felicitous phrasing were common to the distinguished company of whom he was one. The Statute on Religious Freedom gave formal expression to a movement of religious toleration already making its way through the states. The future of higher education in America, which already had a distinguished past before Jefferson, could hardly be said to have been profoundly influenced by him.
Oddly enough, from the point of view of narrow historical action, it is to something by which Jefferson himself set much less store that we must turn to find evidence for his event-making status. This is the Louisiana Purchase, in which he was the moving figure. He carried it through in the teeth of an opposition strong enough to have daunted a weaker man. And yet had this territory not been acquired from Napoleon when it was, England would probably have fallen heir to it at the Congress of Vienna, if not sooner. Without the Louisiana territory—and the west to which it furnished access—the United States might have remained an Atlantic seaboard power. Its political history as well as its economic history might have been very different. There is no assurance that another incumbent of the presidency than Jefferson would have had the foresight and energy required to seize this golden opportunity to remove a foreign power and potential enemy from our borders, and at the same time to double the area under the American flag. But however we evaluate Jefferson’s part in the territorial expansion of the United States, his stature as a man and thinker and his role as a historical force on American culture do not depend upon it. There is room for others besides those whom we call historical “heroes” in a democracy.[1]
What shall we say of historical figures who enjoyed great political power and whose reigns, although outwardly uneventful, seem to be conspicuous for their peace and prosperity? This is the type of situation with which Wood was primarily concerned, and which he too easily set down to the credit of the ruling individuals. When can they be credited with it and when not? And if they are credited with it, when can they be regarded as eventful or event-making? Our illustration here will be drawn from a period that might be called “the golden age” of Roman history.
Gibbon gives it as a considered judgment that after the reign of Augustus the happiness of all the European peoples “depended
- ↑ Cf. Chapter Eleven below on “The Hero and Democracy.”
