From his personal notebooks - where he wrote ideas which were of real importance to him (they also constitute one of the few sources of insight we have as to the young Jefferson's mind) - we are able to see into his new ideas of the world. Jefferson, while young, was deeply affected by his educational experiences at the College of William and Mary, both by his personal contacts (for example, he came to dine and converse regularly with the Governor of Virginia, whose father had worked for Sir Isaac Newton), as well as by his readings. While only one of the seven faculty members at the College was not an Anglican clergyman: Dr. William Small of Scotland; it was he who the young Jefferson was most influenced by. Of him Jefferson later wrote that he was "a man profound in most of the useful branches of science...from his conversations I got my first views of the expansion of science and of the system of things in which we are placed." (This is a clear, if later-written, indication of Jefferson's transition from a theological-religious to a natural scientific world-view.)
We know from his notebooks that be was deeply impacted by the writings concerning religious and philosophical themes and history of Lord Boling broke (1678-1751), whose works are a rather tedious, rationalist, empiricist critique of all of the religious and philosophical systems then known of in the world. Jefferson seems, from his note-taking, to have read all of the several volumes at this early period as a student. (Jefferson would eventually come to assemble one of the greatest personal libraries of his time in America; it became the core of the current Library of Congress, for, after the British burnt the first one in 1814, Jefferson sold his personal library of about 6,500 books to the US Congress to rebuild its library. Even with this comparatively small reading in Boling broke, Jefferson received a broader and more solid intellectual education than today most Americans do after many years of schooling.)
If Jefferson lived uncritically in the Christian cosmos as a child, Boling broke's critical works (and not only this author) would have deeply affected the Jefferson's young understanding - and this effect in his ideas and philosophy lasted for the rest of his life. So that when we look to see what Jefferson did mean of man and cosmos when he wrote the words still famous around the world today, we find that he did not hold a religious or spiritual view of man and cosmos, as had the early settlers (and still many of Jefferson's contemporaries) of the "age of faith" in American history. Indeed, Jefferson had rejected most of their ideas and beliefs, believing rather in a material, physical, natural scientific view of man and world. (He held a Deist view of God, as the original creator, who had ordered nature and life through the "laws of nature", but otherwise was detached from earthly life. And in general he tended to reduce all religion to morality.) Closer to Darwin in spirit and time (of whose later writings he could know nothing of course), Jefferson would later symptomatically place busts of Bacon, Locke and Newton in his self- designed home of Monticello - which is now become a place of American pilgrimage. This is an indication of his lifelong adherence - beginning as a student - to a natural-scientific view of man and world. Jefferson rejected most religions and metaphysical philosophies and their ideas as myths. (He especially disliked for example Plato, St. Paul, Athanasius and Calvin.) Sometimes he viewed them as the deliberate fabrications of priests and kings to manipulate and control their people. Jefferson thought that man's "reason" should rule man.
Jefferson's words came to be repeated on e. g. "Fourth of July Celebrations" throughout America over the years and came to be a sort of creedal statement as to what it means to be "American" - as we saw also in the President's address in November of 1995 But in fact very few Americans are clear about either the original context or meaning of the "American Creed" - the "cosmos" of these words - or of Jefferson’s rejection of most of the spiritual beliefs which many of these Americans personally hold, commonly blended together with Jefferson's contrasting, antithetically-conceived grand expressions! In other words, these ideas from 1776, still alive today, are in fact only truly to be understood within a scientific-natural view of man, nature, society. God and world. And this is so even though the religious, spiritual and philosophical beliefs of the vast majority of the US people - who often use them in close association with Jefferson's phrases, when they explain and understand America and life - were in fact rejected by Jefferson before (and after) he wrote them. His human and social ideals were conceived within a natural cosmos of man; they are ideals of man in this world. He had rejected a spiritual cosmos and anthropology to man.
Jefferson would, symptomatically, at the end of his great life (devoted largely to serving America) attempt (unsuccessfully) to exclude the teaching of religion from the University of Virginia which he had brought into being. Contrariwise, most Americans - in their (generally) extremely limited knowledge of even their own nation's history-place together views which Jefferson himself considered to be fundamentally antithetical. The beliefs of a greater spiritual cosmos, e.g. Dante's world's, the spiritual-metaphysical beliefs of man and world, cannot properly be fit inside of Jefferson's world and his ideals - at least not realistically intellectually. The cosmos of the "American Creed" has its own reality and dignity - but it is not such that all of the ideas which Americans have come to place inside of its famous phrases, can, truthfully and unproblematically, be placed.
In my view - and no one who reads this great man's biography can doubt his devotion and service to America, Jefferson was true to the history, reality and life of mankind in his time. One of his biographers called him "one of the most devoted disciples of the Age of Reason". (Nostalgia and longing for the "age of faith" - like the time before the "Fall of Man" - is understandable; but the "age of reason" was, if not an inevitability or necessity of history, still nevertheless a new more realistic relationship of man to nature. So that no mere easy return to the past is true or realistic.) He was a realistic man of science; he could not and would not rest in the "age of faith". And, as was characteristic of this and later time, once the Bible and religion were subjected to the "age of reason", the beliefs of the "age of faith" could never be immediately accepted unquestioned again.
While he was close to Darwin in his scientific attitude, he would have deeply lamented Darwin's eventual rejection both of a creator God (chance and natural selection rather than divine design) and the view of man's reason and conscience as special "gifts" (Jefferson) of God to man.
In fact, Darwin and Jefferson (as well as many of their contemporaries of course), were offended by many of the same "unbelievable" aspects of Christianity and in relationship to Jefferson's phrases as well!
Here is an aspect - perhaps even more fundamental and definitive in some ways than the problem of the popular and noble "American Dream" - of how Americans are unaware and unconscious of the lineage of their own spiritual and intellectual origin and history. Very, very few even college-graduate Americans could even begin to give a serious account of the relation-ship between their own personal spiritual beliefs, the cosmos of their "American Creed" and the intellectual and spiritual history of mankind (e.g. Indo-European sources, Dionysus the Areopagite's cosmography, Dante's Comedy, even Newton, Laplace, et al). They are simply unaware and uninformed of how America's "ideas" acutally stand inside of not only European, but Occidental and world intellectual and spiritual history. Indeed, I am certain that even the current President of the USA himself- himself an active Christian Southern Baptist believer - would find it difficult to give such an account of the relationship of his Baptist religious beliefs, to the natural ideas of man and cosmos in the "American Creed" which he had cited in his November 1995 speech, in which he defined America to the world. But American ideals - the cosmos of the American Creed-do stand within the entire spiritual and intellectual history of Mankind - however little this may be clearly conceived and worried by Americans themselves.
The cosmos of the "American Creed" is a natural, not a spiritual one. The failure to recognize and understand this clearly cannot be of spiritual and intellectual hope, health and help to Mankind. If America is now in many ways leading the world, it should, presumably, know and understand more deeply and clearly what America and her ideals are actually about.
Andrew Jackson became the U. S. President in 1828. For weeks thousands of people had been coming to Washington, D. C. to see his inauguration. Jackson was the hero of common people. He was truly a President of the people.
Jackson was a fighter. He took part in the Revolutionary War. His soldiers called him "Old Hickory" because hickory wood was the toughest thing they knew. When he had moved to Tennessee he served its people as a lawyer, judge, Congressman and senator. But he won his greatest fame as a soldier. Because of his activities in Florida, the U. S. was able to take control of that area from Spain.
Jackson believed in people who loved him. He felt that common people could run the government. This idea has come to be called Jacksonian democracy. These people elected him as their President. He gave them their first chance to really have a part in government.
Not everyone benefited while Jackson was President- Women, black and Native Americans were not able to take part in gov_ernment. In fact, in some cases, the government worked against them.
The Cherokee nation serves as an example of what happened to many Native American tribes and people in Jackson's times. The Cherokees had a great deal of land in Georgia and Alabama. They were farmers. They had roads and lived in houses. They had a written language and a weekly newspaper. Their government was democratic. But white settlers wanted their land.
The land was promised to the Cherokee nation by treaty. Missionaries, Congressman Henry Clay, and the Supreme Court all said that the Cherokees had rights to their claims. Even so, the Cherokees were thrown off their land. They were told to go to Oklahoma. With soldiers watching them, they had little choice but to obey.
This journey lasted several months. Disease, hunger and cold brought death to many. Over 4,000 Cherokees Were buried along the Trial of Tears which stretched from Georgia to Oklahoma.
Jackson said that their removal was necessary. Without it, he said, the Cherokees all would have been killed by white settlers looking for more land. Jackson did agreat deal to make people feel a part of government. But he was not ready to give equality to Native Americans. A slave holder, all his life Jackson did not believe in equality for blacks either.
Yet in Jackson's time, some people were starting to oppose slavery. These people were called abolitionists.
For many Americans the election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy as the 35th President of the United States in 1960 marked the beginning of a new era in this country's political history. Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic and the youngest man ever chosen Chief Executive. He was also the first person bom in the 20th century to hold the nation's highest office.
Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on May 29. 1917, Kennedy was descended from two politically conscious, Irish-American families that had emigrated from Ireland to Boston shortly after potato blight and economic upheavals had struck their homeland in the 1840s. Kennedy's grandfathers, Patrick J. Kennedy and John F. ("Honey Fitz") Fitzgerald, became closely associated with the local Democratic Party; Kennedy served in the Massachusetts legislature, and Fitzgerald won election as mayor of Boston. In 1914 the marriage of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald united the two families. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the second eldest of Joseph and Rose Kennedy's four sons and five daughters.
Joseph P. Kennedy was an extraordinarily successful businessman. Despite the relatively modest means of his family, Kennedy attended Harvard College, and upon graduation in 1912 began a career in banking. During the 1920s he amassed a substantial fortune from his investments in motion pictures, real estate, and other enterprises, and unlike many magnates of his era he escaped unscathed from the stock market crash of 1929. Joseph Kennedy himself was never a candidate for elective office, but he was deeply interested in the Democratic Party. He made large contributions to the presidential campaign of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932; in return, Roosevelt appointed him chairman of the recently established Securities and Exchange Commission, where his business expertise proved especially helpful in drafting legislation designed to regulate the stock market. In 1937 Roosevelt named Kennedy US ambassador to Great Britain.
Despite his wealth and political influence, the Democratic Irish-Catholic Joseph Kennedy never won the acceptance of Boston's Protestant elite. He deeply resented this, and determined that his sons' achievements would equal, if not excel, those of their Brahmin counter-parts. Toward this end he modeled their lives and education after those enjoyed by the Yankee upper class.
John Kennedy, like his brothers and sisters, grew up in comfortable homes and attended some of the nation's most prestigious preparatory schools and colleges. He was enrolled at the age of 13 at Canterbury, a Catholic preparatory school staffed by laymen, but transferred after a year to the nonsectarian Choate School, where he completed his secondary education before entering Princeton University. Illness forced him to leave the college before the end of Ins freshman year. but the following'. autumn he resumed his studies, at Hanard.
Kennedy's college years coincided with a time of world crisis 'The future President had unusual opportunities to combine know ledge gained in the classroom with his own firsthand observations. As a government major at Harvard he benefited from the teachings of some of the nation's most prominent political scientists and historians. men who in the late 1930s were acutely aware of the growing menace of Nazism. Moreover, in 1938 Kennedy spent six months in London assisting his father. who was then serving as US ambassador. "This slay in England gave the young student an excellent opportunity to witness for himself the British response to the Nazi aggression of the 1930s, and he used the insight gained from the experience in writing his senior thesis. This thesis, in which Kennedy attempted to explain England's hesitant reaction to German rearmament, was extremely perceptive. and in 1940 it was published in expanded form in the United States and 6reat Britain under the title Why England Slept.
After receiving his B.S. degree cum laude from Harvard in 1940, Kennedy briefly attended ihe Stanford University Graduate School ot Business, and then spent several months traveling through South America. Late in 1941, when the United States' entry into World War II seemed imminent. Kennedy joined the US Navy. As an officer he served in the South Pacific Theater, where he commanded one of the small PT or torpedo boats that patrolled off the Solomon Islands.
On April 25. 1943, Kennedy assumed command of P 1 -109, the vessel on which, only a little more than four months later, his courage and strength were put to their first serious test. On the night of August 2, 1943, the Japanese destroyer Amagiri rammed PT-109. The force of the destroyer sliced the American craft in half and plunged its 11 -man crew into the waters of Ferguson Passage. Burning gasoline spewed forth from the wrecked torpedo boat, setting the waters of the passage aflame: but Lieutenant Kennedy retained his composure, directed the rescue of his crew, and personally saved the lives of three of the men. Kennedy and the other survivors found refuge on a small unoccupied island, and during the days that followed he swam long distances to obtain food and aid for his men. Finally, on the sixth day of the ordeal the crew was rescued.