'To Join with Heart, and Soul, and Voice for Jefferson and Liberty'
As we count down the days to the Fourth of July, it’s appropriate to remember the ideas and attitudes of Thomas Jefferson and maybe to gain some useful perspective on our present predicaments by raising our voices in his theme song.
Jefferson not only wrote the Declaration of Independence that launched a new nation, but also established himself as the first leader of a national political party. He rallied its supporters with a campaign anthem that seems strangely pertinent in 2025.
Jefferson and Liberty borrowed the melody of an Irish jig called The Gobby-O and featured 12 rousing poetic verses by Robert Treat Paine, a prominent Boston lawyer and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Like other Jeffersonians in 1800, Paine supported their candidate as a liberating force to correct the executive overreach and alleged tyrannical tendencies of John Adams, the second president.
The song’s catchy chorus offered a celebratory promise of a new president with a less arrogant approach to federal power:
Rejoice, Columbia’s sons, rejoice
To tyrants never bend the knee
But join with heart and soul and voice
For Jefferson and Liberty.
One of the liberties that Jefferson’s backers enthusiastically extolled involved the freedom to welcome immigrants to the new nation, granting the ability to become citizens with the same rights as the native-born.
Here strangers from a thousand shores
Compell’d by tyranny to roam;
Shall find, amidst abundant stores
A nobler and a happier home.
This generous attitude toward “strangers from a thousand shores” reflected the viewpoint of the third president and his backers, but would hardly fit comfortably with today’s deportation enthusiasts like Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan and other MAGA loyalists among Team Trump.
The pro-immigration slant in Jefferson’s campaign song expressed some of the genuine anger and indignation that Jefferson, Robert Treat Paine, and others who were known at the time as “Republicans” felt toward a fateful package of four repressive laws passed by Adams and his Federalist allies in 1798. One of those legislative efforts, the Naturalization Act, made it much more difficult for newcomers to earn citizenship. Another, the Alien Act, gave the President the ability to deport any immigrant he considered dangerous. The Sedition Act also provided President Adams with a new power to react to press comments or reports deemed “scandalous and malicious” with fines and imprisonment—just the sort of response to “fake news” that the current incumbent would seem to savor.
The fourth attempt of the second president to crush and silence his critics was the Alien Enemies Act, which provided the basis to imprison any migrants from a hostile power in a time of war. Coincidentally, President Trump has explicitly cited this 1798 legislation as applicable to our current situation as victims of an “invasion” by gang members from El Salvador and Venezuela.
Two years after the enactment of these constitutionally and historically dubious efforts, the song Jefferson and Liberty expressed strikingly different notions about civil liberties and limitations on presidential power.
The song begins with the (ultimately accurate) assumption that Adams, with his attempts to restrict the rights of immigrants and critics, will be replaced by a more expansive and more cheerful vision of liberty:
The gloomy night before us flies,
The reign of terror now is o’er,
Its gags, inquisitors and spies
Its herds of harpies are no more!...
From Europe’s wants and woes remove
A friendly waste of waves between,
Here plenty cheers the humblest cot
And smiles on every village green.
Here free as air, expanded space,
To every soul and sect shall be –
That sacred privilege of our race –
The worship of the Deity
These words cheer me in a troubled time, as do the extraordinarily generous and grateful reactions from around the world to this week’s debut of my film THE AMERICAN MIRACLE: OUR NATION IS NO ACCIDENT.
If nothing else, those results provide precious reassurance that millions of Americans (and others) can still draw inspiration from the founders of this remarkable Republic. While others may prefer to watch President Trump dancing with rally crowds to the dulcet strains of YMCA, I would suggest….
…Another choice
To join with heart and soul, and voice
For Jefferson and Liberty!