"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ...And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."Note, Jefferson is radically not advocating the perennial overthrow of the government. He is advocating that a handful of misinformed citizens disproportionately malcontented mount a trivial little insurrection from time to time, to remind the rulers that if they fuck up badly enough eventually one of these rebellions might not be so trivial. And then set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. Does Jefferson think they have the right of rebellion? I don't think so. He thinks it is healthy for the country that they attempt a rebellion, and that, their having done so, they should be content to take a pardon and an explanation and quit their rebelling.
And as I said in a previous post, this is all prior to the establishment of the fact that there can be peaceful transfers of power. There have been 21 in US history, along with two violent ones (one in 1776, one in 1861). So even if occasional minor violent rebellion could be argued as healthy in a republic in 1787, when Jefferson wrote seemingly all of his pro-rebellion quotes, there's no reason to think it would still be so in the post-Jeffersonian world (since after all Jefferson led the first-ever peaceful revolution in the world).
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