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Richard Hofstadter, “Jefferson as Cautious Pragmatic” (excerpted w/o editor’s marks)
“In the federalist tradition later taken up by so many historians, [Jefferson] was a theorist, a
visionary, a radical; and American liberals have praised him for the same qualities the federalists abhorred.
The modern liberal mind has been bemused by his remarks about the value of a little rebellion now and
then, or watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, or having a complete constitutional revision
every twenty or thirty years. His public statements and actions were colored by a relative caution and
timidity that reveal a circumspect and calculating mind—or, as so many of his contemporary foes
believed, a guileful one. He was not enraptured by the drama of unrestrained political conflict; and with
the very exception of some of his views on foreign policy and war, his approach to public policy was far
from utopian. The most stunning achievement of his presidential years, the Louisiana Purchase, was an
accident, the outcome of the collapse of Napoleon’s ambitions for a Caribbean empire—in the
inadvertent gift of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the blacks of Haiti to this slaveholding country. The most
stunning disaster was the embargo, and the embargo itself came from Jefferson’s penchant, here
misapplied, for avoiding conflict. His was a temporizing and not a violent disposition.
This disposition dictated an initial strategy of conciliation toward the Federalists, which led to a
basic acceptance of the Hamiltonian fiscal system, to a patronage policy which Jefferson considered to
be fair and compromising and hoped to appease moderate Federalists, and to an early attempt to pursue
neutrality and to eschew aggravating signs of that Francophilia and Anglophobia of which the
Federalists accused him.
It was in speaking of American conflicts that Jefferson achieved his finest subtlety. The acerbity
of American political conflict, he suggested in his inaugural address, would deceive ‘strangers unused to
think freely and to speak and to write what they think. Every difference of opinion is not a difference
of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans;
we are all federalists.’ In expressing these healing sentiments Jefferson succeeded at a focal moment in
reassuring many Federalists. Yet the Federalists would have been much deceived if they had imagined
that the striking [last] sentence implied that Jefferson would put the principles of the two parties on a
nearly equal footing of legitimacy. One can only concur here with Henry Adams’ remark that Jefferson
‘wished to soothe the great body of his opponents, but he had no idea of harmony or affection other
than that which was to spring from his own further triumph.
Chance plays its part in history. Jefferson’s plan of conciliation was favored by a fortunate lull in
the European wars, before war broke out again in May 1803. The field was thus left briefly clear for
Jefferson’s conciliatory strategy on domestic matters. Here some examination of Jefferson’s restraint on
patronage and the Hamiltonian system is in order. Rather than clean out Federalist officeholders like a
petty chieftain in a partisan vendetta, he tried to arrive at a formula for what might be called civilservice coexistence. The Hamiltonian system was a less formidable problem, as issues of funding
sources and state-debt assumption were dead, killed by their very success. As for long-term debt and
the bank, they would remain; for, as Jefferson noted, ‘What is practicable must often control what is
pure theory.’ Though state banks, chartered by Republican legislatures multiplied and flourished during
the first decade of Republican rule and laid the groundwork for the destructive attack on central
banking that came with the Jacksonian era.
Forrest McDonald, “Jefferson as Reactionary Ideologue”
Even in his own time, Jefferson was regarded as a champion of liberty—whatever that elusive
word may mean. Its meaning to him can scarcely have been a conventional one, since Jefferson owned
several hundred human beings during his lifetime and theirs, never made a serious effort to liberate them,
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purchased at least eight more while he was president, and once asked his friend Madison to acquire a
black person for a visiting French lady who sought to be amused by breeding them. Nor can liberty as
Jefferson conceived of it have had much to do with such legal and constitutional rights as the writ of
habeas corpus, freedom of the press, freedom from unlawful search and seizures, and judicial review of
the acts of legislatures and law enforces. Regarding some of these, Jefferson wrote strong words of
support; but equally often he denounced the abuse of these ‘rights’ and when he exercised executive
authority he was capable of running roughshod over them in what he regarded as a higher interest.
Jeffersonian Republicanism was an ideology and an idea, a system of values and a way of
looking at thing. But it was also a program of action, carefully crafted and methodically executed. To
appraise Jefferson’s presidency, it is therefore necessary to take both sets of criteria into account.
In the realm of ideas and ideology, Jeffersonian Republicanism was a body of thought taken largely
from the Oppositionist tradition, particularly the Viscount Bolingbroke, that condemned and sought to
undo the Financial Revolution epitomized by the ministry of Sir Robert Walpole. In its stead, it proposed
to restore a pristine and imaginary past in which life was rural, relationships were personal, the gentry ruled
as a natural aristocracy, the main body of the citizenry was an honest yeomanry, and government was
limited. The Jeffersonians’ ideological forebears were reactionaries, swimming against the tide of history,
for the world aborning was the depersonalized world of money, machines, cities, and big government.
The Jeffersonians were likewise resisting the emergence of the modern world. They had seen the
Hamiltonian Federalists trying to transform and corrupt America, and their vies of Jefferson’s mission as
president did not differ substantively and significantly from Bolingbroke’s idea of a Patriot King: a head of
state who would rally the entire nation to his banner, and then, in an act of supreme wisdom and virtue,
voluntarily restrain himself and thus give vitality and meaning to the constitutional system. The only
genuine change they brought to the ideology was to put it into practice.
If who they were and what they were seeking are thus understood, it is evident that they
remained remarkably true to their principles. Moreover, they were remarkably successful in
accomplishing what they set out to do. They set out to destroy the complex financial mechanism that
Hamilton had built around the public debt, and they came so close that if war could have been avoided
for another eight years, their success might have been total. They also set out to secure the frontiers of
the U.S. by expanding the country’s territorial domain into the vast wilderness, and they succeeded so
well that it became possible to dream that the U.S. could remain a nation of uncorrupted farmers for a
thousand years to come.
Yet on the broader scale they failed, and failed calamitously because their system was incompatible
with the immediate current of events, the broad sweep of history, and the nature of man and society. At
the core of the Republicans’ thinking lay the assumption, almost Marxian in its naïveté, that only two things
must be done to remake America as an ideal society and a beacon unto mankind. First, the public debt
must be extinguished. Second, governmental power must be confined to its constitutional limits. If the
ancient ways were restored, Jeffersonians believed, liberty and independence would inevitably follow and
would make it possible for every man, equal in rights but not in talents, to pursue happiness in his own way
and to find his own ‘natural’ level in the natural order.
Things did not work out that way. Far from freeing the country from foreign interference,
Republican policy sorely impaired the nation’s ability to determine its own destiny. In their eagerness to
retire the public debt, the Jeffersonians tried diligently to economize. Toward that end they slashed military
and naval appropriations so much as to render the U.S. incapable of defending itself. Simultaneously, in
their haste to destroy all vestiges of the Hamiltonian system, the Jeffersonians abolished virtually all internal
taxes. This made national revenues almost totally dependent upon duties on imports.
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For two or three years the Jeffersonians were extremely lucky. During that period the kaleidoscope of
events in Europe turned briefly and flukishly in their favor. They obtained Louisiana as a result of a series
of wildly improbable and unrepeatable events. From 1803 onward, however, each turn of the international
wheel was less favorable to the U.S. By 1805 it was apparent that West Florida would not become
American in the way that Louisiana had. In the same year it began to be clear that the British would not
long continue to allow the U.S. to grow wealthy by trading with Britain’s mortal enemies.
But for their ideology, the Jeffersonians could have reversed their earlier policy stance, embraced
Britain and become hostile toward France and Spain, thus enabling the nation to continue to prosper and
expand. Moreover, given the consequences of their actions so far, they lacked the strength to make even
a token show of force against Britain. Thus in 1807, when both Britain and France forbade the U.S. to
engage in international trade, the embargo was the only course open to them. At home, as they became
ever more deeply impaled upon the horns of their self-created international dilemma, the Jeffersonians
became progressively less tolerant of opposition or criticism. The embargo, then, both as a bankrupt
foreign policy and as a reign of domestic oppression, was not a sudden aberration but the logical and
virtually certain outcome of the Jeffersonian ideology put into practice.
Drew McCoy, “Jefferson and the Empire of Liberty”
Thomas Jefferson commented that ‘the revolution of 1800’ was ‘as real a revolution in the
principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.’ He meant revolution in the traditional
sense—a restoration of original values and ideals that had been overturned or repudiated. For him, the
election of 1800 was a revolution because it marked a turning back to the true republican spirit of 1776.
Hoping to avoid the social evils both of barbarous simplicity and decadent maturity, the
Jeffersonians proposed to escape the burden of an economically sophisticated society without sacrificing a
necessary degree of republican civilization. Three conditions were necessary to create and keep such a
republican political economy: a national government free from the taint of corruption, an unobstructed
access to an ample supply of open land, and a relatively liberal international commercial order that would
offer adequate foreign markets for America’s flourishing agricultural surplus.
The electoral revolution of 1800 promised to remove the threat to a republican economy posed
by the machinations of a corrupt administration [by removing the Federalists and replacing them with
themselves.] But Jeffersonians also had to secure the other guarantors of republicanism: landed and
commercial expansion. Through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, undoubtedly the greatest achievement
of his presidency, Jefferson appeared to eliminate the perceived problem of not enough land for a
growing population for generations, if not for centuries, to come. But the third and thorniest problem,
in the form of long-standing restrictions on American trade, proved far more frustrating and intractable.
As their experience as policymakers soon demonstrated, the Jeffersonian endeavor to secure a peaceful,
predominately agricultural republic demanded a tenaciously expansive foreign policy—a foreign policy
that ultimately endangered both the peace and the agricultural character of the young republic.
The Mississippi crisis of 1801-1803, which culminated in the Louisiana Purchase, affected
crucial and long-standing American concerns. Since the 1780s most Americans had regarded free
navigation of the Mississippi River and the right of deposit at New Orleans as essential to the national
interest. When Spain made a secret agreement in 1800 to transfer possession of Louisiana back to
France, however, the old problem took on a new and more ominous dimension. As Jefferson and most
Americans immediately recognized, Napoleonic ambitions in the Mississippi valley posed a far more
serious threat to the westward course of American empire than Spain ever had.
To add insult to injury, before formally transferring Louisiana to Napoleon, the Spanish
revoked American right of deposit in violation of the Pinckney Treaty. Many Americans, including
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eastern Federalists as well as westerners, responded with threats of war. Jefferson shrewdly contained
this war fever and proceeded cautiously, employing a strategy that ultimately contributed to the
convergence of circumstances that made the Louisiana Purchase possible.
In the minds of many Americans, the question of the Mississippi River involved much more
than a narrow concern with the prosperity or profits of western farmers. What they saw to be at stake
was the very character of western society. This concern with social character, especially with the
interdependence of economic life and the moral integrity of the individual personality, was part of a
republican world view. To Americans committed to the construction of a republican political economy,
it was imperative that public policy he directed toward the creation of social conditions that would
permit and even foster the maintenance of a virtuous people. What the Louisiana Purchase made
possible was the existence of a republican civilization in the American West.
But if the Louisiana Purchase removed some serious obstacles to the realization of Jefferson’s
republican empire, it also exposed some of the tensions and contradictions within that vision. Since the
proper functioning of the empire required both westward and commercial expansion, an assertive, even
aggressive, foreign policy would often be necessary to secure the republic. The Jeffersonians frequently
boasted of the isolation and independence of the U.S.; curiously, this claim obscured the fact that
American republicanism demanded both an open international commercial order and the absence of any
competing presence on the North American continent. If the necessary guarantors of the Republican
vision included an interventionist foreign policy, territorial aggression, Indian removal or management,
and even war, then might not the means of achieving an escape from time subvert their fundamental
purpose? Ultimately, as the event of Jefferson’s second administration and Madison’s presidency
demonstrated, the struggle to secure the Jeffersonian republic culminated in the need to wage a second
war for American independence.
Assignment:
1. Make sure you understand the meaning of underlined words and phrases, and any other parts
you may misunderstand. Look up or discuss with a partner anything you question.
2.1 Do they agree on anything? – Use a highlighter to mark common terms of phrases among
the three articles.
2.2 Even if they are using the language (terms, phrases, etc.) are they using them the same way?
2.3 What examples or evidence are common among the articles?
3.1 What do they disagree on? Use a different color to mark differences.
3.2 What language or terms are different?
3.3 What examples or evidence are different?
4. Which do you find more convincing? On the internet, find a secondary (or primary) source on
Jefferson that covers these events to get another view. (no Ask.com, Answers.com, or similar
general (tertiary source). You may use Wikipedia to find a suitable, serious, and reliable source,
but you are not to use Wikipedia as your source)
5. Write 3-5 paragraphs summarizing your view of Jefferson (provide supporting evidence and
citations where appropriate).