took up many concerns and themes of the now ostensibly defunct Antifederalism: pushing for the decentralization of power and a weak federal judiciary. Each was convinced that the plans, policies, and plots of the other menaced fundamental rights and rendered precarious the nation’s hopes to stand before the world as a beacon of liberty.
A proponent of a prosperous commercial republic that would compete on the world stage as an industrial powerhouse, Hamilton had linked the new government closely to powerful capitalist and financial interests, in the process confirming the worst fears of the country’s erstwhile Antifederalists. In time, convinced that the President was fatally in sympathy with Hamilton, Jefferson left Washington’s cabinet, recruiting his fellow Virginian James Madison to his cause. In this way, the country’s two-party system – in its first iteration, the Federalists versus the Democratic-Republicans – was born. So, too, was a template for debate that pitted proponents of a strong central government against those championing decentralization and states’ rights; proponents of the federal courts as guarantors of an individual liberty endangered by the tyranny of the majority against those who held federal judges to be unelected, life-tenured elitists less committed to the dispassionate application of laws than to imposing their own politicized understandings on the polity by fiat; and proponents of one political party as the friend of freedom against the opposition as its most implacable foe.
Because they considered a powerful strong and active central government a crucial tool in setting the nation’s direction and meeting its problems, and because they believed a feeble government stinted on guaranteeing liberty and promoting justice, Hamiltonians were proponents of the broad construction of the federal government’s constitutional powers. In this, they emphasized that government’s inherent powers in service of its legitimate ends. They looked to the nation’s vibrant urban centers as critical to the development of a vibrant commercial republic. As proponents of business and commerce, they also prized the rights of property, regularity, stability, and institutional and social order.
Because they hewed to a republican faith in a “constitutionally and conscientiously democratic” people, in whose wisdom and judgment Jefferson – unlike his compatriot Madison – had surpassing confidence and trust, Jeffersonians called for the devolution of government downward, from states, to counties, to small, locally governed “ward republics” of self-sustaining – independent – yeoman farmers. Like the ancient Athenian Aristotle, they believed that the people’s virtues would be cultivated through their active participation in the responsibilities of governance. As Jefferson explained in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), the self-sufficiency and independence of farmers – which, given slavery, of course, was anything but – was uniquely conducive to the development of the liberal, democratic, and egalitarian character that he placed at the core of the nation’s promise. For these reasons, Jefferson championed universal public education that would similarly cultivate a republican spirit, character, and virtue. (He regarded his founding of the University of Virginia as one of his greatest achievements.) These views underwrote the Jeffersonians’ vigorous advocacy for the reserved powers of the states, to the point of insisting on the right of states to resist unconstitutional federal laws, like the Alien and Sedition Acts (see The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, 1798). They also underwrote suspicion about the powers of judicial review claimed by the federal courts – which they understood as not only parts, but also agents of, the national government.
Unlike the consummate New Yorker Hamilton, the Sage of Monticello loathed cities, with their bustling web of often far-flung and anonymous interdependencies. Cities were seedbeds of vice and scourges of virtue. Jeffersonians celebrated rural, agricultural life; the property-holding, ostensibly independent yeoman farmer; the common man; deliberative, participatory majoritarian democracy (rule by popular will) – albeit with appropriate protections for minority rights; and even orneriness and resistance. (Jefferson’s heart leapt with excitement – at least when he was not President – when the people resisted moves to trench upon their fundamental rights.) Although a profoundly compromised proprietor of what was, in effect, a slave labor camp at Monticello, Jefferson was nevertheless, as a political theorist at least, perhaps the founding era’s most fervent proponent of equality, which he held a hallmark of republicanism. His condemnation of hierarchies, for example, especially hereditary ones, informed his campaign for placing sharp limits on the inter-generational inheritance of wealth.
While he criticized what he held to be artificial aristocracies, Jefferson celebrated natural aristocracies – the aristocracy of talents. He was a tireless proponent of what we today call the equality of opportunity. His support for public education and his founding of the University of Virginia evinced a commitment to the notion that, if a fair and equal start in life is given to all without distinction, those who cultivated their individual talents and virtues would – and should – rise. The belief in such opportunities, with the promise that merit would be rewarded, of course, is one of the surpassing appeals of the liberal world-view, and of an exceptionalist reading of American political culture as the world’s pre-eminent land of opportunity.
In the broadest sense, like the pioneering Enlightenment scientists of America’s founding, Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson was a meliorist who was passionate about the all-but-limitless possibilities for individual, social, and human progress. He looked hopefully to the future, where, ultimately, truth would win out. One of his great hopes in this regard was that human reason might ultimately triumph over the scourge of religious fanaticism, which history had shown to have done such damage to individual minds, lives, and nations. History, alas, was replete with instances in which religious orthodoxies and superstitions had thwarted the progress of reason. (One of Jefferson’s more notorious sallies was to take his scissors to his Bible, leaving the good stuff, but excising caked-on layers of fantasy, absurdity, and mumbo-jumbo.) Needless to say, Jefferson was the founding’s most relentless proponent of building “a wall of separation between Church & State,” and religious liberty and toleration. “The legitimate powers of government,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, in a quintessential statement of the role of liberal government, “extend to such acts only as are injurious to others…. [I]t does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” As such, Jefferson was a proponent of secular government, and of a polity that consigned religion to the private sphere, where all manner of belief – and unbelief – was to be strictly voluntary, a matter between the individual and his God – or not. (In addition to the authorship of the Declaration of Independence, and the founding of the University of Virginia, Jefferson counted his third and final great accomplishment to be the authorship in 1777 of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.)
Most of the original American colonies and, subsequently, states – with the exception of Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey – had either single or multiple Christian establishments. In these, individuals were required to support the state’s official church, or a church of their choosing. In some cases, they were required by law to attend worship services. (There were also a host of other mandatory supports for established religions, and debilities for disapproved faiths.) Jefferson opposed these establishments, and their systems of privileges, supports, and penalties. The country was already moving in his direction at the time of independence, a trend reinforced by ideas concerning individual liberty that had driven the American Revolution. Joining Jefferson’s campaign on this, and continuing the Puritan legacy of Roger Williams, was James Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance on Religious Assessments (1785), which marshaled a phalanx of religious and secular arguments in opposition to the religious establishment of Virginia, their home state. The country’s last state religious establishment (in Massachusetts) was repealed in 1833.
As one might expect given all this, Jefferson was a fervent proponent of free inquiry and the freedom of speech, convictions the tetchy statesman failed to consistently support, against his own stated principles, when he ended up being its target. Jefferson’s compatriot in opposing the Sedition Act (1798), James Madison, did better in this regard. Madison explicitly recognized, in his great statement in his Report to the Virginia Assembly (1800), that abuse of the exercise of a right was
