Partly due to the demands of restoring and maintaining Stenton, Logan gave up his career as a physician and became a gentleman farmer and politician.

[2] At Stenton, the couple entertained a wide circle of politicians, artists, writers, and businesspeople, counting among their friends Thomas Jefferson and the painter Charles Willson Peale.

On his return, he found he had been denounced by the anti-Jeffersonian Federalists, who had passed a statute informally known as the "Logan Act", which made it a crime for an individual citizen to interfere in a dispute between the United States and a foreign country.

[citation needed] In 1801, as Jefferson's presidency began, Logan ran for the open U.S. Senate seat previously held by William Bingham, who was retiring.

With reference to his political activities, he was called at various times a "busybody" and a "great fool",[1]: 308  but Jefferson considered him "the best farmer in Pennsylvania, both in theory and practice.