Jeffersonian democracy
Jeffersonian democracy, named after its advocate Thomas Jefferson, was one of two dominant political outlooks and movements in the United States from the 1790s to the 1820s.
[4] They were antagonistic to the aristocratic elitism of merchants, bankers, and manufacturers, distrusted factory workers, and strongly opposed and were on the watch for supporters of the Westminster system.
At the beginning of the Jeffersonian era, only two states, Vermont and Kentucky, established universal white male suffrage by abolishing property requirements.
States then moved on to allowing white male popular votes for presidential elections, canvassing voters more modernly.
Jefferson's party was then in full control of the apparatus of government – from the state legislature and city hall to the White House.
[37] However, established New England political interests feared the growth of the West, and a majority in the Federalist Party opposed the purchase.
[38] Jeffersonians thought the new territory would help maintain their vision of the ideal republican society, based on agricultural commerce, governed lightly and promoting self-reliance and virtue.
[42] Jefferson believed the expansion of industry and trade could lead to the development of a class of wage laborers reliant on others for income and sustenance.
Jefferson's solution was, as scholar Clay Jenkinson noted, "a graduated income tax that would serve as a disincentive to vast accumulations of wealth and would make funds available for some sort of benign redistribution downward", as well as tariffs on imported articles, which were mainly purchased by the wealthy.
[45]Lastly, Jefferson and other Jeffersonians believed in the power of embargoes as a means to inflict punishment on hostile foreign nations.
[47] Self-sufficiency, self-government, and individual responsibility were in the Jeffersonian worldview among the most important ideals that formed the basis of the American Revolution.
For example, Jefferson once wrote a letter to Charles Willson Peale explaining that although a Smithsonian-style national museum would be a fantastic resource, he could not support the use of federal funds to construct and maintain such a project.
Staloff proposed that it was due to his being a proto-Romantic;[58] John Quincy Adams claimed that it was a manifestation of pure hypocrisy, or "pliability of principle";[59] and Bailyn asserts it simply represented a contradiction with Jefferson, that he was "simultaneously a radical utopian idealist and a hardheaded, adroit, at times cunning politician".
[62] Historian Sean Wilentz argues that as a practical politician elected to serve the people, Jefferson had to negotiate solutions, not insist on his own version of abstract positions.
The result, Wilentz argues, was "flexible responses to unforeseen events ... in pursuit of ideals ranging from the enlargement of opportunities for the mass of ordinary, industrious Americans to the principled avoidance of war".
At best according to many historians, the Jeffersonians were reactionary utopians who resisted the onrush of capitalist modernity in hopes of turning America into a yeoman farmers' arcadia.
[64]Joseph Ellis wrote that developments in urbanization and industrialization that occurred during the turn of the 20th century has largely rendered Jefferson's agrarian dream irrelevant.
[65] Jefferson summarized his essential principles of government in his first inaugural address on March 4, 1801, when he expounded on "the essential principles of our Government, and consequently, those which ought to shape its Administration", stating: Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; a jealous care of the right of election by the people...; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority...a well-disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burthened; the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid; the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason; freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected.
