Quotes About Jefferson

Both Madison and Thomas Jefferson were influenced by the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, who defined a "republic" as a self-regulating political society whose mainspring was civic virtue.

We stand in the shadow of Jefferson who believed that a society founded upon the rule of law and liberty was dependent upon public education and the diffusion of knowledge.

While Jefferson and the Republicans made light of the excesses of the Revolution in France, the Federalists were horrified to see America's sister-republic and erstwhile ally descend into lawlessness.

grown steadily throughout the South ever since. The Mt. Jefferson branch was the twenty-third to open, and Milton felt lucky to be part of such a flourishing company.

across Jefferson Square to sanctuary in the inn. Good god, he thought, what have I gotten

The suspect nature of these stories can be seen in the anecdote Jefferson told of Hamilton visiting his lodging in 1792 and inquiring about three portraits on the wall. "They are my trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced," Jefferson replied: "Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Locke." Hamilton supposedly replied, "The greatest man that ever lived was Julius Casar.

Both Hamilton and Jefferson believed in democracy, but Hamilton tended to be more suspicious of the governed and Jefferson of the governors.

Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never saw the creation of America as a magical leap across a chasm to an entirely new landscape, and he always thought the New World had much to learn from the Old.

Where Jefferson dismissed these wholesale killings as regrettable but necessary sacrifices to freedom, Hamilton was traumatized by them. The burgeoning atheism of the French Revolution reawakened in him religious feelings that had lain dormant since King's College days.

So it may be said, with undoubted truth, that the whiskey drinkers made Mr. Jefferson the President of the United States.

While other Americans dreamed of a brand-new society that would expunge all traces of effete European civilization, Hamilton humbly studied those societies for clues to the formation of a new government. Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never saw the creation of America as a magical leap across a chasm to an entirely new landscape, and he always thought the New World had much to learn from the Old.

The strident tone of "The Stand" reflects the polarization that had gripped America over the French crisis. Feelings ran so high that Jefferson told one correspondent, "Men who have been intimate all their lives cross the street to avoid meeting and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch hats.

Jefferson took often commonplace ideas and endowed them with majestic form.

elite pedigree on both sides of his family, Jefferson was anything but common. His father, Peter, was a tobacco planter, a judge of the court of chancery, and a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, while his mother, Jane Randolph, came from a prominent family. By the time Peter Jefferson died, he bequeathed to his children more than 60 slaves, 25 horses, 70 head of cattle, 200 hogs, and 7,500 acres; two-thirds of this bountiful legacy went to his eldest son, Thomas.

For Jefferson, banks were devices to fleece the poor, oppress farmers, and induce a taste for luxury that would subvert republican simplicity. Strangely enough for a large slaveholder, he thought that agriculture was egalitarian while manufacturing would produce a class-conscious society.

It was not until February 11, 1801, that votes cast by presidential electors in the various states were actually opened in the Senate chamber, confirming what was already common knowledge: that Jefferson and Burr had tied with seventy-three votes apiece.

When Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, slaves constituted 40 percent of the population of his home state, Virginia.

In 1807, Burr was arrested for treason and for trying to incite a war against Spain. He was acquitted by Chief Justice John Marshall, who applied a strict definition of treason. The acquittal only sharpened Jefferson's contempt for "the original error of establishing a judiciary independent of the nation

At one stroke, Jefferson heaped heartless abuse on a sick man and inverted reality. Not only did Hamilton have yellow fever, but he had shown outstanding valor during the Revolution while Jefferson, as Virginia governor, had cravenly fled into the woods before the advancing British troops.

After reading through George Washington's papers, Marshall pronounced Hamilton "the greatest man (or one of the greatest men) that had ever appeared in the United States."31 Marshall considered Hamilton and Washington the two indispensable founders, and it therefore came as no surprise that Jefferson looked askance at the chief justice as "the Federalist serpent in the democratic Eden of our administration."32

For Hamilton, Jefferson's desire to overturn the Judiciary Act was an insidious first step toward destroying the Constitution: "Who is so blind as not to see that the right of the legislature to abolish the judges at pleasure destroys the independence of the judicial department and swallows it up in the impetuous vortex of legislative influence?"34 Without an independent judiciary, the Constitution was a worthless document.

Then, on September 1, 1802, Callender broke a story that he had learned about in jail and that was to reverberate down through American history: Jefferson's scandalous romance with Sally Hemings: "It is well known that the man whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally. . . . By this wench Sally, our President has had several children.

Jefferson inwardly reviled Hamilton as a traitor to republican government. "What a fatal stroke at the cause of liberty; et tu Brute," he wrote in his diary.

When it suited his convenience, Jefferson set aside his small-government credo with compunction.