Conclusion: The Revenge of Respectability

Abstract

Abstract When Thomas Jefferson delivered his first inaugural address to the U.S. Senate on March 4, 1801, he urged Americans to put the political divisions of the past behind them. The recent election campaign or, as he put it, “the contest of opinion through which we have passed” had been savage, a fitting climax to a decade of merciless partisan conflict. But now, he argued, it was time for Americans to “unite in common efforts for the common good.” Political intolerance posed as much danger to the Republic as religious intolerance, he warned, and he struck a chord of approval with his listeners (and readers) when he urged them to “restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.” With all of the generosity of the victorious politician, Jefferson reminded his audience that “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.” This was a remarkable statement from the leader of a party that had spent most of the previous decade trying to convince Americans that just the opposite was true. One of the central themes of the recent Republican election campaign, the culmination of a campaign begun in 1791 by Freneau’s National Gazette, had been the threat to republican government posed by the Federalists. Uttered a decade before, Jefferson’s words would have been unremarkable, and only a few irreconcilable Anti-Federalists would have questioned his equation between republicanism and federalism. But by the mid-1790s, a Republican opposition had been formed, largely under the leadership of Jefferson himself, dedicated to portraying Federalists as an anti-republican elite that had corrupted American society and politics with its financial schemes, plundered the public purse, allied the country with its most dangerous adversary, Great Britain, and undermined the Constitution.