Thomas Jefferson

As secretary of state from 1789 to 1794 in the administrations of George Washington, Jefferson revived a proposal he had originated as a member of Congress in 1783 to establish reciprocal trade agreements with continental European nations and, in the face of British restrictions on American commerce, to deny such benefits to the British. The proposal died in Congress. His hopes for at least an evenhanded American approach to Britain and France evaporated when the French envoy, Edmond Genêt, appealed to the American public for a military alliance with revolutionary France—an indiscretion that made Washington decide to remain neutral in the war between Britain and France.

After leaving office, Jefferson was disturbed by the administration's increasing friendliness to Great Britain and by other policies promoted by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. In 1796, he reluctantly allowed his name to be put forward as a candidate for the presidency by the opposition Republican party. He received the second-largest number of votes among four candidates and therefore, according to the electoral system then in use, became vice-president under the Federalist president John Adams in 1797.

During his term in that office he watched with growing indignation as the Federalists capitalized on anti-French feeling to create a standing army under the control of his enemy, Alexander Hamilton, and to pass the Alien Acts, restricting the liberty of supposedly pro-Republican foreigners, and the Sedition Act, which allowed the prosecution of anyone who printed false statements critical of government officials. In resolutions drafted for the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures, Jefferson and James Madison denounced the constitutionality of these laws and assigned to the states the role of bulwark against infringements on individual liberties.

In the election of 1800, Jefferson and his fellow Republican Aaron Burr received an equal number of electoral votes, thus creating a tie and throwing the presidential election into the House of Representatives. After 36 ballots, the House declared Jefferson elected. (The Constitution was then amended to require a separate electoral vote for president and vice-president.)

As had Adams before him, Jefferson faced opposition from an uncompromising faction within his own party as well as from the Federalists. He steered a steady course between these two extremes, appointing some qualified Federalists to office and refusing a wholesale purge of officeholders inherited from the Adams administration. He supported repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801, which had created a costly tier of federal appeals courts and would have encouraged appeals from state courts, but he opposed any assault on the independence of the Federalist-dominated judiciary; Jefferson's three appointments to the Supreme Court, made between 1804 and 1807, were all strong nationalists and upholders of judicial independence.

During his first term his lifelong interest in the West and in American-French relations prompted his major presidential achievement, the 1803 purchase from France of Louisiana—all the western land drained by the Missouri and Mississippi rivers—and the organization of an expedition by William Clark and Meriwether Lewis (1804-1806) to explore this territory. Foreign policy during his second term was less successful. Seeking to force the British to respect US neutrality on the high seas during the Napoleonic Wars, he persuaded Congress in 1807 to embargo all trade with Britain (the Embargo Act)—a move that failed to elicit any concessions, devastated the nation's economy for a generation, and alienated New England, which lived by foreign trade.

After leaving office in 1809 he retired to Monticello, where he lived until his death on July 4, 1826, corresponding with John Adams about the great issues of revolution and constitutionalism, trying to preserve his declining estate for his daughters instead of his creditors, and brooding over the baneful effects of slavery. He was unwilling, for financial reasons, to free his own slaves, and he disagreed with abolitionist friends who held that blacks were equal to whites. His paradoxical beliefs in human dignity and in racial inferiority typified the dilemma of the country he had helped to create.