If virtue was based on liberty and independence, then it followed that only autonomous individuals free from any ties of interest and paid by no master were qualified to be citizens. Jefferson and many other republican idealists hoped that all ordinary yeoman farmers who owned their own land and who depended for their subsistence only “on their own soil and industry” and not “on the casualties and caprice of customers” would be independent and free enough of pecuniary temptations and marketplace interests to be virtuous.26
