“What is good in this case cannot be effected,” he wrote Gallatin; “we have, therefore, only to find out what will be least bad.”33 Jefferson was guided in part by republican ideology: The end of war and the reign of reason was a dream of the age. War led to monarchy and aristocracy and evils that tended to destroy the liberty of the many while empowering the few. Yet Jefferson was no pacific purist. He had waged war in the Mediterranean, and he was willing to wage it against Britain and possibly against France. But not yet.
