To Jefferson, little in America was secure, for the military success of the Revolution had marked only the end of one battle in a larger, half-century war. From Alexander Hamilton’s financial program to John Adams’s weakness for British forms to the overt New England hostility toward his presidency, he judged political life in the context of the British threat to democratic republicanism. In retrospect, Jefferson’s fears about the British may seem overheated—they surely did to some who lived through the same years and the same pressures—but they were real to him.
