Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

There is much truth in the tendency to encapsulate the competing traditions of the early American republic as a contest between Jefferson and Hamilton.47 For partisans of each man, it was then—and has been ever since—convenient to caricature the other, with Hamilton as the scheming proto-Brit bent on monarchy and Jefferson as the naïve proto-Frenchman intoxicated by visions of excessive democracy. Inevitably, though, such shorthand is incomplete. In the first hours of the decade and sporadically throughout, Jefferson sometimes found himself in agreement with Hamilton (and with Washington and Adams as well), for Jefferson was a working politician and diplomat who believed in an effective central government—his experience in the Virginia governorship and during the Confederation years had convinced him of that—and often asserted the need to project power.