Just to be politically aligned was, at least in the eyes of some Federalists, immoral and perhaps treasonous.16 Even Jefferson at this point remained reluctant to embrace factionalism, at least in public. It meant giving up a conception of governance that he and his peers had held all their lives. “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all,” he avowed from Paris in March 1789.17 But he would soon sing a different hymn.
