Jefferson himself grandly referred, in an 1819 letter written long after his retirement from public life, to “the revolution of 1800,” and many historians have followed him in employing that expression. But Jefferson was referring in those words not to his implementation of transforming revolutionary policies but merely to the peaceable transfer of power itself: the nation’s success in producing change “not effected indeed by the sword … but by the rational and peaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people.”
