Thomas Jefferson

Excerpt: ...and should the new nation be given an aristocratic or a democratic twist? This was a burning question, and it gave rise to that long struggle led by Hamilton on one side and by Jefferson on the other, which ended pg 85 with the election of Jefferson as President in the year 1800. Hamilton and his party utterly disbelieved in government by the people. 2 John Adams declared that the English Constitution, barring its element of corruption, was an ideal constitution. Hamilton went farther and asserted that the English form of government, corruption and all, was the best practicable form. An aristocratic senate, chosen for a long term, if not for life, was thought to be essential even by Mr. Adams. Hamilton's notion was that mankind were incapable of self-government, and must be governed in one or two ways, -by force or by fraud. Property was, in his view, the ideal basis of government; and he was inclined to fix the possession of "a thousand Spanish dollars" as the proper qualification for a voter. The difference between the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian view arises chiefly from pg 86 a different belief as to the connection between education and morality. All aristocratic systems must, in the last analysis, be founded either upon brute force or else upon the assumption that education and morality go hand-in-hand, and that the well-to-do and best educated class is morally superior to the less educated. Jefferson rejected this assumption, and all real believers in democracy must take their stand with him. He once stated his creed upon this point in a letter as follows: - "The moral sense or conscience is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree to the guidance of reason, but it is a small stock which is required for this, even a less one than what we call common sense. State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor....