The election of 1800 was perhaps the most vicious this country has ever seen. Led by Alexander Hamilton, the Federalists were attacking each other.
But the Federalists did more than snipe at each other. They also attacked the fifty-seven-year-old Jefferson—Deist, champion of the people, friend of the French Revolution—with savage fury. Their favorite epithet was Jacobin, that is, French radical. For a high-toned people they waved an astonishingly low-level campaign. They charged that Jefferson had cheated his British creditors, obtained his property by fraud, robbed a widow of an estate worth ten thousand pounds, and behaved in a cowardly fashion as Governor of Virginia during the Revolution. Jefferson, wrote one Federalist, was “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father…raised wholly on hoe-cake made of coarse-ground Southern corn, bacon and hominy, with an occasional change of fricaseed bullfrog.” Queried one Federalist leaflet:
“Can serious and reflecting men look about them and doubt that if Jefferson is elected, and the Jacobins get into authority, that those morals which protect our lives from the knife of the assassin—which guard the chastity of our wives and daughters from seduction and violence—defend our property from plunder and devastation, and shield our religion from contempt and profanation, will not be trampled upon and exploded?”
— Presidential Campaigns by Paul F. Boller, Jr.
Thomas Jefferson was a very complex man to say the least, full of contradictions.
Thankfully so.
He believed in a small federal government, but that didn’t stop him from going against everything he believed in and making the Louisiana Purchase and sending Louis and Clark on their way. For that alone I’ll give him a thumb up.
He also devised what is known as the Jefferson Bible by cutting all the miracles and other supernatural junk out of the gospels and leaving only mostly the nice things that Jesus supposedly said. But he did that after he was no longer president, so that doesn’t count.