Presidency of Thomas Jefferson - Jeffersonian Democracy

Jeffersonian Democracy

Historians have long portrayed the contest between Jefferson and Hamilton as iconic for the politics, political philosophy, economic policies and future direction of the United States. For example in the 1920s Claude Bowers, a historian and Democrat, wrote a best-seller that pitted good versus evil in Jefferson and Hamilton: The Struggle for Democracy in America (1925). The Jeffersonian position—called Jeffersonian democracy--won out in 1800 and Hamilton's Federalism died out (except on the Supreme Court of John Marshall). The historian Sean Wilentz in 2010 identified a scholarly trend in Hamilton's favor:

"In recent years, Hamilton and his reputation have decidedly gained the initiative among scholars who portray him as the visionary architect of the modern liberal capitalist economy and of a dynamic federal government headed by an energetic executive. Jefferson and his allies, by contrast, have come across as naïve, dreamy idealists. At best according to many historians, the Jeffersonians were reactionary utopians who resisted the onrush of capitalist modernity in hopes of turning America into a yeoman farmers' arcadia. At worst, they were proslavery racists who wish to rid the West of Indians, expand the empire of slavery, and keep political power in local hands -- all the better to expand the institution of slavery and protect slaveholders' rights to own human property."