His obvious intellectual brilliance notwithstanding, Jefferson has always been an easy target, due to the discrepancies between his stirring words and his actual deeds. He wrote eloquently about equality, but kept a slave woman as his mistress; his greatest accomplishment as President, the Louisiana Purchase, was completely inconsistent with his avowed constitutional principles; he financed newspapers that opposed the Washington Administration while he was still a member of the cabinet; he professed to hate cities, while luxuriating in Paris; and so on. The uncharitable could call him a hypocrite, and many did; more indulgent viewers would say that he was a practical politician, not a philosopher, whose actions were largely dictated by the necessities of the day.
The two most important questions about Jefferson are as follows:
1. Would Jefferson have supported or opposed the ratification of the Constitution if he had been in the country in 1788? It’s difficult to say. He clearly had reservations about the Constitution, but so did everyone else; it was, after all, a series of compromises. He used arguments that were consistent with those of the Anti-Federalists when he was in opposition, but his governing practices as President did not diverge dramatically from those of his predecessors. I guess what you can say is that it was a good thing both for his reputation and for the country that he was in France at the time, so we will never really know one way or the other.
2. How should one apply Jeffersonian principles in a Hamiltonian world? Jefferson’s vision of America was dominated by small, independent farmers. He was right in the short run, which meant that the Federalist Party was doomed, but wrong about the national economy in the long run. How would he have reacted to a world in which national and multi-national corporations have the kind of economic clout that they do today? Would he have supported increased governmental regulation as the only possible counterweight to their power? If you are a Democrat, you say yes; if you are a Republican, you cite to his antipathy to the use of federal power, and say no. There is no possible definitive answer to this question, but I have to believe, given Jefferson’s willingness to change tactics and his open-mindedness about the future, that the Democrats are right.