[A] Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and the leader of the Democratic Republicans, brought to the presidency a political philosophy and style with a marked difference from that of his two Federalist predecessors, George Washington and John Adams. [B] Jefferson began his presidency with a symbolic action, choosing to walk to his inauguration through the swampy streets of the new capital city of Washington from his modest boardinghouse to the steps of the unfinished Capitol building. [C] Through the eight years of his presidency (1801-1809), Jefferson acted in line with a clear set of beliefs that served as the foundation of his interpretation of the meaning of republicanism in America, one based upon a hardworking, civically minded, self-governing, free, and equal citizenry, and a limited role for the federal government. [D]
Jefferson's political thinking had clearly been shaped by the years that he had spent in Europe as the ambassador to France in the 1780s. [A] There he had witnessed a society of extreme wealth and extreme poverty in the period just prior to the French Revolution, and he felt that a society with such excesses and extremes would not be able to offer the bulk of its citizens the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness that he himself had described in the Declaration of Independence. [A] He was opposed to the development of the factory system, having witnessed the squalid working and living conditions and difficult lives of the masses who toiled in the factories in England. [C] When the Federalists had begun promoting the industrialization of America in the 1790s, he had been strongly opposed. He believed that the Federalist plan would create an industrialized society with the same extremes of wealth and poverty that he had witnessed in Europe. [D]
[A] At the core of Jefferson's beliefs was that the best way for the young United States to achieve a republican form of government was as an agrarian republic. [B] The country was blessed with large expanses of land and plenty of room for growth across the continent. [C] He pictured a nation of small family farms grouped together in rural communities and believed that only a nation of hardworking farmers, owning their own land and not dependent on others for their existence, would share the concern for the good of the community that was necessary for a republic to thrive. [D]
Another event in Europe that helped to shape Jefferson's political vision was the publication in 1798 of "Essay on the Principle of Population." [A] This influential essay was a pessimistic warning of the effect of an imminent population explosion. [B] In the essay, the author warned that, because of the rapidly growing population, the food supply would soon be inadequate to feed the population, in England, throughout Europe, and even in America. [C] Many Americans were alarmed by the essay. [D] Jefferson, however, countered the alarm raised by the essay with the idea that the United States would always be able to feed its population if it developed a strong agrarian society as it expanded across the continent.
Jefferson became president in 1801, and as he came into office he was determined to reverse the Federalist policies of the 1790s. His vision was to institute an expanded agrarian republic composed of self-governing civically oriented citizen-farmers and to reduce the size and scope of the federal government. [A] The results of the agrarian expansionism that Jefferson had so favored were not always positive in that the movement west for lands led to a society in constant motion rather than a society of stable communities. [B] However, Jefferson was instrumental in achieving a number of his goals. [C] The size of the United States was expanded tremendously during his presidency through the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the country; the size of the federal government was reduced by cutting taxes, reducing the size of both the army and the navy, and decreasing the number of government workers; and the national debt that he had inherited from the Federalists was eliminated. [D]
