Are there any magazine or newspaper articles that explain how Thomas Jefferson affected democracy in the U.S?
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http://weekendinterviewshow.com/InterviewDisplay.aspx?i=135\nhttp://weekendinterviewshow.com/InterviewDisplay.aspx?i=140\nhttp://www.philipdru.com/griffin3_stream.html
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Coragryph is right. And I think that by today's definitions of each party, Thomas Jefferson would have been a Democrat. He was a humanitarian, and disliked aristocratic attitudes in government. Interesting man- I always enjoyed reading about his philosophy- he is definitely one of my favorite wise men in American history.\n\nI just read the 2nd part to your question, about the textbooks--OMG!! My 17 year old stepson (yes, Texas) told me some things that were in his history textbooks as well, asking why they would make kids believe one thing, only to have to relearn the truth later on. At least he is inquisitive enough to want to do so. Some kids will never learn the truth. When will these far right people realize that you cannot rewrite history to your liking? I do not understand the mentality that only Republicans are good people, or moral, or Christian. I'm a Christian- a lover and seeker of the Truth. It is just not right to imply that one political party is the steward and dictator of what truth is- especially when they lie.
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Thomas Jefferson \n\nIn the thick of party conflict in 1800, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a private letter, "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." \n\nThis powerful advocate of liberty was born in 1743 in Albemarle County, Virginia, inheriting from his father, a planter and surveyor, some 5,000 acres of land, and from his mother, a Randolph, high social standing. He studied at the College of William and Mary, then read law. In 1772 he married Martha Wayles Skelton, a widow, and took her to live in his partly constructed mountaintop home, Monticello. \n\nFreckled and sandy-haired, rather tall and awkward, Jefferson was eloquent as a correspondent, but he was no public speaker. In the Virginia House of Burgesses and the Continental Congress, he contributed his pen rather than his voice to the patriot cause. As the "silent member" of the Congress, Jefferson, at 33, drafted the Declaration of Independence. In years following he labored to make its words a reality in Virginia. Most notably, he wrote a bill establishing religious freedom, enacted in 1786. \n\n   \n \n \n\nPresident Bush Biography\nVice President Cheney Biography\nLaura Bush Biography\nLynne Cheney Biography  \n \n  \n \n \n \nJefferson succeeded Benjamin Franklin as minister to France in 1785. His sympathy for the French Revolution led him into conflict with Alexander Hamilton when Jefferson was Secretary of State in President Washington's Cabinet. He resigned in 1793. \n\nSharp political conflict developed, and two separate parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, began to form. Jefferson gradually assumed leadership of the Republicans, who sympathized with the revolutionary cause in France. Attacking Federalist policies, he opposed a strong centralized Government and championed the rights of states. \n\nAs a reluctant candidate for President in 1796, Jefferson came within three votes of election. Through a flaw in the Constitution, he became Vice President, although an opponent of President Adams. In 1800 the defect caused a more serious problem. Republican electors, attempting to name both a President and a Vice President from their own party, cast a tie vote between Jefferson and Aaron Burr. The House of Representatives settled the tie. Hamilton, disliking both Jefferson and Burr, nevertheless urged Jefferson's election. \n\nWhen Jefferson assumed the Presidency, the crisis in France had passed. He slashed Army and Navy expenditures, cut the budget, eliminated the tax on whiskey so unpopular in the West, yet reduced the national debt by a third. He also sent a naval squadron to fight the Barbary pirates, who were harassing American commerce in the Mediterranean. Further, although the Constitution made no provision for the acquisition of new land, Jefferson suppressed his qualms over constitutionality when he had the opportunity to acquire the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon in 1803. \n\nDuring Jefferson's second term, he was increasingly preoccupied with keeping the Nation from involvement in the Napoleonic wars, though both England and France interfered with the neutral rights of American merchantmen. Jefferson's attempted solution, an embargo upon American shipping, worked badly and was unpopular. \n\nJefferson retired to Monticello to ponder such projects as his grand designs for the University of Virginia. A French nobleman observed that he had placed his house and his mind "on an elevated situation, from which he might contemplate the universe." \n\nHe died on July 4, 1826.
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Jefferson changed the face of the presidency.  In the study of how our government started he was a key factor.  Jefferson thought the government was too powerful at the time he took office.  Jefferson worked to change it with new economic policies.  He reduced government spending through budget management. (a lesson we should take from him now)  He also decreased the size of the government by having government take less of a role in the lives of everyday people like us.  \n\nThis is important for 8th graders to know because there are many things you can learn from Jefferson.  In only four or five years you will be voting in the same elections adults are voting in.   We want you to be informed voters.  We want you to know how to listen for what candidates stand for, decide if you agree with them and make your own choices.  That is why we study any past presidents,  it is to make you consider, is this someone you would have voted for?  If not what would you vote for?  Jefferson and Adams differed in many ways.  Jefferson and Hamilton probably differed even more.  Who would you have voted for?  Look at candidates we have now.  They too have different opinions.  Can you take a position and stand for it?  Can you make an informed decision and vote for the person that will help our country the most?  Start thinking about it now because you will be standing in that voting booth all alone some day and you will have to make the decisions.
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A few of the many. . . . . . \n\nA democracy is a state in which the poor gaining the upper hand, kill some and banish others, and then divide the offices among the remaining citizens equally by lot. – Plato, from The Republic, VIII, 370 BCE.\n\nDemocracy arose from men thinking that if they are equal in any respect they are equal in all respects. – Aristotle, from Politics, V, 322 BCE.\n\nA democracy, when put to the strain, grows weak, and is supplanted by oligarchy. – Aristotle, from Rhetoric, 322 BCE.\n\nDemocracy is more cruel than wars or tyrants. – Seneca, from Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, 63 CE.\n\nA democracy in effect is no more than an aristocracy of orators, interrupted sometimes with the temporary monarchy of one orator. – Thomas Hobbes, from De corpore politico, II, 1650 CE.\n\nThe evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy.  The people do no want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots. – Elbridge Gerry, - Speech in the Constitutional convention, 1787 CE.\n\nA perfect democracy is the most shameless thing in the world. – Edmund Burke, from Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790 CE.\n\nDemocracy is Lovelace and the people is Clarissa. – John Adams, Letter to William Cunningham, March 1804 CE.\n\nThe tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity. – James Fenimore Cooper, from The American Democrat, XIV, 1838 CE.\n\nDemocracy is morose, and runs to anarchy. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Nominalist and Realist, 1841 CE.\n\nInstitutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization or both. – T. B. Macaulay, from Letter to H. S. Randall, 23 May 1857 CE.
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"Information is the currency of democracy."  Thomas Jefferson
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Americans' sense of civic virtue was shocked by the scandals associated with the Reconstruction era, including corrupt state governments, massive fraud in cities controlled by machines, political payoffs to secure government contracts (especially the Crédit Mobilier of America scandal regarding the financing of the transcontinental railroad), and widespread evidence of government corruption during the Ulysses S. Grant administration (see Whiskey Ring). Led by the Bourbon Democrats, especially Samuel J. Tilden and Grover Cleveland, there was a call for reform, such as Civil Service Reform. More generally there was a sense that government intervention in the economy resulted in favoritism, bribery, kickbacks, inefficiency, waste and corruption. The Bourbon Democrats led the call for a free market, low tariffs, low taxes, less spending and, in general, a Laissez-Faire (hands-off) government. They also denounced imperialism and overseas expansion. Many business and professional people supported this approach, although most Republicans continued to argue for a high protective tariff to encourage rapid growth of industry and protect America's high wages against the low wage system in Europe. Labor activists and agrarians expressed the same spirit but focused their attacks on monopolies and railroads as unfair to the little man.\n\nIn politics the two parties engaged in very elaborate get-out-the vote campaigns that succeeded in pushing turnout to 80%, 90% and even higher. It was financed by the "spoils system" whereby the winning party distributed most local, state and national government jobs, and many government contracts, to its loyal supporters. Large cities were dominated by political machines, in which constituents supported a candidate in exchange for anticipated patronage—favors back from the government, once that candidate was elected—and candidates were selected based on their willingness to play along. Presidential elections between the two major parties (the Republicans and Democrats), were closely contested, and Congress was marked by political stalemate. Mudslinging became an increasingly popular way of gaining advantage at the polls, and Republicans employed an election tactic known as "waving the bloody shirt". Candidates, especially when combating corruption charges, would remind voters that the Republican Party had saved the nation in the Civil War. During the 1870s voters were repeatedly reminded that the Democrats had been responsible for the bloody upheaval, an appeal that attracted many Union veterans to the Republican camp. The Republicans consistently carried the North in presidential elections. The South, on the other hand, became the Solid South, nearly always voting Democratic. The political humiliations of Reconstruction were still fresh in many minds. Conversely, the Democrats invoked images of the "lost cause" and the glorious "stars and bars" in much the same way Republicans "waved the bloody shirt". Overall, Republican and Democratic political platforms remained remarkably constant during the years before 1900. The negativity and ambiguity of politics began a shift in the press to yellow journalism, in which sensationalism and sentimental stories took as prominent a role as factual news.\n\nGreat question.  Thanks...I learned something too.
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Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 N.S. – July 4, 1826) was the third President of the United States (1801–1809), author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and one of the most influential founders of the United States. Major events during his presidency include the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the Embargo Act of 1807, and the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806).\n\nAnd check out the link below.
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Thomas Jefferson to William Johnson, 1823\n\nAnd it means that people should not try to find every loophole available in the original meaning behind the Consititution. They should just remember what the principles it was based on represented and conform to that.
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"Wall of Separation" between Church and State\nThomas Jefferson, as president, wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut on 1802-JAN-1. It contains the first known reference to the "wall of separation". The essay states in part:\n\n"...I contemplate with solemn reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State..."\n\nDuring the 1810's, President James Madison wrote an essay titled "Monopolies" which also refers to the importance of church-state separation. He stated in part:\n\n"Strongly guarded as is the separation between religion and Government in the Constitution of the United States, the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history."\n\nThe US Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment as if it requires this "wall of separation" between church and state. It not only prohibits any government from adopting a particular denomination or religion as official, but requires government to avoid excessive involvement in religion.
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That was a very heated discussion as they were writing it.  Thomas Jefferson (the writer) was forced by other Virginians to take out several passages where the freedom of the slaves would be brought into question.  AT THE TIME - the slave owners thought of the slaves as less than human (3/5ths of a human to be exact).  So yes, the final document was a bit hypocritical in hindsight, but not in their point of view.
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wikipedia!!!\n\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_jefferson
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John Adams, Thomas Jefferson
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I have an answer of a scholar that thinks that O'Brien is wrong (Oct 1996):\n\nCounter Points:\nJefferson scholar Douglas L. Wilson responds to Conor Cruise O'Brien\n\n\n\nConor Cruise O'Brien, in "Thomas Jefferson: Radical and Racist" (October, 1996, Atlantic), apparently believes that Jefferson deserves to be demonized and disavowed by the American people because of "two major factors": "challenges to the authority of the federal government and the race issue."\n\nSee "Thomas Jefferson and the Character Issue" by Douglas L. Wilson, from the November, 1992, Atlantic.\nMr. O'Brien seems to believe that Jefferson is the inspiration for, and therefore somehow ultimately responsible for, contemporary acts of lawlessness and terrorism, a perception that was apparently confirmed for him when the news media reported last winter that a suspect in the Oklahoma City bombing wore, at the time of his arrest, a T-shirt emblazoned with a Jefferson quotation: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." But it also seems clear that Mr. O'Brien's grievance against Jefferson is much deeper and of longer standing.\n\nJefferson's besetting sin, by Mr. O'Brien's lights, is that he was not a "Burkean." Mr. O'Brien is said to have been deeply affected by the life and example of the eighteenth-century statesman Edmund Burke, whose biography he regards as his crowning achievement. He quotes admiringly Burke's cautionary words on the early phase of the French Revolution: "the wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgement until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface." In other words, the proof will be in the pudding, and unless the Revolution produces order and good government, it will not be a blessing. Mr. O'Brien assures us that George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, the other great American founders, "were all spiritually Burkeans; so was Madison, while he worked with Hamilton on the Federalist papers and before he fell under the Jeffersonian spell." Jefferson, he says, is different, because "the liberty that Jefferson adored is not a liberty 'combined' with all those tedious Burkean things, as in the Constitution, but a wild liberty, absolute, untrammeled, universal. . . ." "The other Founders saw the Declaration as embodying generalities that would at a later stage need to be combined with and confined by practical considerations. But Jefferson saw the principles of the Declaration as transcendent truths of which he himself, as author of the Declaration, was also the destined and authoritative interpreter." He was, in Mr. O'Brien's view, intoxicated with the wild gas of liberty.\n\nBut what is the evidence for this view of Jefferson? Mr. O'Brien would have us conclude that because Jefferson defended a band of farmers in western Massachusetts -- who, a few years after the Revolution, armed themselves and defied the state government -- he therefore sanctioned armed rebellion against the federal government. But of course he did not. In the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 he secretly tried to promote the idea of defeating unconstitutional laws, such as the Alien and Sedition acts, by having the individual states nullify and refuse to enforce them. If he believed that the answer to unconstitutional laws and other betrayals of the Constitution was armed rebellion, he missed a perfect occasion for saying so.\n\n\nThe "Tree of Liberty" Letter\n\nThe key text for Mr. O'Brien's case is the provocative "tree of liberty" letter, but he offers no analysis or extensive look at it -- for good reason. Mr. O'Brien knows that, particularly wher
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Hamilton was strong central government and industry based. Jefferson was states rights and farming based.
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Read the Federalist Papers
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Yes. It is true. During Jefferson's presidential administration, Rodney Cox, from North Carolina was discovered in the act of providing former Tories with information regarding the American naval forces capability to secure American shores. After a brief ad hoc trial, Cox was convicted and sentenced to death by firing squad. Jefferson, being a notorious Anglophobic at the time, served as the sole member of the firing squad. With a single bullet dispatched from a flint lock rifle, Cox received a fatal wound. It took 10 hours for Cox to expire, during which he lay prostrate on the White House lawn. Afterwards, he was committed to the sea in a right proper burial, albeit, without any fanfare.