Journal of Southern History

Peter S. Onuf, an eminent scholar of the early American republic and Thomas Jefferson, richly deserves this Festschrift. The contributors to Jeffersonians in Power: The Rhetoric of Opposition Meets the Realities of Governing consider the ideology of Jefferson and his supporters and investigate what happens to ideas when they are put into practice. How and why the ideas change are questions this collection asks of Jefferson and the party he led from opposition to power.

Editors Joanne B. Freeman and Johann N. Neem know that by depicting a sharp transition from opposition to power, they are contributing to a venerable historiographical preoccupation in which Jefferson and his party have not fared well. Beginning most prominently with Henry Adams, scholars have depicted the Jeffersonians as hypocrites who once in power out-Federalized the Federalists. The editors seek “a middle ground” by exploring “the meeting place of ideology and policy,” to reveal that “what appears to be hypocrisy”—asserting national authority, relying on public debt, waging war, rechartering the Bank of the United States—“was in fact a process of discovery and definition” (pp. 2, 10). This discovery led the Jeffersonians to become less naive when they confronted, as the Federalists had in the 1790s, the “realities of governing” (p. 5). For in the 1790s, the editors state in the book’s first sentence, the Jeffersonians “were the party of ‘no’” (p. 1).

The editors are less transcending a limited historiographical construct than they are adding to it more thoughtfully. There are unspoken (possibly unrealized) assumptions informing the subtitle “The Rhetoric of Opposition Meets the Realities of Governing.” With enormous respect for Freeman and Neem, I think these assumptions might be improved if ideals and challenges informed the book’s organizing premise rather than rhetoric and realities.

The essays by John A. Ragosta and Mark Smith remind us that during the 1790s, the Jeffersonians were far from being merely the party of no. These essays suggest that the best way to anticipate what the Jeffersonians did after 1800 is to understand what they said in the 1790s. Most of what the Jeffersonians did in power was not a “paradox,” a term relied on in the introduction and later in the volume (p. 2). The Jeffersonians made clear in the 1790s that they always wanted a certain kind of active nation-state, a certain kind of global commercial order, and hoped to wield power to achieve this vision. To a remarkable degree, the Jeffersonians pursued these goals when they got the chance.

Smith’s essay contributes to scholarship that shows that the Jeffersonians, when denouncing the Federalists, offered an alternative domestic and global political and commercial order. Beginning in the 1790s, James Madison demanded commercial discrimination, which required powerful market intervention by the national government. The Jeffersonians wanted to upend a [End Page 115] global commercial order dominated by Britain, a legacy of imperial supremacy that they feared was fatal to republican institutions. Upending it would challenge the culture of monarchy, or, as Madison described it, “‘the genius of Monarchy’” (p. 85). Jeffersonians feared that monarchy was not an antiquated institution. Rather, at its most potent and effective it harnessed modern instruments such as public debt, national banks, stock markets, and global commerce to concentrate and consolidate power. Policies that consolidated authority over debt, banks, and commerce were key indicators of this culture of monarchy.

Smith shows that in opposing the Bank of the United States, the Neutrality Proclamation, and the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Jeffersonians denounced Federalist policies that they believed exemplified the culture of monarchy. Yet they did not oppose all banks, only a massive bank connected to the national government. They also opposed public debt serviced to concentrate ownership and to connect public creditors to that government in perpetuity, but not all...