Word: virginias
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...purchasing the Louisiana Territory from the French ruler, Jefferson was struggling from afar to understand Napoleon's increasingly power-hungry motives. At first, Jefferson held out hope that France was in the hands of an enlightened statesman. By April 1800, when he addressed Everard Meade, a Virginia state legislator, Jefferson was growing disillusioned. He was worried that the French example of a republic lost to a despot would shake faith in the U.S.'s fledgling government. But thanks to its physical remoteness, the U.S., Jefferson felt, was safe from Napoleon's cannons and muskets--and his bad example...
...official recognition--an amount estimated to be worth nearly $22 billion today, which some Haitians insist should be repaid--began its perilous slide toward turmoil and dependency, resulting in a 19-year U.S. occupation and two subsequent interventions in the past 100 years. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson presented dire warnings about what might happen to the U.S. political system in a worst-case scenario, but his words turned out to be a more accurate prophecy for America's plundered neighbor: "The spirit of the times ... will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt ... The shackles ... which shall...
Then there's the Jefferson of the Notes on the State of Virginia, who in the time-honored fashion--"I'm no racist but ..."--proclaimed whites' superior beauty and ventured his "suspicion" that although racial intermixture improved them, blacks were intellectually inferior to whites. Although he qualified his disparaging remarks because he hadn't observed blacks in their natural state of freedom in Africa, Jefferson's presentation leaves no doubt that he, like a typical white person of the 18th century, believed in white supremacy. Consider Abigail Adams, who upon seeing Othello expressed her "disgust and horror" at the thought...
Instead, the feud worsened. In early 1793, a Virginia Congressman named William Branch Giles began to harry Hamilton with resolutions ordering him to produce, on short deadlines, stupendous amounts of Treasury data. With prodigious bursts of energy, Hamilton complied with those inhuman demands, foiling his opponents. Jefferson then committed an unthinkable act. He secretly drafted a series of anti-Hamilton resolutions for Giles, including one that read, "Resolved, That the Secretary of the Treasury has been guilty of maladministration in the duties of his office and should, in the opinion of Congress, be removed from his office by the President...
Jefferson, who was Vice President at the time, drafted his position in secret and wrote it into the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. James Madison, in collaboration with Jefferson, subsequently authored the Virginia Resolutions. In the second and fourth of the Kentucky Resolutions, Jefferson cited the 10th Amendment, which gives the states powers not delegated to the government by the Constitution, to declare the Alien and Sedition Acts unconstitutional. Jefferson feared that a strong central government might put an end to slavery. Jefferson's fight against the Alien and Sedition Acts is often placed in the context of free speech...