Memories of Tory confiscations and penalties
were sufficiently fresh to give credence to a rumour that the
President-elect contemplated such retributive measures toward his
political opponents. Memories of the disunion sentiments contained in
the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were still fresher, although
Jefferson's close connection with the latter was not yet generally
known.
Thomas Jefferson was an exponent of the democracy of his day, and with
him democracy came into the National Administration. The "well-born"
were discomfited. Yet it was not the democracy of Andrew Jackson's
time. It was a democracy reflected from Europe like everything else
in America at the time. It was the democracy of Montesquieu and the
encyclopaedists. It was a democracy which could be led by a college
graduate and lawyer, who was also a gentleman farmer and a large
landholder, bound to his party by a country residence, by being a
borrower, and by speculative theories. Only such aristocratic democracy
was possible on the Atlantic coast-plain. Pure American democracy would
be born only after advancing civilisation found a majority in the
mid-valley of the continent, with the barrier of the Alleghenies at
its back.
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