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Among his numerous suggestions to Congress for cancelling eventually the eighty million dollars of the national debt, to which business men of the Northern States were subscribing freely, was an excise. Although this debt, the "Hamiltonian debt," as the Jeffersonians called it, was an iniquitous burden saddled upon the common people, an excise was to them a most offensive way of meeting it.
It took the name of "Republican," as signifying its opposition to the alleged monarchical designs of Hamilton and his supporters. Later, when it appeared that such a title was really too universal to be descriptive, the Jeffersonians began to call themselves by the more genuinely characteristic title of "Democratic Republicans," subsequently abbreviated into "Democrats."
The Floridas, or the western portion at least, would have been annexed to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1804 if the Jeffersonians had been expansionists at heart. Livingston, whose antecedents were more Federalistic than the majority of Jefferson's appointees, advised taking immediate possession of the Floridas upon the assumption that they were part of Louisiana.
Genet wished to embroil America with England, and sought to fit out American privateers on the seacoast towns to prey on the English commerce, and to organize on the Ohio River an armed expedition to conquer Louisiana, as Spain was then an ally of England and at war with France. The Jeffersonians' Western Policy.
Numerous others might be introduced here. The Jeffersonians inherited from the Federalists a small collection of books and maps, which had been purchased for the use of the members of Congress deprived of the library facilities they had enjoyed in the cities of New York and Philadelphia. It was the beginning of the present magnificent Library of Congress.
Many of the Federalists saw this; and to many of them, the Adamses, for instance, and Jay and Pinckney, the West owed more than it did to most of the Republican statesmen; but as a whole, the attitude of the Federalists, especially in the Northeast, toward the West was ungenerous and improper, while the Jeffersonians, with all their unwisdom and demagogy, were nevertheless the Western champions.
The controversy between Jefferson and Hamilton was about realities. The Jeffersonians won, and the Federalist Party disappeared. The controversy between Jackson and the Whigs was originally also real. Jackson won, and the Whigs would have shared the fate of the Federalists if they stood by their original principles and refused to accept the consequences of the Jacksonian Revolution.
The anathemas of the "promoted" officials, thus fallen between stools, added to the pleasure of the Jeffersonians. The names of twenty-two unfortunates, whom the Senate failed to find time to ratify in the closing hours, were recalled by Jefferson, under the caption, "Nominated but not appointed."
Being unable to admit the people of Louisiana to immediate statehood, and unwilling to hold them purely as colonists, the Jeffersonians divided the land into a territory and a district. This action prolonged for years the possibility that the people reside in territories, deprived of the privileges and protection of a State government.
The theorists, too, must make their sacrifices; the believers in centralization, the believers in diffusion of power; Madisonians, Hamiltonians, Jeffersonians all must concede something, or there could be no nation. And between principles of moral right and wrong, here, too, can there be compromise?
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