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Updated: June 1, 2025
In fact, the great prosperity and high customs receipts to which the financial success of the Jeffersonians was due depended to a great extent on the fortunate neutral situation of the United States. By 1805, the British shipowners felt that flesh and blood could not endure the situation.
If the Jeffersonians had been driven from their first ground by this territorial acquisition, the Federalists had fared no better. They had first called into being the genii of the "implied powers," and now had the mortification of seeing it serve their enemies.
When the Jeffersonians came to power, they no longer opposed federal pretensions; they now, by one of those strange veerings often found in American politics, began to give a liberal interpretation to the Constitution, while the Federalists with equal inconsistency became strict constructionists.
Even Jefferson was ready to sacrifice his theory of strict construction in order to acquire the province of Louisiana. The Jeffersonians now made several concessions to the manufacturers, and with their support linked to that of the agriculturists Jeffersonian democracy flourished without any potent opposition.
It did not mean the adoption by the Jeffersonians of a party policy on such liberal principles. But it made easier the adoption of such a policy after the War of 1812 had demonstrated in a most unpleasant manner the absolute necessity for such action on the part of the General Government.
The lower branch of Congress had gone over to the Jeffersonians, and the upper House would be lost after the next session. No check was possible upon the reformers.
England and France were now arrayed against each other, and Americans, though their Government remained neutral, arrayed themselves openly as partisans of either combatant. The division followed almost exactly the lines of the earlier quarrel which had begun to appear as the true meaning of Hamilton's policy discovered itself. The Hamiltonians were for England. The Jeffersonians were for France.
When threatened by foreign powers, Federal citizenship assumed a new value in the eyes of the Jeffersonians, much akin to that which it had long borne in the opinion of the Federalists. The party which ten years before was endeavouring to distinguish between State and national citizenship was now compelled to take action to protect sailors who were not residents of any State.
Too many Federalists failed to see that these positions were the only proper ones to take. In consequence, notwithstanding all their manifold shortcomings, the Jeffersonians, and not the Federalists, were those to whom the West owed most. Right of the Westerners to Self-Government. Whether the Westerners governed themselves as wisely as they should have mattered little.
Moreover, Napoleon had sufficient thought for these pawns in the game of diplomacy to insert in the treaty of cession a provision that statehood should be given them "as soon as possible." The Jeffersonians were compelled to resort to loose construction in interpreting this phrase.
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