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The Presidency Of Thomas Jefferson Essay

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The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson

By: Hayden Osborne

The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson- Written by Forrest McDonald, published by the University Press of Kansas in 1976, 169 pages excluding the appendix, 201 pages including the appendix. The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson outlines our third President’s youth, his time as Secretary of State under George Washington, as well as his time in office. However, due to the length of this book, my focus will lie on section two, titled The Republican Tack: At Home, 1801-1803. In this section, McDonald mainly focuses on the rise of Jefferson’s party and the influences that gave him his ideas.

In section two, McDonald remarks that ‘Thomas Jefferson referred to the ascent of his party as the Revolution of 1800- a claim that scholars have..regarded as exaggerated.’ He goes on to say that this was exaggerated because it was a leisurely ascent. There were no executions nor was there a Reign of Terror, nothing done was particularly amazing and it was not dramatic, yet Jefferson called it this.

Jeffersonians were, according to McDonald, Americans of Celtic descent, Protestants, or slaveholders from the south. In his own time, Jefferson was regarded by his peers as a champion of liberty, although he never thought it through as a concept. To him, it 's meaning was a conventional one, and since he was a slaveholder, Jefferson never could truly understand liberty. Even his father gained their estate by slaughtering or conning the natives,

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