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Presidents Of The United States In The Century From Jefferson To Fillmore
Presidents Of The United States In The Century From Jefferson To Fillmore Author:Francis Bellamy Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER HI. THE NEW FEDERAL GOVEBNMEOT. When Jefferson reached his plantation in time for Christmas, in 1789, a new epoch opened for him. He had expected t... more »o return to his interesting post in France, but instead he was called by Washington to take a place in the new government which, under the new Constitution, was just then being established. It was twelve years before his own first administration was to begin. But those years were to be the constructive period of the government of the United States,—the period when its most fundamental problems were to be met and its politics were to be formed. In this, Jefferson was himself to be a conspicuous factor. The applications of his pronounced views to the basic questions of that period were to become the rallying points of a great party. And though in most of the important issues at stake, Jefferson was on the defeated side, he became with failure more knowing of the essentials of sound democratic policy; and when the day of his larger power arrived, he was fortunate in what he had thrown away. While Jefferson had been long separated from first-hand acquaintance with home affairs, his talent for sympathetic letter-writing had kept him in vital touch with the leaders of thought in the States. He had realised that changes must result from the chaos which he had left behind, but he had not anticipatedanything Bo grave as a fundamentally new government. If the Constitution, which emerged full-made when the closed door of the Philadelphia Convention at last opened, was a surprise to the expectant public, it was much more startling to the absent optimist who had reasoned that experience and a few obvious repairs would make the ramshackle Confederacy a comfortably jogging machine. When he first saw the document, which was later to...« less