Jefferson & the Crucible of Peaceable Coercions

It was not just an affirmation of him and his principles by the American people, nor a rejection of his opponents.

Thomas Jefferson’s election to the presidency in 1800 was, above all else, an opportunity. Up to this moment, he had been a writer, theorist, legislator, ambassador, secretary, and vice president. But except for a single (highly-controversial) term as Virginia’s governor, he had never been an executive, able to put his theories of limited government and non-coercive foreign policy into practice, demonstrating to a skeptical world their superiority to the old ways of monarchy and military power.[1]

Though in one sense humbled by the magnitude of the task before him, and “seeing with pain [that] more will be expected than my limited faculties can accomplish,” he was nevertheless certain of success. To one well-wisher, he wrote that it was both his hope and belief that his presidency would provide proof once and for all that “a free government is of all others the most energetic,” the consequences of which would be to “ameliorate the condition of man over a great portion of the globe.”[2] To another he affirmed that his administration’s “just, dispassionate and steady conduct, will at length rally to a proper system the great body of our country. Unequivocal in principle, reasonable in manner, we shall be able I hope to do a great deal of good to the cause of freedom and harmony.”[3]

It was this restoration of harmony, as he declared in his first inaugural address, that would be the ultimate marker of his success. “Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.”

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To that end, he promised “a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, [but that] shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.” To the rest of the world, he promised “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”[4]

He would do much of this quickly—so quickly, in fact, that, domestically, the “Revolution of 1800” seemed complete midway through his first term.[5] “The session of the first Congress convened since republicanism has recovered its ascendancy, is now drawing to a close,” he reported.

They will pretty completely fulfil all the desires of the people. They have reduced the army and navy to what is barely necessary. They are disarming executive patronage and preponderance, by putting down one half the offices of the United States, which are no longer necessary. These economies have enabled them to suppress all the internal taxes, and still to make such provision for the payment of their public debt as to discharge that in eighteen years.

Unsurprisingly, the harmony he sought was already at hand, “and all is now tranquil, firm, and well, as it should be.”[6] To another he wrote that, with seemingly everything accomplished already, “the path we have to pursue is so quiet, that we have nothing scarcely to propose to our legislature.” Looking forward, he saw only a “noiseless course,” his major object being to avoid meddling “with the affairs of others.”[7]

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As galling as Jefferson’s triumphalism might seem, it was entirely justified at that moment in 1802. Not only had the administration set up a path to retire the public debts in less than twenty years, but they had done so while ending most domestic taxation.

Not content there, he and the Republican Congress had also disemboweled the two institutions that most embodied the previous Federalist regime: the military and the judiciary.[8] As historian Forrest McDonald writes,

To do all that was to defy every precedent. It was simply not in the nature of government to pay its debts, abolish taxes; deliberately restrict its ability to coerce, or voluntarily reduce its authority; rather, the tendency had always been the other way around . . . For the moment, the Jeffersonians had reversed the flow of history.[9]

Nor, at that point, was the flow of history done coursing in Jefferson’s direction.

Louisiana was of primary interest to him and the Revolution of 1800. Politically and economically, his and the Republicans’ southern agrarian base depended upon the Mississippi River—and especially New Orleans—“through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce and contain more than half our inhabitants.”

So long as it was controlled by Spain, who had allowed American merchants a “right of deposit” in New Orleans since 1795, all was well.[10] “Spain might have retained [Louisiana] quietly for years,” said Jefferson. “Her pacific dispositions, her feeble state, would induce her to increase our facilities there, so that her possession of the place would be hardly felt by us.”[11]

But rumors began to swirl that Spain would soon transfer ownership to France, another matter altogether. “This little event,” Jefferson warned, “this speck which now appears as an almost invisible point in the horizon, is the embryo of a tornado which will burst on the countries on both shores of the Atlantic and involve in its effects their highest destinies.”[12] As he would explain, the “impetuosity of [France’s] temper,” as well as “the energy and restlessness of her character,” would place it “in a point of eternal friction with us, and our character, which though quiet . . . is high-minded, despising wealth in competition with insult or injury.” Combined, “these circumstances render it impossible that France and the U.S. can continue long friends when they meet in so irritable a position.”

So intolerant was the possibility, in fact, that should it happen, the infamously Anglophobic President believed that Americans would have no recourse left but to “marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.”[13]

Matters would worsen when Spain briefly closed New Orleans to American commerce in 1802. “The agitation of the public mind . . . is extreme,” Jefferson wrote to James Monroe. While it seemed impossible that the United States could buy Louisiana (“we are too poor to pay any sum which France would feel . . . [and] are in debt, and wish to pay our debts”), it was politically necessary that he buy time to quiet the public outcry.[14] For this, the president envisioned a minister plenipotentiary who would travel to Europe and, if nothing else, demonstrate to the public back home that the issue of Louisiana was a priority.

Monroe was his man. “You possess the unlimited confidence of the administration and of the western people; and generally of the republicans everywhere; and were you to refuse to go, no other man can be found who does this.”[15]

Monroe would not refuse, but was two months delayed in sailing for France, not touching down in Le Havre until April 1803—four months after his official appointment.[16] When he arrived in Paris days later, he soon discovered just how much a few months of time could buy, and how quickly the flow of history could change.

First consul and master of France, Napoleon had seized upon the Peace of Amiens in 1802 as an opportunity to lead France to the apex of power and glory. The French colony of Saint Domingue (Haiti), riven by a slave rebellion, and the Louisiana Territory were of a primary importance to this ambition: the former because of the lucrativeness of its sugar and coffee trade; the latter for the additional commodities it could give France access to.

Of the two, Saint Domingue—and the need to restore French authority there—was of the first importance. As a mark of this, Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc, and 20,000 French troops were dispatched to re-pacify the island. Once this was done, and shiploads of sugar and coffee were filling French wharves once more, a fraction of those forces would then establish French footprints in Louisiana.

But Bonaparte’s ambition was no match for yellow fever, nor the militant desire of San Domingue’s population not to be returned to slavery. Within months of landing on the island, both would lay absolute waste to French forces, and in just over six months more than half of the forces sent to the island were buried in the earth beneath it.

Leclerc himself succumbed to the fever in early 1803, and to his grave he brought Napoleon’s hopes of an empire in the Americas with him. “Damned sugar, damned coffee, damned colonies,” the First Consul cried out in frustration. “Irresolution and deliberation are no longer in season; I renounce Louisiana.”

In so many words, he would swap his imperial ambitions from one hemisphere to another, cutting his losses in the former and extracting what treasure he could to fund his ambitions in the latter.[17]

Once again Jefferson found himself suddenly lifted by the flooding tide of history. Hardly had the dust of French soil been allowed to settle upon Monroe’s boots, in fact, before he was presented with a French offer to sell all of Louisiana to the United States. Within hours, he and the American minister to France, Robert Livingston, had agreed to terms with their French counterparts, and news of the treaty was being shipped to Washington as fast as wind and sea could carry it.

When it arrived, Jefferson received it with complacency. “We have by pursuing the ways of peace & reason, obtained immediately & permanently . . . the whole country of Louisiana . . . larger in extent than the whole united states & equal to them in soil & climate.”[18]

To him, his judgment and principles had been confirmed once again. In the years before his election, it had been his repeated prayer that, in remaining at peace amidst the eternal conflict between France and Britain, the young republic would set “another example to the world” that “nations may be brought to do justice by appeals to their interests as well as by appeals to arms.”[19]

A few weeks after his inauguration he would elaborate on this idea. Having “nothing to fear” from the powers of Europe “in any form,” he was adamant that “our commerce is so valuable to them that they will be glad to purchase it when the only price we ask is to do us justice.” Should conflict arise, “we have in our own hands the means of peaceable coercion; & that the moment they see our government so united as that [we] can make use of it, they will for their own interest be disposed to do us justice.”[20]

He had held firm to this doctrine when rumors of Spain’s impending retrocession of Louisiana had rocked the nation. The question had been whether the republic should go to “war with the most powerful nation on earth, or place things on the best footing practicable for the present, and avail ourselves of the first war in Europe . . . to obtain the country as the price of our neutrality.” The answer had been obvious, and events had vindicated him.[21]

His domestic agenda accomplished, his theories of “peaceable coercions” in international affairs seemingly vindicated, and the size of the country doubled for pennies an acre, Thomas Jefferson was reelected in a landslide in 1804. In the words of Henry Adams,

Such success might have turned the head of any philosopher that ever sat on a throne. Easily elated, unwilling to forebode trouble, devoid of humor, and unable to see himself in any but the heroic light, President Jefferson basked in the sunshine of popularity and power as though it were no passing warmth such as had led scores of kings into disaster, but shone by virtue of some democratic law which rested on truth that could never change.[22]

It is one of the laws of political gravity, though, that one rarely sits atop the pinnacle of power and success for long. Jefferson would be no different, and the flow of history, so favorable to this point, began to ebb underneath him before his first term was fully complete, a current whose increasing force would eventually wash away the laurels upon which he reclined.

One source of frustration would be failed attempts to fully geld the Federal judiciary. Another would be the alleged treason and trial of his former vice president, Aaron Burr. But those, combined with the erosion of party unity in Congress, would be comparatively mild headaches.[23]

It was events abroad—a world that was once again contested over by the British and French—that would crush Jefferson beneath a tsunami, leaving him clinging to the flotsam and jetsam of his principles and presidency until the tide washed him up on Monticello’s doorstep.

* * *

Having tasted nothing but success thus far, Jefferson immediately looked to enlarge the American “empire of liberty” further by adding Florida to Louisiana.[24] First, Monroe and Livingston were instructed to claim that the Spanish-held territory was included in the Louisiana Purchase. After Napoleon swatted this notion away, the two sought out the notoriously mendacious French foreign minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, and asked his assistance in persuading Madrid to accept the United States’ claim to Florida free of charge. Not only did Talleyrand decline, but France and Spain soon became formal allies once again.[25]

Not knowing this, but sensing he was going to get nowhere in Paris, Monroe went to Madrid and spent seven useless months attempting – through a combination of persuasion, threat, and pure delusion—not only to compel Spain to cede Florida, but to pay the United States millions in compensation for damages previously done to American commerce.

Eventually accepting the inevitable there too, Monroe, having suffered humiliations in two European capitals, made his way to a third. Once arrived in London, however, whatever hope he clung to of a more favorable experience vanished immediately, as a new ministry—contemptuous of American weakness and determined to favor British commerce—had just come to power. In the ensuing course of events, Florida, and Spain’s refusal to part with it, would seem minor in comparison. Indeed, over the months remaining in the year 1805, a litany of misfortunes would transpire that would constitute the first ripples of the eventual wave that would subsume Jefferson’s presidency.

The first was news that a dozen American merchantmen had been seized by the British navy en route to France. A British admiralty court then upheld the seizures, effectively ending the United States’ free commerce with Europe. Concurrent to this, His Majesty’s navy redoubled impressment of sailors suspected of having deserted from British men-of-war to the American merchant marine, where conditions were less harsh and the compensation more lucrative.

Up to this moment, Jefferson had seen the United States in a position of advantage vis-à-vis Great Britain and France, convinced that, in the words of Henry Adams, “his friendship was as vital to England, France, and Spain as all the armies and navies of the world.”[26]

By the end of the year, though, Britain would be left absolute master of the seas, and Napoleon master of continental Europe, following the Battles of Trafalgar and Austerlitz, respectively.[27] Between those polar hegemonies, the middle ground that Jefferson had hoped to occupy and exploit collapsed beneath him. As Bonaparte made explicit in the Berlin Decree of 1806, and Britain reciprocated with its “Orders in Council” the following year, commerce with one was forbidden by the other.[28] As Jefferson put it, “the whole world is thus laid under interdict by these two nations, and our vessels, their cargoes & crews are to be taken by the one or the other, for whatever place they may be destined, out of our own limits.”[29]

The climactic moment of Jefferson’s presidency had arrived. Arguably a crisis, arguably an opportunity, it was certainly a trial—a crucible through which not just Jefferson, but his most fundamental principles on the role of government and foreign affairs would have to pass if his presidency was to fulfill the expectations Jefferson himself had made for it back in 1800.

If, in other words, he was to set an example that would “ameliorate the condition of man over a great portion of the globe,” it would be here and now.

* * *

Feeling was high in the country entering the summer of 1807. It rose higher still when, that June, the HMS Leopard, searching for deserters, opened fire upon the frigate USS Chesapeake off the coast of Virginia. The attack killed three American sailors, injured several more, and forced the Chesapeake to strike its colors.

To a long string of insults was suddenly added grievous injury to the nation’s honor. The calls for war that had echoed across the United States after Spain had closed Louisiana, and again when Spain refused to part with Florida, were mere whimpers in comparison to the howls that pierced the ears of Jefferson, his cabinet, and Congress when they returned to Washington later that fall.

Amidst this din, the president remained minimally perturbed: he shared Americans’ sense of outrage, but not their fever for war. Having proudly “reduced the army and navy to what is barely necessary,” Jefferson’s first-term “successes” and the flow of history had positioned him perfectly to wield the “peaceable coercions” he had long advocated. He was careful to stipulate that Congress had the power to declare war if it chose, but his wish remained that, in this moment of conflict with Great Britain, and “having taught so many other useful lessons to Europe, we may not add that of shewing them that there are peaceable means of repressing injustice.”[30]

He made known that he preferred some additional harbor fortifications and the addition of one-hundred and eighty gunboats, and nothing more.[31] Congress overwhelmingly approved, then moved onto the weapon that Jefferson had long advocated: embargo. Once more, after a short debate in secret session, the legislature gave the executive exactly what had been asked of it. The Embargo Act of 1807—and the other embargo acts that would follow—proscribed all trans-oceanic trade with foreign nations and overland trade with Canada. [32]

Shortly after signing the Act in December, Jefferson sang its praises. But now that the “peaceable coercions” he had spoken of for years were no longer merely hypothetical, the rhetorical means he employed to defend them became far more prosaic. No mention was made any longer of larger, history-altering purposes, or of teaching Europeans another lesson. Instead, the embargo was the lesser of two evils. “It postpones war, gives time, and the benefit of events which that may produce: particularly that of peace in Europe, which will postpone the causes of difference to the next war.”[33] If and when that happened, the United States would likely be in a stronger position, for “by that time our debt may be paid, our revenues clear, & our strength increased.”[34]

Though he did understand the hardship this caused amongst seamen deprived of their living, and of the sacrifice asked of farmers and merchants, he was confident these sacrifices would be “cheerfully met.”[35]

That confidence would prove misplaced. Passed in Congress with little debate, let alone with any time for Jefferson to prepare the nation prior, Americans were unready for the sacrifices suddenly required of them.[36] It should have been no surprise, then, that within weeks of signing the bill, Jefferson would be chagrined by reports that gave him “a bad account of the patriotism” of some Americans “not disposed to submit to the small privations to which the embargo will subject them.”[37]

Protest and resistance would only grow from there. Those hardest hit were amongst his most ardent supporters in the commodity export-dependent south, but opposition to the “dambargo” was fiercest in the Northeast. Letters expressing opposition and death threats began to flood the executive mansion, as did reports of brazen contravention of the law—sometimes in collusion with customs collectors; other times in violent defiance of them.[38]

Yet as disobedience hardened, so did Jefferson’s resolve. The epicenter was around Lake Champlain, a commercial thoroughfare between New England and Canada, where “information has been received that sundry persons are combined . . . for the purposes of forming insurrections against the authority of the laws of the US.” The regular legal mechanisms had been insufficient, and so “that the authority of the laws may be maintained,” Jefferson issued a proclamation “commanding such insurgents . . . instantly & without delay to disperse & retire peaceably to their respective abodes.” He further required “all officers having authority civil or military” to aid and assist “by all the means in their power by force of arms or otherwise to quell & subdue such insurrections or combinations.”[39]

Within days of this edict, Jefferson asked for, and Congress approved, an Enforcement Act empowering him to search and seize cargo on the suspicion that the holder might be contemplating a violation of the embargo, and to use the army and navy to enforce the law.[40]

With these enhanced powers, Jefferson’s next target was the “coasting trade” between states. Though this was technically domestic, Jefferson was worried it would create the opportunity for shipmasters to find themselves blown off course, and to then leave their cargo in ports they shouldn’t. To give “complete effect to the embargo laws,” he mandated that the national government detain most ships engaging in this trade “freely,” so “that we may by a fair experiment know the power of this great weapon, the embargo.”[41]

From then on Jefferson found himself in a descending spiral: enforcement, met with resistance, met with more draconian enforcement, met with more determined resistance. By the summer of 1808, he was at an absolute loss. “I did not expect a crop of so sudden & rank growth of fraud & open opposition by force could have grown up in the US.”[42]

Yet instead of pausing, the enforcement intensified. Americans’ private property was seized, martial law was resorted to when civilian courts proved inadequate, the army was sent to “suppress any commotion,” and pleas from communities for bread were denied on the assumption that “the place has been so deeply concerned in smuggling, that if it wants it is because it has illegally sent away what it ought to have retained for its own consumption.”[43]

The man who had labeled the administration of his predecessor a “reign of witches” had found himself, a decade later, declaring that, in his ever-desperate attempt to enforce a national law on a nonconsenting people, “there are extreme cases where the laws become inadequate even to their own preservation, and where the universal resource is a dictator.”[44]

By the early winter of 1808, Jefferson had exercised extreme levels of centralized, coercive power that he would have denounced in any other potentate, and he had been no more successful in peacefully coercing the British and French than he had in compelling obedience from his fellow citizens. As the time for him to leave office neared, there was nothing to do but admit failure. “This candid and liberal experiment having thus failed,” he informed Congress, “and no other event having occurred on which a suspension of the embargo by the executive was authorized, it necessarily remains in the extent originally given to it.” With matters unchanged internationally, it would “rest with the wisdom of Congress to decide on the course best adapted to such a state of things.”[45]

Thomas Jefferson and two of his most cherished principles had indeed entered a crucible; and in it he had surrendered one in pursuit of the other: a national government that left its citizens “free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement,” in exchange for “peaceable coercions” that eschewed military exercises of power for commercial ones. The upshot of this sacrifice was that he avoided war with a foreign power, but only at the expense of waging war against his own citizens.

Despite his best efforts, the world continued to operate as it always had. Forcible coercions—and the power to wield them—were what moved human affairs, and the condition of man over a great portion of the globe remained unchanged.[46]

As 1808 turned to 1809, Jefferson did nothing to conceal the spiritual toll this had taken on him. “I am now so near the moment of retiring, that I take no part in affairs beyond the expression of an opinion.” For him, it had been eight years of choosing after a lifetime of opining, and to retire to the latter was a release he yearned for as desperately as he did the comfort of his family and farm. “Five more weeks will relieve me from a drudgery to which I am no longer equal, and restore me to a scene of tranquility . . . more congenial to my age and inclinations.”[47]

Returned to his mountaintop, he could once again occupy heights both physical and intellectual, safely perched above the flow of history and crucibles that might disturb them. There at least, he could hope to find the harmony that had eluded him and his countrymen.

[1] For a discussion of Jefferson’s (for the most part unfairly) maligned term as governor of Virginia during the War of Independence, see John Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (New York: Random House, 2013), 129-143.

[2] Thomas Jefferson to John Dickinson, March 6, 1801, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-33-02-0156.

[3] Jefferson to James Bowdoin, March 8, 1801,” Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-33-02-0172; “To Elbridge Gerry; Washington, Mar. 29, 1801,” in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1090.

[4] “First Inaugural Address; March 4, 1801,” in Peterson, ed., Writings, 493-494.

[5] For Jefferson’s use of the term “Revolution of 1800” in describing his election that year, see Jefferson to Spencer Roane, September 6, 1819, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-15-02-0014.

[6] “To General Thaddeus Kosciusko; Washington, April 2, 1802,” Peterson, ed., Writings, 1103.

[7] “Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, November 29, 1802,” Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-39-02-0070.

[8] For a discussion of the Jefferson Administration’s military reductions, see Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801-1805 (New York: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 247-249.

[9] Forrest McDonald, The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1976), 52.

[10] U.S. Department of State (n.d.), Treaty of San Lorenzo/ Pinckney’s Treaty, 1795. Office of the Historian. history.state.gov/milestones/1784-1800/pickney-treaty.

[11] “To the U.S. Minister to France (Robert R. Livingston); Washington, April 18, 1802,” in Peterson, ed., Writings, 1105.

[12] Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, April 25, 1802, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-37-02-0263.

[13] “To the U.S. Minister to France,” Peterson, ed., Writings, 1105.

[14] Jefferson to de Nemours, May 5, 1802, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-37-02-0335.

[15] “To the Special Envoy to France (James Monroe); Washington, Jan. 13, 1803, in Peterson, ed., Writings, 1111-12.

[16] Malone, First Term, 272.

[17] For an account of Napoleon and the Americas, see Adam Zamoysky, Napoleon: The Man Behind the Myth (London: William Collins, 2019), 327-332. See also McDonald, Presidency of Jefferson, 66-67.

[18] Jefferson to John Strode, July 6, 1803, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-40-02-0512.

[19] “Jefferson to James Madison; March 24, 1793,” in Peterson, ed., Writings, 1006.

[20] Jefferson to George Logan, March 21, 1801,” Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-33-02-0334.

[21] Jefferson to William Dunbar, July 17, 1803,” Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-41-02-0044.

[22] Henry Adams, History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Library of America, 1986), 438.

[23] Jefferson to Joel Barlow, March 14, 1801,” Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-33-02-0234. For a discussion of the split within the Republican Party, see McDonald, Presidency of Jefferson, 75-93; and Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2006), 116-125.

[24] For Jefferson’s quote on the “empire of liberty,” see Jefferson to Benjamin Chambers, December 28, 1805, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-2910 (“[By] enlarging the empire of liberty, we multiply it’s auxiliaries, & provide new sources of renovation, should it’s principles at any time, degenerate”).

[25] McDonald, Presidency, 98-99.

[26] For a discussion of Jefferson’s views on the United States in relation to Britain and France, see Adams, History, 144-146. For his quote on Jefferson, see ibid., 471.

[27] McDonald, Presidency, 101-114.

[28] Adams, History, 1000-1014.

[29] Notes for Message to Congress, December 1807, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-7013.

[30] Jefferson to William H. Cabell, June 29, 1807, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-5836.

[31] See Adams, History, 1035.

[32] See ibid., 1031-1048.

[33] “Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, January 3, 1808, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-7129.

[34] Jefferson to John Taylor, January 6, 1808, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-7143.

[35] Jefferson to Gideon Granger, January 22, 1808,” Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-7245.

[36] See Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805-1809 (New York: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 486-490.

[37] Jefferson to Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge, February 23, 1808, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-7474.

[38] See Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 131-133.

[39] Proclamation on the Embargo, April 19, 1808, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-7861.

[40] See McDonald, Presidency, 148-149.

[41] Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, May 6, 1808,” Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-7972.

[42] Jefferson to Gallatin, August 11, 1808,” Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-8492.

[43] Jefferson to Henry Dearborn, August 9, 1808,” Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-8471; Jefferson to Levi Lincoln, November 13, 1808, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-9079. For a succinct summation of Jefferson’s embargo enforcement efforts, see McDonald, Presidency, 147-152.

[44] Jefferson to Samuel Brown, October 27, 1808, Founders Online, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-8958. For his labelling of the Adams presidency a “reign of witches,” see Jefferson to Taylor, June 4, 1798,” Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-30-02-0280.

[45] “Eighth Annual Message, November 8, 1808,” in Peterson, ed., Writings, 544.

[46] See Adams, History, 1115-1126.

[47] “To James Monroe; Washington, January 28, 1809,” in Peterson, ed., Writings, 1200.