Title: Jefferson's Call for Nationhood: The First Inaugural Address
Abstract: Jefferson's Call for Nationhood: The First Inaugural Address. By Stephen Howard Browne. (College Station: Texas AM paper, $14.95.)When Thomas Jefferson rose to deliver his inaugural address, the stakes could not have been higher. The preceding months had been marked an extraordinarily divisive and cantankerous campaign. While fellow Republicans held the newly elected president up as the most authentic spokesman of the American Revolution, rushed to smear him as profligate philosopher, an atheist more loyal to France and its quick succession of bloodthirsty regimes than to the United States and its fragile Constitution. In the Electoral College, Jefferson defeated incumbent John Adams but tied with Aaron Burr, the New Yorker who appeared on ballots as his running mate. Burr, however, did little to discourage in the House of Representatives who angled unsuccessfully to elevate him instead of Jefferson to the presidency. For several weeks Americans witnessed true constitutional crisis. Yet on March 4, 1802, when Jefferson stood in the nation's new Capitol to address representatives of citizens who had alternatively showered him with love or hatred, reverence or revulsion, he proclaimed that are Republicans, we are Federalists (xiv).The speech soothed most Federalists, many of whom regarded it as promise of moderation and-as one New Hampshire writer gushed-a model of eloquence (89). Republicans, on the other hand, viewed Jefferson's words as vindication. Only handful of the thousands of Americans who read it in newspapers found anything to which they could object. The third president, as Stephen Howard Browne observes, had disarmed his enemies and buoyed his friends delivering a rhetorical performance of the most complex and portentous kind. The brief address evinced all of the felicities characteristic of Jefferson's prose, he writes, and known then as it is now to be the singular expression of nation's highest ideals (13).Browne's elegant study of Jefferson's most famous presidential pronouncement is nearly as successful. As the first extended meditation on the speech, it fills surprising void m Jefferson scholarship. Browne's analysis of the third president's vision for American nationalism is well-grounded and well-considered. In addition, it is well-balanced, for it centers around three important themes.The first is that the address, while partisan statement, aimed to define as partisan only the most extreme and recalcitrant Federalists; others were brethren of the same principle (xiv). So successful was Jefferson at defining broadly and innocuously his philosophy that the Gazette of the United States, Federalist newspaper, fumed that his comforting words and general professions . . . mean notliing, because they mean everything (17). Yet the Gazzette was wrong, for Jefferson not only broadened but also redefined the political center. Americans, he said, stood for toleration of political dissent, freedom of worship, and diplomatic neutrality. Defenders of the Alien and Sedition Acts, church establishments, and the Jay Treaty must have perceived barbs poking from Jefferson's softly spoken words, but the new chief executive, according to Browne, aimed to win the hearts and minds of Americans not by dissuading the Federalist leadership but isolating them (32). …
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot