Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), author of the Declaration of Independence and third President (1801–1809), is the emblem of the democratic-republican wing of the American founding — and a contested figure in Infrared's Americanist genealogy.
Record
- Principal author of the Declaration's universalist language; architect of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.
- Founder of the Democratic-Republican opposition to Hamilton's financial system: agrarianism, strict construction, hostility to the national bank, debt, and speculation — the "empire of liberty" of free farmers against the moneyed interest.
- As President: the Louisiana Purchase (1803) — arguably the greatest single act of American state development; the Embargo Act, an early experiment in economic nationalism.
- Contradiction: the slaveholder who wrote "all men are created equal"; the small-government theorist who exercised sweeping federal power.
Infrared treatment
Infrared reads Jefferson through the lens of the two American traditions: Jeffersonian democracy as the popular, anti-finance pole (later carried by Jackson) versus the Hamiltonian-Carey-Lincoln line of directed industrial development. Haz has criticized Jefferson's Lockean idealism and his laissez-faire agrarianism as the seed of what later became Anglo-liberal "small government" ideology — while claiming the Declaration's promise for the patriotic-socialist reading of America (see Andrew Jackson, New Deal).