The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
UNITY / PARTY POLITICS / ARISTOCRATICAL PARTY
The aspect of our politics has wonderfully changed since you left us.
In place of that noble love of liberty and republican government which
carried us triumphantly through the war, an Anglican monarchical
aristocratical party has sprung up, whose avowed object is to draw
over us the substance, as they have already done the forms, of the
British government. The main body of our citizens, however, remain
true to their republican principles; the whole landed interest is
republican, and so is a great mass of talents. Against us are the
executive, the judiciary, two out of three branches of the
legislature, all the officers of the government, all who want to be
officers, all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the
boisterous sea of liberty, British merchants and Americans trading on
British capital, speculators and holders in the banks and public
funds, a contrivance invented for the purposes of corruption, and for
assimilating us in all things to the rotten as well as the sound parts
of the British model. It would give you a fever were I to name to you
the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were
Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had
their heads shorn by the harlot England. In short, we are likely to
preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and
perils. But we shall preserve it; and our mass of weight and wealth on
the good side is so great, as to leave no danger that force will ever
be attempted against us. We have only to awake and snap the
Lilliputian cords with which they have been entangling us during the
first sleep which succeeded our labors.
to Philip Mazzei, 24 April 1796
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