The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
CONSTITUTION / UNITED STATES / THREATS TO
Behold you, then, my dear friend, at the head of a great army,
establishing the liberties of your country against a foreign enemy
[Austria]. May heaven favor your cause, and make you the channel
through which it may pour its favors. While you are exterminating the
monster aristocracy, and pulling out the teeth and fangs of its
associate, monarchy, a contrary tendency is discovered in some here. A
sect has shown itself among us, who declare they espoused our new
Constitution, not as a good and sufficient thing in itself, but only
as a step to an English constitution, the only thing good and
sufficient in itself, in their eye. It is happy for us that these are
preachers without followers, and that our people are firm and constant
in their republican purity. You will wonder to be told that it is from
the eastward chiefly that these champions for a king, lords and
commons come. They get some important associates from New York, and
are puffed up by a tribe of agitators which have been hatched in a bed
of corruption made up after the model of their beloved England. Too
many of these stock-jobbers and king-jobbers have come into our
legislature, or rather too many of our legislature have become
stock-jobbers and king-jobbers. However, the voice of the people is
beginning to make itself heard, and will probably cleanse their seats
at the ensuing election.
to Marquis de Lafayette, 16 June 1792
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