The end of the Jeffersonian Era and its principles

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My paper argues that Thomas Jefferson s agrarian republic faced total destruction by the end of Thomas Jefferson s second term because of many forces and issues that threatened it, the two main one being westward expansion and slavery.

 The Founding Fathers and especially Jefferson wanted to create a society free of Europe s corruption and social problems. Jefferson after his experience as ambassador in Europe Thomas Jefferson detested the ills of the European society such as poverty, inequality, and dependence and wanted America to be completely different from Europe. He wanted a society where the population would control, an agrarian or manufacturing society. When he became president he established an agrarian society.

  Jefferson brought to the presidency a clearly defined political philosophy . Agrarian republicanism as Jefferson envisaged was to be composed of  yeoman farmers, each secure in his own possessions , as shown in in the painting in Salem, North Carolina in 1787 with an independent farmer plowing his own fields for himself and his family,  not dependent on someone else for his livelihood.  Drew McCoy in his book The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America does clearly outlines the role of the government in a Jeffersonian republic.  The government needed to promote social and economic progress, support a moral, land-owning independent citizenry and prevent corruption, social decay and unconstrained materialism , this was agrarian republicanism Left unchecked, these areas quickly lead to an eventual advancement into an industrial society, eliminate that landed citizenry and doom the republic.

The Jeffersonians wanted to forestall that industciety to an industrialized commercial society and destabilized Jefferson s agrarian republic.

According to Steven S. Raab   the first great crisis over slavery occurred when Missouri requested to be admitted to the Union as a slave state in 1819.  Slavery was related with expansion. As America moved west, the largely southern system of slavery expanded as well.   The number of slave and free states was then balanced at 11 each, and admission would upset that balance.  Both north and south staked out positions based on political advantages rather than nationalism. Northern politicians did not want to admit another slave state and lose power in the Senate, while Southerners wanted an advantage in the Senate,  because of faster population growth they were already outnumbered in the House of Representatives (105 to 81).  This question created controversy in the Congress and after a year John Tallmadge Jr. demanded that Missouri be accepted in the Union at the condition that it accepts to the  gradual end of slavery  proposing that   all children born within the state [Missouri], after the admission thereof in the Union, shall be free at the age of twenty-five years.  This ended in the Missouri Compromise, it appeared to be the perfect solution but some and especially Jefferson were troubled by the implications of drawing a physical line between north and south, and thereby creating defined sections where once there was a union.

In March 1820, Jefferson received word of the details of the Compromise essentially agreed upon in Congress. He was appalled by the very idea of reducing a political disagreement to geographical terms.  On April 5, 1820, he wrote to Mark Hill, a Maine

Congressman, that "The idea of a geographical line, once suggested, will brood in the minds of all those who prefer the gratification of their ungovernable passions to the peace and union of their country." Days later he wrote to Thomas Holmes saying that the Missouri question was a "fire bell in the night," and promised to be the knell of the Union. Ultimately Jefferson proved to be correct; dividing the nation geographically made people act along sectional lines, and was the first step to Civil War.

The Jeffersonian Republicans feared living in a European style society with poverty, landless masses of laborers, unorganized violence, social inequality and probably war. They saw the only way to disrupt that industrial society was physical expansion west and economic expansion into foreign markets but it came out that the agrarian republic disrupted instead and that slavery grew to the point of separating the Union geographically by a line so expansion and slavery surfaced as moral arguments to the Jeffersonian Republicans because it meant the end of their virtuous utopian society.

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