Jefferson Administrations - Domestic Issues
Domestic Issues
In 1800 agriculture was still the principal livelihood of Americans, as the industrial revolution lay decades into the future. Jefferson fantasized that the United States should develop as a country dotted with small, self-sufficient, family-run farms. Each region would have its own specialty—rice, cotton, and tobacco plantations in the South, grain and livestock farms in the mid-Atlantic states, lumberyards and fisheries in the North. People would govern locally, largely without interference from the national government, which instead would concern itself primarily with the foreign policy of minimizing intercourse with foreign nations.
The Federalists under George Washington and John Adams, however, had set up national institutions that propelled the United States forever away from Jefferson's agrarian ideal. Washington's secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, saw the United States's strength in the...
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