[52] Wirt: Letters of the British Spy, 10-11.
These brilliant articles, written by Wirt when he was about thirty years old, were published in the Richmond Argus during 1803. So well did they deceive the people that many in Gloucester and Norfolk declared that they had seen the British Spy. (Kennedy: Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt, i, 111, 113.)
[53] Ames to Pickering, Feb. 4, 1807, Pickering MSS. Mass. Hist. Soc.
[54] Jefferson to Rush, Oct. 4, 1803, Works: Ford, x, 32.
Immediately after his inauguration, Jefferson restated the American foreign policy announced by Washington. It was the only doctrine on which he agreed with Marshall.
"It ought to be the very first object of our pursuits to have nothing to do with European interests and politics. Let them be free or slaves at will, navigators or agricultural, swallowed into one government or divided into a thousand, we have nothing to fear from them in any form.... To take part in their conflicts would be to divert our energies from creation to destruction." (Jefferson to Logan, March 21, 1801, Works: Ford, ix, 219-20.)
[55] Jefferson to Postmaster-General (Gideon Granger), May 3, 1801, Works: Ford, ix, 249.
The democratic revolution that overthrew Federalism was the beginning of the movement that finally arrived at the abolition of imprisonment for debt, the bestowal of universal manhood suffrage, and, in general, the more direct participation in every way of the masses of the people in their own government. But in the first years of Republican power there was a pandering to the crudest popular tastes and passions which, to conservative men, argued a descent to the sansculottism of France.
[56] See infra, chaps. iii and vi; also vol. iv, chap. i.
[57] 1 Cranch, 1 et seq.