The President had no patience with
... the interested and crafty individuals among them who inculcate a sanctimonious reverence for the customs of their ancestors; that whatsoever they did, must be done through all time; that reason is a false guide, and to advance under its counsel, in their physical, moral, or political condition, is a perilous innovation; that their duty is to remain as their Creator made them.
The attitude of these reactionaries among the Indians gave Jefferson an opportunity to hit at one stroke the medicine men and the clergymen who were attacking him fiercely.
In short, my friends, among them is seen the action and counter-action of good sense and bigotry; they, too, have their anti-philosophers, who find an interest in keeping things in their present state, who dread reformation, and exert all their faculties to maintain the ascendency of habit over the duty of improving our reason, and obeying its mandates.
The New England and New York clergymen who had stood with the Federalists knew exactly where they belonged.
But if the President was unwilling to let the attacks to which he had been subjected pass entirely unnoticed, he maintained at the same time that no official steps must be taken to repress in any way freedom of speech and freedom of the press. In more emphatic terms than ever before, he reasserted the fundamental doctrine he had defended against all comers for more than twenty-five years:
During this course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been levelled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science, are deeply to be regretted, inasmuch as they tend to lessen its usefulness, and to sap its safety; they might, indeed, have been corrected by the wholesome punishments reserved and provided by the laws of the several States against falsehood and defamation; but public duties, more urgent press on the time of public servants, and the offenders have therefore been left to find their punishment in the public indignation.
Thus were the Callender and the Federalist pamphleteers handed over to the public to be dealt with, according to the merits of their cases.
The address ended with a new appeal to harmony, with the hope that truth, reason and well-understood self-interest might enlighten the last opponents of true republicanism. It ended also with a sort of prayer which may or may not have expressed the religious beliefs of Jefferson at the time:
I shall need the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers, as Israel of old, from their native land, and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life; who has covered our infancy with his providence, and our riper years with his wisdom and power, and to whose goodness I ask you to join me in supplications.