The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
CONSTITUTION / UNITED STATES / NEED FOR INFORMED CITIZENRY
Our new Constitution, of which you speak also, has succeeded beyond
what I apprehended it would have done. I did not at first believe that
eleven States out of thirteen would have consented to a plan
consolidating them as much into one. A change in their dispositions,
which had taken place since I left them, had rendered this
consolidation necessary, that is to say, had called for a federal
government which could walk upon its own legs, without leaning for
support on the State legislatures. A sense of necessity, and a
submission to it, is to me a new and consolatory proof that, whenever
the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own
government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their
notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights. You say you are
not sufficiently informed about the nature and circumstances of the
present struggle here. Having been on the spot from its first origin,
and watched its movements as an uninterested spectator, with no other
bias than a love of mankind, I will give you my ideas of it. Though
celebrated writers of this and other countries had already sketched
good principles on the subject of government, yet the American war
seems first to have awakened the thinking part of this nation in
general from the sleep of despotism in which they were sunk. The
officers too who had been to America, were mostly young men, less
shackled by habit and prejudice, and more ready to assent to the
dictates of common sense and common right. They came back impressed
with these. The press, notwithstanding its shackles, began to
disseminate them; conversation, too, assumed new freedom; politics
became the theme of all societies, male and female, and a very
extensive and zealous party was formed, which may be called the
Patriotic party, who, sensible of the abusive government under which
they lived, longed for occasions of reforming it. This party
comprehended all the honesty of the kingdom, sufficiently at its
leisure to think; the men of letters, the easy bourgeois, the young
nobility, partly from reflection, partly from mode; for those
sentiments became a matter of mode, and as such united most of the
young women to the party.
to Dr. Price, 8 January 1789
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