Bound for Canaan by Fergus Bordewich

like the young nation itself, was still more an idea, more a hopeful plan than an established reality. Jefferson’s walk that morning took him through what was essentially a worksite whose grandly named avenues were still troughs of red mud cluttered with alder trees and stumps, where only a relative handful of unimposing buildings lay scattered between patches of woods and the Potomac River. Even the president’s official residence—not yet known as the White House—was still under construction. Cannon roared as Jefferson entered the north wing of the Capitol, the only concession to ceremony that the champion of the small farmers, and mechanics, and men of little property countenanced on this historic day, when power would pass, at least symbolically, into their hands and out of those of the Federalists.
    When he raised his hand to take the oath from John Marshall, his cousin and political rival, the fifty-eight-year-old Jefferson was becoming president less of a stable union sharing a deep sense of common interest, than of a political confection that resembled the tacked-together Yugoslavia of the late twentieth century, a loose agglomeration of mini-states protective of their autonomy, and suspicious of encroachment by their weak central government. It was a simple, rural nation whose population was smaller than that of Ireland. Its largest city, Philadelphia, numbered seventy thousand inhabitants, and its constituent parts were linked by roads that were little more than rambling tracks sketched through the forest. The writ of the national government barely reached beyond the Appalachians, into lands that were still inhabited by powerful Indian nations who occupied most of the territory between the mountains and the Mississippi River. Indeed, only a few years earlier, the country had suffered the worst defeat ever to befall Americans at the hands of Indians, the loss of more than eight hundred men on the banks of the Wabash River, in present-day Indiana. Spaniards governed Florida; and the French, New Orleans and most of the Mississippi Valley. It was a country inwhich inequalities of class, gender, and race were ingrained and largely unquestioned.
    The prospect of Jefferson’s election had thrown fear into the hearts of many Americans. During the recent campaign, he had been denounced by his opponents as a “vulgar demagogue” and a “bold atheist,” who would undertake “dangerous innovations.” He owed his very election to the disproportionate power of the slave states in the Electoral College, a fact that infuriated legislators from New England. Now, however, his gracious demeanor, his acute intelligence, and more than anything else his conciliatory words reassured even Marshall, the leader of the Federalists, who had feared that Jefferson as president might prove to be an “absolute terrorist.” When he began to speak, Jefferson’s reedy voice barely reached the ears of his audience, who strained to catch every pregnant word. What he had to say was exquisite in its eloquence, fusing soaring idealism with the hard realities of politics.
    The speech was Jefferson at his most seductive. “We are all Republicans—we are all Federalists,” he declared, directly addressing his wary, not to say vengeful, opponents in the chamber. “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the world’s best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve