Thomas Jefferson Hypocrisy In The Constitution

Thomas Jefferson, one of the most popular founding fathers, the main author of the Declaration of Independence, and the third president of the United States of America was revered by his contemporaries and is still to this day a well respected figure in American history. But, this does not mean that the man had no faults. Often in todays world Thomas Jefferson is looked back upon and has been scrutinized by many for his apparent hypocrisy on matters such as slavery and on what he believed limitations of the federal government were to be. Although some of Jefferson’s past can be dark and questionable, he was no hypocrite, but a man who understood that his decisions would have lasting effects on the new country, and that putting his own personal …show more content…
Thomas Jefferson was a strict constructionist which means that every word in the constitution is to be taken at face value and nothing is to be assumed, or more simply put, if it is not in the constitution than the government cannot do it. He attests this in a letter he sent to a senator in 1820 on the matter of the Missouri compromise. His answer to the question can be summarized by the last sentence of the second paragraph of this letter, "This certainly is the exclusive right of every state, which nothing in the Constitution has taken from them and given to the general government." Although seventeen years prior in the midst of his first term as president of the United States he made the biggest purchase of land in American history the Louisiana purchase. When he knew well that there was nothing in the constitution that gave him the right to buy new territory, explore it, and even go beyond the borders of the land. In a letter to Merriweather Lewis he says "The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri River, and such principal streams of it, as, by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado, or any other river, may offer the most direct and practible water-communication across the continent, for the purposes of commerce." The constitution does not give him the right to buy new land and certainly …show more content…
The election of 1800 was the first time the federal government had submitted its power and truly gave into democracy and more importantly laid the framework of how an election should be ran. In his address Jefferson’s passion for differing viewpoints is shown when he said “...every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists . 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". But more importantly later in the speech he rectifies his own decisions by saying "I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground." Proving that Thomas Jefferson knew that his own personal convictions were not as important as what is best for the