Jefferson as President 175on the cooling of partisan passions: “Every difference
of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have
called by different names brethren of the same princi-
ple. We are all Republicans—we are all Federalists.”
And he promised the country “a wise and frugal
Government which shall restrain men from injuring
one another” and “leave them otherwise free to regu-
late their own pursuits.”
Jefferson quickly demonstrated the sincerity of
his remarks. He saw to it that the whiskey tax and
other Federalist excises were repealed, and he made
sharp cuts in military and naval expenditures to keep
the budget in balance. The Naturalization Act of
1798 was repealed, and the old five-year residence
requirement for citizenship restored. The Sedition
Act and the Alien Act expired of their own accord in
1801 and 1802.
The changes were not drastic. Jefferson made no
effort to tear down the fiscal structure that Hamilton
had erected. “We can pay off his debt,” the new presi-
dent confessed, “but we cannot get rid of his financial
system.” Nor did the author of the Kentucky Resolves
try to alter the balance of federal-state power.
Yet there was a different tone to the new regime.
Jefferson had no desire to surround himself with
pomp and ceremony; the excessive formality of the
Washington and Adams administrations had been dis-
tasteful to him. From the moment of his election, he
played down the ceremonial aspects of the presidency.
He asked that he be notified of his election by mail
rather than by a committee, and he would have pre-
ferred to have taken the oath at Charlottesville, near
Monticello, his home, rather than at Washington.
After the inauguration, he returned to his boarding-
house on foot and took dinner in his usual seat at the
common table.
In the White House he often wore a frayed coat
and carpet slippers, even to receive the representa-
tives of foreign powers when they arrived, resplen-
dent with silk ribbons and a sense of their own
importance, to present their credentials. At social
affairs he paid little heed to the status and seniority
of his guests. When dinner was announced, he
offered his arm to whichever lady he was talking to
at the moment and placed her at his right; other
guests were free to sit wherever they found an empty
chair. During business hours congressmen, friends,
foreign officials, and plain citizens coming to call
took their turn in the order of their arrival. “The
principle of society with us,” Jefferson explained, “is
the equal rights of all.... Nobody shall be above
you, nor you above anybody, pell-mellis our law.”
“Pell-mell” was also good politics, and
Jefferson turned out to be a superb politician. He
gave dozens of small stag dinner parties for con-
gressmen, serving the food personally from a
dumbwaiter connected with the White House
kitchen. The guests, carefully chosen to make con-
genial groups, were seated at a round table to
encourage general conversation, and the food and
wine were first-class. These were ostensibly social
occasions—shoptalk was avoided—yet they paid
large political dividends. Jefferson learned to know
every congressman personally, Democratic
Republican and Federalist alike, and not only their
political views but their strengths, their quirks, and
their flaws as well. And he worked his personal
magic on them, displaying the breadth of his
knowledge, his charm and wit, and his lack of pom-
posity. “You see, we are alone, andour walls have no
ears,” he would say, and while the wine flowed and
the guests sampled delicacies prepared by
Jefferson’s French chef, the president manufactured
political capital. “You drink as you please and con-
verse at your ease,” one guest reported.
Jefferson made effective use of his close support-
ers in Congress and of Cabinet members as well, in
persuading Congress to go along with his proposals.
His state papers were models of reason, minimizing
conflicts, stressing areas where all honest people must
agree. After all, as he indicated in his inaugural
address, nearly all Americans believed in having bothThis portrait of Thomas Jefferson, painted when he was thirty-seven
years old, in 1800, the year before he was elected president, is
considered an accurate likeness. Its artist, just twenty at the time,
was the American painter, Rembrandt Peale. Rembrandt’s father—
the painter Charles Willson Peale—also named his other sons after
painters: Rubens, Titian, Raphaelle, and Titian II.