7 Thomas Jefferson 7a three-pronged division soon emerged over American
policy toward the European powers. Washington and
Adams, who was serving as vice president, insisted on
complete neutrality. Alexander Hamilton pushed for a
pro-English version of neutrality, while Jefferson favoured
a pro-French version of neutrality.
Serving as vice president during the Adams presidency
from 1797 to 1801, Jefferson worked behind the scenes to
undermine Adams’s efforts to sustain strict neutrality.
Jefferson’s foreign-policy vision was resolutely moralistic
and highly ideological, dominated by a dichotomous view
of England as a corrupt and degenerate engine of despo-
tism and France as the enlightened wave of the future.
Jefferson’s position on domestic policy during the 1790s
was a variation on the same ideological dichotomy, and he
came to regard the consolidation of power at the federal
level as a diabolical plot to subvert the true meaning of the
American Revolution. By the middle years of the decade,
two distinctive political camps had emerged, calling
themselves Federalists and Republicans (later Democratic-
Republicans). Jefferson, assisted and advised by James
Madison, established the rudiments of the first opposition
party in American politics under the Republican banner.
The highly combustible political culture of the early
republic reached a crescendo in the election of 1800, one
of the most fiercely contested campaigns in American his-
tory. Jefferson ran for the presidency with Aaron Burr as
his vice presidential candidate. A quirk in the Constitution,
subsequently corrected in the Twelfth Amendment, pre-
vented electors from distinguishing between their choice
of president and vice president, so Jefferson and Burr tied
for the top spot, even though voter preference for Jefferson
was incontestable. The decision was thrown into the
House of Representatives, which chose Jefferson for pres-
ident after several weeks of debate.