Thomas Jefferson and the making of an American nationalism

This dissertation examines Thomas Jefferson's intellectual construction of an American identity and the influence of this imagination on his political action. The study integrates recent writing on nationalism and national identity into a reading of Jefferson as an American nationalist, exploring Jefferson's participation in a nationalist discourse that was becoming increasingly common in the late eighteenth-century. Jefferson's repeated claims about the American nation, his effort to ensure unity and homogeneity within the nation, and his organization of a political party, the express purpose of which was the facilitation of congruence between the nation and the state, suggest that labeling Jefferson a "nationalist" is more than a merely semantic change. The traditional description of Alexander Hamilton as nationalist to Jefferson as states' rights opponent of national government can no longer adequately capture the complexity of their decade-long argument. Jefferson thought about America in ways that transcend our traditional understanding of what nationalism means and that clearly challenge as anachronistic the common juxtaposition of Jefferson and Hamilton that we have come to accept.; The dissertation also contends that Jefferson's vision of America and American national identity profoundly influenced his political behavior---both his opposition to successive Federalist administrations and his use of presidential power---and lends a measure of coherence, if not consistency, to much of his action. During the 1790s, Jefferson led a nationalist movement to wrest control of the state from the hands of what he considered an elite sect out of touch with the will of the nation (the people). His explicit goal was to reassert the authority of the nation over the reins of the state. That this movement often took the form of opposition to consolidation of all power in the federal government has prevented many historians from understanding the broadly nationalist origins of Jefferson's dissension. The central importance, in historical studies, of the dialectic between Jefferson and Hamilton, relies too much on a common conflation of nationalism with devotion to a strong centralized state and has obscured the extent to which states' rights and nationalism grew up together in the making of Jefferson's America.