Jefferson was not very well fitted for the strenuous life of political
contest. Nevertheless, he was an ambitious and shrewd negotiator. He was
also by honest opinion and matured conviction the exact opposite of
Hamilton. The latter believed in a strong, active, "high-toned"
government, vigorously compelling in all its branches. Jefferson looked
upon such government as dangerous to the liberties of citizens and
openly avowed his faith in the desirability of occasional popular
uprisings. Hamilton distrusted the people. "Your people is a great
beast," he is reported to have said. Jefferson professed his faith in
the people with an abandon that was considered reckless in his time.

On economic matters, the opinions of the two leaders were also
hopelessly at variance. Hamilton, while cherishing agriculture, desired
to see America a great commercial and industrial nation. Jefferson was
equally set against this course for his country. He feared the
accumulation of riches and the growth of a large urban working class.
The mobs of great cities, he said, are sores on the body politic;
artisans are usually the dangerous element that make revolutions;
workshops should be kept in Europe and with them the artisans with their
insidious morals and manners. The only substantial foundation for a
republic, Jefferson believed to be agriculture. The spirit of
independence could be kept alive only by free farmers, owning the land
they tilled and looking to the sun in heaven and the labor of their
hands for their sustenance. Trusting as he did in the innate goodness of
human nature when nourished on a free soil, Jefferson advocated those
measures calculated to favor agriculture and to enlarge the rights of
persons rather than the powers of government. Thus he became the
champion of the individual against the interference of the government,
and an ardent advocate of freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and
freedom of scientific inquiry. It was, accordingly, no mere factious
spirit that drove him into opposition to Hamilton.

=The Whisky Rebellion.=--The political agitation of the Anti-Federalists
was accompanied by an armed revolt against the government in 1794. The
occasion for this uprising was another of Hamilton's measures, a law
laying an excise tax on distilled spirits, for the purpose of increasing
the revenue needed to pay the interest on the funded debt. It so
happened that a very considerable part of the whisky manufactured in t