"We are infinitely better off without treaties of commerce with any nation."
--Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1815.
--Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1815.
"Our people have a decided taste for navigation and commerce. They take this from their mother country, and their servants are in duty bound to calculate all their measures on this datum: we wish to do it by throwing open all the doors of commerce and knocking off its shackles."--Thomas Jefferson to G.K. Van Hogendorp
"It is impossible the world should continue long insensible to so evident a truth as that the right to have commerce and intercourse with our neighbors, is a natural right. To suppress this neighborly intercourse is an exercise of force, which we shall have a just right to remove [with a] superior force."
--Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph