I said that Jeffersonian Republicanism was more “complex and variegated” not Mathew Carey’s sympathies. In any case, in The Olive Branch or, Faults on both sides, Federal and Democratic, written during his Jeffersonian period, Carey praises and defends Jefferson, and has little to say one way or the other about Hamilton.
The truth is that Jeffersonian Republicanism wasn’t unequivocally in favor of strict construction, radically limited government, or free trade during its years in power. From the Louisiana Purchase, the Navigation Acts, the Embargo, and Gallatin’s plan for internal improvements to the chartering of the Second Bank of the United States, the tariff of 1816, Jefferson’s endorsement of home industries, and Madison’s call for public works projects, the legacy of Jefferson’s party was quite mixed. Younger Republicans often connected the dots in ways very much at odds with later ideologists understanding of the era.
The notoriously mild tariff of 1816 makes a slothful comparison to the aggressive protective regimes of 1824 and 1828.
I did not say that the 1816 tariff was as protectionist as latter tariff proposals were, but it did set a precedent for Republican support for a protective tariff. The argument heard earlier and later that protective tariffs were unconstitutional wasn’t much heard in the Republican mainstream in 1816. Quite the contrary, there was widespread acceptance of a tariff with higher rates than Hamilton's, a sign that Democratic-Republican attitudes were very different from what they had been in the Federalist era.
It is folly to speak of the 1816 tariff as a partisan measure of Jeffersonian-Republican progeny for the simple reason of the Federalist Party alternative effectively ceasing to exist as a national organization from that year forward, and even as a regional one by decade's end. The partisan reorganization that occurred around its demise resulted in many strange bedfellows, not the least among them being the thoroughly Federalist John Quincy Adams becoming the presidential standard bearer for a party that ostensibly bore the name of Jefferson's own creation, and much to the disdain of Jefferson himself.
Historians have to walk a line between lumping too much together and splitting things up too much -- between looking at the picture from too far away and from too close up. A crude picture from a distance might see Federalists, Whigs, and Lincoln Republicans all as part of one "Hamiltonian" "side" with "Jeffersonian" Democrats on the other and the nationalist Republicans of the Era of Good Feeling on the Hamiltonian side. But one has to take into affect the particular climate of an era, the different strands of intellectual descent, and how people actually thought of themselves.
John Quincy Adams had broken with the Federalists in 1808, 16 years before he took office as President, and served as Monroe's Secretary of State. Calhoun and Clay had much deeper Democratic-Republican roots. To get more than a polemical, partisan view of history, such self-identifications and backgrounds have to be taken into account. See Joyce Appleby's Inheriting the Revolution or Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought for more about this era.
It is historically difficult, and indeed somewhat flippant, to maintain that Jefferson's recurring resurrection of the 1798 resolutions in his politics "doesn't really matter." For better or worse, Jefferson is a weighty authority of founding era political thought.
I said that the consistency or inconsistency between the Jefferson of 1798 and the Jefferson of 1826 didn’t matter when set against Jefferson in the White House. Jefferson in power had to deal with the real opportunities and dangers facing the nation and the real Constitution and didn’t luxuriate in bizarre theories of nullification. That is the change or inconsistency that stands out, not how later historians characterize his evolution from the 1790s to the 1820s.
Jefferson did not launch his protest out of the road-hating caricature you seem to convey, and in fact the opposite was true. He openly stated that he hoped they might consider a constitutional amendment granting Congress a limited power to build roads and canals.
Nobody said Jefferson was allergic to turnstiles or locks or barges or mules, but Jefferson did leave a spotty record on roads and canals. Jefferson did help start the enthusiasm for road and canal building. In his Second Inaugural Address he suggested using the federal surplus to promote road and canal building, apparently through some form of revenue sharing with the states, though he wasn't clear about the details.
In his Seventh Message to Congress, Jefferson proposed federal support of road and canal building, adding that he "supposed" a constitutional amendment necessary. Albert Gallatin worked out an extensive program of canal building and Jefferson ordered surveys conducted. The embargo meant the money wasn't forthcoming and the plan didn't develop, though the Cumberland road was built. The constitutional amendment went nowhere.
If you'd been around then, you might have thought Jefferson was putting out crossed signals. If he thought federal support of road and canal construction was important and a constitutional amendment was necessary to make that support possible, why not work harder to put the amendment through congress (and the state legislatures)? If the subsidies required an amendment but the construction wasn't important, why raise the question of subsidies and amendments at all?
Clearly, there was some ambivalence in Jefferson's mind about the whole question. It's natural that some of his supporters heard him urging federal support for internal improvements, while others heard him opposing it, and it's comical that almost 20 years after the amendment went nowhere he brings up the topic again.
But was an amendment necessary? The federal government could "establish post roads," but couldn't build roads or have them built? Congress could charter a bank, but couldn't charter a canal company? Jefferson could suppress his scruples to buy Louisiana, but wouldn't do so in the matter of transportation? There were plenty of reasons to oppose federal subsidies for road and canal construction, but Jefferson's argument wasn't particularly convincing.
It is not an easy case to maintain that the Tertium Quids, who formally broke with Jefferson in 1806-7 and did not truly reconcile with the mainline of his party until Andrew Jackson's election, were making statements even remotely representative of his views in the late 1810's or early 1820's.
You have promoted a simplistic dichotomy of Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians and cited the Quids as representatives of true Jeffersonianism as against the rest of the party. Now suddenly, they don’t represent Jeffersonianism.
In 1824 Jefferson wrote Edward Livingston with regard to the public works controversy:
I thank you for the copy of your speech on the question of national improvement, which I have read with great pleasure, and recognize in it those powers of reasoning and persuasion of which I had formerly seen from you so many proofs. Yet, in candor, I must say it has not removed, in my mind, all the difficulties of the question. And I should really be alarmed at a difference of opinion with you, and suspicious of my own, were it not that I have, as companions in sentiments, the Madisons, the Monroes, the Randolphs, the Macons, all good men and true, of primitive principles.
Well, it's hard to say which Randolph. Jefferson's mother was a Randolph, and so was his son in law. But John Randolph was in Congress at the time and here's Jefferson presumably expressing his fellowship with him. Elsewhere Jefferson reportedly called Randolph his "comrade in sentiment."
My point wasn't that Randolph or Macon or Jefferson was primarily motivated by the desire to defend slavery, but that slavery was a factor in their world and their thinking that it's not always easy to separate out from other factors. Randolph's private dislike for slavery was not so different from Jefferson's, though as practical men they both had to cope with the requirements of a slave-based economy. It's not absurd to wonder just how closely the two men's views coincided after Jefferson left office and the requirements of real world politics behind.
Jefferson took great care in urging his actual correspondents - Giles, Madison, Taylor before he died, and the allied newspapermen in Richmond - to differentiate himself from the "hot-headed Georgians," who frequently did blend slavery with their motives on other issues.
After the War of 1812 ended, Giles's stands in politics weren't very different from Randolph's. Giles and Randolph were considered as part of the "Old Republican" faction. Indeed, "Old Republicans" was a more common label after Jefferson left office than "Tertium Quids." There were longstanding feuds and disputes over offices, but few ideological disagreements. In 1830, Randolph said: "There never was so great a void occasioned in any assembly as that caused by the retirement of William B. Giles from the United States Senate."
I've gotten tired of looking these things up, and tired of your annoying mannerisms. FWIW, I'll leave it at this: as many members of Jefferson's party adopted "Hamiltonian" policies without ever thinking themselves anything but "Jeffersonian," so many Southern politicians from Jefferson on have seen themselves as proponents of limited government in Washington while countenancing real tyranny at home. They claimed to be strict constructionists so long as they were in the minority in the legislature, but didn't always follow those principles when they were in power. But doubtless, like Clay and Calhoun in the 1810s they were sincere in their belief.
As goes the tariff of 1816, a somewhat dangerous but natural temptation exists to view it outside of its immediate political context and view it as a matter of ideological significance where it was not. Yes, all but the most radical Jeffersonian purists deviated from their strictest philosophical ideals when "in power" (though I would contend that the Embargo Act, poor policy as it may have been, was not in the slightest way inconsistent with Jefferson's 1793 discussion of the legitimate uses of that power in foreign policy, offered in rejoinder to Hamilton's reports). But what political party isn't? What politician in the entirety of American history has ever come into the presidential office and remained a complete ideological purist, never deviating from views he articulated before or after his term? In citing the Jeffersonian "failures" to uphold their philosophical ideals in every instance, you are also setting up an unattainable standard, and one that is not evidently applied elsewhere though it is equally if not more true of other presidents.
As the particulars of that tariff go though, it was born of an extremely transient post-war surge of nationalism, not any far-reaching system of political economy as Hamiltonianism or Jeffersonianism might entail in their purer forms. It was even supported by a young John C. Calhoun, for decades later the free trade standard bearer in Congress. And it attracted Madison's support not because of any reordering of Jeffersonian political thought, but only because Madison himself was moving rapidly away from the positions of his early political career. Nor was that anything new - there had been a rift between the Jeffersonians and Madison dating back to at least 1808, when the purists attempted to push him aside for James Monroe causing a brief secondary rift (in addition to the existing Tertium Quids) between the Taylor faction and Thomas Ritchie. As Madison moved further and further away, the old Jeffersonians centered around Giles and Taylor at first, and eventually Ritchie and even Jefferson himself at the end of his life, found themselves at increasing odds with their former ally and chief lieutenant. By 1833, much of Madison's political writing on canals and tariffs and the sort was virtually indistinguishable from something Hamilton had written and Madison had denounced 4 decades prior. People's politics change over time, and Madison was one of them.
I suppose we could return to Jefferson himself in 1816, but again the point you seem to be getting at is a rather weak for reasons previously noted. First, Jefferson's post-war turn to manufacturing was mild at best, born of a post-war political climate that had accused him of sympathizing with the hated British in the manufacturing trade and coming nowhere near an embrace of protectionism itself, though later protectionists certainly spun it that way. Second, if the 1816 letters showed any deviation at all, it was every bit as temporary as it was tepid. Jefferson returned to his old views almost immediately, largely at Taylor's instigation and prompted by Taylor's political writings after the publication of Robert Yates' constitutional convention notes. Citing them as anything more than a temporary, politically instigated, and mild break from a philosophical theme that had dominated Jefferson's entire career up until that point, and for the rest of his life after it, borders on willful misrepresentation, although historians are certainly prone to doing that.
Speaking of misrepresentations though, there is this matter:
You have promoted a simplistic dichotomy of Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians and cited the Quids as representatives of true Jeffersonianism as against the rest of the party. Now suddenly, they don’t represent Jeffersonianism.
Far from it, I simply cited the Quids as one of the major "purist" factions in the Jeffersonian umbrella, the other being Pendleton and Taylor, with whom Jefferson remained on good terms for most of his life and thoroughly embraced at its end. The formal courtesies and flourishes of early 19th century letter writing aside (Jefferson still politely referenced Quincy Adams near the end of his life even though he personally could not stand him by that time and was passing rumors of his alleged diplomatic treasons to Giles), it is difficult to maintain Randolph as a part of Jefferson's personal circle beyond their break in 1806. Randolph certainly never considered it reconciled, even beyond Jefferson's death, though it is certainly true that Randolph's own politics were not far removed from Giles, Taylor, and others with whom Jefferson still closely confided.
Of course they all fit somewhere under the philosophical umbrella that is usually termed Jeffersonianism. But my point in raising the issue of the Quids is not to demonstrate their break from Jefferson himself (which is nonetheless sufficient to cast doubt upon your claim that Jefferson's 1826 nullification writings, which contained not a word about slavery, were nonetheless connected based on some passing statement Randolph made a few years earlier) but to show that the spectrum within the Democratic-Republicans extended in both directions, and that those who fell on the hardline purist side of that extension were nonetheless closer in their abstract conception of government to what Jefferson believed for his own ideal.
The real interpretive fault emerges in your conception of the Jeffersonian umbrella, as it is apparently so broad as to encompass practically anyone who happened to be a politician in national political office between 1816-24 for simple want of an organized opposition party. But a more detail attentive historian will note that not all Democratic-Republicans were philosophically Jeffersonian, nor were all Federalists philosophically Hamiltonian (Luther Martin and, in his better moments, Samuel Chase come to mind). And that seems to be the source of your confusion - an unwillingness to recognize that simply voting with a certain loosely organized hodge-podge of a political party in a time of partisan fluctuation and realignment does not make one a philosophical fellow-traveler with the party's core any more than Carey's printing contracts on a Jeffersonian pamphlet negate his very explicit embrace of Hamiltonianism. As may be expected of a party system in its infancy, a tendency exists to factionalize and compartmentalize further internally as well as externally until a structure of tradition and ideological cohesion emerges tilting in one direction or the other. The Democratic-Republican organization did just that until reaching an inevitable point of schism after 1824, with both the Quids and the other remaining Jeffersonian purists tilting toward what eventually became the old Democratic Party. Those of a more Hamiltonian inclination - Adams, Webster, Clay, and most of the old Federalists who had absorbed into the Democratic-Republicans after the War of 1812 - eventually found a home in the Whig Party. Far from a "crude" rendering of partisan politics from afar, that process by which the varying factions sorted themselves out into the "second party system" is at the center of an early major electoral realignment that produced very pronounced partisan differences almost as soon as it all sorted out.
This too begs an answer:
But was an amendment necessary? The federal government could "establish post roads," but couldn't build roads or have them built? Congress could charter a bank, but couldn't charter a canal company? Jefferson could suppress his scruples to buy Louisiana, but wouldn't do so in the matter of transportation?
A strict constructionist would answer that the establishment of post roads conveys the assignment of a designation to an existing roadway owned by a state or even private hands. Jefferson himself posed this very question in 1796. "Does the power to establish post roads, given you by Congress, mean that you shall make the roads, or only select from those already made, those on which there shall be a post?" If the early congresses are to be taken as a guide though, the answer was the former. In 1791 it was observed that Congress obtained from this clause a "duty to designate the roads as to establish the offices," though uncertainty certainly existed as to how far this boundary could be pushed.
Nor was the chartering of a national bank a settled matter, or at least not until the highly suspect decision of McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819 and arguably well beyond that to Jackson's bank war. Jefferson, Madison and many other founders openly and aggressively doubted this power from its outset even though it was chartered. Madison flip flopped on it later for all intents and purposes, but by the time of the 2nd chartering its constitutionality was still very much in doubt. As to the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson had his own personal qualms out of fear for how the territory would be carved up in relation to the existing states, but the doubt surrounding its constitutionality is substantially overstated by pop historians of the same ilk that dwell in inconsequential trivia and apocrypha. The reality is that the Constitution gives the president a very clear power to negotiate treaties with other nations, so long as it is subjected to Senate approval. The Louisiana Purchase played out exactly as prescribed, ratification and all.
The canal question was another matter entirely though, as it did explicitly come up at the Constitutional Convention with a proposal to allow Congress "a power to provide for cutting canals where deemed necessary." This clause was soundly rejected though on September 14, indicating it was not within the intended scope of the powers of Congress and likely explaining why Jefferson felt a need for an amendment.
Not that I expect you to acknowledge it, seeing as you are still quibbling over even Carey's self-identified Hamiltonian beliefs found in his own very direct and enthusiastic praise and rearticulation of the same, quod erat demonstrandum. Persons who cannot concede even the simplest factual point may be better advised to heed their own advice on annoying mannerisms, as equivocation around the obvious and plainly demonstrated certainly seems to be among them.