The Science of Nations

On 4 March 1801 Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office as the United States's third president before delivering his first inaugural address in the Senate chamber of the not yet finished Capitol building. The occasion presented, in the words of one observer, Margaret Bayard Smith, ‘one of the most interesting scenes, a free people can ever witness’. ‘The changes of administration,’ she wrote to her sister-in-law Susan B. Smith, ‘which in every government and in every age have most generally been epochs of confusion, villainy and bloodshed, in this our happy country take place without any species of distraction or disorder. This day, has one of the most amiable and worthy men taken that seat to which he was called by the voice of his country.’ According to Bayard Smith, Jefferson delivered his address in ‘so low a tone that few heard it’; but early that morning he had given an advance copy of the text to her husband, the local Republican publisher Samuel Harrison Smith, for printing in the Washington, DC National Intelligencer, ‘so that on coming out of the house, the paper was distributed immediately’. This imprint served as the basis for the newspaper, pamphlet and broadside printings that followed over the next two to three weeks. The text of the address circulated through the United States with remarkable rapidity; it was also widely republished and commented upon abroad.

Characterising the presidential campaign of 1800 as a contest of opinion, not a difference of principle, Jefferson sought in his speech to assuage the bitter rivalry between Federalists and Republicans that had culminated in the deadlock election (the deadlock had eventually been broken by Congress's election of Jefferson on the thirty-sixth ballot on 17 February 1801). American political attitudes of the 1790s had been marked by intolerance, evident in the ‘violence of opinion […] to be met with in a greater or less degree in all cities’, and the ‘disgraceful and hateful appellations […] mutually given by the individuals of the parties to each other’, remarked upon by Francois-Alexandre-Frederic, Duc de La Rouchefoucauld-Liancourt, in his Travels through the United States of North America […] in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797 (1799).