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Knowledge in those days wasn't broken up into the specialized fields that it is now. In a mind such as Jefferson's, everything connected. Observations of the natural world held deep implications for the human world. Both realms obeyed eternal, rational laws--"self-evident truths" that came from the Creator and didn't depend upon the whims of kings or make exceptions for class and nationality. In 1782 at Monticello, he began his only published book, Notes on the State of Virginia, a kind of almanac that was partly intended to refute various European prejudices about life in the New World, among them a leading French scientist's belief that America's animal and plant life was punier, weaker and shorter lived than Europe's.
When Jefferson later visited France, then a tottering monarchy on the cusp of revolution, he experienced profoundly mixed emotions. He liked the wine and was awestruck by the architecture but the haughty, pampered nobility disgusted him. "A slight acquaintance with them," Jefferson wrote, "will suffice to show you that, under the most imposing exterior, they are the weakest and worst part of mankind." When the masses overthrew the bigwigs, Jefferson cheered. The indiscriminate, riotous violence that followed the initial uprisings struck Jefferson as the price of liberty, revealing a tolerance for political bloodshed that makes one wonder what he would think about Iraq. "Were there but an Adam & an Eve left in every country, & left free," he wrote, "it would be better than it now is."
It's a subject worth lingering over: Jefferson and Iraq. Would the nation's first Republican President (a "Republican" then was like a modern-day Democrat, though not identical to one) have even engaged in such a conflict? It's hard to know but tempting to ponder. On the one hand, Jefferson loathed oppression and looked upon freedom as mankind's natural tendency. "When [Paul] Wolfowitz and Bush say that if you plant the seeds of democracy in the Middle East, they will grow, that's very Jeffersonian," Ellis says. "In a pure Jeffersonian vision, these principles are universal and inevitable." Do these principles justify armed intervention though? Jefferson might have balked on several counts. First, the cost. In wartime, red ink flows as freely as blood, and Jefferson hated nothing more than debt, especially public debt. One controversy that led to his great split with Hamilton (and which ultimately expressed itself in the formation of rival political parties from a single original club of gentlemen who sought to work out their differences in private) boiled down to the financing of the Federal Government.