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Jefferson also had isolationist instincts. "Jefferson saw France and England as capricious monarchies," says Lehigh University political scientist Richard Matthews, author of The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson. "He believed in waging war for the right reasons--for example, a threat to U.S. sovereignty--not for capricious ones." Factoring into Jefferson's belief that America should restrain itself from engaging in international conflict was his optimistic image of the country's utter physical vastness and geographic impregnability. Here is how he characterized the nation in his first Inaugural Address: "Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation ..."
Distances have shrunk since then, of course, and Jefferson's notion that the country's population would never strain its seemingly limitless resources comes off as ridiculously shortsighted now. What's more, the Virginian couldn't have foreseen the way in which America's thirst for oil would place it at the mercy of foreign powers. A global economy changes everything.
Some things haven't changed since Jefferson's time, though, and one of them is the country's ongoing struggle with the role of religion in civic life. As the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which prohibited government interference in people's religious beliefs, Jefferson took a hard line in this regard, and it isn't difficult to imagine where he would stand on current debates about prayer in public schools, say, or faith-based funding for social projects. "If there is one field of constitutional law, and law generally, where Jefferson was amazing, it's the separation of church and state," Bernstein says. "He had come to believe not in traditional English deism--that God created the universe and was the Supreme Being--but that Jesus embodied 'every human excellence' and nothing more. He thought the alliance of religion and government corrupted both, and that that endangered the liberty of the individual mind."
If Jefferson were alive today, he would be shocked by the monstrous complexity and expense of modern politics. When he first ran for President in 1800, the Electoral College and the House of Representatives decided elections, by and large, and there was little campaigning in the current sense. The nonstop advertising, showy conventions and hectic travel would have repelled the shy Virginian, who found public speaking burdensome. "In [the Founding Fathers'] minds, the person who was ambitious and wanted high office was the one person you should never trust with it," says Yale historian Joanne Freeman, author of Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. "They would have been horrified to see candidates begging for votes."