ABSTRACT
In 1804 Jefferson was overwhelmingly re-elected, and took his success as fresh evidence of the people's mandate not only to himself but to his program, his party, and his worldview. In 1805 he began to run into bad trouble with his foreign policy, and from that point on until he relinquished office in 1809 his administration slid downhill, getting into numerous entanglements, stirring up popular discontent and outright hostility. Jefferson was operating under the fateful delusion that American trade was a matter of survival to Great Britain and, in more general terms, that the economic nerve was the crucial one in international relations. It was a primitive form of the economic interpretation of politics, and at a moment of crisis for America Jefferson made the blunder of formulating an entire foreign policy around this doctrinaire conviction. In Europe the British and French were pitted against each other in a deadly war of embargoes.
