ABSTRACT
Some have called this quality of ambiguity in Jefferson crafty and worse, the deliberate aim of being all things to all men. The ambiguities lie in the fact that he contained within himself dialectically both the positive and negative principles of later American national development, both an expanding Populist nationalism and an antistate individualism. This chapter discusses that Jefferson overplayed the enemy, especially during the entire decade of the 1790s, which contained his role as a party organizer and leader and defined his path to the presidency. When Jefferson resigned as secretary of state it was because the original coalition was breaking up. He gave the final fillip to the break-up, and since his political talents were primarily those of an ideologist and a party leader he reverted to his revolutionary image of the war years, and for the king and the British he substituted Hamilton and the Federalists as the enemy.
