ABSTRACT
During most of the decade of the 1790s, the shadow under which Jefferson had to work, think, and function as a political activist was the shadow of the French Revolution. When the French Revolution moved from its constitutional phase into the phase of the Terror, it caused a revulsion even among many sympathetic liberals, both in Europe and in America. Jefferson and his friends recognized the strength of this reaction, and thought of it as a counter-revolutionary swing in opinion. The remarkable fact about the period from Jefferson's resignation as secretary until his election as president, from 1794 to 1800, was that it was a period darkened by the impact of French Revolutionary excesses upon American opinion, but that the Jeffersonian camp nevertheless came through tolerably in the 1794 congressional elections and got their leader chosen as vice president in 1796 and as president in 1800.
