Thomas Jefferson Foresaw This Moment
Thomas Jefferson's Prophecy about Foreign Influence and the Seeds of a Grassroots Movement to Return Power to the People
Thomas Jefferson’s Prophecy about Foreign Influence and the Seeds of a Grassroots Movement to Return Power to the People
( An excellent article by John, Son of Dick over at the Bright and Sunny South - DD)
(John, Son of Dick, The Bright and Sunny South) - First allow me to say that Thomas Jefferson was not an “Anti-Federalist” proper; insofar as that title is attributed to the men who wrote the “Anti-Federalists” papers and opposed the ratifying of the Constitution in 1787-1788. In July 1784, Jefferson arrived in Paris after he was appointed to be the “Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Versailles” earlier the same year. Here he was reunited with Benjamin Franklin and, was later joined by John Adams; the former being replaced by Jefferson as the “senior Minister in France” on May 17, 1785, after which date, Franklin returned to the United States. John Adams served in France from April 1, 1788, to February of 1789; leaving Paris just several months before Jefferson did on November 23rd of the same year.
These dates mean that Thomas Jefferson did not attend the Constitutional Convention and was absent from the debates leading up to the Convention and carrying on until the ratification of the Constitution on June 21, 1788. The geographical distance made it impossible for Jefferson to have an adequate understanding of the nuances of the debate being had; an inadequacy that he was keenly aware of when he wrote his pseudo-Anti-Federalist letter to James Madison on December 20,1787.
In this letter he says, “I have thus told you freely what I like, and what I dislike [of the proposed Constitution], merely as a matter of curiosity; for I know it is not in my power to offer…
