Shy and modest in manner, halting in speech, disliking the turmoil of public debate, and deeply interested in science and philosophy, Jefferson was not very well fitted for the strenuous life of political contest.  Nevertheless, he was an ambitious and shrewd negotiator.  He was also by honest opinion and matured conviction the exact opposite of Hamilton.  The latter believed in a strong, active, “high-toned” government, vigorously compelling in all its branches.  Jefferson looked upon such government as dangerous to the liberties of citizens and openly avowed his faith in the desirability of occasional popular uprisings.  Hamilton distrusted the people.  “Your people is a great beast,” he is reported to have said.  Jefferson professed his faith in the people with an abandon that was considered reckless in his time.

On economic matters, the opinions of the two leaders were also hopelessly at variance.  Hamilton, while cherishing agriculture, desired to see America a great commercial and industrial nation.  Jefferson was equally set against this course for his country.  He feared the accumulation of riches and the growth of a large urban working class.  The mobs of great cities, he said, are sores on the body politic; artisans are usually the dangerous element that make revolutions; workshops should be kept in Europe and with them the artisans with their insidious morals and manners.  The only substantial foundation for a republic, Jefferson believed to be agriculture.  The spirit of independence could be kept alive only by free farmers, owning the land they tilled and looking to the sun in heaven and the labor of their hands for their sustenance.  Trusting as he did in the innate goodness of human nature when nourished on a free soil, Jefferson advocated those measures calculated to favor agriculture and to enlarge the rights of persons rather than the powers of government.  Thus he became the champion of the individual against the interference of the government, and an ardent advocate of freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of scientific inquiry.  It was, accordingly, no mere factious spirit that drove him into opposition to Hamilton.

=The Whisky Rebellion.=—­The political agitation of the Anti-Federalists was accompanied by an armed revolt against the government in 1794.  The occasion for this uprising was another of Hamilton’s measures, a law laying an excise tax on distilled spirits, for the purpose of increasing the revenue needed to pay the interest on the funded debt.  It so happened that a very considerable part of the whisky manufactured in the country was made by the farmers, especially on the frontier, in their own stills.  The new revenue law meant that federal officers would now come into the homes of the people, measure their liquor, and take the tax out of their pockets.  All the bitterness which farmers felt against the fiscal measures of the government was redoubled.  In the western districts of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina,