A virtual Fellow's Forum with Grant E. Stanton, Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania from October 2021. Recording available.
“One hundred and fifty” libeling, slandering, lawyers was, of course, not Thomas Jefferson’s idea of a party. It may have been his idea of hell, though, and hell is a pretty good description for how he felt about America’s emerging party system. Not always appreciative of the superficialities of a capital gala – and often life could seem no more than one long stream of them – at least in these he could expect to pass an evening without someone calling him a living “slur upon the moral government of the world.” As any student of Jefferson well knows, he could give as good as he got when it came to the art of insult, but, as for many of the founding generation, such rhetoric was deeply problematic to him. Simultaneously threatening the new world order that he had helped bring into being, even as it began to appear to be the hallmark of a free society, factional discourse occupied a central position in Jefferson’s mature thought on government. Exploring libel and party politics as problems to Jefferson, as much moral as they were political, however, this talk aims to give us some insight into how eighteenth-century assumptions of good and evil framed discussions over what constituted legitimate dissent in the early republic, and yet too how these increasingly, though ever only partially, fell apart as Americans entered the nineteenth century.
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