Note 55 — Chapter I
Reading edition
Jefferson to Postmaster-General (Gideon Granger), May 3, 1801, Works: Ford, ix, 249.
The democratic revolution that overthrew Federalism was the beginning of the movement that finally arrived at the abolition of imprisonment for debt, the bestowal of universal manhood suffrage, and, in general, the more direct participation in every way of the masses of the people in their own government. But in the first years of Republican power there was a pandering to the crudest popular tastes and passions which, to conservative men, argued a descent to the sansculottism of France.