“The people,” he declared in 1821,[24] “to whom all authority belongs, have divided the powers of government into two distinct departments, the leading characters of which are foreign and domestic; and they have appointed for each a distinct set of functionaries. These they have made co-ordinate, checking and balancing each other, like the three cardinal departments in the individual States,—each equally supreme as to the powers delegated to itself, and neither authorized ultimately to decide what belongs to itself or to its coparcener in government. As independent, in fact, as different nations, a spirit of forbearance and compromise, therefore, and not of encroachment and usurpation, is the healing balm of such a Constitution.”
In the year 1824 Jefferson still maintained the same doctrine, and expressed it more concisely than ever:—
“The federal is in truth our foreign government, which department alone is taken from the sovereignty of the separate States.”[25] “I recollect no case where a question simply between citizens of the same State has been transferred to the foreign department, except that of inhibiting tenders but of metallic money, and ex post facto legislation.”[26]
These expressions, taken together, partly explain why Jefferson thought his assumption of power to be “as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.” His view of governmental functions was simple and clearly expressed. The national government, as he conceived it, was a foreign department as independent from the domestic department, which belonged to the States, as though they were governments of different nations. He intended that the general government should “be reduced to foreign concerns only;” and his theory of foreign concerns was equally simple and clear. He meant to enforce against foreign nations such principles as national objects required, not by war, but by “peaceful coercion” through commercial restrictions. “Our commerce is so valuable to them that they will be glad to purchase it, when the only price we ask is to do us justice.”
The history of his Administration will show how these principles were applied, and what success attended the experiment.