Thomas Jefferson's vision of the United States was that it
would be a nation of small farmers. This is somewhat strange given that he owned a
large plantation but he, nonetheless, believed that the US should be a very democratic
and egalitarian nation made up mainly of independent
farmers.
To Jefferson, the only person who was really free
was one who worked for himself. He felt that only small farmers were truly their "own
men" because they had no bosses. Only those who had no bosses could be trusted to vote
in a democratic society because people who had bosses would surely vote in the way that
their bosses told them.
Jefferson was dedicated to the idea
of a nation made of men who were independent of one another. It was for this reason
that he wanted to maintain the US as an agrarian nation rather than allowing it to
become industrialized and stratified (between workers and bosses) as Hamilton and the
Federalists wanted.
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