Thomas Jefferson’s First Retirement (in 1793)

George Washington Presidency Timeline. Retirement and vice president Because he was increasingly at odds with Hamilton and Hamilton’s growing influence over Washington, Jefferson resigned as Secretary of State in 1793. At fifty-one (the same age as Washington when he “retired” in1783), Jefferson believed he was leaving public service for good. He brought his family to Monticello. First and foremost, Jefferson was a traditional Virginia planter. He believed agrarian life, coupled with “the eye of vigilance,” provided the best security against what he saw as the evils of centralization, consolidation, and urbanization.

Jefferson implemented a scientific rotation of crops, then a novel experiment, added a grist-mill and nail factory to make the plantation more self-sufficient, and expanded Monticello. Jefferson wrote in the Notes that towns were unimportant in Virginia because commerce could be conducted along rivers. In any event, the goal for the planter was self-sufficiency so that he didn’t have to dirty his hands too much with the money-grubbing of the merchant class. The goal was to be a gentleman, and as one Virginian wrote in 1773, “The people of fortune . . . are the pattern of all behaviour here.” Politics was a duty, but the plantation was center of his life.

Duty called again. Jefferson finished second in the 1796 presidential election, and accordingly, served one term as vice-president. He fulfilled his constitutional duties and even wrote the definitive manual on parliamentary practice in the Senate. His defining moment as vice president, however, was not in any official capacity. It was during the Quasi-War with France, when the Federalists, worried that French revolutionary ideas and agents were spreading to America, issued the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.

Jefferson responded by writing, in secret, the Kentucky Resolutions for the state legislature of Kentucky. The Constitution, the resolutions stated, is a compact among the states, and if the federal government, as the agent of the contracting parties, breached that compact by violating its delegated authority (as in the Alien and Sedition Acts), the states had a right to declare such acts null and void. Popular opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts doomed the Federalist Party, which was defeated by Jefferson and the Republican Party in 1801.