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To What Extent Did The Presidencies Of Jefferson And Madison Reduce The Tensions Of The 1790s?

Decent Essays

Caiser Bravo
Rigg
APUSH
6 October, 2015

To what extent did the presidencies of Jefferson and Madison reduce the tensions of the 1790s?

The presidency of George Washington was a difficult pair of terms to follow. John Adams tried to follow the precedent that the first president had set, but the second president only managed to polarize the nation among two parties: the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. Although his decisions are today looked at with mixed feelings, at the time John Adams fell into popular disfavor. After his singular term due to the opposition of the Jeffersonian Anti-Federalists and the Hamiltonian Federalists (members of Adams’s own party), there was a power vacancy clearly waiting to be filled which would lead to the spot of the third President of the United States. The first twelve years of the nation and its first two presidents had been marred by stirrings of factionalism and tension. However, the two presidents after Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, would do much to lessen these issues due to educated and intelligent policy-making, in addition to a great deal of fortunate circumstances. When Thomas Jefferson took office in 1801, after an intense realignment of the majority of office holders from Federalist to Anti-Federalist in the “Revolution of 1800”, there were many policies headed by former Treasurer Alexander Hamilton that were still in place. Instead of doing what would have been expected of him by his peers, and taking steps

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