Thomas Jefferson by John Trumbull, 31 December 1787
Thomas Jefferson was the 3rd President of the United States and the main writer of the Declaration of Independence. During Shays’ Rebellion he had a different reaction than George Washington. Where Washington reacted with fear and a call for a more centralized government, Jefferson almost embraced the rebellion. In a letter to Madison on January 30, 1787, Jefferson wrote “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical… It is medicine necessary for the sound health of government.”[1] In another letter Jefferson expressed to Abigail Adams, “The spirit of the resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.” [2] Jefferson saw the people as the ultimate way to protect liberty and their rights. He felt so strongly about this idea that he did not think the rebels should be punished.
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[1] Sean Condon, Shays’s Rebellion (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2015), 120.
[2] Ibid, 121.