In early March of 1801, Jefferson received a letter from Moses Robinson, a prominent Vermont politician and supporter of Jefferson. Robinson congratulated Jefferson on winning the presidency. He stressed the importance of having the government administered by leaders who believed in a republican form of government in order to safeguard the rights of the people (as opposed to, he implied, those who led the previous administration).
Jefferson of course concurred, noting in his reply on this date in history:
I sincerely wish with you we could see our government so secured as to depend less on the character of the person in whose hands it is trusted. bad men will sometimes get in, & with such an immense patronage, may make great progress in corrupting the public mind & principles.”
In particular he focused on the “dominion of the clergy” in the eastern states. He accused them of looking backward rather than forward for “improvement”:
. . . but I am in hopes their good sense will dictate to them that since the mountain will not come to them, they had better go to the mountain: that they will find their interest in acquiescing in the liberty & science of their country, and that the Christian religion when divested of the rags in which they have inveloped it, and brought to the original purity & simplicity of it’s benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, & the freest expansions of the human mind.”
Thomas Jefferson
