We hear a great deal these days, during an intensely political Presidency, about “consensus politics,” but it is no novelty of modern times. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Thomas Jefferson was its inventor and master practitioner. Time has all but canonized this Founding Father, so that few associate him with either guile, ruthlessness, or skill in political maneuver. Yet he had all three, and he knew how to use them.

Jefferson founded the Democratic party upon the base of an alliance between the Virginia planters and New York’s professional politicians, a partnership affording accommodation between the rival sectional giants, the North and the South. He lured members of the opposition Federalist party in droves into his own Democratic-Republican party. “We are all republicans—we are all federalists,” he declared in his first inaugural, and took as his own the financial system of the Federalist hero, Alexander Hamilton. Business prospered; the Louisiana Purchase was enormously popular; the country kept out of the widening Napoleonic wars. Jefferson was overwhelmingly re-elected, with the Federalists offering only token resistance.

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