What arguments does he make to justify his policy positions?

Jefferson opposed Hamilton's plan for the federal government to pay the domestic and state debts. He thought it was unfair to Southern farmers who had been forced to sell their bonds to Northern speculators during hard economic times. He also thought it was unfair for states who had paid their war debts to be taxed by the federal government to help states who had not yet paid their debts. Most importantly, he opposed Hamilton's proposal for a national bank because he believed that the national government was allowed to do only those things that were explicitly stated in the Constitution. Jefferson believed that going beyond a strict interpretation of the document would allow the national government to expand so that it threatened the liberty of individuals and the states.

As the argument raged on, the new nation faced the first test to the authority of the national government. The excise tax that had been implemented with Secretary Hamilton's financial plan had angered a group of small farmers in Pennsylvania. Jefferson criticized Hamilton's plan as favoring Northern businessmen over farmers. He advocated "equal rights for all, special privileges for none." He believed that the tax placed an unfair burden on the farmers and was a direct attack on the agrarian way of life. He argued that the nation must encourage farmers because small, independent landowners were the best guarantee of a free nation. They would not be under the control of wealthy bosses, but could make free choices about the wisest policies for the good of the country.

• Jefferson's philosophy of limited national power is best exemplified by his letter to Washington describing his views on the power of Congress to create a national bank:

http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/curr/pctl/models/SocialSciences/Washington/JeffBankLetter.html

• Much of Jefferson's argument is based upon his interpretation of two sections of the U. S. Constitution:

Amendment 10

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.billofrights.html#amendmentx

Article I, Section 8, Clauses 1, 2, 3, and 18

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.articlei.html#section8

• Jefferson's beliefs in the virtues of an agrarian society and the dangers of an urban, manufacturing society are exemplified by a passage from his Notes on The State of Virginia:

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JEFFERSON/ch19.html

"Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue . . . Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry . . . for their subsistence, depend for it on casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition . . . While we have land to labor then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff . . . for the general operations of manufacture, let our work-shops remain in Europe . . . The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body."