Both Hamilton and Jefferson understood that their new found freedom came with the heavy cost of internal and external issues. The most demanding of these issues though primarily dealt with foreign policy during the …show more content…
He, like Hamilton, understood that the rebellion in France would soon spread throughout Europe and abroad. Unlike Hamilton, however, Jefferson believed that the spread of radical French ideologies was tantamount to preserving the American constitution, “I consider the establishment and success of their government as necessary to stay up our own and to prevent it from falling back to that kind of Halfway-house, the English constitution” (108). Comparatively speaking though, Jefferson’s idealistic stance on American and French relations proved more dangerous to the U.S. than Hamilton’s. His initial views were, in retrospect, Machiavellian in that he believed that the ends would ultimately justify the means, “The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood?” (109). Jefferson’s idealist position here is both powerful and dangerous in that no one can determine how far they might go for freedom nor how far they would go to maintain