Directions : The following question requires you to construct a coherent essay that integrates your interpretation of Documents A-H and your knowledge of the period referred to in the question. High scores will be earned only by essays that both cite key pieces of evidence from the documents and draw on outside knowledge of the period.
Question : With respect to the federal Constitution, the Jeffersonian Republicans are usually characterized as strict constructionists who were opposed to the broad constructionism of the Federalists. [To what extent]* was this characterization of the two parties accurate during the presidencies of Jefferson and Madison?
*not as great ax ablxb hoped.
Army
Tariff
In writing your answer, use the documents and your knowledge of the period 1801-1817.
Document A
Source: (Thomas Jefferson) to Gideon Granger, a future member of Jefferson's cabinet, 13 August 1800 I believe [we] shall obtain. . .a majority in the legislature of the United States, [attached to the preservation of the federal Constitution], according to its obvious principles and those on which it was known to be received; attached equally to the preservation to the states of those rights unquestionably remaining with them ; . . .in short, a majority firm in all those principles which we have espoused, and the (Federalists have opposed uniformly) . . . . It [our country] can never be harmonious and solid while so respectable a portion of its citizens support principles which go directly to a change of the federal Constitution, to sink the state governments, consolidate them into one, and to monarchise that. Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. . . . The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best that the... |
English: Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President ...
English: View of Capitol Hill from the U.S. Suprem...
English: Detail of Preamble to Constitution of the...