Tenth Amendment Center

Jefferson’s account of the nature of the Union–a voluntary contract among free and independent States in order to establish a common caretaker for few and enumerated things–contains a great deal of common sense

Thomas Jefferson: “the support of the state governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies”

The battle between Jefferson and Hamilton is of very great significance, and precisely because it represented a clash between two fundamentally contrasting systems of political principle.

If Thomas Jefferson could come back and visit the United States for a day, would he recognize the government his wisdom and wordsmithing helped create?

Jefferson argues against exclusive judiciary construction; he felt it would undermine the principle of checks and balances

Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States of America, was an architect, a philosopher, a Deist and an impeccable prose stylist. His passionate appeal to dissolve ties with England—the Declaration of Independence—led the early colonies to war and ultimately freedom. As president, he earned respect for his sound principles and industrious nature, though his private life has been subjected to intense scrutiny.

Jefferson portrayed the Union as voluntarily entered into by the states; the states were “not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government”

by Thomas E. Woods, The Freeman
Thinkers in the classical-liberal tradition, to the extent that they support a coercive state at all, speak routinely of the importance of keeping government strictly limited. To that end, the United States has a written Constitution, which enumerates the relatively brief list of tasks entrusted to the federal government and [...]

by Gennady Stolyarov II
The doctrine of nullification, i.e., the idea that states have the right to unilaterally render void an act of the federal government that they perceive to be contrary to the Constitution, finds its origins in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, most notably his 1798 Kentucky Resolutions, written to protest the Federalist Congress’s [...]