Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)

STUDIES - András Tarnóc: "Jefferson Still Survives".

In June 1776 Jefferson was appointed to head a committee charged with the writing of the Declaration of Independence. He was finished with the draft on July 2 and after a two and a half day debate the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress. The Declaration was technically a painstakingly written lawyer's brief indicting the king of Britain on various violations of the social contract and justifying America's desire for independence. In the next 3 years Jefferson served in the Virginia House of Delegates and on July 1, 1779 he was elected governor of his state. While his gubernatorial administration was marked with frustration and a general inability to lead the state during wartime, his attempts to rewrite Virginia's legal code introduced changes in the school system and promoted freedom of religion. Although in 1781 his term expired and he returned to his Monticello estate, grief over his wife's death forced him back to the political arena a year later. From 1785 Jefferson served as a Minister to France. His stay in Paris reenforced his acceptance of the Enlightenment and exposed him to the ideas of the French Revolution. As Jefferson became Secretary of State of the Washington government in 1790 the Virginia planter holding agrarian beliefs got into several conflicts with the more urbane Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson and his followers, the Republicans opposed the growing power of the central government, emphasized the importance of agriculture and supported France in the post 1789 European conflict. In 1796 he was elected vice president of the incoming administration of John Adams and in the following year he was chosen president of the American Philosophical Society. As the relationship between France and the United States exacerbated due to the pro-British policies of the Adams government, Jefferson became politically isolated and he was portrayed by the popular press as a supporter of French Jacobines. When the Federalist Adams administration introduced the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 aimed at crippling Republican opposition, Jefferson returned to Monticello to work on his reply, known as the Kentucky Resolutions. The resolutions promoted the so-called state compact theory arguing that the United States Constitution had 117