this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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United States | News & Politics

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Also, to be fair to Jefferson (whether or not he deserves it), he was deluded enough to have a vision of a pastoral America, in which each family would have a decent-sized plot of land to live on and farm. (I say "deluded," because even in his time the actual, urban U.S. was taking shape, in the form of big cities like Boston.) You can see a concrete example of this in his township-and-range system, which was the basis of the Public Land Survey System which has shaped so much about U.S. geography. At least in his reckoning, future Americans would have had a lot more control of their lives by owning a big chunk of land that they and their families could fuck off to and make a living independently, should the political situation become disagreeable.

Also, pertinently, the distribution of voters was supposed to be a lot more even among the states. (Which means they should've scrapped the Constitution already in 1807 once the Lewis and Clark expedition reported back to him about the landscape of the interior.)