Jefferson and Civil Liberties
What was the high moment in the career of Thomas Jefferson? Was it the writing of the Declaration of Independence or was it his election as President, which, as Henry Cabot Lodge says, “definitively determined that ours should be a democratic republic"? CLAUDE G. BOWERS, author of Jefferson and Hamilton and The Tragiclira and for the past thirteen years our ambassador to Chile, is f irmly of the opinion that Jefferson’s election was one of the turning points in our national story, and that Jefferson’s courageous stand against the Alien and Sedition Laws set an example which should be burned into our conscience today. This is the fourth in our series of biographical essays dealing with the decisive events in the lives of famous men.