by his critics to be of the “levelling” sort. As Daniel Elazar has stressed more recently, “for a res
publica to exist…appropriate publics” must be established for its support. In other words, the
principal constituent element in a functional republic is not a mass of individuals governed by
federal institutions devoted to managing conflict between persons seeking their own self-interest,
but rather, “a public characterized by its civic character and political expression,” which
accentuates “the necessity for republican virtue. Moreover, a res publica “cannot exist
permanently,” according to George Sabine, “or at least cannot exist in any but a crippled
condition, unless it depends upon, and acknowledges, and gives effect to the consciousness of
mutual obligations and the mutual recognition of rights that bind its citizens together.” This
means that “federalism most clearly becomes a matter of structuring relationships and not simply
institutions,” according to Elazar.
Jefferson had similar ideas in mind when he was advocating
his “little republics…where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward…and feels that he
is a participator in the government…not merely at an election one day in the year, but every
day,” but he subsequently discovered, as he had on other occasions, that it is easier to extol an
ideal than to realize one.
The Philosophy Behind Jefferson’s “Little Republics”
This paper analyzes Thomas Jefferson’s democratic wards or hundreds as representing
his best effort to put into practice his classical republican ideals. More radical than most of the
American Founders, Jefferson sought to recreate a polity resembling the classical republican
institutions he believed existed in the ancient and pre-feudal (and largely mythical) Saxon
Constitution. Not unlike many of the English radicals, Jefferson believed democracy to be the
ideal form of political association, however impractical it was viewed at the time, and he
2
Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1987), 231-232, and
George H. Sabine and Thomas L. Thorson, A History of Political Theory, 4
th
ed. (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace
College Publishers, 1973), 163.
3
Thomas Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell, Monticello, February 2, 1816, in Writings, 1380.
3
Convention