The American Experiment

This is Jefferson's sundial at Monticello (photo Katherine Heline). Jefferson was, in many ways, a child of the Enlightenment, and in his own way found room to retain some of the optimism which had withered in France. Whatever one has to say about Jefferson's philosophy, I have always found it easy to sympathize with his foundational confidence - that we could be a republic where strength and liberty rose up from the land itself. America would be a practical, agrarian realization of the sound principles of Enlightenment. His head may have been in the clouds, but his feet were on the ground, and he stood on good earth. And his neighbors, however unsophisticated their philosophies, were lords of something fresh and limitless and bursting with life. It was a powerful application of the scientific and moral constructions coming out of Europe.

...But we (as opposed to Europe) have an immensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman. Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which He keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.... Dependence (mean commerce) begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.
Thom. Jefferson
Notes on Virginia, query XIX