General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Here's a punch in the face from Thomas Jefferson to today's 2nd amendment crowd [View all]Bucky
(54,005 posts)He was offered the job of Minister to France in 1784, because Franklin was old & wanted to come home. The movement for even considering a new Constitution didn't start until 1786, when the Annapolis Convention fell apart and left Hamilton & Madison a lot of spare time to sit around chewing the fat and brainstorming about how to fix the country's enui.
Jefferson was mildly opposed to the 1787 convention's final product (although he stayed quiet about it), but absolutely not opposed to the convening of a body to rewrite the Articles of Confederation. He called the Philadelphia convention a meeting of "demigods" when he got a look at the rolecall. Like most Virginians, his opposition was rooted in the Senate leaving the old "one state-one vote" balance intact. Like most big-state critics of the Constitution (eg, George Mason & Sam Adams), he only later rested his reservation on the firmer ground of a lack of a Bill of Rights.
Politically, Jefferson was much closer to the people who pushed for the Constitution than with those who resisted it, although he was generally out of factional politics for the three years preceding the debates.