The popularity of inflation and credit expansion, the ultimate source of the repeated attempts to render people prosperous by credit expansion, and thus the cause of the cyclical fluctuations of business, manifests itself clearly in the customary terminology. The boom is called good business, prosperity, and upswing. Its unavoidable aftermath, the readjustment of conditions to the real data of the market, is called crisis, slump, bad business, depression.
Thomas Jefferson’s second term was marked by the growing controversy with Great Britain over the latter’s increasing restrictions on and seizures of American commerce and impressments of American seamen. These began and steadily increased after the resumption of war between Great Britain and France in 1803.
When Jefferson ran for president in 1800, he made it clear that he supported strict construction, original intent jurisprudence, federalism, and states’ rights:
