d on a British model, one that to Jefferson was dangerous because it allowed abundant opportunity for corruption. Jefferson (like many contemporary Americans) fascinated with British technology, but he did not regard with pleasure an American future with large industrial manufacturing complexes like those of England-or that planned for Paterson, New Jersey. Americans' independence and "virtue" depended for Jefferson on the fact that so many of them were farmers who worked for themselves, not for others. Jefferson was also deeply loyal to France, the Americans' old ally in the War for Independence. While serving as minister to France during the 1780's, Jefferson had witnessed the beginnings of the French Revolution-which in his opinion only tightened the bond between France and America, whose Revolution, he thought, had inspired the French. Most Americans shared his enthusiasm for the French Revolution until it took a turn unlike anything the American Revolution brought, with escalating popular violence, the execution of King Louis XVI (1793), and the establishment not of regular constitutional government but the arbitrary violence of Maximilien Robespierre and the Terror. Events in France horrified Hamilton, who argued that the Franco-American Treaty of 1778 was with the French king and so ceased once he died. Jefferson justified the violence and declared that the treaty was with the French Nation, and so still binding. These differences widened as issues in foreign policy came to dominate Washington's administration, and they gradually marked a division not just in the cabinet but in Congress and the electorate. In 1790, Britain and Spain seemed likely to go to war; then Britain seemed headed for the war with France that finally broke out in 1793. Jefferson argued that Britain's situation gave the United States an opportunity to secure concessions in return for American neutrality; and several issues ...