Thomas Jefferson felt that Federalists were often too restricted by their own limited partisan aims. He felt that effective Federalists need not be afraid to incorporate elements of Anti-Federalism into their political philosophy. As for himself, Jefferson declared in a 1789 letter to Francis Hopkinson Paris, "I am not a Federalist, because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself . . . but I am much farther from that of the Antifederalists."
Jefferson believed that Federalists had a duty to permit the presence of countervailing forces. As expressed through the Bill of Rights, such forces guarded the local interests of the nation's states. "It is by dividing and subdividing these republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations, until it ends in the administration of every man's farm by himself; by placing under every one what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best," maintained Jefferson in an 1816 letter to Joseph C. Cabell.
Jefferson expressed hope that Federalists, whose power was expressed so convincingly in the U.S. Constitution of 1789, would abide faithfully by the lofty ideals contained in his Declaration of Independence of 1776. The Jeffersonian model of democracy that was set forth in his Declaration had contained a provision for the abolishment of slavery, before falling subject to censorship by the Continental Congress prior to its publication. By contrast, the Constitution sanctioned the practice of slavery, protecting the slave trade until 1808 under the terms outlined in Article 1 Section 9. Jefferson would later firmly enforce the terms of this article, effectively ending the legal importation of slaves into the United States.
Jefferson himself, in many respects, may be considered a Federalist. Acting in the interests of the government over which he presided as our nation's third president, Jefferson adopted an expansive view of federal laws in his approval of the acquisition of the territory of Louisiana. Furthermore, Jefferson pursued a complex policy of assimilating Native Americans in order to facilitate the abrogation by the U.S. of the territories that they had traditionally claimed as their own.