What Jefferson Meant by "We Are All Republicans, We Are All Federalists"

Historical setting

Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office on March 4, 1801, the first president inaugurated in Washington millercenter.org. He reached the office by an unusual route. He and his own running mate, Aaron Burr, had tied at 73 electoral votes, and the House of Representatives needed 36 ballots before choosing Jefferson on February 17, 1801 archives.govhistory.house.gov. The outgoing president, John Adams, was a Federalist. The Sedition Act, under which Republican editors had been prosecuted, expired on March 3, the day before the inauguration archives.gov.

So Jefferson spoke to an audience that included people who had just lost an election, people who had been prosecuted for criticizing the government, and people who feared what a Republican administration would do. The address is short, and its second paragraph contains the sentence quoted ever since.

The exact words

In the Avalon Project text of the address, published by the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School, the sentence reads avalon.law.yale.edu:

We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.

Printed editions of the address differ in capitalization and punctuation; some reproduce the line with lowercase party names or a colon between the clauses. This article quotes the Avalon text exactly and has queued a comparison with Jefferson's manuscript for a future update. The meaning discussed below does not depend on the punctuation, but quotations on this site always follow a specific, citable source.

Evidence

The sentences around it

The line is the conclusion of a short argument, and it makes little sense alone. Immediately before it, Jefferson wrote avalon.law.yale.edu:

But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle.

The claim is precise. Jefferson did not say that Republicans and Federalists agreed. He said their disagreements were about opinion, meaning policy and judgment, rather than about first principles. The two party names, in this reading, were "different names" for people who shared a deeper commitment.

What was that commitment? The very next sentence names it by negation avalon.law.yale.edu:

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

Read together, the passage points to two shared principles: a republican form of government and the federal Union. The party names echoed them. Being a "Republican" and being a "Federalist" were, for Jefferson's rhetorical purpose, two ways of describing loyalty to the same constitutional order. That is an interpretation of the passage, and it is the most common one, but the text supports it closely: the words "Union" and "republican form" follow immediately.

The promise to the minority

Earlier in the same paragraph, Jefferson set out the rule he asked everyone to accept avalon.law.yale.edu:

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

This is the practical heart of the passage. The election was "decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution," and so everyone should "arrange themselves under the will of the law" avalon.law.yale.edu. In return, the winners owed the losers equal protection. Coming months after Federalist prosecutions of Republican editors under the Sedition Act archives.gov, the promise had specific content: the new majority would not do to the old one what had just been done to it.

Jefferson also tied political tolerance to religious tolerance. The country, he said, had "gained little" if, having banished religious intolerance, it would "countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions" avalon.law.yale.edu. He attributed the sharpness of American division to the upheavals of "the ancient world," whose agitation had reached "even this distant and peaceful shore," and treated that as a difference over "measures of safety," not over principle avalon.law.yale.edu.

What the new government did next

The address set a tone. It did not freeze policy. Within about a year, the Republican Congress repealed excise taxes including the whiskey tax (April 6, 1802), cut the army to its 1796 size (March 16, 1802), and repealed the 1798 naturalization law, returning the residency requirement from fourteen years to five (April 14, 1802) millercenter.org. These were reversals of Federalist measures. Accepting the opposition as legitimate and keeping its policies are different things, and Jefferson's address promised the first, not the second.

What the line does not mean

It does not mean partisanship ended

The Federalist Party did not merge into the Republican coalition in 1801. It continued to contest elections for more than a decade. The National Archives records Federalist candidates such as Charles C. Pinckney in 1804 and 1808 and Rufus King in 1816 archives.gov. New England Federalists opposed the War of 1812, and the Miller Center notes that after the war they were mostly discredited because of that opposition millercenter.org. When national two-party competition faded, the Republican coalition itself divided within a few years.

Jefferson's own later view also cuts against a purely conciliatory reading. The Library of Congress displays his 1819 letter to Spencer Roane and summarizes it as presenting the election of 1800 as a second American Revolution loc.gov. A man can call for reconciliation on inauguration day and still regard his victory as a decisive change in the country's direction. The two readings are not contradictory, but the second should keep anyone from treating the inaugural line as a statement that the parties did not matter.

It does not describe everyone in the country

The address praised a government "where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law" avalon.law.yale.edu. The people who could take part in that political community were limited by state voting rules, by race, by sex, and by enslavement. Jefferson himself enslaved over 600 people over his lifetime, according to the White House Historical Association whitehousehistory.org. Native nations were outside the electorate entirely. "We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists" was addressed to the political nation of 1801, which excluded most of the people living in the country. Our chapter on participation and exclusion documents those rules state by state.

It does not map onto modern parties

The Republicans and Federalists of 1801 are not today's Republicans and Democrats. The U.S. Senate's party key warns that "Republican" refers to two different parties widely separated in time, and that the present Republican Party was founded in the 1850s senate.gov. Quoting the line as if Jefferson were addressing modern partisans misreads it.

What the evidence does not show

The text shows what Jefferson said and how the passage is constructed. It does not show what any listener understood, how many Federalists were persuaded, or whether Jefferson privately expected the reconciliation to last. Those questions require letters, newspapers, and diaries from the weeks after the address, which this article has not yet reviewed at the passage level.

It also does not establish a single correct punctuation of the line across all editions. That comparison is queued.

What the text does establish is narrower and still useful. Jefferson drew a line between difference of opinion and difference of principle, placed both parties on the same side of it, and promised that a minority on the losing side of an election keeps its equal rights. Whether a political community lives up to that standard is a question every generation answers for itself, with the record of who was included and who was not in plain view.

Sources

1. Miller Center, University of Virginia, "Thomas Jefferson: Key Events." millercenter.org (locator: March 4, 1801; March 16, April 6, and April 14, 1802). Accessed 2026-10-28.
2. National Archives, Electoral College results, 1800. archives.gov (locator: results table and notes). Accessed 2026-10-28.
3. U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art and Archives, "Electoral College Fast Facts." history.house.gov (locator: contingent elections, 6th Congress). Accessed 2026-10-28.
4. National Archives, "Alien and Sedition Acts (1798)," Milestone Documents. archives.gov (locator: summary; Sedition Act Sec. 4). Accessed 2026-10-28.
5. Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801, Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu (locator: paragraph 2). Accessed 2026-10-28.
6. National Archives, Electoral College results, 1804, 1808, and 1816. archives.gov , archives.gov , archives.gov (locator: results tables). Accessed 2026-10-28.
7. Miller Center, University of Virginia, "James Monroe: Domestic Affairs." millercenter.org (locator: section on the Era of Good Feelings). Accessed 2026-10-28.
8. Library of Congress, "Establishing a Federal Republic," Thomas Jefferson exhibition. loc.gov (locator: item 137, Jefferson to Spencer Roane, September 6, 1819). Accessed 2026-10-28.
9. White House Historical Association, "Thomas Jefferson," biography. whitehousehistory.org (locator: section on slavery). Accessed 2026-10-28.
10. U.S. Senate, "Key to Party Abbreviations." senate.gov (locator: entry R and footnote). Accessed 2026-10-28.

Last checked against its sources on October 28, 2026. Report a correction.