In 1789, fearing that the United States had abandoned all traces of its Republican values during his long absence in Revolutionary France, Thomas Jefferson returned to Virginia to find Alexander Hamilton the master of King George Washington's Government.

Rebuilding WorksAs the American Ambassador to France, Jefferson had witnessed the excesses of the last days of the Bourbon Kings. In a letter to his secretary William Short he noted that "Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is. I have expressed to you my sentiments, because they are really those of 99 in an hundred of our citizens". In the final months in Paris, Jefferson also witnessed those change unfolding as France entered a period of radical social and political upheaval.

Retiring to Charlottesville, Jefferson withdrew from public life in order to focus on the task of rebuilding Monticello. A delegation led by Benjamin Franklin and James Madison arrived, hoping to convince Jefferson that his architecture skills were required on a grander scale, to rebuild the nation in the image of the republican government that they had always imagined.

And Alexander Hamilton was forced to advise the King that the man who had penned the Declaration of Independence now posed a threat to the Federalist unity of the new nation. That Jefferson had gone native in Europe and become an American Oliver Cromwell.