"The Circle of Our Felicities": Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural Address and the Rhetoric of Nationhood

Abstract

Jefferson's first inaugural address is best understood as a conspicuous display of its author's style and thought. It is a statement about what oratory ought to look and sound like to a nation of republicans. A speech about politics, it offers as well a politics of speech, a rhetorical expression of the republican creed, and the republican expression of a rhetorical creed. The address thus constitutes its own theory of rhetoric; it is an exemplification of republican virtue, the conception, design, and delivery of which was meant to instantiate Jefferson's vision of a new moral and political order.