Thomas Jefferson felt that with hard-working, moral, virtuous farmers the nation would be shaped in the same manner and is quoted as writing, "Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example" (Major Problems, page 165). Jeffersonians felt that industrialization lead to a break down of morals in society, which led to a break down of the government as a whole. When Thomas Jefferson took office after two consecutive Federalist terms, his main contribution was in negotiating the Louisiana Purchase from the French, insuring several more generations worth of expansion West, and in so doing, insuring the ability to colonize uninhabited land for the planting of agriculture. However, opposite to Jefferson's dream of an independent American agricultural network, unattached to industrialization and European countries, was the fact that vast trade networks and intricate foreign relations would need to be established in order to export the harvested products of the Americas and transport them to European nations, who would in turn furnish the assembled goods required by the farming yeomen of America.
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Jefferson's plan would require the exportation of crops to European nations as the backbone of its commerce. Dealings with countries like Britain and France required the continued reliance of America on Old World Europe and involvement in its distant affairs. Also, the shipping of goods across the Atlantic was a costly enterprise even before factoring in the frequent seizing of American trade ships by the French and other countries that possessed formidable navies. The problem of exporting the American harvests to purchasing countries showed itself as the main problem in Jefferson's short sighted agricultural economic plan for America, "But the third and thorniest problem, in the form of long-standing restrictions on American commerce, proved far more frustrating and intractable.