Politics & Power Quote by Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson’s “mortified” lands like an aristocrat’s blush: not just anger, but shame that a republic he helped midwife could stoop to policing commerce in ideas. The line is engineered to make censorship sound not merely wrong, but embarrassingly provincial - the kind of thing a self-styled beacon of liberty should have outgrown. He doesn’t argue in abstractions about “rights” here. He points to something mundanely American: the sale of a book. If even that ordinary transaction can trigger “criminal inquiry,” then the state has effectively deputized suspicion itself.

The phrasing does sly work. “To be told” distances Jefferson from the scene, suggesting a breakdown so basic it travels as scandalous news. “In the United States of America” is both indictment and brand audit: a country named like an ideal failing its own marketing. Then comes the escalating drumbeat - “inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too” - a rhetorical double-take that mirrors the reader’s disbelief. The “too” is the dagger; it implies a line crossed from scrutiny to punishment, from debate to prosecution.

Context matters: early American anxieties about sedition, foreign influence, and unruly print culture made “public order” an easy pretext for clampdowns. Jefferson is staking out a boundary between governance and thought control, warning that once the machinery of law is pointed at books, it won’t stop at books. The real target isn’t a particular title; it’s the habit of treating reading as evidence.