The Making of an Historian - Garry Will's

Between the slave power and states rights there was no necessary connection. The slave power, when in control, was a centralizing influence, and all the most considerable encroachment on states' rights were its acts. The acquisition and admission of Louisiana; The embargo; the War of 1812; the annexation of Texas by "joint resolution" [rather than treaty]; the war with Mexico, declared by the mere announcement of President Polk; the Fugitive Slave Law; the Dred Scott decision - all triumphs of the slave power - did far more than either tariffs or internal improvements, which in their origin were also southern measures, to destroy the very memory of states' rights as they existed in 1789. Whenever a question arose of extending or protecting slavery, the slaveholders became friends of centralized power, and used that dangerous weapon with a kind of frenzy. Slavery in fact required centralization in order to maintain and protect itself, but it required to control the centralized machine; it needed despotic principles of government, but it needed them exclusively for its own use.

This eighteenth-century document is still the law of the land, and it must be construed as such. How can it give us infallible guidance when it is fallible? The answer is obvious, though unacceptable to some. It must be treated as what it is, as a fallible thing. It is a great human achievement, but it reflects a society that was deeply flawed (as all societies must be). The idea of human dignity in that society was very far from ours. It denied basic human rights not only to slaves, but to women, to Native Americans, to recent and propertyless immigrants. Yet some would reimpose the norms of that society on our time - for instance, in the constitutional definition of "cruel and unusual punishment." The eighteenth century routinely practiced things we now consider barbaric - public lashing, for instance, judicial mutilation, punitive treatment of the insane, public execution, capital punishment for minor felonies. Thomas Jefferson proposed the lex talionis for the state of Virginia. Here is his prescription for sexual offenses:

  "Whosoever shall be guilty of Rape, Polygamy, or Sodomy with man or woman shall be punished, if a man, by castration, if a woman, by cutting thro' the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half diameter at the least."

Since he proposed these punishments, he obviously did not think them cruel or unusual. To say that we are bound by the view of his society is to deny all possibility for moral progress.

The idea that Americans can be neatly sorted into Jeffersonians or Hamiltonians brings to mind the W.S. Gilbert lyric in Iolanthe:

I often think it's comical
How Nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That's born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
or else a little Conservative. 

Yet Americans continue to think we must get right with the Founders.

What is it to have that new-old thing, a "revolutionary tradition"? If it is a tradition, it should preclude or evade the need for revolution. If it is still revolutionary, it should be fundamentally remaking itself on a continuing basis...
Some think this problem is solved by the fact that America's basic values are capitalistic, and capitalism is itself a blend of revolutionary mobility and traditional stability. As Joseph Schumpeter demonstrated, there is nothing less rooted in the past - more ready for gambles on the future and risk in the present - than capitalism. It professes to remake anything and everything at the whim of the market. Yet those with the biggest stake in the profits of the system are determined to hold on to the power they wield, resisting at least one kind of change, that which would replace them. There, then, you have a revolutionary tradition.
Yet where is this to be found in the Constitution? The capitalist system is no more present there than is the political party system. Protection of property and trade is there. But that is not the same thing as the capitalist system....

The Jeffersonians helped bring about a country different from the one they had to deal with in 1800. The very terms used to describe it had changed radically  in meaning. "Nation" no longer referred to a collection of states. The new country envisaged things the old one had not - projection of American power abroad, and energetic adoption of the means of western expansion, greater hesitancy to punish "heresy," a governmental patronage of science. These could not be crammed back into the old straitjackets of prior ideology. Attempting to do that is what has made people misread the History, thinking Jefferson, if he stopped acting like a Republican in the John Randolph mode, had to become a Federalist in the Hamilton mode, as if there were no alternatives to the one or the other. This or that. Either-or. Adams says both-neither. History is far more complex than the interplay of two (or many) ideologies. Chance, mistakes, opportunism, progress, reassessments, forgetfulness - all of them and more concatenate something less neat than anyone envisaged.
There was no going back to Jefferson's or Hamilton's "original intent."