" The president had much on his mind. It was the age of Napoleon and Nelson, of contending powers who seemed never truly at peace, and America remained a target for the designs of enemies determined to dominate all or part of it. His final four years in public office were like the previous decades: Jefferson still struggled to secure the nation. It began—but hardly ended—with Britain, which still harbored doubts about the wherewithal of the United States. “We drove them into being a nation when they were no more fit for it than the convicts of Botany Bay,” the British diplomat Augustus Foster wrote his mother in 1805. "

― Jon Meacham , Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power