“Let our workshops remain in Europe,” Jefferson famously wrote, with deceptive rhetorical flourish. These words are the most frequently cited example of what is called Jeffersonian “agrarianism,” in Notes on Virginia, and one of the most familiar to historians, but “agrarian” is not a term that Jefferson employed frequently or with fondness. More than once he used the term negatively, as we shall presently see, and he knew the term was ambiguous, having radical associations both in ancient Roman law and in the rhetoric of his times. For example, Thomas Paine recycled the word in Agrarian Justice (1797), which was a proposal for a sweeping big-government reform that Jefferson could hardly have approved. Jefferson’s brand of the ideology was much more in step with the agrarianism of John Taylor, who is generally regarded its foremost American prophet, but even Taylor did not use the term frequently.