But he did not hesitate to show his dislike of the ceremony that prevailed around him. He stopped the weekly levee at the White House, and the system of precedence in force at the present time; also the appointment of fast and thanksgiving days. He dressed with severe simplicity and would not permit any attention to be paid him as president which would be refused him as a private citizen. In some respects, it must be conceded that this remarkable man carried his views to an extreme point. The story, however, that he rode his horse alone to the capitol, and, tying him to the fence, entered the building, unattended, lacks confirmation. Jefferson was re-elected in 1804, by a vote of 162 to 14 for Pinckney, who carried only two States out of the seventeen. The administrations of Jefferson were marked not only by many important national events, but were accompanied by great changes in the people themselves. Before and for some years after the Revolution, the majority were content to leave the task of thinking, speaking and acting to the representatives, first of the crown and then to their influential neighbors. The property qualification abridged the right to vote, but the active, hustling nature of the Americans now began to assert itself. The universal custom of wearing wigs and queues was given up and men cut their own hair short and insisted that every free man should have the right to vote. Jefferson was the founder and head of the new order of things, and of the republican party, soon to take the name of democratic, which controlled all the country with the exception of New England. Our commerce increased enormously, for the leading nations of Europe were warring with one another; money came in fast and most of the national debt was paid. Louisiana with an area exceeding all the rest of the United States, was bought from France in 1803, for $15,000,000, and from the territory were afterward carved the states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, Oklahoma, the Indian Territory and most of the states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado and Wyoming. The upper Missouri River and the Columbia River country to the Pacific Ocean were explored in 1804-6, by Lewis and Clarke, the first party of white men to cross the continent north of Mexico. Ohio was admitted to the Union in 1802. Fulton's steamboat, the Clermont made her maiden trip from New York to Albany in 1807. The first boatload of anthracite coal was shipped to Philadelphia, and it was a long time before the people knew what to do with it. The Tripolitan Pirates were snuffed out (1801-1805). The blight of the Embargo Act settled upon our commerce in 1807, in which year the opening gun of the War of 1812 was fired when the Leopard outraged the Chesapeake.