The quote is sometimes attributed to Jefferson, but actually it was Gerald Ford.

You need to remember that the idea of a Federal government that infested every single level of human activity was so far-fetched in Jefferson's time that they never really conceived of many of these things. The idea of the Federal government controlling, for example, what someone in a distant state could do on his own property, would have been as unbelievable as flying to Europe in a few hours.

That a government could take away an American's liberty by force was well known. The Constitution was written with that in mind. That an American could become the property of the government, a ward of the state relying on it for all his needs, was an idea for years in the future.