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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Thomas Jefferson by Henry Childs Merwin
+
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no
+restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under
+the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or
+online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+
+Title: Thomas Jefferson
+
+Author: Henry Childs Merwin
+
+Release Date: June 28, 2010 [Ebook #33011]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOMAS JEFFERSON***
+
+
+
+
+
+                   *The Riverside Biographical Series*
+
+                                 NUMBER 5
+
+                             THOMAS JEFFERSON
+
+                                    BY
+
+                           HENRY CHILDS MERWIN
+
+                      [Illustration: Th. Jefferson]
+
+
+
+
+
+                            THOMAS JEFFERSON
+
+                                   BY
+
+                           HENRY CHILDS MERWIN
+
+
+                           [Publisher's emblem]
+
+
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
+Boston: 4 Park Street; New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street
+Chicago: 378-388 Wabash Avenue
+*The Riverside Press, Cambridge*
+
+
+
+
+
+                   COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY HENRY C. MERWIN
+
+                           ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+
+
+
+
+                                 CONTENTS
+
+
+ CHAP.                                        PAGE
+    I.   YOUTH AND TRAINING                      1
+   II.   VIRGINIA IN JEFFERSON'S DAY            16
+  III.   MONTICELLO AND ITS HOUSEHOLD           28
+   IV.   JEFFERSON IN THE REVOLUTION            36
+    V.   REFORM WORK IN VIRGINIA                45
+   VI.   GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA                   59
+  VII.   ENVOY AT PARIS                         71
+ VIII.   SECRETARY OF STATE                     82
+   IX.   THE TWO PARTIES                        98
+    X.   PRESIDENT JEFFERSON                   114
+   XI.   SECOND PRESIDENTIAL TERM              130
+  XII.   A PUBLIC MAN IN PRIVATE LIFE          149
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             THOMAS JEFFERSON
+
+
+
+
+
+                                    I
+
+
+                            YOUTH AND TRAINING
+
+
+Thomas Jefferson was born upon a frontier estate in Albemarle County,
+Virginia, April 13, 1743. His father, Peter Jefferson, was of Welsh
+descent, not of aristocratic birth, but of that yeoman class which
+constitutes the backbone of all societies. The elder Jefferson had
+uncommon powers both of mind and body. His strength was such that he could
+simultaneously "head up"--that is, raise from their sides to an upright
+position--two hogsheads of tobacco, weighing nearly one thousand pounds
+apiece. Like Washington, he was a surveyor; and there is a tradition that
+once, while running his lines through a vast wilderness, his assistants
+gave out from famine and fatigue, and Peter Jefferson pushed on alone,
+sleeping at night in hollow trees, amidst howling beasts of prey, and
+subsisting on the flesh of a pack mule which he had been obliged to kill.
+
+Thomas Jefferson inherited from his father a love of mathematics and of
+literature. Peter Jefferson had not received a classical education, but he
+was a diligent reader of a few good books, chiefly Shakespeare, The
+Spectator, Pope, and Swift; and in mastering these he was forming his mind
+on great literature after the manner of many another Virginian,--for the
+houses of that colony held English books as they held English furniture.
+The edition of Shakespeare (and it is a handsome one) which Peter
+Jefferson used is still preserved among the heirlooms of his descendants.
+
+It was probably in his capacity of surveyor that Mr. Jefferson made the
+acquaintance of the Randolph family, and he soon became the bosom friend
+of William Randolph, the young proprietor of Tuckahoe. The Randolphs had
+been for ages a family of consideration in the midland counties of
+England, claiming descent from the Scotch Earls of Murray, and connected
+by blood or marriage with many of the English nobility. In 1735 Peter
+Jefferson established himself as a planter by patenting a thousand acres
+of land in Goochland County, his estate lying near and partly including
+the outlying hills, which form a sort of picket line for the Blue Mountain
+range. At the same time his friend William Randolph patented an adjoining
+estate of twenty-four hundred acres; and inasmuch as there was no good
+site for a house on Jefferson's estate, Mr. Randolph conveyed to him four
+hundred acres for that purpose, the consideration expressed in the deed,
+which is still extant, being "Henry Weatherbourne's biggest bowl of Arrack
+punch."
+
+Here Peter Jefferson built his house, and here, three years later, he
+brought his bride,--a handsome girl of nineteen, and a kinswoman of William
+Randolph, being Jane, oldest child of Isham Randolph, then
+Adjutant-General of Virginia. She was born in London, in the parish of
+Shadwell, and Shadwell was the name given by Peter Jefferson to his
+estate. This marriage was a fortunate union of the best aristocratic and
+yeoman strains in Virginia.
+
+In the year 1744 the new County of Albemarle was carved out of Goochland
+County, and Peter Jefferson was appointed one of the three justices who
+constituted the county court and were the real rulers of the shire. He was
+made also Surveyor, and later Colonel of the county. This last office was
+regarded as the chief provincial honor in Virginia, and it was especially
+important when he held it, for it was the time of the French war, and
+Albemarle was in the debatable land.
+
+In the midst of that war, in August, 1757, Peter Jefferson died suddenly,
+of a disease which is not recorded, but which was probably produced by
+fatigue and exposure. He was a strong, just, kindly man, sought for as a
+protector of the widow and the orphan, and respected and loved by Indians
+as well as white men. Upon his deathbed he left two injunctions regarding
+his son Thomas: one, that he should receive a classical education; the
+other, that he should never be permitted to neglect the physical exercises
+necessary for health and strength. Of these dying commands his son often
+spoke with gratitude; and he used to say that if he were obliged to choose
+between the education and the estate which his father gave him, he would
+choose the education. Peter Jefferson left eight children, but only one
+son besides Thomas, and that one died in infancy. Less is known of
+Jefferson's mother; but he derived from her a love of music, an
+extraordinary keenness of susceptibility, and a corresponding refinement
+of taste.
+
+His father's death left Jefferson his own master. In one of his later
+letters he says: "At fourteen years of age the whole care and direction of
+myself were thrown on myself entirely, without a relative or a friend
+qualified to advise or guide me."
+
+The first use that he made of his liberty was to change his school, and to
+become a pupil of the Rev. James Maury,--an excellent clergyman and
+scholar, of Huguenot descent, who had recently settled in Albemarle
+County. With him young Jefferson continued for two years, studying Greek
+and Latin, and becoming noted, as a schoolmate afterward reported, for
+scholarship, industry, and shyness. He was a good runner, a keen
+fox-hunter, and a bold and graceful rider.
+
+At the age of sixteen, in the spring of 1760, he set out on horseback for
+Williamsburg, the capital of Virginia, where he proposed to enter the
+college of William and Mary. Up to this time he had never seen a town, or
+even a village, except the hamlet of Charlottesville, which is about four
+miles from Shadwell. Williamsburg--described in contemporary language as
+"the centre of taste, fashion, and refinement"--was an unpaved village, of
+about one thousand inhabitants, surrounded by an expanse of dark green
+tobacco fields as far as the eye could reach. It was, however, well
+situated upon a plateau midway between the York and James rivers, and was
+swept by breezes which tempered the heat of the summer sun and kept the
+town free from mosquitoes.
+
+Williamsburg was also well laid out, and it has the honor of having served
+as a model for the city of Washington. It consisted chiefly of a single
+street, one hundred feet broad and three quarters of a mile long, with the
+capitol at one end, the college at the other, and a ten-acre square with
+public buildings in the middle. Here in his palace lived the colonial
+governor. The town also contained "ten or twelve gentlemen's families,
+besides merchants and tradesmen." These were the permanent inhabitants;
+and during the "season"--the midwinter months--the planters' families came
+to town in their coaches, the gentlemen on horseback, and the little
+capital was then a scene of gayety and dissipation.
+
+Such was Williamsburg in 1760 when Thomas Jefferson, the frontier
+planter's son, rode slowly into town at the close of an early spring day,
+surveying with the outward indifference, but keen inward curiosity of a
+countryman, the place which was to be his residence for seven years,--in
+one sense the most important, because the most formative, period of his
+life. He was a tall stripling, rather slightly built,--after the model of
+the Randolphs,--but extremely well-knit, muscular, and agile. His face was
+freckled, and his features were somewhat pointed. His hair is variously
+described as red, reddish, and sandy, and the color of his eyes as blue,
+gray, and also hazel. The expression of his face was frank, cheerful, and
+engaging. He was not handsome in youth, but "a very good-looking man in
+middle age, and quite a handsome old man." At maturity he stood six feet
+two and a half inches. "Mr. Jefferson," said Mr. Bacon, at one time the
+superintendent of his estate, "was well proportioned and straight as a
+gun-barrel. He was like a fine horse, he had no surplus flesh. He had an
+iron constitution, and was very strong."
+
+Jefferson was always the most cheerful and optimistic of men. He once
+said, after remarking that something must depend "on the chapter of
+events:" "I am in the habit of turning over the next leaf with hope, and,
+though it often fails me, there is still another and another behind." No
+doubt this sanguine trait was due in part at least to his almost perfect
+health. He was, to use his own language, "blessed with organs of digestion
+which accepted and concocted, without ever murmuring, whatever the palate
+chose to consign to them." His habits through life were good. He never
+smoked, he drank wine in moderation, he went to bed early, he was regular
+in taking exercise, either by walking or, more commonly, by riding on
+horseback.
+
+The college of William and Mary in Jefferson's day is described by Mr.
+Parton as "a medley of college, Indian mission, and grammar school,
+ill-governed, and distracted by dissensions among its ruling powers." But
+Jefferson had a thirst for knowledge and a capacity for acquiring it,
+which made him almost independent of institutions of learning. Moreover,
+there was one professor who had a large share in the formation of his
+mind. "It was my great good fortune," he wrote in his brief autobiography,
+"and what probably fixed the destinies of my life, that Dr. William Small,
+of Scotland, was then professor of mathematics; a man profound in most of
+the useful branches of science, with a happy talent of communication and
+an enlarged liberal mind. He, most happily for me, soon became attached to
+me, and made me his daily companion when not engaged in the school; and
+from his conversation I got my first views of the expansion of science,
+and of the system of things in which we are placed."
+
+Jefferson, like all well-bred Virginians, was brought up as an
+Episcopalian; but as a young man, perhaps owing in part to the influence
+of Dr. Small, he ceased to believe in Christianity as a religion, though
+he always at home attended the Episcopal church, and though his daughters
+were brought up in that faith. If any theological term is to be applied to
+him, he should be called a Deist. Upon the subject of his religious faith,
+Jefferson was always extremely reticent. To one or two friends only did he
+disclose his creed, and that was in letters which were published after his
+death. When asked, even by one of his own family, for his opinion upon any
+religious matter, he invariably refused to express it, saying that every
+person was bound to look into the subject for himself, and to decide upon
+it conscientiously, unbiased by the opinions of others.
+
+Dr. Small introduced Jefferson to other valuable acquaintances; and, boy
+though he was, he soon became the fourth in a group of friends which
+embraced the three most notable men in the little metropolis. These were,
+beside Dr. Small, Francis Fauquier, the acting governor of the province,
+appointed by the crown, and George Wythe. Fauquier was a courtly,
+honorable, highly cultivated man of the world, a disciple of Voltaire, and
+a confirmed gambler, who had in this respect an unfortunate influence upon
+the Virginia gentry,--not, however, upon Jefferson, who, though a lover of
+horses, and a frequenter of races, never in his life gambled or even
+played cards. Wythe was then just beginning a long and honorable career as
+lawyer, statesman, professor, and judge. He remained always a firm and
+intimate friend of Jefferson, who spoke of him, after his death, as "my
+second father." It is an interesting fact that Thomas Jefferson, John
+Marshall, and Henry Clay were all, in succession, law students in the
+office of George Wythe.
+
+Many of the government officials and planters who flocked to Williamsburg
+in the winter were related to Jefferson on his mother's side, and they
+opened their houses to him with Virginia hospitality. We read also of
+dances in the "Apollo," the ball-room of the old Raleigh tavern, and of
+musical parties at Gov. Fauquier's house, in which Jefferson, who was a
+skillful and enthusiastic fiddler, always took part. "I suppose," he
+remarked in his old age, "that during at least a dozen years of my life, I
+played no less than three hours a day."
+
+At this period he was somewhat of a dandy, very particular about his
+clothes and equipage, and devoted, as indeed he remained through life, to
+fine horses. Virginia imported more thoroughbred horses than any other
+colony, and to this day there is probably a greater admixture of
+thoroughbred blood there than in any other State. Diomed, winner of the
+first English Derby, was brought over to Virginia in 1799, and founded a
+family which, even now, is highly esteemed as a source of speed and
+endurance. Jefferson had some of his colts; and both for the saddle and
+for his carriage he always used high-bred horses.
+
+Referring to the Williamsburg period of his life, he wrote once to a
+grandson: "When I recollect the various sorts of bad company with which I
+associated from time to time, I am astonished I did not turn off with some
+of them, and become as worthless to society as they were.... But I had the
+good fortune to become acquainted very early with some characters of very
+high standing, and to feel the incessant wish that I could ever become
+what they were. Under temptations and difficulties, I would ask myself
+what would Dr. Small, Mr. Wythe, Peyton Randolph do in this situation?
+What course in it will assure me their approbation? I am certain that this
+mode of deciding on my conduct tended more to correctness than any
+reasoning powers that I possesed."
+
+This passage throws a light upon Jefferson's character. It does not seem
+to occur to him that a young man might require some stronger motive to
+keep his passions in check than could be furnished either by the wish to
+imitate a good example or by his "reasoning powers." To Jefferson's
+well-regulated mind the desire for approbation was a sufficient motive. He
+was particularly sensitive, perhaps morbidly so, to disapprobation. The
+respect, the good-will, the affection of his countrymen were so dear to
+him that the desire to retain them exercised a great, it may be at times,
+an undue influence upon him. "I find," he once said, "the pain of a little
+censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of
+much praise."
+
+During his second year at college, Jefferson laid aside all frivolities.
+He sent home his horses, contenting himself with a mile run out and back
+at nightfall for exercise, and studying, if we may believe the biographer,
+no less than fifteen hours a day. This intense application reduced the
+time of his college course by one half; and after the second winter at
+Williamsburg he went home with a degree in his pocket, and a volume of
+Coke upon Lytleton in his trunk.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                    II
+
+
+                       VIRGINIA IN JEFFERSON'S DAY
+
+
+To a young Virginian of Jefferson's standing but two active careers were
+open, law and politics, and in almost every case these two, sooner or
+later, merged in one. The condition of Virginia was very different from
+that of New England,--neither the clerical nor the medical profession was
+held in esteem. There were no manufactures, and there was no general
+commerce.
+
+Nature has divided Virginia into two parts: the mountainous region to the
+west and the broad level plain between the mountains and the sea,
+intersected by numerous rivers, in which, far back from the ocean, the
+tide ebbs and flows. In this tide-water region were situated the tobacco
+plantations which constituted the wealth and were inhabited by the
+aristocracy of the colony. Almost every planter lived near a river and had
+his own wharf, whence a schooner carried his tobacco to London, and
+brought back wines, silks, velvets, guns, saddles, and shoes.
+
+The small proprietors of land were comparatively few in number, and the
+whole constitution of the colony, political and social, was aristocratic.
+Both real estate and slaves descended by force of law to the eldest son,
+so that the great properties were kept intact. There were no townships and
+no town meetings. The political unit was the parish; for the Episcopal
+church was the established church,--a state institution; and the parishes
+were of great extent, there being, as a rule, but one or two parishes in a
+county.
+
+The clergy, though belonging to an establishment, were poorly paid, and
+not revered as a class. They held the same position of inferiority in
+respect to the rich planters which the clergy of England held in respect
+to the country gentry at the same period. Being appointed by the crown,
+they were selected without much regard to fitness, and they were
+demoralized by want of supervision, for there were no resident bishops,
+and, further, by the uncertain character of their incomes, which, being
+paid in tobacco, were subject to great fluctuations. A few were men of
+learning and virtue who performed their duties faithfully, and eked out
+their incomes by taking pupils. "It was these few," remarks Mr. Parton,
+"who saved civilization in the colony." A few others became cultivators of
+tobacco, and acquired wealth. But the greater part of the clergy were
+companions and hangers-on of the rich planters,--examples of that type
+which Thackeray so well describes in the character of Parson Sampson in
+"The Virginians." Strange tales were told of these old Virginia parsons.
+One is spoken of as pocketing annually a hundred dollars, the revenue of a
+legacy for preaching four sermons a year against atheism, gambling,
+racing, and swearing,--for all of which vices, except the first, he was
+notorious.
+
+This period, the middle half of the eighteenth century, was, as the reader
+need not be reminded, that in which the English church sank to its lowest
+point. It was the era when the typical country parson was a convivial
+fox-hunter; when the Fellows of colleges sat over their wine from four
+o'clock, their dinner hour, till midnight or after; when the highest type
+of bishop was a learned man who spent more time in his private studies
+than in the duties of his office; when the cathedrals were neglected and
+dirty, and the parish churches were closed from Sunday to Sunday. In
+England, the reaction produced Methodism, and, later, the Tractarian
+movement; and we are told that even in Virginia, "swarms of Methodists,
+Moravians, and New-Light Presbyterians came over the border from
+Pennsylvania, and pervaded the colony."
+
+Taxation pressed with very unequal force upon the poor, and the right of
+voting was confined to freeholders. There was no system of public schools,
+and the great mass of the people were ignorant and coarse, but morally and
+physically sound,--a good substructure for an aristocratic society. Wealth
+being concentrated mainly in the hands of a few, Virginia presented
+striking contrasts of luxury and destitution, whereas in the neighboring
+colony of Pennsylvania, where wealth was more distributed and society more
+democratic, thrift and prosperity were far more common.
+
+"In Pennsylvania," relates a foreign traveler, "one sees great numbers of
+wagons drawn by four or more fine fat horses.... In the slave States we
+sometimes meet a ragged black boy or girl driving a team consisting of a
+lean cow and a mule; and I have seen a mule, a bull, and a cow, each
+miserable in its appearance, composing one team, with a half-naked black
+slave or two riding or driving as occasion suited." And yet between
+Richmond and Fredericksburg, "in the afternoon, as our road lay through
+the woods, I was surprised to meet a family party traveling along in as
+elegant a coach as is usually met with in the neighborhood of London, and
+attended by several gayly dressed footmen."
+
+Virginia society just before the Revolution perfectly illustrated Buckle's
+remark about leisure: "Without leisure, science is impossible; and when
+leisure has been won, most of the class possessing it will waste it in the
+pursuit of pleasure, and a _few_ will employ it in the pursuit of
+knowledge." Men like Jefferson, George Wythe, and Madison used their
+leisure for the good of their fellow-beings and for the cultivation of
+their minds; whereas the greater part of the planters--and the poor whites
+imitated them--spent their ample leisure in sports, in drinking, and in
+absolute idleness. "In spite of the Virginians' love for dissipation,"
+wrote a famous French traveler, "the taste for reading is commoner among
+men of the first rank than in any other part of America; but the populace
+is perhaps more ignorant there than elsewhere." "The Virginia virtues,"
+says Mr. Henry Adams, "were those of the field and farm--the simple and
+straightforward mind, the notions of courage and truth, the absence of
+mercantile sharpness and quickness, the rusticity and open-handed
+hospitality." Virginians of the upper class were remarkable for their
+high-bred courtesy,--a trait so inherent that it rarely disappeared even in
+the bitterness of political disputes and divisions. This, too, was the
+natural product of a society based not on trade or commerce, but on land.
+"I blush for my own people," wrote Dr. Channing, from Virginia, in 1791,
+"when I compare the selfish prudence of a Yankee with the generous
+confidence of a Virginian. Here I find great vices, but greater virtues
+than I left behind me." There was a largeness of temper and of feeling in
+the Virginia aristocracy, which seems to be inseparable from people living
+in a new country, upon the outskirts of civilization. They had the pride
+of birth, but they recognized other claims to consideration, and were as
+far as possible from estimating a man according to the amount of his
+wealth.
+
+Slavery itself was probably a factor for good in the character of such a
+man as Jefferson,--it afforded a daily exercise in the virtues of
+benevolence and self-control. How he treated the blacks may be gathered
+from a story, told by his superintendent, of a slave named Jim who had
+been caught stealing nails from the nail-factory: "When Mr. Jefferson
+came, I sent for Jim, and I never saw any person, white or black, feel as
+badly as he did when he saw his master. The tears streamed down his face,
+and he begged for pardon over and over again. I felt very badly myself.
+Mr. Jefferson turned to me and said, 'Ah, sir, we can't punish him. He has
+suffered enough already.' He then talked to him, gave him a heap of good
+advice, and sent him to the shop.... Jim said: 'Well I'se been a-seeking
+religion a long time, but I never heard anything before that sounded so,
+or made me feel so, as I did when Master said, "Go, and don't do so any
+more," and now I'se determined to seek religion till I find it;' and sure
+enough he afterwards came to me for a permit to go and be baptized.... He
+was always a good servant afterward."
+
+Another element that contributed to the efficiency and the high standard
+of the early Virginia statesman was a good, old-fashioned classical
+education. They were familiar, to use Matthew Arnold's famous expression,
+"with the best that has ever been said or done." This was no small
+advantage to men who were called upon to act as founders of a republic
+different indeed from the republics of Greece and Rome, but still based
+upon the same principles, and demanding an exercise of the same heroic
+virtues. The American Revolution would never have cut quite the figure in
+the world which history assigns to it, had it not been conducted with a
+kind of classic dignity and decency; and to this result nobody contributed
+more than Jefferson.
+
+Such was Virginia in the eighteenth century,--at the base of society, the
+slaves; next, a lower class, rough, ignorant, and somewhat brutal, but
+still wholesome, and possessing the primitive virtues of courage and
+truth; and at the top, the landed gentry, luxurious, proud, idle and
+dissipated for the most part, and yet blossoming into a few characters of
+a type so high that the world has hardly seen a better. Had he been born
+in Europe, Jefferson would doubtless have devoted himself to music, or to
+architecture, or to literature, or to science,--for in all these directions
+his taste was nearly equally strong; but these careers being closed to him
+by the circumstances of the colony, he became a lawyer, and then, under
+pressure of the Revolution, a politician and statesman.
+
+During the four years following his graduation, Jefferson spent most of
+the winter months at Williamsburg, pursuing his legal and other studies,
+and the rest of the year upon the family plantation, the management of
+which had devolved upon him. Now, as always, he was the most industrious
+of men. He lived, as Mr. Parton remarks, "with a pen in his hand." He kept
+a garden book, a farm book, a weather book, a receipt book, a cash book,
+and, while he practiced law, a fee book. Many of these books are still
+preserved, and the entries are as legible now as when they were first
+written down in Jefferson's small but clear and graceful hand,--the hand of
+an artist. Jefferson, as one of his old friends once remarked, _hated_
+superficial knowledge; and he dug to the roots of the common law, reading
+deeply in old reports written in law French and law Latin, and especially
+studying Magna Charta and Bracton.
+
+He found time also for riding, for music, and dancing; and in his
+twentieth year he became enamored of Miss Rebecca Burwell, a Williamsburg
+belle more distinguished, tradition reports, for beauty than for
+cleverness. But Jefferson was not yet in a position to marry,--he even
+contemplated a foreign tour; and the girl, somewhat abruptly, married
+another lover. The wound seems not to have been a deep one. Jefferson, in
+fact, though he found his chief happiness in family affection, and though
+capable of strong and lasting attachments, was not the man for a romantic
+passion. He was a philosopher of the reasonable, eighteenth-century type.
+No one was more kind and just in the treatment of his slaves, but he did
+not free them, as George Wythe, perhaps foolishly, did; and he was even
+cautious about promulgating his views as to the folly and wickedness of
+slavery, though he did his best to promote its abolition by legislative
+measures. There was not in Jefferson the material for a martyr or a Don
+Quixote; but that was Nature's fault, not his. It may be said of every
+particular man that there is a certain depth to which he cannot sink, and
+there is a certain height to which he cannot rise. Within the intermediate
+zone there is ample exercise for free-will; and no man struggled harder
+than Jefferson to fulfill all the obligations which, as he conceived, were
+laid upon him.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                   III
+
+
+                       MONTICELLO AND ITS HOUSEHOLD
+
+
+In April, 1764, Jefferson came of age, and his first public act was a
+characteristic one. For the benefit of the neighborhood, he procured the
+passage of a statute to authorize the dredging of the Rivanna River upon
+which his own estate bordered in part. He then by private subscriptions
+raised a sum sufficient for carrying out this purpose; and in a short time
+the stream, upon which before a bark canoe would hardly have floated, was
+made available for the transportation of farm produce to the James River,
+and thence to the sea.
+
+In 1766, he made a journey to Philadelphia, in order to be inoculated for
+smallpox, traveling in a light gig drawn by a high-spirited horse, and
+narrowly escaping death by drowning in one of the numerous rivers which
+had to be forded between Charlottesville and Philadelphia. In the
+following year, about the time of his twenty-fourth birthday, he was
+admitted to the bar, and entered almost immediately upon a large and
+lucrative practice. He remained at the bar only seven years, but during
+most of this time his professional income averaged more than L2500 a year;
+and he increased his paternal estate from 1900 acres to 5000 acres. He
+argued with force and fluency, but his voice was not suitable for public
+speaking, and soon became husky. Moreover, Jefferson had an intense
+repugnance to the arena. He shrank with a kind of nervous horror from a
+personal contest, and hated to be drawn into a discussion. The turmoil and
+confusion of a public body were hideous to him;--it was as a writer, not as
+a speaker, that he won fame, first in the Virginia Assembly, and afterward
+in the Continental Congress.
+
+In October, 1768, Jefferson was chosen to represent Albemarle County in
+the House of Burgesses of Virginia; and thus began his long political
+career of forty years. A resolution which he formed at the outset is
+stated in the following letter written in 1792 to a friend who had offered
+him a share in an undertaking which promised to be profitable:--
+
+"When I first entered on the stage of public life (now twenty-four years
+ago) I came to a resolution never to engage, while in public office, in
+any kind of enterprise for the improvement of my fortune, nor to wear any
+other character than that of a farmer. I have never departed from it in a
+single instance; and I have in multiplied instances found myself happy in
+being able to decide and to act as a public servant, clear of all
+interest, in the multiform questions that have arisen, wherein I have seen
+others embarrassed and biased by having got themselves in a more
+interested situation."
+
+During the next few years there was a lull in political affairs,--a sullen
+calm before the storm of the Revolution; but they were important years in
+Mr. Jefferson's life. In February, 1770, the house at Shadwell, where he
+lived with his mother and sisters, was burned to the ground, while the
+family were away. "Were none of my books saved?" Jefferson asked of the
+negro who came to him, breathless, with news of the disaster. "No,
+master," was the reply, "but we saved the fiddle."
+
+In giving his friend Page an account of the fire, Jefferson wrote: "On a
+reasonable estimate, I calculate the cost of the books burned to have been
+L200. Would to God it had been the money,--then had it never cost me a
+sigh!" Beside the books, Jefferson lost most of his notes and papers; but
+no mishap, not caused by his own fault, ever troubled his peace of mind.
+
+After the fire, his mother and the children took temporary refuge in the
+home of an overseer, and Jefferson repaired to Monticello,--as he had named
+the elevated spot on the paternal estate where he had already begun to
+build the house which was his home for the remainder of his life.
+
+Monticello is a small outlying peak, upon the outskirts of the mountainous
+part of Virginia, west of the tide-water region, and rising 580 feet above
+the plain at its foot. Upon its summit there is a space of about six
+acres, leveled partly by nature and partly by art; and here, one hundred
+feet back from the brow of the hill, Jefferson built his house. It is a
+long, low building,--still standing,--with a Grecian portico in front,
+surmounted by a cupola. The road by which it is approached winds round and
+round, so as to make the ascent less difficult. In front of the house
+three long terraces, terminating in small pavilions, were constructed; and
+upon the northern terrace, or in its pavilion, Jefferson and his friends
+used to sit on summer nights gazing off toward the Blue Ridge, some eighty
+miles distant, or upon the nearer peaks of the Ragged Mountains. The
+altitude is such that neither dew nor mosquitoes can reach it.
+
+To this beautiful but as yet uncompleted mountain home, Jefferson, in
+January, 1772, brought his bride. She was Martha Skelton, who had been
+left a widow at nineteen, and was now twenty-two, a daughter of John
+Wayles, a leading and opulent lawyer. Martha Skelton was a tall,
+beautiful, highly educated young woman, of graceful carriage, with hazel
+eyes, literary in her tastes, a skillful performer upon the spinnet, and a
+notable housewife whose neatly kept account books are still preserved.
+They were married at "The Forest," her father's estate in Charles City
+County, and immediately set out for Monticello.
+
+Two years later, in 1774, died Dabney Carr, a brilliant and patriotic
+young lawyer, Jefferson's most intimate friend, and the husband of his
+sister Martha. Dabney Carr left six small children, whom, with their
+mother, Jefferson took under his wing, and they were brought up at
+Monticello as if they had been his own children. Jefferson loved children,
+and he had, in common with that very different character, Aaron Burr, an
+instinct for teaching. While still a young man himself, he was often
+called upon to direct the studies of other young men,--Madison and Monroe
+were in this sense his pupils; and the founding of the University of
+Virginia was an achievement long anticipated by him and enthusiastically
+performed.
+
+Jefferson was somewhat unfortunate in his own children, for, of the six
+that were born to him, only two, Martha and Maria, lived to grow up. Maria
+married but died young, leaving one child. Martha, the first-born, was a
+brilliant, cheerful, wholesome woman. She married Thomas Mann Randolph,
+afterward governor of Virginia. "She was just like her father, in this
+respect," says Mr. Bacon, the superintendent,--"she was always busy. If she
+wasn't reading or writing, she was always doing something. She used to sit
+in Mr. Jefferson's room a great deal, and sew, or read, or talk, as he
+would be busy about something else." John Randolph of Roanoke once toasted
+her--and it was after his quarrel with her father--as the sweetest woman in
+Virginia. She left ten children, and many of her descendants are still
+living.
+
+To her, and to his other daughter, Maria, who is described as being more
+beautiful and no less amiable than her sister, but not so intellectual,
+Jefferson owed the chief happiness of his life. Like many another man who
+has won fame and a high position in the world, he counted these things but
+as dust and ashes in comparison with family affection.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                    IV
+
+
+                       JEFFERSON IN THE REVOLUTION
+
+
+Shortly after Mr. Jefferson's marriage, the preliminary movements of the
+Revolution began, and though he took an active part in them it was not
+without reluctance. Even after the battle of Bunker Hill, namely, in
+November, 1775, he wrote to a kinsman that there was not a man in the
+British Empire who more cordially loved a union with Great Britain than he
+did. John Jay said after the Revolution: "During the course of my life,
+and until the second petition of Congress in 1775, I never did hear any
+American of any class or description express a wish for the independence
+of the colonies."
+
+But these friendly feelings were first outraged and then extinguished by a
+long series of ill-considered and oppressive acts, covering, with some
+intermissions, a period of about twelve years. Of these the most
+noteworthy were the Stamp Act, which amounted to taxation without
+representation, and the impost on tea, which was coupled with a provision
+that the receipts should be applied to the salaries of officers of the
+crown, thus placing them beyond the control of the local assemblies. The
+crown officers were also authorized to grant salaries and pensions at
+their discretion; and a board of revenue commissioners for the whole
+country was established at Boston, and armed with despotic powers. These
+proceedings amounted to a deprivation of liberty, and they were aggravated
+by the king's contemptuous rejection of the petitions addressed to him by
+the colonists. We know what followed,--the burning of the British war
+schooner, Gaspee, by leading citizens of Providence, and the famous
+tea-party in Boston harbor.
+
+Meanwhile Virginia had not been inactive. In March, 1772, a few young men,
+members of the House of Burgesses, met at the Raleigh Tavern in
+Williamsburg. They were Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee and his brother,
+Thomas Jefferson, and a few others. They drew up several resolutions, the
+most important of which called for the appointment of a standing committee
+and for an invitation to the other colonies to appoint like committees for
+mutual information and assistance in the struggle against the crown. A
+similar resolution had been adopted in Massachusetts two years before, but
+without any practical result. The Virginia resolution was passed the next
+day by the House of Burgesses, and it gave rise to those proceedings which
+ushered in the Revolution.
+
+The first Continental Congress was to meet in Philadelphia, in September,
+1774; and Jefferson, in anticipation, prepared a draft of instructions for
+the delegates who were to be elected by Virginia. Being taken ill himself,
+on his way to the convention, he sent forward a copy of these
+instructions. They were considered too drastic to be adopted by the
+convention; but some of the members caused them to be published under the
+title of "A Summary View of the Rights of America." The pamphlet was
+extensively read in this country, and a copy which had been sent to London
+falling into the hands of Edmund Burke, he had it reprinted in England,
+where it ran through edition after edition. Jefferson's name thus became
+known throughout the colonies and in England.
+
+The "Summary View" is in reality a political essay. Its author wasted no
+time in discussing the specific legal and constitutional questions which
+had arisen between the colonies and the crown; but he went to the root of
+the matter, and with one or two generalizations as bold and original as if
+they had been made by Rousseau, he cut the Gordian knot, and severed
+America from the Parliament of Great Britain. He admitted some sort of
+dependence upon the crown, but his two main principles were these: (1)
+that the soil of this country belonged to the people who had settled and
+improved it, and that the crown had no right to sell or give it away; (2)
+that the right of self-government was a right natural to every people, and
+that Parliament, therefore, had no authority to make laws for America.
+Jefferson was always about a century in advance of his time; and the
+"Summary View" substantially anticipated what is now the acknowledged
+relation of England to her colonies.
+
+Jefferson was elected a member of the Continental Congress at its second
+session; and he made a rapid journey to Philadelphia in a chaise, with two
+led horses behind, reaching there the night before Washington set out for
+Cambridge. The Congress was composed mainly of young men. Franklin, the
+oldest member, was seventy-one, and a few others were past sixty.
+Washington was forty-three; John Adams, forty; Patrick Henry, a year or
+two younger; John Rutledge, thirty-six; his brother, twenty-six; John
+Langdon and William Paca, thirty-five, John Jay, thirty; Thomas Stone,
+thirty-two, and Jefferson, thirty-two.
+
+Jefferson soon became intimate with John Adams, who in later years said of
+him: "Though a silent member of Congress, he was so prompt, frank,
+explicit, and decisive upon committees and in conversation--not even Samuel
+Adams was more so--that he soon seized upon my heart."
+
+Jefferson, as we have seen, was not fitted to shine as an orator, still
+less in debate. But as a writer he had that capacity for style which
+comes, if it comes at all, as a gift of nature; which needs to be
+supplemented, but which cannot be supplied, by practice and study. In some
+of his early letters there are slight reminders of Dr. Johnson's manner,
+and still more of Sterne's. Sterne indeed was one of his favorite authors.
+However, these early traces of imitation were absorbed very quickly; and,
+before he was thirty, Jefferson became master of a clear, smooth,
+polished, picturesque, and individual style. To him, therefore, his
+associates naturally turned when they needed such a proclamation to the
+world as the Declaration of Independence; and that document is very
+characteristic of its author. It was imagination that gave distinction to
+Jefferson both as a man and as a writer. He never dashed off a letter
+which did not contain some play of fancy; and whether he was inventing a
+plough or forecasting the destinies of a great Democracy, imagination
+qualified the performance.
+
+One of the most effective forms in which imagination displays itself in
+prose is by the use of a common word in such a manner and context that it
+conveys an uncommon meaning. There are many examples of this rhetorical
+art in Jefferson's writings, but the most notable one occurs in the noble
+first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: "When, in the course
+of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the
+political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume
+among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the
+Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the
+opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which
+impel them to the separation."
+
+Upon this paragraph Mr. Parton eloquently observes: "The noblest utterance
+of the whole composition is the reason given for making the
+Declaration,--'_A decent __respect for the opinions of mankind_.' This
+touches the heart. Among the best emotions that human nature knows is the
+veneration of man for man. This recognition of the public opinion of the
+world--the sum of human sense--as the final arbiter in all such
+controversies is the single phrase of the document which Jefferson alone,
+perhaps, of all the Congress, could have originated; and in point of merit
+it was worth all the rest."
+
+Franklin and John Adams, who were on the committee with Jefferson, made a
+few verbal changes in his draught of the Declaration, and it was then
+discussed and reviewed by Congress for three days. Congress made eighteen
+suppressions, six additions, and ten alterations; and it must be admitted
+that most of these were improvements. For example, Jefferson had framed a
+paragraph in which the king was severely censured for opposing certain
+measures looking to the suppression of the slave trade. This would have
+come with an ill grace from the Americans, since for a century New England
+had been enriching herself by that trade, and the southern colonies had
+subsisted upon the labor which it brought them. Congress wisely struck out
+the paragraph.
+
+The Declaration of Independence was received with rapture throughout the
+country. Everywhere it was read aloud to the people who gathered to hear
+it, amid the booming of guns, the ringing of bells, and the display of
+fireworks. In Philadelphia, after the reading, the late king's coat of
+arms was burned in Independence Square; in New York the leaden statue, in
+Bowling Green, of George III. was "laid prostrate in the dust," and
+ordered to be run into bullets. Virginia had already stricken the king's
+name from her prayer-book; and Rhode Island now forbade her people to pray
+for the king, as king, under a penalty of one hundred thousand pounds! The
+Declaration of Independence, both as a political and literary document,
+has stood the test of time. It has all the classic qualities of an oration
+by Demosthenes; and even that passage in it which has been
+criticised--that, namely, which pronounces all men to be created equal--is
+true in a sense, the truth of which it will take a century or two yet to
+develop.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                    V
+
+
+                         REFORM WORK IN VIRGINIA
+
+
+In September, 1776, Jefferson, having resigned his seat in Congress to
+engage in duties nearer home, returned to Monticello. A few weeks later, a
+messenger from Congress arrived to inform him that he had been elected a
+joint commissioner with Dr. Franklin and Silas Deane to represent at Paris
+the newly formed nation. His heart had long been set upon foreign travel;
+but he felt obliged to decline this appointment, first on account of the
+ill health of his wife, and secondly, because he was needed in Virginia as
+a legislator. Not since Lycurgus gave laws to the Spartans had there been
+such an opportunity as then existed in the United States. John Adams
+declared: "The best lawgivers of antiquity would rejoice to live at a
+period like this when, for the first time in the history of the world,
+three millions of people are deliberately _choosing_ their government and
+institutions."
+
+Of all the colonies, Virginia offered the best field for reform, because,
+as we have already seen, she had by far the most aristocratic political
+and social system; and it is extraordinary how quickly the reform was
+effected by Jefferson and his friends. In ordinary times of peace the task
+would have been impossible; but in throwing off the English yoke, the
+colonists had opened their minds to new ideas; change had become familiar
+to them, and in the general upheaval the rights of the people were
+recognized. A year later, Jefferson wrote to Franklin: "With respect to
+the State of Virginia, in particular, the people seem to have laid aside
+the monarchical and taken up the republican government with as much ease
+as would have attended their throwing off an old and putting on a new set
+of clothes."
+
+Jefferson's greatness lay in this, that he was the first statesman who
+trusted the mass of the people. He alone had divined the fact that they
+were competent, morally and mentally, for self-government. It is almost
+impossible for us to appreciate Jefferson's originality in this respect,
+because the bold and untried theories for which he contended are now
+regarded as commonplace maxims. He may have derived his political ideas in
+part from the French philosophical writers of the eighteenth century,
+although there is no evidence to that effect; but he was certainly the
+first statesman to grasp the idea of democracy as a form of government,
+just as, at a later day, Walt Whitman was the first poet to grasp the idea
+of equality as a social system. Hamilton, John Adams, Pinckney, Gouverneur
+Morris, even Washington himself, all believed that popular government
+would be unsafe and revolutionary unless held in check by a strong
+executive and by an aristocratic senate.
+
+Jefferson in his lifetime was often charged with gross inconsistency in
+his political views and conduct; but the inconsistency was more apparent
+than real. At times he strictly construed, and at times he almost set
+aside the Constitution; but the clue to his conduct can usually be found
+in the fundamental principle that the only proper function of government
+or constitutions is to express the will of the people, and that the people
+are morally and mentally competent to govern. "I am sure," he wrote in
+1796, "that the mass of citizens in these United States mean well, and I
+firmly believe that they will always act well, whenever they can obtain a
+right understanding of matters." And Jefferson's lifelong endeavor was to
+enable the people to form this "right understanding" by educating them.
+His ideas of the scope of public education went far beyond those which
+prevailed in his time, and considerably beyond those which prevail even
+now. For example, a free university course for the most apt pupils
+graduated at the grammar schools made part of his scheme,--an idea most
+nearly realized in the Western States; and those States received their
+impetus in educational matters from the Ordinance of 1787, which was
+largely the product of Jefferson's foresight.
+
+Happily for Virginia, she did not become a scene of war until the year
+1779, and, meanwhile, Jefferson and his friends lost no time in remodeling
+her constitution. There were no common schools, and the mass of the people
+were more ignorant and rough than their contemporaries in any other
+colony. Elections were scenes of bribery, intimidation, and riot,
+surpassing even those which Hogarth depicted in England. Elkanah Watson,
+of Massachusetts, describes what he saw at Hanover Court House, Patrick
+Henry's county, in 1778: "The whole county was assembled. The moment I
+alighted, a wretched, pug-nosed fellow assailed me to swap watches. I had
+hardly shaken him off, when I was attacked by a wild Irishman who insisted
+on my swapping horses with him.... With him I came near being involved in
+a boxing-match, the Irishman swearing, I 'did not trate him like a
+jintleman.' I had hardly escaped this dilemma when my attention was
+attracted by a fight between two very unwieldy fat men, foaming and
+puffing like two furies, until one succeeded in twisting a forefinger in a
+sidelock of the other's hair, and in the act of thrusting by this purchase
+his thumb into the latter's eye, he bawled out, 'King's Cruise,'
+equivalent in technical language to 'Enough.'"
+
+Quakers were put in the pillory, scolding women were ducked, and it is
+said that a woman was burned to death in Princess Anne County for
+witchcraft. The English church, as we have seen, was an established
+church; and all taxpayers, dissenters as well as churchmen, were compelled
+to contribute to its support. Baptist preachers were arrested, and fined
+as disturbers of the peace. The law of entail, both as respects land and
+slaves, was so strict that their descent to the eldest son could not be
+prevented even by agreement between the owner and his heir.
+
+In his reformation of the laws, Jefferson was supported by Patrick Henry,
+now governor, and inhabiting what was still called the palace; by George
+Mason, a patriotic lawyer who drew the famous Virginia Bill of Rights; by
+George Wythe, his old preceptor, and by James Madison, Jefferson's friend,
+pupil, and successor, who in this year began his political career as a
+member of the House of Burgesses.
+
+Opposed to them were the conservative party led by R. C. Nicholas, head of
+the Virginia bar, a stanch churchman and gentleman of the old school, and
+Edward Pendleton, whom Jefferson described as "full of resource, never
+vanquished; for if he lost the main battle he returned upon you, and
+regained so much of it as to make it a drawn one, by dexterous manoeuvres,
+skirmishes in detail, and the recovery of small advantages, which, little
+singly, were important all together. You never knew when you were clear of
+him."
+
+Intense as the controversy was, fundamental as were the points at issue,
+the speakers never lost that courtesy for which the Virginians were
+remarkable; John Randolph being perhaps the only exception. Even Patrick
+Henry--though from his humble origin and impetuous oratory one might have
+expected otherwise--was never guilty of any rudeness to his opponents. What
+Jefferson said of Madison was true of the Virginia orators in
+general,--"soothing always the feelings of his adversaries by civilities
+and softnesses of expression."
+
+Jefferson struck first at the system of entail. After a three weeks'
+struggle, land and slaves were put upon the same footing as all other
+property,--they might be sold or bequeathed according to the will of the
+possessor. Then came a longer and more bitter contest. Jefferson was for
+abolishing all connection between church and state, and for establishing
+complete freedom of religion. Nine years elapsed before Virginia could be
+brought to that point; but at this session he procured a repeal of the law
+which imposed penalties for attendance at a dissenting meeting-house, and
+also of the law compelling dissenters to pay tithes. The fight was,
+therefore, substantially won; and in 1786, Jefferson's "Act for
+establishing religion" became the law of Virginia.(1)
+
+Another far-reaching law introduced by Jefferson at this memorable session
+of 1776 provided for the naturalization of foreigners in Virginia, after a
+two years' residence in the State, and upon a declaration of their
+intention to become American citizens. The bill provided also that the
+minor children of naturalized parents should be citizens of the United
+States when they came of age. The principles of this measure were
+afterward embodied in the statutes of the United States, and they are in
+force to-day.
+
+At this session Jefferson also drew an act for establishing courts of law
+in Virginia, the royal courts having necessarily passed out of existence
+when the Declaration of Independence was adopted. Moreover, he set on foot
+a revision of all the statutes of Virginia, a committee with him at the
+head being appointed for this purpose; and finally he procured the removal
+of the capital from Williamsburg to Richmond.
+
+All this was accomplished, mainly by Jefferson's efforts; and yet the two
+bills upon which he set most store failed entirely. These were, first, a
+comprehensive measure of state education, running up through primary
+schools and grammar schools to a state university, and, secondly, a bill
+providing that all who were born in slavery after the passage of the bill
+should be free.
+
+This was Jefferson's second ineffectual attempt to promote the abolition
+of slavery. During the year 1768, when he first became a member of the
+House of Burgesses, he had endeavored to procure the passage of a law
+enabling slave-owners to free their slaves, He induced Colonel Bland, one
+of the ablest, oldest, and most respected members to propose the law, and
+he seconded the proposal; but it was overwhelmingly rejected. "I, as a
+younger member," related Jefferson afterward, "was more spared in the
+debate; but he was denounced as an enemy to his country, and was treated
+with the greatest indecorum."
+
+In 1778 Jefferson made another attempt:--he brought in a bill forbidding
+the further importation of slaves in Virginia, and this was passed without
+opposition. Again, in 1784, when Virginia ceded to the United States her
+immense northwestern territory, Jefferson drew up a scheme of government
+for the States to be carved out of it which included a provision "that
+after the year 1800 of the Christian Era, there shall be neither slavery
+nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States, otherwise than in
+punishment of crimes." The provision was rejected by Congress.
+
+In his "Notes on Virginia," written in the year 1781, but published in
+1787, he said: "The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual
+exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism,
+on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see
+this, and learn to imitate it.... With the morals of the people their
+industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate no one will labor for
+himself who can make another labor for him.... Indeed, I tremble for my
+country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep
+forever.... The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in
+such a contest."
+
+When the Missouri Compromise question came up, in 1820, Jefferson rightly
+predicted that a controversy had begun which would end in disruption; but
+he made the mistake of supposing that the Northern party were actuated in
+that matter solely by political motives. April 22, 1820, he wrote: "This
+momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me
+with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.... A
+geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and
+political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will
+never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and
+deeper.... The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is
+a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought if, in that way, a
+general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually and
+with due sacrifices I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by
+the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in
+one scale, and self-preservation in the other."
+
+And later, he wrote of the Missouri Compromise, as a "question having just
+enough of the semblance of morality to throw dust into the eyes of the
+people.... The Federalists, unable to rise again under the old division of
+Whig and Tory, have invented a geographical division which gives them
+fourteen States against ten, and seduces their old opponents into a
+coalition with them. Real morality is on the other side. For while the
+removal of the slaves from one State to another adds no more to their
+numbers than their removal from one country to another, the spreading them
+over a larger surface adds to their happiness, and renders their future
+emancipation more practicable."
+
+These misconceptions as to Northern motives might be ascribed to
+Jefferson's advanced age, for, as he himself graphically expressed it, he
+then had "one foot in the grave, and the other lifted to follow it;" but
+it would probably be more just to say that they were due, in part, to his
+prejudice against the New England people and especially the New England
+clergy, and in part to the fact that his long retirement in Virginia had
+somewhat contracted his views and sympathies. Jefferson was a man of
+intense local attachments, and he took color from his surroundings. He
+never ceased, however, to regard slavery as morally wrong and socially
+ruinous; and in the brief autobiography which he left behind him he made
+these predictions: "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate
+than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two
+races, equally free, cannot live in the same government."
+
+History has justified the second as well as the first of these
+declarations, for, excepting that brief period of anarchy known as "the
+carpet-bag era," it cannot be maintained that the colored race in the
+Southern States have been at any time, even since their emancipation,
+"equally free," in the sense of politically free, with their white fellow
+citizens.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                    VI
+
+
+                           GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA
+
+
+For three years Jefferson was occupied with the legislative duties already
+described, and especially with a revision of the Virginia statutes, and
+then, in June, 1779, he succeeded Patrick Henry as governor of the State.
+It has often been remarked that he was, all through life, a lucky man, but
+in this case fortune did not favor him, for the ensuing two years proved
+to be, so far as Virginia was concerned, by much the worst period of the
+war.
+
+The French alliance, though no doubt an ultimate benefit to the colonies,
+had at first two bad effects: it relaxed the energy of the Americans, who
+trusted that France would fight their battles for them; and it stimulated
+the British to increased exertions. The British commissioners announced
+that henceforth England would employ, in the prosecution of the war, all
+those agencies which "God and nature had placed in her hands." This meant
+that the ferocity of the Indians would be invoked, a matter of special
+moment to Virginia, since her western frontier swarmed with Indians, the
+bravest of their race.
+
+The colony, it must be remembered, was then of immense extent; for beside
+the present Virginia and West Virginia, Kentucky and the greater part of
+Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were embraced in it. It stretched, in short,
+from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. Upon the seaboard
+Virginia was especially vulnerable, the tide-water region being penetrated
+by numerous bays and rivers, which the enemy's ships could easily ascend,
+for they were undefended by forts or men. The total navy of the colony was
+four vessels, mounting sixty-two guns, and a few armed boats. The flower
+of the Virginia soldiery, to the number of ten thousand, were in
+Washington's army, and supplies of men, of arms, of ammunition and food
+were urgently called for by General Gates, who was battling against
+Cornwallis in North Carolina. The militia were supposed to number fifty
+thousand, which included every man between sixteen and fifty years of age;
+but this was only one man for every square mile of territory in the
+present State of Virginia, and of these militiamen it was estimated that,
+east of the Blue Ridge, only about one in five was armed with a gun. The
+treasury was practically bankrupt, and there was a dearth of every kind of
+warlike material.
+
+Such was the situation which confronted, as Mr. Parton puts it, "a lawyer
+of thirty-six, with a talent for music, a taste for art, a love of
+science, literature, and gardening." The task was one calling rather for a
+soldier than a statesman; but Mr. Jefferson faced it with courage, and on
+the whole with success. In retaliating the cruel measures of the British,
+he showed a firmness which must have been especially difficult for a man
+of his temperament. He put in irons and confined in a dungeon Colonel
+Henry Hamilton and two subordinate officers who had committed atrocities
+upon American prisoners. He caused a prison-ship, like the ships of
+infamous memory which were employed as prisons by the British at New York,
+to be prepared; and the exchange of captives between Virginia and the
+British was stopped. "Humane conduct on our part," wrote Jefferson, "was
+found to produce no effect. The contrary, therefore, is to be tried. Iron
+will be retaliated by iron, prison-ships for prison-ships, and like for
+like in general." But in November, 1779, notice was received that the
+English, under their new leader, Sir Henry Clinton, had adopted a less
+barbarous system of warfare; and fortunately Jefferson's measures of
+reprisal became unnecessary.
+
+Hampered as he was by want of men and money, Jefferson did all that he
+could to supply the needs of the Virginia soldiers with Washington, of the
+army in North Carolina, led by Gates, and of George Rogers Clarke, the
+heroic commander who put down the Indian uprising on the western frontier,
+and captured the English officer who instigated it,--that same Colonel
+Hamilton of whom mention has already been made. The story of Clarke's
+adventures in the wilderness,--he was a neighbor of Jefferson, only
+twenty-six years old,--of his forced marches, of his masterful dealing with
+the Indians, and finally of his capture of the British force, forms a
+thrilling chapter in the history of the American Revolution.
+
+Many indeed of Jefferson's constituents censured him as being over-zealous
+in his support of the army of Gates. He stripped Virginia, they said, of
+troops and resources which, as it proved afterward, were needed at home.
+But if Cornwallis were not defeated in North Carolina, it was certain that
+he would overrun the much more exposed Virginia. If he could be defeated
+anywhere, it would be in the Carolinas. Jefferson's course, it is
+sufficient to say, was that recommended by Washington; and his exertions
+in behalf of the Continental armies were commended in the highest terms
+not only by Washington, but also by Generals Gates, Greene, Steuben, and
+Lafayette. The militia were called out, leaving behind only so many men as
+were required to cultivate the land, wagons were impressed, including two
+belonging to the governor, and attempts were even made--extraordinary for
+Virginia--to manufacture certain much-needed articles. "Our smiths," wrote
+Jefferson, "are making five hundred axes and some tomahawks for General
+Gates."
+
+Thus fared the year 1779, and in 1780 things went from bad to worse. In
+April came a letter from Madison, saying that Washington's army was on the
+verge of dissolution, being only half-clothed, and in a way to be starved.
+The public treasury was empty and the public credit gone. In August
+occurred the disastrous defeat of General Gates at Camden, which left
+Virginia at the mercy of Cornwallis. In October a British fleet under
+Leslie ravaged the country about Portsmouth, but failing to effect a
+juncture with Cornwallis, who was detained in North Carolina by illness
+among his troops, did no further harm. Two months later, however, Benedict
+Arnold sailed up the James River with another fleet, and, after committing
+some depredations at Richmond, sailed down again, escaping by the aid of a
+favorable wind, which hauled from east to west just in the nick of time
+for him.
+
+In June, 1781, Cornwallis invaded Virginia, and no one suffered more than
+Jefferson from his depredations. Tarleton was dispatched to seize the
+governor at Monticello; but the latter was forewarned by a citizen of
+Charlottesville, who, being in a tavern at Louisa when Tarleton and his
+troop swept by on the main road, immediately guessed their destination,
+and mounting his horse, a fleet Virginia thoroughbred, rode by a short cut
+through the woods straight to Monticello, arriving there about three hours
+ahead of Tarleton.
+
+Jefferson took the matter coolly. He first dispatched his family to a
+place of safety, sent his best horse to be shod at a neighboring smithy,
+and then proceeded to sort and separate his papers. He left the house only
+about five minutes before the soldiers entered it.
+
+Two slaves, Martin, Mr. Jefferson's body servant, and Caesar, were engaged
+in hiding plate and other articles under the floor of the portico, a
+single plank having been raised for that purpose. As Martin, above, handed
+the last article to Caesar under the floor, the tramp of the approaching
+cavalry was heard. Down went the plank, shutting in Caesar, and there he
+remained, without making any outcry, for eighteen hours, in darkness, and
+of course without food or water. One of the soldiers, to try Martin's
+nerve, clapped a pistol to his breast, and threatened to fire unless he
+would tell which way his master had fled. "Fire away, then," retorted the
+black, fiercely answering glance for glance, and not receding a hair's
+breath.
+
+Tarleton and his men scrupulously refrained from injuring Jefferson's
+property. Cornwallis, on the other hand, who encamped on Jefferson's
+estate of Elk Hill, lying opposite Elk Island in the James River,
+destroyed the growing crops, burned all the barns and fences, carried
+off--"as was to be expected," said Mr. Jefferson--the cattle and horses, and
+committed the barbarity of killing the colts that were too young to be of
+service. He carried off, also, about thirty slaves. "Had this been to give
+them freedom," wrote Jefferson, "he would have done right; but it was to
+consign them to inevitable death from the smallpox and putrid fever, then
+raging in his camp."
+
+"Some of the miserable wretches crawled home to die," Mr. Randall relates,
+"and giving information where others lay perishing in hovels or in the
+open air, by the wayside, these were sent for by their generous master;
+and the last moments of all of them were made as comfortable as could be
+done by proper nursing and medical attendance."
+
+These dreadful scenes, added to the agitation of having twice been
+obliged, at a moment's notice, to flee from the enemy, to say nothing of
+the anxieties which she must have endured on her husband's account, were
+too much for Mrs. Jefferson's already enfeebled constitution. She died on
+September 6, 1782.
+
+Six slave women who were household servants enjoyed for thirty years a
+kind of humble distinction at Monticello as "the servants who were in the
+room when Mrs. Jefferson died;" and the fact that they were there attests
+the affectionate relations which must have existed between them and their
+master and mistress. "They have often told my wife," relates Mr. Bacon,
+"that when Mrs. Jefferson died they stood around the bed. Mr. Jefferson
+sat by her, and she gave him directions about a good many things that she
+wanted done. When she came to the children, she wept, and could not speak
+for some time. Finally she held up her hand, and, spreading out her four
+fingers, she told him she could not die happy if she thought her four
+children were ever to have a stepmother brought in over them. Holding her
+other hand in his, Mr. Jefferson promised her solemnly that he would never
+marry again;" and the promise was kept.
+
+After his wife's death Jefferson sank into what he afterward described as
+"a stupor of mind;" and even before that he had been, for the first and
+last time in his life, in a somewhat morbid mental condition. He was an
+excessively sensitive man, and reflections upon his conduct as governor,
+during the raids into Virginia by Arnold and Cornwallis, coming at a time
+when he was overwrought, rankled in his mind. He refused to serve again as
+governor, and desiring to defend his course when in that office, became a
+member of the House of Burgesses in 1781, in order that he might answer
+his critics there; but not a voice was raised against him. In 1782, he was
+again elected to the House, but he did not attend; and both Madison and
+Monroe endeavored in vain to draw him from his seclusion. To Monroe he
+replied: "Before I ventured to declare to my countrymen my determination
+to retire from public employment, I examined well my heart to know whether
+it were thoroughly cured of every principle of political ambition, whether
+no lurking particle remained which might leave me uneasy, when reduced
+within the limits of mere private life. I became satisfied that every
+fibre of that passion was thoroughly eradicated."
+
+Jefferson was an impulsive man,--in some respects a creature of the moment;
+certainly often, in his own case, mistaking, as a permanent feeling, what
+was really a transitory impression. His language to Monroe must,
+therefore, be taken as the sincere deliverance of a man who, at that time,
+had not the remotest expectation of receiving, or the least ambition to
+attain, the highest offices in the gift of the American people.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                   VII
+
+
+                              ENVOY AT PARIS
+
+
+Two years after his wife's death, namely, in 1784, Jefferson was chosen by
+Congress to serve as envoy at Paris, with John Adams and Benjamin
+Franklin. The appointment came at an opportune moment, when his mind was
+beginning to recover its tone, and he gladly accepted it. It was deemed
+necessary that the new Confederacy should make treaties with the various
+governments of Europe, and as soon as the envoys reached Paris, they drew
+up a treaty such as they hoped might be negotiated. It has been described
+as "the first serious attempt ever made to conduct the intercourse of
+nations on Christian principles;" and, on that account, it failed. To this
+failure there was, however, one exception. "Old Frederick of Prussia," as
+Jefferson styled him, "met us cordially;" and with him a treaty was soon
+concluded.
+
+In May, 1785, Franklin returned to the United States, and Jefferson was
+appointed minister. "You replace Dr. Franklin," said the Count of
+Vergennes when Jefferson announced his appointment. "I succeed,--no one can
+replace him," was the reply.
+
+Jefferson's residence in Paris at this critical period was a fortunate
+occurrence. It would be a mistake to suppose that he derived his political
+principles from France:--he carried them there; but he was confirmed in
+them by witnessing the injustice and misery which resulted to the common
+people from the monarchical governments of Europe. To James Monroe he
+wrote in June, 1785: "The pleasure of the trip [to Europe] will be less
+than you expect, but the utility greater. It will make you adore your own
+country,--its soil, its climate, its equality, laws, people, and manners.
+My God! how little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are
+in possession of and which no other people on earth enjoy! I confess I had
+no idea of it myself."
+
+To George Wythe he wrote in August, 1786: "Preach, my dear sir, a crusade
+against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common
+people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us
+against these evils; and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose
+is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings,
+priests, and nobles, who will rise up among us if we leave the people in
+ignorance." To Madison, he wrote in January, 1787: "This is a government
+of wolves over sheep." Jefferson took the greatest pains to ascertain the
+condition of the laboring classes. In the course of a journey in the south
+of France, he wrote to Lafayette, begging him to survey the condition of
+the people for himself. "To do it most effectually," he said, "you must be
+absolutely incognito; you must ferret the people out of their hovels, as I
+have done; look into their kettles; eat their bread; loll on their beds on
+pretense of resting yourself, but in fact to find if they are soft. You
+will feel a sublime pleasure in the course of the investigation, and a
+sublimer one hereafter, when you shall be able to apply your knowledge to
+the softening of their beds, or the throwing a morsel of meat into their
+kettle of vegetables."
+
+These excursions among the French peasantry, who, as Jefferson well knew,
+were ruinously taxed in order to support an extravagant court and an idle
+and insolent nobility, made him a fierce Republican. "There is not a
+crowned head in Europe," he wrote to General Washington, in 1788, "whose
+talents or merits would entitle him to be elected a vestryman by the
+people of America."
+
+But for the French race Jefferson had an affinity. He was glad to live
+with people among whom, as he said, "a man might pass a life without
+encountering a single rudeness." He liked their polished manners and gay
+disposition, their aptitude for science, for philosophy, and for art; even
+their wines and cookery suited his taste, and his preference in this
+respect was so well known that Patrick Henry once humorously stigmatized
+him as "a man who had abjured his native victuals."
+
+Jefferson's stay in Paris corresponded exactly with the "glorious" period
+of the French Revolution. He was present at the Assembly of the Notables
+in 1787, and he witnessed the destruction of the Bastille in 1789.
+
+"The change in this country," he wrote in March, 1789, "is such as you can
+form no idea of. The frivolities of conversation have given way entirely
+to politics. Men, women, and children talk nothing else ... and mode has
+acted a wonderful part in the present instance. All the handsome young
+women, for example, are for the _tiers etat_, and this is an army more
+powerful in France than the 200,000 men of the king."
+
+The truth is that an intellectual and moral revolution preceded in France
+the outbreak of the populace. There was an interior conviction that the
+government of the country was excessively unjust and oppressive. A love of
+liberty, a feeling of fraternity, a passion for equality moved the
+intellect and even the aristocracy of France. In this crisis the reformers
+looked toward America, for the United States had just trodden the path
+upon which France was entering. "Our proceedings," wrote Jefferson to
+Madison in 1789, "have been viewed as a model for them on every
+occasion.... Our [authority] has been treated like that of the Bible, open
+to explanation, but not to question."
+
+Jefferson's advice was continually sought by Lafayette and others; and his
+house, maintained in the easy, liberal style of Virginia, was a meeting
+place for the Revolutionary statesmen. Jefferson dined at three or four
+o'clock; and after the cloth had been removed he and his guests sat over
+their wine till nine or ten in the evening.
+
+In July, 1789, the National Assembly appointed a committee to draught a
+constitution, and the committee formally invited the American minister to
+assist at their sessions and favor them with his advice. This function he
+felt obliged to decline, as being inconsistent with his post of minister
+to the king. No man had a nicer sense of propriety than Jefferson; and he
+punctiliously observed the requirements of his somewhat difficult
+situation in Paris.
+
+What gave Mr. Jefferson the greatest anxiety and trouble, was our
+relations with the piratical Barbary powers who held the keys of the
+Mediterranean and sometimes extended their depredations even into the
+Atlantic. It was a question of paying tribute or going to war; and most of
+the European powers paid tribute. In 1784, for example, the Dutch
+contributed to "the high, glorious, mighty, and most noble, King, Prince,
+and Emperor of Morocco," a mass of material which included thirty cables,
+seventy cannon, sixty-nine masts, twenty-one anchors, fifty dozen
+sail-needles, twenty-four tons of pitch, two hundred and eighty loaves of
+sugar, twenty-four China punch-bowls, three clocks, and one "very large
+watch."
+
+Jefferson ascertained that the pirates would require of the United States,
+as the price of immunity for its commerce, a tribute of about three
+hundred thousand dollars per annum. "Surely," he wrote home, "our people
+will not give this. Would it not be better to offer them an equal treaty?
+If they refuse, why not go to war with them?" And he pressed upon Mr. Jay,
+who held the secretaryship of foreign affairs, as the office was then
+called, the immediate establishment of a navy. But Congress would do
+nothing; and it was not till Jefferson himself became President that the
+Barbary pirates were dealt with in a wholesome and stringent manner.
+During the whole term of his residence at Paris he was negotiating with
+the Mediterranean powers for the release of unfortunate Americans, many of
+whom spent the best part of their lives in horrible captivity.
+
+Mr. Jefferson's self-imposed duties were no less arduous. He kept four
+colleges informed of the most valuable new inventions, discoveries, and
+books. He had a Yankee talent for mechanical improvements, and he was
+always on the alert to obtain anything of this nature which he thought
+might be useful at home. Jefferson himself, by the way, invented the
+revolving armchair, the buggy-top, and a mould board for a plough. He
+bought books for Franklin, Madison, Monroe, Wythe, and himself. He
+informed one correspondent about Watt's engine, another about the new
+system of canals. He smuggled rice from Turin in his coat pockets; and he
+was continually dispatching to agricultural societies in America seeds,
+roots, nuts, and plants. Houdin was sent over by him to make the statue of
+Washington; and he forwarded designs for the new capitol at Richmond. For
+Buffon he procured the skin of an American panther, and also the bones and
+hide of a New Hampshire moose, to obtain which Governor Sullivan of that
+State organized a hunting-party in the depth of winter and cut a road
+through the forest for twenty miles in order to bring out his quarry.
+
+Jefferson was the most indefatigable of men, and he did not relax in
+Paris. He had rooms at a Carthusian monastery to which he repaired when he
+had some special work on hand. He kept a carriage and horses, but could
+not afford a saddle horse. Instead of riding, he took a walk every
+afternoon, usually of six or seven miles, occasionally twice as long. It
+was while returning with a friend from one of these excursions that he
+fell and fractured his right wrist; and the fracture was set so
+imperfectly that it troubled him ever afterward. It was characteristic of
+Jefferson that he said nothing to his friend as to the injury until they
+reached home, though his suffering from it was great; and, also, that he
+at once began to write with the other hand, making numerous entries, on
+the very night of the accident, in a writing which, though stiff, was, and
+remains, perfectly clear.
+
+Mr. Jefferson's two daughters had been placed at a convent school near
+Paris, and he was surprised one day to receive a note from Martha, the
+elder, asking his permission to remain in the convent for the rest of her
+life as a nun. For a day or two she received no answer. Then her father
+called in his carriage, and after a short interview with the abbess took
+his daughters away; and thenceforth Martha presided, so far as her age
+permitted, over her father's household. Not a word upon the subject of her
+request ever passed between them; and long afterward, in telling the story
+to her own children, she praised Mr. Jefferson's tact in dealing with what
+she described as a transient impulse.
+
+After this incident, Jefferson, thinking that it was time to take his
+daughters home, obtained leave of absence for six months; and the little
+family landed at Norfolk, November 18, 1789. They journeyed slowly
+homeward, stopping at one friend's house after another, and, two days
+before Christmas, arrived at Monticello, where they were rapturously
+greeted by the slaves, who took the four horses from the carriage and drew
+it up the steep incline themselves; and when he alighted, Mr. Jefferson,
+in spite of himself, was carried into the house on the arms of his black
+servants and friends.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                   VIII
+
+
+                            SECRETARY OF STATE
+
+
+Mr. Jefferson had a strong desire to resume his post as minister to
+France, but he yielded to Washington's earnest request that he should
+become Secretary of State in the new government. He lingered long enough
+at Monticello to witness the marriage of his daughter Martha to Thomas
+Mann Randolph, and then set out upon a cold, wet journey of twenty-one
+days, reaching New York, which was then the seat of government, late in
+March, 1790. He hired a small house at No. 57 Maiden Lane, and immediately
+attacked the arrears of work which had been accumulating for six months.
+The unusual confinement, aggravated, perhaps, by a homesickness, clearly
+revealed in his letters, for his daughters and for Monticello, brought on
+what seems to have been a neuralgic headache which lasted for three weeks.
+It may have been caused in part by the climate of New York, as to which
+Mr. Jefferson observed: "Spring and fall they never have, so far as I can
+learn. They have ten months of winter, two of summer, with some winter
+days interspersed." But there were other causes beside homesickness and
+headache which made Jefferson unhappy in his new position. Long afterward
+he described them as follows:--
+
+"I had left France in the first year of her Revolution, in the fervor of
+natural rights and zeal for reformation. My conscientious devotion to
+those rights could not be heightened, but it had been aroused and excited
+by daily exercise. The President received me cordially, and my colleagues
+and the circle of principal citizens apparently with welcome. The
+courtesies of dinners given to me, as a stranger newly arrived among them,
+placed me at once in their familiar society. But I cannot describe the
+wonder and mortification with which the table conversations filled me.
+Politics were the chief topic, and a preference of kingly over republican
+government was evidently the favorite sentiment. An apostate I could not
+be, nor yet a hypocrite; and I found myself for the most part the only
+advocate on the republican side of the question, unless among the guests
+there chanced to be some member of that party from the legislative
+houses."
+
+It must be remembered that Jefferson's absence in France had been the
+period of the Confederacy, when the inability of Congress to enforce its
+laws and to control the States was so evident and so disastrous that the
+need of a stronger central government had been impressed on men's minds.
+The new Constitution had been devised to supply that need, but it was
+elastic in its terms, and it avoided all details. Should it be construed
+in an aristocratic or in a democratic spirit, and should the new nation be
+given an aristocratic or a democratic twist? This was a burning question,
+and it gave rise to that long struggle led by Hamilton on one side and by
+Jefferson on the other, which ended with the election of Jefferson as
+President in the year 1800.
+
+Hamilton and his party utterly disbelieved in government by the people.(2)
+John Adams declared that the English Constitution, barring its element of
+corruption, was an ideal constitution. Hamilton went farther and asserted
+that the English form of government, corruption and all, was the best
+practicable form. An aristocratic senate, chosen for a long term, if not
+for life, was thought to be essential even by Mr. Adams. Hamilton's notion
+was that mankind were incapable of self-government, and must be governed
+in one or two ways,--by force or by fraud. Property was, in his view, the
+ideal basis of government; and he was inclined to fix the possession of "a
+thousand Spanish dollars" as the proper qualification for a voter.
+
+The difference between the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian view arises
+chiefly from a different belief as to the connection between education and
+morality. All aristocratic systems must, in the last analysis, be founded
+either upon brute force or else upon the assumption that education and
+morality go hand-in-hand, and that the well-to-do and best educated class
+is morally superior to the less educated. Jefferson rejected this
+assumption, and all real believers in democracy must take their stand with
+him. He once stated his creed upon this point in a letter as follows:--
+
+"The moral sense or conscience is as much a part of man as his leg or
+arm.... It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of
+the body. This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree to the guidance
+of reason, but it is a small stock which is required for this, even a less
+one than what we call common sense. State a moral case to a ploughman and
+a professor. The former will decide it as well and often better than the
+latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules."
+
+This is sound philosophy. The great problems in government, whether they
+relate to matters external or internal, are moral, not intellectual. There
+are, indeed, purely intellectual problems, such as the question between
+free silver and a gold standard; and as to these problems, the people may
+go wrong. But they are not vital. No nation ever yet achieved glory or
+incurred destruction by taking one course rather than another in a matter
+of trade or finance. The crucial questions are moral questions, and
+experience has shown that as to such matters the people can be trusted. As
+Jefferson himself said, "The will of the majority, the natural law of
+every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man. Perhaps
+even this may sometimes err; but its errors are honest, solitary, and
+short-lived."
+
+Washington's cabinet was made up on the theory that it should represent
+not the party in power, but both parties,--for two parties already existed,
+the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, who, under Jefferson's
+influence, soon became known by the better name of Republicans. The
+cabinet consisted of four members, Jefferson, Secretary of State,
+Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Knox, Secretary of War, and
+Edmund Randolph, Attorney-General.
+
+Knox sided almost always with Hamilton, and Randolph was an inconstant
+supporter of Jefferson. Though an able and learned man, he was given to
+hair-splitting and hesitation, and, in allusion to his habit of arguing on
+one side, but finally voting upon the other, Jefferson once remarked that
+he usually gave the shell to his friends, and reserved the oyster for his
+opponents.
+
+The political opinions of Jefferson and Hamilton were so diametrically
+opposed that the cabinet was soon torn by dissension. Hamilton was for a
+strong government, for surrounding the President with pomp and etiquette,
+for a central authority as against the authority of the States. In
+pursuance of these ideas, he brought forward his famous measures for
+assumption of the state debts by the national government, for the funding
+of the national debt, and finally for the creation of a national bank.
+Jefferson opposed these measures, and, although the assumption and the
+funding laws had grave faults, and led to speculation, and in the case of
+many persons to financial ruin, yet it must be admitted that Jefferson
+never appreciated their merits.
+
+The truth is that both Hamilton and Jefferson were essential to the
+development of this country; and the principles of each have been adopted
+in part, and rejected in part. Hamilton's conception of a central
+government predominating over the state governments has been realized,
+though not nearly to the extent to which he would have carried it. On the
+other hand, his various schemes for making the government into an
+aristocracy instead of a democracy have all been abandoned, or, like the
+Electoral College, turned to a use the opposite of what he intended. So,
+Jefferson's view of state rights has not strictly been maintained; but his
+fundamental principles of popular government and popular education have
+made the United States what it is, and are destined, we hope, when fully
+developed, to make it something better yet.
+
+No less an authority than that of Washington, who appreciated the merits
+of both men, could have kept the peace between them. Hamilton under an
+assumed name attacked Jefferson in the public prints. Jefferson never
+published a line unsigned; but he permitted Philip Freneau, who had slight
+employment as a translator in his department, and the trifling salary of
+$250 a year, to wage war against Hamilton in the gazette which Freneau
+published; and he even stood by while Freneau attacked Washington.
+Washington indeed once gave Jefferson a hint on this subject, which the
+latter refused to take. "He was evidently sore and warm," wrote Jefferson,
+"and I took his intention to be that I should interfere in some way with
+Freneau, perhaps withdraw his appointment of translating clerk to my
+office. But I will not do it. His paper has saved our constitution, which
+was galloping fast into monarchy.... And the President has not, ... with
+his usual good sense and _sang froid_, ... seen that, though some bad
+things had passed through it to the public, yet the good have predominated
+immensely."
+
+In the spring of 1792, Jefferson, who had now been two years in office,
+was extremely anxious to retire, not only because his situation at
+Washington was unpleasant, but because his affairs at home had been so
+neglected during his long absences that he was in danger of bankruptcy.
+His estate was large, but it was incumbered by a debt to English creditors
+of $13,000. Some years before he had sold for cash a farm near Monticello
+in order to discharge this debt; but at that time the Revolutionary war
+had begun, and the Virginia legislature passed an act inviting all men
+owing money to English creditors to deposit the same in the state
+treasury, the State agreeing to pay it over to the English creditors after
+the war. Jefferson accordingly deposited the $13,000 in gold which he had
+just received. Later, however, this law was rescinded, and the money
+received under it was paid back, not in gold, but in paper money of the
+State, which was then so depreciated as to be almost worthless. In riding
+by the farm thus disposed of, Jefferson in after years would sometimes
+point to it and say: "That farm I once sold for an overcoat;"--the price of
+the overcoat having been the $13,000 in paper money. Cornwallis, as we
+have seen, destroyed Jefferson's property to an amount more than double
+this debt, which might be considered as a second payment of it; but
+Jefferson finally paid it the third time,--and this time into the hands of
+the actual creditor. Meanwhile, he wrote: "The torment of mind I endure
+till the moment shall arrive when I shall not owe a shilling on earth is
+such really as to render life of little value."
+
+Urged by all these motives, Jefferson had resolved to resign his office in
+1792, notwithstanding the remonstrances of Washington; but the attacks
+made upon him by the Federalists, especially those made in the newspapers,
+were so violent that a retirement at that time would have given the public
+cause to believe that he had been driven from office by his enemies.
+Jefferson, therefore, concluded to remain Secretary of State a few months
+longer; and those few, as it happened, were the most important of the
+whole term.
+
+On January 21, 1793, King Louis of France was executed, and within a week
+thereafter England was at war with the new rulers of the French. Difficult
+questions at once arose under our treaties with France. The French people
+thought that we were in honor bound to assist them in their struggle
+against Great Britain, as they had assisted us; and they sent over as
+minister "Citizen" Genet, in the frigate L'Embuscade. The frigate,
+carrying forty guns and three hundred men, sailed into the harbor of
+Charleston, April 8, 1793, with a liberty-cap for her figure-head, and a
+British prize in her wake. Citizen Genet, even for a Frenchman, was a most
+indiscreet and hot-headed person, and before he had been a week on shore
+he had issued commissions to privateers manned by American citizens.
+L'Embuscade then proceeded to Philadelphia, where, as in Charleston,
+Citizen Genet was welcomed with the utmost enthusiasm. His coming was
+hailed by the Republicans generally with rapture; and their cry was for
+war. "I wish," wrote Jefferson, in a confidential letter to Monroe, "that
+we may be able to repress the people within the limits of a fair
+neutrality."
+
+This was the position taken also by Washington and the whole cabinet; and
+it is a striking example of Jefferson's wisdom, justice, and firmness,
+that, although the bulk of the Republicans were carried off their feet by
+sympathy with France and with Genet, he, the very person in the United
+States who most loved the French and best understood the causes and
+motives of the French Revolution, withstood the storm, and kept his eye
+fixed upon the interests of his own country. England, contrary to the
+treaty which closed the Revolutionary War, still retained her military
+posts in the west; and she was the undisputed mistress of the sea. War
+with her would therefore have been suicidal for the United States. The
+time for that had not yet come. Moreover, if the United States had taken
+sides with France, a war with Spain also would inevitably have followed;
+and Spain then held Florida and the mouth of the Mississippi.
+
+Nevertheless, there were different ways of preserving neutrality: there
+were the offensive way and the friendly way. Hamilton, whose extreme bias
+toward England made him bitter against France, was always for the one;
+Jefferson for the other. A single example will suffice as an illustration.
+M. Genet asked as a favor that the United States should advance an
+installment of its debt to France. Hamilton advised that the request be
+refused without a word of explanation. Jefferson's opinion was that the
+request should be granted, if that were lawful, and if it were found to be
+unlawful, them that the refusal should be explained. Mr. Jefferson's
+advice was followed.
+
+Mr. Jefferson, also, though he firmly withstood the many illegal and
+unwarrantable acts attempted by Genet, did so in such a manner as not to
+lose the friendship of the minister or even a degree of control over him.
+To Madison Jefferson wrote of Genet: "He renders my position immensely
+difficult. He does me justice personally; and giving him time to vent
+himself and become more cool, I am on a footing to advise him freely, and
+he respects it; but he will break out again on the very first occasion."
+
+Finally Citizen Genet, becoming desperate, fitted out one of L'Embuscade's
+prizes as a frigate to be used against England, which amounted on the part
+of the United States to a breach of neutrality; and being hindered in
+sending her to sea, he threatened to appeal from the President to the
+people of the United States. Thereupon the question arose, what shall be
+done with Genet? and upon this question the cabinet divided with more than
+usual acrimony. Knox was for sending him out of the country without
+ceremony; Hamilton for publishing the whole correspondence between him and
+the government, with a statement of his proceedings. Jefferson was for
+sending an account of the affair to the French government, with copies of
+the correspondence, and a request for Genet's recall. Meanwhile the whole
+country was thrown into a state of tumultuous excitement. There was a riot
+in Philadelphia; and even the sacred character of Washington was assailed
+in prose and verse.
+
+The President decided to adopt the course proposed by Jefferson; France
+appointed another minister, and the Genet episode ended by his marriage to
+a daughter of George Clinton, governor of New York, in which State he
+lived thereafter as a respectable citizen and a patron of agriculture. He
+died in the year 1834.
+
+The summer of delirium at Philadelphia culminated in the panic and
+desolation of the yellow fever, and every member of the government fled
+from the city, Jefferson being the last to depart.
+
+When, in the next year, the correspondence between Genet and Jefferson,
+and between the English minister and Jefferson, was published, the
+Secretary was seen to have conducted it on his part with so much ability,
+discretion, and tact, and with so true a sense of what was due to each
+nation concerned, that he may be said to have retired to his farm in a
+blaze of glory.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                    IX
+
+
+                             THE TWO PARTIES
+
+
+When Jefferson at last found himself at Monticello, having resigned his
+office as Secretary of State, he declared and believed that he had done
+with politics forever. To various correspondents he wrote as follows: "I
+think that I shall never take another newspaper of any sort. I find my
+mind totally absorbed in my rural occupations.... No circumstances, my
+dear sir, will ever more tempt me to engage in anything public.... I would
+not give up my retirement for the empire of the universe."
+
+When Madison wrote in 1795, soliciting him to accept the Republican
+nomination for the presidency, Mr. Jefferson replied: "The little spice of
+ambition which I had in my younger days has long since evaporated, and I
+set still less store by a posthumous than present fame. The question is
+forever closed with me." Nevertheless, within a few months Mr. Jefferson
+accepted the nomination, chiefly, it is probable, because, with his usual
+sagacity, he foresaw that the Republican candidate would be defeated as
+President, but elected as Vice-President. It must be remembered that at
+that time the candidate receiving the next to the highest number of
+electoral votes was declared to be Vice-President; so that there was
+always a probability that the presidential candidate of the party defeated
+would be chosen to the second office.
+
+There were several reasons why Jefferson would have been glad to receive
+the office of Vice-President. It involved no disagreeable responsibility;
+it called for no great expenditure of money in the way of entertainments;
+it carried a good salary; it required only a few months' residence at
+Washington. "Mr. Jefferson often told me," remarks Mr. Bacon, "that the
+office of Vice-President was far preferable to that of President."
+
+Mr. Jefferson therefore became the Republican nominee for President, and,
+as he doubtless expected, was elected Vice-President, the vote standing as
+follows: Adams, 71; Jefferson, 68; Pinckney, 59; Burr, 30.
+
+It is significant of Mr. Jefferson's high standing in the country that
+many people believed that he would not deign to accept the office of
+Vice-President; and Madison wrote advising him to come to Washington on
+the 4th of March, and take the oath of office, in order that this belief
+might be dispelled. Jefferson accordingly did so, bringing with him the
+bones of a mastodon, lately discovered, and a little manuscript book
+written in his law-student days, marked "Parliamentary Pocket-Book." This
+was the basis of that careful and elaborate "Manual of Parliamentary
+Practice" which Jefferson left as his legacy to the Senate.
+
+Upon receiving news of the election Jefferson had written to Madison: "If
+Mr. Adams can be induced to administer the government on its true
+principles, and to relinquish his bias to an English Constitution, it is
+to be considered whether it would not be, on the whole, for the public
+good to come to a good understanding with him as to his future elections.
+He is perhaps the only sure barrier against Hamilton's getting in."
+
+Mr. Adams, indeed, at the outset of his administration, was inclined to be
+confidential with Mr. Jefferson; but soon, by one of those sudden turns
+not infrequent with him, he took a different course, and thenceforth
+treated the Vice-President with nothing more than bare civility.
+
+It was a time, indeed, when cordial relations between Federalist and
+Republican were almost impossible. In a letter written at this period to
+Mr. Edward Rutledge, Jefferson said: "You and I have formerly seen warm
+debates, and high political passions. But gentlemen of different politics
+would then speak to each other, and separate the business of the Senate
+from that of society. It is not so now. Men who have been intimate all
+their lives cross the street to avoid meeting, and turn their heads
+another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hats."
+
+These party feelings were intensified in the year 1798 by what is known as
+the X Y Z business. Mr. Adams had sent three commissioners to Paris to
+negotiate a treaty. Talleyrand, the French Minister for Foreign Affairs,
+held aloof from them; but they were informed by certain mysterious agents
+that a treaty could be had on three conditions, (1) that the President
+should apologize for certain expressions in his recent message to
+Congress; (2) that the United States should loan a large sum of money to
+the French government; (3) that a _douceur_ of $25,000 should be given to
+Talleyrand's agents.
+
+These insulting proposals were indignantly rejected by the commissioners,
+and being reported in this country, they aroused a storm of popular
+indignation. Preparations for war were made forthwith. General Washington,
+though in failing health, was appointed commander-in-chief,--the real
+command being expected to devolve upon Hamilton, who was named second; men
+and supplies were voted; letters of marque were issued, and war actually
+prevailed upon the high seas. The situation redounded greatly to the
+advantage of the Federalists, for they were always as eager to go to war
+with France as they were reluctant to go to war with England. The newly
+appointed officers were drawn almost, if not quite, without exception from
+the Federalist party, and Hamilton seemed to be on the verge of that
+military career which he had long hoped for. He trusted, as his most
+intimate friend, Gouverneur Morris, said after his death, "that in the
+changes and chances of time we would be involved in some war which might
+strengthen our union and nerve our executive." So late as 1802, Hamilton
+wrote to Morris, "there must be a systematic and persevering endeavor to
+establish the future of a great empire on foundations much firmer than
+have yet been devised." At this very time he was negotiating with Miranda
+and with the British government, his design being to use against Mexico
+the army raised in expectation of a war with France.
+
+Hamilton was not the man to overturn the government out of personal
+ambition, nor even in order to set up a monarchy in place of a republic.
+But he had convinced himself that the republic must some day fall of its
+own weight. He was always anticipating a "crisis," and this word is
+repeated over and over again in his correspondence. It even occurs in the
+crucial sentence of that pathetic document which he wrote on the eve of
+his fatal duel. When the "crisis" came, Hamilton meant to be on hand; and,
+if possible, at the head of an army.
+
+However, the X Y Z affair ended peacefully. The warlike spirit shown by
+the people of the United States had a wholesome effect upon the French
+government; and at their suggestion new envoys were sent over by the
+President, by whom a treaty was negotiated. This wise and patriotic act
+upon the part of Mr. Adams was a benefit to his country, but it aroused
+the bitter anger of the Federalists and ruined his position in that party.
+
+But what was Mr. Jefferson's attitude during this business? He was not for
+war, and he contended that a distinction should be made between the acts
+of Talleyrand and his agents, and the real disposition of the French
+people. He wrote as follows: "Inexperienced in such manoeuvres, the people
+did not permit themselves even to suspect that the turpitude of private
+swindlers might mingle itself unobserved, and give its own hue to the
+communications of the French government, of whose participation there was
+neither proof nor probability." And again: "But as I view a peace between
+France and England the ensuing winter to be certain, I have thought it
+would have been better for us to have contrived to bear from France
+through the present summer what we have been bearing both from her and
+from England these four years, and still continue to bear from England,
+and to have required indemnification in the hour of peace, when, I firmly
+believe, it would have been yielded by both."
+
+But this is bad political philosophy. A nation cannot obtain justice by
+submitting to wrongs or insults even for a time. Jefferson himself had
+written long before: "I think it is our interest to punish the first
+insult, because an insult unpunished is the parent of many others." It is
+possible that he was misled at this juncture by his liking for France, and
+by his dislike of the Federalists and of their British proclivities. It is
+true that the bribe demanded by Talleyrand's agents might be considered,
+to use Mr. Jefferson's words, as "the turpitude of private swindlers;" but
+the demand for a loan and for a retraction could be regarded only as
+national acts, being acts of the French government, although the bulk of
+the French people might repudiate them.
+
+Whether Jefferson was right or wrong in the position which he took, he
+maintained it with superb self-confidence and aplomb. For the moment, the
+Federalists had everything their own way. They carried the election.
+Hamilton's oft-anticipated "crisis" seemed to have arrived at last. But
+Jefferson coolly waited till the storm should blow over. "Our countrymen,"
+he wrote to a friend, "are essentially Republicans. They retain
+unadulterated the principles of '76, and those who are conscious of no
+change in themselves have nothing to fear in the long run."
+
+And so it proved. The ascendency of the Federalists was soon destroyed,
+and destroyed forever, by the political crimes and follies which they
+committed; and especially by the alien and sedition laws. The reader need
+hardly be reminded that the alien law gave the President authority to
+banish from the country "all such aliens as _he_ should judge dangerous to
+the peace and safety of the United States,"--a despotic power which no king
+of England ever possessed. The sedition act made it a crime, punishable by
+fine and imprisonment, to speak or write anything "false, scandalous, and
+malicious," with intent to excite against either House of Congress or
+against the President, "the hatred of the good people of the United
+States." It can readily be seen what gross oppression was possible under
+this elastic law, interpreted by judges who, to a man, were members of the
+Federal party. Matthew Lyon, of Vermont, ventured to read aloud at a
+political meeting a letter which he had received expressing astonishment
+that the President's recent address to the House of Representatives had
+not been answered by "an order to send him to a mad-house." For this Mr.
+Lyon was fined $1,000, and imprisoned in a veritable dungeon.
+
+These unconstitutional and un-American laws were vigorously opposed by
+Jefferson and Madison. In October, 1798, Jefferson wrote: "For my own part
+I consider those laws as merely an experiment on the American mind to see
+how far it will bear an avowed violation of the Constitution. If this goes
+down, we shall immediately see attempted another act of Congress declaring
+that the President shall continue in office during life, reserving to
+another occasion the transfer of the succession to his heirs, and the
+establishment of the Senate for life."
+
+Jefferson also prepared the famous Kentucky resolutions, which were
+adopted by the legislature of that State,--the authorship, however, being
+kept secret till Jefferson avowed it, twenty years later. These
+much-discussed resolutions have been said to have originated the doctrine
+of nullification, and to contain that principle of secession upon which
+the South acted in 1861. They may be summed up roughly as follows: The
+source of all political power is in the people. The people have, by the
+compact known as the Constitution, granted certain specified powers to the
+federal government; all other powers, if not granted to the several state
+governments, are retained by the people. The alien and sedition laws
+assume the exercise by the federal government of powers not granted to it
+by the Constitution. They are therefore void.
+
+Thus far there can be no question that Jefferson's argument was sound, and
+its soundness would not be denied, even at the present day. But the
+question then arose: what next? May the laws be disregarded and disobeyed
+by the States or by individuals, or must they be obeyed until some
+competent authority has pronounced them void? and if so, what is that
+authority? We understand now that the Supreme Court has sole authority to
+decide upon the constitutionality of the acts of Congress. It was so held,
+for the first time, in the year 1803, in the case of Marbury _v._ Madison,
+by Chief Justice Marshall and his associates; and that decision, though
+resisted at the time, has long been accepted by the country as a whole.
+But this case did not arise until several years after the Kentucky
+Resolutions were written. Moreover, Marshall was an extreme Federalist,
+and his view was by no means the commonly accepted view. Jefferson scouted
+it. He protested all his life against the assumption that the Supreme
+Court, a body of men appointed for life, and thus removed from all control
+by the people, should have the enormous power of construing the
+Constitution and of passing upon the validity of national laws. In a
+letter written in 1804, he said: "You seem to think it devolved on the
+judges to decide the validity of the sedition law. But nothing in the
+Constitution has given them a right to decide for the executive more than
+the executive to decide for them. But the opinion which gives to the
+judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not--not
+only for themselves in their own sphere of action, but for the legislature
+and executive also in their spheres--would make the judiciary a despotic
+branch."(3)
+
+In the Kentucky resolutions, Jefferson argued, first, that the
+Constitution was a compact between the States; secondly, that no person or
+body had been appointed by the Constitution as a common judge in respect
+to questions arising under the Constitution between any one State and
+Congress, or between the people and Congress; and thirdly, "as in all
+other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has
+an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode
+and measure of redress." It was open to him to take this view, because it
+had not yet been decided that the Supreme Court was the "common judge"
+appointed by the Constitution; and the Constitution itself was not
+explicit upon the point. Moreover, the laws in question had not been
+passed upon by the Supreme Court,--they expired by limitation before that
+stage was reached.
+
+It must be admitted, then, that the Kentucky resolutions do contain the
+principles of nullification. But at the time when they were written,
+nullification was a permissible doctrine, because it was not certainly
+excluded by the Constitution. In 1803, as we have seen, the Constitution
+was interpreted by the Supreme Court as excluding this doctrine; and that
+decision having been reaffirmed repeatedly, and having been acquiesced in
+by the nation for fifty years, may fairly be said to have become by the
+year 1861 the law of the land.
+
+Jefferson, however, by no means intended to push matters to their logical
+conclusion. His resolutions were intended for moral effect, as he
+explained in the following letter to Madison:--
+
+"I think we should distinctly affirm all the important principles they
+contain, so as to hold to that ground in future, and leave the matter in
+such a train that we may not be committed absolutely to push the matter to
+extremities, and yet may be free to push as far as events will render
+prudent."
+
+As to the charge that the Kentucky Resolutions imply the doctrine of
+secession, as well as that of nullification, it has no basis. The two
+doctrines do not stand or fall together. There is nothing in the
+resolutions which implies the right of secession. Jefferson, like most
+Americans of his day, contemplated with indifference the possibility of an
+ultimate separation of the region beyond the Mississippi from the United
+States. But nobody placed a higher value than he did on what he described
+"as our union, the last anchor of our hope, and that alone which is to
+prevent this heavenly country from becoming an arena of gladiators."
+
+
+
+
+
+                                    X
+
+
+                           PRESIDENT JEFFERSON
+
+
+For the presidential election of 1800, Adams was again the candidate on
+the Federal side, and Jefferson on the Republican side. Jefferson, by
+interviews, by long and numerous letters, by the commanding force of his
+own intellect and character, had at last welded the anti-Federal elements
+into a compact and disciplined Republican party. The contest was waged
+with the utmost bitterness, and especially with bitterness against
+Jefferson. For this there were several causes. Jefferson had deeply
+offended two powerful classes in Virginia, the old aristocratic and Tory
+element, and--excluding the dissenters--the religious element; the former,
+by the repeal of the law of entail, and the latter by the statute for
+freedom of religion in Virginia. These were among the most meritorious
+acts of his life, but they produced an intense enmity which lasted till
+his death and even beyond his death. Jefferson, also, though at times
+over-cautious, was at times rash and indiscreet, and the freedom of his
+comments upon men and measures often got him into trouble. His career will
+be misunderstood unless it is remembered that he was an impulsive man. His
+judgments were intuitive, and though usually correct, yet sometimes hasty
+and ill-considered.
+
+Above all, Jefferson was both for friends and foes the embodiment of
+Republicanism. He represented those ideas which the Federalists, and
+especially the New England lawyers and clergy, really believed to be
+subversive of law and order, of government and religion. To them he
+figured as "a fanatic in politics, and an atheist in religion;" and they
+were so disposed to believe everything bad of him that they swallowed
+whole the worst slanders which the political violence of the times, far
+exceeding that of the present day, could invent. We have seen with what
+tenderness Jefferson treated his widowed sister, Mrs. Carr, and her
+children. It was in reference to this very family that the Rev. Mr. Cotton
+Mather Smith, of Connecticut, declared that Jefferson had gained his
+estate by robbery, namely, by robbing a widow and her children of L10,000,
+"all of which can be proved."
+
+Jefferson, as we have said, was a deist. He was a religious man and a
+daily reader of the Bible, far less extreme in his notions, less hostile
+to orthodox Christianity than John Adams. Nevertheless,--partly, perhaps,
+because he had procured the disestablishment of the Virginia Church,
+partly on account of his scientific tastes and his liking for French
+notions,--the Federalists had convinced themselves that he was a violent
+atheist and anti-Christian. It was a humorous saying of the time that the
+old women of New England hid their Bibles in the well when Jefferson's
+election in 1800 became known.
+
+The vote was as follows:--Jefferson, 73, Burr, 73; Adams, 65; C. C.
+Pinckney, 64; Jay, 1. There being a tie between Jefferson and Burr, the
+Republican candidate for Vice-President, the election was thrown into the
+House of Representatives, voting by States. In that House the Federalists
+were in the majority, but they did not have a majority by States. They
+could not, therefore, elect Adams; but it was possible for them to make
+Burr President instead of Jefferson. At first, the leaders were inclined
+to do this, some believing that Burr's utter want of principle was less
+dangerous than the pernicious principles which they ascribed to Jefferson,
+and others thinking that Burr, if elected by Federal votes, would pursue a
+Federal policy. It was feared that Jefferson would wipe out the national
+debt, abolish the navy, and remove every Federal officeholder in the land.
+He was approached from many quarters, and even President Adams desired him
+to give some intimation of his intended policy on these points, but
+Jefferson firmly refused.
+
+As to one such interview, with Gouverneur Morris, Jefferson wrote
+afterward: "I told him that I should leave the world to judge of the
+course I meant to pursue, by that which I had pursued hitherto, believing
+it to be my duty to be passive and silent during the present scene; that I
+should certainly make no terms; should never go into the office of
+President by capitulation, nor with my hands tied by any conditions which
+would hinder me from pursuing the measures which I should deem for the
+public good."
+
+The Federalists had a characteristic plan: they proposed to pass a law
+devolving the Presidency upon the chairman of the Senate, in case the
+office of President should become vacant; and this vacancy they would be
+able to bring about by prolonging the election until Mr. Adams's term of
+office had expired. The chairman of the Senate, a Federalist, of course,
+would then become President. This scheme Jefferson and his friends were
+prepared to resist by force. "Because," as he afterward explained, "that
+precedent once set, it would be artificially reproduced, and would soon
+end in a dictator."
+
+Hamilton, to his credit, be it said, strongly advocated the election of
+Jefferson; and finally, through the action of Mr. Bayard, of Delaware, a
+leading Federalist, who had sounded an intimate friend of Mr. Jefferson as
+to his views upon the points already mentioned, Mr. Jefferson was elected
+President, and the threatening civil war was averted.
+
+Mr. Adams, who was deeply chagrined by his defeat, did not attend the
+inauguration of his successor, but left Washington in his carriage, at
+sunrise, on the fourth of March; and Jefferson rode on horseback to the
+Capitol, unattended, and dismounting, fastened his horse to the fence with
+his own hands. The inaugural address, brief, and beautifully worded,
+surprised most of those who heard it by the moderation and liberality of
+its tone. "Let us," said the new President, "restore to social intercourse
+that harmony and affection without which liberty, and even life itself,
+are but dreary things."
+
+Jefferson served two terms, and he was succeeded first by Madison, and
+then by Monroe, both of whom were his friends and disciples, and imbued
+with his ideas. They, also, were reelected. For twenty-four years,
+therefore, Jefferson and Jeffersonian Democracy predominated in the
+government of the United States, and the period was an exceedingly
+prosperous one. Not one of the dismal forebodings of the Federalists was
+fulfilled; and the practicability of popular government was proved.
+
+The first problem with which Jefferson had to deal was that of
+appointments to office. The situation was much like that which afterward
+confronted President Cleveland when he entered upon his first term,--that
+is, every place was filled by a member of the party opposed to the new
+administration. The principle which Mr. Jefferson adopted closely
+resembles that afterward adopted by Mr. Cleveland, namely, no officeholder
+was to be displaced on account of his political belief; but if he acted
+aggressively in politics, that was to be sufficient ground for removal.
+"Electioneering activity" was the phrase used in Mr. Jefferson's time, and
+"offensive partisanship" in Mr. Cleveland's.
+
+The following letter from President Jefferson to the Secretary of the
+Treasury will show how the rule was construed by him:--
+
+"The allegations against Pope [collector] of New Bedford are insufficient.
+Although meddling in political caucuses is no part of that freedom of
+personal suffrage which ought to be allowed him, yet his mere presence at
+a caucus does not necessarily involve an active and official influence in
+opposition to the government which employs him."
+
+There were some lapses, but, on the whole, Mr. Jefferson's rule was
+adhered to; and it is difficult to say whether he received more abuse from
+the Federalists on account of the removals which he did make, or from a
+faction in his own party on account of the removals which he refused to
+make.
+
+His principle was thus stated in a letter: "If a due participation of
+office is a matter of right, how are vacancies to be obtained? Those by
+death are few; by resignation, none.... It would have been to me a
+circumstance of great relief, had I found a moderate participation of
+office in the hands of the majority. I should gladly have left to time and
+accident to raise them to their just share. But their total exclusion
+calls for prompter corrections. I shall correct the procedure; but that
+done, disdain to follow it. I shall return with joy to that state of
+things when the only questions concerning a candidate shall be, Is he
+honest? Is he capable? Is he faithful to the Constitution?"
+
+The ascendency of Jefferson and of the Republican party produced a great
+change in the government and in national feeling, but it was a change the
+most important part of which was intangible, and is therefore hard to
+describe. It was such a change as takes place in the career of an
+individual, when he shakes off some controlling force, and sets up in life
+for himself. The common people felt an independence, a pride, an elan,
+which sent a thrill of vigor through every department of industry and
+adventure.
+
+The simplicity of the forms which President Jefferson adopted were a
+symbol to the national imagination of the change which had taken place. He
+gave up the royal custom of levees; he stopped the celebration of the
+President's birthday; he substituted a written message for the speech to
+Congress delivered in person at the Capitol, and the reply by Congress,
+delivered in person at the White House. The President's residence ceased
+to be called the Palace. He cut down the army and navy. He introduced
+economy in all the departments of the government, and paid off
+thirty-three millions of the national debt. He procured the abolition of
+internal taxes and the repeal of the bankruptcy law--two measures which
+greatly decreased his own patronage, and which called forth John
+Randolph's encomium long afterward: "I have never seen but one
+administration which seriously and in good faith was disposed to give up
+its patronage, and was willing to go farther than Congress or even the
+people themselves ... desired; and that was the first administration of
+Thomas Jefferson."
+
+The two most important measures of the first administration were, however,
+the repression of the Barbary pirates and the acquisition of Louisiana.
+Mr. Jefferson's ineffectual efforts, while he was minister to France, to
+put down by force Mediterranean piracy have already been rehearsed. During
+Mr. Adams's term, two million dollars were expended in bribing the
+bucaneers. One item in the account was as follows, "A frigate to carry
+thirty-six guns for the Dey of Algiers;" and this frigate went crammed
+with a hundred thousand dollars' worth of powder, lead, timber, rope,
+canvas, and other means of piracy. One hundred and twenty-two captives
+came home in that year, 1796, of whom ten had been held in slavery for
+eleven years.
+
+Jefferson's first important act as President was to dispatch to the
+Mediterranean three frigates and a sloop-of-war to overawe the pirates,
+and to cruise in protection of American commerce. Thus began that series
+of events which finally rendered the commerce of the world as safe from
+piracy in the Mediterranean as it was in the British channel. How
+brilliantly Decatur and his gallant comrades carried out this policy, and
+how at last the tardy naval powers of Europe followed an example which
+they ought to have set, every one is supposed to know.
+
+The second important event was the acquisition of Louisiana. Louisiana
+meant the whole territory from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean,
+embracing about one million square miles. All this region belonged to
+Spain by right of discovery; and early in the year 1801 news came from the
+American minister at Paris that Spain had ceded or was about to cede it to
+France. The Spanish ownership of the mouth of the Mississippi had long
+been a source of annoyance to the settlers on the Mississippi River; and
+it had begun to be felt that the United States must control New Orleans at
+least. If this vast territory should come into the hands of France, and
+Napoleon should colonize it, as was said to be his intention,--France then
+being the greatest power in Europe,--the United States would have a
+powerful rival on its borders, and in control of a seaport absolutely
+necessary for its commerce. We can see this now plainly enough, but even
+so able a man as Mr. Livingston, the American minister at Paris, did not
+see it then. On the contrary, he wrote to the government at Washington:
+"... I have, however, on all occasions, declared that as long as France
+conforms to the existing treaty between us and Spain, the government of
+the United States does not consider itself as having any interest in
+opposing the exchange."
+
+Mr. Jefferson's very different view was expressed in the following letter
+to Mr. Livingston: "... France, placing herself in that door, assumes to
+us the attitude of defiance. Spain might have retained it quietly for
+years. Her pacific disposition, her feeble state would induce her to
+increase our facilities there.... Not so can it ever be in the hands of
+France; the impetuosity of her temper, the energy and restlessness of her
+character, placed in a point of eternal friction with us and our
+character, which, though quiet and loving peace and the pursuit of wealth,
+is high-minded, despising wealth in competition with insult or injury,
+enterprising and energetic as any nation on earth,--these circumstances
+render it impossible that France and the United States can continue long
+friends when they meet in so irritable a position.... The day that France
+takes possession of New Orleans fixes the sentence which is to restrain
+her forever within her low-water mark.... From that moment we must marry
+ourselves to the British fleet and nation."
+
+Thus, at a moment's notice, and in obedience to a vital change in
+circumstance, Jefferson threw aside the policy of a lifetime, suppressed
+his liking for France and his dislike for England, and entered upon that
+radically new course which, as he foresaw, the interests of the United
+States would require.
+
+Livingston, thus primed, began negotiations for the purchase of New
+Orleans; and Jefferson hastily dispatched Monroe, as a special envoy, for
+the same purpose, armed, it is supposed, with secret verbal instructions,
+to buy, if possible, not only New Orleans, but the whole of Louisiana.
+Monroe had not a word in writing to show that in purchasing Louisiana--if
+the act should be repudiated by the nation--he did not exceed his
+instructions. But, as Mr. Henry Adams remarks, "Jefferson's friends always
+trusted him perfectly."
+
+The moment was most propitious, for England and France were about to close
+in that terrific struggle which ended at Waterloo, and Napoleon was
+desperately in need of money. After some haggling the bargain was
+concluded, and, for the very moderate sum of fifteen million dollars, the
+United States became possessed of a territory which more than doubled its
+area.
+
+The purchase of Louisiana was confessedly an unconstitutional, or at least
+an extra-constitutional act, for the Constitution gave no authority to the
+President to acquire new territory, or to pledge the credit of the United
+States in payment. Jefferson himself thought that the Constitution ought
+to be amended in order to make the purchase legal; but in this he was
+overruled by his advisers.
+
+Thus, Jefferson's first administration ended with a brilliant achievement;
+but this public glory was far more than outweighed by a private loss. The
+President's younger daughter, Mrs. Eppes, died in April, 1804; and in a
+letter to his old friend, John Page, he said: "Others may lose of their
+abundance, but I, of my wants, have, lost even the half of all I had. My
+evening prospects now hang on the slender thread of a single life. Perhaps
+I may be destined to see even this last cord of parental affection broken.
+The hope with which I have looked forward to the moment when, resigning
+public cares to younger hands, I was to retire to that domestic comfort
+from which the last great step is to be taken, is fearfully blighted."
+
+
+
+
+
+                                    XI
+
+
+                         SECOND PRESIDENTIAL TERM
+
+
+The purchase of Louisiana increased Jefferson's popularity, and in 1805,
+at the age of sixty-two, he was elected to his second term as President by
+an overwhelming majority. Even Massachusetts was carried by the
+Republicans, and the total vote in the electoral college stood: 162 for
+Jefferson and Clinton; 14 for C. C. Pinckney and Rufus King, the Federal
+candidates.
+
+This result was due in part to the fact that Jefferson had stolen the
+thunder of the Federalists. His Louisiana purchase, though bitterly
+opposed by the leading Federalists, who were blinded by their hatred of
+the President, was far more consonant with Federal than with Republican
+principles; and in his second inaugural address Jefferson went even
+farther in the direction of a strong central government, for he said:
+"Redemption once effected, the revenue thereby liberated may, by a just
+repartition among the States, and a corresponding amendment of the
+Constitution, be applied _in time of peace_ to rivers, canals, roads,
+arts, manufactures, education, and other great objects within each State.
+In time of war, ... aided by other measures reserved for that crisis, it
+may meet within the year all the expenses of the year without encroaching
+on the rights of future generations by burdening them with the debts of
+the past."
+
+This proposal flatly contradicted what the President had said in his first
+inaugural address, and was in strange contrast with his criticism made
+years before upon a similar Federal scheme of public improvement, that the
+mines of Peru would not supply the moneys which would be wasted on this
+object. In later years, after his permanent retirement to Monticello,
+Jefferson seems to have reverted to his earlier views, and he condemned
+the measures of John Quincy Adams for making public improvements with
+national funds.
+
+But the President was no longer to enjoy a smooth course. One domestic
+affair gave him much annoyance, and our foreign relations were a continual
+source of anxiety and mortification.
+
+Aaron Burr had been a brilliant soldier of the Revolution, a highly
+successful lawyer and politician, and finally, during Mr. Jefferson's
+first administration, Vice-President of the United States. But in the year
+1805 he found himself, owing to a complication of causes, most of which,
+however, could be traced to his own moral defects, a bankrupt in
+reputation and in purse. Such being his condition, he applied to the
+President for a foreign appointment; and Mr. Jefferson very properly
+refused it, frankly explaining that Burr, whether justly or unjustly, had
+lost the confidence of the public.
+
+Burr took this rebuff with the easy good-humor which characterized him,
+dined with the President a few days later, and then started westward to
+carry out a scheme which he had been preparing for a year. His plans were
+so shrouded in mystery that it is difficult to say exactly what they were,
+but it is certain that he contemplated an expedition against Mexico, with
+the intention of making himself the ruler of that country; and it is
+possible that he hoped to capture New Orleans, and, after dividing the
+United States, to annex the western half to his Mexican empire. Burr had
+got together a small supply of men and arms, and he floated down the Ohio,
+gathering recruits as he went.
+
+Jefferson, with his usual good sense, perceived the futility of Burr's
+designs, which were based upon a false belief as to the want of loyalty
+among the western people; but he took all needful precautions. General
+Wilkinson was ordered to protect New Orleans, Burr's proceedings were
+denounced by a proclamation, and finally Burr himself was arrested in
+Alabama, and brought to Richmond for trial.
+
+The trial at once became a political affair, the Federalists, to spite the
+President, making Burr's cause their own, though he had killed Alexander
+Hamilton but three years before, and pretending to regard him as an
+innocent man persecuted by the President for political reasons. Jefferson
+himself took a hand in the prosecution to the extent of writing letters to
+the district attorney full of advice and suggestions. It would have been
+more dignified had he held aloof, but the provocation which he received
+was very great. Burr and his counsel used every possible means of throwing
+odium upon the President; and in this they were assisted by Chief Justice
+Marshall, who presided at the trial. Marshall, though in the main a just
+man, was bitterly opposed to Jefferson in political affairs, and in this
+case he harshly blamed the executive for not procuring evidence with a
+celerity which, under the circumstances, was impossible. He also summoned
+the President into court as a witness. The President, however, declined to
+attend, and the matter was not pressed. Burr was acquitted, chiefly on
+technical grounds.
+
+The Burr affair, however, was but a trifle compared with the difficulties
+arising from our relations with England. That country had always asserted
+over the United States the right of impressment, a right, namely, to
+search American ships, and to take therefrom any Englishmen found among
+the crew. In many cases, Englishmen who had been naturalized in the United
+States were thus taken. This alleged right had always been denied by the
+United States, and British perseverance in it finally led to the war of
+1812.
+
+Another source of contention was the neutral trade. During the European
+wars in the early part of the century the seaport towns of the United
+States did an immense and profitable business in carrying goods to
+European ports, and from one European port to another. Great Britain,
+after various attempts to discourage American commerce with her enemies,
+undertook to put it down by confiscating vessels of the United States on
+the ground that their cargoes were not neutral but belligerent
+property,--the property, that is, of nations at war with Great Britain.
+And, no doubt, in some cases this was the fact,--foreign merchandise having
+been imported to this country to get a neutral name for it, and thence
+exported to a country to which it could not have been shipped directly
+from its place of origin. In April, 1806, the President dispatched Mr.
+Monroe to London in order, if possible, to settle these disputed matters
+by a treaty. Monroe, in conjunction with Mr. Pinckney, our minister to
+England, sent back a treaty which contained no reference whatever to the
+matter of impressments. It was the best treaty which they could obtain,
+but it was silent upon this vital point.
+
+The situation was a perilous one; England had fought the battle of
+Trafalgar the year before; and was now able to carry everything before her
+upon the high seas. Nevertheless, the President's conduct was bold and
+prompt. The treaty had been negotiated mainly by his own envoy and friend,
+Monroe, and great pressure was exerted in favor of it,--especially by the
+merchants and shipowners of the east. But Jefferson refused even to lay it
+before the Senate, and at once sent it back to England. His position, and
+history has justified it, was that to accept a treaty which might be
+construed as tacitly admitting the right of impressment would be a
+disgrace to the country. The other questions at issue were more nearly
+legal and technical, but this one touched the national honor; and with the
+same right instinct which Jefferson showed in 1807, the people of the
+United States, five years later, fixed upon this grievance, out of the fog
+in which diplomacy had enveloped our relations with England, as the true
+and sufficient cause of the war of 1812.
+
+Nevertheless, Jefferson treated Monroe with the greatest consideration. At
+this period Monroe and Madison were both candidates for the Republican
+nomination for the presidency. Jefferson's choice was Madison, but he
+remained impartial between them; and he withheld Monroe's treaty from
+publication at a time when to publish it would have given a fatal blow to
+Monroe's prospects. In every way, in fact, he exerted himself to disguise
+and soften Monroe's discredit.
+
+The wisdom of Jefferson's course as to the treaty was shown before three
+months had elapsed by an act of British aggression, which, had the Monroe
+treaty been accepted, might fairly have been laid to its door. In June,
+1807, the British frigate Leopard, having been refused permission to
+search the American frigate Chesapeake, fired upon the Chesapeake, which
+was totally unprepared for action, and, after killing three men and
+wounding eighteen, refused to accept the surrender of the ship, but
+carried off three alleged deserters.
+
+This event roused a storm of indignation, which never quite subsided until
+the insult had been effaced by the blood which was shed in the war of
+1812. "For the first time in their history," says Mr. Henry Adams, "the
+people of the United States learned in June, 1807, the feeling of a true
+national emotion." "Never since the battle of Lexington," wrote Jefferson,
+"have I seen this country in such a state of exasperation as at present."
+
+War might easily have been precipitated, had Jefferson been carried away
+by the popular excitement. He immediately dispatched a frigate to England
+demanding reparation, and he issued a proclamation forbidding all British
+men-of-war to enter the waters of the United States, unless in distress or
+bearing dispatches. Jefferson expected war, but he meant to delay it for a
+while.
+
+To his son-in-law, John Eppes, he wrote: "Reason and the usage of
+civilized nations require that we should give them an opportunity of
+disavowal and reparation. Our own interests, too, the very means of making
+war, require that we should give time to our merchants to gather in their
+vessels and property and our seamen now afloat."
+
+Gallatin, the Secretary of the Treasury, even criticised the President's
+annual message at this time as being too warlike and "not in the style of
+the proclamation, which has been almost universally approved at home and
+abroad." It cannot truly be said, therefore, that Jefferson had any
+unconquerable aversion to war.
+
+Mr. Canning, the British Foreign Minister, went through the form of
+expressing his regrets for the Chesapeake affair, and sent a special envoy
+to Washington to settle the difficulty. Reparation was made at last, but
+not till the year 1811.
+
+In the mean time, both Great Britain and France had given other causes of
+offense, which may be summarized as follows: In May, 1806, Great Britain
+declared the French ports from Brest to the Elbe closed to American as to
+all other shipping. In the following November, Napoleon retorted with a
+decree issued from Berlin, prohibiting all commerce with Great Britain.
+That power immediately forbade the coasting trade between one port and
+another in the possession of her enemies. And in November, 1807, Great
+Britain issued the famous Orders in Council, which forbade all trade
+whatsoever with France and her allies, except on payment of a tribute to
+Great Britain, each vessel to pay according to the value of its cargo.
+Then followed Napoleon's Milan decree prohibiting trade with Great
+Britain, and declaring that all vessels which paid the tribute demanded
+were lawful prizes to the French marine.
+
+Such was the series of acts which assailed the foreign commerce of the
+United States, and wounded the national honor by attempting to prostrate
+the country at the mercy of the European powers. Diplomacy had been
+exhausted. The Chesapeake affair, the right of impressment, the British
+decrees and orders directed against our commerce,--all these causes of
+offense had been tangled into a complication which no man could unravel.
+Retaliation on our part had become absolutely necessary. What form should
+it take? Jefferson rejected war, and proposed an embargo which prohibited
+commerce between the United States and Europe. The measure was bitterly
+opposed by the New England Federalists; but the President's influence was
+so great that Congress adopted it almost without discussion.
+
+Jefferson's design, to use his own words, was "to introduce between
+nations another umpire than arms;" and he expected that England would be
+starved into submission. The annual British exports to the United States
+amounted to $50,000,000. Cutting off this trade meant the throwing out of
+work of thousands of British sailors and tens of thousands of British
+factory hands, who had no other means of livelihood. Mr. Jefferson felt
+confident that the starvation of this class would bring such pressure to
+bear upon the English government, then engaged in a death struggle with
+Bonaparte, that it would be forced to repeal the laws which obstructed
+American commerce. It is possible that this would have been the result had
+the embargo been observed faithfully by all citizens of the United States.
+Jefferson maintained till the day of his death that such would have been
+the case; and Madison, no enthusiast, long afterward asserted that the
+American state department had proofs that the English government was on
+the point of yielding. The embargo pressed hardest of all upon Virginia,
+for it stopped the exportation of her staples,--wheat and tobacco. It
+brought about, by the way, the financial ruin of Jefferson himself and of
+his son-in-law, Colonel Randolph. But the Virginians bore it without a
+murmur. "They drained the poison which their own President held
+obstinately to their lips."
+
+It was otherwise in New England. There the disastrous effect of the
+embargo was not only indirect but direct. The New England farmers, it is
+true, could at least exist upon the produce of their farms; but the
+mariners, the sea-captains, and the merchants of the coast towns, saw a
+total suspension of the industry by which they lived. New England evaded
+the embargo by smuggling, and resisted it tooth and nail. Some of the
+Federal leaders in that section believing, or pretending to believe, that
+it was a pro-French measure, were in secret correspondence with the
+British government, and meditated a secession of the eastern States from
+the rest of the country. They went so far, in private conversation at
+least, as to maintain the British right of impressment; and even the
+Orders in Council were defended by Gardenier, a leading Federalist, and a
+member of Congress.
+
+The present generation has witnessed a similar exhibition of anglomania,
+when, upon the assertion of the Monroe doctrine in respect to Venezuela,
+by President Cleveland, his attitude was criticised more severely by a
+group in New York and Boston than it was by the English themselves.
+
+Jefferson's effort to enforce the embargo and his calm resistance to New
+England fury showed extraordinary firmness of will and tenacity of
+purpose. In August, 1808, he wrote to General Dearborn, Secretary of War,
+who was then in Maine: "The Tories of Boston openly threaten insurrection
+if their importation of flour is stopped. The next post will stop it."
+
+Blood was soon shed; but Jefferson did not shrink. The army was stationed
+along the Canadian frontier, to prevent smuggling; gunboats and frigates
+patrolled the coast. The embargo failed; but Mr. Henry Adams, the ablest
+and fairest historian of this period, declares that it "was an experiment
+in politics well worth making. In the scheme of President Jefferson,
+non-intercourse was the substitute for war.... Failure of the embargo
+meant in his mind not only a recurrence to the practice of war, but to
+every political and social evil that war had always brought in its train.
+In such a case the crimes and corruptions of Europe, which had been the
+object of his political fears, must, as he believed, sooner or later, teem
+in the fat soil of America. To avert a disaster so vast was a proper
+motive for statesmanship, and justified disregard for smaller interests."
+Mr. Parton observes, with almost as much truth as humor, that the embargo
+was approved by the two highest authorities in Europe, namely, Napoleon
+Bonaparte and the "Edinburgh Review."
+
+Perhaps the fundamental error in Jefferson's theory was that nations are
+governed mainly by motives of self-interest. He thought that England would
+cease to legislate against American commerce, when it was once made plain
+that such a course was prejudicial to her own interests. But nations, like
+individuals, are influenced in their relations to others far more by pride
+and patriotism, and even by prejudice, than by material self-interest. The
+only way in which America could win respect and fair treatment from Europe
+was by fighting, or at least by showing a perfect readiness to fight. This
+she did by the war of 1812.
+
+The embargo was an academic policy,--the policy of a philosopher rather
+than that of a practical man of affairs. Turreau, the French ambassador,
+wrote to Talleyrand, in May, 1806, that the President "has little energy
+and still less of that audacity which is indispensable in a place so
+eminent, whatever may be the form of government. The slightest event makes
+him lose his balance, and he does not even know how to disguise the
+impression which he receives.... He has made himself ill, and has grown
+ten years older."
+
+Jefferson had energy and audacity,--but he was energetic and audacious only
+by fits and starts. He was too sensitive, too full of ideas, too
+far-sighted, too conscious of all possible results for a man of action.
+During the last three months of his term he made no attempt to settle the
+difficulties in which the country was involved, declaring that he felt
+bound to do nothing which might embarrass his successor. But it may be
+doubted if he did not unconsciously decline the task rather from its
+difficulty than because he felt precluded from undertaking it.
+Self-knowledge was never Mr. Jefferson's strong point.
+
+But he had done his best, and if his scheme had failed, the failure was
+not an ignoble one. He was still the most beloved, as well as the best
+hated man in the United States; and he could have had a third term, if he
+would have taken it.
+
+He retired, permanently, as it proved, to Monticello, wearied and
+harassed, but glad to be back on his farm, in the bosom of his family, and
+among his neighbors. His fellow-citizens of Albemarle County desired to
+meet the returning President, and escort him to his home; but Mr.
+Jefferson, characteristically, avoided this demonstration, and received
+instead an address, to which he made a reply that closed in a fit and
+pathetic manner his public career. "... The part which I have acted on the
+theatre of public life has been before them [his countrymen], and to their
+sentence I submit it; but the testimony of my native county, of the
+individuals who have known me in private life, to my conduct in its
+various duties and relations, is the more grateful as proceeding from
+eyewitnesses and observers, from triers of the vicinage. Of you, then, my
+neighbors, I may ask in the face of the world, 'whose ox have I taken, or
+whom have I defrauded? Whom have I oppressed, or of whose hand have I
+received a bribe to blind mine eyes therewith?' On your verdict I rest
+with conscious security."
+
+
+
+
+
+                                   XII
+
+
+                       A PUBLIC MAN IN PRIVATE LIFE
+
+
+Jefferson's second term as President ended March 4, 1809, and during the
+rest of his life he lived at Monticello, with occasional visits to his
+more retired estate at Poplar Forest, and to the homes of his friends, but
+never going beyond the confines of Virginia. Just before leaving
+Washington, he had written: "Never did a prisoner released from his chains
+feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power. Nature
+intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science by rendering them my
+supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived
+have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself on
+the boisterous ocean of political passions."
+
+Though no longer in office, Jefferson remained till his death the chief
+personage in the United States, and his authority continued to be almost
+supreme among the leaders as well as among the rank and file of the
+Republican party. Madison first, and Monroe afterward, consulted him in
+all the most important matters which arose during the sixteen years of
+their double terms as President. Long and frequent letters passed between
+them; and both Madison and Monroe often visited Jefferson at Monticello.
+
+The Monroe doctrine, as it is called, was first broached by Jefferson. In
+a letter of August 4, 1820, to William Short, he said: "The day is not far
+distant, when we may formally require a meridian through the ocean which
+separates the two hemispheres on the hither side of which no European gun
+shall ever be heard, nor an American on the other;" and he spoke of "the
+essential policy of interdicting in the seas and territories of both
+Americas the ferocious and sanguinary contests of Europe." Later, when
+applied to by Monroe himself, in October, 1823, Jefferson wrote to him:
+"Our first and fundamental maxim should be never to entangle ourselves in
+the broils of Europe. Our second, never to suffer Europe to meddle in
+cisatlantic affairs." The whole letter, a long one, deserves to be read as
+the first exposition of what has since become a famous doctrine.
+
+The darling object of Mr. Jefferson's last years was the founding of the
+University of Virginia at Charlottesville. For this purpose he gave $1000;
+many of his neighbors in Albemarle County joined him with gifts; and
+through Jefferson's influence, the legislature appropriated considerable
+sums. But money was the least of Jefferson's endowment of the University.
+He gave of the maturity of his judgment and a great part of his time. He
+was made regent. He drew the plans for the buildings, and overlooked their
+construction, riding to the University grounds almost every day, a
+distance of four miles, and back, and watching with paternal solicitude
+the laying of every brick and stone. His design was the perhaps
+over-ambitious one of displaying in the University buildings the various
+leading styles of architecture; and certain practical inconveniences, such
+as the entire absence of closets from the houses of the professors, marred
+the result. Some offense also was given to the more religious people of
+Virginia, by the selection of a Unitarian as the first professor. However,
+Jefferson's enthusiasm, ingenuity, and thoroughness carried the scheme
+through with success; and the University still stands as a monument to its
+founder.
+
+It should be recorded, moreover, that under Jefferson's regency the
+University of Virginia adopted certain reforms, which even Harvard, the
+most progressive of eastern universities, did not attain till more than
+half a century later. These were, an elective system of studies; the
+abolition of rules and penalties for the preservation of order, and the
+abolition of compulsory attendance at religious services.
+
+Mr. Jefferson's daily life was simple and methodical. He rose as soon as
+it was light enough for him to see the hands of a clock which was opposite
+his bed. Till breakfast time, which was about nine o'clock, he employed
+himself in writing. The whole morning was devoted to an immense
+correspondence; the discharge of which was not only mentally, but
+physically distressing, inasmuch as his crippled hands, each wrist having
+been fractured, could not be used without pain. In a letter to his old
+friend, John Adams, he wrote: "I can read by candle-light only, and
+stealing long hours from my rest; nor would that time be indulged to me
+could I by that light see to write. From sunrise to one or two o'clock,
+and often from dinner to dark, I am drudging at the writing-table. And all
+this to answer letters, in which neither interest nor inclination on my
+part enters; and often from persons whose names I have never before heard.
+Yet writing civilly, it is hard to refuse them civil answers." At his
+death Jefferson left copies of 16,000 letters, being only a part of those
+written by himself, and 26,000 letters written by others to him.
+
+At one o'clock he set out upon horseback, and was gone for one or two
+hours,--never attended by a servant, even when he became old and infirm. He
+continued these rides until he had become so feeble that he had to be
+lifted to the saddle; and his mount was always a fiery one. Once, in Mr.
+Jefferson's old age, news came that a serious accident had happened in the
+neighboring village to one of his grandsons. Immediately he ordered his
+horse to be brought round, and though it was night and very dark, he
+mounted, despite the protests of the household, and, at a run, dashed down
+the steep ascent by which Monticello is reached. The family held their
+breath till the tramp of his horse's feet, on the level ground below,
+could faintly be heard.
+
+At half past three or four he dined; and at six he returned to the
+drawing-room, where coffee was served. The evening was spent in reading or
+conversation, and at nine he went to bed. "His diet," relates a
+distinguished visitor, Daniel Webster, "is simple, but he seems restrained
+only by his taste. His breakfast is tea and coffee, bread always fresh
+from the oven, of which he does not seem afraid, with at times a slight
+accompaniment of cold meat. He enjoys his dinner well, taking with his
+meat a large proportion of vegetables." The fact is that he used meat only
+as a sort of condiment to vegetables. "He has a strong preference for the
+wines of the continent, of which he has many sorts of excellent
+quality.... Dinner is served in half Virginian, half French style, in good
+taste and abundance. No wine is put on the table till the cloth is
+removed. In conversation, Mr. Jefferson is easy and natural, and
+apparently not ambitious; it is not loud as challenging general attention,
+but usually addressed to the person next him." His health remained good
+till within a few months of his death, and he never lost a tooth.
+
+Scarcely less burdensome than his correspondence was the throng of
+visitors at Monticello, of all nationalities, from every State in the
+Union, some coming from veneration, some from curiosity, some from a
+desire to obtain free quarters. Groups of people often stood about the
+house and in the halls to see Jefferson pass from his study to his
+dining-room. It is recorded that "a female once punched through a
+window-pane of the house with her parasol to get a better view of him." As
+many as fifty guests sometimes lodged in the house. "As a specimen of
+Virginia life," relates one biographer, "we will mention that a friend
+from abroad came to Monticello, with a family of six persons, and remained
+ten months.... Accomplished young kinswomen habitually passed two or three
+of the summer months there, as they would now at a fashionable
+watering-place. They married the sons of Mr. Jefferson's friends, and then
+came with their families."
+
+The immense expense entailed by these hospitalities, added to the debt,
+amounting to $20,000, which Mr. Jefferson owed when he left Washington,
+crippled him financially. Moreover, Colonel Randolph, who managed his
+estate for many years, though a good farmer, was a poor man of business.
+It was a common saying in the neighborhood that nobody raised better crops
+or got less money for them than Colonel Randolph. The embargo, and the
+period of depression which followed the war of 1812, went far to
+impoverish the Virginia planters. Monroe died a bankrupt, and Madison's
+widow was left almost in want of bread. Jefferson himself wrote in 1814:
+"What can we raise for the market? Wheat? we can only give it to our
+horses, as we have been doing since harvest. Tobacco? It is not worth the
+pipe it is smoked in. Some say whiskey, but all mankind must become
+drunkards to consume it." Jefferson, also, was so anxious lest his slaves
+should be overworked, that the amount of labor performed upon his
+plantation was much less than it should have been. And, to cap the climax
+of his financial troubles, he lost $20,000 by indorsing to that amount for
+his intimate friend, Governor Nicholas, an honorable but unfortunate man.
+It should be added that Mr. Nicholas, in his last hours, "declared with
+unspeakable emotion that Mr. Jefferson had never by a word, by a look, or
+in any other way, made any allusion to his loss by him."
+
+In 1814, Mr. Jefferson sold his library to Congress for $23,950, about one
+half its cost; and in the very year of his death he requested of the
+Virginia legislature that a law might be passed permitting him to sell
+some of his farms by means of a lottery,--the times being such that they
+could be disposed of in no other way. He even published some "Thoughts on
+Lotteries,"--by way of advancing this project. The legislature granted his
+request, with reluctance; but in the mean time his necessities became
+known throughout the country, and subscriptions were made for his relief.
+The lottery was suspended, and Jefferson died in the belief that
+Monticello would be saved as a home for his family.
+
+In March, 1826, Mr. Jefferson's health began to fail; but so late as June
+24 he was well enough to write a long letter in reply to an invitation to
+attend the fiftieth celebration, at Washington, of the 4th of July. During
+the 3d of July he dozed hour after hour under the influence of opiates,
+rousing occasionally, and uttering a few words. It was evident that his
+end was very near. His family and he himself fervently desired that he
+might live till the 4th of July. At eleven in the evening of July 3 he
+whispered to Mr. Trist, the husband of one of his granddaughters, who sat
+by him: "This is the fourth?" Not bearing to disappoint him, Mr. Trist
+remained silent; and Mr. Jefferson feebly asked a second time: "This is
+the fourth?" Mr. Trist nodded assent. "Ah!" he breathed, and sank into a
+slumber from which he never awoke; but his end did not come till half past
+twelve in the afternoon of Independence Day. On the same day, at Quincy,
+died John Adams, his last words being, "Thomas Jefferson still lives!"
+
+The double coincidence made a strong impression upon the imagination of
+the American people. "When it became known," says Mr. Parton, "that the
+author of the Declaration and its most powerful defender had both breathed
+their last on the Fourth of July, the fiftieth since they had set it apart
+from the roll of common days, it seemed as if Heaven had given its visible
+and unerring sanction to the work which they had done."
+
+Jefferson's body was buried at Monticello, and on the tombstone is
+inscribed, as he desired, the following: "Here was buried Thomas
+Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the
+Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of
+Virginia."
+
+Jefferson's expectation that Monticello would remain the property of his
+descendants was not fulfilled. His debts were paid to the uttermost
+farthing by his executor and grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph; but
+Martha Randolph and her family were left homeless and penniless. When this
+became known, the legislatures of South Carolina and Louisiana each voted
+to Mrs. Randolph a gift of $10,000. She died suddenly, in 1836, at the age
+of sixty-three. Monticello passed into the hands of strangers.
+
+Jefferson had his faults and defects. As a statesman and ruler, he showed
+at times irresolution, want of energy and of audacity, and a
+misunderstanding of human nature; and at times his judgment was clouded by
+the political prejudices which were common in his day. His attitude in the
+X Y Z business, his embargo policy, and his policy or want of policy after
+the failure of the embargo,--in these cases, and perhaps in these alone,
+his defects are exhibited. It is certain also that although at times frank
+and outspoken to a fault, he was at other times over-complaisant and
+insincere. To Aaron Burr, for example, he expressed himself in terms of
+friendship which he could hardly have felt; and, once, in writing to a
+minister of the gospel he implied, upon his own part, a belief in
+revelation which he did not really feel. It seems to be true also that
+Jefferson had an overweening desire to win the approbation of his
+fellow-countrymen; and at times, though quite unconsciously to himself,
+this motive led him into courses which were rather selfish than patriotic.
+This was the case, perhaps, in his negotiations with the English minister
+after the failure of the embargo. It is charged against him, also, that he
+avoided unpleasant situations; and that he said or did nothing to check
+the Republican slanders which were cast upon Washington and upon John
+Adams. But when this much has been said, all has been said. As a citizen,
+husband, father, friend, and master, Jefferson was almost an ideal
+character. No man was ever more kind, more amiable, more tender, more
+just, more generous. To her children, Mrs. Randolph declared that never,
+never had she witnessed a _particle_ of injustice in her father,--never had
+she heard him say a word or seen him do an act which she at the time or
+afterward regretted. He was magnanimous,--as when he frankly forgave John
+Adams for the injustice of his midnight appointments. Though easily
+provoked, he never bore malice. In matters of business and in matters of
+politics he was punctiliously honorable. How many times he paid his
+British debt has already been related. On one occasion he drew his cheque
+to pay the duties on certain imported wines which might have come in
+free,--yet made no merit of the action, for it never came to light until
+long after his death. In the presidential campaigns when he was a
+candidate, he never wrote a letter or made a sign to influence the result.
+He would not say a word by way of promise in 1801, when a word would have
+given him the presidency, and when so honorable a man as John Adams
+thought that he did wrong to withhold it. There was no vanity or smallness
+in his character. It was he and not Dickinson who wrote the address to the
+King, set forth by the Continental Congress of 1775; but Dickinson enjoyed
+the fame of it throughout Jefferson's lifetime.
+
+Above all, he was patriotic and conscientious. When he lapsed, it was in
+some subordinate matter, and because a little self-deception clouded his
+sight. But in all important matters, in all emergencies, he stood firm as
+a rock for what he considered to be right, unmoved by the entreaties of
+his friends or by the jeers, threats, and taunts of his enemies. He shrank
+with almost feminine repugnance from censure and turmoil, but when the
+occasion demanded it, he faced even these with perfect courage and
+resolution. His course as Secretary of State, and his enforcement of the
+embargo, are examples.
+
+Jefferson's political career was bottomed upon a great principle which he
+never, for one moment, lost sight of or doubted, no matter how difficult
+the present, or how dark the future. He believed in the people, in their
+capacity for self-government, and in their right to enjoy it. This belief
+shaped his course, and, in spite of minor inconsistencies, made it
+consistent. It was on account of this belief, and of the faith and courage
+with which he put it in practice, that he became the idol of his
+countrymen, and attained a unique position in the history of the world.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                FOOTNOTES
+
+
+    1 It is to be remembered that the support of public worship was
+      compulsory in Massachusetts--the inhabitants of certain cities
+      excepted--down to the year 1833. An attempt to free the people from
+      this burden, led by Dr. Childs, of Berkshire County, was defeated at
+      the Constitutional Convention of 1820.
+
+    2 The father of Miss Catherine Sedgwick was a leading Federalist, and
+      his daughter records that, though a most kind-hearted man, he
+      habitually spoke of the people as "Jacobins" and "miscreants."
+
+    3 Abraham Lincoln said in his first inaugural address:--"But if the
+      policy of the government upon a vital question affecting the whole
+      people is to be irrevocably fixed by the decisions of the Supreme
+      Court, the moment they are made, the people will cease to be their
+      own masters; having to that extent resigned their government into
+      the hands of that eminent tribunal."
+
+
+
+
+
+                            TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
+
+
+Italic type is marked by underscore (_), black letter by asterisk (*).
+
+The following changes have been made to the text:
+
+      page 65, "Charlotteville" changed to "Charlottesville"
+      page 73, "goverment" changed to "government"
+      page 93, "1795" changed to "1793"
+      page 98, "circumtances" changed to "circumstances"
+
+Both "draught" and "draft" are used in the text.
+
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOMAS JEFFERSON***
+
+
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