Thomas Jefferson

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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 £2500 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
£200. 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 manœuvres,
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 Cæsar, 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 Cæsar under the floor, the tramp of the approaching
cavalry was heard. Down went the plank, shutting in Cæsar, 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 étât_, 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 manœuvres, 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 £10,000,
“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 reëlected. 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 élan,
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.





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