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LIFE 
 
 Thomas Jefferson. 
 
 THIRD PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES PARTON. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY. 
 
 (L.\TE TicKNOR & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co.) 
 
 1874- 
 
tssz 
 
 r- 
 
 k 
 
 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by 
 
 JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO., 
 In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. 
 
 Boston : 
 Stereotyped and Printed by Rand, Avery, & Co. 
 
iv PEEFACE. 
 
 until a majority of its inhabitants are so far sharers in it 
 better civilization, that their v)tes can be obtained by arp- 
 ments addressed to the understanding. 
 
 We must now accept it a* an axiom, that universal suf- 
 frage, where one-third of thevoters cannot read the lano-uao-e 
 of the country they inhabit, ends to place the scoundref clals 
 at the summit of affairs. iVe see that it has done so "^ 
 France, in the Southern Sttes, in l^ew York, and in Phil 
 delphia. 
 
 But such virtue is there n the Jeffersonian methods that 
 even in those places, we nd them our best resource. In 
 New York, a mass meetir and its Committee of Seventy 
 in two years, suppressed t3 worst of the public .stealino-. iJ 
 the South, the freedman rjes for the spelling-book. In Penn- 
 sylvania, the reign of the £)undrel draws to an ead ; and it is 
 everywhere evident, thatothing is farther fron the inten- 
 tion of the American peoe -han to submit to lawless or law- 
 ful spoliation. 
 
 It is even possible that le prty which Jefferscn founded 
 
 such vitality did he brehe ito it— may again, instructed 
 by defeat and purified ithe f rnace of afflictioi, deliver the 
 country from the evils ^hichperplex and thr3aten it em- 
 ploying the only expediit thi will ever long succeed' in a 
 free country, the expediit of ting right. Jefferson's prin- 
 ciples will do this, if ts par does not. A government 
 simple, inexpensive, anstrong^hat shall protect all ^' ' 
 including those of postity, and^t all interests prc^ 
 selves, assuming no fu-tions ex^pt those which 
 tution distinctly assigr it, — the are the princ 
 Jefferson restored in 301, and) which the fu 
 country can be safely usted. 
 
 i 
 
PBEFIOE. 
 
 This volimie originated in thelesire that there should be 
 
 one work upon Jefferson and hittimes within the reach of 
 
 the mass of readers. It was inteded to be smaller than it 
 
 is • but, in spite of a constant efft to be brief, it has grown 
 
 to the propoitions which the reatr sees. For years I have 
 
 wished, in some way, to recall tention to tlie points of 
 
 difference between Jefferson an^his opponents, because I 
 
 think that the best chance of^publican America is an 
 
 adherence to the general line of pities of which he was the 
 
 embodiment. If Jefferson was\Amg, America is wrong. 
 
 If America is right, Jefferson wis rht. 
 
 Nor ouo-ht ve to be impatiet \\h those who assert that 
 
 both America and Jefferson wee W)ng, since we cannot yet 
 
 claim for eithtr a final and indbitile triumph. In Franco 
 
 the politics with which he ws iiDthe warmest sympathy 
 
 resulted in organized massacnandiU Bonaparte; and the 
 
 Hr which h5 led in the Unjd Stes issued, at the South, 
 
 rebellion, and, in soe por)ns of the North, in the 
 
 Thief. We musUce the facts, and understand 
 
 ag. They no I're pr^e that Jefferson and 
 
 ifayette and Paii were rong, than the Inqui- 
 
 ne religious warsi'ove th the maxims of Jesus 
 
 They are only istratio. of the familiar fact, 
 
 progress of truth id justicis slow and very diffi- 
 
 ley show that no^untry itipe for equal rights 
 
 y 
 
OOI^TEJSrTS. 
 
 Chapter. Page. 
 
 I. — Colonel Peter Jefferson 1 
 
 n.— The Mother of Jefferson 5 
 
 m.— Our Jefferson's Childhood 9 
 
 IV. — Jefferson's School-life 15 
 
 V. — He goes to College 19 
 
 VI.— At College 26 
 
 . VII. — Jefferson in Love 34 
 
 Viii. — Coming of Age 41 
 
 IX.— TheLaw-stndent 46 
 
 X. — Stamp-act Scenes 63 
 
 XI. —Lawyers in Old Virginia 70 
 
 XII. —A Member of the Virginia Legislature 85 
 
 Xm. — His Marriage 99 
 
 XTV. — An Affair in Narragansett Bay 109 
 
 XV. — The Effect in Virginia and Elsewhere 120 
 
 XVI. — Jefferson gives Advice to George ni 134 
 
 XVn.— The Congress 143 
 
 XVm. — Hostilities precipitated by the Eoyal Governors . . . 151 
 
 XIX. — Jefferson in the Continental Congress 163 
 
 XX — In Vii-giuia again 172 
 
 XXI. — The Declaration of Independence 179 
 
 XXH. — Jefferson named Envoy to France 195 
 
 XXHr. —Need of Eeform in Old Vu-ginia 199 
 
 XXIV. — Jefferson, Wythe, and Madison begin the Work of Reformation 207 
 
 XXV.— Fii-st Three Years of the War 220 
 
 XXVI. — Jefferson Governor of Virginia 225 
 
 XXVn.— Virginia Ravaged 240 
 
 XXVin.— The Enemy at MonticeUo 250 
 
 XXIX. —At Home after the War 257 
 
 XXX. —Death of IMrs. Jefferson 265 
 
 XXXI. — In Congress at Annapolis 268 
 
 XXXU.— Envoy to France 277 
 
VI pONTENTS. 
 
 CHArTEK. Tif3K. 
 
 XXXIII. — First Impressions of Europe 285 1 
 
 XXXIV.— The Work of Ms Mission 291 j 
 
 XXXV.— Unofficial Labors 303| 
 
 XXXVI.— His Travels in Europe 312I 
 
 XXXVIL— Jefferson and tLe French devolution 818| 
 
 XXXVm.—Pteturning to the United States 3301 
 
 XXXIX.— His Welcome Home 342 
 
 XL. — Alexander Hamilton 349 
 
 XLL— Tone of New-York Society in 1790 364 
 
 XLH. —The Cabinet of President Washington . , . . .376 
 
 XLin.— The New Government and the Public Debt .... 384 
 
 XXIV. —Jefferson settling to his Work 398 
 
 XLV. — Negotiations with England after the Revolution . . . 402 
 
 XLVI. — The French Revolution in American PoUtics . . . 417 
 
 XL'VTI. —The Quarrel of Jefferson aid Hamilton 430 
 
 XLVni. — Causes of his Desire to resign ....... 451 
 
 XLIX. — Genet coming . . .1 461 
 
 L. — Edmund Genet in the Unitqd States 469 
 
 LI. — Jefferson resigns, and retii-es to Monticello . . - . . 491 
 
 LII. — Arrival of Dr. Priestley in the United States .... 496 
 
 LTEI. — Jefferson as a Farmer 501 
 
 LrV. — Candidate for the Presidency 609 
 
 LV. — Elected Vice-president 524 
 
 LVI. -7- Hamilton's Amour with Mrs. Reynolds 532 
 
 LVn. —The Grand Embassy to France in 1797 540 
 
 LVill. — Hamilton improves the Opportunity 550 
 
 LIX.— The Campaign Lies of 1800 567 
 
 LX. — The Tie between Jefferson and Burr 576 
 
 LXI. — The First Republican Administration 583 
 
 LXn.— Jefferson President 604 
 
 LXin.— The Algerine Piracies 636" 
 
 LXrV. — Louisiana purchased 641 
 
 LXV. — Downfall of Aaron Burr 657 
 
 LXVI.— The Embargo 671 
 
 LXVn. — Correspondence with Mrs. Adams 678 
 
 LXV ill. — Retirement from the Presidency 683 
 
 LXix.— At Monticello 687 
 
 LXX. — His Labors to promote Education 700 
 
 LXXI. — Visitors at Monticello, and Family Reminiscences . . 714 
 
 LXXn. — Last Years and Days 727 
 
 LXXTTT. —Summary 737 
 
LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 COLONEL PETER JEFFERSON. 
 
 JEFFERSON was a stripling of seventeen, tall, raw-boned, 
 freckled, and sandy-haired, when, in 1760, he came to Wil- 
 liamsburg, from the Far West of Virginia, to enter the College of 
 William and Mary. With his large feet and hands, his thick 
 wrists, and prominent cheek-bones and chin, he could not have been 
 accounted handsome or graceful. He is described, however, as a 
 fresh, bright, healthy-looking youth, as straight as a gun-barrel, 
 sinewy and strong, with that alertness of movement which comes 
 of early familiarit}'' with saddle, gun, canoe, minuet, and contra- 
 dance, — that sure, elastic tread, and ease of bearing, which we still 
 observe in country-bred lads who have been exempt from the ruder 
 toils of agriculture, while enjoying in fidl measure the freedom and 
 the sports of the country. His teeth, too, were perfect, which alone 
 redeems a countenance destitute of other charm. His eyes, which 
 were of hazel-gray, were beaming and expressive ; and his de^ 
 meanor gave assurance of a gentle heart, and a sympathetic, 
 inquisitive mind. 
 
 Such lads, eager and unformed, still come to college from honest 
 country homes, in regions where agriculture is carried on upon a 
 scale that allows some leisure to the farmer's family, some liberality 
 of expenditure, books, music, a tincture of art, and hospitable 
 habits. How welcome, how dear, to instructors worthy of them, 
 are such unhackneyed minds in bodies unimpaired ! 
 
2 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 The abode of this j^outh was a hundred and fifty miles to the 
 nortli-west of Williamsburg, among the mountains of Central Vir- 
 ginia, near where the Eiver Eivanna, an important tributary, enters 
 the James. His home was a plain, spacious farm-house, a story and 
 a half high, with four large rooms and a wide entry on the ground- 
 floor, and many garret chambers above. The farm was nineteen 
 hundred acres of land, part of it densely wooded, and some of it so 
 steep and rocky as to be unfit for cultivation. The fields near the 
 river were strong land, not yet (though soon to be) worn past the 
 profitable culture of tobacco; but the upper portions were well 
 suited to the grains and roots familiar to the farmers of the Middle 
 States. For sixty years the staple product of all that fine mountain 
 region, witli its elevated fields, its far-reaching valleys, and rapid 
 streams, was wheat ; which the swift tributaries ground into flour, 
 and the yellow James bore down its tranquil tide to Eichmond, 
 distant from the Jefferson home two 'days' ride. The rustle of 
 wheat-ears was familiar music to Thomas Jefferson from infancy to 
 hoary age. 
 
 The farm was tilled at this period by thirty slaves, — equivalent 
 to about fifteen farm-hands. The circumstances of the family were 
 easy, not afiiuent. Almost every common thing they consumed was 
 grown or made at home, — all the common fabrics and ordinary 
 clothing: and of home-made commodities they had an abundance : 
 but the thirty pounds sterling per annum in cash, which the student 
 was to expend at Williamsburg for his board and tuition, was not so 
 • light a charge upon the estate as it sounds to us. The entire 
 expense of his maintenance away from home may have been fifty 
 pounds a year ; which was, probably, not less than half the sum that 
 could be taken properly from the annual product of the farm and 
 shops, after all the home charges had been paid. , The yeomen of 
 Virginia, though they enjo3red a profusion of the necessaries of life, 
 w^ere sometimes sorely put to it when a sum of money was to be 
 raised. 
 
 This student of seventeen, through the death of his father three 
 years before, was already the head of the family, and, under a guar- 
 dian, the owner of the Shadwell Farm, the best portion of his 
 father's estate. 
 
 The happy results that spnng from the intermingling, by mar-, 
 riage, of families long cultured with families more vigorous and less 
 
COLONEL PETER JEFFERSON. 3 
 
 refined, lias been often remarked. Sucli conjunctions ghve us 
 Shakspeare and Goethe. A novelist of the day tells us of a ducal 
 house, which, on system, married a plebeian estate every other gen- 
 eration, which renewed at once its blood and its fortunes. The 
 material point was the renewal of the blood, which brings with it 
 the brain, the stamina/ and the self-control by which great houses 
 are founded, and all grfeat things are done. If at the present time 
 there is an aristocracy in Europe, which, iii any respectable degree, 
 earns its wages, it is that aristocracy which has oftenest renewed 
 itself by the strenuous blood of men who have won commanding 
 places by sheer strength of mind and purpose. The world would 
 never have heard of the Palmerstons, if the second lord had not won 
 the admirable daughter of a Dublin tradesman; nor of Brougham, 
 if the father of the late lord had married, as he intended, in his 
 native country and class. Nature so delights in uniting opposites, 
 that she seals with the unmistakable signet of her approbation the 
 coming-together of opposites artificially produced, — ancient culture 
 and unlettered force. 
 
 Peter Jefferson, the father of the student, was a superb specimen 
 of a class, nearly extinct in Great Britain, which used to be called 
 yeomen, — farmers who owned the soil they tilled, but had no pre- 
 tensions to aristocratic rank, — a class intermediate- in a parish 
 between the squire and his tenants. In old Virginia, yeomen were 
 farmers, who, beginning life with little capital besides a strong arm 
 and an energetic will, had taken up a tract of land to the westward 
 of the great tobacco-region of Virginia, and gradually worked their 
 way to the possession of a cleared farm, and a few families of slaves. 
 In this manner Peter Jefferson, and his father before him, had 
 achieved an independent position : stanch both, of strong self-tutored 
 sense, and of signal ability in the conduct of business; enterprising 
 and methodical; liberal, but exact; good at figures, with a clear, 
 careful handwriting, and an aptitude for mechanics. The family was 
 of Welsh extraction. The first of the name in Virginia, it is well 
 worth noting, was a member of that Virginia Assembly of 1610, the O 
 first legislative body ever convened on the western continent, the 
 summoning of which ended the twelve years' anarchy that followed 
 the planting of the colony, and notified the colonists, that, in crossing 
 the sea, they had lost none of the rights of Englishmen. All that 
 is important, characteristic, and hopeful, in the history of America, 
 
4 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 dates' from the meeting of that Assembly ; and an ancestor of 
 Thomas Jefferson was a member of it. Virginia then contained 
 six hundred white inhabitants. The church nearest his farm was 
 called the ''Jefferson Cburch" for a hundred years after his death, 
 and tlie ruins of it were visible as late as 1856. 
 
 Peter Jefferson, a younger son, and therefore having little to 
 expect from his father, made his entrance into responsible life by 
 the door which, many years later, admitted the son of another Vir- 
 ginia yeoman, George Washington. He learned the art of survey- 
 ing laud, — a hind of liberal jirofession in a new country. He 
 practised this profession in his native county of Chesterfield, and in 
 all the region trodden by Confederate armies and torn by Federal 
 cannon during the long siege of Richmond and Petersburg, — cities 
 which then existed only in the prophetic minds of men like Colonel 
 Byrd, who marked both as the sites of towns when as yet not a 
 tree of the primeval forest had been felled. Like George Washing- 
 ton, too, this young surveyor owed his rise in the social scale to a 
 marriage ; though it was Peter Jefferson's happier fortune to win 
 a maiden heart, and to create for her the home over which he asked 
 her to preside. 
 
CHAPTER 11. 
 
 THE MOTHER OF JEFFEKSOIST, 
 
 What a pretty romance it was ! The athletic j^outli, master of 
 his surveyor's chain and knowledge, a natural prince of the frontier, 
 becomes knit in an ardent, young man's friendship with William 
 Randolph, sou of one of those flourishing Randolphs who lived in 
 such lordly state, in the good old barbaric days, when the soil of 
 Virginia was still unworn, when negroes were twenty-five guineas 
 "a head," and tobacco brought four pence a pound in London 
 docks. Together they visit an uncle of William Randolph, seated 
 on a vast plantation on the James, some miles below the mouth of 
 the Rivanna, — one of the few grand houses of Virginia wherein, 
 knowledge and taste were more conspicuous than pride and pro- 
 fusion. Isham Randolph was the name of this tobacco lord, and 
 his eldest daughter was Jane. She was born while the family were 
 living in London, where her father knew Peter Collinson, wool- 
 merchant, botanist, and friend of Pennsylvania ; also Hans Sloane, 
 founder of the British Museum, and all that circle of the Royal 
 Societj'^'s more active members. 
 
 She was not too lightly won, this daughter of a stately house. 
 Peter Jefferson was twenty-eight, and she seventeen, when he 
 mounted and rode a hundred miles to the northwest of his home, 
 and fifty miles beyond hers, and bought his first thousand acres on 
 the Rivanna, and began to hew out a farm and home. Within half a 
 day's ride, the smoke of only three or four settlers' cabins floated up 
 through small clearings to the sky, and the trail of Indians was to be 
 seen in the woods. For two years he wrought there in the forest, 
 aided, doubtless, by a slave family or two ; and when he had cleared a 
 few fields, and built something a little better than a cabin, he went 
 to DungenesSj and brought home his bride, Jane Randolph. To do 
 
 6 
 
b LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOIS". 
 
 her honor, he named their abode Shadwel], because it was in a Lon- 
 don parish of that name that she first saw the light. He was 
 married in 1738. Five years after, — April 13^ 1743, — his third 
 child was born, whom he named Thomas, that student who stands 
 at the threshold of William and IMarj College, waiting our conven- 
 ience to be admitted. 
 
 Of this adventurous lady, who gave her hand to Peter Jefferson 
 and rode by his side to their home in the woods, we only know that 
 she was the child of an intelligent and hospitable father; and this 
 one fact comes to ixs by a strange and pleasant chance. There 
 was a Quaker farmer near Philadelphia, at the beginning of the 
 last ♦century, named John Bartram, who, while he was resting 
 from the plough one day, under a tree, pulling a daisy to pieces, 
 and observing some of the more obvious marvels of its construction, 
 suddenly awoke to his pitiful, ignorance of the vegetable wonders in 
 the midst of which he had lived and labored from childhood. He 
 resumed his toil, but not with that stolid content with his ignorance 
 that he had enjoyed so long. On the fourth day after, raging for 
 knowledge, he hired a man to hold his plough, while he rode to 
 Philadelphia, and brought home a work upon botany in Latin, and 
 a Latin grammar. In three months, by a teacher's aid, he. could 
 grope his way in the Latin book ; in a year he had botanized all over 
 the region round about, and cast longing eyes over the border into 
 Maryland and Virginia. By good management of his farm and 
 servants, — emancipated slaves, — he was able to spend the rest of 
 his life in the stndy of Nature, making wide excursions into neigh- 
 boring colonies, until he knew every plant that grew between the 
 Alleghany range and the Atlantic Ocean; becoming at length 
 botanist to the king, at fifty guineas a year, and founding on the 
 banks of the Schuylkill the first botanical garden of America. He 
 and his garden flourished together to a green old age; and he died, 
 at the approach of the British army during the Eevolutionarj^ War, 
 of terror lest the pride of his life should be trampled into ruin by 
 the troops. Among his European correspondents was that assidu- 
 ous friend of Pennsylvania and of Franklin, Peter Collinson, with 
 whom for fifty years he exchanged letters, seeds, roots, trees, slips, 
 nuts, grafts, birds, turtles, squirrels, and other animals ; and it is to 
 their correspondence that Europe owes the profusion of American 
 trees and shrubs that adorn so many parks, gardens, and highways. 
 
THE MOTHER OF JEFFERSON. 7 
 
 To the same interchange America was indebted, among otiier bene- 
 fits, for those rare kinds of plums, cherries, apricots, gooseberries, 
 and other fruits, that flourished for a time, though tlie clijnate lias 
 since proved too harsh and exacting for them. In a sihgularly 
 quiet, homely waj?-, those two excellent men, at the cost of a few 
 guineas per annum, conferred solid and lasting benefits upon count- 
 less generations of the inhabitants of two continents. 
 
 It is in the letters of Peter Collinson to his American friend, that 
 we find allusions to the father of our Jefferson's mother. William 
 Bartram may have seen Peter Jefferson and Jane Randol[)h mar- 
 ried ; for a few months before that event, when the botanist was 
 about to make a botanical tour in Virginia, Collinsoa sends him the 
 names of three or four gentlemen of that province who were inter- 
 ested in " our science," one of whom was Isham Randolph. " jSTo 
 one," he remarks, "will make tliee more welcome;" and he adds, 
 "I take his house to be a very suitable place to make a settlement 
 at, for to take several days' excursions all round, and to return to his 
 house at night." The worthy Quaker favors his somewhat too plain 
 American friend, who was also of Quaker family, with a piece of ad- 
 vice, that gives us some information. "One thing," he sa3''s, "I 
 must desire of thee, and do insist that thee oblige me therein : that 
 thou make up that drugget clothes " (a present from Collinson to 
 Bartram), "to go to Virginia in, and not appear to disgrace thyself 
 or me ; for, though I should not esteem thee less to come to me in 
 what dress thou will, yet these Virginians " (having in his mind's 
 eye his old acquaintances, Isham Randolph and his young family-) 
 '•' are a very gentle, well-dressed people, and look, perhaps, more at a 
 man's outside than his inside. For these and other reasons, pray go 
 very clean, neat, and handsomely dressed, in Virginia. Never mind 
 thy clothes : I will send more another time." The benevolent Peter 
 was a dealer in woollens, and sent the rustic Bartram many a good 
 ell of cloth to wear at the great houses in the country. 
 
 The botanist visited Isham Randolph's mansion on the James, in 
 and about which, it is said, a hundred servants attended. There he 
 must have seen the eldest daughter of the house at the time when 
 she was busy with preparations for her marriage ; and he may have 
 staid to the wedding-feast, and cheered the bride and bridegroom 
 as they rode away on horseback to their new home. He had gen- 
 erous entertainment, of which he sent grateful accounts to his pa- 
 
8 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 tron in London. Collinson replies, that it was no more than he 
 expected of his friend Isham : " I did not doubt his civility to thee. 
 I only wish to have been there, and shared it with thee." In anoth- 
 er letter, the worthy merchant mentions that "onr friend, Isham 
 Kandolph (a generous, good-natured gentleman, and well respected 
 by most who are acquainted with him) " had agreed to correspond 
 with him on their beloved science. When the news came of Isham 
 Randolph's death, Collinson wrote of him as *' the good man " who 
 had gone to his long home, and, he doubted not, was happy. 
 
 These glimpses of the father of Jefiferson's mother are slight, but 
 they are the more interesting because they confirm the tradition that 
 it was from his mother he derived his temper, his disposition, and 
 his sympathy with living nature. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 OUR Jefferson's childhood. 
 
 Though his mother had been the teiiderest of women, his father 
 had strength to match her tenderness. Tradition, current in the 
 county where he lived, and gathered by Mr. Randall, whose exten- 
 sive and sympathetic work * must remain tlie great reservoir of 
 information respecting the JefFersons, reports Peter Jefferson a 
 wonder of physical force and stature. He had the strength of 
 three strong men. Two hogsheads of tobacco, each weighing a 
 thousand pounds, he could raise at once from their sides, and stand 
 them upright. When surveying in the wilderness, he could tire out 
 his assistants, and tire out his mules ; then eat his mules, and still 
 press on, sleeping alone by "iiight in a hollow tree, to the howling of 
 the wolves, till his task was done. He loved mathematics. He 
 managed his affairs so well, that, in twenty years, he was master of 
 a competent estate, and could assign a good plantation to his 
 younger son, after leaving the bulk of his estate to his eldest. But 
 with this strength of character there was genuine intelligence. He 
 relished Shakspeare ; and Shakspeare alone can be a liberal edu- 
 cation. His fine edition of Shakspeare, still preserved among his 
 relics, attests, by its appearance, that the man whose property it was 
 loved it, and repaired often to it during many years for solace and 
 delight. The Spectator, a new work in his day, and some volumes 
 of Swift, are among the books, once his, that his descendants pos- 
 sess. 
 
 County honors, which at that time and place could mean nothing 
 but public duties, always difficult, often perilous, never compensated, 
 made him at length the tinquestioned chief of the frontier region. 
 
 * The Life of Tliomas Jefferson, by Henry S. Randall, LL.D. Three vols. New York, 
 1853. 
 
 9 
 
10 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 When the county was set off and named Albemarle, Peter Jefferson 
 was appointed one of its three justices of the peace ; afterwards 
 county surveyor; then colonel of the county, chief of provincial 
 honors in old Virginia, in which capacity he was the defender of 
 the frontier against the Indians ; finally he was sent to represent 
 his county in the House of Burgesses, which sat at Williamsburg, the 
 capital of the Province. In politics he was a British Whig, like 
 most of the Western yeomen of the early day ; the great planters 
 of the lower country generally affecting Tory politics. For many 
 years he was vestryman of his parish church. 
 
 His qualifications were recognized by the royal government. He 
 was out, when his boy was six years old, for several weeks, on the 
 line between Virginia and North Carolina, as joint commissioner 
 with Joshua Fry, professor of mathematics in William and Mary 
 College, completing the boundary between these two Provinces. 
 Two years after, he was associated with Professor Fry in the con- 
 struction of the first map of Virginia ever attempted since Captain 
 John Smith's conjectural sketch of 1609. The boy of eight must 
 have seen tlie surveys and broad sheets spread upon the great table 
 in tlie family room. Perhaps this honorable connection with one of 
 the college professors may have strengthened, may have originated, 
 the fondest purpose of Peter Jefferson's heart, which was to give his 
 son the best chance for education the colony afforded. 
 
 From this natural chief of men, Thomas Jefferson derived his 
 stature, his erectness, his bodily strength, — in which only his father 
 excelled him of all the men known or remembered in that county, 
 — his self-reliance, his habit of waiting upon himself, his aversion 
 to parade and ceremony, his tendency to humane politics, his curious 
 exactness in matters of business, his strong bias toward mathemat- 
 ics, mechanics, and architecture. He may have derived from him, 
 too, some traits that limited his ability as an executive chief. One 
 of his father's maxims was, "Never ask another to do for you what 
 you can do for yourself." A man who has to direct extensive affairs, 
 and control many men, must reverse this maxim, and never do any 
 thing himself which he can properly get another to do. 
 
 We can hardly imagine a boy better placed for the equal develop- 
 ment of mind, body, and character, than Thomas Jefferson was 
 during his father's lifetime. That region combines both the charms 
 and the advantages of mountain and plain ; for the heights are not 
 
OUR Jefferson's childhood. 11 
 
 too difficult for access, and the lowlands are not insalubrious. He 
 could shoot wild turkeys, deer, and all flying garae, without going 
 off his father's estate; and past his native fields flowed a river, over 
 which he was early taught to swim his horse. The primeval wilder- 
 ness covered the mountains, and waved luxuriant in many a valley, 
 the most conspicuous fact of nature around him till he was long past 
 boyhood. But by the time he was a well-grown lad, there were 
 neighbors near and numerous enough for society. His father's 
 official position made him the arbiter between contentious men, and 
 the minister of justice. The lad must have seen his father try 
 man}' a petty case, and settle many a difference, as well between 
 white men as between wliites and Indians. 
 
 That liking for Indians, which we observe in the writings of 
 Jeff"erson, resulted from his earfy acquaintance with some of the best 
 of the uncorrupted chiefs, who used to visit and stay with his father 
 on their journeys to and from the capital of Virginia. The Indians 
 held his father in that entire respect which they were apt to feel for 
 men who never feared and never deceived them. One of the most 
 vivid recollections of his boyhood was of a famous chief of the 
 Cherokees, named Ontassete, who Avent to England on behalf of his 
 people. The boy was in the camp of this chief the evening before 
 his departure for England, and heard him deliver his farewell ora- 
 tion to his tribe, — a scene that he used to describe with animation 
 seventy years after its occurrence. ■ The moon was in full splendor 
 that evening ; and it seemed as if it was to that lustrous orb the 
 impassioned orator addressed prayers for his own safety, and the 
 protection of his people during his absence. The powerful voice of 
 the speaker, his distinct articulation, his animated gesture, and the- 
 silence of the listening Indians sitting motionless in groups by their 
 several fires, filled him with awe and veneration, although he did 
 not understand a word that was spoken. 
 
 All the important circumstances of his home come to mind as we 
 brood over scattered indications in old and new Virginia books. We 
 see that giant of a father, steadfast, reserved, even austere, but not 
 ungentle, busy with official labors and the details of farm and barn 
 during the day, and in the evening giving his boy (his only son 
 for many years) lessons in book-keeping and arithmetic; two elder 
 sisters, perhaps, taking their turn at slate and pencil, or sitting with 
 their mother plying the needle : the father not uufrequently, treat- 
 
12 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 in g the gronp to a favorite paper from tlie Spectator. The morn- 
 ing scene, too, with the mother and her servants, we can infer with, 
 much probability from descriptions of similar interiors preserved 
 from that period. 
 
 Deeply as Jefferson came to hate slavery, clearly as he foretold 
 the ruin enclosed in the system, he saw it only in its better aspects 
 at his own home. He saw his father patiently drilling negroes, not 
 long from their native Africa, into carpenters, millers, wheelrights, 
 shoemakers, and farmers. He saw his mother of a morning in her 
 sitting-room, which was well furnished with contrivances for facili- 
 tating labor, seated with her daughters and her servants, like An- 
 dromache surrounded by her maidens, all busy with household tasks. 
 We possess authority' for the picture. Have we not been favored 
 with a glimpse of Mrs. Wasliington's "morning-room at Mount Ver- 
 non, — that room which was so " nicely fixed for all sorts of work" ? 
 '•' On one side sits the chambermaid with her knitting ; on the other, 
 a little colored pet, learning to sew. An old, decent woman was 
 there with her table and shears, cutting out the negroes' winter 
 clothes, while the good old lady directs them all, incessantly knit- 
 ting herself. She points out to me several pairs of nice colored 
 stockings and gloves she had just finished, and presents me with a 
 pair half done, which she begs I will finish and wear for her sake." 
 Bishop Meade, who quotes this interesting passage from an old Vir- 
 ginia manuscript, adds that, in other houses (like the home of the 
 Jeffersons) less opulent and containing many children, the mother 
 would have her daughters with her in the same apartment, one spin- 
 ning, another basting, another winding yarn, another churning, — 
 all vigorousl}'- at work : for at that day a plantation was obliged to 
 be nearly self-supplying ; and the family at the great house had to do 
 the thinking, contriving, cutting, and doctoring for a family of as 
 many helpless, improvident children as there were slaves. 
 
 In such a bus}^, healthy home as this, with father, mother, two 
 elder sisters, four younger sisters, and a little brother, Thomas Jef- 
 ferson lived in his boyhood. He was happy in his eldest sister, 
 Jane, whose mind was akin to his own. She was his confidant and 
 companion, and shared his taste for the arts, particularly his early 
 love of music. The family were all reared and baptized in the 
 Church of England ; and this sister greatly excelled in singing the 
 fcAV fine old psalra-tunes which then coustitated the whole psalmody 
 
oiTR Jefferson's childhood. 13 
 
 of the Protestant world. For a century, it is said, there were hut 
 five tunes sung in the colonial churches. By the fireside in the 
 winter evenings, and on the banks of their river in the soft, summer 
 twilight, there were family singings, Jane Jefferson's melodious 
 voice leading the choir ; to which was added, as the years went on, 
 the accompaniment of her brother's violin. There must have been 
 much musical feeling in the family to have generated in this boj'' so 
 profound a passion for music as he exhibited. He speaks of three 
 early tastes as "the passion of his soul," — music, mathematics, 
 and architecture ; and. of these the one first developed was music. 
 
 The massive instruments with which we are familiar — the piano 
 and the organ — would have been unattaitiable in a Virginia farm- 
 house at that period, even if they had been sufficiently perfected to 
 warrant transportation so far. The violin, called by its old-fashioned 
 name of the fiddle, king of instruments, was almost the only one 
 generally known in the back countries of the colonies. In Vir- 
 ginia, when Jefferson and Patrick Henry were merry lads together, 
 both of whom played the fiddle, it appears that almost every farm- 
 house which had a boy in it could boast a fiddle also. Mr. Kives, in 
 his *' Life of Madison," among many other precious things, pre- 
 serves the programme of the rustic festivities arranged for St. 
 Andrew's Day in 1737, in the next county but one to Jefferson's, 
 Albemarle. It throws light on his early violin, besides showing 
 how English the tone of Virginia was at that period. 
 
 First, twenty horses were to run round a three-mile course for a 
 prize of five pounds, no one " to put up a horse unless he had sub- 
 scribed for the entertainment and paid half a pistole." Next, a hat 
 of the value of twenty shillings was to be cudgelled for. Then, a 
 violin was to be played for by twenty fiddlers, — "no person to have 
 the liberty of playing, unless he bring a fiddle with him." When 
 the prize had been awarded, all the performers were to play together, 
 each a different tune, and to be treated by the company. Next, 
 twelve boys, twelve j'^ears of age, were to run a hundred and twelve 
 yards for a hat worth twelve shillings. A " quire of ballads were to 
 be sung for by a number of songsters, all of them to have liquor 
 sufficient to clear their windpipes." A pair of silver buckles was to 
 be wrestled for by " a number of brisk young men." " A pair of 
 handsome shoes " was to be "danced for." A pair of handsome silk 
 stockings of one pistole value was to be given to " the handsomest 
 
14 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 yonng country maid that appears in the field." A "handsome 
 entertainment " was also to be provided for the subscribers and their 
 wives ; " and such of them as are not so happy as to have wives 
 may treat any other lady." Drums, trumpets, and hautboj's were 
 to play ; and, at the feast, the healths of the king and of the gover- 
 nor were to be drunk. The programme concluded by notifying the 
 public, that, "as this mirth is designed to be purely innocent and 
 void of offence, all persons resorting to these are desired to behave 
 themselves with decency and sobriety ; the subscribers being re- 
 solved to discountenance all immorality with the utmost rigor." 
 
 The prominence assigned to the violin contest in these festivities 
 explains the frequent allusions to it in the early memorials of Vir- 
 ginia, and lessens our surprise at Jefferson's statement, that, daring 
 twelve years of his early life, he practised on the violin three hours 
 a day. The innocent instrument, it appears, had an ill name among 
 the stricter religious people of the mountain counties, where " evan- 
 gelical " principles prevailed. Our zealous young amateur may have 
 heard a sermon once preached in a parish church near his home by 
 Kev. Charles Clay, — cousin of the eloquent Kentuckian, — in 
 which the preacher warned his hearers against the " profanation " 
 of Christmas Day by " fiddling, dancing, drinking, and such like ; " 
 practices, he said, which were only too common in Albemarle. 
 Then, as now, it was the drink that did the mischief, though the 
 fiddle and the dance had to share the blame. 
 
CHAPTEE IV. 
 jeffekson's school-life. ^ 
 
 Peter Jeffersox began early to execute his heartfelt intention 
 of educating his son. This was not so difficult as has been repre- 
 sented. Twenty years before the child was born, the Bishop of 
 London, in whose diocese Virginia was, addressed certain questions 
 to the Virginian clergy. One of the questions was, " Are there any 
 schools in your parish ? " All the clergymen, except two or three, 
 answered, '■'■ ISTone ; " and the two or three who did not make this 
 answer could only claim that their parishes had '• a charitj' school." 
 Another question was, " Is there any parish library ? " To this, all 
 the clergy, except one man, answered, " iSTone ; " and that one man 
 made this replj', " We have the Book of Homilies, the Whole Duty 
 of Man, and the Singing Psalms." But, by the time Jefferson was 
 old enougli to go to school, there were a few schools in tlie more 
 densely peopled counties of Virginia ; and several of the more learned 
 and decent of the clergy received pupils into their houses for instruc- 
 tion in Latin and Greek. 
 
 He was fortunate in his ' teachers, as in all things else. At five 
 he went to a school where only the English language was emplo^yed ; 
 at nine his education seriously began, when he entered a Scottish 
 clergyman's family as a boarding scholar, where he learned Latin, 
 Greek, and French. Entries in Peter Jefferson's account-book, still 
 existing, show that he paid the Rev, William Douglass sixteen \ 
 pounds sterling a year for his son's board and tuition. Tliis first / 
 instructor of Thomas Jefferson came over from Scotland as tutor in 
 the famil}' of Colonel Monroe, father of President Monroe, and set- 
 tling on the James, near Peter Jefferson's tobacco plantation, spent 
 a long life in teaching young and old. Ho was of what we now call 
 the " evangelical " school, and regarded Dr. Doddridge's works as 
 
 15 
 
16 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 more precious than gold, — " the best legacy " he could leave his chil- 
 dren. Peter Jefferson was a vestryman of his church. The boy 
 was evidently much at home during the five years he spent at this 
 school, — always, probably, on Saturdays and Sundays ; and his 
 father took care that the boy did not neglect a child's first and chief 
 duty, which is to grow. He also instructed him in arithmetic and the 
 rudiments of mathematics, then generall}^ neglected in classical schools. 
 
 But this excellent father was not destined to experience the no- 
 blest triumph parents know, — that of seeing his child a full-formed 
 man, and better equipped for life's journey than himself had been at 
 starting. His great strength did not avail to bring him to old age. 
 In 1757, when he was but fifty years old, he died of a disease not 
 recorded. 
 
 After Braddock's defeat, in 1755, there could have been little rest for 
 such a colonel of a frontier county as he was ; and, indeed, there are 
 indications — paj'-rolls and other military documents and entries — 
 among his existing papers, showing that he was active against the ex- 
 ulting foe. JSTothiag was heard of for a time on the borders but mas- 
 sacre and fire, and the flight of whole counties of settlers to the lower 
 country. It is of this period, in the midst of which Colonel Jefferson 
 died, that the youthful commander of the Virginian forces. Colonel 
 Wasliington, wrote that despatch from the frontier which startles every 
 reader of his letters by its burst of vehement pathos. " The sup- 
 plicating tears of the women and moving petitions of the men," he 
 wrote, " melt me with such deadly sorrow, that I solemnly declare, 
 if I know my own mind, I could offer myself a willing sacrifice to 
 the butchering enemy, provided that would contribute to the peo- 
 ple's ease." The county colonels were all in arms during that time 
 of terror. Colonel John Madison, in Orange, the next county to 
 Albemarle, and nearer the scene, saw some of the horrors of the war 
 from his own front door. His son James, four years old at the time 
 of Braddock's defeat, always remembered the terror and desolation 
 of the two next years. Exposure and fatigue may have rendered 
 the colonel of Albemarle County liable to the attack of one of the 
 summer diseases, for it was on the 17th of August that he died. 
 
 His death is spoken of as sudden ; but this good father, it seems, 
 had time and strength, sudden as his death may have been, to 
 render his eldest son one last service. Dying, he left an injunction 
 that his sou's education should be completed, and enjoined those in 
 
Jefferson's school-life. 17 
 
 whose charge he was to be, not to permit him to neglect the exer- 
 cises requisite for his body's development. This strong man valued 
 strength. He used to say that the weakly in body could not be in- 
 dependent in mind; and, therefore, among his dying thoughts was 
 solicitude for his son's healthy, unchecked growth. He died leaving 
 his wife still young, not quite forty ; one daughter seventeen ; an- 
 other sixteen ; his son Thomas fourteen ; another daughter thir- 
 teen ; another eleven ; another five ; and a boy and girl, twins, aged 
 twenty-two months. To the end of his days, Jefferson spoke of his 
 father, thus early lost, with pride and veneration ; and he especially 
 loved to think that his dying command was that his sou's mind 
 should not be wronged of its due culture and nourishment. He 
 used to say, that, if he had to choose between the education or the 
 estate his father gave him, he would choose the education. 
 
 His father's death left him his own master ; for he says in one of 
 his later letters, that, "at fourteen years of age the whole care and 
 direction of myself was thrown on myself entirely, without a rela- 
 tion or friend qualified to advise or guide me." The first use he 
 made of his liberty was to change his school. 
 
 Fourteen miles away was the parsonage of Rev. James Maury, a 
 man of great note in his time, and noted for many things ; from 
 whose twelve children have descended a great number of estimable 
 persons of the name still living. Of Huguenot descent and gen- 
 uine scholarship, he was free both from the vices and the bigotry 
 which the refuse of the young English clergy often brought with 
 them to Virginia in the early time. Pamphlets of his remain, main- 
 taining the right and liberal side of questions bitterly contested in 
 his day. He was one of the clergymen of the Established Church 
 in Virginia who opposed, with voice and pen, that senseless persecu- 
 tion of Dissenters, which at last brought the Church itself to ruin. 
 He went so far as to say, in a printed address, that he should feel it 
 an " honor and happiness " to promote the spiritual good of " any 
 one honest and well-disposed person of whatever persuasion ; " and, 
 though he preferred his own church, he thought he saw errors in it, 
 as well as in the other sects, and should be glad to assist in the cor- 
 rection and improvement of both / 
 
 The coming of this clergyman into the mountain region, about 
 the time of Jefferson's birth, was evidently a welcome event ; for a 
 glebe of four hundred acres was at once set off for him, and so spa- 
 2 
 
18 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 cious a par?!onage was built, that he was able to add to his own large 
 family some pupils from the adjacent counties. By the time Jef- 
 ferson was fourteen, an important school had grown up about him, — 
 the best, it is thought, then existing in the Province ; and it con- 
 tinued to flourish, under one of Mr. Maury's sons, as late as the 
 year 1808, when one of its pupils was President of a nation which 
 the founder of the school did not live to see established. 
 
 We do not know what Jefferson read in Latin and Greek during 
 the two years that he remained at Mr. Maury's school ; but we know 
 that he learned nothing but Latin and Greek. A classmate and an 
 associate of his at this school was the second son of the master, also 
 named James ; to whom Mr. Jefferson, when Secretary of Stare un- 
 der President Washington, gave the Liverpool consuls]) ip, which he 
 held for forty-five years. The consul, on his return to Virginia in 
 old age, used to say that Jefferson was noted at his father's school 
 for scholarship, industry, and shyness. If a holiday was desired, it 
 was not he who could be induced to ask it, though he urged others 
 to ask ; and, if the request was granted, he would, first of all, with- 
 draw from the noisy crowd of his schoolfellows, learn next day's 
 lesson, and then, rejoining them, begin the day's pleasure. Their 
 favorite diversion was hunting on a mountain near by, which then 
 and long after abounded in deer, turkeys, foxes, and other game. 
 He was a keen hunter, as eager after a fox as Washington himself, 
 swift of foot and sound of wind, coming in fresh and alert after a 
 long day's clambering hunt. 
 
 After two years' stay at this school, he began, like other students, 
 to be impatient to enter college. He had never j^et seen a town, 
 nor even a village of twenty houses, for there was none such within 
 his range ; and he doubtless had the curiosity of youth to behold 
 the glories of the capital. He found plenty of reasons for gratify- 
 ing his wish, some of which he laid before his guardian. He lost a 
 fourth of his time, he said, by company coming to Shadwell and 
 detaining him from school, which added very much to the expenses 
 of the estate in housekeeping. At the college, too, he could learn 
 "'something of mathematics," as well as the languages, and " could, 
 get a more universal acquaintance, which may hereafter be service- 
 able to me." His guardian consenting, he bade fore well to his 
 mother and sisters, and set oft", early in the spring of 17G0, for 
 Williamsburgh, five days' long ride from his home. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 HE GOES TO COLLEGE. 
 
 It was not the custom of this young gentleman, nor of Virgini- 
 ans generally then, to perform their journeys with straightforward 
 rapidity. They took friends' houses on the way, were easily per- 
 suaded to remain over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and made the 
 most of the opportunity. Such was eminently the hahit of 3'oung 
 Jefferson, related as he was to half the families of the Province, and 
 seldom going far from home without his fiddle, and perhaps a roll 
 of "new minuets" from London, so welcome to j'oung ladies in the 
 remoter counties. It was always impressed on his memory, that he 
 began this interesting journey before Christmas, and staid over for 
 the holidays at a merry house in Hanover County, where he met, for 
 the first time, a jovial blade named Patrick Henry, only noted then 
 for fiddling, dancing, mimicry, and practical jokes. He was mis- 
 taken, however. An existing letter of the time shows that he had 
 not thought of going to college till after Christmas, and did not con- 
 sult his guardian on the subject till January was half gone. He 
 probably spent the holidays with Patrick Henry, returned home, 
 and then entered upon the project of going to college. But it was 
 always his custom, in his journeys to and from Williamsburg, to 
 make long visits to friends on and near the road ; and it was this, 
 perhaps, that led to the error. He remembered the future orator 
 merely as the prime mover of all the fun of the younger circle, and 
 had not a suspicion of the wonderful talent that lay undeveloped 
 within him. As little, doubtless, did Patrick Henry see in this 
 slender, sandy-haired lad a political leader and associate, — the pen 
 of a Revolution of which himself was to be the tongue. 
 
 On reaching Williamsburg, we may be sure he did not see that 
 metropolis with our disparaging eyes. In the old letters and me- 
 
 19 
 
20 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON". 
 
 moirs we read delusive accounts of its splendors and gayeties, — of 
 the " viceregal court," " vying in elegance with that of St. James ; " 
 of the grand equipages of "the gentrj' ; " and of all the pomp and 
 circumstance of old Virginia, gathered there in the winter. It was 
 "the centre of taste, fashion, and refinement," we are told; and the 
 entertainments given at " the palace " were a blending of refine- 
 ment and sumptuosity " worthy of the representative of royalty." 
 Such statements do not prepare the cold investigator to discover that 
 the capital of Virginia was an unpaved village of a thousand 
 inhabitants, surrounded by an expanse of dark-green tobacco-fields 
 as far as the eye could reach. Andrew Burnaby, an English clergy- 
 man who visited it eight months before the arrival of our student, 
 estimates the number of its houses at " about two hundred," and its 
 .population at "one thousand souls, whites and negroes." He men- 
 tions, also, that "there are ten or tivelve gentlemen's families con- 
 stantly residing in it, besides merchants and tradesmen." But he 
 adds that in the winter, when the legislature and the great court of 
 the colony were in session, the place was " crowded with the gentry 
 of the country," and then there were balls and gayeties ; but, as 
 soon as business is over, the gentry return to their plantations, and 
 " the town is in a manner deserted." 
 
 _^Williamsburg, insignificant as it may seem to us, furnished the 
 pattern for the city of Washington. It consisted chiefly of one 
 street, a 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. It was well arranged to 
 display whatever of equipage or costume the town could boast. As 
 the great planters' families travelled in their own huge coaches, 
 which at least had been gorgeous in the fashion of the age, — 
 coaches drawn of necessity by six horses, — and as the dress of the 
 period was bright with color and jDicturesque in style, we may well 
 believe that this broad avenue presented, during the season, a strik- 
 ing and animated scene. 
 
 The public buildings, as they apj^eared to Jefferson's maturer 
 judgment, were of a mongrel description, generally unpleasing and 
 inharmonious. The Capitol, in which he was to witness such thrill- 
 ing scenes, and take part in such important events, he thought "a 
 light and airy structure," — heavy and dull as it looks in the old 
 pictures ; and the governor's palace, though not handsome without, 
 
HE GOES TO COLLEGE. 21 
 
 was large and commodious, and surrounded by agreeable grounds ; 
 but the college and the hospital he condemns utterly. They were 
 "rude, misshapen piles, which, but that they have roofs, would be 
 taken for brick-kilns." This, however, was the remark of a con- 
 noisseur in architecture. The main edifice of the college resembled 
 those brick barracks of Yale and Harvard, built in the same period : 
 two stories high, with a steep roof and a row of windows in it, and a 
 small belfry on its summit ; quite good enough for young gentlemen 
 who kept dogs and guns in their rooms, and considered it the chief 
 end of students to frustrate the object for which they were sent to the 
 institution. This building, with two solid-looking professors' houses 
 near it, all standing in a square of four acres, marked with well- 
 worn paths, and not wanting in large trees, presented upon the 
 whole a respectable appearance. The arriving student probably did 
 not think it so despicable as the author of the " Notes on Virginia." 
 The private houses of Williamsburg, according to Mr. Burnaby, 
 were "of wood, covered with shingles, and but indifferently built." 
 The site of the town, however, was agreeable, — an elevated plateau, 
 midway between the York and the James, six miles from both. 
 Those breezes which swept across the peninsula, and raised the 
 clouds of dust in Williamsburg streets that annoyed the English 
 traveller, tempered the burning heat of the summer, and, as he 
 records, kept the town free from mosquitoes. 
 
 Such was Williamsburg in 1760, the chief residence of Jefferson 
 for the next seven years, the most important period of his life ; 
 for it was then that he acquired his knowledge and his opinions. 
 Whatever Williamsburg may have been to others, it was to him a 
 true university; because, coming into familiar contact there with a 
 few universal minds, he was capable of being instructed by them. 
 He brought with him to college the three prime requisites of the 
 successful student, — perfect health, good habits, and an inquisitive 
 intellect. He had come from a pui'e and honest home, where he 
 had learned nothing but what was good and honorable ; and he had 
 come in good faith, to fulfil his father's fond intention of making 
 him a scholar. 
 
 It was an ill-starred institution, this College of William and ]\Iary. 
 It had existed sixty-eight years, having been founded in 1692 by 
 the sovereigns whose names it bore. They gave it an endowment, 
 as an old historian records, of " nineteen hundred and eighty-five 
 
22 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 pounds fourteen sliillings and ten pence," besides twenty thousand 
 acres of land, and certain taxes that yielded three hundred pounds 
 a jeav. Other benefactors had bequeathed and given it pro^^erty, 
 until it enjoyed an annual income of three thousand pounds ; which 
 was enough, with the tuition fees, to maintain an efficient college. 
 But, like Harvard and Yale, the institution was hampered by the 
 incongruous conditions imposed by the donors of its capital. One 
 important estate was given for tiie express purpose of maintaining 
 Indians at the college; and Indians were maintained accordingly. 
 But Indians cannot receive our civilization. If the college had any 
 success with an Indian youth, he was no sooner, tamed than he sick- 
 ened and died. The rest may have assumed the white man's liabits 
 while they remained at Williamsburg ; but the very day that they 
 rejoined their tribe they threw off their college clothes, resumed 
 their old costumes and weapons, and ran whooping into the forest, 
 irreclaimable savages. And so this fondly-cherished project of the 
 benefactors ended in utter failure. But the estate remained ; its in- 
 come could only be spent in one way ; and hence the Indian nuisance 
 still clung to the college, wasting its resources and lessening its 
 attractiveness. 
 
 A leading object of the founders was to provide learned ministers 
 of the Established Church ; and consequently there was a professor 
 of " divinity," another of moral philosophy ; and the only special 
 duty assigned to the president, in return for his two hundred pounds 
 a year and his handsome house, was the delivery of four theological 
 lectures per annum. As if to give still greater prominence to the 
 department of theology, the reverend president usually held the office 
 of commissary, or bishop's representative, at a hundred pounds a year, 
 and had charge of the parish church of Williamsburg, which swelled 
 his income to about six hundred a year, — an official revenue only 
 exceeded by that of the governor. Those who know for wlrat kind 
 of reasons the fat things in church and state were usually given in 
 the good old times will not be surprised to learn that one of the com- 
 missary-presidents of the college, in Jefferson's youth, could not pro- 
 ceed against the clergy for drunkenness, because he was himself a 
 drunkard ; nor will he be at a loss how to explain the indications of 
 college riot that lurk in the letters of the time. 
 
 Moreover, the chief object of the founders was not accomplished. 
 As the parishes were usually assigned to English clergymen, whom 
 
HE GOES TO COLLEGE. 23 
 
 the Bishop of London sent to Virginia because there was nothing 
 for them in Eiighmd, few young Virginians entered the college with 
 a view to compete for a church-living of sixteen thousand pounds of 
 tobacco per annum. Yet the costly professorships of divinity had 
 to be kept up, and the college was obliged to continue a theological 
 seminary without theologians. 
 
 Dead brandies are not only merely inert and useless : the}'' injure 
 and disfigure the tree. This college, which ought to have attracted 
 the elite of Virginia youth, and sent them home strong and enlight- 
 ened to save beautiful Virginia from the blight of tobacco, repelled 
 many of them, and seldom regenerated those who came. Young 
 men whose fatliers could afford the expense went to English Eton, 
 Oxford, and Cambridge, often returning as ignorant as they went 
 out, and dissolute beyond \\o^e of reform. Of late years the college 
 had been filling up, more and more, with boys who came to learn 
 the rudiments of Latin : and it was some time before a clear dis- 
 tinction was made between these and the students proper of the 
 college. Jeiferson found the institution a medley of college, Indian 
 mission, and grammar-school, ill-governed, and distracted by dissen- 
 sions among its ruling powers. The Bishop of London, who, as 
 chancellor of the institution, had the nomination of its professors, 
 sometimes sent out men so manifestly incompetent or unfit, that the 
 trustees would not admit them ; and others, being admitted, led scan- 
 dalous lives, and filled the college, as the trustees said, with riot, 
 contention, and dissipation. Jefierson in old age wrote of "the 
 regular annual riots and battles between the students and the town- 
 boys, before the Revolution, part of which I was, and the manj'' and 
 more serious affraj-s of later times." On Sundays, we are told, when 
 the divinity professors and reverend president were away performing 
 parochial duties, the more orderly students went off shooting, with 
 their dogs behind them, and the others made the village resound 
 with their noise. It was not until several years after Jefferson's 
 time, that the rights of the several authorities of the college were 
 so defined that the siippression of these disorders became possible. 
 
 But out of this chaos Thomas Jefferson contrived to pick a genu- 
 ine university education; because, among the crowd of its school- 
 masters, mission teachers, divinity professors, and bishop's proteges, 
 there was, by some strange chance, one man of knowledge and abil- 
 ity, one man who did not " survey the universe from his parish bel- 
 
24 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 fry," one skilful and sympathetic teacher. " It was my great good 
 fortune," he says, in his too 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, 
 correct and gentlemanly manners, and an enlarged, liberal mindr- 
 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. Fortunately the 
 philosophical chair became vacant soon after my arrival in college, 
 and he was appointed to fill it per interim ; and he was the first 
 who ever gave, in that college, regular lectures in ethics, rhetoric, 
 and belles-lettres." It is a pleasure to copy a passage like this, — 
 one more testimonial to add to the long list of similar ones, from 
 Marcus Aurelius to Lord Brougham, which attest the immeasurable 
 value of an enlightened teacher of youth. 
 
 I wish we had something more particular of this gentleman. 
 Jeiferson's college intimate, John Page, governor of Virginia in 
 later years, speaks of him as " my beloved professor," who was 
 "afterward the great Dr. Small of Birmingham, the darling friend 
 of Darwin." And he confesses that he did not derive all the benefit 
 from his instruction that he might; for he was " too sociable to study 
 as Mr. Jefferson did, who could tear himself away from his dearest 
 friends to fly to his studies." 
 
 Another friend of Jefferson, John Burk, author of a " History of 
 Virginia," insinuates that Dr. Small was not too orthodox in his opin- 
 ions. The professors, he remarks, weye usually chosen from " the 
 licensed champions of orthodoxy ;" by which he appears to mean 
 the clergy : bat, " novv and then, in spite of the jealous scrutiny of 
 the metropolitan, some unbeliever would steal into the fold." This, 
 he adds, was particularly the case with the mathematical department, 
 for which divines were generally incompetent ; and he illustrates 
 this observation by mentioning "the friend and companion of the 
 poetic and philosophic Darwin," Professor Small, who had formed 
 the minds of so many of the youth of the Province. It is certain the 
 college was beginning to have an ill name among the religious peo- 
 ple, not on account of the bad lives and inefficient teacliing of some of 
 " the divines " connected with it, but of the heretical opinions supposed 
 
HE GOES TO COLLEGE. 25 
 
 to prevail among the students. The true reason, it is said, whj^ James 
 Madison went to Princeton College, was the dread his parents had 
 lest he should imbibe those opinions if he attended the college nearer 
 home. Edmund Randolph, who succeeded Mr. Jefferson in the office 
 of Secretary of State, was a student of William and Mary about this 
 time. He used to say that such heresies were much in vogue at the 
 college, and he had a vivid recollection of a scene that followed his 
 utterance of something in unison with the prevailing tone. One of 
 the leaders of the new opinions patted him on the head, and called 
 him a promising youth for daring to express so hold a thought. The 
 fact remains, however, that all the professors were required by law 
 to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, and all their pupils to say 
 the Church-of-En gland Catechism. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 AT COLLEGE. 
 
 The student settled to his work. Without neglecting Latin and 
 Greek, liis chief employment since his ninth year, he now became, 
 under Professor Small's tuition, enamoured of mathematics. That 
 science, as he wrote in later years, became "the passion of his life;" 
 and he could read off in his 3'outh, " with the facilit}^ of common 
 discourse," processes which at seventy cost him " labor and time and 
 slow investigation." It is evident, from many trifling indications, 
 that he subdued mathematics to his will, and employed it all his 
 days as a familiar, obedient servant. Part of his travelling appa- 
 ratus, even on short journej's, was a box of instruments and a book 
 of logarithms, and he always had a rule in his pocket. Professor 
 Small, who left Scotland about the time (1756) that Professor Black 
 was appointed to the chair of chemistry which he covered with im- 
 mortal lustre, — James Watt and the improved steam-engine being 
 among its incidental results, — shared in the new enthusiasm for 
 applied science ; and he imparted it to his j^oung companion. There 
 was some apparatus, it appears, at William and Mary. Doubtless 
 Professor Small possessed the electrical tubes, one of which Benjamin 
 Franklin, printer, had rubbed with so much effect fifteen jea.x3 
 before. Details of the student's scientific course we do not possess; 
 but we know that he derived from his walks and talks with Professor 
 Small the habit of surveying objects with the eyes of science, and 
 subjecting them to scientific tests, — one of the chief points of differ- 
 ence between the educated and the ignorant mind. 
 
 He worked hard in college, and ever harder, as his circle widened, 
 — too hard at last, — fifteen hours a day, as he said himself when 
 talking of college daj^s. He kept a horse or two at Williamsburg, 
 it appears (and riding on ho}'seback should be part of every college 
 
 26 
 
AT COLLEGE. 27 
 
 course) ; but, as his love of knowledge grew, his rides became shorter 
 and less frequent, until the only exercise he allowed himself on a 
 regular working-day was a rapid run out of town of a mile while it 
 was getting dark enough for candles. The beloved violin was never 
 quite laid aside : he snatched a kiss now and then, instead of his 
 three hours' wooing. Though related, through his mother, to most 
 of the society of the place, and fond of society, he withdrew from it" 
 more and more. Few students could have indulged in such excess 
 of mental exertion with impunitj^; nor could he for a long period, 
 although " blessed," as he once wrote, " with organs of digestion 
 which accepted and concocted, without ever murmuring, whatever 
 the palate chose to consign to them." His habits, too, were excel- 
 lent. The simple, old-fashioned cookery, that gave the human race 
 so many ages of good digestion, had not yet become one of the lost 
 arts in Virginia ; and, like most of the well-nurtured young Vir- 
 ginians of that period, he was so happy as to escape the servitude of 
 tobacco. Many planters of the olden time, who had grown rich by 
 the culture of tobacco, held the use of it in contempt. One reason 
 assigned, in a letter of the period, why the young men of Virginia 
 should not be sent to England for education, was, that they were so 
 likely to acquire there the horrid practice of smoking. 
 
 The number of persons much interested in intellectual affairs has 
 never been great in any community, not even in college-towns. 
 In the Williamsbi;rg of that day we hear of but two individuals 
 who could be associates of Dr. Small. One was Francis Fauquier, 
 the lieutenant-governor of the Province, wlio inhabited " the palace," 
 and presided over the the grand entertainments given therein. Jef- 
 ferson speaks of him as the ablest governor colonial Virginia ever had. 
 Perhaps, in saying so, he meant to damn him with faint praise. He 
 appears to have been a gentleman of the school of Louis XIV., 
 translated into England by Charles II., and into English by Lord 
 Chesterfield. We find him spoken of as the most elegant gentleman 
 Virginia had ever seen, a great patron of learning and literature, 
 himself an admirable scholar, master of an excellent style, both 
 spoken and written. It was he who set the fashion of importing 
 French literature, which filled so many Virginia libraries, a few years 
 later, with Voltaire, Rousseau, D'Alembert, and Diderot. He it was 
 also who introduced high play into the polite society of the Province, 
 or at least made high play reputable ; vyhich hastened the collapse of 
 
28 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 some showy Virginia fortunes, already eaten hollow by London cred- 
 itors. Whatever his faults, he was a man of high personal and 
 official honor. He was one of the few royal officers in the colonies 
 who disdained to increase their revenues by conniving at illicit com- 
 merce. Archdeacon Bnrnaby reports, that, at a time when other gov- 
 ernors were not so scrupulous, Governor Fauquier refused an offer of 
 two hundred pounds for a permit to trade with the enemy. He was 
 a gentleman, too, of eminent courtesy, of agreeable conversation, 
 interested in knowledge and literature, acquainted with the polite 
 world of cities, — a man of the metropolis residing for a while in a 
 province. 
 
 Prof Small being the governor's most familiar associate, our stu- 
 dent, young as he was, became intimate with him also, and was thus 
 brought into communication with the great world. The governor, 
 alnong his other accomplishments, was a musical amateur. Once a 
 week he had a musical party at the palace, to which the guests 
 brought their instruments. Jefferson was regularly present with his 
 violin ; and at these parties, for the first time in his life perhaps, 
 he heard music performed in concert. 
 
 But it was the governor's conversation that did most to form his 
 mind. It was during these j^ears that Great Britain, by the con- 
 quest of India, Canada, and many islands of the sea, became impe- 
 rial ; and when the news of victory came, Fauquier could tell the 
 student something of the mighty Chatham, who found his country an 
 island, and left it an empire. In Jeff"erson's first year at college, 
 '■'The Williamsburg Gazette," Virginia's only newspaper, published 
 the account of the accession to the throne of George III., who found 
 his country an empire, and left it an island. Of that young prince, 
 welcomed to the throne by acclamations in every quarter of the 
 globe, the governor could doubtless relate hopeful things, much to 
 the content of his young Whig friend from Albemarle. The Jeffer- 
 sons, as a Whig famil}^, could not but hail with joy the accession of 
 the first king of the Hanover line who was. a native of England. 
 They were loyal subjects ever, and none of them more so than this 
 youth, the present head of the family. From Governor Fauquier, 
 too, he heard, doubtless, something of the literary gossip of London, 
 fresh traditions of Addison, Swift, Thomson, Poj^e, and Boling- 
 broke. All this was education to the young student. He was get- 
 ting knowledge of the world in a very agreeable way. Sitting, as 
 
AT COLLEGE. 29 
 
 he says, at " the familiar table " of the governor, with Professor 
 Small opposite him, he was learning to estimate things by other 
 than Virginian standards, and saw more of the universe than could 
 be discerned from the parish belfry. Most happily, too, he was one 
 of those, who, as they go their way through life, get the good 
 that chance companions have to offer them, without imbibing the 
 evil that qualifies it. He caught the graces and escaped the vices of 
 the Chesterfield period. In avoiding the governor's habit of gam- 
 bling, he went even to an extreme ; for, it is said, he never had a 
 card in his house. 
 
 But the daily familiar party at the governor's table consisted of 
 four persons. The fourth remains to be mentioned. It was George 
 Wythe, a rising member of the bar of Virginia, who was destined to 
 a distinguished and long career as lawyer, statesman, professor, and 
 judge. He is the more interesting to us as the benevolent and wise 
 precejitor by whom three persons of eminent note in the politics of 
 the country were introduced to the law, and, through the law, to 
 public life, — Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and Henry Clay. 
 
 Virginia, during the hundred and twenty years of seeming pros- 
 perity given it by tobacco grown in virgin soil, cultivated by low- 
 priced slaves, was an illustration of Mr. Buckle's remark concerning 
 the connection between leisure and knowledge. "Without leisure," 
 he observes, "science is impossible ;' and, when leisure has been won, 
 most of the class possessing it will waste it in the pursuit of pleas- 
 ure, but a few will employ it in the pursuit of knowledge." How 
 perfectly this describes the Virginia of 1760! The great majority 
 of the ruling class lived lives of thoughtless profusion and self- 
 indulgence, with Governor Fauquier as the accomplished master of 
 the revels. John Burk, historian of Virginia, very friendly to the 
 memory of that brilliant personage, tells us that Fauquier found 
 the Virginian gentlemen quite, to his mind, — as profuse and fond 
 of pleasure as himself; and, after spending a winter of elegant 
 dissipation at the capital, he would enter upon a round of visits to 
 the great proprietors ; among whom, adds Burk, "' the rage for play- 
 ing deep, reckless of time, health, or money, spread like a conta- 
 gion." 
 
 In the midst of such scenes grew up a few men — a very few, but 
 always a few — who sought knowledge with disinterested love, and 
 with such success as almost to redeem the character of their Pro- 
 
30 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSOlSr. 
 
 vince and period. Three of the best educated gentlemen America 
 has produced were young men during Fauquier's term of service, — 
 Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Wythe, — all of 
 them men of singular moral purity and elevation of tone, and all 
 eminently capable of public spirit. It seems as if the very preva- 
 lence of the self-indulgent vices made these golden hearts recoil 
 from them with the greater decision and firmness. Jefferson wrote 
 once from the White House in Washington to a grandson at school: 
 " 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," he adds, " 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 w'ould 
 Dr. Small, Mr. Wythe, Peyton Randolph, do in this situation? 
 What course in it will insure me their approbation ? I am certain 
 that this mode of deciding on my conduct tended more to correct- 
 ness than any reasoning powers I possessed. Knowing the even 
 and dignified line they j)ursued, I never could doubt for a moment 
 which of two courses would be in character for them. Whereas, 
 seeking the same object through a process of much reasoning, and 
 with the jaundiced eye of youth, I should often have erred." He 
 tells his grandson that he was of necessity brought into contact with 
 the extremes of character, — jockeys and moralists, racing men and 
 philosophers, gamblers and statesmen ; and often, " in the enthu- 
 siastic moment of the death of a fox, the victory of a favorite horse," 
 and during a contest of mind in court or legislature, he has asked 
 himself which of these trium[)hs he should prefer. 
 
 George Wythe was thirtj'-three years of age at the beginning of 
 Jefferson's college life. Though heir of a competent estate, he was 
 wholly self-educated, except that, his mother, as tradition reports, 
 assisted him by keeping an eye upon an English Testament while 
 he translated from the Greek. He became, as contemporaries agree, 
 the best Greek scholar Virginia had ever seen ; to which Mr. Jef- 
 ferson adds, the best Latin scholar also. Young Henry Clay, his 
 amanuensis long after, not knowing a Greek letter, had trouble 
 enough in copying his decisions, interspersed as they were with 
 passages from Greek authors. The chancellor was an old man 
 
AT COLLEGE. 31 
 
 « 
 then, and this habit of quoting Greek was an old man's foible; but 
 when Jefferson was a student at Williamsburg, he knew him as an 
 able, vigilant lawyer, an enthusiast for all classical knowledge, and 
 fond to an extreme of Greek literature and Grecian history. Jeffer- 
 son's preference would naturally have been for Greek if he had 
 never seen George Wythe ; but doubtless their similarity of taste 
 was a bond of union between them, and nerved him for the supreme 
 achievement of old-fashioned scholarship, — a conquest of the Greek 
 language. Wythe was a man of nice conscience. He was among 
 the first to perceive the incongruous iniquity of slavery in our mod- 
 ern world, and he early washed his hands of it by emancipating his 
 slaves. Henry Clay went straight from his office and inspiration to 
 Kentuck}^, where his first political act was an attempt to induce 
 that 3'^oung Commonwealth to start fair by abolishing slavery. 
 
 Such was the party oftenest gathered about the governor's "fami- 
 liar table : " Professor Small, the mathematician and man of science ; 
 George Wythe, the moralist, learned in law and Greek; Francis 
 Fauquier, the man of the world of the period; Thomas Jefferson, a 
 shy, inquisitive young man, quick to take in all which these accom- 
 plished men had to give, and contributing his share of the enter- 
 tainment by the intelligent sympathy with which he listened. 
 These men were his teachers ; this table was his university. 
 
 Four persons so formed to entertain and improve one another 
 need never expect to remain long together. The party was broken 
 in 1762 by Professor Small's removal to Birmingham, where he had 
 a bright career. The young man whom he aided to form corre- 
 sponded with him till the Revolutionary War. They did not agree, 
 it seems, on the topics of the Revolutionary period ; but Jefferson 
 not the less revered him as the person who met him at the thresh- 
 old of life, and directed his steps aright, — who kept him out of the 
 slough of mean Provincial pleasures and excesses by awakening his 
 intelligence, and guiding him to the sources whence its proper 
 nourishment is drawn. An awakened mind, a hearty interest in 
 intellectual things, is virtue's strongest ally; and Jefferson felt that 
 he owed this unspeakable boon to Professor Small. 
 
 A profession was necessary to the student. His father's tobacco- 
 farm on the James was the portion of his brother Randolph, still a ■ 
 child. The Shadwell estate was charged with the support of his 
 mother and six sisters ; and Virginia estates were not apt to be very 
 
32 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 productive when the eye of the master was wanting. He can 
 scarcely be said to have had a choice of vocations. He was the last 
 person in the workl to think of tlie army or navy as a career ; and, 
 if he had, it would not have been possible, perhaps, for him to get a 
 commission. It was not as a " midshipman " that Washington's 
 mother thought of sending her son to sea, but as a sailor before the 
 mast: sucli was the narrow choice a parent had then in Virginia for 
 younger sons. The very letter which discloses this unexpected 
 piece of information shows how few employments were exercised in 
 the Province. Mrs. Washington mentioned the scheme of sending 
 George to sea, to her brother, Joseph Ball, in London. That gen- 
 tleman replied, that she had better put him an apprentice to a 
 tinker; " for," said he, " a common sailor before the mast has by no 
 means the common liberty of the subject; for they will press him 
 from a ship wliere he has fifty shillings a month, and make him 
 take twenty-three, and cut and slash him, and use him like a negro, 
 or rather like a dog." And even (he proceeds to say) if the lad 
 should work his way to the top of the ladder, and become the mas- 
 ter of a Virginia ship, a "very difficult thing to do," a planter that 
 has three or four hundred acres of land and three or four slaves, if he 
 be ii dustrious, may live more comfortably, and leave his family in 
 better bread, than such a captain can,* And so the mother thought 
 bette- of her project, and George Washington did not attempt the 
 difficult acliievement of rising to be master of a tobacco-ship. 
 
 There were no manufactures in the Province, except the very 
 rudest and crudest. People sent to London for every thing that 
 slaves could not make, even window-sashes and the commoner 
 implements. The commerce was in British hands. There was, of 
 course, no art, no literature, no journalism, and nothing that could 
 tempt* intelligence or ambition in the medical profession. If 
 Thomas Jefferson had been reared in a European capital, the first 
 wish of his heart would have been to be an artist of some kind. 
 After toying with music for a while, he would perhaps have fixed 
 upon architecture as his profession. In Virginia, at Williamsburg, 
 with George Wythe for a daily associate, he must needs become a 
 lawyer ; and accordingly, in 1763, after two years' residence at the 
 college, he began, under Mr. Wythe's direction, the study of the 
 law. 
 
 * Meade's Old Churches, Ministers, and Families of Virginia, vol. ii. p. 128. 
 
AT COLLEGE. 33 
 
 Perhaps the example of his jovial young acquaintance, Patrick 
 Henry, first turned his thoughts to the legal profession. In 1760, 
 a few days after his arrival in Williamsburg, who should present 
 himself at his room in the college but the merry Patrick ! But he 
 had come on a serious errand. He was bent on a change in his 
 mode of life, that had important consequences for his country as 
 well as himself. He told the student, that since they had parted, 
 after the Christmas holidays, two or three months before, he had 
 studied law ! He had studied it, in fact, six weeks ; and he had now 
 come to Williamsburg to get a license to practise. And he got it ! 
 Of the four examiners, only one, George Wythe, persisted in refus- 
 ing his signature ; and the three names sufficing, he went off 
 triumphant, to tend his father-in-law's tavern for four years longer, 
 until his opportunity came. Our student made no such haste. It 
 was not in his nature to slight his work, and he prepared himself 
 for a four years' course of reading. 
 
 8 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 jeffersojst in love. 
 
 His college days were over when he had been two years a student 
 at William and Mary ; and he went home in December, 1762, with 
 Coke upon Lyttleton in his trunk, to spend the winter in reading law. 
 He made the journey in his usual leisurely way, visiting friends near 
 the road, and found himself, about Christmas time, at a friend's house 
 half a day's ride from his own Shadwell. There he staid for two 
 or three days, taking part in the festivities of the season, to which 
 he could always contribute his violin. On this occasion he had 
 brought with him a roll of new minuets for the young ladies ; and 
 doubtless he did his part toward the entertainment of the company. 
 
 But he had left his lieart behind him at Williamsburg. He had 
 danced too many minuets in the Apollo — the great room of the old 
 Raleigh tavern — with Miss Rebecca Burwell, one of the orphan 
 daughters of a great house near the capital ; and she had given him 
 a watch-paper, cut and painted with her own lovely hands ; and he 
 found his mind dwelling night and day upon her sweet image. He 
 had packed his Coke at Williamsburg, with the most virtuous reso- 
 lutions of reading him, even amid the gayeties of the holiday time; 
 but the work lay in his trunk untouched. He even wrote to his 
 college friend, John Page, that he wished the Devil had old Coke, 
 for he was sure he never was so tired of an old dull scoundrel in his 
 life. " What ! " lie says, " are there so few inquietudes tacked to this 
 momentary life of ours, that we must needs be loading ourselves 
 with a thousand more ? " How different this from the tone of fond 
 regard witli which he speaks, in the grave letters of his maturer 
 years, of Coke and his works. But he was in love ; and he was writ- 
 ing on a Christmas Day, a hundred miles from the object of his 
 affection. 
 34 
 
JEFFERSON IN LOVE. 35 
 
 He liad risen on that joyful morning to face what mtist have been, 
 to a young fellow in love for the first time, a dreadful catastrophe. 
 He told his friend Page that he was in a house surrounded by ene- 
 mies, who took counsel together against his soul ; who, when he lay 
 down to rest, said, Come, let us destroy him ! In the night the 
 " cursed rats," at the instigation of the Devil, if there was a Devil, 
 had eaten his pocket-book within a foot of his head, carried off his 
 "jemmy-worked silk garters," and all those new minuets. But 
 these were trifles. It had rained in the night; and in the morning 
 he found his watch all afloat in a pool of water, and as silent as the 
 rats that had eaten his pocket-book. But this was not the catastro- 
 phe. '*The subtle particles of the water with which the case was 
 filled, had, by their penetration, so overcome the cohesion of the 
 particles of the paper of which my dear picture and w.atch-papet 
 were composed, that, in attempting to take them out to dry them — 
 good God ! Mens hot-ret referre ! — my fingers gave them such a 
 rent, as I fear /never shall get over." He is so overcome by the 
 recollection, that he cannot keep up the jocular strain, but breaks 
 into a serious invocation. Whatever misfortunes may attend the 
 j)icture or the lover, his hearty prayers shall be, that all the health 
 and happiness which Heaven can send may be the portion of the 
 original, and that so much goodness may ever meet with what is 
 most agreeable in this world, as he is sure it must in the next. "And 
 now," he adds, " although the picture may be defaced, there is so 
 lively an image of her imprinted in my mind, that I shall think of 
 her too often, I fear, for my peace of mind, and too often, I am sure, 
 to get through old Coke this winter." 
 
 Message upon message he sends to the young ladies at Williams- 
 burg, with whom, he says, the better part of him, his soul, ever is, 
 though that heavy, earthly part, his body, may be absent. With 
 one he has a bet pending of a pair of silk garters ; which the rats 
 knew he was destined to win, else they never could have been so 
 cruel as to carry off the pair he had. And oh, tvould Miss Burwell 
 give him another watch-paper of lier own cutting ? What does dear 
 Page think ? Would he ask her ? A watch-paper cut by her fin- 
 gers, though it were only " a plain round one," he should esteem 
 much more than the nicest one in the world cut by other hands. 
 Another young lady, he had heard, was offended with him. What 
 could it be for ? Neither in word nor deed had he ever, in all his 
 
36 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOlsr. 
 
 life, been guilty of the least disrespect to her; and, no matter what 
 she might say or do, he was determined ever to look upon her as 
 " the same honest-hearted, good-humored, agreeable lady " he had 
 alwaj's thought her. So full was he of Williamsburg and its lovely 
 girls, — " Sukey Potter," " Betsy Moore," ''Judy Burwell," '' Nancy," 
 and, above all, " Becca Burwell," otherwise " Belinda," the adored 
 one, — that, on this Christmas Day, 1762, he wrote a letter about them 
 that would have filled a dozen of our trivial modern sheets of paper. 
 It well became him to write such an epistle on his nineteenth Christ- 
 mas. Young men of nineteen still write such who have -preserved 
 their innocence. 
 
 He was at home soon after Christmas. Absence only made his 
 heart grow fonder. He missed the gayety and variety, the friends 
 and stir of- life and business at the capital. He found the old farm- 
 house dull. There must have been something uncongenial there, 
 else so affectionate a youth, the head of the family, would not have 
 spent his Christmases away from home. Perhaps his mother w-as 
 oppressed by the care of a family of eight children and thirty slaves ; 
 or she ma}' have agreed with tliat small portion of the clergy who 
 regarded the fiddle and the minuet as a "profanation " of Christmas. 
 However that may be, this sudden change from the Apollo and the 
 palace, from college friends and employments, to a farm-house on 
 the frontier and Coke's digest of law, was almost too much for his 
 philosophy. He could hardly muster spirits to write to his friend 
 Page. When he had been at home three weeks, he wrote a short 
 letter, which shows him reduced to a sorry plight indeed. He was 
 torn with the contest raging in his soul between his passion and his 
 judgment ; and he plunges into a letter, as it were head-foremost, 
 seeking relief in converse with his friend, with whom he had been 
 accustomed to exchange such confidences : " Dear Page, to tell you 
 the plain truth, I have not a syllable to write to you about ; " which 
 was a lover's way of stating that his heart was full to bursting. "I 
 do not conceive," he continues, " that any thing can happen in my 
 world which j^ou would give a curse to know." The tvorlds of these 
 two friends were, indeed unlike; for John Page, heir to one of the 
 largest estates, lived in the largest mansion of all Virginia, — Roswell, 
 — which stands to this day near the banks of the York Eiver, a 
 vast square barrack, treeless, fenceless, dismantled, a pile without 
 inhabitant, a picture of desolation. "All things here," the dis- 
 
JEFFERSON IN LOVE. . 37 
 
 tractecl lover went on, " appear to me to trudge on in one and the 
 same round: we rise in the morning that we may eat breakfast, din- 
 ner, and supper, and go to bed again that we may get up the next 
 morning and do the same ; so that you never saw two peas more 
 alike than our yesterday and to-day." 
 
 If he had nothing to tell, he had plenty to ask. A jury of lovers 
 would have pronounced his situation serious in the extreme. He 
 was enamoured of a beauty and an heiress: she in the full lustre 
 of her charms ; he a youth not twenty, of small estate heavily burr 
 dened, reading the elementary book of a profession requiring years 
 of preparation. Moreover, he had the usual dream of foreign travel. 
 Before settling to the business of life, he meant to visit England, 
 Holland, France, Spain, Italy, — where he would buy " a good fiddle," 
 — and then cross to Egypt, returning home by the way of the St.' 
 Lawrence and Canada. Such a tour would require two or three 
 years. Would she wait ? Could he ask her to wait ? Slie must 
 love him very much to do that, and he did not know that she loved 
 him at all; for the watch-paper meant nothing particular, — indicat- 
 ing friendly feeling, nothing more. What would dear Page advise ? 
 Should he go at once to town, receive his sentence, and end this 
 awful suspense ? Inclination prompted this course ; but, if she 
 rejected him, he would be " ten times more wretched than ever." 
 In this dilemma, he had some thoughts of going to Petersburg, "if 
 the actors go there in May," and keeping on to Williamsburg for the 
 birth-night ball at the Apollo, which of course she would attend. 
 But, after all, had not he and Page better go abroad at once for a 
 two or three years' tour ? " If we should not both be cured of love 
 in that time, I think the devil would be in it." 
 
 He remained at home, however, all that winter and all the ensu- 
 ing summer, wrestling with love and Coke, writing long letters to 
 Page on the one, and long notes on the other in his blank-books. 
 Page, though he was as far gone in love as Jefferson, tried to act 
 as his friend's attorney in love ; and Jefferson, on his part, reflected 
 much on Page's " case," and favored him with sage advice. And 
 so the affair went on nearly all that year. 
 
 " The test of a woman is goM," says poor Eichard, "and the test 
 of a man is woman." This young man bore the test well. He 
 was not carried away, even by this first yearning passion, but held 
 firmly to his purposes, making his love subordinate to them. 
 
38 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 After viewing the subject in every light, he could only come to this 
 wise conclusion : If she said Yes, he should be happy; but, "if she 
 does not, I must endeavor to be as much so as possible." He then 
 bestows upon his fellow-sufferer a discourse upon the necessity of 
 fortifying the mind against inevitable strokes of ill-fortune. "The 
 only method of doing this," he remarks, " is to assume a perfect 
 resignation to the Divine Will ; to consider that whatever does 
 happen must happen, and that by our uneasiness we cannot pre- 
 vent the blow before it does fall, but we may add to its force after 
 it has fallen." This attitude of mind, which he recommends to his 
 friend in several rotund and solemn sentences, will enable a man to 
 tread the thorny path of life with " a pious and unshaken resigna- 
 tion." He ends this discourse with a sentence which reminds us 
 that Dr. Johnson was then a power in the world : " Few things will 
 disturb him at all ; nothing will disturb him much." 
 
 The lover had occasion for all his philosophy. In October, when 
 the General Court convened, he must needs be in Williamsburg, to 
 watch its proceedings, and submit knotty questions to his friend 
 Wythe. He flew thither on the wings of love. There was a ball 
 at the Apollo. He met her there. Who so happy as he when Tie 
 led her out to the dance? He had made up his mind to speak, if 
 opportunity favored; and he had meditated some moving passages, 
 which he hoped would touch her heart, and call forth the response 
 he desired. But, alas! when at length, after so many months of 
 longing, the moment arrived, and he had her tete-a-tete, he could 
 only stammer a few broken sentences, with dreadful pauses between 
 them ; which elicited no explicit reply, and had no result except to 
 plunge him into the depths of shame and despair. " For God's 
 sake, COME," he writes to Page, who had not yet arrived. He met 
 her again. The fearful subject was again approached. This time 
 he got on a little better; explained his projects; did not put the 
 question, but gave her to understand that he should do so in due 
 time. Girls of spirit are not won in that manner, and we may pre- 
 sume she did not flatter his hopes ; for when next he wrote to his 
 friend, he calls the capital of Virginia, the scene of his disaster, by 
 the name of " Devilsburg." The probability is, that the young 
 lady was engaged at the time, since, a few months after the 
 tete-a-tete in the Apollo, she was married to that dread being — 
 another! Page, too, seems to have been crossed in love* but he 
 
JEFFEKSON IN LOVE. 39 
 
 immediately consoled himself by courting — another. Poor love-sick 
 Jefferson declared he would not believe the tale till he had heard it 
 from Page himself. For his own part, he had been perfectly sure, 
 during the whole course of his love, that, if Belinda rejected him, 
 his heart was dead to love forever ; and he wanted to know his fate 
 as soon as possible, that, if doomed to disappointment, he might 
 have " more of life to wear it off." 
 
 How captivating to lovers is the poetry of love ! It was during 
 these two or three years of longing that London ships were bringing 
 to Virginia, among the other new publications, volumes of the 
 poems of Ossian, invested with the halo of a London celebrity, soon 
 to become European. Burly Johnson, tyrant of Great Britain, had 
 not yet denounced them as forgeries ; and all the reading world 
 accepted them as genuine relics of antiquity. In these poems there 
 is much which could not but have impressed a youth who had 
 listened spell-bound to the melodious oratory of an Indian chief, 
 of which he understood not a word, and gazed with such interest 
 upon the scene of the various groups of listeners, each group by its 
 own fire, and the full-orbed moon shining over all. It was an 
 Ossian scene. But he was now a lovelorn young man; and Ossian 
 contains on almost every page some picture of beauty in distress, 
 some utterance of passion or tenderness, which lovers can easily 
 make their own. *" Daura, my daughter, thou wert fair, — fair as the 
 moon on Para, white as the driven snow, sweet as the breathing 
 gale." So was Belinda. " Her fair bosom is seen from her robe, 
 as the moon from the clouds of night, when its edge heaves white 
 on the view from the darkness which covers its orb." He had often 
 observed this fine effect when dancing at the Apollo with Belinda, 
 arrayed in the bodice of the period. "Fair was she, the daughter 
 of the mighty Conlock. She appeared like a sunbeam among 
 women." Precisely the observation he had frequently made to Page, 
 when glorious Belinda appeared, surrounded by her excellent but 
 commonplace friends. " Often met their eyes of love." E-apturous 
 thought ! Would it ever be any thing more than a thought ? 
 Tradition has not recorded the color of Belinda's hair ; but whether 
 it were of the hue of the "raven's wing," or "dark brown,"^ or 
 of some lighter shade ; whether she wore her hair " flowing," or 
 "wandering," or in some other touching style, he had not far to 
 go in Ossian without meeting a damsel similarly adorned, with the 
 additional resemblance of white hauds and snowy arms. 
 
40 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 "^ It belongs to youtli to abandon itself to these literary raptures ; 
 but there has seldom been a case of such lasting fascination as this. 
 He could not get over it. His passion for Ossiau long outlived his 
 love for Belinda. The fulminations of Dr. Johnson, if they were 
 heard on this side of the Atlantic, could not shake his faith. It 
 chanced that Charles MacPherson, a relative of the translator, 
 visited Virginia a few years after, when Jefferson made his ac- 
 quaintance, and, we may be sure, gave utterance to his enthusiasm. 
 The longer he read the ancient poet, the more interested he became ; 
 and for ten years of his life, at least, he thought "this rude bard 
 of the North the greatest poet that ever existed." His friends had 
 but to start that topic to call from him the most animated discourse, 
 interspersed with many a favorite passage, delivered with his best 
 elocution. 
 
 Ossian had other American admirers. Some enthusiast, perhaps, 
 it was who took the name of Selma from Ossian, and gave it to 
 a town in Alabama, since become important, as another reader of 
 poetry fancied the pretty name of Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," 
 and called a village in New York, Auburn. With regard to other 
 familiar authors, the student's preferences were such as we should 
 expect, — Shakspeare, Homer, Moliere, Cervantes, and the old Eng- 
 lish songs and ballads. Copies of songs in his youthful hand are 
 still preserved, — simple old love-ditties that pleased the simple old 
 generations. Fiction had not then become one of the fine arts, and 
 he had little relish for any but the few immortal tales. Don 
 Quixote, his descendants think, was the only fiction lie ever read 
 twice. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. • 
 
 COMING OF AGE. 
 
 FoETUJfATELT for love-sick swains, the affairs of tliis vulgar 
 ■world go on, little as they may regard them; and, indeed, there is 
 reason to surmise that our lover recovered his serenity very soon 
 after he knew his fate. In his long letters to Page on their affairs 
 of the heart, there is generally a saving clause like this, " The court 
 is at hand, wliich I must attend constantly ; " or this, "As I suppose 
 you do not use your ' Statutes of Britain,' if you can lend them to 
 me till I can provide myself with a copy, it will infinitely oblige 
 me." During the period of his preparation for the bar, he usually 
 spent the winter at the capital and the summer at home ; working 
 at both places, as he did everywhere and always, with a constancy, 
 system, and cheerfulness, of which there have been few examples 
 among the toiling sons of men. It was this that soon enabled him 
 to play groomsman for happier friends with so much gayety, and 
 contemplate John Page's fortunate suit without a sigh. If we pos- 
 sessed nothing of this part of his life but these familiar letters to 
 John Page, wherein love and the Apollo are every thing to him, and 
 Coke appears as an '' old dull scoundrel," lying snugly packed in a 
 trunlc, we should be utterly deceived. 
 
 Letters, indeed, though of eminent value as biographical material, 
 are most misleading, unless we employ other means of information. 
 In this respect they are like newspapers, which are a kind of digest 
 of the letters of the time, and valuable as showing, not what 
 occurred at a given period, but what was then thought to have 
 occurred. The very exhaustion which results from long mental toil 
 may cause a student to write in a strain of reckless audacity or rol- 
 licking merriment very unlike his habitual tone, — as people who 
 find themselves in extremely dismal circumstances sometimes aban- 
 
 41 
 
42 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 don tliemselves to hilarity. As to the letters of public or famous 
 persons, are they not generally written under the expectation or 
 dread of ultimate publication? Happily we have other means than 
 these few epistles about Belinda and the girls, of knowing how this 
 student of law passed his time, both at the capital and at home. 
 
 He came of age in April, 1764. According to an old British 
 custom, he signalized the year by causing an avenue of trees to be 
 planted near his house. Time has dealt harshly with it ; for, after a 
 hundred and ten years, there are only a few battered, decaying 
 trees left, locusts and sycamores. He did not spend tliis birth- 
 day at home, but at Williamsburg, where he and all the other 
 mathematical heads of the place were intent upon a grand opera- 
 tion of measurement. "Every thing," he writes to Page, "is now 
 ready for taking the height of this place above the water of the 
 creeks," — two streams, one a tributary of tho James, and the other 
 of the York, both navigable to within a mile of Williamsburg; 
 and he hopes Page will come to take part in the interesting affair, 
 " if his mistress can spare him." 
 
 He did not delay in accepting the responsibilities of his position 
 as a leading gentleman of his county. We find him soon in two of 
 his father's offices, — justice of the peace and vestryman of the 
 parish. Not long after coming of age he set on foot a public im- 
 provement of importance to his neighborhood. The river Rivanna, 
 that flowed by his land, although a considerable stream, was so 
 obstructed as to be useless for purposes of navigation. Scarcely an 
 empty canoe had ever floated on it to the James. Upon reaching 
 home he examined its channel ; and, perceiving that it could be 
 cleared for twenty-two miles without too great expense, he set on 
 foot a subscription for the purpose, which was successful ; and, after 
 procuring an act of the legislature authorizing the work, he caused 
 it to be done. The result was, that he and his neighbors used the 
 river thenceforth for carrj'ing down all the produce of their farms. 
 Thus did this colonial squire announce and celebrate his coming of 
 age. 
 
 The young man took hold of his business as a farmer in a man- 
 ner which showed that the genuine culture of the mind is the best 
 preparation for the common as well as for the higher duties of life. 
 In every thing he did he was the educated being. Was there ever a 
 mortal so exact, so punctual, so indefatigable as he, in recording and 
 
COMING OF AGE. 43 
 
 tabularlzing details ? He may he said to have lived pen in hand. 
 He kept a garden-book, a farm-book, a weather-book, a receipt-book, 
 a pocket-expenditure book, and, later, a fee-book ; and there was 
 nothing too trivial to be entered in one of them, provided it really 
 had any relation to matters of importance. In the small, neat 
 hand then common in Virginia, h$ would record in his pocket-book 
 such items as these : " Put into the church-box, Id. • " " Paid a barber, 
 lid. ; " " Paid for pins, 4/2 ; " " Paid for whetting penknife, Ad. ; " 
 " Paid my part for an express to AVilliamsburg, 10s. ; " " Paid -Bell 
 for books, 355. / " "Paid postage, 8/3." In his garden-book, for some 
 pages of which we are indebted to Mr. Handall, may be read count- 
 less entries like the following : " March 30, sowed a patch of later 
 peas ; " " July 15, planted out celery ; " " July 22, had the last 
 dish of our spring peas ; " " March 31, grafted five French chestnuts 
 into two stocks of common chestnut." His garden-books show 
 that he was a bold and constant experimenter, always eager to try 
 foreign seeds and roots, of which he introduced a great number in 
 the course of his life. They show, also, that he was a close 
 observer and calculator. His weather-book, of which I possess a 
 few pages, given to me by Mr. Kandall, is a wonder of neatness and 
 minuteness, — fifty-nine days' weather history on one small page. 
 This is one day's record: "March 24, at 6.30, A.31., ther., 27°; 
 barom. 25°, wind N. W. (force of wind not stated) ; weather, clear 
 after rain, Blue Ridge and higher parts of S. W., mountain covered 
 with snow. No snow here, but much ice ; black frost." Multiply 
 this by fifty-nine, and you have the contents of one page of his 
 weather-book, every word of which, after the lapse of a century, is 
 as clear and legible as diamond type. Ifc is ruled in ten columns, 
 one for each class of entries. This practice of minute record, which 
 remained with him to the end of his days, he began while he was still 
 a student. Nor did he ever content himself with the mere records 
 of items. These were regularly reviewed, added, compared, and 
 utilized in every possible way. It was the most remarkable of all 
 his habits. 
 
 Interesting events were occurring in the family at the Shadwell 
 farm-house. During his first year in college one of his sisters was 
 married ; and now, soon after his coming of age, another marriage in 
 the family, and one that proved of far more importance to the head 
 of the house, became probable. 
 
44 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 Among the most beloved of liis schoolfellows was Dabney Carr, a 
 youth destined like himself to the bar. It was that Dabney Carr 
 who fills the place in the annals and the hearts of Virginia which 
 young Josiah Quincy occupies in those of Massachusetts ; both 
 having died in the prime of early manhood, at the beginning of the 
 Revolution, after figuring honorably in its opening scenes. At this 
 time, when Jefferson was coming into his duties as head of his 
 family, clearing out his river, and watching his early peas, Dabney 
 Carr was getting into practice as a country lawyer ; and when Jef- 
 ferson was at home, during the long summers, the two friends and 
 fellow-students were insej)arable. Two miles from Jefferson's home 
 was an isolated mountain, five hundred and eighty feet high, which 
 he afterwards named Monticello, or The Little Mount, covered then 
 to the summit with the primeval forest. High up on this mountain, 
 in the deepest shade of the luxuriant woods, under an ancient oak 
 of vast size, the young friends constructed a rustic seat; and thither, 
 in the summer mornings, they would ride with their law-books, and 
 pass peaceful days there in study and conversation. Both of them 
 became strongly attached to the spot. They made a compact, that 
 ^whichever of them died first should be buried by the other under 
 'that grand old tree. The compact was fulfilled; and the place was, 
 ■ long after, enclosed and made the burial-place of the Jefifersons ; so 
 that both the friends now repose on the spot where they studied 
 together in their youth. It was these happy visits to the mountain 
 that led to its selection, by and by, as the site of Jefferson's abode. 
 When the young men returned to Shadwell at the close of the day, 
 they returned to a house full of sisters, three of whom were young 
 ladies, twenty-five, twenty-one, nineteen years of age; the work of 
 the day done, the costume of the evening assumed, the evening meal 
 ready, the violin and music in the next room. It was the beautiful 
 and gifted Martha, in ber ninteenth year, upOn whom Dabney Carr 
 fixed his affections ; and in the summer vacation of 1765 Jefferson 
 had tlie pleasure of seeing them married. The bridegroom had still 
 his fortune to make ; and they went away to live, a few miles off, in 
 the next county of Louisa, in a house amusing to them all for its 
 smallness and simplicity. It was one of the triumphant marriages. 
 " Tliis friend of ours. Page," wrote Jefferson, when they had been 
 five years married, *'in a very small house, with a table, half a dozen 
 chairs, and one or two servants, is the happiest man in the universe. 
 
COMING OF AGE. 45 
 
 Every incident in life he so takes as to render it a source of pleas- 
 ure. Witli as much benevolence as the heart of man will hold, but 
 with an utter neglect of the costly apparatus of life, he exhibits to 
 the world a new phenomenon in philosophy, — the Samian sage in 
 the tub of the cynic." To this pleasing picture, Mr. Wirt adds, 
 from tradition current in Virginia, that Dabney Carr was the most 
 formidable rival in oratory that Patrick Henry had among the law- 
 yers of his own age ; and that his person was of engaging elegance, 
 and his voice finely toned. In old age Mr. Jefferson wrote of him as 
 the man who united inflexible firmness of principle to the most per- 
 fect amiability. 
 
 But on this happy wedding-day in July the shadow of death 
 already rested upon the young student's home. His eldest sister, 
 Jane, the best of all his friends hitherto, was approaching her end. 
 She died in October, leaving a void in the home and the heart of her 
 brother that was never quite filled. From the funeral of this beloved 
 sister he was summoned soon, by the opening of the General Court, 
 to resume his law-studies at Williamsburg. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE LAW-STUDENT. 
 
 Not that he discontinued those studies at home. He used, in 
 after years, to tell his grandchildren, that, when he was a law-student, 
 he kept a clock in his bedroom at Shadwell, on a shelf opposite his 
 bed ; and his rule was to get up in the summer mornings as soon 
 as he could see what o'clock it was, and begin his day's work at once. 
 In the winter he rose at five, and went to bed at nine. He did a 
 fair day's work at his law-books every day, even at home, besides 
 attending to company, besides his vigorous gallop on horseback, 
 besides walking to the top of Monticello, besides looking closely to his 
 garden and farm, besides caressing his violin, besides keeping up his 
 Latin, Greek, French, and an extensive system of other reading. 
 Nevertlieless, it is reasonable to conclude that at the capital he gave 
 himself to study more completely than at home ; and it is there that 
 we can best observe him as a student. 
 
 The law is not an easy nut to crack, even in these days, after so much 
 of its husk has been cut away by the Broughams and the Dudley 
 Fields of the legal profession. It will never be easy to apply the 
 eternal principles of right to the "cases" that arise in our compli- 
 cated human life. But, when Jefferson studied law, generations of 
 ingenious men had spent their lives in investing the science of jus- 
 tice with difficulties, artificial and needless. They had wrought with 
 such success, that if our young justice of the peace had been required 
 to record that John Jones had hanged himself at Williamsburg, he 
 would have been obliged to say, — and I now copy from a Virginia 
 justice's own book, in which his name appears as a subscriber, — that 
 " John Jones, not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being 
 moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil, at Williamsburg, 
 in a certain wood as aforesaid, standing and being, the said John 
 46 
 
THE LAW-STUDENT. 4T 
 
 Jones, being then and there alone, with a certain hempen cord, of the 
 vahie of tliree pence, wliich he then and there had and. hekl in his 
 hands, and one end thereof tlien and there put about his rieck, and 
 the other end thereof tied about a bough of a certain oak-tree, him- 
 self then and there, with the cord aforesaid, voluntarily and feloni- 
 ously, and of his malice aforethought, hanged and suffocated." 
 This is a specimen of the law jargon of that day, for the retention 
 of which lawyers strove so long. It was the confused, bewildering 
 element in which lawyers worked for centuries. 
 
 When the love-sick student opened that "old dull scoundrel, Coke," 
 he opened a work printed in black-letter, and offering as little prom- 
 ise of entertainment or instruction as the outside of a gold-mine does 
 of the wealth within it. The author himself, in his Preface, does 
 not flatter his readers with any hope of pleasure in the perusal. 
 
 ''I shall desire," he says, ''that the learned reader will not con- 
 ceive any opinion against any part of this painful and large volume 
 until he shall have advisedly read over the whole, and diligently 
 searched out and well considered of the several authorities, proofs, 
 and reasons, which we have cited and set down for warrant and con- 
 formation of our opinions throughout this whole work." 
 
 To add to a student's perplexity, the passages from Lyttleton, the 
 ancient lawyer whom Coke is "upon," are written in the law-French 
 of Edward III.'s time, plentiful]}'- interspersed with Latin equiva- 
 lents and illustrations. But, fortunately, these passages are short, 
 being mere texts for old Coke's long discourses. In the edition of 
 1789 Lyttleton's observations on " Fee Simple " occupy a third of 
 a page ; but Coke's quaint and subtle treatment of the topic fills 
 thirty-three pages, with a thick-set hedge of references down each 
 page. It would be an excellent month's work for a student to master 
 that one chapter. Tedious and repulsive as all this must have been 
 to a youth the morning after dancing with Belinda at the Apollo, 
 Jefferson learned in due time to value old Coke aright. When, in 
 the midst of his law-studies, the passage of the Stamp Act called at- 
 tention to the rights of Englishmen, he turned with responsive mind 
 to Coke's learned and cordial comments upon Magna Charta, and 
 recognized a master. He probably did not know that one Roger 
 Williams served Lord Coke as clerk and amanuensis in his youth, 
 and went from his inspiring influence to convey to New England the 
 first notion it ever had of the rights of conscience. What Coke did 
 
48 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 in person for Eoger AVilliams and Rhode Island, Jefferson thought 
 he did by his Look for himself, for oMadison, for Henry, for Dabney 
 Can, foi; Virginia, for the United States. 
 
 " Coke Lyttleton," he once wrote, "was the universal elementary 
 book of law-students ; and a sounder Whig never wrote, nor of pro- 
 founder learning in the orthodox doctrines of the British Constitu- 
 Q tion, or in what were called British liberties. Our lawyers were then 
 all Whigs. But when his black-letter text, and uncouth but cun- 
 ning learning, got out of fashion, and the honeyed Mansfieldism of 
 Blackstone became the student's horn-book, from that moment that 
 profession (the nursery of our Congress) began to slide into Toryism, 
 and nearly all the J'oung brood of lawyers are now of that line. They 
 suppose themselves indeed to be Whigs, because they no longer know 
 what Whiggism or Republicanism means." 
 
 When he had made a conquest of Coke, he was desirous of 
 ascending to the sources of English law in the ages preceding the 
 Norman invasion ; for, as one of his old friends remarked, he 
 " hated superficial knowledge." He perceived that law, like the 
 other sciences, is progressive ; and that Coke merely marked a stage 
 of its progress. He used to compare the laws of England, in their 
 course down the ages, with the journey of a traveller, who, when he 
 has accomplished a certain distance, stops, looks back over the route 
 he has pursued, recalls the business he has done, and, before going 
 farther, makes a record of the whole. The most ancient digest of 
 this nature is not Coke, but Bracton, an ecclesiastic of Richard I.'s 
 reign, who wrote in law-Latin, more puzzling than Lyttleton's law- 
 Erench, to read whom the most learned lawyers of Jefferson's time 
 required a glossary. This work, too, he read and loved, because it 
 was able and luminous, and because it interpreted Magna Charta in 
 the spirit and lifetime of the men who wrote and extorted it. He 
 went even farther back, and conned with keenest scrutiny the book 
 of Alfred's laws, the abrogation of which, by the Conqueror, the 
 English so bitterly lamented. He did not fail to note the " pious 
 fraud " of the ancient clergy in prefixing to Alfred's laws five chap- 
 ters of the Book of Exodus, the twentieth to the twenty-fourth 
 inclusive, though they contained laws at direct variance with those 
 of the king. Eor a young vestryman, he seems to have had a sharp 
 scent for pious frauds. 
 
 Already we observe, in the few relics of his student life which 
 
THE LAW-STUDENT. 49 
 
 have come down to us, indications of the coming Jeiferson, the 
 Thomas Jefferson of American history. The most interesting of all 
 those relics is an extract, which he made for a friend in 1814, from 
 a book in which, when he was plodding through Bracton and the 
 older law-hooks, he was accustomed to enter abstracts. " When I 
 was a student of the law," he wrote to this friend, " not half a cen- 
 tury ago, after getting through Coke Lyttleton, whose matter can- 
 not he abridged, I was in the habit of abridging and commonplacing 
 what I read meriting it, and of sometimes mixing my own reflec- 
 tions on the subject." The abstract which is thus introduced is 
 a complete exhibition of Jefferson's mind and mental habits as a 
 student of law. We notice, first of all, that it is numbered '-873/' 
 which shows us that he studied, as well as lived, pen in hand. Com- 
 pact as it is with abbreviations (" pi." for plaintiff, "■ def." for de- 
 fendant, " V." for versus, " Blackst." for Blackstone), it fills seven 
 and a half octave pages, bristling all over with references, old 
 French and law-Latin, which attest his industry and knowledge. 
 There is a maturity of tone and completeness of execution in the 
 work which would surprise us if it had been done by a lawj'^er of 
 many years' standing at the bar. But the most remarkable and 
 rare quality which it exhibits is an absolute fearlessness of mind, a, 
 loyalty to truth, no matter to what conclusion the evidence may 
 lead, and no matter what array of authorities may ha-^e maintained 
 the contrary. In a mind that is immature or unformed, a dis- 
 regard fox authorities may be mere vanity and presumption ; but 
 when the intelligence is superior, trained to investigation, and 
 patient of labor, it is the quality to which the whole of the progre'ss 
 of our race is due. An independent, superior mind is the most 
 precious thing that human nature possesses. 
 
 This young man found it an axiom of the courts, that the Bible 
 was a part of the common law of the realm ; and it was in accord- 
 ance with this principle that witches were hanged, tithes exacted, 
 and labor forbidden on Sunday. In the long document before us he 
 denied the fact, and traced the error up to its source in one of the 
 ancient law-books, the author of which had converted the words 
 ancien scripture (employed in a work still older) into " Holy Scrip- 
 ture." The student proved that the words ancien scripture, as 
 employed in the original, meant precisely what they seem to mean, 
 that is, ancient writings, the old records of the Church. Having 
 4 
 
50 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 thus detected tlie source of the error, lie follows it down through the 
 law-books, until he finds it stated with bluntest simplicity by Sir 
 ]\[atthew Hale, thus: '•'Christianity is parcel of the laws of Eng- 
 land." " Sir Matthew Hale," observes this relentless pursuer of 
 -error, "quotes no authority, but rests the statement on his own; 
 which was good in all cases in which his mind received no bias from 
 his bigotry, his superstitions, his visions about sorceries, demons, 
 &c. The power of these over him," continues the student, "is ex- 
 emplified in his hanging of the witches." From this dictum of Sir 
 Matthew Hale he proceeded to the time when it bore fruit in laws 
 making it criminal to write against Christianity, or to utter words 
 implying disbelief in it. Blackstone incorporated the doctrine into- 
 his commentaries, and Mansfield into his decisions. " The essen- 
 tial principles of revealed religion," Lord Mansfield had just said 
 on the bench, "are part of the common law;" which carried the 
 doctrine still farther, while leaving the public, as Jefferson indig- 
 nantly remarked, " to find out, at our peril, what, in the opinion of 
 the judge, and according to the measure of his foot or his faith, are 
 those essential principles of revealed religion obligatory on us as 
 part of the common law." And all this without authority to sup- 
 port it ; for " this string of authorities," resumes the wrathful stu- 
 dent, " all hang on the same hook, a perverted expression of 
 Prisot's." 
 
 But this was not enough. He goes back into antiquity, as far as 
 the seventh century, when Christianity was introduced intcj England, 
 and examines every source of information, from Alfred to Bracton, 
 and can find no trf^ce of formal or informal adoption of Christianity 
 as part of the common law; dwelling particularly upon the obvious 
 fact, that the insertion of the chapters of Exodus among the laws 
 of Alfred was " an awkward monkish fabrication ; " and showing 
 that the adoption by Alfred of the Ten Commandments was an 
 express exclusion of the laws in Exodus, which were suited only to 
 the Jews. " The adoption of a part proves the rejection of the rest, 
 as municipal law." 
 
 We observe further, in this curious paper, a certain aversion to 
 the clergy as an order, joined to a veneration for the Christian 
 religion. The fact that Christianity is truth, he remarks, does not 
 make it part of the law of England. The Newtonian philosophy' is 
 truth, but it is not common law. " Christianity and Newtonianism 
 
THE LAW-STUDENT. 51 
 
 being reason and verity itself, in tlie opinion of all but infidels and 
 Cartesians, they are protected under the wings of the common law 
 from the dominion of other sects, but not erected into dominion over 
 them." He illustrates the point further by an allusion to tlie con- 
 troversy concerning the use of the lancet in medical practice. He 
 was among the first to reject bleeding as a common remedy, and 
 early forbade his overseers to bleed a negro. An eminent Spanish 
 doctor, he says, affirms that the lancet had slain more than the 
 sword ; but Dr. Sangredo maintains, that, with plentiful bleedings and 
 draughts of warm water, every disease can be cured. Both these 
 opinions the common law protected ; but neither of them was com- 
 mon law. How palpable all this, he remarks ; but " the English 
 judges have piously avoided lifting the veil under which it was 
 shrouded," since ''• the alliance between Church and State in Eng- 
 land has ever made their judges accomplices in the frauds of the 
 clergy, and even bolder than they are." The precepts of the gospel, 
 he adds, were designed, by " their benevolent Author," to bear sway 
 in the realm of conscience, and only there. 
 
 Old Virginia had had a world of trouble with matters ecclesias- 
 tical and religious ; and this is among the reasons why so large a 
 number of young men of Jefferson's day were on ill terms with the 
 Church. Of ISTew-England intolerance the world has heard enough ; 
 but few persons of the present day seem to be aware, that, for every 
 outrage committed on the human intellect in New England, a case 
 equally atrocious can be found in the annals of Virginia. The Blue 
 Laws of Connecticut were a forgery ; but Virginia once had a code 
 of Blue Laws that were all too real. 
 
 When Virginia was settled in 1607, let us remember, nothing was 
 known of the art of colonization. Shiploads of worthless adven- 
 turers were poured out upon the banks of the James, and deprived of 
 the usual motives to exertion by being fed from the common stock. 
 During the fi.rst five years, there was no such thing as private prop- 
 erty in Virginia. Many of the settlers were men of loose character, 
 unused to labor, unacquainted with any useful occupation, — dis- 
 charged soldiers, and men released from prison, and sent to Virginia 
 to get rid of them. Hence the colony often presented a scene of idle- 
 ness, waste, and disorder. No returns of value were made to the 
 company at home ; and the enterprise, from being highly popular, 
 sunk into disrepute, and became the theme of ridicule and burlesque. 
 
52 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOIS". 
 
 It was long before the company in London attributed the ill- 
 success of the colony to its true causes. Tlie soil was fertile, the 
 climate was healthy, the rivers abounded in fish, and the forests in 
 game : why could not a few hundred Englishmen, in the prime and 
 vigor of their days, without women and children to support, main- 
 tain themselves in a country for which Nature had done so much? 
 They cast the whole blame upon the colonists themselves, whom 
 they had so unwisely selected, and then deprived of the great natural 
 motive to exertion. Accordingly, in the year 1611, the fourth year 
 of the colony's existence, they sent over a code of laws for the gov- 
 ernment of the people, as severe, bloody, and inquisitorial, as any 
 on record. 
 
 By this code it was death to speak disrespectfully of the king, of 
 the Trinity, "or against the known articles of the Christian faith." 
 Stealin'g was punished with death. If any man uttered an oath, 
 " taking the name of God in vain," the punishment for the first 
 offence was to be "severe; " for the second, he was to have a "bod- 
 kin" (stiletto) thrust through his tongue; and, for the third, he was 
 to be tried by court-martial, and, if found guilty, sentenced to death. 
 If any man treated a clergyman with disrespect, he was to be pub- 
 licly whipped three times, and ask pardon in church before the 
 whole congregation on three successive Sundays. Every one was 
 obliged to go to church both Sunday morning and afternoon, and 
 attend the Sunday exercise in the Catechism ; the penalty for neglect 
 being, for the first offence, the loss of a week's jDrovisions ; for the 
 second, whipping, and the loss of provision as well ; and, for the 
 third, cU'ith ! A washerwoman who should purposely keep back or 
 change the linen intrusted to her was to be publicly whipped ; and 
 a baker who should cheat in the weight of his bread, for the first 
 offence, had his ears cut off; and, for the second, was sent to the 
 galleys for a year. To give a better idea of this astounding code, I 
 will copy the thirty-third law entire, as a fair specimen of its form 
 and spirit : — 
 
 "33. There is not one man nor woman in this colony, now pre- 
 sent, or hereafter to arrive, but shall give up an account of his and 
 their faith and religion, and repair unto the minister, that, by his 
 conference with them, he may understand and gather whether hereto- 
 fore they have been sufficiently instructed and catechised in theprin- 
 
THE LAW-STUDENT. 53 
 
 ciples and grounds of religion ; whose weakness and ignorance herein, 
 the minister finding, and advising them, in all love and charity, to 
 I'epair often unto him, to receive therein a greater measure of knowl- 
 edge ; if the J shall refuse so to repair unto him, and he, the minis- 
 ter, give notice thereof unto the governor,- the governor shall cause 
 the offender, for his first ^ime of refusal, to be whipped ; for the 
 second time, to be whipped twice, and to acknowledge his fault 
 upon the sabbath day, in the assembly of the congregation; and, for 
 the third time, to be whipped every day until he hath made this 
 same acknowledgment, and asked forgiveness for the same ; and 
 shall repair unto the minister to be further instructed as aforesaid; 
 and upon the sabbath, when the minister shall catechise, and of 
 him demand any question concerning his faith and knowledge, he 
 shall not refuse to make answer, upon the same peril." 
 
 The punishments for military offences were extremely cruel ; such 
 as cutting off the right hand, and having neck and heels bound to- 
 gether for thirty successive nights. !N"ot only were the laws severe, 
 but there was ordained a complete and effective system for their 
 enforcement, and for the detection of offences. Take this rule, for 
 example : — 
 
 " It shall be the duty of the captain of the watch, half an hour 
 before the divine service morning and evening, to shut the ports 
 and place sentinels : and the bells having tolled the last time, he 
 shall search all the houses of the town, to command every one, of 
 what quality soever, — the sick and hurt excepted, — to repair to 
 church ; after which, he shall accompany all the guards with their 
 arms — himself being last — into the church, and lay the keys 
 before the governor." 
 
 And, as if all this were not enough, a prayer of surprising length 
 — it fills more than five octavo pages, closely printed — was sent 
 over from England, and required to be said, morning and evening, 
 by the captain of the guard, or one of his principal officers. This 
 prayer is unique, as I think the reader will allow when he reads 
 the following sentence from it : — 
 
 " And whereas we have, by undertaking this plantation, under- 
 
54 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 gone the reproofs of the base world, inasmuch as many of our owu 
 brethren laugh us to scorn, Lord ! we pray thee, fortify us 
 against this temptation : let Sanballat and Tobias, Papists and play- 
 ers, and such other Amonits and Horonits" — so in the original — 
 " the scum and dregs of the earth, let them mock such as help to 
 build up the walls of Jerusalem, and they that be filthy let them be 
 filthy still, and let such swine still wallow in the mire ; but let not 
 the rod of the wicked fall upon the lot of the righteous ; let not 
 them put forth their hands to such vanity ; biit let them that fear 
 thee rejoice and be glad in thee, and let them know that it is thou, 
 Lord ! that reiguest in England, and unto the ends of the world." 
 
 In this strange way the prayer rambles on, page after page, until 
 at length it ends with an outburst of mingled patriotic and sectarian 
 feeling : — 
 
 " Lord, bless England, our sweet, native country ; save it from 
 Popery, this land from heathenism, and both from Atheism." 
 
 This cruel code, which combined the harshest features of the 
 Spartan and Mosaic laws, was translated from the martial law of 
 Holland, with the addition of some rules which originated in Puritan 
 England. It does not appear that it made the colonists more provi- 
 dent, or the colony more profitable ; for we still read in the old rec- 
 ords of the neglect to plant corn, and of the propensity of many 
 settlers to pass their time in sport. One of the best men in the 
 colony, an old soldier and a good citizen, entered into a conspiracy 
 with some of the earliest comers to overthrow the government, and 
 abrogate these cruel laws. The j)lot was detected, and the ringleader 
 executed. On another occasion, five men, unable to endure the sys- 
 tem, formed a plan for running away to the Spanish colony in 
 Florida, which they supposed they could reach in five days. This, 
 also, was a capital offence by the new code, and I presume it was 
 capitally punished. 
 
 Nor did Virginia escape the witchcraft mania of a later day. In 
 fact, the history of the Province contains abundant explanation of 
 the peculiar, the intense, the unappeasable hatred of ecclesiastical 
 domination which raged in the souls of her more thoughtful sons of 
 Jefferson's generation. Young as he was, it could not have been 
 
THE LAW-STUDENT. 55 
 
 difficult for liira to discover the nnsuitableness of a union of Church 
 and State to the circumstances of modern communities ; for the evil 
 results of the union in Virginia were never so apparent as just then, 
 when he was studying law, from 1762 to 1767. The clergy, indeed, 
 had fallen into contempt ; or, as Bishop Meade expresses it, had be- 
 come "the laughing-stock" of the colony. Nor does the bishop 
 fall into the usual error of attributing this to the " Twopenny Quar- 
 rel " between the clergy and the vestrymen, of which Mr. Wirt gives 
 us so interesting an account in his Life of Patrick Henry. In 
 that dispute, the clergy had both law and justice on their side, as 
 Mr. Wirt avows, while exulting in his orator's victory over both. 
 As Patrick Henry was always Jefferson's guest when he came to 
 Williamsburg, doubtless our student heard his merry friend's own 
 version of that affair; and, being himself a vestryman and a young 
 man, may have shared the general joy at the defeat of the clergy. 
 
 The clergymen of Virginia were in a position so false and demor- 
 alizing, that, as a body, they could not but become indolent and disso- 
 lute. The law gave them sixteen thousand pounds of tobacco per 
 annum ; which might be worth two hundred pounds a year, if the 
 quality were high, and the incumbent lucky and skilful in selling it ; 
 or it might be worth sixty pounds a year, if the quality were low and 
 the crop superabundant. They were further allowed by law four 
 hundred pounds of tobacco, or forty shillings, for preaching a funeral 
 sermon ; two hundred pounds of tobacco for a marriage by license ; 
 fifty for a marriage by banns ; and a fee for baptism, which custom 
 appears to have fixed at a guinea for the rich, and five shillings for 
 others. To these revenues was added a glebe sufficient for a good 
 farm, which a liberal vestry, we are told, were sometimes kind enough 
 to ''stock" with one or two families of slaves. The clergy, ap- 
 pointed without much regard to their fitness, were subjected to little 
 supervision. The parishes were of great extent, stretching some- 
 times as much as thirty mile^ along a river, and jet so thinly inhab- 
 ited that they could scarcely furnish a congregation ; and such was 
 the scarcity of candidates, that a commissar}'- hesitated to suspend 
 a clergyman, even for notorious vice, because the parish might remain 
 vacant for two or three years. 
 
 Thus circumstanced, each clergyman behaved according to his dis- 
 position. A few of them, men of learning and virtue, did their duty, 
 and eked out their slender and changing incomes by taking pupils j 
 
56 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 and it was tliese few who saved civilization in the colony. Otliers, 
 men of rude energy and executive force, pushed the cultivation of 
 their glebes, bought more slaves, raised more tobacco, speculated 
 sometimes in both, grew rich, reduced their parish duty to the mini- 
 mum, and performed that minimum with haste and formality. But 
 the greater number lived as idle hangers-on of the wealthier houses, 
 assisting their fellow-idlers, the planters, to kill time and run through 
 their estates, not always dissolute, but easy-going, self-indulgent, good- 
 natured men of the world. It was not very uncommon for the clergy- 
 man of a parish to be president of its jockey-club, and personally 
 assist in the details of the race-course, such as weighing the men and 
 timing the horses. It was common for clergymen .to ride after the 
 hounds in fox-hunting; and they were as apt to nail the trophj'' of 
 the day's chase to their stable-door as any other men. The names 
 of clergymen figured among the patrons of balls, and they were 
 rather noted for their skill at cards, v All of which was just as proper 
 for clergymen as for planters, and more necessary. But in those days 
 the bottle was the vitiating accompaniment of every innocent delight. 
 The race must end in a dinner, and the dinner must end under the 
 table. The day's hunt must be followed by a night's debauch. The 
 cliristening of a child must be the pretext for a day's revel. This 
 single element of mischief converted all festal days, all honest mirth, 
 all joyous recreation, into injury, shame, and ruin. Nothing can 
 make any headway against the potency of wine; for it suspends the 
 operation of that within us which enables us to resist, and finally 
 destroys it. It vitiates the^ texture of the brain itself, the seat of life, 
 and the citadel of all the superior forces. And the wine which flowed 
 so freelj' at the planters' tables was Madeira, strongest of wines, so 
 enriched by time and two long voyages, that the uncorking of one 
 bottle filled a large house with fragrance. 
 
 The tales we read of the clergy of Old Virginia stagger belief, 
 though it is clergymen who report them. The reverend rector 
 of Wicomio, we read, not approving the bread placed upon the com- 
 munion-table, cried out from the altar, in the midst of the service, to 
 one of his church-wardens, " George, this bread is not fit for a dog." 
 We read of another who was invited after church to dinner at a 
 planter's house, where he drank so much that he had to be tied in his 
 gig, and a servant sent to lead his horse home. One jolly parson 
 comes down to us reeling up and down the porch of a tavern, bawling 
 
THE LAW-STUDENT. 57 
 
 to the passevs-by to come and drink with him. Another lives in the 
 memory of his count}' because he fought a duel within sight of the 
 church in which he had formerly officiated. Another is remembered 
 as the jovial hunter who died cheering on the hounds to the chase. 
 One is spoken of as pocketing annually a hundred dollars, the reve- 
 nue of a legacy, for preaching four sermons a year against atheism, 
 gambling, racing, and swearing, though himself a notorious swearer, 
 racer, and gambler. Another is the hero of a story, that, one day, par- 
 son and vestry differed in opinion, quarrelled, and came to blows. 
 The parson, a giant in strength, put them to flight. Not content 
 with his victory, he renewed the battle on Sunday morning in church, 
 when, from the vantage-ground of the pulpit, he hurled at them this 
 text from Nehemiah : "And I contended with them, and cursed 
 them, and smote certain of them, and plucked off their hair ; " which 
 had the keen sting of literal truth. 
 
 One old clergyman is remembered as staggering towards the altar 
 at the time of communion, wheu the rector, who was officiating, 
 ordered him back to his seat. The monthly dinners of the clergy 
 have not yet passed out of mind, to which men would ride for thirty 
 or forty miles, and revel far into the night. The court records of 
 Hampton show that a clergjanan of that parish was presented by the 
 grand jury for drunkenness, and on another occasion for slander ; and 
 that, when before the court, he behaved with such insolence as to be 
 committed to prison for contempt. Bishop Meade of Virginia, to 
 whom the reader is indebted for several of these incidents, relates 
 that a lady once came to one of his clergymen, asking re-baptism, as 
 she had doubts whether the christening of her infancy was valid. 
 The clergyman who performed the ceremonj'-, she said, dined with 
 her father that day ; and, after dinner, her father won back from the 
 priest at cards the very guinea he had paid him before dinner as his 
 baptismal fee. 
 
 The Bishop of London, hearing of these scandals, would sometimes 
 urge his commissary, the president of William and Mary College, 
 to proceed against the clergy known to be drunkards. The difficulty 
 of proof was submitted to the bishop as an excuse for not complying 
 with his commands. At what point of intoxication does it become a 
 scandal? How shall we decide when a clergyman has been drunk 
 enough for ecclesiastical censure ? The Bishop of London sent over 
 directions on this point. He thought that if a clergyman sat an 
 
58 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 hour or more with a company that were drinking strong drink, — 
 not wine, — and took the cup as it went the rounds of the table, and 
 drank the healths proposed, like the rest of the company, there was 
 ground of proceedings. He was also of opinion, that "striking and 
 challenging, or threatening to fight, or laying aside any of his gar- 
 ments for that purpose, staggering, reeling, vomiting, incoherent, 
 impertinent, obscene, or rude talking," was sufficient to justify 
 judges in deciding that "the minister's behavior at such a time 
 was scandalous, indecent, unbecoming the gravity of a minister." 
 Por many years, too, as before observed, the commissary-president 
 was himself too fond of the bottle to prosecute a drunken clergyman 
 without calling attention to his own habits. 
 
 Pld Virginia was a kind of caricature of Old England in every 
 thing. As in England this state of things in the Church called 
 forth Wesley and Whitefield; so in Virginia, says John Burk, 
 "swarms of Methodists, Moravians, and New-Light Presb^-terians" 
 came over the border from Pennsylvania, and pervaded the colony, 
 "propagating their doctrines with all the ardor and vehemency of 
 gesture and boldness of denunciation which mark the first move- 
 ments of a new sect in religion." It was during the boyhood of 
 Jefferson that these " swarms " are represented to have darkened 
 the air ; and he was old enough to observe the beginnings of the 
 bitter conflict between the New Lights (Henry Clay's father was 
 one of them) and the royal government. Burk, who was a new 
 light of another description, and in full accord with Jefferson in his 
 "disestablishment" measures of a later day, informs posterity, that 
 when these swarms descended upon Virginia, " government had not 
 yet learned the secret of subduing the frenzy of religious bigotry by 
 suffering it to waste its powers, and perish by convulsions of its own 
 exciting." Nor was the government alone in fault. Many of 
 Jefferson's stanchest supporters in the measures by which the 
 domination of one sect was terminated gave the governor at 
 this period moral and official support in silencing the dissenting 
 ministers. 
 
 His own mind, we may be sure, did not arrive at the simple 
 solution of this problem all at once. Possibly the young vestryman 
 may have himself regarded the swarms as furnishing occasion for 
 the interference of a young justice of the peace. The vestryman's 
 oath, then used in Virginia, was stringent enough : — 
 
THE LAW-STUDENT. 59 
 
 " I, Thomas Jefferson, as I do aclinowledge myself a true son of 
 the Church of England, so I do believe the articles of faith therein 
 professed, and do oblige myself to be conformable to the doctrine 
 and discipline therein taught and established ; and that, as a 
 vestryman of this church, I will well and truly perform my duty 
 therein, being directed by the laws and customs of this country and 
 the canons of the Church of England, so far as they will suit our 
 present capacity ; and this I shall sincerely do, according to the 
 best of my knowledge, skill, and cunniiig, without fear, favor, or 
 partiality ; and so help me Grod." 
 
 The time came, as most readers know, when he could not have 
 taken this oath, though he never ceased to perform the duties 
 which it indicates. As his mind matured, his religion reduced Q 
 itself to two articles, — belief in God, and veneration for the char- 
 acter and precepts of Jesus Christ ; which has been, during the last 
 century and a half, a kind of established religion with minds of 
 the cast and grade of his. But he ever lived in the most perfect 
 accord with neighbors who believed more than he could, giving 
 freely of his time, money, and skill to promote their religious 
 objects. It was long before Charlottesville became village enough 
 to have a church ; and every preacher that came along occupied 
 the court-house, a small, rude edifice, without seats for auditors. 
 Old men of the neighborhood used to remember young Jefferson 
 riding over to the service on Sunday morning, with a small folding- 
 chair of his own contriving hung to his saddle, upon which he sat 
 in the court-room. By and b}^, when the Episcopalians were ready 
 to build their church, he drew_ tlie plan ; and the edifice which re- 
 sulted, Bishop Meade testifies, was better adapted to the purposes 
 of a church than many modern buildings much more costly. This 
 jcliurch still stands. 
 
 We may say, therefore, that if the church of his youth and 
 early manhood did not materially assist in the formation of his char- 
 acter, it did not place obstacles in the way of his mental growth. 
 He was unrestricted in his reading. It would not have been so if 
 he had come to college twenty je&vs sooner. Bishop Meade men- 
 tions that when, about 1740, " the first infidel book was imported 
 into Virginia," it created such excitement that the governor and 
 president of the college wrote to the authorities in England about 
 
60 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 it. Governor Fauquier would not have taken so much trouble. 
 They had such works in Boston as early as 1720, as Franklin 
 records, who read and was convinced by them. Jefferson, when a 
 law-student, could not have had many books at Williamsburg ; but 
 we know that among his books was an edition of Hume's Essays, 
 because he speaks of having lent two of the volumes to Patrick 
 Henry. Few young men of Jefferson's cast of mind have ever read 
 Hume's "Essay on Miracles" without being much influenced by it, 
 at least for a time. 
 
 Meanwhile he continued his study of the law with excessive 
 ardor, including in his preparation for the bar a vast range of sub- 
 jects. Indeed, he went to a rash and perilous excess in study. He 
 bore it with impunity, because he inherited a constitution- exception- 
 ally strong, because he had horses at command, because, during his 
 long vacations at home, he was obliged to attend to his farms and 
 improvements. But his friend Madison, led astray by his example 
 and precepts, and pursuing his education at Princeton, far from 
 horse and home, nearly killed himself with study, and could not 
 recover his health for many years. Indeed, though among the very 
 best of American citizens, and of infinite value to his country when 
 his country most needed its best citizens, James Madison was never 
 quite the -man he might have been if he had studied less and 
 played more at college. The only fault Jefferson could ever see in 
 this most-honored and most-trusted of all the friends of his life, 
 was a certain lack of power to stand firm against vehement opposi- 
 tion, — a certain lack of stanch, indomitable manhood, — caused, 
 perhaps, by the waste of the capital stock of his vitality at Prince- 
 ton. Thus Peel was made sensitive to the shallow sarcasm of 
 Disraeli. Thus valedictory men pass from the Commencement plat- 
 form into oblivion. Thus to-day, throughout Christendom, Igno- 
 rance is master, and Knowledge is its hireling; Ignorance controls 
 capital, and Knowledge lives on wages ; Ignorance rides in a car- 
 riage, and Knowledge trudges on foot; Ignorance edits, and 
 Knowledge writes ; the Counting-room orders, and the Sanctum 
 
 ; obeys. 
 
 ^""Before Jefferson had finished his law-studies, his devotion to 
 study drew admiring eyes upon him. Young men asked his advice 
 as to what they should read, and parents consulted him concerning 
 the education of their sons. He was asked to suggest a course for 
 
THE LAW-STUDENT. * 61 
 
 Madison, when Madison was seventeen and himself twenty-three. 
 He had ah'eady written an outline for a young man about to enter 
 upon the study of tlie law; and we may learn from that both what 
 he practised himself, and what he laid down for Madison, Monroe, 
 and other friends. 
 
 The student, duly prepared for the study of the law by mastering 
 Latin and French, and by a course of those "peculiarly engaging 
 and delightful " branches, natural philosophy and mathematics, 
 must divide each day into portions, and assign to each portion the 
 studies most proper for it. Until eight in the morning he should 
 confine himself to natural philosophy, morals, and religion; reading 
 treatises on astronomy, chemistry, anatomy, agriculture, botanj'', 
 international law, moral j)hilosophy, and metaphysics. Religion, 
 during these early morning hours, was to be considered under two 
 heads, — " natural religion " and " religion sectarian." For informa- 
 tion concerning sectarian religion, the student was advised to apply 
 to the following sources: "Bible; New Testament ; commentaries 
 on them by Middleton in his works, and by Priestley in his ' Corrup- 
 tion of Cliristianity,' and 'Early Opinions of Christ;' the sermons 
 of Sterne, Massillon, and Bourdaloue." From eight to twelve he 
 was to read law, and condense cases, "never using two words where 
 one will do." From twelve to one, he was advised to " read poli- 
 tics," in Montesquieu, Locke, Priestley, Malthus, and the Par- 
 liamentary Debates. In the afternoon he was to relieve his mind 
 with history; and, when evening closed in, he might regale him- 
 self with literature, criticism, rhetoric, and oratory. No, not regale 
 himself, but sit down to a hard and long evening's work, as Jeffer- 
 son did himself, keeping it up sometimes till two in the morning. 
 The student was recommended in the evening to write criticisms 
 of the books he read, to analyze the orations of Demosthenes and 
 Cicero, to read good English orations and pleadings with closest 
 attention to the secrets of their excellence, to compose original 
 essays, and to plead imaginary causes with a friend. 
 
 This was cram, not education. It might make a perfect chief 
 clerk, but not a great minister.- It would have diminished Jefferson, 
 but for his fiddle, his horses, his farms, his journeys, and his minu- 
 ets at the Apollo. Perhaps, however, as he knew his young friends 
 better than we do, he was aware that most of theni required no ur- 
 ging to take rest and recreation. Madison read this paper too liter- 
 
f 
 
 62 'life of THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 ally, without putting in the saving clauses ; and Monroe was saved 
 by the summons to arms, which, in 1775, drew him and most of his 
 fellow-students from William and Mary to the sterner discipline of 
 Cambridge, where man could not, just then, be regarded as a crea- 
 ture composed of intellect alone. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 STAMP-ACT SCENES. 
 
 Passing events are an important educating force to attentive 
 minds. Perhaps they educate us more than all things else, for we 
 cannot easily get off our lesson for a single day ; and, once in a 
 generation, occur electric events which rouse and inform the minds 
 of whole nations at once.' What person in the United States so 
 unteachably dull as to have been no more of a human being in 1865 
 than he was in 1861 ! But, in all recent history, I know of no example 
 more striking of the greater good that results from great evil, than 
 the Stamp-act agitation of 1764 to 1766, which began the de-colo- 
 nization — the independent public life — of North America. It so 
 chanced that our student was in the thick of events at the time. It 
 was the Stamp Act which changed old Coke's comments on ]\[agna 
 Charta from dead law into living gospel ; and, what the Staiup Act 
 did for Jefferson's mind, it did for the mind of his country. It 
 converted the fundamental principles of right into the familiar 
 things of daily speech, and infused the essence of old Coke into a 
 million minds that never heard his name. He had watched with 
 interest, as he himself records, the series of events by which impe- 
 rial Chatham had given Great Britain her opportunity of empire by 
 making her supreme in Korth America; and he was now to follow, 
 with interest more intense and more intelligent, the events by which 
 an ignorant king and a corrupt ruling class threw England's 
 magnificent chance away, and caused her to lapse into an island 
 again. 
 
 His friend, Patrick Henry, had been coming and going during 
 these student years ; dropping in when the General Court met in 
 the autumn, and riding homeward, with a book or two of Jefferson's 
 in his saddle-bags, when the court adjourned over till the spring; 
 
 63 
 
G4 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 then returning with the books unread. The wondrous eloquence 
 which he had displayed iu the Parsons Case in December, 17G3J does 
 not seem to have been generally known in Williamsburg in 1764; 
 for he moved about the streets and public places unrecognized, though 
 not unmarked. It would not have been extraordinary if our young 
 student had been a little ashamed of his oddity of a guest as they 
 walked together towards the Capitol, at the time when the young 
 ladies were abroad, — Sukey Potter, Betsy Moore, Judy Burwell, and 
 the rest ; for Henry's dress was coarse, worn, and countrified, and 
 he walked with such an air of thoughtless unconcern, that he was 
 taken bj- some for an idiot. But he had a cause to plead that winter ; 
 and when he sat down he had become '' Mr. Henry " to all Williams- 
 burg. You will observe in the memorials of Old Virginia, from 1765 
 to 1800, that, wdioever else may be named without a prefix of honor, 
 this "forest-born Demosthenes," as Byron styled him, is generally 
 styled Mr. Henry. To Washington, to Jefferson, to Madison, to all 
 that circle of eminent men, he ever remained '"'Mr. Henry." On 
 that day in 1764 he gave such an exhibition of his power, that, dur- 
 ing the next session of the House of Burgesses, a vacancy was made 
 for him, and he was elected to a seat. The up-country yeomen, 
 whose idol he had become, gladlj'' gave their votes to such a man, 
 when the Stamp Act was expected to be a topic of debate. 
 
 And so, in May, 1765, the new member was in Williamsburg to 
 take his seat, a guest again of his young friend Jefferson. He sat, 
 day after day, waiting for some of the older members to open the 
 subject. But no one seemed to know just what to do. A year be- 
 fore the House had gently denied the right of Parliament to tax the 
 colonies, and softly remonstrated against the threatened measure ; 
 but as the act had been jDassed, in spite of their objections, what 
 more could a loyal colony do ? No one thought of formal resistance, 
 and remonstrance had failed. What else ? What next ? However 
 frequently the two friends may have conversed upon this perplexity, 
 it was Patrick Henry, who, to use his own words, " alone, unadvised, 
 and unassisted," hit upon the proper expedient. 
 
 Only three daj's of the session remained. On the blank leaf of 
 ail old Coke upon Lyttleton — perhaps Jefferson's own copy — 
 the new member wrote his celebrated five resolutions, of this purport : 
 We, Englishmen, living in America, have all the rights of English- 
 men living in England ; the chief of which is, that we can only be 
 
STAIMP-ACT SCENES. . 65 
 
 taxed by our own representatives ; and any attempt to tax us other- 
 wise meuaces British liberty on both continents. In all probability, 
 Jefferson knew that something of the kind was intended on that 
 memorable day, for he was present in the House. There was no gal- 
 lery then, nor any other provision for spectators ; but there could be 
 no objection to the friend and relative of so many members standing 
 in the doorway between the lobby and the chamber ; and there he 
 took his stand. He saw his tall, gaunt, coarsely-attired guest rise in 
 his awkward waj^-, and break with stammering tongue the silence 
 wliich had brooded over the loudest debates, as week after week of 
 the session had passed. He observed, and felt too, the thrill which 
 ran tlirough the House at the mere introduction of a subject with 
 which every mind was surcharged, and marked the rising tide of 
 feeling as the reading of the resolutions went on, until the climax of 
 audacity was reached in the last clause of the last. How moderate, 
 how tame, tha words seem to us ! " Every attempt to invest such 
 power (of taxation) in any person or persons whatever, other than 
 the General Assembly aforesaid, has a manifest tendency to destroy 
 British and American freedom." "Ravishing words to the Whig 
 members from Albemarle and the other western counties. Sound 
 as old Coke himself, in the judgment of our spell-bound listener in 
 the doorway. Words of fearful import to the Tory lords of the 
 eastern counties. Not approved, as yet, by George Wythe, nor by 
 Pe3''ton Randolph, whom the student held in so much honor. 
 
 When the reading was finished, he heard his friend utter the 
 opening sentences of his speech, with faltering tongue as usual, and 
 giving little promise of the strains that were to follow. But it was 
 the nature of this great genius, as of all genius, to rise to the occa- 
 sion. Soon Jefferson saw him stand erect, and, swinging free of all 
 impediments, launch into the tide of his oration; every eye capti- 
 vated by the large and sweeping grace of his gesticulation ; every 
 ear charmed with the swelling music of his voice ; every mind 
 thrilled or stung by the vivid epigrams into which he condensed his 
 opinions. He never had a listener so formed to be held captive by 
 him as the student at the lobby door, who, as a boy, had found the 
 oratory of the Indian chief so impressive, and could not now resist a 
 slurring translation of Ossian's majestic phrases. After the lapse of 
 fifty-nine years, he still spoke of this great day with enthusiasm, and 
 described anew the closing moment of Henry's speech, when the 
 
 6 
 
66 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOl^. 
 
 orator, interrupted by cries of treason, uttered the well-known words 
 of defiance, " If this be treason, malie the most of it ! " 
 
 The debate which followed Mr. Henry's opening speech, was, as 
 Jefferson has recorded, "most bloody." It is impossible for a reader 
 of this generation to conceive the mixture of fondness, pride^ and 
 veneration with which these colonists regarded the mother country, 
 its parliament and king, its cluirch and its literature, and all the 
 glorious names and events of its history. Whig as Jefferson was by 
 nature and conviction, he could not give up England as long as there 
 was any hope of a just union with her. What, then, must have 
 been the feelings of the Tories of the House, — Tories by nature 
 and by party, — upon hearing this yeoman from the west speak of 
 the natural rights of man in the spirit of a Sidney, and use language 
 in reference to the king which sounded to them like the prelude to 
 an assassin's stab? They had to make a stand, too, for their posi- 
 tion as leaders of the House, unquestioned for a century. To the 
 matter of the resolutions no one objected. All that Wythe, Pendle- 
 ton, Bland, and Peyton Pandolph could urge against them was, that 
 they were unbecoming and unnecessary. The House had already 
 remonstrated without effect, and it became a loyal people to submit. 
 *' Torrents of sublime eloquence " from Patrick Henry, as Jefferson 
 observes, swept away their arguments ; and the resolutions were car- 
 ried ; the last one, however, by only a single voice. Standing in the 
 door-way, the student watched the taking of the vote on the last 
 resolution, upon which the contest had been hottest. When the 
 result had been declared, Peyton Randolph, the king's attorney- 
 general, brushed past him, saying, as he entered the lobby, "By 
 God ! I would have given five hundred guineas for a single vote." 
 
 Doubtless the young gentlemen went home exulting. Patrick 
 Henry, unused to the artifices of legislation, and always impatient 
 of detail, supposing now that the work for which he had come to 
 Williamsburg was done, mounted that very evening and rode away. 
 Jefterson, perhaps, was not too sure of this ; for the next morning, 
 some time before the hour of meeting, he wa,s again at the Capitol, 
 and in the Burgesses' Chamber. His' uncle, Colonel Peter Randolph, 
 one of the Tory members, came in, and, sitting down at the clerk's 
 table, began to turn over the journals of the House. Pie had a dim 
 recollection, he said, of a resolution of the House, many years ago, 
 having been expunged ! He was trying to find the record of the 
 
STAMP-ACT SCEiSTES. 67 
 
 transaction. He wanted a precedent. The student of law looked 
 over his shoulder, as he turned the leaves ; a group of members 
 standing near, in trepidation at the thought of yesterday's doings. 
 The House-hell rang ; the House convened ; the student resumed 
 his stand in the doorway. A motion was made to expunge the last 
 resolution of yesterday's series; and, in the absence of the mighty 
 orator whose eloquence had yesterday(made the dull intelligent and ^ 
 the timid brave^the motion was carried, and the resolution was 
 expunged. 
 
 We hear no more from Jefferson of his making the tour of Europe, 
 after the Stamp Act. Perhaps, although the odious measure was 
 repealed a year after its passage, to the boundless joy of the people, 
 these events lessened his desire to visit the land of his forefathers. 
 He begins now to speak with some asperity of the Tory leaders in 
 England. In abstracting cases, he detects the political bias of the o 
 judge in his rulings. As Braddock's defeat revealed to the colonists 
 that red-coats were not invincible, so did the Stamp Act break the 
 enchantment of distance, and show some of them that British judges 
 and law-makers could be subservient to power. Nor was he rich 
 enough for such a luxury as foreign travel, and by this time he must 
 have discovered the fact. His farms did not yield an income of 
 more than four hundred pounds sterling per annum. 
 
 But a young gentleman may take a little recreation in travel, with- 
 out going to the ends of the earth. The system of inoculation for 
 the small-pox was still a topic with physicians and persons inter- 
 ested in medical science. Jefferson was, all his life, a curious inquirer 
 in such subjects ; and he became, by and by, a not unskilful sur- 
 geon, — one who could, upon an emergency, sew up an ugly wound, 
 or set a negro's broken leg. The delicac}' of touch, and dexterity of 
 hand, that he possessed, joined to his patience in investigation and 
 fearlessness of precedent, could have made him a master in surgery. 
 Convinced of the utility of inoculation, then performed by Dr. Ship- 
 pen of Philadelphia, he availed himself of this pretext, in the spring 
 of 1766, to take a journey northward, and see eomething of the world 
 that lay beyond the boundaries of Virginia. At twenty-three he 
 bad never been out of his native Province. 
 
 This journey he made, not on horseback, but in a one-horse chaise. 
 Readers familiar with the road will not be at a loss to imagine the 
 time he must have had in crossing so many wide and brimming 
 
68 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON". 
 
 riyers over wliicli we now thunder with so much ease, — the York, 
 ■Pamunkey, Rappahannock, Potomac, Pawtuxent, Patapsco, Susque- 
 hanna, Delaware, Passaic, Hackensack, and Hudson, without count- 
 ing fifty smaller streams, and those wide shallows that indent the 
 sliores of Chesapeake Bay, — all to be forded, or crossed in a ferry- 
 boat propelled by poles or oars. It argues ill for his habits that his 
 horse ran away with him twice the first day, for the animal evidently 
 wanted exercise. The second he rode in a drenching rain from 
 morning till night, without comiug to a habitation in which he could 
 take shelter. The third day, in fording the swollen Pamunkey, he 
 was nearly drowned. After getting beyond this river, he came to 
 a more inhabited region, where he visited old college friends at their 
 homes, to his great content. At Annapolis, the capital of Maryland, 
 then a town of a thousand inhabitants, and of somewhat more im- 
 portance than Williamsburg, he found the people in the midst of 
 public rejoicings over the repeal of the Stamp Act. The Maryland 
 Assembly was in session. It was no such courteous and dignified 
 body, he told his friend Page, as the House of Burgesses of Virginia. 
 Business was conducted in a more informal manner; so loosely, in 
 fact, as to move the young Virginian to laughter. He was struck, 
 however, with the beauty and convenience of the situation, — "the 
 largest vessels, those of four hundred hogsheads, being able to brush 
 against the sides of the dock." 
 
 At Philadelphia the inoculation was jjerformed. When he recov- 
 ered, he continued his journey to the clean, crooked, little, cobble- 
 stoned, half-Dutch city, so green and shady, that covered the last mile 
 of beautiful Manhattan Island, — a place then of nearly twenty thou- 
 sand inhabitants. Of his stay in New York we know only one trifling 
 fact. He chanced to take lodgings in a house where a young gen- 
 tleman of his own age from Massachusetts, named Elbridge Gerry, 
 was staying. They became acquainted with one another well enough 
 to remember the chance meeting, when, nine years after, they met 
 in "the Congress" at Philadelphia. They remained friends and 
 political allies for fifty years. It was perhaps on his return from 
 this journey that an incident occurred, which, in his old age, he used 
 to relate with so much glee. On his way through Virginia he 
 stopped at a tavern, the landlady of which had just returned from 
 the funeral of a young man of that neighborhood, whom she extolled 
 and lamented with much feeling. "But, Mr. Jefferson," said she, 
 
' STAMP-ACT SCENES. 69 
 
 "we have the consolation of knowing that every thing was done for 
 him that could be done. He was bled no less than six and twenty 
 times." 
 
 And so sped these happy, laborious years of preparation for the 
 bar. Early in the year 1767, about the time of his twenty-fourth 
 birthday, he was admitted ; and he began at once the practice of his 
 profession. He had not to wait for business. One of his existing O 
 account-books shows, that, in this first year of his practice, he was 
 employed in sixty-eight cases before the Greneral Court of the Prov- 
 ince, besides county and office business. 
 
CHAPTEE XI. 
 
 LAWYERS IN OLD VIRGINIA. 
 
 He was admitted to the bar at a fortunate time for a profession 
 that tlirives most wlien tbe community has ceased to thrive. 
 
 During tlie flush period, when Virginia seemed to be so flourish- 
 ing because she was living on her capital, — the virgin soil of the 
 river valleys, — the people indulged to the full that antipathy to 
 lawyers which appears natural to the rustic mind. Far back in 
 Charles I.'s reign, in 1642, the Assembly had passed a law, that 
 " all mercenary attorneys be wholly expelled " from the courts of 
 Virginia; meaning by "mercenary attorneys," paid attorneys. 
 The reason assigned for this act was, that "many troublesome suits 
 are multiplied by the unskilfulness and covetousness of attorneys, 
 who have more intended their own profit and their inordinate lucre 
 than the good and benefit of their clients." The very tautologies of 
 this law seem to betray the trembling eagerness of the honest bur- 
 gess who drew it. 
 
 For nearly eleven years not a lawyer in Virginia could lawfully 
 take a fee for serving a client in court. But, of course, the rogues 
 evaded the act ; and this the Assembly tried to prevent by enacting 
 a supplement, to the eflect that no attorney should " take any rec- 
 ompense, directly or indirectly," for any legal service ; but, in case 
 a judge should perceive that a man was likely to lose his cause 
 merely by his inability to plead it, he was " to appoint some fitt man 
 out of the people " to plead it for him, who was to be paid such a 
 fee as the court should deem just. The plan was plausible, but it 
 did not answer. The act was repealed ; and such attorneys as were 
 licensed were bound by a stringent oath not to oppress clients nor 
 foment suits. But no sooner were the lawyers in the courts again, 
 than they behaved in such a way as to become more odious than 
 70 
 
LAWYERS IN OLD VIRGINLi. 71 
 
 ever. Tlien the House of Burgesses — in 1657, liis Highness, O 
 Oliver Cromwell, being Lord Protector — took up the s\ibject anew, 
 and debated this question : " Shall we attempt a regulation or totall 
 ejection of lawyers ?" The House decided for "totall ejection," and 
 framed a law which they thought would be too much even for a 
 lawyer's cunning to evade: "Noe person or persons within this 
 coUony, either lawyers or any other," shall plead for pay in a court, 
 nor give counsel in any cause or controversy, for any kind of com- 
 pensation, under a penalty of five thousand pounds of tobacco for 
 every offence ; " and because the breakers thereof, through their 
 subtillit}'' cannot easily be discerned," every man pleading for another 
 must take an oath that he is not " a breaker of the act." 
 
 But the governor and council had a veto on the acts of the 
 Assembly. It reveals to us the intensity of the odium in which law- 
 yers were held, that the governor and council did not directly veto 
 so preposterous a law, but attempted to parry it by sending this 
 message : " The governor and council will consent to this proposi- 
 tion so farr as it shall be agreeable to Magna Charta." The Assem- • 
 bly made " humble reply," that they had considered Magna Charta, 
 but found nothing therein applicable to the case ; and as law_yers had 
 been kept out of the courts for more than ten years, by the act of a for- 
 mer House, "wee humbly conceive that wee have no less power" to 
 eject them again. The humble reply seems to have convinced the 
 governor and council ; for the law appears in the statutes, and 
 remained in force for twenty-three years ! 
 
 But our complicated modern world cannot do without lawyers, not 
 even simple, rustic Old Virginia. And accordingly in 1680, thirty- O 
 second of Charles II., we find a House of Burgesses — farmers to a 
 a man — enacting the lawyers back again, and giving good reasons 
 therefore : " Whereas all courts in this country are many tj^mes hin- 
 dered and troubled in their judicial proceedings by the impertinent 
 discourses of many busy and ignorant men, who will pretend to as- 
 sist their friend in the business, and to clear the matter more plainly 
 to ^he court, although never desired or requested thereunto by 
 the person whome they pretended to assist, and many tyuies to the 
 destruction of his cause, and the great trouble and hindrance of the 
 court ; for prevention whereof to the future, Bee it enacted," that no 
 one shall in future presume to plead in any court of this colony 
 without license " first obtained and had," under penalties of six 
 
r2 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 hundred or of. two thousand pounds of tobacco, according to the 
 dignity of the court in which the offence shall have been committed. 
 
 This act terminated a controversy which had lasted thirty-eight 
 years ; and the Assembly, having admitted lawyers, fixed their com- 
 pensation at rates which were meant to be liberal. For conducting 
 a cause in the chief court of the colony an attorney was allowed to 
 charge five hundred pounds of tobacco, and, in the county courts, 
 one hundred and fifty pounds, — splendid compensation, if tobacco 
 could only have been kept up to a shilling a pound. 
 
 When John Tiolfe, not yet husband of Pocahontas, planted the 
 first tobacco seed in Jamestown, in 1612, good tobacco sold in Lon- 
 don docks at five shillings a pound, or two hundred and fifty pounds 
 sterling for a hogshead of a thousand pounds' weight. Fatal facility 
 i of money-making! It was this that diverted all labor, capital, and 
 I enterprise into one channel, and caused that first shipload of 
 negroes in the James River to be so welcome. The planter could 
 have but one object, — to get more slaves in order to raise more 
 tobacco. Hence, the price was ever on the decline, drooping first 
 from shillings to pence, and then going down the scale of pence, 
 until it remained for some years at an average of about two pence a 
 pound in Virginia, and three pence in London. In Virginia, it 
 often fell below two pence ; as, during brief periods of scarcity, it 
 w^ould rise to six pence and seven pence. A fee of five hundred 
 pounds of tobacco, from 1680 to 1750, might average about three 
 guineas ; and a fee of one hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco, 
 something less than one guinea. These sums, small as they seem 
 to us, sufficed to create the profession of the law in Virginia, and to 
 draw into it a few of the younger sons of great planters, and the 
 eldest sons of western yeomen. 
 
 But these fees were the highest that could be charged. It is evi- 
 dent from Jefferson's own books, that his usual compensation was 
 somewhat less; for he records that, during his first year at the bar, 
 1767, he was employed in sixtj'-eight cases before the General 
 Court, — business that must have brought with it many cases in 
 county courts ; but his entire emolument for the year was a little 
 more than two hundred pounds sterling ; or in the currency of 
 Virginia, as set down by himself with Jeffersonian exactness, 
 ^ £293. 4s. 5|c?. From the accounts of later years, I should conclude 
 that his cases, one with another, yielded him about one pound ster- 
 
LAWYERS IN OLD VIRGINIA. 73 
 
 ling profit ; for the number of his cases and the number of pounds of 
 his law income are never far from equal, in the busier years of his 
 practice. Translating the pounds of tliat period into the dollars of 
 this, it was as though a lawyer of the present day should receive 
 fifty dollars for arguing a cause before the Supreme Court of the 
 United States, ten dollars for a cause before a local court, two dol- 
 lars for a verbal opinion, and five for a written one. As late as 1792, 
 when lawyers' fees were again fixed by law in Virginia, the most 
 eminent lawyer in the State could not legally charge, for the most 
 elaborate written opinion on the most abstruse question relating to 
 real estate, more than sixteen dollars and sixty-six cents ;' and 
 when lawyers attended at a distance from their homes, they could 
 charge for their time not more than three dollars and fifty-eight 
 cents per day. Well might Mr. Webster say, that, in that age, 
 la wye ^' worked hard, lived well, and died poor." 
 
 Nevertheless, it was a good time for a lawyer when Jeiferson 
 began to practise ; for he could make up for the smallness of his 
 fees by the number of his cases. Everybody almost was in law. 
 After a hundred years of profusion, pay-day, -postponed by mort- 
 gage and other devices, was at hand ; and the shadow of coming 
 ruin darkened many a stately house. 
 
 Old Virginia is a pathetic chapter in Political Economy. Old 
 Virginia, indeed ! She reached decrepitude while contemporary 
 communities were enjoying the first vigor of youth ; while Nev^ 
 York was executing the task which Virginia's George Washington 
 had suggested and foretold, that of connecting the waters of the 
 great West with the ocean ; while New England was careering 
 gayly over the sea, following the whale to his most distant retreat, 
 and feeding belligerent nations with her superabundance. One 
 little century of seeming prosperity; three generations of spend- 
 thrifts; then the lawyer and the sheriff! Nothing was invested, 
 nothing was saved for the future. Tliere were no manufactures, no 
 commerce, no towns, no internal trade, no great middle class. As fast 
 as that virgin richness of soil could be converted into tobacco, and sold 
 in London docks, the proceeds were expended in vast, ugly man- 
 sions, heavy furniture, costly apparel, Madeira wine, fine horses, 
 huge coaches, and more slaves. The planters lived as though 
 virgin soil were revenue, not capital. They tried to maintain in 
 Virginia the lordly style of English grandees, without any Birming- 
 
74 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOIST. 
 
 Iiam, Staffordshire, Sheffield, or London docks, to pay for it. Their 
 short-lived prosperity consisted of three elements, — virgin soil, low- 
 priced slaves, high-priced tobacco. The virgin soil was rapidly 
 exhausted ; the price of negroes was always on the increase ; and the 
 price of tobacco was always tending downward. Their sole chance 
 of founding a stable commonwealth was to invest the proceeds of 
 their tobacco in something that would absorb their labor and yield 
 them profit when the soil would no longer produce tobacco. 
 
 But their laborers were ignorant slaves, the possession of whom 
 destroyed their energy, swelled their pride, and dulled their under- 
 standings. Yirginia's case was hopeless from the day on which that 
 Dutch ship landed the first twenty slaves ; and, when the time of 
 reckoning came, the people had nothing to show for their long occu- 
 pation of one of the finest estates in the world, except great hordes 
 of negroes, breeding with the rapidity of rabbits; upon whose 
 annual increase Virginia subsisted, until the most glorious and 
 beneficial of all wars set the white race free, and gave Virginia her 
 second opportunity. 
 
 All this was nobody's fault. It was a combination of circum- 
 stances against which the unenlightened human nature of that period 
 could not possibly have made head. Few men saw anything wrong 
 in slavery. No man knew much about the laws that control the 
 prosperity of States. No man understood the science of agriculture. 
 Every one with whom those proud and thoughtless planters dealt 
 plundered them; and the mother country discouraged every attempt 
 of the colonists to manufacture their own supplies. There were so 
 many charges upon tobacco, in its course from the planter's packing- 
 house to the consumer's pipe, that it was no very uncommon thing, 
 in dull years, for the planter to receive from his agent in London, in 
 return for his hogsheads of tobacco, not a pleasant sum of money, 
 nor even a box of clothes, but a bill of charges which the price of 
 the tobacco had not covered. One of the hardships of which the 
 clergy complained was, tliat they did not "dare" to send their 
 tobacco to London, for fear of being brought in debt by it, but had 
 to sell it on the spot to speculators much below the London price. 
 The old Virginia laws and records so abound in tobacco information, 
 that we can follow a hogshead of tobacco from its native plantation 
 on the James to the shop of tlie tobacconist in London. 
 
 In the absence of farm vehicles; — many planters who kept a coach. 
 
LAWYERS IN OLD VIRGINIA. 75 
 
 had no wagons, — eacla hogshead was attached to a pair of shafts 
 with a horse between them, and "rolled" to a shed on the bank of 
 the stream. When a ship arrived in the river from London, it 
 anchored opposite each plantation which it served, and set ashore 
 the portion of the cargo belonging to it; continuing its upward 
 course until the hold was empty. Then, descending the river, it 
 stopped at the different plantations, taking in from each its hogs- 
 heads of tobacco ; and the captain receiving long lists of articles to 
 be bought in London with the proceeds of the tobacco. The rivers 
 of Virginia, particularly the Potomac and the James, are wide and 
 shallow, with a deep channel far from either shore ; so that the 
 transfer of the tobacco from the shore to the ship, in the general 
 absence of landings, was troublesome and costly. To this day, as 
 readers remember, the piers on the James present to the wondering 
 passenger from the North a stretch of pine planks, from an eighth to 
 half a mile long. The ship is full at length, drops down past 
 Newport News, salutes the fort upon Old Point Comfort, and glides 
 out between the capes into the ocean. 
 
 Suppose her now safe in London docks, say about the year 1735, 
 the middle of the prosperous period, when the great houses were 
 building in Virginia, with stabling for "a hundred horses," and pre- 
 text of work for " a hundred servants." By the time she is fast at 
 her berth, the vultures have alighted upon her deck. Two "land- 
 waiters" represent the authorities of the custom-house, and are 
 sworn to see that the king gets his own. A personage called the 
 "ship's husband" is not long behind them. He, representing the 
 merchant to whom the tobacco is consigned, would naturally be 
 the antagonist of the land-waiters ; but he is only too glad to establish 
 an understanding with them. And behind each of these two powers 
 there is a train of hangers-on, hungry for a morsel of the prey. 
 There is already a charge of two pounds for freight upon each hogs- 
 head. As soon as the ship is reported at the custom-house, the 
 king demands his "old subsidy" of three farthings upon every 
 pound of tobacco on board, — more than three pounds sterling on a 
 hogshead of a thousand pounds weight. The "duty" of five and 
 one-third pence per pound has next to be calculated, and a bond 
 given for its payment when the tobacco is sold for home consump- 
 tion. The purchaser, it is true, pays these duties ; but the planter is 
 responsible and bound for the payment. 
 
T6 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 Then there is a continuous fire of petty charges at each unfor- 
 tunate hogshead, some of which it is difficult now to explain. 
 I copy the following items from an agent's bill of 1733 : " primage, 
 6d;" "wharfage and lighterage, 6cZ.;" "Mr, Perry, M.;" "hus- 
 banding the ship, 4c?.;" "watching and drink, 3(3?.;" "entry in- 
 wards and bonds, GtZ.;" "land-waiters' fees, 3c?.;" " dinners,,^break- 
 fasts to the husband and officers while landing the ship, with other 
 incident expenses, 9fZ.;" "entry outwards and searchers, 8cZ.;" 
 "cocket* money, etc., 3c?.;" "debentures one with another, 13(Z.; " 
 "cooperage on board, 2c?.;" "ditto, landing. Is.;" " ditto outwards, 
 9c?.;" "refusing and hoops. Id.;" "porterage, rehousing, and 
 extraordinary rummaging, Qd. ;" "weighing and shipping, Qd.;" 
 "wharfage and lighterage outwards, 6d.;'' "cartage. Is.;" "ware- 
 house rent for three months. Is. 6d.;" "brokerage, 2s.;" "postage, 
 as charged by the post-office ; " " agent's commission, 2^ per cent." 
 In other bills I observe such words as " suttle," f and the old famil- 
 iar " tare " and " tret." 
 
 Besides these vexatious charges, each of which could be a pretext 
 for fraud, the London agent had other modes of despoiling the 
 planter who w^as quaffing his Madeira, or chasing the fox, three 
 thousand miles away. Two pounds of tobacco were allowed to be 
 taken from each hogshead for a sample ; but a cooper who knew 
 what was due to a British merchant and to himself could draw eight 
 pounds as well as two ; and a weigher who had been previously 
 "seen" could mark down the weight of a hogshead two hundred 
 pounds or ten pounds, according to the size of the hogshead ; leaving 
 the planter to decide whether his scales, or 'those of the London 
 custom-house, were untrustworthy. In a word, all those fraudulent 
 devices complained of by honest merchants in the bad days of the 
 New York custom-house were familiar in the custom-house of Lon- 
 don in 1733 ; and the frauds were concealed by precisely the same 
 means. Upon the arrival of a ship, the merchant to whom the 
 tobacco was consigned would apply for the services of certain land- 
 waiters, " ivhose friendship he could rely vpon,^' to superintend the 
 landing of his tobacco. Perhaps they were engaged at the time. 
 
 * Cocket. — A scroll of parchment, sealed and delivered by the officers of the custom- 
 house to merchants, as a warrant that their merchandise is entered. — Webster. 
 
 t Sl'Ttle. — Suttle- weight, in commerce, is the weight when the tare has been deducted, 
 and tret has yet to be allowed. — Wkbstkk. 
 
LAWYERS IN OLD VIRGINIA. 77 
 
 Then lie delayed landing his tobacco till they were at leisure. The 
 rest can be imagined. The weighers, the coopers, and the " ship's 
 husband " understand one another ; and " if," as an old remon- 
 strance has it, " any two of them agree in their account, the third 
 alters his book to make it agree with theirs." * We read, besides, 
 of British merchants sweeping the refuse of their warehouses into 
 casks, putting a little good tobacco at the top and bottom ; and, after 
 getting a drawback of duty from tlieir own government, sending 
 this mass of dust and stalks to defraud a foreign countr3^ In 1750, 
 when tobacco yielded the British government one hundred and fifty 
 thousand pounds sterling per annum, it gave the planter an average 
 profit of one pound sterling per hogshead. 
 
 The same factors who sold the Virginia tobacco were usually 
 charged to purchase the merchandise which the planters required. 
 Doubtless many of them performed both duties with sufficient cor- 
 rectness ; but, down to the Revolution, it was a standing complaint 
 with the planters, that their tobacco brought them less, and their 
 merchandise cost them more, than they had expected. Readers 
 remember the emphatic expostulations of General Washington on 
 both these points. The very ships that carried the tobacco, and 
 brought back the merchandise, were nearly all owned in London. 
 When a Yankee merchant had a prosperous year, or made a lucky 
 voyage, he built another schooner ; so that, when Jefferson made his 
 first bow to a jurv, in 1767, New England owned seven-eighths of the 
 shipping that frequented New-England ports. But of all the great 
 fleet trading with Virginia, — about three hundred vessels in 1767, — 
 seven-eighths belonged to British merchants. The Yankee's new 
 schooner proved a better investment than the Virginian's " likely 
 negro wenches," whom the Yankee's schooner brought for him from 
 the coast of Guinea ; and the Virginian's pipes of Madeira con- 
 sumed his acres, while the Yankee, with his New-England rum, 
 added acres to his estate. 
 
 How little the planters foresaw the desolation of their Province is 
 affectingly attested by many of the relics of their brief affluence. 
 They built tlieir parish churches to last centuries, like the churches 
 to which they were accustomed " at home." In neighborhoods 
 
 * Case of the Tobacco-Planters of Virginia, as represented by themselves : signed by the 
 Presiduut of the Council and Speaker of the House of Burgesses. London. 1733. 
 
78 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 where now a congregation of fifty persons co^^^d not be collected, 
 there are the ruins of churches that were evidently built for the 
 accommodation of numerous and wealthy communities ; a forest, in 
 some instances, has grown up all around them, making it difficult to 
 get near the imperishable walls. Sometimes the wooden roof has 
 fallen in, and one huge tree, rooted among the monumental slabs of 
 the middle aisle, has filled all the interior. Other old churches long 
 stood solitary in old fields, the roof sound, but the door standing 
 open, in which the beasts found nightly shelter, and into which the 
 passing horseman rode and sat on his horse before the altar till the 
 storm passed. Others have been used by the farmers as wagon- 
 houses, by fishermen to hang their seines in, by gatherers of turpen- 
 tine as storehouses. One was a distillery, and another was a barn. 
 A poor drunken wretcli reeled for shelter into an abandoned church 
 of Chesterfield County, — the county of the first Jeifersons ; and 
 he died in a drunken sleep at the foot of the reading-desk, where he 
 lay undiscovered until his face was devoured by rats. An ancient 
 font was found doing duty as a tavern punch-bowl ; and a tomb- 
 stone, which served as the floor of an oven, used to print memorial 
 words upon loaves of bread. Fragments of richly-colored altar- 
 pieces, fine pulpit-cloths, and pieces of old carving, used to be 
 preserved in farm-houses, and shown to visitors. When the late 
 Bishop Meade began his rounds, forty years ago, elderly people 
 would bring to him sets of communion plate and single vessels, 
 which had once belonged to the parish church, long deserted, and 
 beg him to take charge of them. 
 
 Those pretty girls of the Apollo, who turned young Jefferson's head 
 in 1762, and most of the other bright spirits of that generation, — 
 where does their dust repose ? In cemeteries so densely covered 
 with trees and tangled shrubbery, that no traces of their tombstones 
 can be discovered; in cemeteries over which the plough and the har- 
 row pass ; in cemeteries through the walls of which some stream 
 has broken, and where the bones and skulls of the dead may be 
 seen afloat upon the slime. 
 
 The suddenness of the collapse was most remarkable. Westmore- 
 land County, the birthplace of Washington, Madison, Monroe, and 
 Marshall, called absurdly enough "the Athens of Virginia," was 
 still the most polite and wealthy region of Virginia when Thomas 
 Jefferson was a young lawyer. In thirty years it became waste and 
 
LAWYERS IN OLD VIRGINLA.. 79 
 
 desolate. A picket-guard in 1813, posted on the Potomac to watch 
 for the expected British fleet, were seeking one day a place to 
 encamp, when they came upon an old church, the condition of which 
 revealed at once the completeness and the recentness of the ruin. 
 It stood in a lonely dell, where the silence was broken only by the 
 breeze whispering through the pines and cedars and dense shrub- 
 bery that closed the entrance. Huge oaks, standing near the walls, 
 enveloped the roof with their long, interlacing branches. The doors 
 all stood wide open ; the windows were broken ; the roof was rotten, 
 and had partly fallen in ; and a giant pine, iiprooted by a tempest, 
 was lying against the front, choking up the principal door. The 
 churchyard, which was extensive, and enclosed by a high brick wall 
 of costly structure, was densely covered all over with^ tombstones 
 and monuments ; many of which, though they bore names once held 
 in honor throughout Virginia, were broken to pieces, or prostrate, 
 with brambles and weeds growing thick and tangled between them 
 everywhere. The parish had been important enough to have a 
 separate building for a vestry just outside the churchyard wall. 
 This had rotted away from its chimney, which stood erect in a mass 
 of ruin. 
 
 With some difficulty the soldiers forced their way through the 
 fine old porch, between massive doors, into the church. What a 
 picture of desolation was disclosed'! The roof, rotted away at the 
 corners, had let in for years the snow and rain, staining and sj)oiling 
 the interior. The galleries, where in the olden time the grandees 
 of the parish sat, in their square, high pews, were sloping and lean- 
 ing down upon the peivs on the floor, and on one side had quite 
 fallen out. The remains of the great Bible still lay open on the 
 desk, and the tattered canvas which hung from the walls showed 
 traces of the Creed and Commandments which had once been written 
 upon it. The marble font was gone : it was a punch-bowl, the com- 
 mander of the picket was told. The communion-table, which had 
 been a superb piece of work, of antique pattern, with a heavy wal- 
 nut top, was in its place, but roughened and stained by exposure. 
 It was afterwards used as a chopping-block. The brick aisles 
 showed that the church was the resort of animals, and the wooden 
 ceiling was alive with squirrels and snakes. The few inhabitants 
 of the vicinity — white trash — held the old church and its wilder- 
 ness of graves in dread, and scarcely dared enter the tangled dell 
 
80 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 in which they were. It was only the runaway slave, overcome by a 
 greater terror, flying from a being more awful than any ghost, — 
 savage man, — that ventured to go into the church itself, and crouch 
 among the broken pews. 
 
 Such is the ruin that befalls a community which subsists upon 
 its capital. "We have seen the end of it. Mr. Jefferson, admitted 
 to the bar in 1767, saw the beginning-of it, and doubled his estate 
 by it in seven years' practice. He was present as a spectator in the 
 House of Burgesses in 17G5, when an attempt was made to bolster 
 the falling fortunes of leading members by loans of public money. 
 Patrick Henry exploded the scheme by an epigram. The speaker 
 of the House, who was also the treasurer of the Province, had been 
 in the habit for years of lending sums of the public money to dis- 
 tressed members and others, becoming himself responsible to the 
 government for the repayment. But those planters were doomed 
 never to be again in a paying condition. Many of them borrowed, 
 few repaid, until his deficit was a hundred and thirty thousand 
 pounds. A ring was formed in the Assembly, for the double pur- 
 pose of relieving the speaker's estate from this menacing obligation, 
 and of enabling him to accommodate others of the ring with further 
 loans of public money. A public loan-office was proposed, a sort of 
 Bank of Virginia, authorized to lend the public money on good 
 security. It was the intention of this ring to make the scheme 
 work backward, and include the loans already effected. Mr. Speaker 
 Eobinson, in fact, intended to slip his shoulders out from under 
 his burden, and leave it saddled upon Virginia. The bill being 
 introduced, the borrowing gentlemen supported it by the usual argu- 
 ment : Many men in the colony, of large property, had been obliged 
 to contract debts, the immediate exaction of which would cause 
 their ruin ; but with a little time, and a little seasonable assistance, 
 they could pay every thing they owed, with ease. Patrick Henry 
 was not the most solvent of men, but he saw the fallacy of this 
 argument as applied to the lavish aristocrats of Eastern Virginia. 
 
 " What, sir," he cried, condensing his speech into a sentence, 
 " is it proposed, then, to reclaim the spendthrift from his dissipation 
 and extravagance by filling his pocket with money ? " 
 
 There was an end of the scheme of a loan-office. That rending 
 sentence "penetrated the understandings of Western yeomen, tho 
 solvent class of Virginia ; and they were too numerous for the insol- 
 
LAWYERS IX OLD VIRGINIA. 81 
 
 vent aristocrats to carry a measure against them. The speaker 
 died next year : the deficit could no longer be concealed ; the real 
 object of the scheme became apparent ; and the speaker's estate 
 had to make good the loss. 
 
 All this sank deeply into the mind of the young man who stood 
 listening to the debate at the door of the chamber. That epigram 
 of his guest stuck in his rpemory, and remained fixed there while 
 Memory held her seat. In scenes widely different from these, at a 
 time many years distant, this debate, and the impressive commentary 
 upon it disclosed by the speaker's death, may have influenced him 
 too much, may have made him too distrustful of institutions which 
 enable men of business to apply the superabundance of. next month 
 to the insufiiciency of this. 
 
 For the present behold him a bus,y, thriving young lawyer, in the 
 midst of the general embai-rassment of the great planters. Sixty- ^.. 
 eight cases before the chief court of the Province the first year of 
 his practice ; the second 3- ear, one hundred and fifteen ; the third, one 
 hundred and ninety-eight ; the fourth, one hundred and twenty-one ; 
 the fifth, one hundred and thirty-seven ; the sixth, one hundred 
 and fifty-four ; the seventh, one hundred and twenty-seven ; the 
 eighth, — which was 1774, — only twenty-nine, for by that time 
 Virginia had other work for him. This account, which Mr. Randall 
 copied from Jefferson's own books, shows a falling off from the year 
 1769. But it was a falling off only from his practice in that one 
 court. As the new party lines were formed, and party feeling waxed 
 hot, he lost some practice in the General Court, but more than made 
 up for the loss by an increase of office business and county-court '^ 
 cases. In 1771 he was engaged in a hundred and thirty-seven causes 
 before the General Court ; but the whole number of his cases that 
 year was four hundred and thirty, since tJie politics that may have 
 repelled the tobacco lords of Lower Virginia attracted clients in the 
 mountain counties. To the income of four hundred pounds a year, 
 derived from his farm, a professional revenue was now added that 
 averaged more than five hundred pounds a year ; which made him, 
 with his excellent habits, a prosperous 3X)ung gentleman indeed, able 
 to add a few hundred acres to his estate from time to time, until his 
 home farm of nineteen hundred acres had become, in 1774, a number ^ 
 of farms and tracts, five thousand acres in all, and "all»paid for." 
 There was nothing in which a thriving Virginian of that day could 
 6 
 
82 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 
 
 invest his surplus income except land and slaves. Every one had 
 the mania for possessing vast tracts of land, hoping one day to have 
 negroes enough to clear and work them. Jefferson, however, appears 
 never to have bought slaves as an investment. ■ The thirty slaves 
 inherited from his father in 1757 had become but fifty-four in 1774 ; 
 anclliis further increase in this kind of property came to him by other 
 ways than purchase. 
 
 It is not clear to us what he could have done with his stores of 
 legal knowledge, practising before such courts as they had then in 
 Virginia. The General Court, of which we read so much, what was 
 it ? It was not a bench of learned judges, raised, from the bar- by 
 their superior ability -and judicial cast ot mind. It was composed of 
 the governor and a quorum (five) of the Council ; the Council being 
 a dozen or so of the great planters, appointed by the king, and 
 selected, as we are told, for their " wealtli, station, and loyalty." 
 This council was a little House of Lords to the Province; and, 
 like tlie British House of Lords, it was the Supreme Court 
 as well, without a learned chancellor on the woolsack. Governor 
 Fauquier, one would think, was better fitted to decide a card-table 
 dispute, a point of drawing-room etiquette, or the scanning of aline 
 in Horace, than knotty questions of law ; but he was the legal head of 
 this court as long as he filled the place of go.vernor. Nor is it to be 
 supposed that the wealthy planters of the Council had either inclina- 
 tion or ability to make up judgments from the reasoning of the 
 Wythes and the Jeffersons that conducted causes in their hearing. 
 But the English have had ways of neutralizing the errors of their 
 system. They know how, among a crowd of pleasure-loving, un- 
 learned peers, to get a few "law lords ; " and how, into a committee 
 or a commission of five or seven illustrious incapables, to insert one 
 real person, who is appointed for the purpose of doing the work ! So, 
 in Virginia, there aj)pears to have usually been in the body of 
 councillors one learned and able man, who performed the duty 
 of listening, weighing, and deciding. 
 
 Jefferson had most of the requisites of a great lawyer: industry, 
 so quiet, methodical, and sustained, that it amounted to a gift ; learn- 
 ing, multifarious and exact ; skill and rapidity in handling books ; 
 the instinct of research, that leads him who has it to the fact lie 
 wants, as surely as the hound scents the game ; a serenity of tem- 
 per, which neither the inaptitude of witnesses nor the badgering of 
 
LAWYERS IN OLD VIRGINIA. 83 
 
 counsel could ever disturb ; a habit of getting every thing upon paper 
 in such a way that all his stores of knowledge could be marshalled 
 and brought into action ; a ready sympathy with a client's mind ; an 
 intuitive sense of what is due to the opinions, prejudices, and errors 
 of others ; a knowledge of the few avenues by which alone unwel- 
 come truth can find access to a human mind ; and the power to state 
 a case with the clearness and brevity that often make argument 
 superfluous. And surely it ought to be reckoned among the quali- 
 fications of a lawyer — a trained servant of justice — that he is him- 
 self just, and a lover of whatever is right, fair, and equal between a 
 man and his brother. A grandson of Mr. Jefferson once asked an 
 old man, who, in his youth, had often heard him plead causes, how 
 he ranked as a speaker. " Well," said the old man, "it is hard to 
 tell, because he always took the right side." * 
 
 He was no orator. He knew too much, and ^vas too much, to be 
 eloquent. He once defined a lawyer as a person whose trade it is to 
 contest every thing, concede nothing, and talk by the hour. He 
 could not talk by the hour. Besides the mental impediment, there 
 was a physical impediment to his addressing a large company. If he 
 spoke in a tone much above that of conversation, his voice soon 
 became husky and inarticulate. But Madison, to whom we owe the 
 preservation of this fact, used also to say, that, when he was a student, 
 be heard his friend Jefferson plead a cause before a court, and he 
 acquitted himself well, speaking with fluency as well as force. He 
 could not have been wanting in such speech as was' oftenest required 
 before a jury, because we find his practice always increasing in the 
 county courts. If he had lived in these times, Patrick Henry and 
 himself would have formed a law partnership perhaps; Jefferson 
 getting up the cases, and Henry pleading such as gave scope and 
 opportunity to his magnificent talent. I It takes two men to make a 
 man. .What a power would have been wielded by a firm, one mem- 
 ber of which was possessed of an unequalled gift of uttering the 
 truth which the other was singularly gifted to investigate ! The two 
 talents have never been possessed in an eminent degree by one 
 individual. 
 
 This young lawyer loved his work, and took an interest in it, apart 
 from the exigencies of the moment. He was one of the first of his 
 
 * Domestic Life of Tliomas Jefferson, p. 40. 
 
84 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOiT. 
 
 countrymen to form historical collections, — a taste since developed 
 into mania. As Virginia was latp in becoming familiar with the 
 printing-press, the early laws had been supplied to the counties in 
 manuscript at public expense, and without any adequate provision for 
 their preservation. He found extreme difficulty in procuring copies 
 of some of them ; some appeared to have perished ; others existed 
 in one copy so rotten with age that a leaf would fall into powder on 
 being touched. " I set myself, therefore, to work," he says, "tocol- 
 lect all which were then existing, in order that when the day should 
 come in which the public should advert to the magnitude of their 
 loss in these precious monuments of our property and our history, a 
 part of their regret might be spared by information that a portion 
 had been saved from the wreck, which is worthy of their attention 
 and preservation. In searching after these remains, I spared neither 
 time, trouble, nor expense." The more ancient manuscripts he pre- 
 served in oiled silk, some of them being so far gone, that, having been 
 laid open for copying, they could never be gathered up again, but 
 perished of the operation. Others he had bound into volumes. If 
 the reader will turn over the volumes of Hening's " Statutes at 
 Large," a publication suggested by Jefferson, and the most impor- 
 tant work relating t(j the early history of Virginia which now exists, 
 he will discover that a very large number of the most curious docu- 
 ments and earliest laws are credited by the editor to Mr. Jefferson's 
 collection. 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 A MEMBER OE THE VIEGIJTIA LEGISLATURE. 
 
 It belonged to his position in Albemarle to represent that county 
 in the House of Burgesses ; but, in imitation of the British Parlia- 
 ment, the little parliament of Virginia usually lasted seven years, 
 and consequently there had been no general election, since he came of 
 age. In 1767 Governor Fauquier died, aged sixty-five, and there was 
 an interregnum of a year, during which the duties of governor 
 devolved on the President of the Council, John Blair; but there was 
 no pause in the course of political events. The king held to his 
 purpose of raising a revenue in the colonies ; and an obliging min- 
 istry having, as they supposed, learned wisdom from the failure of 
 their predecessors to enforce the Stamp Act, endeavored next " to 
 raise a revenue from the colonies without giving them any offence^ 
 These words of Charles Townsend give us the key to the policy of 
 the ministry. The colonies were to be flattered and conciliated. 
 They had objected to an internal tax ; very well, they should be 
 accommodated with external duties collected at the custom-houses, 
 trifling duties on glass, tea, paper, and painters' materials. Any 
 thing to oblige colonies so loyal, so willing to assist a gracious young 
 king. In the spring of 1768 an express came riding into Wil- 
 liamsburg, bearing a despatch from Massachusetts to the House of 
 Burgesses, announcing the firm resolve of Massachusetts to resist 
 these duties by all constitutional means, and asking the concurrence 
 and co-operation of Virginia. The messenger, having delivered his 
 despatch, rode southward to deliver copies of the same to the Caro- 
 linas and Georgia. 
 
 The Virginians, in the absence of a royal governor, could give full 
 play to their opposition ; for John Blair was in accord with the 
 popular feeling. Another remonstrance was addressed to Great 
 
 85 
 
86 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOIST. 
 
 Britain, asserting strongly, but with dignity and moderation, the old 
 principle, "ISTo power on earth has a right to impose taxes on the 
 people, or take the smallest portion of their pi'operty, without their 
 consent given b}' their representatives." It is remarkable with what 
 clearness this truth was perceived by every creature in America who 
 had capacity to perceive any truth. Nearly everybody seems, at 
 first, to have understood that this principle was, as our loyal Vir- 
 ginians said on this occasion, "the chief pillar of the Constitution," 
 without which "no man could be said to have the least shadow of 
 liberty ; " since no man could be truly said to possess any thing, if 
 other men could lawfully take any portion of it. 
 
 A royal governor of amplest 'dignity was coming over the sea. 
 In accordance with the new imbecility of flattering the colonies, it 
 was determined, that, in future, tlie governor-in-chief should reside 
 in Virginia, instead of governing his Province by a lieutenant. Vir- 
 ginia was thrilled by the announcement that a personage of no less 
 note than the Right Honorable Norborue Baron de Botetourt was 
 coming in person to govern them. In October, 1768, he arrived 
 with a prodigious train of servants and' baggage, and a gorgeous 
 state-coach, the gift of the king, and milk-white steeds to draw it, 
 which some historians say were eight in number, others six. Vir- 
 ginia, no less loyal to the king than to Magna Charta, rose to the 
 occasion, and gave the Right Honorable Norborne Baron de Botetourt 
 a reception worthy of his name. One relic of this ceremonial is an 
 " Ode," published in the " Virginia Gazette," which swells with the 
 importance of the occasion. If this " Ode " was actually sung in the 
 presence of Lord Botetourt, he must have been hard put to it to 
 preserve the gravity of his countenance. 
 
 Eecitative. 
 
 Virginia, see, thy Governor appears ! 
 
 The peaceful olive on his brow lie wears ! 
 
 Sound the shrill trumpets, beat the rattling drums ; 
 
 From Great Britannia's isle his Lordship comes. 
 
 Bid Echo from the waving woods arise. 
 
 And joyful acclamations reach the skies ; 
 
 Let the loud organs join their tuneful roar, 
 
 And bellowing cannons rend the pebbled shore; 
 
 Bid smooth James River catch the cheerful sound, 
 
 And roll it to Virginia's utmost bound ; 
 
 While Rappahannock and York's gliding stream 
 
 Swift shall convey the sweetly pleasing theme 
 
A MEMBER OF THE VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE. 81 
 
 To distant plains, whei'e pond'rous mountains rise, 
 Whose cloud-capped ver;^es meet the bending skies; 
 The Lordly Prize the Atlantic waves resign, 
 And now, Virginia, now the Blessing's thine: 
 His listening ears will to your burst attend. 
 And be your guardian, governor, and friend. 
 
 Air. 
 
 He comes : His Excellency comes. 
 
 To cheer Virginian plains ! 
 Fill your brisk bowls, ye loyal sons, 
 
 And sing your loftiest strains. 
 Be this your glory, this your boast, 
 Lord Botetourt's the favorite toast : 
 
 Triumphant wreaths intwine; 
 Fill full your bumpers swiftly round, 
 And make your spacious rooms resound 
 
 With music, joy, and wine. 
 
 Recitative. 
 
 Search every garden, strip the shrubby bowers, 
 And strew his path with sweet autumnal flowers ! 
 Ye virgins, haste, prepare the fragrant rose. 
 And with triumphant laurels crown his brows. 
 
 Ddet. 
 
 (Enter virgins with flowers, laurels, etc.) 
 See, we've stript each flowery bed ; 
 Here's laurels for his Lordly Head ; 
 And while Virginia is his care. 
 May he protect the virtuous fair ! 
 
 Air. 
 
 Long may he live in health and peace, 
 
 And every hour his joys increase! 
 
 To this let every swain and lass 
 
 Take the sparkling, flowing glass ; 
 
 Then join the sprightly dance, and sing, 
 
 Health to our Governor, and God save the King. 
 
 Virgins. 
 
 Health to our Governor. 
 
 Bass Solo. 
 
 Health to our Governor. 
 
 Chords. * 
 
 Health to our Governor, and GOD save the KING ! 
 
88 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFEESOX. 
 
 It is difficult to conceive of such an outburst as this coming from 
 the community that sent forth a series of sucli manly and able 
 papers on the rights of men and citizens ; but they were all still 
 under the illusion of royalty. Jefferson himself, perhaps, in 1768, 
 could have accompanied this performance on his violin without 
 violent grimaces. 
 
 To business. As when a new king comes to the throne, Parlia- 
 ment is dissolved, so, on the arrival of a new governor, the House 
 of Burgesses was 'dismissed, and a general election ordered. Thomas 
 Jefferson announced himself a candidate for the county of Albemarle ; 
 and, during the winter of 17G8-C9, he canvassed his county for votes, 
 — visiting each voter, asking him for his vote and influence, getting 
 his promise if possible, keeping open house and full punch-bowl as 
 long as the canvass lasted. Every voter was rightly compelled to 
 vote at every election, under penalty of a hundred pounds of 
 tobacco. During the three election days the candidates supplied 
 unlimited punch and lunch, attended personally at the polls, and 
 made a low bow as often as they heard themselves voted for. No 
 candidate was so strong that he could omit the treating or the can- 
 vassing. James Madison was the first who tried it in Virginia, in 
 1777 ; and he lost his election by it. The withdrawal of the punch- 
 bowl was ascribed to parsimony, and the omission of the canvassing 
 to pride. 
 
 Jefferson's election was a matter of course. Nevertheless, he ac- 
 cepted the honorable trust with seriousness, and formed a resolution, 
 the wisdom of which every j^ear of the existence of free government 
 has only the more clearly shown. We owe the record of this reso- 
 lution to his own pen. At a later stage of his public life, a friend 
 having invited him to share in some enterprise that promised profit," 
 he made this reply : — 
 
 " 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 ofBce, 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 mj^self hajipy in being able to decide and 
 to act as a public servant, clear of all interest, in the multiform ques- 
 tions that have arisen, wherein I have seen others embarrassed and 
 
A MEMBER OF THE VIBGINIA LEGISLATURE. 89 
 
 biased by having got tbemselves in a more interested situation. 
 Thus I have thought myself richer in contentment than I should 
 have been with any increase of fortune. Certainly I should have 
 been much wealthier had I remained in that private condition which 
 renders it lawful and even laudable to use proper efforts to better it." 
 
 It was in this spirit that he began his public life of forty years. 
 At the same time he was very desirous of distinguishing himself. 
 He desired most ardently the approval of his countrymen. He 
 avowed to Madison, long after, that, in the earlier years of his 
 public service, " the esteem of the world was, perhaps, of higher 
 value in his eyes than every thing in it." 
 
 The assembly convened on the 31th of May, 1769, nearly a hun- 
 dred members in attendance, Colonel George Washington among 
 them. It must have been a great day for the children and negroes 
 of Williamsburg ; for Lord Botetourt was to ride, for the first time, 
 in his splendid state-coach, a king's gift, from the palace to the 
 Capitol, to open the Provincial Parliament in person. Posterity 
 will perhaps never know with certainty whether his lordship was 
 drawn on this occasion by six milk-white steeds, or by eight, be- 
 cause historians differ on the point; and Mr. Burk says eight on 
 one page of his history, and six on another. The yeoman of the 
 western counties, and indeed tlie members generally, though much 
 conciliated by the frank and friendly manner of the governor, eyed 
 his grand coach with disfavor, regarding it as a college youth 
 might the present of a large humming-top sent by a relative on 
 the other side of the globe. He is past humming-tops. "Poor 
 old uncle," says the lad, as he feels his nascent mustache, " he still 
 thinks of me as the boy I wasJ^ We can well believe, however, 
 that as the milk-white steeds, covered with the showy trq,ppings of 
 the time, slowly drew the gaudy coach between lines of faces, 
 black and white, the spectacle was greeted with acclamations. 
 Upon reaching the Capitol, at the other end of the avenue, the 
 governor alighted, and ascended, with stately steps and slow, to the 
 Council Chamber, the Council being the Senate, or House of Lords 
 of Virginia. 
 
 How amusingly formal the opening of the little parliament ! 
 Young Jefferson miglit well be surprised at the free-and-easy ways 
 of the Maryland Legislature j for at Williamsburg all the etiquette 
 
90 LIFE OF THOIVIAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 of legislation was observed with rigor. Imagine the members, new 
 and old, strolling into the chamber towards ten in the morning; 
 Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, perhaps, going up together 
 from their lodging-house. When the bell rings, Jefferson need not 
 now withdraw to the lobby door. Two members of the Council 
 are in attendance, at the governor's command, to administer the 
 oath to the burgesses, standing and uncovered : — 
 
 "You and every one of you shall swear upon the Holy Evange- 
 lists, and in the sight of God, to deliver your opinion faithfully, 
 justly, and honestly, according to your best understanding and con- 
 science, for the general good and prosperity of this country, and 
 every particular member thereof; and to do your iitmost endeavor 
 to prosecute that, without mingling with it any particular interest 
 of any person or persons whatever. So .help you God and the con- 
 tents of this book." 
 
 The members having taken their seats, and resumed their hats, 
 the clerk of the General Assembly appears, and pronounces these 
 words : " Gentlemen, the governor commands this House to attend 
 His Excellency immediately in the Council Chamber." The bur- 
 gesses obey this command ; and being gathered about His Excellency, 
 seated on his viceregal throne, are thus addressed by him : " Gen- 
 tlemen of the House of Burgesses, you must return to your House, 
 and immediately proceed to the choice of a speaker." This com- 
 mand also the House obeys; and when they are once more in their 
 seats, and silent, the clerk being at his desk, a member rises and 
 says, " Mr. Clerk." The clerk then stands up, points to the mem- 
 ber without speaking, and sits down again. The member speaks : 
 "I move that Peyton Randolph, Esq., take the chair of this 
 House as speaker, which office he has before filled with such dis- 
 tinguished abilities, steadiness, and impartiality, as have given 
 entire satisfaction to the public." Mr. Randolph is unanimously 
 elected. Two members attend him, one on each side, from his seat 
 to the uppermost step of the platform, which having ascended, and 
 being left there alone, he turns and addresses the House, thanking 
 them for their unanimous vote, and asking their indulgence for the 
 future. As soon as he has taken his seat in the speaker's chair, the 
 mace, which until that moment has lain under the table, is placed 
 ux)on it. 
 
A MEMBER OP THE VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE. 91 
 
 Is the House now ready to transact business ? By no means. 
 It is next ordered that two members bear a message to the gover- 
 nor, informing him, that, in obedience to his commands, they have 
 elected a speaker, and desire to know His Excellency's pleasure 
 when they shall wait upon him to present their speaker to him. To 
 this message the governor replies that he will send an answer by a 
 messenger of his own. Accordingly the clerk of the General 
 Assembly soon re-appears in the House, and delivers the governor's 
 answer: "The governor commands this House to attend His Excel- 
 lency immediately in the Council Chamber.''" Once more the bur- 
 gesses march to the apartment, but this time with a speaker at their 
 head ; and, when the speaker has been presented to the governor, 
 His Excellency is pleased to say that he approves their choice. 
 Then the speaker, on behalf of the House, lays claim to all its 
 ancient rights and privileges, — freedom of sj^eech, untrammelled 
 debate, exemption from arrest, and protection of their estates from 
 attachment. Finally he asks the governor not to impute to the 
 Hoiise any errors their speaker may commit. The governor 
 answers that he shall take care to defend them in all their rights 
 and privileges. Then the governor reads his speech, conceived on 
 the plan of a king's speech, addressing first the Council and the 
 Burgesses, then the Burgesses alone, and finally both Houses once 
 more. 
 
 The speech being finished, the speaker asks a copy for the guid- 
 ance of the House of Burgesses ; which is furnished him, and the 
 burgesses return to Iheir own chamber. The speaker ascends to his 
 chair, whence he makes a formal report of what they had just wit- 
 nessed. He informs them that the governor had made a speech 
 to the Council and Burgesses, of which, '' to prevent mistakes," he 
 had obtained a copy ; which he proceeds to read to the House. 
 Not till this formality is over is the House ready to perform an act 
 of its own. /^ 
 
 To such a point of decorum had the House be^i^brought 
 since the time, 1664, when it was necessary to impose a fine .of 
 twenty pounds of tobacco upon ** every member that shall pipe it" 
 after the roll had begun to be called, unless, in an interval of 
 business, he obtained " public license from the major part of the 
 house." The same code was stringent with regard to all breaches 
 of decorum. Any member adjudged by the majority to be " dis- 
 
92 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 guised with drink " was fined, for the first offence, one hundred 
 pounds of tobacco ; for tlie second, three liuudred pounds ; and, for 
 the third, a thousand. To interrupt a member cost the offender a 
 thousand pounds of tobacco ; and, to speak of a member with disre- 
 spect, five hundred. As the pay of members was a hundred and 
 fifty pounds of tobacco per day, with a further allowance for 
 travelling expenses and servants, these fines were severe ; and 
 doubtless they had their share in making this Virginian parlia- 
 ment the dignified and decorous body we know it to have been. 
 Its influence lives to-day in every legislative hall in the country, 
 transmitted by Jefferson's Manual. 
 
 One of its kindly and courteous customs brought to the new mem- 
 ber from Albemarle a cutting mortification on the first day of the 
 session. It was usual to assign some formal duty to young members 
 by way of introducing them to public business, and giving them an 
 opportunity to air their talents. As soon as the speaker had fin- 
 ished reading the governor's speech, it was in order to appoint a 
 committee to make the draught of a reply ; and, to assist this com- 
 mittee, the House was accustomed to pass resolutions, the substance 
 of which was to be incorporated in the draught. Jefferson, in com- 
 pliance with the request of Mr. Pendleton, a leading member, wrote 
 these resolutions, which the House accepted ; and he was named 
 one of the committee to prepare the address. His elders, Mr. Pen- 
 dleton and Mr. Nicholas, assigned him this duty also. He wrote 
 the draught on the too obvious plan of sticking close to the resolu- 
 tions, employing much of their very language. Upon reading his 
 draught to the committee, — pluming himself, as he confesses, upon 
 the neatness and finish of his performance, — the elder members 
 were. totally dissatisfied with it. It would not do at all. The resolu- 
 tions, they said, should be regarded only as hints, to be amplified into 
 a flowing and original discourse. Jefferson's draught was set aside ; 
 and Mr. Nicholas, his chief critic, the head of the bar of Virginia, 
 was ajppointed to produce a more suitable composition. The old 
 hand could not be at a loss in expanding and rewording the compact 
 resolutions of the tyro ; and his draught was accepted both by the 
 committee and 'the House. ''Being a j'^oung man," wrote Jefferson 
 long after, "as well as a young member, it made on me an impres- 
 sion proportioned to the sensibility of that time of life." Thus the 
 man who was destined to gain by his pen the parliamentary distinc- 
 
A MEMBER OF THE VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE. 93 
 
 tion usually won only by the tongue, began bis career, as so many 
 illustrious orators have done, by a failure. 
 
 These lofty civilities between the governor and the Legislature 
 consumed, as it seems, two days. What next ? Lord Botetourt in 
 his speech had made no particular suggestions; and, in the minds 
 of members, there was but one thought, — to resist the lawless taxa- 
 tion of the colonies by Parliament, and the reckless outrage of 
 sending persons accused of treason to be tried on the other side of 
 the ocean. The spirited behavior of Massachusetts in inviting the 
 concurrence of the other colonies in constitutional opposition to 
 these measures had been severely commented upon in England ; and 
 this was a new cause of irritation. The milk-white steeds, too, and 
 the gaudy coach, had increased suspicion in some minds. Indeed, 
 at just this stage of the controversy, there was a near approach to 
 unanimity of feeling along the whole line of the Thirteen Colonies, 
 and in none of them a nearer than in loyal Virginia. And they 
 were all equally mistaken in attributing the false policy of thq 
 mother country to Parliament and ministers, instead of the king 
 and his Scotch tutors. ^ 
 
 On the third day were introduced the Four Resolutions, which a 
 precipitate governor was to stamp with the seal of his reprobation, 
 and so send them ringing round the world : 1. No taxation without > 
 representation ; 2. The colonies may concur and co-operate in seek- \ 
 ing redress of grievances ; 3. Sending accused persons away from 
 their country for trial is (an inexpressible complexity of wrong ;[)'0 
 4. We will send an address on these topics to the " father of all his 
 people," beseeching his " royal interposition." The resolutions being 
 passed almost unanimously, the speaker was ordered to send a copy 
 of the same to every legislative Assembly ''on this continent." 
 After such a day's work the House adjourned. That for your 
 milk-white steeds ! The next day the address to the king was 
 reported, revised, agreed to, and ordered to be forwarded to the king's 
 most excellent Majesty, through the colony's London agent, and 
 afterwards published in the English newspapers. On the day fol- 
 lowing, at noon. Lord Botetourt's secretary entered the chamber. 
 He pronounced the formula: "The governor commands this House 
 to attend His Excellency in the Council Chamber." The members 
 tramped to the other end of the building, and ranged themselves 
 expectant about the throne. No one, I think (though tradition has 
 
94 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 it otherwise), anticipated the governor's extreme course ; and all 
 appear to have been astounded to hear the "ominous and alarming 
 words," as Burk styles them, which fell from his lips: — 
 
 "Mr. S2:)eaker and Gentlemen of the House of Burgesses : I have 
 heard of 3'our resolves, and augur ill of their effects. You have 
 made it my duty to dissolve you, and you are dissolved accordingly." 
 
 Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues were by these words changed, 
 in an instant, from a legislative assembly into a hundred and eight 
 private gentlemen. Such was the law of the British Empire. The 
 new member from Albemarle, after all his canvassing and treating, 
 enjoyed the honor of representing his native county five days, dur- 
 ing one of which he had received a snub. But now the whole 
 House, Virginia, Magna Charta, the rights and dignity of man, had 
 been mocked and made of no account. 
 
 What an afternoon and evening Williamsburg must have experi- 
 enced after that abrupt dismissal of the House ! It is strange, that, 
 among so many writers, no one should have left a more minute record 
 than has yet come to light. How did Colonel Washington take it ? 
 By birth and feeling he was a yeoman ; and he had narrowly 
 escaped going to sea before the mast, to work his way, if he could, 
 up to the command of a merchant-ship. But his brilliant gallantry 
 in the field, and a rich widow's hand and fortune, had placed him 
 among the aristocrats. No man can quite avoid the reigning foible 
 of his class and time. Washington's sense of justice, however, was 
 sure and keen ; and he had been, from the first rumor of the Stamp 
 Act, on the right side of this great controversy. He was no milk- 
 sop. There was a fund — a whole volcano — of suppressed fire in 
 him; and being still a young man, all unschooled to the prudential 
 reticence of the statesman, he doubtless favored the company with 
 his sentiments. I suppose he dined that afternoon at the old Ra- 
 leiglj tavern, with many other members ; and, amid the roar of talk, 
 his voice was occasionally heard, uttering those hearty exclamations 
 with which the Virginians of that day used to relieve their minds. 
 We can fancy Patrick Henry, too, surrounded as he must have been 
 at such a time, holding high discourse in the evening on the piazza; 
 and all Williamsburg standing in groups, discussing the great event 
 of the day, and the greater events expected to-morrow. Jeiferson 
 
A MEMBER OF THE VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE. 95 
 
 probably, and other writing members, were closeted somewhere in the 
 town, preparing for the next day's work. A hundred gentlemen 
 may not be a House of Burgesses, but they can hold a meeting; 
 and a meeting they mean to hold to-morrow in the Apollo, the 
 great room of the Raleigh tavern, where so manj^ of them have 
 danced the minuet. 
 
 They met accordingly. We only know what the}^ did on the 
 occasion, not how they did it. Following the example set by Massa- 
 chusetts the year before, they agreed to recommend their constituents 
 to try and starve a little good sense into the minds of British manu- 
 facturers and merchants. It was America that gave Great Britain 
 the deadly w^ealth — ill-distributed wealth is alwajus deadly — -with 
 which she is now struggling for life. These Virginians, acting upon 
 Franklin's hint and Massachusetts' example, agreed : 1. To be a 
 great deal more saving and industrious than they ever were before ; 
 2. Never again, as long as time should endure, to buy an article 
 taxed by Parliament for the sake of raising a revenue in America, 
 excepting alone low qualities of paper, without which the business 
 of life could not go on ; 3. Never, until the repeal of the recent act, 
 to import any article from Britain, or in British ships, which it was 
 possible to do without; 4. They would save all tlieir lambs for 
 wool. And, lest any weak brother should choose to misunderstand 
 the terms of the compact, they enumerated the forbidden articles, 
 — an interesting catalogue, because it shows how dependent Vir- 
 ginia then was upon Europe for every thing except some of the 
 coarser staples of food and raiment. The list was : — v,.,J 
 
 Spirits, wine, cider, perry, beer, ale, malt, barley, pease, beef, ( 
 pork, fish, butter, cheese, tallow, candles, oil, fruit, sugar, pickles, 
 confectionery, pewter, hoes, axes, watches, clocks, tables, chairs, 
 looking-glasses, carriages, joiners' and cabinet W'ork, upholstery, 
 trinkets, jewelry, plate and gold, silver-ware, ribbons, millinery, lace, 
 India goods except spices, silks except sewing-silk, cambric, lawn, 
 muslin, gauze except bolting-cloths, calico, cotton or linen stuffs 
 above 2s. per yard, woollens above Is. Qd., broadcloths above Ss., 
 narrow cloths above Ss., hats, stockings, shoes, boots, saddles, and all 
 leather-work. 
 
 Eighty-eight members of the House of Burgesses signed this 
 agreement. As it was seldom that more than ninety-five members 
 were in attendance on the same day, this was a near approach to 
 
96 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 unanimity. Virginia accepted the compact made by her representa- 
 tives. Every man who signed the agreement was re-elected. Ev- 
 ery man who refused lost his election. 
 
 The respectful tone of the document, the perfect decency of the 
 proceedings in the Apollo, the dignified character of the men who 
 led the movement, made the deepest impression upon the mind of 
 Lord Botecourt. He had been told in London — I need not say 
 what. We all know how England has misinterpreted America 
 always. America has generally loved that step-mother too much ; 
 England has never loved America at all. What Lord Botetourt 
 found in Virginia, w^ know ; and he had understanding enough to 
 discern the trut]i. He wrote home to the ministry that these 
 Virginians were not rebellious, not factious, not indifterent to the 
 needs of the empire, but loyal subjects, contending for the birth- 
 right of Englishmen, with intelligence and dignity. There was 
 vacillation in the counsels of the king, and the party opposed to the 
 taxation of the colonies gained a brief ascendency. 
 
 Lord Botecourt, therefore, before many months had gone by, had 
 the i^leasure of summoning the Assembly ; and again there passed 
 between them those elaborate formalities described above. When, 
 at length, he had reached the point of delivering his speech, what 
 a joyful announcement it was his privilege to make ! 
 
 "I have been assured by the Earl of Hillsborough, that His 
 Majesty's present administration have at no time entertained a 
 design to propose to Parliament to lay any further taxes upon Ameri- 
 ca for the purpose of raising a revenue, and that it is their intention 
 to propose to the next session of Parliment, to take off the duties 
 upon glass, paper, and colors, upon consideration of such duties hav- 
 ing been laid contrary to the true principles of commerce." 
 
 These words thrilled every heart. Joy glistened in every eye. 
 No one seems to have noticed the omission of the word tea from the 
 list. The governor, now in the fullest sympathy with the people of 
 his Province, could not be content without adding some assurances 
 for the remoter future ; and he proceeded to utter words, that, in all 
 probability, cost him his life. He was a gentleman of the nicest 
 sense of honor, in whose mind a promise of his own unfulfilled 
 might rankle mortally. A ministry, he observed, is not immortal : 
 
A MEMBER OF THE VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE. 97 
 
 what then of their successors ? Upon this point, he said, he could 
 give only a personal assurance. 
 
 " It is my firm opinion, that the plan I have stated to you will 
 certainly take place, and that it will never he dejjarted from ; and so 
 determined am I ever to ahide hy it, that I will be content to be 
 declared infamous, if I do not, to the last hour of my life, at all 
 times, in all places, and upon all occasions, exert every power with 
 which I am or shall be legally invested, in order to obtain and 
 maintain for the continent of America that satisfaction which I 
 have been authorized to promise this day, by the confidential ser- 
 vants of our gracious sovereign, who, to my certain knowledge, rates 
 his honor so high, that he would rather part with his crown than 
 preserve it by deceit." 
 
 Almost while he uttered these words, which seemed to pledge the 
 king, the ministry, and himself. Lord Korth came into power, and 
 renewed the strife. Lord Botetourt with indignation demanded his 
 recall ; but, before he obtained it, he died, as is supposed, of morti- 
 fication at his inability to make good his emphatic assurances. 
 Virginia did justice to his character, and placed his statue in the 
 public square of Williamsburg. 
 
 For the present, however, all minds were content, and the parlia- 
 ment of Virginia proceeded with alacrity to business. The member 
 from Albemarle received, during his second session, a rebuff more 
 decided and more public than when his draught was so summarily 
 set aside in his first. 
 
 What an absurd creature is man ! This sanguine young burgess, 
 now that all danger seemed past of his white countrymen being, as 
 they termed it, "reduced to slavery," thouglit it a good time to 
 endeavor to mitigate the oppression of his black countrymen, who 
 were reduced to slavery already. He soon had the hornets about 
 his ears. At that time, no man could free his slaves without sending 
 them out of Virginia. Jefferson desired the repeal of this law. He 
 wished to throw around the slaves what he calls "certain moderate 
 extensions of the protection of the laws." With the proper mod- 
 esty of a young member, he called the attention of Colonel Bland 
 to this subject, secured his co-operation, and induced him to intro- 
 duce the bill. " I seconded his motion," records Jefferson, " and, as 
 
98 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 a younger member, was more spared in the debate ; but he was 
 denounced as an enemy to his country, and was treated with the 
 greatest indecorum"! And this, too, although Colonel Bland was 
 " one of the oldest, ablest, and most-respected members " ! Jefferson 
 attributes this conduct to the habitual subservience of members to 
 the mother country. " During the regal government," he says, 
 "nothing liberal could expect success." Under no government has 
 an assembly of slaveholders ever been otherwise than restive under 
 attempts to limit their power over their slaves. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 HIS MARRIAGE. 
 
 This year, 1769, so fruitful of public events, Avas a busy and 
 interesting one to the member from Albemarle in his private capa- 
 city. He was now in the fullest tide of practice at the bar, — one 
 hundred and ninety-eight cases before the General Court, the great- 
 est number he ever reached in a year. Already he had chosen 
 Monticello as the site of his future home. He had had men chop- 
 ping and clearing on the summit for some time ; and, in the spring 
 of this year, he had an orchard planted on one of its slopes. Be- 
 tween the two sessions he superintended the construction of a brick 
 wing of the coming mansion, one pretty large room with a chamber 
 or two over it, under the roof. The General Court sat in April. 
 During December and January he was preparing for the court, 
 making briefs, taking notes, collecting precedents ; getting every 
 thing, according to his custom, upon paper, and then dismissing it 
 from his mind. On the 1st of February, 1770, his mother and 
 himself went from home to visit a neighbor. While they were at 
 the neighbor's house, a slave came to them, breathless, to say that 
 their house and all its contents were burned. After the man had 
 finished his account of the catastrophe, the master asked, "But 
 were none of my books saved ? " A grin of exultation overspread 
 the sable countenance. " No, master," said the negro, '' but we 
 saved the fiddle ! " 
 
 Two hundred pounds' worth of books gone, besides all his law- 
 papers, and notes of cases coming on in April for trial ! Nothing 
 saved but a few old volumes of his father's library, and some un- 
 important manuscript books of his own. His mother and the chil- 
 dren found temporary shelter in the house of an overseer ; and he 
 repaired to his unfinished nest on the mountain-top, where he vainly 
 
 99 
 
100 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 strove to recoustruct his cases for the coming term. It was an iron 
 rule of that primitive court, never to grant an adjournment of a 
 case to another term. How he made it up with his clients and the 
 coA-t, no one has told us. 
 
 That house which he was constructing on Monticello was strangely 
 in his thoughts during the next year or two. When he was far 
 away from home he brooded over it ; and he used to solace the tedium 
 of country inns by elaborately recording dreams of its coming fit- 
 ness and beauty. It was his resolve that there should be one 
 mansion in Virginia, for the design of which the genius of archi- 
 tecture should at least be invoked. He meant that there should 
 be one home in Virginia worthy the occupation of perfectly civilized 
 beings'; in which art, taste, and utility should unite to produce an 
 admirable result. What a piece of work it was to place such an 
 abode on the summit of his little mountain, with no architect but 
 himself, few workmen but slaves, no landscape-gardeiier witliin three 
 thousand miles, no models to copy, no grounds to imitate, no tincture 
 of high gardening in the Province. The bricks had to be made, the 
 trees felled, the timber hewn, the nails wrought, the vehicles con- 
 structed, the laborers trained, on the scene of operations, No fine 
 commodities could be bought nearer than Williamsburg, a hundred 
 and fifty miles distant, nor many nearer than Europe. He had to send 
 for even his sashes to London, where one lot was detained a month 
 to let the putty harden ! Nothing but the coarsest, roughest work 
 could go on in his absence ; and often the business stood still for 
 weeks, for months, for years, while he was in public service. But 
 he kept on with an indomitable pertinacity for a quarter of a cen- 
 tury, at the expiration of which he had the most agreeable and 
 refined abode in Virginia, filled with objects of taste and the means 
 of instruction, and surrounded by beautiful lawns, groves, and gar- 
 dens. 
 
 At present all this existed only in his thoughts. He used to 
 write, in one of his numerous blank-books, minute plans for various 
 parts of the grounds, still rough with the primeval stumps. A 
 most unlawyer-like tone breathes through these written musings. 
 What spell was upon him, when, in dreaming of a future cemetery, 
 he could begin his entry with a sentence like this ? " Choose out 
 for a burial-place some unfrequented vale in the park, where is ' no 
 sound to break the stillness but a brook, that, bubbling, winds among 
 
HIS MAEEIAGE. 101 
 
 the weeds ; no mark of any human shape that had been there, 
 unless the skeleton of some poor wretch who sought that place out 
 to despair and die in.' " The rest of the description is in a similar 
 taste. The park, in general, was to be a grassy expanse, ad-q^ned 
 with every fragrant shrub, with trees and groves, and it was to be 
 the haunt of every animal and bird pleasing to man. " Court them 
 to it by laying food for them in proper places. Procure a buck-elk 
 to be, as it were, monarch of the wood ; but keep him shy, that his 
 appearance may not lose its effect by too much familiarity. A 
 buffalo might be confined also. Inscriptions in various places, on 
 the bark of trees or metal plates, suited to the character and expres- 
 sion of the particular spot." Whence these broodings over the 
 mountain nest that was forming under his eye ? Could it be love ? 
 Seven years before, he had solemnly assured John Page, tliat, if 
 Belinda would not accept his service, it should never be offered to 
 another. 
 
 But the mightiest capacity which this man possessed was the 
 capacity to love. In every other quality and grace of human nature 
 he has been often equalled, sometimes excelled ; but where has there 
 ever been a lover so tender, so warm, so constant, as he ? Love was 
 his life. Few men have had so many sources of pleasure, so many 
 agreeable tastes and pursuits ; but he knew no satisfying joy, at any 
 period of his life, except through his affections. And there is none 
 other for any of us. There is only one thing that makes it worthN- 
 while to live : it is love. Not the wild passion that plagues us in 
 our youth, but the tranquil happiness, the solid peace, to which 
 that is but the tumultuous prelude, — the joy of living with people 
 whose mere presence rests, cheers, improves, and satisfies us. He 
 who achieves that needs no catechism to tell him what is the chief 
 end of man. That is the chief end of man. Nothing else is oiy 
 any account, except so far as it ministers to that. Jefferson was 
 making this beautiful mountain nest for a mate whom he meant to 
 ask to come and share it with him. 
 
 Among his associates at the Williamsburg bar was John Wayles, 
 a lawyer in great practice, who had an estate near by, upon which 
 he lived, called The Forest. He, too, had thriven upon the decline 
 of Virginia ; and he had invested his fees in lands and slaves, until, 
 in 1771, he had a dozen farms and tracts in various parts of the 
 Province, and four hundred slaves. At his home (which was not so 
 
102 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 far from Williamsburg that a young barrister could not ride to it 
 occasionally with a violin under his arm) there lived with him his 
 widowed daughter, Martha Skelton, childless,' a beauty, fond of 
 music, and twenty-two. We all know how delightfully the piano 
 and the violin go together when both are nicely touched. It was 
 the same with the spinet and the violin. Jefferson had improved 
 in person and in position since he had danced with Belinda in the 
 Apollo, seven years before. It was observed of him that he con- 
 stantly grew better looking as he advanced in life, — plain in 
 youth, good-looking in his prime, handsome as an old man. And 
 he had now advanced from the bashful student to the condition 
 of a remarkably successful lawyer and member of the Assem- 
 bly. The wooing appears to have been long. She was a widow 
 in 1768, and there are slight indications of a new love in one 
 of Fis letters of 1770 ; but they were not married till New- Year's 
 Day, 1772. 
 
 How fixed his habit was of recording every item of expense is 
 shown by the page of his pocket-diary for his wedding-day. The 
 fees of the two clergymen in attendance, the sums given to musi- 
 cians and servants, all are set down in order, quite as usual. On 
 one of the early days of January, 1772, the newly married pair 
 started from The Forest, where the ceremony had been performed, 
 for Monticello, their future abode, more than a hundred miles dis- 
 tant, in a two-horse chaise. 
 
 As the day lengthens, the cold strengthens. In Virginia there is 
 often no serious winter till after New Year's, when all at once it 
 comes rushing down from the north in a tempest of wind and snow. 
 There was some snow on the ground when they left the bride's 
 home ; and it grew deeper as they went towards the mountains, until 
 it was too deep for their vehicle. They were obliged, at last, to 
 leave the carriage, and mount the horses. At sunset on the last 
 day of their journey, when they were still eight miles from Monti- 
 cello, the snow was nearly two feet deep. A friend's house gave 
 them rest for a while, but they would plod on, and get home that 
 night. They reached the foot of the mountain, ploughed up the 
 long ascent, and stood at length, late at night, cold and tired, 
 before their door. 
 
 In old Virginia servants seldom lodged in their master's bouse, 
 but in cabins of their own, to which they returned after their work 
 
HIS MAERIAGE. 103 
 
 was done. No light saluted the arriving pair. No voice welcomed 
 them. No door opened to receive them. The servants had given 
 them up long before, and gone home to bed. Worst of all, the fires 
 were out, and the house was cold, dark, and dismal. What a wel- 
 come to a bride on a cold night in January ! They burst into the 
 house, and flooded it with the warmth and light of their own un- 
 quenchable good-humor ! Who could wish a better place for a 
 honeymoon than a snug brick cottage, lifted five hundred and 
 eighty feet above the world, with half a dozen counties in sight, and 
 three feet of snow blocking out all intruders ? What readings of 
 Ossian there must have been ! I hope she enjoyed them as well as 
 he. For his part, the poems of that ancient bard — if he was 
 ancient — were curiously associated in his mind with the tender 
 feelings; and now, shut in with his love in his mountain home, he 
 grew so enamoured of the poet, that nothing would content him but 
 studjnng him in the original Gaelic. 
 
 He wrote to his acquaintance, Charles Macpherson, cousin of the 
 translator, that " merely for the pleasure of reading Ossian's works, 
 he was desirous to learn the language in which he sung." He begs 
 Macpherson to send him from Scotland, not only a grammar, a dic- 
 tionary, a catalogue of Gaelic works, and whatever other apparatus 
 might be necessary, but copies of all the Ossianic poems in the origi- 
 nal Gaelic. If they had been printed, he would have them in print. 
 If not, " my petition is, that you would be so good as to use your 
 interest with Mr. Macpherson to obtain leave to take a manuscript 
 copy of them, and to procure it to be done. I would choose it in a 
 fair, round hand, with a good margin, bound in parchments as ele- 
 gantly as possible, lettered on the back, and marbled or gilt on the 
 edges of the leaves. I would not regard expense in doing this." He 
 tells him, that if there are any other Gaelic manuscript poems acces- 
 sible, it would at any time give him " the greatest happiness " to 
 receive them ; for " the glow of one warm thought is to me worth 
 more than nwney." 
 
 Public events prevented the execution of this scheme. It is 
 remarkable, that, here in the woods of America, a young man, inspired 
 by love, should have hit upon the method, very simple and obvious, 
 it is true, which, a hundred years after, has apparently cleared up 
 the Ossianic mystery, by showing that Macpherson's Ossian is a 
 poor, slurring translation of poems really existing in the Gaelic Ian- 
 
104 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 guage.* Among a tliousand babblers, it is the man who goes out of 
 his way, and looks at the thing with his own eyes, who is likely to 
 understand it first. 
 
 Next year the death of his wife's father brought them forty thou- 
 sand acres of land and one hundred and thirfc^'^-five slaves. When 
 their share of the debts upon Mr. Wayles's estate had been paid, 
 the fortunes of the wife and of the husband were about equal. The 
 Natural Bridge, eighty miles from Monticello, was upon one of the 
 tracts now added to their property. 
 
 The year 1772, which was the first of JeflFerson's married life, I 
 think he would have ever after pronounced the happiest of all his 
 years. To most of us, perhaps, that first year, or at least some 
 small part of it, is the most consciously happy time we ever know. 
 It may w^ell be so. Tlie moment when two stand at the altar, a 
 wedded pair, is the moment for which all their past moments were 
 made, from which all their future moments date. The first months 
 are a blissful pause in life's toilsome journey ; for the old cares have 
 ended in fruition, and the new cares are as yet nothing but delight. 
 The chilly winter of desire is past ; the tempest of the passions 
 l^asses soon with well-attempered minds ; 'it is May-time then, the 
 bright and sunny seed-time, when no one thinks that .the harvest 
 can be other than glorious. Nature begins every thing with a smile. 
 The most bountiful harvest is not joyous and serene, like the May 
 morning when the wheat is only a greener grass, and the trees have 
 nothing for us but blossoms. We see many couples who have been 
 harshly dealt with in the struggle for life, — they are sadly battered 
 and worn ; and we meet others who have dealt harshly with one an- 
 other, whose case is more deplorable. It is an affecting thought, that 
 they, to'o, must once have looked hopefully upon life, must once have 
 been pleasing in one another's eyes, must once have had their Monti- 
 cello to go home to, and to make lovely by their touch, — if it were 
 only two tenement-rooms, adorned with pictures cut from the illus- 
 trated papers. 
 
 A lull in the political storm gave Jefferson a long interval of 
 peace, the last he was to know for many a year. The General Court 
 called him to Williamsburg, April 15 and October 15, and detained 
 
 * The Poems of Ossian in the original Gaelic, with a literal Translation into English, and 
 a Dissertation on the Authenticity of the Poems. By the Rev. Archibald Clerk, Minister 
 of KilmalUe. Two vols. Eilinburgh. 1871. 
 
HIS MARRIAGE. 105 
 
 him " eiglateen days exclusive of Sundays " eacli time ; but during 
 most of the year he was on his mountain, laying out his grounds, 
 planning parts of his house, watching his garden in that vigilant 
 manner of his, superintending his widening farms, and keeping brief, 
 exact record of whatever he did, observed, and learned. Snow three 
 feet deep, as he records soon after reaching home with his bride, 
 "the deepest snow we have ever seen," covered the county of Albe- 
 marle during the last days of January. It was not an inviting 
 prospect for the Italians whom Philip Mazzei was about to start in 
 the culture of the vine near by, and who were to furnish Jefferson 
 with Italian gardeners. Virginia has a month of polar winter every 
 third or fourth year, when the James and the Potomac are ice-bound, 
 and the mountain counties are buried in snow. This happy winter 
 chanced to be one such. But an early spring atones ; and we are 
 relieved, on looking over the published leaves of the young husband's 
 garden-book, to discover, that, on March 20, he " sowed a patch of 
 later pease." 
 
 The broad summit of his mountain presented a busy scene as the 
 season advanced. Men were levelling the summit down to that 
 expanse of six acres which was to become so bright with lawn, garden, 
 grove, and flowers. Others were cutting roads and paths through 
 the woods, or making the drive around the great lawn. Jefferson, 
 with his rule in his pocket, and his case of instruments at hand, 
 watched every operation with the eye of a curious philosopher, 
 pausing often to make a calculation or record a hint. Like a true 
 mathematician, he would take nothing for granted. Having wheel- 
 barrows with one wheel and others with two wheels, he was bound 
 to ascertain, with the certainty of arithmetic, which was the more 
 advantageous. So he takes his position, watch in hand, pencil in 
 pocket. He discovered that Julius Shard fills a two-wheeled barrow 
 in three minutes, and wheels it thirty yards in a minute and a half. 
 He observes further, that the two-wheeled barrow holds four times 
 as much as the one-wheeled. With these facts before him, he puts the 
 case in a form which Professor Small himself would have approved : 
 Suppose the 4 loads put in in the same time, viz., 3 minutes ; 4 trips 
 will take 4Xl2 = ^') which added to 3' filling is=9', to fill and carry 
 the same earth which was filled and carried in the two-wheeled bar- 
 row in 4^'." This seems conclusive against the one-wheeled vehicle; 
 but, as that form of barrow has held its own against all rivals for 
 
106 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 another century, we must conclude that Mr. Jefferson's one-wlieeled 
 barrow was not a fair representative of its order. He was evidently 
 mucli attached to the two-wheeled specimen. 
 
 Every operation was scanned and tested. He observed that a 
 four-horse wagon made ten trips a day up the mountain, and brought 
 nearly five cords of wood. He counted the number of rails that 
 could be drawn up the steepest part of the mountain, and found it 
 was twent3''-eight. "A coach and six," he records, "will turn in 
 eighty feet." He meant to allow room enough for the grandees of 
 Virginia who might visit him to turn homeward. For his own part, 
 he had not yet set up a vehicle more imposing than the two-wheeled 
 chaise in which he had attempted to bring home his bride. We 
 learn, from the same source, that the grounds were to be enclosed by 
 a picket-fence, every other picket long, and that the short pickets 
 were to have four nails each, and the long ones five. No scrap of 
 knowledge came amiss to the young housekeeper. " Mrs. Wythe," 
 he records, " puts one-tenth very rich superfine Malmsey to a 
 dry Madeira, and makes a fine wine." Tliis item, doubtless, he 
 brought home from Williamsburg for his wife, with Mrs. Wythe's 
 compliments ; for the lady of the moiintain kept her housekeeping- 
 book, and was noted for her skill in household arts. Her books of 
 accounts, written in a neat lady-like hand, still exist. 
 
 What an experimenter he was with his garden ! He tried almost 
 every valuable nut, vegetable, grain, bulb, shrub, tree, and grass 
 the world knows, — almonds, bitter almonds, soft-shelled almonds, 
 olives (fifteen hundred olive-stones at once), Alpine strawberries, 
 French chestnuts, and all the rare kinds of more familiar fruits and 
 vegetables. His new neighbor, Mazzei, filled his garden with the 
 fine melons, vines, and nuts of Italj'-, which it was one of Jeiferson's 
 dearest delights to spread over Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and 
 Georgia. He watched the operations of the Italian vineyard plant- 
 ers with the closest attention, and put down in his garden-book a 
 curiously minute account of their method of laying out a' vineyard 
 and planting vines. The coming of this little Italian colony, 
 with the intelligent Mazzei at their head, and the prospect which it 
 opened of Albemarle, already called the "garden of Virginia," be- 
 coming its vineyard also, was an immense addition to the interest 
 and attractiveness of Monticello. If Jefferson loved his home more 
 than most men, it must be owned that few men have ever had such 
 a home to love. 
 
HIS MAEEIAGB. .107 
 
 It is the wife who is the soul of a house. It is she who makes, 
 who constitutes, who is, the home. The wife of Jefferson comes 
 down to us as slie was in this brightest year of her existence, a beau- 
 tiful woman, her countenance brilliant with color and expression, 
 with luxuriant auburn hair, somewhat tall, and of a very graceful 
 figure, though too slight for the wear and tear of this troublesome 
 world. Nothing but good has been recorded of her, and her care- 
 fully-kept household books still speak her praise. Tradition reports ; 
 that she possessed an attraction for her husband, most rare in that 
 age among ladies, — an educated mind and a taste for the higher 
 literature. Her love of music, her skill in playing the harjisichord, 
 and her voice in singing, all harmonized with his tastes and habits, 
 recalling that sister so early lost. A Virginian lady of that period 
 could scarcely escape acquiring the homely, invaluable wisdom that 
 comes of dealing with the common duties of a household. She 
 might not be so accomplished as the mother of Washington, who 
 was one of the best judges of a horse in her county, and perfectly 
 capable of conducting a plantation ; but a woman could not be quite 
 a fool who had to think and contrive for a great family of grown-up 
 children. 
 
 I see this elegant figure moving about with her husband among 
 the improvements of the mountain-top, visiting with him the spot 
 where negroes were grubbing up roots and trees for the family 
 burying-ground, or standing by his side as he counted the wheel- 
 barrow-loads and watched the wall-building. During the winter, 
 perhaps, she may have been alive to the inconveniences of living 
 five hundred and eighty feet in the air; but in the summer she 
 must have warmly approved her husband's choice, if it were only 
 that it lifted them above the mosquitoes and all disagreeable, insects. 
 If she cast her eyes in one direction, she saw their mount sloping 
 down a mile and a half to the Eiver Rivanna; and she could see, half 
 a mile beyond the river, the blackened ruins of the house in which 
 her husband was born. On another side, the mountain fell off into 
 the valley in an almost precipitous descent. From one face of the 
 summit there is nothing between the spectator and the ocean, two 
 hundred miles distant, and yet not so far that it is not felt in the 
 afternoon breeze of the hot summer days. From another, there is a 
 vast expanse billowy with mountains, one peak clearly visible forty 
 miles off, and the line of the Blue Ridge marked against the horizon 
 
108* LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 a hundred miles away. Three miles yonder lies the village of 
 Charlottesville ; and here is a region of waving wheat fields and 
 farms, with the river winding among them. From one point, 
 nothing breaks the view for forty-seven miles, and then it ends in a 
 solitary peak precisely resembling the great Pyramid of Egypt. 
 A lady less susceptible than she could have forgiven the height of 
 the little mount for the wide world of loveliness which it dis- 
 closed. 
 
 As the summer advanced, she leaned more heavily upon her 
 husband's strong arm than before, and less frequently rode down 
 into the valley. Their first child was born in the autumn, — that 
 Martha Jefferson who contributed most and longest to the solace of 
 her father's life. Here was a new tie binding him to his home ; and 
 it was wound about his heart at the very period when the events 
 occurred that were to summon him away, and detain him many 
 times and long. 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 AN AFFAIR IN NARBAGANSETT BAY. 
 
 From tlie breezy height of Monticello we must repair to a spot 
 not less enchanting, — Newport, the Emerald Isle of North Amer- 
 ica. Keaders are familiar with the ocean drive, that winds about 
 among the rocks and by the beaches, and past Lily Pond, until it 
 turns the Point at the ocean end of the island, and winds round 
 past Port Adams, where the band plays; then by the pretty harbor, 
 alive with j-achts and skimming sail-boats; and "so home." Bren- 
 ton's Point is the ancient and proper name of that turning-place, 
 where the carriages stop for their occupants to look out for Point 
 Judith and Block Island, and admire the tumbling waves that foam 
 over the reefs near the shore, and where children get out to explore 
 the aquarium disclosed to view at low tide, and gather star-fish, wet 
 and squirming, inadmissible to a well-regulated vehicle. In March, 
 1772, it was a bleak and desolate place, without sign of human 
 habitation. But even at that early period there was much life upon 
 the waters ; for Newport had an important commerce with the 
 African coast, and Providence, thirty miles off, at the head of Nar- 
 ragansett Bay, though inferior to Newport in wealth and population, 
 was a thriving town. Those were th^days when the best Chris- 
 tians saw nothing wrong in buying rSJroes and gold-dust on the 
 coast of Africa with New-England rum, and selling the negroes to 
 the West Indies for molasses, and taking the molasses home to be 
 converted into more rum for another voyage. Newport had the 
 cream of this sweet commerce for mjjny a year, as well as a legiti- 
 mate trade with the mother-country. 
 
 But this was not all the business that enriched Newport and 
 Providence. It was not to protect lawful commerce that British 
 men-of-war cruised continually in Narragansett Bay, and lay at 
 
 109 
 
110 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 anchor off Brenton's Point. England was at peace with all the 
 world ; the pirates had been driven from these waters ; but in March, 
 1772, when Jefferson was sowing his later pease at Monticello, two 
 British men-of-war approached the Point, one of some magnitude, 
 called the Beaver, and the other, a schooner of eight guns, named 
 the Gaspee. The larger of these vessels kept on her course, and 
 vanishes from this history. The Gaspee dropped her anchor, furled 
 her sails, and remained about where the Light Ship now rides 
 uneasily on the waves. 
 
 Need I remind the reader with what rigor England applied the 
 protective system at that time ? A colonist could catch a beaver, 
 and take off its skin ; but a British law forbade his making that skin 
 into a hat. English hatters were protected. A Pennsylvanian might 
 dig a piece of iron out of his native hills, and even smelt away its 
 impurities ; but he was obliged to send it to England to be made into 
 steel and a scythe. British cutlers must be protected. A Virginian 
 could raise as much tobacco as he chose ; but, though England were 
 glutted with tobacco, he could not export a hogshead of it to another 
 country. He must send it all to England, whence British mer- 
 chants would distribute it over the world. A Newport merchant 
 might discover excellent fabrics and commodities in Holland or 
 France ; but he must buy his return cargo in English ports of 
 English dealers. A Carolinian could not sell a pound of his indigo 
 to France, where so much of it was used. The commerce of the 
 colonies, and their internal trade as well, were restricted and ham- 
 pered in every way, with the single object, and that object avowed, 
 of compelling the colonists to pour the net product of their toil and 
 enterprise into British coffers. The colonists complied not unwill- 
 ingly, because they loved their country, that is, the British Empire, 
 and because they felt, that,^ return for all this, England was bound 
 to defend them against theWorld. 
 
 ^ But the protective system includes, as an invariable accompani- 
 j ment, the illicit trader and the smuggler ; and it will not be one of 
 ^the least advantages of the universal freedom of trade, which we 
 have been approaching for a. century past, and may reach a century 
 hence, that those bad vocations will cease to be exercised. Seldom 
 have they been so flourishing as in the waters about Newport, from 
 the peace of 1763 to the war of 1775. The French War had given 
 a wonderful development to the business. A colonial governor had the 
 
AN AFFAIR IN NAEEAGANSETT BAY. IH 
 
 power to grant a flag of truce, and an enterprising Newporter could 
 apply for one under pretext of going to the French West Indies to 
 effect an exchange of prisoners. It is mentioned as a proof of the 
 incorruptible honor of Governor Fauquier of Virginia, gambler as 
 he was, that he refused an offer of two thousand pounds sterling for 
 a flag. Other governors were not so scrupulous ; and the governor of 
 Rhode Island, who alone was elected by the people of his Province, 
 had, it is said, no scruples at all, but granted flags to all applicants 
 at a certain price. Give a Yankee captain, in time of war, a 
 schooner full of " fish and notions," a flag of truce to the enemy, and 
 a free range of the seas; what does he want more? He is trading/ 
 with peace advantages, and gets war prices. 
 
 Considering the circumstances, we cannot be surprised at the had 
 account given of the Eliode-Islanders by Archdeacon Burnaby, who 
 visited them towards the close of the French War. A cunning, 
 deceitful people, he calls them, who, " live almost entirely hi/ tinfair 
 and illicit trading,^' and their "magistrates are partial and corrupt." 
 The English traveller adds this remark: "Were the governor to 
 interpose his autliority, were he to refuse to grant flags of truce, or 
 not to wink at abuses, he would, at the expiration of the year, be 
 excluded from his office, the only thing, perhaps, which he has to sub- 
 sist upon." But then, according to this Tory archdeacon, the people 
 themselves had little to subsist upon except the illicit trade ; for the 
 enemy, in the course of the war, had captured one hundred and 
 thirty of their vessels ; and their own privateers, of which they kept 
 a great number at sea, had had ill luck. Nevertheless, he says, 
 they would, out of their population of thirty-five thousand souls, 
 maintain a regiment of provincial troops, which made the taxation 
 burdensome. Besides, their paper money was in a woful condition, 
 as it required twenty-five hundred pounds in Rhode-Island paper to 
 buy one golden guinea. ^ 
 
 The war being at an end in 1763, nothing more could be done in 
 the flag-of-truce way ; and a part of this demoralized energy and 
 capital was employed in evading the revenue laws. One glance at 
 the map will renaind the reader that the waters about Rhode Island 
 furnish every facility for any kind of illicit trade that can be carried 
 on in small, swift vessels. 
 
 For eight years — 1764 to 1772 — there had been war in Narra- 
 gansett Bay, between Rhode Island and the king of Great Britain. 
 
112 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 The king began it. An offensive armed schooner, the St. John, 
 was stationed in the bay in 1764, for the sole purpose of interfering 
 with the maritime pursuits of the Ehode Islanders. This St. 
 John had the insolence to make a prize of a brig which had 
 brought in an unlawful cargo. Retaliation : the people seized a 
 shore battery, and fired into the St. John. Eoyal ships impressed 
 unwary seamen. On one occasion the Maidstone, man-of-war, 
 boarded a brig just from the African coast, and impressed her 
 whole crew, who had expected that very night to be at home. Retal- 
 iation ; a crowd of Newporters seized one of the Maidstone's 
 boats at the Long Wharf, dragged her up Broad Street to the 
 Parade, and burnt her in front of that handsome State House 
 which still stands. Again, in 1769, the sloop-of-war Liberty, 
 besides making herself generally odious through the sleepless vigil- 
 ance of her commander. Lieutenant Reid, once stopped and 
 brought in an innocent vessel, and then fired at the captain's boat 
 when he came seeking redress. Retaliation : a resolute company 
 of Newporters boarded her, cut her cables, let her drift ashore, hard 
 and fast ; and then, when night fell, a party set her on fire, and she 
 was burned to the water's edge ! This was war. 
 
 In 1772 it fell to the little Gaspee, of eight guns, Lieutenant 
 Dudingston commanding, to continue the strife. This lieutenant 
 was not long in making himself an object of passionate disgust to 
 a seafaring people. Lying there, off Brenton's Point, right at the 
 entrance of the bay, in the very highway leading both to Newport 
 and Providence, he adopted the system of boarding every thing 
 that floated, — packets, market-boats, ferry-boats, coasting schoon- 
 ers, Indiamen, Londoners, homeward-bound, outward-bound, — 
 every thing ! The expedient was simple and obvious, but it was all 
 too effectual. And, to make his conduct the more offensive, he 
 sent any contraband proper^ that he seized to Boston for adjudica- 
 tion. 
 
 At that time the deputy-governor of Rhode-Island Plantation, 
 Darius Sessions by name, lived at Providence ; and the governor, 
 Joseph Wanton, lived at Newport. Darius Sessions wrote to 
 Joseph Wanton a letter of ludicrous gravity, relating the aggres- 
 sions of " a schooner " upon " our navigatipn ; " affecting not to 
 know " who he is, and by what authority he assumes such a con- 
 duct J " and requesting his honor to inquire into the matter. The 
 
AN AFFAIR IN NARRAGANSETT BAY. 113 
 
 deputy contrived to make a pointed allusion to the sloop " Liberty," 
 burnt at Kewport some time before. " It is suspected," said Mr. 
 Session, ''that he has no legal authority to justify. his conduct; 
 and his commission, if he has any, is some antiquated paper, more 
 of a fiction than any thing else, ... no other than the commission 
 the famous ileid had, w7io lost his sloop at Newport, or something 
 else of no validity." The governor, in the same strain of affected 
 ignorance, addressed a note of inquiry to the odious lieutenant, who 
 replied, not in the most conciliatory tone, that he " had done noth- 
 ing but what was his dut3\" Much correspondence followed. The 
 governor wrote to the admiral at Boston, and the admiral replied 
 with the hauteur that might be expected : both referred the matter 
 to the Earl of Hillsborough ; and the affixir drew to great length 
 and complexity. But, in the mean time. Lieutenant Dudingston 
 continued to "disturb the navigation" of Xarragansett Bay, and 
 seized whatever rum or other commodity had not contributed its 
 quota to the king's strong box. 
 
 June 10, 1772, at noon, the regular packet plying between New- 
 port and Providence, left Newport for Providence without notifying 
 Lieiitenant Dudingston. The Gaspee gave chase ; chased the 
 packet up the bay twenty-three miles, and then ran hard aground 
 on Narragansett Point, seven miles below Providence. The packet 
 reached her berth about sunset. Her captain related his adven- 
 ture, and described the situation of the hated Gaspee to Mr. 
 John Brown, the most substantial merchant of the place. In 
 common with the whole colony, Mr. Brown believed the proceedings 
 of Lieutenant Dudingston to be illegal. Deputy-Governor Darius 
 Sessions had consulted Chief-justice Hopkins upon the subject, and 
 the chief justice had officially pronounced them lawless. No com- 
 mander of a vessel, the chief justice maintained, had any right to 
 exert authority in the colony without previously applying to the 
 governor, showing his warrant for so doing, and being regularly 
 sworn in. 
 
 Mr. Brown, like most men who live near the sea, carried the 
 tide in his mind, as farmers at work in a distant field observe, with- 
 out thinking of it, their taskmaster, the sun. The Gaspee 
 cannot get off Namquit Point before three in the morning, thought 
 the merchant. The case of the Liberty, perhaps, flashed across 
 his mind. The Gaspee had run herself ashore ! What an 
 
114 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 opportunity to free tlie waters of Rhode Island from this worse 
 than a pirate ! 
 
 He spoke to one of the captains in his service, wlio hurried 
 away as if on a joj'ful errand. A few minutes later the beating of 
 a drum in the main street of Providence summoned the people to 
 doors and windows ; and the drummer, in the manner of a town- 
 crier, lifted up his voice and proclaimed the situation of the 
 Gaspee, and invited all men disposed to lend a hand to her de- 
 struction to repair to Sahin's tavern as soon as it was dark. At 
 half-past nine, eight of the largest boats belonging to the town, 
 with mutfled oars and filled with armed men, each boat com- 
 manded by a sea-captain, dropped away from Fenner's Wharf. It 
 was no mob that manned the boats. The best men of the town 
 took part in this expedition, and all men's hearts went with it ; 
 unless it might be some lone representative of the collector of the 
 C) customs, — the only officer in Rhode Island not elected by the peo- 
 j pie. John Brown, the prime mover, who was in one of the boats, 
 / besides being the chief merchant of the colonj^-, was of the family 
 that afterwards founded, and gave its name to. Brown University. 
 
 All on board the Gaspee slept, except one sailor who kept the 
 watch. At midnight the watch was changed, when Bartholomew 
 Cheever came on deck in his turn. At a quarter to one he descried, 
 in the darkness, — the night was very dark, — a line of boats silently 
 approaching the vessel. He reported the ominous circumstance to the 
 lieutenant, who hurried on deck in his night-shirt, and soon saw the 
 boats himself " Hail them," said the officer, " and tell them to stand 
 off at their peril." The sailor obeyed. No answer. Again he shouted, 
 "Who comes there ?" No answer. The lieutenant himself then 
 took his station at the side of the vessel, a pistol in one hand and. a 
 cutlass in the other. He hailed the boats twice. From one of 
 them came at length an angry reply, which may be softened into, 
 "I am the sheriff of the county of Kent, damn you ! I have got 
 a warrant to apprehend you, damn you ! So surrender, damn you ! " 
 Which was a fiction, uttered by one of the captains commanding, 
 "Call all hands," said the lieutenant to Cheever, who obeyed; and 
 the men, in the course of a few seconds, began to tumble up. But 
 those few seconds were fatal to the Gaspee. 
 
 For, at the instant of Lieutenant Dudingston's appearance at the 
 side of his vessel, one of the men in the boats said to a comrade, 
 
AN APFAIR E^T NABRAGANSETT BAY. 115 
 
 "Reach me your gnn, and I can kill that fellow." Just as the lieu- 
 tenant had given the order to call all hands, he fell to the deck, dan- 
 gerously wounded in the arm and groin, hleeding profusely. He 
 had not yet been helped to the cabin before the assailants boarded, 
 drove the men below, and were masters of the vessel. The Provi- 
 dence men followed the crew into the hold, tied every man's hands 
 behind him, and prepared to set them ashore. 
 
 A young medical student, while busy below tying the hands of the 
 unresisting crew, was called to the deck by a voice familiar to all 
 the party. "What is the matter, Mr. Brown?" asked the student. 
 " Don't call names," was the reply, "but go immediately into the 
 cabin. There is one wounded, and will bleed to death." Upon 
 examining the wound the student feared the great artery was cut, 
 and began to pull and tug at the collar of his own shirt to tear a 
 bandage. The wounded man showed that he was worthy of better 
 work than chasing packet-boats, and groping after hidden rum, by 
 saying, " Pray, sir, don't tear your clothes : there is linen in that 
 trunk." And, after his wound was dressed, he begged the young 
 surgeon to accept a gold stock -buckle as a mark of his gratitude ; 
 and, this being refused, he pressed upon him a silver one, which the 
 student accepted, and wore to old age. The crew were landed in two 
 parties, two miles apart, and the lieutenant was carried to a house 
 near the shore. The schooner was then set on fire. 
 
 When the sun rose, nothing remained of her but a black and 
 smoking hulk. The assailants rowed home at leisure in broad day- 
 light, reaching Providence in time for breakfast. So little conceal- 
 ment was there, that, in the course of the morning, a young man 
 appeared in the most public place in Providence with Lieutenant 
 Pudingston's gold-laced hat upon his head, and related to a great 
 circle of admiring bystanders how and where he had got it in the 
 schooner's cabin. He was induced to retire with his trophy ; but 
 every American in Providence knew who had done the deed, who 
 suggested it, and what part in it each of the leading persons had 
 borne. 
 
 Darius Sessions's parents must have been devoid of a sense of the 
 ludicrous, else he had not been blessed with such a name ; but Dari- 
 us himself was a humorist.- In the morning he received the "news" 
 of this transaction. Whereupon he rode down to the scene, attended 
 by some gentlemen of the town, to inquire into it. He found the 
 
116 ' LIFE or THOMAS JEFFEKSO]^. 
 
 thing had really happened. Here was the smoking hulk. In yon- 
 der house lay the wounded officer. The crew were roaming at large, 
 subsisting on the country. He visited the lieutenant, and begged 
 to know how he could be of service to him. That truly gallant 
 officer replied, that, for his own part, he wanted nothing ; he hardly 
 expected to survive ; but he asked to have his men attended to, and 
 sent to the admiral in Boston. The deputy took sundry depositions, 
 provided for the crew, and returned home to exercise his talent for 
 grave burlesque in a letter to the governor. " A very disagreeble 
 aifair," said he, "has lately happened within this part of the col- 
 ony." He related the disagreeable affair. Then he remarked, 
 "The dangerous tendency of this transaction is too obvious to pass 
 it over with the least ajypearance of neglect." He did not under- 
 line the word " appearance : " it was not necessary. He concluded 
 his epistle thus: " It is the prevailing opinion of the gentlemen in 
 this quarter, that a proclamation, with a large reward, be issued for 
 apprehending the persons .who have thus offended; You will jjlease 
 consult the gentlemen your way; and, iu the mean time, I will 
 endeavor to collect the sentiments of the members of the Assembly, 
 and other principal gentlemen by name, and send the same to your 
 honor as soon as may be." va,. 
 
 Governor Wanton acted upon this hint. A proclamation was very 
 promptly issued, offering a reward of a hundred pounds to any one 
 who should discover the perpetrators. Strange to say, the proclama- 
 tion was of no effect. Not a person in Rhode Island disclosed 
 what many hundretls of men, women, and children must have per- 
 sonally known. Lieutenant Dudingston recovered his health, was 
 recommended for promotion, and, it is to be hoped, obtained it. 
 Other cruisei's replaced the burnt Gaspee. Karragansett Bay was 
 as blue and bright as before, its islands as richly verdured, and all 
 things went their usual train. 
 
 No one can understand the importance of this affiiir unless he 
 bears in mind that the great controversy of which it was one trifling 
 outbreak was a controversy between the colonists and one man. 
 That one man was the king, — poor, dull, proud, ignorant, moody 
 George III., — the costliest king a country was ever cursed with. 
 He cost, in fact, £800,000,000, besides his board and the loss of 
 thirteen colonies ; for it was he, that one blind, unteachable dunce, 
 who severed the empire. 
 
 Of course there are always men enough to flatter the foibles of a 
 
AN AFFAIR IN NAEKAGANSETT BAY. 117 
 
 king. The American Tories exulted in the destruction of the Gas- 
 pee. If this does not wake the British lion, wrote Governor Hutch- 
 inson of Massachusetts, no one will ever tremhle at his roar again ! 
 " So daring an insult ! " By men, too, who are perfectly well known, 
 and yet not one arrested ! The royal animal has been asleep these 
 four or five years past ; as if these turbulent colonists could be ruled 
 by soft words, and milk-white steeds drawing great lords in gor- 
 geous coaches ! A gracious king sees with what result. A ?cinr/s 
 lieutenant wounded, and turned out of his vessel ! Governor Hutch- 
 inson had the honor of conversing with Admiral Montagu on the 
 subject ; and he rejoiced to hear the admiral state, that, in his opinion, 
 Lord Sandwich would " never leave pursuing the colony until it was 
 disfranchised." Goveriior Hutchinson's own opinion, as recorded 
 for the perusal of the home government, was this : " If the late 
 affair at Rhode Island is passed, over without a full inquiry and due 
 resentment, our liberty people will think they may with impunity 
 commit any acts of violence, be they ever so atrocious ; and the friends 
 to government will despond, and give up all hopes of being able to 
 withstand the faction." 
 
 The home government needed no prompting. The lion was 
 awake. The " law-servants of the crown " pronounced the act of 
 the Rhode Islanders high treason, levying war against the king. 
 Five royal commissioners — the governor of Rhode Island, the chief 
 justices of New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, and a judge 
 of the Boston Vice-admiralty Court — were appointed to go to Rhode 
 Island, and investigate the fell business. General Gage, command- 
 ing the troops at Boston, was ordered to hold himself in readiness to 
 assist the commissioners, if they should need assistance. Governor 
 Wanton received this information from England about the 1st of 
 October in a long despatch from Lord Dartmouth ; and the material 
 parts of this document found their way into the newspapers. Secrecy 
 would have been desirable, if the governor had meant to execute the 
 king's commands ( but important matters will get into the papers 
 in times of public commotion, if the pigeon-hole is not well looked 
 to. There was one paragraph in Lord Dartmouth's despatch which 
 arrested every intelligent mind in the colonies, and kindled every 
 patriotic heart, Jefferson read it at Monticello with feelings inex- 
 pressible. Dabney Carr read it in his cabin full of children, and, 
 I doubt not, rode swiftly to his brother-in-law, Jefferson, to talk it 
 over : — 
 
118 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEHSOX. 
 
 " It is his majesty's intention, in consequence of tlie advice of his 
 Privv Council, that the persons concerned in the burning of the 
 Gaspee schooner, and in the otlier violences which attended that 
 daring insult, should be brought to England to be tkied ; 
 and I am therefore to signify to you his majesty's pleasure," that 
 the prisoners, together with the witnesses on both sides, shall 
 be delivered to the custody of Admiral Montagu, and sent in a king's 
 ship to England ! 
 
 The commissioners arrived at iSTewport. They offered a reward 
 of a thousand pounds sterling to any one who would reveal or betray 
 the ringleaders, and five hundred pounds for the detection of any 
 other person concerned. Before entering upon their duties they all 
 swore and subscribed the three great oaths, so pertinent to the 
 occasion. Eirst, they swore they did not believe the doctrine of 
 transubstantiation, and that they regarded the invocation of the 
 Virgin Mary and the sacrifice of the mass as superstitious and 
 idolatrous. Secondly, they swore that they considered George III. 
 the true king of Great Britain, and rejected the Pretender, who 
 called himself James III. Thirdly, they swore, that, from their 
 hearts, they abhorred, detested, and abjured, as impious and hereti- 
 cal, the damnable doctrine and position, that the Pope could depose 
 a king by pronouncing him excommunicate. These three tremen- 
 dous oaths, drawn out to great length, having been duly sworn, 
 recorded, and signed, the commissioners proceeded to business. It 
 was in the Newport State House, in that large room into which 
 summer visitors peep, and admire the quaint carpentry of other 
 days, that these solemn things were done. 
 
 The commissioners summoned witnesses, took depositions, ad- 
 journed, met again, sat long and often, made up a voluminous 
 report, and discovered nothing ! Not one man was so much as 
 arrested ! Every witness that knew any thing about the matter 
 staid at home, and sent an excuse. Some had causes coming on at 
 court. One had "a swelling in the hand." Another was seventy- 
 four years of age. Sabin, at whose house the assailants had met, and 
 wdiere they had spent an hour and a half in casting bullets and sharp- 
 ening cutlasses, sent the following, which may serve as a sample : — 
 
 "Gentlemen, I now address you on account of a summons I 
 received from you, requiring my attendance at the Council Chamber 
 in Newport on Wednesday, 20th instant. 
 
AN AFFAIE, IN NAERAGANSETT BAY. 119 
 
 "Now, gentlemen, I beg to acquaint you what renders me incapa- 
 ble of attending. I am an insolvent debtor ; and, therefore; my 
 person would be subject to an arrest by some one or other of my 
 creditors ; and my health has been on a decline for these two 
 months past, and it would be dangerous should I leave my house. 
 
 ''And, further, were I to attend, T could give no information 
 relative to the assembling, arming, training, and leading on the peo- 
 ple concerned in the destroying the schooner Gaspee. 
 
 " On the 9th day of June last, at night, I was employed at my 
 house, attending company ; who were John Andrew, Esq., Judge of 
 the Court of Vice-admiralty, John Cole, Esq., Mr. Hitchcock, and 
 George Brown, who supped at my house, and staid there until two 
 of the clock in the morning following; and I have not any 
 knowledge relative to the matter on which I am summoned." * 
 
 And so said they all, namely, George Brown, Mr. Hitchcock, 
 Judge Andrews, and John Cole, Esq., none of whom could attend 
 the honorable commissioners, though they found time to write ex- 
 cuses protesting the densest ignorance of the whole affair. In 
 a word, the investigation was an absolute nullity and farce. 
 Those five commissioners, with all the aid the king could give 
 them, with his fleet, his army, and his thousand pounds, could not, 
 after five months' trying, discover what every boy in the streets 
 knew, and what they themselves knew, as mere men. The publi- 
 city given to Lord Dartmouth's despatch would alone have defeated 
 its object, even if the commissioners had been in earnest. 
 
 The affair might have ended here ; but the king's friends were 
 now in the ascendency in Parliament, and they must needs invest 
 this folly with the importance and permanence of law. An act was 
 passed for the better protection of the navy and its appurtenances, 
 which made it a capital offence to destroy any object belonging to a 
 king's vessel. The act was so worded, that a man who should cut 
 a button from a drunken marine's coat, or knock in the head of a 
 royal beef-barrel, was to be presumed a traitor to the king, and could 
 be sent for trial to any county in England. 
 
 * A History of the Destruction of his Britannic Majesty's Schooner Gaspee in Narragan- 
 sett Bay. By Jolin Russell Bartlett, Secretary of State of Rhode Island. P. 102. Provi- 
 dunce. 1871. 
 
CHAPTER XV. 
 
 THE EFFECT i:S" VIRGINIA AND ELSEWHERE. 
 
 It were difficult to exaggerate the interest wliich this affair 
 excited throughout the colonies. The audacious gallantry of the 
 Providence men was the first theme of admiration ; and, hefore that 
 had become an exhausted topic, rumors of coming vengeance from 
 England renewed the public interest in it. Lord Dartmouth's 
 despatch, the arrival of the commissioners, and their solemn sessions 
 at Newport, still kept all minds attentive. The absurd failure of 
 the royal commission does not seem to have allayed the popular re- 
 sentment. Finally, the act of Parliament fixing the Rhode Island 
 precedent into imperial law convinced all but the most reluctant 
 that the king was resolved upon forcing the controversy to au 
 armed issue. Students familiar with the period receive the impression 
 that it was the burning of the Gaspee, more than the throwing 
 overboard of the tea, that led to the Boston Port Bill, and so precip- 
 itated the Revolution. 
 
 One evening in the early part of March, 1772, six or seven gentle- 
 men sat about a table in a private room of the Raleigh Tavern at 
 Williamsburg, Va. They were all members of the House of 
 Burgesses, — Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, his brother Fran- 
 cis Lightfoot Lee, Thomas Jefferson, his brother-in-law Dabney 
 Carr, and one or two others. Rhode Island had been for weeks upon 
 every tongue. It was not yet known that the scenes enacting in 
 the Newport State House were comedy instead of tragedy. Para- 
 graphs of fearful import circulated in the newspapers from colony 
 to colony. It looked, for a time, as though poor little Rhode Island 
 was, about to be extirpated ; for Admiral Montagu was going there 
 with a fleet, General Gage with an army; the inquisition had 
 already been set up ; and every man whom it chose to arrest was to 
 
 120 
 
THE EFFECT IN VIBGINIA AND ELSEWHEEE. 121 
 
 be sent tliree thousand miles away for trial. Rhode Island was the 
 least of the colonies; and it seemed as if, for that reason, she had 
 been first marked for vengeance. But the lawless court then sitting 
 at Newport an infuriate ministry could transfer to "Williamsburg, 
 and order fleets and armies to Virginia to execute its decrees ! At 
 such a crisis, what does it become the most powerful of the colonies 
 to do on behalf of the weakest? 
 
 This was the question which those gentlemen were discussing at 
 the E-aleigh Tavern that night. They were of the younger mem- 
 bers of the House ; and they had met by themselves, because they 
 feared their elders would hesitate to act with the requisite prompt- 
 ness and spirit. Their object was to hit upon a course which should Q 
 be moderate enough for the Tories, while being decided enough 
 for the Whigs. Virginia, they all felt, must stand by Rhode Island. 
 The colonies must make common cause. But it was requisite to 
 proceed with moderation. 
 
 We shall never appreciate what it cost some of the Virginians to 
 fall into line with the Northern colonies on these occasions. The 
 ideal of New England, as we plainly see in all the memorials of the 
 first century, was Israel ; but Virginia's beloved and honored model 
 was England: and both were equally cramped by the inadequacy 
 of their pattern. When the coast of British North' America was 
 divided, it was the northern half that should have been called Vir- ^ 
 ginia, and the southern half New England ; for it was in the south- 
 ern half that another England was to be attempted. There the - "' 
 Church of England was to be established ; there primogeniture and — 
 entail were to perpetuate county families ; there the laborer was to — 
 be ignorant, poor, and hopeless; there the government was to be ■' 
 an imitation of king, lords, and commons; there tlie king was to 
 be the source of honor ; there that inexplicable, complex, omnipotent 
 influence, the social tone, was to be English, only English, and that 
 exceedingl3^ For a century or more it was Virginia's favorite vanity 
 to differ from New England in just that very particular which the - 
 present crisis called upon her to disregard. __~ 
 
 In 1G74, when the agents of Virginia were in London trying to / 
 get their rights secured by a charter, they were opposed on the 
 ground of New England's recent adherence to Cromwell. The 
 agents replied. No disobedience of New England ought to cause 
 apprehension of the same on the part of Virginia; for the people of 
 
122 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 New England " steer a quite contrary course " from us Virginians. 
 They endeavor, as much as tliey can, to " sever themselves from the 
 crown ; " whereas our ''chief desire is to be assured of our perpet- 
 ual, immediate dependence thereon." They discover antimonarchical 
 principles ; they love a republican form of government, which is 
 something distinct and independent from the policy of England. 
 But we " are and ever have been heartily affectionate and loyal to the 
 monarchy of England ; " and the government of Virginia is " con- 
 stituted, as we humbly conceive, in imitation of it." They have 
 obtained power of choosing their own governor. We, on the con- 
 trary, " would not have that power, but desire our governor may be 
 from time to time appointed by the king." " The New Englanders 
 imagine great felicity in their form of government, civil and ecclesi- 
 astical, under which they were trained up to disobedience to the 
 crown and church of England ; but the Virginians would think 
 themselves very unhappy to be obliged to accept of and live under a 
 government so constituted." 
 
 1 ^ J Every Virginian heart would have responded to these sentiments. 
 But, with all thi'S loyalty to the king, there was a deeper attachment 
 to what they called the rights of Englishmen, and especially to 
 that fundamental right, without which no other has validity, — the 
 right of self-taxation. The Province, for a century and a half, was 
 never suffered long to forget that great right and the means of pre- 
 serving it. The people had a special drill and training in Magna 
 Charta. Old men long remembered, and told their descendants, that 
 all was chaos in Virginia for the first fourteen j^ears ; until the first 
 House of Burgesses convened at Jamestown, — their "darling 
 assembly," as one of the old historians styles it. During fifty-three 
 years more it was the first object of Virginians to secure this right 
 of self-gOTernment by a royal charter. Curiously enough, the first 
 king who recognized their parliament was the monarch who lost his 
 head by trying *to govern England without one. Young Charles I. 
 wrote them a letter, scolding them for founding their colony upon 
 tobacco-smoke, and advising them to turn their attention to potash, 
 staves, iron, and salt ; but he offered them three shillings a pound 
 for their whole crop of tobacco, and told them to convene an Assem- 
 bly to consider and decide upon the proposition. To the moment of 
 that king's decapitation, Virginia sided with the Commonwealth men, 
 as England herself did. Once, in 1654, the tobacco lords in the Bur- 
 
THE EFFECT IN VIRGINIA AND ELSEWHERE. 123 
 
 gesses disfranchised all their constituents, except these who pos- 
 sessed a certain quantity of land. The act was repealed two years 
 after, and for reasons which Jefferson himself might have dictated, 
 and which, doubtless, his ancestors approved. It was unreasonable and 
 unnatural, said the preamble to the repealing act, that men who con- 
 tributed to the support of government and the defence of the coun- 
 try should be deprived of their chartered and natural rights by the 
 very servants whom they had chosen to watch over their interests. 
 
 A long series of events could be adduced to show that the funda- 
 mental rights of citizens were familiar and dear to Virginians from 
 1621 onward to the time of the Stamp Act. Every doctrine of the 
 Revolutionary period can be found, expressed with force and intelli- 
 gence, in the public papers of the Province a century before the 
 meeting of the first Congress. Despite that sentimental loj^alty of 
 theirs, the yeomen of Virginia were distinctly aware that their col- 
 ony had been " deduced " not at the king's expense, and defended 
 not by the Icing's troops, and supported not by the king's treasure ; 
 and that, in founding a colony which cost the king nothing, and 
 yielded him a revenue of a hundred and fifty pounds a year, they had 
 certainly not lost any of the rights of Englishmen. 
 
 Sentiment, however, is a potent influence, particularly when it is 
 allied with vanity. It is hard for men to profess opinions to which 
 the stigma of vulgarity has been affixed ; and, in Virginia, loyalty 
 to church and king was regarded as the trait of a gentleman. And, 
 ridiculous as it seems, those twelve councillors whom the governor 
 recommended and the king appointed, — the only Virginians who 
 could, with any show of legality, claim precedence of the rest — 
 were held in extravagant respect. There was a large circle of fami- 
 lies with whom the object of ambition was to see one of their mem- 
 bers appointed to a seat in the Council Chamber. Sentiment, vanity, 
 interest, tradition, habit, united to bind the heads of great families 
 in close array around the viceregal throne. The excellent Botetourt, 
 too, had now been replaced by the rash, ignorant, and reckless Lord 
 Dunmore, with his cormorant factotum extorting illegal fees, and a 
 numerous family of sons and daughters, who were striving to intro- 
 duce into society at Williamsburg rules of precedence similar to 
 those which prevailed in European courts. Eool as he was, he had 
 his courtiers and his votaries. " The palace " was still a social force, 
 as well as a political one. 
 
124 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 
 
 Our young burgesses, therefore, who were closeted at the Raleigh 
 Tavern, could recommend nothing very bold or decisive. Besides, 
 they came of a race whose words are apt to be moderate and few 
 when their intent is most serious and unchangeable ; not inclined 
 to threaten until they are ready with the stroke. 
 
 Two years and a half before, the Massachusetts Assembly had 
 appointed a committee of correspondence, of five members, to com- 
 municate with their agent and others in England, and with the 
 speakers of the several colonial legislatures, upon subjects of common 
 concern ; anA, once or twice, circular letters had been sent by the 
 House to the speakers of the various assemblies. Acting upon this 
 hint (though without thinking of it at the time), the young gentle- 
 men determined to propose to their House to establish a Standing 
 Committee of eleven members, for the sole purpose of getting and 
 transmitting to sister colonies the earliest intelligence of such acts 
 of the administration and of Parliament as related to America; to 
 instruct this committee to inquire at once into the affair at Rhode 
 Island ; and to invite each of the other colonial legislatures to 
 appoint a similar committee. This measure was to be urged as a 
 means of "quieting the minds of his viajesti/s faithful subjects in 
 this colony,'" which had been " much disturbed by various rumors 
 and reports of proceedings tending to deprive them of their ancient 
 legal and constitutional rights." 
 
 Tlie resolutions having been drawn, Jefferson was asked to offer 
 f> them to the House the next morning. He preferred to assign this 
 task to his brother-in-law, Dabney Carr, a new member, as yet 
 unheard in the House, but endowed, as Jefferson believed, with emi- 
 nent talents for debate. Mr. Carr consenting, the company broke up, 
 Carr and Jefferson going to their lodgings together. As they walk- 
 ed homeward, they conversed upon the utility and probable effects 
 of such committees of correspondence ; and they agreed in thinking 
 that the measure must lead, and that speedily, to a Congress of 
 Deputies from all the colonies, for the purpose of presenting a 
 united front to these strange aggressions, and of concerting the best 
 methods of opposition. If eitiier of them had ever heard of the 
 Massachusetts committee of 1770, they had forgotten it. That com- 
 mittee's chief object had been correspondence with agents in 
 London. ISTo s?/5feHi of interchanging news and ideas had resulted 
 from its appointment. They felt then, and always felt, that theirs 
 was an original measure. 
 
THE EFFECT IN VIRGINIA AND ELSEWHERE. 125 
 
 Tlie next morning Dabney Carr rose to address the House for the 
 first time. A general favorite, every one wished him success ; and 
 lie spoke to men alarmed at the events transpiring in Rhode Island, 
 The resolutions were read. He supported them in a speech which 
 tradition reports to have been a liappy blending of boldness, pru- 
 dence, and courtesy. How harmless the measure suggested! What 
 more proper than for legislative bodies to procure prompt, exact in- 
 formation ! He reconciled nearly every mind to the wisdom and 
 propriety of the scheme ; and, when he sat down, the faces of the 
 little parliament beamed with generous joy as in the triumph of a 
 friend. Forty-three years after, Jefferson told a son of the j^oung 
 speaker how well he remembered the pleasure which shone in the 
 countenances of the Assembly at the conclusion of the speech, and 
 the buzz of applauding remark that followed it. The resolutions 
 were carried with a near aj^proach to unanimity. The members of 
 the committee were Peyton Randolph, R. C. Nicholas, Richard 
 Bland, R; H. Lee, Benjamin Harrison, Edmund Pendleton, Patrick 
 Henry, Dudley Digges, Dabney Carr, Archibald Gary, and Thomas '0 
 Jefferson. 
 
 The session ended on the day following; but the committee 
 remained long enough to prepare and despatch a circular letter to 
 the colonial assemblies, explaining the object of their appointment, 
 and requesting each of them to designate a similar committee with 
 whom they could regularly communicate. What a part these com- 
 mittees played in the times that followed need not be told ! Every 
 county, every village, came to have its committee, the power of 
 which increased as the public alarm increased. No j)ower is so 
 terrible as the organ of a public terror. Some of the innumerable 
 committees, American and French, that sprang into being through 
 that meeting in the Raleigh Tavern, abused their power; but the 
 Committees of Correspondence — forerunner and cause of the Con- 
 tinental Congress — secured the independence of the colonies. The O 
 author of the scheme lived to see its success in one Revolution, and 
 its fearful abuse in another. 
 
 The sympathy of the most powerful — or, at least, the most 
 imposing and famous — of the colonies with the smallest and 
 weakest touched every generous heart in America, and led the way 
 to that predominance of Virginia which made her by and by the 
 " mother of Presidents." The Assembly of Massachusetts hailed 
 
126 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOI!^. 
 
 with warm applause the wise and firm conduct of Virginia at all 
 times, and especially in thus making the cause of Rliode Island her 
 own. The Khode-Island Legislature, in one of its resolves, spoke of 
 " the glorious Assembly of Virginia." Tlie young burgesses had 
 every reason to be satisfied with the results of their measure. 
 
 The session being ended, Jefferson and Carr resumed their pro- 
 fessional duties. If they rode homeward together, as is probable, 
 Jefferson was obliged to return soon to the April term of the Gen- 
 eral Court a-t Williamsburg ; and his brother-in-law had causes to 
 plead in the county court held at Charlottesville, the village that 
 lay within sight of Monticello. Dabney Carr, then eight 3'ears 
 married, had, as I have said, his little house full of little children. 
 The sixth was born about the time of his coming from his first ses- 
 sion, flushed with the triumph of his maiden speech. He was com- 
 pelled to leave home again before his wife was strong enough to sit 
 up. Her spirits sank at the thought of his leaving her, and she 
 was oppressed with forebodings of evil. He took his leave of her, 
 and mounted his horse for his journey to Charlottesville. When 
 she heard his horse's steps upon the road under her window, she 
 raised herself feebly in bed to catch one last look at him; but she 
 only could get high enough to see his hat, as it swayed to the 
 motion of the horse. Soon after reaching Charlottesville he wag 
 seized with a malignant type of typhoid fever, the course of which 
 was so rapid that he could not be moved even so far as Monticello, 
 and he died before Jefferson heard that he was in danger. 
 
 The news of this desolating stroke came near depriving his chil- 
 dren of a mother. She lost her reason for a time ; during which she 
 could see only the moving phantom of a Hat, as she had seen her 
 husband's when he passed her window. When reason returned, and 
 for many weeks after, still that maddening hat would not vanish 
 from her sight.* It was long before she could bend her mind to 
 the new duties which the event devolved upon her. 
 
 In this sudden desolation of her young life, her brother was 
 literally a tower of refuge to her ; for he took her, and all her help- 
 less brood, home to Monticello, which thenceforth became their 
 home, as he their father. He reared and educated all those six chil- 
 dren — three sons and three daughters — with the same care, 
 
 ♦ Kandall'a JcSerson, i. 84. 
 
THE EFFECT IK VIRGINIA AND ELSEWHERE. 127 
 
 tenderness, and liberality as his own. He nurtured their infancy ; 
 he directed their studies ; he guided their entrance into active life ; 
 two of the sons pursuing with distinguished success his own profes- 
 sion. ISTor did he ever, during the long series of years when he 
 had offices to give awaj', quarter one of them, or one of their chil- 
 dren, upon the public. When he reached home, he found that his 
 friend had been buried at Shadwell. Mindful of the romantic agree- 
 ment of their youth, that, whichever died last, should bury the 
 other under the giant oak on Monticello, beneath which they had 
 read and talked during long summer daj's, he caused the remains to 
 be removed, and mused over an inscription proper for the tombstone. 
 He wrote one, which recorded the usual brief outline of a human 
 life, and ended it with these words : " To his virtue, good sense, 
 learning, and friendship, this stone is dedicated by Thomas Jeffer- 
 son, who, of all men living, loved him most.'" He thought of these 
 lines to accompany the inscription, from the Excursion of Mallet : — 
 
 " Lamented Shade, whom every gift of Heaven 
 Profusely blest ; a temper winning, mild ; 
 Nor pity softer, nor was truth more bright. 
 Constant in doing well, he neither sought 
 Nor shunned applause. No bashful merit sighed 
 Near him neglected. Sympathizing, he 
 Wiped oif the tear from Sorrow's clouded eye 
 With kindly hand, and taught her heart to smile." 
 
 These melancholy duties done, there remained for Jefferson a vast 
 increase to the joy of his home ; the play and prattle of six affection- 
 ate children, their opening intelligence, their abundant love, their 
 six countenances speaking welcome when he returned, and luring 
 him while away. He bad the instinct of the parent and of tlie 
 tutor, and both unusually strong; so strong that his own family could 
 not have sufficed for their gratification. Science will one day tell us 
 ^vhy the children of such a pair should have had so slight, so pre- 
 carious, a hold upon life. At present we have to be content with 
 the miserable fact. Their first child, Martha, inherited a constitu- 
 tion sufficiently robust ; their second lived but five months ; their 
 third only seventeen days ; their fourth child was Mary, who 
 grew to womanhood ; their fifth lived five months ; and their sixth 
 two years. All of them were girls, except the one that lived seven- 
 
128 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 teen days. The youngest, who survived two years, seemed all 
 spirit. She listened to music with rapture, and had an organization 
 so finely attuned, that a false note brought tears to her eyes. But 
 Jefferson was hlest in this, that his mountain-top at every period of 
 his long life was alive and merry with a swarm of children besides 
 his own. 
 
 We know so little of Mrs. Jefferson, that the least thing which 
 concerns her has interest. Three glimpses of their home life are 
 afforded in the memorials of these happy years. In one record we see 
 her teaching " the little Cans " the beginnings of knowledge, along 
 with her own child. In another the dense veil of a hundred years is 
 lifted for a moment, and we hear her blaming her husband for some 
 generous deed of his which had met with an ungrateful return. 
 " But," she immediately added, in a gush of admiring affection, " it 
 was always so with him : he is so good himself, that he cannot under- 
 stand how bad other people may be." In anotlier we witness a short 
 domestic scene, in which appear three characters, -^father, mother, 
 and child. For some trifling fault the child had undergone a trifling 
 punishment. Some time after, being again in disgrace, her mother 
 reminded her of the painful circumstance. The too sensitive Mar- 
 tha, deeply wounded at what seemed a taunt, turned away with a 
 swelling heart, and eyes filled with tears ; but, before she had gone 
 beyond hearing, she heard her father say to her mother, in the low 
 tone of affectionate remonstrance, " My dear, a fault in so young a 
 child, once punished, should be forgotten." The child never forgot 
 the passion of grateful love that filled her heart as these words caught 
 her ear.* 
 
 The year 1773 wore away. The next year was the one decisive of 
 the controversy between the colonies and the king. When the year 
 1774 opened, Thomas Jefferson was a thriving young lawyer, not 
 known even by name beyond his native Province ; when it closed, 
 he was a person of note among the patriots of America, and had won 
 the honor of being proscribed by name in England. 
 
 The spring found him as usual in liis seat in the House of Bur- 
 gesses. As, in 1773, the ej'es of the continent were fixed upon Nar- 
 ragansett Bay, so now, in 1774, every mind was intent upon Boston 
 Harbor. The wrath of a misguided king was kindled against the 
 
 * Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, p. 341. 
 
THE EFFECT IN VIRGINIA AND ELSEWHEEE. 129 
 
 Bostonians. They had not equalled the Rhode Islanders in audacity ; 
 they had not burnt a king's vessel, nor wounded a king's lieutenant ; 
 but a few of them had taken the liberty of throwing some chests of 
 tea into the harbor. The ministry, instructed by their failure in 
 Rhode Island, made no attempt to discover the doers_ of this deed. 
 They offered no reward, and appointed no commissioners. They 
 held the whole population guilty, and closed the port ; which, in an 
 instant, suspended the business of the town, and deprived it of the 
 means of subsistence. So do some unskilful schoolmasters, when they 
 cannot detect a culprit, " keep in '' the whole school, and put every 
 boy upon bread and water. 
 
 Once more Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, the two Lees, and a 
 few other choice spirits, met to consider what part it became Virginia 
 to take in this new crisis. Expedients appeared to be exhausted : at 
 least, all appeals to the powers on the other side of the ocean had 
 proved fruitless. The youtig Whigs in conference concluded that 
 the next thing in order was to rouse the people of Virginia to a more 
 vivid sense of the deadly peril to their liberty. The Boston Port 
 Bill was to go into operation on the 1st of June. They determined 
 to get the House, if they could, to appoint that day as one of public 
 fasting and humiliation, to be observed by services in all the parish 
 churches. Between the end of the session and the day designated, 
 there would be time for members to go to their counties, and inspire 
 the clergy with the feeling proper to the occasion. '• We cooked up 
 a resolution," Jefferson records, " somewhat modernizing the Puritan 
 phrases, appointing the first day of June for a day of fasting, humil- 
 iation, and prayer, to implore Heaven to avert from us the evils of 
 civil war, to inspire us with firmness in support of our rights, and to 
 turn the hearts of the king and parliament to moderation and justice." 
 
 Jefferson never invited failure by neglecting obvious precautions, 
 or disregarding the small proprieties. He was aware, that, if this 
 resolution and its pious preamble were offered by himself, or by his 
 merry friend Patrick Henry, or by any of the younger Whigs, the 
 incongruity would not escape remark. The head of the bar, Mr. ^ 
 Nicholas, a grave, religious gentleman, was asked to offer it to the 
 Burgesses. He complied with the request, and the resolution passed 
 without opposition. 
 
 Lord Dunmore dissolved the House. The members, as in Lord 
 Botecourt's time, assembled the next morning in the Apollo. 
 
130 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOK. 
 
 Momentous meeting! Tliej did a few quiet things, in their 
 usual quiet, courteous way ; but two of them were things tliat proved 
 decisive, irreversible, revolutionary. They agreed to buy no more 
 tea. They instructed the committee of correspondence to propose 
 an Anxual Congress of deputies from all the colonies. They 
 agreed to meet on the 1st of August, at Williamsburg, to elect the 
 Virginia members of that congress. They declared that an attack 
 on the rights of one colony was an attack on all. Then they broke 
 up, and hurried home to rouse the clergy to make the very utmost 
 of the opportunity about to be afforded them on the Fast Day. 
 
 The Fast was universally observed ; and its effect, as Jefferson 
 thought, was most salutary. The people, he says, met at their parish 
 churches with anxiety and alarm in their faces ; for no solemnity of 
 the kind had been held in nineteen years, not since the daj^s of ter- 
 ror after Braddock's defeat. The minister of his own parish was 
 Charles Clay (cousin of Henry Clay), a man fully alive to the occa- 
 sion, whose fervid oratory was heard all through the Revolutionary 
 period, nerving the people to dare and endure. " The cause of lib- 
 erty is the cause of God ! " he once exclaimed in the course of a 
 sermon on a fast day. " Cursed be he," was another of his sen- 
 tences, " who keepeth back his sword from blood in this war ! " 
 " The effect of the day," wrote Jefferson many years after, thinking, 
 doubtless, of what he had heard and seen in Albemarle, " was like a 
 shock of electricity, arousing every man, and placing him erect and 
 solidly on his centre." 
 
 All that summer Boston, suffering, impoverished Boston, lay upon 
 every heart. Each Province, county, city, town, neighborhood, sent 
 its contribution to supply the needs of the people, suddenly deprived 
 of their occupation. The port being closed on the 1st of June, the 
 day of the year when the stock of food in a country reaches its low- 
 est point, the farmers could not at first be as liberal as they wished; 
 but they did what they could. Windham (Conn, began the work 
 of relief Before the month of June ended, Windham sent in, with a 
 cordial letter of applause and sympathy, "a small flock of sheep, 
 which, at this season, are not so good as we could wish, but are the 
 best we had." Two hundred and fifty-eight was Windham's notion 
 of the number of sheep that go to " a small flock." Groton (Mass.) 
 sent forty bushels of grain ; Wrentham, one load of grain ; Pepperill, 
 forty bushels ; Charlemout, two barrels of flour ; Farmington, between 
 
THE EFFECT IN VIRGINIA AND ELSEWHERE. 1-31 
 
 three and four hundred bushels of rye and corn ; and fertile Weth- 
 ersfield, nearly eight hundred bushels of grain, with promise of more 
 after harvest. 
 
 New Jersey soon wrote to say that she, too, was making contri- 
 butions, and would be glad to know whicli would be most acceptable 
 to a suffering sister, cash or produce. Cash, replied Boston, if 
 perfectly convenient. North Carolina promptly sent two sloop- 
 loads of provisions. The Marblehead fishermen were so liberal as 
 to forward " two hundred and twenty-four quintals of good eating- 
 fish, one barrel and three-quarters of good olive-oil, and thirty-nine 
 pounds, five shillings, and three pence in cash." South Carolina's 
 first gift was one hundred casks of rice. '' Baltimore town " contrib- 
 uted three thousand bushels of corn, twenty barrels of rye-flour, 
 two barrels of pork, and twenty barrels of bread. Virginia, — there 
 seemed to be no end to Virginia's gifts ! A cargo of corn was her 
 first offering; Alexandria followed soon with a present of tliree hun- 
 dred and fifty pounds in money; and the several counties kept 
 forwarding cargoes and large consignments of corn, all through the 
 autumn and winter. In all, Virginia contributed about ten thou- 
 sand bushels of what one forwarder styled, in his letter, " donation 
 .grain," besides several sums of money from villages and individuals. 
 "Hold out long enough," wrote a gentleman in the South, "and 
 Boston will become the granary of America." 
 
 As the cool season approached, the agricultural towns became 
 more liberal. Lebanon drove in "three hundred and seventy-six fat 
 sheep ; " Norwich, tw;o hundred and ninety-one ; Groton, one hun- 
 dred and twenty ; Brooklyn, one hundred and twenty-five ; East 
 Haddam, " a drove of sheep and cattle." The Maryland counties 
 were extremely liberal : each sent its thousand or ttro thousand 
 bushels of corn. From cold and remote Quebec came "a small O 
 quantity of wlieat ; " from Montreal, a hundred pounds sterling. 
 What droves of sheep kept streaming into Boston, when the tem- 
 perature favored driving ! From every little mountain town in New 
 Hampshire and Vermont came sheep, — fifty, sixty-five, one hundred, 
 in a flock. Hartford sent off, after harvest, seven hundred and 
 thirty-eigltt bushels of rye and one hundred and eleven bushels of 
 corn, its ''small but free gratuity." Berwick, with apologies for the 
 smallness of its gift, sent six oxen and twenty-six sheep. Many 
 towns and some Provinces, which out of the summer's scarcity had 
 
132 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 contributed liberally, contributed a second time from the autumn's 
 fat abundance. Groton did so and Marblebead, New Jersey and 
 Baltimore. 
 
 Individual donations swelled tlie tide of benefaction. Samuel 
 Moody treated himself to a gift of five guineas. Philadelphia raised 
 two thousand pounds, and forwarded it, part in provisions, part in 
 iron, part in money. Providence voted one hundred and twenty- 
 five pounds. Newport contributed a thousand dollars. New York 
 sent a New- Year's gift of one thousand and sixty-two pounds, with 
 notice of more to come. Ckibs, fire-companies, and other organiza- 
 tions, forwarded sums of money during the winter. Charleston, in 
 South Carolina, alleviated tlie winter's cold with three hundred and 
 seventy-eight tierces of rice. The church in Salem, just after their 
 meeting-house was burnt, and a powerful member had drawn off 
 a number of their body, contrived to send twenty-four pounds, six- 
 teen shillings, and eight pence, "wishing it had beeii ten times 
 more." Little Butland could only spare "four quarters of beef," 
 weight five hundred and ninety-three pounds. Springfield gave 
 twenty-five pigs, worth " three pounds, eighteen shillings, one penny, 
 lawful money." Wells, in Maine, contributed twenty-five cords of 
 wood ; Falmouth, fifty-seven cords ; Cape Elizabeth, forty-eight 
 cords. Portsmouth, in New Hampshire, voted two hundred pounds. 
 From Delaware came nine hundred dollars. In the spring arrived 
 another thousand pounds from New York. Farmers who had 
 nothing else to give carted firewood, some twelve miles, some six- 
 teen. Dominica gave three bags of cocoa. Even from London — 
 from the "Constitutional Society " there — came a hundred pounds; 
 from another society, called "The Supporters of Civil Eights," came 
 five hundred pounds ; and four smaller sums were received from 
 individuals in England, — fifteen pounds, twenty pounds, ten pounds, 
 four guineas. Augustine Washington, in Virginia, was asked 
 whether he could sell a quantity of hoes and axes which Boston 
 mechanics, thrown out of employment by the Port Bill, had turned 
 to and made. The committee of relief set large numbers of the 
 mechanics at work making bricks, nails, fabrics, implements, and 
 invited contributions of materials. And so the work went on, even 
 after the siege of the town was begun by the Continental troops ; 
 Georgia sending sixt^'-three casks of rice as late as June, 1776. 
 
 The letters which accompanied the gift, and the answers of the 
 
THE EFFECT IN VIRGIOTA AND ELSEWHERE. 133 
 
 Boston Committee, — for every gift was specially acknowledged in 
 an epistle of liigli courtesy and considerable length, — would fill a 
 volume of some magnitude. They have been printed by the Massa- 
 chusetts Historical Society, to whicli the public is indebted for the 
 preservation and accessibility of a great number of most precious 
 memorials of the past. No relic of that period contains so much of 
 its spirit as this mass of correspondence. 
 
 Jefferson, on his mountain-top that summer, was busy both with 
 hands and brain. He was striving to get a more commodious 
 house over tlie heads of his double brood ; making bricks, cutting 
 timber, sending to England for sixteen pairs of sashes, and a small 
 box of glass to mend with. His new Italian gardeners gave him as 
 much work as he gave them ; such an enthusiast in their lovely art 
 was he. Nor was he yet, nor was he ever, weaned from his violin. 
 
 Alberti, a great performer on the instrument, who had come to 
 Virginia with a troupe of actors, and settled there as a teacher of 
 music, he had lured to Monticello. Under him he practised three 
 hours a day, until the absorbing events of these times drew him ofip. 
 
 This summer, especially, his head was busier than his hands. 
 June and July would soon pass ; and then the burgesses were to 
 meet at Williamsburg, in convention, to elect deputies to the Con- 
 gress which was to assemble at Philadelphia in September. Those 
 deputies, when elected, would require formal, exact instructions. 
 What did Virginia desire her deputies to do or attempt in Philadel- 
 phia ? It was a grave question. It was a difficult question. The 
 situation being unique, there were no precedents to guide ; and how 
 necessary to the limited mind of man are precedents ! Jefferson 
 brooded over this problem; and before starting for Williamsburg, at 
 the end of July, he prepared a draft of such instructions as he 
 desired should be given to the representatives of Virginia in the 
 General Congress. It was but a rough draft, with gaps in it for 
 names and dates, which he could not procure at home. Such as it 
 was, however, it made him famous on one side of the ocean, and 
 proscribed on the other. 
 
CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 JEFFERSOX GIVES ADVICE TO GEORGE III. 
 
 The slow pace at whicli the two great revolutions of tlie last cen- 
 tury marched surjirises anew every new inquirer. In our own day 
 a Louis Philippe slips across the Channel at the imminent risk of 
 catching a cold, or a Louis Napoleon eagerly surrenders a sword he 
 never used, and finds safety in an enclianting chateau ; and, hehold, 
 the revolution is accomplished ! No one misses them. No one 
 regrets tliem. They vanish from the scene like player kings, — as 
 they are ; and, if a movement is made for their return, it is by men 
 who take their wages for doing it. So completely have we outgrown 
 that mighty illusion of the past, "the divinity that hedged a king. 
 
 V Mr. Carlyle opens his series of pictures of the French Revolution 
 with the death of Louis XV. To have made the series complete, lie 
 might have begun with the execution of poor crazy Damiens, who 
 pierced the skin of that monarch with a penknife in 1757, and was 
 j)ut to death with tortures inconceivable. Nothing could recall to 
 the modern reader more forcibly the spell that once surrounded the 
 
 ' kingly office. Nothing could better show what the French people 
 had to overcome before they could think of a king as the mere chief 
 magistrate of a nation, existing only for the nation's convenience. 
 The apology and explanation of tlie frenzies of the French Revolu- 
 tion was the awful majesty with which policy and religion had con- 
 sj)ired to invest the name and person of the monarch. 
 
 It was not merely that the king had the power to inflict upon an 
 irresponsible fanatic all the anguish which the frame of a powerful 
 young man could endure ; it was not merely that the wretch was 
 burned with red-hot tongs by the parasites who arrested him; that 
 his eighty-two days of detention and trial were all days of keenest 
 suffering ; that the art of torture was exhausted to wring from his 
 
 134 
 
JEFFERSON GIVES ADVICE TO GEOEGE Til. 135 
 
 lips the names of imaginary confederates; that his right hand was 
 slowly burnt off; that he was torn with red-hot pincers, and melted 
 lead and boiling pitch poured into his wounds ; that he was pulled 
 to pieces by four horses ; that his body was burned to ashes, his 
 house levelled with the dust, his iunoceiit family banished, and his 
 relations forbidden to bear his name. The cowardice of kings has 
 done or permitted such cruelty many times. The, instructive fact in 
 this case is, that France, Europe, the civilized world, looked on, 
 and saw all that done without disapproval ! The king was hailed 
 with unaccustomed, acclamations when next he appeared in public. 
 When he pensioned, or otherwise rewarded, every man concerned in 
 the trial and execution, from the judged to the torturers, he evidently 
 did what France thought wa,s becoming. A dozen diarists of the 
 time have left minute narratives of the whole fell business ; but who 
 intimates disapproval ? The woman of rank who expressed pity for 
 the horses, as she watched their struggles to accomplish their part 
 of the programme, was supposed to have uttered a gay, spriglitly 
 thing, suited to the occasion. Even Voltaire, the chief opponent 
 of the system of torture, made a jest of this victim's agony; for he 
 held that torture, thoug'h absurd and monstrous in ordinary cases, 
 might properly be employed when the life of a king had been 
 aimed at. 
 
 In England and in English colonies, king-w^orship was as much 
 more profound and solemn as the character of the Saxon is deeper 
 than that of the Celt. How else can we account for the submission 
 of such an empire as that of Great Britain to such kings as the 
 Four Georges, from whom it derived immense evils, and no good? 
 Whoever or whatever, during the last two centuries, has been right 
 in England, the king has always been wrong. Whoever has been 
 wise in England, the king has always been foolish. Whoever has 
 assisted progress in England, the king has always obstructed it. 
 During the reign of the first two of these royal Georges, the 
 interests of a great empire were made subordinate to those of a petty 
 Continental state. The third spent his long life in warring upon 
 that in the government of his country which constitutes a great 
 part of Britain's claim to the gratitude of our race. The fourth, so 
 far as the finite mind of man can discern, lived but to show how 
 nearly a man can resemble a brute, without undergoing an Ovid's 
 metamorphosis, and falling upon four legs. 
 
136 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 But, being called by the name of king, it was enough. From 
 imperial Chatham, through all gradations of intelligence and 
 power, down, past Dr. Johnson, to the lowest flunky that ever aired 
 his " quivering calves " behind a carriage. Englishmen were proud 
 to be called their subjects, and could not hold their souls upright in 
 their presence. This is one of the mysteries of human nature for 
 some future Darwin to investigate; for it is something which we 
 appear to have in common with the bees, the ants, some migratory 
 birds, and some gregarious beasts. 
 
 Jeiferson had one of the most radical of minds, superior to the 
 illusions in which most men pass their lives ; but when, in the 
 summer of 1774, he sat down to prepare a draft of Instructions for 
 Virginia's delegates to the Congress, which was to meet at Philadel- 
 phia in September, he thought of nothing more revolutionary than 
 ■Qthis : The Congress should unite in a most solemn and elaborate 
 address to the king ! The case had been argued, one would think, 
 often enough. For nine years the separate colonies had been peti- 
 tioning and resolving. The press of both countries had teemed 
 with the subject. Franklin had been elucidating it, and flashing 
 wit upon it. If a gracious king did not understand the matter yet, 
 there was small reason to hope that any further expenditure of 
 mere ink would avail. Nevertheless, this young radical of Monti- 
 cello deemed it the chief duty of the Continental Congress to argue 
 the matter once more, and make another appeal to the justice of 
 the king. The delegates from Virginia, he thought, should be 
 instructed to propose to the Congress to present ''a humble and 
 dutiful address to His Majesty," as' the chief magistrate of the 
 empire, — an empire governed by many legislatures, — informing 
 him that one of those legislatures, namely, the British Parliament, 
 had encroached upon the rights of others, namely, those of the 
 Thirteen American Colonies, and calling upon the king to interfere. 
 
 A humble and dutiful address ! One who is familiar with the 
 character of George III. can scarcely read Jefferson's draft of In- 
 structions with a serious countenance, so ludicrously remote was it 
 from the king's conception of the humble and the dutiful. 
 
 It was a frightfully radical way of opening the case to speak of 
 the mighty British Parliament as the legislature of one portion of 
 the king's dominions. That was the point in dispute. It is not 
 probable, that, in 1774, Thomas Jefferson, a provincial lawyer, knew 
 
JEFFERSON" GIVES ADVICE TO GEORGE HI. 137 
 
 the secrets of the Court of St. James ; nor could it have been his 
 intention to inflame the wrath of the British lion ; but if he had 
 known George III. from his childliood, and heard every Tory senti- 
 ment which his Scotch tutors had instilled into his unformed mind, 
 he could not have produced a piece of writing better calculated to 
 exasperate the king. In almost every sentence there was a sting, — • 
 the bitter sting of truth and good sense. Jefferson learned, by and 
 by, to be a politician ; and he acquired the art of uttering offensiveC 
 truths with the minimum of oftence. Just as some noblemen, big- 
 oted tories in theory, are most courteous democrats in practice, giving 
 to every human creature they know or meet his due of consideration, 
 so he, a democrat in theory, became conciliatory and conservative in 
 giving utteratice to his opinions, anxious to narrow the breach between 
 himself and his opponents. But in this paper he accumulated offence, 
 careless of every thing but to get roughly upon paper the substantial 
 truth of the matter, leaving it to the convention to invest that truth 
 with becoming words. 
 
 The Congress, he thought, should address the king in a frank and 
 manly manner, devoid of those servile expressions " which would 
 persuade His Majesty that we are asking favors and not rights." 
 The king was, to be invited to reflect " that he is no more than the 
 chief officer of the people, appointed by the laws, and circumscribed 
 with definite powers, to assist in working the great machine of gov- 
 ernment, erected for their use, and, consequently, subject to their 
 superintendence." This sentence bluntly asked George III. to un- 
 learn his whole education. The king was to be reminded, also, that 
 the colonies had been planted, and defended for a hundred and fifty 
 J^ears, without costing the king's treasury a shilling. Kecently,. since 
 the commerce of America had become important to Great Britain, 
 the home government had assisted to expel the French. For the 
 same reason England had given aid to Portugal, and other allies, 
 commercially important to her ; but the British Parliament did not 
 claim, in consequence, a right to tax the Portuguese. 
 
 But this was inoffensive compared with his next point. In allud- 
 ing to the oppressions suffered by the colonies in the time of the 
 Stuarts, the uncompromising radical held language that no king has 
 ever been able to hear with patience : " A family of princes was 
 then upon the British throne, whose treasonable crimes against their 
 people brought on them afterwards the exertion of those sacred and 
 
138 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON". 
 
 sovereign rights of punisliment, reserved in the hands of the people 
 for cases of extreme necessity, and judged by the constitution unsafe 
 to be delegated to any other judicature" ! . He spoke familiarly, too, 
 of "the late deposition of His Majesty King Charles, by the 
 Commonweath of England," as a thing too obviously right to be 
 defended. Equally right was it for some of the colonies to choose to 
 reiBaiu under Charles II. It was wholly tlieir business : they could 
 have any king they liked, or no king. The people were sovereign ; 
 the king was their head servant. 
 
 With regard to the various legislatures in the empire, all of them 
 were equally independent and equally sovereign. The parliament 
 of Virginia had no right to pass laws for the government of the 
 people of England, and the British legislature had no right to pass 
 laws for the government of the people of Virginia. Hence, the 
 whole series of absurd and iniquitous acts of the British legislature 
 regulating the commerce and restricting the industry of the colonies 
 were void ! " Can any one reason be assigned, why a hundred and 
 sixty thousand electors in the island of Great Britain should give law 
 to four millions in the States of America, every individual of whom is 
 equal to every individual of them, in virtue, in understanding, and in 
 bodily strength ?" He enumerated the long catalogue of monstrous 
 acts, from the amazing laws which forbade an American to make a 
 hat or a nail, to the malignant tyranny which would drag an accused 
 American three thousand miles to his trial. " The cowards who 
 would suffer a countrj'man to be torn from the bowels of their soci- 
 ety, in order to be thus offered a sacrifice to parliamentary tj'ranny, 
 would merit that everlasting infamy now fixed on the authors of 
 the act." 
 
 The burden of these instructions is decentralization. Already 
 Jefferson saw the necessity of local government, the impossibility of 
 a power on the banks of the Thames acting wisely for a Province 
 on the shores of the James, the certainty that the momentary inter- 
 ests of a class near the law-making power would outweigh the per- 
 manent interests of the distant Province. The abolition of slavery, 
 he remarked, was " the great object of desire in the colonies ;" and, 
 as a step towards that, Virginia had tried again and again to stop 
 all farther importations of slaves ; but every such law had been 
 vetoed by the king himself, who thus preferred the advantage of "a 
 few British corsairs, to the lasting interests of the American States, 
 
JEFFERSON GIVES ADVICE TO GEOEGE III. 139 
 
 and to the rights of human nature deeply wounded by this infamous 
 practice." 
 
 In asserting that the great object of desire in the colonies was the 
 abolition of slav^ery, he expressed rather the feeling of his own set, — O 
 the educated and high-bred j'oung Whigs of the Southern colonies, 
 than the sentiments of the great body of slaveholders. He could 
 boast that the first act of his own public life had been an attempt in 
 that direction; and he knew that his friend and ally, Richard Henry :. 
 Lee, had opened his brilliant career by a motion to put an end to 
 ''the iniquitous and disgraceful traffic" in slaves. Virginia, this 
 orator observed,'was falling behind younger colonies, because, "with 
 their whites, they import arts and agriculture, whilst we, with 
 our blacks, exclude both." Every man with whom Jefferson asso- 
 ciated felt and spoke in this spirit. Wythe, R. H. Lee, Madison, 
 Jefferson, and the flower of the young men of South Carolina, were 
 all abolitionists; and all of them used in 1774 the arguments which 
 were so familiar to us in 1860. 
 
 Jefferson made a clean breast of it in these Instructions. He 
 went to the root of the matter on every topic that he touched. He 
 paid the king the extravagant homage of assuming, that, if a thing 
 could be shown to be wrong or unlawful, his majesty would refrain 
 from doing it, as a matter of course. Hence, in descanting upon 
 the odious presence of British troops in Massachusetts, he desired 
 the king to be informed that he had "no right to land a single 
 armed man upon these shores ; " and that those regiments in Boston 
 were subject to the laws of Massachusetts, like all other emi- 
 grants ! The king's grandfather, George II., in the Seven Years' 
 War, found it convenient to bring over a body of his own Han- 
 overian troops to assist in the defence of England ; but he could 
 not land a man of them till Parliament had given its consent, 
 and specified the precise number that might be brought in. The 
 States of America had the same right. "Every State must judge 
 for itself the number of armed men which they may safely trust 
 among them, of whom they are to consist, and under what restric- 
 tions they are to be laid." 
 
 Every State! The word "colonies" seldom occurs in this docu- 
 ment. The word "States" supplies its place. 
 
 The wrongs of Boston, when he came to speak upon them, kin- 
 dled his visually tranquil mind. He wanted it put to the king with 
 
140 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 all the force of which language was capable, that, while only a few 
 men had been concerned in throwing the tea into the harbor, the 
 closing of the port had reduced " an ancient and wealthy town, in a 
 moment, frftm opulence to beggary." Men who had spent their 
 lives in extending the commerce of the empire, men who were 
 absent in distant countries, men who sided with the king, all, all, 
 were involved in one indiscriminate ruin. This might be revenge : 
 it could not be justice. 
 
 Towards the close of his draft the author dropped the tone of a 
 burgess instructing his representative, and talked directly to the 
 king himself: "Open your breast, sire, to.liberal and expanded 
 thought. Let not the name of George III. be a blot on the page of 
 history. . . . iThe whole art of government consists in the art of 
 being honest. Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give 
 you credit when you fail.' No longer persevere in sacrificing the 
 rights of one part of the empire to the inordinate desires of an- 
 other." With several other brotherly observations equally suited to 
 sootlie the mind of a proud, ignorant, obstinate, and misguided king. 
 
 These radical doctrines found free acceptance among the planters 
 of Jefferson's own county of Albemarle. At least, Jefferson's 
 ascendency was such, that he was able to procure for them the sup- 
 port of the freeholders of the county. 
 
 It is interesting to notice that the details of politics were managed 
 a hundred years ago very much as they are now. May we not say, 
 as they were twenty centuries ago ? Who has forgotten the shock 
 of surprise which he experienced upon opening for the first time a 
 volume of Demosthenes' speeches, to discover that Whereas and 
 Kesolved were forms as familiar to an Athenian audience as they 
 are to us ; and that when, on a memorable occasion, Daniel Webster 
 called for the reading of the resolution, he practised a device which 
 Demosthenes used almost every time he spoke? Thomas Jefferson 
 wrote this draft of instructions before he had been chosen a member 
 of the convention which was to elect delegates to the Congress. But 
 politics had alreadj'' the character which we sometimes describe as 
 "cut and dried." He knew he was to be elected. The freeholders 
 of Albemarle were to meet on the 26th of July, in order to choose 
 two gentlemen to serve them in the double capacity of burgesses 
 and members of the Williamsburg Convention. Those two gentle- 
 men would also require instructions which should accord with the 
 
JEFFERSON GIVES ADVICE TO GEORGE IH. 141 
 
 ponderous document that one of tliem intended to carry in his 
 pocket to the convention. How could that conformity be better 
 secured thaij by employing the same mind to execute both ? In the 
 resolutions passed by tlie freeholders of Albemarle, Jefferson caused, 
 himself and his colleague to be notified that no foreign legislature 
 could rightfully exercise authority in an American colony. This 
 was the leading idea of his draught, which Franklin had promul- 
 gated seven years before. 
 
 Being duly elected and instructed, he left his home for Williams- 
 burg some days before the time appointed for the meeting of the 
 Convention. How cold are words to express the tumult of desire 
 with which this ardent young radical looked forward to meeting his 
 friends on this occasion ! Every thing we have of him belonging to 
 this period shows a degree of excitement to which he was little 
 accustomed. He knew Avell that Virginia was not yet prej)ared for 
 si^ch extreme good sense as he had inserted in the roll of manuscript 
 which he carried with him. He had himself held the Franklinian 
 theory for several years ; but, as yet, he knew but one other member 
 of the House of Burgesses who fully accepted it ; and that was his 
 old friend and mentor, George Wythe. There was something re- 
 volting to the patriotic pride of Virginians in the doctrine that the 
 political tie between Virginia and England was the same as that 
 which connected England and Hanover, -r- only a king in common! 
 He wished to be promptly on the ground to talk tlie matter over 
 with members, and, above all, with Patrick Henry, the idol of the 
 people, whose irresistible eloquence alone could reconcile the public 
 mind to novel or unwelcome ideas. It would not be the first time 
 that Henry's morning speech had conveyed to Virginia the results 
 of a conference with Jefferson the evening before. An orator is 
 never so potent as when he gives wings to truth which minds more 
 patient than his own have evolved. 
 
 But Jefferson was not destined to sit in the Williamsburg Con- 
 vention. On the road he was taken sick ; he could not continue his 
 journey ; and, for the only time in his life, he was unable to perform 
 a public duty from mere bodily inability. The intense mental excite- 
 ment under which he had labored, the toil of composing in haste so 
 extensive a piece, and the sudden change from the airy height of 
 Monticello to the August heats of the lower country, proved too 
 much even for his excellent constitution. But an author is strongly 
 
142 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 attached to the offspring of his brain. He sent forward to Williams- 
 burg two copies of his work, one addressed to Peyton Randolph, who 
 was to preside over the convention, and the other to Patrick Henry, 
 Mr. Henry was an idle, disorderly man of genius, — "the laziest 
 man in reading," says Jefferson, " I ever knew." Whether he ever 
 read this mass of manuscript (sixty or seventy pages of ordinary 
 writing) will never be known ; for nothing was ever heard of the 
 copy sent to him. But the chairman, Mr. Randolph, took public 
 notice of his copy. He announced to the Convention that he had 
 received such a document from a member who was prevented from 
 attending by sickness, and he laid it on the table for members to 
 read if they chose. Most of them read it, and many approved it, 
 though aware of its unsuitableness to the existing state of things. 
 Probablj'' not one member would have given it the stamp of his 
 official approbation. It occurred to some, however, that it would 
 make a timely pamphlet ; and in that form it was published and 
 extensively circulated, with this title, "A Summary View of the 
 Rights of America." Copies were sent to England. Mr. Burke, 
 who saw in it a weapon of offence against the ministry, changed it 
 here and there, added sentences, and caused it to be published in 
 England, where it ran through edition after edition. It procured 
 for the author, to use his own language, " the honor of having his 
 name inserted in a long list of proscriptions enrolled in a bill of 
 attainder commenced in one of the Houses of Parliament, but sup- 
 pressed in embryo by the hasty step of events." The list included 
 about twenty names, among which were John Hancock, Samuel 
 Adams, John Adams, Peyton Randolph, and Patrick Henry. 
 
 In this pamphlet, the truth concerning both the nature and the 
 history of the connection between the colonies and Great Britain — 
 the truth, without any reserves whatever — was stated for the first 
 time ; and it was so fully stated, that no one was ever able to add 
 any thing to it. The Declaration of Independence was only the 
 substance of this pamphlet given in a moderate, brief, official form. 
 
CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 THE CONGRESS. 
 
 What anguish, wliat humiliation, to be laid aside at such a time 
 by a ridiculous summer disease, such as children get from eating 
 green apples ! Such is man, high and mighty as he fancies himself 
 to be ! It must be owned, however, that the Convention accomplished 
 its work exceedingly well without Jefferson. Let us mark well the 
 prodigious fact, that Virginia, in 1774, knew how to choose from 
 her people, or, as Colonel Washington expressed it, her " ten thou- 
 sand taxables," the seven men who best represented her, who could 
 best serve her, and reflect most honor upon her. All the colonies 
 could do as much. We cannot. It is one of the Lost Arts. These 
 seven were all members of the House of Burgesses, and hence were 
 familiarly known to the members of the Convention. Mr. Jell'erson 
 used to say that every individual of them was chosen for a partic- 
 ular reason. *'Ben Harrison," as he styled him, was a jolly, self- 
 indulgent, wealthy planter, without much knowledge of principles, 
 or capacity for business ; but he perfectly represented his class, long 
 the ruling class of the colony, and therefore he was chosen one of 
 the deputies. He had at home a son, eighteen months old, who was 
 destined to preside over the nation, which the meeting of the Con- 
 gress was to create. . Richard Bland was chosen because he was 
 considered the best writer in Virginia. Edmund Pendleton was 
 regarded in the light of ballast ; since, besides possessing a vast 
 fund of legal knowledge, he was prudence personified. Peyton 
 Randolph had a genius for presiding over an assembly, — a man of 
 weighty presence and imperturbable courtesy. Richard Henry Lee, 
 the fluent and ornate orator, was sent to add argument, fact, and 
 persuasion to Patrick Henry's awakening peals. Henry himself 
 was not selected for his eloquence alone, but also because he was 
 
 143 
 
14-1 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFPERSOK. 
 
 the man of the people. He was the first eminent American instance 
 of a certain combination of qualities that renders a man resistless 
 before an unlettered people, — a common mind, uncommon talents, 
 and the instinct of being popular. To these six the convention 
 added the shining figure of Colonel Washington, now forty-two 
 years of age, who united in himself the three possessions that capti- 
 vate the greatest number of persons, — military glory, great wealth, 
 and a fine person. 
 
 Virginia, I repeat, could choose her seven best and fittest in 
 1771; but she could no more have done it then than New York 
 ^ can do it now, if her grossly ignorant laborers of foreign lineage had 
 been admitted to the suffrage. 
 
 Seldom has an assembly so sedulously veiled a radical purpose 
 under conservative forms, as this Williamsburg Convention of 
 1771. Still protesting " inviolable and unshaken fidelity and attach- 
 ment to our most gracious sovereign," still professing regard and 
 affection for their friends and fellow-subjects in other parts of the 
 empire, still declaring that they opposed every thing which might 
 have " the most distant tendency to interrupt or in any wise disturb 
 his majesty's jDeace," they nevertheless instructed their delegates, 
 that, if that " despotic viceroy," General Gage, should presume to 
 attempt to execute his threats against Massachusetts, such conduct 
 O would "justify resistance and reprisal." This might be termed a 
 conditional declaration of war, and went far be^nd any thing in 
 Jefferson's draft of Instructions. The ConveutioiT^lso pledged 
 Virginia to a suspension of her business as a tobacco-producing >- 
 State, if the home government persisted in its system of oppression. 
 No more exportation of produce, no more importation of merchandise ! 
 The convention only restrained their deputies in one particular. As 
 it was then the first week of August, the tobacco crop was, to use the 
 planters' term, "nearly made;" and, what was of more weiglit in 
 their honest minds, it was eaten up, spent, pledged to London 
 merchants for goods had and consumed. That crop, therefore, must 
 go forward. Honor and necessity demanded it. But no more ! 
 Unless American grievances were redressed by Aug. 10, 1775, 
 not a pound of Virginia tobacco should go to England; and Virginia 
 would'find some other way of earning her subsistence. As for tea, 
 " we view it with horror ! " From this day, this very 6th of August, 
 1774, we will neither import it nor buy it, — no, nor even use the 
 little we have on hand ! 
 
THE CONGRESS. 145 
 
 It is interesting to view the action of this convention in connec- 
 tion with Jefferson's paper. He, the philosopher, tiie man of books 
 and thoughts, was chiefly concerned to get on paper the correct 
 theory of the situation ; but the practical, English-minded men of p 
 the convention, who shrank from the theory, had the clearest view 
 of what was to be done. If General Gage stirs to carry out his 
 proclamations, give him Lexington I Meanwhile, we will retort the 
 starvation of Boston upon British merchants and manufacturers! 
 Nothing could be better than Jefterson's theory, except tliis exqui- 
 site practice ; and it was part of that practice to give the theory 
 wings, and so communicate to it the intelligence of both coun- 
 tries. 
 
 Colonel Washington, a very practical head, conceived the idea that 
 the Congress might desire to know something exact respecting the 
 population, commerce, and resources of each colony. If it should 
 come to a fight, it would certainly be desirable to know what 
 means the central power would have at command. He took care to 
 ascertain from George TVythe, Secretary of the House of Burgesses, 
 how many men Virginia contained who were subject to taxation. 
 Before leaving Williamsburg for Mount Vernon, he sent off a 
 despatch to Richard Henry Lee, who had gone home, to ask him to 
 lend his aid toward getting from the four custom-houses (one at 
 the mouth of each river, York, James, Rappahannock, and Po- 
 tomac) a statement of Virginia's annual exports and imports. 
 
 "P.S. If you should travel to Philadelphia by land, I should be 
 glad of your company. Mr. Henry is to be at my house on his way, 
 Tuesday, the 30th instant." 
 
 In those electric days people were too full of the great business 
 in hand to make any record of their feelings; and hence it is only 
 trifles recorded by chance that betray how vivid and universal was 
 the interest in the subjects the Congress were to discuss. One 
 Sunday morning, in this very August, 1774, an obnoxious tool of 
 the "ministry went to church in Plymouth, Massachusetts. As 
 soon as he entered, a large number of the congregation rose, left 
 the building, and weiit home ! An act of this nature, which might 
 not mean much in some communities, indicated in New England a 
 deep and unchangeable resolve. Journalism was then an infant 
 art. Interviewing — its latest acquisition, and one of its best, 
 10 
 
146 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 though liable to abuse — had not yet been borrowed from that 
 great, first interviewer, James Boswell. Often, in those primitive 
 days, the press could only reveal an intense and general excitement 
 by silence. We know, from many sources, that Philadelphia was 
 profoundly moved at the gathering of this Congress ; that the whole 
 population was astir ; that two continents had followed with atten- 
 tive minds those little groups of horsemen making their way through 
 the woods from the various colonies to this central city ; that kings, 
 courts, ministries, politicians, philosophers, and peoples, in London, 
 Paris, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Ferney (capital of 
 Voltaire's empire), were speculating upon what might come of this 
 • unique proceeding. But, when we look into the Philadelphia news- 
 papers of the week, we find tliat they. mentioned, in a quiet para- 
 graph of three lines, that " the gentlemen appointed to meet in the 
 General Congress are arrived." Nothing more ! Now and then, 
 during the session of fifty-two days, some paper presented to the 
 Congress was published without comment; but no indication appears 
 in the press, either of the unusual nature of the assembly, or of 
 the peculiar interest felt in its proceedings, or of the measures it 
 discussed. 
 
 The king employed a similar device, it seems; for, when he 
 received at length the eloquent and pathetic petition which the 
 Congress addressed to him in the name of the colonies, he sent it 
 down to Parliament, as Franklin records, among a great heap of 
 letters, handbills, newspapers, and pamphlets from America, and it 
 ■was laid upon the table undistinguished by any recommendation, 
 and unnoticed in the royal speech. 
 
 The sick Jefferson, while the deputies to the Congress were mak- 
 ing their way to Philadelphia, resumed his journey, as it seems, and 
 reached Williamsburg a few days after the Convention adjourned. 
 There he performed an important act. The courts had been closed 
 throughout Virginia for several months, which left the lawyers little 
 to do. The law fixing the fees of the various ofiicers attached to 
 the courts having expired by its own limitation, an act renewing the 
 fees was pending in the House of Burgesses when Lord Dunmore 
 abruptly dismissed the House in May, 1774 ; and hence no courts 
 Lad since been held. The people, not unwilling to bring home to 
 their governor a sense of the absurd precipitancy of his conduct, 
 appear to have submitted with pleasure to the deprivation. Jeffer- 
 
THE CONGRESS. 147 
 
 son never resumed practice. At tliirty-one, after seven years' success- 
 ful exercise of his profession, lie gave up his unfinished business into i 
 the hands of his friend and kinsman, Edmund Randolph, and so 
 withdrew from the law, as it proved forever. 
 
 His marriage, as we have seen, had doubled his estate, increasing 
 the number of his slaves to more tlian eighty ; and the profits of his 
 profession had added three thousand acres to his paternal farm. 
 There had gathered about him, too, on his mountain-top, including 
 his own family, his sister's brood, his mother and brother, his Italian 
 gardeners, the mechanics employed on his house, and his overseers, 
 a patriarchal household of thirty-four persons. His presence at 
 home was peculiarly needed at all times ; for his wife was not one 
 of those robust ladies of the Old Dominion who could conduct a plan- 
 tation as well as their husbands, and she was generally absorbed in 
 nourishing a life more feeble than her own. Ifcwas for such reasons, 
 as we may presume, that he now withdrew from a profession that 
 compelled him to be long absent from Albemarle. He felt himself 
 strong enough to trust his future to glorioles agriculture and the 
 manly, homely arts tliat facilitate agriculture. He might build a 
 mill for his own and his neighbor's grain ; he might keep a few boys 
 at work, making nails for his county; he might convert some of his 
 wood into timber, and a little of his clay into bricks; but hence- 
 forth, to the end of his days, he derived the greatest part of his 
 revenue from the culture of the soil. He was a. farmer, as his 
 fathers had been before him. 
 
 At a time when busy and capafbjft men shrink from public office 
 with a feeling resembling horror, it niay. be well to note that few 
 persons have ever performed public duty at' such a sacrifice of per- 
 sonal feeling and private interest as Thomas Jefferson. Even in old 
 and highly-organized communities, the head of such a household 
 can be ill spared; but in Virginia, in a remote county, in a region 
 where trained labor did not exist, and where men of much capacity 
 could seldom be hired at all, and never for long^;. where rudest men 
 tilled a new soil with rudest implements, and those men were slaves, 
 nothing but the master's eye could prevent the ' most reckless waste 
 and ruinous mismanagement. Every frontier plantation was, of 
 necessity, a little kingdom, in which the master had to furnish the 
 whole daily requirement of authority and guidance. If a wood- 
 chopper broke a leg or a blood-vessel, it was Jefi'erson who was sum- 
 
148 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOISr. 
 
 moned ; and, if the baby had the measles, it was Jefferson Tcho must 
 prescribe. When the dam gave way, or a wheel-barrow broke down; 
 if a shop caught fire, or the lettuce was nipped by the frost ; if the 
 cattle got into the wheat, or the small-pox into the negro quarter, 
 — it was still the master who had to furnish brain and nerve for the 
 emergency. There was never a "period, during his public life, when 
 he had not reasons for remaining at home which most men would 
 have felt to be sufficient. 
 
 An incident of this period shows the temper of the times and of 
 the man. A copy of the non-importation agreement having reached 
 him in August, 1774, he wrote to London to countermand the order 
 which he had despatched in June for fourteen pairs of sashes ready 
 glazed, and a little glass to mend with. Despatched, do I say ? 
 Jefferson's way of getting a letter across the ocean at this time had 
 nothing in it that could be called despatch. When he had written 
 his letter, the next thing was to find some one going into the lower 
 country, who would talce the trouble to get it on board a shij) lying 
 in one of the rivers, bound for London. A letter could be manj'- a 
 long clay reaching salt water by this method. Before his letter had 
 been long gone, word came that his sashes were finished, but the 
 putt}' was not hard enough yet to brave the perils of the deep. It 
 must harden " about a month." Hence the sashes, which were 
 ordered on the 1st of June, before the non-importatiou agreement 
 had been contemplated, threatened to arrive about Christmas, when 
 that agreement had become the main hope of a roused and patriotic 
 continent. In these circumstances, he explained the matter to the 
 committee in charge of the county where the sashes would be landed, 
 and placed them at their disposal. '' As I mean," said he, " to be a 
 conscientious observer of the measures generally thought requisite 
 for the preservation of our independent rights, so I think myself 
 bound to account to my country for any act of mine which might 
 wear an appearance of contravening them." 
 
 His own county was to have its committee of safety, elected, as 
 in all the counties, by the freeholders, with due form and solemnity; 
 for, if the worst came to the worst, the committees of safety would 
 wield, during an interregnum, the sovereign power. On New- Year's 
 Day, 1775, this groat business was done in Albemarle. A committee 
 of fifteen was elected, with Thomas Jefferson at its head. For him, 
 two-hundred and eleven votes were cast, which was eleven more than 
 any one else received ; one member getting but sixty-four. 
 
THE CONGRESS. 149 
 
 A public duty of eminent importance called him away from home 
 in the early days of the spring of 1775. The Williamsburg Conven- 
 tion of August, 1774, which had elected deputies to the first 
 Congress, had adjourned to meet March 20, 1775. But not at Wil- 
 liamsburg ! Not at the capital of the Old Dominion ! Not under 
 the eye of Dunmore, nor within easy reach of the marines of the 
 men-of-war that lay in York River. During these years of agita- 
 tion, a village had been slowly gathering upon the site of Virginia's 
 future capital, — its natural capital, — where the navigation of the 
 James is interrupted, about midway between the ocean and the 
 mountains, by islands and impassable rapids. Sea-going vessels of 
 a hundred and fifty tons can ascend the winding river a hundred 
 and fifty miles, as far as those rapids 5 and, above them for two 
 hundred miles farther, barges could be poled and towed. Here 
 then, at this " carrying-place," was the spot, of all others in Virginia, 
 for Virginia's mart, store-house, and counting-room. The banks of 
 the river rise here into commanding heights, which afford a site as 
 peculiar and picturesque as that of Edinburgh. E-ichmond was still 
 but a straggling village, when the Convention met there in March, 
 1775 ; and there was only one building in it fit for such ah assem- 
 bly, — the parish church of St. John, — which is still standing, little 
 changed, surrounded by its spacious, ill-kept churchyard. It shows 
 to what a point of excitement the Province had been wrought, that 
 a parish church should have been used for such a purpose. 
 
 The Convention sat eight days, — long enough to give an impulse 
 to the course of events, and to decide the future career of Thomas 
 Jefferson. 
 
 When we read of Patrick Henry's wonderful displays of elo- 
 quence, we naturally figure to ourselves a spacious interior and a 
 great crowd of rapt listeners. But, in truth, those of his orations 
 which quickened or changed the march of events, and the thrill of 
 which has been felt in the nerves of four generations, werg all 
 delivered in small rooms and to few hearers, nevermore than one 
 hundred and fifty. The first thought of the visitor to St. John's 
 church in Richmond is : Could it have been here, in this oaken 
 chapel of fifty or sixty pews, that Patrick Henry delivered the 
 greatest and best known of all his speeches ? Was it here that he 
 uttered those words of doom, so unexpected, so unwelcome, " We 
 must fight " ? Even here. And the words were spoken in a tone 
 
150 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 and manner worthy of the men to whom they were addressed, — 
 with quiet and profound solemnity. The mere outline of the speech 
 which we possess (with here and there a sentence or a phrase of such 
 concentrated power that their every syllable is stamped indelibly 
 upon the mind) shows that this untaught orator practised all the art 
 of Demosthenes, while exhibiting all his genius. How strangely 
 proplietic the sentence, " The next gale that sweeps from the North 
 will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms" ! These words 
 were spoken on the 23d of March, 1775, while the people were joy- 
 ously repeating the news that the king had been so good as to 
 receive the petition of the Congress. Nothing at the moment fore- 
 told the coming conflict, except the intuitive sense of this inspired 
 yeoman. 
 
 He carried the Convention with him. It was agreed that Virginia 
 should arm; and a committee of thirteen — a magical number 
 henceforth — was named to concert a plan. Along with Patrick 
 Henry, George Washington, li. H. Lee, Harrison, Pendleton, and 
 others, the young member from Albemarle was appointed to serve . 
 on this committee. They agreed upon this : The more densely 
 peopled counties should enroll, equip, supply, and drill companies of 
 infantry ; the other counties should raise troops of horsemen ; all 
 should wear the hunting-shirt, which. Colonel Washington told them, 
 was the best possible uniform; and all should set about the work 
 of preparation at once. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 HOSTILITIES PRECIPITATED BY THE ROYAL GOVERNORS, 
 
 On" the last day of the session the Convention performed the act 
 which proved momentous to Mr. Jeflferson. Lord Dunmore was 
 governing Virginia without the assistance of its legislature ; hut 
 the necessities of the Province were such, that it was thought he 
 might be induced or compelled to summon it. Peyton Randolph,' 
 the speaker of the House of Burgesses, had presided over the delib- 
 erations of the Congress ; and it accorded with the spirit and 
 custom of that age (as with justice and good sense) never to change 
 public servants except for a good reason. Hence it was certain he 
 would be elected chairmaii of the next Congress, to meet on the 
 lOtli of May. The Convention, not disposed to give a royal govern- 
 or any fair occasion to complain, provided for his return to Virginia, 
 by voting, that, in case Peyton Randolph should be obliged to leave 
 the Congress before its adjournment, Thomas Jefferson should 
 supply his place. 
 
 How graciously the king had received the Congress petition, the 
 members of this Convention may have learned before they left 
 Richmond. Perhaps in the very hour when Patrick Henry was 
 warning them not to indulge in the illusions of hope, nor suffer 
 themselves to be betrayed b}'- a kiss, Lord Dunmore was penning a 
 ridiculous proclamation, which showed the king's antipathy to the 
 Congress, and to every thing that emanated from it : " Whereas cer- 
 tain persons have j)r6sumed, without his majesty's authority or 
 consent, to assembj^s together at Philadelphia," and have called 
 another and similar meeting for May next, " I am commanded by 
 the king to require, all magistrates and other officers to use their 
 utmost endeavors vo prevent any such appointment of deputies, and 
 to exhort all perj>ons whatever within this government to desist 
 
 151 
 
152 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON". 
 
 from such an unjustifiable proceeding as higlily displeasing to liis 
 majesty." 
 
 This document provoked derision only. But the governor's next 
 act was an act of war, which every man in Virginia felt like a blow. 
 In one of the public squares in Williamsburg, in the very middle of 
 the town, was the powder-magazine, containing twenty barrels of 
 gunpowder, the property of the colony, and part of its usual means 
 of defence against the Indians.' This store, always precious, had 
 now become an object of intense and even morbid interest. It was 
 not merely that the Province was arming, and that every thing 
 relating to arms had acquired new value ; but, in times of public com- 
 motion, a community maintained by the labor of slaves is haunted 
 by a dread of insurrection. Conscience makes cowards of us all. 
 O This fear, always latent, had recently become omnipresent in Vir- 
 ginia ; and every man shuddered to think of the deluge of mischief 
 and horror a rash coward like Dunmore could bring upon the Prov- 
 ince, b}'' luring the negroes to his aid with the promise of freedom. 
 To Dunmore, too, that powder had become interesting ; for he was 
 almost alone in ,a community that looked upon him as the enemy of 
 all which they most prized. True, it was a community in which 
 regard for law had become an instinct; and he was, if possible, the 
 more safe in their midst because he was their enemy. But con- 
 science made a coward of him also. He, too, feared the people he 
 had wronged, as thej^ feared the people whom they were always 
 wronging. 
 
 In the dead of night, April 20, a small party of marines filed 
 from " the palace " grounds, followed by a small wagon belonging to 
 Dunmore himself, and marched towards the magazine. For some 
 time past a patrol of patriotic citizens had guarded the magazine at 
 night ; but, as no alarm occurred, they had gone home a little earlier 
 every night, until, on this occasion, the streets of Williamsburg were 
 silent an hour after midnight. The noble governor had apparently 
 been watching for such a chance to steal the public property ; for, 
 like General Gage, he wished to disarm his Province in a quiet way. 
 That very night. Gage in Boston was reckoning rp the cost of his 
 attempt, in British dead and wounded. Dimmoi i had the key of 
 the Williamsburg magazine. About three in thi: morning of the 
 day after the battle of Lexington, Dunmore's wagon, loaded with 
 fifteen half-barrels of Virginia's powder, was driven out of town, 
 
HOSTILITIES PKECIPITATED. 153 
 
 guarded by marines, and, soon after daylight, was conveyed on 
 board of an English man-of-war, that lay in the James River, seven 
 miles distant. The rest of the powder, which the ngble lord's 
 noble " little wagon " would not hold, was buried, as it seems, in the 
 magazine itself. 
 
 In tlie morning, as soon as this puerile act was known, there 
 arose a contest, not between the robbed and the robber, but between 
 the cool heads and the hot heads of the town. The people filled 
 the streets, excited and angry ; tlie patrol resumed their arms, and 
 gathered in the public square ; and every thing was ripe for tumult. 
 But the elders and chief men of the place, above all others Peyton 
 Kandolph, chairman of the Congress, and Mr. Nicholas, the head of 
 the bar, moved about among the people, advising moderation and 
 order; and, early in the day, a safetj'-valve was found. Williams- 
 burg, small as it was, was a city blessed with a mayor, recorder, 
 aldermen, and councilmen, who, on great emergencies, met in 
 " common hall," and acted as one body. They met on this wild 
 day, and agreed to present an humble address to His Excellency, 
 the Rigiit Honorable John, Earl of Dunmore, asking him why the 
 colony's powder was taken away from its proper repository, and 
 asking him to have it brought back. In his reply, this right 
 honorable personage lied. He said he had heard of an insurrec- 
 tion in a neighboring county, and had thought it best to remove the 
 powder to a place of greater safet}'. Having uttered this falsehood, 
 he proceeded to show that it toas a falsehood by promising, upon his 
 word and honor, that, if the powder should be wanted for an ^insur- 
 rection, it should be brought back in half an hour. But the cool 
 heads succeeded in dispersing the people, and leaving the town for 
 the night in charge of the patrol. 
 
 Dreadful rumors were in the air. The news of the plunder of the 
 magazine sped from county to county, inflaming mijids which no 
 considerations of abstract tea could reach. He has taken our 
 powder, our own powder, bouglit with our money, and stored for our 
 common defence ! The dullest mind could feel all the wrong, and 
 much of ttie complex indignity, of the act. In the night, too, while 
 honest men were asleep ! 
 
 And what tidings were on their way from the North ! Gage, 
 also in the dead of night, had sent an armed force to disarm Massa- 
 chusetts! Her yeomen had risen upon them, and driven them back 
 
154 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 again, a chase of thirty miles ; and they had left a dead or wounded 
 soldier on every furlong of the road ! This intelligence, following 
 so quick upon the news of Dunmore's exploit, startled every one 
 into the conviction that the plunder of the magazine and the march 
 of Gage's troops were parts of a general scheme to deprive the 
 colonies of the means of defence. The newly-formed companies 
 seized such arms as they had, and rushed to their several rendez- 
 vous without waiting for orders, demanding to be led to the Capitol, 
 and recover their stolen powder. Never was a widely-scattered 
 community so instantly kindled ; for, before the news of Lexington 
 had been in Virginia four days, there were assembled at Fredericks*- 
 burg fourteen companies of horsemen ready to march to Williams- 
 burg, seventy miles distant. And yet the cool heads triumphed 
 once more. A letter from Peyton Randolph arrived in the nick of 
 time, informing them that the governor had engaged to. arrange the 
 affair of the powder in a manner satisfactory to the colony, and 
 entreating the troops to return to their homes. By one majority, in 
 a meeting of one hundred and two officers, this advice was accepted, 
 and the troopers rode homeward. The Congress was to meet again 
 in eleven days. It seemed best not to precipitate the colony into 
 war. 
 
 There was a man in Virginia, the King of Virginia we may call 
 him, Patrick Henry, who saw in this affair of the powder the best 
 opportunity that had yet occurred of bringing home the controversy 
 to the minds of the unthinking. " You may talk in vain to them," 
 said he to his friends, "about the duties upon tea ; but tell them of 
 the robber}- of the magazine, and that the next step will be to dis- 
 arm them, and j'ou bring the subject home to their bosoms." He 
 called together the horsemen of his county of Hanover, harangued 
 them, and began his march toward Williamsburg, joined, as he 
 advanced, by squads of other companies, until his band amounted to 
 a hundred and fifty men. By the time the news of this movement 
 reached the capital, rumor had swelled his force to five thousand 
 infuriate patriots, armed to the teeth. Consternation filled the 
 palace of the governor. He sent his wife and daughters on board 
 the Fowey, man-of-war. The captain of that famous vessel gar- 
 risoned the palace with marines, and threatened, in case of an out- 
 break, to fire upon the town. Several of Patrick Henry's friends 
 rode in hot haste to induce him to turn back ; but he held to his pur- 
 
HOSTILITIES PEECIPITATED. 155 
 
 pose, until, at the close of the second clay's march, he halted sixteen 
 miles from Williamsburg. 
 
 Lord Dunmore, in this extremity, called his Council together, — 
 that select body whom the governor himself nominated, and the 
 king appointed. Being summoned, they repaired to the Council 
 Chamber in the Capitol, their invariable place of meeting ; but the 
 governor, panic-stricken, would not venture out, and commanded 
 the Council to attend him in the^ palace. When they were seated 
 in his presence, he stated the case, and said he was afraid the 
 excited troopers who were approaching might, in their frenzy, seize 
 upon a public magazine, which would infallibly bring down upon ■ 
 the Province the direst vengeance of an insulted king. To ward off 
 this fearful peril from Virginia, he suggested that panacea of fall- 
 ing governments, a proclamation. The youngest member of this 
 Council of seven, and the only Whig among them, was John Page, O 
 the college friend of Jefferson, and the confident of his youthful love 
 for Belinda. It was he who broke the long and awkward pause that 
 followed the governor's address by asking whether, in case the 
 Council should agree to advise a proclamation, his Lordship would 
 consent to restore the powder. The removal of the powder, con- 
 tinued Mr. Page, having caused the present tumult, tranquillity 
 would be instantly restored by its restoration. " Mr. Page," ex- 
 claimed the governor, with the fury natural to such a brain at the 
 reception of advice so simple and so wise, — "Mr. Page, I am 
 astonished at you ! " And he brought down his lordly fist upon the 
 table with a prodigious thump. To which the young councillor 
 quietly replied, that, in giving his opinion, he had done his duty, 
 and he had no other advice to give. 
 
 The curtain falls upon this scene. The next morning at sunrise, 
 a messenger from the capital sought an interview with Patrick 
 Henry in the tavern where he had passed the night. . When the 
 messenger ]eft«the tavern, he bore with him a written paper, of 
 which the following is a copy : — 
 
 " Doncastle's Ordinary, New Kent, May 4, 1775. Eeceived from 
 the Honorable Richard Corbin,Esq., His Majesty's Eeceiver-General, 
 330 pounds, as a compensation for the gunpowder lately taken out 
 of the public magazine by the governor's order ; which money I 
 promise to convey to the Virginia delegates at the General Congress, 
 
156 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 
 
 to be, under their direction, laid out in gunpowder for tlie colony's 
 use, and to be stored as they shall direct, until the ne;s:t Colony 
 Convention or General Assembly, unless it shall be necessary, in the 
 mean time, to use tlie same in defence of the colony. It is agreed, 
 that, in case the next Convention shall determine that any part of 
 the said money ought to be returned to the said Receiver-General, 
 that the same shall be done accordingly, Patrick Heurj'-, juu." * 
 
 Such was Virginia's bloodless Lexington. The volunteers re- 
 turned to their homes at once ; and their leader, a few days after, 
 set out for the Congress, escorted by a great retinue of horsemen, as 
 far as the Potomac River. There was a neatness and finish to this 
 triumph that captivated the continent, and made Patrick Henrj' 
 inexpressibly dear to Virginia. The Province would liave at once 
 resumed its tranquillity, but for the incredible folly of the governor, 
 who, totally bereft of sense and judgment, and emboldened by the 
 presence of a royal squadron, still kept the peninsula in a broil. 
 
 From the distant summit of Monticello, Jefferson watched the 
 course of events with the interest natural to such a person, ever 
 longing for a restoration of the ancient harmony and good-will 
 between the two countries. Lord Chatham's bill of January, 1775, 
 inspired by Franklin, which conceded every thing the colonies 
 deemed essential, had given him hope, until the next ship brought 
 the tidings of its summary and contemptuous rejection. The news 
 of Lexington was fourteen days in reaching Albemarle ; and then it 
 arrived loaded with exaggeration, — "five hundred of the king's 
 troops slain." In writing, a few days after, to the honored instruct- 
 or of his youth, Professor Small, then physician and man of science 
 in Birmingham, he spoke of Lexington as an "accident" that had 
 " cut off our last hope of reconciliation ; " since " a fi-enzy of revenge 
 
 * The sum rcceivod for the powder proved to be too much. The following is an extract 
 from the Journal of the Convention held at Richmond in August, 1775. • 
 
 " It appearing to this Convention, by a receipt of Patrick Henry, Esq., and other testi- 
 mony, that it was referred to them at this meeting to determine how much of the three hun- 
 dred and thirty pounds which had been received by the Receiver-General, on the 4th of 
 May, last, to compensate for the powder taken out of the magazine by the governor's orders, 
 should bo restored to the said Receiver-General, RliSOLVKD, as the opinion of this Conven- 
 tion, tliat sufficient proof being had of their being only fifteen half-barrels of powder so 
 taken by Lord Dunmore's order, that no more money should be retained than one hundred 
 and twelve pounds ten shiliings, which we judge fully adequate to the p.ayment of the said 
 powder, and that the residue of the said three hundred and thirty pounds ought to be 
 returnrd to the s^aid Receiver-General; and it is hereby directed to be paid to him by the 
 treasurer of this Colony." 
 
HOSTILITIES PRECIPITATED. 157 
 
 seemed to have seized all ranks of people." We may judge of the 
 strength of the tie between the mother-country and the colonies, by 
 the fact that so un-English a mind as Jefferson's clung with senti- 
 mental fondness to the union long after there was any reasonable 
 hope of their preserving it. " My first wish," he still wrote, late in 
 1775, "is a restoration of our just rights." His second wish was to 
 be able, consistently with honor and duty, to withdraw totally from 
 the public stage, and pass the rest of his days in domestic ease and 
 tranquillity. He did not claim to possess a disinterested patriotism, 
 but avowed that the warmth of his wish for reconciliation with 
 England was increased by his intense desire to stay at home. His 
 pride as a citizen, too, was involved. He saw, as clearly as the 
 imperial-minded Chatham, that Britain's chance of remaining 
 imperial lay in America. This truth was hidden from the world 
 during England's contest with Bonaparte, because she was able to 
 waste in twenty years the revenue of three centuries, keeping a 
 thousand ships in commission, and subsidizing a continent. That 
 looked imperial, but it teas mer^ reckless waste. The whole world 
 now perceives, that, when Great Britain threw her American colonies 
 away, she lapsed into insularity ; or, to use Jefferson's words of 
 1775, she " returned to her original station in the political scale of 
 Europe." With the fond pride natural to the citizen, he desired his 
 country to be vast, imposing, and powerful. 
 
 Brooding over Lexington and its consequences, he was startled by 
 the intelligence that the contingency which would oblige him to 
 become a member of Congress was actually to occur : Lord Dunmore, 
 in his panic and distraction, had been induced to summon the House 
 of Burgesses. This would recall Peyton Randolph from Philadel- 
 phia, and send Thomas Jefferson thither to supply his place. The 
 rash insolence of the captains of the king's ships lying in the York 
 River having roused the people of the peninsula nearly to the point 
 of investing the capital with an armed force, Lord Dunmore called 
 together the Council, and asked their advice. Summon the bur- 
 gesses, suggested a member. His Lordship, as nsual with him when 
 he was well advised, broke into a furious and senseless harangue ; 
 and when he had finished, John Page calmly replied to him, point 
 by point, his best argument being this : If you deprive the people 
 of their usual, legal, constitutional representation, they will resort 
 to conventions; which itself is revolution. The whole Council joined 
 
lo8 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 in this sentiment; and, at length, the governor accepted their advice, 
 the writs were issued, and the first of June named as the day of 
 meeting. 
 
 Tlie air was highly electric. These rural Virginians had heen 
 slow to kindle ; for, until the foolish Dunmore and his naval captains 
 had joined hands to threaten and insult them, Virginia's part had. 
 been to sympathize with the victims of distant oppression, and resent 
 wrongs done to a sister colon3^ But these vessels of war in their 
 own rivers were now as maddening to them as Gage's regiments 
 were to Massachusetts. How welcome English men-of-war had heen 
 in other days, when, under an awning, Virginian beanty had de- 
 lighted to tread a spotless quarter-deck, and when at the balls in the 
 Apollo no partners could be so agreeable as naval officers, sj)lendid in 
 the cumbrous uniform of tlie time ! All that was over forever. 
 Williamsburg had ever been most lavish of politeness and hospitality 
 to the king's navy ; but, at the mere rumor of Patrick Henry's 
 approach, Captain Montagu had threatened to fire, not upon 7^ im, but 
 upon the tow)i. In making this tlyeat, the captain, in the language 
 of a Williamsburg Committee, ''had discovered the most hellish 
 principles that can actuate a human mind; " and they advised the 
 people to show him no " other mark of civility besides what common 
 decency and absolute necessity require." Captain Montagu was 
 cut in ^Villiamsburg by every Whig. 
 
 The 1st of June arrived. It had been a question with distant 
 constituencies whether it would be safe for patriotic burgesses to 
 venture down into that narrow peninsula, with men-of-war in both 
 rivers, and bodies of marines at the beck of a savage governor; 
 particularly as some members — Peyton Randolph, Patrick Henry, 
 and Thomas Jefferson — had been menaced with a prosecution for 
 treason. A paragraph advised every member to come "prepared as 
 an American ; " and, accord inglj'', many members arrived at the 
 capital clad in the hunting-shirt, and carrying the rifle, to which 
 the}'' had become accustomed in the training-field. Jeffei'son, now a 
 member both of the Legislature of Virginia and of the General 
 Congress, took Williamsburg on his way to Philadelphia, and there 
 ^ he met Peyton Eandolph, fresh from the Congress. The speaker 
 asked him to delay his journey, and remain for a short time in his 
 seat in the House of Burgesses. Lord North's conciliatory proposi- 
 tion, as it was called, had been Dunmore's pretext for summoning 
 
HOSTILITIES PRECIPITATED. 159 
 
 tlie House ; and the speaker desired tlie aid of Jefferson's pen in 
 drawing up Virginia's answer to the same. 
 
 On Thursday, the 1st of June, for the last time, a royal governor 
 and a loyal House of Virginia Burgesses exchanged the elaborate 
 civilities usual on the first day of a session. The usual committee 
 was appointed to reply to the governor's courteous, conciliatory 
 speech. Jefferson was a member of this committee, but he was 
 charged to make a separate reply to the part of it which related to 
 Lord North's proposition ; and to this important duty he addressed 
 himself. The dut}'', indeed,, was doubly important, since the docu- 
 ment he was to prepare would not only be the reply of Virginia to 
 the ministerial scheme, but it would be America's first response 
 to it, as no other colonial legislature had been in session since its 
 arrival. 
 
 Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Monday, the first days of the 
 session, j^assed harmoniously enough. If the House was less hum- 
 ble than usual in the tone of its communications with the governor, 
 it still protested its unshaken attachment to the king; and there 
 seemed a fair prospect of the session proceeding agreeably to its 
 close. But, as I have observed, the air was electric. There was a 
 revolution in the clouds. On Monday evening several 3'oung men 
 went to the magazine in Williamsburg, intending to supply them- 
 selves with arms from the few weapons still remaining in the public 
 store. Arms, at the moment, were in extreme request, and only he 
 was happy who had a good weapon. On opening the door of the 
 magazine, a spring-gun was discharged, loaded deep with swan-shot, 
 and two of the young men were badly wounded. One of them 
 received two balls in his shoulder and another in his wrist ; the other 
 had one finger cut off and another shattered. Upon examining the 
 magazine, the party discovered that other spring-guns were set in it, 
 and that no notice had been written up, warning intruders of the 
 danger. The setting of these guns, it was immediately ascertained, 
 was Dunmore's work, done by his orders soon after Patrick Henry 
 had disbanded his troop. 
 
 The cloud burst. The revolution had come. The Williamsburg O 
 companies seized their arms, and rushed to the public squares. The 
 indignation of the people at this dastardly act of their governor was 
 not lessened by the consideration that the young men had been 
 wounded while they were breaking the law. They might have 
 
160 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 fallen cleatl under the coward fire of those guns; and the insult of 
 fighting a patriotic and loyal people with w^eapons iisually employed 
 against poachers and trespassers was felt by every person. Curses 
 both loud and deep were hurled at the palace and its inmates : and 
 though the cool heads again contrived to prevent any thing like a 
 breach of the peace, yet, at such a time, no potentate can so wall 
 himself in, that the hatred and contempt of the people cannot reach 
 f him. The next morning, two hours before the early Jane dawn, the 
 governor, his family, his abhorred secretary, and his chief servants, 
 all fled in silence from the palace, and were driven ten miles down 
 the peninsula to Yorktown, whence they were rowed off to the flag- 
 ship of the armed squadron anchored there. He was governor of 
 Virginia never again. He had still some savage mischief to do in 
 the Province, as a mere marauder; but when, at daybreak on the 
 8th of June, Lord Dunmore stepped on the quarter-deck of the king's 
 ship, George III. ceased to reign over Virginia. His governor had 
 run away. 
 
 The House of Burgesses, with inexhaustible patience and courtesy, 
 attempted to woo him back by assuring him that he would be, as he 
 ever had been, safe in his palace, and that his residence on board a 
 distant ship was in the highest degree inconvenient to them and 
 irritating to the people. His reply amounted to this : Let the 
 House frankly accept Lord North's proposition, dismiss the militia 
 companies, and rescind the non-importation agreement, and he would 
 not only return to Williamsburg, but do all in his power to soothe 
 the just anger of a gracious king against a rebellious Province. 
 Mr. Jefferson, meanwhile, had completed his paper upon Lord 
 *'- North's scheme. That scheme merely proposed to let the colonies 
 tax themselves for the general expenses of the empire, instead of 
 being taxed by Parliament ; Parliament to fix the amount to be 
 raised, and to have the spending of the money. Mr. Jefferson's 
 answer was courteous, clear, and decided. It was incomparably the 
 best paper he had yet drawn, and it was adopted by the House with 
 only a few verbal changes; or, as the author expresses it, with "a 
 dash of cold water on it here and there, enfeebling it somewhat." 
 ^' His paper may be summed up in two sentences : 1. The ministerial 
 scheme '^ changes the form of oppression, without lightening its 
 burden ; " 2. It leaves our other wrongs unredressed. Having 
 duly elaborated these points, he closed with a paragraph, which, we 
 
 i 
 
HOSTILITIES PRECIPITATED. 161 
 
 presume, he meant to be tender and conciliatory, but which, we 
 know, was the quintessence of exasperation to the king and his 
 party, since it referred the subject for " final determination to the 
 General Congress now sitting, before whom we shall lay the papers 
 your lordship has communicated to us." 
 
 '■'■ For ourselves," he continued, " we have exhausted every mode 
 of application which our invention could suggest as proper and 
 promising. We have decently remonstrated with Parliament : they 
 have added new injuries to the old. We have wearied our king 
 with our supplications : he has not deigned to answer us. We have 
 appealed to the native honor and justice of the British nation: their 
 efforts in our favor have hitherto been ineffectual. What, then, re- 
 mains to be done ? That we commit our injuries to the even-handed 
 justice of that Joeing who doeth no wrohg, earnestly beseeclting him 
 to illuminate the councils and prosper the endeavors of those to 
 whom America hath confided her hopes, that, through their wise 
 directions, we may again see re-united the blessings of liberty, pros- 
 perit}^, and harmony with Great Britain." 
 
 The governor's reply to this eloquent and most reasonable address 
 was in these words : " Gentlemen of the House of Burgesses, it is 
 with real concern that I can discover nothing in your address that 
 I think manifests the smallest inclination to, or will be productive 
 of, a reconciliation with the mother-country." 
 
 Jefferson did not wait to learn the governor's opinion. The docu- 
 ment which he had composed was accepted by the House, on the 10th 
 of June, as Virginia's reply to Lord North's proposition ; and the 
 next morning, in a one-horse chaise, with a copy of his address duly 
 signed and certified in his pocket, he left Williamsburg for Phila- 
 delphia. With the assistance of two led horses to change with, he 
 could not average more than twenty-two miles a day; and so im- 
 perfectly marked were some parts of the road, that twice he emploj^ed 
 a guide. He reached Philadelphia on that memorable 20th of June 
 when George Washington received his commission from the Con- 
 gress ; and we may be sure, that, before the general slej^t that night, 
 Jefferson had communicated to him the substance of Virginia's 
 response to the Parliamentary scheme. He could not have let the 
 general depart for Massachusetts without informing him that his 
 own native Province was at his back. The next morning, before 
 taking his seat with the Congress, he could not but have seen Wash- 
 11 
 
162 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 
 
 ington review the military companies of Philarlelphia, and then ride 
 away on his long journey, accompanied by General Schuyler and 
 Charles Lee, and escorted by a Pliiladelphia troop of horsemen. 
 
 Twenty miles from Philadelphia General Washington met a mes- 
 senger from the North, spurring forward to bear to Congress the 
 news of Bunker Hill. Jefferson heard it before night. He was 
 himself the bearer of tidings for which Congress had w^aited with 
 solicitude ; but tliis was news to cast into the shade all bloodless 
 events. How he gloried in the Yankees ! What a Avarmth of 
 affection there was then — and will be again — between Massachu- 
 setts and Virginia ! " The adventurous genius and intropiditj' of 
 those people is amazing," Jefferson wrote to his brother-in-law, when 
 the details of the action were hnowii. They were fitting out, he 
 said, liglit vessels, armed, A'ith which they expected to clear the 
 coast of "every thing below the size of a ship-of-war." So magnani- 
 mous too ! " They are now intent on burning Boston as a hive 
 which gives cover to regulars ; and none are more bent on it than 
 the very people who come out of it, and whose whole prosperity lies 
 there." 
 
 America did not feel it necessary or becoming, in those days, to 
 scrimp her public men in the matter of salary. It was not, indeed, 
 supposed possible to compensate an eminent public servant by any 
 amount of money whatever ; but it was considered proper to facili- 
 tate his lahovs so far as money could do it. Virginia allowed her 
 representatives in the Continental Congress forty-five shillings a day 
 each, and a shilling a mile for their travelling expenses, besides "all 
 ferriages," then no small item: and the treasurer was authorized to 
 advance a member two hundred pounds, if it would be convenient 
 to him, before he left Virginia, the member to refund on his return 
 home, if the sum advanced " shall happen to exceed his allowance." 
 
CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 JEFFERSON IN THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS. 
 
 Sixty gentlemen, in silk stockings and pigtails, sitting in a 
 room of no great size in a plain brick building up a narrow alley, 
 — such was the Continental Congress ; "the Honorable Congress," 
 as its constituents made a point of calling it ; " the General Con- 
 gress at Philadelphia," as Lord Chatham styled it, when he told 
 an incredulous House of Lords that no body of men had ever sur- 
 passed it " in solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom 
 of conclusion." The present generation of Philadelphians has seen 
 the hall wherein Peyton Randolph presided and Patrick Henry 
 spoke, a second-hand furniture sales-room, and none too large for 
 the purpose ; while the committee-rooms up stairs, to which 
 Franklin and Samuel Adams repaired for consultation, were used 
 for a school. The principal apartment must have been well filled 
 when all the members were present ; and we may be sure that the 
 Society of House Carpenters, to whom the building belonged, did 
 not violate the proprieties of the Quaker City so far as to furnish 
 it sumptuously. 
 
 The Congress was not an assemblage of aged sires with snowy 
 locks and aspect venerable, such as art has represented the Roman 
 Senate. Old men could neither have done the work nor borne the 
 journeys. Franklin, the oldest member, was seventy-one, though 
 still ruddy and vigorous ; and there were two or three others past 
 sixty ; but the members generally were in the prime of their years 
 and powers, with a good sprinkling of j'oung men among them, 
 as there must be in representative bodies which truly represent. 
 John Jay was thirty, not too old to be a little vain of the papers 
 he drew. Maryland had sent two young men, — Thomas Stone, 
 thirty-two, and William Paca, thirty -five. From South Carolina 
 
 163 
 
164 LIFE OP THO:\IAS JEFFEESOK. 
 
 came eloquent John Rutledge, thirty-six, and his brother, Edward 
 Eutledge, twenty-six. Patrick Henry was not quite forty ; John 
 Adams, only forty; John Langdon, thirty-five; and Jefferson, 
 thirty-two. Nor could the Congress be called a learned body, 
 though about one-half of the members had had college and pro- 
 fessional training. By various paths these men had made their 
 way to the confidence of their fellow-citizens ; and the four powers 
 that conjointly govern the world — knowledge, character, talents, 
 and wealth — were happily combined, as well in the whole body as 
 in some individuals. Franklin had them all. Patrick Henry 
 wielded one most brilliant and commanding gift ; and there were 
 two or three members, now dropped even from biographical dic- 
 tionaries, who fulfilled the definition of " good company " reported 
 by Crabb Robinson, — persons who "lived upon their own estates 
 and other people's ideas." Some sturdy characters were there, who 
 had fought their way from the ranks, like Eoger Sherman of Con- 
 necticut, farmer's son, shoemaker's apprentice, store-keeper, sur- 
 veyor, lawyer, judge, member of the Congress; or like' John 
 Langdon of New Hampshire, another farmer's son, mariner and 
 merchant till the British cruisers drove him ashore and to the 
 Congress. It was, indeed, a wonderful body of sixty men, that 
 could send forth to command its armies one of its own members, 
 and retain orators like Lee, Henry, John Adams, and John Rut- 
 ledge ; writers of the grade of Dickinson, Jefferson, William Liv- 
 ingston, and Jay; lawyers like Sherman, Wilson, and Chase; men 
 of business such as Hopkins, Langdon, and Lewis ; a philosopher 
 like Franklin ; and such an embodiment of energetic and untiring 
 will as Samuel Adams. 
 
 The new member from Virginia was most welcome in the Con- 
 gress. Besides being the bearer of encouraging news from home, 
 he brought with him a kind of reputation which then gave per- 
 haps even more prestige than it does at present, — "a reputa- 
 tion," as John Adams records, " for literature, science, and a happy 
 talent for composition." Even now a new member of good presence 
 and liberal fortune would be regarded as an acquisition to Congress 
 and to the capital, concerning whom it should be whispered about, 
 that, besides the usual Latin and Greek, he had acquired French, 
 Italian, and Spanish, and was going on to learn German, and even 
 Gaelic if he could only get the books from Scotland ; a gentleman 
 
JEFEEESOK IN" THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS. 165 
 
 of thirty-two who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an 
 artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, 
 and play the violin. The papers which he had written for the Vir- 
 ginia Legislature, one of which he brought with him, and another 
 of which had been widely scattered in both countries^ were known 
 to members. Moreover he was an accession to the radical side. 
 His mind was keeping pace with the march of events. There were O 
 orators enough already, and no lack of writers ; but Jefferson came, 
 not only surcharged with that spirit which was to carry the country 
 through the crisis, but full of the learning of the case, up in his 
 Magna Charta, versed in the lore of the lawyers of the Common- 
 wealth, and conversant with Virginia precedents. He could only 
 take part in conversational debates ; there was neither fluency nor ii 
 fire in his public utterances ; but, to quote again the language of 
 John Adams, ''he was so prompt, frank, explicit, and decisive upon o 
 committees and in conversation, — not even Samuel Adams was 
 more so, — that he soon seized upon my heart." He was a Vir- 
 ginian too ; and that was a proud title then, and most dear to the 
 people of New England. Massachusetts and Virginia, — Massa- 
 chusetts oppressed, and Virginia sympathizing, — that was the 
 most obvious fact of the situation. And Virginia had espoused the 
 cause of persecuted Boston with so eloquent a tongue, and poured 
 supplies into her lap with a hand so bountiful and untiring, and 
 brought to her support so respectable a liame and such imposing 
 wealth and numbers, and sent men to the Congress of such splen- 
 did gifts and various worth, that to be a Virginian was itself an 
 honorable distinction. Jefferson, too, united in himself the method 
 and plod of a Yankee lawyer with the ease and grace which man 
 began to acquire when he first bestrode the horse. 
 
 The greatness of this Congress is shown in its consideration for its 
 weakest members. An ordinary parliament is controlled by its 
 strongest; but this Congress deliberately allowed itself to be domi- s^j 
 nated by John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, timidest of gentlemen, 
 though a man of ability and worth. He dared not face the crisis. 
 '•' Johnny," his mother used to say to him (so reports John Adams), 
 "you will be hanged; your estate will be forfeited and confiscated; 
 you will leave your excellent wife a widow, and your charming chil- 
 dren orphans, beggars, and infamous." And this, too, while the 
 excellent wife stood by with confirmatory anguish visible in her 
 
166 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 countenance. Mr. Adams confesses, that, if his wife and mother 
 had held such language, it would have made him the most miserable 
 of men, even if it did not render him an apostate. The Congress, 
 if it could not regard Mr. Dickinson's scruples as purely disinter- 
 ested and patriotic, knew that they were representative, and felt the 
 necessity of opposing to the king's insensate obstinacy a united 
 front. Hence it was, that, when these lions and lambs sat down 
 together, it was a little child that led them ; and, for his sake, they 
 committed the sublime imbecility of a second petition to the king. 
 It was a wonderful condescension. Ben Harrison expressed the 
 feeling of nearly every member when he said, in reply to Dickin- 
 son's exulting remark, that there was but one word in the petition 
 wdiich he disapproved, and that was the word Congress, " There is 
 but one word in the paper, Mr. President, of which I approve, and 
 that is the word Congress?' It is only the great who can thus bend 
 and accommodate themselves to the scruples of the little. 
 
 Nor was it timidity alone that influenced the excellent ladies of 
 Mr. Dickinson's family. It was' sentiment as well. In looking over 
 the newspapers of that year, 1775, we gather the impression that 
 the ministry endeavored to turn to account the personal popularity 
 of the king and queen, which was very great," particularly with 
 mothers; for were they not th6 parents of ten children, — the oldest 
 thirteen, the youngest a baby in arms? It is not possible for the 
 scoffing readers of this generation to conceive of the tender emotions 
 awakened in the maternal bosom of 1775 upon reading paragraphs 
 in the newspapers describing the family life led at Kevv by the royal 
 parents and their numerous brood : how their Majesties rose at six in 
 the morning, and devoted the next two hours, which they called their 
 own, to Arcadian enjoyment ; how, at eight, the five elder children 
 were brought from their several abodes to brealvfast with their illus- 
 trious parents. " At nine," as one reporter of the period has it, 
 " the younger children attend to lisp or smile their good-morrows ; 
 and while the five eldest are closely applying to their tasks, the 
 little ones and their nurses pass the whole morning in Richmond 
 Gardens. The king and queen frequently amuse themselves with 
 sitting in the room while the children dine, and once a week, 
 attended hy the whole offspring in pairs, va.di\e the little delightful 
 tour of Eichmond Gardens " ! Who but a republican savage could 
 resist such a picture ? The same faithful reporter bade a loyal 
 
JEFFERSON IN THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS. 167 
 
 empire take note that the Prince of Wales, aged thirteen, and the 
 Bishop of Osnaburgh, aged twelve, promised to excel the generality 
 of mankind as much in learning as in rank, for they were kept at 
 their books eight hours a day, and were so fond of their lessons ! 
 "All the ten are indeed fine children." 
 
 We observe, also, that there was much petitioning this year, both 
 for and against the Americans ; which gave the king opportunities 
 to indicate his own sentiments: for, when a petition was presented 
 adverse to the royal policy, no notice was taken of it ; but when a 
 delegation came to the palace, charged to say that a malignant 
 spirit of resistance had gone forth in America, fomented by selfish 
 men resolved to rise upon the ruins of their country; or when a 
 committee of aldermen gave utterance to the opinion that clemency 
 was thrown away upon colonists who raised parricidal hands against 
 a parent State to which they owed existence and every blessing; or 
 when nine tailors from Tooley Street laid "their lives and fortunes 
 at the foot of the throne," for a gracious king to employ in main- 
 taining tlie authority of Parliament in every part of the» empire, — 
 then the Majesty of Britain unknit its troubled brow, and the news- 
 papers were enabled to state that " His Majesty received the address 
 very graciously, and the gentlemen of the deputation had the honor 
 to kiss His Majesty's Irand." The king's deliberate opinion of the 
 troubles in America was that Washington, Patrick Henry, the 
 Adamses, Jefferson, Peyton Randolph, John Dickinson, and the 
 Congress generally, had entered into " a desperate consjiiracy," to 
 Use the language of the royal speech of 1775, for the purpose of 
 wresting from him a valuable part of his dominions. All this peti- 
 tioning, and all these tender or timid scruples of the Dickinson 
 part}^, he thought, were, " meant to amuse " a too confiding British 
 people; while the leaders, Dickinson himself being one of them, 
 were " preparing for a general revolt." Tlius do the stupid usually 
 interpret the wise. 
 
 Mr. Jefferson's talent for composition was called into requisition 
 on the fifth day of his attendance. The Congress was extremely 
 solicitous concerning the wording of the documents which they 
 issued, not because they felt the eyes of the universe to be uj)on 
 them, though every thing they published luas printed in all the 
 newspapers of Christendom that dared insert it, but because they 
 had, in all their formal utterances, to avoid many possible errors, 
 
168 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON". 
 
 and try for many desirable objects. They were resolyed to remain 
 in the right, to be the party sinned against; and they meant to 
 make this clearly appear. They had to satisfy English Whigs with- 
 out giving a handle to English Tories, and express the feeling of 
 Samuel Adams without repelling John Dickinson. They had to 
 resist General Gage, without appearing as rebels in the ej^es of 
 kings whose countenance and succor might become important to 
 them. Hence, nothing was so much valued at the moment, next to 
 the art of making saltpetre, as skill in the use of Avritten words. 
 
 On the very day when Jefferson took his seat came the first tid- 
 ings of Bunker Hill. How powerless is language to recall the thrill, 
 the alarm, the rapture, the apprehension, the triumph, the tumult, 
 of those days when the tremendous and incredible details were arriv- 
 ing ! One thousand and fiftj'-four of the king's own red-coated 
 soldiers dead and wounded ! Thirteen officers, bearing the king's 
 commission, killed, and seventy wounded ! The king's general and 
 army shut up in Boston, impotent ! The Honorable Congress felt 
 it necessary to get upon paper, at once, the correct theory of these 
 events, with which the world would soon be ringing; for there had 
 never before been such a slaughter as this in British America, — not 
 in the bloodiest of the Indian fights, nor when Wolfe completed the 
 conquest of Canada on the Plains of Abraham. A committee was 
 appointed to draw up a statement of the causes of taking up arms. 
 This committee, on June 24, Jefferson's third day in the Congress, 
 presented a draft, written by a great orator, John Rutledge. Great 
 
 '"^ orators have not the desk-patience to be great writers. The paper 
 not being approved, the committee, two days after, was ordered to 
 
 c try again ; and two gentlemen noted for their writing talent, John 
 Dickinson and Thomas Jefferson, were added to the committee. 
 
 The members of this famous Congress, nobly as they acquitted 
 themselves of their task, were not exempt from the foibles of human 
 nature. Tliey had their little vanities, antipathies, and resentments, 
 like the rest of our limited race. 
 
 When the Congress adjoarned that day, the members of tlie com- 
 
 r mittee remained; and Jefferson found himself next to William 
 Livingston of New Jersey, a lawyer of about his own age, much 
 admired for the sweeping vigor of his written style. Jefferson 
 regarded him with particular interest. Among the papers issued by 
 the first Congress, the one he had liked^best was the Address to the 
 
JEFFEKSON IN THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS. 169 
 
 People of Great Britain, the most extensive and complete version 
 of the case yet given to the world. Without being particularly well 
 written, it was a plain, straightforward piece of work, free from those 
 reserves and softenings supposed to be requisite in petitions to the 
 king. When the Virginia delegates returned, he had inquired con- 
 cerning the authorship of a paper so much to his mind ; and Ben 
 Harrison had told him that William Livingston was the author. 
 Hence he now turned to Livingston, and urged him to undertake O 
 the important and difficult draught committed to them. The member 
 from New Jersey excused himself, and proposed the work to Jeffer- 
 son. Upon this he renewed his request with such urgency, that 
 Livingston was puzzled. " We are as j^et but new acquaintances, 
 sir," said the Jerseyman : " why are you so urgent for my doing 
 it?" He replied, "Because I have been informed that you drew 
 the Address to the People of Great Britain, — a production, certainly, 
 of the finest pen in America." Livingston had, indeed, presented 
 the paper to the house; but, as it was the composition of John Jay 
 of New York, he was compelled to waive the compliment. " On 
 that, perhaps, sir," said he, "you may not have been correctly in- 
 formed." 
 
 The next morning, as Jefferson himself reports, he discovered that 
 Mr. Ja}'- was not disposed to lose the honor of his performance. As 
 he was walking about in the hall, before the House had been called 
 to order, he observed Mr. Jay leading towards him, " by the button 
 of his coat," Mr. E. H. Lee of Virginia. These gentlemen were 
 not the best friends. " I understand, sir," said Jay to Jeiierson, 
 when he had brought up the Virginia orator, " that this gentleman 
 informed you that Mr. Livingston drew the Address to the People 
 of Great Britain." Mr. Jefferson set him right on the point ; but 
 Jay and Lee remained " ever very hostile to one another." 
 
 It is a relief to catch Mr. John Jay, who comes down to us with 
 a reputation for austerest virtue, behaving so much like a sophomore. 
 The truth is, however, that at thirty he was a merry gentleman 
 enough, who smoked his pipe, loved his jest, could be vain of his 
 " composition," and was actually — if the reader can believe it — 
 called by his intimate friends Jack ! 
 
 The committee asked the new member from Virginia to try his 
 hand at the draught, and put Lexington and Bunker Hill into docu- 
 mentary form for general circulation. He did his best, but his 
 
170 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 O usual ill luck pursued liim. Mr. Dickinson thought the paper "too 
 strong." No one, as yet, expected or desired any other ending of 
 the controversy than reconciliation with Great Britain on the old 
 terms. Why, then, asked Dickinson, make reconciliation more dif- 
 ficult by offensive words ? " He was so honest a man," says Mr. 
 Jefferson, '' and so able a one, that he was greatly indulged, even by 
 those who could not feel his scruples." The committee asked him 
 
 ^ to take Mr. Jefferson's draught, which all seem to have approved but 
 
 O Dickinson, and put it into a form he could adopt. The result was a 
 much better document for the purpose than either of them alone 
 could have prepared; for in nothing that men does is the saying 
 truer, than in the preparation of official documents, tliat two heads 
 are better than one. Mr. Dickinson restated the course of events, 
 
 6 but appended to his mild version of the facts four and a half para- 
 graplis of Jefferson's flowing eloquence, which came in well when the 
 document was read in town meetings and at the head of departing 
 regiments. But Dickinson's part was not less effective. The very 
 awkwardnesses of a piece of writing have convincing power when 
 they arise from the struggle of an honest mind to get upon paper 
 the exact truth. How effective and affecting some of Mr. Lincoln's 
 messages for tliis very reason ! It was not eloquent to describe the 
 affair of Lexington as " an unprovoked assault upon the inhabit- 
 
 • ants of the said Province, as appears by the affidavits of a great 
 number of persons;" nor was it a fine stroke of rhetoric to speak 
 of the battle of Bunker Hill as a butchery of our countrymen (say- 
 ing nothing of tlie 1,054 British dead and wounded) ; but Homer 
 could not have stated it in a better way to reacli the minds of the 
 
 j plain, scrupulous people of Pennsylvania. The committee and the 
 Congress adopted Mr. Dickinson's draught. If the reader will turn 
 to the document, he will easily discover the precise point where Dick- 
 inson's labored statement ends, and Jefferson's glowing utterance 
 begins. 
 
 There is one word of three'letters in Mr. Jefferson's portion, which 
 I wonder the cautious Pennsylvanian did not erase. It is the word 
 of threat italicized in this passage : " We mean not to dissolve that 
 union which has so long and so happily subsisted between us, and 
 which we sincerely wish to see restored. Necessity has not yet 
 driven us into that desperate measure, nor induced us to excite any 
 other nation to war against them. We have not raised armies with 
 
JEFFERSON IN THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS. 171 
 
 ambitious designs of separating from Great Britain, and establish- 
 ing independent States." These words render the date of the tlocu- 
 ment interesting. The attested copy bears date July 6, 1775. If 
 John Hancock had found it convenient to sign two days before, he 
 would have furnished the orators and historians of future ages with 
 a " point " ! A year later he put his name to a document of dif- 
 ferent tenor. 
 
 Towards the close of the session, it fell to Jefferson to do for the 
 Congress what he had already done for Virginia, — draught an 
 answer to Lord North's Conciliatory Proposition. As there w^as no 
 Dickinson upon the committee, his draught was approved ; and the 
 adoption of this paper was among the last acts of the session. 
 August 1, seventy-one days after Jefferson had taken his seat, the 
 Congress adjourned. 
 
 Besides participating in the daily unreported debates, he had 
 penned two important papers, one of which had been rejected, and 
 the other accepted. His presence in the House was his best service 
 to the cause. His clear conception of the situation, his knowledge 
 of the laws and precedents bearing on the controversy, the native 
 fearlessness of his intellect, his curious freedom from some of the 
 troublesome foibles of our nature, particularly his indifference as to 
 who should have the credit of doing the best thing, provided the 
 best thing was done, and a certain conciliatory habit of mind and 
 manner, — made him a valuable member of such a body as this ; and 
 he was happy, too, in being in a situation where his special gift was 
 the one in request. With the good-will of all his colleagues, he set 
 out for Virginia, Ben Harrison riding with him in his carriage, and 
 the other Virginia delegates not far behind. These Virginians were 
 wanted at home. They were \vaited for, and anxiously desired. 
 
 For in the Church of St. John, on the loftiest height of Richmond, 
 the Virginia convention had been for several days in session, electing 
 colonels to the regiments, examining specimens of saltpetre, preparing 
 to frustrate the fell designs of Dunmore, and yet reluctant to go on 
 until the arrival of the honorable delegates from Philadelphia. 
 Patrick Henry, in grateful remembrance of his powder exploit, was 
 elected colonel of the First Regiment. 
 
CHAPTER XX. 
 
 IN TIKGINIA AGAIN". 
 
 It took the delegates eight days to perform the journey from 
 Philadelphia to Eichmond. August 9, in the midst of the morn- 
 ing session, four of them, as the Journal records, '* Patrick Henry, 
 Edmund Pendleton, Benjamin Harrison, and Thomas Jefferson, 
 Esquires, appeared in convention, and took their seats ; and the gen- 
 tlemen appointed to represent their counties, in their necessary 
 absence, retired." At once the four gentlemen were added to the 
 important committee of the moment, and resumed legislative duty. 
 On the 11th arrived another delegate, R. H. Lee, who took his seat. 
 And this was the last of the arrivals ; for George Washington was 
 on other duty, and was not expected home that summer. 
 
 It was a great day in the Convention, this 11th of August, 
 meagre as the record is. Again the Convention was to elect seven 
 members to represent the colony in the next Congress, which was 
 to meet in September. First, three of the last delegation, no longer 
 eligible, — General Washington, Colonel Patrick Henry, and 
 Edmund Pendleton, the last named being in infirm health, — were 
 solemnly thanked by the chairman, on behalf of the Convention, for 
 their services in the Congress. The new soldier and the old lawyer 
 becomingly responded ; and then the chairman was " desired to trans- 
 mit the thanks of this convention, by letter, to His Excellency 
 General Wasliington." These high courtesies performed, the ballot- 
 ing began. The result showed that Virginia was well pleased with 
 the youngest of her representatives : Peyton Randolph, eighty-nine ; 
 *^R. H. Lee. eighty-eight ; Thomas Jefferson, eighty-five ; Benjamin 
 Harrison, eighty-three ; Thomas Nelson, sixty-six ; Richard Bland, 
 sixty one ; George Wythe, fifty-eight. Thus the delegate, who, a few 
 months before, had been sent to the Congress to fill a brief vacancy, 
 172 
 
rS" VIRGINIA AGAIN. 173 
 
 stood now third in the list ; above JTelson, one of the richest men in 
 Virginia ; above Harrison, the favorite representative of the plant- 
 ing interest; above Wythe, his instructor in the law ; above Bland, 
 long regarded as the ablest political writer in Virginia^ now venera- 
 ble in years. 
 
 Virginia, we observe, stood by her faithful servants. The fatal 
 notion of rotation in office had not yet been evolved. The delegates 
 who could no longer serve vmre publicly applauded; those who 
 could were re-elected with a near approach to unanimit}^, except in the 
 case of Mr. Bland, whose age and infirmities rendered him incapable 
 of efficient service. His re-election was probably only another form 
 of honorable dismission. Calumnious reports had been circulated of 
 late, casting doubt upon the sincerity of his attachment to the great 
 cause. The Convention, promptl}' yielding to his demand for an 
 investigation, had " considered it their duty to bear to the world 
 their testimony, that the said Richard Bland had manifested him- 
 self the friend of his country, and uniformly stood forth an able 
 asserter of her rights and liberties." Copies of this vindication were 
 ordered to be sent to the Congress, and to Arthur Lee, the London 
 agent of the Province, in whose suspicious mind the slanders had 
 probably originated. The re-election was an additional testimony 
 which touched the old man's heart. The next morning he 
 rose in the Convention to decline the honor conferred upon him. 
 This fresh instance of the approval of the Convention, he said, 
 was enough for an old man, almost deprived of sight, whose highest 
 ambition had ever been to receive, when he should retire from pub- 
 lic life, "the plaudit of his country;" and he begged the Conven- 
 tion to appoint " some more fit and able person to supply his place." 
 The Convention declared that their thanks were due to Richard 
 Bland for his able and faithful service, and that they were induced 
 tp accept his resignation only by consideration for his advanced age. 
 The old man then rose, and remained standing, while the chairman 
 pronounced the thanks of the Convention in fit, impressive words. 
 A community is not apt to be ill served that treats' its servants in 
 this spirit. 
 
 Impatient for his home, Jefferson obtained leave of absence on 
 the fifth day of his attendance in the Convention ; but, before he 
 left Richmond, he gave his voice and vote for a measure which 
 proved to be the beginning of a revolution in Virginia, of which he 
 
174 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 was to be the soul and director. Dissenters from the Established 
 Chur(3h had, as yet, neither rights nor recognition, and in ordinary- 
 times both would have been denied them ; but at such a time as 
 this, when the fundamental rights of man become living truths in all 
 but the dullest minds, enthusiasm lifts men above the trivialities of 
 sectarian difference, and enables them to lay aside sectarian arro- 
 gance. August 16, 1775, an address from the Baptists was presented 
 to the Convention. Of this, the most numerous body of dissent- 
 ers in the colon}'. Rev. John Clay, father of the renowned Kentuck- 
 ian, was then an active member; and doubtless his name was 
 appended to the document. Differ as we may, said the Ba^itists of 
 Virginia in this petition, we are nevertheless members of the same 
 community, — a community now menaced with oppression and devas- 
 tation ; and " we have considered what part it will be proper for 
 us to tahe in the unhappy contest." The result of their deliberations 
 was : 1, That, " in some cases, it is lawful to go to war ; " and, 2, 
 This was one of the cases. Consequently many of their numbers 
 had enlisted, and man}' more desired to enlist, who "had an earnest 
 desire their ministers should preach to them during the campaign." 
 Their petition was, that four Baptist ministers should be allowed to 
 preach to Baptist soldiers, " without molestation or abuse." The 
 Convention passed a resolution which both granted the request and 
 conceded the principle : — ; 
 
 '^Resolved, That it bean instruction to the commanding officers of 
 regiments or troops to be raised, that they permit dissenting clergy- 
 men to celebrate divine worship, and to preach to the soldiers, or 
 exhort, from time to time, as the various operations of the military 
 service may permit, for the ease of such scrupulous consciences as 
 may not choose to attend divine service as celebrated by the 
 chaplain." 
 
 Thus began religious equalit}'' in Virginia. 
 
 Jefferson lingered another day in the Convention ; perhaps to wit- 
 ness the election of a new chairman, R. C. Nicholas, in the place of 
 Peyton Randolph, whom ill-health had compelled to withdraw; per- 
 haps to cast his vote in favor of his brother-in-law, Francis Eppes, 
 for the office of major of the First Regiment, of which Patrick 
 Henry was colonel ; perhaps to assist in the election of the great 
 
IN VIRGINIA AGAIN. 175 
 
 committee of safety, a body of eleven men, the ruling power in 
 Virginia from the adjournment of the Convention till Diinmore was 
 expelled, and a new order of things instituted. The four personages 
 of the Convention, who are designated in the brief record as " Mr. 
 Richard Heni-y Lee, Mr. Henry, Mr. Harrison, and Mr. Jefferson," 
 were appointed to count the ballot^ on this high occasion. Jeffer- 
 son's old friend, John Page, — styled still " the Honorable," from 
 his having been one of Dunmore's Council, — was elected a member 
 of the controlling committee. I wonder if, at that stirring time, 
 Jefferson and "dear Page" ever found time to recall the happy, 
 miserable daj-s, when, both being crossed in love, Jefferson sought 
 solace in Ossian and old Coke, and dear Page went home to his 
 baronial hall, and paid successful court to another ; which Jefferson 
 would not believe till he heard it from Page's own lips, well know- 
 ing, that, for his own part, he had done with love forever ! — 
 
 Jefferson, at least, still plaj-ed the A'iolin. A violinist now of 
 fifteen years' standing, extremely fond of music, aii indefatigable 
 practiser, and inheriting a touch of singular delicacy, he had become 
 a superior performer. For journeys he had one of those minute 
 violins formerly called kits, with a tiny case, which could be packed 
 in a portmanteau, or even carried in a large pocket. Wealthy Vir- 
 ginians were late risers in those easy-going, luxurious times : but he 
 was always an early riser ; and he found his kit a precious resource 
 in the long mornings while he was waiting, at country-houses, for 
 the family to come down to breakfast. At night, too, he and his 
 kit could whisper together without disturbing the occupants of 
 adjacent rooms. If the absorbing political events of the period had 
 much interrupted his playing, he now owed to them the acquisition 
 of the finest violin, perhaps, in the colonies, upon which he had 
 fixed covetous ej'es years before. 
 
 To say that this instrument belonged to John Randolph convej's 
 no information ; because there are so many John Randolphs of note 
 in Virginia history, that the name has lost its designating power. 
 We are obliged to say John Randolph, the king's attorney-genei'al, 
 son of Sir John, and brother of Peyton Randolph, speaker. This 
 precious violin, brought from a foreign land by its proprietor, could 
 not in ordinary times have become the object of vulgar sale ; but the 
 attorney-general, feeling doubtless that the best fiddle should prop- 
 erly belong to the best fiddler, had entered into a compact, four years 
 
176 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 before, by which the instrument should fall to Jefferson's possession 
 after his own death. An agreement was drawn up in legal form, 
 signed and sealed by the parties, attested by seven of their friends, 
 most of whom were young members of the bar, George Wythe and 
 Patrick Henry among them, and duly recorded in tlie minutes of 
 the General Court, to this effect : — 
 
 " It is AGREED between John Randolph and Thomas Jefferson, 
 that, in case the said John shall survive the said Thomas, the execu- 
 tors of the said Thomas shall deliver to the said John 80 pounds 
 sterling of, the books of the said Thomas, to be chosen by the said 
 John ; and, in case the said Thomas should survive the said John, 
 that the executors of the said John shall deliver to the said Thomas 
 the violin which the said John brought with him into Virginia, 
 together with all his music composed for the violin." * 
 
 To the merry attestors of this unique document the transaction 
 may have seemed a joke ; but to Jefferson himself it was so serious, 
 that he provided for the fulfilment of the compact in his will, and 
 bequeathed a hundred pounds to " the said John " besides. 
 
 This paper was drawn in the piping times of peace, when, as yet, 
 Jefferson was " Tom " to his familiars, and Patrick Henry was mas- 
 ter of the Christmas revels ; the whole part}'' unknown beyond their 
 native Province. But now the times were out of joint. John Ran- 
 dolj^h, like most men who held places under the crown, sided with 
 the king so far as to think it his duty to leave the country, and, 
 before leaving, sold his exquisite violin to Jefferson for thirteen 
 pounds. This important bargain was concluded on this last day of 
 his attendance in the Convention, and he carried the instrument 
 home with liim to Monticello, where it remained a precious posses- 
 sion for fifty-one years. 
 
 Short, indeed, was the vacation he now enjoyed, though it was 
 longer than he meant it to be. August 19, he reached Monticello; 
 Congress was to meet at Philadelphia September 5 ; leaving him 
 ten days to stay on his mountain-top, where he had a house 
 enlarging, a family of thirty-four whites and eighty-three blacks 
 to think for, half a dozen farms to superintend, and a highly 
 
 * Abbreviated from 1 Randall, 131. 
 
 I 
 
IN VIKGINIA AGAIN. 177 
 
 complicated and extensive garden to overlook. Probablj'' he did not, 
 on tliis occasion, much enjoy his new violin. A few days after reach- 
 ing home, however, he played upon its late proprietor by writing 
 him a letter upon public aftairs, which seems to have been designed 
 to be shown in England, to aid in the correction of errors prevalent 
 there. Like many other Americans, JeiFerson was puzzled to ac- 
 count for the wonderfully absurd conduct of the home government. 
 What could possess rational beings, that they should go on, year 
 after year, repelling, alienating, the most valuable and loyal colonies 
 a nation had ever had, — colonies that cost nothing, never had coat 
 any thing, and poured into the mother-country a clear revenue esti- 
 mated at two millions sterling a year ; which enriched seaport 
 towns, nourished manufactures, and covered the land with new 
 wealth ? It must be ignorance, he thought : the ministry had been 
 deceived by their servants on this side of the Atlantic. But why 
 the American governors and other official persons should want to 
 deceive their employers, he declared, was a mystery to him. Why 
 should they keep writing home that the American opposition was a 
 mere faction, when they knew it was the whole brain and heart of 
 the country ? Without attempting to solve this enigma, he seized 
 the occasion of the attorney-general's departure to write a letter 
 which might assist individuals in England to arrive at the truth 
 respecting America. 
 
 When he had finished his statement, he told his Tory friend, that 
 though he still preferred a just union with Britain to independence, 
 yet, rather than submit to the claims of Parliament, he would lend 
 his hand to sink the island of Great Britain in the ocean. He 
 added a prophecy» which has been fulfilled: " Whether Britain shall 
 continue the head of the greatest empire on earth, or shall return 
 to her original station in the political scale of Europe, depends, per- 
 haps, on the resolutions of the succeeding winter." Happily for us, 
 for the world, and for herself, Britain has returned to her original 
 station in the political scale of Europe, and assists the progress of 
 the human race in a nobler way by her Earradays, Spencers, Hux- 
 leys, Buckles, Mills, Darwins, and George Eliots. 
 
 The day named for the meeting of the Congress found the family 
 at Monticello anxious for the preservation of a flickering life, pre- 
 cious to them all. Jefferson's eldest child, Martha, was now three 
 years old. His second, Jane, aged seventeen months, died in this 
 
 12 
 
178 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON." 
 
 montli of September, 1775. Detained from his seat by this event, 
 he made such haste, wheu at last he did set out, that he performed 
 the journey from Monticello.to Philadelphia in six days, arriving 
 September 25. This was a feat that must have tasked both liorses 
 and rider severely; for the distance in a straight line appears 
 to exceed two hundred and fifty miles, and much of the road was 
 little more than a " blazed " path through the wilderness. 
 
CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 THE DECLABATION OF INDEPENDEIfCE. 
 
 He might as well have travelled leisurely ; for, when he reached 
 Philadelphia, the great news from England, for which Congress and 
 the country were waiting with extreme anxiety, had not arrived; 
 and nothing decisive could be intelligently considered until it did. 
 The midsummer ships had carried to England the news of Bunker 
 Hill, with that incongruous accompaniment, Mr. Dickinson's Second 
 Petition to the king. How could Congress have doubted what the 
 response would be ? At the beginning of a war, it is bloodshed that 
 takes the controversy out of the domain of reason, and consigns it to 
 that of mania. Before he had been many days in his seat, he had 
 to send news to his brother-in-law. Major Eppes, that the ministry 
 were going to push the war with all the might of tlie British 
 Empire. The Tower of London was despoiled of its cannon for use 
 against the rebellious colonies ; two thousand troops were just 
 embarking in Ireland; ten thousand more were to come in the 
 spring; most of the garrison of Gibraltar, to be replaced by 
 Hessians, were to swell the army of General Gage. And there was 
 a piece of news still more alarming to Virginians : a fleet of frigates 
 and small vessels, which Dunmore had expressly and most earnestly 
 asked for, was coming to lay waste the plantations on the Virginia 
 rivers. Soon arrived intelligence of Lord Dartmouth's reply to the 
 agent who had delivered into his hands the absurd Second Petition : 
 " No answer will be given." The curiously perverse king's speech 
 to Parliament was not long behind; in which His Majesty afforded 
 Colonel Barre a text for an oration which tlie boys of three genera- 
 tions have been well pleased to declaim. The king was so unfortu- 
 nate as to speak of the colonies as having been "planted with 
 great industry " by the mother country, " nursed with great tender- 
 
 179 
 
180 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 nesSj encouraged with many commercial advantages, and protected 
 and defended at much expense of hlood and treasure." Colonel 
 Barre's reply is remarkable for this : it is one of the most eloquent 
 passages ever spoken, and it is, at the same time, a perfectly 
 unexaggerated statement of facts. The king added to the many 
 other politic and conciliatory passages of his speech a delightful 
 offer of " tenderness and mercy " to the " unhappy and deluded 
 multitude " as soon as they should become " sensible of their error." 
 The worst of the news from England was, that the people, wounded 
 in their pride by the slaughter at Bunker Hill, were supporting the 
 government with enthusiasm and seeming unanimity. 
 
 Jefferson was no longer so much puzzled to account for the 
 conduct of the ministr3\ He began to get that insight into the 
 nature of personal government — "the folly of heaping importance 
 upon idiots " — which became, in later years, so clear and vivid. 
 And yet with what strange pertinacity his radical nature clung to 
 the connection with Great Britain ! As late as November 29, 1775, 
 he could write to his kinsman, John Randolph, that there was not 
 a man in the British Empire who more cordially loved a union with 
 Great Britain than he did ! Love it as he might, he had probably 
 ceased to think it possible. " It is an immense misfortune to the 
 whole empire," he wrote, "to have such a king at such a time. We 
 are told, and every thing proves it true, that he is the bitterest 
 enemy we, have. His minister is able, and that satisfies me that 
 ignorance or wickedness somewhere controls him." The last remark 
 is interesting, as showing that Jefferson, at a time when the fact 
 was not generally known, felt that a man of the calibre of Lord 
 North was out of place in the Cabinet of George III., and did not 
 in his heart approve the king's policy. " To undo his empire," 
 Jefferson continued, "the king has but one more truth to learn, — 
 that, after colonies have drawn the sword, there is but one more step 
 they can take ! " 
 
 This autumn of 1775 was a period of intense excitement. All 
 America was drilling, the Philadelphia companies twice a day. 
 Everybody with a tincture of science in his composition was brood- 
 ing over the ingredients of gunpowder, and discussing with kindred 
 spirits the great saltpetre problem. No day passed without some- 
 thing of deep interest coming up in the Congress. When there was 
 no news from England to consider, the army around Boston, its 
 
THE DECLAKATION OF INDEPENDENCE. 181 
 
 destitution, its dwindling numbers, its defective organization, was an 
 ever-present topic. Once more it was proved that militia are inca- 
 pable of prolonged service in the field, and are useless except to hold 
 important points while a proper army is forming. Bull Kun was 
 inexcusable ; for we ought not to have been so ignorant or unmindful 
 of General Washington's reiterated and most emphatic warnings 
 on this point as to have hurled a miscellaneous multitude of citizens 
 in soldier-clothes against a fortified position. 
 
 How curiously ignorant were those peaceful colonists of the art 
 of war ! Philadelphia seems to have confided implicitly in Dr. 
 Franklin's row-gallej^s and marine chevaux-de-frise as a defence 
 against the British fleet. Jefferson, doubtless, was one of the con- 
 gressional party who went down the river to inspect them, when 
 seven of the galleys were paraded, and performed their evolutions. 
 The names of the galleys, as John Adams records, were the 
 Wasliington, the Effingham, the Dickinson, the Franklin, the Otter, 
 the Bull-dog, and "one more which I have forgot." Mr. Jefferson, 
 it is to be hoped, went in the Bull-dog with Mr. Adams ; for in 
 that vessel were two gentlemen whom he would have found interest- 
 ing. One was Mr. Hillegas, treasiirer to Congress, " a great musician," 
 says Adams, " talks perpetually of the forte and piano, of Handel, 
 and songs and tunes." And besides, " he plays upon the fiddle." 
 The other was the famous Rittenhouse, who, Mr. Adams informs us, 
 was a mechanic, a mathematician, a philosopher, an astronomer; "a 
 tall, slender man, plain, soft, modest, no remarkable depth or 
 thoughtfulness in his face, yet cool, attentive, and clear." Then 
 there was Mr. Owen Biddle, another member of the Philosophical 
 Society. A delightful day Mr. Jefferson would have had upon the 
 broad and placid Delaware with such companions ; to say nothing 
 of the galleys, and the vaisseaux-de-frise, and Dr. Franklin's 
 explanations of the same. If some gentleman questioned the efficacy 
 of the galleys, all seemed convinced that the chevaux-de-frise (three 
 rows of heavy timber, barbed with iron, anchored to the bottom of 
 the river) would puzzle a British admiral extremely. Perhaps they 
 did. Nevertheless, before 'two years were past, a British fleet lay at 
 anchor off Philadelphia, in a line nearly two miles long. 
 
 In the midst of all this bustle, excitement, and alarm, Congress 
 sat with closed doors, no reporter present ; and Jefferson sat with 
 them, serving laboriously on committees, and doing his part. Merely 
 
182 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOX. 
 
 to be present in the Congress, when he had at his distant home an 
 infirm mother, a sickly and most tenderly-beloved wife, a little child, 
 and a great brood of dependent relatives, cost him the most painful 
 self-sacrifice. It was only by chance that he could get a letter from 
 or to his mountain-top. When he had been seven weeks away from 
 home, he had still to write, " I have never received the scrip of a 
 pen from any mortal in Virginia since I left it, nor been able by any 
 inquiries I could make to hear of my family." The suspense in 
 which he lived was "too terrible to be endured." "If any thing 
 has happened," he added, " for God's sake let me know it." 
 
 It fell to his lot, tliis N'ovember, 1775, to witness the beginning 
 of the long connection between France and America, which was 
 destined to control, not' the destinies of his country only, but his 
 own career as a jjublic man. That ''French influence," according 
 to the report of ]\Ir. John Jay, to whom we owe our knowledge of 
 it, had an almost ludicrous beginning. The scene, indeed, would be 
 effective in a comedy. No sooner had the tidings arrived of the 
 rejection of the Second Petition, than Congress began to receive 
 mysterious notifications that there was a fokeigner in Philadelphia 
 who desired to make to them an important and confidential com- 
 munication. When this intimation had been several times repeated, 
 Congress condescended to name a committee, Mr. Jay, Dr. Franklin, 
 and Mr. Jefferson, to receive the message. At the appointed hour, 
 in a committee-room of Carpenters' Hall, this distinguished commit- 
 tee met the stranger, " an elderly lame man," as Mr. Jay describes 
 him, " having the appearance of an old, wounded French ofiicer." 
 After preliminary civilities, the lame unknown delivered his commu- 
 nication. The king of France, he said, had heard with pleasure of 
 the exertions made by the colonies in defence of their rights, wished 
 them success, and would manifest his friendship for them openly 
 whenever it should become necessary. The committee, of course, 
 asked him what authority he had for making these assurances ; but 
 the old gentleman only answered by drawing his hand across his 
 throat, and saying, " Gentlemen, I shall take care of my head." 
 The committee inquired what proofs of friendship the Congress might 
 expect from the king. "Gentlemen," was the reply, "if you want 
 arms, you shall have them ; if you want ammunition, you shall have 
 it ; if you want money, you shall have it." 
 
 This would have been comforting if the stranger would only have 
 
THE DECLAEATION OF INDEPENDENCE. 183 
 
 exhibited something in the way of credentials. The committee said 
 as much ; but no response could be obtained except, " Gentlemen, I 
 shall take care of my head." The interview terminated ; and, to use 
 the romantic language of Mr. Jay, "he was seen in Philadelphia no 
 more." His bearing and appearance, however, gained for him some 
 credit ; for Congress speedily appointed that ever-memorable secret 
 committee to correspond with.the friends of America in foreign lands, 
 which had such momentous consequences. The mysterious stranger 
 was indeed an emissary from the French government, — his name 
 De Bonvouloir, — an old courtier of noble lineage, who had been in 
 America last year at the outbreak of the Revolution. He could, 
 indeed, show no credentials, for his instructions were verbal. His 
 duty in America was three-fold : 1, To get exact information ; 2, To 
 convey warm assurances of sympathy; 3, To assure the Congress 
 that they were quite welcome to get Canada if they could, for the 
 French had ceased to think of it. On his return to France, he told 
 the minister that the Americans were practically unanimous, and 
 his report produced as important effects there as his presence had 
 here. 
 
 As the winter drew on, it became distressing beyond measure for 
 a Virginian with a large household to be absent from home. The 
 Province was filled with alarm. A struggle was in progress between 
 Dunmore and the Convention for the possession of the slaves ; the 
 governor proclaiming freedom to all of them who would join him ; 
 and the Convention threatening all who did join him with severest 
 punishment. The Convention triumphed in this contest ; but the 
 mere attempt to seduce the slaves carried terror to hundreds of those 
 isolated Virginia homes, the guardians of which were absent in camp, 
 in Convention, and in Congress. The plantations then were almost 
 all open to the ravages of a naval force, as every considerable plan- 
 tation was of necessity within reach of a navigable stream, by which 
 also the negroes could easily escape to Dunmore's head-quarters. It 
 seems, from the Journal of the Convention, that only twenty-nine 
 slaves joined Dunmore ; namely, Ishmael, Africa, Europe, Romeo, 
 Tawley, Cato, Derry, Cuif, Jasper, Luke, and several Toms, Dicks, 
 and Harrys, who were ordered to be sold into exile in the West 
 Indies or at Honduras. 
 
 Dunmore was successful in nothing except alarming the timid, and 
 exasperating the brave. Even his blockade of Hampton Roads did 
 
184 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 not prevent the Virginia " cruisers " in December from making the 
 timely and precious capture of fifty-six hundred bushels of salt. 
 Salt was getting very scarce in the Province; owing, as the Journal 
 of the Convention assures us, " to the many illegal seizures of vessels 
 laden with that article by his majesty's ships of war, and sundry 
 piratical vessels fitted out by Lord Dunmore." Having obtained 
 this salt, the Convention disposed of it in a singularly wise and just 
 manner. It was divided among all the counties of the Province, 
 according to their population, and consigned to the several commit- 
 tees of safety, to be sold to the families most in need of salt at five 
 shillings a bushel ; and, if it should be found that tlie captured salt 
 belonged to persons "not inimical to this colony," it was to be paid 
 for at the rate of four shillings a bushel. It was a scant supply, 
 divided among thirty-one counties. Warwick County's sliare was 
 only fourteen busliels, and populous Botetourt's but two hundred and 
 ninety-seven. Mrs. Jefferson, perhaps, got a little ; for Albemarle 
 was assigned a hundred and forty-four bushels. 
 
 In all the proceedings of Virginia's little parliament, we find a 
 most happy blending of courtesy, good sense, and rectitude. In the 
 midst of Dunmore's savage aud stupid war against the Province 
 (only a few daj^s before it culminated in the infernal bombardment 
 and burning of Norfolk), a British frigate arrived in the E-oads with 
 a crew of four hundred men. The captain of this vessel, with an 
 effrontery seldom paralleled, sent a flag on shore to ask leave to take 
 in a supply of fresh provisions; averring that he had no wish "to 
 shed the blood of the innocent and helpless," but, if his men " should 
 break loose in the uncontrollable pursuit of fresh and wholesome 
 nourishment, the result must be obvious to every one." The reply 
 of the Convention was politeness itself They desired the captain 
 to be informed that they were sensible of the hardship which many 
 innocent people on board the frigate were suffering from the want 
 of fresh provisions, and that nothing could prevent their permitting 
 a supply but patriotic duty. The captain, they continued, was prob- 
 ably a stranger in Virginia; and hence they wished him to be 
 further informed that "this country hath ever, till of late, considered 
 the officers and men of his majesty's navy as their friends, and have 
 always had great pleasure in showing them every hospitality and 
 civility; but many very recent and unwarrantable instances of the 
 hostile behavior of some of the navy towards our inhabitants justify 
 
THE DECLAEATION OF INDEPENDENCE. 185 
 
 us in suspicions which we would not otherwise entertain. Who are 
 the ' iunccent and helpless ' whose blood Captain Bellew would not 
 wish to shed, we cannot from his expressions determine ; hut they 
 carry with them the strongest implication, that the elTusion of the 
 blood of some of our countrymen is the object of his voyage to this 
 country." If, however, Captain Bellew would condescend to satisfy 
 them that he had come to Virginia on a friendly errand, the Con- 
 vention would take every opportunity to pay proper respect to a gen- 
 tleman in his station, and use every means in their power to render 
 his stay as agreeable as possible. But if, on the contrary. Captain 
 Bellew's design was to further the views of our enemies, " he must 
 excuse the inhabitants of Virginia, if they totally decline contribut- 
 ing towards their own destruction." 
 
 Three days after — January 1, 1776 — Norfolk, the richest and 
 most populous city in Virginia, was bombarded, set on fire, and 
 nine-tenths of it consumed, — a loss of three hundred thousands 
 sterling. Eive thousand people were made homeless and houseless in 
 the middle of winter, and those people as innocent of offence as are 
 to-day the inhabitants of the most peaceful seaport town on the coast 
 of Norway. The Convention, when this intelligence reached them, 
 ordered the troops to evacuate the site, and, before doing so, to 
 destroy the few houses which had escaped the fire. Norfolk accord- 
 ingly was obliterated from the face of the earth. This event, and O 
 the burning of Falmouth on the coast of Maine, weaned all hearts 
 from an unnatural mother-country. It was not merely the unlet- 
 tered portion of the people that were so deeply moved. Franklin's 
 old heart was fired. He never forgot Falmouth and Norfolk ; and, 
 before he was many months older, he and Paul Jones were concerned 
 in those "reprisals," that, for three or four years, kept the coasts of 
 Great Britain in alarm, from John O'Groat's House to Land's End. 
 Independence never could have been carried in 1776, but for these 
 two conflagrations. 
 
 Jefferson heard this maddening news while he was on his way 
 home from Philadelphia. Virginia did not require the constant 
 attendance of all her seven delegates in Congress, but only of any 
 four of them ; and hence they took turns in going home. Nor 
 was it desirable, in that critical time, for so many as seven of the 
 most influential persons on the popular side to be absent from the 
 Province at once. After three months' attendance, therefore, Jeffer- 
 
186 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 
 
 son bade farewell to his colleagues, and passed the rest of tlie winter 
 in Virginia, raising further supplies for the people of Boston, collect- 
 ing money for the purchase of powder, concerting measures for the 
 relief of the inhabitants of Norfolk, entertaining relations and 
 friends compelled to abandon their homes in the lower country, and 
 preparing the public mind for that "one more step" which colonies 
 can take "after they have drawn the sword." What a houseful he 
 must have had, with his brother-in-law's family, besides his own 
 multitude ! His mother died in March, 1776, aged fifty-five, after 
 a widowhood of eighteen years, — an occurrence which may have 
 prolonged his absence from Philadelphia. 
 
 The march of events was swift that spring. General Washington 
 took Boston, the country read Thomas Paine's "Common Sense," 
 and Virginia instructed her delegates to propose independence to 
 Congress. 
 
 ; May 13, 1776, Jefferson, after an absence of four months and a 
 half, resumed his seat in Congress. It was the week when a com- 
 mittee of three gentlemen went from house to house in Philadelphia, 
 buying old lead for bullets, at sixpence a pound, but excusing fami- 
 lies from giving up their clock-weights, because "the iron weights to 
 replace them are not yet made." No one was compelled to give up 
 his lead ; oh, by no means ! but the public were notified, that, "if any 
 persons should be so lost to all sense of the public good as to refuse, 
 a list of their names is directed to be returned to the committee of 
 safety ! " 
 
 Before Mr. Jefferson had been many days in his place, came the 
 intelligence so long waited for, that the Virginia Convention were 
 unanimous for independence. A kind of premature Fourth of 
 July broke oiit everywhere, as the news spread from town to town. 
 First at Williamsburg, where the Convention sat, there were 
 "military parades, discharges of artillery, civic dinners, toasts, illu- 
 minations ; " and when " the Union flag of America proudly waved 
 upon the Capitol, every bosom swelled with generous sentiments 
 and heroic confidence." At Philadelphia some gentlemen, as we 
 read in the newspapers of the week, made "a handsome collection 
 for the purpose of treating the soldiery ; " and there was a grand 
 parade on the ground since called Independence Square ; and a 
 glorious hoisting of the " Union Flag of the American States " upon 
 the Capitol; after which the troops enjoyed the repast provided for 
 
THE DECLARATIOX OF INDEPENDENCE. 187 
 
 them, and tlie day ended with illuminations. Great Virginia had 
 spoken: it was enough. "Every one," said the "Pennsylvania 
 Journal" of May 29, "seems pleased that the domination of 
 Great Britain is ?io if; at an end!" The newspaper poets kindled 
 into song : — 
 
 " Virginia, hail ! Thou venerable State ! 
 In arms and council still acknowledged great. 
 When lost Britannia in an evil hour 
 First tried the steps of arbitrary power, 
 Thy foresight then the continent alarmed, 
 Thy gallant temper cv'ry bosom warmed." 
 
 Independence was the only topic now. Members of Congress 
 still held back, but the feeling out of doors was pressing them to 
 take the inevitable step. Mr. Jefferson has recorded a long list of 
 the reasons brought forward in debate by the Dickinsonians against 
 a final severance of the tie that bound the colonies to Great Britain ; 
 but to us these reasons seem mere pretexts for delay. Perhaps the 
 true arguments against independence were those given as a bur- 
 lesque in one of the radical newspapers : "1, I shall lose my office; 
 2, I shall lose the honor of being related to men in office ; 3, I shall 
 lose the rent of houses for a year or two ; 4, We shall have np more 
 rum, sugar, tea, or coffee, except at a most exorbitant price ; 5, No 
 more gauze or fine muslins; 6, The New-England men will ^urn 
 Goths and Vandals, and overrun all the Southern colonies ; 7, The 
 Church will have no king for a head; 8, The Presbyterians will 
 have a share of power in this country; 9, I shall lose my chance of 
 a large tract of land in a new purchase ; 10, I shall want the sup- 
 port of the first officers of government in my insolence, injustice, and 
 viilany ; 11, The common people will have too much power in their 
 hands." To this last reason the writer added a note of explanation : 
 " N.B. The common people are composed of tradesmen and farmers, 
 and include nine-tenths of the people of America." 
 
 It was on the 7th of June that Mr. E.. H. Lee obeyed the instruc- 
 tions of the Virginia legislature by moving that Congress should 
 declare independence. Two days' debate revealed that the meas- 
 ure, though still a little premature, was destined to pass ; and 
 therefore the further discussion of the subject was postponed for 
 twenty days, and a committee of five was appointed to drauglit a decla- 
 ration, — Thomas Jefferson, Dr. Eranklin, John Adams, Roger 
 
188 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 Sherman, and R. R. Livingston. Mr. Jefferson was naturally 
 urged to prepare the draught. He was chairman of the committee, 
 having received the highest number of votes ; he was also its 
 youngest member, and therefore bound to d6 an ample share of the 
 work ; he was noted for his skill with the pen ; he was particularly 
 conversant with the points of the controversy ; he was a Virginian. 
 The task, indeed, was not very arduous or difficult. Nothing wag 
 wanted but a careful and brief recapitulation of wrongs familiar to 
 every patriotic mind, and a clear statement of principles hackneyed 
 from eleven years' iteration. Jefferson made no difficulty about 
 undertaking it, and probably had no anticipation of the vast 
 celebrity that was to follow so slight an exercise of his faculties. 
 
 The public seem to have had some intimation of what was trans- 
 piring in Congress. On June 11, the day after the committee 
 was appointed, and perhaps the very day on which Jefferson began 
 to write the draught, he doubtless read in the newspaper of the morn- 
 ing that "the grand question of independency" was proposed to two 
 thousand Philadelphia volunteers on parade ; when the whole body 
 voted for independence, except four officers and twenty-five privates. 
 One lieutenant, however, was so much opposed to the proceeding, 
 that he refused to put the question ; which " gave great umbrage to 
 the men, one of whom replied to him in a genteel and spirited 
 manner." Jefferson may have witnessed this scene from his win- 
 dow. He lived then in a new brick house out in the fields, near 
 what is now the corner of Market and Seventh Streets, a quarter of 
 a mile froih Independence Square. " I rented the second floor," he 
 tells us, "consisting of a parlor and bedroom, ready furnished," 
 rent, thirty-fire shillings a week ; and he wrote this paper in the 
 parlor, upon a little writing-desk three inches high, which still 
 exists. 
 
 He was ready with his draught in time. His colleagues upon the 
 committee suggested a few verbal changes, none of which were im- 
 portant ; but, during the three daj^s' discussion of it in the house, 
 it was subjected to a review so critical and severe, that the author 
 sat in his place silently writhing under it, and Dr. Franklin felt 
 called upon to console him with the comic relation of the process by 
 which the sign-board of John Thom.pson, hatter, makes and sells 
 hats for ready money, was reduced to the name of the hatter and 
 the figure of a hat. Young writers know what he suffered, who 
 
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. 189 
 
 come fresli from the commencement platform to a newspaper office, 
 and have their eloquent editorials (equaj to Burke) remorselessly 
 edited, their best passages curtailed, their glowing conclusions and 
 artful openings cut off, their happy epithets and striking similes 
 omitted. Congress made eighteen suppressions, six additions, and 
 ten alterations ; and nearly every one of these changes was an im- 
 provement. The author, for example, said that men are endowed 
 with " inherent and inalienable riglits." Congress struck out 
 inherent, — an obvious improvement. He in-tfcftduced his catalogue 
 of wrongs by these words: "To prove this, let facts be submitted 
 to a candid world, /br tJie truth of which we pledge a faith yet un- 
 sullied by falsehood^ It was good taste in Congress to strike out 
 the italicized clause; for it was beneath such a body to use language 
 of that nature. If gentlemen of the press, who are in secret revolt 
 against chiefs insensible to the charms of eloquence, will turn to 
 the first volume of Mr. Jefferson's works, and go carefully over the 
 passages suppressed or changed in his draught of the Declaration of 
 Independence, they may become more reconciled to a process by 
 which writers suffer and the public gain. 
 
 That the passage concerning slavery should have been stricken 
 out by Congress has often been regretted ; but would it have 
 been decent in this body to denounce the king for a crime in the 
 guilt of which the colonies had shared ? Mr. Jefferson wrote in his 
 draught, — 
 
 "He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating 
 its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant 
 people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into 
 slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their 
 transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of 
 IKFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great 
 Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be 
 bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing 
 every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable com- 
 merce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact 
 of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise 
 in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has 
 "deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded 
 them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liber- 
 
190 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 TiKS of one people, witli crimes wliich he urges them to commit 
 against the lives of another." 
 
 Surely the omission of this passage was not less right than wise. 
 New-England towns had been enriched by the commerce in slaves, 
 and the Southern colonies had subsisted on the labor of slaves for 
 a hundred 3'ears. The foolish king had committed errors enough ; 
 but it was not fair to hold so limited a person responsible for not 
 being a century in advance of his age ; nor was it ever in the 
 power of any king to compel his subjects to be slave-ovs^ners. It 
 was young Virginia that spoke in this paragraph, — Wythe, Jef- 
 ferson, Madison, and their young friends, — not the public mind of 
 America, which was destined to reach it, ninety years after, by the 
 usual way of agony and blood. 
 
 One omitted passage, perhaps, might have been retained, in which 
 Jefferson gave expression to the mighty throb of wounded love 
 which American Englishmen suffered when they heard that foreign 
 mercenaries had been hired to wage war upon them : — 
 
 " Our British brethren are permitting their chief magistrate to 
 send over, not only soldiers of our common blood, but Scottish and 
 foreign mercenaries to invade and destroy us. These facts have 
 given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us 
 to renounce forever these unfeeling brethren. We must endeavor 
 to forget our former love for them, and hold them as we hold the 
 rest of minkind, enemies in war, in peace-friends. We might have 
 been a free and a great people together ; but a communication of 
 grandeur and of freedom, it seems, is below tlieir dignity. Ee it so, 
 since they will have it. The road to happiness and to glory is open 
 to us too. We will tread it apart from them, and acquiesce in the 
 necessity which denounces our eternal separation." 
 
 Even this passage, so creditable to the author's feelings, was per- 
 haps better suppressed; for, ^ter all, the mother country of Amer- 
 ica, as Paine remarked, was not Great Britain, but Europe ; and, 
 since the burning of Falmouth and the bombardment of Norfolk, 
 such words were not expressive of the feelings of the people. 
 
 The "glittering generality" of the document, "all men are cre- 
 ated equal," appears to have been accepted, without objection or 
 
THE DECLAEATION OF INDEPENDENCE. 191 
 
 remarlr, as a short and simple reprobation of caste and privilege. 
 Readers are aware that it has not escaped contemptuous comment in 
 recent times. It would have been easy for the author of the Decla- 
 ration — and I wish he had done so — to put the statement in 
 words which partisan prejudice itself could not have plausibly pre- 
 tended to misunderstand ; for, as the passage stands, its most ob- 
 vious meaning is not true. 
 
 The noblest utterance of the whole composition is the reason 
 given for making the Declaration, — "a decent respect for the 
 OPiNioxs OF MANKIND." Thls 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 contro- 
 t; versies, is the single phrase of the document which Jefferson alone, 
 perhaps, of all the Congress, would have originated ; and, in point 
 of merit, it was worth all the rest. 
 
 During the 2d, 3d, and 4th of July, Congress were engaged 
 in reviewing the Declaration. Thursday, the fourth, was a hot 
 da}-; the session lasted many hours ; members were tired and im- 
 patient. Every one who has watched the sessions of a deliberative 
 body knows how the most important measures are retarded, accele- 
 rated, even defeated, bj' physical causes of the most trifling nature. 
 Mr. Kinglake intimates that Lord Raglan's invasion of the 
 Crimea was due rather to the after-dinner slumbers of the British. 
 Cabinet, than to any well-considered purpose. Mr. Jefferson used 
 to relate, with mucli merriment, that the final signing of the Dec- 
 laration of Independence was hastened by an absurdly trivial cause. 
 Near the hall in which the debates were then held was a livery- 
 stable, from which swarms of flies came into the open windows, and 
 assailed the silk-stockinged legs of honorable members. Handker- 
 chief in hand, they lashed the flies with such vigor as they could 
 command on a July afternoon ; but the annoyance became at length 
 so extreme as to render them impatient of delay, and they made 
 haste to bring the momentous business to a conclusion. 
 
 After such a long and severe strain upon their minds, members 
 seem to have indulged in many a jocular observation as they stood 
 around the table. Tradition has it, that when John Hancock had 
 affixed his magnificent signature to the paper, he said, " There, 
 John Bull may read nvj name without spectacles ! " Tradition, also, 
 
192 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 will never relinquish the pleasure of repeating, that, when Mr. Han- 
 cock reminded members of the necessity of hanging together. Dr. 
 Franklin was ready with his, "Yes, we must indeed all hang 
 
 ( together, or else, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." 
 
 i And this may have suggested to the portly Harrison — a " luxuri- 
 ous, heavy gentleman," as John Adams describes him — his remark 
 to slender Eibridge Gerry, that, when the hanging came, he should 
 have the advantage ; for poor Gerry would be kicking in the air 
 \ long after it was all over with himself. 
 
 ^1 French critics censure Shakspeare for mingling huffoonery with 
 
 scenes of the deepest tragic interest. But here we find one of the 
 most important assemblies ever convened, at the supreme moment 
 of its existence, while performing the act that gives it its rank 
 among deliberative bodies, cracking jokes, and hurrying up to the 
 table to sign, in order to get away from the flies. It is precisely so 
 that Shakspeare would have imagined the scene. 
 
 No composition of man was ever received with more rapture than 
 this. It came at a happy time. Boston was delivered, and New 
 York, as yet, but menaced ; and in all New England there was not 
 a British soldier who was not a prisoner, nor a king's ship that was 
 not a prize. Between the expulsion of the British troops from Bos- 
 ton, and their capture of New York, was the period of the Rerolu- 
 tionary War when the people were most confident and most united. 
 From the newspapers and letters of the times, we should infer that 
 the contest was ending rather than beginning, so exultant is their 
 tone I and the Declaration of Independence, therefore, was received 
 more like a song of triumph than a call to battle. 
 
 ( The paper was signed late on Thursday afternoon, July 4. On 
 the Monday following, at noon, it was publicly read for the first time, 
 in Independence Square, from a platform erected by Rittenhouse for 
 
 the purpose of observing the transit of Venus. Captain John Hop- 
 kins, a young man commanding an armed brig of the navy of the 
 new nation, was the reader ; and it required his stentorian voice to 
 carry the words to the distant verge of the multitude who had come to 
 hear it. In the evening, as a journal of the day has it, " our late 
 king's coat-of-arms were brought from the hall of the State House, 
 where the said king's courts were formerly held, and burned amid 
 the acclamations of a crowd of spectators." Similar scenes tran- 
 spired in every centre of population, and at every camp and post. 
 
THE DECLAEATIOX OF INDEPENDENCE. 193 
 
 Usually the militia companies, the committee of safety, and other 
 revolutionary bodies, marched in procession to some public place, 
 where they listened decorously to the reading of the Declaration, at 
 the conclusion of which cheers were given and salutes fired ; and, in 
 the, evening, there were illuminations and bonfires. In New York, 
 after the reading, the leaden statue of the late king in Bowling 
 Green was " laid prostrate in the dirt," and ordered to be run into 
 bullets. The debtors in prison were also set at liberty. Virginia, 
 before the news of the Declaration had reached her (July 5, 177(5), 
 had stricken the king's name out of the prayer-book ; and now (July 
 30), Rhode Island made it a misdemeanor to pray for the king as 
 king, under penalty of a fine of one hujadred thousand pounds ! 
 
 The news of the Declaration was received with sorrow by all that 
 was best in England. Samuel Rogers used to give American guests 
 at his breakfasts an interesting reminiscence of this period. On the 
 morning after the intelligence reached London, his father, at family 
 prayers, added a prayer for the success of the colonies, which he 
 repeated every day until the peace. 
 
 The deed was done. A people not formed for empire ceased to 
 be imperial; and a people destined to empire began the political edu- 
 cation that will one day give them far more and better than imperial 
 sway. 
 
 Thirteen governments were now to be created, thirteen consti- 
 tutions formed, thirteen codes established, even thirteen seals en- 
 graved. Heavens ! what a perplexity some of the new governors 
 were in about a seal ! No seal, no commission ! Could an ensign 
 or lieutenant's commission have the least validity without a dab of 
 sealing-wax, with some letters and figures stamped upon it ? Ob- 
 viously not. George Wythe and John Page had devised a proper 
 seal for Virginia ; but not in all the Province, nor anywhere in 
 America south of the Delaware, was there a person who had the 
 least idea how to engrave it. " Can you get the work done in Phila- 
 delphia ? " writes Page to his old comrade, Jefferson, in this month 
 of July. " I^ you can, we must get the favor of you to have it 
 done immediately. . . . The engraver may want to know the size. 
 This you may determine, unless Mr. "VVytlie should direct the dimen- 
 sions. He may also be at a loss for a Virtus and Libertas, but you 
 may refer him to Spence's Polj'metis, whicli must be in some library 
 in Philadelpliia." The work, however, could not be done there} and 
 13 
 
194 lif:^ of thomas jefferson. 
 
 the legislature was obliged to pass an act empowering the governor 
 to issue commissions without a seal, until one could be engraved in 
 Europe. The words to be engraved upon this mystic piece of metal, 
 words suggested by the gentlest and most benevolent of men, 
 George Wythe, acquired a mournful and horrible celebrity in 1865, 
 Sic semper Ti/rannis. 
 
 While Jefferson was going about Philadelphia in these burning 
 summer daj's looking for an engraver, he was himself brooding over 
 a design for a seal; Dr. Franklin, John Adams, and himself having 
 been appointed a committee to devise a seal for the central power. 
 But Congress, too, had to do without a seal for some years. The 
 committee, by combining their ideas, achieved a most elaborate de- 
 sign, with the Red Sea in it, and Pharaoh, and a sword, and a pillar, 
 and a cloud brilliant with the hidden presence of God. All of their 
 suggestions were finally rejected, except the very best legend ever 
 appropriated, E Plurihus Unum^ 
 
 Jefferson could not remain in Congress at such a time. Besides 
 that the condition of his wife and household now made his presence in 
 v^ Virginia, as he said, " indispensably necessary," he had been elected 
 to his old seat in the legislature, where duties of the most interest- 
 ing nature invited him. Twice he asked to be released, before his 
 request was granted and a successor appointed. In September, 1776, 
 he left Congress, and went home to assist in adjusting old Virginia 
 to the new order of things. 
 
CHAPTER XXIL 
 
 JEFFEBSON NAMED ENVOY TO FRAXCE. • 
 
 A TEMPTATION crossecT Jefferson's path while the Declaration of 
 Independence was still a fresh topic in Christendom. It was a 
 temptation which was, and is, of all others, the most alluring to an. 
 American who is young, educated, a,nd fond of art ; and it came to 
 him in such a guise of public duty, that, if he had yielded to it, only 
 one person in the world would have blamed him. But the censure 
 of that one would have properly outweighed a world's applause ; for 
 it was himself. 
 
 This temptation presented itself on the 8th of October, 1776. He 
 had resigned his seat in Congress, and, after spending a few days at 
 home, had proceeded to Williamsburg, where he had taken his seat 
 in the legislature, and was about to engage in the hard and long 
 task of bringing up old Virginia to the level of the age. His heart 
 was set on this work. He wanted to help deliver her from the 
 bondage of outgrown laws, and introduce some of the institutions 
 and usages which had given to New England so conspicuous a supe- 
 riority over the Southern Colonies. A Virginian, dining one day 
 with John Adams, lamented the inferiority of his State to New 
 England. " I can give you," said Mr. Adam%, " a receipt for mak- 
 ing a New England in Virginia. V Toivn-meetings, training-days, 
 toion-scJiools, and niinisters\; the meeting-house, schoolhouse, and 
 training-field are the scenes where New-England men were formed." 
 Probably Mr. Jefferson had heard his friend Adams, say something 
 of the kind. He was now intent upon purging the Virginia statute- 
 books of unsuitable laws, and founding institutions in accord with 
 the recent events. 
 
 Young as he was, he had had some training now in practical states- 
 manship. That sharp experience in Congress, while his draught of the 
 
 195 
 
196 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 Declaration of Independence was edited of its crudities, redundancies, 
 and imprudences, was salutary to him. It completed the prelim- 
 inary part of his education as a public man, — a public man being 
 one who has to do, not with what is ideally best, but with the best 
 attainable ; not to give eloquent expression to his own ideas, but 
 effective expression to the will of his constituents. He wrote little 
 that needed severe pruning after July 4, 1776, though he was 
 still to propose many things that were unattainable. A truly wise, 
 bold, safe, competent public man is one of the slowest formations in 
 human nature ; but when formed, there is only one man more pre- 
 cious, — the philosopher, who is the common teacher of legislators 
 and constituents. If there had been such a philosopher in Virginia 
 just then, he would have smiled, perhaps, at the noble enthusiasm 
 of these young Virginians, who were about to try to make a New 
 England out of a State in which the laboring majority were only 
 too likely to remain slaves. 
 
 But it belongs to the generous audacity of youth to attempt the 
 impossible. Here at Williamsburg, in this October, 1776, were 
 gathered once more the circle of Virginia liberals who had been 
 working together against the exactions of the king. Patrick Henry 
 was governor now, living in "the palace," and enjoying the old 
 viceregal salary of a thousand pounds a year. George Wythe, from 
 service in Congress, had acquired experience and distinction. It 
 was he who began the constitution-making in which Virginia had 
 been engaged during much of this year. In January, while spend- 
 ing an evening with Mr. John Adams at Philadelphia, and hearing 
 him discourse, in his robust and ancient-Briton manner, of the 
 constitution proper for a free State, George Wythe asked him to 
 put the substance of his ideas upon paper. Mr. Adams. gave him, 
 in consequence, his "'Thoughts upon Government ; " which were 
 the best thoughts on that subject of Locke, Milton, Algernon 
 Sidney, James Otis, and John Adams. How congenial to Mr. 
 Adams such a piece of work ! " The best lawgivers of anti- 
 quity," said he,, " would rejoice to live at a period like this, when, 
 for the first time in the history of the world, three millions of people 
 were deliberately choosing their government and institutions." 
 Patrick Henry was well pleased with the " Thoughts." " It shall 
 be my incessant study," he wrote to Mr. Adams, " so to form our 
 portrait of government, that a kindred with New -England may be 
 
JEFFERSON NAMED ENVOY TO FRANCE. 197 
 
 discerned in it." So tliought all tlie band of radically-liberal men 
 in Virginia, wbo were beginning to regard Thomas Jefferson as 
 their chief. 
 
 And now, on the second day of the session, came a fair excuse for 
 him to leave the " laboring oar," and throw the difficult task of 
 re-creating Virginia upon his colleagues. A messenger from the 
 Honorable Congress reached Williamsburg, October 8, bearing a 
 despatch for Mr. Jefferson, informing him that he had been elected 
 joint commissioner with Dr. Franklin and Silas Deane to represent 
 the United States at Paris. The temptation was all but irresistible. 
 He relished extremely the delicious society of Dr. Franklin, and was 
 getting into the Frauklinian way of dealing with cantankerous man. 
 Paris, too, to which good Americans were already looking as the 
 abode of the blest, where Jefferson could see at last, after living in 
 the world thirty-three years, harmoniously porportioned edifices, and 
 listen to music such as* the Williainsburg '' Apollo " had only heard 
 in dreams. The public duty, also, was supposed to be of the first 
 importance. Perhaps it was ; but, also, perhaps it was not. Con- 
 sidering the whole case, the j^oung giant might have done better if 
 he had, from the first, made up his mind to fight unassisted. It was 
 a costly business, that French alliance ; the heaviest item being the 
 habit of leaning upon France, and looking for help, at every pinch, 
 to the French treasury. But this could not have been foreseen in 
 1776 ; and happy, indeed, would it have been for Franklin, for the 
 country, for the future, if he could have been seconded by a person 
 so formed to co-operate with him as Jefferson. Franklin would have 
 got Canada at the peace of 1782, if he had had a Jefferson to help, 
 instead of a Jay and an Adams to hinder. 
 
 Torn with contending desires, Jefferson kept the messenger wait- 
 ing day after day ; so hard was it to say No to Congress, and to give 
 up an appointment promising so much honor and delight. But his 
 duty was plain. There was a lady upon Monticello who had a claim 
 upon his service with which no other claim could compete. To leave 
 her in the condition in which she was, had been infidelity ; and to 
 take her with him might have been fatal to her. Virginia had 
 many sons, but Mrs. Jefferson had but one husband. So, on the 
 11th of October, the messenger mounted and rode away, bearing the 
 proper answer to the President of Congress : — 
 
198 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEES02T. 
 
 " It would argue great insensibility in me, could I receive with 
 indiiference so confidential an appointment from your body. My 
 tbanks are a poor return for tlife partiality tliey have been pleased to 
 entertain for me. No cares for my own person, nor yet for my pri- 
 vate affairs, would have induced one moment's hesitation to accept 
 the charge. But circumstances very peculiar in the situation of my 
 family, such as neither permit me to leave nor to carry it, compel me 
 to ask leave to decline a service so honorable, and, at the same time, 
 so important to the American cause. The necessity under which I 
 labor, and the conflict I have undergone for three days, during which 
 I could not determine to dismiss your messenger, will, I hope, plead 
 my pardon with Congress ; and I am sure there are too many of that 
 body to whom they may with better hopes confide this charge, to 
 leave them under a moment's difficulty in making a new choice." 
 
 As soon as he had reached a decision on this important matter, his 
 colleagues in the Assembly'', who had been waiting for it, placed him 
 on a great number of committees ; and he began forthwith, on the 
 very day of the messenger's departure, to introduce the measures of 
 reform which he had meditated. Mr. Adams might well regard 
 Virginia as a reformer's jjaradise ; for owing to the colonial necessity 
 of submitting every desired change to the king, which involved time, 
 trouble, expense, and probable rejection, the Province was far behind 
 even Great Britain in that adaptation of laws and institutions to 
 altered times, which ought to be always in progress in every com- 
 munity. There was such an accumulation, in Virginia, of the out- 
 grown and the unsuitable, that Jefferson and his friends hoped to 
 accomplish in a few months an amount of radical change that would 
 have been a fair allowance for a century and a half 
 
CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 NEED OF EEFOEM IN OLD VIKGINIA. 
 
 The law-books were full of old absurdity and old cruelty.* Of the 
 four hundred thousand people who were supposed to inhabit Virginia, 
 one-half were African slaves ; and it was a fixed idea in the Jeffer- 
 son circle, that whites and blacks could not live in' equal freedom in 
 the same community. Besides the intense prejudice entertained by 
 the master race against the servile, and the hatred which had been 
 gathering (as Jefferson thought) in the minds of the slaves from 
 four generations of outrage, he believed that Nature herself had made 
 it impossible for the two races to live happily together on equal terms. 
 He evidently had a low opinion of the mental capacity of his colored 
 brethren. The Indian, with no opportunities of mental culture 
 beyond those of the negro, had acquired the art of oratory, could 
 carve the bowl of his pipe into a head not devoid of truth and spirit, 
 and draw upon a piece of bark a figure resembling an animal, a plant, 
 a tract of country. But never had he observed in a negro, or a 
 negro's work, one gleam of superior intelligence, aptitude, or taste. 
 No negro standing behind his master's chair had caught from the 
 conversation of educated persons an elevated mode of thinking. 
 " Never," says Mr. Jefferson, " could I find that a black had uttered 
 a thought above the level of plain narration ; never saw even an 
 elementary trait of painting or sculpture." In music they were more 
 gifted; but no negro had yet imagined any thing bej'oud "a small 
 
 * Like this, for example: "Whereas, oftentimes many brabling women often slander 
 and scandalize their neighbors for which tlieir poore husbands are often brought into charge- 
 able and vexatous suites, and caste in greatc damages : Bee it therefore enacted by the 
 authority aforesaid, that in actions of slander, occasioned bj'the wife as aforesaid, after judg. 
 ment passed fur the damages, the woman shall be punished by ducking ; and if the slander 
 be soe enormous as to bo adjudged at a greater damage than live hundred pounds of tobacco, 
 then the woman to sutter a ducking for every live hundred pounds of tobacco adjudged against 
 the husband, if he refuse to pay tlie tobacco." 
 
 199 
 
200 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 cateli." Love, which inspires the melodious madness of poets, kin- 
 dles only the senses of a black man, not his mind, and has never, in 
 all the tide of time, wrung from him a word which other lovers love 
 to repeat. Mere misery, to other races, has* been inspiration. The 
 blacks are wretched enough, but they have never uttered their woes 
 in poetry. 
 
 For these and other reasons, Mr. Jefferson was disposed to regard 
 the negro race as naturallj'^ inferior ; though he expresses himself on 
 the point with the hesitation natural to a scientific mind provided 
 with a scant supply of facts. On the political question, he was 
 clear : the two races could not live together in peace as equals. The 
 attempt to do so, he thought, would " divide Virginians into parties, 
 and jiroduce convulsions which would probably never end but in the 
 extermination of the one or the other race." Here was a problem for 
 a knot of young legislators, without a precedent to guide them in all 
 the known history of man ! 
 
 The gross ignorance of the white inhabitants, except one small 
 class, was another too obvious fact. They were almost as ignorant 
 as Europeans, with fewer restraints than Europeans. Almost every 
 glimpse we get of the poorer Virginians of that day is a revelation 
 of rude and reckless ignorance. We have in the Memoirs of Elkanah 
 Watson, who rode through Virginia in 1778, an election scene at 
 Hanover Court House, which must have been a startling contrast to 
 the elections he had witnessed in his native Massachusetts, where an 
 election was a solemnity opened with prayer. The " whole coun- 
 try," he records, 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, and, in a twinkling, 
 ran up the pedigree of his horse to the grand dam. Treating his 
 importunity with little respect, I became 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 xnj attention 
 was attracted by a fight between two very unwieldy fat men, foam- • 
 ing and puffing like two furies, until one succeeded in twisting a 
 forefinger in a side-lock of the other's hair, and in the act of thrust- 
 ing by this purchase his thumb into the latter's eye, he bawled out, 
 King's Cruse, equivalent, in technical language, to Enough." 
 
 There was in Virginia an unusually large proportion of this 
 
NEED OF KEFOEM IN OLD VIRGINIA. 201 
 
 savage ignorance, easily convertible into fanatical ignorance. The 
 handling of tobacco, it appears, gave employment to a great number 
 of rough fellows, — tobacco-rollers, among others, who drove a pin 
 into each end of a hogshead of tobacco, and thus attaching to it a 
 pair of shafts, harnessed a horse to it, and rolled it to the landing. 
 Professor Tucker of Virginia speaks of this class as " hardy, reckless, 
 proverbially rude, and often indulging in coarse humor at the expense 
 of the traveller who chanced to be well dressed, or riding in a car- 
 riage." But ignorance was almost universal in Virginia, as it must 
 be in every community, unless there is a universal system of educa- 
 tion. And this tvas another problem for the young gentlemen at 
 Williamsburg who desired to Yankeefy Virginia. Mr. Jefferson, for 
 one, felt the absolute necessity of the voting class being able to vote. 
 He saw, too, wherever he looked in Virginia, the evils arising 
 from ill-distributed wealth. It is the nature of wealth to get into 
 heaps ; because it is the nature of the weak to squander their money, 
 and of the strong to husband it; and this being its nature, laws 
 need not aggravate the tendency. But in Virginia, as in all the 
 old-fashioned countries, there was a whole system of laws and 
 usages expressly designed to keep property from being distributed. 
 Fathers could prevent a profligate son from sinking to his natural level 
 in the community, by entailing upon him and upon the first-born of 
 his male descendants, not his landed estates only, but the negroes 
 who gave them value ; and this entail could only be broken by a 
 special act of the legislature. The law of primogeniture prevented 
 the natural division of estates among all the family of a deceased 
 proprietor, excluding all the daughters, and all the sons but one. 
 The consequence was, that the best portions of Virginia were held 
 by a few families, who suffered the ills and inconveniences of aristo- 
 cratic rank, without attaining that moral elevation which is possible 
 to aristocrats who accept the public duties of their position. They 
 monopolized the honors of the colony ; but, as a class, they appear to 
 have been as destitute of public spirit as the grandees of Spain or 
 Poland. There is only one test of a genuine superiority, and that 
 test was as familiar to their ears as it was foreign to their hearts : 
 " Let him that will be chief among you, be your servant," a i:)erfect 
 definition of a proper aristocracy. Jefferson, Henry, Madison, and 
 their circle, who had been contending with the aristocracy of Vir- 
 ginia during the whole of their public life, had to consider a remedy 
 for this evil also. 
 
202 LIFE OF THOaiAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 The Established Church, during the ten years preceding the Rev- 
 olution, had been pressing heavily upon the people of Virginia. 
 Virginians used sometimes to ridicule New Englanders whom they 
 chanced to meet, for the persecution of the Quakers in Massachu- 
 setts, and the witchcraft delusion of Salem and Boston. It is the 
 privilege of an American citizen to be profoundly ignorant of his 
 country's history ; and Virginians, availing themselves of this privi- 
 lege, are not generally aware, that, at the time when Yankee magis- 
 trates were hanging witches and whipping Quakers, Virginia justices 
 of the peace were putting Quakers in the j)illory for keeping their 
 hats on in church, and appointing juries of matrons to fumble over 
 the bodies of old women for " witch-marks," which, of course, they 
 found. John Burk, historian of Virginia, intimates that a woman 
 was burned to death in Princess Anne County for witchcraft, and 
 adds, that, " in all probability, the case was not solitary." And as 
 Massachusetts expelled Eoger Williams and others for opinions' 
 sake, so did Virginia, in the same generation, refuse a residence to 
 some Puritan clergymen who went from Massachusetts to Virginia 
 upon the urgent invitation of persons of their own faith. But 
 there is this to be said in favor of the Yankees : They recovered 
 from the mania of uniformity sooner than the Virginians. If^ in 
 1650, they regarded the celebration of the Mass as a capital offence, 
 and would not permit the Church of England service to be performed, 
 nor the rite of baptism to be administered by immersion, nor a com- 
 pany of men to pray with their hats on, yet, in 1750, all these things 
 were permitted, except, perhaps, the celebration of the Mass. But, 
 in Virginia, the Established Church had become more intolerant as 
 the colony increased in population. It seemed so hostile to liberty, 
 that James Madison, after coming home from Princeton College in 
 New Jersey, where he was educated, expressed the opinion, that, if 
 the Church of England had been established and endowed in all the 
 colonies as it was in Virginia, the king would have had his way, and 
 gradually reduced all America to subjection. 
 
 It was not merely that obsolete (though unrepealed) law still made 
 Jefferson and several of his most virtuous friends liable to be burned 
 to death for heresy ; nor that a denial of the doctrine of the Trinity 
 was legally punishable by three years' imprisonment ; nor that 
 Unitaiians could be legall}' deprived of the custody of their own 
 children, and those children assigned to drunken and dissolute Trin- 
 
NEED OF REFORM IN OLD VIRGINIA 203 
 
 itarians ; nor even that Baptists, Presbyterians, and Quakers had to 
 pay for supporting a church they did not attend, — these were not 
 the grievances which made Virginians restive under the Establish- 
 ment. 
 
 In 1774, when Madison was twenty-three, we find him writing to 
 a Northern friend, " I want again to breathe your free air. . . . 
 That diabolical, hell-conceived principle of persecution rages among 
 some ; and, to their eternal infamy, the clergy can furnish tlieir quota 
 of imps for such purposes. There are at this time, in the adjacent 
 county, not less than five or six well-meaning men in close jail for 
 publishing their religious sentiments, which, in the main, are very 
 orthodox." These prisoners were Baptists, the most numerous and 
 enterprising of the dissenting sects. The historian of tlie Virginia 
 Baptists, Semple, throws light ou Mr. Madison's brief, indignant rec- 
 ord. The Baptist ministers, from 1768 to 1775, were frequently 
 arrested, he tells us ; and, as it was awkward to define their exact 
 offence, they were usually arraigned as " disturbers of the peace." 
 He gives a ludicrous account of the first arrest, which occurred in 
 1768, near the seat of the Madisons. Young Madison, then a lad 
 of seventeen, may have witnessed the ridiculous scene. Three Bap- 
 tist preachers were seized by the sheriff" on the same Sunday morn- 
 ing, and brought to the yard of the parish church, where three 
 magistrates, who were in waiting for them, bound them in a thousand 
 pounds to appear in court two days after. When they • were 
 arraigned, the prosecutor assailed them with the utmost vehemence. 
 " May it please Your Honors," he cried, " these men are great dis- 
 turbers of the peace. They cannot meet a man upon the road but 
 they must ram a text of Scripture down his throat." It so chanced 
 that one of the prisoners was a very good lawyer in an unprofes- 
 sional way, and made a defence that was embarrassing to magis- 
 trates who were resolved to find them in the wrong. The Court 
 off'ered, at length, to release them, if they would .give their word not 
 to preach for a year. Refusing this, they were ordered into close 
 confinement, and went to Spottsylvania Jail, singing, " Broad is the 
 road that leads to death," amid the jeers of the mob. After 
 remaining in jail (a straw-strewn pen, with grated holes for win- 
 dows) for forty-three days, preaching daily through the grated aper- 
 tures to a hooting crowd, they were released. 
 
 Worthy John Blair, governor jjro tem., to whom accusers and 
 
204 LIFE OF THOltlAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 accused hastened to refer the matter, being a man of liberal opin- 
 ions, sided, as a matter of course, with the Baptists. He told the 
 bigoted squires that the persecution of dissenters only increased 
 their numbers, and that the Baptists had really brought some repro- 
 bates to repentance. Nay, said he, if a man of theirs is idle, and 
 neglects to provide for his family, he incurs the censure of his 
 brethren, which has had good effects ; and he only wished Church 
 people would try the same system. But there was an ignorant mul- 
 titude in Virginia, as bigoted as the county magnates. Hence this 
 persecution continued; and the case of these very men was tried 
 again at Spottsylvania Court House, and Patrick Henry rode fifty 
 miles to defend them. 
 
 But for the account (missed by Wirt) which has been preserved 
 of Patrick Henry's performance on this occasion, we should not have 
 understood the secret of his power over an assembly. The resistless | 
 magic of his oratory was greatly due to artifice, management, I 
 extreme and sudden changes in tone, adroit repetition of telling \ 
 phrases. He entered the court-house while the prosecuting attorney I 
 was reading the indictment. He was a stranger to most of the 
 spectators ; and, being dressed in the country manner, his entrance 
 excited no remark. When the prosecutor had finished his brief 
 opening, the new-comer took the indictment, and, glancing at it with 
 an expression of puzzled incredulity, began to speak in the tone of 
 a man who has just heard something too astounding for belief: — 
 
 "May it please Your Worships, I think I heard read by the prose- 
 cutor, as I entered the house, the paper I now hold in my hand. 
 If I have rightly understood, the king's attorney has framed an 
 indictment for the purpose of arraigning and punishing by imprison- 
 ment these three inoffensive persons before the bar of this court for 
 a crime of great magnitude, — as disturbers of the peace. May it 
 please the court, what did I hear read ? Did I hear it distinctly, or 
 was it a mistake of my own ? Did I hear an expression as of 
 crime, that these men, whom Yoiir Worships are about to try for 
 misdemeanor, are charged with — with — with what ? " 
 
 Having delivered these words in a halting, broken manner, as if 
 his mind was staggering under the weight of a monstrous idea, he 
 lowered liis voiceto its deepest bass; and assuming the profouudest 
 solemnity of manner, answered his own question : " JPreaclung the 
 gosjpel of the Son of God!" 
 
NEED OF EEFOEM IN OLD VIRGESTIA. 205 
 
 Then lie paused. Every eye was now riveted upon liim, and 
 every mind intent ; for all this was executed as a Kean or a Siddons 
 would have performed it on the stage, — eye, voice, attitude, gesture, 
 all in accord to produce the utmost possibility of effect. Amid a 
 silence that could be felt, he waved the indictment three times round 
 his head, as though still amazed, still unable to comprehend the 
 charge. Then he raised his hands and eyes to heaven, and, in a 
 tone of pathetic energy wholly indescribable, exclaimed, '^ Great 
 God ! " 
 
 At this point, such was his power of delivery, the audience 
 relieved their feelings by a burst of sighs and tears. The orator 
 continued, — 
 
 " May it please Your Worships, in a day like this, when Truth is 
 about to burst her fetters ; when mankind are about to be aroused to 
 claim their natural and inalienable rights ; when the yoke of oppres- 
 sion that has reached the wilderness of America, and the unnatural 
 alliance of ecclesiastical and civil power are about to be dissev- 
 ered, — at sxcch a period, when Liberty, Liberty of Conscience, is 
 about to wake from her slumberings, and inquire into the reason 
 of such charges as I find exhibited here to-day in this indict- 
 ment " — Here occurred another of his appalling pauses, during 
 which he cast piercing looks at the judges and at the three clergy- 
 men arraigned. Then resuming, he thrilled every hearer by his 
 favorite device of repetition, " If I am not deceived, — according to 
 the contents of the paper I now hold in my hand, — these men are 
 accused of preaching the gospel of the Son of God ! " He waved 
 the document three times round his head, as though still lost in 
 wonder ; and then, with the same electric attitude of appeal to 
 heaven, he gasped, " Great God ! " 
 
 This was followed by another burst of feeling from the spectators ; 
 and again this master of effect plunged into the tide of his dis- 
 course : — 
 
 " May it please Your Worships, there are periods in the history of 
 man when corruption and depravity have so long debased the human 
 character, that man sinks under the weight of the oppressor's hand, 
 — becomes his servile, his abject slave. He licks tlie hand that 
 smites him. He bows in passive obedience to the mandates of the 
 
206 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOIf. 
 
 despot ; and, in this state of servility, he receives his fetters of per- 
 petual bondage. But, may it please Your Worships, such a day has 
 passed. From that period when our fathers left the land of their 
 nativity for these American wilds, — from the moment they placed 
 their feet upon the American continent, — from that moment despot- 
 ism was crushed, the fetters of darkness were broken, and Heaven 
 decreed that man should be free, — free to worship God according to 
 the Bible. In vain were all their sufferings and bloodshed to subju- 
 gate this New World, if we, their offspring, must still be oppressed 
 and persecuted. But, maj^ it please Your Worships, permit me to 
 inquire once more, for what are these men about to be tried? This 
 paper says, for preaching the gospel of the Saviour to Adam'' s fallen 
 
 race 
 
 /" 
 
 Again he paused. For the third time, he slowly waved the 
 indictment round his head ; and then turning to the judges, looking 
 them full ill the face, exclaimed with the most impressive effect, 
 "What laws have they violated?" The whole assembly were now 
 painfully moved and excited. The presiding judge ended the scene 
 by saying, '' Sheriff, discharge these men." 
 
 It was a triumph of the dramatic ayt. The men were discharged ; 
 but not the less, in other counties, did zealous bigots pursue and 
 persecute the ministers of other denominations than their own. Ifc 
 was not till the Revolutionary War absorbed all minds, that Baptists 
 ceased to be imprisoned ; nor then were they released from paying 
 tithes to support a church which they neither attended nor approved. 
 
 Such Avas this old Virginia which Thomas Jefferson and his 
 friends were about to ity to reform. A slovenly, slatternly old Eng- 
 land in the woods, where the abuses and absurdities of the old coun- 
 try were exaggerated, the flower of her young gentlemen now 
 desired to change into an orderly, industrious, thoughtful, and 
 instructed N'ew England. And what a time to begin, in this 
 gloomy autumn of 1776, after New York was lost, and while Wash- 
 ington was on the retreat, fighting as he went, not for victory, but 
 for escape ! Perhaps the time was not so unpropitious. The minds 
 of men, at periods of public danger, are sometimes in a state of 
 exaltation that renders it possible for them to receive new truth, and 
 gives to persons of understanding an ascendency that is generally 
 awarded only to rank, talent, or executive force. 
 
CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 JEFFERSON^, "WYTHE, AND MADISON BEGIN THE ■WORK OF 
 KEFOKMATION. 
 
 There were two parties in the Assembly, of course. But pos- 
 terity cares only for the party that triumphs, — the radical party, 
 the party in the right. In his own day, the conservative usually is, 
 and usually ought to he, uppermost : he represents the human 
 family, which is too large a body to move forward rapidl3^ The 
 radical usually is one of a small minorit}^, — half a dozen pioneers 
 with broad-axes and leathern aprons, who march some paces in 
 advance of the regiment, and get little besides scratches and hard 
 knocks. But the radical has his revenge. He alone can have any 
 enduring success. If the politics of the United States, from 1787 
 to 1861, are remembered at all in the general history of the world, 
 the only names likely to be preserved will be those of a few trouble- 
 some Abolitionists, Democrats, Law-reformers, and Free-traders. 
 The triumphant and respectable multitude with whom and for whom 
 these contended, sweet Oblivion will claim them, and have its claim 
 allowed. 
 
 To Thomas Jefferson, it is evident, the radicals of Virginia looked 
 as their chief in the work of reform. First among those upon 
 whom he depended for co-operation was that noble-hearted aboli- 
 tionist, that humane and high-principled radical; that gentleman 
 without pride and without reproach, George Mason of Gunston Hall 
 on the Potomac, — he who wrote to a neighbor, just before the 
 patriotic Fast Day of 1774, "Please to tell my dear little family 
 that I charge them to pay a strict attention to it, and that I desire 
 my three eldest sons and my two eldest daughters may attend 
 church in mourning, if they have it, as I believe they have." It 
 was he who, in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, set his face 
 
 207 
 
208 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 against all compromise with slavery, ancT* avowed the opinion, that 
 the Southern States ought not to he admitted to the T't'nion unless 
 they would give it up. It was he who drew that Virginia Bill of 
 Rights witli which Mr. Bancroft enriches and ennohlcs the eighth 
 Tolume (p. 381) of his History of the United States, — a state- 
 ment of principles so advanced that mankind can never outgrow 
 them. Brolv en-hearted by the death of his wife, he would not, he 
 could not, leave his family to serve Virginia in Congress, though 
 the appointment was pressed upon him with tears. But he was in 
 his place in the State legislature in this critical year, 1776, ready 
 to lend the aid of his humane mind and gifted tongue to every 
 enlightened measure. Nature had done every thing for him. A 
 superb man he was, of noblest presence and most engaging dignity; 
 the ablest man in some kinds of debate whom Virginia possessed ; 
 healthy-minded, too, as fond of out-of-door sport almost as Wash- 
 ington himself. 
 
 George Wj^the, the abolitionist who emancipated his own slaves 
 when he found he could not emancipate Virginia, was sure to be on 
 the right side of leading questions, though he was not efficient in 
 carrying measures, — a man of the closet rather than the forum. 
 Governor Patrick Henry's influence, at that period, was given 
 without reserve to liberal measures. These were the great names 
 on the liberal side. • 
 
 But tliere was a new member in the house this year, a young man 
 of twenty-five, small of stature, wasted by too much study, not in 
 the least imposing in appearance, and too modest as yet to utter 
 one word in debate, who was destined to be Jefferson's most efiS- 
 cient ally during all his career. This was James Madison, to whom 
 we all owe so much more than we know, whose services are so little 
 remarked because they were so great. He never shone resplendent 
 in debate, he never wrote or spoke any thing that was striking or 
 brilliant ; but fe\Tt countries have ever possessed so useful a citizen 
 as he. From 1776 to 1817, look where you will in the public affairs 
 of the United States, you find this little man doing, or helping to 
 do, or trying to get a chance to do, the thing that most wanted 
 doing. He was the willing horse who is allowed to draw the load. 
 His heart was in the business of serving his country. He was 
 simply intent on having the right thing done, not to shine in doing 
 it. Among his virtues was his joyous love of a jest, which made 
 
JEFFERSON, WYTHE, AND MADISON. 209 
 
 him one of the most agreeable of comrades, and preserved his health 
 and spirits to his eighty-fifth year, and lighted up his dying face 
 with smiles. It is a pleasure to me to walk in Madison Square 
 because it bears his name. Of all Jefferson's triumphs, none seems 
 so exceptional as his being able to give to a man so little brilliant 
 and so very useful the conspicuous place he held in the public life 
 of the United States. They met for the first time at this session O 
 of the legislature, and remained friends and political allies for fifty 
 years. 
 
 A leader on the conservative side was E. C. Nicholas, for many ,^ 
 years the head of the bar in Virginia, a stanch Churchman and 
 gentleman of the old school. But Jefferson feared most the singu- o 
 lar, tireless persistence of Edmund Pendleton, a cool, wary, accom- 
 plished speaker, he says, "full of resource, never vanquished; for, 
 if he lost the main battle, he returned upon you, and regained so 
 much of it as to make it a drawn one, by dexterous manoeuvres, 
 skirmishes in detail, and the recovery of small advantages, which, 
 little singly, were important all together. You never knew when 
 you were clear of him." Differ as they might, the leaders of the 
 two parties in this House remained excellent friends ; the reason 
 being, tliat they, were most scrupulously observant of all the 
 forms of courtesy. It was often remarked of Patrick Henry, that 
 never, in his most impetuous oratory, was he guilty of personal 
 disrespect to a member of the House. On the contrary, he was 
 profuse in those expressions of regret for being obliged to differ, 
 and of respect for the character of an opponent, which assist so 
 much to make public debate a genuine interchange of thought, 
 and keep it above the contemptible pettiness of personal contention. 
 All the men trained in that old House of Burgesses appear to have 
 caught this spirit. What Jefferson said of Madison's manners in 
 debate describes all of them who are remembered: "Soothing 
 alwa3's the feelings of his adversaries by civilities and softness of 
 expression." As to Jefferson himself, not once in his whole public 
 career did he lose or weaken a point by needlessly wounding an 
 opponent's self-love. 
 
 In the woi'k of re-organizing Virginia, Jefferson struck first at the ■ 
 sj^stem of entail. After a three weeks' struggle, that incubus was 
 lifted. Every acre and every negro in Virginia, by the 1st of 
 November, 1776, was held in fee simple, could be sold for debt, 
 14 
 
210 LITE OF THOMAS JErrERSON". 
 
 was free to fall into hands that were able to use them. It was the 
 easiest and quickest of his triumphs, though he did not live long 
 enough to outlive the enmity his victory engendered. Some of the 
 old Tories found it in their hearts to exult that he who had disap- 
 pointed so many fathers lost his only son before it was a month 
 old; and John Randolph, fifry-five years after, could still attribute 
 all the evils of Virginia to this triumph of "Jefferson and his level- 
 ling system." 
 
 He found it easier to set free the estates of his countrymen than 
 their minds. Petitions for the repeal of statutes oppressive of the 
 conscience of dissenters came pouring in vipon the Assembly from 
 the first day of the session. These, being referred to tlie committee 
 of the whole, led to the severest and longest struggle of the session. 
 " Desperate contests," as Jefferson records, " continued almost daily 
 from the 11th of October to the 5th of December." He desired to 
 sweep away the whole sj^stem of restraint and monopoly, and estab- 
 lish perfect liberty of conscience and opinion, by a simple enactment 
 of half a dozen lines : — 
 
 " No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious 
 worship, ministry, or place whatsoever ; nor shall be enforced, 
 restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods ; nor shall 
 otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief: but 
 all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their 
 opinions in matters of religion ; and the same shall in no wise 
 diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities." 
 
 It required more than nine years of effort on the part of Jefferson, 
 Madison, and their liberal friends, to bring Virginia to accept this 
 solution of the religious problem, in its simplicity and completeness. 
 All that they could accomplish at this session, after their twenty- 
 five days' debate, was the repeal of the statutes imposing penalties 
 for going to the wrong church, and compelling dissenters to pay 
 tithes. At every subsequent session, for many years, the subject 
 was called up, and usually some concession was made to the 
 demands of the liberal partj\ In 1779, for example, all forced con- 
 tributions for the support of religion were surrendered. The princi- 
 ple, however, was retained, and, indeed, re-asserted, that it was part 
 of the duty of the government to regulate religious belief; and the 
 laws remained in force which made it penal to deny the Trinitj', 
 and which deprived a parent of the custody of his children if he 
 could not subscribe to the leading articles of the Episcopal creed. 
 
JEFFERSON, WYTHE, AND MADISON. 211 
 
 We have coine now to regard liberty of belief very much as we 
 do liberty of breathing, — as a riglit too natural, too obvious, to be 
 called in question, — forgetting all the ages of effort and of anguish 
 which it cost to rescue the human mind from the domination of its 
 natural foes. These nine years of Virginia debates have perished; 
 but something of their heat and strenuous vigor survive in a pas- 
 sage which Jefferson inserted in l>is Notes on Virginia, written 
 towards the end of the Kevolationary War, and circulated in Virgi- 
 nia a year before the final triumph of religious freedom. The 
 passage is out of place in the work ; and it was probably left in, or 
 lugged in, to give aid to Madison in his last contest with the oppo- 
 nents of Jefferson's act. Doubtless it had its influence, coming as 
 it did from a distant land, and a name bright with the undimmed 
 lustre of Kevolutionary successes. Indeed, this vigorous utterance 
 of Thomas Jefferson was the arsenal from which the opponents of 
 the forced support of religion drew their weapons, during the whole 
 period of about fifty years that elapsed between its publication and 
 the repeal of the last State law which taxed a community for the 
 support of the clergy; nor will it cease to have a certain value as 
 long as any man, in any land, is distrusted, or undervalued, or 
 abridged of his natural rights, on account of any opinion whatever. 
 
 It is a curiously intense and compact passage, all alive with 
 short, sharp sentences, as if he had struggled to get the whole of 
 the controversy into a few pages, v Opiniojn, he says, is something 
 with which government has nothing fo^T);'"")' It does me no injury 
 for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither 
 picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." Constraint makes hypocrites, 
 not converts. A government is no more competent to prescribe 
 beliefs, than diet or medicine. '■'■ It is error alone which needs the 
 support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion 
 to coercion, and whom will you make your inquisitors ? Fallible 
 men, governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. 
 And why subject it to coercion ? Difference of opinion is advan- 
 tageous to religion. The several sects perform the office of censor 
 morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable ? Millions of 
 innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Chris- 
 tianity, have beeu burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned ; yet we have 
 not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the 
 effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the 
 
212 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 Other Lalf li^^pocrites ; to support roguery and error all over the 
 earth. Let us reflect that it is inhabited by a thousand millions of 
 people ; that these profess probably a thousand different systems of 
 religion; that ovirs is but one of that thousand; that if there be but 
 one right, and ours that one, we should wish to see the nine hun- 
 dred and ninety-nine wandering sects gathered into the fuld of 
 truth. But against such a majority we cannot effect tliis by force. 
 Keason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To 
 make way for these, free inquiry must be indulged ; and how can 
 we wish others to indulge it, while we refuse it ourselves? " 
 
 Fortunately, he was able to alia}' the fears of those who believed 
 that virtue would cease to prevail if tithes could not be collected by 
 the sheriff, by pointing to Pennsylvania and New York, where 
 there was no established church, and yet no indications of a decay 
 of morals could be discerned. Keligion was well supported, and no 
 more malefactors were hanged than in Virginia. Religious dissen- 
 sion was unknown ; for the people had made the happy discovery, 
 that the way to silence religious disputes was to take no notice of 
 them, and to extinguish religious absiirdity, to laugh at it. He 
 urged his countrymen to have the rights of conscience fixed in law 
 before the war ended, while rulers were honest and people united; 
 for, when i^eace recalled the people to their usual pursuits, he 
 feared it would be difficult to concentrate attention upon a matter 
 of abstract right. '■' The shackles which shall not be knocked off at 
 the conclusion of this war will remain on us long, will be made 
 heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive, or expire in a con- 
 vulsion." 
 
 In 1716 the act drawn by Jefferson, entitled by him ^' An Act 
 for establishing Eeligious Freedom," became the law of Virginia. 
 The preamble of the act is a forcible statement of the whole argu- 
 ment for freedom of opinion ; and, not content with thus fortifying 
 the law, he adds to the act itself a paragraph, which, I believe, is 
 unique : " And though we well know that this Assemblj', elected by 
 the people for the ordinar}' purposes of legislation only, have no 
 power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies, constituted with 
 power equal to our own, and that, therefore, to declare this act 
 irrevocable would be of no effect in law, yet we are free to declare, 
 and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural 
 rights of mankind ; and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to 
 
JEFFEESON, WYTHE, AND MADISON. 213 
 
 repeal the present, or to narrow its operation, such act will be an 
 infringement of natural right." 
 
 Never, perhaps, since the earliest historic times, has one mind so 
 incorporated itself with a country's laws and institutions as Jeffer- 
 son's with those of new-born Virginia. In this first month of 
 October, 1776, besides actually accomplishing much, he cut out 
 work enough to keep the best heads of Virginia busy for ten years. 
 It was he who drew the bill for establishing courts of law in the 
 State, and for defining the powers, jurisdiction, and methods of 
 each of them. It was he who caused the removal of the capital 
 from Williamsburg to Eichmond, thus originating the plan, since 
 followed by nearly every State, of fixing the capital near the geo- 
 graphical centre, but remote from the centre of trade, capital, and 
 fashion. It may have been best for Virginia, it was best for Vir- 
 ginia ; but it is not yet certain that a policy is sound which caused 
 the city of Washington to come into being, and which has given 
 a fictitious importance to twenty Harrisburgs and Albanys, besides 
 affording to official misconduct the convenient cloak of distance. 
 Little, however, could Jefferson have foreseen the influence of his 
 action, when, in the teeth of the old Tory families planted in the 
 ancient capital, he carried the day for the village of Richmond, and 
 served on the committee that laid out its public square and placed 
 its unfortunate public buildings. 
 
 Another bill introduced by him in this most fruitful month has 
 produced consequences far-reaching and momentous. It was a bill 
 fixing the terms upon which foreigners should be admitted to citi- 
 zenship in Virginia : Two years' residence ; a declaration of inten- 
 tion to live in the State, and a promise of fidelity to it ; minor 
 children of naturalized parents, and minors without parents in the 
 State, to become citizens on coming of age, without any legal for- 
 malirj^ The principle of this bill and most of its details have been 
 adopted by the national government. In the light of the experience 
 of eighty-five years, and writing on Manhattan Island, we can still 
 say, that the principle of adniitting foreigners to citizenship on easy 
 terms, and after a short residence, has been the vital principle of 
 the country's growth ; and that Jefferson's bill lacked but one brief 
 clause to make it as safe as it has been powerful : Provided, That 
 the foreigner aforesaid proves, to the satisfaction of the court, that 
 he can read English well enough to be independent of all other men 
 
214 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 in acquiring the political information requisite for intelligent 
 voting. Alas! he did not foresee the Manhattan Island of 1871; 
 nor had a mind yet been created capable of conceiving the idea of 
 admitting to the suffrage hordes of ignorant negroes without the 
 least preliminary preparation. 
 
 The laws of Virginia were a chaos of obsolete and antiquated 
 enactments, good for lawyers, bad for clients. Jefferson brought in 
 a bill, in October, 1776, proposing that the House name a committee 
 of five, who should get together the whole mass, revise th'em, and 
 present, for the consideration of the House, a body of law suited to 
 the altered times and circumstances of the State. Tlie bill being 
 passed, the five revisers were elected by ballot, and Jefferson 
 received the highest number of votes ; his colleagues being Edmund 
 Pendleton, George Wythe, George Mason, and F. L. Lee. The two 
 last named, not being lawyers, soon withdrew from the commission, 
 leaving the three others to do the work, Jefferson's portion of 
 which occupied the leisure of two j'ears. It was, indeed, one of the 
 most arduous and difficult labors of his life ; for to him was assigned 
 the revision of ancient British law, from the remotest period to the 
 meeting of the first House of Burgesses of Virginia, of which his 
 great-grandfather had been a member, in 1619. Many a long 
 journey it cost these three public-souled gentlemen to get together, 
 in order to discuss principles and compare work ; until, in 1779, the 
 revisers were able to present their labors to the legislature in the 
 convenient form of one hundred and twenty-six bills, to be sepa- 
 rately acted upon. These bills were taken up, one at a time, as 
 occasion favored or demanded, during the next six or seven years; 
 every enlightened and humane principle or detail having a most 
 persistent and persuasive advocate in James Madison. 
 
 Jefferson's part in this revision was most important. The bill for 
 religious freedom, already described, was now completed in the form 
 in which it was finally acted upon in 17jp6. Against the opposition 
 of Pendleton, he carried the extirpation of the principle of primo- 
 geniture from the legal system of Virginia. True to his character, 
 Pendleton strove, when the main battle was lost, to save something 
 from the wreck ; proposing that the eldest son should, at least, have 
 a double portion. No, said Jefferson : " if the eldest son could eat 
 twice as much, or do double work, it might be a natural evidence of 
 his i;ight to a double portion ; but, being on a par .in his powers and 
 
JEFFERSON, WYTHE, AND MADISON. 215 
 
 wants with his broJ;hers and sisters, he should be on a par also in 
 the partition of his patrimony." Against Pendleton, too, Mr. 
 Jeiferson prevailed to preserve as much of the letter of ancient law 
 as possible, because the meaning of each word and phrase had been 
 established by judicial decisions. A new code, Mr. Jefferson 
 thought, owing to the imperfection of human language, would 
 " involve us in ages of litigation," until the precise meaning of every 
 word had been settled by decisions and commentaries. But this did 
 not apply to modern Virginia statui:es, which, he thought, should be 
 reduced to the utmost simplicity and directness. 
 
 It is pleasing to notice how cordially the revisers labored together, 
 and how entirely they confided in one another, though differing in 
 opinion. Observe this evidence of it in one of Jefferson's later 
 letters : " We found " (on the final revision) " that Mr. Pendleton 
 had not exactly seized the intentions of the committee, which were 
 to reform the language of the Virginia laws, and reduce the matter to 
 a simple style and form. He had copied the' acts verhatlm, only 
 omitting what was disapproved; and some family occurrence calling 
 him indispensably home, he desired Mr. Wytbe and myself to make 
 it what we thought it ought to be, and authorized us to report him 
 as concurring in the work." 
 
 The bill assigning pains and penalties cost Jefferson much 
 research and thought. The committee swept away at once most of 
 the obsolete cruelties of the ancient code ; but some of the revisers 
 were disposed to retain portions of the old sj'stem of retaliation, — an 
 eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a poisoner to die by poison, and a 
 maimer to be maimed. Jefferson objected. The infliction of such 
 penalties, he thought, would " exhibit spectacles" the moral effect 
 of which would not be salutary; particularly (he might have added) 
 in a State where every free fight was expected to end in gouging. 
 This part of the scheme was, at his suggestion, reconsidered ; so that 
 no sheriff in Virginia has ever been called upon to pry out an eye or 
 bite off a nose. 
 
 One of Jefferson's substitutions of new sense for ancient folly in 
 the penalties bill was admirable. Instead of the old laws concern- 
 ing witchcraft, he suggested this: "All attempts to delude the 
 people, or to abuse their understanding, by exercise of the pretended 
 arts of witchcraft, conjuration, enchantment, or sorcery, or by pre- 
 tended prophecies, shall be punished by ducking and whipping, at 
 
Y 
 
 216 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 the discretion of a jury, not exceeding fifteen stripes." He dropped 
 also the barbarous Jewish penalties for unnatural crimes, on this 
 ground : " Bestiality will ever be properly and severely punished 
 by universal derision." In his preamble to the bill assigning penal- 
 ties, he asserted doctrines'" many years in advance of the least 
 monstrous code then existing. At a time when France condemned 
 to death a female servant who stole a spoon, and London saw cart- 
 loads of lads drawn to Tyburn for theft, Jefferson began this act by 
 declaring that "cruel and sanguinary laws defeat their own purpose, 
 by engaging the benevolence of mankind to withhold prosecution;" 
 and that "capital punishments, which exterminate instead of 
 reforming, should be the last melancholy resource against those 
 whose existence has become inconsistent with the safety of their 
 fellow-citizens." In this code no crimes were capital but murder 
 and treason ; and only an overt act was to be accounted treason. 
 
 Of the bills drawn by Jefferson, those upon which he most set his 
 heart failed utterly. Only a commonwealth of Jeffersons, Masons, 
 Madisons, and Wythes could have carried into successful operation 
 that magnificent scheme of universal education embodied in three 
 of the acts drawn by him. He loved knowledge. He loved litera- 
 ture. Writing to Dr. Priestly, in themidst of one of the political 
 frenzies of a later day, he said, "I thank, on, my knees, him who 
 directed my earl^r education, for having put into my possession this 
 rich source of delight," — the ability to read Homer in the original; 
 and, during a similar paroxysm of political fury, he wrote to a 
 neighbor, that if any thing could induce him to sleep another night 
 away from home, it would be his solicitude for the education of 
 youth. He felt that a community needs the whole of the superior 
 intelligence produced in it, and that such intelligence is only made 
 available for good purposes by right culture. His plan, therefore, 
 embraced the whole intellect of the State. He proposed to place a 
 common school within reach of every child; to make a high school 
 accessible to every superior .youth ; to convert William and Mary 
 College into a university ^jKand to found at Richmond a State 
 library to be maintained at a cost of two thousand pounds a year. 
 The whole scheme, which was worked out in great detail, was 
 received, he says, with enthusiasm ; but when after the war the 
 expense had to be faced, there was not public spirit enough in the 
 counties to set even the common schools in operation. The scheme 
 
• JEFFERSOK, WYTHE, AND MADISON. 217 
 
 failed because there was no middle class in Virginia. In his bill for 
 establishing common schools, a clause was slyly inserted, leaving 
 each county free to tax itself for the purpose or not, as the tax- 
 payers should decide. But the tax-payers were planters, served by 
 slaves, not accustomed to regard white trash as fellow-citizens 
 whose welfare was identified with their own. They would not tax 
 themselves for the education of the children of tobacco-rollers, and 
 the plan remained inoperative during Jefferson's whole life. 
 
 A remarkable feature of the laws drawn by him daring this 
 revision are the preambles — compact, loaded with meaning — with 
 which he prefaced many*of them. I think he must have derived 
 the idea from Plato. In preparing himself for work so important, 
 he could not have overlooked the fact, that Plato's longest work is 
 entitled Laws; nor would he have failed to. seek light from so 
 promising a source. 
 
 "And is our legislator," asks 9, person of this dialogue, "to have 
 no preface to his laws, but to say at once, Do this, avoid that; 
 and then, holding the penalty in terrorem, to go on to another 
 law, offering never a word of advice or exhortation to those for 
 whom he is legislating, after the manner of some doctors ? " Not so, 
 he thinks. Music has overtures, and discourse its introduction ; 
 "but of the tones and higher strain of law, no one has ever yet 
 uttered any prelude." And Plato recurs to the topic, as though it 
 were a favorite idea.* I please myself with thinking that it was 
 such passages of the kindred Greek that induced Jefferson to 
 compose those noble preambles — noble, even when preluding laws 
 too difficult for the tinie and scene — which illuminate Virginia law- 
 books here and there. The preamble to the act for establishing 
 religious freedom is the weightiest and finest. It touches every 
 point : it all but exhausts the subject. 
 
 The slave-laws remained to be considered. The revisers, first of 
 all, made ^ digest of. existing laws concerning slaves and slavery, 
 silently dropping such as they deemed inadmissible, and arranging 
 the rest, as was their custom, in the form of a bill. This bill, since 
 it contained nothing novel, nor excluded any thing vital, could be 
 expected to pass without opposition. The whole difficulty of the 
 subject they resolved to keep by itself, and concentrate it in an 
 
 * Jowett's Plato, vol. iv. pp. 24, 243, 2S8, 427, &c. (London edition). 
 
218 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 amendment to the bill, designing to present this when the times 
 should admit of the discussion of fundamental changes. 
 
 The shade of noble, unpractical Plato must have hovered over the 
 place where this amendment was pennted. The community has 
 never existed capable of executing such a scheme. These three 
 benevolent revisers demanded of Virginia a degree of self-control, 
 far-seeing wisdom, and executive genius, which a community composed 
 
 ' of the elect of the whole human race could not have furnished. All 
 slaves born after the passage of the act were to be free ; but they 
 were to remain with their parents during childhood, then educated 
 at the public expense, "in tillage, arts, or sciences, according to 
 their geniuses," until maturity, when they were to be colonized in 
 some convenient place, furnished with arms, implements, and seeds, 
 declared independent, and protected till they were strong enough to 
 protect themselves. While Virginia was employed in this most 
 complicated and not inexpensive bjisiness, other ships of hers were 
 to repair to other parts of the earth, and bring home "an equal 
 number of white inhabitants, to induce whom to migrate hither 
 j)roper encouragements were to be proposed." Such ludicrous 
 impossibilities may the wisest of mortals conceive who legislate in 
 the snug retreat of a library for out-of-door, every-day men, face to 
 face with the universal task ! 
 
 ■^ No enthusiast ever ventured to introduce this amendment into the 
 legislature. "It was found," wrote Mr. Jefferson in 1821, "that 
 the public mind would not bear the proposition, nor will it bear it 
 even at this day." One thing Jefferson did accomplish. In 1778 
 he brought in a bill forbidding the farther importation of slaves, 
 which was passed without opposition. This was the only important 
 change wdiicli was made in the slave-system of Virginia during the 
 Revolutionary period. 
 
 During the two years employed in the work of revising the laws, 
 there were four or five sessions of the legislature, ajl of them 
 attended by Jefferson. His industry was immense. We find him 
 on numberless committees, and reporting every kind of bill ; even 
 such as related to the discipline of the militia, the rank of marine 
 officers, and the subsistence of members of Congress. There was no 
 great merit then in punctuality of attendance, for punctuality was 
 compelled. At the calling of the roll on the opening of one session, 
 fifty members were absent. Every man of them was ordered under 
 
JEFFERSON, WYTHE, AND MADISON. 219 
 
 arrest; nor was one excused until he had risen in his place, and 
 stated tlie reason of his absence. If the reason was accounted 
 sufficient, he was excused, without paying the costs of his arrest ; if 
 not, he had to pay them. Many and swift journeys fell to Jefferson's 
 lot during this absorbing time, — to Fredericksburg to meet his 
 brother revisers, a rough ride of a hundred and twenty miles ; to 
 Williamsburg, for the semi-annual session ; back suddenly to Monti- 
 cello, more than once, to attend his sick wife. His only son was 
 born in May, 1777, and lived but seventeen days, though causing his 
 parents many a month of anguish and solicitude. But at home, 
 while the lives of mother and child seemed to hang upon the 
 father's care, in the intervals of watching he worked at his part of 
 the revision. He told Dr. Franklin, in August, 1777, that the people 
 of Virginia had 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 suit of clothes." 
 It was easy to the people of Virginia, because- at this critical time 
 they were so happy as to possess a few able, experienced, leai-ned, 
 liberal-minded citizens, who thought no labor- severe, no self-denial 
 excessive, if exercised in the service of their country. 
 
CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 •iflEST THREE YEARS OF THE WAR. 
 
 So passed the first years of the war. It was an anxious time, of 
 course, to all patriotic hearts, but, to the people of Virginia, not 
 so unhappy a period as we sliould suppose. Their trial was to come. 
 Early rid of the nuisance of Dunmore's hateful presence, they had 
 not, since the burning of Norfolk, witnessed much of the desolations 
 of the war; and, if their spirits were depressed sometimes by the 
 mishaps of the armies in the North, good news came occasionally, 
 and came magnified by the distance it had travelled. The rapturous 
 tidings of Burgoyne's surrender was enough of itself to light up 
 half a year; and it was followed by news supposed to be even more 
 important, that of the alliance with France. Virginia was to have 
 her turn, but the time had not yet come. 
 
 Jefferson, too, was to experience a most ample share of the bitter- 
 ness of the war. But during these three years of it, absorbed in 
 congenial and elevated labors, happy in the confiding love of the 
 people he served, blest at home in wife and children, he lived very 
 much in his accustomed way; still finding time to record the 
 weather, watch the barometer, observe eclipses, measure the rain, 
 compute the force of the wind, study the growth of plants, and 
 caress the violin. He began now to look forward fondly, as so many 
 fond parents have, to the time when his eldest daugliter would play 
 the harpsichord to his accompaniment. His old teacher of the 
 violin, Alberti, was in Paris in 1778. Jefferson wrote him a gay 
 letter after Burgoyne's surrender; telling him that Americans had 
 lost all apprehensions touching the issue of the war, and he expected 
 to trouble him, within the next two and three years, to send him 
 over a professor competent to teach singing and the harpsichord. 
 Nay, more: he had indulged dreams of a domestic band of music! 
 
 220 
 
FIRST THREE YEARS OF THE WAE. 221 
 
 He tokl Alberti, that, in his retinue of domestic servants, he kept a 
 weaver, a gardener, a cabinet-maker, and a stone-cutter, to whom he 
 meant to add a vine-dresser. Why could not Alberti send him 
 Europeans of these trades, who could also play on instruments? If 
 he could, — behold a band of music upon Monticello, without going 
 "beyond the bounds of an American fortune!" Music, he said, 
 was " the favorite passion of his soul ; " and yet fortune had cast his 
 lot in a country where it was in a state of "deplorable barbarism." 
 In the same joyous and triumphant summer of 1778, failing to get 
 much good from the eagerly-expected and closely-obferved eclipse of 
 the sun, from want of an accurate clock, he ordered from Kittenhouse 
 the most perfect clock his art could produce, so as to be ready for the 
 next. A.S to that theodolite of which he had spoken to him in 
 Philadelphia, Mr. Rittenhouse need not trouble himself about it 
 further; for he had since bought one which was just the thing. A 
 British army captured, and the French alliance avowed, who could 
 expect a much longer continuance of the war ? Not Jefferson, most 
 sanguine of men. 
 
 Tlie surrender of Burgoyne brought unexpected animation to the 
 neighborhood of Monticello, and filled the house upon its summit 
 with agreeable company. The region round about being the wheat- 
 field of America, but too remote from the Northern army to contrib- 
 ute to its supply, Congress deemed it best, in the winter of 1778- 
 79, to march thither the prisoners of war, English and German, four 
 thousand in number, and establish them near Charlottesville. It 
 was a dreary and weary march, in an inclement season, from Boston 
 to Albemarle, a distance of seven Imndred miles ; and when the 
 troo2:)S reached the plateau selected for them, within sight of Monti- 
 cello, the barracks were unfinished, no store of food had been gath- 
 ered, the roads were almost impassable, and " the spell of weather," 
 as Jefferson records, "was the worst ever known within the memory 
 of man." The gentlemen of the county did their utmost to miti- 
 gate the situation ; and who so prompt with needful aid as the 
 inhabitants of Monticello? Mrs. Jefferson lent her help to the wife 
 of the Hessian General Riedesel, in getting her started in housekeep- 
 ing, at the house of Mazzei, their Italian neighbor, who was just 
 going home to Tuscany on a public errand. 
 
 Jefferson himself was lavish of attention to officers and men of 
 both nationalities j and, when they were all settled in quarters, 
 
222 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOlSr. 
 
 tlirew open Ins house, his libraiy, his grounds, his garden, to such 
 of them as could enjoy refined pleasures. There could be no lack 
 of officers, among so many, who could play and sing. Many a 
 delightful concert was improvised at Monticello, when some amateur 
 would play violin duets with Jefferson, and the whole company sur- 
 round Mrs. Jefferson's harpsichord, and join her in singing. A tra- 
 dition of these pleasant musical evenings lives to tliis day. General 
 Dix of New York, as Mr. Randall reports, heard them described by 
 a Captain Bibby, who settled in New York after the war. This 
 captain, himself a good violinist, played many a duet with Jeffer- 
 son, and considered him the best amateur he had ever heard. A 
 German officer of scientific tastes was much in the library of JNIon- 
 ticello, a congenial companion to its proprietor. Even General Phil- 
 lips, commander of the English troops, whom Jefferson describes as 
 the proudest man of the proudest nation on earth, was not proof 
 against his resolute civilities. " The great cause that divides our 
 countries," Jefferson wrote to the general, " is not to be decided by 
 individual animosities. The harmony of private societies cannot 
 weaken national efforts. To contribute by neighborly intercourse 
 and attention to make others happy is the shortest and surest way 
 of being happy ourselves." General Phillips, proud as he may 
 have been, seems to have assented to this opinion; for we find him 
 writing to Mr. Jefferson in August, 1779 : " The British officers 
 intend to perform a play next Saturday at the barracks. I shall be 
 extremely happy to have the honor to attend you and Mrs. Jeffer- 
 son in my box at the theatre, should you or that lady be inclined to 
 go." * In winding up this polite epistle, the haughty son of Albion 
 was careful to say that he was, "with great personal respect," Mr. 
 Jefferson's humble servant. He was the gentleman, who, at a later 
 day, addressed Mr. Jefferson as " Thomas Jefferson, Esquire, Ameri- 
 can Governor of Virginia ; " and the governor retorted by addressing 
 him as, "William Phillips, Esquire, commanding the British troops 
 in Virginia." 
 
 As the spring advanced, the barracks began to exhibit a truly 
 inviting scene, particularly the quarter occupied bj^ the Germans. 
 The officers, who had lijred every available house in the neighbor- 
 hood, bought cows, sheep, and chickens, cultivated fields, and laid 
 
 * Lossing's American Historical Record, vol. i, p. 33. 
 
FIRST THREE YEARS OF THE WAR. 223 
 
 out gardens. If some of the decorous Virginia ladies wore a little 
 scandalized at the Amazonian habits of Madame Riedesel, who rode 
 astride with the boldness of a fox-hunter, every one commended the 
 liberality of the general toward his men. He distributed among 
 them two hundred pounds' worth of seeds ; and soon the whole 
 region round the barracks was smiling with pretty gardens, and 
 alive with cheerful laborers, conveying to the spectator, as Jefferson 
 said, "the idea of a company of farmers, rather than a camp of sol- 
 diers." Some of the officers went to great expense in refitting 
 their houses, even to several thousands of dollars. The health of 
 these troops, thus agreeably situated and pleasantly employed, im- 
 proved in the most remarkable manner. According to the ordinary 
 rate of mortality, tliere should have been one death a day ; but in 
 three months there were but four deaths among them, and two of 
 those were of infants. 
 
 Jefferson wrote in reference to this enchanting scene, "It is for 
 the benefit of mankind to mitigate the horrors of war as much as 
 possible. The practice, therefore, of modern nations, of treating 
 captive enemies with politeness and generosity, is not only delight- 
 ful in contemplation, but really interesting to all the world, — friends, 
 foes, and neutrals." 
 
 It is pleasing to reflect that the United States, from tlie first hour 
 of its existence to the present time, in every instance, and in spite 
 of the bitterest provocation to the contrary in three wars, has treated 
 captives with "politeness and generosity." 
 
 The prisoners might well be grateful to Jefferson, for he rendered 
 them a greater service than neighborly attention. A panic fear arose, 
 that these four thousand foreign mouths would eat Virginia out of 
 house and home. A famine was dreaded, and Governor Henry was in- 
 undated with remonstrances against their longer stay. By the time 
 the barracks were in order, the gardens laid out, and General Rie- 
 desel's two hundred pounds' worth of garden-seeds all nicely " come 
 up," a terrible rumor ran through the camp, that the governor had 
 yielded to pressure, and was about to order them away. It was Jef- 
 ferson who interposed in their behalf. He wrote a most A'igorous 
 and elaborate statement of the case to Governor Henry, showing 
 the utter groundlessness of the panic, describing the happy situation 
 of the troops after their winter march of seven ^i*i*dred miles, and 
 exhibiting the cruel breach of faith it would be to compel them so 
 
224 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 soon to resume their wanderings. The prisoners' camp was not dis- 
 turbed ; and the Virginians discovered, that, if the prisoners ate a good 
 deal of wheat and beef, tliey circulated a great many gold and silver 
 coins. 
 
 Wliat strikes me as peculiar in Jefferson's letter is its extreme 
 politeness. Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry had been friends, 
 comrades, fellow-lodgers, partisans, every thing that was intimate 
 and confidential, for nineteen years; but in this letter he keeps in 
 mind that he is a member for Albemarle writing to Plis Excellenc}'' 
 the Governor of Virginia, and he both begins and ends his epistle 
 with expressions of deference and apology. He "takes the liberty 
 of troubling " the governor with some observations on the subject. 
 The reputation and interest of the country being involved, " it could 
 hardly be deemed an indecent liberty in the most private citizen to 
 offer his thoughts to the consideration of the Executive ; " and there 
 were particular reasons which justified liim in so doing ; such as his 
 residence near the barracks, his public relation to the people of that 
 county, and his being sui-e, from liis personal acquaintance with the 
 governor and council, that they would be " glad of information from 
 an]i quarter, on a subject interesting to the public." Then, at the 
 end of his letter, after an argument apparently complete and unan- 
 swerable, he was *' sensible that the same subject might appear to 
 different persons in very different lights." But he hoped that the 
 reasons he had urged, even though to sounder minds they should seem 
 fallacious, would, at least, be plausible enough to excuse his inter- 
 position. 
 
 There was a reason for this extreme delicacy. The letter was 
 written in IMarch, 1779. The third year of Patrick Henry's gover- 
 norship would expire in June ; and, by the new constitution, a gover- 
 nor was ineligible after the third term. Jefferson was to succeed him ; 
 and it is always a delicate thing for an heir to say or do any thing 
 that savors of interference with the management of the estate. 
 
CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 JEFFERSON GOVEKXOR OF VIEGII^^IA. 
 
 College friends find themselves strangely confronted, sometimes, 
 in afterlife, — rivals, perhaps, for prizes more important than a higli 
 place in a commencement programme. In January, 1779, the Vir- 
 ginia Legislature had to choose a governor to succeed Patrick Henry, 
 whose third term would expire on the 1st of June. The favorite 
 candidates were no other than John Page and Thomas Jefferson, 
 fellow-students at William and Mary, who had exchanged love- 
 confidences, and gone with thumping hearts together to meet their 
 sweethearts at the balls in the lialeigh Tavern at Williamsburg ; 
 and not so very long before, either. In 1779 they were still young 
 men, thirty-six both ; Page being fifteen days the elder. The gild- 
 ing was still bright on some parts of the state-coach which Lord 
 Botetourt had brought over from England about the time of their 
 entering public life ; and " the palace " had not yet been defaced by 
 vandal hands. Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts saw that tre- 
 mendous vehicle, as late as 1781, in an outhouse near the palace ; 
 "a clumsy machine," he thought it; "as. heavy as two common 
 wagons;" "gilded in every part, even the edges of the tires of the 
 wheels, and the arms of Virginia painted on every side." On the 
 day, ten years before, when these two young friends had smiled 
 derision at this historic coach, as it bore the new governor to the 
 Capitol, who were less likely than they to be candidates for the 
 right to ride in it ? Things had changed, indeed, in Virginia, since 
 young Jefferson had put his fiddle under his arm, and gone to "the 
 palace" to take his part in one of Governor Fauquier's weekly con- 
 certs. 
 
 Page's strong point was, that, though born a member of the plan- 
 tation aristocracy, possessing a great estate, inhabiting the largest 
 15 225 
 
226 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 house ever built in Virginia, and enjoying the honor most coveted 
 by his class, a seat at the viceregal council-'board, he had, from the 
 beginning of the controversy with the king, sided with his country. 
 The contest was a warm one between the friends of the candidates ; 
 but between the candidates themselves there was no contest. It 
 was part of the recognized etiquette of politics then, which both of 
 these gentlemen observed, that the candidates for a responsible exec- 
 utive post should take no part, either by word or deed, in the canyass. 
 Jefferson was elected by a majority of a very few votes. His old 
 friend wrote him a letter of apology and congratulation, and Jeffer- 
 son replied with the tact which good-nature inspires. " It had given 
 me much pain," he said, "that the zeal of our respective friends 
 should ever have placed us in the situation of competitors. I was 
 comforted, however, with the reflection, that it was their comjietition, 
 not ours, and that the difference of the numbers which decided 
 between us was too insignificant to give you a pain or me a pleasure, 
 had our dispositions towards each other been such as to admit those 
 sensations." Twenty-three years later, when Jefferson was presi- 
 dent, he had the pleasure of congratulating his friend Page on his 
 election to the governorship of their native State. 
 
 The governor elect took the lead in one important administrative 
 act before he was sworn in. The war was gas-ping for money ; for 
 the legal-tender notes were rushing down the sharp decline that led 
 from par to zero ; and, as yet, the French troops had not begun to 
 scatter coin about the country, nor Dr. Franklin to coax more mil- 
 lions from the French treasury than were needed to freight a few 
 ships with military stores. One of Jefferson's friends in the House, 
 who had rented four thousand acres of good land before the war to 
 tenants at six pounds a year per hundred acres, and received his 
 rents in 1778 in the legal-tender currency, had not money enough 
 from that estate to buy twenty barrels of corn. Governor Jefferson's 
 magnificent salary of four thousand five hundred pounds a year was 
 not enough, when he began to receive it, to supply the inmates of "the 
 palace " with food ; and, when he went out of office, it would only 
 buy the governor a new saddle. This was the period when members 
 of Congress — the ruling power of the United States — had to bor- 
 row little sums from their landladies in order not to be quite penni- 
 less. Elbridge Gerry, member from Massachusetts, a man of good 
 estate in Marblehead, was behind with his board, in 1779, a hundred 
 
 1 
 
JEFFERSON GOVEENOR OF VIRGINIA. 227 
 
 and forty-seven dollars, besides being obliged to borrow twenty-seven 
 from his landlady, and going in debt sixteen to his tailor and shoe- 
 maker. At the head of the finance committee, which had to deal 
 with millions, he had not sixpence in his personal pocket with which 
 to buy a pair of shoestrings. 
 
 Hard money alone, as it was thought, could restore the currency. 
 Jefferson's Italian neighbor, Philip Mazzei, who had once been in 
 office under the Duke of Tuscany, told him that the duke, like His 
 Higliness of Hesse-Cassel, was a great hoarder of mone}'-, and, only 
 three years before, had had " ten million crowns lying dead in his 
 treasury ; " part of which, Mazzei thought, he could borrow for the 
 United States, if he could be sent over properly authorized. Jefier-" 
 son wrote to John Adams on the subject, stating the facts, and 
 commending Mazzei as " a native of that duchy, well connected there, 
 conversant in courts, of great understanding, and equal zeal in our 
 cause." Nothing came of this suggestion, so far as is known ; and 
 those ten million crowns remained in the duke's strong-box, though 
 the struggling States needed them so much, — needed them more 
 and more. Doubtless the two neighbors talked over those precious 
 crowns often enough as they sat by Jefferson's fireside on Mouticello, 
 or strolled about in Mazzei's young vineyards. Indeed, whenever, 
 in this impecunious world, there is known to be a large lump of 
 money "lying dead" anywhere, there are sure to be individuals 
 scheming for its resurrection. Besides, was not the Duke of Tuscany, 
 though an Austrian prince, a brother of Marie Antoinette, queen of 
 France, known to be enthusiastic for Franklin and the noble insur- 
 gents ? And had not Philip Mazzei sent his duke an Italian transla- 
 tion of tlie Declaration of Independence ? How plausible, on the 
 breezy heights of Albemarle, seemed the scheme of getting some of 
 those dead crowns from Tuscany, and giving them life in Virginia ? 
 
 Philip Mazzei, who had all an Italian's ardor for the American 
 cause, offered to go himself without compensation to his native land, 
 and negotiate the loan ; and soon after the election of Jefferson to 
 the governorship, he sailed, commissioned by Governor Henry and 
 his Council, to borrow from his prince a sum not to exceed nine hun- 
 dred thousand pounds sterling, and to buy with part of it a quantity 
 of supplies for Virginia's quota of troops. Kot fto exceed ! It is 
 always prudent to limit strictly the powers of an agent. Mazzei 
 •might, in his excessive zeal, carry ofi" the whole ten million crowns I 
 
228 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOK. 
 
 It was a costly mission to poor Mazzei. His misfortunes began 
 before he left home. He rented his house to the Hessian general, 
 Baron Riedesel, who moved in, with his Amazon of a wife and his 
 large military family, before the Italians could move out. It was a 
 tight squeeze, as the baroness recorded ; and Mazzei, it seems, had 
 no notion of the amount of sustenance required by so many Hessian 
 warriors, and a baroness who rode astride. " We looked impatiently 
 forward," wrote the lady, " to the time of his departure, and that of 
 his wife and daughter, on account of the smallness of the house and 
 the scarcity of provisions." She took the liberty of remarking one 
 day, that a calf's head and tripe was not enough for twenty persons' 
 dinner; but the frugal Italian replied that ''we could make a very 
 good soup of it." He did, however, add to the repast "two cabbages 
 and some stale ham ;" and this, says the baroness, " was all we could 
 obtain from him." The Italians left the house at last ; and, long 
 before they had made their way across the sea, the Hessians' horses 
 had trampled their vineyards, planted with so much care, and 
 watched by Jefferson and by all intelligent Virginia with so much 
 interest, into irremediable ruin. 
 
 In Paris, face to face with practical Dr. Franklin, the project of 
 extracting nine hundred thousand pounds sterling from the coffers of 
 an Austrian duke addicted to hoarding, at an interest of five per cent, 
 for a province four thousand miles off, whose independence the duke 
 had not acknowledged and would not acknowledge, did not wear so 
 feasible an aspect as it had on Jefferson's piazza, overlooking the 
 rich garden of Virginia. If the Duke of Tuscany was brother to a 
 romantic queen of France, he was also brother to an emperor of Aus- 
 tria, who reminded Paris patriots that he was a king by trade. 
 Tuscany ! The very name was enough to put even the placid 
 Franklin out of temper; for he had had an eye himself upon those 
 Tuscan crowns, hneio they could not be got, and was in full quarrel 
 with llalph Izzard of South Carolina for draAving twenty^ve hun- 
 dred pounds sterling per annum, in his character of Tuscan minis- 
 ter, though unable to do so much as to get permission to enter 
 Tuscany. Franklin was barely civil to the sanguine and generous 
 Italian. At their first interview, the moment he learned Mazzei's 
 errand, he dashed cold water upon the scheme. " So many peo- 
 ple," he said, " have come to Europe on that kind of business, that 
 they have ruined our credit, and made the money-men shy of 
 
JEFFERSON GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA. 229 
 
 US." * Mazzei argued in vain. As often as he went out to Passy, and 
 broached the subject, Franklin "never failed," as Mazzei reported 
 to Governor Jefferson, " giving some mark of disapprobation and 
 displeasure." And well he might, since he had already offered six 
 per cent for the very crowns which Virginia hoped to get for five. 
 The Duke of Tuscany kept his money; Mazzei returned to Virginia 
 to find his estate in ruins, and to seek in vain compensation for his 
 losses ; and the governor passed his two terms in torture, with hostile 
 fleets ravaging the shores, and hostile armies menacing the interior, 
 while every effort to defend the State was " cramped for want of 
 money." 
 
 In sending Mazzei upon this mission to a reigning prince, Virginia 
 performed the act of a sovereign State. In the same spirit, and 
 evidently without a thought of impropriety, the legislature, on the 
 second day of Jefferson's governorship, June 2, 1779, formally 
 ratified the treaty with France. Such acts as these throw a valua- 
 ble light upon the subsequent State-Rights controversy. This rati- 
 fication seems to me so remarkable, that I will copy the resolutions 
 by which it was authorized : — 
 
 " Eesolved, nemine contradicente. That it is the opinion of 
 this Assembly, that the treaties of alliance and commerce between his 
 Most Christian Majesty of France on the one part, and the Congress 
 of the United States of America, on behalf of the said States, on the 
 other part, ought to be ratified, confirmed, and declared binding on 
 this Commonwealth. 
 
 " Resolved, That the governor be desired to notify to the minister 
 of His Most Christian Majesty, resident at Philadelphia, the above 
 ratification, under the seal of the Commonwealth." 
 
 On the 1st of June, then, 1779, ^Ir. Jefferson became His Excel- 
 lency, the second republican governor of Virginia. In his public 
 life hitherto, all had been plain sailing ; for the wind and tide had 
 been strongly in his favor, and the services which he had been called 
 upon to render were such as his character and habits had fitted him 
 to perform. How different the task which confronted him now ! 
 Kot more difficult nor nobler, but far more difficult to him. And 
 
 * Lossing'B American Histoi-ical Keeord, vol. i. p. 33. 
 
230 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 from the time of his election in January, to the day when he was 
 sworn in, the situation had been growing, every week, more compli- 
 cated and menacing. If, in January, he had been gratified by the 
 honor done him, jirobably on the 1st of June he shrank dismayed 
 from the responsibility which that honor brought with it. 
 
 The French alliance, he now knew, was working ill in two ways, 
 — in relaxing the vigor of the States, and rendering the foe more 
 unanimous and more savage. The three British commissioners had 
 announced to ' all the world that the nature of the contest was 
 changed by the alliance with France. Britain was, thenceforth, 
 going to use all the means for subduing rebellious colonies which 
 " God and Nature had placed in her hands." Since America might 
 ere long become an accession to France, the common law of self-pre- 
 servation (said the commissioners) " will direct Great Britain to ren- 
 der that accession of as little avail to her as possible." The colonies 
 were to be subdued by being destroyed. America was to be laid 
 waste. This declaration, published in October, 1778, was acted upon 
 at once by Henry Hamilton, commandant of Detroit, by marcliing 
 into the western wilderness to rouse the Indians to war against Vir- 
 ginia. Ths State over wliich Jefferson ruled extended to the Missis- 
 sippi, and embraced all the territory which we now call Virginia, 
 West Virginia, and Kentucky, besides a great part of what is now 
 Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. I need not remind the reader that 
 that rich and well-watered region swarmed with Indians, among 
 the best and bravest of their race. Taking post at Vincennes on 
 the Wabash, a hundred miles from its junction with the Ohio, 
 Colonel Hamilton spent the winter in " talking " with chiefs, gather- 
 ing supplies, and preparing for a desolating swoop over Kentucky 
 into the settlements of Virginia. An Indian war, therefore, was 
 among the difficulties preparing for the governor elect while he was 
 receiving the congratulations of his friends. He knew it not, how- 
 ever. It was a good " express " who could keep either his despatches 
 or his scalp while making his way from the Wabash to the James in 
 1779. 
 
 British commanders at the South executed the threats of the com- 
 missioners not less. Thej'', too, were to ravage and devastate a 
 country which they had tried in vain to conquer. The war was now 
 to be transferred to the South, too thinly settled to resist, it was 
 thought, yet offering an inviting field for spoliaiion. Americans, as 
 
.raFFERSON GOVERNQR OF VIRGINIA 231 
 
 they wander about the dusty interior of St. Paul's Cathedral in Lon- 
 don, remark with surprise that the most sliowy monument there com- 
 memorates a soldier associated in tlieir minds . with defeat, — the 
 great defeated, Cornwallis. He certainly behaved at the South more 
 in the style of a bandit than a soldier; not disdaining petty larceny, 
 it appears, when he saw a precious object that could be conveniently 
 pocketed and carried off. His system being to wreak the king's 
 vengeance, rather than promote his country's interest, his orders 
 were to imprison and despoil every man who would not take arms in 
 his service, and to hang every man, who, after being tlius impressed, 
 made his escape, and joined his brethren in arms on the other side. 
 
 Governor Jefferson, therefore, from the watch-tower of his high 
 office, had sometimes to look half a dozen ways at once. The 
 flower of the men of Virginia were, of course, in the army under 
 Washington. They must be looked to, and their numbers \s.Q\)t up. 
 But tliat new enemy in the Carolinas, able, enterprising, relent- 
 less, must be opposed with all the force which Virginia could spare ; 
 since to defeat Cornwallis in North Carolina was the only way to 
 keep him out of Virginia : it was self-defence. The Indians were a 
 third object of attention. The thousands of British and German pris- 
 oners in Albemarle occasioned constant solicitude ; and the more as 
 the war drew nearer the borders of the State, and as the men of the 
 State were drawn away to serve in distant camps. On the side of 
 the ocean there was always a wide and an oj^en door to danger. 
 Nothing but a fleet will ever be able to shut out a fleet from Chesa- 
 peake Bay; and what was Virginia's navy then? Four little 
 cruisers, carrying in all sixty-two guns. And as to Hampton Roads 
 and the mouth of the James River, military men think that even 
 now, in this year 1874, after fifty-nine years' work upon Fortress 
 Monroe and the Ripraps, there is nothing there which could stop a 
 good iron-clad. Certainly there was nothing in 1779 that could 
 stop a wooden frigate. Three weeks before Jefferson's inauguration, 
 a fleet of a dozen vessels, with two thousand troops on board, had 
 run in without firing or receiving a shot, and landed troops without 
 the least molestation. These troops carried out their part of the 
 new programme. They spent several days in ravaging, burning, 
 plundering, murdering, while the militia fled helpless ; for in Vir- 
 ginia, in 1779, there was only one musket. left to every four or five 
 men ; and the unarmed militia of the region could not even limit the 
 
232 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 area of spoliation. When at last Governor Henry had got together 
 an armed force of some magnitude, the bold marauders ceased 
 destroying turpentine, tobacco, and pork, ceased despoiling farm- 
 houses and burning villages, and went at their leisure on board their 
 ships, and sailed away. The smoke of their burning had not 
 ceased to ascend to heaven when Jefferson took the oath. What 
 had been done once, he well knew, could be done again. 
 
 That was the situation : front door open to hostile fleets ; back 
 door, to hostile Indians ; General Washington wanting all that Vir- 
 ginia had of men, money, arms, and food ; a powerful foe at the South 
 anxious to get over the border ; one gun to four or five men, and 
 a most plentiful lack of all other warlike material which can only 
 be got with money. This was the task which had fallen to the lot 
 of a lawyer of thirty-six, with a talent for music, a taste for art, a 
 love of science, literature, and gardening. But mind is mind, in- 
 telligence is intelligence. I would not choose Mr. Emerson or Mr. 
 Darwin to command an expedition, or govern a country ; but if, in 
 the course of events, it fairly fell to their part to undertake either 
 of those tasks, I should confidently look to their acquitting them- 
 selves respectably. Moreover, the individual at the head of a free 
 republic does really have at command, and may utilize, its whole 
 intelligence, as we saw Mr. Lincoln do during the late wiir. Jeffer- 
 son had near him a Council and Assembly which contained the best 
 sense that Virginia could spare from the field. 
 
 The gloom which hung over' the State in consequence of the late 
 unchecked and unpunished ravages of the enemy near the sea was 
 dispelled, before the new governor had been many days in office, by 
 most cheering news from the ojjposite quarter. 
 
 Virginia had in the field, at that time, two eminent heroes : one 
 so known to all mankind, that he need not be named; the other 
 now almost fallen out of memory : one at the head of the armies 
 of America ; the other in the Far West, twelve hundred miles from 
 the capital of Virginia, with a band of a hundred and fifty kindred 
 spirits, holding back, by the force of his single will, the Indians from 
 the frontiers of his native State. George Eogers Clarke was the 
 name of this other hero. Ho was a native of Jefferson's own coun- 
 t}'' of Albemarle; "our Colonel Clarke," he calls him; a neighbor 
 of the governor ; not twentj^-six years old when Governor Henry 
 sent him into the wilderness; in the spring of 1778, to protect the 
 
JEFFERSON GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA. 233 
 
 border. This hero is not as famous as Leonidas or Hannibal, only 
 because he has not had such historians as they. But he defended 
 the western homes of Virginia precisely as Hannibal would have 
 done. By way of giving the Indians something to do in their own 
 country, he floated and marched to the post of Kashaskias on the 
 Mississippi, took it, held it as a base ; struck for other posts near by, 
 terrified some tribes, seduced others, broke the spell of British in- 
 fluence, became lord paramount in the land of the Illinois ; showing 
 himself a most swift, alert, tough, untiring, closely-calculating com- 
 mander. No order from home helped or hindered him. "Not a 
 scrape of jonv pen," he wrote to the governor in April, 1779, " have 
 I received from you for near twelve months." 
 
 In the midst of his success, when he had held the Indians quiet 
 for nine months. Colonel Hamilton interposed, marching from De- 
 troit, and taking post at Vincennes on the Wabash, right between 
 Clarke and Virginia. Instantly the whole aspe9t of things was 
 changed ; for Hamilton was a man of energy and skill, long familiar 
 with Indians, unscrupulous, willing to let his Indians wage war in 
 the Indian manner. Whole tribes fell off from Clarke, and joined 
 Hamilton, who had guineas, wampum, weapons, red cloth, and all 
 that an Indian prizes. War parties streaked the prairies, and glided 
 through the woods. The Indians of the whole western wilderness, 
 from the Alleghanies to the Great Biver, were agitated or astir. 
 Clarke prepared to sell his post as dearly as he could ; for, as he said, 
 he had not men enough to stand a siege, and was too remote to 
 send for aid. But while he was in the rush of preparation, calling 
 in his outposts, burning superfluous and obstructive houses, making 
 all tight and snug for a desperate fight, came news that Hamilton 
 had sent out so many parties from Vincennes, that he had but eighty 
 men left to defend the post. His resolution was taken ; for, really, 
 he had but one chance. Let him wait at Kaskaskias till the spring 
 opened, and he would have Hamilton, British troops, and thousands 
 of Indians, upon him, against whom his little band could fight only 
 to be at last tortured and burnt alive. 
 
 The distance from Kaskaskias to Vincennes was a hundred and 
 fifty miles ; Clarke's force, about one hundred and fifty men. Send- 
 ing a barge round by river with the artillery and stores, he struck 
 across the country with a hundred and thirty soldiers, joined on the 
 way by a few young men of the country. It was in the midst of 
 
234 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 the great February thaw, the rivers all overflowing, the swamps 
 under water, the prairies soft, the woods soaked and dripping. On 
 the eleventh day they were within nine miles of Vincennes ; but 
 those nine miles were covered with the waters of the overflowing 
 Wabash. It took the band five days to accomplish the distance, 
 " having to wade often," saj'-s the heroic leader ; and, the last six 
 miles, " up to our breasts in water." They must have perished, he 
 added, if the weather had not been warm. Reaching dry land, an 
 hour after dark, they saw the place before them ; when, all chilled 
 and. wet as they were, they began the attack; and, after an eighteen 
 hours' fight, took the post and all its garrison without the loss of a 
 man. It was Clarke's audacity, fortitude, and skill that won this 
 victor^'-, which, in its consequences, was one of the most important 
 of the war ; for, besides relieving the whole frontier of apprehension 
 from the Indians, it confirmed Virginia's claim to the possession of 
 the country, andjiad its due weight in the final negotiations. 
 
 The victors were bountifully rewarded. A few days after, they 
 made an easy capture of forty men and ten thousand pounds' worth 
 of goods, floating down the river to re-enforce Colonel Hamilton. In 
 short, George Rogers Clarke was lord of the West, vice Henry Hamil- 
 ton, deposed, and sent as a prisoner of war, with his chief officers, to 
 the governor of Virginia. " But what crowned the general joy," 
 wrote Clarke to the governor, " was tlie arrival of William Morris, 
 my express to you, with your letters, which gave general satisfaction. 
 The soldier}'', being made sensible of the gratitude of their country 
 for their services, were so much elated that they would have at- 
 tempted the reduction of Detroit, had I ordered them." William 
 Morris was despatched with tidings of this new triumph ; but, as he 
 was killed on the way, it was not until the beginning of June, a hun- 
 dred days after the event, that Jeft'erson received the intelligence. 
 
 The success of Colonel Clarke, though it relieved the governor's 
 mind from an ever-present dread, devolved upon him a painful duty. 
 Hamilton and two of his officers reached Williamsburg, prisoners, 
 charged with having incited the Indians to scalp, massacre, torture, 
 and burn ; Hamilton himself having confined in a dungeon without 
 fire, and loaded with chains, and cruelly tormented, an American 
 citizen. For four years Congress and the people had seen, with a 
 sorrowing and indignant amazement, the cruelty with which English 
 commanders had uniformly treated American prisoners of war ; and 
 
JEFFERSOlSr GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA. 235 
 
 they had sought to avenge the wrong by lieaping coals of fire upon 
 their heads, treating English and Hessian prisoners with an extrav- 
 agance of generosity. In their unique manifesto of October 30, 
 1778, the Congress of the United States had declared to the world, 
 that, " considering themselves bound to love their enemies," they 
 had " studied to spare those who were in arms against them, and to 
 ligliten the chains of captivity." This was the simple truth. The 
 British prisoners had been, courted and petted, rather than abused. 
 Jeft'erson and his neighbors had personally striven to render the stay 
 of the Burgoyne prisoners in Albemarle, not endurable merely, but 
 delightful. 
 
 I can perfectly understand the feelings of the Virginians on this 
 occasion ; because, during the late war, while Union prisoners were 
 dying in anguish at Andersonville, unsheltered, and not permitted 
 to shelter themselves from the blasting Georgia sun and rain, I saw, 
 near Fortress Monroe, Confederate prisonex's in an exquisite seaside 
 hospital, nourished, while their wounds were healing, upon a diet of 
 altei'nate broiled .chicken and lamb-chop, with a glass of delicate 
 hock (whenever ordered by the physicians) at eleven and four ; and 
 as well treated, in all essential particulars, as Queen Victoria could 
 be if she lay sick in Windsor Castle. Having seen this sight in 
 September, 1864, I can understand how it was that the governor of 
 Virginia and his council, in June, 1799, came to the conclusion to 
 discontinue the refined coals-of-fire system, and try the vulgar 
 method of retaliation. The council, in fact, " resolved to advise the 
 governor," that the three prisoners from Vincennes " be put in irons, 
 confined in the dungeons of the public jail, debarred the use of perJ", 
 ink, and paper, and excluded all converse, except with their keeper." 
 
 Each variety of human being has its own besetting foible. As a 
 man of great executive force is apt to be cruelh^ reckless of others' 
 woe, so a person of scholarly habits and philaf^throjiic character is 
 generally too reluctant to be the instrument of iiiflicting pain, even 
 when justice, necessity, and mercy, all unite to demand it at his 
 hands. I observe, therefore, with pleasure, in the voluminous cor- 
 respondence relating to this affair, that Governor Jefferson rose 
 superior to the natural and usual infirmity of men of his tempera- 
 ment, and went heart and hand with his legal advisers. He put 
 those men in irons, and immured them in a dungeon. In those 
 days, too (Howard was only just beginning his jail-tours then), a dun- 
 
236 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOK. 
 
 geon ivas a dungeon. It was rotten straw, foul air, darkness, under- 
 ground cliill, and every thing that was most dismal and repulsive. 
 A hundred years ago the Christian religion was just struggling into 
 existence.y,If*had not yet acquired force enough to purify the pub- 
 lic jails of re'mote Virginia. But Jefferson, philanthvopisfc as he 
 was, and, indeed, because he was a philanthropist, adhered firmly 
 to the sj^stem of retaliation ; perceiving, as he told General Wash- 
 ington, that retaliation in this instance was only a more far-reaching 
 kind of mercy. 
 
 General Phillips, that "proudest man of the proudest nation on 
 earth," prisoner of war in a pleasant mansion near Monticello, sent a 
 vigorous, though moderate and respectful, remonstrance to Governor 
 JeiFerson. His chief point was, that Hamilton having capitulated, 
 it was a breach of faith on the part of Virginia to treat him other- 
 wise than as a prisoner of war. The governor ransacked authorities, 
 but found nothing to justify this view. It occurred to hira, however, 
 that militaiy usage, not yet embodied in law, might have estab- 
 lished the principle; and he therefore, with the consent of his coun- 
 cil, referred the matter to the decision of General Washington. " I 
 have the highest idea," he wrote to the general, " of tliose contracts 
 which take place between nation and nation at war, and would be 
 the last on earth to do any thing in violation of them ; " and " my 
 own anxiety under a charge of violation of national faith by the exe- 
 cutive of this Commonwealth will, I hope, apologize for my adding 
 this to the many troubles with which I know you to be burdened." 
 The commander-in-chief, after much reflection, and consultation 
 with military men, thought it best, upon the whole, that Hamilton 
 and his companions should have the benefit of the doubt. Their 
 shackles were, therefore, taken off, and they were finally admitted 
 to parole. 
 
 Not the less were the governor and council resolved to adhere to 
 the system of retaliation. A prison-ship, on the fell pattern of those 
 used by the English in New York, was actually got ready, and the 
 exchange of prisoners was stopped between Virginia and New York. 
 " Humane conduct on our part," wrote the governor, " was found to 
 produce no effect: the contrary was therefore to be tried. If it 
 produces a proper lenity to our citizens in captivity, it will have the 
 effect we meant : if it does not, we shall return a severity as terrible 
 as universal Iron," he added, " will be retaliated by iron, 
 
JEFFEESON GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA. 237 
 
 but a great multiplication on distinguished objects ; prison-ships by 
 prison-ships, and like for like in general." But happily Governor 
 Jefferson, in November, 1779, received notification from head-quar- 
 ters that the British generals, under the new commander, Sir Henry 
 Clinton, had changed their system, and were treating prisoners of 
 war with an approach to humanity. Virginians might be pardoned 
 for thinking that the just, spirited, and firm conduct of their 
 governor and council had had something to do with this change. 
 
 Meanwhile the governor had trouble enough ^Vith the thousands 
 of Burgoyne prisoners near his own home. Their thriving gardens, 
 attractive as they might be to a visitor, could not retain them when 
 there was a chance to escape ; and whenever there "was a British 
 force operating in or near Virginia, no one could say, of a squad of 
 soldiers on the tramp, whetlier they were deserters from that force, 
 or prisoners escaped from Albemarle. '' Four hundred desertions in 
 the last fortnigli»t,''' wrote Colonel Bland in Jul}', 1779; and he had 
 reason to believe, " with the connivance of some of the officers." 
 This news was not calculated to soothe the mind of the new 
 governor. 
 
 But the grand object of Mr. Jefferson's solicitude, during the first 
 summer of his administration, was to enable the gallant Colonel 
 Clarke to make the most of his commanding position in the Far 
 West. The burning desire of that hero's heart was to capture De- 
 troit, the seat of the enemy's power in the Indian country, and, as 
 Governor Jefferson described it, " an uneasy thorn in our side." A 
 great host of friendly Indians were assembled at Vincennes ; and all 
 was ready for the expedition, except the more costly supplies, and 
 the regiment or- two of white troops needful for the onset. It lay 
 heavy on the governor's mind, during the whole period of his service, 
 that he could never quite spare them. Several times he thought he 
 had both men and money enough. But, just as the troops were 
 ready to march, an exigency would occur so dire, so pi-essing, that he 
 was compelled to order them elsewhere. Thus Detroit remained in 
 the hands of the enemy ; remained a very uneasy thorn in the side 
 of Washington, the United States, the Federal party, until John 
 Jay extracted it by treaty in 1794. Governor Jefferson, unable to 
 get Detroit, resolved to secure what Colonel Clarke had already 
 conquered. A wild delusion prevailed just then, that peace was at 
 hand through the mediation of Spain ; and, supposing that each 
 
238 LIFE OF THOIVIAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 belligerent would retain what he actually held at the moment of 
 treating, the governor ordered Colonel Clarke to build certain forts 
 in the western country, particularly one on the Mississippi, at the 
 southern boundary of Virginia, which would make good Virginia's 
 ancient claim to extend westward as far as the Great River. 
 Colonel Clarke, who was a surveyor by profession, — resembling in 
 this as in other respects Jefferson's own father, — built the fort, and 
 named it Fort Jefferson. 
 
 This year, 1779, the last of Williamsburg's serving as the capital 
 of Virginia, was the last of Jefferson's residence near William and 
 Mary College, in which he had been educated. Being now elected 
 a college visitor, he endeavored, amid the bustle and anxieties of 
 war, to lop off some of the dead branches that hindered, as he 
 thought, its useful operation. He caused the grammar-school to 
 be abolished, and the two professorships of divinity and Hebrew to 
 be suppressed. In place of these he made provision for the instruc- 
 tion of the students in chemistry, natural history, anatomy, medi- 
 cine, law, modern languages, the fine arts, natural justice, and the 
 laws of nations. In the spring of 1780, Richmond, a village then 
 of nine hundred white inhabitants, peculiarly defenceless and unpro- 
 vided, became the capital of Virginia ; the government finding 
 shelter — and little more than shelter — in extemporized wooden 
 structures. 
 
 The dream of peace was rudely dispelled. About the date of 
 this removal to Richmond, April 1, 1780, the stern and bitter trial 
 of Virginia and her governor began. By the time he had arranged 
 his new pigeon-holes at Richmond, came a private letter from Madi- 
 son, then in Congress, which must have appalled timid minds. The 
 army under Washington, Mr. Madison said, was on the verge of 
 dissolution, being short of bread and nearly out of meat ; the treas- 
 ury empty, and the public credit gone ; the currency nearly worth- 
 less, and no visible means of restoring it ; the States pulling one 
 way, and Congress another; and every thing in extremity. This 
 was, indeed, the period of profoundest gloom, — the black hour 
 before the dawn. It was the time when Thomas Paine, whose pen, 
 during the Revolution, was equal to a thousand men in the field, 
 drew the year's salary due him as clerk of the Pennsylvania Assem- 
 bly, and began with it a private subscription in aid of the • gasping 
 cause, which had an effect rivalling in importance a new number of 
 
JEFFEESON GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA. 239 
 
 "The Crisis." The sum was but five hundred paper dollars, it is 
 true ; but it was all he had, and it kindled the patriotism of men 
 who had more. 
 
 By the time Governor Jefferson had docketed Mr. Madison's 
 letter, in the first week of April, 1780, arrived news that a British 
 fleet and army were investing Charleston. News followed, six weeks 
 after, that the city was taken. South Carolina helpless, and a British 
 army free to move northward over North Carolina into Virginia, 
 unless a half-armed militia could stop it. 
 
CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 VIBGINIA RAVAGED. 
 
 To the governor of Virginia, this whole year, 1780, and half the 
 next, was a period of the most rending anxiety, and of exertion the 
 most intense and constant. With four thousand five hundred Vir- 
 ginians already in the army, we see him stimulating the recruiting 
 system in each county, writing letters, public and private, to county 
 members and magnates, urging them to utilize the dying currency, 
 and get out the last man witli the last dollar, while it still had a 
 semblance of* value. He arranged, early in the campaign, three 
 lines of express-riders, — one to General Washington, one to Hamp- 
 ton Roads, one to the head-quarters of the army of the South, — so 
 that, at a crisis, he hoped to be able to get and send news at the 
 rate of one hundred and twenty miles in a day and niglit. Still 
 further to guard against surprise, he despatched General Nelson on 
 a tour of the eastern counties, requesting him to get the county 
 lieutenants together, and concert a plan of action in case of another 
 descent of the enemy from the oceans. At first it was an agonizing 
 question, to which quarter Virginia should send her levies. Three 
 letters from the Committee of Congress at head-quarters lay upon his 
 desk at once, all asking for men and means; but early in July, Gene- 
 ral Gates arrived at Richmond, on his way to take the command in 
 the South; and, for the next six weeks, every man, horse, wagon, gun, 
 bayonet, axe, cartridge-box, shoe, belt, saddle, blanket, tent, and 
 coin, which Governor Jefferson could beg, buy, borrow, or get made, 
 was hurried away to General Gates's head-quarters in North Caro- 
 lina. Some Virginians saw with dismay the governor pouring into 
 General Gates's camp the whole of Virginia's means of defence. 
 His answer then and ever after was, that Virginia's single chance 
 of escaping devastation by Coruwallis's army lay in strengthening 
 240 
 
VIRGINIA EAVAGED. 241 
 
 Gates. If Gates and his army did not stop and hurl back upon 
 Charleston the British forces, nothing could keep them out of 
 Virginia. 
 
 For the first time in her history, Virginia became a manufac- 
 turing State. '' Our smiths," wrote the governor, August 4, " are 
 making five hundred axes and some tomahawks for General Gates," 
 — turning out twenty a day; "and we are endeavoring to get bay- 
 onet-belts made," — though leather was so scarce that people stole 
 the flaps of cartouch-boxes from the wagons to mend their shoes 
 with. The governor sent messengers all over the State to pick up 
 little lots of material, such as duck and leather. And, when he had 
 accumulated supplies, he was at his wit's end for wagons in which 
 to transport them. Nearly a quarter of a century had elapsed since 
 Braddock had found wagons so scarce in Virginia and Maryland ; and 
 Governor Jefiferson, since he had no money in his treasury to hire or 
 buy them, found them scarcer still. In this extremity he was 
 obliged to impress wagons, not sparing his own. His principle was, 
 to leave on every farm the horses and vehicles absolutely necessary 
 to secure the ripening crops, and take all the rest for the public ser- 
 vice. This he did upon his own farms in Albemarle. It is inter- 
 esting to note, that, in tlie crisis of the campaign, the governor was 
 sending about to try and find, for the use of General Gates, a copy 
 of the old map of Virginia, made when he was a child, by Professor 
 Fry and his own father. The ladies, this summer, were contribut- 
 ing the costly trifles of their jewel-drawers to the cause, besides 
 huge packets of the paper-money of the period. Mrs. Jefferson, 
 the gentle wife of the governor, was active in the work. Among the 
 Gates papers in the priceless collection of the New- York Historical 
 Society, is a letter in the neatest, firmest hand, which she wrote to a 
 friend at this time, — the only scrap of her writing, perhaps, that has 
 escaped the privacy in which her life was passed : — 
 
 Richmond, Aug. 8, 1780. 
 Mrs. Washington has done me the honor of communicating the 
 enclosed proposition of our sisters of Pennsylvania, and of informing 
 me that the same grateful sentiments are displaying themselves in 
 Maryland. Justified by the sanction of her letter in handing for- 
 ward the scheme, I undertake with cheerfulness the duty of furnish- 
 ing to my country-women an opportunity of proving that they also 
 16 
 
242 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 participate of those virtuous feelings which gave birth to it. I can- 
 not do more for its promotion than by enclosing to j^ou a number of 
 the papers, to be distributed to such counties as are convenient to 
 you, and to such persons in them as you think proper. 
 
 I have the honor to be, with sentiments of the most perfect esteem 
 and respect, madam, 
 
 Your most obedient and most humble servant, 
 
 Martha Jeffersoic. 
 
 The results of this appeal, I fear, were not brilliant ; and yet it 
 had results. Doubtless a hard-pressed treasurer valued Mrs. Sarah 
 Gary's gold watch-chain, which "cost £7 sterling," or Mrs. Ambler's 
 " five gold rings," or Mrs. Griffin's " ten half-joes," or Mrs. Ramsay's 
 collectioft of " one half-joe, three guineas, three pistareens, one bit," 
 more highly than the same lady's sounding collection of four bundles 
 of paper money, containing in all seventy-five thousand five hun- 
 dred and eighteen dollars and one-third. This delusive sum was 
 not altogether to be despised. It would buy one or two blankets, or 
 half a dozen pairs of tolerable marching-shoes. 
 
 These efforts were in vain. In the midst of the governor's 
 endeavors, while he was in the very act of hurrying away re-enforce- 
 ments and stores to the scene of action, occurred (August 16, 1780) 
 the disastrous defeat of Gates at Camden. It was a woful stroke. 
 In an hour — such a destroyer is war — all that Virginia and the 
 whole Confederacy could accumulate of men, horses, and material, in 
 two months of intensest exertion, was scattered and gone. Those 
 wagons so painfully got together, to the number of one hundred and 
 thirty, were all lost, — one of Jefferson's among the rest. In this sad 
 extremity, the governor's first thought was to gather precise and 
 full information of the cause and extent of the disaster, and transmit 
 the same to General Washington; his second, to raise and equip new 
 levies (though " without any money in the treasury, or hope of any 
 till October "), and do whatever else was possible to enable General 
 Gates to make a new stand. For the lost wagons, he tried to substi- 
 tute barges, in which to float provisions down the streams towards 
 General Gates's camp ; but he was obliged to become personally 
 responsible for the cost of their construction. It marks the confu- 
 sion of the time, that, when a month had elapsed after the Camden 
 defeat, he was still ignorant of the fate of his own wagoner and 
 
VIRGINIA RAVAGED. 243 
 
 horses. A wagon-master from the fatal field told liim that a brigade 
 quartermaster, at the moment of panic, cut one of his best horses 
 from the harness, and rode av\-ay on him ; and that his negro 
 wagoner, Phil, lame in one arm and leg, was seen loosening another 
 horse for the same laudable purpose of saving himself for further 
 service. As the public money was carried in the governor's wagon, 
 it is also to be presumed he never saw it again. 
 
 Camden is about one hundred and fifty miles from the Virginia 
 line ; and yet several months passed before a soldier of the victorious 
 army trod Virginia soil. The enterprising and resolute yeomanry 
 of North Carolina held them in check, and even compelled a retreat 
 into South Carolina. It was from another quarter that Virginia was 
 menaced next. 
 
 It was the 22d of October, 1780. Amid the universal horror and 
 consternation caused by Arnold's defection, the governor of Virginia 
 was still sending forward from everj'' county all the men it could 
 spare to General Gates, except a force which he still hoped to 
 reserve for Colonel Clarke's project against Detroit. Droves of 
 cattle were on the southern road; the smiths were still working on 
 the axes, producing twenty a day; agents were out buying the newly- 
 harvested corn on the credit of the State ; men were ranging the 
 western counties for a hundred more wagons, all for the new army 
 forming under Gates in North Carolina, — when news came that a 
 British fleet of sixty vessels had entered Hampton Eoads, and were 
 landing troops near Portsmouth ! Jefferson's three lines of express- 
 riders stood him in good stead now ; for against such a force — a 
 dozen armed vessels and three thousand regular troops of all arms — - 
 there was nothing in Virginia that could stand an hour; and he could 
 do little more than send the information to Washington and Gafes. 
 Such militia as were left and had arms were instantly diverted to 
 this new danger; but they could 'do nothing but make a show of 
 resistance. To General Gates the governor could now only forward 
 an idea : " Would it not be worth while to send out a swift boat from 
 some of the inlets of North Carolina to notify the French admiral 
 that his enemies are in a net, if he has leisure to close the mouth of 
 it?" 
 
 "His enemies!" Mr. Jefferson soon learned whose enemies 
 these new-comers were, and what t\\&j had come to Virginia for. 
 When they had ♦been a week at Portsmouth, doing nothing, particu- 
 
244 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOIT. 
 
 lav, a suspicious character was arrested on the road leading south- 
 ward. While protesting his willingness to be searched, he was seen 
 to put something into his mouth. Tobacco, perhaps? But the 
 Virginia militia-men, experienced tobacco-chewers, did not recognize 
 the correct swing of the arm in the motion made by this unknown ; 
 and, taking the liberty to examine his mouth, they extracted there- 
 from a remarkable quid, — a neat little roll of the size of a goose-quill, 
 covered with goldbeater's-skin, and nicely tied at each end. It 
 proved to be a letter from General Leslie, the commander of the 
 expedition, to Lord Cornwallis : " My Lord, I have been here near a 
 week, establishing a post, • I wrote to you to Charleston and by 
 another messenger by land. I cannot hear for a certainty where 
 you are. I wait your orders. The bearer is to be handsomely 
 rewarded, if he brings me any note or mark from your lordship. 
 A. L." 
 
 This great armament, then, had come to co-operate with Corn- 
 wallis in the subjection of Virginia. The design was frustrated by 
 the activity and valor of the North-Carolina militia in annoying and 
 detaining Cornwallis. Leslie waited a month ; at the expiration of 
 which he put to sea again with all his ships and all his men. Dur- 
 ing his stay, the British prisoners in Albemarle escaped in such 
 numbers, that the governor deemed it best to march them into 
 Maryland. And none too soon! If they had remained in Albe- 
 marle through the winter, every man of them would have gone to 
 swell the British army when it. made its last stand at Yorktown ; 
 for Cornwallis, in the spring, could have struck the camp which they 
 had made so inviting with gardens and shrubbery. To the last 
 week of their stay, the agreeable relations between some of the 
 officers and Governor Jefferson continued. To a young German 
 lieutenant of scientific tastes, who had poured forth fervent thanks- 
 givings for Mr. Jefferson's kindness, the governor sent an amiable 
 reply, making light of the services he had been able to render, and 
 suggesting to his young friend to resume philosophy when the war 
 should be over, and, settling in America, acquire a fame "founded 
 on the happiness, and not on the calamities, of human nature." 
 Beally, these were fortunate prisoners. The ofScers had bought for 
 their pleasure such a large number of the superior Virginia horses, 
 that, upon their going away, it became a serious question whether 
 they ought to be allowed to take the animals out of a State so 
 
VIEGINIA RAVAGED. 245 
 
 terribly in want of them ; and Governor Jefferson referred tliis point 
 also to General Washington's decision. 
 
 The month of December, 1780, was a breathing-time to the 
 Virginians. The governor employed it chiefly in pushing measures 
 in aid of Colonel Clarke's design against Detroit. The British were 
 again powerful in the Far "West. Certain news came, that, in the 
 spring, two thousand Indians and English would ravage the fron- 
 tiers, unless employment could be found for them nearer home ; and 
 it was only too probable that the scene of the nest regular campaign . 
 would be Virginia. Clarke was himself in Richmond for the pur- 
 pose of urging and organizing the expedition, and was waiting, as 
 the 3'ear 1780 drew to a close, the final answer of General Washing- 
 ton to the governor's strong recommendation of the scheme. The 
 general's consent and warm approval were given in due tim3; but, 
 before his letter reached E-ichmond, events again interposed their 
 irresistible fiat. 
 
 On Sunday, the last day of the year 1780, at eight in the morn- 
 ing, Jefferson received intelligence that a fleet of twenty-seven sail 
 had entered Chesapeake Bay the day before. The messenger must 
 have ridden hard, the distance in a straight line between Richmond 
 and Old Point Comfort being not less than a hundred and twenty 
 miles; and he had not waited long enough to learn what flag the 
 vessels bore, nor whether they were bound up the bay or into the 
 James. All the rulers of Virginia were in Richmond at the moment ; 
 for the legislature was in session, within two days of its adjournment. 
 General Nelson of the State militia and the heroic Clarke were 
 there; and Baron Steuben, who had recently come to assist in the 
 defence of the State, was not far off. But neither soldier nor 
 civilian could assist an anxious governor in determining the char- 
 acter of the new arrival. Could it be Leslie back again? Might it 
 not be the long-wished-for French fleet ? Was it that mysterious 
 expedition fitting out lately in New York, destined, as it was given 
 out, for some Southern port, of which General Washington, three 
 weeks before, had sent his usual circular of notification to the gov- 
 ernors of States ? No one could tell. And if the fleet should prove to 
 be hostile, would the commanding general be content with merely 
 ravaging the shores of the lower country, like his. two predecessors, 
 or push for regions which no enemy had yet despoiled? Which 
 river would he ascend, — the York, the James, the Potomac, the 
 
246 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 Patapsco? What town would he first plunder, — Alexandria, Bal- 
 timore, Williamsburg, Petersburg, or Eichraond ? 
 
 Amid all this doubt, the governor could only despatch General 
 Nelson, with full powers, to the mouth of the James, that he might 
 be near the scene of his duties in case it were necessary to call out 
 the militia. Richmond has known some anxious Sundays since, 
 but perhaps few more distressing than this ; for the whole day 
 passed without bringing further intelligence. Monday came and 
 went; but not a 'messenger from the lower country arrived. On 
 Tuesday morning, 'at ten, the suspense was at an end. Word 
 came that the fleet was British, not French, and that it had entered 
 the James, not gone up Chesapeake Bay. Instantly the governor 
 signed orders, calling out half the militia of the region menaced, and 
 a third of the militia of the counties adjacent to it, — four thousand 
 seven hundred men in all, — and intrusted the orders to the county 
 members just departing for their homes. That done, he directed 
 the removal of public property to Westham, a village just above the 
 rapids which close the navigation of the James at Kichmond. 
 
 The next evening, Wednesday, January 3, the governor learned 
 that the enemy's fleet of light vessels had come to anchor near 
 Jamestown, the point where the river is only seven miles from 
 Williamsburg. Then all thought the enemy's first object must be 
 the ancient capital. But it was not. On Thursday morning, two 
 hours before the dawn, came intelligence that the fleet, favored by 
 wind and tide, had swept on up the broad James to a landing below 
 where the Appomattox enters it. There was still, therefore, some 
 doubt whether Eichmond or Petersburg was to be visited ; but the 
 governor, who had now learned that " the parricide Arnold " was the 
 commander of the expedition, called out all the militia of that part 
 of the State. At five that afternoon all doubt was dispelled by a 
 despatch which informed the governor that the foe had landed troops 
 at Westover, twenty-five miles distant. 
 
 In this emergency Governor Jeff'erson found himself alone.- Not 
 a member of the Council or of the Assembly remained in Richmond 
 to aid him, for all had gone to place their families in safety, or were 
 absent on public duty. He sent his own family — wife and three 
 children, the youngest two months old — to the house of a relative at 
 Tuckahoe, thirteen miles above the town. There were two hundred 
 militia of the neighborhood near at hand; and stronger parties were 
 
VIRGINIA BAVAGED. 247 
 
 gathering at various points under Steuben, Clarke, Nelson, and 
 others ; but nowhere in Virginia was there yet an armed body capa- 
 ble of holding in check a regiment of regular troops led by an 
 Arnold. 
 
 The governor mounted his horse, and took command of the situa- 
 tion. His first orders were to stop transporting stores to Westham, 
 and simply get every thing across the river, or into the river, any- 
 where so that Arnold could not easily reach it. Some hours he 
 spent in superintending and urging on this worlj, first at Richmond, 
 later at Westham, reaching Tuckahoe, where his family were, at one 
 in the morning. There he remained long enough to assist them 
 across the river, and see them safely on their way to a securer 
 refuge, eight miles above; and then he galloped back along the 
 James to a point opposite Westham, where, at daylight, he resumed 
 his superintendence of the transfer of the public property. At full 
 speed, on the same tired, unfed horse, he continued his ride towards 
 Manchester, then a small village, opposite Richmond. Before he 
 reached it, his horse sank under him exhausted, and he was obliged 
 to leave the animal dying in the road. With saddle and bridle on 
 his own back, he hurried on to the next farm-house for another 
 horse. He could only borrow there a colt not yet broken, iipon 
 which he continued his journey; until, coming in sight of Rich- 
 mond, he discovered the foe already in possession. After doing the 
 little that was possible for the security of the public stores at 
 Manchester, he rode away to the head-quarters of Baron Steuben, a 
 few miles ofi", for consultation with the only educated soldier within 
 his reach. 
 
 In war every thing, even the elements, seem sometimes to favor 
 audacity. Arnold only remained in Richmond twenty-three hours ; 
 but so promptly had the governor acted, and so well was he seconded 
 by the county militia and their ofiicers, that Arnold only escaped 
 with his nine hundred men through a timely change in the wind, 
 which bore him down the river with the extraordinary swiftness of 
 his ascent. In five days from the first summons, twenty-five hun- 
 dred militia were on the traitor's path, and hundreds more coming 
 in every hour ; but the breeze wafted him away from them down the 
 James, with the loss of thirty of his men, laid low by a whiff of mus- 
 ketry from a party of militia under Colonel Clarke. During the 
 brief staj^ of the enemy near Richmond, they burned a cannon foun- 
 
248 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 dery, several of tlie public shanties, a few private houses, and a pro- 
 digious quantity of tobacco, besides throwing into the canal five tons 
 of powder, and spoiling three liundred muskets. 
 
 After three days' absence from the capital, the governor returned, 
 and affairs began to resume their usual train. For eightj'-four hours 
 his home had been the saddle. Arnold went plundering on to the 
 mouth of the James, where he intrenched himself in the camp 
 abandoned a few weeks before by Leslie. 
 
 A passionate desii."e pervaded the continent to have this traitor 
 brought to justice; or, as Jefferson expressed it, "to drag him from 
 those under whose wing he is now sheltered." When the governor 
 learned the details of Arnold's retreat, he felt that a small band of 
 cool, resolute men could have seized and carried him off; and he now 
 proposed the scheme to an officer of militia. The men to aid him 
 were drawn from the regiments of western Virginia, in whom the 
 governor had " peculiar confidence." The band, he recommended, 
 should be few in number, the smaller the better ; and he left it to the 
 discretion of the chief whether they should enter Arnold's camp as 
 friends, or lie in wait for him without. " I will undertake," he 
 wrote, " if they are successful in bringing him off alive, that they 
 shall receive five thousand guineas' reward among them ; and, to men 
 formed for such an enterprise, it must be a great incitement to know 
 that their names will be recorded with glory in history with those 
 of Van Wart, Paulding, and Willianis." Arnold grew wary, how- 
 ever, and could not be caught. 
 
 From this time the civil government in Virginia was, in effect, 
 almost suspended. The war was to be fought out upon Virginia 
 soil and in Vii>ginia waters ; and it is an old saying, that, in the 
 presence of contending armies, laws are silent. Arnold, Phillips, 
 Cornwallis,Tarlton, Rochambeau, Greene, Steuben, Lafayette, Nelson, 
 "Washington, are the names that figure in the history of Virginia 
 during the next nine months. Arnold, re-enforced and superseded 
 by Phillips, ravaged one portion of the State, except when checked 
 by Steuben and Lafayette. Cornwallis and Tarlton, long retarded 
 and eluded by Greene, swept over the border at last. Indians 
 threatened the western counties; and fleets arrived, departed, con- 
 tended, on the eastern shores. All that Virginia had of manhood, 
 resources, credit, ability, was enlisted in the cause ; and so many 
 men were in service during the planting season, that the governor 
 
VIRGINIA RAVAGED. 249 
 
 feared there would not be food enough raised for the year's neces- 
 sities. 
 
 Jefferson, in the midst of this agonizing chaos, did whatever was 
 possible to supply and re-enforce Greene, Steuben, Lafayette : the 
 burden of his cry to Washington, to Congress, being always "the 
 fatal want of arms." The need of arms became at length so press- 
 ing, that, after "knocking at the door of Congress " by letter for 
 many months, he requested Harrison, Speaker of the Assembly, to 
 go to Philadelphia, and beg Congress in person, if they could not 
 assign to Virginia a proper supply of arms, to at least repay Virginia 
 the arms she had lent for the protection of the Carolinas. Power 
 little short of absolute was conferred upon the governor by the 
 legislature at one of its hurried spring sessions. He was authorized 
 to call out the whole of the militia ; to impress all wagons, horses, 
 food, clothing, accoutrements, negroes ; to arrest the disaffected and 
 banish the disloyal. He was empowered, also, to emit the magnifi- 
 cent sum of fifteen millions of dollars, in addition to the hundred 
 and twenty millions previously issued in the same month, — the 
 whole amount being worth then about twenty-seven thousand golden 
 guineas. But all this availed little. Virginia wanted muskets, — 
 wanted them, not merely for the great operations of the war, but for 
 daily and nightly and hourly defence against predatory bands. 
 Governor J effersou could not furnish them. 
 
CHAPTEE XXVIII. 
 
 THE ENEMY AT MONTICELLO. 
 
 Four times in the spring of 18|"1 the legislature of Virginia 
 were obliged to adjourn in haste, and fly before the coming or the 
 menace of an enemy. First in January, when Arnold plundered 
 the capital. Next in March, when every act was hurried through 
 from fear of another interruption. Then in May, when an attack 
 seemed so imminent, that the few members who had come together 
 gave up trj^ing to legislate at E,ichmond, and separated to meet at 
 Charlottesville, under the shadow of Monticello, little thinking that 
 the storm of war was about to sweep over Albemarle also. 
 
 Tlie day appointed for the assembling of the legislature at Char- 
 lottesville was May 24. The governor's second term of service 
 would expire on the 1st of June ; but, amid the hurry and alarm of 
 the time, the Assembly had as yet found no opportunity to attend to 
 an election. There was no quorum till the 28th, when a speaker 
 was chosen ; but even then, such was the emergency, the House 
 could not enter into the election of a governor. Cornwallis, with all 
 his arm}^, was five days' march distant, and the State seemed to lie 
 at his mercy. Not a boat could cross the bay nor descend the James 
 without risk of capture by the enemy's smaller craft. The civil 
 government seemed a nullity at such a moment ; and the governor, as 
 the last hours of his term were gliding away, could only serve his 
 State by explaining its situation to Congress and the commander-in- 
 chief He felt that what Virginia needed then was a general, able, 
 strong in the confidence of the people, acquainted with the State, 
 one who would place himself in the centre of the crisis, rally around 
 him every element of force Virginia possessed, and direct it upon the 
 foe. He thought, moreover, that the seven thousand men of Corn- 
 wallis must be the enemy's principal force ; and, under this impres- 
 250 
 
THE ENEMY AT MONTICELLO. 251 
 
 sion, he wrote to General Washington on the 28th of May, while a 
 small quorum of the legislature were choosing their speaker within 
 sight of his house : " Were it possible for this circumstance to justify 
 in Your Excellency a determination to lend us your personal aid, it 
 is evident from the universal voice that the presence of their beloved 
 countryman, whose talents have so long been successfully employed 
 in establishing the freedom of kindred States, to whose person they 
 have still flattered themselves they retained some right, and have 
 ever looked upon as their dernier resort in distress, that your appear- 
 ance among them, I say, would restore full confidence of salvation, 
 and would render them equal to whatever is not impossible." 
 
 The time had not yet come for Washington's appearance on this 
 scene, though that time was not distant. The month of May ex- 
 pired. Jefferson was out of office, and Virginia had no governor. 
 
 The Speaker of the House, the President of the Council, and 
 several members of both bodies, were his guests at Monticello, riding 
 over from Charlottesville every afternoon after the business of the 
 day was at an end. 
 
 Just before sunrise, June 4, 1781, while as yet the inhabitants of 
 Monticello slept, except, perhaps, the early-waking master of the 
 mansion, a horseman rode at full speed up the mountain, and sprang, 
 ifrom his foaming steed at the door of the house. He was a gentle- 
 man of the neighborhood, named Jouitte, well known to Jefferson. 
 He had been spending the evening before at a tavern in Louisa, 
 twenty miles away, the county town of the next county eastward 
 from Albemarle. 'An hour before midnight a body of British 
 cavalry, two hundred and fifty in number, had galloped into the 
 town, had come to a halt, dismounted, and proceeded to refresh man 
 and beast with food and rest. Jouitte guessed that the object of 
 such a band, so far from the actual seat of war, commanded, too, by 
 the famous Tarlton, could be no other than the surprise of the 
 governor and legislature of Virginia. He had his horse saddled ; 
 and, while Tarlton and his men were enjoying their three hours' 
 halt at Louisa, he had struck into an old, disused road, a short cut, 
 and ridden with all speed towards Charlottesville to give the 
 alarm ; making a slight detour on his way, to warn Mr. Jefferson 
 and his friends at Monticello. He delivered his message there, and 
 rode on to notify the rest of the members in the village. 
 
 The family, we are told, breakfasted as usual ; after which, the 
 
252 LIFE OF THOINIAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 / 
 guests rode away to Charlottesville, and the inmates of the house 
 
 prepared for a journey. A carriage was made ready, and brought 
 round to the door, in which Jefferson placed his most valued papers. 
 He sent his best horse to be shod at a shop on the river's bank, a 
 mile off. The two most trusted of the household servants gathered 
 the plate and other things of value, and hid them under the floor of 
 the front portico. All these things were done with a certain deliber- 
 ation, because the family naturally concluded that Tarlton would 
 first strike Charlottesville, which lay in plain sight from Monticello, 
 and thus give them ample notice of his approach. But Tarlton, as 
 he went thundering on towards the village, detached a troop to seize 
 the governor, and hold Monticello as a lookout during his stay in the 
 vicinity ; and hence, when Jefferson had been employed something 
 less than two hours in sorting and packing his papers, an of&cer of 
 militia came in, breathless, to say that British cavalry were coming 
 ■up the mountain. Jefferson had two law-pupils at the time, James 
 Monroe, and another, whose name is not recorded. Monroe was in 
 the field, of course, during these weeks of stress and ravage. To 
 the other, Jefferson confided his family, directing him to take them 
 to a friend's house some miles distant. He sent to the blacksmith's 
 for his horse, ordering the servant to bring the animal to a spot 
 between his own mountain and the next, which he could quickly 
 reach by a by-road through the woods. Still he lingered a few 
 minutes among his papers, wishing to give his servant time to get 
 the horse to the designated place. He left his house at length, tele- 
 scope in hand, light sword of the period at his side, and walked 
 down through the forest to the valley between the two mountains, 
 where he found his horse. Before mounting, he paused to listen. 
 No sound was audible, except the musical din of a peaceful June 
 morning in the primeval woods. No clang of accoutrements, nor 
 tramp of armed men, nor distant thunder of a troop of horse. He 
 went a little way up the next mountain to a rock, whence,, with the 
 aid of his telescope, he could clearly see Charlottesville ; but there 
 was no unusual stir in the streets. A false alarm perhaps ; and, so 
 surmising, he resolved to go back to hi3 house, and finish the sorting 
 of his papers, the accumulated treasure of the years that had past 
 since the burning of the house in which he was born. He had gone 
 some distaiice towards his homo, when he discovered that his sword 
 had slipped from its scabbard, as he guessed, when he had stopped 
 
THE ENEMY AT MONTICELLO. 253 
 
 to get a rest for liis spyglass. He went back for it. Before leaving 
 the rock, he took another peep through his glass at the village ; 
 when, behold, it was all alive and swarming with troopers ! 
 
 Then, for the first time, he mounted his horse, and took the road 
 to follow his family, whom he rejoined before night. Tlie dropping / 
 of his sword was a lucky event.) If he had gone back to the house, 
 he might have fallen into the hands of the enemy ; for fchey entered 
 just five minutes after he left it. The two friendly slaves who were 
 hiding the family treasures, one in the cavity receiving, and the 
 other on the portico handing down, were almost caught in-the act of 
 stowing away the last article. They heard the sound of hoofs just 
 in time for the one above to slam down the plank, shutting up the 
 other in a dark, hot, and narrow hole, during the whole eighteen 
 hours' stay of the troop. It proved to be a superfluous exertion of 
 fortitude. Tarlton had given orders that nothing in the house should 
 be injured or removed, and these orders were obeyed; except that 
 some of the thirsty soldiers, after their thirty hours' gallop, helped 
 themselves on the sly to some wine in the cellar. 
 
 The fidelity of these two slaves, Martin and Csesar, during this 
 time of trial, was always remembered by the family with gratitude 
 and pride. , Martin, after shutting down the faithful Csesar with the 
 treasures, remained standing upon the plank of the portico, where 
 he received the captain of the troopers with dignified politeness. 
 He conducted the officer over the house. When they reached the 
 library, where Jefferson had, five minutes before, been at worki 
 among his papers, this captain — McCleod by name, gentleman hj\ 
 nature — locked the door ; and then, handing the key to Martin, said, 
 in substance, "If any of the soldiers ask you for the key of this 
 room, tell them / have it." One of the soldiers, to test Martin's 
 mettle, put a pistol to his breast, and , -threatened to fire unless he 
 told which way his master had gone./ "Fire away, then," replied 
 the slave. Csesar, on his part, cramped and tortured as he was in j 
 his black hole, made no movement, uttered no sound, during the whole | 
 eighteen hours, — all the rest of that day and all the night follow- / 
 ing. 
 
 Down the James, a hundred miles or more, Jefferson possessed a 
 plantation named Elk Hill, with mansion-house, negro quarter, 
 extensive stables, herds of cattle, and growing crops. For ten days 
 Cornwallis lived in this house, which had an elevated site, command- 
 
254 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 
 
 ing a view' of the whole estate. Jefferson himself has put upon 
 record what his lordship did or permitted during his brief residence 
 there. He destroyed all the growing crops of corn and tobacco ; he 
 burned all the barns, filled with last year's product ; he took all the 
 cattle, hogs, and sheep, for his army ; he appropriated all the service- 
 able horses ; he cut the throats of the colts ; he burned all the fences;, 
 he carried off twenty-seven slaves. With his usual exactness, Jeffer- 
 son enumerates the items of his loss : nine horses, fifty-nine cattle, 
 thirt}'- sheep, sixty hogs, seven hundred and eighty barrels of corn, 
 nineteen hogsheads of tobacco, and two hundred and seventy-five 
 acres of growing wheat and barley. Respecting the lost slaves he 
 remarks, " Had this been to give them freedom, he would have done 
 right ; but it was to consign them to inevitable death from the small- 
 pox and putrid fever, then raging in his camp." A few of these 
 slaves crawled home to recover or to die, and to give the fever to five 
 who had not left the plantation. Cornwallis, he adds, " treated the 
 rest of the neighborhood in much the same style, but not wi,th that 
 spirit of total extermination with which he seemed to rage over my 
 possessions,^^ 
 
 For twelve days Virginia had no governor. If Tarlton had rid- 
 den on that morning, without stopping for breakfast, he might have 
 caught a quorum of the legislature in or near Charlottesville, and 
 kept the State without a government for the rest of the campaign. 
 It would have been no great harm ; for during the next five months, 
 while the allied fleets and armies, and all the militia of Virginia that 
 Jefferson had been able to arm, were cornering the marauder of the 
 Southern States, there was little for civilians to do. Tarlton halted 
 at the house of one of Jefferson's friends, who ordered breakfast for 
 the colonel and his officers. But the privates were as hungry as 
 their leaders, and devoured the food in the kitchen as fast as the 
 cook could get it ready. Tarlton got no breakfast until he had 
 placed a guard to protect the cook ; and this delay gave members 
 time to come together at Charlottesville, and adjourn to meet, three 
 days after, at Staunton, forty miles to the westward, on the safe side 
 of the Blue Ridge. 
 
 They met, accordingly, on the 7th of June. Discouraged at the 
 aspect of affairs, soured and irritated by this fourth flight from the 
 tramp of armed men, several of them were disposed to cast the 
 blame of these invasions upon Governor Jefferson. One young 
 
THE ENEMY AT MOKTICELLO. 255 
 
 member even said as much in the House, intimating that the gover- 
 nor should have foreseen Arnold's coming, and called out the militia 
 in time. We all know, from recent experience, that in war-time, 
 when aifairs go ill in the field, the civil administration sinks in the 
 esteem of the public ; and, indeed, we cannot wonder, that, amid 
 the musket-famine of this terrible year, Virginians should bitterly 
 regret the arms and accoutrements which the governor had sent 
 down all the highways to Carolina, only to have them thrown away 
 or captured at Camden and Guilford. Jefferson's friends courted, 
 demanded, inquiry into his conduct, and insisted on having it set 
 down as part of the business of the next session. 
 
 Still the House refrained from the election of a governor. Some 
 of the weaker members revived the stale device of naming Patrick 
 Henry dictator, but again laid the project aside from fear of the dan- 
 gers of imaginary patriot-assassins. " The very thought," as Jeffer- 
 son wrote, " was treason against the people, was treason against 
 mankind in general, as riveting forever the chains which bow down 
 their necks, by giving to their oppressors a proof, which they would 
 have trumpeted through the universe, of the imbecilit}' of republican 
 government, in times of pressing danger, to shield them from harm." 
 Jefferson had a far better device, one which gave the State a legiti- 
 mate, a constitutional dictator. Several months before, he had 
 resolved to decline serving a third term. In the belief, that, at such 
 a crisis, the civil and military power should be wielded by the same 
 hands, he induced his friends, who were a majority of the House, 
 to give their votes to Thomas Nelson, commander-in-chief of the 
 militia of the State, who was accordingly elected. 
 
 General Nelson had been a main stay of Jefferson's administration, 
 giving to it the support of his honored name, his militar}^ talents, 
 and the credit of his vast estates. On his own personal security he 
 had raised the greater part of a most timely loan of two millions of 
 dollars, and advanced money to pay two Virginia regiments who 
 would not march for the Southern army before their arrears were dis- 
 charged. Governor Nelson took the field. He used without reserve 
 the despotic powers with which he was intrusted; forcing men into 
 the field, and impressing wagons, horses, negroes, supplies. He was 
 in at the death of that foul, mean, and monstrous war. At York- 
 town, his own mansion being within the enemy's lines, and occupied 
 by British officers, he had the pleasure of sending cannon-balls 
 
256 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOIST. 
 
 crashing through his own dining-room, and breaking up festive par- 
 ties making merry over his own wine. It was a happy stroke of 
 good sense and good management in Jefferson to leave his office to 
 such a successor ; because he appeased tlie dictator party by giving 
 them a dictator, while assigning the sole duty of the time to one 
 fitted to perform it. 
 
 But General Nelson did not succeed in satisfying his countrymen, 
 for whom he had sacrificed health and fortune. He was an unpop- 
 ular governor ; for the Virginians did not enjoy a dictator when they 
 had got one, and he could not long endure the opprobrium which 
 the exercise of dictatorial power evoked. He threw up his office after 
 holding it about six months ; and he, too, sought opportunity to 
 defend his administration before the legislature. 
 
CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 AT HOME AFTER THE TTAR. 
 
 Public men were apparently more sensitive to criticism in the 
 last century than in this. Junius has had many imitators : he 
 founded a school ; he invented an industry; and the efforts of so 
 many keen, reckless, ill-informed makers of antithesis and epigram 
 have, perhaps, toughened the skins of public men, so that they now 
 scarcely feel what would have made the statesmen of other days 
 writhe in torment. It is an easy mode of producing an effect, this 
 assailing the anxious and heavy-laden servants of the state. It was 
 not difficult for a perfumed dandy in the amphitheatre, yawning at 
 his ease, to find fault with the scarred and sweating gladiator fight- 
 ing for life in the arena. It is not difficult to prepare in the secrecy 
 of a garret a barbed and stinging bolt, and hurl it from the safe 
 ambush of a pseudonyme at a distinguished combatant while he is 
 absorbed in a contest with open foes. Poor Chatterton did it almost 
 as well as Junius. At sixteen, an attorney's apprentice in far-off 
 Bristol, singularly ignorant of the world, knowing nothing of poli- 
 tics, he wrote fulminations against ministers, which Wilkes thought 
 good enough to print in " The North Briton." So easy a trade is it 
 to one who is ignorant enough and reckless enough. It were easy 
 now to prove that Junius himself, who showed such skill in the arb 
 of hiding, knew little more of the real- character, aims, and difficulties 
 of the men whom he assailed, than the boy Chatterton. Happily 
 the industry of so many anonymous and irresponsible cowards has 
 lessened the power of the most envenomed criticism to injure or 
 torture a good minister. Unhappily it has rendered the most just 
 exposure of a bad one all but ineffectual. Truth and calumny we 
 are apt alike to reject when they concern a public man. 
 
 Jefferson was destined to suffer a very large share of ignorant 
 17 267 
 
258 LIPE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 and reckless criticism, which he learned to endure with the imper- 
 turbability of trained good sense. However, in 1781, he was not 
 only a young man, but the world was j^ounger than it is now, not 
 having outgrown the veneration once supposed to be due to all 
 governors as such. It was a fearful thing still to censure the head 
 of a state. One young man in the legislature of Virginia had pub- 
 licly cast the blame of Virginia's desolation, during the first months 
 of 1781, upon Governor Jefferson ; and in this censure some other 
 members were known to acquiesce. It fills the reader of to-day 
 with astonishment to observe, in Jefferson's correspondence, how 
 deeply he took this to heart, and how long he brooded over it. 
 Every man in a situation to judge his conduct had commended it. 
 Washington, Gates, Greene, Lafa\'ette, Steuben, with whom he had 
 co-operated in the defence of the State, had applauded his wisdom 
 and promptitude ; and many of his fellow-citizens complained only 
 that he had done too much. But the single word of censure out- 
 weighed all applause. For many months he could not get over it. 
 And, indeed, we must own that the censure was ill-timed, when his 
 estate was overrun, his old servants destroyed, his family driven 
 from their home, and himself pursued; all because he had been his 
 country's conspicuously faithful servant in a perilous time. 
 
 Such was his indignation, that he forswore public service forever. 
 He would go back once to the legislature to meet his accusers face 
 to face ; but, after that was done, nothing, no, nothing, should ever^ 
 draw him from his books, his studies, his famih^, his gardens, his 
 farms, again. He had had enough of public life. No slave, he 
 wrote, was so wretched as "the minister of a commonwealth." He 
 declared that the only reward he had ever desired for his thirteen 
 years of public service was the good-will of his fellow-citizens, and 
 he had not even obtained that ; nay, he had lost the little share of 
 their esteem he had once enjoyed. Thus he exaggerated the 
 injustice done him, and nursed, Achilles-like, his mortification. 
 
 In August, Lafayette forwarded to him through the lines a letter 
 from the President of Congress, telling him, that, six weeks before, 
 Congress had again elected him to a foreign mission. But he 
 would not be consoled. For once the healthy of his wife and the 
 condition of his family (their infant child had died a few weeks 
 before) were such as to permit their attempting the voyage together. 
 He might have gone to Europe in 1781 ; he would have gone, but 
 
AT HOME AFTER THE "WAR. 259 
 
 for tliis slight show of legislative censure. " I lose an opportu- 
 nity," he wrote to Lafayette, " the only one I ever had, and perhaps 
 ever shall have, of combining public service with private gratifica- 
 tion ; of seeing countries whose improvements in science, in arts, in 
 civilization, it has been my fortune to admire at a distance, but 
 never to see, and at the same time of lending some aid to a cause 
 which has been handed on from its first organization to its present 
 stage by every efi^ort of which my poor faculties were capable. 
 These, however, have not been such as to give satisfaction to some 
 of my countrymen; and it has become necessary for me to remain in 
 the State till a later period in the present year than is consistent 
 with an acceptance of what has been offered me." 
 
 Before the legislature met again, the winter of Virginia's discon- 
 tent was made glorious summer by the surrender of Cornwallis at 
 Yorktown. All thought of censure was swallowed up in that stupen- 
 dous joy. December 19, 1781, exactly a month after the surrender, 
 Jefferson, occupying his ancestral seat as member for Albemarle, — 
 to which he had been re-elected without one dissentient vote, — 
 rose in his place, reminded the House of the intimated censure of 
 the last session, and said he was ready to meet and answer any 
 charges that might be brought against him. No one responded. 
 His accuser was absent. There was silence in the chamber. After 
 a pause, a member rose, and offered a resolution thanking him for 
 his '•' impartial, upright, and attentive administration," which 
 passed both Council and Assembly unanimously. 
 
 Even this did not heal the wound. As he refrained from attend- 
 ing the spring session of the legislature, James Monroe wrote to 
 him a letter of remonstrance, telling him that the public remarked 
 his absence, and were disposed to blame him for withholding his help 
 at so difficult a time. He answered, that, before announcing his 
 determination to retire from public life, he had examined well his 
 heart, to learn whether any lurking particle of political ambition 
 remained in it to make him uneasy in a private station. " I became 
 satisfied," he continued, " that every fibre of that passion was 
 thoroughly eradicated." He thought, too, that thirteen years of 
 public service had given him a right now to withdraw, and devote 
 his energies to the care and education of the two families dependent 
 upon him, and the restoration of estates impaired by neglect or laid 
 waste by war. Nor could he forget the wrong done him in the As- 
 
260 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOX. 
 
 semUj. "I felt," he wrote, "that these injuries, for such they have 
 since been aclinowledged, had inflicted a wound on my spirit ivhich 
 will only he mired hy the aU-heallng graveP For tliese and other 
 reasons, he held to his purpose to withdraw from all participation in 
 public affairs, and dedicate the whole residue of his life to the edu- 
 cation of his children, the culture of his lands, and the sweet toils 
 of the library. He. concluded by inviting his 3'oung friend to visit 
 him at Monticello. " You will find me busy/' he said, '' but in 
 lighter occupations." 
 
 Yes, he was busy ; but few persons who look over the work he was 
 then doing regard it as a very light occupation. The French 
 government had instructed its minister at Philadelphia to gather and 
 transmit to Paris information respecting the States of the American 
 Confederacy ; and the secretary of legation had sent Mr. Jefferson 
 a list of questions to answer concerning Virginia. From childhood 
 he had observed nature in his native land with the curiosity of an 
 intelligent and sympathetic mind; and in his maturer age, even in 
 the busiest and most anxious times, he had been ever a student, an 
 inquirer, a collector. All the stores of knowledge accumulated in so 
 many years he now poured upon paper, and interspersed subtle and 
 curious essays upon points of natural history, geography, morals, 
 politics, and literature. M. de Marbois must have been astonished 
 to receive from him, not a series of short, dry answers to official 
 questions, but a volume, teeming with suggestive fact and thought, 
 warm with humane sentiment, and couched, in the fluent language 
 natural to a sanguine and glowing mind. It is in this work that 
 the chapter occurs which gave so many powerful texts to our a o bl o 
 Abolitionists during their eighty years' war with slavery: — 
 
 " The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual 
 exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting des- 
 potism, on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. 
 Our children see this, and learn to imitate it ; for man is an imita- 
 tive animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. 
 From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees 
 others do. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the linea- 
 ments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, 
 gives a loose to the worst of passions, and, thus nursed, educated, 
 and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with 
 
AT HOME AFTER THE WAK. 261 
 
 odious peculiarities. That man must be a prodigy who can retain 
 his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. . . .11 
 tremble for my country when I reflect that God is justj that his 
 justice cannot sleep forever; that, considering numbefs, nature, and 
 natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an ex- 
 change of situations, is among, possible events ; that it may become 
 probable by supernatural interference) The Almighty has no attri- 
 bute which can take side with us in such a contest." 
 
 At the close of the war, then, Jeiferson supposed his public life 
 ended. He was sure of it. He had publicly said so. Monroe had 
 remonstrated with him ; Madison had remonstrated ; his old constit- 
 uents and Congress both solicited his services ; but he could not be 
 lured again from his pleasant mountain home and its delicious duties 
 into the arena of public strife, whence he had but lately issued, 
 wounded and sore. I suppose he was wrong in this ; for if he, with 
 his ample fortune, his fine endowments, his health, his knowledge, 
 and his culture, was not bound to render some service to Virginia in 
 1782, of whom could public service be reasonably demanded? 
 
 It was a delightful dream while it lasted, that of spending a long 
 life in the Garden of Virginia, with an adored wife, troops of affec- 
 tionate children, and an ever-growing library. We have a glimpse 
 of him there in the spring of 1782, when he was visited by one of 
 the officers of the French army, Major-General the Marquis de 
 Chastellux. During this year, while the negotiations for peace were 
 lingering, the French officers were much in American society, mak- 
 ing an impress upon manners and character that is not yet obliter- 
 ated. Americans were peculiarly susceptible then to the influence 
 of men whose demeanor and tone were in such agreeable contrast to 
 those of the English. The French were exceedingly beloved at the 
 time; not the officers only, but the men as well; for had they nof 
 marched through the country without burning a rail, without touch- 
 ing an apple in an orchard, without ogling a girl by the roadside? 
 
 The influence of the French officers upon the young gentlemen of 
 the United States was not an unmixed good. It was from them 
 that the American of eighty years ago caught the ridiculous affecta- 
 tion of fighting duels, which raged like a mania from 1790 to 1804. 
 The French nobleman of the old school had also acquired an art, 
 which men of our race never attain, the art of making sensual vice 
 
262 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 seem elegant and becoming. \ Anglo-Saxons are only respectable 
 wben tbey are strictly virtuous. "^ It has not been given to us to lie 
 with grac-e, and sin with dignity. We are nothing if not moral. 
 And, doubtless, if a man permits himself to conduct his life on an. 
 animal basis, it is honester in him, it is better for others, for him to 
 appear the beast he is. The dissoluteness of the English officers at 
 Philadelphia and New York, being open and offensive, was not cal- 
 culated to make American youth cast aside the lessons of purity 
 which they had learned in their clean and honorable homes. Dash- 
 ing down Chestnut Street in a curricle, with a brazen hussy by your 
 side, is not as jjretty a feat as carrying on what was styled " an in- 
 trigue," in an elegant house. It was these French officers who 
 infected many American youths, besides Hamilton and Burr anq 
 their young friends, with the most erroneous and pernicious ideatha^ 
 ever deluded youth, — that it is but a trifling, if not a becoming, 
 lapse to be unchaste. 
 
 Jefferson, who had the happy art of getting the good, and letting 
 alone the evil, of whatever he encountered on his way througli life, 
 was strongly drawn to this Marquis de Chastellux, a man of mature 
 age, of some note in literature, a member of the Academy, and full 
 of the peculiar spirit of his class and time. Jefferson had invited 
 him to visit Monticello. On an afternoon in the first week of May, 
 1782, behold the marquis and his three friends — a cavalcade of four 
 gentlemen, six mounted servants, and a led horse — winding up the 
 LittIe.Mount, and coming in sight of the "rather elegant," unfin- 
 ished Italian villa on its summit. I am afraid Mrs. Jefferson saw 
 this brave company dismount with some dismay, for she was not in a 
 condition to entertain strangers. They, however, were well pleased 
 to see a bit of Europe in those western wilds. "Mr. Jefterson," 
 wrote the marquis, "is the first American who has consulted the 
 fine arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather; " 
 which was a sweeping statement, though not far from the truth. 
 Upon entering, he met the master of the house, — ".a man not yet 
 forty, tall, and with a mild and pleasing countenance ; " " an Ameri- 
 can, who, without ever having quitted his own country, is at once a 
 musician, skilled in drawing, a geometrician, an astronomer, a natu- 
 ral philosopher, legislator, and statesman;" "a philosopher in vol- 
 untary retirement from the world and public business," because 
 "the minds of his countrymen are not yet in a condition either to 
 
HOME AFTER THE WAE. 263 
 
 bear the light or to suffer contradiction ; " blessed with " a mild and 
 amiable wife, and charming children of whose education he himself 
 takes charge." Mr. Jefferson, he adds, received his invited guest 
 without any show of cordiality, even with something like coldness ; 
 but, before they had conversed two hours, they were as intimate as 
 if they had passed their whole lives together. During four days 
 the joy of their intercourse never lessened ; for their conversation, 
 " always varied and interesting, was supported by that sweet satis- 
 faction experienced by two persons, who, in communicating their 
 sentiments and opinions, are invariably in unison, and who under- 
 stand one another at the first hint." 
 
 It so chanced that the Frenchman was a lover of Ossian. "I 
 recollect with pleasure," he tells us, "that, as we were conversing 
 one evening over a bowl of punch, after Mrs. Jefferson had retired, 
 our conversation turned on the poems of Ossian, . It was a spark of 
 electricity which passed rapidly from one to the other. We recol- 
 lected the passages in those sublime poems which had particularly 
 struck us, and entertained with them my fellow-travellers, who for- 
 tunately knew English well. In our enthusiasm the book was sent 
 for, and placed near the bowl, where, by their mutual aid, the night 
 advanced imperceptibly upon us. Sometimes natural philosophy, at 
 others politics or the arts, were the topics of our conversation ; for 
 no object had escaped Mr. Jefferson, and it seemed as if from his 
 youth he had placed his mind, as he had done his house, on an ele- 
 vated situation, from which he might contemplate the universe." 
 
 Sometimes he rambled with his guests about the grounds, show- 
 ing them his little herd of deer, a score in number. " He amuses 
 himself by feeding them with Indian com, of which they are very 
 fond, and which they eat out of his hand. I followed him one 
 evening into a deep valley, where they are accustomed to assemble 
 towards the close of the day, and saw them walk, run, and bound ; " 
 but neither guest nor host could decide upon the family to which 
 they belonged. In other branches of natural science the marquis 
 found Mr. Jefferson more proficient, particularly in meteorology- 
 He had made, in conjunction with Professor Madison of William 
 and Mary, a series of observations of the ruling winds at Williams- 
 burg and at Monticello, and discovered, that, while the north-east 
 wind had blown one hundred and twenty-seven times at Willidms- 
 burg, it had blown but thirty-two times at Monticello. The four 
 
264 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 days passed like four minutes, says the marquis. The party of 
 Frenchmen continued their journey towards the Natural Bridge, on 
 land belonging to their host, eighty miles distant. Mr. Jefferson 
 would have gone with them : " but his wife being expected every 
 moment to lie in, as he is as good a husband as he is an excellent 
 philosopher and virtuous citizen, he onlj^ acted as my guide for about 
 sixteen miles, to the passage of the little River Mechinn, where we 
 parted, and, I j)resume to flatter myself, with mutual regret." 
 
 He might flatter himself so far. Mr. Jefferson was extremely 
 pleased with him ; and this was the beginning of that fondness for 
 the French people which he carried with him through the rest of 
 his life. 
 
CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 DEATH OF MRS. JEFFERSON.. 
 
 Before the Marquis deChastellux had been gone from Monticello 
 many hours, the sixth child of Thomas and Martha Jeiferson was 
 born, making the number of their living children three. It was 
 death to the mother. She lingered four months, keeping her 
 husband and all the household in what he termed " dreadful sus- 
 pense." He took his turn with his sister and with her sister in 
 sitting up at night. With his own hands he administered her 
 medicines and her drinks. For four months he was either at her 
 bedside, or at work in a little room near the head of her bed, never 
 beyond call. His eldest daughter, a little girl of ten, but maturer 
 than her years denoted, never lost the vivid recollection of her 
 father's tender assiduity during those months. When the morning 
 of September 6 dawned, it was evident that she had not many hours 
 to live; and all the family gathered round her bed. Thirty years 
 after, six of the female servants of the house enjoyed a kind of hon- 
 orable distinction at Monticello, as " the servants who were in the 
 room when Mrs. Jefferson died, " — such an impression did the scene 
 leave upon the minds 'of the little secluded community. It was a 
 tradition among the slaves, often related by these six eye-witnesses, 
 that the dying lady gave her husband "many directions about many 
 things that she wanted done ; " but that when she came to speak of 
 the children, she could not command herself for some time. At last 
 she said that she could not die content if she thought her children 
 would ever have a step-mother; and her husband, holding her hand, 
 solemnly promised that he would never marry again.* Towards 
 noon, as she was about to breathe her last, his feelings became 
 
 * Jefferson at Monticello, p. 106. 
 
 265 
 
266 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 uncontrollable. He almost lost his senses. His sister, Mrs. Carr, 
 led liim staggering from the room into his library, where he fainted, 
 and remained so long insensible that the family began to fear that 
 he, too, had passed away. They brought in a pallet, and lifted 
 him upon it. lie revived only to a sense of immeasurable woe. 
 Plis daughter Martha, who was to be the solace of all his future 
 years, ventured into the room at night; and even then, such was 
 the violence of his grief, that she was amazed and confounded. 
 For three weeks he remained in that apartment, attended day and 
 night by this littla child. He walked, as she related, almost inces- 
 santly, all day and all night, only lying down now and then, when 
 he was utterly exhausted, upon the pallet that had been hurriedly 
 brought while he lay in his fainting fit. When at last he left the 
 house, he would ride on horseback hours and hours, roaming about 
 in the mountain roads, in the dense woods, along the paths least 
 frequented, accompanied only by his daughter, — "a solitary wit- 
 ness," she says, " to many a violent burst of grief, the remembrance 
 of which has consecrated particular scenes beyond the power of time 
 to obliterate." 
 
 So passed some weeks. He fell into what he called " a stupor of 
 mind," from which the daily round of domestic duties could not 
 rouse him. Meanwhile the intelligence of his loss reached Congress, 
 then in session at Philadelphia, waiting with extreme solicitude the 
 issue of the negotiations for peace at Paris. Six months had already 
 passed since the negotiations had been begun, during the last three 
 of which Dr. Pranklin had been laid aside by an attack of his 
 disease, leaving the chief burden to be borne by Mr. Jay alone. It 
 now occurred to the Virginia members, that, as the causes of Mr. 
 Jefferson's previous declining to cross the sea were removed, he 
 might be willing to join the commission to treat for peace. He was 
 at once elected a plenipotentiary by a unanimous vote, and, as 
 Madison reports, "without a single adverse remark." The news of 
 his election reached him November 25, 1782, eleven weeks after the 
 deatli of his wife, when he had gone with his troop of children, — 
 daughters, nephews, and nieces, nine in all, — to a secluded estate 
 in Chesterfield County to have them inoculated. 
 
 It was like a trumpet-call to a war-horse standing listless under a 
 tree in the pasture, after a rest from the exhaustion and wounds of 
 a campaign. He accepted instantly. He flew to his long-neglected 
 
DEATH OF MES. JEFEEESON. 267 
 
 desk to write the necessary letters, and to bring up the arrears in 
 his correspondence ; for the French minister had offered him a pas- 
 sage in a man-of-war which was to sail from Baltimore in three 
 weeks, and in that vessel his beloved Marquis de Chastelluxwas also 
 to cross the ocean! Enchanting prospect! But*there is many a 
 slip 'twixt the cup and the lip. When he reached the port, after 
 many delays, it was only to discover that the enemy's fleet blocked 
 the pathway to the sea; and before the admiral saw a chance to 
 elude them came the ecstatic news that the preliminaries had been 
 signed, and there was no need of his going. So he wrote to Mr. 
 Jay to give up the lodgings in Paris which he had requested him 
 to engage ; and in May, 1783, he was at home once mors. 
 
CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 IN CONGRESS AT ANNAPOLIS. 
 
 BiTT the spell was broken. He had shown himself willing to serve 
 the public. Nest month the legislature elected him a member of 
 Congress ; and in November, 1783, we find him at Annapolis ready 
 to take his seat, after having left his eldest daughter at school in 
 Philadelphia. 
 
 In the universal languor which followed the mighty effort of 1781, 
 it was hard to get twenty-five members together; but Jefferson 
 found them brimful of the spirit of disputation ; for Arthur Lee was 
 a member, the most disputatious man of whom history condescends 
 to make mention. Caught in a shower in London, he sought the 
 shelter of a shed, when a gentleman ventured the civil remark that 
 it rained very hard. " It rains hard, sir," said Lee, " but I doubt 
 whether you can say it rains very hard." One such person would 
 suffice to set any twenty men by the ears. Days were wasted in 
 the most trivial and needless debates, during Avhich the good-tem- 
 pered Jefferson sat silent and tranquil. A member asked him one 
 day, how he could listen to so much false reasoning, which a word 
 would refute, and not utter\hat word. " To refute,*' said he, " is easj' ; 
 to silence, impossible." He added, that, in measures brought forward 
 by himself, he took, as was proper, the laboring oar; but, in general, 
 he was willing to play the part of a listener, content to follow the 
 example of Washington and Franklin, who were seldom on their 
 feet more than ten minutes, and yet rarely spoke but to convince. 
 Despite the copious flow of words, many memorable things were 
 done by this Congress; and though Jefferson sat in it but five 
 months, his name is imperish ably linked with some of its most inter- 
 esting measures. It is evident that he often took "the laboring 
 oar." Twice during the sickness of the president, he was elected 
 268 
 
IN CONGRESS AT ANNAPOLIS. 269 
 
 cliairman of the body ; and his name stands at the head of every 
 committee of much importance. 
 
 He it was, who, as chairman of the committee of arrangements, 
 wrote the much-embracing address with which the President of Con- 
 gress received General Washington's resignation of his commission. 
 He assisted in arranging the details of that affecting and immortal 
 scene. The spectacle presented in the chamber at Annapolis im- 
 pressed mankind ; and the two addresses winged their way round the 
 world, affording " a lesson useful to those who inflict and to those 
 who feel oppression." As a member of this Congress, Thomas Jef- 
 ferson, with four other signers of the Declaration of Independence, 
 namely, Eoger Sherman, Elbridge Gerry, Robert Morris, and William 
 Eller}^, signed the treaty of peace which acknowledged the inde- 
 pendence of the United States. 
 
 A currency for the new nation, to take the place of the chaos of 
 coins and values which had plagued the colonies from an early day, 
 was among the subjects considered at this session. Jefferson, chair- 
 man of the committee to which the matter was referred, assisted to 
 give us the best currency ever contrived by man, — a currency so 
 convenient, that, one after another, every nation on earth will adopt 
 it. Two years before Gouverneur Morris, a clerk in the oflSce of his 
 uncle, Robert Morris, had cODceived the most happy idea of applying 
 the decimal system to the notation of money. But it always re- 
 quires several men to complete one great thing. The details of the 
 system devised by Gouverneur Morris were so cumbrous and awk- 
 ward as almost to neutralize the simplicity of the leading idea. 
 Jefferson rescued the fine original conception by proposing our pres- 
 ent system of dollars and cents ; the dollar to be the unit and the 
 largest silver coin. He recommended also a great gold coin of ten 
 dollars value, a silver coin of the value of one-tenth of a dollar, and 
 a copper coin of the value of one-hundredth of a dollar. He sug- 
 gested three other coins for the convenience of making change, — a 
 silver half-dollar, a silver double-tenth, and a copper twentieth. It 
 remained only to invent easy names for these coins, which was done 
 in due time. 
 
 This perfect currency was not adopted without much labor and 
 vigorous persistence on the part of Jefferson, both in and out of 
 Congress. His views prevailed over those of Robert Morris, the first 
 name in America at that time in matters of finance. 'Jefferson 
 
270 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 desired to apply the decimal system to all measures ; and this, doubt- 
 less, will one day be done! " I use," he tells us, " when I travel, an 
 odometer, which divides the miles into cents, and I find every one 
 comprehends a distance readily when stated to him in miles and 
 cents ; so he would in feet and cents, pounds and cents." 
 
 Jefferson struck another blow at slavery this winter, which again 
 his Southern colleagues warded off. The cession by Vii-ginia of her 
 vast domain in the north-west, out of which several States have been 
 formed, was accepted by this Congress ; and it was Mr. Jefferson 
 who drew the plan for its temporary government. He inserted a 
 clause abolishing slavery " after the year 1800 of the Christian era." 
 In a Congress of twenty-three members, only seven voted no; but, as 
 a measure could only be adopted by a majority of States, these suf- 
 ficed to defeat it. Every member from a Northern State voted for it, 
 and every Southern member except two against it. 
 
 In this ordinance, Jefferson assigned names to various portions of 
 the territory. If his names had held, we should to-day read upon 
 the map of the United States, Sylvania, Michigania, Cherronesus, 
 Assenisipia, Metropotamia, Illiuoia, Saratoga, Polypotamia, Pelispia, 
 instead of the present names of the States west and north-west of 
 Virginia. We have improved upon his names. Ohio is better than 
 Pelispia ; and the least agreeable of the present names is not so bad 
 as Assenisipia. 
 
 Absorbed as he was in these public duties, he could not forget the 
 desolation of his home ; and he seems to have thought of returning 
 to Mouticello with some degree of dread. But when the strongest 
 tie is severed, others grow stronger. He had another dream of the 
 future now, suggested by his young friend, James Monroe, talk- 
 ing of buying a farm near Monticello with a view to settle there. 
 His three most congenial and beloved friends at this time were 
 James Madison, James Monroe, and William Short. We might 
 almost style them his disciples ; for they had been educated under his 
 influence or guidance, and were curiously in accord with him on 
 questions moral and political. Why, he asked, could not they all 
 live near one another in Albemarle, and pass their days in study 
 and contemplation, a band of brothers and philosophers ? Madison, 
 just disappointed in love, which kept him a bachelor for many a 
 year, had gone home to his father's house in Orange, where he sought 
 relief in the most intense and unremitting study. Who was better 
 
IN CONGRESS AT ANNAPOLIS. 271 
 
 fitted to console him than Jeffereon, who had had a similar experi- 
 ence in his tender youth ? Jefferson did his best, and begged him 
 to ride over to Monticello as often as he chose, and regard the library- 
 there as his own. And more, "Monroe is buying land almost 
 adjoining me. Short will do the same. What would I not give if 
 you could fall into the circle. With such a society, I could once 
 more venture home, and lay myself up for the residue of life, quitting 
 all its contentions, which daily grow more and more insupportable." 
 
 There was a little farm two miles from Monticello, of a hundred 
 and forty acres of good land, with a small, old, indifferent house 
 upon it, that would just do, Jefferson thought, for a republican and 
 a philosopher ; for it was just such an establishment as his beloved 
 friend, Dabney Carr, had been so happy in. It could be bought for 
 two hundred and fifty pounds. " Think of it," he urged. ■'' To ren- 
 der it practicable only requires you to think so." !^Iadison, all un- 
 suspicious of the different career in store for himself and his three 
 friends, replied that he could neither accept nor renounce the capti- 
 vating scheme. He could not then change his abode ; but, in a few 
 years, he thought he might make one of the circle proposed. The 
 large estates of his father required his attention and presence. Mon- 
 roe alone settled in the neighborhood, though Madison lived all his 
 life within a day's ride. 
 
 With General Washington, too, we find Mr. Jefferson in close 
 relations during the spring of 1784. They agreed in deploring the 
 weakness, the utter insufficiency, of the central power, and in think- 
 ing tliere must be something besides Congress, if only a committee 
 of members to remain at the seat of government during the absence 
 of the main body. The country was feeling its way to a constitu- 
 tion. Independence had been won, but a nation had not yet been 
 created. It was just after receiving General Washington's concur- 
 rence, that Jefferson brought forward his proposition to divide the 
 work of Congress into legislative and executive, and to intrust the 
 executive functions to a permanent committee of one from each 
 State. This was the first attempt towards a government ; and its 
 failure, as Mr. Jefferson records, was speedy and complete. A com- 
 mittee of thirteen was only a more disputatious and unmanageable 
 Congress. The committee being appointed. Congress adjourned, 
 leaving it the supreme power of the continent ; but they "quarrelled 
 very soon," split into two parties, abandoned their post, and left the 
 
272 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 government without any visible head until the next meeting of 
 Congress. Jefferson remarks that many attributed their disruption 
 to the disputatious propensity of certain men ; but the wise, to the 
 nature of man. The failure of the executive committee had its 
 effect in preparing the wa}'' for the convention of 1787. 
 
 On another point Jefferson and Washington were in full accord 
 this winter. For more than ten years the general had been 
 warmly interested in connecting the great system of western waters 
 with the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Potomac River. Besides 
 public reasons, General Washington had a private one for favoring 
 this scheme. He owned a superb tract of land on the Ohio, which 
 was dearer to his pride than important to his fortune ; for he had 
 won it by his valor and conduct in the defence of his native land in 
 the French War. If the Potomac were but rendered navigable back 
 to the mountains, and then connected with the nearest branch of the 
 Ohio by a canal, this fine western estate would be advantageously 
 accessible. The general was deep in the scheme when he was 
 elected to take command of the army in 1775, and resumed it as soon 
 as he was released in 1783 ; and he now pursued it with the more 
 zeal for a new reason. He had become acquainted during the war 
 with the pushing energy of the people of New York. He had pro- 
 phetic intimations of the Erie Canal. In March, 1784, when De 
 Witt Clinton was a school-boy of fifteen. General Washington, the 
 father of our internal-improvement system, wrote thus to Thomas 
 Jefferson, " With you, I am satisfied that not a moment ought to 
 be lost in recommencing this business, as I know the Yorkers will 
 delay no time to remove every obstacle in the way of the other com- 
 munication, so soon as the posts of Oswego and Niagara are surren- 
 dered ; and I shall be mistaken if they do not build vessels for the 
 navigation of the lakes, which will supersede the necessity of coast- 
 ing." Any one familiar with the magnificent line of cities created 
 by the Erie Canal, and with the harbors of Buffalo, Toledo, Oswego, 
 and Chicago, finds it difficult to realize that this sentence was 
 written less than ninety years ago. 
 
 The general had acquired in some way a strong conviction of the 
 resistless enterprise of the New Yorkers. He returns to the subject 
 in a letter to Benjamin Harrison. "No person," he says, "that 
 knows the temper, genius, and policy of those people as well as I 
 do, can hurbor the smallest doubt of their connecting New York and 
 
IN CONGEESS AT ANNAPOLIS. 273 
 
 the lakes by a canal. It is curious these same Kew Yorkers, 
 in 1874, after having dug, enlarged, and superseded their own canal, 
 should be carrying out Washington's idea in a way he never 
 dreamed of, by completing the railroad from Richmond to the Ohio. 
 Such is the "temper, genius, and policy of those people." 
 
 A topic of the deepest interest at this time was the Societ}'' of the 
 Cincinnati, the first annual meeting of which was to occur in May. 
 Members of Congress, not of the order, viewed it with extreme dis- 
 approval, and were resolved, as Jefferson reports, " to give silent 
 preferences to those who were not of the fraternit}'," in the bestowal 
 of office. It was not in human nature for such men as Henry, 
 Madison, Jefferson, Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, and John 
 Page, to regard with favor an institution designed to perpetuate the 
 distinctions of the war, even to remote generations; an institution 
 that would give a valuable advantage to the posterity of a raw lieu- 
 tenant of one campaign over the offspring of the most illustrious 
 sages of the civil service. Besides, the events of the last eighteen 
 years had implanted in the minds of reflecting Americans a dread 
 and horror of the hereditary principle, to which the recent bloody 
 disruption of the British Empire was due. General Washington, 
 who was to preside at the coming assembly, was troubled and 
 anxious at the growing opposition. He ashed Jefferson's opinion. 
 Jefferson was utterly opposed to the order, and said so in a long and 
 ingenious letter to the general ; and when Washington passed 
 through Annapolis, a few weeks after, on his way to the meeting, he 
 called on Jefferson to talk the matter over with him. 
 
 They sat together alone at Jefferson's lodgings from eight o'clock 
 in the evening until midnight. They agreed that the object of the 
 officers in founding the society was to preserve the friendships of the 
 war by renewing their intercourse once a year. Nothing more 
 innocent than the motive. But they agreed, also, that there was 
 great danger of the order degenerating into an hereditary aristoc- 
 racy ; and, meanwhile, it was odious to the great body of civilians. 
 In the course of the conversation Jefferson suggested, that, if the 
 hereditary quality were suppressed, there would be no harm in the 
 officers who had actually served coming together in a social way 
 now and then. "No," said the general, "not a fibre of it ouglit to 
 be left, to be an eyesore to the public, a ground of dissatisfaction, 
 and a line of separation between thena and their country." 
 18 
 
274 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 The general resiunGcl liis journe}*, fully resolved to use his influ- 
 ence with the members of the order to induce them to disband. He 
 tried his best. Most of the old officers came into liis views at length, 
 and he thought he had secured a majority against going on ; but 
 just then arrived from France Major I'lnfant, as Jefferson tells us, 
 "with a bundle of eagles for which he liad been sent there, with 
 letters from the French officers who had served in America praying 
 for admission into the order, and a solemn act of their king permit- 
 ting them to wear its ensign." All was changed in a moment. 
 Such was the revulsion of feeling, that the general could only 
 obtain the suppression of the hereditary principle; which, however, 
 sufficed to render the order as unobjectionable as the societies of simi- 
 lar nature which were formed after the late war. ) 
 
 Jefferson had a new pleasure during this session, that of writing 
 to his daughter Martha in Philadelphia. No one who has ever 
 loved a child can read his letters to his children without emotion ; 
 least of all, those written while the anguish of their irrej)arable loss 
 was still recent. It is difficult to quote them, because' nearly every 
 sentence is so lovelj'^ and wise, that we know not what to select. 
 Imagine all that the tenderest and most thoughtful father could 
 wish for the most engaging child. But the burden of his song was, 
 that goodness is the greatest treasure of human beings. " If you 
 love me," he says, " strive to be good under every situation, and to 
 all livincf creatures, and to acquire those accomplishments which I 
 have put in your power." A curious trait of. the times is this : " It\ 
 produces great praise to a lady to spell well."/ Happy would it be for 
 those benefactors of our race, the wise and faithful teachers of the 
 young, if ever}'' parent would use such words as these in writing to 
 his children at school : " Consider the good lady who has taken you 
 under her roof, who has undertaken to see that you perform all your 
 exercises, and to admonish you in all those wanderings from what is 
 right, and what is clever, to which your inexperience would expose 
 you; consider her, I say, aa your mother, as the only person to 
 whom, since the loss with which Heaven has been pleased to afflict 
 you, you can now look up ; and that her displeasure or disapproba- 
 tion, on any occasion, would be an immense misfortune, which, 
 should you be so unhappj^ as to incur by any unguarded act, think 
 no concession too much to regain her good-will." 
 
 The session drew to great length. When pressing domestic 
 
IN CONGEESS AT ANNAPOLIS. 275 
 
 measures had been disposed of, Congress turned its attention to 
 foreign aifairs ; and this led to an important change in the career 
 of Jefferson. " I have been thrown back," he wrote to General 
 Washington, April 16, 1784, " on a stage where I had never more 
 thought to appear. It is but for a time, however, and as a daj^- 
 laborer, free to withdraw, or be withdrawn, at will." Three weeks 
 after these words were written. Congress found a piece of work for 
 this day-laborer to do. 
 
 It was the golden age of " protection." All interests were pro- 
 tected then, except the interests of human nature ; and every right 
 was enforced, except the rights of man. British commerce and 
 manufactures, since Charles II., had been so rigorously protected, 
 that, when a member of Parliament moved that Americans should 
 be compelled to send their horses to England to be shod, there was 
 room for doubt whether he was in jest or earnest. James Otis 
 believed he spoke ironically ; only believed ! But there was no 
 doubt of the seriousness of the parliamentary orator who avowed 
 the opinion that " not a hobnail should be made in America ; " nor 
 of the binding force of the law which made it penal for an Ameri- 
 can to carry a fleece of wool across a creek in a canoe. John 
 Adams, looking back in his old age upon the studies of his early 
 professional life, declared, that, as a young lawyer, he never turned 
 over the leaves of the British statutes regulating American trade 
 " without pronouncing a hearty curse upon them." He felt them 
 " as a humiliation, a degradation, a disgrace," to his country, and to 
 himself as a native of it. 
 
 One consequence of this fierce protection was, that America was 
 not on trading terms with the nations of the earth ; and Congress 
 felt that one of its most important duties, after securing indepen- 
 dence, was to propose to each of them a treaty of commerce. With 
 France, Holland, and Sweden, such treaties had already been nego- 
 tiated ; but Congress desired commercial intercourse, " on the 
 footing of the most favored nation," with Great Britain, Hamburg, 
 Saxony, Prussia, Denmark, Russia, Austrja, Venice, - Rome, Naples, 
 Tuscany, Sardinia, Genoa, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Algiers, Tripoli, 
 Tunis, and Morocco. Congress wielded sovereign power ; a nation 
 was coming into existence ; and the conclusion of treaties was at 
 once a dignified way of asserting those not sufficiently obvious 
 truths, and a convenient mode of getting them acknowledged by 
 
276 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 other nations. Congress, as Jefferson confesses, though it would 
 not condescend to ask recognition from any of the powers, yet " we 
 are not unwilling to furnish opportunities for receiving their friend- 
 ly salutations and welcome." 
 
 Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams, who still represented Congress in 
 Europe, were not supposed to be equal to so much hibor. May 7, 
 1784, Congress agreed to add a third plenipotentiary to aid them in 
 negotiating commercial treaties ; and their choice for this office fell 
 upon Thomas Jefferson. The appointment was for two j^ears, at the 
 reduced salary of nine thousand dolkirs a year. He accepted the 
 post ; and, expecting to be absent only two j'ears, he determined to 
 spare himself a laborious journey home, and the re-opening of a 
 healing wound, by going direct from Annapolis northward "in quest 
 of a passage." This he could do the easier, since, as he records, "I 
 asked an advance of six months' salary, that I might be in cash to 
 meet the first expenses ; which was ordered." I£is two younger 
 children were in safe hands at home ; and his eldest daughter he 
 w^ould take with him, and place at school in Paris. His nephews he 
 left to the guardianship of James Madison, to whom, on the day 
 after his election, he wrote in an affecting strain ; — 
 
 " I have a tender legacy to leave you on my departure. I will 
 not say it is the son of my sister, though her worth would justify it 
 on that ground ; but it is the son of my friend, the dearest friend 
 I knew, who, had fate reversed our lots, would have been a father to 
 my children. He is a boy of fine dispositions, and of sound, mascu- 
 line talents. I was his preceptor myself as long as I staid at 
 home ; and, when I came away, I placed him with Mr. IVfaury. 
 There is a younger one, just now in his Latin rudiments. If I did 
 not fear to overcharge you, I would request you to recommend a 
 school for him." 
 
 Mr. Madison fulfilled this trust with affectionate care, and kept 
 his friend informed of the progress of his nephews during his long 
 absence. 
 
CHAPTER XXXIL 
 
 ENVOY TO FRANCE. 
 
 Mat 11, four days after his election, the plenipotentiary left 
 Annapolis for Philadelphia, a four d:iys' journey then ; and, while his 
 daughter was getting ready for her departure, he improved the oppor- 
 tunity to collect precise and full information respecting the com- 
 merce of the port ; for was he not going to Europe on commercial 
 business? One of the toasts given in 1784, at the May-day festi- 
 val of the St. Tammany Society of Philadelphia, which he probably 
 read in the newspapers during his stay, gave him a hint of what 
 was desired, " Free-trade in American Bottoms." Pleasing dream ! 
 Many a year must yet j^ass before it comes true. It was a buoyant, 
 I expectant time, when Mr. Jefferson made this sea-board journey. 
 The refuse of the war was clearing away, and new projects were in 
 the air. It was while Jefferson was in Philadelphia on this occasion, 
 that some ingenious contriver managed to extract from the deep 
 mud of the bottom of the Delaware those chevaux-de-frise which 
 Dr. Eranklin had placed there nine years before to keep out the 
 British fleet, to the sore obstruction of the navigation ever since. 
 It was an " Herculean task," said the newspapers, requiring " vast 
 apparatus;" but up came the biggest cheval of them all at the 
 first yank of the mighty engine. 
 
 But this was a small matter compared with the project for an 
 " air-biijloon " of silk, sixty feet high, also announced while Jeffer- 
 son was in Philadelphia, to be paid for by private subscriptions. 
 Philadelphia, too, should behold the new wonder of the world, de- 
 scribed at great length in a Paris volume lately received from Dr. 
 Eranklin. Gentlemen were invited to send their money, and phi- 
 losophers their advice, to the committee having the scheme in 
 charge. The glowing prospectus issued by the committee may have 
 
 27Y 
 
278 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 drawn a guinea and a smile from Jefferson. " Is it not probable," 
 asked these sanguine gentlemen, " tliat those who sometimes travel 
 through the parched and sandy deserts of Arabia, where there is 
 danger of perishing for want of water, or of being buried under 
 mountains of sand suddenly raised by whirling eddies of wind, as 
 hath too often been the case, would prefer a vo^'age by means of an 
 air-balloon to any other known method of conveyance ? In places 
 where the plague may suddenly appear, it is capable, when im- 
 proved, of rescuing those from danger who happen to be travelling 
 through that region without any other means of making their escape. 
 It may perform the same service to such as are suddenly surprised 
 by unexpected sieges, and to whom no other means of safety may be 
 left." " Quick advices may be given of intended invasions ; " and, 
 in short, war rendered so little destructive, that no one will think it 
 worth while to resort- to that " unchristian mode of arbitrating dis- 
 putes." Then, " by means of these balloons, the utmost despatch 
 may be given to express-boats," which they will both lift and draw. 
 They were expected also to enable philosophers to push their dis- 
 coveries into the upper regions of the air, to ascertain " the causes 
 of hail and snow," and " make further improvements in thermome- 
 ters, barometers, hygrometers, in astronomy and electricity." This 
 programme of blessings did not tempt the guineas fast enough, 
 until the committee added personal solicitation; and when, at last, 
 the balloon ascended, they were obliged to charge two dollars for the 
 best places in the ampliitheatre. 
 
 It was a simple, credulous world, then, full of curiosity respecting 
 the truths which science was beginning to disclose. Tliis balloon 
 prospectus, with its betrayals of ignorance, credulity, and curiosity, 
 was perfectly characteristic of the period. I am not sure that 
 Franklin and Jefferson would have deemed it so venj absurd, though 
 Franklin might have thought it improbable that a traveller caught 
 by an unexpected siege would have a balloon in his trunk. Frank- 
 lin had high hopes of the balloon. " Of what use is this discovery 
 which makes so much noise ? " some one asked him, soon after the 
 first ascension in Paris. " Of what use is a new-born child ? " was 
 his reply. '^ ^ 
 
 In quest of a passage to France, the plenipotentiary, his daughter, 
 and William Short, whom he was so happy as to have for a secretary, 
 left Philadelphia near the end of May, and went to New York. 
 
ENVOY TO FRANCE. 279 
 
 The monthly Ha\Te packet, La Sj'^lphe, had been gone ten days. 
 After a few days' stay in New York, where he continued his com- 
 mercial studies, the party resumed their " quest," travelling eastward 
 from port to port in the leisurely manner of the time. At New 
 Haven, could he fail to pause a day or two to view a college so dis- 
 tinguished as Yale, and converse with the president and professors, 
 and promise to send them from Europe some account of the new dis- 
 coveries and the new books ? The newspapers, silent as to his stay 
 in Philadelphia and New York, chronicle the arrival of His Excellency 
 at New Haven on the 7th of June, and his departure for Boston on 
 the 9th. At Boston the travellers met another disappointment, 
 peculiarly aggravating. A good ship was within thirty-six hours 
 of sailing, in which Mrs. Adams was going to join her husband ; 
 and she would have been as agreeable a companion to the father 
 as a kind protector to the daughter. But, in those clays, passengers 
 had to lay in stores of various kinds, and make extensive prepara- 
 tions for a voyage, which could not be done in so short a time, even 
 if the plenipotentiary had regarded his commercial information as 
 complete. Mrs. Adams sailed without them ; but, while Jefferson 
 was thinking of returning in all haste to New "iork to catch the 
 next French packet, he heard of a Boston ship loading for London, 
 that would, it was thought, put him ashore on the French coast. It 
 proved to be the ship Ceres, belonging to Nathaniel Tracy, one of 
 the great merchants of New England, who was going in her him- 
 self, and would land the party at Portsmouth, after having passed 
 the whole voj'^age in communicating commercial knowledge to Mr. 
 Jefferson. Nothing could have been more fortunate. 
 
 Boston gave the Virginian a courteous ajid warm reception on this 
 occasion. A chair in the chamber of the Massachusetts House of 
 Representatives was assigned to "His Excellency, Thomas Jefferson, 
 late governor of Virginia, and now one of the commissioners_ for 
 negotiating treaties ; " and " no small part of my time," as he wrote 
 to Elbridge Gerry, " has been occupied by the hospitality and civilities 
 of this place, which I have experienced m the highest degree." ]\Ir. 
 Gerry not reaching home in time to see him off, Jefferson left for 
 him a present, not common then, which he was rather fond of giv- 
 ing, a portable writing-desk. To add to his knowledge of business, 
 he made an excursion along the coast to Salem, Newburyport, Ports- 
 mouth, towns beginning already to feel the impulse towards the 
 
280 LIFE OP TH05IAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 remoter commerce which was to enrich them. -Harvard, noted from 
 of ohl for a certain proclivity towards science, had at this time, in Dr. 
 Willard, a president who was particularly interested in scientific 
 discovery. Jefferson made his acquaintance now, became his corre- 
 spondent, and thus kept the college informed of the progress of 
 knowledge. 
 
 The Fourth of July was Sunday this year. There was the usual cele- 
 bration on Monday ; but it was on that day the Ceres sailed, bear- 
 ing away the author of the Declaration of Independence. So far as 
 we know, Jefferson was not yet known to the public as the writer of 
 that document. About the time in the morning of July 5 when 
 the Declaration was read in Faneuil Hall, the Ceres spread her 
 sails, and glided out into the ocean between the emerald isles that 
 form Boston Harbor. They had a splendid passage, — nineteen days 
 from shore to shore, three days dead calm and codfishing on the 
 Banks, only six passengers, and every thing delightful. Thirty- 
 two days after leaving Boston, the plenipotentiary was at a hotel in 
 Paris, while a house was making ready for him. He was at once a 
 familiar member of the easy, happy circle of able men and amiable 
 women who assembled at Dr. Franklin's pleasant abode in the subur- 
 ban village of Passy. 
 
 The aged philosopher could not but smile at the mountain of new 
 duties which Congress had imposed upon him, instead of the permis- 
 sion to return home for which he had applied. It so chanced that 
 he was writing to Mr. Adams upon the subject on the very day of 
 Jefferson's arrival in Paris ; and he discussed it with that sly humor 
 with which he knew how to parry and return every disagreeable 
 stroke : " You will see that a good deal of business is cut out for us, 
 — treaties to be made with, I think, twenty powers, in two years, — 
 so that we are not likely to eat the bread of idleness ; and, that we 
 may not eat too much, our masters have diminished our allowance " 
 (from $11,000 to $9,000 per annum). ''I commend their econ- 
 omy, and shall imitate it by diminishing my expense.) Our too 
 liberal entertainment of our countrymen here has been reported at 
 home by our guests, to our disadvantage, and has given offence. 
 They must be contented for the future, as I am, with plain beef and 
 pudding. The readers of Connecticut newspapers ought not to be 
 troubled with any more accounts of our extravagance. For my own 
 part, if I could sit down to dinner on a piece of their excellent salt 
 
ENVOY TO FRANCE. 281 
 
 pork and pumpkin, I would not give a fartliing for all the luxuries 
 of Paris." 
 
 In three weeks Mr. Adams arrived ; and the three plenipotentiaries 
 held their first meeting at Dr. Franklin's house, agreeing to meet 
 there every day until the business was concluded. Besides announ- 
 cing their mission to various ambassadors, thej^ did nothing during 
 the first month except prepare the draught of a treaty such as they 
 would be willing to sign. What an amiable, harmless, useless docu- 
 ment it seems ! But it was the first serious attempt ever made to 
 conduct the intercourse of nations on Christian principles ; and it 
 was made by three men to whom Arrogance has sometimes denied 
 the name of Christians ! Many of its twenty-seven articles were 
 nothing but the formal concession of the natural right of a man to 
 go, come, stay, buy, and sell, according to his own interest and pleas- 
 ure, subject only to the laws of the country in which he may be. 
 One article provided that shipwrecked mariners should not be plun- 
 dered ; and another, that "when the subjects or citizens of the one 
 party shall die within the jurisdiction of the other, their bodies shall 
 be buried in the usual burying-grounds, or other decent and suitable 
 places, and shall be protected from violence and disturbance." What 
 a tale of savage intolerance is told by the mere proposal of such an 
 article ! 
 
 It was into the latter half of the treaty that the three representa- 
 tives of» the United States put most of their hearts. Their great 
 object was to confine the evils of war, as much as possible, to belli- 
 gerents. They desired to have war conducted in the manner of a 
 play-ground fight, where a ring is formed, and no one is hit but the 
 combatants, and they are prevented from striking a foul blow. Xo 
 j)rivateering. No confiscation of neutral property. No molestation 
 of fishermen, farmers, or other noncombatants. ITo ravaging an 
 enemy's coasts. No seizure of vessels or other property for the pur- 
 poses of war. No crowding of prisoners of war into unwholesome 
 j)laces. Article XVII. was wonderful for its advanced magnanim- 
 \ty : "If the citizens or subjects of either party, in danger from 
 tempests, pirates, or other accidents, shall take refuge with their 
 vessels or eftects within the harbors or jurisdiction of the other, they 
 shall be received, protected, and treated with humanity and kind- 
 ness, and shall be permitted to furnish tliemselves, at reasonable 
 prices, with all refreshments, provisions, and other things necessary 
 
282 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 for their subsistence, liealtli, and accommodation, and for the repair of 
 their vessels." Such was the treaty drawn by throe early Christians 
 in Dr. Franklin's house at Passy in 1784. It marks "a new era 
 in negotiation," wrote General Washington when he read it; and 
 he regarded it always as the most original and liberal treaty ever 
 negotiated. 
 
 When tliey had finished their draught, and when, as I suppose, the 
 doctor had caused a few copies to be struck off on the little printing- 
 press wliich he kept in his house for such odd jobs, they sought a 
 conference with that worthy, but extremely unsentimental minister 
 for foreign affairs, the Count de Vergennes, and asked him how they 
 had better proceed in order to coiciliate the twenty powers (includ- 
 ing Algiers, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli), and dispose them to con- 
 clude such a treaty with the Honorable Congress. I wish we had 
 some account of thQ interview. We only know, from- Jefferson's too 
 brief report, that the astute old diplomatist did not attach much im- 
 portance to the labors of the commissioners. He evidently thought 
 that Congress, in sending Jefferson to Europe on this errand, had 
 performed a superfluous work, and that the proposal of such a treaty 
 to the Dey of Algiers, or to the personage styled in the instructions 
 of the commissioners " the high, glorious, mighty, and most noble 
 Prince, King, and Emperor of the Kingdom of Fez, Morocco, Taffi- 
 lete, Sus, and the whole Algasbe, and the territories thereof," would 
 be a diplomatic absurdity. He thought it better, and the 'commis- 
 sioners came into the same opinion, " to leave to legislative regula- 
 tion, on both sides, such modifications of our commercial intercourse 
 as would voluntarily flow from amicable dispositions." 
 
 The commissioners did, nevertheless, fulfil their instructions by 
 "sounding " the several ambassadors resident at Paris, most of whom 
 forwarded copies of the draught to their courts. At that moment there 
 was in Europe but one intelligent man upon a throne, — '' old Fred- 
 erick of Prussia," as Jefierson styles him, who "met us cordially 
 and without hesitation ; " and with him the treaty, with unimpor- 
 tant changes, was concluded. Denmark and Tuscany also entered 
 into negotiations. The other powers appeared soinditFerent, that the 
 commissioners could not, consistently with self-respect, press the 
 matter. " They seemed, in fact," says Jefferson, " to know little 
 about us, except as rebels who had been successful in throwing off 
 the yoke of the mother country. They were ignorant of our com- 
 
ENVOY TO FEANCE. 283 
 
 merce, wliicli had always been monopolized by England, and of the 
 exchange of articles it might offer advantageously to both parties." 
 In short, the commission to negotiate commercial tx'eaties had but one 
 important result, namely, the composition of the draught of the treaty, 
 and its preservation in the Diplomatic Correspondence of the United 
 States, against the time when the nations shall want it. It seems a 
 mockery of noble endeavor that such a draught should have been 
 placed on record on the eve of wars which desolated Europe for 
 twenty years, during which every principle of humanity and right 
 was ruthlessly trampled under foot. Napoleon Bonaparte was a 
 youth of sixteen when the commissioners completed it. The treaty 
 to this day remains only an'admonition and a prophecy. 
 
 Nine months passed. On the 2d of May, 1785, the youngest of 
 the commissioners received from Mr. Jay, secretary for the foreign 
 affairs of Congress, a document of much interest, to him, signed by 
 the President of Congress, Richard Henry Lee : — 
 
 " The United States of America in Congress assembled, to our trusty 
 and loell-beloved Thomas Jefferson, Esq., send greeting : — 
 
 " We, reposing special trust and confidence in your integrity, pru- 
 dence, and ability, have nominated, constituted, and appointed, and 
 by these presents do nominate, constitute, and appoint you, the said 
 Thomas Jefferson, our Minister Plenipotentiary to reside at the court 
 of his most Christian Majesty; and do give you full power and 
 authority there to represent and do and perform all such matters 
 and things as to the said place or office doth appertain, or as may by 
 our instructions be given unto you in charge. This commission to 
 continue in force for the space of three years from this day (March 
 10, 1785), unless sooner revoked." 
 
 This honorable charge Jefferson gratefully and gladly accepted. 
 "You replace Dr. Franklin," said the Count de Vergennes to him, 
 when he went to announce his appointment. " I succeed ; no one 
 can replace him," was Jefferson's reply. He witnessed the memo- 
 rable scene of Dr. Franklin's departure from Passy, on the 12th of 
 July. All the neighborhood, and a great number of friends from 
 Paris, gathered to bid the noble old man farewell. The king could 
 not have been treated with an homage more profound or more sincere. 
 Indeed, it was often remarked at the time, that only the young king 
 
284 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 was ever greeted by the people of Paris so warmly as Franklin. 
 The queen, mindful of his age and infirmities, had sent her own 
 travelling-litter, a kind of Sedan chair carried between two mules, 
 to convey him to Havre. At four o'clock on that summer afternoon, 
 he was assisted into this strange vehicle, and began his long, slow 
 journey, followed by the heartfelt benedictions of friends and neigh- 
 bors. " It seemed," wrote Jefferson, " as if the village had lost its 
 patriarch." 
 
CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 
 FIRST IMPRESSIOXS OF EUROPE. 
 
 The United States has contributed to tlie diplomatic circles of 
 the Old World some incongruous members, heroes of the caucus and 
 the stump, not versed in the lore of courts, and unskilled in draw- 
 ing-room arts. So, at least, we are occasionally told by persons who 
 think it a prettier thing to bow to a lady than to an audience, and 
 nobler to chat agreeably at dinner than to discourse acceptably to a 
 multitude. Perhaps we shall do better in the diplomatic way by and 
 by. Hitherto our diplomatists have won their signal successes sim- 
 ply by being good citizens. We have never had a Talleyrand, nor 
 one of the Talleyrand kind (though we came near it when Aaron 
 Burr was pressed for a foreign appointment), and no American has 
 ever been sent to lie abroad for his country's good. We have had, 
 however, besides a large number of respectable ministers in the ordi- 
 nary way, three whose opportunitj'^ was, at once, immense and unique, 
 — Prauklin, Jefferson, and Washburne ; and each of these proved 
 equal to his opportunity. 
 
 It is not as a record of diplomatic service that Jefferson's five 
 years' residence in France is specially important to us. France and 
 America were like lovers then, and it is not difficult to negotiate 
 between lovers. His master in the diplomatic art was the greatest 
 master of it that ever lived, — Benjamin Franklin's excellence 
 being, that he conducted the intercourse of nations on the princi- 
 ples which control men of honor and good feeling in their private 
 business,' who neither take, nor wish, nor will have, an unjust 
 advantage, and look at a point in dispute with their antagonist's 
 eyes as well as their own, never insensible to his difficulties and his 
 scruples. It is what France did to Jefferson that makes his long 
 residence there historically important ; because the mind he carried 
 
 285 
 
286 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 home entered at once into the forming character of a young nation, 
 and became a part of it forever. All these millions of people, whom 
 we call fellow-citizens, are perhaps more or less ditferent in their 
 character and feelings from what they would have been, if, in the 
 distribution of diplomatic offices in 1785, Congress had sent Jeffer- 
 son to London instead of Paris, and appointed John Adams to Paris 
 instead of London. 
 
 At first he had the usual embarrassments of American ministers: 
 he could read, but not speak, the French language, and he was 
 sorely puzzled how to arrange his style of living so as not to go 
 beyond his nine thousand dollars a year. The language was a diffi- 
 culty which diminished every hour, though he never trusted him- 
 self to write French on any matter of consequence ; but the art of 
 living in the style of a plenipotentiary, upon the allowance fixed by 
 Congress, remained difficult to the end. Nor could he, during the 
 first years, draw much revenue from Virginia. He left behind him 
 there so long a "list of debts" (the result of the losses and desola- 
 tions of the war), that the proceeds of two crops, and the arrears of 
 his salary as governor, voted by the legislature, only sufficed to 
 satisfy the most urgent of them. 
 
 A Virginia estate was a poor thing indeed in the absence of the 
 master; and unhappily, the founders of the government of the 
 United States, in arranging salaries, made no allowance for the 
 American fact, that the mere absence of a man from home usually 
 lessens his income and increases his expenditure. Even Franklin 
 took it for granted that we should always have among us men of 
 leisure, most of whom would be delighted to serve the public for 
 nothing. Who, indeed, could have foreseen a state of things, such 
 as we see around us now, when the richer a man is the harder he 
 works, and when, in a flourishing city of a hundred thousand 
 inhabitants, not one man of leisure can be found, nor one man of 
 ability who can "afford " to go to the legislature? Jefferson, Adams, 
 and perliaps I may say most of the public men of the country, have 
 suffered agonies of embarrassment from the failure of the first Con- 
 gresses to adopt the true republican principle of jjaying for all 
 service done the public at the rate which the requisite quality of 
 service commands in the market. The only great error, perhaps, 
 of Washington's career was his aristocratic disdain of taking fair 
 wages for his work, — an error which most of his successors and 
 
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF EUROPE. 287 
 
 many of their most-valued ministers have rued in silent bitterness, 
 Nay, he rued it himself. What anxious hours Washington himself 
 passed from the fact that there were so few competent statesmen in 
 the country who chanced to be rich enough to live in Philadelphia 
 on the salary of a secretary of state ! 
 
 Jefferson was somewhat longer than usual in getting used to 
 what he called "the gloomy and damp climate" of Paris, — such a 
 contrast to the warmth, purity, and splendor of the climate of his 
 mountain home. We find him, too, still mourning his lost wife, and 
 writing to his old friend Page, that his "princijjal happiness was 
 now in th^ retrospect of life." Moreover, the condition of human 
 nature in Europe astonished and shocked him beyond measure. He 
 was not prepared for it ; he could not get hardened to it. While 
 experiencing all those art raptures which we should presume be 
 would, — keenly enjoying the music of Paris above all, and the 
 architecture only less, falling in love with a statue here and an 
 edifice there, — still, he could not become reconciled to the hideous 
 terms on which most of the people of France held their lives. At 
 his own pleasant and not inelegant abode, gathered most that was 
 brilliant, amiable, or illustrious in Paris. Who so popular as the 
 minister of our dear allies across the sea, the successor of Franklin, 
 the friend of Lafayette, the man of science, the man of feeling, the 
 scholar and musical amateur reared in the wilderness ? He liked 
 the French, too, exceedingly. He liked their manners, their habits, 
 their tastes, and even their food. He was glad to live in a com- 
 munitj'-, where, as he said, " a man might pass a life without 
 encountering a single rudeness," and where people enjoyed social 
 pleasures without eating like pigs and drinking like Indians. But 
 none of these things could ever deaden his heart to the needless 
 misery of man in France. Read his own words : — 
 
 First to his young friend and pupil, James Monroe, in June, 
 1785, when he had been ten months in Paris: "The pleasure of the 
 trip [to Europe] will be less than j^ou expect, but the utility greater. 
 It will make you adore your own country, — its soil, its climate, its 
 equality, liberty, laws, people, and manners. My God! how little 
 do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in pos- 
 session of, and which no other people on earth enjoy ! I confess I 
 had no idea of it myself." 
 
 To Mrs. Trist, in August, 1785: "It is difficult to conceive how 
 
288 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 so good a people, with so good a king, so well-disposed rulers in 
 general, so genial a climate, so fertile a soil, should be rendered so 
 ineffectual for producing human happiness by one single curse, — 
 that of a bad form of government. But it is a fact, in spite of the 
 mildness of their governors, the people are ground to powder by the 
 vices of the form of government. Of twenty millions of people sup- 
 posed to be in France, I am of opinion there are nineteen millions 
 more wretched, more accursed in every circumstance of human exist- 
 ence, than the most conspicuously- wretched individual of the whole 
 United States." 
 
 To an Italian friend in Virginia, September, 1785: ''Behold me, 
 at length, on the vaunted scene of Europe ! You are, perhaps, curi- 
 ous to know how it has struck a savage of the mountains of 
 America. Not advantageously, I assure you. I find the general 
 fate of mankind here most deplorable. The truth of Voltaire's 
 observation offers itself perpetually, that every man here must be 
 either the hammer or the anvil. It is a true picture of that country 
 to which they say we shall pass hereafter, and where we are to see 
 God and his angels in splendor, and crowds of the damned trampled 
 under their feet. 
 
 To George Wythe of Virginia, in August, 1786 : " If anybody 
 thinks that kings, nobles, or priests are good conservators of the 
 public happiness, send him here. It is the best school in the iiniverse 
 to cure him of that folly. He will see here, with his own eyes, that 
 these descriptions of men are an abandoned conspiracy against the 
 happiness of the people. 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 pro- 
 tect 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 General Washington, in November, 1786 : " To know the mass. 
 of evil which flows from this fatal source [an hereditary aristocracy], 
 a person miist be in France ; he must see the finest soil, the finest 
 climate, and the most compact State, the most benevolent character 
 of people, and every earthly advantage combined, insaflScient to pre- 
 vent this scourge from rendering existence a curse to twenty-four 
 out of twenty-five parts of the inhabitants of this country." 
 
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF EUROPE. 289 
 
 To James Madison, in January, 1787 : " To have an idea of the 
 curse of existence under a government of force, it must be seen. It 
 is a government of wolves over sheep." 
 
 To another American friend, in August, 1787 : "If all the evils 
 which can arise among us from the republican form of government, 
 from this day to the day of judgment, could be put into scale against 
 what this country suffers from its monarchical form in a week, or 
 England in a month, the latter would preponderate. No race of 
 kings has ever presented above one man of common sense in twenty 
 generations. The best they can do is to leave things to their minis- 
 ters ; and what are their ministers but a committee badly chosen?" 
 
 To Governor Kutledge of South Carolina, August, 1787 : " The 
 European are governments of kites over pigeons." 
 
 To another American friend, in February, 1788: "The long- 
 expected edict at length appears. It is an acknowledgment (hitherto 
 withheld by the laws), that Protestants can beget children, and that 
 they can die, and be offensive unless buried. It does not give them 
 permission to think, to speak, or to worship. It enumerates the 
 humiliations to which they shall remain subject, and the burthens to 
 which they shall continue to be unjustly exposed. What are we to 
 think of the condition of the human mind in a country where such 
 a wretched thing as this has thrown the State into convulsions, and 
 how must we bless our own situation in a country the most illiterate 
 peasant of which is a Solon compared with the authors of this law. 
 Our countrymen do not know their own superiority." 
 
 Such were the feelings with which he contemplated the condition 
 of the French people. But he was in a situation to know, also, how 
 far "the great" in France were really benefited by the degradation 
 of their fellow-citizens. Their situation was dazzling; but there 
 was, he thought, no class in America who were not happier than 
 they. Intrigues of love absorbed the younger, intrigues of ambition 
 the elder. Conjugal fidelity being regarded as something provincial 
 and ridiculous, there was no such thing known among them as that 
 "tranquil, permanent felicity with which domestic society in America 
 blesses most of its inhabitants, leaving them free to follow steadily 
 those pursuits which health and reason approve, and rendering truly 
 delicious the intervals of those pursuits." 
 
 Such sentiments as these were in vogue at the time, even among 
 19 
 
290 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 the ruling class. Beaumarcliais' Marriage of Figaro was in its first 
 run when Jefferson reached Paris. Doubtless he listened to the bar- 
 ber's soliloquy in the fifth act (a stump-speech d la mode de Paris), 
 the longest soliloquy in a modern Comedy, in which Beaumarchais, 
 as we should say, " arraigns the administration." " I was thought 
 of for a government appointment," says poor Eigaro, " but, unfortu- 
 nately, I was not fit for it . An arithmetician was wanted, — a dancer 
 got it." Jefferson rarely mentions the theatre in his French letters ; 
 but the theatre in Paris is like dinner, too familiar a matter to get 
 upon paper. Beaumarchais himself he knew but too well ; for the 
 brilliant dramatist was a claimant of sundry millions from the Hon- 
 orable Congress for stores furnished during the war, which puzzled 
 and perplexed every minister of the United States from Franklin 
 to Rives. 
 
CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 
 THE WORK OF HIS MISSION. 
 
 Our plenipotentiary was one of the most laborious of men during 
 his residence in Europe. He had need of all his singular talent for 
 industry. The whole of a long morning he usually spent in his 
 office hard at work ; and sometimes, as his daughter reports, when 
 he was particularly pressed, he would take his papers, and retire 
 to a monastery near Paris, in which he hired an apartment, and 
 remain there for a week or two, all the world shut out, till his task 
 was done. In the afternoon he walked seven miles into the countrj'-, 
 and back again ; and, in the evening, music, art, science, and society 
 claimed him by turns. I must endeavor, in a few words, to indicate 
 the nature and objects of such incessant toil. 
 
 And, first, as to his public and official duties. The two continents 
 were then as far apart as America is now from Australia. It took 
 Jefferson from fourteen to twenty weeks to get an answer from home ; 
 and, if his letters missed the montlily packet, there was usually no 
 other opportunity till the next. It was part of his duty as minister 
 to send to Mr. Jay, secretary for the foreign affairs of Congress, not 
 only a regular letter of public news, but files of the best newspapers. 
 He did, in fact, the duty of own correspondent, as well as that of 
 plenipotentiary, with much that is now done by consuls and com- 
 mercial agents. As it was then a part of the system of governments 
 in Europe to open letters intrusted to the mail, important letters 
 had to be written in cipher; which was a serious addition to the 
 labor of all official persons. An incident of Mr. Jefferson's second 
 year serves to show at once the remoteness of America from Europe, 
 the difficulty of getting information from one continent to another, 
 and the variety of emploj'ments which then fell to the lot of the 
 American minister. He received a letter making inquiry concerning 
 
 5 291 
 
292 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 
 
 a young man named Abraham Albert Alpbonso Gallatin, -who had 
 emigrated from Switzerland to America six years before, and of 
 whose massacre and scalping by the Indians a report had lately 
 reached his friends in Geneva. It was to the American minister that 
 the distressed family (one of the most respectable in Switzerland), 
 applied for information concerning the truth of the report. In case 
 this young man had fallen a victim to the savages, Mr. Jefferson 
 was requested to procure a certificate of his death, and a copy of 
 his will. It was in this strange way that Thomas Jefferson first 
 obtained knowledge of the Albert Gallatin whom he was destined to 
 appoint secretarj'- of the treasury. 
 
 France and America, I say, were like lovers then. And yet, in 
 one respect, the new minister found Frenchmen disappointed with 
 the results of the alliance between the two countries. The moment 
 the war closed, commerce had resumed its old channel; so that the 
 new flag of stars and stripes, a familiar object on the Thames, was 
 rarely seen in a port of France. Why is this ? Mr. Jefferson was 
 frequently asked. Does friendship count for nothing in trade ? Is 
 this the return France had a right to expect from America ? Do 
 Americans prefer their enemies to their friends ? The American 
 minister made it his particular business, first, to explain the true 
 reason of this state of things, and then to apply the only remedy. 
 In other words, he made himself, both in society and in the audi- 
 ence-room of the Count de Vergennes, an apostle of free-trade. 
 
 The spell of the protective system, in 1785, had been broken in 
 England, but not in France. Jefferson showed the Count de Ver- 
 gennes that it was the measure of freedom of trade which British 
 merchants enjoyed that gave them the cream of the world's com- 
 merce. He told the count (an excellent man of business and an 
 honorable gentleman, but as ignorant as a king of political economy), 
 that if national preferences could weigh with merchants, the whole 
 commerce of America would forsake England and come to France. 
 But, said he, in substance, our merchants cannot buy in France, be- 
 cause you will not let them sell in France. One day he went over 
 the whole list of American products, and explained the particular 
 restriction, or system of restrictions, which rendered it impossible 
 for American merchants to sell it in France at a profit. Indigo, -^ 
 France had troj)ical islands, the planters of which she must " pro- 
 tect." TobaccO; — Oh, heavens ! in what a coil and tangle of protec- 
 
THE WOEK OF HIS MISSION. 293 
 
 tion was that fragrant weed ! First, tlie king liad the absolute 
 monopoly of the sale of it. Secondly, the king had " farmed " the 
 sale to some great noblemen, who, in turn, had sub-let the right to 
 men of business. These gentlemen had concluded a contract with 
 Robert Morris of Philadelphia, giving him a complete monopoly of 
 the importation for three years. Morris was to send to France 
 tweniy thousand hogsheads a year at a fixed price ; and no other 
 creature on earth could lawfully send a pound of tobacco to France. 
 
 The learned reader perceives that there was a tobacco King in 
 1785, which included king, noblemen, French merchants, and Mr. 
 Jefferson's friend, Robert Morris. When, in the course of this 
 enumeration, he came to the article of tobacco, and explained the 
 mode in which it was "protected," the count remarked that the king 
 received so large a revenue from tobacco, that it could not be 
 renounced. " I told him," as Mr. Jefferson relates, " that we did not 
 wish it to be renounced, or even lessened, but only that the monopoly 
 should be put down ; that this might, be effected in the simplest 
 manner by obliging the importer to pay, on entrance, a duty equal 
 to what the king now received, or to deposit his tobacco in the king's- 
 warehouses till it was paid, and then permitting a free sale of it. 
 ^Mafoi!' said the count, 'that is a good idea: we must think of 
 it.' " 
 
 They did think of it. Mr. Jefferson kept them thinking during 
 the whole of his residence in Paris. In man}'' letters and in conver- 
 sation, vivid with his own clear conviction, and warm with his ear- 
 nest purpose to serve both countries, and man through them, he 
 expounded the principles of free-trade. " Each of our nations," he 
 said, " has exactly to spare the articles which the other wants. We 
 have a surplus of rice, tobacco, furs, peltry, potash, lamp-oils, timber, 
 which France wants ; she has a surplus of wines, brandies, esculent 
 oils, fruits, manufactures of all kinds, which we want. The govern- 
 ments have nothing to do but not to Ititider their merchants from 
 making the exchange" 
 
 To the theory of free-trade every thinking man, of course, assented. 
 But when it came to practice, he generally found (as free-traders 
 now do) that private interest was too powerful for him. It was in 
 France very much as it was in Portugal. After negotiating for 
 years witii the Portuguese minister for the free admission of Amer- 
 ican products, Jefferson succeeded in getting his treaty signed, and 
 
294 ' LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 sent to Lisbon for ratification. The astute old Portuguese ambassa- 
 dor predicted its rejection. " Some great lords of the court," said 
 he to Mr. Jefferson, " derive an important part of their revenue from 
 their interest in the flour-mills near the capital, which the admission 
 of American flour will shut up. Thei/ will prevail upon the king to. 
 reject it." And so it proved. Jefferson, however, was not a man 
 to prefer no bread to half a loaf. He did really succeed in France, 
 after twelve months' hard work and vigilant attention, aided at 
 every turn by the Mai-quis de Lafayette, whose zeal to serve his 
 other country across the ocean knew no diminution while he lived, 
 in obtaining some few crusts of free-trade for the merchants of 
 America ; which had an important effect in nourishing the infant 
 commerce between the two countries. Nor did he rest content with 
 them. He could not break the Morris contract, nor even wish it 
 broken ; but, aided by Lafayette's potent influence, he obtained from 
 the ministry' an engagement that no contract of the same nature 
 should ever again be permitted. To the last month of his stay in 
 Europe, we find, in his voluminous correspondence, that he still 
 strove to loosen what he was accustomed to call '' the shackles upon 
 trade." 
 
 His efforts in behalf of free-trade in tobacco exposed him to the 
 enmity of Robert Morris and his kindred, one of the most powerful 
 circles in the United States, including Gouverneur Morris, as able 
 and honorable an aristocrat as ever stood by his order, — a man of 
 Bismarckian acuteness, candor, integrity, and humor. In writing 
 of this matter, in confidence, to James Monroe, Jefferson held this 
 language : " I have done what was right ; and I will not so far wound 
 my privilege of doing that without regard to any man's interest, as 
 to enter into any explanations of this paragraph with Robert Morris. 
 Yet I esteem him highly, and suppose that hitherto he had esteemed 
 me." The paragraph to which he alludes was one in a letter of the 
 French minister of finance, in which there was an expression 
 implying that Mr. Jefferson had recommended the annulling of the 
 Morris contract. This he had not done. On the contrary, he had 
 maintained that to annul it would be unjust. But he deemed it 
 unbecoming in him as a public man to so much as correct this 
 misapprehension. 
 
 The reader, perhaps, has supposed that the evils resulting from 
 tariflf-tinkering are peculiar to the United States. Mr. Jefferson 
 
THE TVORK OF HIS MISSION. 295 
 
 knew better. As often as he succeeded in getting a restriction upon 
 trade loosened a little, an injured interest cried out, and did not 
 always cry in vain. In 1788 he obtained a revisal of the tariff in 
 favor of American products, which admitted American whale-oil 
 (before prohibited) at a duty of ten dollars a tun. This was a vast 
 boon to Yankee whalers. But an existing treaty between France 
 and England obliged France to admit English oil on the terms of 
 "the most-favored nation." At once the English oils "flowed in," 
 over-stocked the market, and lowered the price to such a point, that 
 the French fishermen and sealmen could not live. An outcry arose, 
 which the French Ministry could not disregard. Then it was pro- 
 posed to exclude all " Europe'an oils, which would not infringe the 
 British treaty ; " and this idea Jefferson, free-trader as he was, 
 encouraged with patriotic inconsistency, because, as he says, it would 
 give to the French and American fisheries a monopoly of the French 
 market." The arret was drawn up ; ministers were assembled ; and 
 in a moment more it would have been passed, to the enriching of 
 Nantucket and the great advantage of all the New-England coast. 
 Just then a minister proposed to strike out the word European, 
 which would make the measure still more satisfactory to French oil- 
 men. The amendment was agreed to ; the arret was signed ; and, 
 behold, Nantucket excluded ! 
 
 As soon as Jefferson heard of this disaster, he put forth all his 
 energies in getting the arret amended. Not content with verbal and 
 written remonstrance, he took a leaf from Dr. Franklin's book, and 
 caused a small treatise upon the subject to be printed, " to entice 
 them to read it," particularly the new minister, M. Necker, who, 
 minister as he was, had "some principles of economy, and will enter 
 into calculations." He succeeded in his object, and soon had the 
 pleasure of sending to Nantucket, through Mr. Adams, a notification 
 that the whalemen might put to sea in full confidence of being 
 allowed to sell their oil in French ports on profitable terms. He 
 testified to the generous aid he had had in this business from Lafa- 
 yette : " He has paid the closest attention to it, and combated for 
 us with the zeal of a native." 
 
 Other curious incidents of his five-years' war against the protec- 
 tive system press for mention ; but, really, one suffices as well as 
 a thousand. It is alwa^'^s the same story : the interests of men 
 against the rights of man, — temporary and local advantage oppose^ 
 
296 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 to the permanent interest of the human race, — a sliriuking from a 
 fair, open contest, and compelling your adversary to go into the ring 
 with one hand tied behind him. Nevertheless, such is the nature of 
 man, that the progress from restriction to freedom, whether in poli- 
 tics, religion, or trade, mn«»j be slow in order to be sure. It is human 
 to cry, " Great is Diana of the Ephesians," when you live bj^ mak- 
 ing images of the chaste goddess. Even Jefferson, a free-trader by 
 the constitution of his mind, was not so very ill-content with a 
 "monopoly" which shut English whalemen out of the ports of France, 
 and let his own countrymen in. The principle was wrong, but he 
 could bear it in this instance. It required many years of pig-headed 
 outrage to kill his proud and yearning love for the land of his ances- 
 tors ; but the thing was done at last, with a completeness that left 
 nothing to be desired. 
 
 Among the powers with which the commissioners of the United 
 States endeavored to negotiate treaties of amity and commerce on 
 sublime Christian principles, were Tunis, Algiers, Tripoli, and ^' the 
 high, glorious^ mighty, and most noble King, Prince, and Emperor" 
 of Morocco. Before Mr. Jefferson had held the post of plenipoten- 
 tiary many weeks, he was reminded most painfully, that those 
 powers were not yet, perhaps, quite prepared to conduct tlieir for- 
 eign affairs in the lofty style proposed. A rumor ran over Europe, 
 that Dr. Franklin, on his voyage to America, had been captured by 
 the Algerines, and carried to Algiers ; where, being held for ransom, 
 he bore his captivitj'^ with the cheerfulness and dignity that might 
 have been expected of him. Nor was such an event impossible, nor 
 even improbable. The packets plying between Havre and New 
 York were not considered safe from the Algerine corsairs in 1785. 
 Nothing afloat was safe from them, unless defended by superior guns, 
 or protected by an annual subsidy. Among the curious bits of 
 information which Jefferson contrived to send to Mr. Jay, was a list 
 of the presents made by tlie Dutch, in 1784, to the aforesaid King, 
 Prince, and Emperor of Morocco. The Dutch, we should infer from 
 this catalogue, supplied the emperor with the means of preying upon 
 the commerce of the world ; for it consists of items like these : 69 
 masts, 30 cables, 267 pieces of cordage, 70 cannon, 21 anchors, 285 
 pieces of sail-cloth, 1,450 pulleys, 51 chests of tools,"12 quadrants, 12 
 compasses, 26 hour-glasses, 27 sea-charts, 50 dozen sail-needles, 24 
 tons of pitch ; besides such " extraordinary presents " as 2 pieces of 
 
THE WORK OF HIS MISSION. 297 
 
 scarlet cloth, 2 of green clotli, 280 loaves of sugar, one chest of tea, 
 24 china punch-bowls, 50 pieces of muslin, 3 clocks, and one " very 
 large watch." He learned, too, that Spain had recently stooped to 
 buy a peace from one of these piratical po^yers at a cost of six hun- 
 dred thousand dollars. 
 
 It was in the destiny of Mr. Jefferson, at a later time, to extort a 
 peace from these pirates in another way, and, in fact, to originate the 
 system that rid the seas of them forever. But at present the coun- 
 try which he represented was not strong enough to depart from the 
 established system of purchase. The United Stated was a gainer 
 even by the treaty for which Spain had paid so high a- price ; for 
 Spain was then in close alliance with the republic which had humbled 
 the great enemy of the House of Bourbon. In the spring of 1785 
 came news that the American brig Betsy had been captured and 
 taken to Morocco, where the crew were held for ransom. It was the 
 good offices of Spain that induced the King, Prince, and Emperor of 
 Morocco to make a present to the American minister at Cadiz of 
 the liberty of the Betsy's crew. But when Mr. Carmichael waited 
 on the Spanish ambassador to thank him, " in the best Spanish he 
 could muster," for the friendly act of the king, he was given to 
 understand, that, unless the United States sent an envoy to j\Iorocco 
 with presents for the emperor, no more crews would be released 
 except on the usual terms. Mr. Carmichael notified Mr. Jefferson of 
 these events, and added that he feared further depredations from the 
 Algerines. Thirteen prizes had recently been brought in by them, 
 chiefly Portuguese, he thought. " The Americans, I hope, are too 
 much frightened already," said he, " to venture any vessels this way, 
 especially during the summer.'" And they ran some risk even in , 
 the more northern latitudes. 
 
 A month later Mr. Jefferson received a doleful letter from three 
 American captains in Algiers, which brought the subject home to 
 him most forcibly : " We, the subjects of the United States of 
 America, having the misfortune of being captured off the coast of 
 Portugal, the 24th and 30th of July, by the Algerines, and brought 
 into this port, where we are become slaves, and sent to the work- 
 houses, our sufferings are beyond our expressing or your concep- 
 tion, .... being stripped of all our clothes, and nothing to exist on 
 but two small calves of bread per day, without any other necessa- 
 ries of life." But the captains had found a friend : " Charles Logie, 
 
298 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 Esq., British consul, seeing our distressed situation, has taken us 
 three masters of vessels out of the workhouse, and has given security 
 for us to the Dey of Algiers, Klnrj of CrueltiesP The sailors, how- 
 ever, remained in the workhouses, where they would certainl}^ starve, 
 the captains thought, if Mr. Jefferson could not at once prevail upon 
 Congress to grant them relief. 
 
 In writing this letter, the three captains provided Mr. Jefferson 
 with seven years' trouble. During all the remainder of his resi- 
 dence at Paris, and years after his return home, one of his chief 
 employments was to procure the deliverance of those unfortunate 
 prisoners from captivity. After making some provision for their 
 maintenance, he explained to Congress the necessity of treating with 
 the pirates as the Spaniards had done, money in hand. He was 
 authorized to give twenty thousand dollars to the High and Mighty 
 Prince and Emperor of Morocco, and the same sum to the King of 
 Cruelties, for a treaty of peace. Inadequate as these sums were, 
 they seemed stupendous to a Congress distressed with the debt of 
 the Revolution, fearing to learn by every arrival that their credit 
 was gone in Europe, through the failure of their agents to effect a 
 new loan. Jefferson and Adams took the liberty of doubling the 
 price for a treaty with Algiers; offering forty thousand dollars for a 
 treaty and the twenty prisoners. They felt that this was assuming 
 a responsibility which nothing could justify but the emergency of 
 the case. " The motives which led to it," wrote Jefferson to Mr. 
 Jay, "must be found in the feelings of the human heart, in a par- 
 tiality for those sufferers who are of our own country, and in the 
 obligations of every government to yield protection to their citizens 
 as the consideration for their obedience." He assured the secretary'', 
 "that it would be a comfort to know that Congress did not disap- 
 prove this step." He received that comfort in due time; but the 
 forty thousand dollars did not get the treaty, nor bring home the 
 captives. The agents whom he despatched returned with the report 
 that upon such terms no business could be done. 
 
 And so the affair drew on. In the spring of 1786 Mr. Jefferson, 
 upon an intimation received from Mr. Adams, hurried over to Lon- 
 don to confer with the ambassador of Tripoli upon the matter; sup- 
 posing that whatever bargain they might make with Tripoli would 
 be a guide in their negotiations with Algiers and Morocco. The 
 two Americans met the ambassador, and had a conversation with 
 
THE WORK OF HIS MISSION. 299 
 
 him whicli one would think more suitable to A. D. 1100 tnan 1786, 
 The first question discussed between them was, whether it vyere bet- 
 ter for the United States to buy a temporary peace by annual pay- 
 ments, or a permanent peace by what our English friends elegantly 
 style "a lump sum." The ambassador was much in favor of a per- 
 manent peace. Any stipulated annual sum, he said, might cease to 
 content his country ; and an increased demand might bring on a war, 
 which would interrupt the payments, and give new cause of differ- 
 ence. It would be much cheaper in the long run, he assured thein, for 
 the United States to come down handsomely at once, and make an 
 end of the business. 
 
 That question having been duly considered, the Americans were 
 ready to listen to the terms ; which were these : for a treaty of peace 
 with Tripoli, to last one year, with privilege of renewal, twelve thou- 
 sand five hundred guineas to the government, and one thousand two 
 hundred and fifty guineas to the ambassador; for a permament 
 peace, thirty thousand guineas to the government, and three thou- 
 sand guineas to the ambassador; cash down on receipt of signed 
 treaty. N.B. — Merchandise not taken. On the same terms, the 
 ambassador assured them, a peace could be had with Tunis ; but, 
 with regard to Algiers and Morocco, he could not undertake to prom- 
 ise any thing. Peace with the four piratical powers, then, would 
 cost Congress at least six hundred and sixty thousand dollars. If 
 the affair had not involved the life and liberty of countrymen, the 
 American commissioners might have laughed at the disproportion 
 between the sums they were empowered to offer and those demanded. 
 
 Disguising their feelings as best they could, they "took the lib- 
 erty to make some inquiries concerning the ground of the preten- 
 sions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury." 
 The ambassador replied : It was written in their Koran, that all na- 
 tions which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom 
 it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; 
 and that every Mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure 
 to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to 
 board a vessel had one slave over and above his share; and that 
 when they sprang to the deck of an enemy's ship, every sailor held 
 a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth, which usually 
 struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at 
 OBce. It was the opinion of this enlightened public functionary 
 
300 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFPEESON. 
 
 that the Devil aided his countrymen in these expeditions j for they 
 were almost always successful. 
 
 It is diiScalt for us to realize, only eighty-six years after this con- 
 versation, that it could ever have been held ; still less that the Ameri- 
 can commissioners should have seriously reported it to Mr. Jay, with 
 an offer of their best services in trying to borrow the mone^y in Hol- 
 land or elsewhere, and in concluding the several bargains for peace 
 with the four powers ; least of all, that Mr. Jay should have sub- 
 mitted the offers of the ambassador to Congress. Congress, in their 
 turn, referred the matter back to Mr. Jay for his opinion, which he 
 gave with elaboration and exactness. The substance of his report 
 was this : We cannot raise the money; and it would be an injury to 
 our credit to attempt to do so, and not succeed. 
 
 Mr. Jefferson was obliged, therefore, to confine his efforts to the 
 mere deliverance of the captives by ransom. This, too, was a mat- 
 ter demanding the most delicate and cautious handling; for the 
 price of a captive was regulated like j)rofessional fees, according to 
 the wealth of the parties interested. Let those professional pirates 
 but suppose a government concerned in a slave's ransom, and the 
 price ran up the scale to a height most alarming. Jefferson was 
 obliged to conceal from every one, and especially from the prisoners, 
 that he had any authority to treat for their release, — a course that 
 brought upon him a kind of censure hard to bear indeed. While 
 he was exerting every faculty in behalf of the captives, he would 
 receive from them " cruel letters," as he termed them, accusing him, 
 not merely of neglecting their interests, but of disobeying the posi- 
 tive orders of Congress to negotiate their ransom. 
 
 He availed himself at length of the services of an order of monks 
 called the Mathurins, instituted for the purpose of begging alms for 
 the ransom of Christian captives held to servitude among the Infi- 
 dels. Agents of theirs constantly lived in the Barbary States, 
 searching out captives, and driving hard bargains in their purchase. 
 As it was known that the Mathurins could ransom cheaper than atoy 
 other agency, they were frequently employed by governments and 
 by families in procuring the delivea:ance of captives. The chief of 
 the order received Mr. Jefferson with the utmost benignity, and won 
 his favorable regard by making no allusion to the religious heresy of 
 the American captives. He offered to undertake the purchase, pro- 
 vided the most profound secrecy were observed ; and he thought the 
 
THE WORK OF HIS MISSION. 301 
 
 twenty captives would cost Congress ten thousand dollars. Congress 
 authorized the expenditure. But that was the time when it over- 
 taxed the credit of the United States, even to subsist their half a 
 dozen representatives in Europe. '* The moment I have the money," 
 Mr. Jefferson was obliged to write, " the business shall be set in 
 motion." But the money was long in coming. A new government 
 was forming at Philadelphia. All was embarrassment in the 
 finances, and confusion in the minds, of the transitory administration. 
 The poor captives lingered in slavery year after year, dependent for 
 daily sustenance, for months at a time, on advances made by the 
 Spanish ambassador. As late as 1793 we still find Mr. Jefferson 
 busied about the same prisoners in Algiers. 
 
 While doing what he could for the relief and protection of his 
 own countrymen, he set on foot a nobler scheme for delivering the 
 vessels of all the maritime nations from the risk of capture by these 
 pirates. He drew up a plan, which he submitted to the diplomatic 
 corps at Versailles, for keeping a joint fleet of six frigates and six 
 smaller vessels in commission, one-half of which should be always 
 cruising against the corsairs, waging active war, until the four Bar- 
 bary States were willing to conclude treaties of peace without sub- 
 sidy or price. Portugal, Naples, the two Sicilies, Venice, Malta, 
 Denmark, and Sweden, all avowed a willingness to share in the 
 enterprise, provided France offered no opposition. Having satisfied 
 the ambassadors on this point, he felt sure of success if Congress 
 would authorize him to make the proposition as from them, and to 
 support it by undertaking to contribute and maintain one of the 
 frigates. But the power of the Congress of the old confederacy, 
 never sufficient, was now waning fast. What could it ever do but 
 recommend the States to pay their share of public expenses ? And 
 the recommendations of this nature, as Jefferson remarked, were 
 now so openly neglected by the States, that Congress "declined an 
 engagement which they were conscious they could not fulfil with 
 punctuality." It was an excellent scheme. Jefferson had drawn it 
 up in great detail, and with so much forethought and good sense, 
 tliat it looks on paper as though it might have answered the pur- 
 pose. 
 
 It fell to the lot of Jefferson to negotiate and sign a convention 
 between France and the United States which regulated the consular 
 services of both nations. Does the reader happen to know what 
 
302 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 despotic powers a consul exercised formerly? He was a terrible being. 
 He was invested with much of the sacredness and more than the 
 authority of an ambassador. The laws of the country in which he 
 lived could not touch him, — could neither confine his person, nor 
 seize his goods, nor search his house. Over such of his countrymen 
 as fell into his power he exercised autocratic sway. If he suspected 
 a passenger of being a deserter or a criminal, he could send him 
 home ; if he caught a ship in a contraband act, he could order it 
 back to its port. When Dr. Franklin came to arrange the consular 
 service of the two countries, the Count de Vergennes simply 
 handed him a copy of the consular convention established between 
 Prance and the continental powers ; and this the doctor accepted, 
 signed, and sent home for ratification, supposing it to be the correct 
 and only thing admissible. " Congress received it," as Jefterson 
 reports, " with the deepest concern. They honored Dr. Franklin, 
 they were attached to the French nation, but they could not relin- 
 quish fundamental principles." The convention was returned to 
 Jefferson, with new instructions and powers ; and he succeeded, after 
 a long and difficult negotiation, in inducing the French government 
 to limit those excessive consular powers. The government, he 
 explains, anticipated a very extensive emigration from France to the 
 United States, which, under the old consular sj^stem, they could 
 have controlled ; and hence they yielded it " with the utmost reluc- 
 tance, and inch by inch." But thej^ yielded it at last with frank- 
 ness and good-humor, and the consular system was arranged as we 
 find it now. 
 
CHAPTER XXXV. 
 
 UNOmCIAIi LABORS. 
 
 When we turn from the plenipotentiary's public duties to his 
 semi-official and voluntary labors, it is impossible not to be stirred 
 to admiration and gratitude. I do not know what public man has 
 ever been more solicitous to use the opportunities which his office 
 conferred of rendering solid service to his country, to institutions, 
 to corporations, to individuals. He kept four colleges — Harvard, 
 Yale, William and Mary, and the College of Philadelphia — advised 
 of the new inventions, discoveries, conjectures, books, that seemed 
 important. And what news he had to send sometimes ! It was he 
 who sent to America the most important piece of mechanical intelli- 
 gence that pen ever recorded, — the success of the Watt steam- 
 engine, by means of which " a peck and a half of coal performs as 
 much work as a horse in a day." He conversed at Paris with 
 Boulton, who was Watt's partner in the manufacture of the engines, 
 and learned from his lips this astounding fact. But it did not 
 astound him in the least. He mentions it quietly in the postscript 
 of a long letter; for no man yet foresaw the revolution in all human 
 affairs which that invention was to effect. He went to see an engine 
 at work in London afterwards ; but he was only allowed to view the 
 outward parts of the machinery, and he could not tell whether the 
 mill "wfis turned by the steam immediately," or by a stream of 
 water which the steam pumped up. 
 
 We are all familiar with the system of manufacturing watches, 
 clocks, arm!?, and other objects, in parts so exactly alike that they 
 can be used without altering or fitting. It was Jefferson who sent 
 to Congress an account of this admirable idea, which he derived 
 from its ingenious inventor, a French mechanic. He also forwarded 
 specimens of the part of a musket-lock, by way of illustration. 
 
 303 
 
304 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEHSON. 
 
 Tlie system, wliicli was at first employed ojily in the manufacture 
 of arms, seems now about to be applied to all manufactures. He 
 sent to Virginia particular accounts of the construction of canals 
 and locks, and of the devices employed in Europe for improving 
 and extending the navigation of rivers ; information peculiarly 
 welcome to General Washington and the companies formed under 
 his auspices to extend the navigation of the James and the Potomac 
 back to the mountains. 
 
 Virginian as he was, he had a Yankee's love for an improved 
 implement or utensil ; and he was alwaj's sending something ingeni- 
 ous in that way to a friend. He scoured Paris to find one of the 
 " new lamps " for Richard Henry Lee, failed to get a good one, 
 tried again in London, and succeeded. Madison was indebted to 
 him for getting made the most perfect watch the arts could then 
 produce, — price six hundred francs, ; — and a portable copying- 
 press of his own contriving, besides a great number of books for his 
 library. A stroll among the book-stalls was one of his favorite 
 afternoon recreations during the whole of his residence in Paris, so 
 one of his daughters records ; and he picked up many hundreds of 
 prizes in the way of rare and curious books, for Madison, Wythe, 
 Monroe, and himself. 
 
 Europe is still the chief source of our intellectual nourishment ; 
 but, when Jefferson was minister in Paris, it was the only source. 
 America had contributed nothing to the intellectual resources of 
 man, except Pranklin ; and the best of Franklin was not yet acces- 
 sible. We had no art, little science, no literature ; not a poem, not 
 a book, not a picture, not a statue, not an edifice. Jefferson evident- 
 ly recognized it as a very important part of his duty to be a channel 
 of communication bj'' which the redundant intellectual wealth of one 
 continent should go to lessen the poverty of the other. He had in 
 his note-book a considerable list of Americans, such as Dr. Frank- 
 lin, James Madison, George Wythe, Edmund Randolph, Dr. Stiles, 
 of whom he was the literary agent in Europe, for whom he received 
 the volumes of the Encyclopaedia as they appeared, and subscribed 
 for copies of any work of value which was announced for publica- 
 tion. In advance of international copyright, and, indeed, before 
 Noah Webster had procured a home copj'^right for his spelling-book 
 from a few of the State legislatures (the beginning of our copyright 
 system), Jefferson aided two American authors to gain something 
 
UNOFFICIAL LABORS. 305 
 
 from the European sale of their writings. He got forty guineas for 
 an early copy of Ramsay's History of the Revolutionary War for 
 translation into French ; and when he found that the London book- 
 sellers did not dare sell the book, he sent for a hundred copies, and 
 caused it to be advertised in the London papers, that persons in 
 England wishing the work could have it from Paris, per diligence. 
 Similar service he rendered Dx'. Gordon, author of the history of the 
 war to which he had himself contributed. 
 
 Some opportunities which occurred to him of aiding the growth 
 of a better taste in America for architecture, he eagerly seized. 
 Virginia was about to disfigure Richmond with public buildings ; 
 and the commissioners wrote to him for plans, particularly a plan 
 for a Capitol. What commission 'could have been more welcome ? 
 From his youth up, before he had ever seen an edifice that was not 
 repulsive, he was an enthusiast in architecture; and now, in Paris, 
 it was a daily rapture to pass one of his favorite buildings. He 
 would linger near it, he tells one of his friends, for a long time; 
 would often go out of his way to catch a view of it ; loved to study 
 it in new lights and unusual conditions of the atmosphere, and 
 never grew weary of admiring it. 
 
 As soon, therefore, as he received the letter from Richmond, he 
 engaged the best architect of the day, and entered upon the joyous 
 work. They took for their model the liaison Qiiarree of Kismes, 
 which, he thought, was "one of the most beautiful, if not the most 
 beautiful and precious morsel of architecture left us by antiquity ; 
 . . , very simple, but noble beyond expression." All the time he 
 could spare from pressing public duties he spent in adajiting the 
 ancient model to modern utilities. But, with all his zeal, the plan 
 consumed time ; and he was aghast one day, to receive news from 
 home that the commissioners were beginning to build without it. 
 He wrote to jVIadison, begging him to use all his influence for delay. 
 " How is a taste," he asked, " for this beautiful art to be formed in 
 our countrymen unless we avail ourselves of every occasion when 
 public buildings are to be erected, of presenting to them models for 
 their study and imitation ? " The loss of a few bricks, he thought, 
 was not to be weighed against "the comfort of laying out the pub- 
 lic money for something honorable, the satisfaction of seeing an 
 object and proof of national good taste, and the regret and mortifi- 
 cation of erecting a monument of our barbarism, which will be 
 20 
 
306 LEFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 loaded with execrations as long as it shall endure." He seems to 
 have smiled at his own vehemence. " You see," he concluded, " I 
 am an enthusiast on the subject of arts ; but it is an enthusiasm 
 of which I am not ashamed, as its object is to improve the taste of 
 my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile to them the 
 respect of the world, and j^rocure them its praise." 
 
 Madison exerted himself; the work was stopped; the plan was 
 accepted. But the home architect, as Professor Tucker tells us, 
 mingled an idea or two of his own with those of the ancient master, 
 and considerations of economy were allowed to modify parts of the 
 design. The result many readers have seen iia that ill-starred, for- 
 lorn-looking edifice, the Capitol of Virginia at Richmond. Kear it, 
 on the Capitol grounds, is the best thing America has yet paid for 
 in the way of a monument to the memory of deserving men, — the 
 monument to Washington and other Virginians most distinguished 
 in the Revolutionary struggle. Jefferson was much occupied with 
 details of this fine work during his residence in Paris. Por. Virginia, 
 also, he bought some thousands of stands of arms and other warlike 
 material ; for who had yet so much as thought that Virginia was 
 not a sovereign State ? 
 
 There was no end of his services to the infant unskilled agricul- 
 ture of his country. In Charleston and Philadelphia there was 
 already something in the way of an agricultural society, to which 
 he sent information, seeds, roots, nuts, and plants ; thus continuing 
 the work begun in his father's youth by John Bartram of Philadel- 
 phia, to whom be honor and gratitude forever ! To the Charleston 
 society, Jefferson's benefactions were most numerous and imjiortant. 
 Upon receiving the intelligence that he had been elected a member 
 of the society, he sent them, with his letter of acknowledgment, 
 "some seeds of a grass that had been found very useful in the 
 southern parts of Europe," and was almost the only grass cultivated 
 in Malta. It is to be feared the seed was not duly cared for by the 
 society; for the ISTorthern eye looks in vain, in the Carolina?, for a 
 vivid lawn or a fine field of grass. Afterwards he procured for them 
 a quantity of the acorns of the cork-oak. Where are the cork-oaks 
 that should have sprung from them ? He burned with desire to 
 introduce the olive culture into the Southern States ; and he returns 
 again and again to the subject in his letters. He saw what a great 
 good the olive-tree was to Europe, from its hardiness, its fruitfulness, 
 
insrOFFICIAL LABOES. SOT 
 
 tbe low quality of the soil in whicli it flourishes, aucl the agreeable 
 flavor it imparts to many viands otherwise tasteless or disagreeable. 
 He urged the Charleston society to make it a chief object to intro- 
 duce the olive, and offered to send them bountiful supplies of plants 
 of every valuable variety, and to be one of five persons to contribute 
 ten guineas a year to their experimental culture in South Carolina. 
 
 "ly'' he wrote to President Drayton, "the memory of those per- 
 sons is held in great respect in South Carolina who introduced there 
 the culture of rice, a plant which sows life and death with almost 
 equal hand, what obligations would be due to him who should 
 introduce the olive-tree, and set the example of its culture ! Were 
 the owners of slaves to view it only as the means of bettering their 
 condition, how much would he better that by planting one of those 
 trees for every slave he possessed ! Having been mj'self an eye- 
 witness to the blessings which this tree sheds on the poor, I never 
 had my wishes so kindled for the introduction of any article of new 
 culture into our own country." 
 
 Olive-oil, however, despite his generous efforts, is not yet an 
 American product. The societj' accepted his oifers. He sent them 
 a whole ''cargo of plants." The culture was begun with enthusi- 
 asm. But whether from want of skill, or want of perseverance, or 
 the unsuitableness of the climate, or the excessive richness of. the 
 soil, the trees did not flourish. The caper, too, of which he sent 
 seeds and amplest information, we still import in long, thin bottles, 
 from Europe; Cotton he dismisses with curious brevity, consider- 
 ing the importance it has since attained. In writing of East India 
 products to the Charleston society, he says, "Cotton is a precious 
 resource, and which cannot fail with you." y' 
 
 Eice was the great theme "of his agricultural letters. He was 
 surprised, upon settling for the first time in a Catholic community, 
 at the vast quantities of rice consumed ; for it was the great resource 
 of all classes during Lent. Eish was then a costly article, so far 
 from the sea. Voltaire laughs at the Paris dandies of his day, who 
 alleviated the rigors of Lent by breakfasting with their mistresses 
 on a fresh fish brought, post, from St. Malo, that cost five hundred 
 francs, — a delicate mark of attention, he observes, to a pretty pen- 
 itent. Kice, however, was the standing dish in France during the 
 fasting-season, and the merchants timed their importations accord- 
 ingly. Jefferson was struck with the small quantity of American 
 
308 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 rice brouglit to French ports and the low price it brought. Upon 
 inquiry, he was told that the American rice (which reached France 
 by way of England) was inferior in quality to that of Piedmont, and 
 not so well cleaned. He sent to Charleston specimens of the kinds 
 of rice sold in Paris, explained the inconveniences of a circuitous 
 commerce, urged the Carolinians to send cargoes direct to Havre, 
 and told them to be sure to get the bulk of the supply in port a 
 month before Lent. As to the imperfect cleaning, he resolved to 
 investigate that point to the uttermost. Being at Marseilles in 
 1787, he inquired on every hand concerning the machine employed 
 in Italy to hull and clean the rice. No one could tell him. The 
 vast national importance of the matter, together with the warm 
 responses which he had received from Charleston to his letters upon 
 rice, induced him to cross the Alps, and traverse the rice-country on 
 purpose to examine the hulling-mill employed there, to- the use of 
 whicli he supposed the higher j)rice of the Italian rice was due. "I 
 found their machine," he wrote to Edward Rutledge of South Caro- 
 lina, "exactly such a one as you had described to me in Congress in 
 the year 1783 ! " 
 
 But he did not cross the Alps in vain. Seeing that the Italians 
 cleaned their rice by the very mill used in South Carolina, he con- 
 cluded that the Italian rice was of a better kind, and resolved to 
 send some of the seed to Charleston. It was, however, part of the 
 barbaric protective system to prevent the exportation of whatever 
 could most signally bless other nations ; and no one was allowed to 
 send seed-rice out of the country. Jefferson, falling back on the 
 higher law, " took measures with a muleteer to run a couple of sacks 
 across the Apennines to Genoa;" but, having small faith in the 
 muleteer's success, he filled the pockets of his coat and overcoat with 
 the best rice of the best rice-producing district in Italy, and sent it, 
 in two parcels by different ships, to Charleston. The muleteer 
 failed to run his sacks ; but this small store reached the Charleston 
 society, who distributed it among the rice-planters, a dozen or two 
 of grains to each. These were carefully sown and watched, usually 
 under the master's eye. The species succeeded well in the rice 
 country, and enabled the South-Carolina planters to produce the 
 best rice in the world. If the reader has had to-day a pudding of 
 superior rice, its grains were, in all probability, descended lineally 
 from those which Jefferson carried off in his pockets in 1787. 
 
UNOFFICIAL LABOES. 809 
 
 He afterwards sent the society rough seed-rice from the Levant, 
 from Egypt, from Cochin-Cliina, from the East Indies ; besides an 
 " improved tooth " of a rice-miU. He also perfected with the French 
 government and with French merchants the best arrangements then 
 possible for the direct importation of rice from South Carolina and 
 Georgia. No man was ever more vigilant than he in detecting 
 opportunities to benefit his country. How did he get unhulled rice 
 from Cochin-China? "The young prince of that country, lately 
 gone from hence, having undertaken that it shall come to me." 
 
 Nor did he confine his services to his own country; for, as he said 
 more than once, he regarded the ofSce which he filled as interna- 
 tional, and he wished to be the medium of good to both countries. 
 Among other American productions, he sent for two or three hundred 
 pecan-nuts from the Far West, for planting in France. To Dr. 
 Stiles he wrote, " Mrs. Adams gives me an account of a flower 
 found in Connecticut, which vegetates when suspended in the air. 
 She brought one to Europe. What can be this flower ? It would 
 be a curious present to this continent." Such hints were seldom 
 dropped in vain. Some of his correspondents took extraordinary 
 pains to gratify liis desires of this nature. The venerable BufFon, 
 getting past eighty then, and verging to the close of his illustrious 
 career, was indebted to Jefferson for torrents of information concern- 
 ing nature in America, as well as for many valuable specimens. He 
 gave the great naturalist the skin of a pantlier, which the old man 
 had never seen, and had not mentioned in his work ; also the horns 
 and skins of American deer, the feet and combs of American birds, 
 and many other similar objects. 
 
 He did not, it seems, always agree with Buflfon. The old man 
 held chemistry in contempt, — mere cooker}', he called it, — and 
 held that a chemist was no better than a cook. " I think it," said 
 Jeiferson, "on the contrary, the most useful of sciences, and big 
 with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race." 
 He combated, also, the Count de Buffbn's theory of the degeneracy 
 of animals in America. After much discussion, he tried an argu- 
 ment similar to that which Dr. Franklin had used, when, in reply 
 to. a remark of the same nature, he requested all the Americans 
 seated on one side of- the table to stand, and then all the Frenchmen, 
 who happened to sit in a row on the otlier side. The Americans 
 towered gigantic above the little Gauls, and the doctor came off 
 
810 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 triumphant. jTeiferson, on his part, wrote to General Sullivan of 
 New Hampshire to send him the hones and skin of a moose, 
 mightiest of the deer kind; Sullivan exaggerating the importance 
 of the ohject, on fire to do honor to his country and ohlige its 
 representative, formed a hunting party, plunged into the measureless 
 snows of the New-Hampshire liills, found a herd, killed one, cut a 
 road twenty miles to get it home, got the flesh from the hones, 
 packed skeleton and skin in a great hox, with horns of five other 
 varieties of American deer, and sent it on its way to the ocean. In 
 the course of time Mr. Jefiierson received a hill of thirty-six guineas 
 for the carriage of the box, and a glowing account from General 
 Sullivan of his exertions in procuring its gontents. He paid the 
 bill with a wry face, but the moose did not arrive. Six months 
 after the grand hunt, he wrote thus : " That the tragedy might not 
 want a proper catastrophe, the box, bones and all, are lost; so that 
 this chapter of natural history will still remain a blank. But I 
 have written to him 7iot to send me another. I will leave it for my 
 successor to fill up, whenever I shall make my bow here." A. week 
 later, however, he had the pleasure of sending the box to the Count 
 de Bufifon, promising much larger horns another season. The 
 naturalist gracefully acknowledged the gift, and owned that the 
 moose was indeed an animal of respectable magnitude. " I should 
 have consulted you, sir," said he, "before publishing vaj natural 
 history, and then I should have been sure of my facts." He died 
 next year, too soon to enjoy the enormous pair of buck's horns 
 coming to Jefferson from his native mountains, to maintain in 
 Europe the credit of his native continent. 
 
 The publication of Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia," in English and 
 in French, was an interesting event of his residence in Europe. 
 Saturated as the book was with the republican sentiment of which 
 he was the completest living exponent, it was eagerly sought after 
 in Paris, and had its effect upon the time. He appears to have 
 taken a modest view of the merits of the work. " I have some- 
 times thought," he wrote to his friend Hopkinson of Philadelphia, 
 "of sending my 'Notes' to the Philosophical Society as a tribute 
 due to them ; but this would seem as if I considered them as worth 
 something, which I am conscious they are not. I will not ask for 
 your advice on this occasion, because it is one of those on which 
 no man is authorized to ask a sincere opinion." 
 
TTNOFFICIAL LABOES. 311 
 
 A work mucli more important, upon wliicli he valued himself 
 more than upon any thing he ever wrote in hife life, except the 
 Declaration of Independence, and far more meritorious than that, 
 was published in Paris in 1786. I mean his Act for Freedom of 
 Eeligion, passed in that year by the Virginia legislature. He had 
 copies of it printed, according to his custom. It was received and 
 circulated with an ominous enthusiasm. I say ominous ; for the 
 first effect of ideas so much in advance of the state of things could 
 not be but destructive and disastrous. The whole diplomatic 
 corps complimented the author by asking for a copy to transmit, to 
 their several courts ; and he had it inserted in the Encydopedie, to 
 which he had contributed articles, and material for articles, on 
 subjects relating to the United States. " I think," he wrote to his 
 old friend and mentor, George Wythe, that " our Act for Freedom 
 of Religion will produce considerable good even in these countries, 
 where ignorance, superstition, poverty, and oppression of body and 
 mind in every form, are so firmly settled on the mass of the people, 
 that their redemption from them can never be hoped." Never is a long 
 time. He told George Wythe, that if every monarch in Europe 
 were to try as hard to emancipate the minds of his subjects from 
 ignorance and prejudice, as he was then trying to keep them 
 benighted, a thousand years would not raise them to the American 
 level. He attributed the superiority of Americans, in freedom and 
 dignity of mind, to their severance from the parent stock, and their 
 separation from it by a wide ocean ; which had placed all things 
 "under the control of the common sense of the ^eople.^ 
 
CHAPTER XXXVI. 
 
 HIS TRAVELS IN EUROPE. 
 
 A SUMMONS from Mr. Adams, Lis colleague in tlie commission for 
 negotiating commercial treaties, called him to London in March, 
 1786. He spent two months in England. The visit was an utter 
 and a woful failure. What evils might have been averted — the 
 war of 1812, for one item — if that unhappy dotard of a king had 
 had the least glimmer of sense, or the smallest touch of nobleness! 
 He received these two gentlemen, representatives of an infant nation 
 oflfering amity and reciprocal good, in a manner so churlish as left 
 them no hope of being so much as decently listened to. And they 
 were not decently listened to. Ministers were cold, vague, evasive. 
 Merchants said to them, in substance, America must send us her 
 produce, 'must buy our wares : we are masters of the situation. 
 Why should we treat ? What do we want more ? Society, too, 
 gave them the cold shoulder. These two men, the most important 
 personages upon the island, if England could but have known it, 
 were held of less account than a couple of attaches of the Austrian 
 legation. It required " courage," as Mr. Adams intimates, for a 
 nobleman to converse with them at an assembly. " That nation," 
 wrote Mr. Jefferson, "hate us; their ministers hate us ; and their 
 king more than all other men." Strange infatuation! Fatal 
 blindness ! 
 
 Of course, being human, Mr. Jefferson did not relish England. 
 He found the people heavy with beef and beer, of a growling tem- 
 per, and excessively prona to worship power, rank, and wealth. 
 " They are by no means the free-minded people we suppose them in 
 Ainerica. Their learned men, too, are few in number, and are less 
 learned, and infinitely less emancipated from jDrejudice, than those 
 of France." In the mechanic arts, he admitted, they surpassed all 
 312 
 
HIS TRAVELS IN EUEOPB. 313 
 
 the world ; and he enjoyed most keenlj'- the English gardens and 
 parks. London he thouglit a handsomer city than Paris, but not 
 as handsome as Philadelphia ; and the architecture generally, in 
 England, the " most wretched" he ever saw, not excepting America, 
 nor even Virginia, " where it is worse than in any other part of 
 America I have seen." 
 
 He set the Londoners riglit on one point. The noted invention 
 of the moment was a carriage-wheel, the circumference of which 
 was made of a single piece of wood. As these wheels were patented 
 and made in London, the invention was claimed as English, He 
 told his friends, and caused the fact to be published, that the farmers 
 in New Jersey were the first, since Homer's day, who were known 
 to have formed wheels in that manner. Dr. Eranklin, some years 
 before, had clianced to mention it to the person who then held the 
 patent. The idea struck him ; and the doctor went to his shop, and 
 assisted him in making a wheel of one piece. The Jerseymen did 
 it by merely bending a green sapling, and leaving it bent till it was 
 se't^ but as in London there were no saplings, the philosopher was 
 kept experimenting for several weeks. He triumphed at length, 
 and made a free gift of the process to the carriage-maker, who made 
 a fortune by it. Jefferson visited the shop in which Dr. Eranklin 
 had worked out the idea, where he received the story from the owner, 
 who gave the whole credit to Franklin, and " spoke of him with love 
 and gratitude." He also found, in the Iliad, the passage which proves 
 that the Greeks and the Jersey farmers employed the same process :' 
 " He fell on the ground like a poplar which has grown smooth in 
 the western part of a great meadow, with its branches shooting from 
 its summit. But the chariot-maker with the sharp axe has felled it, 
 that he may bend a wheel for a beautiful chariot. It lies drying on 
 the banks of a river." 
 
 In company with Mr. Adams, he made the usual tour of England, 
 visiting the famous parks, towns, battle-fields, edifices. So far as 
 his letters show, nothing kindled him in England but the gardens, 
 "the article in which England excels all the earth;" and he made 
 the most minute inquiries as to the cost of maintaining those exqui- 
 site places, in order to ascertain whether it were possible for him to 
 have a really fine garden at Monticello. It is to be presumed he 
 applauded Mr. Adams's harangue to the rustics on the battle-field of 
 Worcester, — Cromwell's " crowning mercy." The impetuous Adams, 
 
314 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 exalted by the recollections called up by the scene, was offended at 
 the stolid indifference of the people who lived near by. "Do Eng- 
 lishmen," he exclaimed, "so soon forget the ground where liberty 
 was fought for ? Tell your neighbors and your children that this is 
 holy ground, much holier than that on which your churches stand! 
 All England should come in pilgrimage to this hill once a year ! " 
 The by-standers, as Mr. Adams reports, were animated and pleased 
 by this compliment to their-native field. The two Americans visited 
 Stratford-upon-Avon ; but Mr. Jefferson only records that he paid 
 a shilling for seeing Shakspeare's house, another for seeing his tomb, 
 four shillings and twopence for his entertainment at the inn, and 
 two shillings to the servants. Mr. Adams, on the contrary, ventured 
 the bold remark that Shakspeare's wit, fancy, taste, and judgment, 
 his knowledge of life, nature, and character, were immortal. 
 
 Jefferson played his last piece upon the violin in Paris. Walking 
 one day with a friend, four or five miles from home, absorbed in ear- 
 nest conversation, he fell, and dislocated his right wrist. He grasped 
 it firmly with his other hand, and, resuming the conversation, 
 walked home in torture, of which his companion suspected nothing. 
 It was unskilfully set ; and he never, as long as he lived, recovered 
 the proper use of it, — could never again write with perfect ease, could 
 never again play upon his instrument. Mr. Kandall remarks the 
 curious fact, that, so inveterate had become the habit of entering his 
 expenditures, he continued to record items that very afternoon, using 
 his left hand. In' the morning, before the accident, he entered the 
 payment to his steward, Petit, of five hundred and four francs for 
 various household expenses, and in the afternoon, after the accident, 
 in a hand more legible, records the expenditure of "24f. 10" for 
 buttons, and "4 f. 6 " for gloves. The next day he was out again^ 
 " seeing the king's library," for which he paid three francs. 
 
 The wrist being weak and painful five months after the accident, 
 the doctors " filled up the measure " of their absurdity by advising 
 him to try the waters of Aix in Provence. He tried those waters, 
 and, deriving no benefit from them, resumed his journey, and en- 
 joyed an instructive and delightful four months' tour of France and 
 Italy ; visiting especially the seaports, rice-districts, and regions 
 noted for the culture of particular products. The cities, he says, he 
 " naade a jo)) of, and generally gulped it all down in a day ; " but 
 he was " never satiated with rambling through the fields and farms, 
 
HIS TRAVELS IN EUEOPE. 315 
 
 examining the culture and cultivators with a degree of curiosity 
 which make some take me to be a fool, and others to be much wiser 
 than I am." But he did not always find the towns so devoid of 
 interest. It was upon this tour that he saw at Nismes the edifice 
 which he had taken for a model for the Capitol at Richmond. " Here 
 I am, madam," he wrote to one of his friends, " gazing whole houus 
 at the Maison Quarree* like a lover at his mistress. The stock- 
 ing-weavers and silk-spinners around it consider me a hypochondriac 
 Englishman about to write with a pistol the last chapter of his his- 
 tory. This is the second time I h&ve been in love since I left Paris. 
 The first was with a Diana at the Chateau de Laye-Epinaye in Beau- 
 jolois, a delicious morsel of sculpture by M. A. Slodtz. This, you 
 will say, was in rule, — to fall in love with a female beauty ; but with 
 a house ! It is out of all precedent. No, madam, it is not without 
 precedent in my own history." At Vienna he owns to having been 
 in a rage on seeing a superb Eoman palace "defaced" and "hewed 
 down " into a hideous utility. 
 
 When he saw men working long hours and hard for forty cents a 
 week, children toiling with the hoe, women carrying heavy loads, 
 tending locks, striking the anvil, and holding the plough, he some- 
 times made rather violent entries in his brief, hurried diary. Eor 
 example, "Few chateaux, no farmhouses, all the people being gath- 
 ered in villages. Are they thus collected by that dogma of their 
 religion which makes them believe, that, to keep the Creator in 
 good-humor with his own works, they must mumble a mass every 
 day ? " 
 
 The hopeless, helpless condition of the peasantry in some parts of 
 France to which Nature had been most bountiful struck him to the 
 heart again and agai3|/ It was his custom, as ho wandered among 
 the farms and vineyards, to enter their abodes upon some pretext, 
 and converse with the wives of the absent laborers. He would con- 
 
 * This edifice still enchants every intelligent beholder. In the life of Mr. Thomas Brassey, 
 by Sir Arthur Helps (London, 1872), is the following passage by the son of the great con- 
 tractor : — 
 
 " On our way from the station at Nismes to the hotel, we passed the Maison Quarree, so 
 justly celebrated for the exquisite symmetry of its architectural proportions. I do not 
 think he had heard much about this building, perhaps he might never have heard of it before ; 
 but he immediately appreciated its great beauty, and remained .it least half an hour upon 
 the spot, ia order that he might thoroughly examine that admirable monument of ancient 
 art from every point of view. The excellent judgment in architectural art, and the sincere 
 and unaflected cnjojnnent of the beautiful, which he displayed in the instance to which I 
 have referred, made a strong impression ou my youthful mind." 
 
316 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOF. 
 
 trive to sit upon the bed, instead of tlie offered stool, in order to 
 ascertain of what material it was made ; and he would peep on the 
 sly into the boiling pot of grease and greens to see what was to be 
 the family dinner. He had left Lafayette at Paris, deeply absorbed 
 in the early movements of the coming revolution ; and he bogged 
 fcim to come into the southern provinces, and see for himself what 
 occasion there was for discontent. " To do it most eft'ectually," 
 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 pretence of resting yourself, but, in 
 fact, to find if they are soft. You will feel a sublime pleasure in 
 the course of this 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 vege- 
 tables." 
 
 What a republican such scenes as these made of him ! How he 
 came to hate, abhor, despise, and loathe the hereditary principle ! 
 And all the more, because his post gave him the means of knowing 
 the exact calibre of the hereditary kings and nobles who took from 
 these faithful laborers nearly all their toil produced, and left them 
 thistles and garbage for their own sustenance. " There is not a 
 crowned head in Europe," he wrote to General Washington in 1788, 
 " whose talents or merits w^ould entitle him to be elected a vestry- 
 man by the people of America ; " and he gave it to the general as 
 his opinion, that there was scarcely an evil known in Europe which 
 could not be traced to the monarch as its source, " nor a good which 
 was not derived from the small fibres of republicanism existing 
 among them." 
 
 The king of France he knew was a foolj^and the queen, at a 
 moment when the fate of the monarchj^ seemed to hang upon a few 
 millions more or less in the treasury, gratified to the full a mania 
 for high play. The kings of Spain and of Naples knew but one 
 interest in life, — the slaughter of birds, deer, and pigs. "They 
 passed their lives in hunting, and despatched two couriers a week, 
 one thousand miles, to let each other know what game they had 
 killed the preceding days." The Successor to the great Frederick 
 was "a mere hog in body and mind." George III. was a madman, 
 and his son an animal of the same nature as the king of Prussia. 
 According to Jefferson, England was as happy in her Prince of 
 
HIS TRAVELS IN EUROPE. 317 
 
 Wales in 1789, as she is in 1874. A friend (probably the Duke 
 of Dorset) described to him the behavior of the prince at a little 
 dinner of four persons : — 
 
 " He ate half a leg of mutton ; did not taste the small dishes be- 
 cause small ; drank champagne and Burgundy as small beer during 
 dinnei', and Bordeaux after dinner, as the rest of tlie company. 
 Upon the whole, he ate as much as the other three, and drank about 
 two bottle's of wine without seeming to feel it. . . . He has not a 
 single element of mathematics, of natural or moral philosophy, or 
 of any other science on earth ; nor has the society he has kept been 
 such as to supply the void of education. It has been that of the 
 lowest, most illiterate, and profligate persons in the kingdom. . . . 
 He has not a single idea of justice, morality, religion, or of the 
 rights of men, or any anxiety for the opinion of the world. He 
 carries that indifference for fame so far, that he probably would not 
 be hurt were he to lose his throne, provided he could be assured of 
 having always meat, drink, horses, and women." 
 
 Compared with the political system which placed such animals as 
 these upon the summit of things, and made life burdensome, shame- 
 ful, and bitter to nearly all but such, Jefferson thought the least 
 good of the American governments a paragon of perfection. The 
 very evils of democracy he learned to regard with a kind of favor. 
 A little rebellion now and then, like that in Massachusetts in 1786, 
 he thought, might be, upon the whole, beneficial. " It is true," he 
 wrote, that "our governments want energy;" and this, he confessed 
 was "an inconvenience." But "the energy which absolute govern- 
 ments derive from an armed force, which is the effect of the bayonet 
 constantly held at the breast of every citizen, and which resembles 
 very much the stillnds3^of the grave, must be admitted also to have 
 its inconveniences." The outrageous license of the London newspa- 
 pers seemed to him an evil not greater than the suppressions and 
 the perversions of the more shackled press of the Continent. He 
 made an acute observation on this point to Thomas Paine in 1787, 
 the truth of which every inhabitant of New York who has glanced 
 over the newspapers during the last few years can attest : — 
 
 " The licentiousness of the press produces the same effect which 
 the restraint of the press was intended to do. If the restraint pre- 
 vents things from being told, the licentiousness of the press j^revents 
 things from being believed when they are told." 
 
CHAPTEE XXXVII. 
 
 JEFFERSON AND THE FKENCH EEVOLUTION. 
 
 Man proposes, woman disposes. Sucli is often the way of this 
 world. Q 
 
 In the summer of 1781^, James Madison, who was the man of all 
 others most solicitous for the success of the new constitution of the 
 United States, wrote to Jefferson asking him if he would accept an 
 appointment at home in General Washington's administration. 
 " You know," Jefferson replied, " the circumstances which led me 
 from retirement, step by step, and from one nomination to another 
 up to the present. My object is a return to the same retirement ; 
 whenever, therefore, I quit the present, it will not be to engage in 
 any other office, and most especially any one which would require a 
 constant residence from home." A few months after these words 
 were written, he was in New York, Secretary of State ; and it was a 
 maiden of seventeen that brought him to it. 
 
 His situation in Paris had become too interesting to leave, too 
 pleasant to last. What man was ever more happily placed ? In 
 the most delightful city of the earth, he held a post which put all its 
 noblest resojarces at his command. His v^si^ was occupied with 
 honorable duties which practice had made easy to him ; and the cir- 
 cle of his friends was among the most agreeable the world has known 
 since human beings first learned to converse politely with one 
 another. In the houses which he most frequented, — that of the 
 Lafayettes, for example, — he found all that was truly elegant and 
 refined in the ancient manners, joined to the interest in knowledge 
 and in the welfare of man that distinguished the new period. High 
 thinking was, as it were, in vogue. Every man, woman, and child 
 in Paris, Jeflerson said, had become a politician ; so that wherever 
 be went he met people ardently desirous to listen to him as a master 
 818 
 
JEFFERSON AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 319 
 
 in the science of human riglits. Nobles caught something of the new 
 spirit; and rose superior to their rank. Simplicity and sincerity were 
 recognized as the true elevation of manner. Jefferson, without think- 
 ing of it, was quite in -the fashion when he finished a letter to Lafa- 
 yette by saying, that, in America, people did not permit themselves to 
 utter even truths when they had the air of flattery; and therefore 
 he would say, once for all, " I love you, your wife, and children." 
 
 He was on happy terms, too, with the diplomatic corps. Little as 
 he had cause to love the realm of Britain, it was, nevertheless, with 
 the British ambassador, the Duke of Dorset, that he was most inti- 
 mate ; and his daughter struck up a girl's friendship with the duke's 
 daugliter, that lasted beyond the term of their residence in Paris. 
 The officers who had served in America were among the favorites in 
 Paris society, and Jefferson's house was their natural rendezvous. 
 That prince of gossips and story-tellers, Baron Grimm, was among 
 his familiar acquaintances. Madame de Staiil, who was married 
 during Jefferson's second year in Paris, he knew only as the daugh- 
 ter of ISTecker and the brilliant young wife of the Swedish ambassa- 
 dor. Among the lions who flourished in Paris at the time was De la 
 Tude, who had been confined thirty-five years for writing an epigram 
 upon Pompadour. " He comes sometimes," writes Jefferson, " to 
 take a family soup with me, and entertains me with anecdotes of his 
 five and thirty years' imprisonment. How fertile is the mind of 
 man, which can make the Bastille and the dungeon of Vincennea 
 yield interesting anecdotes ! " That " family soup " of his played a 
 great part in his social life. He lived in the easy, liberal style of 
 Virginia, which harmonized as well with the humor of the time as 
 with his own character and habits. Pew set dinners, but a well- 
 spread table alwaj^s open and generally filled ; no grand parties, but 
 an evening circle that lured and detained the people fullest of the 
 prevalent spirit. He had already the habit of mitigating business 
 with dinner. If he had a difficult matter to conclude or discuss, it 
 was usual with him to invite the parties interested to one of his 
 light, rational, refreshing " family dinners," and afterwards, under 
 its humanizing influence, introduce the troublesome topic. 
 
 There were plenty of Americans in Paris, even at that early day ; 
 that is, there were, perhaps, as many individuals as there are thou- 
 sands now. " I endeavor to show civilities," he once wrote, " to all 
 the Americans who come here ! " There might have been three or four 
 
320 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOIST. 
 
 in a month. Gouverneiir Morris was there during the Lnter ferments, 
 shaking liis knowing head at' the French dream of a millennium, 
 and arguing with Jefferson by the liour against every thing that the 
 plenipotentiary most believed ; full of talk, self-confidence, and good- 
 humor ; apt to be right in his predictions, because exempt from the 
 longings to which the heavy-laden and anxious portion of the human 
 race are subject. Hence, all his life, as often as the millennium 
 failed to come to time, he had the noble satisfaction of saying, " I 
 told you so." Poor Mazzei was much in Paris at this time, ruined 
 by his endeavor to serve Virginia with Tuscan crowns during the 
 Kevolutionary War, and now often compelled to figure in Jefferson's 
 memorandum-book for French francs borrowed to supply his own 
 necessities. Ledyard, the born traveller of Connecticut, came to the 
 legation, poor and disappointed, incapable of remaining long in a 
 place, plagued even from his boyhood with a mania to roam over the 
 earth. He had sailed w'ith Cook, and revealed the tactless barbarity 
 of that navigator; had seen on the western coast of North America 
 the richest of all fur-bearing regions ; and had come to Paris to set 
 on foot the enterprise which Astor attempted twenty-five j'ears after, 
 when Astoria was founded. " But for the war of 1812," Astor used 
 to say, " I should have been the richest man that ever lived ; " thus 
 confirming Ledyard's view. Failing in his object, he was helpless 
 in Paris ; and Jefierson chalked out a bold scheme for him, worthy of 
 his singular genius for travelling. 
 
 From his youth up, Jefferson had gazed from Monticello, wonder- 
 ing what there might be between his mountain-top and the Pacific 
 Ocean. It was an inherited curiosity ; for his own father had felt 
 it, and, indeed, all intelligent Virginians, from the time when 
 Captain John Smith sailed up the Chickahominy in qiiest of the 
 South Sea. He now proposed to Ledyard to make his way through 
 Russia to Kamtchatka ; thence by some chance vessel to Nootka 
 Sound; and so, by one means or another, to what we now call 
 Oregon ; and then strike into the wilderness, explore that vast 
 unknown region, and endeavor to reach the western settlements of 
 the United States, 
 
 It was an audacious scheme, only fit for Ledyard, only possible to 
 just such a man. He jumped at it. Through Baron Grimm, who 
 was Own Correspondent in Paris to the Empress Catherine, Jeffer- 
 son tried to obtain the requisite permission, which she, knowing the 
 
JEFFERSON AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 321 
 
 perils of the route, humanely refused ; and Ledyard started without 
 it. Ragged, penniless, hungrj', gaunt, undaunted, he kept on, 
 "kicked," as he wrote to Jefferson, "from town to town," and hop- 
 ing " to be kicked round the world ; " until he was within two hun- 
 dred miles of Kamtchatka, where an order from Catherine arrested 
 him. He was brought back, and turned loose in Poland. It was 
 reserved for President Jefferson to get our first knowledge of the 
 boundless prairie world, through the explorations of his neighbor, 
 friend, and secretarj^. Captain Meriwether Lewis. 
 
 Mr. Hawthorne has told us, in his sly, humorous way, something 
 of the odd projects and eccentric characters that solicit the notice of 
 American representatives in Europe. Jefferson had his share of 
 both. He saw, too, while living in Paris, how far-reaching the 
 influence of the American Revolution was likely to be. He was 
 among the first to hear of the agitation in the Spanish and Portu- 
 guese colonies of America, that has since led to their deliverance 
 from all their oppressors, except those twin despots of the tropical 
 world, Indolence and Appetite. A mysterious note reached him in 
 October', 1786, from which he only learned that the writer was a 
 foreigner, who had " a matter of very great consequence " to com- 
 municate, and wished him to indicate a safe channel. The plenipo- 
 tentiary complied with the request. The letter arrived. " I am a 
 native of Brazil," it began. " You are not ignorant of the frightful 
 slavery under which my country groans. This continually becomes 
 more insupportable since the epoch of your glorious independence." 
 The Brazilians meant to rise, the writer continued, and they looked 
 to the United States for support : he had come to France on purpose 
 to say so to the plenipotentiary of the United States, because in 
 America he could not act in the matter without exciting suspicion. 
 If Mr. Jefferson desired further information, the writer could give it 
 him. 
 
 Meet me at Nismes, Mr. Jefferson replied in substance, whither 
 he would go " under the pretext of seeing the antiquities of tha^ 
 place." They met and conversed long. Jefferson reminded the 
 Brazilian that he could only give him his ideas on the subject as an 
 individual, having no authority to utter a word on behalf of Con- 
 gress. Those ideas were, that the United States were not in a con- 
 dition to take part in any war, and that they particularly wished to 
 cultivate the friendship of Portugal, a country with which they had 
 21 
 
322 LIFE or THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 an advantageous commerce. "But," lie added, ''a successful revo- 
 lution in Brazil could not be uninteresting to us ; " and " prospects 
 o{ lucre might possibly draw numbers of individuals to tlieir aid, 
 and purer motives our officers ; " and citizens of the United States 
 were free to leave their country whenever they wished. With this 
 zold comfort the Brazilian was obliged to depart from Nismes, and 
 leave Mr. Jefferson free to gaze with rapture upon the Malson 
 Quarree. 
 
 A similar series of mysterious approaches brought him, about the 
 same time, face to face with a Mexican, whose country was also pre- 
 paring to rise against its oppressors. In dealing with this gentle- 
 man," the minister showed that he had picked up in Paris or 
 elsewhere a little of the diplomatist's craft. " I was more cautious," 
 he reports, " with the Mexican than with the Brazilian ; " and he 
 threw cold water on his hopes by saying that he " feared tliey must 
 begin hj enlightening and emancipating the minds of their people." 
 No revolutionist likes to be met with an observation of that nature. 
 "I was led into this caution," Jefferson explains, "by observing 
 that this gentleman was intimate at the Spanish ambassador's," and 
 that he was in the service of the Spanish government at the very 
 time of making the communication. " He had much of the air of 
 candor," adds the suddenlj^-forraed 'diplomatist; "but that can be 
 borrowed, so that I was not able to decide about him iu my own 
 mind." / 
 
 All of which was reported at great length to Congress, with the 
 additional intelligence that Peru, which had already lost two hun- 
 dred thousand men in failure to eject tile hated Spaniards, could 
 easily be roused to rebellion again. In one way, if in no other, Mr. 
 Jefferson served Congress well : he provided them by every packet 
 with long letters, which at that period, when journalism was but an 
 infant art, must have been more interesting than we can now con- 
 ceive, close packed as they were with information, curious, impor- 
 tant, and new. 
 
 It was not in far-off Peru, Mexico, or Brazil, that he saw the most 
 memorable proofs of the mighty influence of the " glorious Revolu- 
 tion " of which he had been a part. He witnessed the " glorious " 
 part of the French Revolution, having been present at the Assembly 
 of the Notables in 1787, and at the destruction of the Bastille in 
 1789. His sympathy vfith that supreme effort of France to escape 
 
JEFFEESON AND THE FRENCH EEVOLUTION. 323 
 
 the oppression of outgrown institutions was entire and profound, but 
 it was also considerate and wise. Living in the most familiar 
 intimacy with Lafayette and the other leaders of the preliminary 
 movements, he knew every thing and influenced every thing they 
 did; for at first, while as yet the king and the nation seemed in 
 harmony, his official position was no restraint upon him ; and, to tlie 
 last, his constant advice was. Save the monarchy ; France is not ripe 
 for a republic ; get a constitution that will secure substantial liberty 
 and essential rights, and wait for the rest. 
 
 I suppose a good many of Mr. Carlyle's readers were a little 
 offended at Buckle's sweeping assertion tliat no history of the French 
 Revolution exists, and that no man had yet appeared who possessed 
 the knowledge requisite for writing such a work. Mr. Carlyle's 
 French Revolution seems only to lack the form and cadence of 
 poetry to rank with the great poems of all time, the Iliad, the 
 Inferno, Paradise Lost, and Faust. Dickens might well call it 
 a " wonderful work." Its brevity and pictorial power are wonder- 
 ful indeed; and a young reader who rises from its perusal pene- 
 trated and awe-struck may be pardoned for thinking, that, among 
 his other acquisitions, he has gained some insight into the French 
 Revolution. He has gained every thing hut insight. Mr. Carlyle 
 does not sacrifice the true to the picturesque : he gives us picture in 
 lieu of truth. He has all a poet's love for the picturesque, and is 
 more guided in his selection of events for relaiidn by their effective- 
 ness than by their importance. Hence, as the antidotal Buckle 
 remarks, we have a series of thrilling pictures, instead of that 
 noblest and most difficult of all the products of the mind, a genuine 
 history. 
 
 The narrative of events written by Jefferson in extreme old age, 
 brief, cold, and colorless as it is, taken in connection with his numer- 
 ous letters, official and private, written at the time, will be prized by 
 the individual who will, at length, evolve the French Revolution 
 from the chaos of material in which it is now involved. Unfortu- 
 nately, Jefferson went too far in extirpating his egotism. He was 
 not vain enough ; he was curiously reticent concerning his own j)art 
 in important events ; he instinctively veiled and hid his personality. 
 But for this he might have found time, in his busy retirement, to 
 compose a history of the Revolution down to the taking of the 
 Bastille, which would have been of imperishable interest. It was 
 
324 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 not merely that he knew the men and witnessed the events; but he 
 preserved his incredulitj^, accepted nothing upon mere rumor, and 
 personally investigated occurrences. If a rumor reached him that 
 "three thousand people had fallen in the streets," he and his secre- 
 tary, Mr. Short, would go to the spot, and, after minute inquiry, 
 reduce the number to "three." He was unwearied in sitting out 
 the interminable sessions of the various asselnblies, and thought 
 little of riding to Versailles "' to satisfy myself what has passed 
 there, for nothing can be believed but what one sees or has from an 
 eye-witness." 
 
 Occasionally his part in events was conspicuous, usually it was 
 unseen, always it was such as became the representative of the 
 United States. On the gathering of the Notables in 1787, his 
 advice to Lafayette was, Not to attempt too much ; to aim at secur- 
 ing a recurrence of the Assembly ; to vote the king ample supplies 
 in return for irreclaimable concessions ; to make the English consti- 
 tution their model, not as the best conceivable, but the best attain- 
 able. "If every advance," said he, "is to be purchased by filling 
 the royal coffers with gold, it will be gold well employed." In the 
 interval between the Assembly of the Notables of 1787, and the 
 National Assembly of 1789, he was guide, philosopher, and friend 
 to the liberal leaders; giving them numberless dinners and sound 
 instruction in constitutional government; furnishing them with 
 American precedents and English law-books, as well as with sum- 
 maries and elucidations of his own. One darling object of the La- 
 fayette party was to introduce trial by jury. It was Jefferson who 
 supplied them with a list of works on the subject, and added a brief 
 discourse, in which juries were justified on two grounds: 1, Because 
 in every branch of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, 
 an infusion of the people was necessary to the preservation of 
 purity; 2, The chance of getting justice from a biassed judge was 
 not as good as from a cast of the dice, but from a jury the chance 
 was something better than from a cast of the dice. Hence, trial by 
 jury was a good thing. 
 
 The frightful winter of 1788-89, when the mercurj'- in Paris fell 
 to twenty below zero; and the government was obliged to keep vast 
 fires burning in the streets to preserve the poor from freezing; and 
 every family that had any thing to spare was called upon for a 
 weekly contribution for the purchase of food; and long queues of 
 
JEFFEESON AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 325 
 
 hunger-stricken women and cliilJren besieged every baker's shop; 
 and, on cards of invitation to dinner, guests were requested to bring 
 their own bread; and the king himself was self-limited to his proper 
 Dumber of ounces, — this fearful season Jefferson was so happy as 
 to be the means of mitigating to the people of France. In the 
 autumn of 1787 it became known to the government that the supply 
 of food was insufficient; and M. Necker asked the American minister 
 to make the fact known in the United States, in order to stimulate 
 the exportation of grain to France. Jefferson wrote to Mr. Jay 
 on the subject, and Mr. Jay caused the letter to be inserted in the 
 newspapers. The result was, that France received from America 
 many thousand barrels of flour, — about thirty-five thousand, as it 
 appears, — enough sensibly to lessen the distress, because the bulk 
 of it arrived late, when the scarcity was extreme. 
 
 Wild ]\[irabeau, acting upon imperfect information, and eager to 
 make a point against the ministry, charged M, Necker, in one of his 
 harangues, with having refused an offer of American flour made by 
 the American minister. Jefferson hastened to defend the govern- 
 ment, and contrived to set M. Necker right with the public, witliout 
 offending Mirabeau. The orator read Jefferson's exculpatory letter 
 to the Assembly, and apologized for the error. 
 
 We have seen how susceptible Jefferson was to the spell of ora- 
 tory, from the time when, as a boy, he had listened in rapture to the 
 moonlight oration of an Indian chief in the Virginia woods, to the 
 period when the eloquence of Patrick Henry charmed and amazed 
 him in the House of Burgesses. And now, in Paris, he owned the 
 resistless power of Mirabeau, of whose singular fascination he re- 
 tained the liveliest recollection as long as he listed. William Wirt 
 and Henry Clay both testified to having heard Mr. Jefferson speak 
 of the sway of that strange being over the minds of men of every 
 class. " He spoke of him," saj'^s Wirt, " as uniting two distinct and 
 perfect characters in himself, whenever he pleased : tlie mere logi- 
 cian, with a mind apparently as sterile and desolate as the sands of 
 Arabia, but reasoning at such times with an Herculean force which 
 nothing could resist; at other times, bursting out with a flood of. 
 eloquence more sublime than Milton ever imputed to the cherubim 
 and seraphim, and bearing all before him." 
 
 At the supreme moment of the Revolution, in July, 1789, the 
 National Assembly paid homage, at once to the American people 
 
326 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 and to their representative. They appointed a committee to draught 
 a constitution, the chairman being the Archbishop of Bordeaux ; 
 and this committee formally invited the American minister to assist 
 at their sessions, and favor them with his advice. But, as it was to 
 the king that the plenipotentiary was accredited, he was obliged to 
 decline. He was not, however, to escape so easily. When the con- 
 stitution was under discussion in the Assembly, article by article, 
 differences of opinion arose which debate could not reconcile, because 
 the opinion of one powerful faction was prompted and supported by 
 interest. Two questions rent the Assembly, at length, into hostile 
 parties : 1, Shall the Icing have a veto? 2, Shall there be hereditary 
 legislators in France ? The nobility put forth all their energies, and , 
 used all their arts, to have both these vital questions answered aflBrm- 
 atively. The popular party were not united on either question ; 
 and hence there was wide-spread fear that the solid, small plialanx 
 of the aristocracy would wrest the constitution to the perpetuation 
 of their power. 
 
 In the midst of this alarm, Jefferson received a note from Imfa- 
 yette, informing him that he should, the next day, bring a party of 
 six or eight friends to dine with him. The hospitable Virginian re- 
 plied that they would be welcome ; and, at the time named, the party 
 arrived, — just eight' in all, including Lafaj'^ette. They proved to be 
 leaders on the po^Dular side, devoted to the cause, but unable to agree 
 on the two dividing questions ; and Lafayette, taking a hint from the 
 usual tactics of Jefferson, and forgetting his official character, had 
 brought them together in this way for a friendly conference. The 
 dinner passed. The cloth being removed, wine, according to the cus- 
 tom of old Virginia, was for the first time jilaced upon the table. 
 First eat, then drink, appears to have been the Virginian order. 
 Lafayette introduced the subjects upon which an interchange of 
 opinion Avas desired, reminded them of the state of things in the 
 Assembly, and dwelt upon the deadly peril of the new-born liberty 
 of France so long as the enemies of liberty were united and its 
 friends divided. " I have my opinion," said he ; " but I am ready 
 to sacrifice it to that of my brethren in the same cause." Some 
 common conclusion, he said, they must reach, and stand to, or the 
 nobility would carry all before them ; and, whatever they might now 
 agree upon, he pledged himself to maintain at the head of the 
 National Guard. 
 
JEFFERSON AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 327 
 
 It was four o'clock in the afternoon when Lafayette ceased to 
 speak, and it was ten iii the evening when the conference ended. 
 During those six hours, Jefferson says, " I was a silent witness to a 
 coolness and candor of argument unusual in the conflicts of political 
 opinion ; to a logical reasoning and chaste eloquence, disfigured by 
 no gaud}^ tinsel of rhetoric or declamation, and truly worthy of being 
 placed in parallel with the finest dialogues of antiquity." The 
 expedient was successful. Under the happy influence of Jefferson's 
 early, rational dinner, not wholly vitiated by the light v/ines which, 
 he had personally sought among the vineyards of France and Italy, 
 and with minds at once calmed and exalted by his silent, sympa- 
 thetic presence, the deputies, at last, discovered ground upon which 
 they covdd all stand. They agreed tliat the king should have a sus- 
 pensive veto, and that there should be no hereditary legislators. 
 France should be governed, thenceforth, by a constitutional king, 
 and by one legislative body, — the latter elected by the people. 
 Rallying upon these two principles, the liberal party presented a 
 solid front to the aristocrats, and thus controlled the Revolution as 
 long as it was controllable. 
 
 During this conference, the plenipotentiary had sat " silent " at 
 the head of his table ; nor had he had any part in causing the 
 meeting to be held in his house. Nevertheless, he felt that the eti- 
 quette of his position had been violated ; and, consequently, the 
 next morning lie went to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and ex- 
 plained the circumstances. The information was superfluous. The 
 minister, who, as Jefferson intimates, was in the confidence of the 
 patriots, had already learned what had passed, and had approved the 
 conference before it was held. He said, that, so far from taking 
 umbrage at the use to which Jefferson's house had been put, he 
 earnestly wished that he would habituallj'' attend such conferences, 
 because he was sure he would moderate the warmer spirits, and pro- 
 mote attainable reforms only. Jefferson replied, that he knew too 
 well the duties he owed to the king, to France, and to the United 
 States, to meddle with the internal affairs of the country; and he 
 should preserve careiully the attitude of a neutral and passive spec- 
 tator, except that his heart's desire would ever be for the prevalence 
 of measures most beneficial to the nation. 
 
 During these intense weeks, Jefferson had a foretaste of what he 
 was to experience soon in New York and Philadelphia. He discov- 
 
828 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 ered that a man niiglit be an American, a patriot, and a person of 
 great ability and worth, and yet not sympathize at all with this 
 mighty and hopeful movement. Almost every day or two Gonver- 
 neur Morris dropped in at the legation for a dinner and a chat with 
 the minister; differing from him in opinion, in sentiment, in sym- 
 pathy, yet glad of the information he obtained from him, and well 
 affected towards him personally. Marie the difference between the 
 humane and the tory mind : Morris instinctively took sides with 
 the hated aristocrats, associated chiefly with them, lamented their 
 downfall, sympathized deeply with them in all their alarms and sor- 
 rows. When he saw the queen of France pass unsaluted by a sin- 
 gle voice, he could not help calling upon the by-standers to give her 
 a cheer ; and only refrained himself from raising the cry, because he 
 remembered in time that he was not a Frenchman. He honestly 
 bewailed the spectacle of the " high Austrian spirit " abased to the 
 point of the queen's bowing low in acknowledgment of one faint 
 cheer. He exulted when the king showed for a moment the fierte 
 which he deemed proper to " the Bourbon blood." He sent a letter 
 of advice to the queen ; and, at a later day, pressed uj)on the exiled 
 Duke of Orleans a loan of fifteen hundred pounds. Such men as 
 he are so constituted, that the brief and shallow distress of a 
 wealthy and picturesque family brings tears to their eyes, while they 
 can calmly accept as inevitable doom the desolation and hopeless 
 anguish of whole provinces of unornamental people. Their sympa- 
 thies are genuine and acute, but limited. Burke, doubtless, was 
 sorry that France was unhappy ; but the downfall and death of one 
 picturesque woman tore his heart, and unsettled his mind. 
 
 '' What is the queen disposed to do in the present situation of 
 things ? " Jefferson supposes some one to ask in this same summer of 
 1789. He answers the question thus : *' Whatever rage, pride, and 
 fear can dictate in a breast which never knew the presence of one 
 moral restraint." . Again he writes, " The queen cries, and sins on." 
 That is, as Madame Campan explains, she had a woman's passion for 
 deep play; and there was no one in France \vho,could stay her hand, 
 no one who could keep her from squandering thousands at a sitting. 
 Ministers lamented, that, at such a crisis, France for the first time 
 in ages should be cursed with a king who had the mania to live 
 without a mistress, — a thing extremely inconvenient in a despotic 
 court, where it makes the queen king. A virtuous man has no chance 
 
JEFFERSON AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 329 
 
 whatever with such a wife as that. Let him be neglectful, contempt- 
 uous, dissolute ; let him put upon her the ignominy of an avowed 
 mistress ; let him be a Louis XV. instead of a Louis XVI., — and 
 she is as submissive as a lamb. '' This angel, as gaudily painted in the 
 rhapsodies of Burke," wrote Jefferson forty years after, " witli some 
 smartness of fancy, but no sound sense, was proud, disdainful of 
 restraint, indignant at all obstacles to her will, eager in the pursuit 
 of jileasure, and firm enough to hold to her desires, or perish in their 
 wreck. Her inordinate gambling and dissipations, witli tliose of the 
 Count d'Artois and others of her clique, had been a sensible item 
 in the exhaustion of the treasury, which called into action the re- 
 forming hand of the nation ; and her opposition to it, her inflexible 
 perverseness and dauntless spirit, led herself to the guillotine, drew 
 the king on with her, and plunged the world into crimes and calam- 
 ities which will forever stain the pages of modern history. I have 
 ever believed, that, had there been no queen, there would have been 
 no revolution. No force would have been provoked or exercised." 
 He adds, that he would not have voted for the execution of the sover- 
 eign. He would have shut the queen up i*! a convent, and deprived 
 the king only of irresponsible and arbitrar3'' power. 
 
 IVforris, on the contrary, throws the blame of the subsequent hor- 
 rors — including both Robespierre and Bonaparte — upon the de- 
 sti'uction of the nobility; and, in this opinion, he lived and died. He 
 wrote thus in his diary, after getting home one evening from Jeffer- 
 son's house : " Mr. Jefferson and I differ in our systems of politics. 
 He, with all the leaders of liberty here, is desirous of annihilating 
 distinctions of order. How far such views may be right respecting 
 mankind in general is, I think, extremelj' problematical. But, with 
 respect to this nation, I am sure it is wrong, and cannot eventuate 
 well." On the Fourth of July, Mr. Jefferson entertained a large 
 party of Americans at dinner, among whom and of whom were M. 
 and Madame de Lafaj'^ette. Morris, after dinner, urged Lafayette to 
 preserve, if possible, some constitutional power to the body of the 
 .nobles, "as the only means of preserving any liberty to the peo- 
 ple." Happy the Morris who records in his diary such a remark 
 as this, on the eve of such a period as France was entering in the 
 summer of 1789. 
 
CHAPTER XXXVIII. 
 
 RETURNING TO THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 Placed m the midst of all tins stir and effervescence, while as 
 yet every thing wore a hopeful aspect, — the Bastille in ruins, the 
 people easily triumphant everywhere, and the aristocrats acquiescent, 
 submissive, or in flight, — we cannot wonder that Jefferson found 
 his situation, as he said, too interesting to abandon. He had no 
 thought of abandoning it. Nevertheless, an evout had occurred in 
 his household which made it necessary for him to visit Virginia for 
 a short time ; and while the Bastille was tumbling, he was impa- 
 tiently waiting for the arrival of a six-months' leave of absence for 
 which he had applied. And there was a member of his family who 
 was waiting for it, perhaps, more impatiently than himself. 
 
 When he left Virginia, in 1784, he had three children, — Martha, 
 • twelve, years of age ; Mary, six ; and Lucy, two. The eldest he 
 took with him to Paris, where he placed her at a convent school ; 
 and the two others he left in Virginia under the care of their aunt, 
 Mrs. Eppes. A few weeks after his arrival in Paris, the intelligence 
 reached him that his youngest daughter, Lucy, a strangely interest- 
 ing child, had died of whooping-cough, after a week of acute suffer- 
 ing. After this cutting stroke he began to long for the coming of 
 her sister, whom he wished to have educated in Paris. But she was 
 ofte of the most clingingly affectionate of all children ; resembling 
 those vines which we sometimes find in the woods, which cast 
 adhesive tendrils round every object they toiich, and can scarcely 
 be disengaged without breaking. She could not hear of leaving 
 her Virginia home without such distress as made her aunt shudder 
 at the thought of sending her away. Her father tried to accus- 
 tom her mind to the idea of leaving ; telling her that he and 
 her sister IVIartha could not live without her, and that he would 
 330 
 
EETUENING TO THE UNITED STATES. 331 
 
 soon bring her back to her uncle, aunt, and cousins, whom she was 
 so sorry to leave. " You shall be taught here," he wrote, " to play 
 on tlie harpsichord, to draw, to dance, to read and talk French, and 
 such other things as will make you more worthy of the love of your 
 friends." To this he added a temptation more alluring: "You shall 
 have as many dolls and playthings as you want for yourself, or to 
 send to your cousins." He concludes with all the good advice that 
 tender and thoughtful fathers give, with some items less usual : 
 "Never beg for any thing," and, "remember, too, as a constant 
 charge, not to go out without your bonnet, because it will make you 
 very ugly, and then we shall not love jou. so much." 
 
 The little girl could not be tempted. She scrawled a brief reply, 
 in which she said that she longed to see her father and her sister, 
 but, '• I am sorry you have sent for me. I don't want to go to France ; 
 I had rather stay with Aunt Eppes." In two postscripts she 
 strove to impress the same lesson upon her father's mind : " I want 
 to see 3'ou and Sister Patsy ; but you must come to Uncle Eppes's 
 house." The father, however, insisted, because, as he said, his 
 reason told him that the dangers were not great, and the advantages 
 to the child would be considerable. But she must not sail till just 
 the right vessel offered, — a good ship, not too new and not too 
 old, — nor until the right person was found to take charge of her. 
 " A careful negro woman, as Isabel for instance, if she has had the 
 small-pox, would suffice under the patronage of a gentleman." 
 When he had mentioned every precaution that the most anxious 
 fondness could suggest, he was still tormented with visions of new 
 dangers. His long and fruitless negotiations with the Algerines 
 called up the most horrible of all his apprehensions. Suppose she 
 were taken into captivity by those pirates, who had already driven 
 the American flag froni the Mediterranean, and menaced American 
 commerce in every part of the ocean ! The thought preyed upon 
 his mind to such a degree, that he wrote one letter to IVIr. Eppes for 
 no other purpose than to beg him once more not to confide the child 
 to an American ship, but " to a French or English vessel having a 
 Mediterranean pass." The possible peril of his daughter was a 
 stimulant to his diplomatic exertions ; and he told Mr. Eppes, that, if 
 a peace were concluded with the Algerines, he should be among the 
 first to hear it. " I pray you," he added, " to believe it from 
 nobody else." 
 
332 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 These precautions were not needless; for wliile the child was 
 upon the ocean, in the spring of 1787, a Virginia ship going to 
 Spain was attacked by a corsair. After an action of an hour and a 
 quarter, the Virginians boarded and took her, bound the pirates 
 with the shackles themselves would have worn if the battle had 
 gone the other way, and so carried them to Virginia. Well might 
 the father say, when he knew that she had sailed, "I shall try not- 
 to think of Polly till I hear that she has landed." 
 
 He did think of her, however, constantly ; and he endeavored to 
 prepare his elder daughter for the duties which the coming of so 
 young a sister would devolve upon her. " She will become," he 
 wrote to her, "a j^recious charge upon j^our hands. The difference 
 of your age, and your common loss of a mother, will put that office 
 upon you. Teach her, above all things, to be good, because without 
 that we can neither be valued by others, nor set any value on our- 
 selves." In his advice to his children and nephews, this truth is 
 often repeated : " If ever you find yourself in any difficulty, and 
 doubt how to extricate yourself, do ivhat is right, and you will find 
 it the easiest way of getting out of the difficulty." And, again, to 
 his nephew, Peter Carr: "Give up money, give up fame, give up 
 science, give the earth itself, and all it contains, rather than do 
 an immoral act. And never suppose, that, in any possible situation 
 or any circumstances, it is best for you to do a dishonorable thing." 
 
 She was really coming at length, though to the last moment, she 
 clung with all her little heart to her home. No promises, no strata- 
 gems, availed to reconcile her to going away. The ship lay at 
 anchor in the river. Her cousins all went on board with her, and 
 remained a day or two, playing about the deck and cabins, and 
 making the ship seem like another home. Then using the device 
 by which Pocahontas had been taken prisoner in the same waters a 
 hundred and seventy years before, they all left the ship one day 
 while she was asleep ; and she awoke to find the sails spread, the 
 familiar shore vanished, her cousins gone, and only her negro maid 
 left of the circle of her home. Her affections then gathered about 
 the captain of the vessel, to whom she became so attached, that part- 
 ing with him, too, was agony. Mrs. Adams received her in London, 
 where she remained two weeks, and won the heart of that estimable 
 lady. " A finer child of her age I never saw," wrote Mrs. Adams. 
 "So mature an understanding, so womanly a behavior, and so 
 
EETURNING TO THE UNITED STATES. * 333 
 
 much sensibility united, are rarely to be met with. I grew so fond 
 of her, and she was so much attached to me, that, when Mr. Jeffer- 
 son sent for her, they were obliged to force the little creature 
 away." 
 
 It was a strange meeting in Paris between father and child, and 
 between sister and sister. Martha, then a tall and elegant girl of 
 fifteen, had a week's holiday from the convent to meet her sister. 
 The little girl did not know either of them, nor would they have 
 known her. But they were both enchanted with her. Besides 
 being a girl of singular and bewitching beauty both of form and 
 face, she was one of the most artless, unselfish, and loving creatures 
 that ever blessed and charmed a home. Her father was abundantly 
 satisfied with " her reading, her writing, and her manners in gene- 
 ral ; " and he poured forth eloquent gratitude to Mrs. Eppes for the 
 patient goodness which had borne such fruit in the character and 
 mind of his child. During the week's holiday, Martha took her 
 sister occasionally to the convent, showed her its pleasant gardens 
 and inviting apartments^ familiarized her with the place, which, as 
 they all thought, was to be her abode for some years. At the end 
 of the week the new-comer went to the convent to reside, where as 
 " Mademoiselle Polie " she soon became a universal favorite. 
 
 Both sisters learned to speak French almost immediately, and 
 soon spoke it as easily as they did English ; while the three adult 
 members of the family, Humphries, Short, and Jefferson, when they 
 had been two years in Paris, got on in speaking French not much 
 better than when they landed. So, at least, Jefferson says in one 
 of his letters. It does require about two years to begin to be at 
 home in a foreign language ; but, when you have reached a certain 
 point, familiarity seems to come all at once. 
 
 The parent who keeps a daughter at a good specimen of a con- 
 vent school for more than two years may count upon her having a 
 fit of desire to become a nun ; unless, indeed, the girl has much 
 more or much less understanding than the average. These daugh- 
 ters of Mr. Jefferson were conscientious, affectionate, and sympa- 
 thetic, lovers of tranquillity, of strong local attachments ; but they 
 were not exceptionally endowed with intellect. One day in the 
 spring of 1789, he received a letter from Martha, in which she 
 informed him of her wish to pass her days in the convent in the ser- 
 vice of religion. At any time this would have been a startling 
 
834 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 announcement to such a father ; but particuhxr circumstances greatly 
 increased its effect upon him. 
 
 Among the young Americans who had been studying in European 
 universities during Jefferson's residence in Paris, was a cousin of 
 his own, Thomas Mann Randolph, known to the public in later 
 years as member of Congress and governor of Virginia. In 1788 he 
 left the University of Edinburgh, and, before returning to Virginia, 
 made the usual tour of Europe, lingering several weeks at the lega- 
 tion in Paris, where he renewed his acquaintance with Martha Jeffer- 
 son. The little playmate of his boyhood had grown to be a beautiful 
 girl of sixteen; and she, on her part, saw the black-haired*boy of her 
 early recollections transformed into a tall, alert young man, fluent 
 in conversation, and of distinguished bearing. From slight indica- 
 tions in Jefferson's letters of this year, I infer that the j'outh pro- 
 posed to the father for the hand of the daughter; and that Jefferson, 
 while approving the match and consenting to it, had not disturbed 
 the school-girl's mind by making the offer known to her. Young 
 Randolph sailed for Virginia in the fall of 1788 ; and the plenipoten- 
 tiary, a few weeks after, applied for leave of absence, for the purpose 
 of taking his daughters home. But at home the old government 
 was going out, and a new government was coming in ; and this was 
 the reason Vfhy the leave asked for in November, 1788, did not 
 reach Paris till late in the summer of 1789. During this interval it 
 was that Mr. Jefferson received the letter from his daughter which 
 notified him of her desire to espouse the Church. . 
 
 He managed this difficult case with prompt and successful tact. 
 He allowed a day or two to pass without noticing the letter. He 
 drove to the convent on the third morning, and, after explaining and 
 arranging the matter with the abbess, asked for his daughters. 
 He received them with somewhat more warmth and tenderness than 
 usual. Without uttering a word of explanation, he simply told 
 them that he had come to take them away from school. As soon as 
 they were ready, they entered the carriage, and were driven home, 
 where they continued their education under masters ; and neither 
 then nor ever did a word pass between father and daughter on the 
 subject of her letter. The dream of romantic and picturesque self- 
 annihilation was soon dissipated in the healthy air and honest light 
 of her father's houf^e. She accepted her destiny with the joyous 
 blindness of youth ; and instead of the self-abnegation of the con- 
 
BETUENING TO THE UNITED STATES. 335 
 
 vent, so easy and so flattering, she led a life of self-denial whicli 
 was not romantic nor picturesque, but homely and most real. 
 
 Late in August, 1789, the tardy leave of absence arrived, and the 
 family hastened to conclude their preparations for the voyage. 
 There was not much to do. Every thing at the legation was to be 
 left unchanged, in the care of Mr. Short, who was to be the official 
 charge till Mr. Jefferson returned. To the last hour of his stay, 
 this most zealous, faitliful, and vigilant of ministers continued to 
 render timely and fortunate services to his country's commerce with 
 France, which had grown under his fostering touch frond next to 
 nothing to 'something considerable. Tt had been happy for him, 
 perhaps, if he had not gone to America then. In Paris he was in 
 harmony with the prevailing tone. In Paris his fitness for his 
 place was curiously complete. In Paris he was sole of his kind, — 
 admired, believed in, trusted, liked, beloved. In Paris, with an 
 ocean between him and New York, he might have said No to the 
 invitation the acceptance of which changed the current of his life. 
 But it was in his destiny to go, and go he must. 
 
 His iis'e years' life in Paris had done much for his general culture, 
 and more for his particular training as a public man. He had 
 become a swift, cool, adroit, thoroughly trained, and perfectly accom- 
 plished minister; and this without ceasing to be a man and a 
 citizen, without hardening and narrowing into the professional 
 diplomatist, without losing his interest or his faith in mankind. 
 We have seen how deeply he was moved, on his arrival in Europe, 
 by the condition of the people; nineteen-twentieths of the whole 
 population, as he rashly computed, being more wretched and more 
 hopeless than the most miserable being who could be found in all 
 the length and breadth of America. These first impressions were 
 never effaced. When he had spent years in Europe, his disap- 
 proval of its political system — hereditjiry rank and irresponsible 
 power — remained passionate and unspeakable. Whenever, in his 
 letters or other writings of the time, he touches that theme, his 
 style rises, intensifies, warms; his words become short and simple, 
 his similes homely and familiar; every phrase betrays heartfelt 
 conviction. 
 
 In his numerous contributions of material for the Encyclojiidie 
 and similar works, he had evidently tried to get into them as much 
 of the genuine republican essence as the censor could be expected 
 
336 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 to admit. It liad been his delight to explain the state of things in 
 America, where, as he said, no distinction between man and man 
 had ever been known, except that conferred by office ; where '"' the 
 poorest laborer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest million- 
 naire, and generally on a favored one whenever their rights seemed 
 to jar;" where "a shoemaker or other artisan, removed by the 
 voice of his country into a chair of office, instantly commanded all 
 the respect and obedience which the laws ascribe to his office ; " 
 where, "of distinction by birth or badge, the people had no more 
 idea than they had of the mode of existence in the moon or 
 planets;" having merely heard there were such, and knowing they 
 must be wrong. Hence, he said, that due horror of the evils 
 flowing from that barbaric system could only be excited in Europe, 
 where "the dignity of man is lost in arbitrary distinctions, where 
 the human species is classed into several stages of degradation, 
 where the many are crushed under the weight of the few, and where 
 the order established can present no other picture than that of God 
 Almighty and his angels trampling under foot the host of the 
 damned." 
 
 Such utterances as these — and they abound in his Paris letters 
 — were penned before Buncombe County in North Carolina had 
 been " laid off"." They grew from the native elevation of his mind. 
 They attest his high-breeding, as well as his humanity and good 
 sense. The gentleman speaks in them, as well as the citizen; for 
 to be an American citizen, and not feel so, is to be of the Vulgar. 
 
 But, in those days, no American could boast of his country's 
 freedom, without laying himself open to a taunt. Did Jeff"erson 
 forget that the laborers of his own State were slaves, wlien he 
 vaunted the equality of its people ? Not always. He confessed 
 the shame of it; he foretold the ruin enclosed within it. "What 
 an incomprehensible machine is man!" he exclaims, "who can 
 endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself, in vin- 
 dication of his own liberty, and, the next moment, be deaf to all 
 those motives whose power supported him through his trial, and 
 inflict on his fellow-men a bondage one hour of which is fraught 
 with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to 
 oppose!" But, then, he threw the burden of delivering the slaves 
 of Virginia upon that convenient resource of self-indulgent mortals, 
 "Providence." An "overruling Providence," he thought, would at 
 
EEtURNING TO THE UNITED STATES. 337 
 
 length effect wliat the masters of Virginia ought at once to do. 
 When the measure of the slaves' tears should be full, then " a God 
 of justice will awaken to their distress, and by diffusing light and 
 liberality among their oppressors, or, at length, by his exterminat- 
 ing thunder, manifest his attention to the things of this world, and 
 that they are not left to the guidance of a blind fatality." 
 
 To the moment of his departure from Europe, we find him still a 
 warm lover of France, and devoted to the alliance between the two 
 countries. The last letter which he wrote to Madison in Paris con- 
 tains a passage on the alliance, which, coming from the( placid 
 Jefferson, we may almost call fiery : — 
 
 " When, of two nations, the one has engaged herself in a ruinous 
 war for us, has spent her blood and money to save us, has opened 
 her bosom to us in peace, and received us almost on the footing of 
 her own citizens; while the other has moved heaven, earth, and hell 
 to exterminate us in war, has insulted us in all her councils in 
 peace, shut her doors to us in every port vhere her interests would 
 admit it, libelled us in foreign nations, endeavored to poison them 
 against the reception of our most precious commodities, — to place 
 these two nations on a footing is to give a great deal more to one 
 than to the other, if the maxim be true, that to make unequal quan 
 titles equal, you must add more to one than to the other. To say, 
 in excuse, that gratitude is never to enter into the motives of 
 national conduct, is to revive a princij)le which has been buried foi 
 centuries with the kindred princij^les of the lawfulness of assassina- 
 tion, poison, and peijury. ... I know but one code of morality 
 for men, whether acting singly or collectively." 
 
 Such was his feeling with regard to France and England in 1789 
 before there were '* Galileans " or "Anglicans," still less '' Galloma- 
 niacs " or " Anglomaniacs," among his countrymen. 
 
 And, since I am endeavoring to show what manner of mind 
 Thomas Jefferson brought back with him to his native land in 1789, 
 I must allude to another matter. He carried his view of the rights 
 of the individual mind to an extreme, which, in that age, had few 
 supporters in his own country. His moral system was strict ; his 
 " doxy " was startlingly lax. The advice he gave his nephews on 
 these points, when they were college students, might be summed up 
 
338 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSO^T. 
 
 in words like these : Perfect freedom of thinking, but no other free- 
 dom ! To do right and feel humanely, we are hound : it is an honor- 
 able bondage, and he is noblest who is most submissive to it; but, in 
 matters of opinion, it is infamy not to be free. These sentences, 
 among others, he addressed to Peter Carr in college in 1787 : — 
 
 "Religion. In the first place, divest 3'onrself of all bias in favor 
 of novelty and singularity of opinion. Indulge them on any other 
 subject rather than that of religion. On the other hand, shake off 
 all the fears and servile prejudices under which weak minds are 
 servilely crouched. Fix Reason firmly in her seat, and call to her 
 tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even 
 the existence of a God ; because, if there be one, he must more 
 approve of the homage of reason than of blindfolded fear. You 
 will naturally examine, first, the religion of your own country. 
 Read the Bible, then, as you would Livy or Tacitus. For example, 
 in the Book of Joshua we are told the sun stood still for several 
 hours. Were we to read that fact in Livy or Tacitus, we should 
 class it with their showers of blood, speaking of statues, beasts, etc. 
 But it is said that the writer of that book was inspired. Examine, 
 therefore, candidly, what evidence there is of his having been in- 
 spired. The pretension is entitled to your inquiry, because millions 
 believe it. On the other hand, you are astronomer enough to know 
 how contrary it is to the law of nature. You will next read the 
 New Testament. It is the history of a personage called Jesus, Keep 
 in your eye the opposite pretensions : 1, Of those who say he was 
 begotten by God, born of a virgin, suspended and reversed the laws 
 of nature at will, and ascended bodily into heaven ; and, 2, Of those 
 who say he was a man of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, 
 enthusiastic mind, who set out with pretensions to divinit3'-, ended 
 in believing them, and was punished capitally for sedition, by being 
 gibbeted, according to the Roman law, which punished the first 
 commission of that offence by whipping, and the second by exile, or 
 death in f area. See this law in Digest, lib. 48, tit. 19, If 28, 3, and 
 Lipsius, lib. 2, de cruce, cap. 2. Do not be frightened from this 
 inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that 
 there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort 
 and pleasantness you will feel in its exercise, and the love of others 
 which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe there is a 
 
BETUENING TO THE UNITED STATES. 339 
 
 God, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he 
 approves you, will be a vast additional incitement : if that Jesus 
 was also a God, you will be comforted by a belief of his aid and love. 
 Your own reason is the only oracle given you by Heaven ; and you are 
 answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness, of the decision." 
 
 Such sentiments as these, which he cherished as long as he lived, 
 were familiar enough then to the educated class of the U nited 
 States, as of Christendom generally ; but they were seldom stated 
 with such uncompromising bluntness as in the passage from which 
 these sentences are selected. He disposed of subtler questions in 
 the same letter with equal abruptness : " Conscience is as much a 
 part of a man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings 
 in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them 
 in a greater or less degree. It may be strengthened by exercise^ as 
 may any particular limb of the body." 
 
 His long residence in a metropolis had not freed his mind from 
 some provincial prejudices. He shared the common opinion of that 
 age, that virtue was a product of the country, rather than the town, 
 and that farmers were better citizens than mechanics or merchants. 
 He spoke occasionally of mechanics as a class disposed to turbu- 
 lence, as if he had derived his knowledge of them from Shak- 
 speare's Julius Caesar, rather than from the workshops of his own 
 time. He hoped the period was remote when manj'- of his country- 
 men would be employed in manufactures ; which he evidently 
 regarded, with Franklin, as a kind of necessary evil, or last resource 
 of an over-populated country. But his special aversion was mer- 
 chants. " Merchants," he wrote, " are the least virtuous citizens, 
 and possess the least amor patriot}.''^ The reason why Ehode Island 
 was so difficult, and Connecticut so easj^, to be brought to consent 
 to reasonable measures, he thought, was this : In Connecticut there 
 was scarcely a man who was not a farmer, and in E-hode Island 
 almost every one was a merchant. All this, which savors of the 
 country gentleman, seems to us of the present day crude and erro- 
 neous. Khode Island might well pause, in 1787, before surrendering 
 control of the business to which she owed her whole subsistence. Ob- 
 serve a one-eyed man, when splinters are flying, with what anxious 
 vigilance he guards the organ which alone saves him from a life- 
 time's darkness. Ehode Island's commerce was like that last charge 
 
-340 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 in David Crocket's rifle, wben Le and the bear were eying one 
 another across the brook. 
 
 Such a man was Thomas Jefferson on his departure from France. 
 He had his limits, of course; he had his foibles; he had his faults. 
 But the sum of his worth as a human being was very great ; and he 
 had more in him of that which makes the glory and hope of Amer- 
 ica than any other living t^reature known to us. American prin- 
 cif)les he more than believed in : he loved them, and he deemed 
 their prevalence essential to the welfare of man. 
 
 What a plague it was to get across the sea eighty j^ears ago ! 
 With trunks packed (and their trunks, as Jefferson intimates, were 
 of American number and magnitude), the little family sat at home 
 waiting a whole month for a ship ; and, after all, they could do no 
 better than charter one in London to take them in at the Isle of 
 Wight. It was a month of alarm in Paris. The harvest had not 
 relieved the scarcity of food ; long queues of hungry people streamed 
 still from every baker's shop ; and the government itself, perishing 
 of inanition, was obliged to spare a million a week to keep down the 
 price of bread in Paris. Even in that dire extremity, the Protective 
 System shut the ports of France against the food for want of which 
 Frenchmen were djnng ; and Jefferson spent his last days, and even 
 his last hours, in Paris, in trying to persuade the Ministry , to ^ermii 
 the importation of salted provisions from the United States 1 Salt 
 beef, objected the Count de Montmorin, will give people the scurvy. 
 No, replied Jefferson : we eat it in America, and don't have the 
 scurvy. The salt-tax will fall off, said the minister. Jefferson 
 could not deny that it might a little ; but, on the other hand, it 
 would relieve the government from the necessity of keeping the 
 price of bread below its value. But, resumed the Count, the people 
 of France will not buy salt meat. Then, replied Jefferson, the 
 merchants won't import it, and no harm will be done. And you 
 cannot make a good soup of it, urged the Count. True, said Jeffer- 
 son, but it gives a delightful flavor to vegetables. Besides, it will 
 cost only half the price of fresh meat. He convinced the Count de 
 Montmorin, who requested him to propose the measure to M. 
 Necker. But, as he was summoned to join the ship, he could only 
 argue it briefly in a letter to M. Necker, which he left for Mr. Short 
 to deliver and enforce. August 26th, the day on which this letter 
 was written, he and his daughters left Paris for Havre. 
 
EETTJRNING TO THE UNITED STATES. 341 
 
 He might as well have waited a while longer. They were de- 
 tained at Havre ten days, during which he was so fortunate as to 
 effect another practicable breach in the Protective System. Ameri- 
 can ships bringing cargoes to Havre, found nothing to take from 
 Havre, sometimes, except salt ; but salt could only be bought " at 
 a mercantile price," at places on the Loire and Garonne, away 
 round on the Biscay side of France, involving six or eight hun- 
 dred miles of difficult and perilous coasting. He now obtained 
 from the farmers-general a concession, by which American ships 
 could load with salt at Honfleur, opposite Havre, paying only mer- 
 cantile rates. It made a nice finish to his diplomatic career, — this 
 valuable service to the merchants and mariners of his country. 
 
 Ten days further detention at Cowes gave the young ladies an 
 opportunity to ride about the Isle of Wight, to peep into the deep 
 well at Carisbrooke Castle, and stare at the window in the ruins 
 out of which Charles I. looked when he was a prisoner there, per- 
 haps with comments on the character of the decapitated from their 
 father. Mr. Pitt, it appears, had the politeness to send an order to 
 Cowes, exempting the baggage of the voyagers from search, an 
 attention which Miss Jefferson remembered with gratitude, she 
 being the member of the party who was most obliged. 
 
CHAPTER XXXIX. 
 
 HIS WELCOME HOME. 
 
 Twenty-three days of swift sailing and perfect autumn weather 
 brought the ship into a dense fog off the coast of Virginia. For 
 three days the thick November mist clung to the shore, preventing 
 the captain from getting a glimpse of either cape. At length; 
 trusting only to his calculations, in which, doubtless, a mathemat- 
 ical plenipotentiary had taken part, he stood in boldly, and escaped 
 into Chesapeake Bay, with only a graze and a scare, just in time to 
 avoid a storm that kept some companion vessels a month longer at 
 sea. This, however, was but the beginning of mishaps. In 
 beating up to Norfolk against the rising gale, they were run into 
 by a vessel rashing seaward before the wind, and lost part of their 
 rigging. At Norfolk, two hours after the passengers had landed, 
 and before anj of their effects had been taken ashore, the ship 
 caught fire. The flames gained sudi headway, that the captain 
 was on the point of scuttling the vessel. But at last, through the 
 exertions of every sailor in port, the fire was got under, without 
 damage to the papers of the minister or the aaintier effects of 
 his daughters. Nothing saved them but the thickness of the trunks ; 
 for the heat was so great in the state-rooms, that the powder in a 
 musket standing in one of them was silently consumed. 
 
 Norfolk, which had been burned to the last house during the war, 
 was little more than a village of shanties when Jefferson and his 
 daughters landed there, November 18, 1789. They would have been 
 puzzled to find shelter, as the only inn in the town was full, but 
 for the generosity of its inmates, who insisted on giving up their 
 rooms to them. On the very day of his landing, Jefferson read in a 
 newspaper that President Washington had appointed him secretary 
 of state. " I made light of it," he wrote soon after to a lady in 
 
 842 
 
HIS WELCOME HOME. 343 
 
 Paris, " supposing I had only to say No, and there would be an end 
 of it." 
 
 In all Virginia there was scarcely such a thing, at that time, as 
 a public conveyance. Friends, however, lent the party horses ; and 
 they journeyed homeward in tbe delightfully slow, easy, social man- 
 ner of the time, stopping at every friend's house on and near their 
 road. They were ten days or more in getting as far as Kiclimond. 
 The legislature was in session, many of Jefferson's old colleagues 
 being present. They coiild not let him pass through the caj)ital of 
 his native State without some mark of their regard. On the 7th 
 of December, 1789, the House of Delegates appointed a committee 
 of thirteen members, — sacred number! — with Patrick Henry for 
 chairman, to congratulate him on his return, and to assure him of 
 their esteem for " his character and public services." The com- 
 mittee waited upon him, and communicated the resolution of the 
 House. His reply was in the taste of the period : — 
 
 "I receive with humble gratitude, gentlemen, the congratulations 
 of the Honorable the House of Delegates on my return ; and I beg 
 leave, through you, to present them my thanks and dutiful respects. 
 Could any circumstance heighten my affection to my native coun- 
 try,, it would be the indulgence with which they view my feeble 
 efforts to serve it, and the, esteem with which they are pleased to 
 honor me. I shall hope to merit a continuance of their goodness, 
 by obeying the impulse of a zeal of which public good is the first 
 object, and public esteem the highest reward. Permit me, gen- 
 tlemen, for a moment, to separate from my general thanks the 
 special ones 1 owe to you, the organs of so flattering a communica- 
 tion." i- 
 
 Resuming their journey, they arrived, early in December, at the 
 mansion of Uncle Eppes in Chesterfield County, the happy home 
 of Mary Jefferson's childhood. Here they halted for many days. 
 It was at this place that Jeff'erson received the official announce- 
 ment of his appointment as secretary of state. A gentleman from 
 New York overtook him at Eppington, bearing his commission 
 signed by the president : also a letter from the president, cordially 
 inviting him to accept the place, yet giving him his choice to return 
 to Paris if he preferred to do so. It was evident that General 
 
344 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 
 
 Washington expected liim to accept. Mr. Jefferson's reply was 
 such as became the citizen of a republic. He told the president 
 that he preferred to remain in the office he then held, the duties of 
 which he knew and felt equal to, rather than undertake a place, the 
 duties of which were more difiBcult and much more extensive. 
 " But," he added, " it is not for an individual to choose his post. 
 You are to marshal us as may be best for the public good." There- 
 fore, if the president, after learning his decided preference to return 
 to France, still thought it best to transfer him to New York, " my 
 inclination must be no obstacle." 
 
 They were six weeks in reaching home. Two days before Christ- 
 mas, — a joyful time of year everywhere, but nowhere, perhaps, 
 quite so hilarious as in the Virginia of that generation, — all was 
 expectation at Monticello. The house had been made ready. The 
 negroes, to whom a holiday had been given, all came in from the 
 various farms of the estate, dressed in their cleanest attire, and 
 the women wearing their brightest turbans, and gathered, early in the 
 day, about the house. Their first thought was to meet the return- 
 ing familj' at the foot of the mountain ; and thither they moved in 
 a body, — men, women, and children, — long before there was any 
 reason to expect them. As the tedious hours passed, the more 
 eager of the crowd walked on ; and these being followed by the 
 rest, there was a straggling line of them a mile or two in length. 
 Late in the afternoon, the most advanced descried a carriage at 
 Shadwell, drawn by four horses, with postilions, in the fashion of 
 the time. The exulting shout was raised. All ran forward ; and 
 soon the whole crowd huddled round the vehicle, pulling, pushing, 
 crying, cheering, until it reached the steep ascent of the mountain, 
 where the slackened pace gave them the opportunity they desired. 
 In spite of the master's entreaties and commands, they took off" the 
 horses, and drew the carriage at a run up the mountain, and round 
 the lawn to the door of the house. 
 
 It was no easy matter to alight. Mr. Jefferson swam in a tumul- 
 tuous sea of black arms and faces, from the carriage to the steps of 
 the portico. Some kissed his hands, others his feet; some cried, 
 others laughed ; all tried at least to touch him. Not a word could 
 be heard above the din. But when the young ladies appeared ; when 
 Martha, whom they had last seen a child of eleven, stepped forth a 
 woman grown, in all the glorious lustre of youth, beauty, and joy ; 
 
HIS WELCOME HOME. 345 
 
 and when Mary followed, a sylph in form, face, and step, they all 
 fell apart, and made a lane for them to pass, holding up their chil- 
 dren to see them, and uttering many a cry of rapturous approval. 
 The father and daughters entered the house at length; the carriage 
 rolled away ; the negroes went off chattering to their quarters ; and 
 there was quiet again at Monticello. " Such a scene," wrote Martha 
 Jefferson long after, " I never witnessed in my life." As late as 
 1851, INIr. Eandall heard a vivid description of it at IMonticello, from 
 an aged negro who was one of the boys of the joyful crowd. 
 
 The merry Christmas passed. One of the first visitors from 
 beyond the immediate neighborhood was James Madison, who was 
 about starting for New York to attend Congress. General Wash- 
 ington, it seems, had requested him to call at Monticello, and ascer- 
 tain more exactly the state of Mr. Jefferson's mind with regard to 
 the appointment. " I was sorry," Madison wrote to the president, 
 January 4, 1790, "to find him so little biassed in favor of the domes- 
 tic service allotted him, but was glad that his difficulties seemed to 
 result chiefly from what I take to be an erroneous view of the kind 
 and quantity of business." To the foreign department alone he felt 
 equal, but he dreaded the new and unknown duties which had been 
 annexed to that. Upon receiving this information, the president 
 wrote again to Jefferson. The new business, he thought, would not 
 be arduous ; and, if it should prove so, doubtless Congress would apply 
 a remedy. The office, in the president's opinion, was very impor- 
 tant, on many accounts ; and he knew of no one who could better 
 execute it. He added a remark sure to have great weight with Jef- 
 ferson, as, indeed, it ought : " In order that you may be better pre- 
 pared to make your ultimate decision on good grounds, I think it 
 necessary to add one fact, which is this, that your late appointment 
 has given very extensive and very great satisfaction to the public." 
 Still the president would not urge acceptance. He merely said, 
 with regard to his own feelings, " My original opinion and wish 
 may be collected from my nomination." Jefferson yielded without 
 further parley. "I no longer hesitate," he wrote February 11, "to 
 undertake the office to which you are pleased to call me." So Mr. 
 Short had to break up the establishment at Paris, and send home 
 the accumulated treasures of five years' haunting of Paris bookstalls 
 and curiosity-shops. 
 
 The day after accepting office, a committee of his old constituents 
 
346 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 of Albemarle arrived at Monticello, and presented an address of 
 congratulation and commendation. It was unusually cordial and 
 interesting. They sketched his whole public career with approval ; 
 and felicitated themselves upon the fact, that it was they who had 
 introduced him to public life. Above all his other services, the}' 
 extolled "the strong attachment he had always shown to tlie rights 
 of mankind, and to those institutions that were best calculated to 
 preserve them." Much as they should like to enjoy his services 
 again, they assured him that they were too much attached to the com- 
 mon interests of their country, and too sensible of his merit, not to 
 unite with the general voice that called him " to continue in her 
 councils." In his reply, he again seized the opportunity to recall 
 attention to first principles. The favor of his neighbors, he said, 
 was, indeed, " the door through which he had been ushered on the 
 stage of public life ;" and, after becoming reference to that circum- 
 stance, he added these words, which contain the chief article of his 
 political creed : — 
 
 "We have been fellow-laborers and fellow-sufferers ; and Heaven 
 has rewarded us with a happy issue from our struggles. It rests now 
 with ourselves alone to enjoy in peace and concord the blessings of 
 self-government, so long denied to mankind: to show by example 
 the sufficiency of human reason for the care of human affairs ; and 
 that the will of the majority — the natural law of everj'^ 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. Let us then, my dear friends, forever bow down to the 
 general reason of the society. We are safe with that, even in its 
 deviations, for it soon returns again to the right way." 
 
 The lovers, meanwhile, were improving their time. February 23, 
 1790, the wedding occurred at Monticello. The clergyman who 
 performed the ceremony was Mr. Maury, son of Jefferson's school- 
 master. Young liandolph was heir to large estates ; and the pair, 
 after living a while at Monticello, settled on land in the neighbor- 
 hood. For a single week Jefferson witnessed and shared the happi- 
 ness of his children; and then, in obedience to General Washing- 
 ton's urgent desire, he set out for New York. The president had 
 already kept the office six months for him j business was accumu- 
 
HIS WELCOME HOIklE. 347 
 
 lating; he miglit well be a little impatient to see bis secretary of 
 state. 
 
 What a journey Jefferson had of it in the wet and stormy INIarch 
 of 1790 ! Twenty-one days of hard travel, including brief rests at 
 Eichmond, Alexandria, Baltimore, and Philadelphia! Delightful 
 as old-fashioned travel may have been to a home-returning plenipo- 
 tentiary, leisure being abundant, and the season propitious, it was 
 misery to a secretar}'- of state overdue, in chill and oozy March, at 
 a point four hundred miles distant. He sent his carriage round to 
 Alexandria in advance, intending to go in it the rest of the way. 
 At that ancient and flourishing port, where he paused one day, he 
 received an address from the mayor and citizens; from which we 
 learn that his labors in behalf of commerce had become known to 
 parties interested. The Alexandrians, besides approving his exer- 
 tions in " the sacred cause of freedom," had a word of thanks for 
 " the indulgences which his enlightened representations to the court 
 of France had secured to their trade ; " adding these words : " You 
 have freed commerce from its shackles, and destroyed the first essay 
 made in this country towards establishing a monopoly." The last 
 remark was aimed, probably, at British merchants and their resident 
 agents, who still had a tight grip upon Virginia estates, and did not 
 want any Virginia ships to go to Havre. Jefferson waived this com- 
 pliment with his usual excess of modesty, but did not refrain from 
 a sentence or two upon general politics : — 
 
 " Convinced that the republican is the only form of government 
 which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of man- 
 kind, my prayers and efforts shall be cordially contributed to the 
 support of that we have so happily established. ... It is, indeed, 
 an animating thought, that, while we are securing the rights of our- 
 selves and our posterity, we are pointing out the way to struggling 
 nations, who wish, like us, to emerge from their tyrannies also. 
 Heaven help their struggles, and lead them, as it has done us, tri- 
 umphantly through them ! " 
 
 All this was cordial to the people of that day, who had scarcely 
 heard, as yet, that there were Americans who felt otherwise. No 
 one could say, in March, 1790, that it was the partisan who spoke 
 such words. 
 
348 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 During the nigKt of liis stay at Alexandria, a late winter storm 
 covered the ground with snow to the depth of eighteen inches. He 
 therefore left liis carriage to be sent round by sea, and took a place 
 in the stage, his horses being left, and ridden after him by his ser- 
 vants. So bad were the roads, that the lumbering vehicle, as he 
 wrote back to his son-in-law, "could never go more than three miles 
 an hour, sometimes not more than two, and in the night but one." 
 During the few hours of his stay at Philadelphia, he had his last 
 interview with Dr. Franklin, who was then on the bed from which 
 he was to be borne, a month after, to his coffin. Tlie old man, 
 whose mental faculties seemed to remain undiminished to the last, 
 listened with flushed face to Jefferson's narrative of all that had 
 occurred lately in France. He asked eagerly what part his friends 
 there had taken, what had been their course amid the torrent of 
 events, and what their fate. Jefferson had volumes to impart to 
 him, and Franklin was almost exhausted by the intensity of his 
 interest in what he heard. 
 
 Sunday, March 21, 1790, " after as laborious a journey as I ever 
 went through," Jefferson reached New York. A paragraph of a 
 line and a half in the principal newspaper of the town announced 
 his arrival ; but, as he attacked immediately the accumulated busi- 
 ness of his office, his name soon begins to appear at the end of pub- 
 lic documents, below that of '■ G. Washington." The amount of 
 work in prospect was a little alarming. Finding no suitable house 
 vacant in " the Broadway," he hired a small one. No. 57 Maiden 
 Lane, while he could look about him ; for it was his habit and inten- 
 tion to keep house in comfortable style. The salary of his office 
 then was three thousand five hundred dollars a year, five hundred 
 more than the salaries of his colleagues in the cabinet. Hamilton 
 lived in Pine Street, where so many lawyers still labor, but not live ; 
 and Colonel Aaron Burr was plodding at the law in Nassau Street, 
 near Wall, where he had a large garden and grapeiy. Jefferson 
 appears to have startled mankind by continuing at first to wear his 
 French clothes, even red breeches and red waistcoat, the fashion in 
 Paris. 
 
 ^s* 
 
CHAPTER XL. 
 
 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 
 
 With whatever reluctance aud dread Jefferson may have ac- 
 cepted the office of secretary of state, his forebodings were realized. 
 After five years' residence in Paris at the most interesting period of 
 its history; after a kind of triumphal progress through Virginia, 
 where delegations of grateful and admiring citizens had saluted him 
 with addresses of congratulation ; after some peerless weeks at Mon- 
 ticello, crowded with old friends and relatives gathered to attend his 
 daughter's wedding, — he found himself, in the early spring of 1790, 
 just when his gardens at home were fullest of allurement, closeted 
 with four clerks (the whole force of his department), face to face 
 with a . Monticello of despatches, documents, applications, many of 
 which were bulky and important papers, requiring close attention 
 and hard work. It was like going to school after a ^particularly 
 joyous vacation, — inky grammar and damp dictionary, instead of 
 gun and picnic ; keen contests with uncomplimentary equals and 
 rivals, instead of the easily won applause of partial friends and 
 affectionate sisters. He had enjoyed much and done much during 
 the past few^ years : he was now to be tried and tested. The sum- 
 mer of his growth was suspended ; the wintry blast was to blow 
 uiwn him awhile, pruning and hardening him. A tree does not 
 look so pretty during this season, but the timber ought to improve. 
 
 He had a cordial welcome in New York. General Washington 
 was relieved to find his cabinet complete after the new government 
 had existed nearly a year, and glad to have near him a Virginian 
 whom he knew, from of old, to be in singular accord with the 
 American people. The loading citizens threw open their doors to 
 him. Among members of (Congress, whom should he find but that 
 genial comrade of his youth, John Page ? Oddly enough, one of 
 
 349 
 
350 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 the first parties he attended, in the very first week of his residence, 
 was the wedding of that confidant of liis own early loves to a 
 daughter of New York. Madison, too, was in Congress, with other 
 allies and old colleagues. But it is plain, from his letters, that his 
 heart was in Virginia; that he pined for his children, and took un- 
 kindly to the yoke of his office. He told his daughters, that, after 
 having had them with him so long to cheer him in the intervals of 
 business, he felt acutely the separation from them ; but that his own 
 happiness had become a secondary consideration with him, and he 
 was only happy in their happiness. He was homesick during the 
 whole period of his holding this office, except when he was at home. 
 
 Even his health failed at first. He attacked his arrears of busi- 
 ness with such vigor and persistence as to bring on a three weeks' 
 headache, which for several days even kept him from his office. 
 And while the gloom of this malady still hung over him, the infant 
 government was menaced with a stroke that appalled the group of 
 j^ersons nearest him, whose dearest hopes for themselves and for 
 their country were bound up with it. The president, who had been 
 drooping for some time, became alarmingly sick. Washington, too, 
 found the desk a bad exchange from the saddle. It was his custom 
 to read with the utmost care, pen in hand, all important despatches 
 and papers, and to make abstracts of the most important. -During 
 the year that had elapsed since his inauguration, he had been going 
 through, iu the same thorough, attentive manner, the mass of papers 
 which had been accumulating in the offices of government since the 
 peace of 1783. Fidelity to a trust was the ruling instinct, the first 
 necessity, in the nature of this most nearly perfect head of a com- 
 monwealth that ever lived. For several days in May, 1790, the 
 inner circle of official persons in New York were anxious about him. 
 He grew worse and worse. At one time the inmates of his house 
 lost all hope, for he seemed to be dying. He rallied, however, and 
 began slowly to improve. " He continues mending to-day," Jeffer- 
 son wrote to his daughter, "and from total despair we are now in 
 good hopes of him." 
 
 In a strange, unexpected way, Jefferson found liimself in ill-accord 
 with the tone of society in New York. He had come from Paris 
 more a republican than ever, all glowing witli the new liopes for 
 mankind whirh the Revolution there had kindled. The patriots of 
 France had drawn inspiration from America, and tried all their 
 
ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 351 
 
 measures by American standards. " Our proceedings," Jefferson 
 wrote to Madison from Paris, in August, 1789, " have been viewed 
 as a model for them on every occasion ; and though, in the heat of 
 debate, men are generally disposed to contradict every authority 
 urged by their opponents, ours has been treated like that of the 
 Bible, open to explanation, but not to question." He was now iu 
 that America whose conquest of freedom and peaceful establishment 
 of a republican government intelligent men in other lands liad 
 owned among the noblest achievements of civilization. Tlie faith- 
 ful believer was now at Mecca. But he did not find the magnates 
 of the temple so enthusiastic for the Prophet and the Koran as 
 more distant worshippers. 
 
 While France for sixty years — ever since the publication of Vol- 
 taire's "English Letters," in 1730 — had been growing to a sense 
 of the evils of excessive power in the government, America for ten 
 years had had painful experience of the evils of an insufficient 
 central authority. 
 
 A favorite toast in the Revolutionary Army, as General Knox 
 records, was tliis, " A Hoop to the Barrel." Some officers pre- 
 ferred a plainer form of words, and gave the same sentiment thus, 
 "Cement to the Union." The army, he says, abhorred the idea of 
 being "thirteen armies." We can all imagine how much feelings 
 of this nature would be increased when the troops co-operated with 
 French soldiers, who served a single power, carried one flag, obeyed 
 one general, received the same pay at regularly recurring periods, in 
 a kind of money that did not waste and spend itself, even when it 
 lay vintonched in the pocket, — money to-day, paper to-morrow. 
 We cannot wonder that officers should have longed for an efficient 
 power at the centre, when we hear General Washington averring 
 that to the want of it he attributed "more than half" of his own 
 perplexities, and " almost the whole of the difficulties and distress 
 of the army." Civilians came, at length, to share in this feeling, 
 and no man more than Jefferson. When in Paris, in 178G, he was 
 choking down the humiliation of bribing the Algerines to peace, 
 instead of blowing the pirates out of water with honest guns under 
 his country's flag, he desired nothing so much as that Congress 
 should seize the happy occasion to found a navy. " It will be said," 
 he wrote to Monroe, " there is no money in the treasury. There 
 never will be money in the treasury till the Confederacy shows its 
 
352 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 teeth. The States must see the rod : perhaps it must be felt by one 
 of tliem. I am persuaded all of them would rejoice to see every 
 one obliged to furnish its contributions," 
 
 Every thing had been pulling this way in America for ten years 
 ■when Jefferson reached New York. He came from Paris when it 
 was negatively charged with electricity, to New York positively 
 charged. The whole soul of France was intent upon limiting the 
 central power, but America's dearest wish had long been to create 
 one. 
 
 There is a fashion in thinking, as well as in watch-chains and 
 dog-carts. In the new, untried republic, which had had no expe- 
 rience of tyranny except to combat and defeat it, various influences 
 had been drawing the minds of the educated class away from repub- 
 lican ideas. It was the mode to extol strong and imposing govern- 
 ments, to regret that the people were so attached to the town- 
 meeting methods of conducting public busineso, and to anticipate 
 the day when America would be ripe for a government '' not essen- 
 tially different from that which they had recently discarded." No- 
 where was this tone so prevalent as in New York, — the chief seat of 
 the royal authority for seven years of the war; the refuge of Tories ; 
 the abode, after the peace, of that ardent, positive, captivating spirit, 
 Alexander Hamilton. 
 
 How difficult to extract the real Hamilton from the wilderness of 
 contradictory words in which he is lost ! Every thing we haye about 
 him partakes of the violence of his time. If we question his oppo- 
 nents, Jefferson informs us that Hamilton was '' the evil genius of 
 America ; " and George Mason declares that he did the country 
 more harm than " Great Britain with all her fleets and armies." If 
 we consult his partisans, we are assured, that, after having created 
 the government, he, and he alone, kept it in prosperous motion for 
 twelve years. Every one has in his memory some fag-end of Daniel 
 Webster's magnificent sentence, in which he represents Hamilton 
 as touching the corpse of the Public Credit, and causing it to spring 
 to its feet. And have we not a lumbering pamphlet, in seven 
 volumes octavo, designed to show that George Washington was 
 Punch, and Alexander Hamilton the man behind the green curtain, 
 pulling the wires and making him talk ? We have. It weighs many 
 pounds avoirdupois. But we must rule out extreme and frenzied 
 utterances, and endeavor to estimate this gifted and interesting 
 
ALEXANDER HA.MILTON". 353 
 
 man as though he had had no worshippers, no rivals, and no 
 sous. 
 
 It is not so very easy to see why he had any public career at all. 
 When we have turned over tlie ton of printed matter to which he 
 gave rise, and looked at all his busts and portraits, we are still at 
 some loss to undei'stand the victorious dash he made at America. A 
 little fellow of about fiv^e feet seven, a stranger in a strange land, 
 without an influential friend on earth, tlie child of a broken-down 
 merchant in the West Indies, subsisting in New Jersey upon 
 invoices of West India produce, we find him, from the start, having 
 the best of every thing, distinguished at school, at college, in the 
 arm^y, taking an influential part in every striking scene of the war, 
 and every crisis after the peace, — a public man, as it were, by 
 nature. Nor was it a dash only. He held his own ; and, rapid as 
 his rise was, it was always the high place that sought him, never he 
 the high place; unless, indeed, when he asked General Washington 
 the favor of letting him head an attack on the enemy's works. 
 Nor was it merely place and distinction that he won. The daughter 
 of one of America's most noted and wealthy families became the 
 proud and happy wife of this stranger when he was a lieutenant- 
 colonel of twenty-three, without a dollar or an acre to fall back upon 
 at the peace. 
 
 We do not get at the secret of all this from print or picture ; so 
 difficult is it to put upon paper or canvas that which gives a man 
 ascendency oyev othe-rs. It is hard to define the Spirit of Command. 
 Kent recognized it in Lear when he met the fiery old king in the 
 wilderness, and told him he had that in his mien and bearing which 
 he would fain call master. I once asked a Tennesseean what kind 
 of man General Jackson was. "He was this kind of man," said 
 he : " if Andrew Jackson had joined a party of strangers travelling 
 in the woods, and, half an hour after, they should be attacked by 
 Indians, he would instantly take command, and all the rest would 
 obey him." Nothing that has ever been put upon paper about 
 Jackson so explains him as this chance saying of an unlettered- 
 man. 
 
 Of this commanding, self-su£6cient spirit Hamilton had an ample 
 share. His confidence in himself is among the curiosities of char- 
 acter ; it was absolute and entire : and, hence, neither events nor 
 men could teach him ; and he died cherishing the delusions of his 
 23 
 
354 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFEESOF. 
 
 youth. If to this remaric his life furnishes one exception, it was 
 when as a lad of sixteen he allowed himself to he converted from a 
 supporter of the king to a defender of the colonies. But, it seems, 
 even this conversion was only partial : for/ when it came to a ques- 
 tion of severance from the king, he wrote a pamphlet against 
 Paine's " Common Sense." He appears to have had nothing that 
 could he called youth. In the earliest of his efiusions, whatever we 
 may think of the sentiments, we perceive that the writer had no 
 sense whatever of the deference due from youth to maturitj'. Noth- 
 ing is more evident in his aide-de-camp letters than that he 
 condescended to serve General Washington. He was hut twenty- 
 four when he wrote, after refusing to resume his place in the 
 general's family, that he had remained in it as long as he had, not 
 from regard to General Washington, nor hecause he thought it an 
 honor or a privilege to assist him, but hecause the popularity of the 
 general was essential to the safety of America, and he "thought it 
 necessary he should be supported." It w^as also his opinion that 
 the breach between them ought to be concealed, since it would have 
 "an ill-effect" if it were known. In the records of youthful arro- 
 gance, there are few instances so amusing as this. 
 
 But, then, those who knew him best appear to have accepted him 
 at his own valuation. Some unv.'oi'thy opponents have dishonored 
 themselves by sneering at his poverty and at the alleged insignifi- 
 cance of his family in the West Indies ; but he brought with him 
 from St. Croix a better title of nobility than any herald could have 
 given him, — the admiring love of his friends there, who hailed his 
 early honors in the United States with enthusiasm. His brother 
 aids in General Washington's busy family loved him most warmly. 
 In his early letters we catch gleams of the good fellow amid the 
 formalities of the general-in-chief's official scribe. "Mind your 
 eye to-night, my boy," he writes to a young friend on picket; and 
 Meade, his colleague, writes to him as a lover to a mistress. "If 
 you have not already writ to me," says Meade, "let me entreat you, 
 when you go about it, to fill a sheet in close hand." At the same 
 time, when governors, generals, members of Congress, and presi- 
 dents of Convention wrote to him, they addressed him as a man of 
 their own weight and standing, as a personage and an equal. The 
 general-in-chief, too, overvalued the accomplishments he did not 
 himself possess, — the fluent tongue, the ready pen, dexterity at 
 figures. 
 
ALEXANDER HAMILTON-. 355 
 
 Hamilton was singularly incapable of Americanization. Besides 
 having arrived here a few j'^ears too late, his mind was invincibly 
 averse to what we may call the town-meeting spirit, — the true 
 public spirit, generated by the habit of acting in a body for the 
 good of the whole, putting questions to the vote, and accepting the 
 will of the majority as law. His instincts were soldierly. How he 
 delighted in all military things! How he loved the recollection of 
 his seven years' service in the array! In later years, though under 
 a political necessity to detest Bonaparte, he found it impossible to 
 do so with any heartiness, so bewitched was he with the mere skill 
 with which that marauder of genius devastated the heritage of the 
 people of Europe. He delighted to read of battles. It pleased him 
 to have a tent upon his lawn, because it reminded him of the days 
 when he and Lafayette and Meade and the young French officers 
 were merry together ; and he always retained in his gait something 
 that betrayed the early drill. But it is questionable if he could 
 ever hjive been greatly successful as a general, because, unlike 
 Bonaparte, he thought officers were every thing, and soldiers noth- 
 ing. When he was a bronzed veteran of twenty-two, he wrote a 
 letter of ludicrous gravity to the president of Congress, urging the 
 enrolment of negro slaves ; in which he says that their stupidity 
 and ignorance would be an advantage. It was a maxim, he 
 observed, with some great military judges, — the king of Prussia 
 being one, — that, " with sensible officers, soldiers can hardly be too 
 stupid." flence "it was thought" that the Russians wotild be the 
 best soldiers in the world if they were commanded by officers of a 
 more advanced countrj'. The conclusion reached by this great 
 military authority was this : " Let officers be men of sense and sen- 
 timent ; and the nearer the soldiers approach to machines, perhaps 
 the better." 
 
 As the utterance of a very young military dandy, airing his lav- 
 ender kids in St. James's Park after an early breakfast at one, p.m., 
 this would be merely funny : we should smile, and hope he would 
 rhow to better advantage when the time came for action. And, 
 indeed, Hamilton was a brave, vigilant, energetic officer, on fire to 
 distinguish himself by being foremost where the danger was great- 
 est. But this contempt for the undistinguished part of mankind 
 (i.e. for mankind) he never outgrew. The ruling maxim of his 
 public life, the source of its weakness, its errors, and its failure, was 
 this, " Men in general are vicious." 
 
356 . LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOJf. 
 
 This lamentable misreading of human nature^ so worthy of a 
 Fouche or a Tallej'rand, he repeats in manj^ forms, alwaj^s assuming 
 it to be a self-evident truth. It was certainly an unfortunate basis 
 for a statesman who was to be the servant of a system founded on a 
 conviction that men in general are well disposed. He could not be 
 an American. Richlj'' endowed as he was, he could not rise to that 
 height. He knew it himself at last; for twent}^ j^ears later, when 
 he had outlived his success, and lost the control even of his own wing 
 of the Federalists, we hear him saying, with his usual unconscious 
 arrogance, "Every day proves to me, more and more, that this 
 American world was not made for me." It ce^rtainly was not, nor 
 was he made for this American world. It never, we may be sure, 
 once crossed his mind, during his whole life, that possibly this 
 American world might be right, and Colonel Hamilton wrong. 
 
 Every thing that happens to these self-suiBcient persons seems to 
 confirm them in their errors and strengthen their strong propensi- 
 ties. This American world, which Hamilton thought so mueh 
 beneath him, had been too easy a conquest : he would have re- 
 spected it more, perhaps, if it had given him a few hard knocks at 
 an age when hard knocks are salutary. But when he began to 
 write his first essays in the newspapers, literary abilitj^ was so rare 
 in the world, — rarest of all in these colonies, — that his friends 
 were agape with wonder. Every one flattered him. Then he early 
 exhibited another imposing talent, that of oratory. He was ha- 
 ranguing meetings in New York when he was the merest boy both 
 in years and appearance, and acquitting himself to admiration. He 
 was but nineteen, and 3'oung-looking even for that age, when he 
 thundered across Jersey, captain of a company of artillerj^, in Gen- 
 eral Washington's retreating army. Soon after, in. his character of 
 aide-cle-cavip, he was truly an important person, a powder, as any 
 efficient aid must ever be to a busy commander, as any competent 
 secretary must ever be to the greatest minister. If he overesti- 
 mated his importance, it was but natural and most jjardonable. 
 Few young fellows of twenty, w^ho write despatches or editorials for 
 a chief, can believe that the chief may be the true author of im- 
 portant despatches or thundering leaders which, perhaps, he never 
 so much as looks over. The chief has created the situation which 
 the writer but expresses. A secretary, while using his own baud, 
 often employs his chief's mind. 
 
ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 357 
 
 When tlie young French officers came over, and head-quarters 
 were gay with young nobles, all enthusiasm for this novel service in 
 a new world, Colonel Hamilton was a brilliant personage indeed, — 
 so young, so handsome, so high in the confidence of the general 
 and the army, and such a master of the French language ! He 
 must, I think, have spoken French in his boyhood, to have written 
 it so well at twenty-three as we see he did. Who was now so much 
 in request as our cher Hamilton? 
 
 But, if he caught his loose military morals from the Gauls, it was 
 from the British that this Briton learned his politics. Before the 
 war was over, he tells us, he " was struck with disgust " at the rise 
 of a party actuated by *' an undue complaisance " to France, — a 
 power which, in helping us, had only been pursuing, he thought, 
 her own interest. " I resolved at once," he continues, " to resist 
 this bias in our affairs." He was British, as was natural. He had 
 a British mind and a British heart. While in the immediate pres- 
 ence of the fact, that the English governmental system had split 
 asunder the British Empire, he cherished the conviction that it 
 was th^ best system possible. It was the hereditary Dunderhead 
 with whom Great Britain was saddled, who began, continued, and 
 ended, the business of severing America from the empire; and yet 
 the very corruption of parliament, which had enabled an obstinate 
 and unteachable king to carry his measures, Hamilton extolled as 
 essential to its perfection. The grand aim of his public life was 
 to make the government of the United States as little unlike that 
 of Great Britain as the people would bear it. Nor did he reach 
 these convictions by any process of reasoning. He was a Briton; 
 and it was then part of a Briton's birthright to enjoy a complete 
 assurance of his country's vast superiority to all others in all things. 
 I honor him for the disinterested spirit in which he pursued his 
 system, and the splendid contempt of all considerations of policy 
 with which he avowed opinions the most unpopular. In spite of 
 his errors and his faults, this alone would give him some title to our 
 regard. 
 
 With all his other qualities, he had one which would have carried 
 him to great heights in a more congenial scene. He had a wonderful 
 power of sustilined exertion. His mind was energetic and pertina- 
 cious. He thought little of sitting over a paper till the dawn 
 dimmed his candles. His favorite ideas and schemes were never 
 
358 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON". 
 
 inert within him : he dinned them into every ear; and his inces- 
 sant and interminable discourses upon the charms of monarchy- 
 rendered him, at last, a bore to his best friends. 
 
 He began at an early period of the war to take a laborious part 
 in political discussion. AVhile the army lay at Morristown in 1779, 
 having less to do than usual at head-quarters, and having arrived 
 at the mature age of twenty-three, he wrote to Kobert Morris an 
 anonymous letter, that must have filled a dozen sheets of large 
 paper, upon the troubled finances of the country, recommending 
 the establishment of a Bank of the United States. The scheme 
 was wrought out in great detail, with infinite -labor and uncommon 
 ability for so young a financier. The scheme was founded upon 
 Law's idea of utilizing the depreciated paper with which Louis 
 XIX's profusion had deluged France. By receiving hundreds of 
 millions of this paper at its market value, in payment for shares 
 in his various enterprises. Law soon raised the price of paper above 
 that of gold, and thus afforded the strange spectacle of people 
 selling their family plate in order to buy a dead king's promises to 
 pay. Hamilton, of course, intended to stop short of Law's fatal 
 excesses. He was as honorable a person, in all matters pecuniary, 
 as ever drew the breath of life ; and, consequently, Ms bank was to 
 have a sound basis of two millions of pounds sterling of borrowed 
 money : to which should be added a subscription of two hundred 
 millions of dollars in the depreciated paper of Congress. At once, 
 he thought, the paper would rise in value, and become an instru- 
 ment of good. The existence of the bank, he thought, " would 
 make it the ivimediate interest of the moneyed men to co-operate 
 with the government in its support." This was the key to his 
 financial system ; for he never advanced beyond the ideas of this 
 production. It was ever his conviction, that a government could 
 not stand which it was not the interest of capitalists to uphold ; and 
 by capitalists he meant the class who control money, who live in 
 cities, and can speculate in paper. He meant Wall Steeet ; though, 
 as yet, the actual street of that name was only a pleasant lane of 
 modest, Dutch-looking residences. 
 
 This portentous epistle was accompanied with notes, in one of 
 which the youthful sage favors an honorable Congress with a few 
 hints. " Congress," he observes, with the modesty so becoming his 
 years, " have too long neglected to organize a good scheme of 
 
ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 359 
 
 administration, and throw public business into proper executive 
 departments. For commerce, I prefer a board ; but, for most other 
 things, single men. We want a minister of war, a minister of 
 foreign affairs, a minister of finance, and a minister of marine ; " 
 and having these, he thought, " we should blend the advantages 
 of a monarchy and a republic in a happy and a beneficial union." 
 
 What Eobert Morris thought of this production no one has told 
 us. The author of it was evidently in earnest. He did not write 
 the essay to amuse his leisure, nor merely to display his talents : 
 he meant batik. He clearly saw the institution he recommended, 
 believed in its feasibility, and, I am sure, felt himself competent to 
 assist in establishing it, though he intended Mr. Morris to take 
 the leading part. He concluded his long letter by saying that he 
 had reasons which made him unwilling to be known ; but a letter 
 addressed to James Montague, Esq., lodged in the post-office at Mor- 
 ristown, would reach him ; and even an interview might be had 
 with the author, should it be thought material. 
 
 From this time the ingenious, intense, Scotch intellect of Alex- 
 ander Hamilton was a power in the United States. Before the 
 war was quite over he was in Congress ; and one of the members 
 said to him, "If you were, but ten years older and twenty thousand 
 pounds richer. Congress would give you the highest place they have 
 to bestow." In New York, j'oung as he was, without fortune, just 
 admitted to the bar, we find him alwaj's discussing the great topics ; 
 always the peer of the most important men; always exerting his 
 influence for one overruling object, — the founding of a "strong," 
 a "high-toned" government; which should attract to it the trinity 
 he believed in, — "charactei-, talents, and property, — and raise the 
 thirteen States to national rank. In the State of New York he 
 became, not the most powerful, but by far the most shining, con- 
 spicuous, active personage. 
 
 Behold him, at length, in the Convention of 1787; which met 
 at Philadelphia to make a constitution, — Washington its president, 
 Franklin a member. It was this young lawyer, thirty years of 
 age, who brought with him a plan of government, so completely 
 wrought out, that, Madison says, it could have gone into operation 
 at once, without alteration or addition. He had thought of every 
 thing, and provided for every thing. There it was, in Hamilton's 
 pocket, a goverjs'Ment, complete to the last detail. In making it, 
 
860 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 too, lie had exercised self-control : he had put far away from him 
 his own dearest preferences ; he had fixed his thoughts upon the 
 people of the United States, allowed for their prejudices, their 
 ignorance of Greek and Roman history, their infatuation in sup- 
 posing they knew what was good for them. In a most able, ingen- 
 ious, candid speech of five or six hours' duration, he told the 
 Convention what he knew about government, and prepared the way 
 for the reading of his plan. He said he did not offer it as the best 
 conceivable, but only tlie best attainable. The British Constitu- 
 tion, he said, was " the best form." It was only a king who was, 
 necessarily, " above corruption," who " must always intend, in 
 respect to foreign nations, the true interest and glory of the peo- 
 ple." Republicanism was a dream, — an amiable dream it was true, 
 but still a dream. No matter : the people would have their govern- 
 ment republican ; and therefore, as long as there was any cliance 
 of its success, he would do his very utmost to afford it a chance. 
 This he proposed to do by making the American republic as much 
 like the British monarchy as possible. 
 
 His plan was such as might have been expected from a person so 
 ingenious, so self-sufficient, so inexperienced, and so young. Noth- 
 ing more unsuitable or more impracticable can be imagined than 
 this government evolved from the depths of Hamilton's conscious- 
 ness ; for, even if the principles upon which it was founded had been 
 admissible, it was far too complicated a machine for tlie wear and tear 
 of use. Most of Hamilton's measures had the great fault of being 
 too complex and refined. His enemies, indeed, accused him of pur- 
 posely mystifying the people ; but, in truth, he had so mathematical 
 an intellect, that a statement might be as clear as the light to him, 
 W'hich was a mere conundrum to people in general. His scheme of 
 government included, first of all, a popular assembly, or House of 
 Commons, to consist of not less than a hundred members, elected by 
 universal suffrage, which should have the control of the public purse, 
 and the exclusive power to impeach. So far, so good. But assum- 
 ing that men in general are ill-disposed, and stand ready to embrace 
 the first opportunity of voting themselves a farm, his chief care was 
 to keep this body in check ! That was a point respecting which he 
 was deeply solicitous. Here was a democratic assembly, to be 
 checked by an elected senate, and both of them by an elected chief 
 magistrate. His senate, accordingly, which was to consist of not 
 
ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 361 
 
 less than forty members, was to be a permanent body, elected by 
 men of property. The senators, chosen by electoffs who had an 
 estate in land for life, or for an unexpired term of fourteen years, 
 were to hold their seats until removed by death or impeacbraent. 
 It was the senate that was to declare war, ratify treaties, and con- 
 trol appointments. 
 
 The president of the republic was to be a tremendous personage 
 indeed, more powerful far than any monarch of a country enjoying 
 any semblance of liberty. No man could have any part even in 
 electing him, who had not an inherited estate wholly his own, or for 
 three lives, or " a clear personal estate of the value of a thousand 
 Spanish dollars." Nor were these favored mortals to vote directly 
 for the president : they were only to elect electors ; and these elect- 
 ors were to vote for the president, each maij handing in a sealed 
 ballot. That done, the electors of each State were to elect two 
 "second electors," who were to carry the sealed ballots to some 
 designated place, where, in the presence of the chief justice, they 
 were to open the ballots, and declare that man president who had 
 a majority of the whole number. In case no one had a ma-jority, 
 then these second electors were to try their hand at electing, though 
 they could only vote for the three candidates who had received the 
 highest number of votes. If the second electors could not give a 
 clear majority for any candidate, then the man who had received 
 the highest number of votes of the first electors was to be declared 
 elected. 
 
 Happily, when once a president had been evolved by this ingen- 
 ious complication, the country could hope to enjoy a long period of 
 rest ; for he was to hold his office for life, unless removed by im- 
 peachrnent. Besides exercising all the authority which our present 
 Constitution confers on the president, Hamilton's president was to 
 have the power to appoint the governors of States, and to convene 
 and prorogue Congress. The President of the Senate was to be the 
 Vice-President of the United States; and the Supreme Court was 
 to be about such a tribunal as we see it now. 
 
 When Dr. Channing was the ruling influence of Boston, forty 
 years ago, the orthodox clergy used to describe his system of the- 
 ology as " Calvinism with the bones taken out." The Convention 
 of 1787 listened to Hamilton with attentive admiration, and then 
 performed upon his plan of government an operation similar to that 
 
362 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 wliicli Dr. Clianning was supposed to have done upon the ancient 
 creed of New England. Nothing which he regarded as hone was 
 left in it. The Constitution of 1787, though he admitted it to be an 
 improvement upon the Confederation, he thought a " shilly-shally 
 thing," which might tide the country over the crisis, and begin the 
 construction of a nation, but could not endure. What he chiefly 
 hoped from it was this, That it would sicken the people of republic- 
 anism, and reconcile it to the acceptance of his panacea of King, 
 Lords, and Commons. For every reason, however, he deemed it 
 necessary to give the new Constitution a trial; and, accordingly, it 
 was Hamilton, the man who believed in it least, that did most to 
 recommend it to the people. Gliding down the tranquil Hudson, 
 in October, 1787, in one of the commodious packet-sloops of the 
 time, he wrote in the cabin the first number of the series of news- 
 l^aper essays now called "The Federalist." Absorbed as he then 
 was in his young family and his profession, he found time, in the 
 course of the winter, to write sixty-five of the eighty-five pieces of 
 which the series consists; writing several of them, it appears, amid 
 the bustle of his law-of&ce, with the priurter's boy waiting for the 
 copy. 
 
 These essays by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, Jefferson read in 
 Paris with great satisfaction. He had lamented the absence,' in the 
 new Constitution, of a formal bill of rights, which should secure 
 "the freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom from stand- 
 ing armies, trial by jury, and a constant haheas corjms act ; " and 
 he regarded a few of its provisions with some apprehension. The 
 re-eligibility of the president, he thought, would result in the presi- 
 dent usually holding the office as long as he lived ; the tenden-cy to 
 re-elect being so powerful. He would have preferred a single term 
 of seven years, which was often proposed, and once carried in the 
 Convention. But the Federalist, he owns, " rectified him on several 
 points," dissipated his apprehensions, and rendered him more than 
 willing to accept the Constitution, and trust to the future for the 
 needful amendments. 
 
 Thus we find persons of opposite political sympathies heartily 
 commending a constitution which neither of them whollj' approved : 
 Hamilton, because it was, as he hoped, a step toward the only kind 
 of government he believed in, — a limited monarchy ; Jefierson, 
 because he thought it would issue in a plain, republican government, 
 
ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 363 
 
 simple, inexpensive, just sufficient to enable tlie thirteen States to 
 deal with foreign nations as one power, and secure the prompt pay- 
 ment of the Revolutionary debt. When Hamilton commended the 
 Constitution, he had in his mind his ^'favorite morsels," those fea- 
 tures which gave the government some resemblanc^to a monarchy, 
 which made it more imposing, and less dependent upon the people, 
 than the Confederation which it displaced. Coming events, he felt 
 sure, would quickly convince all thinking men that a democratic as- 
 sembly could not be effectually '* checked " by a democratic senate, 
 nor either of them by a democratic chief magistrate ; and then the 
 whole of the character, talents, and property of America would 
 demand the stiffening of the loose contrivance, by the insertion of the 
 rivet, bolt, and screw, of an hereditary king and house of lords. 
 Jefferson, on the other hand, looked upon the new government as an 
 engine already more potent than the case required; cumbered with 
 several superfluous appendages, easily capable of becoming oppress- 
 ive ; but he trusted to time and the republican habits of the people 
 to lop its redundancies, and keep its dangerous possibilities in check. 
 What Jefterson loved in the Constitution, Hamilton despised ; and 
 the changes in it which Hamilton hoped for, Jefferson dreaded. 
 
CHAPTER XLI. 
 
 TONE OP KEW-YOBK SOCIETY IN 1790. 
 
 In the city of New York in 1790, when it contained a population 
 of about thirty-five thousand people, " society " consisted of so few 
 families, that, when one of them gave a grand party, the whole body 
 of society would be present. In this small circle Hamilton was 
 incomparably the most shining and captivating individual, and he 
 found it well disposed toward his ideas. What is society ? It prop- 
 erly consists of the victorious class, the leading persons in each of 
 the honorable pursuits : the great mechanics, merchants, lawyers, 
 doctors, preachers, teachers, actors, artists, authors, capitalists, far- 
 mers, engineers ; the men and women who have conquered a safe 
 and pleasant place for themselves in the world by serving the com- 
 munity with signal skill and effect. These are the aristocrats to 
 whom we all render a proud and willing homage. We are even 
 disposed to honor them too much, and undervalue the prodigious mul- 
 titude of those who are equally worthy perhaps, though less gifted or 
 less fortunate. But, in Hamilton's day, society chiefly consisted of 
 families who had inherited estates, — people descended from victors. 
 It is human in a conqueror to wish to throw around his conquest 
 every possible safeguard. It is natural to a man who possesses a 
 fine estate to lend a favoring mind to ideas, laws, usages, which tend 
 to exempt that estate from the usual risks of waste and accident, 
 and to reserve for the holders of inherited property the most coveted 
 honors of the state. In New York, therefore, the young and elo- 
 quent propagandist carried all before him, and assisted to prepare 
 for his coming colleague a painful surprise. 
 
 " I had left France," Mr. Jefferson wrote long after, " 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 
 
 364 
 
TONE OF NEW-YORK SOCIETY IN 1790. 865 
 
 be heightened, but it had been aroused and excited by dai]y exer- 
 cise. The president received me cordially, and my colleagues and 
 the circle of principal citizens appai'ently with welcome. The cour- 
 tesies of dinner-parties given me, as a stranger newlj'' arrived among 
 them, placed me at once in their familiar society. But I cannot 
 describe the wonder and mortification with which the table conver- 
 sations filled me. Politics were the chief topic, and a preference of 
 kingly over republican government was evidently the favorite senti- 
 ment. 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." 
 
 No one can glance over the memorials of the time without meet- 
 ing on every side confirmation of this passage. The Hamiltonians, 
 we perceive, were having it all their Own way in New Yorlc ; their 
 immediate object being to surround the president with imposing 
 ceremonial and court-like etiquette. Hamilton, strangely ignorant 
 of human nature and of the people he aspired to serve, was infat- 
 uated with the idea of gradually reconciling them to the ludicrous 
 pomp of a European court. When General Washington asked his 
 opinion as to the etiquette of the president's house, he replied, that, 
 though the notions of equality were yet too general and too strong 
 to admit of " a proper distance " being maintained by the chief 
 magistrate, still he must go as far in that direction as the people 
 would endure, even to the point of incurring the risk of partial and 
 momentary dissatisfaction. He recommended the adoption of the 
 usual etiquette of the courts of Europe ; except, that to " remove the 
 idea of too immense an inequality," which,' he feared, would excite 
 dissatisfaction and cabal, the president itfight invite a few high 
 officials to dinner now and then; though, on such occasions, "the 
 president should never remain long at the table ; " that is, as I sup- 
 pose, not sit and booze after the ladies had retired. The president 
 was to be so august and inaccessible a personage, that a member of 
 the House of Representatives sh6uld have no right to an interview 
 with him, even on public business, nor any foreigner of lower rank 
 than ambassador. Senators, Hamilton thought, should be entitled 
 to an interview, as the peers of France and England might demand 
 to speak to their sovereign face to face ; and, besides, the people 
 would be glad to know there was one body of men whose right to 
 
366 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 approach the president would he " a safeguard against secret comhi- 
 nations to deceive liim." 
 
 All the writings of the time that most readily catch the eye are 
 in this tone. The vice-president, John Adams, seized every occa- 
 sion to dwell upon the necessity of decorating the head of the state 
 with the most gorgeous properties. This son of New England, who 
 had had a life-time's experience of the unquestioning ohedience paid 
 to the plainest citizen clad in the imperial purple of fair election or 
 legal appointment, gave it as his opinion, that " neither dignity nor 
 authority can be supported in human minds, collected into nations 
 or any great numbers, without a splendor and majesty in some 
 degree proportioned to them." He opposed the practice of styling 
 the president His Excellency, for precisely the reason which made 
 it a rule of the old French court to give every one some title of 
 honor excepting alone the "king. To style the president His 
 Excellency, Mr. Adams thought, was to " put liim on a level with 
 a governor of Bermuda, or one of his own ambassadors, or a gover- 
 nor of any one of our States." 
 
 One would think, from reading the. letters and newspapers of 1789 
 and 1790, that pickpockets and cut-throats could be driven, awe- 
 struck, from their evil courses, by the magnificence of the presi- 
 dent's house and the splendor of his chariot. Jefferson reached 
 New York on Sunday, Marcli 21, 1790. In all probability, some 
 one was polite enough to hand him the newspaper of the day before, 
 the Gazette of the United States, the organ of the administration, full 
 charged with the Hamiltonian spirit. If so, he may have espied this 
 little essay, — milk for babes, not yet fit for stronger food, — which 
 harmonized perfectly with the prevalent way of thinking : — 
 
 " There must be some adventitious properties infused into the 
 government to give it energy and spirit, or the selfish, turbulent 
 passions of men can never be controlled. This has occasioned that 
 artificial splendor and dignity that are to be found in the courts of 
 so many nations. Some admiration and respect must be excited 
 towards public officers, by their holding a real or supposed superior- 
 ity over the mass of the people. The sanctions and penalties of law 
 are likewise requisite to aid in restraining individuals from tram- 
 pling upon and demolishing the government. It is confessed, that, in 
 some situations a small degree of parade and solemnity, co-operating 
 
TONE OF NEW- YORK SOCIETY IN 1790. 369 
 
 " Wlien the Convention to form a Constitution was sitting in 
 Philadelphia in 1787, of which General Washington was president, 
 he had stated evenings to receive the calls of his friends. At an 
 interview between Hamilton, the Morrises, and others, the former 
 remarked that Washington was reserved and aristocratic even to 
 his intimate friends, and allowed no one to be familiar with him. 
 Gouverneur Morris said that was a mere fancy, and he could be as 
 familiar with AVashington as with any of his other friends. Hamil- 
 ton replied, " If you will, at the next reception evening, gently slap 
 him on the shoulder, and say, ' My dear General, how happy I am 
 to see j^ou look so well ! ' a supper and wine shall be provided for 
 you and a dozen of your friends." The challenge was accepted. 
 On the evening appointed, a large number attended ; and at an early 
 hour Gouverneur Morris entered, bowed, shook hands, laid his left 
 hand on Washington's shoulder, and said, " My dear General, I 
 am very happy to see you look so well! " Washington withdrew his 
 hand, stepped suddenly back, fixed his eye on Morris for several 
 minutes with an angry frown, until the latter retreated abashed, and 
 sought refuge in the crowd. The company looked on in silence. 
 At the supper, which was provided by Hamilton, Morris said, " I 
 have won the bet, but paid dearly for it, and nothing could induce 
 me to repeat it." 
 
 It was not difficult to bring a gentleman of this reserved cast of 
 character, who shrank from familiarities, to consent to being hedged 
 about with etiquette. And there really seemed to prevail a mania 
 to extol, exalt, and royalize the president. Indeed, Mr. Jefferson 
 calls it, somewhere, "a frenzy." If the president attended a ball, 
 the managers mu^t needs cause a platform to be erected at one end 
 of the ball-room, several steps high, with a sofa upon it, and conduct 
 thither the president and his " consort." An attempt was made to 
 have the president's head engraved upon the coinage about to be 
 issued by the new government. The levees were arranged and con- 
 ducted exactly as at the palace of St. James ; and, when the president 
 rode abroad on any official errand, he used what was called the state 
 carriage, — a cream-colored chariot drawn by six horses, and 
 attended by white servants, in liveries of white cloth trimmed with 
 scarlet. 
 
 All of which, we can now see, proves the innocence of the Hamil- 
 24 
 
370 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 tonians of any design to spring a king upon the country ; for surely, 
 people of their ability, who had formed a scheme to subvert republi- 
 can government, would have most carefully avoided such a plain 
 showing of their hand. They would at once have courted and 
 deceived the multitude of republicans by casting aside the worn-out 
 trumpery of kings, and weaving round the president the magic spell 
 of utter simplicity. 
 
 This was Bonaparte's method. We find him, first, an extreme 
 republican, using all the forms of that sect with rigor long after he 
 was the ruling mind of France ; next, an austere first consul, still 
 dating his letters in the manner decreed by the republic, and calling 
 his officers citizen-general ; last, when his genius had dazzled and 
 overwhelmed his intellect, and he was expanding to his ruin, he 
 stooped to the imperial crown, and condescended to inquire how 
 things had been done' in the court of that gorgeous delusion, Louis 
 XIV. 
 
 Nothing could be more artless and open than the manner in which 
 our imposing-government men sought to commend their opinions to 
 the public. Colonel Hamilton, indeed, censured the vice-president 
 for going too far and too fast in that direction ; disturbing people's 
 minds prematurely, and not giving the new government that "fair 
 chance " he was determined it should have. It was in this spring 
 of 1790, when Jefferson and his four clerks were working their way 
 down through the accumulated business of the state department, 
 that Mr. Adams broke out in the Gazette with his weekly "Dis- 
 courses on Davila," a chaos of passages from, and comments upon, a 
 History of the Civil Wars of France by the Italian Davila, inter- 
 spersed with long extracts from Pope, Young, Adam Smith, and any 
 other author whom Mr. Adams might happen to think of in the fury 
 of composition. The great object of the series was to show that 
 there is a necessity, fixed in the constitution of the human mind, for 
 such orders in the state as kings and nobles. The basis of Mr. 
 Adams's political system, which he drew from his OAvn heart, was 
 this : Man's controlling motive is the passion for distinction. If 
 any one should doubt this, he advises that benighted person to go 
 and attentively observe the journeymen and apprentices in the first 
 workshop, or the oarsmen in a cockboat, the members of a family, a 
 neighborhood, the inhabitants of a house, the crew of a ship, a school, 
 a college, a city, a village, the bar, the church, the exchange, a camp, 
 
TONE OF NEW-YOEK SOCIETY IN 1790. 371 
 
 a court, wherever, indeed, men, women, or children are to be found, 
 whether old or j'oung, rich or poor, wise or foolish, ignorant or learned, 
 and he will find every individual " strongly actuated by a desire 
 to be seen, heard, talked of, approved, and respected by the people 
 about him and within his knowledge." And, of all known distinc- 
 tions, none is so universally bewitching as ''an illustrious descent." 
 One drop of royal blood, thought Mr. Adams, though illegitimately 
 scattered, will make any man proud or vain ; and why ? Because 
 it attracts the attention of mankind. Hence the wisdom and virtue 
 of all nations have endeavored to utilize this passion, by regulating 
 and legitimating it, by giving it objects to pursue, such as orders in 
 the magisti'acy, titles of honor, insignia of office, — ribbons, stars, 
 garters, golden keys, marshals' batons, white sticks, rings, the ivory 
 chair, the official robe, the coronet. And this has been done most of 
 all in republics, where there is no monarch, to overtop and over- 
 shadow every one. Mr. Adams was most decided in his advocacy of 
 the hereditary principle. "Nations," he remarked, "perceiving 
 that the still small voice of merit was drowned in the insolent roar 
 of the dupes of impudence and knavery in national elections, without 
 a possibility of remedy, have sought for something more permanent 
 than the popular voice to designate honor." Some of the nations, he 
 continued, had annexed honor to the possession of land ; others to 
 office ; others to birth ; but the policy of Europe had been to 
 unite these, and bestow the highest honors of the state upon men 
 who had land, office, and ancestors. To the landed and privileged 
 aristocracy of birth, Europe, according to the vice-president, owed 
 '' her superiority in war and peace, in legislation and commerce, in 
 agriculture, navigation, arts, sciences, and manufactures." In this 
 strain Mr. Adams continued to discourse, week after week, until he 
 had published thirty-one numbers ; when the public indignation 
 alarmed the printer, and gave pause even to the impetuous author. 
 Or, to use Mr. Adams's own language, written twenty-three years 
 after : " The rage and fury of the Jacobinical journals against these 
 discourses increased as they proceeded, intimidated the printer, John 
 Fenno, and convinced me that to proceed would do more hurt than 
 good." 
 
 For we must ever bear in mind, in reading of this period, that 
 every utterance of a political nature hy a person of note was read in 
 the lurid and distorting light cast over the nations by the French 
 
872 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 Revolution. Prom the fall of the Eastille in 1789, to the seizure of 
 the supreme power by Bonaparte 1799, civilized man was mad. 
 The news from France was read in the more advanced nations with 
 a frenzied interest ; for, besides being in itself most strange and tragic, 
 it either flattered or rebuked every man's party feelings, helped or 
 hindered every man's party dream or scheme. Each ship's budget 
 was fuel to party fires, — both parties ; for the news which flat- 
 tered one enraged the other. 
 
 Mr. Adams had made up his mind respecting the French Kevolu- 
 tiou at once. He knew it to be wholly diabolical. No good could 
 come of it. In these ver}' Discourses, all written, as he says, to 
 counteract the new Frencli ideas, he did not hesitate to denounce 
 the most vaunted proceedings of the popular party. In his old age, 
 when Bonaparte's coarse and heavy hand made life more burden- 
 some to nearly every virtuous family in Christendom, he was proud 
 indeed to point, in the seventeenth of his Davila papers, to this sen- 
 tence : " If the wild idea of annihilating the nobility should spread 
 far and be long persisted in, the men of letters and the national 
 assembly, as democratical as they may think themselves, will find 
 no barrier against despotism." This in 1790, when Bonaparte was 
 a yellow, thin little lieutenant of artillery twenty-two years old. 
 He wrote the sentence, as he himself records, in the historic mansion 
 upon Richmond Hill, near ISTew York, at a moment when- the view 
 from his windows afforded him another proof of man's inhei'ent love 
 of distinctions. A deputation of Creek Indians were encamped 
 within sight and hearing; and even among them there were " gran- 
 dees, warriors, and sachems." 
 
 Neither this honest Adams nor the more adroit Hamilton — both 
 public-spirited and patriotic — seem to have had any glimmering of 
 the truth, so familiar to us, that institutions, like all things else, having 
 served their turn, grow old, get past service, become obstructive, and 
 die. Their discourses upon government read like the remarks that 
 might be made by a young lobster of ability and spirit against the 
 custom which has long prevailed in the lobster tribe of changing 
 their shells. The ardent representative of young lobsterdom might 
 point to the undeniable fact, that the old shell§ had answered an 
 excellent purpose, had proved sufficient, had protected them in storm, 
 and adorned them' in calm. He might further descant upon the 
 known inconveniences of change ; the languor, the sickness, the 
 
TONE OF NEW-YORK SOCIETY IN 1790. 873 
 
 emaciation, the feverish struggle out of the time-honored incase- 
 ment, and the long insecurity while the new armor was getting hard- 
 ness and temper. Every word true. The only answer is : The time 
 of year has come for a change ; we must get other shells, or stop 
 growing. As long as people generallj^ are childlike* enough to be- 
 lieve in the fictions upon which kingly authority rests, so long the 
 institution of monarchy assists and blesses them, as the dail}'^ mass 
 solaced and exalted Columbus, Isabella, the great Prince Heiuy of 
 Portugal, and all the noblest and most gifted of that age ; but 
 when faith declines, and knowledge is in the ascendent, kings 
 become ridiculous, and the most touching ceremonials of the past 
 are an emjity show. 
 
 Mr. Adams protested he could see no difference between the rich 
 families of Boston and the great houses of a European city. "You 
 and I," he wrote to his kinsman, Samuel Adams, in October, 1790, 
 " have seen four noble families rise up in Boston, — the Crafts, 
 Gores, Dawes, and Austins. These are as really a nobility in 
 our town as the Howards, Somersets, Berties, in England." And 
 when Samuel Adams remarked that " the love of liberty is inter- 
 woven in the soul of man," John Adams, vice-president of the 
 United States, replied, ''' So it is, according to La Fontaine, in that 
 of a wolf." 
 
 i In 1790 Jefferson could scarcely have found in New York three 
 drawing-rooms in which such sentiments as these were uncongenial 
 with the prevailing temper. Mr. Jay, generally in accord with 
 Hamilton, had suggested, in 1787, a governor-general of great 
 powers, and senators ajipointed for life. General Knox, secretary 
 of war, a soldier and nothing but a soldier, would have swept away 
 at a stroke all the State governments, and established a standing 
 army. With regard to the sentiment of equality which was assert- 
 ing itself in Prance with so much emphasis, it was all but unknown 
 in the United States. What Miss Sedgwick records in her auto- 
 biography of her father, an important public man of this period, was 
 true then of nearly every person in liberal circumstances in town or 
 country : " He was born too soon to relish the freedoms of democracy; 
 and I have seen his'brow lower when a free-and-easy mechanic came 
 to 'Ci\(i front door; and, upon one occasion, I remember his turning off 
 the east steps (I am sure not kicking, but the demonstration was 
 unequivocal), a grown-up lad who kept his hat on after being told to 
 
374 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 take it off." Gentlemen of the period found no difficultly in jnelding 
 assent to the doctrine of human equality when they heard it melo- 
 diously read on the Fourth of July from the Declaration of Indepen- 
 dence ; but how hard to miss the universal homage once paid them 
 as " gentlemen " ! Many of them spoke with a curious mixture of 
 wonder, scorn, and derision of what they seemed to think was a new 
 French notion, " the contagion of levelism " as Chauncey Goodrich 
 st^'led it. "What folly is it,"' asked this son of Connecticut, " that 
 has set the world agog to be all equal to French barbers ? It must 
 liave its run." 
 
 What a change for Jefferson was the New York of- 1790, from 
 such a city as Paris was in 1789 ! His dearest and deepest convic- 
 tions openly and everywhere abhorred or despised ! The worn-out, 
 obstructive institutions of the past, the acttursed fruits of which had 
 excited in: him a constant and vast commiseration for five years, 
 extolled on every side as the indispensable conditions of human wel- 
 fare ! 
 
 Hamilton and Jefferson met, — the man of action and the man of 
 feeling. Jefferson had brought with him, so far as appears, no preju- 
 dice against his colleague. In Paris he had recommended an 
 English suitor, who had claims in America, "to apply to Colonel 
 Hamilton (who was aid to General Washington), and is now very 
 eminent at the bar, and much to be relied on." Nor is Hamilton 
 known to have had any dislike to Jefferson. Naturally the man of 
 executive force and the man of high qualities of mind regard one 
 another with even an exaggerated respect. The mutual homage of 
 Sir Walter Scott, poet and man of letters, and James Watt, the 
 sublime mechanic, was not less natural than pleasing. In the pres- 
 ence of the genius who had cheered and charmed his life, and 
 enriched his country's fame, making mountainous and unfertile 
 Scotland dear to half the world. Watt looked upon his steam-engine 
 as something small, commonplace, material ; and, at the same instant, 
 Scott was saying to himself. How petty are my light scribblings com- 
 pared with the solid good this great man has done the world ! This 
 is the natural feeling between men of opposite excellences and noble 
 character, who meet, as a sultan of the East might meet a monarch 
 of the West, equals, without being rivals. It was otherwise with 
 these two men, Jefferson and Hamilton. In their case, there were 
 so many causes of antipathy, noble and ignoble, external and inter- 
 
TONE OP NEW-YORK SOCIETY IN 1790. 3T5 
 
 nal, that nothing short of thorough breeding in both could have kept 
 them well with one another. 
 
 There is no contest so little harmful as an open one. The English 
 people have originated no governmental device better than the 
 arrangement of their parliament, by which the administration mem- 
 bers sit facing the opposition, and the leaders of the two bodies fight 
 it out openly in the hearing of mankind. These two men should 
 have been avowed opponents, not colleagues, and debated publicly 
 the high concerns respecting which they were bound to differ ; so as 
 to correct while exasperating one another ; so as to inform, at once, 
 and stimulate the public mind. Hamilton's fluency and self-confi- 
 dence would have given him the advantage for a while ; but Jeffer- 
 son would have had the American people behind him, since it was 
 his part to marshal them the way they were to go. 
 
CHAPTER XLIL 
 
 THE CABINET OF PRESIDENT WASHINGTON. 
 
 "We are in a wilderness, without a single footstep to guide us." 
 Thus wrote Madison to Jefferson, in June, 1789, frotia his seat in 
 Congress, when President Washington, not yet three months in 
 o^ce, and without a cabinet, was surveying the thousand diiBculties 
 of his position: "the whole scene," as the gloomy mind of Fisher 
 Ames conceived it, "a deep, dark, and dreary chaos.". 
 
 The government of the United States at that moment consisted 
 of General Washington, Congress, and a roll of parchment: the 
 last named being the Constitution, the sole guide out of the "wil- 
 derness" of which Mr. Madison wrote. Pootstep there was none. 
 ' No nation had travelled that way before ; though all nations may 
 be destined to follow the path which the United States have since 
 "blazed " and half beaten. Every thing was to be done, and there 
 seemed nothing to do it with, not even money to pay the govern- 
 ment's board ; there being as yet no treasury, no treasurer, and no 
 treasure. And worse : this outline, this sketch, this shadowy 
 promise of a government, was confronted with what seemed to the 
 simple souls of the time a giant debt, — a thousand-armed Briareus, 
 — debt in all forms, paper of every kind known to impecunious 
 man. The total approached fifty-four millions of dollars, to say 
 nothing of the debts of the several States, amounting to twenty-one 
 millions more. Worst of all, fifteen millions of the general debt 
 was arrears of interest ! Hence, the credit of the government was 
 low; not so low as that of the late Congress, whose Promise to 
 Pay Bearer one dollar had passed, as monej'-, in 1787, for eight 
 cents ; but so low that the money lent it to subsist upon for the 
 first few months was lent chiefly as a mark of confidence in the 
 men who solicited it. 
 376 
 
THE CABmET OF PRESIDENT WASHINGTON. 377 
 
 There was not mucli real money in the country. No one, not 
 even the richest man, could raise a large sum of unquestionable 
 cash. The estate of General Washington was extensive, and not 
 so unproductive as many; but, during the first year and a half of 
 his presidency, he was often embarrassed, and was once obliged to 
 raise money on his own note to Tobias Lear, at two per cent a 
 month, in order to enable " The Steward of the Household " to pay 
 off the butcher and the grocer before leaving for Mount Vernon. 
 Years later we find the secretary of the treasury taken to task in 
 Congress for presuming to advance the president a quarter's salary. 
 The first Congress was paid, in part, by anticipating the duties at 
 the custom-houses, each member receiving a certificate of indebted- 
 ness, which the collectors were required to receive for duties. The 
 personal credit of the secretary of the treasury (when at last there 
 was one) helped members to many a liberal shave, and lured from 
 the Bank of New York several timely loans, which kept the life in 
 a starving government. 
 
 "What are we to do with this heavy debt?" the new president 
 asked of Robert Morris, who had so long superintended the finances 
 of the Confederacy, both in war and in peace. The answer was, 
 " There is but one man in the United States who can tell you : 
 that is Alexander Hamilton." Colonel Hamilton agreed with 
 Kobert Morris in this opinion. He had had an eye upon the office 
 of secretary of (lie treasury : not from any common-place ambition ; 
 but because, feeling equal to the post, he believed he could be of 
 more service in it than in any other. " I can restore the public 
 credit," said he to Gouverneur Morris. It was not in the nature of 
 that cool, consummate disciple of Epicurus to sympathize with the 
 spirit of martyrdom ; and hence he endeavored to dissuade his 
 young friend from encountering the obloquy and distrust which 
 then so often assailed ministers of finance. Hamilton's reply was, 
 that he expected calumny and persecution. "But," said he, "I am 
 convinced it is the situation in which I can do most good." Wash- 
 ington was scarcely sworn in before he told Hamilton he meant to 
 offer him the department of finance ; and the next day Colonel 
 Hamilton called upon his old comrade, Colonel Troup, then a 
 thriving lawyer in New York, and asked him if he would undertake 
 to wind up his law business. Troup remonstrated against his 
 making so great a sacrifice. Hamilton replied to him as to Morris, 
 
378 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 that tlie impression upon his mind was strong, that, in the place 
 offered him, he could essentially promote the welfare of the country. 
 Without heing devoid of a proper and even strong desire to distin- 
 guish himself, doubtless he accepted the office in the spirit in which 
 he urged some of his friends to take places under the experimental 
 government. "If it is possible, my dear Harrison," he wrote to 
 one of those who shrank from the toil, the wandering, and poverty 
 of the Supreme Bench, " give yourself to us. We want men like 
 you." Good and able men were wanted, because, as he said in the 
 same letter, " I consider the business of America's happiness as yet 
 to be done ! " 
 
 It is the privilege of Americans, despite the efforts of so many 
 misinterpreters of the men of that time, to believe that every 
 member of General Washington's administration accepted office in 
 the same high, disinterested spirit. Every one of them sacrificed 
 his pecuniary interest, and most of them sacrificed their inclina- 
 tions, to aid in giving the government a start. The salaries 
 attached to their places were almost as insufficient as they are now. 
 Not a man of them lived upon his ofiicial income, any more than 
 the members of the government of to-day live upon theirs. In 
 1.789 there seemed' (but only seemed) a necessity for fixing the 
 salaries of the dozen men upon whom the success of the system 
 chiefly depended, at such a point that their service was generosity 
 as much as duty. There is an impression that we owe to Jefferson 
 the system of paying extravagantly low salaries to high men. Not 
 so. He was far too good a republican to favor an idea so aristo- 
 cratic. Make offices desirable, he says, if you wish to get superior 
 men to fill them. In giving his ideas respecting the proposed new 
 constitution for Virginia, he dwelt upon this point, and returned to 
 it. There is nothing in the writings of Jefferson which gives any 
 show of support to temptation salaries or to ignorant suffrage, — 
 the bane and terror of our present politics. 
 
 Henry Knox, whom President Washington appointed secretary 
 of war, had been, before the Revolution, a thriving Boston book- 
 seller, with so strong a natural turn for soldiering that he belonged 
 to two military companies at once, and' read all the works in his 
 shop which treated of military things. From Bunker Hill, where 
 he served as volunteer aid to General Artemas Ward, to Yorktown, 
 where he commanded and ably directed the artillery, he was an 
 
THE CABINET OF PEESIDENT WASHINGTON. 379 
 
 efficient, faithful soldier; and after the war, being retained in 
 service, he had the chief charge of the military affairs of the Con- 
 federacy, high in the confidence of the disbanded army and its 
 chief He was a man of large, athletic frame, tall, deep-chested, 
 loud-voiced, brave, deligliting in the whirl and rush of field-artillery 
 and the thunder of siege-guns. But a secretary of war is the 
 adviser of the head of the government on all subjects ; and General 
 Knox was only acquainted with one. Nor' was he a man of capa- 
 cious and inquisitive mind. He was one who must take his opinions 
 from another mind, or not have any opinions. But such men, since 
 they lack the only thing in human nature which is progressive, — 
 original intelligence, — have usually a. bias toward what we now 
 call the conservative side of politics. [^Ve hear sometimes of " the 
 car of progress." Intellect alone appears to be the engine which \V 
 draws that celebrated vehicle, ever}'- thing else within us being '' 
 burden or brake. 1 Not only are indolence, ignorance, timidity, and 
 habit conservative, but love and imagination also cling fondly to 
 the old way, to the old house at heme, and to all things ancient and 
 sanctioned; so that, often, the highest genius in the community 
 and its stolidest clodhopper belong to the same political party. 
 Thackeray owned that he preferred the back seat in the car afore- 
 said, because it commanded a view of the country which had been 
 traversed, — Queen Anne's reign, instead of Queen Victoria's ; 
 and we observe the same tendency in most men of illustrious giftg. 
 
 It is only intellect, the fearless and discerning mind, that dis- 
 covers the better path, or welcomes the news that a better path 
 has been discovered. Happy the land where this priceless force has 
 free play : for, small as it ever is in quantitj^, we owe to it every 
 step that man has made from the condition of the savage. 
 
 General Knox had much faith in the tools he was accustomed to 
 use. His original remedy for the ills of the Confederacy was as sim- 
 ple and complete as a patent medicine : Extinguish the State gov- 
 ernments, and establish an imposing general government, with 
 plent}^ of soldiers to enforce its decrees. In the cabinet of Presi- 
 dent Washington, he was the giant shadow of his diminutive friend 
 Hamilton. Wli^ Hamilton had spoken, Knox was usually ready 
 to say in substance, " My own opinion, better expressed." 
 
 These two men were established as members of the cabinet as 
 early as September, 1789, Mr. Jay continuing to serve as secre- 
 
380 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSO]S". 
 
 tary for foreign affairs ; and all of them were highly valued by 
 their chief. How honorable and how right was the conduct of 
 this group of men in setting the government in motion! What an 
 honest soul breathes in this first note which the president ever 
 wrote to the secretary of the treasury' : " From a great variety of 
 characters, who have made a tender of tlieir services for suitable 
 offices, I have selected the following. If Mr. Jay and you will 
 take the further trouble of running them over, to see if among them 
 there can be found one, who, under all circumstances, is more eligi- 
 ble for the post-of&ce than Colonel , I shall be obliged to you 
 
 for your opinion thereon by eleven o'clock. Another paper, which 
 is enclosed, will show how the appointments stand to this time. 
 And that you may have the vndittQic fully before you, I shall add, 
 that it is my j^J'escnt intention to nominate Mr. Jefferson for secre- 
 tary of state, and Mr. Edmund Randolph as attorney-general; 
 though their acceptance is problematical, especially the latter." 
 
 It was in this spirit that every thing was done, — public good 
 the object, patient inquiry the means. 
 
 Edmund Eandolph, who accepted the post of attorney-general, 
 besides being a Randolph and a Virginian, had this claim to the 
 regard of General Washington : he had been disinherited by his 
 father for siding with the E-evolution. He was a rising lawyer 
 twenty-two years of age when his father, the king's attorney-gen- 
 eral, withdrew to England, — an act upon which the son commented 
 by mounting his horse, and riding by the side of General Wash- 
 ington as his volunteer aid, until the general could organize his 
 military househpld. This marked "discrepancy" cost the young 
 man his estate, and made his fortune. )The next year, 1776, young 
 as he was, Virginia sent him to the convention which called upon 
 Congress to declare independence. At twentj'-six he was a mem- 
 ber of the war Congress, in which he served three years, and at 
 tliirty-three was governor of Virginia. Being a Randolph, we 
 might infer, even without Mr. Wirt's full-length portrait of him in 
 the British Spy, that he was a man of great but peculiar talents, — 
 resembling his eccentric kinsman, John Randolph of a later day, 
 but sounder and stronger than that meteoric personage. Tall, 
 meagre, emaciated, loose-jointed, awkward, with small head, and a 
 face dark and wrinkled, nothing in his appearance denoted a superior 
 person excfept his eyes, which were black and most brilliant. Mr. 
 
THE CABINET OF PRESIDENT WASHINGTON. 381 
 
 Wirt, who knew bim some years later, when, after much public 
 service, he had resumed the leadership of the Virginia bar, tells us 
 that he owed his supremacy there to a single facultj', that of seeing 
 and seizing at once the real point at issue in a controversy. " No 
 matter what the question," says Mr. Wirt, "though ten times more 
 knotty than the gnarled oak, the lightning of heaven is not more 
 rapid nor more resistless than his astonishing penetration. Nor 
 does the exercise of it seem to cost him an effort. On the contrary, 
 it is as easy as vision." John Randolph possessed a residuum of 
 the same talent in his power of condensing one side of a question 
 into an epigram of ten words, which pierced every ear, and stuck in 
 every memory. 
 
 But Edmund Randolph, keen and bold as he was before judge 
 and jury, where the responsibility of deciding lay with others, was 
 timid and hesitatirrg when it was his part to utter the decisive 
 word. He saw clearly, he saw correctly ; but, when the time came 
 to vote, his ingenious mind conjured up difficulties, and he often 
 gave his voice to the side his head disapproved, — his argument sup- 
 porting one party and his vote the other ; or, as Jefferson expressed 
 it, he sometimes gave the shells to his friends, and the oyster to his 
 enemies. Most men, whose, profession it has long been to use 
 words, would experience the same difficulty when called upon to 
 deal with things ; so much easier is it to be eloquent than to be 
 wise. How confident the hero of the platform or of the editorial 
 page ! what vigorous blows he gets in at enemies, remote or ima- 
 ginary ! how striking the skill with which he barbs, and the audacity 
 with which he shoots, the poisoned arrow which will rankle a life- 
 time in an unseen breast ! But put the same man in a situation 
 which requires him on his honor to decide the smallest practical 
 question, and his confidence is gone. A government of orators and 
 editors would never do, unless at or near the head of it there was 
 one unfluent man trained in the great art of making up his mind. 
 
 Such were the gentlemen who were gathered round the council- 
 table at the president's house in New York in 1790. How inter- 
 esting the group! At the head of the table. General Washington, 
 now fifty-eight, his frame as erect as ever, but his face showing 
 deep traces of the thousand anxious hours he had passed. Not 
 versed in the lore of schools, not gifted with a great sum of intel- 
 lect, the eternal glory of this man is, that he used all the mind he 
 
382 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 had in patient endeavors to find ont the right way ; ever on the 
 watch to keep out of his decision every thing like bias or prejudice ; 
 never deciding till he had exhausted every source of elucidation 
 within his reach. Some questions he could not decide with his own 
 mind; and he knew he could not. In such cases, he bent all his 
 powers to ascertaining how the subject appeared to minds fitted to 
 grapple with it, and getting tJieni to view it without prejudice. 
 
 I am delighted to learn that Mr. Carlylo can seldom hear the 
 name of Washington pronounced without breakijxg forth with an 
 explosion of contempt, especially, it is said, if tliere is an American 
 within hearing. Washington is the exact opposite of a fell Car- 
 lylean hero. His glory is, that he was not richly endowed, not 
 sufficient unto himself, not indifferent to human rights, opinions, 
 and preferences; but feeling deej)!}'- his need of help, sought it, 
 where alone it was to be found, — in minds Ktted by nature and 
 training to supply his lack. It is this heartfelt desire to be right 
 which shines so afifectingl}' from the plain words of Washington, 
 and gives him rank so far above the gorgeous bandits whom hero- 
 worshippers adore. 
 
 On the right of the president, — in the place of honor, — sat 
 Jefferson, now forty-seven, the senior, of all his colleagues ; older 
 in public service, too, than any of them ; tall, erect, ruddy ; noticea- 
 bly' quiet and unobtrusive in his address and demeanor ; the least 
 pugnacious of men. Not a fanatic, not an enthusiast; but an 
 old-fashioned Whig, nurtured upon "old Coke," enlightened by 
 twenty-five years' intense discussion, — with pen, tongue, and 
 sword, — of Cokean principles. Fresh from the latest commentary 
 upon Coke, — the ruins of the Bastille, — and wearing still his red 
 Paris waistcoat and breeches, he was an object of pai-ticular interest 
 to all men, and doubtless often relieved the severity of business 
 by some thrilling relation out of his late foreign experience. 
 
 Opposite him, on the president's left, was the place of Hamilton, 
 secretary of the treasury, in all the alertness and vigor of thirty- 
 three years. If time had matured his talents, it had not lessened 
 his self-sufficiency ; because, as yet, all his short life had been suc- 
 cess, and he had associated chiefly with men who possessed nothing 
 either of his fluency or his arithmetic. A positive, vehement little 
 gentleman, with as firm a faith in the apparatus of finance as Gen- 
 eral Knox had in great guns. He was now in the full tide of activ- 
 
THE CABINET qjP PRESIDENT WASHINGTON. 383 
 
 ity, lobbying measures tbrougli Congress, and organizing tlie treasury 
 department; the most conspicuous man in the administration, 
 except the president. As usual, his unseen work was his best. In 
 organizing a sj'stem of collecting, keeping, and disbursing the rev- 
 enue, he employed so much tact, forethought, and fertility, that his 
 successors have each, in turn, admired and retained his most impor- 
 tant devices. He arranged the system so that the secretary of the 
 treasury, at any moment, could survey the whole working of it ; and 
 he held at command all the resources of the United States, subject 
 to lawful use, without being able to divert one dollar to a purpose 
 not specially authorized. He could not draw his own pittance of 
 salary without the signatures of the four chief officers of the depart- 
 ment, — comptroller, auditor, treasurer, and register. 
 
 ''Hamilton and I," Jefferson wrote, " were pitted against each 
 other every day in the cabinet, like two fighting-cocks." Age had 
 not quenched the vivacity of either of the four secretaries : Jeffer- 
 son, forty-seven ; Knox, forty ; Randolph, thirty-seven ; Hamilton, 
 thirty-three. When, in the world's history, was so young a group 
 charged with a task so new, so difficult, so momentous ? At first, 
 what good friends they were ! No " opposition," in the party sense, 
 seems to have been thought of. "I remember," said a lady who 
 was living in 1858, " how Hamilton and Madison would talk together 
 in the summer [of 1789], and then turn and laugh and play with a 
 monkey that was climbing in a neighbor's yard." But how suddenly 
 was all this changed when the administration set to work in ear- 
 nest ! An opposition sprang into being full-formed. By the time 
 Jefferson took his seat in the cabinet, it had attained even menacing 
 proportions ; and it was chiefly due to Hamilton's inexperience and 
 precipitation, his ignorance of man, and his ignorance of America. 
 
CHAPTER XLIII. 
 
 THE NEW GOVERNMENT AND THE PUBLIC DEBT. 
 
 In September, 1789, when his appointment to the place of minis- 
 ter of finance had set the seal of Washington's approval to his repu- 
 tation, Hamilton's position before the country was commanding. 
 The dead corpse of the public credit, of which Mr. Webster spoke 
 (repeating the tradition of his father's fireside), took a startling leap, 
 even before Hamilton could be supposed to have " touched " it : thirty- 
 three per cent from January to November. Tlie mere establishment 
 of a government, "clothed," as Hamilton expressed it, "with powers 
 capable of calling forth the resources of the community," had wrought 
 this third part of a miracle. The appointment of Hamilton, who 
 was known to be in favor of using those powers to the uttermost, 
 accelerated the rise, which received a further impetus when Con- 
 gress, late in September, before adjourning over till January, referred 
 the knotty subject of the public credit to the secretary of the treas- 
 ury, requesting him to report a plan for its restoration. He threw 
 himself upon this work with honorable ardor, not disdaining to con- 
 sult Madison, Morris, and all accessible men competent to advise 
 on a matter so full of diflSculty. The rumor of what he intended 
 to recommend had such eifect upon the market, that the debt rose 
 in price fifty per cent more in the last two months of 1789 ; making 
 a rise of eighty-three per cent in the year. The day on which the 
 report was read in the House of Eepresentatives, January 14, 1790, 
 was memorable for the throng of eager auditors that gathered to 
 hear it in gallery and lobby, and the breathless interest with \\'hich 
 so difficult a paper was listened to. The Senate still sat with closed 
 doors, in secrecy meant to be awful ; but the public were admitted 
 to what the Federalists were pleased to designate the Lower House. 
 
 Hamilton's report on the public credit i» one of the most inter- 
 
 884 
 
THE NEW GOVERNMENT AND THE PUBLIC DEBT. 385 
 
 esting documents in the archives of the United States. It began 
 the strife of parties under tlie new Constitution. It was hailed 
 with triumphant rapture by the moneyed few, and received by the 
 landed many with doubt and distrust, which soon became opposition, 
 hostility, rancor, mania. 
 
 How much does the reader suppose the Revolution cost per 
 annum ? Seventeen millions and a half of dollars ; about ten days' 
 expenditure of the late war. Such was " the price of liberty." 
 The debt of the United States in January, 1790, was $54,124,464. 
 56; of which, as before remarked, nearly fifteen millions were 
 arrears of interest; and, besides this general debt, there was a chaos 
 of State debts, amounting, as the secretary erroneously computed, to 
 twenty-five millions more. Not eighty millions in all ; not a 
 month's expenditure during the Rebellion. But if the billions of 
 our present debt were multiplied by two, the stupeadous total would 
 not affright us half as much as these figures did the peojile of 1790, 
 four millions in number, mostly farmers and fishermen, without 
 steam, without cotton, without the mines, without a West. It was 
 a grave question with intelligent men, whether it was possible for 
 the country to pay the. interest, and carry on the general government 
 at the same time. The expenses of supporting the government 
 could not be kept, Hamilton thought, under six hundred thousand 
 dollars a year, and the interest of the whole debt was four millions 
 and a half Would the country stand such a drain ? The secretary 
 thought it possible, but not probable. "It would require," he said, 
 "an extension of taxation to a degree and to objects which the true 
 interest of the public creditor forbids." This was a polite way of 
 stating the case, but the meaning was sufficiently clear : The people 
 will not bear a tax of a dollar and a quarter each per annum. What 
 then? 
 
 The secretary's answer to this question was. Fund the debt at a 
 lower rate of interest. But how could a country borrow at a lower 
 rate, which already owed fifteen millions of unpaid interest? It 
 was in answering this question that the young financier displayed 
 too much ingenuity and not enough wisdom. He answered it very 
 much as John Law would have done, if John Law had been a man 
 of honor. His suggestions were so numerous, so complex, and so 
 refined, as to suggest to opponents the idea that he had contrived 
 them on purpose to puzzle the people. Nothing could be more 
 
 25 
 
386 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 unjust. He was a financier of tliirfcy-tliree, whose mind was as full 
 of ideas as his pockets were empty of money and his life devoid of 
 experience. But every page of his report is warm with tlie passion 
 of honesty wliich possessed the author's mind. If some cool, prac- 
 tised man of the world, like Gouverneur Morris, had gone over this 
 report, stricken out three out of every four of Hamilton's ingenuities, 
 kept his best ideas, and given them the simplest expression, an ad- 
 mirable result might have been attained. But what could the most 
 uncommercial and uncapitalled of all people on earth be expected 
 to think of a scheme which would require the United States to em- 
 bark in the business of selling annuities, and contracting loans "on 
 the principles of a tonthie, to consist of six classes"? I think I 
 see the country gentleman of the period puzzling over the secretary's 
 lucid explanations of the annuity business : " One hundred dollars, 
 bearing an interest of six per cent for five years, or five per cent for 
 fifteen years, and thenceforth of four per cent (these being the 
 successiv(3 rates of interest in the market), is equal to a capital of 
 $122.510725, bearing an interest of four per cent; which, con- 
 verted into a capital bearing a fixed rate of interest of six per cent, 
 is equal to $81.6738166." 
 
 A valuable suggestion was to turn the waste lands to account in 
 paying part of the debt. He wished to raise one loan by giving 
 every holder of the debt the option to fund his whole amount at six 
 per cent, or, receiving one-third of it in land at twenty cents an acre, 
 fund the rest at four per cent. Another loan of ten millions he pro- 
 posed to effect on Law's own plan of utilizing depreciated bonds : 
 every man subscribing one hundred dollars, to pay half in money 
 and the other half in Congress paper; the whole to bear an interest 
 of five per cent. A third scheme was founded upon the erroneous 
 opinion, that the rate of interest would decline from six per cent to 
 four in a few years. Besides suggesting six different jdans of luring 
 money from the public in aid of tlie government, he proposed a stiff 
 duty upon liquors, wines, tea, and coffue. But even his tariff had 
 the vice of complication. Each grade of tea (four in number) had 
 its special rate of duty ; and every barrel of liquor was to be tested by 
 " Dica's hydrometer," to ascertain exactly how many degrees it was 
 above or below proof There were to be six rates upon liquor; 
 beginning with twenty cents a gallon upon spirits ten per cent 
 below proof, and rising to forty cents a gallon if it were forty per 
 
THE NEW GOVERNMENT AND THE PUBLIC DEBT. 387 
 
 cent above proof. If the report had been contrived, as some of its 
 heated opponents charged, to jierplex the people and multiply cus- 
 tom-honse officers, it could hardly have been better done. Even the 
 loans on ''the tontine plan" were to be of "six classes." 
 
 Congress, of course, disregarded the refinements and the ingenui- 
 ties, and adopted the substance of the report j the opposition con- 
 centrating upon two points. 
 
 The public debt, as the secretary remarked, was '^ the price of 
 liberty." The veterans of the Revolution, a kind of sacred class at 
 this period, had been the most numerous original holders of it ; and 
 many of them, through the failure of Congress to pay the interest, 
 had been obliged to sell their claims for a small fraction of their 
 amount. It was not as when a poor widow in a hard time sells her 
 diamond for a quarter of its value ; for, in the case of the Revolution- 
 ary soldier, it was neither his fault nor his necessity that lessened 
 the value of his property, but the government's inability to keep its 
 promise. Hence there was a wide-spread feeling in the country, 
 that, in funding the debt, original holders should be credited with 
 the full amount of their claims ; but the " speculator " should receive 
 only what he had paid for his certificate, with interest, and the rest 
 should go to the original holder. The secretary of the treasury, 
 anticipating this opinion, argued against it with equal ability and 
 good feeling. Probably there is not to-day a man in Wall Street 
 nor in the Treasury Department at Washington who will not give 
 his approval to Hamilton's reasoning upon this ^oint. But, in 
 1790, an immense number of the most able and just-minded men 
 denounced it with bitterness. What ! pay a speculator a thousand 
 dollars, with ten years' arrears of interest, for a bond which he had 
 bought from a veteran of the Eevolution for a hundred and fifty! 
 Yes, even so; because it is not in the power of so cumbrous a thing 
 as a goveruQient to execute any scheme for avoiding this twofold 
 wrong which would not cause more wrong than it would prevent. 
 To those who have shall be given, and from those who have not 
 shall be taken away that which they have. Such is the scheme of 
 the universe, which man's devices can but regulate and mitigate ; 
 but, in a large number of instances, this profoundly beneficent law 
 appears to the sufferers to work sheer cruelty. After a long and 
 severe struggle, in which Madison strove worthily for the soldiers' 
 interest. Congress accepted Hamilton's conclusion as the law of 
 necessity governing the case. 
 
388 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOIST. 
 
 This contest was at its height while Jefferson was floundering 
 through the mud from Virginia to New York. Immersed at once 
 upon his arrival in the business of his own department, and having a 
 dislike of financial questions, he took no part in the strife. But 
 Hamilton, unhappily, had cumbered his report with a recommenda- 
 tion that Congress should assume tlie debts of the States. To him, 
 born in a little sugar-island, from which he had early escaped, and 
 therefore unable to comprehend or sympathize with the hereditary 
 love of the native citizen for the State in which he was born, nothing 
 seemed more natural or more proper than this sweeping measure. 
 Debt is debt. The people of the United States owe this money. 
 How much better to arrange it all under the same system ! He sur- 
 veyed this tangled scene of debt as Bonaparte may be supposed to 
 have looked upon the map of Europe \Yhen he was about to piece 
 out a new kingdom for one of his brothers. Here is a nice little 
 duchy to round off that corner; this pretty province will make a 
 capital finish to the western boundary ; and, to fill up this gap on 
 the north, we'll gouge a piece out of the king of Prussia, poor devil. 
 The reader, perhaps, in looking upon the map of New England, has 
 sometimes thought wliat an improvement it would be to the sym- 
 metry of things to obliterate the lines which make Rhode Island a 
 separate State, with its own apparatus of government ; not expen- 
 sive, indeed, but superfluous. If the reader has ever had this bold 
 thought, let him, the next time he finds himself in Thames Street, 
 Newport, propose the scheme of merging Rhode Island into Massa- 
 chusetts to the inhabitants of that too narrow thoroughfare. The 
 idea will seem to the worthy sons of Newport too preposterous to be 
 considered; but if you could succeed in convincing one of them that 
 the plan was seriously entertained, with some remote possibility of 
 success, you would perhaps discover why Hamilton's plan of assump- 
 tion excited, not disapproval merely, but passion. It cut deeply into 
 State pride. It gave the party which had held out longest against 
 the new Constitution an opportunity to turn upon the Federalists 
 with a bitter, Did we not tell you so? What is this but consolida- 
 tion? 
 
 Besides, the rapid rise in the value of the public debt, and 
 especially the jump towards par which it gave when the funding reso- 
 lution was passed, had had the usual effect (so familiar to us of this 
 generation) of enriching several individuals not the most estimable 
 
THE NEW GOVERNJyiENT AND THE PUBLIC DEBT. 389 
 
 of men, and of luring from honest industry a considerable class of 
 speculators. Whoever saw exaggerated Wall Street when gold was 
 going up and down the scale at ten per cent a week, or whoever has 
 read of the precisely similar scenes in Paris when Louis XIV. had 
 died insolvent, leaving France littered with every kind of fluctu- 
 ating paper for John Law to operate with and upon, can form some 
 idea of the horror excited in the unsophisticated minds of country 
 members in 1790 by the spectacle of sudden wealth gained by spec- 
 ulation in the public debt. As a rule, no sudden fortune is made 
 without wrong to some and injury to many. It is in the highest 
 degree undesirable for money to be made fast ; and, in a healthy, 
 proper state of things, it will seldom be done. During the colonial 
 period, it is questionable if one individual had made a fortune even 
 in so short a period as ten years, except by wrecking or privateer- 
 ing ; and privateer fortunes were proverbially demoralizing and 
 evanescent. It was thought remarkable that Franklin should have 
 gained a competence in twenty years by legitimate business, and he 
 never ceased to speak of it himself with grateful wonder. And 
 what made these paper fortunes of 1790 and 1791 so aggravating to 
 country gentlemen was, the serious decline in the value of their own 
 lands. In Hamilton's report upon the public credit occurs this sen- 
 tence : " The value' of cultivated lands, in most of the States, has 
 fallen, since the Revolution, from twenty to fifty per cent." And 
 here were speculators in the public debt setting up their carriages 
 in the face of honorable members of hereditary estates, hard put to 
 it to pay their board! At that period, all Southern members were 
 country members ; the whole south, except Charleston, being 
 " country." 
 
 On public grounds, too, the mania for getting rich in a week was 
 deplorable, since it injured those who lost and spoiled those who 
 gained. It was a true mania, as Hamilton himself admits. *' In 
 the late delirium of speculation," he wrote, after the worst of it was 
 over, "large sums [of the public debt] were purchased at twenty- 
 five per cent above par and upwards ; " which was just what hap- 
 pened when John Law "touched the corpse" of French credit in 
 1717. " Since this report has been read," exclaimed a fiery 
 member from Georgia, "a spirit of speculation and ruin has arisen, 
 and been cherished by people who had an access to the information 
 the report contained, that would have made a Hastings blush to 
 
390 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 have been connected with, though long inured to preying on the 
 vitals of his fellow-men. Three vessels, sir, have sailed within a 
 fortnight from this port, freighted for speculation : they are intend- 
 ed to purchase up the State and other securities in the hands of the 
 uninformed though honest citizens of North Carolina, South Caro- 
 lina, and Georgia. My soul rises indignant at the avaricious and 
 moral turj^itude wliich so vile a conduct displays." 
 
 Thus the virtuous Georgian. And, indeed, few persons then 
 I perceived the usefulness of speculators, — the men who employ 
 ■' themselves in applying the redundancy of one place to the scarcity 
 of another. Too many nutmegs in London, not enou-gh nutmegs 
 in New York : it is the speculator who remedies both evils at 
 a stroke, with occasional advantage to himself. But how far a 
 sjjeculator may honorably avail himself of special knowledge 
 is a question upon which Wayland's Moral Pliilosophy (school 
 edition) is clear and decisive, but which presents difficulties in 
 practical life. Those three fast-sailing schooners play a great part 
 in the journalism and politics of the time. Whether they were 
 phantom vessels or genuine two-masted schooners is not certain, but 
 they excited profound and general horror. " If any man burns his 
 fingers,'" said the indignant Jackson of Georgia, "which I hope to 
 God, with all the warmth of a feeling heart, they may, they will 
 on\y have their own cupidity to blame." 
 
 Now, the proposed assumption of the State debts, even if the 
 principle could be admitted, even if the measure could be thought 
 desirable or timely, was open to the obvious objection, that it would 
 throw upon the market twenty-one millions more of the fuel that 
 had caused this alarming conflagration. It'woidd be like putting 
 gallons of tar into the furnace of a Mississippi steamboat already 
 making nineteen miles an hour, with a colored boy on the safet}'^- 
 valve ; a proceeding usually applauded by the gamblers and betting 
 men on board, though extremely unpleasing to steady-going pas- 
 sengers. 
 
 Some of the States, moreover, had paid off half their war-debt; 
 others were making strenuous efforts in that direction ; but some 
 had not diminished their indebtedness at all, nor tried to do so. 
 The proposed assumption placed all the States upon a level. The 
 five foolish virgins were to have their lamps filled for them at the 
 door of the mansion, and to be allowed to flaunt into the banquet- 
 
THE NEW GOVERNMENT AND THE PUBLIC DEBT. 391 
 
 ing-room on the same footing as their wise companions. The bad 
 apprentice and the good apprentice were each to marry liis master's 
 daughter, inherit the business, and be lord-mayor. 
 
 For these and other reasons, a small majority of the House (31 
 to 29), in spite of the outcries of an arm}'- of creditors, and in spite 
 of Hamilton's dazzling prestige and irrepressible resolution, rejected 
 the plan of assumption. So acrimonious had been the debate, so 
 intense the feeling on both sides, on the floor, in the lobby, in "the 
 street," that when at last the rash scheme was rejected, it seemed 
 as if the experiment of a general government had failed. Congress 
 assembled every morning as usual, but onl}' to adjourn at once ; as 
 the two sides were " too much out of temper to do business to- 
 gether." It was a case of Town versus Country, North against 
 South, centralism against the rights and dignity of the State gov- 
 ernments. 
 
 But why so much ill-humor ? Because Hamilton and his friends, 
 the men who were conducting the experiment of Federal govern- 
 ment by the people, had no faith in the principle. It was not in 
 their blood to submit at once, without a word, to the decision of a 
 majority. The cogent arguments of Madison and the Republican 
 members against assumption, instead of instructing this brilliant 
 young pupil of John Law, only irritated him, only made him the 
 more resolute to carry his point, only convinced him the more that 
 the people do not know what is best for them. He had an unteach- 
 able mind. " I will not give him up yet," he said, when he heard 
 of Madison's opposition ; as though it were a moral aberration in a 
 friend to object to his measures ; and when it became clear that 
 Madison was fixed in his Opposition, he had the immeasurable 
 insolence to say, "Alas, poor human nature!" The idea never 
 crossed his mind of dropping the scheme. And we may be sure, 
 that, at such a time, the clamor of an interested lobby will make 
 itself heard ; for the vote against assumption was a shivering blow 
 to many a paper fortune, 
 
 Mr. Madison, in his bright and happy old age, once gave Ills 
 version of the reason why Hamilton and himself had separated in 
 1790. Mr. Nicholas P. Trist preserves the anecdote. "I aban- 
 doned Colonel Hamilton," said Madison, "or Colonel Hamilton 
 abandoned me, -—in a word, we loarted, — upon its plainl}'- becom- 
 ing his purpose and endeavor to administration the government 
 
392 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 into a thing totally different from that which he and I both knew 
 perfectly well had been understood and intended by the Convention 
 which framed it, and by the people in adopting it." 
 
 In this extremity, to whom, of all men in tlie world, should 
 Hamilton apply for assistance but Jefferson, his colleague of three 
 weeks' standing, up to the eyes in the work of his own department ! 
 Chance gave him the opportunity. On an April day, as the secre- 
 tary of state was walking from his house, 54 Maiden Lane, to the 
 president's mansion, at the corner of Pearl and Cherry Streets, 
 Hamilton met and joined him, and broke into tlie topic that filled 
 his mind. The distance being much too .short for his purpose, he 
 "walked" his colleague to and fro in front of the president's house 
 for half an hour, descanting upon the situation, dwelling especially 
 upon the dangerous temper into which Congress had been wrought, 
 and the fierce disgust of members whose States were supposed to 
 have more to receive than to pay. That word of fearful omen, 
 secession, was then first uttered in connection with the politics of 
 the United States. There was danger, .Hamilton said, of the 
 secession of the opposing members, and the separation of their 
 States from the Union, At such a crisis, he thought, members of 
 the administration should rally round the president, who was " the 
 centre on which all administrative measures ultimately rested," and 
 give a united support to such as he approved. This misinterpreta- 
 tion of the situation shows us how" much he was "bewitched by the 
 British form." The man was incapable of comprehending the 
 crisis. There was no crisis, except of his own making. One of the 
 suggestions of his report having been rejected by the House of 
 Representatives, he and his friends had only to acquiesce in becom- 
 ing silence, and all was well. But confused by their familiarity 
 with the English system, excited by the clamor of the street, and 
 having an ample share of false pride, the}'- must needs persist until 
 they had produced a crisis. 
 
 Thus appealed to, Jefferson fell back upon the expedient which 
 had been so successful in Paris during the French crisis of August, 
 1789, — a dinner. He told his anxious colleague that he was a 
 stranger to the whole subject, not having yet informed himself of 
 the system of finance adopted, and unable, therefore, to decide how 
 far this measure of assuming the State debts was " a necessary 
 sequence." But of one thing there could be no doubt : if its rejec- 
 
THE NEW GOVERNMENT AND THE PUBLIC DEBT. 393 
 
 tion was really perilous to the Union at this early stage of its 
 existence, all partial and temporary evils should be endured to avert 
 that supreme catastrophe. ''Dine with me to-morrow," he con 
 tinued, "and I will invite another friend or two, and bring you into 
 conference together. I think it impossible that reasonable men, 
 consulting together coolly, can fail, by some mutual sacrifices of 
 opinion, to form a compromise which is to save the Union." 
 
 The conference occurred. Jeiferson, as usual with him on such 
 occasions, did not join in the discussion, but only exhorted his friends 
 to conciliation, and quieted their minds by his serene presence. A 
 compromise was effected ; but, unhappily, it was not a compromise 
 of opinion. Contending interests had to be assuaged ; and thus a 
 vast permanent wrong was done in order to tide over a temporary 
 inconvenience. Nay, two permanent wrongs : log-rolling was in- 
 vented, and the city of Washington was sprawled over the soft j 
 banks of the Potomac. 
 
 As early as September, 1789, the question of a capital of the 
 United States had been debated in Congress, and debated with that 
 warmth and irritation which such a subject excites always. A King 
 loomed up dimly upon the imaginations of members, supposed to 
 have been formed " out of doors," in order to fix the capital at 
 "Wright's Ferry on the Susquehanna;" a place whicli has since 
 developed into Wrightsville, containing, according to the Gazetteer, 
 " two saw-mills, and thirteen hundred and ten inhabitants." Few, 
 perhaps, of these thirteen hundred and ten inhabitants know what 
 a narrow escape their secluded village had of being the capital of 
 their country. The members from New England and New York 
 agreed in preferring it, as the point nearest the centre of population, 
 wealth, and convenience; and for many days it seemed to have a 
 better chance than any of the other places proposed, — Harrisburg, 
 Baltimore, New York, Germantown, Philadelphia. Wright's Ferry 
 was shown in the debates to be the veritable "hub of the universe," 
 a region favored by nature above others ; where, as one member 
 remarked, not merely the soil, the water, and the " advantages of 
 nature," were unsurpassed, but where, " if honorable gentlemen were 
 disposed to pay much attention to a dish of fish, he could assure . 
 them their table might be furnished with fine and good from the 
 waters of the Susquehanna." 
 
 But Wright's Ferry lost its chance through the opposition of the 
 
394 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 Southern members ; and the Eing rumor was the ass's jawbone 
 which they used to kill the project. "Preconcerted out of doors," 
 said Madison. "I am sorry the people should learn," remarked 
 the loud Jackson of Georgia, whose home was a thousand miles from 
 Wright's Ferry, " that the members from New England and New 
 York had fixed on a seat of government." Such a report, he 
 thought, would "blow the coals of sedition, and endanger the 
 Union." 
 
 The members from New England and New York denied the offen- 
 sive charge, and contended that Wright had fixed his ferry at the 
 point which would be " the centre of population for ages yet to 
 come." With regard to the country west of the Ohio, " an im- 
 measurable wilderness," Fisher Ames was of opinion (and it was 
 everybodj^'s opinion) that it was "perfectly romantic" to allow it 
 any weight in the decision at all. " When it will be settled, or how 
 it will be possible to govern it," said he, "is past calculation." 
 Southern gentlemen, on the other hand, denied the " centrality " 
 of Wright, and maintained that the shores of the noble Potomac 
 presented the genuine centre to the nation's choice. The Potomac ! 
 Horror ! A deadly miasma hung over its banks ; and no native of 
 New England could remain there and live. "Vast numbers of 
 Eastern adventurers," said Mr, Sedgwick of Massachusetts, " have 
 gone to the Southern States, and all have found their graves there : 
 they have met destruction as soon as they arrived." Centre of popu- 
 lation ? " Yes," said Sedgwick, " if you count the slaves ; " but 
 "if they were considered, gentlemen might as well estimate the 
 black cattle of New England." 
 
 One remark made by Madison in the course of this long and too 
 warm discussion has a particular interest for us who live under a 
 network of telegraphic wires. " If," said he, " it were possible to 
 promulgate our laws by some instantaneous operation, it would be 
 of less consequence, in that point of view, where the government 
 might be placed." But even in that case, centralit}^, he thought, 
 would be but just, since the government would probably expend 
 every year as much as half a million of dollars, and every citizen 
 should partake of this advantage as equally as Nature had rendered 
 it possible. 
 
 And so the debate went on day after day. The Susquehanna 
 men triumphed in the House ; but the senate sent back the bill with 
 
THE NEW GOVERNMENT AND THE PUBLIC DEBT. 395 
 
 " Susquehanna " stricken out, and " Germantown " inserted. The 
 House would not accept the amendment, and the session ended 
 before a place had been agreed upon. The subject being resumed 
 in the spring of 1790, it was again productive of heat and recrimi- 
 nation ; again the South was outvoted, and the Potomac rejected by 
 a small majority. Baffled in the House, Southern men renewed 
 their efforts over Mr. Jefferson's wine and hickory-nuts in IVIaiden 
 Lane. Two sets of members were sour or savage from the loss of 
 a measure upon which they had set their hearts : Southern men had 
 lost the capital, and Northern men assumption. Then it was that 
 the original American log-roller — name unrecorded — conceived the 
 idea of this bad kmd of compromise. The bargain was this : two 
 Southern members should vote for assumption, and so carry it; and, in 
 return for this concession, Hamilton agreed to induce a few Northern 
 members to change their votes on the question of the capital, and 
 so fix it upon the Potomac. It was agreed, at length, that for the 
 next ten years the seat of government should be Philadelphia, and 
 finally near Georgetown. How much trouble would have been 
 saved if some prophetic member had been strong enough to carry a 
 very simple amendment, to strike out ten years, and insert one hun- 
 dred ! And, in that case, what an agreeable task would have been 
 devolved upon this generation, of repealing Georgetown, and begin- 
 ning a suitable capital at the proper place ! 
 
 To the last of his public life, Jefferson never ceased to regret the 
 part he had innocently taken in this bargain. Even as a matter of 
 convenience (leaving principle out of sight), he thought the separate 
 States could reduce their chaos of debts to order, and put them in a 
 fair way to be discharged, better, sooner, and cheaper, than it could 
 be done by the general government. But, w^hile the crisis lasted,, 
 the minds of all men were filled with dismay and apprehension ; for 
 the threat of disunion had then lost none of its terrors by repetition 
 and familiarity. The letters of the time are full of the perils of the 
 situation. Jefferson himself, in a letter to his young friend Monroe, 
 dated June 20, 1790, held this fearful language: " After exhausting 
 their arguments and patience on these subjects, members have been 
 for some time resting upon their oars, unable to get along as to these 
 businesses, and indisposed to attend to any thing else till they are 
 settled. And, in fine, it has become probable, that, unless they can 
 be settled by some plan of compromise, there will be no funding- 
 
396 LIFB OP THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 bill agreed to, and our credit (raised by late prospects to be the first 
 on the exchange at Amsterdam, where our paper is above par) will 
 burst and vanish, and the States separate to take care every one of 
 itself." 
 
 And so Hamilton triumphed. The young republic rose in the 
 estimation of all the money-streets of Christendom ; and in Amster- 
 dam,' a few months later, a new United-States loan of two and a 
 half millions of florins was filled in two hours and a half What a 
 contrast from the time when all Mr. Adams's pertinacity and elo- 
 I quence, united with Mr. Jefferson's tact and suavity, had only been 
 able to wring florins enough from Holland to keep the servants of 
 Congress in Europe supplied with the necessarie'^ of life ! At home 
 the sudden increase in the A'-alue of the widely scattered debt enriched 
 many people, improved the circumstances of more, and gave a lift 
 to the whole country, America began to be. New York entered 
 upon its predestined career. Corner-lots acquired value. But the 
 corpse of the public credit, having got firmly upon its feet, began 
 soon to dance, caper, leap, and execute gymnastic wonders ; for the 
 young gentleman at the head of the treasury must needs apply the 
 galvanic fluid once more. That " Bank of the United States," of 
 which he had dreamed by the camp-fires of the Revolution, he was 
 now in a position to establish. Deaf to the warnings of the prudent 
 and the arguments of the wise, he forced it through Congress, and 
 sat up all night writing a paper to convince the president that he 
 ought to sign the bill. The books were opened. In a day — as fast, 
 indeed, as the entries could be made — the shares were all taken, 
 and large numbers of people were still eager to subscribe. 
 
 Then arose in the United States just such a mania for speculation 
 as France experienced when the gambler Law, and the roue Re- 
 gent, put their heads together in 1717. Every scrap of paper issued 
 by the United States or bearing its sanction, whether debt or shares, 
 acquired a fictitious value. " What do you think of this scrippo- 
 mania?" asks Jefferson of a fr.end in August, 1791. "Ships are 
 lying idle at the wharves, buildings are stopped, capitals are with- 
 drawn from commerce, manufactures, arts and agriculture, to be 
 employed in gambling ; and the tide of public prosperity, almost 
 unparalleled in any country, is arrested in its course, and suppressed 
 by the rage of getting rich in a day. No mortal can tell when this 
 will stop J for the spirit of gaming, when once it has seized a 
 
THE NEW GOVERNMENT AND THE PUBLIC DEBT. 397 
 
 subject, is incurable. The tailor who has made thousands in one 
 day, though he has lost them the next, can never again be content 
 with the slow and moderate earnings of his needle." Hamilton, 
 too, was alarmed at the " extravagant sallies of speculation," which, 
 he said, disgusted all sober citizens, and gave " a wild air to every 
 thing." Such periods, happily, can never be of long duration : 
 under the magic touch of Law, the corpse of French credit kept 
 upon its feet eight months, then collapsed, and " a hundred thousand 
 persons ruined." The period of inflation in the United States lasted 
 about the same time, and was followed by the usual depression, and 
 the sudden return of the speculating tailor to his needle. 
 
 We laugh at those periods of collapse when they are past ; but, 
 while they are passing, the hurricanes of the West Indies, the 
 simooms of Sahara, the earthquakes of the Andes, are not more ter- 
 rible. They once threatened to play the same part in the spiritual 
 history of America as the " terrible aspects of Nature " did in that 
 of Spain, where, as Mr. Buckle remarks, famines, epidemics, and 
 earthquakes kept the human mind in a bondage of terror, and ren- 
 dered it the easy prey of the priest. 
 
CHAPTER XLIV. 
 
 JEFFERSON SETTLING TO HIS WORK. 
 
 The secretary of state, meanwhile, was grappling with the 
 weighty, nnconspicuous duties of his place. No one knew, at first, 
 what those duties were, or were not. For a while he was postmaster- 
 general ; and we find him inviting Colonel Pickering to dinner to 
 confer upon a dashing scheme of sending the mail over the country 
 at the furious pace of one hundred miles a day. His idea was to 
 employ the public coaches for the service ; but, as they only travelled 
 by day, he wished to "hand the mail along through the night, till it 
 may fall in with another stage the next day." He was commis- 
 sioner of patents as well; and, in that capacity, saw what "a. 
 spring " was given to invention by the patent-law. Happy were 
 the inventors to find so appreciative an examiner of their devices ! 
 Oddly enough, too, it was to him the House referred a pretended 
 discovery of one Isaacs for converting sea water into fresh. Pie 
 gave a quietus to the claim of the enterprising Isaacs by inviting 
 him to try his hand upon a few gallons of salt water in the presence 
 of Rittenhouse, Wistar, Hutchinson, and himself, all members of 
 the Philosophical )Society. The process proved to be a mere distil- 
 lation (known and practised for many years), veiled by a little hocus- 
 pocus of Mr. Isaac's own contriving. He reported against the claim, 
 and advised that a short account of the best way of extemporizing 
 a still on board ship be printed on the back of all ships' clearances, 
 with an invitation to forward results of such attempts to the secre- 
 tary of state. 
 
 The question otf establishing a mint was referred by a lazy House 
 of Representatives to the secretary of state. Shall we send abroad 
 to get our coins made, or manufacture them at home ? At home, 
 said Mr. Jefferson, f Coinage is peculiarly an attribute of sovereign- 
 
JEFFERSON SETTLING TO HIS WOEK. 399 
 
 ty. . . . To transfer its exercise into another country, is to submit 
 it to another sovereign." So the mint was established at Philadel- 
 phia, workmen were invited from abroad, and a quantity of copper 
 ordered from Europe to be made into American cents. 
 
 Some questions, which would now be answered by the Supreme 
 Court, were referred to him for an opinion. One was this : If the 
 president nominates an ambassador, has the senate a right to change 
 the grade of the nominee to plenipotentiarj'' ? It has not, was the 
 opinion given. Even the validity of a grant of land was referred 
 to him. Man}' a day of arduous toil, and many an hour of earnest 
 consultation, were devoted by Jefferson in the summer of 1790 to a 
 report, called for by. the House, of a plan of establishing uniformity 
 in coinage, weights, and measures ; a subject familiar to his mind 
 for many years. In this most elaborate and able paper, packed 
 close with curious knowledge, and illumined with happy suggestions, 
 he made one more attempt to inti'oduce the decimal system. If his 
 advice had been followed, school-boys to-day might be "saying" 
 their tables in this fashion: "Ten points one line; ten lines one 
 inch ; ten inches one foot ; ten feet one decad ; ten decads one rood; 
 ten roods one furlong; ten furlongs one mile." But this was too 
 audacious for Congress to accept. The only decimal table adopted 
 was the one relating to the new Federal money. But the people 
 long clung to the familiar difficulties of pounds, shillings, and pence, 
 aggravated by the intricacies of the different State currencies. After 
 the lapse of eighty-two years, — so inveterate is habit — we are not 
 yet universally submissive to the easy yoke of the decimal currency. 
 "Dime" comes slowly into use; the words "sixpence" and "shil- 
 ling " linger after the coins are gone ; and the popular propensity 
 is to call an eagle a " ten-dollar piece." 
 
 In addition to these domestic duties, it devolved upon the secre- 
 tary of state to superintend the laying out of the District of Co- 
 lumbia, and the planning of the public edifices in the dense forest 
 that covered the site of Washington. Hence, perhaps, the general 
 resemblance of that city to ancient Williamsburg in Virginia, where 
 the secretary of state attended college, studied law, played the violin, 
 and loved Belinda. If Jefferson could have forgotten the spacious, 
 pleasant old town, there was "dear Page" at his side, and plenty of 
 other graduates of William and Mary, to remind him of it. 
 
 In the autumn of 1790 the government packed up its traps, and 
 
400 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 removed from New York to Philadelphia. New-Yorkers took the 
 loss good-humoredly enough, if we may judge from the newspapers. 
 "And so Congress is going to Philadelphia," said one. "Well, 
 then there is an end of every thing: no more pavement; no more 
 improvements of any kind." And the editor wound up a long, 
 jocular article by telling the story of Charles II. and the Lord 
 Mayor of London. "What did the king say?" asked his Lordship 
 of a deputation of aldermen just returned from court. "He says, 
 if we don't give him more mone}', he'll remove his court to Wind- 
 sor." "Is that all?" cried the Mayor. "I thought his Majesty 
 said he'd take the Thames away." New York, too, has found its 
 Thames sufficient. 
 
 In November, then, of 1790, the secretary of state, after a 
 delightful month at Monticello, was established in Philadelphia, 
 living in " four rooms " of a spacious lodging-house on the pleasant 
 outskirts of the city, not far from where Dr. Franklin flew his 
 immortal kite. Near by, the secretary had a stable and coach-house 
 with stalls for six horses, four of which were occupied; so that 
 Madison, Monroe, and himself could enjoy a canter together along 
 the delicious banks of the Schuylkill. It was oftener a walk than 
 a ride. Once it was a " wade." " What say you," he writes to 
 Madison, during a rainy week in April, 1791, "to taking a wade 
 into the country at noon ? It will be pleasant above head at least, 
 and the party will finish by dining here." He was raised to the 
 dignity of grandfather in February, 1791. " Your last two letters," 
 he writes to his daugliter, " gave me the greatest pleasure of any I 
 ever received from you. The one announced that you were become 
 a notable housewife ; the other, a mother. The last is undoubtedly 
 the keystone of the arch of matrimonial happiness, as the first is 
 its daily aliment." Monticello waited for him to name the baby. 
 "Anne" was his choice, because it was a name frequent in both 
 families. 
 
 He. had also the honor, at this time, of being a kind of martyr to 
 his principles. It was Jefferson who had taken the lead in destroy- 
 ing the ancient system of primogeniture and entail in Virginia; and 
 one of the first great heirs who suffered by the reform was his own 
 son-in-law, Randolph. The father of the young husband, a brisk 
 and social old gentleman of the old school, gave alarming symptoms 
 of a second marriage. A girl in her teens was the object of his 
 
JEFFERSON SETTLING TO HIS WORK. 401 
 
 choice, upon whom he proposed to make a settletlient so lavish as to 
 •greatly abridge the inheritance of the young couple, as well as to 
 throw a great part of the charge of their immediate settlement upon 
 Mr. Jefferson. The letter which he wrote to his daughter on this 
 occasion has been a thousand times admired, and will be admired 
 again as often as it is read by a person in whose disposition there is 
 any thing of magnanimity or tenderness. He told her that Colonel 
 Randolph's marriage was a thing to have been expected ; for, as he 
 was a man whose amusements depended upon society, he could not 
 live alone. The settlement upon the old man's bride might be 
 neither prudent nor just, but he hoped it would not lessen their 
 affection for him. 
 
 " If the lady," he continued, " has any thing difficult in her 
 disposition, avoid what is rough, and attach her good qualities to 
 you. Consider what are otherwise as a bad stop in your harpsi- 
 chord, and do not touch on it, but make yourself happy with the 
 good ones. Every human being, my dear, must thus be viewed, 
 according to what he is good for ; for none of Us, — no not one, — is 
 perfect ; and, were we to love none who had imperfections, this world 
 would be a desert for our love. All we can do is to make the best 
 of our friends, love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out 
 of the way of what is bad; but no more think of rejecting them 
 for it, than of throwing away a piece of music for a flat passage or 
 two. Your situation will require peculiar attentions and respects 
 to both parties. Let no proof be too much for either your patience 
 or acquiescence. Be you, my dear, the link of love, union, and 
 peace for the whole family. The world will give you the more 
 credit for it in proportion to the difficult}'- of the task, and your own 
 happiness will be the greater as you perceive that you promote that 
 of others. Former acquaintance and equality of age will render it 
 the easier for you to cultivate and gain the love of the lady. The 
 mother, too, becomes a very necessary object of attentions." 
 
 The marriage took place, and the settlements upon the bride were 
 made. The young couple, in consequence, were much more cur- 
 tailed in their resources than any one bad expected. But the 
 daughter of Jefferson remained, for thirty-five years, " the link of 
 love, union, and peace for the whole family ; " one member of which, 
 John Randolph of Eoanoke, estranged as he was from her father, 
 toasted her as " the noblest woman in Virginia." 
 
 26 
 
CHAPTER XLV. 
 
 NEGOTIATIONS "WITH ENGLAND AFTER THE REVOLUTION". 
 
 President Washington's chief difficulties, after the public debt 
 had been provided for, arose from the relations of the young repub- 
 lic with foreign powers. To weakness every thing is difficult. The 
 necessity of keeping the peace was so manifest and so urgent, that 
 the government could not meet the representatives of an unfriendly 
 power on equal terms. The United States then signified merely a 
 thin line of settlements along the Atlantic coast, open on the side of 
 the ocean to a hostile fleet, and on the western boundary to the 
 Indian tribes; Spain holding New Orleans, and Great Britain Can- 
 ada. There was no army, no navy, no surplus revenue ; and the 
 country was but just recovering from the exhaustion and ravage of 
 an eight-years' war. Happily, for one reason or another, from 
 policy or sentiment, all Christendom wished well to the infant 
 nation, excepting alone the king and ruling class of Great Britain. 
 These could not forgive America the wrongs they had done her. 
 There was, also, a small, but influential class in the United States, 
 whose ancient fondness for the land of their ancestors had survived 
 the war, and affected their judgment concerning questions in dispute 
 between the two countries. 
 
 When General Washington came to the presidency in 1789, six 
 years had elapsed since the peace. In the treaty of 1783, Great 
 Britain had agreed to evacuate, without needless delay, every forti- 
 fied place within the boundaries of the United States ; and yet 
 British garrisons still held seven American posts of little use to her, 
 but of vital importance both to the honor and the safety of this 
 country, — posts the retention of which was a menace as well as an 
 injury ; for they kept open the great natural highways from Canada 
 into the United States. The posts were Detroit, Mackinaw, 
 
 402 
 
NEGOTIATIONS WITH ENGLAND. 403' 
 
 Oswego, OgdensDurg, Niagara, and two commanding places on 
 Lake Cliamplain, called then Iron Point and Dutchman's Point. 
 Independence was not complete while the English flag flew above 
 these posts ; nor were the frontiers safe. What could the Indians 
 think of it? An Indian head is a small, poor thing, .which cannot 
 hold many ideas at a time. The Indians could see that familiar flag, 
 and could recognize those red-coated soldiers as servants of the 
 power to which they had been submissive for thirty years ; but wliat 
 could they know of President Washington and his government, dis- 
 tant a month's journey ? 
 
 The fur-trade, too, which would have been important to an infant 
 nation obliged to buy so much in Europe, was necessarily in the 
 hands of men having access to those posts. John Jacob Astor was 
 already a furrier in New York, doing business in 1790 at No. 40, 
 Little Dock Street ; but while the English held the posts, he could 
 only tramp the eastern half of the State of New York, with his pack 
 of gewgaws and paint upon his back, and gather fui-s from the 
 friendly part of the Six Nations. A nice little business he had, it is 
 true, but not sufficient to encourage him to tliink of building an 
 Astor House or founding an Astor Library. Captain Cooper (father 
 of Peter Cooper), who had a small hat-factory in the same street, 
 and bought many a beaver-skin of this thriving furrier, would have 
 had them cheaper if his neighbor could have ranged free over the 
 western country. Another grievance was this : In evacuating New 
 York, the British commander, in open disregard of the treaty, liad 
 jjermitted a large number of slaves to find passage in the fleet; three 
 thousand of whom had been received on board under the eyes of the 
 American commissioners appointed to prevent it, in spite of their 
 remonstrance, and in consequence of an avowed order of tlie general 
 in command. 
 
 To these substantial wrongs was added a neglect, an indifference, a 
 silence, that looked like sj'stematic discourtesy. Congress sent Mr. 
 Adams to London, in 1785, to represent the new member of tlie 
 family of nations near the court of one of tlie oldest. No English 
 minister was sent to America till six years after. Mr. Adams, 
 though he was received civilly enough, was kept haunting ante-cham- 
 bers for three months before he began to get any certaint}'' as to the 
 reason why the posts were retained. When the king, in 1775, made 
 war upon the colonies, suddenly suspending commercial intercourse, 
 
404 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 
 
 America owed British merchants vast suras. Tlie long-credit sys- 
 tem had been so encouraged by the merchants, that the colonies 
 were, perhaps, a year behindhand in their payments. The war 
 lasted nearly eight years, and left the country exhausted and impov- 
 erished, — with an alarming public debt to provide for, with a host 
 of needy soldiers to appease, with the means of recuperation 
 destroyed, with the commerce of the West Indies closed to them, 
 and all the old commerce gone into other hands. But the treaty of 
 peace had not been signed before the British creditors began to 
 clamor for their debts, with interest! Eight years' interest added 
 to the principal ! Interest for the long period when every port was 
 blockaded, and the productive industry of the country suspended by 
 the power which owed protection to both ! Not Grotius, nor Vattel, 
 no, nor Puftendorf, nor all these learned pundits in accord, were ever 
 able to convince New England merchants or Virginia planters that 
 this was right. Every State passed laws protecting its citizens 
 against ruinous suits to recover these debts. There was a general 
 intention to pay the ancient principal ; but the war interest no 
 Whig could feel to be just. 
 
 Mr. Adams had at length the satisfaction of sitting face to face 
 with Mr. Pitt, the heaven-born minister, aged twenty-six, still in 
 the splendid dawn of his wonderful career. " What are the princi- 
 pal points to be discussed between us?" Mr. Pitt inquired. The 
 American minister enumerated them. The posts, the negroes, and 
 a treaty of commerce, were the chief. With regard to the negroes, 
 Mr. Pitt was candid and explicit. Carrying them off, he said, was 
 so clearly against the treaty, that, if Mr. Adams could produce the 
 requisite proof of their number and value, the British government 
 " must take measures to satisfy that demand." This was a good 
 beginning. Another point, relating to certain captures of American 
 vessels after the armistice of 1783, Mr. Pitt thought was '' clear," 
 and could be " easily settled." But those were all the concessions 
 the English minister was disposed to make. " As to the posts," 
 said he, " that is a point connected with some others, that, I think, 
 must be settled at the same time." We can imagine the eager 
 interest with which Mr. Adams asked what those points were. 
 " The debts," was Mr. Pitt's reply : " several of the States have 
 interfered against the treaty, and by acts of their legislatures have 
 interposed impediments to the recovery of debts, against which there 
 are great complaints in this country." 
 
NEGOTIATIONS WITH ENGLAND. 405 
 
 The secret was out. The creditors, as Mr. Pitt remarked, were 
 clamorous. In London they formed themselves into a society for the 
 purpose of urging on the government to press their claims; and this 
 society was so powerful, that no administration could willingly disre- 
 gard its wishes. 
 
 The conversation continued. No American jurj^, Mr. Adams said, 
 would ever award any interest for the time of the war. That would 
 surj^rise people in England, ]\lj:. Pitt observed; for warsjiever inter- 
 rupted the interest or principal of debts ; a*nd he could see no differ- 
 ence between this war and an\'' other, and English lawj'ers made 
 none. This was too much for Mr. Adams. '' I begged his p.irdon 
 here," he reports, ''and said that American lawyers made a wide 
 difference: th&y contended that the late war was a total dissolution 
 of all laws and government, and consequently of all contracts made 
 under those laws." This being the case, he thought the two gov- 
 ernments should come to an understanding, so that the same rule of 
 law might be observed on both sides. Mr. Pitt seemed to think 
 this not unreasonable ; but he frankly owned that the administration 
 " would not dare to make the proposal, without previously feeling 
 out the dispositions of the persons chiefly interested." 
 
 Erom this subject they turned to the desired treaty of commerce, 
 so necessary to enable America to pay these very debts. It was 
 unaccountable, Mr. Adams said, that Great Britain should sacrifice 
 the general interest of the nation to the private interest of a few 
 individuals interested in the whale-fishery and ship-building, so far 
 as to refuse to take American oil and ships in payment of the debts. 
 Mr. Adams became eloquent on this point. " The fat of the sperma- 
 ceti whale," he said, " gives the clearest and most beautiful flame of 
 any substance known in nature ; and we are all surprised that you 
 prefer darkness, and consequent robberies, burglaries, and murders, 
 in j'^our streets, to the receiving, as a remittance, our spermaceti oil. 
 The lamps around Grosvenor Square " (where Mr. Adams lived) '• I 
 know, and in Downing Street " (where this conversation occurred), 
 "I suppose, are dim by midnight, and extinguished by two o'clock;, 
 whereas our oil would burn bright till nine o'clock, and chase away 
 before the watchmen all the villains, and save you the trouble and 
 danger of introducing a new police into the city." 
 
 The whole conversation was sprightly and good-tempered. Mr. 
 Pitt sent a thrill of triumphant joy through the frame of Mr. 
 
40G LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON". 
 
 Adams by saying, as the conference closed, that he was in favor of 
 taking advantage of the recess to mature a plan for settling the 
 differences. The American minister declared he was rejoiced to 
 hear it. He would be ready at all times to attend whenever expla- 
 nation was wanted. Meanwhile, he was anxious about the posts: he 
 would like an answer on that point, so vital to the peace and safety, 
 as well as to the business of his country. "I am in dut}^ bound," 
 said he, "tQ insist on their evacuaticjn." To which the Avary Pitt 
 replied, that that point was connected with others, and he should 
 be for settling all these together. 
 
 And that was all the satisfaction Mr. Adams received during ^is 
 three years' residence in England. No summons from the Ministry 
 came, no explanation was asked, no apology offered. King, Parlia- 
 ment, and people were against him, against America, against 
 receiving oil from Nantucket, or ships from Maine; against remit- 
 ting the war interest; against giving up the posts till the debts 
 were paid ; against affording a young nation the slightest chance of 
 getting on in the world. In these circumstances, what could the 
 Ministry do but do nothing? If Mr. Adams sought an interview, 
 he never advanced a step beyond the point where Mr. Pitt and 
 himself had left the controversy. Give up the posts, said Mr. 
 Adams. P(^y the dehts, replied the English minister. What, cried 
 Adams, pay the debts ? No government was ever before asked to 
 pay the private debts of its subjects. The treaty only stipulated 
 that no lawful impediment should be put in the way of the recovery 
 of the 'debts. " But," said the minister, " if lawful impediments 
 have been thrown in the way" — Finally, the king himself when 
 Mr. Adams, weary of hopeless waiting, went to take formal leave, 
 said bluntly, " Mr. Adams, you may with great truth assure the 
 United States, that, whenever they shall fulfil the treaty on their 
 part, I, on my part, will fulfil it in all its particulars." 
 
 Exasperating as all this was to the old Adam in human nature, 
 Congress were patient under it. They referred the whole subject, 
 as disclosed in Mr. Adams's letters, to John Ja}', for his opinion. 
 Mr. Jay, in an elaborate paper, which aimed -to present the wh'ole 
 matter from the beginning, came to this strange conclusion : We 
 are wrong, and England is right ! The fourth article of the treaty 
 of peace was in these words: "It is agreed that the creditors on 
 either side shall meet with no lawful impediment to the recoveiy of 
 
NEGOTIATIONS WITH ENGLAND. 407 
 
 the full value, in sterling money, of all the bona fide debts hereto- 
 fore contracted." The simple question was, according to Mr. Jay, 
 "Have British creditors met with lawful impediments to the 
 recovery of their American debts?" To this question, he said, but 
 one answer could be given : They have ; every State had passed 
 laws impeding, delaying, or forbidding the collection of the debts. 
 This infraction, Mr. Jay thought, justified Great Britain in holding 
 the posts ; " nor would Britain be to blame in continuing to hold 
 them, until America shall cease to impede her enjojang every essen- 
 tial right secured to her and her peoj^le and adherents by the 
 treaty." 
 
 Having reached this conclusion, he advised Congress, 1, To 
 recommend the States to repeal the impeding laws ; 2, To instruct 
 Mr. Adams " candidly to admit that the fourth and sixth articles of 
 the treaty had been violated in America;" and to say that the 
 United States were taking efficacious measures for removing all 
 cause of complaint. Congress accepted Mr. Jay's conclusions. 
 They gave the required advice to the States, and gave it with all 
 the requisite tact and dignity. A majority of the State legisla- 
 tures repealed the laws; others were considering the subject, when! 
 the Constitution of 1787 removed the difficulty by rendering the* 
 general government unquestionably supreme in all matters of \ 
 foreign concern. 
 
 But this sublime diplomacy did not touch the heart of the British 
 creditor, nor change the policy of the government, nor assuage the 
 animosity of the ruling class. As a rule, Americans who were able 
 to pay their British debts paid them ; but a considerable number, 
 dead or ruined by the war, gave no sign. . America remained an 
 odious name in England, Mr. Adams informs ^^s. Members of 
 Parliament, he wrote, had been so long badgered and tormented on 
 the subject, that they detested to hear the name mentioned, and th$ 
 humor of the nation seemed to be neither to speak nor think of 
 America. Four millions sterling had already been appropriated by 
 Parliament to compensate banished Tories and ruined adherents. 
 The pension-list had been lengthened by a long catalogue of Ameri- 
 can placemen ; and still the lobbies and ante-chambers were haunted 
 by a clamorous multitude of hungry claimants. We can hardly 
 { wonder, that when at length Mr. Adams, in weariness and despair, 
 V.was preparing to leave, he should have been treated "with that dry, 
 
408 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOK. 
 
 decency and cold civility which appears to liave been the premedi- 
 tated plan from the beginning." 
 
 Two years passed. The new government came into existence, 
 with General Washington at its head. Great Britain still held the 
 posts, retained the fur-trade, ruled the Indians, shut the ports of the 
 West Indies, and sent no minister to Philadelphia. The president, 
 after an attentive perusal of the papers and a survey of the situa- 
 tion, privately commissioned Gouverneur Morris, in October, 1789, 
 to cross the channel, and "converse with his Britannic majesty's 
 ministers" on the points in controversy, and "ascertain their 
 views," and endeavor to discover whether negotiations could be 
 re-opened with any fair prospect of a termination satisfactorj'- to the 
 United States. 
 
 It is a trial to the temper of an American citizen to read the 
 record of Mr. Morris's mission. The policy of "dry decency and 
 cold civility" was carried to an extreme whicli was sometimes too 
 much for the warm temper of tlie American commissioner, who gave 
 Mr. Pitt some pretty sharp retorts. On one occasion, after pressing 
 the English minister hard for some basis of a negotiation, he got a 
 glimpse of daylight. 
 
 MoRKis. If I understand you, Mr. Pitt, you wish to make a 
 new treaty, instead of complying with the old one. 
 
 Pitt. That is, in some sort, my idea. 
 
 MoKRis. I do not see what better can be done than to perform 
 the old one. As to the compensation for negroes taken away, it is 
 too trifling an object for 3'ou to dispute, so that nothing remains but 
 the posts. I suppose, therefore, that you wish to retain those posts. 
 
 Pitt. IMiy, 2^erhaj)s we may. 
 
 Morris. They are not worth the keeping ; for it must cost you a 
 great deal of monej'', and produce no benefit. The only reason you 
 can have to desire them is to secure the fur-trade ; and that will 
 centre in this country, let who will carry it on in America. 
 
 Pitt. If you consider these posts as a trivial object, there is the 
 less reason for requiring them. 
 
 Morris. Pardon me, sir, I only state the retaining them as use- 
 less to you. . . . Our national honor is interested. You hold them 
 with the avowed intention of forcing us to comply with such con- 
 ditions as you may impose. 
 
NEGOTIATIONS WITH ENGLAND. 409 
 
 Pitt. Wliy, sir, as to the consideration of national honor, we 
 may retort the observation, and say, our honor is concerned in your 
 delay of performance of the treaty'; 
 
 MoiiRis. No, sir: your natural and proper course was to comply 
 fully on your part, and if then we had refused compliance, you 
 might rightfully have issued letters of marque and reprisal to such 
 of your subjects as were injured by bur refusal. But the conduct 
 you have pursued, naturally excites resentment in every American 
 bosom. We do not think it wortli while to go to war with you for 
 these posts ; but we know our rights, and will avail ourselves of them 
 when time and circumstances may suit. 
 
 Pitt. Have you powers to treat? 
 
 Morris. I have not. ' We cannot appoint any person as minister, 
 you so much neglected the former appointment. 
 
 Pitt. Will you appoint a minister if we do ? 
 
 Morris. I can almost promise we shall, but am not authorized to 
 give any positive assurance. 
 
 Pitt. Then the question is, How shall we communicate on this 
 subject? 
 
 Morris. Perhaps it would be expedient for you to appoint a 
 minister, and delay his departure till we have made a similar 
 appointment. 
 
 Pitt. W^e could communicate to the president our intention to 
 appoint. 
 
 Morris. Your communication might encounter some little diffi- 
 culty, because the president cannot properly hear any thing from the 
 British consuls, these being characters unacknowledged in America. 
 
 Pitt (^firing up a little). I should suppose, Mr. Morris, that 
 attention might as well be paid to what they say, as that the Duke 
 of Leeds and myself should hold the present conversation with you. , 
 
 Morris. By no means, sir. I should never have thought of 
 asking a conference with His Grace, if I had not possessed a letter 
 from the president of the United States. 
 
 Pitt. We, in like manner, could write a letter to one of our 
 consuls. 
 
 Morris. Yes, sir ; and the letter would be attended to, but not the 
 consul, who is in no respect different from any other British subject. 
 
 Pitt. Etiquette ought not to be pushed so far as to injure busi- 
 nesS; and keep the countries asunder. 
 
410 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 Morris. The rulers of America have too much understanding to 
 care for etiquette ; but I beg you to recollect, that you have hitherto 
 kept us at a distance, instead of Snaking advances. The president 
 has gone quite as far as you had any reason to expect, in writing 
 the letter I have just mentioned ; and, from what has passed in con- 
 sequence of it, we cannot but consider you as wishing to avoid an 
 intercourse. 
 
 Pitt. I hope j-ou will endeavor to remove such an idea. I assure 
 you, we are disposed to cultivate a connection. 
 
 Morris. Any communications which His Grace of Leeds may 
 make shall be duly transmitted; but I do not like to write mere 
 conversations. Our disposition towards a good understanding is evi- 
 denced, not only by the president's letter, but by the decision of a 
 majority of the House of Representatives against laying extraordi- 
 nary restrictions on British vessels in American ports. 
 
 Pitt. Instead of restrictions, you ought to give us particular 
 privileges, in return for those which you enjoy here. 
 
 Morris. I assure you I know of no particular privileges which 
 we enjoy here, except that of being impressed, which, of all others, 
 is the one we least wish to partake of. 
 
 Duke of Lekds (Jaugking). You are at least treated in that 
 respect as " the most favored nation," seeing that you are treated 
 like ourselves. 
 
 Pitt (serioushj). We have certainly evidenced good-will towards 
 you by what we have done respecting your commerce. 
 
 Morris. Your regulations were dictated by a view to your own 
 interest; and therefore, as we feel no favor, we owe no obligation. 
 
 Here the conversation ended. Mr. Pitt said that the Duke of 
 Xeeds and himself would consult together, and give Mr. Morris the 
 result of their deliberations. Doubtless they meant to do so; and, 
 if the decision had rested with the three gentlemen present on this 
 occasion, the posts would have been speedily surrendered, and a 
 reasonable treaty of commerce concluded. But there was a royal 
 Dunderhead in the way, the sum-total of whose American policy 
 was this: "My American Tories stood by me: I will stand by 
 them. Annul the confiscations, make good the lost debts, and then 
 we'll talk about the posts." There was, also, an ignorant mer- 
 cantile and manufacturing class, wlio had not yet begun to study 
 
NEGOTIATIONS WITH ENGLAND. 411 
 
 their Adam Smith, and who cherished the pride that goes with 
 ignorance, whether its possessor is an Indian chief or a British cot- 
 ton-spinner. 
 
 The cons^ersation given above occurred May 21, 1790. May 
 ended, June began and ended, July and August passed, September 
 was gliding by, and yet Gouverneur Morris received not a line, not a 
 word, from the ministry. Had they forgotten his existence ? He 
 had extensive affairs in Holland that demanded his presence; and 
 yet he waited, — waited solely for the promised communication. 
 Meanwhile, the nocturnal exploits of the press-gang in British sea- 
 ports added new outrage to the old grievances. Morris, after wait- 
 ing four months, was compelled to ask attention to his mission. He 
 obtained "dry decency and cold civility" in return for his patient 
 waiting ; but he could neA'er wring a satisfactory word from the 
 ministers of a king, who, he said, " hated the very name of America." 
 The president, acting upon Jefferson's advice, terminated his mis- 
 sion, and sent him a thousand dollars to defray the expenses of his 
 six months' residence in London. The outspoken founder of " Mor- 
 risania" returned polite acknowledgments of the president's con- 
 sideration, and remarked to the secretary of state, that his detention 
 in London had cost him four hundred and eighty-nine pounds six 
 shillings and sixpence. 
 
 Such were the relations between the United States and Great 
 Britain in 1790, when Jefferson and Hamilton began to discuss 
 national affairs across the president's mahogany. And still the 
 jjenchant of the secretary of the treasury was for Great Britain. 
 Washington's was not : he had been cured of it years before., Jef- 
 ferson's was not, of course. Hamilton had concurred with Mr. Jay 
 and Mr. Adams in the opinion, that there had been violations of the 
 treaty on both sides, and that, as America began it, England had 
 not been to blame for retaining the posts. Penchant is a great 
 matter. I am sure that Colonel Hamilton was most warmly 
 attached, nay, wholly devoted to the country which he served; but 
 this leaning toward Great Britain, and a certain British aversion to 
 France, could not but have its effect upon his judgment. 
 
 In September, 1790, while Gouverneur Morris was still waiting in 
 London, occurred one of those diplomatic crises, once so frequent, 
 which threatened war between Great Britain and Spain, with strong 
 probability of involving half of Europe in the strife. The president, 
 
412 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 from many indications, concluded, that, in case the war brolce out, 
 Mr. Pitt would strike at once, in his father's style, for Kew Orleans, 
 and all the Spanish territory in that region ; floating troops from 
 Detroit down our lakes and rivers to meet a British armament from 
 the sea. Two momentous questions arose in the president's mind, 
 which he proposed to Jefferson and Hamilton, requesting answers in 
 writing: 1, Suppose Lord Dorchester, the governor of Canada, 
 should ask permission to send troops through the territories of the 
 United States, what answer shall we give ? 2, Suj^pose he should 
 do it without leave ("the most prohabl* proceeding"), what shall 
 we do about it ? The president was profoundly impressed with the 
 magnitude of the danger to a young nation, exhausted with a long 
 war, deep in debt, without army or navy, of having, as he said, "so 
 formidable and enterprising a people as the British on both our 
 flanks and rear, with their navy in front." 
 
 Mr. Jefferson's reply was short and explicit. E-ather than have 
 New Orleans and the mouth of the Mississippi a British possession, 
 he thought, we should join in the melee of nations, and fight. But 
 this w"as the last thing to do, not the first ; and not to be done so 
 long as any other decent expedient remained untried. If permission 
 to pass troops should be asked' and refused, and still they should pass, 
 we must instantly declare war ; since V one insult pocketed soon pro- 
 duces another."\ Let us, then, begin by trying a middle course. 
 Avoid giving an answer. Then, if they march, we can acgept an 
 apology, or make it a "handle of quarrel hereafter," according to cir- 
 cumstances. If they sliould march without asking leave, we should 
 resent, or forgive, or disregard it, just as we might find it most con- 
 ducive to our main object. 
 
 Mr. Jefferson was ready with his brief opinion the day after the 
 president asked for it. Hamilton took nineteen days, and sent in a 
 treatise. Being out of his element, and beyond his depth, he floun- 
 dered in a distressing manner, clutching at Puffendorf, Grotius, Vat- 
 tel, and Barbeyrac. He wandered so far as to introduce a discourse 
 upon his favorite topic of the United States owing no " romantic 
 gratitude " to France, and no gratitude at all to Spain. The tone 
 and spirit of this long essay are such- as to justify much of the 
 warmth of opposition which Hamilton's political system excited. It 
 is evident that the insolence of the British government, and the out- 
 rage of holding the posts, had excited in his mind, no indignation ; 
 
NEGOTIATIONS WITH ENGLAND. 413 
 
 and tliat he was one of those, who, to use his own language, "would 
 prefer an intimate connection between the United States and Great 
 Britain as most conducive to our security and advantage.'^ He 
 dwelt upon the obvious unfitness of the country to enter into the 
 war, and the little likelihood there was of our accomplisliing our 
 object if we did. His conclusions were, that, if Lord Dorchester 
 should ask permission, it would be best to grant it ; if he should 
 march without permission, but commit no offence, we should remon- 
 strate ; but, if he should force a passage past a fortification, we must 
 declare war. 
 
 Happily the European war-cloud blew over. In America the west- 
 ern sky was overcast, and General St. Clair was preparing the ex- 
 pedition against the hostile Indians which was to terminate in the 
 surprise of the white army, and the massacre of six hundred troops. 
 Jefferson and Hamilton differed again ; for Jefferson was opposed to 
 the expedition. He hoped, indeed, that General St. Clair would 
 give the Indians *' a thorough drubbing," since the affair had come 
 to that; but he thought that "the most economical, as well as most 
 humane, conduct toward them is to bribe them into peace, and retain 
 them in peace by eternal bribes." A hundred years of -present-giv- 
 ing, he said, would not cost as much as this single expedition ; and 
 then follows a sentence which reveals the heat of many a cabinet 
 battle, as the lava on Vesuvius betrays past eruption : " The least 
 rag of Indian depredation will be an excuse to raise troops for those 
 who love to have troops and for those who tliink that a public debt 
 is a public blessing." This to Charles Carroll of Carrollton, April, 
 1791. 
 
 Upon another practical question, the secretary of the treasury dif- 
 fered from the secretary of state. Hamilton opposed, Jefferson 
 favored, a system of retaliating the restrictions imposed by Great 
 Britain upon American commerce. With regard to commercial 
 intercourse with foreign nations, the only system Jefferson ever 
 heartily approved was this : " Perfect and universal free-trade, as one 
 of the natural rights of man and as the only sound policy. We may 
 style that his first choice. His second was this : Free-trade with 
 I any nation which will reciprocate. But, as no nation was yet pre- 
 tpared for so advanced a measure, he was in favor of reciprocating 
 privileges conceded by a foreign power, and retaliating restrictions. 
 V Free trade and navigation," he thought, " are not to be given, in 
 
414 ' LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOK. 
 
 exchange for restrictions and vexations, nor are they likely to pro- 
 duce a relaxation of them." 
 
 <ireat Britain imposed such restrictions upon American commerce 
 as seem, at present, too preposterous for belief. From her West 
 India Islands American vessels were utterly excluded ; and onlj^ such 
 American products were admitted as could not be dispensed with, — 
 grain, horses, live animals used for food, timber, tar, and turpentine. 
 But neither an American vessel nor American products of any kind 
 whatever were admitted into one British possession which could do 
 without them; not into Newfoundlaml, Canada, or India. From 
 Great Britain itself, whale-oil, salt fish, salt provisions, were ex- 
 cluded, and grain only admitted when the people must have it or 
 go hungry. Jefferson proposed to meet all this by " counter prohi- 
 bitions, duties, and regulations," and at the same time go to the 
 uttermost in responding to the more liberal policy of France. 
 
 Hamilton, ever desirous of a cordial alliance with Great Britain, 
 favored an opposite policy ; and Jefferson thought it was his influ- 
 ence which finally held back Congress from retaliating restriction by 
 restriction. In the cabinet, Hamilton opposed the retaliation sys- 
 tem "violently," and offered one argument which the placable Jeffer- 
 son owned was cogent. It was of more importance, Hamilton said, 
 for us to have the posts than an open commerce, because nothing 
 but the possession of the posts would free us from the expense of the 
 Indian wars; and therefore, while we were treating for the posts, it 
 would be folly to irritate the English by restricting their commerce. 
 The Englisli government would say, " These people mean war, let 
 us therefore hold what we have in our hands." Struck with this 
 argument, Jefferson replied, " If there is a hope of obtaining the 
 posts, I agree it would be imprudent to risk that hope by a commer- 
 cial retaliation." He agreed to delay recommending his scheme to 
 Congress till the next session. 
 
 For, when this conversation occurred, negotiations had been 
 recommenced. In August, 1791, George Hammond, the first British! 
 plenipotentiary who ever made his bow to a president of the United' 
 States, reached Philadelphia ; and, in the course of the following 
 winter, he was in correspondence with the secretary of state upon 
 the vexed questions. They were old Paris acquaintances, and both 
 were truly desirous of adjusting the differences on a basis of justice. 
 The despatch of Mr. Jefferson of May 29, 1792, in which he argues 
 
NEGOTIATIONS WITH ENGLAND. 415 
 
 the American case, is the longest and the ablest of his official papers. 
 There is good reason to believe that it convinced Mr. Hammond ; 
 and we know that a large number of JeiFerson's political opponents 
 owned, that, whatever errors he may have committed in his public 
 life, he was a great man when he argued the cause of h'is country 
 against the honest misconceptions of the British minister. "He is 
 only fit for a secretary of state," they would say, when his name was 
 mentioned in connection with places more eminent. In this paper 
 he proved by original documents, that " the treaty of 1783 was vio- 
 lated in England before it was known in America, and in America 
 as soon as known, and that, too, in points so essential, as that, with- 
 out them, it never would have been concluded." He also showed, 
 by an array of documentary evidence, that " the recovery of the debts 
 was obstructed validly in none of our States, invalidly only in a 
 few, and that not till after the infractions committed on tlie other 
 side." This despatch is perhaps unsurpassed among the dijjlomatic 
 documents of recent times for the thoroughness with which the work 
 undertaken was performed. Its tranquil, dispassionate tone, and its 
 freedom from every thing that could irritate the self-love of the 
 English government or the English people, are as remarkable as the 
 perfect frankness and fulness with which the rights of his country 
 are stated. 
 
 Jefferson invited Mr. Hammond to a " solo dinner " on the sub- 
 ject, a few days after the delivery of this despatch, when they con- 
 versed on the points at issue in the most open and friendly manner. 
 The British minister admitted that the idea of England having 
 committed the first infraction was a new element in the controversy. 
 His court had never heard of it ; and it " gave the case a complexion 
 so entirely new and different from what had been contemplated, 
 that he should not be justified in taking a single step." He could 
 only send the despatch across the ocean, and await further instruc- 
 tions. From the whole of this conversation, Jefferson derived the 
 impression, that the English government " had entertained no 
 thought of ever giving up the posts." Toward the close of the 
 interview, Mr. Hammond suggested the idea of neither party having 
 fortified posts on the frontier, but trading-posts only ; which, says 
 Jefferson, " accorded well with two favorite ideas of mine, of leaving 
 commerce free, and never keeping an unnecessary soldier." 
 
 Mr. Jefferson's despatch of two hundred and fifty manuscript 
 
416 LIFE OF THOIVIAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 pages made its way to Downing Street, but not to the brain or the 
 conscience of George III. Nothing came of it. The controversy 
 remained open during the whole period of his tenure of office. He 
 sent in, at last, his report, recommending commercial retaliation, but 
 only to have the scheme defeated, as he always supposed by his col- 
 league. 
 
 And we must keep in mind, that while these two gentlemen, 
 Hammond and Jefferson, calmly conversed over their wine on these 
 subjects, there was an American people whose conversation vipon 
 them was the farthest possible from being tranquil. The people 
 might not be up in their Puflfendorf, nor was Vattel often seen on 
 the family table ; but the St. Clair massacre struck horror to the 
 coldest heart, and excited reflections in the dullest head. Every 
 one could enter into such cases as that of Hugh Purdie, a native of 
 Virginia, impressed in London streets, carried to sea in a man-of- 
 war, ordered to be released by the admiralty, put in irons and 
 flogged after thoee orders had been received, and set on shore in a 
 strange land without the means of subsisting for a day. It took 
 fifty 3'^ears to get the hatred out of the hearts of the American peo- 
 ple which was engendered, not so much by the war, as by this inso- 
 lent persistence in outrage after the war. 
 
CHAPTER XLVI. 
 
 THE FREXCH REVOLUTION" IX AMERICAN POLITICS. 
 
 Meanwhile the Revolution in France, followed at first with uni- 
 versal approval, was becoming an element of discord in the politics 
 of the country; and nowhere were the questions involved discussed 
 so warmly as in President Washington's cabinet. An accident 
 revealed to the public in 1791 Jefferson's complete sj'mpathy with 
 the French people, placed him distinctly at the head of the popular 
 part}'^, and made him, at length, president of the United States. 
 
 At first, I repeat, all classes in all countries seemed to hail the 
 proceedings of the French people as the beginning of a better day 
 for France and for man : even kings, nobles, and the other classes 
 most obviously interested in the existing system, cherished or 
 affected a sentimental approval of the ideas most subversive of it. 
 The destruction of the Bastille shook off from the popular party all 
 such adherents. " The time of illusions is past," wrote the queen 
 of France to Madame de Polignac, " and to-day we pay dear for our 
 infatuation and enthusiasm for the American war." But it was not 
 from the party assailed that the first protest reached the ear of Chris- 
 tendom. It was from a man whose whole public life had been a strug- 
 gle against despotic principles, the most eloquent defender America 
 ever had in Europe, Edmund Burke. From an J]arly period — as 
 soon, indeed, as the king and queen of France had been brought 
 face to face with the Revolution in that wild march from Versailles 
 to Paris — he had recoiled from it with a horror which only his own 
 mighty pen could express. 
 
 In November, 1789, Dr. Richard Price, an honored member of 
 Franklin's familiar London circle, published his famous sermon on 
 Love of Country, in which he applied the example of France to the 
 case of England, maintaining the principle now so familiar, that 
 
 26 417 
 
418 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 
 
 government is, properly, the creature and servant of the people. It 
 was in reply to this discourse that Edmund Burke wrote his Reflec- 
 tions on the Revolution in France, — four hundred pages of rhap- 
 sody and passion, invested with the potent charm of his inthralling 
 style. It was a sorry lapse from the Edmund Burke of the Stamp- 
 act nights in the House of Commons. The work was so weak in 
 argument, of substance so flimsy and transparent, as really to give 
 some slight show of probability to the dastardly charge, that his 
 motives in writing it were not disinterested. But we ought not to 
 doubt that this poor pamphlet was the faithful expression of his 
 state of mind at the time. In 1773, during a recess of Parliament, 
 he had had a joyous holiday in France, when he saw all that was 
 brightest and most bewitching there, in court and saIo7i, in town 
 and country-, himself honored as the great orator of the British Par- 
 liament. Only the most pleasing recollections of that happy time 
 lingered in his memory. 
 
 "It is now," he wi-ote in his Reflections, "sixteen or seventeen 
 years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Ver- 
 sailles ; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly 
 seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the 
 horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just 
 begun to move in, — glittering like the morning star, full of life and 
 splendor and joy. wliat a revolution ! and what a heart must I 
 have, to contemplate, without emotion, that elevation and that fall! 
 Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of 
 enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged 
 to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that 
 bosom ; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disas- 
 ters fall upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of 
 honor and of cavaliers. I thouglit ten thousand swords must have 
 leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened 
 her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophis- 
 ters, economists, and calculators has succeeded ; and the glory of 
 Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold 
 that generous loj-alty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that 
 dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept 
 alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The 
 unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of 
 manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone ! It is gone, that 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN POLITICS. 419 
 
 sensibility of principle, that chastit}'- of honor, which felt a stain like 
 a wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocit_y, which 
 ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half 
 its evil, by losing all its grossness.'*' 
 
 What a Celtic fluency and gorgeousness in these false, false 
 words ! In the composition of such a piece, how ner-essary an 
 ingredient is that remoteness from" the object depicted which veils 
 all of it which is not enchanting! _.i this whole pamphlet, the 
 agony and shame and panic-terror of fair France, how small and 
 slight they seem compared with the discomfort endured by one 
 Austrian woman rudely interrupted in her career of ignoble pleas- 
 ures ! Mr. Burlce, too, had known personally many of the French 
 nobility; and he had found them " tolerably well-bred," "frank and 
 open," "with a good military tone, and reasonably tinctured with 
 literature." " As to their behavior to the inferior classes, they 
 appeared to me to comport themselves toward them with good- 
 nature," and "I could not dis*cover that their agreements with their 
 farmers were oppressive." In speaking of the great multitude of 
 industrious and frugal persons, whose toil maintained those tolera- 
 bly well-bred nobles of a good military tone ; in speaking, I say, of 
 THE PEOPLE OF FkAnce, whom king and nobility had had in charge 
 for a thousand years, and had permitted 'to remain grossly ignorant 
 and squalidly poor, he used expressions surcharged with the most 
 insolent and inhuman contempt. The march from Versailles to the 
 Tuileries, he said, was like " a procession of American savages 
 entering into Onondaga, and leading into hovels hung round with 
 scalps their captives, overpowered with the scoffs and buffets of 
 women as ferocious as themselves ; " and he said, also, that when the 
 nobles and priests had been expelled from France, learning itself 
 would be " trodden doivn under the hoofs of a swinish multit^ide." 
 This hideous expression (which admitted more than the worst 
 enemies of nobles and priests had ever charged against them) rang 
 through Europe, imbittering every generous heart and maddening 
 every excited head. 
 
 Never had pamphlet such success with the class it was written 
 to please. George III., of his own motion, settled upon the author, 
 whom he had hated for twenty-six years, a pension of twelve 
 hundred pounds a year, and soon after a second jjension of twenty- 
 five hundred pounds a j^ear. The k;ng had also a number of copies 
 
420 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 
 
 handsomely bound for presents; and wlien he gave one to a favorite, 
 he would say, "This is a book which every gentleman ought to 
 read." The Emperor of Germany, the Empress Catherine of 
 Russia, the royal family of France, and even poor Stanislaus of 
 Poland, sent the author some tribute of their sincere gratitude. 
 The book had a great run with the public: in England nineteen 
 thousand copies were sold in three months, and in France thirteen 
 thousand of the French translation. During the first half-year, the 
 number of replies which it called forth was thirty-eight. 
 
 Its effect upon the public was wholly and greatly bad, because it 
 excited the reader without instructing him. It hardened the Tory's 
 heart, and shut his mind to every truth which it most concerned him 
 to know; while the humane portion of the people were only 
 incensed at the contemptuous tone of the work toward all the most 
 pitiable victims of aristocratic misrule, — those who had lapsed 
 under it from citizens to populace. Mad world ! For thirty years, 
 in various capacities, public and privafe, Edmund Burke had served 
 his countrymen on both sides of the ocean with fidelitj'^ and power, 
 and got little by it but the opportunity to serve them better. He 
 writes this false and foolish pamphlet, and behold him rich, and 
 the world at his feet! The people gave him little but honor, and the 
 kings rewarded him with all but that. 
 
 Among the friends of Mr, Burke, many may have been more 
 grieved at his new departure, but none was more astonished, than 
 Thomas Paine, then at Paris, pushing into publicity his own self- 
 supporting bridge. He appears to have originated that kind of 
 structure, now so common. Arriving in England, a year or two 
 before, on the same errand, he had been Mr. Burke's guest for 
 several weeks, during which they had made together the tour of the 
 iron foundries of Yorkshire, and visited together some of Mr. 
 Burke's political allies on the liberal side. "I am just going to 
 dine with the Duke of Portland," writes Burke to Wilkes in 
 Augixst, 1788, " in companj^ with the great American, Paine, whom 
 I take with me " From Paris, Paine wrote occasionally to the great 
 "Whig orator; one letter, indeed, after Mr. Burke must have begun 
 the composition of his work, in which Paine gave him an account, 
 as he says, "how prosperously matters were going on in France;" 
 not doubting that he was pouring his information into a sympa- 
 thetic ear. Like most writers who make sentences that stick in the 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN POLITICS. 421 
 
 general memory, and long remain part of the common f?peecli of 
 men, Thomas Paine composed very slowly and with great toil^ One 
 of his friends reports that the author of Common Sense knew by 
 heart all that he had ever written, — so thoroughly had he wrought 
 each sentence and each phrase. Nevertheless, in March, 1791, 
 about four months after the publication of Burke's Reflections, he 
 was ready with his reply to it, which he named " The Eights of 
 Man." The two works from that time were competitors for the 
 possession of the public mind ; editions quickly following editions ; 
 each work execrated, and each extolled, with almost equal extrava- 
 gance. Paine, with his usual generosity, gave up his copja-ight as 
 soon as he discovered that it was an obstacle to cheaper issues ; and 
 at once, in every town where there was a press not controlled by 
 squire or pa,rj^on, there was a sixpenny edition of The Rights of 
 Man. One hundred thousand copies were sold before the demand 
 abated; and when the author followed up his success, the next year, 
 with a Second Part, the gorernment gave a prodigious impulse to 
 the sale of both by a series of prosecutions, accompanied by a 
 system of riots, — so familiar a resource of the Tory party in every 
 recent age, from James I. to Dilke. 
 
 To say that Mr. Paine's pamphlet is superior to Burke's in every 
 worthy quality of composition, is not to praise it ; for Burke's pro- 
 duction is a shallow, misleading, pernicious work. Let me rather 
 say, that it is as good an answer to Burke as so rambling a rhapsody 
 admits ; and that for every one of Burke's swelling passages of 
 declamation, Paine has an epigram wdiich reduces it to its proper 
 dimensions. So compassionate a man as Thomas Paine could not 
 fail to be shocked at Burke's insensibility to all the anguish endured 
 in France except that suffered by a few conspicuous individuals : 
 " He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird." " His hero or 
 his heroine must be a tragedy victim expiring in show, and not the 
 real prisoner of misery, sliding into death in the silence of a dun- 
 geon." Burke's lamentation over the abolition of titles in Prance 
 gave Paine an opportunity : " France has outgrown the babyhood 
 of count and duke, and breeched itself in manhood. France has 
 not levelled, it has exalted. It has put down the dwarf to set up 
 the man. . . . Titles are like circles drawn by the magician's wand 
 to contract the sphere of man's felicit3^ He lives immured within 
 the Bastille of a word, and surveys at a distance the envied life of 
 
422 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 man," On the union of Cliurcli and State, extolled by Burke, 
 Paiae<;^ad a happy word: "Take away the law-establishment, and 
 every religion resumes its original benignity. In America a 
 Catholic, priest is a good citizen, a good character, and a good 
 neighbor ; an Episcopalian minister is of the same description ; and 
 this proceeds, independent of men, from there being no law-estab- 
 lishment in America." 
 
 The work was dedicated to George Washington, who cherished 
 for t-liis skilful and humane writer that warmth of grateful regard 
 which is due from the patriotic sword to the patriotic pen. When 
 Paine was about to leave Paris, in the spring of 1790, it was to his 
 hands that Lafayette intrusted, for transmission to the president, 
 the interesting relic which is preserved to this day at Mount 
 Vernon. " I take over with me to London," he wrote to a friend in 
 Philadelphia, March 16, 1790, "the key of the Bastille, which the 
 Marquis intrusts to my care as his present to General Washington, 
 and which I shall send by the first American vessel to New York." 
 He was to go back to Paris in time to take part in the inauguriition 
 of the new constitution; "at which time there is to be a procession, 
 and I am to return to Paris to carry the American flag." Pie added 
 these words, the prophetic meaning of which the lapse of eighty- 
 three years has not exhausted: "I wish most anxiously to see my 
 much-loved America. It is the country from whence all reforma- 
 tion must originally spring." Nor did he forget that America, too, 
 like all the rest of the world, needed reformation; and he wished 
 that "a few well-instructed negroes could be sent among their 
 brethren in bondage ; for, until they are enabled to take tlieir own 
 part, nothing will be done." 
 
 His dedication to the president was in harmony with his habitual 
 feelings : " I present you a small treatise in defence of those princi- 
 ples which your exemplar}^ virtue hath so eminently contributed to 
 establish. That the rights of man may become as universal as your 
 benevolence can wish, and that you may enjoy the happiness of see- 
 ing the new world regenerale the old, is the prayer of ... . Tho- 
 mas Paine." 
 
 A single cop}'- of the work chanced to reach America about the 
 first of May, 1791, in advance of the parcel sent by the author to 
 the president. This copy was lent by the owner to Madison, who 
 lent it to Jefferson j but, before the secretary of state had finished 
 
THE FRENCH EEVOLUTION IN AMERICAN POLITICS. 423 
 
 reading it, the owner called upon him for it, as he had promised to 
 lend it for reprinting. The owner, discovering tliat Mr. Jefferson 
 had not done with it, asked him to send it liimself, when he had fin- 
 ished the reading, to Mr. Jonathan 13. Smith, a noted merchant of 
 Philadelphia, once a member of Congress, whose brother, Samuel 
 H. Smith, an enterprising young printer (founder in 1800 of the 
 National Intelligencer at Washington), was to issue the American 
 edition. Mr. Jefferson complied with this request. Not being 
 acquainted, with the merchant, he wrote him a short note to explain 
 why he, a stranger, should send him the pamphlet, and. added a 
 few words of commendation of the work, "to take off," as he 
 explained afterwards, "a little of the dryness of the note," and, as 
 he might have added, because he was tlirilled with triumphant 
 delight at so vigorous and. telling a vindication of American princi- 
 ples from a pen identified in the popular mind with the gloom and 
 glorj^ of the Revolution. "I am extremeh' pleased," he wrote, "to 
 find it will be reprinted here, and that something is at length to be 
 publicly said against the political heresies which have sprung up 
 among us. I have no doubt our citizens will rally a second time 
 round tli£ standard of Common Sense." 
 
 So little importance did he attach to this hasty note, that he, the 
 most scrupulous docketer in the world, did not keep a copy of it. 
 In a few days the pamphlet was published ; and behold, printed, on 
 the cover, the material sentences of this note, attributed distinctly 
 to the "Secretary of State"! "I was thunderstruck," he tells us, 
 fearing that an excited public, applying the remark concerning 
 " political heresies " to Mr. Adams's Discourses upon Davila, 
 recently stopped by the growing indignation of the people, would 
 force him to an antagonism with the vice-president. And who 
 would believe the indorsement unauthorized ? He was the more 
 embarrassed, because he really had had those Discourses in his mind 
 while writing the note. In familiar, half-jocular conversation with the 
 vice-president, he had combated those "political heresies," always 
 feigning to be ignorant of the author of Davila. Davila, indeed, 
 had no friends ; Hamilton liimself censuring the Discourses, as ill- 
 timed and injudicious. But ante-chamber chaff was verj'- different 
 from an open, serious collision between two officers of a government 
 still on trial. 
 
 The mutterings of a coming storm were soon audible. A JMajor 
 
424 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 Beckwitli from Canada was loitering then about Philadelphia, a 
 non-commissioned, semi-autliorized, semi-recognized British agent, 
 who was in punctual attendance at presidential levees, where he 
 conversed freely with the president's secretary, Tobias Lear, who 
 used to report the conversations at large to the president. The 
 excellent Tobias, a dear lover of gossip, had much to tell General 
 Washington (absent at Mount Vernon) in his letter of May 8, 1791, 
 of the astonishment of this major on seeing Mr. Paine's work dedi- 
 cated to the president of the United States, and commended by the 
 secretary of state. The scene occurred at " Mrs. Washington's 
 drawing-room." "Major Beckwith was "surprised," not only at the 
 dedication, but that the work should be "published in Philadelphia; " 
 "especially as it contained many remarks that could not but be 
 offensive to the British government." A highly Pickwickian con- 
 versation followed : — 
 
 Lear. The pamphlet was written and published in England. 
 The president has neither seen nor knows what it contains, and, of 
 course, cannot in any sense be considered as approving its senti- 
 ments, or as being responsible for them. 
 
 Beckwith. True : but I observe in the American edition, that 
 the secretary of state has given a most unequivocal sanction to the 
 book, as Secretary of State ; it is not said as Mr. Jefferson. 
 
 Lear. I have not seen the American, or any other edition of this 
 pamphlet ; but I will venture to sa}'- that the secretary of state has 
 not done a thing which he would not justify. 
 
 Beckwith. On this subject you will consider, that I have only 
 spoken as an individual, and as a j^rivate person. 
 
 Lear. I do not know you, sir, in any other character. 
 
 Beckwith. I was apprehensive that you might conceive, that, on 
 this occasion, I meant to enter the lists in more than a private char- 
 acter. 
 
 At this moment they were interrupted, and the awful conversa- 
 tion was not resumed. But the next day, when Mr. Edmund Ban- 
 dolph dined with Mrs. Washington " in a family wa}'^," Mr. Lear 
 related to him what had passed. The attorney-general thought the 
 matter important enough to report to his colleague, and asked him 
 if he had authorized the printing of his note. Mr. Jefferson said he 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN POLITICS. 425 
 
 Lad not, though he approved the work. The faithful Tohias, a few 
 days after, had an opportunity to learn the sentiments of the vice- 
 president. " I was at the vice-president's house," he records, " and 
 while there Dr. and Mrs. Rush came in. The conversation turned 
 upon this book, and Dr. Rush asked the vice-president what he 
 thought of it. After a little hesitation, he laid his hand upon his 
 breast, and said in a very solemn manner, ' I detest that book and 
 its tendency, from the bottom of my heart.' " 
 
 As yet, however, though the reprint was rapidly spread abroad, 
 eagerly read, and hotly discussed, the slow newspaper of the period 
 was silent. About the middle of May, 1791, Jefferson and Madi- 
 son, both exhausted with official labor during the session of Con- 
 gress, set out on a tour to the northward, which they had long before 
 promised themselves, leaving politics and all its irritations and 
 misconceptions behind them. 
 
 Up the Hudson by sloop, — the true way, always, of enjoying it, — 
 and then onward from Albany to Lake George on horseback, a ride 
 of sixty miles, mostly through the primeval wilderness, with a taste 
 of Saratoga water on the way, as it bubbled up from the springs 
 where the deer had licked or lapped it from the beginning of time. 
 A hut or two, and one frame-house built by General Schuyler seven 
 years before, were all that man had done to mark the site ; although, 
 from the time (1767) when Sir William Johnson had been carried 
 to Saratoga in a litter to drink the waters so highly extolled by his 
 Indians, and had found them salutary, the springs had enjoyed a 
 certain vague celebrity. All the scenes near by, made famous by 
 Burgoyne's vain struggle with wild nature and brave men, they 
 visited also ; " the cataracts of the Hudson," too, of course, — great 
 marvels then. The limpid crystal of Lake George, and the luxu- 
 riant foliage on its banks, awoke all the enthusiasm of the two Vir- 
 ginians, to whom some of the trees, and many of the shrubs, were 
 new. "Lake George," wrote Mr. Jefterson to his daughter, "is, 
 without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw." They 
 walked to the picturesque, commanding bluff on which Fort Ticon- 
 deroga stood so long, its site still marked by ruins ; and they visited 
 the other spots of bloody memory in that region, as we do now; but 
 not, like us, with guide-book in hand, for all that gorj' history was 
 fresh and vivid theii in every one's memory. Lake Cliamplain they 
 did not see to advantage, — the day on which they crossed it being 
 
426 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 rough and gusty; and they were not far enough north to see tho 
 three ranges of mountains in one view, — Green, Wliite, and Adiron- 
 dacks, — a multitudinous, billowy sea of mountains. But, while 
 crossing tliis lake, lie wrote a long letter to one of his daughters in 
 a little book of birch-bark, which still exists ; and some of the com- 
 pany shot at the squirrels swimming from New York to Vermont, 
 where the States are three miles apart. Reaching Bennington, in 
 Vermont, on a Saturday evening, they were detained till Monday 
 haorning, "the laws of the State not permitting us to travel on 
 Sunday." Tliey crossed the State of Vermont to a point near uin- 
 brageous Brattleborough, on the Connecticut Biver ; and, floating 
 down that uncomfortable and capricious stream, made their way by 
 the Sound to New York, and reached Philadelphia, in perfect health, 
 after a month's journey of a thousand miles. 
 
 These summer holidays of our modern life are delightful enough ; 
 only the getting into harness again is so disagreeable. Upon reach- 
 ing Philadelphia, the secretary'- of state found the newspapers in full 
 cry after him. Mr. Paine's pamphlet, to use Jefferson's homely 
 expression, had " kicked up a dust." There was a young lawyer in 
 Boston, named John Quincy Adams, aged twenty-four, who did not 
 approve the pamphlet, and perhaps still less the indorsement of 
 Thomas Jefferson, and his seeming fling at the vice-president. 
 This 3'oung lawyer, fresh from the courts of Europe, not the best 
 school in which to learn the rights of man, answered " Mr. Pain " 
 in a series of seven short newspaper essays, signed Publicola ; not 
 omitting to give the secretary of state a fair hit in passing, though 
 polite and de(;orous to both. The fair hit was in reference to Mr. 
 Jefferson's unlucky use of the word "heresies." Publicola asked, 
 " Does he consider the pamphlet of Mr. Pain as the canonical book 
 of political scripture ? As containing the true doctrine of political 
 infallibility, from which it would be heretical to depart in a single 
 point ? The expressions would, indeed, implj^ more : they seem, like' 
 the Arabian prophet, to call upon all true believers in the Islam of 
 democracy to draw their swords, in the fervor of their devotion, to 
 compel all their countrymen to cry out, There is but one Goddess of 
 X/iberty, and Common Sense is her prophet ! " 
 
 This was but a fair retort, as Mr. Jefferson once acknowledged; 
 but the young gentleman px'oceeded to discourse upon the sujieri- 
 ority of the British system of government over the new Prench con- 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN POLITICS. 427 
 
 stitution eulogized by Paine ; and he did this so well, that the essays 
 were republished in England, with the name of John Adams on the 
 title-page, as an antidote to what the Tories of the period courteously 
 styled '"the French disease." But the American people, who had 
 had experience for a century and a half of the badness of the gov- 
 ernmental system of Great Britain, did not relish the essays of Pub- 
 licola. The leading principles of Thomas Paine's Eights of Man 
 were, as Mr. Jefferson remarked at the time, " the principles of the 
 people of the United States." They are such at this moment. The 
 doctrines of the work, if they could now be put to the vote, would be 
 sustained by a majority of a thousand to three. A political party 
 might as well place itself in opposition to the multiplication table. 
 Hence, as soon as Publicola appeared, Brutus, Agricola, Cato, and 
 other noble Romans, threw themselves into the arena to defend the 
 persons and axioms assailed, and thus "kicked up the dust" to 
 which Mr. Jefferson alluded. 
 
 "I thank God," he wrote to Paine soon after, "that the people 
 appear firm in their republicanism, notwithstanding the contrary 
 hopes and assertions of a sect here, high in name but small in num- 
 bers. These had flattered themselves that the silence of the people 
 under the 'Defence' and 'Davila' was a symptom of their conver- 
 sion to the doctrine of King, Lords, and Commons. They are 
 checked at least by your pamphlet, and the people confirmed in their 
 good old faith." And to Colonel Monroe ; " A host of writers have 
 risen in favor of Paine, and prove, that, in this quarter at least, the 
 spirit of republicanism is sound. The contrary spirit of the high 
 officers of government is more understood than I expected. Colonel 
 Hamilton avows that he nt'ver made a secret of his principles, yet 
 taxes the imprudence of Mr. Adams in having stirred the question, 
 and agrees that ' his business is done.' Jay, covering the same 
 principles under the veil of silence, is steadily rising on the ruins of 
 his friends." 
 
 Colonel Hamilton was mistaken in supposing that the vice-presi- 
 dent's "business was done." The newspaper storm, however, 
 alarmed Mr. Adams not a little. Mr. Jeff'erson gave him an expla- 
 nation of the circumstances attending the publication of his note, 
 which restored to its usual cordiality the old friendship between 
 them, — a friendship, said Mr. Adams in reply, "which ever has 
 been and still is very dear to my heart." But no private explanation 
 
428 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 could still the tempest out of doors. Chimeras dire haunted the 
 vice-president's mind. "It is Hiought by some," he wrote to Jeffer- 
 son, "that Mr. Hancock's friends are preparing the way by my 
 destruction for his election to the place of vice-president, and that of 
 Mr. Samuel Adams to be governor of this Commonwealth ; and then 
 the Stone-house faction " (Mr. Hancock lived in a stone house) 
 "will be sure of all the loaves and fishes." All of which might have 
 speedily come to pass if the later excesses and woful collapse of the 
 French Kevolution had not afforded a new, though short, lease of 
 Kfe to the old ideas, and given pause to all but the stanchest and 
 farthest-sighted republicans. It was Robespierre that balked the 
 Stone-house faction, — if there was such a faction; and it was the 
 murder of the amateur locksmith of the Tuileries, beginning to be 
 known as " Mr. Capet," that suspended the decline of the author of 
 Davila. 
 
 Thus was Thomas Jefferson, the man of all others most averse to 
 controversy, placed, without act or volition of his own, at the head 
 of the Eepublicans of the United States. He took no part in the 
 public strife. " I never did in my life," he wrote to Mr. Adams on 
 this occasion, " either by myself or by any other, have a sentence of 
 mine inserted in a newspaper without putting my name to it ; and I 
 believe I never shall." Nor do we ever find his name appended to 
 any controversial piece or passage in the papers of his time. 
 
 But in the privacy of the president's cabinet the questions of the 
 day were discussed between Colonel Hamilton and himself with ever- 
 growing warmth. There was little harmony between them after the 
 publication of Mr. Paine's Eights of Man, though no personal 
 breach occurred for another year. On 'nearly every subject there 
 was a difference between them, either of sentiment or of opinion ; and 
 on some points the difference was such that neither could quite 
 believe in the other's sincerity, flamilton, for example, could not 
 comprehend, and therefore could not respect, the state of mind which 
 caused Jefferson to oppose his darling, long-cherished scheme of a 
 United States Bank. Other nations have national banks : why 
 should not we? Jefferson replied in the words of the Constitution: 
 " All powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, 
 nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to 
 the people." To which plain statement of fundamental law, Hamil- 
 ton opposed his mere opinion : "Congress can be considered as under] 
 
 * 
 
 1 
 
THE FRENCH DEVOLUTION IN AMERICAN POLITICS. 429 
 
 only one restriction which does not apply to other governments, — 
 they cannot rightfully apply the money they raise to any purpose 
 merely or purely local." Hamilton laughed at the '•' metaphysical 
 whimseys " of the strict-constructionists, and predicted that " the 
 most incorrigible theorist among the opponents of the bank would, 
 in one month's experience as head of the department of the treasury, 
 be compelled to acknowledge that it is an indispensable engine in the 
 managenient of tlie finances^ 
 
 In this dispute we find another proof, that, when two honest men 
 differ, both are much in the right. How convenient, urged the sec- 
 retary of the treasury, to have bank-notes that would be current in 
 all the States of the Union ! True, said Jefferson ; and it would be 
 still more convenient to have a bank the bills of which should be 
 current all over the world ; but it does not follow that there exists 
 anywhere authority to establish such a bank ! The bank was estab- 
 lished, and proved an element of discord and a menace of evil, from 
 the day of its creation to that of its final suppression in 1836. But 
 the single utility which Hamilton claimed and Jefferson admitted 
 has since been constitutionally attained by that most exquisite 
 device of finance, the National-bank system of the United States. 
 
 Suppose 7101V we had a Bank of the United States, with a capital 
 of, say three hundred and fifty millions of dollars (about equivalent 
 to the tliirty-five millions of 1830), overshadowing Wall Street, its 
 president holding the^ame relation to the business of to-day which 
 Nicholas Biddle held to that of 1830 ! 
 
CHAPTER XLVII. 
 
 THE QUAKREL OF JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON. 
 
 Politeness appears to have been invented to enable people who 
 would naturally fall out to live together in peace. And there is 
 great need of etiquette in a world where antipathy plaj's a part not 
 less essential than sympathy. It is as necessary to the continuance 
 of animated nature that cat and dog should hate, as that cat and cafc 
 should love. A genuine and profound antipatliy, therefore, may 
 exist without either of the parties being to blame; and, in our com- 
 plicated civilization, vast numbers of us are compelled to live in the 
 nearest intimacy, or labor in the closest contact, with persons 
 between whom and ourselves there is this incurable dislike. In 
 such cases there is no peace, no dignity, save through the resolute 
 observance of all the etiquette which the situation imposes. 
 
 It was this tliat kept our two secretaries, Jeiferson and Hamilton, 
 on friendly terms with one another for many months after both had 
 discovered that they differed in toto and on every leading question. 
 A breach of etiquette finally embroiled them past reconciliation. It 
 was difficult to quarrel with Jefferson ; since, besides being naturally 
 placable and good-tempered, he had a vivid sense of the value of 
 peace and a singular knowledge of the arts by which peace is pre- 
 served. He advised his daughters to avoid breaking with disagree- 
 able people as long as they could with honor. Sacrifices and sup- 
 pressions of feeling for such an object, he thought, cost much less 
 pain than open separation. The effort of self-control was soon for- 
 gotten ; but an open breach " haunts the peace of every day." 
 
 Hamilton, too, though much spoiled by applause too early and 
 too easily won, seemed a good fellow ; amiable at home, agreeable 
 abroad; who sang his old song of The Drum at the annual dinner of 
 the Cincinnati, and was welcome in all companies and circles till politi- 
 
 430 
 
THE QUARREL OP JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON. 481 
 
 cal differences imbittered men's minds. What a pleasant picture 
 we have of the breakfast scene at his liouse, No. 2i Broadwaj', the 
 mother seated at the head of the table, with a napkin in her lap, 
 cutting slices of bread from a great family loaf of the olden time, 
 and spreading them with butter for the younger boys, who stood 
 round her, reading in turn from the Bible or Goldsmith's History of 
 Rome ; while the father, in the room adjoining, was seated at the 
 piano playing an accompaniment to his daugliter's new song, or 
 singing it to her accom]ja!iiment. When the lessons were finished, 
 and a stately pile of bread and butter was ready, all the eight chil- 
 dren carae to breakfast ; after which, the younger ones were packed 
 off to school, and the father went to his office. 
 
 Who more amiable than that father? There is a portrait of Mrs. 
 Hamilton, ,as one of her sons relates, bearing the name of the 
 painter, " T. Earle, 1787," which attests his goodness of heart. 
 Earle was in the debtors' prison at the time, and Hamilton induced 
 his 3"oung wife to go to the prison and sit for her portrait. She per- 
 suaded other ladies, and thus the artist gained monej^ enough to pay 
 his debts and get out of jail. No man was more ready than Hamil- 
 ton to set on foot such good-natured schemes, though himself never 
 too far from the debtors' prison. At this very time, — 1791 to 
 1794, — while he was handling millions upon millions of the public 
 money, he was pinched severely in the effort to live upon his little 
 salar3^ "If you can conveniently lend me twenty dollars for a few 
 days," he wrote to a friend, in September, 1791, " be so good as to 
 send it by the bearer." The friend sent a check for fifty dollars. 
 And Talleyrand said, in 1794, after coming from Hamilton's house, 
 /' I have beheld one of the wonders of the world, — a man who has 
 made the fortune of a nation laboring all night to support a famil3%" 
 
 Hamilton, alas! had more to support than a family. Two fami- 
 lies, at least, we know he was supporting at this time; for it was 
 during 1791 and 1792 that he had his affair with the Reynolds, which 
 obliged him to buy the silence of the husband by the payment of a 
 quarter's salary, not to mention smaller " loans " whenever that hus- 
 band chose to apply. 
 
 Talleyrand made another remark upon Hamilton. When Mr. 
 George Ticknor visited him in 1819, the old diplomatist was so 
 warm in his eulogy of Hamilton, that the American was disposed 
 modestly to waive part of the compliment by saying that the public 
 
432 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 men of Europe liad to do with larger masses and wider interests. 
 " But," said Talleyrand, " Hamilton had divined Europe." He 
 ma}'' have divined Europe. His misfortune was, that he had not 
 divined America. In Europe, after a drill of twenty-five years in 
 the British House of Commons, he might have been another Can- 
 ning, a liberal Tory, the forerunner of Peel and Palmerston. In 
 American politics it was impossible that he should ever have been at 
 home, because he never could believe the truths, nor share the hopes, 
 upon which the American system is based. In an ordinary period, 
 however, he might have co-operated with Jefferson, for a while, 
 both being gentlemen and patriots ; but the time was not ordi- 
 nary. Cliristendom was losing its senses ; and the discussions of 
 the cabinet had a bass accompaniment out of doors, ever deepening, 
 always becoming more vehement. And it is but fair to remember, 
 that, if Jefferson had the inarticulate masses of the American people 
 at his back, Hamilton was ceaselessly flattered by the articulate 
 class, — the bar, the bench, the college, the drawing-room, the pul- 
 pit, the bureau. These two men, even if they had not become 
 mutually repellent, would have been pulled apart by their adher- 
 ents. 
 
 When the government, in 1790, removed from New York to Phil- 
 adelphia, John Pintard, the translating clerk in the Department of 
 State, chose not to go with it; and Jefferson gave the place — salary 
 two hundi'ed and fifty dollars a year — to the " poet Freneau," an 
 old college classi^ate and friend of Madison and Henry Lee. Cap- 
 tain Philip Freneau, a native of New York, besides being a kind of 
 mild American Peter Pindar, had suffered and sung the horrors of 
 the New York prison-ships during the Revolutionary War. He 
 was the bright, jDopular writer of his day, both in prose and 
 verse; and, as he had contemplated "the British model" from the 
 pestilential steerage of the Scorpion, frigate anchored in the Hudson, 
 he was never "bewitched" by it, but remained, to the end of his 
 long life, a sound republican. No appointment could have been 
 more natural, more proper, or more agreeable to the public. In 
 recommending it, Mr. Madison's chief motive was to promote the 
 interest of his friend, then gaining a precarious and slender liveli- 
 hood as man-of- all -work on the New York Daily Advertiser. But 
 he had another object in view. Bestive under the opposition of 
 Hamilton's organ at Philadelphia, the Gazette of the United States, 
 
THE QUAREEL OF JEFFEESON AND HAMILTON. 433 
 
 Madison and Governor Henry Lee of Virginia had formed the project 
 of setting up a weekly republican journal at the seat of government, 
 to be edited, perhaps, by Captain Freneau. This scheme, half formed 
 at the time of the appointment, could not Iput have had the approval 
 of the secretary of state, stranger though he was to Freneau; and 
 this may have suggested a remark which the secretary made in his 
 note, offering him the place. The salary, Mr. Jefferson observed, 
 was very low; but the ofSce "gives so little to do as not to inter- 
 fere with any other calling the person may choose, Avhich would not 
 absent him from the seat of government." 
 
 Eight months after, October 31, 1791, appeared the first number 
 of the National Gazette, edited by Philip Freneau ; capital fur- 
 nished by Madison and Lee ; twenty-one subscribers previously 
 obtained by Jefferson among his neighbors in Virginia. Thus 
 there were two Gazettes at Philadelphia, — Fenno's daily and 
 Freneau's weekly ; the one Hamiltonian, the other Jeffersonian. 
 But the only part which the secretary of state took in the manage- 
 ment of Freneau's Gazette was to lend the editor the foreign news- 
 papers which came to the de]3artment. "I never did," he once 
 wrote, "by mj'self or any other, or indirectly, say a syllable, nor 
 attempt any kind of influence, . . . nor write, dictate, or procure 
 any one sentence to be inserted, in Freneau's or any other gazette, 
 to which my name was not affixed, or that of my office." The 
 enter^irise was chiefly Madison's, who wished to have a weekly 
 paper of republican politics for circulation in all the States, Bache's 
 daily paper not going much bej'ond the city of Philadelphia. Jef- 
 ferson's sympathy with the object was complete ; but the fact of 
 Freneau's holding an office in his department is itself a kind of 
 proof that he could not have regarded or used the paper as a jier- 
 sonal organ. How absurd the supposition that a "politician" 
 would thus display his hand! If Freneau's Gazette had been 
 designed as Jefferson's organ, Jefferson surely would have begun 
 by removing Freneau from office. 
 
 If the; reader will turn over^the files of Fenno, preserved in 
 several j)ublic libraries, he will perceive the need there was of some- 
 thing antidotal to it, No opportunity was lost by the editor of 
 reflecting upon republican institutions ; and the adulation of the 
 president was unceasing and offensive. Whatever question was 
 .uppermost, this Gazette of the L^nited States might be depended 
 
 28 
 
434 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 upon for taking the side least characteristic of the United States. 
 The burden of its song was, government by tlie people is anarchy. 
 If any one ventured to ask a Federalist, Why, then, are we not 
 anarchic ? the answer was, The high character of the jiresident, 
 and the universal awe which that character inspires, hold the dema- 
 gogues in some decent show of restraint. It is Washington that 
 saves us, not our ''shilly-shally Constitution." 
 
 When Freneau's Gazette appeared, defending Paine, attacking 
 Burke, criticising Hamilton's measures, especially his new Bank of 
 the United States, and commending Jefferson's public acts, Fenno 
 affected to be aghast. The morning after Freneau's second number 
 was circulated, a writer in Fenno, without mentioning the name of 
 the audacious sheet, burst into the most ludicrous fury. He began 
 by saj'ing that there were acts of baseness and villany so atrocious, 
 that we could hardly persuade ourselves to believe that any of the 
 human race were depraved enough to commit tliem ; and he pro- 
 ceeded to mention a crime or two of this description, such as 
 firing a city in the dead of night. But there is a depth of deprav- 
 ity, he continued, far beyond that. Such offences are of a mild 
 type of turpitude compared with the revolting blackness of the one 
 which he introduces to the reader's notice in his closing paragraph : 
 "In a free republic, the officers of the people are entitled to double 
 honor, because thej have no inheritance in their office, and, when 
 actuated by just principles, accept of public employments from 
 motives superior to mercenary considerations. The crime, there- 
 fore, of individuals who devise the destruction and imbrue their 
 hands in the innocent blood of such characters, is tinged with the 
 blackest hue of hellish darkness." 
 
 Such was the spirit of a paper that derived an important part of 
 its revenue from the patronage of the government, and an important 
 portion of its contents from the pens of high officers of the govern- 
 ment. Freneau continued his gazette, however, and did not refrain 
 from imbruing his hands in the innocent blood of an eminent 
 public character. H^ proceeded to the length of mentioning the 
 secretary of the treasury by name. He descanted freely upon all 
 that Hamilton had done, and all that he proposed; admitting many 
 communications from republican friends; doing all that in him lay 
 to controvert and ridicule the writers in Fenno, and defend the 
 principle of government by the people for the people. Eeaders who 
 
TBTE QUARREL OF JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON. 435 
 
 examine the file will find it difficult to believe that satire so mild 
 and invective so harmless should have had power to kindle wrath in 
 Federal minds. 
 
 Antipathjj-, meanwhile, w^as grpwing in the hearts of Jefferson 
 and Hamilton, blinding both, misleading both. It is of the nature 
 of antipathy to distort the view, and shut the mind to truth ; and 
 when it reaches the degree of rendering social intercourse difficult 
 and mutual explanation impossible, men may advance from miscon- 
 ception to misconception, untif the idea they have of one another 
 becomes monstrous. fNever before, since they were born, had either 
 of these two encountered immovable opposition. The lives of both 
 had been too easily triumphant. From their youth up they had 
 experienced little but acquiescence, sympathy, and applause, until 
 they met in Washington's cabinet, and each discovered in the 
 other an invincible antagonist. The self-love of both was deeply 
 wounded. Hamilton owned that he took Jefferson's opposition to 
 the bank as a wrong done to himself. "Mr. Jefferson," he says, 
 "not only delivered an opinion in writing against its constitutional- 
 ity and expediency, but he did it in a style and manner which I 
 felt as partaking of asperity and ill-humor toward ??ie." This to 
 Colonel Carrington, May, 1792. But who can now discover in 
 Jefferson's opinion on the bank one word savoring of asperity or 
 ill-humor ? On the contrary, it seems studiously void of offence, 
 full of regpect for opposing opinions, and ends by advising the 
 president to sign the bill "if the pro and con hang so even as to 
 balance his judgment." This, he thought, would be paying only 
 "a just regard to the wisdom of the legislature." 
 
 Miserable error, to attribute difference of opinion to baseness of 
 biotive ! Oliver Wolcott, comptroller of the treasury, Hamilton's 
 echo and successor (as genial a soul as ever cracked a walnut), 
 betrays his chief's blinding antipathy in his letters of this time. 
 "]Mr. Jefferson," he writes, February, 1792, "appears to have shown 
 rather too much of a disposition to cultivate vulgar prejudices; 
 accordingly, he will become poJDular in ale-houses, and do much 
 mischief to his country by exciting apprehension that the govern- 
 ment will operate unfavorably." The comptroller interpreted the 
 Publicola controversy, too, in his own merry fashion: "Mr. Adams 
 and Mr. Jefferson seem much disposed to quarrel on the question, 
 whether liberty can be maintained in a country which allows citi- 
 
436 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 zens to be distinguished by the addition Mr., Esq., and Deacon^ 
 and whether Thomas Paine or Edmund Burke are the greatest 
 fools." Hamilton's grammar was better than Wolcott's ; but he, 
 too, was at first disposed to laugh^at Jefferson's notion of abolishing 
 the small, lingering absurdities of the feudal sj-stem. But he soon 
 ceased to laugh. Under Freneau's attacks, he became, very early 
 in 1792, as sour and bitter in his feelings toward his colleague as so 
 good-tempered a man could be; and he poured out all his heart to 
 his old comrade, Colonel Carrington of Virginia, He said he was 
 convinced — "unequivocally convinced" — that "Mr. Madison, co- 
 operating with Mr. Jefferson, is at the head of a faction decidedly 
 hostile to me and to my administration, and actuated by views, in 
 my judgment, subversive of the princij)les of good government, and 
 dangerous to the union, peace, and happiness of the country." 
 
 Such was Hamilton's conviction in May, 1792 ; and it remained 
 his conviction until that fatal day in July, 1804, when he stood at 
 Weehawken before Burr's pistol, a conscious martyr. What reasons 
 had he for thinking so! He gives them at great length to Colonel 
 Carrington : Madison and Jefferson disajiproved his financial meas- 
 ures ! They had openly said so; Madison in debate, Jefferson in 
 conversation, — yes, even in conversation v^nih foreigners ! Some 
 persons, whom the secretary of state " immediately and notoriously 
 moves," had even whispered suspicions of his official integrity. It 
 was also "reduced to a certainty," that Freneau, a "known anti- 
 Federalist," had been " brought to Philadelphia by Mr. Jefferson to 
 be the conductor of a newspaper." And such a newspaper! Evi- 
 dently devoted to the subversion of vie and my measures, as well as 
 unfriendly to the government ! Moreover, both Madison and Jeffer- 
 son (and here Hamilton rises into capital letters) " had a woman- 
 ish ATTACHMENT TO FRANCE, AND A WOMANISH RESENTMENT 
 
 AGAINST Great Britain ; " and this to such a degree, that, un- 
 checked, they would in six months bring on " an open war 
 BETWEEN THE United States AND Great Britain ! " Mr. Jeffer- 
 son was especially and extravagantly addicted to these womanish 
 propensities. 
 
 "In France," continues Hamilton, "he saw government only on 
 the side of its abuses. He drank deeply of the French philosophy, 
 in religion, in science, in politics. He came from France in the 
 moment of a fermentation which he had a share in exciting, and in 
 
THE QUAEEEL OF JEFFEESON AND, HAlvnLTON. 437 
 
 the passions and feelings of whicli lie shared, both from tempera- 
 ment and situation. He came here, probably, with a too partial idea 
 of his own powers, and with the expectation of a greater share in 
 the direction of our councils than he has in reality enjoyed. I am 
 not sure that he had not marked oi;t for himself the department of 
 the finances. He came electrified ^Zi/s with attachment to France, 
 and with the project of knitting together the two countries in the 
 closest political bands. Mr. Madison had always entertained an 
 exalted opinion of the talents, knowledge, and virtues of Mr. Jeffer- 
 son. The sentiment was probably reciprocal. A close correspond- 
 ence subsisted between them during the time of Mr. Jefferson's 
 absence from this country. A close intimacy arose on his return. . . . 
 Mr. Jefferson was indiscreetly open in his approbation of ]\Ir. Madi- 
 son's principles on first coming to the seat of government. I say 
 indiscreetly, because a gentleman in one department ought not to 
 have taken sides against another in another department." 
 
 Both the Virginians, he thought, were chagrined and out of humor, 
 because, so far, he had usually triumphed over the opposition of one 
 or both of them ; and he proceeds to enumerate his victories, — fund- 
 ing, assumption, the bank, and others, — a " current of success on 
 one side, and defeat on the other," which had " rendered the opposi- 
 tion furious." And worse defeat was in store for them ; for it was 
 evident, he thought, beyond a question,, that " Mr. Jefferson aims, 
 with ardent desire, at the presidential chair; " and, of course, Hamil- 
 ton's influence with the community must be destroyed; and here the 
 secretary of the treasury owns that he had already aided to frustrate 
 the imaginary ambition of his colleague. It had been a question 
 who should be president pro tern., in case both the president and 
 vice-president should die in office. Some members of Congress had 
 proposed the chief justice, Mr. Jay ; Mr. Madison had moved the 
 secretary of state. 4' I acknowledge," says Hamilton, " though I 
 took far less part than was supposed, I ran counter to Mr. Jefferson's 
 wishes ; for, if I had had no other reason for it, I had already expe- 
 rienced opposition from him, which rendered it a measure of self- 
 defence." Finally, he read Mr. Jefferson thus : " A man of pro- 
 found ambition and violent passions." 
 
 Thus may one honest and patriotic man misread another, when, 
 attempting to evolve his character from the depths of his own con- 
 sciousness, the gall of an antipatliy tinges his thoughts. 
 
438 LIFE OF THOIVIAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 The mere clifTerence of opinion between tliem was extreme. One 
 day in April, 1791, when the vice-president and the cabinet dined 
 together at Jefferson's house to talk over some public question, the 
 conversation turned, as it often did in those days, upon forms of 
 government. " Purge the British Constitution of its corruption," 
 said Mr. Adams, '•' and give td its popular branch equality of repre- 
 sentation, and it would be the most perfect constitution ever devised 
 by the wit of man." Hamilton waited a moment, and then said, 
 " Purge it of its corruption, and give to its popular branch equality 
 of representation, and it would become an impracticable government. 
 As it stands at present, with all its supj^osed defects, it is the most 
 perfect government that ever existed." What intelligent American 
 citizen, whose memory of public events ran back to 17C5, and who 
 had access to the pigeon-holes of the state department, could be 
 expected to listen to such an opinion without something like indig- 
 nation ? 
 
 But, in truth, when Hamilton pronounced the word govermnent, 
 he meant something radically diiferent from Jefferson's idea of gov- 
 ernment. What is government ? Jefferson's answer would have been : 
 An agency for the execution of the people's will. Hamilton must 
 have answered : A means of curbing and frustrating people's will. 
 The British government had proved \tse\i practicable, by being able, 
 in the teeth of the people's will, to alienate and repel the American 
 Colonies ; and it had accomplished this by buying voters at the 
 polls, and voters in the, House of Commons. Hence, in a Hamilto- 
 nian sense, it was a " practicable " government. There were mem- 
 bers of Congress who had a pecuniary interest in supporting 
 Hamilton's financial system. This he regarded as legitimate and 
 desirable ; wdiile good republicans could only think of it with horror, 
 as if jurymen should sit in judgment on a cause in which their 
 fortune was embarked. « 
 
 A few months after, Hamilton seized an opportunity to explain 
 himself to his colleague. Jefferson mentioned to him, in August, 
 1791, that he had received a letter from Mr. Adams, disavowing 
 Publicola, and denying that he had ever had any wish to introduce 
 the hereditary principle. Hamilton censured the vice-president for 
 having stirred questions of that nature in the newspapers. " I 
 own," he added, " it is my own opinion, though I do not publish it in 
 Dan or Beersheba, that the present government is not that which 
 
THEQUAEREL OF JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON. 439 
 
 will answer the ends of society by giving stability and protection to 
 its rights, and that it will probably be found expedient to go into 
 the British form. However, since we have undertaken the experi- 
 ment, I am for giving it a fair coarse, whatever my expectations 
 may be." Hence, he thought Mr. Adams was wrong, however pure 
 his intentions, to disturb, by the discourses on Davila, the public 
 confidence in the present order of things. These avowals, appar- 
 ently deliberate and made for a purpose, Jefferson thought worthy 
 of preservation; and this conversation, accordingly, is the first of 
 the "Anas" which give us so many interesting glimpses of the 
 interior of General Washington's cabinet. 
 
 To this radical difference of opinion was added a grievance which 
 was at once public and personal, wounding both to Jefferson's pat- 
 riotism and pride. Hamilton was an inveterate lobbyist. Excluded 
 from Congress by the Constitution, he nevertheless endeavored to 
 exercise as much influence over legislation as an English Chan- 
 cellor of the Exchequer who sits in Parliament. In his published 
 correspondence, he mentions, with evident elation, several instances 
 in which he had procured the passage or the rejection of measures. 
 Upon occasions he would even threaten to resign, unless he had his 
 way ; and such was his ascendency, that this absurd insolence 
 provoked from his adherents neither resentment nor ridicule. The 
 Republican members objected to the reference of legislative prob- 
 lems to members of the cabinet; regarding the cabinet as part 
 of the executive power. Hamilton could not so much as believe 
 that a member of Congress could have any other than a factious 
 reason for opposing such a reference. • He distinctly claimed it, as 
 belonging to his office, to perform the duty which now devolves upon 
 the Committee of Ways and Means. He regarded himself as an 
 injured being when Madison opposed the reference to the secreta,ry 
 of the treasury of the qiaestion of waj^s and means for the Indian 
 War. Madison, he says, even went so far as to " combat, on jprln- 
 ciple, the propriety of such reference ;" well knowing, that, *' if he 
 had prevailed, a certain consequence was my resignation." Late in 
 the debate he became apprised of the danger. "Measures of coun- 
 teraction," he says, " were adopted ; and when the question was 
 called, Mr. Madison was confounded to find characters voting 
 against him whom he had counted upon as certain." 
 
 Now, this interference with legislation was the more aggravating 
 
440 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 to Jefferson, because the secretary of the treasury had such a vast 
 patronage with which to make his interference effectual : one hun- 
 dred clerks at Philadelphia, a custom-house at every port, bank- 
 directors, loan-agents, — a thousand places in his gift. And these 
 places were not the trivial and demoralizing gifts which a cabinet 
 minister has at his disposal now, — the brief, precarious teniire of 
 under-paid offices. A government office was then a career. You were 
 a made man if you got one. A peaceful and dignified life could be 
 founded upon it, and a family reared. Hamilton wielded more power 
 of this kind than all the rest of the administration put together, 
 multiplied by ten ; and it is reasonable to conclude, that some voters 
 in Congress (not as many, perhaps, as Jefferson thought) were influ- 
 enced by the interest members had in Hamilton's various financial 
 measures. 
 
 Before he had been a 3'ear in office, the secretary of state had had 
 enough of it. Scrupulously avoiding all interference with the 
 departments of his colleagues, never lobbying, immersed in the 
 duties of his place, he found himself borne along by Hamilton's rest- 
 less impetuosity, and conapelled to aid in the execution of a policy 
 which he could as little approve as prevent. He was nominally at 
 the head of the cabinet, without possessing the ascendency that 
 belonged to his position. He seemed to himself, at once responsible 
 and impotent ; and he believed the sway of Hamilton over public 
 affairs to be illegitimate, and to be upheld by illegitimate means. 
 In the spring of 1791, when he had been in the cabinet little more 
 than a year, he discovered, from a sentence in one of the president's 
 letters to himself, that he had no thought of serving beyond the end 
 of his term, which would expire March 4, 1793. Jefferson instantly 
 resolved to make that the period of his own service also. He longed 
 for repose. His affairs clamorously demanded his attention. He 
 was utterly devoid of commonplace ambition. All pageantry was 
 wearisome to him. If, in liis earlier years, he had coveted the kind 
 of distinction which place conferred, he had outgrown that foible 
 long ago, and had now for himself but one wish, — to enjoy a busy, 
 tranquil existence at home, among his farms, his books, his appa- 
 ratus, his children, and his friends. What man above forty-five, not 
 a fool, has ever had, for himself alone, any other dream but that? 
 
 With regard to the presidency, no one had as yet presumed to 
 publish a conjecture as to what an infant nation was to do, when, at 
 
THE QUAEEEL OF JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON. 441 
 
 last, deprived of its "father," it should he obliged — to tise Jeffer- 
 son's expressi9n — to "go alone." Adams, Jay, and Jefferson were 
 the three names oftenest whispered in conversation ; but the situ- 
 ation was not ripe for any thing bej'ond a whisper, and all patriotic 
 men concurred in desiring General Washington's continuance. 
 
 It was in February, 1792, in the course of a conference upon post- 
 office affairs, that Jefferson disclosed to the president his intention 
 to retire. It was not yet clear whether the post-office belonged to 
 the Department of State or to that of the Treasury, and Jefferson 
 wished the question settled. He told the president, that, in his 
 opinion, it belonged, and ought to belong, to the State Department, 
 because, among other reasons, the Treasury Department was already 
 too powerful ; wielding " such an influence as to swallow up the 
 whole executive powers," so that "even the future presidents, not 
 supported by the weight of character which himself possessed, would 
 not be able to make head against it." He disclaimed all personal 
 interest in the matter. If he was supposed to have any aj^petite 
 for power, the intervening time was too short to be an object, for his 
 own tenure of office would be exactly as long as that of the i>resi- 
 dent's. " My real wish," said he, " is to avail the public of every 
 occasion, during tlie rest of the president's period, to place things 
 on a safe footing." 
 
 The conversation was interrupted here at its most interesting 
 moment. The president asked him to^ breakfast with him the next 
 morning, in order that tlie subject might be resumed. They met 
 accordingly ; and, when the post-office question had been duly con- 
 sidered, the president revived the topic of Jefferson's intention to 
 retire. " In an affectionate tone," he told Jefferson that he had 
 felt much concern at the intelligence. For his own retirement there 
 were reasons enough, and he enumerated them ; but he should con- 
 sider it unfortunate if his own return to private life should bring on 
 the resignation of the great officers of the government, which might 
 give a sliock to the public mind of dangerous consequence. Jeffer- 
 son tried to re-assure the president on this point. He did not believe, 
 he said, that any of his brethren thought of resigning. On the 
 contrary, at the last meeting of the trustees of the sinking-fund, 
 the secretary of the treasury had developed a plan of operations which 
 contemplated years of his own personal service. 
 
 General Washington was not re-assured by this statement. He 
 
442 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFEESON". 
 
 clung to Jefferson. He remarked, that lie considered the Depart- 
 ment of the Treasury less important and less conspicuous than the 
 Department of State, which "embraced nearly all the objects of 
 administration," and that the retirement of a secretary of state 
 would be more noticed. Symptoms of dissatisfaction, he added, 
 far beyond what could have been expected, had lately shown them- 
 selves ; and to what height these miglit arise, in case of too great a 
 change in the administration, could not be foreseen. 
 
 Upon this Jefferson's tongue was loosed, and he expressed him- 
 self, without reserve, in words like these : " In my opinion, there is 
 only a single source of these discontents, — the Treasury. A system 
 has there been contrived for deluging the States with paper-money 
 instead of gold and silver ; for withdrawing our citizens from the pur- 
 suits of commerce, manufactures, buildings, and other branches of 
 useful industry, to occupy themselves and their capitals in a species 
 of gambling destructive of morality, which has introduced its poison 
 into the government itself. It is a fact, as well known as that you 
 and I are notv conversing, that particular members of the legisla- 
 ture, while those laws were on the carpet, feathered their nests with 
 paper, then voted for the laws, and constantly, since, have lent all 
 the energy of their talents, and the instrumentality of their offices, 
 to the establishment and enlargement of their system. They have 
 chained the system round our necks for a great length of time ; and, 
 in order to keep the game in their own hands, they have, from time 
 to time, aided in making such legislative constructions of the Consti- 
 tution as make it a very different thing from what the people 
 thought they had submitted to. And now they have brought for- 
 ward a proposition far beyond any one advanced before ; to which 
 the eyes of many are now turned, as the decision which is to let us 
 know whether we live under a limited or an unlimited government." 
 
 " To what proposition do you allude ?" asked the president. 
 
 "To that," replied Jefferson, " in the Report of Manufactures (by 
 Hamilton), which, under color of giving bounties for the encourage- 
 ment of particular manufactures, meant to establish the doctrine, 
 that the Constitution, in giving power to Congress to provide for the 
 general welfare, permitted Congress to take every thing under their 
 charge which thetj should deem for the public welfare. If this was 
 maintained, then the eniimeration of powers in the Constitution 
 does not at all constitute the limits of their authority." 
 
THE QUAEREL OF JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON. 443 
 
 With this topic the conversation ended. The mingling of justice 
 and injustice in Jeiferson's observations is obvious. He was chiefly 
 unjust in ascribing the ill-working of some of Hamilton's measures to 
 design ; whereas, the infl.ation of values, and the consequent mania for 
 speculation, were unforeseen, and were by no one more regretted than 
 by Hamilton. The real grievances of the Republicans at that mo- 
 ment were two: 1, Hamilton's free-and-easj'' construction of tlie Con- 
 stitution. 2, The interference of the Treasury Department with legis- 
 lation. During that very week the Republicans made a serious effort 
 toward turning the secretary of the treasury and his allies out of the 
 lobby bj'' breaking up the system of referring questions to membei's of 
 the cabinet. After a long debate, the House adjourned without com- 
 ing to a vote ; but Madison and his friends went home that afternoon 
 in the highest spirits, so sure were they of victory on the day follow- 
 ing. During the evening, as the}^ believed, the special adherents of 
 the secretary of the treasury bestirred themselves with such effect, 
 that, — to employ Jefferson's own words, — " The Treasur)/ carried 
 it by thirty-one to twenty-seven." But even this triumph was 
 esteemed only the forerunner of defeat, so omnipotent had the Treas- 
 ury once been. "It showed," Jefferson thought, "that Treasury 
 influence was totten'ng." 
 
 So far the personal intercourse between the two diverging minis- 
 ters was agreeable ; and we even observe in their official correspond- 
 ence an apparent effort to conciliate. In March, 1792, Jefferson 
 submitted the draught of a cabinet paper for Hamilton's review and 
 emendation ; and when it came back with comments, Jefferson 
 appears to have made a point of accepting as many of his colleague's 
 suggestions as possible. Out of ten emendations he adopted all but 
 one, which would have involved a looser construction of the Consti- 
 tion than he approved. As late as February, 1792 (a month before 
 the conversation 'with the president), Jefferson, in returning his col- 
 league's Report on the Mint, commended the performance, suggested 
 a change or two, and ended his note thus : " I hazard these thoughts 
 to you extempore, and am, dear sir, respectfully and affectionately 
 yours." 
 
 This, however, was the year of the presidential election. For the 
 presidency, there was, indeed, but one candidate ; but Mr. Adams's 
 incoherences upon Davila, and his son's essays in the name of Pub- 
 licola, cost him a severe contest for the vice-presidency; George 
 
444 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 Clinton of New York being the candidate of the Republicans. 
 Need it be said that the two Gazettes, Fenno and Freneau, improved 
 the occasion ? But how mild the prose and verse of Captain Fre- 
 neau compared with the vituperation and calumny which have since 
 made the party press as powerless to abase as to exalt ! 
 
 " On Davila's page 
 
 Your discourses so sage 
 Democratic numsciiUs bepuzzle, 
 
 With arguments tough 
 
 As white leather or butF, 
 The Republican bull-dogs to muzzle!" 
 
 It is to be i^resumed that the vice-president did not take seriously 
 to heart such fooling as this, which is a fair enough specimen of 
 "Jonathan Pindar's" doggerel. Hamilton and his friends were 
 assailed in prose not quite so pointless. Perhaps the following was 
 as " severe " as most of the editorial paragraphs, if only from its con- 
 taining a portion of truth : " The mask is at length torn from the 
 monarchical party, who have, with but too much success, imposed 
 themselves upon the public for the sincere friends of our republican 
 Constitution. Whatever may be the event of the competition for the 
 vice-presidency, it has been the happy occasion of ascertaining the 
 two following important truths; First, that the name of Federalist 
 has been assumed by men who approve the Constitution merely ' as 
 a promising essay toward a well-ordered government;' that is to 
 say, as a step toward a government of King, Lords, and Commons. 
 Secondly, that the spirit of the people continues firmly republican." 
 Often, however, the secretary of the treasury was specially designated ; 
 and his financial system was always condemned, as Jefferson con- 
 demned it in the hearing of the president. 
 
 When Hamilton read his Freneau, week after week, during that 
 exciting summer of 1792, he read it, not at all as the publication of 
 Captain Philip Freneaix, mariner and poet, but, wholly and always, 
 as the utterance of Thomas Jefferson, secretary of state. He was 
 right, and he was wrong. Jefferson, to people like-minded with 
 himself, was a pervading and fascinating intelligence. His easy 
 manners, his long experience, his knowledge of nature, men, and 
 events, his sanguine trust in man, his freedom from inhuman pride, 
 his prodigious Christianity, his great gifts, his great fame, and his 
 
THE QUARREL OP JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON. 445 
 
 great place, all conspired to make him the oracle of his circle, as he 
 was the soul of his party. Freneau could not help iufusing a good 
 deal of Jefferson into almost every thing he wrote. But although 
 that was the only kind of influence which the secretary of state ever 
 exerted over the pen of his translating clerk, Hamilton could not 
 believe it. He took it for granted that the National Gazette was 
 edited in his colleague's office, with his colleague's assistance, for the 
 purpose of subverting himself. Irritated and indignant, the secre- 
 tary of the treasury composed, July 15, 1791, the epistle following, 
 and had it inserted iu the other Gazette, — the Gazette of the 
 United States : — 
 
 " Mr. Fen'no, — The editor of the National Gazette receives a 
 salary from government. 
 
 " Qucere. Whether this salary is paid him for Translations, or for 
 publications, the design of which is to vilify those to wliom the voice 
 of the people has committed the administration of our public affairs, 
 — to oppose the measures of government, aild, by false insinuations, 
 to disturb the public peace ? 
 
 " In common life it is thought ungrateful for a man to bite the 
 hand that puts bread in his mouth ; but, if the man is hired to do it, 
 the case is altered. T. L." 
 
 Freneau was not politician enough, nor guilty enough, to pass by 
 this hint in silence. He repelled the insinuation, which gave 
 Hamilton a pretext for following it up. A series of strongly 
 written, incisive articles, from the pen of the secretary of the treas- 
 ury, appeared in Fenno; in which Jefferson was attacked by name. 
 Some of these articles (there were twelve in all) were signed, " An 
 American ; " others, " Amicus ; " others, " Catullus ; " one, " Metel- 
 lus ; " one, " A Plain, Honest Man : " but all of them are included 
 in the authorized edition of the works of Alexander Hamilton. 
 They appeared from time to time, during the rest of the presiden- 
 tial " campaign ; " calling forth replies from " Aristides " and other 
 sages of antiquity, but eliciting no printed word from Jefferson. 
 The burden of the earlier numbers was, that Mr. Freneau was 
 brought from New York to Philadelphia, and quartered upon the 
 government, by Mr. Jefferson, for the purpose of establishing a 
 
446 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 gazette hostile to the government. (Denied by Freneau on oath.) 
 When tliat topic was exhausted, Colonel Hamilton endeavored to 
 show, by fragments of Jefferson's letters to Madison from France, 
 that his colleague had been an original opponent of the Constitution. 
 (Disproved by Madison's publishing the whole of the quoted pas- 
 sages.) Plarailton proceeded to descant upon Mr. Jefferson's indorse- 
 ment of Paine's reply to Burke : accusing him, first, of an intention 
 to wound and injure Mr. Adams ; and, secondly, of a dastardly 
 denial of the same, when he found that "discerning and respectable 
 men disapproved the step." After relieving his mind of many a 
 column of fluent and vigorous outrage, he called upon Mr. Jefferson 
 to resign his oflice. 
 
 "If," said Metellus, "he cannot coalesce with those with whom 
 he is associated, as far as the rules of ofScial decorum, propriety, 
 and obligation may require, without abandoning what he conceives 
 to be the true interest of the community, let him place himself in a 
 situalion in which he will experience no collision of opposite duties. 
 Let him not cling to the honor or emolument of an oflBce, whichever 
 it may be that attracts him, and content himself with defending the 
 injured rights of the people by obscure or indirect means. Let him 
 renounce a situation which is a clog upon his patriotism." 
 
 The effect upon the public mind of this ill-timed breach of offi- 
 cial decorum was such as we should naturally suppose it would be. 
 The thin disguise of the various signatures adopted by the secretary 
 of the treasury deceived only readers distant from the capital, and 
 them not long ; for Hamilton, besides betraying himself by the 
 power of his stroke, seems, in some passages, to have courted dis- 
 covery, — pushing aside the gauzy folds of the curtain, and all but 
 crjnng out. Behold, it is I, the administration! "Society" 
 applauded. The drawing-room eyed Jefferson askance. It could 
 not quite cut a secretary of state, but its bow was as distant as its 
 habitual deference to place and power would permit ; and to this 
 day, if indeed we can be said to have a drawing-room now, it has 
 loved to repeat the traditional disparagement. But the articles had 
 not the political effect which their ingenious author intended ; for, 
 while they emphasized Jefferson's position as the Republican chief, 
 they really — so Federalists themselves report — lowered Hamilton 
 in the view of the country. He lost that prestige of reserve and 
 mystery that gathers round a name associated in the public mind 
 
THE QUAEREL OP JEFFEESOK AND HAMILTON. 447 
 
 only with affairs of national magnitude, and subjects of general 
 importance. The people were not pleased to discover, in an adviser 
 of the president, a partisan, positive, vehement, ingenious, and 
 unjust, a coarse assailant of a name hallowed by its association with 
 the birthday of the nation. Hamilton lost something which is of 
 no value to an anonymous writer in a presidential "campaign," but 
 is of immense value to a public man, — weight. And, with all 
 this, he did not retard the development of the new-born opposition. 
 George Clinton received fifty electoral votes for the vice-presidency, 
 Jefferson four, and Burr one, to seventy-seven for Mr. Adams. 
 
 There was one man in the country who was great enough to do 
 justice to both these men, and to feel only sorrow for their dissen- 
 sions. How the president tried to reconcile them is a pleasing and 
 noble passage of his historj'. He wrote a kind, manl}'' letter to each 
 of them, employing similar arguments and several identical phrases 
 in both letters ; reminding them of the difEculties and dangers of 
 the country's position, encompassed as it was by avowed enemies 
 and insidious friends, and urging them to a more charitable Inter- 
 pretation of one another. 
 
 Both secretaries replied, as it chanced, on the same day, Septem- 
 ber 9, 1792. Hamilton owned that he had attacked his colleague 
 in the newspapers, and intimated, that, for the present, he could not 
 discontinue his assaults. He justified his conduct thus : " I hriotv 
 that I have been an object of uniform opposition from Mr. Jefferson, 
 from tlie moment of his coming to the city of New York to enter 
 upon his present office. I know, from the most authentic sources, 
 that I have been the frequent subject of the most unkind whispers 
 and insinuations from the same quarter. I have long seen a formed 
 party in the legislature under his auspices, bent upon my subver- 
 sion. I cannot doubt, from the evidence I possess, that the National 
 Gazette was instituted by him for political purposes ; and that one 
 leading object of it has been to render me, and all the measures 
 connected with my dejiartment, as odious as possible." These, how- 
 ever, were personal wrongs, which he had resolved to bear in silence. 
 But when he saw that a party had been formed "deliberately bent 
 upon the subversion of measures, which, in its consequences, would 
 subvert the government," then he had felt it to be his duty to 
 defeat the nefarious purpose by "drawing aside the veil from the 
 principal actors." 
 
448 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 Jeflferson's rop]y was long, vehement, and powerful. So far as it 
 was exculpatory of liimself, it was i:>erfectly successful ; but, at such 
 a moment, he must have been either more or less than man to have 
 been just to his antagonist. Nor is there any one now alive compe- 
 tent to say precisely how far he was unjust to him. AVho can tell 
 us to what point "treasury influence" may have influenced legisla- 
 tion, and how far Colonel Hamilton may have deemed it right and 
 legitimate to enlist the interests of men on the side of what he 
 called "government"? One thing we do know: the rule which 
 Jefferson prescribed for his own conduct as a member of the cabinet 
 is the true republican rule. "If," said he, "it has been supposed 
 that I have ever intrigued among the members of the legislature to 
 defeat the plans of the secretary of the treasury, it is contrary to 
 all truth. As I never had the desire to influence the members, so 
 neither had I any other means than my friendships, Avhich I valued 
 too highly to risk by usurpations on their freedom of judgment and 
 the conscientious pursuit of their own sense of duty." 
 
 This was the right view to take of the limits prescribed by the 
 spirit of the Constitution to his place. But, though we know Ham- 
 ilton gloried in holding an opposite opinion, we do not know how 
 far he carried his ideas in practice. That he interfered liah'ttuaXhj 
 in legislation, and was proud of his success in so doing, his letters 
 plainly reveal. Jefi'erson charges him with using his power as min- 
 ister of finance to control votes. "That I have utterly," writes the 
 secretary of state, " in my private conversations, disapproved of the 
 system of the secretary of the treasury, I acknowledge and avow ; 
 and this was not merely a speculative difference. Plis system 
 flowed from princijjles adverse to liberty, and was calculated to 
 undermine and demolish the republic, by creating an influence of 
 his department over the members of the legislature. I saw this 
 influence actuallj^ produced, and its first fruits to be the establish- 
 ment of the great outlines of his project by the A'otes of the very 
 persons, who, having swallowed his bait, were laying themselves out 
 to profit by his plans; and that had these persons withdrawn, as 
 those interested in a question ever should, the vote of the disinter- 
 ested majority was clearly the reverse of what they tuade it." He 
 accused his colleague, too, of defeating the system of favoring 
 French commerce and retaliating British restrictions, by cabals with 
 members qf Congress. 
 
THE QUAEREL OF JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON. 449 
 
 Another retort of Jefferson's gives pause to the modern inquirer. 
 Who can say with any thing like certainty, whetlier, in the passage 
 following, Mr. Jefferson uttered truth pure and simple, or truth 
 colored, distorted, and exaggerated by antipathy ? 
 
 " I have never inquired," said he, " what number of sons, relations, 
 and friends of senators, representatives, printers, or other useful 
 partisans, Colonel Hamilton has provided for among the hundred 
 clerks of his department, the thousand excisemen, custom-house offi- 
 cers, loan-oflBcers, appointed by him, or at his nod, and spread over 
 the Union ; nor could ever have imagined, that the man who has 
 the shuffling of. millions backwards and forwards from paper into 
 money, and money into paper, from Europe to America, and Amer- 
 ica to Europe, the dealing out of treasury secrets among his friends 
 in what time and measure he pleases, and who never slips an occa- 
 sion of making friends with his means, — that such a one, I say, 
 would have brought forward a charge against me for having 
 appointed the poet Freneau, translating clerk to my office, with a 
 salary of two hundred and fifty dollars a year." 
 
 A passage followed, in relation to this appointment, wliich had a 
 wonderful currency years ago, and is still occasionally revived. He 
 declared, that, in appointing Freneau, he had been actuated by the 
 motive which had induced him to recommend to the president for 
 public employment such characters as Kittenhouse, Barlow, and 
 Paine. " I hold it," he added, " to be one of the distinguishing 
 excellences of an elective over hereditary succession, that the talents 
 which Nature has provided in sufficient proportion should be 
 selected by the society for the government of their affairs, rather 
 than that this should be transmitted through the loins of knaves 
 and fools, passing from the debauches of the table to those of the 
 bed." 
 
 In conclusion, he said, that, as the time of his retirement from 
 office was so near (only six months distant), he should postpone any 
 public reply which he might deem it best to make to the Fenno 
 articles until he was a private citizen, — a period to which he looked 
 "with the longing of a wave-worn mariner, who has at length the 
 land in view, and shall count the days and hours which still lie 
 between me and it." Then he would be free to defend himself, 
 without disturbing the quiet of the president; but, if he did break 
 silence, he should subscribe his name to whatever he wyote. Con- 
 
450 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOISr. 
 
 scious, he said, of having merited the esteem of liis countrymen, which 
 he dearly prized, h}' an integrity which could not be reproached, and 
 by an enthusiastic devotion to their rights and to liberty, he " would 
 not suffer his retirement to be clouded by the slanders of a man 
 whose history, from the moment at which history could stoop to 
 notice him, was a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the 
 country which had not only received and given liim bread, but 
 heaped its honors upon his head." But during the short time he 
 had to remain in office, he should find. " ample employment in closing 
 the present business of the department." 
 
 This letter was written at Monticello. On his way to Philadel- 
 phia he stopped, as usual, at Mount Vernon, when the president 
 renewed the subject in conversation, and urged him to reconsider 
 his intention to refeign ; for he "tliought it important to preserve 
 the check of his opinions in the administration to keep things in 
 the proper channel and prevent them from going too far." The 
 check ! The check to what ? The president said he did not believe 
 there were ten men, worth consideration, in the country, who had so 
 much as a thought of transforming the republic into a monarchy. 
 Mr. Jefferson replied that there was " a numerous sect who had 
 monarchj'' in contemplation, of whom the secretary of the treasury 
 was one." The most intimate friend Hamilton ever had was Gou- 
 yerneur Morris, who pronounced his funeral oration. This exquisite 
 writer stated Hamilton's opinions at much length in 1811, in a 
 letter to Eobert Walsh of Piiiladelphia. The following are some of 
 Morris's expressions: "General Hamilton disliked the Constitution, 
 believing all republican government radically defective. , . . He 
 hated republican government. . . . He trusted, that, in the changes 
 and chances of time, we should be. involved in some war, which 
 might strengthen our union and nerve the executive. . . . He 
 never failed on every occasion to advocate the excellence of, and 
 avow his attachment to, monarchical government." The other 
 points of difference were gone over, but without lessening Mr. Jeffer- 
 son's passionate desire to retire from public life. But, on reaching 
 Philadelphia, friends insisted on his remaining in office with such 
 pertinacity, and offered reasons so cogent, that he knew not how 
 either to rebut or accept them. 
 
CHAPTEE XLVIII. 
 
 CAUSES. OF HIS DESIRE TO RESIGN. 
 
 No language can overstate his longing for retreat. Six months 
 before the Fenno assaults began, this had been the burden of his 
 letters to his family and friends. " The ensuing year," he wrote to 
 his daughter, in March, 1792, "will be the longest of my life, and 
 the last of such hateful labors : the next we will sow our cabbages 
 together." To other friends he said that the 4th of March, 1793, 
 was to him what land was to Columbus. He had sent to Scotland 
 for one of the new threshing-machines, and a plough of his invention 
 had recently won a medal in France. He had engaged mechanics 
 in Europe to work upon his house, and upon other schemes which he 
 had formed. He was packing his books in view of the termination 
 of the lease of his house in Philadelphia, and had arranged for one 
 of its inmates, " Jack Eppes," to enter William and Mary in the 
 spring. Schemes upon schemes were forming in his mind for extri- 
 cating his great estate from encumbrance, and turning its latent 
 resources to better account than could be expected from overseers. 
 But the attacks in the newspapers and tlae hostility of powerful 
 classes, though they intensified his desire for repose, seemed to 
 interpose a barrier which he could not pass. He was torn with con- 
 tending emotions. " I have been," he wrote to his daughter in 
 Januarj^, 1793, " under an agitation of mind which I scarcely ever 
 experienced before, produced by a check on my purpose of returning 
 home at the close of this session of Congress." Madison, Monroe, 
 Page, Randolph, all friends and all partisans, united in the opinion 
 that he must not give the Federalists the triumph of being able to 
 say, with an appearance of truth, that Hamilton had driven him 
 from office. He consented, at length, to remain a short time longer. 
 He sent most of his library home, sold the bulkier articles of his fur- 
 
 451 
 
452 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 niture, gave np his house, took three rooms in the suburhs, and 
 " held himself in readiness to take his departure for Monticello the 
 first moment he could do it with due respect to himself." Thus he 
 wrote to the father of " Jack Eppes," in April, 1793. 
 
 But why this agonizing desire for retirement? Thereby hangs a 
 tale. If we give ten reasons for a certain course of conduct, there is 
 often an eleventh which we do not give; and that unspoken one is 
 apt to be the reason. He could no longer aiFord to serve the public 
 on the terms fixed by Congress. It was not merely that his salary 
 did not pay the cost of his Philadelphia establishment, nor that his 
 estate was ill-managed by overseers. An ancient debt hung, as he 
 says, "like a millstone round his neck," — a debt which he had 
 twice paid, although not incurred by him. Upon the death of his 
 ■wife's father, twenty years before, he had received property from his 
 €state worth forty thousand dollars, but subject to a British debt of 
 thirteen thousand. Impatient of debt, he sold a fine farm near Mon- 
 ticello for a sum sufficient to discharge it ; but, by the time he 
 Teceived the money, the war of the Revolution had begun. Vir- 
 ginia invited all men owing money to Great Britain to deposit the 
 same in her treasury, the State agreeing to pay it over to the Brit- 
 ish creditor after the war. The identical coin w^hich Jefferson 
 received for his farm he himself carried to the treasury in Williams- 
 burg, where it was immediately expended in equipping troops. 
 
 The legislature of Virginia, however, thought better of this 
 policy, rescinded the resolution, and returned the sums received 
 under it. But Jefferson was obliged to take back his thirteen thou- 
 sand dollars in depreciated paper, which continued to depreciate 
 until it was worthless. In fact, the thirteen thousand dollars just 
 sufficed to buy him one garment; and in riding by that farm, in 
 after years, he would sometimes point to it, and say laughing, 
 *' That farm I once sold for an overcoat." At the end of the war, 
 during which Cornwallis destroyed more than enough of his prop- 
 erty to pay this debt, he had, as he remarked, " to lay his shoulders 
 to the payment of it a third time," in addition to a considerable 
 debt of his own, incurred just before the outbreak of hostilities. 
 "What the laws of Virginia," he wrote to his creditor in England, 
 "are, or may be, will in no wise influence my conduct. Substan- 
 tial justice is my object, as decided by reason, not hy authority or 
 comDulsion." Ever since the war closed, he had been struggling to 
 
CAtJSES OF niS DESIRE TO RESIGN". 453 
 
 reduce these debts, and finally made an arrangement for paying 
 them off at the rate of four hundred pounds sterling a year. How 
 easy this ought to have been to a person owning ten thousand acres 
 of excellent land, "one hundred and fifty-four slaves, thirty-four 
 horses, five mules, two hundred and fortj'-nine cattle, three hundred 
 and ninety hogs, and three sheep ! " But only two thousand acres of 
 his land were cultivated ; nine of his horses were used for the saddle; 
 and the labor of his slaves had been for ten years directed by over- 
 seers. In 1793 the greater part of the debt remained to he dis- 
 charged ; and he saw, whenever he visited Monticello, such evidences 
 of "the ravages of overseers" as filled him with alarm. He had 
 now a son-in-law to settle, a second daughter to establish, a moun- 
 tainous debt to pay, a high office to live uj) to, and an estate going 
 to ruin. Behold his eleventh, unuttered reason for the frenzy which 
 possessed him to live at home. 
 
 He might well desire to see the reign of overseers brought to an 
 end on his estate. Eeaders remember, perhaps, General Washing- 
 ton's experience with them. How, when he owned one hundred and 
 one cows, he was compelled to buy butter for his own, table ; and 
 how, after building one of the best barns in the country, where 
 thirty men could conveniently wield the flail, he could not prevent 
 his manager from treading out the grain with horses, — so impossible 
 was it, he says, " to put the overseers of this country out of the 
 track they have been accustomed to walk in." He reached home for 
 his annual vacation in 1793, about the middle, of September, and 
 caught this truly conservative gentleman in the act. "I found a 
 treading-yard," wrote the president, " not thirty feet from the barn- 
 door, the wheat again brought out of the barn, and horses treading 
 it out in an open exposure, liable to the vicissitudes of weather." 
 With such men to manage, the general thought the new threshing- 
 machine would have a brief existence. What need there was, then, 
 of the master's eye upon an encumbered estate ! 
 
 Jefferson settled to his work again in Philadelphia, and watched 
 for a good opportunity to resign. Through the good offices of the 
 president, a truce was arranged between the two hostile secretaries, 
 who tried their best to co-operate in peace, not without success. 
 Hamilton, in particular, was scrupulously careful to avoid the error 
 of interfering, or seeming to interfere, in his colleague's department. 
 At heart each felt the sincerity and patriotic intentions of the 
 
454 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON". 
 
 other, and Jeiferson had even an exaggerated idea of Hamilton's 
 ability. The elections, too, of 1792, had strengthened the Republi- 
 cans in Congress, who gained a decisive triumph in the first month 
 of the session, by defeating (thirty-five to eleven) a proposition to 
 allow members of the cabinet to attend the house of Represen- 
 tatives, and explain '■'■their measures" to the House. This made it 
 easier for Jefferson to continue. And, besides, the French Revolu- 
 tion, of late, had turned in arms upon the kings banded against it, 
 and seemed to be able, contrary to all expectation, to hold its own. 
 As yet nearly all America was in enthusiastic sympathy with 
 France. When the news arrived of a movement favorable to the 
 French, the "■ monocrats," as Jefferson styled the Oi^Aercrats, made 
 wry faces ; but the Republicans set the bells ringing, illuminated 
 their houses, and wore a tri-colored cockade in their hats. 
 
 The time was at hand when the youngest of the nations would 
 need in its government the best talent it could command, and, 
 above all, in the department which directed its intercourse with for- 
 eign nations. The French king had been dethroned, and was about 
 to be brought to trial, all the world looking on with ah interest diffi- 
 cult now to conceive. It stirred Jefferson's indignation sometimes, 
 to observe that mankind were more attentive to the sufferings of the 
 king and queen than to the welfare of the people of France. " Such 
 are the fruits," he once wrote, " of that form of government which 
 heaps importance upon idiots, and which the Tories of the present 
 day are trying to pneach into our favor." It pleased many of the 
 Republicans, however, to learn that Thomas Paine, one of themselves, 
 was exerting himself ably to save the king's life. Paine said in 
 the Convention, that "Louis Capet," if he had been slightly 
 favored by fortune, — if he had been born in a private station in 
 " an amiable and respectable neighborhood," — would have been, in 
 all probability, a virtuous citizen ; but cursed from the dawn of his 
 reason with ceaseless adulation, and reared in " brutal luxury," he 
 was a victim of monarchy, as well as the agent of its ill-working. 
 England, he reminded the Convention, had cut off the head of a 
 very bad Charles Stuart, only to be plagued, a few years after, with a 
 worse ; but when, forty years later, England had ha'nished the 
 Stuarts, there was an end to their doing harm in the world. 
 
 What a happy stroke was this in a French Assembly ! He followed 
 it up by oflering to accompany the fallen king to the only ally 
 
CAUSES OF HIS DESIEE TO EESIGN. 455 
 
 France then had, the United States, where the people regarded him 
 as their friend. "His execution, I assure you," said this master of 
 effective composition, ''will diffuse among them a general grief. I 
 propose to you to conduct Louis to the United States. After a resi- 
 dence of two years, Mr. Capet will find himself a citizen of America. 
 Miserable in this country, to which his absence will be a benefit, he 
 will be furnished the means of becoming happy in another." 
 
 There was a passage in this speech to which the bloody scenes 
 about to occur in Paris give a singular significance. Part of the 
 long period of re-action towards barbaric (i.e. ancient) ideas and 
 institutions, which began with the French guillotine, and from 
 which we are only now emerging, might have been spared mankind 
 if Thomas Paine could have spoken French as well as he wrote 
 English, and brought this warning home to the Convention with the 
 oratorical power of a Mirabeau'. " Monarchical governments," he 
 said, " have trained the human race, and inured it to the sangui- 
 nary arts and refinements of punishment ; and it is exactly the 
 same punishment which has so long shocked the sight and tormented 
 the patience of the people, that now, in their turn, they practise in 
 revenge upon their oppressors. But it becomes us to be strictlj' on 
 our guard against the abomination and perversity of monarchical 
 examples. As France has been the first to abolish royalty, let her 
 also be the first to abolish the punishment of death." In these 
 words spoke the humane spirit in which the French Revolution 
 originated. 
 
 The execution of the king, January 21, 1793, saddened every well- 
 constituted mind in Europe and America. It lessened the sympathy 
 of a vast number of persons with the revolution ; and all but the 
 most extreme republicans felt in some degree the infinite impolicy 
 of the act. Frgm that time the good-will of mankind for unhappy 
 France would have more sensibly diminished, but that the world in 
 arms seemed gathering for her destruction. 
 
 It was a mad time. The manager of a Philadelphia theatre 
 thought it opportune to revive the tragedy of Cato. Before the play 
 began, the company of actors sang upon the stage La Marseilhtlse, 
 when the whole theatre rose, and joined in the chorus. At the end 
 of each act this performance was repeated. Every evening after- 
 wards, as soon as the musicians entered the orchestra, a cry arose 
 for La Marseillaise, and no other music would be listened to. 
 
456 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON". 
 
 Usually some portion of the audience caught the fury of the piece, 
 and thundered out the familiar refrain. But as the guillotine con- 
 tinued its ravages, the enthusiasm decreased; and, instead of the 
 universal and deafening demand for the French hymn, there would 
 be, at length, only a score or two of voices from the gallery, all the 
 rest of the house sitting in grim silence. Finally, on a night long 
 remembered in the theatre, one defiant soul ventured to give the 
 usual sign of disapproval. Instantly the whole house burst into one 
 overwhelming hiss ; and never was the terrible piece played again. 
 Soon the new song of Hail Columbia took its place in popular regard, 
 and was, for some years, played at every theatre just before the ris- 
 ing of the curtain. 
 
 The change of government in France produced political complica- 
 tions with which the cabinet of General Washington had to deal at 
 once and practically. Questions of law and of finance, as well as of 
 opinion and sentiment, had to be, not only discussed, but rightly 
 decided under penalty of being drawn into the maelstrom of the war. 
 Our two " cocks," exasperated by previous encounters, were now 
 pitted against each other every day ; but they were under bonds to 
 keep the peace, and each was further restrained by the perils of the 
 situation. Hamilton, by himself, might have involved the country 
 in an entangling alliance with the powers hostile to the revolution. 
 Jefferson alone might have found it difficult to avoid a too helpful 
 sympathy with beleaguered, bewildered France. The result of their 
 antagonism was an honorable' neutrality, useful to France, not 
 injurious to the allies, and exceedingly profitable to the United 
 States. 
 
 How irreconcilable they were in their feelings respecting the great 
 events of 1793 ! " Sir," said Hamilton, in August, to Edmund Ran- 
 dolph, " if all the people in America were now assembled, and were 
 to call on me to say whether I am a friend to the French Revolution, 
 I would declare that I have it in abhorrence." Jefferson, on the 
 contraiy, wrote thus to his old friend Short, just before the execution 
 of the king : " Mj- own affections have been deeply wounded by some 
 of the martyrs to this cause ; but rather than it should have failed, I 
 would have seen half the earth desolated ! Were there but an Adam 
 and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better 
 than as it now is." 
 
 Gouverneur Morris was then American minister in France, — a 
 
CAUSES OF HIS DESIRE TO RESIGl<r. 457 
 
 very able gentleman and honorably frank in the avowal of his opin- 
 ions. ]\Iark this striking sentence, written by him as far buck as 
 J 1790 : " The French Assembly have taken genius instead of reason 
 ' for their guide, adopted experiment instead of experience, and wan- 
 j der in the dark because they prefer liglitning to light." He meant 
 / Mirabeau. But a few weeks after, writing to General Washington, 
 he gave such a list of the ancient abuses which the revolution had 
 abolished as amount to a compensation to France for all the revolu- 
 tionary miseries she has suffered from Mirabeau to Thiers. As the 
 revolution advanced, though Jefferson, in official instructions, had 
 cautioned him to avoid the utterance of opinions hostile to the revo- 
 lution, he gave such offence to the revolutionary leaders that Lafay- 
 ette complained of it to the president. But, in 1792, he redeemed 
 himself nobly. Upon the detlironement of the king, when all the 
 diplomatic corps left Paris, the American minister alone, rightly 
 interpreting his mission, remained. " The position," as he truly 
 wrote to Mr. Jefferson, "is not without danger; but I presume, that, 
 when the president did me the honor of naming me to this embassy, 
 it was not for my personal pleasure or safety, but to. promote the inter- 
 ests of my country." And he remained at his post all through the 
 period of the terror, though the ministry gave him pretext enough 
 for abandoning it, and though even the sanctuary of his abode was 
 violated by a committee in search of arms. The fury of the people, 
 he wrote to Mr. Jeff"erson, was such as to render them capable of all 
 excesses without being accountable for them. The calm courage 
 and utter frankness of this splendid old Tory conciliate the modern 
 reader. The French ministry, however, abhorred him to such a 
 point, that they made it a matter of formal complaint to Mr. Jeffer- 
 son, that this representative of a republic, in a despatch addressed to 
 the government of a republic (a few days old), had used the familiar 
 expression, " Les ordres de MA COUR." 
 
 But the cabinet question was this : The king being dethroned, 
 who was authorized to give a valid receipt for the money which the 
 United States was paying to France from time to time ? Upon this 
 point, the orders of Gouverneur Morris's court were necessary ; and 
 the real secret of the animosity of the French ministers was, tliat he 
 would not and could not pay over to them the sums due nominally to 
 the king. The ministers remonstrated in their own way, and sent 
 complaints across the sea. Morris, at his own table, and in the 
 
458 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 hearing of his servants, indulged himself in calling them a set of 
 damned rascals, and in predicting (lie was curiously fond of prophe- 
 sying) that the king would have his own again. Upon the pecu- 
 niary question, the opinions of the cabinet were divided. 
 
 Jefferson's opinion: Every people may establish what form of 
 government they please, and change it as often as they please. But 
 the National Assembly of France, to which all power had fallen by 
 necessity upon the removal of the king, had not been elected bj^ the 
 people of France as an executive body. For the moment, therefore, 
 the French government was, at best, incomplete. But a national 
 convention had been elected in full view of the crisis, and for the 
 express purpose of meeting its requirements. That convention 
 would be, when organized, a legitimate government, qualified to give 
 a valid receipt to the United States. 
 
 Hamilton's opinion : He doubted whether the convention would 
 be a legitimate body. In case the monarchy should be re-estab- 
 lished, the king might disallow payments made to it. He was for 
 stopping payment altogether until there was something more stable 
 and regular established in France. 
 
 On this occasion General Knox, secretary of war, ventured to 
 express an opinion. ''For once," says Jefferson, "Knox da^-ed to 
 differ from Hamilton, and to express very submissively an opinion 
 that a convention named by the whole body of the nation would be 
 competent to do any thing." The result was, that the secretary of 
 state was requested to write to Gouverneur Morris, directing him to 
 suspend payments until further orders. A few daj^s after arrived the 
 despatches in which the French ministry complained of the too can- 
 did Morris and of his insolent contempt of a sister republic in speak- 
 ing of "ma cour." Upon this delicate subject the president 
 conversed with the secretary of state in a manner which exhibits 
 the situation. 
 
 The President. The extracts from Ternant (French j^lenipo- 
 tentiary in Philadelphia) I consider very serious, in short, as decisive. 
 I see that Gouverneur Morris can be no longer continued there con- 
 sistently with the public good. The moment is critical in our favor 
 (that is for getting free-trade with the French West Indies and freer 
 trade with France), and ought not to be lost. Yet I am extremely 
 at a loss what arrangement to make. 
 
CAUSES OP HIS DESIRE TO EESIGIT. 459 
 
 Jeffekson". Might not Gouverneur Morris and Pinckney 
 (American minister in England) change places ? 
 
 The President. That would be a sort of remedy, but not a 
 radical one. If the French ministry conceive Gouverneur Morris to 
 be hostile to them, if they were jealous merely on his proposing to 
 visit London, they will never be satisfied with us at placing him in 
 London permanently. You have unfixed the day on which you 
 intended to resign ; yet you appear fixed in doing it at no great dis- 
 tance of time. In that case, I cannot but wish that you would go 
 to Paris. The moment is important. You possess the confidence 
 of both sides, and might do great good. I wish you could do it, 
 were it only to stay there a year or two. 
 
 Jeffersost. My mind is so bent on retirement, that I cannot 
 think of launching forth again on a new business. I can never 
 again cross the Atlantic. As to the opportunity of doing good, this 
 is likely to be the scene of action, as Genet is bringing ^^owers to do 
 the business here. I cannot think of going abroad. 
 
 The President. You have pressed me to continue in the public 
 service, and refuse to do the same yourself. 
 
 Jefferson. The case is different. You unite the confidence of 
 all America, and you are the only person who does so. Your ser- 
 vices, therefore, are of the last importance. But, for myself, my 
 going out would not be noted or known. A thousand others can 
 supply my place to equal advantage ; and, therefore, I feel myself 
 free. 
 
 The President. Consider maturely, then, what arrangement 
 shall be made. 
 
 Here the conversation ended. Mr. Jeiferson did not remind the 
 president of the vast difference in their pecuniary condition. He 
 did not remark that General Washington was so rich a man, that 
 not even the ravages of Virginia overseers could quite ruin him, but 
 that Thomas Jefferson could only continue to serve the public at the 
 imminent risk of financial destruction. 
 
 Meanwhile Genet was coming, — the first minister sent by the 
 Republic of France to the Republic of the United States. The 
 Republicans of the United States awaited his arrival with inexpressi- 
 ble ardor, and were prepared to give him one of those " receptions " 
 for which the country has since become noted, — receptions which are 
 
460 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 SO amusing and agreeable to all but the victim. Colonel Hamilton, 
 was by no means elevated at the prospect of his coming. At a 
 cabinet meeting a short time before the landing of the expected 
 minister, he had dropped this remark: "When Mr. Genet arrives, 
 whether we shall receive him or not will then be a question for 
 discussion." 
 
CHAPTER XLIX. 
 
 GENET COMING. 
 
 It seemed an odd freak of destiny that sent Edmond Genet, a 
 2')roterje of Marie Antoinette, to represent the Republic of France 
 in the United States. Gouverneur Morris, in liis neat, uncom- 
 promising manner, sums up this young diplomatist, aged twenty- 
 eight in 1793, as "a man of good parts and very good education, 
 brother to *the queen's first woman, from whence his fortune origi- 
 nates." Even so. He was a brother of that worthy and capable 
 Madame Campan, first yb//i??ie de chamhre to Marie Antoinette, and, 
 after the queen's death, renowned through Europe as the head of a 
 seminary for young ladies in Paris. It was she who wrote a hun- 
 dred circulars with her own hand because she had not money to get 
 them printed, and received sixty pupils the first year, — Hortense, 
 ere long, from Napoleon's own hand. 
 
 The father of this respectable, energetic family was, nearly all his 
 life, under the influence of English and American ideas and persons. 
 He lived in England many years, where he acquired familiar com- 
 mand of the English language, and a fond, wide acquaintance with 
 English literature. Upon returning to his native land he seems — 
 if we may judge from the long catalogue of his publications — to 
 have adopted it as a profession to make England known to France. 
 Beginning with two volumes of Pope's best letters in 1753, he con- 
 tinued to publish translations from the English, and original works 
 relating to England, until, in 1765, the list embraced twenty-two 
 volumes. A few years later, when he held the post of chief clerk 
 to the department of foreign affairs, he was in frequent intercourse 
 with Dr. Franklin, Silas Deane, Beaumarchais, and all the American 
 circle. His house, too, from 1765 to 1781, when he died, was one 
 of those agreeable haunts of men connected with literature and art 
 
 461 
 
462 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 which had, at that period, an eclat rivalling that of the great houses, 
 where Power in its cruder forms of wealtli and rank was represented. 
 From such a home, it was natural enough tlnit Henrietta Genet, at 
 fifteen, should be invited to fill the place of reader to Mesdames the 
 sisters of Louis XV., to be in due time advanced to a place of real 
 importance in the rcfjlnie of the period, — that of "first woman" 
 to the young queen. 
 
 Nor was her brother's career quite such a caprice of fortune as it 
 seemed. If, as a boy, he was noted in the palace for the warmth of 
 his republican sentiments, it was only that he was in the mode. 
 Did not the queen smile benignantly upon Franklin, and chat famil- 
 iarly with him while she held the cards waiting her turn to play ? 
 Who more distinguished at court than Lafayette, the stern republi- 
 can of nineteen? When the queen desired to give young Genet a 
 start in the diplomatic career, his grand republican sentiments were 
 rather a point in his favor than otherwise; and, at twenty-four, he 
 had reached a position in the diplomatic service to which only court 
 favor of the most irresistible description could have pushed so young 
 a man. He was secretary of legation at St. Petersburg ; whence, 
 according to Morris, he wrote in so republican a style, that his 
 despatches, read after the dethronement, made his fortune with the 
 chiefs of the Gironde, who named him ambassador to Holland, his 
 appointment bearing date November 14, 1792. 
 
 Suddenl}"- the programme was changed, for a reason never conjec- 
 tured till within these few months past. The Holland commission 
 was revoked in December, and M. Genet was appointed to represent 
 Prance in America. Genet, it appears, was at once a Girondist and 
 a grateful friend to his royal benefactors, whom he was now in the 
 habit of styling "Louis and. Madame Capet." The Girondists had 
 adopted the scheme proposed by Thomas Paine of sending this 
 hapless pair and their children to the United States ; and Genet, as 
 we are now assured, was selected for the purpose of promoting the 
 project. A well-known writer, who has made a particular study of 
 that period, and who apparently derived his information from the 
 American family of M. Genet, holds this language, and emphasizes 
 it by the use of italics : — 
 
 "M. Genet was selected for the mission to America, by the more 
 moderate republicans in France, because of his friendship with 
 the deposed monarch, and for the express purpose of conducting the 
 
GENET COMING. 463 
 
 imprisoned king and the royal family secretly to America. This 
 arrangement was entered into at a meeting of the leading Girond- 
 ists, at which our own Thomas Paine assisted ; and it was at that 
 meeting that M. Genet was tendered the mission, and accej^ted it, 
 playfully describing, in response, to what occupations such and such 
 of tlie roj'al exiles could be appropriated, on their arrival in Ameri- 
 ca." * 
 
 But it was no longer in the power of the more moderate republi- 
 cans to control the course of events. If France was mad, England 
 was not sane; and the man in England whose voice was mightiest, 
 who should have been the great tranquillizing influence of tlie hour, 
 was the maddest public man in Europe. " I vote for this (alien) 
 bill," said Burke in Parliament, about the time of Genet's appoint- 
 ment, "because I consider it as the means of saving my life and all 
 our lives from the hands of assassins. When they smile, I see 
 blood trickling down their faces : I see that tbe object of all their 
 cajoling is blood." How was the mighty fallen ! Here was genius 
 stooping to clothe in powerful language the imbecile panic of igno- 
 rance. The raving of Burke, by infecting the policy of England, 
 was among the influences in the French Convention that decided the 
 king's fate. Louis was exiled to the other world, instead of going 
 with Genet and Paine to the shores of the peaceful Delaware. A 
 few hours after the news of his execution reached London, the 
 British government, in effect, declared war against France ; and, as 
 soon as this intelligence reached Paris, February 1, 1793, France 
 declared war, in form, against England. 
 
 Thus began the bloodiest struggle the modern world has known, 
 whicb only ended after Waterloo. There was no pretext for the 
 war which will bear the light of to-day. All thrones, it is true, 
 were menaced in the fall of the French throne ; and no king felt so 
 sure of his head after January 21, 1793, as he had before tliat mem- 
 orable date. Here was motive enough for the king of England, but 
 not for the realm of Britain. The reason why Great Britain struck 
 France in 1793 was, as the world is now informed, because France 
 was weak. Such is the explanation given of the origin of this 
 infernal war by a work that speaks to foreign nations with an 
 
 * New York Historical Magazine for February, 1871, p. 143. Article by the 
 editor, H. P. Dawson. 
 
464 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 authority semi-official. Fr.ance was sorely afflicted, distracted, anar- 
 chic. "All Europe was now leagued against her. Within she was 
 divided hy faction, and without she was assailed by immense hosts 
 of the best disciplined soldiers of Europe, conducted by the most 
 skilful leaders, to whom she had nothing to oppose but an undisci- 
 plined multitude, led on by inexperienced chiefs. In this state of 
 things it seemed a safe measure to make war against her. To do 
 so was only to retaliate the conduct she had herself pursued when 
 she effected the dismemberment of the British Empire by assisting 
 our revolted Colonies." * Such is the nature of dj'nastic rule. 
 Such was that " British form," of which British Hamilton was so 
 enamoured. 
 
 It was from the frenzj' and delirium of all this that Citizen Genet 
 sailed in the frigate L'Embuscade for the United States. He had, 
 indeed, been ranked with the more moderate republicans ; but in 
 Februar}'', 1793, moderation was a quality unknown to the heart of 
 civilized man. He was a Frenchman ; he was a rei:)ublican ; he was 
 twenty-eight; he was bearing to America the news that England, 
 too, had sided in arms against his country. Long was this frigate 
 tossed upon the wintry deep. She was driven far to the south- 
 ward of her course, and the great tidings which she brought reached 
 President Washington before L'Embuscade was heard of at the 
 seat of government. 
 
 The genius for rectitude which General Washington possessed 
 was never so manifest as on this occasion. Passion spoke but one 
 voice. Here was our ally attacked by the great naval power of the 
 world because she seemed prostrate and helpless ! Here was France 
 threatened with dismemberment because she had helped us in the 
 crisis of our destiny ! Here was the king who warred upon Ameri- 
 cans, because they had demanded to govern America, presuming to 
 deny the right of Frenchmen to govern France ! Generosity, justice, 
 gratitude, pride, and even policy, appeared to call upon the two 
 republics to make common cause against the common foe. Was not 
 England the common foe? Did she not hold the United States by 
 the throat? What was the retention of the seven posts but sus- 
 pended war ? Such were the thoughts that naturally rose in the 
 minds of a vast majority of American citizens when the news was 
 
 * Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. v. p. 547. 
 
GEXET COMING. ' 465 
 
 circulated. The president had but to remain passive, he had but to 
 linger another mouth at Mount Vernon, and every vessel that could 
 have carried half a dozen guns and forty men would have been 
 afloat in quest of British prizes. And to this hour, if you will 
 imbue yourself with the spirit of that time, and shut out all tliose 
 larger and nobler considerations which alone should control the 
 decisions of a government, you will often find yourself ready to 
 exclaim. Oh that he had! 
 
 Then, there were treaties with France to be considered, — treaties 
 that seemed to many all the more sacred now because they were 
 made when France was powerful and we were weak. Knotty ques- 
 tions started up as men in 1793 read those two treaties of 1778, — 
 one of "Amity and Commerce," and the other of "Alliance," both 
 bearing the name of Franklin, both signed by dead Louis. By the 
 first, French men-of-war and French privateers might, and British 
 might not, bring their prizes into American ports. By the second, 
 the United States guaranteed " to his Christian Majesty the present 
 possessions of the crown of France in America." 
 
 General Washington was at Mount Vernon when Mr. Jefferson's 
 letter reached him, announcing the declaration of war between France 
 and England. All the peril of the crisis flashed upon his mind. 
 Its difficulties, too, occurred to him as he travelled post-haste to 
 Philadelphia ; and on his arrival he drew up, for the instant consid- 
 eration of the cabinet, a list of questions embracing the situation : 
 Shall we warn our citizens not to interfere in this contest ? Shall 
 we formally proclaim ourselves neutral ? Ought we to receive the 
 coming Genet ? And, if we ought, how ? Do our treaties with the 
 late king hold ? If we have the right to renounce or suspend the 
 treaties, is it best to do so ? Would it be a breach of neutrality to 
 consider the treaties still in operation? Supposing the treaties in 
 force, what precisely are the rights of France, and what precisely are 
 'our duties to France ? If the French royal family should send us 
 a representative, shall we receive him too ? Ought Congress to be 
 convened ? And, if it ought, on what grounds should the call be 
 placed ? 
 
 The cabinet met at the president's house on the following day, 
 April 19. Upon one of the questions there was a substantial una- 
 nimity^ of opinion : it was agreed to notify American citizens that 
 they could only join in the fight at their own peril. Mr. Jefferson^ 
 
466 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 however, prevailed so far as to keep the word '' neutrality " out of 
 the proclamation. He preferred that his country should not need- 
 lessly declare itself neutral in a contest concerning which its heart 
 hilew no neutrality. But on the otlier questions there was a 
 difference of opinion in the cabinet which could not sufficiently 
 argue itself in words spoken across the table of the president's office. 
 To warm debates, long written papers succeeded, in which Hamilton 
 displayed more of his fatal ingenuity than usual, and Jefferson all 
 the wisdom that comes of a man's central principle being sound. 
 The president's questions relating to Fra.nce resolved themselves, it 
 was found, into one, namely, Does the decapitation of Louis absolve 
 the United States from obligation contracted nominally with him ? 
 In other words, Are the treaties still valid ? Was it with France, or 
 with Louis, that Ave made them? Here is M. Ternant, the resident 
 French plenipotentiary, whose commission bears the king's signa- 
 ture ; and somewhere on the ocean is Citizen Genet, coming to 
 supersede him, whose commission has been issued neither by Louis 
 nor by his heir. 
 
 Shall we receive Genet? Of course, said, in substance, the two 
 E-epublicau members, Jefferson and Randolph. We musi, reluc- 
 tantl}' said the two Federalists, Hamilton and Knox. But how ? 
 As plenipotentiaries are usually received, or with reserves and 
 qualifications? It was in discussing this question that the two 
 fighting-cocks of the cabinet joined battle, and fought out their 
 difference. Hamilton's opinion was, that, before M. Genet was 
 admitted to an audience with the president, the government should 
 "qualify" that reception by declaring that the question of the 
 validity of the treaties was "reserved." In supporting this opinion, 
 he took the ground which George JII. had taken in making war 
 upon France : he presumed to sit in judgment upon the acts of the 
 French people. He arraigned the revolution ! "No proof," said 
 he, " has yet come to light sufficient to establish a belief that the 
 death of Louis is an act of national justice." He also said, " It 
 was from Louis XVI. tha^t the United States received those succors 
 which were so important in the establishment of their independence 
 and liberty. It was with him, his heirs and successors, that they 
 contracted their engagements, by which they obtained those precious 
 succors." Amplify these two statements to a vast eixtent ; support 
 them by a prodigious number of curiously subtle and remote rea- 
 
GENET COMING. 467 
 
 sons; throw in the usual citations from Vattel, Grotius, Wolf, and 
 Puffendorf ; add some remarks upon the danger of guaranteeing to 
 France islands that might he taken by the English, — and you have 
 the substance of Hamilton's paper upon the reception of Genet. 
 
 Jeifersou replied to it at much length. Besides giving his col- 
 league an ample supply of Vattel, Puffendorf, Grotius, and Wolf, 
 arranged in parallel columns, executed with singular neatness, he 
 favored him with some joassages of pure Jefferson, which have become 
 part and parcel of the diplomatic system of the United States. 
 
 "If," said Mr. Jefferson, ''I do not subscribe to the soundness of 
 the secretary of the treasury's reasoning, I do most fully to its inge- 
 nuity. ... I consider the people who constitute a society or nation 
 as the source of all authority in that nation ; as free to transact their 
 common concerns by any agents they think proper; to change those 
 agents individuallj^, or the organization of them in form or function, 
 whenever they please ; that all the acts done by these agents, under 
 the authority of the nation, are the acts of the nation, are obligatory 
 on them, and inure to their use, and can in no wise be annulled or 
 affected by any change in the form of the government or of the 
 persons administering it. Consequently, the treaties between the 
 United States- and France were not treaties between the United 
 States and Louis Capet, but between the two nations of America 
 and France ; and the nations remaining in existence, though loth 
 of them have since changed their forms of government, the treaties 
 are not a-nnulled by these changes." 
 
 He admitted, however, that, as there are circumstances which 
 sometimes excuse the non-performance of contracts between man 
 and man, so there are between nation and nation. " When perform- 
 ance, for instance, becomes impossible, non-performance is not im- 
 moral ; so, if performance becomes self-destructive to the party, the 
 law of self-preservation overrules the law of obligation to others. 
 For the reality of these principles, I appeal to the true fountains of 
 evidence, the head and heart of every rational and honest man. It 
 is there Nature has written her moral laws, and where every man 
 may read them for himself. He will never read there the permis- 
 sion to annul his obligations for a time or forever, whenever they 
 become dangerous, useless, or disagreeable." 
 
 It seems strange to us that principles like these could ever have 
 been subjects of debate in the cabinet of a president of the United 
 
468 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 States. The president's decision was, that Genet should be received 
 without qualification, that is, without insulting the authority that 
 commissioned him. As to the treaties, General Washington told 
 Jefferson that he had never had a doubt of their validity ; but, since 
 the question had been raised, he had thought it best to have it con- 
 sidered. 
 
CHAPTER L. 
 
 EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 The proclamation which announced to mankind that the duty 
 and interest of the United States required that they should "pursue 
 a conduct friendly and impartial towards the belligerent powers," 
 and warning American citizens to avoid all acts inconsistent with 
 that policy, was published on the 22d of April, 1793. On that very 
 day, as it chanced, news reached the government that L'Embuscade, 
 with Genet on board, had put into the port of Charleston, and that 
 the minister, wearied of his long voj^^age, would tempt the main no 
 more, but would send the frigate to Philadelphia, and perform the 
 journey himself by land. 
 
 The people of the United States were troubled with no scruples 
 in regard to Genet's commission. They gave him a reception like 
 that which, in recent years, astounded and deluded the Hungarian 
 Kossuth. It was on the 8th of April that L'Embuscade, of forty 
 guns and three hundred men, "Citizen Bompard " commanding, 
 cast anchor in the harbor of Charleston, forty-jSve days from Koche- 
 fort. M. Genet was so little identified with the extremists in 
 France, that, on his way to join his ship, he had been arrested on a 
 charge of being concerned in a plot to convey the Dauphin to the 
 United States. The ship, on the contrary, made extravagant profes- 
 sions of loyalty to the Kevolution. Her figure-head was a liberty- 
 cap. On her stern there was a carved representation of the same. 
 Her foremast was also converted into a liberty-pole by being crowned 
 with that emblematic artisle of attire. Around her mizzen-top was 
 a sentence to this effect : " We are armed to defend the rights 
 OF MAN." Her main-top bore the following: "Freemen, we are 
 YOUR BROTHERS AND FRIENDS." Her fore-top was a warning to 
 tyrants; "Enemies op equality, relinquish your principles, 
 
 469 
 
470 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 OR tremble!" Besides being thus decorated, she came into 
 Charleston Harbor with a British prize in her wake, a pleasing fore- 
 taste of the rich pickings to which the ocean invited men of enter- 
 prise who were also lovers of liberty. 
 
 Charleston was then a city of greater commercial importance than 
 it has been within living memory. Many French merchants resided 
 there. Amid the fetes, dinners, balls, receptions, which hospitable 
 Charleston exchanged with a frigate enthusiastic for liberty, these 
 French merchants thronged about Citizen Genet, full of zeal for 
 their country, and extremely desirous to display that zeal in the 
 profitable form of privateering. They were willing to fit out vessels 
 at their own expense : all they asked of Genet was authority. Only 
 give us commissions, said they, and we will do the rest. Citizen 
 Genet consulted Governor Moultrie on the subject. The governor, 
 a better soldier than lawyer, and probably not uninfluenced by the 
 prevalent ''exaltation," told him he "knew no law against it," but 
 begged, that, whatever he might do iu the way of commissioning 
 privateers, he would do without consulting farther the governor 
 of South Carolina. What could Genet desire more ? Two vessels, 
 bought and equipped by French merchants, manned in part by 
 Americans, were commissioned b}^ Citizen Genet ; and L'Embiiscade 
 used also to leave her anchorage in the morning, cruise off the har- 
 bor all day, and return to safety in the evening. Not a British 
 vessel dared stir. Citizen Bompard publicly offered a lieutenancy 
 in the French navy to any competent American who would engage 
 to pilot the frigate along the coast. He obtained a pilot on these 
 terms, and stood out to sea, returning to Charleston no more. 
 
 On her short passage to Philadelphia she captured two British 
 prizes, — a brig named the Little Sarah, and a valuable ship called 
 :the Grange. Seldom has staid Philadelphia known an afternoon of 
 such thrilling excitement as when these vessels cast anchor in the 
 Delaware, opposite one of the principal wharves. The frigate's 
 thundering salute of fifteen guns — one for each State — could only 
 be returned by two field-pieces on Market-street Wharf, and these 
 worked by volunteers ; but the cannonade sufficed to summon all the 
 movable population of the town to the river-side. The shipping was 
 dressed in flags and streamers. Cheers from the spectators saluted 
 the frigate as she glided past each dock, answered by cheers from the 
 *hip ; and when she had dropped her anchor, her crew swarmed up 
 
EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. 471 
 
 into the rigging, manned the tops and yards, and gave what a reporter 
 of the period stj'led "tliree or four concurrent cheers." The most 
 rapturous moment of all, according to Mr. Jefferson, was when the 
 Grange was descried with' the British colors upside-down and the 
 flag of France fl3'ing above them. The thousands and thousands of 
 the 3'eomanry of the city, he tells us, who crowded the wharves, 
 ** burst into peals of exultation." It was about five in the afternoon 
 when L'Embascade cast anchor. Every procurable boat put off to 
 her crowded with passengers, until tliere were as many Pliiladel- 
 phians on board as Frenchmen. Each boat-load, we are assured, was 
 welcomed with effusion. Pliiladelphia ''fraternized" with L'Erabus- 
 cade. ''I wnsh," said Jefferson, in a confidential letter to Monroe, 
 " we may be able to repress the people within the limits of a fair 
 neutrality." 
 
 Some days after arrived the Citizen Genet, not the plenipoten- 
 tiary, but one of the privateers which he had commissioned at 
 Charleston, bringing in two more prizes, both British. This was 
 cheering indeed. But now Citizen Genet himself was at hand. 
 Five weeks had elapsed since his landing at Charleston, — so many 
 dinners had he been compelled to eat, and so many ovations to 
 undergo, in the cause of libertj'. From Charleston to Philadelphia., 
 wherever there were people to make a demonstration, the people 
 were only too glad to demonstrate. Nay, more, merchants of Alex- 
 andria and Baltimore offered to sell to a beleaguered ally provisions 
 below the market price. Six hundred thousand barrels of flour were 
 offered Citizen Genet on terms more favorable than those granted to 
 the most favored customer. 
 
 On the 16th of May the rumor was spread abroad in Philadelphia, 
 that the representative of the French Republic was approaching the 
 city from the south. The bells of Christ Church rang out a peal of 
 welcome. By every road crowds hurried towards Gray's Ferry ; but 
 they were too late: Genet was so fortunate as to get over the river 
 and into the city, even to the City Tavern, before any great number 
 of the people could intercept him. A committee of seven distin- 
 guished Republicans, headed by the venerated Rittenhouse, had 
 been appointed to address the plenipotentiary on his arrival. This 
 committee, preceded by their chairman, marched toward the hotel, 
 three abreast, joined as they M'ent by other citizens, who also walked 
 in threes 5 until there was a long line of gentlemen trailing after the 
 
472 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFF.'CESON'. 
 
 committee. These entered the hotel, and were presented to M. 
 Genet, while a prodigious crowd filled the street, and rent the air 
 with cheers. The address was read. It was fortunate tlie min- 
 ister was familiar with the English language; for, being unpre- 
 pared for such a reception, he was obliged to reply extempore. 
 His 3'outhful appearance, his bearing, at once aifable and distin- 
 guished, the responsive warmth of his demeanor, and even the 
 French accent with which he spoke, all served to heighten the 
 enthusiasm. 
 
 " I am no orator," he began with faltering tongue, ''and I should 
 not at any time affect the language of eloquence. But even in 
 uttering the genuine and spontaneous sentiments of my heart, on an 
 occasion so interesting and so flattering, I experience some embar- 
 rassments, arising from my defective acquaintance with the language 
 in which I am about to speak. But this defect, I am certain, free- 
 men will readily excuse, if they are convinced of the sincerit}'' of the 
 sentiments which I shall deliver. I cannot tell you, gentlemen, how 
 penetrated I am by the language of the address to which I have 
 listened, nor how deeply gratified my fellow-citizens will be in read- 
 ing so noble an avowal of the principles of the Revolution of France, 
 and on learning that so cordial an esteem for her citizens exists in a 
 country for which they have shed their blood and disbursed their 
 treasures, and to which they are allied by the dearest fraternal senti- 
 ments and the most important political interests. France is sur- 
 rounded with difficulties: but her cause is meritorious; it is the 
 cause of mankind, and must prevail. With regard to j'ou, citizens 
 of the United States, I will declare openly and freely (for the minis- 
 ters of republics should have no secrets, no intrigues), that, from the 
 remote situation of America, and other circumstances, France does 
 expect that you should become a party in the war; but, remember- 
 ing that she lias alread3' combated for your liberties (and if it were 
 necessary, and she had the power, would cl^perfully again enlist in 
 vour cause), Ave hope (and every thing I hear and see assures me 
 our hope will be realized) that her citizens will be treated as brothers 
 ]n danger and distress. Under this impression, my feelings at this 
 moment are inexpressible ; and when I transmit your address to my 
 fellow-citizens in France, they will consider this day as one of the 
 happiest of their infant republic." 
 
 When M. Genet ceased to speak, the feelings of the auditors, if 
 
EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. 473 
 
 we may believe the newspapers of the day, were such as could not 
 be adequately expressed by shouts. Some natural tears were shed. 
 In response to the cheers from the street, M. Genet turned to a win- 
 dow, and delivered a short but most moving speech to the concourse 
 below. The committee then took " an affectionate leave," and all 
 the company withdrew "in peace and order;" " every man," adds a 
 reporter, " departing with this virtuous and patriotic satisfaction, 
 that he had, at once, testified his gratitude to a faithful ally in the 
 hour of her distress, and demonstrated his attachment to those 
 republican principles which are the basis of the American govern- 
 ment." 
 
 The next day Citizen Genet issued a general thanksgiving to the 
 people who had greeted him so cordially on his journey. He sent 
 also a formal replj' to the citizens' address of the day before. " My 
 conduct," he said in this reply, " shall be to the height of our 
 national political principles. An unbounded openness shall be the 
 constant rule of my intercourse with those wise and virtuous men 
 into whose hands you have intrusted the management of your public 
 affairs. I will expose candidly to them the great objects on which 
 it will be our business to deliberate; and the common interest of 
 both nations will, I have no doubt, be the compass of our direction; 
 for, without such a guide, what would become of both nations, 
 exposed, as we mutually are, to th-e resentment, the hatred, and the 
 treachery of all the tyrants of the earth, who, you may rest assured, are 
 at this moment armed, not only against France, but against liberty 
 itself?" 
 
 This was but the beginning of Philadelphia's entertainment of 
 the plenipotentiary. Deputation succeeded deputation ; dinner fol- 
 lowed dinner. First, the officers of the French frigate were invited 
 to a grand banquet, at which one hundred gentlemen assisted. The 
 Marseillaise was sung, of course, all standing, and all joining in the 
 chorus. In the midst of the effusive toast-giving, a delegation of 
 the "mariners of L'Embuscade " entered the dining-room; for at 
 this happy epoch sailors, too, were citizens and even fellow-citizens. 
 Such was the "effusion" of the hour, that Philadelphians were seen 
 " embracing" the mariners; and then again the whole company 
 burst into a patriotic song. A few 'days after. Citizen Borapard 
 entertained the Governor of Pennsylvania and a distinguished com- 
 pany on board the frigate, with the usual " hymns to liberty " and 
 
474 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOlSr. 
 
 toashs. Again the mariners bore a part, wliicli a reporter thus 
 describes : — 
 
 , " As the American citizens were preparing to leave the frigate, 
 Citizen Dupont, tlie boatswain, addressed them in the name of his 
 messmates, in a short speech replete with feeling, and nearly as fol- 
 lows : ' You see before you your friends the French. Several of us 
 have shed their blood to establish your liberty and independence. 
 We are willing, if necessary, to shed to the last drop of what 
 remains for the maintaining of that freedom, which, like you, we 
 have conquered. We are still your good friends and brethren; and, 
 if you should again want our assistance, we shall alwaj's be ready to 
 give you proofs of our attachment.' The governor answered this 
 artless- and energetic address by expressing his most sincere wishes 
 for the happiness of the French nation, and the success of the frigate 
 L'Embuscade." 
 
 Then came the grandest festival of all, — a banquet to M. Genet, 
 attended by two hundred gentlemen, tickets four dollars ! The 
 toasts, on this occasion, betray the touch of abler hands than those 
 which had penned the sentiments given at the other feasts. If Mr. 
 Jefferson did not indite some of these sentences for an anxious com- 
 mittee, they certainly bear a strong resemblance to some that occur 
 in his writings. The toasts contain the Ilepublican code of the 
 period : — 
 
 1. The people and the law. 2. The people of France : may they 
 have one head, one heart, and one arm in the support of the right- 
 eous cause of liberty ! 3. The people of the United States : may 
 liberty only be their idol, and freemen only be their brethren ! 
 4. The llepublics of France and America : ma}'' they be forever 
 united in tlie cause of liberty ! 5. May principles, and not men, be 
 the objects of republican attachment! 6. May France give an exam- 
 ple to tlie world, that the balances of a government depend more 
 upon knowledge and vigilance than upon a multifarious combination 
 of its power ! 7. In complaining of the temporary evils of revolu- 
 tions, may we never forget that the greater evils of monarchy and 
 aristocracy are perpetual ! 8. The spirit of sevent^'^-six and of ninety- 
 two : may the citizens of America and France, as the}' are equal in 
 virtue, be egual in success! 9. May true republican simplicity be the 
 
EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. 475 
 
 only ornament of the magistrate in every elective government ! 
 10. Confusion to the councils of the confederated despots, and dismay 
 to their hosts : may they never be able to form a centre of union or 
 of action ! 11. May France prove a political Hercules, and exter- 
 minate the Hydrse of despotism from the earth ! 12. Peace, liberty, 
 and independence: may the tyrants and traitors of all countries be 
 punished by the establishment of the happiness which tliey wish to 
 betray or destroy ! 13. May the systems of the United States be 
 entirely their own, and no corrupt exotic be ingrafted upon the tree 
 of libert}' ! 14. May the defects of individuals teach us to place our 
 hopes of the safety and perpetuity of freedom on the whole body of 
 the people ! 15. May the clarion of freedom, sounded by France, 
 awaken the people of the world to their own happiness, and the 
 tyrants of the earth be prostrated by its triumphant sounds ! 
 
 The reader observes that the toasts are fifteen in number ; the 
 recent adinission of Terrrressee -and Kentucky to the Union having 
 broken the spell long attached to the number thirteen. He also 
 remarks that principles are toasted, not men. The birthday of 
 George III. occurring during the same week, there was a banquet 
 on that occasion too, the toasts of which seem to have been designed 
 as a reply to this remarkable series. This feast derived additional 
 eclat from the recent marriage of the English minister, George 
 Hammond, to a young lady of Philadelphia. Four Georges were 
 toasted, — George III., George, Prince of "Wales, George Wash- 
 ington, and George Hammond ; and, to mark the contrast, a neat 
 sentiment was offered, more human and more wise than the repub- 
 lican ^oast at which it was aimed: "Men and principles: may 
 neither be forgotten, if deserving remembrance ! " The other toasts 
 were less brilliant than characteristic. One of them was as much 
 designed to single out Alexander Hamilton for honor as though he 
 had been mentioned by name : " The proclamation of neutrality : 
 may the heart that dictated and the head that proposed it live long 
 to enjo}^ the blessings of all true friends to humanity ! " Other 
 toasts were these: "All good Americans : may moderation be their 
 principle, neutrality their resolution, and industry their motto!" 
 " The cap of liberty ; but may those who wear it know there is 
 another for licentiousness ! " 
 
 In the mere matter of toasts, it must be owned, the republicans 
 of 1793 succeeded somewhat better than " the monocrats." For the 
 
476 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFEESOF. 
 
 moment it seemed as if all pettj' distinctions had melted away in 
 the fiery heat of the popular sympathy with France, encompassed, 
 as she was, by the armies of conspiring kings. And interesting it 
 is to note, that the events, which had united the American people 
 in sympatliy with France, had rallied the people of England to 
 their king's support. The declaration of war following instantly the 
 execution of Louis, appeared to destroy the prestige of the opposi- 
 tion, and to give the Tories the command of a congenial mob. 
 Thomas Paine, notwithstanding his adroit and courngeous effort to 
 rescue France and the republican cause from the dishonor of 2)ntting 
 the king to death, became odious in England. It was a kind of fash- 
 ion in country towns to burn him in effigy, — a ceremony in which 
 the county magnates and municipal officers joined with Sunday 
 schools and parish clerg3\ At, Bristol, for example, in February, 
 1793, there was a performance of this kind that is worthy of remem- 
 brance as a curiosity of human folly. 
 
 "The cavalcade," as the Bristol Journal exultingly relates, "pro- 
 ceeded through our principal streets in the following order :. Four 
 constables headed about one hundred of the biggest boys from their 
 Sunday schools, with colors and banners, having different mottoes, 
 as, 'God save the King,' 'Church and King,' 'King and Constitu- 
 tion,' ' Sunday Schools,' etc., decorated with blue and orange-colored 
 ribbons, and white staves in their hands. Then followed on foot 
 many hundreds of colliers, etc., belonging to several friendly socie- 
 ties or clubs, with blue cockades in their hats, large, elegant silk 
 colors, with their respective devices and mottoes in letters of gold. 
 After them followed twelve javelin-men, and the under and' high 
 sheriffs on horseback, the horses richly caparisoned. Next came 
 the prisoner, seated in a chair, drawn in a coal-cart guarded by 
 twenty-four constables, and dressed in a black-trimmed coat, white 
 waistcoat, Florentine breeches, white stockings, cocked hat, with a 
 French cockade, bag wig, etc. On his right hand stood the D — 1, 
 a well-made figure, about six feet high, with his left hand on Paine's 
 shoulder, and under his right arm a real fox. On Paine's left hand 
 sat a person in a clergyman's habit. The hangman followed on 
 horseback with his black axe, amidst the acclamation of such a 
 concourse of nobility to bring up the rear as, we believe, was never 
 before seen on the like occasion. They made a stand at the 
 •Exchange and Custom House, and sung God save the King, then 
 
EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. 477 
 
 proceeded to a place called Truebody's Hill, in their own parish, 
 where the figures were first hung on a gallows near thirty feet high, 
 and then burnt." 
 
 All of which was done, the editor states, without eliciting a dis- 
 sentient manifestation of any kind. Dr. Priestley, whose house 
 had been destroyed, and his library scattered over the land, by a 
 Tory mob the year before, now shared with his friend Paine the 
 honors of many a scene like that of Bristol. He was discovering 
 that Eugland was not a comfortable dwelling-place for a republican. 
 
 All went well with Citizen Genet as long as there was nothing to 
 be done but receive enthusiastic deputations, and assist at effusive 
 banquets. Those British prizes, too, did-not come amiss. Waging 
 war in the sacred cause of liberty is not arduous so long as the sea 
 swarms with unwarned prizes, and there are no hard knocks to risk 
 in taking them. It was .not until M. Genet read the president's 
 proclamation of , neutrality, that he experienced a premonitory 
 chill. He thought the president should have waited to hear what 
 lies had to communicate before taking a step so decisive. It was at 
 Richmond that he read the proclamation ; and Governor Henry Lee 
 endeavored to convince him, that, in adopting the policy of neutral- 
 ity, the president had served France. Genet seemed to acquiesce ; 
 but he thought the safety of the United States depended on the 
 success of France in the war. If, said he, the Bourbons are restored, 
 the kings of Europe will unite to crush liberty in the United States. 
 On his arrival at Philadelphia he heard that the president of the 
 United States, a few days before, had gone to the length of admit- 
 ting to a private audience two emigres of the most pronounced quali- 
 ty, the Vicomte de Noailles and M. Talon. M. de Noailles had 
 served in the American war, by the side of Lafayette, under Wash- 
 ington's own eye, and had been among the most decided republicans 
 in France, until terror had pi'ecipitated the Hevolution into chaos 
 and massacre. Then he had resigned his rank in the army, and 
 became an emigre. M. Talon had actually assisted the king's 
 flight, and escaped to America only after lying in close concealment 
 for many weeks. And these men had been admitted to a ^jy^v'ya^e 
 audience ! M. Genet was losing his head ; else he would have felt 
 how particularly welcome both these gentlemen must have been 
 to General Washington, and what a claim one of them had to 
 cordial recognition from a president of the United StatQj|^ 
 
478 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 Citizen Genet stood at length in the impassive, and perhaps 
 sliglitly austere, presence of General Washington. He observed 
 that the room was decorated with what he was pleased to style 
 " medallions of Capet and his farailj^," then regarded in France as 
 emblematic of the most extreme " re-action." M. Genet, who owed 
 his advancement to the favor of " Madame Capet," had reached such 
 a pitch of exaltation as to be, as he said afterwards, " extremely 
 wounded " at this exhibition. Controlling his feelings, however, the 
 plenipotentiary made his bow, and delivered a speech, conceived in a 
 stjde of magnanimity which is inexpensive, indeed, but congenial to 
 the " Latin " mind. " We know," said he in substance, " that, under 
 present circumstances, we have a right to call upon the United States 
 for the guaranty of our West India islands. But we do not desire 
 it. We wish you to do nothing but what is for your own good, and 
 we will do all in our power to promote it. Cherish your own peace 
 and prosperity. You have expressed a willingness to enter into a 
 more liberal treaty of commerce with us. I bring full powers to form 
 such a treaty, and a preliminary decree of the National Convention 
 to la}' open our country and its colonies to you for every purpose of 
 utility, without your participating in the burden of maintaining and 
 defending them. We see in you the only people on earth who can 
 love us sincerely, and merit to be by us sincerely loved." 
 
 In short, as Mr. Jefferson remarked at the time, " he offers every 
 thing, and asks nothing." The president responded to thjs effusion 
 in a manner which was not pleasing to M. Genet. Warmly as he 
 spoke of the friendship of the people of the United States for France, 
 he said nothing of the Revolution. Not a revolutionary sentiment, 
 as M. Genet complained, escaped his lips, " while all the towns from 
 Charleston to Philadelphia had made the air resound with their most 
 ardent wishes for the French Republic." 
 
 Tiie president may well have been somewhat graver than usual 
 during this interview. The spectacle of the British ship Grange, 
 with the British colors reversed, and the glorious flag of France flying 
 over them, was thrilling to the republicans of Philadelphia ; but Mr. 
 Hammond, the British minister, did not find it agreeable. Several 
 days before Genet's arrival he had sent in a remonstrance. Many of 
 the sweet hours of his honeymoon he was obliged to spend in writing 
 memorials and despatches, and in toying with Vattel, Wolf, Grotius, 
 and Puff€JJi%)rf. He was a polite but urgent and strenuous diplo- 
 
EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. 479 
 
 matist ; who, as Mr. Jefferson remarked, " if he did not get an 
 answer in three days or a week, would goad a secretary of state with 
 anotlier letter." He demanded the surrender of the Grange to her 
 owners. He objected to the proceedings of M. Genet, and required 
 the surrender of all the prizes taken in consequence of those proceed- 
 ings. He complained that a French agent was buying arms for 
 France in the United States. These demands had been most anx- 
 iously considered by the president, and debated in the cabinet by 
 Hamilton and Jefterson with a warmth and pertinacity worthy of 
 the importance of the crisis. A crisis we may well stjde it ; for, in 
 truth, the independence of an infant nation was never so menaced 
 as that of the United States was then, and the moral questions 
 involved presented real difficulties. The passion of the country was 
 to help France ; but that involved war with two j)owers, each of 
 which had the United States at a disadvantage. England retained 
 the seven posts, and was mistress of the sea. Spain held Florida 
 and the mouth of the Mississipj:*!, which gave her ascendency over 
 the Creek Indians, the most numerous, powerful, and warlike system 
 of tribes in North America. As the ancient alliance between France 
 and Spain had been dynastic only, not national, the Revolution had 
 dissolved it, and thrown Spain into the coalition of kings. The 
 Creeks were already threatening the frontiers. The mouth of the 
 Mississippi, never too wide open for the convenience of Kentuckians, 
 showed symptoms of closing tight to American commerce ; and the 
 tone of the Spanish government in its intercourse with that of the 
 United States was such as usually precedes the invention of a pre- 
 text for open hostility. 
 
 In these circumstances President Washington could see but one 
 Course, which was sanctioned both by prudence and morality, — 
 absolute neutrality. The country was shut up to that policy. The 
 government could not be said to have a choice ; because, even if it 
 had been shown that the United States were morally bound to help 
 France in her dire and pitiable extremity, it was manifest that the 
 United States were powerless to do so by arms. No man saw this 
 more clearly than Jefferson. The difference between him and Ham- 
 ilton was this : Hamilton's sympathies were wholly and warmly with 
 the coalition of kings, and Jefferson's with the French people. Both 
 accepted neutrality as a necessity of the case, and both with reluc- 
 tance : Hamilton because he longed to help England ; arJjjJfefferson, 
 
480 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 because he yearned to help France. In every question that came up, 
 therefore, Jeiferson desired to do as much, and Hamilton as little, to 
 oblige and gratify France, as Vattel, the treaties, and eternal justice 
 would permit. Between them sat Washington, a just man, who 
 Leccaise his inclination was toward France, was all the more on his 
 guard against any influence favoring that side. 
 
 First Question. — Shall we give up the ship Grange? Yes; 
 because she was taken when lying at anchor off Cape Henlojoen, 
 within the jurisdiction of the United States. Genet was requested 
 to surrender her accordingly. 
 
 Second Question. — Is it right and lawful for our citizens to sell 
 arms to agents of France ?" It is. They may sell to either power. 
 "Our citizens," wrote Jefferson to Hammond, "have always been 
 free to make, vend, and export arms. It is the constant occupation 
 and livelihood of some of them. To suppress tlieir callings, the only 
 means perliaps of their subsistence, because there is a war existing 
 in foreign and distant countries, in which we have no concern, would 
 scarcely be expected. It would be hard in principle and impossible 
 in practice." But if any of these American arms are taken on their 
 way to a belligerent port, the American vender has no redress. 
 
 Third Question. — May privateers be fitted out, manned, or 
 commissioned in American ports? Decidedly not. No citizen of 
 the United States may enlist under either flag. Besides the duty 
 we owe to other nations, " our wish to preserve the morals of our citi- 
 zens from being vitiated by courses of lawless plunder and murder" 
 would induce us to use all j)roper means to prevent this " with good 
 faith, fervor, and vigilance." 
 
 Fourth Question. — Well, then, ought we to surrender the 
 prizes which Genet's Charleston privateers have brought in ? On 
 this point the difference between Hamilton and Jefferson was irrecon- 
 cilable. Hamilton thought that the commissioning of those vessels 
 by Genet was an affront and a wrong to tlie United States, for which 
 apology and reparation should be demanded from Fi-ance. It was his 
 opinion also, that, since the jjrivateers were unlawfully commissioned, 
 the captures were unlawful, and should be restored by the United 
 States. Jefferson contended, that, although Genet's conduct toward 
 the United States was improper, yet he had a right to issue commis- 
 sions totf»Lvateers. Genet had done a right thing in a wrong place. 
 
EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. 481 
 
 Tbe commissions, therefove, were valid, notwithstanding the offencft 
 against the United States ; and hence tlie captures were hiwful, and 
 might be retained. Edmund Randolph, the attorney-general, gave 
 an ingenious opinion, to this effect: The French may lawfully sell 
 their prizes, but the privateers themselves cannot remain in Ameri- 
 can ports. They must be ordered awa}^, not to return to the United 
 States ''until they should have been to the dominions of their own 
 sovereign, and thereby purged the illegality of tlieir origin." This 
 opinion was the one which the president adopted. Genet was noti- 
 fied of the President's conclusion, and informed that he was expected 
 to act in accordance therewith. The prizes he might sell, but the 
 privateers he must order away. 
 
 Fifth Question. — M. Genet asked, as a favor to his belea- 
 guered country, that the United States should advance some instal- 
 ments of its debt to France, which he proposed to send home in the 
 form of produce. Hamilton advised that this request be bluntly 
 refused, without a word of explanation. Jefferson's opinion was, 
 that the request should be complied with so far as it could be done 
 lawfully; and if it could not be done lawfully, then tlie refusal 
 should be explained so far as it could be without compromising the 
 credit of the United States. It was found that the debt could not 
 be advanced without violating both the letter and the spirit of the 
 law; that is, without borrowing at six per cent to pay a debt at five. 
 Mr. Jefferson's advice was followed. 
 
 M. Genet was shocked and amazed at the course of the adminis- 
 tration. His reception had bewildered him. Though belonging to 
 a nation given to "demonstrations," he was as completely deceived 
 as Kossuth was ; and he was the more misled because he had just 
 come from a country where the people and the government had been, 
 for years belligerent powers. The United States, he concluded, had 
 a Capet! Interpreting America by the light of France, he fell 
 naturally into the delusion, that though he was, as a matter of form, 
 accredited to the president of the United States, yet it was with the 
 people of .the United States, the Sovereign People, that he really 
 had to do. The ship Grange, indeed, he gave up, though not with- 
 out a wry face, nor without making a merit of the act. When, 
 however, Mr. Jefferson informed him that he was expected to send 
 away the privateers to purge the illegality of their origin, he merely 
 shrieked. And yet there was some method in his shriek. ^,. It was a 
 31 J| 
 
482 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 shriek of insulting defiance which alone would have justified the 
 president ia asking his recall. 
 
 *'If," wrote Genet, "our merchant vessels or others are not 
 allowed to arm themselves, when the French alone are resisting the 
 league of tj^rants against the liberty of the people, they will be 
 exposed to inevitable ruin in going out of the ports of the United 
 States, which is certainlj'- not the intention of the people of Ameri- 
 ca. Their fraternal voice has resounded from every quarter around 
 me, and their accents are not equivocal; they are as pure as the 
 hearts by whom they are expressed ; and the more they have 
 touched my sensibility, the more I wish, sir, that the Federal gov-, 
 ernment should observe as far as in their power the public engage- 
 ments contracted by both nations ; and that by this conduct, they 
 will give, at least to the world, the example of a true neutrality, 
 which does not consist in the cowardly ahandonment of their 
 friends in the moment when danger menaces them, but in adhering 
 strictly, if they can do no better, to the obligations they have con- 
 tracted with them." 
 
 And soon after, when he learned that two Americans who had 
 gone privateering in the Citizen Genet were in prison awaiting 
 trial for the offence, he shrieked again. The crime laid to their 
 charge, he said, was one which his pen almost refused to state, and 
 which the mind could not conceive. Their crime was serving 
 France, and "defending with her children the common glorious 
 cause of liberty." With both treaties open before him, he declared, 
 and kept declaring, that the United States were bound by treaty to 
 permit the equipping of ^Jrivateers in American ports, and to allow 
 all citizens who chose to take service in them. There is not a 
 word in either treaty which gives support to the position. 
 
 This was bad diplomacy, even for a tyro ; nor did it promote any 
 of M. Genet's objects. Mr. Hammond might well congratulate 
 himself upon having such a competitor. The president's conduct, 
 on this occasion, would have been exquisite art, if it had not been 
 simple truth and fidelity. After listening to many a hot discussion 
 in the cabinet between Jefferson and Hamilton on the questions of 
 international law at issue, he resolved to refer the whole subject of 
 the rights and duties of neutrals, and the true interpretation of the 
 French treaties, to the judges of the Supreme Court, summoned 
 expressly for that purpose. Twenty-nine questions were drawn up 
 
EDMOND GEiSTET IN" THE UNITED STATES. 483 
 
 for tlieir consideration, which covered the whole field of inquiry. 
 But, as the solution of so many problems would take time, the 
 entire fleet of privateers and prizes, seven vessels in all, were 
 ordered not to depart, "till the further order of the president." 
 M. Genet would have done better to sell his prizes while he could. 
 
 "Never, in my opinion," wrote Jefferson to Madison, July 8, 
 1793, " was so calamitous an appointment as that of the present 
 minister of France here. Hot-headed, all imagination, no judg- 
 ment, passionate, disrespectful, and even indecent toward the 
 president, in his written as well as his verbal communications, 
 before Congress or the public they will excite indignation. He 
 renders my position immensely difficult. He does me' justice per- 
 sonally; 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, so that he is incapa- 
 ble of correcting himself" 
 
 When these words were written. Citizen Genet was "breaking 
 out" in a manner unexampled in the annals of diplomacy. Not by 
 words onl}^, but by an open and unequivocal act, he had resolved to 
 defy the administration ! Among the prizes captured by L'Embus- 
 cade was a vessel named the Little Sarah, then lying in the Dela- 
 ware, within a mile or two of the president's house. After having 
 been most distinctly and at great length informed by Mr. Jefferson, 
 officially, that no vessel could lawfully be equipped in a port of the 
 United States for a purpose hostile to a nation at peace with the 
 United States, M. Genet changed the name of the Little Sarah to 
 Le Petit Deraocrate, jjierced her for fourteen guns, armed and 
 equipped her for a cruise, placed on board of her a crew of one 
 hundred and twenty men, and was about to send her to sea. This 
 act was the more flagrant because it was done while the president 
 was absent at Mount Vernon. Colonel Hamilton, who was the first 
 officer of the government to discover the project, caused the gover- 
 nor of Pennsylvania to be notified. Governor Mifilin, Eepublican 
 as he was, gave orders on the instant (it was late Saturday evening, 
 July 6) to call out a body of militia to prevent the Little Democrat 
 from sailing. The secretary of the State of Pennsylvania, Mr. G. 
 J. Dallas, another Eepublican, suggested, that perhaps M. Genet 
 would be found accessible to reason, if he were approached in a 
 friendly spirit. Before summoning the militia, therefore, Mr. 
 
484 LIFE OF THOJIAS JEFFERSOK. 
 
 Dallas was requested to try the effect of argument and persuasion 
 upon the mind of the plenipotentiary. 
 
 M. Genet and Mr. Dallas met at eleven o'clock on Saturday even- 
 ing, at M. Genet's house. They talked till midnight, or, rather, 
 M. Genet stormed till midnight. He utterly refused to detain the 
 vessel, ending with these words : " I hope no attempt to seize her 
 will be made ; for, as she belongs to the republic, she must defend 
 the honor of her flag, and will certainly repel force by force." 
 
 Early on Sunday morning Mr. Jefferson, at his house on the 
 Schuylkill, received a despatch from the governor to the effect that 
 the vessel was to sail that day, and requesting him to detain her at 
 least until the president's return, which was expected on Wednes- 
 day. An hour or two later Mr. Jefferson was at Genet's house, 
 listening to a repetition of the tempest with which Mr. Dallas had 
 been favored the night before. But Jefferson knew his man. "I 
 found it necessary," he records, " to let him go on, and, in fact, 
 could do no otherwise ; for the few efforts which I made to take some 
 part in the conversation were quite ineffectual." The storm showed, 
 at last, some signs of abating, when the angry diplomatist said that 
 as soon as the president arrived he meant to ask him to convene 
 Congress. Mr. Jefferson availed himself of the lull to give him a 
 little elementary instruction in the nature of constitutional govern- 
 ment. He explained to him how it was that Congress could have 
 no voice in the questions which had arisen, since thej'- belonged to 
 the executive department of the government. " If Congress were 
 sitting," said the secretary of state, " they would take no notice of 
 them." " Is not Congress the sovereign ? " asked Genet. " No," 
 replied Jefferson : "Congress is sovereign in making laws only; the 
 executive is sovereign in executing them, and the judiciary in con- 
 struing them when they relate to their department." " But," said 
 Genet, "at least Congress is bound to see that the treaties are 
 observed," Again Mr. Jefferson set him right. No, said he, the 
 president is to see that treaties are observed. " If," asked Genet, 
 " he decides against a treaty, to whom is a nation to appeal ? " 
 "The Constitution," replied Jefferson, "has made the president the 
 last appeal." 
 
 This idea, which was new to l;he plenipotentiary, seemed to him 
 utterly preposterous. He bowed to Mr. Jefferson, and said that he 
 " would not make him his compliments upon such a Constitution ! " 
 
EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. , 485 
 
 He expressed the utmost astonisliment at it ; and the contemplation 
 of such an absurdity was so amusing as to restore him to good- 
 humor. Mr. Jefferson seized the happy moment to expostulate with 
 him on the impropriety of his conduct. Genet took it in good part. 
 "But," said he, '^ I have a right to expound the treaty on our side ! " 
 " Certainly," replied Jefferson, "each party has an equal right to 
 expound their treaties. You, as the agent of your nation, have a 
 right to bring forward your exposition, to support it by reasons, to 
 insist on it, to be answered with reasons for our exposition where it 
 is contrary ; but when, after hearing and considering j'^our reasons, 
 the highest authority in the nation has decided, it is 3'our duty to say 
 you think the decision wrong, that you cannot take upon yourself to 
 admit it, and will represent it to your government to do as they 
 think proper; but, in the mean time, you ouglit to acquiesce in it, 
 and to do nothing within our limits contrary to it." 
 
 M. Genet, inexperienced as he was in the diplomatic art, could 
 not object to this statement. His silence appearing to give assent, 
 Mr. Jefferson came to the point, and pressed him to detain the Little 
 Democrat till the president's return, " Why detain her ? " asked 
 Genet. "Because," replied Jefferson, "she is reported to be armed 
 with guns acquired here." No, said Genet, the guns are all French 
 property. Mr. Jefferson, however, insisted that the vessel should 
 not sail, and said that her departure " would be considered a very 
 serious offence." After some hesitation, M. Genet, partly by words, 
 partly by look and gesture, intimated to Mr. Jefferson tliat the Little 
 Democrat, not being yet ready for sea, would not sail till the presi- 
 dent's return. " But," said he, " she is to change her position, and fall 
 down the river to day." " What," asked Jefferson, " will she fall 
 down to the lower end of the town ? " M. Genet's reply was : " I do 
 not know exactly where, but somewhere there for the convenience of 
 getting ready some things; but let me beseech you not to permit any 
 attempt to put men on board of her. She is filled v^nth high-spirited 
 patriots, and they will unquestionably resist ; and there is no occasion, 
 for I tell you site will not he ready to depart, for some time." 
 
 Mr. Jefferson said he would then take it for granted that the 
 vessel would not be ready before the president's return ; and, in the 
 mean time, the government would make inquiries into the facts of her 
 armament, for the president's information. He immediately reported 
 this conversation to the governor, who dismissed the militia called 
 out in the morning. 
 
486 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 The next day there was a cabinet meeting on the subject at the 
 State House, the governor having asked advice as to tlie steps he 
 should take in the absence of the president. The governor informed 
 the secretaries that two of the Little Democrat's new cannon had 
 been, as he had good ground for believing, bought in Philadelphia. 
 Colonel Hamilton and General Knox advised that a battery should 
 be thrown up on Mud Island, and manned by militia ; and, if the 
 vessel should attempt to leave before the pleasure of the president 
 should be known, she should be prevented by force. Jefferson dis- 
 sented. He dissented strongly ; and he has left us the reasons of his 
 dissent, expressed with a blending of dignity and i:)assion, of lawyer- 
 like coolness and philanthropic fire, which speak to us both of the 
 man and the time. He was satisfied, he said, that the vessel would 
 not sail until the arrival of the president, who was known to be but 
 forty-eight hours distant ; and it was not respectful to him to resort 
 to a measure so unusual and so extreme, when he was so near at 
 hand. The erection of the battery, too, vi^ould probably cause the 
 departure it would be designed to jirevent ; and the vessel would 
 sail, after having added blood to the other causes of exasperation. 
 Blood usually closed the hearts of men and nations to peace. 
 Besides, a French fleet of twenty men-of-war and a hundred and 
 fifty merchant vessels was hourly expected in the Delaware : it might 
 arrive at the scene of blood in time to join in it. And if the Little 
 Democrat should sail to-day, how easily we could explain the matter 
 to the belligerents ! How capable of demonstration our innocence ! 
 And suppose there are fifteen or twenty Americans on board of her: 
 are there not ten times as many Americans on board English vessels, 
 impressed in foreign ports ? Are we as ready and disposed to sink 
 British ships in our harbors as we are to fire upon this French ^ssel 
 for a breach of neutrality far less atrocious ? How inconsistent for 
 a nation, which has been patiently bearing for ten years the grossest 
 insults and injuries from their late enemies, to rise at a feather 
 against tlieir friends and benefactors ; and that, too, at a moment 
 when circumstances have knit their hearts together in a bond of the 
 most ardent affection ! And how monstrous to begin a quarrel by 
 an act of war ! England wrongs us deeply and essentially ; we 
 negotiate ; we submit to the outrage of her insolent silence ; but let 
 one excited Frenchman do us an injury wliich his government would 
 instantly disavow, and we are ready to precipitate a war ! 
 
EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. 487 
 
 " I would not/' said Jefferson, " gratify the combination of kings 
 witli the spectacle of the only two republics on earth destroying 
 each other for two cannon ; nor would I, for infinitely greater cause, 
 add this country to that combination, turn the scale of contest, and 
 let it be from our hands that the hopes of man received their last 
 stab." 
 
 The battery was not erected upon Mud Island. The Little Dem- 
 ocrat dropped down the river as far as Chester, where she lay at 
 anchor until the president's return to the seat of government. As 
 soon as the president could master the facts of the situation, he 
 caused M. Genet to be informed, that, since all the questions in dis- 
 pute were referred to the judges, ''it was expected" that the Little 
 Democrat, as well as the other prizes and privateers, would remain 
 where thej'' were until further notice. "Within three days after the 
 date of this communication Le Petit Democrate put to sea. It was 
 then that the administration, formally and distinctly assuming the 
 responsibility of all the damage she might do the belligerents, 
 adopted the doctrine of international obligation which has recently 
 been applied, with such happy and hopeful results, to the case of the 
 Alabama. Mr. Jefferson officially notified M. Genet, that, in case 
 the Little Democrat made any prizes, the government of the United 
 States held itself bound to restore the same or to compensate the 
 owners, " the indemnification to be reimbursed by the French 
 nation." 
 
 M. Genet behaved like a man who has crossed the Rubicon, and 
 means to press on to mastery or destruction. It was evident that 
 he was bent upon fully executing his threat of appealing to the 
 people. Besides assisting to form Jacobin clubs in the Atlantic 
 cities, distributing considerable sums of money for the purpose ; 
 besides organizing a troop of mounted Frenchmen with whom he 
 paraded Philadelphia on festive days; besides playing other pranks 
 of the same histrionic nature, — he continued to defy and frustrate 
 the government in its resolve to hold the balance even between the 
 warring powers. Other vessels, in New York and Baltimore, he 
 was getting ready for cruising in quest of British prizes. He was 
 still intent upon organizing an expedition in Kentucky for an 
 attempt upon New Orleans ; and this in the teeth of Mr. Jefferson's 
 emphatic notification, that "his enticing men and officers in Ken- 
 tucky to go against Spain was putting a halter 'around their necks." 
 
488 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 This Kentucky scheme of Genet's was set on foot at the very 
 moment when it seemed as if Spain was only waiting for a pretext 
 to declare war against tlie United States. Jefferson's famous 
 despatch to Madrid, the most energetic of all his oflScial papers, in 
 which he warned Spain to let the Creeks alone, was crossing the 
 ocean at the time. Never hefore, never since, has the government 
 of the United States taken a firmer or loftier tone than at this 
 threatening crisis. "We confide in our strength," wrote Mr. Jef- 
 ferson, " without boasting of it ; we respect that of others without 
 fearing it. If we cannot otherwise prevail on the Creeks to dis- 
 continue their depredations, we will attack them in force. If Spain 
 chooses to consider our defence against savage butchery as a cause 
 of war to her, we must meet her also in war, with regret, but with- 
 out fear ; and we shall be happier, to the last moment, to repair 
 with her to the tribunal of peace and reason." What a time was 
 this for Citizen Genet to be, not merely fomenting war with Spain, 
 but preparing to wage war by attacking a Spanish j)ost ! 
 
 All cabinet questions were now merged into one, — What shall 
 we do with Genet? "Send him out of the country," said robust 
 Knox at the cabinet meeting of August 1, when this dreadful 
 question was first discussed. " Publish the whole correspondence," 
 said Hamilton, "with a statement of his proceedings, thus anticipat- 
 ing him in his threatened appeal to the people." Jefferson's advice, 
 supported warmly by Eandolph, was this : To send a history of his 
 doings in America, with copies of the letters between Genet and 
 himself, to the French government, and request, with all the delicacy 
 possible, the recall of Genet. For two days the subject was de- 
 bated with a heat and passion unexampled ; Hamilton twice harang- 
 uing his audience of four individuals for three-quarters of an H^r, 
 in a manner, as Jefferson reports, "as inflammatory and declamatory 
 as if he had been speaking to a jury." He dwelt upon the new 
 Jacobin Society just formed in Philadelphia, on the model of the 
 dread club to which Robespierre owed his power. The publication 
 of Genet's letters, Hamilton thought, would crush this terrible 
 organization. Jefferson, on the contrary, thought that the club 
 would die out of itself if it were only let alone: opposition alone 
 could give it undue importance. 
 
 The president was, like Othello, "perj)lexed in the extreme." If 
 we may believe the exaggerating memory of Mr. John Adams, a 
 
EDMOND GENET IN THE UNITED STATES. 489 
 
 vast multitude of the noisier part of the population of Philadelphia 
 sided with Genet at this moment. Years after we find him writing 
 to Jefferson of the terror of 1793, when " ten thousand people in 
 the streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Wash- 
 ington out of his house, and effect a revohition in the government, 
 or compel it to declare war in favor of the French Revolution and 
 against England." The Republican newspapers, too, were all that 
 Genet could have wished. The president w^as no longer spared, 
 either in prose or verse ; and there was even a burlesque poem in 
 which he was represented as being brought to the guillotine. At 
 one of these cabinet meetings, irritated by Knox reminding him 
 of this pasquinade, he lost his self-control for a moment. Voltaire 
 wickedly remarks tljat Newton "consoled" mankind for his unap- 
 proachable supremacy in the realm of science by coming at last to 
 write on the Prophecies. George Washington occasionallj' solaced 
 the self-love of his admiring friends by getting into a good honest 
 passion, like an ordinary mortal. Bursting into speech, he defied 
 any man to" produce a single act of his since he had been in the 
 government which was not done from the purest motives. He 
 declared that he had never repented but once of liaving slipped the 
 moment of resigning his office, and that was every moment since. 
 "By God!" he exclaimed, using the familiar oath of the period, "I 
 would rather be >n my grave than in my present situation ! I would 
 rather be on my farm than be made emperor of the world ; and yet 
 tliey are charging me with wanting to be a king!" That rascal 
 Freneau, he continued, sent him three of his papers every day, as 
 if he would become their distributor ; and he could see nothing in 
 this but an impudent design to insult him. 
 
 Hftppy the mortal wlio has no worse fault than a rare outburst of 
 legitimate and harmless anger ! It was embarrassing to get back 
 to the question after this explosion. The subject was, however, 
 resumed ; ^nSTihe president decided to follow Mr. Jefferson's advice, 
 of appealing to the French government; and asking Genet's recall, 
 reserving the expedient of appealing to the American people to a 
 later day. With all the discretion conceivable, and with a most 
 happy mixture of frankness, friendliness, and decision, the secretary 
 of state performed this difficult duty. In due time M. Genet was 
 recalled, and his proceedings were disavowed ; but France was a long 
 way off in 179.3, and some months elapsed before the letter of recall 
 
490 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEBSON. 
 
 reached the plenipotentiary. In the mean time he continued his 
 course of reckless defiance. He executed his threat of appealing to 
 the people, by publishing a portion of his official correspondence 
 with Mr. Jefferson ; and the people, with a near approach to unani- 
 mity, condemned him. 
 
 This summer of delirium at Philadelphia ended in the panic and 
 desolation of the yellow fever, from which every member ctf the 
 government fled, Jefferson last of all. In New York, where' M. 
 Genet then resided, love softened his heart, and assisted to restore 
 serenity to his mind. Miss Cornelia Clinton, the daughter of that 
 stanch Republican chief, George Clinton, governor of the State of 
 New York, was the young lady to whom he paid his court; and 
 paid it with such success, that, when he received his recall, he 
 married her, and settled in the State. He spent there the r£st of 
 his days, a good citizen, a worthy gentleman, though never quite 
 able to understand how it was that the American people cherished 
 such veneration for the character of their first pre'Sident. Every 
 thing would have gone well with his mission, he thought, had it 
 not been for the invincible resolution of President Washington. He 
 died at Jamaica, Long Island, in 1834, after contributing much to 
 agricultural improvement and the progress of science. His virtues 
 were his own ; his errors were those of the time in which he was 
 called upon to act. 
 
CHAPTEE LI. 
 
 JEFFERSON RESIGNS, AND RETIRES TO MONTICELLO. 
 
 Meanwhile Jefferson was longing for retreat with ever-growing 
 desire. Hamilton, too, wearied of the vain effort to maintain two 
 families upon his little salary, had made up his mind to return to 
 the New York bar, and only remained for a while longer, like Jef- 
 ferson, in compliance with Washington's earnest entreaty. Hamil- 
 ton, however, was not so painfully situated as his colleague, for he had 
 society on his side. The people he oftenest met approved his course 
 and valued his character. Jefferson had few adherents among the 
 rich and the educated. It is only the human race in general that is 
 the gainer by the ideas of which he was the exponent. Classes may 
 be benefited, or may think themselves benefited, by abuses, by 
 privilege, by " protection," by " caste ; " and those classes often 
 know enough to flatter and retain the occasional gifted men, — the 
 Cannings, the Peels, the Hamiltons, — whom birth, breeding, or 
 circumstances throw in their way. Pair play and equal rights are 
 the common and eternal interest of human nature. No man has 
 ever been so loved in the United States, or loved so long, as 
 Thomas Jefferson was by those who had no interest apart from this 
 common interest, and no hope or desire except to share the common 
 lot of man. But the elegant class of Philadelphia in 1793 held 
 him in aversion ; for the commerce of the United States, by which 
 they were chiefly sustained, was in British hands. Genet was war- 
 ring upon that commerce, and Jefferson had to share the odium of 
 his irrepressible zeal. His letters to Madison and Monroe of this 
 year show us that he felt acutely the alienation of the people around 
 him, and saw, too, how powerless he was to stem the tide of re- 
 action which the guillotine in France and Genet in America had 
 caused. 
 
 491 
 
492 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 " Tlie motion of my blood," he wrote to Madison in June, 1793, 
 ''no longer keeps time with the tumult of the world. It leads me 
 to seek for happiness in the lap and love of my family, in the society 
 of my neighbors and my books, in the wholesome occupations of my 
 farm and my affairs, in an interest or affection in every bud that 
 opens, in every breath that blows around me, in an entire freedom 
 of rest, of motion, of thought, owing account to mj'-self alone of my 
 hours and actions. What must be the principle of that calculation 
 which should balance against these the circumstances of my present 
 existence, — worn down with labors from morning to night, and day 
 to day, knowing them as fruitless to others as they are vexatious to 
 mj'self ; committed singly in desperate and eternal contest against a 
 host who are systematically undermining the public liberty and 
 prosperity; even the rare hours of relaxation sacrificed to the society 
 of persons in the same intentions, of whose hatred I am conscious 
 even in those moments of conviviality when the heart wishes most 
 to open itselt to the effusions of friendship and confidence; cut off 
 from my family and friends, my aftairs abandoned to chaos and 
 derangement; in short, giving every thing I love in exchange for 
 every thing I hate, and all this without a single gratification in 
 possession or prospect, in present enjoyment or future wish." 
 
 All his confidential letters of 1793 are in this tone. But, as often 
 as he alluded to the necessity under which he rested of retiring, 
 General Washington urged him to remain with such importunity 
 that he knew not how to resist. When the president discovered 
 that he could not prevail, he begged him at least to defer his resig- 
 nation ; for, said he, "like a man going to the gallows, I am willing 
 to put it off as long as I can." Jefferson remained in office through 
 the year. " Yesterday," he wrote to his daughter, December 22, 
 1793, "the president made what I hope will be the last set at me to 
 continue ; but in this I am now immovable by any considerations 
 whatever." So, indeed, it proved. He could not continue without 
 ruin; and such was the urgency of the case, that his going home 
 did but postpone the catastrophe. The president accepted his resig- 
 nation January 1, 1794. " The opinion," wrote General Washing- 
 ton on this occasion, "which I had formed of your integrity and 
 talents, and which dictated your original nomination, has been con- 
 firmed by the fullest experience, and both hate been eminently dis- 
 
* JEFFEESON EETIEES TO MONTICELLO. 493 
 
 played in tlie discharge of j'^our duty." Five days after lie was on 
 his way to IMonticello, having held the post of secretary of state 
 two months less than four years. 
 
 Strange to relate, he went out of office in a blaze of glory, to 
 which even the fine ladies and gentlemen of the ''Eepublican court" 
 were not wholly insensible. When Congress met, the correspond- 
 ence between Thomas Jefferson and the two plenipotentiaries, 
 George Hammond and Edmond Genet, was published in a massive 
 pamphlet. The intense interest of the public in the recent trans- 
 actions, now fully disclosed for the first time, caused this collection 
 to be widely disseminated and most eagerly scanned. "What candid 
 person has ever read that correspondence without enjoying Jeffer- 
 son's part of it? It shows him at his best. His singular diligence 
 and skill in gathering information were happily displayed ; and all 
 men saw that he had never — not in a single phrase — gratified his 
 feelings as a man at the expense of his duty as a public officer. It 
 was evident that he distinguished between France and her plenipo- 
 tentiary, and that he did not withdraw his sympathy from that" dis- 
 tracted nation at the moment of her extreraest need. And whatever 
 wrath may have swelled within him at the conduct of the English 
 government toward his country'', he preserved always the conciliatory 
 tone which renders easy the adoption of a worthier policy. The 
 people of the United States appreciated the merit of his despatches, 
 and many of them recognized the difficulties which so warm a parti- 
 san as he must have overcome in producing them. His opponents, 
 as we are informed by the most respectable of them all. Chief Jus- 
 tice Marshall, were conciliated for the moment. Their prejudices 
 were "dissipated." They even flattered themselves, while under the 
 spell of his benign and large intelligence, that the sentiments which 
 Hamilton, their idol, had contested and reviled in the cabinet were 
 their own ! " The partiality for France," says Marshall, in his 
 Life of Washington, '' that was conspicuous through the whole of 
 the correspondence, detracted nothing from its merit in the opinion 
 of the friends of the administration, because, however decided their 
 determination to support their own government in a controversy 
 with any nation whatever, they felt all the partialities for that 
 republic which the correspondence expressed. The hostility of his 
 enemies, therefore, was, for a time, considerably lessened, without a 
 corresponding diminution of the attachment of his friends." 
 
494 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOF. 
 
 Genet might have destroyed the Eepublican party, if the Eepub- 
 lican chief had not, with so much tact and right feehng, repudiated 
 the plenipotentiary while conciliating France. The re-action of the 
 following years no man could have prevented. The re-action was 
 necessary. France had torn down, without having acquired the 
 ability to construct. Not a community on earth was yet ripe for 
 the republican system, except that of the American States, wherein 
 a majority of the people were accessible through their understand- 
 ings. It was necessary for Christendom to wait another century 
 before resuming revolution at the point where the Terror inter- 
 rupted it in 1792. 
 
 In reading the records of those years, we discover in Jefferson 
 some human foibles, some morbidness, some impatience with virtu- 
 ous stupidity, some misinterpretation of men and events. He did 
 not, indeed, misconceive the Federalists as grossly as they misrepre- 
 sented him ; and yet he did misconceive them. On one occasion, 
 when he was attributing to some of them an intention to avail them- 
 selves of the first opportunity to convert the government into some- 
 thing like monarchy, Washington set him right in half a dozen 
 words : Desires there inay he, but not designs. This we now know 
 was the truth ; but we know, also, how easily desires become designs ; 
 and we know the contempt and utter distrust in which the leading 
 Federalists of the day held the republican system which Jefferson 
 loved, and which is evidently destined to govern the world. We 
 know that Hamilton passed the remaining years of his life await- 
 ing the crisis which should call him to contend in arms for the ideas 
 which he vainly struggled for in the cabinet and the Convention. 
 
 Jefferson was clear in his great office, and he lived up to his great 
 -principles. Being asked by a neighbor to write something that 
 should help him into Congress, Jefferson said, " From a very early 
 moment of my life, I determined never to intermeddle with elections 
 by the people, and have invariably adhered to this determination." 
 Much as he loved his old friend and secretary, William Short, he 
 would not assist him to sell the little public stock which he possessed, 
 saying, " I would do any thing my duty would permit ; but were I 
 to advise 3'our agent (who is himself a stock-dealer) to sell out yours 
 at this or that moment, it would be used as a signal to guide specu- 
 lation." Invited to share in a promising speculation, he declined, on 
 the ground that a public man should preserve his mind free from all 
 
JEFFEESON EETIEES TO MONTICELLO. 495 
 
 possible bias of interest. When the fugitives from the St. Domingo 
 massacre arrived in 1793, destitute and miserable, he wrote to Mon- 
 roe : " JSTever was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of 
 man. I deny the power of the general government to apply money 
 to svich a purpose, but I deny it with a bleeding heart. It belongs 
 to the State governments. Pray urge ours to be liberal." In his 
 French package came one day a letter from the wife of a groom in 
 the stables of the Duke of Orleans in Paris, addressed to her sister, 
 a poor woman who lived fifteen miles from Monticello. Pie was care- 
 ful to enjoin it upon his daughter, not merely to forward the letter, 
 but to send it to the woman's house by a special messenger. 
 
 We observe, too, that he still looked wistfully to the unexplored 
 West. As a member of the Philosophical Society, he took the lead 
 in 1792 in raising a thousand guineas to send Andrew Michaud to 
 grope his way across the continent, and find out all he could of the 
 great plains and rivers, the Indians and the animals, the bones of 
 the mammoth, and whatever else a Philosophical Society and an 
 American people might care to know. Andrew Michaud did not 
 find the Pacific Ocean ; and the task remained undone till Jefferson, 
 ten years later, found the predestined man in Meriwether Lewis, a 
 son of one of his Albemarle ueishbors. 
 
CHAPTEE LIL 
 
 ARRIVAL OF DB. PRIESTLEY IN" THE UN^ITED STATES. 
 
 Time brings its revenges. I read, in a recent number of the Lon- 
 don Athenaeum, a quiet advertisement informing the public that "it 
 is proposed to honor the memory of Dr. Priestley, and to commem- 
 orate his discoveries, and his services to the scientific world, by the 
 erection of a statue in Birmingham, where he lived so many years." 
 
 The advertisement goes on to say, that, as no other public memo- 
 rial of Dr. Priestley exists, it is believed that a large number of per- 
 sons interested in science will be glad to contribute something to 
 perpetuate the memory "of the father of Pneumatic Chemistry, the 
 discoverer of oxj^gen, and one of the most illustrious men of science 
 whom the last century produced." Then follows a list of sixty-six 
 subscriptions, varying in amount from fifty pounds to ten sliillingg. 
 Among the names we recognize those of Professor Huxley, Mr. 
 Martineau, Dr. Russell, Sir Eowland Hill, and several other members 
 of the Roj'al Society. 
 
 A statue to Priestley in Birmingham I Does the reader happen 
 to remember how Dr. Priestley left Birmingham eighty years 
 ago? July the 14th, 1791, some of the liberal people of that city 
 proposed to celebrate by a public dinner the anniversary of the 
 destruction of the Bastille, which had taken place two years before. 
 But two years in revolutionary times is equal to a century. When 
 the Bastille was destroj^ed, in 1789, the event was hailed with joy 
 throughout the world ; but, during the two j-ears following, the revo- 
 lutionists of Paris had committed excesses which had repelled and 
 disheartened all but the stanchest friends of liberty, — all but such 
 as Priestley, who was recognized in Birmingham as a chief and rep- 
 resentative of the liberal part3^ Priestley had published a reply to 
 the Reflections of Edmund Burke. He had been named a citi- 
 
 496 
 
AERIVAL OF DE. PRIESTLEY. 497 
 
 zen of the French Republic. He had defended the Eevolution in 
 the local press. 
 
 The aristocratic faction of Birmingham, whose instinct was then, 
 and is now, to advance their cause by violence, determined to prevent 
 the celebration. It is easy to stir up a riot in times of popular 
 excitement, but it is not so easy to limit or check its ravages. After 
 breaking up the banquet, and destroying the tavern in which it was 
 given, the mob rushed to the house of Priestley, who had not 
 attended the dinner, broke it open, and compelled the family to seek 
 safety in flight. The rioters took out his books in armfuls, — those 
 precious books, the solace of his life, which he had been fifty years 
 in gathering, for he was a hoarder of books from his infancy. His 
 library was scattered over the road for half a mile, and his torn man- 
 uscripts covered the floors of his house. His apparatus was broken to 
 pieces ; and, when the destruction of the interior was complete, the 
 house was set on fire. The fire, however, was extinguished before 
 further harm wg,s done. 
 
 This disaster, strange to relate, made the philosopher's fortune ; for 
 although the jury, after a trial of nine years, awarded him but 
 twenty-five hundred pounds damages, of his claim of more than 
 four thousand, the liberal portion of the public subscribed handsome- 
 ly to make good his loss. His own brother-in-law, as Lord Brough- 
 am tells us, gave him ten thousand pounds, besides settling upon 
 him an annuity of two hundrjed pounds for life. As he already had 
 a pension of one hundred and fifty pounds a year from Lord Shel- 
 burne, whose librarian he had formerly been, he was now in very 
 liberal circumstances for a philosopher. In Pennsylvania, where he 
 spent the residue of his life, such an income, at that period, was even 
 superabundant. 
 
 There is an error in the advertisement quoted above. It is not 
 true, that no " public memorial " of Dr. Priestlej' has been erected. 
 Every soda-fountain is his monument ; and we all know how nu- 
 merous and how splendid they are. Every fountain, too, whence flows 
 the home-made water of Vichy and Kissingen is a monument to 
 Priestley ; for it was he who discovered the essential portions of the 
 process by which all such waters are made. The misfortune is, how- 
 ever, that, of the millions of human beings who quaff the cool and 
 sparkling soda, not one in a thousand would know what name to 
 pronounce, if he were called upon to drink to the memory of the 
 
 32 
 
498 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 
 
 inventor. And really his invention of soda-water is a reason why 
 Americans should join in the scheme to honor his memory. He 
 not only did all he could to assist the birth of the nation, but he 
 invented the national beverage. 
 
 Yet he always protested that he was very little of a chemist; and 
 often said that his making chemical experiments at all was a kind of 
 accident. ,A Yorkshireman by birth, the son of a cloth-finisher, he 
 was one of those boys who take to learning as a duck takes to the 
 water. He was an eager, precipitate student from his childhood up. 
 Not content with the Latin and Greek of his school, he must needs 
 learn Hebrew in the vacations, and push on into other ancient lan- 
 guages of the East, — Chaldaic, Syriac, Arabic, — not neglecting such 
 trifles as French, Italian, and German. This way of passing youth 
 never fails to do lasting injury. He had an aversion to the glorious 
 sports of the play-ground, and to all the lighter literature. Need I 
 say, then, that, before he was eighteen years of age, his health had 
 completely broken down, and he was obliged to lay aside his books 
 for months. 
 
 Beginning life as a Calvinist minister, he gradually adopted a 
 milder theologj', — became, in fact, a Unitarian, and abandoned the 
 pulpit for a time. Then he set up a school. He spent many years 
 in teaching and writing school-books ; his first publication being an 
 English grammar for children. At one school, where he taught for 
 a while, a course of lectures was given upon chemistry, a science of 
 which he knew nothing, not even its object or nature. Attending 
 these lectures, his curiosity was awakened, and he began to experi- 
 ment. 
 
 It was Dr. Franklin's influence, however, that weaned him from 
 other subjects, and caused him to devote his main strength to sci- 
 ence. In 1761, when Dr. Franklin was in London, Priestley, who 
 was in the habit of visiting the city once a year, sought the acquaint- 
 ance of Franklin, and became intimate with him. Franklin related 
 to him the history of those delightful six winters, during which he 
 and his Philadelphia friends were experimenting in electricity. The 
 young schoolmaster, who had already some success in book-making, 
 now offered to write a history of electricity, if Franklin would put 
 him in the way of getting the material. Twelve months after, 
 Franklin had the pleasure of receiving from his industrious friend a 
 copy of the work, one of those square, massive quartos, in which the 
 
AEKIVAL OF DR. PRIESTLEY. 499 
 
 science of that age was usually given to the world. In this work 
 was printed, for the first time, the narrative of Franklin's immortal 
 experiment with the kite, which Priestley received from the experi- 
 menter's own lips. It is a curious fact in the history of science, that 
 Dr. Franklin himself never took the trouhle to write out an account 
 of this experiment, — the most daring, ingenious, and celebrated 
 which science records. The work was remarkably successful, passing 
 through three editions in nine years. From this time onward, 
 Priestley was almost wholly a man of science, and no year passed 
 without his adding something to human knowledge. He very 
 greatly increased our knowledge of the air we breathe, and its con- 
 stituent gases. 
 
 He would have been even more successful, if he had been earlier 
 favored by fortune. Being compelled, through his poverty, to spend 
 a large portion of his time and strength in earning his livelihood, 
 he could not follow out his discoveries, nor pursue them with that 
 watchful calm so necessary for avoiding error and perfecting truth. 
 His zeal, however, made up in some degree for his lack of means ; 
 and the list of his discoveries will always invest his name with dis- 
 tinction. 
 
 During the whole period of Franklin's residence in England, 
 Priestley aided him by his pen and influence in opening the eyes of 
 the public to the folly of the ministry in estranging the American col- 
 onies. The last day of Franklin's stay in London, Priestley spent 
 with him from morning to night, without interruption, looking over 
 American newspapers just arrived. Franklin was completely over- 
 come with the prospect of a civil war, and the dismemberment of the 
 empire. 
 
 "A great part of the day," says Dr. Priestley, "he was looking 
 over a number of American newspapers, directing me what to 
 extract from them for the English ones ; and in reading them he was 
 frequently not able to proceed for the tears literally running down 
 his cheeks." 
 
 The two friends never met again ; for it was not until 1794, when 
 Franklin had been dead four years, that the English philosopher 
 landed in New York. He had a distinguished public reception in 
 the city; and, proceeding to Philadelphia, he was invited to become 
 Professor of Chemistry in the University of Pennsylvania. He 
 declined, on the ground that he did not know enough of the subject. 
 
500 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 He refused also an offer, most munificent for that day, of a thousand 
 dollars for a course of scientific lectures in Philadelphia. His labors 
 in America were chiefly theological ; and he resided usuall}^ on his 
 son's farm in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. He was an 
 immense personage in his daj^ The public were constantly 
 reminded of his existence by some publication bearing his name. 
 According to Allibone, he gave the public one hundred and fort^'-one 
 separate works. 
 
 In those days people attached much more importance than we do 
 to a man's religious oj)inions ; and consequently Dr. Priestley, though 
 an exquisite Christian in temper and practice, incurred odium for his 
 heterodoxy. The famous Robert Plall, a great admirer of Priestley, 
 hearing one day that lie had been ill spoken of on account of his 
 regard for Priestley, broke out in this magnificent manner : — 
 
 " Are we suddenly fallen back into the darkness and ignorance of 
 the Middle Ages, during which the spell of a stupid and unfeeling 
 uniformity bound the nations in iron slumber, that it is become a 
 crime to praise a man for talents which the whole world admire, and 
 for virtues which his enemies confess, merely because his religious 
 creed is erroneous ? If any thing could sink orthodoxy into con- 
 tempt, it would be its association with such Gothic barbarity of 
 sentiment, such reptile manners." 
 
 Thus spoke an English dissenter. But Dr. Priestley, after escap- 
 ing the violence of re-action in England, crossed the ocean at a time 
 when re-action was about to resume power in America. Even the 
 honors paid him on his arrival had something of a partisan charac- 
 ter ; and Republicans made it as much a point to pay him attention 
 as Federalists to avoid doing so. All the Franklin circle of Phila- 
 delphia gathered round him ; and the Philosophical Society, founded 
 by Franklin, gave him cordial welcome. Jefferson, during the com- 
 ing years, found solace in his society and correspondence, and went 
 to hear him as often as he preached in the Unitarian chapel. 
 
 It stirred Jefferson's indignation, that a man of science so amiable 
 as Priestley, who, he thought, honored his country by selecting it as 
 an asylum, should have been made the object of party vituperation. 
 
CHAPTER LIU. 
 
 JEFFERSON AS A FARMER. 
 
 Eight bushels of wheat to the acre is not brilliant agriculture; 
 nor could the production of eighteen bushels of Indian corn to the 
 acre, at the present time, be thrown in the face of a rival farmer 
 with any reasonable hope of abasing his pride. But in 1796, when 
 Mr. Jefferson had been two years at home after retiring from the 
 oflSce of secretary of state, and was showing his home-farm to an 
 old French friend, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld, these were the "><^ 
 figures he gave as the utmost he could then extract from his lands 
 in the garden of Virginia. The land was cheap enough, however, 
 — four or five dollars an acre; and wheat sold in Richmond at two 
 dollars and a half a bushel. Mr. Jefferson boasted that the wheat 
 grown upon his mountain slopes was whiter than the low-country 
 wheat, and averaged five or six pounds heavier to the bushel. 
 
 Overseers, during his ten years' absence in the public service, had 
 ravaged his farms in the fine old fashion of old Virginia. The 
 usual routine was this : When the forest was first cleared, laying 
 bare the rich, deep, black, virgin soil, the slow accumulation of ages 
 of growth and decay, tobacco was grown for five successive years. 
 That broke the heart of the land, and it was allowed to rest a while. 
 Then tobacco was raised again, until tbe crop ceased to be remunera- 
 tive ; and then the fields were abandoned to the crops sown by the 
 methods of Nature; and she made haste to cover up with a growth 
 of evergreens the outraged nakedness of the soil. But Jefferson 
 had, long before, abandoned the culture of the exacting weed on his 
 Albemarle estate. His overseers, therefore, had another rotation, 
 which exhausted the soil more completely, if less rapidly. They 
 sowed wheat in the virgin soil among the stumps ; next year, corn ; 
 then wheat again ; then corn again ; and maintained this rotation 
 
 501 
 
502 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 as long as they could gather a liarvest of five hushels of wheat or 
 ten bushels of corn to the acre; after which Nature was permitted to 
 have her way with the soil again, and new lands were cleared for 
 spoliation. There was then no lack of land for the application of 
 this method of exhaustion. Out of Mr. Jefferson's five thousand 
 five hundred and ninety-one acres and two-thirds in Albemarle, less 
 than twelve hundred were under cultivation. His estate of Poplar 
 Forest was ne'arly as large, but only eight hundred acres were 
 cleared. The land upon which the Natural Bridge was situated, 
 one hundred and fifty-seven acres in extent, was a wilderness ; 
 though he always hoped to build a hut there for retirement and 
 repose, amid a scene which awoke all his enthusiasm. 
 
 This sj'stem of agriculture wasted something more costly than 
 Virginia land, namely, African muscle. One hundred and fiPty-four 
 persons called Thomas Jeflierson master; equivalent, perhaps, to a 
 working-force of eighty efficient field-hands. Give an Illinois or 
 Ohio farmer of ability the command of such a force, on the simple 
 condition of maintaining it in the style of old Virginia, and in fif- 
 teen years he could be a niillionnaire. But, on the system practised 
 in All*emarle in 1795, the slaves had two years' work to do in one. 
 No sooner was the wretched crop of the summer gathered in, and 
 the grain trodden out with horses, and the pitiful result set afloat in 
 barges bound for Richmond, than the slaves were formed into chop- 
 pin g-gangs, who made the woods melodious with the music of the 
 axe during the long fall and winter. All the arts by w,hich the 
 good farmer contrives to give back to his fields a little more than he 
 takes from them were of necessity neglected; and the strenuous 
 force of the eighty hands was squandered in an endless endeavor to 
 make good the ravage of the fields by the ra'wiige of the woods. 
 Mr. Jefferson's eight bushels of wheat, his eighteen of corn, and his 
 scant ton of clover to the acre, was the beginning of victory, instead 
 of the continuation of defeat. 
 
 It was on the 16th of January,- 1794, that he surveyed once more 
 his Albemarle estate from the summit of Monticello. Every object 
 upon which he looked betrayed the ten years' absence of the master: 
 the house unfinished, and its incompleteness made conspicuous by 
 the rude w^ay in which it was covered up ; the grounds and gardens 
 not advanced beyond their condition when he had last rambled over 
 them by the side of the mother of his children j his fields all lying 
 
JEFFERSON AS A FAEMER. 503 
 
 distinct before him like a map, irregular in shape, separated by 
 zigzag fences and a dense growth of bushes ; outhouses dilapidated ; 
 roads in ill-repair; the whole scene demanding the intelligent 
 regard which he was burning to bestow upon it. Kever was there 
 a Yankee in whom the instinct to improve was more insatiable; and 
 seldom, out of old Ireland, has there been an estate that furnished 
 such an opportunity for its gratification as this one in old Virginia. 
 " Ten years' abandonment of my lands," he wrote to General Wash- 
 ington, " has brought on them a degree of degradation far beyond 
 what I had expected." 
 
 After the lapse of two years and a half, the Duke de la Roche- 
 foucauld saw a different prospect from the portico of Monticello. 
 The summit, indeed, was disfigured with the litter of building; for, 
 as the exile informs us, Mr. Jefferson, who had formerly studied 
 architecture and landscape-gardening in books only, had since seen 
 in Europe the noblest triumphs of both, and was endeavoring now 
 to improve upon his original designs. Monticello, the duke 
 remarks, had been infinitely superior before to all other homes in 
 America; but in the course of anotlier year he thought, when the 
 central dome would be finished, and the new designs happily 
 blended with the old, the house would rank with the most pleasant 
 mansions in France and England. And how enchanting the pano- 
 rama ! Nothing to break the view to the ocean, from which, though 
 it was a hundred and fifty miles distant, the cooling breeze reached 
 the mountain. on a summer day about two in the afternoon. The 
 traveller thought the prospect faultless except in two particulars, — 
 too much forest and too little water. His European eye craved a 
 cultivated expanse, — craved castle-crowned heights, the spire pier- 
 cing the distant grove, the farm-house, the- cottage, and the village 
 clustering in the vale ; and without a mass of water, he thought, 
 the grandest view lacks the last charm. 
 
 In the whole worl,d it had been difficult to find men who had 
 more' in common than these two, — the exile from distracted France, 
 and the American who never loved France so much as when the 
 banded despotisms of Europe had driven her mad» Jefferson had 
 last seen the duke, when, as president of the National Assembly of 
 1789, he was striving, with Jefferson's cordial sympathy, to save 
 kingship and establish liberty. It was La Eochefoucauld who 
 sought the king's presence at Versailles on a memorable occasion 
 
504 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOIT. 
 
 in July, 1789, and laid before that bewildered locksmitli the real 
 state of things at Paris. "But this is a revolt, then!" said the 
 king. " Sire," replied the duke, " it is a revolution ! " Two days 
 after the Bastille was in the hands of the people. Besides the 
 political accord between Jefferson and his guest, they were both 
 improvers by nature, and both most zealous agriculturists. For 
 years the French nobleman had had upon his estate a model farm 
 for the purpose of introducing into his neighborhood English meth- 
 ods of tillage and improved utensils. He had maintained also an 
 industrial school, and endeavored to plant in France the cotton man- 
 ufacture which was beginning to make the world tributary to 
 England. In a word, he was a citizen after the best American 
 pattern, which is another way of saying that he' was a man after 
 Jefferson's own heart. 
 
 We can easily imagine the family group as they would gather 
 on the portico to see the master of the house and his guest mount 
 for a morning's ride over the farms. Jefferson was now approach- 
 ing fifty-three, and his light hair was touched with gray ; but his 
 face was as ruddy, his tall form as erect, his tread as elastic, his 
 seat in the saddle as easy, as when at twenty-one he had galloped 
 from Shadwell with Dabney Carr, From his youth temperate and 
 chaste, keeping faith with man and woman, occupied always with 
 pursuits worthy of a man, neither narrowed by a small ambition, 
 nor perverted by malignant passions, nor degraded by vulgar appe- 
 tites, equable, cheery, and affectionate, he only reached his prime at 
 sixty, and shone with mellowing lustre twenty years longer, giving 
 the world assurance of an unwasted manhood. The noble exile was 
 forty-nine, with thirty-one years of rigorous life before him. The 
 eldest daughter of the house, at home now because her father was 
 at home, the mother of three fine children, had assumed something 
 of matronly dignity during her six years of married life 5 and her 
 husband had become a perfect Randolph, — tall, gaunt, restless, dif- 
 ficult to manage, and not very capable of managing himself.' He 
 vented superfluous energy, Mr. Randall tells us, in riding eighty 
 miles a day through Virginia mud, and, rather than take the trouble 
 of riding another mile or two to a bridge, would swim his foaming 
 steed across a river in full flood. If making cavalry charges were 
 the chief end of man, he had been an admirable specimen of our 
 race 5 but, for life as it is in piping times of peace, he was not 
 
JEFFEESON AS A FAE]VIEE. 505 
 
 always a desirable inmate, despite Lis hereditary love of botany, and 
 his genuine regard for his father-in-law. 
 
 Maria Jefferson, now seventeen years of age, attracted the French 
 traveller; and he easily read the open secret of her young life. 
 *'Miss Maria," he observes, "constantly resides with her father; 
 but as she is seventeen years old, and is remarkably handsome, she 
 will doubtless soon find that there are duties which it is sweeter to 
 perform than those of a daughter." " Jack Eppes " may have been 
 one of the Monticello circle during those pleasant June daj's of 
 1796, when the Duke de la Rochefoucauld surprised Mr, Jefferson 
 in the harvest-field under a scorching sun. Perhaps the guest of 
 the house may have said to the young college-student what he 
 recorded in his narrative. He may even have accompanied the 
 remark with the nearest thing to a wink which the politeness of the 
 anclen regime permitted. "Mr. Jefferson's philosophic mind," 
 observes the exile, "his love of study, his excellent library, which 
 supplies him with the means of satisfying it, and his friends, will 
 undoubtedly help him to endure this loss; which, moreover, is not 
 likely to become an absolute privation, as the second son-in-law of 
 Mrw Jefferson may, like Mr. Randolph, reside in the vicinity of 
 Monticello, and, if he be worthy of Miss Maria, will not be able to 
 find any company more desirable than that of Mr. Jefferson." 
 
 But the horses aw^ait their riders. We may be sure that both 
 gentlemen were well mounted. Virginia took the lead of all the 
 thirteen colonies in breeding horses; and Jefferson, though he dif- 
 fered irom his countrymen in things more important, surpassed 
 them in his love of fine horses. And, curiously enough, it was only 
 in dealing with horses that he was ever known to show any thing 
 of that spirit of domination which marks some varieties of common 
 men. With a pilfering negro, an uncomfortable neighbor,- a refrac- 
 tory child, or a perverse colleague, his patience seemed inexhausti- 
 ble ; but let a horse rebel, and the lash instantly descended, and the 
 battle never ceased until the animal had discovered which of the 
 two held the reins. He always loved the exhilaration of a race, and 
 did not permit false ideas of official decorum to prevent his attend-, 
 ing races near the seat of government, no matter what office he may 
 have held. The saddle alone was his test of the quality of a horse, 
 the trotting-wagon being unknow^n in the land of corduroy roads. 
 Jefferson and the horsemen of that age liked to share the labor and 
 
506 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 peril of the ride witli the horse, seeking no vantage-ground of a 
 vehicle from which to exercise mastery over him. He liked a horse 
 fiery and sure-footed, that could gallop down his mountain on a dark 
 night, and -carry him through flood and mire safe to the next village, 
 while a negro would be fumbling over the broken bridle of his mule. 
 
 On this occasion, however, there was no need of haste, and the 
 two gentlemen descended at their ease the winding road to the 
 country below. The French agriculturist was too polite to hint that 
 his American brother's methods were defective ; and j'et he ap2:)ears 
 to have thought so. Mr. Jefferson, lie intimates, was a book-farmer. 
 " Knowledge thus acquired often misleads," the exile remarks, and 
 "yet it is preferable to mere practical knowledge." In arranging 
 his new system, Mr. Jefferson had betrayed a mathematical taste. 
 All the old, unsightly fences, with their masses of bushes and bram- 
 bles, having been swept awaj', he had divided his cultivated land 
 into four farms of two hundred and eighty acres each, and divided 
 each farm into seven fields of forty acres, marking the boundaries 
 by a row of peach-trees, of which he set out eleven hundred and 
 fifty-one during his first year at home. The seven fields indicated 
 his new system of rotation, which embraced seven years : first jeaVf 
 wheat; second, corn ; third, pease or potatoes ; fourth, vetches; fifth, 
 wheat again ; sixth and seventh, clover. Each of the four farms, 
 under its own overseer, was cultivated by four negroes, four 
 negresses, four horses, and four oxen ; but at harvest and other busy 
 times the whole working-force was concentrated. Upon each farm 
 Mr. Jefferson had caused to be built a great log-barn, at little cost 
 except the labor of the slaves. 
 
 He did not fail to show his guest the new threshing-machine 
 imported from Scotland, where it was invented, — the first specimen 
 ever seen in Virginia. It answered its purpose so well, that several 
 planters of the State had sent for machines, or were trying to get 
 them made at home. " This machine," records the traveller, " the 
 whole of which does not weigh two thousand pounds, is conveyed 
 from one farm to another in a wagon, and threshes from one hun- 
 dred and twenty to one hundred and fifty bushels a day."" Mr. Jef- 
 ferson showed him, also, a drilling-machine for sowing seed in row^s, 
 invented in the neighborhood, with the performance of which the 
 master of Monticello was well pleased. Doubtless the two farmers 
 discussed again that plough of Mr. Jefferson's invention for which 
 
JEFFERSON AS A FAEMEE. 507 
 
 lie Lad received, in 1790, a gold medal from France. During liis 
 European tours he had been struck with the waste of power caused 
 by the bad construction of the ploughs in common use. The part 
 of the plough called then the mould-board, which is above the 
 share, and turns over the earth, seemed to him the chief seat of 
 error; and he spent many of the leisure hours of his last two years 
 in France in evolving from Euclid the mould-board which should 
 offer the minimum of resistance. Nothing is more likely than that 
 he had discussed the subject many a time in Paris with so ardent 
 an agriculturist as the Duke de la Eochefoucauld. Satisfied, at 
 length, that he had discovered precisely the best form of mould- 
 board, he sent a plough provided with one to the Eoj'al Agricultural 
 Society of the Seine, of which the duke was a member. The medal 
 which they awarded it followed the inventor to ISTew York ; and, 
 eighteen years after, the society sent President Jefferson a superb 
 plough containing his improvement. 
 
 An agreeable incident in connection with that plough invention 
 has been reported. Among the many 3'oung Virginians who were 
 educated under the direction of Mr. Jefferson was the late William 
 C. E/ives, born almost in the shadow of Monticello. In 1S53, when, 
 for the second time, Mr. Rives was American Minister at Paris, he 
 was elected a member of the Agricultural Society, then temporarily 
 dishonored hy the prefix " Imperial" to its name. In his address at 
 his public reception, Mr. Pives alluded to the prize bestowed by 
 the society half a century before upon one of his predecessors. 
 " Yes," said the president, '' we still have, and will show you, the 
 prize plough of Thomas Jefferson." • 
 
 The French traveller was interested in seeing at Monticello a 
 principality of two hundred inhabitants almost independent of the 
 world without ; for Mr. Jefferson showed him a cluster of little shops 
 "wherein his own negroes carried on all the necessary trades, such as 
 carpentry, cabinet-making, shoe-making, tailoring, weaving. The 
 masonry of the rising mansion was also executed by slaves. There 
 was a mill upon the estate for the accommodation of the neighbor- 
 hood. For many years the making of nails had been one of the 
 winter industries of American farmers, all nails being then of 
 the wrought description ; and Mr. Jefferson, too, had his nail-forge, 
 wherein a foreman and half a dozen men and boys hammered out 
 nails for the country round about. "When James JMonroe built his 
 
608 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 house near by, it was from his former instructor that he bought his 
 nails. At times Jefferson had as many as ten nailers at work, — 
 two fires, and five hands at each fire ; and he supplied the country 
 stores far and near with nails, at an excellent rate of profit. His 
 weaving-house grew, also, into a little factory of sixty spindles, pro- 
 ducing cotton cloth enough for all his plantations, as well as a 
 redundancy for the village stores. Some of the black mechanics 
 whom the exile saw on his friend's estate were among the best 
 workmen in Virginia. One man is spoken of as being a universal 
 genius in handiwork. He painted the mansion, made some of its 
 best furniture, repaired the mill, and lent a hand in that prodi- 
 gious structure of the olden time, a family coach, planned by the 
 master. 
 
 The duke bears testimony to the kind, considerate way in which 
 the slaves were treated. They had not only substantial justice, he 
 tells us, but received special reward for special excellence. In the 
 distribution of clothes, Mr. Randall adds, it was a system at Monti- 
 cello to give better and handsomer garments to those who lived 
 decently together in families than to the unmarried, — an expedient 
 which had obvious good results. This was not freedom; but, in the 
 Virginia of that period, there was room and chance of welfare for 
 every kind of creature, excepting a free negro. 
 
 The exile remained a week at Monticello in June, 1796, and then 
 left his brother farmer to pursue his labors. " On several occa- 
 sions," the duke records, " I heard him speak with great respect of 
 the virtues of the president, and in terms of esteem of his sound and 
 unerring judgment." He adds.these remarks : " In private life, Mr. 
 JefFerson displays a mild, easy, and obliging temper, though he is 
 somewhat cold and reserved. His conversation is of the most agree- 
 able kind, and he possesses a stock of information not inferior to 
 that of any other man. In Europe he would hold a distinguished 
 rank among men of letters, and as such he has already appeared 
 there : at present he is employed with activity and perseverance in 
 th& management of his farms and buildings; and he orders, directs, 
 and pursues, in the minutest detail, every branch of business relative 
 to them. I found him in the midst of the harvest, from which the 
 scorching heat of the sun does not j>revent his attendance. 
 
CHAPTER LIV. 
 
 CAJN'DIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY. 
 
 Had he, tlien, really accepted this plantation life as a career for 
 the remainder of his daj-s ? 
 
 In the first exultation at his recovered ease and liberty, in 1794, 
 he thought he had. ''I return to farming,"' he wrote to his old 
 friei^d and colleague, John Adams, in the midst of the joyous April 
 work of that year, " with an ardc^- which I scarcely knew in my 
 youth, and which has > got the better entirely of my love of study. 
 Instead of writing ten or twelve letters a day, — which I have been 
 in the habit of doing as a thing in course, — I put off asiswering my 
 letters now, farmer-like, till a rainy day, and then find them some- 
 times postponed by other necessary occupations." At first, too, he 
 was even indifferent to the newspapers. Young Buonaparte (he 
 had not j'et dropped the u from his Italian name) had cannonaded 
 the English out of Toulon Harbor a few weeks before ; and, though, 
 his name was still unknown, his genius was making itself felt in the 
 organization of the French armies. The great Toulon news, which 
 reached Monticello by private letters a month after the masters 
 return, recalled him to his old self for a moment. ITe even indulged 
 in a little sanguine prophecy. "Over the foreign powers," he wrote 
 in April, 1794, " I am convinced the French will triumph com- 
 pletely." The French, led by Napoleoue di Buonaparte, a general 
 of alien race, did triumph over the foreign powers ; but the rest of 
 Mr. Jefferson's anticipation, happily, was not realized : " I cannot 
 but hope that that triumph, and the consequent disgrace of the 
 invading tj'rants, is destined, in the order of events, to kindle the 
 wrath of the people of Europe against those who have dared to 
 embroil them in such wickedness, and to bring, at length, kings, 
 nobles, and priests to the scaifolds -which they have been so long 
 
 509 
 
510 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 deluging with human blood. I am still warm whenever I thinlc of 
 tlie?e scoundrels; though I do it as seldom as I can, preferring infi- 
 nitel}^ to contemplate the tranquil growth of my lucerne and pota- 
 toes.'"' 
 
 ISTor did the lapse of a long summer change his mind. General 
 "Washington naturally concluded, that the coming retirement of 
 Hamilton from the cabinet would remove the cause of Jefferson's aver- 
 sion to a cabinet office ; but it did not. In September, 1794, when an 
 express from Philadelphia dismounted at his door, bearing an invita- 
 tion from the president to resume the office of secretary of state, he 
 replied that 7io circumstances would ever more tempt him to engage 
 in any thing public. ..." I thought myself perfectly fixed in this 
 determination when I left Philadelphia ; but every day and hour 
 since has added to its inflexibility'." The president was sorely 
 embarrassed. The aristocratical sentiment which had fixed the sala- 
 ries of the higher offices at such a point that only rich men could 
 accept them with safety to thei^ afftiirs and their honor, made it 
 alwaj's difficult to fill them aright, and sometimes impossible. Jef- 
 ferson sympathized with him, but felt himself justified in refusing. 
 " After tweiity-five years' continual employment in the service of 
 our country," he wrote to a friend, "I trust it will be thought I have 
 fulfilled my tour, like a punctual soldier, and may (;laim my dis- 
 charge." 
 
 These words were written in November, 1795. In June, 1796, 
 when the Duke de la Kochefoucauld discovered him in the scorching 
 harvest-field, he was the candidate of the Eepublican party for the 
 presidency. It was the year of the presidential election, and the 
 noise of that quadrennial uproar was beginning to resound in every 
 village. General Washington was going out of office in March, 1797. 
 "Wliere was the American citizen inditferent to the mighty question, 
 Who should succeed him? In 1796, for the first time, there was a 
 contest, for the first office, — for Washington never had a competitor; 
 and we can all imagine — we who are familiar with such scenes — 
 with what ardor a young republic, in peril between two such power- 
 ful belligerents as France and England, would spring to a contest so 
 novel, so interesting, so momentous. 
 
 How are we to reconcile the habitual language of Jefferson in 1794 
 and 1795 with his position before the country in 1796 ? It is not 
 necessary to reconcile it, since it is permitted to every man to change 
 
CANDIDATE FOU THE PRESIDENCY. 511 
 
 his mind ; and considering the limits and defects of that portion of 
 our organization, what can we do better with our minds than change 
 them ? But the discrepancj'' was much more apparent than reah 
 In predicting the future, Jefferson's hopeful disposition frequently 
 led him astray ; but his judgment concerning the issue of a contested 
 election was remarkably sound. His conviction was, that the time 
 had not yet come for a national triumph of the Republicans. The 
 bloody lapse of the French Revolution was too recent, the tide of 
 re-action too strong, vis inert ice of ancient habit too general, Hamil- 
 ton too active, Bonaparte too young (he was in Italy now, and had 
 dropped the Italian u from his name), the French Directory was too 
 touchy, and the French marine too indiscriminate in the matter of 
 prize-taking on the ocean, to afford a Republican calculator ground for 
 expecting an immediate triumph of his half-organized party in the 
 United States. Nor had the Federalists yet filled up tlie measure 
 of their errors, nor attained that advanced degree of madness which 
 immediately precedes destruction. The countr}', too, was getting 
 rich by suppl^'ing the belligerents with flour, beef, pork, fish, fruit, 
 potatoes, and rum. Those square, spacious, handsome houses, which 
 still give an air of mingled comfort and grandeur to the old towns 
 on the New England coast, — Newburyport, Portsmouth, Salem, 
 Portland, — and others, were beginning to be built. As President 
 "Washington remarked in March, 1796, in a letter to Gouverneur 
 Morris, " No city, town, village, or even farm, but what exhibits 
 evidence of increasing wealth and prosperity'', while taxes are hardly 
 known but in name." 
 
 Jefferson, therefore, felt that he was in small danger of being 
 tcirn from Monticello by an election to the presidency. Vice-presi- 
 dent, indeed, he might be, through that absurd relic of Hamilton's 
 mischievous ingenuity, the electoral college, which even now, in 
 1874, waits to be swept into oblivion. By the sj'-stem as then estab- 
 lished, 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 elected to the second office. That office, however, 
 happened to be the only one, in the gift of the people or of the presi- 
 dent, which Jefferson thought desirable in itself: .first, because the 
 salary paid the cost of four months' residence at the seat of govern- 
 ment 5 secondly, because it gave the occupant eight months' leisure ; 
 
012 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 anrl, thirdly, because it enhanced a man's power to disseminate 
 and recommend principles, without his joining in the conflict of 
 parties. 
 
 Behold him, then, in a new character, one of the most trying to 
 human virtue, digestion, nerve, and dignity ever contrived by mor- 
 tals for a mortal, — candidate for the presidency ! To him, partly 
 because he was a Democrat, partly because he was Jefferson, it was 
 less trying than to any other man that ever was subjected to it. At 
 once, without effort, without a precedent to guide him, without con- 
 sultation with friends, he comprehended the morality of the situa- 
 tion, and assumed the proper attitude toward it. His tone, his 
 demeanor, his feelings, his conduct, were all simply right ; and, since 
 a considerable portion of the inhabitants of the United States expect 
 one day to stand in the same bewildering relation to the universe, it 
 may be useful to some of them to know how he comported himself. 
 
 His grand advantage was, that he did not want the office. He was 
 in the position of a belle who is wooed, not in that of the pale and 
 anxious lover who trembles with desire and fear. It is an immense 
 thing, if 3^ou have property to dispose of, to be able to stand serene 
 in the market, not cari^ig whether you sell it this year or next, or 
 never. Nor was this any thing so very meritorious in such a man. 
 All men, it is true, love power, who are capable of wielding power ; 
 but there are grades and kinds of power. All men love ; but each 
 man's love takes the quality of his nature. The noble love nobly ; 
 the base, basely ; the common, commonly. The feeling that bound 
 together in sweet and sublime accord Goethe and Schiller, the 
 noblest pair of lovers since Socrates and Plato, was only called 
 love ; and the instinct that originally drew Bill Sikes to the side of 
 Nancy was also love, of the Sikes quality, the best he had to bestow. 
 In like manner, power is of as many grades as there are grades of 
 men. Rude physical strength is power in the dawn of civilization. 
 In a commercial city, to possess five million dollars is power. A 
 refinement upon this crude form was that mystical device of former 
 ages, now no longer potent, styled Rank. Great ministers like 
 Richelieu were an advance upon the men of mere pedigree, as the 
 Leader of the House of Commons is an advance upon them. Latest 
 and highest is that power which Jefferson craved, — that of govern- 
 ing men and moulding institutions by the promulgation of heartfelt 
 truth. 
 
CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY. 513 
 
 Valuing power, but not place, he found it easy to adhere to the 
 rule which he adopted: To avoid'writing or conversing on politics 
 during the contest, except with two or three confidential friends. 
 According to Mr. Adams, it was in 1793, soon after the publication 
 of Jefferson's correspondence with Genet and Hammond, that the 
 movement began which ended in his nomination. Boston, of all 
 places in'the world, originated it! Boston, too, enjoys the credit of 
 having originated the method by which it was done, as well as the 
 word which describes that method, — caucus. "The Republican 
 party," says Mr. Adams, "had a caucus in 1793, and wrote to jMr. 
 Jefferson, upon his resignation of the office of secretary of state, 
 that, if he would place himself at their head, they would choose him 
 at the next election ; and they organized their party by their corre- 
 spondences through the States." Whatever civil reply the candidate 
 may have made to these gentlemen, he did not place himself at their 
 head, but remained passive and silent from that time until the ques- 
 tion had been decided. 
 
 These Jefifersonian rules will guide a.\-\j man with safety and dig- 
 nity through the thousand snares of such a contest: 1, Don't want 
 the office ; 2, Utter no syllable concerning it beyond the narrowest 
 circle of tried confidants. 
 
 It was the Jay treaty of 1794, ratified in 1795, and executed in 
 1796, which imbittered politics during this strife for the control of 
 the administration, and nearly gave it to Jefferson. Who shall now 
 presume to judge between the able and honest men of that day who 
 so widely differed concerning this treaty? Having sent Mr. Jay to 
 England to negotiate, we can easily admit that the president did 
 well to ratify the treaty which resulted; but the difficult question is, 
 Was it becoming in the United States to send a special envoy, the 
 chief judge of its highest court, to negotiate with a country from 
 which it liad received, and was hourly receiving, indignity and wrong? 
 It was no more becoming than it is becoming in a man, creation's 
 lord, to make terms with a lion that has got his hand in its mouth, 
 or with a bull which has obtained prior possession of a field. It was 
 not becoming in G-alileo to kneel submissive before the herd of infu- 
 riate inquisitors who had power to roast him. But it was right. 
 He had been a traitor to his class and to his vocation, to science and 
 to man, if he had allowed those tonsured savages to rack and burn 
 an aged philosopher. His lie was a wiser fidelity to truth. There 
 
 33 
 
514 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOK 
 
 is sometimes an accidental and extreme inequality of force between 
 a spoiler and Ijis victim wliicli suspends the operation of some moral 
 laws in favor of the victim, and makes a device justifiable, which, in 
 ordinary circumstances, would be dastardlj'. 
 
 It is difficult for us to realize the weakness of the country ovei? 
 which George Washington presided. If its four millions of people 
 had all been cast in the heroic mould, capable of Spartan discipline, 
 like-minded, demanding for their country, with unanimous voice, 
 only untarnished honor, with or without prosperity, even in that 
 case it had been a doubtful question ; for there would still have been 
 a hand i^ the lion's mouth, — Detroit and the chain of lake-posts 
 occupieil by British garrisons, the mouth of the Mississippi held by 
 the Spanish, and no single port of the coast capable of keeping out 
 an armed slooj). But the j^eople of the United States had only 
 their fair share of heroic souls ; and there was the most honest and 
 irreconcilable difference of opinion among them as to which of the 
 belligerents was really fighting the battle of mankind and civiliza- 
 tion. President Washington was as right in sending Mr. Jay to 
 London as the Eepublicans were right in opposing it. The presi- 
 dent, surveying the whole scene from the watch-tower of his office, 
 weighing all the circumstances, hearing all opinions, considering all 
 interests, felt it admissible to court a power he could not crush. 
 Eepublicans, considering only tlie obvious facts of the situation, 
 longing to see their country joining heart and hand with France in 
 her unequal strife, yet willing to be neutral, could not but lament a 
 policy which looked like abasement to a powerful foe, and abandon- 
 ment of a prostrate friend. Tlie modern student of those mad 
 times finds himself at this conclusion: "If I had' been Washing- 
 ton, I should have made the treaty : if I had been Jefferson, I should 
 have held it in execration." 
 
 What a struggle it cost the president to choke down this huge 
 bolus of humiliation is revealed in his leters. If he had put ofi" the 
 departure of the envoy a few weeks, he would, perhaps, have put it 
 off forever, and the course of events in the United States had gone 
 otherwise. While Mr. Jay was upon the ocean. Colonel Simcoe, the 
 Governor of Upper Canada, published a protest which claimed juris- 
 diction over a wide expanse of territory of the United States which 
 the posts commanded. The president, during the whole of his 
 administration, never wrote an official letter showing such warmth 
 
CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY* 515 
 
 of indignation as the one which he instantly penned to Mr. Jay, 
 hoping to send it by a vessel on the point of sailing from New York. 
 The best of Washington's letters are those which we know he must 
 have written with his own hand ; and this is one of them. It is the 
 letter of a man, not of a secretary. Smooth and polished it is not; 
 but it has the eloquence of deep emotion struggling in vain for ade- 
 quate expression. He begins by saying, that, on this irregular and 
 high-handed proceeding, he would rather hear what tha ministry of 
 Great Britain will say than pronounce his own sentiments. Never- 
 theless, he does tell Mr. Ja}^, that, although this amazing claim of 
 Colonel Simcoe is the most audacious thing yet done by British 
 agents in America, it is by no means the most cruel. To this the 
 president adds a parac^raph which contains ten years of bloody his- 
 tory : — 
 
 " There does not remain a doubt in the mind 'of any well-informed 
 person in this countrj^, not shut against conviction, that all the difS- 
 culties we encounter with the Indians, their hostilities, the murders 
 of helpless women and innocent children along our frontiers, result 
 from the conduct of the agents of Great Britain in this country. In 
 vain is it, then, for its administration in Britain to disavow having 
 given orders which will warrant such conduct, whilst their agents 
 go unpunished ; whilst we have a thousand corroborating circum- 
 stances, and, indeed, almost as many evidences, some of which can- 
 not be brought forward, to prove that they are seducing from our 
 alliance, and endeavoring to remove over the line, tribes that have 
 hitherto been kept in peace and friendship with us at a heavy 
 expense, and who have no cause of complaint, except pretended ones 
 of their creating; whilst they keep in a state of irritation the tribes 
 who are hostile to us, and are instigating those who know little of 
 us ov we of them, to unite in the war against us ; and whilst it is 
 an undeniable fact, that they are furnishing the whole with arms, 
 ammunition, clothing, and even provisions, to carry on the war ; I 
 might go farther, and, if they are not much belied, add men, also, 
 in disguise." 
 
 Thus General Washington, in August, 1794. Mr. Wendell 
 Phillips was much censured some time ago for expressing a similar 
 opinion on the platform. The president proceeded to declare that 
 
516 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 nothing sliort of a surrender of the posts could prevent war between 
 the two countries ; and Mr. Jay was to say to the ministry, "Give 
 up the posts, — peace ! Keep the posts, — war ! " 
 
 Contrary to expectation, the amiable and virtuous envoy found 
 court, parliament, ministry, people, king, all desirous of a better 
 understanding. And who could have been better chosen for such 
 an embassy to such a country than John Jay, a devoted member of 
 the English Church, a friend of Wilberforce, a gentleman whose 
 virtues, tastes, foibles, and limitations were as English as if he had 
 been born and reared in a rural parish of Sussex? The king smiled 
 benignantly upon him, and told him he thought he would succeed 
 in his mission. After live months' negotiation, a treaty was con-- 
 eluded which Mr. Jay was willing to sign ; not because he thought 
 it good and sufficient, but because he knew it to be the least bad 
 then possible, and, upon the whole, better than none, — better than 
 drifting into war. The posts were to be surrendered. Commission- 
 ers were to be appointed — two hy the king, two by the president, 
 and one by these four — to award damages to the' owners of Ameri- 
 can ships illegally captured. Other commissioners were to settle the 
 claims of the English creditors of American merchants. American 
 vessels of seventy tons' burden could trade between the West Indies 
 and the United States, but not carr3^ West India produce to any 
 other country. American ships could trade with the East Indies 
 and other distant British possessions, on possible terms. But what- 
 ever could feed a French soldier, or equip a French ship, was 
 declared contraband; and an American captain obtained from the 
 treaty neither any limitation of the right of search, nor the slight- 
 est additional protection against the press-gang. No compensation 
 was made for the loss of millions of dollars and many hundreds of 
 lives through the eleven years' lawless retention of the posts, and 
 none for the negroes carried off from New York and Virginia after 
 the peace of 1783. 
 
 In the innocence of his heart, Mr. Jay supposed at first that the 
 concessions of the treaty were due to a revival of friendly feeling on 
 the part of the English people. On the eve of his departure for 
 America, the merchants concerned in American commerce gave him 
 a dinner, at which the leading cabinet ministers and two hundred 
 merchants assisted. When the health of the president was proposed, 
 the company could not express all their enthusiasm in the " three 
 
CANDIDATE FOE THE PRESIDENCY. 517 
 
 cheers" prescribed by the chairman, but prolonged them to six. 
 Every toast, Mr. Jay reports, which referred in a friendly manner 
 to America, was received with " general and strong marks of appro- 
 bation." At length an incident occurred which threw light upon 
 the unconscious motive of the cheerers. " Toward the conclusion 
 of the feast," Mr. Jaj' relates, " I was asked for a toast. I gave a 
 neutral one, namely, ' A safe and honorable peace to all the belliger- 
 ent powers.' You cannot conceive how coldly it was received ; and 
 though civility induced them to give it three cheers, yet they were 
 so faint and single, as most decidedly to show that peace was not 
 the thing they wished. These were merchants." If Mr. Jay had 
 desired to hear thunders of applause, and see the glasses dance on 
 the thumped mahogan}'^, he should have given, War eternal, and 
 British bottoms forever ! 
 
 The treaty was received in the United States with what must 
 have seemed, at the time, universal execration. Even Hamilton, 
 though he favored ratification, pronounced it, and justly pronounced 
 it, " execrable ; " nor was he entirely wrong in saying that Mr. Jay 
 was "an old woman for making it." It i<;as 'because Mr. Jay 
 possessed some of the traits which we revere in our grandmothers, 
 that he was able to make the treaty. Posterity's verdict on this 
 matter is one in which each successive student of the period will 
 finally acquiesce : that a president of the United States has seldom 
 done an act more difficult, more wise, or more right than the ratifi- 
 cation of the Jay treaty of 1794, which procured the surrender of 
 the posts, inaugurated the policy that naturally issued in arbitration, 
 made some slight beginnings of reciprocity and free trade, and 
 postponed inevitable war for eighteen years. If ever there was 
 a case in which half a loaf was better than no bread, surely it was 
 this. 
 
 But the agonizing want of the other half of the loaf justifies the 
 opposition. That was the time when collections were still made in 
 churches for the ransom of American mariners in captivity among 
 the Algerines ; when the' whole crew of an American vessel was fre- 
 quently impressed by a British man-of-war at out-of-the-way places, 
 like the Barbadoes ; when a neutral vessel had no rights which a 
 " dashing " British captain would allow to stand between himself and 
 his object ; when a suspicion that a schooner containing provisions 
 was bound for a French port often sufficed to condemn her. A 
 
518 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 search in the old garrets of Salem, Gloucester, Newburyport, New 
 London, or any other old town on the coast, would discover hundreds 
 of letters like those given by Mrs. E. Vale Smith in her History of 
 Newburyport. One captain of a schooner writes home, in 1794, 
 from Martinico : "We are continually insulted and abused by the 
 British. The commodore saj^s, ' All American property here will 
 be confiscated.' My schooner is unloaded, stripped, and plundered 
 of everything. Nineteen American sail here have been libelled; 
 seven of them were lashed together, and drifted ashore, and stove to 
 pieces." Worse outrages occurred in 1796, when the Republicans 
 were concentrating all their forces upon defeating the appropriation 
 needful for the execution of tlie Jay treaty. How grand in Wash- 
 ington to ratify it ! How pardonable the execrations that form a 
 great part of the glory of the act ! 
 
 It was in April, 179C, that the battle of the treaty was fought in 
 the House of Representatives. The man that saved it was, as tradi- 
 tion reports, Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, whose speech in its 
 defence, delivered to a concourse of people, lived in the memory of 
 that generation as the greatest achievement of eloquence which the 
 American j^arliament had yet exhibited. He was just the man to 
 plead for such a treaty ; for he was a conservative by the nature of 
 his mind, and the pulmonary disease which was to terminate his 
 existence twelve years after had already overspread his face with 
 pallor and tinged his mind with gloom. A man so gifted as he 
 was, if in robust and joyous health, might have been brought to 
 vote for the treat}^, but he could not have defended it with such 
 warmth and pathos. His appearance, as he rose to speak, was that 
 of a man with one foot in the grave ; and his first words gave the 
 impression to the audience that they were assisting at a scene like 
 those in which Chatham, swathed in flannel, had risen in the 
 House of Lords to speak for the rights of Englishmen violated in 
 America, or to rebuke the employment of savages in a war upon 
 brethren. " I entertain the hope," he faltered, " perhaps a rash one, 
 that my strength will hold me out to speak a few minutes." He 
 was not, however, as near death as he looked ; and as he went on, 
 speaking in a peculiar, reserved tone, low, but solemn, weighty, and 
 penetrating, he gathered strength, and spoke for an hour in a man- 
 ner which intbralled every hearer. Toward the close occurred the 
 famous tomahawk passage, in which he foretold the consequences 
 
CANDIDATE FOE THE PEESIDENCY. 519 
 
 to tLe frontiers of a longer retention of the posts by the English. 
 On reaching this subject, the orator was no longer an invalid. He 
 was transfigured. His words seemed fraught with passionate appre- 
 hension, and drew tears from the eyes, not of women only, but of 
 judges grown gray on the bench. Such poor sentences as these 
 fell from his lips in tones that disguised their poverty and 
 irrelevancy : — 
 
 "By rejecting the posts, we light the savage fires, we bind the 
 victims. This day we undertake to render account to the widows 
 and orphans whom our decision may make, to the wretches that will 
 be roasted at the stake, to our country, and, I do not deem it too 
 serious to say, to conscience and to God. The voice of humanity 
 issues from the shade of the wilderness. It exclaims, that, while 
 one hand is held up to reject this treaty, the other grasps a /toma- 
 hawk. I can fancy that I listen to the yells of savage vengeance 
 and the shrieks of torture ; already they seem to sigh in the westerA 
 wind; already they mingle with every echo from the mountains. 
 This treaty, like a rainbow on the edge of the cloud, marked to our 
 eyes the space where the storm was raging, and afforded at the 
 same time the sure prognostic of fair weather. If we reject it, the 
 vivid colors will grow pale : it will be a baleful meteor, portending 
 tempest and war." 
 
 When by such appeals as these he had wrought upon the feelings 
 and the fears of his auditors, he again, by a stroke of the orator's art, 
 drew attention to himself. "I have," said he, "as little personal 
 interest in the event as any one here. There is, I believe, no mem- 
 ber who will not think his chance to be a witness to the consequences 
 greater than mine. If, however, the vote should pass to reject, and 
 a spirit should arise, as it will, with the public disorders to make 
 confusion worse confounded, even I, slender and almost broken as 
 my hold upon life is, may outlive the government and Constitution 
 of my country. 
 
 The last stroke completed the subjugation of his audience. "My 
 God ! " exclaimed Irish Judge Iredell (of the Supreme Court) to 
 Vice-president Adams seated at his side, " how great he is ! how 
 great he has been ! " " Noble ! " cried Adams. " Bless my stars ! " 
 broke in the judge, after a pause, "I never heard any thing so great 
 
520 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 since I was born ! *' " Divine ! " chimed in the vice-president. 
 And so they continued their interchange of interjections while the 
 tears rolled down their cheeks. "Not a dry eye in the house," Mr. 
 Adams reports, '"'excei^t some of the jackasses who had occasioned 
 the oratory. These attempted to laugh, but their visages grinned 
 horribly ghastly smiles." The ladies, he adds, wished the orator's 
 soul had a better body. Forty-eight hours after, the treaty was 
 carried by a vote of fifty-one to forty-eight. 
 
 It is not unlikely that Fisher Ames's appeal to the apprehensions 
 and sympathies of the Holise, supported by his artful allusion to the 
 interests involved, may have added the needful votes to the side of 
 the administration. He did not disdain to remind his auditors on 
 this occasion, that "profit was every hour becoming capital," and 
 that "the vast crop of our neutrality was all seed-wheat, and was 
 sown again to swell almost beyond calculation the future harvest of 
 our prosperity." He was right there. Seldom has there been a treaty 
 that brought in a larger return of profit, and never one that yielded 
 less honor. Mau}'^ interests united in the demand .for the treaty. 
 It was only the honor and dignitj'' of the nation that could be ' 
 sacrificed by accepting it; and they were only saved by the hard 
 necessity of the case. A hand was in the lion's mouth which it 
 was a thing of necessity to get out; and on the 1st of June, 1796, 
 when the posts were surrendered, that indispensable preliminary to 
 a fair fight was accomplished. 
 
 From the airy height of Monticello, Jetferson surveyed this 
 troubled scene with the deepest interest. He held the treaty in 
 abhorrence. He thought the honest part of its friends were influ- 
 enced by an excessive, unreasonable dread of the power of Great 
 Britain ; and the dishonest, by the vast pecuniary interests involved. 
 He speaks of one person, high in oflQ.ce, who was possessed in turn 
 by a mortal fear of two bugbears, — a British fleet and the demo- 
 cratical societies. Years after the storm of this controversy had 
 blown over, he still adhered to the opinion, that, "by a firm yet just 
 conduct in 1793, we might have obtained a respect for our neutral 
 rights." Not being a military man, having, indeed, no military 
 instincts, the recovery of the posts did not strike his mind as a 
 compensation for the defects of the treaty ; and inhabiting a part of 
 the country which shared the perils of the situation, hut not its 
 ]^TOs;perity, which bore the shame of a violated flag without deriv- 
 
CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY. 521 
 
 ing profit from the commerce that escaped interruption, he desired 
 ardently the rejection of the treaty. Once, in the heat of the con- 
 troversy, he declared that General Washington was the only honest 
 man who favored it. Silence, however, became a candidate for the 
 presidency ; and, though he lent the aid of his experience and 
 knowledge to Madison in private conferences, he uttered not a word 
 designed for the public eye or ear. After the final acceptance of 
 the treaty in April, 179G, he passed a quiet, pleasant summer in the 
 congenial labors of his farm and garden, arid in building his house, 
 never going seven miles from home. 
 
 To secure the influence of General Washington was one of the 
 objects of both parties. The president could have decided this 
 election by merely letting it be distinctly known which of the two 
 candidates he pi'eferred for his successor. Nor were attempts want- 
 ing to bias his mind. Onl}'' a few months after Jefferson's return 
 home, in 1794, Governor Henry Lee of Virginia, a recent convert to 
 Federalism, felt it to be his duty to do a dastardly act : he was con- 
 strained by his conscience to report to the president a question 
 which Mr. Jefferson was said to have addressed to a guest at his 
 own house. Lee was not present when this awful question was 
 asked; but he had received his information from the "very respect- 
 able gentleman" of whom Mr. Jefferson had made the inquiry: 
 "Was it 2)ossible that the president had attached himself to Eng- 
 land, and was governed by British influence ? " General Washing- 
 ton, though he stooped to reply to this small infamy, marked his 
 sense of it by immediately (two daj^s after) sending an express to 
 invite Jefferson back to his old place in the cabinet. And now, in 
 the summer of 1796, we find him writing to Jefferson in the most 
 frank and friendly manner, as of old, though evidently smarting 
 under the sharp attacks of the Republican press. People told him, 
 he wrote, that Mr. Jefferson had represented the president as being 
 too much under Hamilton's influence. "My answer," said he, 
 " has invariably been, that I had never discovered any thing in the 
 conduct of Mr. Jefferson to raise suspicions in my mind of his insin- 
 cerity ; that, if he would retrace my public conduct while he was in 
 the administration, abundant proofs would occur to him, that truth 
 and right decisions were the sole objects of my pursuit ; that there 
 were as many instances within his own knowledge of my having 
 decided against as i?i favor of the opinions of the person evidently 
 
522 LIFE OF THOIMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 alluded to; and, moreover, that I was no believer in the infallibility 
 of the politics or measures of any man living." At the same time, 
 be bitterlj'' complained that he should be rewarded for an honest 
 attempt to avert a desolating war, by being assailed ^' in such exag- 
 gerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Xero, 
 a notorious defaulter, or even to a common pickpocket." Mrs. 
 Washington, who is said to have hated "filthy democrats" with all 
 the ardor of a lady of the old school, sent her "best wishes" to the 
 chief democrat on this occasion. Indeed, nothing like a breach 
 ever occurred between the two families or the two men ; and Jef- 
 ferson never failed, on any occasion, to the last day of his life, to 
 do justice, not alone to the integrity of Washington, — which was 
 never questioned, — but to his mind and judgment, which Hamilton 
 underrated, if he did not despise. To Jefferson's pen we owe the 
 best characterization of Washington which comes down to us from 
 his contemporaries. 
 
 The strife of parties continued during the summer and autumn of 
 1796. The contest was unexpectedly close. The Jaj'^ treaty, though 
 the remoter commerce of the young nation was almost created by it, 
 seemed at first, to the great damage of his friends, only to give new 
 audacity to the dashing British captain. " Three hundred American 
 vessels seized, and one thousand American sailors impressed," during 
 the 3'-ear following its ratification ! Such was the statement of the 
 Republican press of the period. Long lists of seizures lie before me, 
 — not tliree hundred, it is true, nor one hundred, but enough to stir 
 the indignation of those who read the particulars, even at this late 
 day. Nor was the news from France re-assuring. Republicans, in 
 1796, could point to France, after exhibiting the catalogue of British 
 impressments and captures, and say, with alarming appearance of 
 truth, The Jay treaty, which has not conciliated our most danger- 
 ous enemy, has alienated our only friend. 
 
 James Monroe replaced in Paris the brilliant aristocrat, Gouver- 
 neur Morris, a few days after the execution of Robespierre had 
 broken the spell of terror. The National Convention received the 
 young Republican with every honor which enthusiasm could suggest. 
 Reiterated plaudits greeted his entrance, and followed the reading of 
 a translation of his address. The chairman of the Convention re- 
 plied in a style of rhetorical flourish that made Monroe's plain speech 
 seem a model of Roman simplicity. "Why." said the president 
 
CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY. 523 
 
 at length, "should I delay to confirm the friendship of our republics 
 by the fraternal embrace I am directed to give you in the name of 
 the French people ? Come and receive it in the name of the Amer- 
 ican people ; and may this scene destroy the last hope of the impious 
 band of tyrants ! " Mr. Monroe was then conducted to the presi- 
 dent, who, as the Moniteur of the next day reports, " gave the kiss 
 and embrace in the midst of universal acclamations of joy, delight, 
 and admiration." Republican Paris smiled upon the new minister. 
 He found it not difficult to procure the release of Thomas Paine 
 from the Luxembourg. He wrote consolingly to Paine in his prison, 
 claiming him as an American citizen concerning whose welfare 
 Americans could not be indifferent, and for whom the president cher- 
 ished a grateful regard. He received the sick and forlorn captive 
 into his house, and entertained him for a year and a half. All went 
 well with Mr. Monroe until the rumor of Jay's mission reached 
 Paris. Prom that hour to the convention of 1800, the relations of 
 the United States with France had but one course, from bad to worse ; 
 French captains, at length, surpassing the English in dashing 
 exploits upon schooners hailing from the American coast. 
 
CHAPTER LV. 
 
 ELECTED VICE-PRESIDENT. . 
 
 It was for these reasons that the voters were so evenly divided in 
 November, 1796, between the candidates of the two parties, — Adams 
 and Pinckney, Jefferson and Burr. Jefferson had the narrowest 
 escape from being elected to the presidency : Adams 71, Jefferson 
 68, Pinckney 59, Burr 30, Samuel Adams 15, Oliver Ellsworth 11, 
 George Clinton 7, Jay 5, Iredell 2, George Washington 2, John 
 Henry 2, Samuel Johnson 2, C. C. Pinckney 1. It was a geograph- 
 ical result. Eor Adams, the North ; for Jefferson, the South, — 
 except that Jefferson received every Pennsylvania vote but one, and 
 Adams seven from Maryland, one from Virginia, and one from 
 North Carolina. Hamilton might well say that Mr. Adams was 
 elected by a kind of " miracle ; " for the three votes that elected him 
 were, so to speak, unnatural, eccentric, contrary to all rational expec- 
 tation, against the current of popular feeling in the States which 
 gave them, namely, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Virginia. 
 According to the Constitution, not then amended, Mr. Jefferson, hav- 
 ing received next to the highest number of electoral votes, was 
 elected vice-president. 
 
 December was well advanced before he knew the result. His feel- 
 ings on learning it were fully expressed in a confidential letter to 
 his other political self, James Madison. He said the vote had conle 
 much nearer an equality than he had expected, and that he was well 
 content with his escape. " As to the first office," said he, " it was 
 impossible that a more solid unwillingness, settled on full calculation, 
 could have existed in any man's mind, short of the degree of abso- 
 lute refusal. The only view on which I would have gone into it for 
 a while was, to put our vessel on her republican tack, before she 
 should be thrown too much to leeward of her true principles. As to 
 
 524 
 
ELECTED VICE-PRESIDENT. * 525 
 
 the second, it is the only office in the world about which I am unable 
 to decide in my own mind whether I had rather have it or not have 
 it. Pride does not enter into the estimate ; for I think with the 
 Romans, that the general of to-day should be a soldier to-morrow if 
 necessar3\ I can particularly have no feelings which would revolt 
 at a secondary position to Mr. Adams. I am his junior in life, was 
 his junior in Congress, his junior in the diplomatic line, his junior 
 lately in our civil government." Nay, more : " 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." 
 
 Having settled these affairs of state, he proceeds to discourse upon 
 a parcel of books which Madison had lately sent him. In this letter 
 to Madison he enclosed an open one to Mr. Adams, leaving it to 
 Madison's discretion to forward or return it. JeflFerson's doubt as to 
 the propriety of sending this letter arose from the awkwardness of 
 professing indifference to public honors. Not one man in five could 
 then believe such professions sincere ; and we see, in all the cam- 
 paign frenzy of those years, the most unquestioning assumption that 
 Jefferson's every act and word had but one object, — the presidency. 
 He desired to say to Mr. Adams how satisfied he was, personally, 
 with the result of the election, and to congratulate him upon the 
 honor his country had done him. '' I leave to others," he wrote, 
 *' the sublime delight of riding in the storm, better pleased with 
 sound sleep and a warm berth below, with the society of neighbors, 
 friends, and fellow-laborers of the earth, than of spies and sycophants. 
 No one, then, will congratulate you with purer disinterestedness than 
 myself. The share, indeed, which I may have had in the late vote, 
 I shall still value highly, as an evidence of the share I have in the 
 esteem of my fellow-citizens. But still, in this point of view, a few 
 votes less would be little sensible ; the difference in the effect of a 
 few more would be very sensible and oppressive to me. I have no 
 ambition to govern men. It is a painful and thankless office." 
 
 Upon reflection, Mr. Madison deemed it best not to send this let- 
 ter. The ''ticklish temper," of Mr. Adams, the consideration due 
 to those who had so vehemently contested his election, and the prob- 
 able future necessity of opposing his measures, induced him to keep 
 
526 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 the letter till Mr. Jefferson's arrival at the seat of government. At 
 the same time Mr. Madison admitted " the duty and policy of culti- 
 vating Mr. Adams's favorable disposition, and giving a fair start to 
 his executive career." 
 
 As soon as the result of this long contest was known, an imagina- 
 tive paragraphist evolved the report, that Mr. Jefferson would not 
 deign to accept the second office. The rumor rapidly spread itself 
 over the country. Madison wrote to Monticello, suggesting that the 
 best way to dispel so absurd an imputation was for Mr. Jefferson to 
 come to Philadelphia and be publicly sworn in on the 4th of March. 
 It was one of the ''cold winters " of the century. On the very day 
 upon which Madison wrote this letter the shivering lord of Monti- 
 cello, in the course of a long meteorological letter to Voluey (in exile 
 at Philadelphia) used these words : " It is at this moment so cold, that 
 the ink freezes in my pen, so that my letter will scarcely be legible." 
 It is to be feared that the remodelled mansion was not yet weather- 
 proof. For so healthy a man, Jefferson was curiously susceptible of 
 cold ; and he once wrote that he had suffered during his life more 
 from cold than from all other phj'sical causes put together. He 
 resolved however, as he told Madison, to appear in Philadelphia on 
 the day of tlie inauguration, " as a mark of respect for the public, 
 and to do away with the doubts which have spread that I should con- 
 sider the second office as beneath my acceptance." The journey, 
 however, he owned, was " a treiuendous undertaking for one who had 
 not been seven miles from home since his resettlement." 
 
 Jefferson's aversion to ceremonial was manifested on this occa- 
 sion. It was an article of his political creed, that political office 
 stood upon the same footing as any other respectable vocation, and 
 entitled tlie holder to no special consideration ; no respect except 
 that which justly rewards fidelity to any important trust; no eti- 
 quette except such as that very fidelity necessitates ; no privileges 
 except those legally given to facilitate the discharge of public duty. 
 Holding this opinion, he wrote to Mr. Tazewell of the Senate, ask- 
 ing him to prevent the sending of a costly and imposing embassy to 
 notify him of his. election, as had been done when General Wash- 
 ington and Mr. Adams were first elected. Better drop a letter into 
 the post-office, said he in substance : it is the simplest, quickest, 
 and surest way. He begged Madison, also, to discoura-ge any thing 
 that might be proposed in the way of a public reception at Phila- 
 
ELECTED VICE-PRESIDENT. 527 
 
 delpliia. "If Governor Mifflin" (of Pennsylvania, a pronounced 
 Kepublican), " should show any symptoms of ceremony, j)Viiy con- 
 trive to parry them." 
 
 When John Howard was appointed high-sheriff of his county, 
 he conceived the novel idea of inquiring wliat duties were attached 
 to the office. The duties of a high-sheriff, he was informed, w^ere 
 to ride into town on court days in a gilt coach, entertain the judges 
 at dinner, and give an annual county ball. But Howard pushed 
 his eccentricity so far as to look into the law-books, to see if there 
 might not be something, else required at the hands of a high-sheriff. 
 There -was : he was to inspect the jail ! He inspected the jail ; and 
 his inspection had the unprecedented quality of being real. He 
 looked; he felt; he smelt; he tasted ; he weighed ; he measured; 
 he questioned. The reformation of the jails of Christendom dates 
 from that incongruous act. So Jefferson, soon after his election to 
 an office that made him chairman of the Senate, awoke to the fact 
 that he was, from twelve years' disuse, " entirely rusty in the parlia- 
 mentary rules of procedure." He had once been well versed in 
 those rules. Among the many curious relics of his tireless, minute 
 industry, which have been preserved to this day, is a small, well- 
 worn, leather-bound manuscript volume of one hundred and five 
 pages, entitled '' Parliamentary Pocket-book, " begun by him when 
 he was a young lawyer, expecting soon to be a member of the par- 
 liament of Virginia. This work, which contained the substance of 
 ancient parliamentary law and usage, he now fished from its hiding- 
 place ; and upon it, as a basis, he gradually constructed his "Manual 
 of Parliamentary Practice," which still governs our deliberative 
 bodies. After amending it, and adding to it for four years, aided 
 by tlie learning and experience of his ancient master in the law, 
 George Wythe, he left it in manuscript to the Senate, as the stand- 
 ard by which he had "judged and was willing to be judged." 
 
 The opening paragraph betrays the habit of his mind, and shows 
 from what quarter he habitually expected danger : " Mr. Onslow, 
 the ablest among the speakers of the House of Commons, used to 
 say, It was a maxim he had often heard, when he was a j^oung 
 man, from old and experienced members, that nothing tended more 
 to throw power into the hand of administration, and' those who 
 acted with a majority of the House of Commons, than a neglect of, 
 or departure from, the rules of proceedings ; that these forms, as 
 
 m 
 
528 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 instituted by our ancestors, operated as a check and control on the 
 actions of the majority ; and that they were, in many instances, a 
 shelter and protection to the minority against the attempts of 
 power." This little Manual is a wonderful piece of work, compact 
 with the brief results of wide research. This sentence startles one 
 who now turns over its pages : " Whex the private interests 
 
 OF A member are CONCERNED IN A BILL OR QUESTION, HE IS TO 
 WITHDRA\^ ! " 
 
 In 1797 it was still ten days' ride from Monticello to Philadel- 
 phia. When ]Mr. Jefferson's man, Jupiter, drove his chaise round to 
 the door on the 20th of February, the master did not forget that a 
 few weeks before he had beer^ elected president of the Philosophical 
 Society ; and, accordingly, he placed in the carriage some bones of 
 the mastodon, lately come into his possession, the size of which had 
 filled him with special wonder. With the Parliamentary Pocket- 
 book in his trunk, and these bones under the seat, he was well 
 set up in both his characters. Prom Alexandria he took the public 
 coach, and sent his own vehicle home ; not omitting to record in 
 his diary that the stage-fare from Alexandria to Philadeljihia was 
 $11.75, — no great charge for six days' ride in February mud. Mr. 
 Madison did not succeed in parrying the symptoms of ceremony ; for 
 we read in a Philadelphia newspaper of the time, that on Thurs- 
 daj^, the 2d of March, "the company of artillery welcomed that 
 tried patriot, Thomas' Jefferson, with a discharge of sixteen rounds 
 from two twelve-pounders, and a flag was displaj-ed from the 
 2Jark of artillery bearing the device ' Jefferson, the Friend of the 
 People.' " 
 
 The inauguration of a new president, like the accession of a 
 young prince to a throne, is naturally a time of joyous excitement; 
 but the present occasion was clouded with apprehension. Every 
 newspaper of those early weeks of 1797, which contained news from 
 abroad, had from one to a dozen items like this: "The ship Eliza, 
 on her passage from Liverpool to New York, sprang a leak, and was 
 obliged to bear away to the West Indies. In sight of Martinico she 
 was taken by a French privateer, and run ashore, where she was totally 
 wrecked. The captain was imprisoned thirty-two days, and then 
 released without trial." This from the only power in the world 
 which could be regarded as the natural ally of the United States ! 
 This from the native land of Lafayette ! And now the great 
 
ELECTED VICE-PRESIDENT. 529 
 
 cLaracter wliicli had stood between contending parties, himself no 
 partisan, was to withdraw from the scene, leaving the crisis to he 
 dealt with by men untried in the responsibilities of government. 
 Good citizens might well be anxious for their country. 
 
 On reaching Philadelphia, Jefferson went at once to pay his 
 respects to Mr. Adams, who, the next morning, returned the call, 
 and started immediately the topic that was upon every man's mind 
 and tongue, — the danger of a rupture with France. The president 
 elect said that he was impressed with the necessity of sending an 
 embassy to that country. The first wish of his heart would have 
 been to intrust the mission to Jefferson ; but he supposed that was 
 out of the question, as it did not seem justifiable for, a president to 
 send away the person destined to take his place in case of accident 
 to himself, nor decent to remove, from competition one who was a 
 rival for the public favor. He had resolved, he Said, to send an 
 imjjosing embassy of three distinguished persons, — Elbridge Gerry 
 from New England, from Virginia James Madison, from South Caro- 
 lina G. C. Pinckney. The dignity of the mission, he thought, 
 would satisfy France ; and its selection from the three great divis- 
 ions of the country would satisfy the people of the United States. 
 Mr. Jefferson agreed with the president elect as to the impropriety 
 of his leaving the post assigned him by the people, and consented 
 to make known his wishes to Madison. Mr. Adams was all candor 
 and cordiality on this occasion. In the elation of the hour, he 
 evidently regarded Mr. Jefferson as a colleague, with whom it was 
 but natural for him to consult. In his swelling moments, during 
 these first days of his elevation, he liked to compare Jefferson's 
 position in tlie country with that of prince-roj'al or heir-apparent 
 to a throne, — much too exalted a personage to be sent on any 
 mission. 
 
 On the last day of Washington's term, Jefferson was one of the 
 guests at the dinner given by the president -to the conspicuous per- 
 sons of the capital with whom he had been officially connected. It 
 was a merry dinner; for, on tliis occasion, he who was to lay down 
 the burden of power was happier than they who were to take it up. 
 On Saturday, the 4th of March, occurred the memorable scenes of the 
 inauguration so often described. At eleven Mr. Jefferson, in the 
 Senate Chamber, was sworn into office, assumed the chair, and deliv- 
 ered the usual brief address. He concluded with a cordial tribute to 
 
 31 
 
530 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSOK. 
 
 Mr. Adams: " No one more sincerely prays that no accident may 
 call me to the higher and more important functions which the Con- 
 stitution eventually devolves on this oiEce. These have been justly 
 confided to the eminent character which has preceded me here, whose 
 talents and integrity have been known and revered by me through 
 a long course of years, and have been the foundation of a cordial and 
 uninterrupted friendship between us ; and I devoutly pray he may 
 be long preserved for the government, the happiness, and prosperity 
 of our common country." 
 
 The Senate, with Mr. Jefferson at their head, then proceeded to 
 the Representatives' Hall, where Mr. Adams took the oath, and 
 delivered his robust inaugural, so worthy of him and of the occasion, 
 so little appreciated by tlie party leaders who were to deceive, mis- 
 lead, and destroy him. General Washington's fine sense of propri- 
 ety was shown 'on this occasion in a trifling incident that caugbt 
 every eye and dwelt in many memories. After Mr. Adams had left 
 the chamber, the general and Mr. Jefferson rose at the same moment 
 to follow him ; and Mr. Jefferson, of course, stood aside to let the 
 ex-president take the lead in leaving the chamber. But the private 
 citizen pointedly refused to accept the precedence over the vice- 
 president. Mr. Jefferson was obliged to go first. 
 
 That afternoon there was a mighty banquet given in honor of the 
 retiring chief by the merchants of Philadelphia ; which was attended 
 by the president, the vice-president, members of Congress, the cabi- 
 net, the foreign ministers, and a great company of noted citizens. 
 The circus was converted into a banqudting-hall, to which the corn- 
 pan}' marched, two and two, from the great tavern of the day. The 
 toast given by Jefferson was very significant to the men of that 
 time, little as it conveys to us : " Eternal union of sentiment between 
 the commerce and agriculture of our country." Benevolent readers 
 will be pleased to learn, that, in accordance with a kindly custom of 
 the period, "the remains of this festival were given to the prisoners 
 in the jail, and the sick in the hospital, that the unfortunate and 
 afflicted might also rejoice." 
 
 Sunday passed. If we may judge from the vituperation of after- 
 years, Mr. Jefferson took the liberty of attending the Unitarian 
 chapel, where Dr. Priestley might then be occasionally heard, instead 
 of exhibiting himself at Christ Church, which had been more politic. 
 
 On Monday Mr. Adams and himself again dined with General 
 
ELECTED YICE-PEESIDENT. 531 
 
 Washington. As they chanced to leave at the same moment, they 
 walked together until their ways diverged, and Mr. Jefferson seized 
 the opportunity to inform the president that Madison declined the 
 French mission. The topic had evidently become an embarrassing 
 one to the president. Objections, he said, in his honest, tactless 
 manner, had been made to the nomination of Mr. Madison ; and he 
 continued to stammer excuses till the welcome corner of Market 
 Street and Fifth Street gave him an undeniable excuse for breaking 
 off the conversation. 
 
 Mr. Adams never again consulted the vice-president on a political 
 measure. They exchanged punctually the civilities which tlieir situ- 
 ations and their ancient friendship demanded ; but never again did 
 they converse on a measure of the administration. Mr. Jefferson, 
 as he strolled along Fifth Street in the silence and solitude of a 
 Philadelphia evening, mused upon the cause of the sudden change 
 in the president's tone on the subject of the French mission. He 
 / arrived at a probable solution of the mystery : Mr. Adams had met 
 the cabinet that Monday morning for the first time. Madison to 
 France ! What a proposition to make to a knot of -Federalists, sore 
 and hot from the strife of 1796 ! Madison, the thorn in Hamilton's 
 side for seven years, to be selected for the most conspicuous honor 
 in the administration's gift by Hamilton's own satellites and jjroteges/ 
 Mr. Adams, as Jefferson conjectured, rose from the council-table in 
 an altered mood ; and " as he never acted on any system, but was 
 always governed by the feeling of the moment," he gave up his 
 dream of steering impartially between the two parties, and employ- 
 ing the talents of both, in the lofty style of Washington. It is not 
 given to every man to bend the bow of Ulysses ! The king and the 
 heir-apparent seldom agree in politics while the king reigns ! 
 
CHAPTER LVI. 
 
 Hamilton's amour with mrs. Reynolds. 
 
 Whether the people of the United States should govern or be 
 governed, or, in other words, whether America, should remain Amer- 
 ica or become merely a greater Britain, — that was the issue in the 
 infuriate presidential election of 1800. The issue was confused, as 
 it alwaj's is, by intrigue, accident, and personality: but the people 
 saw it clearly enough ; for of all the devices of man for clarifying 
 and disseminating truth, nothing has yet been invented so effective 
 as one of our hotly contested presidential elections. Millions of 
 lies are generated only to be consumed ; and the two warring princi- 
 ples stand at last clearly revealed, for each man to choose, according 
 to his nature. Never once, from 1789 to 1872, have the people of v 
 the United States failed to reach a decision, which, upon the whole, 
 was best ; not once, little as some of us could think so on the morn- 
 ing after certain elections that could be named. 
 
 The discussion which had begun in the privacy of President 
 Washington's cabinet in 1790, between American Jefferson and 
 British Hamilton, at length divided the nation into two parties. 
 The representative individuals who began it were now in situations 
 that seemed to withdraw them from the, arena of stri'fe, — Hamilton 
 a lawyer at the New York bar, Jefferson in the chair of the Senate; 
 and yet it was about these two men that the strife concentrated. It 
 was still Hamilton who led the party of re-action ; it was still Jef- 
 ferson who inspired the Republicans, — each deeply and entirely 
 convinced, that upon the supremacy of his ideas depended, not the 
 welfare of America onlj'', but the happiness of man. What a might 
 there is in disinterested conviction ! It sometimes invests common 
 talents with a far-reaching and late-enduring power which unprin^ 
 cipled genius never wields. 
 532 
 
HAMILTON'S AMOUR WITH MRS. REYNOLDS. 533 
 
 And it so chanced in tin's first year of Mr. Adams's presidency, 
 1797, that both these individuals, without agency of their own and 
 to their extreme annoyance, were invested with a new and intense 
 conspicuousness. They awoke to find ''the eyes of the universe" 
 fixed upon them. 
 
 In April, 1796, in the heat of the debates upon the Jay treaty, 
 Mr. Jefferson had occasion to write a long letter of business to his 
 old neighbor, Mazzei, then happily settled in his native Ituly. By 
 way of a friendly finish to a letter of dull detail, he appended a 
 short paragraph upon politics, writing hastily and without reserves, 
 as republican to republican. He told Mazzei, that, since he had left 
 America, the aspect of politics had wonderfully changed. Aa 
 Anglican monarchical and aristocratical party had spTung up, small 
 in numbers but high in station, whose avowed object was to draw us 
 over to the substance, as they had already to the forms, of the 
 British government. On the side of republicanism pure an(J simple 
 were these three, — the people, the planters, and the talents; 
 against republicanism pure and simple, placemen, office-seekers, the 
 Senate, *' all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the 
 boisterous sea of liberty, British merchants and Americans trading 
 on British capitals, speculators and holders in the banks and public 
 funds, a contrivance invented for the purposes of corruption, and 
 for assimilating us in all things to the rotten as well as the sound 
 parts of the British model." He added these observations : " It 
 would give j'ou a fever were I to name to you the apostates who 
 have gone over to these heresies, — men who were Samsons in the 
 field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads 
 shorn by the harlot England. In short, we are likely to preserve 
 the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils. 
 But we shall preserve it; and our mass of weight and wealth on the 
 good side is so great as to leave no danger that force will ever be 
 attempted against us. We have only to awake, and snap the Lili- 
 putian cords with which they liave been entangling us during the 
 first sleep which succeeded our labors." 
 
 Upon receiving this letter, Mazzei translated the political para- 
 graph into Italian, and had it inserted in one of the newspapers of 
 Florence, as an extract from a letter from Thomas Jefferson, late 
 secretary of state of the United States. The editor of the Paris 
 Moniteur espied it, translated it into French, and transferred it to 
 
504 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 his journal. An American editor translated it back into English, 
 printed it, and soon all America was ringing with it. 
 
 It would be difficult to compress into a few lines a greater amount 
 of exasperating offence than Jefferson had managed to pack into 
 these; for it was not individuals who were hit, but classes, and 
 classes, too, that had weapons with which to return the stroke. The 
 passage had another peculiarity : to the few extreme Federalists it 
 had the bitter sting of truth ; while the mass of the party honestly 
 resented it as calumny. Nor could the writ-er disavow or explain it 
 away, despite the errors of translation that intensified some phrases. 
 Upon reflection, and after consultation with Madison, he decided to 
 adhere to his ancient rule, and publish not a word of personal expla- 
 nation. But nothing that Jefferson ever did or wrote in his whole 
 life gave such deep, wide, and lasting offence as this hasty post- 
 script, written in the heat of controversy, and published with crim- 
 inal thoughtlessness by a sincere friend four thousand miles away. 
 Those figures of speech which are the natural utterance of a kindled 
 mind, how they delight and mislead the unconcerned bearer ! how 
 they rankle in the wounds of self-love ! 
 
 Hamilton's affair was a thousand times worse than this; and yet, 
 strange to say, it gave less offence, and seemed to be sooner forgot- 
 ten. To clear himself from a charge of peculation during his 
 tenure of the treasury, he was obliged to publish in great detail the 
 history of his amour with a married woman, named Reynolds. His 
 pamphlet on this subject will be valuable to any one who may 
 desire to pursue Mr. Lecky's line of investigation in ximerica, and 
 get further light upon the history of morals. It is a highly inter- 
 esting fact, that, A. D. 1797, one of the foremost men of the United 
 States, a person who valued himself upon his moral principle, and 
 was accepted by a powerful party at his own valuation in that par- 
 ticular, should have felt it to be a far baser thing to cheat men of 
 their money than to despoil women of their honor. In this pam- 
 phlet he puts his honorable wife to an open shame, 'and publishes to 
 the world the frailty of the woman who had gratified him; and this 
 to refute a calumny which few would have credited. His. conduct 
 in this affair throws light upon his political course. He could be 
 false to women for the same reason that he could disregard the will 
 of the people.i/ He did not look upon a woman as a person and an 
 equal with wliom faith was to be kept, any more than he recognized 
 
Hamilton's amour with mrs. Reynolds. 535 
 
 jthe people as the master and the owner whose will was law. Origi- 
 nal iu nothing, he took his morals from one side of the Straits of 
 Dover, and his politics from the other. 
 
 What more amusing than the high-stepping morality of the open- 
 ing of this pamphlet, where the autlior declares that the spirit of 
 Jacobinism (Hamilton's word for the opinions of his opponents) 
 threatens more mischief to the world than the three great scourges, 
 War, Pestilence, and Famine ; and that it is, in fact, nothing other 
 than " a conspiracy of Vice against Virtue ! " It was after prelud- 
 ing upon this theme, that the representative of Injured Innocence 
 told his story. In the summer of 1791, a woman had called at his 
 house in Philadelphia, and asked to speak with him in private. As 
 soon as they were alone, she had related a piteous tale, — how her 
 husband, after treating her cruelly, had left her destitute, and gone 
 off to live with another woman. She now desired only to get home 
 to her friends in New York ; and, knowing that Colonel Hamilton 
 was a New Yorker, she had ventured to come to him, as a country- 
 man, and ask him to give her money enough for the journey. He 
 replied that her situation was interesting, and that he was disposed 
 to help her, but he had no mone^^, — a very common case with the 
 secretary of the treasury. He told her to leave her address, and he 
 would call or send in the evening. 
 
 " In the evening," he says, " I put a bank-bill in my pocket, and 
 went to the house. I inquired for Mrs. Reynolds, and was shown 
 up stairs, at the head of which she met me, and conducted me into a 
 bedroom. I took the bill out of my pocket, and gave it to her. 
 Some conversation ensued, from which it quickly appeared that 
 other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable. After this I 
 had frequent meetings with her, most of them at my own house; 
 Mrs. Hamilton with her children being absent on. a visit to her 
 father." 
 
 These ''frequent meetings," which began in July, continued until 
 December, when they were rudely interrupted by the return of the 
 husband, and his discovery of what had occurred in his absence. 
 The honorable secretary received one morning a chaotic letter from 
 Mrs. Reynolds, who had then become "Maria" to him, in which 
 she announced the appalling fact, in the ladies' spelling of the 
 period, that irate Reynolds " has swore if he dose not se or hear 
 from you to-day, he will write Mrs. Hamilton." 
 
536 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 A letter not less chaotic, nor better spelled, soon arrived from Mr. 
 lie^'nold.-?; and this led to an interview between the husband and the 
 paramour, — not at Weehawken, but in Colonel Hamilton's house. 
 The consolation which the husband desired could not be described 
 as " other than pecuniary." He asked for a place under govern- 
 ment. But Colonel Hamilton was never capable of the imfamj of 
 saddling such a fellow-upon the public service. In the vain attempt 
 to shut the man's mouth, he committed very great folly, it is true, but 
 not crime: he tried to buj'- his silence with money, — with a thou- 
 sand dollars, paid in two instalments ; six hundred dollars on the 
 22d of December, 1791, and the remainder January 3, 1792. The 
 reader knows very well what followed ; for he lives in the advanced 
 year 1874, when the truth is familiar that blackmail is a 'case of 
 interminable subtraction. The thousand dollars which was squeezed 
 with so much difficulty out of a small salary kept the noble Rey- 
 nolds quiet for fourteen days. On the 17th of January, 1792, the 
 secretary of the treasury of the United States had the pleasure, of 
 receiving the following note : — 
 
 *'■' Sir I suppose j-ou will be surprised in my writing to you 
 Repeatedly as I do. but dont be Alarmed for its Mrs. R. wish to 
 See you. and for My own happiness and hers. I have not the 
 Least Objections to your Calling, as a friend to Bouth of us. and 
 must Rely intirely on your and her honnor. when I conversed with 
 you last. I told you it would be disagreeable to me for you to Call, 
 buti Sence, I am pritty well Convinsed, She would onely wish to See 
 you as a friend, and sence I am Reconsiled to live with her, I 
 would wish to do every thing for her happiness and my own, and 
 Time may ware of every thing. So dont fail in Calling as Soon as 
 you Can make it Conveanant. and I Rely on your befriending me 
 if there should any thing otter that would be to my advantage, as 
 you Express a wish to befrind me. So I am yours to Serve 
 
 " James Reynolds." 
 
 From this letter it appeared that Mi-. Reynolds wished to open a 
 new account with a gentleman who was so free with his money. 
 But the burnt child avoided the fire. Colonel Hamilton did not 
 call. Late one evening, a maid-servant left at his door an epistle 
 still more moving from " Maria " herself. She could " neither Eate 
 
Hamilton's amouk with mrs. Reynolds. 537 
 
 nor sleep." She had been on the point of doing " the moast horrid 
 acts," the thought of which made her " shuder." She felt that she 
 was not long for this world ; and all she asked was to " se " him 
 once more. " For God sake," she concluded, " be not so voed of all 
 humannity as to deni me this Last request but if you will not Call 
 some time this night I no its late but any tim between this and 
 twelve A Clock I shall be up Let me Intreat you If you wont Come 
 to send me a Line oh my head I can rite no more do something to 
 Ease My heart or Els I no not what I shall do for so I cannot live 
 Commit this to the care of my maid be not offended I beg." 
 
 But even this tender appeal did not bring the truant to her feet. 
 She wrote again two daj's after, on " Wensday Morning ten of 
 Clock," imploring him " if he has the Least Esteeme for the 
 unhappy Maid whos grateest fault Is loveing him that he will come 
 as soon as he shall get this and till that time My breaste will be the 
 seate of pain and woe." Nor did she omit the truly feminine post- 
 script : " P. S. If you cannot come this Evening to stay just come 
 only for one moment as I shal be Lone Mr. is going to sup with a 
 friend from New York." This postscript, it to be feared, proved too 
 much for the " virtue " of a man against whom the spirit of Jacob- 
 inism had formed a conspiracy with vice. At least we know that 
 relations between the woman and the cabinet minister were re-estab- 
 lished, and that the husband promptly brought in his bill. If we 
 may judge from the specimens of receipts signed James Reynolds 
 which Hamilton gives in his pamphlet, we may conclude, that when- 
 ever James Eeynolds felt the need of a little money, which was only 
 too often, he was in the habit of applying to the honorable secretary 
 of the treasury for a small loan ; which alas ! the secretary dared not 
 refuse. He responded promptly too ; for we find the receipt bearing 
 the same date as the begging letter. 
 
 What a snarl for the leader of a national party to be caught in, 
 in the year of a presidential election, — the wife pestering him with her 
 tears and her awful letters, and the husband bleeding him every few 
 weeks of a fift^'^-dollar bill, so needed for his own teeming household ! 
 We cannot wonder that he should have broken out in that indec- 
 orous manner, in the newspapers, against his colleague. The affair 
 became loathsome beyond expression, and he could get neither peace 
 nor respite. With a shabby servant-girl leaving crumpled notes at 
 his door at nine o'clock in the evening, and a man of the Keynolds 
 
538 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 stamp, to whom he dared not deny a private interview, hanging 
 round his office in the daj^'time, he could not hope long to escape 
 suspicion, if he did detection ; and, as time went on, the importuni- 
 ties of both became alarmingly frequent. If he abstained from 
 going near the woman for a few days, he received a letter from the 
 husband, begging him to call. 
 
 "Sir I am sorry to be the barer of So disagreeable, an unhappy 
 infermation. I must tell you Sir that I have bin the most unhap- 
 piest man, for this five days in Existance, which you aught to be 
 the last person I ever Should tell my troubls to. ever Sence the 
 night you Called and gave her the Blank Paper. She has treated 
 me more Cruel than pen cant paint out. and Ses that She is deter- 
 mined never to be a wife to me any more, and Ses that it is a plan 
 of ours, wliat has past god knows I Freely forgive you and dont 
 wish to give you fear or pain a moment on the account of it. now 
 Sir I hope you will give me your advise as freely as if Nothing had 
 ever passed Between us I think it is in your power to make matter 
 all Easjr again, and I suppose you to be that Man of fealing that 
 you would wish to make every person happy Where it in your power 
 I shall wate to See you at the office if its Conveuant. I am sir with 
 Asteem yours 
 
 "James Keynolds." 
 
 Only six days passed before the husband handed in his account. 
 The date of the note just given was April 17. The date of the 
 following was April 23 : — 
 
 "Sir I am sorry I am in this disagreeable sutivation which Obliges 
 me to trouble j-ou So offen as I do. but I hope it wont be long 
 before it will be In my power to discharge what I am indebted to 
 you Nothing will give me greater pleasure I must Sir ask the loan 
 of thirty dollars more from you, which I shall asteem as a particular 
 favour, and you may Rest ashured that I will pay you with Strickest 
 Justice, for the Reliefe you have aforded me, tlie Inclosed is the 
 Receipt for the thirty dolhirs. I sliall wate at your office. Sir for 
 an answer I am sir your very Humble Servant, 
 
 "James Reynolds." 
 
HAMILTON'S AMOUE WITH MRS. EEYNOLDS. 539 
 
 The connection became intolerable to the victim at last, and he 
 contrived to shake it off. But Reynolds, five years after, finding 
 himself in jail for debt, thought to extricate himself by selling 
 Hamilton's good name to his political opponents ; and he had letters 
 to show, in Hamilton's own hand, proving, that, between this dast- 
 ardly and ignorant wretch and the secretary of the treasury, some 
 incongruous connection involving pecuniary transactions had existed. 
 It was to explain the incongruity, that, in July, 1797, Hamil- 
 ton felt himself obliged to publish the pamphlet relating the rise 
 and progress of this " amorous intrigue," with enough of the letters 
 to show that the sinner in the case was not the Honorable Secretary 
 of the Treasury, but only a weak, vain, and limited human being, 
 named Alexander Hamilton. 
 
CHAPTER LVII. 
 
 THE GKAND EMBASSY TO FRANCE IN 1797. 
 
 Public opinion miglit have judged Hamilton with almost as 
 much severity for this amour as the Federalists condemned Jeffer- 
 son for his Mazzei paragraph, if public events had not given a brief 
 but overwhelming ascendency to tlie political system which Hamil- 
 ton represented. By the time his pamphlet had made its way 
 through the remoter States, the French imbroglio assumed a charac- 
 ter that destroyed in a moment (and for a moment) all that popular 
 sympathy with France which had constituted a great part of the politi- 
 cal capital of the Kepublican party. For a time, sny about a year, 
 E-epublicanism was under a cloud; and that man was the hei'o of 
 every circle who was loudest against France. Hamilton saw his 
 dream of a consolidating war on the point of realization. The poor 
 man was excessively vain of his military prowess, and had no more 
 doubt of his eminent fitness to command an army than Lord John 
 Russell was once supposed to have of his ability to command the 
 Channel fleet. It was a bewildering turn in public affairs for a man 
 who regarded war as the noblest vocation of human beings, who 
 esteemed himself singularly endowed by nature to shine in that 
 vocation, and who felt that only a war could save "social order " in 
 the United States. 
 
 It was the exploits of three French "strikers," that deceived and 
 maddened the American people in 1798. Vain-glorious Americans 
 pretend that strlkmg is an American invention, practised first in 
 New York, and then at Albany, upon persons interested in a pend- 
 ing act. "Pay me five thousand dollars," says the professional 
 striker, "and your bill will pass." And no man can say whether or 
 not the bill passes in consequence of the striker's influence, or 
 whether the striking was or was not authorized by members. It 
 540 
 
THE GRAND EMBASSY TO FEANCE IN 1797. 541 
 
 was the Eastern Continent, not the Western, that originated this 
 fine device. 
 
 President Adams carried out his scheme of siding to France an 
 imposing embassy of three gentlemen of the first distinction. The 
 Directory had refused to receive one American plenipotentiary, 
 General C. C. Pinckney, — refused even to give him "cards of hospi- 
 tality," legalizing his residence in Paris ; and, finally (January 25, 
 1797), notified him that he had no legal right to remain in France. 
 The cause of this remarkable behavior was the Jay treaty ; or, as 
 the French government styled it, " the condescension of the Ameri- 
 can government to its ancient tj'rants." Imagine the effect in the 
 United States of an insult so emphatic and so unprovoked ! The 
 best friends of France were the most wounded and dismayed ; while 
 the party in power, in extra session of Congress assembled, voted 
 every thing short of downright war, and might even have precipitated 
 actual hostilities, but for the overshadowing, portentou-s^restige of 
 General Bonaparte. In the nick of time was published an " Order 
 of the Day," dated "30 Germinal, An V" (or vulgarly, April 19, 
 1797), in which that "Geaeral-en-Chef" informed his army, in five 
 lines, that the preliminaries of peace had been signed the day before 
 between the emperor of Austria and the French Republic. This 
 brief document notified mankind that General Bonaparte, with 
 resources vastly increased, was now free to direct his exclusive atten- 
 tion to the war with perfidious Albion, either by way of Calais and 
 Dover, or Egypt and Calcutta. This intelligence, as Jefferson 
 remarked at the time, "cooled the ardent spirits," and therefore, 
 instead of war, we had the grand embassy, — C. C. Pinckney, John 
 Marshall, and Elbridge Gerry. Pinckney and Marshall were Fed- 
 eralists ; Gerry a Republican. 
 
 How warmly Mr. Jefferson urged Mr. Gerry to accept the mission 
 is worthy of remembrance, in view of its result. " If," wrote Jef- 
 ferson," we engage in a war during our present passions, and our 
 present weakness in some quarters, our Union runs the greatest 
 risk of not coming out of that war in the shape in which it enters it. 
 My reliance for our preservation is in your acceptance of this mis- 
 sion. I know the tender circumstances which will oppose themselves 
 to it. But its duration will be short, and its reward long. You 
 have it in your power, by accepting and determining the character 
 of the mission, to secure the present peace and eternal union of 
 
542 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 your country. If you decline, on motives of private pain, a substi- 
 tute maybe named who has enlisted his passions in the present con- 
 test, and, by the preponderance of his vote in the mission, may 
 entail on us calamities, your share in which, and your feelings, will 
 outweigh whatever pain a temporary absence from your family could 
 give you." 
 
 Elhridge Gerry had now been in the service of his country for 
 nearly a quarter of a century. Before the Revolutionary War, he 
 was a thriving merchant at Marblehead, a town situated on a point 
 that extends two or three miles out into Massachusetts Bay, and was 
 inhabited at that time only by fishermen and merchants. Being a 
 mercliant and a man of substance, he naturally took the lead in 
 such a community during the agitation which preceded the Revolu- 
 tionary War. He was a just, public-spirited, thouglitful, and reso- 
 lute man, a great friend and constant correspondent of Samuel 
 Adams, who was the soul and centre of the opposition to the king 
 in Massachusetts for twenty years. , 
 
 *' The whole business of life," WTote Gerry to Adams, wlien the 
 news of the Boston Port Bill reached Marblehead, " seems involved 
 in one great question, What is best to he done for our country ? '^ 
 
 That sentence perfectly describes both the feelings and the con- 
 duct of Elbridge Gerry at that period. Politics became, indeed, the 
 whole business of his life ; and, after serving his State in various 
 honorable capacities, he found himself a member of the Continental 
 Congress, in which character he signed the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence. He served during the gloomiest period of the war, on 
 that most laborious and responsible committee which had charge of 
 the finances of the country. As the war went on, the forty gentlemen 
 who composed the Congress of the United States were reduced .to 
 sad straits. At one period, when a dollar in gold was worth four 
 thousand in paper, if, indeed, it could be said to have any value, Mr. 
 Gerry described his own situation thus : — 
 
 "I now owe one hundred, and forty-seven dollars (gold) for 
 board, and some little borrowed of my landlady, besides twenty-six 
 borrowed for every-day expenses, and perhaps sixteen more to tailors 
 and shoemakers. How, under Heaven, am I to get this with 
 provincial paper, which does not pass here for any thing at all, and 
 is next to nothing where it was issued ? You speak of my soon 
 
THE GRAND EMBASSY TO FRANCE IN 1797. 543 
 
 being at home ! . I own no horse, or I might ride away from these 
 great debts, and ask charity on the road for a delegate from Massa- 
 chusetts, to enable him to reach home." 
 
 The supreme power of the country, nevertheless, and the control 
 of two armies, were in the liands of these forty men who were trou- 
 bled to pay their board. Gerry took it in good part, and made a 
 joke of it. He guarded the public treasury with vigilance and 
 sternness. It was he, in fact, who, as chairman of the treasury- 
 board, rejected the corrupt claims of General Arnold, which kindled 
 the anger of the traitor, and caused him to appeal to Congress from 
 Gerry's decision, Svith severe remarks upon the conduct of the chair- 
 man of the financial committee. Mr. Gerry replied to Arnold's 
 abuse with a remark which some public servants of the present day 
 might use with propriety. 
 
 "If," said he, "the faithful discharge of official duty, unpleasant 
 enough in itself, is to bring with it the liability of personal attack 
 from men who have neither honesty in their public dealings nor 
 courtesy in private life, it might be well to abolisli all guards upon 
 the treasury, and admit rapacity and crime to help themselves at 
 pleasure." 
 
 Elbridge Gerry, though a strictly virtuous and honorable man, 
 was one of those who are sometimes described as " difficult to get 
 along with." He had a spiritual malady, not uncommon in New 
 England at that period, which still troubles some Yankees, otherwise 
 excellent : He was morbidly suspicious. He was prone to attribute 
 evil motives. His companions felt tliat he was doubtful of their 
 sincerity ; and he did indeed habitually expect public men to abuse 
 their trust. John Adams was full of this untrusting, distrusting 
 spirit ; and I have often wondered how it could be, that men so hon- 
 est and sincere as John Adams and Elbridge Gerry could instinc- 
 tively attribute to other men baseness of which they were themselves 
 incapable. Along with this suspiciousness, there was in Elbridge 
 Gerry a tenacity of mind which caused him to adhere to a ground- 
 less suspicion or a trifling right as firmly as to intej-ests the most 
 sacred and the most important. In the midst of the revolutionary 
 period. Congress having refused him the ayes and noes on a motion, 
 he protested against the refusal as a wrong done to his State ; and, 
 after waiting a month for Congress to redress his grievance, he aban- 
 
544 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 doned Lis seat, and referred the subject to the legislature of Massa- 
 chusetts. Nor, -when re-elected to Congress, would he accept the 
 seat until the affair had been adjusted. 
 
 He was one of the original founders of our Democratic party, — - 
 one of those, who, even before the war ended, had a dread of increas- 
 ing the power of the central government, and a horror of the 
 parade and pageantry which called to mind this vice-regal system. 
 
 At the close of the war, when the treaty of peace was presented 
 to Congress for its consideration, there were only three members in 
 the body who had signed the Declaration of Independence, — Mr. 
 Jefferson, Mr. Gerr}^, and Mr. Ellery of Rhode Island; all of whom 
 were named upon the committee to whom the treaty was referred. 
 He witnessed the memorable scene of Washington's resigning his 
 commission at Annapolis. He served also in the Constitutional 
 Convention of 1787. 
 
 But the great event of his life, and that which alone will cause 
 him to be remembered in history, was the part which he took in 
 preserving peace, in 1798, between the United States and France. 
 
 After the departure of the envoys in August, there was a lull in 
 the storm of politics ; and several months of expectation passed, 
 increasing as time went on, until the mere delay created alarm. 
 The summer passed, the autumn glided by, winter began. Congress 
 convened, the winter ended, and still the dreadful question of peace 
 or war remained unanswered. What of our envoys ? How has our 
 sublime embassy been received? It was not until it had been gone 
 seven months, that any authoritative answer could be given to such 
 inquiries, even by the president. And then what an answer! Let 
 us accompany these gentlemen on their mission. 
 
 It was on the 4th of October, 1797, that the three envoys found 
 themselves in Paris, — two having come fresh from the United 
 States, and General Pinckney from Holland. On that very first 
 morning they had an experience which was a fit prelude to what 
 was to come. The musicians of the Directory, in accordance with 
 ancient custom (" everybody does it, my dear sir "), called upon 
 them for a present, and got from each, as Mr. Gerry reports, " fif- 
 teen or twenty guineas." Next, a deputation of fish-women, also 
 in accordance with ancient custom, presented themselves for the 
 same purpose. " When the ladies," wrote Mr. Gerry, " get sight 
 of a minister, as they did of my colleagues, they smother him with 
 
THE GRAND EMBASSY TO FRANCE IN 1797. 545 
 
 kisses." But Mr. Gerry escaped this part of the penalty by send- 
 ing one of the secretaries of the mission, Major Rutledge, to "nego- 
 tiate for me." Gerry paid the guineas, and Rutledge,.it is to he 
 presumed, drew the kisses. 
 
 The next morning business began. The envoys sent a messen- 
 ger to notify verbally M. de Talleyrand, Minister of Foreign 
 Affairs, of their arrival in Paris, and to ask him to name a time 
 when he would be at leisure to receive one of their secretaries with 
 a formal and written notification. Answer: The next day, at two 
 o'clock. Major Rutledge, punctual to the time, delivered the usual 
 letter, announcing the object of the embassy, and requesting the min- 
 ister to appoint an hour for them to present their letters of credence. 
 To the cordial and stately letter of the three envoys, Talleyrand gave 
 a verbal reply : " The day after to-morrow at one o'clock." They 
 waited upon him at the hour appointed. He was not at home ! His 
 chief secretary informed them that he had been compelled to meet the 
 Directory, but would be glad to see them at three o'clock. They 
 called again at three o'clock. He was "engaged with the Portuguese 
 minister;" and the envoj's waited till he was disengaged, about ten 
 minutes. They were then introduced, and presented their letters, 
 which the minister read and kept. He then informed them that the 
 Directory had required him to draw up a report upon the relations of 
 Prance with the United States, which he was then engaged upon, 
 and would complete in a few days ; when we would let them know 
 "what steps wei-e to follow." They asked him if, in the mean time, 
 the usual cards of hospitality would be necessary. Yes, and they 
 should be sent to them. He rang his bell, told his secretary to 
 make tliera out. The envoys then withdrew ; and, on the day fol- 
 lowing, the cards were brought to them. 
 
 Ten days passed. No letter from M. de Talleyrand. 
 
 But, on the morning of October 18, the strikers began their 
 attempts upon the envoys. A certain " Mr. W." called upon Gen- 
 eral Pinckney, and informed him that " a Mr. X was a person of 
 considerable credit and reputation, and that the envoys might place 
 great reliance upon him ; " and, in the evening of the same day, 
 who should happen to drop in upon the envoys but the same Mr. X? 
 After sitting a while, this Unknown Quantity whispered to General 
 Pincknej'- that he was the bearer of a message to him from M. de 
 Talleyrand. The general immediately showed the message-bearer 
 
546 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 into tlie next room, and lent an attentive ear to his communication, 
 which was to this effect : M. de Talleyrand, who had a great regard 
 for the American people, was very desirous to promote a reconcilia- 
 tion between them and France, and was ready, in confidence, strict 
 confidence, to suggest a jilan which he thought would answer the 
 purpose. " I shall be glad to hear it," said the envoy. Mr. X 
 resumed : The Directory was exceedingly irritated at some pas- 
 sages of the president's speech. First, those passages must be 
 " softened." That was essential, even to the mere reception of the 
 envoi's by the Directory. Then the United States must lend some 
 money to France. But, besides this, " a sum of money was 
 required for tlie poclcefs of the Directory and ministers. 'What 
 passages of the president's speech have given offence ? ' asked Gen- 
 eral Pinckney. Mr. X did not know. ' "What amount of loan is 
 expected ? ' Mr. X could not tell. ' How much for the pockets of 
 the Directory?'" On this point, and on this only, the striker 
 possessed exact information : " Twelve hundred thousand francs," 
 or, sa}', a matter of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, gold ! 
 
 In the secret recesses of liis soul, it is to be presumed, General 
 Pinckney whistled. But, being on duty, he only said, that he 
 could not so much as take these propositions into consideration, 
 until he had consulted his colleagues. He consulted his colleagues. 
 Their answer was : Let Mr. X meet us all face to face ; and, to avoid 
 mistakes, let him reduce his propositions to writing. Mr. X con- 
 senting, he came the next evening, and submitted in writing the 
 same " suggestions." He was careful to explain, on this occasion, 
 that his communication did not come directly from M. de Talley- 
 rand : Oh, no ! but from " a. gentleman in whom M. de Talleyrand 
 had great confidence." Other interviews followed ; and, at length, 
 the envoys had the pleasure of meeting that very gentleman in whom 
 M. de Talleyrand had so much confidence. He did but confirm what 
 Mr. X had said. " You can have your treaty, gentlemen," said he ; 
 " but I will not disguise from you, that, satisfaction being made 
 (softening the president's speech), the essential part of the treaty 
 remains to be adjusted : moxey is necessart ; much money." 
 
 For a month or more, this head striker kept coming and going, 
 making various propositions, and pretending to bring from Talley- 
 rand various suggestions ; but always the burden of his song was, 
 ^he douceur ; the loan ; money; much money ! The envoys, hav- 
 
THE GRAND EMBASSY TO FEANCE IN 1797. 547 
 
 ing once for all declined to entertain any proposition of that nature, 
 fought shy of the subject, and turned a deaf ear to hints. Take the 
 following as a sample of these lofty conversations : — 
 
 Head Striker. Gentlemen, you do not speak to the point. 
 The point is money ! It is expected you will ofter money. 
 
 Envoys. We have spoken to that point very explicitly : we have 
 given an answer. 
 
 Head Striker. No : you have not. What is your answer ? 
 
 Envoys. It is No, no ; not a sixpence ! 
 
 Head Striker. Think of the dangers which threaten your 
 country. Would it not be prudent, even though you may not 
 make a loan to the nation, to interest an influential friend in your 
 favor? Consider the character of the Directory: they care nothing 
 for the justice of the case ; they can only be reached by a judicious 
 application of money. 
 
 Envoys. We have no proof of this, even if we were disposed to 
 give the money. 
 
 Head Striker. When you employ a lawyer, you give him a fee 
 without knowing whether the cause can be gained or lost. It is 
 necessary to have a lawyer, and you pay for his services whether 
 those services are successful or not. So, in the present state of 
 things, the money must be advanced for the good offices the individ- 
 uals are to render, whatever may be the effect of those offices. 
 
 Envoys. There is no parallel in the cases ; for the lawyer cannot 
 command success. But the Directory has but to order that no more 
 vessels should be seized, and to release those now held, and there 
 could be no opposition to the order. 
 
 Head Striker. All the members of the Directory are not dis- 
 posed to receive your money. Merlin, for example, is paid from 
 another quarter, and would touch no part of your douceur. 
 
 Envoys. We have understood that Merlin is paid by the priva- 
 teers. 
 
 Head Striker (nodding assent). You pay money to obtain peace 
 with the Indians and with the Algerines; and it is doing no more 
 to pay France for peace. Does not your government know that 
 nothing is to be obtained here without money ? 
 
 Envoys. Our government has not even suspected such a state of 
 things. 
 
548 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 Head Striker (with an appearance of surprise). There is not au 
 American in Paris who cannot give you that information. 
 
 The gentleman, with what the envoys in their despatch styled 
 "vast perseverance," continued to urge this view upon them, return- 
 ing to ''the point" again and again; they ever adhering to their 
 original reply, "Xot a sixpence." It was General Pinckney who 
 afterwards converted that homely Not a Sixpence into an electric 
 and immdrtal phrase, " Millions for Defence, but not a Cent for 
 Tribute." \ At the end of thirty days, the envoys seemed no nearer 
 recognition than on the day when the fishwomen had smothered 
 them with kisses. 
 
 Elbridge Gerry alone had known Talleyrand in the United States. 
 One of the mysterious go-betweens informed him, one daj', that M. 
 de Tallej^rand had expected to meet and converse with the envoys 
 individually. Mr. Gerry reported this intimation to his colleagues, 
 who thought that he might, considering his acquaintance witji the 
 minister, call upon him. He did so. They conversed freely upon 
 the relations of the two countries ; and Mr. Gerry thus learned pre- 
 cisely what the Directory expected as conditions preliminary to a 
 treaty : 1, An apology for certain expressions in the president's 
 speech ; as when he said, France must be convinced " we a,re not a 
 degraded peoj^le," " fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign 
 influence." 2, A voliiiifari/ loan of fifteen 'or sixteen million florins. 
 Nothing was said touching a douceur. Mr. Gerry having reported 
 the conversation to his colleagues, they all agreed that neither of 
 these preliminaries was admissible, — no apology, and not a six- 
 pence ; and they caused this information to be conveyed to Talley- 
 rand by one of the mj'sterious emissaries. But, in recognition of 
 Mr. Gerry's call, Talleyrand invited him to one of his diplomatic 
 dinners. Mr. Gerry went to the dinner, and, in return, gave Talley- 
 rand a dinner. No progress, however, was made in the business of 
 the mission, and Mr. Gerry declined further civilities. 
 
 For six months the envoys vainly endeavored to bring the Direc- 
 tory to reason. From first to last, the cry was, Money, money, 
 money ! " We are engaged in a death-grapple with our only foe, 
 your foe, liberty's foe, mankind's foe : we lent you money when 
 you were in a similar situation ; lend us some in our struggle." 
 Such was the substance of the later messages from the Directory. 
 
THE GEAND EMBASSY TO FEANCE LN" 1797. 549 
 
 And, above the uproar of events, Thomas Paine's voice made itself 
 heard, expressing exultation at the proposed descent upon England, 
 and offering material aid toward it. Not much, it is true ; but 
 enough to create a " scene " in the Council of Five Hundred, and 
 stimulate the loan. The chairman of that excitable body read aloud 
 Paine's letter on the 31st of Januarj", 1798 ; in which he said, that, 
 although in his present circumstances he could not subscribe to the 
 invasion loan, yet his economy enabled him to make a small dona- 
 tion. "I send one hundred livres, and, with it, all the wishes of 
 my heart for the success of the descent, and a voluntary offer of 
 any service I can render to promote it. There will he no lasting 
 peace for France, nor for the world, until the tyranny and corrup- 
 tion of the English government be abolished, and England, like 
 Italj^, becomes a sister republic." This letter was received with 
 acclamations, and unanimously ordered to be printed. 
 
 But the American envoys refused to take the hint. "No," they 
 replied in substance, " a loan to France will embroil us with Eng- 
 land." " Well, then," rejoined Talleyrand, " make us a loan ijciya- 
 ble after the loarP On this last proposition the envoys differed in 
 opinion ; Marshall and Pinckney rejecting it as not fit to be enter- 
 tained, Gerry willing to "open negotiations on the basis" of such a 
 loan. The difference proved irreconcilable ; and, after numberless 
 attempts to arrange the difficulty, Talleyrand notified the envoys 
 that the two gentlemen who refused to consider the proposition 
 might expect to receive their passports, but Mr. Gerry was desired 
 to remain. Gerry replied, that he had no authority to conclude 
 any thing apart from his colleagues : he could only, in their absence, 
 confer with the French minister unofificiallj^, and communicate with 
 his own government as a private citizen. Messrs. Marshall and 
 Pinckney departed. Mr. Gerry, eager as he was to rejoin his family, 
 and foreseeing the ruin to his affairs from his prolonged absence, 
 which actually occurred, was induced to stay. Talleyrand officially 
 informed him, " by order of the Director}'," that his departure from 
 France would be instantly followed by a declaration of war; which, 
 if he remained, would be withheld until he could hear from his gov- 
 ernment. 
 
CHAPTER LVIII. 
 
 HAMILTON IMPROVES THE OPPORTUNITY. 
 
 And so this weighty embassy, this grand and magnanimous 
 endeavor to restore the ancient friendship between two estranged 
 nations, seemed to end pitifully in an intrigue to get a little money. 
 French cruisers had despoiled American commerce of many millions 
 of dollars ; and a demand was now made of millions more, before 
 the claim for redress would be listened to ! Half a dozen corrupt 
 men, whirled aloft in the storm of the Revolution, committed this 
 outrage ; but to the people of the United States, remote from Europe, 
 unversed in its tortuous and childish politics, what could it seem but 
 the act of France? For a short time France had few friends in the 
 United States ; and the extremists of the Federalist party, led Ky 
 Hamilton, had every tiling their own way. 
 
 Judge of the effect of this intelligence upon the public mind by 
 events: Gerry recalled ; Marshall received homelike a conqueror; 
 meetings everywhere; addresses "poured into" the president's office 
 from every town, ''ojffering life and fortune;" a navy department 
 created; a navy voted; guns ordered; small arms purchased to a 
 vast amount ; an army of ten thousand regulars, and any number of 
 militia authorized, i7i case war was declared, or the country invaded; 
 Washington induced to accept the command as lieutenant-general ; 
 three major-generals, and nine brigadiers commissioned ; Hamilton 
 nominally second in command, but practically commander-in-chief; 
 the fortification of harbors begun ; merchant vessels authorized to 
 arm and to resist French men-of-war ; naval commanders ordered to 
 seize and bring in any French vessel which had molested, or was 
 suspected of being about to molest, American ships; the president 
 authorized to suspend commercial intercourse between France and 
 the United States. In a word, the power and resources of the 
 
 550 
 
HAMILTON EVIPEOVES THE OPPOETTJNITY. 551 
 
 country were placed at the disposal of the president, to be by him 
 employed in waging war against France, at his discretion. Hamil- 
 ton saw the dream of his life about to be realized, — a war, in which 
 he should win the only distinction he valued, — military glory, — 
 and, employ, at least, the i^restige of a victorious sword on behalf of 
 what he was accustomed to style '* social order." All this year 1798, 
 he was in earnest, confidential correspondence with Miranda, the 
 South American patriot, who was in England striving to unite 
 William Pitt and Alexander Hamilton, or, in other words, the 
 government of England and the United States, in an expedition to 
 invade and wrest from Spain her American colonies. 
 
 This was to Hamilton a captivating scheme, as it was a few years 
 later to Aaron Burr. But Hamilton, ardently as he cherished it, 
 expressly stipulated that he could have nothing to do with it, "unless 
 patronized by the government of this country." The country, he 
 wrote in August, 1798, was not quite ready for the undertaking ; 
 " but we ripen fast." The plan, he thought, should be this : A 
 fleet of Great Britain, an army of the United States, a government 
 for the liberated territory agreeable to both the co-operators. Mr. 
 Pitt, it seems, was decided for the scheme. Miranda replied to 
 Hamilton's August letter in October. *' Your wishes are in some 
 sort fulfilled,-" wrote the South American; "since they have agreed 
 here that no English troops are to be employed on shore, seeing that 
 the auxiliary laud forces should be American only, while the naval 
 force shall be purely English. All difficulties have vanished, and 
 we only await the fiat of your illustrious president to set out like a 
 flash. "y To this point Hamilton had brought the mad scheme with- 
 out the illustrious president knowing any thing of it. 
 
 But even this was not the wildest nor the worst of Hamilton's 
 misuse of the transient power which circumstances gave him in 
 1798. What shall be said of his attempt to fasten upon the United 
 States the stupid and shameful repressive system of George III. ? 
 What of the Alien Laws, inspired by him, approved by him, passed 
 by his adherents ? The mere rumor of the intention to pass such 
 laws sent shiploads of French and Irish exiles hurrying home, and 
 prevented worthy men from seeking needful refuge here. Kosci- 
 uszko and Volney dejjarted ; Priestley was not deemed safe; noble 
 Gallatin was menaced. By these Alien Laws, the wonder and 
 opprobrium of American politics, servile copies of Pitt's servile 
 
552 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 
 
 originals, the president could order away " all such aliens as he 
 should judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the United 
 States;" and the alien who disobeyed the order was liable to three 
 years' imprisonment. Other clauses and amendments placed the 
 entire foreign population of the United States, and all who might 
 in future seek their shores, under strictest surveillance] and, in case 
 of war with France, every Frenchman not naturalized was to leave 
 the country, or be forcibly put out of it. 
 
 But even tliis was not so monstrous as the Sedition Law, also 
 borrowed from recent British legislation. Five j'ears' imprison- 
 ment and five thousand dollars' fine for conspiring to oppose any 
 measure passed by Congress, or for attempting or advising a riot or 
 insurrection, whether " the advice or attempt should have the pro- 
 posed effect or not." Imprisonment for two years, and a fine of 
 two thousand dollars, for writing, speaking, or publishing " any 
 false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the 
 government of the United States, or either house of the Congress 
 of the United States, or the president of the United States, with 
 intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said 
 Congress, or the said president; or to bring them, or either, of 
 them, into contempt or disrepute ; or to excite against them, or 
 either or any of tliem, the hatred of the good people of tlie United 
 States; or to stir up sedition within the United States; or to 
 excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing or resisting 
 any law of the United States." Is it not incredible ? But I have 
 open before me, at this moment, a ponderous law-book of seven 
 hundred and twenty-one large pages, two-thirds filled with "■ State 
 Trials " under the Alien and Sedition Laws. 
 
 To these base imitations the Federalists added an originality that 
 surpassed in refined absurdity any thing devised by Pitt or exe- 
 cuted by Castlereagh. A very worthy, benevolent physician. Dr. 
 George Logan of Philadelphia, appalled at the prospect of two 
 friendly nations being thus cruelly misled into a bloody war, scraped 
 together a little money with much difficulty, and went to France to 
 try and prevent, by purely moral means, by mere remonstrance and 
 persuasion; a calamity so dire and so unnecessar3^ He discovered 
 by conversations with Talleyrand and others, and so reported, that 
 there was nothing the French government so little desired as war 
 with the United States. To parry this blow, the Hamiltonians 
 
HAMILTON ESIPEOVES THE OPPOETUNITY. 553 
 
 passed what was called, in party parlance, the Logan Law, — five 
 thousand dollars' fine and three years' imprisonment to any future 
 Logan, or any person who " should carry on any verbal or written 
 correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government, or any 
 ofiicer or agent thereof, with an intent to influence the measures or 
 conduct of any foreign government, or any officer or agent thereof, 
 in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States." 
 Hamilton was not going to be balked of his war and his Miranda pro- 
 jee-t by any sentimental Quaker; least of all, by one for whom Jeffer- 
 son had procured a safe conduct, and provided with a certificate of 
 citizenship ! Dr. Logan won great honor by this worthy and useful 
 attempt; and in 1810, after an honorable public career in Penn- 
 sylvania, he went to England to endeavor, by the same means, to 
 prevent war between the United States and Great Britain. 
 
 From his lofty seat in the chair of the Senate, Jefferson surveyed 
 the momentary triumph of the re-actionists, and prepared to frus- 
 trate their intentions. Not for a moment was he deceived concern- 
 ing the real disposition of France. One of the first letters that he 
 wrote, after reading the despatches of the envoys, contains these 
 words: "You will perceive that they have been assailed by swin- 
 dlers, whether with or without the participation of Talleyrand is 
 not apparent. But that the Directory knew any thing of it is 
 neither proved nor probable." The lapse of seventy-five years has 
 added little to our knowledge of that intrigue. "Assailed by 
 swindlers, " — that is about all we are sure of at this moment. In 
 reckoning up the wrongs inflicted by France upon his country, he 
 ruled out, therefore, all that mass of curious dialogue, — thirty-six 
 pages of cipher, — between the envoys and the individuals whom 
 Mr. Adams considerately named X, Y, Z, and who are at once 
 named, and explained to modern ears by the word strikers. Hence, 
 liis position and that of his friends, Madison, Gallatin, Monroe, 
 Giles, and the rest of the Republican forlorn hope: "The peace- 
 party will agree to all reasonable measures of internal defence, but 
 oppose all external preparations." With regard to the Alien and 
 Sedition Laws, he thought they were an experiment to ascertain 
 whether the people would submit to measures distinctly contrary to 
 the Constitution. If the experiment succeeded, the next thing 
 would be a life presidency; then an hereditary presidency; then 
 a Senate for life. " Nor/' said he, October, 1798, " can I be confi- 
 
554 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSOlf. 
 
 dent of their failure, after the dupery of which our countrymen 
 have shown themselves susceptible." 
 
 He soon, however, had new evidence of the truth of the words he 
 had spoken to his Albemarle neighbors on returning from Prance in 
 1790 : " 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 5 but its errors are honest, solitary, and short- 
 liveciy 
 
 How he toiled and schemed to enlighten the public mind at this 
 crisis, his letters of the time reveal, and the hatred of the enemies 
 of freedom attest. He was the soul of the opposition. By long, 
 able, earnest letters to leading public men in many States, he 
 roused the dormant and restrained the impetuous. He induced 
 good writers on the Eepublican side, Madison above all, to compose 
 the right articles for the press. Madison, overpowered in Congress, 
 and regarding the Constitution as set aside, and no longer any 
 restraint upon an arrogant and exulting majority, had retired to 
 the legislature of Virginia, as a general falls back to make a new 
 stand in the fastnesses of his native, familiar hills. "Every man," 
 wrote Jefferson to him in Februarj^, 1799, " must lay his purse and 
 his pen under contribution. As to the former, it is possible I may be 
 obliged to assume something for you. As to the latter, let me pray 
 and beseech you to set apai^ a certain portion of every post-day to 
 write what maj^ be proper for the public. Send it to me while here; 
 and when I go away I will let you know to whom you may send, 
 so that your name shall be sacredly secret. You can render such 
 incalculable services in this way as to lessen the effect of our loss 
 of your presence here." At the same time Jeff'erson, acting on 
 behalf of a club of choice spirits to which he belonged, endeavored 
 to induce Madison to publish the notes taken by him of the debates 
 in the Convention of 1787. The project failed. The work was, 
 indeed, too voluminous, and yet all too brief, for the purpose of 
 recalling the public mind to a sense of constitutional obligation, 
 • And what did the Hamiltons of the day care for the intentions of 
 that convention ? Every pen, however, that could be used with 
 effect against the military faction, Jeff'erson sought out, and stimu- 
 lated ; urging upon his friends the powerlessness of blackguard 
 vituperation, if met by good sense, and strong, clear, dignified 
 reasoning. 
 
HAMILTON IMPROVES THE OPPORTUNITY. 655 
 
 He restraiued as well as impelled. In tlie midst of the war-fury 
 of May, 1798, John Taylor of Caroline thought the time had come 
 for Virginia and North Carolina to begin to think of setting up for 
 themselves. ISTo, said Jefferson : " if, on a temporary superiority of 
 one party, the other is to resort to a scission of the Union, no federal 
 government can ever exist. If to rid ourselves of the present rule of 
 Massachusetts and Connecticut, we break the Union, will the evil 
 stop there ? Suppose the New England States alone cut off, will our 
 nature be changed? Are we not men still to the south of that, and 
 with all the passions of men ? Immediately we shall see a Pennsyl- 
 vania and a Virginia party arise in the residuary confederacy, and 
 the public mind will be distracted with the same party spirit. What 
 a game, too, will the one 'party have in their hands, by eternally 
 threatening the other, that, unless they do so and so, they will join 
 their Northern neighbors ! If we reduce our Union to Virginia and 
 North Carolina, immediately the conflict will be established between 
 the representatives of these two States, and they will end by break- 
 ing into their simple units. Seeing, therefore, that an association of 
 men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which never 
 yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town 
 meeting or a vestry, seeing that we must have somebody to quarrel 
 with, I had rather keep our New England associates for that pur- 
 pose than to see our bickerings transferred to others." 
 
 No language can overstate the boiling fury of party passion then. 
 Social intercourse between members of the two parties ceased, and 
 old friends crossed the street to avoid saluting one another. Jeffer- 
 son declined invitations to the usual gatherings of " society," and 
 spent his leisure hours in the circle that met in the rooms of the 
 Philosophical Societj^, ever longing for the end of the session and the 
 sweet tranquillity of his home. " Here," he writes to his daughter 
 Martha, in February, 1798, " your letters serve like gleams of light, 
 to cheer a dreary scene, where envy, hatred, malice, revenge, and all 
 the worst passions of men, are marshalled, to make one another as 
 miserable as possible. .1 turn from this with pleasure, to contrast it 
 with your fireside, where the single evening I passed at it was worth 
 more than ages here." Agaii;i, in May : " Eor you to feel all the 
 happiness of your quiet situation, you should know the rancorous 
 passions which tear every breast here, even of the sex which should 
 be a stranger to them. Politics and party hatreds destroy the hap- 
 
556 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 piness of every being here. They seem, like salamanders, to consider 
 fire as tlieir element." And again, in February, 1799 : " Your 
 letter was, as Ossian says, or would say, like tlie bright beams of the 
 moon on the desolate heath. Environed here in scenes of constant 
 torment, malice, and obloquy, worn down in a station where no eifort 
 to render service can avail any thing, I feel not that existence is a 
 blessing but when something recalls my mind to my family or 
 farm." 
 
 If a man so placid as Jefferson was moved so deeply, we cannot 
 wonder at the frenzy of nervous and excitable spirits. President 
 Adams seemed at times almost beside himself Many readers 
 remember the remarkable account given by him of scenes in the 
 streets of Philadelphia, on what he calls " my fast day," May 9, 
 179S : " When Market Street was as full as men could stand by one 
 another, and even before my door ; when some of my domestics, in 
 frenz}'^, determined to sacrifice their lives in my defence ; when all 
 were ready to make a desperate sally among the multitude, and 
 others were with difficulty and danger dragged back by the others; 
 when I myself judged it prudent and necessary to order chests of 
 arms from the war-office to be brought through by-lanes and back- 
 doors ; determined to defend m}'' house at the expense of my life, 
 and the lives of the few, very few, domestics and friends within it." 
 This record was mere midsummer madness. On referring to the 
 Philadelphia newspapers of the time, I read in Claypoole, of May 11, 
 1798, that " the Fast was observed with a 'decency and solemnity 
 never before exhibited on a similar occasion." 
 
 There was, indeed, a slight disturbance. For the warning of stu- 
 dents, and particularly for the benefit of those who may hereafter 
 investigate the laws govekxing the generation of falsehood, 
 I will copy two newspaper accounts of Mr. Adams's terrible riot. 
 Claypoole, May 11 : '* After the solemnities of the day were ended, 
 towards evening, a number of butcher-boys made their appearance at 
 the State House garden with French cockades in their hats. Some 
 disturbance ensued; but, several of them being taken up and com- 
 mitted to jail, order was restored, and tranquillity reigned through 
 the night." The following is from another Philadelphia paper, the 
 Merchants' Daily Advertiser, May 10, 1798 : " About six o'clock 
 information was received at the mayor's office, that a number of per- 
 sons were marching about the city in a very disorderly manner, with 
 
HAMILTON IMPROVES THE 0PP0RTT7NITY. 557 
 
 French cockades in their hats. A short time after, the mayor, with 
 the secretary of state, the attorney-general, and one of the aldermen, 
 being at the attorney-general's office, were informed that thirty or 
 forty persons of the above description were close at hand : they 
 accordingly went out to disperse them. Upon the appearance of the 
 civil officers, the mob took out their cockades and dispersed. How- 
 ever, one fellow, more hardy than the rest, persisted in keeping in 
 his cockade, and swore he would not leave the ground, in consequence 
 of which he was committed to prison. Several of these persons, after 
 they had been dispersed, are said to have assembled again in differ- 
 ent parts of city ; but the spirited exertions of the citizens soon put 
 an end to the business. The cavalry paraded through the city dur- 
 ing the night ; and a number of young men, who voluntarily offered 
 themselves to the mayor as guai'ds to the military stores, mint, &c., 
 were accepted, and stationed at their posts under proper officers. At 
 the time this paper went to press (three o'clock in the morning), we 
 could not learn that any fresh attempt had been made to disturb the 
 public tranquillit}'." 
 
 Mr. Adams might have spared himself such an alarm. He was 
 riding then upon the topmost wave of popularity. The onlj'' trace of 
 opposition to the war measures which I can discover in the press 
 during that month, except in the Congressional debates, is a toast 
 given at the annual banquet of the Tammany Societj^ of New York: 
 " May the Old Tories, and all who wish to engage the United States 
 in a war with any nation, realize the felicity they anticipate by 
 being placed in front of the first battle." This sentiment was hon- 
 ored by an extraordinary number of cheers, even "thirteen." 'Nev- 
 ertheless, Mr. Adams was safe in his house. All men can be driven 
 mad by outrage ; but riot and violence are the natural and familiar 
 resort of Old Tories. It is of the essence of republicanism to prevail 
 by arguments addressed to the conscience and understanding. 
 
 The conduct of the Republican leaders,- in this year of supreme' 
 trial, was temperate, patriotic, and wise. They saw the Constitution 
 of their country, even its most cherished and sacred provisions, 
 those which made the United States an asylum to the elite of the 
 nations, and those which secured to thought a free expression, — 
 even those they saw trampled under foot. Their resort was to the 
 reason and conscience of their fellow-citizens : they prepared to 
 repeat the wise and humane tactics of the period preceding the 
 
I 
 
 658 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 Revolution, — eleven years of remonstrance and entreaty. In Octo- 
 ber, 1798, two Republicans, George Nicholas of Kentucky, and Wil- 
 son C. Nicholas of Virginia, met at J\Tonticello, to consult their 
 chief upon the situation. These brothers, like Madison, had retired 
 from Congress to endeavor to make head in the legislatures of their 
 States against the bold, blind, arrogant men who controlled the gov- 
 ernment. The result of their deliberations was the " Kentucky 
 Resolutions," draughted by Jefferson, and the "Virginia Resolutions," 
 draughted by Madison ; by the passage of which the legislatures of 
 those States declared that the Alien and Sedition Laws, being con- 
 trai-y to the plainest letter of the Constitution, were " altogether 
 void and of no force." Jefferson's draught uttered only the simple 
 and obvious truth, when it said that " these and successive acts of 
 the same nature, unless arrested at the threshold, will necessarily 
 drive these States into revolution and blood;" "for this common- 
 wealth is determined, as it doubts not its oo-States are, to submit to 
 undelegated, and consequently unlimited power, in no man or body 
 of men on earth." The last of the Kentucky Resolutions provided 
 for a Committee of Conference and Correspondence, who should 
 have in charge to exchange information and sentiments with the 
 legislatures of other States. 
 
 One would have expected Hamilton to pause and reconsider his 
 course upon reading such a weighty and cogent protest as this. He 
 did not. His was the unteachable mind of a Scotch Jacobite. His 
 response to the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 is pub- 
 lished at length in his works, in the form of his annual political 
 programme for 1799, addressed to Jonathan Dayton, long the 
 speaker of the House, and then about to enter the Senate. Circum- 
 stances, he said, aided by the extraordinary exertions of " the friends 
 of government," had, indeed, gained something for "the side of 
 men of information and property ; " but, after all, " public opinion 
 tias not been ameliorated," and "sentiments dangerous to social 
 happiness have not been diminisl^ed." The Kentucky and Virginia 
 Resolutions could be considered, he thought, "in no other light than 
 as an attempt to change the government;" and it was "stated" 
 that ''the faction" in Virginia was preparing to follow up hostile 
 words by hostile acts, and was actually gathering arms, stocking 
 arsenals, and levying new taxes. In these circumstances, the "sup- 
 porters of government," while preparing to meet force with force, . 
 
HAMILTON IIVIPROVES THE OPPOE-TITNITY. 559 
 
 should adopt "vigorous raeasuyes of counteraction," "surround the 
 Constitution with more ramparts," and thus " disconcert its 
 enemies." 
 
 He advised the following measures : 1. The division of each 
 State into small judicial districts (Connecticut, for example, into 
 four), with a federal judge in each, appointed by the president, for 
 the trial of offenders against the general government. 2. The 
 appointment by the president in each county of " conservators or 
 justices of the peace, with only ministerial functions," a,in\ 2^ai(l hy 
 fees only, in order to give efficacy to laws which the local magis- 
 trates were indisposed to execute. 3. The keeping up of the army 
 and navy nearly on the scale adopted in view of war with France. 
 4. A military academy. 5. The establishment of government man- 
 ufactories of every article needful for the supply of an army. 6. The 
 prompt calling out of the militia by new laws, "to suppress unlaw- 
 ful combinations and insurrections." 7. " The subdivision of the 
 great States ought to be a cardinal point in the federal policy ; " 
 and Congress ought to have, by constitutional amendment, the 
 power to subdivide them, "on the application of any considerable 
 portion of a State containing not less than a hundred thousand 
 persons." 8. " Li>bels, if levelled against anj' officer whatsoever of 
 the United States, shall be cognizable in the courts of the United 
 States : " " they ought not to be left to the cold and reluctant pro- 
 tection of State courts." Finally: "But what avail laws which 
 are not executed ? Renegade aliens conduct more than one-half of 
 the most incendiary presses in the United States ; and yet, in open 
 contempt and defiance of the laws, they are permitted to continue 
 their destructive labors. Why are they not sent away ? Are laws 
 of this kind passed merely to excite odium, and remain a dead letter? 
 Vigor in the executive is at least as necessary as in the legislative 
 branch : if the president requires to be stimulated, those who can 
 approach him ought to do it." 
 
 Here we have a complete apparatus of tyranny, such as a Jeffreys 
 might have sketched for a Stuart. It justifies Jefferson's severest 
 judgment concerning the spirit and tendency of this limited and 
 unwise man ; and it calls to mind that sentence hurled at Demos- 
 thenes by his rival in the presence of the people of Athens: "He 
 who acts wickedly in private life cannot prove excellent in his pub- 
 lic conduct." I do not know enough of the laws of our being to 
 
560 LIFE OF THOIMAS JEFFERSOlSr. 
 
 explain the truth, but a truth it £<;,_that the paramour of a Rey- 
 nolds was never yet capable of founding a safe system for the guid- 
 ance of a nation. Immoral men may be gifted and amiable, but 
 they are never wise. 
 
 And now it fell to the lot of honest John Adams, by doing the 
 noblest action of his life, to reduce Alexander Hamilton to some- 
 thing like his natural proportions, while dispelling his silly dream 
 of leading an American army to conquest in South America, and 
 picking up a French island or two on the way. We all know Mr. 
 Adams's boisterous foibles. But if all the other actions of his life 
 had been foolish, this one act, now to be related, would entitle him 
 to a high place among the worthies of America. 
 
 Upon the return of Elbridge Gerry from France, October 1, 1798, 
 he found himself, in the circles naturally frequented by a person of 
 his character and services, the most odious of men. At Cambridge 
 even his family had been subjected to outrage in his absence. 
 Anonymous letters reached his young wife by " almost every post," 
 attributing his prolonged stay in France to the cause of all others 
 the most distressing to an honorable woman ; and " on several occa- 
 sions," as his biographer adds, " the -morning sun shone upon a 
 model of a guillotine, erected in the field before her window, 
 smeared with blood, and having the effigy of a headless man." It 
 was known that his house contained only women and children ; but 
 savage yells, and bonfires suddenly blazing under their windows, 
 disturbed and terrified them at night. After leaving his despatches 
 with the cabinet at Philadelphia, and visiting his home, Mr. Gerry 
 drove out to Quincy, where, most fortunately, the president was 
 passing his vacation, — far from a cabinet devoted to Hamilton and 
 determined upon war. In long conferences, renewed from day to 
 day, Mr. Gerry proved, to the perfect satisfaction of Mr. Adams, that 
 the government and people of France desired peace with the United 
 States, and would respond cordially to a re-opening of diplomatic 
 relations. He showed to the president letters from Talleyrand, 
 offering him, in the name of the Directory, a public reception ; aban- 
 doning the demand for a loan and an apology for the president's 
 speech ; positively engaging to receive another American minister 
 with all due respect ; and declaring a willingness to enter into just 
 commercial arrangements on the basis of conceding to the United 
 States the neutrality they claimed. Mr. Gerry had something 
 
HAIVULTON IMPROVES THE OPPORTUNITY. 561 
 
 better to show the president than promises. At Havre, as he was 
 about to sail, he had received a copy of an order of the Directory to 
 the French officer in command of the West India fleet, to restrain 
 the lawless spoliation of American commerce by French privateers. 
 He told the president, too, that the French, dazzled and inflated 
 beyond measure by Bonaparte's victories, had treated other nations 
 with far greater insolence than they had the United States. The 
 govei'nment had sent off from Paris thirteen foreign ambassadors, and 
 even gone to the length of imprisoning one, and confining another to 
 his house under guard. 
 
 Mr. Adams, instructed and convinced by Mr. Gerry, had the great 
 and rare courage to act upon his conviction. Against the opinion 
 of his cabinet, contrary to the cry and expectation of his party, to 
 the infinite disgust and cutting disappointment of Hamilton, as well 
 as to his own speedy downfall and immortal glory, he re-opened dip- 
 lomatic relations with France, which led to a peace that has lasted 
 seventy-three years. It was his own act, and Elbridge Gerry alone 
 shares with him the glory of it. Mr. Adams, in one of -his public 
 letters of a later day, tells the story of Mr. Gerry's appointment and 
 success in a few lines : " I called the heads of departments together, 
 and proposed Mr. Gerry. All the five voices were unanimously 
 against him. Such inveterate prejudice shocked me. I said noth- 
 ing, but was determined not to be the slave of it. I knew the man 
 infinitely better than all of them. He was nominated and approved, 
 and finally saved the peace of the nation ; for he alone discovered 
 and furnished the evidence that X, Y, and Z were employed by Tal- 
 leyrand ; and he alone brought home the direct, formal, and official 
 assurances upon which the subsequent commission proceeded, and 
 peace was made." February 17, 1799, the president, to the equal , 
 astonishment of Federalists and Republicans, nominated William/ 
 Vans Murray plenipotentiar}' to the French Republic. ' 
 
 Hamilton had a prompt revenge, but it inured to tlie good of the 
 country. The strange manner iu which both the folly and the 
 crimes of public men in the United States have issued in lasting 
 public benefit, is an argument for Providence that sometimes stag- 
 gers the stanchest unbelievejr. Hamilton destroyed the Federalists, / 
 and Calhoun killed slavery. | When the time came for choosing can- 
 didates for the presidenc}^, Hamilton was resolved to push John 
 Adams from his seat, though in doing so he prostrated his own party. 
 36 
 
562 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 "For my individual part," he wrote to Theodore Sedgwick, "my 
 mind is made up. I will never more be responsible for Adams by 
 my direct support, even though the consequence should be the elec- 
 tion of Jefferson. If we must have an enemy at the head of the 
 government, let it be one whom we can oppose, and for whom we are 
 not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his 
 foolish and bad measures. Under Adams, as under Jefferson, the 
 government will sink." 
 
 A bungling business he made of it; but he had his way. His 
 first thought was to lure General Washington from the retreat he so 
 much loved, needed, and deserved ; but when the letter of Gouver- 
 neur ]\rorris, proposing tliis ungrateful scheme, reached Mount Ver- 
 non, Washington lay cold in death. Then Hamilton brought once 
 more into play that baleful ingenuity of his which had misled him 
 so often. He attempted a manoeuvre which every competent corpo- 
 ral knows to be necessarily fatal, — a change of front under the 
 enemy's hottest fire. First by secret manipulations of legislatures, 
 and afterwards by an open, printed appeal, signed by his name, he 
 endeavored to bring C. C. Pinckney, the Federalist candidate for the 
 vice-presidency, into the presidency over Mr. Adams. By thus 
 rending his own party in twain, he made the victory easier to the 
 Republicans ; and perhaps it was he who made that victory theirs in 
 1800 instead of 1804 
 
 Nor can we award him even the credit of submitting to the decis- 
 ion of the people, which is one of the two vital conditions of a 
 republic's existence ; the other being a pure ballot-box. The election 
 in New York went against him; i.e. the people elected a legislature 
 pledged to choose Republican electors. He instantly wrote to Gov- 
 ernor Jay, urging him to summon at once the existincf legishituve 
 (whose time had still seven weeks to run), and get it to pass a law 
 \depriving the legislature of the power to elect electors, and devolv- 
 ing it upon the people by districts. This manoeuvre would 
 give the beaten Federalists a second chance. It would rob the Re- 
 publicans of their victory. It would compel them to gird on their 
 armor again, and descend a second time into the arena. It was los- 
 ing the game, grabbing the stakes, and demanding another chance 
 to- win them, with points in favor of the grabber. 
 
 To a person unacquainted with Hamilton's peculiar character, this 
 advice to the governor seems simply base. But the error, like mil- 
 
HAMILTON IMPROVES THE OPPORTUNITY. 563 
 
 lions of other errors of our short-siglited race, was not half so much 
 moral as mental. It was ignorance and incapacity rather than tur- 
 pitude. He said to tlie governor, in substance : I own that this 
 measure is not regular, nor delicate, nor, in ordinary circumstances, 
 even decent; but "scruples of delicacy and propriety ought not to 
 hinder the taking of a legal and constitutional step to prevent an 
 atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics from getting possession 
 of the helm of state." You don't know these Republicans as I do, 
 he continued. The party is '' a composition, indeed, of very incon- 
 gruous materials, but all tending to mischief; some of them to the 
 overthrow of the government by stripping it of its due energies ; 
 others of them to a revolution, after the manner of Bonaparte. I 
 speak from indubitable facts, not from conjectures and inferences." 
 Now, my dear sir, these people call to their aid " all the resources 
 which vice can give : " can we, then, hope to succeed, we virtuous, if 
 we confine ourselves " within all the ordinary forms of delicacy and 
 decorum?" No, indeed. But, of course, we must "franldy avow" 
 our object. You must tell the legislature that our purpose is to 
 reverse the result of the late election, in order to prevent the general 
 government from falling into hostile hands, and to save the '* great 
 cause of social order." To us, this long epistle to Mr. Jay reads 
 more like mania than wickedness. This man had lived in New York 
 twenty years without so much as learning the impossibility of its 
 people being made to submit to an avowed outrage so gross ! Gov- 
 ernor Jay was at no loss to characterize the proposal aright. Instead 
 of plunging the State into civil war by adopting the measure, he 
 folded Hamilton's letter, and put it away among his most private 
 papers, bearing this indorsement : " Proposing a measure for party 
 purposes ivhich I think it would not become vie to adoptP 
 
 Mr. Jefferson's attitude during this intensest of all known polit- 
 ical struggles is an interesting study. The simplicity of his politi- 
 cal sj^stem was such, that he could give a complete statement of it 
 in a few lines ; and it was so sound, that the general government, 
 from 1789 to 1873, has worked well so far as it has conformed to it, 
 and worked ill as often as it has departed from it. Jefferson was so 
 RIGHT, that every honest, patriotic man who has since gone to Wash- 
 ington after having learned his rudiments from Jefferson, and has 
 had strength enough to vote up to the height of his convictions, has 
 made a respectable public career, no matter how ordinary his endow- 
 
 J 
 
564 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOF. 
 
 ments ; while every public man who has not accepted tliis simple 
 clew to the labyrinth of public business has made a career which 
 time and events will condemn, though he may have had the talents 
 of a Webster or a Clay. 
 
 This is the Jeflfersonian system in brief: *'Let the general gov- 
 ernment be reduced to foreign concerns onlj'', and let our affairs be 
 disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, 
 which the merchants will manage the better the more they are left 
 free to manage for themselves, and our general government may be 
 reduced to a very simple organization, and a very unexpensive one; 
 a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants." 
 
 This was the basis. He explained himself more in detail to 
 Elbridge Gerry, in January, 1799. He said he was in fixvor of 
 fulfilling the Constitution in the sense in which it was originallj'' 
 interpreted by the men who drew it, and as it was accepted by the 
 States upon their interpretation. He objected to every thing which 
 tended to monarchy, or which even gave the government a mon- 
 archical air and tone. He claimed for the States every power not 
 expresshj yielded by the Constitution to the general government. 
 He demanded that the three great departments of the government, 
 Congress, the Executive, and the Judiciary, should each keep to its 
 sphere, neither of them encroaching upon any of the others. He 
 desired a government rigorously frugal and simple, and the applica- 
 tion of all possible savings to the discharge of the public debt. In 
 peace, no standing army, and only just navy enough to protect our 
 coasts and harbors from ravage and depredation. Free-trade with 
 all nations; political connection with none; little or no diplomatic 
 establishment. Freedom of religion ; perfect equality of sects 
 before the law; freedom of the press ; free criticism of government 
 by everybody, whether just or unjust. Finally, in the great struggle 
 which began with the dawn of human reason, and will end only 
 when reason is supreme in human affairs, namely, the struggle 
 between Science and Superstition, he was on the side of Science. 
 Personally, he was in favor of " encouraging the progress of science 
 in all its branches ; " and he was opposed to "overawing the human 
 mind \>^ stories of raw-head and bloody bones," which made it dis- 
 trustful of itself, and disposed to follow blindly the lead of others. 
 The first object of his heart, he said, was his own country, — not 
 Trance, not England, — and the one no more than the other, except 
 
HAMILTON IMPROVES THE OPPORTUNITY. 565 
 
 as one might be more or less frieuflly to us than the other. The 
 depredations of France upon our commerce were indeed " atrocious," 
 but he believed that a mission sincerely disposed to peace would 
 obtain retribution and honorable settlement. These were his 
 principles, but he indulged no antipathy to those who differed from 
 him. ''I know too well," said he, "the texture of the human mind 
 and the slipperiness of the human reason, to consider differences of 
 opinion otherwise than differences of form and feature. Integrity 
 of views, more tlian their soundness, is the basis of esteem." 
 
 Such is a brief outline of his opinions, political and other, in view 
 of the fact well known, that he would again be the candidate of 
 his party for the presidency in 1800. 
 
 The tranquil dignity of the candidate's demeanor was pleasing to 
 witness. During 1798 and 1799 he devoted a great part of his 
 time and strength to enlightening the public mind; emplojang for 
 this purpose all that his party possessed of bright intelligence and 
 practised ability. But when, in 1800, the contest lost the character 
 of a conflict of ideas, and assumed that of a competition of persons, 
 he ceased to write letters, withdrew to Monticello, and spent an 
 unusually laborious summer in improving his nail-factory, burning 
 bricks for his house, and superintending his farms ; rarely going 
 farther from home than the next village ; never too busy to keep up 
 his meteorological records, and look after the interests of the Philo- 
 sophical Society. 
 
 Indeed, if we may judge from his letters, the more furiously the 
 storm of politics raged about him, the more attentive he was to 
 philosophy. It was in the very heat of the war frenzy of 1798 that 
 he wrote his well-known letter to Mr. Nolan, asking information 
 concerning those "large herds of horses in a wild state," which, he 
 had been recently informed, were roaming "in the country west of 
 the Mississippi." He entreated Mr. Nolan to be very particular 
 and exact in detailing "the manners, habits, and laws of the horse's 
 existence " in a state of nature. It was also during the very crisis 
 of the French imbroglio, in February, 1799, that he penned his 
 curious letter about the steam-engine ; in which he expressed a 
 timid hope, that perhaps the steam-engine, as now improved by 
 Watt, might be available for pumping water to the tops of houses 
 for family use. Every family, he said, has a kitchen fire; small, 
 indeed, but sufficient for the purpose. To these years seems to 
 
566 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 
 
 belong also his invention of the revolving chair, which the newspa- 
 pers of that day nsed to style " Mr, Jefferson's whirligig chair," 
 now a familiar object in all countries and most counting-rooms. 
 The party papers of the time had their little joke even upon this 
 innocent device ; insisting that Mr. Jefferson invented it to facilitate 
 his looking all ways at once. 
 
CHAPTER LIX. 
 
 THE CAMPAIGN" LIES OF 1800. 
 
 That product of the human intellect which we denominate the 
 Campaign Lie, though it did not originate in the United States, has 
 here attained a development unknown in other lands. It is the 
 destiny of America to try all experiments and exhaust all follies. 
 In the short space of seventy-seven years, we have exhausted the 
 efficiency of falsehood uttered to keep a man out of office. The fact 
 is not to our credit, indeed ; for we must have lied to an immeasura- 
 ble extent before the printed word of man, during six whole months 
 of every fourth year, could have lost so much of its natural power 
 to affect human belief Still less is it for our good; since Campaign 
 Truths, however important they may be, are equally ineffectual. 
 Soon after the publication of a certain ponderous work, called the 
 Life of Andrew Jackson, one of the original Jackson men of Penn- 
 sylvania met the author in the street, and said in substance, " I am 
 astonished to find how little I knew of a man whose battles I fought 
 for twelve years. I heard all those stories of his quarrels and vio- 
 lence ; but I supposed, of cofrse, they were Campaign Lies ! " 
 
 Thomas Jefferson, who began so many things in the early career 
 of the United States, was the first object upon whom the Campaign 
 Liar tried his unpractised talents. The art, indeed, may be said to 
 have been introduced in 179G to prevent his election to the presi- 
 dency ; but it was in 1800 that it was clearly developed into a 
 distinct species of falsehood. And it must be confessed, that, even 
 amid the heat of the election of 1800, the 'Campaign Liar was hard 
 put to it, and did not succeed in originating that variety and reck- 
 less extravagance of calumny which has crowned his efforts since. 
 Jefferson's life presented to his view a most discouraging monotony 
 of innocent and beneficial actions, — twenty-five years of laborious 
 
 567 
 
568 LITE OF THOIklAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 and unrecompensed public service, relieved by the violin, science, 
 invention, agriculture, tbe education of his nephews, and the love of 
 liis daughters. A life so exceptionally blameless did not give fair 
 scope to talent; since a falsehood, to have its full and lasting effect, 
 must contain a fraction of a grain of truth. Still, the Campaign 
 Liar of 1800 did very well for a beginner. 
 
 He was able, of course, to prove that Mr. Jefferson "hated the 
 Constitution," had hated it from the beginning, and was "pledged 
 to subvert it." The noble Marcellus of New York (Hamilton 
 apparently) writing in Noah Webster's new paper, the Commercial 
 Advertiser, soared into propliecy, and was thus enabled to describe 
 ■with precision the methods which Mr. Jefferson would employ in 
 effecting his fell purpose. He would begin by turning every Fed- 
 eralist out of office, down to the remotest postmaster. Then he 
 would "tumble the financial system of the country into ruin at one 
 stroke;" wliich would of necessity stop all payments of interest on 
 the public debt, and bring on "universal bankruptcy and beggary." 
 Next he would dismantle the navy, and thus give such free course 
 to privateering, that "every vessel which floated from our shores 
 would be plundered or captured." And, since every source of reve- 
 nue would be dried up, the government would no longer be able to 
 j)ay the pensions of the scarred veterans of the Revolution, who 
 would be seen " starving in the streets, or living on the cold and 
 precarious supplies of charity." Soon the unpaid officers of the 
 government would resign, and " counterfeiting would be practised 
 with impunity." In short, good people, the election of Jefferson 
 will be the signal for Pandora to open her box, and empty it upon 
 your heads. '^ 
 
 The Campaign Liar mounted the pulpit. In the guise of the 
 Reverend Cotton Mather Smith of Connecticut, he stated that Mr. 
 Jefferson had gained his estate by robbery and fraud, — yea, even by 
 robbing a widow and fatherless children of ten thousand pounds, 
 intrusted to him by the dead father's will. " All of this can be 
 proved," said the Reverend Campaigner. Some of the falsehoods 
 were curiously remote from the truth. "He despises mechanics," 
 said a Philadelphia paragraphist of a man who doted on a well- 
 skilled, conscientious workman. "He despises mechanics, and owns 
 two hundred and fifty of them," remarked this writer. That Mon- 
 ticello swarmed with yellow Jeffersons was the natural conjecture 
 
THE CAMPAIGN LIES OF 1800. 569 
 
 of a party who recognized as their chief the paramour of a Reynolds. 
 " Mr. Jefferson's Congo Harem " was a party cry. There were 
 allusions to a certain " Dusky Sally," otherwise Sally Henings, 
 whose children were said to resemble the master of Monticello in 
 their features and the color of their hair. In this particular Cam- 
 paign Lie, there was just that fractional portion of truth which was 
 necessary to preserve it fresh and vigorous to this day. There is 
 even a respectable Madison Henings, now living in Ohio, who sup- 
 poses that Thomas Jefferson was his father. Mr. Henings has been 
 misinformed. The record of Mr. Jefferson's every day and hour, 
 contained in his pocket memorandum books, compared with the 
 record of his slaves' birth, proves the impossibility of his having 
 been the father of Madison Henings. So I am informed by Mr. 
 Randall, who examined the records in the possession of the family. 
 The father of those children was a near relation of the Jeff'ersons, 
 who need not be named. 
 
 Perhaps I may, in view of recent and threatened publications, 
 copy a few words from Mr. Randall's interesting letter on this sub- 
 ject. They will be valued by those who believe that chastity in man 
 is as precious a treasure as chastity in woman, and not less essential 
 to the happiness, independence, and dignity of his existence : — 
 
 " Colonel Randolph (grandson of Mr. Jefferson) informed me (at 
 Monticello) that there was not a shadow of suspicion that Mr. Jef- 
 ferson, in this or any other instance, had any such intimacy wdth 
 his female slaves. At the period when these children were bom, 
 Colonel Randolph had charge of Monticello. He gave all the gene- 
 ral directions, and gave out all ffieir clothes to the slaves. He said 
 Sally Henings was treated and dressed just like the rest. He said 
 Mr. Jefferson never locked the door of his room by day, and that he, 
 Colonel Randolph, slept within sound of his breathing at night. 
 He said he had never seen a motion or a look or a circumstance 
 which led him to suspect, for an instant, that there was a particle 
 more of familiarity between Mr. Jeff"erson and Sally Henings than 
 between him and the most repulsive servant in the establishment, 
 and that no person living at Monticello ever dreamed of such a 
 thing. Colonel Randolph said that he had spent a good share of 
 his life closely about Mr. Jeff'erson, — at home and on his journeys, 
 in all sorts of circumstances, — and he believed him to be as chaste 
 
570 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 
 
 and pure, "as immaculate a man as ever God created." Mr. Jeffer- 
 son's eldest daughter, Mrs. Governor Randolph, took the Dusky 
 Sally stories much to heart. But she spoke to her sons only once 
 on the subject. Not long before her death, she called two of them 
 to her, — the Colonel, and George Wythe Randolph. She asked 
 the Colonel if he remembered when Henings (the slave who most 
 resembled Mr. Jefferson) was born. He turned to the book contain- 
 ing the list of slaves, and found that he was born at the time sup- 
 posed by Mrs. Randolph. She then directed her son's attention to 
 the fact, that Mr. Jefferson and Sally Heniugs could not have met, 
 were far distant from each other, for fifteen months prior to the 
 birth. She bade her sons remember this fact, and always defend 
 the character of their grandfather. It so happened, when I was 
 examining an old account-book of Mr. Jefferson's, I came po/? on 
 the original entry of this slave's birth ; and I was then able, from 
 ' well-known circumstances, to prove the fifteen months' separation. 
 ... I could give fifty more facts, if there were any need of it, to 
 show Mr. Jefferson's innocence of this and all similar offences 
 against propriety." 
 
 So much for this poor Campaign Lie, which has been current in 
 the world for seventy-four years, and will, doubtless, walk the earth 
 as long as weak mortals need high examples of folly to keep them on 
 endurable terms with themselves. 
 
 Religion, for the first and last time, was an important element in 
 the political strife of 1800. There was not a pin to choose between 
 the heterodoxy of the two candidates ; and, indeed, Mr. Adams was 
 sometimes, in his familiar letters, more pronounced in his dissent 
 from established beliefs than Jefferson. Neither of these Christians 
 perceived, as clearly as w^e now do, the absolute necessity to unrea- 
 soning men of that husk of fiction in which vital truth is usually 
 enclosed ; nor what a vast, indispensable service the Priest renders the 
 ignorant man in supplying fictions for his acceptance le.ss degrading 
 than those which he could invent for himself Mr. Adams, however, 
 was by far the more impatient of the two with popular creeds, as he 
 shows in many a comic outburst of robust and boisterous contempt. 
 He protested his utter inability to comprehend that side of human 
 nature which made people object to paj'ing a pittance for his new 
 navy-yards, and eager to throw away their money upon such struc- 
 
THE CAMPAIGN LIES OF 1800. 571 
 
 tures as St. Paul's in London and St. Peter's at Rome. As for the 
 doctrine of the Trinity, he greatly surpassed Jefferson in his aver- 
 sion to it. He scolded Jefferson for bringing over European -profes- 
 sors, because they were " all infected with Episcopal and Presbyterian 
 creeds," and "all believed that that great Principle which has pro- 
 duced this boundless universe, — Newton's universe and Herschel's 
 universe, — came down to this little ball, to be spit upoij by Jews." 
 Mr. Adams's opinion was, that " until this awful blasphemy was got 
 rid of, there will never be any liberal science in this world." 
 
 And yet he escaped anathema. Mr. Jefferson, on the contrary, 
 was denounced by the pious and moral Hamilton as " an atheist." 
 The great preacher of that day in New York was Dr. John Mason, 
 an ardent politician, as patriotic and well-intentioned a gentleman 
 as then lived. He evolved from Jefferson's Notes on Virginia the 
 appalling truth, that the Republican candidate for the presidency 
 did not believe in a universal deluge ! He sounded the alarm. A 
 few weeks before the election, he published a pamphlet entitled The 
 Voice of Warning to Christians on tbe ensuing Election ; in which 
 he reviewed the Notes, and inferred, from passages quoted, that the 
 author was "a profane philosopher and an infidel." "Christians !" 
 he exclaimed, " it is thus that a man, whom you are expected to 
 elevate to the chief magistracy, insults yourselves and your Bible !" 
 An interesting character was this Dr. Mason, if we may believe the 
 anecdotes still told of him by old inhabitants of Now York. What 
 a scene must that have been when he paused, in the midst of one of 
 his rousing Fast-day sermons, and, raising his eyes and hands to 
 heaven, burst into impassioned supplication : " Send us, if Thou 
 wilt, murrain upon our cattle, a famine upon our land, cleanness of 
 teeth in our borders ; send us pestilence to waste our cities ; send us, 
 if it please Thee, the sword to bathe itself in the blood of our sons ; 
 but spare us. Lord God Most Merciful, spare us that curse, — most 
 dreadful of all curses, — an alliance with Napoleon Bonaparte ! " 
 An eye-witness reports that, as the preacher uttered these words 
 with all the energy of frantic apprehension, the blood gushed from 
 his nostrils. He put his handkerchief to his face, without knowing 
 what he did, and, instantly resuming his gesture, held the bloody 
 handkerchief aloft, as if it were the symbol of the horrors he foretold. 
 To. such a point, in those simple old days, could campaign falsehood 
 madden able and good men ! 
 
 1 
 
672 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 
 
 The orthodox clergy were not averse then, it appears, to "politics 
 in the pulpit." Our historical collections yield many proofs of it in 
 the form of pamphlets and sermons of the year 1800. It cheers the 
 mind of the inquirer, in his dusty rummaging, to measure the stride 
 the public mind has taken in less than three-quarters of a century. 
 "Hold ! " cries one vigorous lay sermonizer (Claims of Thomas Jef- 
 ferson to the Presidency examined at the Bar of Christianity), — 
 "hold! The blameless deportment of this man has been the theme 
 of encomium. He is chaste, temperate, hospitable, affectionate, and 
 frank." But he is no Christian ! He does not believe in the Del- 
 uge. He does not go to church. "Shall Thomas Jefferson," asks 
 this writer, " who denies the truth of Christianity, and avows the 
 pernicious folly of all religion, be your governor ? " 
 
 One writer proves his case thus : 1, The French Revolution was 
 a conspiracy to overthrow the Cliristian religion ; 2, Thomas Jeffer- 
 son avowed a cordial sympathy with the French Revolution ; 
 3, Therefore Thomas Jefferson aims at the destruction of the Chris- 
 tian religion. To this reasoning facts were added. Mr. Jefferson, 
 fearing to trust the post-office, had written a letter in Latin to an 
 infidel author, approving his work, and urging him to print it. Then 
 look at his friends ! Are they not " deists, atheists, and infidels ? " 
 Did not General Dearborn, one of his active supporters, while travel- 
 ling to Washington in a public stage, say, that " so long as our 
 temples stood, we could not hope for good order or good govern- 
 ment " ? The same Dearborn, passing a church in Connecticut, 
 pointed at it, and scornfully exclaimed, "Look at that painted nuis- 
 ance ! " But the most popular and 9ften-repeated anecdote of this 
 nature, which tlie contest elicited, was the following: "When the 
 late Rev. Dr. John B. Smith resided in Virginia, the famous Mazzei 
 happened one night to be his guest. Dr. Smith having, as usual, 
 assembled bis family for their evening devotions, the circumstance 
 occasioned some discourse on religion, in which the Italian made no 
 secret of his infidel principles. In the course of conversation, he 
 remarked to Dr. Smith, * Why, your great philosopher and statesman, 
 Mr. Jefferson, is rather further gone in infidelity than I am ; ' and 
 related, in confirmation, the following anecdote. That, as he was 
 once riding with Mr. Jefferson, he expressed his ' surprise that the 
 people of this country take no better care of their public buildings.' 
 ' What buildings ? ' exclaimed Mr. Jefferson. ' Is that not a 
 
THE CAMPAIGN LIES OF 1800. 573 
 
 churcli ?' replied he, pointing to a decayed edifice. 'Yes,' answered 
 Mr. Jefferson. 'I am astonished,' said the other, 'that they permit 
 it to be in so ruinous a condition.' 'It is good eJiour/h,' rejoined 
 Mr. Jefferson, 'for him that was horn in a manger T Such a con- 
 temptuous fling at the blessed Jesus could issue from the lips of no 
 other than a deadly foe to his name and his cause." 
 
 This story had the greater effect from the constant repetition of 
 the unlucky passage of Jefferson's letter to Mazzei upon the Sam- 
 sons and Solomons who had gone over to the English side of Amer- 
 ican politics. Fifty versions of it could easily be collected, even at 
 this late day, but the one just given appears to be the original. It is 
 startling to discover, while turning over the campaign litter of 1800, 
 that, in the height and hurly-burly of the strife, there was spread 
 abroad, all over the land, a report of Mr. Jefferson's sudden death, 
 which it required several days to correct, even in the Atlantic cities. 
 
 It was first printed in the Baltimore American. " I discharge my 
 duty," said the gentleman who brought the news from Virginia, " in 
 giving til is information as I received it ; but may the God who 
 directed the pen and inspired the heart of the author of the Declara- 
 tion of American Independence procrastinate, if but for a short time, 
 so severe a punishment from a land which heretofore has received 
 more than a common share of his blessings ! " 
 
 It is not clear, upon the first view of the subject, why Jefferson 
 should have been singled out for reprobation on account of a hetero- 
 doxy in which so many of the great among his compeers shared. 
 He attributed it himself to the conspicuous part he had talcen in 
 the separation of Church and State in Virginia; a policy which the 
 clerg}' opposed with vehemence in each State, vintil, in 1834, the 
 divorce was complete and universal by the act of Massachusetts. 
 Readers of Dr. Lyman Beecher's Autobiography remember how ear- 
 nestly that genial hunter before the Lord fought the severance in Con- 
 necticut. Some of the clergy, Jefferson thought, cherished hopes of 
 undoing the work done in Virginia and other States through Madi- 
 son, Wythe, and himself. But, said he, "the returning good sense 
 of oxir country threatens abortion to their hopes, and they believe 
 that any portion of power confided to me will be exerted in opposi- 
 tion to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn 
 upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny 
 over the mind of man." 
 
574 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 He avoided, on principle, that line of conduct, so familiar to pub- 
 lic men of the fourth, fifth, and sixth rank, which Mark Twain has 
 recently called *' currying favor with the religious element," While 
 he was most careful not to utter a word, in the hearing of young or 
 unformed persons, even in his own family, calculated to disturb their 
 faith, he was equally strenuous in maintaining his right to liberty 
 both of thought and utterance." Thus, at a time when the word 
 "Unitarian" was only less opprobrious than infidel, and he was a 
 candidate for the presidency, he went to a church of that denomina- 
 tion at Philadelphia, in which, as he says, " Dr. Priestley ofiiciated 
 to numerous audiences." " I never will," he once wrote, " by any 
 word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance, or admit a right of 
 inquiry into the religious opinions of others. On the contrary, we 
 are bound, you, I, and every one, to make common cause, even with 
 error itself, to maintain the common right of freedom of conscience. 
 We ought, with one heart and one hand, to hew down the daring 
 and dangerous efforts of those who would seduce the public opinion 
 to substitute itself into that tyranny over religious faith which the 
 laws have so justly abdicated. For this reason, were my opinions 
 up to the standard of those who arrogate the right of questioning 
 them, I would not countenance that arrogance by descending to an 
 explanation." • 
 
 It strengthened Jeff'erson's faith in republican institutions, that 
 his countrymen rose superior to religious prejudices in 1800, and 
 gave their votes very nearly as they would if th« religious question 
 had not been raised. Tradition reports, that, when the news of his 
 election reached New England, some old ladies, in wild consternation, 
 hung their Bibles down the well in the butter-cooler. But, in truth, 
 the creed of Jefferson is, and long has been, the real creed of the 
 people of the United States. They know in their hearts, whatever 
 form of words they may habitually use, that Christianity is a life, 
 not a belief; a principal of conduct, not a theory of the universe. 
 " I am a Christian," wrote Jefferson, " in the only sense in which 
 Jesus wished any one to be, — sincerely attached to his doctrines in 
 preference to all others." One evening, in Washington, having, 
 for a wonder, a little leisure, he took two cheap copies of the New 
 Testament, procured for the purpose, and cut from them the words of 
 Jesus, and such other passages of the evangelists as are in closest 
 accord with them. These he pasted in a little book, and entitled it, 
 
THE CAMPAIGN LIES OF 1800. 575 
 
 Tlie Philosophy of Jesus extracted from the Text of the Evangelists. 
 Two evenings were employed in this interesting work; aud when it 
 was done he contemplated it with rapturous satisfaction. The 
 words of Jesus, he thought, were " as distinguishable from the mat- 
 ter in which they are imbedded as diamonds in dunghills. A more 
 precious morsel of ethics was never seen." 
 
CHAPTER LX. 
 
 THE TIE BETWEEN JEFFERSON AND BURB. 
 
 The peculiar result of the election of 1800 is familiar to most 
 .readers : Jefferson, 73 ; Burr, 73 ; Adams, 65 ; C. C. Pinckney, 64 ; 
 / Jay, 1. Again Hamilton's preposterous device of the electoral col- 
 lege brought trouble and peril upon tlie country; for the Federalists, 
 as soon as the tie was known, made haste to fill up the measure of 
 their errors by intriguing to defeat the will of the people, and make 
 Burr president instead of Jefferson. I need not repeat the shame- 
 ■^ul storj'. For many days, during which the House of Representa- 
 tives balloted twentj'-nine times, the country was excited and 
 alarmed; and nothing averted civil commotion but the wise and 
 resolute conduct of the Republican candidates. At Albany, where 
 Burr's duties as a member of the legislature of New York detained 
 him during the ci'isis, an affair more interesting to him even than the 
 presidential election was transpiring. Theodosia, his only daugh- 
 ter, the idol of his life,*was married at Albany, February 2, 180^ / 
 (a week before the balloting began), to Joseph Alston of South 
 Carolina. He performed but one act in connection with the strug- 
 gle in the wilderness of Washington. He wrote a short, decisive 
 note to a member of the House, repudiating the unworthj' attempt 
 about to be made to elevate him. His friends, he truly said, 
 " would dishonor his views and insult his feelings by a suspicion 
 that he would submit to be instrumental in counteracting the wishes 
 and the expectations of the United States;" and he constituted the 
 friend to whom he wrote his proxy to declare these sentiments if the 
 occasion should require. Having despatched this letter, and being 
 then at a distance of ten * days' travel from the seat of government, 
 he did nothing, and could do nothing, further. 
 
 * " New York and Albany Mail Stage — 
 
 " Leaves New York every morning at six o'clock, loflgea flt Peekekill and Rhinetieck, 
 and arrives in Albany on the third day. Fare of each passenger through, eight dollars; and 
 676 
 
THE TIE BETWEEN JEFFERSON AND BUER. 577 
 
 Jefferson's part was mncli more difficnlfc. Besides that a great 
 party looked' to him as the repository of their riglits, his own pride 
 was interested in his not being made the victim of a corriapt 
 intrigue. As the jiresident of the Senate, he was in the nearest 
 proximity to the scene of strife, liable to take fire from the passions 
 that raged there. Seldom has a fallible man been placed in circum- 
 stances more trying to mind and nerve. 
 
 There were four evil courses possible to the Federalists ; each of 
 which Jefferson had considered, and was prepared for, before the 
 balloting began, 
 
 1. They might elect Aaron Burr president, and himself vice-pres- 
 ident. In that case, because the election would have been " agree- 
 able to the Constitution," though " variant from the intentions of 
 the people," his purpose was to submit without a word. " No man," 
 he wrote a few weeks later, " would have submitted more cheerfully 
 than myself, because I am sure the administration would have been 
 Republican." 
 
 2. The Federalists could offer terms to JefiFerson, and endeavor to 
 extort valuable concessions from him. Upon this point, too, his 
 mind was made up; and he met every approach of this nature by a 
 declaration, in some form, that " he would not come into the presi- 
 dency by capitulation." He has him"self recorded several of these 
 attempts at negotiation. " Coming out of the Senate one day," he 
 writes, " I found Gouverneur Morris on the steps. He stopped me, 
 and began a conversation on the atrange and portentous state of 
 things then existing, and went on to observe, that the reasons why 
 the minority of States was so opposed to my being elected were, that 
 they apprehended, that, 1, I would turn all Federalists out of office ; 
 2, Put down the navy; 3, Wipe off the public debt. That I need 
 onl^' to declare, or authorize my friends to declare, that I would not 
 take these steps, and instantly the event of the election would be 
 
 Bixpence per mile way passengers. For seats apply to William Vandervoort, No. 48, corner 
 of Courtland and Greenwich Streets, New York, and of T. Wetmore, Albany." — New York 
 Evening Post, Sept. 11, 1804. 
 
 " The New York and Albany Mail Stage on the West Side of the Kiver — 
 
 " Will leave New York every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, at two o'clock in the 
 
 afternoon, lodges at Hackensack, Goshen, and Kingston, and arrives at Albany the third day. 
 
 Fare of each passenger through, eight dollars. Way passengers, ^re cents per mile. For 
 
 Beats apply to John Oakley, No. 75 Vesey Street, opposite the Bear Market, New York. 
 " Extra carriages and horses may be had at any time by applying at Hoboken or Hacken- 
 
 Back." — Neio York Evening I'ost, Nov. 6, 1804. 
 37 
 
578 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 fixed. I told him that I should leave the world to jvulge of the 
 course I meant to pursue by that which I had j)ursued 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 should hinder me from pursuing the measures which 
 I should deem for the public good." Other interviewers, some of 
 whom held the election in their hands, had no better success. 
 
 3. The balloting could have been continued day after day, until 
 the end of Mr. Adams's term, two weeks distant^ when, there being 
 no president and no vice-president, anarchy and chaos might have 
 been expected. For this emergency, also, Jefferson had provided a 
 plan, which, he always thought, would have prevented serious 
 trouble. The Republican members of Congress, in conjunction with 
 the jjresident and vice-president elect, intended to meet, and issue a 
 call to the whole country for a convention to revise the Constitution, 
 and provide a suitable, orderly remedy for the lapse of government. 
 This convention, as Jeiferson remarked to Dr. Priestley, "would 
 have been on the ground in eight weeks, would have repaired the 
 Constitution where it was defective, and wound it up again." 
 
 4. But unhappily there was a fourth expedient contemplated, 
 which was frauglit with peril to the country's peace. It was pro- 
 posed to pass a law devolving the government upon the chairman 
 of the Senate (to be elected by the Senate), in case the office of 
 president should become vacant. At once he declared, in conversa- 
 tions meant to be reported, that such an attempt would be resisted 
 by force. The very day, said he, that such an act is passed, the 
 Middle States (i.e. Virginia and Pennsylvania) will arm. And 
 when we know that James Monroe was the governor of Virginia, 
 and Thomas McKean governor of Pennsjdvania, we may be sure 
 that this was no empty threat. Not for a day, he added, will such 
 a usurpation be submitted to. "I was decidedly with those," he 
 explained a few weeks after, "who were determined not to permit 
 it. Because, that precedent once set, it would be artificially repro- 
 duced, and would soon end in a dictator." 
 
 But he was not wanting in efforts to prevent a calamity so dire. 
 There was one man who could have instantly frustrated the scheme 
 by his veto, — Mr. Adams, the president, with whom Jefferson, 
 with that indomitable good-nature and inexhaustible tolerance of 
 
THE TIE BETWEEN JEFFERSON AND BURR. 579 
 
 his, had maintained friendly relations through all the mad strife 
 of the last years. Upon reaching the seat of government at the 
 beginning of this session, he had hesitated before calling at the 
 presidential mansion. Knowing the sensitive self-love of his old 
 friend, he was afraid that if he called too soon Mr. Adams would 
 think he meant to exult over him, and that if he delayed his visit 
 beyond the usual period it would be regarded as a slight. He 
 called, however, at length, and found the defeated man alQne. One 
 glance at the president satisfied him that he had come too soon. 
 Mr. Adams, evidently unreconciled to the issue of the election, hur- 
 ried forward in a manner which betrayed extreme agitation ; and, 
 without sitting down or asking his visitor to sit, said, in a tremulous 
 voice, "You have turned me out; you have turned me out." Mr. 
 Jefferson, in that suave and gentle tone which fell like balm upon 
 the sore and troubled minds of men, said, " I have not turned you 
 out, Mr. Adams ; and I am glad to avail myself of this occasion to 
 show that I have not, and to explain my views on this subject. In. 
 consequence of a division of opinion existing among our fellow-citi- 
 zens, as to the proper constitution of our political institutions, and of 
 the wisdom and propriety of certain measures which have been 
 adopted by our government, that portion of our citizens who ap- 
 proved and advocated one class of these opinions and measures 
 selected jon as their candidate for the presidency, and their oppo- 
 nents selected me. If you or myself had not been in existence, or 
 for any other cause had not been selected, other persons would have 
 been selected in our places ; and thus the contest would have been 
 carried on, and with the same result, except that the party which 
 supported you would have been defeated by a greater majority, as it 
 was known, that, but for you, your party would have carried their 
 unpopular measures much farther than they did. You will see from 
 this that the late contest was not one of a personal character between 
 John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, but between the advocates and 
 opponents of certain political opinions and measures, and, therefore, 
 should produce no unkind feelings between the two men who hap- 
 pened to be placed at the head of the two parties." 
 
 These words did much to restore Mr. Adams to composure for 
 the moment. Both gentlemen took seats, when they conversed in 
 their usual friendly way upon the topics of the hour. We have the 
 testimony of both of them to the correctness of this report. Mr. 
 
580 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 
 
 Jeflferson has recorded the interview; and once, when his friend, 
 Edward Coles, repeated to Mr. Adams the story as he had heard 
 it at Monticello, Mr. Adams said to him, " If you had been present 
 and witnessed the scene 3'ou could not have given a more accurate 
 account of what passed." The fiery ex-president added, " Mr. 
 Jefferson said I was sensitive, did he? Well, I tvas sensitive. 
 But I never before heard that Mr. Jefferson had given a second 
 thought as to the proper time for making the visit." 
 
 Being thus on the old terms with his old friend, Jefferson visited 
 him at this threatening crisis to call his attention to the most 
 obvious means of averting the danger. He has recorded the failure 
 of his attempt: "We conversed on the state of things. I observed 
 to him that a very dangerous experiment was then in contemplation, 
 to defeat' the presidential election hj an act of Congress declaring 
 the right of the Senate to name a president of the Senate, to devolve 
 on him the government during any interregnum ; that such a 
 measure would probably produce resistance by force, and incalculable 
 consequences, which it would be in his power to prevent by negativ- 
 ing such an act. He seemed to think such an act justifiable, and 
 observed, it was in my power to fix the election by a word in an 
 instant, by declaring I would not turn out the Federal officers, nor 
 put down the navy, nor sponge out the national debt. Finding his 
 mind made up as to the usurpation of the government by the 
 president of the Senate, I urged it no further, and observed, the 
 world must judge as to mj'self of the future by the past, and turned 
 the conversation to something else." 
 
 Happily the Federalists, admonished by their fears, recovered in 
 time the use of their reason. Hamilton, from the first, opposed the 
 attempt to give the first place to his vigilant New York rival; but 
 this he did merely on the ground that Burr was, if possible, a more 
 terrific being even than Jefferson. Gouverueur Morris, who was a 
 gentleman, as well as a man of real ability, placed his own opposi- 
 tion to the nefarious scheme on the right basis : " Since it was 
 evidently the intention of our fellow-citizens to make Mr. Jefferson 
 their president, it seems proper to fulfil that intention." After 
 seven days of balloting, the House of Representatives elected 
 Thomas Jefferson president, and Aaron Burr vice-president. 
 
 Thus ended the rule of the Federalists, the first party that ever 
 governed the United States. Never was the downfall of a party 
 
THE TIE BETWEEN JEFFERSQN AND BUKE. 581 
 
 more just or more necessary. Its entire policy was tainted by the 
 unbelief pf its leaders in the central principle of the Republican 
 system. Nearly every important thing they did was either wrong 
 in itself, or done for a wrong reason. The only president they ever 
 elected, Mr. Adams, was as interesting and picturesque a character 
 as Dr. Samuel Johnson, and nearly as unfit as Johnson for an 
 executive post ; while Hamilton, in whom they put their chief trust, 
 can be acquitted of depravity only by conceding his ignorance and 
 incapacity. Alexander Hamilton had no message for the people of 
 the United States. His " mission," if he had one, was not here. 
 His mind was not continental. He did not know his ground. And 
 like many other unwise, well-intentioned men, he brought oppro- 
 brium even upon that portion of truth which he had been able to 
 grasp. Probably there is an ingredient of truth in every heartfelt 
 conviction of an honest mind ; and no one can read Hamilton's con- 
 fidential letters without feeling his sincerity and devotion. 
 
 The basis of truth in the convictions of Hamilton and his circle 
 was, that the Intelligence and Virtue of a country must, in some 
 way, be got to the top of things, and govern. Jefferson heartily 
 agreed with them in this opinion ; and felt it the more deeply, from 
 having discovered that the political sj'stem of the Old World had 
 placed a fool on every throne, and hedged him about with a dissolute 
 and ignorant class. Hamilton always assumed that intelligence 
 and virtue of the requisite degree are only to be found among peo- 
 ple who possess a certain amount of property; equivalent, say, to a 
 thousand Spanish dollars. Jefferson was for bringing the wltole of 
 the intelligence and virtue of a community into play by the subsoil 
 plough of general suff"rags ; recognizing the natural right of every 
 mature person to a voice in the government of his country. If 
 Hamilton *had been a wise and able man, he would have had an im- 
 portant part to play in anticipating and warding off the only real 
 danger that has ever menaced republican institutions in America, — 
 ignorant suff'rage. Upon him would have devolved the congenial 
 task of convincing the American people, seventy years before Tweed 
 and the Carpet-bagger convinced them, that a man of this age who 
 cannot read is not a mature person, but is a child, who cannot per- 
 form the act of the mind called voting. { His had been the task of 
 establishing the truth, that a system of suff'rage which admits the 
 most benighted men, and excludes the most enlightened women, is 
 
682. LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 one which will not conduct this republic honorably or safely down 
 the centuries. '. He might have helped us in this direction. His 
 "thousand Spanish dollars" belonged to another system, utterly 
 unsuited to this hemisphere ; and he did nothing for the United 
 States which time has not undone, or is not about to undo. 
 
 He threatened, it seems, to " beat down," the incoming adminis- 
 tration ; and, indeed, I observe, in the newspapers of the time, that 
 he continued, as long as he lived, to fulminate sonorous inanity 
 against Mr. Jefferson's acts and utterances. But he was never again 
 a power in the politics of America. He bought a few acres of land 
 near the Hudson, not far from what exultant land-agents now speak 
 of as One hundred and Fiftieth Street ; where the thirteen trees, 
 which he planted in commemoration of the original thirteen States, 
 are now in a condition of umbrageous luxuriance, pleasing to behold 
 eveu in a photograph. There he strove, during the pleasant sum- 
 mer weeks, to forget politics in cultivating his garden ; and there he 
 awaited the inevitable hour when Jeiferson's fanatical course should 
 issue in that anarchy which he had so often foretold, and from which 
 his puissant arm would deliver a misguided people. 
 
CHAPTER LXI. 
 
 THE FIBST REPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION. 
 
 Peace now fell upon tlie anxious minds of men. A vast content 
 spread itself everywhere as tlie news of Jefferson's election was 
 slowly borne in creaking vehicles over the wide, weltering mud of 
 February and March. The tidings from abroad, too, were more and 
 more re-assuring : a convention with Bonaparte was as good as con- 
 cluded ; the Continent was pacificated by being terrified or subdued; 
 and there were good hopes of that peace between Great Britain and 
 France which was to follow before Jefferson had sent in his fi^rst mes- 
 sage. Bonaparte, so terrible to Europe and to Federalists, seems 
 always, if we may judge from his correspondence, to have cast friendly 
 eyes across the Atlantic. In 1800, it is true, he ordered Fouche to 
 notify " M. Payne," that the police was aware of his ill-conduct, and 
 that, on the first complaint against him, he would be renvoye en Ame- 
 rique, sa patrie ; but in 1801, about the time of Jefferson's inaugura- 
 tion, he assigned to Robert Fulton ten thousand francs for the com- 
 pletion of his experiment with the Nautilus at Brest. Fortunate 
 Jefferson ! For the first time in eight years, an American administra- 
 tion could look abroad over the ocean without shame and without fear. 
 Peace at home, peace abroad, safety on the sea ! 
 
 It becomes a conqueror to conciliate. Only gentle and benevolent 
 feelings occupied the benign soul of Jefferson at this trying period. 
 Those who look over his correspondence of the early weeks of 1801 
 remark again what a precious, tranquillizing resource he had in na- 
 ture, and in those "trivial fond records" that employ the naturalist's 
 pen. His letters to philosophical friends, at the time when mis- 
 guided men were intriguing to rob his country of its right to elect a 
 chief magistrate, were more frequent and more interesting than usual. 
 The bones of the mammoth, the effects of cold on human happiness, 
 
 583 
 
584 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOIT. 
 
 the power of the moon over the weatlier, the temperature of moon- 
 beams, the question of the turkey's native land, the peculiar rain- 
 bows seen from Mouticello, and the nature of tlie circles round the 
 moon, were subjects which had power to lure him from the contem- 
 plation of the pitiful strifes around him. Nor did he forget his 
 precious collections of Indian words. He tells one corresjjondent 
 that he possesses already thirty vocabularies, and that he has it 
 " much at heart to make as extensive a collection as possible of In- 
 dian tongues ; " wondering to find the different languages so radically . 
 different. When, at last, the political struggle was at an end, his 
 first and only thought was to conciliate. He knew the suicidal char- 
 acter of the error which the Federalists had committed; and he was 
 glad of it, because it made his task of restoring parties to good- 
 humor so much easier. " Weeks of ill-judged conduct here," he 
 wrote to a friend a few days after the election in the House, "have 
 strengthened us more than years of prudent and conciliatory admin- 
 istration could have done. If we can once more get social inter- 
 course restored to its pristine harmony, I shall believe we have not 
 lived in vain." The leaders of the Federalists, he supposed, were 
 "incorrigible:" they would, doubtless, continue to oppose and de- 
 nounce ; but he hoped to convince the mass of their followers that 
 the accession of the Republican party to power would not reverse all 
 the beneficent laws of nature. 
 
 If there is one tiling upon which the Tories of America and Great 
 Britain plume themselves more than another, it is their superior 
 breeding, their finer sense of what is due from one person to another 
 in trying circumstances. The public has been frequently informed, 
 that, when the Federalists fell from power in 1801, the " age of polite- 
 ness passed away." The late Mr. Peter Parley Goodrich lamented 
 the decline of "the good old country custom," of youngsters giving 
 respectful salutation to their elders in passing. It was at this 
 period, he tells us, that the well-executed bow " subsided, first, into a 
 vulgar nod, half ashamed and half impudent, and then, like the pen- 
 dulum of a dying clock, totally ceased." When Je9:erson came in, 
 he adds, rudeness and irreverence were deemed the true mode for 
 democrats ; a statement which he illustrates by one of his entertaining 
 anecdotes. " How are you priest? " said a rough fellow to a clergy- 
 man. "How are you, democrat?" was the clergyman's retort. 
 " How do you know I am a democrat ? " asked the man. " How do 
 
THE FIRST REPUBLICAN' ADMINISTRATION. 585 
 
 you know I am a priest ? " said the clergyman. " I know you to 
 be a priest by your dress." " I knovy you to be a democrat by yom 
 address," said the parson. 
 
 Tliis anecdote, Mr. Goodrich assures us, in his humorous manner, 
 is "strictly historical." I am afraid it is. And I fear that much of 
 the superior breeding of the gentlemen of the old school, of which 
 we are so frequently reminded, was a thing of bows and observ- 
 ances ; which expressed the homage claimed by rank, instead of 
 the respectful and friendly consideration due from man to man. 
 
 In taking leave of power in 1801, the "gentlemen's party" 
 revealed the innate vulgarity of the Tory soul. When I say vul- 
 garity, I mean commonness, the absence of superiority, which is the 
 precise signification of the word. Congress had acted upon Hamil- 
 ton's suggestion of dividing the country into judicial districts, with 
 a permanent United States court in each ; but they preserved only 
 the shadow of his perfect apparatus of tyranny, — twenty-four dis-- 
 trict courts in all, with powers not excessive. But when the fangs 
 of a serpent have been extracted, the creature, in its writhing 
 impotence, retains its power to disgust. This increase of the judi- 
 ciary was believed to be only a device for providing elevated and 
 coaiafortable places for Federalists, from the vantage-ground of which 
 they could assail with more effect the Republican administration. 
 The measure was not, in itself, a lofty style of politics ; but the 
 manner in which the scheme was carried out bears the unquestion- 
 ble stamp of — commonness. 
 
 Mr. Adams's last day arrived. This odious judiciary law had been 
 passed three weeks before ; but, owing to the delay of the Senate to 
 act upon the nominations, the judges were still uncommissioned. 
 The gentlemen's party had not the decency to leave so much as one 
 of these valuable life-appointments to the incoming administration; 
 nor any other vacancy whatever, of which tidings reached the seat 
 of government in time. Nominations were sent to the Senate as 
 late as nine o'clock in the evening of the 3d of March ; and Judge 
 Marshall, the acting secretary of state, was in his office at mid- 
 night, still signing commissions for men through whom another 
 administration was to act. But the secretary and his busy clerks, 
 precisely upon the stroke of twelve, were startled by an apparition. 
 It was the bodily presence of Mr. Levi Lincoln of Massachusetts, 
 whom the president elect had chosen for the office of attorney gen- 
 
686 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 eral. A conversation ensued between these two gentlemen, which 
 has been recently reported for us by Mr. Jefferson's great-grand- 
 daughter : * — 
 
 Lincoln. I have been ordered by Mr. Jefferson to take posses- 
 sion of this office and its papers. 
 
 Marshall. Wh^^^, Mr. Jefferson has not yet qualified, 
 
 Lincoln. Mr. Jefferson considers himself in the light of an 
 executor, bound to take charge of the papers of the government 
 until he is duly qualified. 
 
 Marshall {taking out his watch). But it is not yet twelve 
 o'clock. 
 
 Lincoln (taking a watch from his pocket and showing it). 
 This is the president's watch, and rules the hour. 
 
 Judge Marshall felt that Mr. Lincoln was master of the situa- 
 tion ; and; casting a rueful look upon the unsigned commissions 
 spread upon the table, he left his midnight visitor in possession. 
 E-elating the scene in after-years, when the Federalists had recov- 
 ered a portion of their good humor, he used to say, laughing, that 
 he had been allowed to pick up nothing but his hat. 
 
 While these events were transpiring, Mr. Adams was preparing 
 for that precipitate flight from the capital which gave the last 
 humiliation to his party. He had not the courtesy to stay in 
 Washington for a feyv hours, and give the eclat of his presence to 
 the inauguration of his successor. Tradition reports that he 
 ordered his carriage to be at the door of the White House at mid- 
 night ; and we know, that, before the dawn of the 4th of March, 
 he had left Washington forever. 
 
 That day was celebrated throughout the United States like 
 another 4th of July. Soldiers paraded, bells rang, orations were 
 delivered, the Declaration of Independence was read, and in some 
 of the Republican newspapers it was printed at length. In most 
 towns of any importance a dinner was eaten in honor of the day, 
 the toasts of which figured in the papers, duly numbered, and the 
 precise number of cheers stated which each called forth. Sixteen 
 was evidently considered the proper number for the president. In 
 
 * Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, p. 308. 
 
THE FIRST KEPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION. 587 
 
 some instances, if we may believe the party-press, the Federalists 
 paraded their disgust. No one can tell us now whether the great 
 bell of Christ Church in Philadelphia reallj- did "toll all day," 
 when the news of Jefferson's election reached the city ; nor whether, 
 on the 4th of March, a ship-owner, on going to the wharf and 
 finding his vessel dressed with flags, flew into a passion, and swore 
 he would sell out his share in her if the flags were not taken in. 
 Nothing is too absurd to be believed of human prejudice. 
 
 Of the ceremonies at Washington the records of the time give 
 us the most meagre accounts. Boswell, the father of interviewing, 
 had no representative in America then ; and journalism was con- 
 tent to print little more than the inaugural address. It is only 
 from the accidental presence of an English traveller that we know 
 in what manner Mr. Jefferson was conveyed to the Capitol that 
 morning. He had no establishment in Washington. "Jack 
 Eppes," his son-in-law, was completing somewhere in Virginia the 
 purchase of four coach-horses, — price, $1,600, — with which the 
 president elect hoped to contend triumphantly with the yellow 
 mud of Washington. But, as neither horses nor coach had yet 
 arrived, he went to the Capitol in his usual way. "His dress," as 
 our traveller, John Davis, informs us, " was of plain cloth, and he 
 rode on horseback to the Capitol without a single guard or even 
 servant in his train, dismounted without assistance, and hitched the 
 bridle of his horse to the palisades." In composing the inaugural 
 address (fitter to be read on the Fourth of July than the Declara- 
 tion of Independence), he evidently put his heart and strength 
 into the passages which called upon estranged partisans to be fellow- 
 citizens once more : — 
 
 " Every diff"erence of opinion is not a difference of principle. 
 We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. 
 We ai'e all Eepublicans : we are all Federalists. If there be any 
 among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change 
 its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of 
 the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where rea- 
 son is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest 
 meii fear that a republican government cannot be strong, — that this 
 government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, 
 in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government 
 
588 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 whicTi lias so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and vis- 
 ionary fear that this government, the world's best hope, may by 
 possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe 
 this, on the contrary, the strongest on earth. I believe it the only 
 one where every man, at the call of the laws, would fly to the 
 standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order 
 as his own personal concern." 
 
 In 1801 this was theory. In 1861 it was fact. 
 
 Happy, indeed, was the change which that day came oyer the 
 aspect of American politics. No longer was the spectacle exhibited 
 of the government pulling one way, and the people another. The 
 people of the United States ruled the United States; and they 
 were served by men who owned their rightful mastery. That ele- 
 ment which resisted the Stamp Act, and declared independence, was 
 uppermost again. "Old Coke " and Algernon Sidney were in the 
 ascendent. The hard hand that held the plough, the thick muscle 
 that wielded the hammer, the pioneer out on the deadly border-line 
 between savage and civilized man, and all the mighty host of toil- 
 ing men, gained something of dignity and self-esteem by the change. 
 The old Whig chiefs, who for two or three years past had been 
 avoided, reviled, cut, by their juniors and inferiors, could look up 
 again, and exchange glad salutations. The old men of the ante- 
 Revolution time were coming into vogue once more, and Jefferson 
 used all the prestige of his office in their behalf. 
 
 A graceful act of manly homage (like king Hal's greeting to 
 "old Sir Thomas Erpingham" on the morning of Agincourt*) was 
 that letter which President Jefferson, amid the hurry and distrac- 
 tion of his first days of power, found time to write to Samuel Adams, 
 then verging upon fourscore, past service, but not past love and 
 veneration. It was so good and gentleman-like in Jefferson to 
 think of the old hero at such a time ; and it was becoming in Y^^^" 
 ginia tlius again, as in the great years preceding the Revolution, 
 to greet congenial Massachusetts. And how gracefully the president 
 acquitted himself: "I addressed a letter to you, my very dear and 
 ancient friend, on the 4th of March ; not, indeed, to you by name, 
 but through the medium of some of my fellow-citizens, whom occa- 
 
 * Henry V., act iv. scene 1. 
 
THE riEST REPUBLIC AK ADMIKISTRATION. 589 
 
 sion called on me to address. In meditating the matter of that 
 address, I often asked myself, •' Is this exactly in the spirit of the 
 patriarch, Samuel Adams ? Is it as he would express it ? Will he 
 approve of it?' I have felt a great deal for our country in the 
 times we have seen, but individually for no one so much as your- 
 self. When I have been told that you were avoided, insul^ed^ 
 frowned upon, I could but ejaculate, ' Father, forgive them ; for they 
 know not what they do ! ' I confess I felt an indignation for you 
 which for myself I have been able, under every 'trial, to keep 
 entirely passive. However, the storm is over, and we are in port. 
 The ship was not rigged for the service she was put on. We will 
 show the smoothness of her motions on her Republican tack." And 
 he goes on to tell the old man how intent he is upon restoring har- 
 mony in the country, — an object to which he is ready to " sacrifice 
 every thing but principle." " How much I lament," concluded the 
 president, "that time has deprived me of your_ aid. It would have 
 been a day of glory which should have called you to the first office of 
 the administration. But give us your counsel, mj^ friend, and give 
 us your blessing ! " We can imagine the radiant countenance of this' 
 venerable man, so august in his poverty and isolation, as he held 
 this letter in his palsied hand, and slowly gatheredcits contents. - 
 
 Dr. Priestley, too, who had been an object of envenomed attaclc, 
 and menaced with expulsion under the Alien Law, received cordial 
 recognition, and a warm invitation to visit the seat of g'pvernmeut. 
 "I should claim the right to lodge you," said the presiden+,\'''should 
 yorf make such an excursion." He evidently felt it a public duty to 
 atone; in. some degree, for the inhospitality with which the United 
 States had appeared to treat the first man eminent in original 
 science who ever emigrated to the western continent. " It is with 
 heartfelt satisfaction," he wrote to him, "that in the first moments 
 of my public action I can hail you with welcome to our land, tender 
 to y«ii the honiage of its respect and est*m, cover j^ou under 
 the protection of those laws which were made for the good and wise 
 like you, and disdain the legitimacy of that libel on legislation, 
 which, under the form of a law, was for some time placed among 
 them." 
 
 Before Dr. Priestley had the pleasure of reading these lines, he 
 had enjoyed the greater one of knowing, that, among President 
 Jefi"erson's first acts, was the pardoning of every man in the country 
 
590 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 who was in prison under the Sedition Law. Jefferson used to say 
 that he considered that law "a nullity as absolute and palpable as 
 if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden 
 image." Tlie victims of the Alien Law were beyond his reach; 
 but some of them, who could be fitly consoled by epistolary notice, 
 Kosciuszko, Volney, and others, received friendly letters from the 
 president. 
 
 A gallant, high-bred act it was in Jefferson not to shrink from 
 the odium of recognizing the claim which Thomas Paine had to the 
 regards of a Republican president. The ocean, for some years past, 
 had not been a safe highway for a man whom both belligerents 
 looked upon as an enemy; and Paine had, in consequence, expressed 
 a wish for a passage home in a naval vessel. The first national 
 ship that sailed for France after Mr. Jefferson's inauguration carried 
 a letter from the president to Mr. Paine^ offering him a passage in 
 that vessel on its return. "I am in hopes," he wrote, "that you will 
 find us returned generally to sentiments worthy of former times. 
 In these it will be your glory to have steadily labored, and with as 
 much effect as any man living." This must have been comforting 
 to a man who, having been first driven from England, then threat- 
 ened with expulsion from France, and warned by the Sedition Law 
 from entering the United States, might have been truly described, 
 before the 4th of March, 1801, as "the man without a country." 
 Enriched though he had been by the gratitude of America, he had 
 been living in Paris for some time past in poverty and squalor, his 
 American property being little productive in the absence of the 
 owner. Mr. Jefferson's letter found him the occupant of " a little 
 dirt3'^ room, containing a small wooden table and two chairs." An 
 old English friend, who visited him not long after he had received 
 it, described Paine's abode, which he had much trouble to find, as 
 being the dirtiest apartment he ever sat down in. " Tlie chimney- 
 hearth was a heap OT dirt," he adds: " there was not a speck of 
 cleanliness to be seen. Three shelves were filled with pasteboard 
 boxes, each labelled after the manner of a minister of foreign affairs, 
 — Correspondance Britannique, Prangaise, etc. In one corner of 
 the room stood several huge bars of iron, curiously shaped, and two 
 large trunks ; opposite the fireplace, a board covered with pamphlets 
 and journals, having more the appearance of a dresser in a scullery 
 than a sideboard." 
 
THE FIRST REPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION. 591 
 
 The occupant of this doleful room, then sixty-five years of age, 
 soon came clown stairs dressed in a long flannel gown, and weai'ing 
 Ib his haggard ftice an expression of the deepest melancholy. His 
 conversation showed that he was in full sympathy with the little band 
 of Frenchmen whom Bonaparte had not dazzled out of their senses. 
 He had dared even to translate and print Jefferson's Inaugural 
 Address, "by way of contrast," as he said, "with the government 
 of tlie First Consul." But he had lost all hope of France. " This 
 is not a country," he said, " for an honest man to live in : they do 
 not understand any thing at all of the principles of free government, 
 and the best way is to leave them to themselves. You see, they 
 have conquered all Europe, only to make it more miserable than it 
 was before. Republic! Do you call this a republic ? Why, they 
 are worse off tlian the slaves at Constantinople ; for there they 
 expect to be bashaws in heaven by submitting to be slaves here 
 below. But here they believe neitlier in heaven nor hell, and yet 
 are slaves \>y choice ! I know of no republic in the world except 
 America, which is the only countrj^ for such men as j^ou and me. 
 I have done with Europe and its slavish politics." He gave his 
 visitor Mr. Jefferson's letter to read, and said he meant soon to 
 avail himself of its offer. " It would be a curious circumstance," he 
 added, laughing, " if I should hereafter be sent as secretary of 
 legation to the English Court which outlawed me. What a hubbub 
 it would create at the king's levee to see Tom Paine presented by 
 the American ambassador ! All the bishops and women would 
 faint away." His guest frankly told him that the course of events 
 had caused him to change his principles. Paine's answer was, 
 " You certainly have the right to do so, but you cannot alter the 
 nature of things. The French have alarmed all honest men; but, 
 still, truth is truth." 
 
 Poor Paine ! His errors were, for the most part, those of his age ; 
 and they were aggravated by his circumstances, nis defective educa- 
 tion, and the ardor of his temperament. But his merits, which were 
 real and not small, were peculiarly his own. He loved the truth for 
 its own sake ; and he stood by what he conceived to be the truth 
 when all the world around him reviled it. That hasty pamphlet of 
 his which he named The Age of Reason, written to alleviate the 
 tedium of his Paris prison, differs from other deistical works only in 
 being bolder and honester. It contains not a position which Frank- 
 
592 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 lin, Jolm Adams, Jefferson, and Theodore Parker would have dis- 
 sented from ; aud, doubtless, he spoke the truth when he declared 
 that his main purpose in writing it was to " insj)ire mankind with a 
 more exalted idea of the Supreme Architect of the Universe." I 
 think his judgment must have been impaired before he could have 
 consented to publish so inadequate a performance. In a remarkably 
 convivial age, he sang a very good song, and often favored a jovial 
 company, after dinner, M'ith ditties of his own composition. This 
 ever-welcome talent, joined to the vivacity of mind which naturally 
 expends itself in agreeable conversation, made him in his best days 
 the delight of his circle, and lured him, perhaps, into habits that pre- 
 vented his ripening into happiness and wisdom ; for no man can 
 attain welfare who does not obey the physical laws of his being. It 
 becomes us, however, to deal charitably with the faults of a benefac- 
 tor who wrote The Crisis and Common Sense, who conceived the 
 planing-machine and the iron bridge. A glorious monument in his 
 honor swells aloft in many of our great towns. The principle of his 
 arch now sustains the marvellous railroad depots that half abolish the 
 distinction between in doors and out. 
 
 Nearlj' every other man whom Jefferson singled out for distinction 
 had suffered, in some special manner, during the recent contests. 
 Madison, after bearing the brunt of many a battle in the House of 
 Representatives, retired at last, almost despairing of the republic, 
 and went home to make a new stand in the legislature of Virginia. 
 His father, too, far advanced in years, needed his constant aid in the 
 management of an extensive estate that only a master's eye could 
 render profitable. Now he was coming back to the seat of govern- 
 ment as secretary of state ! The declining strength of his. father 
 warned him not to leave his home for the inauguration, and the old 
 man died a few days after. The news of Mr. Madison's nomination 
 to the cabinet, and that of his father's death, reached the public at 
 the same time. * 
 
 This is an interesting sentence in the will of Thomas Jefferson, 
 especially to those who know something of the friendship which sub- 
 sisted between the illustrious democrat and the greatest of his dis- 
 ciples : — 
 
 " I give to my old friend, James Madison of Montpelier, my gold- 
 mounted walking-staff of animal horn, as a token of the cordial and 
 
THE FIRST EEPUBLICAX ADMINISTRATION. 693 
 
 affectionate friendship, wliicli, for nearly now an half-century, has 
 united us in the same principles and pursuits of what we have 
 deemed for the greatest good of our country." 
 
 This passage was written in March, 1826, a few months "before the 
 death of the testator. The friendship of wliich it speaks was the 
 controlling influence in the public career of Mr. Madison, and an 
 event of the greatest importance in that of Mr. Jefferson. It made 
 Madison president, and secured to Jefferson the successor best fitted 
 of all living men to continue the Jeffersonian system, 
 
 James Madison, born in Virginia in 1751, was the son of James 
 Madison, a wealthy tobacco -planter, ar' descendant from John 
 Madison, an English gentleman who came to Virginia about the year 
 ICoO. The eldest son of a thriving planter, he received an education 
 remarkable for its extent and thoroughness. In those days it was 
 customary for the parish clergyman of Virginia to prepare pupils for 
 college. James Madison had this advantage, and at the age of 
 eighteen went to Princeton College in New Jersey, from which he 
 graduated after a residence of only two years. He continued, how- 
 ever, to reside at Princeton for another year, during which he pur- 
 sued his studies as a kind of private pupil of the president. He 
 committed at this period an error, from the effects of which he never 
 wholly recovered during all his long life of eighty-five years. Hav- 
 ing an insatiable thirst for knowledge, he allowed himself but three 
 hours' sleep, and devoted almost all the rest of the day to study ; and 
 even when warned of the folly of this course by the failure of his 
 health, he continued to over-exert himself, although in a less degree. 
 
 In the year 1772, when he was twenty-one years of age, he returned 
 to his native State, and there began the study of the law; which he 
 pursued with the same zeal and devotion, without discontinuing his 
 general studies. His biographer tells us that his attention was 
 drawn powerfully at t-his time to the study of theology, which he 
 continued to investigate until he had satisfied himself respecting its 
 nature and its claims. 
 
 The Revolutionary War was impending. Among the subjects of 
 agitation then in Virginia, was the connection between Churcli and 
 State, which existed in Virginia as completely as in the mother 
 country ; so that every denomination except one labored under obvi- 
 ous and serious disadvantages. James Madison, as we have seen, 
 §8 
 
594 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 was among th« young men who favored the dissolution of this unnat- 
 ural tie, and on this isslie was elected, in the spring of 1776, a mem- 
 ber of the Virginia legislature. Almost the only knowledge we 
 have of liis early parliamentary career is derived from an interesting 
 passage in the autobiography of Mr. Jefferson. 
 
 " Mr. Madison," he says, " came into the House in 1776, a new 
 member and young; which circumstances, concurring with his 
 extreme modesty, prevented his venturing himself in debate before 
 his removal to the Council of State in November, 1777. From tbence 
 he went to Congress, then consisting of a few members. Trained iu 
 in three successive schools, he acquired a habit of self-possession, 
 which placed at ready command the rich resources of his luminous 
 and discriminating mind and of his extensive information, and ren- 
 dered liim the first of every assembly afterwards of which he became 
 a member. Never wandering from his subject into vain declama- 
 tion, but pursuing it closely, in language pure, classical, and copious, 
 soothing always the feelings of his adversaries by civilities and soft- 
 ness of expression, lie rose to the eminent station which he held in 
 the great national convention of 1787; and in that of Virginia which 
 followed, he sustained the new constitution in all its parts, bearing 
 off the palm against the logic of George Mason and the fervid decla- 
 mation of Mr. Henry. With these consummate powers were united 
 a pure and spotless virtue, which calumny in vain attempted to sully." 
 
 This is a noble tribute. So glowing is it, that manj^ persons have 
 thought it exaggerated, and attributed it to the affectionate regard 
 which a good master naturally feels for the chief of his disciples ; 
 but this is not the case. I have been assured b}'' the Hon. Nicholas 
 P. Trist, the son-in-law and executor of Mr. Jefferson, that there 
 was no man to whose understanding Mr. Jefferson more sincerely 
 deferred, or for whose character he had so complete a respect, as for 
 that of James Madison. 
 
 What a change, too, for Albert Grallatin to find himself at the head 
 of the treasury department ! We can estimate his services to 
 Republicanism by the singular intensity of the hatred borne him by 
 the Federalists. From 1793, when Pennsylvania elected him to rep- 
 resent her in the Senate of the United States, their aversion, as much 
 as his own merit, had kept his name conspicuous. 
 
THE PIEST EEPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION. 595 
 
 Aliraham Albert Alplionse de Gallatin was born at Geneva, in 
 Switzerland, in 1761. In the letters of Voltaire, who lived two or 
 three miles from Geneva, there are many allusions to the family of 
 Gallatin, which was one of the most ancient and respectable of Swit- 
 zerland; and I presume Albert Gallatin must have often seen Vol- 
 taire in his boyhood, and perhaps conversed with him. Among the 
 connections of the family was the celebrated Madame de Stael. 
 Graduating from the University of Geneva in 1779, he refused the 
 brilliant offer of a lieutenant-colonelcy in a German regiment, for the 
 express purpose of comipg over to America, as Lafayette had done 
 a year or two before, and joining the patriot army ixnder General 
 Washington. 
 
 It was. in the spring of 1780, that the vessel in which he sailed to 
 America was obliged to put into a harbor on the coast of Massachu- 
 setts, and the young enthusiast came on shore. On landing he went 
 to the nearest tavern; and there, to his equal astonishment and 
 delight, he met with some Swiss lately from Geneva, who were 
 acquainted with his famil3^ They were on their way to a settlement 
 in Maine, where they intended to reside. Overjoyed at this coinci- 
 dence, he joined the party, and went with them to Machias, where he 
 at once enlisted in a company of volunteers about to march to the 
 defence of a threatened point ; and he was soon appointed to com- 
 mand a post of some importance, garrisoned by a body of militia and 
 Indians. Being the son of a wealthy family, he had brought with 
 him a little money, something less than a thousand dollar's; and his 
 troops being in need of the most indispensable supplies, he advanced 
 the greater part of his money for their relief, receiving in return an 
 order on the treasury of the United States. At the end of the cam- 
 paign, being in Boston, and having spent all the rest of his cash, he 
 presented his order for payment, and was informed that the treasury 
 was empty. He was obliged to sell his order for one-third of its 
 value ; so, for his six hundred dollars, he received two hundred. 
 
 The war ended, he looked about him for employment, and found it 
 at Harvard College, where he taught French during the year 1783. 
 On coming of age he received from Switzerland his share of his 
 father's estate, with which he went to Virginia and bought a tract of 
 land in the western part of the State. It was there that he had his 
 celebrated interview with General Washington, which he often 
 related, and which was published some years ago in a literary journal. 
 
596 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 It occurred in a log-house, fourteen feet square, consisting of one 
 room, which was furnished with a bed, a pine table, and a bench or 
 two. General Washington, who owned large tracts of land in that 
 region, had invited some of the settlers and hunters acquainted with 
 the country, to meet him at this log-hut, for the purpose of talking 
 over and settling upon the best pass for a road through the Alle- 
 ghany Mountains. Attracted by curiosity to see so celebrated a 
 person, Gallatin was present. 
 
 When General Washington came in (Mr. Gallatin used to sa}') he 
 took his seat at the pine table ; and all tlie hunters of the country 
 stood up around it, except a few who found seats upon the bed. The 
 general questioned them, and noted down their replies upon paper. 
 He was very particular in his inquiries, &nd continued his questioning 
 for some time after the young Swiss thought he had discovered, not 
 only the best pass, but the only one available' for the purpose. Being 
 a little impatient at the apparent indecision of tlie general, he sud- 
 denly interrupted him, without reflecting upon the impropriety of his 
 conduct, and said, — 
 
 " Oh, it is plain enough ! such a place (mentioning the one in his 
 mind) is the most practicable." 
 
 The people present stared at the young man with much surprise, 
 marvelling at his boldness in giving his opinion before the general 
 had asked it. Washington paused, laid down his pen, lifted his eyes 
 from the paper, and looked sternly at the young foreigner, evidently 
 offended, but uttered not a word. He resumed his inquiries, and 
 continued to question the hunters for some time longer, when he 
 suddenly stopped, and, throwing down his pen, said to the stranger, — 
 
 " You are right, sir." 
 
 In commenting upon this scene, Mr. Gallatin used to say, — 
 
 " It was so on all occasions with General Washington. He was 
 slow in forming an opinion, and never decided until he knew he 
 was right." 
 
 The warlike Indians of Western Virginia prevented his settling 
 the lands he had purchased ; and he went to reside upon a farm in 
 Pennsylvania, on the banks of the Monongahela, not far from Pitts- 
 burg. There, besides carrying on a farm, he founded the glass 
 manufacture, which has since grown to such proportions, that, at the 
 present time, about one-half of all the glass used in the United 
 States is made within a few miles of the spot where Albert Gallatin 
 began it about 1790. 
 
THE FIEST REPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION. 59T 
 
 He was soon drawn into public life. Upon the division of parties 
 during Washington's first term, Albert Gallatin sided with Jeffer- 
 son and the Democracy, and made himself conspicuous by the bold- 
 ness and decision with which he advocated Democratic principles. 
 The whole country rang with his name in 1793, when, after having 
 boen elected a United States senator by the legislature of Pennsyl- 
 vania, his right to the seat was denied by the Federal senators. 
 The Constitution requires that a senator, if not a native of the United 
 States, must have been a citizen for nine years. The question was 
 this : Did Gallatin's citizenship begin on the day he landed in 
 Massachusetts, tlilrteen years before, or did it begin on the day he 
 swore allegiance to the republic in 1785, which was only eight years 
 before. After a debate of eight weeks, the Senate decided, by a strict 
 party vote of fourteen Federalists to twelve Democrats, that his citi- 
 zenship began when he took the oath. This affair was really benefi-' 
 cial to Albert Gallatin, because the Democratic party deemed that 
 he had been the subject of an outrage. They regarded him as an 
 injured man. 
 
 At the time of the whiskey insurrection, though he sympathized 
 warmly with the insurrectionists, he opposed all violent measures, and 
 was greatly instrumental in bringing the affair to a peaceful conclu- 
 sion. The great period of his life began in 1795, when the people 
 of Western Pennsylvania elected him to the House of Representa- 
 tives, where he distinguished himself by the vigor of his opposition 
 to Federal measures. 
 
 His enemies were again incoilsiderate enough to confer upon him 
 the distinction of an outrage. In February, 1799, when he was 
 exerting every faculty in opposition to the Alien Law, tlie majority 
 held a caucus, and resolved to make no answer whatever to any thing 
 that might be said against either the Alien or the Sedition Law. Gal- 
 latin rose in the House to urge their repeal. For a short time he was 
 heard in contemptuous silence. Then honorable members began to 
 converse, laugh, talk, cough, move about ; and made at last so loud a 
 noise, that, as Jefferson remarked at the time, the speaker must have 
 had the lungs of an auctioneer to be heard. Perhaps he may have 
 thought of this scandalous scene when he sent to the Senate, two 
 years after, the name of Albert Gallatin for secretary of the treas- 
 ury. 
 
 Levi Lincoln, the new attorney-general; had a taste in common 
 
598 LIFE OF THOISIAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 with the president. He loved science. Another remarkable quali- 
 fication was, that he was a distinguished Massachusetts lawyer, — 
 at the head of the bar of that State for several years, — and yet not a 
 Federalist. These two facts, if we may believe the controversial writ- 
 ings of the day, bore to one another the relation of cause arid effect. 
 
 Henry Dearborn of Maine, whom Mr. Jefferson appointed secre- 
 tary of war, had been a veritable hero of romance. In 1775 he was 
 a village doctor. For three j'ears the sign of Dr. Dearborn had 
 hung out in a hamlet of New Hampshire, when a horseman on a 
 panting steed brought the news of the battle of Lexington. 
 Before the sun had set that day, the ^''onng doctor, splendid with the 
 glow of perfect health and the elastic grace of twenty-four, led sixty 
 men toward Cambridge, sixty-five miles distant, which he reached 
 soon after sunrise on the day following. At Bunker Hill he was a 
 •captain; but, as there was nothing to do there but load and fire, he 
 took a musket, and made one of his company, loading and firing 
 with the rest as long as they had any thing to put into their guns. 
 He went with Arnold's thousand men on that march through an 
 untrodden wilderness to join Montgomery in an attack upon Quebec. 
 The wonder was, that a man of them escaped starvation. Captain 
 Dearborn had with him a magnificent dog, the favorite of all the 
 company, and to himself most dear ; but he could not resist the 
 entreaties of starving comrades, and gave him up, at length, to some 
 soldiers, who took the dog to their quarters, and divided his flesh, 
 with fine Yankee self-control, among the men who could least help 
 themselves, who were nearest perishing. " They ate every part of 
 him," wrote his master, " not excepting his entrails ; and, after fin- 
 ishing their meal, they collected the bones and carried them to be 
 pounded up, and to make broth for another meal." The only other 
 dog attached to the expedition, a small one, had been privately killed 
 and eaten before. Men sacrificed their "old breeches " made of 
 moosehide ; boiled them long, and then cut them into slices, and 
 broiled them on the coals. A barber's powder-bag was made into 
 soup at last. It excited the wonder of the doctor-captain to see men 
 keep up with their company until they were so near exhaustion that 
 they would breathe their last four or five minutes after sitting down. 
 Dearborn himself gave out at length, and lay in a hut for ten days 
 at the point of death. But he rallied, trudged after the army, and 
 went to the assault at the head of his command. 
 
THE FIRST EEPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION. 599 
 
 In this spirit and in this manner Heniy Dearborn served till the 
 surrender of Cornwallis, which he witnessed. On General Washing- 
 ton's staff, as quartermaster-general, he acquired that familiarity 
 with military business which made him at home in the office in which 
 Mr. Jeiferson placed him. President Washingtcm had appointed 
 him marshal of the district of Maine, and the people had elected him 
 twice to the House of Representatives. He was a large, handsome 
 man, of erect, graceful, military bearing; a striking figure in the circles 
 of the city that was rising in the primeval wilderness. He was, 
 perhaps, the only public man in the country who united all the 
 qualities desirable for his post ; being a soldier, a Republican, a man 
 of science, and a man of business. 
 
 In bestowing the great places of the government, Jefferson evi- 
 dently had it in view to exalt and stimulate the intellectual side of 
 human nature, then under a kind of ban in Christendom. Every 
 member of his cabinet was college-bred; and every man of them 
 was in some peculiar way identified with knowledge. Madison was, 
 above all things else, a student of constitutional science as well as 
 of constitutional law. Gallatin, the founder of the glass manufac- 
 ture of Pittsburg, was accomplished in the science of his day, em- 
 inently an intellectual ized person. Dearborn, a graduate of Har- 
 vard, had also been admitted to one of the learned professions. 
 Robert Smith of Maryland, secretary of the navj^, a graduate of 
 Princeton, after long eminence at the bar and in public life, died 
 president of the Agricultural Society and provost of the University 
 of IMaryland. Gideon Granger of Connecticut, post-master-gen- 
 eral, a graduate of Yale, a lawyer of learning and high distinction, 
 fought through the Connecticut legislature the liberal school-fund 
 to which that State is so much indebted. He was noted, all his life, 
 as the intelligent and public-spirited friend of every thing high and 
 advanced. It was he who promoted internal improvements in a 
 manner to which the strictest constructionist could not object, by 
 giving a thousand acres of land for the benefit of the Erie Canal. 
 Chancellor Livingston, whom Mr. Jefferson invited to his cabinet, 
 and induced to go as minister to France, was the most liberal patron 
 science had yet found in America. A graduate of King's College 
 in New York, he spent his leisure and his income in promoting 
 science, art, and agriculture. It was his intelligent faith and his 
 liberal outlay of money that enabled Robert Fulton to carry out 
 
600 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 John Eitch's idea of a steamboat. James Monroe, the least learned 
 of the men whom Jefferson advanced, could give a glorious reason 
 why he was not a graduate of a college. The battle of Lexingtoa 
 called him away from William and Mary to the camp at Cambridge. 
 Let it be noted, then, as an interesting fact in political history, 
 that the first Democratic administration paid homage to the higher 
 attainments of man, and sought aid from the class farthest removed 
 from the uninstructed multitude. If Jefferson had not done this 
 from principle, he would have done it from calculation ; because, 
 knowing the people as he did, he was aware that the farther they 
 get from bowing down to fictitious distinctions, the more alive they 
 become to those which are real. At the same time, he did not over- 
 value learning. "It is not by his reading in Coke-Littleton," he 
 wrote to the brother of Robert Smith, "that I am induced to this 
 proposition (offering him the Navy Department), thougli that also 
 will be of value in our administration ; but from a confidence that 
 he must, from his infancy, have been so familiarized with naval 
 things, that he will be perfectly competent to select proper agents 
 and to judge of their conduct." From that day to this, as often as 
 Mr. Jefferson's example has been followed in this particular, the 
 people of the United States have been gratified. What appoint- 
 ments more popular than those of Irving, Goodrich, Hawthorne, 
 Bancroft, Kennedy, and Curtis ? 
 
 An American president usually has something to do besides man- 
 aging the affairs of the public. After making the first arrange- 
 ments, Jefferson went home for a month to put his own affairs in 
 train for a long absence, to select books for removal, and give time 
 for the members of his cabinet to remove to Washington. The 
 city was miserably incomplete and unprovided. Only ten months 
 had passed since Philadelphians, going by the office of the secretary 
 of state, had read on a placard the official notice of the removal of 
 the government to the tract of wilderness which had been despoiled 
 of its primeval beauty, and named after the Father of his Country. 
 These were the words they read: "Notice. — The office of the 
 Department of State will be removed this day from Philadelphia. 
 All letters and applications are therefore to be addressed to that 
 department at the city of Washington from this date, 28th May, 
 1800." The day before. President Adams began his journey toward 
 the new capital, going "by way of Lancaster and Fredericksburg." 
 
THE FIRST REPUBLICAN ADMINISTIlATIOlsr. 601 
 
 When Mrs. Adams joined him, she was ill-advised enough to go by 
 Baltimore; and a nice time she had of it. Between Baltimore and 
 Washington, th'e forest had not a break. Soon after leaving Balti- 
 more, her coachman lost his way, went eight or nine miles wrong,' 
 then tried to get back through the forest to the right road, and 
 wandered two hours without finding a creature of whom to ask a 
 question ; until, at last, a straggling negro came along, whom they 
 hired as a guide. Wasliington she discovered to be all promise and 
 no performance ; every thing begun and nothing finished ; no bells 
 in the presidential mansion ; no fence about it ; the grand staircase 
 not up ; and the great rooms unfurnished. She used the unplas- 
 tered east room that winter for drying clothes. 
 
 If the president's house was in such a condition, we may con- 
 clude, that, if the president and cabinet meant to be comfortable, 
 they must lend a hand to the work themselves. They were going 
 to live in a city of huts and small unfinished houses, with here and 
 there a marble palace rising above the trees, and a great street of 
 rich yellow clay piercing the forest, three miles long, a hundred feet 
 wide, and two feet deep, — " the best city in the world for a future 
 residence," as Gouverneur Morris remarked to one of his fair corre- 
 spondents. "We want nothing here," said he, "but houses, cellars, 
 kitchens, well-informed men, amiable women, and other little trifles 
 of this kind, to make our city perfect." 
 
 Besides sending many a load of books and other articles by way 
 of beginning, Jefferson kept a wagon going pretty frequently 
 between Monticello and Washington during the whole of his presi- 
 dency. Before leaving home he wrote curiously minute directions 
 for his steward, Mr. Edmund Bacon. His heart was set upon 
 restoring and enlarging a mill for grinding the grain of the region 
 round about : that must be pushed to completion. Then there were 
 fences to be made, fields to be cleared, a new variety of corn to be 
 tried, charcoal to be burned, the garden to be levelled, pork to be 
 bought, the nailery to be kept going, clothing to be provided, groves 
 to be thinned, shrubs to be pruned, the building to continue. Con- 
 cerning all these labors, Mr. Jefferson left precise instructions, and 
 kept them in mind at all times. Take this brief passage of his 
 last orders in April, 1801, as a specimen of the kind of directions 
 he frequently gave while he was apparently absorbed in affairs of 
 state : — 
 
602 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 "I have hired all the hands belonging to Mrs. and Miss Danger- 
 field for the next year. They are nine in number. Moses the 
 miller is to be sent home when his year is up. With these will 
 "work in common, Isaac, Charles, Ben, Shepherd, Abram, Davy, 
 John, and Shoemaker Phill ; making a gang of seventeen hands. 
 Martin is the miller, and Jerry will drive his wagon. Those who 
 work in the nailery are Moses, Wormly, James Hubbard, Barnaby, 
 Isbel's Davy, Bedford John, Bedford Davy, Phill Hubbard, Bartlet, 
 and Lewis. They are sufficient for two fires, five at a fire. I am 
 desirous a single man, a smith, should be hired to work with them, 
 to see that their nails are well made, and to superintend them gen- 
 erally ; if such an one can be found for a hundred and fifty or two hun- 
 dred dollars a year, though I would rather give him a share in the 
 nails made, say one-eighth of the price of all the nails made, deduct- 
 ing the cost of the iron : if such a person can be got, Isbel's Davy 
 may be withdrawn to drive the mule-wagon, and Samson to join the 
 laborers. There will then be nine nailers, besides the manager, so 
 that ten may still work at two fires ; the manager to have a log-house 
 built, and to have five hundred pounds of pork. The nails are to be 
 sold by Mr. Bacon, and the accounts to be kept by him ; and he is 
 to direct at all times what nails are to be made. 'The toll of the mill 
 is to be put away in the two garners made, which are to liave 
 secure locks, and Mr. Bacon is to keep the keys. When they are get- 
 ting too full, the wagons should carry the grain to the overseer's house, 
 to be carefidly stowed away. In general, it will be better to use all 
 the bread-corn from the mill from week to week, and only bring away 
 the surplus. Mr. Bandolph is hopper-free and toll-free at the mill. 
 Mr. Eppes, having leased his plantation and gang, they are to pay 
 toll hereafter. Clothes for the people are to be got from Mr. Higgin- 
 botham, of the kind heretofore got. I allow them a best striped 
 blanket every three years. This j^ear eleven blankets must be bought, 
 and given to those most in need, noting to whom they are given. The 
 hirelings, if they had not blankets last year, must have them this 
 year. Mrs. Randolph always chooses the clothing for the house-ser- 
 vants ; that is to saj', for Peter Henings, Burwell, Edwin, Critta, 
 and Sally. Colored plaids are provided for Betty Brown, Betty 
 Henlugs, Kance, Ursula, and indeed all the others. The nailers, 
 laborers, and hirelings may have it, if they prefer it to cotton. 
 Wool is given for stockings to those who will have it spun and knit 
 
THE FIRST EEPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION^ 603 
 
 for themselves. Fish is always to be got from Kichmond, and to be 
 dealt out to ,the hirelings, laborers, workmen, and house-servants of 
 all sorts, as has been usual. Six hundred pounds of pork is to be 
 provided for the overseer, five hundred pounds for Mr. Stewart, and 
 five hundred pounds for the superintendent of the nailery, if one is 
 employed ; also about nine hundred pounds more for the people, so 
 as to give them half a pound apiece once a week. This will require, 
 in the whole, two thousand or two thousand five hundred pounds. 
 After seeing what the plantation can furnish, and the three 
 hogs at the mill, the residue must be purchased. In the winter 
 a hogshead of molasses must be provided and brought up, which 
 Mr. Jefferson (merchant at Kichmond) will furnish. This will afibrd 
 to give a gill apiece to everybody once or twice a week." 
 
 No interest of his plantation was too trifling to escape his atten- 
 tion. He did not disdain to remind Mr. Bacon that " the old gar- 
 den pales " w^anted patching up, nor omit to designate the two men 
 nvost fit for the job. When all else had been provided for, he adds . 
 by way of postscript, that, as "these rains have possibly spoiled the 
 fodder you had agreed for, you had better see it, and, if injured, 
 look out in time for more." And yet another word : If Mr. Bacon 
 would prefer to "take his half beef ?iow," he might kill an animal 
 for the purpose, and send the other half to the house or to Mr. 
 Handolph's. 
 
 A man does not govern a commonwealth the worse for having 
 been trained in a homely school like tliis. Such training, of course, 
 would not be sufficient ; but, even of itself, it would bring an intel- 
 ligent mind nearer the secret of genuine statesmanship than Bona-, 
 parte's military school or Pitt's parliamentary arena. 
 
 Early in May the members of the administration were in Wash- 
 ington, and Mr. Jefferson addressed himself to the task which his 
 countrymen had assigned him. 
 
CHAPTER LXII. 
 
 JEFFERSON PRESIDENT. 
 
 One thing only is indisputable with regard to the administration 
 of Thomas Jefferson, from 1801 to 1809 : it satisfied the people of the 
 United States. The proof of this is not merely that he was re- 
 elected by a vastly increased majority; nor. that the Federalists, 
 once so powerful and so confident, were reduced in the House to 
 twenty-seven, and in the Senate to one less than half a dozen ; nor 
 that the legislatures of Vermont, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Mary- 
 land, and Georgia, the Senate of New York, and the House of Dele- 
 gates of Virginia, requested him to stand for a third term ; nor that, 
 at last, fourteen States out of seventeen were ranged in the Republi- 
 can line, and Jefferson himself thought the ojDposition was getting 
 too weak for the country's good. These were remarkable facts, but 
 they were only a part of his triumph. At the end of eight years, 
 without an effort of his own, without so much as the expression of a 
 preference, he handed over the govei'nment to the man of all others 
 in the woi'ld whom he would have chosen for a successor; and that 
 man, at the end of his eight years, passed it on to another of Jeffer- 
 son's disciples and allies, under whom opposition died, only to live 
 again when Federalism started into a semblance of life in the mes- 
 sages of John Quincy Adams. Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe 
 were three men and one system. The era of good feeling in Mon- 
 roe's time, which would have come in Madison's but for the war of 
 1812, was the completion of Jefferson's success. It is this twenty- 
 four years of public content that renders an inquiry into the conduct 
 of President Jefferson interesting. 
 
 For, as all readers know, there are two ways of explaining it. To 
 republicans, indeed, it requires no explanation. It is of the essence 
 of their faith, that there is nothing occult or mysterious in the art^ 
 
 601 
 
JEFFEKSON PRESIDENT. 605 
 
 of government, but that it consists in doing right. Their simple 
 conviction is, — and they desire the Coming Party to ponder well 
 the truth, — that the old Democratic party ruled the United States 
 for sixty years for no other reason than that, on every leading issue 
 except one, — the extension of slaver}', the rock on which it struck 
 and went to pieces, — the ohl Democratic party was right. The 
 other theory is, that Mr. Jefferson and his successors were wonder- 
 fully skilful and perfectly unscrupulous in flattering what the polite 
 Federalists used to style the Mob. Readers remember, perhaps, 
 Tom Moore's verses on this subject, written soon after his visit to 
 Washington, in which, putting into rhyme the gossip and sniff of 
 Federalist drawing-rooms, he spoke of President Jefferson as 
 
 "That iiifflorions soul, 
 Which creeps and winds beneath a mob's control, 
 Which courts the rabble's smile, the rabl)le's nod, 
 And makes, like Egypt, every beast its god." 
 
 This was the Federalists' opinion better expressed; and they used 
 to point to Aaron Burr's skill in political management as a proof of 
 its correctness. Aaron Burr, however, was too knowing a politician 
 ever to waste time upon the dozen loafers in each ward of New 
 York who alone could then be justly called rabble ; and his skill, 
 such as it was, did not prevent his own downfall and hopeless ruin. 
 America had no rabble. America has no rabble. Except in a few 
 large cities, there is no considerable class that even bears any out- 
 ward resemblance to a rabble ; and never has that class been impor- 
 tant in a general election. The voters that kept the Tweeds in 
 power were, for the most part, well-meaning, industrious men, whom 
 a Tweed could reach through their prejudices, their vanity, and 
 their interest, but who could not be reached by honest men because 
 education had oj)ened no road to their minds accessible to disinter- 
 ested intelligence. But let me recall the leading traits of Mr. Jef- 
 ferson's administration, with a view to getting light upon the ques- 
 tion, wdiether he satisfied the people of his time by doing right, or 
 by adroitly pretending to do right. 
 
 He was faithful to the party that elected him. 
 
 As soon as his election was known, some of his friends urged him 
 to conciliate the Federalists by appointing a few of their leaders to 
 office. His answer was, IN o : the mass of the party, being Eepubli- 
 
606 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 can at heart, will be conciliated by a consistent adherence to Eepnb- 
 licau principles; and, as to the chiefs, they cannot be conciliated! 
 Besides, every office in the country in the gift of the president was 
 already filled by a Federalist; for that party, said he, had at an 
 early period adopted the principle of "excluding from office every 
 shade of opinion that was not theirs ; " and he thought it onl3^ right 
 that all vacancies should be given to Republicans, until there should 
 be at least as many of them in office as Federalists. He meant, as 
 he said early in his first term, to "sink Federalism into an abyss 
 from which there should be no resurrection for it." He accom- 
 plished this purpose; and his clear adherence both to the men and 
 principles of his own party was among the means which he employed. 
 
 But he would not appoint men to office merely because they were, 
 con.spicuous partisans. 
 
 The notorious Callender was a case in point. He was a scurrilous, 
 fertile, forcible writer of the day, who had been px-osecuted under 
 the Sedition Law, and so made a dirty martyr of. Republicans had 
 been compelled to give him aid and comfort in his distress, because 
 he was the victim of a law they abhorred. Upon the triumph of 
 the Republican party, he came to Jefferson, asking as a reward for 
 party services the Richmond post-office, worth fifteen hundred dol- 
 lars a year. Jefferson relieved his necessities with money, but 
 refused him' the place, simply because he was unfit for it, and thus 
 gained one of the most implacable and indecent vituperators a pub- 
 lic servant ever had. George Rogers Clarke, too, a hero whom he 
 revered, he often longed to employ, as the most skilful manager of 
 all Indian affairs the country possessed. But he did not. The 
 reason was, Whiskey. He gave General Clarke's brother a commis- 
 sion and an appointment; but not the man who had aided to give 
 his country . libert}'^, only to become himself a slave. Nor did 
 Thomas Paine realize his joke of shocking the bishops and old ladies 
 of the English court bj'^ going as secretary of legation to London. 
 Jefferson gave him a safe passage home in a man-of-war, received 
 him with honor at the White House, with cordiality at Monticello, 
 and exchanged philosophic news with him; but did not send him 
 to do what he could not do, — represent a clean, sober, orderly peo- 
 ple in a foreign land. And when it became apparent that Chancel- 
 lor Livingston's growing deafness rendered him an inefficient 
 minister at the court of Napoleon, Jefferson risked losing the sup- 
 
JEFFEESON PRESIDENT. . 607 
 
 port of the State of Xew York, first, bj sending Monroe to help 
 him, and afterwards b}^ recalling him. But the most remarlcable 
 case was that of John Randolph, the sharp-tongued leader of the 
 Republican party in the House of Representatives. He was^ sug- 
 gested by a friend for the English mission. Mr. Jeiferson was silent. 
 Mr. Madison also waived the subject. Then the friend pressed his 
 claims, and other members of the House added solicitations. The 
 president withheld the appointment. John Randolph went into 
 opposition, in which his single small talent shone like a thin, keen 
 rapier in the sun. The only objection to his appointment was, that 
 he was ludicrously unfit for a post requiring patience, prudence, 
 self-control, industry, and address. 
 
 Jefferson took great care to get the right man for the right place. 
 
 In fact, a ruler of men, whether he is a private or a public person, 
 has but two duties to perform, — to select the right assistants, and 
 to treat them so as to get out of them the best service they have in 
 them. That is the whole art of governing, and Jefferson knew it. 
 "There is nothing," he wrote to a friend in May, 1801, ''I am so 
 anxious about as making the best possible appointments." But 
 how difficult the task in a country so extensive as the United States, 
 where personal knowledge is impossible ! His chief reliance seems 
 to have been upon the unsolicited recommendation of men in whom 
 he had confidence. Thus, he wrote to ISTathaniel Macon of North 
 Carolina very early in his first year: "In all cases when an office 
 becomes vacant in your State, I shall be much obliged to you to 
 recommend the best characters." Jefferson was curiously happy in 
 his appointments; and the reason was, that he never slighted this 
 chief duty, and was, from the first, on his guard against the recom- 
 mendations of thoughtless, unprincipled good-nature. He would 
 have made more successes of this kind even than he did, but for the 
 inadequate compensation attached to the most important posts ; 
 which limits a president's choice to a few individuals exceptionally 
 circumstanced. Many of his letters offering appointments show 
 how much he lamented his inability to offer "due remuneration." 
 
 He would not give an appointment to a relative. 
 
 At the first view, this seems unjust to the honorable and capable 
 families who were related to the president. It has the air of court- 
 ing cheap and easy popularitj', and it is open to the objection of 
 pitching the note too high for the limited range of human nature. 
 
608 UFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 But his convictions on the point were clear and strong; and Profes- 
 sor Tucker records that he acted on this principle throughout life in 
 the administration of trusts. Thus, as rector of the University of 
 Virginia, he opposed the appointment of a nephew to a professor- 
 ship, though he was well qualified for the place; dreading lest it 
 should open a door to the system which has made universities and 
 church endowments in other lands mere appendages to the estates 
 of governing families. He was nobly seconded in his resolution by 
 bis own kindred. Imagine his delight on receiving from one of 
 them, George Jefferson, a few days after his inauguration, a letter 
 spontaneously declining to be a candidate for a Federal office to 
 which his neighbors and friends desired to recommend him. ''The 
 public," wrote the president, "will never be made to believe that an 
 appointment of a relative is made on the ground of merit alone, 
 uninfluenced by family views ; nor can they ever see with approba- 
 tion ofl&ces, the disposal of which they intrust to their presidents for 
 public purposes, divided out as family property." He owned that 
 the rule bore hardly upon a president's relations ; but the public 
 good, he thought, required the sacrifice, for which their share in the 
 public esteem might be considered some compensation. "I could 
 not be satisfied," said he, " until I assured j-ou of the increased 
 esteem with which this transaction fills me for you." 
 
 His two sons-in-law did not suffer from the rule, since their neigh- 
 bors kept them both in the House of Representatives. Here, again, 
 the president showed his nice regard for the mental integrity of 
 others. In his intercourse with these gentlemen, it was a thing 
 understood between them, that measures pending in their House 
 were not to be a topic of conversation ; and if, by chance, conversa- 
 tion took that turn, "I carefully avoid," says Jefferson, "expressing 
 an opinion on them in their presence, that we may all be at our 
 ease." The rule, happily, did not exclude friends; and he thus had 
 the pleasure of appointing to the place of commissioner of loans at 
 E-ichmond the beloved comrade of his youth, John Page. 
 
 But he would not exempt friends from the operation of a good 
 rule. 
 
 It was an old opinion of his, which now became a rule of his 
 administration, that a foreign minister should not remain abroad 
 more than seven or eight years. He drew this opinion from his own 
 experience. " When I returned from France," he once explained, 
 
JEFFEESON PRESIDENT. 609 
 
 "after an absence of six or seven years, I was astonished at the 
 change which I founrl had taken place in the United States in that 
 time. No more like the same people : their notions, their habits 
 and manners, the course of their commerce, so totally changed, that 
 I, who stood in those of 1784, found myself not at all qnalified to 
 speak of their sentiments, or forward their views, in 1790." Hence 
 the rule. But it excluded from the public service two of liis oldest 
 friends, David Humphreys and William Short, both of whom had 
 served under him as secretary of legation before attiiining the rank 
 of plenipotentiary which they then held. Humphreys had been 
 absent from home eleven years, and Short seventeen years. One of 
 Jefferson's first acts was to recall Humphrej^s; which he soon fol- 
 lowed by declining to transfer Short to Paris, where he felt the need 
 of just such a tried and vigilant minister. "Your appointment," he 
 wrote to Mr. Short, " was impossible a/ter an absence of seventeen 
 years. Under any other circumstances, I should never fail to give 
 to 3'ourself and the world proofs of my friendship for you and of my 
 confidence in j'ou." 
 
 He turned no man out of office because he was opposed to him in 
 politics. 
 
 And yet he did, during the first two years of his first terra, 
 remove twenty-six Federalists, and appoint Kepublicans in their 
 stead. After that, there were scarcely any removals ; and Republi- 
 cans were only appointed to vacancies created by death or resigna- 
 tion. And now with regard to those twenty-six. The result of the 
 presidential election of 1800 was known in Washington on the 12th 
 of December, a little less than three months before the end of Mr. 
 Adams's term. During that interval some valuable life-offices fell 
 vacant, twenty-four judgeships were created, and several places held 
 during the president's pleasure were vacated. Mr. Adams hastened 
 to fill these offices, from that of chief justice of the Supreme Court 
 to postmaster, leaving not one of them to his successor. Such was 
 the primitive condition of the political mind in 1801, that Republi- 
 cans regarded tliis conduct as the last degree of indecenc}^, and 
 Jefferson shared the feeling. Indeed, for so placid and placable a 
 gentleman, he was highly indignant; and two or three years passed 
 before he could "heartily forgive" his old friend Adams for yielding, 
 in so unworthy a manner, to the "pressure" of his partisans. He 
 resolved not to regard those appointments; which, he said, Mr. 
 
 89 
 
610 LIFE OF TH0]V1AS JEFFEESON. 
 
 Adams knew lie was not making for liimself, but for a successor. 
 "Tin's outrage on decency," he wrote to his okl colleague, General 
 Knox, who had written to congratulate him on his election, "should 
 not have its effect except in the life-appointments, which are irremo- 
 vable ; but, as to the others, I consider the nominations as nullities, 
 and will not view the persons appointed as even candidates for their 
 office, much less as possessing it by any title meriting respect." 
 These offices were sixteen in number. Their incumbents v»ere all 
 removed during the first year, and Kepublicans appointed to fill 
 them. The other ten removals, most of which occurred in the 
 second year, were for three causes: 1, Official misconduct; 2, "Ac- 
 tive and bitter opposition " (to use the president's own words) "to 
 the order of things which the public will has established." There 
 was a third reason for removal, which the president thus explained: 
 "The courts being so decidedly Federal and irremovable, it is 
 believed that Republican attornej's and marshals, being the doors of 
 entrance into the courts, are indispensably necessary as a shield to 
 the Republican part of our fellow-citizens, which, I believe, is the 
 main body of the people." Accordingly, although the expiration 
 of the Alien and Sedition Laws rendered the Federal courts less 
 dangerous to freedom than they had been, four or five of these 
 officials were removed. 
 
 Tlie outcry caused by this moderate exercise of the president's 
 power cannot be imagined by readers of the present day. Jefferson, 
 indeed, stood between two fires, — the Federalists shrieking with 
 most vigorous unanimity as each head dropped into the basket; and 
 the Republican host muttering remonstrance that the decapitating 
 instrument worked so slowly. The denunciation of the Federalists 
 he could not avoid ; but he showed much tact in reconciling his own 
 partisans to this moderate course. To mere partisans, he would show 
 how much better it was to have an able Federalist passive and 
 acquiescent in office, and all hia circle of friends quiet for his sake, 
 than, by turning him out of office, to convert him and his family 
 into vigilant, imbittered opponents. To men, who, like himself, 
 desired to see the whole body of citizens restored to good humor, his 
 appeal was to their sense of the just and the becoming. The Tam- 
 many Society of Baltimore deputed a 3'oung member, who was going 
 t6 Monticello, to make known to the president the discontent of the 
 society al seeing so many Federalists still in office. The following 
 conversation is reported by the deputy : — 
 
' JEFFERSON PRESIDENT. 611 
 
 President. I should be very glad to gratify my friends in Balti- 
 more by turning the Federalists out of ofSce, and filling their places 
 with men of my own part3^ But there is an obstacle in the way 
 wliich I cannot remove, — a question which I have not been able to 
 solve. Perhaps you can do this for me. 
 
 Young Tammany. I despair of solving any problem that puzzles 
 Mr. Jefterson, but I desire to hear what it is. 
 
 President. Well, sir, we are Republicans, and we are contending 
 for the extension of the right of suffrage. Is it not so ? 
 
 Young Tammant. Yes, sir. 
 
 President (who had not read his Plato for nothing). We would 
 not, therefore, put any restraint upon the right of suffrage as it 
 already exists ? 
 
 Young Tammany (unwarned by the fate of those who sought 
 wisdom from Socrates). By no means, sir. 
 
 President. Tell me, then, what is the diiference between deny- 
 ing the right of suffrage, and punishing a man for exercising it by 
 turning him out of office ? 
 
 The deputy could not answer this question. "I had to leave him 
 where I found him," he used to say in telling the stor3\ The presi- 
 dent held firmly to his course, xinmoved by the execrations of 
 Federalists and the remonstrances of Republicans. At a moment 
 in his second year, when the opposition was vituperative beyond all 
 previous experience, he wrote to a member of his cabinet : " I still 
 think our original idea as to office is best ; that is, to depend for the 
 obtaining a just participation on deaths, resignations, and delin- 
 quencies. This will least effect the tranquillity of the people, and 
 prevent their giving in to the suggestion of our enemies, that ours 
 has been a contest for office, not for principle." I wish he could 
 have gone one step farther, and admitted the right of every office- 
 holder to pass his leisure hours exactly as he chose. I wish he had 
 not added: "To these means of obtaining a just share in the trans- 
 action of the public business shall be added one other, to wit, • 
 removal for electioneering activity, or open and industrious opposi- 
 tion to the principles of the present government, legislative and 
 executive. Every officer of the government may vote at elections 
 according to his conscience ; but we should betray the cause com- 
 mitted to our care were we to permit the influence of official patron- 
 
612 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOJST. 
 
 age to be used to overthrow that cause." We must always heware 
 of demanding too mucli of liaman nature. But I luish he could 
 have said, "Rail on, Federalist postmasters and Hamiltonian col- 
 lectors ! Mount the stump ! Berate the administration ! You are 
 not my servants, nor the administration's servants, but the servants 
 of the people. It is only my concern to see that 3'ou do faithfully 
 the duty of your places. After office-hoiu"s, 3'ou differ in no respect 
 from citizens engaged in the ordinary pursuits of private life." It 
 is easy to be wise for other people; nor have we a victorious party 
 at our back to make wisdom difficult ; and who could have foreseen 
 such an abuse of the precedent as infuriate Jackson made in 1829? 
 No man. 
 
 Jefferson reduced the patronage of the government to the mini- 
 mum. 
 
 The strongest organization on earth is, as we all know, the Boman 
 Catholic Church. Viewed merely as an organization, it has but one 
 defect, — there is no provision in itself for limiting its expansion, 
 and preventing its becoming an insupportable burden. And this 
 grievous fault belongs to all the ancient governments, whether eccle- 
 siastical or secular. When Louis XIV. passed a few weeks at 
 Versailles, accommodation had to be provided in the palace for three 
 thousand persons ; audi have myself jjossessed an octavo volume 
 of four hundred pages which was filled with the mere catalogue of 
 the servants of George III., stating only their titles, duties, and 
 salaries. Burke's Reform Bill abolished six hundred court offices, 
 without making a gap in the mighty host large enough to attract 
 the notice of a disinterested public. Nobody appears to have missed 
 any of them. This tendency of governments to become excessive 
 is so strong, constant, and insidious, that no head of a government 
 will ever resist it unless the ambition that controls him is something 
 nobler than personal. Jefferson was one of those who gave this best 
 proof of a disinterested love of right j^riuciples. Every office in 
 his control that was not necessary was suppressed ; and the whole 
 apparatus of government — military, naval, judicial, executive — was 
 reduced in quantity. We might sum up his policy in this particular 
 in a sentence : The men you do employ, pay adequately ; make it 
 worth the ablest men's while to serve the government, but employ 
 no two men to do one man's work. 
 
 Thus, while no branch of the public service was increased in cost 
 
JEFFERSOK PRESIDENT. 613 
 
 or in importance, most departments were diminished. Mr. Gallatin 
 co-operated heartily with the president in reducing the extensive 
 corps of ofificials which Colonel Hamilton had created. In 1802 
 the office of commissioner of internal revenue and that of super- 
 intendent of stamps were suppressed ; which only whetted the 
 president's appetite for further reductions. " It remains," he wrote 
 to Gallatin, " to amalgamate the comptroller and auditor into one, and 
 reduce the register to a clerk of accounts ; and then the organization 
 will consist, as it should at first, of a keeper of money, a keeper of 
 accounts, and the head of the department." Details do not concern 
 us now: it is the spirit of the administration which I desire to 
 exhibit. "Let us deserve well of our country," he concluded, "by 
 making her interests the end of all our plans, and not our pomp, 
 patronage, and irresponsibility." It is this disinterested spirit, 
 which shines from all the documents, the correspondence, the hasty 
 notes, of the president and his cabinet, that renders the administra- 
 tion of Jefferson so remarkable. Bitter John Randolph conceded 
 this merit to Jefferson. "I have never seen," said he in 1828, "but 
 one administration, which, seriouslj' and in good faith, was disposed 
 to give up its patronage, and was willing to go farther than Con- 
 gress, or even the people themselves, so far as Congress represents 
 their feelings, desired ; and that was the first administration of 
 Thomas Jefferson. He, sir, was the only man I knew, or ever heard 
 of, who reallj'', truly, and honestly, not only said, Nolo ejjiscojyari, 
 but actually refused the mitre." 
 
 He endeavored to simplify the apparatus and the operations of 
 government, so that the rural member of Congress and his constitu- 
 ents might understand them. 
 
 His heart was much set on this, particularly in the finances, 
 which, he thought, Hamilton had purposely complicated. What we 
 can now all see was merely a defect of Hamilton's mind (or the 
 inevitable failure of a third-rate man in a first-rate place), Jefferson, 
 stung by his calumnious vituperation, and alarmed at the pernicious 
 tendency* of his influence, regarded as intentional mystification. 
 He thought, that Hamilton began by puzzling the president and 
 Congress, and ended by getting the finances into such a snarl that 
 he could not "unravel" them himself. Thus he explained his 
 meaning to Mr. Gallatin : "Hamilton gave to the debt, in the first 
 instance, ir funding it, the most artificial and mysterious form he 
 
614 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOIfr. 
 
 could devise. He then moulded up his appropriations of a number 
 of scraps and fragments, many of wliich were nothing at all, and 
 applied them to different objects in reversion and remainder, until 
 the whole system was involved in an impeneti-able fog; and, while he 
 was giving himself the airs of providing for the payment of the 
 debt, he left himself free to add to it continually, as he did, in fact, 
 instead of paying it." Jefferson's idea was to let the money re- 
 ceived into the treasury form one mass, from which all pnj'ments 
 should be made, only giving precedence to such claims as involved 
 the honor of the nation : that is, reserve, first, the interest of the 
 public debt; next, any portion of the principal of the debt due 
 within the year ; then pay the expenses of the year; and finally, if 
 there is any money left, discharge part of the debt payable at 
 pleasure. This was his idea, which he desired the secretary to 
 "approach by every tack which previous arrangements force upon 
 us ; " until the finances should be " as clear and intelligible as a 
 merchant's books ; so that every member of Congress, and every man 
 of any mind in the Union, should be able to comprehend them, to 
 investigate abuses, and consequently to control them." 
 
 He abolished court etiquette, and every usage that resembled it. 
 
 Any one who passed an hour at the head-quarters of a command- 
 ing general during the late war had an opportunity of discovering 
 that court etiquette originated in necessity. So many people desire 
 access to the officer in command of a large force in active service, 
 that unless he is hedged about by rules, usages, sentinels, aides-de- . 
 camp, he would, not merely be useless as an officer, but he would 
 soon be destroyed. Kingship began in generalship. The king was 
 once the ablest man in defending his people, who were alwaj^s men- 
 aced by other barbarians. The first time an ancient border chief 
 told one of his tribe to answer questions for him while he devoured 
 his dinner, or persuaded two or three to stand guard over him with 
 their clubs while he caught an hour's sleep between two fights, court 
 etiquette began. It was the invention of "Divine Right," that 
 exaggerated the necessary regulations of a camp into a f^'stera of 
 adulation and semi-worship. How absurd, how oppressive, how 
 impious, how ridiculous, it had become in the last century, we can 
 still partly see by the relics of it that remain. We know how it 
 "riled" the generous mind of Thackeray (who was no democrat) to 
 see Prince Albert attended in shooting by a gentleman-equerry to 
 
JEFFERSON PRESIDENT. 615 
 
 hand the prince his gun, when it had been loaded by a servant, and 
 give it back to the servant after it had been discharged. This trifle 
 represents the system which was founded on the assumption that 
 the king, and the class whoin the king honored, were of an essence 
 or blood superior to others, as the Brahmin is supposed to be 
 innately and eternally superior to the pariah. It all grew out of the 
 theory, that the king is the divinely designated master. Jefferson 
 regarded himself as the chosen servant of the people of his country, 
 entitled, if he was faithful to his trust, to the honor due from 
 all the worthy to all the worthy, and to no more. His person, his 
 time, his house, could justly claim the protection which is the right 
 and necessity of all men engaged in affairs numerous and important, 
 and no more. 
 
 Accordingly the weekly levee was at once abolished. On two 
 days in the j-ear, the 4th of July and the 1st of January, when 
 houses and hearts are usually open in the United States, he opened 
 his to all who chose to visit him. On other days he was accessible 
 to visitors on the terms and conditions which his duties imposed : 
 all were welcome who had claims upon his attention or regard, 
 except so far as the superior claim of the whole people restricted him. 
 Some of the Federalists in WaslTington, we are told, hit upon an 
 expedient to balk the president's intention of abolishing the levee. 
 On the usual day, at the usual hour, — two in the afternoon, — 
 ladies and gentlemen began to arrive at the president's house, 
 attired in the manner customarj- at the levees. Tbe president was 
 not at home. He was enjoying his regular two hours' ride on 
 horseback, which nothing but absolute necessity could make him 
 forego. When he returned at three o'clock, and learned that the 
 great rooms were filled with company waiting to see him, he guessed 
 their object, and frustrated it gracefully, and with perfect good- 
 humor, by merely going among them, all accoutred as he was, 
 booted, s^mrred, splashed with mud, riding-whip in hand, and 
 greeting them as though the conjunction of so many guests were 
 merely .a joyous coincidence. They, in their turn, caught the spirit 
 of the joke, and the aflair ended happily. But it was the last of 
 the levees. 
 
 In the great matter of dinners, he adopted, or rather he continued, 
 the style of Old Virginia, wliich proved to be to him a grievous, if 
 not a ruinous burden, as it had been to many a wealthier planter. 
 
616 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 The Virginia style was simply : Come one, comti all, come again, 
 keep coming, and bring your friends. In President Washington's 
 time, the business of entertaining members of Congress, officers of the 
 government, and distinguished strangers, had been assumed by the 
 four members of the cabinet; and it became so oppressive, Jefferson 
 tells us, that "it was among the motives for their retirement." 
 Their successors, he adds, profited by the experiment, and lived 
 altogether as private individuals, leaving to the president the whole 
 burden of that representative hospitality supposed then to be incum- 
 bent upon the head of a government. In Washington, too, the 
 president was then the only man who had a house large enough for 
 the entertainment of a dozen people at dinner, or fifty persons in 
 the evening; and lieuce there could be little social life in the place, 
 unless the president kept open house. Shut out from all tlie world, 
 ill-lodged and ill-attended, the circle of officials, the foreign legations, 
 and members of Congress, could only meet in an agreeable manner at 
 the president's mansion. To the last year of Jefferson's second term, 
 Washington was still only a spoiled wilderness. Francis Jackson, 
 the English plenipotentiary, described it, in 1809, as more resem- 
 bling Hampstead Heath than anv place he had ever seen ; consisting 
 of scattered houses, intersected \^th heath, forest, and gravel-pits. 
 He declares .that he started a covey of partridges " about three 
 hundred yards from the House of Congress." In such circum- 
 stances, what could a hospitable Virginian do but convert his 
 residence into a general rendezvous and free club ? 
 
 All would have gone well but for the dinners, to which the salary 
 was fatally inadequate. We get an insiglit into the way of life at 
 the White House from the recollections of Edmund Bacon of Ken- 
 tucky (Jefferson at Monticello, p. 113), who was, for twenty years, 
 Mr. Jefferson's manager. He visited ^Vashington several times, and 
 always lived at the White House during his stay, dining daily at the 
 president's table. There were eleven servants in the house from 
 Monticello, he tells us, besides a French cook, a French steward, and 
 an Irish coachman. " When I was there," Mr. Bacon reports, " the 
 president's house was surrounded by a high rock wall, and there was 
 an iron gate immediately in front of it, and from that gate to the 
 Capitol the street was just as straight as a gun-barrel. Nearly all 
 the houses were on that street." This is Mr. Bacon's recollection 
 of the dinners : — 
 
JEFFERSON PRESIDENT. • 617 
 
 *'Mr. Jefferson often told me that the office of vice-pi-esident was 
 far preferable to that of president. He was perfectly tired out with 
 company. He had a very long dining-room, and his table was chock- 
 full every one of the sixteen days I was there. There were Con- 
 gressmen, foreigners, and all sorts of people, to dine with him. He 
 dined at four o'clock, and they generally sat and talked until night. 
 It used to worry me to sit so long; and I finally quit when I got 
 through eating, and went off and left them. The first thing in the 
 morning there was to go to market. Mr. Jefferson's steward was a 
 very smart man, well educated, and as much of a gentleman in his 
 appearance as any man. His carriage-driver would get out the 
 wagon early in the morning, and Lamar would go with him to 
 Georgetown to market. I have all mj' life been in tlie habit of get- 
 ting up about four o'clock in tlie morning, and I went with them 
 very often. Lamar told me that it often took fifty dollars to pay for 
 what marketing they would use in a day." 
 
 At these dinners, which so wearied the soul of Mr. Bacon, there 
 was no etiquette except that which would have been observed at the 
 table of any private person of the time. Mr. Jefferson, however, as 
 his friend Professor Tucker, reports, was well aware of the sensi- 
 tiveness of self-love, and was most careful never to wound it. At 
 his more public dinners, if he found that he could not recall the 
 name of a member of Congress who was present, he would give a 
 sign to his secretary to go into the next room, where the president 
 would join him to get the information desired. 
 
 Tlie sjrstem of precedence was abolished. 
 
 This was settled at a cabinet meeting early in the first term, whtin 
 the whole barbarous code of precedence was swept awaj". These 
 Eules were substituted : 1. Kesidents to pay the first visit to stran- 
 gers ; and among strangers, whether native or foreign, first comers call 
 first upon later comers. To this rule tliere was allowed one exception : 
 '•'Foreign ministers, from the necessity of making themselves known, 
 pay the first visit to the secretary of state, which is returned." 
 2. "When brought together in society, all are perfectly equal, 
 whether foreign or domestic, titled or untitled, in or out of office." 
 The president amplified these rules thus : " The families of foreign, 
 ministers, arriving at the seat of government, receive the first visit 
 from those of the national ministers, as from all other residents. 
 
618 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESO]Sr. 
 
 Members of the legislature and of the judiciary, independent of 
 their offices, have a riglit as strangers to receive the first visit. No 
 title being admitted here, those of foreigners give no precedence. 
 Difference of grade among the diplomatic members gives no prece- 
 dence. At public ceremonies to which the government invites the 
 presence of foreign ministers and their families, a convenient seat 'or 
 station will be provided for them, with any other strangers invited, 
 and the families of the national ministers, each talcing place as they 
 arrive, and without any precedence. To maintain the principle of 
 equality, or of pele mele, and prevent the growth of precedence out 
 of courtesy, the members of the executive will practise at their own 
 houses, and recommend an adherence to, the ancient usages of the 
 country, of gentlemen in mass giving precedence to the ladies in 
 mass, in passing from one apartment where they are assembled into 
 another." 
 
 All this, with the friendly, humane usages that grew out of it, or 
 were akin to it, agreeable as it was to most persons, shocked some 
 ladies, and offended all men who owed their importance solely to 
 rank or office. Mr. Jackson, English minister in 1809, being a 
 gentleman of sense and good-humor, was amused and pleased, dur- 
 his first conference with President Madison (which proved to be very 
 long), when a " negro servant brought in some glasses of punch and 
 a seed-cake," just as might have been done in a farm-house of the 
 day; but his wife lamented that her husband, after having been 
 accustomed "to treat with the civilized governments of Europe," 
 should liave to negotiate with the "savage democrats" of America. 
 It so chanced that the British minister from 1803 to 1809, with 
 whom Jefferson had most to do, Merry by name but not bj^ nature, 
 was a fanatic of etiquette ; and it appears, that, previous to his pres- 
 entation to the president, he had not heard of the business-like manner 
 in which the affairs of the White House were conducted. He was 
 stunned at the manner of his reception. It- made an impression 
 upon his mind which neither explanation nor the lapse of years could 
 even soften, much less obliterate. And, really, when we consider 
 that he had passed his life at courts where the nod, the smile, the 
 frown, the glance, the tone, the silence, the presence, the absence, 
 of the head of the government, were matters of importance, to be 
 noted, recorded, transmitted, and weighed, we ought not to laugh at 
 this Mr. Merry as we do. Besides, as Mr. Jefferson remarks, "Poor 
 
JEFFEESON PKESIDENT. G19 
 
 Merry had learned nothing of diplomacy but its suspicions, without 
 head enough to distinguish when they were misplaced." Nevertlieless, 
 he comes down to us borne on a billow of laughter, and he remains to 
 this day one of the stock-jests of Washington. Thus he recounted 
 his woes, three years after the event, to Mr. Josiah Quincy of Massa- 
 chusetts, the ablest Federalist in Congress and one of the 
 worthiest : — 
 
 "I called on Mr. Madison, who accompanied me officially to intro- 
 duce me to the president. We went together to the mansion-house* 
 I being in full official costume, as the etiquette of my place required 
 on such a formal introduction of a minister from Great Britain to the 
 president of the United States. On arriving at the hall of audi- 
 ence, we found it empty ; at which Mr. Madison seemed surprised, 
 and proceeded to an entry leading to the president's study. I fol- 
 lowed him, supposing the introduction was to take place in the ad- 
 joining room. At this moment Mr. Jefferson entered the entry at 
 the other end, and all three of us were packed in this narrow space, 
 from which, to make room, I was obliged to back out. In this awk- 
 ward position my introduction to the president was made by Mr. 
 Madison. Mr. Jefferson's appearance soon explained to me that the 
 general circumstances of my reception had not been accidental, but 
 studied. I, in my official costume, found myself at the hour of 
 reception he had himself appointed, introduced to a man as president 
 of the United States, not merely in an undress, but actually 
 STANDING IN SLIPPERS DOWN AT THE HEELS, and both pautaloons, 
 coat, and under-clothes indicative of utter slovenliness and indiffer- 
 ence to appearances, and in a state of negligence actually studied. I 
 could not doubt that the whole scene was prepared and intended as 
 an insult, not to me personally, but to the sovereign I represented." 
 
 It is just possible that Mr. Jefferson thought, that morning, of 
 the time when Gouverneur Morris kicked his heels four months in 
 London waiting for the promised answer of the British government 
 to as reasonable and urgent a communication from President Wash- 
 ington as one government ever made to another, and then had to 
 leave England without getting it. Possibly, also, it did happen to 
 occur to his memory, that Mr. Adams had been kept vainly waiting 
 three years in England for a reply to the same proposals. Perhaps, 
 too, he remembered the period when he was himself presented to 
 
620 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 the king of England by Mr. Adams, and the king froze to them 
 both; an example which was followed by the "king's friends," and 
 society generally, so that it required courage for a courtier to show 
 them any thing more than cold civility at an evening party. And 
 this, while they were only asking the king to stay the bloody 
 ravages of the Indians by giving up the seven posts within the 
 boundaries of their country. He may, too, have thought of the 
 time when he, as secretary of state, would send an important com- 
 munication to the British minister at Philadelphia, and wait many 
 months for an answer; but if he failed to answer a letter within 
 three or four days, he would be "goaded" by a second. Perhaps 
 he thought the time had come to show the Federalists that he did 
 not accept Great Britain at her own valuation, and did not believe 
 she was fighting the battle of man and liberty against Bonaparte. 
 It may be, too, that he, knowing the childish politics of Europe, and 
 what ridiculous importance was attached there to trifles, may have 
 paused before ringing for a pair of shoes not down at the heels, and 
 wondered if his old slippers, duly reported to Bonaparte, miglit not 
 drive another nail into the bargain for Louisiana, just concluded 
 by Mr. Livingston and Mr. Monroe, to the great joy of president 
 and people. All these thoughts niaij have flitted through the presi- 
 dent's mind, and held back his hand from the bell-rope ; but, in all 
 probability, he had no thoughts of the kind, and only wore the 
 clothes he usually did while at work. 
 
 A few weeks after arrived in Washington the young Irish poet, 
 Thomas Moore, who had crossed the Atlantic in the same ship with 
 Mr. and INIrs. Merry. To him, also, the affronted Briton related 
 his sorrows, and even exhibited the president clad in the same 
 style. Mr. Merry presented Mr. Moore to the president at the 
 White House. " I found him," the poet records, "sitting with Gen- 
 eral Dearborn, and one or two other officers, and in the same homely 
 costume, comprising slippers and Connemara stockings, in which 
 Mr. Merry had been received by him, much to that formal minister's 
 horror, when waiting on him in full dress to deliver his credentials. 
 My single interview with this remarkable person was of very short 
 duration ; but to have seen and spoken to the man who drew up the 
 Declaration of Independence was an event not to be forgotten." 
 The poet did not ap[)rove of the president, and said so in several 
 sa/tirical stanzas and poems in his next publication ; at which Mr. 
 
JEFFEESON PRESIDENT. ' 621 
 
 Jefferson was amnsed and even surprised, for he had not before heard 
 of this new light in literature. Mr. Randall relates a pleasing inci- 
 dent to show how little he had come to regard the stings and arrows 
 of outrageous politics. A few years after his retirement, a grand- 
 daughter placed in his hands Moore's Irish Melodies, as the book of 
 the season, which was having a great run on both sides of the ocean. 
 The young lady, curious and expectant, watched him as he opened 
 the work and turned over the leaves. Said Jefferson, " This is the 
 little man who satirized me so." Reading on, he was won by the 
 flowing music and patriotic feeling of the verse. '•' Why" he said at 
 length, " he is a poet after all ; " and ever after, even to the end of 
 his life, he was fond of reading certain favorites among the poems 
 of Thomas Moore. 
 
 But poor Merry's troubles were not yet at an end. He and his 
 wife dined one day at the White House ; and, when dinner was 
 announced, the president offered his arm to the lady nearest him at 
 the moment, Mrs. Madison — not to Mrs. Merry, who was on the 
 other side of the room ! Insult upon insult! " Poor Merry " made 
 such an outcry at this in Washington, that Mr. Madison deemed it 
 best to explain the circumstances to Monroe, the American minis- 
 ter in London, that he miglit be prepared to meet Meurj^'s version. 
 Mr. Merry did relate his grievances to the English minister for 
 Foreign Affairs ; who, however, forbore to mention it to Monroe. 
 If he had, Monroe was ready for him ; for, besides being fully alive 
 to the humor of the aff;xir, he liad seen, a few weeks before, in an 
 official London drawing-room, the wife of an under-secretary of 
 state accorded pj-ecedence over his own. Mrs. Merry went no more 
 to tlie White House, and her husband only went when official duty 
 compelled. But nothing could tire the placable good-nature of 
 Jefferson. Some time after, desirous to restore social intercourse, 
 he caused Mr Merry to be informally asked whether he and his 
 wife would accept an invitation to a family dinner at the president's 
 house ; and receiving, as he understood, an affirmative intimation, 
 Mr. Jefferson sent the invitation, written with his own hand. 
 Merry rose to his opportunity. He wrote to the secretary of 
 state, asking whether the president of the United States had 
 invited him as a private gentleman or as British plenipotentiary; 
 for, if as a private gentleman, he must obtain the king's permission 
 before he could accept j if in his official character, he must have an 
 
622 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 assurance that he would be treated with the respect due to it. 
 Madison, with short civility, waived the solution of this problem,' 
 and the matter dropped. But it was not till 1809 that British inter- 
 ests in America were confided to abler hands. 
 
 Some other points of public etiquette were now settled on rational 
 principles once and forever. The fussy incompetents recently in 
 power had been concerned to know the relation which the f)resident 
 sustained to the governors of States, — precisely how much more 
 exalted a president was than a governor, the exact degi-ee of defer- 
 ence a governor should show a president, and the forms in wliich 
 deference should be expressed. In July, 1801, the governor of 
 Virginia asked the president to indicate the etiquette which he 
 thought should regulate the communications between the Sljate gov- 
 ernments and the general government. His reply in substance was: 
 Let there be 7w special etiquette. Between president and governor, 
 each being the supreme head of an independent government, no 
 difference of rank can be admitted. Thej" are equals. Let us con- 
 tinue then, as in General Washington's time, to write freely, just 
 as public business requires, and with no more ceremon}'- than obvious 
 propriety and convenience dictate. " If it be possible," he said, " to 
 be certainly conscious of any thing, I am conscious of feeling no 
 diiFerence between writing to the highest and lowest being on 
 earth." 
 
 The two miles of tenacious yellow mud that lay " straight as a 
 gun-barrel " between the White House and the Capitol assisted to 
 reconcile all but the extreme Federalists to a change in the mode 
 of intercourse between the president and Congress.^ Hitherto the 
 president had opened Congress by a speech, framed on the model 
 of a king of England's speech, and delivered it to both Houses assem- 
 bled in the Senate Chamber. He had been wont to ride to and from 
 the Capitol in a coach and six, which was followed by coaches and 
 four bearing members of the government and others, the whole form- 
 ing a considerable procession. When the president had retired, the 
 Houses separated, and each appointed a committee to prepare an 
 address in reply. Of late years these addresses had furnished the 
 pretext for long and impassioned debates on party politics, lasting 
 one, two, and even three weeks, the minority always striving to 
 reduce the eulog}'' of the address to the minimum. When, after this 
 desperate struggle, an address had been agreed upon, the House 
 
JEFFERSON PRESIDENT. 623 
 
 voting it rode in such state as members could command to the abode 
 of the president, and stood around him in a solemn semicircle, while 
 one of their number read to him what he had already read fifty times 
 for himself, besides fifty columns of debate upon it. Then the pres- 
 ident read a short, formal acknowledgment of the address, after 
 which the members returned to their chamber, and began the busi- 
 ness of the session. 
 
 Federalist gentlemen discovered, on the morning of December 8, 
 1801, that this fine opportunity for oratorical display and partisan 
 recrimination was not to be afforded them. Scene : the Senate 
 Chamber; the chairman in his revolving chair; members in their 
 seats. Enter a young gentleman, Meriwether Lewis perhaps, pri- 
 vate secretary to the president, bearing a mass of documents, and a 
 note from the president to the vice-president: — 
 
 " Sir, — The circumstances under which we find ourselves at this 
 place rendering inconvenient the mode heretofore practised, of 
 making by personal address the first communications between the 
 legislative and executive branches, I have adopted that by message, 
 as used on all subsequent occasions tbrough the session. In doing 
 this, I have had principal regard to the convenience of the legisla- 
 ture, to the economy of their time, to their relief from the embarrass- 
 ment of immediate answers on subjects not yet fully before them, 
 and to the benefits thence resulting to the public affairs. Trusting 
 that a procedure founded on these motives will meet their approba- 
 tion, I beg leave through you, sir, to communicate the enclosed copy, 
 with the documents accompanying it, to the honorable the Senate, 
 and pray you to accept for yourself and them the homage of my 
 high regard and consideration." 
 
 Thus the present usage was established, to the great content of 
 all rational beings. He was himself well pleased with the first 
 results of the experiment. " Our winter campaign," he wrote to Dr. 
 Rush, "has opened with more good-humor than I expected. By 
 sending a message, instead of making a speech, at the opening of 
 the session, I have prevented the bloody conflict to which the 
 making an answer would have committed them." 
 
 Other changes of this nature were these : He discontinued the 
 practice of assigning a frigate for the conveyance of ministers across 
 
624 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 the ocean. He declined to write official letters of condolence to the 
 widows or families of deceased officers. He would not have his 
 hirtlida}' celebrated by the. usual bulls; and, to prevent this, refused 
 to let the date of his birth be communicated. He would not deny 
 himself any innocent pleasure, such as attending the races near 
 Washington, from any false ideas of official dignity. He refused to 
 appoint days of fasting or thanksgiving, on tbe ground that to do 
 so would be indirectly to assume an authority over religious exer- 
 cises, which the Constitution has expressly forbidden. A recommen- 
 dation from the chief magistrate, he thought, would carry with it so 
 much authority, that any person or sect disregarding it would suffer 
 some degree of odium. "Fasting and prayer," said he, "are reli- 
 gious exercises; the enjoining them an act of discipline." "And 
 does the change in the nature of the penalty make the recommenda- 
 tion less a law of conduct for those to whom it is directed?" He 
 declined to make any thing resembling an official tour or progress, 
 or to receive while travelling attentions directed to his office. To 
 secularize and to republicanize the government completehj, remain- 
 ing himself a plain American citizen, — these were among the 
 objects which he steadily pursued and which he accomplished. 
 
 He was resolved not to be a personage. He would he Thomas 
 Jefferson, and nothing else. Pleasing anecdotes are those which 
 Mr. llandall relates in illustration of this point, particularly that 
 one in which the president figures as the thoughtful and affectionate 
 grandfather to his namesake, Thomas Jefferson Kandolph, who 
 stopped at Washington a few days on his way to attend the scientific 
 lectures at Philadelphia. The president came into his room one 
 day, had him unpack his trunk, took pencil and paper, and made a 
 list of things he still lacked, saying, "You will need this and this at 
 Philadelphia y" and then going about among the stores of Washing- 
 ton with the lad, and buying the articles required; finishing the 
 performance by asking to see his pocket-book, and handing it back 
 to him much better furnished than when he had taken it. That 
 story, too, of the j^resident carrying the rough Kentuckian over a 
 river on his horse is interesting. This Kentuckian, sitting solitary 
 on the bank of a swollen stream, let the gay young men of the pres- 
 ident's party all pass on and flounder across the river, without 
 making known his desire. Last of all rode the president. Him 
 the rough wayfarer addressed, and Mr. Jefferson took him up behind 
 
JEFFERSON PRESIDENT. 625 
 
 witliout ado. Being asked why lie selected that particular individ- 
 ual of the party, the Kentuckian replied, " I reckon a man carries 
 Yes or No in his face. The young chaps' faces said, No ; the old 
 man's said, Yes." And one day, in his daily ride near Washington, 
 the president fell into conversation with a stranger. Politics 
 becoming a topic, he had the pleasure of hearing, not only his meas- 
 ures roundly denounced, but his character most indecently reviled. 
 " Do you know Mr. Jefferson personally ? " he asked. " ISTo, nor do 
 I want to." " But is it fair play to believe and repeat such stories, 
 and then not dare to meet the subject of them face to face, S,nd trust 
 to your own senses?" "I will never shrink from meeting Mr. 
 Jefferson if he comes in my way." " Will you go to his house to- 
 morrow, and be introduced to him, if I will meet you there?" He 
 consented, and Jefferson galloped on. Instantly it occurred to the 
 traveller, that it was tlie president himself with whom he had been 
 conversing. But he kept his appointment, appearing at the hour, 
 attired in his best. "I have called, Mr. Jefferson," said he, "to 
 apologize for having said to a stranger" — Here the president, 
 laughing, broke in and finished the sentence — "hard things of an 
 imaginary personage who is no relation of mine." The stranger 
 tried to get in his apology ; but the president laughed it down, 
 insisted on his staying to dinner, and made a friend of him and all 
 his family. 
 
 He declined to receive presents while in office. 
 
 But he made one exception. In 1806 he received a present of a 
 bust of the new Emperor of Kussia, Alexander, with whom he had 
 much friendly intercourse during his second term. He thus 
 acknowledged the receipt of this work : " I had laid down as a law 
 for my conduct while in office, and hitherto scrupulously observed, 
 to accept of no present beyond a book, a pamphlet, or other curiosity 
 of minor value ; as well to avoid imputation on my motives of action, 
 as to shut out a practice susceptible of such abuse. But my partic- 
 ular esteem for the character of the Emperor places his image, in 
 my mind, above the scope of law. I receive it, therefore, and shall 
 cherish it with affection. It nourishes the contemplation of all the 
 good placed in his power, and of his disposition to do it." 
 
 An instance of his scrupulousness with regard to deriving per- 
 sonal advantage from his office has only lately come to light. A 
 private letter of his to General Muhlenberg, collector at Philadel- 
 40 
 
626 LIFE OF TH0MA8 JEFFERSON. 
 
 phia, concerning a purchase of wine, was found, a few years ago, by 
 a descendant of that officer, and sent to Mr. Greeley for publication. 
 If I were a collector, I would have it printed, framed, and hung up 
 in my custom-house. It is dated February 6, 1803 : — 
 
 "Dear Sik, — Mons. d'Yrujo, the Spanish minister here, has been 
 so kind as to spare me two hundred bottles of Champagne, part of 
 a larger parcel imported for his own use, and consequently privi- 
 leged from duty; but it would be improper for me to take the 
 benefit of that. I must therefore ask the favor of you to take the 
 proper measures for paying the duty ; for which purpose I enclose 
 you a bank-check for twenty-two and a half dollars, the amount of 
 it. If it could be done without mentioning my name, it would avoid 
 ill-intended observations, as in some such way as this^ 'By duty 
 paid on a part of such a parcel of wines not entitled to privilege,' 
 or in any other way you please. The wine was imported into Phila- 
 delphia probably about midsummer last. Accept assurances of my 
 great esteem and respect. 
 
 "Th. Jefferson. 
 *' General Muhlenberg." 
 
 It would be absurd to praise sucli an act as this, because it was 
 simply right. Nor ought it to be within the choice of any public 
 officer, of any grade whatever, to do otherwise. It will doubtless, 
 before many years have passed, be an impeachable offence for any 
 man holding a public office to accept so much as a free ride on a 
 horse-car. This is a point that comes home to the suffering sons of 
 Manhattan, who remember that a system of plunder which reached 
 an average of ten millions a year began in aldermen pocketing bun- 
 dles of cigars and quires of note-paper in the old corporation " tea- 
 room." 
 
 He used the prestige and the opportunities of his office for the 
 public advantage. 
 
 His introduction of better breeds of domestic animals into Vir- 
 ginia is a case in point. With the aid of Mr. Livingston, minister 
 at Paris, after a long course of manoeuvring and trouble, he man- 
 aged to get six merino sheep as far on their way to Albemarle as 
 Predericksburg, half for himself, half for Madison, and all for Vir- 
 ginia J and wrote to his manager to go with Mr. Madison's head 
 
JEFFERSON PEESIDENT. 627 
 
 man to get them home. The two managers, when they caught 
 sight of these animals, so renowned at the time througliout the 
 country, were wofully disappointed. " Tlie sheep were little bits 
 of things," reports Mr. Bacon; "and Graves said he would not give 
 liis riding-wliip for the whole lot." Their instructions were to 
 divide them by tossing up for the first choice. "So," says Mr. 
 Bacon, " I put my hand into my pocket, and drew out a dollar, and 
 said, 'Head or tail ?' I got the best buck. He was a little fellow, 
 but his wool was as fine almost as cotton. When I got home, I put 
 a notice in the paper at Charlottesville, that persons who wished to 
 improve their stock could send us two ewes, and we would keep them 
 until the lambs were old enough to wean, and then give the owners 
 the choice of the lambs, and they leave the other lamb and both of 
 the ewes. We got the greatest lot of sheep, more than we wanted, — 
 two or three hundred, I think ; and in a few years we had an 
 immense flock. People came long distances to buy our full-blooded 
 sheep. At first we sold them for fifty dollars, but they soon fell to 
 thirty and twenty ; and, before I left Mr. Jefferson, merino sheep 
 were so numerous, that they sold about as cheap as common ones." 
 
 Next he imported some of the broad-tailed sheep from Barbary, 
 which made splendid mutton, but would not thrive in Virginia. He 
 introduced also a superior kind of Guinea pigs. Himself, Mr. Madi- 
 son, and General Dearborn joined in importing six hogs of a kind 
 which Mr. Bacon tells us were called Calcutta hogs ; black and 
 white, short-legged, long-bodied, easily kept, and not given to root- 
 ing, — a very great success in every respect. "Mr. Jefferson," 
 remarks Mr. Bacon, "didn't care about making money from his 
 imported stock. His great object was to get it widefy scattered 
 over the country, and he left all these arrangements to me. I told 
 the people to bring three sows, and when they came for them they 
 might take two and leave one. In this way he soon got a large 
 number of hogs, and the stock was scattered over that whole 
 country." 
 
 His neighbors derived benefit even from his salary, which, to the 
 imagination of primitive Virginia, seemed inexhaustible. A larger 
 mill was among the urgent wants of the neighborhood, Mr. Bacon 
 relates; and the people thought, that, "as Mr. Jefferson had a large 
 salary, he was better able to build it than anybody else." He under- 
 took the work, since "he was always anxious to benefit the com- 
 
628 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 munity as much as possible ; " and Mr. Bacon, assisted by an 
 engineer from the North, superintended the construction. In bis 
 homely, excellent way, the manager relates the hopeful rise of the 
 structure, "built of rock," four stories high, witb "four run of 
 stone," and a dam and race that cost a thousand dollars ; and he 
 tells us what minute directions Mr. Jefferson kept sending from 
 Washington about it, and how he preferred it to all tbe works in 
 progress on his estate. The mill complete, grain came in, in sur- 
 prising quantities, until eleven thousand bushels were stored, await- 
 ing their turn to be ground. Coopers, millers, and teamsters were 
 all in full activity ; when, alas ! in the midst of a great freshet, Mr. 
 Bacon saw the dam swept away by the torrent of waters. " I 
 thought we were ruined," he says : " I never felt worse. I did not 
 know what we should do." Mr. Jefferson being at home at the 
 time. Bacon hurried off to the mountain-top to convey to him the 
 dreadful news. There he met the lord of the mansion just from the 
 breakfast-table, calm as a May morning. He asked, "Have you 
 heard from the river?" "Yes, sir," replied the doleful manager: "I 
 have just come from there with very bad news. The mill-dam is 
 all swept away." " Well, sir," said Mr. Jefferson, with perfect seren- 
 ity of manner, " we can't make a new dam this summer; but we will 
 get Lewis's ferry-boat, with our own, and get the hands from all 
 the quarters, and boat in rock enough in place of the dam to answer 
 for the present; and, next summer, I will send to Baltimore and 
 get ship-bolts, and make a dam that the freshet can't wash away." 
 Which was done. " You never saw his countenance ruflied," Mr. 
 Bacon pbserves. "No odds what happened, it always maintained 
 the same expression." 
 
 How eagerly he availed himself of his opportunities for increasing 
 the sum of knowledge, his letters exhibit ; and the fact is part of the 
 history of that age. It was his thought that sent Meriwether Lewis 
 and William Clarke up the Missouri to its sources in the Rocky 
 Mountains, across those mountains to the Columbia River, and 
 down thve Columbia until huge waves rolling in from the ocean and 
 tossing high their light canoes notified them that they had reached 
 the Pacific. Counting from the time when Captain John Smith 
 sailed up the Chickahominy in search of the South Sea, the world 
 had waited two hundred years for this exploration. Never was a 
 piece of work of that kind better done or better chronicled ; for it 
 
JEFFEKSON PRESIDENT. 629 
 
 was Jefferson who selected the two heroes that conducted it. Cap- 
 tain Lewis was the son of one of his most valued Albemarle neigh- 
 bors. Lieutenant Clarke was th§ brother of tha,t General George 
 Edgers Clarke who held back ^lie Indians from joining in the war 
 of the Revolution ; and both of them were such masters of all fron- 
 tier arts, that the perilous expedition of two years, four months, and 
 ten days, was one joj'ous holiday-excursion to them. Returning to 
 St. Louis laden with spoils and trophies. Captain Lewis, besides 
 his journals and other official results, sends off" exultingly to the 
 president "sixty-seven specimens of earths, salts, and minerals, and 
 sixty specimens of plants." It was Jefferson, too, who set on foot 
 the two exploring expeditions of Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery 
 Pike, whose name lives in that of the peak which he discovered, and 
 and in those of ten counties of the United States. Pike was the 
 first American who explored the Upper Mississippi beyond the Falls 
 of St. Anthony; noting the sites of the cities now rising on its 
 banks, and shaking hands on the way with "Monsieur Dubuque," 
 wlio was working the lead-mines, and lording it over a wide domain. 
 Lieutenant Pike was the first American to explore the valley of 
 the Arkansas. He said trulj^ in one of his letters, that the regions 
 which he had traversed were little more known to the world than 
 the wilds in the interior of Africa. In seventj'' years we behold 
 them populous, and more familiar to our knowledge than the next 
 county. 
 
 It was Jefferson who encouraged Astor to attempt his scheme of 
 North-western trade, — a scheme which was as feasible as it was 
 audacious, and which only the war of 1812 frustrated. It is inter- 
 esting to observe, in view of the present importance of the Western 
 silver-mines, that, in 1808, the secret of their existence, " seventeen 
 hundred miles from St. Louis," was confided to the president, who, 
 however, considering the menacing attitude of Spain, could only 
 give verbal encouragement to the exploration sought. He jocularly 
 writes to Gallatin : " I enclose for your information the account of a 
 silver-mine to fill your treasury." As for the bones of the mam- 
 moth, he had enough of them at last, and kept the Philosophical 
 Society, of which he was still the president, abundantly supplied 
 with objects of curiosity and investigation. And was there ever 
 such an indefatigable recorder? Among his papers is a leaf thus 
 entitled : " Statement of the vegetable market of Washington during 
 
630 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 a period of eight years, wherein the earlfest and latest appearance of 
 eacli article within the whole eight years is noted." One small page 
 suffices, but it is complete : the list embraces thirty-seven articles. 
 He could tell at a glance that the earliest appearance of ''sprouts" 
 was on the 22d of February, and the latest, May 20 ; and that the 
 extremes of the strawberry season were May 8 and July 9. He 
 refutes Dickens's satire of red-tape. In a minute or two he could 
 put his hand upon any letter or document, any entry or memoran- 
 dum, of the tens of thousands whicli he possessed;' and of all this 
 myriad mass of details he was the master, not the slave. 
 
 He preserved perfect harmony in his cabinet during the whole of 
 botli terms. 
 
 One reason was this : there was not an egotist among them. The 
 pugnacious traits, such as vanity, jealousy, personal ambition, and 
 the other commonplace forms of self-love, were extinguished, or, at 
 least, subordinated in them all. " Our administration," wrote Jef- 
 ferson once, " now drawing to a close, I have a sublime pleasure in 
 believing will be distinguished as much by having placed itself 
 above all the passions which could disturb its harmony as by the 
 great operations by which it will have advanced the well-being of 
 the nation." All of them were modernized persons. The masters 
 of the past were, of necessity, soldiers and men of the soldierly 
 spirit. The masters of our modern world are educated men of busi- 
 ness. These five gentlemen, Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin, Dear- 
 born, and Robert Smith, were all of this description; for Dearborn 
 was only a soldier while his country was invaded; just as the most 
 peaceful citizen becomes warlike when attacked by a ruffian. The 
 military tj-pe of man, valuable as it was and is, was not represented 
 in the cabinet at all. It is also true, that the Jeffersonian theory of 
 government is precisely the one that tasks the intellect and stirs the 
 passions least, because it excludes even from consideration seven- 
 tenths of the questions which usually most perplex governments, its 
 chief object being to protect rifjhts, not interests. Interests are 
 complex ; riglits are simple. The tariff question is a puzzler if you 
 view it as aifecting existing interests; but if you put the case thus: 
 Has an American citizen a riglit to buy a pair of Sunday trousers, 
 London made, for four dollars, instead of paying twenty-two for 
 the Broadway article? — the case is within finite comprehension. 
 Kalph Waldo Emerson and John Gr. Whittier go to Washington 
 
JEFFERSON PRESIDENT. 631 
 
 demanding to be protected, at home and abroad, in their rirjJit to 
 the product of their lifetime's arduous and noble toil. Pirate pub- 
 lisher meets them there with the thieves' natural plea: Stolen books 
 are cheaper than books honestly paid for. Republican government 
 waives all that complicated nonsense out of hearing, and considers 
 but two points, both easy: 1, Does the Constitution give us juris- 
 diction ? 2, Is the demand of these ornaments of their country 
 just? How adapted to human capacity such questions! Away- 
 faring man, unless a book-peddler, need not err therein. 
 
 Bat there never was a time when the politics of the world were 
 so difficult as then. "Every country but one," as Jeff'erson said, 
 " demolished ; a conqueror roaming over the earth with havoc and 
 destruction, a pirate spreading misery and ruin over the face of the 
 ocean. Indeed, my friem.l, ours is a bed of roses. And the system 
 of government which shall keep us afloat amidst this wreck of the 
 world w^ill be immortalized in history." It was a bed of roses, 
 because the simple aim of the republican administration was to 
 have nothing whatever to do with this prodigious and astounding 
 broil, except to sell refreshing provisions to both combatants, and 
 pick up any thing in the way of a Louisiana or so that might get 
 loose in the contest. 
 
 But, after all, it is the Arnold who makes the Rugby ; it is the 
 Fellenberg who renders possible the " self-governing college," so 
 pleasingly revealed to vis by Mr. Robert Dale Owen ; and it was the 
 large, benign, commanding intelligence of the chief which alone 
 could have united and exalted a group of men to the height main- 
 tained by this peerless administration. Washington, Adams, and 
 Madison, all had dissension in their cabinets. Jefferson alone had 
 none. He gave them his confidence without reserve. "If I had 
 the universe to choose from," he said to them all in 1801, " I could 
 not change one of my associates to my better satisfaction ; " and in 
 1809, he said the same, with only a change of tense. Nor did any 
 thing like a serious diff"erence of opinion ever arise among them. 
 "All matters of importance or difficulty," he once wrote, "are sub- 
 mitted to all the heads of departments composing the cabinet, some^- 
 times by the president consulting them separately and successively, 
 as they happen to call upon him ; but, in the greatest cases, by call- 
 ing them together, discussing the subject maturely, and finally tak- 
 ing the vote, in which the president counts himself but as one. So 
 
632 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 that, in all important cases, the executive is in fact a Directory, 
 which certainly the president might control; but of this there 
 never was an example, either in the first or the present administra- 
 tion." 
 
 In his use of the pardoning power, he was governed by principles 
 that rendered that absurd relic of Divine Right comparatively harm- 
 less. 
 
 These principles are two in number. In a letter to Edmund 
 Randolph, of 1808, he stated them both : 1. To entitle a criminal to 
 the remission of a penalty, " extraordinary and singular considera- 
 tions are necessarj^ ; " otherwise, the pardon of. the criminal would 
 be "to repeal the law" that condemned him. 2. '•' Tlie opinion of 
 the judges who sat in the cause I have ever required as indispensa- 
 ble to ground a pardon." 
 
 He submitted to the outrages of the press. 
 
 We are now too familiar with this policy to appreciate either its 
 novelty or its difficulty in the early years of the present century. 
 Jefferson both believed and proved that a public man, fit for his 
 place and doing his duty, cannot be injured by a hostile press. 
 This truth we now all know, and have seen it tested many times ; 
 but in ISOl it was a discovery. iSTor was there then in Christendom 
 one government besides that of the United States strong and able 
 enough to permit freedom of the press. Bonaparte's, of course, was 
 not. Pitt's was not. Nor was there a government in all Europe 
 where the idea of a free press could be entertained. And what 
 made Jefferson's triumph the more remarkable was, that the Feder- 
 alists were the " vocal class." It was they who tilled most pulpits, 
 wrote most books, edited most papers, presided in most courts, 
 pleaded most causes, and taught in most colleges. They were 
 denominated the educated class. Education, at that day, did not 
 mean the acquisition of knowledge, but of scholarship ; wiiich, while 
 it cultivates the communicating talents, may leave the prejudices 
 intact, and is compatible with the last degree of mental servility 
 and narrowness. A man may become a genuine scholar and remain 
 a Jesuit. The Federalist leaders, 'too, were exasperated beyond 
 mortal endurance. Their self-love was torn all to pieces. They 
 had predicted their own speedy return to power : tliey saw their 
 minority dwindling at every election. They foretold anarchy : they 
 saw universal order and general content. They had prophesied 
 
JEFFERSON PRESIDENT. 633 
 
 financial chaos : they saw every obligation of the governmen met, 
 its debt steadily diminished, its credit perfect, its only embarrass- 
 ment a surplus. They had expected a suppression of the navy : 
 they now saw, for the first time, the navy put to its legitimate use 
 in teriBinating the piracies of the Algerines. They had dreaded anl. 
 expulsion from office of all their adherents : they saw the right of I 
 opinion respected, and no man disturbed in his place, except for a > 
 reason that did not include his political creed. They had predicted | 
 a reign of loafers and scallawags : they saw the great offices filled 
 with men who were both refined by scholarship and enlarged by 
 knowledge. They had foretold a base subserviency to France : they 
 saw the president win from France the most valuable acquisition 
 that one country ever gained from another since the creation, and f 
 this without bloodshed. They had predicted insult and rash hostil- 
 ity to Great Britain : they saw the moment come when, with uni- 
 versal acclamation, Jeff'erson could have had a war with England, 
 and yet he held back the conflict for another four years, every 
 month of which made that conflict less unequal. 
 
 It is not in mortals to behold with equanimity such brilliant and 
 triumphant wisdom in the career of a person against whom they 
 are publicly committed. The leading Federalists seem to have been 
 equally puzzled and indignant. C. C Pinckney could only attrib- 
 ute the strengthening hold Jefferson had of the public confidence 
 to " the infatuation of the people." John Quiney Adams thought 
 that Jefferson's success was owing to an unaccountable run of good 
 luck. " Fortune," said he, '• has taken a pleasure in making Jeffer- 
 son's greatest weaknesses and follies issue more successfully than if 
 he had been inspired with the profoundest wisdom." (This in 1804. 
 Before Mr. Jefferson went out of office Adams was a Republican.) 
 Gouverneur Morris, the jovial and witty aristocrat, set it down, 
 Froude-fashion, to the natural baseness of merchants and traders. 
 It was a favorite fiction of the class of Tories represented by Morris, 
 that the counting-room is the centre and resort of all that is sordid 
 and contemptible. Bvit Morris did not despair of the republic. 
 " When the people," said he, " have been long enough drunk, they 
 will get sober; but while the frolic lasts, to reason with them is 
 useless. Their present leaders take advantage of their besotted 
 condition, and tie their hands and feet ; but if this prevents them 
 from running into the fire, why should we, who are their friends, 
 
634 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 complain ? " Fisher Ames thought it was all a piece of impudent, 
 reckless imposture, which just happened to succeed. " ISfever 
 before," wrote he, " was it attempted to play the fool on so great a 
 scale." Hamilton solved the enigma with the utmost ease, in his 
 old manner; his central, immutable principle being this, Man is 
 an ass. In his usual high-stepping style, he remarks, " Mankind 
 are forever destined to be the dupes of bold and cunning imposture." 
 Old John Adams, " nursing his wrath to keep it warm," fulminated 
 comparative history, but thought the people would open their eyes 
 at la^^t. " If," said he, "the talents, the policy, the address, the 
 power, the bigotry and tyranny, of Archbishop Laud and the court 
 of Charles the First were not able to destroy or discredit sound 
 principles in 1630 or 1635, there is little cause of apprehension for 
 them from the feeble efforts of the frivolous libertines who are 
 combining, conspiring, and intriguing against them in 1802." 
 
 How instructive is all this ! How eloquent it is against intrust- 
 ing the rights of a nation to the custod}' of a class ! 
 
 If the uppermost men of the opposition wrote thus in their confi- 
 dential correspondence, we can imagine the tone and style of the 
 party press. The falsehoods which had been accumulating for 
 three presidential elections, with the new atrocities of Callender 
 and others, formed a mass of calumny from which the mildest and 
 the fiercest county editor could draw every week the slanders most 
 congenial to his disposition. They did so. The State courts gave 
 members of the administration a fair means of redress, and some of 
 them appear to have thought of bringing suits for libel. Jefferson 
 avowed their right to do so ; but said he, in various forms of expres- 
 sion, " Let us prove to the world that an administration which has 
 nothing to conceal has nothing to fear from the press." It is the 
 means which the press has of giving publicity to events which 
 makes it one of the great powers of the modern world. When it 
 utters falsehood, the party injured is itself " I admit," he wrote to 
 an old friend in 1808, " that restraining the press to truth, as the 
 present laws do, is the only way of making it useful. But I have 
 thought it necessarj' first to prove that it can never be dangerous." 
 Again, in his second inaugural, he spoke of the importance to man- 
 kind of this experiment to ascertain whether a government that 
 did no act which it would be unwilling the whole world should 
 witness could be written down. " The experiment has been tried," 
 
JEFFERSON PRESIDENT. 635 
 
 said he. " You have witnessed the scene ; our fellow-citizens 
 looked on, cool and collected ; they saw the latent source from 
 which these outrages proceeded ; they gathered around their public 
 functionaries ; and, when the Constitution called them to the decis- 
 ion by suffrage, they pronounced their verdict, honorable to those 
 who had served them, and consolatory to the friend of man, who 
 believes he may be trusted with the control of his own affairs." 
 
 Such were some of the preliminary and minor excellences of this 
 unique administration. Of themselves, they would not have car- j 
 ried it far. We are familiar with the theological student of tradi-Y 
 tion, who advertised for a home in a family where a pious examplel 
 would be considered an equivalent for his board. Of similar* 
 absurdity we might accuse the head of a nation who should expect 
 to satisfy the people by being a virtuous, attentive, and rational 
 man. That, indeed, is highl}- desirable ; but it was for something 
 else that the people assigned to Mr. Jefferson quarters in their 
 White House at Washington. 
 
CHAPTER LXIII. 
 
 THE ALGERINE PIRACIES. 
 
 How rapidly the face of the world changes in these modern 
 times ! As recently as 1794, it was a common occurrence for such 
 a letter as the following to be read out in church at seaport towns, 
 like Boston, Salem, ISTewburyport, where, perhaps, the writer had 
 been known from his boyhood, and where his family still lived: — 
 
 " I was captured on the 18th of October by an Algerine corsair, 
 and stripped of every thing. On arriving at Algiers, I was con- 
 ducted to the dey's house ; and in the morning was sent to the 
 slaves' bagnio, and there received an iron shackle round my leg, and 
 a chain of twenty pounds, and three loaves of coarse bread for 
 twenty-four hours, and some water, and was immediately put to hard 
 labor. My situation is so deplorable, that to mention but a small 
 part of it would require much longer time than I am allowed." * 
 
 And the great cost of ransoming a captured brother and fellow- 
 citizen must have been most discouraging to a congregation 
 acquainted only with simple manners and frugal habits, — codfish 
 for Saturday's dinner, baked beans on Sunday, and a best coat worn 
 for twenty years. Here is the bill sent to Mr. Jefferson, plenipo- 
 tentiary at Paris, in 1786, for the first American crews ever cap- 
 tured by the Barbary pirates : — ' 
 
 For 3 captains, $6,000 each $18,000 
 
 2 mates, $4,000 each 8,000 
 
 2 passengers, $4,000 each 8,000 
 
 14 seameii, $1,400 each ' * 29,600 
 
 $53,600 
 For custom, 11 per cent 5,896 
 
 $59,496 
 
 * History of Newburj'port, by Mrs. E. Vale Smith, p. 146. 
 686 
 
THE ALGERINE PIEACIES. 637 
 
 If he was appalled at such a demand (Congress only empowered 
 him to offer two hundred dollars a man), what must have been the 
 feeling of a Newburyport family in average circumstances, on 
 learning that the release of a father, husband, brother, son, 
 depended on their raising six thousand hard dollars ! Many a 
 homestead was deeply mortgaged, and many sold, to procure the 
 money, which sometimes reached Algiers or Tripoli only to find the 
 object of compassion in a captive's grave. Nor did the price mate- 
 rially decline during the next ten years. In 1794 we find super- 
 cargoes quoted at four thousand dollars, cabin passengers at four 
 tliOLisand, and cabin-boys at fourteen hundred. Business, it is 
 true, could always be done on more favorable terms if the ransom 
 was paid in guns, powder, sail-cloth, rope, fast-sailing schooners, 
 and naval stores generally ; but against this Jefferson, from first 
 to last, set his face, though all the other powers complied. Two 
 Moors would sometimes be taken in. exchange for one Christian, and 
 a single Turk was regarded as equivalent to half a dozen Christian 
 dogs ; but it was necessary first to catch your Turk. This traffic in 
 Christians was very profitable. In 1786 the number of captives in 
 Algiers alone was officially reported to Mr. Jefferson at twenty-two 
 hundred; and during the early autumn of 1793 ten American ves- 
 sels were taken by the Barbary corsairs, for the release of the crews 
 of which a collection was taken in every church in New England 
 on Thanksgiving Day of that year. People gave liberally (one gen- 
 tleman subscribed four thousand dollars, "enough to redeem a master 
 or supercargo") ; but it was not till the general ransom by Congress, 
 in 1796, that the poor fellows saw their homes again. A million 
 dollars it cost the government to buy that shameful peace, and 
 another million during the four years of Mr. Adams's term to keep 
 the peace, a large part of which was paid to the pirates in naval 
 stores and ammunition. It is hard to believe that one item in this 
 account was officially described as "a frigate to carry thirty-six 
 guns, for the Dey of Algiers." But it was even so. The bill that 
 Congress paid for her construction, equipment, and navigation to 
 Algiers, amounted to $99,727 ; and she went crammed with a 
 hundred thousand dollars' worth of powder, lead, timber, rope, 
 shells, canvas, and other means of piracy. One hundred and 
 twentj'-two captives, however, came home in that year, — 1796,— 
 among whom were ten who had been in slavery for eleven years. 
 
638 LIFE OF THOMAS, JEFFEE SON. 
 
 And liow can we sufficiently admire the impudence of those cor- 
 sairs ? A man-of-war, one would think, went very far in merely 
 saluting their flag; but that was only a small part of the infamy. 
 The pirates returned the salute, and then demanded /rom the man- 
 of-war one barrel of powder for every gun they had fired ! Every 
 power seems to have conceded .this, as a matter of course, until the 
 American consul in 1798 refused. The conversation that occurred 
 on this subject between the Bey of Tunis and Consul William 
 Eaton is a curiosity of negotiation. The consul endeavored, at 
 first, to pass it over as something too trifling for a sovereign prince 
 to regard. 
 
 Bet. However trifling it may appear to you, to me it is impor- 
 tant. Fifteen barrels of powder will furnish a cruiser, which may 
 capture a prize, and net me a hundred thousand dollars. 
 
 Consul. The concession is so degrading, that our nation will 
 not yield to it. Both honor and justice forbid; and we do not 
 doubt that the world will view the demand as they will the con- 
 cession. 
 
 Bey. You consult your honor, I my interest; but, if you wish to 
 save your honor in this instance, give me fifty barrels of powder 
 annually, and I will agree to the alteration. 
 
 Consul. We shall not expend a thought upon a proposition 
 which aims at making us tributary. We will agree to pay for the 
 powder you burned in the salute. 
 
 Bey (addressing his minister in Turkish). These people are 
 Cheribeenas (Persian merchants). They are so hard there is no 
 dealing with them 
 
 In a spirit not unlike this, the Dey of Algiers said, in 1793, tak- 
 ing the tone of an injured being, " If I make peace with every- 
 body, what shall I do with my corsairs ? What shall I do with my 
 soldiers ? They would take off my head for want of other prizes, 
 not being able to live upon their miserable allowa'nce." In 1801, 
 when Mr. Jefferson came to the presidency, the time had arrived, 
 he thought, to place the intercourse of the United States and the 
 Barbary Powers on a diffefent footing. 
 
 The practice of electing to the presidency a man grown gray in the 
 
THE ALGERINE PIRACIES. 639 
 
 service of the public had this advantage : An intelligent and patri- 
 otic person, while serving in subordinate stations, acquires a great deal 
 of special knowledge, gets a particular insight into weak places in 
 the system of which he is a part, and perfects in his mind scliemes 
 of change or reform. He has often said to himself, " If / were 
 president, I would recommend such a plan, or adopt such a meas- 
 ure." Of all this knowledge, experience, and reflection, the country 
 derives the benefit, if the tried servant of the State happens to be 
 one of those rarely-gifted men who possess the strength to execute, 
 in the presence of mankind, what they have meditated in seclu- 
 sion. 
 
 From the beginning of the national part of his public life, Jeffer- 
 son's attention had been, of necessity, drawn to this fell business 
 of capturing Christians for ransom. To the reams of despatches 
 and reports which he wrote on the subject as plenipotentiary in 
 Paris, he was obliged to add annual quires as secretary of state in 
 Philadelphia. Frustration followed frustration, until at length, 
 when he was no longer in office, the government, in its extreme 
 desire to procure the release of men wearing out their lives in bond- 
 age, yielded to the pirates' demands, and got the captives home at 
 the prodigious cost of money and dignity just named. But now he 
 was president. The Federalists had availed themselves of the 
 transient delusion of the people in 1797, with regard to the inten- 
 tions of the French government, to create a navy ; which Jefferson 
 immediately reduced by putting all but six vessels out of commis- 
 sion. His first important act as president was to despatch four of 
 the six, — three frigates and a sloop, — to the Mediterranean to 
 overawe the pirates, and cruise in protection of American commerce. 
 Thus began the series of events which finally rendered the com- 
 merce of the world as safe from piracy in the Mediterranean as it 
 was in the British Channel. How brilliantly Decatur and his 
 gallant comrades executed the intentions of the government, and 
 how, at last, the tardy naval powers of Europe followed an example 
 they ought to have set, every one is supposed to know. Commo- 
 dore Decatur was the Farragut of that generation. There was 
 something really exquisite in Jefferson's turning the infant navy 
 of the infant nation to a use so legitimate, but also so unexpected 
 a-nd so original. What in 1785 he had urged the combined naval 
 
640 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 powers to attempt, he was enabled to begin to effect in 1805 by the 
 confidence of Congress and tlie valor of a few heroes. There is 
 something peculiarly pleasing in the spectacle of a peace-man's 
 making a successful fight, when that fight is clearly forced upon 
 him by au essential difference in the grade of civilization between 
 himself and his enemy, — the only justification of a war that will 
 stand modern tests. 
 
CHAPTER LXIV. 
 
 LOUISIANA PURCHASED. 
 
 The acquisition of Louisiana was, also, the completion of mucli 
 wbicli Jefferson had meditated years before. He may have heard 
 Dr. Franklin repeat, in 1784, the remark which the acute old man 
 once made to Mr. Jay, " I would rather agree with the Spaniards 
 to buy at a great price the whole of their right on the Mississippi, 
 than sell a drop of its waters. A neighbor might as well ask me 
 to sell my street-door." Whether he heard it or not, his public acts 
 and utterances show that he agreed with Dr. Franklin. As secre- 
 tary of state in 1790, Avhen there appeared some danger of Great 
 Britain seizing New Orleans, he gave it as his official opinion to 
 President Washington, that, rather than see Louisiana and Florida 
 added to the British Empire, the United States should brave the 
 risks of joining actively in the general war then supposed to be 
 impending. But not less averse to the French possessing it, he 
 warned them also, in the same year, to let it alone. The French 
 minister in Philadelphia was supposed to have indulged a dream of 
 planting a new colony of his countrymen somewhere within the 
 vast and vague Louisiana that was once all their own. The secre- 
 tary of state gave him Punch's advice, Don't. He caused it to be 
 softly intimated to him after his return to France, through the 
 American minister there, that such a project could not be advan- 
 tageous to France, and would not be pleasing to the United States. 
 Fratice, he owned, might sell a few more yards of cloth and silk in 
 that country ; but, said he, the Count de Moustier did not take into 
 consideration *' what it would cost France to nurse and protect a 
 colony there till it should be able to join its neighbors, or to stand by 
 itself, and then what it would cost her to get rid of it." And there 
 was something else the Count did not think of. "The place being 
 
 41 611 
 
642 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 ours," added Mr. Jefferson, "their yards of cloth and silk would he 
 as freely sold as if it were theirs." This in 1790, twelve years 
 hefore there there was an}^ expectation of the place being ours. 
 
 The war-cloud of 1790 hle>v over, and. the Sj)aniards remained, 
 in possession. Trouble enough they gave the government during 
 the rest of Jeiferson's tenure of ofSce. Holding both Florida and 
 Louisiana, they sometimes stirred up the Creehs to war, they 
 always interposed obstacles to the free outlet of the products of 
 Kentucky, and they occasionally threatened to close the mouth of 
 the river altogether to American commerce. In many a vigorous 
 despatch, Jefferson remonstrated with the Spanish government, 
 warning them that a spark might kindle a flame in the breasts of 
 "our borderers," which could not be controlled. "In such an 
 event," he wrote in 1791, " Spain cannot possibly gain ; and what 
 may she not lose ?" Next year he demanded a frank and complete 
 concession of the right to navigate the river; appealing, finally, to 
 the law of nature, written on the heart of man in the deepest char- 
 acters, that the ocean is free to all men, and the rivers to all who 
 inhabit their shores. The treaty was concluded ; but there was 
 never a year thereafter in which the Kentuckiaus were not in feud, 
 more or less violent, with the Spanish authorities at New Orleans. 
 There were times when only the strong, instinctive regard for law 
 and decorum which marks men who own no laws but of their own 
 making, prevented "our borderers" from seizing New Orleans, and 
 setting the Spaniards floating down toward the sea. 
 
 Jefferson had not been president two mouths before Louisiana 
 became again a subject of anxious concern with him. A despatch 
 from Rufus King, American minister in London, dated March 29, 
 1801, contained an intimation of startling import. It was whis- 
 pered about, he said, in diplomatic circles, that Spain had ceded. 
 Louisiana and Florida to France ! Can it be true ? Some weeks 
 later Mr. King, who felt all the import of such a change, conversed 
 with Lord. Hawksbury on the subject, using as a text Montesquieu's 
 remark, "It is happy for the commercial powers that God has per- 
 mitted Turks and Spaniards to be in the world, since of all nations 
 they are the most proper to possess a great empire with insignifi- 
 cance." " We are contented," said Mr. King, " that the Florid.as 
 should remain in the hands of Spain, but should not be willing to 
 see them transferred, except to ourselves." By Floridas he meant 
 
LOUISIANA PURCHASED. 643 
 
 Louisiana and Florida. Lord Hawksbury proved on this occasion 
 that he perfectly divined Bonaparte's object. He said in June, 
 1801, what Bonaparte avowed in April, 1803, that the acquisition of 
 Louisiana was tlie beginning of an attempt to undo the work of the 
 Seven Years' War. During all the rest of the year 1801, we see 
 Mr. Madison writing anxiously to tho American ministers in Paris, 
 London, and Madrid : How is it about this rumored cession of 
 Louisiana? Inquire. Send us information. 
 
 Those gentlemen inquired diligently. Mr. King, in December, 
 1801, was all but sure the cession had been made, and sent what he 
 believed to be a true copy of one of i the treaties involving the ces- 
 sion. Mr. Livingston had "broken the subject" to two of Bona- 
 parte's ministers. Both denied that the province had been ceded. 
 One of them, in reply to an intimation that the United States would 
 buy it, said, "Xone but spendthrifts satisfy their debts by selling 
 their lands ; " adding, after a pause, "but it is not ours to give." 
 Talleyrand also (December, 1801) declared that the cession had only 
 been talked of. In March, 1802, when Mr. Livingston had been 
 several months in Paris, he was stiJl unable to get official informa- 
 tion of a treaty which had then been in existence a year. But he 
 had no serious doubts. "It is a darling object with the Pirst Con-^ 
 sul," he wrote to Mr. Madison, March, 24, " who sees in it a means 
 to gratify his friends and to dispose of his armies. There is a man 
 here who calls himself a Frenchman, by the name of Francis Tater- 
 gem, who pretends to have great interest with the Creek nations. 
 He has been advanced to the rank of a general of division. He 
 persuades them that the Indians are extremely attached to France, 
 and hate the Americans; that they can raise twenty thousand 
 warriors ; that the country is a paradise. I believe him to be a mere 
 adventurer, but he is listened to." 
 
 This news, confirmed from many quarters and inferred from many 
 facts, was alarming indeed. Nor could it be longer confined to 
 ofiScial circles. Kentucky was in a flame. The president was 
 deeply stirred ; for he was as well aware as Rufus King that the 
 new master of the mouth of the Mississippi was not a person whom 
 an eloquent despatch could intimidate. The Spaniards had retained 
 Louisiana on sufferance : the United States could have it at any 
 time from them; but the French would be likely to hold their 
 ancient possession with a tighter clutch, and not content themselves 
 
644 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 with two or three trading-posts in a fertile territory large enough 
 for an empire. Jeflferson, from the hour when the intelligence 
 reached him, had only this thought : The French must not have 
 New Orleans ; no one but ourselves must own our own street-door. 
 He had been a year in pursuit of his object before the public sus- 
 pected that the peace of Amiens was only a truce ; and he was pre- 
 pared to join the next coalition against Bonaparte, rather than not 
 accomplish it. So far was Mr. Livingston from anticipating Jeffer- 
 son's scheme, that he, as he himself reports, "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 herself as having any interest in opposing the ex- 
 change." These words v/ere written January 13, 1802. The 
 despatches which he received from Washington in May must have 
 surprised him, for they notified him that the government of the 
 United States was resolved to prevent the exchange. 
 
 Besides the formal and official despatches which Mr. Madison 
 wrote on the subject, the president himself addressed to Mr. Living- 
 ston one of those letters of fire which he occasionally produced when 
 his whole soul was set upon accomplishing a purpose. On the one 
 hand, the United States could not let the French control the mouth 
 of the Mississippi ; on the other, the president felt that a conflict with 
 Napoleon would finally necessitate an *' entangling alliance " with 
 Great Britain. The one chance, he thought, of avoiding both these 
 giant evils lay in an appeal to the reason of Napoleon, for whose 
 understanding he had then some respect. This powerful letter, 
 though directed to the American minister, was evidently aimed at 
 the intellect of the First Consul. He began by saying, that, of all 
 the nations in the world, France was the one with which the United 
 States had the fewest points of probable collision, and the most of a 
 communion of interests; and for this reason we had ever esteemed 
 her our natural friend, viewing her growth as our own, her misfor- 
 tunes ours. But — 
 
 " There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is 
 our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which 
 the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market ; 
 and from its fertility it will e^-e long yield more than half of 
 our whole produce, and contain more than half our inhabitants. 
 
LOUISIANA PURCHASED. 645 
 
 France, placing herself in that door, assumes to us the attitude of 
 defiance. Spain might have retained it quietly for years. Her 
 pacific dispositions, her feeble state, would induce her to increase 
 our facilities there, so that her possession of the place would 
 he hardly felt by us ; and it would not, perhaps, be very long before 
 some circumstance might arise which might make the cession of it 
 to us the price of something of more wortli to her. Not so can it 
 ever be in the hands of Prance : 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 Joving 
 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 irritating a position. They, as well as we, must be blind 
 if t])ey do not see tliis; and we must be very improvident if we do 
 not begin to make arrangements on that hypothesis. The day that 
 France takes possession of New Orleans fixes the sentence which is 
 to restrain her forever within her low-water-mark. It seals the 
 union of two nations, who, in conjunction, can maintain exclusive 
 possession of the ocean. From that moment we must marry our- 
 selves to the British fleet and nation. We must turn all our atten- 
 tions to a maritime force, for which our resources place us on very 
 high ground ; and having formed and connected together a power 
 which may render re-enforcement of her settlements here im- 
 possible to France, make the first cannon which shall be fired in 
 Europe the signal for tearing up any settlement she nyiy have 
 made, and for holding the two contiijents of America in sequestra- 
 tion for the common purposes of the United British and American 
 nations." 
 
 His conclusion was, that it was for the most obvious interest of 
 both nations for France to cede Louisiana to the United States ; but 
 if that could not be, then, at least, the island of New Orleans and 
 Florida, making the Mississippi River the boundary between the 
 possessions of the two countries. " But still," added the president, 
 " we should consider New Orleans and the Floridas no equivalent 
 for the risk of a quarrel with France produced by her vicinage." At 
 this time the rumor prevailed that Florida also had been ceded to 
 
646 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEKSOIf. 
 
 France ; which proved to be not the case, much to the cost of the 
 United States a quarter of a century Liter. 
 
 It happened that an ancient French friend of Jefferson's, M. 
 Dupont de Nemours, a republican exile of the Kevolution, was go- 
 ing home, in the spring of 1802, after a long residence in the United 
 States, to spend the evening of his life in his native country. To 
 him the president intrusted this letter open, urging him, before 
 sealing it, to possess himself thoroughly, of its contents, in order 
 that he might aid in "informing the wisdom of Bonaparte" and 
 enlightening the circle that surrounded him, "In Europe," wrote 
 JetTersbn to this republican statesman and author, "nothing but 
 Europe is seen ; " a remark nearly as true in 1873 as it was in 1802. 
 "But," he continued, "this little event, of France's possessing her- 
 self of Louisiana, which is thrown in as nothing, as a mere make- 
 weight in the general settlement of accounts, — this speck which 
 now appears as an almost invisible point in the horizon, — is the 
 embryo of a tornado which will burst on the countries on both sides 
 of the Atlantic, and involve in its effects their highest destinies." 
 He asked another service of this friend, who was not less a friend to 
 the United States than to the president. Talleyrand, Minister for 
 Forei'-'n Affairs, was at this moment, if we may believe M. Thiers^ 
 .the minister who could do most to soothe the blinding passions of 
 Napoleon, and dispose him to a reasonable view of things. But 
 Talleyrand was supposed to be out of humor with the United 
 States, on account of the explosion of 1797, commonly called the 
 X Y Z affair ; when it was a point of party tactics with the Federal- 
 ists to maintain that Talleyrand was the person who "struck" the 
 American envoys for twelve hundred thousand francs. The presi- 
 dent requested M. Dupont to endeavor to talk Talleyrand out of this 
 ill-humor, by assuring him that the people who spread abroad that 
 story had been consigned to private life, while those now in power 
 were "precisely those who disbelieved it, and saw nothing in it but 
 an attempt to deceive our country." He had even another re- 
 quest, so intent was he upon this vital business. He begged M. 
 Dupont to deliver the letter to Chancellor Livingston with his own 
 hands, and to charge Madame Dupont, if any accident happened 
 to him, to deliver it with her own hands. 
 
 The letter and Mr. Madison's despatches reached Mr. Livingston 
 in due time. M. Dupont could not do much toward " informing the 
 
LOUISIANA PURCHASED. 647 
 
 wisdom of Bonaparte." He did himself the honor of detesting 
 Bonaparte and all his works ; refused to serve under liim when office 
 was offered ; and at last, when the tyrant returned from Elba, the 
 old man, past seventy-five then, despairing of his country, declared 
 he would no longer be exposed to pass, in a day, from one master to 
 another, comme une coiirtisane ou un couvtlsan, took ship for the 
 United States, and spent the rest of his life on his son's farm in 
 Delaware. 
 
 Nor can it be said that Mr. Livingston made much impression 
 upon Bonaparte's wisdom. Bonaparte had no wisdom to inform. 
 He was fully resolved upon his scheme of colonizing Louisiana on a 
 grand scale : the ships were designated, and officers were appointed. 
 The expedition was to consist of two ships-of-the-line, " several 
 frigates," three thousand troops, and three thousand workmen. 
 Bernadotte was first thought of for governor of the colony ; but the 
 appointment finally fell to Lieutenant-General Victor, who after- 
 wards bore the ridiculous title of Due de Bellune, and survived all 
 that histrionic pageant nearly long enough to see its mimicrj^ mim- 
 icked in our own day. Mr. Livingston could make no head against 
 the infatuation of the First Consul. He wrote an "essay," of which 
 he had twenty copies printed, and extracted froni Tallej-^rand a prom- 
 ise to "give it an attentive perusal." But he could not so much as 
 prevail upon him to submit the case to his master. It would be 
 "premature," said the minister ; "for the French government has 
 determined to take possession first." Mr. Livingston felt the useless- 
 ness of all attempts to prevent the departure of the fleet. " There 
 never was, " he wrote to Mr. Madison, September 1, 1802, " a govern- 
 ment in which less could be done by negotiation than here. Thore 
 is no people, no legislature, no counsellors. One man is every thing. 
 He seldom asks advice, and never hears it unasked. His ministers 
 are mere clerks ; and his legislature and counsellors are parade 
 officers. Though the sense of every reflecting man about him is 
 against this wild expedition, no one dares to tell him so." 
 
 The whole twenty-eight volumes of the correspondence of Napo- 
 leon, recently given to the world, might be cited in proof of Mr. 
 Livingston's remarks; but the man never appears to have lived in 
 quite such a tumult of business and passion as during that year and 
 a half of "peace." In turning over the other volumes, the reader 
 hears, from first to last, the steady roll of the drum, the rattle of mus- 
 42 
 
648 LIEE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 ketry, the thunder of cannonade, the short, sharp word of command ; 
 and he marks everywhere an assumption that fighting is the chief 
 end of man, to which all other pursuits are immeasurably inferior. 
 But in these two volumes of the year X, vulgarly styled 1802, there 
 is such a rush of projects and topics demanding notice of the head 
 of the nation, that we cannot discover a gap large enough to admit 
 a modest and polite old gentleman, hard of hearing, with a request 
 that the First Consul would please to be so good as to relinquish Ips 
 Louisiana scheme, and cede all those uncounted and unknown square 
 miles to a country, which, according to Talleyrand, was of no more 
 account in general politics that Genoa. Suppose it was on the 4th 
 of May that Mr. Livingston desired a hearing. That day, in the 
 lingo of the E,evolution, which Bonaparte still employed, was called 
 Floreal 14, An X. It was a busy day, indeed, with the First Consul ; 
 for he was disposing the minds of men to view his next step toward 
 an imperial throne, without an unmanageable excess of consternation. 
 How sweetly this great histrionic genius discoursed to the Council 
 of State that morning ! " In all lands, force yields to civic qualities. 
 Bayonets fall before the priest who speaks in the name of Heaven, 
 and before the man whose learning inspires respect. I have said to 
 military men who had scruples, that a military government could 
 never prevail in France until the nation had become brutalized by 
 fifty years of ignorance. Soldiers are only the children of the citi- 
 zens. The army, it is the nation." Turn over a few leaves, and you 
 catch him scolding Bertliier for not pushing the conscription vigor- 
 ously enough. " Mecndtmr/,^' he adds, " is the first and most imjjor- 
 tant concern of the nation^ Meanwhile, we see him thanking the 
 Senate for a new proof of their confidence, in having made him 
 First Consul for ten years longer. "You judge that I owe a new 
 sacrifice to the peoj)le. I shall make it if the will of the people com- 
 mands that which your suffrage authorizes." 
 
 This new lease of absolute power brought with it a world of 
 urgent business, in the intervals of which there was nothing too 
 high for him to meditate and no detail too trifling for him to rule. 
 It was a case of one 7)iind trying to govern a country, instead of all 
 the mind in it, which alone is competent to the task. If a general 
 fights ^ duel, it is the First Consul who exiles him to that dread 
 Siberia of the French of that age, " thirty leagues from Paris." 'A 
 soldier kills himself for love : it is the First Consul who issues an 
 
LOUISIANA PURCHASED. 649 
 
 Order of the Daj' on the subject: "A soldier should know how to 
 bear up under the grief and melancholy of the passions : there is as 
 much true courage in enduring anguish of mind with constancy as 
 in standing firm under the steady tire of a battery." A young lady 
 is attentive to the poor daring an epidemic; and it is still the First 
 Consul wlio sends her twentj'- thousand francs, and a note telling 
 her what a good girl she is. 
 
 In his strong desire to accomplish the purpose of his government, 
 Mr. Livingston had recourse, like manj' otlier anxious diplomatists, 
 to Jok^ph Bonaparte. Joseph told him that his brother was his 
 own counsellor, but at the same time an affectionate brother, to 
 whom he had access at all times, and whose attention he could call 
 to any subject. He assured the American minister that his brother 
 had read with attention the essay, or memoir, upon Louisiana, which 
 Mr. Livingston had prepared. Perhaps he liad. One thing is 
 certain : the First Consul held to his purpose. The expedition was 
 delayed, but not abandoned. December 19, 1802, Victor was or- 
 dered to despatch a member of his staff to Washington to notify the 
 French minister there that the French government was about to 
 take possession of Louisiana; and February 3, 1803, there was an 
 order given (8 Correspondence, 199) showing that the expedition 
 was still under sailing-orders, and soon to depart. Livingston 
 despaired of getting New Orleans by negotiation. His earnest 
 " notes " to Talleyrand remained unnoticed. His opinion was this : 
 If we want New Orleans, we must seize it first, and negotiate after- 
 wards. To Madison he wrote in November, 1802 : Nothing can 
 now prevent the sailing of the expedition; it will be off in twenty 
 days ; two and a half millions of francs are appropriated to it For- 
 tify Natchez, strengthen all the upper posts. 
 
 All these efforts on the part of the administration to solve this 
 problem by peaceful methods were unknown to the people of the 
 United States. Kentucky saw the right of deposit denied by a 
 foolish Spanish governor, and heard rumors of the Frencli expedition, 
 which magnified it four times, making its three thousand troops and 
 three thousand workmen, " twenty thousand troops." The press 
 and stump of Kentucky, it is said, began to utter words like these : 
 *'The Mississippi is ours by the law of nature, by the authority of 
 numbers, and bj' the right of necessity. If Congress cannot give it 
 to us, we must take it ourselves. No protection, no allegiance ! " 
 
650 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 The Federalists were not backward to talce up this promising cry. 
 "The Freiich troops are ah-eady at sea," said Gouverneur Morris : 
 "their arrival should be anticipated; it is time to come to an- open 
 rupture." With all his own fine patience, the president bore in 
 silence, for a whole j'ear, the outcry of the Kentuckians and the 
 misinterpretation of the Federalists. But only a few daj's of the 
 new 3'ear, 1803, had passed before he perceived the necessity of some 
 measure which the people could know, discuss, and observe. He 
 wrote to his old friend, Monroe, January 10 : — 
 
 « 
 "I have but a moment to inform you that the fever into which 
 the Western mind is thrown by the affairs at New Orleans (denying 
 the right of deposit), stimulated hy the mercantile and generally 
 
 the Federal interest, threatens to overbear our peace I shall 
 
 to-morrow nominate you to the Senate for an extraordinary mission 
 
 to France Pray work night and day to arrange your affairs 
 
 for a temporary absence, perhaps for a long one." 
 
 Two months later Mr. Monroe was travelling post-haste from 
 Havre to Paris, charged with the president's fullest instructions, 
 authorized to give two millions of dollars, if he could do no better, for 
 the island of New Orleans alone, and empowered by Congress to pay 
 cash down on the conclusion of the bargain. X Y Z was not forgot- 
 ten. Ready money might still have a certain weight in Paris, the 
 president thought, when he recommended the appropriation. 
 
 How changed the situation in April, 1803, from the time when 
 the president stunned Mr. Monroe with the announcement of his 
 nomination I For some months, as we see so plainly in his Corre- 
 spondence, Bonaparte had been working himself up to the point of 
 breaking the peace of Amiens; fuming about Malta, about the 
 assaults of the London press, about the Count D'Artois wearing the 
 decorations of the old monarchy at a dress-parade in England, and 
 all those other silly half-preteXts which he afterwards enumerated ; 
 while urging his minister of war to take every man from the 
 villages which a merciless conscription could extort. At length, 
 February 19, 1803, there fell from his pen, while he was writing his 
 imitation-message to his sham legislature, the taunt, once so famil- 
 iar to all the world, "In England, two parties contend for power. 
 One has made peace with us, and seems decided to maintain it. The 
 
LOUISIANA PURCHASED. 651 
 
 other has svrorn implacable hate against France. "While this 
 struggle lasts, it is but prudence on oiir part to have five hundred 
 thousand men ready to defend and avenge ourselves. However the 
 intrigue in London may issue, no other people will be drawn into 
 the contest; and the government says with just pride, Aloxe 
 Englaxd cannot to-day hold her own against France ! " 
 The very next day the order went to the Louisiana expedition at 
 Dunkirk : Don't sail till further orders. George IIL was prompt 
 enough with his retort. He read Bonaparte's message about Febru- 
 ary 23; and on March 8 he sent to the House of Commons the 
 lumbering message in twenty lines, that gave Napoleon Bonaparte 
 the pretext he longed for, and began the war that ended at — Sedan. 
 The king merely acquainted his faithful Commons, that, as consider- 
 able military preparations were going on in France, England, too, 
 must begin to think of " additional measures of precaution." Bona- 
 parte continued the contest by storming at the English ambassador 
 in the Tuileries, at a Sunday reception, in the sight and hearing of 
 the whole diplomatic corps, two hundred in number. In a word, 
 both parties meant war ; and war they had, to their hearts' content. 
 
 A month passed of intensest preparation on both sides. Bona- 
 parte's plan was to invade England, — a thing of immense difficulty 
 and vast expense. He wanted monej^, and dared not press the 
 French people further at the beginning of a war. On Easter 
 Sunday, April 10, in the afternoon, after having taken conspicuous 
 part in the revived ceremonies of the occasion (Mr. Monroe being 
 still many leagues from Paris, but expected hourly), the First 
 Consul opened a conversation with two of his ministers upon 
 Louisiana.' One of these ministers, who reports the scene, was that 
 old friend of Jefferson's, Barbe-Marbois, for whom, twenty-six years 
 before, he had compiled his Notes on Virginia, — a gentleman ten 
 years resident at Philadelphia, where he married the daughter of a 
 governor of Pennsylvania. The other minister had served in 
 America under Rochambeau during the Revolutionary War. 
 
 "I know," said the First Consul, speaking with "passion and 
 vehemence, — "I know the full value of Louisiana, and I have been 
 desirous of repairing the fault of the French negotiator who aban- 
 doned it in 1763. A few lines of a treaty have restored it to me, and 
 I have scarcely recovered it when I must expect to lose it. But, if it 
 escapes from me, it shall one day cost dearer to those who oblige me 
 
652 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 to strip myself of it than to those to whom I wish to deliver it. 
 The English have successively taken from France, Canada, Cape 
 Breton, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the richest portions of 
 Asia. They shall not have the Mississippi, which they covet. I 
 have not a moment to lose in putting it out of their reach : I think 
 of ceding it to the United States. I can scarcely say that I cede it 
 to them, for it is not yet in our possession. If, however, I leave the 
 least time to our enemies, I shall only transmit an empty title to 
 those republicans whose friendship I seek. They only ask of me 
 one town in Louisiana : but I already consider the colony as entirely 
 lost ; and it appears to me, that, in the hands of this growing power, 
 it will be more useful to the policy, and even to the commerce of 
 France, than if I should attempt to keep it." 
 
 He paused to hear the opinion of the two ministers. Barbe-Mar- 
 bois said, in a long discourse, The province is as good as gone. 
 Let the Americans have it. The other said at great length, No: 
 there is still a chance of our being able to keep it ; it will be time to 
 give up so precious a possession when we must. The three contin- 
 ued to converse on the subject till late at night, and the master 
 broke up the conference without announcing his decision. The 
 ministers remained at St. Cloud. At daybreak Barbe-Marbois 
 received a summons to attend the First Consul in his cabinet. 
 Despatches had arrived from England, showing that the king and 
 ministry were entirely resolved upon war, and were pushing prepa- 
 rations with extraordinary vigor. When M. Marbois had read these, 
 Bonaparte resumed the subject of the evening's conversation : — 
 
 "Irresolution and deliberation," he said, "are no longer in reason. 
 I renounce Louisiana. It is not only New Orleans that I will cede : it 
 is tlie whole colon j^, without any reservation. I renounce it with the 
 greatest regret. To attempt obstinately to retain it would be folly. 
 I direct you to negotiate this affair with the envoys of the United 
 States. Do not even await the arrival of Mr. Monroe : have an 
 interview this very day with Mr. Livingston. But I require a great 
 deal of money for this war, and I would not like to commence it 
 with new contributions. If I should regulate my terms according 
 to the value of those vast regions to the United States, the indem- 
 nity would have no limits. I will be moderate, in consideration of 
 the necessity in which I am of making a sale ; but keep this to your- 
 self. I want fifty millions of francs, and for less than that sum I 
 
LOUISIANA PURCHASED. 653 
 
 • 
 will not treat : I would rather malce a desperate attempt to keep 
 those fine countries. To-morrow you sliall liave your full powers." 
 
 The deed was done. The rest was merely the usual cheapening 
 and chaffering that passes between buyer and seller when the com- 
 modity has no market-price. Mr. Monroe's arrival was well timed ; 
 for Mr. Livingston had lost all faith in the possibility of getting 
 New Orleans by purchase, and was unprepared even to consider a 
 proposition for buying the whole province. He evidently thought 
 that the French ministers were all liars together ; and he looked 
 upon this sudden change of tone, after so many months of neglect or 
 evasion, as a mere artifice for delay. " If Mr. Monroe agrees with 
 me," said Livingston to Talleyrand, a day or two before Monroe's 
 arrival, " we shall negotiate no further on the subject, but advise our 
 government to take possession. The times are critical ; and, though 
 I do not know what instructions Mr. Monroe may bring, I am per- 
 fectly satisfied they will require a precise and prompt notice. I am 
 fearful, from the little j)rogress I have made, that my government 
 will consider me a very indolent negotiator." Talleyrand laughed. 
 " I will give you a certificate," said he, " that you are the most im- 
 portunate one I have yet met with.'' 
 
 But Mr. Livingston soon discovered that all had really changed 
 with regard to Louisiana. On the day after Monroe's arrival, while 
 sitting at dinner with him and other guests, Livingston espied M. 
 Barb#-Marbois strolling about in his garden. During the interview 
 thalffollowed, business made progress. Marbois took the liberty of 
 telling a few diplomatic falsehoods to the American minister. 
 Instead of the " fifty millions," which, in his History of Louisiana, 
 he says Napoleon demanded, he told Mr. Livingston that the sum 
 required was one hundred millions. He represented the First Consul 
 as saying, " Well, you have charge of the treasury : make the 
 Americans give you one hundred millions, pay their own claims, and 
 take the whole country." Mr. Livingston was aghast at the magni- 
 tude of the sum. After a long conversation, Marbois dropped to 
 sixty millions ; the United States to pay its own claimants, which 
 would require twenty millions more. "It is in vain to ask such a, 
 thing," said Livingston : " it is so greatly bej'^ond our means." He 
 thought, too, that his government would be perfectly satisfied wuth 
 New Orleans and Florida, and bad no disposition to extend across 
 the river." 
 
654 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 Then it was that Mr. Monroe, fresh from Washington, and know- 
 ing the full extent of the president's wishes, knowing his aversion to 
 tlie mere proximity of the French, came upon the scene with deci- 
 sive and most happy effect. In a few days all was arranged. M. 
 Barbc-Marbois's offer was accepted. Twenty daj^s after the St. 
 Cloud conference, and eighteen days after Mr. Monroe's arrival, the 
 convention was concluded which gave imperial magnitude and com- 
 pleteness to the United States, and supplied Napoleon with fifteen 
 millions of dollars to squander upon a vain attempt to invade and 
 ravage another country. _M. Marbois relates, that, as soon as the 
 three negotiators had signed the treaties, they all rose and shook 
 hands. Mr. Livingston gave utterance to the joy and satisfaction of 
 them all. 
 
 " We have lived long," said he, " but this is the noblest work of 
 our whole lives. The treaty which we have just signed has not been 
 obtained by art nor dictated by force, and is equally advantageous to 
 the two contracting parties. It will change vast solitudes into flour- 
 ishing districts. From this day the United States take their place 
 among the powers of the first rank. The United States will re- 
 establish the maritime rights of all the world, which are now usurped 
 by a single nation. The instruments which we have just signed 
 will cause no tears to be shed : they prepare ages of happiness for 
 innumerable generations of human creatures. The Mississippi and 
 Missouri will see them succeed one another and multiply, truly worthy 
 of the regard and care of Providence, in the bosom of equality, under 
 just laws, freed from the errors of superstition and bad government." 
 
 Bonaparte was so well pleased with the bargain, that he gave M. 
 Marbois one hundred and ninety-two thousand francs of the pro- 
 ceeds. Sixty millions, he said, was a pretty good price for a province 
 of which he had not taken possesssion, and might not be able to retain 
 twenty-foun hours. He also said, " This accession of territory 
 strengthens forever the power of the United States ; and I have just 
 given to England a maritime rival that will sooner or later humble 
 her pride." Strange to relate, the British government expressed 
 approval of the cession. All the world, indeed, rejoiced or acqui- 
 esced in it, excepting alone the irreconcilable fag-end of the Feder- 
 alist jjarty, who, from the first rumor of the purchase ';o the voting 
 of the last dollar necessary to complete it, opposed the acquisition. 
 
 One of the Federalist members, Josiali Quincy of Massachusetts, 
 
 1 
 
LOUISIANA PUECHASED. 655 
 
 objected to it on grounds that were elevated and patriotic. Looking 
 into the future witli wise but only mortal forecast, he dreaded so 
 vast an increase to the territory out of which many slave-States 
 could be made. His son relates, that, during the happiest years of 
 the Era of Good Feeling under Monroe, he would say, " You and I 
 may not live to see the day ; but, before that boy is otf the stage, he 
 will see this country torn in pieces by the fierce passions that are 
 now sleeping." Both father and son lived to "see the day;" and 
 the father, in 1864, his ninety-second year and his last, must have 
 clearly seen that slavery, which vitiated all our politics, spoiled 
 every measure, and injured every man, was an evanescent thing. 
 Slaver}'' passed, but Louisiana remains. "If slavery is not wrong," 
 Mr. Lincoln .said, in that homely, vivid way of his, "nothing is 
 wrong." It was so wrong, that, while it lasted, nothing in America 
 could be quite right, except war upon it. 
 
 One consideration embarrassed the president amid the relief and 
 triumph of this peaceful solution of a problem so alarming. He, a 
 strict constructionist, had done an act unauthorized by the Consti- 
 tution. He owned and justified it thus : " The Constitution has 
 made no provision for our holding foreign territorj', still less for 
 incorporating foreign nations into our Union. The executive, in 
 seizing the fugitive occurrence which so much advances the good of 
 their country, have done an act beyond the Constitution. The legis- 
 lature, in casting behind them metaphysical subtleties, and risking 
 themselves like faithful servants, must ratify and pay for it, and 
 throw themselves on their country for doing for them unauthorized, 
 what we know they would have done for themselves had they been 
 in a situation to do it. It is the case of a guardian, investing the 
 money of his ward in purchasing an important adjacent territory; 
 and saying to him when of age, I did this for your good ; I pretend 
 to no right to bind you; you may disavow me, and I must get out 
 of the scrape as I can ; I thought it my duty to risk myself for 3'ou. 
 But we shall not be disavowed by the nation ; and their act of indem- 
 nity will confirm and not weaken the Constitution, by more strongly 
 marking out its lines." He proposed that the case should be met 
 by an additional article to the Constitution. It is to be regretted 
 that this was not done ; for, let us travel as far away as we will from 
 the strict JefFersonian rule, to strict construction we must come 
 back at last, if it takes a century of heroic struggle to reach it. 
 
656 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 It was like Jefferson, when he had won Louisiana, to think first 
 of offering the governorship to Lafayette. It had to remain a 
 thought only. Upon re-considering the situation, he deemed it best 
 not to gratify a sentiment by an act which might be construed as a 
 reflection upon the seller. Andrew Jackson, who was then getting 
 tired of serving as judge of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, was 
 strongly urged for the place; and because he had been urged, and 
 because he would have liked the appointment, he refrained from call- 
 ing upon the president when he was in Washington in April, 1804. 
 So I gathered in Nashville from a yellow and musty letter of the 
 learned judge, — which was, perhaps, the worst-spelled and most 
 ungrammatical letter a judge of a supreme court ever wrote. He 
 said, that, if he should call upon the president, it would be regarded 
 as " the act of a courteor ; " and, therefore, he " traviled on, enjoying 
 his own feelings." He confessed, too, that the governor of Louisi- 
 ana ought to be acquainted with the French language. Peojile can 
 forgive bad spelling when it expresses sentiments so honorable ; and 
 happy the president when the expectants of ofiice behave in so con- 
 siderate a manner. 
 
CHAPTEE LXV. 
 
 DOWNFALL OF AARON BURR. 
 
 Not long after Jefferson had entered into possession of Louisiana, 
 rumors reached him that Aaron Burr, for many years his political 
 ally, and recently his associate in the government, was rousing the 
 western country to wrest the province from the United States, and 
 annex it to some vaguely imagined empire of Mexico. Burr's 
 scheme need not detain us here. It is only as a curious illustration 
 of the party ferocity of that time that I recall attention to it for a 
 moment. In recent times we have had nothing resemhling the 
 blind, malignant fury of party passion which raged in the breasts 
 of men, otherwise reasonable, during the decline of the Federalists. 
 As that party grew smaller, it seemed as if the whole sum of bitter- 
 ness which had been diffused in the brimming cup of 1800, remained 
 in the lees and dregs at the bottom of the vesseL Jefferson did 
 not exaggerate when, on sending his nephew to school at Phila- 
 delphia, during the second term of his presidency, he told him that 
 the more furious Federalists were little more sane than the patients 
 of Bedlam, who needed medical more than moral counsel. 
 / " Be a listener only," he continued. '•' Keep within yourself, and 
 ,endeavor to establish with yourself the habit of silence, especially on 
 ''politics. In the fevered state of our country no good can ever result 
 from any attempt td set one of these fiery zealots to rights, either in 
 fact or principle. Thej' are determined as to the facts they will 
 believe, and the opinions on which they will act. Get by them, 
 therefore, as you would by an angry bull : it is not for a man of 
 sense to dispute the road with such an animal. You will be more 
 exposed than others to have these animals shaking their horns at 
 you because of the relation in which you stand to me. Full of 
 political venom, and willing to see me and to hate me as a chief in the 
 42 657 
 
658 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 antagonist party, your presence will be to them what the vomit-grass 
 is to the sick dog, a nostrum for producing ejaculation. Look upon 
 them exactly with that eye, and pity them as objects to whom you 
 can administer only occasional ease." 
 
 Persons familiar with the politics of that period will recognize the 
 truth of this picture. Jefferson might well place it among the first 
 objects of his administration to allay the fury of a party spirit; for at 
 that time the bloody code of the duellist was still despotic in politi- 
 cal circles, and political estrangements were only too apt to result in 
 tragedies that desolated families and appalled society. Duels more 
 groundless, and, I may say, more devilish, than some which took 
 place in the United States during the first few years of the present 
 century, have seldom occurred out of Ireland. Consider, for example, 
 the incredible ferocity of the duel between De Witt Clinton and 
 John Swartwout in 1802, when Swartwout, after the fifth exchange 
 of shots, and while the surgeon was extracting from his leg the 
 second ball, stood firmly at his post, and demanded a written apology 
 or another fire. 
 
 Less known, but perhaps more remarkable, was the duel which 
 occurred on the same spot between the eldest son of Alexander Ham- 
 ilton and George Eacker. I have often thought, that, among the 
 many reasons which induced Alexander Hamilton to submit to the 
 barbarous custom of duelling, was the very fact, that his own son 
 had recently done so, and in circumstances similar to those of his 
 own fatal encounter. Yov although the quarrel between Philip 
 Hamilton and his antagonist appeared to originate in a common 
 theatre brawl, yet, in reality, such was not the case : the two young 
 men belonged to opposite political parties, and their dispute origi- 
 nated in hostile political feeling. 
 
 On Friday evening, November 21, 1801, a play was performed 
 in the only theatre then existing in the city of Kew York. In 
 one of the stage boxes, with a party of friends, sat Mr. George I. 
 Eacker, a young lawyer of some note in the town, a member of the 
 Republican party, then in the first year of its possession of the 
 national government. He was twenty-seven years of age. On the 
 Fourth of July preceding he had delivered the oration at the Demo- 
 cratic celebration of the day, in the course of which he had probably 
 spoken of the Federal magnates with the freedom usual on such 
 OCcasioiK at that period. Mr. Eacker was a perfectly respectable 
 
DOWNFALL OF AAEON BURR. 659 
 
 and honorable gentleman ; certainly he was entitled to be treated 
 with respect in public by his juniors. In the course of the evening, 
 he heard loud conversation behind him, accompanied with derisive 
 laughter; and, upon looking round, he observed that it came from 
 two well-known young men, Philip Hamilton and a Mr. Price. It 
 was evident to Mr. Eacker that these young gentlemen were talking 
 about liini, and laughing at him. Philip Hamilton, at this time, 
 was twenty years of age, a recent graduate from Columbia College, 
 and just entering upon the study of the law. Price, the son of a 
 respectable gentleman of the city, was somewhat noted for his disso- 
 lute habits and roystering ways. 
 
 Mr. Eacker at first took no notice of their behavior. At the end 
 of the play, while the audience were waiting for the after-piece to 
 begin, the two merr}^ young blades crowded into the box occupied 
 by Eacker and his friends, where they at once began to make sarcas- 
 tic remarks upon the Fourth of July oration before alluded to, and 
 it was but too evident that their observations were intended to be 
 heard by the person who was the subject of them. Backer's patience 
 giving way, he rose from his seat for the purpose, as he said, of 
 remonstrating with the young men. As he stepped into the lobby, 
 and at a moment when his back was turned toward his assailants, 
 he exclaimed, speaking to himself, — 
 
 " It is too abominable to be publicly insulted by a set of d — d 
 rascals." 
 
 Both men instantly asked, "Whom do you call d — d rascals ? " 
 
 Mr. Eacker, wishing to avoid a disturbance in so public a place, 
 said to the two young scapegraces, — 
 
 " I live at No. 50, Wall Street, where I am always to be found." 
 
 " Your place of residence," said young Hamilton, " has nothing 
 to do with it," 
 
 Upon which the young men rushed at one another, or, at least, they 
 appeared to be about to do so, when one of their friends got between 
 them, and compelled them to keep the peace. Eacker urged his 
 assailants to make less noise, and proposed that they should go to a 
 certain tavern near by, where they could discuss the matter more 
 conveniently. To the tavern they went ; and on the way they con- 
 tinued to converse in a hostile tone. When they reached the tavern, 
 both the young men insisted upon Mr. Eacker's naming the individ- 
 ual to whom he had applied the word rascal, 
 
660 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 " Did you come into the box on purpose to insult me ? " Eacker 
 demanded. 
 
 "That is nothing to the purpose," replied one of the young men. 
 " We insist upon your particularizing the person you meant to dis- 
 tinguish by the appellation of rascal." 
 
 Mr. Eacker again asked : "Did you mean to insult me? " 
 
 " We insist upon a direct answer/' repeated the angry youths. 
 
 "Well, then," said Eacker, justly indignant at their conduct, 
 " you are both rascals." 
 
 Upon this the young men, who must have been greatly under the 
 influence of drink, went roaring out of the tavern into the street. 
 
 "Gentlemen," said Eacker, "you had better make less noise: I 
 shall expect to hear from you." 
 
 « That you shall," said they. 
 
 Mr. Eacker immediately returned to his box in the tlieatre. A 
 few minutes after, he received the briefest possible note from Mr. 
 Price, challenging him to mortal combat. Before the evening closed, 
 a challenge reached him also from young Hamilton. Eacker replied 
 to the person who brought the last note, that he had atready received 
 a message from Mr. Price, which he had accepted, and was therefore 
 " engaged to him." After fulfilling that engagement, he added, he 
 should be jirepared to receive a commnnication from Mr. Hamilton. 
 
 On Sunday afternoon, between twelve and one o'clock, at the usual 
 duelling-ground on the shores of the Hudson, Eacker and Price met, 
 accompanied by their seconds. They exchanged shots three times, 
 without doing one another any harm, when the seconds interposed, 
 and advised them to make up their quarrel. Both the men, however, 
 insisted on a fourth shot, agreeing that afterwards they would shake 
 hands and be friends. They fired a fourth time without effect ; 
 M'hereupon the jovial Price observed, " Eacker is such a lath of a 
 fellow, that I might shoot all day to no purpose." 
 
 Amid the laughter occasioned by this lively sally, the antagonists 
 fulfilled their promise by shaking hands, and both parties returned 
 to New York. Instantly on the arrival of Eacker in the city, he 
 sent word to Philip Hamilton's friend, that, having disposed of Mr. 
 Price, he was now ready to receive a communication from Mr. Ham- 
 ilton, which could be transmitted to the friend whom he named. 
 The two seconds met. They had a long conversation together, both 
 of them endeavoring to hit upon some expedient for accommodating 
 
DOWNFALL OP AAEON BUEK. 661 
 
 the absurd difficulty. There was a great deal of running to and fro 
 that afternoon and evening, and many long consultations with those 
 who were learned in the art of duelling. Young Hamilton knew 
 well that he had been in the wrong, and jet, after the events at 
 Hoboken that afternoon, had not the courage to say so; and, consid- 
 ering the state of public feeling at that time, such a confession would 
 probably have blasted his prospects for life. All that he could be 
 persuaded to do was, to send a message to Backer, " requiring an 
 explanation of the expressions which he had made use of to Mr. 
 Hamilton at the theatre on Friday night." 
 
 The gentleman who conveyed this ridiculous message said, that, if 
 Mr. Eacker desired to consult his friends before giving an answer, he 
 would retire for a short time to enable him to do so. Mr. Eacker 
 accepted the proposal, and asked for fifteen minutes. The messenger 
 returning at the end of that time, Eacker at first endeavored to give 
 his answer. verball}'-, but, after some hesitation, took from his pocket 
 a written paper, which he read as follows : — 
 
 " The expressions I made use of towards Mr. Hamilton at the 
 theatre on Friday night last were produced by his conduct on that 
 occasion : I thought them applicable then, and I think so still." 
 
 This closed the door to an accommodation, and the meeting was 
 appointed for Monday. Young Hamilton being still convinced (as 
 his friends afterwards avowed and published) that he had been in 
 the wrong, determined to receive the fire of his antagonist, and then 
 discharge his pistol in the air, — precisely as his father resolved to do 
 three years after, and with precisely the same results. The men 
 were placed. The signal was given. Mr. Eacker fired, and inflicted 
 a mortal wound. Young Hamilton could not carry out his inten- 
 tion, for the shock of his wound discharged his pistol before he could 
 raise it into the air. The wounded youth was immediately rowed 
 across the river, and taken to a house near the shore, to which his 
 parents and friends were speedily summoned. It appeared that the 
 ball had entered the right side just above the hip, passed completely 
 through the body, and lodged in the left arm. There is a letter in 
 the New York Historical Magazine, written by one of his young 
 friends a day or two after the event, which contains an affecting 
 description of the scene round his bed : — 
 
662 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 " All the physicians in town were called for, and the news spread 
 like a conflagration. At the theatre I was informed of it about nine 
 o'clock Monday evening. I immediately ran to the house near the 
 State's prison, from whence I was told they dare not remove him. 
 Pi-cture to yourself the emotions wliich must have assailed me on my 
 arrival at his room, to which I was admitted as his old college class- 
 mate ! On a bed without curtains lay poor Phil, pale and languid, 
 his rolling, distorted eyeballs darting forth the flashes of delirium. 
 On one side of him, on the same bed, lay his agonized father ; on the 
 other, his distracted niotlier; around him numerous relatives and 
 friends, weeping and fixed in sorrow. Blanched with astonishment 
 and aifright was the countenance, which, a few minutes before, was 
 illumined by the smile of merriment. I could continue in the room 
 but a very short time. Returning home, I quickened my pace 
 almost unconsciously, hoping to escape the image as well as the 
 reality of what I had witnessed." 
 
 Strange coincidence ! Three years later, near the same place, 
 surrounded by nearly the same company, lay the father of this ill- 
 starred youth, dying from a similar wound, received in a similar 
 encounter, on the same spot ! The young man lingered through the 
 night in great agony, and died about five o'clock on the following 
 morning. His father was so overcome by his grief, at the funeral, 
 that he had to be supported to the grave between two of his friends. 
 
 The hapless youth, whose life was thus suddenly extinguished, 
 appears to have been chiefly noted for the gayety of his disposition, 
 which made him a favorite with his young friends. It was thought 
 a fine thing then for a young man to be dissolute. People foolishly 
 regarded it as a proof of spirit; and, consequently, few thought the .^ 
 less of '• Phil Plamilton " for being " a gay boy about town." This • 
 is another proof that the world is both wiser and better than it was \ 
 sixty years ago. We now know that dissipation in a young man is ' 
 not an indication of " spirit," but an absolute proof of the want of it. 
 Dull, indeed, must be the youth who needs artificial aid to gayety 
 and merriment. 
 
 The standing of Aaron Burr in the Republican party was 
 destroyed many months before his duel with General Hamilton, and 
 it was destroyed by calumny. True it is that the man had no right 
 to a place in the party at all 5 for his political convictions, if he had 
 
DOWNFALL OF AAEON BUER. 663 
 
 any, and the natural bias of his mind, were anti-Republican. Nev- 
 ertheless, the specific charge that destroyed hina was false. The 
 charge was, that, during the existence of the tie in 1801, he had 
 intrigued with the Federalists to be elected to the first place in the 
 government, instead of the second. This was not only morally 
 improbable, but physically impossible ; but the accusation sufficed, 
 in the peculiar circumstances of the time and place, to deprive him 
 of the confidence of his party. 
 
 In January, 1804, the year of the presidential election, and six 
 months before the duel, he sought an interview with Mr. Jefferson, 
 and conversed with him at great length upon his own position. He 
 frankly told the president, that, in his opinion, it would be for the 
 interests of the Republican party that he should not attempt to secure 
 a renomination to the vice-presidency. It would divide the party, he- 
 thought ; but, if he were to retire voluntarily, it would be said that 
 he shrunk from the public condemnation. 
 
 " My enemies," said he, " are using j^our name to destroy me ; 
 and something is necessary from you to prevent it, and deprive them 
 of that weapon, — some mark of favor from you, which will declare 
 to the world that I retire with your confidence." 
 
 Mr. Jefferson replied, that as he had never interfered with the 
 election of 1800, nor with the choice of candidates, so in the election 
 then coming on, he was observing the same line of conduct : he held 
 no councils with anybody respecting it, nor suffered any one to speak 
 to him on the subject, as he believed it to be his duty to leave him- 
 self to the free discussion of the public. 
 
 " I do not," continued the president, " at this moment know, nor 
 have ever heard, who were to be proposed as candidates for the pub- 
 lic choice, except so far as can be gathered from the newspapers." 
 
 Mr. Jefferson did not respond favorably to Colonel Burr's request 
 to be appointed to one of the great offices in the president's gift. 
 Politics make strange bedfellows. Without liking or ever impli- 
 citly trusting Colonel Burr, he had been connected with him for 
 many years by party ties ; and Burr had certainly contributed mate- 
 rially to the success of the Republican party in 1800. He had lived 
 on terms of perfect civility with the vice-president, but no more. 
 On this occasion, he distinctly enough declined to nominate Burr to 
 the office which, doubtless, both of them had in their minds at the time, 
 — that of minister to France. Colonel Burr left the matter with 
 
664 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 the president for further consideration. The subject, however, was 
 never renewed between them. 
 
 Burr pursued his destiny. Defeated in a contest for the gover- 
 norship of New York, he challenged to mortal combat his old rival 
 at the bar and constant opponent in politics, Alexander Hamilton, 
 whom he must have regarded as the chief cause of his late failure. 
 That fatal duel on the 11th of July, 1804, made him a fugitive and 
 a wanderer on the face of the earth. He returned, however, to 
 Washington, where he completed with credit his term of service as 
 vice-president, and then entered upon that career of western adven- 
 ture and conspiracy which ended in his total ruin. 
 
 In the spring of 1806, before taking the irretrievable step, being 
 in the city of Washington, he again applied to the president for an 
 a2")pointment. He claimed, and justly claimed, that he had assisted 
 to place the present administration in power. He added, that he 
 could do Mr. Jefferson much harm, but he wished to be on different 
 grounds with him. He was now disengaged from all particular 
 business, was willing to engage in something, and should be in 
 town some daj^s, if the president should have any thing to propose 
 to him. 
 
 The president had nothing to propose to him. Mr. Jefferson 
 replied, — 
 
 " I have always been sensible that you possessed talents which 
 might be employed greatly to the advantage of the public ; and, as 
 to myself, I have a confidence, that, if you were employed, you would 
 use your talents for the public good. But you must be sensible that 
 the public have withdrawn their confidence from you; and in a gov- 
 ernment like ours it is necessary to embrace in its administration 
 as great a mass of public confidence as possible, by employing those 
 who have a character with the public of their own, and not merely 
 a secondary one through the executive." 
 
 " If we believe a few newspapers," said Burr, '^ it may be sup- 
 posed that I have lost the public confidence ; but you know how 
 easy it is to engage newspapers in any thing." 
 
 " I do not refer," rejoined the president, " to that kind of evidence 
 of your having lost the public confidence, but to the late presiden- 
 tial election, when, though in possession of the office of vice-presi- 
 dent, there was not a single voice heard for your retaining it. As 
 
DOWNFALL OF AAEON BUBK. 665 
 
 to any harm you can do me, I know no cause why you should 
 desire it ; hut, at the same time, I fear no injury which any man 
 can do me. I have never done a single act, or been concerned in 
 any transaction, which I fear to have fully laid open, or which could 
 do me any hurt if truly stated." 
 
 Burr remained in Washington for a month after this interview, 
 during which he dined with the president ; and, when he was about 
 to depart, he called to take leave. Soon after he directed his course 
 westward, and was seen in Washington no more. 
 
 A year passed. The disappearance from the scene of his former 
 activity of so remarkable a person as Colonel Burr was, of itself, 
 provocative of curiosity. But in September, 1806, the president 
 began to receive intimations of strange and suspicious movements 
 in the western country, in which Burr seemed to be the chief per- 
 son concerned. He deemed it best to send to the Ohio George 
 Graham, a confidential clerk in the War-Office, who was directed to 
 ascertain the nature and object of these movements. Graham 
 directed his course to Blennerhassett Island, where a few conversa- 
 tions witli the credulous lord of the isle made him acquainted with 
 the general purport of the scheme. Meanwhile Mr. Jefferson 
 received from General Wilkinson unquestionable proofs that an 
 irregular and lawless project of some kind was on foot, of which 
 Aaron Burr was the ruling spirit. A short proclamation shattered 
 the scheme in an instant, and made the adventurer a fugitive in the 
 Alabama forests. He was arrested, and brought to Eichmond for 
 trial. 
 
 And now the Federalists gave another proof of what I have 
 before deliberately asserted, that, of all the parties that ever rose to 
 power in a free country, this one, composed chiefly of the educated 
 portion of the people, was the most destitute of political morality. 
 What could Aaron Burr have done against the Federalists that he 
 had not done ? He had actively opposed them from the first year 
 of their existence as a party. He had been one of the principal 
 means of their expulsion from power. He had resisted their over- 
 tures to reconciliation. He had slain their leader. And now he had 
 engaged in a scheme, which, though it might have stopped short of 
 treason, was known to be impi-oper and unlawful. Nevertheless, no 
 sooner had he reached Richmond a prisoner, than the Federalists 
 
66Q LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 took liim up, aifected to sympathize with him as a martyr, extolled, 
 caressed, and feted him. John Marshall, chief justice of the 
 Suj)reme Court of the United States, — even he, a man punctili- 
 ously just when politics were not involved, accepted an invitation 
 to a dinner given in honor of Aaron Burr, and which he was 
 expressly informed Aaron Burr was to attend. The judge 
 dined in comjjany with the man whom he knew he was about to 
 try on a capital charge. Federalists in Kew York made a pretence 
 of retaining a briefless barrister, named Washington Irving, himself 
 a Federalist, who went to Richmond, ostensiblj^ to take part in the 
 trial, but really to employ in behalf of the prisoner the most ele- 
 gant pen of America. The long list of able advocates who assisted 
 Burr did so quite as much for party as for professional reasons. 
 
 Luthur Martin, then the head of the Maryland bar, made no 
 secret that the motive which actuated him was political. This 
 strange, and now almost forgotten character, was born in New Jer- 
 sey, in 1744 ; and, after graduating at Princeton, wandered off to 
 Maryland, where he tauglit school, studied law, and was admitted to 
 practice. Very early in his career' he became a man of distinction ; 
 for he served in Congress during the Revolutionary War ; and by 
 the time he was forty years of age, he was, beyond all comparison, 
 the head of the bar in the State of Maryland. At a time when 
 learning was the prime requisite for success at the bar, and the' 
 quality held in most respect both by the profession and the people, 
 he was admitted to be the most learned of lawyers. At what period 
 of his life he fell under the slavery of drink, no one has recorded. 
 But we know that before he was fifty years of age the habit was 
 fixed, and had made serious depredations on his character and 
 talents. 
 
 When young Roger Taney, in 1795, came up to Annapolis to 
 study law, and visited the court where the three judges still wore 
 long scarlet cloaks, and sat in a solemn row in three great chairs on 
 a lofty platform, he was all curiosity to see the great Luther Martin, 
 then near the height of his reputation. Great was the disappoint- 
 ment of the youth. He saw before him a coarse-looking, dirty, and 
 ill-dressed man, who had come into court under the influence of 
 liquoi". His attire was a distressing mixture of the gay and the 
 unclean. He wore ruffles at his wrists, bordered with costlj' lace, 
 although they had long ago gone out of fashion ; and those ruffles, 
 
DOWNFALL OF AARON BURR. .667 
 
 conspicuously broad, were rumpled and dirty. His voice, always 
 harsh, cracked when he was much excited ; his arguments were full 
 of digressions ; and, as he indulged in constant repetition, his 
 speeches were usually very long. He was really a very good scholar, 
 and wrote with classical correctness ; but he seemed to take a bar- 
 barous pleasure in using such words as cotch for caught, and sot for 
 sat. At a table, too, his manners were coarse and disgusting. 
 
 With all these obvious and offensive faults, which constantly grew 
 upon him, he held his place at the head of his profession for at 
 least twenty years. Tiie late Chief-justice Taney explains this 
 mystery : — 
 
 " He was a profound lawyer. He never missed the strong points 
 of his case ; and, although much might have been generally better 
 omitted, everybody who listened to him would agree that nothing 
 could be added. Pie had an iron memory, and forgot nothing that 
 he had read ; and he had read a great deal on every branch of 
 law, and took pleasure in showing it when his case did not require 
 it. Many years after I came to the bar, when I was engaged in an 
 important case on the same side with Mr. Shaaff, and Mr. Martin 
 was opposed to us, Mr. Shaaff and myself went over the case to- 
 gether very carefully ; and when we had done with the examination, 
 he said, ' I think the case is with us, and I see nothing in it to be 
 afraid of; hut I am always afraid of Martin.^ Yet Mr. Shaaff 
 ranked then with the foremost men in Maryland." 
 
 The greatest of Luther Martin's professional triumphs was at 
 the trial of Judge Chase of the Supreme Court, in 1805, at Wash- 
 ington. Judge Chase was a violent, arrogant man, who, it was 
 charged, had allowed his prejudices as a politician to influence his 
 decisions as a judge. The impeachment created universal interest, 
 and attracted a great multitude of people from all parts of the 
 country. Aai'ou Burr, the vice-president, presided ; and the Sen- 
 ate Chamber was fitted up in grand style, with places for the for- 
 eign ambassadors, members of the House of Representatives, and 
 other spectators. The senators sat in a great semicircle on each 
 side of the vice-president, and the temporary galleries were draped 
 with blue cloth ; the whole presenting a scene that must have been 
 striking in the extreme. A special interest was imparted to the 
 
668 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 trial by the situation of Colonel Burr. His duel with Hamilton 
 had occurred a few months before ; two indictments for murder 
 were hanging over his head ; and he had been for months a fugitive 
 from justice. But he bore himself on this occasion with a coolness 
 and dignity that excited universal admiration. He conducted the 
 trial, as an editor of the day remarked, "with the dignity and 
 impartiality of an angel, but with the rigor of a devil." 
 
 The working man of this trial, he whose exertions decided its 
 issue, was Luther Martin. He was not only a friend and fellow- 
 citizen of Judge Chase ; but he sympathized with him in politics 
 to the uttermost. Martin was an infuriate Federalist, or, as Jeffer- 
 son called him, " a Federal bull-dog ; " and he threw himself into 
 the defence with a mixture of coolness and impetuosity, of passion- 
 ate ardor and quiet dexterity, altogether peculiar to himself. Every 
 specification he sifted to the bottom, and exhausted every argument 
 tending to refute it. For four weeks, during which the trial lasted, 
 he was always in his place, prompt, indefatigable, vigilant. It 
 was unquestionably he who secured the judge's acquittal. Many 
 of the charges were distinctly proved ; but on no one of them was 
 he condemned by a two-thirds vote, which the laws require. He 
 was at once convicted and acquitted. 
 
 Two years after Aaron Burr himself was on trial at Richmond. 
 He remembered the great services of Luther Martin, and secured 
 his assistance for his own defence. Into this service Martin 
 entered with a zeal due more to his hatred of Jefferson than to 
 his love of Burr; and for six months he abandoned all his other 
 cases, and devoted himself — heart, soul, and purse — to the deliv- 
 erance of his client. He became one of Burr's sureties ; and took 
 the opportunity to declare, in open court, that he was glad to have 
 this opportunity to give a public proof of his confidence in Colonel 
 Burr's honor, and of his conviction that he was an innocent man. 
 The vehemence of some of his harangues at that trial, as well as 
 their indecency, was most remarkable. On one occasion he said 
 that the president and his cabinet were " bloodhounds, hunting Burr 
 with a keen and savage thirst for blood." His fury against Jeffer- 
 son was such as to excite the suspicion in the president's mind 
 that he was one of Burr's accomplices. The truth is, however, 
 that strong drink tends to destroy all soundness and moderation of 
 judgment; and at this time there never was a waking hour when he 
 was not under the influence of it. 
 
DOWNFALL OF AAEON BTJER. 669 
 
 It was this unconcealed political character of the trial, as well as 
 the great number and great ability of the counsel for the defence, 
 that induced the president to take that active part in directing 
 the trial which surprises to this day the readers of his correspond- 
 ence. It so happened, too, that George Hay, the attorney-general 
 of Virginia, who conducted the prosecution, was very far from being 
 the peer of the great lawyers on tile other side. It was at Jeffer- 
 son's own request that the brilliant William Wirt lent to the 
 l^rosecutiou the aid of his respectable character and effective decla- 
 mation. Almost daily Jefferson assisted the prosecution by letters 
 to the attorney-general. It had been more dignified, perhaps, and 
 more proper, if he had held himself aloof from all such interference. 
 Nothing, however, can be more evident than that the object T^hich 
 Martin and his colleagues had nearest their hearts was, not to save 
 Aaron Burr, but to damn Thomas Jefferson; and human beings 
 are so constituted, that they do not usually submit to be destroyed 
 without an effort to prevent it. Hence he gave to his friend, 
 George Hay, the benefit of his legal knowledge. He was also con- 
 vinced that the mind of the chief justice was so warped by political 
 prejudice, that he was disqualified from giving impartial decisions. 
 The judge's dining with Burr before the trial was an act which 
 the judge himself afterward regretted. Nor can I believe that 
 John Marshall, in his later years, would have sustained an opinion 
 which he threw out in the course of this trial, that the president 
 co.uld himself be compelled to appear in the court as a witness. 
 Jefferson's reply to this appears unanswerable. 
 
 "As to our personal attendance at Richmond," he wrote, "I am 
 persuaded the Court is sensible that paramount duties to the nation, 
 at large control the obligation of compliance with their summons in 
 this case, as they would, should we receive a similar one to attend 
 the trials of Blennerhasset and others in the Mississippi territory, 
 those instituted in St. Louis and other places on the western waters, 
 or at any place other than the seat of government. To comply 
 with such calls would leave the nation without an executive branch, 
 whose agency, nevertheless, is understood to be so constantly neces- 
 sary, that it is the sole branch which the Constitution requires to 
 be always in function." 
 
670 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 Tlie course of public events produced a decisive commentary on 
 this passage of the president's letter. Two days after it was 
 written occurred the attack upon the American frigate Chesapeake 
 in Chesapeake Bay by an English vessel of war, which roused the 
 indignation of the whole country to a degree never surpassed 
 before or since. The mere absence of the president from the seat 
 of government at that moment might have precipitated the two 
 countries into war, for which an immense majority of the people 
 were prepared. 
 
 Burr was acquitted on technical grounds. He left the court, 
 however, covered with an opprobrium which still clings to his name. 
 The report of the trial satisfied every reasonable mind, that, in 
 arresting the scheme and the schemer, the president had done an 
 act which he could not have omitted without grievous fault. The 
 conduct of the Federalists, during the trial of Burr, would have 
 filled up the measure of their ruin, if a new issue had not 
 arisen that withdrew public attention from it, and gave to the 
 combative side of human nature a certain prominence that is 
 highly favorable to reactionary ideas. The region of the brain 
 where Toryism has its seat lies chiefly behind the ears. 
 
CHAPTER LXVI. 
 
 THE EMBARGO. 
 
 Jefferson's constitutional aversion to war, and his known prefer- 
 ence for peaceful methods of proceeding, gave to the anti-Christians 
 of his day a fruitful theme of vituperation. It is amusing to read 
 the expressions of scorn to which eminent churchmen gave utterance, 
 when they spoke of Jeiferson's principle of exhausting every expe- 
 dient known to the diplomatist's art before*entertaining the thought 
 of war. " There is just now," wrote Gouverneur Morris, wlien he 
 heard of Monroe's appointment, " so much philosojihy among our 
 rulers, that we must not be surprised at the charge of pusillanimity. 
 And our people have so much of the mercantile spirit, that, if otlier 
 nations will keep their hands out of our pockets, it will be no trifling 
 insult that will rouse us. Indeed, it is the fashion to say, that, when 
 injured, it is more honorable to wait in patience the uncertain issue 
 of negotiation than promptly to do ourselves right by an act of hos- 
 tility." These are light words; but the spirit which they breathe 
 lias desolated many and many a fair province, and shrouded in hope- 
 less gloom millions upon millions of homes. All that hideous, 
 groundless contest between Bonaparte and George III., which added 
 sensibly to the burden of every honest family tln^oughout the whole 
 extent of Christendom ; which did harm to every man, and good to 
 no man, — all sprang from the spirit which the jovial Morris 
 expressed in this gay letter to John Parish. 
 
 In the effort to keep the United States out of that contest, Jeffer- 
 son gave a brief access of strength to the anti-Christian party. The 
 outrages of the English captains were, indeed, most hard to bear; 
 and the question whetlier or not they ought to be borne, was one 
 upon which the wisest men might well differ. All the Old Adam, 
 and some of the ^e\v, rises and swells within us when we read, even 
 
 671 
 
672 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 at the distance of seventy _years, of the Leander firing upon a coast- 
 ing vessel near Sandy Hook, and killing one of her crew. The 
 president felt both the wrong and the indignity of the act. He 
 ordered the Leander and her two companions out of the waters of 
 the United States. He called upon the civil and military officers to 
 arrest the offending captain if found within their jurisdiction. He 
 warned all persons against giving aid to the vessels of the squadron. 
 But he did something more difficult than such acts' as these. ^Vhen 
 the treaty reached his hands, early in 1807, which Monroe and 
 Pinckney, after a long and difficult negotiation, had concluded with 
 England, discovering that it contained no renunciation of the im- 
 pressment claim, and no adequate concession of the rights of neutrals, 
 he would not submit it to the Senate, but sent it back to London for 
 revision, — to the sore mortification of Monroe. The more mon- 
 strous outrage upon the Chesapeake followed, rousing the whole 
 people to a degree seldom equalled since America was settled. The 
 English ship Leopard j^oured broadsides into the unprepared and 
 unsuspecting Chesapeake within hearing of the post we now call 
 Eortress Monroe, killed three men, wounded eighteen, and carried 
 away four sailors charged with desertion from the British navj^, — 
 three Americans and one Englishman. The Englishman was hanged ; 
 and the three Americans were pardoned, on condition of returning 
 to service. 
 
 Parties ceased to exist. " I had only to open my hand," wrote 
 Jefferson once, '' and let havoc loose." Only a president with such a 
 deep hold upon the confidence of the people could have kept the 
 peace ; nor could any but a Jefferson have done it, because, at such 
 a time, the chief of the state is apt- to be himself possessed by the 
 universal feeling. He is a fellow-citizen, as well as president. 
 But this benignant spirit remained true to itself. " If ever," he 
 wrote in 1812, "I was gratified with the possession of power and of 
 the confidence of those who had intrusted me with it, it was on that 
 occasion when I was enabled to use both for the prevention of war 
 toward which the torrent of passion was directed almost irresistibly, 
 and when not another person in the United States less supported by 
 autliority and favor could have resisted it." Nor was his conduct 
 wanting in " spirit." He instantly sent a frigate to England with 
 a demand for reparation. He for'bade the naval vessels of Great 
 Britain all access to the harbors of the United States, except those 
 
THE EMBARGO. 678 
 
 in distress and those bearing despatches. Two thousand militia were 
 jjosted on the coast to prevent British ships from obtaining supplies. 
 Every vessel in the navy was made ready for active service, and 
 every px'eparation for war within the compass of the administration 
 was pushed forward with vigor. He privately notified members of 
 Congress to be ready to respond to his summons on the instant of 
 the frigate's return from England. Decatur, commanding at Norfolk, 
 was ordered to attack with all his force if the British fleet, anchored 
 in the outer bay, should attempt to enter the inner. And the far- 
 resounding noise of all these proceedings called home from every 
 sea the merchant vessels of the United States. 
 
 He expected war, and meant, if it could not be prevented honora- 
 bl}", to make the most of it. He intended, as we see by his confi- 
 dential letters to Madison, to swoop upon England's commerce, and 
 to avail himself of the occasion to bring Spain to terms. Your 
 peaceable gentlemen, if you absolutely force them to a fight, some- 
 times lay about them in an unexpected manner. Thus, we find the 
 president, on the cool summit of Monticello, in August, 1807, writ- 
 ing upon the Spanish imbroglio to Mr. Madison: "As soon as we 
 have all the proofs of the Western intrigues, let us make a remon- 
 strance, and demand of satisfaction ; and, if Congress approves, we 
 may in the same instant make reprisals on the Floridas, until we get 
 satisfaction for that and for spoliations, and a settlement of bound- 
 ary. I had rather have war against Spain than not, if we go to 
 war against England. Our Southern defensive force can take the 
 Eloridas, volunteers for a Mexican army will flock to our standard, 
 and rich pabulum will be offered to our privateers in the plunder of 
 their commerce and coasts. Probably Cuba would add itself to our 
 confederation." It is evident that he intended to make this war pay 
 expenses, and to come out of it with troublesome neighbors removed 
 fartlier off. All his letters of that summer show the two trains of 
 thouglit: First, let us have no war, if we can properly avoid it; 
 secondly, if we must have war, the conflict could not come at a 
 better time than when England has a Bonaparte upon her hands, 
 and we have a Spain to settle with. 
 
 Partial repai'ation was made for the outrage upon the Chesapeake, 
 
 and formal '•' regrets " were expressed that it should have occurred ; 
 
 but the claim to board American vessels and carry off" deserters was 
 
 re-affirmed by royal proclamation. No American ship was safe from 
 
 43 
 
674 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 violation, no American sailor was safe from impressment. In meet- 
 ing this new aspect of the case, Jefferson took another leaf from 
 Franklin's book. In the Stamp- Act times, before the Revolution, 
 Dr. Franklin was always an advocate for the peaceful remedy of 
 non-intercourse ; and this had been a favorite idea of Jefferson's 
 when he was secretary of state. In 1793, when the allied kings 
 tried to starve France into an acceptance of the Bourbons by exclud- 
 ing supplies from all her ports, he deemed it "a justifiable cause of 
 war." But he wrote to Madison that he hoped Congress, instead of 
 declaring war, " would instantly exclude from our ports all the man- 
 ufactures, produce, vessels, and subjects of the nations committing 
 the aggression, during the continuance of aggression." The embargo 
 of 1807, which kept all American vessels and produce safe at home, 
 was conceived in the same spirit and had the same object. That 
 object was, to use Jefferson's own words, " to introduce between 
 
 NATIONS ANOTHER UMPIRE THAN ARMS." He thought that Great 
 
 Britain, so dependent then upon American materials and supplies, 
 could not do without them as long or as easily as we could do with- 
 out the money, they brought. 
 
 But this policy was putting human nature to a test which only a 
 very few of our race are wise and strong enough to bear. The 
 embargo, of course, was passed by large majorities and hailed with 
 enthusiasm : it was striking back, in a new and easy way. But 
 when commerce came to a stand, when ships and men were idle, when 
 produce was of little value, and nothing could be done in the way of 
 remedy but to wait, then the embargo was regarded in a different 
 light. New England suffered most, not because it lost most, but 
 because it was more immediately dependent upon commer'ce than the 
 other States. Nor did the educated class in New England give 
 moral support to the president in this interesting endeavor to intro- 
 duce between nations '' another vampire than arms." 
 
 The inference which he drew from the power of New England in 
 finally breaking down the embargo is worthy of note. He attributed 
 it to the township system, which he valued most highly, and strove 
 long to introduce into Virginia. ^' How powerfully," he wrote in 
 1816, "did we feel the energy of this system in the case of the 
 embargo ! I felt the foundations of the government shaken under 
 my feet by the New England township. There was not an indi- 
 vidual in those States whose body was not thrown, with all its 
 
THE EMBARGO. 675 
 
 momentum, into action ; and, although the whole of the other States 
 were known to be in favor of the measure, yet the organization of 
 this little selfish minority enabled it to overrule the Union. What 
 could the unwieldy counties of the Middle, the South, and the West 
 do? Call a county meeting; and the drunken loungers at and 
 about the court-houses would have collected, the distances being too 
 great for the good people and the industrious generally to attend. 
 As Cato, then, concluded every speech with the words, Carthago 
 delendiun est, so do I every opinion with the injunction. Divide 
 THE Counties ikto Wards." 
 
 But the embargo lasted to the end of his term. To the end 
 of his days, he believed, that, if it had been faithfully observed by 
 the whole people, it would have saved the country the war of 1812, 
 and procured, what that war did not procure, an explicit renuncia- 
 tion of the claim to board and. search. The two great powers of 
 Europe gave it their approval, — Napoleon Bonaparte and the Edin- 
 burgh Review. There was then living in a secluded village of 
 Massachusetts a marvellous boy of thirteen, famous in his county 
 for the melodious verses whicli he had been writing for four or five 
 years past, some of which had been published in the county paper, 
 and one had been spoken with applause at a school exhibition. This 
 wonderful boy, hearing dreadful things said on every side of the 
 embargo, wrote a poem on the subject, which was published in Bos- 
 ton, in 1808, with this title, "The Embargo; or, Sketches of the 
 Times. A Satire. Together with the Spanish Revolution and other 
 Poems. By William Cullen Bryant." That the father of 
 Bryant, and the other ruling spirits of New England, should have 
 refused their support to the embargo, is almost of itself enough to 
 show that the system was too far in advance of the time to be long 
 effectual. But it answered the purpose of delay ; which, in the 
 peculiar circumstances, was an immense advantage. " If," said the 
 president once, " we can delay but for a few years the necessity of 
 vindicating the laws of nature on the ocean, we shall be the more 
 sure of doing it with efi'ect. The day is within my time as well as 
 yours, when we may say by what laws other nations shall treat us 
 on the sea. And we will say it." 
 
 How many things were settled, how many happily begun, during 
 these eight years ! At the president's recommendation, the term of 
 residence before naturalization was restored from fourteen years to 
 
676 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 five. He tried, but failed, to procure a recession of the District of 
 Columbia, to Virginia and Maryland. — a district which the govern- 
 ment needs as much as it does Terra del Fuego. The polic}'^ was 
 settled, so far as brilliant precedent could settle it, of paying off 
 public debt with all the rapidity that the country can reasonably 
 bear. A great public debt exaggerates the importance, the magni- 
 tude, and the complexity of government ; and it is a Jeffersonian 
 principle, that government should be as small a thing as it can be 
 without sacrifice of its desirable efSciency. During these eight 
 years, the ocean ports were fortified to a degree, that, at least, ena- 
 bled the government to slam tlie door in an enemy's face, and keep 
 it shut daring the next war; a successful contest was carried on in a 
 distant sea; the militia were re-organized and re-armed; the west- 
 ern posts were widely extended; taxes were sensibly diminished; 
 thirty-three millions of the old debt were extinguished; and the 
 only pecuniary embarrassment the administration ever experienced 
 was a surplus, always increasing, for which there was no suitable or 
 legal outlet. Every act and every word of the administration was a 
 proclamation of welcome to all the world ! All the world came 
 thronging to these western shores, bringing w'ith them power, 
 wealth, hope, resolve, and all the stuff, material and immaterial, of 
 which empire is made. When Jefferson came into power in 1801, 
 that man was a wonder to his friends who had seen the nearest of 
 the western lakes ; when Jefferson retired in 1809, Astor was busy 
 with his expedition to found a town on the Pacific coast. 
 
 The general polic}'' of the government with regard to the Indians 
 was then established as it has since i-emained. Jefferson had more 
 Indian business than all the other presidents put together. To 
 "extinguish " their titles hj fair purchase, to introduce among them 
 the arts of civilization, to accustom them to depend more upon agri- 
 culture and less upon hunting, and to push them gently back over 
 the Mississippi in advance of the coming pioneer, — these were 
 among the objects which he desired most to promote. He was not 
 sanguine of speedy results. That is an amusing passage in his 
 second Inaugural, in which he explains the hinderances in the way 
 of the Indian's improvement, and, at the same time, gives some of 
 his white brethren a box on the ear. Habit, custom, pride, preju- 
 dice, and ignorance, he says, all hold the Indians back; but, in 
 addition to these internal foes to progress, there were among them 
 
THE EMBARGO. 677 
 
 " crafty and interested individuals who feel themselves something in 
 the present order of things, and fear to become nothing in any- 
 other." These were the medicine-men ; who "inculcate a sanctimo- 
 nious reverence for the customs of their ancestors ; that whatso- 
 ever they did, must be done through all time ; that reason is a false 
 guide, and to advance under its counsel, in their physical, moral, or 
 political condition, is perilous innovation ; that their duty is to 
 remain as their Creator made them, ignorance being safety, and 
 knowledge full of danger. In short, my friends, among them is 
 seen the action and counteraction of good sense and bigotry : they, 
 too, have their anti-philosophers, who find an interest in keeping 
 things in their present state, who dread refox-mation, and exert all 
 their faculties to maintain the ascendency of habit over the duty of 
 improving our reason and obeying its mandates." This is an exact 
 description of the arts and arguments employed, four or five years 
 after, by the Prophet, brother of Tecumseh, in rousing the Ohio 
 tribes to war upon the white men. 
 
CHAPTER LXVII. 
 
 CORRESPONDENCE WITH MRS. ADAMS. 
 
 The last two years of Mr. Jefferson's second term were laborious 
 and troubled ; and the old longing for home, rest, and tranquillity 
 gained full possession of him. The precedent of retiring at the end 
 of eight years had not then acquired the force of law, and he could 
 unquestionably have been elected to a third term. But eight years 
 of the presidency is enough for any man. General Washington 
 himself in eight years exhausted his power to render good service in 
 that office ; and Jefferson never for a moment had a thouglit but to 
 retire at the end of his second term. During his presidency, one 
 sad, irreparable breach had been made in the circle upon which he 
 relied for the solace of his old age. His younger daughter, Maria, 
 Mrs. Eppes, died at Monticello, in 1804. He stood then upon the 
 pinnacle of his career. Triumph of every kind had followed his 
 endeavors, and a great majority of the people gave him heartfelt 
 approval. It was then that this blow fell. " My loss," he wrote to 
 his oldest friend, John Page, "is great indeed. . Others may lose of 
 their abundance ; but I, of my want, have lost even the half of all I 
 had." 
 
 Among the letters of condolence which reached him on this occa- 
 sion was one from Mrs. Adams, which led to the most interesting 
 correspondence of these years. The president, without knowing it, 
 had given the deepest offence to this gifted lady; but when the 
 intelligence reached her secluded home on the Massachusetts coast, 
 of the death of the lovely girl whom she had taken to her arms in 
 London eighteen years before, and had cherished ever since as a 
 friend, her tenderness proved stronger than her resentment, and she 
 was moved irresistibly to write to the bereaved father. She told 
 him she would have done so before if he had been only the private 
 678 
 
COERESPONDENCE WITH MRS. ADAMS. 679 
 
 inhabitant of Monticello ; but reasons of various kinds had withheld 
 her pen, until the powerful feelings of her heart burst through the 
 restraint. She recalled the incidents of her acquaintance witii his 
 daughter; and, after distantly alluding to the recent estrangement 
 between the families, expressed " the sincere and ardent wish," that 
 he might find comfort and consolation in this day of his sorrow and 
 affliction. This, she said, was the desire of ''her who once took 
 pleasure in subscribing herself his friend." 
 
 In his acknowledgment, after due recognition of her goodness to 
 his daughter and to himself, he frankly told her what had given him 
 personal offence in the conduct of Mr. Adams: "I can say with 
 truth, that one act of Mr. Adams's life, and one only, ever gave me 
 a moment's personal displeasure. I did consider his last appoint- 
 ments to office as personally unkind. They were from among my 
 most ardent political enemies, from whom no faithful co-operation 
 could ever be expected, and laid me under the embarrassment of 
 acting through men whose views were to defeat mine, or to encoun- 
 ter the odium of putting others in their places. It seems but 
 common justice to leave a successor free to act by instruments of 
 his own choice. If my respect for him did not permit me to ascribe 
 the whole blame to the influence of others, it left something for 
 friendship to forgive; and after brooding over it for some little time, 
 and not always resisting the expression of it, I forgave it cordially, 
 and returned to the same state of esteem and respect for him which 
 had so long subsisted." 
 
 She replied with great spirit and ability, without a whisper to her 
 husband of what was transpiring. General Washington, she said, 
 had left no vacancies for his successor to fill ; and she was sure that 
 Mr. Adams, in the last appointments, had meant no disrespect to 
 Ms successor ; nor, indeed, had it been certain, until after many of 
 them had been made, that Mr. Jefferson was to be his successor. 
 That point disposed of, she opened her heart as to the causes of 
 offence which Mr. Adams had against him. One of these was his 
 remission of the fine of Callender, condemned under the Sedition. 
 Law for a libel upon President Adams. Besides : " One of the first 
 acts of your administration was to liberate a wretch who was suffer- 
 ing the just punishment of his crimes for publishing the basest libel, 
 the lowest and vilest slander, which malice could invent or calumny 
 exhibit, against the character and reputation of your predecessor ; of 
 
680 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFERSON". 
 
 him, for whom you professed a friendship and esteem, and whom 
 you certainly knew incapable of such complicated baseness. The 
 remission of Callender's fine was a public approbation of his con- 
 duct." Upon this she expanded with eloquence. But Mr. Jefferson 
 had done more than remit the fine. He had given Callender fifty 
 dollars, and complimented him upon his writings. " This, sir,'' she 
 added, " was the sword that cut asunder the Gordian knot, which 
 could not be untied by all the efforts of party spirit, by rivalry, by 
 jealousy, or any other malignant fiend." There was one other act 
 of his administration, she said, which she considered "person- 
 ally unkind," and which his own mind would easily suggest to him; 
 but, " as it affected neither character nor reputation, she forbore to 
 state it." 
 
 He replied to this fine burst of a wife's loyal indignation with 
 something of her own warmth and point. "I do not know," said 
 he, "who was the particular wretch alluded to; but I discharged 
 every person under puuishment or prosecution under the Sedition 
 Law, because I considered, and now consider, that law to be a nullity 
 as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall 
 down and worship a golden image ; and that it was as much my 
 duty to arrest its execution at every stage as it would have been to 
 rescue from the fiery furnace those who should have been cast into 
 it for refusing to worship the image. It was accordingly done in 
 every instance, without asking what the offenders had done, or 
 against whom they had offended, but whether the pains they were 
 suffering were inflicted under the pretended Sedition Law," He 
 showed her, too, that his compliment to Callender had been written 
 before that writer's homely truth had lapsed into coarse libel, and 
 that the gifts of money were bestowed to relieve his destitution, not 
 reward his scurrility. But there was another act of personal unkind- 
 ness to which Mrs. Adams had referred. "I declare, on my 
 honor, madam," said he, " I have not the least conception what act; 
 was alluded to." 
 
 In her reply, which betrayed a mind only slightly mollified, she 
 told him what this act was. The wife had spoken in the previous 
 letters ; but it was now the mother's turn : " Soon after my eldest 
 son's return from Europe, he was appointed by the district judge to 
 an office in which no political concerns entered. Personally known 
 to you, and possessing all the qualifications, you yourself being judge, 
 
CORRESPONDENCE WITH MRS. ADAMS. 681 
 
 • which you had designated for office, as soon as Congress gave the 
 appointments to the president you removed him. This looked so 
 particuLarly pointed, that some of your best friends in Boston at that 
 time expressed their regret that you had done so." 
 
 This was news to Mr. Jefferson. He had sinned without know- 
 ing it. With a patient consideration not usual in the head of a 
 state, nor even possible to one not gifted with a genius for toil, he 
 entered into a minute statement respecting the appointment of the 
 commissioners of bankruptcy in Boston ; showing her that the former 
 commissioners, of whom John Quincy Adams was one, had not been 
 removed by an act of the. president, but discontinued by a change in 
 the law. "Had I known," he added, "that your son had acted, it 
 would have been a real pleasure to me to have preferred him to some 
 who were named in Boston, in what was deemed the same line of 
 politics." This last letter, all kindness and benignity, was a distinct 
 proffer of reconciliation to the whole family. 
 
 "I hope," said he in conclusion, "you will see these intrusions 
 on your time to be, what they really are, proofs of my great respect 
 for you. I tolerate with the utmost latitude the right of others to 
 differ from me in opinion, without imputing to them criminality. I 
 know too well the weakness and uncertainty of human reason to 
 wonder at its different results. Both of our political parties, at 
 least the honest part of them, agree conscientiously in the same 
 object, — the public good ; but they differ essentially in what they 
 deem the means of promoting that good. One side believes it best 
 done by one composition of the governing powers ; the other by a 
 different one. One fears most the ignorance of the people ; the 
 other the selfishness of rulers independent of them. Which is right, 
 time and experience will prove. We think that one side of this 
 experiment has been long enough tried, and proved not to promote 
 the good of the many ; and that the other has not been fairly and 
 sufficiently tried. Our opponents think the reverse. With which- 
 ever opinion the body of the nation concurs, that must prevail. My 
 anxieties on this subject will never carry me beyond the use of fair 
 and honorable means, of truth and reason ; nor have they ever les- 
 sened my esteem for moral worth, nor alienated my affections from a 
 single friend who did not first withdraw himself. Whenever this has 
 happened, I confess I have not been insensible to it, yet have ever 
 kept myself open to a return of their justice. I conclude with sin- 
 
682 LIFE OP THOMAS JEFFEKSON. 
 
 cere prayers for your health and happiness, that yourself and Mr. 
 Adams may long enjoy the tranquillity you desire and merit, and 
 see in the prosperity of your family what is the consummation of 
 the last and warmest of human wishes." 
 
 When a poisoned arrow has rankled long in living flesh, the 
 wound cannot heal as soon as the arrow is withdrawn. This noble- 
 minded lady accepted her correspondent's personal explanations, 
 hut she could not help giving him a little lecture about the very 
 great importance of appointing the riglit men to office. The arrow 
 was withdrawn; but time, the all-healer,' had to perform his part 
 before the reconciliation could be complete. Time began upon it at 
 once. Soon after she had " closed this correspondence " with one of 
 those admonitory prayers by which pious souls sometimes bestow a 
 parting slap, she gave the letters to her husband to read. The old 
 man was still under a cloud of obloquy, and perhaps not reconciled 
 to that sudden change in his way of life which had occurred four 
 years before. In the year 1800, his grandson tells us, the letters 
 addressed to him might be counted by thousands ; but after his 
 retirement to Quincy, he received about two letters a week. He 
 could not but be pleased to learn from Mr. Jefferson's letters that 
 his good-will was still an object of desire with the chief of the 
 nation. When he had read the packet of letters all through, he 
 wrote upon the last one these words : " Quincy, November 19, 1804. 
 The whole of this correspondence was begun and conducted without 
 my knowledge or suspicion. Last evening and this morning, at the 
 desire of Mrs. Adams, I read the whole. I have no remarks to make 
 upon it at this time and in this place, J. Adams." Time did the 
 rest, with the help of John Quincy Adams. It was all right between 
 them in 1812 ; and the letters they exchanged during the rest of 
 their lives are among the most interesting the world possesses. 
 
CHAPTER LXVIII. 
 
 RETIREMENT FROM THE PRESIDENCY. 
 
 Jefferson's final release from public life, after a nearly contin- 
 uous service of forty-four years, was now at hand. During the last 
 years of his presidency he had lost in some degree " the run " of his 
 private affairs, — a fact which any one will understand who has ever 
 been absorbed for a long time in concerns of magnitude and diffi- 
 culty not personal. Every one who has ever put his whole heart 
 into writing a book or conducting a periodical understands it. 
 Groceries elude the sweep of vision that takes in all the affairs and 
 interests of a great country or a great subject ; and no man can 
 easily subside from the triumph of an important measure or the rap- 
 ture of a " good number," to that exact consideration which monthly 
 accounts demand. Little by little, the mind floats away from all 
 that detail, until, at last, a kind of real inability .to grasp it takes 
 the place of former vigilant attention ; which is only another way 
 of saying that a president should be, if convenient, a married man. 
 A few months before his retirement it occurred to him to look into 
 his affairs, and see how he was coming out on the 4th of March, 
 1809. To his consternation and horror, he found that there would be 
 a most serious deficit. His plantations had only yielded four or five 
 thousand dollars a year, at the best; but the embargo, by preventing 
 the exportation of tobacco, had cut his private income down two- 
 thirds. " ISTothing," he wrote to his merchant in Richmond, " had" 
 been more fixed than my determination to keep my expenses here 
 within the limits of my salary ; and I had great confidence that I 
 had done so. Having, however, trusted to rough estimates by my 
 head, and not being sufficiently apprised of the outstanding accounts, 
 I find, on a review of my affairs here as they will stand on the 3d 
 of March, that I shall stand three or four months' salary behindhand. 
 
 683 
 
684 LIFE OF THOIMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 In ordinary cases, this degree of arrearage would not be serious ; but 
 on the scale of the establishment here it amounts to seven or eight 
 thousand dollars, which being to come out of my private funds will 
 be felt by them sensibly." He requests his correspondent to arrange 
 a loan for him at a Richmond bank, and urges him to lose no time. 
 " Since I have become sensible of this deficit," he added, " I have 
 been under an agony of mortification, and therefore must solicit as 
 much urgency in the negotiation as the case will admit. My inter- 
 vening nights will be almost sleepless, as nothing could be more 
 distressing to me than to leave debts here unpaid, if, indeed, I should 
 be permitted to depart with them unpaid, of which I am by no 
 means certain." 
 
 Such is the price, or rather a very small part of the price, which 
 citizens of the United States have often had to pay for the privilege 
 of serving their country. The privilege is worth the price; but it 
 is not safe to put the price so high that only a very great or a very 
 little man can find his account in paying it. Poverty and abuse, — 
 a Tweed will undertake a city on those terms. So will a Jefferson. 
 But Jeffersons do not grow on every bush ; and Tweeds can be had 
 on most wharves of any extent. The loan was effected, however; 
 and Mr. Jefferson was thus enabled to get home to Monticello 
 without danger of being arrested for debt upon the suit of a Feder- 
 alist with a taste for a sensation. 
 
 Captain Bacon, with two great wagons each drawn by six mules 
 and one drawn by four horses, came from Monticello. He left 
 Washington with his wagons loaded, on the 3d of March, leaving 
 Mr. Jefferson behind to attend the inauguration of his successor, 
 and to close up his various affairs of business and friendship. From 
 every quarter of the country came testimonials of grateful regard 
 from Republicans; and Federalists, to the last, bestowed upon him 
 the homage of their hate and apprehension. Josiah Quincy was 
 relieved- by his departure. "Jefferson is a host," he wrote in his 
 diary during one of the last embargo debates; "and, if the wand of 
 the magician is not broken, he will yet defeat the attempt. But I 
 hope his power is drawing to an end in this world." All things end 
 at last. Captain Bacon's train of wagons moved away ; and a 
 remarkable procession indeed must have arrested the attention of 
 passers-by as it hove in sight, heaped high with boxes and shrub- 
 
EETIREMENT FROM THE PRESIDENCY. 685 
 
 bery, and eleven colored servants stowed away in convenient spots 
 on the various summits, followed by tlie president's four-horse car- 
 riage. In this last vehicle rode Mr. Bacon, and thus caught some 
 of the roadside "ovations" intended for another. The worthy 
 manager was nearly three weeks in getting home through the mud 
 and storm of a cold, dismal spring; so that Mr. Jefferson overtook 
 him at Culpeper Court-House, though he did not start till the 
 wagons had been a week on the road. 
 
 " On our way home," Bacon reports, " it snowed very fast, and 
 when we reached Culpeper Court-IIouse it was half-leg deep. A 
 Lxrge crowd of people had collected there, expecting that the presi- 
 dent would be along. When I rode up, they thought I was the 
 president, and shouted and hurrahed tremendously. When I got 
 out of the carriage, they laughed very heartily at their mistake. 
 There was a platform along the whole front of the tavern, and it 
 was full of people. Some of them had been waiting a good while, 
 and drinking a good deal ; and they made so much noise, that they 
 scared the horses, and Diomede backed, and trod upon my foot, and 
 lamed me so that I could hardly get into the carriage the next 
 morning. There was one very tall old fellow, that was noisier than 
 any of the rest, who said he was bound to see the president, — 
 * Old Tom,' he called him. They asked me when he would be along ; 
 and I told them I thought he would certainly be along that night, 
 and I looked for him every moment. The tavern was kept by an 
 old man named Shackleford. I told him to have a large fire built 
 in a private room, as Mr. Jefferson would be very cold when he got 
 there ; and he did so. I soon heard shouting, went out, and Mr, 
 Jefferson was in sight. He was in a one-horse vehicle, — a phaeton, 
 — with a driver, and a servant on horseback. When he came up, 
 there was great cheering again. I motioned to him to follow me ; 
 took him straight to his room, and locked the door. The tall olii 
 fellow came and knocked very often, but I would not let him in. I 
 told Mr. Jefferson not to mind him, he was drunk. Finally 'the 
 door was opened, and they r.ushed in .and filled the room. It, was 
 as full as I ever saw a bar-room. He stood up, and made a sf?ort 
 address to them. Afterwards some of them told him how they hjid 
 mistaken me for him. He went on next day, and reached Monti- 
 cello before we did." 
 
 But not till he had encountered another snow-storm, still more 
 
086 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 violent. " As disagreeable a snow-storm as I was ever in," wrote 
 Jefferson. During the last three days of the journey he was glad to 
 abandon his phaeton and take to one of his horses. On reaching 
 Monticello, he found that his sixty-six years had not sensibly 
 lessened the vigor of his frame; for this rough journey had done him 
 no harm which a night's rest could not repair. 
 
CHAPTER LXIX. 
 
 AT MONTICELLO. 
 
 After his retirement from the presidency, in 1809, Jefiferson 
 lived seventeen . years. He was still the chief personage of the 
 United States. Between himself and the president there was such 
 a harmony of feeling and opinion, that the inauguration of Madison 
 did little more than change the signature to public documents. 
 Madison consulted him on every important question ; and Jefferson, 
 besides writing frequently and at length, rode over to Orange every 
 year, when the president was at home, and spent two or three weeks 
 at his house. When there was dissension in the cabinet, it was 
 Jefferson who restored harmony. Monroe was in ill-humor because 
 Madison had been preferred before himself by the nominating cau- 
 cus. It was Jefferson who healed the breach, and thus prevented 
 one in the Republican party. During the gloom of 1815, many 
 Republicans desired a candidate for the presidency of more executive 
 energy than Mr. Madison was then supposed to have ; and Jefiferson 
 was himself solicited from many quarters to accept a nomination. 
 He said, with convincing power, " What man can do will be done 
 by Mr. Madison." In the same year the president proposed that he 
 should return to the office of secretary of state, and Monroe become 
 secretary of war ; but he pleaded his sixty-nine years as an excuse 
 for declining the invitation. 
 
 The success in public life of these two men, Madison and Monroe, 
 whose early education he had assisted, as well as the bright 
 career which his nephews and sons-in-law were enjoying, induced 
 other young men to seek his advice and assistance. " A part of my 
 occupation," he wrote to General Kosciuszko in 1810, " and by no 
 means the least pleasing, is the direction of the studies of such young 
 men as ask it. They place themselves in the neighboring village, 
 
 687 
 
688 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 and liave tlie use of my library and counsel, and make a part of my 
 society. In advising the course of their reading, I endeavor to keep 
 their attention fixed on^the main objects of all science, the freedom 
 and happiness of man. So that coming to bear a share in the coun- 
 cils and government of their country, they will keep ever in view 
 the sole objects of all legitimate government." 
 
 Monticello ovorflowed with guests during all these years. The 
 circle of those who had a right to seek its hospitality was very large ; 
 and many foreigners of distinction felt their American experience 
 incomplete until they had paid a pilgrimage to the author of the 
 Declaration of Independence. But these were bnt a small portion 
 of the throng of guests whom the custom of the country brought to 
 Monticello during the summer months. His daughter, Mrs. Ran- 
 dolph, said once that she had been obliged to provide beds for as 
 many as fifty inmates; and Mr. Randall tells us of one friend who 
 came from abroad with a family of six persons, and remained at 
 Monticello ten months. It fell to the manager, Mr. Edmund Bacon, 
 to keep the mountain-top supplied with sustenance for this crowd of 
 people, and tlie animals that carried and drew them. Mr. Bacon 
 did not enjoy it, and he has since availed himself of an opportunity 
 to relieve his mind. 
 
 "After Mr. Jefferson returned from Washington," he relates, "he 
 was for years crowded with visitors, and they almost ate him out of 
 house and home. They were there all times of the year ; but about 
 the middle of June the travel would commence from the lower part 
 of the State to the Springs, and then there was a perfect throng of 
 visitors. They travelled in their own carriages, and came in gangs, 
 the whole family, with carriage and riding horses and servants ; 
 sometimes three or four such gangs at a time. We had thirty-six 
 stalls for horses, and only used about ten of them for the stock we 
 kept there. Very often all of the rest were full, and I had to send 
 horses off to another place. I have often sent a wagon-load of hay 
 up to the stable, and the next morning there would not be enough 
 left to make a hen's-nest. I have killed a fine beef, and it would all 
 be eaten in a day or two. There was no tavern in all that country 
 that hail so much company. Mrs. Randolph, who always lived with 
 Mr. Jefferson after his return from Washington, and kept house for 
 him, was very often greatly perplexed to entertain them. I have 
 
AT MONTICELLO. 669 
 
 known her many and many a time to have every bed in the house 
 fulL I finally told the servant who had charge of the stable to only 
 give the visitors' horses half allowance. Somehow or other Mr. 
 Jefferson heard of this : I never could tell how, unless it was throug^'i 
 some of the visitors' servants. He countermanded my orders. One 
 great reason why Mr. Jefferson built his house at Poplar Forest, in 
 Bedford County, was that he might go there in the summer to get 
 rid of entertaining so much company. He knew that it more than 
 used up all his income from the plantation and every thing else; but 
 he was so kind and polite that he received all his visitors with a smile,' 
 and made them welcome. They pretended to come out of respect and 
 regard to him; bat I think that the fact that they saved a tavern- 
 bill had a good deal to do with it with a good many of them. I can 
 assure you I got tired of seeing them come, and waiting on them." 
 
 Such was the custom of old Virginia ; and a very bad, cruel cus- 
 tom it was. All this, too, at a period when non-intercourse and 
 war had reduced the income of Virginia planters two-thirds, and 
 when Mr. Jefferson had a Washington debt of many thousand dol- 
 lars to provide for. But, among this multitude of visitors, there 
 were a large number whose company he keenlj'^ enjoyed; nor would 
 he permit his guests to rob him of his working-hours. From break- 
 fast to dinner, he let them amuse themselves as best they could while 
 he toiled at his correspondence and rode over his farms. From din- 
 ner-time he gave himself up to social enjoyment. I may well speak 
 of his correspondence as toil. One thousand and sixty-seven letters 
 he received in one year, which was not more than the average. 
 After his death, there were found among his papers twenty-six thou- 
 sand letters addressed to him, and copies of sixteen thousand written 
 by him. 
 
 To complete his character as a personage, it should be mentioned 
 that the Federalists still bestowed upon him the distinction of an 
 animosity such as, perhaps, virtuous men never before entertained 
 for one of their number. I look with wonder upon the publications 
 spread out before me at this moment, issued during the time of non- 
 intercourse and war, Jefferson being the theme. Here are two octavo 
 volumes of vituperation, entitled " Memoirs of the Hon. Thomas 
 Jefferson," published in Kew York several months after his retire- 
 ment, and opening thus : " The illustrious Dr. Robertson, in a letter 
 
 44 
 
V. ggg LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOK. 
 
 to IvjLr. Gibb(^n, gave it as bis opinion that an bistorian ougbt to write 
 as if he were giving evidence upon oatb." Eight liundred and 
 tbirh'-eight pages of innocent and tedious falsehood naturally follow 
 this noble sentiment; and they end with a prophecy, that nothing 
 Would go well in the United States until the people had turned the 
 lA-epublicans out of office, and placed their afifuii;s in the bands of 
 "that man who more than any other resembles the Father of his 
 Country," — General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. The clergy of 
 New England continued to revile the greatest Christian America has 
 produced in terms surpassing in violence those which the clergy of 
 Palestine applied to the Founder of Cbristianity, He was an 
 "atheist," Dr. David Osgood of Massachusetts remarked, and no 
 better than "the raoe of demons," to whose service he had been 
 devoted. By race of demons, this " last of the New England popes " 
 meant the people of France. Young Edward Payson of Portland 
 signalized his entrance into public life by delivering a Fourth of 
 July oration, in which he observed that Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin, 
 and their colleagues, were men of a character so vile, that " the most 
 malicious ingenuity can invent nothing worse than the truth." The 
 orator of twenty-three was as innocent as a lamb in saying this ; for 
 he was merely echoing what he had heard constantly asserted from 
 his youth up, by the men whom he held in veneration, — the clergy 
 of Connecticut and the professors in Yale College. In 1809 
 appeared a second edition of William Cullen Bryant's Embargo, with 
 a certificate to the effect, that '^ Mr. Bryant, the author," had arrived, 
 in the Month of Novembei', 1808, at the age of fourteen years. A 
 doubt had been intimated in the Monthly Anthology, whether a 
 youth of thirteen could have been the author of this poem. The 
 reader may be gratified to see a few lines from the earliest volume of 
 a poet who has since, in so many ways, both served and honored his 
 country. In this poem, too, lives tbe judgment of educated New 
 England upon Mr. Jefferson's attempt to keep his country out of 
 the maniac fight between Bonaparte and the coalition of kings; for 
 this boy, gifted as he was, could only be a melodious echo of the talk 
 he had heard in his native village : — 
 
 " Curse of our nation, source of countless woes, 
 From wliose dark womb unreckoned misery flows : 
 Th' Embargo rages, like a sweeping \\ind, 
 Fear lowers before, and famine stalks behind. 
 
AT MONTICELLO. 691 
 
 "What words, Muse ! can paint the mournful scene, 
 The saddening street, the desolated green ? 
 How hungry laborers leave their toil and sigh, 
 And sorrow droops in each desponding eye ! 
 
 " See the bold sailor from the ocean torn, 
 His element, sink friendless and forlorn ! 
 His suffering s],onse the tear of anguish shed, 
 His starving children cry aloud for bread I 
 On the rough billows of misfortune tost. 
 Resources fail, and all his hopes are lost ; 
 To foreign climes for that relief he flies. 
 His native land ungratefully denies. 
 
 " In vain mechanics ply their curious ait, 
 And bootless mourn the interdicted mart ; 
 While our sage Ruler's diplomatic skill 
 Subjects our councils to his sovereign will ; 
 His grand ' restrictive energies ' employs. 
 And wisely regulating trade destroys. 
 
 " The farmer, since supporting trade is fled. 
 Leaves the rude joke, and cheerless hangs his head ; 
 Misfortunes fall, an unremitting shower. 
 Debts follow debts, on taxes, taxes pour. 
 See in his stores his hoarded produce rot, 
 Or sheriffs sales his produce brings to nought ; 
 Disheartening cares in thronging myriads flow, 
 Till down he sinks to poverty and woe. 
 
 " Ye who rely on Jcffersonian skill. 
 And say that fancy paints ideal ill, 
 Go, on the wing of observation fly, 
 Cast o'er the land a scrutinizing eye : 
 States, counties, towns, remark with keen review, 
 JjQt facts convince, and own the picture true ! 
 
 " When shall this land, some courteous angel, say, 
 Throw off a weak and erring ruler's sway 1 
 Eise, injured people, vindicate your cause, 
 And prove your love of liberty and laws ; 
 Oh, wrest, sole refuge of a sinking land. 
 The sceptre from the slave's imbecile hand ! 
 Oh, ne'er consent obsequious to advance. 
 The ivillirif} vassal of imperious France ! 
 Correct that suffrage you misused before, 
 And lift your voice above a Congress roar. 
 
692 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 " And thou, the scorn of every patriot's name, 
 Thy country's ruin, auil her council's shame ! 
 Poor servile tiling ! derision of the brave ! 
 Who erst from Tarlton fled to Carter's cave ; 
 Thou who, ivhen menaced by perfidious Gaul, 
 Didst prostrate to her whiskered minion fall ; 
 And when our cash her empty bags supplied. 
 Didst meanly strive the (bul disgrace to hide; 
 Go, wretch, resign the presidential chair. 
 Disclose thy secret measures, foul or fair. 
 Go, search with curious eyes for horned frogSj 
 'j\Iid the wild wastes of Louisianian bogs ; 
 Or, where Ohio rolls his turbid stream. 
 Dig for huge bones, thy glory and thy theme. 
 Go, scan, philosophist, thy .... charms 
 And sink supinely in her sable arms ; 
 But quit to abler hands tiie helm of state, 
 Nor image ruin on thy country's fate. 
 
 "As Johnson deep, as Addison refined. 
 And skilled to pour conviction o'er the mind. 
 Oh, might some patriot rise ! the gloom dispel. 
 Chase error's mist, and break her magic spell ! 
 
 " But vain the wish ; for hark ! the murmuring meed' 
 Of hoarse applause from yonder shed proceed ; 
 Enter, and view the thronging concourse there, 
 Intent, with gaping mouth, and stupid stare; 
 While in their midst the supple leader stands. 
 Harangues aloud, and flouri:^hes his hands ; 
 To adulation tunes his servile throat. 
 And sues successful for each blockhead's vote." 
 
 The work contains nearly six hundred lines, several of which 
 clearly annonnce the coming poet ; but in these which I have chosen, 
 it is the Federalist that speaks. The forming poet of the woods 
 appears in a passage where the author of thirteen imagines Com- 
 merce starting to life again, amid the desolation of the Embargo, 
 when at last the people had expelled from Washington the pimps of 
 France : — 
 
 " Thus in a fallen tree, from sprouting roots, 
 With sudden growth a tender sapling shoots. 
 Improves from day to day, delights the eyes 
 With strength and beauty, stateliness and size, 
 Puts forth robuster arms, and broader leaves. 
 And high in air its branching head upheaves." 
 
AT MONTICELLO. 693 
 
 It is interesting to discover that a poet who solaced his old age 
 by translating Homer had, at thirteen, already begun to pay him 
 the homage of imitation. The boy's prediction was fulfilled seven 
 years later ; not through the return of the Federalists to power, but 
 by the treaty of Ghent, which ended the conflict for neutral rights. 
 
 Abuse and adulation were equally powerless to disturb the seren- 
 ity of the lord of Monticello. '• I have rode over the plantation, I 
 reckon," reports the worthy Mr. Bacon, " a thousand times with Mr. 
 Jefierson ; and when he was not talking, he was nearly always hum- 
 ming some tune, or singing in a low tone to himself." During his 
 annual rides to Poplar Forest, ninety miles distant, he was usually 
 accompanied by his daughter or by one of her children ; and he often 
 beguiled the tedium of the journey by singing an old song, alone or 
 with his companion. His daughter, too, bad what Mr. Bacon calls 
 tlie Jefferson temper, — all music and sunshine. In the twenty 
 years of his service, he declares that he never once saw her in ill- 
 bumor. She was nearly as tall as her father, he tells us, and had 
 his bright, clear complexion and blue eyes ; and as she went about 
 the house she seemed always in a happy mood, and was " nearly 
 alwaj's humming a tune." The singularly sound health of the 
 father was, no doubt, part of the secret of his festive existence. 
 Mr. Bacon supplies another part of it : — 
 
 " Mr. Jefferson was the most industrious person I ever saw in my 
 life. All the time I was with him 1 had full permission to visit his 
 room whenever I thought it necessary to see him on any business. 
 I knew how to get into his room at any time of day or night. I 
 have sometimes gone into his room when he was in bed ; but aside 
 from that, I never went into it but twice, in the whole twenty years 
 I was with him, that I did not find him employed. I never saw 
 him sitting idle in his room but twice. Once he was suffering with 
 the toothache ; and once, in returning from his Bedford farm, he 
 had slept in a room where some of the glass had been broken out of 
 the window, and the wind had blown upon him and given him a 
 kind of neuralgia. At all other times he was either reading, writ- 
 ing, talking, working upon some model, or doing something else. 
 Mrs. Randolph was just like her father in this respect. 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 
 
694 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 dealj and sew, or read, or talk, as lie -would be busy about something 
 else. As lier daughters grew up, she taught them to be industrious 
 like herself. They used to take turns each day in giving out to the 
 servants, and superintending the housekeeping." 
 
 These children were eleven in number, six daughters and five 
 sons ; to whom must be added Francis Eppes, a fine lad, the son of 
 Maria Jefferson, to say nothing of a troop of schoolmates that one 
 of the grandsons usually brought over from school at the next 
 village, on Friday afternoons, to join in the sports of Saturday. 
 Jefferson joined heartily in the pleasures of these children, but he 
 was not the less a stickler for industry. 
 
 Colonel Thomas Mann Randolph, the father of this numerous 
 brood, was governor of Virginia from 1819 to 1822. I have been 
 favored by the Honorable Nicholas P. Trist with copies of sev- 
 eral letters of Colonel Randolph, addressed to himself while he 
 was a cadet in the military academy at West Point. They afford 
 interesting glimpses of the mind so long and intimately associated 
 with Mr. Jefferson's, and they show a spirit different indeed from 
 that exhibited bj' Virginians of a later day. Here is a passage that 
 exhibits the tone of feeling at Monticello with regard to slavery. 
 Colonel Randolph writes thus to the cadet in November, 1818, con- 
 cerning what he mildly terms " an accident " that had happened on 
 a plantatioh not far from Monticello : — ■ 
 
 " The overseer for next year had just taken his place, with great 
 unwillingness on the part of the negroes, who were attached to the 
 old one ; and their master would gladly have kept him at any salary 
 in reason, but he had resolved on quitting business to go to his own 
 farm. Several of the negroes gave so much displeasure, that they 
 received punishment in the first days from the new commander ; 
 among others, a very sensible, lively,, and likely young mulatto man, 
 who, it seems, had seriously formed the resolution never to incur the 
 punishment of stripes by any misconduct, and had, in consequence, 
 become the most trustworthy among them according to the testimony 
 of the neighborhood, being the one chosen to go on the road with 
 the wagon always, to haul off grain and bring back supplies. The 
 new overseer, however, could not understand the value of character 
 in a slave, and concluded that fear would be safer security for good 
 
AT MONTICELLO. 695 
 
 condupt, than any determination to do right, no matter how deliber- 
 ately made, or how long persisted in, and near becoming a fixed 
 habit. Power seldom reasons well. The young fellow received a 
 few lashes on his bare back for some trifling misdemeanor. Leav- 
 ing his tools in the field, it is said he hung himself twenty feet from 
 the ground in a tree near his master's door the same night ; having 
 first taken leave of all his companions, who did not think seriously 
 enough of his threat to give the alarm, and who, perhaps, felt pleas- 
 ure at the idea of his running away,. because the lost time would be 
 an appeal to interest with the master and overseer on future occa- 
 sions, manifestly in their favor. The bravery of this fellow seems 
 to have left no room in his mind for such a thought. He had made 
 a resolution ; and he marched intrepidly forward in the execution of 
 it, despising pain and not knowing fear. 
 
 " AVhat a hideous monster, among the various phenomena of the 
 social state, is our Southern system ! Tyranny in the army is 
 mitigated by the reflection that the brave have to submit to the 
 brave only. But the greatest dastard might possibly have the 
 feelings, moral and physical, as well as the comforts, of man}'' a 
 brave man entirely in his power, and dependent upon his caprice. 
 In this particular case, both master and overseer are humane men ; 
 and the latter is of proven fortitude, as well as moral worth. The 
 former you knovv^ and respect. 
 
 "Long ago /have dismissed the man-whip from my slave manege. 
 I find, however, that the cane of a corporal must be tolerated 3^et. 
 But I always scrupulously distinguish, and exempt, manly and 
 moral character, when it shows itself with any steadiness of ray in 
 the sooty atmosphere of our slave discipline. And such exempts 
 never suffer from me any other punishment than privations for little 
 obliquities of conduct. I find use for all my thirty years' experi- 
 ence, with whatever ingenuity it may have given rise to in the time, 
 to keep up sufficient authority, without recurrence to the old mode 
 of government. My only resource is to bring the culprit, if he be a 
 man grown, and had ever displayed moral character at any time, 
 before a magistrate by some contrivance, and to get punishment 
 inflicted by a constable under legal forms. I have found confine- 
 ment in the county-jail to have an admirable effect on my high-tem- 
 pered men. And by magnifying a troublesome contumacy into 
 incipient revolt, seasonably detected in the misconduct of an indi- 
 
696 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 vidual, I have always succeeded, without any difficulty, in lodging 
 my own there. It convinces them that I do not regard the loss of 
 their time ; which consideration, by gratifying their ill-humor, makes 
 them often run away from many masters, very rarely from me, 
 perhaps on account of what I have just mentioned. They know the 
 jail to be the sure fate of runaways, and it is. not amiss that they should 
 have a proper distaste for it. I am certain that I have not iu thirty 
 years lost one month's work altogether by their running away." 
 
 There are other passages in these letters that breathe a similar 
 spirit. He descants in one letter upon Mr. Trist's choice of a mili- 
 tary career, and favors him with a translation from the Greek that 
 speaks well for his knowledge of the ancient tongue, and his skill iu 
 the use of his own. 
 
 "I see," wrote the governor in May, 1821, "no encouragement 
 for a young man to embrace the military profession at this time, yet 
 I sincerely hope the military science will be cultivated by our gov- 
 ernment ; and I would, if I were in Congress, give my vote alwaj's 
 to support the army as it has lately been, and to extend the nursery 
 of officers, so absolutely necessary to its honorable existence, in a 
 greater degree than has been hitherto contemplated. The doctrine 
 of the Quakers is womanish, and their hope of making peace as 
 fashionable forever as their dress is absolutely childish. It is the 
 only tenet of theirs which I do not in some degree approve. My 
 historical reading and observation of human nature forbid me to 
 bear with them upon that point with any patience at all. I 
 admire their steady industry, temperance, gravity of deportment, 
 frugality, uniformity of manners, and a thousand other things ; but 
 I cannot refrain from ridiculing their thoughtless censure of Nature 
 for having given stings to bees, under the mistaken idea that any 
 weapon at all was necessary to preserve to them the delicious fruits 
 of their incessant toil in summer, upon the preservation of which 
 their existence during winter depends ; besides the satisfaction of 
 'producing (UjSTFORCEd), and the pleasure of enjoying, which insects, 
 much more men, can never cease to feel. The use of arms would be 
 necessary even in a perfectly insulated society; for without them the 
 good would soon become the victims of the bad, Avho cannot be pre- 
 vented from increasing their power of mischief by such means 
 
AT MONTICELLO. 697 
 
 privately, if prolribited publicly, and the discovery would become too 
 late for unarmed hands to avert the calamity. Menaonists would 
 ever become the victims of terrorists, if not protected by those who 
 are both brave and good, who defend peace because they love it. 
 
 "Where stood the foremost rank, how fiiir they lie, 
 The brave and good who for their country die. 
 How wretched he who leaves his native fields 
 To be<^ the bread a foreign harvest yields ! 
 Wandering, with parents in the wane of life, 
 With tender offspring, and a youthful wife; 
 Despised by those the scanty boon who grant. 
 Subdued by hateful penury and want; 
 He stains his name, the manly form degrades. 
 Low-minded vice the growing race pervades, 
 A wretch like that no fear of shame assails; 
 With him no hope of honored line prevails. 
 The land and those we love let tts defend, 
 Regardless when this anxious life may end. 
 Yoimg men ! in firm array prepare to figlit; 
 Unfelt be fear, disdained be shanieful flight ; 
 Let mighty hearts beat high in bosoms strong ; 
 Think not of life while in the hostile throng." 
 
 [" Part of a translation from the Greek of Tyrtaeus, made during the late war 
 by T. M. R., not a line of which was ever written before: indeed, the remainder is 
 entirely forgotten, and not likely to be ever recalled."] 
 
 These are agreeable passages, and show the brighter side of a 
 strong and gifted mind. But at this very time, when public honors 
 added distinction to his person and name, he was sutfering deeply 
 from the bad system which he hated, and from which he had not 
 strength to escape. Occasionally even he felt himself compelled to 
 eke out the dwindling income of his estate by the sale of some of 
 his slaves. His affairs were fatally disordered at length, and he 
 became a bankrupt. 
 
 Mr. Jefferson and his daughter enjoyed long intervals of tranquil 
 happiness. But, living as he did in the midst of slavery, it was 
 impossible for him to avoid his personal share of the harm it wrought 
 to every creature in the United States, even to those who hated it 
 most, and opposed it always ; for it made them intense and one- 
 sided. He was an indulgent master, it is true ; and he never lost a 
 sense of the folly of a system of labor, of which the laborer got 
 
698 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESOIT. 
 
 most of the good, and the master nearly all the evil. " He did not 
 like slavery," remarks Mr. Bacon. "I have heard him talk a great 
 deal about it. He thought it a bad system. I have heard him 
 prophesy that we should have just such trouble with it as we are 
 having now, in 1862." And yet his lifelong contact with slavery 
 appears to have lessened his ability to think rationally concerning 
 it. Long he cherished the dream of colonization, and fancied he 
 saw in Liberia the beginning of a movement that would deliver the 
 negroes of America from slavery, and those of Africa from barbarism. 
 He took it for granted that the two races could not live together, 
 both being free. "We have the wolf by the ears," he wrote in 
 1820, "and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice 
 is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other." 
 
 When the question arose of extending the area of slavery over 
 Missouri, he showed a strange blending of keenness and dulness of 
 vision ; descrying the distant danger most clearly, as aged eyes are 
 apt to do, but blind to the path immediatelj'- before him. " This 
 momentous question," he wrote in April, 1820, "like a fire-bell in 
 the night, awakened and filled me with terror." He thought it was 
 "the knell of the Union." Since Bunker Hill, he said, we had never 
 had so ominous a question ; and he thanked Heaven that he should 
 not live to see the issue. We now know that his worst forebodings 
 came short of the mighty sum-total of evil and calamity which his 
 country was to endure : first, forty years of an ignoble strife of words, 
 one side insolent and infuriate, the other insincere and timorous ; 
 next, four years of carnage ; then ten of the beggar-on-horseback's 
 demoralizing sway. But, with all this correctness of prophecy, the 
 aged Jefferson thought the Northern members were wrong in wish- 
 ing to keep slavery out of those lovely, fertile plains west of the 
 Mississippi. He thought slavery would be weakened by being spread, 
 and its final abolition made easier. Worse than this, he began to 
 think it an evil for Southern youth to attend Northern colleges, 
 " imbibing opinions and principles in discord with those of their own 
 country ; " and he was far from discerning that the opposition in 
 the Northern States to the extension of slavery had any basis of 
 disinterested conviction. " The Hartford Convention men," he wrote 
 in 1821, "have had the address, by playing on' the honest feelings 
 of our former friends, to seduce them from their kindred spirits, and 
 to borrow their weight into the Federal scale. Desperate of regain- 
 
AT MONTICELLO. 699 
 
 ing power under political distinctions, tLey have adroitly wriggled 
 into its seat under the auspices of morality, and are again in the 
 ascendency from which their sins had hurled them." Much is to be 
 allowed to seventy-eight years. But even at seventy-eight so fine 
 an intelligence as his could not, even for a moment, have shrunk to 
 these limits in an atmosphere congenial with it. To become capable 
 of thus misinterpreting the course of events was part of his share 
 of the penalty of slavery. 
 
CHAPTEE LXX. 
 
 HIS LABORS TO PROMOTE EDUCATION. 
 
 But bis conduct was wiser than his words ; for he spent all his 
 declining years in a singularly persistent endeavor to introduce into 
 Virginia the institutions of New England. When a man finds him- 
 self a member of a community in which there is incorporp,ted some 
 all-pervading evil, — like slavery in old Virginia, like ill-distributed 
 wealth in Great Britain now, — there are two ways in which he can 
 attack it. One way is to cry aloud and spare not ; place himself dis- 
 tinctly in opposition to the evil ; show it no quarter ; and take the 
 chance of being a martyr or a conqueror. There are times and 
 places when this heroic system is the only one admissible. The 
 other method of attack is to set on foot measures, the fair working 
 of which will infuse such health and vigor into the sick body politic 
 as will enable it, at length, to cast out the disease. Thus we see 
 that Yale, Harvard, and the common school, have gone far toward 
 rescuing the fine intelligence of New England from the blight of 
 the Mathers and their hideous ideas ; and we see the cheap press 
 and the workingmen's lyceums and unions of Great Britain about to 
 break up entail, primogeniture, and the rich preserves of an exclu- 
 sive army, navy, India, and church. In Virginia no other method 
 but this was even possible to be attempted in Jefferson's time. If 
 he had set free his slaves, and waged open war against slavery, he 
 would not have improved their condition, nor mitigated the malady 
 of which Virginia was dying. His slaves would have become vaga- 
 bonds, and himself an object of commiseration and derision. He 
 made no such Quixotic attempts to serve his State, but directed his 
 efforts to the gradual removal of what he felt to be the all}'- and 
 main support of all the evil in the universe, — ignorance. He 
 made this his business during the last sixteen years of his life, 
 700 
 
HIS LABOES TO PEOMOTE EDUCATION. 701 
 
 and toiled at it as vigorous men toil for the ordinary objects of 
 ambition. 
 
 And happily, as in earlier days when the liberties of his country 
 were menaced he had in Madison a confidential ally, gifted with a 
 parliamentary talent which Nature had denied to himself; so now, 
 when his object was to break up the great deep of Virginia ignorance, 
 he found a most efficient and untiring co-operator in his friend, 
 Joseph C. Cabell, a member of the Senate of Virginia. They 
 entered into a holy alliance to bring their State up to the level de- 
 manded by the age. What both had planned in the study, Cabell 
 advocated in the legislature ; and when Cabell found the legislature 
 unmanageable, Jefferson would come to his aid with one of his 
 exhaustive, vote-changing letters, which would find its way into a 
 Richmond newspaper, and then- go the rounds of the press. 
 
 A part of the letters which passed between these lovers of their 
 country have been published in an octavo of five hundred and 
 twenty-eight pages ; and most of Jefferson's, long and elaborate as 
 many of them are, were written when a page or two of manuscript 
 cost him hours of painful exertion. Once in 1822, when Cabell had 
 urged him to write a number of letters to influential gentlemen in 
 aid of one of their schemes, he replied, " You do not know, my dear 
 sir, how great is my physical inability to write. The joints of my 
 right wrist and fingers, in consequence of an ancient dislocation, are 
 become so stiffened, that I can write but at the pace of a snail. The 
 copying our report and my letter lately sent to the governor, being 
 seven pages only, employed me laboriously a whole week. The let- 
 ter I am now writing you" (filling one large sheet) "has taken me 
 two days. A letter of a page or two costs me a day of labor, and 
 of painful labor." 
 
 But some of these letters were among the best he ever wrote. In 
 his endeavors to reconcile the people of Virginia to the cost of main- 
 taining a common school in each " ward " of every county, he showed 
 all his old tact and skill. His " ward " was to be "so laid oft' as to 
 comprehend the number of inhabitants necessary to furnish a cap- 
 tain's company of militia," — five hundred persons of all ages and 
 either sex. The great difficulty was to convince the average planter 
 that he, the rich man of the ward, had an interest in contributing 
 to the common school, the teacher of which wag to receive a hundred 
 and fifty dollars a year, and "board round." Jefferson met this 
 
702 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 objection in a letter that still possesses convincing power. And liis 
 argument comes home to the inhabitants of the great cities now ris- 
 ing everywhere, and destined to contain half of the population of 
 this continent. What are they but a narrow rim of elegance and 
 plenty around a vast and deep abyss of squalor, into which a certain 
 portion of the dainty children of the smiling verge are sure to slide 
 at last ? How eloquent are these quiet words of Jefferson, when we 
 apply them to our own city! Would that I could give them wings 
 that would carry round the world a passage so simple, so humane, so 
 wise, and so adroit ! 
 
 "And will the wealthy individual have no retribution? And 
 what will this be? 1. The peopling his neighborhood with honest, 
 useful, and enlightened citizens, understanding their own rights, and 
 'firm in their perpetuation. 2. When his descendants become poor, 
 which they generally do within three generations (no law of primo- 
 geniture now perpetuating wealth in the same families), their chil- 
 dren will be educated by the then rich ; and the little advance he 
 now makes to poverty, while rich himself, will be repaid by the then 
 rich to his descendants when become poor, and thus give them a 
 chance of rising again. This is a solid consideration, and should go 
 home to the bosom of ever}'^ parent. This will be seed sown in fertile 
 ground. It is a.2yrovision for his family looking to distant times, 
 and far in duration beyond that he has now in hand for them. Let 
 every man count backwards in his own family, and see how many 
 generations he can go, before he comes to the ancestor who made 
 the fortune he now holds. Most will be stopped at the first genera- 
 tion ; many at the second ; few will reach the third ; and not one 
 in the State can go beyond the fifth." 
 
 Like Franklin, he was not content with appealing only to the 
 higher motives. State pride was a chord which he touched with 
 effect. He reminded Virginians, that, before the Eevolution, the 
 mass of education in Virginia placed her with the foremost of her 
 sister colonies ; but now " the little we have we import, like beg- 
 gars, from other States, or import their beggars to bestow on us 
 their miserable crumbs." He pointed to Virginia's ancient friend 
 and ally, Massachusetts, only one-tenth as large as Virginia, and 
 the twenty-first state in the Union in size. But she has " more 
 
HIS LABOES TO PEOMOTE EDUCATION. 703 
 
 influence in our confederacy than any 6th er State in it." Why? 
 " From her attention to education unquestionably. There can be 
 no stronger proof that knowledge is power and that ignorance is 
 weakness." 
 
 He did not live to see a State system of common schools estab- 
 lished in Virginia. A scheme of his for maintaining in each 
 county a circulating library was also in advance of that generation, 
 and had no great results in his own day. 
 
 But the two conspirators against ignorance had one memorable 
 and glorious triumph. They succeeded in planting on Virginia soil 
 a viniversity, unique in two particulars. In all other American 
 colleges then existing, the controlling influence was wielded b}'' one 
 of the lea,rned professions ; and all students were compelled to pur- 
 sue a course of studies originally prescribed by that one pi'ofession 
 for its own perpetuation. In the University of Virginia, founded 
 through lihe influence and persistent tact of Jefferson, seconded at 
 every stage by the zeal and ability of Cabell, all the professions are 
 upon an equalit}', and every student is free to choose what knowl- 
 edge he will acquire, and what neglect. It is a secularized univer- 
 sity. Knowledge and scholarship are there neither rivals nor 
 enemies, but equal and independent sources of mental power, invit- 
 ing all, compelling none. Jefferson's intention was to provide an 
 assemblage of schools and professors, where every student could find 
 facilities for getting just what knowledge he wanted, without being 
 obliged to pretend to pursue studies for which he had neither need 
 nor taste. He desired, also, to test his favorite principle of trusting 
 every individual to the custody of his own honor and conscience. 
 It was his wish that students should stand on the simple footing of 
 citizens, amenable only to the laws of their State and country, and 
 that the head of the faculty should be a regularly commissioned 
 magistrate, to sit in judgment on any who had violated those laws. 
 This part of the scheme he was compelled, at a critical moment, to 
 drop ; but he did so only to avoid .the peril of a more important 
 failure. But he held to the principle. He would have no espionage 
 upon the students ; but left all of them free to improve their oppor- 
 tunities in their own way, provided the laws of the land were not 
 broken, and the rights of others were respected. His trust was in 
 the conscience and good sense of the students, in the moral influ- 
 ence, of a superior corps of instructors, and in an elevated public 
 opinion. 
 
704 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 Jefferson was forty years in getting the University of Virginia 
 establislied. Long he hoped that the ancient college of William 
 and Mary could be freed from limiting conditions and influences, 
 and be developed into a true university. As late as 1820 he was 
 still striving for a " consolidation " of the old college with the form- 
 ing institution in Albemarle. It was already apparent that the 
 want of America was, not new institutions of learning, but a sup- 
 pression of one-half of those already existing, aijd the "survival of 
 the fittest," enriched by the spoils of the weak. But William and 
 Mary, like most of the colleges of Christendom, is constricted by 
 the ignorance and vanity of " benefactors," who gave their money 
 to found an institution for all time, and annexed conditions to 
 their gifts which were suited only to their own time. Nothing 
 remained but to create a new institution. In 1794 a strange cir- 
 cumstance occurred, which gave him hopes of attaining his object 
 by a short cut. Several of the professors in the College of Geneva, 
 Switzerland, dissatisfied with the political condition of their canton, 
 united in proposing to Mr. Jefferson to remove in a body to Vir- 
 ginia, and continue their vocation vmder the protection and patron- 
 age of the legislature. On sounding influential members, he 
 discovered that the project was premature, and it was not pressed. 
 The coming of Dr. Priestley, followed by some learned friends 
 of his and other men of science, revived his hopes. A letter to 
 Priestley in 1800 shows that the great outlines of the scheme were 
 then fully drawn in his mind. He told the learned exile that he 
 desired to found in the centre of the State a "university on a plan 
 so broad and liberal and modern as to be worth patronizing with 
 the public support, and be a temptation to the youth of other States 
 to come and drink of the cup of knowledge, and fraternize with 
 us." He proposed that the professors should follow no other call- 
 ing; and he hoped " to draw from Europe the first characters in 
 science hj considerable temptations." He asked Dr. Priestley to 
 draw up a plan, and favor him with advice and suggestions. Dur- 
 ing his presidency, he still embraced opportunities to increase his 
 knowledge of such institutions. After his retirement, the war of 
 1812 interposed obstacles^ but, from the peace of 1815 to the close 
 of his life, the University of Virginia was the chief subject of his 
 thoughts, and the chief object of his labors. 
 
 It is not difficult to begin the most arduous enterprise. How 
 
HIS LABORS TO PROMOTE EDUCATION. 705 
 
 many well-cut corner-stones lie buried in various parts of this conti- 
 nent ! We excel in corner-stones. That was a glad and proud 
 day for Albemarle when the corner-stone of the University of Vir- 
 ginia was laid, witnessed by the three neighbors who filled in suc- 
 cession the office of president of the United States, — Jefferson, 
 Madison, Monroe, the last named being president at the time. 
 But it had cost Jefferson some exercise of his tact to get the cor- 
 ner-stone laid just there, within sight of his own abode. Other 
 localities had, of course, their strenuous advocates. If a member 
 of the commission raised an objection on the ground that other 
 places were more salubrious, Jefferson would draw from liis pocket 
 a list of persons past eighty then living in the neighborhood. But 
 an institution built and supported by the common treasure should 
 be central ! So it must. And Jefferson produced a card cut into 
 the shape of Virginia, upon which the proposed site of the univer- 
 sity was indicated by a dot. That the dot was very near the centre 
 of the State could be shown by balancing the card on the point of 
 a pencil. But a place may be geographically central without being 
 near the centre of population. It may indeed. And Jefferson 
 exhibited a piece of board representing Virginia, on which he had 
 written, in his own clear, minute hand, the population of everj'' 
 part of the State; which made it plain to the eye, that, if the popu- 
 lation of Virginia had been called upon to revolve, Monticello was 
 the very pivot for the purpose. In short, the corner-stone was laid 
 where the master of Monticello could watch its rising glories from 
 his portico, and ride over every day to the site, five miles distant. 
 
 Then came the tug of war. He had subscribed a thousand dol- 
 lars toward the fund, and his neighbors had multiplied that sum by 
 forty- four. But the main reliance of the founder was upon the 
 legislature of the State, not accustomed to appropriate money for 
 such an object, nor able to appropriate much. Party passions were 
 7iot extinct ; and if, with the majority, Jefferson was a name to 
 conjure with, there was an influential minority who held him in 
 undiminished'aversion. Virginia, too, was a declining commonwealth. 
 Nothing was so abundant tliere as encumbered estates ; and many 
 families, who held their heads high, were subsisting on the proceeds 
 of the sale, now and then, of little girls and boys, or " likely " men 
 and women. Money came hard ; and Jefferson wanted a great deal 
 more of it to complete his plans than either he or the legislature 
 45 
 
706 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 had anticipated. "I have been long sensible," he wrote in 1826, 
 " that while I was endeavoring to render our country the greatest 
 of all services, that of regenerating the public education, and pla- 
 cing our rising generation on the level of our sister States (which 
 they have proudly held heretofore), I was discharging the odious 
 function of a physician pouring medicine down the throat of a 
 patient insensible of needing it." He was, also, a connoisseur in 
 architecture, which is not an inexpensive taste. He thought that 
 it became Virginia to erect something grand and noble for an insti- 
 tution that was to bear her name, and invite the flower of the j^outh 
 of other States. Year after year Mr. Cabell had to renew the 
 struggle in the legislature to get money to go on with. Three hun- 
 dred thousand dollars were expended in all, and an appropriation 
 of fifteen thousand dollars a year was made toward the support of 
 the institution. The zeal of Cabell was contagious and irresistible. 
 At one critical moment his feelings were wrought to such a pitch, 
 that he dared not remain in the chamber while the vote was taken; 
 and thus he missed a moving scene. The vote that day decided 
 the location. As soon as the result was declared, Mr. B. G. Bald- 
 win, the leader of the party opposed to placing the institution at 
 Charlottesville, rose and made a powerful appeal in behalf of the 
 university. He had contended strenuously for a more western site 
 as long as there was auy hope of success ; but now that another 
 place had been chosen, he conjured the western members to rise 
 superior to local prejudices, and give the institution a cordial sup- 
 port. " A great part of the House," reports Cabell, " were in 
 'tears. Such magnanimity in a defeated adversary excited univer- 
 sal applause." 
 
 Mr. Jefferson had now secured the most fascinating occupation 
 for his last years that could have been contrived for him. He was 
 chairman of the board of trustees ; and they all seemed to agree 
 with Mr. Madison when he remarked at one of their first meetings, 
 " This is Mr. Jefferson's scheme ; the responsibility is his ; and it is 
 but fair that he should be allowed to carry it out in his own way." 
 Jefferson's love of construction, his ingenuity as an inventor, his 
 interest in science, his patriotism and benevolence, were all gratified 
 in superintending the formation of the university. Colonel T. J. 
 Eandolph has described in a vivid and agreeable manner the joyous 
 activity of his grandfather at this time, — how he would mount his 
 
HIS LABORS TO PROMOTE EDUCATION. 707 
 
 horse early in the morning, canter down the mountain and across 
 the country to the site, and spend a long day there in assisting- at 
 the work ; carrying with him a walking-stick of his own invention 
 (now familiar to all), composed of three sticks, which, being spread 
 out and covered witha piece of cloth, made a tolerable seat. He it 
 was who designed the plan and made working-draughts for each 
 detail. He engaged workmen, selected timber, and bought bricks. 
 Carvers of stone whom he caused to be brought from Italy settled 
 in the county, and have living descendants there at this moment. 
 Afterwards, finding his ornate capitals could be cut cheaper in Italy, 
 he had them executed there. It was his object to exhibit to the 
 future students specimens of all the orders of architecture, and edi- 
 fices that should call to mind seyeral of the ancient triumphs of his 
 favorite art. Occupants of the buildings, it is said, would prefer 
 less grandeur and more convenience, fewer columns and more, closets. 
 The time came for selecting professors. The very first appoint- 
 ment brought ia storm about his ears. One of the fugitives from the 
 re-action in European politics of 1793 was Thomas Cooper, a friend 
 of Priestley and a gentleman of note in chemistry and other 
 branches of natural science. Under the Sedition Law, for a harm- 
 less paragraph upon President Adams, after a trial in which Judge 
 Chase had not kept up even a decent show of impartiality, the 
 accused was sentenced to pay a fine of four hundred dollars, and to 
 •be imprisoned six months. Of course he was a made man from the 
 moment of the ascendency of the Republican party. As he was 
 reputed to be the first chemist in the United States, the visitors 
 innocently invited him to the chair of chemistry in the new univer- 
 sity. Four States were competing for his services. New York, 
 through De Witt Clinton, offered him liberal compensation for that 
 time, — twenty-five hundred dollars a year and fees. Pennsylvania 
 sought him for the university in Philadelphia, offering him a place 
 worth seven thousand a year. New Orleans had invited him, and 
 William and Mary desired him. But when it became known that 
 he had decided for Jefferson and the University of Virginia, the 
 slumbering fury of the year 1800 blazed up again, and an outcry 
 arose so violent as to threaten the existence of a university depend- 
 ent upon the popular will. It was remembered, too, that Dr. 
 Cooper was a Unitarian, a name of opprobrium even at a time so 
 recent. This was, indeed, a serious consideration ; for a religious 
 
708 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFBESON". 
 
 prejudice was then one of those blind, resistless forces whicli were 
 no more amenable to reason than an earthquake or a tornado. 
 There is nothing to be done in the presence of a convulsion of 
 nature but to get out of its way. And it really was of the very 
 first necessity to avoid the appearance of using the university as a 
 means of propagating peculiar opinions. Jefferson bent to a storm 
 he could not brave, and relinquished Cooper to one of the other 
 institutions that desired him. It was a happy riddance. South 
 Carolina obtained him at last, and made a nullifier of him in 1832. 
 >i A competent corps of professors were engaged in England ; and 
 in March, 1825, the universit}^ was opened with forty students, a 
 number which was increased to one hundred and twenty-three before 
 the end of the first term, and to one hundred and seventy-seven at 
 the beginning of the second year. 
 
 The institution differs from other American colleges in these partic- 
 ulars : there is no president ; all the professors are of equal rank, 
 except that one of their number is elected chairman of the faculty, 
 and performs the usual representative duties. They get_ from the 
 ufiiversity a small fixed salary, meant to be sufficient for subsist- 
 ence. Besides this, every professor receives a small fee from each of 
 the students attending his " school." There are no rewards given 
 by the university and no honors, except a statement of the student's 
 proficiency in each of the ''schools" which he attends; and that 
 liroficiency is ascertained, not by a system of daily marks, but by an 
 examination which is intended to be thorough and just. " Gradua- 
 tion " signifies only that a student has acquitted himself well in one 
 of the "groups" of schools. A great point is made of the exami- 
 nations. " Rigorous written examinations," Dr. Charles Venable, 
 the chairman of the faculty, has recently written, " are held period- 
 ically in each school, and the diploma of the school is conferred on 
 those students only whose examination-papers come up to a fixed 
 standard. That is, the candidate for graduation must obtain four- 
 fifths (in some of the schools three-fourths) of the values assigned 
 to the questions set in the examinations. No distinctions are made 
 among the graduates. A student either graduates cum laude or 
 not at all. In the lower classes of the schools like examinations are 
 held, and certificates of distinction given to those who come up to 
 the standard of three-fourths of the values of the questions' set." 
 Another peculiarity of this institution is the homage it pays to 
 
HIS LABOES TO PROMOTE EDUCATION. 709 
 
 religion. This is unique. In other colleges it is assumed that 
 students will neither go to church nor attend prayers unless they 
 are compelled to do so. This university, on the contrary, assumes 
 that religion ha5 an attractive power of its own, and leaves it to each 
 student to go to church and attend prayers, or to abstain from so 
 doing. Daily prayers are held, and a service on Sunday is conducted 
 by a clergyman of the vicinit}'-, elected in rotation from the chief 
 denominations of the State ; and he is maintained by the voluntary 
 contributions of the inmates of the university. But the dishonor 
 is not put upon him of compelling attendance at his ministrations. 
 Dr. Venable states that the results of this system of freedom are 
 such as might have been expected. " The students," he says, " con- 
 tribute with commendable liberality to the support of the chaplain, 
 who goes constantly in and out among them as their friend and 
 brother, laboring earnestly in the promotion of Christian activity 
 and all good works. There is always a respectable attendance of 
 student worshippers at morning prayers, a good attendance of 
 students in the Sunday services in the chapel as well as in the 
 churches in the town. There is an earnest Christian activity among 
 the students, which employs itself in the different enterprises of the 
 University Young Men's Christian Association. They keep up six 
 Sunday schools in the sparsely-settled mountain districts of the 
 neighborhood, — five for whites and one for freedmen, with an aver- 
 age attendance on each of thirty pupils. This steady Christian activ- 
 ity is not a thing of to-day or yesterday, but it has been the rule 
 for years." 
 
 Dr. Venable bears explicit testimony also to the happy results of 
 Mr. Jefferson's darling system of trusting the students, instead of 
 spying them. " I have seen," he says, "the plan of trusting to the 
 students' honor, and of the abolition of all espionage, tested here and 
 in the University of South Carolina. It has also been adopted in 
 most of the Virginia colleges with the best results. Its eftects in 
 imbuing the body of the students with the spirit of truth and 
 candor, in giving them the proper scorn for a lie, and in promoting a 
 frank and manly intercourse between the students and professors, 
 cannot be too highly estimated. A student who is known to have 
 been guilty of a violation of his examination pledge, or of any other 
 falsehood in his dealings with the authorities, — things of rare occur- 
 rence, — is not permitted by his fellows to remain in the institution." 
 
710 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 It is also his opinion, that the university has signally answered 
 the great design of. its founder, which was to raise the standard of 
 liberal education in Virginia. The mere fact of keeping its diplomas, 
 so far as is possible to human scrutiny, free froid falsehoods, and 
 issuing no diplomas of the kind called honorary, has had a percepti- 
 ble effect, he thinks, in restoring to parchment a portion of the 
 power it once had to confer honorable distinction. 
 
 Like all other institutions of learning in the Southern States, it 
 was subjected to a most severe ordeal during the late war. The 
 number of students had gone on increasing from year to year, until 
 it had reached an average of six hundred and fifty. Then came the 
 rude blast of war, which a Southern student must have been much 
 more or something less than human, not to have obeyed. Abstract 
 truth is usually powerless when father, mother, sisters, brothers, 
 friends, and neighbors are all pulling the other way. Hundreds of 
 alumni (the strength of a university) fell in battle, never doubting 
 that they died for their country and their rights. But during the 
 whole of the four years' struggle, the university was kept open, and 
 only once did the war come near it. In March, 1865, General Sher- 
 idan was at Charlottesville with a body of cavalry ; but during the 
 few daj's of his stay in the neighborhood he placed guards around 
 the grounds of the university, and preserved its property uninjured. 
 For the first two or three years after the peace, education being in 
 arrears, and the people, it is said, more hopeful than they are now, 
 the number of students was again nearly five hundred. The Cata- 
 logue for 1872 shows three hundred and sixty-five. Virginia, besides 
 bearing up under a great load of debt, has nobly continued the 
 annual appropriation of fifteen thousand dollars ; and two citizens 
 of the State, Samuel Miller and Thomas Johnson, have recently 
 given one hundred and forty thousand dollars to found a department 
 of incfustrial chemistry and engineering. 
 
 The present effort of the visitors is to strengthen and widen the 
 basis of the university by an endowment of half a million. That 
 peculiar friendship which once existed between Virginia and Massa- 
 chusetts, dating back to the time when Massachusetts was stricken 
 in her chief industry, and Virginia was her bountiful helper and con- 
 solation, seems to live again in the late exchange of courtesies between 
 the president of Harvard and the chairman of the faculty of the 
 University of Virginia. " I hope," says Dr. Venable, " the many 
 
HIS LABORS TO PROMOTE EDUCATION. 711 
 
 friends and benefactors of Harvard will wisely concentrate on her 
 the means of fulfilling all her high aspirations." Massachusetts, 
 with her capital to rebuild, and her Harvard to restore, must deny 
 herself at present many pleasures which she would otherwise enjoy. 
 New York will, perhaps, treat herself to the gift of this half million. 
 It is a pleasing evidence of the advance of catholicity of feeling, 
 that Henry Ward Beecher, the representative liberal of the North- 
 ern States, the son of a Calvinist and a Federalist, himself always 
 an Abolitionist, should have contributed a thousand dollars to the 
 fund. 
 
 The great thing to be desired in the higher education of America 
 is the union of several colleges in each State to form one or 
 two real universities. But probably this can only be done by 
 Nature's own method of strengthening the strong and starving the 
 weak. This university, from the day when Jefferson gave it life, 
 has shown a lusty strength, that marks it as one of the " fittest " 
 which are destined to " survive." 
 
 During these last years Mr. Jefferson showed in many other ways 
 that the best solace of declining age is an intelligent and benevolent 
 mind. He watched with deep concern the ceaseless movement of 
 the human soul toward freedom and purity. Dr. Channing became 
 an interesting figure to him ; and he hailed with delight the inroads 
 which Channing appeared to be making in what he considered the 
 most pernicious of all priestly devices, the theology of Calvin. It is 
 hard to say which surpassed the other in boiling hatred of Calvin- 
 ism, Jefferson or John Adams. " I rejoice," writes Jefferson in 
 1822, ''that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which 
 has surrendered its creed and conscience neither to kings nor priests, 
 the genuine doctrine of one only God is reviving; and I trust there 
 is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die 
 a Unitarian." He was ever the most sanguine of men. Often, at 
 tliis period, he spoke of the ancient doctrines with an approach to 
 violence. In thanking Colonel Pickering for sending him one .of 
 Dr. Channing's sermons, he wrote thus : " No one sees with greater 
 pleasure than myself the progress of reason in its advances toward 
 rational Cliristianity. When we shall have done away with the 
 incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian arithmetic, that three are 
 one, and one is three ; when we shall have knocked down the artifi- 
 cial scaffolding reared to mask from view the simple structure of 
 47 
 
712 LD^E OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 Jesus ; when, in short, we shall have unlearned every thing taught 
 since his day, and got back to the pure and simple doctrines he 
 inculcated, — we shall then be truly and worthily his disciples ; and 
 my opinion is, that, if nothing had ever been added to what flowed 
 purely from his lips, the whole world would at this day have been 
 Christian. . . . Had there never been a commentator, there never 
 would have been an infidel." 
 
 He became even more vehement than this after his eightieth year. 
 He spoke of "the blasphemous absurdity of the five points of Cal- 
 vin ; " of " the hocus-pocus phantasm of a God " created hy Calvin, 
 which, " like ailother Cerberus," had " one body and three heads ; " 
 and declared, that, in his opinion, "it would be more pardonable to 
 believe in no God at all than to blaspheme him by the atrocious 
 attributes of Calvin." Hence his joy at the triumphs of the young 
 Boston preacher whose boldness aud fervor, he heard, were setting 
 free so many human minds from the iron bondage of the past. "In 
 Boston and its neighborhood," he writes exultingly to Dr. Cooper, 
 " Unitarianism has advanced to so great strength as now to humble 
 this haughtiest of all religious sects, the Presbyterian ; inasmuch as 
 they condescend to interchange with them and the other sects the 
 civilities of preaching freely and frequently in each other's meeting- 
 houses." But other parts of the country, he owned, were far less 
 enlightened, a threatening cloud of fanaticism being over them, 
 " lighter in some parts, denser in others, but too heavy in all." ''In 
 Bhode Island no sectarian preacher will permit a Unitarian to pol- 
 lute his desk. In our Richmond there is much fanaticism, but chiefly 
 among the women. They have their night meetings and praying 
 parties where, attended by their priests, and some times by a hen- 
 pecked husband, tliey pour forth the effusions of their love to Jesus, 
 in terms as amatory and carnal as their modesty would permit them 
 to use to a mere earthly lover. In our village of Charlottesville 
 there is a good degree of religion with a small spice only of fanati- 
 cism. We have four sects, but without either church or meeting- 
 house. The court-house is the common temple, one Sunday in the 
 month to each. Here Episcopalian and Presbyterian, Methodist 
 and Baptist, meet together, join in hjnnning their Maker, listen with 
 attention and devotion to each other's preachers, and all mix in 
 society with perfect harmony." The final and comjilete remedy, he 
 thought, for the '• fever of fanaticism " was the diffusion of knowl- 
 
HIS LABORS TO PROMOTE EDUCATION. 713 
 
 edge ; and again he indulges his sanguine humor by predicting 
 that " Unitarianism will, ere long, be the religion of the majority, 
 from north to south." 
 
 In matters political he remained to the last what he was in 1800. 
 He could not relish Scott's novels, because they concealed, as he 
 thought, the ugly truth of the past under an alluring guise of the 
 romantic and picturesque. He disliked the robber Norman, loved 
 the industrial Saxon. As for Hume's History of England, and 
 Blackstone's Commentaries, he never ceased to hate them. "They 
 have made Tories," he wrote, " of all England, and are making Tories 
 of those young Americans whose native feelings of independence do 
 not place them above the wily sophistries of a Hume or a Blafck- 
 stone. These two books, but especially the former, have done more 
 towards the suppression of the liberties of man than all the million 
 of men in arms of Bonaparte and the millions of human lives with 
 the sacrifice of which he will stand loaded before the judgment-seat 
 of his Maker." He said, too, that, while he feared nothing for our 
 liberty from the assaults of force, he had fears of the influence of 
 English books, English prejudices, English manners, and their apes 
 and dupes among professional men. He remained a free-trader to 
 the end. , The longer he lived the more he felt the necessity of ja 
 subdivision of territory, like the town-system of New England, under 
 which each citizen belongs to a small body of voters, with whom he 
 can conveniently co-operate, and who can be assembled without delay 
 or difficulty. He would have divided a city of the size of New York 
 into three hundred wards. He also became perfectly aware of the 
 truth, since demonstrated in so many ways and places, that universal 
 suffrage, where a majority of the voters are grossly ignorant, tends 
 to put the scoundrel at the summit of affairs. In commenting upon 
 a new constitution proposed for Spain, he said there was one provision 
 in it " which would immortalize its inventors." That provision dis- 
 franchised every, man, who, after a certain epoch, could not read and 
 write. 
 
CHAPTER LXXL 
 
 VISITORS AT MONTICELLO, AND FAMILY REMINISCENCES. 
 
 The reader may naturally desire to linger a moment longer upon 
 the summit of the little mount, where, for the long period of sixty 
 years, such a joyous, intelligent, and dignified life was lived. 
 Among the visitors who thronged thither during the last years of 
 Mr. Jefferson's life were several persons of note who recorded their 
 recollections. Mr. Randall has gathered from surviving descendants 
 of the family many pleasing reminiscences, and from them also I 
 will borrow a trait or two. 
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF A GRAND-DAUGHTER. 
 
 Books were at all times his chosen companions, and his acquaint- 
 ance with many languages gave him great power of selection. He 
 read Homer, Virgil, Dante, Corneille, Cervantes, as he read Sliak- 
 speare and Milton. In his youth he had loved poetry ; but, by the 
 time I was old enough to observe, he had lost his taste for it, except 
 for Homer and the great Athenian tragics, which he continued to the 
 last to enjoy. He went over the works of ^schylus, Sophocles, and 
 Euripides not very long before I left him (the year before his death). 
 Of history he was very fond ; and this he studied in all languages, 
 though always, I think, preferring the ancients. In fact, he derived 
 more pleasure from his acquaintance with Greek and Latin than 
 from any other resource of literature ; and I have often heard him 
 express his gratitude to his father for causing him to receive a classi- 
 cal education. I saw him more frequently with a volume of the 
 classics in his hand than with any other book. Still he read new 
 publications as they came out, never missed the new number of a 
 7U 
 
VISITOES AT MONTICELLO. ' 71l 
 
 review, especially of the Edinburgli, and kept himself acquainted 
 with what was being done, said, or thought in the world from which 
 lie had retired. 
 
 He loved farming and gardening, the fields, the orchards, and his 
 asparagus-beds. Every day he rode through his plantation and 
 walked in his garden. In the cultivation of the last he took great 
 pleasure. Of flowers, too, he was \evy fond. One of my early recol- 
 lections is of the attention which he paid to his flower-beds. He 
 kept up a correspondence with persons in the large cities, particu- 
 larly, I think, in Philadelphia, for the purpose of receiving supplies 
 of roots and seeds both for his kitchen and flower garden. I remem- 
 ber well, when he first returned to Monticello, how immediately he 
 began to prepare new beds for his flowers. He had these beds laid 
 off on the lawn, under the windows ; and many a time I have run 
 after him when he went out to direct the work, accompanied by one 
 of his gardeners, generally Wormley, armed with spade and hoe, 
 while he himself carried the measuring-line. 
 
 I was too young to aid him, except in a small way ; but my sister, 
 • Mrs. Bankhead, then a young and beautiful woman, was his active 
 and useful assistant. I remember the planting of the first hyacinths 
 and tulips, and their subsequent growth. The roots arrived labelled, 
 each one with a fancy name. There was "Marcus Aurelius" and 
 the "King of the Gold Mine," the "Roman Empress" and the 
 "Queen of the Amazons," "Psyche," the "God of Love," &c. 
 Eagerly, and with childish delight, I studied this brilliant nomen- 
 clature, and wondered what strange and surprisingly beautiful crea- 
 tions I should see arising from the ground when spring returned ; 
 and these precious roots were committed to the earth under my 
 grandfather's own eye, with his beautiful grand-daughter Anne 
 standing by his side, and a crowd of happy young faces, of j'ounger 
 grandchildren, clustering round to see the progress, and inquire anx- 
 iously the name of each separate deposit. 
 
 Then, when spring returned, how eagerly we watched the first 
 appearance of the shoots above ground ! Each root was marked 
 with its own name written on a bit of stick by its side ; and what 
 joy it was for one of us to discover the tender green breaking through 
 the mould, and run to grandpapa to announce that we really believed 
 Marcus Aurelius was coming up, or the Queen of the Amazons was 
 above ground ! With how much pleasure, compounded of our pleas- 
 
716 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 ure and his own, on the new birth, he would immediately go out to 
 verify the fact, and praise us for our diligent watchfulness. 
 
 Then, when the flowers were in bloom, and we were in ecstasies 
 over the rich purple and crimson, or pure white, or delicate lilac, or 
 pale yellow of the blossoms, how he would sympathize with our 
 admiration, or discuss vA-itli my mother and elder sister new group- 
 ings and combinations and contrasts ! Oh, these were happy 
 moments for us and for him ! 
 
 It was in the morning, immediately after our early breakfast, that 
 he used to visit his flower-beds and his garden. As the day, in 
 summer, grew warmer, he retired to his own apartments, which con- 
 sisted of a bed-chamber and libi'ary opening into each other. Here 
 he remained until about one o'clock, occupied in reading, writing, 
 looking over papers, &c. My mother would sometimes send me with 
 a message to liim. A gentle knock, a call of " Come in," and I would 
 enter, with a mixed feeling of love and reverence, and some pride in 
 being the bearer of a communication to one whom I approached with 
 all the affection of a child, and something of the loyalty of a subject. 
 Our mother educated all her children to look up to her father, as" 
 she looked up to him herself, — literally looked up, as to one stand- 
 ing on an eminence of greatness and goodness. And it is no small 
 proof of his real elevation, that as we grew older, and better able to 
 judge for ourselves, we were more and more confirmed in the opin- 
 ions we had formed of it. 
 
 AXOTHER grand-daughter's RECOLLECTIONS. 
 
 Cheerfulness, love, benevolence, wisdom, seemed to animate his 
 whole form. His face beamed with them. You remember how 
 active was his step, how lively and even playful were his manners. 
 
 I cannot describe the feelings of veneration, admiration, and love 
 that existed in my heart towards him. I looked on him as a being 
 too great and good for my comprehension ; and yet I felt no fear to 
 approach him, and be taught by him some of the childish sports that 
 I delighted in. When he walked in the garden, and would call the 
 children to go with him, we raced after and before him, and we were 
 made perfectly happy by this permission to accprnpan^' him. Not 
 one of us in our wildest moods ever placed a foot on one of the gar- 
 den bedsj for that would violate one of his rules ; and yet I never 
 
VISITORS AT MONTICELLO. 717 
 
 heard liim ntter a harsh word to one of us, or sjieak in a raised tone 
 of voice, or use a throat. He simply said, "Do," or "Do not." He 
 wouhl gather fruit for us, seek out the ripest figs, or bring down the 
 cherries from on high above our heads with a long stick, at the end 
 of which there was a hook and a little net bag. . . . One of our 
 earliest amusements was in running races on the terrace, or around 
 the lawn. He placed us according to our ages, giving the 3'oungest 
 and smallest the start of all the others by some 3'ards, and so on ; 
 and then he raised his arm high with his white handkerchief in his 
 hand, on which our eager eyes were fixed, and slowly counted three, 
 at which number he dropped the handkerchief and we started off to 
 finish the race by returning to the starting-place and receiving our 
 reward of dried fruit, — three figs, prunes, or dates to the victor, two 
 to the second, and one to the lagger who came in last. These were 
 our summer sports with him. 
 
 I was born the year he was elected president ; and except one 
 winter that we spent with him in Washington, I never was with 
 him during that season until after he had retired from office. Dur- 
 ing his absences, all the children who could write corresponded with 
 him. Their letters were duly answered ; and it was a sad mortifica- 
 tion to me that I had not learned to write before his return to live 
 at home, and of course had no letter from him. Whenever an 
 opportunity occurred, he sent us books ; and he never saw a little 
 story or piece of poetry in a newspaper suited to our ages and tastes, 
 that he did not preserve it and send it to us ; and from him we 
 learned the habit of making these miscellaneous collections by past- 
 ing in a little paper book, made for the purpose, any thing of the 
 sort that we i-eceived from him or got otherwise. 
 
 On winter evenings, when it grew too dark to read, in the half- 
 hour that passed before candles came in, as we all sat round the fire, 
 he taught us several childish games, and would play them with us. 
 I remember that " cross questions," and " I love my love with an A," 
 were two I learned from him ; and we would teach some of ours to 
 him. When the candles were brought, all was quiet immediately, 
 for he took up his book to read, and we would not speak out of a 
 whisper lest we should disturb him ; and generally we followed his 
 example and took a book ; and I have seen him raise his eyes from 
 his own book, and look round on the little circle of readers, and smile, 
 and make some remark to mamma about it. When the snow fell we 
 
718 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 woulJ go out as soon as it stopped to clear it off the terraces with 
 shovels, that he might have his usual walk on them without tread- 
 ing in snow. 
 
 He often made us little presents. I remember his giving us 
 "Parents' Assistant;" and that we drew lots, and that she who drew 
 the longest straw had the first reading of the book, the next 
 longest straw entitled the drawer to the second reading, the short- 
 est, to the last reading and the ownership of the book. Often he 
 discovered, we knew not how, some cherished object of our desires; 
 and the first intimation we had of his knowing the wish was its 
 unexpected gratification. 
 
 REMINISCENCES OF ANOTHER GRAND-DAUGHTER. 
 
 My grandfather's manners to us, his grandchildren, were delight- 
 ful. I can characterize them by no other word. He talked with us 
 freely, affectionately, never lost an opportunity of giving a pleasure 
 or a good lesson. He reproved without wounding us, and commended 
 without making us vain. He took pains to correct our errors and 
 false ideas, checked the bold, encouraged the timid, and tried to 
 teach us to reason soundly and feel rightly. Our smaller follies he 
 treated witli good-humored raillery, our graver ones with kind and 
 serious admonition. He was watchful over our manners, and called 
 our attention to every violation of propriety. He did not interfere 
 with our education, technically so called, except by advising us what 
 studies to pursue, what books to read, and by questioning us on the 
 books which we did read. I was . . . thrown most into compan- 
 ionship with him. I loved him very devotedly'', and sought every 
 opportunity of being with him. As a child I used to follow him 
 about, and draw as near to him as I could. I remember when I was 
 small enough to sit on his knee and play with his watch-chain. As 
 a girl I would join him in his walks on the terrace, sit with him 
 over the fire during the winter twilight, or by the open windows in 
 summer. As a child, girl, and woman, I loved and honored him 
 above all earthly beings. And well I might. From him seemed to 
 flow all the pleasures of my life. To him I owed all the small bless- 
 ings and jox'ful surprises of my childish and girlish years. His nature 
 was so eminently sympathetic, that, with those he loved, he could 
 enter into their feelings, anticipate their wishes, gratify their tastes, 
 
VISITOES AT MONTICELLO. 719 
 
 and surround tllem with an atmosphere of affection. I was fond of 
 riding, and was rising above that childish simplicity when, provided 
 I was mounted on a horse, I cared nothing for my equipments, and 
 when an old saddle or broken bridle were matters of no moment. 
 I was beginning to be fastidious, but I had never told my wishes. I 
 was standing one bright day in the portico, when a man rode up to 
 the door with a beautiful lady's saddle and bridle before him. My 
 heart bounded. These coveted articles were deposited at my feet. 
 My grandfather came out of his room to tell me they were mine. 
 
 When about fifteen j^ears old, I began to think of a watch, but 
 knew the state of my father's finances promised no such indulgence. 
 One afternoon the letter-bag was brought in. Among the letters 
 was a small packet addressed to my grandfather. It had the Phila- 
 delphia mark upon it. I looked at it with indifferent, incurious eye. 
 Three hours after, an elegant ladj^'s watch with chain and seals was 
 in my hand, which ti'embled for very joy. IMy Bible came from him, 
 my Shakspeare, mj first writing-table, my first handsome writing- 
 desk, my first Leghorn hat, my first silk dress. "What, in short, of 
 all my small treasures did not come from him ? . . . . 
 
 ]My sisters, according to their wants and tastes, were equally 
 thought of, equally provided for. Our. grandfather seemed to read 
 our hearts, to see our invisible wishes, to be our good genius, to 
 wave the fairy wand, to brighten our young lives by his goodness 
 and his gifts. But I have written enough for tliis time ; and, 
 indeed, what can I say hereafter but to repeat the same tale of love 
 and kindness ? 
 
 VISIT OF LIEUTENANT FKANCIS HALL, OF THE BRITISH ARMY, 
 
 IN 1817. 
 
 " Having an introduction to Mr. Jefferson, I ascended his little 
 mountain on a fine morning, which gave the situation its due effect. 
 The whole of the sides and base are covered with forest, through 
 which roads have been cut circularly, so that the winding may be 
 shortened at pleasure ; the summit is an open lawn, near to the 
 south side of which the house is built, with its garden just descend- 
 ing the brow ; the saloon, or central hall, is ornamented with several 
 pieces of antique sculpture, Indian arms, mammoth bones, and other 
 curiosities collected from various parts of the Union. I found Mr. 
 
720 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 Jefferson tall in person, but stooping and lean witli old age ; thus 
 exhibiting the fortunate mode of bodily decay, which strips the frame 
 of its most cumbersome parts, leaving it still strength of muscle and 
 activity of limb. His deportment was exactly such as the Marquis 
 de Chastellux describes it above thirty years ago. 'At first serious, 
 nay, even cold,' but in a very short time relaxing into a most agree- 
 able amenity, with an unabated flow of conversation on the most 
 interesting topics, discussed in the most gentlemanly and philosophic 
 manner. I walked with him round his grounds, to visit his pet trees 
 and improvements of various hinds. During the walk he pointed out 
 to my observation a conical mountain, rising singly at the edge of 
 the southern horizon of the landscape : its distance, he said, was 
 forty miles, and its dimensions those of the greater Egyptian jDj^ra- 
 mid; so that it accurately represents the appearance of the pja-amid 
 at the same distance. There is a small cleft visible on its summit, 
 through which the true meridian of Monticello exactly passes : its 
 most singular property, however, is, that on different occasions it 
 looms, or alters its appearance, becoming sometimes cylindrical, 
 sometimes square, and sometimes assuming the form of an inverted 
 cone. Mr. Jefferson had not been able to connect this phenomenon 
 with any particular season, or state of the atmosphere, except that it 
 most commonly occurred in the forenoon. He observed that it was 
 not only whollj'- unaccounted for by the laws of vision, but that it 
 had not as yet engaged the attention of philosophers so far as to 
 acquire a name ; that of looming being, in fact, a term applied by 
 sailors to appearances of a similar kind at sea. The Blue Mountains 
 are also observed to loom, though not in so remarkable a degree. 
 
 " It must be remarkable to recall and preserve the political senti- 
 ments of a man who has held so distinguished a station in public life 
 as Mr. Jefferson, He see.med to consider much of the freedom and 
 happiness of America to rise from local circumstances. ' Our pop- 
 ulation,' he observed, 'has an elasticitj^ by which it would fly off 
 from oppressive taxation.' He instanced the beneficial eftects of a 
 free government in the case of New Orleans, where many proprie- 
 tors who were in a state of indigence under the dominion of Spain 
 have risen to sudden wealth, solely by the rise in the value of land 
 which followed a change of government. Their ingenuity in 
 mechanical inventions, agricultural improvements, and that mass of 
 general information to be found among Americans of all ranks and 
 
VISITORS AT MONTICELLO. 7!l 
 
 conditions, he ascribed to that ease of circumstances which affordel 
 them leisure to cultivate their minds, after the cultivation of thei; 
 lands was completed. In fact, I have frequently been surprised to 
 find mathematical and other useful works in houses which seemed 
 to have little pretensions to the luxury of learning. ' Another cause,' 
 Mr. Jefferson observed, 'might be discovered in the many court and 
 county meetings which brought men frequently together on public 
 business, and thus gave them habits, both of thinking, and express- 
 ing their thoughts on subjects, which in other countries are confined 
 to the privileged few.' Mr. Jefferson has not the reputation of being 
 very friendly to England: we should, however, be aware that a par- 
 tiality in this respect is not absolutely the duty of an American 
 citizen ; neither is it to be expected that the policy of our govern- 
 ment should be regarded in foreign countries with the complacency 
 with which, it is looked upon by ourselves; but, whatever may be his 
 sentiments in this respect, politeness naturally repressed any offen- 
 sive expression of them : he talked of our affairs with candor, and 
 apparent good will, though leaning perhaps to the gloomier side of 
 the picture. He did not perceive by what means we could be extri- 
 cated from our present financial embarrassments, without some kind 
 of revolution in our government. On my replying that our habits 
 were remarkably steady, and that great sacrifices would be made to 
 prevent a violent catastrophe, he acceded to the observation, but 
 demanded if those who made the sacrifices would not require some 
 political reformation in return. His repugnance was strongly 
 marked to the despotic principles of Bonapartfe ; and he seemed to 
 consider France under Louis XVI. as scarcely capable of a repub- 
 lican form of government, but added that the present generation of 
 Frenchmen had grown up with sounder notions, which would proba- 
 bly lead to their emancipation. 
 
 " Mr. Jefferson preferred Botta's Italian History of the American 
 Revolution to any that had yet appeared ; remarking, however, the 
 inaccuracy of the speeches. Indeed, the true history of that period 
 seems to be generally considered as lost. A remarkable letter on this 
 point lately appeared in print from the venerable Mr. John Adams, 
 to a Mr. Niles, who had solicited his aid to collect and publish a 
 body of revolutionary speeches. He says, ' Of all the speeches made 
 in Congress from 1774 to 1777, inclusive of both years, not one sen- 
 tence remains, except a few periods of Dr. Witherspoon, printed ia 
 46 
 
72 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 hi, works.' His concluding sentence is very strong. ' In plain 
 Biglish, and in a few words, Mr. Niles, I consider the true history 
 of the American Kevolution, and the establishment of our present 
 Constitutions, as lost forever ; and nothing hut misrepresentations, or 
 partial accounts of it, will ever be recovered.' 
 
 "I slept a night at Monticello, and left it in the morning with 
 such a feeling as the traveller quits the mouldering remains of a 
 Grecian teraplQ, or the pilgrim a fountain in the desert. It would 
 indeed argue a great torpor, both of understanding and heart, to have 
 looked without veneration and interest on the man who drew up the 
 Declaration of American Independence ; who shared in the councils 
 by wliich her freedom was established; whom the unbought voice of 
 his fellow-citizens called to the exercise of a dignity from which his 
 own moderation impelled him, when such an example was most 
 salutary, to withdraw ; and who, while he dedicates the evening of 
 his glorious days to the pursuits of science and literature, shuns none 
 of the humbler duties of private life; but, having filled a seat high- 
 er than that of kings, succeeds with graceful dignity to that of the 
 good neighbor, and becomes the friendly adviser, lawj'er, and physi- 
 cian, and even gardener, of his vicinity. This is the still small voice 
 of philosophy, deeper and holier than the lightnings and earthquakes 
 which have preceded it." 
 
 VISIT OF DANIEL WEBSTER IN 1824. 
 
 "Mr. Jefferson is now between eighty-one and eighty-two, above 
 six feet high, of an ample, long frame, rather thin and spare. His 
 head, which-is not peculiar in its shape, is set rather forward on his 
 shoulders ; and his neck being long, there is, when he is walking or 
 conversing, an habitual protrusion of it. It is still well covered with 
 hair, which having been once red, and now turning gray, is of an 
 indistinct sandy-color. 
 
 " His eyes are small, very light, and now neither brilliant nor 
 striking. His chin is rather long, but not pointed. His nose small, 
 regular in its outline, and the nostrils a little elevated. His mouth 
 is well formed, and still filled with teeth : it is strongly compressed, 
 bearing an expression of contentment and benevolence. His com- 
 plexion, formerly light and freckled, now bears the marks of age and 
 cutaneous affection. His limbs are uncommonly long, his hands 
 
VISITORS AT MONTICELLO. 723 
 
 and feet very large, and his wrists of an extraordinary size. His 
 walk is not precise and military, but easy and swinging. He stoops 
 a little, not so much from age as from natural formation. When 
 sitting, he appears short, partly from a rather lounging habit of sit- 
 ting, and partly from the disproportionate length of his limbs. 
 
 " His dress when in the house is a gray surtout coat, kerseymere- 
 stuff waistcoat, with an under-one faced with some material of a dingy 
 red. His pantaloons are very long and loose, and of the same color 
 as his coat. His stockings are woollen, either white or gray ; and 
 his shoes of the kind that bear his name. His whole dress is very 
 mach neglected, but not slovenly. He wears a common round hat. 
 His dress when on horseback is a gray straight-bodied coat, and a 
 spencer of the same material, both fastened with large pearl buttons. 
 When we first saw him he was riding ; and, in addition to the above 
 articles of apparel, wore round his throat a knit white woollen tippet 
 in the place of a cravat, and black-velvet gaiters under his panta- 
 loons. His general appearance indicates an extraordinary degree of 
 health, vivacity, and spirit. His sight is still good, for he needs 
 glasses only in the evening. His hearing is generally good, but a 
 number of voices in animated conversation confuse it. 
 
 "Mr. Jefferson rises in the morning as soon as he can see the 
 hands of his clock, which is directly opposite his bed, and examines 
 his thermometer immediately, as he keeps a regular meteorological 
 diary. He employs himself chiefly in writing, till breakfast, which 
 is at nine. From that time till dinner he is in his library, excepting 
 that in fair weather he rides on horseback from seven to fourteen 
 miles. Dines at four, returns to the drawing-room at six, when coffee 
 is brought in, and passes the evening till nine in conversation. His 
 habit of retiring at that hour is so strong, that it has become essen- 
 tial to his health and comfort. His diet 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 
 sometimes a slight accompaniment of cold meat. He enjoys his din- 
 ner well, taking with his meat a large proportion of vegetables. He 
 has a strong preference for the wines of the Continent, of which he 
 has many sorts of excellent quality, having been more than com- 
 monly successful in his mode of importing and preserving them. 
 Among others' we found the following, which are very rare in this 
 country, and apparently not at all injured by transportation, — L'Ed- 
 
724 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 nau, Muscat, ,Saraian, and Blanchette de Limoux. 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 appar- 
 ently not ambitious : it is not loud, as challenging general attention, 
 but usually addressed to the person next him. The topics, when not 
 selected to suit the character and feelings of his auditor, are those 
 subjects with which his mind seems particularl}^ occupied ; and these, 
 at present, may be said to be science and letters, and especially the 
 University of Virginia, which is coming into existence almost entirely 
 from his exertions, and will rise, it is to be hoped, to usefulness and 
 credit under his contiued care. When we were with him, his favorite 
 subjects were Greek and Anglo-Saxon, historical recollections of the 
 times and events of the Revolution, and of his residence in France 
 from 1783-4 to 1789." 
 
 VISIT OF THE DUKE OF SAXE-WEIMAR IN 1825. 
 
 " President Jefferson invited us to a family dinner ; but as in Char- 
 lottesville there is but a single hackney-coach, and this being absent, 
 we were obliged to go the three miles to Monticello on foot. 
 
 " We went by a pathway, through well-cultivated and enclosed 
 fields, crossed a creek named Eivanna, passing on a trunk of a tree 
 cut in a rough shape and without rails ; then ascended a steep hill 
 overgrown with wood, and came, on its top, to Mr. Jefferson's house, 
 which is in an open space, walled round with bricks, forming an 
 oblong whose shorter sides are rounded ; on each of the longer sides 
 are portals of four columns. 
 
 ''The unsuccessful waiting for a carriage, and our long walk, caused 
 such a delay, that we found the company at table when we entered ; 
 but Mr. Jefferson came very kindly to meet us, forced us to take our 
 seats, and ordered dinner to be served up anew. He was an old man 
 of eighty-six years of age, of tall stature, plain appearance, and 
 long white hair. 
 
 " In conversation, he was very lively ; and his spirits, as also his hear- 
 ing and sight, seemed not to have decreased at all with his advan- 
 cing age. I found in him a man who retained his faculties remark- 
 ably well in his old age, and one would have taken him for a man 
 of sixty. He asked me what I had seen in Virginia. I eulogized 
 
VISITORS AT MONTICELLO. 725 
 
 all the places that I was certain would meet with his approbation, 
 and he seemed very much pleased. The company at the table con- 
 sisted of the family of his daughter, Mrs. Randolph, and of that of 
 the professor of mathematics at the university, an Englishman and 
 his wife. I turned the conversation to the subject of the university, 
 and observed that this was the favorite topic with Mr, Jefferson : he 
 entertained very sanguine hopes as to the flourishing state of the 
 university in future, and believed that it, and the Harvard Univer- 
 sity near Boston, would in a very short time be the only institutions 
 where the youth of the United States would receive a truly classical 
 and solid education. After dinner we intended to take our leave, in 
 order to return to Charlottesville ; but Mr. Jefferson would not con- 
 sent to it. He pressed us to remain for the night at his house. The 
 evening was spent by the fire : a great deal was said about travels, 
 and objects of natural historj^ ; the fine arts were also introduced, 
 of which Mr. Jefferson was a great admirer. He spoke also of his 
 travels in France, and the country on the Rhine, where he was very 
 much pleased. His description of Virginia is the best proof what an 
 admirer he is of the beauties of nature. He told us that it was 
 only eight months since he could not ride on horseback ; otherwise 
 he rode every day to visit the surrounding country : he entertained, 
 however, hopes of being able to recommence, the next spring, his 
 favorite exercise. Between nine and ten o'clock in the evening the 
 company broke up, and a handsome room was assigned to me. 
 
 " The next morning I took a walk round the house, and admired 
 the beautiful panorama which this spot presents. On the left I saw 
 the Blue Ridge, and between them and Monticello are smaller hills. 
 Charlottesville and the university lay at my feet; before me, the 
 valley of the Rivanna River, which farther on makes its junction 
 with the James River ; and on my right was the flat part of Virginia, 
 the extent of which is lost in distance ; behind me was a towering 
 hill which limited the sight. The interior of the house was plain, 
 and the furniture somewhat of an old fashion. In the entrance was 
 a marble stove, with Mr. Jefferson's bust, by Cerracchi. In the room 
 hung several copies of the celebrated pictures of the Italian school, 
 views of Monticello, Mount Vernon, the principal buildings in Wash- 
 ington, and Harper's Ferry ; there were also an oil-];)ainting and an 
 engraving of the Natural Bridge, views of Niagara by Vanderlin, a 
 sketch of the large picture by Trumbull representing the surrender 
 
726 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 at Yorktown, and a pen-drawing of Hector's Departure by Benja- 
 min West, presented by bim to General Kosciuszko ; finally, several 
 portraits of Mr. Jefferson, among wbicb tbe best was tbat in profile, 
 by Stuart. In tbe saloon tbere were two busts, one of Napoleon as 
 First Consul, and anotber of the Emperor Alexander. Mr. Jefferson 
 admired Napoleon's military tactics, but did not love him. After 
 breakfast, which we took with the family, we bade the respectable old 
 man farewell, and set out upon our return to Charlottesville. 
 
 " Mr. Jefferson tendered us tbe use of his carriage ; but I declined, 
 as I preferred walking in a fine and cool morning." 
 
CHAPTER LXXn. 
 
 LAST TEARS AND DATS. 
 
 The meeting of Jefferson and Lafayette in 1824 fills a great 
 place in the inemoirs of those times. They had labored together in 
 anxious and critical periods, — first when Jefferson was governor of 
 Virginia, and Lafayette commanded the forces defending the State 
 against the inroads of Cornwallis ; and afterwards when Jefferson, 
 a tyro in diplomacy, enjoyed the powerful aid of the young and 
 popular nobleman at the court of France. Thirty-six years had 
 jjassed since that memoi-able day when Lafayette had brought the 
 leaders of the Revolution to Jeft'erson's house in Paris, and they 
 had there eaten a sacramental dinner, and afterwards, under the 
 serene influence of the silent master of the feast, arranged a pro- 
 gramme upon which it was possible for them to unite. Thirty-six 
 years ! Both were old men now, — Jefferson past eighty, Lafayette 
 nearly seventy; but both retained every faculty except those which 
 begin to perish as soon as they are created. Jefferson exulted when 
 he heard of the landing of his ancient friend and colleague. " I 
 hope," said he, "we shall close his visit with something more solid 
 for him than dinners and balls ; " and it was Jefferson who proposed 
 that Congress should pay part of the unrecorded and unclaimed 
 debt which the country owed Lafayette for money advanced during 
 the Revolutionary War. 
 
 During the heats of August the French republican landed in 
 New York ; and as soon as the cool days of September came he 
 moved southward on a pilgrimage to Monticello. They met on one 
 of the fine days of October. Jefi'erson would have gone some dis- 
 tance to welcome his approaching guest ; but the gentlemen in 
 charge of the occasion requested him to remain at his house, wliile 
 they escorted the Marquis from Charlottesville to the summit of the 
 
 727 
 
728 LIFE OF THOilAS JEFFEESOX. 
 
 mount. A brave cavalcade of the gentlemen of the county, with 
 trumpets sounding, and banners waving in the breeze, accompanied 
 him, and formed aboirt the lawn, while the carriage advanced to the 
 front of the mansion. A great concourse of excited and expectant 
 people were present, gazing intently upon the portico. The car- 
 riage drew up ; and while an alert little figure with gray hair 
 descended, the front door of the house opened, and the tall, bent, 
 and wasted form of JeflFerson was seen. The music ceased, and 
 every head was uncovered. The two old men threw themselves into 
 each other's arms, and relieved their feelings by a hearty embrace. 
 The coldest heart was moved, and tears filled the eyes of almost 
 every spectator. They entered the house together, and the assem- 
 bly dispersed. 
 
 During the stay of Lafayette at Monticello, there was a grand 
 banquet given in his honor in the great room of the university, 
 whicli was attended by President Monroe and the two ex-Presidents, 
 Madison and Jefferson. It was a time of hilarity and enthusiasm 
 such as we can all easily imagine. When Jefferson was toasted, he 
 handed a written speech to a' friend to read to the company. I 
 think he meant this address as a kind of farewell to his countrymen, 
 and to the great cause to which his own life and the life of his 
 guest had been devoted, — the supremacy of Eight in the affairs 
 of men. 
 
 '' I will avail myself of this occasion, my beloved neighbors and 
 friends, to thank you for the kindness which now, and at all times, 
 I have received at your hands. Born and bred among your fathers, 
 led by their partiality into the line of public life, I labored in fel- 
 lowship with them through that arduous struggle, which, freeing us 
 from foreign bondage, established us in the rights of self-govern- 
 i3;ient, — rights which have blessed ourselves, and will bless, in their 
 sequence, all the nations of the earth. In this contest we all did 
 our utmost ; and, as none could do more, none had pretensions to 
 superior merit. 
 
 " I joj, my friends, in your joy, inspired by the visit of this our 
 ancient and distinguished leader and benefactor. His deeds in the 
 War of Independence you have heard and read. They are known 
 to you, and embalmed in your memories and in the pages of faithful 
 history. His deeds in the peace which followed that war are per- 
 
LAST YEARS AND DAYS. 729 
 
 haps not known to you ; but I can attest them. When I was sta- 
 tioned in liis country, for the purpose of cementing its friendsliip 
 with ours, and of advancing our mutual interests, this friend of 
 both was my most powerful auxiliary and advocate. He made our 
 caiTse his own, as in truth it was that of his native country also. 
 His influence and connections there were great. All doors of all 
 departments were open to him at all times : to me only formally 
 and at appointed times. In truth, I only held the nail : he drove it. 
 Honor him, then, as your benefactor in peace, as well as in war. 
 
 "My friends, I am old, long in the disuse of making speeches, 
 and without voice to utter them. In this feeble state the exhausted 
 jjowers of life leave little within my competence for your service. 
 If, with the aid of my younger and abler coadjutors, I can still con- 
 tribute any thing to advance the institution within whose walls we 
 are now mingling manifestations to this our guest, it will be, as it 
 ever has been, cheerfully and zealously bestowed. And could I live 
 to see it once enjoy the patronage and cherishment of our public 
 authorities v.'ith undivided voice, I should die without a doubt of 
 the future fortunes of my native State, and in the consoling contem- 
 plation of the happy influence of this institution on its character, its 
 virtue, its prosperity', and safety. 
 
 " To these effusions for the cradle and land of my birth, I add, for 
 our nation at large, the aspirations of a heart warm with the love 
 of country ; whose invocations to Heaven for its indissoluble union 
 will be fervent and unremitting while the pulse of life continues to 
 beat ; and^ when that ceases, it will expire in prayers for the eternal 
 duration of its freedom and prosperity." 
 
 When Lafayette again visited Monticello, in 1825, to take leave 
 of his venerable friend, the university was open, with a fair pros- 
 pect of realizing at length the fond hopes of its chief founder. 
 Professors and students gathered about the visitor, and enlivened 
 the table of his illustrious liost. 
 
 These last years of Mr. Jefferson's life were not wholly passed in 
 such lofty occupations as the founding of a university and the 
 entertainment of a nation's guest. His own estate, always more 
 large than productive, had been diminishing in value for many 
 years. Few men lost more by the Embargo, in proportion to their 
 means, than the author of that measure ; and this was one of the 
 
730 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 reasons why he left Washington in 1809 owing twenty thousand 
 dolhirs. The war of 1812 continued the suspension of commerce, 
 and made tobacco and cotton ahnost worthless. After the war, Mr. 
 Jefferson relieved himself of his most pressing embarrassments by 
 selling the part of his estate which was most precious to him, and 
 most peculiarly his own, — his library, — the result of sixty 
 years', affectionate search and selection. He offered it to Congress 
 to supply the place of their library burnt by the English soldiers in 
 1814 ; and he sedulously schemed to cut down the price so as to 
 silence the murmurs of his old enemies, and prevent the purchase 
 from being an injurj'^ to his friends. The committee valued it at 
 twenty-three thousand dollars, about half its cost, and a quarter of 
 its worth. Mr. Bacon had the charge of removing the boohs to 
 Washington. " There was an immense quantity of them," he tells 
 us, " sixteen wagon-loads. Each wagon was to carry three thou- 
 sand pounds for a load, and to have four dollars a day for delivering 
 them in Washington. If they carried more than three thousand 
 pounds, they were to have extra pay. There were all kinds of 
 books, — books in a great many languages that I knew nothing 
 about." 
 
 And so Mr. Jefferson lost his library just when he needed it 
 most ; and Congress did not dare improve the golden opportunity 
 (by merely paying the just value of a unique collection) of giving 
 him substantial relief. His own collection of books had been largely 
 increased in 1807 by his old friend. Chancellor Wythe, bequeathing 
 to him his library. All these accumulations, except a few favorites, 
 he was obliged to part with in his old age. 
 
 The hard times of 1819 and 1820, which reduced so many estab- 
 lished families to poverty, brought upon Mr. Jefferson also an 
 insupportable burden. He. had indorsed for one of his oldest 
 friends and connections to the amount of twenty thousand dollars, 
 in the confident expectation of saving him from ruin. His friend 
 became bankrupt jiotwithstanding ; and the indorser had to take 
 upon his aged shoulders this crushing addition to his already ex- 
 cessive load, — twelve hundred dollars a year in money. One con- 
 sequence of this misfortune was, that he lost the services of his 
 faithful and competent manager, Edmund Bacon, who had been for 
 some years looking westward, intending to buy land and settle 
 there. " I was sorry," he says, " to leave Mr. Jefferson ; but I was 
 
LAST YEAES AND DAYS. 731 
 
 more willing to do it, because I did not wish to see the poor old 
 gentleman suffer, what I knew he must suffer, from the debts that 
 were pressing upon him." They had a sorrowful parting after their 
 twenty years of friendly and familiar intercourse. " It was a trying 
 time to me," Mr. Bacon records. " I don't know whether he shed 
 any tears or not, but I know that I shed a good many. He was 
 sitting in his room, on his sofa, where I had seen him so often ; and 
 keeping hold of my hand some time, he said, ' Now let us hear from 
 each other occasionally ; ' and as long as he lived I heard from him 
 once or twice a year. The last letter I ever had from him was 
 when I wrote him of the death of my wife, soon after T got to Ken- 
 tucky. He expressed a great deal of sympatliy for me ; said he 
 did not wonder that I felt completely broken up, and was disposed 
 to move back ; that he had passed through the same himself; and 
 only time and silence would relieve me." 
 
 Mr. Jefferson's affairs did not mend, though he enjoyed the able 
 and resolute assistance of his grandson and namesake, Thomas 
 Jefferson Randolph ; and he resolved, at length, to discharge the 
 worst of his debts, in the fashion of old Virginia, by selling a por- 
 tion of his lands. But there was nobody to buy. Land sold in the 
 usual way would not bring a third of its value ; and consequently 
 he petitioned the legislature to relax the operation of law so far as 
 to all6w him to dispose of some of his farms by lottery, as was fre- 
 quently done when money was to be raised for a public object. The 
 legislature granted his request, though with reluctance. But, in 
 the mean time, it had been noised abroad, all over the Union, that 
 the author of the Declaration of Independence was about to lose 
 that far-famed Monticello with which his name had been associated 
 in the public mind for two generations, the abode of liis prime and 
 the refuge of his old age, a Mecca to the republicans of many 
 lands. A feeling arose in all liberal minds that tliis must not be; 
 and during the spring of 1826, the last of his years, subscriptions 
 were made for his relief in several places. Philip Hone, mayor of 
 New York, raised without an effort, as Mr. Randall records, eight 
 thousand five hundred dollars. Philadelphia sent five thousand, and 
 Baltimore three thousand. The lottery was suspended ; and Mr. 
 Jefferson's last days were solaced by the belief that the subscrip- 
 tions w'ould suffice to free his estate from debt, and secure home and 
 independence to his daughter and her children. He was proud of 
 
732 LITE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 the liberality of his countrymen, and proud to be its object. He 
 who had refused to accept so much as a loan from the legislature 
 of his State gloried in being the recipient of gifts from individuals. 
 "No cent of this," said he, "is wrung from the tax-payer. It is 
 the pure and unsolicited offering of love." 
 
 There has seldom been a sounder constitution than his, nor one 
 less abused. At eighty-two his teeth were all but perfect, he 
 enjoyed his daily ride on horseback of ten miles, and he was only 
 afraid that life might continue after it had ceased to be a blessing. 
 " I have ever," he wrote to Mr. Adams in 1822, " dreaded a doting 
 old age ; and my health has been generally so good, and is now so 
 good, that I dread it still. The rapid decline of my strength 
 during the last winter has made me hope sometimes that I see land. 
 During summer I enjoy its temperature; but I shudder at the 
 approach of winter, and wish I could sleep through it with the dor- 
 mouse, and only wake with him in spring, if ever." Reduced 
 by an occasional diarrhoea, he alternately rallied and declined 
 during the next three years, but, of course, never quite regained 
 after an attack what he had lost. By his family the decay of his 
 bodily |)owers was scarcely observed, it was so gradual, until the 
 spring of 1826, when it became more obvious and rapid. It was 
 his habit all his life to be silent with regard to his own sufferings ; 
 and now, especially, he concealed from every one the ravages of a 
 disease which, he knew, was about to deliver him from the "doting 
 old age" that he dreaded. His grandson just mentioned, who 
 stood nearer to him at this period than any one except his daughter, 
 was taken by surprise when he heard him say, in March, 1826, that 
 he might live till midsummer; and again, when, about the middle 
 of June, he said, as he handed him a paper to read, " Don't delay : 
 there is no time to be lost." 
 
 From that day he was under regular medical treatment. He told 
 his ph3^sician. Dr. Dunglison of the university, that he attributed 
 his disease to his free use, some years before, of the water of the 
 White Sulphur Springs of Virginia. On the 24th of June he was 
 still well enough to write a long letter in reply to an invitation to 
 attend the fiftieth celebration of the Fourth of July, at Washington. 
 
 How sanguine his mind within nine days of his death! "All 
 eyes," he wrote, with trembling hand indeed, but with a heart buoy- 
 ant and alert, "are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The 
 
LAST YEAES AND DAYS. 733 
 
 general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every 
 view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind have not been born 
 with, saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, 
 ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God." ISTothing of 
 him was impaired but his body, even then. But that grew steadily 
 weaker until he la}' upon his bed, serene, painless, cheerful, in full 
 possession of his reason, but helpless and dying. He conversed 
 calmly with his family concerning his affairs, in the k)ne of a person 
 about to set out upon a journey whicli could not be avoided. He 
 mentioned to his friends a fact of his mental condition that seemed 
 to strike him as peculiar, — that the scenes and events of the Revo- 
 lutionary period kept recurring to him. The curtains of his bed, he 
 said, were brought over in the first ship that arrived after the peace 
 of 1782 ; and he related many incidents of those eventful times. 
 Once, while he was dozing, he placed his hands as if he were writing 
 with his right on a tablet held in his left, and murmured, "Warn 
 the committee to be on the alert." When his grandson said that he 
 thought he was a little better, he replied, " Do not imagine for a 
 moment that I feel the smallest solicitude about the result. I am 
 like an old watch, with a pinion worn out here, and a wheel there, 
 until it can go no longer." Upon imagining that he heard a clergy- 
 man of the neighborhood in the next room, he said, " I have no 
 objection to see him as a kind and good neighbor ; " meaning, as his 
 grandson thought, that he did not desire to see him in his profes- 
 sional character. He repeated on his death-bed a remark which he 
 had made a hundred times before : His calumniators he had never 
 thought were assailing him, but a being non-existent, of their own 
 imagining, to whom they had given the name of Thomas Jefferson. 
 Observing a little grandson eight years old in the room, he said with 
 a smile, ''George does not understand what all this means." He 
 spoke much of IMr. Madison, who, he hoped, would succeed him as 
 rector of the university. He eulogized him justly as one of the best 
 of men and one of the greatest of citizens. 
 
 During the 3d of July he dozed hour after hour, under the influ- 
 ence of opiates, rousing occasionally, and uttering a few words. It 
 was evident that his end was very near; and a fervent desire arose in 
 all minds that he should live until the day which he had assisted to 
 consecrate half a century before. He, too, desired it. At eleven in 
 the evening Mr. N. P. Trist, the young husband of one of his grand- 
 
734 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 daughters, sat by his pillow watching his face, and turning every 
 minute toward the slow-moving hands of the clock, dreading lest the 
 flickering flame should go out before midnight. " This is the 
 Fourth ? " whispered the dying patriot. Mr. Trist could not bear to 
 say, " Not yet ; '• so he remained silent. "This is the Fourth?" 
 again asked ]\Ir. Jeiferson in a whisper. Mr. Trist nodded assent. 
 "Ah !" he breathed; and an expression of satisfaction passed over 
 his countenance.' Again he sunk into sleep, which all about him 
 feared was the slumber of death. But midnight came; the night 
 passed ; the morning dawned ; the sun rose ; the new day progressed ; 
 and still he breathed, and occasionally indicated a desire by words 
 or looks. At twenty minutes to one in the afternoon he ceased 
 to live. 
 
 At Quinc3^, on the granite shore of distant Massachusetts, another 
 memorable death-scene was passing on this Fourth of July, 1826. 
 
 John Adams, at the age of ninety-one, had been an enjoyer of 
 existence down almost to the dawn of the fiftieth Fourth of July. 
 He voted for Monroe in 1820. His own son was president of the 
 United States in 1826' He used to sit many hours of every day, 
 tranquilly listening to members of his family, while they read to him 
 the new books with which friends in Boston, knowing his taste, kept 
 him abundantly supplied. He, who was a formed man when Dr. 
 Johnson was writing his Dictionary, lived to enjoy Scott's novels and 
 Byron's poetry. His grandson, Mr. Charles Francis Adams, the 
 worthy heir of an honorable name, then a youth of eighteen, used to 
 sit by him, he tolls us, for days together, reading to him, "watching 
 the noble image of a serene old age, or listening with unabated inter- 
 est to the numerous anecdotes, the reminiscences of the past, and 
 the speculations upon the questions of all times, in which he loved 
 to indulge." On the last day of June, 1826, though his sti-ength 
 had much declined of late, he was still well enough to receive and 
 chat with a neighbor, the orator of the coming anniversary, who 
 called to ask him for a toast to be offered at the usual banquet. " I 
 will give you," said the old man, " Ixdepkndexce forever ! " 
 Being asked if he wished to add any thing to it, he replied, " Not a 
 word." The day came. It was evident that he could not long sur- 
 vive. He lingered, tranquil and without pain, to the setting of the 
 sun. The last words that he articulated were thought to be, " Thomas 
 Jefferson still lives." As the sun sank below the horizon, a noise of 
 
LAST YEAES AND DAYS. 735 
 
 great shouting was heard iu the village, and reached even the apart- 
 ment in which the old man lay. It was the enthusiastic cheers 
 called forth by his toast, — Independence forever. Before the sounds 
 died away he had breathed his last. 
 
 The coincidence of the death of these two venerable men on the 
 day associated with their names in all minds did not startle the 
 whole country at once, on the morning of the next day, as such an 
 event now. would. Slowly the news of Mr. Adams's death spread 
 over the Northern States, while that of Mr. Jefferson's was borne 
 more slowly over the Southern; so that almost everj^' person hea"rd of 
 the death of one several days before he learned the death of the 
 other. ' The public mind had been wrought to an unusual degree of 
 patriotic fervor by the celebration of the nation's birth, when few 
 orators had failed to allude to the sole survivors of the body which 
 had declared independence. That one of them should have departed 
 on that day struck every mind as something remarkable. But when 
 it became known that the author of the Declai*ation 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 they had done. 
 
 Among Mr. Jefferson's papers was found a rough sketch in ink 
 of a stone to mark his grave. He designed it to be an obelisk of 
 granite eight feet high ; and he wished it to bear the following 
 inscription, which it does : 
 
 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. 
 
 His remains were placed in the family burial-ground, near the 
 summit of Monticello, on the spot selected nearly seventy years 
 before by Dabney Carr and himself, and where the dust of Carr 
 
736 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 had reposed for half a century, awaiting the coining of his friend. 
 His wife lies on one side of him, and his youngest daughter, his 
 fragile and clinging Maria, on the other. 
 
 But the utmost efforts of his executor did not suffice to retain 
 even this hurial-ground, still less the mansion and estate, in the 
 possession of the family. Thomas Jefferson died more than sol- 
 vent; hut the extreme depression of values in Virginia in 1826 and 
 the few following years, compelled the total sacrifice of the property. 
 The debts were paid to the uttermost farthing; but Martha Jeffer- 
 son and her children lost their home, and had no means of provid- 
 ing another. These circumstances becoming known, the legislatures 
 \^ of South Carolina and Louisiana each voted to Mrs. Randolph an 
 honorable gift of ten thousand dollars. She lived to the year 1836, 
 when she died suddenly at the age of sixty-three, and her remains 
 were buried close to those of her parents. A large number of her 
 descendants survive to this day. 
 
CHAPTEE LXXIII. 
 
 SUMMART. 
 
 Jeffekson was among the most fortunate of men. In modern 
 times a person, in order to fulfil the requirements of an eminent 
 career, needs to be so variously equipped and so richly furnished, 
 that few individuals can hold on to the end unless fortune begins 
 by placing them on vantage-ground. A strong father must usually 
 precede the gifted son, and break the road for him. It is not enough, 
 in the realm of the intellect, for the father to conquer leisure for 
 the son, though that is desirable. He must be the beginning of the 
 boy's culture, and save him from the melancholy waste of unlearn- 
 ing in maturity what he had learned in childhood. We find, accord- 
 ingly, that many of our recent famous names belong to two persons, 
 — father and child ; and perhaps this will be more frequently the 
 case as knowledge increases and the standard of attainment rises. 
 We have two Pitts, two Mills, two Macaulays, two ISTiebuhrs, two 
 Darwins, two Landseers, two Collinses, two D'Israelis, two Beechers, 
 two Bryants, two Arnolds. We have had men, too, whose career 
 was fatally harmed and limited only because they had but one 
 parent, and that one not a father. 
 
 On the other hand, no one is more likely to have been ill-born 
 than a person sprung from an ancient family. The marriages which 
 perpetuate an historic house, being usually prompted by considera- 
 tions of rank and estate, cannot but result, at last, in reducing both 
 the volume and the vivacity of the average brain of the family. This 
 we should infer from the little that is known of the art of breeding 
 superior creatures, if the fact were not plainly exhibited in the qual- 
 ity of existing aristocracies and royal lines. In all literature there 
 can be found no delineations of vulgarit}' so unmitigated as those 
 ^ith which the masters of modern fiction (from Scott to George 
 \ 47 737 
 
738 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 Eliot) favor us when they portray the aristocratic life of Europe. 
 The curious insensibility to every thing elevated and interesting 
 which their ancient families exhibit is merely a natural consequence 
 of a system of pairing with which neither instinct nor science has 
 had any thing to do. 
 
 It was Jefferson's happiness to derive from his progenitors the 
 
 maximum of help with the minimum of hinderance. His stalwart 
 
 father created for him a peaceful and healthy home in a beautiful 
 
 land, and provided sufficiently, but not excessively, for his education 
 
 and training. His father, too, though not a scholar, was a man of 
 
 sound intelligence and practical ability, who honored learning by 
 
 word and deed, and marked out for his boy a liberal career. He 
 
 was also an embodiment of that ancient something in the British 
 
 people which created parliament, established parishes, invented the 
 
 jury, extorted Magna Charta, resisted Charles I., brought over 
 
 William and Mary, passed the Habeas Corpus act, carried the 
 
 Keform Bill, and disestablished the Irish Church. 
 
 I The political part of Thomas Jefferson's career in America was 
 
 j the application and development of the ancient Whig principles which 
 
 ; his father loved and lived. 
 
 His religious tone was also that of most healthy English souls 
 before religion became intense and opinionative. The Jeifersons 
 appear to have been of that good-tempered and sensible class who 
 escaped the anguish and narrowness of the Puritan period, equally 
 incapable of fighting a bishop or stoning a Quaker, To such, reli- 
 gion was never a system or a salvation. It was the supreme decency, 
 the highest etiquette, with the addition of bell-ringing and merry 
 Christmas. That Jefferson was able to attain to a rational and 
 comfortable tone of mind on this distracting subject, without any 
 severe internal conflict, wrs a happiness he owed to the well-attem- 
 pered mind of his father, and to the healthy race from which he 
 sprang. 
 
 There was a most rare union of good qualities in his bodily con- 
 stitution. Here was a man capable of lifting a thousand pounds, — 
 the strongest in a county full of the exceptionally strong; but to 
 this jjrodigious jjhj^sical power there was joined a dexterity of hand 
 and a firm delicacy of touch beyond those of a woman. His hand- 
 writing was as minute as it was strong and clear, and he greatly 
 excelled iu the arts and devices that demand the union of strength 
 
SUMMAEY. 739 
 
 and delicacy. The least effeminate of men, he was very feminine ia 
 many of his ways, feelings, and tastes. The wild beast was more 
 nearly extirpated in him than in. any other human being of whom I 
 have any familiar knowledge. People could live with him many 
 years and not once see him angry, ill-humored, irritable, or melan- 
 choly. He rose jocund to greet the dawn, and lived a festal life to 
 the going down of the sun, his hours all filled with occupation 
 innocent, elevated, and becoming. The barbaric traits, too, were 
 strangely subdued in him. Who so little vain as he? who less 
 selfish ? which of the sons of men has held the troublesome er/o in 
 juster subjection, while guarding with solicitous and vigilant respect 
 the sensitive self-love of other men ? In his private and public life 
 there was the happiest possible mixture of the firm and ^e tractable. 
 And the special wonder of the case was, that the beast and the 
 savage had been bred out of him and educated out of him without 
 in the least impairing his original vigor and vivacity. 
 
 Very different was his serene and sunny good temper from mere 
 animal spirits. There was thought and principle in his good tem- 
 per. In this great matter of temper, upon which the hourly happi- 
 ness of our race depends, vfe find him still tlie educated being. He 
 had reflected much upon the causes of friends' estrangements and 
 the agonizing discords of home. If his observations on this subject 
 were published in a four-page tract, and dropped in every human 
 abode, the happiness of man would be sensibly increased by it. 
 Here, for example, is a passage that might well be engraved on 
 every wedding-present : — 
 
 " Harmony in the married state is the very first object to be aimed 
 at. Nothing can preserve affections uninterrupted but a firm reso- 
 lution never to differ in will, and a determination in each to consider 
 the love of the other as of more value than any object whatever on 
 which a wish had been fixed. How light, in fact, is the sacrifice of 
 any other wish, when weighed against the affections of one with 
 whom we are to pass our whole life. And though opposition, in a 
 single instance, will hardly of itself produce alienation, yet every 
 one has his pouch into which all these little oppositions are put: 
 while that is filling, the alienation is insensibly going on, and when 
 filled it is complete. It would puzzle either to say wlaj, because no 
 one difference of opinion has been marked enough to produce a 
 
740 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFEESON. 
 
 serious effect by itself. But he finds his affections wearied out by a 
 constant stream of little checks and obstacles. Other sources of dis- 
 content, very common indeed, are the little cross-purposes of husband 
 and wife, in common conversation, — a disposition in either to criticise 
 and question whatever the other saj'S, a desire always to demonstrate 
 and make him feel himself in the wrong, and especially in company. 
 Nothing is so goading. Much better, therefore, if our companion 
 views a thing in a light different from what we do, to leave him in 
 quiet possession of his view. What is the use of rectifying him, if 
 the thing be unimportant; and, if important, let it pass for the 
 present, and wait a softer moment and more conciliatory occasion of 
 revising the subject together. It is wonderful how many persons 
 are rendered unhappy by inattention to these little rules of pru- 
 dence." 
 
 Such passages as these show us that the excellence to which he 
 had brought the "art of living" was due to something more than a 
 happy commingling of natural ingredients in the composition of 
 mind and body. He was, indeed, most fortunately constituted ; but 
 he was also a man who considered his ways, and controlled them. 
 And this it is which alone makes his life of value to us. Jefferson's^ 
 temperament few can have ; and, if our happiness depended upon 
 inherited qualities, a large number of the human race might justly 
 reproach the constitution of things that brought them into being. 
 But there is no one, let him be as cross-grained as he may by nature, 
 who maj'^not achieve a happiness and make his life a benefaction by 
 acting upon Jefferson's principles. From the first hour that we get 
 any knowledge of him, we see him a person who never remained 
 content with the gifts of fortune, but turned them to the best 
 account, and pressed forward to worthy achievement. He was an 
 indomitable student always, and a man of better sustained activity 
 than almost any other of his time. There was not an idle bone in 
 his body. 
 
 In his public life the same good fortune attended him. He was 
 usually in the thick of events when his presence was of the utmost 
 advantage to himself; but on several occasions he enjoyed those 
 happy absences from the scene of difficulty which have often sufficed 
 to give a public man ascendency over rivals. These absences were 
 never contrived, and their advantage never could have been fore- 
 
71 ' 
 
 -iMvt4 * SUMMARY. y ^. ;-....74J 
 
 seen. During that buoyant and inspiring period when all hearts 
 were in unison, from the Stamp Act to the Declaration of Indepen- 
 dence, circumstances and inclination united to keep him in the van . 
 of affairs, and to assign him the kind of work in doing which Nature 
 had formed him to excel. Thus, by an exercise of his tjilents which J 
 we may call slight and acci<lenta,l, his name was forever associated 
 with the act that began the national life of America. Virginia then 
 summoned him imperatively away to adjust her laws and institutions 
 to the Declaration which he had penned. When, at last, his good 
 fortune seemed to forsake him, and the storm of war broke over 
 Virginia, so long exempt, and swept away civil government and 
 civil governor, then the triumph at Yorktown consigned his mishaps 
 to prompt oblivion, and all men saw in the light of that triumph 
 that he had done whatever was possible by civil methods. 
 
 It has been said that a complete man buttons up a good soldier 
 whenever he puts on his waistcoat. This would be true if there were 
 any complete men. But there are not. If Jefferson, when the war~ 
 broke out, had gone to the field, and kept Arnold from ravaging his 
 native province, and been in at, the death of the hunted foe at York- ^ 
 town, he would have done a noble and heroic thing; but he would 
 not have been Thomas Jefferson. And, from first to last, there was 
 always in Virginia a redundancy of ofiScers. John Marshall, after- 
 wards chief justice, went all the way from Virginia to head-quarters 
 near New York, alone, on foot, ragged,,and destitute ; because, after 
 waiting many months, he could not find in Virginia a chance to serve 
 as an ofiScer. In the field Jefferson could only have rendered service 
 that many stood ready to perform ; in civil office he did some splen- 
 did things which no man in Virginia could have done so well as he. 
 
 After the war, during all that anxious and dividing period when 
 the thirteen States lacked the hoop to the barrel, he was honorably 
 absent in France ; and again, during the frenzied time of American 
 politics, from 1797 to 1800, h_e_was safe^ and snug at home, while 
 friend and foe conspired to give prominence and fascination to his 
 name. In the closing years of his life his peace was disturbed by 
 the decline in the value of his estate, and by apprehension for the 
 future of his descendants. But he died without knowing the worst, 
 and the timely generosity of two grateful States saved his daughter 
 from painful embarrassment. He was happier in this than either of 
 the other two of the Republican triumvirate. Monroe died bank- 
 
742 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 rupt and dependent. Mrs. Madison knew what it was to want 
 bread.* 
 
 Jefferson needed the happy accidents of his life to atone for his 
 deficiencies as a puBlic man. He was shy; he shrank from publi- 
 city ; he was not combative; he was no orator; he could not have 
 controlled a public assembly, nor handled a mass-meeting. Nature 
 had not fitted him for an executive office ; and if he had lived in 
 peaceful times, and been born subject to the ordinary conditions, he 
 never would have made his way into politics at all. Whether he 
 would have been an artist or a man of science would have depended 
 upon the place and time of his birth ; but .he would have pursued 
 either of those careers with that blending of passion and plod which 
 distinguishes the man who is doing the precise thing Nature meant 
 him to do. 
 
 But having been called into politics, and kept in politics, by the 
 exigencies of his country, and by the proprieties of the place he 
 held in it, he bore himself wonderfully well. He represented the 
 best side of his country in a foreign land, remaining proof against 
 all the seductions of his place to take part with the graceful and 
 picturesque oppressor, instead of the homely, helpless, ill-favored 
 oppressed. E-eturning home he finds a tone in society, a style in 
 the government, an influence in the air, that first astonished, soon 
 disgusted him, and before long determined him to retire from public 
 life. Circumstances had given to the narrow Scotch intellect 
 of young Hamilton an ascendency in the unformed, groping politics 
 of the thirteen States to which it was not naturally entitled. 
 
 After dwelling long in the political dissensions of that period, and 
 tracing their consequences to the present moment, I feel deeply the 
 truth of Jefferson's remark, that Hamilton was the evil genius of 
 America. He meddled balefully with the metal of American insti- 
 tutions while it was cooling, and so muddled the political system of 
 
 * " In the last days of her life, before Conjifress had purchased her husband's 
 papers, Mrs. Madison was in a state of absolute poverty ; and I think sometimes 
 suffered for the necessaries of life. While I was a servant to Mr. (Daniel) Web- 
 ster, he often sent me to her with a market-basket full of provisions, and told me, 
 whenever I saw any thing in the house that I thought she was in need of, to take 
 it to her. I often did this, and occasionally gave her small sums from my own 
 pocket, though I had yeai-s before bought my freedom of her." — A Colored Alan's 
 Reminiscences of James Madison, p. 16. 
 
SUMMARY. 743 
 
 tlie country, that probably it will never get the shape originally 
 intended till it is recast. At the moment when I am writing these 
 words, the country is striving to rid itself of that miserable fag-end 
 of one of Hamilton's ridiculous ingenuities, — the electoral colleges. 
 Perhaps in 1887, the hundredth anniversary of the constitutional 
 convention, the country may be ri^je for a second constitutional con- 
 vention, which will thoroughly JefFersonize the general government; 
 making it the simple, strong, and strictly limited agency which the 
 people meant it should be, and desire that it shall be. Why have a 
 written constitution if it is not to be religiously complied with? 
 How safe, how wise, how adapted to our'limited human capacity, the 
 simple theory of the general government which Jefferson and Mad- 
 ison-defended? 
 
 Called to administer the government, we find Jefferson still at- 
 tended by that strange, and, I may, say startling good luck, that pur- 
 sued him from the cradle to the grave. A general peace promptly 
 followed his inauguration ; and when that peace was broken (an 
 event that brought woe ui^on the rest of Christendom), it enabled 
 him to add to his country the most valuable aequisition which it was 
 possible for it to receive. While Europe shuddered to hear the mutter- 
 ing of the coming storm, three gentlemen in Paris quietly arranged 
 the terms on which the United States were to possess the mouths of 
 the Mississippi, and an empire which the Mississippi drained. But 
 I venture again to affirm, that, much as he was favored by fortune, 
 his merit was equal to his fortun^ He rose to every opportunity, 
 and improved to the very uttermosTT'^fll: 'his chances. , Since civil 
 government was founded, never was a government administered with 
 such strict, such single-hearted, such noble-minded, such wise fidel- 
 ity. Ages hence, when all the nations will be republican and feder- 
 ated, the administration of Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin, and 
 Dearborn will be loved and venerated as the incomparable model, to 
 be aimed at always if never reached. 
 
 There was of course some shade to this bright picture of human 
 excellence. Jefferson, too, was a limited and defective person, like 
 all the rest of our race. The first rank among mortals is justly as- 
 signed to the discoverers of truth, and the second to those who 
 heroically render new truth available for human use. Toscanelli, 
 who taught Columbus that he could reach the East by sailing to the 
 West, represents the first order of men ; and the heroic mariner who 
 
 49 
 
744 LIFE OF THOMAS JEPFEESON. 
 
 directed his prow westward, and sailed dauntless till a new world 
 had been reached, is the type of the second. Of our own generation, 
 Charles Darwin will probably be regarded by posterity as our first 
 man of the first order, and John Brown as a specimen of the second. 
 It cannot be said that Jefferson belonged to either of these illustri- 
 ous classes. Nor can we claim for him a place among men of genius, 
 the pets and darlings of manliind, who cheer, amuse, soften, and 
 exalt the care-laden sons of men. 
 
 Our faults appear to spring from the same root as our excellencies. 
 A man of very quick, warm sympathies, cool intellect, and good tem- 
 per is not the person to pioneer a conviction. He is apt to have so clear 
 a sense of the necessity which antagonists are under to think just as 
 they do think, that he forbears to assail their opinions. Some read- 
 ers of Jefferson's letters will feel, that, occasionally, he carried his 
 tolerance of other people's sentiments to a point bpyond what courte- 
 sy demanded. In writing, for example, to Isaac Story, one of the 
 few New England clergymen who sided with him in politics, he good- 
 naturedly used expressions that seemed to imply a belief which we 
 know he repudiated. This respectable clergyman had sent him some 
 speculations with regard to the transmigration of souls, and improved 
 the occasion to compliment him upon his inaugural address. Jefferson 
 replied, "The laws of nature have withheld from us the means of 
 physical knowledge of the country of spirits ; and revelation has, for 
 reasons unknown to us, chosen to leave us in the dark as we were. 
 When I was young, I was fond of the speculations which seemed to 
 promise some insight into that hidden country ; but observing at 
 length that they left me in the same ignorance in which they had 
 found me, I have for very many years ceased to read or think con- 
 cerning them, and have reposed my head on that pillow of ignorance 
 #hich a benevolent Creator has made so soft for us, knowing how 
 much we should be forced to use it. I have thought it better, by 
 nourishing the good passions and controlling the bad, to merit an 
 inheritance in a state of being of which I can know so little, and 
 to trust for the future to Him who has been so good for the past." 
 
 And again, at the close of this kind and wise letter, he uses simi- 
 lar language. 
 
 " I am happy in your approbation of the principles I avowed on 
 entering on the government. Ingenious minds, availing themselves 
 of the imperfection of language, have tortured the expressions out 
 
SUMMAEY. 745 
 
 of their plain meaning, in order to infer departures from them in 
 practice. If revealed language has not been able to guard itself 
 against misinterpretations, I could not expect it." 
 
 The complaisance to a clerical friend that prompted the use of the 
 words revelation and revealed seems to me to have been excessive 
 and needless. Nothing could have been more absurd than for him 
 to obtrude opposition to a belief which so many of the virtuous peo- 
 ple of Christendom then cherished ; but it was not necessary to lend 
 it support. Very few such instances, however, occur in the nine 
 volumes of his writings which we possess, and noAe occur in his 
 letters to persons whom he might be supposed interested to concili- 
 ate. The belief implied in the use of the word revelation is one 
 to which no intelligent person can be indift'erent; because, if it is 
 true, it is the most important of all beliefs, and, if false, it is the 
 most obstructive and misleading. 
 
 I cannot agree with those who think he ought, being an abolition- 
 ist, to have emancipated his slaves. There are virtuous and heroic 
 acts, which, when they are done, we passionately admire, but which, 
 at the same time, we have no right to demand or expect. Few per- 
 sons acquainted with the history and character of John Brown could 
 avoid having some sense of the real sublimity of his conduct ; but 
 who can pretend that human affairs admit of being generally con- 
 ducted on the John Brown principle ? If Jefferson, on coming to a 
 clear sense of the iniquity of slavery and the impossibility of indu- 
 cing Virginia to abolish it, had set his slaves free, and led them forth 
 with his daughter Martha holding his right hand, Maria the left,, 
 and the slaves marching behind with their bundles and their chil- 
 dren, and he had conducted them to a free territory, and established 
 them as freemen and freeholders, standing by them till they were 
 able to take care of themselves, he would have done one of those 
 high, heroic deeds which contemporaries call Quixotic, and posterity 
 sublime. And if, while the young patriarch was on the march, a 
 mob of white trash had set upon him and killed him, contemporaries 
 might have said it served him right, and centuries hence his name 
 might serve as the pretext for a new religion, and nations contend 
 for the possession of his tomb. But no one has a right to cen- 
 sure him for not having done this, except a person who has given proof, 
 that, in similar circumstances, he would have done it. Such individ- 
 uals — and there are a few such in each generation — seldom cen- 
 sure any one. 
 
746 LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. 
 
 We must admit, then, that he belonged neither to the first nor to 
 the second order of human beings. He was not the discoverer of 
 the truths he loved, nor did he promote their acceptance by any of 
 the heroic metliods. He did not always avoid the errors to which 
 his cast of character rendered him peculiarly liable. 
 
 But the sum of his merit was exceedingly great. He was an 
 almost perfect citizen. He loved and believed in his species. Few 
 men have ever been better educated than he, or practised more habit- 
 ually the methods of an educated person. He defended the honor of 
 the human intellect when its natural foes throughout Christendom 
 conspired to revile, degrade, and crush it. After Washington, he was 
 the best chief magistrate of a republic the world has ever known ; 
 and, in some material particulars, he surpassed Washington. He 
 keenly enjoyed his existence, and made it a benefaction to his kind. 
 
INDEX. 
 
Il^DEX. 
 
 Adams, Charles Francis. Upon old age of 
 John Adams, 734. 
 
 Adams, John. Proscribed in England, 142. 
 In Congress, 164. Quoted upon Jefferson, 
 164, 165. Upon Dickinson's timidity, 165. 
 Upon Franklin's galleys, 181. Upon Har- 
 rison, 192. His opinions upon government 
 in 1776, 195, 196. Jefferson to, on Mazzei, 
 227. Curses the protective system, 275. 
 Envoy in Europe, 276. Franklin to, in 1784, 
 280. Treats for American captives in Bar- 
 bary, 298. In England with Jefferson, 312, 
 313. Upon presidential etiquette, 366. 
 Publishes discourses upon Davila, 370. 
 Minister to London, 403. Upon Paine's re- 
 ply to Burke, 425. Pubhcola attributed to, 
 427. Upon the British Constitution, 438. 
 To Jefferson on the Genet excitement, 489. 
 Jefferson to, on farming, 509. Relates Jef- 
 ferson's first nomination to the presidency, 
 513. Extols Ames, 519. Elected president, 
 524. Distrustful, 543. His alarm in 1798, 
 556. Convinced by Gerry, re-opens rela- 
 tions with France, 560. His heterodoxy, 
 570. During the tie intrigues of 1801, 579. 
 Retires from the presidency, 585. His 
 journey to Washington, 600. His last ap- 
 pointments, 609. Upon Jefferson's admin- 
 istration, 634. His difference with Jeffer- 
 son, 679. Detests Cahinism, 711. His 
 death, 734. 
 
 Adams, Mrs. John. To Europe in 1784, 279. 
 Describes a strange flower, 309. Entertains 
 Maria Jefferson, 332. Her journey to 
 Washington in 1800, 601. Her correspond- 
 ence with Jefferson, 679. 
 
 Adams, John Quincy. Upon Paine's reply to 
 Burke, 426. Upon Jefferson's administra- 
 
 tion, 633. Why not appointed by Jeffer- 
 son, 681. 
 
 Adams, Samuel. Proscribed in England, 142. 
 •In Congress, 164. On Liberty, 373. Thought 
 of for governor, 428. Gerry to, on Boston 
 Port-Bill, 542. Jefferson to, after his in- 
 auguration, 588. 
 
 Alberti. Teacher music at Monticello, 133. 
 Jefferson to, on a home band of music, 221. 
 
 Alexander I. of Russia. Jefferson accepts 
 his bust, 625. 
 
 Alexandria, Va. Aids Boston, 131. Welcomes 
 Jefferson home, 347. 
 
 Alfred, King. His laws, 50. 
 
 Algiers. Its corsairs in 1784, 206. American 
 captives in, 297. Jefferson fears for his 
 daughter, 331. Piracies of, 636, 638. 
 
 Alien Law, The. Passed, 551. Jefferson's 
 opinion of, 553. 
 
 Alston, Joseph. Marries Theodosia Burr, 765. 
 
 Ames, Fisher. Quoted on the public debt, 
 376. On the site for a capital, 394. His 
 speech on the Jay treaty, 518. Upon Jeffer- 
 son's administration, 634. 
 
 Andrew, John. In affair of the Gaspee, 118. 
 
 Annapolis. Visited by Jefferson in 1766, 68. 
 Congress at, in 1783, 268. 
 
 Appointments. Jefferson's policy with re- 
 gard to, 605. 
 
 Aristocracy. Jefferson dreads, 273, 274. 
 Evils of, in France, 288, 335, 336. The 
 true, 364. 
 
 Arnold, Benedict. Invades Va., 243, 246. 
 Denounced by Gerry, 543. 
 
 Astor, J. J. Quoted upon Pacific coast, 320. 
 In business at New York, 403. Founds 
 Astoria, 676. 
 
 Auburn, N.Y. Why bo named, 40. 
 749 
 
750 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Bacon, Edmund. Jefferson to, on fann oper- 
 ations, 601. At Washington, 616. Re- 
 ceives sheep for Jefferson, 627. Describes 
 destruction of dam, 628. Conducts remov- 
 al, 684. Upon the visitors at Monticello, 
 688. Upon Jefferson's temper, 693. Upon 
 the sale of Jefferson's library, 730. Leaves 
 Monticello, 731. 
 
 Ball, Joseph. Quoted on project of sending 
 George Washington to sea as a sailor, 32. 
 
 Ballooning. In 1784, at Philadelphia, 277. 
 
 Baltimore. Aids Boston, 131. 
 
 Bancroft, George. Quoted upon Mason, 208. 
 
 Bank of U. 8. Established by Hamilton, 396. 
 
 Baptists. Their petition to Burgesses of 
 Va., 174. Persecuted in Va., 202-203. 
 Defended by Patrick Henry, 204. 
 
 Barbe-Marbois, Francois de. Questions Jef- 
 ferson on Va., 260. Receives Notes on 
 Virginia in reply, 260. Negotiates sale 
 of Louisiana, 651-954. 
 
 Bartlett, John Russell. Quoted upon the 
 burning of the Gaspee, 118. 
 
 Bartram, John. Becomes a botanist, 6. 
 Corresponds with European botanists 6, 306. 
 
 Beaumarchais, Caron de. His Marriage of 
 Figarro produced, 290. 
 
 Beckwith, Major. Upon Paine's pamphlet, 
 424. 
 
 Beecher, Henry Ward. His gift to Univer- 
 Bity of Virginia, 711. 
 
 Beecher, Dr. Lyman. A church-and-state 
 man, 573. 
 
 Bellew, Captain. Refused provisions in Va., 
 185. 
 
 Berwick, Mass. Aids Boston, 131. 
 
 Bibby, Captain. Prisoner in Va., 222. 
 
 Bible, The. Not a part of the Common Law, 
 49. Jefferson upon, 338. 
 
 Biddle, Owen. In excursion on the Dela- 
 ware, 181. 
 
 Black, Professor Joseph, 26. 
 
 Blackstone, Sir William. Jefferson upon, 
 48, 713. 
 
 Blair, John. Governor of .Va., pro tern., 8b. 
 Protects the Baptists, 204. 
 
 Bland, Colonel Richard. Introduces bill to 
 mitigate slavery, 97. On committee of cor- 
 respondence, 124. Elected to Continental 
 Congress, 143. Re-elected, 172. Excused 
 and thanked, 173. In command of Bur- 
 goyne prisoners, 237. 
 
 Bleeding. Anecdote of, 68. 
 
 Bompard, Captain. At Charleston, 470. 
 At Philadelphia, 473. 
 
 Bonaparte, Joseph. In Louisiana negotia- 
 tion, 649. 
 
 Bonaparte, Napoleon. Affects Republican 
 methods, 370. His early career, 509. Dread- 
 ed by Federalists, 571. Offended with Paine, 
 583. Offends Paine, 591. Sells Louisiana 
 to U. 8., 652. 
 
 Bonvouloir, M. de. At Philadelphia, 183. 
 
 Boston. Gifts to, during closing of the port, 
 130. Jefferson indignant at wrongs of, 
 139. Extols people of, 162. Jefferson at, in 
 1784, 279. 
 
 Boswell, James. Inventor of intei"viewing, 
 146. 
 
 Botetourt, Lord. Arrives in Va., 86. Opens 
 Burgesses, 89, 93. Dissolves them, 94. 
 Takes part w^ith Virginians, 96. Death of, 
 97. 
 
 Bracton, Henry de. His work upon law, 48. 
 
 Brassy, Thomas. Upon the Maison Quarree, 
 315. 
 
 Brazil. An emissary from, meets Jefferson, 
 321. 
 
 Brooklyn, Mass. Aids Boston, 131. 
 
 Brown, George. In affair of the Gaspee, 
 118. 
 
 Brown, John. Remark upon, 744. 
 
 Brown, John, of Rhode Island. Heads attack 
 upon the Gaspee, 113 to 116. 
 
 Brown University. Why so named, 113. 
 
 Bryant, William CuUen. His poem on the 
 Embargo, 675, 690. 
 
 Buckle, Henry Thomas. Quoted upon lei- 
 sure, 29. Upon Spain, 397. 
 
 Buffon, Count de. Jefferson supplies with 
 specimens, 309, 310. 
 
 Bull Run. Battle of, 181. 
 
 Bunker Hill. Battle of, 162. News of, in 
 Congress, 168. 
 
 Burgesses, House of, in Va. Its manners and 
 usages, 68, 71. How opened, 89. Dissolv- 
 ed by Botetourt, 94. First assembled, 121. 
 Summoned by Dunmore, 157, 158, 159. 
 Abandoned by him, 160. Replies to Lord 
 North, 160. 
 
 Burgoyne, General. Effects of his surrender 
 in Va., 220, 221. 
 
 Burk, John. Quoted upon Small, 24. Upon 
 Fauquier, 29. Upon religion in Va., 58. 
 Upon Lord Botetourt's equipage, 89. Up- 
 on witchcraft in Va., 202. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 751 
 
 Burke, Edmund. Causes publication in Eng- 
 land of Jefferson's pamphlet, 142. His eu- 
 logy of Marie Antoinette, 418. Denounces 
 French Revolution, 419. Paine replies to, 
 420. Misleads his country, 463. 
 
 Burnaby, Rev. Andrew. Describes Wil- 
 liamsburgh, 19. Quoted upon Fauquier, 
 28. Upon people of Rhode Inland, 110. 
 
 Burr, Aaron. Injured by association with 
 French officers, 232. In the tie intrigues, 
 576. Elected vice-president, 580. Seeks 
 appointment from Jefferson, 663. His 
 trial, 663. 
 
 Burr, Thcodosia. Her marriage, 576. 
 
 Burwell, Miss Rebecca. Jefferson in love 
 ■with, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39. 
 
 Cabfli,, Joseph C. Co-operates with Jeffer- 
 son in founding the University of Virginia, 
 701. . 
 
 Caesar. His fidelity to Jefferson, 258. 
 
 Callender, James T. Jefferson's connection 
 •with, 6J6, 680. 
 
 Calvinism. Jefferson detests, 711. 
 
 Camden, S. C. Defeat at, in 1780, 242. 
 
 Campaign Lies. Of 1800, 567. 
 
 Campan, Madame Jeane Genet. Quoted 
 upon the queen, 328. Her family and ca- 
 reer, 461. 
 
 Capet, Louis. See Louis XVI. 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas. Upon French Revolution, 
 134, 323. Upon Washington, 382. 
 
 Carmichael, William. At Cadiz in 1785, 297. 
 
 Carpenter's Hall. Congress sits in, 163. 
 
 Carr, Dabney. Marries sister of Jefferson, 
 44. Hears of the burning of the Gaspee, 
 116, 119. Speaks in House of Burgesses, 
 123, 124. Death of, 125. Allusion to, 271. 
 Education of his sons, 276, 332, 338. 
 
 Carr, Mrs. Dabney. Death of her husband, 
 125. 
 
 Carr, Peter. Jefferson advises, on morals, 
 333. On religion, 338. 
 
 Carrington, Colonel Edward. Hamilton to, 
 on Jefferson, 435, 436. 
 
 Carroll, Charles. Jefferson to, on Indian 
 depredation, 413. 
 
 Cary, Archibald. On committee of corre- 
 spondence, 124. 
 
 Catherine II. Frustrates Ledyard, 321. 
 Compliments Burke, 420. 
 
 Channing, Dr. W. E. His theology described, 
 361. Jefferson upon, 711. 
 
 Charles I. Hia letter to the Virginians, 121. 
 
 Charleston, 8. C. Aids Boston, 132. Genet 
 at, in 1793, 469. Importance of, then, 470. 
 
 Charlmont, Mass. Aids Boston, 130. 
 
 Chase, Judge Samuel. His trial, 6:17. 
 
 Chastellux, Marquis de. Visits Monticello, 
 262. Returning to France, 267. 
 
 Chatterton, Thomas. Contributes to North 
 Briton, 257. 
 
 Chatham, Lord, 63. His veneration for 
 George III., 136. Extols Congress, 163. 
 
 Chesapeake, The. Fired into by the Leop- 
 ard, 672. 
 
 Christianity. Not part of the common law, 
 50. Quoted upon aristocracy, 201. 
 
 Church of England. Intolerant in Va., 202, 
 210, 
 
 Churches. Ruins of, in Va., 78. 
 
 Cincinnati, The. Jefferson opposes, 273. 
 
 Clerk, Rev. Archibald. His work upon 
 Ossian, 103. 
 
 Clarke, George Rogers. Takes Kaskaskias, 
 2C2. Keeps Indians in check. 233. Cap- 
 tures Vincennes, 234. Desires to attack 
 Detroit, 237, 243. Assists in repelling Ar- 
 nold, 247. His later life, 6J6. 
 
 Clarke, General William. Employed by Jef- 
 ferson, 606. Explores western country, 
 628. 
 
 Clay, Rev. Charles. Denounces Christmas 
 fiddling, 13. Preaches on Fast Day, 130. 
 
 Clay, Henry. His family in Va., 13, 58. 
 Studies under Wythe, 29, 30, 31. His fa- 
 thcr, 174. Quoted upon Jefferson and 
 Mirabeau, 325. 
 
 Clay, Rev. John, 174. 
 
 Clergy, The. In Old Va., 55, 56. 
 
 Clinton. DeWitt Clinton. His duel with 
 Swartwout, 658. 
 
 Clinton, George. His daughter marries Ge- 
 net, 490. 
 
 Clinton, Miss Cornelia. Married to Genet, 
 490. 
 
 Clinton, Sir Henry. Mitigates treatment of 
 prisoners, 237. 
 
 Coke upon Lyttleton. Jefferson studies, 34. 
 Described, 47. Jefl'erson's opinion of, 48, 
 63. 
 
 Coles, Edward. Quoted upon Adams, 580. 
 
 Cole, John. In affair of the Gaspee, 118. 
 
 Collinson, Peter. Corresponds with Bar- 
 tram, 5. His notices of the father of Jef- 
 ferson's mother, 7. 
 
752 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Committee of Correspondence, Origin of, 
 124. 
 
 Cooper, Peter. His father in New Yorli, 403. 
 
 Cooper, Dr. Thomas. Uproar at his appoint- 
 ment as professor, 707. 
 
 Congress, The Continental. Proposed, 130. 
 Instructed, 13G. Members elected to, in 
 Va., 143. How paid, 162. Described, 163. 
 Jefferson in, 164. Anecdote of, 166. De- 
 clares Independence, 192. Meets at Annap- 
 olis in 1783, 268. 
 
 Connecticut. Blue Laws of, a forgery, 51. 
 Jefl'crson's remarks upon, 339. 
 
 Corbiii, Hon Richard. Pays for the stolen 
 powder, 155. 
 
 Cornwallis, Lord. In command at the South, 
 231, 244. Ravages Jegerson's estate, 253. 
 Surrenders, 259. 
 
 Custom House. Exactions of, in London, 75, 
 76. 
 
 Dallas, G. J. In Genet affair, 483. 
 
 Damicns, R F. His execution, 134. 
 
 Dartmouth, Lord. In affair of the Gaspee, 
 116, 118, 119. His reply concerning second 
 petition, 179. 
 
 Darwin, Charles. First man of his genera- 
 tion, 744. 
 
 Darwin, Erasmus. Friend of Dr. Small, 24. 
 
 Davila, Henri. Discourses upon, by John 
 Ad.-ims, 370. 
 
 D.avis, John. Quoted upon inauguration of 
 Jefferson, 587. 
 
 Dawson, H. P. Quoted upon Genet, 403. 
 
 Dearborn, General Henry. Slandered in 
 1800, 572. Appointed secretary of war, 
 598. His career, 597. Imports pigs, 027. 
 
 Decimal currency. Perfected by Jefferson, 
 239. Adopted by Congress, 399. 
 
 Declaration of Independence. 188 to 193. 
 
 De la Tude, M. A. Guest of Jefferson, 319. 
 
 Delaware. Aids Boston in 1774, 13,'. 
 
 Demosthenes. His use of forms still adhered 
 to, 140. 
 
 De Stael, Madame. Married, 319. 
 
 Detroit. Henry Hamilton commands at, 230, 
 233. Clarke desires to attack, 237. Retained 
 by Great Britain after the Revolution, 402. 
 
 Dickinson, John. In Congress, 164. De- 
 ferred to by Congress, 105, lb6. The king's 
 opinion of, K,7. Pens draft, 168, 170. 
 
 Digges, Dudley. On committee of corre- 
 Bpondencc, 124. 
 
 Dilke, Sir Charles. Behavior of Tories to, 
 421. 
 
 Dix, Governor John A. Upon Jefferson's 
 playing, 222. 
 
 Doddridge, Dr. Philip, 14. 
 
 Dominica. Aids Boston, 132. 
 
 Dorchester, Lord. In command in Canada, 
 412. 
 
 Dorset, Duke of. Jefferson friendly to, 319. 
 
 Douglass, Rev. William. Jefferson attends 
 his school, 14. 
 
 Drayton, Wiliiam. Jefferson to, on the ol- 
 ive, 307. 
 
 Dubuque, M. Pike meets, on Mississippi, 629. 
 
 Dudington. Lieut. His vessel burnt at New- 
 port, 111. Wounded, 114. 
 
 Dunmore, Lord. Replaces Botetourt, 122. 
 His proclamation derided, 151, 152. Seizes 
 the powder, 152. Pays for it, 155. Sum- 
 mons Burgesses, 157. Runs away, 160. 
 Asks for a fleet, 179. Invites slaves to join 
 him, 183. 
 
 D'Yrujo, Seiior. Sells wine to Jefferson, 626. 
 
 Eacker, George I. His duels with Price 
 and Hamilton, 658. 
 
 Earle, T. Hamilton benefits, 431. 
 
 Eaton, William. His negotiation with Bey 
 of Tunis, 638. 
 
 Education. Jefferson's bills to promote, in 
 Va., 216. His labors in beh.ilf of, 700. 
 
 Ellery, William. Signs treaty of i^e.ace, 269. 
 
 Embargo, The. Of 1807, 674. 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo. How defrauded, 
 630. 
 
 Entail. Abolished in Va., 209. 
 
 Eppes, Francis. Elected major, 174. 
 
 Eppes, Francis, jun. At Monticello, 694. 
 
 Eppes, John W. With Jefferson at Philadel- 
 phia, 451. Engaged, 605. Buying horses, 
 587. 
 
 Eppes, Maria Jefferson. Going to France, 
 330, 332. At Paris, 333. Return home, 345. 
 Engaged, 505. Her death, 678. 
 
 Etinuctte. Of president's house in Washing- 
 ton's time, 365,367, 368. In Jefferson's, 614. 
 
 Falmodth, Mass. Aids Boston, 132. Burnt, 
 
 185. 
 Farmington, Ct. Aids Boston, 131. 
 Fauquier, Francis. His character and habits, 
 
 27, 28, 29, 82. Death, 85. Incorruptible, 
 
 110. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 753 
 
 Federalists, The. Described by Freneau, 
 444. Their downfall, 580. Virulent 
 against President Jefferson, 633, Assail 
 him in retirement, 6S9. 
 
 Federalist, The. How written, 362. 
 
 Fenno, John. Alarmed at Discourses upon 
 Davila, 371. Tone of his paper, 433. At- 
 tacks Freneau, 434. Hamilton's contribu- 
 tions to, 445. 
 
 Field, Da\-id Dudley, 46 
 
 Fine, John. Quoted, 368. 
 
 France. Sends emissary to Continental Con- 
 gress, 182, 1S3. AlUance with, 197. Rati- 
 fied by Va., 229. Not an unmixed good, 
 230, 261. Jefferson's impressions of, in 1785, 
 288. His attachment to, 337. Embroglio 
 with in 179S, 539, 550. 
 
 Free Trade. Jefferson recommends, 292, 293, 
 340, 413. 
 
 French Revolution. Jefferson's part in, 318, 
 323, 326. Effect of, upon the world, 372. 
 John Adams's opinion of, 372. Effect on 
 politics of United States, 417. Burke upon, 
 418. Paine upon, 421. Paine in, 454. Ham- 
 ilton upon, 456. 
 
 Franklin, Dr. Benjamin. In Congress, 163, 
 164. Obstructs the Delaware, 181, 277. 
 Meets French emissary, 182. Effect upon, 
 of the burning of Norfolk and Falmouth, 
 185. Anecdote of, 188. Jefferson Ukes, 
 197. Jefferson to, on change of government 
 in Va., 219. His reception of Mazzei, 228. 
 Upon ballooning in 1784, 276, 277. To Ad- 
 ams on their new duties in 1784, 280. Leav- 
 ing France, 283, 284. His excellence as a 
 diplomatist, 285. Riunor of his capture, 
 296. Anecdote of, 309, 313. Last inter- 
 view with Jefferson, 248. With Priestley, 
 498. Upon value of Mississippi river, 
 641. 
 
 Frederick 11., of Prussia, makes treaty with 
 Congress, 282. 
 
 Freneau, Captain Philip. Jefferson appoints, 
 432. Sets up newspaper, 433. Attacks 
 Hamilton, 434, 444. Hamilton attacks, 445. 
 
 Frj-, Professor Joshua. Associated with Pe- 
 ter Jefferson in making early map of Va., 
 9, 241. 
 
 Fulton, Robert. Employed by Bonaparte, 
 584. 
 
 Gage, General Thomas. Warned by Va., 
 144, 145. • Precipitates war, 152. 
 
 Galileo. Right in recanting, 513. 
 Gallatin, Abraham Albert Alphonso. Re- 
 port of his murder, 292. Menaced by Al- 
 len Law, 551. Appointed Secretary of the 
 Treasury, 594. His career, 595. Jefferson 
 to, on reducing his department, 613. Jef- 
 ferson to, on the silver mines, 629. 
 
 Gaspee, The. Burnt in Narragansett Bay, 
 109 to 114. 
 
 Gates, General Horatio. In command at 
 South, 240. Defeated at Camden, 242. . 
 
 Genet, Edmond. Coming as minister to U. 
 S., 459, 460. His early life, 461. At Charles- 
 ton, 469. At Philadelphia, 471. Interviews 
 with official persons, 478, 484. Recalled, 
 489. Marriage, 490. 
 
 Gerry, Elbridge. Jefferson meets, at New 
 York in 1776, 68. Signing Declaration of 
 Independence, 192. His poverty during 
 the war, 226. Signs treaty of peace, 269. 
 Jefferson to, in 1784, on Boston, 279. In em- 
 bassy to France, 541. His poverty during 
 Revolution, 542. Exposes Benedict Arnold, 
 543. In Paris, 544. Converses with Tal- 
 leyi-and, 548. Recalled, 550. Visits Presi- 
 dent Adams, 560. Restores peace between 
 France and the U. S., 561. Jefferson to, 
 on his political system, 564. 
 
 George IV. ConipUment to, 135. As a boy, 
 167. As a man, 316, 317. 
 
 George III. Succeeds to the throne, 28. • An 
 expensive king, 115. Dismembered Brit- 
 ish empire, 135, 137. His family life, 166. 
 His opinion of American patriots, 167. Jef- 
 ferson upon, 180, 189. Jefferson presented 
 to, 312. Jefferson upon, 316. Speech to 
 John Adams, 406. His antipathy to the 
 United States, 410. Pensions Burke, 419. 
 His birthday at Philadelphia, 475. 
 
 George, Lake. Jefferson upon, 425. 
 
 Georgia. Aids Boston, 132. 
 
 Goodrich, Chauncey. Quoted upon level- 
 ling, 374. 
 
 Goodrich, G. G. Quoted upon manners, 584. 
 
 Gr.aham, George. Detects Burr, 665. 
 
 Granger, Gideon. Appointed postmaster- 
 general, 599. 
 
 Grange, The. Captured, 470. 
 
 Great Britain. Reduced in importance by 
 the American Revolution, 157, 177. Her 
 protective system, 414. 
 
 Greeley, Horace. Publishes a letter of Jef. 
 ferson's, 626. 
 
754 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Grimm, Baron. Jefferson knew, 319. As- 
 sists Ledyard, 320. 
 Grotou, Mass. Aids Boston, 130, 132. 
 
 HAiiE, Sir Matthew. Jefferson upon, 50. 
 
 Hall, Lieut. Francis. Relates visit to Monti- 
 cello, 719. 
 
 Hall, Rev. Robert. Quoted upon Priestley, 
 500. 
 
 Hamilton, Alexander. Corrupted by French 
 officers, 262. His early career in U. S., 352. 
 His self-sufficiency, 353. His politics, 363. 
 Upon etiquette of President's house, 365. 
 His bet with Q. Morris, 369. Meets Jeffer- 
 son, 374. Appointed Secretary of the 
 Treasury, 377, 3S3. Reports on the Pub- 
 lic Debt, 383. Inclined toward England, 
 411, 412, Opposes tariff retaliation, 414. 
 Differences with Jefferson, 423, 430. Ami- 
 able at home, 431. Talleyrand upon, 431. 
 Ignorant of America, 432. Has two fami- 
 lies to mamtaiu, 431. Accuses Jefferson and 
 Madison of cabal, 435, 436. His opinion of 
 the British constitution, 438. A lobbyist, 
 439. Attacks Jefferson in the press, 445. 
 Defends his course, 4S7. A monarchist, 
 450. Upon French Revolution, 456, 458. 
 Upon reception of Genet, 460, 466. Toast- 
 ed at English banquet, 475. Against Ge- 
 net's proceedings, 479, 486, 488. His amour 
 with Mrs. Reynolds, 534. His scheme to 
 invade South ^\merica, 551. His political 
 programme for 1799, 558. Intrigues John 
 Adams out of the presidency, 562. Attacks 
 Jefferson in 1800, 568. During the tie in- 
 trigues, 580. Retires from politics, 582. 
 His complicated methods, 613. Upon Jef- 
 ferson's administration, 634. His evil in- 
 fluence, 742. 
 
 Hamilton, Henry. Stirs up Indians to attack 
 western settlements, 230, 233. A prisoner, 
 234. Released, 236. 
 
 Hamilton, Mrs. Alexander. At home, 431. 
 Benefits a poor artist, 431. Her husband 
 false to, 481. 
 
 Hamilton, Philip. His duel with Backer, 658. 
 
 Hammond, George. English minister at 
 Philadelphia, 414. In conference with Jef- 
 ferson, 418. His marriage, 475. Remon- 
 strates against Genet, 478. 
 
 Hancock, John. Proscribed in England, 142. 
 Signs address to people of England, 171. 
 Aaecdotc of, 191. John Adams upon, 428. 
 
 Harrison, Benjamin. On committee of cor- 
 respondence, 124. Elected to Continental 
 Congress, 143. On committee to arm Va., 
 150. In Congress, 166, 171. Re-elected, 
 172. Anecdote of, 192. Sent to Congress 
 for arms, 249. Washington to, on New 
 York canal, 272. 
 
 Hartford. Aids Boston, 131. 
 
 Hiiy, George. In trial of Burr, 669. 
 
 Helps, Sir Arthur. Quoted upon Brassy, 315. 
 
 Henings, Madison. Does not know his own 
 father, 569. i 
 
 Henings, Sally. Mistake respecting, 569. 
 
 Hening's Statutes at Large. Contributed to 
 by Jefferson, 84. 
 
 Henry Patrick. A player upon the \'iolin, 
 12. First meeting with Jefferson, 18. Ad- 
 mitted to bar, 33. Dabney Carr his only 
 rival, 45. In the clergy case, 55. Borrows 
 books of Jefferson, 60. Member of House 
 of Burgesses, 64. Opposes Stamp Act, 65, 
 66. Denounces the loan bill, 80. Compar- 
 ed with Jefferson, 83. At dissolution of 
 House of Burgesses, 94. In consultation 
 upon Gaspee affair, 119, 124. Promotes 
 Fast Day, 129. An indolent reader, 142. 
 Proscribed in England, 142. Elected to 
 Congress in 1774, 143, 445. In Va. Con- 
 vention of 1775, 149. On Committee to arm 
 Va., 150. At the head of troops gels paid 
 for the stolen powder, 154, 155. 
 
 Hessians, The. Prisoners in Va., 221, 223, 
 228, 244. 
 
 Hillegas, Michael. His love of music, 181. 
 
 Hillsborough, Earl of, 96. 
 
 Hitchcock, Mr. In affair of the Gaspee, 118. 
 
 Hone, Philip. Raises money for Jefferson, 
 731. ' 
 
 Hopkins, Captain John. Reads Declaration 
 of Independence, 192. 
 
 Hopkins, Chief Justice. In affair of the Gas- 
 pee, 112. 
 
 Hopkinson, Francis. Jefferson- to, on his 
 Notes, 310. 
 
 Hume, David. His Essay on Miracles, 60. 
 His History of England, 713. 
 
 Humphries, Colonel David. In Paris with 
 Jefferson, 333. Jefferson recalls, 609. 
 
 Hutchinson, Governor. Upon the burning 
 of the Gaspee, 116. 
 
 Impressment.. Barbarity of, 416. 
 Independence. Virginia decides for, 18S. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 755 
 
 Debates upon, 187. Declaration of, written 
 by Jefferson, 188. Declared, 191. 
 
 Indians. Jefferson's liking for, 10. At Wil- 
 liam and Mary College, 21. 
 
 Inoculation. Jefferson undergoes, 67. Sub- 
 jects his family to it, 266. 
 
 International Copyright. Remarks upon, 
 630. 
 
 Iredell, Judge. Extols Ames's speech, 519. 
 
 Irving, Washington. Retained for Burr, 666. 
 
 Isaacs, Mr. His experiment with salt water, 
 398. 
 
 Jackson, Andrew. Described, 353. Desires 
 governorship of Louisiana, 656. 
 
 Jackson, Francis. Describes Washington, 
 D.C., 616. BQs first conference with Madi- 
 son, 618. 
 
 Jackson, George. Upon speculation in cur- 
 rency, 390. Upon the site for a capital, 
 394. 
 
 Jay, John. Ift Congress, 163. Hostile to R. 
 H. Lee, 169. Vain of his writings, 169. 
 Meets French emissary, 182. In Paris, 266, 
 267. Sends commission to Jefferson, 283. 
 Reports upon the Algerine captives, 300. 
 Promotes exporlation of flour, 325. Upon 
 government, 373. Consulted by Washing- 
 ton, 380. On the treaty of peace, 406. Dis- 
 approves Paine's reply to Burke, 427. 
 Negotiates treaty with England, 614, 516. 
 Rejects iidvice of Hamilton, 562. 
 
 Jay Treaty, The. Signed, 517. 
 
 Jefferson, George, Declines a federal ap- 
 pointment, 60S. 
 
 Jefferson, Jane. Wife o£ Peter Jefferson. 
 Her marriage, 6. Allusion to, 36. Burnt 
 out, 98. Death of, 186. 
 
 Jefferson, Lucy. Her death, 330. 
 
 Jefferson, Miss Jane. Her singing, 12. 
 Death, 45. 
 
 Jefferson, Peter. His farm and home, 2. 
 His person and character, 3. Marriage, 5. 
 Strength, 8. Assists Fry to make map of 
 Va., 10. Trains negroes, 11. Educates his 
 son, 14. Death, 15. 
 
 Jefferson, Randolph. His inheritance, 31. 
 
 Jefferson, Thomas. His person at seventeen, 
 1. Birth, 5. Boyhood, 10, 11, 12. Plays 
 the violin, 13. Attends Maury's school, 17. 
 Enters college, 20. At CoUege, 23, 26. Es- 
 capes vices of Va., 30. Begins law, 32. 
 In love, 34 to 40. Of age, 42. Methodical 
 
 and exact, 43. As a law student, 46. 
 Sworn in as vestryman, 59. His course of 
 study, 61. Hears Patrick Henry, 65. Jour- 
 ney northward, 67. Inoculated, 68. Prac- 
 tises law, 69, 72, 80, 81;82, 83. Elected to 
 House of Burgesses, 88. Takes part in 
 proceedings, 92. Supports bill to mitigate 
 slavery, 97. His house burned, 98. Mar- 
 ries, 101. Sends for Ossian manuscripts, 
 102. Consults on Gaspee affair, 119, 123. 
 On committee of correspondence, 124. 
 Buries Carr, 126. Recommends fast-day, 
 129, 130. Draughts instructions for members 
 of Continental Congress, 136. They are 
 published in England, 142. Retires from 
 the bar, 147. His order for English sashes, 
 148. Chairman of committee of safety, 148. 
 On committee to get arms for Va., 150. 
 Elected member of the Continental Con- 
 gress, 151. Clings to England, 157. Re- 
 plies to North, 159. In Continental Con- 
 gress, 162. Urges Livingston to pen draught, 
 169. Draws it himself, 170. Ke-elected to 
 Congress, 172. Buys violin of John Ran- 
 dolph, 176. Meets Fi'ench emmissary, 182. 
 Writes Declaration of Independence, 188, 
 Retires from Continental Congress, 194. 
 Declines French mission, 198. Reforms 
 laws of Va., 201, 210. Defends freedom of 
 thinking, 211. Attentive to Hessian pris- 
 oner, 222, 223, 224. Elected goveror of Va., 
 226. Sworn in, 229. Retaliates ill-treatment 
 of prisoners, 236. Re-enforces Gates, 241, 
 242. His conduct during Arnold's invasion, 
 246, 248. Driven from Monticello, 252. 
 Retires from governorship, 255. Smarts 
 under censure, 258. Declines a mission to 
 France, 258. To Monroe and Lafayette, on 
 the supposed censure, 259. Thanked by 
 legislature of Va., 260. Writes Notes upon 
 Virginia, 260. Visited by Chast^iUux, 262. 
 Loses his wife, 266. Elected peace com- 
 missioner to France, 266. In Congress at 
 Annapolis, 268. Perfects our decimal cur- 
 rency, 269. Washington to, on canal sys- 
 tem, 272. Objects to the Cincinnati, 273. 
 Letters to his daughter at school, 274. Ac- 
 cepts mission to Europe, 276. In Paris, 
 280. Appointed plenipotentiary to France, 
 283. Impressions of Paris, 287. His labors 
 there, 292. Treats with the Algerines, 298, 
 Sends rice and olives to S.C, 307, 309. 
 Supplies Buffon with specimens, 309. Visit 
 
756 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 to England, 312. Tour in Europe, 314. 
 His part iu French Revolution, 318, 323, 327. 
 His connection -witli Ledyar J, 320. Rescues 
 his daughter from a convent, 334. Leaving 
 France, 335. Appointed secretary of state, 
 342. Accepts, 345. Welcome home, 344. 
 Takes office in New York, 349. First im- 
 pressions, 364. Meets Hamilton, 374, 383. 
 Helps him to a majority in Congress, 392, 
 395. Opposed to his finance, 386. Recom- 
 mends mint, 399. Resides at Philadelphia, 
 400. His oj^inion on passage of British 
 troops, 412. Favors tariff retaliation, 414. 
 Committed hy Paine's pamphlet, 423, 425. 
 Excursion to Lake Champlain, 425. Op- 
 poses bank, 428. Quarrel with Hamilton, 
 430. Appoints Freneau, 432. Discloses 
 his intention to retire, 441. Hamilton at- 
 tacks, in the press, 445. To Washington, 
 on Hamilton, 448. His estate in 1793,452. 
 Washington urges upon him mission to 
 France, 459. Upon reception of Genet, 
 467. Upon Genet's conduct, 471, 480, 483. 
 Interview with Genet, 484. Against violent 
 measures, 486. Resigns, 492. His corre- 
 spondence with Hammond and Genet pub- 
 lished, 493. A Democrat in practice, 495. 
 Promotes scheme of western exploration, 
 495. As a farmer, 501. Visited by Roche- 
 foucauld, 503. Gets medal for a plough, 
 507. Invited to return to cabinet, 510. 
 Candidate for the presidency, 510, 512. 
 On Jay treaty, 520. Elected vice-president, 
 524. Composes manual, 527. Adams con- 
 sults, 629. Attends banquet, 530. Part of 
 letter to Mazzei published, 533. Urges 
 Gerry to accept mission to France, 541. 
 On Alien and Sedition Laws, 553, 554. To 
 John Taylor, against secession, 555. To 
 Gerry on, his political system, 564. In 
 campaign of 1800, 565. To Nolan, on wild 
 horses, 565. Invents revolving chair, 566, 
 Lies respecting, in 1800, 668. During the 
 tie intrigues, 576. Elected president, 580. 
 Inaugurated, 586. His first letters, 588, 
 589. Eulogizes Madison, 594. Methods of 
 Ms administration, 605. Buys Louisiana. 
 642. Repels Burr, 663. Frustrates Burr's 
 expedition, C65. Recommends embargo, 
 674. Corresponds with Mrs. Adams, 678. 
 Upon death of his daughter Maria, 678. 
 Retiring from presidency, 683. Overrun 
 by visitors, 689. His alarm at the Missouri 
 
 question, 698. His opinions respecting sla- 
 very, 698. Founds University of Virginia, 
 703. His habits in old age, 714. Visited by 
 Lafayette, 727. Sells his library to Con, 
 gross, 730. Impoverished, 731. Death, 
 734. Summary of his life and character, 
 737. 
 
 Jefl'erson, Mrs. Thomas. Marriage of, 101. 
 Character and habits, 105, 106. Birlh of 
 her daughter Martha, 107. Her children, 
 126. Anecdote of, 128. Prevents Jeffer- 
 son's acceptance of French mission, 197. 
 Her ill-health, 219. Attentive to Hessian 
 prisoners, 221, 222. Her letter to ladies of 
 Va., 241. Entertains ChastcUux, 262, 263. 
 Death of, 265. Mourned by her husband, 
 287. 
 
 Jesus Christ. Jefferson's remarks upon, 338. 
 
 Johnson, Dr. Samuel. Influences Jefferson's 
 style, 38. Denounces Ossian, 39. 
 
 Johnson, Sir William. At Saratoga, 425. 
 
 Johnson, Thomas. His gift to University of 
 Virginia, 710. 
 
 Jouitte, Mr. Warns Jefferson of British 
 troops, 251. 
 
 Journalism. An infant art, 146. 
 
 Junius. Remarks upon, 257. 
 
 Kaskaskias. Taken by Clarke, 233. 
 
 King, Rufus. Discloses transfer of Louisi- 
 ima, 642, 
 
 Kinglake, A. W. Quoted*, 191. 
 
 Kings. How regarded formerly, 134, 135, 136. 
 
 Knox, General Henry. Quoted on an army 
 toast, 351. Upon government, 373. Ap- 
 pointed Secretary of war, 378, 379. In cab- 
 inet, 458. On Genet, 486, 488, 489. 
 
 Kosciuszko, General Thaddeus. Driven 
 from U. S. by Alien Law, 551, 590. 
 
 LArAYETTE, General. Applauds Jefferson 
 in 1781, 258. Forwards a letter to him, 258. 
 Jefl'erson to, on the public censure, 259. 
 Assists Jefferson in France, 294, 295. Jef- 
 ferson to, on the French peasantry, 316. 
 His political dinner at Jefferson's house, 
 326. Sends key of Bastille to Washington, 
 422. Jefl'erson meditates appointing him 
 governor of Louisiana, 656. Visits Monti- 
 cello, 727. 
 
 Langdon, John. In Congress, 164. 
 
 Law, John. Hamilton borrows from, 358, 
 386, 389, 396. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 757 
 
 Laws. Of ancient England, 49, 50. Of Old 
 Virginia, 52, 70, 71, 84, 199. 
 
 Lawyers. In Va., 46, 47. Ancient, 47,48, 69 
 to 73. Thrown out of employment in 1774, 
 in Va., 146. 
 
 Leander, The, Fires into an American vessel, 
 672. 
 
 Lear, Tobias. Assists "Washington to raise 
 money, 377. Quoted upon Paine's pam- 
 phlet, 424, 425. 
 
 Lebanon, Ct. Aids Boston, 131. 
 
 Ledyard, John. His scheme of exploration, 
 320. 
 
 Lee, Arthur. Accuses Bland, 173. Dispu- 
 tations, 268. 
 
 Leeds, Duke of. In conference with G. Mor- 
 ris, 409, 410. 
 
 Lee, Henry. Befriends Freneau, 473. Ad- 
 vises Genet, 477. A tale-bearer, 521. 
 
 Lee, Francis Lightfoot. In consultation up- 
 on Gaspee affair, 119. Aids to reform Va., 
 214. 
 
 Lee, Richard Henry. In consultation upon 
 Gaspee affair, 119, 124. His bill against 
 slave trade, 139. Elected to Continental 
 Congress, 143, 144. On committee to arm 
 Va., 150. In Congress, 164. Re-elected, 
 172. Signs Jefferson's commission, 283. 
 Jefferson gets a lamp for, 304. 
 
 L'Embuscade. At Charleston, 469, 470. 
 
 LesUe, General A. Co-operates with Corn- 
 wallis, 244. 
 
 Letters. Their use as material of biography, 
 41. 
 
 Lewis, Meriwether. Private Secretary to 
 Jefferson, 023. His exploring expedition, 
 628. 
 
 Lexington. Battle of, 153, 156. 
 
 Liberty, The. Burnt at Newport, 111. 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham. His definition of slavery, 
 655. 
 
 Lincoln, Levi. Takes possession of the ofBce 
 of secretary of state, 586. Appointed at- 
 torney-general, 598. 
 
 LTnfant, Major. His mission to France, 274. 
 
 Little Sarah, The. Captured, 470. 
 
 Livingston, R. R. On committee to draught 
 Declaration of Independence, 187. Minis- 
 ter to France, 599. Why recalled, 606. 
 Sends sheep to Jefferson, 626. Negotiates 
 for purchase of Louisiana, 643, 654. 
 
 Livingston, William. In Congress, 164. Jef- 
 
 «ferson urges to pen draught, 169. 
 
 Logan, Dr. George. His attempt to preserve 
 peace between France and U. 8., 552. 
 
 Logic, Charles. His generosity to American 
 captives in Algiers, 297. 
 
 London. Sends aid to Boston in 1774, 132. 
 
 Louis XV. In affair of D.amiens, 134. 
 
 Louis XVI. His inconvenient virtue, 328. 
 Paine tries to save, 454. Executed, 455. 
 
 Louisiana. Purchase of, 641. 
 
 Lyttleton, Lord. His work upon law, 47. 
 
 McCleod, Captain. Protects Monticcllo, 258. 
 
 Macon, Nathaniel. Jefferson consults, 607. 
 
 MacPherson, Charles. Jefferson knows, 40. 
 Jefferson asks to send Ossiau MSS., and 
 Gaelic works, 102. 
 
 Madison, James. Remembered Braddock'a 
 defeat, 16. Why he entered Princeton, 25. 
 Escaped vices of Va., 30. His excessive 
 study, 60. Advised by Jefferson as to his 
 studies, 61, 62. Upon Jefferson as a speak- 
 er, 83. Lost election by refusing to can- 
 vass, 88. 'Upon uitoleranco of the church 
 in Va., 202, 203. His character and career, 
 208. Aids to reform Va., 208, 210. To 
 Jefferson on public affairs in 1780, 238. 
 Upon Jefferson's election to France, 266. 
 Disappointed in love, 270. Jefferson urges 
 to settle near Montlcello, 271. Guardian 
 of Jefferson's nepliew, 276. Jefferson to, 
 upon France, 289. Jefferson gets a watch 
 for, 304. Jefferson to, on architecture, 305. 
 On accepting office, 317. Visits Jefferson 
 in 1790, 345. Jefferson to, on Fi-ench Revo- 
 lution, 351. To Jefferson on the new gov- 
 ernment, 376. Cordial with Hamilton in 
 1789, 383. His difference with Hamilton, 
 391. On site for a capital, 394. With Jef- 
 ferson on an excursion, 425. Advances 
 Freneau, 432. Hamilton accuses, 436. Jef- 
 ferson to, on Genet, 403. On his desire to 
 resign, 492. On beginning of Adams's pres- 
 idency, 523. Proposed as minister to France, 
 531. Urged by Jefferson to write, 554. 
 Appointed secretary of state, 592. His ca- 
 reer, 593. Presents Merry to Jeffei'son, 619. 
 Imports sheep, 626. Pigs, 672. In negotia- 
 tion for purchase of Louisiana, 643. Jef- 
 ferson to, on impending war, 673. Jefferson- 
 defends, 687. Upon the University of Vir- 
 ginia, 706. Impoverished, 742. 
 
 Madison, Colonel John. After Braddock's 
 defeat, 15. His death, 592. 
 
758 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Madison, Mrs. James. Her poverty, 742. 
 
 Madison, Professor James. Observes the 
 ■winds, 2G3. 
 
 Magna Charta. Source of liberal politics, 47, 
 48, 71. Virginians attached to, 121. 
 
 Maison Quarree. At ISTismes, 305, 315, 322. 
 
 Mansfield, Lord. Jefferson disapproves, 48. 
 
 Marbois, M. de. See BarbCiMarbois. 
 
 Marblchead, Mass. Aids Boston, 131. 
 
 Marie Antoinette. Her high play, 316. Jef- 
 ferson's opinion of, 328. Quoted upon the 
 American Revolution, 417. Burke eulo- 
 gizes, 418. Advances Genet, 461, 462. 
 
 Marriage. Remarks upon, 3, 103. 
 
 Marselliiise, The. Sung in Philadelphia thea- 
 tres, 456. 
 
 Marshall, John. Quoted upon Jefferson, 493. 
 To France in grand embassy, 541, 549, 550. 
 Anecdote of, 58G. Dines with Burr, 666. 
 In trial of Burr, 639. 
 
 Martm, Luther. Defends Burr, 666, 66S. 
 
 Martin. Receives British troops at Monti- 
 cello, 258. 
 
 Maryland. Aids Bos'ton, 131. 
 
 Mason, George. Aids to reform Va., 207, 
 214. His opinion of Hamilton, 352. 
 
 Mason, Rev. John. Quoted upon Jefferson, 
 571. Upon Bonaparte, 571. 
 
 Massachusetts Historical Society. Public 
 obligations to, 133. ' 
 
 Massachusetts. Asks co-operation of Va., 
 85. Virginia imitates, 95, 123. Jefferson 
 extols, 162, 702. 
 
 M.ithurius, The. Employed to ransom Amer- 
 ican captives, 300. 
 
 Maury, James, jun. Consul to Liverpool, 
 17. 
 
 Maury, Rev. James. Jefferson attends his 
 school, 16. 
 
 Maury, Rev. Mr. Marries Martha Jefferson, 
 346. 
 
 Mazzei, Philip. Settles near Monticello, 104. 
 Supplies Jefferson's garden, 105. To Eu- 
 rope for a loan, 227, 229. In Paris, 329. 
 Publishes extract from Jefferson's letter, 
 533. Anecdote of, 573. 
 
 Meade, Colonel R. K. Attached to Hamilton, 
 354. 
 
 Meade, William. Quoted upon industry of 
 Old Virgiuia, 11. Upon the Washingtons, 
 32. Upon the clergy of Va., 55, 56, 57, 59. 
 
 Medicine men. Jefferson describee, 677. 
 
 Merchants. Jefferson dislikes, 339. 
 
 Merry, Mr. His reception by Jefferson, 618, 
 
 621. 
 
 Mexico. Jefferson discourages revolution in, 
 322. 
 
 Michaud, Andrew. Attempts to explore 
 west, 495. 
 
 Miflain, Governor. In Genet affair, 483, 486. , 
 His reception of Jefferson at Philadelphia, 
 527, 528. 
 
 Miller, Samuel. His gift to University of 
 Virginia, 710. 
 
 Mint. Established at Philadelphia, 398. 
 
 Mirabeau, Count Honor^. Jefferson ad- 
 mired, 325. 
 
 Miranda, Don Francisco. His scheme of 
 South American independence, 551. 
 
 Monroe, Colonel James, 14. 
 
 Monroe, James. His father, 14. Ad\ised by 
 Jefferson as to his studies, 61, 62. In the 
 field in 1781, 252. Jefferson to, on the cen- 
 sure, 259. Buying laud near Monticello, 
 270, 271. Jefferson to, on France, 287. 
 Jeffcrsou to, on need of a navy, 351. Jef- 
 ferson to, on deadlock in Congress, 395. On 
 Paine, 427. Builds house near Jefferson, 
 507. Minister to France, 522. Assists 
 Paine, 523. Why not a graduate of a col- 
 lege, COO. Minister in London, 621. To 
 Paris for purchase of Louisiana, 650, 653, 
 654. Negotiates treaty with England, 672. 
 Reconciled to Madison, 687. 
 
 Monticello. Why chosen for a residence, 44. 
 Jefferson goes to live at, 98. Improves, 99, 
 103, 106. Described, 106. Seized by Tarl- 
 ton, 252. Visited by Chastellux, 262. The 
 prevalent winds there, 263. 
 
 Montmorin, Count de. Conference with Jef- 
 ferson, 340. 
 
 Moody, Samuel. Sends aid to Boston, 182. 
 
 Moore, Thomas. His verses upon Jefferson, 
 605. His intei-view with Jefferson, 612. 
 Jefferson enjoys his poetry, 621. 
 
 Montague, Admiral. In affair of the Gaspee, 
 116, 117, 119. 
 
 Montague, Captain. Threatens to fire upon 
 Williamsburg, 158. 
 
 Montreal. Aids Boston, 131. 
 
 Morris, Gouverneur. Suggests decimal cur- 
 rency, 269. His character, 294. At Jeft'er- 
 son's house in Paris, 320, 328. Assists 
 French nobles, 328. Quoted upon nobility 
 in France, 329. His bet with Hamilton, 
 369. Envoy to England, 408. Upon Hanj- 
 
INDEX. 
 
 759 
 
 ilton's opinions, 450. In Paris during reign 
 of terror, 457. Replaced by Monroe, 522. 
 Visits Mt. Vernon, 502. Interviews Jeffer- 
 son on the tie, 577. His opinion tliereon, 
 580. Describes Washington, D.C., 601. 
 Upon Jefferson's administration, 633, 650. 
 Upon Monroe's appointment to France, 671. 
 
 Morris, Robert. Signs treaty of peace, 269. 
 His tobacco contract with France, 293, 294. 
 Hamilton to, on finance, 358, 359. In New 
 York in 17S9, 367. Recommends Hamilton, 
 377. 
 
 Morris, William. Killed by Indians, 234. 
 
 Moultrie, G-overnor W. In Genet affair, 
 470. 
 
 Moustier, Count de. Jefferson to, on Louisi- 
 ana, 642. 
 
 Muhlenberg, General J. P. G-. Jefferson to, 
 on his wine duty, 626. 
 
 Narragansett Bay. Scenes in, before Rev- 
 olution, 108 to 116. 
 
 Natural Bridge. Owned by Jefferson, 103. 
 Visited by ChastcUux, 264. 
 
 Naturalization. Tenns of, 213. 
 
 Necker, Jacques. Gets flour from U. S., 325. 
 
 Negroes, The. Jefferson's opinion of, 199. 
 
 Nelson, Thomas. Elected to Congress, 172. 
 Despatched to eastern counties, 240, 246. 
 Governor of Va., 255. 
 
 Nemour, Dupont de. Jefferson to, on Loui- 
 siana purchase, 646. 
 
 New England. Early laws of, 51. Prosperi- 
 ty of, 77. Ought not to have been so 
 named, 120. Enriched by commerce in 
 slaves, 190. How its men were ftrmed, 
 195. Sides against the embargo, 674. Re- 
 marks upon, 700. 
 
 New Hampshire. Aids Boston, 132. 
 
 New Jersey. Aids Boston, 131. 
 
 Newport, R. I. Commerce of, before Revolu- 
 tion, loS, 109. Scenes at. 111, 112, 117. 
 Aids Boston, 132. ^Illusion to, 388. 
 
 Newspapers. Jefferson upon, in 1787, 317. 
 
 New York, City of. Visited by Jefferson in 
 1766, 68. Aids Boston in 1774, 132. Inde- 
 pendence declared at, 193. Society of, in 
 1790, 364, 307, 368. Beginning of rapid 
 gro'wth, 396. Congress removes from, 400. 
 
 Nicholas, George. Confers with Jefferson on 
 Kentucky Resolutions, 558. 
 
 Nicholas, R. C. On committee with Jeffer- 
 son, 92, 124. Quietsthe people, 153. Elect- 
 50 
 
 ed chairman of Burgesses of Va., 174. 
 
 His politics, 209. 
 Nicholas, W. C. Confers with Jefferson, 558. 
 Noailles, Vicompto de. At Philadelphia, 477. 
 Norfolk, Va. Burnt by the Enghsh, 185. 
 
 Jefferson at, in 1789, 342. 
 North Carolina. Aids Boston, 131, 
 North, Lord. Comes to the premiership, 97. 
 
 His proposition to the colonies, 159. 
 Norwich, Ct. Aids Boston, 131. 
 Notes upon Virginia. Written by Jefferson, 
 
 260. Published, 310. 
 
 Olives. Jefferson's efforts to introduce into 
 the U. S., 307. 
 
 Ontassete. His oratory, 10. 
 
 Orleans, Duke of. G. Morris assists, 328. 
 
 Osgood, Dr. David. Assails Jefferson, 690. 
 
 Ossian. Jefferson loves, 39. Gives name to 
 a town, 40. Jefferson intends to read him 
 in the original, 102. Recent light on, 103, 
 Jefferson and ChastcUux converse upon, 263. 
 
 Otis, J. Upon British protective system, 275. 
 
 Owen, Robert Dale. Alluded to, 631. 
 
 Paca, WilUam. In Congress, 163. 
 
 Page, John. At college, 24. Jefferson to, 
 upon his love, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38. His house, 
 36. Marriage, 41. Jefferson to, on Dab- 
 ncy Carr, 44. Advises Dunmore, 155,157. 
 In House of Burgesses, 175. Devises seal 
 for Va., 193. Candidate for governor of 
 Va., 225. Jefferson to, m 1785, 287. Sec- 
 ond marriage in New York, 349. Jefferson 
 appoints to office, 608. 
 
 Paine, Thomas. His Common Sense pub- 
 lished, 186. Quoted, 190. Gives a year's 
 salary to the Revolution, 238. Jefferson to, 
 on the press, 317. Hamilton reijlies to his 
 Common Sense, 354. Replies to Burke on 
 French Revolution, 421. Forwards key of 
 Bastille to Washington, 422. His pamphlet 
 in United States, 423, 425, 426. Jefferson 
 to, on the same, 427. Defended by Fre- 
 neau, 434. Endeavors to save Louis XVI. 
 Burnt in effigy at Bristol, 476. Befriended 
 in Paris by Monroe, 523. Gives money 
 toward French invasion of England, 549. 
 Offends Bonaparte, 583. Permitted to re- 
 turn to U.S. in a naval ship, 590. His abode 
 in Paris, 590. Remarks upon, 591, 606. 
 
 Pardoning Power. How exercised by Jeflfer- 
 6on, 632. 
 
760 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Parish, John. G. Morris to, on Jefferson, 671. 
 
 Payson, Edward. Assails Jefferson, 690. 
 
 Pendleton, Edmund. On committee of cor- 
 respondence, 12-t. Elected to Continental 
 Congress, 143. On committee to arm Va., 
 150. Thanked by Burgesses, 172. His 
 dexterity in debate, 209, 213, 215. 
 
 Pcpperill, Mass. Aids Boston, 130. 
 
 Philadelphia. Sends aid to Boston in 1774, 
 132. Continental Congress meets at, 163. 
 Defended by galleys, 181. Lead collected 
 from house to house, 1S6. Seat of general 
 government, 395. Congress removes to, 
 400. Scenes at, in 1793, 470. 
 
 Phillips, General William. A prisoner in 
 Va., 222. Remonstrates on behalf of Hen- 
 rj' Hamilton, 236. 
 
 Philosophical Society. Jefferson sending his 
 Notes to, 310. Members of, witness an 
 experiment, 397. Sends Michaud to explore 
 west, 495. 
 
 Pickering, Timothy. Upon Botetourt's coach, 
 225. 
 
 Pike, General Z. M. Explores western 
 country, 629. 
 
 Pinckney, General C. C. Commissioner to 
 France, 541, 548. Candidate for presidency, 
 562, 630. Upon Jefferson's administration, 
 633. 
 
 Pintard, John. Resigns clerkship, 432. 
 
 Pitt, William. Exempts Jefferson's baggage 
 from the duties, 341. In conference with 
 Adams, 404. With G. Morris,^408. 
 
 Plymouth, Mass. Incident at, 145. 
 
 Politeness. Importance of, 430. 
 
 Port Bill, Boston, 129 to 133. 
 
 Portsmouth, N.H. Aids Boston, 132. 
 
 Price, Dr. Richard. Calls forth Burke's 
 reflections, 417. 
 
 Price, Mr. His duel with Eacker, 659. 
 
 Priestley, Dr. Joseph. Jefferson recom- 
 mends to students, 61. Jefferson to, on 
 classi(!al education, 216. His house de- 
 stroyed, 477, 496. His life in England, 497. 
 Removes to America, 499. Jefferson at- 
 tends his church, 530. Menaced by Alien 
 Law, 551. Preaches in Philadelphia, 574. 
 Jefferson invites and commends, 5S9. Jef. 
 ferson consults ou the University, 704. 
 
 Primogeniture. Abolished in Va., 214. 
 
 Prisoners of war. How treated in Revolu- 
 tionary War, 234, 235, 236. 
 
 Protective System. Before the Revolution, 
 
 109, 275. Struggles to destroy, 277. Jef- 
 ferson opposes in France, 292, 340. Eng- 
 land devoted to, 414. Complicated, 630. 
 
 Providence, R.I. Commerce of, before Rev- 
 olution, 108. Men of, burn the Gaspee, 
 112 to 116. Aids Boston, 132. 
 
 Purdie, Hugh. Barbarity to, 416. 
 
 Quebec. Sends aid to Boston, 131. 
 
 Quincy, Josiah. Quoted on Merry's recep- 
 tion, 619. Opposes purchase of Louisiana, 
 654. On Jefferson's retirement, 684. 
 
 Radicals. Remarks upon, 207. 
 
 Raglan, Lord, 191. 
 
 R.ileigh Tavern. Scenes in, 34, 119. 
 
 Randall, Henry S. Quoted upon Peter Jef- 
 ferson, 8. Upon Jefferson's habits, 43. 
 Upon his law-practice, 81. Upon Mrs. 
 Carr, 125. Upon Jefferson's skill in music, 
 222. Upon Jefferson's exactness, 314. Up- 
 on his welcome home, 345. Upon T. M. 
 Randolph, 504. Upon treatment of the 
 slaves at Monticello, 508. Defends Jeffer- 
 son, 569. Relates anecdotes of Jefferson's 
 simple manners, 624. Furtiishes reminis- 
 cences of Jefferson's grand-daughters, 714. 
 Upon raising money for Jefferson, 731. 
 
 Randolph, Edmund. At college, 25. Jeffer- 
 son gets books for, 304. Appointed attor- 
 ney-general, 380. Described, 330. Hamil- 
 ton to, on the French Revolution, 456. His 
 opinion on privateering, 481. On Genet, 
 488. Jefferson to, on the pardoning power, 
 632. 
 
 Randolph, George Wythe, 570. 
 
 Randolph, Isham. His lineage and character, 
 4, 7. 
 
 Randolph, John. Att'y-gen. of Va. Sella 
 violin to Jefferson, 176. Jefferson to, on 
 public affairs, 177, 180. 
 
 Randolph, John, of Roanoke. Upon Jeffer- 
 son, 210. Toasts Martha Jefferson, 401. 
 Goes into opposition, 607. Eulogizes Jef- 
 ferson's administration, 613. 
 
 Randolph, Martha Jefferson. Born, 107. 
 Anecdote of, as a child, 128. Upon the 
 death of her mother, 265. Jefferson ad- 
 vises, 274. To Paris, 277, 280. At school 
 in Paris, 330, 332. Rescued from a convent, 
 333, 334. Engaged to be married, 334. 
 Return home, 3i4. Married, 346. Jeffer- 
 son to, on birth of a child, 400. On the 
 
INDEX. 
 
 761 
 
 marriage of her father-in-law, 401. Jeffer- 
 son to, on Lake George, 425. Jefferson to, 
 on party violence, 555. Refutes the Dusky 
 Sally slander, 570. Lives at Monticello, 
 68S. Her disposition, 693. Her death, 736. 
 
 Randolph, Colonel Peter. Anecdote of, 66. 
 
 Randolph, Peyton. Revered by Jefferson, 
 30. Anecdote of, 66. Elected speaker of 
 House of Burgesses, 90. On committee of 
 correspondence, 124. Presents Jefferson's 
 draught of instructions, 142. Proscribed in 
 England, 142. Elected to Continental Con- 
 gi'ess, 143. Chairman of it, 151. Quiets 
 the people, 153. Induces troops to return 
 home, 154. Induces Jefferson to reply to 
 North, 158. In Congress, 163. Reelected, 
 172. Retires from public life, 174. 
 
 Randolph, Colonel T. J. Quoted upon the 
 Dusky Sally slander, 569. Anecdote of his 
 youth, 624. Describes Jefferson's labors 
 for the university, 706. 
 
 Randolph, Thomas Mann. In Paris, 334. 
 Engaged to Martha Jefferson, 334. Mar- 
 ries her, 346. Marriage of his father, 401. 
 His impetuosity, 504. His opinions respect- 
 ing slavery, 694. His translation from the 
 Greek, 697. 
 
 Randolph, William, 4. 
 
 Reid, Lieutenant. His vessel burnt, 111. 
 
 Religion set free in Va., 210, 211. Effect of it 
 in France, 311. Jefferson advises nephew 
 respecting, 338. His opinions on, 711, 712, 
 744. 
 
 Reynolds, James. Extorts money from Ham- 
 ilton, 536, 538. 
 
 Reynolds, Mrs. James. Her amour with 
 Hamilton, 535. 
 
 Rhode Island. People of, before the Revolu- 
 tion, 110. Accepts Independence, 193. Jef- 
 ferson's remarks upon, 339. 
 
 Rice. Jefferson sends varieties of, to U. S., 
 307, 308, 309. 
 
 Richmond, Va. Convention at, in 1775, 149. 
 Becomes capital of Va., 213, 238. Public 
 buildings at, 305. 
 
 Riedesel, General. A prisoner in Va., 221, 
 228. Liberality to his troops, 223. 
 
 Riedesel, Madame. Her residence inVa., 221. 
 Her habits, 223, 228. 
 
 Rittenhouse, David. With Franklin on the 
 Delaware, 181. Jefferson employs, 221. 
 Witnesses an experiment, 398. Receives 
 Genet, 471. 
 
 Rivanna River, 2. Improved by Jefferson, 
 42. 
 
 Rives, William O. Quoted upon violin, 12. 
 Upon Jefferson's plough, 507. 
 
 Robinson, Crabb. Quoted upon good com- 
 pany, 164. 
 
 Rochefoucauld, Due de la. Visits Monti- 
 cello, 503. 
 
 Rogers, Samuel. Anecdote of, 193. 
 
 Rolfe, John. Plants first tobacco in Va., 72. 
 
 Roswell, Va. Described, 36. 
 
 Rush, Dr. Benjamin. Jefferson to, on the 
 message system, 623. 
 
 Rutland, Vt. Aids Boston, 132. 
 
 Rutledge, Edward. In Congress, 164. Jef. 
 ferson to, on rice, 308. 
 
 Rutledge, John. In Congress, 164. His 
 draught rejected, 168. Jefferson to, on Eu- 
 ropean governments, 289. 
 
 Sabin, Mr. On the burning of the Gaspee,- 
 117. 
 
 St. Clair, General Arthur. Defeated, 413, 
 416. 
 
 St. John, The. Fired into at Newport, 111. 
 
 Salaries. Insufficient, paid by U. S., 286. 
 
 Salem, Mass. Aids Boston in 1774, 132. 
 
 Saratoga Springs. In early days, 425. 
 
 Saxe- Weimar, Duke of. Relates visit to Mon- 
 ticello, 724. 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter. Admired James Watt, 
 374. Jefferson upon, 713. 
 
 Secession. Jefferson's argument against, 555. 
 
 Shadwell farm. "Why so named, 5. Charged 
 with support of Jefferson's mother and 
 sisters, 31. House burnt, 98. 
 
 Sedgwick, Catharine. Quoted upon her fa- 
 ther, 373. 
 
 Sedgwick, Theodore. His arrogance, 373. 
 Quoted, 394. Hamilton to, on John xidams, 
 562. 
 
 Sedition Law, The. Described, 552. Jeffer- 
 son's opinion of, 553, 679. 
 
 Selma, Ala. Why so named, 40. 
 
 Sessions, Darius. In affair of the Gaspee, 
 111 to 115. 
 
 Shard, Julius, 104. 
 
 Sheep. Imported by Jefferson, 626. 
 
 Sheridan, General P. H. Protects Univerai- 
 ty of Virginia, 710. 
 
 Sherman, Ro^er. In Congress, 164, 187. 
 Signs treaty of peace, 269. 
 
 Shippen, Dr. Inoculates Jefferson, 67. 
 
T62 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Short, "William. Beloved by Jefferson, 270. 
 In Paris with Jefferson, 324, 333. ChargS 
 at Paris, 335, 3-10. Jefferson to, on the 
 French Revolution, 456. On selling his 
 stock, 494. Jefferson recalls, 609. 
 
 Simcoe, Colonel. His proclamation, 515. 
 
 Skeiton, Martha. Marries Jefferson, 101. 
 
 Slavery. In Jefferson's boyhood, 11. Ab- 
 horred by George Wythe, 31. In Va., 55. 
 Jefferson's bill concerning, in House of 
 Burgesses, 97. Opposition to, in the colo- 
 nies, 139. A cause of terror in times of civ- 
 il commotion, 152. Denounced in draught 
 of Declaration of Independence, 189, 190. 
 Remarks upon, 199. Jefferson's scheme to 
 abolish, 218. Jefferson denounces, in his 
 Notes on Va., 260. Jefferson moves to pre- 
 vent, in N. W. territory, 270. His remarks 
 upon, in Paris, 336. 
 
 Sloane, Hans, 5. 
 
 Slodtz, A. His Diana, 315. 
 
 Small, Dr. William. Instructs Jefferson, 24, 
 26, 30. Removes to Birmingham, 31. Jef- 
 ferson to, on Lexington, 156. 
 
 Smith, Dr. John B. Converses with Mazzci, 
 572. 
 
 Smith, Mrs. E. Vale. Quoted on marine spo- 
 liation, 518, Upon Algerine piracies, 636. 
 
 Smith, Rev. Cotton Mather. Slanders Jeffer- 
 son, 668. 
 
 Smith, Robert. Appointed secretary of the 
 navy, 599. Why, 600. 
 
 Sotith Carolina. Aids Boston, 131. 
 
 Springfield, Mass. Aids Boston in 1774, 132. 
 
 Stamp Act. Opposition to, in Va., 63, 64, 65. 
 
 Story, Rev. Isaac. Jefferson to, on religion, 
 744. 
 
 State Rights. Lighten the question of, 259. 
 
 Stiles, Dr. Ezra. Jefferson to, on a flower, 
 309. 
 
 Stratford upon Avon. Visited by Jefferson 
 and Adams, 314. 
 
 Strikers. Their operations described, 540, 547. 
 
 Stone, William. In Congress, 163. 
 
 Sullivan, General. Sends moose to Jefferson, 
 310. 
 
 Swartwout, John. His duel with Clinton, 
 658. 
 
 TAiLEYRAND, Prince. Upon Hamilton, 431. 
 In X T Z affair, 545, 54S. *In negotiation 
 for cession of Louisiana to U. S., 646. 
 
 Talon, M. At Philadelphia, 477. 
 
 Tammany Society, of Baltimore. Anecdote 
 of, 610. 
 
 Taney, Roger. Describes Luther Martin, 666. 
 
 Tarlton, Colonel Baunastre. Seizes Monti- 
 cello, 252. . I 
 
 Taylor, John. To Jefferson on secession, ] 
 555. 
 
 Ternant, M. At Philadelphia, 458. 
 
 Thackeray, W. M. Quoted, 379, 614. 
 
 Threshing Machine. Where invented, 506. 
 
 Tickuor, George. Quoted upon Talleyrand, 
 431. 
 
 Tie, The. Between Jefferson and Burr, 576. 
 
 Tobacco. Use of, disapproved in Va., 27. 
 Clergy paid in, 55. Culture of, in Va., 72, 
 Fr.auds upon, 74. Exportation of, forbid- 
 den, 144.' Monopoly of, in France, 292. 
 
 Townscnd, Charles. Quoted upon British 
 policy, 85. 
 
 Township system. Jefferson upon, 674. 
 
 Tracy, Nathaniel. To Europe with Jefferson, 
 279. 
 
 Tripoli. Negotiations with, in 1786, 299. 
 
 Trist, N. P. Quoted upon breach between ■' 
 Hamilton and Madison, 391. Upon Jeffer- ' 
 son's regard for Madison, 594. Governor 
 T. M. Randolph's letters to, 694. At death- 
 bed of Jefferson, 733. 
 
 Troup, Colonel Robert. Takes Hamilton's . 
 law business, 377. 2 
 
 Tucker, Professor George. Upon tobacco- -1 
 rollers of Va., 201. Upon Jefferson's ap- ic 
 pointment policy, 608. 
 
 Tunis, Bey of. His conversation with Eaton, 
 638. 
 
 Tuscany, Duke of. Refuses a loan, 227, 228. 
 
 Twain, Mark. Quoted, 574. 
 
 University of Virginia. Founded by Jef- 
 
 son, 703. 
 
 Van Buren, Martin. Quoted upon G. Mor- ' 
 ris at Washington, 3C8. 
 
 V.ans Murray, William. Goes as minister to 
 France, 561. 
 
 Venable, Dr. Charles. Describes University 
 of Virginia, 708. 
 
 Vergennes, Count de. Advises the Ameri- 
 can commissioners in 1784, 282. Receives 
 Jefferson, 283. Conferences with him, 292. 
 
 Vermont. Sends aid to Boston, 132. Jef-'s 
 ferson visits, in 1791, 426. 
 
 Vestryman. The oath of, in Va., 69. i 
 
INDEX. 
 
 763 
 
 tor, Lieut-General. Appointed to com- 
 land in Louisiana, 647. 
 :oennes. Taken by Clarke, 234, 23T. 
 lin. The. Its use in Virginia, 12. Jeflfer- 
 m plays, 27, 28, 34, 37. Saved from the 
 ■arning house, 98. Odd compact for one, 
 , 5. Jefferson's skill upon, 222. Deprived 
 f, 314. 
 
 t^inia. The ancient sports of, 12. Schools 
 , in early days, 14. Its ancient capital, 
 I. Habits of, 27. Early gambling in, 29. 
 Vo choice of occupations in, 32. Early laws 
 ■f, 51, 52. Clergy In olden time, 56, 57, 58. 
 obacco culture in, 73. Legislature of, 82. 
 1 accord with Mass., 85. Reception of Lord 
 ""ototourt, 86. Dependent upon Great Brit- 
 ain for manufactures, 95. Winter in, 101, 
 1.04. Attached to mouarchy, 120. And to 
 herty, 122. Aids Boston, 131. Elects mem- 
 •ers of Continental Congress, 143. Pays 
 •r members liberally, 162. Menaced with 
 devastation in 1775, 183. Its' admirable 
 legislature, 184. Decides for independence, 
 "S6, 187. Her ancient laws reformed by 
 Jefferson, 199. An election in, described, 
 a)0. Witchcraft in, 202. During first years 
 of Revolutionary War, 220. Hessian pris- 
 oners in, 221, 223. Ratifies treaty as a sov- 
 reign state, 229. Ravaged by Arnold, 
 46. By CornwaUis, 258. Notes upon, by 
 jfferson, 260. Farming in, 501, 502. 
 "ney, Compte de. Flies from AUen Law, 
 551, 590. 
 /oltaire. Upon execution of Damiens, 135. 
 Interested in American Revolution, 146. 
 Upon anvil and hammer, 288. Upon fish in 
 Lent, 307. Upon Newton, 489. Knew the 
 Gallatins, 595. 
 
 Walsh, Robert. G. Morris to, on Hamil- 
 ton, 450. 
 
 Wanton, Joseph. In affair of the Gaspee, 
 111 to 115. 
 
 vV^ard, General Artemas. Knox, his aid-de- 
 camp, 378. 
 
 Washington, Augustine. Consulted by Boston 
 •ommiltee, 132. 
 
 'shington, D.C. Selection of the site, 393. 
 'jaid out, 399. Government removed to, 
 600. Described, 601. 
 
 vV ishington, George. In the field after Brad- 
 dock's defeat, 15. Project of his going to 
 sea before the mast, 32. Upon frauds in 
 
 London, 77. In House of Burgesses, 89, 94. 
 Elected to Continental Congress, 144, 145. 
 On committee to arm Va., 150. Command- 
 er-in-chief, 161. Hears of Bunker liiU, 162. 
 Thanked by Burgesses of Va., 172. Decides 
 to release Henry Hamilton, 236. Jefferson 
 to, on danger of Va. in 1781 , 251. Resign- 
 ing his commission, 269. Foretells the Erie 
 canal, 272, 273. Upon the draught of the 
 commercial treaty of 1784, 232. Wrong to 
 refuse pay, 286. Jefferson to, from France, 
 288. Jefferson to, on the Kings, 316. Ap- 
 points Jefferson secretary of state, 345. 
 Dangerous illness in 1790, 350. Quoted on 
 need of efficient government, 351. His re- 
 lations with Hamilton, 354. Etiquette dur- 
 ing his presidency, 365, 367. Resents fa- 
 miliarity, 309. Beginning of his presidency, 
 376. Carlyle upon, 382. Sends O. Morris 
 to England, 408. Paine dedicates pamphlet 
 to, 422. Lear to, on Painc's pamphlet, 424. 
 adulation of, 434. Endeavors to reconcile 
 Jefferson and Hamilton, 442, 447, 450. On 
 Virginia overseers, 453. Urges Jefferson to 
 accept mission to France, 459. In Genet 
 affair, 464. Receives Genet, 478. His an- 
 ger at a caricature, 489. Comj)liments Jef- 
 ferson on his retiring, 492. Invites Jeffer- 
 son to return to cabinet, 510. Signs Jay 
 treaty, 517. To Jefferson on Lee's charges, 
 521. Retires from presidency, 529, 530. 
 Urged by Hamilton to return, 562. Galla- 
 tin describes, 596. 
 
 Washington, Mrs. Martha. Her workroom 
 at Mt. Vernon, 11. To Mrs. Jefferson on 
 ladies aiding Revolution, -Ml. Her arrival 
 in New York in 1789, 367. Detested demo- 
 crats, 522. 
 
 Washington, Mrs. Mary. Thinks of sending 
 George to sea before the mast, 3J. 
 
 Watson, Elkanah. Quoted upon a Virginia 
 election, 200. 
 
 Watt, James, 25. His steam-engine invented, 
 303. Admires Sir Walter Scott, 374. 
 
 Wayles, John. His estate, 100. Jefferson 
 marries his daughter, 101. Death, 103. 
 
 Webster, Daniel. Quoted upon lawyers, 
 73. Upon Hamilton, 352, 384. Relates visit 
 to Monticello, 722. Assists Mrs. Madison, 
 742. 
 
 Webster, Noah. Begins copyright in U.S., 
 304. 
 
 WeUs, Me. Aids Boston, 132. 
 
764 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 "Wethersfield, Ct. Aids Boston, 131. 
 
 Witchcraft. In Va., 54, 202. 
 
 Wheelbarrows. Jefferson's experiments 
 with, 104. 
 
 Whittier, J. G. How defrauded, 630. 
 
 Wilkinson, General. Reveals Burr's project, 
 665. 
 
 Willard, Dr. Joseph. Jefferson corresponds 
 with, 280. 
 
 William and Mary College. Jefferson enter- 
 ing, 1. Early history, 21, 23. Jefferson 
 proposes to enlarge, 216, He reforms, 238. 
 Desires to unite it with University of Vir- 
 ginia, 704. 
 
 Williamsburg, Va. Described, 20. Gayety 
 in, 35. Situation of, 42. Scenes at, in early 
 day, 94. Powder seized at, 162, 159. Polite 
 to naval officers, 158. Ceases to be the capi- 
 tal, 213, 238. Washington a copy of, 399. 
 
 Williams, Roger. Instructed by Coke, 47. 
 
 Windham, Ct. Aids Boston, 130. 
 
 Wine. Spoils gayety, 56. 
 
 Wirt, William. Quoted upon Dabney Carr, 
 45. Upon Jefferson and Mirabeau, 325. 
 
 Upon Edmund Randolph, 380. In trial of 
 Burr, 669. 
 
 Wistar, Dr. Caspar. Witnesses an experi- 
 ment, 393. 
 
 Wolcott, Oliver. Quoted upon Jefferson, 435. 
 
 Wrentham, Mass. Aids Boston, 130. 
 
 Wright's Perry. Proposed as site for capital 
 of U.S., 393, 394. 
 
 Wj'the, George. Early friend of Jefferson, 
 29, 30. Emancipates his slaves, 31. Re- 
 fused to sign Patrick Henry's Ucense, 33. 
 In acco'rd with Jefferson in 1774, 141. Sup- 
 plies Washington with statistics, 145. 
 Elected to Congress, 172. Attests violin 
 compact, 176. Devises seal for Va., 193, 
 194. Consults John Adams upon govern- 
 ment, 196. Aids to reform Va., 208. Re- 
 vises the laws, 215. Jefferson to, on France, 
 288. On freedom of religion, 311. Assists 
 to prepare Jefferson's Manual, 527. Be- 
 queaths his Ubrary to Jefferson, 730. 
 
 Wythe, Mrs. Her mixture of wines, 105. 
 
 X T Z Affair, 545. 
 
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