V

[pg 45]VREFORM WORK IN VIRGINIAIn September, 1776, Jefferson, having resigned his seat in Congress to engage in duties nearer home, returned to Monticello. A few weeks later, a messenger from Congress arrived to inform him that he had been elected a joint commissioner with Dr. Franklin and Silas Deane to represent at Paris the newly formed nation. His heart had long been set upon foreign travel; but he felt obliged to decline this appointment, first on account of the ill health of his wife, and secondly, because he was needed in Virginia as a legislator. Not since Lycurgus gave laws to the Spartans had there been such an opportunity as then existed in the United States. John Adams declared:“The best lawgivers of antiquity would rejoice to live at a period like this when, for the first time in the history of the world,[pg 46]three millions of people are deliberatelychoosingtheir government and institutions.”Of all the colonies, Virginia offered the best field for reform, because, as we have already seen, she had by far the most aristocratic political and social system; and it is extraordinary how quickly the reform was effected by Jefferson and his friends. In ordinary times of peace the task would have been impossible; but in throwing off the English yoke, the colonists had opened their minds to new ideas; change had become familiar to them, and in the general upheaval the rights of the people were recognized. A year later, Jefferson wrote to Franklin:“With respect to the State of Virginia, in particular, the people seem to have laid aside the monarchical and taken up the republican government with as much ease as would have attended their throwing off an old and putting on a new set of clothes.”Jefferson’s greatness lay in this, that he was the first statesman who trusted the mass of the people. He alone had divined the fact that they were competent, morally and[pg 47]mentally, for self-government. It is almost impossible for us to appreciate Jefferson’s originality in this respect, because the bold and untried theories for which he contended are now regarded as commonplace maxims. He may have derived his political ideas in part from the French philosophical writers of the eighteenth century, although there is no evidence to that effect; but he was certainly the first statesman to grasp the idea of democracy as a form of government, just as, at a later day, Walt Whitman was the first poet to grasp the idea of equality as a social system. Hamilton, John Adams, Pinckney, Gouverneur Morris, even Washington himself, all believed that popular government would be unsafe and revolutionary unless held in check by a strong executive and by an aristocratic senate.Jefferson in his lifetime was often charged with gross inconsistency in his political views and conduct; but the inconsistency was more apparent than real. At times he strictly construed, and at times he almost set aside the Constitution; but the clue to[pg 48]his conduct can usually be found in the fundamental principle that the only proper function of government or constitutions is to express the will of the people, and that the people are morally and mentally competent to govern.“I am sure,”he wrote in 1796,“that the mass of citizens in these United States mean well, and I firmly believe that they will always act well, whenever they can obtain a right understanding of matters.”And Jefferson’s lifelong endeavor was to enable the people to form this“right understanding”by educating them. His ideas of the scope of public education went far beyond those which prevailed in his time, and considerably beyond those which prevail even now. For example, a free university course for the most apt pupils graduated at the grammar schools made part of his scheme,—an idea most nearly realized in the Western States; and those States received their impetus in educational matters from the Ordinance of 1787, which was largely the product of Jefferson’s foresight.Happily for Virginia, she did not become[pg 49]a scene of war until the year 1779, and, meanwhile, Jefferson and his friends lost no time in remodeling her constitution. There were no common schools, and the mass of the people were more ignorant and rough than their contemporaries in any other colony. Elections were scenes of bribery, intimidation, and riot, surpassing even those which Hogarth depicted in England. Elkanah Watson, of Massachusetts, describes what he saw at Hanover Court House, Patrick Henry’s county, in 1778:“The whole county was assembled. The moment I alighted, a wretched, pug-nosed fellow assailed me to swap watches. I had hardly shaken him off, when I was attacked by a wild Irishman who insisted on my swapping horses with him.... With him I came near being involved in a boxing-match, the Irishman swearing, I‘did not trate him like a jintleman.’I had hardly escaped this dilemma when my attention was attracted by a fight between two very unwieldy fat men, foaming and puffing like two furies, until one succeeded in twisting[pg 50]a forefinger in a sidelock of the other’s hair, and in the act of thrusting by this purchase his thumb into the latter’s eye, he bawled out,‘King’s Cruise,’equivalent in technical language to‘Enough.’”Quakers were put in the pillory, scolding women were ducked, and it is said that a woman was burned to death in Princess Anne County for witchcraft. The English church, as we have seen, was an established church; and all taxpayers, dissenters as well as churchmen, were compelled to contribute to its support. Baptist preachers were arrested, and fined as disturbers of the peace. The law of entail, both as respects land and slaves, was so strict that their descent to the eldest son could not be prevented even by agreement between the owner and his heir.In his reformation of the laws, Jefferson was supported by Patrick Henry, now governor, and inhabiting what was still called the palace; by George Mason, a patriotic lawyer who drew the famous Virginia Bill of Rights; by George Wythe, his old pre[pg 51]ceptor, and by James Madison, Jefferson’s friend, pupil, and successor, who in this year began his political career as a member of the House of Burgesses.Opposed to them were the conservative party led by R. C. Nicholas, head of the Virginia bar, a stanch churchman and gentleman of the old school, and Edward Pendleton, whom Jefferson described as“full of resource, never vanquished; for if he lost the main battle he returned upon you, and regained so much of it as to make it a drawn one, by dexterous manœuvres, skirmishes in detail, and the recovery of small advantages, which, little singly, were important all together. You never knew when you were clear of him.”Intense as the controversy was, fundamental as were the points at issue, the speakers never lost that courtesy for which the Virginians were remarkable; John Randolph being perhaps the only exception. Even Patrick Henry—though from his humble origin and impetuous oratory one might have expected otherwise—was never guilty[pg 52]of any rudeness to his opponents. What Jefferson said of Madison was true of the Virginia orators in general,—“soothing always the feelings of his adversaries by civilities and softnesses of expression.”Jefferson struck first at the system of entail. After a three weeks’ struggle, land and slaves were put upon the same footing as all other property,—they might be sold or bequeathed according to the will of the possessor. Then came a longer and more bitter contest. Jefferson was for abolishing all connection between church and state, and for establishing complete freedom of religion. Nine years elapsed before Virginia could be brought to that point; but at this session he procured a repeal of the law which imposed penalties for attendance at a dissenting meeting-house, and also of the law compelling dissenters to pay tithes. The fight was, therefore, substantially won; and in 1786, Jefferson’s“Act for establishing religion”became the law of Virginia.1[pg 53]Another far-reaching law introduced by Jefferson at this memorable session of 1776 provided for the naturalization of foreigners in Virginia, after a two years’ residence in the State, and upon a declaration of their intention to become American citizens. The bill provided also that the minor children of naturalized parents should be citizens of the United States when they came of age. The principles of this measure were afterward embodied in the statutes of the United States, and they are in force to-day.At this session Jefferson also drew an act for establishing courts of law in Virginia, the royal courts having necessarily passed out of existence when the Declaration of Independence was adopted. Moreover, he set on foot a revision of all the statutes of Virginia, a committee with him at the head being appointed for this purpose; and finally he procured the removal of the capital from Williamsburg to Richmond.[pg 54]All this was accomplished, mainly by Jefferson’s efforts; and yet the two bills upon which he set most store failed entirely. These were, first, a comprehensive measure of state education, running up through primary schools and grammar schools to a state university, and, secondly, a bill providing that all who were born in slavery after the passage of the bill should be free.This was Jefferson’s second ineffectual attempt to promote the abolition of slavery. During the year 1768, when he first became a member of the House of Burgesses, he had endeavored to procure the passage of a law enabling slave-owners to free their slaves, He induced Colonel Bland, one of the ablest, oldest, and most respected members to propose the law, and he seconded the proposal; but it was overwhelmingly rejected.“I, as a younger member,”related Jefferson afterward,“was more spared in the debate; but he was denounced as an enemy to his country, and was treated with the greatest indecorum.”In 1778 Jefferson made another attempt:[pg 55]—he brought in a bill forbidding the further importation of slaves in Virginia, and this was passed without opposition. Again, in 1784, when Virginia ceded to the United States her immense northwestern territory, Jefferson drew up a scheme of government for the States to be carved out of it which included a provision“that after the year 1800 of the Christian Era, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States, otherwise than in punishment of crimes.”The provision was rejected by Congress.In his“Notes on Virginia,”written in the year 1781, but published in 1787, he said:“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism, on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.... With the morals of the people their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate no one will labor for himself who can make another labor for him.... Indeed, I tremble for my country[pg 56]when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.... The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest.”When the Missouri Compromise question came up, in 1820, Jefferson rightly predicted that a controversy had begun which would end in disruption; but he made the mistake of supposing that the Northern party were actuated in that matter solely by political motives. April 22, 1820, he wrote:“This momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.... A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.... The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually and with due sacrifices I think it might be.[pg 57]But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”And later, he wrote of the Missouri Compromise, as a“question having just enough of the semblance of morality to throw dust into the eyes of the people.... The Federalists, unable to rise again under the old division of Whig and Tory, have invented a geographical division which gives them fourteen States against ten, and seduces their old opponents into a coalition with them. Real morality is on the other side. For while the removal of the slaves from one State to another adds no more to their numbers than their removal from one country to another, the spreading them over a larger surface adds to their happiness, and renders their future emancipation more practicable.”These misconceptions as to Northern motives might be ascribed to Jefferson’s advanced age, for, as he himself graphically expressed it, he then had“one foot in the grave, and the other lifted to follow it;”but[pg 58]it would probably be more just to say that they were due, in part, to his prejudice against the New England people and especially the New England clergy, and in part to the fact that his long retirement in Virginia had somewhat contracted his views and sympathies. Jefferson was a man of intense local attachments, and he took color from his surroundings. He never ceased, however, to regard slavery as morally wrong and socially ruinous; and in the brief autobiography which he left behind him he made these predictions:“Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.”History has justified the second as well as the first of these declarations, for, excepting that brief period of anarchy known as“the carpet-bag era,”it cannot be maintained that the colored race in the Southern States have been at any time, even since their emancipation,“equally free,”in the sense of politically free, with their white fellow citizens.[pg 59]VIGOVERNOR OF VIRGINIAFor three years Jefferson was occupied with the legislative duties already described, and especially with a revision of the Virginia statutes, and then, in June, 1779, he succeeded Patrick Henry as governor of the State. It has often been remarked that he was, all through life, a lucky man, but in this case fortune did not favor him, for the ensuing two years proved to be, so far as Virginia was concerned, by much the worst period of the war.The French alliance, though no doubt an ultimate benefit to the colonies, had at first two bad effects: it relaxed the energy of the Americans, who trusted that France would fight their battles for them; and it stimulated the British to increased exertions. The British commissioners announced that henceforth England would employ, in the prosecu[pg 60]tion of the war, all those agencies which“God and nature had placed in her hands.”This meant that the ferocity of the Indians would be invoked, a matter of special moment to Virginia, since her western frontier swarmed with Indians, the bravest of their race.The colony, it must be remembered, was then of immense extent; for beside the present Virginia and West Virginia, Kentucky and the greater part of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were embraced in it. It stretched, in short, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. Upon the seaboard Virginia was especially vulnerable, the tide-water region being penetrated by numerous bays and rivers, which the enemy’s ships could easily ascend, for they were undefended by forts or men. The total navy of the colony was four vessels, mounting sixty-two guns, and a few armed boats. The flower of the Virginia soldiery, to the number of ten thousand, were in Washington’s army, and supplies of men, of arms, of ammunition and food were urgently called for by General[pg 61]Gates, who was battling against Cornwallis in North Carolina. The militia were supposed to number fifty thousand, which included every man between sixteen and fifty years of age; but this was only one man for every square mile of territory in the present State of Virginia, and of these militiamen it was estimated that, east of the Blue Ridge, only about one in five was armed with a gun. The treasury was practically bankrupt, and there was a dearth of every kind of warlike material.Such was the situation which confronted, as Mr. Parton puts it,“a lawyer of thirty-six, with a talent for music, a taste for art, a love of science, literature, and gardening.”The task was one calling rather for a soldier than a statesman; but Mr. Jefferson faced it with courage, and on the whole with success. In retaliating the cruel measures of the British, he showed a firmness which must have been especially difficult for a man of his temperament. He put in irons and confined in a dungeon Colonel Henry Hamilton and two subordinate officers who had com[pg 62]mitted atrocities upon American prisoners. He caused a prison-ship, like the ships of infamous memory which were employed as prisons by the British at New York, to be prepared; and the exchange of captives between Virginia and the British was stopped.“Humane conduct on our part,”wrote Jefferson,“was found to produce no effect. The contrary, therefore, is to be tried. Iron will be retaliated by iron, prison-ships for prison-ships, and like for like in general.”But in November, 1779, notice was received that the English, under their new leader, Sir Henry Clinton, had adopted a less barbarous system of warfare; and fortunately Jefferson’s measures of reprisal became unnecessary.Hampered as he was by want of men and money, Jefferson did all that he could to supply the needs of the Virginia soldiers with Washington, of the army in North Carolina, led by Gates, and of George Rogers Clarke, the heroic commander who put down the Indian uprising on the western frontier, and captured the English officer who instigated[pg 63]it,—that same Colonel Hamilton of whom mention has already been made. The story of Clarke’s adventures in the wilderness,—he was a neighbor of Jefferson, only twenty-six years old,—of his forced marches, of his masterful dealing with the Indians, and finally of his capture of the British force, forms a thrilling chapter in the history of the American Revolution.Many indeed of Jefferson’s constituents censured him as being over-zealous in his support of the army of Gates. He stripped Virginia, they said, of troops and resources which, as it proved afterward, were needed at home. But if Cornwallis were not defeated in North Carolina, it was certain that he would overrun the much more exposed Virginia. If he could be defeated anywhere, it would be in the Carolinas. Jefferson’s course, it is sufficient to say, was that recommended by Washington; and his exertions in behalf of the Continental armies were commended in the highest terms not only by Washington, but also by Generals Gates, Greene, Steuben, and Lafayette. The mili[pg 64]tia were called out, leaving behind only so many men as were required to cultivate the land, wagons were impressed, including two belonging to the governor, and attempts were even made—extraordinary for Virginia—to manufacture certain much-needed articles.“Our smiths,”wrote Jefferson,“are making five hundred axes and some tomahawks for General Gates.”Thus fared the year 1779, and in 1780 things went from bad to worse. In April came a letter from Madison, saying that Washington’s army was on the verge of dissolution, being only half-clothed, and in a way to be starved. The public treasury was empty and the public credit gone. In August occurred the disastrous defeat of General Gates at Camden, which left Virginia at the mercy of Cornwallis. In October a British fleet under Leslie ravaged the country about Portsmouth, but failing to effect a juncture with Cornwallis, who was detained in North Carolina by illness among his troops, did no further harm. Two months later, however, Benedict Arnold sailed up the James River[pg 65]with another fleet, and, after committing some depredations at Richmond, sailed down again, escaping by the aid of a favorable wind, which hauled from east to west just in the nick of time for him.In June, 1781, Cornwallis invaded Virginia, and no one suffered more than Jefferson from his depredations. Tarleton was dispatched to seize the governor at Monticello; but the latter was forewarned by a citizen ofCharlottesville, who, being in a tavern at Louisa when Tarleton and his troop swept by on the main road, immediately guessed their destination, and mounting his horse, a fleet Virginia thoroughbred, rode by a short cut through the woods straight to Monticello, arriving there about three hours ahead of Tarleton.Jefferson took the matter coolly. He first dispatched his family to a place of safety, sent his best horse to be shod at a neighboring smithy, and then proceeded to sort and separate his papers. He left the house only about five minutes before the soldiers entered it.[pg 66]Two slaves, Martin, Mr. Jefferson’s body servant, and Cæsar, were engaged in hiding plate and other articles under the floor of the portico, a single plank having been raised for that purpose. As Martin, above, handed the last article to Cæsar under the floor, the tramp of the approaching cavalry was heard. Down went the plank, shutting in Cæsar, and there he remained, without making any outcry, for eighteen hours, in darkness, and of course without food or water. One of the soldiers, to try Martin’s nerve, clapped a pistol to his breast, and threatened to fire unless he would tell which way his master had fled.“Fire away, then,”retorted the black, fiercely answering glance for glance, and not receding a hair’s breath.Tarleton and his men scrupulously refrained from injuring Jefferson’s property. Cornwallis, on the other hand, who encamped on Jefferson’s estate of Elk Hill, lying opposite Elk Island in the James River, destroyed the growing crops, burned all the barns and fences, carried off—“as was to be expected,”[pg 67]said Mr. Jefferson—the cattle and horses, and committed the barbarity of killing the colts that were too young to be of service. He carried off, also, about thirty slaves.“Had this been to give them freedom,”wrote Jefferson,“he would have done right; but it was to consign them to inevitable death from the smallpox and putrid fever, then raging in his camp.”“Some of the miserable wretches crawled home to die,”Mr. Randall relates,“and giving information where others lay perishing in hovels or in the open air, by the wayside, these were sent for by their generous master; and the last moments of all of them were made as comfortable as could be done by proper nursing and medical attendance.”These dreadful scenes, added to the agitation of having twice been obliged, at a moment’s notice, to flee from the enemy, to say nothing of the anxieties which she must have endured on her husband’s account, were too much for Mrs. Jefferson’s already enfeebled constitution. She died on September 6, 1782.[pg 68]Six slave women who were household servants enjoyed for thirty years a kind of humble distinction at Monticello as“the servants who were in the room when Mrs. Jefferson died;”and the fact that they were there attests the affectionate relations which must have existed between them and their master and mistress.“They have often told my wife,”relates Mr. Bacon,“that when Mrs. Jefferson died they stood around the bed. Mr. Jefferson sat by her, and she gave him directions about a good many things that she wanted done. When she came to the children, she wept, and could not speak for some time. Finally she held up her hand, and, spreading out her four fingers, she told him she could not die happy if she thought her four children were ever to have a stepmother brought in over them. Holding her other hand in his, Mr. Jefferson promised her solemnly that he would never marry again;”and the promise was kept.After his wife’s death Jefferson sank into what he afterward described as“a stupor of[pg 69]mind;”and even before that he had been, for the first and last time in his life, in a somewhat morbid mental condition. He was an excessively sensitive man, and reflections upon his conduct as governor, during the raids into Virginia by Arnold and Cornwallis, coming at a time when he was overwrought, rankled in his mind. He refused to serve again as governor, and desiring to defend his course when in that office, became a member of the House of Burgesses in 1781, in order that he might answer his critics there; but not a voice was raised against him. In 1782, he was again elected to the House, but he did not attend; and both Madison and Monroe endeavored in vain to draw him from his seclusion. To Monroe he replied:“Before I ventured to declare to my countrymen my determination to retire from public employment, I examined well my heart to know whether it were thoroughly cured of every principle of political ambition, whether no lurking particle remained which might leave me uneasy, when reduced within the limits of mere private[pg 70]life. I became satisfied that every fibre of that passion was thoroughly eradicated.”Jefferson was an impulsive man,—in some respects a creature of the moment; certainly often, in his own case, mistaking, as a permanent feeling, what was really a transitory impression. His language to Monroe must, therefore, be taken as the sincere deliverance of a man who, at that time, had not the remotest expectation of receiving, or the least ambition to attain, the highest offices in the gift of the American people.[pg 71]VIIENVOY AT PARISTwo years after his wife’s death, namely, in 1784, Jefferson was chosen by Congress to serve as envoy at Paris, with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. The appointment came at an opportune moment, when his mind was beginning to recover its tone, and he gladly accepted it. It was deemed necessary that the new Confederacy should make treaties with the various governments of Europe, and as soon as the envoys reached Paris, they drew up a treaty such as they hoped might be negotiated. It has been described as“the first serious attempt ever made to conduct the intercourse of nations on Christian principles;”and, on that account, it failed. To this failure there was, however, one exception.“Old Frederick of Prussia,”as Jefferson styled him,“met us[pg 72]cordially;”and with him a treaty was soon concluded.In May, 1785, Franklin returned to the United States, and Jefferson was appointed minister.“You replace Dr. Franklin,”said the Count of Vergennes when Jefferson announced his appointment.“I succeed,—no one can replace him,”was the reply.Jefferson’s residence in Paris at this critical period was a fortunate occurrence. It would be a mistake to suppose that he derived his political principles from France:—he carried them there; but he was confirmed in them by witnessing the injustice and misery which resulted to the common people from the monarchical governments of Europe. To James Monroe he wrote in June, 1785:“The pleasure of the trip [to Europe] will be less than you expect, but the utility greater. It will make you adore your own country,—its soil, its climate, its equality, laws, people, and manners. My God! how little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of and which no other people on earth[pg 73]enjoy! I confess I had no idea of it myself.”To George Wythe he wrote in August, 1786:“Preach, my dear sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils; and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests, and nobles, who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”To Madison, he wrote in January, 1787:“This is agovernmentof wolves over sheep.”Jefferson took the greatest pains to ascertain the condition of the laboring classes. In the course of a journey in the south of France, he wrote to Lafayette, begging him to survey the condition of the people for himself.“To do it most effectually,”he said,“you must be absolutely incognito; you must ferret the people out of their hovels, as I have done; look into their kettles; eat their bread; loll on their beds on pretense of resting your[pg 74]self, but in fact to find if they are soft. You will feel a sublime pleasure in the course of the investigation, and a sublimer one hereafter, when you shall be able to apply your knowledge to the softening of their beds, or the throwing a morsel of meat into their kettle of vegetables.”These excursions among the French peasantry, who, as Jefferson well knew, were ruinously taxed in order to support an extravagant court and an idle and insolent nobility, made him a fierce Republican.“There is not a crowned head in Europe,”he wrote to General Washington, in 1788,“whose talents or merits would entitle him to be elected a vestryman by the people of America.”But for the French race Jefferson had an affinity. He was glad to live with people among whom, as he said,“a man might pass a life without encountering a single rudeness.”He liked their polished manners and gay disposition, their aptitude for science, for philosophy, and for art; even their wines and cookery suited his taste, and his preference in this respect was so well known that[pg 75]Patrick Henry once humorously stigmatized him as“a man who had abjured his native victuals.”Jefferson’s stay in Paris corresponded exactly with the“glorious”period of the French Revolution. He was present at the Assembly of the Notables in 1787, and he witnessed the destruction of the Bastille in 1789.“The change in this country,”he wrote in March, 1789,“is such as you can form no idea of. The frivolities of conversation have given way entirely to politics. Men, women, and children talk nothing else ... and mode has acted a wonderful part in the present instance. All the handsome young women, for example, are for thetiers étât, and this is an army more powerful in France than the 200,000 men of the king.”The truth is that an intellectual and moral revolution preceded in France the outbreak of the populace. There was an interior conviction that the government of the country was excessively unjust and oppressive. A love of liberty, a feeling of[pg 76]fraternity, a passion for equality moved the intellect and even the aristocracy of France. In this crisis the reformers looked toward America, for the United States had just trodden the path upon which France was entering.“Our proceedings,”wrote Jefferson to Madison in 1789,“have been viewed as a model for them on every occasion.... Our [authority] has been treated like that of the Bible, open to explanation, but not to question.”Jefferson’s advice was continually sought by Lafayette and others; and his house, maintained in the easy, liberal style of Virginia, was a meeting place for the Revolutionary statesmen. Jefferson dined at three or four o’clock; and after the cloth had been removed he and his guests sat over their wine till nine or ten in the evening.In July, 1789, the National Assembly appointed a committee to draught a constitution, and the committee formally invited the American minister to assist at their sessions and favor them with his advice. This function he felt obliged to decline, as being[pg 77]inconsistent with his post of minister to the king. No man had a nicer sense of propriety than Jefferson; and he punctiliously observed the requirements of his somewhat difficult situation in Paris.What gave Mr. Jefferson the greatest anxiety and trouble, was our relations with the piratical Barbary powers who held the keys of the Mediterranean and sometimes extended their depredations even into the Atlantic. It was a question of paying tribute or going to war; and most of the European powers paid tribute. In 1784, for example, the Dutch contributed to“the high, glorious, mighty, and most noble, King, Prince, and Emperor of Morocco,”a mass of material which included thirty cables, seventy cannon, sixty-nine masts, twenty-one anchors, fifty dozen sail-needles, twenty-four tons of pitch, two hundred and eighty loaves of sugar, twenty-four China punch-bowls, three clocks, and one“very large watch.”Jefferson ascertained that the pirates would require of the United States, as the[pg 78]price of immunity for its commerce, a tribute of about three hundred thousand dollars per annum.“Surely,”he wrote home,“our people will not give this. Would it not be better to offer them an equal treaty? If they refuse, why not go to war with them?”And he pressed upon Mr. Jay, who held the secretaryship of foreign affairs, as the office was then called, the immediate establishment of a navy. But Congress would do nothing; and it was not till Jefferson himself became President that the Barbary pirates were dealt with in a wholesome and stringent manner. During the whole term of his residence at Paris he was negotiating with the Mediterranean powers for the release of unfortunate Americans, many of whom spent the best part of their lives in horrible captivity.Mr. Jefferson’s self-imposed duties were no less arduous. He kept four colleges informed of the most valuable new inventions, discoveries, and books. He had a Yankee talent for mechanical improvements, and he was always on the alert to obtain anything of this nature which he thought might be[pg 79]useful at home. Jefferson himself, by the way, invented the revolving armchair, the buggy-top, and a mould board for a plough. He bought books for Franklin, Madison, Monroe, Wythe, and himself. He informed one correspondent about Watt’s engine, another about the new system of canals. He smuggled rice from Turin in his coat pockets; and he was continually dispatching to agricultural societies in America seeds, roots, nuts, and plants. Houdin was sent over by him to make the statue of Washington; and he forwarded designs for the new capitol at Richmond. For Buffon he procured the skin of an American panther, and also the bones and hide of a New Hampshire moose, to obtain which Governor Sullivan of that State organized a hunting-party in the depth of winter and cut a road through the forest for twenty miles in order to bring out his quarry.Jefferson was the most indefatigable of men, and he did not relax in Paris. He had rooms at a Carthusian monastery to which he repaired when he had some special[pg 80]work on hand. He kept a carriage and horses, but could not afford a saddle horse. Instead of riding, he took a walk every afternoon, usually of six or seven miles, occasionally twice as long. It was while returning with a friend from one of these excursions that he fell and fractured his right wrist; and the fracture was set so imperfectly that it troubled him ever afterward. It was characteristic of Jefferson that he said nothing to his friend as to the injury until they reached home, though his suffering from it was great; and, also, that he at once began to write with the other hand, making numerous entries, on the very night of the accident, in a writing which, though stiff, was, and remains, perfectly clear.Mr. Jefferson’s two daughters had been placed at a convent school near Paris, and he was surprised one day to receive a note from Martha, the elder, asking his permission to remain in the convent for the rest of her life as a nun. For a day or two she received no answer. Then her father called[pg 81]in his carriage, and after a short interview with the abbess took his daughters away; and thenceforth Martha presided, so far as her age permitted, over her father’s household. Not a word upon the subject of her request ever passed between them; and long afterward, in telling the story to her own children, she praised Mr. Jefferson’s tact in dealing with what she described as a transient impulse.After this incident, Jefferson, thinking that it was time to take his daughters home, obtained leave of absence for six months; and the little family landed at Norfolk, November 18, 1789. They journeyed slowly homeward, stopping at one friend’s house after another, and, two days before Christmas, arrived at Monticello, where they were rapturously greeted by the slaves, who took the four horses from the carriage and drew it up the steep incline themselves; and when he alighted, Mr. Jefferson, in spite of himself, was carried into the house on the arms of his black servants and friends.[pg 82]VIIISECRETARY OF STATEMr. Jefferson had a strong desire to resume his post as minister to France, but he yielded to Washington’s earnest request that he should become Secretary of State in the new government. He lingered long enough at Monticello to witness the marriage of his daughter Martha to Thomas Mann Randolph, and then set out upon a cold, wet journey of twenty-one days, reaching New York, which was then the seat of government, late in March, 1790. He hired a small house at No. 57 Maiden Lane, and immediately attacked the arrears of work which had been accumulating for six months. The unusual confinement, aggravated, perhaps, by a homesickness, clearly revealed in his letters, for his daughters and for Monticello, brought on what seems to have been a[pg 83]neuralgic headache which lasted for three weeks. It may have been caused in part by the climate of New York, as to which Mr. Jefferson observed:“Spring and fall they never have, so far as I can learn. They have ten months of winter, two of summer, with some winter days interspersed.”But there were other causes beside homesickness and headache which made Jefferson unhappy in his new position. Long afterward he described them as follows:—“I had left France in the first year of her Revolution, in the fervor of natural rights and zeal for reformation. My conscientious devotion to those rights could not be heightened, but it had been aroused and excited by daily exercise. The President received me cordially, and my colleagues and the circle of principal citizens apparently with welcome. The courtesies of dinners given to me, as a stranger newly arrived among them, placed me at once in their familiar society. But I cannot describe the wonder and mortification with which the table conversations filled me. Politics were[pg 84]the chief topic, and a preference of kingly over republican government was evidently the favorite sentiment. An apostate I could not be, nor yet a hypocrite; and I found myself for the most part the only advocate on the republican side of the question, unless among the guests there chanced to be some member of that party from the legislative houses.”It must be remembered that Jefferson’s absence in France had been the period of the Confederacy, when the inability of Congress to enforce its laws and to control the States was so evident and so disastrous that the need of a stronger central government had been impressed on men’s minds. The new Constitution had been devised to supply that need, but it was elastic in its terms, and it avoided all details. Should it be construed in an aristocratic or in a democratic spirit, and should the new nation be given an aristocratic or a democratic twist? This was a burning question, and it gave rise to that long struggle led by Hamilton on one side and by Jefferson on the other, which ended[pg 85]with the election of Jefferson as President in the year 1800.Hamilton and his party utterly disbelieved in government by the people.2John Adams declared that the English Constitution, barring its element of corruption, was an ideal constitution. Hamilton went farther and asserted that the English form of government, corruption and all, was the best practicable form. An aristocratic senate, chosen for a long term, if not for life, was thought to be essential even by Mr. Adams. Hamilton’s notion was that mankind were incapable of self-government, and must be governed in one or two ways,—by force or by fraud. Property was, in his view, the ideal basis of government; and he was inclined to fix the possession of“a thousand Spanish dollars”as the proper qualification for a voter.The difference between the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian view arises chiefly from[pg 86]a different belief as to the connection between education and morality. All aristocratic systems must, in the last analysis, be founded either upon brute force or else upon the assumption that education and morality go hand-in-hand, and that the well-to-do and best educated class is morally superior to the less educated. Jefferson rejected this assumption, and all real believers in democracy must take their stand with him. He once stated his creed upon this point in a letter as follows:—“The moral sense or conscience is as much a part of man as his leg or arm.... It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree to the guidance of reason, but it is a small stock which is required for this, even a less one than what we call common sense. State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.”This is sound philosophy. The great prob[pg 87]lems in government, whether they relate to matters external or internal, are moral, not intellectual. There are, indeed, purely intellectual problems, such as the question between free silver and a gold standard; and as to these problems, the people may go wrong. But they are not vital. No nation ever yet achieved glory or incurred destruction by taking one course rather than another in a matter of trade or finance. The crucial questions are moral questions, and experience has shown that as to such matters the people can be trusted. As Jefferson himself said,“The will of the majority, the natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man. Perhaps even this may sometimes err; but its errors are honest, solitary, and short-lived.”Washington’s cabinet was made up on the theory that it should represent not the party in power, but both parties,—for two parties already existed, the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, who, under Jefferson’s influence, soon became known by the better name of Republicans. The cabinet consisted of four[pg 88]members, Jefferson, Secretary of State, Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Knox, Secretary of War, and Edmund Randolph, Attorney-General.Knox sided almost always with Hamilton, and Randolph was an inconstant supporter of Jefferson. Though an able and learned man, he was given to hair-splitting and hesitation, and, in allusion to his habit of arguing on one side, but finally voting upon the other, Jefferson once remarked that he usually gave the shell to his friends, and reserved the oyster for his opponents.The political opinions of Jefferson and Hamilton were so diametrically opposed that the cabinet was soon torn by dissension. Hamilton was for a strong government, for surrounding the President with pomp and etiquette, for a central authority as against the authority of the States. In pursuance of these ideas, he brought forward his famous measures for assumption of the state debts by the national government, for the funding of the national debt, and finally for the creation of a national bank. Jefferson opposed[pg 89]these measures, and, although the assumption and the funding laws had grave faults, and led to speculation, and in the case of many persons to financial ruin, yet it must be admitted that Jefferson never appreciated their merits.The truth is that both Hamilton and Jefferson were essential to the development of this country; and the principles of each have been adopted in part, and rejected in part. Hamilton’s conception of a central government predominating over the state governments has been realized, though not nearly to the extent to which he would have carried it. On the other hand, his various schemes for making the government into an aristocracy instead of a democracy have all been abandoned, or, like the Electoral College, turned to a use the opposite of what he intended. So, Jefferson’s view of state rights has not strictly been maintained; but his fundamental principles of popular government and popular education have made the United States what it is, and are destined, we hope, when fully developed, to make it something better yet.[pg 90]No less an authority than that of Washington, who appreciated the merits of both men, could have kept the peace between them. Hamilton under an assumed name attacked Jefferson in the public prints. Jefferson never published a line unsigned; but he permitted Philip Freneau, who had slight employment as a translator in his department, and the trifling salary of $250 a year, to wage war against Hamilton in the gazette which Freneau published; and he even stood by while Freneau attacked Washington. Washington indeed once gave Jefferson a hint on this subject, which the latter refused to take.“He was evidently sore and warm,”wrote Jefferson,“and I took his intention to be that I should interfere in some way with Freneau, perhaps withdraw his appointment of translating clerk to my office. But I will not do it. His paper has saved our constitution, which was galloping fast into monarchy.... And the President has not, ... with his usual good sense andsang froid, ... seen that, though some bad things had passed through it to the public, yet the good have predominated immensely.”[pg 91]In the spring of 1792, Jefferson, who had now been two years in office, was extremely anxious to retire, not only because his situation at Washington was unpleasant, but because his affairs at home had been so neglected during his long absences that he was in danger of bankruptcy. His estate was large, but it was incumbered by a debt to English creditors of $13,000. Some years before he had sold for cash a farm near Monticello in order to discharge this debt; but at that time the Revolutionary war had begun, and the Virginia legislature passed an act inviting all men owing money to English creditors to deposit the same in the state treasury, the State agreeing to pay it over to the English creditors after the war. Jefferson accordingly deposited the $13,000 in gold which he had just received. Later, however, this law was rescinded, and the money received under it was paid back, not in gold, but in paper money of the State, which was then so depreciated as to be almost worthless. In riding by the farm thus disposed of, Jefferson in after years would sometimes[pg 92]point to it and say:“That farm I once sold for an overcoat;”—the price of the overcoat having been the $13,000 in paper money. Cornwallis, as we have seen, destroyed Jefferson’s property to an amount more than double this debt, which might be considered as a second payment of it; but Jefferson finally paid it the third time,—and this time into the hands of the actual creditor. Meanwhile, he wrote:“The torment of mind I endure till the moment shall arrive when I shall not owe a shilling on earth is such really as to render life of little value.”Urged by all these motives, Jefferson had resolved to resign his office in 1792, notwithstanding the remonstrances of Washington; but the attacks made upon him by the Federalists, especially those made in the newspapers, were so violent that a retirement at that time would have given the public cause to believe that he had been driven from office by his enemies. Jefferson, therefore, concluded to remain Secretary of State a few months longer; and those few, as it happened, were the most important of the whole term.[pg 93]On January 21, 1793, King Louis of France was executed, and within a week thereafter England was at war with the new rulers of the French. Difficult questions at once arose under our treaties with France. The French people thought that we were in honor bound to assist them in their struggle against Great Britain, as they had assisted us; and they sent over as minister“Citizen”Genet, in the frigate L’Embuscade. The frigate, carrying forty guns and three hundred men, sailed into the harbor of Charleston, April 8,1793, with a liberty-cap for her figure-head, and a British prize in her wake. Citizen Genet, even for a Frenchman, was a most indiscreet and hot-headed person, and before he had been a week on shore he had issued commissions to privateers manned by American citizens. L’Embuscade then proceeded to Philadelphia, where, as in Charleston, Citizen Genet was welcomed with the utmost enthusiasm. His coming was hailed by the Republicans generally with rapture; and their cry was for war.“I wish,”wrote Jefferson, in a con[pg 94]fidential letter to Monroe,“that we may be able to repress the people within the limits of a fair neutrality.”This was the position taken also by Washington and the whole cabinet; and it is a striking example of Jefferson’s wisdom, justice, and firmness, that, although the bulk of the Republicans were carried off their feet by sympathy with France and with Genet, he, the very person in the United States who most loved the French and best understood the causes and motives of the French Revolution, withstood the storm, and kept his eye fixed upon the interests of his own country. England, contrary to the treaty which closed the Revolutionary War, still retained her military posts in the west; and she was the undisputed mistress of the sea. War with her would therefore have been suicidal for the United States. The time for that had not yet come. Moreover, if the United States had taken sides with France, a war with Spain also would inevitably have followed; and Spain then held Florida and the mouth of the Mississippi.[pg 95]Nevertheless, there were different ways of preserving neutrality: there were the offensive way and the friendly way. Hamilton, whose extreme bias toward England made him bitter against France, was always for the one; Jefferson for the other. A single example will suffice as an illustration. M. Genet asked as a favor that the United States should advance an installment of its debt to France. Hamilton advised that the request be refused without a word of explanation. Jefferson’s opinion was that the request should be granted, if that were lawful, and if it were found to be unlawful, them that the refusal should be explained. Mr. Jefferson’s advice was followed.Mr. Jefferson, also, though he firmly withstood the many illegal and unwarrantable acts attempted by Genet, did so in such a manner as not to lose the friendship of the minister or even a degree of control over him. To Madison Jefferson wrote of Genet:“He renders my position immensely difficult. He does me justice personally; and giving him time to vent himself and become more[pg 96]cool, I am on a footing to advise him freely, and he respects it; but he will break out again on the very first occasion.”Finally Citizen Genet, becoming desperate, fitted out one of L’Embuscade’s prizes as a frigate to be used against England, which amounted on the part of the United States to a breach of neutrality; and being hindered in sending her to sea, he threatened to appeal from the President to the people of the United States. Thereupon the question arose, what shall be done with Genet? and upon this question the cabinet divided with more than usual acrimony. Knox was for sending him out of the country without ceremony; Hamilton for publishing the whole correspondence between him and the government, with a statement of his proceedings. Jefferson was for sending an account of the affair to the French government, with copies of the correspondence, and a request for Genet’s recall. Meanwhile the whole country was thrown into a state of tumultuous excitement. There was a riot in Philadelphia; and even the[pg 97]sacred character of Washington was assailed in prose and verse.The President decided to adopt the course proposed by Jefferson; France appointed another minister, and the Genet episode ended by his marriage to a daughter of George Clinton, governor of New York, in which State he lived thereafter as a respectable citizen and a patron of agriculture. He died in the year 1834.The summer of delirium at Philadelphia culminated in the panic and desolation of the yellow fever, and every member of the government fled from the city, Jefferson being the last to depart.When, in the next year, the correspondence between Genet and Jefferson, and between the English minister and Jefferson, was published, the Secretary was seen to have conducted it on his part with so much ability, discretion, and tact, and with so true a sense of what was due to each nation concerned, that he may be said to have retired to his farm in a blaze of glory.

[pg 45]VREFORM WORK IN VIRGINIAIn September, 1776, Jefferson, having resigned his seat in Congress to engage in duties nearer home, returned to Monticello. A few weeks later, a messenger from Congress arrived to inform him that he had been elected a joint commissioner with Dr. Franklin and Silas Deane to represent at Paris the newly formed nation. His heart had long been set upon foreign travel; but he felt obliged to decline this appointment, first on account of the ill health of his wife, and secondly, because he was needed in Virginia as a legislator. Not since Lycurgus gave laws to the Spartans had there been such an opportunity as then existed in the United States. John Adams declared:“The best lawgivers of antiquity would rejoice to live at a period like this when, for the first time in the history of the world,[pg 46]three millions of people are deliberatelychoosingtheir government and institutions.”Of all the colonies, Virginia offered the best field for reform, because, as we have already seen, she had by far the most aristocratic political and social system; and it is extraordinary how quickly the reform was effected by Jefferson and his friends. In ordinary times of peace the task would have been impossible; but in throwing off the English yoke, the colonists had opened their minds to new ideas; change had become familiar to them, and in the general upheaval the rights of the people were recognized. A year later, Jefferson wrote to Franklin:“With respect to the State of Virginia, in particular, the people seem to have laid aside the monarchical and taken up the republican government with as much ease as would have attended their throwing off an old and putting on a new set of clothes.”Jefferson’s greatness lay in this, that he was the first statesman who trusted the mass of the people. He alone had divined the fact that they were competent, morally and[pg 47]mentally, for self-government. It is almost impossible for us to appreciate Jefferson’s originality in this respect, because the bold and untried theories for which he contended are now regarded as commonplace maxims. He may have derived his political ideas in part from the French philosophical writers of the eighteenth century, although there is no evidence to that effect; but he was certainly the first statesman to grasp the idea of democracy as a form of government, just as, at a later day, Walt Whitman was the first poet to grasp the idea of equality as a social system. Hamilton, John Adams, Pinckney, Gouverneur Morris, even Washington himself, all believed that popular government would be unsafe and revolutionary unless held in check by a strong executive and by an aristocratic senate.Jefferson in his lifetime was often charged with gross inconsistency in his political views and conduct; but the inconsistency was more apparent than real. At times he strictly construed, and at times he almost set aside the Constitution; but the clue to[pg 48]his conduct can usually be found in the fundamental principle that the only proper function of government or constitutions is to express the will of the people, and that the people are morally and mentally competent to govern.“I am sure,”he wrote in 1796,“that the mass of citizens in these United States mean well, and I firmly believe that they will always act well, whenever they can obtain a right understanding of matters.”And Jefferson’s lifelong endeavor was to enable the people to form this“right understanding”by educating them. His ideas of the scope of public education went far beyond those which prevailed in his time, and considerably beyond those which prevail even now. For example, a free university course for the most apt pupils graduated at the grammar schools made part of his scheme,—an idea most nearly realized in the Western States; and those States received their impetus in educational matters from the Ordinance of 1787, which was largely the product of Jefferson’s foresight.Happily for Virginia, she did not become[pg 49]a scene of war until the year 1779, and, meanwhile, Jefferson and his friends lost no time in remodeling her constitution. There were no common schools, and the mass of the people were more ignorant and rough than their contemporaries in any other colony. Elections were scenes of bribery, intimidation, and riot, surpassing even those which Hogarth depicted in England. Elkanah Watson, of Massachusetts, describes what he saw at Hanover Court House, Patrick Henry’s county, in 1778:“The whole county was assembled. The moment I alighted, a wretched, pug-nosed fellow assailed me to swap watches. I had hardly shaken him off, when I was attacked by a wild Irishman who insisted on my swapping horses with him.... With him I came near being involved in a boxing-match, the Irishman swearing, I‘did not trate him like a jintleman.’I had hardly escaped this dilemma when my attention was attracted by a fight between two very unwieldy fat men, foaming and puffing like two furies, until one succeeded in twisting[pg 50]a forefinger in a sidelock of the other’s hair, and in the act of thrusting by this purchase his thumb into the latter’s eye, he bawled out,‘King’s Cruise,’equivalent in technical language to‘Enough.’”Quakers were put in the pillory, scolding women were ducked, and it is said that a woman was burned to death in Princess Anne County for witchcraft. The English church, as we have seen, was an established church; and all taxpayers, dissenters as well as churchmen, were compelled to contribute to its support. Baptist preachers were arrested, and fined as disturbers of the peace. The law of entail, both as respects land and slaves, was so strict that their descent to the eldest son could not be prevented even by agreement between the owner and his heir.In his reformation of the laws, Jefferson was supported by Patrick Henry, now governor, and inhabiting what was still called the palace; by George Mason, a patriotic lawyer who drew the famous Virginia Bill of Rights; by George Wythe, his old pre[pg 51]ceptor, and by James Madison, Jefferson’s friend, pupil, and successor, who in this year began his political career as a member of the House of Burgesses.Opposed to them were the conservative party led by R. C. Nicholas, head of the Virginia bar, a stanch churchman and gentleman of the old school, and Edward Pendleton, whom Jefferson described as“full of resource, never vanquished; for if he lost the main battle he returned upon you, and regained so much of it as to make it a drawn one, by dexterous manœuvres, skirmishes in detail, and the recovery of small advantages, which, little singly, were important all together. You never knew when you were clear of him.”Intense as the controversy was, fundamental as were the points at issue, the speakers never lost that courtesy for which the Virginians were remarkable; John Randolph being perhaps the only exception. Even Patrick Henry—though from his humble origin and impetuous oratory one might have expected otherwise—was never guilty[pg 52]of any rudeness to his opponents. What Jefferson said of Madison was true of the Virginia orators in general,—“soothing always the feelings of his adversaries by civilities and softnesses of expression.”Jefferson struck first at the system of entail. After a three weeks’ struggle, land and slaves were put upon the same footing as all other property,—they might be sold or bequeathed according to the will of the possessor. Then came a longer and more bitter contest. Jefferson was for abolishing all connection between church and state, and for establishing complete freedom of religion. Nine years elapsed before Virginia could be brought to that point; but at this session he procured a repeal of the law which imposed penalties for attendance at a dissenting meeting-house, and also of the law compelling dissenters to pay tithes. The fight was, therefore, substantially won; and in 1786, Jefferson’s“Act for establishing religion”became the law of Virginia.1[pg 53]Another far-reaching law introduced by Jefferson at this memorable session of 1776 provided for the naturalization of foreigners in Virginia, after a two years’ residence in the State, and upon a declaration of their intention to become American citizens. The bill provided also that the minor children of naturalized parents should be citizens of the United States when they came of age. The principles of this measure were afterward embodied in the statutes of the United States, and they are in force to-day.At this session Jefferson also drew an act for establishing courts of law in Virginia, the royal courts having necessarily passed out of existence when the Declaration of Independence was adopted. Moreover, he set on foot a revision of all the statutes of Virginia, a committee with him at the head being appointed for this purpose; and finally he procured the removal of the capital from Williamsburg to Richmond.[pg 54]All this was accomplished, mainly by Jefferson’s efforts; and yet the two bills upon which he set most store failed entirely. These were, first, a comprehensive measure of state education, running up through primary schools and grammar schools to a state university, and, secondly, a bill providing that all who were born in slavery after the passage of the bill should be free.This was Jefferson’s second ineffectual attempt to promote the abolition of slavery. During the year 1768, when he first became a member of the House of Burgesses, he had endeavored to procure the passage of a law enabling slave-owners to free their slaves, He induced Colonel Bland, one of the ablest, oldest, and most respected members to propose the law, and he seconded the proposal; but it was overwhelmingly rejected.“I, as a younger member,”related Jefferson afterward,“was more spared in the debate; but he was denounced as an enemy to his country, and was treated with the greatest indecorum.”In 1778 Jefferson made another attempt:[pg 55]—he brought in a bill forbidding the further importation of slaves in Virginia, and this was passed without opposition. Again, in 1784, when Virginia ceded to the United States her immense northwestern territory, Jefferson drew up a scheme of government for the States to be carved out of it which included a provision“that after the year 1800 of the Christian Era, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States, otherwise than in punishment of crimes.”The provision was rejected by Congress.In his“Notes on Virginia,”written in the year 1781, but published in 1787, he said:“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism, on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.... With the morals of the people their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate no one will labor for himself who can make another labor for him.... Indeed, I tremble for my country[pg 56]when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.... The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest.”When the Missouri Compromise question came up, in 1820, Jefferson rightly predicted that a controversy had begun which would end in disruption; but he made the mistake of supposing that the Northern party were actuated in that matter solely by political motives. April 22, 1820, he wrote:“This momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.... A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.... The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually and with due sacrifices I think it might be.[pg 57]But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”And later, he wrote of the Missouri Compromise, as a“question having just enough of the semblance of morality to throw dust into the eyes of the people.... The Federalists, unable to rise again under the old division of Whig and Tory, have invented a geographical division which gives them fourteen States against ten, and seduces their old opponents into a coalition with them. Real morality is on the other side. For while the removal of the slaves from one State to another adds no more to their numbers than their removal from one country to another, the spreading them over a larger surface adds to their happiness, and renders their future emancipation more practicable.”These misconceptions as to Northern motives might be ascribed to Jefferson’s advanced age, for, as he himself graphically expressed it, he then had“one foot in the grave, and the other lifted to follow it;”but[pg 58]it would probably be more just to say that they were due, in part, to his prejudice against the New England people and especially the New England clergy, and in part to the fact that his long retirement in Virginia had somewhat contracted his views and sympathies. Jefferson was a man of intense local attachments, and he took color from his surroundings. He never ceased, however, to regard slavery as morally wrong and socially ruinous; and in the brief autobiography which he left behind him he made these predictions:“Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.”History has justified the second as well as the first of these declarations, for, excepting that brief period of anarchy known as“the carpet-bag era,”it cannot be maintained that the colored race in the Southern States have been at any time, even since their emancipation,“equally free,”in the sense of politically free, with their white fellow citizens.[pg 59]VIGOVERNOR OF VIRGINIAFor three years Jefferson was occupied with the legislative duties already described, and especially with a revision of the Virginia statutes, and then, in June, 1779, he succeeded Patrick Henry as governor of the State. It has often been remarked that he was, all through life, a lucky man, but in this case fortune did not favor him, for the ensuing two years proved to be, so far as Virginia was concerned, by much the worst period of the war.The French alliance, though no doubt an ultimate benefit to the colonies, had at first two bad effects: it relaxed the energy of the Americans, who trusted that France would fight their battles for them; and it stimulated the British to increased exertions. The British commissioners announced that henceforth England would employ, in the prosecu[pg 60]tion of the war, all those agencies which“God and nature had placed in her hands.”This meant that the ferocity of the Indians would be invoked, a matter of special moment to Virginia, since her western frontier swarmed with Indians, the bravest of their race.The colony, it must be remembered, was then of immense extent; for beside the present Virginia and West Virginia, Kentucky and the greater part of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were embraced in it. It stretched, in short, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. Upon the seaboard Virginia was especially vulnerable, the tide-water region being penetrated by numerous bays and rivers, which the enemy’s ships could easily ascend, for they were undefended by forts or men. The total navy of the colony was four vessels, mounting sixty-two guns, and a few armed boats. The flower of the Virginia soldiery, to the number of ten thousand, were in Washington’s army, and supplies of men, of arms, of ammunition and food were urgently called for by General[pg 61]Gates, who was battling against Cornwallis in North Carolina. The militia were supposed to number fifty thousand, which included every man between sixteen and fifty years of age; but this was only one man for every square mile of territory in the present State of Virginia, and of these militiamen it was estimated that, east of the Blue Ridge, only about one in five was armed with a gun. The treasury was practically bankrupt, and there was a dearth of every kind of warlike material.Such was the situation which confronted, as Mr. Parton puts it,“a lawyer of thirty-six, with a talent for music, a taste for art, a love of science, literature, and gardening.”The task was one calling rather for a soldier than a statesman; but Mr. Jefferson faced it with courage, and on the whole with success. In retaliating the cruel measures of the British, he showed a firmness which must have been especially difficult for a man of his temperament. He put in irons and confined in a dungeon Colonel Henry Hamilton and two subordinate officers who had com[pg 62]mitted atrocities upon American prisoners. He caused a prison-ship, like the ships of infamous memory which were employed as prisons by the British at New York, to be prepared; and the exchange of captives between Virginia and the British was stopped.“Humane conduct on our part,”wrote Jefferson,“was found to produce no effect. The contrary, therefore, is to be tried. Iron will be retaliated by iron, prison-ships for prison-ships, and like for like in general.”But in November, 1779, notice was received that the English, under their new leader, Sir Henry Clinton, had adopted a less barbarous system of warfare; and fortunately Jefferson’s measures of reprisal became unnecessary.Hampered as he was by want of men and money, Jefferson did all that he could to supply the needs of the Virginia soldiers with Washington, of the army in North Carolina, led by Gates, and of George Rogers Clarke, the heroic commander who put down the Indian uprising on the western frontier, and captured the English officer who instigated[pg 63]it,—that same Colonel Hamilton of whom mention has already been made. The story of Clarke’s adventures in the wilderness,—he was a neighbor of Jefferson, only twenty-six years old,—of his forced marches, of his masterful dealing with the Indians, and finally of his capture of the British force, forms a thrilling chapter in the history of the American Revolution.Many indeed of Jefferson’s constituents censured him as being over-zealous in his support of the army of Gates. He stripped Virginia, they said, of troops and resources which, as it proved afterward, were needed at home. But if Cornwallis were not defeated in North Carolina, it was certain that he would overrun the much more exposed Virginia. If he could be defeated anywhere, it would be in the Carolinas. Jefferson’s course, it is sufficient to say, was that recommended by Washington; and his exertions in behalf of the Continental armies were commended in the highest terms not only by Washington, but also by Generals Gates, Greene, Steuben, and Lafayette. The mili[pg 64]tia were called out, leaving behind only so many men as were required to cultivate the land, wagons were impressed, including two belonging to the governor, and attempts were even made—extraordinary for Virginia—to manufacture certain much-needed articles.“Our smiths,”wrote Jefferson,“are making five hundred axes and some tomahawks for General Gates.”Thus fared the year 1779, and in 1780 things went from bad to worse. In April came a letter from Madison, saying that Washington’s army was on the verge of dissolution, being only half-clothed, and in a way to be starved. The public treasury was empty and the public credit gone. In August occurred the disastrous defeat of General Gates at Camden, which left Virginia at the mercy of Cornwallis. In October a British fleet under Leslie ravaged the country about Portsmouth, but failing to effect a juncture with Cornwallis, who was detained in North Carolina by illness among his troops, did no further harm. Two months later, however, Benedict Arnold sailed up the James River[pg 65]with another fleet, and, after committing some depredations at Richmond, sailed down again, escaping by the aid of a favorable wind, which hauled from east to west just in the nick of time for him.In June, 1781, Cornwallis invaded Virginia, and no one suffered more than Jefferson from his depredations. Tarleton was dispatched to seize the governor at Monticello; but the latter was forewarned by a citizen ofCharlottesville, who, being in a tavern at Louisa when Tarleton and his troop swept by on the main road, immediately guessed their destination, and mounting his horse, a fleet Virginia thoroughbred, rode by a short cut through the woods straight to Monticello, arriving there about three hours ahead of Tarleton.Jefferson took the matter coolly. He first dispatched his family to a place of safety, sent his best horse to be shod at a neighboring smithy, and then proceeded to sort and separate his papers. He left the house only about five minutes before the soldiers entered it.[pg 66]Two slaves, Martin, Mr. Jefferson’s body servant, and Cæsar, were engaged in hiding plate and other articles under the floor of the portico, a single plank having been raised for that purpose. As Martin, above, handed the last article to Cæsar under the floor, the tramp of the approaching cavalry was heard. Down went the plank, shutting in Cæsar, and there he remained, without making any outcry, for eighteen hours, in darkness, and of course without food or water. One of the soldiers, to try Martin’s nerve, clapped a pistol to his breast, and threatened to fire unless he would tell which way his master had fled.“Fire away, then,”retorted the black, fiercely answering glance for glance, and not receding a hair’s breath.Tarleton and his men scrupulously refrained from injuring Jefferson’s property. Cornwallis, on the other hand, who encamped on Jefferson’s estate of Elk Hill, lying opposite Elk Island in the James River, destroyed the growing crops, burned all the barns and fences, carried off—“as was to be expected,”[pg 67]said Mr. Jefferson—the cattle and horses, and committed the barbarity of killing the colts that were too young to be of service. He carried off, also, about thirty slaves.“Had this been to give them freedom,”wrote Jefferson,“he would have done right; but it was to consign them to inevitable death from the smallpox and putrid fever, then raging in his camp.”“Some of the miserable wretches crawled home to die,”Mr. Randall relates,“and giving information where others lay perishing in hovels or in the open air, by the wayside, these were sent for by their generous master; and the last moments of all of them were made as comfortable as could be done by proper nursing and medical attendance.”These dreadful scenes, added to the agitation of having twice been obliged, at a moment’s notice, to flee from the enemy, to say nothing of the anxieties which she must have endured on her husband’s account, were too much for Mrs. Jefferson’s already enfeebled constitution. She died on September 6, 1782.[pg 68]Six slave women who were household servants enjoyed for thirty years a kind of humble distinction at Monticello as“the servants who were in the room when Mrs. Jefferson died;”and the fact that they were there attests the affectionate relations which must have existed between them and their master and mistress.“They have often told my wife,”relates Mr. Bacon,“that when Mrs. Jefferson died they stood around the bed. Mr. Jefferson sat by her, and she gave him directions about a good many things that she wanted done. When she came to the children, she wept, and could not speak for some time. Finally she held up her hand, and, spreading out her four fingers, she told him she could not die happy if she thought her four children were ever to have a stepmother brought in over them. Holding her other hand in his, Mr. Jefferson promised her solemnly that he would never marry again;”and the promise was kept.After his wife’s death Jefferson sank into what he afterward described as“a stupor of[pg 69]mind;”and even before that he had been, for the first and last time in his life, in a somewhat morbid mental condition. He was an excessively sensitive man, and reflections upon his conduct as governor, during the raids into Virginia by Arnold and Cornwallis, coming at a time when he was overwrought, rankled in his mind. He refused to serve again as governor, and desiring to defend his course when in that office, became a member of the House of Burgesses in 1781, in order that he might answer his critics there; but not a voice was raised against him. In 1782, he was again elected to the House, but he did not attend; and both Madison and Monroe endeavored in vain to draw him from his seclusion. To Monroe he replied:“Before I ventured to declare to my countrymen my determination to retire from public employment, I examined well my heart to know whether it were thoroughly cured of every principle of political ambition, whether no lurking particle remained which might leave me uneasy, when reduced within the limits of mere private[pg 70]life. I became satisfied that every fibre of that passion was thoroughly eradicated.”Jefferson was an impulsive man,—in some respects a creature of the moment; certainly often, in his own case, mistaking, as a permanent feeling, what was really a transitory impression. His language to Monroe must, therefore, be taken as the sincere deliverance of a man who, at that time, had not the remotest expectation of receiving, or the least ambition to attain, the highest offices in the gift of the American people.[pg 71]VIIENVOY AT PARISTwo years after his wife’s death, namely, in 1784, Jefferson was chosen by Congress to serve as envoy at Paris, with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. The appointment came at an opportune moment, when his mind was beginning to recover its tone, and he gladly accepted it. It was deemed necessary that the new Confederacy should make treaties with the various governments of Europe, and as soon as the envoys reached Paris, they drew up a treaty such as they hoped might be negotiated. It has been described as“the first serious attempt ever made to conduct the intercourse of nations on Christian principles;”and, on that account, it failed. To this failure there was, however, one exception.“Old Frederick of Prussia,”as Jefferson styled him,“met us[pg 72]cordially;”and with him a treaty was soon concluded.In May, 1785, Franklin returned to the United States, and Jefferson was appointed minister.“You replace Dr. Franklin,”said the Count of Vergennes when Jefferson announced his appointment.“I succeed,—no one can replace him,”was the reply.Jefferson’s residence in Paris at this critical period was a fortunate occurrence. It would be a mistake to suppose that he derived his political principles from France:—he carried them there; but he was confirmed in them by witnessing the injustice and misery which resulted to the common people from the monarchical governments of Europe. To James Monroe he wrote in June, 1785:“The pleasure of the trip [to Europe] will be less than you expect, but the utility greater. It will make you adore your own country,—its soil, its climate, its equality, laws, people, and manners. My God! how little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of and which no other people on earth[pg 73]enjoy! I confess I had no idea of it myself.”To George Wythe he wrote in August, 1786:“Preach, my dear sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils; and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests, and nobles, who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”To Madison, he wrote in January, 1787:“This is agovernmentof wolves over sheep.”Jefferson took the greatest pains to ascertain the condition of the laboring classes. In the course of a journey in the south of France, he wrote to Lafayette, begging him to survey the condition of the people for himself.“To do it most effectually,”he said,“you must be absolutely incognito; you must ferret the people out of their hovels, as I have done; look into their kettles; eat their bread; loll on their beds on pretense of resting your[pg 74]self, but in fact to find if they are soft. You will feel a sublime pleasure in the course of the investigation, and a sublimer one hereafter, when you shall be able to apply your knowledge to the softening of their beds, or the throwing a morsel of meat into their kettle of vegetables.”These excursions among the French peasantry, who, as Jefferson well knew, were ruinously taxed in order to support an extravagant court and an idle and insolent nobility, made him a fierce Republican.“There is not a crowned head in Europe,”he wrote to General Washington, in 1788,“whose talents or merits would entitle him to be elected a vestryman by the people of America.”But for the French race Jefferson had an affinity. He was glad to live with people among whom, as he said,“a man might pass a life without encountering a single rudeness.”He liked their polished manners and gay disposition, their aptitude for science, for philosophy, and for art; even their wines and cookery suited his taste, and his preference in this respect was so well known that[pg 75]Patrick Henry once humorously stigmatized him as“a man who had abjured his native victuals.”Jefferson’s stay in Paris corresponded exactly with the“glorious”period of the French Revolution. He was present at the Assembly of the Notables in 1787, and he witnessed the destruction of the Bastille in 1789.“The change in this country,”he wrote in March, 1789,“is such as you can form no idea of. The frivolities of conversation have given way entirely to politics. Men, women, and children talk nothing else ... and mode has acted a wonderful part in the present instance. All the handsome young women, for example, are for thetiers étât, and this is an army more powerful in France than the 200,000 men of the king.”The truth is that an intellectual and moral revolution preceded in France the outbreak of the populace. There was an interior conviction that the government of the country was excessively unjust and oppressive. A love of liberty, a feeling of[pg 76]fraternity, a passion for equality moved the intellect and even the aristocracy of France. In this crisis the reformers looked toward America, for the United States had just trodden the path upon which France was entering.“Our proceedings,”wrote Jefferson to Madison in 1789,“have been viewed as a model for them on every occasion.... Our [authority] has been treated like that of the Bible, open to explanation, but not to question.”Jefferson’s advice was continually sought by Lafayette and others; and his house, maintained in the easy, liberal style of Virginia, was a meeting place for the Revolutionary statesmen. Jefferson dined at three or four o’clock; and after the cloth had been removed he and his guests sat over their wine till nine or ten in the evening.In July, 1789, the National Assembly appointed a committee to draught a constitution, and the committee formally invited the American minister to assist at their sessions and favor them with his advice. This function he felt obliged to decline, as being[pg 77]inconsistent with his post of minister to the king. No man had a nicer sense of propriety than Jefferson; and he punctiliously observed the requirements of his somewhat difficult situation in Paris.What gave Mr. Jefferson the greatest anxiety and trouble, was our relations with the piratical Barbary powers who held the keys of the Mediterranean and sometimes extended their depredations even into the Atlantic. It was a question of paying tribute or going to war; and most of the European powers paid tribute. In 1784, for example, the Dutch contributed to“the high, glorious, mighty, and most noble, King, Prince, and Emperor of Morocco,”a mass of material which included thirty cables, seventy cannon, sixty-nine masts, twenty-one anchors, fifty dozen sail-needles, twenty-four tons of pitch, two hundred and eighty loaves of sugar, twenty-four China punch-bowls, three clocks, and one“very large watch.”Jefferson ascertained that the pirates would require of the United States, as the[pg 78]price of immunity for its commerce, a tribute of about three hundred thousand dollars per annum.“Surely,”he wrote home,“our people will not give this. Would it not be better to offer them an equal treaty? If they refuse, why not go to war with them?”And he pressed upon Mr. Jay, who held the secretaryship of foreign affairs, as the office was then called, the immediate establishment of a navy. But Congress would do nothing; and it was not till Jefferson himself became President that the Barbary pirates were dealt with in a wholesome and stringent manner. During the whole term of his residence at Paris he was negotiating with the Mediterranean powers for the release of unfortunate Americans, many of whom spent the best part of their lives in horrible captivity.Mr. Jefferson’s self-imposed duties were no less arduous. He kept four colleges informed of the most valuable new inventions, discoveries, and books. He had a Yankee talent for mechanical improvements, and he was always on the alert to obtain anything of this nature which he thought might be[pg 79]useful at home. Jefferson himself, by the way, invented the revolving armchair, the buggy-top, and a mould board for a plough. He bought books for Franklin, Madison, Monroe, Wythe, and himself. He informed one correspondent about Watt’s engine, another about the new system of canals. He smuggled rice from Turin in his coat pockets; and he was continually dispatching to agricultural societies in America seeds, roots, nuts, and plants. Houdin was sent over by him to make the statue of Washington; and he forwarded designs for the new capitol at Richmond. For Buffon he procured the skin of an American panther, and also the bones and hide of a New Hampshire moose, to obtain which Governor Sullivan of that State organized a hunting-party in the depth of winter and cut a road through the forest for twenty miles in order to bring out his quarry.Jefferson was the most indefatigable of men, and he did not relax in Paris. He had rooms at a Carthusian monastery to which he repaired when he had some special[pg 80]work on hand. He kept a carriage and horses, but could not afford a saddle horse. Instead of riding, he took a walk every afternoon, usually of six or seven miles, occasionally twice as long. It was while returning with a friend from one of these excursions that he fell and fractured his right wrist; and the fracture was set so imperfectly that it troubled him ever afterward. It was characteristic of Jefferson that he said nothing to his friend as to the injury until they reached home, though his suffering from it was great; and, also, that he at once began to write with the other hand, making numerous entries, on the very night of the accident, in a writing which, though stiff, was, and remains, perfectly clear.Mr. Jefferson’s two daughters had been placed at a convent school near Paris, and he was surprised one day to receive a note from Martha, the elder, asking his permission to remain in the convent for the rest of her life as a nun. For a day or two she received no answer. Then her father called[pg 81]in his carriage, and after a short interview with the abbess took his daughters away; and thenceforth Martha presided, so far as her age permitted, over her father’s household. Not a word upon the subject of her request ever passed between them; and long afterward, in telling the story to her own children, she praised Mr. Jefferson’s tact in dealing with what she described as a transient impulse.After this incident, Jefferson, thinking that it was time to take his daughters home, obtained leave of absence for six months; and the little family landed at Norfolk, November 18, 1789. They journeyed slowly homeward, stopping at one friend’s house after another, and, two days before Christmas, arrived at Monticello, where they were rapturously greeted by the slaves, who took the four horses from the carriage and drew it up the steep incline themselves; and when he alighted, Mr. Jefferson, in spite of himself, was carried into the house on the arms of his black servants and friends.[pg 82]VIIISECRETARY OF STATEMr. Jefferson had a strong desire to resume his post as minister to France, but he yielded to Washington’s earnest request that he should become Secretary of State in the new government. He lingered long enough at Monticello to witness the marriage of his daughter Martha to Thomas Mann Randolph, and then set out upon a cold, wet journey of twenty-one days, reaching New York, which was then the seat of government, late in March, 1790. He hired a small house at No. 57 Maiden Lane, and immediately attacked the arrears of work which had been accumulating for six months. The unusual confinement, aggravated, perhaps, by a homesickness, clearly revealed in his letters, for his daughters and for Monticello, brought on what seems to have been a[pg 83]neuralgic headache which lasted for three weeks. It may have been caused in part by the climate of New York, as to which Mr. Jefferson observed:“Spring and fall they never have, so far as I can learn. They have ten months of winter, two of summer, with some winter days interspersed.”But there were other causes beside homesickness and headache which made Jefferson unhappy in his new position. Long afterward he described them as follows:—“I had left France in the first year of her Revolution, in the fervor of natural rights and zeal for reformation. My conscientious devotion to those rights could not be heightened, but it had been aroused and excited by daily exercise. The President received me cordially, and my colleagues and the circle of principal citizens apparently with welcome. The courtesies of dinners given to me, as a stranger newly arrived among them, placed me at once in their familiar society. But I cannot describe the wonder and mortification with which the table conversations filled me. Politics were[pg 84]the chief topic, and a preference of kingly over republican government was evidently the favorite sentiment. An apostate I could not be, nor yet a hypocrite; and I found myself for the most part the only advocate on the republican side of the question, unless among the guests there chanced to be some member of that party from the legislative houses.”It must be remembered that Jefferson’s absence in France had been the period of the Confederacy, when the inability of Congress to enforce its laws and to control the States was so evident and so disastrous that the need of a stronger central government had been impressed on men’s minds. The new Constitution had been devised to supply that need, but it was elastic in its terms, and it avoided all details. Should it be construed in an aristocratic or in a democratic spirit, and should the new nation be given an aristocratic or a democratic twist? This was a burning question, and it gave rise to that long struggle led by Hamilton on one side and by Jefferson on the other, which ended[pg 85]with the election of Jefferson as President in the year 1800.Hamilton and his party utterly disbelieved in government by the people.2John Adams declared that the English Constitution, barring its element of corruption, was an ideal constitution. Hamilton went farther and asserted that the English form of government, corruption and all, was the best practicable form. An aristocratic senate, chosen for a long term, if not for life, was thought to be essential even by Mr. Adams. Hamilton’s notion was that mankind were incapable of self-government, and must be governed in one or two ways,—by force or by fraud. Property was, in his view, the ideal basis of government; and he was inclined to fix the possession of“a thousand Spanish dollars”as the proper qualification for a voter.The difference between the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian view arises chiefly from[pg 86]a different belief as to the connection between education and morality. All aristocratic systems must, in the last analysis, be founded either upon brute force or else upon the assumption that education and morality go hand-in-hand, and that the well-to-do and best educated class is morally superior to the less educated. Jefferson rejected this assumption, and all real believers in democracy must take their stand with him. He once stated his creed upon this point in a letter as follows:—“The moral sense or conscience is as much a part of man as his leg or arm.... It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree to the guidance of reason, but it is a small stock which is required for this, even a less one than what we call common sense. State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.”This is sound philosophy. The great prob[pg 87]lems in government, whether they relate to matters external or internal, are moral, not intellectual. There are, indeed, purely intellectual problems, such as the question between free silver and a gold standard; and as to these problems, the people may go wrong. But they are not vital. No nation ever yet achieved glory or incurred destruction by taking one course rather than another in a matter of trade or finance. The crucial questions are moral questions, and experience has shown that as to such matters the people can be trusted. As Jefferson himself said,“The will of the majority, the natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man. Perhaps even this may sometimes err; but its errors are honest, solitary, and short-lived.”Washington’s cabinet was made up on the theory that it should represent not the party in power, but both parties,—for two parties already existed, the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, who, under Jefferson’s influence, soon became known by the better name of Republicans. The cabinet consisted of four[pg 88]members, Jefferson, Secretary of State, Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Knox, Secretary of War, and Edmund Randolph, Attorney-General.Knox sided almost always with Hamilton, and Randolph was an inconstant supporter of Jefferson. Though an able and learned man, he was given to hair-splitting and hesitation, and, in allusion to his habit of arguing on one side, but finally voting upon the other, Jefferson once remarked that he usually gave the shell to his friends, and reserved the oyster for his opponents.The political opinions of Jefferson and Hamilton were so diametrically opposed that the cabinet was soon torn by dissension. Hamilton was for a strong government, for surrounding the President with pomp and etiquette, for a central authority as against the authority of the States. In pursuance of these ideas, he brought forward his famous measures for assumption of the state debts by the national government, for the funding of the national debt, and finally for the creation of a national bank. Jefferson opposed[pg 89]these measures, and, although the assumption and the funding laws had grave faults, and led to speculation, and in the case of many persons to financial ruin, yet it must be admitted that Jefferson never appreciated their merits.The truth is that both Hamilton and Jefferson were essential to the development of this country; and the principles of each have been adopted in part, and rejected in part. Hamilton’s conception of a central government predominating over the state governments has been realized, though not nearly to the extent to which he would have carried it. On the other hand, his various schemes for making the government into an aristocracy instead of a democracy have all been abandoned, or, like the Electoral College, turned to a use the opposite of what he intended. So, Jefferson’s view of state rights has not strictly been maintained; but his fundamental principles of popular government and popular education have made the United States what it is, and are destined, we hope, when fully developed, to make it something better yet.[pg 90]No less an authority than that of Washington, who appreciated the merits of both men, could have kept the peace between them. Hamilton under an assumed name attacked Jefferson in the public prints. Jefferson never published a line unsigned; but he permitted Philip Freneau, who had slight employment as a translator in his department, and the trifling salary of $250 a year, to wage war against Hamilton in the gazette which Freneau published; and he even stood by while Freneau attacked Washington. Washington indeed once gave Jefferson a hint on this subject, which the latter refused to take.“He was evidently sore and warm,”wrote Jefferson,“and I took his intention to be that I should interfere in some way with Freneau, perhaps withdraw his appointment of translating clerk to my office. But I will not do it. His paper has saved our constitution, which was galloping fast into monarchy.... And the President has not, ... with his usual good sense andsang froid, ... seen that, though some bad things had passed through it to the public, yet the good have predominated immensely.”[pg 91]In the spring of 1792, Jefferson, who had now been two years in office, was extremely anxious to retire, not only because his situation at Washington was unpleasant, but because his affairs at home had been so neglected during his long absences that he was in danger of bankruptcy. His estate was large, but it was incumbered by a debt to English creditors of $13,000. Some years before he had sold for cash a farm near Monticello in order to discharge this debt; but at that time the Revolutionary war had begun, and the Virginia legislature passed an act inviting all men owing money to English creditors to deposit the same in the state treasury, the State agreeing to pay it over to the English creditors after the war. Jefferson accordingly deposited the $13,000 in gold which he had just received. Later, however, this law was rescinded, and the money received under it was paid back, not in gold, but in paper money of the State, which was then so depreciated as to be almost worthless. In riding by the farm thus disposed of, Jefferson in after years would sometimes[pg 92]point to it and say:“That farm I once sold for an overcoat;”—the price of the overcoat having been the $13,000 in paper money. Cornwallis, as we have seen, destroyed Jefferson’s property to an amount more than double this debt, which might be considered as a second payment of it; but Jefferson finally paid it the third time,—and this time into the hands of the actual creditor. Meanwhile, he wrote:“The torment of mind I endure till the moment shall arrive when I shall not owe a shilling on earth is such really as to render life of little value.”Urged by all these motives, Jefferson had resolved to resign his office in 1792, notwithstanding the remonstrances of Washington; but the attacks made upon him by the Federalists, especially those made in the newspapers, were so violent that a retirement at that time would have given the public cause to believe that he had been driven from office by his enemies. Jefferson, therefore, concluded to remain Secretary of State a few months longer; and those few, as it happened, were the most important of the whole term.[pg 93]On January 21, 1793, King Louis of France was executed, and within a week thereafter England was at war with the new rulers of the French. Difficult questions at once arose under our treaties with France. The French people thought that we were in honor bound to assist them in their struggle against Great Britain, as they had assisted us; and they sent over as minister“Citizen”Genet, in the frigate L’Embuscade. The frigate, carrying forty guns and three hundred men, sailed into the harbor of Charleston, April 8,1793, with a liberty-cap for her figure-head, and a British prize in her wake. Citizen Genet, even for a Frenchman, was a most indiscreet and hot-headed person, and before he had been a week on shore he had issued commissions to privateers manned by American citizens. L’Embuscade then proceeded to Philadelphia, where, as in Charleston, Citizen Genet was welcomed with the utmost enthusiasm. His coming was hailed by the Republicans generally with rapture; and their cry was for war.“I wish,”wrote Jefferson, in a con[pg 94]fidential letter to Monroe,“that we may be able to repress the people within the limits of a fair neutrality.”This was the position taken also by Washington and the whole cabinet; and it is a striking example of Jefferson’s wisdom, justice, and firmness, that, although the bulk of the Republicans were carried off their feet by sympathy with France and with Genet, he, the very person in the United States who most loved the French and best understood the causes and motives of the French Revolution, withstood the storm, and kept his eye fixed upon the interests of his own country. England, contrary to the treaty which closed the Revolutionary War, still retained her military posts in the west; and she was the undisputed mistress of the sea. War with her would therefore have been suicidal for the United States. The time for that had not yet come. Moreover, if the United States had taken sides with France, a war with Spain also would inevitably have followed; and Spain then held Florida and the mouth of the Mississippi.[pg 95]Nevertheless, there were different ways of preserving neutrality: there were the offensive way and the friendly way. Hamilton, whose extreme bias toward England made him bitter against France, was always for the one; Jefferson for the other. A single example will suffice as an illustration. M. Genet asked as a favor that the United States should advance an installment of its debt to France. Hamilton advised that the request be refused without a word of explanation. Jefferson’s opinion was that the request should be granted, if that were lawful, and if it were found to be unlawful, them that the refusal should be explained. Mr. Jefferson’s advice was followed.Mr. Jefferson, also, though he firmly withstood the many illegal and unwarrantable acts attempted by Genet, did so in such a manner as not to lose the friendship of the minister or even a degree of control over him. To Madison Jefferson wrote of Genet:“He renders my position immensely difficult. He does me justice personally; and giving him time to vent himself and become more[pg 96]cool, I am on a footing to advise him freely, and he respects it; but he will break out again on the very first occasion.”Finally Citizen Genet, becoming desperate, fitted out one of L’Embuscade’s prizes as a frigate to be used against England, which amounted on the part of the United States to a breach of neutrality; and being hindered in sending her to sea, he threatened to appeal from the President to the people of the United States. Thereupon the question arose, what shall be done with Genet? and upon this question the cabinet divided with more than usual acrimony. Knox was for sending him out of the country without ceremony; Hamilton for publishing the whole correspondence between him and the government, with a statement of his proceedings. Jefferson was for sending an account of the affair to the French government, with copies of the correspondence, and a request for Genet’s recall. Meanwhile the whole country was thrown into a state of tumultuous excitement. There was a riot in Philadelphia; and even the[pg 97]sacred character of Washington was assailed in prose and verse.The President decided to adopt the course proposed by Jefferson; France appointed another minister, and the Genet episode ended by his marriage to a daughter of George Clinton, governor of New York, in which State he lived thereafter as a respectable citizen and a patron of agriculture. He died in the year 1834.The summer of delirium at Philadelphia culminated in the panic and desolation of the yellow fever, and every member of the government fled from the city, Jefferson being the last to depart.When, in the next year, the correspondence between Genet and Jefferson, and between the English minister and Jefferson, was published, the Secretary was seen to have conducted it on his part with so much ability, discretion, and tact, and with so true a sense of what was due to each nation concerned, that he may be said to have retired to his farm in a blaze of glory.

[pg 45]VREFORM WORK IN VIRGINIAIn September, 1776, Jefferson, having resigned his seat in Congress to engage in duties nearer home, returned to Monticello. A few weeks later, a messenger from Congress arrived to inform him that he had been elected a joint commissioner with Dr. Franklin and Silas Deane to represent at Paris the newly formed nation. His heart had long been set upon foreign travel; but he felt obliged to decline this appointment, first on account of the ill health of his wife, and secondly, because he was needed in Virginia as a legislator. Not since Lycurgus gave laws to the Spartans had there been such an opportunity as then existed in the United States. John Adams declared:“The best lawgivers of antiquity would rejoice to live at a period like this when, for the first time in the history of the world,[pg 46]three millions of people are deliberatelychoosingtheir government and institutions.”Of all the colonies, Virginia offered the best field for reform, because, as we have already seen, she had by far the most aristocratic political and social system; and it is extraordinary how quickly the reform was effected by Jefferson and his friends. In ordinary times of peace the task would have been impossible; but in throwing off the English yoke, the colonists had opened their minds to new ideas; change had become familiar to them, and in the general upheaval the rights of the people were recognized. A year later, Jefferson wrote to Franklin:“With respect to the State of Virginia, in particular, the people seem to have laid aside the monarchical and taken up the republican government with as much ease as would have attended their throwing off an old and putting on a new set of clothes.”Jefferson’s greatness lay in this, that he was the first statesman who trusted the mass of the people. He alone had divined the fact that they were competent, morally and[pg 47]mentally, for self-government. It is almost impossible for us to appreciate Jefferson’s originality in this respect, because the bold and untried theories for which he contended are now regarded as commonplace maxims. He may have derived his political ideas in part from the French philosophical writers of the eighteenth century, although there is no evidence to that effect; but he was certainly the first statesman to grasp the idea of democracy as a form of government, just as, at a later day, Walt Whitman was the first poet to grasp the idea of equality as a social system. Hamilton, John Adams, Pinckney, Gouverneur Morris, even Washington himself, all believed that popular government would be unsafe and revolutionary unless held in check by a strong executive and by an aristocratic senate.Jefferson in his lifetime was often charged with gross inconsistency in his political views and conduct; but the inconsistency was more apparent than real. At times he strictly construed, and at times he almost set aside the Constitution; but the clue to[pg 48]his conduct can usually be found in the fundamental principle that the only proper function of government or constitutions is to express the will of the people, and that the people are morally and mentally competent to govern.“I am sure,”he wrote in 1796,“that the mass of citizens in these United States mean well, and I firmly believe that they will always act well, whenever they can obtain a right understanding of matters.”And Jefferson’s lifelong endeavor was to enable the people to form this“right understanding”by educating them. His ideas of the scope of public education went far beyond those which prevailed in his time, and considerably beyond those which prevail even now. For example, a free university course for the most apt pupils graduated at the grammar schools made part of his scheme,—an idea most nearly realized in the Western States; and those States received their impetus in educational matters from the Ordinance of 1787, which was largely the product of Jefferson’s foresight.Happily for Virginia, she did not become[pg 49]a scene of war until the year 1779, and, meanwhile, Jefferson and his friends lost no time in remodeling her constitution. There were no common schools, and the mass of the people were more ignorant and rough than their contemporaries in any other colony. Elections were scenes of bribery, intimidation, and riot, surpassing even those which Hogarth depicted in England. Elkanah Watson, of Massachusetts, describes what he saw at Hanover Court House, Patrick Henry’s county, in 1778:“The whole county was assembled. The moment I alighted, a wretched, pug-nosed fellow assailed me to swap watches. I had hardly shaken him off, when I was attacked by a wild Irishman who insisted on my swapping horses with him.... With him I came near being involved in a boxing-match, the Irishman swearing, I‘did not trate him like a jintleman.’I had hardly escaped this dilemma when my attention was attracted by a fight between two very unwieldy fat men, foaming and puffing like two furies, until one succeeded in twisting[pg 50]a forefinger in a sidelock of the other’s hair, and in the act of thrusting by this purchase his thumb into the latter’s eye, he bawled out,‘King’s Cruise,’equivalent in technical language to‘Enough.’”Quakers were put in the pillory, scolding women were ducked, and it is said that a woman was burned to death in Princess Anne County for witchcraft. The English church, as we have seen, was an established church; and all taxpayers, dissenters as well as churchmen, were compelled to contribute to its support. Baptist preachers were arrested, and fined as disturbers of the peace. The law of entail, both as respects land and slaves, was so strict that their descent to the eldest son could not be prevented even by agreement between the owner and his heir.In his reformation of the laws, Jefferson was supported by Patrick Henry, now governor, and inhabiting what was still called the palace; by George Mason, a patriotic lawyer who drew the famous Virginia Bill of Rights; by George Wythe, his old pre[pg 51]ceptor, and by James Madison, Jefferson’s friend, pupil, and successor, who in this year began his political career as a member of the House of Burgesses.Opposed to them were the conservative party led by R. C. Nicholas, head of the Virginia bar, a stanch churchman and gentleman of the old school, and Edward Pendleton, whom Jefferson described as“full of resource, never vanquished; for if he lost the main battle he returned upon you, and regained so much of it as to make it a drawn one, by dexterous manœuvres, skirmishes in detail, and the recovery of small advantages, which, little singly, were important all together. You never knew when you were clear of him.”Intense as the controversy was, fundamental as were the points at issue, the speakers never lost that courtesy for which the Virginians were remarkable; John Randolph being perhaps the only exception. Even Patrick Henry—though from his humble origin and impetuous oratory one might have expected otherwise—was never guilty[pg 52]of any rudeness to his opponents. What Jefferson said of Madison was true of the Virginia orators in general,—“soothing always the feelings of his adversaries by civilities and softnesses of expression.”Jefferson struck first at the system of entail. After a three weeks’ struggle, land and slaves were put upon the same footing as all other property,—they might be sold or bequeathed according to the will of the possessor. Then came a longer and more bitter contest. Jefferson was for abolishing all connection between church and state, and for establishing complete freedom of religion. Nine years elapsed before Virginia could be brought to that point; but at this session he procured a repeal of the law which imposed penalties for attendance at a dissenting meeting-house, and also of the law compelling dissenters to pay tithes. The fight was, therefore, substantially won; and in 1786, Jefferson’s“Act for establishing religion”became the law of Virginia.1[pg 53]Another far-reaching law introduced by Jefferson at this memorable session of 1776 provided for the naturalization of foreigners in Virginia, after a two years’ residence in the State, and upon a declaration of their intention to become American citizens. The bill provided also that the minor children of naturalized parents should be citizens of the United States when they came of age. The principles of this measure were afterward embodied in the statutes of the United States, and they are in force to-day.At this session Jefferson also drew an act for establishing courts of law in Virginia, the royal courts having necessarily passed out of existence when the Declaration of Independence was adopted. Moreover, he set on foot a revision of all the statutes of Virginia, a committee with him at the head being appointed for this purpose; and finally he procured the removal of the capital from Williamsburg to Richmond.[pg 54]All this was accomplished, mainly by Jefferson’s efforts; and yet the two bills upon which he set most store failed entirely. These were, first, a comprehensive measure of state education, running up through primary schools and grammar schools to a state university, and, secondly, a bill providing that all who were born in slavery after the passage of the bill should be free.This was Jefferson’s second ineffectual attempt to promote the abolition of slavery. During the year 1768, when he first became a member of the House of Burgesses, he had endeavored to procure the passage of a law enabling slave-owners to free their slaves, He induced Colonel Bland, one of the ablest, oldest, and most respected members to propose the law, and he seconded the proposal; but it was overwhelmingly rejected.“I, as a younger member,”related Jefferson afterward,“was more spared in the debate; but he was denounced as an enemy to his country, and was treated with the greatest indecorum.”In 1778 Jefferson made another attempt:[pg 55]—he brought in a bill forbidding the further importation of slaves in Virginia, and this was passed without opposition. Again, in 1784, when Virginia ceded to the United States her immense northwestern territory, Jefferson drew up a scheme of government for the States to be carved out of it which included a provision“that after the year 1800 of the Christian Era, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States, otherwise than in punishment of crimes.”The provision was rejected by Congress.In his“Notes on Virginia,”written in the year 1781, but published in 1787, he said:“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism, on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.... With the morals of the people their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate no one will labor for himself who can make another labor for him.... Indeed, I tremble for my country[pg 56]when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.... The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest.”When the Missouri Compromise question came up, in 1820, Jefferson rightly predicted that a controversy had begun which would end in disruption; but he made the mistake of supposing that the Northern party were actuated in that matter solely by political motives. April 22, 1820, he wrote:“This momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.... A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.... The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually and with due sacrifices I think it might be.[pg 57]But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”And later, he wrote of the Missouri Compromise, as a“question having just enough of the semblance of morality to throw dust into the eyes of the people.... The Federalists, unable to rise again under the old division of Whig and Tory, have invented a geographical division which gives them fourteen States against ten, and seduces their old opponents into a coalition with them. Real morality is on the other side. For while the removal of the slaves from one State to another adds no more to their numbers than their removal from one country to another, the spreading them over a larger surface adds to their happiness, and renders their future emancipation more practicable.”These misconceptions as to Northern motives might be ascribed to Jefferson’s advanced age, for, as he himself graphically expressed it, he then had“one foot in the grave, and the other lifted to follow it;”but[pg 58]it would probably be more just to say that they were due, in part, to his prejudice against the New England people and especially the New England clergy, and in part to the fact that his long retirement in Virginia had somewhat contracted his views and sympathies. Jefferson was a man of intense local attachments, and he took color from his surroundings. He never ceased, however, to regard slavery as morally wrong and socially ruinous; and in the brief autobiography which he left behind him he made these predictions:“Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.”History has justified the second as well as the first of these declarations, for, excepting that brief period of anarchy known as“the carpet-bag era,”it cannot be maintained that the colored race in the Southern States have been at any time, even since their emancipation,“equally free,”in the sense of politically free, with their white fellow citizens.

In September, 1776, Jefferson, having resigned his seat in Congress to engage in duties nearer home, returned to Monticello. A few weeks later, a messenger from Congress arrived to inform him that he had been elected a joint commissioner with Dr. Franklin and Silas Deane to represent at Paris the newly formed nation. His heart had long been set upon foreign travel; but he felt obliged to decline this appointment, first on account of the ill health of his wife, and secondly, because he was needed in Virginia as a legislator. Not since Lycurgus gave laws to the Spartans had there been such an opportunity as then existed in the United States. John Adams declared:“The best lawgivers of antiquity would rejoice to live at a period like this when, for the first time in the history of the world,[pg 46]three millions of people are deliberatelychoosingtheir government and institutions.”

Of all the colonies, Virginia offered the best field for reform, because, as we have already seen, she had by far the most aristocratic political and social system; and it is extraordinary how quickly the reform was effected by Jefferson and his friends. In ordinary times of peace the task would have been impossible; but in throwing off the English yoke, the colonists had opened their minds to new ideas; change had become familiar to them, and in the general upheaval the rights of the people were recognized. A year later, Jefferson wrote to Franklin:“With respect to the State of Virginia, in particular, the people seem to have laid aside the monarchical and taken up the republican government with as much ease as would have attended their throwing off an old and putting on a new set of clothes.”

Jefferson’s greatness lay in this, that he was the first statesman who trusted the mass of the people. He alone had divined the fact that they were competent, morally and[pg 47]mentally, for self-government. It is almost impossible for us to appreciate Jefferson’s originality in this respect, because the bold and untried theories for which he contended are now regarded as commonplace maxims. He may have derived his political ideas in part from the French philosophical writers of the eighteenth century, although there is no evidence to that effect; but he was certainly the first statesman to grasp the idea of democracy as a form of government, just as, at a later day, Walt Whitman was the first poet to grasp the idea of equality as a social system. Hamilton, John Adams, Pinckney, Gouverneur Morris, even Washington himself, all believed that popular government would be unsafe and revolutionary unless held in check by a strong executive and by an aristocratic senate.

Jefferson in his lifetime was often charged with gross inconsistency in his political views and conduct; but the inconsistency was more apparent than real. At times he strictly construed, and at times he almost set aside the Constitution; but the clue to[pg 48]his conduct can usually be found in the fundamental principle that the only proper function of government or constitutions is to express the will of the people, and that the people are morally and mentally competent to govern.“I am sure,”he wrote in 1796,“that the mass of citizens in these United States mean well, and I firmly believe that they will always act well, whenever they can obtain a right understanding of matters.”And Jefferson’s lifelong endeavor was to enable the people to form this“right understanding”by educating them. His ideas of the scope of public education went far beyond those which prevailed in his time, and considerably beyond those which prevail even now. For example, a free university course for the most apt pupils graduated at the grammar schools made part of his scheme,—an idea most nearly realized in the Western States; and those States received their impetus in educational matters from the Ordinance of 1787, which was largely the product of Jefferson’s foresight.

Happily for Virginia, she did not become[pg 49]a scene of war until the year 1779, and, meanwhile, Jefferson and his friends lost no time in remodeling her constitution. There were no common schools, and the mass of the people were more ignorant and rough than their contemporaries in any other colony. Elections were scenes of bribery, intimidation, and riot, surpassing even those which Hogarth depicted in England. Elkanah Watson, of Massachusetts, describes what he saw at Hanover Court House, Patrick Henry’s county, in 1778:“The whole county was assembled. The moment I alighted, a wretched, pug-nosed fellow assailed me to swap watches. I had hardly shaken him off, when I was attacked by a wild Irishman who insisted on my swapping horses with him.... With him I came near being involved in a boxing-match, the Irishman swearing, I‘did not trate him like a jintleman.’I had hardly escaped this dilemma when my attention was attracted by a fight between two very unwieldy fat men, foaming and puffing like two furies, until one succeeded in twisting[pg 50]a forefinger in a sidelock of the other’s hair, and in the act of thrusting by this purchase his thumb into the latter’s eye, he bawled out,‘King’s Cruise,’equivalent in technical language to‘Enough.’”

Quakers were put in the pillory, scolding women were ducked, and it is said that a woman was burned to death in Princess Anne County for witchcraft. The English church, as we have seen, was an established church; and all taxpayers, dissenters as well as churchmen, were compelled to contribute to its support. Baptist preachers were arrested, and fined as disturbers of the peace. The law of entail, both as respects land and slaves, was so strict that their descent to the eldest son could not be prevented even by agreement between the owner and his heir.

In his reformation of the laws, Jefferson was supported by Patrick Henry, now governor, and inhabiting what was still called the palace; by George Mason, a patriotic lawyer who drew the famous Virginia Bill of Rights; by George Wythe, his old pre[pg 51]ceptor, and by James Madison, Jefferson’s friend, pupil, and successor, who in this year began his political career as a member of the House of Burgesses.

Opposed to them were the conservative party led by R. C. Nicholas, head of the Virginia bar, a stanch churchman and gentleman of the old school, and Edward Pendleton, whom Jefferson described as“full of resource, never vanquished; for if he lost the main battle he returned upon you, and regained so much of it as to make it a drawn one, by dexterous manœuvres, skirmishes in detail, and the recovery of small advantages, which, little singly, were important all together. You never knew when you were clear of him.”

Intense as the controversy was, fundamental as were the points at issue, the speakers never lost that courtesy for which the Virginians were remarkable; John Randolph being perhaps the only exception. Even Patrick Henry—though from his humble origin and impetuous oratory one might have expected otherwise—was never guilty[pg 52]of any rudeness to his opponents. What Jefferson said of Madison was true of the Virginia orators in general,—“soothing always the feelings of his adversaries by civilities and softnesses of expression.”

Jefferson struck first at the system of entail. After a three weeks’ struggle, land and slaves were put upon the same footing as all other property,—they might be sold or bequeathed according to the will of the possessor. Then came a longer and more bitter contest. Jefferson was for abolishing all connection between church and state, and for establishing complete freedom of religion. Nine years elapsed before Virginia could be brought to that point; but at this session he procured a repeal of the law which imposed penalties for attendance at a dissenting meeting-house, and also of the law compelling dissenters to pay tithes. The fight was, therefore, substantially won; and in 1786, Jefferson’s“Act for establishing religion”became the law of Virginia.1

Another far-reaching law introduced by Jefferson at this memorable session of 1776 provided for the naturalization of foreigners in Virginia, after a two years’ residence in the State, and upon a declaration of their intention to become American citizens. The bill provided also that the minor children of naturalized parents should be citizens of the United States when they came of age. The principles of this measure were afterward embodied in the statutes of the United States, and they are in force to-day.

At this session Jefferson also drew an act for establishing courts of law in Virginia, the royal courts having necessarily passed out of existence when the Declaration of Independence was adopted. Moreover, he set on foot a revision of all the statutes of Virginia, a committee with him at the head being appointed for this purpose; and finally he procured the removal of the capital from Williamsburg to Richmond.

All this was accomplished, mainly by Jefferson’s efforts; and yet the two bills upon which he set most store failed entirely. These were, first, a comprehensive measure of state education, running up through primary schools and grammar schools to a state university, and, secondly, a bill providing that all who were born in slavery after the passage of the bill should be free.

This was Jefferson’s second ineffectual attempt to promote the abolition of slavery. During the year 1768, when he first became a member of the House of Burgesses, he had endeavored to procure the passage of a law enabling slave-owners to free their slaves, He induced Colonel Bland, one of the ablest, oldest, and most respected members to propose the law, and he seconded the proposal; but it was overwhelmingly rejected.“I, as a younger member,”related Jefferson afterward,“was more spared in the debate; but he was denounced as an enemy to his country, and was treated with the greatest indecorum.”

In 1778 Jefferson made another attempt:[pg 55]—he brought in a bill forbidding the further importation of slaves in Virginia, and this was passed without opposition. Again, in 1784, when Virginia ceded to the United States her immense northwestern territory, Jefferson drew up a scheme of government for the States to be carved out of it which included a provision“that after the year 1800 of the Christian Era, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States, otherwise than in punishment of crimes.”The provision was rejected by Congress.

In his“Notes on Virginia,”written in the year 1781, but published in 1787, he said:“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism, on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.... With the morals of the people their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate no one will labor for himself who can make another labor for him.... Indeed, I tremble for my country[pg 56]when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.... The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest.”

When the Missouri Compromise question came up, in 1820, Jefferson rightly predicted that a controversy had begun which would end in disruption; but he made the mistake of supposing that the Northern party were actuated in that matter solely by political motives. April 22, 1820, he wrote:“This momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.... A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.... The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually and with due sacrifices I think it might be.[pg 57]But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”

And later, he wrote of the Missouri Compromise, as a“question having just enough of the semblance of morality to throw dust into the eyes of the people.... The Federalists, unable to rise again under the old division of Whig and Tory, have invented a geographical division which gives them fourteen States against ten, and seduces their old opponents into a coalition with them. Real morality is on the other side. For while the removal of the slaves from one State to another adds no more to their numbers than their removal from one country to another, the spreading them over a larger surface adds to their happiness, and renders their future emancipation more practicable.”

These misconceptions as to Northern motives might be ascribed to Jefferson’s advanced age, for, as he himself graphically expressed it, he then had“one foot in the grave, and the other lifted to follow it;”but[pg 58]it would probably be more just to say that they were due, in part, to his prejudice against the New England people and especially the New England clergy, and in part to the fact that his long retirement in Virginia had somewhat contracted his views and sympathies. Jefferson was a man of intense local attachments, and he took color from his surroundings. He never ceased, however, to regard slavery as morally wrong and socially ruinous; and in the brief autobiography which he left behind him he made these predictions:“Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.”

History has justified the second as well as the first of these declarations, for, excepting that brief period of anarchy known as“the carpet-bag era,”it cannot be maintained that the colored race in the Southern States have been at any time, even since their emancipation,“equally free,”in the sense of politically free, with their white fellow citizens.

[pg 59]VIGOVERNOR OF VIRGINIAFor three years Jefferson was occupied with the legislative duties already described, and especially with a revision of the Virginia statutes, and then, in June, 1779, he succeeded Patrick Henry as governor of the State. It has often been remarked that he was, all through life, a lucky man, but in this case fortune did not favor him, for the ensuing two years proved to be, so far as Virginia was concerned, by much the worst period of the war.The French alliance, though no doubt an ultimate benefit to the colonies, had at first two bad effects: it relaxed the energy of the Americans, who trusted that France would fight their battles for them; and it stimulated the British to increased exertions. The British commissioners announced that henceforth England would employ, in the prosecu[pg 60]tion of the war, all those agencies which“God and nature had placed in her hands.”This meant that the ferocity of the Indians would be invoked, a matter of special moment to Virginia, since her western frontier swarmed with Indians, the bravest of their race.The colony, it must be remembered, was then of immense extent; for beside the present Virginia and West Virginia, Kentucky and the greater part of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were embraced in it. It stretched, in short, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. Upon the seaboard Virginia was especially vulnerable, the tide-water region being penetrated by numerous bays and rivers, which the enemy’s ships could easily ascend, for they were undefended by forts or men. The total navy of the colony was four vessels, mounting sixty-two guns, and a few armed boats. The flower of the Virginia soldiery, to the number of ten thousand, were in Washington’s army, and supplies of men, of arms, of ammunition and food were urgently called for by General[pg 61]Gates, who was battling against Cornwallis in North Carolina. The militia were supposed to number fifty thousand, which included every man between sixteen and fifty years of age; but this was only one man for every square mile of territory in the present State of Virginia, and of these militiamen it was estimated that, east of the Blue Ridge, only about one in five was armed with a gun. The treasury was practically bankrupt, and there was a dearth of every kind of warlike material.Such was the situation which confronted, as Mr. Parton puts it,“a lawyer of thirty-six, with a talent for music, a taste for art, a love of science, literature, and gardening.”The task was one calling rather for a soldier than a statesman; but Mr. Jefferson faced it with courage, and on the whole with success. In retaliating the cruel measures of the British, he showed a firmness which must have been especially difficult for a man of his temperament. He put in irons and confined in a dungeon Colonel Henry Hamilton and two subordinate officers who had com[pg 62]mitted atrocities upon American prisoners. He caused a prison-ship, like the ships of infamous memory which were employed as prisons by the British at New York, to be prepared; and the exchange of captives between Virginia and the British was stopped.“Humane conduct on our part,”wrote Jefferson,“was found to produce no effect. The contrary, therefore, is to be tried. Iron will be retaliated by iron, prison-ships for prison-ships, and like for like in general.”But in November, 1779, notice was received that the English, under their new leader, Sir Henry Clinton, had adopted a less barbarous system of warfare; and fortunately Jefferson’s measures of reprisal became unnecessary.Hampered as he was by want of men and money, Jefferson did all that he could to supply the needs of the Virginia soldiers with Washington, of the army in North Carolina, led by Gates, and of George Rogers Clarke, the heroic commander who put down the Indian uprising on the western frontier, and captured the English officer who instigated[pg 63]it,—that same Colonel Hamilton of whom mention has already been made. The story of Clarke’s adventures in the wilderness,—he was a neighbor of Jefferson, only twenty-six years old,—of his forced marches, of his masterful dealing with the Indians, and finally of his capture of the British force, forms a thrilling chapter in the history of the American Revolution.Many indeed of Jefferson’s constituents censured him as being over-zealous in his support of the army of Gates. He stripped Virginia, they said, of troops and resources which, as it proved afterward, were needed at home. But if Cornwallis were not defeated in North Carolina, it was certain that he would overrun the much more exposed Virginia. If he could be defeated anywhere, it would be in the Carolinas. Jefferson’s course, it is sufficient to say, was that recommended by Washington; and his exertions in behalf of the Continental armies were commended in the highest terms not only by Washington, but also by Generals Gates, Greene, Steuben, and Lafayette. The mili[pg 64]tia were called out, leaving behind only so many men as were required to cultivate the land, wagons were impressed, including two belonging to the governor, and attempts were even made—extraordinary for Virginia—to manufacture certain much-needed articles.“Our smiths,”wrote Jefferson,“are making five hundred axes and some tomahawks for General Gates.”Thus fared the year 1779, and in 1780 things went from bad to worse. In April came a letter from Madison, saying that Washington’s army was on the verge of dissolution, being only half-clothed, and in a way to be starved. The public treasury was empty and the public credit gone. In August occurred the disastrous defeat of General Gates at Camden, which left Virginia at the mercy of Cornwallis. In October a British fleet under Leslie ravaged the country about Portsmouth, but failing to effect a juncture with Cornwallis, who was detained in North Carolina by illness among his troops, did no further harm. Two months later, however, Benedict Arnold sailed up the James River[pg 65]with another fleet, and, after committing some depredations at Richmond, sailed down again, escaping by the aid of a favorable wind, which hauled from east to west just in the nick of time for him.In June, 1781, Cornwallis invaded Virginia, and no one suffered more than Jefferson from his depredations. Tarleton was dispatched to seize the governor at Monticello; but the latter was forewarned by a citizen ofCharlottesville, who, being in a tavern at Louisa when Tarleton and his troop swept by on the main road, immediately guessed their destination, and mounting his horse, a fleet Virginia thoroughbred, rode by a short cut through the woods straight to Monticello, arriving there about three hours ahead of Tarleton.Jefferson took the matter coolly. He first dispatched his family to a place of safety, sent his best horse to be shod at a neighboring smithy, and then proceeded to sort and separate his papers. He left the house only about five minutes before the soldiers entered it.[pg 66]Two slaves, Martin, Mr. Jefferson’s body servant, and Cæsar, were engaged in hiding plate and other articles under the floor of the portico, a single plank having been raised for that purpose. As Martin, above, handed the last article to Cæsar under the floor, the tramp of the approaching cavalry was heard. Down went the plank, shutting in Cæsar, and there he remained, without making any outcry, for eighteen hours, in darkness, and of course without food or water. One of the soldiers, to try Martin’s nerve, clapped a pistol to his breast, and threatened to fire unless he would tell which way his master had fled.“Fire away, then,”retorted the black, fiercely answering glance for glance, and not receding a hair’s breath.Tarleton and his men scrupulously refrained from injuring Jefferson’s property. Cornwallis, on the other hand, who encamped on Jefferson’s estate of Elk Hill, lying opposite Elk Island in the James River, destroyed the growing crops, burned all the barns and fences, carried off—“as was to be expected,”[pg 67]said Mr. Jefferson—the cattle and horses, and committed the barbarity of killing the colts that were too young to be of service. He carried off, also, about thirty slaves.“Had this been to give them freedom,”wrote Jefferson,“he would have done right; but it was to consign them to inevitable death from the smallpox and putrid fever, then raging in his camp.”“Some of the miserable wretches crawled home to die,”Mr. Randall relates,“and giving information where others lay perishing in hovels or in the open air, by the wayside, these were sent for by their generous master; and the last moments of all of them were made as comfortable as could be done by proper nursing and medical attendance.”These dreadful scenes, added to the agitation of having twice been obliged, at a moment’s notice, to flee from the enemy, to say nothing of the anxieties which she must have endured on her husband’s account, were too much for Mrs. Jefferson’s already enfeebled constitution. She died on September 6, 1782.[pg 68]Six slave women who were household servants enjoyed for thirty years a kind of humble distinction at Monticello as“the servants who were in the room when Mrs. Jefferson died;”and the fact that they were there attests the affectionate relations which must have existed between them and their master and mistress.“They have often told my wife,”relates Mr. Bacon,“that when Mrs. Jefferson died they stood around the bed. Mr. Jefferson sat by her, and she gave him directions about a good many things that she wanted done. When she came to the children, she wept, and could not speak for some time. Finally she held up her hand, and, spreading out her four fingers, she told him she could not die happy if she thought her four children were ever to have a stepmother brought in over them. Holding her other hand in his, Mr. Jefferson promised her solemnly that he would never marry again;”and the promise was kept.After his wife’s death Jefferson sank into what he afterward described as“a stupor of[pg 69]mind;”and even before that he had been, for the first and last time in his life, in a somewhat morbid mental condition. He was an excessively sensitive man, and reflections upon his conduct as governor, during the raids into Virginia by Arnold and Cornwallis, coming at a time when he was overwrought, rankled in his mind. He refused to serve again as governor, and desiring to defend his course when in that office, became a member of the House of Burgesses in 1781, in order that he might answer his critics there; but not a voice was raised against him. In 1782, he was again elected to the House, but he did not attend; and both Madison and Monroe endeavored in vain to draw him from his seclusion. To Monroe he replied:“Before I ventured to declare to my countrymen my determination to retire from public employment, I examined well my heart to know whether it were thoroughly cured of every principle of political ambition, whether no lurking particle remained which might leave me uneasy, when reduced within the limits of mere private[pg 70]life. I became satisfied that every fibre of that passion was thoroughly eradicated.”Jefferson was an impulsive man,—in some respects a creature of the moment; certainly often, in his own case, mistaking, as a permanent feeling, what was really a transitory impression. His language to Monroe must, therefore, be taken as the sincere deliverance of a man who, at that time, had not the remotest expectation of receiving, or the least ambition to attain, the highest offices in the gift of the American people.

For three years Jefferson was occupied with the legislative duties already described, and especially with a revision of the Virginia statutes, and then, in June, 1779, he succeeded Patrick Henry as governor of the State. It has often been remarked that he was, all through life, a lucky man, but in this case fortune did not favor him, for the ensuing two years proved to be, so far as Virginia was concerned, by much the worst period of the war.

The French alliance, though no doubt an ultimate benefit to the colonies, had at first two bad effects: it relaxed the energy of the Americans, who trusted that France would fight their battles for them; and it stimulated the British to increased exertions. The British commissioners announced that henceforth England would employ, in the prosecu[pg 60]tion of the war, all those agencies which“God and nature had placed in her hands.”This meant that the ferocity of the Indians would be invoked, a matter of special moment to Virginia, since her western frontier swarmed with Indians, the bravest of their race.

The colony, it must be remembered, was then of immense extent; for beside the present Virginia and West Virginia, Kentucky and the greater part of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were embraced in it. It stretched, in short, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. Upon the seaboard Virginia was especially vulnerable, the tide-water region being penetrated by numerous bays and rivers, which the enemy’s ships could easily ascend, for they were undefended by forts or men. The total navy of the colony was four vessels, mounting sixty-two guns, and a few armed boats. The flower of the Virginia soldiery, to the number of ten thousand, were in Washington’s army, and supplies of men, of arms, of ammunition and food were urgently called for by General[pg 61]Gates, who was battling against Cornwallis in North Carolina. The militia were supposed to number fifty thousand, which included every man between sixteen and fifty years of age; but this was only one man for every square mile of territory in the present State of Virginia, and of these militiamen it was estimated that, east of the Blue Ridge, only about one in five was armed with a gun. The treasury was practically bankrupt, and there was a dearth of every kind of warlike material.

Such was the situation which confronted, as Mr. Parton puts it,“a lawyer of thirty-six, with a talent for music, a taste for art, a love of science, literature, and gardening.”The task was one calling rather for a soldier than a statesman; but Mr. Jefferson faced it with courage, and on the whole with success. In retaliating the cruel measures of the British, he showed a firmness which must have been especially difficult for a man of his temperament. He put in irons and confined in a dungeon Colonel Henry Hamilton and two subordinate officers who had com[pg 62]mitted atrocities upon American prisoners. He caused a prison-ship, like the ships of infamous memory which were employed as prisons by the British at New York, to be prepared; and the exchange of captives between Virginia and the British was stopped.“Humane conduct on our part,”wrote Jefferson,“was found to produce no effect. The contrary, therefore, is to be tried. Iron will be retaliated by iron, prison-ships for prison-ships, and like for like in general.”But in November, 1779, notice was received that the English, under their new leader, Sir Henry Clinton, had adopted a less barbarous system of warfare; and fortunately Jefferson’s measures of reprisal became unnecessary.

Hampered as he was by want of men and money, Jefferson did all that he could to supply the needs of the Virginia soldiers with Washington, of the army in North Carolina, led by Gates, and of George Rogers Clarke, the heroic commander who put down the Indian uprising on the western frontier, and captured the English officer who instigated[pg 63]it,—that same Colonel Hamilton of whom mention has already been made. The story of Clarke’s adventures in the wilderness,—he was a neighbor of Jefferson, only twenty-six years old,—of his forced marches, of his masterful dealing with the Indians, and finally of his capture of the British force, forms a thrilling chapter in the history of the American Revolution.

Many indeed of Jefferson’s constituents censured him as being over-zealous in his support of the army of Gates. He stripped Virginia, they said, of troops and resources which, as it proved afterward, were needed at home. But if Cornwallis were not defeated in North Carolina, it was certain that he would overrun the much more exposed Virginia. If he could be defeated anywhere, it would be in the Carolinas. Jefferson’s course, it is sufficient to say, was that recommended by Washington; and his exertions in behalf of the Continental armies were commended in the highest terms not only by Washington, but also by Generals Gates, Greene, Steuben, and Lafayette. The mili[pg 64]tia were called out, leaving behind only so many men as were required to cultivate the land, wagons were impressed, including two belonging to the governor, and attempts were even made—extraordinary for Virginia—to manufacture certain much-needed articles.“Our smiths,”wrote Jefferson,“are making five hundred axes and some tomahawks for General Gates.”

Thus fared the year 1779, and in 1780 things went from bad to worse. In April came a letter from Madison, saying that Washington’s army was on the verge of dissolution, being only half-clothed, and in a way to be starved. The public treasury was empty and the public credit gone. In August occurred the disastrous defeat of General Gates at Camden, which left Virginia at the mercy of Cornwallis. In October a British fleet under Leslie ravaged the country about Portsmouth, but failing to effect a juncture with Cornwallis, who was detained in North Carolina by illness among his troops, did no further harm. Two months later, however, Benedict Arnold sailed up the James River[pg 65]with another fleet, and, after committing some depredations at Richmond, sailed down again, escaping by the aid of a favorable wind, which hauled from east to west just in the nick of time for him.

In June, 1781, Cornwallis invaded Virginia, and no one suffered more than Jefferson from his depredations. Tarleton was dispatched to seize the governor at Monticello; but the latter was forewarned by a citizen ofCharlottesville, who, being in a tavern at Louisa when Tarleton and his troop swept by on the main road, immediately guessed their destination, and mounting his horse, a fleet Virginia thoroughbred, rode by a short cut through the woods straight to Monticello, arriving there about three hours ahead of Tarleton.

Jefferson took the matter coolly. He first dispatched his family to a place of safety, sent his best horse to be shod at a neighboring smithy, and then proceeded to sort and separate his papers. He left the house only about five minutes before the soldiers entered it.

Two slaves, Martin, Mr. Jefferson’s body servant, and Cæsar, were engaged in hiding plate and other articles under the floor of the portico, a single plank having been raised for that purpose. As Martin, above, handed the last article to Cæsar under the floor, the tramp of the approaching cavalry was heard. Down went the plank, shutting in Cæsar, and there he remained, without making any outcry, for eighteen hours, in darkness, and of course without food or water. One of the soldiers, to try Martin’s nerve, clapped a pistol to his breast, and threatened to fire unless he would tell which way his master had fled.“Fire away, then,”retorted the black, fiercely answering glance for glance, and not receding a hair’s breath.

Tarleton and his men scrupulously refrained from injuring Jefferson’s property. Cornwallis, on the other hand, who encamped on Jefferson’s estate of Elk Hill, lying opposite Elk Island in the James River, destroyed the growing crops, burned all the barns and fences, carried off—“as was to be expected,”[pg 67]said Mr. Jefferson—the cattle and horses, and committed the barbarity of killing the colts that were too young to be of service. He carried off, also, about thirty slaves.“Had this been to give them freedom,”wrote Jefferson,“he would have done right; but it was to consign them to inevitable death from the smallpox and putrid fever, then raging in his camp.”

“Some of the miserable wretches crawled home to die,”Mr. Randall relates,“and giving information where others lay perishing in hovels or in the open air, by the wayside, these were sent for by their generous master; and the last moments of all of them were made as comfortable as could be done by proper nursing and medical attendance.”

These dreadful scenes, added to the agitation of having twice been obliged, at a moment’s notice, to flee from the enemy, to say nothing of the anxieties which she must have endured on her husband’s account, were too much for Mrs. Jefferson’s already enfeebled constitution. She died on September 6, 1782.

Six slave women who were household servants enjoyed for thirty years a kind of humble distinction at Monticello as“the servants who were in the room when Mrs. Jefferson died;”and the fact that they were there attests the affectionate relations which must have existed between them and their master and mistress.“They have often told my wife,”relates Mr. Bacon,“that when Mrs. Jefferson died they stood around the bed. Mr. Jefferson sat by her, and she gave him directions about a good many things that she wanted done. When she came to the children, she wept, and could not speak for some time. Finally she held up her hand, and, spreading out her four fingers, she told him she could not die happy if she thought her four children were ever to have a stepmother brought in over them. Holding her other hand in his, Mr. Jefferson promised her solemnly that he would never marry again;”and the promise was kept.

After his wife’s death Jefferson sank into what he afterward described as“a stupor of[pg 69]mind;”and even before that he had been, for the first and last time in his life, in a somewhat morbid mental condition. He was an excessively sensitive man, and reflections upon his conduct as governor, during the raids into Virginia by Arnold and Cornwallis, coming at a time when he was overwrought, rankled in his mind. He refused to serve again as governor, and desiring to defend his course when in that office, became a member of the House of Burgesses in 1781, in order that he might answer his critics there; but not a voice was raised against him. In 1782, he was again elected to the House, but he did not attend; and both Madison and Monroe endeavored in vain to draw him from his seclusion. To Monroe he replied:“Before I ventured to declare to my countrymen my determination to retire from public employment, I examined well my heart to know whether it were thoroughly cured of every principle of political ambition, whether no lurking particle remained which might leave me uneasy, when reduced within the limits of mere private[pg 70]life. I became satisfied that every fibre of that passion was thoroughly eradicated.”

Jefferson was an impulsive man,—in some respects a creature of the moment; certainly often, in his own case, mistaking, as a permanent feeling, what was really a transitory impression. His language to Monroe must, therefore, be taken as the sincere deliverance of a man who, at that time, had not the remotest expectation of receiving, or the least ambition to attain, the highest offices in the gift of the American people.

[pg 71]VIIENVOY AT PARISTwo years after his wife’s death, namely, in 1784, Jefferson was chosen by Congress to serve as envoy at Paris, with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. The appointment came at an opportune moment, when his mind was beginning to recover its tone, and he gladly accepted it. It was deemed necessary that the new Confederacy should make treaties with the various governments of Europe, and as soon as the envoys reached Paris, they drew up a treaty such as they hoped might be negotiated. It has been described as“the first serious attempt ever made to conduct the intercourse of nations on Christian principles;”and, on that account, it failed. To this failure there was, however, one exception.“Old Frederick of Prussia,”as Jefferson styled him,“met us[pg 72]cordially;”and with him a treaty was soon concluded.In May, 1785, Franklin returned to the United States, and Jefferson was appointed minister.“You replace Dr. Franklin,”said the Count of Vergennes when Jefferson announced his appointment.“I succeed,—no one can replace him,”was the reply.Jefferson’s residence in Paris at this critical period was a fortunate occurrence. It would be a mistake to suppose that he derived his political principles from France:—he carried them there; but he was confirmed in them by witnessing the injustice and misery which resulted to the common people from the monarchical governments of Europe. To James Monroe he wrote in June, 1785:“The pleasure of the trip [to Europe] will be less than you expect, but the utility greater. It will make you adore your own country,—its soil, its climate, its equality, laws, people, and manners. My God! how little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of and which no other people on earth[pg 73]enjoy! I confess I had no idea of it myself.”To George Wythe he wrote in August, 1786:“Preach, my dear sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils; and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests, and nobles, who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”To Madison, he wrote in January, 1787:“This is agovernmentof wolves over sheep.”Jefferson took the greatest pains to ascertain the condition of the laboring classes. In the course of a journey in the south of France, he wrote to Lafayette, begging him to survey the condition of the people for himself.“To do it most effectually,”he said,“you must be absolutely incognito; you must ferret the people out of their hovels, as I have done; look into their kettles; eat their bread; loll on their beds on pretense of resting your[pg 74]self, but in fact to find if they are soft. You will feel a sublime pleasure in the course of the investigation, and a sublimer one hereafter, when you shall be able to apply your knowledge to the softening of their beds, or the throwing a morsel of meat into their kettle of vegetables.”These excursions among the French peasantry, who, as Jefferson well knew, were ruinously taxed in order to support an extravagant court and an idle and insolent nobility, made him a fierce Republican.“There is not a crowned head in Europe,”he wrote to General Washington, in 1788,“whose talents or merits would entitle him to be elected a vestryman by the people of America.”But for the French race Jefferson had an affinity. He was glad to live with people among whom, as he said,“a man might pass a life without encountering a single rudeness.”He liked their polished manners and gay disposition, their aptitude for science, for philosophy, and for art; even their wines and cookery suited his taste, and his preference in this respect was so well known that[pg 75]Patrick Henry once humorously stigmatized him as“a man who had abjured his native victuals.”Jefferson’s stay in Paris corresponded exactly with the“glorious”period of the French Revolution. He was present at the Assembly of the Notables in 1787, and he witnessed the destruction of the Bastille in 1789.“The change in this country,”he wrote in March, 1789,“is such as you can form no idea of. The frivolities of conversation have given way entirely to politics. Men, women, and children talk nothing else ... and mode has acted a wonderful part in the present instance. All the handsome young women, for example, are for thetiers étât, and this is an army more powerful in France than the 200,000 men of the king.”The truth is that an intellectual and moral revolution preceded in France the outbreak of the populace. There was an interior conviction that the government of the country was excessively unjust and oppressive. A love of liberty, a feeling of[pg 76]fraternity, a passion for equality moved the intellect and even the aristocracy of France. In this crisis the reformers looked toward America, for the United States had just trodden the path upon which France was entering.“Our proceedings,”wrote Jefferson to Madison in 1789,“have been viewed as a model for them on every occasion.... Our [authority] has been treated like that of the Bible, open to explanation, but not to question.”Jefferson’s advice was continually sought by Lafayette and others; and his house, maintained in the easy, liberal style of Virginia, was a meeting place for the Revolutionary statesmen. Jefferson dined at three or four o’clock; and after the cloth had been removed he and his guests sat over their wine till nine or ten in the evening.In July, 1789, the National Assembly appointed a committee to draught a constitution, and the committee formally invited the American minister to assist at their sessions and favor them with his advice. This function he felt obliged to decline, as being[pg 77]inconsistent with his post of minister to the king. No man had a nicer sense of propriety than Jefferson; and he punctiliously observed the requirements of his somewhat difficult situation in Paris.What gave Mr. Jefferson the greatest anxiety and trouble, was our relations with the piratical Barbary powers who held the keys of the Mediterranean and sometimes extended their depredations even into the Atlantic. It was a question of paying tribute or going to war; and most of the European powers paid tribute. In 1784, for example, the Dutch contributed to“the high, glorious, mighty, and most noble, King, Prince, and Emperor of Morocco,”a mass of material which included thirty cables, seventy cannon, sixty-nine masts, twenty-one anchors, fifty dozen sail-needles, twenty-four tons of pitch, two hundred and eighty loaves of sugar, twenty-four China punch-bowls, three clocks, and one“very large watch.”Jefferson ascertained that the pirates would require of the United States, as the[pg 78]price of immunity for its commerce, a tribute of about three hundred thousand dollars per annum.“Surely,”he wrote home,“our people will not give this. Would it not be better to offer them an equal treaty? If they refuse, why not go to war with them?”And he pressed upon Mr. Jay, who held the secretaryship of foreign affairs, as the office was then called, the immediate establishment of a navy. But Congress would do nothing; and it was not till Jefferson himself became President that the Barbary pirates were dealt with in a wholesome and stringent manner. During the whole term of his residence at Paris he was negotiating with the Mediterranean powers for the release of unfortunate Americans, many of whom spent the best part of their lives in horrible captivity.Mr. Jefferson’s self-imposed duties were no less arduous. He kept four colleges informed of the most valuable new inventions, discoveries, and books. He had a Yankee talent for mechanical improvements, and he was always on the alert to obtain anything of this nature which he thought might be[pg 79]useful at home. Jefferson himself, by the way, invented the revolving armchair, the buggy-top, and a mould board for a plough. He bought books for Franklin, Madison, Monroe, Wythe, and himself. He informed one correspondent about Watt’s engine, another about the new system of canals. He smuggled rice from Turin in his coat pockets; and he was continually dispatching to agricultural societies in America seeds, roots, nuts, and plants. Houdin was sent over by him to make the statue of Washington; and he forwarded designs for the new capitol at Richmond. For Buffon he procured the skin of an American panther, and also the bones and hide of a New Hampshire moose, to obtain which Governor Sullivan of that State organized a hunting-party in the depth of winter and cut a road through the forest for twenty miles in order to bring out his quarry.Jefferson was the most indefatigable of men, and he did not relax in Paris. He had rooms at a Carthusian monastery to which he repaired when he had some special[pg 80]work on hand. He kept a carriage and horses, but could not afford a saddle horse. Instead of riding, he took a walk every afternoon, usually of six or seven miles, occasionally twice as long. It was while returning with a friend from one of these excursions that he fell and fractured his right wrist; and the fracture was set so imperfectly that it troubled him ever afterward. It was characteristic of Jefferson that he said nothing to his friend as to the injury until they reached home, though his suffering from it was great; and, also, that he at once began to write with the other hand, making numerous entries, on the very night of the accident, in a writing which, though stiff, was, and remains, perfectly clear.Mr. Jefferson’s two daughters had been placed at a convent school near Paris, and he was surprised one day to receive a note from Martha, the elder, asking his permission to remain in the convent for the rest of her life as a nun. For a day or two she received no answer. Then her father called[pg 81]in his carriage, and after a short interview with the abbess took his daughters away; and thenceforth Martha presided, so far as her age permitted, over her father’s household. Not a word upon the subject of her request ever passed between them; and long afterward, in telling the story to her own children, she praised Mr. Jefferson’s tact in dealing with what she described as a transient impulse.After this incident, Jefferson, thinking that it was time to take his daughters home, obtained leave of absence for six months; and the little family landed at Norfolk, November 18, 1789. They journeyed slowly homeward, stopping at one friend’s house after another, and, two days before Christmas, arrived at Monticello, where they were rapturously greeted by the slaves, who took the four horses from the carriage and drew it up the steep incline themselves; and when he alighted, Mr. Jefferson, in spite of himself, was carried into the house on the arms of his black servants and friends.

Two years after his wife’s death, namely, in 1784, Jefferson was chosen by Congress to serve as envoy at Paris, with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. The appointment came at an opportune moment, when his mind was beginning to recover its tone, and he gladly accepted it. It was deemed necessary that the new Confederacy should make treaties with the various governments of Europe, and as soon as the envoys reached Paris, they drew up a treaty such as they hoped might be negotiated. It has been described as“the first serious attempt ever made to conduct the intercourse of nations on Christian principles;”and, on that account, it failed. To this failure there was, however, one exception.“Old Frederick of Prussia,”as Jefferson styled him,“met us[pg 72]cordially;”and with him a treaty was soon concluded.

In May, 1785, Franklin returned to the United States, and Jefferson was appointed minister.“You replace Dr. Franklin,”said the Count of Vergennes when Jefferson announced his appointment.“I succeed,—no one can replace him,”was the reply.

Jefferson’s residence in Paris at this critical period was a fortunate occurrence. It would be a mistake to suppose that he derived his political principles from France:—he carried them there; but he was confirmed in them by witnessing the injustice and misery which resulted to the common people from the monarchical governments of Europe. To James Monroe he wrote in June, 1785:“The pleasure of the trip [to Europe] will be less than you expect, but the utility greater. It will make you adore your own country,—its soil, its climate, its equality, laws, people, and manners. My God! how little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of and which no other people on earth[pg 73]enjoy! I confess I had no idea of it myself.”

To George Wythe he wrote in August, 1786:“Preach, my dear sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils; and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests, and nobles, who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”To Madison, he wrote in January, 1787:“This is agovernmentof wolves over sheep.”Jefferson took the greatest pains to ascertain the condition of the laboring classes. In the course of a journey in the south of France, he wrote to Lafayette, begging him to survey the condition of the people for himself.“To do it most effectually,”he said,“you must be absolutely incognito; you must ferret the people out of their hovels, as I have done; look into their kettles; eat their bread; loll on their beds on pretense of resting your[pg 74]self, but in fact to find if they are soft. You will feel a sublime pleasure in the course of the investigation, and a sublimer one hereafter, when you shall be able to apply your knowledge to the softening of their beds, or the throwing a morsel of meat into their kettle of vegetables.”

These excursions among the French peasantry, who, as Jefferson well knew, were ruinously taxed in order to support an extravagant court and an idle and insolent nobility, made him a fierce Republican.“There is not a crowned head in Europe,”he wrote to General Washington, in 1788,“whose talents or merits would entitle him to be elected a vestryman by the people of America.”

But for the French race Jefferson had an affinity. He was glad to live with people among whom, as he said,“a man might pass a life without encountering a single rudeness.”He liked their polished manners and gay disposition, their aptitude for science, for philosophy, and for art; even their wines and cookery suited his taste, and his preference in this respect was so well known that[pg 75]Patrick Henry once humorously stigmatized him as“a man who had abjured his native victuals.”

Jefferson’s stay in Paris corresponded exactly with the“glorious”period of the French Revolution. He was present at the Assembly of the Notables in 1787, and he witnessed the destruction of the Bastille in 1789.

“The change in this country,”he wrote in March, 1789,“is such as you can form no idea of. The frivolities of conversation have given way entirely to politics. Men, women, and children talk nothing else ... and mode has acted a wonderful part in the present instance. All the handsome young women, for example, are for thetiers étât, and this is an army more powerful in France than the 200,000 men of the king.”

The truth is that an intellectual and moral revolution preceded in France the outbreak of the populace. There was an interior conviction that the government of the country was excessively unjust and oppressive. A love of liberty, a feeling of[pg 76]fraternity, a passion for equality moved the intellect and even the aristocracy of France. In this crisis the reformers looked toward America, for the United States had just trodden the path upon which France was entering.“Our proceedings,”wrote Jefferson to Madison in 1789,“have been viewed as a model for them on every occasion.... Our [authority] has been treated like that of the Bible, open to explanation, but not to question.”

Jefferson’s advice was continually sought by Lafayette and others; and his house, maintained in the easy, liberal style of Virginia, was a meeting place for the Revolutionary statesmen. Jefferson dined at three or four o’clock; and after the cloth had been removed he and his guests sat over their wine till nine or ten in the evening.

In July, 1789, the National Assembly appointed a committee to draught a constitution, and the committee formally invited the American minister to assist at their sessions and favor them with his advice. This function he felt obliged to decline, as being[pg 77]inconsistent with his post of minister to the king. No man had a nicer sense of propriety than Jefferson; and he punctiliously observed the requirements of his somewhat difficult situation in Paris.

What gave Mr. Jefferson the greatest anxiety and trouble, was our relations with the piratical Barbary powers who held the keys of the Mediterranean and sometimes extended their depredations even into the Atlantic. It was a question of paying tribute or going to war; and most of the European powers paid tribute. In 1784, for example, the Dutch contributed to“the high, glorious, mighty, and most noble, King, Prince, and Emperor of Morocco,”a mass of material which included thirty cables, seventy cannon, sixty-nine masts, twenty-one anchors, fifty dozen sail-needles, twenty-four tons of pitch, two hundred and eighty loaves of sugar, twenty-four China punch-bowls, three clocks, and one“very large watch.”

Jefferson ascertained that the pirates would require of the United States, as the[pg 78]price of immunity for its commerce, a tribute of about three hundred thousand dollars per annum.“Surely,”he wrote home,“our people will not give this. Would it not be better to offer them an equal treaty? If they refuse, why not go to war with them?”And he pressed upon Mr. Jay, who held the secretaryship of foreign affairs, as the office was then called, the immediate establishment of a navy. But Congress would do nothing; and it was not till Jefferson himself became President that the Barbary pirates were dealt with in a wholesome and stringent manner. During the whole term of his residence at Paris he was negotiating with the Mediterranean powers for the release of unfortunate Americans, many of whom spent the best part of their lives in horrible captivity.

Mr. Jefferson’s self-imposed duties were no less arduous. He kept four colleges informed of the most valuable new inventions, discoveries, and books. He had a Yankee talent for mechanical improvements, and he was always on the alert to obtain anything of this nature which he thought might be[pg 79]useful at home. Jefferson himself, by the way, invented the revolving armchair, the buggy-top, and a mould board for a plough. He bought books for Franklin, Madison, Monroe, Wythe, and himself. He informed one correspondent about Watt’s engine, another about the new system of canals. He smuggled rice from Turin in his coat pockets; and he was continually dispatching to agricultural societies in America seeds, roots, nuts, and plants. Houdin was sent over by him to make the statue of Washington; and he forwarded designs for the new capitol at Richmond. For Buffon he procured the skin of an American panther, and also the bones and hide of a New Hampshire moose, to obtain which Governor Sullivan of that State organized a hunting-party in the depth of winter and cut a road through the forest for twenty miles in order to bring out his quarry.

Jefferson was the most indefatigable of men, and he did not relax in Paris. He had rooms at a Carthusian monastery to which he repaired when he had some special[pg 80]work on hand. He kept a carriage and horses, but could not afford a saddle horse. Instead of riding, he took a walk every afternoon, usually of six or seven miles, occasionally twice as long. It was while returning with a friend from one of these excursions that he fell and fractured his right wrist; and the fracture was set so imperfectly that it troubled him ever afterward. It was characteristic of Jefferson that he said nothing to his friend as to the injury until they reached home, though his suffering from it was great; and, also, that he at once began to write with the other hand, making numerous entries, on the very night of the accident, in a writing which, though stiff, was, and remains, perfectly clear.

Mr. Jefferson’s two daughters had been placed at a convent school near Paris, and he was surprised one day to receive a note from Martha, the elder, asking his permission to remain in the convent for the rest of her life as a nun. For a day or two she received no answer. Then her father called[pg 81]in his carriage, and after a short interview with the abbess took his daughters away; and thenceforth Martha presided, so far as her age permitted, over her father’s household. Not a word upon the subject of her request ever passed between them; and long afterward, in telling the story to her own children, she praised Mr. Jefferson’s tact in dealing with what she described as a transient impulse.

After this incident, Jefferson, thinking that it was time to take his daughters home, obtained leave of absence for six months; and the little family landed at Norfolk, November 18, 1789. They journeyed slowly homeward, stopping at one friend’s house after another, and, two days before Christmas, arrived at Monticello, where they were rapturously greeted by the slaves, who took the four horses from the carriage and drew it up the steep incline themselves; and when he alighted, Mr. Jefferson, in spite of himself, was carried into the house on the arms of his black servants and friends.

[pg 82]VIIISECRETARY OF STATEMr. Jefferson had a strong desire to resume his post as minister to France, but he yielded to Washington’s earnest request that he should become Secretary of State in the new government. He lingered long enough at Monticello to witness the marriage of his daughter Martha to Thomas Mann Randolph, and then set out upon a cold, wet journey of twenty-one days, reaching New York, which was then the seat of government, late in March, 1790. He hired a small house at No. 57 Maiden Lane, and immediately attacked the arrears of work which had been accumulating for six months. The unusual confinement, aggravated, perhaps, by a homesickness, clearly revealed in his letters, for his daughters and for Monticello, brought on what seems to have been a[pg 83]neuralgic headache which lasted for three weeks. It may have been caused in part by the climate of New York, as to which Mr. Jefferson observed:“Spring and fall they never have, so far as I can learn. They have ten months of winter, two of summer, with some winter days interspersed.”But there were other causes beside homesickness and headache which made Jefferson unhappy in his new position. Long afterward he described them as follows:—“I had left France in the first year of her Revolution, in the fervor of natural rights and zeal for reformation. My conscientious devotion to those rights could not be heightened, but it had been aroused and excited by daily exercise. The President received me cordially, and my colleagues and the circle of principal citizens apparently with welcome. The courtesies of dinners given to me, as a stranger newly arrived among them, placed me at once in their familiar society. But I cannot describe the wonder and mortification with which the table conversations filled me. Politics were[pg 84]the chief topic, and a preference of kingly over republican government was evidently the favorite sentiment. An apostate I could not be, nor yet a hypocrite; and I found myself for the most part the only advocate on the republican side of the question, unless among the guests there chanced to be some member of that party from the legislative houses.”It must be remembered that Jefferson’s absence in France had been the period of the Confederacy, when the inability of Congress to enforce its laws and to control the States was so evident and so disastrous that the need of a stronger central government had been impressed on men’s minds. The new Constitution had been devised to supply that need, but it was elastic in its terms, and it avoided all details. Should it be construed in an aristocratic or in a democratic spirit, and should the new nation be given an aristocratic or a democratic twist? This was a burning question, and it gave rise to that long struggle led by Hamilton on one side and by Jefferson on the other, which ended[pg 85]with the election of Jefferson as President in the year 1800.Hamilton and his party utterly disbelieved in government by the people.2John Adams declared that the English Constitution, barring its element of corruption, was an ideal constitution. Hamilton went farther and asserted that the English form of government, corruption and all, was the best practicable form. An aristocratic senate, chosen for a long term, if not for life, was thought to be essential even by Mr. Adams. Hamilton’s notion was that mankind were incapable of self-government, and must be governed in one or two ways,—by force or by fraud. Property was, in his view, the ideal basis of government; and he was inclined to fix the possession of“a thousand Spanish dollars”as the proper qualification for a voter.The difference between the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian view arises chiefly from[pg 86]a different belief as to the connection between education and morality. All aristocratic systems must, in the last analysis, be founded either upon brute force or else upon the assumption that education and morality go hand-in-hand, and that the well-to-do and best educated class is morally superior to the less educated. Jefferson rejected this assumption, and all real believers in democracy must take their stand with him. He once stated his creed upon this point in a letter as follows:—“The moral sense or conscience is as much a part of man as his leg or arm.... It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree to the guidance of reason, but it is a small stock which is required for this, even a less one than what we call common sense. State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.”This is sound philosophy. The great prob[pg 87]lems in government, whether they relate to matters external or internal, are moral, not intellectual. There are, indeed, purely intellectual problems, such as the question between free silver and a gold standard; and as to these problems, the people may go wrong. But they are not vital. No nation ever yet achieved glory or incurred destruction by taking one course rather than another in a matter of trade or finance. The crucial questions are moral questions, and experience has shown that as to such matters the people can be trusted. As Jefferson himself said,“The will of the majority, the natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man. Perhaps even this may sometimes err; but its errors are honest, solitary, and short-lived.”Washington’s cabinet was made up on the theory that it should represent not the party in power, but both parties,—for two parties already existed, the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, who, under Jefferson’s influence, soon became known by the better name of Republicans. The cabinet consisted of four[pg 88]members, Jefferson, Secretary of State, Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Knox, Secretary of War, and Edmund Randolph, Attorney-General.Knox sided almost always with Hamilton, and Randolph was an inconstant supporter of Jefferson. Though an able and learned man, he was given to hair-splitting and hesitation, and, in allusion to his habit of arguing on one side, but finally voting upon the other, Jefferson once remarked that he usually gave the shell to his friends, and reserved the oyster for his opponents.The political opinions of Jefferson and Hamilton were so diametrically opposed that the cabinet was soon torn by dissension. Hamilton was for a strong government, for surrounding the President with pomp and etiquette, for a central authority as against the authority of the States. In pursuance of these ideas, he brought forward his famous measures for assumption of the state debts by the national government, for the funding of the national debt, and finally for the creation of a national bank. Jefferson opposed[pg 89]these measures, and, although the assumption and the funding laws had grave faults, and led to speculation, and in the case of many persons to financial ruin, yet it must be admitted that Jefferson never appreciated their merits.The truth is that both Hamilton and Jefferson were essential to the development of this country; and the principles of each have been adopted in part, and rejected in part. Hamilton’s conception of a central government predominating over the state governments has been realized, though not nearly to the extent to which he would have carried it. On the other hand, his various schemes for making the government into an aristocracy instead of a democracy have all been abandoned, or, like the Electoral College, turned to a use the opposite of what he intended. So, Jefferson’s view of state rights has not strictly been maintained; but his fundamental principles of popular government and popular education have made the United States what it is, and are destined, we hope, when fully developed, to make it something better yet.[pg 90]No less an authority than that of Washington, who appreciated the merits of both men, could have kept the peace between them. Hamilton under an assumed name attacked Jefferson in the public prints. Jefferson never published a line unsigned; but he permitted Philip Freneau, who had slight employment as a translator in his department, and the trifling salary of $250 a year, to wage war against Hamilton in the gazette which Freneau published; and he even stood by while Freneau attacked Washington. Washington indeed once gave Jefferson a hint on this subject, which the latter refused to take.“He was evidently sore and warm,”wrote Jefferson,“and I took his intention to be that I should interfere in some way with Freneau, perhaps withdraw his appointment of translating clerk to my office. But I will not do it. His paper has saved our constitution, which was galloping fast into monarchy.... And the President has not, ... with his usual good sense andsang froid, ... seen that, though some bad things had passed through it to the public, yet the good have predominated immensely.”[pg 91]In the spring of 1792, Jefferson, who had now been two years in office, was extremely anxious to retire, not only because his situation at Washington was unpleasant, but because his affairs at home had been so neglected during his long absences that he was in danger of bankruptcy. His estate was large, but it was incumbered by a debt to English creditors of $13,000. Some years before he had sold for cash a farm near Monticello in order to discharge this debt; but at that time the Revolutionary war had begun, and the Virginia legislature passed an act inviting all men owing money to English creditors to deposit the same in the state treasury, the State agreeing to pay it over to the English creditors after the war. Jefferson accordingly deposited the $13,000 in gold which he had just received. Later, however, this law was rescinded, and the money received under it was paid back, not in gold, but in paper money of the State, which was then so depreciated as to be almost worthless. In riding by the farm thus disposed of, Jefferson in after years would sometimes[pg 92]point to it and say:“That farm I once sold for an overcoat;”—the price of the overcoat having been the $13,000 in paper money. Cornwallis, as we have seen, destroyed Jefferson’s property to an amount more than double this debt, which might be considered as a second payment of it; but Jefferson finally paid it the third time,—and this time into the hands of the actual creditor. Meanwhile, he wrote:“The torment of mind I endure till the moment shall arrive when I shall not owe a shilling on earth is such really as to render life of little value.”Urged by all these motives, Jefferson had resolved to resign his office in 1792, notwithstanding the remonstrances of Washington; but the attacks made upon him by the Federalists, especially those made in the newspapers, were so violent that a retirement at that time would have given the public cause to believe that he had been driven from office by his enemies. Jefferson, therefore, concluded to remain Secretary of State a few months longer; and those few, as it happened, were the most important of the whole term.[pg 93]On January 21, 1793, King Louis of France was executed, and within a week thereafter England was at war with the new rulers of the French. Difficult questions at once arose under our treaties with France. The French people thought that we were in honor bound to assist them in their struggle against Great Britain, as they had assisted us; and they sent over as minister“Citizen”Genet, in the frigate L’Embuscade. The frigate, carrying forty guns and three hundred men, sailed into the harbor of Charleston, April 8,1793, with a liberty-cap for her figure-head, and a British prize in her wake. Citizen Genet, even for a Frenchman, was a most indiscreet and hot-headed person, and before he had been a week on shore he had issued commissions to privateers manned by American citizens. L’Embuscade then proceeded to Philadelphia, where, as in Charleston, Citizen Genet was welcomed with the utmost enthusiasm. His coming was hailed by the Republicans generally with rapture; and their cry was for war.“I wish,”wrote Jefferson, in a con[pg 94]fidential letter to Monroe,“that we may be able to repress the people within the limits of a fair neutrality.”This was the position taken also by Washington and the whole cabinet; and it is a striking example of Jefferson’s wisdom, justice, and firmness, that, although the bulk of the Republicans were carried off their feet by sympathy with France and with Genet, he, the very person in the United States who most loved the French and best understood the causes and motives of the French Revolution, withstood the storm, and kept his eye fixed upon the interests of his own country. England, contrary to the treaty which closed the Revolutionary War, still retained her military posts in the west; and she was the undisputed mistress of the sea. War with her would therefore have been suicidal for the United States. The time for that had not yet come. Moreover, if the United States had taken sides with France, a war with Spain also would inevitably have followed; and Spain then held Florida and the mouth of the Mississippi.[pg 95]Nevertheless, there were different ways of preserving neutrality: there were the offensive way and the friendly way. Hamilton, whose extreme bias toward England made him bitter against France, was always for the one; Jefferson for the other. A single example will suffice as an illustration. M. Genet asked as a favor that the United States should advance an installment of its debt to France. Hamilton advised that the request be refused without a word of explanation. Jefferson’s opinion was that the request should be granted, if that were lawful, and if it were found to be unlawful, them that the refusal should be explained. Mr. Jefferson’s advice was followed.Mr. Jefferson, also, though he firmly withstood the many illegal and unwarrantable acts attempted by Genet, did so in such a manner as not to lose the friendship of the minister or even a degree of control over him. To Madison Jefferson wrote of Genet:“He renders my position immensely difficult. He does me justice personally; and giving him time to vent himself and become more[pg 96]cool, I am on a footing to advise him freely, and he respects it; but he will break out again on the very first occasion.”Finally Citizen Genet, becoming desperate, fitted out one of L’Embuscade’s prizes as a frigate to be used against England, which amounted on the part of the United States to a breach of neutrality; and being hindered in sending her to sea, he threatened to appeal from the President to the people of the United States. Thereupon the question arose, what shall be done with Genet? and upon this question the cabinet divided with more than usual acrimony. Knox was for sending him out of the country without ceremony; Hamilton for publishing the whole correspondence between him and the government, with a statement of his proceedings. Jefferson was for sending an account of the affair to the French government, with copies of the correspondence, and a request for Genet’s recall. Meanwhile the whole country was thrown into a state of tumultuous excitement. There was a riot in Philadelphia; and even the[pg 97]sacred character of Washington was assailed in prose and verse.The President decided to adopt the course proposed by Jefferson; France appointed another minister, and the Genet episode ended by his marriage to a daughter of George Clinton, governor of New York, in which State he lived thereafter as a respectable citizen and a patron of agriculture. He died in the year 1834.The summer of delirium at Philadelphia culminated in the panic and desolation of the yellow fever, and every member of the government fled from the city, Jefferson being the last to depart.When, in the next year, the correspondence between Genet and Jefferson, and between the English minister and Jefferson, was published, the Secretary was seen to have conducted it on his part with so much ability, discretion, and tact, and with so true a sense of what was due to each nation concerned, that he may be said to have retired to his farm in a blaze of glory.

Mr. Jefferson had a strong desire to resume his post as minister to France, but he yielded to Washington’s earnest request that he should become Secretary of State in the new government. He lingered long enough at Monticello to witness the marriage of his daughter Martha to Thomas Mann Randolph, and then set out upon a cold, wet journey of twenty-one days, reaching New York, which was then the seat of government, late in March, 1790. He hired a small house at No. 57 Maiden Lane, and immediately attacked the arrears of work which had been accumulating for six months. The unusual confinement, aggravated, perhaps, by a homesickness, clearly revealed in his letters, for his daughters and for Monticello, brought on what seems to have been a[pg 83]neuralgic headache which lasted for three weeks. It may have been caused in part by the climate of New York, as to which Mr. Jefferson observed:“Spring and fall they never have, so far as I can learn. They have ten months of winter, two of summer, with some winter days interspersed.”But there were other causes beside homesickness and headache which made Jefferson unhappy in his new position. Long afterward he described them as follows:—

“I had left France in the first year of her Revolution, in the fervor of natural rights and zeal for reformation. My conscientious devotion to those rights could not be heightened, but it had been aroused and excited by daily exercise. The President received me cordially, and my colleagues and the circle of principal citizens apparently with welcome. The courtesies of dinners given to me, as a stranger newly arrived among them, placed me at once in their familiar society. But I cannot describe the wonder and mortification with which the table conversations filled me. Politics were[pg 84]the chief topic, and a preference of kingly over republican government was evidently the favorite sentiment. An apostate I could not be, nor yet a hypocrite; and I found myself for the most part the only advocate on the republican side of the question, unless among the guests there chanced to be some member of that party from the legislative houses.”

It must be remembered that Jefferson’s absence in France had been the period of the Confederacy, when the inability of Congress to enforce its laws and to control the States was so evident and so disastrous that the need of a stronger central government had been impressed on men’s minds. The new Constitution had been devised to supply that need, but it was elastic in its terms, and it avoided all details. Should it be construed in an aristocratic or in a democratic spirit, and should the new nation be given an aristocratic or a democratic twist? This was a burning question, and it gave rise to that long struggle led by Hamilton on one side and by Jefferson on the other, which ended[pg 85]with the election of Jefferson as President in the year 1800.

Hamilton and his party utterly disbelieved in government by the people.2John Adams declared that the English Constitution, barring its element of corruption, was an ideal constitution. Hamilton went farther and asserted that the English form of government, corruption and all, was the best practicable form. An aristocratic senate, chosen for a long term, if not for life, was thought to be essential even by Mr. Adams. Hamilton’s notion was that mankind were incapable of self-government, and must be governed in one or two ways,—by force or by fraud. Property was, in his view, the ideal basis of government; and he was inclined to fix the possession of“a thousand Spanish dollars”as the proper qualification for a voter.

The difference between the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian view arises chiefly from[pg 86]a different belief as to the connection between education and morality. All aristocratic systems must, in the last analysis, be founded either upon brute force or else upon the assumption that education and morality go hand-in-hand, and that the well-to-do and best educated class is morally superior to the less educated. Jefferson rejected this assumption, and all real believers in democracy must take their stand with him. He once stated his creed upon this point in a letter as follows:—

“The moral sense or conscience is as much a part of man as his leg or arm.... It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree to the guidance of reason, but it is a small stock which is required for this, even a less one than what we call common sense. State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.”

This is sound philosophy. The great prob[pg 87]lems in government, whether they relate to matters external or internal, are moral, not intellectual. There are, indeed, purely intellectual problems, such as the question between free silver and a gold standard; and as to these problems, the people may go wrong. But they are not vital. No nation ever yet achieved glory or incurred destruction by taking one course rather than another in a matter of trade or finance. The crucial questions are moral questions, and experience has shown that as to such matters the people can be trusted. As Jefferson himself said,“The will of the majority, the natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man. Perhaps even this may sometimes err; but its errors are honest, solitary, and short-lived.”

Washington’s cabinet was made up on the theory that it should represent not the party in power, but both parties,—for two parties already existed, the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, who, under Jefferson’s influence, soon became known by the better name of Republicans. The cabinet consisted of four[pg 88]members, Jefferson, Secretary of State, Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Knox, Secretary of War, and Edmund Randolph, Attorney-General.

Knox sided almost always with Hamilton, and Randolph was an inconstant supporter of Jefferson. Though an able and learned man, he was given to hair-splitting and hesitation, and, in allusion to his habit of arguing on one side, but finally voting upon the other, Jefferson once remarked that he usually gave the shell to his friends, and reserved the oyster for his opponents.

The political opinions of Jefferson and Hamilton were so diametrically opposed that the cabinet was soon torn by dissension. Hamilton was for a strong government, for surrounding the President with pomp and etiquette, for a central authority as against the authority of the States. In pursuance of these ideas, he brought forward his famous measures for assumption of the state debts by the national government, for the funding of the national debt, and finally for the creation of a national bank. Jefferson opposed[pg 89]these measures, and, although the assumption and the funding laws had grave faults, and led to speculation, and in the case of many persons to financial ruin, yet it must be admitted that Jefferson never appreciated their merits.

The truth is that both Hamilton and Jefferson were essential to the development of this country; and the principles of each have been adopted in part, and rejected in part. Hamilton’s conception of a central government predominating over the state governments has been realized, though not nearly to the extent to which he would have carried it. On the other hand, his various schemes for making the government into an aristocracy instead of a democracy have all been abandoned, or, like the Electoral College, turned to a use the opposite of what he intended. So, Jefferson’s view of state rights has not strictly been maintained; but his fundamental principles of popular government and popular education have made the United States what it is, and are destined, we hope, when fully developed, to make it something better yet.

No less an authority than that of Washington, who appreciated the merits of both men, could have kept the peace between them. Hamilton under an assumed name attacked Jefferson in the public prints. Jefferson never published a line unsigned; but he permitted Philip Freneau, who had slight employment as a translator in his department, and the trifling salary of $250 a year, to wage war against Hamilton in the gazette which Freneau published; and he even stood by while Freneau attacked Washington. Washington indeed once gave Jefferson a hint on this subject, which the latter refused to take.“He was evidently sore and warm,”wrote Jefferson,“and I took his intention to be that I should interfere in some way with Freneau, perhaps withdraw his appointment of translating clerk to my office. But I will not do it. His paper has saved our constitution, which was galloping fast into monarchy.... And the President has not, ... with his usual good sense andsang froid, ... seen that, though some bad things had passed through it to the public, yet the good have predominated immensely.”

In the spring of 1792, Jefferson, who had now been two years in office, was extremely anxious to retire, not only because his situation at Washington was unpleasant, but because his affairs at home had been so neglected during his long absences that he was in danger of bankruptcy. His estate was large, but it was incumbered by a debt to English creditors of $13,000. Some years before he had sold for cash a farm near Monticello in order to discharge this debt; but at that time the Revolutionary war had begun, and the Virginia legislature passed an act inviting all men owing money to English creditors to deposit the same in the state treasury, the State agreeing to pay it over to the English creditors after the war. Jefferson accordingly deposited the $13,000 in gold which he had just received. Later, however, this law was rescinded, and the money received under it was paid back, not in gold, but in paper money of the State, which was then so depreciated as to be almost worthless. In riding by the farm thus disposed of, Jefferson in after years would sometimes[pg 92]point to it and say:“That farm I once sold for an overcoat;”—the price of the overcoat having been the $13,000 in paper money. Cornwallis, as we have seen, destroyed Jefferson’s property to an amount more than double this debt, which might be considered as a second payment of it; but Jefferson finally paid it the third time,—and this time into the hands of the actual creditor. Meanwhile, he wrote:“The torment of mind I endure till the moment shall arrive when I shall not owe a shilling on earth is such really as to render life of little value.”

Urged by all these motives, Jefferson had resolved to resign his office in 1792, notwithstanding the remonstrances of Washington; but the attacks made upon him by the Federalists, especially those made in the newspapers, were so violent that a retirement at that time would have given the public cause to believe that he had been driven from office by his enemies. Jefferson, therefore, concluded to remain Secretary of State a few months longer; and those few, as it happened, were the most important of the whole term.

On January 21, 1793, King Louis of France was executed, and within a week thereafter England was at war with the new rulers of the French. Difficult questions at once arose under our treaties with France. The French people thought that we were in honor bound to assist them in their struggle against Great Britain, as they had assisted us; and they sent over as minister“Citizen”Genet, in the frigate L’Embuscade. The frigate, carrying forty guns and three hundred men, sailed into the harbor of Charleston, April 8,1793, with a liberty-cap for her figure-head, and a British prize in her wake. Citizen Genet, even for a Frenchman, was a most indiscreet and hot-headed person, and before he had been a week on shore he had issued commissions to privateers manned by American citizens. L’Embuscade then proceeded to Philadelphia, where, as in Charleston, Citizen Genet was welcomed with the utmost enthusiasm. His coming was hailed by the Republicans generally with rapture; and their cry was for war.“I wish,”wrote Jefferson, in a con[pg 94]fidential letter to Monroe,“that we may be able to repress the people within the limits of a fair neutrality.”

This was the position taken also by Washington and the whole cabinet; and it is a striking example of Jefferson’s wisdom, justice, and firmness, that, although the bulk of the Republicans were carried off their feet by sympathy with France and with Genet, he, the very person in the United States who most loved the French and best understood the causes and motives of the French Revolution, withstood the storm, and kept his eye fixed upon the interests of his own country. England, contrary to the treaty which closed the Revolutionary War, still retained her military posts in the west; and she was the undisputed mistress of the sea. War with her would therefore have been suicidal for the United States. The time for that had not yet come. Moreover, if the United States had taken sides with France, a war with Spain also would inevitably have followed; and Spain then held Florida and the mouth of the Mississippi.

Nevertheless, there were different ways of preserving neutrality: there were the offensive way and the friendly way. Hamilton, whose extreme bias toward England made him bitter against France, was always for the one; Jefferson for the other. A single example will suffice as an illustration. M. Genet asked as a favor that the United States should advance an installment of its debt to France. Hamilton advised that the request be refused without a word of explanation. Jefferson’s opinion was that the request should be granted, if that were lawful, and if it were found to be unlawful, them that the refusal should be explained. Mr. Jefferson’s advice was followed.

Mr. Jefferson, also, though he firmly withstood the many illegal and unwarrantable acts attempted by Genet, did so in such a manner as not to lose the friendship of the minister or even a degree of control over him. To Madison Jefferson wrote of Genet:“He renders my position immensely difficult. He does me justice personally; and giving him time to vent himself and become more[pg 96]cool, I am on a footing to advise him freely, and he respects it; but he will break out again on the very first occasion.”

Finally Citizen Genet, becoming desperate, fitted out one of L’Embuscade’s prizes as a frigate to be used against England, which amounted on the part of the United States to a breach of neutrality; and being hindered in sending her to sea, he threatened to appeal from the President to the people of the United States. Thereupon the question arose, what shall be done with Genet? and upon this question the cabinet divided with more than usual acrimony. Knox was for sending him out of the country without ceremony; Hamilton for publishing the whole correspondence between him and the government, with a statement of his proceedings. Jefferson was for sending an account of the affair to the French government, with copies of the correspondence, and a request for Genet’s recall. Meanwhile the whole country was thrown into a state of tumultuous excitement. There was a riot in Philadelphia; and even the[pg 97]sacred character of Washington was assailed in prose and verse.

The President decided to adopt the course proposed by Jefferson; France appointed another minister, and the Genet episode ended by his marriage to a daughter of George Clinton, governor of New York, in which State he lived thereafter as a respectable citizen and a patron of agriculture. He died in the year 1834.

The summer of delirium at Philadelphia culminated in the panic and desolation of the yellow fever, and every member of the government fled from the city, Jefferson being the last to depart.

When, in the next year, the correspondence between Genet and Jefferson, and between the English minister and Jefferson, was published, the Secretary was seen to have conducted it on his part with so much ability, discretion, and tact, and with so true a sense of what was due to each nation concerned, that he may be said to have retired to his farm in a blaze of glory.

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