Thomas Jefferson as a Sore-Head

PUBLIC men were apparently more sensitive to criticism in the last century than in this. Junius has had many imitators ; he founded a school ; he invented an industry; and the efforts of so many keen, reckless, ill-informed makers of antithesis and epigram have, perhaps, toughened the skins of public men, so that they now scarcely feel what would have made the statesmen of other days writhe in torment. It is an easy mode of producing an effect, this business of assailing the anxious and heavy-laden servants of the State. It was not difficult for a perfumed dandy in the amphitheatre, yawning at his ease, to find fault with the scarred and sweating gladiator fighting for life in the arena. It is not difficult to prepare in the secrecy of a garret a barbed and stinging bolt, and hurl it from the safe ambush of a pseudonyme at a distinguished combatant while he is absorbed in a contest with open foes. Poor Chatterton did it almost as well as Junius. At sixteen, an attorney’s apprentice in far-off Bristol, singularly ignorant of the world, knowing nothing of politics, he wrote fulminations against ministers, which Wilkes thought good enough to print in the “ North Briton.” So easy a trade is it to one who is ignorant enough and reckless enough. It were easy now to prove that Junius himself, who showed such skill in the art of hiding, knew little more of the real character, aims, and difficulties of the men whom he assailed, than the boy Chatterton. Happily, the industry of so many anonymous and irresponsible cowards has lessened the power of the most envenomed criticism to injure or torture a good minister. Unhappily, it has rendered the most just exposure of a bad one all but ineffectual. Truth and calumny we are apt alike to reject when they concern a public man.

Jefferson was destined to suffer a very large share of ignorant and reckless criticism, which he learned to endure with the imperturbability of trained good sense. However, in 1781 he was not only a young man, but the world was younger than it is now, not having outgrown the veneration once supposed to be due to all governors as such. It was a fearful thing still to censure the head of a State. One young man in the Legislature of Virginia had publicly cast the blame of Virginia’s desolation, during the first months of 1781, upon Governor Jefferson ; and in this censure some other members were known to acquiesce. It fills the reader of today with astonishment to observe, in Jefferson’s correspondence, how deeply he took this to heart, and how long he brooded over it. Every man in a situation to judge his conduct had commended it. Washington, Gates, Greene, Lafayette, Steuben, with whom he had co-operated in the defence of the State, had applauded his wisdom and promptitude ; and many of his fellow-citizens complained only that he had done too much. But the single word of censure outweighed all applause. For many months he could not get over it. And, indeed, we must own that the censure was ill-timed, when his estate was overrun, his old servants destroyed, his family driven from their home, and himself pursued ; all because he had been his country’s conspicuously faithful servant in a perilous time.

Such was his indignation, that he forswore public service forever. He would go back once to the Legislature to meet his accusers face to face ; but, after that was done, nothing, no, nothing, should ever draw him from his books, his studies, his family, his gardens, his farms again. He had had enough of public life. No slave, he wrote, was so wretched as “ the minister of a commonwealth.” He declared that the only reward he had ever desired for his thirteen years of public service was the good-will of his fellowcitizens, and he had not even obtained that ; nay, he had lost the little share of their esteem he had once enjoyed. Thus he exaggerated the injustice done him, and nursed, Achilles-like, his mortification.

In August, Lafayette forwarded to him through the lines a letter from the President of Congress, telling him that, six weeks before, Congress had again elected him to a foreign mission. But he would not be consoled. For once, the health of his wife and the condition of his family (their infant child had died a few weeks before) were such as to permit their attempting the voyage together. He might have gone to Europe in 1781 ; he would have gone, but for this slight show of legislative censure. “ I lose an opportunity,” he wrote to Lafayette, “the only one I ever had, and perhaps ever shall have, of combining public service with private gratification ; of seeing countries whose improvements in science, in arts, in civilization it has been my fortune to admire at a distance, but never to see, and at the same time of lending some aid to a cause which has been handed on from its first organization to its present stage by every effort of which my poor faculties were capable. These, however, have not been such as to give satisfaction to some of my countrymen, and it has become necessary for me to remain in the State till a later period in the present year than is consistent with an acceptance of what has been offered me.”

Before the Legislature met again, the winter of Virginia’s discontent was made glorious summer by the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. All thought of censure was swallowed up in that stupendous joy. December 19, 1781, exactly a month after the surrender, Jefferson, occupying his ancestral seat as member for Albemarle, — to which he had been re-elected without one dissentient vote, — rose in his place, reminded the House of the intimated censure of the last session, and said he was ready to meet and answer any charges that might be brought against him. No one responded. His accuser was absent. There was silence in the chamber. After a pause, a member rose and offered a resolution thanking him for his “ impartial, upright, and attentive administration” ; which passed both Council and Assembly unanimously.

Even this did not heal the wound. As he refrained from attending the spring session of the Legislature, James Monroe wrote to him a letter of remonstrance, telling him that the public remarked his absence and were disposed to blame him for withholding his help at so difficult a time. He answered, that, before announcing his determination to retire from public life, he had examined well his heart, to learn whether any lurking particle of political ambition remained in it to make him uneasy in a private station. “ I became satisfied,” he continued, “ that every fibre of that passion was thoroughly eradicated.” He thought, too, that thirteen years of public service had given him a right now to withdraw and devote his energies to the care and education of the two families dependent upon him, and the restoration of estates impaired by neglect or laid waste by war. Nor could he forget the wrong done him in the Assembly. “I felt,” he wrote, “that these injuries, for such they have since been acknowledged, had inflicted a wound on my spirit which will only be cured by the all-healing grave.” For these and other reasons, he held to his purpose to withdraw from all participation in public affairs, and dedicate the whole residue of his life to the education of his children, the culture of his lands, and the sweet toils of the library. He concluded by inviting his young friend to visit him at Monticello. “ You will find me busy,” he said, “but in lighter occupations.”

Yes, he was busy ; but few persons who look over the work he was then doing regard it as a very light occupation. The French government had instructed its minister at Philadelphia to gather and transmit to Paris information respecting the States of the American Confederacy ; and the secretary of legation had sent Mr. Jefferson a list of questions to answer concerning Virginia. From childhood, he had observed nature in his native land with the curiosity of an intelligent and sympathetic mind ; and, in his maturer age, even in the busiest and most anxious times, he had been ever a student, an inquirer, a collector. All the stores of knowledge accumulated in so many years he now poured upon paper, and interspersed subtle and curious essays upon points of natural history, geography, morals, politics, and literature. M. de Marbois must have been astonished to receive from him, not a series of short, dry answers to official questions, but a volume, teeming with suggestive fact and thought, warm with humane sentiment, and couched in the fluent language natural to a sanguine and glowing mind. It is in this work that the chapter occurs which gave so many powerful texts to our noble Abolitionists, during their eighty years’ war with slavery : —

“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and, thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. That man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.... I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever; that, considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situations, is among possible events ; that it may become probable by supernatural interference ! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”

At the close of the war, then, Jefferson supposed his public life ended. He was sure of it. He had publicly said so. Monroe had remonstrated with him ; Madison had remonstrated ; his old constituents and Congress both solicited his services ; but he could not be lured again from his pleasant mountain home and its delicious duties into the arena of public strife, whence he had but lately issued, wounded and sore. I suppose he was wrong in this ; for if he, with his ample fortune, his fine endowments, his health, his knowledge, and his culture, was not bound to render some service to Virginia in 1782, of whom could public service be reasonably demanded ?

It was a delightful dream while it lasted, that of spending a long life in the Garden of Virginia, with an adored wife, troops of affectionate children, and an ever-growing library. We have a glimpse of him there in the spring of 1782, when he was visited by one of the officers of the French Army, MajorGeneral the Marquis de Chastellux. During this year, while the negotiations for peace were lingering, the French officers were much in American society, making an impress upon manners and character that is not yet obliterated. Americans were peculiarly susceptible then to the influence of men whose demeanor and tone were in such agreeable contrast to those of the English. The French were exceedingly beloved at the time ; not the officers only, but the men as well ; for had they not marched through the country without burning a rail, without touching an apple in an orchard, without ogling a girl by the roadside ?

The influence of the French officers upon the young gentlemen of the United States was not an unmixed good. It was from them that the American of eighty years ago caught the ridiculous affectation of fighting duels, which raged like a mania from 1790 to 1804. The French nobleman of the old school had also acquired an art, which men of our race never attain, the art of making sensual vice seem elegant and becoming. AngloSaxons are only respectable when they are strictly virtuous. It has not been given to us to lie with grace, and sin with dignity. We are nothing if not moral. And, doubtless, if a man permits himself to conduct his life on an animal basis, it is honester in him, it is better for others, for him to appear the beast he is. The dissoluteness of the English officers at Philadelphia and New York, being open and offensive, was not calculated to make American youth cast aside the lessons of purity which they had learned in their clean and honorable homes. Dashing down Chestnut Street in a curricle with a brazen hussy by your side, is not as pretty a feat as carrying on what was styled “ an intrigue,” in an elegant house. It was these French officers who infected many American youth besides Hamilton and Burr and their young friends with the most erroneous and pernicious idea that ever deluded youth,— that it is but a trifling, if not a becoming, lapse to be unchaste.

Jefferson, who had the happy art of getting the good, and letting alone the evil, of whatever he encountered on his way through life, was strongly drawn to this Marquis de Chastellux, a man of mature age, of some note in literature, a member of the Academy, and full of the peculiar spirit of his class and time. Jefferson had invited him to visit Monticello. On an afternoon in the first week of May, 1782, behold the Marquis and his three friends — a cavalcade of four gentlemen, six mounted servants, and a led horse — winding up the Little Mount, and coming in sight of the “ rather elegant,” unfinished Italian villa on its summit. I am afraid Mrs. Jefferson saw this brave company dismount with some dismay, for she was not in a condition to entertain strangers. They, however, were well pleased to see a bit of Europe in those western wilds. “ Mr. Jefferson,” wrote the Marquis, “is the first American who has consulted the fine arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather ” ; which was a sweeping statement, though not far from the truth. Upon entering, he met the master of the house ; “ a man not yet forty, tall, and with a mild and pleasing countenance ”; “ an American, who, without ever having quitted his own country, is at once a musician, skilled in drawing, a geometrician, an astronomer, a natural philosopher, legislator, and statesman ” ; “a philosopher in voluntary retirement from the world and public business,” because “ the minds of his countrymen are not yet in a condition either to bear the light or to suffer contradiction ” ; blessed with “a mild and amiable wife, and charming children of whose education he himself takes charge.” Mr. Jefferson, he adds, received his invited guest without any show of cordiality, even with something like coldness ; but before they had conversed two hours, they were as intimate as if they had passed their whole lives together. During four days the joy of their intercourse never lessened ; for their conversation, “ always varied and interesting, was supported by that sweet satisfaction experienced by two persons, who, in communicating their sentiments and opinions, are invariably in unison, and who understand one another at the first hint.”

It so chanced that the Frenchman was a lover of Ossian. “ I recollect with pleasure,” he tells us, “that, as we were conversing one evening over a bowl of punch, after Mrs. Jefferson had retired, our conversation turned on the poems of Ossian. It was a spark of electricity which passed rapidly from one to the other. We recollected the passages in those sublime poems which had particularly struck us, and entertained with them my fellow - travellers, who fortunately knew English well. In our enthusiasm the book was sent for, and placed near the bowl where, by their mutual aid, the night advanced imperceptibly upon us. Sometimes natural philosophy, at others politics or the arts, were the topics of our conversation ; for no object had escaped Mr. Jefferson, and it seemed as if from his youth he had placed his mind, as he had done his house, on an elevated situation, from which he might contemplate the universe.”

Sometimes he rambled with his guests about the grounds, showing them his little herd of deer, a score in number. “ He amuses himself by feeding them with Indian corn, of which they are very fond, and which they eat out of his hand. I followed him one evening into a deep valley, where they are accustomed to assemble towards the close of the day, and saw them walk, run, and bound ”; but neither guest nor host could decide upon the family to which they belonged. In other branches of natural science the Marquis found Mr. Jefferson more proficient, particularly in meteorology. He had made, in conjunction with Professor Madison, of William and Mary, a series of observations of the ruling winds at Williamsburg and at Monticello, and discovered that, while the northeast wind had blown one hundred and twentyseven times at Williamsburg, it had blown but thirty-two times at Monticello. The four days passed like four minutes, says the Marquis. The party of Frenchmen continued their journey toward the Natural Bridge, on land belonging to their host, eighty miles distant. Mr. Jefferson would have gone with them : “ but his wife being expected every moment to lie in, as he is as good a husband as he is an excellent philosopher and virtuous citizen, he only acted as my guide for about sixteen miles, to the passage of the little river Mechinn, where we parted, and, I presume to flatter myself, with mutual regret.”

He might flatter himself so far. Mr Jefferson was extremely pleased with him ; and this was the beginning of that fondness for the French people which he carried with him through the rest of his life.

Before the Marquis de Chastellux had been gone from Monticello many hours, the sixth child of Thomas and Martha Jefferson was born, making the number of their living children three. It was death to the mother. She lingered four months, keeping her husband and all the household in what he termed “dreadful suspense.” He took his turn with his sister and with her sister in sitting up at night. With his own hands he administered her medicines and her drinks. For four months he was either at her bedside, or at work in a little room near the head of her bed, never beyond call. His eldest daughter, a little girl of ten, but maturer than her years denoted, never lost the vivid recollection of her father’s tender assiduity during those months. When the morning of September 6th dawned, it was evident that she had not many hours to live, and all the family gathered round her bed. Thirty years after, six of the female servants of the house enjoyed a kind of honorable distinction at Monticello, as “ the servants who were in the room when Mrs. Jefferson died,” — such an impression did the scene leave upon the minds of the little secluded community. It was a tradition among the slaves, often related by these six eyewitnesses, that the dying lady gave her husband “ many directions about many things that she wanted done ” ; but that when she came to speak of the children, she could not command herself for some time. At last, she said that she could not die content if she thought her children would ever have a step-mother ; and her husband, holding her hand, solemnly promised that he would never marry again.¹ Toward noon, as she was about to breathe her last, his feelings became uncontrollable. He almost lost his senses. His sister, Mrs. Carr, led him staggering from the room into his library, where he fainted, and remained so long insensible that the family began to fear that he, too, had passed away. They brought in a pallet and lifted him upon it. He revived only to a sense of immeasurable woe. His daughter Martha, who was to be the solace of all his future years, ventured into the room at night ; and even then, such was the violence of his grief, that she was amazed and confounded. For three weeks he remained in that apartment, attended day and night by this little child. He walked, as she related, almost incessantly, all day and all night, only lying down now and then, when he was utterly exhausted, upon the pallet that had been hurriedly brought while he lay in his fainting fit. When at last he left the house, he would ride on horseback hours and hours, roaming about in the mountain roads, in the dense woods, along the paths least frequented, accompanied only by his daughter,—“a solitary witness,” she says, “ to many a violent burst of grief, the remembrance of which has consecrated particular scenes beyond the power of time to obliterate.”

So passed some weeks. He fell into what he called " a stupor of mind,” from which the daily round of domestic duties could not rouse him. Meanwhile the intelligence of his loss reached Congress, then in session at Philadelphia, waiting with extreme solicitude the issue of the negotiations for peace at Paris. Six months had already passed since the negotiations had been begun, during the last three of which Dr. Franklin had been laid aside by an attack of his disease, leaving the chief burden to be borne by Mr. Jay alone. It now occurred to the Virginia members that, as the causes of Mr. Jefferson’s previous declining to cross the sea were removed, he might be willing to join the commission to treat for peace. He was at once elected a plenipotentiary by a unanimous vote, and, as Madison reports, “ without a single adverse remark.” The news of his election reached him November 25, 1782, eleven weeks after the death of his wife, when he had gone with his troop of children, — daughters, nephews, and nieces, nine in all, — to a secluded estate in Chesterfield County to have them inoculated.

It was like a trumpet-call to a warhorse standing listless under a tree in the pasture, after a rest from the exhaustion and wounds of a campaign. He accepted instantly. He flew to his long-neglected desk to write the necessary letters, and to bring up the arrears in his correspondence ; for the French Minister had offered him a passage in a man-of-war which was to sail from Baltimore in three weeks, and in that vessel his beloved Marquis de Chastellux was also to cross the ocean! Enchanting prospect! But there is many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip. When he reached the port after many delays, it was only to discover that the enemy’s fleet blocked the pathway to the sea; and before the admiral saw a chance to elude them, came the ecstatic news that the preliminaries had been signed, and there was no need of his going. So he wrote to Mr. Jay to give up the lodgings in Paris which he had requested him to engage, and in May, 1783, he was at home once more.

But the spell was broken. He had shown himself willing to serve the public. Next month, the Legislature elected him a member of Congress; and in November, 1783, we find him at Annapolis ready to take his seat, after having left his eldest daughter at school in Philadelphia.

In the universal languor which followed the mighty effort of 1781, it was hard to get twenty-five members together. But Jefferson found them brimful of the spirit of disputation ; for Arthur Lee was a member, the most disputatious man of whom history condescends to make mention. Caught in a shower in London, he sought the shelter of a shed, where a gentleman ventured the civil remark that it rained very hard. “ It rains hard, sir,” said Lee, “ but I doubt whether you can say it rains very hard.” One such person would suffice to set any twenty men by the ears. Days were wasted in the most trivial and needless debates, during which the good-tempered Jefferson sat silent and tranquil. A member asked him one day, how he could listen to so much false reasoning, which a word would refute, and not utter that word. “To refute,” said he, “is easy; to silence, impossible.” He added that in measures brought forward by himself he took, as was proper, the laboring oar ; but, in general, he was willing to play the part of a listener, content to follow the example of Washington and Franklin, who were seldom on their feet more than ten minutes, and yet rarely spoke but to convince. Despite the copious flow of words, many memorable things were done by this Congress ; and though Jefferson sat in it but five months, his name is imperishably linked with some of its most interesting measures. It is evident that he often took “ the laboring oar.” Twice during the sickness of the president, he was elected chairman of the body, and his name stands at the head of every committee of much importance.

He it was who, as chairman of the committee of arrangements, wrote the much-embracing address with which the President of Congress received General Washington’s resignation of his commission. He assisted in arranging the details of that affecting and immortal scene. The spectacle presented in the chamber at Annapolis impressed mankind ; and the two addresses winged their way round the world, affording “ a lesson useful to those who inflict and to those who feel oppression.” As a member of this Congress, Thomas Jefferson, with four other signers of the Declaration of Independence, namely, Roger Sherman, Elbridge Gerry, Robert Morris, and William Ellery, signed the Treaty of Peace which acknowledged the independence of the United States.

A currency for the new nation, to take the place of the chaos of coins and values which had plagued the Colonies from an early day, was among the subjects considered at this session. Jefferson, chairman of the committee to which the matter was referred, assisted to give us the best currency ever contrived by man,—a currency so convenient that, one after another, every nation on earth will adopt it. Two years before, Gouverneur Morris, a clerk in the office of his uncle, Robert Morris, had conceived the most happy idea of applying the decimal system to the notation of money. But it always requires several men to complete one great thing. The details of the system devised by Gouverneur Morris were so cumbrous and awkward as almost to neutralize the simplicity of the leading idea. Jefferson rescued the fine original conception by proposing our present system of dollars and cents ; the dollar to be the unit and the largest silver coin. He recommended also a great gold coin of ten dollars’ value, a silver coin of the value of one tenth of a dollar, and a copper coin of the value of one hundredth of a dollar. He suggested three other coins for the convenience of making change, — a silver half-dollar, a silver double tenth, and a copper twentieth. It remained only to invent easy names for these coins, which was done in due time.

This perfect currency was not adopted without much labor and vigorous persistence on the part of Jefferson, both in and out of Congress. His views prevailed over those of Robert Morris, the first name in America at that time in matters of finance. Jefferson desired to apply the decimal system to all measures ; and this doubtless will one day be done. “ I use,” he tells us, “ when I travel an odometer, which divides the miles into cents, and I find every one comprehends a distance readily when stated to him in miles and cents ; so he would in feet and cents, pounds and cents.”

Jefferson struck another blow at slavery this winter, which again his Southern colleagues warded off. The cession by Virginia of her vast domain in the Northwest, out of which several States have been formed, was accepted by this Congress ; and it was Mr. Jefferson who drew the plan for its temporary government. He inserted a clause abolishing slavery “ after the year 1800 of the Christian era.” In a Congress of twenty-three members, only seven voted no ; but as a measure could only be adopted by a majority of States, these sufficed to defeat it. Every member from a Northern State voted for it, and every Southern member except two against it.

In this ordinance Jefferson assigned names to various portions of the territory. If his names had held, we should to day read upon the map of the United States, Sylvania, Michigania, Cherronesus, Assenisipia, Metropotamia, Illinoia, Saratoga, Polypotamia, Pelispia, instead of the present names of the States west and northwest of Virginia. We have improved upon his names. Ohio is better than Pelispia, and the least agreeable of the present names is not so bad as Assenisipia.

Absorbed as he was in these public duties, he could not forget the desolation of his home, and he seems to have thought of returning to Monticello with some degree of dread. But when the strongest tie is severed, others grow stronger. He had another dream of the future now, suggested by his young friend, James Monroe, talking of buying a farm near Monticello with a view to settle there. His three most congenial and beloved friends at this time were James Madison, James Monroe, and William Short. We might almost style them his disciples, for they had been educated under his influence or guidance, and were curiously in accord with him on questions moral and political. Why, he asked, could not they all live near one another in Albemarle, and pass their days in study and contemplation, a band of brothers and philosophers ? Madison, just disappointed in love, which kept him a bachelor for many a year, had gone home to his father’s house in Orange, where he sought relief in the most intense and unremitting study. Who was better fitted to console him than Jefferson, who had had a similar experience in his tender youth ? Jefferson did his best, and begged him to ride over to Monticello as often as he chose and regard the library there as his own. And more, “ Monroe is buying land almost adjoining me. Short will do the same. What would I not give if you could fall into the circle. With such a society, I could once more venture home and lay myself up for the residue of life, quitting all its contentions, which daily grow more and more insupportable.”

There was a little farm two miles from Monticello, of a hundred and forty acres of good land, with a small, old, indifferent house upon it, that would just do, Jefferson thought, for a republican and a philosopher ; for it was just such an establishment as his beloved friend, Dabney Carr, had been so happy in. It could be bought for two hundred and fifty pounds. “ Think of it,” he urged. “ To render it practicable only requires you to think so.” Madison, all unsuspicious of the different career in store for himself and his three friends, replied that he could neither accept nor renounce the captivating scheme. He could not then change his abode, but in a few years he thought he might make one of the circle proposed. The large estates of his father required his attention and presence. Monroe alone settled in the neighborhood ; though Madison lived all his life within a day’s ride.

With General Washington, too, we find Mr. Jefferson in close relations during the spring of 1784. They agreed in deploring the weakness, the utter insufficiency of the central power, and in thinking that there must be a SOMETHING besides Congress, if only a committee of members to remain at the seat of government during the absence of the main body. The country was feeling its way to a constitution. Independence had been won, but a nation had not yet been created. It was just after receiving General Washington’s concurrence, that Jefferson brought forward his proposition to divide the work of Congress into legislative and executive, and to intrust the executive functions to a permanent committee of one from each State. This was the first attempt toward a government ; and its failure, as Mr. Jefferson records, was speedy and complete. A committee of thirteen was only a more disputatious and unmanageable Congress. The committee being appointed, Congress adjourned, leaving it the supreme power of the continent ; but they “ quarrelled very soon,” split into two parties, abandoned their post, and left the government without any visible head until the next meeting of Congress. Jefferson remarks that many attributed their disruption to the disputatious propensity of certain men ; but the wise, to the nature of man. The failure of the Executive Committee had its effect in preparing the way for the convention of 1787.

On another point Jefferson and Washington were in full accord this winter. For more than ten years, the General had been warmly interested in connecting the great system of Western waters with the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Potomac River. Besides public reasons, General Washington had a private one for favoring this scheme. He owned a superb tract of land on the Ohio, which was dearer to his pride than important to his fortune ; for he had won it by his valor and conduct in the defence of his native land in the French War. If the Potomac were but rendered navigable back to the mountains, and then connected with the nearest branch of the Ohio by a canal, this fine western estate would be advantageously accessible. The General was deep in the scheme when he was elected to take command of the army in 1775, and resumed it as soon as he was released in 1783 ; and he now pursued it with the more zeal for a new reason. He had become acquainted during the war with the pushing energy of the people of New York. He had prophetic intimations of the Erie Canal. In March, 1784, when De Witt Clinton was a school-boy of fifteen, General Washington, the father of our internal - improvement system, wrote thus to Thomas Jefferson : “With you, I am satisfied that not a moment ought to be lost in recommencing this business, as I know the Yorkers will delay no time to remove every obstacle in the way of the other communication, so soon as the posts of Oswego and Niagara are surrendered ; and I shall be mistaken if they do not build vessels for the navigation of the lakes, which will supersede the necessity of coasting.” Any one familiar with the magnificent line of cities created by the Erie Canal, and with the harbors of Buffalo, Toledo, Oswego, and Chicago, finds it difficult to realize that this sentence was written less than ninety years ago.

The General had acquired in some way a strong conviction of the resistless enterprise of the New-Yorkers. He returns to the subject in a letter to Benjamin Harrison. “ No person,” he says, “ that knows the temper, genius, and policy of those people as well as I do, can harbor the smallest doubt of their connecting New York and the lakes by a canal.” It is curious that these same New-Yorkers in 1872, after having dug, enlarged, and superseded their own canal, should be carrying out Washington’s idea in a way he never dreamed of, by completing the railroad from Richmond to the Ohio. Such is the “ temper, genius, and policy of those people.”

A topic of the deepest interest at this time was the Society of the Cincinnati, the first annual meeting of which was to occur in May. Members of Congress, not of the order, viewed it with extreme disapproval, and were resolved, as Jefferson reports, “to give silent preferences to those who were not of the fraternity,” in the bestowal of office. It was not in human nature for such men as Henry, Madison, Jefferson, Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, and John Page to regard with favor an institution designed to perpetuate the distinctions of the war, even to remote generations ; an institution that would give a valuable advantage to the posterity of a raw lieutenant of one campaign over the offspring of the most illustrious sages of the civil service. Besides, the events of the last eighteen years had implanted in the minds of reflecting Americans a dread and horror of the hereditary principle, to which the recent bloody disruption of the British Empire was due. General Washington, who was to preside at the coming assembly, was troubled and anxious at the growing opposition. He asked Jefferson’s opinion, Jefferson was utterly opposed to the order, and said so in a long and ingenious letter to the General ; and when Washington passed through Annapolis, a few weeks after, on his way to the meeting, he called on Jefferson to talk the matter over with him.

They sat together alone at Jefferson’s lodgings from eight o’clock in the evening until midnight. They agreed that the object of the officers in founding the society was to preserve the friendships of the war by renewing their intercourse once a year. Nothing more innocent than the motive. But they agreed, also, that there was great danger of the order degenerating into an hereditary aristocracy ; and, meanwhile, it was odious to the great body of civilians. In the course of the conversation Jefferson suggested that if the hereditary quality were suppressed, there would be no harm in the officers who had actually served coming together in a social way now and then. “ No,” said the General, “ not a fibre of it ought to be left, to be an eyesore to the public, a ground of dissatisfaction, and a line of separation between them and their country.”

The General resumed his journey, fully resolved to use his influence with the members of the order to induce them to disband. He tried his best. Most of the old officers came into his views at length, and he thought he had secured a majority against going on ; but just then arrived from France Major l’Infant, as Jefferson tells us, “with a bundle of eagles for which he had been sent there, with letters from the French officers who had served in America praying for admission into the order, and a solemn act of their king permitting them to wear its ensign.” All was changed in a moment. Such was the revulsion of feeling, that the General could only obtain the suppression of the hereditary principle ; which, however, sufficed to render the order as unobjectionable as the societies of similar nature which were formed after the late war.

Jefferson had a new pleasure during this session, that of writing to his daughter Martha in Philadelphia. No one who has ever loved a child can read his letters to his children without emotion ; least of all, those written while the anguish of their irreparable loss was still recent. It is difficult to quote them, because nearly every sentence is so lovely and wise that we know not what to select. Imagine all that the tenderest and most thoughtful father could wish for the most engaging child. But the burden of his song was, that goodness is the greatest treasure of human beings. “If you love me,” he says, “ strive to be good under every situation, and to all living creatures, and to acquire those accomplishments which I have put in your power.” A curious trait of the times is this : “It produces great praise to a lady to spell well.” Happy would it be for those benefactors of our race, the wise and faithful teachers of the young, if every parent would use such words as these in writing to his children at school: “Consider the good lady who has taken you under her roof, who has undertaken to see that you perform all your exercises, and to admonish you in all those wanderings from what is right, and what is clever, to which your inexperience would expose you ; consider her, I say, as your mother, as the only person to whom, since the loss with which Heaven has been pleased to afflict you, you can now look up; and that her displeasure or disapprobation, on any occasion, would be an immense misfortune, which, should you be so unhappy as to incur by any unguarded act, think no concession too much to regain her good-will.”

The session drew to great length. When pressing domestic measures had been disposed of, Congress turned its attention to foreign affairs ; and this led to an important change in the career of Jefferson. “ I have been thrown back,” he wrote to General Washington, April 16, 1784, “on a stage where I had never more thought to appear. It is but for a time, however, and as a day-laborer, free to withdraw, or be withdrawn, at will.” Three weeks after these words were written, Congress found a piece of work for this daylaborer to do.

It was the golden age of “protection.” All interests were protected then, except the interests of human nature ; and every right was enforced, except the rights of man. British commerce and manufactures, since Charles II., had been so rigorously protected, that when a member of Parliament moved that Americans should be compelled to send their horses to England to be shod, there was room for doubt whether he was in jest or earnest. James Otis believed hespoke ironically ; only believed ! But there was no doubt of the seriousness of the parliamentary orator who avowed the opinion that “ not a hobnail should be made in America ” ; nor of the binding force of the law which made it penal for an American to carry a fleece of wool across a creek in a canoe. John Adams, looking back in his old age upon the studies of his early professional life, declared that, as a young lawyer, he never turned over the leaves of the British statutes regulating American trade “ without pronouncing a hearty curse upon them.” He felt them “as a humiliation, a degradation, a disgrace ” to his country, and to himself as a native of it.

One consequence of this fierce protection was that America was not on trading terms with the nations of the earth ; and Congress felt that one of its most important duties, after securing independence, was to propose to each of them a treaty of commerce. With France, Holland, and Sweden such treaties had already been negotiated ; but Congress desired commercial intercourse “ on the footing of the most favored nation” with Great Britain, Hamburg, Saxony, Prussia, Denmark, Russia, Austria, Venice, Rome, Naples, Tuscany, Sardinia, Genoa, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Algiers, Tripoli, Tunis, and Morocco. Congress wielded sovereign power; a nation was coming into existence ; and the conclusion of treaties was at once a dignified way of asserting those not sufficiently obvious truths, and a convenient mode of getting them acknowledged by other nations. Congress, as Jefferson confesses, though it would not condescend to ask recognition from any of the powers, yet “ we were not unwilling to furnish opportunities for receiving their friendly salutations and welcome.”

Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams, who still represented Congress in Europe, were not supposed to be equal to so much labor. May 7, 1784, Congress agreed to add a third plenipotentiary to aid them in negotiating commercial treaties, and their choice for this office fell upon Thomas Jefferson. The appointment was for two years, at the reduced salary of nine thousand dollars a year. He accepted the post; and, expecting to be absent only two years, he determined to spare himself a laborious journey home, and the reopening of a healing wound, by going direct from Annapolis northward “in quest of a passage.” This he could do the easier, since, as he records, “ I asked an advance of six months’ salary, that I might be in cash to meet the first expenses ; which was ordered.” His two younger children were in safe hands at home, and his eldest daughter he would take with him and place at school in Paris. His nephews he left to the guardianship of James Madison, to whom, on the day after his election, he wrote in an affecting strain : —

“ I have a tender legacy to leave you on my departure. I will not say it is the son of my sister, though her worth would justify it on that ground ; but it is the son of my friend, the dearest friend I knew, who, had fate reversed our lots, would have been a father to my children. He is a boy of fine dispositions, and of sound, masculine talents. I was his preceptor myself as long as I stayed at home ; and when I came away I placed him with Mr. Maury. There is a younger one, just now in his Latin rudiments. If I did not fear to overcharge you, I would request you to recommend a school for him.”

Mr. Madison fulfilled this trust with affectionate care, and kept his friend informed of the progress of his nephews during his long absence.

May 11th, four days after his election, the plenipotentiary left Annapolis for Philadelphia, a four days’ journey then ; and while his daughter was getting ready for her departure, he improved the opportunity to collect precise and full information respecting the commerce of the port; for was he not going to Europe on commercial business ? One of the toasts given in 1784, at the May-day festival of the St. Tammany Society of Philadelphia, which he probably read in the newspapers during his stay, gave him a hint of what was desired, “ Free-trade in American bottoms.” Pleasing dream ! Many a year must yet pass before it comes true. It was a buoyant, expectant time, when Mr. Jefferson made this seaboard journey. The refuse of the war was clearing away, and new projects were in the air. It was while Jefferson was in Philadelphia on this occasion, that some ingenious contriver managed to extract from the deep mud of the bottom of the Delaware those chevaux de frize which Dr. Franklin had placed there nine years before to keep out the British fleet, to the sore obstruction of the navigation ever since. It was an “ Herculean task,” said the newspapers, requiring “ vast apparatus ” ; but up came the biggest cheval of them all at the first yank of the mighty engine.

But this was a small matter compared with the project for an “air-balloon” of silk, sixty feet high, also announced while Jefferson was in Philadelphia, to be paid for by private subscriptions. Philadelphia, too,should behold the new wonder of the world, described at great length in a Paris volume lately received from Dr. Franklin. Gentlemen were invited to send their money, and philosophers their advice, to the committee having the scheme in charge. The glowing prospectus issued by the committee may have drawn a guinea and a smile from Jefferson. “Is it not probable,” asked these sanguine gentlemen, “that those who sometimes travel through the parched and sandy deserts of Arabia, where there is danger of perishing for want of water, or of being buried under mountains of sand, suddenly raised by whirling eddies of wind, as hath too often been the case, would prefer a voyage by means of an air-balloon to any other known method of conveyance ? In places where the plague may suddenly appear, it is capable, when improved, of rescuing those from danger who happen to be travelling through that region without any other means of making their escape. It may perform the same service to such as are suddenly surprised by unexpected sieges, and to whom no other means of safety may be left.” “ Quick advices may be given of intended invasions ” ; and, in short, war rendered so little destructive, that no one will think it worth while to resort to that “ unchristian mode of arbitrating disputes.” Then, “by means of these balloons, the utmost despatch may be given to expressboats,” which they will both lift and draw. They were expected also to enable philosophers to push their discoveries into the upper regions of the air, to ascertain “the causes of hail and snow,” and “make further improvements in thermometers, barometers, hygrometers, in astronomy and electricity.” This programme of blessings did not tempt the guineas fast enough until the committee added personal solicitation ; and when, at last, the balloon ascended, they were obliged to charge two dollars for the best places in the amphitheatre.

It was a simple, credulous world then, full of curiosity respecting the truths which science was beginning to disclose. This balloon prospectus, with its betrayals of ignorance, credulity, and curiosity, was perfectly characteristic of the period. I am not sure that Franklin and Jefferson would have deemed it so very absurd, though Franklin might have thought it improbable that a traveller caught by an unexpected siege would have a balloon in his trunk. Franklin had high hopes of the balloon. “ Of what use is this discovery which makes so much noise ? ” some one asked him soon after the first ascension in Paris. “ Of what use is a new-born child ? ” was his reply.

In quest of a passage to France, the plenipotentiary, his daughter, and William Short, whom he was so happy as to have for a secretary, left Philadelphia near the end of May, and went to New York. The monthly Havre packet, La Sylphe, had been gone ten days. After a few days’ stay in New York, where he continued his commercial studies, the party resumed their “quest,” travelling eastward from port to port in the leisurely manner of the time. At New Haven, could he fail to pause a day or two to view a college so distinguished as Yale, and converse with the president and professors, and promise to send them from Europe some account of the new discoveries and the new books ? The newspapers, silent as to his stay in Philadelphia and New York, chronicle the arrival of his Excellency at New Haven on the 7th of June, and his departure for Boston on the 9th. At Boston, the travellers met another disappointment, peculiarly aggravating. A good ship was within thirty-six hours of sailing, in which Mrs. Adams was going to join her husband ; and she would have been as agreeable a companion to the father, as a kind protector to the daughter. But, in those days, passengers had to lay in stores of various kinds, and make extensive preparations for a voyage; which could not be done in so short a time, even if the plenipotentiary had regarded his commercial information as complete. Mrs. Adams sailed without them; but while Jefferson was thinking of returning in all haste to New York to catch the next French packet, he heard of a Boston ship loading for London that would, it was thought, put him ashore on the French coast. It proved to be the ship Ceres, belonging to Nathaniel Tracy, one of the great merchants of New England, who was going in her himself, and would land the party at Portsmouth, after having passed the whole voyage in communicating commercial knowledge to Mr. Jefferson. Nothing could have been more fortunate.

Boston gave the Virginian a courteous and warm reception on this occasion. A chair in the chamber of the Massachusetts House of Representatives was assigned to “ His Excellency, Thomas Jefferson, late governor of Virginia, and now one of the commissioners for negotiating treaties ” ; and “ no small part of my time,” as he wrote to Elbridge Gerry, “ has been occupied by the hospitality and civilities of this place, which I have experienced in the highest degree.” Mr. Gerry, not reaching home in time to see him off, Jefferson left for him a present, not common then, which he was rather fond of giving, a portable writing-desk. To add to his knowledge of business, he made an excursion along the coast to Salem, Newburyport, Portsmouth, towns beginning already to feel the impulse toward the remoter commerce which was to enrich them. Harvard, noted from of old for a certain proclivity toward science, had at this time in Dr. Willard a president who was particularly interested in scientific discovery. Jefferson made his acquaintance now, became his correspondent, and thus kept the college informed of the progress of knowledge.

The Fourth of July was Sunday this year. There was the usual celebration on Monday, but it was on that day that the Ceres sailed, bearing away the author of the Declaration of Independence. So far as we know, Jefferson was not yet known to the public as the writer of that document. About the time in the morning of July 5th, when the Declaration was read in Faneuil Hall, the Ceres spread her sails, and glided out into the ocean between the emerald isles that form Boston Harbor. They had a splendid passage ; nineteen days from shore to shore, three days dead calm and codfishing on the Banks, only six passengers, and everything delightful. Thirty-two days after leaving Boston, the plenipotentiary was at a hotel in Paris, while a house was making ready for him. He was at once a familiar member of the easy, happy circle of able men and amiable women who assembled at Dr. Franklin’s pleasant abode in the suburban village of Passy.

The aged philosopher could not but smile at the mountain of new duties which Congress had imposed upon him, instead of the permission to return home, for which he had applied. It so chanced that he was writing to Mr. Adams upon the subject on the very day of Jefferson’s arrival in Paris, and he discussed it with that sly humor with which he knew how to parry and return every disagreeable stroke : “ You will see that a good deal of business is cut out for us, — treaties to be made with, I think, twenty powers in two years, — so that we are not likely to eat the bread of idleness ; and that we may not eat too much, our masters have diminished our allowance.” (From $11,111 to $9,000 per annum.) “I commend their economy, and shall imitate it by diminishing my expense. Our too liberal entertainment of our countrymen here has been reported at home by our guests, to our disadvantage, and has given offence. They must be contented for the future, as I am, with plain beef and pudding. The readers of Connecticut newspapers ought not to be troubled with any more accounts of our extravagance. For my own part, if I could sit down to dinner on a piece of their excellent salt pork and pumpkin, I would not give a farthing for all the luxuries of Paris.”

In three weeks Mr. Adams arrived, and the three plenipotentiaries held their first meeting, at Dr. Franklin’s house, agreeing to meet there every day until the business was concluded. Besides announcing their mission to various ambassadors, they did nothing during the first month except prepare the draft of a treaty such as they would be willing to sign. What an amiable, harmless, useless document it seems ! But it was the first serious attempt ever made to conduct the intercourse of nations on Christian principles ; and it was made by three men to whom ignorance has sometimes denied the name of Christians ! Many of its twenty-seven articles were nothing but the formal concession of the natural right of a man to go, come, stay, buy, and sell, according to his own interest and pleasure, subject only to the laws of the country in which he may be. One article provided that shipwrecked mariners should not be plundered ; and another, that “ when the subjects or citizens of the one party shall die within the jurisdiction of the other, their bodies shall be buried in the usual burying-grounds, or other decent and suitable places, and shall be protected from violence and disturbance.” What a tale of savage intolerance is told by the mere proposal of such an article !

It was into the latter half of the treaty that the three representatives of the United States put most of their hearts. Their great object was to confine the evils of war, as much as possible, to belligerents. They desired to have war conducted in the manner of a play-ground fight, where a ring is formed, and no one is hit but the combatants, and they are prevented from striking a foul blow. No privateering. No confiscation of neutral property. No molestation of fishermen, farmers, or other noncombatants. No ravaging an enemy’s coasts. No seizure of vessels or other property for the purposes of war. No crowding of prisoners of war into unwholesome places. Article XVII. was wonderful for its advanced magnanimity: “If the citizens or subjects of either party, in danger from tempests, pirates, or other accidents, shall take refuge with their vessels or effects within the harbors or jurisdiction of the other, they shall be received, protected, and treated with humanity and kindness, and shall be permitted to furnish themselves, at reasonable prices, with all refreshments, provisions, and other things necessary for their subsistence, health, and accommodation, and for the repair of their vessels.” Such was the treaty drawn by three early Christians in Dr. Franklin’s house at Passy in 1784. It marks “a new era in negotiation,” wrote General Washington when he read it; and he regarded it always as the most original and liberal treaty ever negotiated.

When they had finished their draft, and when, as I suppose, the Doctor had caused a few copies to be struck off on the little printing-press which he kept in his house for such odd jobs, they sought a conference with that worthy, but extremely unsentimental minister for foreign affairs, the Count de Vergennes, and asked him how they had better proceed in order to conciliate the twenty powers (including Algiers, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli) and dispose them to conclude such a treaty with the honorable Congress. I wish we had some account of the interview. We only know, from Jefferson’s too brief report, that the astute old diplomatist did not attach much importance to the labors of the commissioners. He evidently thought that Congress, in sending Jefferson to Europe on this errand, had performed a superfluous work, and that the proposal of such a treaty to the Dey of Algiers, or to the personage styled in the instructions of the commissioners “ the high, glorious, mighty, and most noble Prince, King and Emperor of the Kingdom of Fez, Morocco, Taffiete, Sus, and the whole Algasbe, and the territories thereof,” would be a diplomatic absurdity. He thought it better, and the commissioners came into the same opinion, “to leave to legislative regulation, on both sides, such modifications of our commercial intercourse as would voluntarily flow from amicable dispositions.”

The commissioners did, nevertheless, fulfil their instructions by “ sounding ” the several ambassadors resident at Paris, most of whom forwarded copies of the draft to their courts. At that moment there was in Europe but one intelligent man upon a throne; “ old Frederick of Prussia,’’as Jefferson styles him, who “met us cordially and without hesitation ”; and with him the treaty, with unimportant changes, was concluded. Denmark and Tuscany also entered into negotiations. The other powers appeared so indifferent that the commissioners could not, consistently with self-respect, press the matter. “ They seemed, in fact,” says Jefferson, “ to know little about us, except as rebels who had been successful in throwing off the yoke of the mother country. They were ignorant of our commerce, which had always been monopolized by England, and of the exchange of articles it might offer advantageously to both parties.” In short, the commission to negotiate commercial treaties had but one important result, namely, the composition of the draft of the treaty, and its preservation in the Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, against the time when the nations shall want it. It seems a mockery of noble endeavor that such a draft should have been placed on record on the eve of wars which desolated Europe for twenty years, during which every principle of humanity and right was ruthlessly trampled under foot. Napoleon Bonaparte was a youth of sixteen when the commissioners completed it. The treaty, to this day, remains only an admonition and a prophecy.

Nine months passed. On the 2d of May, 1785, the youngest of the commissioners received from Mr. Jay, secretary for the foreign affairs of Congress, a document of much interest to him, signed by the President of Congress, Richard Henry Lee : —

“The United States of America in Congress assembled, to our trusty and well-beloved Thomas Jefferson,Esq., send greeting : —

“We, reposing special trust and confidence in your integrity, prudence, and ability, have nominated, constituted, and appointed, and by these presents do nominate, constitute, and appoint you, the said Thomas Jefferson, our Minister Plenipotentiary to reside at the court of his most Christian Majesty ; and do give you full power and authority there to represent, and do and perform all such matters and things as to the said place or office doth appertain, or as may by our instructions be given unto you in charge. This commission to continue in force for the space of three years from this day (March 10, 1785), unless sooner revoked.”

This honorable charge Jefferson gratefully and gladly accepted. “ You replace Dr. Franklin,” said the Count de Vergennes to him when he went to announce his appointment. “ I succeed; no one can replace him,” was Jefferson’s reply. He witnessed the memorable scene of Dr. Franklin’s departure from Passy on the 12th of July. All the neighborhood and a great number of friends from Paris gathered to bid the noble old man farewell. The king could not have been treated with an homage more profound or more sincere. Indeed, it was often remarked at the time, that only the young king was ever greeted by the people of Paris so warmly as Franklin. The queen, mindful of his age and infirmities, had sent her own travelling-litter, a kind of Sedan chair carried between two mules, to convey him to Havre. At four o’clock on that summer afternoon, he was assisted into this strange vehicle, and began his long, slow journey, followed by the heartfelt benedictions of friends and neighbors. “ It seemed,” wrote Jefferson, “as if the village had lost its patriarch.”

James Parton.