Jefferson

by Albert Jay Nock

  With all his distaste for lawyers and the ways of lawyers, his professional training stood him in well during his service in the Virginia Assembly. He drafted and brought in a great flock of bills of a routine character, and four which represented the groundwork of his whole legislative scheme. These he considered as “forming a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of ancient or future aristocracy, and a foundation laid for a government truly republican.” They are chiefly interesting now as showing how short a way they went towards these desirable ends. One was for repealing the laws of entail; and this, he quite sincerely believed, “would prevent the accumulation and perpetuation of wealth in select families, and preserve the soil of the country from being daily more and more absorbed in mortmain.” Another was for the abolition of primogeniture, substituting the equal partition of estates, which he called “the best of all agrarian laws.” A third was for religious liberty, to relieve the people from taxation for the support of a State church. The old days in Williamsburg had shown Mr. Jefferson quite enough of a State-owned religious monopoly, its establishment being “truly of the religion of the rich, the dissenting sects being entirely composed of the less wealthy people.” The fourth bill comprised a scheme for general popular education, which he thought would qualify the citizenry “to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government.”

  So great an advance did these measures represent that they had a hard time passing into law, and the education bill never did pass in its entirety. Yet they were popular measures, all but the education bill which had no warm friends worth speaking of; the others touched a popular sentiment. As a desire for free trade was the animating spirit of the Revolution in one section of the country—that is to say, among the merchants and traders of New England—so free land was the desideratum among Virginians. They wanted to see the great royal land-grants broken up; they hated this monopoly as much as the Massachusetts merchant hated the British monopoly of his trade, and for the same reason: the merchant would do better in a free competitive market, and the Virginian would do better if he could get hold of some of the monopolized land for himself. Bills like Mr. Jefferson’s, therefore, which squinted in the direction of this popular desire, were well received. Actually, the Virginian never got his free land; the royal patentee was dislodged only to give place to the speculator. Still, like Patrick Henry and many others, he might turn speculator himself, which was even better—there was always the chance of that—so Mr. Jefferson’s bills were good bills. They had, however, to run the gauntlet of a small and compact opposition, in which a number of motives had place, and as many prejudices, social, economic and religious. Washington and Patrick Henry, for instance, were not for pure voluntaryism in religion. They were for a compromise, whereby a general tax should be imposed for the support of churches, but leaving the individual taxpayer free to designate the denomination to which his contribution should go. “Although no man’s sentiments are more opposed to any kind of restraint upon religious principles than mine are,” Washington wrote to George Mason, “yet I confess that I am not among the number of those who are so much alarmed at the thoughts of making people pay towards the support of that which they profess.” Washington was not impressed, apparently, by the prompt degeneration of a State-owned church into a mere political agency, which was the fact that chiefly impressed Mr. Jefferson, as it had impressed John Adams; and it lay at the root of the disestablishment-bill.

  The Virginia Legislature shilly-shallied over these measures interminably; and not only over these, but over a general ratification of the work of the committee appointed to revise the existing statutes; which work was practically all done by Mr. Jefferson and George Wythe. There was nothing startling in this revision; nothing new, for instance, on the subject of slavery. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate,” said Mr. Jefferson, “than that these people are to be free.” But he became well aware—wearily aware—that “the public mind would not yet bear the proposition.” Indeed, if the temper of the Legislature was any index of the public mind, it would not until 1796 bear even the proposition to limit the death penalty to cases of murder and treason, or to eliminate the lex talionis from the criminal code. The revisers did the best they could, but their report still expressed to a great degree what Mr. Jefferson called the “revolting principle” of retaliation; it retained such penal measures as gibbeting, executing poisoners by poison, punishing maiming by maiming, and the like; and yet the Legislature paltered along over the routine portions of the revision “until after the general peace in 1785, when by the unwearied exertions of Mr. Madison, in opposition to the endless quibbles, chicaneries, perversions, vexations and delays of lawyers and demi-lawyers, most of the bills were passed by the Legislature with little alteration”—and eleven years later, in 1796, the criminal code, which was lost by one vote in 1785, was finally passed.

  Mr. Jefferson’s professional training came handy to him occasionally also in his subsequent long career of office-holding; sometimes in drafting opinions as Secretary of State under Washington, and once notably during his own Presidency, in the celebrated Batture Case, to evict Edward Livingston from possession of a flat or shoal in the Mississippi, near New Orleans, called the Batture Sainte Marie. Mr. Jefferson’s papers in this case, and particularly the recapitulatory brief which he drew up for use of his counsel when Livingston brought suit against him in 1811, are the work of a great lawyer, a great “man of science,” and none the less great for being disillusioned. When John Adams read it, he said, “You have brought up to the view of the young generation of lawyers in our country, tracts and regions of legal information of which they never had dreamed.” Mr. Jefferson’s profession owed him nothing; the time and energy put in on it were well spent. “Every political measure,” he wrote, “will forever have an intimate connexion with the laws of the land; and he who knows nothing of these will always be perplexed and often foiled by adversaries having the advantage of that knowledge over him.”

  Under pressure of a disillusionment essentially similar, his disposition to take part in public affairs evaporated with his interest in his profession. Apart from any question of abstract faith in republicanism and the parliamentary principle, he had quite got his fill of parliamentary bodies. The Continental Congress was bad enough; its tedious pettiness, its factions and feuds, its incessant collisions of self-interest and local interest, made its service profoundly distasteful. Yet after he had drawn in his horns and retired to his own State, there was the Virginia Assembly which was even worse. After trying to work with it as a legislator, he tried working for it as an executive; he served two years as Governor, during 1779 and 1780, in succession to Patrick Henry. He took office at the worst possible time. The State was defenceless, at the mercy of the British; it was without military resources. He was as helpless at withstanding the enemy’s incursions as Henry had been at anticipating them. He had to endure the popular complaint that is always made in such circumstances; and like any parliamentary body in such circumstances, the Assembly was always ready to make a scapegoat of the Executive. A motion for his impeachment, however, came to nothing; the charges were preposterous; indeed, the affair ended by the Assembly offering Mr. Jefferson a unanimous and handsome resolution of amends. This was all very well; it was a time of great stress and some allowances must be made. Yet it is a humiliating and repugnant business to put oneself at the mercy of a crew of third-rate people who do not know their own mind and have no self-reliance. Had there not, indeed, been a strong movement in the Assembly to throw over republican government in the crisis, and set up a dictator? Of this Mr. Jefferson wrote indignantly that “the very thought alone was treason against the people; was treason against mankind in general; as rivetting forever the chains which bow down their necks, by giving to their oppressors a proof, which they would have trumpetted through the universe, of the imbecility of republican government, in times of pressing danger, to shield them f
rom harm.”

  But should one go on indefinitely exposing oneself to the brunt of ignorance, slackness, stupidity, irresponsibility and petty self-interest? Replying to Monroe’s remonstrances, he says that “however I might have comforted myself under the disapprobation of the well-meaning but uninformed people, yet that of their representatives was a shock on which I had not calculated.” Mr. Jefferson had not perhaps yet learned the official character of representatives, but he was learning fast, and his own feeling was that he had learned enough. He was forty years old, and more than half his life was yet before him. He had been, as he wrote Monroe, thirteen years engaged in the public service in one way and another; and “during that time I had so totally abandoned all attention to my private affairs as to permit them to run into great disorder and ruin.” So much was enough. Enough of public affairs, enough of representative parliamentary bodies, enough of lawyers! Henceforth he would live as a farmer, a student and an organizer of civilized amenities at Monticello. “I have taken my final leave,” he writes Edmund Randolph, “. . . I have returned to my farm, my family and books, from which I think nothing will ever more separate me.” This letter is dated September 16th, 1781; and one year later, lacking ten days, Mrs. Jefferson died.

  III

  Mr. Jefferson wrote his own epitaph, in which he describes himself as “author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.” We have his own word for it that these are the three achievements by which he most wished to be remembered; although he may have regarded them more impersonally than his words suggest, as illustrative of certain principles in which he was most interested. He seems so rarely to have taken a personal view of anything that this latter interpretation bears some probability. There is in existence, however, a brief note or memorandum, unfinished, undated, but evidently written when he was well along in years, a mere scrap, which lists in part his achievements for the public good. They are run off so informally that one may perhaps discern a suggestion of the relative importance that he assigned them in his own mind. The list begins abruptly:

  I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all. I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things; but they would have been done by others; some of them, perhaps, a little better.

  The first item on the list is this:

  The Rivanna had never been used for navigation; scarcely an empty canoe had ever passed down it. Soon after I came of age, I examined its obstructions, set on foot a subscription for removing them, got an Act of Assembly passed and the thing effected, so as to be used completely and fully for carrying down all our produce.

  Then follows a bare notation of the Declaration of Independence; and the several items of his work on the Virginia statutes stand without comment. After this, he mentions his importation of olive trees from France in 1789 and 1790, for experimental planting in South Carolina and Georgia, and of heavy upland rice from Africa in 1790, “which I sent to Charleston in hopes it might supersede the culture of the wet rice which renders South Carolina and Georgia so pestilential through the summer.” His paramount interest then comes out in the remark that “the greatest service which can be rendered to any country is to add a useful plant to its culture, especially a bread grain; next in value to bread is oil.” Politics, as Homer said of words, “may make this way or that way,” but to live at all, people must eat food; and the only way that food can be provided for them is by some one “labouring the earth” to produce it.

  This dry but fundamental truth seems never to have been far out of Mr. Jefferson’s mind. It governed his estimate of politics, of trade and commerce, of banking and manufacturing. “When first he dabbled in public affairs, in pre-Revolution days, he was aware that whatever community of interest prevailed among the colonies was purely temporary and factitious. Massachussetts and Virginia, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, had for the time being to hang together, as Franklin said, lest all hands should hang separately later in London. All must unite to make the Revolution a success, but it was clear that as soon as this occasional interest was disposed of, the collision between their permanent interests would take place; and Mr. Jefferson made up his mind early—or, rather, his mind made itself up—about the side he was on. While Secretary of State in 1793, when the battle of economic interests was well under way, he wrote to an unidentified correspondent, “When I first entered on the stage of public life (now twenty-four years ago) I came to a resolution never . . . to wear any other character than that of a farmer.”

  But even as Virginian farming went in those days, he was not a good practical farmer. “To keep a Virginia estate together,” he wrote mournfully to Monroe in the last year of his life, when his poverty amounted to destitution, “requires in the owner both skill and attention. Skill I never had, and attention I could not have; and really, when I reflect on all circumstances, my wonder is that I should have been so long as sixty years in reaching the result to which I am now reduced.” If he had kept to his great resolution of 1781—that is to say, if his wife had not died—he might have become a better farmer than he was. Still, he was right about himself; skill he never had, and it is doubtful that he could have had it. He was careful, assiduous, diligent, ingenious and no end wissenschaftlich—in all respects a man after Dr. Small’s own heart—nor was he quite the type of scientific adventurer who knows everything except what to do with his knowledge. Apparently he managed well, and he managed under uncommon difficulties; yet with all allowances made, he somehow lacked the knack of making more than fair-to-middling success. The Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, who visited him in 1796, compliments the high quality of his management, especially complimenting the excellent treatment of his slaves; but he is struck with all a thrifty Frenchman’s horror at the wastefulness of the “detestable method” of exhausting the soil and abandoning it, piece by piece, to recover as best it may. He remarks dryly that Mr. Jefferson “has drawn the principles of culture either from works which treat on this subject, or from conversation,” which might perhaps do for Virginia, and he hopes for the best, but which he must say is often a misleading kind of knowledge, “and at all times insufficient in a country where agriculture is well understood,” as in France, for example. Perhaps the distinguished exile compared the hillside fields of Albemarle with those of the Auvergne, coddled and coaxed to the limit of fertility as long ago, probably, as when they were swept by the vigilant eye of Vercingetorix. The Duke mentions with dismay that on worked-over land—land that had been exhausted and left for a while to recuperate—the farmers of Albemarle got only about four bushels of wheat to the acre; and Mr. Jefferson himself writes in 1815 to the French economist Say, that “our best farmers (such as Mr. Randolph, my son-in-law) get from ten to twenty bushels of wheat to the acre; our worst (such as myself) from six to eighteen”!

  Yet some of Mr. Jefferson’s anticipations in the science of agriculture are interesting. He seems, for instance, to have done something in the way of efficiency studies, though the purpose to which they were directed is not clear.

  Julius Shard fills the two-wheeled barrow in 3 minutes, and carries it 30 yards in 1 ½ minutes more. Now this is four loads of the common barrow with one wheel. So that suppose the 4 loads put in at the same time viz. 3 minutes, 4 trips will take 4 × 1½ minutes = 6, which added to 3 minutes filling = 9 minutes to fill and carry the same earth which was filled and carried in the two-wheeled barrow in 4½. From a trial I made with the same two-wheeled barrow, I found that a man could dig and carry to the distance of 50 yds, 5 cubical yds of earth in a day of 12 hours length. Ford’s Phill did it; not overlooked [i.e. supervised] and having to mount his loaded barrow up a bank 2 f. high and tolerably steep.

  When Mr. Jefferson ventured into this special technique, he also took on something of the efficiency-engineer’s slowness to see that the human being is not for all purposes a machine. His farm-book has
this note on the rye and wheat harvest of 1795:

  Were the harvest to go over again with the same force, the following arrangement should take place:

  The treading-floors should be laid down before harvest. ½ a doz. spare scythes should be mounted, and fingers for ½ a dozen more ready formed, bent and mortised, and some posts should be provided.