It would not do. “In any case I wish nothing from the Treasury,” Mr. Jefferson replied. He had always been paid the full wage of his various offices, and he could countenance no further claim on his behalf. “The pecuniary compensations I have received for my services from time to time, have been fully to my own satisfaction.” Yet he had no false pride. When private persons voluntarily brought relief, he saw nothing against taking it. It was in the service of the great majority of his countrymen that he had been ruined, and when some of them came forward, in the only way they could, “to repay me, and save an old servant from being turned like a dog out of doors,” he could find neither antipathy nor scruple against their “pure and unsolicited offering of love.” But public money, “wrung from the taxpayer,” who had no choice but to pay, was another matter, and he would have none of it. It was regrettable that the Virginia Legislature saw reason to fear a compromising precedent in the proposed lottery, but he could not complain; the decision was theirs to abide by, and therefore it must be theirs to make. “I had hoped the length and character of my services might have prevented the fear in the Legislature of the indulgence asked being quoted as a precedent in future cases. But I find no fault with their adherence to a rule generally useful, although relaxable in some cases, under their discretion, of which they are the proper judges.”
The interests that Mr. Jefferson had served all his life were too unorganized, immobile and inattentive to do much for him. Their view of him was indistinct, as of one of a generation not their own. They knew in a vague way that he was supposed to have been more or less on their side, but they could hardly say how, or to what extent. He had always been reputed rich, and his fellow-producers, in so far as incessant preoccupation with the problems of labour and livelihood permitted them to think of him at all, still thought of him as rich; and even when his condition became known to them, what was every one’s business was no one’s. It was the “rich and wellborn” who came to his rescue, and they were by no means out of character in doing so. The fact is interesting that while taking excellent care of their own advocates and servants, “the rich and well-born” are not often averse to doing the generous thing by a fallen enemy, if they are sure he has fallen for good and will not rise again. The moment the Eastern cities had the news that Mr. Jefferson was in straits, the mayor of New York picked up the first few thousand dollars he could lay his hands on at short notice, and sent it on with the cordial assurance that there was plenty more where it came from. Philadelphia, where but a few years before people refused to speak to Mr. Jefferson on the street, and turned corners to avoid a meeting with him, extemporized a similar emergency-contribution, as did Baltimore and other cities. At this time, moreover, the lottery was finally sanctioned by the Legislature, after months of earnest lobbying; but the inflow of unsolicited gifts made it for the moment seem unnecessary, and it was never held.
Mr. Jefferson died in the belief that his debts were taken care of, and his family assured of a permanent home at Monticello. His last few weeks were therefore truly happy; as he said, his gratification “closed with a cloudless sun a long and serene day of life.” But within six months most of his personal property was sold for debt, and all of it within a year. His lands were sold as soon as the depressed market would permit. His daughter and her family were turned out of their home; they received some assistance, but lived more or less poorly and precariously, getting on as best they might; and Monticello was alienated for a century, to serve as an object of idle sentiment and yet more idle curiosity to generations which its builder knew not, and which knew not him.
II
A dominant sense of form and order, a commanding instinct for measure, harmony and balance, unfailingly maintained for fourscore years towards the primary facts of human life—towards discipline and training, towards love, parenthood, domesticity, art, science, religion, friendship, business, social and communal relations—will find its final triumph and vindication when confronting the great fact of death, “the great problem,” Mr. Jefferson wrote Correa, “untried by the living, unreported by the dead.” Looking back over his experience of life, he found it good; so good, so interesting and desirable, as to be well worth having over again— “You ask,” he wrote John Adams, “if I would agree to live my seventy, or rather seventy-three, years over again? To which I say, yea. I think with you, that it is a good world on the whole; that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us. There are indeed (who might say nay) gloomy and hypochondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present and despairing of the future; always counting the worst will happen because it may happen. To these I say, How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened! My temperament is sanguine. . . . My hopes indeed sometimes fail, but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.”
Yet though life had been good, though to relive it were desirable, in the appointed time of its relinquishment it was a thing to be relinquished willingly and with satisfaction. “Depart then satisfied,” was the last great injunction that Marcus Aurelius laid upon himself, “for he also who releases thee is satisfied.” In this forecast of departure there was none of the pain, the horror and the ugliness of dying. Like a guest unexpectedly summoned from a banquet, one would rise quietly from one’s place and go one’s way without reluctance, glad of one’s participation, and in turn glad to go. “Our next meeting,” Mr. Jefferson wrote Mrs. Adams, “must be in the country to which [the past years] have flown—a country for us not now very distant. For this journey we shall need neither gold nor silver in our purse, nor scrip nor coats nor staves. Nor is the provision for it more easy than the preparation has been kind. Nothing proves more than this, that the Being who presides over the world is essentially benevolent. Stealing from us one by one the faculties of enjoyment, searing our sensibilities, leading us like the horse in his mill, round and round the same beaten circle, . . . until, satiated and fatigued with this leaden iteration, we ask our own congé. I heard once a very old friend, who had troubled himself with neither poets nor philosophers, say the same thing in plain prose, that he was tired of pulling off his shoes and stockings at night, and putting them on again in the morning.”
The last letter that Mr. Jefferson ever wrote was in acknowledgment of an invitation from the city of Washington, to take part in a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In this, the wisdom which comes with death guided him into a singularly happy formulation, the clearest and most forceful that he ever made, of his lifelong contention “that the mass of mankind was not born with saddles on their backs, nor a favoured few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” Then, almost at once, his last illness, which was rather a debility than an illness, came upon him. As he grew weaker, it became evident that his mind was being much revisited by events of half a century before. On the night of the third of July, he sat up in bed, went through the motions of writing, and said some words, only partly intelligible, about the Revolutionary Committee of Safety. He seemed to wish to live until the Fourth; he never spoke out plainly about it, but once or twice inquired whether it was yet the Fourth, and when told at last that it was, he appeared satisfied. He died painlessly at one o’clock in the afternoon, about five hours before his old friend and fellow, John Adams; it was the only time he ever took precedence of him, having been all his life “secondary to him in every situation” except this one.
After his death, his daughter Martha opened a paper that he had handed her two days before. It contained words which he never spoke—words which one does not speak—words of loving thankfulness for her devotion to him, declaring that the thought of parting from her was “the last pang of life,” and promising to bear her love to the “two seraphs,” her mother and her little sister, long shrouded in death, who now awaited him.
A
VIRO EXIMIO
EDGARDO SPEYER
HU
NC LIBELLUM
PROBARI CUPIT
ALBERTUS IAIIUS NOCK
Bibliographical Note
THE Memorial Edition of Mr. Jefferson’s writings contains an excellent bibliography down to twenty-five years ago. There seems no need to reproduce it here. Of later books that are easily available, Mr. Muzzey’s short biography is very competent. Mr. Bowers’s Jefferson and Hamilton gives a capital account of political history in the decade 1790-1800. If any one wishes to know the worst that a good attorney can make of Mr. Jefferson, it is to be found in Mr. Beveridge’s biography of John Marshall. The sharply divergent views of two Englishmen appear in Mr. F. S. Oliver’s Life of Alexander Hamilton and Mr. F. W. Hirst’s Life and Letters of Thomas Jefferson.
This book is not meant to be a biography of Mr. Jefferson or to take the place of one. It is a mere study—a study in conduct and character—and therefore it takes no account of long stretches of biographical material which is otherwise most valuable, but contributes nothing to this special purpose. Being neither a biographer nor a historian, I feel quite free to say that Parton’s biography seems to me still by far the best for the purposes of a general reader. The trouble is, of course, to get hold of a copy, for it was published half a century ago and is out of print. One’s best chance is to leave an order with a dealer in second-hand books, and be patient. James Parton is not now in favour with professional historians, for some reason; there seems to be a kind of fashion in these matters. Mr. Hirst says he is less accurate than his predecessors, Randall and Tucker. This is probably true; still, his inaccuracies are neither specious nor misleading, and I never found them serious enough to weigh heavily on a non-professional conscience in recommending his book. There are qualities that outweigh occasional and trivial inaccuracy, and Parton has them, while the other biographers of Mr. Jefferson, as far as I can see, have not; and the worth of his book should be assessed accordingly. Indeed, if one were condemning books on the strength of minor inaccuracies, Mr. Hirst himself would get off badly. I noticed more inaccuracies in one very casual reading of his book than I ever saw in my close readings of Parton. But Mr. Hirst’s errors of fact, like Parton’s, are not important enough that one should think of them. The thing to think of is that a foreigner and an Englishman should have done as well as Mr. Hirst has done with a subject of uncommon difficulty, even for a native critic. His book should be judged on the scale of its major qualities, and so, I think, should Parton’s. “Let us never forget that we are all pedants,” said Benjamin Constant to his literary associates; which may be all very well for those who live to read, but hardly for those who read to live.
My best thanks are due for courteous assistance to several libraries and historical associations, and to individual collectors of manuscripts. The New York Society Library has been especially patient under heavy requisitions. If ten per cent of the patriotic pride now frittered away on silly and vicious objects were engaged upon our finest national possession, the Library of Congress, we should have a new civilization. What an incomparable instrument it is, and how little general appreciation it gets! When one remembers that Mr. Jefferson’s private library formed its nucleus, one sees a depressing allegory in its present state of practical encystment in our culture.
Many of my acquaintance have given me help and encouragement. Mr. Edgar Speyer read my fifth and sixth chapters in manuscript, with particular reference to Mr. Jefferson’s economics. Miss Suzanne La Follette brought the best editorial mind I know so effectively to bear upon the whole of my first draught, that my publishers think I am a very good critic of my own work. I hope that Mr. Charles A. Beard will look indulgently on the freedom of an old friend who has helped himself wholesale to the contents of his work on the Constitution and on the economic origins of Jeffersonian democracy. What is one to do? If the development of intelligence in America goes on at its present rate, no more than four or five centuries will elapse, probably, before it will be generally seen that any one dealing with the political history of the Jeffersonian period must deal with it on the lines laid down by Mr. Beard. Meanwhile, one who wishes to deal with it under the handicap of a certain unhandiness with fable, convention and journalism, has little choice but to anticipate the judgment of that time.
INDEX
Adams, John, 16, 34, 44, 45, 75, 92, 103, 105, 107–109, 115, 128, 150, 164, 175, 183, 194, 206, 217, 218, 220–228, 230–233, 238, 241, 273, 278, 292, 294, 295, 300, 305, 310, 329, 331
Adams, Mrs. John, 116, 129, 230, 305, 330, 331
Adams, Samuel, 218, 244, 260
Agriculture, 51–61, 64, 68, 70, 72, 73, 104, 158, 167–171, 191, 195, 274, 280, 323
Aix, visit to, 153–164
Alien Sedition Acts, 228–230
America. See United States and Government.
American: historians, 308, 309;
Revolution, 41, 43, 50, 61–65, 206
Architecture, 3, 4, 164, 165, 281–288, 317
Articles of Confederation, 113, 176
Arts and Sciences, Jefferson’s interest in, 138–149, 165, 281–287
Bank bill, 187, 193, 197–199
Barbary States, 128
Bastrop, Baron, grant of, 264
Bibby, Captain, 28
Bingham, Mrs. William, 94
Blennerhassett, 264
Blunderhassett. See Blennerhassett Bonaparte, 121, 250, 251
Brunswick, Duke of, 124
Buffon, 134–146
Burgoyne, De, 150
Burr, Aaron, 240, 241, 242, 262, 263, 264, 272, 273
Burr trial, 263, 264
Burwell, Rebecca, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 37
Buttman, 294
Caermarthen, Marquis of, 101, 163
Calonne, 93, 102, 127, 179
Capitol. See National capitol Carmichael, 108, 117, 133, 150, 256
Centralization, 110, 111, 181, 268–274, 311, 312
Chastellux, Marquis de, 32, 36, 146
Climate: animals and, 134–136;
in Virginia, 146–148;
in France, 157, 158, 161
Cobbett, William, 216
Colonial Virginia, life in, 4, 7, 11, 17, 18
Connecticut, family compact of, 236, 237
Constitution, 65, 68, 110, 114, 172, 175–179, 181–184, 187, 198–200, 230, 234, 251, 254, 272, 273
Continental Congress, 76, 292
Cook, Captain, 131
Cooper, Dr., 318
Corny, Mme. de, 92, 164
Courts. See Judiciary
De Burgoyne, 150
De Corny, Mme., 92, 164
Debt. See Public debt Declaration of Independence, 35, 48, 49, 103, 216, 331
De la Rochefoucault, Duchesse de, 93
De l’Espinasse, Mlle., 295
Democracy, 183, 185, 191, 192, 205, 209, 224, 292
De Nemours, Dupont, 193, 310
De Rozière, Pilâtre, 138
De Staël, Mme., 92
D’Houdetot, Comtesse, 93
Dickinson, John, 305
Douglas, 14
Dunmore, Lord, 37
Dwight, Timothy, 236, 304
Economie system in U. S., 217, 273
Economics, science of, 192, 193
Education, 16, 42, 96–100, 311, 312, 314
Embargo Act, 202, 266, 267, 271, 322
England. See Great Britain English gardens, 163
English language, Jefferson on, 301, 302
Entail, bill for repealing laws of, 42
Espinasse, Mlle, de l’, 295 (footnote)
Europe, influence of, on Americans, 90
Exploiting interests, 16, 103, 104, 110–115, 117, 182, 192, 208, 210, 214, 215, 231, 249, 268, 270. See also Government and exploiting interests
Expropriation. See Land-monopoly
Family compact of Connecticut, 236, 237, 255
Farmers-General, 101, 102, 126, 131, 179
Fauchet, 208
Fauquier, Francis, 9, 17, 29, 90, 178
Federalism, 172, 177, 207, 234, 235, 241–245,
250, 255, 267, 269, 273, 275, 309
France :
Absence of freedom in, 88;
American revolution and, 41;
arts and sciences in, 87, 88;
climate in, 157, 158, 161
constitution of, 119
Farmers-General, 101, 102, 126, 131, 179;
Government in, 102–105;
land-monopoly in, 85–103;
life and manners in, 86;
Louisiana purchase, 247–252;
piracy against American trade, 265;
political woman in, 91–95;
poverty in, 84–86
relations with U. S., 225–227, 248, 258, 265, 266;
revolution in, 115, 118–125, 178, 179, 205–207, 211, 289;
taxation in, 101–103;
tobacco-trade, 100, 126, 131;
trade with U. S., 77, 92, 100–102, 105, 126, 127, 210;
war with England (1793), 205–215;
XYZ incident, 225–228
Franklin, Benjamin, 17, 40, 50, 75, 87, 91, 134, 140, 175, 222
Free Trade, 43, 126, 201, 202
Freedom, 88, 89, 102, 110–113, 116, 118, 196, 206, 209, 212, 266
French Revolution, 115, 118–125, 178, 179, 205–207, 211, 289
Funding and assumption, 185–190; 193–197, 217, 218
Gallatin, 96, 245, 247, 253, 255, 262, 266
Genêt, Edmond Charles, 70, 205–209, 213, 228, 289
Goethe, 293, 298, 303, 311
Government:
Democracy, 183, 185, 192, 205, 209, 224, 292;
exploiting interests and, 16, 103, 104, 110–115, 117, 122, 182, 185–188, 193–197, 199, 210, 215, 249, 268–270;
Jefferson and centralization in, 110, 111, 181, 268–274, 311, 312;
Jefferson on French government, 102–105, 115;
Jefferson on English government, 102–105, 275;
Jefferson and theory and practice of, 102–104, 110–115, 192, 223, 224, 271, 278, 290;
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