Jefferson and Hamilton

Suddenly the bubble showed signs of bursting. A New York bank stopped discounting for some of the speculators. Messengers hurried forth with the ominous news, horses’ hoofs hammering the Jersey roads to Philadelphia, where there was consternation and a falling-off in buying.[350] Pay-day had not yet come, but it was on the way, and men began to regain their senses.

Then came the emergence of the political phase. ‘Does history afford an instance,’ asked one observer, ‘where inequality in property, without any adequate consideration, ever before so suddenly took place in the world? or the basis of the power and influence of an Aristocracy was created?’[351] A Boston paper commented significantly on the ease with which the mere opening and closing of the galleries of Congress could serve the purposes of speculation. ‘How easily might this be done should any member of Congress be inclined to speculate.’[352]

Thus the talk of a ‘corrupt squadron’ in the First Congress was not the invention of Jefferson—it was the talk of the highways and the byways, the coffee-houses and the taverns, and we find it recurring in the correspondence of the public men of the period. Everywhere sudden fortunes sprang up as if by magic. There was a rumbling and grumbling in the offing. With the people thinking more seriously of Madison’s fight for discrimination, he began to loom along with Jefferson as a prospective leader against the ‘system.’ With the discovery that the law had been violated in the subscription of more than thirty shares, it was hoped that it would ‘draw the attention of Madison ... immediately on the meeting of Congress’ and that ‘the whole proceedings ... be declared nugatory.’[353]

Then came the election of Bank directors in the fall, and indignation flamed when the prizes went to leaders in the Congress that had created the Bank—to Rufus King, Samuel Johnson of North Carolina, William Smith of South Carolina, Jeremiah Wadsworth of the ‘fast sailing vessels,’ John Laurance of New York, William Bingham of Philadelphia, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, George Cabot, Fisher Ames, and Thomas Willing, the partner of Robert Morris.

Members of Congress had speculated heavily and profitably on their knowledge of their own intent in legislation; they were owners of bank scrip of the Bank they created, and their leaders were on the board of directors. There was talk among the people of a ‘corrupt squadron,’ and Jefferson did not invent the term; he found it in the street and used it. Though Hamilton, scrupulously honest, was not involved in proceedings that were vicious, if not corrupt, many of his lieutenants were, and that, for the purposes of politics, made an issue.

But Hamilton was in the saddle, booted and spurred, and riding hard toward the realization of his conception of government, followed by an army that fairly glittered with the brilliancy of many of his field marshals, and which was imposing in the financial, social, and cultural superiority of the rank and file; an army that could count on the greater part of the press to publish its orders of the day, and on the beneficiaries of its policies to fill its campaign coffers. And it was at this juncture that Jefferson began the mobilization of an army that would seem uncouth and ragged by comparison. The cleavage was distinct; the ten-year war was on.

As a preliminary to the story of the struggle, it is important to know more of the character and methods of the man who dared challenge Hamilton’s powerful array and something of the social atmosphere in Philadelphia where the great battles were fought.

CHAPTER V

THOMAS JEFFERSON: A PORTRAIT

IN the personal appearance of Thomas Jefferson there was little to denote the powerful, dominating leader and strict disciplinarian that he was. Unlike Hamilton, he did not look the commander so much as the rather shy philosopher. The gruff Maclay, on seeing him for the first time, was disappointed with his slender frame, the looseness of his figure, and the ‘air of stiffness in his manner,’ while pleased with the sunniness of his face.[354] He was of imposing height, being more than six feet, and slender without being thin.[355] All contemporaries who have left descriptions refer to the long, loosely jointed limbs, and none of them convey an impression of grace. His hair, much redder than that of Hamilton, was combed loosely over the forehead and at the side, and tied behind. His complexion was light, his eyes blue and usually mild in expression, his forehead broad and high. Beneath the eyes, his face was rather broad, the cheek-bones high, the chin noticeably long, and the mouth of generous size. The casual glance discovered more of benevolence than force, more of subtlety than pugnacity. Nor, in that day of lace and frills, was there anything in his garb to proclaim him of the élite. His enemies then, and ever since, have made too much of his loose carpet slippers and worn clothes, and the only thing they prove is that he may have had the Lincolnian indifference to style. Long before he made his ‘pose’ in the President’s house for the benefit of the groundlings, we find a critic who was to be numbered among his followers complaining because his clothes were too small for his body.[356] The truth, no doubt, is that he dressed conventionally, because men must, and was careless of his attire.

Certain it is that when she first met him, Mrs. Bayard Smith, who had been unduly impressed with the Federalist references to the ‘coarseness and vulgarity of his manners,’ was astonished at the contradiction of the caricature by the man. ‘So meek and mild, yet dignified in his manners, with a voice so soft and low, with a countenance so benign and intelligent’ she found him.[357] In truth there was enough dignity in his manner to discourage the stranger on a first approach, as Tom Moore found to his disgust. Even Mrs. Smith thought his ‘dignified and reserved air’ chill at first;[358] and a French admirer who made a sentimental journey to Monticello thought him somewhat cold and reserved.’[359] ‘The cold first look he always cast upon a stranger’[360] appears too often in the observations of his contemporaries to have been imaginary.

As some have found fault with his dress, others have criticized a slovenly way of sitting—‘in a lounging manner, on one hip commonly, with one of his shoulders elevated much above the other’;[361] while another—a woman too—was charmed at the ‘free and easy manner’ in which he accepted a proffered chair.[362] The natural deduction from the contradictions is that he seated himself as comfortably as possible with little regard to the picture in the pose. There is a manifest absurdity in the idea that the man who moved familiarly in the most cultured circles of the most polished capital in Europe could have been either impossible in dress or boorish in manner.

But there is one unpleasant criticism of his manner that cannot be so easily put aside—a shiftiness in his glance which bears out the charge of his enemies that he was lacking in frankness. The most democratic member of the first Senate, meeting him for the first time, was disappointed to find that ‘he had a rambling vacant look, and nothing of that firm collected deportment which I expected would dignify the presence of a Secretary or Minister.’[363] Another found that ‘when speaking he did not look at his auditor, but cast his eyes toward the ceiling or anywhere but at the eye of his auditor.’[364] This weakness was possibly overemphasized, for he was notoriously shy.

Aside from this, there is abundant evidence that there was an ineffable charm in his manner. One who objected to his ‘shifty glance’ was favorably impressed with ‘the simplicity and sobriety’ of his deportment, and found that while ‘he was quiet and unobtrusive ... a stranger would perceive that he was in the presence of one who was not a common man.’[365] He was free of the affectations of pedantry, courteous and kindly, modest and tolerant. Thus he appeared to excellent advantage in conversation, and, with one exception, all who knew him and have left their impressions found him an entertaining and illuminating talker. Maclay, who was certainly not the most competent of judges, thought his conversation ‘loose and rambling,’ and yet admitted that ‘he scattered information wherever he went, and some even brilliant sentiments sparkled from him.’[366] It is probable that the gout-racked radical confused conversation with set speeches, and quite as possible that on this particular occasion, when Jefferson was meeting with a curious senatorial committee, he was not inclined to tell all he knew.

Certainly the polished nobleman, familiar with the most intellectual circles of Paris, who found his ‘conversation of the most agreeable kind,’ and that he possessed ‘a stock of information not inferior to that of any other man,’ and ‘in Europe ... would hold a distinguished rank among men of letters,’ was quite as competent a judge as the Senator from the wilderness of Pennsylvania.[367] Among men his manner of conversation was calm and deliberate, without the Johnsonian ex-cathedra touch, and yet he ‘spoke like one who considered himself as entitled to deference.’[368] Among friends, and particularly women, he appears to have been deferential and captivating in his tactful kindness. Then when, ‘with a manner and voice almost femininely soft and gentle,’ he ‘entered into conversation on the commonplace topics of the day,’ at least one woman found that ‘there was something in his manner, his countenance and voice that at once unlocked [her] heart.’[369]

Such was the Jefferson seen superficially by his contemporaries.

II

Those who prefer to think of Jefferson as an aristocrat, born to the purple, who departed from the paths of his fathers, refer only to the maternal ancestry. The American founder of this branch of the family liked to think of himself as the descendant of gentlemen of title and of the half-brother of Queen Mary. Jefferson preferred to dismiss this claim on the aristocracy with the statement that his mother’s family traced ‘their pedigree far back in England and Scotland, to which let every one ascribe the faith and merit he chooses.’ From the Randolphs he probably inherited his love of beauty, his fondness for luxury, but they failed utterly to transmit to him any aristocratic notions of government. There was a reason—his father was a middle-class farmer, and it was from him and his early environment that he received his earliest and most lasting political impressions.

This father was no ordinary man. Physically a giant, he was big in mind and strong in character. By the light of the log fire in the evenings, he was wont to read Shakespeare, Swift, and Addison to his family. An ardent Whig with advanced democratic ideas, he as a magistrate manifested sympathy for the plain people.[370] His thousand acres at Shadwell were in the wilderness and on the frontier, and his son was as much a Westerner in his boyhood as is the boy of Idaho to-day, for the West is a relative term.

This Western boy at the most impressionable age was sent to school in Louisa County, which was then the hot-bed of radical democracy and Presbyterian dissent. The natives about him were in buckskin breeches and Indian moccasins, and, with no coat over their rough hunting shirts, they covered their heads with coon-skin caps. It was a long cry from the polished circles of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia to this typical Western scene; if one was the East, the other was the West. The small proprietor farmers lived in crude cabins, and theirs was the hard lot of the pioneer. Thus Jefferson’s training was that of the Westerner.[371]

The boy was father to the man. When he entered college at Williamsburg, he found himself in the headquarters of the aristocracy, for there, at the capital, the lords of the land had their winter homes where lavish hospitality was displayed. Into this society Jefferson was thrown, and he moved therein as to the manor born—at heart a Western man with Eastern polish.[372] It was not for nothing that there was Randolph blood in his veins.

Even as he moved among the hard-drinking, fox-hunting imitators of the English squires, his sympathies were enlisted in the growing democratic movement of the small farmers among the upper rivers, the tobacco-growers, the hunters and trappers of the Alleghany slopes. The western counties, then the western frontier, had been populated by the Scotch-Irish and Germans—earnest, hard-working, hard-thinking men, who wrestled with nature as with their consciences, built churches in the woods, and school-houses in the clearing. These men were democrats, and their cause became the cause of Jefferson even while he was in college. Volumes have been written to explain Jefferson, but it was reserved for Professor William E. Dodd to do it in a paragraph:

If in college he was confirming his faith in democracy, born of his schooling in the land of the small farmers, he was burnishing his weapons for the fight. It is significant that he disliked Blackstone and liked Coke because he found the former a teacher of Toryism and the latter a reflector of the philosophy of the Whigs. His training in the law was thorough, for he studied under George Wythe, with whom both Marshall and Clay received their legal schooling. The friendship of Professor Small encouraged his natural spirit of toleration and investigation; and at the ‘palace’ of Francis Fauquier, the gay and brilliant royal governor—‘a gentleman of the school of Louis XV translated into England by Charles II, and into English by Lord Chesterfield’[374] he formed his literary tastes and learned the virtues of literary style. Thus assiduous in his studies, reasonably circumspect in his morals, and profiting immeasurably by contact with superior minds, he was receiving an intensive preparation for his future labors. In the seclusion of his room he communed with Coke and Milton, Harrington and Locke, and the time was to come when his most notable literary production was to disclose, in word and phrase, the influence of the latter. Locke, not Rousseau, was the well from which he drew; and there is no sillier assertion in history than that his democracy was born of association with the men of the French Revolution.

III

Long before there were levelers in France, Jefferson was a leveler in Virginia; and because he was a leveler in Virginia, the reactionaries who resented his reforms were afterward to charge his democracy to the influence of the levelers of Paris. His democracy was inherent, in part inherited from a pioneer father. His dislike of the aristocratic system amounted to a prejudice, and he could not bear the novels of Scott because of his detestation of the institutions of medieval times.[375] Having written the Declaration of Independence in the house of a bricklayer, he declined a reëlection to Congress to enter the House of Burgesses in Virginia to revamp the institutions of the State along democratic lines. When he finished his work there, he had made himself one of the foremost democrats of all times—and the French Revolution was still in the distance.

The Virginia system had been made for caste society; the landed aristocracy were as much a caste as that in England—minus the titles. They had the same love of land, the same obsession that the alienation of any part of their possessions was treason to the family. Through the system of entail, the lands and slaves of the aristocracy could be passed on down through the generations, proof against the extravagance and inefficiency of the owners and the attacks of creditors. The law of primogeniture was designed to serve the same general end of preventing the disruption of the great estates. With a fine audacity, Jefferson sallied forth quite gayly to attack them both. Even Henry thought this was radicalism gone mad. Pendleton was more hurt than outraged. The aristocratic members of his mother’s family looked upon him as a matricide. Undaunted by the hate engendered, he put his hand to the plough and kept it there until he had ploughed the field and prepared it for a democratic harvest. His friend Pendleton begged a compromise on primogeniture giving the eldest son a double share of the land. ‘Yes,’ replied the leveler, ‘when he can eat twice the allowance of food and do double the allowance of work.’ It was his purpose to eradicate ‘every fibre of ancient or future aristocracy.’[376] The outraged landed aristocracy never forgave him. He was the first American to invite the hate of a class, and from the beginning he turned his back on the aristocracy and made his appeal to the middle-class yeomanry.[377] All this was behind him when he went to Paris before the Revolution there began. There the tall, slender American in the elegant house on the Grande Route des Champs Elysées, with its extensive gardens and court, was an impressive figure. ‘You replace Doctor Franklin, I hear,’ said Vergennes, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. ‘I succeed him,’ Jefferson replied; ‘nobody could replace him.’ There could have been no more ingratiating reply, for his predecessor had been greatly admired and loved.

No one could have found the conversation of the salons and dinner tables more congenial. His manners were those of a man of the world, and he shared the French fondness for speculative talk, and the French knack of spicing gravity with frivolity. Even his table tastes were similar. He ate sparingly and preferred the light wines. Both his natural hospitality and his respect for the dignity of his position spread the reputation of his lavish table; and while he gave no great parties, gay and frequent dinners were the rule. Lafayette ran in and out constantly; members of the diplomatic set found Jefferson’s house an agreeable meeting-place; the young French officers who had served in America liked his company, and De la Tude, the wit, who had served thirty-five years in prison for writing an epigram on Pompadour, enlivened many an evening with his reminiscences. American tourists were captivated by his civilities, introductions to celebrities, itineraries for profitable trips. Like Franklin before him, he charmed the beautiful women of the court with his wit and humor, and the eloquence of his conversation. He loved the promenades and shops, and was constantly alert for something unusual to send his friends at home—rare books for Madison, Monroe, and Wythe, a portable table for Madison, an artistic lamp for Lee. And yet he was far from an elegant idler, and his days were laboriously passed; mornings at his office, afternoons given to country walks, evenings to society, art, music. He found time for elaborate and illuminating reports that are models in diplomatic literature and which exacted tribute from even John Marshall. Feeling frequently the need of absolute seclusion for his work, he had rooms in the Carthusian Monastery on Mount Calvary where silence was enjoined outside the rooms, but where he had the privileges of the garden.

‘I am much pleased with the people of this country,’ he wrote a lady. ‘The roughness of the human mind is so thoroughly rubbed off with them, that it seems one might glide through a whole life without a jostle.’[378] And in another letter, the same impression: ‘Here it seems a man might pass a life without encountering a single rudeness.’[379] But if he loved the society of Paris, he was not, like Morris, seduced into an acceptance of its system. His passion for democracy did not permit him to judge the happiness of a nation by the luxuries of the court and aristocracy. He struck out into the country to judge for himself of the condition of the peasants, looked into the pots on the fire to see what they ate, felt their beds to see if they were comfortable. He inquired into the wages and the working conditions of the artisans of the cities—and his conclusions were unavoidable, of course. ‘It is a fact,’ he wrote, ‘in spite of the mildness of their governors, the people are ground to powder by their form of government. Of twenty million people supposed to be in France, I am of opinion there are nineteen million more wretched, more accursed in every circumstance of human existence than the most conspicuously wretched individual in the whole United States.’[380] And to another: ‘I find the general fate of humanity here most deplorable. The truth of Voltaire’s observation offers itself perpetually, that every man here is either the hammer or the anvil.’[381] He was shocked by a system that dedicated the sons of peasants as cannon fodder in remote wars precipitated by the whims of a prostitute; that winked at the debauchery of their wives and daughters; that gave men to the Bastile for the expression of a criticism; that crushed the people with intolerable taxation to sustain the luxury of a few; that forced the poor to live on food not fit for a stray dog in a city slums, and which awed the masses into submission to such conditions by the bayonets of the soldiery. This was the France of which he thought in the day when his sympathy with the Revolution was to damn him with the Federalists’ taunt of ‘Jacobin’ and ‘anarchist.’

Such being his observations and views, he rejoiced in the popular awakening in the dawning days of the Revolution. Witnessing the meeting of the Assembly of the Notables, a fascinated spectator of the razing of the Bastile, listening, deeply moved, to the audacious eloquence of Mirabeau, he wrote, with the joy of the reformer, to Washington that ‘the French nation has been awakened by our Revolution.’ It was in those days that Gouverneur Morris, the friend of Hamilton, was accustomed to drop in on Jefferson for a chat on the situation, and their friendly disagreements were soon to appear in a party division in America. ‘He and I differ,’ wrote Morris in his diary, ‘in our system of politics. He with all the leaders of liberty here is desirous of annihilating distinctions of order.’[382] And yet he was not hostile to the King or the monarchy. He hoped for reforms, freely granted. Louis he found ‘irascible, rude, very limited in his understanding,’ with ‘no mistress,’ but governed too much by the Queen—‘devoted to pleasure and expense, and not remarkable for any other vices or virtues.’[383] As the storm-clouds lowered and the easy-going monarch remained inert, he became less tolerant. ‘The King, long in the habit of drowning his cares in wine, plunges deeper and deeper. The Queen cries but sins on. The Count d’Artois is detested.’[384] And a month later: ‘The King goes for nothing. He hunts one half the day, is drunk the other, and signs whatever he is bid.’[385]

As the future Terrorists ascended from the cellars and descended from the garrets, and occasional riots gave premonitory signs of the bloody days ahead, he reported to Jay that the rioting was the work of the ‘abandoned banditti of Paris,’ and had no ‘professed connection with the great national reformation going on.’[386]

All this time he was being constantly consulted by Lafayette and the moderate leaders who were to become the members of the attractive but unfortunate party of the Gironde. They even met at his dinner table to make plans, without notifying him of their intent, and his voluntary explanation to the Minister was received with the expression of a hope that he might be able to assist in an accommodation of differences. He did, in fact, propose a plan, which, had it been accepted, might have saved the monarchy. It was his suggestion that Louis step forward with a charter in his hands, granting liberty of the person, of conscience, of the press, a trial by jury, an annual legislature with the power of taxation, and with a ministry responsible to the people.[387] These associations and these views are conclusive as to the absurdity that he was permeated with the theories of Jacobinism and brought them back to the United States. He was the same kind of Jacobin as Lafayette. His interest was the interest in democracy and popular rights that he had taken with him when he sailed for Europe. Mirabeau was still laboring to save the monarchy with reforms when Jefferson returned to America on leave.

IV

Jefferson was a humanitarian ahead of his time. His humanity spoke above the passions of the Revolution in his letter to Patrick Henry against the mistreatment of the German prisoners. ‘Is an enemy so execrable,’ he wrote, ‘that though in captivity his wishes and comforts are to be disregarded and even crossed? I think not. It is for the benefit of mankind to mitigate the horrors of war as much as possible.’[388] These captives, interned near Monticello, came to love the master on the hill for his efforts to lighten the burdens of their captivity.[389] A little later, in the Virginia Legislature, we find him opposing the death penalty except for treason and murder, and the policy of working convicts on the highways and canals. ‘Exhibited as a public spectacle,’ he wrote, ‘with shaved heads and mean clothing, working on the highroads produced in the criminals such a prostration of self-respect, as, instead of reforming, plunged them into the most desperate and hardened depravity.’[390] It was novel then to hear men speaking of reform instead of punishment.

That this humanitarian impulse was not confined to people at a distance is shown in his relations to his own servants, both the employees and the slaves. A woman of fashion commented on ‘the most perfect servants at the White House’ during his eight years there and the significant circumstance that ‘none left.’[391] But we must turn to his relations with his slaves to find him at his best. One picture will suffice. It is on the occasion of his return to Monticello from his French mission. At the foot of the hill all the slaves in their gaudiest attire are assembled to greet him. The carriage appears down the road. The slaves, laughing, shouting, rush forward to welcome him, unhitch the horses to draw the carriage up the steep hill, some pulling, some pushing, and others huddled in a dark mass close around the vehicle. Some kiss his hands, others his feet, and it is long after he reaches the house before he is permitted to enter. This was long before the day when correspondents with cameras pursued public men and demonstrations were staged.[392] Here was a master who loved his slaves.

Nor can there be any possible doubt as to his hostility to slavery. One of the features of his Virginia reforms was abolition. While he failed, he never doubted that ultimately the chains would fall. ‘Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free’ he wrote in his ‘Autobiography.’[393] A little later, referring to his strictures on slavery in his ‘Notes on Virginia,’ he expressed a desire to get them to the young men in the colleges. ‘It is to them I look, to the rising generation, and not to the one now in power, for these great reformations.’[394] Declining membership in a society for abolition in France on the ground that his official status would make improper a demonstration against an institution his own people were retaining, he said that ‘it is decent of me to avoid too public a demonstration of my wishes to see it [slavery] abolished.’[395] Without any of this evidence, his hostility to slavery would be irrefutably established by the Ordinance of the Northwest Territory, in the handwriting of Jefferson in the archives of the Nation, prohibiting slavery in any of the States that might be carved therefrom after the year 1800.

V

Such is the persistency of falsehood that Jefferson has come down to us vaguely as an atheist and an enemy of the Christian religion. Since this charge is to play a part in the political story we are about to tell, it calls for some attention. He was brought up in the Church of England, and his earliest recollection was of saying the Lord’s Prayer when his dinner was delayed.[396] He planned at least one church and contributed to the erection of others, gave freely to Bible Societies, and liberally to the support of the clergy. He attended church with normal regularity, taking his prayer book to the services and joining in the responses and prayers of the congregation. No human being ever heard him utter a word of profanity. During the period of his social ostracism by the intolerant partisans of Philadelphia, he passed many evenings with Dr. Rush in conversation on religion.[397] ‘I am a Christian,’ he once said, ‘in the only sense in which Jesus wished any one to be—sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others.’ On one occasion when a man of distinction expressed his disbelief in the truths of the Bible, he said, ‘Then, sir, you have studied it to little purpose.’[398] While the New England pulpits were ringing with denunciations of this ‘infidel’ and old ladies, unable to detect the false witness of the partisan clergy, were solemnly hiding their Bibles to prevent their confiscation by the ‘atheist’ in the President’s House, he was spending his nights in the codification of the ‘Morals of Jesus,’ and through the remainder of his life he was to read from this every night before retiring.[399] In his last days he spent much time reading the Greek dramatists and the Bible, dwelling in conversation on the superiority of the moral system of Christ over all others. In his dying hour, after taking leave of his family, he was heard to murmur, ‘Lord, now lettest Thy servant depart in peace.’[400]

The reason for the myth created against him is not far to seek. Just as the landed aristocracy of Virginia pursued him with increasing venom because of his land reforms, the clergy hated him for forcing the separation of Church and State. When he made the fight for this reform, it was a crime not to baptize a child into the Episcopal Church; a crime to bring a Quaker into the colony; and, according to the law, a heretic could be burned. If the latter law was not observed, that compelling all to pay tithes regardless of their religious affiliations and opinions was rigidly enforced. This outraged Jefferson’s love of liberty. The Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, who were making inroads on the membership of the Established Church, were prosecuted, and their ministers were declared disturbers of the peace and thrown into jail like common felons. Patrick Henry and his followers fought Jefferson’s plan for a disestablishment—but he won.[401] The ‘atheist’ law, which was never forgiven by the ministers of Virginia and Connecticut, was simple and brief:

Here we have the secret of the animus of the clergy of the time—but there were other reasons. In his ‘Notes on Virginia’ he did not please the orthodox, and Dr. Mason, a fashionable political minister of New York City, exposed him in the pulpit, holding him up to scorn as a ‘profane philosopher’ and an ‘infidel.’ Discussing the theory that the marine shells found on the high mountains were proof of the universal deluge, Jefferson had rejected it. ‘Aha,’ cried Mason, ‘he derides the Mosaic account’; he ‘sneers at the Scriptures’ and with ‘malignant sarcasm.’ When Jefferson, referring to the tillers of the soil, wrote that they were ‘the chosen people of God if ever He had a chosen people,’ and referred to Christ as ‘good if ever man was,’ the minister charged him with ‘profane babbling.’[402]

His view of creation is set forth in a letter discussing a work by Whitehurst. He believed that a Supreme Being created the earth and its inhabitants; that if He created both, He could have created both at once, or created the earth and waited ages for it to get form itself before He created man; but he believed that it was created in a state of fluidity and not in its present solid form. This was his infidelity. He probably did not believe that Jonah was swallowed by the whale—and that was enough to damn him. But if he was not a Christian, the pulpits are teeming with atheists to-day.[403]

VI

We have seen that Hamilton had no faith in the Constitution, but did yeoman service for its ratification; we have the charge that Jefferson was hostile to both; and the truth is that he was hostile to neither and favorable to both. The evidence is overwhelming.

When the new form of government was under consideration, he proposed ‘to make the States one in everything connected with foreign nations, and several as to everything purely domestic,’ and to separate the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.[404] He was bitterly hostile to any plan based on the monarchical idea, and advised its friends ‘to read the fable of the frogs who solicited Jupiter for a King.’[405] When the Convention met, he wrote Adams that it was ‘really an assembly of demigods,’ but regretted that they began their deliberations ‘by so abominable a precedent as that of tying up the tongues of the members.’[406] His first impressions of the completed document were unfavorable. In a letter to Adams he complained of the reëligibility of the President.[407] To another correspondent he complained that the proposed system would merge the States into one without protecting the people with a bill of rights.[408]

Writing to Madison, he went more into detail, balancing the good against the bad. He liked the separation of the departments, endorsed the lodging of the power of initiating money bills with the representatives of the people, and was ‘captivated with the compromise of the opposite claims of the great and little States’; but he insisted that a bill of rights ‘is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse or rest in inference.’ Professing himself ‘no friend to a very energetic government’ as ‘always oppressive,’ he added that should the people approve the Constitution in all its parts he should ‘concur in it cheerfully in hopes that they will amend it whenever they think it works wrong.’[409]

Little more than a month later he had become an ardent friend of ratification. ‘I wish with all my soul,’ he wrote, ‘that the nine first Conventions may accept the Constitution, because this may secure to us the good it contains, which I think great and important. But I equally wish that the four latest Conventions, whichever they may be, may refuse to accede to it till a declaration of rights is annexed.’[410]

When the Massachusetts Convention accepted with ‘perpetual instructions to her Delegates to endeavor to secure reforms,’ he was delighted,[411] and the same day he wrote another correspondent of his pleasure at the progress made toward ratification. ‘Indeed I have presumed that it would gain on the public mind as I confess it has on my own.’[412] When South Carolina acted, he wrote E. Rutledge his congratulations. ‘Our government wanted bracing,’ he said. ‘Still we must take care not to run from one extreme to another; not to brace too high.’[413] When the requisite nine States had ratified, he wrote Madison in a spirit of rejoicing. ‘It is a good canvas on which some strokes only want retouching. What these are I think are sufficiently manifested by the general voice from North to South which calls for a bill of rights.’[414]

After the ratification, he wrote Madison in praise of ‘The Federalist,’ describing it as ‘the best commentary on government ever written,’ and admitting that it had ‘rectified’ him on many points.[415] In the same vein he wrote to Washington, expressing the hope that a bill of rights would be speedily added.[416] In the spring of 1789 he wrote another that the Constitution was ‘unquestionably the wisest ever yet presented to men.’[417] And after the Bill of Rights had been added, he wrote to Lafayette that ‘the opposition to the Constitution has almost totally disappeared’ and that ‘the amendments proposed by Congress have brought over almost all’ of the objectors.[418]

Years afterward, when he wrote his ‘Autobiography,’ he reviewed his reactions on the document: ‘I received a copy early in November,’ he wrote, ‘and read and contemplated its provisions, with great satisfaction.... The absence of express declarations, ensuring freedom of religious worship, freedom of the press, freedom of the person under the uninterrupted protection of the Habeas Corpus & trial by jury in civil as well as in criminal cases excited my jealousy; and the reëligibility of the President for life I quite disapproved. I expressed freely in letters to my friends, and most particularly to Mr. Madison and General Washington, my approbations and objections.’[419] His recollections were true to the facts as conclusively shown in the correspondence to which reference has been made.

He was no more opposed to the Constitution and its ratification than he was an atheist.

VII

This brings us to Jefferson the creator and leader of a party, and his methods of management. Here he was without a peer in the mastery of men. He intuitively knew men, and when bent upon it could usually bend them to his will. He was a psychologist and could easily probe the minds and hearts of those he met. In his understanding of mass psychology, he had no equal. When a measure was passed or a policy adopted in Philadelphia, he knew the reactions in the woods of Georgia without waiting for letters and papers. This rare insight into the mass mind made him a brilliantly successful propagandist. In every community he had his correspondents with whom he communicated with reasonable regularity, doing more in this way to mould and direct the policies of his party than could have been done in any other way. Seldom has there lived a more tireless and voluminous letter-writer. With all the powerful elements arrayed against him, he appreciated the importance of the press as did few others. ‘I desired you in my last to send me the newspapers, notwithstanding the expense,’ he wrote a friend from Paris.[420] Believing that the people, in possession of the facts, would reach reasonable conclusions, he considered newspapers a necessary engine of democracy. ‘If left to me,’ he once wrote, ‘to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.’[421] There is not a scintilla of evidence to confute his stout contention that he never wrote for the papers anonymously, but the evidence piles mountain high to prove that he constantly inspired the tone of the party press.

In his personal contacts he was captivating—a master of diplomacy and tact, born of his intuitive knowledge of men. Perhaps no better illustration of his cleverness in analyzing men can be found than in his letter to Madison on De Moustier, a newly appointed French Minister to the United States. ‘De M. is remarkably communicative. With adroitness he may be pumped of anything. His openness is from character, not affectation. An intimacy with him may, on this account, be politically valuable.’[422]

In his leadership we find more of leading than of driving. He had a genius for gently and imperceptibly insinuating his own views into the minds of others and leaving them with the impression that they had conceived the ideas and convinced Jefferson. To Madison this was a source of keen delight.[423] Jefferson was the original ‘Easy Boss.’ His tact was proverbial. He never sought to overshadow or overawe. Inferior men were not embarrassed or depressed in his presence. He was amazingly thoughtful and considerate. In a company he instinctively went to the assistance of the neglected. Thus at a dinner party, a guest, long absent from the country, and unknown to the diners, was left out of the conversation and ignored. In a momentary silence, Jefferson turned to him. ‘To you, Mr. C., we are indebted for this benefit—’ he said, ‘no one deserves more the gratitude of his country.’ The other guests were all attention. ‘Yes, sir, the upland rice which you sent from Algiers, and which thus far succeeds, will, when generally adopted by the planters, prove an inestimable blessing to our Southern States.’ After that the neglected guest became the lion of the dinner.[424] Thoughtfulness in small things—this entered not a little into Jefferson’s hold on his followers.

It was at the dinner table that he planned many of his battles. He did not care for the stormy and contentious atmosphere of a caucus. He was not an orator. In the Continental Congress he was disgusted by the ‘rage for debate.’[425] Later he was to find his lot in the Cabinet intolerable because he and Hamilton were constantly pitted against each other ‘like cocks in a pit.’ He was not afraid of a fight, but the futility of angry controversy repelled him. It was this which made him a delightful dinner host—all controversial subjects that might offend were taboo. If his position were warmly controverted, he changed the subject tactfully. It was never the opposition that interested him, but the reason for it; and with rare subtlety he would seek to obliterate the prejudice, if it were prejudice, or to remove the misunderstanding if it were ignorance of facts. Thus he won many victories through a seeming retreat.[426]

Unescapable quarrels and separations were minor tragedies to him. He long sought to get along with Hamilton. He advised his daughters to be tolerant of disagreeable people and acted on his own advice. Fiske has explained him in a sentence: ‘He was in no wise lacking in moral courage, but his sympathies were so broad and tender that he could not breathe freely in an atmosphere of strife.’[427] Thus considerate of his foes, he never hurt the sensibilities of his friends through offensive methods. He liked to gather his lieutenants about him at the table and ‘talk it out’—each man free to give his views. Here he ironed out differences, dominating by the superiority of his intellect and fascinating personality while appearing singularly free from domination.

In his power of self-control Jefferson had another advantage over his leading political opponents. There was something uncanny in his capacity to simulate ignorance of the hate that often encompassed him. To the most virulent of his foes he was the pink of courtesy. He mastered others by mastering himself. And because he was master of himself, he had another advantage—he kept his judgment clear as to the capacity and character of his opponents. One may search in vain through the letters of Hamilton for expressions other than those of contemptuous belittlement of his political foes. Jefferson never made that mistake. He conceded Hamilton’s ability and admired it. Visitors at Monticello, manifesting surprise at finding busts by Ceracchi of Hamilton and Jefferson, facing each other across the hall, elicited the smiling comment—‘opposite in death as in life.’ There never would have been a bust of Jefferson at ‘The Grange.’ Through the long years of estrangement with Adams, Jefferson kept the way clear for the restoration of their old relations. Writing Madison of Adams’s faults, he emphasized his virtues and lovable qualities. When the bitter battles of their administrations were in the past and a mutual friend wrote that the old man at Quincy had said, ‘I always loved Jefferson and always shall,’ he said, ‘That is enough for me,’ and set to work to revive the old friendship. Thus the time came when in reply to Jefferson’s congratulations on the election of John Quincy Adams in 1824, Adams wrote: ‘I call him our John because when you were at the Cul de Sac at Paris, he appeared to me to be almost as much your boy as mine.’[428] This capacity for keeping his judgment clear of the benumbing fumes of prejudice concerning the qualities of his enemies was one of the strong points of his leadership.

This does not mean that in practical politics Jefferson was a ‘Miss Nancy’ or a ‘Sister Sue.’ This first consummate practical politician of the Republic did not consider it practical to underestimate the foe, nor to dissipate his energy and cloud his judgment by mere prejudices and hates. He was not an idealist in his methods, and this has given his enemies a peg on which to hang the charge that he was dishonest. He was an opportunist, to be sure; he never refused the half loaf he could get because of the whole loaf he could not have. He trimmed his sails at times to save his craft—and this was wisdom. He compromised at the call of necessity. He was hard-headed and looked clear-eyed at the realities about him. He was cunning, for without cunning he could not have overcome a foe so powerfully entrenched. He was as elusive as a shadow, and this has been called cowardice—but it was difficult to trap him in consequence. His antipathy to the frontal attack has often been referred to with contempt, but, leading a large but unorganized army against one of tremendous power, he preferred the methods of Washington in the field—which was to avoid the frontal attack with his ragged Continentals against the trained and disciplined army. Because of these conditions he was given to mining. When apparently quiescent, he was probably sowing discord among his foes—his part concealed. This was hateful to the Federalists—just as the tactics of Frederick were hateful to the exasperated superior forces against him.

Jefferson was the most resourceful politician of his time. For every problem he had a solution. He teemed with ideas. These were his shock troops. If he seemed motionless, it was because by a nod or look he had put his forces on the march. Like the wiser of the modern bosses, he knew the virtue of silence. When in doubt, he said nothing. When certain of his course, he said nothing—to his foes. It was impossible to smoke him out when he preferred to stay in. In the midst of abuse he was serene. And he was a stickler for party regularity.[429] He appreciated the possibilities of organization and discipline. When money was needed for party purposes, his friends would receive a note: ‘I have put you down for so much.’ When the party paper languished, he circulated subscription lists among his neighbors, and instructed his friends to imitate his example. He was never too big for the small essential things, and he was a master of detail—very rarely true of men of large views. His energy was dynamic and he was tireless. He never rested on his arms or went into winter quarters. His fight was endless. The real secret of his triumph, however, is found in the reason given by one of his biographers: ‘He enjoyed a political vision penetrating deeper down into the inevitable movement of popular government, and farther forward into the future of free institutions than was possessed by any other man in public life in his day.’

VIII

No American of his time had such versatility or such diversified interests. He was asked to frame the Declaration of Independence because of his reputation as a writer. Adams has told the story: ‘He brought with him a reputation for literary science and a happy talent for composition. Writings of his were handed about[430] remarkable for their peculiar felicity of expression.’ It was the ‘Summary View’ which elicited the admiration of Edmund Burke. A more ambitious effort, his ‘Notes on Virginia’ were written during the fatal illness of his wife, and while he was confined to the house two or three weeks by a riding accident.[431] It was a valuable contribution to the natural, social, economic, and political history of the State, with a number of eloquent passages and fascinating pages.

He had an artistic temperament, loved music, and at the beginning of his career we find him busy planning his garden at Monticello, and practicing three hours a day on his loved violin, under the instructions of an Italian musician. His hospitality to the Hessian prisoners is partly explained by a mutual love of music. Returning from an absence to find ‘Shadwell,’ his early home, in ashes, he inquired anxiously about his books. ‘Oh, my young master,’ exclaimed the distressed slave, ‘they were all burnt, but we saved your fiddle.’[432]

Loving art in all its forms, he was fond of the company of artists. It was he who arranged in Paris for Houdon to go to America to make the statue of Washington.[433] He entertained Trumbull in the French capital, accompanying him to Versailles to see the King’s art collection, and urged him to remain in Paris and study.[434] He was delighted with architectural beauty and lingered about the masterpieces. From Nesmes, he wrote enthusiastically to a woman friend: ‘Here I am, Madame, gazing whole hours at the Maison Quarree, like a lover at his mistress. This is the second time I have been in love since I left Paris. The first was with a Diana at the Chateau de Laye-Epinaye in Beaujolais, a delicious morsel of sculpture, by M. A. Soldtz. This you will say was in rule, to fall in love with a female beauty; but with a house. No, Madame, it is not without a precedent in my own history. While in Paris I was violently smitten with the Hotel de Salm.’[435] When the Capitol at Richmond was in contemplation, he urged the construction of the most beautiful edifice possible as a model to be emulated in other buildings; drew some plans himself; examined those of Hallet, was captivated with those of Thornton, and urged their acceptance. ‘Simple, noble, beautiful,’ he wrote home.[436]

And yet, so many-sided was this man, that he was a utilitarian and scientist as well as artist. In Europe he was thought a philosopher, and Humboldt came to America to pass many hours under his roof. A perusal of his letters discloses the intensity and range of his interests. He was entranced with clocks, and we find him writing David Rittenhouse reminding him of ‘a kind promise of making me an accurate clock,’[437] and later to Madison of a watch he had made for himself and inquiring if his friend wished one.[438] He summoned a Swiss clock-maker to Monticello who died on the mountain and is buried in the enclosure with his patron. He put the noted Buffon to rout in Paris on points in natural history.[439] Admiring the red men, he spent years collecting their vocabularies.[440] When in Paris he heard that an Arabic translation of Livy had been found in Sicily, and importuned the chargés des affaires of Naples to make inquiries, and was much excited to hear that such a translation had been found ‘and will restore to us seventeen of the lost books.’[441] In the midst of the political diversions and social distractions of Paris he found time to write at length on the ‘latest discoveries in astrology.’[442] As early as the summer of 1785, when Pilatre de Rozière made his fatal attempt to cross the English Channel in a balloon, we find him eagerly discussing the possibilities of the aeronautical science.[443] A newly invented lamp pleased him and he sent one to a friend from Paris.[444] The use of steam in the operation of grist mills interested him and he found time to witness the test.[445] Even the absorbing drama of the French Revolution in its early stages did not lessen his interest in Paine’s iron bridge, and he attended its exhibition,[446] and finding the inventor hesitating between ‘the catenary and portions of a circle,’ he sent to Italy for a scientific work by the Abbe Mascheroni.[447] Fascinated by inventions, he was, himself, the inventor of a plough.

IX

Interested as he was in art and inventions, his heart was with the country life and the farmer’s lot. He was never happier than when, in the early morning, mounted on one of his beloved horses, he rode over his broad acres at Monticello, observing with a perennial zest the budding of the trees in spring, the unfolding of the flowers, the ripening of the harvest. Wherever he was, throughout his life, he longed for the house he had made on the hill, the broad fields, the family circle and the servitors and slaves. There he was lord of the domain. If he employed Italian gardeners, they conformed to his ideas. If he had a supervisor, it was he himself who determined what should be planted and where—where the orchards should be, what trees should be set and their location; and even the vines and shrubs, the nuts and seeds, the roots and bulbs claimed his personal attention. Even his hogs were named, and when one was to be killed, he designated it by name.[448] There, too, he lived in an atmosphere of affection. There he had taken his bride, a woman of exquisite beauty, grace, and loveliness; there his children had been born, and there, all too soon, their mother died. He was passionately devoted to her and there was no successor. To the daughters who were left he became both a father and a mother, resulting in an intimacy seldom found between father and daughters. In Paris he would not permit even his trusted servant to do their shopping, reserving that duty for himself. Always patient, never harsh, and ever sympathetic, he was the ideal parent.[449]

Though he did not remarry, he was fond of the society of women and they of his. The few letters to women that have been preserved are masterpieces of their kind, sprightly, playful, sometimes beautiful. His relations with the women of the Adams family are shown in a note to John Adams’s married daughter, written from Paris: ‘Mr. Jefferson has the honor to present his compliments to Mrs. Smith and to send her the two pair of corsets she desired. He wishes they may be suitable, as Mrs. Smith omitted to send her measure. Times are altered since Mademoiselle de Samson had the honor of knowing her; should they be too small, however, she will be so good as to lay them by a while. There are ebbs as well as flows in this world. When the Mountain refused to go to Mahomet, he went to the Mountain.’[450] In Paris he formed a few cherished friendships with women, notably with Mrs. Cosway, Italian wife of an English painter, a woman of charm, beauty, and intellect, with whom he corresponded. One of his letters, the dialogue between the Head and the Heart on her departure for England, is unique and sparkling.[451] He appreciated the exquisite Mrs. Bingham whom he met in Paris, and his chiding letters to her after her return to America must have pleased that artificial lady immensely.[452] He was a friend of the Comtesse De Tesse whose mind he admired,[453] and of Madame De Corney whose beauty attracted him. ‘The Bois de Boulogne invited you earnestly to retire to its umbrage from the heats of the sad season,’ he wrote her gallantly. ‘I was through it to-day as I am every day. Every tree charged me with this invitation.’[454]

Such was Thomas Jefferson who took upon himself the organization of the forces of democracy, when its enemies were in the saddle, booted and spurred, and with a well-disciplined and powerful army at their back. None but an extraordinary character could have dared hope for victory, and he was that, and more. Democrat and aristocrat, and sometimes autocrat; philosopher and politician; sentimentalist and utilitarian; artist, naturalist, and scientist; thinker, dreamer, and doer; inventor and scholar; writer and statesman, he enthralled his followers and fascinated while infuriating his foes.