Thomas Jefferson

Front matter

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FIGURES FROM AMERICAN W DRY

BY

Preface

The story of illustrious men cannot be too often retold. Like great outstanding mountain-peaks, these men invite description but elude definition; they provoke examination but defy exhaustion. The changing hues of political atmosphere, the shifting perspective of social and economic theories, combine with the peculiar equipment, apperception, penchants, and even (alas !) prejudices of each biographer to make any and every interpretation of his hero only a partial, restricted, and temporary one. We grasp so much of the spirit as we can comprehend — and as there are infinite gradations of comprehension, so there are infinite varieties of portrayal. The wonder is not that there are so many different interpretations of the lives of great men, but rather that there is so large a consensus in the case of a great number of them.

Of this number, however, Thomas Jefferson is not one. Though placed by the common consent of scholars in the first class of American statesmen, with Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, Webster, and Lincoln, Jefferson seems far less willing than any of his illustrious compeers to fall into his definitive place of honor. Washington and Lincoln were maligned in life as no other Americans have been;

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their abuse, like their merit, was superlative. But to-day their merit alone remains, acknowledged byall. No one contests Benjamin Franklin's position as our first great statesman, philosopher, and scientist — the man who raised common sense to the level of genius, and made the name America known and respected in the world. Few to-day, even though they may detest his politics, would deny to Alexander Hamilton the title of the master genius of American finance or refuse to acknowledge the unique contribution of the Federalist to political theory. But Thomas Jefferson is still a subject for acrimonious criticism and chivalrous defense. The campaign controversies of the year 1800 have not yet died down to silence. The perpetuation or the refutation of slanders, objurgations, innuendoes occupies even the latest of Jefferson's biographers. The very men often who acclaim him cannot refrain from sneers; and even his bitter political enemies lean on his authority. A Populist senator of the last generation remarked that "every opinion delivered in the Senate of the United States was backed by a quotation from Thomas Jefferson." His name is cited more often than any other in our political platforms, his portrait hangs with Washington's and Lincoln's in our convention halls, his principles are appealed to as the creed of every true American. Surely, there is no stranger problem of our political psychology than this mixture of venera-

PREFACE vii

tion and vituperation, of inspiration and exasperation, still provoked by the mention of the name of Thomas Jefferson.

Suggestions in explanation of this anomaly will appear frequently in the following pages. Here I can only urge the obvious but too often neglected truism that the excellences of men are diverse, and that genius, as Lord Acton said long ago, deserves to be judged by its own best performance. To call Kreisler a second-rate fiddler because he cannot sing like Caruso, or Botticelli a mere dauber because he does not paint in the style of Raphael, appears at once as arrant nonsense; yet many a respectable historian has based his whole condemnatory judgment of Jefferson on the fact that he was not like Hamilton. Indeed, no more astonishingly persistent prejudice can be found in our American historiography than the treatment of these two great men like twin buckets in a well, alternately elevated or depressed according as an historian of the Federalist or the Republican school manipulated the chain. Jefferson was in public life almost continuously from his entrance into the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1769 to his retirement from the presidency in 1809. During less than four of those forty years was he in direct contact with Hamilton in the stormy scenes around Washington's cabinet table. Grave and important differences between these men were there revealed, to be sure; disagreement on the viii PREFACE

extent and nature of the powers of the central government, on the relative value of urban-industrial and agricultural communities, on the capacity of the common people for self-government. But important as these matters are, they by no means exhaust the interests of Jefferson's many-sided activity; nor should they be dwelt on, as they often have been, to the exclusion or obscuration of his splendid services to our diplomacy and public law, to the reform of inveterate social despotisms, to the clarification of the political philosophy of democracy, and to the advancement of freedom of thought, speech, and creed through a widely extended system of public education.

It has been my desire to present the whole man Jefferson in this modest volume, and to present him as far as possible in the first person. The portrait need not be less faithful because the canvas is small; though the form and size of my book are themselves a sufficient disclaimer of any attempt to add an "original contribution" to the mass of Jeffersonian scholarship. I have wished only to write a truthful and readable account of the life of a great American citizen, who served his fellow-citizens long and devotedly in public office, and who will continue to serve his fellow-men so long as freedom is loved

and fought for.

D. S. M.

Columbia University, New York, 1918.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Equipment and Apprenticeship 1

II. The Declaration of Independence. ... 26

Chapter I Equipment And Apprenticeship

But exercise produces habit, and in the instance of which we speak the exercise being of the moral feelings, produces a habit of thinking and acting virtuously. (Jefferson to Robert Skipwith, August 3, 1771.)

A few years after the affable and indolent King Charles II returned from his "travels" and took up his abode in the royal palace of Whitehall, which had been polluted by the presence of Oliver and his saints, a certain William Randolph, gentleman, from Warwickshire, who had sacrificed most of his patrimony in the defense of Charles's martyred father, came to the royal colony of Virginia and started his fortunes anew at Turkey Island, on the broad banks of the lower James. Randolph traced his descent through a long line of nobles, warriors, and statesmen to the royal Earl of Murray, half-brother of the ill-fated Mary, Queen of the Scots. He married Mary Isham, daughter of a baronet, and from this distinguished couple descended a goodly number of the men who have made the name of the Old Dominion illustrious. 1 In the year 1738 a daughter of the house of Randolph left the rich halls of the "tidewater aristocracy " to follow her more plebeian husband up the river to his frontier farm of a thousand acres in the foot-hills of the Blue Ridge, where five years later she became the mother of Thomas Jefferson.

The Jeffersons could make no boast of gentle blood, but their yeoman stock was not without honor in the colony. Their ancestor had come from Wales, so the tradition ran, from beneath the shadow of Mount Snowdon. A Jefferson had sat for Flower de Hundred in the famous House of Burgesses convened by Governor Yeardley in the little church at Jamestown in 1619 — the first legislative body on the soil of America; and Jeffersons of the seventeenth century were accepted as sons-in-law by the burgesses and even by a speaker of the house. But the true founder of the family was the man who in 1738 took Jane Randolph into the wilderness, "where the trails of the hostile Monacons or Tuscaroras were yet fresh on the lands." Peter Jefferson,

1 Besides the Randolphs themselves (Peyton, first president of the Continental Congress; John the eccentric, of Roanoke; Edmund, attorney-general and secretary of state in Washington's cabinet); William Stith, the historian of Virginia; John Marshall, for thirty-four years chief justice of the supreme court; Richard Bland, the celebrated Revolutionary leader; Robert E. Lee, the idol of the Southern Confederacy, and Thomas Jefferson could trace their descent directly to the aristocratic ancestors of Turkey Island.

then thirty years of age, was the finest type of the American pioneer — tall and straight, strong as an Homeric god, without a drop of fear or meanness in his blood, honest as the daylight, industrious, public-spirited, sociable, and intensely human. He had had little schooling, but his innate nobility of mind drew him to the companionship of the noblest authors. Addison, Swift, and Shakespeare were favorites, whose works he delighted to read aloud to his family around the evening fire of logs. , Honors and moderate wealth came to him as the years passed. He was made a justice of the peace and surveyor for the new county of Albemarle, in which his lands lay, then was appointed colonel of the militia of his county, and finally, in the disastrous year of Braddock's defeat (1755), he was elected a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. He survived this crowning honor but two years, dying suddenly on August 17, 1757, near his fiftieth birthday.

Thomas Jefferson was fourteen years old when his father died, and was already showing the happy result of the mixture of the blood of the Jeffersons and the Randolphs by the blend of strength and grace in his nature. From Peter Jefferson he had his tall frame and serious mind, his capacity for labor, his self-reliance, and above all, the robust democratic faith of the frontier. ' At the same time the gentler qualities of the Randolph blood appeared in a certain suavity of manner and extreme delicacy of taste, in his idealism, his musical appreciation, his "almost feminine sensitiveness." He could have appreciated Goethe's famous quatrain, except for the last infinitive:

Like many a "self-made" man who has reached easy circumstances, Peter Jefferson wanted his son to enjoy the education which he himself had missed. He left special instructions that Thomas should have a thorough training in the classics, and the boy's tutors carried out the father's will with zeal; for to the end of his days Jefferson protested that he would rather have been deprived of the paternal estate than to have missed his classics. He proved the truth of Cicero's panegyric on Archias by making those studies the food of youth and the joy of old age, the adornment of his prosperity and the solace of his adversity. About two and a half years after his father's death the young Jefferson wrote a short, businesslike note to his guardian, John Harvey, suggesting that it might be better for his serious application to study, for his wider acquaintance with men and books, and for the economy of the household at Shadwell 1 if he went away to college. So in 1760 the young man of seventeen rode down the river to Williamsburg and entered William and Mary College, next to Harvard the oldest college in the colonies.

Williamsburg was not a very imposing town, with its two hundred houses and its unpaved streets, across whose deep mud-gullies the pedestrian picked Ins careful way. But it was the capital of the col- Dny, where the burgesses met and where the governor's mansion stood as the centre of the social life 3f the tidewater aristocracy. It was a decided event n the life of the impressionable lad from the piednont region when he was taken up by his fashionable relatives and friends at the capital. He gratiied his passion for riding, attended parties, from vhich he carried into his class-rooms distracting thoughts of Virginia beauties, and even became a nember of a little club of four who met regularly tround the dinner-table of the convivial governor, Fauquier. He was somewhat shocked when he nade a report of his first winter's expenses to his ;uardian, to find how much his innocent dissipations tad cost; and for amends made the very honorable uggestion that the sum be charged exclusively to

1 Shadwell was the name of the house which Peter Jefferson built a the Rivanna, given in honor of his bride, Jane Randolph, who as born m the parish of Shadwell, London. The mansion at Shadell was burned in February, 1770, shortly after Jefferson had begun le work on Monticello.

his own share of the paternal inheritance. The next year he made a more substantial sort of amends in devotion to his work.

A youth of less sense and character than Jefferson, without rebuke or restraint from his guardian, would have had his head turned by the flattering notice of the Williamsburg aristocrats, and would probably have considered it the most manly thing to do to imitate the governor in his devotion to the gamingtable. Many years later, when he was President of the United States, Jefferson wrote a letter to his grandson, who was away from home at school, warning him of the dangers which he himself had escaped, and (like Warren Hastings, reviewing his career in India), expressing wonder at his own " moderation' I in the " various sorts of bad company with which he \ [I] associated from time to time." The letter hasi furnished a good deal of amusement for Jefferson's hostile critics, who see in it only a pedant's didactic sermon on his own extraordinary and precocious sagacity. But such a judgment only returns on the head of the critic. Jefferson's mastery of his own spirit in this year of his first choice of the paths of Heracles in Williamsburg was perhaps the most significant act of his whole long life. With the beginning of his second and last year at the college, he threw himself into his work with wonderful singleness of purpose, his " assault on omniscience" winning for him the college degree at the end of the year. Probably this rapid success tells us more of the standards of scholarship at William and Mary than of the actual intellectual attainments of Jefferson at the age of eighteen; but the important fact remains that he had dedicated himself, with a fidelity that never weakened, to the jealous service of the goddess of truth.

After his graduation Jefferson began the study of law in the office of George Wythe, one of the most brilliant ornaments of the Virginia bar, the privilege of whose professional guidance was afterward shared by Jefferson's younger kinsman, John Marshall, and also by Henry Clay. Wythe was attracted at once to the promising young student, who many years later, on the verge of eighty, wrote in reminiscent gratitude: "Mr. Wythe continued to be my faithful and beloved Mentor in youth, and my most affectionate friend through life." The breadth and profundity of Jefferson's knowledge of law, as shown in his reform of the code of Virginia, in his diplomatic correspondence in France, and in his despatches as secretary of state, are sufficient testimony to the use he made of the privilege of the advice and example of George Wythe.

If Jefferson's apprenticeship in the law was long, it was because of his passion for thoroughness. Every step in knowledge won opened his view on a wider vista of knowledge to be attained. He was not content with accumulating facts and cases. Beneath the harsh style and blunt reasoning of Coke on Littleton (the "dull old scoundrel") he detected and approved the political philosophy of the Whigs; while he thought that the student of Blackstone would only "slip backward into Toryism" on his smooth phrases. From the beginning he took the study of the law as an historical training in the principles of jurisprudence, and not simply a hasty professional equipment to fit him to win cases in the courts of Virginia. His friend, the jovial, adventurous, confident Patrick Henry, was admitted to the bar after studying law for six weeks; but Jefferson did not apply for a license until 1767, five years after he had entered Wythe's office.

Jefferson practised law for seven years, until, as he says in his Memoir, "the Revolution shut up the courts of justice." He was not a good barrister, for he lacked all the gifts of the rostra. His voice was thin, with a tendency to huskiness after long speaking; contentious assertion was always distasteful to him; and far from enjoying the clash of forensic arms, he shrank by a native fastidiousness from even the disturbance of a private altercation. He seems also, in his later years at least, not to have had a very high opinion of lawyers. In a letter written from Monticello to his friend David Campbell, in 1810, he contrasts the satisfaction it must give a physician to look back at the lives he has saved with the lawyer's miserable recollection of the many who "by his dexterity have been cheated out of their rights and reduced to beggary." Certainly not a very just comparison ! Ten years later, in his Memoir, he chides "the present Congress" for its garrulousness, but adds in extenuation: "How could it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?" Still, even if Jefferson was not a very enthusiastic lawyer, his success as an attorney : was far above the average of his day. Henry S. Randall, his most painstaking and exhaustive biogirapher, has compiled a table of his cases in the igeneral court during his seven years of practice. I They amount to about a thousand, and the average yearly income from them was not far from three ithousand dollars.

In the midst of his law studies in Wythe's office * Jefferson came of age, and celebrated the event in (characteristic fashion by planting an avenue of trees jat Shadwell. He was now master of the estate, for Iby the laws of entail and primogeniture — laws which J lie himself abolished in the reform of the Virginia llaw code — the oldest son inherited the undivided {property. Jefferson was an ideal figure for a anded proprietor. He was passionately fond of 30untry life, riding his beloved horses at early morn jver his broad acres, watching with perennial enthusiasm the budding of the trees and the ripening of the vegetables, noting in his closely written account-books every item of income and outgo. His native gifts of intellect and grace of manner, supplemented by a remarkably fine education, made him a charming host; while his genuine humanitarian interest extended to the meanest slave on his estate. From the day of his majority to the day of his death, more than threescore years later, this tall, sandy-haired master, with eyes " flecked with hazel," was loved by his family, his friends, and his servants as few were loved even in Virginia, the land of loyal devotions.

With his new manorial dignity Jefferson took up the duties of a country squire. He became a justice of the peace and a vestryman of the parish. He also initiated his lifelong crusade for the improvement of material conditions through applied science, by starting a petition to the legislature for making the Rivanna River a navigable highway for the commerce of Albemarle County.

Just at the moment when Jefferson was coming into his inheritance the curtain rose on the prologue to the tragedy of the American Revolution. George Grenville was prime minister in a cabinet which Macaulay characterizes as the worst that had governed England since the revolution of 1688. In March, 1764, Grenville began to put into operation a plan for the taxation of the American colonies, with the threefold object of increasing the British revenue to meet the large debt contracted in the French war, of restoring the vigor of the Navigation Acts, which bound the commerce of the colonies byrules imposed by the British Parliament, and of raising money to defray the expenses of " defending, protecting, and securing the King's dominion in America/ ' "so happily enlarged" by the expulsion of the French from the St. Lawrence and Mississippi valleys. In addition to various tariff duties levied by the Act of April, 1764, the ministry announced its intention of imposing on the American colonies the next year an "internal tax," that is, a tax not on their foreign trade, which as an "imperial" matter the colonists had been willing, at least in theory, to concede, but a tax on their ordinary business transactions within the colonies themselves. All kinds of legal and public documents, including wills, deeds, mortgages, bills of sale, promissory notes, contracts, as well as pamphlets, newspapers, almanacs, and playing-cards, were to be subject to stamp-duties ranging from three pence to ten pounds.

King George approved the vigorous policy of his new ministers. In proroguing Parliament on the 19th of April — a day made memorable on Lexington Green and at Concord Bridge eleven years later bycertain events not unconnected with the stamp-tax — George III complimented his ministers on "the wise regulations" which they had adopted "to augment the public revenues and unite the interests of the most distant possessions of the crown." While the King was speaking Thomas Jefferson was perhaps musingly inspecting the condition of his newlyplanted shade-trees at Shadwell.

The next spring the Stamp Act was passed through Parliament, with scarcely any debate in the House of Commons and without a division in the Lords. News of the act reached America in May, as the session of the Virginia Burgesses was nearing its close. The representatives of the old conservative families, the Pendletons, Wythes, Blands, and Randolphs, with all the "cyphers of aristocracy/ ' as Jefferson later called them, were willing to dissolve without a protest. There was something sacred and inviolate to them in an act of Parliament. But Patrick Henry, delegate from the upland county of Louisa, spoke out. He offered resolutions condemning the Stamp Act, declaring that the right of taxing the colonies lay in their own legislative assemblies, and that any attempt of the British Parliament to usurp this right tended to the destruction of liberties both here and in England. He supported his resolutions in a fiery speech which drew cries of " Treason ! " from the consternated aristocrats. And he carried his point by a single vote.

Thomas Jefferson was standing in the lobby at the door of the hall of the burgesses when Henry made his speech, and was still under the spell of that Homeric eloquence when his kinsman, Peyton

Randolph, attorney-general of the colony, came storming out of the door with a vow that he would have given a hundred guineas for the one vote needed to kill the resolutions. It was a red-letter day in Jefferson's life — one of those rare moments whose influence lasts to the grave. Forty-five years later Jefferson wrote to his friend William Wirt, who was preparing a biography of Patrick Henry: "By those resolutions Mr. Henry took the lead out of the hands of those who had heretofore guided the proceedings of the House. . . . Subsequent events favored the policy of the bolder spirits . . . with whom I went on all points."

Four years later Jefferson was elected to the House of Burgesses from Albemarle County. Much water had flowed under the political bridges meanwhile. The British Parliament had repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, but, under the spur of Charles Townshend's mocking provocation, had returned to the charge the next year and imposed a fresh set of duties on colonial imports, together with a declaration of the legality of writs of assistance, and a general tightening up of the customs control. Massachusetts had protested in a circular letter to the colonies, drawn up by Samuel Adams, and Lord Hillsborough had ordered the unruly legislature of Massachusetts, through Governor 'Bernard, to rescind the letter. The legislature refused to obey by a vote of ninety-two to seventeen, and was dissolved by the governor. Two regiments of redcoats were brought from Halifax and quartered in Boston (1768). A few months later (May, 1769) the burgesses of Virginia were convened to meet their newly appointed governor, Lord Botetourt; but their reply to his inaugural speech was ominous. The "bolder spirits " were in control. They reasserted their determination to levy their own taxes, protested against the removal to England for trial of persons accused of treason in the colonies, and, with unmistakable indorsement of the behavior of the Massachusetts Legislature, declared the right of the colonies to make their petitions for redress of grievances an affair of common colonial action. Jefferson was on the connnittee to prepare the address in reply to the governor's speech, and at the request of his colleagues he drew up a paper. But it was not considered "sufficiently amplified" (which probably meant "sufficiently vague") by the more conservative members, and Colonel Nicholas prepared one in its place. Jefferson was somewhat chagrined by the incident. "Being a young man as well as a new member," he wrote many years later, "it made on me an impression proportioned to the sensibility of that time of life."

Lord Botetourt dissolved the burgesses after a session of five days, but the members reconvened informally in the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern and had out their say. They passed resolutions boycotting the articles which were subject to the Townshend duties, and discouraged British importations generally. They even agreed to keep their lambs alive for shearing; they would walk in homespun rather than in slavery. Jefferson was one of the most enthusiastic advocates of these measures, which were signed by George Washington, Patrick Henry, Peyton Randolph (now converted), and about eighty other members of the legislature, every one of whom received the indorsement of re-election by his constituents. Two or three years of comparative quiet in the rising dispute with the mother country followed the appointment of Lord North as prime minister in 1770, a period in which, as Jefferson complained, "our countrymen seemed to fall into a state of insensibility to our situation."

But if politics were dull there was plenty of excitement in Jefferson's private life during these years. The paternal home at Shadwell was burned to the ground in the midwintei of 1770, and nothing saved but Jefferson's favorite fiddle. The disaster hastened the building of the new mansion which Jefferson had already begun on the favorite hilltop, where he used to sit and read and dream as a boy. He called it Monticello, the "little mountain," and the house he built on it, wholly from his own plans and partly with his own hands, is one of the treasures of our colonial architecture. Only a single pavilion of the mansion was finished, with three or four small chambers above, when Jefferson brought his bride to Monticello, through a heavy snow, on New Year's night of 1772. She was Martha Skelton, a widow of twenty-three, and daughter of a prosperous lawyer and proprietor, John Wayles. Her father died the year after the wedding, leaving her property in land (somewhat encumbered by debt) and slaves that was about equal to Jefferson's own estate. Mrs. Jefferson was extraordinarily endowed with both charm and sense, though her physical strength began to fail soon after her marriage. Her death in 1782 broke a perfect union of ten years. She left no sons to continue the name of Jefferson, and of her five daughters only two grew beyond babyhood. These two — Martha (Randolph) and Maria (Eppes), were their father's constant solace and joy. He never married again.

The " insensibility " into which Jefferson feared his country had fallen in 1770 was roused to protest in the spring session of the burgesses in 1773, and again the cause was news from New England. The British schooner Gaspee, of eight guns, while chasing smugglers in Narragansett Bay, had run aground on a mud-bank about seven miles from Providence, on the afternoon of June 9, 1772. Late that night the stranded schooner was surrounded by boat-loads of armed citizens of Providence, who easily overpowered the drowsy crew and burned the Gaspee to the water's edge. England's retaliation was an act of Parliament "for the better securing and preserving His Majesty's dockyards, magazines, ships, ammunition, and stores/' which threatened with the penalty of death any one who should destroy the least part of His Majesty's naval equipment, even to a brass button on an officer's coat, and gave the court of inquiry in Rhode Island the power to send the accused to England for trial.

Indignant at this monstrous disproportion between the punishment and the crime, the "bolder spirits" among the burgesses, Patrick Henry, the Lees, Jefferson, and his brilliant brother-in-law, Dabney Carr, held a private evening meeting at the Raleigh Tavern and prepared resolutions censuring the retaliatory act against Rhode Island, and calling for the establishment of a standing committee of correspondence and inquiry, whose business it should be to keep informed of important matters going on in all the American colonies and of the measures taken by Parliament for their regulation. The resolutions were adopted unanimously on March 12, 1773, and a committee of eight, including Jefferson and Carr, was appointed. Governor Dunmore, like Governor Botetourt before him, dissolved the house. But the committee met in the famous Apollo Room the next day and sent their resolutions out to the sister colonies, with the invitation to each to appoint a similar committee to correspond "on any measures or rumors of proceedings tending to deprive them of their ancient, legal, and constitutional rights."

Still a third time New England provoked the British Parliament to punitive measures, and a third time Virginia stood by the northern colonies. The English Government, "blundering into a policy one day and backing out of it the next, seeking fresh principles of action with every fresh mail from America," as Edmund Burke tauntingly put it, had repealed the Townshend duties, leaving only the trifling tax of threepence a pound on tea to maintain the principle of Parliament's right to tax the colonies' trade. In 1773 the British East India Company, in financial straits, and with a glut of millions of pounds of unsold tea in its English warehouses, applied to the government for relief. Here was a rare opportunity for George III to accomplish two desirable objects by a single stroke. By remitting the shilling duty payable in England he could allow the East India corporation to dispose of its tea in America at a lower price, even including the threepenny tax, than the colonists had to pay for their smuggled cargoes from European ports; and at the same time he could tempt the Americans to take the tea at the good bargain offered and, by paying the duty, indorse the principle, so dear to his heart, of Parliament's right to tax them. 1