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self government. That whenever the General Government assumed undelegated powers, its acts were inauthoritative and void; and that each State, being an integral party to the compact, of which there was no common judge, had a right to judge for itself, as well of infractions, as of the mode and measure of redress. After demonstrating the unconstitutionality of the Alien. and Sedition laws, on a variety of grounds, and by a series of elaborate deductions, after declaring an inviolable attachment to the Union, and an anxious desire for its preservation, the resolutions conclude as follows:

"That these and successive acts of the same character, unless arrested on the threshold, may tend to drive these States into revolution and blood, and will furnish new calumnies against republican governments, and new pretexts for those who wish it to be believed, that man cannot be governed but by a rod of iron; that it would be a dangerous delusion, were a confidence in the men of our choice, to silence our fears for the safety of our rights; that confidence is every where the parent of despotism; free government is founded in jealousy and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited Constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power; that our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which and no further our confidence may go; and let the honest advocate of confidence read the Alien and Sedition acts, and say if the Constitution has not been wise in fixing limits to the Government it created, and whether we should be wise in destroying those limits? Let him say what the Government is if it be not a tyranny, which the men of our choice have conferred on the President, and the President of our choice has assented to and accepted over the friendly strangers, to whom the mild spirit of our country and its laws had pledged hospitality and protection; that the men of our choice have more respected the bare suspicions of the President, than the solid rights of innocence, the claims of justification, the sacred force of truth, and the forms and substance of law and justice. In questions of power then let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief, by the chains of the Constitution. That this Commonwealth does therefore, call on its Co-States for an expression of their sentiments on the acts concerning Aliens, and for the punishment of certain crimes herein before specified, plainly declaring whether these acts are or are not authorized by the Federal Compact. And it doubts not that their sense will be so announced, as to prove their attachment unaltered to limited government, whether general or particular, and that the rights and liberties of their Co-States, will be exposed to no dangers by remaining

embarked on a common bottom with their own-That they will concur with this Commonwealth in considering the said acts as so palpably against the Constitution, as to amount to an undisguised declaration, that the compact is not meant to be the measure of the powers of the General Government, but that it will proceed in the exercise over these States of all powers whatsoever--That they will view this as seizing the rights of the States, and consolidating them in the hands of the General Government with a power assumed to bind the States, (not merely in cases made Federal,) but in all cases whatsoever, by laws made, not with their consent, but by others against their consent-That this would be to surrender the form of government we have chosen, and to live under one deriving its powers from its own will, and not from our authority-and that the Co-States recurring to their natural right in cases not made Federal, will concur in declaring these acts void and of no force, and will each unite with this Commonwealth in requesting their repeal at the next session of Congress."

From the warmth with which Mr. Jefferson embarked in opposition to the administration, it might be inferred that he permitted his political feelings to influence him in the discharge of his official duties. But this was not the case. He presided over the Senate, with a dignity never excelled, and, although composed for the most part of his political enemies, with an impartiality, which the rancor and madness of the times. never attempted to impeach. How attentive he was to the duties of his station, and how accurately he understood the rules of parliamentary order, incident to that station, is attested by his "MANUAL," a work which he at this time published, and which has ever since been the guide of both Houses of Congress.

Soon after the election of Mr. Adams, the political contest for his successor was renewed with increased vehemence and agitation. Mr. Jefferson was again, with one accord, selected as the republican candidate for the Presidency, and Aaron Burr of New York, for the office of Vice President. With equal unanimity, John Adams, the incumbent, and Charles C. Pinkney of South Carolina, were designated as the candidates of the federal party.

It would be a tedious and painful task to describe the long and terrible ordeal of bigotry, fanaticism, political malevolence and vituperation, through which Mr. Jefferson was called to pass. The general character of those scandalous annals is matter of proverbial notoriety. The press was made to groan with daily and inor

dinate ravings against a public character, whose principles had revolutionized one hemisphere, and astonished and agitated the other; and whose only crime was, that he had not joined in the audacious conspiracy to cheat the people of all that they had recovered and consecrated by their blood and treasure. The pulpit was debauched into the profligate service, and became the ready handmaid of the press, in echoing and re-echoing the licentious reprobations of the monarchical faction. No one who was a stranger to that tremendous contest, can adequately conceive the diabolism and insanity of the pulpit fulminations and pamphleteering anathemas of the traitorous conspirators of Church and State, to identify republicanism with infidelity, and sink them irrecoverably together. Every instrument of imposition was employed, and every species of engine which could be brought to bear upon the human passions, was resorted to for intimidation, for crushing the power of thought and speech, and perpetuating a delusion, little inferior to New England witchcraft, under which the combination of political Maratists and clerical alarmists had undertaken to bind the understandings of the people, and trample their rights in the dust The clergy of New England were the chiefest of the movers and participators in this atrocious crusade against the principles of the Revolution, and their adoring, persevering advocate; for they believed, and believed rightly, that every portion of power committed to him would be exerted in eternal opposition to their schemes.

Time would fail us to specify the innumerable fabrications of crime and scurrility, with which the myrmidons of monarchism attempted to blacken and beat down the character of the republican candidate. He was accused of having betrayed his native State into the hands of the enemy on two occasions, while at the head of the government, by a cowardly abandonment of Richmond, on the sudden invasion of Arnold, and subsequently, by an ignominious flight from Monticello, on the approach of Tarlton, with circumstances of such panic and precipitation as to occasion a fall from his horse, and the dislocation of his shoulder. He was charged with being the libeler of Washington, and the retainer of mercenary libelers to blast the reputation of the father of his country. He was accused of implacable hostility to the Constitution, of employing foreign scribblers to write it down; and of aiming at the annihilation of all law, order, and government, and the introduc

tion of general anarchy and licentiousness. He was familiarly characterized as an atheist, and the patron saint of French atheists, whom he encouraged to migrate to this country; as a demagogue and disorganizer, industriously sapping the foundations of religion and virtue, and insidiously paving the way for the establishment of a legalized system of infidelity and libertinism. Decency would revolt were we to pursue the catalogue into that low region of obscene invective, which was employed to vilify his private character, and which abounded in fabrications that have been the theme of infinite lampoonry, in prose and verse.

While the madness of faction was thus raging, and attempting to despoil him of his well earned reputation, Mr. Jefferson remained a passive spectator of the scene. Covered with the impenetrable ægis of truth, and supported by a proud consciousness of his innocence, he surveyed, with godlike composure, the impotent tempest of detraction which was furiously howling around him. He was not insensible under the ferocious depredations upon his character; on the contrary, no man was more feelingly alive to unmerited censure, or to well-grounded applause. But his confidence in the ultimate justice of public opinion was even stronger than his sensibility under its temporary reproaches, and he quietly submitted to the licentiousness of the press, as an alloy which was inseparable from the inestimable boon of its freedom. Besides, he felt a glorious and animating pride in being made the subject of the first great experiment in the world, which was to test the soundness of his favorite prinple, that freedom of discussion, unaided by power, was sufficient for the protection and propagation of truth.' Although frequently solicited by his friends, he never would descend to a newspaper refutation of a single calumny; and he never, in a single instance, appealed to the righteous retribution of the laws. "I know," he wrote to a friend in Connecticut, "that I might have filled the courts of the United States with actions for these slanders, and have ruined, perhaps, many persons who are not innocent. But this would be no equivalent for the loss of character. I leave them, therefore, to the reproof of their own consciences. If these do not condemn them, there will yet come a day when the false witness will meet a judge who has not slept over his slanders. If the Rev. Cotton Mather Smith, of Shena, believed this as firmly as I do, he would surely never have affirmed that I had obtained my property

by fraud and robbery; that in one instance I had defrauded and robbed a widow and fatherless children of an estate to which I was executor, of ten thousand pounds sterling, by keeping the property and paying them in money at the nominal rate, when it was, worth no more than forty to one; and that all this could be proved." Every tittle of this pulpit denunciation was founded in falsehood. Mr. Jefferson never was executor but in two instances, which happened about the beginning of the Revolution; and he never meddled in either executorship. In one of the cases only were there a widow and children. She was his sister, and retained and managed the estate exclusively in her own hands. In the other case, he was co-parcener, and only received on division the equal portion allotted him. Again, his property was all patrimonial, except about seven or eight hundred pounds' worth, purchased by himself and paid for, not to widows and orphans, but to the gentleman from. whom he purchased. The charges against Mr. Jefferson were indeed so audacious, and persevered in with such unblushing assurance, as to excite the solicitude of his friends in different sections of the Union; and they addressed him frequent letters of inquiry on the subject. These he invariably answered with the frankness and liberality which belonged to his disposition; but he annexed to every answer a restraint against its publication. In a letter of this kind to Samuel Smith of Maryland, he concludes:

“These observations will show you how far the imputations in the paragraph sent me approach the truth. Yet they are not intended for a newspaper. At a very early period of my life, I determined never to put a sentence into any newspaper. I have religiously adhered to the resolution through my life, and have great reason to be contented with it. Were I to undertake to answer the calumnies of the newspapers, it would be more than all my own time and that of twenty aids could effect. For while I should be answering one, twenty new ones would be invented. I have thought it better to trust to the justice of my countrymen, that they would judge me by what they see of my conduct on the stage where they have placed me, and what they knew of me before the epoch, since which a particular party has supposed it might answer some view of theirs to vilify me in the public eye. Some, I know, will not reflect how apocryphal is the testimony of enemies so palpably betraying the views with which they give it. But this is an injury to which duty requires every one to submit whom the public think proper to call into its councils. I thank you, my dear Sir, for the interest you have for me on this occasion. Though I have made

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