discerned in it." So thought all the band of radically-liberal men in Virginia, who were beginning to regard Thomas Jefferson as their chief.

And now, on the second day of the session, came a fair excuse for him to leave the "laboring oar," and throw the difficult task of re-creating Virginia upon his colleagues. A messenger from the Honorable Congress reached Williamsburg, October 8, bearing a despatch for Mr. Jefferson, informing him that he had been elected joint commissioner with Dr. Franklin and Silas Deane to represent the United States at Paris. The temptation was all but irresistible. He relished extremely the delicious society of Dr. Franklin, and was getting into the Franklinian way of dealing with cantankerous man. Paris, too, to which good Americans were already looking as the abode of the blest, where Jefferson could see at last, after living in the world thirty-three years, harmoniously porportioned edifices, and listen to music such as the Williamsburg "Apollo" had only heard in dreams. The public duty, also, was supposed to be of the first importance. Perhaps it was; but, also, perhaps it was not. Considering the whole case, the young giant might have done better if he had, from the first, made up his mind to fight unassisted. It was a costly business, that French alliance; the heaviest item being the habit of leaning upon France, and looking for help, at every pinch, to the French treasury. But this could not have been foreseen in 1776; and happy, indeed, would it have been for Franklin, for the country, for the future, if he could have been seconded by a person so formed to co-operate with him as Jefferson. Franklin would have got Canada at the peace of 1782, if he had had a Jefferson to help, instead of a Jay and an Adams to hinder.

Torn with contending desires, Jefferson kept the messenger waiting day after day; so hard was it to say No to Congress, and to give up an appointment promising so much honor and delight. But his duty was plain. There was a lady upon Monticello who had a claim upon his service with which no other claim could compete. To leave her in the condition in which she was, had been infidelity; and to take her with him might have been fatal to her. Virginia had many sons, but Mrs. Jefferson had but one husband. So, on the 11th of October, the messenger mounted and rode away, bearing the proper answer to the President of Congress :

"It would argue great insensibility in me, could I receive with indifference so confidential an appointment from your body. My thanks are a poor return for the partiality they have been pleased to entertain for me. No cares for my own person, nor yet for my private affairs, would have induced one moment's hesitation to accept the charge. But circumstances very peculiar in the situation of my family, such as neither permit me to leave nor to carry it, compel me to ask leave to decline a service so honorable, and, at the same time, so important to the American cause. The necessity under which I labor, and the conflict I have undergone for three days, during which I could not determine to dismiss your messenger, will, I hope, plead my pardon with Congress; and I am sure there are too many of that body to whom they may with better hopes confide this charge, to leave them under a moment's difficulty in making a new choice."

As soon as he had reached a decision on this important matter, his colleagues in the Assembly, who had been waiting for it, placed him on a great number of committees; and he began forthwith, on the very day of the messenger's departure, to introduce the measures of reform which he had meditated. Mr. Adams might well regard Virginia as a reformer's paradise; for owing to the colonial necessity of submitting every desired change to the king, which involved time, trouble, expense, and probable rejection, the Province was far behind even Great Britain in that adaptation of laws and institutions to altered times, which ought to be always in progress in every community. There was such an accumulation, in Virginia, of the outgrown and the unsuitable, that Jefferson and his friends hoped to accomplish in a few months an amount of radical change that would have been a fair allowance for a century and a half.

CHAPTER XXIII.

NEED OF REFORM IN OLD VIRGINIA.

THE law-books were full of old absurdity and old cruelty.* Of the four hundred thousand people who were supposed to inhabit Virginia, one-half were African slaves; and it was a fixed idea in the Jefferson circle, that whites and blacks could not live in equal freedom in the same community. Besides the intense prejudice entertained by the master race against the servile, and the hatred which had been gathering (as Jefferson thought) in the minds of the slaves from four generations of outrage, he believed that Nature herself had made it impossible for the two races to live happily together on equal terms. He evidently had a low opinion of the mental capacity of his colored brethren. The Indian, with no opportunities of mental culture beyond those of the negro, had acquired the art of oratory, could carve the bowl of his pipe into a head not devoid of truth and spirit, and draw upon a piece of bark a figure resembling an animal, a plant, a tract of country. But never had he observed in a negro, or a negro's work, one gleam of superior intelligence, aptitude, or taste. No negro standing behind his master's chair had caught from the conversation of educated persons an elevated mode of thinking. "Never," says Mr. Jefferson, " could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never saw even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture." In music they were more gifted; but no negro had yet imagined any thing beyond "a small

Like this, for example: "Whereas, oftentimes many brabling women often slander and scandalize their neighbors for which their poore husbands are often brought into charge. able and vexatous suites, and caste in greate damages: Bee it therefore enacted by the authority aforesaid, that in actions of slander, occasioned by the wife as aforesaid, after judg. ment passed for the damages, the woman shall be punished by ducking; and if the slander be soe enormous as to be adjudged at a greater damage than five hundred pounds of tobacco, then the woman to suffer a ducking for every five hundred pounds of tobacco adjudged against the husband, if he refuse to pay the tobacco."

catch." Love, which inspires the melodious madness of poets, kindles only the senses of a black man, not his mind, and has never, in all the tide of time, wrung from him a word which other lovers love to repeat. Mere misery, to other races, has been inspiration. The blacks are wretched enough, but they have never uttered their woes in poetry.

For these and other reasons, Mr. Jefferson was disposed to regard the negro race as naturally inferior; though he expresses himself on the point with the hesitation natural to a scientific mind provided with a scant supply of facts. On the political question, he was clear: the two races could not live together in peace as equals. The attempt to do so, he thought, would "divide Virginians into parties, and produce convulsions which would probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race." Here was a problem for a knot of young legislators, without a precedent to guide them in all the known history of man!

The gross ignorance of the white inhabitants, except one small class, was another too obvious fact. They were almost as ignorant as Europeans, with fewer restraints than Europeans. Almost every glimpse we get of the poorer Virginians of that day is a revelation of rude and reckless ignorance. We have in the Memoirs of Elkanah Watson, who rode through Virginia in 1778, an election scene at Hanover Court House, which must have been a startling contrast to the elections he had witnessed in his native Massachusetts, where an election was a solemnity opened with prayer. The "whole country," he records, was assembled. "The moment I alighted, a wretched, pug-nosed fellow assailed me to swap watches. I had hardly shaken him off when I was attacked by a wild Irishman, who insisted on my swapping horses with him, and, in a twinkling, ran up the pedigree of his horse to the grand dam. Treating his importunity with little respect, I became near being involved in a boxing-match, the Irishman swearing I did not 'trate him like a jintleman.' I had hardly escaped this dilemma, when my attention was attracted by a fight between two very unwieldy fat men, foaming and puffing like two furies, until one succeeded in twisting a forefinger in a side-lock of the other's hair, and in the act of thrusting by this purchase his thumb into the latter's eye, he bawled out, King's Cruse, equivalent, in technical language, to Enough."

There was in Virginia an unusually large proportion of this

savage ignorance, easily convertible into fanatical ignorance. The handling of tobacco, it appears, gave employment to a great number of rough fellows, tobacco-rollers, among others, who drove a pin into each end of a hogshead of tobacco, and thus attaching to it a pair of shafts, harnessed a horse to it, and rolled it to the landing. Professor Tucker of Virginia speaks of this class as "hardy, reckless, proverbially rude, and often indulging in coarse humor at the expense of the traveller who chanced to be well dressed, or riding in a carriage." But ignorance was almost universal in Virginia, as it must be in every community, unless there is a universal system of education. And this was another problem for the young gentlemen at Williamsburg who desired to Yankeefy Virginia. Mr. Jefferson, for one, felt the absolute necessity of the voting class being able to vote. He saw, too, wherever he looked in Virginia, the evils arising from ill-distributed wealth. It is the nature of wealth to get into heaps; because it is the nature of the weak to squander their money, and of the strong to husband it; and this being its nature, laws need not aggravate the tendency. But in Virginia, as in all the old-fashioned countries, there was a whole system of laws and usages expressly designed to keep property from being distributed. Fathers could prevent a profligate son from sinking to his natural level in the community, by entailing upon him and upon the first-born of his male descendants, not his landed estates only, but the negroes who gave them value; and this entail could only be broken by a special act of the legislature. The law of primogeniture prevented the natural division of estates among all the family of a deceased proprietor, excluding all the daughters, and all the sons but one. The consequence was, that the best portions of Virginia were held by a few families, who suffered the ills and inconveniences of aristocratic rank, without attaining that moral elevation which is possible to aristocrats who accept the public duties of their position. They monopolized the honors of the colony; but, as a class, they appear to have been as destitute of public spirit as the grandees of Spain or Poland. There is only one test of a genuine superiority, and that test was as familiar to their ears as it was foreign to their hearts:. "Let him that will be chief among you, be your servant," a perfect definition of a proper aristocracy. Jefferson, Henry, Madison, and their circle, who had been contending with the aristocracy of Virginia during the whole of their public life, had to consider a remedy for this evil also.