CHAPTER XXIX.

AT HOME AFTER THE WAR.

PUBLIC men were apparently more sensitive to criticism in the last century than in this. Junius has had many imitators: he founded a school; he invented an industry; and the efforts of so many keen, reckless, ill-informed makers of antithesis and epigram have, perhaps, toughened the skins of public men, so that they now scarcely feel what would have made the statesmen of other days writhe in torment. It is an easy mode of producing an effect, this assailing the anxious and heavy-laden servants of the state. It was not difficult for a perfumed dandy in the amphitheatre, yawning at his ease, to find fault with the scarred and sweating gladiator fighting for life in the arena. It is not difficult to prepare in the secrecy of a garret a barbed and stinging bolt, and hurl it from the safe ambush of a pseudonyme at a distinguished combatant while he is absorbed in a contest with open foes. Poor Chatterton did it almost as well as Junius. At sixteen, an attorney's apprentice in far-off Bristol, singularly ignorant of the world, knowing nothing of politics, he wrote fulminations against ministers, which Wilkes thought good enough to print in "The North Briton." So easy a trade is it to one who is ignorant enough and reckless enough. It were easy now to prove that Junius himself, who showed such skill in the art of hiding, knew little more of the real character, aims, and difficulties of the men whom he assailed, than the boy Chatterton. Happily the industry of so many anonymous and irresponsible cowards has lessened the power of the most envenomed criticism to injure or torture a good minister. Unhappily it has rendered the most just exposure of a bad one all but ineffectual. Truth and calumny we are apt alike to reject when they concern a public man.

Jefferson was destined to suffer a very large share of ignorant

and reckless criticism, which he learned to endure with the imperturbability of trained good sense. However, in 1781, he was not only a young man, but the world was younger than it is now, not having outgrown the veneration once supposed to be due to all governors as such. It was a fearful thing still to censure the head of a state. One young man in the legislature of Virginia had publicly cast the blame of Virginia's desolation, during the first months of 1781, upon Governor Jefferson; and in this censure some other members were known to acquiesce. It fills the reader of to-day with astonishment to observe, in Jefferson's correspondence, how deeply he took this to heart, and how long he brooded over it. Every man in a situation to judge his conduct had commended it. Washington, Gates, Greene, Lafayette, Steuben, with whom he had co-operated in the defence of the State, had applauded his wisdom and promptitude; and many of his fellow-citizens complained only that he had done too much. But the single word of censure outweighed all applause. For many months he could not get over it. And, indeed, we must own that the censure was ill-timed, when his estate was overrun, his old servants destroyed, his family driven from their home, and himself pursued; all because he had been his country's conspicuously faithful servant in a perilous time.

Such was his indignation, that he forswore public service forever. He would go back once to the legislature to meet his accusers face to face; but, after that was done, nothing, no, nothing, should ever draw him from his books, his studies, his family, his gardens, his farms, again. He had had enough of public life. No slave, he wrote, was so wretched as "the minister of a commonwealth." He declared that the only reward he had ever desired for his thirteen years of public service was the good-will of his fellow-citizens, and he had not even obtained that; nay, he had lost the little share of their esteem he had once enjoyed. Thus he exaggerated the injustice done him, and nursed, Achilles-like, his mortification.

In August, Lafayette forwarded to him through the lines a letter from the President of Congress, telling him, that, six weeks before, Congress had again elected him to a foreign mission. But he would not be consoled. For once the health of his wife and the condition of his family (their infant child had died a few weeks before) were such as to permit their attempting the voyage together. He might have gone to Europe in 1781; he would have gone, but

for this slight show of legislative censure. "I lose an opportunity," he wrote to Lafayette, "the only one I ever had, and perhaps ever shall have, of combining public service with private gratification; of seeing countries whose improvements in science, in arts, in civilization, it has been my fortune to admire at a distance, but never to see, and at the same time of lending some aid to a cause which has been handed on from its first organization to its present stage by every effort of which my poor faculties were capable. These, however, have not been such as to give satisfaction to some of my countrymen; and it has become necessary for me to remain in the State till a later period in the present year than is consistent with an acceptance of what has been offered me."

Before the legislature met again, the winter of Virginia's discontent was made glorious summer by the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. All thought of censure was swallowed up in that stupendous joy. December 19, 1781, exactly a month after the surrender, Jefferson, occupying his ancestral seat as member for Albemarle, to which he had been re-elected without one dissentient vote, rose in his place, reminded the House of the intimated censure of the last session, and said he was ready to meet and answer any charges that might be brought against him. No one responded. His accuser was absent. There was silence in the chamber. After a pause, a member rose, and offered a resolution thanking him for his "impartial, upright, and attentive administration," which passed both Council and Assembly unanimously.

Even this did not heal the wound. As he refrained from attending the spring session of the legislature, James Monroe wrote to him a letter of remonstrance, telling him that the public remarked his absence, and were disposed to blame him for withholding his help at so difficult a time. He answered, that, before announcing his determination to retire from public life, he had examined well his heart, to learn whether any lurking particle of political ambition. remained in it to make him uneasy in a private station. "I became satisfied," he continued, "that every fibre of that passion was thoroughly eradicated." He thought, too, that thirteen years of public service had given him a right now to withdraw, and devote his energies to the care and education of the two families dependent upon him, and the restoration of estates impaired by neglect or laid waste by war. Nor could he forget the wrong done him in the As

sembly. "I felt," he wrote, "that these injuries, for such they have since been acknowledged, had inflicted a wound on my spirit which will only be cured by the all-healing grave." For these and other reasons, he held to his purpose to withdraw from all participation in public affairs, and dedicate the whole residue of his life to the education of his children, the culture of his lands, and the sweet toils of the library. He concluded by inviting his young friend to visit him at Monticello. "You will find me busy," he said, "but in lighter occupations."

Yes, he was busy; but few persons who look over the work he was then doing regard it as a very light occupation. The French government had instructed its minister at Philadelphia to gather and transmit to Paris information respecting the States of the American Confederacy; and the secretary of legation had sent Mr. Jefferson a list of questions to answer concerning Virginia. From childhood he had observed nature in his native land with the curiosity of an intelligent and sympathetic mind; and in his maturer age, even in the busiest and most anxious times, he had been ever a student, an inquirer, a collector. All the stores of knowledge accumulated in so many years he now poured upon paper, and interspersed subtle and curious essays upon points of natural history, geography, morals, politics, and literature. M. de Marbois must have been astonished to receive from him, not a series of short, dry answers to official questions, but a volume, teeming with suggestive fact and thought, warm with humane sentiment, and couched in the fluent language natural to a sanguine and glowing mind. It is in this work that the chapter occurs which gave so many powerful texts to our noble Abolitionists during their eighty years' war with slavery: :

"The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism, on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and, thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with

odious peculiarities. That man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. . . . I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever; that, considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situations, is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest."

At the close of the war, then, Jefferson supposed his public life ended. He was sure of it. He had publicly said so. Monroe had remonstrated with him; Madison had remonstrated; his old constituents and Congress both solicited his services; but he could not be lured again from his pleasant mountain home and its delicious duties into the arena of public strife, whence he had but lately issued, wounded and sore. I suppose he was wrong in this; for if he, with his ample fortune, his fine endowments, his health, his knowledge, and his culture, was not bound to render some service to Virginia in 1782, of whom could public service be reasonably demanded?

It was a delightful dream while it lasted, that of spending a long life in the Garden of Virginia, with an adored wife, troops of affectionate children, and an ever-growing library. We have a glimpse of him there in the spring of 1782, when he was visited by one of the officers of the French army, Major-General the Marquis de Chastellux. During this year, while the negotiations for peace were lingering, the French officers were much in American society, making an impress upon manners and character that is not yet obliterated. Americans were peculiarly susceptible then to the influence of men whose demeanor and tone were in such agreeable contrast to those of the English. The French were exceedingly beloved at the time; not the officers only, but the men as well; for had they not marched through the country without burning a rail, without touching an apple in an orchard, without ogling a girl by the roadside?

The influence of the French officers upon the young gentlemen of the United States was not an unmixed good. It was from them that the American of eighty years ago caught the ridiculous affectation of fighting duels, which raged like a mania from 1790 to 1804. The French nobleman of the old school had also acquired an art, which men of our race never attain, the art of making sensual vice