CHAP. I.]

WHEN IT CEASES.

31

or the proper freedom of individual action requires them. But when public or private interests cease to demand privacy, the practice of all ages shows that the obligation to preserve it has been regarded as removed. It would be difficult to point to the political memoirs of any statesman which do not reveal things that were regarded at the time of their occurrence as official secrets; and we find no hesitation whatever, even in the cases of colleagues, in giving the particulars of individual action, in such transactions, however they may now be supposed to affect personal reputation. A multitude of instances of this will at once occur to every well-read person.

Governments, too, have in repeated instances given their sanction to the same rule by throwing open to public scrutiny records of secret official proceedings, involving individual action. And the cases have not been few where governments have themselves published such records. We will cite one. Mr. Madison kept a daily record or "report" of what took place in the federal Convention of 1787, which sat with closed doors, and with the express obligation of secrecy resting on every member. That obligation was never raised by the official body which imposed it, or by any other body composed of the same, or a majority of the same persons, or even of other persons acting in the same capacity. No man doubts that a great many things were said and done in that convention by persons who would not have dreamed of saying or doing them with open doors. Published, during the lives of the actors, the records of them would, in many instances, have proved highly damaging to their popularity; and, in the minds of some, they still seriously affect their posthumous reputation. Yet the Government of the United States purchased and published this secret record! We have heard no outcry raised on the subject-no blame imputed to the Government.' It appears to be conceded, then, that acted history must, after immediate personal interests cease to be affected, give up its secrets to written and published history. The practical rule established seems to be that the

Nor have we, except in one case, heard any complaints made or insinuated against Mr. Madison-and they are by a filial biographer, who afterwards exhibited his own delicacy by publishing the most confidential letters to his father, making far more damaging revelations (if either are damaging) to the writers, than do the records of the federal Convention; and there was not, certainly, on public considerations, a tithe of the same good reasons for their publication!

lives of the actors generally' constitute the just limitation of obligations of official secrecy. Perhaps another condition should be superadded, and is really superadded in the public judgment—that fair and good reasons (something besides catering to a useless curiosity) should exist for publication.

If the preceding positions are tenable, we have, at the outset, a sufficient answer to the assertion that the reservation of the Ana for posthumous publication, implied any extraordinary inveteracy in political or personal hostility. And it is quite as easy to defend posthumous publications on the score of fairness. An obscure man may not, it is true, be as easily vindicated from an unjust or untruthful charge, twenty-five years after his death, as when he and all the witnesses were on the stage together. But no man of sufficient consequence to make his memoirs public authority, has any motive for striking at the memories of obscure men, except where they appear as the agents or representatives of more prominent ones; and then the charge against. them usually stands or falls with that against their principal. In the case of a prominent actor on the public stage, in nineteen cases out of twenty, an important charge affecting his secret character or motives, can be better settled after than before his death. He must be a most wary and impenetrable man if his own private papers, and those of his associates and friends, do not really settle all charges in regard to whatever was disguised, or at least not known, of his character and great aims in his life. Infinitely better now, than during their lives, can we judge of the esoteric springs of action which influenced the political measures of Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, or any other conspicuous person whose private papers have come before the world since his death.

And the dead are protected from petty or specific damaging accusations, in regard to which the particular defensive proof has become extinct, by another circumstance. Mankind, justly, on the whole, judge character in the mass, and not on any isolated incident recorded by a true or a false witness. Even though the proof appears to be overwhelming, the world really

An exception would of course exist, where the peace or good of the State demanded either further silence or an earlier exposure.

We are free to confess that, in our opinion, voluntary private and personal confidence can never die; and that it is as binding on descendants as on the original parties.

CHAP. I.] EFFECT OF POSTHUMOUS PUBLICATION.

33

pays little attention to it, if it goes contrary to the tenor of what is well settled to be the character of the accused person. If the proof is purely ex parte, still less is it regarded. Men generously and properly say, "we do not know what contradictions or explanations the accused might have offered." Few men, in truth, have ever been ultimately condemned, except on their own testimony. Accordingly, the posthumous memoirs or allegations of an opponent do not weigh a feather, when opposed to the tenor of a life, and to those inside views of himself which the confidential correspondence and papers of a statesman furnish, when spread before the world. We ought not, for example, to ask any man to believe any aggressive statement in Mr. Jefferson's Ana, which is opposed by such evidence, nor will we. All that such personal memoirs of an opponent-or one not in the confidence of the accused--can be considered worth, after private papers come to light, is that, as corroborations or explanations, they may more fully explain what prudence left but half spoken on paper, even to confidants.

Before a man's private papers are under the inspection of the public, he is, in our judgment, vastly more liable to misconstruction than afterwards, and more exposed to misrepresentation. Contemporary passions and prejudices increase the opportunity for delusion. We assert, then, that posthumous accusations of the nature of those contained in the Ana, are in every point of view as fair as contemporaneous ones; as fair in the intention, when made by an intelligent man who understands their practical effects, and clearly as fair in their practical consequences. Indeed, the world, on the whole, has been inclined to view them with even greater favor, because they cannot possibly be supposed to be prompted by immediate personal interest. While it gives actual credit to them or not, according to circumstances, while it knows that every man is anxious to commend himself and his party to posterity, it takes for granted that no one morally above the rank of a ruffian, would deliberately pass the dark portals of the grave with a gratuitous and malevolent aggressive falsehood on his lips. Nor has the world decided on the rightfulness of these posthumous accusations, even, strictly speaking, by their truthfulness of fact. They have only required that they should be truthful in intention-honestly and sincerely written.

VOL. II.-3

The fact that posthumousness of publication, other things being equal, is generally regarded as, on the whole, a favorable indication as to motives, we make no doubt; but in reality, it is a consideration perhaps generally hardly thought of. Let the best informed reader suddenly ask himself whether the writings approaching to the character of those which have been most condemned in the Ana (accusatory personal charges') of Burnet, Clarendon, De Comines, Evelyn, Franklin, Hutchinson, Las Casas, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Lutterel, Mather, Melvil, Pepys, Reresby, Rochefoucault, De Retz, Sidney, Sully, Temple, Winthrop, and the multitude of other personal memoir writers, from the days of Xenophon to those of Senator Benton, were published before or after the death of their authors. His inability to answer, without a good deal of effort to recollect, will probably satisfy him, by a fair test, how little real importance he has attached to that particular fact-how little he or any other man has dreamed of looking to either side of it for a ground of accusation against any other man than Mr. Jefferson." Unless under a cloud of temporary prejudice and passion, no intelligent person, in our opinion, would have ever dreamed of making it a ground of accusation against the latter. We shall have occasion to see that the rule that would condemn him in this particular, would equally, in the principle, if not in the extent, condemn Washington, and nearly every other prominent statesman of our country.

What were Mr. Jefferson's real and special motives for originally writing, for subsequently revising, and for meditating a posthumous publication of his Ana? We have hinted at these, but he has left express declarations on the subject, in the introduction prefixed to those papers, in 1818, which it would not be proper to omit:

Explanation of the three volumes bound in marbled paper.3

In these three volumes will be found copies of the official opinions given in writing by me to General Washington, while I was Secretary of State, with some

We shall not say that the writings of all we are about to name contain such charges -for we shall mention a list of personal memoir writers almost at random-but we should be curious to know which of them, or of all the same class of writers who ever wrote, contains nothing of the kind.

We make no doubt that had Mr. Jefferson's Ana been published during his life, we should have had ten times as loud a cry about his ferocity." "malignity," etc.! Note, by the editor (Mr. Randolph) of Jefferson's Works:

"These are the volumes containing the Anas to the time that the author retired

CHAP. I.] AN ANSWER TO MARSHALL'S HISTORY.

35

times the documents belonging to the case. Some of these are the rough drafts, some press copies, some fair ones. In the earlier part of my acting in that office, I took no other note of the passing transactions; but after a while, I saw the importance of doing it, in aid of my memory. Very often, therefore, I made memoranda on loose scraps of paper, taken out of my pocket in the moment, and laid by to be copied fair at leisure, which, however, they hardly ever were. These scraps, therefore, ragged, rubbed, and scribbled as they were, I had bound with the others by a binder who came into my cabinet, did it under my own eye, and without the opportunity of reading a single paper. At this day, after the lapse of twenty-five years, or more, from their dates, I have given to the whole a calm revisal, when the passions of the time are passed away, and the reasons of the transactions act alone on the judgment. Some of the informations I had recorded, are now cut out from the rest, because I have seen that they were incorrect, or doubtful, or merely personal or private, with which we have nothing to do. I should perhaps have thought the rest not worth preserving, but for their testimony against the only history of that period, which pretends to have been compiled from authentie and unpublished documents.

*

But a short review of facts * * * will show, that the contests of that day were contests of principle, between the advocates of republican, and those of kingly government, and that had not the former made the efforts they did, our government would have been, even at this early day, a very different thing from what the successful issue of those efforts have made it.

We have here a most unequivocal avowal that the Ana were designed for ultimate publication, to furnish the writer's life-long and dying testimony against a history, brought forth under circumstances which would give it great weight, but a history which, in Mr. Jefferson's opinion, wholly misstated and perverted the respective principles and purposes of the original Federal and Republican parties, and consequently the true grounds of issue between them and their leaders.

The history thus alluded to was Chief-Justice Marshall's Life of Washington. To the importance it derived from being then the only history of its period purporting to be "compiled from authentic and unpublished documents" (General Washington's private papers and the records in the several Government offices), Mr. Jefferson might have added that importance necessarily inuring from its author's high official and personal character.

Judge Marshall was a man of sound and powerful intellect, and of austere public and private virtue. He was a Federalist of the "straightest sect." He had played a conspicuous part in an embassy to France, the result of which gave peculiar disgust to

from the office of Secretary of State. The official opinions and documents referred to, being very voluminous, are for the most part omitted, to make room for the conversations which the same volumes comprise.'