and their attitude towards institutions rather than on the formation of institutions themselves." To the mind that finds it difficult to appreciate such imponderable influences, Jefferson seems like a dreamer dwelling in a fool's paradise of optimism or blocking the path of efficient government with exasperating political scruples. "He died as he had lived," says Oliver, "in the odor of phrases." That is the way principles appear to some minds.

Jefferson's work as a reformer of the laws and customs of old Virginia has been far too little noticed by his biographers. This lies partly, no doubt, in the comparative indifference of the Northern scholars who have written most of our histories to the development of local institutions in the South. "If Jefferson had done his [legal] work east of the Hudson or north of the Susquehanna," writes a member of the Virginia bar, "he would be rated far higher among the greatest legal minds America has produced." To my mind, however, the neglect of Jefferson as a legislator and reformer is due far more to the overemphasis of his work as a party organizer and politician. He is far better known as the antagonist of Hamilton than as the colleague of Wythe and Pendleton. And yet, while we may not allow a man to be the final judge of his own character, it is only fair to respect his estimate of his own accomplishments, especially when he makes that estimate calmly and reflectively at the end of a

long life. In a pathetic little passage stitched into his Memoir on a memorandum leaf, Jefferson says: "I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is better for my having lived at all. I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things but they would have been done by others, some of them, perhaps, a little better." The things he goes on to mention are just these reforms which we have been studying. In a list of ten services, only one is national and political in its nature the Declaration of Independence. The others are reforms-religious, economic, penal, educational, agrarian, fiscal-which he accomplished, or strove to accomplish, for his "country" of Virginia. He does not mention the Louisiana Purchase, but recalls with satisfaction the improvement of the navigation of the Rivanna. He omits the triumph over the Federalists in the great battle of 1800, but dwells with pride on the introduction into Virginia of a better quality of rice from Lombardy.

When we remember that Virginia was the largest and richest State in the Union during the first generation of our history under the Constitution, that she furnished four out of our first five Presidents, that her influence was enormous on the States to the south of her and considerable on the States to the north, we realize what it meant, not for Virginia alone, but for our whole country, that the stamp of Thomas Jefferson's liberalism was put on the insti

tutions of the Old Dominion in the critical years just following our independence. His was the first law in the modern world sanctioning expatriation. His was the first law of a slave state abolishing the slavetrade. His was the first law of modern times apportioning punishment to crime on a rational and humane principle. His was the first conception in our country of a free university as a "group of faculties" in which the elective system prevailed. His was the first formal declaration of complete religious liberty by a sovereign state in the history of the world. For half a century the influence of his work for Virginia was spread abroad-his educational ideas to Michigan, Missouri, Massachusetts, Maine, and Kentucky; his antislavery principles to the Northwest Territory; his elective system to Harvard; his liberal ideas of citizenship to the nation. New York followed Virginia's lead in the abolition of entails in 1782, North Carolina in 1784, Kentucky in 1796, New Jersey in 1820. Far down into the nineteenth century broad-minded men in every State were drawing on Jefferson's arguments, citing his letters, quoting the forceful passages of his Notes on Virginia, and the preamble to his bill for religious freedom, until all over our republic there was vindicated the simple but hard-won truth that "the opinions of men are not the object of civil government nor under its jurisdiction."

As a politician Jefferson appears to some as crafty

and oversubtle. Others regard him as a feeble and counsel-reft executive. His fundamental political principle of trust in a people trained to mistrust its governors seems to many open to grave objections on the grounds of both policy and wisdom. But as a liberalizing and liberating influence on the spirit of the American people he stands without a peer until the advent of Abraham Lincoln. Napoleon Bonaparte said: "I shall go down to posterity with the Code in my hand." How much more finely could Jefferson say this! For the code of Napoleon was order, but the code of Thomas Jefferson was order and liberty.

CHAPTER IV

JEFFERSON AS WAR GOVERNOR

We consider ourselves bound in honor, as well as interest, to share one general fate with our sister colonies; and we should hold ourselves base deserters of that union to which we have acceded, were we to agree. on any measures distinct and apart from them. (Address from Virginia Burgesses to Governor Dunmore, June 12, 1775.)

A FEW days before the committee of revisers made their report to the legislature, Jefferson was chosen governor of Virginia to succeed Patrick Henry, who had served for three consecutive annual terms since the State became a free republic. Jefferson occupied the office for two years, from June, 1779, to June, 1781-two years which, with the possible exception of the closing years of his presidency, were the most irksome period of his whole public life. In his Memoir, after devoting twenty pages to the work of the law revision, he passes over the governorship in silence, alleging as his reason that to write his own history during those two years would be but to duplicate the histories of the State already written. But we may suspect that it was more than a scruple against furnishing a redundancy of historical material that made Jefferson so reticent during his whole life on the sub