CHAPTER XXXIII.

THE MAN AND HIS VIEW OF HIMSELF-THE FEDERALISTS AND ANTI-FEDERALISTS.

TOW

OWARDS the close of his Presidency the Legislature of Virginia addressed Mr. Jefferson in this manner concerning his public services:

"We have to thank you for the model of an Administration conducted on the purest principles of republicanism; for pomp and state laid aside; patronage discarded; internal taxes abolished; a host of superfluous officers disbanded; the monarchic maxim that a national debt is a national blessing,' renounced, and more than thirty-three millions of our debt discharged; the native right to nearly one hundred millions of acres of our national domain extinguished; and without the guilt or calamities of conquest, a vast and fertile region added to our country, far more extensive than her original possessions, bringing along with it the Mississippi and the port of Orleans, the trade of the West to the Pacific Ocean, and in the intrinsic value of the land itself, a source of permanent and almost inexhaustible revenue. These are points in your Administration which the historian will not fail to seize, to expand, and teach posterity to dwell upon with delight. Nor will he forget our peace with the civilized world, preserved through a season of uncommon difficulty and trial; the good will cultivated with the unfortunate aborigines of our country, and the civilization humanely extended among them; the lesson taught the coast of Barbary, that we have the means of chastising their piratical encroachments and aweing them into justice; and that theme, on which, above all others, the historic genius will hang with rapture, the liberty of speech and of the press preserved inviolate, without which genius and science are given to man in vain."

Mr. Jefferson thought his work in establishing and remodeling the University of Virginia of no inconsiderable merit. His abolition of entails and the Church of England he considered great feats to be taken into any just estimate of him. Of his services in the State Legislature and in nearly two years' work in preparing a system of laws for the State, he wrote: "If Legislative services are worth mentioning, and the stamp of liberality and equality, which was necessary to be imposed on our laws in the first crisis of our birth as a nation, was of any value, they will find that the leading and most important laws of that day were prepared by myself, and carried chiefly by my efforts; supported, indeed, by able and faithful coadjutors from the ranks of the House, very effective as seconds, but who would not have taken the field as leaders."

In his appeal to the Virginia Legislature for a special provision enabling him to dispose of his property by lottery, he made use of some trifling and insupportable arguments which were beneath his reason and character, and which greatly aided in exhibiting the pitiable necessity of his circumstances; such as that all human pursuits are lotteries after all, and farming the greatest possible lottery. As a help or incentive to the Legislature in favor of his case, he thought it proper to remind that body of the extent and character of his public services. In this enumeration he makes this remarkable statement, showing his chief occupation as Vice-President, and the supreme value he put upon some of those things which proved to be of doubtful influence in the progress of events:

"There is, one, however, not therein specified, the most important in its consequences of any transaction in any portion of

my life; to wit, the head I personally made against the Federal principles and proceedings during the Administration of Mr. Adams. The usurpations and violations of the Constitution at that period, and their majority in both Houses of Congress, were so great, so decided, and so daring, that after combating their aggressions, inch by inch, without being able in the least to check their career, the Republican leaders thought it would be best to give up their useless efforts there, go home, get into their respective Legislatures, embody whatever of resistance they could be formed into, and if ineffectual, to perish there as in the last ditch. All, therefore, retired, leaving Mr. Gallatin alone in the House of Representatives, and myself in the Senate, where I then presided as Vice-President. Remaining at our posts, and bidding defiance to the browbeatings and insults by which they endeavored to drive us off also, we kept the mass of Republicans in phalanx together, until the Legislatures could be brought up to the charge; and nothing on earth is more certain than that if myself particularly, placed by my office of Vice-President at the head of the Republicans, had given way and withdrawn from my post, the Republicans throughout the Union would have given up in despair, and the cause would have been lost forever. By holding on, we obtained time for the Legislatures to come up with their weight; and those of Virginia and Kentucky particularly, but more especially the former, by their celebrated resolutions saved the Constitution at its last gasp. No person who was not a witness of the scenes of that gloomy period can form any idea of the afflicting persecutions and personal indignities we had to brook. They saved our country, however. The spirits of the people were so much subdued and reduced to despair by the X Y Z imposture, and other stratagems and machinations, that they would have sunk into apathy and monarchy, as the only form of government which could maintain itself."

But in a less confident moment Mr. Jefferson wrote in his Autobiography :

"I have sometimes asked myself, whether my country is the 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 Rivanna had never been used for navigation; scarcely an empty canoe had ever passed down it. Soon after I came of age, I examined its obstructions, set on foot a subscription for removing them, got an act of Assembly passed, and the thing effected, so as to be used completely and fully for carrying down all our produce.

"The Declaration of Independence.

"I proposed the demolition of the church establishment, and the freedom of religion. It could only be done by degrees; to wit, the Act of 1776, c. 2. exempted dissenters from contributions to the church, and left the church clergy to be supported by voluntary contributions of their own sect; was continued from year to year, and made perpetual 1779, c. 36. I prepared the act for religious freedom in 1777, as part of the revisal, which was not reported to the Assembly till 1779, and that particular law not passed till 1785, and then by the efforts of Mr. Madison. "The act putting an end to entails.

"The act prohibiting the importation of slaves.

"The act concerning citizens, and establishing the natural right of man to expatriate himself at will.

"The act changing the course of descents, and giving the inheritance to all the children, &c., equally, I drew as a part of the revisal.

"The act for apportioning crimes and punishments, part of the same work, I drew. When proposed to the Legislature by Mr. Madison, in 1785, it failed by a single vote. G. K. Taylor afterwards, in 1796, proposed the same subject; avoiding the adoption of any part of the diction of mine, the text of which had been studiously drawn in the technical terms of the law, so as to give no occasion for new questions by new expressions. When I drew mine, public labor was thought the best punishment to be substituted for death. But, while I was in France, I heard of a society in England, who had successfully introduced solitary confinement, and saw the drawing of a prison at Lyons, in France, formed on the idea of solitary confinement. And being applied to by the Governor of Virginia for the plan of a Capitol and prison, I sent him the Lyons plan, accompanying it with a drawing on a smaller scale, better adapted to our use. This was in June, 1786. Mr. Taylor very judiciously adopted this idea (which had now been acted on in Philadelphia, probably from the English model) and substituted labor in confinement

to the public labor proposed by the committee of revisal; which themselves would have done, had they been able to act on the subject again. The public mind was ripe for this in 1796, when Mr. Taylor proposed it, and ripened chiefly by the experiment in Philadelphia; whereas in 1785, when it had been proposed to our Assembly, they were not quite ripe for it.

"In 1789 and 1790, I had a great number of olive plants, of the best kind, sent from Marseilles to Charleston, for South Carolina and Georgia. They were planted, and are flourishing; and though not yet multiplied, they will be the germ of that cultivation in those States.

"In 1790, I got a cask of heavy upland rice, from the river Denbigh, in Africa, about latitude 9° 30′ north, which I sent to Charleston, in hopes it might supersede the culture of the wet rice, which renders South Carolina and Georgia so pestilential through the summer. It was divided, and part sent to Georgia. I know not whether it has been attended to in South Carolina, but it has spread in the upper parts of Georgia, so as to have become almost general, and is highly prized. Perhaps it may answer in Tennessee and Kentucky. The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add an useful plant to its culture; especially a bread grain; next in value to bread is oil.

"Whether the act for the general diffusion of knowledge will ever be carried into complete effect, I know not. It was received by the Legislature with great enthusiasm at first; and a small effort was made in 1796, by the act to establish public schools, to carry a part of it into effect, viz., that for the establishment of free English schools; but the option given to the courts has defeated the intention of the act."

It was the opinion of W. A. Washington, the editor of Mr. Jefferson's writings, that this was but a fragment of what Mr. Jefferson designed to write, and on which he put value as his life-work. However this was, the first sentence of this catalogue contains a question which has many a time been asked by other men concerning Mr. Jefferson, and one which they have been disposed to answer in the negative. While he himself, in words at all events, seemed to think that