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he wrote on the 31st of July to the President, that the motives which in February had induced him to suspend his resignation no longer continuing, he should resign at the end of the current quarter. But on the 6th of August, the President called on him at his house on the Schuylkill, when the preceding letter gave rise to a long conversation on the views of parties, on Mr. Jefferson's resignation and that of Colonel Hamilton, which he himself had lately made known, and on the appointment of his successor in the state department; when on the President's expressing a particular desire that Mr. Jefferson would continue in office to the end of the year, he took time to consider of it, and, on the 11th of August, wrote him a card to announce his change of purpose, in compliance with the President's wishes.

His letter of resignation is in the following words:

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"Having had the honour of communicating to you, in my letter of the last of July, my purpose of retiring from the office of Secretary of State, at the end of the month of September, you were pleased, for particular reasons, to wish its postponement to the close of the year. That term being now arrived, and my propensity to retirement becoming daily more and more irresistible, I now take the liberty of resigning the office into your hands. Be pleased to accept my sincere thanks for all the indulgences which you have been so good as to exercise towards me in the discharge of its duties. Conscious that my need of them has been great, I have still ever found them greater, without any other claim on my part than a firm support of what has appeared to be right, and a thorough disdain of all means which were not as open and honourable as their object was pure. I carry into my retirement a lively sense of your goodness, and shall continue gratefully to remember it.

"With my serious prayers for your life, health, and tranquillity, I pray you to accept the homage of the great and constant respect and attachment with which I have the honour to be

"TH. JEFFERSON."

He soon after set out for Monticello, where he hoped to find that peace of mind which public employment had long since ceased to afford him.

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CHAPTER XIX.

Mr. Jefferson's motives for retiring from public life. His continued connexion with the Republican Party. Description of Monticello. Mr. Madison's Commercial Restrictions-arguments for and against them in Congress. State of parties on this Question. A naval force provided. British Order in Council of the 5th of November.The Measures in Congress to which it gave rise. The Chief Justice sent as Minister to England. Each party accuses the other of foreign attachments. Arrangement of each under different classes of citizens.

1794.

THUS Mr. Jefferson, after having been actively engaged in the affairs of his country at home and abroad, for twentyfive years, had now, at the age of fifty, returned to private life, for which he had qualities and resources that peculiarly fitted him, and for which too he had always expressed a strong predilection. Here he would find leisure to gratify his lively relish for letters; to make observations in physics and natural history; and, in the society of his daughters and grandchildren, cultivate the domestic affections. With these sources of happiness, which were more fondly desired from their having been hitherto enjoyed only at brief intervals, and his rare cheerfulness of temper, he would probably have been content to pass the remainder of his life at Monticello with as little of repining or chagrin as ever attended the premature retirement of a statesman.

His motives for withdrawing from public affairs have been, as usual, variously interpreted by his friends and his enemies. The former alleged that, dissatisfied with some parts of the policy of the administration, discouraged by

his failure to defeat the most pernicious of Hamilton's measures, and harassed by the labours of incessant controversy n the cabinet and out of it, he had determined to bid a final adieu to a life of vexation and disappointment; and that since it was not allowed him to serve his country by his counsels, he had sought peace in unambitious and philosophical retirement. But his political adversaries denied that private life was his ultimate object. They insisted, on the contrary, that it was used as a more effectual means for the furtherance of his ambitious views; that in the attitude in which he had been recently placed of defending the exccutive and of opposing Genet, he was in danger of losing the confidence and affections of the party to whom he had hitherto looked for support; and there could be no better time for him to retreat from so delicate a position than when his late official support of the administration had softened his opponents, and even won from them a certain degree of favour, without sensibly diminishing the confidence and adherence of his own party; and that he now withdrew from public affairs in the full expectation of being a candidate for the presidency, on the retirement of General Washington.

It is not always practicable to fathom men's motives, for they are sometimes not known or not distinctly avowed to themselves. Mr. Jefferson's own declarations, repeatedly made with every appearance of sincerity, and consistently with his frequent refusals of public office and resignations after he had accepted, all concur to assure us that he would have contentedly remained a private individual at Monticello. It is not, however, to be supposed that he felt indifferent to the great events which were then passing in Europe, and still less to the political contests of the day in his own country; nor with his views, would such apathy have been creditable to his patriotism or love of civil liberty.

He meant no doubt in his retirement to keep a watchful eye on the proceedings both of Congress and the administration, and to avail himself of his popularity in the nation, to counteract by his counsels the anti-republican tendencies of the men in power, and of the English party generally.— Whether there mingled with these feelings the ambition of attaining the chief power himself cannot now be known. But it is reasonable to suppose that he was not exempt from the desire of self-aggrandizement, if it could be attained without undue sacrifices. With ambition thus tempered and regulated, whether it was disguised from him or not, it seems unfair to charge him with affecting the virtues of humility, and with pretending to disclaim and despise what he secretly coveted, and sedulously sought to attain.

But whatever may have been his views in retiring, he was destined not long to remain in a state of quiet neutrality. The unanimous voice of his party soon proclaimed him the man of their choice to succeed General Washington; and as it is not known that he made any very earnest opposition to their wishes, it may be presumed that he contented himself with a passive acquiescence. The part which he did take, after it was distinctly ascertained that he was to be the candidate of the democratic party, cannot now be easily trace. There is little evidence of it to be found in his correspondence; and there probably never existed any other, except in the conversations and suggestions which passed between him and his numerous visiters, and from them were diffused throughout Virginia, and even the Union. Of these, there remains no memorial save what may still linger in the faded recollections of his surviving fellow labourers. It is certain that Monticello was, in this and the two succeeding years, the head-quarters of those opposed to the federal policy, and that few measures of the republican party in Congress were undertaken without its advice or concurrence. He even had

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