1781, the very day that the definite news of Arnold's approach reached Richmond, the legislature, before its hasty adjournment, ceded the territory north of the Ohio to the United States, on condition that the States should ratify the Articles of Confederation. Jefferson transmitted the resolution to the president of Congress, expressing the hope that "the other States of the Union, equally impressed with the necessity of that important convention [the Articles of Confederation] shall be willing to sacrifice equally to its completion. This single event [confederation], could it take place shortly, would overweigh every success which the enemy have hitherto obtained, and render desperate the hopes to which those successes have given birth." Virginia's splendid example won the cause. Within two months the last State, Maryland, signed the Articles, and the United States had its first Constitution in black on white.

The Northwest Territory thus ceded by Virginia was the beginning of the magnificent public domain of the United States, which, during the next two generations, through cessions by the States, purchase from France, treaty with England, conquest from Mexico, was extended to the Pacific coast; and whose political organization, economic development, and social amalgamation have exercised the most potent influence on the course of American history. By the transfer of the Northwest Territory, as gov

ernor of Virginia, and the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, as President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson set his seal to the acquisition of a national domain imperial in extent and exhaustless in wealth; by his plan of government for the territory west of the Alleghanies in 1784 and his despatch of Lewis and Clark to the Pacific coast twenty years later, he stamped his name on our great Western wilderness and his ideas on all our subsequent territorial policy.

Jefferson retired from the governorship in the midsummer of 1781 under the double cloud of official " criticism and domestic anxiety. He was a man singularly free his life long from feelings of resentment or revenge. Yet the sense of his imputed failure in the highest office within the gift of his "countrymen" lingered for many months to embitter a heart racked with the pain of watching its dearest treasure slowly stolen away by the inexorable hand of death. He believed that he had done with public life forever. The thought of office almost sickened him. He declined an appointment by Congress in June, 1781, to join Adams, Franklin, Jay, and Laurens in Europe to represent the United States in a proposed peace congress at Vienna. He refused an election to Congress by the Virginia legislature in December. To his kinsman, Edmund Randolph, he wrote from Monticello: "I have retired to my farm, my family, and my books, from which I think nothing will evermore separate me..

A desire to leave public office with a reputation not more blotted than it has deserved will oblige me to emerge at the next session of our assembly and perhaps to accept a seat in it, but as I go with a single object I shall withdraw when that shall be concluded." His intimate friends, Madison and Monroe, both tried to coax him from the tent of Achilles. The former thought that his "keen sensibility" (sensitiveness) was not "dictated either by philosophy or patriotism," and Monroe frankly told him that his conduct was provoking murmurs. But still Jefferson persevered in his course of "obstinate condolement." He could have comforted himself, he writes Monroe, "under the disapprobation of the well-meaning but uninformed people," but the mistrust of their enlightened representatives, letting him "stand for months arraigned of treason of the heart" as well as "weakness of the head," was a "wound in his spirit which could only be cured by the all-healing grave." This distressing period of morbid reflection on past chagrin and mortal anxiety for what the next day might bring forth passed with the death of Mrs. Jefferson, early in September, 1782. That great baptism of sorrow swept away all lesser memories of ill, and Jefferson was ready when his country called him a few weeks later to a post of honor and service.

1 Referring, of course, to the proposed examination of his conduct by the legislature, set for December 19, 1781. Jefferson's letter to Randolph was written in September.

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CHAPTER V

THE MISSION TO FRANCE

I do love this people with all my heart, and think that with a better religion, a better form of Government and their present governors their condition and Country would be most enviable. (Jefferson to Mrs. John Adams, June 21, 1785.)

THE surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown put an end to the American Revolution. On March 5, 1782, the British Parliament authorized the ministry to make peace, and a fortnight later Lord North, who had been at the head of the government for twelve years, resigned the seals to the Marquis of Rockingham, the liberal Whig under whom the Stamp Act had been repealed in 1766. Rockingham died in July, but his successor, Lord Shelburne, carried on his policy of a friendly consideration of American claims. Benjamin Franklin was at the head of our peace commission in Paris, with Jay, Adams, and Laurens as his colleagues. They were all able men, but the negotiations halted a bit. Franklin was seventy-six years old and not in the best of health. Jay and Adams had to leave their respective diplomatic posts in Madrid and Amsterdam to take part in the discussions in Paris, while Laurens was captured by the English on the voyage to Europe and held a prisoner in the Tower of London until the

conferences were nearly over. Congress thought it wise to add to the commission a member fresh from America, acquainted at first hand with the condi tions of the later years of the war; and their unanimous choice fell on Jefferson. The appointment reached him at Monticello, November 25, 1782, and he immediately accepted it, not only as a rare opportunity for public service, but as a relief from the brooding sorrow of his great affliction. His passion for art, music, science, and philosophy heightened the anticipation of companionship with the noted men of culture whose names graced the intellectual capital of the world in the latter days of the old régime in France. Paris was his Mecca.

Jefferson left Monticello for Philadelphia in December. The French minister, Luzerne, offered him passage on the frigate Romulus, on which Jefferson's friend and late visitor to Monticello, the Marquis de Chastellux,' was also to sail. But Jefferson's view of the towers of Notre Dame and the courts of the Louvre was destined to still further postponement. While the Romulus lay a few miles below Baltimore, blocked by the ice and fearful of the British cruisers

1 De Chastellux (1734-88) was one of the French generals in the American Revolution, and a member of the Académie française. He published his Travels in the Southern States of America in 1788. We are indebted to Chastellux for one of the most charming descriptions of Jefferson in retirement at Monticello in the spring of 1782: “A man not yet forty, tall and with a mild and pleasing countenance, but whose mind and understanding are ample substitutes for every exterior grace. An American who, without ever having quitted his own country, is at once a musician, skilled in drawing, a geometrician