No sound estimate of the extraordinary influence exerted by Jefferson upon the growth of liberalism can be made at the present time. It would require separate studies, careful investigation and the publication of many letters, safely preserved but too little used, which rest in the Jefferson Papers of the Library of Congress, and with the Massachusetts Historical Society. I have already printed Jefferson's correspondence with Volney, Destutt de Tracy, Lafayette and Du Pont de Nemours; many other letters, no less significant, remain practically unknown. He encouraged his European friends, Correa de Serra, Kosciusko, the Greek Coray, to keep up their courage, to hope against hope. To all of them he preached the same gospel of faith in the ultimate and inevitable recognition throughout the world of the principles of American democracy. This was not done for propaganda's sake, for no man would deserve less than Jefferson the dubious qualification of propagandist. The many letters written to his American friends on the same subject clearly show that this was his profound conviction and almost his only raison d'être. His was not an over-optimistic temperament; he did not fail to notice all "the specks of hurricane on the horizon of the world." Yet, all considered, and in spite of temporary fits of despondency, his conclusion on the future of democracy can be summed up in the words he wrote to John Adams at the end of 1821:
I will not believe our labors are lost. I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on a steady advance. We have seen indeed, once within the record of history, the complete eclipse of the human mind continuing for centuries ... even should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science and liberties of Europe, this country remains to preserve and restore light and liberty to them. In short, the flames kindled on the 4th of July 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.[554]
Jefferson felt such a dislike for unnecessary controversies that he was apt to adopt the tone and the style of his correspondents and apparently to accept their ideas, so that many contradictions can be found in these letters. To a chosen few only he fully revealed his intimate thoughts and without reticence, without fear of being betrayed, communicated his doubts, his hopes and his hatred. The letters he wrote to Short, Priestley, and Thomas Cooper are most remarkable in this respect. But with none of them did he communicate so freely as with his old friend John Adams. The correspondence that passed between them during the last fifteen years of their lives constitutes one of the most striking and illuminating human documents a student of psychology may ever hope to discover. To those who have had the privilege of using the manuscripts to follow month by month the palsied hand of Adams until he had to cease writing himself and dictated his letters to a "female member of his household", it seems unthinkable that the wish expressed by Wirt in 1826,—to see the correspondence between the two great men published in its entirety,—should not have received its fulfillment.
They had been estranged for a long time, and no word had passed between them for more than ten years after Adams' sulky departure from Washington on the morning of March 4, 1801. At the beginning of 1811, Doctor Benjamin Rush made bold to deplore "the discontinuance of friendly correspondence between Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson." Jefferson answered quite lengthily, giving a long account of his difficulties with Adams, including the letter written by Abigail Adams in 1802, but adding that he would second with pleasure every effort made to bring about a reconciliation. However, he did not entertain much hope that Doctor Rush would succeed, for he knew it was "part of Mr. Adams' character to suspect foul play in those of whom he is jealous, and not easily to relinquish his suspicions."[555]
It was not until the end of the same year that Jefferson took up the subject again, having heard that during a conversation Adams had mentioned his name, adding: "I always loved Jefferson, and still love him." This was enough, and it only remained to create an opportunity to resume the correspondence without too much awkwardness; but "from this fusion of sentiments" Mrs. Adams was "of course to be separated", for Jefferson could not believe that the woman wounded in her motherly pride had forgotten anything. This was no insuperable obstacle, however: "It will only be necessary that I never name her" wrote Jefferson.[556]
Adams took the first step, and, knowing how much Jefferson was interested in domestic manufactures, sent him a fine specimen of homespun made in Massachusetts. Jefferson could but acknowledge the peace offering, which he did most gracefully, without mentioning Mrs. Adams.[557] But he was too much of a Southern gentleman to hold a resentment long even against a woman of such a jealous disposition. Two months later he sent for the first time the homage of his respects to Mrs. Adams, after which he never forgot to mention her. On two occasions he even wrote her charming letters, in the same friendly tone as he had used with her twenty-five years earlier, when he used to do shopping for her in Paris. On hearing of her death on November 13, 1818, he sent to his stricken old friend a touching expression of his sympathy:
Will I say more where words are vain, but that it is of some comfort to us both, that the term is not very distant, at which we are to deposit in the same cerement our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love and never lose again.[558]
Quite naturally, as the circle of his friends grew narrower and one after the other were called by death, Jefferson's thoughts turned to the hereafter. In his youth he had apparently settled the problem once for all; but the solution then found was scarcely more than a temporary expedient. It may behove a young man full of vigor, with a long stretch of years before him, to declare that "the business of life is with matter" and that it serves no purpose to break our heads against a blank wall. There are very few men, if they are thinking at all, who can entirely dismiss from their minds the perplexing and torturing riddle, as the term grows nearer every day. Such an ataraxia may have been obtained by a few sages of old, but it is hardly human, and Jefferson, like Adams, was very human. This is a subject, however, which I cannot approach without some reluctance. Jefferson himself would have highly disapproved of such a discussion. After submitting silently to so many fierce criticisms, after being accused of atheism, materialism, impiety and philosophism by his contemporaries, he hoped that the question would never be broached to him again. With those who tried to revive it, he had absolutely no patience.
One of our fan-coloring biographers—he wrote once—who paint small men as very great, inquired of me lately, with real affection too, whether he might consider as authentic, the change in my religion much spoken of in some circles. Now this supposed that they knew what had been my religion before, taking for it the word of their priests, whom I certainly never made the confidants of my creed. My answer was: "Say nothing of my religion. It is known to my God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one."[559]
Unfortunately the controversy is still going on and at least a few points must be indicated here. The simplest and to some extent the most acceptable treatment of the matter was given a few years after his death by the physician who attended him up to the last minutes: