I assure you I was truly distressed to receive your letter of the 20th, and to hear the embarrassed state of your affairs. You may rely on my utmost exertions. Your grandson proposed that the first conference should be held at the Eagle. I prevailed on him to remove the scene to Judge Carr's, and to invite all the Judges of the Court of Appeals. Mr. Coalter and my brother were unable to attend; but all the court is with you. Mr. Johnson agreed to draw the bill. I am co-operating as far as lies in my power. I wish complete justice could be done on this occasion; but we have to deal with men as they are. Your grandson will no doubt give you the fullest information. I will occasionally inform you how matters are progressing.
Shortly after writing to Mr. Cabell we find him drawing up a paper, to be shown to his friends in the Legislature, called "Thoughts on Lotteries," which was written to show that there could be nothing immoral in the lottery which he desired. The following quotation shows that his request was not without a precedent:
In this way the great estate of the late Colonel Byrd (in 1756) was made competent to pay his debts, which, had the whole been brought into market at once, would have overdone the demand, would have sold at half or quarter the value, and sacrificed the creditors, half or three-fourths of whom would have lost their debts. This method of selling was formerly very much resorted to, until it was thought to nourish too much a spirit of hazard. The Legislature were therefore induced, not to suppress it altogether, but to take it under their own special regulation. This they did for the first time by their act of 1769, c. 17, before which time every person exercised the right freely, and since which time it is made unlawful but when approved and authorized by a special act of the Legislature.
In this same paper he sums up as follows the years spent in the public service:
I came of age in 1764, and was soon put into the nomination of justice of the county in which I live; and at the first election following I became one of its representatives in the Legislature. I was thence sent to the old Congress. Then employed two years with Mr. Pendleton and Mr. Wythe, on the revisal and reduction to a single code of the whole body of the British statutes, the acts of our Assembly, and certain parts of the common law. Then elected Governor. Next, to the Legislature and Congress again. Sent to Europe as Minister Plenipotentiary. Appointed Secretary of State to the new Government. Elected Vice-President, and President. And lastly, a Visitor and Rector of the University.
In these different offices, with scarcely any interval between them, I have been in the public service now sixty-one years; and during the far greater part of the time in foreign countries or in other States. Every one knows how inevitably a Virginia estate goes to ruin when the owner is so far distant as to be unable to pay attention to it himself; and the more especially when the line of his employment is of a character to abstract and alienate his mind entirely from the knowledge necessary to good and even to saving management.
Small and trifling as the favor was which Mr. Jefferson asked of the Virginia Legislature, it cost him much pain and mortification to do it, as we find from a sad and touching letter to Madison, in which he unbosoms himself to this long-cherished friend. He writes:
You will have seen in the newspapers some proceedings in the Legislature which have cost me much mortification.... Still, sales at a fair price would leave me competently provided. Had crops and prices for several years been such as to maintain a steady competition of substantial bidders at market, all would have been safe. But the long succession of years of stunted crops, of reduced prices, the general prostration of the farming business, under levies for the support of manufactures, etc., with the calamitous fluctuations of value in our paper medium, have kept agriculture in a state of abject depression, which has peopled the Western States by silently breaking up those on the Atlantic, and glutted the land-market while it drew off its bidders. In such a state of things property has lost its character of being a resource for debts. Highland in Bedford, which, in the days of our plethory, sold readily for from fifty to one hundred dollars the acre (and such sales were many then), would not now sell for more than from ten to twenty dollars, or one-quarter or one-fifth of its former price. Reflecting on these things, the practice occurred to me of selling on fair valuation, and by way of lottery, often resorted to before the Revolution to effect large sales, and still in constant usage in every State for individual as well as corporation purposes. If it is permitted in my case, my lands here alone, with the mills, etc., will pay every thing, and will leave me Monticello and a farm free. If refused, I must sell every thing here, perhaps considerably in Bedford, move thither with my family, where I have not even a log hut to put my head into,[72] and where ground for burial will depend on the depredations which, under the form of sales, shall have been committed on my property.
The question then with me was utrum horum. But why afflict you with these details? Indeed, I can not tell, unless pains are lessened by communication with a friend. The friendship which has subsisted between us, now half a century, and the harmony of our political principles and pursuits, have been sources of constant happiness to me through that long period. And if I remove beyond the reach of attentions to the University, or beyond the bourne of life itself, as I soon must, it is a comfort to leave that institution under your care, and an assurance that it will not be wanting. It has also been a great solace to me to believe that you are engaged in vindicating to posterity the course we have pursued for preserving to them in all their purity the blessings of self-government, which we had assisted, too, in acquiring for them. If ever the earth has beheld a system of administration conducted with a single and steadfast eye to the general interest and happiness of those committed to it; one which, protected by truth, can never know reproach, it is that to which our lives have been devoted. To myself you have been a pillar of support through life. Take care of me when dead, and be assured that I shall leave with you my last affections.
On the 3d of February, 1826, Mr. Cabell wrote to Jefferson:
Your intended application to the Legislature has excited much discussion in private circles in Richmond. Your grandson will doubtless give you a full account of passing occurrences. A second conference was held at Mr. Baker's last evening, at which were four of the Judges of the Court of Appeals, and several members of the Legislature. Finding considerable opposition in some of your political friends to the lottery, and feeling mortified myself that the State should stop short at so limited a measure, I suggested the idea of a loan of $80,000, free of interest, from the State, during the remainder of your life. On consultation, our friends decided that it would be impracticable. At the conference of last evening it was unanimously decided to bring forward and support the lottery. I hear there will be considerable opposition, but I hope it is exaggerated. I do not think that delay would be injurious, as in every case I have found the first impression the worst. Would to God that I had the power to raise the mind of the Legislature to a just conception of its duties on the present occasion. Knowing so well as I do how much you have done for us, I have some idea of what we ought to do for you.
The following extract from a letter written on February 4th by Jefferson to his grandson portrays vividly and painfully the agonized state of his mind about his affairs: