Before September, 1791, Mr. Jefferson thought that our affairs were proceeding in a train of unparalleled prosperity, owing to the real improvements of the Government, and the unbounded confidence reposed in it by the people. Soon a jealousy of Hamilton came upon him, and the displeasure of playing a second part: he began to look for relief in the ranks of the malcontents. He then perceived monarchical longings in the Administration party, and prophesied corruption, despotism, and a loss of liberty forever, if they were to be allowed to interpret the Constitution in their way. Washington was the Atlas whose broad shoulders bore up the Federalists. Bache, of the Aurora, with whom Jefferson's word was law, and Freneau, of the Gazette, who had received from Jefferson a clerkship in the Department of State, accused the General of a desire to subvert the Constitution: the reserve of his manners was said to proceed from an affectation of royalty; they even ventured to charge him with perverting the public money. Jefferson refused to check these base attacks, and wrote in the same vein himself in the famous letter to Mazzei. But after the battle had been fought, he perceived that Washington had a hold stronger than party feelings on the affections of Americans. It would never do to leave his name and fame in the custody of Federalists. And so Mr. Jefferson turned about and denied that he had ever made any charges against General Washington. On the contrary, he felt certain that Washington did not harbor one principle of Federalism. He was neither an Angloman, a monarchist, nor a separatist. Bache he (Jefferson) knew nothing about; over Freneau he had no control; and the Mazzei letter had been misprinted and misinterpreted. In spite of his hatred of England, and his fears lest the English 'form' should be adopted in the United States, Jefferson, in 1788, had recommended the English form to Lafayette for the use of France. And in spite of the admiration for France, which with him and the Democrats was an essential article of the party faith, he took offence with the French Government because they sided with Spain in the dispute on the boundary line between Louisiana and Florida, and proposed to Madison an alliance with England against France and Spain. But Madison kept him steady. Six months later he accused John Randolph, who had abandoned the party, of entertaining the intolerable heresy of a league with England.
Mr. Jefferson once thought it necessary that the United States should possess a naval force. It would be less dangerous to our liberties than an army, and a cheaper and more effective weapon of offence. 'The sea is the field on which we should meet a European enemy.' 'We can always have a navy as strong as the weaker nations.' And he suggested that thirty ships, carrying 1,800 guns, and manned by 14,400 men, would be an adequate force. But the New Englanders, those bitter Federalists, loved the sea, lived by foreign trade, and wanted a fleet to protect their merchantmen. Mr. Jefferson's views became modified. He took a strong dislike to the naval service. He condemned the use of the navy by the late President, and wished to sell all the public armed vessels. Finding, however, that the maritime tastes of the nation were too strong for him, he hit upon the plan of a land navy as the nearest approximation to no navy at all. Gunboats were to be hauled out of the water, and kept in drydocks under sheds, in perfect preservation. A fleet of this kind only needed a corps of horse marines to complete its efficiency. The Federalists laughed at these 'mummy frigates,' and sang in a lullaby for Democratic babes this stanza:
'In a cornfield, high and dry,
Sat gunboat Number One;
Wiggle waggle went her tail,
Pop went her gun.'
The pleasantry is feeble; but the inborn absurdity of this amphibious scheme was too great even for the Democrats. Mr. Jefferson was forced, in the teeth of theory, to send a squadron against the Barbary pirates. He consoled himself by ordering the commodore not to overstep the strict line of defence, and to make no captures. It was to be a display of latent force. Strange as it may seem, he once doubted the expediency of encouraging immigration. Emigrants from absolute monarchies, as they all were, they would either bring with them the principles of government imbibed in early youth, or exchange these for an unbounded licentiousness. 'It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty.' Would it not be better for the nation to grow more slowly, and have a more 'homogeneous, more peaceable, and more durable' government? But when it was found at a later day that the new comers placed themselves at once in opposition to the better classes and voted the Democratic ticket almost to a man, Jefferson proposed that the period of residence required by the naturalization laws to qualify a voter should be shortened. He had no objection to coercion before 1787. Speaking of the backwardness of some of the colonies in paying their quota of the Confederate expenses, he recommends sending a frigate to make them more punctual. 'The States must see the rod, perhaps some of them must be made to feel it.' His somersets of opinion and conduct are endless. Once he talked of opening a market in the neighboring colonies by force; at another time he advised his countrymen to abandon the sea and let other nations carry for us; in 1785 we find him going abroad to negotiate commercial treaties with all Europe. He objected to internal improvements, and he sanctioned the Cumberland road. He proclaimed all governments naturally hostile to the liberties of the people, until he himself became a government. He made the mission to Russia for Mr. Short, regardless of repeated declarations that the public business abroad could be done better with fewer and cheaper ambassadors. The unlucky sedition law was so unconstitutional in his judgment that he felt it to be his duty, as soon as he mounted the throne, to pardon all who had been convicted under it. But before he left the White House he attempted to put down Federal opposition in the same way. Judges were impeached; United States attorneys brought libel suits against editors, and even prosecuted such men as Judge Reeve and the Rev. Mr. Backus of Connecticut. It was a pet doctrine of Jefferson that one generation had no right to bind a succeeding one; hence every constitution and all laws should become null and every national debt void at the end of nineteen years, or of whatever period should be ascertained to be the average duration of human life after the age of twenty-one. He adhered to this notion through life, although Mr. Madison, when urged by him to expound it, gently pointed out its absurdity. When the news of the massacres of September reached the United States at an unfortunate moment for the Francoman party, Jefferson forgot this elementary principle and his logic. He professed that he deplored the bloody fate of the victims as much as any man, but they had perished for the sake of future generations, and that thought consoled him. Finally, the man who had announced in a public address, that he considered it a moral duty never to subscribe to a lottery, nor to engage in a game of chance, petitioned the Legislature of Virginia for permission to dispose of his house and lands in a raffle, and in his memorial recapitulated his services to the country to strengthen his claim upon their indulgence.
Jefferson professed great faith in human nature; but he meant the human nature of the uneducated and the poor. Kings, rulers, nobles, rich persons, and generally all of the party opposed to him, were hopelessly wrong. The errors of the people, when they committed any, were accidental and momentary; but in the other class, they were proofs of an ineradicable perversity. His faith in human reason as the only power for good government must have been shaken by the students of his university in Virginia. Their lawless conduct seemed to indicate that the time had hardly yet come when the old and vulgar method of authority and force could be dispensed with. The University of Virginia was a favorite project of Jefferson and an honorable memorial of his love of education and of letters. Although it may be considered a failure, it has failed from no fault of his. But we may judge of the real extent of Jefferson's toleration, when we read in a letter written about this university: 'In the selection of our law professor we must be rigorously attentive to his political principles.'
It is easy to know what would be Jefferson's position if by some miracle of nature he were living in these times. If at the South, he would be a man of brave words—showing it to be a natural right of the white man to own and to chastise his negro—and proving, from elementary principles, that slavery is the result of the supremacy of reason and the corner stone of civilized society. Had the advantages of the North led him to desert Monticello for the banks of the Hudson, he would have opposed the Administration, acting and talking much like a certain high official, 'letting I dare not wait upon I would'—for Jefferson was not a bold man, was master of the art of insinuating his opinions instead of stating them manfully, and never advanced so far as to make retreat impossible.
The truth is that there was nothing great nor even imposing in Jefferson's mental nor in his moral qualities. He expressed himself well in conversation and on paper, although a little pedagogical in manner, and too much given to epithet in style. The literary claims of the author of the Declaration of Independence cannot be passed over lightly. His mind was active; catching quickly the outlines of a subject, he jumped at the conclusion which pleased his fancy, without looking beneath the surface.[B] He was curious in all matters of art, literature, and science, but his curiosity was easily appeased. He raves about Ossian, gazes for hours on the Maison Carrée at Nismes, writes letters to Paine on arcs and catenaries, busies himself with vocabularies, natural history, geology, discourses magisterially about Newton and Lavoisier, and studies nothing thoroughly. One can see by the way in which he handles his technical terms that he does not know the use of them. He was a smatterer of that most dangerous kind, who feel certain they have arrived at truth. Like so many other children of the eighteenth century, he rejected the past with disdain, but was blindly credulous of the future; and was ready to embrace an absurdity if it came in a new and scientific shape. The marquises and abbés he met in France had dreamed over elementary principles of society and government, until they had lost themselves in wandering mazes like Milton's speculative and erring angels. He believed that those gay philosophes had discovered the magical stone of social science, and that misery and sin would be transmuted into virtue and happiness. It was only necessary to kill all the kings and to confide in the reason and virtue of the people, and the thing was done. The scenes of 1789 stimulated Jefferson's natural tendency beyond the bounds of common sense. He asserted that Indians without a government were better off than Europeans with one, and that half the world a desert with only an Adam and Eve left in each country to repopulate it would be an improvement in the condition of Europe. He became a bigot of liberalism. Luckily he had his American blood and practical education to restrain him, or he might have been as foolish as Brissot and as rabid as Marat. As it was, he could not help perceiving in his calmer moments that this new path to the glorious future which the philosophes were pointing out to their countrymen, had been for many years in America the well-worn high road of the nation.
On most subjects, Jefferson's opinions were dictated by his feelings. He takes so little pains to conceal this weakness, that we can hardly suppose he was aware of it. Contradiction he could not bear. Opposition of any kind produced a bitter feeling. Vanity, latent perhaps, but acrid, corroded his judgment of his adversaries. In France Governeur Morris remarked that he was too fond of calling fools those who did not agree with him; a sure sign of want of strength. Great minds are essentially tolerant of the opinions of others. They know how easy it is to err. There was a good deal, too, of the Pharisee about Jefferson. 'He was of no party, nor yet a trimmer between parties. If he could not go to heaven but with a party, he would not go there at all.' But he thanked God he was not as the Federalists were: Anglomen, monarchists, workers of corruption! nor even as this Washington! He boasted, too, that he had never written a line for the public press; his method was to suggest his views to others, and employ them to put them into print.
Careful not to speak out too boldly when it was not altogether safe to do so, and wanting rather in moral courage, he was a persevering man, pursuing his plans with the eagerness of women, who always have a thousand excellent reasons, however illogical and inconsistent they may be, for doing as they please—and like women, he was not over scrupulous as to the means he employed to reach his object.
The same envious vanity and inability to resist his feelings which warped his judgment into so many contradictions, led him into actions that have damaged his character as a gentleman. For instance, his behavior to Washington. When a member of Washington's cabinet, protesting the warmest friendship to him, his confidential adviser by virtue of the office he held, he permitted, not to say encouraged, those attacks in Freneau's paper which were outrages on common decency. His intimacy with the President enabled him to judge of the effect of the blows. He noticed, with the cool precision of an experimental observer, the symptoms of pain and annoyance which Washington could not always conceal. Freneau was Jefferson's clerk; a word would have stopped him. 'But I will not do it,' Jefferson says; 'his paper has saved our Constitution, which was galloping forth into monarchy.' Jefferson's underhand attack upon Vice-President Adams, in the note he wrote by way of preface to the American publisher of Paine's 'Rights of Man,' is a domestic treachery of the same kind, though very much less in degree. That note might have been written on the impulse of the moment; but what shall we say of his practice of committing to paper Hamilton's sayings in the freedom of after-dinner conversation—a time when open-hearted men are apt to forget that there may be a Judas at table—and of saving them up to be used against him in the future? Jefferson explains away these and other dubious passages in his life with great ingenuity. He had to make such explanations too often. An apology implies a mistake, wilful or accidental. Too many indicate, to say the least, a lack of discretion. What a difference between these explanations, evasions, excuses, denials, and the majestic manliness of Washington, who never did or wrote or said anything which he hesitated to avow openly and without qualification!