received with great pleasure. A truth now and then projecting into the
ocean of newspaper lies, serves like headlands to correct our course.
Indeed, my scepticism as to every thing I see in a newspaper, makes me
indifferent whether I ever see one. The embarrassments at Washington, in
August last, I expected would be great in any state of things; but they
proved greater than expected. I never doubted that the plans of the
President were wise and sufficient. Their failure we all impute, 1.
To the insubordinate temper of Armstrong: and, 2. To the indecision of
Winder. However, it ends well. It mortifies ourselves, and so may check,
perhaps, the silly boasting spirit of our newspapers, and it enlists the
feelings of the world on our side: and the advantage of public opinion
is like that of the weather-gage in a naval action. In Europe, the
transient possession of our Capital can be no disgrace. Nearly every
Capital there was in possession of its enemy some often and long. But
diabolical as they paint that enemy, he burnt neither public edifices
nor private dwellings. It was reserved for England to show that
Bonaparte, in atrocity, was an infant to their ministers and their
generals. They are taking his place in the eyes of Europe, and have
turned into our channel all its good will. This will be worth the
million of dollars the repairs of their conflagrations will cost us.
I hope that to preserve this weather-gage of public opinion, and to
counteract the slanders and falsehoods disseminated by the English
papers, the government will make it a standing instruction to
their ministers at foreign courts, to keep Europe truly informed of
occurrences here, by publishing in their papers the naked truth always,
whether favorable or unfavorable. For they will believe the good, if we
candidly tell them the bad also.
But you have two more serious causes of uneasiness; the want of men and
money. For the former, nothing more wise or efficient could have been
imagined than what you proposed. It would have filled our ranks with
regulars, and that, too, by throwing a just share of the burthen on the
purses of those whose persons are exempt either by age or office; and it
would have rendered our militia, like those of the Greeks and Romans,
a nation of warriors. But the go-by seems to have been given to your
proposition, and longer sufferance is necessary to force us to what is
best. We seem equally incorrigible in our financial course. Although a
century of British experience has proved to what a wonderful extent the
funding on specific redeeming taxes enables a nation to anticipitate
in war the resources of peace, and although the other nations of Europe
have tried and trodden every path of force or folly in fruitless quest
of the same object, yet we still expect to find, in juggling tricks and
banking dreams, that money can be made out of nothing, and in sufficient
quantity to meet the expenses of a heavy war by sea and land. It is
said, indeed, that money cannot be borrowed from our merchants as from
those of England. But it can be borrowed from our people. They will give
you all the necessaries of war they produce, if, instead of the bankrupt
trash they now are obliged to receive for want of any other, you will
give them a paper-promise funded on a specific pledge, and of a size for
common circulation. But you say the merchants will not take this paper.
What the people take the merchants must take, or sell nothing. All these
doubts and fears prove only the extent of the dominion which the
banking institutions have obtained over the minds of our citizens, and
especially of those inhabiting cities or other banking places; and this
dominion must be broken, or it will break us. But here, as in the other
case, we must make up our mind to suffer yet longer before we can
get right. The misfortune is, that in the mean time, we shall plunge
ourselves into inextinguishable debt, and entail on our posterity an
inheritance of eternal taxes, which will bring our government and people
into the condition of those of England, a nation of pikes and gudgeons,
the latter bred merely as food for the former. But, however these two
difficulties of men and money may be disposed of, it is fortunate that
neither of them will affect our war by sea. Privateers will find their
own men and money. Let nothing be spared to encourage them. They are the
dagger which strikes at the heart of the enemy, their commerce. Frigates
and seventy-fours are a sacrifice we must make, heavy as it is, to the
prejudices of a part of our citizens. They have, indeed, rendered a
great moral service, which has delighted me as much as any one in the
United States. But they have had no physical effect sensible to the
enemy; and now, while we must fortify them in our harbors, and keep
armies to defend them, our privateers are bearding and blockading the
enemy in their own sea-ports. Encourage them to burn all their prizes,
and let the public pay for them. They will cheat us enormously. No
matter; they will make the merchants of England feel, and squeal, and
cry out for peace.
I much regretted your acceptance of the war department. Not that I know
a person who I think would better conduct it. But, conduct it ever so
wisely, it will be a sacrifice of yourself. Were an angel from Heaven
to undertake that office, all our miscarriages would be ascribed to
him. Raw troops, no troops, insubordinate militia, want of arms, want of
money, want of provisions, all will be charged to want of management in
you. I speak from experience, when I was Governor of Virginia. Without a
regular in the State, and scarcely a musket to put into the hands of
the militia, invaded by two armies, Arnold’s from the sea-board, and
Cornwallis’s from the southward,--when we were driven from Richmond and
Charlottesville, and every member of my council fled to their homes, it
was not the total destitution of means, but the mismanagement of them,
which, in the querulous voice of the public, caused all our misfortunes.
It ended, indeed, in the capture of the whole hostile force, but not
till means were brought us by General Washington’s army, and the French
fleet and army. And although the legislature, who were personally
intimate with both the means and measures, acquitted me with justice and
thanks, yet General Lee has put all those imputations among the
romances of his historical novel, for the amusement of credulous and
uninquisitive readers. Not that I have seen the least disposition to
censure you. On the contrary, your conduct on the attack of Washington
has met the praises of every one, and your plan for regulars and
militia, their approbation. But no campaign is as yet opened. No
generals have yet an interest in shifting their own incompetence on you,
no army agents, their rogueries. I sincerely pray you may never meet
censure where you will deserve most praise, and that your own happiness
and prosperity may be the result of your patriotic services.
Ever and affectionately yours.
Th: Jefferson.
LETTER CXXI.--TO THE MARQUIS DE LA FAYETTE, February 14, 1815
TO THE MARQUIS DE LA FAYETTE.
Monticello, February 14, 1815.
Mr Dear Friend,
Your letter of August the 14th has been received and read, again and
again, with extraordinary pleasure. It is the first glimpse which has
been furnished me of the interior workings of the late unexpected but
fortunate revolution of your country. The newspapers told us only that
the great beast was fallen; but what part in this the patriots acted,
and what the egoists, whether the former slept while the latter were
awake to their own interests only, the hireling scribblers of the
English press said little, and knew less. I see now the mortifying
alternative under which the patriot there is placed, of being either
silent, or disgraced by an association in opposition with the remains
of Bonaparteism. A full measure of liberty is not now perhaps to
be expected by your nation; nor am I confident they are prepared
to preserve it. More than a generation will be requisite, under the
administration of reasonable laws favoring the progress of knowledge in
the general mass of the people, and their habituation to an independent
security of person and property, before they will be capable of
estimating the value of freedom, and the necessity of a sacred adherence
to the principles on which it rests for preservation. Instead of that
liberty which takes root and growth in the progress of reason, if
recovered by mere force or accident, it becomes, with an unprepared
people, a tyranny still, of the many, the few, or the one. Possibly you
may remember, at the date of the _jeu de paume_, how earnestly I urged
yourself and the patriots of my acquaintance to enter then into a
compact with the King, securing freedom of religion, freedom of the
press, trial by jury, habeas corpus, and a national legislature, all of
which it was known he would then yield, to go home, and let these work
on the amelioration of the condition of the people, until they should
have rendered them capable of more, when occasions would not fail to
arise for communicating to them more. This was as much as I then thought
them able to bear, soberly and usefully for themselves. You thought
otherwise, and that the dose might still be larger. And I found you were
right; for subsequent events proved they were equal to the constitution
of 1791. Unfortunately, some of the most honest and enlightened of our
patriotic friends (but closet politicians merely, unpractised in the
knowledge of man) thought more could still be obtained and borne. They
did not weigh the hazards of a transition from one form of government to
another, the value of what they had already rescued from those hazards,
and might hold in security if they pleased, nor the imprudence of giving
up the certainty of such a degree of liberty, under a limited monarch,
for the uncertainty of a little more under the form of a republic. You
differed from them. You were for stopping there, and for securing the
constitution which the National Assembly had obtained. Here, too, you
were right; and from this fatal error of the republicans, from their
separation from yourself and the constitutionalists, in their councils,
flowed all the subsequent sufferings and crimes of the French nation.
The hazards of a second change fell upon them by the way. The foreigner
gained time to anarchize by gold the government he could not overthrow
by arms, to crush in their own councils the genuine republicans, by the
fraternal embraces of exaggerated and hired pretenders, and to turn the
machine of Jacobinism from the change to the destruction of order: and,
in the end, the limited monarchy they had secured was exchanged for
the unprincipled and bloody tyranny of Robespierre, and the equally
unprincipled and maniac tyranny of Bonaparte. You are now rid of him,
and I sincerely wish you may continue so. But this may depend on the
wisdom and moderation of the restored dynasty. It is for them now to
read a lesson in the fatal errors of the republicans; to be contented
with a certain portion of power, secured by formal compact with the
nation, rather than, grasping at more, hazard all upon uncertainty, and
risk meeting the fate of their predecessor, or a renewal of their own
exile. We are just informed, too, of an example which merits, if true,
their most profound contemplation. The gazettes say, that Ferdinand of
Spain is dethroned, and his father re-established on the basis of their
new constitution. This order of magistrates must, therefore, see, that
although the attempts at reformation have not succeeded in their whole
length, and some secession from the ultimate point has taken place, yet
that men have by no means fallen back to their former passiveness; but
on the contrary, that a sense of their rights, and a restlessness to
obtain them, remain deeply impressed on every mind, and, if not quieted
by reasonable relaxations of power, will break out like a volcano on
the first occasion, and overwhelm every thing again in its way. I always
thought the present King an honest and moderate man: and having
no issue, he is under a motive the less for yielding to personal
considerations. I cannot, therefore, but hope, that the patriots in and
out of your legislature, acting in phalanx, but temperately and wisely,
pressing unremittingly the principles omitted in the late capitulation
of the King, and watching the occasions which the course of events will
create, may get those principles engrafted into it, and sanctioned by
the solemnity of a national act.
With us the affairs of war have taken the more favorable turn which
was to be expected. Our thirty years of peace had taken off, or
superannuated, all our revolutionary officers of experience and grade;
and our first draught in the lottery of untried characters had been
most unfortunate. The delivery of the fort and army of Detroit, by the
traitor Hull; the disgrace at Queenstown, under Van Rensellaer; the
massacre at Frenchtown, under Winchester; and surrender of Boerstler
in an open field to one third of his own numbers, were the inauspicious
beginnings of the first year of our warfare. The second witnessed but
the single miscarriage occasioned by the disagreement of Wilkinson and
Hampton, mentioned in my letter to you of November the 30th, 1813; while
it gave us the capture of York by Dearborn and Pike; the capture of Fort
George by Dearborn also; the capture of Proctor’s army on the Thames by
Harrison, Shelby, and Johnson; and that of the whole British fleet
on Lake Erie by Perry. The third year has been a continued series of
victories; to wit, of Brown and Scott at Chippeway; of the same at
Niagara; of Gaines over Drummond at Fort Erie; that of Brown over
Drummond at the same place; the capture of another fleet on Lake
Champlain by M’Donough; the entire defeat of their army under Prevost,
on the same day, by M’Comb, and recently their defeats at New Orleans by
Jackson, Coffee, and Carroll, with the loss of four thousand men out of
nine thousand and six hundred, with their two Generals, Packingham and
Gibbs killed, and a third, Keane, wounded, mortally, as is said.
This series of successes has been tarnished only by the conflagrations
at Washington, a _coup de main_ differing from that at Richmond, which
you remember, in the revolutionary war, in the circumstance only, that
we had, in that case, but forty-eight hour’s notice that an enemy had
arrived within our capes; whereas at Washington there was abundant
previous notice. The force designated by the President was the double of
what was necessary; but failed, as is the general opinion, through
the insubordination of Armstrong, who would never believe the attack
intended until it was actually made, and the sluggishness of Winder
before the occasion, and his indecision during it. Still, in the end,
the transaction has helped rather than hurt us, by arousing the general
indignation of our country, and by marking to the world of Europe the
Vandalism and brutal character of the English government. It has merely
served to immortalize their infamy. And add further, that through the
whole period of the war, we have beaten them single-handed at sea, and
so thoroughly established our superiority over them with equal force,
that they retire from that kind of contest, and never suffer their
frigates to cruise singly. The Endymion would never have engaged the
frigate President, but knowing herself backed by three frigates and
a razee, who, though somewhat slower sailors, would get up before she
could be taken. The disclosure to the world of the fatal secret that
they can be beaten at sea with an equal force, the evidence furnished by
the military operations of the last year that experience is rearing us
officers, who, when our means shall be fully under way, will plant our
standard on the walls of Quebec and Halifax, their recent and signal
disaster at New Orleans, and the evaporation of their hopes from the
Hartford Convention, will probably raise a clamor in the British nation,
which will force their ministry into peace. I say force them; because,
willingly, they would never be at peace. The British ministers find in
a state of war rather than of peace, by riding the various contractors,
and receiving douceurs on the vast expenditures of the war supplies,
that they recruit their broken fortunes, or make new ones, and therefore
will not make peace, as long as by any delusions they can keep the
temper of the nation up to the war point. They found some hopes on
the state of our finances. It is true, that the excess of our banking
institutions, and their present discredit, have shut us out from the
best source of credit we could ever command with certainty. But the
foundations of credit still remain to us, and need but skill, which
experience will soon produce, to marshal them into an order which may
carry us through any length of war. But they have hoped more in their
Hartford Convention. Their fears of republican France being now done
away, they are directed to republican America, and they are playing the
same game for disorganization here, which they played in your country.
The Marats, the Dantons, and Robespierres of Massachusetts are in
the same pay, under the same orders, and making the same efforts to
anarchize us, that their prototypes in France did there.
I do not say that all who met at Hartford were under the same motives of
money: nor were those of France. Some of them are Outs, and wish to
be Ins; some the mere dupes of the agitators, or of their own party
passions; while the Maratists alone are in the real secret: but they
have very different materials to work on. The yeomanry of the United
States are not the canaille of Paris. We might safely give them leave to
go through the United States recruiting their ranks, and I am satisfied
they could not raise one single regiment (gambling merchants and
silk-stocking clerks excepted), who would support them in any effort to
separate from the Union. The cement of this Union is in the heart-blood
of every American. I do not believe there is on earth a government
established on so immovable a basis. Let them, in any State, even in
Massachusetts itself, raise the standard of separation, and its citizens
will rise in mass, and do justice themselves on their own incendiaries.
If they could have induced the government to some effort of suppression,
or even to enter into discussion with them, it would have given them
some importance, have brought them into some notice. But they have not
been able to make themselves even a subject of conversation, either of
public or private societies. A silent contempt has been the sole notice
they could excite; consoled, indeed, some of them, by the palpable
favors of Philip. Have then no fears for us, my friend. The grounds
of these exist only in English newspapers, endited or endowed by the
Castlereaghs or the Cannings, or some other such models of pure and
uncorrupted virtue. Their military heroes, by land and sea, may sink our
oyster-boats, rob our hen-roosts, burn our negro-huts, and run off. But
a campaign or two more will relieve them from further trouble or expense
in defending their American possessions.
You once gave me a copy of the journal of your campaign in Virginia, in
1781, which I must have lent to some one of the undertakers to write
the history of the revolutionary war, and forgot to reclaim. I conclude
this, because it is no longer among my papers, which I have very
diligently searched for it, but in vain. An author of real ability
is now writing that part of the history of Virginia. He does it in my
neighborhood, and I lay open to him all my papers. But I possess none,
nor has he any, which can enable him to do justice to your faithful and
able services in that campaign. If you could be so good as to send me
another copy, by the very first vessel bound to any port of the United
States, it might be here in time; for although he expects to begin
to print within a month or two, yet you know the delays of these
undertakings. At any rate, it might be got in as a supplement. The old
Count Rochambeau gave me also his memoire of the operations at York,
which is gone the same way, and I have no means of applying to his
family for it. Perhaps you could render them as well as us, the service
of procuring another copy.
I learn, with real sorrow, the deaths of Monsieur and Madame de Tesse.
They made an interesting part in the idle reveries in which I have
sometimes indulged myself, of seeing all my friends of Paris once
more, for a month or two; a thing impossible, which, however, I never
permitted myself to despair of. The regrets, however, of seventy-three
at the loss of friends, may be the less, as the time is shorter within
which we are to meet again, according to the creed of our education.
This letter will be handed you by Mr. Ticknor, a young gentleman of
Boston, of great erudition, indefatigable industry, and preparation for
a life of distinction, in his own country. He passed a few days with
me here, brought high recommendations from Mr. Adams and others, and
appeared in every respect to merit them. He is well worthy of those
attentions which you so kindly bestow on our countrymen, and for those
he may receive I shall join him in acknowledging personal obligations.
I salute you with assurances of my constant and affectionate friendship
and respect.
Th; Jefferson.
P.S. February 26. My letter had not yet been sealed, when I received
news of our peace. I am glad of it, and especially that we closed our
war with the eclat of the action at New Orleans. But I consider it as an
armistice only, because no security is provided against the impressment
of our seamen. While this is unsettled we are in hostility of mind with
England, although actual deeds of arms may be suspended by a truce. If
she thinks the exercise of this outrage is worth eternal war, eternal
war it must be, or extermination of the one or the other party. The
first act of impressment she commits on an American, will be answered
by reprisal, or by a declaration of war here; and the interval must be
merely a state of preparation for it. In this we have much to do,
in further fortifying our seaport towns, providing military stores,
classing and disciplining our militia, arranging our financial, system,
and above all, pushing our domestic manufactures, which have taken such
root as never again can be shaken. Once more, God bless you. T.J.
LETTER CXXII.*--TO MR. WENDOVER, March 13, 1815
TO MR. WENDOVER.
Monticello, March 13, 1815.
[* This is endorsed;’ not sent.’]
Sir,
Your favor of January the 30th was received after long delay on the
road, and I have to thank you for the volume of Discourses which you
have been so kind as to send me. I have gone over them with great
satisfaction, and concur with the able preacher in his estimate of
the character of the belligerents in our late war, and lawfulness of
defensive war. I consider the war, with him, as ‘made on good advice,’
that is, for just causes, and its dispensation as providential,
inasmuch, as it has exercised our patriotism and submission to order,
has planted and invigorated among us arts of urgent necessity, has
manifested the strong and the weak parts of our republican institutions,
and the excellence of a representative democracy compared with the
misrule of Kings, has rallied the opinions of mankind to the natural
rights of expatriation, and of a common property in the ocean, and
raised us to that grade in the scale of nations which the bravery and
liberality of our citizen soldiers, by land and by sea, the wisdom of
our institutions and their observance of justice, entitled us to in the
eyes of the world. All this Mr. McLeod has well proved, and from those
sources of argument particularly which belong to his profession. On one
question only I differ from him, and it is that which constitutes the
subject of his first discourse, the right of discussing public affairs
in the pulpit. I add the last words, because I admit the right in
general conversation and in writing; in which last form it has been
exercised in the valuable book you have now favored me with.