February the 2nd, when that of April the 19th arrived. I had not the
pleasure of receiving the former by the hands of Mr. Lyman. His business
probably carried him in another direction; for I am far inland, and
distant from the great line of communication between the trading cities.
Your recommendations are always welcome, for, indeed, the subjects of
them always merit that welcome, and some of them in an extraordinary
degree. They make us acquainted with what there is excellent in our
ancient sister State of Massachusetts, once venerated and beloved,
and still hanging on our hopes, for what need we despair of after the
resurrection of Connecticut to light and liberality. I had believed that
the last retreat of monkish darkness, bigotry, and abhorrence of those
advances of the mind which had carried the other States a century ahead
of them. They seemed still to be exactly where their forefathers were
when they schismatized from the covenant of works, and to consider as
dangerous heresies all innovations good or bad. I join you, therefore,
in sincere congratulations that this den of the priesthood is at length
broken up, and that a Protestant Popedom is no longer to disgrace the
American history and character. If by religion, we are to understand
sectarian dogmas, in which no two of them agree, then your exclamation
on that hypothesis is just, ‘that this would be the best of all possible
worlds, if there were no religion in it.’ But if the moral precepts,
innate in man, and made a part of his physical constitution, as
necessary for a social being, if the sublime doctrines of philanthropism
and deism taught us by Jesus of Nazareth, in which all agree, constitute
true religion, then, without it, this would be, as you again say,
‘something not fit to be named, even indeed, a hell.’
You certainly acted wisely in taking no notice of what the malice of
Pickering could say of you. Were such things to be answered, our lives
would be wasted in the filth of fendings and provings, instead of
being employed in promoting the happiness and prosperity of our
fellow-citizens. The tenor of your life is the proper and sufficient
answer. It is fortunate for those in public trust, that posterity will
judge them by their works, and not by the malignant vituperations and
invectives of the Pickerings and Gardiners of their age. After all, men
of energy of character must have enemies; because there are two sides
to every question, and taking one with decision, and acting on it with
effect, those who take the other will of course be hostile in proportion
as they feel that effect. Thus, in the Revolution, Hancock and the
Adamses were the raw-head and bloody bones of tories and traitors; who
yet knew nothing of you personally but what was good. I do not entertain
your apprehensions for the happiness of our brother Madison in a state
of retirement. Such a mind as his, fraught with information and with
matter for reflection, can never know _ennui_. Besides, there will
always be work enough cut out for him to continue his active usefulness
to his country. For example, he and Monroe (the President) are now
here on the work of a collegiate institution to be established in our
neighborhood, of which they and myself are three of six Visitors. This,
if it succeeds, will raise up children for Mr. Madison to employ his
attention through life. I say, if it succeeds; for we have two very
essential wants in our way: 1. means to compass our views; and 2. men
qualified to fulfil them. And these you will agree are essential wants
indeed.
I am glad to find you have a copy of Sismondi, because his is a field
familiar to you, and on which you can judge him. His work is highly
praised, but I have not yet read it. I have been occupied and delighted
with reading another work, the title of which did not promise much
useful information or amusement, ‘_L’Italia avanti il Dominio del
Romani, dal Micali_. It has often, you know, been a subject of regret
that Carthage had no writer to give her side of her own history,
while her wealth, power, and splendor prove she must have had a very
distinguished policy and government. Micali has given the counterpart
of the Roman history, for the nations over which they extended their
dominion. For this he has gleaned up matter from every quarter, and
furnished materials for reflection and digestion to those who, thinking
as they read, have perceived that there was a great deal of matter
behind the curtain, could that be fully withdrawn. He certainly gives
new views of a nation whose splendor has masked and palliated their
barbarous ambition. I am now reading Botta’s History of our own
Revolution. Bating the ancient practice which he has adopted, of putting
speeches into mouths which never made them, and fancying motives of
action which we never felt, he has given that history with more detail,
precision, and candor, than any writer I have yet met with. It is, to be
sure, compiled from those writers; but it is a good secretion of their
matter, the pure from the impure, and presented in a just sense of
right, in opposition to usurpation.
Accept assurances for Mrs. Adams and yourself of my affectionate esteem
and respect.
Th: Jefferson.
LETTER CXLI.--TO MARQUIS DE LA FAYETTE, May 14, 1817
TO MARQUIS DE LA FAYETTE.
Monticello, May 14, 1817.
Although, Dear Sir, much retired from the world, and meddling little in
its concerns, yet I think it almost a religious duty to salute at times
my old friends, were it only to say and to know that ‘all’s well.’
Our hobby has been politics; but all here is so quiet, and with you so
desperate, that little matter is furnished us for active attention. With
you too, it has long been forbidden ground, and therefore imprudent
for a foreign friend to tread, in writing to you. But although our
speculations might be intrusive, our prayers cannot but be acceptable,
and mine are sincerely offered for the well-being of France. What
government she can bear, depends not on the state of science, however
exalted, in a select band of enlightened men, but on the condition of
the general mind. That, I am sure, is advanced and will advance, and
the last change of government was fortunate, inasmuch as the new will be
less obstructive to the effects of that advancement. For I consider your
foreign military oppression as an ephemeral obstacle only.
Here all is quiet. The British war has left us in debt; but that is
a cheap price for the good it has done us. The establishment of the
necessary manufactures among ourselves, the proof that our government is
solid, can stand the shock of war, and is superior even to civil schism,
are precious facts for us; and of these the strongest proofs were
furnished, when, with four eastern States tied to us, as dead to living
bodies, all doubt was removed as to the achievements of the war, had
it continued. But its best effect has been the complete suppression of
party. The federalists who were truly American, and their great mass was
so, have separated from their brethren who were mere Anglomen, and are
received with cordiality into the republican ranks. Even Connecticut,
as a State, and the last one expected to yield its steady habits (which
were essentially bigoted in politics as well as religion), has chosen
a republican governor, and republican legislature. Massachusetts indeed
still lags; because most deeply involved in the parricide crimes and
treasons of the war. But her gangrene is contracting, the sound flesh
advancing on it, and all there will be well. I mentioned Connecticut
as the most hopeless of our States. Little Delaware had escaped my
attention. That is essentially a Quaker State, the fragment of a
religious sect which, there, in the other States, in England, are a
homogeneous mass, acting with one mind, and that directed by the mother
society in England. Dispersed, as the Jews, they still form, as those
do, one nation, foreign to the land they live in. They are Protestant
Jesuits, implicitly devoted to the will of their superior, and
forgetting all duties to their country in the execution of the policy
of their order. When war is proposed with England, they have religious
scruples; but when with France, these are laid by, and they become
clamorous for it. They are, however, silent, passive, and give no other
trouble than of whipping them along. Nor is the election of Monroe an
inefficient circumstance in our felicities. Four and twenty years,
which he will accomplish, of administration in republican forms and
principles, will so consecrate them in the eyes of the people as
to secure them against the danger of change. The evanition of party
dissensions has harmonized intercourse, and sweetened society beyond
imagination. The war then has done us all this good, and the further one
of assuring the world, that although attached to peace from a sense of
its blessings, we will meet war when it is made necessary.
I wish I could give better hopes of our southern brethren. The
achievement of their independence of Spain is no longer a question. But
it is a very serious one, what will then become of them. Ignorance and
bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government. They
will fall under military despotisms, and become the murderous tools of
the ambition of their respective Bonapartes; and whether this will be
for their greater happiness, the rule of one only has taught you to
judge. No one, I hope, can doubt my wish to see them and all mankind
exercising self-government, and capable of exercising it. But the
question is not what we wish, but what is practicable. As their sincere
friend and brother, then, I do believe the best thing for them, would be
for themselves to come to an accord with Spain, under the guarantee
of France, Russia, Holland, and the United States, allowing to Spain
a nominal supremacy, with authority only to keep the peace among them,
leaving them otherwise all the powers of self-government, until
their experience in them, their emancipation from their priests,
and advancement in information, shall prepare them for complete
independence. I exclude England from this confederacy, because her
selfish principles render her incapable of honorable patronage or
disinterested co-operation: unless, indeed, what seems now probable, a
revolution, should restore to her an honest government, one which will
permit the world to live in peace. Portugal grasping at an extension
of her dominion in the south, has lost her great northern province of
Pernambuco, and I shall not wonder if Brazil should revolt in mass, and
send their royal family back to Portugal, Brazil is more populous, more
wealthy, more energetic, and as wise as Portugal. I have been insensibly
led, my dear friend, while writing to you, to indulge in that line of
sentiment in which we have been always associated, forgetting that these
are matters not belonging to my time. Not so with you, who have still
many years to be a spectator of these events. That these years may
indeed be many and happy, is the sincere prayer of your affectionate
friend.
Th: Jefferson.
LETTER CXLII.--TO ALBERT GALLATIN, June 16, 1817
TO ALBERT GALLATIN.
Monticello, June 16, 1817.
Dear Sir,
The importance that the enclosed letters should safely reach their
destination, impels me to avail myself of the protection of your cover.
This is an inconvenience to which your situation exposes you, while it
adds to the opportunities of exercising yourself in works of charity.
According to the opinion I hazarded to you a little before your
departure, we have had almost an entire change in the body of Congress.
The unpopularity of the compensation law was completed, by the manner of
repealing it as to all the world except themselves. In some States, it
is said, every member is changed; in all, many. What opposition there
was to the original law, was chiefly from southern members. Yet many of
those have been left out, because they received the advanced wages. I
have never known so unanimous a sentiment of disapprobation; and what
is remarkable, is, that it was spontaneous. The newspapers were almost
entirely silent, and the people not only unled by their leaders, but in
opposition to them. I confess I was highly pleased with this proof
of the innate good sense, the vigilance, and the determination of the
people to act for themselves.
Among the laws of the late Congress, some were of note: a navigation
act, particularly, applicable to those nations only who have navigation
acts; pinching one of them especially, not only in the general way, but
in the intercourse with her foreign possessions. This part may re-act
on us, and it remains for trial which may bear longest. A law respecting
our conduct as a neutral between Spain and her contending colonies,
was passed by a majority of one only, I believe, and against the
very general sentiment of our country. It is thought to strain our
complaisance to Spain beyond her right or merit, and almost against the
right of the other party, and certainly against the claims they have to
our good wishes and neighborly relations. That we should wish to see
the people of other countries free, is as natural, and at least as
justifiable, as that one King should wish to see the Kings of other
countries maintained in their despotism. Right to both parties, innocent
favor to the juster cause, is our proper sentiment.
You will have learned that an act for internal improvement, after
passing both houses, was negatived by the President. The act was
founded, avowedly, on the principle that the phrase in the constitution,
which authorizes Congress ‘to lay taxes, to pay the debts and provide
for the general welfare,’ was an extension of the powers specifically
enumerated to whatever would promote the general welfare; and this,
you know, was the federal doctrine. Whereas, our tenet ever was,
and, indeed, it is almost the only land-mark which now divides the
federalists from the republicans, that Congress had not unlimited
powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those
specifically enumerated; and that, as it was never meant they should
provide for that welfare but by the exercise of the enumerated powers,
so it could not have been meant they should raise money for purposes
which the enumeration did not place under their action: consequently,
that the specification of powers is a limitation of the purposes for
which they may raise money. I think the passage and rejection of this
bill a fortunate incident. Every State will certainly concede the power;
and this will be a national confirmation of the grounds of appeal to
them, and will settle for ever the meaning of this phrase, which, by a
mere grammatical quibble, has countenanced the General Government in a
claim of universal power. For in the phrase, ‘to lay taxes, to pay the
debts and provide for the general welfare,’ it is a mere question of
syntax, whether the two last infinitives are governed by the first, or
are distinct and co-ordinate powers; a question unequivocally decided
by the exact definition of powers immediately following. It is fortunate
for another reason, as the States, in conceding the power, will modify
it, either by requiring the federal ratio of expense in each State, or
otherwise, so as to secure us against its partial exercise. Without this
caution, intrigue, negotiation, and the barter of votes might become as
habitual in Congress, as they are in those legislatures which have the
appointment of officers, and which, with us, is called ‘logging,’ the
term of the farmers for their exchanges of aid in rolling together the
logs of their newly cleared grounds. Three of our papers have presented
us the copy of an act of the legislature of New York, which, if it has
really passed, will carry us back to the times of the darkest bigotry
and barbarism to find a parallel. Its purport is, that all those who
shall hereafter join in communion with the religious sect of Shaking
Quakers, shall be deemed civilly dead, their marriages dissolved, and
all their children and property taken out of their hands. This act being
published nakedly in the papers, without the usual signatures, or any
history of the circumstances of its passage, I am not without a hope it
may have been a mere abortive attempt. It contrasts singularly with a
cotemporary vote of the Pennsylvania legislature, who, on a proposition
to make the belief in a God a necessary qualification for office,
rejected it by a great majority, although assuredly there was not a
single atheist in their body. And you remember to have heard, that, when
the act for religious freedom was before the Virginia Assembly, a motion
to insert the name of Jesus Christ before the phrase, ‘the author of our
holy religion,’ which stood in the bill, was rejected, although that was
the creed of a great majority of them.
I have been charmed to see that a Presidential election now produces
scarcely any agitation. On Mr. Madison’s election there was little, on
Monroe’s all but none. In Mr. Adams’s time and mine, parties were so
nearly balanced as to make the struggle fearful for our peace. But since
the decided ascendancy of the republican body, federalism has looked
on with silent but unresisting anguish. In the middle, southern, and
western States, it is as low as it ever can be; for nature has made some
men monarchists and tories by their constitution, and some, of course,
there always will be.
*****
We have had a remarkably cold winter. At Hallowell, in Maine, the
mercury was at thirty-four degrees below zero, of Fahrenheit, which is
sixteen degrees lower than it was in Paris in 1788-9. Here it was at six
degrees above zero, which is our greatest degree of cold.
Present me respectfully to Mrs. Gallatin, and be assured of my constant
and affectionate friendship.
Th: Jefferson.
LETTER CXLIII.--TO JOHN ADAMS, May 17, 1818
TO JOHN ADAMS.
Monticello, May 17, 1818.
Dear Sir,
I was so unfortunate as not to receive from Mr. Holly’s own hand your
favor of January the 28th, being then at my other home. He dined only
with my family, and left them with an impression which has filled me
with regret that I did not partake of the pleasure his visit gave them.
I am glad he is gone to Kentucky. Rational Christianity will thrive more
rapidly there than here. They are freer from prejudices than we are, and
bolder in grasping at truth. The time is not distant, though neither you
nor I shall see it, when we shall be but a secondary people to them. Our
greediness for wealth, and fantastical expense have degraded, and will
degrade, the minds of our maritime citizens. These are the peculiar
vices of commerce.
I had been long without hearing from you, but I had heard of you
through a letter from Doctor Waterhouse. He wrote to reclaim against
an expression of Mr. Wirt’s, as to the commencement of motion in
the revolutionary ball. The lawyers say that words are always to be
expounded _secundum subjectam materiem_, which, in Mr. Wirt’s case, was
Virginia. It would, moreover, be as difficult to say at what moment
the Revolution began, and what incident set it in motion, as to fix the
moment that the embryo becomes an animal, or the act which gives him
a beginning. But the most agreeable part of his letter was that which
informed me of your health, your activity, and strength of memory;
and the most wonderful, that which assured me that you retained your
industry and promptness in epistolary correspondence. Here you have
entire advantage over me. My repugnance to the writing-table becomes
daily and hourly more deadly and insurmountable. In place of this has
come on a canine appetite for reading. And I indulge it, because I see
in it a relief against the _tædium senectutis_; a lamp to lighten my
path through the dreary wilderness of time before me, whose bourne I see
not. Losing daily all interest in the things around us, something else
is necessary to fill the void. With me it is reading, which occupies the
mind without the labor of producing ideas from my own stock.
I enter into all your doubts as to the event of the revolution of South
America. They will succeed against Spain. But the dangerous enemy is
within their own breasts. Ignorance and superstition will chain their
minds and bodies under religious and military despotism. I do believe it
would be better for them to obtain freedom by degrees only; because that
would by degrees bring on light and information, and qualify them to
take charge of themselves understanding; with more certainty, if, in
the mean time, under so much control as may keep them at peace with
one another. Surely, it is our duty to wish them independence and
self-government, because they wish it themselves, and they have the
right, and we none, to choose for themselves: and I wish, moreover, that
our ideas may be erroneous, and theirs prove well-founded. But these are
speculations, my friend, which we may as well deliver over to those who
are to see their developement. We shall only be lookers on, from the
clouds above, as now we look down on the labors, the hurry, and bustle
of the ants and bees. Perhaps, in that super-mundane region, we may
be amused with seeing the fallacy of our own guesses, and even the
nothingness of those labors which have filled and agitated our own time
here.
_En attendant_, with sincere affections to Mrs. Adams and yourself, I
salute you both cordially.
Th: Jefferson.
LETTER CXLIV.--TO JOHN ADAMS, November 13, 1818
TO JOHN ADAMS.
Monticello, November 13, 1818.
The public papers, my dear friend, announce the fatal event of which
your letter of October the 20th had given me ominous foreboding.
Tried myself in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of
connection which can rive the human heart, I know well, and feel what
you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to
endure. The same trials have taught me that, for ills so immeasurable,
time and silence are the only medicine. I will not, therefore, by
useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief, nor,
although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word 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. God bless you, and support you
under your heavy affliction.
Th: Jefferson.
LETTER CXLV.--TO ROBERT WALSH, December 4, 1818
TO ROBERT WALSH.
Monticello, December 4, 1818.
Dear Sir,