the judiciary usurpation of legislative powers; for such the judges have
usurped in their repeated decisions, that Christianity is a part of
the common law. The proof of the contrary, which you have adduced,
is incontrovertible; to wit, that the common law existed while the
Anglo-Saxons were yet Pagans, at a time when they had never yet heard
the name of Christ pronounced, or knew that such a character had ever
existed. But it may amuse you, to show when, and by what means,
they stole this law in upon us. In a case of _quare impedit_ in the
Year-book, 34. H. 6. folio 38. (anno 1458,) a question was made, how far
the ecclesiastical law was to be respected in a common law court. And
Prisot, Chief Justice, gives his opinion in these words. ‘_A tiel leis
qu’ils de seint eglise ont enancien scripture, covient a nous a donner
credence; car ceo common ley stir quels touts manners leis sont fondes.
Et auxy, Sir, nous sumus obliges de conustre lour ley de saint eglise:
et semblablement ils sont obliges de conustre nostre ley. Et, Sir, si
poit apperer or a nous que Pevesque ad fait come un ordinary fera en
tiel cas, adong nous devons ceo adju-ger bon,ou auterment nemy_,’ &c.
See S. C. Fitzh.Abr. Qu. imp. 89. Bro. Abr. Qu. imp. 12. Finch in his
first book, c. 3. is the first afterwards who quotes this case, and
mistakes it thus. ‘To such laws of the church as have warrant in holy
scripture, our law giveth credence.’ And cites Prisot; mistranslating
‘ancien scripture’ into ‘holy scripture.’ Whereas, Prisot palpably says,
‘to such laws as those of holy church have in ancient writing, it is
proper for us to give credence;’ to wit, to their ancient written laws.
This was in 1613, a century and a half after the dictum of Prisot.
Wingate, in 1658, erects this false translation into a maxim of the
common law, copying the words of Finch, but citing Prisot. Wing. Max.
3. and Sheppard, title, ‘Religion,’ in 1675, copies the same
mistranslation, quoting the Y. B. Finch and Win-gate. Hale expresses
it in these words; ‘Christianity is parcel of the laws of England.’ 1
Ventr. 293, 3 Keb. 607. But he quotes no authority. By these echoings
and re-echoings from one to another, it had become so established in
1728, that in the case of the King vs. Woolston, 2 Stra. 834, the court
would not suffer it to be debated, whether to write against Christianity
was punishable in the temporal court at common law. Wood, therefore,
409, ventures still to vary the phrase and say, that all blasphemy
and profaneness are offences by the common law; and cites 2 Stra.
Then Blackstone, in 1763, IV. 59, repeats the words of Hale, that
‘Christianity is part of the laws of England,’ citing Ventris and
Strange. And finally, Lord Mansfield, with a little qualification, in
Evans’s case, in 1767, says, that ‘the essential principles of revealed
religion are part of the common law.’ Thus ingulphing Bible, Testament,
and all into the common law, without citing any authority. And thus we
find this chain of authorities hanging link by link, one upon another,
and all ultimately on one and the same hook, and that a mistranslation
of the words ‘ancien scripture,’ used by Prisot. Finch quotes Prisot;
Wingate does the same. Sheppard quotes Prisot, Finch, and Wingate.
Hale cites nobody. The court, in Woolston’s case, cite Hale. Wood cites
Woolston’s case. Blackstone quotes Woolston’s case and Hale. And Lord
Mansfield, like Hale, ventures it on his own authority. Here I might
defy the best read lawyer to produce another scrip of authority for this
judiciary forgery; and I might go on further to show, how some of the
Anglo-Saxon priests interpolated into the text of Alfred’s laws, the
20th, 21st, 22nd, and 23rd chapters of Exodus, and the 15th of the Acts
of the Apostles, from the 23rd to the 29th verses. But this would lead
my pen and your patience too far. What a conspiracy this, between Church
and State! Sing Tantarara, rogues all, rogues all, Sing Tantarara,
rogues all!
I must still add to this long and rambling letter, my acknowledgments
for your good wishes to the University we are now establishing in this
State. There are some novelties in it. Of that of a professorship of
the principles of government, you express your approbation. They will be
founded in the rights of man. That of agriculture, I am sure, you will
approve: and that also of Anglo-Saxon. As the histories and laws left us
in that type and dialect, must be the text-books of the reading of the
learners, they will imbibe with the language their free principles
of government. The volumes you have been so kind as to send, shall be
placed in the library of the University. Having at this time in England
a person sent for the purpose of selecting some Professors, a Mr.
Gilmer of my neighborhood, I cannot but recommend him to your patronage,
counsel, and guardianship, against imposition, misinformation, and the
deceptions of partial and false recommendations, in the selection
of characters. He is a gentleman of great worth and correctness, my
particular friend, well educated in various branches of science, and
worthy of entire confidence.
Your age of eighty-four and mine of eighty-one years, insure us a speedy
meeting. We may then commune at leisure, and more fully, on the good and
evil, which in the course of our long lives, we have.both witnessed; and
in the mean time, I pray you to accept assurances of my high veneration
and esteem for your person and character.
Th: Jefferson.
LETTER CLXXXII.--TO MARTIN VAN BUREN, June 29, 1824
TO MARTIN VAN BUREN.
Monticello, June 29, 1824.
Dear Sir,
I have to thank you for Mr. Pickering’s elaborate philippic against Mr.
Adams, Gerry, Smith, and myself; and I have delayed the acknowledgment
until I could read it and make some observations on it.
I could not have believed, that for so many years, and to such a period
of advanced age, he could have nourished passions so vehement and
viperous. It appears, that for thirty years past, he has been
industriously collecting materials for vituperating the characters he
had marked for his hatred; some of whom certainly, if enmities towards
him had ever existed, had forgotten them all, or buried them in the
grave with themselves. As to myself, there never had been any thing
personal between us, nothing but the general opposition of party
sentiment; and our personal intercourse had been that of urbanity, as
himself says. But it seems he has been all this time brooding over an
enmity which I had never felt, and that with respect to myself, as well
as others, he has been writing far and near, and in every direction, to
get hold of original letters, where he could, copies, where he could
not, certificates and journals, catching at every gossipping story he
could hear of in any quarter, supplying by suspicions what he could find
no where else, and then arguing on this motley farrago, as if
established on gospel evidence. And while expressing his wonder,
‘at the age of eighty-eight, the strong passions of Mr. Adams should not
have cooled ‘; that on the contrary, ‘they had acquired the mastery of
his soul,’ (p. 100 ;) that ‘where these were enlisted, no reliance
could be placed on his statements,’ (p. 104 ;) the facility and little
truth with which he could represent facts and occurrences, concerning
persons who were the objects of his hatred, (p. 3 ;) that ‘he is
capable of making the grossest misrepresentations, and, from detached
facts, and often from bare suspicions, of drawing unwarrantable
inferences,’ if suited to his purpose at the instant,’ (p. 174;) while
making such charges, I say, on Mr. Adams, instead of his ‘_ecce homo_,’
(p. 100;) how justly might we say to him, ‘_Mutato nomine, de te fabula
narratur_.’ For the assiduity and industry he has employed in his
benevolent researches after matter of crimination against us, I refer to
his pages 13, 14, 34, 36, 46, 71, 79, 90, bis. 92, 93, bis. 101, ter.
104, 116, 118, 141, 143, 146,150,151,153, 168, 171, 172. That Mr.
Adams’s strictures on him, written and pointed, should have excited some
notice on his part, was not perhaps to be wondered at. But the
sufficiency of his motive for the large attack on me may be more
questionable. He says, (p. 4) ‘of Mr. Jefferson I should have said
nothing, but for his letter to Mr. Adams, of October the 12th, 1823.’
Now the object of that letter was to soothe the feelings of a friend,
wounded by a publication which I thought an ‘outrage on private
confidence.’ Not a word or allusion in it respecting Mr. Pickering, nor
was it suspected that it would draw forth his pen in justification of
this infidelity, which he has, however, undertaken in the course of his
pamphlet, but more particularly in its conclusion.
He arraigns me on two grounds, my actions, and my motives. The very
actions, however, which he arraigns, have been such as the great
majority of my fellow-citizens have approved. The approbation of Mr.
Pickering, and of those who thought with him, I had no right to expect.
My motives he chooses to ascribe to hypocrisy, to ambition, and a
passion for popularity. Of these the world must judge between us. It
is no office of his or mine. To that tribunal I have ever submitted
my actions and motives, without ransacking the Union for certificates,
letters, journals, and gossiping tales, to justify myself and weary
them. Nor shall I do this on the present occasion, but leave still to
them these antiquated party diatribes, now newly revamped and paraded,
as if they had not been already a thousand times repeated, refuted, and
adjudged against him, by the nation itself. If no action is to be deemed
virtuous for which malice can imagine a sinister motive, then there
never was a virtuous action; no, not even in the life of our Savior
himself. But he has taught us to judge the tree by its fruit, and to
leave motives to him who can alone see into them.
But whilst I leave to its fate the libel of Mr. Pickering, with the
thousands of others like it, to which I have given no other answer than
a steady course of similar action, there are two facts or fancies of
his which I must set to rights. The one respects Mr. Adams, the
other myself. He observes, that my letter of October the 12th, 1823,
acknowledges the receipt of one from Mr. Adams, of September the 18th,
which, having been written a few days after Cunningham’s publication, he
says was no doubt written to apologize to me for the pointed reproaches
he had uttered against me in his confidential letters to Cunningham.
And thus having ‘no doubt’ of his conjecture, he considers it as proven,
goes on to suppose the contents of the letter (19, 22), makes it place
Mr. Adams at my feet suing for pardon, and continues to rant upon it,
as an undoubted fact. Now I do most solemnly declare, that so far from
being a letter of apology, as Mr. Pickering so undoubtingly assumes,
there was not a word or allusion in it respecting Cunningham’s
publication.
The other allegation respecting myself, is equally false. In page 34,
he quotes Doctor Stuart, as having, twenty years ago, informed him that
General Washington, ‘when he became a private citizen,’ called me to
account for expressions in a letter to Mazzei, requiring, in a tone of
unusual severity, an explanation of that letter. He adds of himself, ‘in
what manner the latter humbled himself, and appeased the just resentment
of Washington, will never be known, as some time after his death, the
correspondence was not to be found, and a diary for an important period
of his Presidency was also missing.’ The diary being of transactions
during his Presidency, the letter to Mazzei not known here until some
time after he became a private citizen, and the pretended correspondence
of course after that, I know not why this lost diary and supposed
correspondence are brought together here, unless for insinuations worthy
of the letter itself. The correspondence could not be found, indeed,
because it had never existed. I do affirm, that there never passed
a word, written or verbal, directly or indirectly, between General
Washington and myself on the subject of that letter. He would never have
degraded himself so far as to take to himself the imputation in that
letter on the ‘Samsons in combat.’ The whole story is a fabrication, and
I defy the framers of it, and all mankind, to produce a scrip of a
pen between General Washington and myself on the subject, or any other
evidence more worthy of credit than the suspicions, suppositions, and
presumptions of the two persons here quoting and quoted for it. With
Doctor Stuart I had not much acquaintance. I supposed him to be an
honest man, knew him to be a very weak one, and, like Mr. Pickering,
very prone to antipathies, boiling with party passions, and, under the
dominion of these, readily welcoming fancies for facts. But, come the
story from whomsoever it might, it is an unqualified falsehood.
This letter to Mazzei has been a precious theme of crimination for
federal malice. It was a long letter of business, in which was inserted
a single paragraph only of political information as to the state of our
country. In this information there was not one word which would not
then have been, or would not now be approved by every republican in
the United States, looking back to those times, as you will see by a
faithful copy now enclosed of the whole of what that letter said on
the subject of the United States, or of its government. This paragraph,
extracted and translated, got into a Paris paper at a time when the
persons in power there were laboring under very general disfavor, and
their friends were eager to catch even at straws to buoy them up. ‘To
them, therefore, I have always imputed the interpolation of an entire
paragraph additional to mine, which makes me charge my own country with
ingratitude and injustice to France. There was not a word in my letter
respecting France, or any of the proceedings or relations between this
country and that. Yet this interpolated paragraph has been the burden of
federal calumny, has been constantly quoted by them, made the subject
of unceasing and virulent abuse, and is still quoted, as you see, by Mr.
Pickering, (page 33,) as if it were genuine, and really written by me.
And even Judge Marshall makes history descend from its dignity, and the
ermine from its sanctity, to exaggerate, to record, and to sanction this
forgery. In the very last note of his book, he says, ‘A letter from
Mr. Jefferson to Mr. Mazzei, an Italian, was published in Florence, and
republished in the Moniteur, with very severe strictures on the conduct
of the United States.’ And instead of the letter itself, he copies
what he says are the remarks of the editor, which are an exaggerated
commentary on the fabricated paragraph itself, and silently leaves to
his reader to make the ready inference that these were the sentiments of
the letter. Proof is the duty of the affirmative side. A negative cannot
be possibly proved. But, in defect of impossible proof of what was not
in the original letter, I have its press-copy still in my possession. It
has been shown to several, and is open to any one who wishes to see it.
I have presumed only that the interpolation was done in Paris. But I
never saw the letter in either its Italian or French dress, and it may
have been done here, with the commentary handed down to posterity by the
judge. The genuine paragraph, re-translated through Italian and French
into English, as it appeared here in a federal paper, besides the
mutilated hue which these translations and re-translations of it
produced generally, gave a mistranslation of a single word, which
entirely perverted its meaning, and made it a pliant and fertile text of
misrepresentation of my political principles. The original, speaking of
an Anglican, monarchical, and aristocratical party, which had sprung
up since he had left us, states their object to be ‘to draw over us
the substance, as they had already done the forms of the British
government.’ Now the ‘forms’ here meant, were the levees, birth-days,
the pompous cavalcade to the State House on the meeting of Congress, the
formal speech from the throne, the procession of Congress in a body to
re-echo the speech in an answer, &c. &c. But the translator here, by
substituting form in the singular number, for forms in the plural, made
it mean the frame or organization of our government, or its form of
legislative, executive, and judiciary authorities, co-ordinate and
independent: to which form it was to be inferred that I was an enemy. In
this sense they always quoted it, and in this sense Mr. Pickering still
quotes, it (pages 34, 35, 38), and countenances the inference. Now
General Washington perfectly understood what I meant by these forms,
as they were frequent subjects of conversation between us. When, on my
return from Europe, I joined the government in March, 1790, at New York,
I was much astonished, indeed, at the mimicry I found established
of royal forms and ceremonies, and more alarmed at the unexpected
phenomenon, by the monarchical sentiments I heard expressed and openly
maintained in every company, and among others by the high members of the
government, executive and judiciary (General Washington alone excepted),
and by a great part of the legislature, save only some members who had
been of the old Congress, and a very few of recent introduction. I
took occasion, at various times, of expressing to General Washington my
disappointment at these symptoms of a change of principle, and that
I thought them encouraged by the forms and ceremonies, which I found
prevailing, not at all in character with the simplicity of republican
government, and looking as if wishfully to those of European courts.
His general explanations to me were, that when he arrived at New York
to enter on the executive administration of the new government, he
observed to those who were to assist him, that placed as he was in an
office entirely new to him, unacquainted with the forms and ceremonies
of other governments, still less apprized of those which might be
properly established here, and himself perfectly indifferent to all
forms, he wished them to consider and prescribe what they should be; and
the task was assigned particularly to General Knox, a man of parade,
and to Colonel Humphreys, who had resided some time at a foreign court.
They, he said, were the author’s of the present regulations, and that
others were proposed so highly strained, that he absolutely rejected
them. Attentive to the difference of opinion prevailing on this subject,
when the term of his second election arrived, he called the Heads of
departments together, observed to them the situation in which he had
been at the commencement of the government, the advice he had taken, and
the course he had observed in compliance with it; that a proper occasion
had now arrived of revising that course, of correcting in it any
particulars not approved in experience; and he desired us to consult
together, agree on any changes we should think for the better, and
that he should willingly conform to what we should advise. We met at
my office. Hamilton and myself agreed at once that there was too much
ceremony for the character of our government, and, particularly, that
the parade of the installation at New York ought not to be copied on the
present occasion, that the President should desire the Chief Justice to
attend him at his chambers, that he should administer the oath of office
to him in the presence of the higher officers of the government, and
that the certificate of the fact should be delivered to the Secretary
of State to be recorded. Randolph and Knox differed from us, the
latter vehemently: they thought it not advisable to change any of the
established forms, and we authorized Randolph to report our opinions to
the President. As these opinions were divided, and no positive advice
given as to any change, no change was made. Thus the forms, which I had
censured in my letter to Mazzei, were perfectly understood by General
Washington, and were those which he himself but barely tolerated. He had
furnished me a proper occasion for proposing their reformation, and, my
opinion not prevailing, he knew I could not have meant any part of the
censure for him.