1779, and, meanwhile, Jefferson and his friends lost no time in remodeling
her constitution. There were no common schools, and the mass of the people
were more ignorant and rough than their contemporaries in any other
colony. Elections were scenes of bribery, intimidation, and riot,
surpassing even those which Hogarth depicted in England. Elkanah Watson,
of Massachusetts, describes what he saw at Hanover Court House, Patrick
Henry’s county, in 1778: “The whole county was assembled. The moment I
alighted, a wretched, pug-nosed fellow assailed me to swap watches. I had
hardly shaken him off, when I was attacked by a wild Irishman who insisted
on my swapping horses with him.... With him I came near being involved in
a boxing-match, the Irishman swearing, I ‘did not trate him like a
jintleman.’ I had hardly escaped this dilemma when my attention was
attracted by a fight between two very unwieldy fat men, foaming and
puffing like two furies, until one succeeded in twisting a forefinger in a
sidelock of the other’s hair, and in the act of thrusting by this purchase
his thumb into the latter’s eye, he bawled out, ‘King’s Cruise,’
equivalent in technical language to ‘Enough.’”
Quakers were put in the pillory, scolding women were ducked, and it is
said that a woman was burned to death in Princess Anne County for
witchcraft. The English church, as we have seen, was an established
church; and all taxpayers, dissenters as well as churchmen, were compelled
to contribute to its support. Baptist preachers were arrested, and fined
as disturbers of the peace. The law of entail, both as respects land and
slaves, was so strict that their descent to the eldest son could not be
prevented even by agreement between the owner and his heir.
In his reformation of the laws, Jefferson was supported by Patrick Henry,
now governor, and inhabiting what was still called the palace; by George
Mason, a patriotic lawyer who drew the famous Virginia Bill of Rights; by
George Wythe, his old preceptor, and by James Madison, Jefferson’s friend,
pupil, and successor, who in this year began his political career as a
member of the House of Burgesses.
Opposed to them were the conservative party led by R. C. Nicholas, head of
the Virginia bar, a stanch churchman and gentleman of the old school, and
Edward Pendleton, whom Jefferson described as “full of resource, never
vanquished; for if he lost the main battle he returned upon you, and
regained so much of it as to make it a drawn one, by dexterous manœuvres,
skirmishes in detail, and the recovery of small advantages, which, little
singly, were important all together. You never knew when you were clear of
him.”
Intense as the controversy was, fundamental as were the points at issue,
the speakers never lost that courtesy for which the Virginians were
remarkable; John Randolph being perhaps the only exception. Even Patrick
Henry—though from his humble origin and impetuous oratory one might have
expected otherwise—was never guilty of any rudeness to his opponents. What
Jefferson said of Madison was true of the Virginia orators in
general,—“soothing always the feelings of his adversaries by civilities
and softnesses of expression.”
Jefferson struck first at the system of entail. After a three weeks’
struggle, land and slaves were put upon the same footing as all other
property,—they might be sold or bequeathed according to the will of the
possessor. Then came a longer and more bitter contest. Jefferson was for
abolishing all connection between church and state, and for establishing
complete freedom of religion. Nine years elapsed before Virginia could be
brought to that point; but at this session he procured a repeal of the law
which imposed penalties for attendance at a dissenting meeting-house, and
also of the law compelling dissenters to pay tithes. The fight was,
therefore, substantially won; and in 1786, Jefferson’s “Act for
establishing religion” became the law of Virginia.(1)
Another far-reaching law introduced by Jefferson at this memorable session
of 1776 provided for the naturalization of foreigners in Virginia, after a
two years’ residence in the State, and upon a declaration of their
intention to become American citizens. The bill provided also that the
minor children of naturalized parents should be citizens of the United
States when they came of age. The principles of this measure were
afterward embodied in the statutes of the United States, and they are in
force to-day.
At this session Jefferson also drew an act for establishing courts of law
in Virginia, the royal courts having necessarily passed out of existence
when the Declaration of Independence was adopted. Moreover, he set on foot
a revision of all the statutes of Virginia, a committee with him at the
head being appointed for this purpose; and finally he procured the removal
of the capital from Williamsburg to Richmond.
All this was accomplished, mainly by Jefferson’s efforts; and yet the two
bills upon which he set most store failed entirely. These were, first, a
comprehensive measure of state education, running up through primary
schools and grammar schools to a state university, and, secondly, a bill
providing that all who were born in slavery after the passage of the bill
should be free.
This was Jefferson’s second ineffectual attempt to promote the abolition
of slavery. During the year 1768, when he first became a member of the
House of Burgesses, he had endeavored to procure the passage of a law
enabling slave-owners to free their slaves, He induced Colonel Bland, one
of the ablest, oldest, and most respected members to propose the law, and
he seconded the proposal; but it was overwhelmingly rejected. “I, as a
younger member,” related Jefferson afterward, “was more spared in the
debate; but he was denounced as an enemy to his country, and was treated
with the greatest indecorum.”
In 1778 Jefferson made another attempt:—he brought in a bill forbidding
the further importation of slaves in Virginia, and this was passed without
opposition. Again, in 1784, when Virginia ceded to the United States her
immense northwestern territory, Jefferson drew up a scheme of government
for the States to be carved out of it which included a provision “that
after the year 1800 of the Christian Era, there shall be neither slavery
nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States, otherwise than in
punishment of crimes.” The provision was rejected by Congress.
In his “Notes on Virginia,” written in the year 1781, but published in
1787, he said: “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual
exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism,
on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see
this, and learn to imitate it.... With the morals of the people their
industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate no one will labor for
himself who can make another labor for him.... Indeed, I tremble for my
country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep
forever.... The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in
such a contest.”
When the Missouri Compromise question came up, in 1820, Jefferson rightly
predicted that a controversy had begun which would end in disruption; but
he made the mistake of supposing that the Northern party were actuated in
that matter solely by political motives. April 22, 1820, he wrote: “This
momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me
with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.... A
geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and
political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will
never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and
deeper.... The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is
a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought if, in that way, a
general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually and
with due sacrifices I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by
the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in
one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
And later, he wrote of the Missouri Compromise, as a “question having just
enough of the semblance of morality to throw dust into the eyes of the
people.... The Federalists, unable to rise again under the old division of
Whig and Tory, have invented a geographical division which gives them
fourteen States against ten, and seduces their old opponents into a
coalition with them. Real morality is on the other side. For while the
removal of the slaves from one State to another adds no more to their
numbers than their removal from one country to another, the spreading them
over a larger surface adds to their happiness, and renders their future
emancipation more practicable.”
These misconceptions as to Northern motives might be ascribed to
Jefferson’s advanced age, for, as he himself graphically expressed it, he
then had “one foot in the grave, and the other lifted to follow it;” but
it would probably be more just to say that they were due, in part, to his
prejudice against the New England people and especially the New England
clergy, and in part to the fact that his long retirement in Virginia had
somewhat contracted his views and sympathies. Jefferson was a man of
intense local attachments, and he took color from his surroundings. He
never ceased, however, to regard slavery as morally wrong and socially
ruinous; and in the brief autobiography which he left behind him he made
these predictions: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate
than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two
races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.”
History has justified the second as well as the first of these
declarations, for, excepting that brief period of anarchy known as “the
carpet-bag era,” it cannot be maintained that the colored race in the
Southern States have been at any time, even since their emancipation,
“equally free,” in the sense of politically free, with their white fellow
citizens.
VI
GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA
For three years Jefferson was occupied with the legislative duties already
described, and especially with a revision of the Virginia statutes, and
then, in June, 1779, he succeeded Patrick Henry as governor of the State.
It has often been remarked that he was, all through life, a lucky man, but
in this case fortune did not favor him, for the ensuing two years proved
to be, so far as Virginia was concerned, by much the worst period of the
war.
The French alliance, though no doubt an ultimate benefit to the colonies,
had at first two bad effects: it relaxed the energy of the Americans, who
trusted that France would fight their battles for them; and it stimulated
the British to increased exertions. The British commissioners announced
that henceforth England would employ, in the prosecution of the war, all
those agencies which “God and nature had placed in her hands.” This meant
that the ferocity of the Indians would be invoked, a matter of special
moment to Virginia, since her western frontier swarmed with Indians, the
bravest of their race.
The colony, it must be remembered, was then of immense extent; for beside
the present Virginia and West Virginia, Kentucky and the greater part of
Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were embraced in it. It stretched, in short,
from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. Upon the seaboard
Virginia was especially vulnerable, the tide-water region being penetrated
by numerous bays and rivers, which the enemy’s ships could easily ascend,
for they were undefended by forts or men. The total navy of the colony was
four vessels, mounting sixty-two guns, and a few armed boats. The flower
of the Virginia soldiery, to the number of ten thousand, were in
Washington’s army, and supplies of men, of arms, of ammunition and food
were urgently called for by General Gates, who was battling against
Cornwallis in North Carolina. The militia were supposed to number fifty
thousand, which included every man between sixteen and fifty years of age;
but this was only one man for every square mile of territory in the
present State of Virginia, and of these militiamen it was estimated that,
east of the Blue Ridge, only about one in five was armed with a gun. The
treasury was practically bankrupt, and there was a dearth of every kind of
warlike material.
Such was the situation which confronted, as Mr. Parton puts it, “a lawyer
of thirty-six, with a talent for music, a taste for art, a love of
science, literature, and gardening.” The task was one calling rather for a
soldier than a statesman; but Mr. Jefferson faced it with courage, and on
the whole with success. In retaliating the cruel measures of the British,
he showed a firmness which must have been especially difficult for a man
of his temperament. He put in irons and confined in a dungeon Colonel
Henry Hamilton and two subordinate officers who had committed atrocities
upon American prisoners. He caused a prison-ship, like the ships of
infamous memory which were employed as prisons by the British at New York,
to be prepared; and the exchange of captives between Virginia and the
British was stopped. “Humane conduct on our part,” wrote Jefferson, “was
found to produce no effect. The contrary, therefore, is to be tried. Iron
will be retaliated by iron, prison-ships for prison-ships, and like for
like in general.” But in November, 1779, notice was received that the
English, under their new leader, Sir Henry Clinton, had adopted a less
barbarous system of warfare; and fortunately Jefferson’s measures of
reprisal became unnecessary.
Hampered as he was by want of men and money, Jefferson did all that he
could to supply the needs of the Virginia soldiers with Washington, of the
army in North Carolina, led by Gates, and of George Rogers Clarke, the
heroic commander who put down the Indian uprising on the western frontier,
and captured the English officer who instigated it,—that same Colonel
Hamilton of whom mention has already been made. The story of Clarke’s
adventures in the wilderness,—he was a neighbor of Jefferson, only
twenty-six years old,—of his forced marches, of his masterful dealing with
the Indians, and finally of his capture of the British force, forms a
thrilling chapter in the history of the American Revolution.
Many indeed of Jefferson’s constituents censured him as being over-zealous
in his support of the army of Gates. He stripped Virginia, they said, of
troops and resources which, as it proved afterward, were needed at home.
But if Cornwallis were not defeated in North Carolina, it was certain that
he would overrun the much more exposed Virginia. If he could be defeated
anywhere, it would be in the Carolinas. Jefferson’s course, it is
sufficient to say, was that recommended by Washington; and his exertions
in behalf of the Continental armies were commended in the highest terms
not only by Washington, but also by Generals Gates, Greene, Steuben, and
Lafayette. The militia were called out, leaving behind only so many men as
were required to cultivate the land, wagons were impressed, including two
belonging to the governor, and attempts were even made—extraordinary for
Virginia—to manufacture certain much-needed articles. “Our smiths,” wrote
Jefferson, “are making five hundred axes and some tomahawks for General
Gates.”
Thus fared the year 1779, and in 1780 things went from bad to worse. In
April came a letter from Madison, saying that Washington’s army was on the
verge of dissolution, being only half-clothed, and in a way to be starved.
The public treasury was empty and the public credit gone. In August
occurred the disastrous defeat of General Gates at Camden, which left
Virginia at the mercy of Cornwallis. In October a British fleet under
Leslie ravaged the country about Portsmouth, but failing to effect a
juncture with Cornwallis, who was detained in North Carolina by illness
among his troops, did no further harm. Two months later, however, Benedict
Arnold sailed up the James River with another fleet, and, after committing
some depredations at Richmond, sailed down again, escaping by the aid of a
favorable wind, which hauled from east to west just in the nick of time
for him.
In June, 1781, Cornwallis invaded Virginia, and no one suffered more than
Jefferson from his depredations. Tarleton was dispatched to seize the
governor at Monticello; but the latter was forewarned by a citizen of
Charlottesville, who, being in a tavern at Louisa when Tarleton and his
troop swept by on the main road, immediately guessed their destination,
and mounting his horse, a fleet Virginia thoroughbred, rode by a short cut
through the woods straight to Monticello, arriving there about three hours
ahead of Tarleton.
Jefferson took the matter coolly. He first dispatched his family to a
place of safety, sent his best horse to be shod at a neighboring smithy,
and then proceeded to sort and separate his papers. He left the house only
about five minutes before the soldiers entered it.
Two slaves, Martin, Mr. Jefferson’s body servant, and Cæsar, were engaged
in hiding plate and other articles under the floor of the portico, a
single plank having been raised for that purpose. As Martin, above, handed
the last article to Cæsar under the floor, the tramp of the approaching
cavalry was heard. Down went the plank, shutting in Cæsar, and there he
remained, without making any outcry, for eighteen hours, in darkness, and
of course without food or water. One of the soldiers, to try Martin’s
nerve, clapped a pistol to his breast, and threatened to fire unless he
would tell which way his master had fled. “Fire away, then,” retorted the
black, fiercely answering glance for glance, and not receding a hair’s
breath.
Tarleton and his men scrupulously refrained from injuring Jefferson’s
property. Cornwallis, on the other hand, who encamped on Jefferson’s
estate of Elk Hill, lying opposite Elk Island in the James River,
destroyed the growing crops, burned all the barns and fences, carried
off—“as was to be expected,” said Mr. Jefferson—the cattle and horses, and
committed the barbarity of killing the colts that were too young to be of
service. He carried off, also, about thirty slaves. “Had this been to give
them freedom,” wrote Jefferson, “he would have done right; but it was to
consign them to inevitable death from the smallpox and putrid fever, then
raging in his camp.”
“Some of the miserable wretches crawled home to die,” Mr. Randall relates,
“and giving information where others lay perishing in hovels or in the
open air, by the wayside, these were sent for by their generous master;
and the last moments of all of them were made as comfortable as could be
done by proper nursing and medical attendance.”
These dreadful scenes, added to the agitation of having twice been
obliged, at a moment’s notice, to flee from the enemy, to say nothing of
the anxieties which she must have endured on her husband’s account, were
too much for Mrs. Jefferson’s already enfeebled constitution. She died on
September 6, 1782.
Six slave women who were household servants enjoyed for thirty years a
kind of humble distinction at Monticello as “the servants who were in the
room when Mrs. Jefferson died;” and the fact that they were there attests
the affectionate relations which must have existed between them and their
master and mistress. “They have often told my wife,” relates Mr. Bacon,
“that when Mrs. Jefferson died they stood around the bed. Mr. Jefferson
sat by her, and she gave him directions about a good many things that she
wanted done. When she came to the children, she wept, and could not speak
for some time. Finally she held up her hand, and, spreading out her four
fingers, she told him she could not die happy if she thought her four
children were ever to have a stepmother brought in over them. Holding her
other hand in his, Mr. Jefferson promised her solemnly that he would never
marry again;” and the promise was kept.
After his wife’s death Jefferson sank into what he afterward described as
“a stupor of mind;” and even before that he had been, for the first and
last time in his life, in a somewhat morbid mental condition. He was an
excessively sensitive man, and reflections upon his conduct as governor,
during the raids into Virginia by Arnold and Cornwallis, coming at a time
when he was overwrought, rankled in his mind. He refused to serve again as
governor, and desiring to defend his course when in that office, became a
member of the House of Burgesses in 1781, in order that he might answer
his critics there; but not a voice was raised against him. In 1782, he was
again elected to the House, but he did not attend; and both Madison and
Monroe endeavored in vain to draw him from his seclusion. To Monroe he
replied: “Before I ventured to declare to my countrymen my determination
to retire from public employment, I examined well my heart to know whether
it were thoroughly cured of every principle of political ambition, whether
no lurking particle remained which might leave me uneasy, when reduced
within the limits of mere private life. I became satisfied that every
fibre of that passion was thoroughly eradicated.”
Jefferson was an impulsive man,—in some respects a creature of the moment;
certainly often, in his own case, mistaking, as a permanent feeling, what
was really a transitory impression. His language to Monroe must,
therefore, be taken as the sincere deliverance of a man who, at that time,
had not the remotest expectation of receiving, or the least ambition to
attain, the highest offices in the gift of the American people.
VII
ENVOY AT PARIS
Two years after his wife’s death, namely, in 1784, Jefferson was chosen by
Congress to serve as envoy at Paris, with John Adams and Benjamin
Franklin. The appointment came at an opportune moment, when his mind was
beginning to recover its tone, and he gladly accepted it. It was deemed
necessary that the new Confederacy should make treaties with the various
governments of Europe, and as soon as the envoys reached Paris, they drew
up a treaty such as they hoped might be negotiated. It has been described
as “the first serious attempt ever made to conduct the intercourse of
nations on Christian principles;” and, on that account, it failed. To this
failure there was, however, one exception. “Old Frederick of Prussia,” as
Jefferson styled him, “met us cordially;” and with him a treaty was soon
concluded.
In May, 1785, Franklin returned to the United States, and Jefferson was
appointed minister. “You replace Dr. Franklin,” said the Count of
Vergennes when Jefferson announced his appointment. “I succeed,—no one can
replace him,” was the reply.
Jefferson’s residence in Paris at this critical period was a fortunate
occurrence. It would be a mistake to suppose that he derived his political
principles from France:—he carried them there; but he was confirmed in
them by witnessing the injustice and misery which resulted to the common
people from the monarchical governments of Europe. To James Monroe he
wrote in June, 1785: “The pleasure of the trip [to Europe] will be less
than you expect, but the utility greater. It will make you adore your own
country,—its soil, its climate, its equality, laws, people, and manners.
My God! how little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are
in possession of and which no other people on earth enjoy! I confess I had
no idea of it myself.”
To George Wythe he wrote in August, 1786: “Preach, my dear sir, a crusade
against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common
people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us
against these evils; and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose
is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings,
priests, and nobles, who will rise up among us if we leave the people in
ignorance.” To Madison, he wrote in January, 1787: “This is a government
of wolves over sheep.” Jefferson took the greatest pains to ascertain the
condition of the laboring classes. In the course of a journey in the south
of France, he wrote to Lafayette, begging him to survey the condition of
the people for himself. “To do it most effectually,” he said, “you must be
absolutely incognito; you must ferret the people out of their hovels, as I
have done; look into their kettles; eat their bread; loll on their beds on
pretense of resting yourself, but in fact to find if they are soft. You
will feel a sublime pleasure in the course of the investigation, and a
sublimer one hereafter, when you shall be able to apply your knowledge to
the softening of their beds, or the throwing a morsel of meat into their
kettle of vegetables.”