[1] Jean de Meun's translation formed the basis of a rhymed version
(1290) by Jean Priorat of Besançon, _Li abreyance de l'ordre de
chevalerie_.
JEANNETTE, a borough of Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., about
27 m. E. by S. of Pittsburg. Pop. (1890), 3296; (1900), 5865 (1340
foreign-born); (1910), 8077. It is served by the Pennsylvania railroad,
and is connected with Pittsburg and Uniontown by electric railway. It is
supplied with natural gas and is primarily a manufacturing centre, its
principal manufactures being glass, table-ware and rubber goods.
Jeannette was founded in 1888, and was incorporated as a borough in
1889.
JEANNIN, PIERRE (1540-1622), French statesman, was born at Autun. A
pupil of the great jurist Jacques Cujas at Bourges, he was an advocate
at Dijon in 1569 and became councillor and then president of the
_parlement_ of Burgundy. He opposed in vain the massacre of St
Bartholomew in his province. As councillor to the duke of Mayenne he
sought to reconcile him with Henry IV. After the victory of
Fontaine-Française (1595), Henry took Jeannin into his council and in
1602 named him intendant of finances. He took part in the principal
events of the reign, negotiated the treaty of Lyons with the duke of
Savoy (see HENRY IV.), and the defensive alliance between France and
the United Netherlands in 1608. As superintendent of finances under
Louis XIII., he tried to establish harmony between the king and the
queen-mother.
See Berger de Xivrey, _Lettres missives de Henri IV._ (in the
_Collection inédite pour l'histoire de France_), t. v. (1850);
P(ierre) S(aumaise), _Eloge sur la vie de Pierre Janin_ (Dijon, 1623);
Sainte-Beuve, _Causeries du lundi_, t. x. (May 1854).
JEBB, JOHN (1736-1786), English divine, was educated at Cambridge, where
he was elected fellow of Peterhouse in 1761, having previously been
second wrangler. He was a man of independent judgment and warmly
supported the movement of 1771 for abolishing university and clerical
subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles. In his lectures on the Greek
Testament he is said to have expressed Socinian views. In 1775 he
resigned his Suffolk church livings, and two years afterwards graduated
M.D. at St Andrews. He practised medicine in London and was elected
F.R.S. in 1779.
Another JOHN JEBB (1775-1833), bishop of Limerick, is best known as the
author of _Sacred Literature_ (London, 1820).
JEBB, SIR RICHARD CLAVERHOUSE (1841-1905), English classical scholar,
was born at Dundee on the 27th of August 1841. His father was a
well-known barrister, and his grandfather a judge. He was educated at
Charterhouse and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He won the Porson and
Craven scholarships, was senior classic in 1862, and became fellow and
tutor of his college in 1863. From 1869 to 1875 he was public orator of
the university; professor of Greek at Glasgow from 1875 to 1889, and at
Cambridge from 1889 till his death on the 9th of December 1905. In 1891
he was elected member of parliament for Cambridge University; he was
knighted in 1900. Jebb was acknowledged to be one of the most brilliant
classical scholars of his time, a humanist in the best sense, and his
powers of translation from and into the classical languages were
unrivalled. A collected volume, _Translations into Greek and Latin_,
appeared in 1873 (ed. 1909). He was the recipient of many honorary
degrees from European and American universities, and in 1905 was made a
member of the Order of Merit. He married in 1874 the widow of General A.
J. Slemmer, of the United States army, who survived him.
Jebb was the author of numerous publications, of which the following
are the most important: The _Characters_ of Theophrastus (1870), text,
introduction, English translation and commentary (re-edited by J. E.
Sandys, 1909); _The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeus_ (2nd ed.,
1893), with companion volume, _Selections from the Attic Orators_ (2nd
ed., 1888); _Bentley_ (1882); _Sophocles_ (3rd ed., 1893) the seven
plays, text, English translation and notes, the promised edition of
the fragments being prevented by his death; _Bacchylides_ (1905),
text, translation, and notes; _Homer_ (3rd ed., 1888), an introduction
to the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_; _Modern Greece_ (1901); _The Growth and
Influence of Classical Greek Poetry_ (1893). His translation of the
_Rhetoric_ of Aristotle was published posthumously under the
editorship of J. E. Sandys (1909). A selection from his _Essays and
Addresses_, and a subsequent volume, _Life and Letters of Sir Richard
Claverhouse Jebb_ (with critical introduction by A. W. Verrall) were
published by his widow in 1907; see also an appreciative notice by J.
E. Sandys, _Hist. of Classical Scholarship_, iii. (1908).
JEBEIL (anc. _Gebal-Byblus_), a town of Syria pleasantly situated on a
slight eminence near the sea, about 20 m. N. of Beirut. It is surrounded
by a wall 1½ m. in circumference, with square towers at the angles, and
a castle at the south-east corner. Numerous broken granite columns in
the gardens and vineyards that surround the town, with the number of
ruined houses within the walls, testify to its former importance. The
stele of Jehawmelek, king of Gebal, found here, is one of the most
important of Phoenician monuments. The small port is almost choked up
with sand and ruins. Pop. 3000, all Moslems.
The inhabitants of the Phoenician Gebal and Greek Byblus were renowned
as stonecutters and ship-builders. Arrian (ii. 20. 1) represents Enylus,
king of Byblus, as joining Alexander with a fleet, after that monarch
had captured the city. Philo of Byblus makes it the most ancient city of
Phoenicia, founded by Cronus, i.e. the Moloch who appears from the stele
of Jehawmelek to have been with Baalit the chief deity of the city.
According to Plutarch (_Mor._ 357), the ark with the corpse of Osiris
was cast ashore at Byblus, and there found by Isis. The orgies of
Adonis in the temple of Baalit (Aphrodite Byblia) are described by
Lucian, _De Dea Syr._, cap. vi. The river Adonis is the Nahr al-Ibrahim,
which flows near the town. The crusaders, after failing before it in
1099, captured "Giblet" in 1103, but lost it again to Saladin in 1189.
Under Mahommedan rule it has gradually decayed. (D. G. H.)
JEBEL (plur. _jibal_), also written GEBEL with hard _g_ (plur. _gibal_),
an Arabic word meaning a mountain or a mountain chain. It is frequently
used in place-names. The French transliteration of the word is _djebel_.
_Jebeli_ signifies a mountaineer. The pronunciation with a hard _g_
sound is that used in the Egyptian dialect of Arabic.
JEDBURGH, a royal and police burgh and county-town of Roxburghshire,
Scotland. Pop. of police burgh (1901), 3136. It is situated on Jed
Water, a tributary of the Teviot, 56¼ m. S.E. of Edinburgh by the North
British railway, via Roxburgh and St Boswells (49 m. by road), and 10 m.
from the border at Catcleuch Shin, a peak of the Cheviots, 1742 ft.
high. Of the name Jedburgh there have been many variants, the earliest
being Gedwearde (800), Jedwarth (1251), and Geddart (1586), while
locally the word is sometimes pronounced Jethart. The town is situated
on the left bank of the Jed, the main streets running at right angles
from each side of the central market-place. Of the renowned group of
Border abbeys--Jedburgh, Melrose, Dryburgh and Kelso--that of Jedburgh
is the stateliest. In 1118, according to tradition, but more probably as
late as 1138, David, prince of Cumbria, here founded a priory for
Augustinian monks from the abbey of St Quentin at Beauvais in France,
and in 1147, after he had become king, erected it into an abbey
dedicated to the Virgin. Repeatedly damaged in Border warfare, it was
ruined in 1544-45 during the English invasion led by Sir Ralph Evers (or
Eure). The establishment was suppressed in 1559, the revenues being
temporarily annexed to the Crown. After changing owners more than once,
the lands were purchased in 1637 by the 3rd earl of Lothian. Latterly
five of the bays at the west end had been utilized as the parish church,
but in 1873-1875 the 9th marquess of Lothian built a church for the
service of the parish, and presented it to the heritors in exchange for
the ruined abbey in order to prevent the latter from being injured by
modern additions and alterations.
The abbey was built of Old Red sandstone, and belongs mostly to the
end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th centuries. The
architecture is mixed, and the abbey is a beautiful example of the
Norman and Transition styles. The total length is 235 ft., the nave
being 133½ ft. long and 59½ ft. wide. The west front contains a great
Norman porch and a fine wheel window. The nave, on each side, has nine
pointed arches in the basement storey, nine round arches in the
triforium, and thirty-six pointed arches in the clerestory, through
which an arcade is carried on both sides. The tower, at the
intersection of the nave and transepts, is of unusually massive
proportions, being 30 ft. square and fully 100 ft. high; the network
baluster round the top is modern. With the exception of the north
piers and a small portion of the wall above, which are Norman, the
tower dates from the end of the 15th century. The whole of the south
transept has perished. The north transept, with early Decorated
windows, has been covered in and walled off, and is the burial-ground
of the Kerrs of Fernihirst, ancestors of the marquess of Lothian. The
earliest tombstone is dated 1524; one of the latest is the recumbent
effigy, by G. F. Watts, R.A., of the 8th marquess of Lothian
(1832-1870). All that is left of the choir, which contains some very
early Norman work, is two bays with three tiers on each side,
corresponding to the design of the nave. It is supposed that the
aisle, with Decorated window and groined roof, south of the chancel,
formed the grammar school (removed from the abbey in 1751) in which
Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661), principal of St Mary's College, St
Andrews, and James Thomson, author of The _Seasons_, were educated.
The door leading from the south aisle into a herbaceous garden,
formerly the cloister, is an exquisite copy of one which had become
greatly decayed. It was designed by Sir Rowand Anderson, under whose
superintendence restoration in the abbey was carried out.
The castle stood on high ground at the south end of the burgh, or
"town-head." Erected by David I., it was one of the strongholds ceded to
England in 1174, under the treaty of Falaise, for the ransom of William
the Lion. It was, however, so often captured by the English that it
became a menace rather than a protection, and the townsfolk demolished
it in 1409. It had occasionally been used as a royal residence, and was
the scene, in November 1285, of the revels held in celebration of the
marriage (solemnized in the abbey) of Alexander III. to Joleta, or
Yolande, daughter of the count of Dreux. The site was occupied in 1823
by the county prison, now known as the castle, a castellated structure
which gradually fell into disuse and was acquired by the corporation in
1890. A house exists in Backgate in which Mary Queen of Scots resided in
1566, and one in Castlegate which Prince Charles Edward occupied in
1745.
The public buildings include the grammar school (built in 1883 to
replace the successor of the school in the abbey), founded by William
Turnbull, bishop of Glasgow (d. 1454), the county buildings, the free
library and the public hall, which succeeded to the corn exchange
destroyed by fire in 1898, a loss that involved the museum and its
contents, including the banners captured by the Jethart weavers at
Bannockburn and Killiecrankie. The old market cross still exists, and
there are two public parks. The chief industry is the manufacture of
woollens (blankets, hosiery), but brewing, tanning and iron-founding are
carried on, and fruit (especially pears) and garden produce are in
repute. Jedburgh was made a royal burgh in the reign of David I., and
received a charter from Robert I. and another, in 1566, from Mary Queen
of Scots. Sacked and burned time after time during the Border strife, it
was inevitable that the townsmen should become keen fighters. Their cry
of "Jethart's here!" was heard wherever the fray waxed most fiercely,
and the Jethart axe of their invention--a steel axe on a 4-ft.
pole--wrought havoc in their hands.
"Jethart or Jeddart justice," according to which a man was hanged first
and tried afterwards, seems to have been a hasty generalization from a
solitary fact--the summary execution in James VI.'s reign of a gang of
rogues at the instance of Sir George Home, but has nevertheless passed
into a proverb.
Old Jeddart, 4 m. S. of the present town, the first site of the burgh,
is now marked by a few grassy mounds, and of the great Jedburgh forest,
only the venerable oaks, the "Capon Tree" and the "King of the Woods"
remain. Dunion Hill (1095 ft.), about 2 m. south-west of Jedburgh,
commands a fine view of the capital of the county.
JEEJEEBHOY (JIJIBHAI), SIR JAMSETJEE (JAMSETJI), Bart. (1783-1859),
Indian merchant and philanthropist, was born in Bombay in 1783, of poor
but respectable parents, and was left an orphan in early life. At the
age of sixteen, with a smattering of mercantile education and a bare
pittance, he commenced a series of business travels destined to lead him
to fortune and fame. After a preliminary visit to Calcutta, he undertook
a voyage to China, then fraught with so much difficulty and risk that it
was regarded as a venture betokening considerable enterprise and
courage; and he subsequently initiated a systematic trade with that
country, being himself the carrier of his merchant wares on his passages
to and fro between Bombay and Canton and Shanghai. His second return
voyage from China was made in one of the East India Company's fleet,
which, under the command of Sir Nathaniel Dance, defeated the French
squadron under Admiral Linois (Feb. 15, 1804). On his fourth return
voyage from China, the Indiaman in which he sailed was forced to
surrender to the French, by whom he was carried as a prisoner to the
Cape of Good Hope, then a neutral Dutch possession; and it was only
after much delay, and with great difficulty, that he made his way to
Calcutta in a Danish ship. Nothing daunted, he undertook yet another
voyage to China, which was more successful than any of the previous
ones. By this time he had fairly established his reputation as a
merchant possessed of the highest spirit of enterprise and considerable
wealth, and thenceforward he settled down in Bombay, where he directed
his commercial operations on a widely extended scale. By 1836 his firm
was large enough to engross the energies of his three sons and other
relatives; and he had amassed what at that period of Indian mercantile
history was regarded as fabulous wealth. An essentially self-made man,
having experienced in early life the miseries of poverty and want, in
his days of affluence Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy developed an active instinct
of sympathy with his poorer countrymen, and commenced that career of
private and public philanthropy which is his chief title to the
admiration of mankind. His liberality was unbounded, and the absorbing
occupation of his later life was the alleviation of human distress. To
his own community he gave lavishly, but his benevolence was mainly
cosmopolitan. Hospitals, schools, homes of charity, pension funds, were
founded or endowed by him, while numerous public works in the shape of
wells, reservoirs, bridges, causeways, and the like, not only in Bombay,
but in other parts of India, were the creation of his bounty. The total
of his known benefactions amounted at the time of his death, which took
place in 1859, to over £230,000. It was not, however, the amount of his
charities so much as the period and circumstances in which they were
performed that made his benevolent career worthy of the fame he won. In
the first half of the 19th century the various communities of India were
much more isolated in their habits and their sympathies than they are
now. Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy's unsectarian philanthropy awakened a common
understanding and created a bond between them which has proved not only
of domestic value but has had a national and political significance. His
services were recognized first in 1842 by the bestowal of a knighthood
upon him, and in 1858 by that of a baronetcy. These were the very first
distinctions of their kind conferred by Queen Victoria upon a British
subject in India.
His title devolved in 1859 on his eldest son CURSETJEE, who, by a
special Act of the Viceroy's Council in pursuance of a provision in the
letters-patent, took the name of Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy as second
baronet. At his death in 1877 his eldest son, MENEKJEE, became Sir
Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, the third baronet. Both had the advantage of a
good English education, and continued the career of benevolent activity
and devoted loyalty to British rule which had signalized the life-work
of the founder of the family. They both visited England to do homage to
their sovereign; and their public services were recognized by their
nomination to the order of the Star of India, as well as by appointment
to the Legislative Councils of Calcutta and Bombay.
On the death of the third baronet, the title devolved upon his brother,
COWSAJEE (1853-1908), who became Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, fourth
baronet, and the recognized leader of the Parsee community all over the
world. He was succeeded by his son RUSTOMJEE (b. 1878), who became Sir
Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, fifth baronet.
Since their emigration from Persia, the Parsee community had never had a
titular chief or head, its communal funds and affairs being managed by a
public body, more or less democratic in its constitution, termed the
Parsee panchayat. The first Sir Jamsetjee, by the hold that he
established on the community, by his charities and public spirit,
gradually came to be regarded in the light of its chief; and the
recognition which he was the first in India to receive at the hands of
the British sovereign finally fixed him and his successors in the
baronetcy in the position and title of the official Parsee leader.
(M. M. Bh.)
JEFFERIES, RICHARD (1848-1887), English naturalist and author, was born
on the 6th of November 1848, at the farmhouse of Coate about 2½ m. from
Swindon, on the road to Marlborough. He was sent to school, first at
Sydenham and then at Swindon, till the age of fifteen or so, but his
actual education was at the hands of his father, who gave him his love
for Nature and taught him how to observe. For the faculty of
observation, as Jefferies, Gilbert White, and H. D. Thoreau have
remarked, several gifts are necessary, including the possession of long
sight and quick sight, two things which do not always go together. To
them must be joined trained sight and the knowledge of what to expect.
The boy's father first showed him what there was to look for in the
hedge, in the field, in the trees, and in the sky. This kind of training
would in many cases be wasted: to one who can understand it, the book of
Nature will by-and-by offer pages which are blurred and illegible to the
city-bred lad, and even to the country lad the power of reading them
must be maintained by constant practice. To live amid streets or in the
working world destroys it. The observer must live alone and always in
the country; he must not worry himself about the ways of the world; he
must be always, from day to day, watching the infinite changes and
variations of Nature. Perhaps, even when the observer can actually read
this book of Nature, his power of articulate speech may prove inadequate
for the expression of what he sees. But Jefferies, as a boy, was more
than an observer of the fields; he was bookish, and read all the books
that he could borrow or buy. And presently, as is apt to be the fate of
a bookish boy who cannot enter a learned profession, he became a
journalist and obtained a post on the local paper. He developed literary
ambitions, but for a long time to come was as one beating the air. He
tried local history and novels; but his early novels, which were
published at his own risk and expense, were, deservedly, failures. In
1872, however, he published a remarkable letter in _The Times_, on "The
Wiltshire Labourer," full of original ideas and of facts new to most
readers. This was in reality the turning-point in his career. In 1873,
after more false starts, Jefferies returned to his true field of work,
the life of the country, and began to write for _Fraser's Magazine_ on
"Farming and Farmers." He had now found himself. The rest of his history
is that of continual advance, from close observation becoming daily more
and more close, to that intimate communion with Nature with which his
later pages are filled. The developments of the later period are
throughout touched with the melancholy that belongs to ill-health. For,
though in his prose poem called "The Pageant of Summer" the writer seems
absolutely revelling in the strength of manhood that belongs to that
pageant, yet, in the _Story of My Heart_, written about the same time,
we detect the mind that is continually turned to death. He died at
Goring, worn out with many ailments, on the 14th of August 1887. The
best-known books of Richard Jefferies are: _The Gamekeeper at Home_
(1878); _The Story of My Heart_ (1883); _Life of the Fields_ (1884),
containing the best paper he ever wrote, "The Pageant of Summer";
_Amaryllis at the Fair_ (1884), in which may be found the portraits of
his own people; and _The Open Air_. He stands among the scanty company
of men who address a small audience, for whom he read aloud these pages
of Nature spoken of above, which only he, and the few like unto him, can
decipher.
See Sir Walter Besant, _Eulogy of Richard Jefferies_ (1888); H. S.
Salt, _Richard Jefferies: a Study_ (1894); Edward Thomas, _Richard
Jefferies, his Life and Work_ (1909). (W. Be.)
JEFFERSON, JOSEPH (1820-1905), American actor, was born in Philadelphia
on the 20th of February 1829. He was the third actor of this name in a
family of actors and managers, and the most famous of all American
comedians. At the age of three he appeared as the boy in Kotzebue's
_Pizarro_, and throughout his youth he underwent all the hardships
connected with theatrical touring in those early days. After a
miscellaneous experience, partly as actor, partly as manager, he won his
first pronounced success in 1858 as Asa Trenchard in Tom Taylor's _Our
American Cousin_ at Laura Keene's theatre in New York. This play was the
turning-point of his career, as it was of Sothern's. The naturalness and
spontaneity of humour with which he acted the love scenes revealed a
spirit in comedy new to his contemporaries, long used to a more
artificial convention; and the touch of pathos which the part required
revealed no less to the actor an unexpected power in himself. Other
early parts were Newman Noggs in _Nicholas Nickleby_, Caleb Plummer in
_The Cricket on the Hearth_, Dr Pangloss in _The Heir at Law_, Salem
Scudder in _The Octoroon_, and Bob Acres in _The Rivals_, the last being
not so much an interpretation of the character as Sheridan sketched it
as a creation of the actor's. In 1859 Jefferson made a dramatic version
of the story of _Rip Van Winkle_ on the basis of older plays, and acted
it with success at Washington. The play was given its permanent form by
Dion Boucicault in London, where (1865) it ran 170 nights, with
Jefferson in the leading part. Jefferson continued to act with
undiminished popularity in a limited number of parts in nearly every
town in the United States, his Rip Van Winkle, Bob Acres, and Caleb
Plummer being the most popular. He was one of the first to establish the
travelling combinations which superseded the old system of local stock
companies. With the exception of minor parts, such as the First
Gravedigger in _Hamlet_, which he played in an "all star combination"
headed by Edwin Booth, Jefferson created no new character after 1865;
and the success of Rip Van Winkle was so pronounced that he has often
been called a one-part actor. If this was a fault, it was the public's,
who never wearied of his one masterpiece. Jefferson died on the 23rd of
April 1905. No man in his profession was more honoured for his
achievements or his character. He was the friend of many of the leading
men in American politics, art and literature. He was an ardent fisherman
and lover of nature, and devoted to painting. Jefferson was twice
married: to an actress, Margaret Clements Lockyer (1832-1861), in 1850,
and in 1867 to Sarah Warren, niece of William Warren the actor.
Jefferson's _Autobiography_ (New York, 1889) is written with admirable
spirit and humour, and its judgments with regard to the art of the
actor and of the playwright entitle it to a place beside Cibber's
_Apology_. See William Winter, _The Jeffersons_ (1881), and _Life of
Joseph Jefferson_ (1894); Mrs. E. P. Jefferson, _Recollections of
Joseph Jefferson_ (1909).
JEFFERSON, THOMAS (1743-1826), third president of the United States of
America, and the most conspicuous apostle of democracy in America, was
born on the 13th of April 1743, at Shadwell, Albemarle county, Virginia.
His father, Peter Jefferson (1707-1757), of early Virginian yeoman
stock, was a civil engineer and a man of remarkable energy, who became a
justice of the peace, a county surveyor and a burgess, served the Crown
in inter-colonial boundary surveys, and married into one of the most
prominent colonial families, the Randolphs. Albemarle county was then in
the frontier wilderness of the Blue Ridge, and was very different,
socially, from the lowland counties where a few broad-acred families
dominated an open-handed, somewhat luxurious and assertive aristocracy.
Unlike his Randolph connexions, Peter Jefferson was a whig and a
thorough democrat; from him, and probably, too, from the Albemarle
environment, his son came naturally by democratic inclinations.
Jefferson carried with him from the college of William and Mary at
Williamsburg, in his twentieth year, a good knowledge of Latin, Greek
and French (to which he soon added Spanish, Italian and Anglo-Saxon),
and a familiarity with the higher mathematics and natural sciences only
possessed, at his age, by men who have a rare natural taste and ability
for those studies. He remained an ardent student throughout life, able
to give and take in association with the many scholars, American and
foreign, whom he numbered among his friends and correspondents. With a
liberal Scotsman, Dr William Small, then of the faculty of William and
Mary and later a friend of Erasmus Darwin, and George Wythe (1726-1806),
a very accomplished scholar and leader of the Virginia bar, Jefferson
was an habitual member, while still in college, of a _partie carrée_ at
the table of Francis Fauquier (c. 1720-1768), the accomplished
lieutenant-governor of Virginia. Jefferson was an expert violinist, a
good singer and dancer, proficient in outdoor sports, and an excellent
horseman. Thorough-bred horses always remained to him a necessary
luxury. When it is added that Fauquier was a passionate gambler, and
that the gentry who gathered every winter at Williamsburg, the seat of
government of the province, were ruinously addicted to the same
weakness, and that Jefferson had a taste for racing, it does credit to
his early strength of character that of his social opportunities he took
only the better. He never used tobacco, never played cards, never
gambled, and was never party to a personal quarrel.
Soon after leaving college he entered Wythe's law office, and in 1767,
after five years of close study, was admitted to the bar. His thorough
preparation enabled him to compete from the first with the leading
lawyers of the colony, and his success shows that the bar had no rewards
that were not fairly within his reach. As an advocate, however, he did
not shine; a weakness of voice made continued speaking impossible, and
he had neither the ability nor the temperament for oratory. To his legal
scholarship and collecting zeal Virginia owed the preservation of a
large part of her early statutes. He seems to have lacked interest in
litigiousness, which was extraordinarily developed in colonial
Virginia; and he saw and wished to reform the law's abuses. It is
probable that he turned, therefore, the more willingly to politics; at
any rate, soon after entering public life he abandoned practice (1774).
The death of his father had left him an estate of 1900 acres, the income
from which (about £400) gave him the position of an independent country
gentleman; and while engaged in the law he had added to his farms after
the ambitious Virginia fashion, until, when he married in his thirtieth
year, there were 5000 acres all paid for; and almost as much more[1]
came to him in 1773 on the death of his father-in-law. On the 1st of
January 1772, Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton (1749-1782), a
childless widow of twenty-three, very handsome, accomplished, and very
fond of music. Their married life was exceedingly happy, and Jefferson
never remarried after her early death. Of six children born from their
union, two daughters alone survived infancy. Jefferson was emotional and
very affectionate in his home, and his generous and devoted relations
with his children and grandchildren are among the finest features of his
character.
Jefferson began his public service as a justice of the peace and parish
vestryman; he was chosen a member of the Virginia house of burgesses in
1769 and of every succeeding assembly and convention of the colony until
he entered the Continental Congress in 1775. His forceful, facile pen
gave him great influence from the first; but though a foremost member of
several great deliberative bodies, he can fairly be said never to have
made a speech. He hated the "morbid rage of debate" because he believed
that men were never convinced by argument, but only by reflection,
through reading or unprovocative conversation; and this belief guided
him through life. Moreover it is very improbable that he could ever have
shone as a public speaker, and to this fact unfriendly critics have
attributed, at least in part, his abstention from debate. The house of
burgesses of 1769, and its successors in 1773 and 1774, were dissolved
by the governor (see VIRGINIA) for their action on the subject of
colonial grievances and inter-colonial co-operation. Jefferson was
prominent in all; was a signer of the Virginia agreement of
non-importation and economy (1769); and was elected in 1774 to the first
Virginia convention, called to consider the state of the colony and
advance inter-colonial union. Prevented by illness from attending,
Jefferson sent to the convention elaborate resolutions, which he
proposed as instructions to the Virginia delegates to the Continental
Congress that was to meet at Philadelphia in September. In the direct
language of reproach and advice, with no disingenuous loading of the
Crown's policy upon its agents, these resolutions attacked the errors of
the king, and maintained that "the relation between Great Britain and
these colonies was exactly the same as that of England and Scotland
after the accession of James and until the Union; and that our
emigration to this country gave England no more rights over us than the
emigration of the Danes and Saxons gave to the present authorities of
their mother country over England." This was cutting at the common root
of allegiance, emigration and colonization; but such radicalism was too
thorough-going for the immediate end. The resolutions were published,
however, as a pamphlet, entitled _A Summary View of the Rights of
America_, which was widely circulated. In England, after receiving such
modifications--attributed to Burke--as adapted it to the purposes of the
opposition, this pamphlet ran through many editions, and procured for
its author, as he said, "the honour of having his name inserted in a
long list of proscriptions enrolled in a bill of attainder commenced in
one of the two houses of parliament, but suppressed in embryo by the
hasty course of events." It placed Jefferson among the foremost leaders
of revolution, and procured for him the honour of drafting, later, the
Declaration of Independence, whose historical portions were, in large
part, only a revised transcript of the _Summary View_. In June 1775 he
took his seat in the Continental Congress, taking with him fresh
credentials of radicalism in the shape of Virginia's answer, which he
had drafted, to Lord North's conciliatory propositions. Jefferson soon
drafted the reply of Congress to the same propositions. Reappointed to
the next Congress, he signalized his service by the authorship of the
Declaration of Independence (q.v.). Again reappointed, he surrendered
his seat, and after refusing a proffered election to serve as a
commissioner with Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane in France, he
entered again, in October 1776, the Virginia legislature, where he
considered his services most needed.
The local work to which Jefferson attributed such importance was a
revision of Virginia's laws. Of the measures proposed to this end he
says: "I considered four, passed or reported, as forming a system by
which every trace would be eradicated of ancient or future aristocracy,
and a foundation laid for a government truly republican"--the repeal of
the laws of entail; the abolition of primogeniture and the unequal
division of inheritances (Jefferson was himself an eldest son); the
guarantee of freedom of conscience and relief of the people from
supporting, by taxation, an established church; and a system of general
education. The first object was embodied in law in 1776, the second in
1785, the third[2] in 1786 (supplemented 1799, 1801). The last two were
parts of a body of codified laws prepared (1776-1779) by Edmund
Pendleton,[3] George Wythe, and Jefferson, and principally by Jefferson.
Not so fortunate were Jefferson's ambitious schemes of education.
District, grammar and classical schools, a free state library and a
state college, were all included in his plan. He was the first American
statesman to make education by the state a fundamental article of
democratic faith. His bill for elementary education he regarded as the
most important part of the code, but Virginia had no strong middle
class, and the planters would not assume the burden of educating the
poor. At this time Jefferson championed the natural right of
expatriation, and gradual emancipation of the slaves. His earliest
legislative effort, in the five-day session of 1769, had been marked by
an effort to secure to masters freedom to manumit their slaves without
removing them from the state. It was unsuccessful, and the more radical
measure he now favoured was even more impossible of attainment; but a
bill he introduced to prohibit the importation of slaves was passed in
1778--the only important change effected in the slave system of the
state during the War of Independence. Finally he endeavoured, though
unsuccessfully, to secure the introduction of juries into the courts of
chancery, and--a generation and more before the fruition of the labours
of Romilly and his co-workers in England--aided in securing a
humanitarian revision of the penal code,[4] which, though lost by one
vote in 1785, was sustained by public sentiment, and was adopted in
1796. Jefferson is of course not entitled to the sole credit for all
these services: Wythe, George Mason and James Madison, in particular,
were his devoted lieutenants, and--after his departure for France--the
principals in the struggle; moreover, an approving public opinion must
receive large credit. But Jefferson was throughout the chief inspirer
and foremost worker.
In 1779, at almost the gloomiest stage of the war in the southern
states, Jefferson succeeded Patrick Henry as the governor of Virginia,
being the second to hold that office after the organization of the state
government. In his second term (1780-1781) the state was overrun by
British expeditions, and Jefferson, a civilian, was blamed for the
ineffectual resistance. Though he cannot be said to have been eminently
fitted for the task that devolved upon him in such a crisis, most of the
criticism of his administration was undoubtedly grossly unjust. His
conduct being attacked, he declined renomination for the governorship,
but was unanimously returned by Albemarle as a delegate to the state
legislature; and on the day previously set for legislative inquiry on a
resolution offered by an impulsive critic, he received, by unanimous
vote of the house, a declaration of thanks and confidence. He wished
however to retire permanently from public life, a wish strengthened by
the illness and death of his wife. At this time he composed his _Notes
on Virginia_, a semi-statistical work full of humanitarian liberalism.
Congress twice offered him an appointment as one of the
plenipotentiaries to negotiate peace with England, but, though he
accepted the second offer, the business was so far advanced before he
could sail that his appointment was recalled. During the following
winter (1783) he was again in Congress, and headed the committee
appointed to consider the treaty of peace. In the succeeding session his
service was marked by a report, from which resulted the present monetary
system of the United States (the fundamental idea of its decimal basis
being due, however, to Gouverneur Morris); and by the honour of
reporting the first definitely formulated plan for the government of the
western territories,[5] that embodied in the ordinance of 1784. He was
already particularly associated with the great territory north-west of
the Ohio; for Virginia had tendered to Congress in 1781, while Jefferson
was governor, a cession of her claims to it, and now in 1784 formally
transferred the territory by act of Jefferson and his fellow delegates
in congress: a consummation for which he had laboured from the
beginning. His anti-slavery opinions grew in strength with years (though
he was somewhat inconsistent in his attitude on the Missouri question in
1820-1821). Not only justice but patriotism as well pleaded with him the
cause of the negroes,[6] for he foresaw the certainty that the race must
some day, in some way, be freed, and the dire political dangers involved
in the institution of slavery; and could any feasible plan of
emancipation have been suggested he would have regarded its cost as a
mere bagatelle.
From 1784 to 1789 Jefferson was in France, first under an appointment to
assist Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in negotiating treaties of
commerce with European states, and then as Franklin's successor
(1785-1789) as minister to France.[7] In these years he travelled widely
in western Europe. Though the commercial principles of the United States
were far too liberal for acceptance, as such, by powers holding colonies
in America, Jefferson won some specific concessions to American trade.
He was exceedingly popular as a minister. The criticism is even to-day
current with the uninformed that Jefferson took his manners,[8] morals,
"irreligion" and political philosophy from his French residence; and it
cannot be wholly ignored. It may therefore be said that there is nothing
except unsubstantiated scandal to contradict the conclusion, which
various evidence supports, that Jefferson's morals were pure. His
religious views and political beliefs will be discussed later. His
theories had a deep and broad basis in English whiggism; and though he
may well have found at least confirmation of his own ideas in French
writers--and notably in Condorcet--he did not read sympathetically the
writers commonly named, Rousseau and Montesquieu; besides, his democracy
was seasoned, and he was rather a teacher than a student of
revolutionary politics when he went to Paris. The _Notes on Virginia_
were widely read in Paris, and undoubtedly had some influence in
forwarding the dissolution of the doctrines of divine rights and passive
obedience among the cultivated classes of France. Jefferson was deeply
interested in all the events leading up to the French Revolution, and
all his ideas were coloured by his experience of the five seething years
passed in Paris. On the 3rd of June 1789 he proposed to the leaders of
the third estate a compromise between the king and the nation. In July
he received the extraordinary honour of being invited to assist in the
deliberations of the committee appointed by the national assembly to
draft a constitution. This honour his official position compelled him,
of course, to decline; for he sedulously observed official proprieties,
and in no way gave offence to the government to which he was accredited.
When Jefferson left France it was with the intention of soon returning;
but President Washington tendered him the secretaryship of state in the
new federal government, and Jefferson reluctantly accepted. His only
essential objection to the constitution--the absence of a bill of
rights--was soon met, at least partially, by amendments. Alexander
Hamilton (q.v.) was secretary of the treasury. These two men, antipodal
in temperament and political belief, clashed in irreconcilable
hostility, and in the conflict of public sentiment, first on the
financial measures of Hamilton, and then on the questions with regard to
France and Great Britain, Jefferson's sympathies being predominantly
with the former, Hamilton's with the latter, they formed about
themselves the two great parties of Democrats and Federalists. The
schools of thought for which they stood have since contended for mastery
in American politics: Hamilton's gradually strengthened by the
necessities of stronger administration, as time gave widening amplitude
and increasing weight to the specific powers--and so to Hamilton's great
doctrine of the "implied powers"--of the general government of a growing
country; Jefferson's rooted in colonial life, and buttressed by the
hopes and convictions of democracy.
The most perplexing questions treated by Jefferson as secretary of state
arose out of the policy of neutrality adopted by the United States
toward France, to whom she was bound by treaties and by a heavy debt of
gratitude. Separation from European politics--the doctrine of "America
for Americans" that was embodied later in the Monroe declaration--was a
tenet cherished by Jefferson as by other leaders (not, however,
Hamilton) and by none cherished more firmly, for by nature he was
peculiarly opposed to war, and peace was a fundamental part of his
politics. However deep, therefore, his French sympathies, he drew the
same safe line as did Washington between French politics and American
politics,[9] and handled the Genet complications to the satisfaction of
even the most partisan Federalists. He expounded, as a very high
authority has said, "with remarkable clearness and power the nature and
scope of neutral duty," and gave a "classic" statement of the doctrine
of recognition.[10]
But the French question had another side in its reaction on American
parties.[11] Jefferson did not read excesses in Paris as warnings
against democracy, but as warnings against the abuses of monarchy; nor
did he regard Bonaparte's _coup d'état_ as revealing the weakness of
republics, but rather as revealing the danger of standing armies; he did
not look on the war of the coalitions against France as one of mere
powers, but as one between forms of government; and though the immediate
fruits of the Revolution belied his hopes, as they did those of ardent
humanitarians the world over, he saw the broad trend of history, which
vindicated his faith that a successful reformation of government in
France would insure "a general reformation through Europe, and the
resurrection to a new life of their people." Each of these statements
could be reversed as regards Hamilton. It is the key to an understanding
of the times to remember that the War of Independence had disjointed
society; and democracy--which Jefferson had proclaimed in the
Declaration of Independence, and enthroned in Virginia--after
strengthening its rights by the sword, had run to excesses, particularly
in the Shays' rebellion, that produced a conservative reaction. To this
reaction Hamilton explicitly appealed in the convention of 1787; and of
this reaction various features of the constitution, and Hamiltonian
federalism generally, were direct fruits. Moreover, independently of
special incentives to the alarmist and the man of property, the opinions
of many Americans turned again, after the war, into a current of
sympathy for England, as naturally as American commerce returned to
English ports. Jefferson, however, far from America in these years and
unexposed to reactionary influences, came back with undiminished fervour
of democracy, and the talk he heard of praise for England, and fearful
recoil before even the beginning of the revolution in France,
disheartened him, and filled him with suspicion.[12] Hating as he did
feudal class institutions and Tudor-Stuart traditions of arbitrary
rule,[13] his attitude can be imagined toward Hamilton's oft-avowed
partialities--and Jefferson assumed, his intrigues--for British
class-government with its eighteenth-century measure of corruption. In
short, Hamilton took from recent years the lesson of the evils of lax
government; whereas Jefferson clung to the other lesson, which crumbling
colonial governments had illustrated, that governments derived their
strength (and the Declaration had proclaimed that they derived their
just rights) from the will of the governed. Each built his system
accordingly: the one on the basis of order, the other on
individualism--which led Jefferson to liberty alike in religion and in
politics. The two men and the fate of the parties they led are
understandable only by regarding one as the leader of reaction, the
other as in line with the American tendencies. The educated classes
characteristically furnished Federalism with a remarkable body of
alarmist leaders; and thus it happened that Jefferson, because, with
only a few of his great contemporaries, he had a thorough trust and
confidence in the people, became the idol of American democracy.
As Hamilton was somewhat officious and very combative, and Jefferson,
although uncontentious, very suspicious and quite independent, both men
holding inflexibly to opinions, cabinet harmony became impossible when
the two secretaries had formed parties about them and their differences
were carried into the newspapers;[14] and Washington abandoned perforce
his idea "if parties did exist to reconcile them." Partly from
discontent with a position in which he did not feel that he enjoyed the
absolute confidence of the president,[15] and partly because of the
embarrassed condition of his private affairs, Jefferson repeatedly
sought to resign, and finally on the 31st of December 1793, with
Washington's reluctant consent, gave up his portfolio and retired to his
home at Monticello, near Charlottesville.
Here he remained improving his estate (having refused a foreign mission)
until elected vice-president in 1796. Jefferson was never truly happy
except in the country. He loved gardening, experimented enthusiastically
in varieties and rotations of crops and kept meteorological tables with
diligence. For eight years he tabulated with painful accuracy the
earliest and latest appearance of thirty-seven vegetables in the
Washington market. When abroad he sought out varieties of grasses,
trees, rice and olives for American experiment, and after his return
from France received yearly for twenty-three years, from his old friend
the superintendent of the _Jardin des plantes_, a box of seeds, which he
distributed to public and private gardens throughout the United States.
Jefferson seems to have been the first discoverer of an exact formula
for the construction of mould-boards of least resistance for ploughs. He
managed to make practical use of his calculus about his farms, and seems
to have been remarkably apt in the practical application of mechanical
principles.
In the presidential election of 1796 John Adams, the Federalist
candidate, received the largest number of electoral votes, and
Jefferson, the Republican candidate, the next largest number, and under
the law as it then existed the former became president and the latter
vice-president. Jefferson re-entered public life with reluctance, though
doubtless with keen enough interest and resolution. He had rightly
measured the strength of his followers, and was waiting for the
government to "drift into unison" with the republican sense of its
constituents, predicting that President Adams would be "overborne"
thereby. This prediction was speedily fulfilled. At first the reign of
terror and the X. Y. Z. disclosures strengthened the Federalists, until
these, mistaking the popular resentment against France for a reaction
against democracy--an equivalence in their own minds--passed the alien
and sedition laws. In answer to those odious measures Jefferson and
Madison prepared and procured the passage of the Kentucky and Virginia
resolutions. These resolutions later acquired extraordinary and
pernicious prominence in the historical elaboration of the
states'-rights doctrine. It is, however, unquestionably true, that as a
startling protest against measures "to silence," in Jefferson's words,
"by force and not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or
unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of our agents," they served,
in this respect, a useful purpose; and as a counterblast against
Hamiltonian principles of centralization they were probably, at that
moment, very salutary; while even as pieces of constitutional
interpretation it is to be remembered that they did not contemplate
nullification by any single state, and, moreover, are not to be judged
by constitutional principles established later by courts and war. The
Federalist party had ruined itself, and it lost the presidential
election of 1800. The Republican candidates, Jefferson and Aaron Burr
(q.v.), receiving equal votes, it devolved upon the House of
Representatives, in accordance with the system which then obtained, to
make one of the two president, the other vice-president. Party feeling
in America has probably never been more dangerously impassioned than in
the three years preceding this election; discount as one will the
contrary obsessions of men like Fisher Ames, Hamilton and Jefferson, the
time was fateful. Unable to induce Burr to avow Federalist principles,
influential Federalists, in defiance of the constitution, contemplated
the desperate alternative of preventing an election, and appointing an
extra-constitutional (Federalist) president _pro tempore_. Better
counsels, however, prevailed; Hamilton used his influence in favour of
Jefferson as against Burr, and Jefferson became president, entering upon
his duties on the 4th of March 1801. Republicans who had affiliated with
the Federalists at the time of the X. Y. Z. disclosures returned; very
many of the Federalists themselves Jefferson placated and drew over.
"Believing," he wrote, "that (excepting the ardent monarchists) all our
citizens agreed in ancient whig principles"--or, as he elsewhere
expressed it, in "republican forms"--"I thought it advisable to define
and declare them, and let them see the ground on which we can rally."
This he did in his inaugural, which, though somewhat rhetorical, is a
splendid and famous statement of democracy.[16] His conciliatory policy
produced a mild schism in his own party, but proved eminently wise, and
the state elections of 1801 fulfilled his prophecy of 1791 that the
policy of the Federalists would leave them "all head and no body." In
1804 he was re-elected by 162 out of 176 votes.
Jefferson's administrations were distinguished by the simplicity that
marked his conduct in private life. He eschewed the pomp and ceremonies,
natural inheritances from English origins, that had been an innocent
setting to the character of his two noble predecessors. His dress was of
"plain cloth" on the day of his inauguration. Instead of driving to the
Capitol in a coach and six, he walked without a guard or servant from
his lodgings--or, as a rival tradition has it, he rode, and hitched his
horse to a neighbouring fence--attended by a crowd of citizens. Instead
of opening Congress with a speech to which a formal reply was expected,
he sent in a written message by a private hand. He discontinued the
practice of sending ministers abroad in public vessels. Between himself
and the governors of states he recognized no difference in rank. He
would not have his birthday celebrated by state balls. The weekly levée
was practically abandoned. Even such titles as "Excellency,"
"Honourable," "Mr" were distasteful to him. It was formally agreed in
cabinet meeting that "when brought together in society, all are
perfectly equal, whether foreign or domestic, titled or untitled, in or
out of office." Thus diplomatic grades were ignored in social precedence
and foreign relations were seriously compromised by dinner-table
complications. One minister who appeared in gold lace and dress sword
for his first, and regularly appointed, official call on the president,
was received--as he insisted with studied purpose--by Jefferson in
negligent undress and slippers down at the heel. All this was in part
premeditated system[17]--a part of Jefferson's purpose to republicanize
the government and public opinion, which was the distinguishing feature
of his administration; but it was also simply the nature of the man. In
the company he chose by preference, honesty and knowledge were his only
tests. He knew absolutely no social distinctions in his willingness to
perform services for the deserving. He held up to his daughter as an
especial model the family of a poor but gifted mechanic as one wherein
she would see "the best examples of rational living." "If it be
possible," he said, "to be certainly conscious of anything, I am
conscious of feeling no difference between writing to the highest and
lowest being on earth."
Jefferson's first administration was marked by a reduction of the army,
navy, diplomatic establishment and, to the uttermost, of governmental
expenses; some reduction of the civil service, accompanied by a large
shifting of offices to Republicans; and, above all, by the Louisiana
Purchase (q.v.), following which Meriwether Lewis and William Clark,
sent by Jefferson, conducted their famous exploring expedition across
the continent to the Pacific (see LEWIS, MERIWETHER). Early in his term
he carried out a policy he had urged upon the government when minister
to France and when vice-president, by dispatching naval forces to coerce
Tripoli into a decent respect for the trade of his country--the first in
Christendom to gain honourable immunity from tribute or piracy in the
Mediterranean. The Louisiana Purchase, although the greatest
"inconsistency" of his career, was also an illustration, in
corresponding degree, of his essential practicality, and one of the
greatest proofs of his statesmanship. It was the crowning achievement of
his administration. It is often said that Jefferson established the
"spoils system" by his changes in the civil service. He was the
innovator, because for the first time there was opportunity for
innovation. But mere justice requires attention to the fact that
incentive to that innovation, and excuse for it, were found in the
absolute one-party monopoly maintained by the Federalists. Moreover,
Jefferson's ideals were high; his reasons for changes were in general
excellent; he at least so far resisted the great pressure for
office--producing by his resistance dissatisfaction within his party--as
not to have lowered, apparently, the personnel of the service; and there
were no such blots on his administration as President Adams's "midnight
judges." Nevertheless, his record here was not clear of blots, showing a
few regrettable inconsistencies.[18] Among important but secondary
measures of his second administration were the extinguishment of Indian
titles, and promotion of Indian emigration to lands beyond the
Mississippi; reorganization of the militia; fortification of the
seaports; reduction of the public debt; and a simultaneous reduction of
taxes. But his second term derives most of its historical interest from
the unsuccessful efforts to convict Aaron Burr of treasonable acts in
the south-west, and from the efforts made to maintain, without war, the
rights of neutrals on the high seas. In his diplomacy with Napoleon and
Great Britain Jefferson betrayed a painful incorrigibility of optimism.
A national policy of "growling before fighting"--later practised
successfully enough by the United States--was not then possible; and one
writer has very justly said that what chiefly affects one in the whole
matter is the pathos of it--"a philosopher and a friend of peace
struggling with a despot of superhuman genius, and a Tory cabinet of
superhuman insolence and stolidity" (Trent). It is possible to regard
the embargo policy dispassionately as an interesting illustration of
Jefferson's love of peace. The idea--a very old one with Jefferson--was
not entirely original; in essence it received other attempted
applications in the Napoleonic period--and especially in the continental
blockade. Jefferson's statesmanship had the limitations of an agrarian
outlook. The extreme to which he carried his advocacy of diplomatic
isolation, his opposition to the creation of an adequate navy,[19] his
estimate of cities as "sores upon the body politic," his prejudice
against manufactures, trust in farmers, and political distrust of the
artisan class, all reflect them.
When, on the 4th of March 1809, Jefferson retired from the presidency,
he had been almost continuously in the public service for forty years.
He refused to be re-elected for a third time, though requested by the
legislatures of five states to be a candidate; and thus, with
Washington's prior example, helped to establish a precedent deemed by
him to be of great importance under a democratic government. His
influence seemed scarcely lessened in his retirement. Madison and
Monroe, his immediate successors--neighbours and devoted friends, whom
he had advised in their early education and led in their maturer
years--consulted him on all great questions, and there was no break of
principles in the twenty-four years of the "Jeffersonian system."
Jefferson was one of the greatest political managers his country has
known. He had a quick eye for character, was genuinely amiable,
uncontentious, tactful, masterful; and it may be assumed from his
success that he was wary or shrewd to a degree. It is true, moreover,
that, unless tested by a few unchanging principles, his acts were often
strikingly inconsistent; and even when so tested, not infrequently
remain so in appearance. Full explanations do not remove from some
important transactions in his political life an impression of
indirectness. But reasonable judgment must find very unjust the stigma
of duplicity put upon him by the Federalists. Measured by the records of
other men equally successful as political leaders, there seems little of
this nature to criticize severely. Jefferson had the full courage of his
convictions. Extreme as were his principles, his pertinacity in adhering
to them and his independence of expression were quite as extreme. There
were philosophic and philanthropic elements in his political faith which
will always lead some to class him as a visionary and fanatic; but
although he certainly indulged at times in dreams at which one may still
smile, he was not, properly speaking, a visionary; nor can he with
justice be stigmatized as a fanatic. He felt fervently, was not afraid
to risk all on the conclusions to which his heart and his mind led him,
declared himself with openness and energy; and he spoke and even wrote
his conclusions, how ever bold or abstract, without troubling to detail
his reasoning or clip his off-hand speculations. Certain it is that
there is much in his utterances for a less robust democracy than his own
to cavil at.[20] Soar, however, as he might, he was essentially not a
doctrinaire, but an empiricist; his mind was objective. Though he
remained, to the end, firm in his belief that there had been an active
monarchist party,[21] this obsession did not carry him out of touch with
the realities of human nature and of his time. He built with surety on
the colonial past, and had a better reasoned view of the actual future
than had any of his contemporaries.
Events soon appraised the ultra-Federalist judgment of American
democracy, so tersely expressed by Fisher Ames as "like death ... only
the dismal passport to a more dismal hereafter"; and, with it, appraised
Jefferson's word in his first inaugural for those who, "in the full tide
of successful experiment," were ready to abandon a government that had
so far kept them "free and firm, on the visionary fear that it might by
possibility lack energy to preserve itself." Time soon tested, too, his
principle that that government must prove the strongest on earth "where
every man ... would meet invasions of the public order as his own
personal concern." He summed up as follows the difference between
himself and the Hamiltonian group: "One feared most the ignorance of the
people; the other the selfishness of rulers independent of them."
Jefferson, in short, had unlimited faith in the honesty of the people; a
large faith in their common sense; believed that all is to be won by
appealing to the reason of voters; that by education their ignorance can
be eliminated; that human nature is indefinitely perfectible; that
majorities rule, therefore, not only by virtue of force (which was
Locke's ultimate justification of them), but of right.[22] His
importance as a maker of modern America can scarcely be overstated, for
the ideas he advocated have become the very foundations of American
republicanism. His administration ended the possibility, probability or
certainty--measure it as one will--of the development of Federalism in
the direction of class government; and the party he formed, inspired by
the creed he gave it, fixed the democratic future of the nation. And by
his own labours he had vindicated his faith in the experiment of
self-government.
Jefferson's last years were devoted to the establishment of the
university of Virginia at Charlottesville, near his home. He planned the
buildings, gathered its faculty--mainly from abroad--and shaped its
organization. Practically all the great ideas of aim, administration and
curriculum that dominated American universities at the end of the 19th
century were anticipated by him. He hoped that the university might be a
dominant influence in national culture, but circumstances crippled it.
His educational plans had been maturing in his mind since 1776. His
financial affairs in these last years gave him grave concern. His fine
library of over 10,000 volumes was purchased at a low price by Congress
in 1815, and a national contribution ($16,500) just before his death
enabled him to die in peace. Though not personally extravagant, his
salary, and the small income from his large estates, never sufficed to
meet his generous maintenance of his representative position; and after
his retirement from public life the numerous visitors to Monticello
consumed the remnants of his property. He died on the 4th of July 1826,
the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, on the same
day as John Adams. He chose for his tomb the epitaph: "Here was buried
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of
the statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and father of the
university of Virginia."
Jefferson was about 6 ft. in height, large-boned, slim, erect and
sinewy. He had angular features, a very ruddy complexion, sandy hair,
and hazel-flecked, grey eyes. Age lessened the unattractiveness of his
exterior. In later years he was negligent in dress and loose in
bearing. There was grace, nevertheless, in his manners; and his frank
and earnest address, his quick sympathy (yet he seemed cold to
strangers), his vivacious, desultory, informing talk, gave him an
engaging charm. Beneath a quiet surface he was fairly aglow with
intense convictions and a very emotional temperament. Yet he seems to
have acted habitually, in great and little things, on system. His
mind, no less trenchant and subtle than Hamilton's, was the most
impressible, the most receptive, mind of his time in America. The
range of his interests is remarkable. For many years he was president
of the American philosophical society. Though it is a biographical
tradition that he lacked wit, Molière and _Don Quixote_ seem to have
been his favourites; and though the utilitarian wholly crowds
romanticism out of his writings, he had enough of that quality in
youth to prepare to learn Gaelic in order to translate Ossian, and
sent to Macpherson for the originals! His interest in art was
evidently intellectual. He was singularly sweet-tempered, and shrank
from the impassioned political bitterness that raged about him; bore
with relative equanimity a flood of coarse and malignant abuse of his
motives, morals, religion,[23] personal honesty and decency; cherished
very few personal animosities; and better than any of his great
antagonists cleared political opposition of ill-blooded personality.
In short, his kindness of heart rose above all social, religious or
political differences, and nothing destroyed his confidence in men and
his sanguine views of life.
AUTHORITIES.--See the editions of Jefferson's _Writings_ by H. A.
Washington (9 vols., New York, 1853-1854), and--the best--by Paul
Leicester Ford (10 vols., New York, 1892-1899); letters in
Massachusetts Historical Society, _Collections_, series 7, vol. i.; S.
E. Forman, _The Letters and Writings of Thomas Jefferson, including
all his Important Utterances on Public Questions_ (1900); J. P. Foley,
_The Jefferson Cyclopaedia_ (New York, 1900); the _Memoir,
Correspondence_, &c., by T. J. Randolph (4 vols., Charlottesville,
Va., 1829); biographies by James Schouler ("Makers of America Series,"
New York, 1893); John T. Morse ("American Statesmen Series," Boston,
1883); George Tucker (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1837); James Parton
(Boston, 1874); and especially that by Henry S. Randall (3 vols., New
York, 1853), a monumental work, although marred by some special
pleading, and sharing Jefferson's implacable opinions of the
"Monocrats." See also Henry Adams, _History of the United States
1801-1817_, vols. 1-4 (New York, 1889-1890); Herbert B. Adams, _Thomas
Jefferson and the University of Virginia_ (U. S. bureau of education,
Washington, 1888); Sarah N. Randolph, _Domestic Life of Thomas
Jefferson_ (New York, 1871); and an illuminating appreciation by W. P.
Trent, in his _Southern Statesmen of the Old Régime_ (New York, 1897);
that by John Fiske, Essays, _Historical and Literary_, vol. i. (New
York, 1902), has slighter merits. (F. S. P.)