Henry Childs Merwin

“ Perhaps the fundamental error in Jefferson’s theory was that nations are governed mainly by motives of self-interest. He thought that England would cease to legislate against American commerce, when it was once made plain that such a course was prejudicial to her own interests. But nations, like individuals, are influenced in their relations to others far more by pride and patriotism, and even by prejudice, than by material self-interest. The only way in which America could win respect and fair treatment from Europe was by fighting, or [pg 146] at least by showing a perfect readiness to fight. ”

“ This was no small advantage to men who were called upon to act as founders of a republic different indeed from the republics of Greece and Rome, but still based upon the same principles, and demanding an exercise of the same heroic virtues. The American Revolution would never have cut quite the figure in the world which history assigns to it, had it not been conducted with a kind of classic dignity and decency; and to this result nobody contributed more than Jefferson.
Such was Virginia in the eighteenth century,—at the base of society, the slaves ”

“ No nation ever yet achieved glory or incurred destruction by taking one course rather than another in a matter of trade or finance. The crucial questions are moral questions, and experience has shown that as to such matters the people can be trusted. As Jefferson himself said, “The will of the majority, the natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man. ”

“ Among the best emotions that human nature knows is the veneration of man for man. This recognition of the public opinion of the world—the sum of human sense—as the final arbiter in all such controversies is the single phrase of the document which Jefferson alone, perhaps, of all the Congress, could have originated; and in point of merit it was worth all the rest.”
Franklin and John Adams, who were on the committee with Jefferson, made a few verbal changes in his draught of the Declaration, and it was then discussed and reviewed by Congress for three days. ”

“ He may have derived his political ideas in part from the French philosophical writers of the eighteenth century, although there is no evidence to that effect; but he was certainly the first statesman to grasp the idea of democracy as a form of government, just as, at a later day, Walt Whitman was the first poet to grasp the idea of equality as a social system. Hamilton, John Adams, Pinckney, Gouverneur Morris, even Washington himself, all believed that popular government would be unsafe and revolutionary unless held in check by a strong executive and by an aristocratic senate. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There was a largeness of temper and of feeling in the Virginia aristocracy, which seems to be inseparable from people living in a new country, upon the outskirts of civilization. They had the pride of birth, but they recognized other claims to consideration, and were as far as possible from estimating a man according to the amount of his wealth.
Slavery itself was probably a factor for good in the character of such a man as Jefferson,—it afforded a daily exercise in the virtues of benevolence and self-control. ”

“ A nation cannot obtain justice by submitting to wrongs or insults even for a time. Jefferson himself had written long before: “I think it is our interest to punish the first insult, because an insult unpunished is the parent of many others.” ”

“ These excursions among the French peasantry, who, as Jefferson well knew, were ruinously taxed in order to support an extravagant court and an idle and insolent nobility, made him a fierce Republican. “There is not a crowned head in Europe,” he wrote to General Washington, in 1788, “whose talents or merits would entitle him to be elected a vestryman by the people of America.”
But for the French race Jefferson had an affinity. He was glad to live with people among whom, as he said, “a man might pass a life without encountering a single rudeness.” ”

“ There are many examples of this rhetorical art in Jefferson’s writings, but the most notable one occurs in the noble first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” ”

“ Hamilton and his party utterly disbelieved in government by the people.2 John Adams declared that the English Constitution, barring its element of corruption, was an ideal constitution. Hamilton went farther and asserted that the English form of government, corruption and all, was the best practicable form. An aristocratic senate, chosen for a long term, if not for life, was thought to be essential even by Mr. Adams. Hamilton’s notion was that mankind were incapable of self-government, and must be governed in one or two ways,—by force or by fraud. ”

“ He found time also for riding, for music, and dancing; and in his twentieth year he became enamored of Miss Rebecca Burwell, a Williamsburg belle more distinguished, tradition reports, for beauty than for cleverness. But Jefferson was not yet in a position to marry,—he even contemplated a foreign tour; and the girl, somewhat abruptly, married another lover. The wound seems not to have been a deep one. Jefferson, in fact, though he found his chief happiness in family affection, and though capable of strong and lasting attachments, was not the man for a romantic passion. ”

“ XII A PUBLIC MAN IN PRIVATE LIFE Jefferson’s second term as President ended March 4, 1809, and during the rest of his life he lived at Monticello, with occasional visits to his more retired estate at Poplar Forest, and to the homes of his friends, but never going beyond the confines of Virginia. Just before leaving Washington, he had written: “Never did a prisoner released from his chains feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power. Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science by rendering them my supreme delight. ”

“ And Jefferson’s lifelong endeavor was to enable the people to form this “right understanding” by educating them. His ideas of the scope of public education went far beyond those which prevailed in his time, and considerably beyond those which prevail even now. For example, a free university course for the most apt pupils graduated at the grammar schools made part of his scheme,—an idea most nearly realized in the Western States; and those States received their impetus in educational matters from the Ordinance of 1787, which was largely the product of Jefferson’s foresight. ”

“ It does not seem to occur to him that a young man might require some stronger motive to keep his passions in check than could be furnished either by the wish to imitate a good example or by his “reasoning powers.” To Jefferson’s well-regulated mind the desire for approbation was a sufficient motive. He was particularly sensitive, perhaps morbidly so, to disapprobation. The respect, the good-will, the affection of his countrymen were so dear to him that the desire to retain them exercised a great, it may be at times, an undue influence upon him. ”

“ The Chesapeake affair, the right of impressment, the British decrees and orders directed against our commerce,—all these causes of offense had been tangled into a complication which no man could unravel. Retaliation on our part had become absolutely necessary. What form should it take? Jefferson rejected war, and proposed an embargo which prohibited commerce between the United States and Europe. The measure was bitterly opposed by the New England Federalists; but the President’s influence was so great that Congress adopted it almost without discussion. ”

“ Virginia society just before the Revolution perfectly illustrated Buckle’s remark about leisure: “Without leisure, science is impos [pg 21] sible; and when leisure has been won, most of the class possessing it will waste it in the pursuit of pleasure, and a few will employ it in the pursuit of knowledge.” Men like Jefferson, George Wythe, and Madison used their leisure for the good of their fellow-beings and for the cultivation of their minds; whereas the greater part of the planters—and the poor whites imitated them—spent their ample leisure in sports, in drinking, and in absolute idleness. ”

“ All aristocratic systems must, in the last analysis, be founded either upon brute force or else upon the assumption that education and morality go hand-in-hand, and that the well-to-do and best educated class is morally superior to the less educated. Jefferson rejected this assumption, and all real believers in democracy must take their stand with him. ”

“ 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;” ”

“ Jefferson’s first important act as President was to dispatch to the Mediterranean three frigates and a sloop-of-war to overawe the pirates, and to cruise in protection of American commerce. Thus began that series of events which finally rendered the commerce of the world as safe from piracy in the Mediterranean as it was in the British channel. How brilliantly Decatur and his gallant comrades carried out this policy, and how at last the tardy naval powers of Europe fol [pg 125] lowed an example which they ought to have set, every one is supposed to know. ”

“ On the other hand, his various schemes for making the government into an aristocracy instead of a democracy have all been abandoned, or, like the Electoral College, turned to a use the opposite of what he intended. So, Jefferson’s view of state rights has not strictly been maintained; but his fundamental principles of popular government and popular education have made the United States what it is, and are destined, we hope, when fully developed, to make it something better yet. ”

“ In the scheme of President Jefferson, non-intercourse was the substitute for war.... Failure of the embargo meant in his mind not only a recurrence to the practice of war, but to every political and social evil that war had always [pg 145] brought in its train. In such a case the crimes and corruptions of Europe, which had been the object of his political fears, must, as he believed, sooner or later, teem in the fat soil of America. To avert a disaster so vast was a proper motive for statesmanship, and justified disregard for smaller interests. ”

“ No one was more kind and just in the treatment of his slaves, but he did not free them, as George Wythe, perhaps foolishly, did; and he was even cautious about promulgating his views as to the folly and wickedness of slavery, though he did his [pg 27] best to promote its abolition by legislative measures. There was not in Jefferson the material for a martyr or a Don Quixote; but that was Nature’s fault, not his. It may be said of every particular man that there is a certain depth to which he cannot sink, and there is a certain height to which he cannot rise. ”

“ The truth is that an intellectual and moral revolution preceded in France the outbreak of the populace. There was an interior conviction that the government of the country was excessively unjust and oppressive. A love of liberty, a feeling of [pg 76] fraternity, a passion for equality moved the intellect and even the aristocracy of France. In this crisis the reformers looked toward America, for the United States had just trodden the path upon which France was entering. “Our proceedings,” wrote Jefferson to Madison in 1789, “have been viewed as a model for them on every occasion.... ”

“ It must be remembered that Jefferson’s absence in France had been the period of the Confederacy, when the inability of Congress to enforce its laws and to control the States was so evident and so disastrous that the need of a stronger central government had been impressed on men’s minds. ”

“ War might easily have been precipitated, had Jefferson been carried away by the popular excitement. He immediately dispatched a frigate to England demanding reparation, [pg 139] and he issued a proclamation forbidding all British men-of-war to enter the waters of the United States, unless in distress or bearing dispatches. Jefferson expected war, but he meant to delay it for a while.
To his son-in-law, John Eppes, he wrote: “Reason and the usage of civilized nations require that we should give them an opportunity of disavowal and reparation. ”

“ Edward Rutledge, Jefferson said: “You and I have formerly seen warm debates, and high political passions. But gentlemen of different politics would then speak to each other, and separate the business of the Senate from that of society. It is not so now. Men who have been intimate all their lives cross the street to avoid meeting, and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hats.”
These party feelings were intensified in the year 1798 by what is known as the X Y Z [pg 102] business. Mr. Adams had sent three commissioners to Paris to negotiate a treaty. ”