Jefferson Worth

“ And so it was that while James Greenfield and his fellow-capitalists of The King's Basin Land and Irrigation Company were taking their much needed vacations and seeking relaxation and rest from business cares at their seaside and mountain retreats, the desert pioneers were coming more and more to Jefferson Worth for advice and counsel, for strength and courage and help to go on with the work. By fall the financier's position in the life of the new country seemed to be securely won. Perhaps only Jefferson Worth himself, alone behind his gray mask, knew the real value of his apparent victory. ”

“ Jefferson, then, known of all men not fettered by provincial traditions as invested with this foresight and this faith, is become to a vast party an idol, and from his writings issue oracles. But the priests at his shrines, having waxed fat in honors, have at last so befogged his sentiments and wrested his arguments, that thousands of true men regard him sorrowfully as the promoter of that Slavery-Despotism which to-day blooms in treason. It is worth our while, therefore, to seek to know whether Jefferson the god of the Oligarchs is Jefferson the Democrat. ”

“ At the simple words Greenfield controlled himself, but his hatred for Jefferson Worth was very bitter. That he should fail to win in the business warfare with the western man was nothing, but that Worth—through his daughter—should rob him of the son that was more than a son to him was more than he could bear. ”

“ One was no more impossible than the other. Jefferson Worth he compared with the college and university friends of his father—with Mr. Greenfield and the New York-bred business men of his class, demanding that the western pioneer banker show the same characteristics that distinguished the cultured capitalists whose great-great-grandfathers were pioneers. Rubio City he saw in the light of those eastern cities that were founded in the days when men knew not that there was any world west of the Alleghanies. ”

“ Had we carried but our own produce, and brought back but our own wants, no nation would have troubled us. Our commercial dashers, then, have already cost us so many thousand lives, so many millions of dollars, more than their persons and all their commerce were worth. When war was declared, and especially after Massachusetts, who had produced it, took side with the enemy waging it, I pressed on some confidential friends in Congress to avail us of the happy opportunity of repealing the drawback ”

“ Daniel Parker, farther than having once seen him in Philadelphia. He is of Massachusetts, I believe, and I am of Virginia. His circumstances are utterly unknown to me. I think there are few men in America, if there is a single one, who could command a hundred thousand pounds’ sterling worth of these notes, at their real value. At their nominal amount, this might be done perhaps with twenty-five thousand pounds sterling, if the market price of them be as low as when I left America. ”

“ Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. 15 I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. ”

“ But no man is fit to be a soldier who cannot snatch the pleasures of the passing moment; and when the next day saw me out of doors, when I found myself established on the veranda and the view broke upon me, liquid with early sunshine, and my gaze travelled from the green slopes that fringed the farther bank of the creek to the wooded hills and so to the purple distances of the Blue Ridge—the boundary in those days of civilization—I felt that life was still worth living and worth preserving. ”

“ The mass of Americans had become democratic in thought as well as act; not even another political revolution could undo what had been done. As a democrat, Jefferson's social success was sweeping and final; but he was more than a democrat,—and in his other character, as a Virginia republican of the State-rights school, he was not equally successful. ”

“ Such was the programme of humdrum economy which President Jefferson laid before Congress. After the exciting campaign of 1800, when the public was assured that the forces of Darkness and Light were locked in deadly combat for the soul of the nation, this tame programme seemed like an anticlimax. But those who knew Thomas Jefferson learned to discount the vagaries to which he gave expression in conversation. As John Quincy Adams once remarked after listening to Jefferson's brilliant table talk, "Mr. Jefferson loves to excite wonder." ”

“ Men who had spent their lives in extending the British commerce, who had invested in that place, the wealth their honest endeavors had merited, found themselves and their families, thrown at once on the world, for subsistence by its charities. Not the hundredth part of the inhabitants of that town had been concerned in the act complained of; many of them were in Great Britain, and in other parts beyond sea; yet all were involved in one indiscriminate ruin, by a new executive power, unheard of till then, that of a British Parliament. ”

“ Jefferson himself was, next to Hamilton, the ablest statesman of the country,--upright, sincere, patriotic, contemplative; simple in taste, yet aristocratic in habits; a writer rather than an orator, ignorant of finance, but versed in history and general knowledge, devoted to State rights, and bitterly opposed to a strong central power. He hated titles, trappings of rank and of distinction, ostentatious dress, shoe-buckles, hair-powder, pig-tails, and everything English, while he loved France and the philosophy of liberal thinkers; not a religious man, but an honest and true man. ”

“ Happy that he is an honest, unambitious man, who desires neither money nor power for himself; and that his most operative minister, though he has appeared to trim a little, is still, in the main, a friend to public liberty.
I mentioned to you in a former letter, the construction which our bankers at Amsterdam had put on the resolution of Congress, appropriating the last Dutch loan, by which the money for our captives would not be furnished till the end of the year 1790. Orders from the board of treasury have now settled this question. ”

“ How well life was organized, he thought, as he found a softer spot in the pillow. Old age crept on a man unaware, bringing its own opiate to dull any lingering sense of loss.
At length, letting the weight of weariness have its way with him, Thomas Jefferson fell asleep. Martha Randolph, tiptoeing in later, shading a candle with her hand, saw his face upturned, eyes closed, nose pinched a little, some brown freckles standing out on the gray, drained cheeks, and caught the eagle look about him. ”

“ Nothing tended so directly to make respectability conservative, and conservatism a fetich of respectability, as this union of bench and pulpit. The democrat had no caste; he was not respecta­ble; he was a Jacobin,—and no such character was admitted into a Federalist house. Every dissolute intriguer, loose-liver, forger, false-coiner, and prison­bird; every hair-brained, loud-talking demagogue; every speculator, scoffer, and atheist,—was a fol­lower of Jefferson; and Jefferson was himself the incarnation of their theories. ”

“ Said Thomas Jefferson at length, slowly:
“So! You have come back with all happiness, all success, for me and for others—but not for yourself! Such proving as you have had has fallen to the lot of but few men. I know now how great has been the cost—I see it in your face. The fifteen millions I paid for yonder lands was nothing. We have bought them with the happiness of a human soul! The transient gratitude of this republic—the honor of that little paper—bah, they are nothing! But perhaps it may be something for you to know that at least one friend understands.”
Lewis did not speak. ”

“ They still make as much noise as if they were the whole nation." Such success might have turned the head of any philosopher that ever sat on a throne. Easily elated, unwilling to forebode trouble, devoid of humor, and unable to see himself in any but the heroic light, President Jefferson basked in the sunshine of popularity and power as though it were no passing warmth such as had led scores of kings into disaster, but shone by virtue of some democratic law which rested on truth that could never change. ”

“ He is a man of moderate understanding, of no principle, absorbed in low vice, and incapable of abstracting himself from the filth of that, to direct any thing else. His name and his money, therefore, are mere tools in the hands of those who are duping him.
They may produce a temporary confusion, and even a temporary civil war, supported, as they will be, by the money of England; but they cannot have success ultimately. The King, the mass of the substantial people of the whole country, the army, and the influential part of the clergy, form a firm phalanx which must prevail. ”

“ Let us, then, with the courage of Andrew Jackson, apply to present conditions the principles taught by Thomas Jefferson—Thomas Jefferson, the greatest constructive statesman whom the world has ever known; the greatest warrior who ever battled for human liberty. He quarried from the mountain of eternal truth the four pillars upon whose strength all popular government must rest. ”

“ A man of fine education and of noble, elevated character, he earned distinction among his fellows, and though opposed politically by many prominent statesmen of the day, who, like Washington, Hamilton, and Adams, were in favor of a strong centralized government, while Jefferson, in the interests of the masses, feared encroachments on State and individual liberty, he was nevertheless paid the respect, consideration, and regard of his generation, as his services have earned the gratitude and his memory the endearing commendation of posterity. ”

“ Your pet steward, Petit, is getting really fractious, Papa, and I have to keep the people cooking practically night and day. They look at this handsome house and believe that Thomas Jefferson is a rich man, that he can afford to entertain them—people we’ve never seen before and will likely never see again—and, Papa, you know it isn’t true. You aren’t rich enough to afford housing and feeding so many. The farms don’t pay as they should, and we are often hard pressed to feed and clothe our own people. ”

“ With ample pecuniary means—with talents equal to the work he had undertaken, his soul illuminated with the fire of patriotism—his indignation roused against the hirelings of the king—his sympathies excited by the sufferings of his country—his moral courage raised to the zenith of its glory—Mr. Jefferson was amply armed for the conflict and became one of the master spirits of the Revolution—a gigantic champion of universal freedom—a pillar of fire, flashing terror and dismay into the ranks of the foe. ”

“ But now, Jefferson was thinking, how early the fires of patriotism had cooled in Patrick Henry. Patrick had been successful at Red Hill, his plantation. He had made some money, grown old before his time, and been content the last time Jefferson had seen him to sit under a green tree with a jug of cool spring water near by and his grandchildren playing around. Ease and security—were they the drugs that abated the eternal challenge in the minds of men? And did nations like men grow sluggish and apathetic when they were well fed and bodily comfortable, Jefferson wondered? ”

“ Among these last, the poorest laborer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest millionary, and generally, on a more favored one, whenever their rights seemed to jar. It has been seen that a shoemaker, or other artisan, removed by the voice of his country from his work-bench, into a chair of office, has instantly commanded all the respect and obedience, which the laws ascribe to his office. But of distinctions by birth or badge, they had no more idea than they had of the mode of existence in the moon or planets. ”

“ Jefferson's reforms crippled and impoverished the gentry, but did little for the people, and for the slaves nothing.
Nowhere in America existed better human material than in the middle and lower classes of Virginians. As explorers, adventurers, fighters,—wherever cour­age, activity, and force were wanted,—they had no equals; but they had never known discipline, and were beyond measure jealous of restraint. With all their natural virtues and indefinite capacities for good, they were rough and uneducated to a degree that shocked their own native leaders. ”

“ He evidently wished to place the White House on the footing of easy and generous hospitality which was the pride of every Virginia gentleman. No man should be turned away from its doors; its table, liberal and excellent, should be filled with equal guests, whose self-respect should be hurt by no artificial rules of precedence. Such hospitality cost both time and money; but Washington was a petty village, society was very small, and Jefferson was a poor economist. ”

“ But still his elevation was not the victory of a party and awakened in no one either exultation or regret. In the eyes, not only of the public, but of his enemies, he was not included in any party and was above them all: "the only man in the United States," said Jefferson, "who possessed the confidence of all;—there was no other one who was considered as anything more than a party leader." ”