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,[1]
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,[2] 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.[3] 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,[4] 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,[5] 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.[6]
But the French question had another side in its reaction on American parties.[7] Jefferson did not read excesses in Paris as warnings against democracy, but as warnings against the abuses
- ↑ This plan applied to the south-western as well as to the north-western territory, and was notable for a provision that slavery should not exist therein after 1800. This provision was defeated in 1784, but was adopted in 1787 for the north-western territory—a step which is very often said to have saved the Union in the Civil War; the south-western territory (out of which were later formed Mississippi, Alabama, &c.) being given over to slavery. Thus the anti-slavery clause of the ordinance of 1784 was not adopted; and it was preceded by unofficial proposals to the same end; yet to it belongs rightly some special honour as blazoning the way for federal control of slavery in the territories, which later proved of such enormous consequence. Jefferson in the first draft of the Ordinance of 1784, suggested the names to be given to the states eventually to be formed out of the territory concerned. For his suggestions he has been much ridiculed. The names are as follows: Illinoia, Michigania, Sylvania, Polypotamia, Assenisipia, Charronesus, Pelisipia, Saratoga, Metropotamia and Washington.
- ↑ He owned at one time above 150 slaves. His overseers were under contract never to bleed them; but he manumitted only a few at his death.
- ↑ During this time he assisted in negotiating a treaty of amity and commerce with Prussia (1785) and one with Morocco (1789), and negotiated with France a “convention defining and establishing the functions and privileges of consuls and vice-consuls” (1788).
- ↑ Patrick Henry humorously declaimed before a popular audience that Jefferson, who favoured French wine and cookery, had “abjured his native victuals.”
- ↑ Jefferson did not sympathize with the temper of his followers who condoned the zealous excesses of Genet, and in general with the “misbehaviour” of the democratic clubs; but, as a student of English liberties, he could not accept Washington’s doctrine that for a self-created permanent body to declare “this act unconstitutional, and that act pregnant with mischiefs” was “a stretch of arrogant presumption” which would, if unchecked, “destroy the country.”
- ↑ John Basset Moore, American Diplomacy (New York, 1905).
- ↑ Compare C. D. Hazen, Contemporary American opinion of the French Revolution (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 1897).
