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.[1]
Hating as he did feudal class institutions and
Tudor-Stuart traditions of arbitrary rule,[2] 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;[3] 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,[4] 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
- ↑ It was at this period of his life that Jefferson gave expression to some of the opinions for which he has been most severely criticized and ridiculed. For the Shays’ rebellion he felt little abhorrence, and wrote: “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing . . . an observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government” (Writings, Ford ed., iv. 362–363). Again, “Can history produce an instance of rebellion so honorably conducted?. . . God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. . . . What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure” (Ibid. iv. 467). Again he says: “Societies exist under three forms—(1) without government, as among our Indians; (2) under governments wherein the will of every one has a just influence. . . . (3) under governments of force. . . . It is a problem not clear in my mind that the first condition is not the best.” (Ibid. iv. 362.)
- ↑ He turned law students from Blackstone’s toryism to Coke on Littleton; and he would not read Walter Scott, so strong was his aversion to that writer’s predilection for class and feudalism.
- ↑ Hamilton wrote for the papers himself; Jefferson never did. A talented clerk in his department, however, Philip Freneau, set up an anti-administration paper. It was alleged that Jefferson appointed him for the purpose, and encouraged him. Undoubtedly there was nothing in the charge. The Federalist outcry could only have been silenced by removal of Freneau, or by disclaimers or admonitions, which Jefferson did not think it incumbent upon himself—or, since he thought Freneau was doing good, desirable for him—to make.
- ↑ Contrary to the general belief that Hamilton dominated Washington in the cabinet, there is the president’s explicit statement that “there were as many instances” of his deciding against as in favour of the secretary of the treasury.
