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.[1] 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,[2] 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.[3]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,[4] 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
- ↑ See e.g. his letters in 1787 on the Shays’ rebellion, and his speculations on the doctrine that one generation may not bind another by paper documents. With the latter may be compared present-day movements like the initiative and referendum, and not a few discussions of national debts. Jefferson’s distrust of governments was nothing exceptional for a consistent individualist.
- ↑ In his last years he carefully sifted and revised his contemporary notes evidencing, as he believed, the existence of such a party, and they remain as his Ana (chiefly Hamiltoniana). The only just judgment of these notes is to be obtained by looking at them, and by testing his suspicions with the letters of Hamilton, Ames, Oliver Wolcott, Theodore Sedgwick, George Cabot and the other Hamiltonians. Such a comparison measures also the relative judgment, temper and charity of these writers and Jefferson. It must still remain true, however, that Jefferson’s Ana present him in a far from engaging light.
- ↑ “Jefferson, in 1789, wrote some such stuff about the will of majorities, as a New Englander would lose his rank among men of sense to avow.”—Fisher Ames (Jan. 1800).
- ↑ He was classed as a “French infidel” and atheist. His attitude toward religion was in fact deeply reverent and sincere, but he insisted that religion was purely an individual matter, “evidenced, as concerns the world by each one’s daily life,” and demanded absolute freedom of private judgment. He looked on Unitarianism with much sympathy and desired its growth. “I am a Christian,” he wrote in 1823, “in the only sense in which he (Jesus) wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other.”
