Often, when Jefferson saw the Constitution limiting his power, Madison convinced Jefferson the Constitution was flexible, allowing for the full exercise of his power, so long as no one objected. In his first term, Madison was preoccupied with trade wars and attacks on American shipping by the British and the French that threatened to tear the country apart.
Retired at Monticello, Jefferson avoided discussion of war and focused on mutual interests in agriculture, science and neighborhood gossip. Madison needed an advisor to fill the role he once filled for Jefferson and turned to friend and political rival James Monroe, appointing him both Secretary of State and Secretary of War. Exhausted after a decade of war in Europe, the British public demanded an end to the war in America. At the end of his Presidency, Madison enacted plans to restore credit, begin ambitious programs for internal improvements, spur American manufacturing and modernize the Army and Navy.
In retirement, Jefferson and Madison renewed their friendship through frequent visits, formed the Albemarle Agricultural Society, recalled their careers for historians and unsuccessfully dealt with mounting debt. Both men devoted themselves to founding the University of Virginia as an institution dedicated to advancing the idea that the future could be improved through knowledge and a competition of ideas.
Take care of me when dead and be assured I will leave you with my last affections. Madison died June 28th, Occasionally you hear Thomas Jefferson cited as the author of the U. He was more than 3, miles away, serving as the United States Minister to France. A look at the letters with Jeff Looney Your browser does not support the element. Added April 3, Thomas Jefferson to Col. William Stephens Smith, November 13, Your browser does not support the element. This blog post was made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Cunningham, Jr. Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, Papers of Thomas Jefferson , ed. Princeton University Press, Thomas Jefferson Papers. Cunningham, Noble E. Jefferson vs. Hamilton: Confrontations That Shaped a Nation. Read, James H. They have chained the system round our necks for a great length of time, and, in order to keep the game in their own hands, they have from time to time aided in making such legislative constructions of the Constitution as make it a very different thing from what the people thought they had submitted to.
And now, they have brought forward a proposition far beyond any one advanced before; to which the eyes of many are now turned as the decision which is to let us know whether we live under a limited or an unlimited government. If this was maintained, then the enumeration of powers in the Constitution does not at all constitute the limits of their authority.
With this topic the conversation ended. The real grievances of the republicans at that moment were two: 1. The interference of The Treasury Department with legislation. During that very week the republicans made a serious effort toward turning the Secretary of the Treasury and his allies out of the lobby by breaking up the system of referring questions to members of the Cabinet. After a long debate, the House adjourned without coming to a vote; but Madison and his friends went home that afternoon in the highest spirits, so sure were they of victory on the day following.
So far, the personal intercourse between the two diverging ministers was agreeable; and we even observe in their official correspondence an apparent effort to conciliate. Out of ten emendations he adopted all but one, which would have involved a looser construction of the Constitution than he approved.
This, however, was the year of the Presidential election. For the Presidency there was, indeed, but one candidate; but Mr. Need it be said that the two Gazettes, Fenno and Freneau, improved the occasion? But how mild the prose and verse of Captain Freneau compared with the vituperation and calumny which have since made the party press as powerless to abuse as to exalt! Hamilton and his friends were assailed in prose not quite so pointless.
Secondly, that the spirit of the people continues firmly republican. When Hamilton read his Freneau, week after week, during that exciting summer of , he read it, not at all as the publication of Captain Philip Freneau, mariner and poet, but, wholly and always, as the utterance of Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State. He was right, and he was wrong. Jefferson, to people like minded with himself, was a pervading and fascinating intelligence.
His easy manners, his long experience, his knowledge of nature, men, and events, his sanguine trust in man, his freedom from inhuman pride, his prodigious Christianity, his great gifts, his great fame, and his great place, all conspired to make him the oracle of his circle, as he was the soul of his party. Freneau could not help infusing a good deal of Jefferson into almost everything he wrote.
But although that was the only kind of influence which the Secretary of State ever exerted over the pen of his translating clerk, Hamilton could not believe it.
Irritated and indignant, the Secretary of the Treasury composed, July 25, , the epistle following, and had it inserted in the other Gazette, — the Gazette of the United States: —. Fenno: — The editor of the National Gazette receives a salary from government. Whether this salary is paid him for Translations , or for publications, the design of which is to vilify those to whom the voice of the people has committed the administration of our public affairs, — to oppose the measures of government, and, by false insinuations, to disturb the public peace?
In common life it is thought ungrateful for a man to bite the hand that puts bread in his mouth; but if the man is hired to do it, the case is altered. Freneau was not politician enough, nor guilty enough, to pass by this hint in silence. He repelled the insinuation, which gave Hamilton a pretext for following it up. A series of strongly written, incisive articles from the pen of the Secretary of the Treasury appeared in Fenno, in which Jefferson was attacked by name.
The burden of the earlier numbers was, that Mr. Freneau was brought from New York to Philadelphia, and quartered upon the government, by Mr. Jefferson, for the purpose of establishing a gazette hostile to the government. Denied by Freneau on oath. Hamilton proceeded to descant upon Mr. Jefferson to resign his office. Let him not cling to the honor or emolument of an office, whichever it may be that attracts him, and content himself with defending the injured rights of the people by obscure or indirect means.
Let him renounce a situation which is a clog upon his patriotism. The effect upon the public mind of this ill-timed breach of official decorum was such as we should naturally suppose it would be. The thin disguise of the various signatures adopted by the Secretary of the Treasury deceived only readers distant from the capital, and them not long; for Hamilton, besides betraying himself by the power of his stroke, seems, in some passages, to have courted discovery, — pushing aside the gauzy folds of the curtain, and all but crying out, Behold, it is I, the administration!
The drawing-room eyed Jefferson askance. It could not quite cut a Secretary of State, but its bow was as distant as its habitual deference to place and power would permit; and, to this day, if indeed we can be said to have a drawing-room now, it has loved to repeat the traditional disparagement. He lost that prestige of reserve and mystery that gathers round a name associated in the public mind only with affairs of national magnitude and subjects of general importance.
The people were not pleased to discover, in an adviser of the President, a partisan, positive, vehement, ingenious, and unjust, a coarse assailant of a name hallowed by its association with the birthday of the nation. And, with all this, he did not retard the development of the new-born opposition. George Clinton received fifty electoral votes for the Vice-Presidency, Jefferson four, and Burr one, to seventy-seven for Mr. There was one man in the country who was great enough to do justice to both these men, and to feel only sorrow for their dissensions.
How the President tried to reconcile them is a pleasing and noble passage of his history. Both secretaries replied, as it chanced, on the same day, September 9, Hamilton owned that he had attacked his colleague in the newspapers, and, intimated that, for the present, he could not discontinue his assaults. Jefferson, from the moment of his coming to the city of New York to enter upon his present office. I know , from the most authentic sources, that I have been the frequent subject of the most unkind whispers and insinuations from the same quarter.
I have long seen a formed party in the legislature under his auspices, bent upon my subversion. I cannot doubt, from the evidence I possess, that the National Gazette was instituted by him for political purposes, and that one leading object of it has been to render me, and all the measures connected with my department, as odious as possible.
So far as it was exculpatory of himself, it was perfectly successful; but, at such a moment, he must have been either more or less than man to have been just to his antagonist. Nor is there any one now alive competent to say precisely how far he was unjust to him. One thing we do know: the rule which Jefferson prescribed for his own conduct as a member of the Cabinet is the true republican rule. As I never had the desire to influence the members, so neither had I any other means than my friendships, which I valued too highly to risk by usurpations on their freedom of judgment and the conscientious pursuit of their own sense of duty.
This was the right view to take of the limits prescribed by the spirit of the Constitution to his place. But, though we know Hamilton gloried in holding an opposite opinion, we do not know how far he carried his ideas in practice. That he interfered habitually in legislation, and was proud of his success in so doing, his letters plainly reveal.
Jefferson charges him with using his power as minister of finance to control votes. His system flowed from principles adverse to liberty, and was calculated to undermine and demolish the Republic, by creating an influence of his department over the members of the legislature. I saw this influence actually produced, and its first fruits to be the establishment of the great outlines of his project by the votes of the very persons who, having swallowed his bait, were laying themselves out to profit by his plans; and that, had these persons withdrawn, as those interested in a question ever should, the vote of the disinterested majority was clearly the reverse of what they made it.
Who can say, with anything like certainty, whether, in the passage following, Mr. Jefferson uttered truth pure and simple, or truth colored, distorted, and exaggerated by antipathy? A passage followed, in relation to this appointment, which had a wonderful currency years ago, and is still occasionally revived.
He declared, that, in appointing Freneau, he had been actuated by the motive which had induced him to recommend to the President for public employment such characters as Rittenhouse, Barlow, and Paine. This letter was written at Monticello.
The check to what? The President said he did not believe there were ten men, worth consideration, in the country, who had so much as a thought of transforming the republic into a monarchy. But, on reaching Philadelphia, friends insisted on his remaining in office with such pertinacity, and offered reasons so cogent, that he knew not how either to rebut or accept them. No language can overstate his longing for retreat. Six months before the Fenno assaults began, this had been the burden of his letters to his family and friends.
He had sent to Scotland for one of the new threshing-machines, and a plough of his invention had recently won a medal in France. He had engaged mechanics in Europe to work upon his house, and upon other schemes which he had formed.
Schemes upon schemes were forming in his mind for extricating his great estate from encumbrance, and turning its latent resources to better account than could be expected from overseers. But the attacks in the newspapers and the hostility of powerful classes, though they intensified his desire for repose, seemed to interpose a barrier which he could not pass. He was torn with contending emotions. He consented, at length, to remain a short time longer.
But why this agonizing desire for retirement? Thereby hangs a tale. If we give ten reasons for a certain course of conduct, there is often an eleventh which we do not give; and that unspoken one is apt to be the reason.
He could no longer afford to serve the public on the terms fixed by Congress. It was not merely that his salary did not pay the cost of his Philadelphia establishment, nor that his estate was ill-managed by overseers. Impatient of debt, he sold a fine farm near Monticello for a sum sufficient to discharge it; but by the time he received the money, the war of the Revolution had begun.
Virginia invited all men owing money to Great Britain to deposit the same in her treasury, the State agreeing to pay it over to the British creditor after the war. The identical coin which Jefferson received for his farm he himself carried to the treasury in Williamsburg, where it was immediately expended in equipping troops.
The Legislature of Virginia, however, thought better of this policy, rescinded the resolution, and returned the sums received under it. But Jefferson was obliged to take back his thirteen thousand dollars in depreciated paper, which continued to depreciate until it was worthless. Substantial justice is my object, as decided by reason, not by authority or compulsion.
But only two thousand acres of his land were cultivated, nine of his horses were used for the saddle, and the labor of his slaves had been, for ten years, directed by overseers. He had now a son-in-law to settle, a second daughter to establish, a mountainous debt to pay, a high office to live up to, and an estate going to ruin.
Behold his eleventh, unuttered reason for the frenzy which possessed him to live at home. He might well desire to see the reign of overseers brought to an end on his estate. Jefferson settled to his work again in Philadelphia, and watched for a good opportunity to resign.
Through the good offices of the President, a truce was arranged between the two hostile secretaries, who tried their best to co-operate in peace, not without success. This made it easier for Jefferson to continue. And, besides, the French Revolution, of late, had turned in arms upon the kings banded against it, and seemed to be able, contrary to all expectation, to hold its own.
As yet, nearly all America was in enthusiastic sympathy with France. The time was at hand when the youngest of the nations would need in its government the best talent it could command, and, above all, in the department which directed its intercourse with foreign nations. The French king had been dethroned, and was about to be brought to trial, all the world looking on with an interest difficult now to conceive.
England, he reminded the convention, had cut off the head of a very bad Charles Stuart, only to be cursed; a few years after, with a worse; but when, forty years later, England had banished the Stuarts, there was an end of their doing harm in the world.
What a happy stroke was this in a French Assembly! He followed it up by offering to accompany the fallen king to the only ally France then had, the United States, where the people regarded him as their friend. I propose to you to conduct Louis to the United States.
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