Jefferson American Minister in France
THE United States has contributed to the diplomatic circles of the Old World some incongruous members, heroes of the caucus and the stump, not versed in the lore of courts, and unskilled in drawing-room arts. So, at least, we are occasionally told by persons who think it a prettier thing to bow to a lady than to an audience, and nobler to chat agreeably at dinner than to discourse acceptably to a multitude. Perhaps we shall do better in the diplomatic way by and by, when we have our Civil Service College (to match West Point and Annapolis) in which young men will be especially trained for the higher walks of public life. Hitherto, our diplomatists have won their signal successes simply by being good citizens. We have never had a Talleyrand, nor one of the Talleyrand kind (though we came near it when Aaron Burr was pressed for a foreign appointment), and no American has ever been sent to lie abroad for his country’s good. We have had, however, besides a large number of respectable ministers in the ordinary way, three whose opportunity was, at once, immense and unique, — Franklin, Jefferson, and Washburne, — and each of these proved equal to his opportunity.
It is not as a record of diplomatic service that Jefferson’s five years’ residence in France is specially important to us. France and America were like lovers then, and it is not difficult to negotiate between lovers. His master in the diplomatic art was the greatest master of it that ever lived, — Benjamin Franklin’s excellence being, that he conducted the intercourse of nations on the principles which control men of honor and good feeling in their private business, who neither take, nor wish, nor will have an unjust advantage, and look at a point in dispute with their antagonist’s eyes as well as their own, never insensible to his difficulties and his scruples. It is what France did to Jefferson that makes his long residence there historically important ; because the mind he carried home entered at once into the forming character of a young nation, and became a part of it forever. All these millions of people, whom we call fellow-citizens, are more or less different in their character and feelings from what they would have been, if, in the distribution of diplomatic offices in 1785, Congress had sent Jefferson to London instead of Paris, and appointed John Adams to Paris instead of London.
At first, he had the usual embarrassments of American ministers : he could read, but not speak the French language, and he was sorely puzzled how to arrange his style of living so as not to go beyond his nine thousand dollars a year. The language was a difficulty which diminished every hour, though he never trusted himself to write French on any matter of consequence ; but the art of living, in the style of a plenipotentiary, upon the allowance fixed by Congress, remained difficult to the end. Nor could he, during the first years, draw much revenue from Virginia. He left behind him there so long a “ list of debts ” (the result of the losses and desolations of the war), that the proceeds of two crops, and the arrears of his salary as governor voted by the legislature, only sufficed to satisfy the most urgent of them.
A Virginia estate was a poor thing indeed in the absence of the master ; and, unhappily, the founders of the government of the United States, in arranging salaries, made no allowance for the American fact, that the mere absence of a man from home usually lessens his income and increases his expenditure. Even Franklin took it for granted that we should always have among us men of leisure, most of whom would be delighted to serve the public for nothing. Who, indeed, could have foreseen a state of things, such as we see around us now, when the richer a man is the harder he works, and when, in a flourishing city of a hundred thousand inhabitants, not one man of leisure can be found, nor one man of ability who can “ afford ” to go to the legislature ? Jefferson, Adams, and perhaps I may say, most of the public men of the country, have suffered agonies of embarrassment from the failure of the first Congresses to adopt the true republican principle of paying for all service done the public at the rate which the requisite quality of service commands in the market. The only great error, perhaps, of Washington’s career was his aristocratic disdain of taking fair wages for his work, — an error which most of his successors and many of their most valued ministers have rued in silent bitterness. Nay, he rued it himself. What anxious hours Washington himself passed from the fact that there were so few competent statesmen in the country who chanced to be rich enough to live in Philadelphia on the salary of a Secretary of State !
Jefferson was somewhat longer than usual in getting used to what he called “ the gloomy and damp climate ” of Paris, — such a contrast to the warmth, purity, and splendor of the climate of his mountain home. We find him, too, still mourning his lost wife, and writing to his old friend Page, that his “principal happiness was now in the retrospect of life.” Moreover, the condition of human nature in Europe astonished and shocked him beyond measure. He was not prepared for it ; he could not get hardened to it. While experiencing all those art raptures which we should presume he would, — keenly enjoying the music of Paris above all, and the architecture only less, falling in love with a statue here and an edifice there, — still, he could not become reconciled to the hideous terms on which most of the people of France held their lives. At his own pleasant and not inelegant abode, gathered most that was brilliant, amiable, or illustrious in Paris. Who so popular as the minister of our dear allies across the sea, the successor of Franklin, the friend of Lafayette, the man of science, the man of feeling, the scholar and musical amateur reared in the wilderness ? He liked the French, too, exceedingly. He liked their manners, their habits, their tastes, and even their food. He was glad to live in a community, where, as he said, “a man might pass a life without encountering a single rudeness,” and where people enjoyed social pleasures without eating like pigs and drinking like Indians. But none of these things could ever deaden his heart to the needless misery of man in France. Read his own words : —
First, to his young friend and pupil, James Monroe, in June, 1785, when he had been ten months in Paris : “The pleasure of the trip [to Europe] will be less than you expect, but the utility greater. It will make you adore your own country, its soil, its climate, its equality, liberty, laws, people, and manners. My God ! how little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy ! I confess I had no idea of it myself.”
To Mrs. Trist, in August, 1785 : “ It is difficult to conceive how so good a people, with so good a king, so welldisposed rulers in general, so genial a climate, so fertile a soil, should be rendered so ineffectual for producing human happiness by one single curse, — that of a bad form of government. But it is a fact, in spite of the mildness of their governors, the people are ground to powder by the vices of the form of government. Of twenty millions of people supposed to be in France, I am of opinion there are nineteen millions more wretched, more accursed in every circumstance of human existence, than the most conspicuously wretched individual of the whole United States.”
To an Italian friend in Virginia, September, 1785 : “ Behold me, at length, on the vaunted scene of Europe! You are, perhaps, curious to know how it has struck a savage of the mountains of America. Not advantageously, I assure you. I find the general fate of mankind here most deplorable. The truth of Voltaire’s observation offers itself perpetually, that every man here must be either the hammer or the anvil. It is a true picture of that country to which they say we shall pass hereafter, and where we are to see God and his angels in splendor, and crowds of the damned trampled under their feet.”
To George Wythe, of Virginia, in August, 1786 : “ If anybody thinks that kings, nobles, or priests are good conservators of the public happiness, send him here. It is the best school in the universe to cure him of that folly. He will see here, with his own eyes, that these descriptions of men are an abandoned conspiracy against the happiness of the people. Preach, my dear sir, a crusade against ignorance ; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know, that the people alone can protect us against these evils, and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests, and nobles, who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance. ’
To General Washington, in November, 1786 : “ To know the mass of evil which flows from this fatal source [an hereditary aristocracy], a person must be in France; he must see the finest soil, the finest climate, and the most compact state, the most benevolent character of people, and every earthly advantage combined, insufficient to prevent this scourge from rendering existence a curse to twenty-four out of twenty-five parts of the inhabitants of this country.”
To James Madison, in January, 1787 : “ To have an idea of the curse of existence under a government of force, it must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep.”
To another American friend, in August, 1787 : “If all the evils which can arise among us from the republican form of government, from this day to the day of judgment, could be put into scale against what this country suffers from its monarchical form in a week, or England in a month, the latter would preponderate. No race of kings has ever presented above one man of common sense in twenty generations. The best they can do is to leave things to their ministers; and what are their ministers but a committee badly chosen ?”
To Governor Rutledge of South Carolina, August, 1787 : “The European are governments of kites over pigeons.”
To another American friend, in February, 1788 : “ The long-expected edict at length appears. It is an acknowledgment (hitherto withheld by the laws) that Protestants can beget children, and that they can die, and be offensive unless buried. It does not give them permission to think, to speak, or to worship. It enumerates the humiliations to which they shall remain subject, and the burthens to which they shall continue to be unjustly exposed. What are we to think of the condition of the human mind in a country, where such a wretched thing as this has thrown the state into convulsions, and how must we bless our own situation in a country, the most illiterate peasant of which is a Solon, compared with the authors of this law. Our countrymen do not know their own superiority.”
Such were the feelings with which he contemplated the condition of the French people. But he was in a situation to know, also, how far “the great” in France were really benefited by the degradation of their fellow-citizens. Their situation was dazzling ; but there was, he thought, no class in America who were not happier than they. Intrigues of love absorbed the younger, intrigues of ambition the elder. Conjugal fidelity being regarded as something provincial and ridiculous, there was no such thing known among them as that “ tranquil, permanent felicity with which domestic society in America blesses most of its inhabitants, leaving them free to follow steadily those pursuits which health and reason approve, and rendering truly delicious the intervals of those pursuits,”
Such sentiments as these were in vogue at the time, even among the ruling class. Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro was in its first run when Jefferson reached Paris. Doubtless, he listened to the barber’s soliloquy in the fifth act (a stump speech à la mode de Paris), the longest soliloquy in a modern comedy, in which Beaumarchais, as we should say, “arraigns the administration.” “I was thought of for a government appointment,” says poor Figaro, “ but, unfortunately, I was fit for it : an arithmetician was wanted ; a dancer got it.” Jefferson rarely mentions the theatre in his French letters ; but the theatre in Paris is like dinner, too familiar a matter to get upon paper. Beaumarchais himself he knew but too well, for the brilliant dramatist was a claimant of sundry millions from the honorable Congress for stores furnished during the war ; which puzzled and perplexed every minister of the United States from Franklin to Rives.
Our plenipotentiary was one of the most laborious of men during his residence in Europe. He had need of all his singular talent for industry. The whole of a long morning he usually spent in his office hard at work ; and, sometimes, as his daughter reports, when he was particularly pressed, he would take his papers and retire to a monastery near Paris, in which he hired an apartment, and remain there for a week or two, all the world shut out, till his task was done. In the afternoon, he walked seven miles into the country and back again ; and in the evening, music, art, science, and society claimed him by turns. I must endeavor, in a few words, to indicate the nature and objects of such incessant toil.
And, first, as to his public and offcial duties. The two continents were then as far apart as America is now from Australia. It took Jefferson from fourteen to twenty weeks to get an answer from home ; and if his letters missed the monthly packet, there was usually no other opportunity till the next. It was part of his duty as minister to send to Mr. Jay, Secretary for the foreign affairs of Congress, not only a regular letter of public news, but files of the best newspapers. He did, in fact, the duty of Own Correspondent, as well as that of plenipotentiary ; with much that is now done by consuls and commercial agents. As it was then a part of the system of governments in Europe to open letters intrusted to the mail, important letters had to be written in cipher ; which was a serious addition to the labor of all official persons. An incident of Mr. Jefferson’s second year serves to show at once the remoteness of America from Europe, the difficulty of getting information from one continent to another, and the variety of employments which then fell to the lot of the American minister. He received a letter making inquiry concerning a young man named Abraham Albert Alphonso Gallatin, who had emigrated from Switzerland to America six years before, and of whose massacre and scalping by the Indians a report had lately reached his friends in Geneva. It was to the American minister that the distressed family (one of the most respectable in Switzerland) applied for information concerning the truth of the report. In case this young man had fallen a victim to the savages, Mr. Jefferson was requested to procure a certificate of his death and a copy of his will. It was in this strange way that Thomas Jefferson first obtained knowledge of the Albert Gallatin whom he was destined to appoint Secretary of the Treasury.
France and America, I say, were like lovers then. And yet, in one respect, the new minister found Frenchmen disappointed with the results of the alliance between the two countries. The moment the war closed, commerce had resumed its old channel ; so that the new flag of stars and stripes, a familiar object on the Thames, was rarely seen in a port of France. Why is this ? Mr. Jefferson was frequently asked. Does friendship count for nothing in trade ? Is this the return France had a right to expect from America ? Do Americans prefer their enemies to their friends ? The American minister made it his particular business, first, to explain the true reason of this state of things, and, then, to apply the only remedy. In other words, he made himself, both in society and in the audience room of the Count de Vergennes, an apostle of free-trade.
The spell of the protective system, in 1785, had been broken in England, but not in France. Jefferson showed the Count de Vergennes that it was the measure of freedom of trade which British merchants enjoyed that gave them the cream of the world’s commerce. He told the Count (an excellent man of business and an honorable gentleman, but as ignorant as a king of political economy) that if national preferences could weigh with merchants, the whole commerce of America would forsake England and come to France. But, said he, in substance, our merchants cannot buy in France, because you will not let them sell in France. One day, he went over the whole list of American products, and explained the particular restriction or system of restrictions, which rendered it impossible for American merchants to sell it in France at a profit. Indigo, — France had tropical islands, the planters of which she must “ protect.” Tobacco, — O heavens ! in what a coil and tangle of protection was that fragrant weed ! First, the king had the absolute monopoly of the sale of it. Secondly, the king had “ farmed ” the sale to some great noblemen ; who, in turn, had sub-let the right to men of business. These gentlemen had concluded a contract with Robert Morris of Philadelphia, giving him an absolute monopoly of the importation for three years. Morris was to send to France twenty thousand hogsheads a year at a fixed price, and no other creature on earth could lawfully send a pound of tobacco to France.
The learned reader perceives that there was a tobacco Ring in 1785, which included king, noblemen, French merchants, and Mr. Jefferson’s friend, Robert Morris. When, in the course of this enumeration, he came to the article of tobacco, and explained the mode in which it was “ protected,” the Count remarked that the king received so large a revenue from tobacco, that it could not be renounced. “ I told him,” as Mr. Jefferson relates, “ that we did not wish it to be renounced, or even lessened, but only that the monopoly should be put down ; that this might be effected in the simplest manner by obliging the importer to pay, on entrance, a duty equal to what the king now received, or to deposit his tobacco in the king’s warehouses till it was paid, and then permitting a free sale of it. 'Ma foil' said the Count, ‘that is a good idea ; we must think of it.’ ”
They did think of it. Mr. Jefferson kept them thinking during the whole of his residence in Paris. In many letters and in conversation, vivid with his own clear conviction, and warm with his earnest purpose to serve both countries, and man through them, he expounded the principles of free-trade. “ Each of our nations,” he said, “ has exactly to spare the articles which the other wants. We have a surplus of rice, tobacco, furs, peltry, potash, lamp oils, timber, which France wants ; she has a surplus of wines, brandies, esculent oils, fruits, manufactures of all kinds, which we want. The governments have nothing to do but not to hinder their merchants from making the exchange.”
To the theory of free-trade every thinking man, of course, assented. But when it came to practice, he generally found (as free-traders now do) that private interest was too powerful for him. It was in France very much as it was in Portugal. After negotiating for years with the Portuguese minister for the free admission of American products, Jefferson succeeded in getting his treaty signed and sent to Lisbon for ratification. The astute old Portuguese ambassador predicted its rejection. “ Some great lords of the court,” said he to Mr. Jefferson, “ derive an important part of their revenue from their interest in the flour-mills near the capital ; which the admission of American flour will shut up. They will prevail upon the king to reject it.” And so it proved. Jefferson, however, was not a man to prefer no bread to half a loaf. He did really succeed in France, after twelve months’ hard work and vigilant attention, aided at every turn by the Marquis de Lafayette, whose zeal to serve his other country across the ocean knew no diminution while he lived, in obtaining some few crusts of free-trade for the merchants of America; which had an important effect in nourishing the infant commerce between the two countries. Nor did he rest content with them. He could not break the Morris contract, nor even wish it broken ; but, aided by Lafayette’s potent influence, he obtained from the Ministry an engagement that no contract of the same nature should ever again be permitted. To the last month of his stay in Europe, we find, in his voluminous correspondence, that he still strove to loosen what he was accustomed to call “ the shackles upon trade.”
His efforts in behalf of free-trade in tobacco exposed him to the enmity of Robert Morris and his kindred, one of the most powerful circles in the United States, including Gouverneur Morris, as able and honorable an aristocrat as ever stood by his order, — a man of Bismarckian acuteness, candor, integrity, and humor. In writing of this matter, in confidence, to James Monroe, Jefferson held this language : “ I have done what was right, and I will not so far wound my privilege of doing that without regard to any man’s interest, as to enter into any explanations of this paragraph with Robert Morris. Yet I esteem him highly, and suppose that hitherto he had esteemed me.” The paragraph to which he alludes was one in a letter of the French minister of finance, in which there was an expression implying that Mr. Jefferson had recommended the annulling of the Morris Contract. This he had not done. On the contrary, he had maintained that to annul it would be unjust. But he deemed it unbecoming in him as a public man to so much as correct this misapprehension.
The reader, perhaps, has supposed that the evils resulting from tarifitinkering, are peculiar to the United States. Mr. Jefferson knew better. As often as he succeeded in getting a restriction upon trade loosened a little, an injured Interest cried out; and did not always cry in vain. In 1788, he obtained a revisal of the tariff in favor of American products, which admitted American whale oil (before prohibited) at a duty of ten dollars a ton. This was a vast boon to Yankee whalers. But an existing treaty between France and England obliged France to admit English oil on the terms of “ the most favored nation.” At once, the English oils “ flowed in,” overstocked the market, and lowered the price to such a point that the French fishermen and sealmen could not live. An outcry arose, which the French Ministry could not disregard. Then it was proposed to exclude all “ European oils which would not infringe the British treaty” ; and this idea Jefferson, free-trader as he was, encouraged with patriotic inconsistency, because, as he says, it would give to the French and American fisheries a monopoly of the French market.” The arrêt was drawn up ; ministers were assembled ; and in a moment more it would have been passed, to the enriching of Nantucket and the great advantage of all the New England coast. Just then, a minister proposed to strike out the word European, which would make the measure still more satisfactory to French oilmen. The amendment was agreed to ; the arrêt was signed ; and, behold, Nantucket excluded !
As soon as Jefferson heard of this disaster, he put forth all his energies in getting the arrêt amended. Not content with verbal and written remonstrance, he took a leaf from Dr. Franklin’s book, and caused a small treatise upon the subject to be printed “to entice them to read it,” particularly the new minister, M. Neckar, who, minister as he was, had “ some principles of economy, and will enter into calculations.” He succeeded in his object, and soon had the pleasure of sending to Nantucket, through Mr. Adams, a notification that the whalemen might put to sea in full confidence of being allowed to sell their oil in French ports on profitable terms. He testified to the generous aid he had had in this business from Lafayette : “ He has paid the closest attention to it, and combated for us with the zeal of a native.”
Other curious incidents of his five years’ war against the Protective System press for mention ; but, really, one suffices as well as a thousand. It is always the same story ; the interests of men against the rights of man, — temporary and local advantage opposed to the permanent interest of the human race, — a shrinking from a fair, open contest, and compelling your adversary to go into the ring with one hand tied behind him. Nevertheless, such is the nature of man, that the progress from restriction to freedom, whether in politics, religion, or trade, must be slow in order to be sure. It is human to cry “Great is Diana of the Ephesians” when you live by making images of the chaste goddess. Even Jefferson, a freetrader by the constitution of his mind, was not so very ill-content with a “ monopoly ” which shut English whalemen out of the ports of France, and let his own countrymen in. The principle was wrong, but he could bear it in this instance. It required many years of pig-headed outrage to kill his proud and yearning love for the land of his ancestors, but the thing was done at last with a completeness that left nothing to be desired.
Among the powers with which the commissioners of the United States endeavored to negotiate treaties of amity and commerce on sublime Christian principles, were Tunis, Algiers, Tripoli, and “ the high, glorious, mighty, and most noble King, Prince, and Emperor ” of Morocco. Before Mr. Jefferson had held the post of plenipotentiary many weeks, he was reminded, most painfully, that those powers were not yet, perhaps, quite prepared to conduct their foreign affairs in the lofty style proposed. A rumor ran over Europe, that Dr. Franklin, on his voyage to America, had been captured by the Algerines and carried to Algiers ; where, being held for ransom, he bore his captivity with the cheerfulness and dignity that might have been expected of him. Nor was such an event impossible, nor even improbable. The packets plying between Havre and New York were not considered safe from the Algerine corsairs in 1785. Nothing afloat was safe from them unless defended by superior guns, or protected by an annual subsidy. Among the curious bits of information which Jefferson contrived to send to Mr. Jay, was a list of the presents made by the Dutch, in 1784, to the aforesaid King, Prince, and Emperor of Morocco. The Dutch, we should infer from this catalogue, supplied the Emperor with the means of preying upon the commerce of the world ; for it consists of items like these : 69 masts, 30 cables, 267 pieces of cordage, 70 cannon, 21 anchors, 285 pieces of sail-cloth, 1450 pulleys, 51 chests of tools, 12 quadrants, 12 compasses, 26 hour-glasses, 27 sea-charts, 50 dozen sail needles, 24 tons of pitch ; besides such “extraordinary presents ” as 2 pieces of scarlet cloth, 2 of green cloth, 280 loaves of sugar, one chest of tea, 24 china punchbowls, 50 pieces of muslin, 3 clocks, and one “ very large watch.” He learned, too, that Spain had recently stooped to buy a peace from one of these piratical powers at a cost of six hundred thousand dollars.
It was in the destiny of Mr. Jefferson, at a later time, to extort a peace from these pirates in another way, and, in fact, to originate the system that rid the seas of them forever. But, at present, the country which he represented was not strong enough to depart from the established system of purchase. The United States was a gainer even by the treaty for which Spain had paid so high a price, for Spain was then in close alliance with the republic which had humbled the great enemy of the House of Bourbon. In the spring of 1785 came news that the American brig Betsy had been captured and taken to Morocco, where the crew were held for ransom. It was the good offices of Spain that induced the King, Prince, and Emperor of Morocco to make a present to the American minister at Cadiz of the liberty of the Betsy’s crew. But when Mr. Carmichael waited on the Spanish ambassador to thank him, “in the best Spanish he could muster,” for the friendly act of the king, he was given to understand that, unless the United States sent an envoy to Morocco with presents for the Emperor, no more crews would be released except on the usual terms. Mr. Carmichael notified Mr. Jefferson of these events, and added that he feared further depredations from the Algerines. Thirteen prizes had recently been brought in by them ; chiefly Portuguese, he thought. “The Americans, I hope, are too much frightened already,” said he, “ to venture any vessels this way, especially during the summer.” And they ran some risk even in the more northern latitudes.
A month later, Mr. Jefferson received a doleful letter from three American captains in Algiers, which brought the subject home to him most forcibly : “ We, the subjects of the United States of America, having the misfortune of being captured off the coast of Portugal, the 24th and 30th of July, by the Algerines, and brought into this port, where we are become slaves, and sent to the workhouses, our sufferings are beyond our expressing, or your conception, .... being stripped of all our clothes, and nothing to exist on but two small cakes of bread per day, without any other necessaries of life.” But the captains had found a friend : “ Charles Logie, Esq., British Consul, seeing our distressed situation, has taken us three masters of vessels out of the workhouse, and has given security for us to the Dey of Algiers, King of Cruelties.” The sailors, however, remained in the workhouses, where they would certainly starve, the captains thought, if Mr. Jefferson could not at once prevail upon Congress to grant them relief.
In writing this letter, the three captains provided Mr. Jefferson with seven years’ trouble. During all the remainder of his residence at Paris, and years after his return home, one of his chief employments was to procure the deliverance of those unfortunate prisoners from captivity. After making some provision for their maintenance, he explained to Congress the necessity of treating with the pirates as the Spaniards had done, money in hand. He was authorized to give twenty thousand dollars to the High and Mighty Prince and Emperor of Morocco, and the same sum to the King of Cruelties, for a treaty of peace. Inadequate as these sums were, they seemed stupendous to a Congress distressed with the debt of the Revolution, fearing to learn by every arrival that their credit was gone in Europe, through the failure of their agents to effect a new loan. Jefferson and Adams took the liberty of doubling the price for a treaty with Algiers ; offering forty thousand dollars for a treaty and the twenty prisoners. They felt that this was assuming a responsibility which nothing could justify but the emergency of the case. “The motives which led to it,” wrote Jefferson to Mr. Jay, “must be found in the feelings of the human heart, in a partiality for those sufferers who are of our own country, and in the obligations of every government to yield protection to their citizens as the consideration for their obedience.” He assured the secretary “ that it would be a comfort to know that Congress did not disapprove this step.” He received that comfort in due time ; but the forty thousand dollars did not get the treaty, nor bring home the captives. The agents whom he despatched returned with the report that upon such terms no business could be done.
And so the affair drew on. In the spring of 1786, Mr. Jefferson upon an intimation received from Mr. Adams, hurried over to London to confer with the ambassador of Tripoli upon the matter ; supposing that whatever bargain they might make with Tripoli would be a guide in their negotiations with Algiers and Morocco. The two Americans met the ambassador, and had a conversation with him which one would think more suitable to A. D. 1100 than 1786. The first question discussed between them was, whether it were better for the United States to buy a temporary peace by annual payments, or a permanent peace by what our English friends elegantly style " a lump sum.” The ambassador was much in favor of a permanent peace. Any stipulated annual sum, he said, might cease to content his country, and an increased demand might bring on a war, which would interrupt the payments, and give new cause of difference. It would be much cheaper in the long run, he assured them, for the United States to come down handsomely at once and make an end of the business.
That question having been duly considered, the Americans were ready to listen to the terms ; which were these : for a treaty of peace with Tripoli, to last one year, with privilege of renewal, twelve thousand five hundred guineas to the government, and one thousand two hundred and fifty guineas to the ambassador ; for a permanent peace, thirty thousand guineas to the government, and three thousand guineas to the ambassador ; cash down on receipt of signed treaty. N. B. Merchandise not taken. On the same terms, the ambassador assured them, a peace could be had with Tunis ; but with regard to Algiers and Morocco, he could not undertake to promise anything. Peace with the four piratical powers, then, would cost Congress at least six hundred and sixty thousand dollars. If the affair had not involved the life and liberty of countrymen, the American commissioners might have laughed at the disproportion between the sums they were empowered to offer and those demanded.
Disguising their feelings as best they could, they “ took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the ground of the pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury.” The ambassador replied : It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave ; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy’s ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth ; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once. It was the opinion of this enlightened public functionary that the Devil aided his countrymen in these expeditions, for they were almost always successsful.
It is difficult for us to realize only eighty-six years after this conversation, that it could ever have been held ; still less that the American commissioners should have seriously reported it to Mr. Jay, with an offer of their best services in trying to borrow the money in Holland or elsewhere, and in concluding the several bargains for peace with the four powers ; least of all, that Mr. Jay should have submitted the offers of the ambassador to Congress. Congress, in their turn, referred the matter back to Mr. Jay for his opinion ; which he gave with elaboration and exactness. The substance of his report was this : We cannot raise the money, and it would be an injury to our credit to attempt to do so and not succeed.
Mr. Jefferson was obliged, therefore, to confine his efforts to the mere deliverance of the captives by ransom. This, too, was a matter demanding the most delicate and cautious handling ; for the price of a captive was regulated like professional fees, according to the wealth of the parties interested. Let those professional pirates but suppose a government concerned in a slave’s ransom, and the price ran up the scale to a height most alarming. Jefferson was obliged to conceal from every one, and especially from the prisoners, that he had any authority to treat for their release ; a course that brought upon him a kind of censure hard to bear indeed. While he was exerting every faculty in behalf of the captives, he would receive from them “ cruel letters,” as he termed them, accusing him, not merely of neglecting their interests, but of disobeying the positive orders of Congress to negotiate their ransom.
He availed himself, at length, of the services of an order of monks called The Mathurins, instituted for the purpose of begging alms for the ransom of Christian captives held to servitude among the Infidels. Agents of theirs constantly lived in the Barbary States, searching out captives, and driving hard bargains in their purchase. As it was known that the Mathurins could ransom cheaper than any other agency, they were frequently employed by governments and by families in procuring the deliverance of captives. The chief of the order received Mr. Jefferson with the utmost benignity, and won his favorable regard by making no allusion to the religious heresy of the American captives. He offered to undertake the purchase, provided the most profound secrecy were observed, and he thought the twenty captives would cost Congress ten thousand dollars. Congress authorized the expenditure. But that was the time when it overtaxed the credit of the United States even to subsist their half a dozen representatives in Europe. “The moment I have the money,” Mr. Jefferson was obliged to write, “ the business shall be set in motion.” But the money was long in coming. A new government was forming at Philadelphia. All was embarrassment in the finances and confusion in the minds of the transitory administration. The poor captives lingered in slavery year after year, dependant for daily sustenance, for months at a time, on advances made by the Spanish ambassador. As late as 1793, we still find Mr. Jefferson busied about the same prisoners in Algiers.
While doing what he could for the relief and protection of his own countrymen, he set on foot a nobler scheme for delivering the vessels of all the maritime nations from the risk of capture by these pirates. He drew up a plan, which he submitted to the Diplomatic Corps at Versailles, for keeping a joint fleet of six frigates and six smaller vessels in commission, one half of which should be always cruising against the corsairs, waging active war, until the four Barbary States were willing to conclude treaties of peace without subsidy or price. Portugal, Naples, the two Sicilies, Venice, Malta, Denmark, and Sweden, all avowed a willingness to share in the enterprise, provided France offered no opposition. Having satisfied the ambassadors on this point, he felt sure of success if Congress would authorize him to make the proposition as from them, and to support it by undertaking to contribute and maintain one of the frigates. But the power of the Congress of the old Confederacy, never sufficient, was now waning fast. What could it ever do but recommend the States to pay their share of public expenses ? And the recommendations of this nature, as Jefferson remarked, were now so openly neglected by the States, that Congress “ declined an engagement which they were conscious they could not fulfil with punctuality.” It was an excellent scheme. Jefferson had drawn it up in great detail, and with so much forethought and good sense, that it looks on paper as though it might have answered the purpose.
It fell to the lot of Jefferson to negotiate and sign a convention between France and the United States which regulated the consular services of both nations. Does the reader happen to know what despotic powers a consul exercised formerly ? He was a terrible being. He was invested with much of the sacredness and more than the authority of an ambassador. The laws of the country in which he lived could not touch him, — could neither confine his person, nor seize his goods, nor search his house. Over such of his countrymen as fell into his power he exercised autocratic sway. If he suspected a passenger of being a deserter or a criminal, he could send him home ; if he caught a ship in a contraband act, he could order it back to its port. When Dr. Franklin came to arrange the Consular Service of the two countries, the Count de Vergennes simply handed him a copy of the Consular Convention established between France and the Continental powers ; and this the Doctor accepted, signed, and sent home for ratification, supposing it to be the correct and only thing admissible. “ Congress received it,” as Jefferson reports, “with the deepest concern. They honored Dr. Franklin, they were attached to the French nation, but they could not relinquish fundamental principles.” The convention was returned to Jefferson, with new instructions and powers ; and he succeeded, after a long and difficult negotiation, in inducing the French government to limit those excessive consular powers. The government, he explains, anticipated a very extensive emigration from France to the United States, which, under the old consular system, they could have controlled ; and hence they yielded it “ with the utmost reluctance, and inch by inch.” But they yielded it, at last, with frankness and good-humor, and the consular system was arranged as we find it now.
When we turn from the plenipotentiary’s public duties to his semi-official and voluntary labors, it is impossible not to be stirred to admiration and gratitude. I do not know what public man has ever been more solicitous to use the opportunities which his office conferred of rendering solid service to his country, to institutions, to corporations, to individuals. He kept four colleges — Harvard, Yale, William and Mary, and the College of Philadelphia — advised of the new inventions, discoveries, conjectures, books, that seemed important. And what news he had to send sometimes ! It was he who sent to America the most important piece of mechanical intelligence that pen ever recorded, — the success of the Watt steam-engine, by means of which “ a peck and a half of coal performs as much work as a horse in a day.” He conversed at Paris with Boulton, who was Watt’s partner in the manufacture of the engines, and learned from his lips this astounding fact. But it did not astound him in the least, — he mentions it quietly in the postscript of a long letter ; for no man yet foresaw the revolution in all human affairs which that invention was to effect. He went to see an engine at work in London afterwards, but he was only allowed to view the outward parts of the machinery, and he could not tell whether the mill “was turned by the steam immediately,” or by a stream of water which the steam pumped up.
We are all familiar with the system of manufacturing watches, clocks, arms, and other objects, in parts so exactly alike that they can be used without altering or fitting. It was Jefferson who sent to Congress an account of this admirable idea, which he derived from its ingenious inventor, a French mechanic. He also forwarded specimens of the parts of a musket-lock, by way of illustration. The system, which was at first employed only in the manufacture of arms, seems now about to be applied to all manufactures. He sent to Virginia particular accounts of the construction of canals and locks, and of the devices employed in Europe for improving and extending the navigation of rivers ; information peculiarly welcome to General Washington and the companies formed under his auspices to extend the navigation of the James and the Potomac back to the mountains.
Virginian as he was, he had a Yankee’s love for an improved implement or utensil, and he was always sending something ingenious in that way to a friend. He scoured Paris to find one of the “new lamps ” for Richard Henry Lee, failed to get a good one, tried again in London, and succeeded. Madison was indebted to him for getting made the most perfect watch the arts could then produce, —price six hundred francs, — and a portable copying-press of his own contriving, besides a great number of books for his library. A stroll among the book-stalls was one of his favorite afternoon recreations during the whole of his residence in Paris, so one of his daughters records, and he picked up many hundreds of prizes in the way of rare and curious books, for Madison, Wythe, Monroe, and himself.
Europe is still the chief source of our intellectual nourishment; but when Jefferson was minister in Paris, it was the only source. America had contributed nothing to the intellectual resources of man, except Franklin ; and the best of Franklin was not yet accessible. We had no art, little science, no literature; not a poem, not a book, not a picture, not a statue, not an edifice. Jefferson evidently recognized it as a very important part of his duty to be a channel of communication by which the redundant intellectual wealth of one continent should go to lessen the poverty of the other. He had in his note-book a considerable list of Americans, such as Dr. Franklin, James Madison, George Wythe, Edmund Randolph, Dr. Stiles, of whom he was the literary agent in Europe, for whom he received the volumes of the Encyclopædia as they appeared, and subscribed for copies of any work of value which was announced for publication. In advance of international copyright, and, indeed, before Noah Webster had procured a home copyright for his spelling-book from a few of the State legislatures (the beginning of our copyright system), Jefferson aided two American authors to gain something from the European sale of their writings. He got forty guineas for an early copy of Ramsay’s History of the Revolutionary War for translation into French ; and when he found that the London booksellers did not dare sell the book, he sent for a hundred copies, and caused it to be advertised in the London papers, that persons in England wishing the work could have it from Paris, per diligence. Similar service he rendered Dr. Gordon, author of the History of the war to which he had himself contributed.
Some opportunities which occurred to him of aiding the growth of a better taste in America for architecture, he eagerly seized. Virginia was about to disfigure Richmond with public buildings, and the commissioners wrote to him for plans ; particularly, a plan for a capitol. What commission could have been more welcome ? From his youth up, before he had ever seen an edifice that was not repulsive, he was an enthusiast in architecture ; and now, in Paris, it was a daily rapture to pass one of his favorite buildings. He would linger near it, he tells one of his friends, for a long time ; would often go out of his way to catch a view of it; loved to study it in new lights and unusual conditions of the atmosphere, and never grew weary of admiring it.
As soon, therefore, as he received the letter from Richmond, he engaged the best architect of the day, and entered upon the joyous work. They took for their model the Maison Quarrée of Nismes, which, he thought, was “ one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful and precious morsel of architecture left us by antiquity ; . . . . very simple, but noble beyond expression.” All the time he could spare from pressing public duties he spent in adapting the ancient model to modern utilities ; but with all his zeal the plan consumed time, and he was aghast one day, to receive news from home that the commissioners were beginning to build without it. He wrote to Madison, begging him to use all his influence for delay. “ How is a taste,” he asked, “ for this beautiful art to be formed in our countrymen unless we avail ourselves of every occasion when public buildings are to be erected, of presenting to them models for their study and imitation ? ” The loss of a few bricks, he thought, was not to be weighed against “the comfort of laying out the public money for something honorable, the satisfaction of seeing an object and proof of national good taste, and the regret and mortification of erecting a monument of our barbarism, which will be loaded with execrations as long as it shall endure.” He seems to have smiled at his own vehemence. “ You see,” he concluded, “I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts. But it is an enthusiasm of which I am not ashamed, as its object is to improve the taste of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile to them the respect of the world and procure them its praise.”
Madison exerted himself ; the work was stopped ; the plan was accepted. But the home architect, as Professor Tucker tells us, mingled an idea or two of his own with those of the ancient master, and considerations of economy were allowed to modify parts of the design. The result many readers have seen in that ill-starred, forlorn-looking edifice, the Capitol of Virginia at Richmond. Near it, on the capitol grounds, is the best thing America has yet paid for in the way of a monument to the memory of deserving men, — the monument to Washington and the other Virginians most distinguished in the Revolutionary struggle. Jefferson was much occupied with details of this fine work during his residence in Paris. For Virginia, also, he bought some thousands of stands of arms and other warlike material; for, who had yet so much as thought that Virginia was not a sovereign State ?
There was no end of his services to the infant unskilled agriculture of his country. In Charleston and Philadelphia there was already something in the way of an Agricultural Society, to which he sent information, seeds, roots, nuts, and plants ; thus continuing the work begun in his father’s youth by John Bartram of Philadelphia, to whom be honor and gratitude forever ! To the Charleston Society, Jefferson’s benefactions were most numerous and important. Upon receiving the intelligence that he had been elected a member of the society, he sent them, with his letter of acknowledgment, “some seeds of a grass that had been found very useful in the southern parts of Europe,” and was almost the only grass cultivated in Malta. It is to be feared the seed was not duly cared for by the Society, for the Northern eye looks in vain, in the Carolinas, for a vivid lawn or a fine field of grass. Afterwards he procured for them a quantity of the acorns of the cork oak. Where are the cork oaks that should have sprung from them ? He burned with desire to introduce the olive culture into the Southern States, and he returns again and again to the subject in his letters. He saw what a great good the olivetree was to Europe, from its hardiness, its fruitfulness, the low quality of soil in which it flourishes, and the agreeable flavor it imparts to many viands otherwise tasteless or disagreeable. He urged the Charleston Society to make it a chief object to introduce the olive, and offered to send them bountiful supplies of plants of every valuable variety, and to be one of five persons to contribute ten guineas a year for their experimental culture in South Carolina.
“ If,” he wrote to President Drayton, “ the memory of those persons is held in great respect in South Carolina who introduced there the culture of rice, a plant which sows life and death with almost equal hand, what obligations would be due to him who should introduce the olive-tree, and set the example of its culture ! Were the owners of slaves to view it only as the means of bettering their condition, how much would he better that by planting one of those trees for every slave he possessed ! Having been myself an eyewitness to the blessings which this tree sheds on the poor, I never had my wishes so kindled for the introduction of any article of new culture into our own country.”
Olive-oil, however, despite his generous efforts, is not yet an American product. The Society accepted his offers. He sent them a whole “cargo of plants.” The culture was begun with enthusiasm. But, whether from want of skill, or want of perseverance, or the unsuitableness of the climate, or the excessive richness of the soil, the trees did not flourish. The caper, too, of which he sent seeds and amplest information, we still import in long, thin bottles, from Europe. Cotton he dismisses with curious brevity, considering the importance it has since attained. In writing of East India products to the Charleston Society, he says, “ Cotton is a precious resource, and which cannot fail with you.”
Rice was the great theme of his agricultural letters. He was surprised, upon settling for the first time in a Catholic community, at the vast quantities of rice consumed ; for it was the great resource of all classes during Lent. Fish was then a costly article, so far from the sea. Voltaire laughs at the Paris dandies of his day who alleviated the rigors of Lent by breakfasting with their mistresses on a fresh fish brought, post, from St. Malo, that cost five hundred francs, — a delicate mark of attention, he observes, to a pretty penitent. Rice, however, was the standing dish in France during the fasting-season, and the merchants timed their importations accordingly. Jefferson was struck with the small quantity of American rice brought to French ports and the low price it brought. Upon inquiry, he was told that the American rice (which reached France by way of England) was inferior in quality to that of Piedmont and not so well cleaned. He sent to Charleston specimens of the kinds of rice sold in Paris, explained the inconveniences of a circuitous commerce, urged the Carolinians to send cargoes direct to Havre, and told them to be sure to get the bulk of the supply in port a month before Lent. As to the imperfect cleaning, he resolved to investigate that point to the uttermost. Being at Marseilles in 1787, he inquired on every hand concerning the machine employed in Italy to hull and clean the rice. No one could tell him. The vast national importance of the matter, together with the warm responses which he had received from Charleston to his letters upon rice, induced him to cross the Alps and traverse the rice country on purpose to examine the hulling-mill employed there, to the use of which he supposed the higher price of the Italian rice was due. “I found their machine,” he wrote to Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, “ exactly such a one as you had described to me in Congress in the year 1783 ! ”
But he did not cross the Alps in vain. Seeing that the Italians cleaned their rice by the very mill used in South Carolina, he concluded that the Italian rice was of a better kind, and resolved to send some of the seed to Charleston. It was, however, part of the barbaric protective system to prevent the exportation of whatever could most signally bless other nations ; and no one was allowed to send seed-rice out of the country. Jefferson, falling back on the higher law, “ took measures with a muleteer to run a couple of sacks across the Apennines to Genoa ” ; but having small faith in the muleteer’s success, he filled the pockets of his coat and overcoat with the best rice of the best rice-producing district in Italy, and sent it, in two parcels by different ships, to Charleston. The muleteer failed to run his sacks, but this small store reached the Charleston Society, who distributed it among the riceplanters, a dozen or two of grains to each. These were carefully sown and watched, usually under the master’s eye. The species succeeded well in the rice country, and enabled the South Carolina planters to produce the best rice in the world. If the reader has had to-day a pudding of superior rice, its grains were, in all probability, descended lineally from those which Jefferson carried off in his pockets in 1787.
He afterwards sent the society rough seed-rice from the Levant, from Egypt, from Cochin-China, from the East Indies ; besides an “ improved tooth ” of a rice-mill. He also perfected with the French government and with French merchants the best arrangements then possible for the direct importation of rice from South Carolina and Georgia. No man was ever more vigilant than he in detecting opportunities to benefit his country. How did he get unhulled rice from CochinChina ? “ The young prince of that country, lately gone from hence, having undertaken that it shall come to me.”
Nor did he confine his services to his own country ; for, as he said more than once, he regarded the office which he filled as international, and he wished to be the medium of good to both countries. Among other American productions, he sent for two or three hundred peccan nuts from the far West, for planting in France. To Dr. Stiles he wrote : “ Mrs. Adams gives me an account of a flower found in Connecticut, which vegetates when suspended in the air. She brought one to Europe. What can be this flower ? It would be a curious present to this continent.” Such hints were seldom dropped in vain. Some of his correspondents took extraordinary pains to gratify his desires of this nature. The venerable Buffon, getting past eighty then, and verging to the close of his illustrious career, was indebted to Jefferson for torrents of information concerning nature in America, as well as for many valuable specimens. He gave the great naturalist the skin of a panther, which the old man had never seen, and had not mentioned in his work ; also, the horns and skins of American deer, the feet and combs of American birds, and many other similar objects.
He did not, it seems, always agree with Buffon. The old man held chemistry in contempt, — mere cookery, he called it, — and held that a chemist was no better than a cook. “ I think it,” said Jefferson, “on the contrary, the most useful of sciences, and big with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race.” He combated, also, the Count de Buffon’s theory of the degeneracy of animals in America. After much discussion, he tried an argument similar to that which Dr. Franklin had used, when, in reply to a remark of the same nature, he requested all the Americans seated on one side of the table to stand, and then all the Frenchmen, who happened to sit in a row on the other side, The Americans towered gigantic above the little Gauls, and the Doctor came off triumphant. Jefferson, on his part, wrote to General Sullivan of New Hampshire to send him the bones and skin of a moose, mightiest of the deer kind ; Sullivan, exaggerating the importance of the object, on fire to do honor to his country and oblige its representative, formed a hunting party, plunged into the measureless snows of the New Hampshire hills, found a herd, killed one, cut a road twenty miles to get it home, got the flesh from the bones, packed skeleton and skin in a great box, with horns of five other varieties of American deer, and sent it on its way to the ocean. In the course of time, Mr. Jefferson received a bill of thirty-six guineas for the carriage ot the box, and a glowing account from General Sullivan of his exertions in procuring its contents. He paid the bill with a wry face, but the moose did not arrive. Six months after the grand hunt, he wrote thus : “That the tragedy might not want a proper catastrophe, the box, bones and all, are lost ; so that this chapter of Natural History will still remain a blank. But I have written to him not to send me another. I will leave it for my successor to fill up, whenever I shall make my bow here.” A week later, however, he had the pleasure of sending the box to the Count de Buffon, promising much larger horns another season. The naturalist gracefully acknowledged the gift, and owned that the moose was indeed an animal of respectable magnitude. “I should have consulted you, sir,” said he, “ before publishing my Natural History, and then I should have been sure of my facts.” He died next year, too soon to enjoy the enormous pair of buck’s horns coming to Jefferson from his native mountains, to maintain in Europe the credit of his native continent.
The publication of Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, in English and in French, was an interesting event of his residence in Europe. Saturated as the book was with the republican sentiment of which he was the completest living exponent, it was eagerly sought after in Paris, and had its effect upon the time. He appears to have taken a modest view of the merits of the work. “ I have sometimes thought,” he wrote to his friend Hopkinson of Philadelphia, “ of sending my Notes to the Philosophical Society as a tribute due to them ; but this would seem as if I considered them as worth something, which I am conscious they are not. I will not ask for your advice on this occasion, because it is one of those on which no man is authorized to ask a sincere opinion.”
A work much more important, upon which he valued himself more than upon anything he ever wrote in his life, except the Declaration of Independence, and far more meritorious than that, was published in Paris in 1786. I mean his Act for Freedom of Religion, passed in that year by the Virginia legislature. He had copies of it printed, according to his custom. It was received and circulated with an ominous enthusiasm. I say ominous ; for the first effect of ideas so much in advance of the state of things could not but be destructive and disastrous. The whole Diplomatic Corps complimented the author by asking for a copy to transmit to their several courts, and he had it inserted in the Encyclopédie, to which he had contributed articles, and material for articles, on subjects relating to the United States. “ I think,” he wrote to his old friend and mentor, George Wythe, that “ our Act for Freedom of Religion will produce considerable good even in these countries, where ignorance, superstition, poverty, and oppression of body and mind, in every form, are so firmly settled on the mass of the people, that their redemption from them can never be hoped.” Never is a long time. He told George Wythe that if every monarch in Europe were to try as hard to emancipate the minds of his subjects from ignorance and prejudice, as he was then trying to keep them benighted, a thousand years would not raise them to the American level. He attributed the superiority of Americans, in freedom and dignity of mind, to their severance from the parent stock and their separation from it by a wide ocean ; which had placed all things “ under the control of the common sense of the people.”
A summons from Mr. Adams, his colleague in the commission for negotiating commercial treaties, called him to London in March, 1786. He spent two months in England. The visit was an utter and a woful failure. What evils might have been averted — the war of 1812, for one item — if that unhappy dotard of a king had had the least glimmer of sense, or the smallest touch of nobleness ! He received these two gentlemen, representatives of an infant nation offering amity and reciprocal good, in a manner so churlish as _ left them no hope of being so much as decently listened to. And they were not decently listened to. Ministers were cold, vague, evasive. Merchants said to them, in substance : America must send us her produce, must buy our wares ; we are masters of the situation. Why should we treat ? What do we want more ? Society, too, gave them the cold shoulder. These two men, the most important personages upon the island, if England could but have known it, were held of less account than a couple of attachés of the Austrian legation. It required “courage,” as Mr. Adams intimates, for a nobleman to converse with them at an assembly. “ That nation,” wrote Mr. Jefferson, “ hate us ; their ministers hate us ; and their king, more than all other men.” Strange infatuation ! Fatal blindness !
Of course, being human, Mr. Jefferson did not relish England. He found the people heavy with beef and beer, of a growling temper, and excessively prone to worship power, rank, and wealth. “ They are by no means the free-minded people we suppose them in America. Their learned men, too, are few in number, and are less learned, and infinitely less emancipated from prejudice, than those of France.” In the mechanic arts, he admitted, they surpassed all the world, and he enjoyed most keenly the English gardens and parks. London, he thought a handsomer city than Paris, but not as handsome as Philadelphia ; and the architecture generally in England, the “most wretched” he ever saw, not excepting America, nor even Virginia, “ where it is worse than in any other part of America I have seen.”
He set the Londoners right on one point. The crack invention of the moment was a carriage wheel, the circumference of which was made of a single piece of wood. As these wheels were patented and made in London, the invention was claimed as English. He told his friends, and caused the fact to be published, that the farmers in New Jersey were the first, since Homer’s day, who were known to have formed wheels in that manner. Dr. Franklin, some years before, had chanced to mention it to the person who then held the patent. The idea struck him, and the Doctor went to his shop and assisted him in making a wheel of one piece. The Jerseymen did it by merely bending a green sapling, and leaving it bent till it was set ; but as in London there were no saplings, the philosopher was kept experimenting for several weeks. He triumphed, at length, and made a free gift of the process to the carriage-maker, who made a fortune by it. Jefferson visited the shop in which Dr. Franklin had worked out the idea, where he received the story from the owner, who gave the whole credit to Franklin and “spoke of him with love and gratitude.” He also found in the Iliad the passage which proves that the Greeks and the Jersey farmers employed the same process : “ He fell on the ground like a poplar which has grown smooth in the western part of a great meadow, with its branches shooting from its summit. But the chariotmaker with the sharp axe has felled it, that he may bend a wheel for a beautiful chariot. It lies drying on the banks of a river.”
In company with Mr. Adams, he made the usual tour of England, visiting the famous parks, towns, battlefields, edifices. So far as his letters show, nothing kindled him in England but the gardens, — “ the article in which England excels all the earth,” —and he made the most minute inquiries as to the cost of maintaining those exquisite places, in order to ascertain whether it were possible for him to have a really fine garden at Monticello. It is to be presumed he applauded Mr. Adams’s harangue to the rustics on the battletle-field of Worcester, — Cromwell’s “crowning mercy.” The impetuous Adams, exalted by the recollections called up by the scene, was offended at the stolid indifference of the people who lived near by. “ Do Englishmen,” he exclaimed, “so soon forget the ground where liberty was fought for ? Tell your neighbors and your children that this is holy ground ; much holier than that on which your churches stand ! All England should come in pilgrimage to this hill once a year ! ” The by-standers, as Mr. Adams reports, were animated and pleased by this compliment to their native field. The two Americans visited Stratfordupon-Avon, but Mr. Jefferson only records that he paid a shilling for seeing Shakespeare’s house, another shilling for seeing his tomb, four shillings and twopence for his entertainment at the inn, and two shillings to the servants. Mr. Adams, on the contrary, ventured the bold remark that Shakespeare’s wit, fancy, taste, and judgment, his knowledge of life, nature, and character, were immortal.
Jefferson played his last piece upon the violin in Paris. Walking one day with a friend four or five miles from home, absorbed in earnest conversation, he fell and dislocated his right wrist. He grasped it firmly with his other hand, and, resuming the conversation, walked home in torture, of which his companion suspected nothing. It was unskilfully set, and he never, as long as he lived, recovered the proper use of it ; could never again write with perfect ease, could never again play upon his instrument. Mr. Randall remarks the curious fact, that, so inveterate had become the habit of entering his expenditures, he continued to record items, that very afternoon, using his left hand. In the morning, before the accident, he entered the payment to his steward, Petit, of five hundred and four francs for various household expenses, and, in the afternoon, after the accident, in a hand more legible, records the expenditure of “ 24 f. 10” for buttons, and “4f. 6” for gloves. The next day, he was out again, “ seeing the king’s library,” for which he paid three francs.
The wrist being weak and painful five months after the accident, the doctors “ filled up the measure ” of their absurdity by advising him to try the waters of Aix in Provence. He tried those waters, and, deriving no benefit from them, resumed his journey and enjoyed an instructive and delightful four months’ tour of France and Italy ; visiting especially the seaports, rice districts, and regions noted for the culture of particular products. The cities, he says, he “ made a job of, and generally gulped it all down in a day ” ; but he was “ never satiated with rambling through the fields and farms, examining the culture and cultivators with a degree of curiosity which make some take me to be a fool, and others to be much wiser than I am.” But he did not always find the towns so devoid of interest. It was upon this tour that he saw at Nismes the edifice which he had taken for a model for the capitol at Richmond. “ Here I am, madam,” he wrote to one of his friends, “gazing whole hours at the Maison Quarrée, like a lover at his mistress. The stocking-weavers and silk-spinners around it consider me a hypochondriac Englishman about to write with a pistol the last chapter of his history. This is the second time I have been in love since I left Paris. The first was with a Diana at the Chateau de Laye-Epinaye in Beanjolois, a delicious morsel of sculpture by M. A. Slodtz. This, you will say, was in rule, to fall in love with a female beauty ; but with a house ! It is out of all precedent. No, madam, it is not without precedent in my own history.” At Vienna, he owns to having been in a rage on seeing a superb Roman palace “ defaced ” and “ hewed down ” into a hideous utility.
When he saw men working long hours and hard for forty cents a week, children toiling with the hoe, women carrying heavy loads, tending locks, striking the anvil, and holding the plough, he sometimes made rather violent entries in his brief, hurried diary. For example : “ Few chateaux ; no farmhouses, all the people being gathered in villages. Are they thus collected by that dogma of their religion which makes them believe, that, to keep the Creator in good-humor with his own works, they must mumble a mass every day ?”
The hopeless, helpless condition of the peasantry in some parts of France to which nature had been most bountiful struck him to the heart again and again. It was his custom, as he wandered among the farms and vineyards, to enter their abodes upon some pretext, and converse with the wives of the absent laborers. He would contrive to sit upon the bed, instead of the offered stool, in order to ascertain of what material it was made, and he would peep on the sly into the boiling pot of grease and greens to see what was to be the family dinner. He had left Lafayette at Paris deeply absorbed in the early movements of the coming revolution, and he begged him to come into the southern provinces and see for himself what occasion there was for discontent. “To do it most effectually,” he said, “you must be absolutely incognito ; you must ferret the people out of their hovels as I have done, look into their kettles, eat their bread, loll on their beds on pretence of resting yourself, but, in fact, to find if they are soft. You will feel a sublime pleasure in the course of this investigation, and a sublimer one hereafter, when you shall be able to apply your knowledge to the softening of their beds, or the throwing a morsel of meat into their kettle of vegetables.”
What a republican such scenes as these made of him ! How he came to hate, abhor, despise, and loathe the hereditary principle ! And all the more, because his post gave him the means of knowing the exact calibre of the hereditary kings and nobles who took from these faithful laborers nearly all their toil produced, and left them thistles and garbage for their own sustenance. “ There is not a crowned head in Europe,” he wrote to General Washington in 1788, “ whose talents or merits would entitle him to be elected a vestryman by the people of America ” ; and he gave it to the general as his opinion that there was scarcely an evil known in Europe which could not be traced to the monarch as its source, “ nor a good which was not derived from the small fibres of republicanism existing among them.”
The king of France he knew was a fool ; and the queen, at a moment when the fate of the monarchy seemed to hang upon a few millions more or less in the treasury, gratified to the full a mania for high play. The kings of Spain and of Naples knew but one interest in life, — the slaughter of birds, deer, and pigs. “ They passed their lives in hunting, and despatched two couriers a week, one thousand miles, to let each other know what game they had killed the preceding days.” The successor to the great Frederick was “ a mere hog in body and mind.” George III. was a madman, and his son an animal of the same nature as the king of Prussia. According to Jefferson, England was as happy in her Prince of Wales in 1789, as she is in 1872. A friend (probably the Duke of Dorset) described to him the behavior of the prince at a little dinner of four persons : —
“ He ate half a leg of mutton ; did not taste the small dishes because small; drank champagne and burgundy as small beer during dinner, and Bordeaux after dinner, as the rest of the company. Upon the whole, he ate as much as the other three, and drank about two bottles of wine without seeming to feel it. . . . . He has not a single element of mathematics, of natural or moral philosophy, or of any other science on earth ; nor has the society he has kept been such as to supply the void of education. It has been that of the lowest, most illiterate, and profligate persons in the kingdom. . . . . He has not a single idea of justice, morality, religion, or of the rights of men, or any anxiety for the opinion of the world. He carries that indifference for fame so far, that he probably would not be hurt were he to lose his throne, provided he could be assured of having always meat, drink, horses, and women.”
Compared with the political system which placed such animals as these upon the summit of things, and made life burdensome, shameful, and bitter to nearly all but such, Jefferson thought the least good of the American governments a paragon of perfection. The very evils of democracy he learned to regard with a kind of favor. A little rebellion, now and then, like that in Massachusetts in 1786, he thought, might be, upon the whole, beneficial. “It is true,” he wrote, that “our governments want energy ” ; and this, he confessed, was “ an inconvenience.” But “ the energy which absolute governments derive from an armed force, which is the effect of the bayonet constantly held at the breast of every citizen, and which resembles very much the stillness of the grave, must be admitted also to have its inconveniencies.” The outrageous license of the London newspapers seemed to him an evil not greater than the suppressions and the perversions of the more shackled press of the Continent. He made an acute observation on this point to Thomas Paine in 1787, the truth of which every inhabitant of New York who has glanced over the newspapers during the last four years can attest : —
“ The licentiousness of the press produces the same effect which the restraint of the press was intended to do. If the restraint prevents things from being told, the licentiousness of the press prevents things from being believed when they are told.”
James Parton.