Jefferson and Civil Liberties

by CLAUDE G. BOWERS

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WE ARE apt to think of Thomas Jefferson primarily as a consummate polit ician, as indeed he was, but he was more significant as a political philosopher who entered the political arena, not in search of personal preferment, but to impose his political philosophy on American society. To him, above all, we are indebted for the democratic concept of the state. The decisive struggle came during the first years of the Republic when powerful undemocratic forces were fighting to exterminate the American freedoms. To appreciate the caliber of his leadership and the sincerity and consistency of his principles, a hasty review of his character and activities is necessary. He born in his father’s house

He was born on April 2, 1743, in his father’s house at Shadwell, near the hilltop on which he was to build the beautiful home of his heart, Monticello. His father was a self-made man of the pioneer type, but because of his mother the aristocratic blood of the Randolphs coursed in his veins. When in his early boyhood his father died, he came into possession of a large estate, and aside from the management of his property he was the master of his destiny. In his seventeenth year he entered the College of William and Mary, and while his first year there found him sowing the proverbial wild oats “in the society of horse racers, card players, and fox hunters,” his conscience pricked him in the second year, when he devoted fifteen hours a day to study. Adopting law as a profession, he had the immeasurable advantage of the tutelage of George Wythe, a great lawyer and jurist, a political philosopher, and a man of vast erudition. It was in these years that he read the political philosophers from ancient to modern times and discussed them in intimate conversations with his tutor.

In 1769, in his twenty-sixth year, the young country squire was sent to the Virginia House of Burgesses. The Stamp Act had infuriated the patriot party, and the conciliatory repeal was spoiled when Parliament passed the Townshend Acts imposing taxation without representation as a right. Jefferson aligned himself with the patriots.

Then came the Tea Tax, the Boston Port Bill, the rallying of the forces of opposition, and the creation of the Continental Congress to assure the united action of the colonies. When instructions to the Virginia delegation were under consideration, Jefferson submitted his own views in a paper that was profound, brilliantly and powerfully phrased, but so novel and revolutionary that the older members of the Burgesses drew back in alarm. They found an excuse to reject it; yet so deep was the impression made that they who had rejected it as instructions determined on its publication and circulation as propaganda. It reached the seasoned statesmen and politicians in the Congress, who instantly recognized in the author a political genius of a high order. So impressive was this “Summary View of the Rights of British America" that when Lord North submitted his “conciliatory proposition,”which conceded something that meant nothing, the legislature turned to young Jefferson to write the reply, and this he did with such brilliance that the Continental Congress adopted it as its own.

Thus, when elected to Congress in 1775, Jefferson did not appear in Philadelphia as a stranger. His reputation as a writer and original thinker had preceded him, and when at length the hour of separation from the mother country came, the older and more seasoned men in Congress, led by John Adams, turned to him to write the historic document. Today the eloquent indictment of British misrule has but an academic interest, but the Preamble, setting forth concisely the elements of the democratic creed, was revolutionary and is immortal. It is surprising that this revolutionary Declaration of Independence did not figure in the debate, since many members feared and despised democracy, and were to be numbered among Jefferson’s most venomous antagonists in the Homeric struggle to come.

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THE Declaration written and adopted, the author turned his attention to Virginia, and found a seat again in the legislature. Many thought independence meant merely the substitution of a republic for a monarchy, and to Jefferson that meant nothing. For him it was an opportunity to achieve democratic reforms in the social and political systems. Virginia had just adopted a reactionary constitution, antipathetic to democracy, and without submitting it to the people. Thus in October, three months after writing the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson appeared in the legislature with dynamite in his hand.

Within four days he introduced the then drastic measure providing that tenants in tail should hold their lands in fee simple, and this struck at the very root of feudalism in Virginia. It was a deadly blow aimed at the oligarchy of the rich, and seemed all the deadlier to the aristocracy because it came from its side of the barricade. Jefferson had “turned against his class.” The purpose of the system he attacked was to perpetuate wealth, by law, in a few privileged families. Against powerful opposition, he pushed his democratic measure to its passage.

He followed with another measure against the further importation of slaves. His reference to this iniquity in the Declaration of Independence had been stricken out to prevent a sectional schism. Again the opposition was so strong that it was laid aside, lest an insistence on its passage imperil other reform measures that had a chance to pass. Even so, Jefferson again had made men think on the evil. He was always opposed to slavery on both economic and moral grounds. “This abomination must have an end,”he wrote, “and there is a superior bench reserved in heaven for those who hasten it.”

He also introduced a measure for popular education through public schools, maintained through the taxation of the well-to-do. This too was savagely fought by men of property who could see no reason why they should be taxed for the education of the poor man’s son; and so persistent was the opposition that years were to intervene before popular education was possible in Virginia.

But most impassioned of all was the battle waged against the adoption of Jefferson’s bill for the separation of Church and State and his Ordinance of Religious Freedom. For generations, denominations opposed to the Established Church had been subjected to persecution. Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Quakers holding services in their own houses had been declared guilty of a crime, and dissenting preachers had been dragged from the pulpit and thrown into filthy, vermin-infested jails. Jefferson proposed that men should have the right to worship God according to the dictates of their conscience. But he had more in view in his proposed separation of Church and State. The Established Church had long been a powerful ally of the political oligarchy of the feudalistic aristocracy, with political preachers joining the reactionary politicians against progress and reforms. So stubborn was the opposition to the Ordinance of Religious Freedom that it was not until after Jefierson had gone to Paris that it became a law.

These democratic reforms incurred the lasting hatred of the reactionary aristocracy and alienated cherished friends, but the rising democratic forces rallied around Jefferson, and in June, 1779, he was elected Governor of Virginia. Here his enemies were to have their revenge. It was at the darkest hour of the Revolution in Virginia. Washington with his army was in the North; war matériel, on Washington’s appeal, had been sent, to him; and on Washington’s insistence, Virginia soldiers had been sent to reinforce the army in North Carolina, when the invasion came, and found Virginia unprepared. When, very soon after Jefferson’s retirement, Washington and Lafayette with the full force of the patriotic army swept into the state and victory perched upon its banners, Jefferson’s enemies made the most of it.

Sensitive to criticism, Jefferson retired to Monticello, but it too had its shadows now. His wife, to whom he was tenderly devoted, died, leaving him in the deepest gloom. It was then, parity to divert his mind, that he turned to the writing of his Notes on Virginia, his only book. It is still readable today.

On the insistence of his friends, he returned to public life and re-entered Congress in the autumn of 1783. His leadership was conceded, and he, who had written the Declaration of Independence, piloted the peace treaty to its ratification, despite the incredible obstacles in the way. Under his chairmanship, plans for the temporary government of the Northwest Territory were drawn. Into his draft he wrote: “After the year 1800 of the Christian era, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States [to be carved from the Territory] otherwise than in punishment of crimes.” Again Jefferson’s prohibition was stricken out, but his proposal created sentiment and it was included in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

In the summer of 1784, Jefferson went to France as Minister, and one gets the impression that he was happier in Paris than in any other post he held. Here he was to remain five years, relishing tranquillity. Elegantly housed, conversing with the French philosophers and artists, avidly interested in the premonitions of the Revolution, he still had time for reading and writing, and in the cloistered room he had in the Carthusian Monastery he could hide himself away for meditation. He scoured the bookstalls for new and rare volumes, roamed the streets in search of history and beauty, frequented the studio of Houdon, and excitedly inspected new inventions and mechanical devices. He enjoyed the company of Mme Helvétius, mildly flirted with the Princesse de Tessé and Mme de Corney, and, less mildly, with Marie Cosway, the artist, whose friendship was to last into old age.

Once only he had a warning of the struggle he was to encounter on his return. On reading the American Constitution, he was shocked by the absence of a Bill of Rights to protect the people against the abuse of power. Hotly he rallied his friends at home to action. “A Bill of Rights,”he wrote indignantly to Madison, “is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth . . . and which no just, government should refuse or rest on inference.” In the first Congress, Madison responded with the first Ten Amendments, which supplied the need. Soon, back home, Jefferson would have to put on the armor of militant leadership to save the Bill of Rights from the erasure of reactionary antidemocratic forces. The struggle for democracy in America had not been won. He went home on leave, expecting to return to Paris, and it was without elation that he consented to enter Washington’s Cabinet as Secretary of State.

Such was Jefferson’s background in principles and action when the dramatic final struggle began which was to determine definitely whether ours should be a democratic republic.

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HENCEFORTH his life was to be more violently controversial, and gradually, even reluctantly, the philosopher merged into the active politician fighting for the tenets of his political philosophy. In social circles in Philadelphia and New York he was shocked by what he saw and heard. Speculators were absorbed in accumulating wealth by hook or crook, and Society was dreaming of a court. Under the brilliant leadership of Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist Party, scornfully antidemocratic, was thoroughly entrenched. Its leaders were clever, eloquent, resourceful, and ruthless, supported by the rich merchants of seaboard cities and the bankers, speculators, and manufacturers. Small merchants and artisans were as dirt; tillers of the earth were beneath the notice of government, and these, widely scattered, did not easily lend themselves to organization and direction. The Federalists were intent to create a strong government to which the rich should be bound by mercenary interest.

Jefferson observed the drift with consternation. Very soon Hamilton was presuming to direct foreign policy, and brushes in council, distasteful to Jefferson, became frequent. He did not like Hamilton’s Bank, and he distrusted Hamilton’s obsession on an army. At length he and Madison agreed on the necessity for an organized opposition, but there was little that could be done. Congress was dominated by the Federalists. The Federal courts were packed whh Federalist politicians willing to sit in party caucuses. The Federalists bad a powerful propaganda organ in Fenno’s paper, and soon Cobbett’s Porcupine was pouring forth abuse on the despised democrats and especially on Jefferson. It was then that Jefferson encouraged Philip Freneau, the poet, to start a paper in opposition. Soon Hamilton anonymously was writing bitter attacks on his colleague, but Jefferson refrained from retaliation. Twice in disgust he tendered his resignation only to be persuaded by Washington to remain, but he tendered his third resignation definitively. There was nothing he could do by remaining. The policies he had opposed were largely economic. The enemies of democracy had not yet emerged openly to tear down the sustaining pillars of liberty and popular government, and on the issues then involved the people had their remedy at the polls.

He returned to his loved hilltop to cultivate his acres, to tend his flowers and potatoes, to read, write, meditate, and converse amicably with friends and neighbors. He observed the Jay Treaty with distaste as a document bearing the stamp of Downing Street, and concluded that “while all hands were below deck, everyone at his own business, and the captain in his cabin attending to the log book, a rogue of a pilot had run the ship into an enemy’s port.” But it was not the Jay Treaty that put him on his mettle.

The Federalists were now planning to go beyond policies to principles. They were now denouncing the Democratic Societies as tools of the Jacobins and were demanding their suppression. Here was something that struck at the heart of liberty, reduced democracy to a major crime, and erased from the Constitution the Bill of Rights Jefferson had demanded as a protection of the people against the abuse of power. Here was tyranny in incubation, and Jefferson was astonished that it had come so soon. “To demand that censors of public measures be given up for punishment is to renew the demand of the wolves that the sheep give up their dogs as hostages of peace,” he wrote Giles of Virginia.

But there was no overt act as yet. Meanwhile the Federalists, fearing his opposition to their plans most of all, were increasing the ferocity of their slanders. Was not Jefferson a Jacobin — a tool of France — an assassin of Kings — a friend of anarchy — an atheist — the inciter of the Whiskey Rebellion? He turned in contempt, from this fusillade to his fields and gardens, his books, correspondence, and friends. “Let Adams have it,” he said when urged to be a candidate for President in 1796. To Madison he wrote that in the event of a tie he wished that “Mr. Adams may be preferred.” He wrote others that he would be happier “with the society of friends and neighbors, friends and fellow workers of the earth,” than with spies and sycophants.”When the pressure upon him increased he wrote Madison that he wanted nothing, but if his friends insisted, he would accept second place — though he would prefer the third, nothing. Thus he reached the Vice Presidency in 1801 and, unknowingly, approached the great moment of his life.

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IF Jefferson thought of the Vice Presidency as an ivory tower whence in philosophic calm he could observe trends and events and quietly advise his friends, he was almost immediately disillusioned. The Federalists, determined on their quarrel with the French Republic, were pushing toward war. Gouverneur Morris, antidemocratic and antirepublican, our Minister in France, had aligned himself militantly against the Revolution. When, none too soon, he was recalled, Monroe, the Jeffersonian, was sent, and was betrayed by his own government. When Monroe was recalled and Pinckney, the Federalist, was sent, the French refused to receive him — and the war hawks clamored for war. Hamilton, however, was chary and proposed the sending of a commission with two Federalists and one Jeffersonian, Gerry. But the moment the Commissioners set sail, the Federalists began a campaign of provocation against our ally in the Revolution.

Such was the atmosphere when Congress convened in the early winter of 1797. Having silenced the Democratic Societies by intimidation and denunciation, the Federalists felt that the time seemed ripe to wipe out the “heresy of democracy” and to blacken the reputation of democratic leaders — especially Jefferson. The batteries of abuse were turned upon him; his character was assailed, his reputation attacked, his personal honor besmirched. He was an “atheist”; an “anarchist”; the “libeler of Washington”; the “tool of Robespierre,” then dead; a “liar”; and worse than all, a “democrat.” Subjected to the snubs and insults of Society, he shunned it to spend his evenings in the library of the Philosophical Society, of which he was president.

The Congressional session opened with a Message of Adams so wild that Jefferson thought it “insane.” So fantastic became the propaganda that the Porcupine was denouncing all revolutions, not excluding our own, as the work of “knaves, fools, and philosophers,” Jefferson being the knave, the fool, the philosopher.

Then came the XYZ episode, the demand of Talleyrand on the Commission for a bribe; and the war hawks were beside themselves with glee. Jefferson, shocked by the infamy of Talleyrand, refused to believe that the demand had had the sanction of the French government. But the hysteria of the man in the street alarmed him. when the XYZ papers arrived and were hurried to the press he was too good a political psychologist to underestimate the danger. “Art and industry combined have certainly wrought out of the business a wonderful effect on the people,” he wrote Edmund Pendleton, the Virginia jurist.

Now the atmosphere for extreme measures was just right—just right for the Alien and Sedition Laws. Fed on falsehoods, the public opinion was ready for any stupidity. The hysteria was encouraged by the Porcupine, resorting to the lowest form of yellow journalism and feat uring the fantastic tale that the French army had landed in South Carolina and was burning farmhouses, ravishing women, and kidnaping children — and the mobs in the streets of Philadelphia and New York howled.

Knowing that Congress was dominated by the warmongers and the loos of democracy, Jefferson advised his friends in Congress to seek an adjournment to permit a consultation with constituents — actually to gain time for the truth to catch up with the lies. But the Federalists, now booted and spurred, were riding hard and paid no heed.

Thus Jefferson, philosopher of democracy, presided in silence in the Senate, listening to the reading of the Alien and Sedition Laws and the debate that followed. Here was a clear call to him — to his active leadership. He had opposed the Hamiltonian measures, but as long as the people could speak and write, remonstrate and petition, the remedy for such was in their hands. Yet here was an open declaration of war against free speech, and the liberty of the press, and the right to petition for a redress of grievances. Here, brutally frank, was the blotting out of the Bill of Rights on which he had insisted. Finding that the warmongers were talking of “Septembrizing, deportation, and the examples of quelling sedition set by the French executives,” he concluded that “all the firmness of the human mind is now in a state of requisition.”

Then it was that he assumed the active leadership of the opposition, and the consummate politician emerged to defend the tenets of his philosophy. He thought the Alien Law aimed at the Irish Catholics, who were robust republicans, and certainly not at “Porcupine,” who was flaunting the pictures of George III and Lord North in his office windows. When Hamilton Rowan, the Irish patriot, was threatened, Jefferson offered him the sanctuary of Monticello, but in the Terror in preparation the Alien Law was to play an inconspicuous part. The major role was reserved for the Sedition Law.

Coldly calm and apparently unmoved, Jefferson looked down upon the debate on this vicious measure, unable to secure a hearing for its opponents He had urged these to concentrate their arguments on the unconstitutionality of the measure, and men like Madison, Livingston, and Gallatin were prepared. But when they tried to speak they could not be heard for the coughing, laughing, loud talking, and scraping of feet on the floor.

But if Jefferson could not hear his friends he heard his enemies and was appalled. The democratic press was to be silenced, free speech denied, the right of petition proscribed; and the democratic “heresy” was to be crushed if need be by armed force. Livingston was denounced as a traitor for proposing that Gerry should renew negotiations in Paris; the Aurora was “seditious” for telling the Irish what the Alien Law meant for them; and “seditious,” too, the Congressmen daring to write their constituents about these strange proceedings. When a Jeffersonian asked if it was “proposed to prevent members from speaking what they please or from reaching their people,” the suave Robert Harper, leading for the majority, agreed that they might speak in the House but that it would be “seditious” to publish what they said there.

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THE Sedition Law was passed and the Terror began. The Commercial-Advertiser of New York immediately began denouncing all men as traitors who dared question the Sedition Act. Federal judges began charging grand juries in praise of the law and in denunciation of its critics. The Federalist organ in New York was laying down the rule: “When a man is heard to inveigh against the Sedition Law he deserves to be suspected.”

The purpose was to terrorize the people into silence. Jefferson’s faith in the spirit of the people convinced him that this would fail. His fear was elsewhere. He feared the rising of the people in revolt and the dissolution of the Union, and he warned his followers against insurrection. “Nothing could be so fatal,” he wrote Pendleton. “Anything like force would check the progress of public opinion and rally [the people] against the Government. This is not the kind of opposition the American people will permit. But keep away all show of force and they will bear down all the propensities of the government by the constitutional means of election and petition.” Here we have the caliber of his leadership, his consummate genius as political strategist and statesman.

He made no public speeches, wrote neither articles nor pamphlets; but the sponsors of the repressive measures feared him most. Ruffians played the rogue’s march beneath his windows; his mail was burdened with threatening letters; spies penetrated into his home to report his conversation, and spies dogged his footsteps and watched his house. Timothy Pickering was feverishly searching his writings to find an isolated phrase on which he could be arrested for “sedition.” His mail was tampered with, opened, read, withheld; and he explained to Madison his failure to sign his name “which has been rendered almost habitual with me by the necessity of the post office; indeed the period is now approaching when I shall discontinue writing letters as much as possible, knowing that every snare will be used to get hold of what may be perverted. Surrounded by treachery, he had to deny himself to all but trusted friends. With these he had personal contact, and through these he reached others — especially his leaders in every state. His contacts with Madison, Gallatin, and Giles were close and constant, and through them he directed the Congressional strategy of his party.

But when the Terror came he was not prepared for its ferocity. Serenaded along with his friends by the rogue’s march at night, he had abuse poured upon him at Federalist dinners, and the Federalist press, taking its cue from Porcupine, was exhausting the vocabulary of vilification, and the pulpit was bearing false witness while flinging mud, and Eastern colleges were promiscuously passing out honorary degrees to Federalistic politicians of no intellectual distinction while none went to the president of the Philadelphia Philosophical Society, the friend of Franklin and Rittenhouse. For all this, Jefferson was prepared. He was not prepared for the stump speeches of Federal judges in glorification of the Sedition Law and in denunciation of its critics, or for the cynical brutality of these courts in the mock trials of democratic editors. Nor for the smug complacency of governmental officials when drunken mobs fell on editors with guns and clubs and tried to wreck the office of the Aurora. The arrest and persecution of Matthew Lyon, a Vermont patriot, editor, and Congressman, amazed him. The editor in a letter had referred to “Adams’ continual grasp for power” and his “ridiculous pomp.”For this he was arrested for “sedition,” convicted in a farcical trial, and conveyed by armed men on horseback to a loathsome jail forty miles away. The men who had followed Ethan Allen prepared to demolish the jail to effect his rescue but were restrained by Lyon’s appeal to them to resort to legal methods only. He was then elected to Congress by a large majority, and Jefferson and his friends raised the money to pay his fine.

The right of petition had become “seditious.” John C. Ogden, carrying a petition for Lyon’s release to Philadelphia, was arrested; on his release a gang prepared to scourge him in the streets of Litchfield when the arrival of a rescue party intervened. It had become “seditious” to solicit funds to pay Lyon’s fine; and when Anthony Haskell, a Vermont editor, appealed for funds through his paper, rightly describing Lyon’s jailer as “ a Tory,” he was arrested in the night and taken by armed men on horseback sixty miles in a pouring rain to a miserable jail, and denied permission to dry his soaking clothes. He was hurried to trial before Federal Judge Patterson, pronounced guilty of “sedition without ceremony, and denied the right of defense.

Nothing was too petty for the inquisitors. When an illiterate Revolutionary soldier, David Brown, was found distributing attacks of his own crude composition on the Sedition Law, he was denounced as “Jefferson’s agent paid to spread sedition,”Had he not taken part in the raising of a liberty pole? Worse still, had it not borne the inscription “No Stamp Tax; No Sedition Law"? Had he not paid to have the inscription painted — and actually held the ladder for the man who put it up? Dragged before Chase, the grand inquisitor, who was shocked by the man’s “turpitude,” he was fined beyond all reason and sent to jail for a year and a half.

Most infamous perhaps was the cruel persecution of Thomas Adams, the powerful editor of the Independent Chronicle of Boston. His arrest for sedition” followed his criticism of an act of the Massachusetts legislature. While gravely ill, he was dragged before Chief Justice Dana, who, in an inflammatory charge to the jury, not only denounced the editor and the democratic press, but savagely attacked the lawyers for the defense as guilty of “sedition.” Thus it had become dangerous for a lawyer to defend a man charged under the Sedition Law. It is not surprising that Dana refused the challenge of these lawyers to publish his atrocious charge. With protests hammering on the jail door, Adams finally was released, but three weeks later the sick man was dead.

The climax of reactionary stupidity came with the arrest of Jeremiah Peck for the crime of circulating a petition to Congress for the repeal of the Alien and Sedition Laws. Peck was a Federalist, and the petition had been written by the author of the famous “Newburg Letters, also a Federalist. When Peck was dragged from his bed by armed men, put on a horse in manacles, and for five days paraded through villages and towns en route to New York, the people were shocked and enlightened. Here was Federalism on parade; here was the Sedition Law before their eyes. Here, in these arrests and trials, was a brutally frank attempt to wipe out all the fundamental freedoms guaranteed by a Constitution that had become a door mat, and to make the democratic instinct of the people a crime against the state.

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JEFFERSON fixed his hope on the approaching elections when the people would have their inning at the polls. Meanwhile, these crimes against the people had to be kept before them, and the debate continued until the opening of the polls. Jefferson had no ambition for office, but around him alone could the people be rallied, since he had become the symbol of their defense. In the late summer of 1798 a memorable conference was held under the trees on the lawn of Monticello. There sat Jefferson, who had inspired it, with Nicholas of Virginia and John Breckenridge of Kentucky. Madison, unable to attend, was in accord with the purpose. This was to devise a plan to impress upon the people the violations of the Constitution, and to force agitation and debate in every state in the Union. It was in launch a movement against the Sedition Law through the legislatures with resolutions denouncing it as unconstitutional. Today the constitutionality of a law can safely be tested in the Supreme Court; at that time the Court was packed with partisans of the law, and no one was more virulent in denouncing its critics than these Federal judges.

Thus came the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Jefferson knew that the Alien and Sedition Laws would lead inevitably to the dissolution of the Union. The Resolutions therefore called for their repeal. They set forth the compact theory of the Union, but this played no part in the debates that were to follow. The Federalist legislature of Maryland rejected the Resolutions as “improper" because they called for the repeal of the Alien and Sedition Laws; that of Delaware because they were “a very unjustifiable interference with the general government.”

Jefferson’s justification for the Resolutions is quite clear. If, he said, these laws should stand, “these conclusions will flow from them: that the General Government may place any act they think proper on the list of crimes, and punish it themselves, whether enumerated or not enumerated by the Constitution or cognizable of them; that they may transfer its cognizance to the President or any other person who may himself be the accuser, counsel. judge, and jury, and whose Suspicion may be evidence, his Order the sentence, his Officer the executioner, and whose breast the sole record of the transaction.” He knew that “unless the acts of tyranny be arrested on the threshold it would drive the States into Revolution, furnish new calumnies against republican government, and new pretexts for those who wish it to be believed that man cannot be governed but by an iron rod.”

He wrote Madison that the plan would be to affirm all important principles in the Resolutions but to “leave the matter in such a train as that we may not be committed absolutely to push matters to extremities.” The various legislatures were to be asked “ to concur . . . in declaring as it does hereby declare, that the acts are null and void and of no force or effect.”

The Resolutions served their purpose. In every legislature there were debates, which were reported in the press; and in country stores, in streets and fields, the Resolutions were discussed by the people until they came to know the significance of the crisis confronting them. Interest was intensified and general, and the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights became the paramount issue in the Presidential contest approaching. And Jefferson, the leader, became the candidate of the opposition.

Indeed, fidelity to the fundamentals of his political philosophy had literally pitched the philosopher into the cockpit of party politics. He outlined and directed the Congressional strategy of his party and inspired the writing of letters and pamphlets and the establishment of newspapers wherever needed. Insisting on the distribution of pamphlets and leaflets, he summoned his followers to find the money. He made out a subscription list, setting down opposite each name the amount expected.

He urged Madison to set aside a portion of each day for writing, and asked his followers in Congress to flood their constituents with letters that were read avidly in country stores, until the infuriated Federalists, now alarmed, called on their tools on the Federal bench to denounce the writers as “seditious.”

Meanwhile a war over the XYZ episode offered the once powerful party of Hamilton a possible way out. If there could only be a war! Jefferson had written Gerry bluntly that his friends were critical because he did not “more explicitly state whether there was in your colleagues [Marshall and Pinckney] that flexibility which persons earnest after peace would have practiced; whether, on the contrary, their demeanor was not cold, reserved and distant at least if not backward.” He was warned that “your fellow citizens feel they have a right to full information.” And now Gerry was home, going over his report with John Adams in the house in Quincy. The President was stunned by the revelation of the treachery of his Cabinet —especially Pickering. True to the Adams character — petty in small things, majestically great in big things — he took matters into his own hands. He would resume negotiations with the French. The warmongers writhed in agony of spirit and sharpened their knives for the little man they no longer could deceive.

And Jefferson, delighted now with Gerry, was instructing Edmund Pendleton to reduce the voluminous report to a capitulation “stating everything, short, simple, and leveled to every capacity,”and concise enough to permit its publication on handbills. With this he would flood the country and reach all the people. Thus the XYZ episode dwindled to a farce.

Threatened now with the triumph of Jefferson at the polls, the Federalist leaders met in the drawing room of the Binghams to devise a plan to rob him of the victory they feared. It was proposed that the certificates of electoral votes and papers should go to a committee composed of six members of the House and Senate, headed by the Chief Justice. The Federalists, in the majority, would go into secret session and decide which votes should be counted and which thrown out. The plan to keep this sinister project from the public failed when Duane of the Aurora received two copies, under cover, and published it to the world. Nothing daunted, the Federalists in their desperation prepared to force their project through, despite the powerful constitutional argument of Thomas Pinckney, the Jeffersonian, when to their consternation and disgust John Marshall joined the opposition on the issue. He forced amendments to which his fellow partisans could not agree, and the measure died between the House and Senate.

On the adjournment of Congress, Jefferson retired temporarily to the seclusion and serenity of Monticello. His work was done. He rode over his plantation, still interested in his peas and potatoes, his flowers and flocks. Perhaps he turned a page or two of his favorite, Ossian, so remote from politics. When Mari’s pianoforte arrived, he personally attended to the tuning. He wrote gossipy letters about a murder in the neighborhood and about the chitchat of the neighbors. The vile attacks on his public and private character had never been so low, and from numerous pulpits he was blackguarded as an “atheist.” He ignored these attacks, taking notice of but one fulmination from a preacher. “If the precepts of the Gospel are intended for those who preach as well as for others,” he said dryly, “ he will some day feel the duty of repentance.”

He had led the fight against the most powerful attempt in our history to destroy the elemental freedoms in defense of the “American way of life,” and of the fundamentals of liberty and democracy, but in the gloom of that dark day there was one shaft of light: he owed his final triumph to the two greatest opponents he ever had, John Marshall and Alexander Hamilton. The former killed the plan concocted in the Bingham drawing room to rob him of his victory at the polls; and when the Federalist extremists proposed to abandon their candidate and throw their votes to Aaron Burr, it was Hamilton who defeated that maneuver. Generations later, Henry Cabot Lodge, in his biography of Hamilton, was to write that the election of Jefferson “definitively determined that ours should be a democratic republic.”

Putting aside his preference for the contemplative life to lead in the bitter struggle for the freedoms of a democracy, the politician fought to make the ideals of the philosopher a vital part of the “American way of life,” and thus he rendered his greatest service to his country and humanity.

(“Socrates on Trial” by Irwin Edman, the fifth article in this series, will appear in the February Atlantic.)