Grade Level and Copyright 

Grade Level is 10.0 using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test with sample chapters. The Jefferson chapter with its discussions of natural and common law is 10.9. The other chapters are between 9.6 and 10.1. The shorter chapters on Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry might be good starting points for reluctant readers.

First edition published by Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1941.

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A Review

The New England Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 1, March 1942 by Roy F. Nichols
 “Umbreit’s book is the work of a historical scholar with a flair for popularizing biography and drawing clever character sketches,” wrote Roy F. Nichols in The New England Quarterly. 

Nichols continued: “Skillful strokes make intriguing portraits of Jefferson, John Adams, Hancock, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry and George Washington. …One gets the impression that somehow Jefferson is the villain of the piece. Hancock is displayed as an astute self-serving politician whose vanity made it possible for clever men to use him. John Adams appears as usual. Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry are master politicians with the latter treated more gently than usual of late because the author thinks him the victim of Jefferson’s talent for “the assassination of reputation.” The hero is Washington, without whom Umbreit thinks “there would never be a United States.” Umbreit thinks of him as one of the “fierce men” in history,” like William the Conqueror with a talent for organization and money-making. Thus these six men are portrayed with a wealth of detail illuminating the complexities of their characters.”

Foreword

Despite the fact that there are such things as good portraits of Washington, our dollar bills continue to be adorned by a bad one. Even Gilbert Stuart would not dissent from that statement. He painted better pictures, even better pictures of Washington, than the one on the dollar bills. What appears on the dollar bills is a more or less fictionalized and popularized portrait invented by Stuart for the purpose of keeping him well supplied with Madeira. His purpose was successful and for the rest of his life he had a steady trade in replicas, so steady that there are over a hundred of these replicas left, each cherished by some museum or collector as a Stuart Washington.

There is something more than passing strange about the continued use of this lifeless picture as the official portrait of Washington. But it is typical of our whole attitude toward that group of men who are generally included in the expression Founding Fathers. Stuart painted a nice, decorative picture. Who cares whether Washington really looked like that?

It is true there have been occasional debunking books. Those of them I have seen suffer from factual inaccuracy but there is a more basic reason why their influence has been negligible. Something does not come from nothing and a very distinct something came from these men.

Some of the most important events in the history of the world occurred along the Atlantic seaboard of North America in the latter part of the eighteenth century. It is contrary to all probability that the men responsible for the happening of those events were commonplace.

My object in writing this book was to select a few of these men; to take them apart; to try to find out what made them tick; in short, to find out what manner of men they were.

I suppose every reader will wonder at my choice of subjects. The best answer I can make is that I do not think it would be possible to select a list of six which would not arouse equal wonder. Certain practical considerations entered into the choice of subjects. One of the reasons for omitting Franklin, for example, was that he would have taken up at least as much space as Hancock, Sam Adams and Patrick Henry combined. And I was anxious to investigate what manner of men had borne those imposing names for they have not been investigated as often as some of the others.

Jay, John Rutledge and Ellsworth I have already reported on in Our Eleven Chief Justices.

Biographies, as commonly written, should properly be entitled The Life and Times of . . . In most of them the subject of the biography is used merely as a center around which to write history.

My interest is in personality rather than achievement; in what manner of men they were rather than in what they did. I want to get at the truth behind the libel on our dollar bills. It is not necessary to discover some long-lost painting in order to get a better picture than Stuart’s; there are better portraits; the trouble is they are seldom used.

Nor is it necessary to discover unknown manuscripts in order to get behind the literary equivalents of Stuart’s best-known Washington. Volumes and volumes of the letters of Washington, Jefferson and John Adams have been preserved. Lesser, but still ample, records remain of the other three men I have discussed. There are, in addition, volumes and volumes of the letters, journals and diaries of their contemporaries.

The chief use to which this mass of material has been put is to serve as a quarry from which to unearth texts for political disquisitions. There is, for example, a book on Jefferson by a well-known historian, published a few years ago, in which one of the conclusions is that if Jefferson were alive today he would be opposed to perpetual railroad bonds and that therefore perpetual liens should be forbidden.

The trouble in the case of Washington and Jefferson, at least, is, of course, that they have been deified and have thus become subject to the rule that each generation recreates its gods in its own image.

What I have done is to examine the mass of material with as open a mind as possible and to report as well as I am able what I have found out about the nature of these six men.

K. B. U.

New York, N.Y.

Courtesy of The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

GEORGE WASHINGTON 
From a portrait by Charles Willson Peale,

painted in 1779

Courtesy of Washinqton and Lee University

Washington at the age of forty
Detail from a portrait by Charles Willson Peale

Courtesy of Mrs. Francis E. Powell Jr

WASHINGTON WHEN PRESIDENT

Detail from a portrait by Charles Willson Peale

Courtesy of Massachusetts Historical Society

Washington when President
From a portrait by Christian Gullager

Photograph by courtesy of the A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust

WASHINGTON

Detail from the Vaughan-Harrison portrait by Gilbert Stuart

Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery

WASHINGTON

Detail from a portrait 

by John Trumbull

Courtesy of Herbert Lee Pratt, Esq.

PATRICK HENRY

From a miniature bv Lawrence Sully

Courtesy of the City of Boston

John Hancock Detail from a portrait by John Singleton Copley

Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery

John Hancock Detail from Trumbull's Declaration of Independence

Samuel Adams

After a portrait by John Johnston

Courtesy of Henry Adams, Esq. and Harvard University

John and Abigail Adams From pastels taken by Benjamin Blyth about the time of their marriage

Courtesy of Harvard University

John Adams After John Trumbull

Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery

John Adams After John Trumbull

The picture on the top is a detail from a portrait; 

the picture below is a reproduction of a miniature

Courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum

John Adams when minister to England

From a portrait by Mather Brown

Left: Courtesy of the National Museum Independence Hall

Right: Courtesy of the Adams Memorial Society

Left: John Adams From a portrait by Charles Willson Peale

Right: John Adams from a portrait by Gilbert Stuart

Courtesy of the National Museum Independence Hall

Thomas Jefferson from a portrait by Charles Willson Peale

Courtesy of American Philosophical Society

Thomas Jefferson

From a portrait by Thomas Sully

CHAPTER I

Thomas Jefferson

THOMAS JEFFERSON resigned as governor of Virginia because of the public clamor against his administration; few presidents have closed their terms as unpopular as he was when he left the White House, “I verily believe,” his warm supporter, A. J. Dallas, wrote to his Secretary of the Treasury, Gallatin, about seven months before the close of the Jefferson administration, “one year more of writing, speaking, and appointing would render Mr. Jefferson a more odious President, even to the Democrats, than John Adams.” It took nearly twenty years—until a new generation had had time to arise—for his popular prestige to recover from the unpopularity of his presidency. Another period of twenty years separates his resignation of the governorship from his election to the presidency.

What then is the reason for the tremendous space he occupies in American tradition? So far was he from being a popular orator that he declined throughout life even to attempt to make a public speech. He wrote very little for publication. He was the draftsman of the Declaration of Independence, and very proud of it. But the draftsmanship of important state papers seldom confers immortality. Who knows the draftsman of the Constitution? Certainly Jefferson’s drafting of this one state paper—excellent job though it was—cannot account for his fame. He left behind him a correspondence which competes with Voltaire’s for the position of being the largest ever left by any man. This correspondence is like scripture; it furnishes excellent quotations on almost any side of almost any question. He purchased Louisiana—without intending to do so—and immediately set up an autocratic territorial government—over considerable opposition in Congress—which kept the inhabitants on the verge of rebellion. He is sometimes given credit for that provision of the Ordinance of 1787 which forbade slavery in the old Northwest Territory but he seems to have forgotten the fact when he wrote letters right and left denouncing that provision of the Missouri Compromise which forbade slavery in the remaining territory north of the southern boundary of Missouri. He is frequently celebrated as the champion of agriculture against industry but no protective tariff has ever been half so effective in developing manufacturing—has ever paid such subsidies to industry or has had such a disastrous effect on farm prices— as Jefferson’s pet policy of an embargo. “Peace,” he said, “is our passion,” but even Napoleon did not covet his neighbor’s property more eagerly. Indeed, there is no long-range American policy which is so definitely Jeffersonian as manifest destiny.

Some of this contradiction, of course, represents changes of views but most of it does not. He never doubted, for example, that “peace is our passion,” but to his dying day he was writing letters to his successors in the presidency suggesting methods for acquiring Florida, or Texas, or Cuba, or Canada—methods which paid very little attention to the wishes of the inhabitants of those countries. There is nothing dishonest about this contradiction. When Jefferson said that no foreign nation had anything to fear from us because “peace is our passion” and when he lamented the passing of a favorable opportunity to seize Texas or West Florida by force, he saw no occasion for cynical smiles. No one who reads any substantial portion of his correspondence can doubt the utter honesty of the man while he will equally easily note the characteristics which made many of his contemporaries regard him as wholly unscrupulous. If Jefferson had been told that the principle of his foreign policy was never to covet any territory we did not want, he would have regarded the speaker as a man in whom political opposition had destroyed the powers of reason or—perhaps—he might have assented to it. For Jefferson was wholly devoid of the sense of humor, never able to see himself as others saw him.

He is celebrated in current school texts as the founder of American democracy. That might be of some use if we knew what democracy was, but when a word has become a political shibboleth it loses its value for conveying thought among intelligent people. No demonstration, at least, is necessary to prove that the word ‘‘democracy” now means something very different from what it did in 1800. But, in any event, if Jefferson founded American democracy he did not do it intentionally. He himself seldom, if ever, used the word. His own adjective for the political movement which he led was republican, and that word constituted his whole platform. His opponents he described as monarchists. That makes an intelligible distinction when we read the ridiculous insinuation in one of Jefferson's letters that the opposing party was plotting to make John Adams the hereditary chief magistrate of the country. It seems utterly incomprehensible when we read his assertion in letter after letter that those who opposed the admission of Missouri as a slave state were “monarchists.” The mental processes of a statesman who could regard opposition to the spread of slavery as evidence of a secret hankering for monarchy are worthy of examination.

There is one other distinction which should be considered in analyzing the sources of that continuing hold which his name has had on the American people. As Washington was the father of his country, so Jefferson was the first of our statesmen to be celebrated through the length and breadth of the land as “the friend of the people.” Anybody who should scientifically ascertain the qualities which cause a statesman to be accepted as the friend of the people would probably find better uses for the information than to publish it, but one thing is clear: Jefferson did not have the qualities which are commonly reputed to entitle a man to that distinction. It cannot be attributed to the popularity of any law passed during his administration. His presidency was very barren of legislation. The only laws passed under his auspices which impinged on the lives of all the people were the laws providing for the Embargo— and they were so unpopular that before he left the White House he was forced by an angry public opinion to sign an act repealing, or at least modifying, them.

Nor did he have the personal qualities which are usually regarded as essential for a friend of the people. He could not make a speech, he hated crowds, he disliked mingling with people, he freely expressed his contempt for all popular amusements. He did like to entertain individuals and small parties. He went to the utmost trouble to make these private dinner parties outstanding. He imported chefs from Paris, he kept the American diplomatists in Europe busy scurrying around after delicacies for him; his wines, said one of his political opponents, were the best I ever drank . . . I wish his French politics were as good as his French wines.”

These are not traits which usually make for political popularity. He was denounced by no less a popular orator than Patrick Henry as a man who had “abjured his native vittles,” while a New England pamphlet warned the people against entrusting the presidency to a man who lived on “fricassed bullfrog.” But even in these small gatherings— for he seldom invited more than twenty people—his dislike of crowds appears. He installed any number of gadgets to reduce or eliminate the presence of servants. At Monticello, this may have been due to his dislike of Negroes but in Washington his servants were white.

Nearly all his contemporaries who have recorded the impression which he made on them at their first meeting have remarked on his “coldness.” This was not confined to casual visitors. Distinguished foreigners who traveled many miles to visit him at Monticello on his urgent invitation have recorded their astonishment at the coldness with which they were received. But they all add that this mood soon passed and that he then became the most charming of hosts. That is the role in which he exerted his influence. Publicity of any kind he hated. He would trust himself to private correspondence but it was always under the injunction of secrecy and sometimes in cipher. His rostrum was his dinner table. With the cloth removed, the servants out of sight, a few political associates around the table and a glass filled with one of his carefully selected wines in front of each man, he would unburden his mind. More of a monologist than a conversationalist, his talk never gave the impression of having been thought out. He was as loose and disjointed in his conversation as his movements. “He treated,” wrote the French minister to Talleyrand, “twenty-seven different subjects in a conversation of half an hour.”

He was the easiest man in the world to attack. With all his love of secrecy, he always managed to be indiscreet and he was thin-skinned to a degree which can properly be described as abnormal. A stormy session of Congress would make him ill; if the British minister refused to call at the White House, Jefferson would be so upset that the French minister was highly amused. But the social slight, however keenly felt, did not cause Jefferson to change his foreign policy. Nor did the personal hatred that his embargo policy aroused cause him to change his views. He backed down a little on this policy, it is true, but that was only because he did not have the votes.

He has one undisputable distinction. Of all the great reputations in history, his is the easiest to run down. It has been done any number of times. The process of running him down is simple. I have already demonstrated the technique. It is only necessary to select almost any principle which he is credited with initiating or advocating and to show how it contradicts other policies which are equally closely associated with his name or the ends which he claimed to have in view. This can be done readily, honestly, and accurately with any number of his principles and policies. But it leads nowhere. The magic of his name remains undiminished.

This complex individual was born in April, 1743, on a plantation named Shadwell in what became the year after his birth the County of Albemarle, Virginia. His father was Peter Jefferson, a surveyor by trade, who in 1735 had “patented” one thousand acres of the plantation; that is, obtained title from the government. A few years later Peter bought four hundred of the adjoining acres, including the site on which he afterwards built his house of Shadwell, from his good friend and patron, William Randolph of Tuckahoe, for the consideration, as expressed in the deed, of “Henry Weatherbourne’s biggest bowl of arrack punch.”

The Jeffersons were among the earliest settlers in Virginia—they had arrived so early that they themselves did not know when they had come or from where. One of them had been a member of the first House of Burgesses which had met in 1619 but the family had never been of marked importance. Peter was a younger son of a small planter in Chesterfield County on the lower James. Huge of stature, strong of body and mind, plain in appearance, able, energetic and level-headed, he had had little formal schooling but had a taste for reading and studying on his own.

As a very young man he was retained as a surveyor by William Randolph of Tuckahoe, the same who subsequently sold him four hundred acres for a bowl of punch. The business relationship ripened into the closest personal friendship and, with Randolph’s help, Peter, when about thirty, married Jane, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Isham Randolph of Dungeness.

This Randolph connection is important to an understanding of the character of Thomas Jefferson. The first member of the family in the colony, William, came there about 1660 and settled on Turkey Island in the James River. He married into the important family of Isham of Bermuda Hundred and, in the scramble for lands, slaves, and colonial offices, he displayed a more than ordinary share of the acquisitive instinct. It is hardly possible to write a page of Virginia history from then well into the nineteenth century without mentioning a Randolph. At times they almost seem to have a monopoly both of the wealth and of the political offices of the country. They furnished the only native Virginian, Sir John Randolph, ever to be knighted, the most prominent Virginian royalist, John Randolph, and the President of the First Continental Congress, Peyton Randolph; one of them, Edmund Randolph, sat in Washington’s cabinet with Jefferson as Attorney-General and succeeded him as Secretary of State; as President, Jefferson selected John Randolph of Roanoke as his spokesman in the House of Representatives, and Jefferson’s hand-picked son-in-law was Thomas Mann Randolph, later governor of Virginia, Peter Jefferson’s connection with the family did not end with his marriage. William Randolph of Tuckahoe died in 1745, leaving a will under which Peter Jefferson was his executor and the guardian of his only son. The executor moved to Tuckahoe and for the next seven years lived as a master in the home of his deceased friend. Thomas’ earliest recollection was of being handed up and carried on a pillow in front of a mounted slave when the family moved from Shadwell to Tuckahoe.

All this brings us to the first contradiction in his character. In an oft-quoted passage of his Autobiography he states that his mother’s family “trace their pedigree far back in England & Scotland, to which let every one ascribe the faith & merit he chooses.” Peter Jefferson died when Thomas was fourteen but the son always had the greatest veneration for his father’s memory. His mother did not die until after the outbreak of the Revolution. Can we read into this statement a certain condescension with which Mrs. Peter Jefferson and the Randolphs may have treated the Jeffersons? May not this condescension, acting on the supersensitive Thomas, account for the letter which he wrote to a friend in England, asking him to ascertain at the College of Heralds whether there was a Jefferson coat-of-arms. “It is possible there may be none. If so, I would with your assistance become a purchaser, having Sterne’s word for it that a coat of arms may be purchased as cheap as any other coat.” Why did Jefferson in his old age write to John Adams that “a Randolph, a Carter, or a Burwell must have great personal superiority over a common competitor to be elected by the people even at this day”? The only way that statement can be reconciled with history is to assume that there must have been a great many Randolphs, Carters, and Bur-wells with “great personal superiority over their common competitors.” There is certainly no evidence that the name or blood of Randolph was a political disadvantage. If there was, why did Jefferson, whose mother and whose son-in-law were Randolphs, escape? Nor did the son-in-law find it a barrier to his election as governor.

This attitude toward his Randolph ancestry is the more remarkable because there is ample evidence that there was a strain of snobbishness in Jefferson. He found fault with Adams for employing in the lowly position of a diplomatic messenger “one Humphreys, the son of a ship carpenter.” He refused to appoint a man, recommended by Governor George Clinton, as supervisor of the port of New York because of the candidate’s inadequate “standing in society.” He proposed to appoint Sumter of South Carolina governor of New Orleans because, among other things, of his “standing in society.” He was very careful about such men as Eli Whitney. When he wrote a letter of introduction for the inventor to carry to Monroe, Jefferson was careful to limit it to Whitney’s qualifications as “a mechanic of the first order of ingenuity, who invented the cotton gin now so much used in the South.” Contrast this with his letter offering the Secretaryship of the Navy to Robert R. Livingston. “Tho’ you are not nautical by profession, yet your residence [in a seaport] and your mechanical science qualify you as well as a gentleman can possibly be.”

Jefferson once even went so far as to suggest a scheme which, if advanced by a political opponent, he would certainly have denounced as a device for introducing hereditary aristocracy. “There is one other mode of recording merit,” he wrote to Doctor Benjamin Rush in 1800, “which I have often thought might be introduced . . . In giving, for instance, a commission of chief justice [associate justice of the Supreme Court] to Bushrod Washington [nephew of George], it should be in consideration of his integrity, and science in the laws, and of the services rendered to our country by his illustrious relation, etc.” How can we reconcile this suggestion to Jefferson’s steady opposition to the organization of a society to consist of the officers in the Continental Army and their descendants?

What are we to make of this hodgepodge? The interest is not confined to an analysis of Jefferson’s character. Like so many other of his contradictions, it reflects a similar contradiction in a large body of his countrymen. Whenever there was a sectional dispute Jefferson always ended up on the Southern side. Why was it the South which talked most about equality and remained the home of family influence? Mark Twain blamed it on Scott’s novels but it antedated Scott. Why did Jefferson, in his extreme old age, speak of his “near relationship of blood” which “interests me of course” in the “success” of certain girls “for by ascending to my great grandfather and to their great, great, great grandfather, we come to a common ancestor”? That made them, according to my calculation, second cousins twice removed. Nobody who is interested in the success of a second cousin twice removed because of the “near relationship of blood” is a social equalitarian.

If this were a personal problem—if Jefferson were exceptional in exhibiting these contradictions—we might find a clue to the explanation in the relative social positions of the two sides of his family. The caste system of the South naturally gave this importance to genealogy. The problem is, why did it at the same time develop that equalitarianism which is commonly known as Jeffersonian democracy.

At five, Thomas went to the “English” school at Tuckahoe and at nine to a school kept by a Scotch clergyman named Douglass. Here he studied Latin, Greek, and French. “His after-recollections of this place . . . were of mouldy pies and excellent instruction.” His father was a great believer in the adage of a sound mind in a sound body and occasionally took Thomas hunting with him. But Peter died when Thomas was fourteen and the latter spent the following two years at Maury’s, a school located about fourteen miles from Shadwell. The reason for the next step in Thomas’ education we have in his own words, in a letter to his guardian, John Harvey. Colonel Peter Randolph, Thomas wrote, had told him that “he thought it would be to my Advantage to go to the College, & was desirous I should go, as indeed I am myself for several Reasons . . . as long as I stay at the Mountains [where Shadwell was located] the Loss of one fourth of my Time is inevitable, by Company’s coming here & detaining me from School. And likewise my Absence will in a great Measure put a Stop to so much Company, & by that Means lessen the Expences of the Estate . . . And on the other hand by going to the College I shall get a more universal Acquaintance, which may hereafter be servicable to me; & I suppose I can pursue my Studies in the Greek & Latin as well there as here, & likewise learn something of the Mathematics.”

Neither Jefferson’s mother nor his guardian ever paid much attention to his education. So on the supposition that he could study Greek and Latin “as well” in college as at home, he started for William and Mary. His expectation of obtaining “a more universal Acquaintance” was soon realized. On his way to Williamsburg, he spent the Christmas holidays with Colonel Dandridge in Hanover. The Colonel did not draw the social line very carefully for Patrick Henry, young, poor, only slightly educated and already a bankrupt storekeeper, was another of his guests. In after life Jefferson did not like Henry and had much to say about his ignorance and vulgarity. But Jefferson’s taste had not yet been developed. Shadwell was located on the outskirts of civilization, and I doubt whether the “much Company” which frequented it was less ignorant and vulgar than Henry. At this time a sort of friendship sprang up between them based, probably, as much as anything on their common love of “fiddling.” Three months later Henry called on the college student in Williamsburg and told him that since their last meeting he had studied law and was now in the capital to obtain a license. Jefferson later frequently expressed his dislike of the ease with which licenses to practice law were obtained in Virginia—on one occasion he referred to the ill-prepared lawyers who were found throughout the state as “insects.” He and Henry were never intimates but for a time the younger man had something at least akin to admiration for the older. The ignorant and vulgar ex-storekeeper rose so rapidly that before Jefferson was through studying in Williamsburg he stood at the door of the lobby of the House of Burgesses (there was no gallery) and heard the “forest-born Demosthenes” offer his resolutions against the Stamp Act.

Jefferson later described William and Mary as “a college just well enough endowed to draw out the miserable existence to which a miserable constitution has doomed it.” This was based largely on those provisions of its endowment and charter which emphasized its religious mission. His earlier criticisms were directed more to the elementary nature of its instruction. He complained that the college was “filled . . . with children,” that is, with “learners of Latin and Greek . . . The revenues, too,” he added, “were exhausted in accommodating those who came only to acquire the rudiments of science.” In other ways than its curriculum it was more an elementary school than an institution of higher learning for in one of Jefferson’s college letters he relates that “Lewis Burwell, Warner Lewis, and one Thompson, have fled to escape flagellation.”

William and Mary was not a great institution but Jefferson found in Williamsburg an education such as has fallen to few men. The essence of a college has been defined as a log with a student on one end and a professor on the other. There were three professors on Jefferson’s log. The first of them was Francis Fauquier, the Governor, or, to be technical, the Deputy Governor, of the province—at any rate he was the King so far as Virginians were concerned. The second was George Wythe, already one of the leading lawyers in the colony, and the third, William Small, a professor in the college. For a considerable period the four dined together at least once a week.

The impress which the three older men made on the college student was deep and lasting. Wythe, the youngest, a native-born Virginian, was then in his late thirties. A self-educated man, he was already thinking of that theory of the British empire which Jefferson was to adopt—the theory that England and Virginia were kingdoms independent of each other and held together only by their common acknowledgment of the same individual as king. Small, a man in his forties, while technically a professor of mathematics, was a universal genius who had but recently come to Virginia. At various other times he taught philosophy, rhetoric, literature, and science; later he went back to England, became known as “the great Doctor Small of Birmingham” and was the friend of Erasmus Darwin and James Watt. He was one of those men who are too unusual to be successful, for only some latent defect, some inability to be successful at home, drove men as brilliant as Small and Fauquier to a distant colony. In the Governor’s case we know what the defect was: it was an immoderate love of those gaming-tables in London where gentlemen of quality lost thousands of pounds in an evening. This was the cause which had driven the heir of the important English banking house of Fauquier to accept, at the age of fifty-four, what his London friends must have regarded as the very modest position of Deputy Governor of a colony on the other side of the Atlantic and to die in that position.

Fauquier and Wythe were generally regarded as freethinkers in religion. Small was at least suspected of heterodoxy. Fauquier had some reputation as an economist—he had published a pamphlet on government finance which had gone through several editions—and he was not in entire accord with British colonial policy. At times he deliberately violated his instructions. His personal attitude and the difficulties of his position were so well understood in Virginia that even when he dissolved the House of Burgesses because of its opposition to the Stamp Act, he did not incur the ill will of the colonists. Jefferson speaks of him in his Autobiography as “the ablest man who had ever filled that office” (Governor of Virginia).

Small was the first of the group to take up the seventeen-year-old Jefferson. He introduced him both to Wythe and Fauquier. To the former he introduced him as a brilliant young man whom Wythe should be proud to have as a law student after his graduation from college; to the latter . . . ? The most obvious bond between Jefferson and Fauquier was their common love of music. That hardly explains why the cynical old governor invited the young student to intimate dinners planned for free and confidential intellectual conversation. Jefferson was a young man of family, of wealth, and of promise, who spent money freely on clothes and fine horses—particularly horses, an extravagance which he never overcame although he later became quite careless about his clothes.

Anybody whom Fauquier invited to dine with Wythe, Small, and himself had to be carefully selected. How long would a colonial governor survive after it became known in London that he tolerated at his table discussions of the true nature of the relationship between Great Britain and her colonies; discussions which tended to end in conclusions which London could not but regard as treasonable. Their discussions were not much better fitted for local consumption. Religious freethinking was common in Virginia and could be tolerated. But these men violated the mores of the community in their most sensitive point. Both Wythe and Jefferson came out of these dinner parties convinced that slavery was an evil which had to go. They were critical of other local institutions. Both before and since, the architecture of colonial Williamsburg has been regarded as beautiful but not many years after these conversations Jefferson said that “the College and Hospital are rude, mis-shapen piles, which, but that they have roofs, would be taken for brick-kilns. There are no other public buildings but churches and courthouses, in which no attempts are made at elegance.” As to the “private buildings,” “It is impossible to devise things more ugly, uncomfortable, and happily more perishable.” When Jefferson made those statements he had never been out of America and he did not think the architecture in other parts of America was much better than in Virginia. Where did he get his standards? Do we see the influence of Fauquier in the statement of a later French visitor at Monticello that “Mr. Jefferson is the first American who has consulted the fine arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather”?

Several later observers remarked on a certain “cynicism” in Jefferson. Perhaps this reflects the influence of the intelligent, worldly-wise and frustrated governor who first admitted him to a circle in which all things were submitted to reason. Certainly there is more of the governor than of the frontier plantation-owner in Jefferson’s later statement that the “most remarkable” qualities of “my countrymen” are “indolence, extravagance, & infidelity to their engagements.”

He did not spend all his time in Williamsburg in the company of men of the age of Fauquier and Small. Jefferson, in his own opinion, led quite a wild life and many of his letters are dated from “Devilsburg.” It is difficult to see what wickedness he found in the hamlet of fifteen hundred people. It is true, there was gambling and card-playing, but Jefferson never gambled or played cards. What certainly seemed to him his chief vice in college was the amount of money he was spending. Most of it was spent during his first year and was spent on horses. He must have pretty well stopped that source of expenditure later if we are to believe his assertion that during the latter part of his stay in Williamsburg—while he was studying law with Wythe—he studied fifteen hours a day and, as his only recreation, ran a mile or so out of town each evening.

He did not, like John Adams, leave a diary filled with references to “the girls” but despite the fifteen hours a day he did not entirely neglect them. In one of the very few of his early letters which have been preserved he asks his lifelong friend John Page (afterwards Governor of Virginia) to remember him to “Belinda . . . particularly, as also to Sukey Potter, Judy Burwell, & such others of my acquaintance as enquire after me.” “I do not,” he wrote after one vacation, “like the ups and downs of a country life: to-day you are frolicking with a fine girl and to-morrow you are moping by yourself.” At the instant he liked it so little that he forgot that love of study which was the dominant motive of his life. Later in the same letter he wrote “Dear Will, 1 have thought of the cleverest plan of life that can be imagined. You exchange lands for Edgehill, or I mine for Fairfields, you marry S—y P—r [Sukey Potter], I marry R—a B—1 [Rebecca Burwell] join and get a pole chair [a kind of carriage] and a pair of keen horses, practice the law in the same courts, and drive about to all the dances in the country together.”

There are many things about Jefferson’s mind which call up the adjective “feminine.” One of them is that he did not care greatly for the society of women nor were they much attracted to him. His appearance, while not handsome, was masculine enough. He was six feet two and a half inches tall and, throughout life, slender. His bones were large and he was not graceful in his movements. His hair was reddish. His full and deep-set eyes were a mixture of hazel and gray and reflected every emotion. He was as thin-skinned physically as mentally and, since he burned on the slightest exposure to the sun, his complexion was generally reddish and freckled. He never suffered from any serious ailment but he was easily afflicted with headaches, seasickness and vertigo. His interest in all natural curiosities later led him to acquire title to the Natural Bridge of Virginia but when he went to view his property he discovered that looking down from the Bridge “about a minute, gave  a violent head ach [sic].”

He did not marry until what was, under the circumstances, late in life. His wife died in a little over ten years but he never became attached to any other woman. During the period he spent in France, he had a number of feminine correspondents but his letters to them do not rise above the level of politeness and a rather heavy persiflage. There was one exception. Most of Jefferson’s letters both to men and women seem to have been written from behind a mask but one of the few instances in which we seem to catch a glimpse of the real man is in his letters to Mrs. John Adams—Abigail Adams. Perhaps that is chiefly a tribute to Mrs. Adams—she could write such clever letters that even the shy and self-contained Virginian lowered his mask a little in replying. And then he was desperately lonely in Paris.

He did not abandon his clever plan to marry Rebecca Burwell. He intended to carry it out—sometime. But first he intended to tour the world. His proposed itinerary was England, Holland, France, Spain, and Egypt. While he was laying these plans, she married Jacquelin Ambler, which may be important, for the daughter of Jacquelin Ambler and Rebecca Burwell married John Marshall. Jefferson was a man whose views of policy were often affected by personalities. He disliked Marshall—hated him is a more accurate term—in a way and to an extent that he never disliked any other public man. Even Hamilton’s bust was to be found at Monticello. Can it be that somewhere in the strange crucible of the subconscious the love which Thomas Jefferson once had for Rebecca Burwell laid the groundwork for the hatred which he afterwards had for her son-in-law?

As it was, Jefferson, for some now unknown reason, did not make his contemplated tour but contented himself with a trip to New York. That may not seem like much of a journey but it gave him a wider knowledge of British America than most of his fellow Virginians had. All the routes of trade and travel ran from the colonies to England. There was almost no communication north and south. There was little communication even among the New England colonies. John Adams, for instance, wrote letters home from Connecticut describing it as if it were a foreign country.

The one thing that Jefferson acquired on his trip in addition to a somewhat fuller knowledge of America was a friendship. In New York he happened to lodge in the same house with a young man from Massachusetts who was likewise there to see America. The two struck up a fast friendship which, as was characteristic of Jefferson’s friendships, lasted through life. The friend was Elbridge Gerry who was later to be immortalized in our word gerrymander.

Jefferson has left no record of why he took up law—probably he thought the question superfluous. His later letters to his future son-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph, consist largely of advice. The Randolph who developed from this advice was a sort of caricature of Jefferson, having a great many traits in common with him but lacking his balance. In these letters Jefferson advises the younger man, then at the University of Edinburgh, to take a course each in astronomy, natural philosophy, natural history, anatomy, botany, and chemistry. “While you are attending these courses you can proceed by yourself in a regular series of historical reading. It would be a waste of time to attend a professor of this. It is to be acquired from books and if you pursue it by yourself you can accommodate it to your other reading so as to fill up those chasms of time not otherwise appropriated. There are portions of the day too when the mind should be eased, particularly after dinner it should be applied to lighter occupation [sic]: history is of this kind.” Jefferson never doubts that if Randolph takes up any profession it will be the law. The only question was whether he should take up any profession at all or confine himself to his hereditary position as a wealthy plantation-owner. The same alternative had been before the young heir of Shadwell when he graduated from William and Mary. The answers which he passed on to Randolph were the answers he had given for himself. “The study of the law is useful in a variety of points of view. It qualifies a man to be useful to himself, to his neighbors, & to the public. It is the most certain stepping stone to preferment in the political line.” “Besides it is a source of infinite comfort to reflect that under every change of fortune we have a resource in ourselves from which we may be able to derive an honourable subsistence. I would therefore propose not only the study, but the practice of the law for some time.”

This is exactly the course which he himself pursued. But the consequences were far wider than any he suggested to Randolph. Jefferson brought out of his law studies a theory that was to be of profound effect.

In his later political life Jefferson frequently disclaimed any special knowledge of the law—claimed that he had forgotten all the law he ever knew—but this did not prevent him from having very strong opinions on legal education. One of these was that Blackstone was worthless. Another is that Mansfield, who is universally regarded as the leading English judge of the eighteenth century, was ruining the common law; that any decision he might render was prima facie wrong. Even when Jefferson, in his extreme old age, was selecting the first faculty of the University of Virginia, he wrote to Madison of the care that must be exercised lest some admirer of Blackstone and Mansfield get into the professorship of law.

These opinions of Blackstone and Mansfield are not eccentricities. They fit definitely into Jefferson’s political philosophy. The eighteenth century was the pregnancy of the modern world but the men of the eighteenth century found themselves actually living in a world governed by precedent. It is, therefore it is just. But, in the eighteenth century, men began to want to know how it came to be. Nothing seems stranger in reading English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than the apparently almost complete lack of knowledge of English history—at least of older English history. It is somewhat odd that a self-taught man like Wythe, in a remote colony where materials of any sort must have been most difficult to procure, should have felt impelled to plunge into this field but he did, and Jefferson after him. While studying law under Wythe, Jefferson acquired a reading knowledge of two languages, Law French and Anglo-Saxon. A knowledge of either of these languages was extremely rare in America and, at least as regards the latter, even in England. The former may have been helpful to him in the study of law but it is the latter which is important in the development of his political philosophy.

John Adams relates that when, in 1776, the Continental Congress was debating the question of a device for the arms of the United States, Jefferson wanted the device to be a portrayal of “Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and forms of government we have assumed.” That, symbolically, expressed the dominant idea in Jefferson's mind during the period of the Revolutionary War. The foundation of the American colonies he likened, with some degree of truth, to the earlier colonies which the Saxons of Germany had established to the westward of the North Sea. The statements in his draft of the Declaration of Independence that “We have reminded them [“our British Brethren”] of the Circumstances of our Emigration and Settlement here . . . That these were effected at the expense of our own Blood and Treasure, unassisted by the Wealth or the Strength of Great Britain; that in constituting indeed, our Several Forms of Government, we had adopted one common King, thereby laying a Foundation for Perpetual League and Amity with them; but that Submission to their Parliament, was no Part of our Constitution, nor ever in Idea, if History may be credited,” are substantially true.

Jefferson never doubted that the English settlers who landed in Virginia in the beginning of the seventeenth century landed there in precisely the same political condition in which their Teutonic forbears had landed in Britain. It is difficult for us of the twentieth century to realize the force of this discovery. We have seen governments come and go for a century and a half; we have seen them organized on every conceivable principle. Our natural inclination in reading the Declaration of Independence is to ignore the oblique references to Hengist and Horsa and to emphasize the references to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”

This introduces us to one of the major mysteries of American history. Throughout our formative era we hear of “natural rights”; to be tried by a jury, for example, was a “natural right.” Even assuming that premise we always find, in practice, that a jury meant a jury of twelve. In what revelation did “Nature’s God” reveal the natural right of a man to be tried by a jury of twelve? Why, in all the governmental experiments which took place in America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did no one think of experimenting with a jury of ten or thirteen? It is true that twelve is a mystic number but what have mystic numbers to do with the natural rights of man? Why was it that all discussions of “natural rights” were settled on the inarticulate premise that the natural rights of man and his rights under the common law are the same?

The most difficult thing that the mind can attempt to grasp is the intellectual climate of a bygone age. These dead men talked the same language but how do we know that they understood it the same way? Why was it important to Jefferson and to many others to prove the similarity between the early settlers of Virginia and the Saxons who crossed the North Sea from the lower Elbe? Is it conceivable, if a dispute were to arise at the present day between the Dominion of Canada and the United Kingdom, that the example of Hengist and Horsa would seem of importance to anybody? Precedent, it is true, was the dominant principle which underlay all the governments of eighteenth-century Europe and the analogy of Hengist and Horsa at least furnished a precedent. But how account for this perfect fusion of natural right and precedent? To us, the Saxon invaders of Britain were merely a gang of savages out looking for plunder.

A clue to this mystery is to be found in a sentence penned by that representative man of the eighteenth century, Diderot, the editor of the French Encyclopédie. “I am convinced,” he wrote, ‘that the industry of man has gone too far and that if it had stopped long ago and if it were possible to simplify the results, we should not be the worse. I believe there is a limit in civilization, a limit more conformable to the felicity of man in general and far less distant from the savage state than is imagined; but how to return to it, having left it, or how to remain in it, if we were there? I know not.”

To a man of the eighteenth century there was nothing startling about this statement. One of the favorite topics of conversation was the evils of “luxury” which, on closer inspection, usually turns out to be the degeneracy evidenced by the insistence of people on fresh meat when their ancestors were content with salted or something of that nature. We should call that progress or a rise in the standard of livings the eighteenth century did not. The air was still full of such phrases as “the Golden Age,” “Arcadian simplicity,” “the Garden of Eden,” and “the fall of man.” Our word “idyllic” still retains something of its earlier meaning and the eighteenth-century idea of progress was of progress toward an idyllic existence. The very phrase, “the fall of man,” is repugnant to modern ideas. From what did he fall? Our assumption is that he is a beast who by his own efforts has raised himself above other beasts and hopes to rise still higher. But the eighteenth century liked to talk of the simplicity and innocence of ancient times before luxury had corrupted man. Such novels as Paul et Virginie rather than the phrase “every man a king” expressed its ideal of the perfect existence. “If we expect to inherit the blessings of our fathers,” Abigail Adams wrote her husband, “we should return a little more to their primitive simplicity of manners.”

This attitude long antedated the eighteenth century. It was helped out, or reflected in, the religious tradition. Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist saints had won to Paradise by going without washing, by sitting on the points of nails or living on pillars, by denying themselves wholesome foods or by otherwise making themselves miserable. How difficult it is for us to understand the mentality of generations who found intrinsic meritoriousness in such things as sackcloth and ashes, virginity and self-flagellation.

Jefferson, at times, seems almost typical of the eighteenth century and it was in this mental climate that he plunged into the study of Anglo-Saxon law. To us those laws are merely another group of barbarian codes. But he did not view them through the same spectacles. He, like Diderot, believed that “there is a limit in civilization, a limit more conformable to the felicity of man in general and far less distant from the savage state than is imagined,” but, unlike Diderot, he also thought he had found out what it was and how to return to it.

This Arcadian perfection which poetic tradition ascribed to the Golden Age of Saturn, he found in the age of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy. It was then that we truly found “nature” and it followed, without dispute, that the rights which had been enjoyed in England under the Heptarchy were “natural rights.” That might have left mankind in a rather sad condition but fortunately the materials in Virginia for the study of Anglo-Saxon law and history were limited. Jefferson had early acquired that love of the common law which seizes on all her serious votaries and included in the common law, as he understood it, were what the age was pleased to regard as “the immemorial rights of Englishmen.” It had been sufficient for the seventeenth-century Whigs—for those who led the Long Parliament and for those who crowned William of Orange—that these rights were immemorial. That did not satisfy the eighteenth century. It knew that there were immemorial wrongs as well as immemorial rights. It proposed to tell the difference by the use of reason, but reason requires a premise. That premise, the eighteenth century said, was nature, and Jefferson found the perfect specimen of nature in the Saxons of the Heptarchy. Only one link was missing to complete the chain and that, too, he found. “The common law,” he states, “is that system of law which was introduced by the Saxons, on their settlement in England.” Blackstone and Mansfield had departed from this law; they had introduced innovations and that clearly proved that they were Tories.

These concepts taken together—that common law and natural law were the same thing, and that the common law had been handed down from the Anglo-Saxons—had a profound effect both on the development of Jefferson personally and on the development of the United States. It is not so clear to what extent the influence which they exerted in America for at least two generations should be ascribed to him personally. It is always difficult to say whether a particular man is the leader of a procession or whether he merely happens to be walking at its head. But I think it is safe to say that in this case Jefferson had considerable influence on the course which the procession took. The common law by no means enjoyed that acceptance and popularity in colonial America which it was later frequently assumed that it had had. In New England, at least, it was positively unpopular. There it was largely regarded as an engine of royal tyranny or, as one of the earliest American law books, written and published in Connecticut, expresses it, as only “adapted to a people grown old in the habits of vice.” It had stronger roots in Virginia but even there its preservation through the revolutionary era can be ascribed to Jefferson. A few months after the passage of the Declaration of Independence the Virginian legislature appointed a committee consisting of Jefferson, Wythe, Edmund Pendleton, George Mason, and Thomas L. Lee to revise the laws of the state. When the committee met, Pendleton, “contrary,” says Jefferson in his Autobiography “to his usual disposition in favor of antient things,” wanted “to abolish the whole existing system of laws, and prepare a new and complete Institute” as he supposed Justinian to have done. Lee agreed with him. Jefferson and Wythe opposed it and induced Mason, a layman, to vote with them.

But all these things were in the future when Jefferson studied law with Wythe and when he practiced immediately afterwards. He had no trouble in obtaining clients but again those peculiarities of his character which made it so strange that he should have ever become a political leader appear. There is nothing remarkable about an office practice in a highly developed and densely populated country, but Jefferson, from the day of his admission, was an office lawyer—not so much a draughtsman of documents as a giver of opinions.

The ability of such a young man to do this successfully can only be ascribed to the support of Wythe and Fauquier. That the adventure was successful is apparent from the personal financial records which Jefferson, as throughout life, kept so carefully. In 1767, the year of his admission, his fees totalled nearly three hundred pounds and by 1770 they had reached four hundred and twenty-one pounds, five shillings, ten and a half pence. His average for the seven years of his practice was about three thousand dollars, which was not very far under what the leaders earned. All things in Virginia then and long afterwards were on credit. Jefferson himself was accustomed to ask for credits which seem almost Incredible but as a young lawyer he did not like the system. In 1773 an advertisement appeared in the Virginia Gazette signed by Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Pendleton, John Randolph, and two others stating “that after the 10th day of October next we will not give an Opinion on any Case stated to us but on Payment of the whole Fee, nor prosecute or defend any Suit or Motion unless the Tax, and one half of the Fee, be previously advanced, excepting those Cases only where we choose to act gratis.”  He still had the income from his plantation to support him and he treated his gains from practice largely as capital. He invested it in land and thus added three thousand acres to what he had inherited.

The greatest addition to his fortune came, however, with his marriage. This happened in January, 1772. His wife, Martha Wayles Skelton, was a childless widow six years younger than he. She was the daughter by a third marriage of John Wayles, a native of England and a very successful lawyer whose practice, according to Jefferson, was due “more to his great industry, punctuality & practical readiness, than to eminence in the science of his profession.” Even if John Wayles was not very learned, his practice had been profitable and his daughter inherited forty thousand acres and one hundred and thirty-five slaves, subject to certain debts which afterwards troubled Jefferson greatly. Immediately after their marriage he took steps to sell part of the land in order to use the proceeds to pay the debts.

Mrs. Skelton is supposed to have been beautiful and she was undoubtedly an heiress. She had many suitors and the tradition is that Jefferson won her through his musical skill. When he called on her they would spend the time in duets, she playing the spinet or harpsichord and he the violin while they both sang. Jefferson always gave as the reason for his life-long refusal to speak in public that his voice would not stand the strain, but in his younger and musical days he never advanced this as a reason for refusing to sing. The story runs that one evening another of Mrs. Skelton’s suitors came to call, heard Jefferson’s singing coming through an open window and, instead of knocking, sat down on the doorstep to consider the situation. Soon still another suitor appeared and joined the first in his meditations. As the singing and playing continued, interspersed with snatches of conversation which showed the pleasure the two inside were having, the two on the doorstep gradually lost all hope of winning the red-haired Mrs. Skelton and slunk off into the darkness.

It was not much of a home which Jefferson had to offer his wife, Shadwell had burned to the ground in the winter of 1770 with, as Jefferson wrote Page, “every paper I had in the world, and almost every book. On a reasonable estimate I calculate the cost of the books burned to have been £200 sterling. Would to God it had been the money, then had it never cost me a sigh! ” One anecdote of the fire afterwards amused him greatly. His first inquiry of the slave who brought the news was, “Were none of my books saved?” “No, master,” was the reply, “but,” with a look of satisfaction, “we saved the fiddle.”

Even in his college days it had been his custom, when vacationing at Shadwell, to walk in the evenings to the top of a neighboring hill which was included in the thousand acres his father had originally patented. It was the highest hill in the vicinity, except for one neighboring mountain, and commanded an extensive prospect. His father had found his original estate deficient because it did not contain a suitable place for a dwelling and had therefore obtained the neighboring four hundred acres which included the gap where the Rivanna flows through the Southwest Range on its way from Charlottesville to the James. It was at this gap that Peter had built his house of Shadwell. Thomas was of different stuff. He had no regard for those factors of water and convenience which brought about the location of so many colonial mansions at what appear to us far from desirable spots. Height, isolation, and superiority to the world appealed far more to his spirit. The year before the burning of Shadwell he had built a “pavillion” of a story and a half, containing one full-sized room, on this hill which he named Monticello and had planted an orchard of various fruit-trees on one of the slopes. This was the only home he had to which to take his bride.

The marriage was in January and Jefferson and his wife set off for Monticello on horseback. There had been an unusually heavy fall of snow and the farther they advanced, the deeper was the snow. The first night they stopped with an overseer and, at dusk of the second night, they reached Monticello. Nobody was there and no fires were lit. The only nourishment they could find was part of a bottle of wine on a shelf behind some books. Due to the unusually heavy snowfall, it was several days before they could get the household going.

A little over two years after his marriage, Jefferson gave up his practice and referred his clients to Edmund Randolph. He thus retired permanently at thirty-one. He never expressed any desire to go back to practice but he did not give up his interest in the law. Even as President we find him sending to Madison “2 sheets of my commonplace, because on the 5 last pages of them are my abridgments of certain admiralty cases.” Throughout life, he was willing to supervise the legal education of young relatives and of the sons of his friends. Although he provided for a professorship of law in the University of Virginia he stuck fairly consistently to his opinion that law, “like history,” is “to be acquired from books. All the aid you will want will be a catalogue of the books to be read & the order in which they are to be read.” He had little use for the customary method of studying law. “It is a general practice,” he wrote to a young cousin, “to study the law in the office of some lawyer . . . But I have ever seen that the services expected in return have been more than the instructions have been worth.”

His own method was to prescribe a course of reading and to make his library freely available to enable the student to carry out the course, “I will arrange” he wrote further to this cousin, “the books to be read into three columns, and propose that you should read those in the first column till 12. oclock [sic] every day: those in the 2d. from 12. to 2, those in the 3d. after candlelight, leaving all the afternoon for exercise and recreation.” The first column starts with Coke on Littleton, contains many of the early English reports and ends with the statutes of Virginia; the second column lists such books as Dalrymple’s Feudal Systems, Hale’s History of the Common Law and Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the third column consists entirely of history, including Voltaire’s historical works.

Why then did Jefferson retire? What did he want to do with his time? The answer, for once, is clear. He wanted to study, not for the purpose of establishing a reputation as a scholar but for the sheer pleasure of knowing, for the purpose of personal culture. As so often in an attempt to understand Jefferson, it is necessary to turn back the pages of history. Jefferson was intensely fond of the classics—in his old age they became almost his only reading—and when we look for the pattern of life which he hoped to follow we must look at some such Roman noble as the younger Pliny. It is safer to do this with Jefferson than with most men for he was pre-eminently a man of books. The Roman example explains his assumption that it was appropriate for every wealthy slaveowner to study law, not to practice it for a living but so he could be helpful to his neighbors, as the Roman senator studied it so that he could defend the interests of his personal and family retainers, his “clients.” It was likewise the duty of such a gentleman to devote a certain part of his time to the public good and to that end to hold political office without salary. In one of his drafts of a constitution for Virginia, Jefferson went so far as to provide that even the judges were to serve without salaries, but after a few more years he changed his mind and complained of the inadequacy of judicial salaries.

Jefferson’s intellectual interests were unlimited. He wanted to study everything; to learn every language, to cultivate his mind in every conceivable manner. He had always made it a point to practice the violin at least an hour a day. He now increased this to three hours but later, when he was involved in revolutionary activity, he abandoned it entirely. About the last we hear of his early musical interest was a scheme he advanced to a European correspondent in 1778. “I retain . . , he wrote, “among my domestic servants a gardener (Orto-lano), a weaver (Tessitore di lino e liii), a cabinet maker (Stipeltaio) and a stone cutter (Scalpellino laborante in piano) to which I would add a vigneron. In a country where like yours music is cultivated and practiced by every class of men I suppose there might be found persons of those trades who could perform on the French horn, two clarinets, & hautboys & a bassoon.” Jefferson played with this scheme because, as he said in the same letter, “the bounds of an American fortune will not admit the indulgence of a domestic band of musicians, yet” music “is the favorite passion of my soul, & fortune has cast my lot in a country where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism.”

About this time he started the regular thermometric readings which were one of the strongest of his scientific interests. His interest in weather was early and life-long and seems to have been inspired in part by a peculiar sensitivity to cold. “I live,” he wrote a few months before his inauguration as President, “in a temperate climate, and under circumstances which do not expose me often to cold. Yet when I recollect on one hand all the sufferings I have had from cold, & on the other all my other pains, the former preponderate greatly.” His custom was to keep a temperature diary in which he recorded two readings daily, one taken early in the morning, and the other at about four o’clock in the afternoon. He endeavored to induce all his acquaintances to do likewise so as to establish bases for comparison. Madison, whose estate of Montpelier was about fifteen miles from Monticello, was among the first to do so. When Jefferson was in New York as Secretary of State he took observations there while his son-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph, took them at Monticello. As he rose in public office, he managed to get temperature diaries from more distant points, and records in the same letter the receipt of such diaries for both Quebec and Natchez. He never gave any reason but curiosity for collecting this information and, in fact, never drew any conclusion from it except that the gradual deforestation of the country was affecting the climate. His interest in other aspects of climate, such as precipitation, was slight.

In all Jefferson’s scientific activities we are distinctly aware that he was the product of an age which regarded scientific investigation as a polite amusement for gentlemen. His basic assumption was not that the discovery of scientific laws would lead to inventions which would increase the comfort of human beings but that the knowledge of scientific laws would itself increase the happiness of those who possessed that knowledge—that the possession of knowledge is itself a form of happiness. “Mathematics, Natural philosophy, Natural history, Anatomy, Chemistry, Botany,” he wrote to Thomas Mann Randolph “will become amusements for your hours of relaxation.” And he advised his daughter to acquire “that degree of science which will guard you at all times against ennui, the most dangerous poison of life.”

This love of knowledge for its own sake merged into something close to a collector's mania. He was insatiable in his desire to collect the various “big bones” which the pioneers in what later became West Virginia and Kentucky were finding. “And,” he added in one letter asking for these relics, “there is no expense of package or of safe transportation which I will not gladly reimburse to procure them safely. Elk horns of very extraordinary size, or anything else uncommon would be very acceptable . . . Descriptions of animals, vegetables, minerals, or other curious things, notes as to the Indians . . He had theories as to the “mammoth” to whom these bones had belonged ; he was sure that further exploration would result in the discovery of live mammoths, for the “annihilation of any species of existence, is so unexampled in any parts of the economy of nature which we see, that we have a right to conclude, as to the parts we do not see, that the probabilities against such annihilation are stronger than those for it.”

This collector’s mania appears most strongly In his interest in Americana—for Jefferson was one of the first to appreciate the difference between an American and a European. Any book or record which bore on the history of America in the broadest sense—North, Central, and South—was of interest to him. In the midst of the Revolution he prepared a catalogue of American state papers beginning with the commission to John Cabot and ending with the deed of 1768 from the Six Nations to the Crown which, although Jefferson himself never published it, covers fifteen pages of fine print. In 1783, when he, in common with all his countrymen, felt an extreme want of cash, he offered ten guineas for a copy of Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. He sent to Spain for a copy of a book he had heard about and the title of which he did not know but which was supposed to contain copies of Cortez’s correspondence. He sent to Florence for portraits of “Columbus (if it exists), of Americus Vesputius [sic], Magellan etc.” and when in England he saw, and attempted to purchase, a portrait of Raleigh.

He did not neglect the opportunities for collecting valuable records which he found at his own doorstep. Peter Jefferson had been the colonel of Albemarle County and as the chief militia officer in a county on the westernmost fringe of the settlements he had had frequent contact with the Indians, “I knew much,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in his old age to Adams, “the great Outassetè, the warrior and orator of the Cherokees; he was always the guest of my father, on his journeys to and from Williamsburg. I was in his camp when he made his great farewell oration to his people the evening before his departure for England.” Jefferson did not keep up these connections, for hunting, fishing, and camping out had no appeal for him, but he early began to study Indian languages. Here, again, his interest was more in collecting than in analyzing. He collected vocabularies—not complete vocabularies but vocabularies showing the equivalents in the different Indian languages of selected English words.

This trait of his character is most manifest in his collection of the laws of Virginia. Almost from the day he began to study law he began to collect the statutes of the colony—which at that time was a real task. Nobody had a complete collection; nobody, in fact, even had a complete list. No public record office contained all the laws of the colony. In the early days they had not even been printed but had been published in manuscript volumes. “Some of these volumes,” Jefferson wrote to a prospective editor, “seem to have been records of the council, and to contain interspersed copies of some laws. These volumes arc in a black letter, illegible absolutely but to those habituated to it.” They were in such bad condition that Jefferson refused everyone access to them, explaining that “some of the volumes are in such a state of decay, that the leaf falls to pieces on being turned over. Consequently as they never can be examined but once I reserve that to the moment when the legislature shall decide to have an authentic copy taken. In the meantime I have sewed them up in oil cloth, and seared the joints to preserve them from the air.” Even the printed laws were so scarce that, when President, Jefferson claimed to have the only copy of the volume containing the statutes passed between 1734 and 1772 and, he adds, “this fact being generally known, the courts in the different parts of the state are in the practice of resorting to this volume for copies of particular acts called for in the cases before them.”

When Jefferson gave up his practice, he gave up all intention of struggling for fame or fortune. Partly through inheritance, partly through marriage and partly through his own exertions he had a fortune which was adequate to his wants. He had, and retained through life, a taste for fame. But his experience of the world had taught him that, in his case at least, the game was not worth the candle. He had no taste for intriguing, boasting, backbiting, and struggling with other men. Even the presentation of a legal argument as an advocate with his opponent a personal friend or acquaintance, drawn from the same small bar and governed by the same code of manners, was more than he cared for. He abhorred congregating in taverns and that was what his brethren of the bar did. He disliked horse-racing, hunting, cardplaying, cock-fighting, smoking and drinking and that dislike isolated him from his class—the gentlemen of Virginia. It isolated him even more from the common people. He liked to think of himself as typical of his class and, as such, claimed to have an interest in agriculture—in the business of running a plantation—which it is quite plain from the results was not entirely genuine. At times he tried to identify himself with other classes, with the yeomen planters and with the backwoodsmen. The similarity is even more farfetched. Jefferson sympathized with them and tried to look out for their interests but it was never the greedy, rough, hard-drinking yeomen and frontiersmen whom he found about him with whom he tried to identify himself but an idealized group of idyllic farmers whom he found more often in his books than among his neighbors. Nor was he ever entirely accepted by his fellow citizens of Albemarle County as typical or representative. Even after his death, when he had been apotheosized by the nation, detractors could always find plenty of malicious gossip and slander about him in the neighborhood in which he had lived.

How did such a man ever rise to political eminence?

Jefferson’s natural tendency was to live in an ivory tower, to have as little as possible to do with his fellow men, to learn about their habits through books rather than contact. His strongest urge was for personal independence. He yielded to this urge when he retired from practice and when he built Monticello, on top of a hill, far from the habitations of others, as the home of an ideal country gentleman, immersed in his books and his studies. In an older civilization he might have remained there. But Jefferson was too near the frontier both in ancestry and environment to permit his dilettante tendencies to gain full sway over him. He recognized that he had political obligations. He accepted, as they came, the various duties which were expected of a man of his position. Soon after he became of age he was appointed a justice of the peace—an office worth holding in colonial Virginia. He was also a vestryman—another worthwhile office when the church was a branch of the state—and a member of the House of Burgesses.

His career in the House did not start very auspiciously. He devoted his attention first to the improvement of the laws regarding slavery. One thing he wanted to do was to provide a method by which masters who wished to do so could free their slaves—a privilege which did not then exist in Virginia. He proceeded, as he considered, very cautiously. “In the first or second session of the Legislature after I became a member,” he relates, “I drew to this subject the attention of Col. Bland, one of the oldest, ablest, & most respected members, and he undertook to move for certain moderate extensions of the protection of the laws to these people. I seconded his motion, and, as a younger member, was more spared in the debate;  but he was denounced as the enemy of his country, & was treated with the grossest indecorum.” The lesson was not lost on Jefferson. He soon gave up any desire he may have had for Negro emancipation—his settled view became that emancipation would only make a bad situation worse; that Negro slavery could not continue indefinitely but that the only solution was to provide for the transportation of the Negroes to some other country. Freedom could only result in amalgamation and “their amalgamation with the other color produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent.” But this one experiment of the temper of his fellow Virginians taught him to keep from taking any public position on the subject. He steadfastly refused to allow his name to be connected in any way with any movement designed to affect the institution of slavery. He went even further; he refused to accept membership in a society for the suppression of the slave trade even though the previous year he had written to Edward Rutledge, who was endeavoring to stop the importation of slaves into South Carolina, that “this abomination must have an end, and there is a superior bench reserved in heaven for those who hasten it.”

Here we see one of the most definite aspects of Jefferson’s mind. He had few opinions which remained fixed throughout life but one of the few was that slavery was an institution which could not last. Yet he had objections to every proposal which was advanced for doing away with slavery. There was a widespread feeling in his time that the solution was to provide for the re-migration of the Negroes to Africa. Many of his fellow Virginians—notably John Marshall—devoted both time and money to this project. Jefferson refused to have any part in it. In his opinion it was not practical. It was too expensive; the Negroes multiplied faster than provision could be made for their migration. Yet he lived in constant terror of a Negro insurrection. “If something is not done, & soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children . . . the revolutionary storm, now [1797] sweeping the globe, will be upon us, and happy if we make timely provision to give it an easy passage over our land.” His own scheme was to make provision, at government expense, for the migration of the infants. But where? Africa he dismissed as too distant to be practical. The West Indies struck him, especially after the Negro revolution in Hayti, as the solution. He was convinced that those islands were destined ultimately to be inhabited exclusively by Negroes. If he ever thought of the possibility of finding a habitat for the Negroes in the southern part of the United States he did not commit it to paper.

One would expect from this a sympathy with Toussaint’s revolt. This was far from the case. Jefferson reacted to the slave revolt in Hayti like the most hardboiled plantation owner in the deepest South. Yet he had little sympathy with the French refugees from that revolt. He regarded them as “aristocrats” and wished that It were possible to distribute them among the Indians where they might learn lessons In equality. He was shocked when “even South Carolinians” voted for a bill providing for commercial intercourse with the Negro republic.

During his presidency he remedied this. At the demand of Napoleon that American commerce with the Haytian Negroes “must” cease, Jefferson’s administration got an act through Congress forbidding it. This act, says Henry Adams in His History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson “violated the principles of international law, sacrificed the interests of Northern commerce, strained the powers of the Constitution . . . and, taken in all its relations, might claim distinction among the most disgraceful statutes ever enacted by the United States government. . . . The opportunity to declare the negroes of Hayti enemies of the human race was too tempting to be rejected.” Yet at the time Jefferson put his signature to this act he believed that a speedy means must be found for getting rid of the institution of slavery, that the Negroes could not be permitted to live as free people in the United States, that the only practicable place for them to migrate to was the West Indies and that in any event those islands were destined ultimately to have an exclusively Negro population.

The burden of any number of his letters is that “something must be done, & done quickly.” “The hour of emancipation is advancing, in the march of time. It will come; and whether brought on by the generous energy of our own minds; or by the bloody process of St. Domingo . . . is a leaf of our history not yet turned over.” But what did he do about it? The answer must be—nothing. He may have been responsible for the provision of the Ordinance of 1787 which forbade slavery in the old Northwest Territory. If so, he must have regretted it later for he was very indignant when Congress, in the Missouri Compromise, undertook to forbid slavery in the more northern territories. He would never allow himself to be quoted as opposed in any way to slavery and he opposed every measure which anyone else advanced which seemed to be harmful to the institution. He knew that something must be done; he wrote to all his confidential friends that something must be done; why didn’t he do something? What could his friends do that he could not do?

The subject gives some indication of why both Jefferson’s attempts at executive leadership—as Governor and as President—ended in a general atmosphere of futility and incompetence. It casts light on another point, for it gives some indication of the basis of his political strength.

Whatever Jefferson might think about slavery when seated in his library or at his writing-table, his fellow planters knew that when confronted with the necessity for action he would react like any other planter. Northern statesmen might call him a “visionary’’ but slaveholders knew that he was “safe.”

He had talents, too, which most of them lacked and for which the political community soon felt a want. These talents began to come to the surface as soon as the troubles with England began. There was never any question as to the side he was on, although it must be remembered that in 1774 few people expected any war at all, and none expected one of the duration and intensity that actually occurred.

The first talent which Jefferson had to offer the cause was a theory. That may not seem important today, when every library is full of theories for the reorganization of society. But some sort of theory is necessary for a political or social upheaval to be successful, and such theories were scarce in 1774.

Jefferson’s usual response, when he was asked to define his political philosophy, was that he was a Whig. That was the word by which the American revolutionists described themselves. Patriot and Whig were synonymous and their antitheses were loyalist and Tory. But to Jefferson, Whig was more than a mere party label. When he was selecting a faculty for the University of Virginia, for example, he laid it down as essential that the professor of law be a Whig. In Jefferson’s mind Whig was the name of a definite political philosophy. It is therefore necessary to attempt to ascertain the meaning which the word had for him.

Jefferson always expressed the highest admiration for the political writings of Locke and Sidney. “Descending from theory to practice,” he wrote, “there is no better book than the Federalist.” Montesquieu he dismissed as containing “a great number of political truths; but also an equal number of heresies.” The mere knowledge that Jefferson thought that “Locke’s little book on government is perfect as far as it goes” does not help us much. The Whiggism which had adopted Locke as its political philosopher was triumphant in Great Britain. The reigning family itself owed the throne to the Whig revolution. Yet Jefferson never expressed any admiration of the British constitution even as a form of government for England itself.

More light is cast on why Jefferson called himself a Whig by a study of what the word Tory meant to him. This is the natural approach, for in England at the time it was the Tories, rather than the Whigs, who were the dynamic party—the party of change and progress. The word “Tory” is so associated in our minds with the idea of conservatism that it is a little startling to say that it ever described the party of progress. Yet the Tory renascence under (George III is properly described as a progressive movement. It is true it had a reactionary fringe who thought that the power of Parliament should be decreased in favor of the Crown, but this was not the aspect of the movement which interested America. In fact, Jefferson’s own theory of the relation between England and Virginia was the one most conducive to increasing the power of the Crown. If the only tie was the possession of a common king, and if the king was the king of a number of countries each of which had a separate and independent parliament, the personal power of the king would be much greater than if he had to share his power over his overseas possessions with the English parliament. In the conservative and reactionary sense, Jefferson could have described himself as a Tory in his view of the nature of the British Empire.

To understand the other aspect of Toryism, the progressive aspect, the aspect which brought on the American Revolution, it is necessary to consider generally the political organization of the British Empire in the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the century that organization was as bad as bad could be—there really was none. It started with two kingdoms and two parliaments—England and Scotland— which everybody agreed were completely independent except for a common king. Ireland was also a separate kingdom but subordinate In some by-no-means clear manner to the kingdom of England. The Island of Man was some sort of a separate kingdom—at least the Earls of Derby were hereditary “Kings in Man” and the island had a local parliament known as the House of Keys. The Channel Islands were part of the Empire because at one time a Duke of Normandy had become King of England.

England itself was full of any number of political curiosities. Durham, for instance, was unlike any of the counties around it. It was a county palatine, governed by a sort of local king, the Bishop of Durham. There were other counties palatine, Lancaster, Chester, Cornwall. Ireland was a reservation for such animals as an hereditary Lord Treasurer. But Scotland was the home of hereditary government. The Highlands were governed by a patriarchal organization which antedated the Middle Ages, while the Lowlands were overrun by hereditary sheriffs and hereditary local magistrates of all sorts.

There was nothing peculiar about the British Isles in this. All Europe was filled with titled racketeers who practiced their respective rackets under the protection of ancient charters and immemorial usage. But the world was getting very tired of it.

When the eighteenth-century Englishman looked at the overseas portion of the Empire he found the situation no different. Some colonies were governed by local kings—proprietors, they called them in America. Others—Connecticut and Rhode Island—elected their own governors and were in practice local republics. In other colonies there were governors sent out from London who found all their efforts, however well intentioned, thwarted by local politics and local jealousies, expressed through local assemblies. In Asia he found an even stranger situation—although it largely developed in the eighteenth century itself—for there he found the government of millions of people in the absolute control of a mere trading company—of a mere corporation for profit.

The century had hardly opened when the separate kingdoms of England and Scotland were abolished, and by the Act of Union were made into one kingdom. The support which the Highlanders gave to the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 led to the abolition of the governmental rights of their chieftains. These things happened during the period of Whig dominance and this far the Whigs were willing to go. Scotland and the Scotch Highlands were the chief centers of loyalty to the exiled Stuarts. Both the merger of Scotland with England and the abolition of the power of the Highland chieftains were designed chiefly to minimize the danger of a Jacobite restoration. These actions were favored by the Whigs because of their practical advantages. Any general attack on this congeries of medievalisms was contrary to Whig principles.

That was fortunate for the American colonies. The reigns of George I and George II were filled with increasingly frequent complaints from colonial officials about the unsatisfactory nature of government in British America. Pirates were harbored in some of its ports, smuggling was rampant, almost every effort to get effective military cooperation among the colonies, even for their own defense, ended in failure. Disputes between the royal governors and the colonial assemblies were such a regular occurrence that it is not surprising that the authorities in London decided that the cause was more often the narrow-minded obstinacy of the assemblies than the unreasonableness of the governors. Many Englishmen found it difficult to understand why the charter rights of American colonies were any more sacred than the immemorial rights of the Macdonald and the McLean. In fact, the situation in British America was so generally unsatisfactory that the only surprising thing is that no attempt was made at a comprehensive reform prior to the reign of George III.

That it was not, may be ascribed to the Whig ascendency. The administrative officials of the government frequently suggested the interference of Parliament in American affairs. One such scheme was rejected by that prototype of the practical politician, Walpole, on the ground that parliamentary interference in American affairs promised no political advantage and was full of political dynamite. He was not thinking of the repercussions in America—after all, Americans had no vote. The political troubles he feared were parliamentary troubles, and the reason he feared them was that he knew that any attempt to change the government of the British colonies in America by act of Parliament would run counter to Whig instincts.

This reaction would not be due to the writings of Locke and Sidney England, under the first two Georges, was governed by an oligarchy —the Whig aristocracy, it is called. By our standards the government was infinitely corrupt. It seemed to consist chiefly of sinecure offices which entitled the holders to huge fees and perquisites. These offices were generally treated quite frankly as private property. But for the same reason that the Whig aristocracy protected this system, it protected the Americans. It is not an accident that throughout the revolutionary period the Americans had no firmer friend in England than such a great noble as the Duke of Richmond. The eighteenth-century Whigs regarded government as an institution designed for the protection of property. There was no aspect of colonial affairs which irritated British officials more than the practical independence of Connecticut. In the earlier part of the century several attempts were made to get Parliament to abolish it but none of these attempts got anywhere. This was not because of any sympathy the Whig nobles had for the Congregational republic of Connecticut;  it was because the colony of Connecticut had a charter. If Parliament once abolished a colonial charter for the convenience of the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, what protection was there for any or all the privileges and sinecures of the great Whig families? So far as the English Whigs were concerned, the American Revolution began as a conflict between “big government’’ and private property interests. A Whig was not a believer in the natural rights of man but one who believed that individuals had vested rights with which the government could not interfere—that such interference was “tyranny.” Jefferson himself believed that these vested rights were defined by the common law as handed down from Hengist and Horsa. Blackstone and Mansfield had attempted to improve upon that common law; it was for that reason that he called them Tories.

But a very important distinction must be noted between the attacks which the British government made on feudalism in Europe and in America. When the Scotch Parliament disappeared, Scotland received representation in the English Parliament. When the hereditary jurisdiction of the Highland chieftains was abolished those chieftains received cash bonuses. When the Duke of Athol lost his dignity of King in Man he was paid £70,000 and given an annuity.¹  When the charter of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay was abolished no compensation of any sort was offered to anybody. The new deal in America was conceived of as strictly a one-way proposition.

Why the difference? Why all this consideration for Highland chieftains and kings in Man when there was none at all for American colonists?

The answer lies much deeper than the conflict between the United Kingdom and the colonies—so deep that Jefferson himself did not fully appreciate it until after his residence in Paris.

The American Revolution has commonly been treated as an intra-British affair. I do not think that view is correct. The colonies did not break away from Great Britain; they broke away from Europe. The attitude of Europe toward the Americas has always been peculiar. Europe has never been willing to admit that the Americas are a legitimate part of the earth, inhabited by nations who have as much right to exist as any other nations. The European attitude has always been that the Americas exist for the purpose of being exploited for the benefit of Europe. “What,” wrote Jefferson in 1811, “is the whole system of Europe towards America but an atrocious and insulting tyranny?” The purpose of the western hemisphere was to produce riches for Europe, not to make homes for men. It was impossible for any culture to exist there save as a pale reflection of European culture. That was one reason Europe took so to Franklin. To wrest the lightning from the heavens was marvelous enough, but that an American should do it . . . It was like a talking dog.

In the eighteenth century Europe even had a scientific law to justify its attitude. Buffon was regarded as Europe’s greatest biological authority and Buffon had laid it down as a law of nature that all forms of animal life tended to degenerate in America. Oh, yes, he had a reason; it was because of the excessive humidity.

Jefferson combated this theory in his Notes on Virginia, which was published when he was in Paris, and sent a copy to Buffon. Later the Marquis de Chastellux took Jefferson to call on the scientist and introduced him as a man who had disputed this statement. Buffon simply stepped to a bookcase, took down a copy of his book, handed it to his caller and said, “When Mr. Jefferson shall have read this, he will be perfectly satisfied that I am right.”

Buffon had also published the opinions, in support of this alleged law, that the deer of America were the same species as the deer of Europe—only smaller—and that the moose was a degenerate reindeer. “I told him,” so Jefferson related the story of his call on Buffon to Daniel Webster many years later, “that our deer had horns two feet long; he replied with warmth, that if I could produce a single specimen, with horns one foot long, he would give up the question. . . .

I told him also that the reindeer could walk under the belly of our moose; but he entirely scouted the idea.”

Jefferson immediately wrote to Virginia for the antlers of a deer “and obtained a very good specimen, four feet long.” He likewise wrote to President Sullivan of New Hampshire and asked him to send the skeleton of a moose, together with the skin and antlers. John Sullivan was not the man to take such a request casually. It was the dead of winter when he received Jefferson’s letter but he immediately assembled a company of about twenty and went after a moose. After several days hunting they killed one but they had to cut a road through the woods in order to get the skeleton back. Jefferson was much pleased when he received what he had asked for, but not so well pleased when he received Sullivan’s draft for £50 to cover the costs of the expedition. However, he paid it. The moose and the Virginian antlers were immediately sent to Buffon, who promised to correct his statements in regard to those animals in his next edition. He did not abandon his general theory about the degeneracy of life in America.

The obvious concomitant of that theory had not been overlooked. Much ink was wasted explaining to the literate public of Europe how man degenerated physically, intellectually, and morally when transported to the new world. In England this attitude was aided by a knowledge of one of the sources of American immigration. “Sir,” said Dr. Johnson, the Americans “are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging.”

The Revolution started in Virginia when news arrived of the passage of an Act of Parliament providing in certain cases for the transportation of Americans to England for trial. The immediate reason for this Act was the burning of an English revenue cutter, the Gaspee, by the Rhode Islanders. But the passage of the Act aroused Jefferson, as it did many others who hardly knew that Rhode Island existed. This was real tyranny.

A century and a half of explaining away the Revolution is apt to make us forget that when the patriots talked of tyranny they were not always indulging in pure rhetoric. It is true this particular Act remained a dead letter, but that was because the British officials discovered they could only enforce it at the head of an army. It required abstract reasoning for every man in the colonies to feel a personal danger if the principle on which the Act was based was once admitted. No American believed that if he were transported to England for trial, he would receive a fair trial. What chance would he have alone, in prison, in a foreign country, without friends or witnesses? Even if he was acquitted, transportation to England in irons at a time when the best ships frequently took three months to make the crossing was itself a severe punishment. Did this mean that the next time a British army marched through Virginia as Braddock’s had done, if the quartermaster decided that some farmer had not been “cooperative” in letting the army have his wagons and horses, the redcoats would put a ball and chain on the farmer, send him to the coast at their leisure, and ship him to England in the hold of a windjammer, so that he could be hanged at Tyburn a couple of years later for the amusement of a London mob? That, I am afraid, is the way the majority of the people in America interpreted this Act. They were satisfied that the only purpose of providing for transportation to England for trial would be to enable any British official in America to railroad any American to the gallows any time he pleased.

To Jefferson this Act was not only tyranny; it ran counter to his firmly held conviction in regard to the true nature of the relationship between England and America. He could not induce any of the older Whigs in the House of Burgesses to take the lead but he arranged with Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and several others to meet one evening in the early part of 1773 in a room of the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg to consider what should be done. This group produced a set of resolutions which set forth that the minds of His Majesty’s faithful subjects were being upset by various rumors and that therefore it was advisable to provide “a Standing Committee of Correspondence and Inquiry” to obtain the best information from England and the other colonies. The resolutions sounded so innocuous that they passed the House with little difficulty but there was dynamite in them. The gunfire of the Revolution had hardly ceased when the quarrel began whether the Committees of Correspondence had originated in Massachusetts or Virginia. The reason the matter seemed so important afterwards was that these committees had, for the first time, furnished the American Whigs with an organization. Massachusetts had originated them among townships; the example of Virginia was followed by the other colonial legislatures. I have already remarked on the slight amount of normal communication there was among the colonies. These legislative committees furnished the basis for uniting “the Continent.”

Jefferson, Henry, R. H. Lee, Pendleton, and Benjamin Harrison were among the ten members of the Virginia committee which had as its chairman the Speaker of the House, Peyton Randolph.

The first activity of the Committee was to prepare a set of resolutions denouncing the transportation Act. These were apparently prepared by Jefferson, but, at his request, for he would never make a speech, were presented to the House by another member of the committee. They passed without difficulty. The Governor—the Earl of Dunmore— promptly dissolved the House. The next day the Committee met and prepared a circular which it sent to the other colonial assemblies setting forth the resolutions which it had prepared and requesting the others to appoint similar committees. The Revolution was on.

But the average man in Virginia had yet to feel the force of the revolutionary activities of the British government. Most of the members of the old House of Burgesses were re-elected to the House which met in 1774—indeed, such a local magnate as Jefferson practically owned his seat. The Boston Port Bill—the Act of Parliament closing the Port of Boston because of that city’s wickedness—had been passed but there was a general lethargy in Virginia about it. It was difficult for the rural Virginian—the inhabitant of a province which had no cities —to understand either the object or the operation of such an Act. The scholar of Monticello could see further than his fellow planters. Again he went to Patrick Henry; again Henry agreed that there was need for action.

Jefferson arranged a meeting of himself, “Mr. Henry, R. H. Lee, Fr. L. Lee, 3. or 4. other members . . . in the council chamber, for the benefit of the library in that room.” The last phrase shows who had made the arrangements. It was in a library that Jefferson shone. The world was still very much governed by precedent. Henry could arouse the passions of the people, but in order to produce the steady conviction of righteousness which was necessary for the ultimate success of the American cause, that cause had to be based on precedent. Only a man of books could do that.

But Jefferson was more than a man of books. He knew that Henry’s oratory was not the only instrument with which to arouse the people. At the suggestion of this young freethinker the group which had met in the library met again the next morning, put on grave faces, and called on Robert Carter Nicholas, an elderly and pious member of the House, much respected in the community and a pillar of the Church. Their object? They related how they had meditated on the Boston Port Bill; how they were unable to reach any conclusion; how they had implored heaven for assistance—and how they were still in the dark.

Nicholas, too, had been thinking about the Boston Port Bill; he, too, had implored heaven for assistance, and he, too, was still in the dark. He talked for some time—while they listened respectfully—about the perplexities of the situation and the need of relying on heavenly guidance. But did they have anything to suggest?

That was where the library had come in. As Jefferson afterwards related the story of their meeting: “With the help of Rushworth, whom we rummaged over for the . . . forms of the Puritans . . . preserved by him, we cooked up a resolution, somewhat modernizing their phrases, for appointing the 1st day of June, on which the Port bill was to commence, for a day of fasting, humiliation & prayer, to implore heaven to avert from us the evils of civil war, to inspire us with firmness in support of our rights, and to turn the hearts of the King & parliament to moderation & justice.”

Nothing was said to Nicholas of the puritan origin of the resolution which they handed to him. Nothing seemed more innocuous. He was surprised at the source; he had never thought of Thomas Jefferson as a man who got down on his knees and asked God for guidance; but as men grow older they are frequently touched by grace and forget their youthful infidelity; such a student as Jefferson was certain to discover the truths of revealed religion sooner or later; now that he had done so it would certainly be acting the part of an infidel not to encourage his faith. Nicholas therefore agreed to introduce the resolution.

As Jefferson afterwards said, Nicholas’ “grave & religious character was more in unison with the tone of our resolution” than was that of Jefferson. Will any member of any legislative body oppose a resolution, offered by a member respected for his piety, asking the people to pray to heaven for guidance?

The people, in truth, did not know what it was all about but the Governor helped out materially. Instead of ignoring the matter as routine and unimportant, he promptly dissolved the Burgesses. “We all agreed,” said Jefferson later, “to go home and see that preachers were provided in our counties, and notice given to our people. I came home to my own county, provided a preacher, and notified the people, who came together in great multitudes, wondering what it meant.”

The Committee of Correspondence meanwhile suggested to the similar committees which had been organized in the other colonies that the time had come for a congress of representatives from all the colonies and “we further recommended to the several counties to elect deputies to meet at Wmsbg [Williamsburg] the 1st of Aug ensuing, to consider the state of the colony, & particularly to appoint delegates to a general Congress, should that measure be acceded to by the commees of correspdce generally.”

The idea of holding a convention in the colony which could calmly consider the matters in dispute, without fear of dissolution by the Governor, had a universal appeal. There was no difficulty in carrying it out;  no danger of interference. The Governor had no troops or even policemen. The royal government existed only by the sufferance of the inhabitants.

The county authorities conducted the elections to the convention in the same manner as if they were elections to the House of Burgesses and Jefferson was one of those elected to represent Albemarle County. At last he had hope of having his Anglo-Saxon theory authoritatively accepted;  his theory that the settlement of Virginia by Englishmen no more bound Virginia to England than the settlement of England by Hengist and Horsa bound England to Germany.

He was taken ill as the convention was about to meet but he had prepared a paper setting forth his theory. He sent copies to Patrick Henry and Peyton Randolph, the latter of whom was almost certain to be the presiding officer. “Whether,” said Jefferson in his Autobiography, “Mr. Henry disapproved the ground taken, or was too lazy to read it (for he was the laziest man in reading I ever knew) I never learned; but he communicated it to nobody.” It was the beginning of the estrangement between the two men. After all, if an author’s friends won’t read his writings . . .

Randolph presented his copy to the convention without further identifying the author than as a member absent on account of sickness. The convention ordered the paper to be printed but did not otherwise give it its approbation. It appeared under the title of A Summary View of the Rights of British America. “It found its way to England,” says Jefferson in his Autobiography, “was taken up by the opposition, interpolated a little by Mr. Burke so as to make it answer opposition purposes, and in that form ran rapidly thro’ several editions.” Which statement is not altogether accurate but, Jefferson was afterwards proud to relate, it “procured me the honor of having my name inserted in a long list of proscriptions enrolled in a bill of attainder commenced in one of the houses of parliament, but suppressed in embryo.” The other names in the bill, Jefferson says, were “Hancock, the two Adamses, Peyton Randolph . . . Patrick Henry” but unfortunately for the reputation for veracity of autobiographies there does not seem to have been any such bill. Jefferson in his old age was not behind other men either in claiming credit or in relating the risks he had run.

Men who could speak were commoner in Virginia than men who could write, but the ability to write does not lead to as rapid recognition as the ability to speak. Jefferson was not among the Virginia delegates to the first Continental Congress. When the delegates to the second Congress were elected in the following year he was an alternate. Peyton Randolph, one of the delegates, was unable to attend and, accordingly, in June of 1775 Jefferson appeared in Philadelphia as one of the Virginian representatives.

Men who could write were not much more common in Philadelphia and what America needed most at the moment was men who could state her case—men who could tell why she was in arms, for the battle of Lexington was only two months old. There had been a desperate attempt to make writers of orators. John Rutledge, whose ability to sway a South Carolina mob no one disputed, had recently prepared a declaration of the reason for taking up arms. It was a failure, the members of the Congress reluctantly admitted. Jefferson arrived while they were considering what next to do. They heard that he had some reputation for writing ability. Another young lawyer with no special ability to speak—John Jay—had not long before produced a very satisfactory Address To The People Of Great Britain. Perhaps this young Virginian was just what they needed.

He was added to the committee and soon drafted a declaration to take the place of Rutledge’s. Afterwards Jefferson complained much of the way it was mutilated both in the committee and in the Congress, for he had considerable pride of authorship. With these amendments it proved satisfactory to his colleagues. He was clearly a valuable man.

He was put on other committees and drafted other papers. He never made a speech;  he never spoke more than a sentence or two from the floor. But the Congress was tired of speechmaking. The orators had aroused America to the point of resistance and, to the general surprise, it appeared that the English intended to test the genuineness of that resistance. The military situation had not yet become acute. Few Americans believed at the time that the British would embark on the mad experiment of conquering a continent. What was needed at the moment was a theory—a series of written instruments which, while purporting to make the position of the Americans clear to the world, would serve principally to make it clear to themselves.

Jefferson made many new friends and acquaintances in Philadelphia, but the most interesting to him at the time and to us later was John Adams. The factors which drew the two men together are easily apparent. The factors which estranged them for a period were not to appear until later.

Adams was nearly eight years older than Jefferson and his background was very different. But both men were scholars. Jefferson called Adams “a profound lawyer” and that was a compliment he did not give to many. In this respect, Adams was a sort of New England counterpart of Jefferson. He, too, had delved deeply into medieval law. Jefferson’s Anglo-Saxon theory was a little too romantic to have occurred to Adams, but by another route—a much more closely reasoned route—he had arrived at much the same conclusion: that America was bound to England only through a common king.

Many members of Congress feared Adams; many people in Philadelphia feared him to such an extent that they avoided being seen in public with him. He was the leader of the radical element in the Congress, he was always for vigorous measures, he had been among the first to advocate resistance by force, among the first to advocate the organization of a continental army. He was even suspected on good grounds of wishing for independence, and that, in the minds of many members of Congress and of a majority of the people of Philadelphia, was still regarded as treasonable.

He was precisely the kind of man that Jefferson had been seeking. The ideas expressed in The Summary View could lead only to independence. Virginia as a separate constitutional monarchy, with George of Hanover as king, would still be independent even though George was also King of the United Kingdom and Kurfürst of Hanover. But Jefferson had so far been unable to get anyone to take up his idea seriously. Unable to speak himself, easily wounded by scorn, abuse or insults, what he needed was a partner. His first efforts in Virginia had been to act through older, more respected, men. Colonel Bland had taken the insults on Jefferson’s early slavery proposals. But he was very lukewarm on the Anglo-Saxons. Jefferson had then had hope of Patrick Henry. It was true the man was an ignoramus, but how he could sway the people . . . Jefferson himself could supply the learning and the ideas. All Henry had to do was to speak them. But the man was impossible. He could not even be induced to read The Summary View. Peyton Randolph, it is true, had read it. He had even seen to it that it obtained some publicity. But he had not been willing to commit himself. None of these Virginians were. They might encourage Jefferson, but they would not stand forth themselves. Either they were afraid of hanging or they did not understand what it was all about.

This New Englander was different. He would go wherever the argument led him. It is true, as Jefferson wrote to Madison not so many years later: “His want of taste I had observed.” Adams was rough, he was impetuous, he did not mind insults, but after working with an ignorant popular orator like Patrick Henry, and a cautious aristocrat like Peyton Randolph . . . To find a man who could speak —well, maybe he could not speak like Henry but at least he could speak—and who was almost as learned as oneself . . . It was marvelous. A man who could speak and could also read Law French—a man with whom one could converse with understanding about the Greek tragedians and the Latin historians—a man who could understand, and understand intelligently, one’s own political theories—a man whose own previous meditations pointed to the same daring end . . . Such a colleague was more than Jefferson had hoped for.

Adams made himself both disliked and dreaded because of his steady advocacy of independence; the silent Jefferson escaped this. The Congress found itself gradually forced into the position of declaring independence. Various local resolutions showed the direction of public opinion. Yet many members were undecided. Some of the hesitancy was sentimental; some of it conservative—what precedent was there for such action? Despite innumerable jokes among themselves, they had little real fear of being hanged as traitors. Much of the military incompetence was due to the inability of the Americans to believe that the British seriously thought they could establish a military government over a continent. No part of America was very far from the frontier and even the city-bred delegates thought that in case of necessity they would flee to the backwoods. Such a conservative as Jay was willing to suggest, at one point, the destruction of the city of New York in order to keep it out of the hands of the British while Adams several times advised his wife that if the British were successful in Massachusetts she should take their children and “fly to the woods.” If the British had been successful in the war, the patriots, like the Boers, would have fled into the interior and founded one or more little republics.

On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee, pursuant to directions from the convention of Virginia, offered several resolutions, one of which was that “these United States are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.” The Congress went into a committee of the whole to consider the matter and shortly after appointed a committee to prepare a declaration, to be issued in the event this resolution was adopted. The members of this committee were Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston.

“It will naturally be inquired,” Adams says in his Autobiography, “how it happened that he [Jefferson] was appointed on a committee of such importance. There were more reasons than one. Mr. Jefferson had the reputation of a masterly pen; he had been chosen a delegate in Virginia, in consequence of a very handsome public paper which he had written . . . Another reason was, that Mr. Richard Henry Lee was not beloved . . . and Mr. Jefferson was set up to rival and supplant him. This could be done only by the pen, for Mr. Jefferson could stand no competition with him or any one else in elocution and public debate.”

In order to understand the proceedings of the Continental Congress one should always use, not the analogy of the later Congress of the United States, but the analogy of a diplomatic congress. When Jefferson speaks of “my country” he means Virginia. He even spoke on occasion of “the nation of Virginia.” He was not peculiar In this. Adams’ fatherland was Massachusetts;  Roger Sherman’s fatherland was Connecticut. The geographical distribution of this committee was no accident. One member was from Massachusetts, one from Connecticut, one from New York, one from Pennsylvania, and one from Virginia. Nor was it an accident that the member from Virginia was the chairman. Adams, as the principal advocate of independence, would appear to have been the logical choice to head the committee, but the chief duty of Adams as the diplomatic representative of Massachusetts was to win the support of Virginia. The same considerations which led to the choice of Washington as commander-in-chief led to the choice of a Virginian to draft the Declaration.

Adams says simply that Lee was not chosen because he was not “beloved.” The Virginian delegation was torn by dissension and divided generally into two factions, headed by Lee and Harrison. Lee was one of those men who are born with a knack for making enemies and he was later refused re-election to the Congress on the ostensible ground that he was subservient to the New Englanders—indeed, the radical party was frequently referred to as the “Adamses and Lees.” Harrison —the father of one president and great-grandfather of another—was a big, stout, red-faced planter, who had been elected as the representative of great wealth and established social position. Nobody wanted him to draft the Declaration. There was even considerable doubt whether he would sign it, but he did so after commenting to the diminutive Gerry: “Gerry, when the hanging comes, I shall have the advantage;  you’ll kick in the air half an hour after it is all over with me.”

The urbane and tactful Jefferson had managed to keep on good terms with both factions. He liked Harrison personally. He did not like Lee but he liked his policies. When it came to the election of a committee, Jefferson received the most votes, which automatically made him chairman, and as chairman it was easy to appoint himself a subcommittee of one to prepare a draft.

Jefferson never underestimated the honor of drawing the Declaration of Independence—in fact, at times he seemed to believe the Revolution was accomplished because of his excellent draftsmanship and that the war itself was a mere detail. No task could have suited him better. He was not overly fond of ordinary authorship but there was nothing he liked better than the drafting of state papers. When he was President, his enemies accused him of attempting to wage war by proclamation.

He was at this time making his home in Philadelphia with a bricklayer named Graaf, the son of a German immigrant. Graaf had a new brick house of three stories, which was located, said Jefferson many years later, “on the south side of Market street, probably between Seventh and Eighth streets, and if not the only house on that part of the street, I am sure there were few others near it.” Jefferson hired the entire second floor, consisting of a parlor and bedroom, ready furnished, for thirty-five shillings a week. There was another reason besides price for putting up with the inconvenience of the location. The day of the individual hotel room had not yet arrived, but that streak in Jefferson which made him build his own house on top of the most isolated hill available always made him insist on individual and roomy quarters. “A room to myself,” he wrote Madison in asking the latter to reserve accommodations for a subsequent session of the Congress, “if it be but a barrack, is indispensable.”

This trait immediately became apparent when Jefferson now sat down with his writing table. The draft which he brought back to his committee did not, in the familiar language, merely declare that “all men are created equal” but that “all Men are created equal and independent-² which is not exactly the same thing. The words “and independent” were struck out before the document left the committee but it is not known who suggested the change.

Jefferson’s apartment was ostensibly furnished but he had added some articles of his own. Among these was a writing table fourteen inches long and ten wide which had been “made from a drawing of his own, by Ben. Randolph, cabinet-maker at Philadelphia, with whom he first lodged on his arrival in that city” and before he found his quarters with Graaf. He held this table in his lap or on his knee while he wrote. The quotation is from an inscription he caused to be put on the underside of the table identifying it as “the identical one on which he wrote the Declaration of Independence” when he gave the table to his granddaughter, Ellen (Mrs. Joseph Coolidge).

When he had finished his draft he submitted it privately to Adams and Franklin. They suggested only a few changes and since they, with Jefferson, constituted a majority of the committee, the document reached the floor of the Congress largely as he had drafted it, with the notable elimination of the statement that all men are created independent.

It did not fare so well here. Jefferson stuck to his policy of never making a speech but he visibly suffered under the attacks on his handiwork. John Adams, he said later, was “our colossus in that debate.” Those who could not bear to give up the British connection fought a bitter rear-guard action. Their leader was John Dickinson, but whoever rose to attack the Declaration was answered by Adams. He had long been known as the advocate of independence; he now became the special guardian of Jefferson’s Declaration. He defended it as jealously as if it had been his own production but at the same time he developed a certain contempt for its thin-skinned author who writhed in silence when he heard the attacks but still could not bring himself to stand up and defend what he had done. That contempt bore fruit when later Adams thought his own services forgotten while every Fourth of July he listened to patriotic orators extol Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence.

The differences between the document as finally signed and Jefferson’s draft are slight. The changes in phraseology were generally improvements. But the eliminations cast the most light on Jefferson’s personality. One of the eliminations was of the charge that George III had “incited treasonable Insurrections of our Fellow Citizens, with the allurement of Forfeiture and Confiscation of our Property.” Another was of several paragraphs in which Jefferson charged that George III had forced the continued importation of Negro slaves despite the efforts of the Americans to prevent it. Another was of the charge that the King, in order to enforce his tyrannical will, had employed “not only soldiers of our common Blood, but Scotch and foreign Mercenaries.” This “unlucky” expression, Jefferson later said, “excited the ire of a gentleman or two of that country” and is the more remarkable because what little evidence there is indicates that the Jeffersons themselves were Welsh rather than English.

Reference has already been made to the comment of several contemporaries that there was a certain cynicism in Jefferson. His draft set forth that “for the Truth” of the facts therein stated “We pledge a Faith, as yet unsullied by falsehood.” What well of cynicism there must be in a statesman who is willing to declare publicly on the very day that his nation declares its existence that its faith is yet unsullied by falsehood.”

The Declaration of Independence ushered in the equally important question of the form of government which the newly emancipated states were going to adopt. There were innumerable other important matters. What should be their attitude toward Europe? Should they make alliances, and, if so, on what terms? What about finance? A navy? But overshadowing all was the military situation. They had declared independence; how were they going to make that declaration good?

None of these matters interested Jefferson greatly. If he had thought of the Declaration as establishing an American nation they might have. In his view the action of the Congress had merely resulted in dethroning George III in his various American kingdoms. The nations of America—the nation of Virginia, the nation of Pennsylvania and the nation of Massachusetts—had now to work out new governments for themselves. To Jefferson, the provisions of the intestate laws of Virginia were of far more importance than the terms of the treaty of alliance with France.

He resigned his seat near the end of the summer and returned to Virginia because, as he says in his Autobiography, “I knew that our legislation under the regal government had many very vicious points which urgently required reformation.” Congress was anxious not to lose him and in the autumn elected him to a position which was really tempting. It was that of one of the three commissioners to represent the United States in Paris; the other two being Franklin and Silas Deane. Jefferson received the offer at Monticello and hesitated for several days. It had been the dream of his youth to see the world outside America. It is true, negotiating with the French court would be far less interesting than reforming the vicious laws of Virginia, far less interesting or useful than abolishing primogeniture and the established church. Franklin would probably do well enough without him in Paris. Yet it was tempting. To visit France, not as a humble tourist but as the first accredited diplomatic representative of a new nation, as the author of a political document which had been published in every newspaper . . . He would be lionized, he would go everywhere, he would meet everybody. Think of the books he would buy and the wines he would drink . . . He declined the offer on the ground of his wife’s poor health.

At the session of the assembly in the fall of 1776 he proposed the appointment of a commission to revise the laws of the new state. The proposal was adopted and Jefferson, of course, was made a member of the commission. It met a few weeks later. The commissioners, after determining that they should merely prepare reformatory statutes rather than attempt to codify the law, divided the task among their three lawyer members, Jefferson, Wythe, and Pendleton. The division of labor was far from equal. Wythe took the British statute law between the founding of Jamestown and the Declaration of Independence; Pendleton, the statute law of Virginia; and Jefferson all the law, both statute and common, in existence at the founding of Jamestown. He was not led to take this assignment merely because of his love of medieval learning. Statutes were still comparatively unimportant. The common law as it had stood at the settlement of Virginia comprised the major portions of the criminal law, of the property law and of the church law of the new state. The only other field in which he wished to wield the reformatory axe was education. The only laws in existence having anything to do with the subject were “the acts of assembly concerning the College of Wm. & Mary,” and these, Jefferson concedes, “were properly within Mr. Pendleton’s portion of our work.” But Pendleton’s interest was codification, and since that proposal had been defeated he was perfectly willing to yield the acts concerning William and Mary to his colleague.

Two and a half years later the commission made its report. Most of the work had been done by Jefferson and, while the other members of the commission had gone over the results, we know from Jefferson's own account how few the changes were which they made. The results cast much light on his processes of thought.

The revision contained a complete penal code and in reading it we can easily see why Jefferson is sometimes dismissed as a typical product of the eighteenth century. The basic principles of this code would have received the heartiest approbation of any progressive thinker of the time. It was intended to be a humane code. The death penalty was limited to high treason, petty treason, murder, and the second offense of manslaughter. There were gradations of the death penalty. High treason was punishable by hanging and forfeiture of lands and goods; petty treason by hanging, “dissection” and forfeiture of one-half the lands and goods. If a murder was committed in a duel the criminal was to be gibbeted if the challenger but not otherwise. Most lesser crimes were to be punished by imprisonment at hard labor but no latitude was allowed in the period of imprisonment. The punishment for the first offense of manslaughter was seven years; counterfeiting, six; arson, five; robbery and burglary, four; house-breaking and horsestealing, three; grand larceny, two 3 petty larceny, one.

It is its precision which makes this code so typically eighteenth-century. There is not an iota of discretion allowed anywhere. The judge had no power over the sentence; it was useless for the jury to recommend mercy. This was done deliberately. In one of his draft constitutions Jefferson expressly provided that there was to be no power of pardon. This was not based on any jealousy of the power of the executive or of the judiciary for the prohibition against pardons extended to the granting of pardons by the legislature. Jefferson frequently said that mathematics was his favorite study and his penal code bears out the assertion. It reminds one of his farming.

Peter Jefferson, like other settlers in the backwoods, cleared patches of his land from time to time as he had opportunity and, when he cleared a patch, surrounded it with a rail fence. The result was certainly irregular and, in Jefferson’s eyes, unsightly. After he retired from the secretaryship of state he tore down all these fences and divided the cultivated portion of his Monticello estate into quadrilateral fields of forty acres each. These fields were separated by rows of peach trees. It was much more mathematical but the lack of fences made the keeping of cattle very difficult.

This desire to eliminate discretion was characteristic of all the innumerable penal codes which came into being in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The results of this mathematical regularity were as unsatisfactory in the treatment of criminals as they were in the management of Jefferson’s plantation. And with all the book learning which he brought to the subject he was a notoriously unsuccessful farmer.

There is one other aspect of his penal code which deserves attention. In the case of a few crimes the punishment is based on the Mosaic principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Thus, he provided that in the case of murder by poison, the criminal was to be executed by poison, and in the case of rape or sodomy, he was to be punished by dismemberment. “How this last revolting principle,” he says in his Autobiography, “came to obtain our approbation, I do not remember.” I am afraid it was the Anglo-Saxons. After all, do not the Laws of Ethelbert provide that if a man commit adultery with another man’s wife, he shall buy him a new wife? Jefferson also suspected that this was the source from which the principle had made its way into his code but hastened to add that the Anglo-Saxons had “copied probably from the Hebrew law.” It was another one of the corruptions introduced by Christianity.

Otherwise he pretty well purged the criminal law of its Christian corruptions. The only one of the religious crimes which survived was “pretensions to witchcraft,” for which the punishment provided was “ducking.” The other religious crimes—suicide, apostasy, heresy—were, he said, “to be pitied, not punished.”

The two most important changes which he proposed in the law of property were the abolition of primogeniture and the abolition of entails. These are not the same thing. Primogeniture was in the nature of a law of intestacy. If a man did not provide otherwise by will, his real estate descended to his eldest son. Jefferson, for example, although the eldest son, had not inherited all his father’s real estate; his father had left a plantation named Snowdon, on James River, to a younger son, Randolph Jefferson. Entail was not a rule of descent but the name of a particular kind of estate. The possessor of an entailed estate was not the owner of the estate but “the tenant in tail,” the man who was entitled, for the time being, to enjoy the benefit of the estate. Theoretically, he had no control over the disposition of the estate after his decease, but actually, in England, ever since the fifteenth century it had been possible for the tenant in tail, by going through an elaborate rigmarole, to turn his tenancy in tail into an estate in fee simple. What held the great English estates together was not that the possessors were tenants in tail but an elaborate system known as a “family settlement” which had been worked out by astute family solicitors. The secret of a successful family settlement was that the man in possession of the estate was never the tenant in tail and thus was never in a position to dock the entail. The bill to abolish entails was introduced into the legislature separately by Jefferson, before the report of the revisors, and there opposed by Pendleton but passed.

These technicalities are important because they bring out, in sharp relief, one of the outstanding characteristics of Jefferson’s mind. He took great pride in the abolition of primogeniture and even greater pride in the abolition of entails. “The repeal,” he said, “of the laws of entail would prevent the accumulation and perpetuation of wealth in select families . . . The abolition of primogeniture, and equal partition of inheritances removed the feudal and unnatural distinctions which made one member of every family rich and all the rest poor, substituting equal partition, the best of all Agrarian laws.” Neither of these consequences followed from Jefferson’s bills. These changes, it is true, came about but not because of any legislative action. What happened was a change in the outlook of the people. They no longer thought primogeniture just. Anybody who wanted to do so was still able to leave his entire estate to his eldest son by will. Entail fell partly because it was based on the idea of primogeniture and partly because its assumption of the continued residence of a family upon a particular plot of ground was absurd in the migratory era into which America was entering.

This conclusion in regard to Jefferson’s law abolishing entails can be stated with the certitude which is usually found only in the exact sciences. We have a well-nigh perfect control. The social structure of Maryland was almost the same as that of Virginia, and Maryland did not abolish entails—indeed, it is still possible to create them in that state. Has anyone ever noticed the divergent social evolution of Maryland and of Virginia due to the existence of entails in one state and their non-existence in the other?

This matter of the abolition of primogeniture and entail shows more clearly than any other incident in Jefferson’s career why it was that he is so frequently referred to by his contemporaries as a “visionary.” It was not that he was an enthusiast—he was too perfect an eighteenth-century gentleman for that. It was not because he was the slave of some ism—he had too strong a dash of cynicism for that. Nor was it that he was too remote from all practical concerns. But, somehow, he always managed to be practical without being too practical; to keep his feet on the earth and still avoid coming to grips with reality.

This peculiar ability to be practical and yet not effectively practical is best displayed by his careful avoidance of the two changes in the property laws of Virginia which would have produced the results which he claimed that the abolition of primogeniture and entail had produced. The first of these would have been to make real estate subject to execution. That sentence sounds unintelligibly antiquated but what held the English family estates together more than anything else was the inability of creditors to force a sale of their debtor’s real estate. The same thing was true in Virginia. Nearly all the great planters were habitually in debt. It was beneath the dignity of a gentleman to pay his bills promptly. Nothing would have broken up the great estates faster —nothing would have more speedily destroyed the power of the great families—than a law enabling creditors to force the sale of their debtors’ real estate. The other change he might have made was to provide, as was done in France as a result of their revolution, that a parent must leave a certain proportion of his property to each of his children. This is a very different thing from providing that, unless the parent wills otherwise, it is to be divided equally.

His educational bill provided for the division of the counties into hundreds, in each of which was to be a free elementary school. The state was further divided into twenty districts, in each of which was to be a grammar school. It contained other provisions designed to convert William and Mary into a true university. But the most interesting part of the plan I shall give in his own words. Each elementary school was “to be under a visitor who is annually to chuse the boy of best genius in the school, of those whose parents are too poor to give them further education, and to send him forward to one of the grammar schools . . . Of the boys thus sent in any one year, trial is to be made at the grammar schools one or two years, and the best genius of the whole selected, and continued six years, and the residue dismissed. By this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expence, so far as the grammar schools go. At the end of six years instruction, one half are to be discontinued (from among whom the grammar schools will probably be supplied with future masters) j and the other half, who are to be chosen for the superiority of their parts and disposition, are to be sent and continued three years in the study of such sciences as they shall chuse, at William and Mary college.” This merely applied to free education. Anyone could go to these schools who could pay his own expenses.

One advantage, he pointed out, of having the state establish elementary schools was that it would prevent “putting the Bible and Testament into the hands of the children at an age when their judgments are not sufficiently matured for religious inquiries.”

Which introduces what he regarded as the crowning achievement of his revision of the laws. This was the bill for establishing religious freedom. This statute was not strictly a law. It was a declaration of policy. Like the other great Declaration, it abounded in those quotable generalities which make the heart of the reader beat faster. “Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself . . . errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”

This time Jefferson had some difficulty in finding an Adams. He had prepared the bills; it goes without saying that he made no attempt to get them adopted by the legislature. The bills abolishing primogeniture and entails he was willing to sponsor for there was little opposition to them. But the bills for a new penal code, for a state educational system, and for religious freedom were different matters. The opposition to the last was not based on a desire to keep the established church. Public opinion had moved beyond that point. But it had not moved beyond the point of believing that it was the duty of the state to provide some form of religious establishment for the people. The weight of enlightened opinion at the time was that while every man should be required to contribute to the support of some religious establishment, he should be allowed to select the establishment to which he made his contribution. The majority of Virginians, for example, were probably Episcopalians but in the western regions there were numerous bodies of Presbyterians and Baptists. The opposition to Jefferson’s bill would not derive its strength from those who thought that the state should suppress the Presbyterians and Baptists. It would rather be derived from those who thought that every man should be bound to contribute to the support of some religious establishment but that the taxpayer himself should select the sect. This, for example, was Washington’s attitude. Jefferson had left no room for ambiguity on this point. The preamble of his bill states: “That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness . . It reflected the strong hostility which Jefferson always had to every form of ecclesiasticism.

The going was likely to be rough for anyone who attempted to get Jefferson’s bill for religious freedom passed. So far as the public was concerned, he himself left the matter severely alone. Bland had taken the punishment for his early slavery bill; Patrick Henry had given life to the idea of colonial committees of correspondence; John Adams had fought for “every word” of the Declaration of Independence; someone would arise to champion the bill for religious freedom. So far these champions of Jefferson’s ideas had been older and better-known men, who had aided him with prestige as well as debating ability. But the reputation of the author of the Declaration of Independence was already such that there were few men left to whom he could be considered junior. He had been elected Governor at the same session at which the revisors presented their report but he did not attempt to use his position to get his bill for religious freedom passed.

He was still waiting for a legislative champion but this time he was growing his own. The day when older and more important men took up Jefferson’s ideas and put them into effect was past.

James Madison was eight years younger than Jefferson and, like Jefferson, he belonged to what might be called the junior aristocracy. He had inherited one of the most important plantations in Orange County, the county which adjoined Albemarle, but he first met Jefferson about the time of the Declaration of Independence. Superficially, there was much in common between the two men. Madison attempted to live the life which Jefferson thought proper for a wealthy plantation owner. His intellectual interests may not have been as wide as Jefferson’s but they were deep. He devoted the leisure which his wealth gave him to study, principally to the study of political science. He was much more plodding and matter-of-fact than Jefferson but he was also a much better logician.

These intellectual traits naturally appealed to Jefferson but the bond between them was deeper. There is no denying the fact that Madison was always unpopular. None of his contemporaries but Jefferson really liked him. Jefferson made him Secretary of State and he made him President. The South and West acquiesced because he was a Virginian. The Northeast was helpless. He had, said an early historian, “the power of completely interesting and amusing Jefferson in any of the moods of his mind.” He tried out all Jefferson’s schemes. He kept a thermometric diary; he read the books Jefferson recommended; when Jefferson discovered a pedometer Madison bought one.

He was almost as much of an introvert as Jefferson but he was not quite so thin-skinned. In his early twenties he had buried himself in his library and had shunned all contact with the world. But he had made a deliberate effort to overcome this; had set out deliberately to establish a place for himself in the political world.

Madison was sent to Congress by the same session of the legislature which elected Jefferson governor. A few years later, when Jefferson was in France, Madison returned to the legislature and devoted his efforts successfully to obtaining the passage of the bill for religious freedom. This bill was disliked by many of the older leaders but it had real popular support behind it. This support came from various divergent sources. A large proportion of the Virginians were freethinkers—how large, may be judged from the statement, made without comment indignant or otherwise, by a later Episcopal bishop of Virginia that at the time of his ordination there was a common belief that the first holder of the office, Bishop James Madison (a cousin of the statesman) was an ‘Unbeliever.” The established church was not popular even with many of those who accepted its doctrines. For too many years it had been more of a tax-gathering agency than a religious institution. It was too closely allied with the royal government; it was, after all, the Church of England. The backbone of the revolutionary movement was in the western part of the state and very few of the westerners were Episcopalians.

But Madison was a prudent man. He did not take the risk of trying to get all Jefferson’s bills passed. His penal code was a quarry from which a later penal code was constructed. His educational bill remained in the archives. Above all, the Virginians hated taxes and they felt no particular need for a system of free public education. A bill Jefferson had drafted providing for the emancipation and transportation of all Negroes born after a particular date was left severely alone. The only part of his slavery bill which ever became law was a section which provided that slaves were to be considered personal property instead of, as theretofore, real estate. The object Jefferson had in mind in making this change is not clear.

Jefferson worked hard during the two and a half years that he spent on the revision of the law's. There were hours to be spent in his library and other hours at his desk but Jefferson was not a man who was afraid of congenial work. Except for the occasional sessions of the legislature his time was spent at Monticello. His wife’s health was poor but she was still alive and he had, in addition, two young daughters. He rose at daybreak, worked until breakfast and then worked again until noon, when he would mount his horse and ride over his plantation until the dinner hour, which was about three o’clock. It was very pleasant. Nothing, I am sure, in all Jefferson’s career gave him so much pleasure as this opportunity to revise the everyday laws of his state. The thought that it might all be useless labor, that the war might be lost after all, seems never to have occurred to him. It is true he heard occasionally that fighting was still going on further north, that the British sometimes were successful, that even Philadelphia had been captured. But he was sure that all would come out right in the end. Had not he himself drafted the proud Declaration of Independence?

Washington was at Valley Forge while Jefferson was revising the laws and the outlook at Valley Forge was very different from the outlook at Monticello. The enthusiasm of the early days of the Revolution had long vanished. The popular attitude in the army was to blame everything on Congress. The lack of food, the lack of clothing, the lack of ammunition, the lack of pay, it was all the fault of the politicians in Congress. No wonder they were defeated. How could they make bricks without straw? Washington went further. How could you expect anything from the second-raters now in Congress? Where were the leaders? ‘I cannot help asking,” wrote Washington in the winter of 1778-1779, “Where is Mason—Wythe—Jefferson—Nicholas—Pendleton—Nelson —and another I could name . . .” They were all Virginians whom he named for he was writing to Harrison, who was now the Speaker of the House of Delegates and, doubtless, the “other I could name.” “To how little purpose,” Washington pointed out, “the States individually are framing constitutions, providing laws, and filling offices . . . These, if the great whole is mismanaged, must sink in the general wreck.”

But the war seemed very far away to Virginians in the summer of 1779. Philadelphia was at least a week’s journey away and the British had by now been compelled to evacuate even it. All they had seen of the war were a few skirmishes in the course of getting rid of their own royal governor and an occasional British warship. Another British army had begun to operate in the extreme south but that seemed even farther away.

Virginians, for generations, had looked on governors as their natural enemies. It was probably necessary to have some sort of head man but in setting up their new constitution they had taken care to make him as innocuous as possible. They intended that their governor should have the dignity but not the power of his royal predecessor. Patrick Henry was a great friend of the people but what was the use of providing for an election each year if you always elected the same man? In fact, their constitution forbade his re-election for more than three successive one-year terms. Tom Jefferson was doubtless somewhat queer and kept altogether too much to himself, but underneath he was a fine fellow and certainly both dignified and harmless. Why not elect him?

Jefferson was elected Governor in the summer of 1779 for a one-year term and was re-elected the following summer. He himself never exhibited that jealousy of adequate executive power which was one of the most pronounced features of “Jeffersonianism.” It was one of the principal planks in the platform of his party even when he was active in politics. It is always necessary to distinguish between the views of Jefferson and the principles of Jeffersonianism. Hamilton noted the difference on this point. “I admit,” he wrote in 1800, that Jefferson “is not scrupulous about the means of success, nor very mindful of truth, and that he is a contemptible hypocrite. But it is not true, as is alleged, that he is an enemy to the power of the Executive, or that he is for confounding all the powers in the House of Representatives . . . while we were in the administration together, he was generally for a large construction of the Executive authority, and not backward to act upon it in cases which coincided with his views.”

When Jefferson was elected Governor he agreed in theory with the attitude on this question which was afterwards known as Jeffersonian. The Governor of Virginia had very little power. He really had no other function than to act as the titular head of the government on state occasions. The governorship was an honor rather than a job. Every power which could be lodged elsewhere had been taken from the executive and even what little power was left in the executive department the Governor shared with the Council. He was, in truth, merely the chairman of the Council. All Jefferson accomplished in his civil capacity as Governor was to bring about the abolition of the professorship of divinity at William and Mary.

All this worked after a fashion in peace time. Jefferson was a man of peace. He was in every fiber a civilian. But the author of the Declaration of Independence suddenly found himself under the necessity of maintaining his Declaration by force of arms.

If the British ever had a plan to solve the question of North American sedition, all knowledge of it went to the grave with Lord North. They started by camping an army in Boston. When it was chased out of there it went to New York, where it learned after a while that New York City is not America. The next thing that happened is that one British army devoted its attention to making Englishmen unpopular in Pennsylvania while another got lost in the woods of northern New York. The English are notoriously slow but after a few years they noticed that this sort of thing was not getting them anywhere. They then decided that the thing to do was to make themselves as obnoxious as possible. What they now decided to do was, as Jefferson later expressed it of the War of 1812, to let their “military heroes, by land and sea . . . sink our oyster boats, rob our hen roosts, burn our negro huts, and run off.” To add insult to injury the British sent the one American of any consequence whom they had been able to seduce by bribes, Benedict Arnold, on this errand.

The geography of Virginia is such that while it was very difficult to conquer, it was very easy to harry. For the most part, the settled portion of the state consisted of long, narrow peninsulas bounded on the two longer sides by navigable rivers and on the end by Chesapeake Bay. This was the reason the state did not have any cities. Cities did not grow up because there was little need for middlemen between the English merchants and the planters. For years the English ships had come within a few miles of every plantation. Their warships could do what their merchant ships had done.

The task of defense was almost impossible. Any sort of naval force which could have closed the entrance to Chesapeake Bay could have done it easily but Jefferson had no naval force. He did not have troops enough to keep a sufficient force in each peninsula and while the soldiers were going the long, roundabout land route from one peninsula to the other, the marauders could easily get away. That was really all they were—marauders. They were not carrying out any deep-laid military plan. They were merely venting their spite on the Virginians by burning down their houses, killing their horses and carrying away their Negroes.

Jefferson did the best he could. Whenever an alarm was raised he called out the militia but the Virginian militia . . . The subject had better be left to Washington. When the British approached Richmond, the new capital of the state, Jefferson worked hard getting the munitions and public records out of town. He sent away his family and thereafter he remained on the outskirts of safety. He had neither aides, staff, nor even a bodyguard. He rode around the countryside trying to get the stores concealed, trying to get the militia organized, trying to get information. He hated the work but he did his best. Once his horse sank under him on the road. He took off the saddle and bridle, walked with it to the nearest farmhouse and borrowed an unbroken colt with which he continued on his way.

The British, now under the command of a general named Phillips, who was Arnold’s superior, occupied Richmond and sent Jefferson word that unless the town was ransomed they would burn it. He indignantly refused even to discuss the proposal. They then partially burned the town and retired to their ships for further raids.

The pace of the war was increasing. Washington had first sent Steuben to assist Jefferson with military advice. He was followed by Continental detachments under Muhlenberg and Lafayette. Cornwallis was approaching from the south. Greene, who was in command of the army watching Cornwallis, decided to march off and attack the British outposts in South Carolina. This left the road open to Virginia.

Jefferson had summoned the legislature to meet in the village of Charlottesville near Monticello and Cornwallis now detached Tarleton, the ablest of his cavalry commanders and a man whose name was a byword for speed and cruelty, to seize Jefferson and break up the meeting of the legislature. A private citizen saw Tarleton’s troops pass, noted their direction, suspected their design, mounted a fleet horse, arrived at Monticello “about sunrise,” warned Jefferson that Tarleton could be expected any minute and went on to Charlottesville. Jefferson immediately sent off his family by carriage under the protection of a young man who was studying law with him, but remained himself, busily securing his papers. About two hours later another man rode up and said the British had been seen in the vicinity. Jefferson then ordered his horse to be brought from the smithy at Shadwell Ford, where it had been shod that morning, to a point on the road between Monticello and Carter’s Mountain, which could be reached by a path running through the woods behind his house. He then walked over to this point with his telescope in his hand but was still unwilling to mount and ride off. He was convinced Tarleton would go to Charlottesville first and he now climbed a rock from which, with his telescope, he had a good view of the streets of that village. Not a redcoat was in sight. He climbed down and started back to the house when he noticed that in stooping to adjust his telescope his sword had slipped from its sheath. He climbed up again to get it and, while on the rock, took another look through his telescope at Charlottesville, The streets were swarming with redcoats. He then mounted his horse and rode off.

It was the sheerest accident that he escaped. Tarleton, on his way to Charlottesville, had detached a troop under a Captain McLeod to seize Jefferson and this troop had actually reached the house before Jefferson decided it was time to mount his horse. As an early historian puts it, we must give the devil his due. There is no other known instance of Tarleton’s humanity but he apparently gave McLeod orders to touch nothing at Monticello. When the redcoats came in sight two slaves were engaged in secreting the silverware under the plank floor of the front portico. For this purpose they had raised some of the planks and one of the slaves had gone down in the hole thus created. The other slave remained above handing the silverware to him. When the enemy appeared the one above hastily replaced the planks and the faithful Caesar remained under the portico without food or water for the eighteen hours that McLeod remained.

There was a reason for Tarleton’s unusual treatment of Jefferson. The prisoners taken at Saratoga had for a time been kept at Charlottesville and Jefferson had distinguished himself by his kindness to them. Then, too, Tarleton may have felt it advisable to make a friend at court for his recent defeat at Cowpens must have impressed him with the possibility that he himself might some day be captured. That his humanity in this instance was not due to any superior orders is certain, for shortly after this Cornwallis in person camped on another plantation Jefferson owned called Elkhill.

There, Jefferson wrote, “He destroyed all my growing crops of corn & tobacco, he burned all my barns containing the same articles of the last year . . . he used, as was to be expected, all my stocks of cattle, sheep & hogs for the sustenance of his army, and carried off all the horses capable of service: of those too young for service he cut the throats, and he burned all the fences on the plantation, so as to leave it an absolute waste. He carried off also about 30 slaves. Had this been to give them freedom he would have done right, but it was to consign them to inevitable death . . . Wherever he went, the dwelling houses were plundered of everything that could be carried off . . . that his table was served with the plate thus pillaged from private houses can be proved by many hundred eye witnesses.” Those who wonder at the anti-British feeling which still exists in this country should remember Cornwallis. As Jefferson most truly said, “The spirit in which she [Great Britain] wages war . . . does not seem the legitimate offspring either of science or of civilization.” He himself had much to do with the perpetuation of anti-British feeling. “That nation,” he said at another time, “hates us, their ministers hate us, and their King more than all other men.”

Cornwallis’ depredations found Jefferson in a poor mood to withstand misfortunes. So far he had really had none. So far everything in his career had been successful. Nor did he ever admit that anything he had done as Governor had contributed to the British successes. He was satisfied that he had done everything that any holder of the office could have done. But when he had assembled the legislature at Charlottesville their first action was to entertain a motion for an inquiry into his conduct. He promptly resigned. But the insult was almost more than he could bear. This resignation had occurred just before Tarleton’s raid. Jefferson, when he fled from that raid, went with his family to his plantation at Poplar Forest, near Lynchburg. His friends did not approve of his conduct. They wanted him to come forth and make a defense but he refused. He was satisfied that he was through;that he, had had more than enough of trying to serve the public.

He returned to Monticello a few days after the British had left, determined to stay there for the rest of his life and to devote himself to his family, his books, and his farming. He had hardly settled down when Congress again asked him to go to Europe and again he refused. The following winter he was re-elected to his old seat in Congress but declined to serve. Then came the death of his wife.

It is difficult to determine the relations between the Jeffersons. None of their letters survive. He seldom spoke of her to others and he did not take her with him on his trips to Philadelphia so the letters and memoirs of the other eminent men of the time have nothing to say about her. According to the recollection of their elder daughter, written down many years later, when his sister led him from the side of his wife’s deathbed, “he fainted, and remained so long insensible that they feared he never would revive . . . the violence of his emotion, when almost by stealth I entered his room at night, to this day I dare not trust myself to describe. He kept his room three weeks, and I was never a moment from his side. He walked almost incessantly night and day, only lying down occasionally, when nature was completely exhausted . . . When at last he left his room, he rode out, and from that time he was incessantly on horseback, rambling about the mountain, in the least frequented roads, and just as often through the woods.”

This sounds as though the relationship between the husband and wife had been one of the utmost love and intimacy but one should not forget that beneath a rather thick eighteenth-century crust Jefferson had unusually strong emotions. It is almost certain that there was no intellectual companionship between Mrs. Jefferson and her husband. Women of any intellectual culture were so rare in Virginia that if she had had any inclination that way some record of it would have survived. A more certain reason for believing she was in no sense her husband’s intellectual companion is that he avowedly disliked intellectual women. He was shocked at the way the women in Parisian society talked politics and in writing home of it added that he hoped “our good ladies . . . are contented to soothe & calm the minds of their husbands returning ruffled from political debate.” Gallatin, his Secretary of the Treasury, once hinted at taking women into the public service. “The appointment of a woman to office,” Jefferson wrote in reply, “is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.” In his old age he pointed out that even in the purest of democracies it would be necessary to exclude women from the suffrage “to prevent depravation of morals and ambiguity of issue.”

There are occasional expressions in Jefferson’s letters indicating that he did not find his married life altogether satisfactory. Thus, he warned James Monroe that “matrimony illy agrees with study.” After his defeat for the presidency in 1796 he wrote Edward Rutledge that he did not regret it; that “the honey moon would be as short in that case as in any other, & its moments of extasy [sic] would be ransomed by years of torment & hatred.”

His immediate reaction to the death of his wife was a desire to leave the familiar scenes. Congress was anxious to send him to Europe as one of five commissioners to negotiate peace with England and this time he accepted. The British blockade made it difficult to leave the country and Jefferson was still in Baltimore awaiting an opportunity to get to Europe when news arrived that Jay, Franklin, and Adams had concluded a treaty. The next winter was spent in Congress, which now sat in Annapolis, and the following spring he was elected minister to France. He sailed from Boston in the summer, taking with him his elder daughter, Martha, who was about twelve at the time.

“You replace Mr. Franklin?” said Vergennes, the French foreign minister, on first meeting him. “I succeed him,” said Jefferson, “no one can replace him.”

He made an excellent minister. He was unwilling to trust himself to oral negotiations in French, so much of his activity can still be followed on paper. He usually wrote in English. His primary purpose was to open direct commercial relations with France and, despite the fact that he had always expressed a complete lack of interest in commercial matters, he plunged into this task with zeal if not enthusiasm. His greatest success was in increasing the market for New England whale oil.

These activities taught him a lot about the nature of the French government and the lesson he learned was that that government was in great need of reform. It had been found at the close of the Revolution that American foreign trade immediately went back into its old channels, that is, it was almost exclusively with Great Britain. Such changes as there were, were to the disadvantage of the Americans since they no longer had the same privileges, in the British West Indies for example, which they had had as colonials. It seemed absurd to Jefferson that all the tobacco from Virginia went to Great Britain and that even the French imported their Virginian tobaccos from England rather than directly from Virginia. This procedure deprived both the French and the Americans of the fruits of their successful war. Both were still paying tribute to the British navigation acts. This would seem a simple situation to remedy; under a free economy it would have remedied itself.

Jefferson did not find the French ministers deaf to logic. The trouble was that the tobacco trade was a state monopoly in France, which was leased out to the Farmers-General who were unwilling to make any change in the established routine. No French minister felt himself strong enough to challenge the Farmers-General. It was the same in everything. Everybody agreed that something should be done and everybody agreed that nothing could be done because anything that might be done would interfere with some vested racket.

Jefferson was more of an American and less of a Virginian during his stay in Paris than at any other time of his life. He was so alive to the interests of other sections of the country that he even recommended the establishment of a small American navy to be used against the Barbary pirates. The interests of his own section affected his diplomatic conduct in only one particular. In season and out of season he tried to convince the French that Alexandria in Virginia, rather than New York or Philadelphia, was the coming commercial center of the country.

He liked the people but on the whole it all made him very sad. The run of the population led such a miserable existence. He had not conceived it possible. He traveled extensively. He went down into Italy and up into Germany. His love of wines led him to visit all the famous Rhineland vineyards. Everywhere he went he was on the lookout for new agricultural products which could be cultivated successfully in America. He sent back olive trees, capers, and new varieties of rice. But he sent no vines. Even before the Revolution he had tried to introduce the growing of wine into Virginia but what he saw in Europe made him change his mind. Better to import our wines than to develop a peasantry such as that found in these European wine-growing districts.

He found many new taste-sensations and a chef of whom he thought so much that he subsequently took him to America. But there were also taste sensations that he missed—corn and pecans and hominy.

“I am here,” he wrote from Paris,  “burning the candle of life without present pleasure, or future object.” No doubt he had met some interesting people but, he wrote to Francis Hopkinson, “I envy your Wednesday evening entertainments with” Rittenhouse and Dr. Franklin. They would be more valued by me than the whole week at Paris.”

The one definite principle that he acquired in France was the paramount necessity of protecting the Arcadian simplicity of America from the contamination of European civilization. “The pleasure” of a trip to France, he wrote Monroe, “will be less than you expect but the utility greater. It will make you adore your own country, it’s [sic] soil, it’s climate, it’s equality, liberty, laws, people & manners. My God! how little do my country men 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 . . . Come then & see the proofs of this, and on your return add your testimony . . . to satisfy our countrymen how much it is their interest to preserve uninfected by contagion those peculiarities in their government & manners to which they are indebted for these blessings.” That was the spirit in which he himself returned—a great desire to keep America from becoming like Europe; a great desire to keep out “monarchism,” under which term he comprised all that he had found in Europe which was absent in America.

This desire to protect the Arcadian simplicity of America made him look with grave doubt on the current wish of his countrymen to increase immigration. He had long been skeptical on this point. Before he had ever left America he had inquired “are there no inconveniences to be thrown into the scale against the advantage expected from the multiplication of numbers by the importation of foreigners?” In Europe he discovered that the slanders disseminated by the English “prevent foreign emigrations to our country . . . which I consider as advantageous to us.”

This doubt of the wisdom of unrestricted immigration clashes harshly with the traditional political conception of Jefferson. In reality, it tells us why he should be regarded as a wise statesman. It is a commonplace today that a system of government, in order to work, must be adapted to the traditions of the people to whom it is applied. That is a bit of wisdom that has become a commonplace since Jefferson’s time. He lived in a world in which intelligent opinion agreed that the organization of a new government was simply a matter of reason—and reason was the same whether the government was designed for Hottentots or Virginians. The extent to which he had his feet on the ground is apparent by comparing him with the reformers of the next generation— with Jeremy Bentham calmly sitting down in London to draw a constitution for Chile and with John Stuart Mill coming to the surprised conclusion that the problems of India could not be solved by supplying it with a constitution on the latest European model. This type of practicality Jefferson shared with a great many of the founders of our republic but not with Hamilton. The latter had an executive capacity which Jefferson wholly lacked but he always thought in terms of “people” rather than of Americans, Russians, or Chinese. The one was practical; the other had a sense of what was practicable.

Jefferson’s divergence from advanced political thought in Europe appeared before he left France. He was no admirer of the English constitution, he thought it only a slight improvement on the absolute monarchies of continental Europe. Jefferson loved Lafayette as he loved no other man and the only fault he ever found in him was “a canine appetite for popularity.” When the possibilities of a reformation of the government of France first began to appear, Lafayette turned to Jefferson for advice and the advice he received was to keep “the good model of your neighboring country before your eyes.” Actual observation of the States-General in action made Jefferson, if possible, more conservative as to the amount of popular government which was practicable in France. That liking for the drafting of state papers which made him draft constitutions only for private circulation among his friends and statutes which were never introduced in any legislature now made him draft a constitution for France. It was very short and left considerably more power in the Crown than was the case in England. The composition and method of election of the States-General were left unchanged, but that body was to assemble annually without being called and was to have the sole right to levy taxes. The King retained an absolute veto on legislation and the right to appoint all executive and judicial officers. There was a very incomplete bill of rights. In general, this constitution would have brought France about as far along the road to representative government as England was at the death of Elizabeth.

Jefferson’s plan had no appeal for the French revolutionists. Perhaps some word of Jefferson’s conservatism had gotten around because, when a commission was appointed to draft a constitution, its head, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, an adherent of the court, requested Jefferson, by a formal written invitation, to join their deliberations. This he promptly refused to do on the ground of the extreme impropriety of a foreign minister meddling in the domestic concerns of the country to which he was accredited.

One day Lafayette asked Jefferson whether he could bring six or eight friends to dinner with him. On arrival they all turned out to be leading reformers but representing varying shades of opinion. “The cloth being removed, and wine set on the table, after the American manner”—Jefferson liked his wine after his dinner, not with it—he discovered that they had come on business. It was to discuss various points in the proposed constitution on which they differed. Jefferson states he was a “silent witness” to a discussion beginning at four in the afternoon and continuing until ten at night which was “truly worthy of being placed in parallel with the finest dialogues of antiquity.” There is no doubt that he enjoyed it but a night’s reflection convinced him he had gotten himself into a scrape. He called on Montmorin, who had succeeded Vergennes as Minister for Foreign Affairs, the next morning to explain “how it had happened that my house had been made the scene of conferences of such a character. He told me, he already knew everything which had passed, that so far from taking umbrage at the use made of my house on that occasion, he earnestly wished I would habitually assist at such conferences, being sure I should be useful in moderating the warmer spirits, and promoting a wholesome and practicable reformation only.” Yet Jefferson was commonly regarded in America as impractical and doctrinaire, which explains a lot of things about the French Revolution and the American Revolution.

He returned to America in the fall of 1789 only, he thought, for the winter. On his arrival he was offered and accepted the position of Secretary of State in the newly organized government under the constitution.

He had changed but little in his absence. His hair had begun to turn gray and he was beginning to have rather frequent and severe headaches. He still had the spare figure of his youth. His right wrist had been broken in an accident in France and never healed properly. This stopped forever what little violin-playing he had still done. His teeth remained good and his eyesight did not begin to fail until extreme old age. He had been unable to keep a riding-horse in France and had substituted a two-hour walk each day for his previous habit of a daily ride. This walk he took after dinner as the time he could most conveniently spare from his desk and he took it, rain or shine. “A person not sick,” he said, “will not be injured by getting wet.” Walking he thought was twice as valuable for exercise as riding and it would appear from what he says of his habits that he sometimes took walks of as much as fifteen or twenty miles. Yet when his own stable was again available he soon went back to riding. Despite all the exercise he wrote, four or five years later, that he was “in bed, under a paroxysm of the Rheumatism which has now kept me for ten days in constant torment, & presents no hope of abatement.”

After spending the winter in Monticello he arrived in New York in March, 1790 rented a house in Maiden Lane and was ready for his new duties. The new government was nearly a year old. Most of his colleagues were old friends and acquaintances. Jay, who, as Secretary for Foreign Affairs, had been Jefferson’s superior on his French mission and had continued to manage the state department pending Jefferson’s arrival, was Chief Justice. Jefferson’s relations with him, while cordial, had never been intimate. His old friend Adams was Vice-President. Their friendship had increased through the years. Adams had been minister to England while Jefferson was minister to France. They had been in constant correspondence and had occasionally met. The two of them had spent one summer touring England together. Mrs. Adams did Jefferson’s shopping for him in London and he did her shopping for her in Paris. When Jefferson’s younger daughter went to Europe to join him Mrs. Adams met her at the boat in England and kept her until Jefferson could send his maitre d’hotel to bring her to Paris. And when he did come, little Polly Jefferson, then not quite eleven, cried and clung about Mrs. Adams’ neck until she was “forced” away.

Jefferson was greeted warmly on his arrival in New York. He found that the new government was the center of a very lively social life—the “court,” some people called it—and he found himself a very important figure in this social life. He found, too, that his reputation had grown greatly in his absence. The country was prosperous, the new government was an evident success, his old friends were in control of the government, he himself was near the top. All seemed well and yet . . . What, for instance, was this frequent reference to the “court”? And then the President had receptions which were called “levees”? Where had he heard that word before? And then it seemed that on the President’s birthday there were balls. Birthday balls? It was like the celebrations on the King’s birthday in Europe. Was it possible there was a plot afoot to make Washington king? Not that he had any fear in regard to Washington himself but the great man was getting old—he was altogether too open to persuasion by those about him. Who was this stupid fellow Knox who was Secretary of War? Washington said he was a fine artillery officer and no doubt Washington was the best judge of that, but what was that story Jefferson had heard about him? That he had been the ringleader in some scheme at the end of the war to have the army seize the principal cities and proclaim Washington king? Certainly he was not a man to be trusted.

What were the ramifications of this thing? There were some queer stories going around about his old friend Adams. And Jay? It is true Jay was notoriously circumspect but many of his friends and relations, including his brother, had been prominent loyalists.

Where did all this head up? What about this man Hamilton? Jefferson had met him before and had liked him. When in Europe, an Englishman had asked Jefferson to recommend a lawyer in New York and he had recommended Hamilton as “much to be relied on.” Then, too, he was a great friend of Jefferson’s friend Madison. Had not the two of them, with some little assistance from Jay, produced a most excellent book? When Jefferson accepted a position in the cabinet he certainly did not anticipate trouble with Hamilton.

Jefferson afterwards adopted as one of the planks in his party platform, opposition to Hamilton’s financial schemes. The first one of these, the adoption by the new government of the debts of the old at face value, had occurred before his arrival. He later said in his Autobiography that this was wrong; that these debts should only have been adopted at their cost to their then holders. If he believed this at the time his ideas must have undergone a rapid change for only a few months previously he had written to a Dutch banker that “some people in America have seriously contended that the certificates & other evidences of our domestic debt ought to be redeemed only at what they have cost the holder . . . But this is very far from being a general opinion; a very great majority being firmly decided that they shall be paid fully. Were I the holder of any of them, I should not have the least fear of their full paiment.” In a later letter he cautioned the same banker that speculation in these debts “is a science which bids defiance to the powers of reason”.

When Jefferson arrived in the capital the great political question was whether the new government should adopt the debts which the states individually had incurred for the prosecution of the war. Here the division was largely between the members of Congress from states which had such debts and members from states which did not have such debts. The northeastern states had the largest debts to pass on to the new government; “Massachusetts particularly,” said Jefferson later, incurred “in an absurd attempt, absurdly conducted, on the British post of Penobscot.” This measure was defeated in the House by a very few votes. Hamilton went to Jefferson and asked his assistance. It was not a party question; there were as yet no parties.

If Massachusetts wanted the federal government to assume its debts, Virginia also wanted something. The Constitution provided for a federal capital city but did not name the place. Rivers then had an importance which it is difficult for us to grasp and everybody took it for granted that the new city was to be on the banks of some important river. There were four possibilities, the Hudson, the Delaware, the Susquehanna, the Potomac. Any rivers east or south of those four would be too far from the center. Jefferson invited Hamilton and several of the Virginia congressmen to dinner and, over the wine after dinner, they made a deal. The war debts of the states were assumed by the federal government and the capital went to the Potomac. The new city, Jefferson wrote to a friend in Virginia, “will vivify our agriculture & commerce by circulating thro’ our state an additional sum every year of half a million of dollars.”

He afterwards became very much ashamed of this transaction and blamed it on his ignorance and the duplicity of Hamilton. His contemporary explanations are much more convincing. Unless the questions of the assumption of the state debts and the location of the capital are settled at this session of Congress, he wrote, “there will be no bill passed at all for funding the public debts, & if they separate without funding, there is an end of the government.” And he wrote his future son-in-law, Francis Eppes, a few days later that “I see the necessity of sacrificing our opinions some times to the opinions of others for the sake of harmony.”

The historic break between the two Secretaries came when Hamilton advanced his scheme for the creation of a national bank, with branches throughout the country, to act as the fiscal agent of the government. In response to a request from Washington for his opinion Jefferson prepared an elaborate and able paper coming to the conclusion that the proposed institution would be unconstitutional. It was the beginning of the dispute which once loomed so large in American politics over strict construction and loose construction. Too much weight should not be given to this dispute in analyzing Jefferson’s character. He could be legalistic enough when he chose and in this instance he chose to be so, but when it suited him he could just as readily stretch the constitution to the extreme limit of power. Perhaps the purchase of Louisiana should not be cited since he himself at the time recognized its incompatability with his professed theories of the constitution. The Embargo is a better example but still not the best. In a letter written a short time before his death, advocating his favorite scheme for the transportation abroad of the Negro population, he admitted that “this subject involves some constitutional scruples” but urged that “a liberal construction” is “justified by the object.” His identification with the doctrine of narrow construction was one of the chief causes of the barrenness of his Presidency. He would have liked so much, for example, to have had the federal government establish a national university.

There was an unorganized, leaderless group in Congress which regarded Hamilton’s schemes with grave suspicion. At first this group was equally suspicious of Jefferson. Hamilton, they thought, was trying to introduce the financial aspects of the royal government of Britain; Jefferson, its navy and diplomatic establishment.

One of the planks on which Jefferson was elected President was the abolition of the navy since it was an instrument of monarchism. Years later Adams asked him directly in a confidential letter whether he had not been the member of Washington’s cabinet who was responsible for its founding. He knew, Adams wrote, that Hamilton was opposed to the creation of a navy because Hamilton had come to him and asked him to use his influence against it. “That Washington was averse to a navy,” he added, “I had full proof from his own lips, in many different conversations.” On the other hand, “you frequently proposed it to me while we were at Paris.”

In this Adams was right. Jefferson had first become an advocate for a navy as a result of his experience as Governor in trying to keep the British out of the Chesapeake Bay region. When in Paris he had been directed to obtain the release of American sailors held as slaves in Algiers and evolved a scheme for a combination of the smaller naval states to keep up a joint patrol in the Mediterranean. He took it up with a number of foreign governments and it might have gone into effect if the United States had been able to furnish its quota of one frigate.

One of the senators from Pennsylvania, William Maclay, is now frequently referred to as “the first Jeffersonian.” He was in no sense a great man but he probably deserves the appellation. He kept a diary which is our best evidence of the reaction of the average reasonably intelligent rural and small-town American to the goings-on of their new government.

The first question Jefferson took up as Secretary of State was that of the Algerine captives. The report which he transmitted to the Senate, said Maclay, “seemed to breathe resentment, and abounded with martial estimates in a naval way.” A month later, Maclay commented on another “report from the Secretary of State . . . respecting the fisheries of New England. The great object seems to be the making them a nursery for seamen, that we, like all the nations of the earth, may have a navy. We hear every day distant hints of such things as these; in fact, it seems we must soon forego our republican Innocence.” Note that “republican innocence” and remember the Arcadian ideal of society.

Maclay found even less “republican innocence” in Jefferson when he appeared before a senate committee to give his views as to the diplomatic service. “The information which he gave us respecting foreign ministers, etc., was all high-spiced. He had been long enough abroad to catch the tone of European folly.” Nor were the senator’s suspicions allayed by a dinner which the Pennsylvania congressmen gave to the cabinet. “Jefferson,” he said, “transgresses on the extreme of stiff gentility or lofty gravity.” I do not know what made Jefferson curl up that evening but Maclay’s comment calls to mind the statement of Jefferson’s personal physician that he was “by no means easy of approach to all.”

How did Jefferson become the political organ of the group of which Maclay was typical? Why do these far-from-sympathetic comments appear in the diary of “the first Jeffersonian”?

There is a personal equation to be considered. It was impossible for anyone to get along with Hamilton. This does not mean that he did not have many devoted friends and followers. But no one could associate with him as an equal. He was not unpopular. He was not popular in the political sense—he was not a vote-getter—but he had a remarkable power to draw individuals to himself. And he stood loyally by those whom he considered his friends. But Hamilton’s idea of a friend was of a man who took orders. He was consumed by the primitive desire to be first. Even Washington did not escape and Hamilton as a young aide-de-camp in his twenties resigned in a huff because he did not think the commander-in-chief treated him with proper respect. His competition with Jefferson has become classic but Adams disliked Hamilton to an extent which Jefferson never reached.

“Hamilton and myself,” Jefferson later said, “were daily pitted in the cabinet like two cocks.” The situation was undoubtedly disagreeable to Jefferson. He hated arguments. He was inclined to compromise; indeed, he firmly believed that every dispute was capable of compromise. The difficulty was not that the disputes were not capable of compromise but that Hamilton was not interested in compromise. Nothing but domination would satisfy his ego.

Jefferson hated disputes; he hated to be forced to argue. He had a liking for Hamilton, a liking which survived all the vicissitudes of politics. Nor was it impossible for them to agree—there are too many instances of record where they did. But there was one precedent which was difficult to surmount. Hamilton viewed the United States as another and newer England. Now whatever expressions might be used in common speech, everybody knew that legally there was no such official in England as a Prime Minister. By a long course of evolution it had been established that the domination of the British government was vested in the first Lord of the Treasury. And Hamilton was the chief financial officer of the American government.

Washington was well aware of the disputes between the two secretaries but considered it entirely a conflict of personalities. That was what it was in the beginning and that is what it would have remained if it had not been for one circumstance—the French revolution.

It is easier for us to appraise the influence of this event in America than it was for all the generations between 1790 and today. We have seen the effect of the anti-religious policy of the Bolsheviks and the alleged anti-religious policy of one faction in the Spanish civil war on American opinion. We have some measure by which to gauge the reaction of American opinion to the installation of the Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame.

Other factors with which we are familiar were apparent. England—that terrible power, whom every American a few years before had been taught to abhor—was the champion of civilization and religion against the terrorism and atheism of France. As on similar occasions since, there was a substantial group of Americans who felt that it was the moral duty of America to give England—as the bulwark of civilization—all the aid in its power. Sympathy with England was overwhelming among the wealthier classes in the larger cities of the northeast. Anybody who expressed any sympathy with the French revolutionists was immediately denounced as a Jacobin. Substitute the words  “Red” or “Nazi” and you will have no difficulty in appreciating the situation.

“There was no exclusiveness,” said an elderly Philadelphia lady many years later, “but I should as soon have expected to see a cow in a drawingroom as a Jacobin.” That was where Jefferson found himself classified— as a Jacobin. “You & I,” he wrote Edward Rutledge, “have formerly seen warm debates and high political passions. But gentlemen of different politics would then speak to each other . . . It is not so now. Men who have been intimate all their lives, cross the streets to avoid meeting, & turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hats.” There is a tradition that at one time Logan, Thomson, and Rittenhouse were the only people in Philadelphia who received Jefferson socially. In reply to a Philadelphia friend who inquired why he had not called, Jefferson wrote that “on perceiving that many declined visiting me with whom I had been on terms of the greatest friendship & intimacy, I determined, for the first time in my life, to stand on the ceremony of the first visit, even with my friends; because it served to sift out those who chose a separation.”

Extremes always produce extremes. While one group was laboring to convince the country that the defeat of England would mean the downfall of civilization, Jefferson was collecting evidence that there was a plot afloat to introduce a king and house of lords. Political science—the proper organization of a government—was the common staple of conversation. Whenever Jefferson heard, through however roundabout a course, that anybody had said anything in favor of Britain or the British form of government, he put the speaker down as a “monarchist.” He made memoranda of all this information, which he afterwards bound together in a manuscript volume which he called his Anas. The pressure of this pro-British feeling only increased Jefferson’s hatred for the government of Great Britain. He completely forgot that he had in Paris advised the French revolutionary leaders to model their constitution on that of England. At times the destruction of England seemed to be almost as much of an obsession with him as the destruction of Carthage had been with Cato. Even as late as 1815 he described “the government of England as totally without morality, insolent beyond bearing, inflated with vanity and ambition, aiming at the exclusive dominion of the sea, lost in corruption, of deep-rooted hatred towards us, hostile to liberty wherever it endeavors to show its head, and the eternal disturber of the peace of the world.”

This hatred for England and sympathy with France did not mean that Jefferson had any confidence in the various schemes of government which were succeeding each other so rapidly at Paris. His judgment was sound on all of them. But the misery and degradation of the masses which he had seen in Europe had by now convinced him that before a better order could be established the old must be completely destroyed. It was necessary to destroy all this pomp and abuse which Hamilton called civilization in order to bring Europe back to that Arcadian simplicity in which alone free republican government could exist. “I cannot but hope,” he wrote when the Terror was at its height, that the attempt of other countries to interfere, “is destined . . . to kindle the wrath of the people of Europe . . . and to bring at length, kings, nobles, & priests to the scaffolds which they have been so long deluging with human blood. I am still warm whenever. I think of these scoundrels.” In reply to a letter from Short, who had been his secretary of legation in Paris and who remained an intimate friend, he admitted that probably many innocent people, including some of his personal friends, had been executed but insisted that the result was worth the price. “Were there but an Adam & Eve left in every country, & left free, it would be better than as it now is.”

While Jefferson was thinking of European civilization in these terms, the majority of the men in power were bending their energies to making America more like Europe. England had a central bank of issue so Hamilton provided the United States with one. All the countries of the world had armies, so Hamilton thought the United States should have one. All progressive countries in Europe encouraged manufacturing, so the monarchists thought the United States should develop manufacturing. All Jefferson could think of was the wretched proletariats he had seen in the industrial sections of Europe. Such men, he was confident, could not be entrusted with the ballot, and the establishment of a similar class in America meant the end of republican government. For Jefferson was not strictly a democrat properly so called. He did not believe that government by the people was an end in itself but a means to an end. Under the peculiar social conditions then prevailing in the United States he believed it offered the best chance of preventing government from becoming a tyranny.

For the last century, material progress has been so universally accepted in the United States as the end of existence that it is difficult for us to conceive how Jefferson managed to rise to power on the basis of an opposite principle. Yet there is no doubt about it. America in the eighteenth century was one of the backwashes of civilization. Americans did not yet claim to be shrewder or more enterprising than Europeans; they claimed to be more virtuous. Fitch's steamboat traveled against the current of the Delaware for a whole summer but no passengers appeared; if it had been advertised as an importation from Europe the story might have been different. A bill to improve the roads was defeated in the legislature of Rhode Island on the ground that good roads had originated in England, which was a priest-ridden monarchy. It took twenty years before, as President Dwight of Yale sarcastically observed, “free-born Rhode Islanders bowed their necks to the slavery of travelling on a good road.” Jefferson's attitude was not very different from that of the Rhode Island legislature. “As for France and England,” he later wrote to Adams, “with all their preeminence in science, the one is a den of robbers, and the other of pirates. And if science produces no better fruits than tyranny, murder, rapine and destitution of national morality, I would rather wish our country to be ignorant, honest and estimable, as our neighboring savages are.”

As Jefferson watched Hamilton’s fondness for all things English and Hamilton’s desire to make the United States a materially progressive nation, it became his dominant purpose to keep the United States as far as possible from Europe, “where war seems to be the natural state of man.” His experiences in Paris had convinced him that it was unwise to send young Americans abroad for an education. As Secretary of State he advanced the suggestion that the United States should claim the Gulf Stream as its boundary and keep all European warships from coming west of it. He was so fearful of the contamination of Europe that he doubted the wisdom of encouraging immigration from there. As to those who had already come, he raised the question as late as 1797, “whether the safety of the citizens of this commonwealth . . . does not require that the capacity to act in the important office of a juror, grand or petty, civil or criminal, should be restrained in future to native citizens of the United States?” In his old age he called the Fourth of July “the day which divorced us from the follies and crimes of Europe.”

His isolationist views and his dislike of Britain are not alone sufficient to account for the fanatical hatred which was beginning to arise against him. The other factor was his religion—or, rather, his lack of it.

Only a few years before, Washington had been exerting himself to prevent the New England soldiers in his army from burning the Pope in effigy on the fifth of November. Now the Congregational clergy lost their horror of the Pope in their greater horror of the Goddess of Reason. At the outbreak of the Revolution many a New England mob had gone hunting for Anglican clergymen but now that England was the bulwark of civilization and religion the Church of England ceased to look like an enemy. It was the start of the movement which turned so many Congregational churches into Episcopalian ones. Yale had given Jefferson an LL.D. in 1786 and Harvard in 1788. A few years later I doubt whether his life would have been safe on the Yale campus. The spirit which prevailed there can be gathered from an oration delivered by Theodore Dwight, the brother of the President of Yale and himself one of the leading literary men of the country shortly after Jefferson took office as President of the United States. With pardonable zeal, in view of the certainty of the event, the orator used the present tense for the future. “We have a country governed by blockheads and knaves; the ties of marriage with all its felicities are severed and destroyed; our wives and daughters are thrown into the stews; our children are cast into the world from the breast and forgotten; filial piety is extinguished, and our surnames, the only mark of distinction among families, are abolished. Can the imagination paint anything more dreadful on this side hell?”

This is mild compared to many of the sermons preached against Jefferson. The best evidence of his lack of religion which was available at the time was his authorship of the Virginian statute of religious freedom and the statement in his Notes on Virginia that the Deluge could not account for the sea shells found on the tops of mountains since “if the whole contents of the atmosphere . . . were water . .  . the seas would be raised only feet above their present level.” This skepticism in regard to Noah was regarded as clear evidence of his atheism. His own explanation was otherwise. “Besides the usual process for generating shells by the elaboration of earth and water in animal vessels, may not nature have provided an equivalent operation, by passing the same materials through the pores of calcareous earths and stones? As we see calcareous drop-stones generating every day by the percolation of water through lime-stone, and new marble forming in the quarries from which the old has been taken out, which is said to be the case in the quarries of Italy.”

It was difficult to prove his lack of religion since he had always outwardly conformed. For many years he was a vestryman. “Even Mr. Jefferson and Wythe,” Bishop Meade of Virginia records, “who did not conceal their disbelief of Christianity, took their parts in the duties of vestrymen.”

Jefferson was quite a regular attendant at church. One of the reasons in his youth was that he liked the psalm-singing; he said that he found hymns “far less suited to the dignity of religious worship.” We have the evidence of a Federalist minister that as President he “constantly attended public worship . . . On the third Sabbath, it was very rainy, but his ardent zeal brought him through the rain . . . Although this is no kind of evidence of any regard to religion” but rather, said the clergyman, that “courting popularity is his darling object.”

For many years there was no church in Charlottesville. The Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists shared the use of the courthouse. Jefferson attended the various services in turn, bringing his own folding chair and a well-worn prayer-book, the latter of which he carried in his pocket. Among the debts which he left at his death was a subscription of two hundred dollars to build a Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville. It was paid by his grandson. When the Episcopalians finally built a church he acted as the architect. There is a delightful letter written by Jefferson when in retirement to the minister of this church. “In the antient Feudal times . . . when the Seigneur married his daughter, or knighted his son, it was the usage for his vassals to give him a year’s rent extra in the name of an Aid. I think it as reasonable when our Pastor builds a house, that each of his flock should give him an Aid of a year’s contribution. I enclose mine.”

When in Paris he lived in a large house on the Champs Elysee, with a large garden and a number of outbuildings, but he was unable to obtain the solitude there which he at times desired. For that purpose he kept rooms in the Carthusian Monastery on Mount Calvary and would sometimes go there for a week or more at a time. He placed his elder daughter, Martha (Patsy), who accompanied him to France and who was about thirteen at the time, at school in the convent of Panthemont. He wrote his sister that he was satisfied there was no danger of any attempt being made to convert her but in the early part of 1789 he was horrified to receive a letter from Patsy asking his permission to become a nun. He immediately called for his carriage, drove to Panthemont and when he returned Patsy was with him. He never discussed the matter with her or anyone else. A few months later they returned to America and shortly after their return she was married to Thomas Mann Randolph. Jefferson could not bear to part with her and, although Randolph’s plantation of Edgehill was only three miles away, the Randolphs were soon living at Monticello. But when Jefferson invited Tom Paine to visit them, Mrs. Randolph rebelled and it was with great difficulty that her father induced her to act as his hostess during the visit.

That is one side of the picture. The first bit of evidence on the other side is an elaborate opinion, written when he was scarcely admitted to the bar, to prove that Christianity was not part of the common law. Throughout life he always expressed the utmost dislike, in the abstract, for clergy of all persuasions. “I have contemplated their order from the Magi of the East to the Saints of the West,” he wrote In 1816 but never sent the letter, “and I have found no difference of character, but of more or less caution, in proportion to their information or ignorance of those on whom their interested duperies were to be plaid off. Their sway in New England is indeed formidable. No mind beyond mediocrity dares there to develope [sic] itself.” There was a time when he thought clergymen should be excluded from all civil offices. One of his chief worries in connection with his proposed system of public schools was that the clergy would exercise too much influence in the selection of the teachers. He said that Hampden-Sidney College “is going to nothing owing to the religious phrensy they have inspired into the boys young and old.” The clergy, and especially the New England clergy, paid him back in kind but, said Jefferson, “from the clergy I expect no mercy. They crucified their Saviour, who preached that their kingdom was not of this world;  and all who practice on that precept must expect the extreme of their wrath. The laws of the present day withhold their hands from blood; but lies and slander still remain to them.”

While President, Jefferson wrote, or rather prepared, “a wee-little book” which he called the Philosophy of Jesus, It consisted of extracts from the four gospels, rearranged according to his idea of their proper sequence. In four parallel columns the text was given in English, French, Latin, and Greek. He ultimately had this book bound in a handsome morocco binding with the title Morals of Jesus on the back.

It is not very difficult to pick out Jefferson’s religious beliefs from the evidence now available. He did not believe that Jesus was in any sense divine but he believed that he was the greatest moralist who had ever lived. In Jefferson’s opinion, the three greatest enemies of the happiness of mankind had been Plato, Athanasius, and Calvin. One of the ties between Jefferson and Adams was that they were in substantial accord on this point. Jefferson had no respect at all for metaphysics and he regarded Plato as the father of all metaphysicians. He blamed Athanasius for combining Platonic metaphysics with Christianity and Calvin for developing the combination. In his old age Jefferson defined “the corruptions of Christianity” for which this trio was responsible as “the immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity; original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy, etc.” Jefferson did not deny the existence of a God but he regarded the question as immaterial. Any God or Gods who might exist were superior beings who had no concern with the doings of men. The “firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence” which appears in the Declaration of Independence was not in Jefferson’s draft nor in that reported by the committee.

When the government was located in Philadelphia Jefferson attended Priestley’s congregation and, after the Unitarian movement got going, he showed some inclination to join it. “I trust,” he wrote in 1822, “that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian.” But when his correspondent asked permission to publish his letter he told him that “I should as soon undertake to bring the crazy skulls of Bedlam to sound understanding, as inculcate reason into that of an Athanasian.” While he sympathized with Unitarianism, it was only as a step in the right direction, as a movement which would at least wean the people from the Athanasian sects.

Jefferson himself usually explained his election as President as a victory of the republicans over the monarchists. As it was too ridiculous to assume that all those who voted for Adams wanted to establish a king and house of lords, Jefferson would explain that the body of the Federalists was republican in principle but that the leaders had concealed aims. This was his standard explanation until his death but occasionally he recognized that the division into parties was more a question of geography than of principle. As early as 1793 he told Washington that the belief was widespread in the South that his administration was conducted solely in the interests of New England. In questions of practical politics Jefferson usually reacted like any other Virginia planter and there is ample evidence that he disliked New Englanders.

There was a widespread feeling at the time that the United States was too large, that it could not survive as a nation. There were various theories as to the probable solution. Many people believed that it must ultimately divide into three countries, New England, the Middle States, and the South. The belief was probably general that the region west of the mountains would ultimately achieve independence as the United States had achieved independence from England.

Jefferson was resolutely opposed to all thinking along these lines. If America divided itself it would merely be another Europe; another chapter in the crimes, the follies, and the misfortunes of mankind. All his hopes centered on an America organized so that it would have no wars of its own and strong enough to keep out European influence. He did not wish to merge the various American nations of Virginians, Pennsylvanians, and so forth into one nation but to let them develop their several nationalities independently and to be one nation only in their relations with Europe. This was the happy result which he expected would follow from a federal form of government spread over a continent or possibly a whole hemisphere. While, therefore, he regarded the central government under President Washington, and more particularly under President Adams, as largely run in the interests of New England, he did not regard this as a sufficient reason for destroying the Union.

‘It is true,’ he wrote to Taylor of Caroline in 1798, “that we are completely under the saddle of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and that they ride us very hard, cruelly insulting our feelings . . . in every free and deliberating society, there must, from the nature of man, be opposite parties, and violent dissensions and discords; and one of these, for the most part, must prevail over the other for a longer or shorter time. . . If to rid ourselves of the present rule of Massachusetts and Connecticut, we break the Union, will the evil stop there? . . . Immediately, we shall see a Pennsylvania and a Virginia party arise in the residuary confederacy . . . If we reduce our Union to Virginia and North Carolina . . . they will end by breaking into their simple units. Seeing, therefore, that an association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry; seeing that we must have somebody to quarrel with, I had rather keep our New England associates for that purpose, than to see our bickerings transfered to others. They . . . are marked, like the Jews, with such a perversity of character, as to constitute, from that circumstance, the natural division of our parties. A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over . . . who can say what would be the evils of a scission, and when and where they would end? Better keep together as we are, haul off from Europe as soon as we can, and from all attachments to any portions of it; and if they show their power just sufficiently to hoop us together, it will be the happiest situation in which we can exist.”

It is more accurate to say that Adams fell from power than that Jefferson rose to power. “If we had been blessed with common sense,” said Adams, “we should not have been overthrown.” His statement is substantially true but a discussion of the nature of that lack of common sense belongs more properly in the chapter on Adams than in the chapter on Jefferson. The two old friends were no longer on speaking terms and Adams even declined the courtesy of waiting in Washington for the inauguration of his successor.

Jefferson was the first President to take office in Washington, that “wilderness city set in a mudhole.” There was almost nothing there but the unfinished Capitol, a house for the President and a few scattered boardinghouses. It gave Jefferson a good opportunity to practice “republican simplicity.” He abolished “levees,” that is, formal presidential receptions. The ladies of Georgetown did not like it at all and determined to teach him a lesson by appearing as usual on levee day. They did so but the President had wind of the scheme. The ladies, and such men as they could muster, assembled at his home. The President was out riding. When he returned he went immediately into their presence, booted and spurred, covered with sweat and dust, carrying his hat and riding crop. He expressed himself as both pleased and astonished at their presence. Never did he play the host, as the role was understood among the plantation owners of Virginia, to greater perfection, but it was the end of levees. In truth, there was little opportunity in this Potomac village for the social pomp of President Washington.

Jefferson sent his messages to Congress in writing instead of going and delivering them in person. This, he persuaded himself, was more “republican.” He kept a state coach—we know that he paid sixteen hundred dollars for four horses to draw it—with a coachman named Joe Daugherty, but he seldom used it. Jefferson always preferred riding on a horse to riding behind it. On his journeys he used a phaeton. His dress was as simple as the greatest republican could desire. One of the rather numerous British diplomatists who had occasion to do business with him has left a complete description of his appearance as President. “He was a tall man, with a very red freckled face, and gray, neglected hair; his manners good-natured, frank, and rather friendly, though he had somewhat of a cynical expression of countenance. He wore a blue coat, a thick gray-colored hairy waistcoat, with a red under-waistcoat lapped over it, green velveteen breeches with pearl buttons, yarn stockings, and slippers down at the heels,—his appearance being much like that of a tall, large-boned farmer.” There was another British diplomatist who thought that the offense of receiving the King’s representative in “heelless slippers” could only be expiated in the blood of nations.

The simplicity of Jefferson’s attire did not extend to his table. He now brought into play all that he had learned of cooking during his life in Europe. His fear of things European did not extend to the waffles he had found in Holland, the macaroni he had found in Paris or the wines he had found on the Rhine. He had even brought back from France the recipe for a sort of ice cream, and Short, on a trip to Naples, had sent him a mold for spaghetti.

American cooking was in a state of deplorable barbarism. When Jefferson left Paris he was unable to induce his maitre d’hotel, Petit, to come with him. He felt the loss severely and wrote to Short, who had remained in Paris as charge d’affairs, that Mad de Corny, when she reformed her house, parted with her maitre d’hotel, and with great reluctance . . . she speaks of him to me in very high terms. I wish you would enquire about him, and barely sound him to see if he will come.” Petit himself changed his mind and came but it was only to discover the limits of the American diet. “Petit informs me,” Jefferson wrote a year later to Short, that “he has been all over the town [Philadelphia] in quest of Vanilla, & it is unknown here. I must pray you to send me a packet . , . Petit says there is a great imposition in selling those which are bad; that Pictot generally sells good, but that still it will be safe to have them bought by some one used to them.” There is a postscript to a letter Jefferson wrote to Monroe when the latter was minister to France. “If you can send us with Froulles books a supply of 20 or 30 lb. of macaroni, they will be an agreeable addition to his bill.” He somehow lost Petit and as President his maitre d’hotel was Lemaire. Yrujo, the Spanish minister, obtained a chef for him for twenty-eight dollars a month. Jefferson had a complete collection of cookbooks in every language and, as President, he set about “mitigating business with dinner.’ His culinary library was not limited to what was in print. For many years it had been his custom, when dining out, to ask the recipe for any dish which particularly struck his fancy and make careful notes of it.

The type of public man had already changed considerably since the founding of the government. The scholars in the grand manner—the Jeffersons and Adamses—were not being duplicated. The old revolutionary leaders were almost reduced to Gouverneur Morris, and that cynical and one-legged bachelor was now regarded as the representative of the highest aristocratic notions. As a whole, their successors lacked not only their scholarship and worldly wisdom but—shall I say it?— their cynicism. For the most remarkable aspect of the American Revolution is that it was a revolution of skeptics. From Washington even to Jefferson the leaders were doubters. The people? The people of the Revolution felt that they had a simple and uncorrupted way of life and that it was important to keep that way of life free from the contamination of the advanced civilization of Europe. But even as Jefferson became President the national attitude was beginning to change. There was a fundamental change in the national character between the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century. Americans were no longer content to regard themselves as more innocent than Europeans; they were beginning to regard themselves as the inventors of a different and higher type of civilization. “It cannot be denied,” said Jefferson a few years later, “that we are a boasting nation.” That was a new note.

The senators and congressmen who came to the mudhole of Washington to legislate under the auspices of President Jefferson had few outward signs of a justification for boasting. Neither did they at first have any inclination to do so. Some sort of a transformation was taking place in the United States but its first outward aspects—as evidenced by the men it threw to the surface—were not encouraging. The outstanding trait of the Congresses which met in Jefferson’s administrations was their mediocrity. The only brilliant and quotable speeches were those delivered by the few remaining Federalists. The politicians who had risen to power on Jefferson’s coattails—the politicians who claimed to represent the old ideal of an Arcadian America—were a sorry lot. There were a few exceptions, of whom the most conspicuous were Gallatin, the brilliant Swiss from Pennsylvania whom Jefferson made Secretary of the Treasury, and the haughty and erratic John Randolph of Roanoke, who during the first part of Jefferson’s administration was his spokesman in the House.

Jefferson kept his sway over these men through his personal charm and his powers of conversation. He exercised these talents at the dinner table, which was usually set in a room on the south front of the White House. The hour was four in the afternoon and the usual number of guests was fourteen. He evidently did not have a very high regard for their manners for he was accustomed to have the floor covered with a green-colored canvas cloth “to secure,” he said, “a very handsome floor from grease and the scouring which that necessitates.” For smaller and more confidential dinners he invented a device to do away with the presence of servants. This was a set of revolving shelves built into the wall. The servants would place the dishes on to these shelves on the other side of the wall. When Jefferson touched a button which released a spring, the shelves would turn around, bringing the dishes into the room. The guests then helped themselves.

Despite his particularity in regard to food, Jefferson was not himself a heavy eater. He was fond of vegetables, particularly fresh vegetables, but ate relatively little meat. Even when dining alone he always had a light table-wine after dinner. The only time he drank water was on his return from his daily horseback ride. Madeira and other heavier wines were available for those who desired them but one Virginian who dined with Jefferson thought it was more proper to drink what his host drank. The next day this guest asked Madison “why a man of so much taste should drink cold, sour French wine,” insisted that it would kill Jefferson and that Madison was under a duty to remonstrate with him on this habit.

The political movement which had adopted Jefferson as its leader was essentially negative in character. It wanted to reduce the pomp of government, to reduce or abolish the army, the navy and the diplomatic establishment, to reduce the number of judges and other officials, to reduce the national debt, to reduce expense, above all to reduce taxes. Intellectually, Jefferson was sympathetic to this negative program—it certainly was the best way to bring society back to its primitive simplicity. Emotionally, it was antagonistic to him. There was nothing simple about Jefferson. He was willing seriously to consider the proposition that the organization of Indian society, because of the freedom it permitted to the individual, was superior to the organization of any white society. He was also the man who built Monticello, who collected the largest library in the country and who combed the globe for new taste sensations. This conflict between his intellectual ideals and his emotional reactions was matched by a somewhat similar conflict in the nation as a whole. Politically, Americans clung to the Arcadian principle of “simplicity”; in their private lives more and more of them were being dominated by the desire to get rich.

To a greater extent than has been usual with most Presidents, Jefferson ran the government during his administration. This was partly due to the disintegration of the Federalist party and the consequent absence of an effective opposition, and partly to the absence of strong personalities in his own party. But it is my purpose to portray the personality of Thomas Jefferson, not to write the history of the Jefferson administration. There is high authority for omitting all reference to his Presidency for in the epitaph which he prepared for his tombstone, he described himself as and failed to mention that he had been President of the United States. This was in accord with his long-held view that there were higher degrees of eminence than the possession of political power. In the midst of the Revolution, when Washington was wrathfully asking why so many first-rate men—naming Jefferson specifically-had withdrawn from Congress, Jefferson was advising the scientist Rittenhouse to retire from politics. “I doubt not,” he wrote, “there are in your country [Pennsylvania] many persons equal to the task of conducting government; but you should consider that the world has but one Ryttenhouse .  .  . nobody can conceive that nature ever intended to throw away a Newton upon the occupations of a crown.”

AUTHOR

OF THE DECLARATION OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

OF

THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA 

FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, AND

 FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

Jefferson’s experiences as President caused only two important changes in his opinions. The first was in the functions of the judiciary in republican government. In all the criticisms of the constitution of Virginia which he made between the Revolution and his Presidency, he harped on the dependence of the judiciary on the legislature. He insisted that in order to secure the freedom of the individual it was necessary that the judges hold office for good behavior and that their salaries be fixed. “An elective despotism” he said, “was not the government we fought for.” In his proposed constitution for Virginia he went further than any constitution ever actually adopted in America did in giving power over legislation to the judiciary. One of his criticisms of the federal constitution was that the judiciary was not expressly vested with a negative on legislation.

These ideas in regard to the independence of the judiciary were changed completely during his Presidency. The reason was not logical but personal. Marshall, the Chief Justice, was a relative of Jefferson’s but neither man ever claimed the relationship. They hated each other with that hatred peculiar to relatives. After Jefferson’s earlier views as to the necessity for judicial power over legislation it is startling to find him complaining when the Supreme Court, through Marshall, for the first time exercised its power to declare an Act of Congress unconstitutional. Jefferson countered with an impeachment of one of the associate justices but found that he could not carry his party with him.

At least part of the angry tone in which Jefferson always spoke of Marshall must be ascribed to the President’s inarticulate realization of the essentially false position in which this quarrel put him. Jefferson’s whole political outlook was based on the premise that power was in its nature dangerous; that it was certain to be abused, and that the best protection was to set up a system of checks and balances even if the result was a loss of efficiency.

The strongest criticism which Jefferson had of the federal constitution when it appeared was its failure to include a bill of rights. He wanted such a bill because of “the legal check which it puts into the hands of the judiciary.” While the framers neglected to insert a complete bill of rights, they took the precaution to put strict limitations on prosecutions for treason. Jefferson is the only President against whom those limitations have been used.

Aaron Burr may, or may not, have been guilty of treason. The point is that Jefferson went about trying to get him hanged in as autocratic a manner as any Stuart king and, when it came to a showdown in Marshall’s court, Jefferson was unable to produce the evidence required by the constitution. Again he thought of dire vengeance on Marshall but his cabinet persuaded him that he could not rely on the support of his party.

If these incidents had been limited to Burr and Marshall they could be explained on the ground of personal hatred, for Jefferson hated both men vindictively. The cause was deeper than that. When Jefferson contemplated government in the abstract his attitude was that all governments are run by rogues and that it should be the object of every statesman-philosopher to protect the citizens from these rogues; whenever he himself exercised the powers of government he was inclined to stretch them to the utmost. His disregard for the principles of the bill of rights in the Burr case was matched by his action as Governor of Virginia in defending the attainder by the legislature, with his approbation, of a notorious Tory.

The other change in Jefferson’s outlook which occurred during his Presidency was in his views of political economics.

When Jefferson was elected President he was generally regarded as the country’s ablest diplomatist. The evidence supported this view. No reader of Jefferson’s papers as minister to France or as Secretary of State can doubt his diplomatic ability. The country certainly needed a good diplomatist. There was a world war waging in which the normal attitude that neutrals have no rights was intensified by the usual European attitude that America had no right to exist anyway.

Jefferson’s advent to power was followed by a great diplomatic triumph—the purchase of Louisiana. No one was entitled to claim credit for that, since it was actuated by factors over which no American had any control. The subsequent diplomatic career of the Jefferson administration was less successful.

The problem was the age-old one of a neutral in the middle of a world war. For a time the profits were enormous but, as usual, the warring powers showed small regard for the rights of neutrals. They went further than that. Napoleon tried to make money out of confiscating American ships on flimsy pretexts. The British were not content with the confiscation of ships on flimsy pretexts, and the impressment of seamen, but tried in every possible way to add insult to injury. The climax came when they attacked and captured the American warship Chesapeake as it came out from the bay of that name. In the subsequent excitement a mob at Hampton, Virginia, destroyed some water-casks belonging to the British navy. The British minister could think of nothing better to do than to demand compensation for the water-casks. “I have heard of one,” wrote Jefferson, “who, having broke his cane over the head of another, demanded payment for his cane.”

Jefferson’s Presidency did not enhance his reputation as a diplomatist. For one thing, he suffered under the severe handicap of an international reputation as a “peace-at-any-price” man. The only language the warring powers understood was that of guns. For another thing, there was a strong sentiment in England in favor of a war with the United States. This was based partly on a desire to even the score left from the Revolutionary War and partly on a belief that Jefferson was pro-French.

Jefferson thought he had a means other than war for compelling the belligerents to respect the rights of Americans. This means was economic and led, in his second administration, to the Embargo. By act of Congress all intercourse with the European powers was prohibited indefinitely. There were many people in the United States who thought Jefferson intended to commit the country to a hermit existence like that of Japan and Korea. The Embargo itself stretched the constitution to the extreme limit but Jefferson found that every power of government had to be stretched to the limit to enforce it. He had an inventor’s pride in the Embargo. Despite a rising tide of public disapproval he stuck firmly to his policy. The navy was used in New England, the army in New York, public officials were entrusted with the most arbitrary powers. Before Jefferson left office an angry Congress repealed the Embargo. The experience had a profound influence on his views.

There was no manufacturing in the United States of any great importance. The New Englanders were not yet manufacturers; they were traders—middlemen. They carried agricultural products to Europe and brought back manufactured products. The growth of native manufacturing was less in the interests of the shipowners of New England than of any other group. As soon as the United States did its own manufacturing, their business was gone. It was the agriculturalists, rather than the middlemen, who should have backed Hamilton’s manufacturing schemes. That, in effect, is what Jefferson did when he destroyed the business of the middlemen and the market of the agriculturalists.

What was his solution for their common woes? So far as the New England sailors were concerned, he hoped they would forsake the sea and take to agriculture. But what was this nation of farmers going to do with its crops when it raised them? What was it to use in place of English cloth? Were Americans to go naked or clothe themselves in the skins of wild animals?

Again we are thrown back to the Anglo-Saxons. Jefferson had always expressed himself in favor of “domestic manufactures.” The phrase at this time had a different meaning to him than that which it later acquired. “Domestic” meant “domestic” in its literal sense. He himself tried to manufacture at Monticello everything that was needed for the plantation. Some slaves were weavers, others blacksmiths, stonecutters, cabinet-makers, carpenters. His agricultural society was not to consist of individual farmers, each with a quarter-section, but of great plantations, each of which would be self-contained. The plantation owner, like the Saxon thane, would be the lord of an economically self-contained group.

Jefferson’s experiences with the Embargo brought him up with a jolt. For the rest of his life he was an extreme protectionist. “Shall we make our own comforts, or go without them, at the will of a foreign nation? . . . experience has taught me that manufactures are now as necessary to our independence as to our comfort; and if those who quote me as of a different opinion, will keep pace with me in purchasing nothing foreign where an equivalent of domestic fabric can be obtained, without regard to difference of price, it will not be our fault if we do not soon have a supply at home equal to our demand, and wrest that weapon of distress from the hand which has wielded it.” He gave another reason besides his experience with the Embargo for his change of views. “I was once a doubter whether the labor of the Cultivator, aided by the creative powers of the earth itself, would not produce more value than that of the manufacturer . . . But the inventions of latter times, by labor-saving machines, do as much now for the manufacturer, as the earth for the cultivator.”

One of Jefferson’s objections to the federal constitution was that it permitted the perpetual re-election of the President, He did not go so far as some of the revolutionary leaders in his insistence on rotation in office but he was satisfied that republican government had ceased whenever one man became indispensable. He had little political ambition— he had suggested to Madison that the latter be the candidate of the republicans against Adams. Once in office, Jefferson sought re-election from a natural desire to obtain the approbation of the people. But during his second term his popularity had vanished. He could probably have been re-elected for a third term but it would only have been because of the lack of an effective opposition. He was glad to retire from the ruins of the Embargo policy.

Jefferson and Madison were by now so closely associated that the change of Presidents made very little difference in the policy of the government but Jefferson seldom interfered in public affairs. He had complete confidence in Madison and, personally, Jefferson found more interesting things to do. Almost his only interference was in an attempt, which was ultimately successful, to reconcile Madison and Monroe and thus pave the way for the latter’s succession to the Presidency.

For a number of years after his retirement he almost ignored public affairs. “I scarcely notice what is passing,” he wrote in 1815, “and have almost ceased to read newspapers. Mine remain in our post office a week or ten days, sometimes, unasked for.” He paid so little attention to what was passing in the world that it was a long time before his grandchildren were able to persuade him to cut off his queue and exchange his knee-breeches for long pants. When he finally made the changes he immediately wondered why he had not thought of doing it before.

His habits reverted to those of his youth. “I . . . am as industrious a reader,” he wrote a few years after the letter just quoted, “as when a student at college. Not of newspapers. These I have discarded.” A short time after he and Adams became reconciled, he wrote the latter that he had “a canine appetite for reading. And I indulge it, because I see in it a relief against the taedmm senectutis; a lamp to lighten my path through the dreary wilderness of time before me, whose bourne I see not. Losing daily all interest in the things around us, something else is necessary to fill the void. With me it is reading, which occupies the mind without the labor of producing ideas from my own stock.” This reading of his old age was confined almost entirely to the classics. He read a few current books on government such as that of his friend Taylor of Caroline and the biographies which were beginning to appear of his old associates. He even re-read Plato when on a visit to his plantation at Poplar Forest near Lynchburg, but found no reason to revise his earlier judgment that the Greek philosopher was incomprehensible “for this obvious reason, that nonsense can never be explained.” His granddaughters did their best to induce him to read Scott, but in vain. The only poetry which appealed to him was Homer, the Greek tragedians, and Horace.

In his younger days it had been different. Then he had thought Ossian “the greatest poet that has ever existed. Merely for the pleasure of reading his works I am become desirous of learning the language in which he sung” and therefore requested his correspondent to obtain for him copies of the original and non-existent manuscripts. Jefferson’s taste for Ossian was not a passing fancy, for some years later when the Frenchman, Chastellux, visited Monticello, their “conversation turned on the poems of Ossian. It was a spark of electricity which passed rapidly from one to the other; we recollected the passages in those sublime poems which particularly struck us . . . In our enthusiasm the book was sent for, and placed near the bowl, where, by their mutual aid, the night far advanced imperceptibly upon us.”

There were other amusements in his retirement. He himself had had only daughters and most of his grandchildren were girls. They lived at Monticello and he did everything he could to please them.

Even as Secretary of State he had ridden on a stick with his granddaughter Anne “with whom even Socrates might ride on a stick without being ridiculous.” Now he arranged races among his granddaughters. “He placed us according to our ages,” wrote one of the girls later, “giving the youngest and smallest the start of all the others by some yards, and so on, and then he raised his arm high with his white handkerchief in his hand, on which our eager eyes were fixed, and slowly counted three, at which number he dropt the handkerchief and we started off to finish the race by returning to the starting-place and receiving our reward of dried fruit—three figs, prunes or dates to the victor, two to the second.”

All his granddaughters testify to the gifts he made them and the delicacy with which he anticipated their wishes. They needed the gifts, for the affairs of Thomas Mann Randolph went from bad to worse until they ended in hopeless insolvency. He finally left his family and lived by himself in a hut some distance away where he even did his own cooking.

When Jefferson was minister in Paris he had personally done all the shopping for his daughters. When his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, as a boy on his way to school, had stopped in Washington, his grandfather made him unpack all his baggage. The President then made a careful examination of each article, took out a pencil and paper, made notes, and then went out shopping and bought the additional articles which he believed his grandson needed. He was not so minute with his granddaughters at Monticello. They had Martha (Mrs. Thomas Mann Randolph) to look after their everyday wants. He bought their watches, their silk dresses, their riding habits. “My Bible came from him,” said one granddaughter, “my Shakspeare [sic], my first writing-table, my first handsome writing-desk, my first Leghorn hat, my first silk dress. What, in short, of all my small treasures did not come from him?” On one occasion one of the older girls received the present of a silk dress. Jefferson overheard Cornelia, aged eight or ten, exclaiming to herself as she went upstairs, “I never had a silk dress in my life.” The next day he went to Charlottesville and brought back a silk dress for Cornelia.

His popularity gradually returned as the Embargo was forgotten in the prosperity which succeeded the War of 1812. It likewise brought a new and never-ending source of annoyance. Visitors came from everywhere with all sorts of letters of introduction. Most of them did not expect merely to call or to receive a meal but to stay for several days. We hear of a “New England judge” who brought a letter of introduction and stayed three weeks. All Jefferson's old friends sent their sons and grandsons to sit at his feet. He made the proper kind of retaliation. In addition to his granddaughters, he always had the house full of marriageable girls of varying degrees of kinship to him. He took a frank interest in their success.

The expense of this entertaining was greater than it would be today. Most of these visitors came in their own carriages, with their own horses and a servant or two. The quantity of forage which was consumed was so great that although Jefferson had over a thousand acres under cultivation at Monticello he had to bring forage there from his other estates. Madison was troubled with a similar deluge of visitors. When on one occasion he was told that there were nine horses in his stables belonging to guests he replied that while he took the greatest delight in the society of the owners he feared his feelings were somewhat different in regard to the horses.

Jefferson usually left his guests alone until dinner time. It was in the morning that his increasing popularity was of the greatest annoyance to him. The time from rising until he went for his before-dinner ride was spent in his library but he found little time to read. Letters poured in from strangers all over the world. When they were civilly written he thought they deserved an answer. Day after day and year after year he toiled away at his writing table while the pile of unanswered mail grew higher. He had fallen and broken his right wrist in France. It had been improperly set and ever after he had great difficulty in writing with his right hand. He then learned to write with his left hand. In his old age he broke his left arm and after that could write with either hand only with difficulty.

Fame brought other annoyances. There were religious zealots who came to convert him from his presumed atheism and there were everyday citizens who boldly invaded his grounds hoping for a chance to stare at him. It was not for this that he had built his house on top of a hill. He was as individualistic as ever. As the years passed he became so feeble he could scarcely walk but he continued to take his daily horseback ride. One day he was thrown from his horse into a creek and was nearly drowned. The family then insisted that he follow the usual Virginian custom and have a groom accompany him. Jefferson said that if they thought it advisable he would give up his riding but if he rode at all it must be alone. The presence even of a groom would break in on his meditations.

“This country,” he wrote to Adams, “which has given to the world the example of physical liberty, owes to it that of moral emancipation also, for as yet it is but nominal with us. The inquisition of public opinion overwhelms in practice, the freedom asserted by the laws in theory.”

The particular point at which Jefferson had always felt the inquisition of public opinion most keenly was his religious beliefs. In his last years he was to feel it again.

All his life he had been dreaming of a great state-supported institution of higher learning to be located in Virginia but which would attract promising young men from all over the Union. The idea appealed to his love of scholarship but he had another object in view. It was to be a means of spreading Virginian ideas throughout the Union.

There existed in Charlottesville an institution known as Albemarle Academy. When this was about to shut its doors in 1814, Jefferson was approached. He suggested that the solution was to enlarge the institution into a college. He and some others, among whom were Madison and Monroe, then obtained a charter, naming them as Visitors (trustees) of Central College. Later the state legislature was induced, with great difficulty, to take over the support of the institution, which was renamed the University of Virginia.

The Visitors of the new institution appointed Jefferson Rector of the University, and the work of erecting the buildings and selecting the faculty was left entirely in his hands. The other Visitors took care of the constant criticisms and complaints from the legislature and the public. Nearly six years passed before the institution opened. Those years were probably among the happiest in Jefferson’s life.

All his life Jefferson wanted to build. Unlike most intellectuals, he had a talent for doing things with his hands. He devised innumerable gadgets. He had a room fitted up with carpenter’s tools at Monticello where he amused himself in bad weather. He invented a new type of plow and was a customer for every new piece of agricultural machinery. It is certain that on occasion he stitched up other people’s wounds and it was rumored that he knew how to shoe a horse. But the grand seigneur streak in him was not satisfied by making an occasional cabinet. He wanted to build in the grand manner—to build buildings which would be architectural masterpieces.

He had early taken a dislike to the prevailing style of architecture in Virginia and had begun the collection of books on the subject. When in Europe he had taken every opportunity to view famous architectural works. He was particularly pleased with the Roman remains he saw in southern France and northern Italy. Whenever he heard of the probable erection of some public building he offered his unsolicited advice, frequently accompanied by drawings and plans. He never succeeded in convincing any substantial number of his countrymen that he was an architect but he found solace in his own and his friends’ building. For thirty years he was building and rebuilding Monticello. There were other buildings to be built on his various estates. He induced Madison and other friends to let him assist in designing their houses but it was the University which gave him the plaything he had always wanted.

He was well satisfied with the results of his own labors. “I can assure you,” he wrote after the first structure was up, “there is no building in the U. S. so worthy of being seen.” Others were not so well pleased. In the first place, there was the matter of expense. The best plan, if you had Jefferson as your architect, was to make the most liberal estimate of the cost and then multiply it by three. The constant rebuilding of Monticello was one of the factors in his ultimate financial ruin. And then he was not practical. There was nothing functional about his architecture. He bemoaned the presence of windows. His ideal was classical architecture and the Greeks and Romans had no windows. He refused to include closets In the houses he built for the faculty. When the professors complained he explained that closets would have detracted from the symmetry of the houses. When the first professor of medicine asked for an anatomy laboratory, Jefferson readily agreed to attempt to obtain it but it was on the condition that the professor should not presume to interfere with the design which Jefferson had in mind for the building.

Public opinion was not satisfied with his university. As expressed through the state legislature, it was angry at the cost of Jefferson’s architecture. Then the rumor began to spread that the new institution was to be a school of atheism. In the days of the Central College a professorship had been offered to a certain Dr. Cooper, who was reputed to be a Unitarian. He had refused it but, more than a decade after Jefferson’s death, a prominent religious paper charged that at his university “ardent, generous, gifted, and unsuspecting youth was . . . made the victim of a deliberate, cold-blooded, calculating design for is corruption.”

He offended public opinion in other ways. When it came time to select a faculty, he determined to send to Europe for all its members except the professors of law and moral philosophy. “We must get rid,” he wrote, “of this Connecticut Latin.” In writing of the qualifications which the faculty should have he laid down the principle that “a man is not qualified for a professor, knowing nothing but merely his own profession.” Those employed from Europe were all English except for one German. The physicians took the employment of an Englishman to teach medicine particularly ill.

Jefferson paid no attention to these criticisms. Instead, he set himself to play the host to his new university. The professors were constant dinner guests and nearly once a week he would entertain a large party of students. In the latter case he usually dined apart but devoted himself to his guests before and after the meal.

Jefferson had frequently expressed the opinion that he did not desire to live to a great age. “It is at most,” he wrote Adams, “but the life of a cabbage; surely not worth a wish. When all our faculties have left, or are leaving us, one by one, sight, hearing, memory, every avenue of pleasing sensation is closed, and athumy, debility and malaise left in their places, when friends of our youth are all gone, and a generation is risen around us whom we know not, is death an evil?”

No special disease killed him but in the early part of 1826 it was evident the end was near. He spent his time reading Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. He had one ambition left. It was to see the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. He and Adams were now the only surviving signers but both were too feeble to move. During the night of the third of July Jefferson’s life was obviously ebbing. He occasionally aroused himself to inquire of the grandson who sat by his bed whether it was yet the Fourth. He died at fifty minutes past noon on the Fourth of July, 1826. About two hours later John Adams died.

Jefferson was buried in the family cemetery at Monticello with the rites of theEpiscopal Church.

CHAPTER II

John Adams

The death of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on the same day, and that the fiftieth anniversary of the day which we have agreed to celebrate as our Independence Day, is the stuff of which great national traditions are made. There have been few coincidences more remarkable. One man had been the vehement champion of independence; the other the author of the great document by which it was proclaimed. All through the dark days of the Revolutionary War and the government of the Confederation they had been political collaborators and personal friends. “Jefferson, in those days,” said Adams later, “never failed to agree with me.” A sectional difference more than anything else had finally made them rivals for the Presidency. Both men held the office in turn and, after an interval of estrangement, their old age was spent in a full and free correspondence which has few parallels in literature.

All sorts of legends could have arisen out of such facts but of all the legends which one might suppose possibly could have arisen, none is so remarkable as the one which actually did arise. Almost every textbook of American history retells the story how John Adams, the aristocrat, was swept from office by the democratic instincts of the American people marshalled to battle by Thomas Jefferson.

The Massachusetts in which Adams was born had a social structure which combined a general equality of wealth with a considerable degree of social inequality. Outside of a few Boston merchants there were no rich men; none who could be regarded as the financial equals of what Adams, when he first came in contact with them, called ‘‘the barons of Virginia.”

Adams occasionally gave advice as to what was needed to reform the social structure of the southern states. It was to introduce town meetings, training days, and town schools. Jefferson was a convert to this advice and made some ineffectual efforts to divide the Virginian counties with their oligarchic county courts into “wards” in which the voters themselves would come together as they did in New England town meetings. But there was another aspect to the popular form of government and social organization which existed in Massachusetts. “Go into every village in New England,” wrote Adams, “and you will find that the office of justice of the peace, and even the place of representative, which has ever depended only on the freest election of the people, have generally descended from generation to generation, in three or four families at most.” The great families of Virginia held their power because of their wealth and their control of the county courts. In Massachusetts the aristocracy was not one of wealth but of descent from families honored in the history of the province for their wisdom in council or their eloquence in the pulpit. After a residence of seven or eight years in France, England, and the Netherlands, Adams remarked that the interest in genealogy was greater in America than in Europe.

He himself did not belong to one of these families. His paternal ancestor, Henry, had been among the earliest settlers in Massachusetts and was one of the original inhabitants of Braintree when that town was laid out just south of Boston. From time to time in the course of generations scions of the Adamses went to other towns, but the immediate ancestors of John always remained in Braintree. Perhaps they felt as he did when his wife wrote him that in his absence she had purchased some land in Vermont to which possibly they might some day move. “God willing, I will not go to Vermont. I must be within the scent of the sea.” For his local patriotism was very strong. He never felt quite at home living in Boston, and whether in New York, Paris, or London, he still longed for “Penns-hill, Milton-hill, and all the blue hills. I love every tree and every rock upon all those mountains.” The conception of himself as an Englishman who happened to be born in the colonies had no meaning for him. “Massachusetts,” he said when British troops were first stationed in Boston, “is all the country I know, or which has been known by my father, grandfather, or great-grandfather.”

The social status of the family remained remarkably constant. It was just above the lowest. Generation after generation the probate of their estates reveals them as leaving a few acres of land, a few head of cattle and some household goods. One of them operated a small brewery. They were town-clerks, town-constables and occasionally selectmen. They always died solvent but the size of their estates can be estimated from the fact that John’s grandfather, Joseph, inherited one acre of salt meadow from his father. This Joseph, however, became sufficiently prosperous to put his eldest son through Harvard. Joseph’s second son married, at the age of forty-three, Susanna Boylston. When their eldest son, John, was graduated from Harvard he was ranked fourteenth in the class of twenty-four. The ranking was by social standing and it stands recorded on the college records that the only reason he was ranked this high was that his mother was a Boylston of Brookline.

John was born October 19, 1735, and was thus nearly eight years older than Jefferson. He was the eldest of three children, all boys. He attended the town school and did chores on his father’s farm. There was still a family of Indians living about a mile away and he visited them frequently. He says in his Autobiography that he “was of an amorous disposition, and, very early, from ten or eleven years of age, was very fond of the society of females.” He was tutored for college by two local clergymen. “Under my first latin master, who was a churl, I spent my time in shooting, skating, swimming, flying kites, and every other boyish exercise and diversion I could invent. Never mischievous. Under my second master, who was kind, I began to love my books and neglect my sports.” At college, his favorite studies were the classics, mathematics, and natural philosophy, in that order. He was graduated a few months before his twentieth birthday.

The town of Worcester, which was then pretty much on the outskirts of civilization, directed its minister, Thaddeus Maccarty, to attend the Harvard commencement and employ a schoolmaster from among the members of the graduating class. Adams was his selection. Three weeks later “a horse was sent me from Worcester, and a man to attend me. We made the journey, about sixty miles, in one day.”

Adams had been sent to Harvard for the purpose of preparing himself for admission to the Congregational ministry. Schoolteaching was a usual interlude between college and the ministry. The ministry was not a profitable occupation but it was the traditional entrance to the ruling class which dominated the province. When a Massachusetts farmer became sufficiently prosperous he sent one of his sons to Harvard to prepare for the ministry. Thus John’s uncle, Joseph, had been sent to Harvard and was now the minister of a congregation in New Hampshire. It was traditional, but there was a new spirit in the air.

The selectmen of Worcester had contracted to supply Adams with room and board and at the house to which they sent him he found Morgan’s Moral Philosopher a deistical book which he learned had been read by many in the town. The town minister, Maccarty, had been dismissed by a former congregation because he was suspected of heterodoxy. After Adams had spent three months at his first residence, the selectmen arranged to have him room and board with a physician. Adams’ desire to enter the ministry had already been weakened by some theological controversies which he thought were conducted “with an uncharitable spirit of intolerance.” His new surroundings led him to think of medicine, but he soon decided that he had “an aversion to sick rooms and no fondness for rising at all hours of the night to visit patients.” It did not bring him back to the ministry and, after he had been in Worcester less than a year, we find the defiant entry in his diary: “Sunday. Staid at home reading the Independent Whig.”

There were times when he felt desperate. “All my time seems to roll away unnoticed. I long to study sometimes, but have no opportunity. I long to be a master of Greek and Latin. I long to prosecute the mathematical and philosophical sciences. I long to know a little of ethics and moral philosophy. But I have no books, no time, no friends. I must therefore be contented to live and die an ignorant, obscure fellow,” he wrote when he had been in Worcester about nine months.

At the end of one year of teaching he had decided on his profession. He would be a lawyer. The law was just beginning to be recognized as a profession in New England and there was only one lawyer in the town, James Putnam. Adams went to him and expressed his desire to study law. A few days later Putnam informed Adams that Mrs. Putnam would receive him as a lodger for the sum allowed by the town and that he, Putnam, would instruct him in the law for the sum of one hundred dollars, to be paid when convenient.

For two years Adams combined the occupations of schoolmaster and law-student. He did not develop any liking for Putnam. They occasionally went hunting together but Putnam paid very little attention to his pupil's progress. Adams’ questions were usually answered with, as he says in his diary, “satirical and contemptuous smiles.” Putnam was much more interested in discussing religion. He was in that stage of unbelief where he was afraid to accept the conclusions of his own reasoning. “At breakfast, dinner, and tea, Mr. Putnam was commonly disputing with me upon some question of religion. . . . Although he would argue to the extent of his learning and ingenuity to destroy or invalidate the evidences of a future state, and the principles of natural and revealed religion, yet I could plainly perceive that he could not convince himself that death was an endless sleep.”

The social lines were carefully drawn in Massachusetts and, while Adams was only a schoolmaster, his graduation from Harvard and his prospective admission to a profession had already brought him into circles where the habits were different from what he had known at home. It is seldom that one is favored in the study of the personality of a man afterwards famous with a youthful diary. Adams is one of the relatively rare exceptions and, what is even rarer, his diary is honest and free. When he made a social error he notes it, however humiliating, as well as his determination not to commit it again. It throws a curious light on the customs of the community. There is much to show his contempt, and secret envy, of “fine gentlemen with laced hats and waistcoats”; there is the entry “Laid a pair of gloves with Mrs. Willard that she would not see me chew tobacco this month.”

But the strangest thing about these early diaries and letters of Adams is his Americanism. What is known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War and in America as the French and Indian War was raging while Adams was studying with Putnam. He was restrained with some difficulty from enlisting. His only military adventures were as an express rider. Dispatches came down from the Canadian front so often that there was difficulty in finding enough express riders in the then small town of Worcester with which to forward them. Adams volunteered his services and at least once carried dispatches from Worcester to the governor of Rhode Island.

The various British generals who came to America in turn to fight the French marched through Worcester. The schoolmaster was too low in the social scale to meet the generals but he heard stories. “The conduct of Generals Shirley, Braddock, Abercrombie, Webb, and above all Lord Loudon, which were daily discussed in Mr. Putnam’s family, gave me such an opinion and such a disgust of the British government, that I heartily wished the two countries were separated for ever. I was convinced we could defend ourselves against the French, and manage our affairs better without, than with, the English.” That was written in his old age and may represent wisdom after the fact. By some accident a letter which he wrote when he was not quite twenty has survived. It concerned politics, for John’s father, “who had a public soul,” had raised him to pay attention to public concerns. The letter was scarcely that of a loyal Englishman. “Our people, according to the exactest computations, will in another century become more numerous than England itself. Should this be the case, since we have, I may say, all the naval stores of the nation in our hands, it will be easy to obtain the mastery of the seas; and then the united force of ail Europe will not be able to subdue us. The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us.”

After two years with Putnam, and three years in all in Worcester, Adams was ready to practice law. A committee of the leading citizens called on him and asked him to settle in the town, stating that it was unsatisfactory to have only one lawyer there. They offered as an inducement a promise to get him elected Register of Deeds. He declined and gave as a reason his feeling that it would be ungrateful to go into rivalry with Putnam. In his Autobiography he says the real reason was that in Worcester he “panted for want of the breezes from the sea.” He went up to Boston, introduced himself to Jeremiah Gridley, the Attorney-General, and, on Gridley’s motion, was admitted to the bar.

Adams also took to heart the advice which Gridley gave him. “Pursue the study of the law, rather than the gain of it; pursue the gain of it enough to keep out of the briers, but give your main attention to the study of it.’’ Adams complains in his Autobiography of the amount of money his faithful following of this advice had cost him.

Against the advice of most of the Boston lawyers with whom he conversed, he decided to settle in Braintree. His determination to be a country lawyer carried with it no desire to interest himself in the type of matters which commonly come before justices of the peace. Success in such a practice, as he noted in his diary less than a year after his admission, required “a very particular knowledge of the province law and common matters, of which I know much less than I do of the Roman law.”

What then was his object in life? That question is debated back and forth in the pages of his invaluable youthful diary. “Shall I sleep away my whole seventy years? no, by every thing I swear.” There is the earlier comment on an unnamed physician that “he is negligent of the theory of his profession, and will live and die unknown. These drivelling souls, oh! He aims not at fame, only at a living and a fortune.” After this it is not surprising to find him concluding a few months later that “Reputation ought to be the perpetual subject of my thoughts, and aim of my behavior. How shall I gain a reputation? how shall I spread an opinion of myself as a lawyer of distinguished genius, learning, and virtue?”

He had not waited for Gridley’s advice to decide that study was the method. On his way home from Worcester he took out of the Harvard library a copy of Justinian’s Institutes with Vinnius’ notes. He knew what he intended to do with it. “Let me read with attention, deliberation, distinction. Let me admire with knowledge. It is low to admire a Dutch commentator merely because he uses Latin and Greek phraseology.” But that self-congratulatory strain in his character—what his political opponents were later to call his vanity—also appears: “Few of my contemporary beginners in the study of the law have the resolution to aim at much knowledge in the civil law; let me, therefore, distinguish myself from them by the study of the civil law in its native languages.”

He had plenty of time in which to study, for clients were slow in coming, but it was hard and lonely work. Books were scarce. There were no public libraries of consequence. He lived at home but he had little money with which to buy books. He early resolved to build up a library but even if he had had the money this was difficult for there were few bookstores and those but poorly stocked. He did not confine his study to technical law books for his conception of the proper training for a lawyer was much the same as Jefferson’s. He read Coke and Grotius, he also read the Spectator, Voltaire’s Louis XIV, Bolingbroke, and Milton. He made it a practice to copy extracts from what he read.

There were times when he found it hard to keep at it. “Chores, chat, tobacco, tea, steal away time; but I am resolved to translate Justinian and his commentator’s notes by daylight, and read Gilbert’s Tenures by night, till I am master of both, and I will meddle with no other book in this chamber on a week day; on a Sunday I will read the Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul, and for amusement, I will sometimes read Ovid’s Art of Love to Mrs. Savil.” The amusement may seem somewhat odd for puritan New England. Mrs. Savil was the wife of a neighboring physician and her name occurs with suspicious frequency in Adams’ diary but he and her husband were good friends and there was never any scandal.

It was, indeed, that “amorous disposition” which he complained of as having affected him from his eleventh or twelfth year which interfered most with his studies. “Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. All spent in absolute idleness, or, which is worse, gallanting the girls.” A few months later, still at the age of twenty-three, he is admonishing himself “let no girl, no gun, no cards, no flutes, no violins, no dress, no tobacco, no laziness, decoy you from your books.” Gridley had warned him that early marriage would put a stop to his studies and he had taken the advice to heart. He had one narrow escape. “Accidents, as we call them, govern a great part of the world, especially marriages. S . . . and E . . . broke in upon H . . . and me, and interrupted a conversation that would have terminated in a courtship, which would have terminated in a marriage, which marriage might have depressed me to absolute poverty and obscurity, to the end of my life; but that accident separated us, and gave room for.....’s addresses, which have delivered me from very dangerous shackles, and left me at liberty, if I will but mind my studies, of making a character and a fortune.’’

By the time he was twenty-five or six he had largely overcome his tendency to desert his books for more appealing amusements. He had kept in touch with Gridley and occasionally borrowed books from him. “Last Friday I borrowed of Mr. Gridley the second volume of the Corpus Juris Canonici, notis illustratum, Gregorii XIII. Jussu editum: complectens, Decretum Gratiani; Decretales Gregorii Papse IX.; Sextum Decretalium Bonifacii Papae VIII.; Clementinas j Extrava-games Joannis Papae XXII.; Extravagantes Communes”—a load of ecclesiastical lumber out of which Adams was to make his first literary success.

Chief Justice Hutchinson, the leader of the Tories in the province, had recently succeeded in getting the legal profession in Massachusetts divided into two branches, as that of England has always been. Adams’ first admission was only to the inferior branch but in the fall of 1761, again on Gridley’s motion, he was admitted as a full-fledged barrister, acquired a gown, a band and a tie wig, and was entitled to practice in the higher courts. Thereafter his career moved rapidly.

His father had died a few months before and left Adams forty acres in Braintree. He continued to reside with his mother until his marriage but now that he was a barrister he was much more frequently in Boston, since that was then the county seat for the county which included Braintree. He also began to travel circuit to the neighboring towns, usually doing so on horseback. His practice began to grow quite rapidly although most of it consisted of small and not very lucrative cases.

Within a week after his twenty-ninth birthday he married Abigail Smith, whose twentieth birthday occurred a few weeks later. She was the daughter of the Congregational minister in Weymouth, a town adjoining Braintree, and the granddaughter of Colonel John Quincy, who represented the town of Braintree in the legislature and was at various times speaker of the House of Representatives and a member of the council. The Quincys were of such importance that when later the town of Braintree was divided into several towns, the part where Adams lived was called Quincy.

She was a most remarkable woman. Her schooling was as slight as was customary but her self-education was extensive. She wrote letters which rise to the level of literature; she discussed all manner of political questions with knowledge and understanding, and she looked after her husband’s business affairs in his long absences from home during the war so successfully that they seem to have remained in better condition than those of any of his contemporaries. He was very proud of her intellect and knowledge and always gladly received her opinions on political questions.

Adams, himself, had not, so far, shown any great interest in politics. He had listened to Otis argue the illegality of writs of assistance in 1761 and it had made a profound impression. Adams later asserted that this was the spark that lit the revolutionary fire but he always insisted that what resulted was not properly described as a revolution. The idea of independence, he always claimed, was as familiar to John Winthrop as it had been to anyone since. The object the Puritans had had in mind was “a government of their own, independent in religion, government, commerce, manufactures.” This they had substantially obtained during the greater part of the seventeenth century but since then there had been one encroachment after another on the independence of their government. His attitude on the relationship between England and Massachusetts comes out in one of the earliest entries in his diary where he speaks of “every English country.” This view of the object Winthrop and his associates had in mind is borne out by the facts. The many prominent Puritans who stayed in England but assisted in the founding of the New England colonies had in mind the preparation of a refuge for themselves against a time of adversity.

When Otis made his famous argument Adams was still poor and unknown. His immediate purpose was to establish himself in practice and he had no desire to set up as an agitator. He became a political leader by the surprising route of a paper delivered before a learned society.

In the early part of 1765 Gridley organized what was called a sodalitas, a society of young lawyers for the study of jurisprudence and legal history. It was part of the plan of the society that its members should, from time to time, prepare papers with a view to publication. Adams was one of the first to do so. His contribution bore the forbidding title, when it later appeared in print, of A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law. It was published in the Boston Gazette in August, 1765, immediately republished in the London Chronicle and published in book form in London in 1768 and again in 1782 and in Philadelphia in 1783.

The reason for the surprising interest in this paper becomes most readily apparent from a sentence which appeared in the original draft but was omitted before publication. “I always consider,” Adams wrote, “the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.” How did this fit into a dissertation on the canon and the feudal law? It has always been, Adams argued, the object of the great and of the strong to take away the rights of the weak and of the poor. “I say RIGHTS, for such they have, undoubtedly, antecedent to all earthly government,—Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws—Rights, derived from the great Legislator of the universe . . . Numberless have been the systems of iniquity contrived by the great for the gratification of this passion in themselves; but in none of them were they ever more successful than in the invention and establishment of the canon and the feudal law.”

In the December following the publication of the Dissertation Adams was much surprised to receive a letter from the town-clerk of Boston advising him that Gridley, Otis, and he had been retained as counsel to the town. The question on which the town desired counsel was this: The passage of the Stamp Act earlier in the year had been followed by riots which destroyed the machinery for distributing the stamps. Hutchinson, the Chief Justice of the Province and judge of probate for Suffolk County (which included Boston), refused to allow any papers to be filed in his courts which were not stamped pursuant to the Act. This largely stopped the administration of justice, and the patriot clique in Boston determined to bring matters to a head by filing a petition with the Governor and Council asking that the courts be opened. This raised the issue of the legality of the Stamp Act and that was the point which Gridley, Otis, and Adams were expected to argue.

There is a curious entry in Adams’ diary made on the very day of this appointment but before he had learned of it. The closing of the courts, he wrote, “is very unfortunate for me. I was but just getting into my gears, just getting under sail, and an embargo is laid upon the ship. Thirty years of my life are passed in preparation for business; I have had poverty to struggle with, envy and jealousy and malice of enemies to encounter, no friends, or but few, to assist me; so that I have groped in dark obscurity, till of late, and had but just become known and gained a small degree of reputation, when this execrable project was set on foot for my ruin as well as that of America in general.”

Adams had less than a week between learning of his appointment and the date set for the argument. He had no opportunity to confer with his colleagues and, as the junior of the three, the duty fell on him of opening the case. He made his argument on the premise that the Stamp Act could have no force in America since it was enacted by a legislature in which America was not represented. His colleagues contented themselves with less bold premises.

Adams himself was frightened the next day at the boldness of the position he had taken. “Are not,” he entered in his diary, “protection and allegiance reciprocal? and if we are out of the King’s protection, are we not discharged from our allegiance? Are not all the ligaments of government dissolved? Is it not an abdication of the throne? In short, where will such a horrid doctrine terminate? It would run us into treason!” That was four days before Christmas, and the entry for Christmas Day reads “Wednesday. Christmas. At home thinking, reading, searching, concerning taxation without consent; concerning the great pause and rest in business.”

The Stamp Act was repealed and Adams went back to his profession. He rode circuit assiduously, partly because he thought the traveling, which he usually did on horseback, good for his health, but it did not take him long to decide that Boston, rather than Braintree, was the place to practice law. In April, 1768, he moved to Boston to a house he had rented in Brattle Square.

He had temporarily forgotten politics, “To what object,” he entered in his diary, “are my views directed? What is the end and purpose of my studies, journeys, labors of all kinds, of body and mind, of tongue and pen? Am I grasping at money or scheming for power? . . . In truth, I am tossed about so much from post to pillar, that I have not leisure and tranquillity enough to consider distinctly my own views, objects, and feelings. I am mostly intent, at present, upon collecting a library; and I find that a great deal of thought and care, as well as money, are necessary to assemble an ample and well chosen assortment of books.”

The British were not going to let him forget politics so easily. Cabinets were succeeding each other in London in rapid succession but they all had one policy in common—that was to break up the British Empire in America as speedily as possible. A year after the Stamp Act was passed another Act of Parliament laid import duties on the importation of various articles into America. The various royal governors were given strict orders to keep their assemblies in order and, to overawe the Americans once and for all, two regiments of regulars were sent to Boston.

The idea that two regiments were sufficient to police a country that extended from Maine to Georgia is a sufficient index of the mentality of the ministers who planned these measures. But the curious question remains, why was Boston selected for their station? It is not centrally located. New York or Philadelphia would seem a much more sensible place from a purely military standpoint. Indeed, after the war really started, the British concentrated on the two latter points. Was it because Boston was supposed to be the center of the dissatisfaction? Nothing had happened so far to account for such a view. The Stamp Act officials had been as badly treated elsewhere as there. Nothing had happened in Massachusetts which had had so widespread an influence as the resolutions which Patrick Henry had introduced in Virginia.

The answer lies in English history. When the Stamp Act excitement was at its height, Adams recorded in his diary that he met a man who told him that “things go on here exactly as they did in the reign of King Charles I, ‘that blessed saint and martyr’.” The English of the eighteenth century had inherited the political blessings for which the Roundheads had contended but they hated to admit it. Now that the Stuarts were harmless it had become fashionable to speak well of them. Ever since the reorganization of the Massachusetts government after the accession of William and Mary, the Episcopal Church had enjoyed the same established legal position in the province as the Congregational. The Episcopalians were generally supporters of the British. There existed in England a missionary organization called the Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts. It interpreted its duties as the propagation of Anglicanism in the British colonies in America, and Adams himself regarded it as one of the principal causes of the Revolution. This was true not only of Massachusetts. Many years later Adams had some correspondence on this point with Thomas McKean, one of the most active leaders of the revolutionary movement in Pennsylvania and afterwards chief justice and governor of that state, and McKean agreed that in Pennsylvania as well as Massachusetts the Society had been a source of great irritation against the British connection.

The Anglican clergy themselves recognized that they were so closely identified in the popular mind with the Tories that when, some years later, a mob was organized in Braintree for the purpose of seizing and concealing the town’s supply of powder, Abigail Adams wrote her husband that “The Church parson thought they were coming after him, and ran up garret; they say another jumped out of his window and hid among the corn, whilst a third crept under his board fence and told his beads.”

Nothing contributed more to the growing fear of the intentions of the British government than the recurrent suggestions for the establishment of Anglican bishops in America. This seems to have aroused as much alarm in the Episcopal colonies in the South as in the Congregational colonies in the East. Off-hand, one would expect the Episcopalians to welcome such an establishment, as it was certainly an inconvenience to be required to go to England with all church matters which required the authority of a bishop. Apparently they took it for granted that an establishment of bishops, deans, arch-deacons, and canons merely meant that they would be taxed to support patronage for Englishmen. In New England the argument was, as Adams expressed it, that “if Parliament could tax us, they could establish the Church of England, with all its creeds, articles, tests, ceremonies, and tithes, and prohibit all other churches, as conventicles and schism shops.”

The passage of the Quebec Act greatly intensified this fear. That Act recognized the legal position of the Roman Catholic church in Canada and at the same time made the Ohio River the southwestern boundary of Canada. This Act probably had as much to do with the Revolution as the Stamp Act or the tax on tea. The indignation which this Act aroused in the colonies is commonly ascribed to mere bigotry. That explanation might be satisfactory if the Quebec Act could on any interpretation be regarded as evidence of a spirit of religious toleration. The same George III who signed this Act was later nearly to wreck the English constitutional system by his opposition to the removal of any of the disabilities on Catholics in his European dominions. If the British had suddenly become converts to religious toleration they might have begun much nearer home—in Ireland. The American reaction to the Quebec Act was sound. That law was not a manifestation of religious toleration. It was merely another application of the old principle of divide to rule. If it had not been for the Quebec Act, Canada would probably now be part of the United States.

Despite the loss of its original charter, Massachusetts had retained a much greater degree of independence than Virginia had ever had. Adams himself blamed many of the mischievous acts of the British government on a Massachusetts man. Chief Justice Hutchinson. Adams was satisfied Hutchinson’s object was to make Massachusetts more like England—to destroy the public school system and to encourage the gathering together of the small farms into large estates. At the time of the Stamp Act, Adams entered in his diary that the few Americans who supported it were actuated by “a contempt of that equality in knowledge, wealth, and power, which has prevailed in this country” for “the tendency of that Act” is “to reduce the body of the people to ignorance, poverty, dependence.”

Hutchinson had no desire to establish the principle of parliamentary taxation in America so that Englishmen could be relieved from paying taxes. He wanted the revenue thus raised to be spent in America to pay salaries—his own salary as Chief Justice, for example. His object was to create a great body of patronage in America which would not be dependent on grants from the colonial legislatures. Hutchinson was nominally chief justice and lieutenant-governor. Actually, he was the active head of the British interest, and a short while later was made governor. In the meantime, the governor, Bernard, took Hutchinson’s advice in everything.

In his diary and letters Adams never speaks of Hutchinson except with dislike. It is reasonable to assume that Hutchinson’s feelings were the same toward Adams, but Hutchinson did not let personal feelings affect his political conduct. It was his business to build up a British party in Massachusetts and he decided that Adams was a man he could use.

Jonathan Sewall came of one of the oldest and best-established families in the province. He and Adams early became friends. As young lawyers they traveled circuit together, “lived together,” said Adams, “frequently slept in the same chamber, and not seldom in the same bed.” The conquest of Canada had hardly been completed when a rumor spread through Massachusetts that the British were planning to abolish the charter government. Sewall sought out Adams, mentioned this rumor and asked him to write something for the newspapers in opposition to the supposed British scheme. Adams made the obvious retort. Why don’t you do it yourself. You are older, better known and can write better. “I would write,” Sewall replied, “but Goffe will find me out, and I shall grieve his righteous soul, and you know what influence he has in Middlesex.” So it ever was with Jonathan Sewall, Intellectually, he agreed with Adams, but fear and prudence always kept him on the side of power. Time and again, as the clouds of civil war gathered, he sought out Adams and tried to convince him “that all resistance was not only useless but ruinous.”

Sewall was a man of great ability as a lawyer, a writer, and a speaker. He had flirted just enough with the patriots to make the British party anxious to make sure of him. About the time Adams moved to Boston Sewall succeeded Gridley as Attorney-General.

A few months after Adams had settled in Brattle Square, Sewall came in one afternoon and said he would like to take dinner with him. At the end of dinner he proposed that they adjourn to Adams’ office, which was in his house. Mrs. Adams suggested they remain where they were and herself left the room. Sewall came to his point cautiously. The Governor had sent for him and had brought up the subject of the vacancy existing in the office of Advocate-General in the Court of Admiralty. It was, next to the attorney-generalship, the most desirable office in the province for a lawyer. The possessors of both offices were allowed to continue their private practice. In this respect these offices were more desirable even than judgeships, but in any event they were the natural roads to judgeships and seats in council, as well as to lucrative private practice. The Governor had not asked Sewall to suggest someone for the advocate-generalship. The Governor said he had consulted Hutchinson and Hutchinson had recommended Adams. The Governor did not know Adams personally but on Hutchinson’s recommendation the Governor had asked Sewall to sound him out. Nothing was said about any conditions.

Unfortunately, there is a hiatus in Adams’ diary at this point, but it is easy to imagine what his thoughts must have been. He was just thirty-three; only a few years previously he had been a poor and unknown farmer’s son. And now the Governor was sending to him to offer him one of the richest pieces of patronage at the disposal of the colonial government. The wealth of the community was in ships, and as advocate-general he would have been the principal shipping lawyer in New England. It was about as high as an American could expect to climb before the Revolution. Nevertheless, he declined the offer. Sewall came back in three weeks, again to ask him to accept the position and to assure him that no political services would be expected. Adams replied that he was convinced the British government’s long-range policy was to overthrow the government of the province and that he did not care to put himself in a position where he was under any obligation to the royal government.

He had constant evidence of the adoption of the policy which he imputed to the British. Part of the two regiments which had been stationed in Boston to overawe the town drilled daily in Brattle Square. Every morning during his first winter in the city he was awakened by British bugles. The quartering of the troops in the town was almost certain to lead to an explosion. The soldiers were insulted by the people at every opportunity. The town refused to concern itself with their accommodation and they were quartered in Faneuil Hall and other public buildings. Meanwhile, the British government devised one irritating act after another to keep up its unpopularity.

The British navy did its share. Impressment was one of those things which even in England the authorities preferred to keep out of the courts. It was generally understood that it was not safe to practice it in American waters or on American seamen. But the feeling that it was time to put the colonists in their place was growing. The British frigate Rose stopped a Marblehead ship in Massachusetts Bay and sent a press-gang aboard under the command of a lieutenant named Panton. It searched the ship and found four sailors hidden in the forepeak. “Michael Corbet and Lieutenant Panton argued the cause, but neither being convinced, resort was had to the ratio ultima and Panton was killed. The Rose sent reinforcements which succeeded in seizing Corbet, who was subsequently tried for murder before a special court of admiralty in Boston, which was embodied under an act of Parliament aimed primarily at piracy. The court had fifteen members, including the governors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the commodore of the British squadron who afterwards became famous as Admiral Lord Hood, and Hutchinson.

Adams always interpreted his duties to include the defense of such persons charged with crime as asked for his assistance, whether or not they could pay a fee, so when Corbet sent for him he came.

Adams had a perfect defense. There existed a statute passed by Parliament many years previously which forbade impressments in America. Adams was satisfied that the court did not know of the existence of this statute. It was to be found only in the British statutes-at-large and he possessed the only copy of that work in Boston or its vicinity, Adams thought in all British America. Yet he did not want to rely on this. Essentially he was still a lawyer. If he could save his client’s life by an act of the British Parliament he thought it his duty to do so, but he was enough of a politician so that he preferred to find out first whether he could do it by any other means. He was convinced that impressment was illegal—as illegal in London as in Boston. This was the issue which he wished to try. He spent many sleepless nights working on the case but Hutchinson never gave him an opportunity to present his defense.

When the court met, Adams had a volume of the statutes-at-large in front of him, open at the page where the statute appeared forbidding impressments in America. The page was dog-eared but he intended to argue the general question of the legality of impressments anywhere. The “pretended right of impressing seamen”, he wrote later, “is only an enormous abuse.” When he arose he stated that he proposed to defend the conduct of his client as justifiable homicide. Hutchinson immediately interrupted and suggested that the court should go into consultation. They did so and remained in seclusion the rest of the day. When the court reconvened the following morning “all the world,” Adams later wrote, “expected that the trial would commence . . . But after a solemn pause and total silence. Governor Bernard, the President of the Court, arose, and with a countenance so solemn and gloomy as made the audience shudder . .  . addressed himself to the prisoners by name, and pronounced, ‘The Court have considered the evidence in support of the libel against you, and are unanimously of opinion that it amounts only to justifiable homicide’.”

As Adams descended the steps of the courthouse, the boatswain of the Rose stopped him. “Mr. Adams,” he said, “I have spent twenty years of my life depriving honest men of their liberty. I always thought I ought to be hanged for it; now I know it.”

Adams was already well-known in the seaport towns. His circuit riding had taken him from Maine to Martha’s Vineyard and the victory made him the seamen’s friend. On his next trip through Plymouth, when he came out from a tavern where he had stopped to dine, he found a stranger holding his horse. The stranger held the stirrup while Adams mounted and then said, “Mr. Adams, as a man of liberty, I respect you; God bless you! I’ll stand by you while I live, and from hence to Cape Cod you won’t find ten men amiss.”

All this was very pleasant, but Adams had no intention of setting up as a politician. He had been retained by the town of Boston both in 1768 and in 1769 to draw instructions to its representatives but he had never himself attended a town meeting in Boston. He knew the workings of such an institution, however, for in his last year in Braintree he had been a selectman. He had been to a few meetings of the Sons of Liberty. He was occasionally involved in other revolutionary activity. He notes in his diary that he supped one Sunday evening in the fall of 1769 at James Otis’ in company with Sam Adams and others. “The evening spent in preparing for the next day’s newspaper—a curious employment, cooking up paragraphs, articles, occurrences, &c., working the political engine.”

Sam Adams was building a political machine as carefully as Hutchinson. He did not have the same patronage to offer but he agreed with Hutchinson that his distant relative was a valuable man. In the spring of 1770 a vacancy developed in the Boston representation in the General Court. With Sam Adams acting in effect as his campaign manager, John was elected.

It was not an especially important session. The Governor, to punish the wickedness of Boston, had summoned the legislature to meet in Cambridge, which was a great inconvenience in those days when there was no bridge across the Charles. The House of Representatives challenged his authority to do this. This led to an exchange of legalistic messages between the House and the Governor in which Adams was one of the principal draftsmen for the House. The representatives then took the offensive. The historic enacting style in the province was “Be it enacted by the Governor, Council and House of Representatives in General Court assembled, and by authority of the same.” Some years previously the British government had noted the absence of any reference to His Majesty and had issued standing instructions to stop the use of the old form. The House now obstinately insisted on using it. The Representatives then appointed a committee, of which Adams was a member, to consider ways to encourage manufacturing in Massachusetts while the Governor lectured them on their duty as colonials to import all their manufactured articles from Great Britain. None of it was very important but it all helped to keep the pot boiling until it was ready to boil over.

Meanwhile, Adams nearly lost his popularity. The British regiments were still in Boston. There were continual squabbles between the soldiers and the people. The boys of the town made it a game to yell insults at the red-coated “lobsters” and then flee from their wrath. On the night of March 5, 1770, a solitary sentry paced along what is now State Street, guarding the customhouse. A boy started taunting him from what he considered a safe distance, but the boy had misjudged it. The sentry succeeded in grabbing him and began to administer martial law. The resulting noise attracted a crowd which was not backward in expressing its opinion of the soldier. A British officer, Preston, heard the uproar, and taking a squad of soldiers with him, went to investigate. The arrival of more soldiers only raised the numbers and the temper of the crowd. Guns were raised, at first as a threat—no one knows whether there was an order to fire—five citizens were killed. The firing was heard for a considerable distance. Someone began ringing the church bells. The people poured into the streets—Adams among them. He was out visiting and he immediately started home, thinking of his wife, who was ill. As he approached his own house he could scarcely find foot-passage through the fixed bayonets of the redcoats. It was the Boston Massacre. “On that night,” he later wrote, “the foundation of American independence was laid.”

Adams had long predicted that if blood was ever shed the quarrel would never end. Hutchinson, too, was a Massachusetts man and it did not take him long to realize that this was not a situation which could be settled by a lecture on the duties of obedience. Before morning, Preston and his soldiers were in jail on a charge of murder and a few days later the remaining soldiers were removed to Castle William on an island in the harbor. That is where they should have been all along, for there was an act of Parliament which forbade the quartering of troops in any town which had a fort capable of receiving them. But acts of Parliament only had an effect in America now and then. The town instituted an annual oration in commemoration of the event, which was an excellent way of making Adams’ prediction come true. Prior to the removal of the troops it was necessary to call out the militia to keep the peace. Adams was called among the rest and, for a few days, tramped the streets of Boston “with my musket and bayonet, my broadsword and cartridge-box.”

The morning following the Massacre a British officer who went by the name of the Irish Infant pushed his hulking frame into Adams’ office. Tears were streaming from his eyes. He had been to half-a-dozen of the town’s more prominent lawyers. None of them would help him. His dear friend Preston was in jail, charged with murder. Would Adams defend him? The answer was yes, and the weeping Infant handed him a single guinea, which by British tradition was the minimum retainer.

The Massacre and the retainer occurred before Adams’ election to the General Court but the trial did not occur until later. Thus, public attention was not focused on his acceptance until after the election. All his life he was never able to live it down. All sorts of people from Tories to Jacobins attacked him for his defense of Preston. It was alleged that he had received an enormous fee to betray his country, and the charge was circulated by political opponents even as late as when he was President. Yet he never admitted any wrongdoing; in fact, he always proclaimed that he was proud of what he had done—that one of the natural rights of man was to be defended by counsel of his own choosing—and that liberty meant that foes were entitled to the same rights as friends.

The trials occurred in the fall and involved two weeks of exhausting work. Adams always said it was the hardest work he ever undertook. It was not easy to get a Boston jury to acquit British soldiers who had shot Bostonians on State Street. Preston and all his soldiers were acquitted except for two who were convicted of manslaughter. Adams never sent Preston a bill, but after the trials were over Preston sent him, at different times, eighteen guineas more, making the total fee which Adams received nineteen guineas.

Adams never had anything seriously wrong with him, but he always claimed that life in Boston—that metropolis of fifteen thousand people—injured his health. In the winter after the Preston trial he complained of pains in his breast and lungs. The attacks which had been made on him because of his defense of Preston made him feel bitter. He was through with town life and, above all, with politics, forever. He decided to move back to Braintree. Social life had no appeal for him. There is an entry in his diary just before leaving Boston, “I never spent an evening at Pitts’s. What can I learn tonight? Came home, and can now answer the question;—I learned nothing. The company was agreeable enough.” He did not intend to go back to being a village lawyer but to keep his family on his farm in Braintree and to spend long weekends there. He moved to his farm in the spring of 1771, determined to “divide my time between Boston and Braintree, between law and husbandry;—farewell politics.”

At first the new arrangement pleased him immensely. “I find I shall spend more time in my office than ever I did. Now my family is away,

I feel no inclination at all, no temptation, to be anywhere but at my office. I am in it by six in the morning. I am in it at nine at night .  .  . In the evening, I can be alone at my office, and nowhere else; I never could in my family.”

The other part of his life pleased him equally well. Adams had a love of nature that was very unusual in the eighteenth century. He retained through life a contempt for formal gardens and ornamental walks, but there are from time to time revealing entries in his diary such as “Walked out in the morning to hear the birds sing.” He had lost his puritan theology and he habitually used the word puritan with a contemptuous meaning—“his wife is such another old puritan”—but he retained the puritan outlook. “I was not sent into this world to spend my days in sports, diversions and pleasures; I was born for business, for both activity and study. I have little appetite or relish for any thing else.” His puritan conscience did not allow him to spend much time merely walking around listening to the birds. He could only express his love of nature by having a farm where he could spend his time doing something useful. From time to time, as he laid aside a little money, he added to the forty acres he had inherited. He did not spend all his time on his farm supervising others, but pitched in and worked himself.

The only part of his new mode of life which he did not find altogether satisfactory was the loss of time in riding back and forth between Boston and Braintree. He did it one winter but by the fall of the second year he had decided that while the arrangement he had made might be satisfactory in the summer, it was not so in the winter. He had previously lived in rented houses and had moved every one of the three years he had been in Boston. He now purchased a house in Queen Street for use as a home and office. The transaction led to lengthy reflections in his diary on his past life and his future intentions. “Paid Dr. Gardiner and took up my last note to him. I have now got completely through my purchase of Deacon Palmer, Colonel Quincy, and all my salt marsh, being better than twenty acres, and have paid two hundred and fifty pounds old tenor towards my house in Boston, and have better than three hundred pounds left in my pocket. At thirty-seven years of age almost, this is all that my most intense application to study and business has been able to accomplish . . . I am now writing in my own house in Queen Street . . . with a fixed resolution to meddle not with public affairs of town or Province. I am determined my own life and the welfare of my whole family, which is much dearer to me, are too great sacrifices for me to make. I have served my country and her professed friends, at an immense expense to me of time, peace, health, money, and preferment, both of which last have courted my acceptance and been inexorably refused, lest I should be laid under a temptation to forsake the sentiments of the friends of this country. . . . 1 will devote myself wholly to my private business, my office and my farm, and I hope to lay a foundation for better fortune to my children, and a happier life than has fallen to my share.”

He found it was not so easy to escape. He had never considered what others would think. The first intimation of what his friends thought came from Otis, who, meeting Adams one day, told him to his face that he seemed to be “regardless of every thing but to get money enough to carry you smoothly through this world.” Adams in his diary calls this “rant” and goes on at great length to try to show that Otis’ own political activities had been very profitable to him. It was typical of that trait of littleness in Adams which made enemies for him throughout life. It is also typical that after Otis’ death Adams was the most vigorous and loyal defender of his memory.

The next jolt to Adams’ self-complacency came a few weeks later when he learned that Hancock had taken all his legal business to a Tory lawyer. Hancock was reputed to be the richest man in the province. He and Adams had known each other as boys and lately Hancock had been giving all his legal business to Adams. The lawyer poured out his bitterness in his diary. After all he had done for Hancock . . . This breach never was reconciled. One of Adams’ great failings was that he always talked too freely and he doubtless talked to many people about Hancock in the same strain in which he wrote about him in his diary.

Then came a challenge which was difficult to escape. Hutchinson, it was rumored, had recommended the payment of the salaries of the Massachusetts judges out of the British treasury. The right of the Crown to appoint and remove those judges was already clear. The only control the Americans had over them was through the control the General Court had on all financial matters. If this was removed the judges would be the mere agents of the British government. And it would cost the British taxpayers nothing. As soon as the British government was thoroughly in the saddle it could lay what taxes it pleased in America. The furor which this rumor excited might not have drawn Adams from his practice had it not been that a prominent Tory lawyer, William Brattle, felt called upon to defend the legality of this scheme and, in the course of his defense, publicly to challenge Adams to confute him. Adams did so in a series of papers published in the Boston Gazette in the winter of 1772-3.

Hutchinson was the next to display the same argumentative disposition. Power should rely on bayonets. He was not content to do so but, having been made governor, undertook to argue with the legislature the abstract question whether the authority of Parliament was supreme in British America. Instead of the usual governor’s speech the legislature which met in 1773 was regaled with a dissertation on the constitutional—that is, established by precedent—powers of Parliament. It was the custom for the legislature to answer the governor’s speech and this dissertation required an equally erudite answer. It was slow in coming forth, for this type of dispute was somewhat out of the depth of Sam Adams, the leader of the House. He went to his distant cousin John for assistance. The latter had foresworn politics but, after all, a man who reads Justinian at twenty-three will never be entirely content with run-of-the-mill commercial cases. The only question is whether John wrote the whole answer or whether other men contributed to it. Hutchinson replied to the House’s answer and Samuel called on John to defend their position “if vindicable.” John showed that it was.

These efforts were rewarded by an election to the Council, The House had the right to elect Councillors subject to the disapproval of the Governor. In this case that disapproval was not long in forthcoming.

Despite his best efforts Adams was rapidly being drawn back into politics. His diary indicates that he knew beforehand that the tea was going to be dumped into Boston Harbor and might have known the names of the perpetrators if he had not deliberately stopped his informants on the ground that he wished to leave himself free to act as counsel if the “Mohawks” were indicted.

The factor which finally brought him back into the position of a popular leader was his knowledge of law. Hutchinson’s recommendation that the judges be brought under control by making their salaries payable out of the British treasury was adopted. Most of the judges were agreeable, for the British idea of appropriate salaries was considerably higher than that of the Massachusetts legislature; in fact, the ground on which the change was defended publicly was that it was necessitated by the niggardly policy of the representatives. Adams later replied to this in a newspaper article by pointing out that ‘‘Low as the wages were, it was found that, whenever a vacancy happened, the place was solicited with much more anxiety and zeal than the kingdom of heaven.”

The change was almost the sole topic of conversation in Boston. In the midst of the excitement Adams attended a large dinner party. One guest after another lamented the measure, but Adams remained silent. Finally, John Winthrop, the professor of philosophy at Harvard, asked Adams if he, too, was not opposed to it. His reply was yes, he agreed that it would lead to all the evils the others had predicted. Had he any remedy to suggest? To the general surprise, his reply again was yes. What was it? Impeach the judges. But the charter did not provide any method of impeachment. It was not necessary, the power was inherent in all legislative assemblies.

It did not take long for this conversation to spread through town. Joseph Hawley, one of the ablest and most level-headed of the men connected with the American Revolution, was the principal representative of the frontier settlements in western Massachusetts. The next day he called on Adams and asked him what he meant by an impeachment. Adams took down Selden from his bookshelf and, after a long conversation, convinced Hawley that it was in order for the House of Representatives to impeach the judges who took the salaries. It was not for nothing that Adams had assembled and studied the best law library in Massachusetts. The House appointed a committee to manage the impeachment and, at Hawley’s insistence, the committee always met at Adams’ house. “Brother Adams,” said a Tory lawyer, “you keep late hours at your house; as I passed it last night long after midnight, I saw your street door vomit forth a crowd of senators.” Neither Sam Adams nor Hancock could conceal his jealousy.

Thus it was that John Adams was again in the revolutionary forefront when the question arose of electing delegates to the first Continental Congress. The election was held behind locked doors while the Governor's secretary stood outside with a message dissolving the House. All agreed that Hancock, as the richest man in the province, should head the delegation, but unfortunately Hancock was sick. The patriots then elected their next richest man, James Bowdoin, in his place. Adams was among the other four members of the delegation. Bowdoin’s “relations thought his great fortune ought not to be hazarded” and he therefore declined. “Cushing, two Adamses, and Paine,” says Adams, “all destitute of fortune, four poor pilgrims, proceeded in one coach” while a prominent Episcopal clergyman in Philadelphia wrote Washington that he understood the Massachusetts delegation consisted of “bankrupts, attorneys, and men of desperate fortunes.”

“There is one ugly reflection,” Adams wrote just before leaving home, “Brutus and Cassius were conquered and slain. Hampden died in the field, Sidney on the scaffold, Harrington in jail, &c. This is cold comfort.”

The task which faced the Massachusetts delegates was different from that which faced the delegates from any other colony. The others came to consult; the Massachusetts men came to beg for help. The Boston tea party had been followed by an act of Parliament closing the port of Boston. The capital had been moved to Salem. The charter government had been overthrown. The governorship was intrusted to Gage, the British commander-in-chief in America. The province was under military rule.

The immediate and most pressing problem was how to avoid famine. Boston was a trading town and closing it as a port meant there was no business for the employers and no work for the employees. Contributions of foodstuffs were pouring in from all the colonies. This, of course, was merely a temporary expedient. The problem which the Massachusetts men faced was to get the other colonies to agree that the quarrel of Massachusetts was the quarrel of America.

Adams was not particularly well-fitted for this. He never showed any great ability to handle men. His judgment was always good on general questions but in debating them he was likely to get excited, and when excited he was very likely to lose his temper. There was no indication on the surface of the cool consideration which he always gave to the facts before coming to a decision on any important question. Casual acquaintances thought of him as impetuous and emotional. He was of medium height and rather broad frame, and was inclined to be fat, but even so, his manners were such as to give the impression of great energy. His face was broad and his forehead high. His eyebrows were heavy and expressive. His eyes were mild and gave the impression of a humorous cast of mind. Many people thought he was a poor judge of men. His historic position is that he was responsible for the appointment of George Washington as commander-in-chief and of John Marshall as chief justice. That would seem to establish a pretty good record on this point.

The reasons why so many of his contemporaries thought differently is quite apparent. Perhaps it was a hangover from the worse side of puritanism—after all, the Tory pamphleteers commonly referred to Adams as “John the Roundhead”—but he always ascribed the worst motives to his opponents. Whenever he was praised for any action he adopted an attitude of extreme and pharisaic modesty; if he was not praised he ascribed the lack of praise to jealousy or some worse motive. He was inclined to think the worst of men, and he was of too open and emotional a nature to be very successful in keeping his opinions to himself. Jefferson’s opinion, after an intimacy of several years, was that “He is vain, irritable and a bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men. This is all the ill which can possibly be said of him. He is as disinterested as the being who made him; he is profound in his views, and accurate in his judgment. . . . He is so amiable, that I pronounce you will love him if ever you become acquainted with him.” In the same letter Jefferson made one other comment about Adams. He said he was lacking in “knowledge of the world.”

This is somewhat like the opinion that he was a poor judge of men. In 1799 Hamilton, Chief Justice Ellsworth, and all Adams’ cabinet united to tell him that a Bourbon restoration in France was imminent. He laughed at them and asked them whether they had ever read Clarendon. Yet Jefferson’s comment was sound and would have been even more sound if made at the period when Adams set off for the first Continental Congress. He had read widely and he had acquired real knowledge from his reading. But he was lacking in that social knowledge which Jefferson had acquired so early.

Even in eighteenth-century America Boston was a backward town, far off the beaten path. It was the only city Adams knew, and he had not mixed much in such society as Boston afforded. This was partly due to his lack of interest, partly to his lowly origin, and partly to his politics. He had not traveled much. His circuit-riding had taken him to Maine and Martha’s Vineyard. He had made one journey to Connecticut, and as a youthful express rider he had been in Rhode Island. This lack of social knowledge appears in many an entry in his diary. It was only a few years since he had written “Dined at Mr. Nick Boylston’s . . . an elegant dinner indeed! Went over the house to view the furniture, which alone cost a thousand pounds sterling.” He had not gone any farther on his way to the Continental Congress than New York before he discovered that Boylston’s luxury was not unique. Their second day in New York the Massachusetts delegates were invited to breakfast by one Scott, at whose house they found “rich plate, a very large silver coffee-pot, a very large silver teapot, napkins of the very finest materials.” They had dinner the same day with one Platt, “the furniture as rich and splendid as any of Mr. Boylston’s.” A few days later, still in New York, they dined “at the most splendid dinner I ever saw.” Adams appreciated the hospitality but on the whole found it “disagreeable,” since “it hinders us from seeing the college, the churches, the printers’ offices, and booksellers’ shops.”

The luxury of New York equalled or exceeded that of Nick Boylston, but the luxury of Philadelphia was really sinful. The night of their arrival they were taken to a tavern, “the most genteel one in America,” where subsequently “a supper appeared as elegant as ever was laid upon a table.” It was only the beginning. Even the Quakers went in for luxury. “But this plain Friend and his plain though pretty wife, with her Thees and Thous, had provided us the most costly entertainment; ducks, hams, chickens, beef, pig, tarts, creams, custards, jellies, fools, trifles, floating islands, beer, porter, punch, wine, and a long etc.” The next day Adams went to “a most sinful feast again.” A few days later he was at “a mighty feast again; nothing less than the very best of Claret, Madeira, and Burgundy; melons, fine beyond description, and pears and peaches as excellent.” He found some comfort in the fact that the preachers in Philadelphia were much inferior to those in Boston.

Adams’ own idea of a dinner which was excellent without being sinful appears from a menu which was served to him in Fishkill a short time later. “It was a feast;—salt pork and cabbage, roast beef and potatoes, and a noble suet pudding, grog, and a glass of Port.”

New Englanders were not popular in the other colonies and there was considerable feeling that there was no reason for anyone to invite trouble by going to their aid. This feeling was so strong that some colonies never did join the common cause. Adams never forgave Barbadoes and Jamaica for what he regarded as their desertion. It was as much their quarrel as it was that of South Carolina. South Carolina may have been closer in miles, but otherwise had much less contact with New England than the British West Indies had. The great New England merchant marine was built up on the carrying of fish, lumber, cattle, and other products to the West Indies to exchange for sugar and molasses. He was not so surprised at the absence of Canada and Nova Scotia. The first, he wrote, “consists chiefly of Frenchmen,” and the second “of a set of fugitives and vagabonds.”

The delegates had scarcely passed the boundaries of New England when they became aware of this feeling. Almost their first visitor in New York was Alexander McDougall, who came to warn them to be cautious; that if it once came to be believed in New York that the dispute might lead to war, the New Yorkers would desert the common cause. Fortunately, the New Yorkers did not know that in going through New Haven Adams had made it a point to visit the grave of one of the regicides who is buried there.

As they approached Philadelphia they were met at Frankfort by Rush, Mifflin, and other leaders of the Sons of Liberty in Pennsylvania who desired a private conference with the Massachusetts delegates. They retired to an upper room in a tavern where Rush and Mifflin warned Adams and his colleagues that the idea of independence was as unpopular in Pennsylvania as the Stamp Act. They were told plainly that Massachusetts was suspected of hankering after independence and that if it once appeared that the Massachusetts delegates were taking a leading part in the Congress, some of the other colonies might withdraw.

Adams found some kindred spirits in the Congress, notably Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, with each of whom he became very friendly, but on the whole the meeting was under the control of the moderate elements whose leader was John Dickinson. Most of the time Adams had difficulty in restraining his impatience with what he regarded as the timidity of the majority. He already expressed the opinion to his intimates that it would be necessary to fight, but Henry was the only one in the Congress who agreed with him.

The delegates never had to pass on the question. When the second Continental Congress met, the shot heard round the world had been fired. Gage had stirred up a hornet’s nest and there were soon twenty thousand angry men in the vicinity of Cambridge. New England militia, unlike that of the South, was a respectable force. All able-bodied men in Massachusetts were members of the militia. Each man was required to provide his own musket and certain other equipment and to appear for drill at stated times, known as training days. The militia elected its own officers.

Men who had been trained in this democratic form of military organization easily organized themselves into an army. But there was no one to support this army. For the time being, it lived on donated provisions. It had only two pieces of artillery, which were given the names Hancock and Adams. The army was very short of powder and there was no apparent source from which it could replenish its supply.

The second Congress was faced with the problem of what attitude it should adopt towards this army. The Congress was not a governing body; it was never intended that it should do any governing. It was an irregularly organized convention to formulate public opinion. Yet if some form of government did not adopt this army it would dissolve. There were many members of Congress who would have liked to see this happen. Lexington and Concord had thrilled many throughout the colonies, but they had also disgusted many. Into what kind of a scrape are these wild men in Massachusetts getting us? Better draw back in time and let Massachusetts pay for its own folly. The opinion was still general that no American army could stand before British regulars. That was part of the colonial feeling of inferiority, whose existence Adams always resented so bitterly. What to do? Could the Congress be persuaded to declare itself, in effect, a government, and adopt the army? Adams doubted it. The army was too much a New England affair. The problem still was to get the support of the other colonies.

Personal ambitions were already raising complications. The army was commanded by Artemas Ward, an experienced old soldier who was very popular in New England. Hancock, who was now in the Congress, wanted to be the commander-in-chief. He was very popular in Massachusetts and he thought he could get the army to elect him. Patrick Henry was another politician who fancied himself as a general. Then there were several professional soldiers who had their backers. The chief of these was Charles Lee, who had behind him the prestige of having been a lieutenant-colonel in the British army and a general in a Polish civil war.

As Adams saw it, the only way to get the other colonies thoroughly involved was to select a general from outside New England. But the problem was how to get a New England army to accept him. The New England militia had always cherished the right to elect its own officers. Would the soldiers tamely surrender this right because they were told they were fighting for freedom? When a lot of strange officers appeared in Cambridge with commissions from the Congress, would not the reaction of the soldiers be to pack up and go home? If they did so there was nothing that could be done about it. Adams decided the risk had to be taken; he always regarded this decision as the most dangerous he ever made.

He had become acquainted at the first Congress with a Colonel Washington, one of the Virginian delegates. He knew of Washington’s military record. It was fair but no better than that of many other militia officers. It included one surrender. But as Adams studied Washington in the Congress and at the numerous social functions which were given for the delegates, he gradually came to the conclusion that Washington was one Virginian whom New England soldiers might be induced to obey. He sounded the Virginia delegates and found that several of them did not think Washington qualified. Nevertheless, Adams persevered in his opinion that Washington was the man. One morning he took Sam Adams for a walk in the courtyard of the State House before the opening of the Congress and outlined his reasoning and conclusion. Sam Adams said nothing. When the Congress met, John Adams arose and made a speech in which he advocated the adoption of the army and the naming of a commander by the Congress. No one seemed to listen with more pleasure than Hancock who was presiding “but,” Adams wrote, “when I came to describe Washington for the commander, I never remarked a more sudden and striking change of countenance.” Hancock never forgave him but, after Hancock’s death, Adams berated a historian for not sufficiently appreciating the services of the rich merchant.

This action was typical of the aggressive position which Adams occupied in the second Congress. He was among the first to advocate opening relations with foreign countries. This was opposed by many on the ground it was a step toward independence. This was the real reason he advocated it, although it was not the reason it was finally adopted. The majority hoped to obtain military help from France. Adams did not want military help. He regarded the desire for it as a manifestation of the colonial sense of inferiority. He wanted Americans to be men, to fight their own battles and to stay clear of Europe. “America,” he wrote a few years later, “has been the sport of European wars and politics long enough.” For this reason he never entirely approved of the treaty of alliance which Franklin negotiated with France.

Above all, Adams wanted to make the colonies internally self-governing. Even if there was a reconciliation with Great Britain, it would have to be on the basis of internal self-government. This view he set forth in a letter written in July, 1775. “We ought to have had in our hands, a month ago, the whole legislative, executive, and judicial of the whole continent.” The letter was intercepted by the British and published. “I was avoided,” wrote Adams later, “like a man infected with the leprosy. I walked the streets of Philadelphia in solitude, borne down by the weight of care and unpopularity.” This remark is substantiated by the testimony of others. The people preferred the experiment of fighting a war without a government.

It was characteristic of Adams that he was not content with committing these radical sentiments to paper. In the same letter he attributed their non-acceptance to the influence of a “certain great fortune and piddling genius,” that is, John Dickinson. The consequence was another life-long enemy.

Whether or not anybody was willing to admit it, the Congress was now a government and a very poorly organized one. There was plenty of work to be done, and Adams was the man to do it. He was put on all the important committees and always was the working member. Never had he worked so hard. He had no assistance, not even a clerk. It was this sheer ability to labor which pushed him forward in the Congress as much as anything else. The reputation which he was rapidly acquiring appeared forcefully when, at the end of 1775, the legislature of North Carolina instructed its delegates in the Congress to obtain Adams’ views as to a proper constitution of government for their colony.

Meanwhile the stupidities of the British government and the brutalities of the British troops were rapidly advancing the cause of independence. Before leaving for the first Congress Adams had moved his family back to Braintree as a place of safety, and the letters he now received from his wife are full of accounts of British atrocities. In November, 1775, she reached the turning point. ‘I could not join to-day, in the petitions of our worthy pastor, for a reconciliation between our no longer parent state, but tyrant state, and these colonies. Let us separate; they are unworthy to be our brethren. Let us renounce them; and, instead of supplications as formerly, for their prosperity and happiness, let us beseech the Almighty to blast their counsels, and bring to nought all their devices.” Others were reacting in the same way and in June of 1776 Adams was able to write to Patrick Henry, “The dons, the bashaws, the grandees, the patricians, the sachems, the nabobs, call them by what name you please, sigh, and groan, and fret, and sometimes stamp, and foam, and curse, but all in vain. The decree is gone forth, and it cannot be recalled, that a more equal liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth, must be established in America.”

He would so have loved to write the great Declaration. But it was still the primary duty of Massachusetts men to hold Virginia in line.

Shortly after the Declaration, a Board of War was set up to manage military matters. Adams was chairman. He was accustomed to doing a good job, but the attempt to act as a minister of war without materials or proper assistance nearly killed him. He went for months without exercise, without even mounting a horse. He had trouble with his eyes, trouble which was to recur as he grew older. He longed to get back to the practice of the law. His only reward for all his labor was a small per diem from the state on which, with all his frugality, he could scarcely maintain himself. His family lived on the proceeds of his farm. He did not want anything from his public employment. He had been elected the first Chief Justice when the state government was organized. He had nominally accepted, for he wanted to encourage men to take offices in the revolutionary governments. He never sat and soon resigned. Meanwhile, he implored the new state government to send someone to the Congress in his place. He was relieved in November, 1777.

Relations between France and the United States had started off badly. With the best intentions on both sides, everything seemed to get into hopeless confusion. It was the policy of the Congress to have the United States represented in Paris by a commission. A few days after he left York, Pennsylvania, where the Congress was then sitting, Adams was elected a member of this commission by a divided vote, on the nomination of Elbridge Gerry.

Adams was trying an admiralty case in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when the news reached him. He had had a little vacation from his gruelling labor in the Congress and had had an opportunity to learn that while trying admiralty cases might be easier, it was also duller. There was his strong sense of duty, and there was the temptation of a new field of activity. He accepted.

In February, 1778, he sailed from Nantasket Road on the American frigate Boston with his ten-year-old son, John Quincy, and his servant, Joseph Stevens. When the captain, Tucker, returned to America, he appeared before the navy board and reported in regard to Adams that “I did not say much to him at first, but damn my eyes, I found him after a while as sociable as any Marblehead man.”

Even as a young man Adams had some reading knowledge of French. He studied it out of books on the way over and had opportunities to try conversation with the two or three French officers aboard the Boston, but when he arrived in Bordeaux he could still neither talk nor understand. One of the first to greet him was the Premier President of the Parliament, who kissed him and assured him (so Adams understood from the subsequent translation) that “he had long felt for me an affection resembling that of a brother.” He was to go through worse experiences.

It was customary for the French royal family to dine occasionally in public. This was known as a grand couvert. The royal family did its eating on a stage which was surrounded with benches occupied exclusively by ladies. The men of the court and the populace stood and gazed. Adams went to stare with the rest. He was recognized and by the king’s order placed on the front bench on the stage between two duchesses. Most of the audience had seen the king imbibe soup before, but very few of them had ever seen a Massachusetts puritan. “I found myself gazed at,” Adams recorded in his diary that night, “as we in America used to gaze at the sachems who came to make speeches to us in Congress, but I thought it very hard if I could not command as much power of face as one of the chiefs of the Six Nations, and, therefore, determined that I would assume a cheerful countenance, enjoy the scene around me, and observe it as coolly as an astronomer contemplates the stars.” There were other strange customs. A secretary of state showed Adams his rock garden and explained with pride that it had cost “thousands of guineas.” Why anyone should pay money for rocks was beyond the comprehension of a Massachusetts mind. “I told him,” says Adams, “I would sell him a thousand times as many for half a guinea.”

His fellow commissioners were Franklin and Arthur Lee. They had agreed only to disagree. Each maintained a house in a rather elaborate style, which Adams considered a great extravagance. He took up his residence with Franklin but he did not join the latter in his social activities. Adams was studying French day and night and soon decided that the best method was to attend the theatre with a copy of the play and to follow the actors in the text. He was determined not to put the government to any unnecessary expense, so he only went out when the carriage which Franklin was already keeping was available. As Franklin went out a good deal, this did not happen very often. Rumors had reached America of Franklin’s success with the women of France, and Mrs. James Warren, one of Adams’ really extraordinary number of female correspondents, wrote to inquire whether he was equally successful. “The ladies of this country. Madam,” he replied, “have an unaccountable passion for old age.” He then went on to relate that he had been introduced to a lady as the colleague of Franklin. She said she was enchanted to meet him. “Then embrace him,” said the introducer. “Oh, no,” she said, “he is too young.”

Adams did his best to be neutral between Franklin and Lee. He was inclined to favor the former but he was convinced “that however difficult Mr. Lee’s temper might be . . . he was an honest man.” Yet he was extremely jealous of the reputation that Franklin had acquired in France. He was convinced that Franklin did not speak French “grammatically . . . His pronunciation, too, upon which the French gentlemen and ladies compliment him . . . I am sure is very far from being exact.” When a Frenchman eulogized Franklin to Adams as the “legislator of America,” Adams replied that “he did not even make the constitution of Pennsylvania, bad as it is.”

Adams, as usual, was the working member of the commission. He was horrified at the confusion which he found. Night after night his diary shows him turning down social invitations to stay home and work. He recognized one of the sources of the difficulties and recommended to the Congress that the commission be abolished and Franklin be left alone as minister plenipotentiary. This advice was followed and in the summer of I779 Adams returned to America. He had progressed so rapidly in French that his parting conversation with Vergennes was conducted in that language and, Adams noted in his diary, “I found I could talk as fast as I pleased.”

He remained in America just long enough to draft a constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and then, on some premature peace hopes, the Congress sent him back to Europe to negotiate a treaty with Great Britain. This time he took his younger son Charles, as well as John Quincy, with him. Mrs. Adams remained in Braintree with their daughter and the youngest son, Thomas Boylston.

When Adams reached Paris he found that there was no indication the British were yet ready to negotiate. Henry Laurens had been appointed minister to the Netherlands but had been captured at sea by the British and thrown into the Tower of London. In order to keep himself occupied Adams now proposed to perform the duties which had been intended for Laurens.

Adams’ opinion of Vergennes was that he might be a great statesman when dealing with absolute monarchs but that he knew nothing about dealing with a free people. Vergennes’ opinion of Adams was that he was altogether too much inclined to butt into things that were none of his business. The two were soon on bad terms but it was not a clash of personalities. The issue was fundamental. Vergennes naturally looked on the new states as part of the European state system and expected them to grow up to be at least part of the French sphere of influence or possibly even semi-protectorates. This was not the kind of independence Adams wanted. He wanted the United States to be independent not only of Great Britain but of Europe. “The United States of America” he wrote to Vergennes, “are a great and powerful people, whatever European statesmen may think of them.”

The concrete question on which they clashed was Adams’ desire to attempt to induce the Dutch to recognize the United States. Such recognition would open the capital market of Amsterdam to American loans and would lead to direct commercial intercourse between the two countries—both of which would lessen the dependence on France. No country but France had yet recognized the United States. Jay was to spend two weary years in vain trying to get recognition from France’s ally, Spain.

Vergennes thought it impossible to obtain recognition from the Dutch. England and Holland had been allies for nearly a hundred years and English influence was very strong in the Netherlands. That country had one of the most complicated constitutions ever devised. It was a federal republic with the Prince of Orange as hereditary chief magistrate. The Prince was completely under British influence but foreign affairs were conducted directly with the States-General.

Adams tackled this problem not like a diplomatist trained at Versailles but like a modern propagandist. Holland was one of the few places in Europe with a free press, but the newspapers relied on English sources for their news about the American war. Adams soon saw to it that they had something else to print. He could not gain access to court circles but he had no difficulty in meeting bankers and merchants. They all wanted to hear about the possibilities of doing business in America. He told them. He obtained recognition. What is more, he floated an issue of United States guilder bonds in Amsterdam and on very good terms. The Netherlands was the only country besides France which recognized the United States before the end of the war. Vergennes could only congratulate him.

Meanwhile, the French minister in Philadelphia, acting on instructions from Paris, was endeavoring to have Adams recalled. It was clear to Vergennes that in any peace negotiations which might arise, it would be impossible for him to control Adams. The Congress listened so far as to revoke the old appointment and appoint a commission headed by Adams to negotiate the peace. The other members were Franklin, Jay, Jefferson, and Laurens. Further to please the French, the hands of this commission were tied by an instruction that its members were to make the most candid and confidential communications upon all subjects to the ministers of our generous ally, the King of France; to undertake nothing . . . without their knowledge and concurrence; and ultimately to govern yourselves by their advice and opinion.” Adams thought these instructions disgraceful.

He had never had much use for Jay; when they were in the Congress together Adams had classified him with the trimmers. But when Adams now reached Paris from Holland to meet with the other members of the commission he found that Jay had taken upon himself to open negotiations with the British and that he was conducting those negotiations without the knowledge of the French and in direct violation of the instructions of the Congress. Adams was delighted and ever after regarded Jay with the highest esteem. Franklin did not approve of this conduct but Adams and Jay outvoted him. Franklin then acquiesced. Laurens did not arrive until the negotiations were completed and Jefferson did not succeed in leaving America on account of the British blockade.

They obtained marvelous terms. They were dealing with a very shaky cabinet which had come into office on the principle that a stop had to be put to the disastrous war. The American negotiators knew this and took the utmost advantage of it. As for the British cabinet, it soon went the way of cabinets which sign treaties that admit defeat. The Tories returned to office and set about looking for pretexts for not carrying out the treaty. When Vergennes read the treaty he could not believe his eyes.

Technically, it was only a preliminary treaty. The treaty of alliance which Franklin had made with France forbade the making of peace by one power without the other. The commissioners therefore waited in Europe for the approval of their work by the Congress and the negotiation of terms between the other belligerents. Now that the ocean was again about to be safe, Adams sent for his wife.

Paris was the scene of all the negotiations and was full of diplomatists. Previously, the representatives of the neutrals had been very careful not to get themselves involved with the Americans. Now they all treated Adams as a colleague. As the head of the American commission he was given the chief credit for the treaty. Everywhere he went compliments were showered upon him. He was honest enough to enter in his diary that these compliments more properly belonged to Jay but he could not help also saying that ‘a few of these compliments would kill Franklin, if they should come to his ears.”

The Congress rewarded him with an appointment as minister to Great Britain. His wife was not in favor of his accepting, but he did so. It was not so many years since George III had offered to pardon all the rebels in America with the exception of John Adams and a few others.

The Duke of Dorset, the British ambassador in Paris, warned him that he would be “stared at a great deal.” So Adams found. The Government officials in London adopted an attitude of frigid politeness. The diplomatic corps treated him as one of themselves, but the English fled from him. He records that at a ball at the French ambassador’s it was only with difficulty that two English lords could be found bold enough to be seen speaking to him in public. The English would certainly have been surprised if they had known the reason he ascribed in his diary for their timidity. “This people cannot look me in the face; there is conscious guilt and shame in their countenances when they look at me. They feel that they have behaved ill, and that I am sensible of it.”

His diplomatic efforts were fruitless. He was supposed to induce the British to carry out the treaty of peace and to make a commercial treaty. They had no intention of carrying out the peace treaty and no intention of making any more treaties with the Americans. For a strange delusion had seized the British. They were convinced that the poor deluded colonials would find it impossible to govern themselves; that in a few years American legislatures would be imploring George III to send over governors again. Incredible as it may seem, this nonsense was taken seriously. It was one of the causes of the War of 1812.

Adams was so disgusted with England that he was determined under no circumstances to accept a reappointment. He returned to the United States at the end of his term and arrived while the first elections under the new constitution were taking place. In the first few presidential elections the system of electoral colleges actually worked. Without campaigning, he was elected Vice-President. It was not until several years later that he discovered that Hamilton had exerted himself to induce the electors to give their second votes to someone other than Adams.

He had more to do as Vice-President than most of his successors were to have. The unanimous election of Washington for each of his two terms has obscured the lack of political harmony during his administration. Many of the most vital measures passed at this time passed by the narrowest of votes. More than twenty times Adams had an opportunity to cast the deciding vote in the Senate. On these occasions he did not have to be sent for. Unlike his successors, he believed it to be his duty personally to be in the chair whenever the Senate was in session.

Within the framework of the constitution there is room for wide variations in governmental practice, and at first it appeared that the cabinet was going to assume a place in America comparable to that it occupied in England. Washington not only asked the advice of his cabinet but took a vote and decided accordingly. It was the same trait in his character which several times during the war had made him conform to a decision reached by a majority vote in a council of general officers even when it was contrary to his own opinion. All this makes it very strange that Adams was never invited into the cabinet. On only one occasion, when a crisis arose in Washington’s absence, did he direct the cabinet to consult the Vice-President.

The two men respected one another but they were never exactly friends. Adams always had a little too much of the “I made that man” attitude toward Washington. Yet Washington was above such things. The true reason Adams was never consulted was that Hamilton saw to it that he was not. For the first few years Adams did not suspect what was going on—in fact, he developed a considerable liking for Hamilton. When Adams discovered that it was not reciprocated he could not understand the reason. He had forgotten the record.

Schuyler was Hamilton’s father-in-law and when Burgoyne marched down from Canada, Schuyler was in command of the American troops which opposed him. He had a creditable record and enjoyed the confidence of Washington. Yet the Congress intervened for the purpose of sending Gates to supersede Schuyler. Gates arrived on the northern front just in time to reap the glory of a victory which others had won, Adams had been instrumental in substituting Gates for Schuyler. He never admitted any lack of confidence himself in that general but claimed the New England militia would not join an army commanded by Schuyler.

Maclay, the people’s senator, who was so severely critical of Jefferson’s “high-tone” was equally critical of Adams. It was soon believed in the South and West that the Vice-President never appeared in public without a coach-and-six. Pomposity and ostentation were new charges to bring against him. A short time previously, Jefferson, in complaining of his inability to live on his salary in Paris, explained that the reason Adams was able to live on his salary in London was that he was “careless of appearances” and was content with “a very plain stile of life.” Had his election as "Vice-President turned his head? It hardly seems likely. It appears from his diary that when at Braintree in the summertime he would sometimes join his farm hands in chopping down trees and building fences. He forbade any of the family, except his wife, to take the carriage (which was not drawn by six horses) to church because of the inconvenience it would occasion to the crowd of pedestrians. His wife wrote to their daughter that the daughter’s son John, who was staying with his grandparents, “spent an hour this afternoon in driving his grandpapa round the room with a willow stick.” A few weeks later young John discovered another amusement. “Every day, after dinner, he sets his grandpapa to draw him about in a chair, which is generally done for half an hour, to the derangement of my carpet and the amusement of his grandpapa.” There were neither reporters nor photographers in those days.

Adams had one great failing for a politician. He was addicted to writing. That might have been all right if he had said nothing but unfortunately for him his writings were profound. He was really a very great political philosopher. The trouble a great political philosopher has in politics is that only an infinitesimal proportion of the electorate will read his books while his opponents can always pick out isolated sentences and phrases with which to deceive the majority. Mrs. Adams wrote one of their sons that the newspapers were attacking her husband by “making quotations of detached sentences, as the atheist endeavoured to prove from scripture that ‘there is no God’ by omitting, ‘the fool hath said in his heart.’ ”

This is particularly easy to do with Adams’ books. He himself wrote on one occasion “I write too much to write well, and have never time to correct any thing.” Anyone who reads his published writings will agree that what they need is “correction.” They are reminiscent of no classical author so much as Clarendon. There is the same jumble of brilliant sentences and passages with passages which should certainly have been omitted; the same lack of organization, of editorship.

The problem which chiefly concerned Adams was the problem of power. He did not entirely agree with Jefferson that “knaves will always be uppermost.” “It is weakness rather than wickedness,” Adams wrote, “which renders men unfit to be trusted with unlimited power.” He believed in frequent elections and had no use for the then prevailing conservative inclination in America for indirect elections. Even before the signing of the Declaration of Independence he wrote to R. H. Lee that the new state constitutions should provide for the election of the governor by the people at large. This was as contrary to the prevailing radical thought of the day as it was to the conservative. What passed for the progressive and liberal thinkers of the time were all obsessed by the notion that a republican government was a government in which all authority was centered in a deliberative assembly. If it was necessary at all to have such an official as a governor he should be appointed by the assembly and be given only very limited powers.

Great interest was taken in France in the American state constitutions. Adams’ diary when in Paris contains an entry, “The Duke de la Rochefoucauld made me a visit to-day, and desired me to explain to him some passages in the Connecticut Constitution which were obscure to him.” As a whole, the French philosophers did not approve of these constitutions. Turgot published his criticisms. He said that the American constitutions were pedantic imitations of the British; that when the sovereignty rested in the people all power should be vested in an assembly of one chamber representing the people.

This publication produced Adams' greatest literary effort, his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America in three stout volumes, the first of which was published in London in 1787. It appeared in America just before the meeting of the federal constitutional convention and was immediately republished in three separate editions in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, respectively. A French translation appeared in Paris in 1794 and new editions in London in 1794 and in Philadelphia in 1797. Adams sent Jefferson a copy of the first edition and the latter replied that he had read it with “infinite satisfaction and improvement” and that he hoped that it would become “an institute for our politicians.” The only thing he criticized was Adams’ statement that the Continental Congress was “not a legislative, but a diplomatic assembly.”

In this work Adams attacked Turgot slightly on the basis of his own experience. “No man who has not seen the inside of such an assembly, can conceive the confusion, uncertainty, and procrastination.” In the Continental Congress “it was generally agreed that the appointment of officers by lot would have been a more rational method” than their election by the Congress.

He attacked him more on the theoretical side. “A simple democracy by representation is a contradiction in terms.” Even before the Declaration of Independence he had inquired in a private letter, “How . . . does the right arise in the majority to govern the minority . . . Whence arises the right of the men to govern the women . . . Whence the right of the old to bind the young . . . ?”

The major part of these three volumes was devoted to an analysis of history. He examined every republican or quasi-republican constitution of which he knew. His first conclusion was that whenever all power has been vested in an assembly the members of that assembly have used their power to perpetuate themselves in office. His second conclusion is now a commonplace. It was that the reason for the rise of absolute monarchies in Europe was that the people preferred an absolute monarch to a government of nobles. He discussed particularly Poland, which was then an aristocratic republic, and came to the conclusion that the peasantry of that country would be better off if it were an absolute monarchy. He examined Roman history with an attitude which was at the time completely unorthodox. He pointed out that the classical Latin historians almost without exception were “republicans,” that is, supporters of the Senate. Time and again, in the days of the Roman republic, individuals had arisen who had demanded a more equal division of wealth. Each time they had been accused of aspiring to the kingship, and each time they had been killed judicially or otherwise. He noted that the reason Caesar had overthrown the Roman republic was that he was the champion of the common people against the Senate.

Translated into modern terminology, his view was that any assembly will be an assembly of special interests; that the only hope the people have is in a powerful, individual executive elected directly by the people, who will act in the interests of the nation as a whole rather than in those of any special group. That seems to be the general opinion of the American electorate after an experience of a century and a half.

Jackson was the first President to appreciate the possibilities of the office but those possibilities only existed because of Adams. He was alone in the early days in his insistence upon a strong, individual executive, and the American presidency is the direct result of his influence.

He did not have any greater faith in the integrity of such an executive than he had in the integrity of an absolute assembly. Both would seek to perpetuate themselves in power. The remedy? A balance. “Longitude, and the philosophers stone,” he wrote to Roger Sherman a few years later, “have not been sought with more earnestness by philosophers than a guardian of the laws has been studied by legislators from Plato to Montesquieu; but every project has been found to be no better than committing the lamb to the custody of the wolf, except that one which is called a balance of power?" It should be noted that Adams never took the judiciary into account in weighting his balance.

There is another peculiarity. He was not content with a balance of assembly versus executive. His conception of a balance was of two houses of assembly and an individual executive. It was essential to his plan that the executive power should be lodged in an individual and that he should have an absolute veto on all legislation.

This may be termed the practical aspect of his political philosophy. To learn the reason for his insistence on two houses of assembly it is necessary to go into the theoretical aspect. This is easier to understand from his letters than from the Defence.

Adams was in principle throughout life an equalitarian. One of the reasons he was so unpopular in Philadelphia in the early days of the Revolution was that it was rumored that he was a “leveller.” “Power,” he wrote, anticipating later thought which does not recognize him as its ancestor, “always follows property. This I believe to be as infallible a maxim in politics, as that action and reaction are equal, is in mechanics.” He did not believe it possible to maintain an absolute equality of wealth but where he anticipated later thought was in arguing that even if such equality were attainable it would not by itself be sufficient to create an equalitarian society. He illustrated his point from the colonial history of Massachusetts. He pointed out that for the most part the powerful ministerial families had always been poor. He pointed out the strong appeal which the family name Winthrop had always had for Massachusetts voters. He pointed out the superior advantages for worldly education and the making of connections which the sons of important men necessarily enjoy. He recognized that money is the great destroyer of family influence. So what should be done about family influence when an approximate equality of wealth has been established? He could find only one answer—a community of wives.

In his old age he tried to discuss this conclusion in his letters to Jefferson but the latter only responded with an attitude of horror. When Dwight announced that the election of Jefferson meant that “the ties of marriage” were “destroyed,” he was pointing his cannon in the wrong direction.

Even an equal division of property and the abolition of marriage would not establish equality. There were still the inequalities of abilities, personalities and, above all, education. Again Adams turned to Massachusetts and concluded that while that state was in form a representative democracy, in practice it was an oligarchy of Harvard men.

His ultimate conclusion therefore was that it is impossible to create a completely equalitarian society. Some individuals will always have more influence than others. The individuals of greater influence he denominated “natural aristocrats” and he defined an aristocrat as a “man who can command or influence two votes one besides his own.” While an equalitarian, he did not regard equality as the end but rather as a means to an end. His ultimate objective was liberty, an equal liberty for all. He defined that word of many meanings, as “a power to do as we would be done by.’’

His analysis is unanswerable but his solution is more questionable. It is to divide the assembly into two houses of equal power. The upper house should be so constituted as to attract the natural aristocrats while the lower house consists of common people. In view of his familiarity with Greek thought, it is surprising he did not suggest an elective upper house and a lower house chosen by lot.

The only objection he made to the constitution of the United States when he first read it was to the power of the Senate over appointments to office. Practical experience confirmed this objection.

It is easy to see what the scurrilous sheets which then went by the name of newspapers could make of this. They did not know about his theories of marriage but they did know that he said there was a natural aristocracy in every country, including the United States. Everybody knew this was not so. No American was called lord. Clearly what Adams wanted to do was to talk the American people into introducing a house of lords.

This was not the immediate reaction to the publication of the Defence, This opinion as to his beliefs arose later because of Adams’ alleged lack of sympathy with the French revolution. That alleged lack of sympathy was not based on any love of the Ancien Regime but on the belief that no revolution could come to any good end which was under the influence of the politically immature ideas of Turgot, Condorcet, Helvetius and company. The real split between Adams and the Frenchmen and between Adams and Jefferson was this: Jefferson and the Frenchmen believed all men are born equal and are made unequal by law; Adams believed that in every known form of society men are actually born unequal and that it is necessary for the state to take affirmative action to make them as equal as possible.

Adams was never able to get Jefferson to come to grips on the real issue between them. Even in their old-age reconciliation Jefferson persisted in asserting that there was no use getting into an argument over the question whether or not an aristocracy existed in the United States, since it clearly did not. Has not, Adams wrote back, ‘‘an aristocracy of land-jobbers and stock-jobbers” already been “entailed upon us to endless generations”?

Over twenty-five years after the first publication of the Defence, Taylor of Caroline published a stout volume attacking Adams for his alleged advocacy of aristocracy. A certain restraint on both sides is apparent in the old-age correspondence of Adams and Jefferson. Adams did not feel the same restraint in writing to Taylor. “Permit me to ask you,” he wrote, “whether the descent of lands and goods and chattels does not constitute a hereditary order as decidedly as the descent of stars and garters?” It infuriated him that a great slaveowner like Taylor should say there was no aristocratic element in American society. He asked Taylor almost in so many words whether he, Taylor, would ever have been a United States senator if he had not married a wealthy heiress. “If you complain that this is personal, I confess it, and intend it should be personal, that it might be more striking to you.” He asked some other questions. “Would Washington have ever been commander of the revolutionary army or president of the United States, if he had not married the rich widow of Mr. Custis? Would Jefferson ever have been president of the United States if he had not married the daughter of Mr. Wales?”

Taylor’s nearest approach to coming to grips on the real issue was to state that while Adams’ theories might apply to the ancients, they did not apply to a nation which enjoyed a free press. “Property,” Adams replied, “is aristocracy, and . . . property commands the press . . . The types, the machinery, the office, the apprentices, the journeymen require a capital, and that capital is aristocracy.”

Adams lived a rather isolated life during the Washington administration. Always an individualist, he did not belong to any political group. He did not entirely approve of everything he saw going on. He particularly did not like the financial policy of the federal government. “Funds and banks,” he wrote later, “I never approved, or was satisfied with our funding system; it was founded in no consistent principle; it was contrived to enrich particular individuals at the public expense. Our whole banking system I ever abhorred, I continue to abhor, and shall die abhorring.” Yet when Washington refused to serve again, the group in office could see no other possible candidate. Hamilton tried his best to find someone else but finally realized that there were only two possibilities, Adams and Jefferson, The first was elected President and the latter Vice-President. The majority was narrow. With bitterness, Adams always referred to himself as a “President of three votes,” his majority in the electoral college.

He had arrived at an impossible situation. He always bitterly resented the statement that Washington's administration was non-party and that his was the first party administration. If his administration was a party administration it certainly was not administered by a party to which Adams belonged. His first difficulty was that which every President since has faced who has come into office with the blessing of his predecessor. Should he retain the same cabinet? If he did not, there would be a universal outcry that his action was an implied criticism of Washington. The effect of this can best be appreciated by considering that however much in fact Jefferson criticized Washington, Jefferson would never admit it.

Politically, the cabinet had no strength. None of its members had any great ability. From the standpoint of a New England president it was badly distributed geographically. The cabinet had only four members, and of these, the two principal were Timothy Pickering, the Secretary of State, and Oliver Wolcott, the Secretary of the Treasury— both New Englanders. McHenry, the Secretary of War, was utterly incompetent, which fact Washington, who had appointed him, soon found out. Charles Lee, the Attorney-General, was a cipher.

Pickering, Wolcott, and McHenry were completely under the influence of Hamilton. They had no feeling of loyalty for Adams and no respect for his judgment. They were convinced that the true policy of the United States was to ally itself as closely as possible with England. It was another manifestation of that colonial spirit which Adams had fought all his life. In this instance, it was aggravated by the feeling that it was the moral duty of the United States to aid England in its holy war in defense of civilization against the Reign of Terror. Everything that transpired in the cabinet, however confidential, was promptly written to Hamilton, who was practicing law in New York. Hamilton would, in reply, direct the cabinet members how to vote. All of them believed that the executive power was vested in the cabinet as a whole. Most of the Federalist senators were similarly under Hamilton’s influence. “I had all the officers,” said Adams later, “and half the crew always ready to throw me overboard.”

Adams by now was very much alone. His old friends and associates from the early Continental Congresses had nearly all died or left public office. He had not established any intimacy with the younger group. He was so disgusted at being a “President of three votes” that he took no pleasure in the office. His wife was very ill during much of his administration, and he spent as much time as he could with her at Quincy. As a result of all this, it was a long time before he discovered what was going on—in fact, he never did learn that Wolcott was in the plot.

Jefferson was much better acquainted with the situation. Throughout the four years of Adams’ administration he flirted with the idea of aligning himself with Adams against the Anglophiles. Even on the eve of the next presidential election Senator Smith of Maryland, a Jeffersonian stalwart, approached Stoddert, one of Adams’ few loyal supporters, with a suggestion that the Jeffersonians might support Adams for re-election if he made certain changes in his cabinet. Before Stoddert had an opportunity to communicate this to Adams, it became apparent that Jefferson was going to be elected.

Adams was a President without a party. The group which denominated itself “Federalist” nominally supported him. It did so only because it could find nobody else who was “available.” While Adams had no political friends, he had a real hold on the electorate. The Hamiltonians, for example, controlled financial Boston but they knew that Adams had an unequalled voting strength among the common people in every village of the state. This was generally true throughout New England. He also had a real attraction for the voters in some other states, particularly North Carolina.

He had scarcely become President when, as a result of the XYZ affair, the United States found itself involved in a war with France. The Anglophiles were delighted. It was the great opportunity to draw closer to England and to join the crusade for civilization. Adams recommended to Congress the building of as large a navy as possible and the raising of a few regiments of artillery to protect the seacoast. Hamilton wrote to his followers that the thing to do was to raise an army of fifty thousand men, ten thousand of whom should be cavalry. He neglected to mention how this army was going to get at the French. In truth, the Hamiltonians wanted an army principally to keep down rebellion at home—they saw French-inspired revolutions in every corner of the land. Hamilton himself had some vague ideas of conquests in Latin America. Without consulting the President, Congress provided for an army somewhat smaller than Hamilton wanted.

While the army was being organized, Talleyrand indirectly conveyed the information to Adams that France would like to discuss peace. The President jumped at the opportunity. War with France was contrary to his strongest convictions in regard to an appropriate foreign policy for the United States. His first principle was to stay out of all European squabbles; his second, that if by any chance we got involved, France was our natural ally. Against the utmost opposition from his cabinet and the other Anglophiles, he sent envoys to France. The envoys succeeded in making a peace.

It was an act for which the Federalists never forgave him. They charged him with making peace against the advice of his cabinet, to which he replied that the responsibility was his, not his cabinet’s. Years after his retirement they still attacked him for making peace. “Sir,” he wrote to one Federalist historian who had asked him if he had never repented, “I desire no other inscription over my gravestone than: ‘Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of the peace with France in the year 1800.’ ”

In other respects he offended the Federalists. They were eternally looking for rebellions; for opportunities to show the might of the federal government. The Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania had furnished such an opportunity in Washington’s time; the new taxes which were necessary to support the army to fight the French occasioned fresh riots in Pennsylvania. One Fries and others were arrested for these riots and convicted of treason. The Federalists clamored for their execution as an “example.” Against the unanimous opinion of his cabinet Adams pardoned them. It was another one of his offenses. “I pardoned Fries,” he wrote later, “and what would a triumphant, victorious, and intoxicated party . . . have done with honest Judge Chase and Judge Peters, if I had hanged him? . . . What good, what example would have been exhibited to the nation by the execution of three or four obscure, miserable Germans . . . ?”

Before Adams left office he discovered the treachery of his cabinet. McHenry was the first to go. Adams then demanded Pickering’s resignation. It was refused.

Adams’ letter to Pickering asking him to resign is signed “your most obedient and humble servant.” Pickering’s written refusal to do so called forth the following letter:

Sir,—Divers causes and considerations, essential to the administration of the government, in my judgment, requiring a change in the department of State, you are hereby discharged from any further service as Secretary of State.

John Adams, 

       President of the United States

Adams had discovered one man among the Federalists who saw eye-to-eye with him. He was a Virginian congressman named John Marshall. When Adams dismissed McHenry he offered Marshall the vacant office. It was refused. When Pickering was dismissed, Adams again turned to Marshall. This time the latter accepted. When, shortly after, the chief justiceship became vacant, the Federalists, through their control of the Senate, tried to force Adams to appoint Justice Paterson. The President won, and Marshall became Chief Justice just before Jefferson became President.

“I left my country,” Adams later wrote in summing up his administration, “in peace and harmony with all the world, and after all my extravagant expenses’ and wanton waste of public money,’ I left navy yards, fortifications, frigates, timber, naval stores, manufactories of cannon and arms, and a treasury full of five millions of dollars. This was all done step by step, against perpetual oppositions, clamors and reproaches, such as no other President ever had to encounter, and with a more feeble, divided, and incapable support than has ever fallen to the lot of any administration before or since. For this I was turned out of office, degraded and disgraced by my country; and I was glad of it. I felt no disgrace, because I felt no remorse. It has given me fourteen of the happiest years of my life; and I am certain I could not have lasted one year more in that station, shackled in the chains of that arbitrary faction . . .

“As I had been intimately connected with Mr. Jefferson in friendship and affection for five-and-twenty years, I well knew his crude and visionary notions of government as well as his learning, taste, and talent in other arts and sciences. I expected his reign would be very nearly what it has been. I regretted it, but could not help it. At the same time, I thought it would be better than following the fools who were intriguing to plunge us into an alliance with England, an endless war with all the rest of the world, and wild expeditions to South America and St. Domingo; and, what was worse than all the rest, a civil war, which I knew would be the consequence of the measures the heads of that party wished to pursue.”

Adams went back to Braintree an embittered man. He had very few friends. All the Federalist politicians in New England blamed the loss of the election on his misconduct in making peace with France. He had never been popular with the commercial classes in Boston; they always rightly suspected him of radicalism. His political strength lay with the common people of New England. The Anglophiles—the Essex Junto they came to be called—would have disposed of him long before if they had not known of the magic of his name among the farmers and fishermen.

Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana brought the distinction between Adams and the Anglophiles into sharp relief. He applauded that act; they denounced it. Later, when Pickering, who was now a senator, defended the English impressment of American seamen, Adams replied in a newspaper letter which was subsequently published as a pamphlet. In this he took the position that the proper course for the United States was to declare war. He approved of Jefferson’s Embargo as a preliminary step but was satisfied it would not by itself be sufficient to bring Great Britain to reason. He analyzed the vote in places such as Nantucket and Marblehead and concluded that the seamen prefer “to be embargoed rather than go to sea to be impressed.”

Adams alone among our early statesmen realized that the natural protection of the United States was a navy. He did more; he anticipated Mahan. “The trident of Neptune,” he wrote, “is the sceptre of the world” but, he wrote on another occasion, “God forbid that American naval power should ever be such a scourge to the human race as that of Great Britain has been!” Most Americans believed their ships would never be able to stand against British ships. It was another relic of the colonial spirit. He felt his policy fully vindicated when the news arrived during the War of 1812 of one naval victory after another. His hatred of England never abated. When the news came of Napoleon’s fall he wrote “France is humbled and Napoleon is banished; but the tyrant, the tyrant of tyrants is not fallen. John Bull still paws, and bellows terrible menaces and defiances.”

When he left the White House his great fear was of boredom. He felt he could not go back to practice. Largely through his wife’s good management he had accumulated a fortune of nearly one hundred thousand dollars, which was sufficient to maintain them. The rest of his life was spent in his library. For the first time he had leisure to roam the fair fields of literature at will. He was not reading now for any object but his own enjoyment. He took down his Greek grammars and dictionaries and went back to reading the Greek poets. He delved into seventeenth-century Massachusetts history. He re-read Algernon Sidney and Pascal and many another book he had read in his youth. He was particularly fond of works on religious subjects and on what we should now call comparative religion. Why did he read so many theological books? Because, he wrote Jefferson, “I have been a lover and a reader of romances all my life.”

He tried writing his autobiography but he found it “so dull an employment that I cannot endure it. I look so much like a small boy in my own eyes, that, with all my vanity, I cannot endure the sight of the picture.”

He did not, like Jefferson, come in the end to confine his reading to the classics. He read Scott and many another popular novelist of the time. He found D’Israeli’s Curiosities and, after reading it, wished for a similar account of literary life in France. His wish was answered almost immediately by the discovery of Grimm. He read it in. fifteen volumes and pronounced it “the most entertaining work I ever read.” He saw a reference in Priestley to Dupuis and immediately sent to France for the book. He expected a volume or two, but when he received it he read all twelve volumes. He and Jefferson were now reconciled and this reading of Dupuis raised a question in Adams’ mind. Were there not laws in every state against blasphemy? Would not anyone who translated Dupuis be guilty of violating those laws? Should they not do something about getting those laws repealed?

They avoided political topics in their correspondence. Much of it was devoted to religious and philosophic subjects. Here they thought much alike. Both of them hated ecclesiasticism. “Where,” wrote Adams to Jefferson, “are St. Luke’s world of books that were written? If you ask my opinion, who has committed all the havoc? I will answer you candidly. Ecclesiastical and imperial despotisms have done it to conceal their frauds. Why are the histories of all nations, more ancient than the Christian era, lost? Who destroyed the Alexandrian library? I believe that Christian priests, Jewish rabbis, Grecian sages, and Roman emperors, had as great a hand in it as Turks and Mohametans.” When Adams learned of the organization of the American Bible Society under the presidency of his old friend Jay, he turned to Jefferson for comfort. “We have now, it seems, a national Bible Society, to propagate King James’s Bible through all nations. Would it not be better to apply these pious subscriptions to purify Christendom from the corruptions of Christianity than to propagate those corruptions in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America?”

Yet Adams was definitely religious. He joined Jefferson in his hatred of ecclesiasticism and in his contempt for orthodox theology which was typified for both of them by the Athanasian creed. Adams set forth his own creed explicitly in a letter to Vanderkemp, an old friend whom he had made in the Netherlands and who had since migrated to America. “My religion is founded on the love of God and my neighbor; on the hope of pardon for my offences; upon contrition; upon the duty as well as necessity of supporting with patience the inevitable evils of life; in the duty of doing no wrong, but all the good I can, to the creation, of which I am but an infinitesimal part . . . I believe, too, in a future state of rewards and punishments, but not eternal.” Vanderkemp was not satisfied, and six months later we find Adams writing him “Christianity, you will say, was a fresh revelation. I will not deny this. As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed? How has it happened that all the fine arts, architecture, painting, sculpture, statuary, music, poetry, and oratory, have been prostituted, from the creation of the world, to the sordid and detestable purposes of superstition and fraud?”

His omnivorous appetite for reading grew by what it fed on and we find Adams saying that he lamented every day that he did not have a hundred thousand more volumes in his library. Ever since the days of the Continental Congress his eyes had troubled him but now there were long intervals when he could not read at all. Until his wife’s death in 1818 she would read to him. The house was usually full of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren and he would get them to read to him. “Why,” he wrote to Vanderkemp, “you seem to know nothing about me. I have grandchildren and great grandchildren, multiplying like the seed of Abraham. You have no idea of the prolific quality of the New England Adamses. Why, we have contributed more to the population of North America, and cut down more trees, than any other race.” The chief disadvantage was that this limited his reading to the languages they understood. In the periods when his eyesight was good we find him in one case quoting a Greek hymn to Jefferson and adding his own English translation, with a request for Jefferson’s opinion thereon. He then goes on to quote Latin, French, and Italian translations, although he adds, “I am so awkward in Italian, that I am ashamed to quote that language to you.” In another case he starts a letter with a four-line quotation from Theognis. This is followed by Grotius’ Latin translation, then by Adams’ English translation, then by another Latin translation.

After Mrs. Adams’ death, his letters to Jefferson held the same place in Adams’ life that his diary had held in his youth. They followed each other in rapid succession and he poured his heart into them. There was considerably more restraint in the replies. Adams did not notice it. “While you live,” he wrote, “I seem to have a bank at Monticello, on which I can draw for a letter of friendship and entertainment, when I please.” For many years he had been troubled by a trembling of his hands. In his old age this became so bad that he had great difficulty in writing, and at times could not write at all. Otherwise, there would have been even more letters to Monticello.

He deliberately refrained from interfering in his son’s career. He was always careful not to ask John Quincy Adams any questions about his various diplomatic missions. The father warned the son not to write any letters to him which he would not be willing to see published in a newspaper. When, on the eve of the peace negotiations at the end of the War of 1812, John Quincy, who had been appointed one of the American negotiators, wrote to his father and asked him some questions in regard to the peace negotiations at the end of the Revolutionary War, his father thought it his duty to send the letter to President Madison.

As the years rolled on Adams paid less and less attention to current politics. Then came the election of his son as President. “Never did I feel so much solemnity as upon this occasion. The multitude of my thoughts, and the intensity of my feelings are too much for a mind like mine, in its ninetieth year.” He was anxious to include his friend Jefferson in his felicity. He wrote to him of “our John.” “I call him our John, because, when you were at the Cul de sac at Paris, he appeared to me to be almost as much your boy as mine.”

Adams had none of the usual old man’s contempt for the younger generation. When his advice was asked on any question his invariable response was that the current generation appeared to him to be quite as wise as his own. “I must acknowledge,” he wrote to McKean, the old Pennsylvania patriot, that “I contemplate with pleasure the rising generation. As much secluded as I am from the world, I see a succession of able and honorable characters, from members of Congress down to bachelors and students in our universities, who will take care of the liberties which you have cherished and done so much to support.” To a college friend he wrote, “We shall leave the world with many consolations. It is better than we found it. Superstition, persecution, and bigotry are somewhat abated; governments are a little ameliorated; science and literature are greatly improved, and more widely spread. Our country has brilliant and exhilarating prospects before it, instead of that solemn gloom in which many of the former parts of our lives have been obscured.’’

As the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approached, invitations poured in from all sides. But the end was obviously near. For a time the people of Quincy hoped he would at least be able to attend their own local celebration. When hope was gone, a committee was sent to obtain a toast. It was forthcoming. “Independence forever.” The committee asked for something more. “Not a word,” said Adams. The toast was given at the banquet. As the company was dispersing the news arrived of his death.

CHAPTER III

John Hancock

I WRITE,” said Hancock as he signed the Declaration of Independence, “so George III may read without his spectacles.”

John Adams said that the three indispensable men in stirring up the Revolution were James Otis, Sam Adams, and Hancock, in that order. The British would have reversed it. To them, Hancock was the fountainhead of sedition. Through their efforts he became known all over Europe as King Hancock, the great American rebel. When Gage issued his proclamation offering pardon to all the rebels who repented, he expressly excepted Hancock and Sam Adams.

Yet Hancock lives only as a signature. He did not retire from public life after signing his name. Time and again he was elected governor of Massachusetts. As late as 1791 John Adams wrote to Jefferson that he heard an attempt would be made to elect Hancock vice-president at the next election.

What is the explanation? Was he a mere “front-man,” a mere puppet whose motions were controlled from behind the scenes by more astute men of whom Sam Adams would undoubtedly be the chief? But Hancock survived politically long after he had broken with Sam Adams. Was he, as has been suggested recently,¹ merely a lot of cash and a fit of the gout?

The general idea that his fame was more or less fraudulent arose early. In John Adams’ old age one of his former law students wrote that he had ‘'never profoundly admired Mr. Hancock.” The remark brought forth one of Adams’ torrential letters. “I can say, with truth, that I profoundly admired him, and more profoundly loved him.” There was no occasion for Adams to arise so vehemently in the defense of Hancock. They had not been on good terms since the day Hancock had taken his law business to another lawyer. But no one was in a better position than Adams to appraise the other’s character and career. Hancock’s father was the Congregational minister in Braintree who baptized Adams. Hancock was a few months younger than Adams but the boys attended primary school together, they were at Harvard together, one was the client of the other, they were in the General Court together, they were in the Continental Congress together. Certainly if any man was ever in a position to appraise another, Adams was in a position to appraise Hancock.

Hancock’s misfortune is that when he wrote his name so that George III could read it without spectacles he wrote it a little too large. Subsequent generations have expected the chief signer of the Declaration of Independence to be a thinker—a man to rank with Adams and Jefferson. He was not, and, after making this discovery, the tendency was to treat him as a complete fraud. When Adams ranked him as one of the three indispensable men, he was using a different standard. The point about Hancock was that he was rich—sinfully rich. That is of very little interest nearly two centuries later but was very important at the time. How often does a millionaire lead a revolution? Bowdoin refused to go to the first Continental Congress because he did not want to hazard his great fortune. Dickinson opposed the Declaration of Independence, according to Adams, because his mother constantly told him, “Johnny, you will be hanged; your estate will be forfeited . . .” Certainly if anybody was hanged and anybody’s estate was forfeited, Hancock was the first in line. The Tories would have liked to lay their hands on such rich pickings.

That is what Adams meant by his profound admiration of Hancock. The latter was not a great thinker; he contributed nothing to the concept of Americanism. But he was of invaluable service to the cause in the days when the Revolution was being fomented in Massachusetts. At no time and place has the possession of wealth been so highly valued as in eighteenth-century England. The constant attempt of the Tories was to prove that their opponents were desperate men who had nothing to lose and who hoped to better themselves by fishing in troubled waters. So long as the patriots had Hancock with them they had the best possible answer to these slanders.

He contributed in other ways. At one time, Adams says, three great merchants, Thomas Hancock, Charles Apthorp, and Thomas Green, “when united, could carry any election almost unanimously in a Boston town meeting.” The reason is apparent from Adams’ further statement that at least a thousand families were dependent on John Hancock (who had inherited his uncle Thomas’ position) for a living. There was no secret ballot and a thousand families must have been about one-third of the population of Boston. Added to Adams’ estimate at another time that at the outbreak of the Revolution one-third of the people of Massachusetts were Tories, it is apparent why he regarded Hancock as so important.

Rich men are notoriously timid. It is the have-nots and the men who are on the make who encourage social disturbances. The Tories were not blind to Hancock’s importance; they would have paid a high price for him. At one time, a few years before the outbreak of hostilities, he seemed inclined to yield. There was nothing underhand about it. Nor was there anything underhand about his adherence to the patriot interest. He, the owner of the greatest business in New England, stepped forth boldly as the champion of the revolutionary cause, well aware that if it came to hanging, he, above all others, would be the one the Tories would most delight in hanging.

That is one side of the picture. The other is that he had an almost pathological appetite for popularity; that, while he was industrious, his ability was mediocre and that his conduct as treasurer of Harvard was strange to say the least.

Adams has given us a clue to Hancock’s character. He says he was extremely sensitive. Through circumstances which the public could only regard as lucky this sensitive man, while still in his twenties, found himself the owner of the greatest business in New England.

Thomas Hancock was the son of John Hancock, the minister at Lexington. Thomas went to Boston to learn to be a merchant and after a time, became the proprietor of a bookshop, which is seldom a road to fortune. He also married Lydia Henchman, the daughter of the town’s chief importer of books. Thomas, on his father-in-law’s death, took over the importing business. From this he branched into other lines and, at his death, books were a minor item in the general importing business which he conducted. By that time he was also the chief exporter of whale oil and whale bone, and had interests in a number of retail stores.

Thomas’ brother John was the minister at Braintree. His wife, Mary Hawks, had outlived one husband and was to outlive the Reverend John. At his death he left two sons and a daughter by her. The ministry in colonial Massachusetts was not more profitable than elsewhere. Thomas offered to take one child off his sister-in-law’s hands. He selected John, who was about seven at the time.

Thus it was that John, though born poor, grew up rich. He attended the Boston Latin School which was the best preparatory school available. He was graduated from Harvard in 1754 and then entered his uncle’s business. Well-dressed, honorable, and industrious, he was always a model young man. After four years in the business, his uncle decided to send him to London for a year and arranged for him to travel there under the chaperonage of an ex-governor of Massachusetts who was returning to England. During his year in London John sustained the character of being all that a rich uncle could desire. On his return he went back to work in the business. About two years later his pleased uncle, who was childless, announced that he had taken John into partnership and that thereafter the business would be known as Thomas Hancock & Company. Less than a year later Thomas Hancock died, and when his will was probated it was found that he had left practically all his estate of seventy thousand pounds to John.

Thus it was that Hancock became a rich man. He was not rich through his own efforts nor was it the usual sort of inheritance. His relatives were as poor as ever. A few years later he is guaranteeing the credit of his brother Ebenezer for five hundred pounds, so that the latter can start in the hardware business. When Ebenezer failed, John recapitalized him. He had any number of first cousins—as closely related to Uncle Thomas as he was—who were as poor as if they had never had a rich and childless uncle.

This is the key to Hancock’s character. All the world agreed that he was a young man of exemplary character, and all the world agreed that he had become sinfully rich in a manner which could only be described as sheer luck. John Adams says Hancock was extremely sensitive and a good judge of men. All men bowed and scraped when Hancock approached; he could easily surmise what they said after he had left. This is the secret of that obsession for popularity which governed all his public life. This was the reason he was willing to stand forth as the leader of the rebels. Somehow or other, he had to prove to himself that he was more than just a lucky heir and the only proof that satisfied him was to hear the acclamations of the people. His mind was not profound enough to be discriminating about applause.

This desire for the approbation of those around him appeared immediately after his uncle’s death. John was very liberal in making donations to churches; he carried out a promise of his uncle to make a substantial gift of books to Harvard. He had inherited many tenements in Boston, and he soon earned the reputation of being a humane and liberal landlord. He tended to his business assiduously and devoted his attention there to creating a monopoly of whale oil.

But what people most admired in the rich young man was his conduct toward his Aunt Lydia, the widow of Uncle Thomas. John was tall, thin, rather good-looking, dressed well, and was the best catch in New England, but he did not give the girls a chance. He lived with his aunt in the stone mansion of his deceased uncle, surrounded by the negro slaves whom the uncle had imported from London to act as his servants. Everywhere Aunt Lydia went, John was her escort. Never before, the town agreed, had any widow had such a paragon of a nephew. When John finally did marry, his aunt picked his wife for him; indeed, after his wife had outlived him and a succeeding husband, she complained that she had been “forced” to marry Hancock.

This did not happen until he was nearly forty and already President of the Continental Congress, The bride, Dorothy Quincy, was a spinster a few years older than he. The forcing came about in this way: Due to the British occupation of Boston, Dorothy had gone, under the chaperonage of Aunt Lydia, to Fairfield, Connecticut, where they stayed with an uncle of Aaron Burr. While they were there Aaron came to visit. He was a very young man but had already developed that skill as a lady-killer which he had all his life. Since there was nothing better around he now went to work on Dorothy. She remained convinced for the rest of her life that if it had not been that Aunt Lydia would never leave them alone together she would have married Burr.

Hancock was rich and dressed well, but he was not the fine gentleman Burr was. He was very domineering around the house and one of his foibles was that he would not allow china to be used except for formal and elaborate dinner parties. Even when, every Saturday, he kept open house and served salted codfish to all his friends, the plates were pewter. He explained his preference on the ground that the food was less likely to “slide off” a pewter than a china plate. Any remaining doubt as to his table-habits is dispelled by a letter he wrote his wife while he was still President of the Continental Congress. “I am up to the eyes in papers . . . I have not Room on the Table to put a plate.” He has sent his servant Joe for a plate of minced veal and when it comes “I shall take the plate in one hand, the knife in the other.”

Most of his foibles were like those of rich men everywhere. He always insisted on paying the bills when he was in company with others. Shortly after their marriage, when his wife was about to come to Philadelphia to join him, he wrote her that whenever she stopped to dine she should see to it that a “genteel dinner” was provided for everyone who was traveling in her company and that she paid for it. For this purpose he told her always to send her servant, McClosky, ahead to order the dinner and to tell the innkeeper not to accept payment for anything from anyone but her.

He had his business correspondents in Madeira send him with each shipload of wine, a special consignment for his own use. “Four pipes of the very best Madeira Wine that you can possibly procure for my own table. I don’t stand for price. If it be good, I like a Rich wine. & if you can ship a Pipe of Right Sterling old Madeira, Pale & Good, you will add it. I like pale wine, but I need say no more than that they are for my own use, & I beg they may be the very best that can be purchased,” he wrote them shortly after his uncle’s death. He was very fond of fish of all kinds and had a standing offer to pay a guinea for the first salmon of the season. He was unable to find parsnips in Philadelphia and had a quantity sent to him from Boston.

At his death Thomas Hancock was a selectman of Boston and a member of the Council. John was immediately elected a selectman in his place. The Stamp Act aroused him to fury but it was the fury of a business man who feels that a particular law will ruin his business. “I am Determin’d,” he wrote to his London correspondents, “as soon as I know that they are Resolv’d to insist on this act to Sell my Stock in Trade & Shut up my Warehouse Doors Thus much I told our Govr the other day, & is what I am absolutely Determin’d to abide by.” A week later he wrote to them that “I have a Right to the Libertys & Privileges of the English Constitution, & I as an Englishman will enjoy them,” and at the same time complained grievously of the taxes he already had to pay. All his orders for goods for the ensuing year were conditional upon the repeal of the Stamp Act.

When news of the repeal of the Act was received the town set apart a day for public rejoicing. On that day Hancock, according to a contemporary newspaper, “gave a grand and elegant entertainment to the genteel part of the town, and treated the populace with a pipe of Madeira.” He also provided a display of fireworks.

Thomas Hancock’s lawyers at his death had been James Otis and Oxenbridge Thacher and they now represented his nephew. It was of the latter of these lawyers that Hutchinson remarked “Thacher was not born a plebeian but he is determined to die one.” Hancock consequently was in close touch with the patriot clique. They now persuaded him to run for election to the House of Representatives. As Sam Adams was returning from the town meeting at which the election was held, he met John Adams on the street near Hancock’s home. “This town has done a wise thing today,” Sam said, pointing to Hancock’s house, “they have made that young man’s fortune their own.” Hancock continued in the House until it was dissolved forever.

The narrow-minded, monopolistic attitude which governed the political economy of the British government had led to the passage of a lot of acts governing American trade which, if enforced literally, would have completely throttled the development of the New England colonies. In practice, many of these acts were ignored. The British now determined to enforce them and sent a warship to Boston for this purpose. Shortly after, Hancock's sloop Liberty came in with a load of wine from Madeira, the direct shipment of which to America was forbidden. Hancock should have been safe in making this shipment for that Tory stalwart, Harrison Gray, the treasurer of the province, had an interest in the wine. But Gray, of whom the patriot rhymesters wrote, 

 What Puritan could ever pray 

In Godlier tones than Treasurer Gray!

Or at town-meetings, speechifying,

Could utter more melodious whine.

failed to perform his share of the partnership. A customs officer went aboard the Liberty and was confined below by the captain and crew until the cargo had been unloaded. Next day a naval force seized the sloop. Riots followed, and considerable destruction of property. Legal proceedings were instituted against Hancock to recover about ninety thousand pounds in penalties. He retained John Adams as his counsel but the matter never came to trial.

Both during his life and later these suits have been used to detract from Hancock's reputation. It is plain that if he had been compelled to pay ninety thousand pounds he would have been bankrupt; it is also plain that if he had ever sought a reconciliation with the British authorities they would gladly have pardoned the Liberty affair. There is some hint of such a reconciliation when the Governor approved Hancock’s election as a militia colonel. Sam Adams was on the alert and Hancock was soon again in the forefront of the patriot cause.

He delivered the annual oration in commemoration of the Boston massacre in March, 1774. “Some boast of being friends of government; I am a friend to righteous government, to a government founded upon the principles of reason and justice. . . He then went on to relate what happened upon the stationing of the two regiments in Boston. “Our streets nightly resounded with the noise of riot and debauchery; our peaceful citizens were hourly exposed to shameful insult, and often felt the effects of their violence and outrage, “But this was not all; as though they thought it not enough to violate our civil rights, they endeavoured to deprive us of the enjoyment of our religious privileges; to vitiate our morals, and thereby render us deserving of destruction. Hence the rude din of arms which broke in upon your solemn devotions in your temples, on that day hallowed by Heaven; and set apart by God himself for his peculiar worship. Hence, impious oaths and blasphemies, so often tortured your unaccustomed ear. Hence, all the arts which idleness and luxury could invent, were used, to betray our youth of one sex into extravagance and effeminacy, and of the other to infamy and ruin. And did they not succeed but too well? did not our infants almost learn to lisp out curses before they knew their horrid import? did not our youth forget they were Americans; and regardless of the admonitions of the wise and aged, copy with a servile imitation the frivolity and vices of their tyrants? and must I be compelled to acknowledge that even the noblest, fairest part of all the lower creation did not entirely escape the cursed snare? or why have I seen an honest father clothed with shame, or why a virtuous mother drowned in tears?” It is probable that he received substantial help in the composition of this oration. It is better than any other speech he ever delivered but it should be noted that John Adams took it for granted Hancock had composed it himself.

Hancock was president of the first provincial congress which met in the fall of 1774. He still thought himself safe in Boston and as late as March, 1775, he attended a meeting of the selectmen called to take action in regard to the tarring and feathering of a citizen by the redcoats. A few days later a group of British officers, in passing his house, stopped, drew their swords, and hacked his fence. The next night he found his stable full of redcoats, who refused to leave, telling him his house and stable would soon be theirs.

He was again president of the second provincial congress which met at Concord March 22, 1774. While at the congress he stayed with relatives in Lexington, and when the congress adjourned on April 15 he thought it advisable to remain there. Sam Adams was with him and it was in Lexington that Revere awakened them on the night of April 18. Hancock was all for fighting and started to clean his gun. Finally Adams convinced him that “that is not our business; we belong to the cabinet.” At daybreak they left and went to the parsonage at Woburn precinct. When Hancock thought himself safe he sent for his aunt and Dorothy Quincy, who had been in Lexington with him, and enjoined them to bring along “the fine salmon” which he had provided for dinner that day. They did so, but just as the group was about to eat the salmon someone rushed by yelling that the redcoats were coming. Under the guidance of the parson’s negro slave, Hancock and Adams took refuge in a nearby swamp and ultimately found shelter with a farmer.

Hancock next appears on the scene as President of the second Continental Congress. Shortly after Gage had proclaimed him a rebel excepted from pardon, he was elected in place of Peyton Randolph, who had gone back to Virginia. “We will show Britain,” said Ben Harrison, as he escorted Hancock to the chair, “how much we value her proscriptions.”

This is the high point of Hancock’s career. He should have died after signing the Declaration of Independence. He worked faithfully as President but he did not have the knowledge or the ability to take the lead in the matters which came before the Congress for decision. He and Harrison became great friends and this friendship alienated Hancock from his old mentor, Sam Adams. When Hancock retired from the Congress in 1777 Sam Adams opposed the passage of a vote of thanks for his services. This Hancock never forgave.

He had learned from Sam Adams where to find compensation for that feeling of inferiority which his inherited wealth had given him. Now that Hancock no longer had Adams’ guidance, the weakness in his character began to show. All he wished for was popularity; so long as he received the acclamations of the crowd he did not care why. It was now that he discovered the political value of gout. For the rest of his life, whenever there was an important decision to be made, Hancock was sick abed of the gout and remained there until he had decided which side had the more popular support.

The last time he actually tried to do anything was in 1778. He then got himself elected major-general of the Massachusetts militia and commanded them in an expedition which was carried on jointly with the French fleet against the British in Rhode Island. The expedition was unsuccessful and his actions in it were open to great criticism. He realized this and quickly took steps to counteract the effect of any criticism which might be made. He did not try to explain his actions but fell back on his money. On any occasion of popular rejoicing Hancock could be relied on to furnish refreshments. The French fleet now retired to Boston and Hancock set about to entertain all the officers lavishly from the Admiral to the midshipmen. He was successful in stifling comment on his military incompetence.

Thereafter he was careful never to take the responsibility for any decision. John Adams’ constitution was adopted in the state convention only after acrimonious argument. Hancock stayed in bed most of the time for fear he might otherwise say or do something which would injure his chances of being elected governor. He was elected the first governor of the Commonwealth and was re-elected at the next four annual elections. Then a necessity for decision arose which he could not dodge.

When he saw the beginnings of Shays’ rebellion in the western part of the state in 1785 he suddenly resigned as governor in the middle of his term. When others had taken the responsibility of suppressing the rebellion he returned to the governorship in 1787 and continued in that office by annual re-elections until his death in 1793.

There is no question that Hancock’s peculiar system of spending money lavishly and completely avoiding responsibility produced the result he desired. He was the most popular man in the state. He could be elected governor any time he wished. There was only one group which did not share in this enthusiasm for him. That was the group connected with Harvard College.

Hancock had been elected treasurer of the college in 1773. As such, he took possession of the books of account and of the mortgages and other securities in which the endowment was invested and removed them all to his office in Boston. That was the last Harvard heard of its new treasurer. He did not render any accounts; he refused to answer letters; he ignored hints to resign. When he was in Philadelphia, the Corporation of the college suggested he have the securities sent to Cambridge and appoint someone to act in his stead. This time he answered the letter. He said he had given instructions to have the securities sent to him in Philadelphia. The alarmed college sent a representative to Philadelphia who, after a good deal of trouble, managed to get the securities from Hancock. He still refused to give an accounting and still refused to resign as treasurer. Finally, the college screwed up its courage and removed him. It was a dangerous thing to do, since the college was still very dependent on the state government.

As Governor, Hancock was ex officio President of the Board of Overseers of Harvard and, as such, he presided at meeting after meeting where it was reported that it was impossible to state the financial position of the college accurately because of the refusal of Treasurer Hancock to give an accounting. The amount involved was not large for a man of his wealth. When he resigned the governorship he finally condescended to settle his accounts with the college and it appeared that he owed a thousand and fifty-four pounds. He still neglected to pay. The college ultimately brought suit on his surety bond but he managed to stall the suit until his death. Then his representatives managed to stave off payment for years.

This action of his representatives is the more remarkable because he left a very substantial estate. The reason his representatives were so slow in paying was that all Hancock’s friends agreed with him that he had been grossly mistreated. The mistreatment consisted in his removal from the office of treasurer. Hancock’s conduct is hardly evidence that he had embezzled any college funds. The endowment which he carried to Philadelphia with him was in securities, not cash. It would have been very difficult to raise cash on it and, in any event, if he was in want of ready money, he had ample property of his own for collateral, much more than the seventeen-thousand-pound endowment of Harvard. But the conclusive bit of evidence is that among the letters from the college which he refused to answer was one asking him to make arrangements to collect from mortgagees who had expressed a desire to pay off their obligations. He would neither pay nor receive payment.

Hancock was easily irritated. He could also be stubborn. Something in his early relations with the college as its treasurer irritated him. Having adopted the wrong attitude, he was stubborn about it. As so often happens, the more wrong he was in fact, the more thoroughly he convinced himself that he had been mistreated. According to him, it was all a plot to destroy his popularity.

He himself did nothing to risk that popularity. According to custom, he was elected president of the convention which was called in Massachusetts to consider ratification of the federal constitution. According to custom, he immediately took to his bed. Sam Adams led the opposition to ratification, so there was a good reason for Hancock to favor it. Still, he could not risk his popularity. The ratificationists solved the problem. They went to Hancock and suggested that ratification be accompanied by a resolution containing perpetual instructions to the state’s representatives in Congress to press for certain amendments. Again he was given an opportunity to play the hero. He rose from his bed, went to the convention, talked of the deep meditation he had indulged in while ill, and presented this scheme. It was adopted.

He had only one more opportunity to bring his gout upon the stage of history. When Washington, as President, visited Boston in the fall of 1789 Hancock wanted to make the President pay the first visit. At precisely the right moment Hancock had a severe attack of the gout. Washington merely sent his respects. Then word came to the Governor that there was considerable popular disapproval of his course. He could not hazard his popularity and he now wrote asking for an appointment. “The President,” was the reply, “needs not express the pleasure it will give him to see the Governor; but, at the same time, he most earnestly begs that the Governor will not hazard his health on the occasion.” Hancock had himself carried into Washington’s presence with both legs swathed in woolens.

Hancock survived a few years longer, still an unrivalled vote-getter in Massachusetts and the idol of the people. The younger generation of statesmen, Fisher Ames, Rufus King, Theophilus Parsons, regarded him with privately expressed contempt.

When he died he received the most magnificent funeral the Commonwealth of Massachusetts could provide. His estate paid the expenses.

CHAPTER IV

Samuel Adams

IN HIS early forties an unsuccessful brewer sat down in the small colonial town of Boston and determined to break up the British Empire. Samuel Adams made a business of revolution. It was the only successful business he ever had.

He and John Adams had a great-grandfather in common but Sam came of the more successful branch of the family. His grandfather, Captain John Adams, prospered as a sea-captain. His father, Deacon Samuel Adams, was a brewer who in the course of his life acquired considerable property. Both the grandfather and the father married into well-established families.

Sam Adams’ father was fond of politics. For many years he was a member of the House of Representatives but it is more important that he was the dominant figure in the Caucus Club—America’s first political organization. It was through this club that the son later obtained and maintained his absolute control of the politics of Boston.

Sam’s mother wanted him to enter the ministry and he had halfheartedly assented. He attended Harvard and was graduated in 1740. As his father noticed the great interest which his son took in his own political activities he concluded that Sam would be happier at the bar than in the pulpit. He made the suggestion and the son again assented without enthusiasm. For a few months after Sam’s graduation from college, he studied law. It did not please his mother. At her urging he quit the law but he did not go back to the ministry. He never acquired any profession.

He passed his time by taking his master’s degree, which he did three years after his graduation from college. Others did not realize it, but he had already found his career. The title of his thesis was Whether It Be Lawful To Resist The Supreme Magistrate If The Commonwealth Cannot Be Otherwise Preserved. He read the thesis at commencement and his conclusion was that such resistance was lawful. Thus it was that at twenty-one Sam Adams had already publicly maintained the position that rebellion might be justifiable.

He always had a complete lack of interest in the making of money or even in the making of a living. His father did not share his serene unworldliness. The elder Adams was well-to-do but not sufficiently so for his sons to expect to be gentlemen of leisure. He now obtained a position for Sam with a merchant named Cushing, whose son was later to be Adams’ colleague on many occasions. A few months later the elder Cushing told Sam he “would never do as a merchant.” As a last desperate expedient Deacon Adams now gave his son a thousand pounds and hold him to set himself up in any trade or profession he pleased. Sam promptly lent five hundred pounds to a friend who never repaid it and almost as promptly lost the other five hundred in some commercial speculation. His father was at his wits’ end. Sam spent the next few years nominally assisting his father to manage the brewery but his heart was never in the making of beer.

The business of politics always had a fascination for Sam Adams. It was not ambition which attracted him. He was equally indifferent to money, to fame, and to power. He was poor as a churchmouse all his life. Time and again, the King inquired of his colonial secretary why Adams was not “taken off,” meaning, given some office which would make him dependent. The royal advice was duly passed on to Massachusetts. Hutchinson always refused to make the attempt, claiming it would be utterly useless. His successor. Gage, thought it worth trying. By this time the British were willing to pay a good price. Shortly before Adams left for the first Continental Congress, the colonel of one of the newly arrived regiments called at his house. The price was an annuity of two thousand pounds for life or one thousand pounds for two lives. All he was asked to do was to keep quiet. “A guinea,” said Adams, as he ushered his visitor to the door, “never glistened in my eyes.”

He was equally indifferent to the spotlight. He left that to Hancock, thankful that the rich man’s services could be secured so cheaply. Hancock is only the most conspicuous example. Adams controlled Boston politically for several years before he even sat in the legislature. He drew any number of papers for the House but he let others present them. Even when he entered the legislature he was content with the humble position of Clerk of the House. Let Cushing be speaker; it pleased him no end. When the Committee of Correspondence was appointed by Boston, Adams resurrected the wreck which liquor had made of Otis and let him present the Committee’s report as chairman.

In this indifference to the spotlight Adams was a typical political boss. What made him an original was his indifference to power. Of the desires which govern men, the love of power is by far the most insidious. Many men are indifferent to wealth; men who are indifferent to fame are not uncommon; but there are very few men who can resist the pleasure of exercising power. Without question, this inability of men to resist the pleasure of exercising power has been responsible for more misery than any other factor in the history of the human race.

The record shows that Adams could, and did, resist. At the outbreak of the Revolution he was in undisputed possession of an unrivalled political machine which controlled Massachusetts. After the conclusion of peace he was even to be subjected to the humiliation of being defeated for re-election to the state senate. He was ousted from his long-held position of secretary of the state. He was defeated for election to the first Congress under the federal constitution. It was only through the grace of Hancock that he was later elected lieutenant-governor. His political machine had not been stolen from him or defeated; he had deliberately destroyed it. After the war was over he vigorously and frequently denounced conventions, committees, caucuses, parties, and all the machinery of politics. He felt they had no place in a republic; that they were justifiable only as instruments with which to resist a tyranny. It was for this reason that he abandoned the political machine which he had erected with so much care.

What, then, was his driving motive? He frequently expressed hie desire to see Boston become “the Christian Sparta.” “I begin,” he wrote as early as 1777, “to anticipate the Establishment of Peace on such Terms as independent States ought to demand, and I am even now contemplating by what Means the Virtue of my Countrymen may be secured for Ages yet to come.” That was his driving motive; a desire to protect and extend the ‘Virtue” of his countrymen. His conception of virtue was strictly Arcadian. Even before the war was over he feared the “Inundation of Levity Vanity Luxury Dissipation & indeed Vice of every kind.” His desire for independence was largely occasioned by his belief that Britain was a cesspool of iniquity which would infallibly corrupt America unless the tie between the two countries was severed. He was far from being pleased with the government which came out of his efforts. “Is it true that the Review of the Boston Militia was closd with an expensive Entertainment? If it was, and the Example is followed by the Country, I hope I shall be excusd when I venture to pledge myself, that the Militia of that State will never be put on such a Footing as to become formidable to its Enemies.” He did not think that morality was a private affair. He was thoroughly committed to the proposition that government should actively promote virtue. “Let Divines, and Philosophers, Statesmen and Patriots unite their endeavours to renovate the Age, by impressing the Minds of Men with the importance of educating their little boys and girls—of inculcating in the Minds of youth the fear, and Love of the Deity, and universal Phylanthropy; . . . in short of leading them in the Study, and Practice of the exalted Virtues of the Christian system, which will happily tend to subdue the turbulent passions of Men.” It is not clear whether Adams desired virtue as essential to liberty or whether he desired liberty as essential to virtue. It is very clear that he regarded the two as inseparable.

In after years the Anglophile Federalists made It their business to belittle his reputation. They said he was a bigot. So he was, in the sense that he never doubted the truth of the creed in which he had been raised. Nor did he overlook any political advantage to be derived from religious prejudice. In a newspaper article attacking the Stamp Act he says that it “was contrived with a design only to inure the people to the habit of contemplating themselves as the slaves of men; and the transition from thence to a subjection to Satan, is mighty easy.” He had the evidence. People had actually been seen In the province, “it is said,” with crucifixes at their breasts; but I do not avouch for the truth of it.” During interludes in the political storms between the Stamp Act and the Boston Port Bill he beat the tom-toms in the newspapers on the dangers of popery. He was careful not to tie himself down to facts but he had heard rumors that someone had been seen with a crucifix or that another had spoken well of episcopacy. The resolutions which he introduced into the Boston town meeting providing for the appointment of a Committee of Correspondence called on the committee ‘‘to state the Rights of the Colonists . . . as Men, as Christians, and as Subjects.” Elbridge Gerry wrote from Marblehead objecting to the use of the word “Christians.” Adams replied that he had used it because of the danger of an attempt to introduce episcopacy. He hammered away at the argument that if an Act of Parliament could override the political provisions of the charter it could also override those provisions designed to protect the Congregational Church. One of his objections to the federal constitution was to its prohibition of religious tests.

He was a man of strong piety and of unquestioning faith in the creed in which he had been raised but he never allowed his religious prejudices to interfere with his political purpose. A newspaper writer attacked a Doctor Young, one of Adams’ political associates, as an “infidel” and stated that he did not wish to join in any measure in which it would be necessary to “follow the lead of such men as Dr. Young.” Adams replied, asking the critic whether “your patriotism hangs so loosely about you, that your country may perish rather than you will unite for its salvation, with a man not compleatly orthodox.” If Adams did not think that infidelity was any reason for refusing to trust a man politically, neither did he think that a reputation for piety was any reason for according trust. Some dim appreciation of the Puritan background of New England sedition led the British government at one point to entrust the colonial portfolio to a nobleman whose sole qualification was that he was known as the pious Lord Dartmouth. Adams immediately warned his countrymen against the danger of trusting a statesman merely because he has the reputation of being a man. Anyway, what was a “good” man doing in such a corrupt administration as that of Lord North?

When the first Continental Congress met, it immediately got into a wrangle over a motion made by Adams’ colleague, Cushing, to open the proceedings with prayer. Jay and John Rutledge, both Episcopalians, opposed this on the ground of the diversity of sects represented in the Congress. Adams interpreted the opposition as actuated by Episcopal fear of New England Congregationalism. He therefore rose, stated he could hear a prayer read by any “gentleman of piety and virtue” and moved that the leading Episcopal clergyman in Philadelphia be asked to act as chaplain. Adams went even further in forgetting his fear of popery. He wished more than any other member of the Congress to bring Canada into the Confederation and he now employed himself in allaying the religious fears of the French Canadians.

His first political activity was the organization when he was twenty-five of a club for the discussion of public affairs. The club published a weekly newspaper called The Public Advertiser. It contained little news but furnished a medium for the publication of essays by the members of the club. It was here that Adams developed his literary style. Like his speeches, it was lucid, graceful, and free of rhetoric. The club did not have a political program, unless a general determination to promote “virtue” can be regarded as such.

A few months after the organization of this club Adams’ father died. In the settlement of the estate Sam received the family homestead on Purchase Street together with the adjoining brewery and some other property, including a number of dwellings. The family lot was at the waterfront end of the street and the house faced the harbor. There was an observation platform surrounded by a railing on the roof which was reached by an outside stairway. The lot extended to low-water mark and had a frontage of two hundred and fifty-six feet on Purchase Street. Shortly after his father’s death Adams married Elizabeth Checkley, a relation and the daughter of his minister. She died a little less than eight years later. Of their five children, two survived her.

Adams continued the brewery for some years after his father’s death. He was evidently unsuccessful at it for he finally abandoned the business. The empty brew-house was still part of his property at the outbreak of the war. After the failure of the brewery he had no gainful occupation. When he needed money badly enough he would sell a part of his inheritance. He never worried about the inevitable result of such a financial policy. “Took an airing in the chaise with . . . Samuel Adams,” John Adams entered in his diary. “He says he never looked forward in his life; never planned, laid a scheme, or formed a design of laying up any thing for himself or others after him.”

His wants were very few. “He eats little, drinks little, sleeps little, thinks much,” said a Tory later. Even when seated at a well-supplied table he was known on occasion to confine his dinner to milk and brown bread. When wine was served he never drank more than a glass and frequently left that only half empty. When he came into prominence his friends were grieved by the threadbare appearance of his clothes. He had one costume, a dark red suit, which was supplemented in cool weather by a dark red cloak. When he was about to leave for the first Continental Congress his friends decided that his appearance had to be improved. As he was seated at his evening meal a few days before his departure, a well-known tailor knocked at the door and requested the privilege of taking Adams’ measure. The tailor declined to explain why he desired it. He was followed by a hatter, a shirt-maker, and a shoe-maker. A few days later a trunk appeared, addressed to Adams. When it was opened it was found to contain a suit of clothes, two pairs of shoes, a set of silver shoe-buckles, a set of gold knee-buckles, a set of gold sleeve-buttons, a cocked hat, a gold-headed cane, a red cloak and a number of minor articles.

He had very few wants above the bare subsistence level. He never traveled. As a young man he occasionally made horseback journeys a few miles into the country but at the time of the second Continental Congress he stated that he had not been on a horse for many years. He did not collect books like Jefferson and John Adams. He was regarded by his contemporaries as fairly well-read. He was not a scholar. He liked to use historical illustrations in his newspaper articles but they were frequently inaccurate. At his death he left a library of about four hundred volumes.

How did he spend his time in the years before the Stamp Act? The mansion he had inherited was not in the fashionable part of town. It was on the waterfront, near the ropewalks and shipyards. He was well-known and highly respected through all this section of Boston. He was of a social disposition and a remarkably even temper. He liked to dispute but he never let the dispute become ill-tempered. He had the rare quality of honestly rejoicing in the successes of his friends. Few collections of letters arouse so much affection in the reader for the writer as do those of Sam Adams. As time went on he became the friend of everyone along the waterfront. He was their source of wisdom. They came to him with all their troubles and he was always ready to listen and advise. He became famous as an adjuster of disputes. He was very fond of sacred music and on Sundays he sang in the choir of the New South—the Tories later sometimes called him the “Psalm-singer.”

He was learning, too, during these years. “Adams, I believe,” said John when they first began to act together during the Stamp Act troubles, “has the most thorough understanding of liberty and her resources in the temper and character of the people, though not in the law and constitution.” He was always closer to his constituents than most of the other revolutionary statesmen. He knew Boston and he loved it like an Athenian of the fourth century before Christ loved Athens. But he acquired more than a knowledge of the ways of the ropewalkers, sailors, and ships’ carpenters of Boston. He acquired an uncanny skill in the management of men. Long before he brought Hancock and John Adams into the service of the cause, he had done the same thing with many a lesser man. The Caucus Club was still in existence and it was the engine through which Sam Adams acquired political power. When John Adams first heard of the Club, which was in 1763, it met “in the garret of Tom Dawes . . . he has a movable partition in his garret which he takes down, and the whole club meets in one room. There they smoke tobacco till you cannot see from one end of the garret to the other. There they drink flip, I suppose, and there . . . selectmen, assessors, collectors, wardens, fire-wards, and representatives, are regularly chosen before they are chosen in the town.” The Club did not draw its membership from the first families. Whenever Sam Adams found a waterfront worker who seemed to be of suitable calibre he brought him to the Club. The authorities did not yet print the ballots. After the Club had agreed on its slate of candidates, it prepared ballots which were distributed among its members. The members, in turn, distributed them among their friends. There was no competing organization and the Club had absolute control of the political life of Boston.

It was a new type of political power. The eighteenth century knew of the Pitts who controlled Parliament through eloquence; it knew of the Walpoles who controlled Parliament through graft; it had yet to learn of the power of organization. Sam Adams was never noted for eloquence. His speech-making, like his writing, was dry, lucid and methodical. Few people realized the power he had built up—-perhaps he did not realize it himself.

The questions which concerned the Club were mere details. But the man and the organization were waiting; all that was needed was the opportunity. Adams was not satisfied with the small issues of provincial politics. Slaves were generally used as domestic servants in Massachusetts and he was just beginning a campaign for the abolition of slavery when the passage of the Stamp Act created a more urgent issue. He drafted the instructions of the Boston town meeting to its representatives in the legislature protesting against the Stamp Act as illegal before it had even been passed. A short time later he was elected a representative to fill the vacancy created by the death of Oxenbridge Thacher. Otis had been sent to the Stamp Act Congress in New York and Adams assumed the leadership of the opposition in the legislature. He may have been a new member but he was a much older hand at the art of politics than any of his colleagues.

He and Otis worked in harmony during this period but there would have been a break later if Otis had not sunk under a combination of insanity and alcoholism. “If Otis,” said John Adams many years later, “was Martin Luther, Samuel Adams was John Calvin. If Luther was rough, hasty, and loved good cheer, Calvin was cool, abstemious, polished, and refined, though more inflexible, uniform, and consistent.” The thinking of the two men was fundamentally divergent. Otis desired to reform the Empire—to work out some method by which all the parts would be equally represented in the Supreme Council. This Sam Adams regarded as a practical impossibility. Sometime during the Stamp Act troubles he became convinced that the only solution was the breakup of the Empire into its component parts; that is, so far as the part in which he was interested was concerned, independence. The Tories raised the issue. Time and again they said there was no alternative between submission to Parliament and independence. He made his choice.

He was far too good a politician to let his true objective be known. At that time it would have been regarded with horror by the great majority of the people of the province. Ever since the first settlement speculative minds had talked of independence from Europe as an ultimate object. It was a different matter to bring it into the realm of everyday politics. Adams was a master of the peculiar art of convincing by denying. The Tories made the mistake of accusing their opponents of aiming at independence before there was any real sentiment for it. Adams took up the charge. He took every opportunity to deny it. In a letter which he drafted for the House as early as January, 1768, the House is made to say that “we cannot justly be suspected of the most distant thought of an independency on Great Britain. Some, we know, have imagined this of the colonists, and others may, perhaps, have industriously propagated it, to raise groundless and unreasonable jealousies of them; but it is so far from the truth, that we apprehend the colonies would refuse it if offered to them, and would even deem it the greatest misfortune to be obliged to accept it.” The only real power which the British Government had in America arose from the people's sentiment of loyalty. If that could be destroyed, British control would collapse and could only be re-established by conquest. A direct attack on the sentiment of loyalty would only arouse antagonism. The attack might convince some but in the case of many it was likely merely to increase the bigoted sentiment of loyalty. The fervent denial of any desire for independence which Sam Adams inserted in one public document after another was the perfect solution. The most bigoted Tory could not object to the insertion of such statements; at the same time, they familiarized the public mind with the idea of independence. The victory was largely won when public opinion ceased to regard a discussion of the question of independence as taboo.

As always, there was a considerable disposition to make the best of a bad situation, but Adams could see the dangerous effect of precedents. The dispute over the question whether the legislature could be compelled to meet in Cambridge instead of Boston lasted for years. It was a great nuisance, since it interfered with all routine action. Even Hancock was at one time willing to vote for a resolution asking the Governor to permit the legislature to move back to Boston because of the inconvenience of meeting in Cambridge. That was all the Tories desired. It was as much of a nuisance for them as for the patriots to have the seat of government in this country village. Adams succeeded in having the motion defeated by a few votes.

He, more than any other, is responsible for arousing the people over such apparently abstract questions as whether the governor's salary and the judges' salaries could be paid directly by the crown. The British had not anticipated trouble. They thought the argument that the effect of these measures would be to transfer the cost of these salaries from American taxpayers to the British treasury would be conclusive. Both Cushing and Hancock thought it silly to try to make an issue out of these measures. Hancock as a selectman voted against calling a town meeting on the question of the judges' salaries. The town meeting was held and resulted in the Boston Committee of Correspondence “which,” Hutchinson wrote to a former governor now in England, “is such a foolish scheme that they must necessarily make themselves ridiculous.” Later he said that the effect of the measure was that “all on a sudden from a state of peace, order, and general contentment . . . the Province more or less, from one end to the other, was brought into a state of contention, disorder, and general dissatisfaction.” It was not long after the formation of the Committee that a Tory pamphleteer described it as “the foulest, subtlest, and most venomous serpent ever issued from the egg of sedition. It is the source of the rebellion. I saw the small seed when it was implanted; it was a grain of mustard. I have watched the plant until it has become a great tree. The vilest reptiles that crawl upon the earth are concealed at the root; the foulest birds of the air rest upon its branches . .

Adams was not a mob-leader. His theory of the technique of revolution differed from that which has later become standard. He was opposed to mobs and to any use of violence. He conducted himself so cautiously that the government could never find any excuse to arrest him. As early as 1768 depositions were secretly taken before Hutchinson as Chief Justice and sent to London. The object was to enable the crown lawyers to decide whether there was sufficient evidence to justify bringing Adams to England to be tried for treason under a long-forgotten statute of Henry VIII providing for prosecutions within the realm for treason committed outside the realm. The government decided the evidence was so flimsy that it was dangerous to make the attempt.

There was another element of danger besides the lack of evidence. The legal position of the Americans was that the authority of Parliament was confined to the realm and that the colonies were not part of the realm. If Coke and his contemporaries had been called upon to decide the question they would have decided in favor of America. Even Wales for centuries after its conquest was regarded as outside the realm and there were innumerable precedents that for that reason an act of Parliament could have no force there. The medieval concepts of territorial nationality and personal allegiance on which the Americans insisted had become meaningless in England. When we note the havoc which the new theories of nationality which were beginning to arise about that time have created in Europe, we can only be thankful that the medieval, territorial concept has remained pretty firmly imbedded in our thinking.

From the beginning Adams was satisfied that the contest could only end in war. The chief obstacle to success which he foresaw was the genuine affection which the people still had for the British connection and the object of all his writings was to destroy this. When he prepared petitions for the legislature to send to England, he did not expect to move the British government; he wanted to convince his countrymen that their affection for the British connection was not reciprocated. When he was working on the first petition to the King, his daughter Hannah remarked on the marvel that the paper in front of him would soon be touched by the royal hand. “It will, my dear,” he replied, “more likely be spurned by the royal foot.”

His attitude was much the same toward the various boycotts of British goods. He did everything possible to promote such movements but his object was different from that of his associates. They hoped the boycotts would bring the British to reason; he hoped they would encourage local manufacturing—economic independence.

He foresaw the ultimate collapse of the charter government and endeavored to prepare a substitute to forestall British rule. The committees of correspondence were the result. A permanent committee of this name was set up in each town, following the lead of Boston. They served an immediate object as a propaganda machine but they were likewise a province-wide organization which would be in some condition to take over the government when the time arrived.

He would have been quite content if the troubles had ended in an independent New England confederation—perhaps he would have preferred it—but he realized the increased strength of a wider union. From the time of his entrance into the legislature he urged a free correspondence among the colonial assemblies for the object of united action. He had a very keen appreciation of the personal element. He realized the strength which personal confidence could add to such official correspondence. He was too poor to travel but he seized every opportunity to open a correspondence with likely-looking leaders in other colonies. The most conspicuous examples are his correspondence with Christopher Gadsden in South Carolina and Richard Henry Lee in Virginia.

“Put your enemy in the wrong” was a maxim which he constantly impressed on his associates. Confine yourselves to meetings, writings, resolutions. Let the enemy start the use of force. When they did so, he knew how to take advantage of it.

The first bloodshed was the killing of a boy named Christopher Snyder, the son of a German immigrant. Richardson, a customs’ informer, had attempted to tear down a sign asking people to boycott a merchant who carried British goods. A group of boys, including young Snyder, threw stones at Richardson. He retreated to his house, which was nearby, locked himself in, got his gun, opened a second-story window and fired.

The first use which Adams made of this incident was to arrange a most magnificent funeral for young Snyder. The procession was followed by thousands of people as it wound through the town, with stops at Faneuil Hall and the Tree of Liberty. The funeral was managed and presumably paid for by the Sons of Liberty. This was a semisecret organization whose membership consisted largely of skilled workmen. It was completely under Adams’ influence and in time it became as important to him as the Caucus Club.

The purpose of the funeral was to focus attention on the killing of Snyder. The government helped its propaganda value. Richardson was tried and convicted of murder. The killing was clearly unjustifiable but he was pardoned. It was a lesson which all could understand. Anyone who was connected with the British government need not fear the local courts. By constant references in the newspapers Adams saw to it that the lesson was not forgotten.

The Boston Massacre occurred shortly after the killing of Snyder. The town was in an uproar the next morning and it was necessary to call out the militia to protect the soldiers. Men poured in from all the surrounding countryside, many bringing their guns. Before the end of the day it was estimated that there were ten thousand men in town ready and willing to fight the soldiers. A member of the Council warned Hutchinson that those who were swarming into town with their guns “are men of the best characters, men of estates, and men of religion; men who pray over what they do.” A less able revolutionary leader would have judged the hour had come; Adams thought otherwise. Inflexible in purpose—certain that war would come in the end —his judgment was always cool and cautious. Time, he was always certain, was on the side of the Americans. Each new British outrage which was settled without bloodshed meant that American solidarity would be greater when the war broke out. Each year that passed meant that the population and resources of the country had increased. His business was to prevent an outbreak of violence; then to use the story of the Massacre to increase the growing dislike of Americans for the British connection.

The town meeting which assembled at three in the afternoon on the day following the Massacre was larger than any that had ever been held before. It adjourned from Faneuil Hall to the Old South Meetinghouse, the most capacious auditorium in town. Adams addressed the meeting. Ordinarily he was a somewhat dry and heavy speaker but he had a peculiar faculty for rising to great occasions. Even then he was not rhetorical. It was not enthusiasm he inspired, but confidence. The troops must go; otherwise there would be civil war. Castle William, on an island in the harbor, was the proper place for them. A committee, with Hancock as chairman and Adams a member, was appointed to convey this decision to Hutchinson.

He received them surrounded by his Council and with the colonels of the two British regiments at his side. He was resolute. No one but Gage, the Commander-in-Chief in America, could order the troops out of town and Gage was in New York. Adams was equally resolute. By charter the governor was commander-in-chief in the province and he called on Hutchinson to exercise his charter powers. The Council and the colonels heartily wished themselves out of the scrape. Finally the senior colonel, Dalrymple, offered to send the regiment which had been concerned in the incident to the Castle but insisted that his orders required him to keep the other regiment in town. The committee returned to the town meeting. As Adams and his associates filed through the crowded meetinghouse he kept repeating “Both regiments or none.” When the committee’s report was rendered his meaning became clear and the entire meeting echoed back, “Both regiments or none.”

A new committee was appointed to go back to Hutchinson with their answer. Things were becoming too serious to trust even the nominal leadership to Hancock. This time Adams was chairman.

It was dusk when the committee met with Hutchinson, the Council, and the colonels. Adams was the committee’s spokesman. One by one the councillors and the colonels yielded as he painted the dreadful consequences of keeping the troops in town. Only Hutchinson remained firm but finally even he consented to their removal. He was satisfied afterwards that this had been foolish; that if the colonels and the councillors had remained firm, the town could have been overawed. Lord North ever afterwards referred to this unfortunate segment of the British army as “Sam Adams’ regiments.”

The skill with which he averted outbreaks which a lesser revolutionist would have welcomed made Adams an almost legendary figure in Boston. All he had left of his inherited property was the house on Purchase Street and the abandoned brewery. His only income was his salary as clerk of the House of Representatives. This was not quite a hundred pounds a year Massachusetts money (which was not on a par with sterling). His second wife, Elizabeth Wells, whom he had married in 1764 when he was forty-two and she was twenty-four, was noted for her extreme economy, and his friends always found genteel though modest entertainment at his home. A colored servant girl named Surry had been given to the second Mrs. Adams shortly after her marriage. Adams had then announced that “a slave cannot live in my house.” Surry was freed but lived with the Adamses until her death. There was usually a servant boy as well. His education would be supervised by Adams, who would help him set up in a trade when he became old enough. One ex-servant boy, in post-revolutionary days became very influential among the Boston mechanics and was of material assistance to his old master politically. The household was completed by the two surviving children of Adams’ first marriage, a boy and a girl, and by a huge Newfoundland dog. The latter was famous for his antipathy to redcoats.

Adams did most of his writing late at night, in a study adjoining his bedroom. A man whose occupation required him to pass along Purchase Street in the small hours of the morning said that however late it was, he always saw a light burning in that room and that when he saw it he knew that “Sam Adams was hard at work writing against the Tories.” He had not only state papers and newspaper articles to write; his correspondence became more voluminous every year. Hardly any of it is preserved. He had none of John Adams’ passion for the preservation of written records. “I have seen him,” John later related of Samuel, “at Mrs. Yard’s in Philadelphia, when he was about to leave Congress, cut up with his scissors whole bundles of letters into atoms that could never be reunited, and throw them out of the window, to be scattered by the winds. This was in summer, when he had no fire; in winter he threw whole handfuls into the fire. As we were on terms of perfect intimacy, I have joked him, perhaps rudely, upon his anxious caution. His answer was, ‘Whatever becomes of me, my friends shall never suffer by my negligence.’ ”

He still kept up his peregrinations through the ropewalks and the shipyards. A native dignity of manner helped build up the almost superstitious awe which the people were beginning to have for his wisdom. His reputation was such that it was frequently asserted that he had the gift of prophecy. He was a little above the medium height and carried himself very erect. He was prematurely gray and wrinkled—all the strangers who met him overestimated his age. From an early age he suffered from a tremulousness of his head and hands. He was of muscular build and light complexion and his eyes were a light blue. His serious and dignified, yet simple, manners made a great impression on the various foreigners with whom he was later to come into contact. When Steuben landed in Boston he found in Samuel Adams the type of republican simplicity which he had expected to find in Arcadian America. A French officer who met him at a later date put his impressions on paper. “I experienced in his company the satisfaction one rarely has in the world, nay, even on the theatre, of finding the person of the actor corresponding with the character he performs. In him I saw a man wrapt up in his object, who never spoke but to give a good opinion of his cause and a high idea of his country. His simple and frugal exterior seemed intended as a contrast with the energy and extent of his ideas, which were wholly turned towards the Republic, and lost nothing of their warmth by being expressed with method and precision.”

The period immediately following the Boston Massacre was marked by a disposition on the part of the men Adams had brought together to desert the cause. In his lucid and sober moments Otis was inclined to Toryism; John Adams announced his intention to abandon politics; Hancock and Cushing gave evident signs of a disposition to make up with Hutchinson. If the British had been content to leave well enough alone the movement for independence would have collapsed. It was not so much what the British did as the way they did it. Years before, Otis had cited the arrogant phrase “our colonies” and inquired “Whose colonies can the creatures mean?” Years later a Tory refugee who had fled to England entered in his diary “It piques my pride, I confess, to hear us called 'our Colonies, our Plantations' in such terms, and with such airs, as if our property and persons were absolutely theirs, like the Villains’ and their cottages in the old feudal system so long since abolished, though the spirit or leaven is not totally gone, it seems.” Adams never tired of impressing on his countrymen that the English regarded them as “tawny savages” outside the pale of civilization.

Perhaps Adams would have struck at the time of the Massacre if Hutchinson had not given away. Four years later the blow came.

In other places the tea ships were induced to return without unloading or, if the tea was unloaded, the patriots kept guard over it so that none of it could be sold. The presence of British troops in the Castle and a British squadron in the harbor prevented these easy solutions in Boston. The first tea ship to arrive, the Dartmouth, belonged to Rotch, the Quaker merchant with whom Hancock had at one time discussed the possibility of cornering the whale-oil market. Even before its arrival, a town meeting had resolved that the tea should not be permitted to be landed. Adams managed to induce the neighboring towns to involve themselves and did everything possible to keep Boston from being isolated. Guards were placed to keep the tea from being landed by stealth. Rotch would have been glad to get out of his troubles by sending his ship back to England with its cargo but there were difficulties to this. By law, a ship was required to unload and enter its cargo at the customs within a limited time. It could not leave the harbor without doing so unless it had special permission. Hutchinson was the man from whom permission had to be obtained, and the guns at the Castle and on the warships made it certain that no ship could leave without the Governor's pass. Meanwhile, two other tea ships arrived in the harbor.

Thursday, December 16, 1773, was the last day the Dartmouth could lawfully remain without unloading. A town meeting was called for 10 o’clock on the morning of that day and it assembled in the Old South with at least two thousand spectators from the surrounding towns. Rotch came and reported his inability to obtain a clearance. He was directed to see Governor Hutchinson in person. The latter had gone to his countryseat at Milton, and the meeting adjourned until three o’clock to give Rotch time to go on his errand. When the meeting reassembled there were seven thousand people present—the largest town meeting ever held in Boston. It was a quarter after six, an hour after dark, when Rotch returned. The Governor had refused him a pass. When Rotch was through with his report Adams arose and said simply, “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.” It was a prearranged signal. As he ceased, a warwhoop was heard. The startled meeting looked in the direction of the sound and, in the dim twilight, saw the Mohawks running and whooping by the church door. The crowd rushed after them.

The guards who had been stationed by the town at the wharf let the Mohawks through but no one else. It took about three hours to bring the tea up from the holds of the three ships, rip the chests open, and dump their contents into the harbor. It was so quiet that an onlooker about fifty yards from the nearest ship could hear the chests being ripped open. The British men-of-war made no attempt to interfere. Next morning the tea was piled in windrows on Dorchester beach.

There was the devil to pay. The British government passed the Boston Port Bill, which closed Boston as a port; an act which abolished the charter government of the province, and an act for sending people to England for trial for crimes committed in Massachusetts. The Boston Port Bill was so rigidly construed that even a rowboat was forbidden to go from one wharf to another. Gage was appointed Governor. He had discretionary orders to seize Adams but Gage had only four regiments in Boston and was afraid to do so.

It was understood that the first step toward reconciliation must be an agreement by the town of Boston to pay for the tea. Many of the leaders were in favor of taking this step. Even Franklin advised doing so. Adams showed the letter containing Franklin’s advice to others and remarked, “Franklin may be a good philosopher but he is a bungling politician.” The real difference was in their attitude toward independence. Adams now publicly rejoiced that the severity of the British government would soon produce that glorious result.

There was to be one more session of a Massachusetts legislature summoned by a British governor. It met at Salem on June 7, 1774. The first business was the appointment of a committee of nine on the state of the province. Adams was chairman but he soon discovered that the members were by no means in agreement with him. After making this discovery, he did not even go to the committee meetings but left James Warren to preside in his stead. The Tory members of the committee soon became so convinced that Adams knew it was hopeless to oppose paying for the tea that the more prominent of them went out of town on private business. Adams spent his time in caucus. The first evening he invited five members of the legislature on whom he could absolutely rely. The next evening each brought a few members for whom he could vouch. By the third night there were more than thirty. The Governor had plenty of spies but the secret was so well kept that Adams obtained a majority of the House without the Governor knowing anything about it. On June 17 Adams, as Clerk of the House, ordered the doorkeeper to lock the door. Adams put the key into his own pocket. He then introduced his resolution for the appointment of delegates to a Continental Congress. Several members tried to leave but were stopped by the locked door. Somehow or other, word got to Gage, who immediately prepared a very short proclamation dissolving the House. It was sent by his secretary, Flucker, who found the door locked. Flucker thereupon read the proclamation to a great crowd which had assembled outside. In the meantime, the House elected five delegates and, since no funds could be drawn from the Treasury without the Governor's concurrence, assessed five hundred pounds on the towns in proportion to the last tax-roll for the payment of the delegates' expenses.

“Oh, what a glorious morning is this!” said Adams as he and Hancock were crossing the fields of Woburn on the morning of April 19, 1775. Hancock thought he was talking about the weather. This was that for which Adams had lived his life. When he saw his countrymen actually in arms against the British he knew that independence was inevitable.

The remainder of his career was definitely an anticlimax. He was one of the hardest working members of the Congress and remained a member most of the time, until nearly the end of the war. Yet his influence was by no means what one would expect. There are various causes. For one thing, the object to which he devoted the major portion of his effort was one which was destined not to succeed. This was the expulsion of the British from Canada. This meant as much to him as their expulsion from the region west of the Alleghenies meant to Patrick Henry, and for the same reason. The region which became Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and eastern Canada generally was as naturally designed for the expansion of New England as the Ohio valley was designed for the expansion of Virginia and Pennsylvania. The failure of the various Canadian expeditions during the Revolution meant that New England was deprived of its natural frontier.

Then Adams started under the handicap of a reputation as a radical. Neither was his poverty a help. When it was advisable for Massachusetts to defer in order to assure itself of the help of other states, it was particularly advisable not to push Samuel Adams forward. John Adams made a much better spokesman. Samuel Adams, too, was much more provincial than his second cousin. If he was ever out of Massachusetts before he attended the first Continental Congress, no record of it remains. Even after the Declaration of Independence he still toyed with the idea of a separate New England confederation.

He was unfortunate in his choice both of friends and enemies. Arthur Lee in England and Richard Henry Lee in Virginia (who were brothers) were both old correspondents. Samuel Adams acted with Richard Henry Lee in the Congress, and Richard Henry Lee was far from popular with his colleagues in the Virginia delegation. Then the Congress employed Arthur Lee in a diplomatic capacity. Whatever may have been Arthur Lee’s talents, diplomacy was not among them, but Adams felt it his duty to act as his defender in the Congress.

Schuyler was selected by the Congress for the command of the northern department of the army with headquarters at Albany. Washington thought well of Schuyler but Adams labored for his removal. He claimed the New England militia would never consent to be commanded by Schuyler, the reason apparently being that Schuyler was of Dutch extraction.

In common with many others, Adams was much impressed by Gates and thought that Washington did not sufficiently appreciate the talents of his subordinate. Gates was the founder of a regular dynasty of military incompetents. His favorite aide-de-camp was Wilkinson, the same incredibly corrupt and incompetent Wilkinson whom Jefferson as President was to cherish as commander of the United States army. It was the custom in the days before the telegraph for a general to send news of a victory by a favorite officer, and it was the custom for the authority to whom the news was sent to give a suitable reward to the messenger. Wilkinson was Gates’ choice to carry the news of the surrender of Burgoyne to the Congress. He tarried on the way to pay court to a girl, with the result that his news was stale when he arrived at the seat of the Congress. Nevertheless, he expected a reward, and a motion was made that he should be given a suitable present. Thereupon Adams arose and solemnly moved that the Congress present him with a pair of spurs.

Adams passed in the Congress for a poor speaker. Jefferson, who liked him, said in his old age that Adams “could not speak; he had a hesitating, grunting manner’’; that “altho’ he was neither an eloquent nor easy speaker, whatever he said was sound, and commanded the profound attention of the House,” but that, because of his lack of fluency, “in the discussions on the floor of Congress he reposed himself on our main pillar in debate Mr. John Adams.”

There is a more important reason than any of these for his failure to sustain his leadership after the country was once fairly embarked on the road to independence. Samuel Adams cherished a romantic ideal. The most able practical politician in the country ceased to be practical. The republic of which he dreamed was to be a republic in which office always sought the man. There would be no political parties, no solicitation of votes, no intriguing for office. The machinery which he had built up in Massachusetts had been necessary to free the country of monarchical corruption; it would itself be a corruption in the Arcadian atmosphere of republican simplicity.

He had never reflected deeply on the nature of power and accepted without question the then current idea of the nature of a republic as a form of government in which all power is centered in a representative assembly. He carried his attachment for this conception of republicanism so far as to oppose with all his ability a motion for the appointment of a secretary of war. The obvious inconveniences of having a congressional committee run the war department were not sufficient with him to outweigh what he considered a departure from republican principles.

The more ambitious Hancock did not cherish the same romantic ideal. While Adams labored in the Congress, Hancock had returned to Massachusetts and was busy building a personal political machine. By this time Adams made no secret of his opinion that Hancock was an evil influence, whose propensity for luxury and extravagance would tend to prevent the establishment of that virtue among the people which was essential for republican government. Hancock responded by practically eliminating Adams from politics.

By living in the simplest and most frugal manner Adams had been barely able to sustain himself on his salary as a member of the Congress. British officers had been quartered in his house on Purchase Street during the siege of Boston and they had completely wrecked it. The walls were covered with obscene doggerel. The outhouses, the doors and the furniture had been broken up and used for firewood. Adams was not rich enough to repair the damage. By a resolution of the legislature he was allowed to occupy the house of the refugee royal comptroller and he was later given the furniture which he found in this house in payment for the ninety-two pounds which was still owing to him for his services as clerk of the House of Representatives in 1774. In 1784 he purchased a frame house on Winter Street for one thousand pounds. No cash entered into the transaction, the entire purchase price being secured by a mortgage.

He was intermittently a member of the state senate and sometimes its president but did not rise higher until after his reconciliation with Hancock. He lost some more of his popularity by the vigor with which he opposed Shays’ rebellion. He insisted that death should be the punishment of the rebels. “In monarchies,” he wrote, “the crime of treason and rebellion may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished; but the man who dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.” In a republic the proper remedy for grievances was in the use of ballots, not bullets.

He and Hancock were reconciled socially In 1787 and politically in 1789. This result was helped by the fact that they adopted the same attitude in regard to ratification of the federal constitution. Adams’ financial situation was improved at about the same time by the death of his son at the age of thirty-seven. The son had been trained as a physician by Joseph Warren, had served through the war as an army surgeon, and had a claim against the continental government of twelve hundred pounds for accumulated salary. He died a bachelor and his father inherited this claim. Shortly after the organization of the government of the constitution it was paid. Adams used the money to pay off the balance of the mortgage on his house and to purchase a tavern and forty acres of land at Jamaica Plains. This investment proved so good that at his death his real estate was appraised at sixteen thousand dollars.

He was elected Lieutenant-Governor shortly after his reconciliation with Hancock and continued to be re-elected until Hancock’s death. He was elected Governor at the three following annual elections and then refused to be a candidate again.

The only two other governors of the commonwealth, Hancock and Bowdoin, had both been rich men and there was a considerable feeling that a governor ought to live in a certain style. A short time after Adams’ election a group of men in Boston presented him “with a new and handsome chariot and a pair of as handsome horses as there were in the city.” In general, he was opposed to private gifts of all kinds to public men. However, he accepted this one for he, too, believed that public officials should be surrounded by the outward signs of dignity on state occasions. When he had been President of the Senate, a young senator had, in the temporary absence of the doorman, opened the door for a messenger from the House. The senator was berated to the full extent of the chair’s vocabulary.

The first use Adams made of his carriage was to take his wife with him and drive to the home of a great friend of his, a constable by the name of Hewes. Here he alighted and handed Mrs. Hewes into the carriage with great dignity. The two ladies then drove off while the Governor stayed to chat with the constable. When Adams retired from the governorship he returned the carriage and horses to the donors.

His administration of the commonwealth was marked by a direct frontal assault on his dream of Boston as a Christian Sparta. The presentation of theatrical performances had long been criminal but, despite this, in Hancock’s administration a theater had been opened in Boston where plays were presented under the name of “moral lectures.” It was a sort of speakeasy enterprise and it was customary for the audience to bring cudgels with them. Hancock denounced it and one night had the whole company arrested on the stage. This was followed by a riot in the course of which a portrait of Hancock was trampled under foot. When Adams was Governor a bill passed the legislature repealing the law prohibiting theatrical performances. An executive veto was contrary to Adams’ conception of republican government but his cousin John had succeeded in inserting such a power in the state constitution. After weighing one principle against another, Samuel vetoed the repeal bill.

He had shown true wisdom in his retirement from the governorship for, so John Adams wrote Jefferson, he soon after became “a grief and distress to his family, a weeping, helpless object of compassion.

He had aligned himself during his governorship with the political party which was forming around Jefferson, and in the election of 1796 he had received the fifteen electoral votes of Virginia. This put him fifth on the list of presidential candidates. He was bitterly opposed to the Jay Treaty. The news of the treaty led to riots in Boston. A ship in the harbor which was supposed to be a British privateer was burned by the mob. Boys paraded the streets carrying jack-o'-lanterns made out of watermelons. The Federalists implored Governor Adams to interfere but he replied that it was only a “watermelon frolic.’ ”

The extreme Federalists were in control of the state government at his death and at first avoided making any arrangements for an official funeral. The rising tide of public opinion finally forced them to order out a militia escort. None of the Massachusetts congressmen would bring his death to the attention of Congress, and it was left for Randolph of Roanoke to make the appropriate motions.

CHAPTER V

Patrick Henry

Henry stands out in the correspondence of his contemporaries a sort of primeval force of irresistible power and unpredictable course. “He has only to say,” Washington wrote of him at one point, “let this be Law, and it is Law.” He was the first governor of the state of Virginia and could have been governor for the rest of his life if he had wished. Even in 1796, long after he had retired from politics, a legislature which was otherwise completely under the influence of Jefferson and Madison spontaneously elected him governor. He declined the office but the action of the legislature was significant. By temperament, background, habits, and ways of thinking, Henry was much more suited for the leadership of “Jeffersonian democracy” than either Jefferson or Madison. All his life Henry was the spokesman of those groups who later made Jefferson and Madison presidents. Yet when the party which Henry had originally led was finally triumphant —when the West in which he was more interested than any other of our early statesmen except Washington was finally settled—his name was not among the heroes.

One of the less lovely aspects of Jefferson’s contradictory character was a talent amounting to genius for the assassination of reputation. His most conspicuous victim was Henry. Jefferson had a good opportunity for he was younger and he lived to a much greater age. He admitted occasionally that Henry had been the chief leader of the Revolution in Virginia, but he also managed to set the rumor afloat—in such a manner that, while he could never be called upon to prove it, it found its way into several books as authentic—that Henry had plotted to make himself dictator. This was the only serious charge that Jefferson could find to make but he found many other things of which to complain. He said that Henry, “while in genteel society, appeared to understand all the decencies and proprieties of it; but, in his heart, he preferred low society, and sought it as often as possible. He would hunt in the pine woods of Fluvannah, with overseers, and people of that description… Such conduct, Jefferson further reported, was only what was to be expected, for Henry had started life “as barkeeper in the tavern at Hanover … From this he turned his views to the law, for the acquisition or practice of which however he was too lazy.” Henry, according to Jefferson, was utterly ignorant, he never read anything, he never even learned to draw his own pleadings, necessity compelled him to confine his practice to jury cases. His ruling passion, still according to Jefferson, was a “ravenous avarice”; in his practice, “the fee was an indispensable preliminary”; his ignorance confined him largely to criminal cases and “from these poor devils it was always understood that he squeezed exorbitant fees”; he became rich by purchasing an estate on credit and later paying for it in depreciated currency “not worth oak leaves,” Jefferson also said that Henry “more than any other man in the U.S.” had a “thorough contempt & hatred of Genl. Washington” but that Henry’s views changed completely when he made money as a result of some actions of the Washington administration.

Henry, who was good-nature itself, never returned this hatred. It is based obviously on Henry’s leadership of the move to have the legislature investigate Jefferson’s conduct as governor. That alone might not have been sufficient to keep Henry’s name out of the list of Democratic saints, but he had the further misfortune to have an active dislike of Madison. This dislike arose because of Madison’s activities in the formation and adoption of the constitution. While nearly all the other great opponents of the constitution—men like Samuel Adams and George Clinton—later drifted into Jefferson’s orbit, Henry went in the opposite direction.

The people never lost their faith in him, whatever political views he adopted. A few months before his death, at Washington’s earnest solicitation, Henry agreed to run for the legislature to stem the Jeffersonian tide. He had only moved to the county in which he ran a few years previously, and he was so ill that, after making one speech, he had to take to his bed, where he remained until his death. Yet he was elected against a Jeffersonian landslide.

For the man indubitably had power. From the day that he first took his seat in the colonial legislature until his death the small planters and the backwoodsmen regarded him as their particular friend. It was not a political power based on organization but a purely personal power, Jefferson, conscious of his own inability to develop a similar power, liked to think that it was due to Henry’s coarseness and liking for low company. It was usually ascribed to his oratory. None could deny that it existed.

Many stories arose of the popular faith in Henry. The best concerns the flight of the legislature from Charlottesville on the approach of Tarleton. Henry, Ben Harrison, and several others made off together in a group. All day they passed backwoodsmen with their guns, sometimes two on a horse, riding in to fight the British. Towards evening the fugitives began to look about for a place where they could eat. All they could find was a hut, and Henry knocked on the door. An old woman came out with her apron on. “We are members of the legislature,” Henry started to explain, “and have just been compelled to leave Charlottesville on account of the approach of the enemy.”

“Ride on, then, ye cowardly knaves,” was the reply. “Here have my husband and sons just gone to Charlottesville to fight for ye, and you running away with all your might. Clear out!”

“But,” said Henry, “we were obliged to fly. It would not do for the Legislature to be broken up by the enemy. Here is Mr. Speaker Harrison; you don’t think he would have fled had it not been necessary?”

“I always thought a good deal of Mr. Harrison till now, but he had no business to run from the enemy,” and the old woman started to shut the door.

“Wait a moment my good woman,” said Henry, “you would hardly believe Mr. Tyler or Colonel Christian would take to flight if there were not good cause for so doing.”

“No, indeed, that I wouldn’t.”

“But,” said Henry, “Mr. Tyler and Colonel Christian are here.” 

“They here? Well, I never would have thought it.” She hesitated a moment. “No matter we love those gentlemen, and I didn’t suppose they would ever run from the British, but since they have, they shall have nothing to eat in my house. You may ride along.”

Tyler then spoke up. “What would you say, my good woman, if I were to tell you that Patrick Henry fled with the rest of us?”

“Patrick Henry! I would tell you there wasn’t a word of truth in it. Patrick Henry would never do such a cowardly thing.”

“But this is Mr. Henry,” said Tyler, pointing to him.

The old woman’s mouth dropped open and she stood for an instant or two playing with her apron before she said, “Well, then, if that is Patrick Henry, it must be all right. Come in, and ye shall have the best I have in the house.”

John Henry, the father of Patrick, came to Virginia sometime in the second decade of the century. He was a Scotsman and came of an intellectual family. William Robertson, the historian, was his first cousin and the mother of Lord Brougham was his second cousin. On his arrival in Virginia, John Henry went to live with a relative, John Syme, who had migrated a few years earlier. Syme was some sort of connection of Governor Dinwiddie but the relationship does not seem to have helped him materially. Syme had married a local girl, Sarah Winston, and had a small plantation in Hanover County which was then pretty much on the outskirts of civilization. Syme died shortly after the arrival of John Henry and left one child, a son. John Henry later married the widow. Their second son, Patrick, was born on May 29, 1736, and was named after a brother of John Henry, an Episcopal clergyman who had also come to Virginia.

Patrick attended a country school until he was about ten. There his formal education ended. During the next few years his father attempted to teach him Latin and Greek. There is controversy as to the result. Jefferson always insisted Henry was a complete ignoramus but it is clear that Henry deliberately minimized his attainments. Whether he was trying a private lawsuit or endeavoring to bring about the rejection of the federal constitution, there was nothing arrogant or conceited in his manner. He used the same approach in dealing with individuals as in dealing with men in a mass. He won the esteem and friendship of John Adams at the first Congress and he did it partly because, when Adams shortly after they became acquainted, inquired into his education, Henry told him that he had had practically none. He could talk and write a grammatical English when he wished, but he habitually said “Cheena” for “China,” spoke of the “yearth,” and referred to “men’s naiteral parts being improved by larnin.’ ” Jefferson might not like it, but it helped make Henry the idol of the people.

It is clear that Henry was not nearly so ignorant and uneducated as he pretended to be. Jefferson himself occasionally recognized that he had overstated the case; after telling Daniel Webster at length of Henry’s ignorance and love of “low society,” Jefferson added, “I have often been astonished at his command of proper language; how he attained the knowledge of it, I never could find out, as he read so little and conversed little with educated men.”

Henry read Virgil and Livy under his father and also learned to speak Latin—at least when he was Governor he carried on a conversation with a visiting French dignitary in that language. He is supposed to have been fond of arithmetic and geography as a boy. One of his boyhood friends later remembered finding Patrick lying on his back on a bed reading Tristram Shandy. The friend adds that “he had a most retentive memory, making whatever he read his own. I never heard him quote verbatim any passages from history or poetry, but he would give you the fact or sentiment in his own expressive language.” Henry’s reading may not have been extensive but it was sound. The books with which in his early life he most frequently claimed an acquaintance were Livy, Plutarch, and Stith’s History of Virginia. At one time he seems to have made it a rule to read Livy and Plutarch in translation every year. Jefferson’s comment on this, in a letter to Henry’s first biographer, was “that Mr. Henry read Livy through once a year is a known impossibility … He may have read him once … but certainly not twice. A first reading of a book he could accomplish sometimes and on some subjects, but never a second.” Jefferson was so positive because Henry one fall “borrowed of me Hume’s Essays, in two volumes, saying he should have leisure in the winter for reading. In the spring he returned them, and declared he had not been able to go further than twenty or thirty pages in the first volume.” The natural inference would seem to be that Henry found Hume duller than Plutarch.

There is one anecdote which indicates that Henry’s reading was more extensive than Jefferson would ever admit. During one session of the legislature Henry, R, H. Lee, and a number of others stayed at the home of Edmund Randolph. One evening Lee started to descant on the genius of Cervantes and seemed oblivious to the yawns of the audience. Finally, Henry rose slowly from his chair, walked across the room, remarked that Don Quixote was certainly a most excellent work but, he said with a smile, as he stopped before Lee, “Mr. Lee, you have overlooked, in your eulogy, one of the finest things in the book.” “What is that?” asked Lee. “It is,” said Henry, “that divine exclamation of Sancho, ‘Blessed be the man that first invented sleep; it covers one all over, like a cloak.’ ”

When Patrick was about twelve he broke his collarbone and while he was recuperating he learned to play the violin. It was a form of pleasure which he continued all his life.

He had one source of education which Jefferson never appreciated. Henry was born with the knack of getting along with people. He was more than an agreeable companion. Even as a boy he had the ability to extract information without his companions knowing that he was doing so. He never lost the habit, and he later said that he “seldom met with a man who did not tell him something of which he was ignorant.” His son-in-law, Spencer Roane, who was for many years Chief Justice of Virginia, said that “the advantage of Mr. Henry’s education consisted in this, that it arose from some reading which he never forgot, and much observation and reflection. He read good books as it were for a text, and filled up the picture by an acute and penetrating observation and reflection, and by mingling in the society of men.”

John Henry did not prosper as a planter, and when Patrick was fifteen his father obtained a position for him with a local merchant. A year later John Henry set up Patrick and his elder brother William in a country store. After a year the brothers were forced to liquidate. Patrick managed the liquidation and, while doing so, married. He was not yet nineteen. 

His wife was Sarah Shelton, the daughter of a small planter in Hanover County. She brought him a dowery of six Negroes and three hundred acres of poor land adjoining her father’s farm and known as Pine Slash. Patrick later stated that his prospective father-in-law had agreed to give him ten Negroes and four hundred acres but never carried out the agreement in full.

Patrick started to farm at Pine Slash and about two years later his house and most of his furniture were destroyed by fire. The Henrys went to live with the Sheltons and Patrick sold some of his Negroes to raise money to buy a stock of merchandise for another country store. He continued farming, however, and employed a clerk to run the store. In another two years Henry’s second business venture failed. He then decided to take up law, and borrowed copies of Coke on Littleton and a Digest of the Virginia Acts, After studying these for a month or six weeks he went to Williamsburg and applied for a license to practice law. He obtained it because, according to Jefferson, the examiners were “men of great facility of temper.”

Henry continued to live with his father-in-law, who was now running a tavern. Patrick occasionally helped out behind the bar, and thus laid the basis for Jefferson’s gibes about his having been originally a “barkeeper.” Such gibes left Henry unmoved personally and they helped him politically. Like many self-made men, he later came to ascribe his success to his early difficulties. “Looking forward into life,” he wrote to a young man in 1793, “and to those prospects which seem to be commensurate with your talents, native and acquired, you may justly esteem those incidents fortunate which compel an exertion of mental power, maturity of which is rarely seen growing out of an uninterrupted tranquillity. Adversity toughens manhood, and the characteristic of the good or the great man, is not that he has been exempted from the evils of life, but that he has surmounted them.”

For the first few years after his admission he practiced only in the county courts of Hanover and a few surrounding counties. His practice was so successful that within two years after his admission he was lending money both to his father and his father-in-law. He was already acquiring a reputation, too, as a friend of the common people.

By a law which had been in force for a number of years, each parish was required to pay its parson an annual salary of sixteen thousand pounds of tobacco. One year the price of tobacco was unusually high. Sixteen thousand pounds of it would have been worth four hundred pounds sterling. Then the legislature hastily passed an act giving the parishes an election either to pay in tobacco or to commute the payment by the payment of about one hundred and thirty-three pounds in depreciated colonial currency. This act was vetoed in England and the parsons began to bring suits for their salaries.

The first of the Parsons’ Cases in Hanover County was brought by James Maury, the clergyman at whose school Jefferson had studied. The court ruled that the parson was entitled to a judgment for the difference between what he had been paid and the value of sixteen thousand pounds of tobacco at the time it should have been paid to him, a jury was impanelled to ascertain this amount. The issue did not appear to leave much scope for legal talent and the lawyer for the defendants withdrew from the case after advising his clients that there was nothing more he could do for them. They then retained Patrick Henry.

The payment of church taxes was anything but popular and the courtroom was packed to capacity. The court sent the sheriff out to collect a jury and that official used his own discretion in selecting them. When he brought them in the plaintiff objected that they were “people of whom I had never heard before’’—that there was not a single “gentleman” among them—but the court accepted them on Henry’s argument that they were “honest men.”

Henry addressed the jury for nearly an hour. It was the first of his great oratorical triumphs, but its only record is left in the somewhat prejudiced comments of the plaintiff in a letter written a few days after the trial. Henry began by arguing “that the only use of an established church . . . is to enforce obedience to . . . duties of imperfect obligation; that when a clergy ceases to answer these ends, the community have no further need of their ministry . . . that the clergy of Virginia . . . had been so far from answering, that they had most notoriously counteracted, those great ends of their institution; that, therefore, . . . they ought to be considered as enemies of the community.” From this he proceeded to argue that the commutation law “had every characteristic of a good law . . . and could not, consistently with . . . the original compact between the, king and people … be annulled” and that “a king, by annulling or disallowing acts of so salutary a nature, from being the father of his people, degenerated into a tyrant, and forfeited all right to his subjects’ obedience.” At this point the plaintiff’s lawyer “called out aloud, and with an honest warmth,” “Your worships, the gentleman has spoken treason” and, the plaintiff relates, “at the same instant, too, amongst some gentlemen in the crowd behind me, was a confused murmur of ‘treason, treason.’ ” In “less than five minutes” the jury brought in a verdict of one penny damages for the plaintiff.

Henry always tried to avoid making personal enemies and, after the trial, he “apologized” to the plaintiff “alleging that his sole view in engaging in the cause . . . was to render himself popular. You see, then, it is so clear a point in this person’s opinion that the ready road to popularity here is to trample under foot the interests of religion, the rights of the church, and the prerogatives of the crown.”

The Parson’s Case established Henry in Hanover County as the friend of the people but its echoes were faint in Williamsburg. His only visit to the capital had been to obtain his license, but in 1764 he went there again to argue a contested election from Hanover County before the committee on privileges of the House of Burgesses. One of the burgesses later stated that he had “for a day or two observed an ill-dressed young man sauntering in the lobby, that he seemed to be a stranger to everybody . . . but that attending when the case of a contested election came on, he was surprised to find this same person counsel for one of the parties, and still more so, when he delivered an argument superior to anything he ever heard.” Henry lost the case but he created such an impression that when a vacancy occurred in the representation for the County of Louisa the House elected him to fill it. He was not a resident of Louisa but he moved there shortly after his election.

The news of the passage of the Stamp Act was received in Virginia a few days after Henry’s election to the legislature and on his twenty-ninth birthday the House resolved to go into committee-of-the-whole to consider it. There was no Opposition in the colony; the field v/as open and, when the House had organized itself as a committee, the new member from Louisa was the first to take the floor. Only two other members knew his purpose when he arose. It was to assume the leadership of the colony on the most momentous political question which had arisen in its history. The Randolphs and Carters were nearly beside themselves with anger and fright when he produced from his pocket what had once been a blank page of a law book and proceeded to read a series of resolutions.

“Resolved, That the first adventurers and settlers . . . brought with them . . . all the privileges, franchises, and immunities that have at any time been held, enjoyed, and possessed, by the people of Great Britain;”

“Resolved,” that these privileges, franchises and immunities have been confirmed by two royal charters; “Resolved, That the taxation of the people by themselves or by persons chosen by themselves . . . is the distinguishing characteristic of British freedom . . . ;”

“Resolved,” that the Virginians “have uninterruptedly enjoyed the right of being thus governed by their own assembly in the article of their taxes and internal police . . . ;”

“Resolved, therefore, That the general assembly of this colony have, the only and sole exclusive right and power to lay taxes and impositions upon the inhabitants of this colony . . . ;”

“Resolved, That . . . the inhabitants of this colony, are not bound to yield obedience to any law or ordinance whatever, designed to impose any taxation whatsoever upon them, other than the laws or ordinances of the general assembly aforesaid;”

“Resolved,” that any person who shall maintain the contrary “by speaking or writing . . . shall be deemed an enemy to his majesty’s colony.”

The debate, says Jefferson, who tried to follow the proceedings by peering in the open door, was “most bloody.” Sometime in its course Henry pointed out that “Tarquin and Caesar had each his Brutus; Charles the First, his Cromwell; and George the Third—” “Treason,” shouted the chairman; “Treason! Treason!” came from every part of the House, “—may profit by their example! If this be treason, make the most of it.” Jefferson later made the rather inconsistent claims that as Henry was incapable of preparing these resolutions himself they must have been prepared by someone else, and that in any event “they are not such as to prove any power of composition,” but he also remembered at another time that when as a young man he had listened to the debate in the House of Burgesses, Henry “appeared to me to speak as Homer wrote.”

Only the first five of these resolutions were passed. It was near the end of the session and the Governor blamed their passage on the thinness of the House. Each resolution was voted on separately. The vote was so close that the fifth resolution passed by a majority of one only, and Jefferson overheard Peyton Randolph, the Attorney-General, exclaim, as he came out of the House, “By God, I would have given a hundred guineas for a single vote.” That afternoon Henry was seen walking down Duke of Gloucester Street “wearing buckskin breeches, his saddle bags on his arm, leading a lean horse” on his way back to Hanover County. Ten o’clock the next morning young Jefferson found Colonel Peter Randolph, now a member of the Governor’s Council, sitting at the clerk’s desk, “thumbing over the volumes of Journals to find a precedent of expunging a vote of the House.” In Henry’s absence, the House later expunged the fifth resolution but the damage had been done. The resolutions as originally passed were published throughout the continent as the action of Virginia. The reputation they gave Henry can be judged from John Adams’ diary, where we see the young Braintree lawyer eagerly inquiring of the few Virginians he met what they could tell of Patrick Henry.

During the next decade, Henry’s practice grew rapidly but he was not admitted to the bar of the General Court until four years after he had introduced his Stamp Act resolutions. In this court he was not called upon to deal merely with questions of fact but had to argue questions of law. He was found fully capable of doing so. After his argument of an admiralty case—a branch of the law of which it was universally supposed that he was totally ignorant—his reputation was such that Robert Carter Nicholas—who, according to Jefferson, as one of the examiners had only approved Henry’s application for admission to the bar of the county courts “on repeated importunities and promises of future reading”—on retiring from practice, referred his clients to Henry.

Despite the fog which Jefferson raised there is no great mystery as to the method by which Henry acquired his legal knowledge. The only one of the eminent Virginians of the next generation who followed Henry rather than Jefferson was John Marshall. A study of the characters of Henry and Marshall makes the reason plain. Neither was a scholar like Jefferson and John Adams. Both had that faculty so common among great advocates of acquiring information orally. Both knew how to read the common pulse.

Jefferson was a legal scholar but Henry was a lawyer. While Jefferson sat in his office and read books for the sheer pleasure of knowing, Henry learned from the casual conversation of his brethren of the bar and from the cases he happened to overhear argued while he was awaiting his turn. If necessary, he, too, could plunge into the books, but he could not do so on a matter of theory. He could not study law in the abstract; to interest him it had to be related to a concrete controversy. This was why he could step from the county courts into the General Court and argue a question of admiralty law. It was not genius but a habit of mind. The details of the admiralty case are lost, but the method is evident from a later instance.

Shortly after the organization of the government of the constitution Henry was retained by the defendant in a test case designed to ascertain the possibility of recovering pre-revolutionary debts owing to British subjects. For several weeks before the trial he refused all engagements and settled down to intense study. He was then living at an estate he owned in Prince Edward County, and his office was a separate brick building at some distance from the house. He secluded himself here so rigorously that he even had his meals brought to him. When he was all through, the notes he had taken filled a leatherbound notebook more than an inch thick but small enough to go into his coat pocket, A path shaded by black locusts ran in front of his office, and for the next few days he was seen pacing up and down this path. He usually had the notebook open in his hand; when he occasionally returned it to his pocket it was apparent from the gestures which followed that he was rehearsing his speech.

Henry could prepare a closely-reasoned and logical argument on a legal or political question. He could even, Jefferson to the contrary, reduce it to writing. Sometime between 1765 and 1770 he prepared a pamphlet which was never published in which he discussed the questions of why Virginia “should want the common conveniencys, the necessarys of life” and of “How comes it that the lands in Pennsylvania are five times the value of ours?” His conclusion was that the answer to both questions was slavery and an established church. Therefore, he argued, the thing to do is to restrict slavery as much as possible and to encourage the immigration of free whites. “I agree entirely,” he wrote, “with those who insist on the necessity of home manufactures. We differ in the means of procuring them. To what purpose do we offer premiums, when experience tells us no one will obtain them? Common sense informs us that the first thing to be thought of is manufacturers.” The best way to get good artisans to migrate to Virginia, he argued further, would be complete religious toleration.

Neither these abilities nor his close association with the people explain his power. The reasons for that must be sought in his oratory.

The most striking thing about Henry as an orator is that we do not have a complete and accurate copy of any of his speeches. We cannot sit down and compare his literary style with Demosthenes or Daniel Webster, but there is one comparison which we can make. Many of the classics of oratory—Burke’s speech on conciliation with America is a conspicuous example—were delivered on the losing side. Henry did not deliver his speeches for the library but to convince. His speeches do not remain as literature but they produced action.

It was a sound instinct which made him object to their preservation verbatim. It is not an accident that they are all lost; he wanted them lost. This is apparent from an anecdote. Henry was a trustee and one of the most active promoters of Hampden-Sidney College. When, in 1788, it was known that he was about to deliver a speech advocating the rejection of the proposed federal constitution, Smith, the president of that college, sent a stenographer to take down Henry’s speech. A short time later there was an exhibition of public speaking at the college. Henry, as was his custom, attended, and, to his surprise, one of the students delivered what purported to be a reproduction of his speech against the adoption of the constitution. Henry was so offended that he forced Smith’s resignation from the presidency of the college.

Henry the orator was a very great artist—one of the greatest artists of all time. He was not merely a literary artist. Logic and the knack of making words behave were to him merely two factors among others in producing the ultimate result—persuasion. To him oratory was the art of making men behave differently than they otherwise would. This is the reason Henry did not want his speeches preserved; he did not wish to be judged as a logician or a literary artist but as a producer of action.

The absence of the usual evidence is not so important as it would at first sight appear; in fact, it may be an advantage, for it keeps us from trying to judge Henry by a comparison with the literary orators. There is no lack of evidence as to the nature of his art. In his later period lawyers and preachers—especially preachers—flocked from far and near to hear him speak and made detailed written analyses of the art of persuasion as practiced by Patrick Henry. All these analyses make one thing clear: The words which he spoke and their arrangement were to him only the beginning of oratory.

“His mightiest feelings,” said an eminent Presbyterian minister, after a careful study of Henry’s courtroom manner, “were sometimes indicated and communicated by a long pause, aided by an eloquent aspect, and some significant use of the finger.” His long pauses were notorious, but he made equally effective use of less obvious oratorical devices.

Like all “persuaders” as distinct from simple orators, Henry paid the utmost attention to his audience. He did not limit himself to vague general classifications, but in preparing for a jury case, for example, he learned as much as possible about each individual juryman. Henry’s social habits, his powers of close observation and his thorough knowledge of Virginian life then made it easy for him to enter into the minds of those he was about to address. “Arguments,” said Edmund Randolph, who himself had a reputation as an orator, in analyzing the sources of Henry’s oratorical strength, “which at first seemed strange, were afterwards discovered to be select in their kind, because adapted to some peculiarity in his audience.” In one murder case in which an eye-witness who was present at the trial says that the evidence was so clear that he was “unable to conceive any grounds of defence,” Henry, who represented the defendant “for a long time” after he had started to address the jury “never once adverted to the merits of the case . . . but went off into a most captivating and discursive oration on general topics, expressing opinions in perfect accordance with those of his hearers; until having fully succeeded in obliterating every impression of his opponent’s speech, he obliquely approached the subject. . . .”

He even arranged his personal appearance to suit his audience. He is usually described as being ill-dressed. He probably preferred the ease of simple old clothes but he would not have worn them if it had not been for a deeper reason. During both of his two periods as governor he is always described as being very well and very fashionably dressed. That was what the people expected of their chief executive and the actor in Henry called upon him to act the part he was playing to the greatest satisfaction of his audience. But as John Marshall wrote Monroe when Henry became governor for the second time, “he is about moving in a sphere of less real importance and power.” A governor was not then expected to make speeches but when Henry returned to making electioneering speeches and to trying jury cases he knew he would be more persuasive if he wore simple old clothes and talked of his lack of “larnin.”

He was somewhat over the average in height but still under six feet. He was always slender and was stoop-shouldered except when he was well into a speech, when his shoulders would suddenly straighten out. His forehead was high and straight and his nose jutted out at a rather sharp angle. It was long and straight, rather than high. His chin, likewise, was long but well-rounded. His cheekbones were high but rather close together. Length was the predominant characteristic. His complexion was dark and bloodless and his hair black. He began to lose his hair early but he always wore a black wig. His eyebrows were extremely long and black; so much so that many observers described his deep-set eyes as black. Actually they appear to have been blue. “Go out on a perfectly cloudless day,” said one of his daughters, “and look up at the sky, and you will have an exact idea of the color of his eyes.” Early in life he developed deep lines in his face and his brows were habitually knitted. His not very handsome appearance was helped by a fine set of teeth.

There is other evidence besides Jefferson’s that Henry “excelled in pleasantry.” He played the fiddle, he was an excellent dancer and none could equal him in the telling of a story. These talents were not observable in his public life. Thomson, the Secretary of the Continental Congress, when he rather hastily assumed his duties did not know Henry but, Thomson states, “from his appearance, I took him for a Presbyterian clergyman, used to haranguing the people.’’ That was the note which Henry wished to strike. When Thomson first saw him, he was “dressed in a suit of parson’s gray” but his usual attire in the courtroom was black. In 1773 a student in Williamsburg records that he met Henry, who was dressed in a “peach blossom colored coat” but that attire would never do for the courtroom or the House of Burgesses. There the emphasis was on solemnity; Henry always aimed first to impress on his audience that the decision which they were called upon to make involved a grave responsibility. The judge who presided at one of his murder cases said Henry made the jury forget all about the fact that the defendant had killed a storekeeper and made them think only of the possibility that through their verdict an innocent man might be hanged. In another murder case in which a defendant who was pretty obviously guilty was acquitted a juryman, on being asked why, said that Henry had scared him out of his wits by making him feel that if he voted for a hanging he would have to answer for it at Judgment Day.

Although Henry was famous for his ability to tell a story he very seldom used the talent in the courtroom or on the political platform. On the rare occasions when he did, he never deviated from his usual solemn manner. In speaking in the assembly he always addressed himself not only formally, but actually, to the Speaker. According to all accounts Henry had a perfect control of the tones of his voice and achieved many of his most remarkable successes by slight but unique changes of tone or emphasis, but his usual speaking was in a melodious monotone. It was only as he approached his climax that he began to vary his tone and to use gestures.

The beginning of one of his speeches was always disappointing. This may have been due to temperament originally but it was in accord with his general strategy of persuasion. He was always excessively modest. In court, he always treated the judges and his opponents with the greatest deference. He never in any way indicated any consciousness of his oratorical talents. The way to compliment him was not to tell him he was a great orator but that he was a shrewd business man. 

The formula on which he combined these talents was this: His modesty of demeanor and of garb, his hobbling introduction and his vulgar pronunciation were all designed to throw the audience, whether jury or burgesses, off their guard. Surely there could be no guile in this humble and ignorant fellow. Then he was deadly serious. A prominent Presbyterian minister who, after hearing Henry several times, tried to analyze the source of his persuasiveness, came to the conclusion that it was “the vivid feeling of his cause with which he spoke.” The opening having thrown his audience off their guard, Henry’s seriousness paved the way to that unison of feeling with his audience which he wanted to create. Henry’s description, in the Virginian ratifying convention, of the slavery which the proposed federal constitution would bring, was so vivid that one of the members of the convention said later that he had found himself unconsciously feeling his wrists for the fetters.

His greatest speech was delivered a few weeks before the Battle of Lexington. It was delivered in the second Virginian revolutionary convention in support of a series of resolutions which he had introduced culminating in the clause “Resolved, therefore. That this colony be immediately put into a posture of defence . . .” These resolutions were bitterly opposed by some of the leading men of the colony who still hoped against hope that the differences with Britain could be accommodated.

Henry’s start was as prosaic as always. But he warmed to his subject sooner than usual. He had not spoken long before, in the words of a Baptist preacher who was present, “The tendons of his neck stood out white and rigid like whipcords. His voice rose louder and louder, until the walls of the building and all within them seemed to shake and rock in its tremendous vibrations. Finally, his pale face and glaring eyes became terrible to look upon. Men leaned forward in their seats with their heads strained forward, their faces pale and their eyes glaring.” When Henry sat down the preacher says that he “felt sick with excitement. Every eye yet gazed entranced on Henry. It seemed as if a word from him would have led to any wild explosion of violence. Men looked beside themselves.”

Henry began by complimenting those who had spoken on the other side and by apologizing for differing with them. He then pointed to the fleets and armies which England had recently sent to America. “And what have we to oppose to them? Shall we try argument? Sir, we have been trying that for the last ten years. Have we anything new to offer upon the subject? Nothing. We have held the subject up in every light of which it is capable; but it has been all in vain. Shall we resort to entreaty and humble supplication? What terms shall we find, which have not been already exhausted? Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves longer. Sir, we have done everything that could be done, to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned—we have remonstrated—we have supplicated—we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and parliament. Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt, from the foot of the throne. In vain, after these things, may we indulge the fond hope of peace and reconciliation. There is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be free—if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending—if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained—we must fight!—I repeat it, sir, we must fight! ! An appeal to arms and to the God of Hosts, is all that is left us! . . . 

“They tell us, sir, that we are weak—unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs, and hugging the delusive phantom of Hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak, if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations; and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat, but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged, their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable—and let it come! ! I repeat it, sir, let it come!!!

“It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, peace, peace,—but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? what would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it. Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”

The account of an eyewitness reveals that close correlation of action and oratory on which Henry’s power of persuasion depended. “When he said, 'Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?’ he stood in the attitude of a condemned galley slave, loaded with fetters, awaiting his doom. His form was bowed; his wrists were crossed; his manacles were almost visible as he stood like an embodiment of helplessness and agony. After a solemn pause, he raised his eyes and chained hands toward Heaven, and prayed, in words and tones which thrilled every heart. 'Forbid it, Almighty God!’ He then turned toward the timid loyalists of the house . . . and he slowly bent his form yet nearer to the earth, and said, 'I know not what course others may take,’ and he accompanied the words with his hands still crossed, while he seemed to be weighed down with additional chains. The man appeared transformed into an oppressed, heart-broken, and hopeless felon. After remaining in this posture of humiliation long enough to impress the imagination with the condition of the colony under the iron heel of military despotism, he arose proudly, and exclaimed, 'but as for me,’—and the words hissed through his clenched teeth, while his body was thrown back, and every muscle and tendon was strained against the fetters which bound him, and with his countenance distorted by agony and rage, he looked for a moment like Laocoon in a death struggle with coiling serpents; then the loud, clear, triumphant notes, 'give me liberty,’ electrified the assembly. It was not a prayer, but a stern demand, which would submit to no refusal or delay . . . and, as each syllable of the word ‘liberty’ echoed through the building, his fetters were shivered; his arms were hurled apart; and the links of his chains were scattered to the winds. When he spoke the word ‘liberty’ with an emphasis never given it before, his hands were open, and his arms elevated and extended; his countenance was radiant; he stood erect and defiant; while the sound of his voice and the sublimity of his attitude made him appear a magnificent incarnation of Freedom, and expressed all that can be acquired or enjoyed by nations and individuals invincible and free. After a momentary pause, only long enough to permit the echo of the word ‘liberty’ to cease, he let his left hand fall powerless to his side, and clenched his right hand firmly, as if holding a dagger with the point aimed at his breast.” As he closed “with the solemn words ‘or give me death’ . . . he suited the action to the word by a blow upon the left breast with the right hand which seemed to drive the dagger to … [his] heart.”

Henry’s desire to fight and, if necessary, to die was not confined to the rostrum. Gage’s attempt to seize the colonial powder in Concord was in pursuance of general instructions from London which had been sent to all the colonies. At the same time that Gage made his attempt, Dunmore, the Governor of Virginia, had the twenty kegs of powder in the public magazine at Williamsburg taken aboard a schooner in the river. There was a near-riot but the town council managed to keep order. The next day the Governor thought fit to send word to the town council that if any insult was offered to himself or the captain of the schooner he would declare the slaves free and burn the town.

Henry’s comment on hearing of these proceedings was that “it is a fortunate circumstance which will arouse the people. You may in vain mention to them the duties upon tea, etc. These things, they will say, do not affect them. But tell them of the robbery of the magazine, and that the next step will be to disarm them, and they will be then ready to fly to arms to defend themselves.”

He immediately organized a military force of volunteers with which he advanced on Williamsburg. The Governor obtained a detachment from a man-of-war and issued a number of proclamations. When Henry was sixteen miles from Williamsburg a messenger from the Governor met him. Various negotiations followed as a result of which three hundred and thirty pounds—the supposed value of the powder which had been seized—was paid to Henry to be forwarded by him to the Virginian delegates in Congress to be used by them for the purchase of powder in substitution for that which had been seized. Henry thereupon disbanded his force and the following day the Governor issued a proclamation warning people of Henry’s traitorous designs. He set out for the second Continental Congress immediately after. The effect of the Governor’s proclamation was that Henry was guarded until he had reached Maryland by troops of volunteers and, in addition, his journey was greatly impeded by congratulatory addresses.

He was back in Virginia by August. At this time he had a great desire for military glory and he succeeded in getting himself elected commander-in-chief in Virginia with the title of colonel. The members of the convention were by no means unanimous in their opinion of the wisdom of this measure. While Henry’s friends succeeded in getting him elected, the other side succeeded in tying his hands by putting him under the orders of the Committee of Safety. Pendleton, the chairman of this committee, and Henry had seldom agreed in the past, and were seldom to agree in the future. There were a number of skirmishes in Virginia while Henry was nominally commander-in-chief but he was not in any of them. The Committee saw to it that he stayed in Williamsburg while the fighting was directed by his second-in-command.

Henry felt himself very unjustly treated, and with some reason. He may have been an amateur soldier, but so were most of the other officers. Pendleton, who had opposed Henry’s election to command the Virginian forces, had also opposed Washington’s election to command the continental forces. Henry had made a real contribution to the organization of the military force, for most of the soldiers had enlisted only because of their faith in him. This became apparent when he finally resigned. There was a near-mutiny. The soldiers claimed they had enlisted only to serve under him, and it was only as a result of great personal exertion on his part that they were induced to stay under another commander.

A real friendship existed between Washington and Henry. The General, of course, only knew of these bickerings by hearsay, but from what he heard he concluded that “my countrymen made a capital mistake, when they took Henry out of the senate to place him in the field.” The reason for the distrust of Henry as a military leader was his apparent indifference to discipline.

One of the unfortunate results of the possession of such a genius as Henry’s talent for persuasion is that it tends to obscure his real merits as a statesman. Commonplace men were apt to console themselves by saying he was so brilliant he could not be sound. Such a talent as he had can be used for good or evil and those who found themselves in opposition to him were likely to say with Jefferson that Henry “is always alive to catch the first sensation of the popular breeze, that he may take the lead of that which in truth leads him.”

There is ample evidence that Jefferson’s slander is untrue. The most striking instance occurred during the formation of the first Virginia constitution. John Adams has had more influence on American conceptions of government than any other individual and Henry had developed a great admiration for Adams from their association in the first Continental Congress. “I fear,” Henry wrote to R. H. Lee shortly after a form of constitution came under consideration in Virginia, “too great a bias to Aristocracy prevails among the opulent. I own myself a Democrat on the plan of our admired friend, J. Adams, whose pamphlet I read with great pleasure.” Adams himself warned Henry that the “plan of the pamphlet” might be too “popular” for the state of public opinion in Virginia. Adams’ advocacy of frequent elections and a broad franchise would naturally be popular with Henry’s followers. The interesting thing is that Henry devoted himself zealously to the promotion of the one unpopular feature of Adams’ plan of government.

It is very difficult for us Americans of the twentieth century to realize how closely the ideas of popular government and of legislative supremacy were intertwined in the eighteenth-century mind. Some appreciation of the extent to which these two ideas were at one time regarded as inseparable may be gained by considering that the idea of an independent and powerful executive as a necessary, or even a legitimate, part of a popular government has never gained a foothold in Europe. For a long time after the Revolution the idea prevailed in America that a powerful executive, independent of the legislature, was incompatible with a republic. It was one of the principal causes for the popular belief that Adams was a “monarchist.” It would probably never have disappeared if it had not been for Jackson but the existence of constitutional machinery which permitted the emergence of Jacksons was due to Adams.

It was this unpopular idea, in its most unpopular aspect, that Henry championed in Virginia. To most Americans and to all European “liberals” the existence of an executive veto prevented a government from being a republic. This was the precise point on which Henry made his fight. “Those who knew him,” wrote Edmund Randolph, “to be indolent in literary investigations, were astonished at the manner in which he exhausted the topic . . . Among other arguments, he averred that a governor would be a mere phantom, unable to defend his office from the usurpation of the legislature, unless he could interpose on a vehement impulse or ferment in that body, and that he would otherwise be ultimately a dependent, instead of a co-ordinate, branch of power.” Henry was successful. He did not, however, go the whole length with Adams and was content with an election of the governor by the legislature instead of that direct popular election which Adams advocated.

Henry himself was the first occupant of the office, being sworn in July 5, 1776. The salary of the governor was one thousand pounds a year and the legislature appropriated an additional thousand pounds to be used in furnishing the “Palace” in Williamsburg for his residence. With these resources, Henry changed his style of living completely.

The constant shortages of men and food in the Continental Army have been largely blamed on the short-sightedness of the state governments. The charge, at least in Henry’s case, is unwarranted. The record shows him actively engaged in trying to raise troops and finally advocating a draft as the only feasible way to do it. When in the winter of Valley Forge he learned of the urgent need for food, he acted vigorously and did not hesitate to seize supplies by force when he could not obtain them otherwise. Most of the distresses of the Continental Army were due to the lack of a proper organization of government rather than to the indifference of individuals.

His home defense measures were equally practical and successful. He kept a number of small vessels outside the entrance to Chesapeake Bay which gave him timely warning of any British raids. This was a measure which his successor, Jefferson, discontinued. Henry had always been interested in the country across the mountains and, when he had laid aside a little money, engaged in a few speculations in western lands. He stopped speculating in western lands after he was elected to the first Continental Congress, but he was a ready listener when George Rogers Clark came over the mountains from Kentucky with a scheme to drive the British from the Northwest. Henry backed Clark with all the limited resources available.

Henry’s desire for western expansion and his sympathy with the backwoodsmen did not blind him to their faults. When a most indecent and outrageous murder of a friendly Shawnee chief precipitated an Indian war, Henry almost refused to call out the militia to protect the settlements. The jury system made it impossible to punish the murderers and he was induced to call out the militia only because of the “miserable condition” of the people. He limited the militia to “defensive operations . . . offensive measures . . . would be too full of Injustice.”

The new Virginia constitution limited the governor to three successive annual terms. His friends maintained that his first term did not count, since he had been elected for that year by the convention which framed the constitution but he refused to accede to this reasoning.

His wife had died in the early part of 1775, leaving him six children, all of whom were under twenty-one. Less than a year after he became governor he married again. His second wife was Dorothea Dandridge, a granddaughter of Governor Spotswood and a descendant of a brother of Lord Delaware. Henry’s property at the time of his second marriage consisted of his home in Hanover County which he called Scotchtown, two small tracts in Botetourt County, ten thousand acres in Kentucky and thirty slaves. His second wife brought him twelve slaves. About a year after his second marriage he sold Scotchtown and purchased a three-fifths undivided interest in a tract of nearly seventeen thousand acres on Leatherwood Creek in Henry County. Henry County was in the southwestern part of the state. It had been laid out shortly after he became governor and named after him. It was to this estate, which he called Leatherwood, that he moved after his retirement from the governorship. His objects in going into what was then the far interior were to rid himself of malarial fevers which had attacked him several times and to place his family out of danger of British raids. He made a partition with his co-owners but, as was usual in the case of newly settled lands, he found himself with a disputed title and with his estate largely in the possession of squatters. After some litigation he managed to settle these difficulties. The proceeds of Scotchtown had only partially paid for Leatherwood. He paid the final installment of the purchase price on December 1, 1779, with a tobacco note for ten thousand pounds. To raise the money he had sold his two tracts in Botetourt and five thousand acres of his Kentucky land.

He did not return to practice. His health was bad and he had frequent periods of sickness. He refused an election to Congress but he accepted election to the legislature. His activities there do not become interesting until the end of the war. He then championed some measures which encountered vigorous opposition. The first of these was a bill repealing the act forbidding the importation of British goods. The opposition, led by R. H. Lee, argued that other and more friendly countries should first be given an opportunity to establish business connections in Virginia and that in any event it was foolish to repeal the prohibitory act before Great Britain showed some disposition to enter into a commercial treaty with the United States. Henry won but the event proved that Lee’s arguments were sound.

Henry followed this with an even less popular bill—with a bill permitting the exiled Tories and other Britishers to settle in the state. He met the opposition with one of his greatest speeches. “We have, sir, an extensive country, without population—what can be more obvious policy than that this country ought to be populated? People, sir, form the strength and constitute the wealth of a nation. I want to see our vast forest filled up by some process a little more speedy than the ordinary course of nature. I wish to see these states rapidly ascending to the rank which their natural advantages authorize them to hold among the nations of the earth . . . Sir, you are destined, at some time or other, to become a great agricultural and commercial people; the only question is, whether you choose to reach this point by slow gradations, and at some distant period—lingering on through a long and sickly minority—subjected, meanwhile, to machinations, insults, and oppressions of enemies, foreign and domestic, without sufficient strength to resist and chastise them—or whether you choose rather to rush at once, as it were, to the full enjoyment of those high destinies, and be able to cope, single-handed, with the proudest oppressors of the old world. If you prefer the latter course, as I trust you do, encourage emigration—encourage the husbandmen, the mechanics, the merchants of the old world, to come and settle in this land of promise—make it the home of the skilful, the industrious, the fortunate, the happy, as well as the asylum of the distressed—fill up the measure of your population as speedily as you can, by the means which heaven has placed in your hands—and I venture to prophesy there are those now living who will see this favored land among the most powerful on earth— . . . her cannon silencing the vain boasts of those who now proudly affect to rule the waves. But, sir, you must have men—you cannot get along without them— . . .

“Do you ask how you are to get them? Open your doors, sir, and they will come in—the population of the old world is full to overflowing—that population is ground, too, by the oppressions of the governments under which they live. Sir, they are already standing on tiptoe upon their native shores, and looking to your coasts with a wistful and longing eye—they see here a land blessed with natural and political advantages which are not equalled by those of any other country upon earth—a land on which Providence hath emptied the horn of abundance—a land over which peace hath now stretched forth her white wings, and where content and plenty lie down at every door! Sir, they see something more attractive than all this—they see a land in which liberty hath taken up her abode—that liberty, whom they had considered as a fabled goddess existing only in the fancies of poets —they see her here a real divinity—her altars rising on every hand throughout these happy states—her glories chanted by three millions of tongues—. . . 

“But gentlemen object to any accession from Great Britain, and particularly to the return of the British refugees . .  . Let us have the magnanimity, sir, to lay aside our antipathies and prejudices, and consider the subject in a political light. Those are an enterprising, moneyed people . . . I have no fear of any mischief that they can do us. Afraid of them\ What, sir, shall we, who have laid the proud British lion at our feet, now be afraid of his whelps?”

He championed other unpopular measures. Even before the end of the war he advocated the imposition of a tax by the legislature to retire the Virginian quota of the continental debt, but he was unable to prevail over the popular opposition led by George Mason and R. H. Lee. At this period Henry was very much alive to the defects of the government of the Confederation and in 1784 he went so far as to ask Madison to work out some scheme for improving the central government.

Henry ardently desired westward expansion but he did not by any means sympathize with the common attitude towards the Indians. The problem of the future of that race had long troubled him. Shortly after the close of the war he offered a bill to the legislature which embodied his solution. It provided for the encouragement of marriage between whites and Indians by payment of a bounty at marriage and at the birth of each child, exemption from certain taxes, and free schools for the children. Despite the repugnance with which such marriages were regarded, Henry’s advocacy was so powerful that this bill actually passed its second reading. At this point Henry became governor for the second time, and after his removal from the legislature his Indian bill was soon forgotten.

The most interesting thing about his second period as governor is his attempt to reform the criminal law. His approach was diametrically different from that of Jefferson. Henry’s knowledge of people kept him from trying to set up a code with a fixed punishment for each crime. Instead, as governor, when, after a review of the facts, he thought the convict might be reformed, Henry would issue a conditional pardon. The convicts so conditionally pardoned were required to labor on the public works and to sleep in the Richmond jail. “Particular care must be taken,” so Henry wrote to the official who had charge of carrying out this plan, “that they have plenty of wholesome food, and that their clothes be warm and comfortable . . . You are to take care that their clothes and lodging be kept clean, and that their labor be confined to the usual hours and good weather.” The courts later declared this procedure void.

Henry refused re-election at the end of two one-year terms. His second wife was bringing him children at such a rate that they finally reached eleven. He was by no means rich, and he had run into debt trying to live in the style which he thought appropriate for a governor. He left Richmond with the definite intention of devoting his time to the accumulation of money. For this purpose he left Henry County and settled in Prince Edward, which was much nearer the center of things.

He had not practiced actively since the outbreak of the war but now he soon had all the clients he could wish for. He was so busy that he always required his clients to retain associate counsel to prepare the case. It was as a jury lawyer that he was in the greatest demand. His health was bad and he usually traveled to the various county courts where he had to appear in a stick-gig. There is only one known instance when he adopted a more elaborate means of conveyance. Richard Randolph, the elder brother of Randolph of Roanoke, was indicted in Cumberland County for the murder of a new-born infant of which he was reputed to be the father. Randolph wrote to Henry asking him to undertake the defense for a fee of two hundred and fifty guineas. Henry replied that he was too unwell to make the journey. Randolph then offered five hundred guineas. “Dolly,” Henry called to his wife after he had read Randolph’s second letter, “Mr. Randolph seems very anxious that I should appear for him and five hundred guineas is a large sum. Don’t you think I could make the trip in the carriage?”

John Marshall was retained by Randolph as Henry’s junior in this case, but the tradition is that what brought about the acquittal was a single question which Henry asked on cross-examination. The chief witness for the state was a Mrs. Grundy type, who testified that she had acquired her information by peeping through a crack in the door of the room where the mother of the dead infant slept. “Madam,” said Henry in his most solemn manner, “with which eye did you peep?”

About the time he retired from the governorship Madison wrote Washington that Henry, “who has been hitherto the champion of the federal cause, has become a cold advocate.” This was a surprising change for the man who had announced to the first Continental Congress that “the distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders, are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American”; for the man who had asked Madison to work out a plan for a more perfect union. In the two years of his second governorship Henry’s ideas on this point changed completely. He became convinced that the central government, whether strong or weak, would be under the control of the northern majority and that the northern majority would use its control with complete indifference to the interests of the South. It was therefore in the interests of the South to keep the central government weak. At the time, the area west of the mountains was regarded as a part of the South. What convinced Henry of the danger of a strong central government was the disposition shown by Congress at this time to compromise the dispute with Spain over the right to navigate the Mississippi.

When he had once accepted the principle of the necessity of protecting the sectional interests of the South, he soon found other causes for alarm. He warned his colleagues in the Virginian ratifying convention that the adoption of the proposed federal constitution would lead to the abolition of slavery. This might be done by the laying of federal taxes which would force emancipation, but with a strong prescience he warned that it would be accomplished through the exercise of the war power. “They have the power in clear unequivocal terms; and will clearly and certainly exercise it.”

No one today can doubt the soundness of Henry’s analysis of the nature of the government which would be evolved under the constitution. “This government,” he told the Virginian convention, “is not a Virginian but an American government.” He even foretold the method by which the state governments would gradually lose their importance. If both the central government and the state governments had the power to tax, the central government, being the stronger, would in the end absorb all the sources of revenue and let the states “glide imperceptibly and gradually out of existence. This, sir, must naturaly terminate in a consolidation.” “I beg gentlemen to consider,” he told the Virginian convention a few days later, “—lay aside your prejudices—is this a federal government? Is it not a consolidated government for every purpose almost? Is the government of Virginia a State government after this government is adopted? I grant that it is a republican government, but for what purposes? For such trivial domestic considerations, as render it unworthy the name of a legislature.”

He did not confine his opposition to the fear that the adoption of the constitution would put the South under the domination of the North. The great powers entrusted to the President and the Congress meant that the new government “will be an empire of men and not of laws.” “You are not to enquire,” he told the Virginian convention, “how your trade may be increased nor how you are to become a great and powerful people, but how your liberties can be secured; for liberty}-ought to be the direct end of your government.” In short, he thought that the proposed federal constitution was “the most fatal plan that could possibly be conceived to enslave a free people.”

When we consider the soundness of Henry’s arguments, his powers of persuasion and his position with the people, the surprising thing is that the constitution was ever adopted by Virginia. It was only by the narrowest of majorities. He himself estimated that four-fifths of the people were opposed to adoption. What, then, defeated him?

Henry revealed one of the fatal weaknesses in his position in one of his speeches to the Virginian convention. “I acknowledge,” he said, “the weakness of the old confederation. Every man says that something must be done.” The greatest efforts had been made to induce him to act as one of the Virginian delegates in the convention which framed the constitution but he had “peremptorily” refused. It was an illustration of the adage that you can’t beat something with nothing. He admitted that something must be done. What had he to suggest? The other fatal weakness was George Washington. In the abstract, Henry might convince his fellow Virginians that the new government would be a tyranny administered in the interests of the Northerners. But everybody knew that Washington would be the first president.

Henry’s true greatness is apparent in the manner in which he took his defeat. “I beg pardon of this house,” he told the Virginian convention just before the final vote, “for having taken up more time than came to my share, and I thank them for the patience and polite attention with which I have been heard. If I shall be in the minority, I shall have those painful sensations which arise from a conviction of being overpowered in a good cause. Yet I will be a peaceable citizen. My head, my hand, and my heart shall be at liberty to retrieve the loss of liberty, and remove the defects of that system, in a constitutional way. I wish not to go to violence, but will wait with hopes that the spirit which predominated in the revolution is not yet gone, nor the cause of those who are attached to the revolution yet lost—I shall therefore patiently wait in expectation of seeing that government changed so as to be compatible with the safety, liberty, and happiness of the people.”

He lived up to this declaration. On the evening of the day in which the vote of ratification had passed, a group of anti-ratificationists held a meeting. They sent for Henry to take the chair. He came and told them that “he had done his duty strenuously in opposing the constitution, in the proper place, and with all the powers he possessed. The question had been fully discussed, and settled, and that, as true and faithful republicans, they had all better go home; they should cherish it and give it fair play, support it too, in order that the Federal administration might be left to the untrammeled and free exercise of its functions.”

Madison, the leader of the ratificationists in Virginia and one of the chief architects of the federal constitution, soon began to drift into opposition to the new government. Henry despised him for it. Madison’s various complaints against the actions of the federal government merely drew from Henry the comment that they were what he himself had predicted in the convention. At the same time Henry drifted in the opposite direction. A little over a year after the organization of the government of the constitution he wrote to a friend in Georgia that “Truth obliges me to declare that I perceive In the Federal characters I converse with in this country an honest and patriotic care of the general good.”

From then on Henry’s progress into Federalism was rapid. Some of the earliest actions of the new government had been unfavorable to some of his speculations in land in the western part of Georgia—“the measures and tone of the government,” as Jefferson expressed it, “threaten abortion to some of his speculations”—but Henry got over this. The adoption of the constitution had brought on an era of general prosperity but what first brought him to the support of the national administration was his faith in Washington.

Very few letters ever passed between the two men; there is no record of any other great intimacy. But their faith in each other was of that order which does not require constant confirmation. In the darkest days of the war there was a widespread plan to remove Washington as commander-in-chief. An attempt was made to induce Henry to join. His response was to send all the information he had on the subject to the General. One of the very few letters in which Washington dropped his usually impenetrable dignity was that in which he thanked Henry.

Many of those opposed to the administration made the mistake—in which Jefferson never joined—of attacking or belittling Washington. In the first administration Henry attended a dinner at the home of his half-brother, John Syme. When the cloth was removed the first toast which the host proposed was “The people.” Henry pushed his wig aside, as was his custom when much excited, and, with his arms akimbo, exclaimed, “What, brother, not drink to General Washington as we used to do? For shame, brother! for shame!” and, filling up his glass with Thomson’s Madeira, pronounced the name of “Washington.” Washington reciprocated this trust by offering Henry the Secretaryship of State and the Chief Justiceship in succession. Both offers were rejected.

It was the French Revolution which brought about the first definite party cleavage in America and Henry’s views on the French Revolution were clear. The conduct of France, he wrote in 1799, “has made it the interest of the great family of mankind to wish the downfall of her present government; because its existence is incompatible with that of all others within its reach. And, whilst I see the dangers that threaten ours from her intrigues and her arms, I am not so much alarmed as at the apprehension of her destroying the great pillars of all government and of social life; I mean virtue, morality, and religion.”

During most of his life Henry passed among his fellow Virginians for a deist. It was a reputation which in his old age he abhorred. His family were Episcopalians and he had been baptised in that church. It was the only formal connection he ever had with any sect. When he was about eleven a Presbyterian minister, Samuel Davies, who was afterwards president of Princeton, began to preach in Hanover under a special license from the Governor. Henry’s mother became a member of this congregation and used to take Henry to services with her. Davies was known as the “prince of American preachers” and on their return journeys Mrs. Henry was accustomed to ask Patrick for a resume of the sermon. When he grew to manhood he was noted for his friendship for “Dissenters.” The Baptists were his special favorites. In 1768 the Episcopalians began a regular persecution of that church and Henry was the Baptists’ invariable champion. Shortly after the outbreak of the war the Baptists petitioned the Virginian Convention for permission to preach to the troops. On Henry’s motion this privilege was accorded to all dissenting clergymen. Later the Baptists came to him and asked his advice as to the best method for obtaining the right to perform marriages. He advised them to go ahead and afterwards succeeded in getting an act passed by the legislature validating such marriages.

He did not sympathize with Jefferson in his desire for a complete divorce of Church and State. Shortly after the close of the war, Henry championed a bill which, while it continued church taxes, provided that the taxpayer could select the church to which he wished his taxes paid. He left the legislature before the bill was passed and before the end of the session. In his absence Madison succeeded in defeating the measure.

With this background he became very religious in his old age. As early as 1789 he became so alarmed at the spread of infidelity that he printed an edition of Soame Jennings’ Internal Evidences of Christianity. He carried copies around in his gig and gave them away. He later wrote a reply to Paine’s Age of Reason but was so dissatisfied with what he had written that he destroyed the manuscript. But he blamed Jefferson more than Paine. Henry’s analysis was that infidelity had been invented in France and that Jefferson was its apostle in America. With such views it is not surprising to find Henry supporting John Adams against Jefferson.

Henry retired from practice shortly after Washington became President. All his life he had been exchanging one plantation for another. He seldom lived in the same spot for more than three or four years. About the time of his retirement he sold his home in Prince Edward and bought an estate in Campbell County on the Staunton River. He still was not satisfied and two or three years’ later he bought an estate twenty miles lower down the Staunton which was called Red Hill, from the color of the soil. It was here that he died. The residence was a plain wooden structure located on a hill which overlooked the valley. Early on summer mornings he would go to the edge of this hill and use the voice which had been a terror to Britain to shout orders to his Negroes in the valley below, a half-mile away. Much of his time in good weather was spent sitting in his yard, with his chair leaning against the trunk of a tree and a can of spring water on the grass beside him. At other times he was found lying on the floor playing with his children or playing his violin for them.

Visitors were numerous. They came to see the great orator and to hear his own version of his great oratorical triumphs. Instead, he told them of the goodness of his land and of the shrewdness with which he had traded lands and horses. For Henry was very American. He was a great master in his own art—the art of oratory—but aside from that, he was much more typical of the nation that was coming into being than were Jefferson or the Adamses. Nothing pleased him so much as to be thought a shrewd trader.

On rising in the morning Henry would seat himself in his dining room and read the Bible until breakfast. As each one of his children entered the room he would raise his eyes and gravely say “Good morrow.” At other times, he busied himself reading various theological writers, particularly Tillotson, Butler, and Sherlock. He filled the margins of his copy of Sherlock with penciled notes, and on Sunday evenings he was accustomed to read from this volume to his family. After the reading they would all sing hymns while he accompanied them on the violin.

He had some foibles which one would hardly expect of the representative of the common man in eighteenth-century Virginia. One of these was an extreme aversion to whiskey. Shortly after the close of the war he had a merchant in Scotland send him a Scotch brewer and his wife to cultivate barley and make it into small beer. Thereafter small beer was the customary drink at Henry’s table. He drank it himself for he had no taste for wine. Another foible approached being a phobia. Henry disliked tobacco so intensely that he not only forbade his servants to smoke in his presence but to smoke at any time.

He often animadverted on the “French cooking” at Monticello. Henry’s own table was always abundantly spread, but only with the commonest foods.

For years, Henry’s health had been bad. He aged prematurely, and when he was barely sixty-three he reached the end. Shortly before his death he met Randolph of Roanoke, who, Henry had been informed, had delivered a rousing philippic against John Adams. “Young man,” said the old orator to the young one, taking him by both hands, “you call me father; then, my son, I have something to say unto you keep justice, keep truth—and you will live to think differently.”

CHAPTER VI

George Washington

The deeper one delves into the record the more evident it becomes that if it had not been for George Washington there would never have been a United States. It is possible that without him the colonies might ultimately have achieved some sort of independence. But they would never have coalesced. They would have been a group of petty sovereignties—a second Holy Roman Empire or a League of Nation., What brought about the adoption of the constitution was the universal belief that Washington would be President. All the eloquence and popularity of Patrick Henry were insufficient to convince the people that “consolidation” was an evil—provided that “consolidation” was to be under Washington. Men who for years had referred to Pennsylvania or Massachusetts or South Carolina as “my country” suddenly spoke of “our country.” The stupendousness of that fact can only be grasped by looking at the history of peoples beyond our own border. It is not a question of a common language or a common tradition. Why have the Scandinavian countries never coalesced? Or the Low Countries? Or Central America? What an amount of force went into the unification of Germany. What a piece of luck and what an amount of trouble were involved in the union of England and Scotland. Why was Ireland never successfully made a part of Great Britain? Why did Spain and Portugal, after being united for sixty years, separate again? Why, in every country of Europe, are there separatist tendencies which come to life in any period of stress?

The diversities among the original thirteen states are more than sufficient to justify the existence of any number of nations. For the most part the people spoke English, and for the most part they professed some form of Protestant Christianity. That is about all they had in common. For the most part they lived by tilling the land or by fishing—the agriculture of the sea. That was the extent of their economic solidarity. The products of the different colonies were neither similar nor complementary. All the colonies were dependent on Europe for manufactured articles. Their social structures differed widely. There were rich and poor in every colony but there was no sort of similarity between the rich and poor of the different colonies. In some, the rich were planters, owning hundreds of slaves; in others, they were merchants, owning fleets of ships. In some the poor were farm hands who hoped to better their condition; in others they were slaves who had no hope. Aside from the slaves, the people were nearly all of northwest European descent. That certainly was not a reason for their union. The principal characteristic of Europeans in all ages has been their inability to live together in peace.

The colonies lacked a common historical tradition. They had been founded in all sorts of ways and by all sorts of people. They had been New England, New Netherlands, New Sweden. Even in New England two colonies, Connecticut and Rhode Island, were founded by seceders from a third, Massachusetts. Some colonies had a religious, some a feudal, and some a commercial origin. Archbishop Laud’s persecutions had peopled New England; Louis XIV’s devastation of the Palatinate had peopled Pennsylvania; the demand for tobacco had peopled Virginia. The colonies lacked any common triumphs, any common hero. They had fought separate and unrelated wars with the Indians. They had fought the British together. That was all. The triumphs of the Revolutionary War had been merely the common triumphs of allies, but they had given the country one unifying principle—a common hero. It was to be the decisive factor.

Washington, by the end of the war, was a hero of legendary stature. Men who could agree on nothing else agreed in their admiration for him. Men who thought the adoption of the constitution meant the end of liberty quietly submitted to the government of the constitution, secure in the knowledge that it was to be administered by him. A senator who opposed almost every measure of the Washington administration, after hearing the President read a message to Congress in a manner which the senator consider “agitated and embarrassed,” entered in his diary that he “felt hurt that this- first of men was not first in everything.” Measures which had Washington’s known approval—measures which he regarded as of urgent necessity—passed Congress only after long debate and by the slenderest majorities. Yet he was reelected unanimously. Jay was ruined politically so far as national politics was concerned by the treaty he made with England, but none of that unpopularity attached to the president who signed the treaty. The people who disliked what Washington did blamed his actions on his advisers. He himself could do no wrong. This was in spite of the fact that he did not attempt to conceal where he stood when the nation became divided into parties near the end of his life. One of the reasons he gave for refusing to run for president again, after Adams had been in office for one term, was that he would “stand upon no other ground than any other Federal character well supported.” At times his comments on the Jeffersonians were as intemperate as those of the most high-toned Federalist. “You could as soon scrub the blackamore white,” he wrote, “as to change the principle of a protest Democrat, and he will leave nothing unattempted to overturn the Government of this Country.”

The “protest Democrats” did not share this dislike. Many years after Washington’s death a Jeffersonian author sent a manuscript to Monticello in which the author stated he feared he had undertaken a “perilous topic” in attempting to justify Washington’s political conduct. Jefferson seldom spared an old political opponent, but his reply to this letter was “I do not think so. You have given the genuine history of the course of his mind through the trying scenes in which it was engaged, and of the seductions by which it was deceived, but not depraved.”

Washington was first in the hearts of his countrymen; he was pater patriae, the father of his country. He was those things in reality, not in rhetoric. Why?

The surface is so unimpressive. In the nineteenth century a great deal of nonsense was written on both sides of the Atlantic about “natural kings”—a kind of nonsense which has borne bitter fruit in our own age. It was not surprising that much of this nonsense was written in America, for America had produced the only genuine “natural king.” Others—Cromwell, the elder Pitt, Napoleon—might appear to be such. They took charge and defeat was turned into victory; whatever they touched was successful. There is no difficulty in explaining why the victorious general, or the statesman who obtains what the people want, is a natural hero. But Washington was defeated more often than he was victorious; his political career is marked largely by measures—such as the adoption of the constitution—which were far from popular but which were acquiesced in because Washington approved them. He was not popular because he did what the people wanted; the people submitted to unpopular measures because he approved them.

The traditional answer is character. That merely gives the problem a new name. What are the elements that character must possess to produce such implicit trust among millions of people—a trust, too, which could exist alongside a lack of faith in some of the specific measures which the possessor of that character was pursuing?

The men of the time were not blind to Washington’s failures and shortcomings. He received very little genuine admiration from the group of high-toned Federalists—the Hamiltons and the Pickerings—who owed their political importance entirely to his support. John Adams could never quite conceal his feeling that some of the admiration should have gone to him as chiefly responsible for the appointment of Washington as commander-in-chief. Then, too, in that formative era, when the true position of the vice-presidency was little understood, there was a popular tendency to credit President Washington with all the popular acts of his administration and to blame all the unpopular ones on Vice-President Adams. One of the factors in Jefferson’s rise to power was his ability to reconcile admiration for Washington with opposition to his policies.

The people were not blind to the apparent contradiction in their attitude toward Washington. They, too, groped for an explanation and brought forth such legends as that of the cherry tree. That he could not tell a lie is at least doubtful. When President, his diary records that “Having suffered very much by the dust yesterday, and finding that parties of Horse, and a number of other Gentlemen were intending to attend me part of the way to day, I caused their enquiries respecting the time of my setting out, to be answered that, I should endeavor to do it before eight o’clock; but I did it a little after five, by which means I avoided the inconveniences above mentioned.” Nor did he find it impossible to stretch a point in matters of more importance. When, during the war, he had made an agreement to exchange certain British prisoners and the question was raised whether his agreement covered prisoners who did not wish to be exchanged but preferred to become American citizens, he ruled that it did. “At the same time,” he added, “I should think it not improper . . . that they should be invited to escape afterwards, which, in all probability, they may effect without much difficulty.”

Yet the popular instinct which cherished the cherry tree legend was sound. Even in his own lifetime Washington was not regarded as a man among men but as a legendary hero—as one of the giants of old, the drippings of whose spear became islands, who slew armies with the jawbone of an ass. The record is full on Washington the gentleman. We can read his letters by the volume; we have innumerable accounts from other eighteenth-century gentlemen who attended his dull and formal dinner parties. The popular tradition was of a Paul Bunyan; of one whose physical strength exceeded all human bounds; of one who even as a little boy could not depart from the most rigid truth. Aside from the fact that Washington undoubtedly was of great physical and moral strength, these legends should not be dismissed with a smile. Their truth is unimportant. The interesting thing is that these stories were told not of Hercules but of a man who lived among literate people in a literate country in the most skeptical of all ages—the eighteenth century.

Gilbert Stuart once told General Henry (“Light-Horse Harry”) Lee that Washington had a tremendous temper but that he had it under wonderful control. A few days later Lee had breakfast with the Washingtons.

“I saw your portrait the other day,” said Lee, “but Stuart says you have a tremendous temper.”

“Upon my word,” said Mrs. Washington blushing, “Mr. Stuart takes a great deal upon himself to make such a remark.” 

With the mere ghost of a smile, Washington remarked, “He is right.”

Stuart had his finger on the secret. On another occasion he told a third person, in regard to Washington, that “there were features in his face totally different from what he ever observed in that of any other human being; the sockets for the eyes, for instance, are larger than what he ever met with before, and the upper part of the nose broader. All his features, he observed, were indicative of the strongest and most ungovernable passions, and had he been born in the forests, it was his opinion that he would have been the fiercest man among the savage tribes.”

Of one famous occasion it is reported that Washington “swore like an angel from heaven.” The unusualness of the analogy is arresting. It would have been so much more natural for General Scott to have said that Washington had sworn “like the devil.” Like an angel from heaven? It was not a literary device; it expressed the inner conviction of the retreating troops that they had heard and seen something akin to the supernatural.

Washington showed this unhuman quality in other ways than profanity. He was with Braddock as a volunteer aide when the latter marched against Fort Duquesne. Washington became so ill of a fever that he was left behind to travel in a wagon. Impatiently he pushed the wagon forward and mounted his horse for the first time the day the French and Indians made their surprise attack. Braddock’s other aides were killed or wounded. The General’s sole assistant was Washington. Angrily he ranged the field. Two horses were shot under him; bullets pierced his clothing. Over the wrath of Braddock, his aide ordered the colonial troops to take cover and fight like Indians. The fever-stricken militia colonel was in the saddle for forty-eight hours. When it was all over he took to his bed again. But the despised colonials felt that the only reason anybody came away from the Monongahela with his scalp was because of Colonel Washington.

This hidden, superhuman force which made Washington swear “like an angel from heaven” at Monmouth, which made him take charge of the stricken field at the Monongahela, is not unique. It is only too common in the history of man. It is that subterranean energy which is characteristic of the great ruffians, of the scourges of the human race. We find it in the Attilas and the Genghis Khans. Specifically, there is a remarkable resemblance between William the Conqueror and Washington. It is as if one were the reverse side of the other. Washington was an English gentleman of ancient family, but when we view him in his savage aspect he seems like a natural member of that terrible Norman dynasty of Rollo the Ganger, of Robert the Devil, of William the Bastard—what would he have been? Perhaps George the Terrible. It sounds in character.

Heredity is a factor which had better be forgotten in explaining any man, but there is one item about Washington which is so curious that, whether or not accidental, it can hardly be forgotten. Lord Ferrers was a distant relative of Washington’s and the first English peer to be hanged. Neither of those statements is important. Ferrers was hanged for a murder—he was suspected of a series of murders—of such a primitive and savage nature that it was incomprehensible to the eighteenth-century mind. The thing that is interesting is that Horace Walpole in reporting the trial and hanging of Lord Ferrers adds, “The Washingtons were certainly a very frantic race, and I have no doubt of madness in him.” Is this some lingering trace of forgotten gossip? Certainly the brothers and the nephews and the cousins of George displayed no such queer primitivity. Aside from George there is only one trace of it in the American Washingtons. His great-grandfather, John, was known among the Indians as Conotocarlus—“the Destroyer of Villages.” The title was rather ingloriously earned but when George appeared on the frontier many years later as an untried militia officer he promptly inherited it. Was it heredity or was it some secret electricity, current only among savages, which made the Indians recognize in this untried stripling a “Destroyer of Villages”?

This savagery was a terrible inheritance. It might have made him an atrocious murderer like his cousin Lord Ferrers j it might have led him to the frontier where, in Stuart’s words, “he would have been the fiercest man among the savage tribes.” It was the stuff of which desperadoes are made. He might have been a bandit leader or a pirate captain. Those were the possibilities if he had combined with this savage nature a mediocre or less than mediocre intelligence; instead, “his mind,” in the words of Jefferson, “was great and powerful, without being of the very first order.”

There were other possibilities. He belonged to the tribe of the scourges of mankind. The opportunity was there. “Sir,” said Rochambeau, turning to Washington, as together they reviewed the American army after Yorktown, “these men are Prussians,” For years Washington had struggled with raw troops, enlisted for short periods, who went home as soon as they were partially trained; but the army that he led back from Yorktown was a very different outfit. It consisted of veterans, enlisted for the duration of the war, and for the first time it was adequately equipped, partly from the captured British stores and partly with supplies brought from France. The only thing it lacked was pay. And it meant to get that. There was a series of dangerous mutinies. The men had no respect for Congress; they wanted to march on Philadelphia, seize the government, and do themselves justice. Some units actually started marching. They had no quarrel with Washington. If he had mounted his horse and led them on to Philadelphia he would have been followed with a universal roar of approval.

This was no manufactured crisis, cooked up to give a would-be dictator an opportunity. It was a real crisis; it came from the ground up. The army was disgusted with civilian government; it wanted to impose military rule; all it lacked was a leader.

Although the officers did not join in any of the mutinies, they were as dissatisfied as the men. There was a Colonel Nicola, who was somewhat older than the average. He bore a good reputation in the army, was intimate with Washington, and was frequently used by the subordinate officers as a means of communication with the commander-in-chief. He was now used for that purpose again. After various secret meetings among the officers Nicola addressed a letter on their behalf to Washington. It dilated on the distressed condition of the army and the country at large; it compared the merits of republicanism and monarchy; it concluded that the only solution was the establishment of a monarchy. “Some people have so connected the ideas of tyranny and monarchy,” so Nicola wrote, “as to find it very difficult to separate them. It may therefore be requisite to give the head of such a constitution, as I propose, some title apparently more moderate; but if all other things were once adjusted, I believe strong arguments might be produced for admitting the title of king, which I conceive would be attended with some material advantages.” 

There was nothing chimerical about Nicola’s suggestion. Dissatisfaction with the state of affairs was not confined to the army. Distress was universal. The worthless paper currency was a curse to everybody. The greatest single factor in making Tories was the conviction of many men that the choice was between anarchy and British rule. Most of those elements in the population which later advocated adoption of the constitution would now have hurrahed for King Washington. What they wanted above all was good government—one in which the currency was sound, in which order was kept, in which contracts were enforced.

Washington could see other kingdoms from the high mountain. The Kentuckians were already straining at the leash, anxious to seize New Orleans. South of New Orleans was all Latin America, weakly held by a decaying monarchy. The means were there. The army was small but excellent. The amateur generals and the amateur soldiers whom he had found when he took command at Cambridge seven years before were gone. Now it contained not only good soldiers. There were major-generals like Greene, Knox, and Steuben, brigadiers like Daniel Morgan and Mad Anthony Wayne, brilliant young colonels like Hamilton and Burr. There was no reason to suppose that Hamilton would have been an any less able financier for King Washington than for President Washington. All that was needed to expand the army was finance, and once a strong government was formed that could easily be provided. A navy was necessary but New England was one of the great shipping centers of the world. It had the seamen and the shipyards. All that was needed was a government.

“I am much at a loss,” Washington wrote to Nicola, “to conceive what part of my conduct could have given encouragement to an address, which to me seems big with the greatest mischiefs, that can befall my Country . . . if you have any regard for your Country, concern for yourself or posterity, or respect for me, banish these thoughts from your mind, and never communicate, as from yourself or any one else, a sentiment of the like nature. I am. Sir, your most obedient servant.”

Some years later a historian wrote to Washington that he had seen his reply to Nicola and asked for more particulars. “I had quite forgotten,” Washington replied, “the private transaction to which you allude, nor could I recall it to mind without much difficulty. If I now recollect rightly, and I believe I do (though there were several applications made to me), I am conscious of only having done my duty. As no particular credit is due for that, and as no good but some harm might result from the publication, the letter, in my judgment, had better remain in concealment.” That was all, and it came from a man who “had he been born in the forests . . . would have been the fiercest man among the savage tribes,” from the spiritual brother of the Attilas and the Genghis Khans, the scourges of the race. A great portrait painter like Stuart could see in Washington’s countenance traces of the struggle it had taken to turn this wild man into an eighteenth-century gentleman, but even Stuart could not put it on canvas. All Washington’s contemporaries agree that none of his portraits is completely successful.

At first glance, the wild, headlong warrior, “the fiercest man among the savage tribes,” is not very apparent in Washington’s military career. His contemporaries thought the chief characteristic of his military policy was caution. The intrigue to replace him as commander-in-chief derived its strength from a public opinion which was sick of what it called “Fabian tactics.” So was Washington. A month after he took command of the army before Boston, while the public was waiting for him to gain a glorious victory, he was discovering to his horror that if he ignored his few pieces of artillery and issued all the powder for use in muskets, each man would be supplied with nine rounds. And there was no visible source from which the supply could be replenished.

When Washington took command of the army he would scarcely have passed in Europe for a trained officer, but he had seen enough war to convince him, after a few months’ observation, that the men he had “are not to be depended upon . . . I do not apply this only to these people. I suppose it to be the case with all raw and undisciplined troops.” The New Englanders might boast of what they had done at Bunker Hill but it did not change his opinion. “Place them,” he wrote, “behind a parapet, a breast-work, stone wall, or any thing that will afford them shelter, and, from their knowledge of a firelock, they will give a good account of their enemy; but I am as well convinced, as if I had seen it, that they will not march boldly up to a work, nor stand exposed in a plain.” 

Even if the soldiers remained without uniforms until near the end of the war; even if powder was always scarce and food frequently scarcer; even if prior to the advent of Steuben the army did not contain an officer with the training and ability to organize it on the most approved European models, it should in time have outgrown the adjective raw. If it had been like any other army that ever existed it would have. The distinction should be borne in mind between the later army which Rochambeau compared to the Prussians and the army of the first few years. The army which besieged Boston, which was driven from New York and later from Philadelphia was not one army but a series of armies. It was originally enlisted for a term ending on January i, 1776, the next army was enlisted for one year and this practice continued with such gradual modification that as late as August, 1780, Washington solemnly warned Congress to remember that the term of enlistment of nearly one-half his troops expired on the next January 1.

There was nothing nominal about these re-enlistments. Washington was deservedly proud of the first one. He was at the time engaged in a close siege of Boston and, when the second year's army was finally organized, he boasted to his brother that “we have disbanded one army, and recruited another, within musket-shot of two and twenty regiments, the flower of the British army.” Re-enlistment did not consist merely of inducing privates to stay another year. Washington had to begin with the officers. He started by asking them, as early as October, to signify whether they were willing to stay. Over a third refused.

This was only the beginning of his troubles. The army at the time consisted almost entirely of New Englanders but the soldiers from the different New England colonies treated each other as if they were of different colors. “Connecticut,” he wrote, “wants no Massachusetts man in their corps; Massachusetts thinks there is no necessity for a Rhode-Islander to be introduced amongst them; and New Hampshire says, it’s very hard, that her valuable and experienced officers (who are willing to serve) should be discarded, because her own regiments, under the new establishment, cannot provide for them. In short, after a four days’ labor, I expect that numbers of officers, who have given in their names to serve, must be discarded from Massachusetts, (where the regiments have been numerous, and the number in them small) and Connecticut, completed with a fresh recruit of officers from its own government.” Provincial jealousies were not the only thing to be considered. The New Englanders were accustomed to elect their own officers and now Washington found that the men “will not enlist, until they know their colonel, lieutenant-colonel, major, captain, &c.” and that, as a consequence, “a captain must be in this regiment, a subaltern in that company.”

These provincialisms led to other troubles. Pay was on a monthly basis but in Massachusetts soldiers had always been paid by lunar months. There was no justification for paying a Massachusetts soldier the same amount for a lunar month that a Connecticut soldier received for a calendar month. Even after Washington had induced the Massachusetts troops to accept pay on a calendar month basis he had not solved this problem entirely. In order to induce the soldiers to reenlist at the end of 1775 he found it necessary to grant them furloughs in which to visit their homes. He called out the militia to assist in guarding the lines of siege during this period of disorganization. The militia were from Massachusetts and, according to the immemorial custom of that province, expected to be paid by lunar months. If you do so, Washington wrote to the provincial authorities, “you must give me leave to add, that it aims the most fatal stab to the peace of this army that ever was given, and that Lord North himself could not have devised a more effectual blow to the recruiting Service.”

At times, Washington praised the militia. “We may expect every thing from ours that militia is capable of, but . . . I never was witness to a single instance that can countenance an opinion of militia or raw troops being fit for the real business of fighting. I have found them useful as light parties to skirmish in the woods, but incapable of making or sustaining a serious attack. This firmness is only acquired by habit of discipline and service.” At other times, his anger at the militia knew no bounds. His real complaint was not of the inefficiency of the militia but of the inadequacy of the regular army, which forced him to rely on militia. “Being subject to no controul themselves,” he wrote of the militia, “they introduce disorder among the troops, whom you have attempted to discipline, while the change in their living brings on sickness; this makes them impatient to get home, which spreads universally, and introduces abominable desertions.”

The state jealousies increased rather than diminished as the war progressed. In the summer of 1776 the Congress decided that for the ensuing year each state should appoint the officers for its own troops. Washington complained bitterly that “the Commander-in-chief has not an opportunity, even by recommendation, to give the least assurances of reward for the most essential services.” He could not even ask an officer to stay, for the officer could stay only if his state reappointed him.

The news of this decision of the Congress arrived while the army was at the Heights of Harlem, in sight of the enemy and with a battle expected any moment. Yet some of the officers, Washington wrote, “without leave or license from me,” immediately left for their home states to solicit promotion. “What kind of officers these are, I leave Congress to judge.” The officers finally appointed by the states, he wrote his brother, were “such as are not fit to be shoeblacks.” On another occasion, he wrote that the “men consider and treat” an officer “as an equal, and, in the character of an officer, regard him no more than a broomstick.”

One of Washington’s letters to Congress asking for a strengthening of the articles of war on the subject of plundering adds point to these comments. He states that recently an ensign and a number of men robbed a house of all its valuables, including “four large pier looking-glasses, women’s clothes, and other articles, which, one would think, could be of no earthly use to him.”

As the ensign was returning to camp a major saw him and ordered him to take the goods back “which he not only peremptorily refused to do, but drew up his party, and swore he would defend them at the hazard of his life.” When this came to Washington’s ears he ordered the ensign arrested and tried for plunder, disobedience of orders, and mutiny. The court-martial ordered him to ask pardon of the major and to be reprimanded at the head of his regiment. This “judgment appeared so exceedingly extraordinary, that I ordered a reconsideration of the matter, upon which, and with the assistance of a fresh evidence, they made a shift to cashier him.”

It is little wonder that Greene advised the governor of his state that “We want nothing but good officers to constitute as good an army as ever marched into the field. Our men are much better than the officers.” When the war was near the close of its second year Washington admonished a colonel “that no instance has yet happened of good or bad behavior in a corps in our service, that has not originated with the officers.”

Making the army, in effect, an allied force of armies from different states had other inconveniences. Troops raised in the more distant states spent months in reaching the scene of war some of them never did so during their term of enlistment. Even those near to the scene were sometimes useless. A Connecticut colonel whose return showed that he had two hundred and five men in his command drew supplies for five hundred from the inadequate confederate stores. “Can you conceive it necessary,” read the fiery letter of the commander-in-chief, “that your Regiment, is to have one Suit for parade, and another to march to New Haven. Present appearances render it doubtful whether they will ever get further or intend to leave the State of Connecticut.” Other alleged troops could not even be found. “I should suppose,” Washington wrote to Schuyler, “that Vanschaick’s and Wynkoop’s regiments exclusive of any other men would nearly suffice for the purposes mentioned in your several letters, or that very few men more in addition to them certainly would,—if they were compleat and properly employed; but I am informed by a letter from General Sullivan of the 18th Ulto., dated at Albany, that those regiments were not to be found on the strictest enquiry he could make; that Colo. Vanschaick, who was there, never furnished a single man for guard or any other duty after he got there, and that Lieutenant Colo. Courtland, of Wynkoop’s Regiment, when he applied for pay for two companies said to be in Tryon County to keep the Tories in order, informed him they had neither arms nor ammunition; that in some Companies there was not a man present fit for duty, and that in others there were not more than eleven and in some less.”

The troops were raw, incompetently officered and harassed by contradictory orders. Even the commander-in-chief frequently did not know where alleged components of his army were or whether they even existed. “The ridiculous and inconsistent orders given by the executive powers, in some of the states,” Washington wrote his brother, “and even by the officers therein, for the rendezvous of their men, is scarcely to be thought of with patience. It would seem as if to harass the Troops and delay their junction were the ends in view.” On the same day he wrote to Congress that “If the Men that are raised, few as they are, could be got into the Field, it would be a matter of some Consolation, that every Method that I have been able to devise has proved ineffectual. If I send an Officer to collect the sick or scattered of his Regiment, it is ten to one that he neglects his duty—goes home on pleasure or Business, and the next that I hear of him, is, that he has resigned. Furloughs are no more attended to than if there was no limitation of time ...”

There were other difficulties. “We can scarcely form a Court Martial or parade a detachment in any instance,” Washington wrote to Congress as late as the latter part of 1778, “without a warm discussion on the subject of precedence, and there are several Good Officers now, who are forced to decline duty, to prevent disputes and their being commanded by others, who upon every principle are their Inferiors.” This particular difficulty arose from allowing the states to issue commissions since no two of them followed exactly the same system in doing so, if, indeed, they followed any system.

This chaotic military system led to a tremendous waste of the inadequate supplies but the greatest difficulty of all was the encouragement which it gave to desertion. Practically speaking, any deserter who managed to get a few miles from camp was safe. On principle, all loyal Whigs abhorred military power. No help was to be expected from any civil authority in apprehending deserters. Nor did the deserters have any difficulty concealing themselves, since the soldiers did not wear uniforms.

What made the men desert was not so much a desire to get out of the army as a desire to get better terms. Every state was competing for recruits and tried to outbid its fellow states. Pay, even pay in depreciated currency, was months behind in the army, but good bonuses could be received for enlisting in the troops of any state. The states did not issue such clothing as they had to the men already under arms but used it as an inducement to obtain new recruits. “The strongest Washington wrote to Congress on one occasion, “against being able to make a forced march is the want of shoes.” The men were not long in discovering that the most profitable way of soldiering was to get bonuses to serve as substitutes in the militia. This was not only more profitable but more pleasant, for the militia generally took the position that they were not subject to the regular army discipline.

The habitual weakness of the army made frequent calls for the militia necessary. The introduction of militia into the camp disorganized the army still more, facilitated desertion and increased the prices paid for substitutes in the militia, thus increasing the temptation for desertion. The militia went home almost at will. A Connecticut militia regiment was supposed to contain a thousand men but at one point Washington dismissed thirteen of those regiments because the whole lot of them contained only seven hundred men. Most of the rest had deserted. At the end of 1776 the army was reduced to almost nothing and the time of the few remaining men expired with the year. Next year’s army was yet to be raised. Under these circumstances Washington reported to Congress that he had induced the New England regiments to agree to stay for six weeks of the new year. “For this extraordinary mark of their attachment to their country, I have agreed to give them a bounty of ten dollars per man, besides their pay running on.” The bounty had to be paid in advance for no one had any faith in the promises of the government. A few days after it was paid nearly one-half of the men had deserted.

After several years of this Washington described his army as “a force that is constantly fluctuating and sliding from under us as a pedestal of ice would do from a statue in a summer’s day.” His military plans all had to be made to correspond with the terms of enlistment of his men. Trenton, for instance, was attacked on Christmas not so much because Christmas was a good time to attack as because most of the troops would leave on December 31. “We dare not in ye beginning of a campaign attempt enterprises, on acct. of the rawness of the men, nor at the latter end of it, because they are about to leave us.” Before the troops are disciplined, he wrote on another occasion, “the time approaches for their dismissal, and you are beginning to make interest with them for their continuance for another limited period; in the doing of which you are obliged to relax in your discipline, in order as it were to curry favor with them, by which means the latter part of your time is employed in undoing what the first was accomplishing, and instead of having men always ready to take advantage of circumstances, you must govern your movements by the circumstances of your Inlistment.”

This state of affairs did not come to him as a surprise. Only a few weeks after he took command he began to express his conviction that the only way the war could ever be brought to a successful conclusion was by raising an army for the duration and that the only way such an army could be raised was by a draft. From the very beginning he was opposed to any state distinctions among the troops. On July 4, 1775, the day after he took command of the army, his general orders exhorted the soldiers to remember that they were “the Troops of the United Provinces of North America; and it is hoped that all Distinctions of Colonies will be laid aside.” A year and a half later he wrote Congress that “I have labored, ever since I have been in the service, to discourage all kinds of local attachments and distinctions of country, denominating the whole by the greater name of AMERICAN.” None of his contemporaries ever approached Washington in his complete freedom from sectional prejudice. Jefferson, John Adams, Henry, all tried to think nationally but in the case of each of them local prejudice at one time or another affected his thinking importantly. Such prejudice is discernible in Washington when he first appears in history as a frontier officer during the Seven Years’ War. It reappears in a few remarks about New Englanders made in the first few months of the Revolutionary War. Then it disappears forever.

It disappeared so completely that at times his disregard of sectional prejudice verged on imprudence. When Virginia was invaded during Jefferson’s governorship, Washington at first felt that the only help he could send was an officer of experience to take command of the Virginian militia. The officer he selected was Steuben. Steuben had none of the stiffness customary with the Prussian military caste, but he had been one of Frederick the Great’s generals. The military ideas which prevailed in Virginia were somewhat different from those taught at Potsdam. When Steuben caught one of the Virginia colonels making a false return he promptly had the colonel’s spurs knocked off and reduced him to the ranks. The magnates of the Old Dominion were not accustomed to such treatment and it took all Jefferson’s powers of diplomacy to mollify the colonel. 

When Washington later sent troops to Virginia he also sent additional commanders, Lafayette and Muhlenberg. Two foreigners and a Pennsylvania Dutchman was a stiff dose for Virginia. But the most remarkable instance of Washington’s disregard of sectional prejudice was his appointment of Greene to the southern command. After their favorite, Gates, had demonstrated his incompetence, the Congress asked the commander-in-chief to select a general to oppose Cornwallis. At a later date—during the French war—Washington insisted on the appointment of C. C. Pinckney as one of his three major-generals because of Pinckney’s personal and family influence in South Carolina. But now—when South Carolina, Georgia and part of North Carolina were in the hands of the enemy—in what was a sort of civil war—Washington sent a Rhode Islander to try to recover them. Greene was almost unknown in the territory where he was to command. He was by family religion a Quaker and by trade an iron founder. Neither the religion nor the trade was respectable in South Carolina. Greene had qualities of mind—balance and judgment—comparable to Washington’s, but it still was a bold experiment. It is sufficient to say that it was successful. Greene not only accomplished his military purposes; he won the affection and confidence of the strange people among whom he was cast.

This attitude of mind cannot be described as tolerant. The mere use of such a word implies a recognition of fundamental differences. Toleration is an agreement to overlook fundamental differences for the sake of a specific end. Washington did not think in such abstractions; his mind was too practical. Almost from boyhood he had been among those who command. He was an aristocrat by any definition of the term. One of his business letters reveals the attitude which made him so indifferent to sectional prejudices. He asked his correspondent to obtain a house-joiner and a brick-layer and added “if they are good workmen, they may be from Asia, Africa or Europe; they may be Mahometans, Jews or Christians of any sect, or they may be Atheists.” That was his way—to pay attention to essentials. If there was something to be done he inquired merely whether the prospective doer was “a good workman.” If he thought a Prussian the best man to defend Virginia, he sent him; if he thought a Rhode Islander the best man to recover the Carolinas, he sent him. When there was work to be done, his only object was to get the best workman available.

Washington’s military career has been the subject of many unkind remarks. It is clear that if Cromwell or Bonaparte had commanded the Continental Army the war would have been much shorter. Neither of them would have tolerated what Washington tolerated. It is equally clear that if either Cromwell or Bonaparte had been in command the resulting nation would have been vastly different. It is absurd to judge Washington on the basis of what General A should do with X number of troops when opposed by General B with Y number of troops. Washington’s strategy went beyond the bounds of such narrow professional questions.

From the purely military standpoint he had the high merit of judging his opponent’s problem correctly. The British problem was not to defeat an army but to subdue a country. In a pitched battle, with equal numbers and without any advantages of terrain, the British were almost certain to win. But there were no strategic industries, no arteries of communication, whose capture or destruction could compel the population to surrender. For the most part the people lived on farms or plantations and most of the farms and plantations were self-sustaining. Luxuries had to be imported but even if all foreign trade was stopped the people could always eat and sleep. If necessary, they could all wear homespun. Salt and military equipment had to be imported but the colonists had a thousand miles of coast through which to import it. Salt, it is true, became dear, but if salt was expensive among the Americans, the British in New York had to import even their firewood. It was similar to the problem which the Japanese now face in China.

There was one solution. The British could spread out their army so that it actually occupied the country—a “war of posts,” Washington called it. That was the solution, but its effectiveness depended on one factor—the elimination of the American army. So long as Washington was strong enough to surprise and capture any British post, the war would continue. This was demonstrated at the end of 1776. The British were in complete possession of New Jersey. Washington, with a handful of men, was on the other side of the Delaware. He crossed the Delaware on Christmas night and captured the British post at Trenton.

The forces at their other posts rolled together. They were safe but their cause was lost. When the British had first spread over New Jersey the farmers had fallen over each other in their zeal to demonstrate their loyalty to the Crown. Trenton changed all this. The war was not so much military as psychological. The first problem was to convince the Americans of the feasibility of resistance. The second problem was to keep the British united in some seaport town. So long as Washington was in the field at the head of anything which could be called an army, the United States existed. It was a nation struggling for existence, and so long as that nation had some sort of an army, it could be said to exist. If the army disappeared, the prospective nation was merely a group of disgruntled colonists.

It was on this point that Washington demonstrated his supreme grasp of political as well as military strategy. His military strategy is evident enough, but it is his political strategy which established his greatness. So long as the country had an army—a nucleus about which all could gather—it was a nation. This was Washington’s supreme strategy—at all hazards to preserve the semblance of an American army. Militarily, it prevented the British from occupying the country; psychologically, it convinced the Americans that they were a nation.

This was hardly a strategic conception with any emotional appeal for a man who “had he been born in the forests . . . would have been the fiercest man among the savage tribes.” His natural inclinations are apparent enough. He hated the tedium of the defensive. All his instincts were for attack. Both on the Virginian frontier and during the Revolutionary War necessity kept him largely on the defensive. But the few instances where he had an opportunity to attack all bear a remarkable similarity. A fast, secret march, a sudden, headlong attack from an unexpected quarter, preferably at midnight, a reliance on bayonets rather than bullets to gain the decision, that was the style of fighting he liked. He could not go to Stony Point. He decided on the attack largely because of “the necessity of doing something” and the probability that in the event of failure the loss would be inconsiderable. The commander-in-chief could not go on such an expedition. His mere presence would mean that a defeat would have the psychological effect of a disaster. But he made the plan. “Advance,” were his orders to Wayne, whom he selected to command the expedition, “with fixed Bayonets and muskets unloaded. The officers . . . are to know precisely what Batteries, or particular parts of the line, they are respectively to possess, that confusion and the consequences of indecision may be avoided . . . The usual time for exploits of this kind is a little before day . . . I therefore recommend a midnight hour . . . A Dark night, and even a rainy one, (if you can find the way,) will contribute to your success.” That was it. Travel lightly, swiftly, silently. Leave your ammunition at home. Crawl up through the darkness. Then one wild rush at midnight, a brief clash of bayonets and all would be over.

Speed, secrecy, and surprise were the fundamental principles of his military art. They were not so much learned from experience as inherent in his nature. He it was who advised Braddock to divide his army; to push on with a light column while he left his heavy baggage and artillery to follow. Washington went so far as to suggest to Braddock’s successors that the British troops abandon their cumbersome and ornamental uniforms and “adopt the Indian dress . . . convenience, rather than shew, I think, should be consulted.” Shortly after he took command in Boston he began to think of a plan to carry the city by a surprise assault. It was voted down in a council of his generals. In the midst of his troubles with the re-enlistment of his army at the end of the year he wrote to a friend: “Could I have foreseen the difficulties, which have come upon us; could I have known, that such a backwardness would have been discovered in the old soldiers to the service, all the generals upon earth should not have convinced me of the propriety of delaying an attack upon Boston.”

His most brilliant victory was Trenton—a surprise attack in the midst of a blizzard. His most famous victory was Yorktown, which again had its basis in speed and surprise. For years Washington had sat just outside New York City while the British stayed inside. He had played with several different schemes to try to take the city by storm. Then de Grasse and his fleet created a brief period in which Cornwallis’ sea communication was cut off. Washington ostentatiously prepared for the siege of New York while as secretly and unobtrusively as possible he moved the bulk of the American army and the French expeditionary force to Virginia. Yorktown was won when he succeeded in getting his army there without interference. 

His preparations for the war with France give the clearest indication of his military views. In both his previous wars his policies had been governed by necessity; this time he hoped to fight the way he thought a war should be fought. In the first place, he wrote President Adams, he did not want his old generals. They were not “of sufficient activity, energy, and health.” What he wanted was troops trained to “the 'quick step,' long marches.” This from a man of sixty-six, whose own health was undermined. That war never happened, but from the colonial militia officer to the ex-President, Washington clung to the belief that speed, secrecy, and surprise were the elements of successful fighting.

If those elements are not at once apparent In a survey of his generalship, it is because, as he himself said in a letter to Noah Webster, in the Revolutionary War “the difficulty consisted more in providing, than knowing how to apply, the military apparatus.” Washington was unsuccessful in his defense of New York, he lost the battle of Brandywine. He had not entered on either enterprise with any enthusiasm. They represent the other side of Washington, the intellectual side, which recognized that public opinion had to be satisfied. He could not surrender either New York or Philadelphia without at least a battle, and he fought the battles even though, in between times, he wrote to Congress that “I am obliged to confess my want of confidence in the generality of the troops.” He would have recovered Philadelphia by his brilliant surprise attack at Germantown had it not been for an accident which he could not reasonably foresee. His major strategy was justified when the British found themselves compelled voluntarily to evacuate the city. Washington seized the opportunity to make an attack which would have been a brilliant victory if it had not been for the treachery of one of his subordinates.

“Let me get at him” is probably the national theory of fighting. It has a good ancestry, for it was certainly that of the father of the country. In his first skirmishes even his Indian allies characterized his desire to get to close quarters with the enemy as obstinacy. After he reached his maturity it was tempered in his planning by more abstract considerations. After all, what plan of attack could he adopt with an army which, in an official report, he characterized as “continuing a destructive, expensive, and disorderly mob.” 

When battle was actually joined, the wild man always came to the fore. As a militia officer of twenty-two he wrote his brother, after his baptism of fire, ‘‘I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.” As commander-in-chief during the Revolutionary War he was intellectually convinced that the preservation of his army was far more important than any victory or defeat. He must have known that the only thing which held it together was his own personality. Yet he always rushed in where the battle was thickest and where, on any rational principle, he had no business to be. Innumerable are the stories of his carelessness. When he was trying to defend New York he suddenly discovered that two militia brigades whom he had posted at Kip’s Bay were fleeing before a small detachment of British. Washington rushed in among them, struck the officers over the head with his cane, swore at them, and, when this proved ineffectual, rode at the enemy. His aids seized his bridle and forced him from the field amid his own curses. On a reconnaissance at Yorktown he took a position which one of his aids, Colonel Cobb, considered dangerously close to the enemy.

“Sir,” said Cobb, “you are too much exposed here, had you not better step back a little”

“Colonel Cobb,” Washington replied, “if you are afraid, you have liberty to step back.”

Too much should not be known about the childhood of heroes of legendary proportions. It would detract from the myth of Hercules to learn that he had the chickenpox at three. Washington’s beginnings were appropriately obscure. Less is known about his early life than about that of any other man discussed in this book. It is as if the gods who designed him to be the founder of a nation purposely concealed those details a knowledge of which might impair the greatness of the legend which was to give that nation unity.

This obscurity is the more remarkable in view of Washington’s inherited social position. Unlike the other men treated in this book, he could boast of a long and honorable pedigree. He did not have to buy a coat-of-arms, like Jefferson. For obvious reasons most of the settlers in America came from the lower classes in Europe. This was not true of the Washingtons. They had been “gentlemen” for centuries; many of them had been knights; they had more than one relative in the peerage. One of them, a colonel in the royal army during the English civil war, had been distinguished by a foolhardy courage which had added to the tradition that “the Washingtons were certainly a very frantic race.” All the family had followed the King, and they found the struggle for survival difficult under the commonwealth and the protectorate. Several of them went to the Continent and, after George became famous, he received and acknowledged a letter from a James Washington of Berlin who claimed to be a descendant of some member of the family who had settled in Prussia.

The royalist colonel had an uncle, Lawrence Washington, a clergyman, whom the victorious Puritans expelled from his valuable living on the ground that “he is a common frequenter of Ale-houses, not only himselfe sitting dayly tippling there, but also incouraging others in that beastly vice, and hath been oft drunk.”

Lawrence had two young sons, John and Lawrence. Somehow or other, they found means to get to Virginia. John married a young widow he met in that colony, and her father gave him a tract of land. He rapidly expanded this nest-egg and at his death was a prosperous planter in Westmoreland County, on the estuary of the Potomac.

John’s grandson, Augustine, was educated in England and on his return to Virginia promoted and managed an iron-mine. It was financed by English capital and Augustine made frequent trips to England. The Washington family tradition was much broader than that of their fellow planters. In the England of the early Stuarts they had prospered at court. That was then the road to success. In Virginia the situation was different. That did not discourage them. They took to whatever appeared to be the way to get ahead in the social organization in which they found themselves. They were not narrow-minded as to the means. The only form of gainful activity which the average Virginian grandee recognized was the growing of tobacco. If the Washingtons found the mining of iron more profitable, they mined iron. None of them ever showed any hesitancy about the kind of business in which he engaged so long as it was profitable. George himself milled flour, operated a whiskey distillery, caught and sold fish, owned schooners. It probably explains the lingering tradition that despite his pedigree and coat-of-arms he was not quite a gentleman.

They differed from the other planters in another respect. Other planters might, when their means permitted it, send a son to England for his education. The varied business interests of the Washingtons gave them a much more cosmopolitan outlook. John had been to the West Indies before he came to Virginia. His grandson Augustine crossed the ocean frequently. Augustine’s eldest son, Lawrence, was in the British expedition to capture Cartagena. Augustine’s younger son, George, would have become a sea captain if it had not been for the opposition of his mother. The Washingtons were always found wherever there was a chance to gain fame or fortune.

They were a short-lived family. Augustine in his will states that his children were “by several Ventures.” George was the eldest by the second venture—Augustine’s marriage with Mary Ball. There were ten children in all by both marriages. George inherited his physical appearance from the Balls. That was all. The Balls were merely Virginia planters without either the aristocratic or the cosmopolitan tradition of the Washingtons. George was eleven at the time of his father’s death. The boy was thrown pretty much on his own resources. If his father had lived, George would have been sent to school in England—would have grown up in the atmosphere of his father’s extensive connections.

Mary Ball Washington was ignorant, untidy, and, according to tradition, smoked a pipe. She did not hope for any more from her sons than that they should develop into ignorant, small-time Virginia planters quite content to spend their time drinking, hunting, and cock-fighting. She never interfered in George’s career except to his disadvantage. The first time was when in his teens his elder half-brothers obtained what they considered an advantageous opportunity for him to go to sea. She raised so much irrational clamor about it that he did not go. She again interposed violently when Braddock asked Washington to come with him as one of his aids. When her son finally attained eminence in spite of her, her vulgar mind could think of nothing but how to profit pecuniarily from his fame. When he was struggling to hold some sort of American army together he wrathfully learned “from very good authority, that she is, upon all occasions and in all companies, complaining of . . . her wants and difficulties,” and as a result obtaining all sort of gifts from acquaintances and strangers.

Her complaints aroused so much sympathy that there was a scheme afloat in Virginia to pay her a pension out of the state treasury. A vigorous letter from Washington to Ben Harrison put a stop to this. The General pointed out that he had bought his mother a house and lot in Fredericksburg and had rented her plantation from her “which has been an annual expence to me ever since, as the estate never raised one half the rent I was to pay. Before I left Virginia I answered all her calls for money; and since that period have directed my steward to do the same. Whence her distresses can arise, therefore, I know not . . . she has not a child that would not divide the last sixpence to relieve her from real distress. This she has been repeatedly assured of by me.” Even when he gave her money, his troubles were not over. There is a significant entry in his cash-book: “By Cash paid my Mother in the presence of my Br. Chas. £30.”

George Washington was born in 1732 and attended various local schools until he was fourteen or fifteen. His great-grandfather John had originally acquired the estate which was afterwards known as Mount Vernon. It was then a mere wilderness. George’s father, Augustine, had begun its development and by his will had left it to his eldest son, Lawrence. After the death of his father it was Mount Vernon rather than his mother’s house which was home to George. Here the aristocratic, worldly-wise tradition of the Washingtons was reinforced from another direction.

The Stuarts had given a deed to some millions of acres of northern Virginia to one of their faithful supporters, Lord Culpeper. By marriage, this property had passed to the descendants of the Parliamentary general, Fairfax. They had used it so far to provide for several cadet branches of their family. One of these was settled at Belvoir, which was separated from Mount Vernon only by an arm of the Potomac. About the time that Washington went to live with his half-brother, Lord Fairfax himself came to live permanently in Virginia, which he had visited once some years before.

This was an event of great public interest. Fairfax was only a Scotch peer but even so he was the only authentic lord in America. It gave him social preeminence, but his place In American history is derived from his personal qualities. Born some years before the close of the seventeenth century, he was in his fifties when he decided to spend the rest of his life in Virginia. He brought more than a title with him. As a student at Oxford he had contributed to the Spectator. Later he had been among those lords whom Pope collected. A peer, a friend of Pope and Addison, of Bolingbroke and Swift, he was a unique phenomenon in America. For a short time after his arrival he lived at Belvoir. Then he built himself a home which he called Greenway Court, in the Shenandoah Valley, on the edge of the wilderness. The home he built was very modest by Virginian standards but it was well filled with books.

The relations between the Washingtons and the Fairfaxes were close. No entry seems more common in that journal of George Washington’s which has been misnamed a diary than “Fox hunting with Lord Fairfax and his Brothr. and Colo. Fairfax. Started a Fox and lost it.” The relations between the two families began with the marriage of Lawrence Washington and Ann, the daughter of the Fairfax of Belvoir, a few years before the arrival of the head of the family in Virginia. It was at Belvoir that George as a boy met Lord Fairfax.

George was a difficult youngster. The scanty records suggest a boy of such audacity and obstinacy that his elders knew not what to think. He had a most magnificent physique; he was a perfect horseman. Significantly, these factors do not seem to have made him as a boy the hero of other boys. All the voluminous records which he left behind him do not reveal a boyhood friend. There was terrific potential in George, but its development . . . ?

His brother Lawrence and the Fairfaxes had some appreciation of the problem. They did not suggest further schooling; they did not talk to him of his duty to prepare himself to farm the plantation which his father had left him. By study under one or more local surveyors he had acquired the art of surveying. Lord Fairfax decided to send George William Fairfax, the son of the Fairfax of Belvoir, to explore his western lands. George William was in his middle twenties and when he left for the frontier the sixteen-year-old George Washington accompanied him.

The younger George found many things to surprise him. He kept a journal of his adventures. His first surprise ca-me shortly after they reached the frontier. “We got our Supper,” he relates, “and was lighted into a Room and I not being so good a Woodsman as ye rest of my Company striped myself very orderly and went in to ye Bed as they called it when to my Surprize I found it to be nothing but a Little Straw-Matted together without Sheets or any thing else but only one thread Bear blanket with double its Weight of Vermin such as Lice Fleas &c I was glad to get up (as soon as y. Light was carried from us) I put on my Cloths and Lay as my Companions. Had we not been very tired I am sure we should not have slep’d much that night. I made a promise not to Sleep so from that time forward chusing rather to sleep in y. open Air before a fire.” The following day he records that “we set out early and finish’d about one oClock and then TravelPd up to Frederick Town where our Baggage came to us we cleaned ourselves (to get Rid of y. Game we had catched y. Night before) and took a Review of y. Town and thence return’d to our Lodgings where we had a good Dinner prepar’d for us Wine and Rum Punch in Plenty and a good Feather Bed with clean Sheets which was a very agreeable regale.” After some weeks of this he wrote to a friend that “I have not sleep’d above three nights or four in a bed, but, after walking a good deal all the day, I lay down before the fire upon a little hay, straw, fodder, or bearskin, which ever is to be had, with man, wife, and children, like a parcel of dogs and cats 5 and happy is he, who gets the berth nearest the fire.”

It was on this trip to the frontier that he had his first experience with the non-English elements which went into the founding of America. He noted in his journal, of one settlement, that “they seemed to be as Ignorant a Set of People as the Indians they would never speak English but when spoken to they speak all Dutch.”

This journey into the wilderness was followed by his one brief experience of foreign travel. Lawrence’s health was bad and his physicians recommended a trip to the West Indies. George accompanied him. They went to Barbadoes. George lost much of his few months there in an attack of smallpox which left its marks on his appearance ever after. Again he kept a journal of his experiences. Board and lodging for the two of them, he found, cost fifteen pounds a month exclusive of liquors and washing, a price which he considered “extrava-gently dear.” When he left Barbadoes, he made long reflections on the social and economic condition of the island. He records that it is unnecessary to discuss its fruits since these are sufficiently described in a published book, but he adds that “none pleases my taste as do’s the Pine” (pineapple). What surprised him most in the matter of farming was that “their dung they are very careful in saving.” That was not done in Virginia, where no one worried about exhausting his land. Sociologically, he was puzzled by one phenomenon. “There are few,” he records, “who may be called midling people they are either very rich or very poor.”

This was the boy. From this, he almost immediately became the man, not only in years but in deeds. It is plain that his was a misunderstood, lonely boyhood. Even as a man he had many qualities which are not usually associated with success. As President, he impressed a British diplomat as “cold, reserved and even phlegmatic.” Toward the end of the war Hamilton told Madison that Washington’s “extreme reserve, mixed sometimes with a degree of asperity of temper” had made him unpopular in the army. Senator Maclay, after one dinner with the President, records that “The President is a cold, formal man.” Of an earlier dinner, Maclay entered in his diary that “It was the most solemn dinner ever I sat at.” And of another: “The President seemed to bear in his countenance a settled aspect of melancholy. No cheering ray of convivial sunshine broke through the cloudy gloom of settled seriousness. At every interval of eating or drinking he played on the table with a fork or knife, like a drumstick.”

A traveling French nobleman looked a little deeper. He records of his conversations with Washington that “All his answers are pertinent; he shows the utmost reserve, and is very diffident; but, at the same time, he is firm and unchangeable in whatever he undertakes.” That was it—diffidence. Under the most favorable circumstances, Washington was never the life of the party. “Although in the circle of his friends,” says Jefferson, “where he might be unreserved with safety, he took a free share in conversation, his colloquial talents were not above mediocrity, possessing neither copiousness of ideas, nor fluency of words.” When with strangers or mere acquaintances he curled up completely. To the end of his life he only relaxed with those he had known for a long time. But the reason was not pride, it was diffidence. He was shy to an extreme. Even the diplomatist quoted before, who remarked that he was “cold, reserved and even phlegmatic,” added that he was “without the least appearance of haughtiness or ill-nature.”

That this coldness was not innate but was the effect of diffidence seems to have been well understood at the time. “The General,” one traveler to Mount Vernon records, “with a few glasses of champagne got quite merry, and being with his intimate friends laughed and talked a good deal. Before strangers he is very reserved, and seldom says a word. I was fortunate in being in his company with his particular acquaintances.”

This reserve went beyond mere diffidence in speech. Most of those who met him and recorded their impressions speak of his eyes. For the most part, they were impressed. To one English traveler it appeared “a light eye and full—the very eye of genius and reflection” but to another Englishman, a diplomatist, it appeared that “his eyes retire inward (do you understand me?) and have nothing of fire of animation or openness in their expression.” The wild man was only apparent on extraordinary occasions.

He did not act the experienced man of the world. He had to be brought out by whoever interviewed him. When the interviewer had the proper skill he found Washington full of valuable conversation.

When France decided to recognize the United States it sent a minister, Gerard, to America—not an enthusiast like Lafayette, but a regularly trained career diplomatist. One of the things on which he was expected to report was the character and capacity of Washington. Gerard went to camp and interviewed the General. The report to the French foreign minister read, “I have had many conversations with General Washington, some of which have continued for three hours. It is impossible for me briefly to communicate the fund of intelligence, which I have derived from him, but I shall do it in my letters as occasions shall present themselves. I will now say only, that I have formed as high an opinion of the powers of his mind, his moderation, his patriotism, and his virtues, as I had before from common report conceived of his military talents and of the incalculable services he has rendered to his country.” That Gerard found out so much was a tribute to his diplomatic capacity. The effect of what he discovered and reported was that at a later date the French put their expeditionary force under Washington’s command—not under the command of whoever happened to be the American general but only of Washington personally.

This shyness in conversation gave Washington one habit which is curious in a man of his background. He evidently liked to transact business on paper. There exist long letters from him to the manager of his Mount Vernon estate, written when Washington was in residence there and, one would think, would have preferred a conference. He wrote almost as easily and as readily as Jefferson or John Adams. His letters do not read like those of a man who ever had to stop for a word. They might be better letters if he had had to do so. The chief criticism which can be made of them is the excess of words. Most of his letters could have been advantageously pruned.

That Washington liked women is beyond dispute. His success is not remarkable. That is curious, for he had the qualifications. The smallpox marred his appearance but the small-pox was as customary as mumps in the eighteenth century. He was huge—the physician who measured his body after his death reported the length as six feet three and a half inches. Even in his maturity his weight was reported as a mere two hundred and ten pounds. If anything, according to Maclay, “his frame would seem to want filling up.” Many years after his death, Jefferson wrote that “his person, you know, was fine, his stature exactly what one would wish, his deportment easy, erect and noble; the best horseman of his age, and the most graceful figure that could be seen on horseback.” All his life he was extremely fond of dancing. These qualities do not seem to have appealed to the ladies of colonial Virginia. There was also that moodiness. Generally, his eye was vacant. At other times it filled with only too much passion, but the passion was not the passion of love. This magnificent horseman, this mighty man of muscle, did not attract women.

As a youth he was constantly in love with one girl or another. None of these girls possessed the ability to penetrate his crust of pride and diffidence. They admired the muscle and the horsemanship but they gave their hearts to simpler, more understandable men; not to this strange youth whose apparently impenetrable shyness was varied only by fits of demoniac temper.

So acute a man as Hamilton would have said the girls were right. According to the not entirely trustworthy report of Benjamin Rush, Hamilton, on one occasion, after having been in intimate contact with Washington for a number of years, said that “his heart was a stone.” Jefferson was of much the same opinion. “His heart,” he wrote of Washington after his death, “was not warm in its affections; but he exactly calculated every man’s value, and gave him a solid esteem proportioned to it.”

An instance will show what that exact calculation meant. If any public man in America could call Washington “friend” it was Knox. He was one of the few men to whom Washington wrote letters in which there are traces of real affection. When he had decided on the action about to be discussed Washington wrote of Knox “there is no man in the United States with whom I have been in habits of greater intimacy, no one whom I have loved more sincerely, nor any for whom I have had a greater friendship.” They had first met when Washington took command at Cambridge. Knox was then a private citizen who assisted the army with advice in laying out its fortifications. Washington found this advice so valuable that, at his request, Knox was made a colonel. Washington found him one of his few entirely satisfactory subordinates and pushed his promotion. At the end of the war Knox retired as a major-general. When Washington became President he appointed Knox Secretary of War and again received loyal, able, and satisfactory service.

Then came the organization of the army to fight the French. Three major-generals were to be appointed. Knox was the only one of his revolutionary-war major-generals whom Washington was willing to take but insisted that he be ranked last among the three. The other two, Pinckney and Hamilton, had been only colonels in the old army. At that point Knox would certainly have agreed with Hamilton that “his heart was a stone.” Indeed, there were many people besides Knox who disliked this particular “exact calculation of every man’s value.”

“His integrity,” said Jefferson of Washington, “was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known, no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision.” That is very, very high praise. But can anyone blame Henry Knox, a friend of twenty years’ standing, for wishing it tempered a little by the milk of human kindness, when he learned that that inflexible integrity demanded that he, a loyal, competent and zealous subordinate, be the junior of three major-generals of whom the two senior were younger men who had never risen beyond the rank of colonel in the same army in which he had been a major-general? We all demand justice, but we do not wish it to attain the precision of a scientific instrument. Somehow we like it better if it has those traits we call human—such as a bit of weakness for a friend now and then.

There is one other factor to be considered in determining the reasons for Washington’s apparent lack of success with women. It takes us into the realm of speculation, feminine instinct and such-like imponderables. Was there some instinctive, subconscious mechanism that warned the girls of colonial Virginia that he was impotent? Not in the crude sense that he could not perform sexually but in the more important sense that he could not beget. The whole question is pure speculation, but the facts make one wonder. He was so thoroughly masculine. He ardently desired children. When he married his wife, she was a widow in her middle twenties who had had children before. There was never any noticeable rift in their married life. Neither were there any children. Such questions cannot be answered by any reference to ordinary standards. Washington was too thoroughly uncommon. Under a diffident exterior he concealed a demoniac temper. He learned the art of keeping it in an iron cage. That suppression embodied a terrific emotional strain. He was only sixty-seven when he died, yet for years his face had struck observers as marked by the ravages of time. These marks reflected the internal struggle. That struggle drained off his vital energy. May it not also have drained off his sexual energy?

By middle age he overcame some of this shyness with women. One woman wrote to another, when he was commander-in-chief, that when “General Washington throws off the Hero and takes up the chatty agreeable Companion—he can be down right impudent sometimes— such impudence, Fanny, as you and I like.” It is evident from the form of this statement that even then he was “down right impudent” only on rare occasions.

As in the case of other sensitive, misunderstood, bewildered youths, Washington as a young man was intensely ambitious. His ambition took the crudest form. He wanted to be a soldier, a great conquering hero. His colonial birth barred him from the British army. His ambition had to find a local outlet, and the Washington-Fairfax clique found it for him. They had already brought about his appointment as surveyor for the new county of Culpeper when he was seventeen. When he was not quite twenty he was appointed one of the four adjutants of the Virginian militia with the rank of major and a salary of one hundred pounds a year.

Pull, of course, was an important element in this last appointment, but it was not the only element. A new governor, Dinwiddie, had come to Virginia about a year before the appointment was made. George had promptly gone to Williamsburg with a letter of introduction to Dinwiddie from Lawrence Washington. The Governor was impressed; so impressed that it is due to Dinwiddie that Washington almost immediately entered upon a series of offices of startlingly great responsibility. All Washington’s family connections did for him was to bring him to the attention of those in power. The rest must be ascribed to his personality and to the penetration of Dinwiddie.

The first of these great responsibilities was the mission to the French. Washington was twenty-one when Dinwiddie sent him on this combined military and diplomatic trip. His duties were to ascertain the truth of rumors that the French were penetrating into territory which the Governor considered British; to ascertain what they were doing there; to endeavor to persuade them to leave; to warn them that if they did not do so, force would be used to drive them out; but above all, to find out the facts. In truth, it was one of the opening moves in a world war—the Seven Years’ War. Dinwiddie took a bold gamble when he entrusted such a job to a headstrong and inexperienced youth. He was so confident of his choice, however, that he wrote to another colonial governor that he had sent “a person of distinction.”

Washington left on his mission at the end of October, 1753. He took along his former fencing-master, a Hollander named Van Braam, to act as his French interpreter. At Winchester, he employed Christopher Gist, a famous Indian trader, as his guide and four others to act as servants. They traveled on horseback. The weather was unusually cold and their progress was much impeded by rain and snow. On the route he added a number of friendly Indians to his party, including a chief known as the Half-King, with whom he was subsequently to have much to do. He also heard stories of a number of Indian traders who had been seized and were being held by the French. He arrived at the French fort in the middle of December and soon found that the French were entrenched in a manner which meant business. He was received with apparent hospitality; he was permitted to inspect the fortifications; but the French paid no attention to his demand that they get out. Instead, they used every means, of which liquor was the chief, to inveigle his Indians away from him. “I can’t say,” wrote Washington, “that ever in my Life I suffered so much Anxiety as I did in this Affair: I saw that every Stratagem which the most fruitful Brain could invent, was practised, to win the Half-King to their Interest.” Finally Washington got away with his party intact.

The cold increased; the horses were so much fatigued that Washington dismounted and walked. It seemed to him they would never get back to civilization and that the information he was bringing was of vital importance. He determined to leave the party in charge of Van Braam and to set off on foot with only Gist as a companion. Gist, who also kept a journal, records that he opposed this on the ground that Washington was not physically equal to such a trip in the middle of a severe winter. Gist should have thought of a different reason. They set out.

“I took my necessary Papers,” Washington wrote when he got home, “pulled off my Cloaths; and tied myself up in a Match Coat [a fur coat of matched skins]. Then with Gun in Hand and Pack at my Back, in which were my Papers and Provisions, I set-out with Mr. Gist.”

The first day they made eighteen miles. “The Major,” says Gist, “was much fatigued. It was very cold; all the small runs were frozen, that we could hardly get water to drink.” The next day they came to “a Place,” says Washington, “called the Murdering Town.” Here they met an Indian who pretended to be friendly and who agreed to act as their guide. He also carried Washington’s pack. They had not gone very far when Gist was convinced “the Indian steered too much northeastwardly.” Suspicion was ingrained in Washington and it was not long before he was as mistrustful as Gist. “We travelled very brisk for eight or ten miles,” says Gist, “when the Major’s feet grew very sore, and he very weary . . . The Major desired to encamp, to which the Indian asked to carry his gun, but he refused that.” They continued, when suddenly the Indian, who was in front, turned around and fired. “Are you shot?” said Washington. “No,” said Gist, They started after the Indian and secured him before he could fire again. Gist was in favor of killing the Indian. Washington would not hear of it. Gist told him that if they released the Indian he would certainly get assistance and come back to attack them; that if they released the Indian they must travel all night. Washington agreed. “I followed” the Indian, says Gist, “and listened until he was fairly out of the way, and then we set out about half a mile, when we made a fire, set our compass, and fixed our course, and travelled all night.” “The next Day,” says Washington, “we continued travelling till quite dark, and got to the River , . . We expected to have found the River frozen, but it was not, only about 50 Yards from each Shore; The Ice I suppose had broken up above, for it was driving in vast Quantities.

“There was no Way for getting over but on a Raft; Which we set about with but one poor Hatchet, and finished just after Sun-setting. This was a whole Day’s Work. Then set off; But before we were Half Way over, we were jammed in the Ice, in such a Manner that we expected every Moment our Raft to sink, and ourselves to perish. I put-out my setting Pole to try to stop the Raft, that the Ice might pass by; when the Rapidity of the Stream threw it with so much Violence against the Pole, that it jerked me out into ten Feet Water: but I fortunately saved myself by catching hold of one of the Raft Logs. Notwithstanding all our Efforts we could not get the Raft to either Shore; but were obliged, as we were near an Island, to quit our Raft and make to it.

“The Cold was so extremely severe, that Mr. Gist had all his Fingers, and some of his Toes frozen; but the water was shut up so hard, that we found no Difficulty in getting-off the Island, on the Ice, in the Morning.”

Washington got back to Belvoir on the eleventh of January. He rested there a day and on the sixteenth he was in Williamsburg. The Governor was highly pleased with his conduct. He ordered Washington to write up his journal for the official records and allowed him one day in which to do this. As his report as presented was eight or ten thousand words in length, the labor of handwriting alone must have been severe, but he was astonished when he discovered that his hastily written manuscript had been given to a printer. As soon as a copy reached England it was republished there. It was all part of the propaganda build-up for the Seven Years’ War.

Washington was all for going after the Frenchmen. So was the legislature. A few weeks after his return a bill was passed providing for the raising of “the Virginia regiment.” Washington had received nothing in a financial way as a reward for his trip. He had been reimbursed his expenses; that was all. He did not wish for anything more. He was burning with a desire to be famous. Money was not his object. When he learned of the project for a Virginia regiment he wrote to all the influential men he knew not only asking for their aid to get into the regiment but asking their aid to get him in at a rank higher than major. He realized he could not be commander—after all, he was only twenty-two. He wanted to be lieutenant-colonel, and lieutenant-colonel he was. The colonel was Joshua Fry, the professor of mathematics at William and Mary—the same who, in conjunction with Thomas Jefferson’s father, had prepared Fry and Jefferson’s map of Virginia.

Washington began to recruit at Alexandria on the Potomac, a few miles from Mount Vernon. In a short time he had twenty-five men, but he also had the troubles which were to accompany his military exertions all his life. “Some of those,” he wrote Dinwiddie, “who were among the first enlisters, being needy, and knowing it to be usual for his Majesty’s soldiers to be paid once a week, or at most every fortnight, are very importunate to receive their due . . . We daily experience the great necessity for cloathing the men . . . There are many of them without shoes, others want stockings, some are without shirts, and not a few that have scarce a coat or waistcoat to their backs.”

A few weeks later he set off for the wilderness with a total force of somewhat less than two hundred men. War had not yet been declared. It was still merely an incident. As he advanced he was joined by the Half-King and some friendly Indians.

The management of Indians was never an easy matter. The Half-King was an intelligent man and his complaints have come down to us in the journal of Conrad Weiser, a famous frontiersman. The Indian chief told Weiser that Washington “took upon him to command the Indians as his slaves . . . and would by no means take advice from the Indians.” The Half-King also said he and the other Indians had sent their wives and children to a distance because of their lack of confidence in Washington. Weiser states, however, that these complaints were made “in a very moderate way,” the Half-King blaming their troubles chiefly on Washington’s want of experience.

Washington was only on the edge of the wilderness when he learned that a fort which the Virginians were building at the forks of the Ohio had been compelled to surrender to a vastly superior French force. The captors renamed it Fort Duquesne. He resolved to push on and seek out the French. This decision was afterwards much criticized on the ground he should have waited for the rest of the Virginian troops to join him. The military virtue of waiting was something which Washington only learned by experience.

He had not gone far when he learned that there were also French parties in the great woods. The Indians tracked down one party and discovered that it had taken shelter in a hollow for the night. The Half-King sent word of their discovery to Washington. The latter took forty of his men and marched through the night to join the Indians. There was a brief conference. At dawn the Virginians attacked from one side and the Indians from the other. The fight lasted only a few minutes. The French leader, Jumonville, and nine of his men were killed. Twenty-one surrendered. One or two got away.

“I heard the bullets whistle,” Washington wrote to one of his brothers, “and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.” The letter got into print and was carried across the Atlantic. This phrase appears, somewhat misquoted, in one of Horace Walpole’s letters on the news of the day. For Washington’s first action was not a mere wilderness skirmish; it was a diplomatic incident of worldwide importance.

The French took the position that Jumonville had been assassinated. There was no war at least neither country had yet said so. Even admitting that Jumonville was in English territory, at most he was a trespasser. His force was obviously too small to be regarded as an army of invasion. What any properly trained officer in Washington’s position should have done was to have brought up as large a force as possible, surrounded Jumonville, and called upon him to retreat or surrender. That was what the French had done when they drove the English from the forks of the Ohio. A surprise attack assumed the existence of a state of war.

This line of argument was adopted by the French immediately after the encounter. Washington, in reporting to Dinwiddie, gave, among others, one most curious argument in defense of his surprise attack. It was that he had considered the matter with the Half-King, who concurred in his views. A fine authority on a diplomatic question between two presumably civilized countries! It is plain from the use of this argument that after the deed Washington was somewhat uneasy as to the consequences of what he had done. He probably did not have sufficient knowledge of world events to appreciate that he was opening a war not merely between English and French and Indians, but between English and French and Indians and Prussians and Austrians and Saxons and Swedes and Russians and Poles and Hindus.

The Washington of twenty-two was a man of war. He was later to become the man of peace—the man who appreciated the calamities of war—but at this point he saw battle merely as the joyful apex of existence. He had not yet subdued the wild man. He longed for the charming whistle of bullets. The Indians looked on him and, even when they talked of his inexperience, they called him Conotocarius—the Destroyer of Villages. They looked indulgently on his mistakes for they recognized that he had the makings of a great war chief. And now, when his Indian friends told him that the time had come for a surprise attack, how could he talk to them of the lack of a declaration of war? Nor was he likely to. They had read his character correctly.

If the world had been inclined to peace, it might have gone hard with Washington. But the witches’ cauldron had long been boiling. Nor was Dinwiddie the man to blame him. The Governor was an expansionist, an imperialist. What he wanted was officers who were aggressive, who dared to attack. Perhaps the attack was slightly premature. The war was bound to come anyway, and the important thing was that the attack had been successful. Dinwiddie was satisfied that his judgment had been sound in pushing this young man forward.

The campaign which started in this vigorous fashion came to an inglorious end. After his defeat of Jumonville, Washington pushed on over the mountains but he soon learned that the enemy were far superior in numbers. He began to retreat but in the early part of July a French force under a leader named Villiers overtook him. Washington defended himself behind some improvised fortifications at a place which he called Fort Necessity. The French attacked in a blinding rain storm. The Virginians stood knee deep in water behind their fortifications on an open meadow while the French fired at them from the surrounding forest. The fight continued from about eleven in the morning until about eight at night. Washington then agreed to capitulate. Villiers sent him articles of capitulation written in French. By candlelight, in the midst of the driving rain, Van Braam translated them. Washington signed. Among the articles was one in which Washington acknowledged that he had “assassinated” Jumonville. Washington claimed that Van Braam had either failed to read this or had mistranslated it 5 that in any event he was unaware of this statement when he signed the articles. It is one of the very rare instances in which his veracity has been called in question. One of his letters states that at first Washington refused to “sign the Capitulation because they charged us with Assassination in it.” In any event, the existence of his signature on a document containing this admission was grist to the French propaganda mills.

As is usual in the case of a surrender, Washington’s rapidly growing fame suffered a sudden eclipse. The most interesting comment is that of the Half-King. In the customary Indian manner he had deserted Washington when he perceived him getting into difficulties. According to Weiser’s journal, the Indian chief summed up the campaign by saying “that the French had acted as great cowards, and the English as fools.”

Washington’s capitulation did not make him a prisoner of war. He marched back to Virginia and, as is usual in the case of such capitulations, there was a quarrel about its carrying out, in which the French and English accused each other of bad faith. The temper of the twenty-two-year-old colonel was affected badly by his surrender and by the criticisms which were made of his conduct. He became very irritable. He lost interest in military glory. He quarreled with Dinwiddie and was relieved of his command. Governor Sharpe of Maryland was the royal commander-in-chief in America. He offered Washington a command and it was rather perfunctorily refused.

Lawrence Washington had died two years previously. His only surviving child was an infant daughter who died a few weeks later. Under Lawrence’s will Mount Vernon then went to his widow for life, with a remainder over in fee to George. The widow soon married again and George now bought out her life estate.

The following summer Braddock arrived. It had been decided in London that Alexandria should be his point of debarkation, so his headquarters were practically in Washington’s back yard. Washington was one of the few colonials whose names were known in London. Perhaps Braddock came over with prepossessions in his favor—Horace Walpole is evidence that London had not only heard his name but had been favorably impressed—perhaps Braddock liked the looks of the man; perhaps Dinwiddie or Sharpe had something to do with it; in any event, Braddock asked Washington to come along as a member of his staff. The latter had already learned that no British officer had any regard for a colonial commission. What would be his rank? He learned that Braddock did not have authority to grant any rank higher than captain. That Washington could not accept. The difficulty was solved. Washington went on the expedition as a volunteer aid without rank.

It was a very enlightening experience. The General treated him with great intimacy and Washington frequently went far beyond the bounds suitable for a mere aid. His lack of conception of military subordination at this time is really startling. In a letter written from headquarters to the elder Fairfax of Belvoir, for example, Washington remarks that “General Innes has accepted of a Commission to be Governour of Fort Cumberland, where he is to reside; and will shortly receive another to be hangman, or something of that kind, and for which he is equally qualified.”

Braddock, as everyone knows, was thoroughly and disgracefully defeated. This did not mean he was incompetent. He was the best the British government could find. He was an able general in the kind of warfare which then prevailed in Europe. Like so many Europeans, he believed that their own sub-continent was the center of the universe. He could not conceive that America could teach him anything. Braddock did not learn anything from Washington, but Washington learned much from Braddock. It was on Braddock’s staff that Washington first acquired some practical knowledge of traditional European military methods. He learned many things which were to be of advantage to him in organizing the Continental army. He also learned the modes of reasoning which would govern the actions of the royal generals whom he was to oppose. He even met one of them, Gage, who was now in Braddock’s army. He became well acquainted with another royal officer, Horatio Gates, whom he was to meet again. These men did not treat him as one of the despised colonials—he was on the General's staff, he was one of themselves.

The rout which cost Braddock his life and reputation restored and increased Washington’s reputation. Whatever may have been thought in London, most Virginians believed that Washington was the only reason anyone at all escaped from the ford of the Monongahela.

Braddock’s defeat had thrown open the whole frontier. Raiding parties struck everywhere. The French officers soon reported that the Indian villages were full of captive white women and children. And each raid drove the frontier inward; each raid peeled off another layer and brought another community which thought itself removed from danger on to the border. Then a rumor spread among the Negroes that the French were coming to free them. The remains of Braddock’s army had taken up winter quarters in Philadelphia. “Winter-quarters in August!” said Dinwiddie.

The decision of the House of Burgesses was to restore and expand the Virginia Regiment. But they were not willing to do so without some agreement as to its commander. Fry had died the previous year. Augustine Washington was his younger half-brother’s political manager. George stood on his dignity. He would not ask for the position; if it was offered to him he would accept it only on the understanding he was to have a free hand. Dinwiddie, his momentary distrust of Washington gone, agreed. In September Washington formally took command.

No better apprenticeship for the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army could possibly have been devised than the command of the Virginia Regiment. Every evil which afterwards plagued Washington plagued him now. He was forced to take the defensive in a situation in which offense offered the only possible relief. He was forced to this partly because of his inferiority of numbers, partly because of the quality of his troops, and partly by political necessity. He was constantly hampered by a lack of supplies of every kind, from ammunition to clothing. He could never raise the recruits he was supposed to raise. The men he had were raised for limited periods, necessitating frequent reorganizations of his force. His officers lacked military training and, what was worse, many of them did not scruple to make false returns, draw supplies for improper purposes, and engage in other practices which indicated a lack of common honesty. He was cursed by invidious distinctions among different classes of troops under his command. He was supposed to use the militia to assist him, and the militia which he now had to rely on was much worse than that which he later got from the northern states. His soldiers were prone enough to desert, and the use of militia now aggravated this tendency as much as it did in the Revolutionary War. The difficulties which he later had with the divergent ideas and policies of different states were now matched by the differences among counties.

“When Hampshire was invaded,” he wrote to Lord Fairfax, “and called on Frederick for assistance, the people of the latter refused their aid, answering, Tet them defend themselves, as we shall do if they come to us,’ Now the enemy have forced through that county, and begin to infest this, those a little removed from danger are equally infatuated.”

There is a sort of journal in Washington’s papers, made at Winchester in the spring after he had taken command. He there records that fifty privates and four officers of the militia of King George County had set out to reinforce him. Thirty of the privates deserted on the way. Prince William County sent eight officers and one hundred and twenty-one men. According to Washington, they “made use of every means to treat not only the private soldiers, but the officers of the Virginia Regiment ill.” One of the Prince William men was arrested. Thereupon “one of their officers called for a number of Men to rescue him and pulled down” the guardhouse.

On April 29 Washington had received the assistance of a Captain Russel with twenty-three men. On May 3 they were ordered to scout a particular area. On May 8 Russel and his men were back. “Upon enquiring the reason of this I was answered that Captain Russel and his volunteers had got tired and must needs go home.” Of Russel’s original twenty-three men, ten had by this time deserted.

Russel left the next day, and at the same time Washington received word from a Colonel Slaughter that he was coming with two hundred men and adding that “they had not above 50 firelocks in the whole.” Washington ordered him to remain where he was “as the town had more already in it than they could lodge, and many quarrelsome fellows amongst them.”

Two days later Washington ordered a company of the Prince William militia to an outlying fort. Their colonel “insisted upon going out to command them. I expostulated with him on the absurdity of it . . . He said . . . that unless he went, he was sure the men would desert.” Two days later Washington received an “express” from the same colonel “informing that a Sergeant and 14 men deserted last night . . . and desiring Reinforcement.”

The climax came four days later. “Some time last night an express arrived . . . informing that a considerable body of Indians were about again and had taken a prisoner. Upon this all the Militia of Louisa and Stafford, save 6 of the first and 8 of the latter deserted . . . Our strength being so much reduced . . . I immediately dispatched an express to Colonels Barrat, Talliaferro and Slaughter . . . ordering them to return with their Men. In the Evening the Colonels Barrat & Talliaferro returned without any men, informed me . . . that those who were with Colonel Talliaferro upon hearing that they were ordered back charged their pieces and continued their march towards their County in defiance of the officers.”

One of the worst aspects of the Virginia militia was the excessive quantity of officers. It would, of course, never do for a plantation owner to go to war without a commission. In their own estimation the slaveholders were all “gentlemen,” and gentlemen must necessarily be officers. That system worked in Europe, where there was a peasantry to supply the soldiers. But the peasantry in Virginia were alien slaves, who could not be trusted with arms. Any call for the militia produced great quantities of colonels, majors, and captains, but mighty few soldiers.

“From Fort Trial on Smith’s River,” Washington wrote to Dinwiddie a little over a year after he had taken command, “I returned to Fort William on the Catawba, where I met Colonel Buchanan with about thirty men, (chiefly officers,) to conduct me up Jackson’s River, along the range of forts. With this small company of irregulars, with whom order, regularity, circumspection, and vigilance were matters of derision and contempt, we set out, and, by the protection of Providence, reached Augusta Court-House in seven days, without meeting the enemy; otherwise we must have fallen a sacrifice, through the indiscretion of these whooping, hallooing gentlemen soldiers!”

Perhaps it was his own long aristocratic tradition that made Washington look with contempt on these small-time barons. His letters record the giving of an ensigncy to more than one “worthy sergeant.” He fiercely resented attempts which were made by various Virginian aristocrats to obtain commissions in his regiment through influence at Williamsburg. He paid great attention to seniority in promotions from rank to rank.

Most of his own officers were as bad as any he had during the Revolutionary War. Nearly two years after he took command he issued General Instructions To All The Captains of Companies in which there is one sentence which gives an insight into their military accomplishments. “I recommend it to you, likewise, and in the strongest terms, that you and the officers under your command, do make yourselves master of the necessary salutes.”

There is a sharp letter to one captain calling his attention to the fact that for the past ten months he had been drawing pay for a full company although his company had never reached its full strength. This captain was not the only one. A short time later Washington wrote that the returns to him totaled nine hundred and twenty-six men, although the returns to the paymaster as of the same date totaled one thousand and eighty.

Washington would have loved to march over the mountains to Fort Duquesne. He recognized that this was impossible. His force was not equal to the task. Even if he reached Duquesne he could not take it. It could only be attacked by artillery, and he had neither cannon nor anyone who understood the management of cannon. His own plan was to divide his army among three or four strong forts, from which detachments could be sent out to operate against the Indians. Each frontier community, of course, wanted some portion of the army stationed nearby, and the Governor and Council yielded to this pressure. Washington’s army was scattered over a front of nearly four hundred miles in a series of little blockhouses. They served as places of refuge in case of Indian attack. That is all. They were like bombshelters. They might protect you from the bombs but they did not stop the bombing. The reason is that the garrison at any individual fort was barely sufficient to defend the fort. Even if it knew of a party of Indians in the vicinity it could not send out a force to attack it. This scattered condition of the army was largely responsible for the lack of discipline.

Washington ever after had a vivid recollection of the ineffectiveness of this system. When he was President there was the same kind of pressure for the establishment of a little fort at every new settlement in the West. Such forts, he wrote Secretary Knox, “are of no use but to protect the people within them; for unless the garrison is of such strength, and can detach in such force, as to bid defiance to the enemy, it is always cooped up . . . Besides, we shall never be respectable at any point, if the troops are divided and subdivided for the quietude of particular settlements or neighborhoods; nor will they ever be disciplined and under due subordination, whilst they are scattered over the country in small parties under subaltern officers; except when they are employed in ranging, which is an essential part of their military education in the service for which they are designed.”

Washington’s own headquarters were at Winchester, in the Shenandoah Valley, where there was a larger fort. In a report which he made in the second year of his command he states that in the course of “this campaign” his regiment has been engaged in nearly twenty skirmishes and has lost nearly one hundred men in killed and wounded. It does not appear that he was in any of these skirmishes.

In truth, his position was more that of a minister of war than of a commander in the field. There was no civilian war department. Washington reported directly to the Governor and his main function was to keep men and supplies moving to this string of little forts. He made frequent trips to Williamsburg to confer with the Governor and the leaders of the House of Burgesses. Once in the wintertime, when things were quiet on the frontier, he went as far as Boston to confer with Governor Shirley of Massachusetts, who was the royal commander-in-chief in America.

Washington was maturing rapidly. In the day of battle he was still occasionally the wild man, but this administrative experience was converting the soldier into the statesman. When he first went to Winchester he blamed the difficulty he had in getting wagons on “the insolence of these people.” A few months later he told Dinwiddie plainly that the reason was that the people had never been paid for the horses and wagons which Braddock had seized. “I believe it will be impossible to get wagons or horses sufficient, without the old score is paid off; as the people are really ruined for want of their money, and complain justly of their grievances.”

Nor did Washington long content himself with blaming the constant desertions on the rascality of the men. He reported the reasons as the insufficiency of the pay and the lack of clothing. Their pay was less than that in the British army, which itself was too small to attract men even in England. His soldiers, Washington wrote the provincial treasurer, “think it extremely hard, as it is indeed. Sir, that they, who perhaps do more duty, and undergo more fatigue and hardship, from the nature of the service and situation of the country, than any troops upon the continent, should be allowed the least pay, and smallest encouragements in other respects. The Carolinians received [sic] British pay; the Marylanders, I believe, do the same; Pennsylvania is exorbitant in rewarding their soldiers; the Jerseys and New Yorkers, I do not remember what it is they give; but the New England governments give more than a shilling per day, our money, besides an allowance of rum, peas, tobacco, ginger, vinegar, &c, &c.

“Our soldiers complain, that their pay is insufficient, even to furnish shoes, shirts, stockings, &c, which their officers, in order to keep them fit for duty, oblige them to provide. This, they say, deprives them of the means of purchasing any of the conveniences or necessaries of life, and obliges them to drag through a disagreeable service, in the most disagreeable manner. That their pay will not afford more than enough (if that) to keep them in clothes, I should be convinced of for these reasons, if experience had not taught me. The British soldiers are allowed eight pence sterling per day, with many necessaries that ours are not, and can buy what is requisite upon the cheapest terms; and lie one half the year in camp, or garrison, when they cannot consume the fifth part of what ours do in continual marches over mountains, rocks, rivers, &c. . . . The money that is given in paying for deserters, expresses, horse-hire, losses and abuse of horses, would go a great length toward advancing their pay, which I hope would contribute not a little to remove the cause of this expense.”

Another cause of dissatisfaction was the lack of any pension system for those who were maimed. The soldiers, Washington wrote on this point, “can have nothing in view but the most gloomy prospects, and no encouragement to be bold and active; and the probable effects of which are wounds, which no sooner happen and they unfit for service than they are discharged, and turned upon an uncharitable world to beg, steal, or starve!”

The legislature heeded his recommendations so far as to raise the pay of the soldiers. There was still one difficulty which it is hard for a modern to comprehend. The British government had forbidden colonial coinages. It did nothing to supply the deficiency. The colonies put out paper money but this was always in large denominations. There were no small coins in Virginia, at least, except foreign ones, chiefly Spanish and Portuguese. This want was not severely felt in ordinary civilian life in Virginia. There was really no retail trade. Purchases were made by plantation owners who bought not only for themselves but for large groups of slaves and indentured servants. All payments involved large amounts. A currency system in which there were no small denominations might work between the owners of large plantations and their merchants. The army solved the problem by giving “the pay of two or three soldiers to one man. He, ten to one, drinks, games, or pays it away; by which means the parties are all dissatisfied, and perpetually complaining for want of their pay. It also prevents them from laying out their pay for absolute necessaries, and obliges them many times to drink it out; for they put it into the tavern-keeper’s hands, who will give no change, unless they consent to take the greatest part in liquor. In short, for five shillings cash you may at any time purchase a month’s pay from the soldiers.” It is little wonder that Washington complained that his men “in despite of the utmost care and vigilance, are, so long as their pay holds good, incessantly drunk, and unfit for service.” 

The legislature ultimately decided to expand the Virginian army and, with that ineptitude which seemed to govern everything in eighteenth-century America, provided higher pay for the soldiers of the second regiment than of the first. The newer soldiers also received a substantial bonus while nothing was done to supply the old soldiers with the clothes which had been promised them.

At one time Washington reported to the Council that his troops were so wanting in “arms, tents, and other sorts of field-equipage’’ that they were unable to take the field. At times, the lack of supplies was almost as great as in the Continental Army. “I have sent you,” Washington wrote to one of his captains, “two barrels of powder, and four boxes of balls. As to cartridge paper, I neither have nor can get any upon no terms. You must get horns and pouches, if you send over the neighborhood for them.” (Washington’s grammar improved with age.)

The constant lack of adequate supplies during the Revolutionary War—even of supplies such as beef, of which there was a superabundance in the country—is generally blamed on the inefficient form of government. That is not a sufficient explanation. The same chaos and inefficiency is apparent, although in a somewhat lesser degree, in colonial Virginia. Nor can it be blamed on the lack of colonial manufacturing. The sea-lanes were open. All the resources of the British Empire were available to the colony. Yet its troops could not take the field for lack of tents. It could not attack an enemy fort for lack of cannon. Its officers had to scour the countryside for private stocks of cartridge paper.

This state of affairs in Virginia cannot be blamed on the Governor, Dinwiddie and Washington did not always agree but inefficiency, procrastination, and lack of attention to business were not among Dinwiddle’s faults. The Governor blamed it on the form of government, and was among the first to suggest that Parliament take over the government of the colonies. But it is absurd to blame this chaos on the form of government. Many governments much worse organized have proved themselves highly efficient militarily.

The answer lies in the American character. A few years after the foundation of the Republic that character underwent a profound change but in the eighteenth century its characteristics were undisputed. Its inefficiency was Russian. Promises were never kept; everything was put off until a tomorrow which never came. These men had not settled in the wilderness to be ordered around. They were free men, and the first right of free men was the right to loaf.

All the British officials in America agreed on the absolute impossibility of relying on anything which was promised by Americans. Whatever the colonials said they would do, you could be certain they would do nothing, or next to nothing. The unanimity of these reports deserves respect. Any lingering doubt is dissipated by Jefferson’s statement that “the most remarkable qualities” of “my countrymen . . . . are indolence, extravagance, & infidelity to their engagement.” These are precisely the qualities which Washington lacked.

The people deeply resented the attempts of British officials to introduce efficiency. This resentment was a natural resentment against foreigners. It was the British, rather than the Americans, who were responsible for the growth of the national prejudice. Few men regarded themselves as Americans. But no British official ever overlooked the distinction between an Englishman and a colonial. The latter was a mere beast of burden; at the best, he was to be treated merely as an unusually intelligent savage. Washington, personally, received his full share of this condescending patronage.

When Washington first took command in Winchester he was not much more popular than Braddock’s officers. He did not hesitate to use “a party of soldiers, or my own drawn sword” to seize needed horses. He informed Dinwiddie that he was doing so and that he would continue to do so “unless they execute what they threaten, i.e.‘to blow out my brains.’ ” His papers are full of statements that he has ordered floggings of soldiers. Here are a few samples from his orderly book:

Any soldier, who shall presume to quarrel or fight, shall receive five hundred lashes, without the benefit of a court-martial. . . . Any soldier found drunk shall receive one hundred lashes, without benefit of a court-martial.

Colonel Washington has observed, that the men of his regiment are very profane and reprobate. He takes this opportunity of informing them of his great displeasure at such practices. . . . The officers are desired, if they hear any man swear, or make use of an oath or execration, to order the offender twenty-five lashes immediately, without a court-martial. For the second offence, they will be more severely punished.

Sometime during his residence in Winchester he ran for the House of Burgesses in the county in which Winchester was located. He received only forty votes out of a total which may have reached five hundred. But as the people learned that while he might seize their horses with drawn sword he did not do it out of whim; that he did it only when he believed it really necessary; and that after taking the horses he really tried to get payment for the owners, their feelings changed. They saw that he did not run away, as the militia did, upon a mere rumor that Indians were in the vicinity. However poorly disciplined his regiment might have appeared to a European officer, they saw that it was a marvel of efficiency beside the militia. Those things began to win respect. They noticed his justice. He asked the Governor to provide payment for the horses and wagons Braddock had taken. He might punish his soldiers severely but he obtained a raise in pay for them. The frontier had formerly been guarded by small bodies of rangers, the nominal commanders of which usually spent most of their time at home. The people noticed that when Washington was not in Winchester or out inspecting the long line of blockhouses, there was some good reason for it.

He did not have the characteristics which appeal to the people in a time of peace and prosperity, but he was a great comfort in trouble. His mere presence made the Indians seem more remote. The shiftlessness which was so much in evidence among the population made a man in whom it was conspicuously absent stand out the more. People admired when they had no desire to imitate. The voters of Winchester showed the change in their attitude by electing him as one of their burgesses, at the head of the poll, near the end of his military service.

Washington was an acting brigadier-general in command of the advance division of the army which under Forbes finally drove the French from Fort Duquesne near the end of 1758. When that happened Washington promptly resigned his commission, for he had other things on his mind than soldiering.

On January 6, 1759, he was married to Martha Custis. The courtship had not been long. On the previous March he had gone to Williamsburg to consult a physician. He had stopped at a plantation on the way, where she was a house-guest, and it was here that he first met her. In May he ordered a ring from Philadelphia which cost him two pounds sixteen shillings. As soon as he could, he came home from the wars and married her.

She was nine months older than he and, when he met her, had been a widow for seven months. Her talents were not distinguished. All accounts agree that she was well-bred. One intimate of the family described her as “not possessing much sense, though a perfect lady.” Her lack of sense was combined with an obstinacy and temper which sometimes caused him great trouble. She was lacking in any practical ability—so much so that Washington found it necessary to employ a housekeeper to manage his home under his own supervision. She could scarcely write a letter. He was so ashamed of this that when he was commander-in-chief and president—when he was so overwhelmed with business that he delegated the writing of many of his own letters to secretaries—he used to write her letters for her. She would then copy them, so that what the recipient received was in her handwriting. The drafting of her letters could have been entrusted to a secretary more easily than the drafting of his own, but Washington took no chances on letting the secret of his wife’s incapacity get out.

Her first husband had been one of the richest men in the colony. His fortune now belonged to her and her two children, a son, Jacky, and a daughter, Patsy. But a Virginian fortune did not consist of high-grade bonds which merely require the owner to cut the coupons. The Custis fortune seems to have contained an unusual amount of cash and securities, but its basic elements were still that of every Virginian fortune—land and slaves. It was notorious that a Virginian plantation could only be made to pay under the immediate supervision of a vigilant owner. Martha Custis, who could not run her own home, was certainly unequal to the management of the Custis estate. The marriage was of material advantage to Washington, but she also profited. Out of it she obtained the best business man in Virginia to manage the Custis estate.

They did not reside on any of the Custis plantations. Mount Vernon had been managed for Washington in his absence by a younger brother. It was there that the newly married pair now went. Washington was very conscious of his position as a sort of trustee and very careful not to arouse criticism in any way by his management of the Custis properties. In the traditional manner those plantations were given over to the growing of tobacco under his general supervision but under the immediate supervision of overseers. He had other ideas for his own property.

His boyhood surprise at the manner in which manure was saved in Barbados had made a deep impression on him. Since then he had seen other parts of the country than Virginia; he had seen other modes of farmings he had reflected on what he had seen and his reflections had convinced him that the customary method of operating a plantation in Virginia was unsound. That method was to depend on tobacco for cash income and to raise corn as food for the Negroes. Only a few cattle and hogs were kept. In the summer these animals ran wild in the woods. In the winter they were fed on odds and ends. They were not regarded as a source of revenue but merely as a means of obtaining fresh meat for the people on the plantation. The planting of tobacco and corn, Washington wrote Arthur Young years after, was continued on the same land, year after year, “without any dressing, till the land is exhausted; when it is turned out, without being sown with grass-seeds, or any method taken to restore it; and another piece is ruined in the same manner.”

Washington was convinced of the evils of tobacco-growing before he took over the management of his plantation. He could not change the whole course of plantation life at once, but he immediately took steps to prepare for a change. In his first letter to his London agents he ordered “The newest and most approved Treatise of Agriculture— besides this, send me a Small piece in Octavo—called a New System of Agriculture, or a Speedy Way to grow Rich.” Also “Longley’s Book of Gardening.” Also “Gibson, upon Horses.” Also “A pretty large Assortment of Grass Seeds—among which let there be a good deal of Lucerne [alfalfa] & St. Foi, especially the former, also a good deal of English or bleu Grass Clover.”

These agricultural treatises were not ordered for show. Washington was not a great reader. He did not read extensively for mere amusement, nor did he have the speculative, scholarly type of mind which took Jefferson and John Adams to their libraries. Books were only interesting to Washington when he found their contents useful in the solution of some practical problem. What general reading he did was chiefly English history.

When he did find a book which he thought useful there was nothing casual about his reading. He made voluminous notes on agricultural books and compared the results of his own farming with the statements in these books. This was a habit he had acquired early. Before he had gone off to the wars he had abstracted Tull's Husbandry and The Farmer's Comfleat Guide. Nor did the habit ever leave him. He kept notes on Young's Annals of Agriculture from the time they began to appear, which was 1784.

This led to a correspondence with Young. As President, Washington did not have the time to reply to all Young's letters and turned some of them over to Jefferson. John Adams, who had his own theory of how to dress land, also mixed in this correspondence. Anyone who wonders why Jefferson died insolvent should read the notes he prepared for Washington in answer to Young's inquiry as to what return a Virginian plantation owner could expect on his capital investment. If there is still a lingering doubt after this, read Young's devastating analysis of Jefferson's figures. It is sufficient to point out here that one of the principal figures which Jefferson had included on the profit side was unrealized appreciation at an annual rate of five per cent of the value of the land.

Jefferson prepared many documents for Washington's signature. It is significant that when Washington transmitted these notes to Young he identified them as Jefferson's. Washington had no desire to take the responsibility for any of Jefferson’s theories on how to run a plantation.

Washington’s habit of turning to books for help on practical problems was not confined to agricultural problems. In the winter after he took command of the Virginia Regiment he issued an Address to his officers in which he admonished them to “Remember, that it is the actions, and not the commission, that make the officer, and that there is more expected from him, than the title. Do not forget, that there ought to be a time appropriated to attain this knowledge, as well as to indulge pleasure. And as we now have no opportunities to improve from example, let us read for this desirable end. There is Bland’s and other treatises which will give the wished-for information.” Later he wrote to his major “to recommend in the strongest terms to you the necessity of qualifying yourself by reading for the discharge of the duty of major.”

The colonel took his own advice. There was little incentive for him to read military books after the close of the Seven Years’ War. He never expected to fight again. But he was one of the first to see that the dispute with Parliament would end in war and it is probable that he began to look around for the latest treatises which might be useful. He could not have had much time to study after he became commander-in-chief but in reply to a French officer who asked him what he considered the most useful books on the art of war Washington named Frederick the Great’s Instructions to his generals and Guibert’s Tactics.

Washington gave one of the commissioners whom he sent to the British in New York to arrange for its evacuation at the end of the Revolutionary War a list of books which he desired him to purchase while in the city. It consisted of lives of Charles XII, Louis XV, Peter the Great, Gustavus Adolphus, and Charles V, of Sully’s Memoirs, of a book called the Campaigns of Marshall Turenne, of a French and English dictionary, of Robertson’s History of America, Voltaire’s Letters, Vertot’s Revolution of Rome and Revolution of Portugal, Locke’s Essay On The Human Understanding, and, as evidence that the farmer was never completely lost in the general or the statesman, Goldsmith’s Natural History.

An interesting light is cast on Washington’s attitude toward books by a letter which he wrote to Lafayette. The purpose of the letter was to introduce the poet (?) Barlow, who, Washington wrote, is “considered by those who are good Judges to be a genius of the first magnitude . . . And these, my dear Marquis, are no vulgar functions.” Washington goes on to point out that great heroes have always patronized great poets; that Alexander the Great did; that “Julius Caesar is well known to have been a man of a highly cultivated understanding and taste”; that Augustus was a great patron of learning; that Louis XIV was; that Queen Anne was. Evidently Washington felt that Lafayette did not pay sufficient attention to literature. 

When the question of ratification of the constitution was under consideration, Washington studied political science as carefully as he studied the publications in the new-born field of scientific agriculture. “I have read every performance, which has been printed on one side and the other of the great question,” he wrote to Hamilton, and “without an unmeaning compliment,” The Federalist, “will merit the notice of posterity, because in it are candidly and ably discussed the principles of freedom and the topics of government, which will be always interesting to mankind, so long as they shall be connected in civil society.”

One of Young's criticisms of Jefferson’s notes had been that the proportion of animals allowed for was too small to keep up the fertility of the land. The preservation and increase of the value of the land was always the primary consideration in Washington’s farming. When President, he sent detailed instructions to the manager of Mount Vernon as to the crops to be planted. The owner added that he was aware other crops would produce a greater cash return, but his object was “to recover the fields from the exhausted state into which they have fallen.” That exhaustion he blamed on his absences. It is a difficult thing to conduct a large establishment in an unorthodox manner. As soon as Washington’s back was turned his employees and slaves would go back to farming in the traditional manner. “As a proof in point,” Washington wrote when President, “of the almost impossibility of putting the overseers of this country out of the track they have been accustomed to walk in, I have one of the most convenient barns in this, or perhaps any other country, where thirty hands may with great ease be employed in threshing. Half of the wheat of the farm was actually stowed in this barn in the straw, by my order, for threshing; notwithstanding, when I came home about the middle of September, I found a treading-yard not thirty feet from the barn-door, the wheat again brought out of the barn, and horses treading it out in an open exposure, liable to the vicissitudes of weather.” He mentioned this instance as a reason for not buying a threshing-machine which had been recommended to him until he was again settled at home and could personally supervise its use.

His own ideas of profitable farming were incomprehensible to other Virginians. He not only gave up tobacco completely and would have given up corn except that he needed it to feed his Negroes: he even rebelled from the idea that the object of a farmer should be to grow crops for sale. Jefferson told Young that “the carcase of the beef is raised on the spontaneous food of the forests, and is delivered to the farmer in good plight in the fall, often fat enough for slaughter.” That was not Washington’s way. He early became convinced that improved meadow was the most valuable land to own. His business letters are full of plans to make meadows. His opinion of the value of grass lands, expressed in the interval between the war and the adoption of the constitution, was that “an acre of tolerable good grass will pay all the expences of cutting, curing and stacking, and will put at least 40/ in the owner’s pocket annually.”

How unorthodox this was appears from one of his letters written near the close of the Revolutionary War. Mount Vernon was situated on a “neck” located between the estuaries of two tributaries of the Potomac. Washington was always anxious to obtain complete ownership of this neck. An opportunity had arisen to acquire a tract of land in the neck in exchange for another tract. The basis of the exchange was to be an appraisal of the two tracts by independent appraisers. Yet Washington shied away. He was willing to submit to an appraisal if it was to “be determined by northern men . . . But my countrymen are too much used to corn blades and corn shucks; and have too little knowledge of the profit of grass lands.”

Nor were Washington’s ideas of the uses of grass lands orthodox. If a Virginian thought of raising stock at all he thought only of cattle, hogs, and riding horses. Washington thought sheep and draft animals more profitable. The raising of sheep was practically unknown in Virginia but they had a fascination for Washington. He was more interested in the wool than the mutton.

He always liked to raise horses. During the Revolutionary War he availed himself of every opportunity to acquire mares. He was very particular about his mounts but he did not want these mares to raise riding horses. His immediate concern was the breeding of work-horses. But he thought the breeding of mules gave much greater promise. When the Revolutionary War ended he took steps to obtain some jacks of superior quality from Spain. Their exportation was forbidden but when the government learned for whom they were intended two jacks were sent to him as a gift in the name of the King of Spain. One died on the way. Some idea of the cost of such experiments may be gathered from one circumstance. The jack and its transportation to America was a gift. It still cost Washington three hundred dollars to get it from the ship to Mount Vernon.

He wrote Lafayette of his acquisition. “The Jack . . . in appearance is fine; but his late royal master, tho’ past his grand climacteric, cannot be less moved by female allurements than he is; or when prompted can proceed with more deliberation and majestic solemnity to the work of procreation.” Lafayette did better than the King of Spain. A short time later the Marquis sent his friend a jack and two jennets which he had obtained from Malta. Washington named the Spanish jack “Royal Gift” and the Maltese jack “Knight of Malta.” Royal Gift overcame his homesickness and Washington was well pleased with the breeding qualities of both animals. “From these, altogether,” he wrote Young of his acquisitions, “I hope to secure a race of extraordinary goodness, which will stock the country. Their longevity and cheap keeping will be circumstances much in their favor. I am convinced, from the little experiments I have made with the ordinary mules (which perform as much labor, with vastly less feeding than horses), that those of a superior quality will be the best cattle we can employ for the harness; and indeed in a few years, I intend to drive no other in my carriage, having appropriated for the sole purpose of breeding them, upwards of twenty of my best mares.” From time to time advertisements in the newspapers announced that the services of the two jacks were available for a fee and at one time Royal Gift traveled as far as Charleston, South Carolina, where he rendered public service for several months.

Washington’s interest in quality is apparent from the manner in which he took up the breeding of mules. It was the dominant principle in all his farming operations. “My object,” he wrote to one of his managers, “is to labor for profit, and therefore to regard quality, instead of quantity, there being, except in the article of manuring, no difference between attending a good plant and an indifferent one.” This was directly contrary to the commonly accepted practice in the state. Jefferson expressed the ordinary Virginian viewpoint when he explained to Young that “where land is cheap, & rich, & labour dear, the same labour, spread in a slighter culture over 100 acres, will produce more profit than if concentrated by the highest degree of cultivation on a small portion of the lands.” That was never Washington’s way. Sloppiness had no appeal for him in anything. “If the same labor, and expense of manure, &c., (which is the common mode of management in Virginia),” he wrote to a Georgia correspondent, “was bestowed of 50 acres of land, that is now scattered over 100, . . . the former would be more profitable and productive to the owner. What I would be understood to mean by this, is that a field not more than half prepared for a crop, the crop not more than half tilled, and the ground but indifferently manured, will not produce as much as the half of it would, if these were bestowed in full proportion to the requirements of the land.”

Washington did not rely for the improvement in quality at which he aimed on the importation of new strains of plants and animals and on ideas to be found in agricultural publications. His healthy attitude toward importations is evidenced by his experiments with the growing of grapes.

Since the founding of the settlements numerous attempts had been made in every colony to introduce a wine industry. None had been successful. In Washington’s opinion this showed that no European variety of grape could stand the American climate. He therefore devoted his attention to trying to develop a domesticated variety from American wild grapes.

He was careful not to run the risk of turning his plantation into an experimental station rather than a business institution. Generally he devoted only a trifling amount of ground to new crops or new varieties until he was satisfied that it was a reasonably safe speculation to plant a larger area. His numerous experiments with different kinds of fertilizer and different methods of cultivation were frequently confined to boxes. Thus an entry in his journal made in the spring of 1760, almost immediately after he came to live at Mount Vernon, records that he had filled ten boxes with different kinds of soil and different kinds of manures, and had planted three grains of wheat, three of oats, and three of barley, in each. After he finally got rid of tobacco his staple crop was wheat.

Washington had a keen appreciation of the value of water-power. In his numerous notes on different tracts of land he always indicates the possibilities on this point. At first he was content to sell his wheat but he was interested in growing wheat of exceptional quality and he believed “that, for every pound it gains after it is once got to a middling weight, it increases the flour in a tenfold proportion.” At the first opportunity he established his own mill and the Mount Vernon brand ultimately attained such a reputation that he was buying outside wheat.

Later, when President, he set up a distillery where whiskey was made from “Rye chiefly and Indian corn in a certain proportion.” It was so successful that he was soon buying both grains on the outside. In the eighteenth century whiskey was not considered a gentleman’s drink but Washington drank it occasionally. The instructions from his private secretary to the Secretary of War in regard to the accommodations to be provided for Washington on the expedition to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion state that “As the President will be going, if he proceeds, into the country of whiskey, he proposes to make use of that liquor for his drink.”

He did not overlook any possibility for a profit. He kept a seine which was lowered into the Potomac whenever the fish appeared to be running. The greatest catch in quantity was herring, but in value, shad.

His business transactions suggested the advisability of acquiring his own means of transportation. He owned at least one schooner. When it was not engaged in transporting goods for him he was of course glad to hire it out.

Mount Vernon, when he acquired it, consisted of about twenty-five hundred acres, only a small proportion of which had been brought under cultivation. By the time of his death it consisted of over eight thousand acres, of which three thousand two hundred and sixty had been reduced to cultivation.

At first Washington was content with the Virginian labor system. By his father’s will he inherited at least ten slaves. It is not clear whether he ever actually received all these, as he states at one point that his mother is withholding slaves to whom he is entitled. He acquired eighteen with Mount Vernon and immediately began to acquire more by purchase. In 1774 he paid tithes on one hundred and thirty-five but he had stopped buying two years previously. He had become convinced that the use of slave labor was as unsound economically as the growing of tobacco. In time he developed an abhorrence of slavery in principle. It was probably its economic unsoundness which first attracted his attention to the subject, but his opposition was based on its injustice. Washington was not inclined to question established institutions of any kind; he had no taste for abstract speculation, but when some concrete instance raised a doubt of the value or the justness of some established institution he did not content himself with reform. He went thoroughly into the whole question of the justification for the existence of the institution, and if he concluded that it was unjustified, he acted accordingly. This mental trait is most apparent in the reasoning which led him to favor American independence. It acted now on the question of slavery. Washington’s views on slavery and on independence changed at about the same time and it is probable that he applied many of the arguments he heard in favor of the freedom of Americans to the question of the freedom of Negroes. It was the period in which the business man in Washington was giving place to the statesman.

Washington was singularly free from class or racial prejudice. The reason Jefferson’s dislike of slavery never produced any results was that it was emotionally impossible for Jefferson to regard Negroes as human beings. He could not conceive of a population of free Negroes and he could not find any practical alternative to slavery except emancipation. Washington was not alarmed by the social effects of emancipation. It is not that he was an optimist; in fact, he was more inclined to pessimism. But he could not see why, in a country so large as the United States, rational men could not work out some method of living-together even though they differed in color.

If Washington’s dislike of slavery had been motivated simply by a recognition of its economic unsoundness, the answer to his problem would have been simple. Other plantation owners did not recognize this unsoundness. His slaves would find a ready market. He could put them all on the auction-block and be done forever with the institution. “With respect to the other species of property, concerning which you ask my opinion,” he wrote to one correspondent, “I shall frankly declare to you that I do not like even to think, much less talk of it. However, as you have put the question, I shall, in a few words, give you my ideas of it.—Were it not then, that I am principled against selling negroes, as you would do cattle at a market, I would not in twelve months from this date, be possessed of one, as a slave.”

The obvious solution was emancipation. Here Washington had a difficulty peculiar to his own situation. Prior to Jefferson’s reformation of Virginian municipal law, slaves were realty. In addition to the slaves which Washington owned himself, there were a great number of slaves at Mount Vernon belonging to the Custis estate but which Mrs. Washington possessed by right of dower. These slaves were intermarried with his own and Washington thought it inadvisable to free his own slaves while the dower slaves remained at Mount Vernon. At her death the dower slaves would revert to the Custis estate and, therefore, the solution which he ultimately adopted was to provide in his will for the manumission of all his slaves after his wife’s death. He likewise provided for the support of those of the Negroes thus freed who were either too old or too young to support themselves. In the case of the children he provided further that they were “to be taught to read and write and to be brought up to some useful occupation.”

It is never easy for a man to refuse to play the game as his neighbors play it and Washington found it far from easy to live up to a statement he made in 1786 that “I never mean . . . to possess another slave by purchase.” He was once compelled to take a group of slaves as the only method by which he could collect a debt. Frequently the only way to obtain a worker was by purchase. There simply was no free labor to be hired. “The running off of my cook,” Washington wrote near the end of his life, “has been a most inconvenient thing to this family, and what rendered it more disagreeable, is that I had resolved never to become the Master of another slave by purchase, but this resolution I fear I must break. I have endeavored to hire, black or white, but am not yet supplied.”

Washington always had white workmen as well as black. In his very first campaigns he acquired a white body-servant named Alton, to whom he paid thirteen pounds a year. On Braddock’s death Washington hired the General’s servant, Bishop, at a salary of ten pounds a year. Both these men later became foremen for Washington. From time to time he purchased indentured servants. But the number of odd employment contracts which exist among his papers would indicate that many of his skilled white laborers were men who were in a position to bargain with him. There is, for example, a clause in a formal written contract with a gardener which provides that Washington is to give the gardener “four dollars at Christmas, with which he may be drunk for four days and four nights; two dollars at Easter to effect the same purpose; two dollars at Whitsuntide to be drunk for two days; a dram in the morning, and a drink of grog at dinner at noon.”

Washington’s journal contains memoranda of various oral agreements with workmen:

Memm. on the 30th of this Month I agreed with Jonathan Palmer to come and Work with my Carpenters; either at their Trade—Coopering—or, in short at anything that he may be set about. In consideration of which, I am to pay him £40 pr. Ann; allow him 400 lbs of Meat and 20 Bushels of Indian Corn. I am also to allow him to keep two Milch Cows (one half of whose Increase I am to have), and to have Wheat for which he is to pay. He is to be allowed a Garden and I am also to take his Wagon at £17, if he brings it free from damage, and it is no older than he says.

John Knowles came here to work at £5 pr. month, and a pint of rum pr. day.

A Mr. Smith, Boat builder, came here to build me a fishing Boat, for which I am to allow him 8/ a foot, and a pint of rum pr. day.

The industrial establishment which was the plantation of Mount Vernon was run with an efficiency which still arouses admiration. The basic principle of this efficiency was to count. The plantation was divided into farms, each under the management of an overseer. Each overseer made a weekly written report, in which he accounted for the time of each slave or employee on his farm. Thus the owner could tell at a glance that the planting of field A had employed the labor of X men for Y days; that sickness accounted for so many men for so many days. In written instructions given to his manager only a few days before Washington’s death he wrote that “in this, as in every thing else, system is essential to carry on business well, and with ease.” There were periodic reports as to the stock on each farm. There were certain central services which were of benefit to every farm. Again Washington saw the necessity for an accurate accounting. He directs his manager in one letter to be sure that the central smithy charged each farm with the work done for it as accurately as if it were an outsider.

It was a Herculean effort to enforce a system like this in eighteenth-century America. It worked so long as Washington was at home and mounted his horse each morning to tour his farms and check up on the overseers’ reports. So soon as he was absent the overseers stopped counting. When President, Washington wrote to his manager that he had noted the absence of eight sheep in the last report he had received and that “This confirms what I observed to you . . . viz, that the overseers know very little of what relates to their own stock, giving in the number from old reports instead of from actual weekly counting.” It was good experience for the commander of the Continental Army.

This managerial efficiency did not arouse any popular respect among Washington’s contemporaries. It did not fit into their concept of an Arcadian America which was to remain free, virtuous and inefficient. The eighteenth-century American attitude toward industrial efficiency comes out clearly from the entry in Maclay’s journal recording the none-too-accurate account which he had heard of Mount Vernon. “It consists,” Maclay wrote, “of three divisions. The whole contains some ten or fifteen thousand acres. It is under different overseers, who may be styled generals, under whom are grades of subordinate appointments descending down through whites, mulattoes, negroes, horses, cows, sheep, hogs, etc.; it was hinted all were named. The crops to be put into the different fields, etc., and the hands, horned-cattle, etc., to be used in tillage, pasturing, etc., are arranged in a roster calculated for ten years. The Friday of every week is appointed for the overseers, or we will say the brigadier-generals, to make up their returns. Not a day’s work but is noted; what, by whom, and where done; not a cow calves or a ewe drops a lamb but it is registered; deaths, etc., whether accidental or by the hands of the butcher, all minuted. Thus the etiquette and arrangement of an army are preserved on his farm. This may truly be called sham-care; but is it not nature. When once the human mind is penetrated by any system, no matter what, it can never disengage itself.”

In the years between the Seven Years’ War and the Revolutionary War Washington’s conscious, dominant desire was a desire to get rich. Subconsciously it was a desire to develop the country; to exploit the earth. He loved Mount Vernon; he would never have considered the possibility of making his permanent home elsewhere. “No estate in United America,’’ he wrote Young, “is more pleasantly situated than this. It lies in a high, dry and healthy country . . . on one of the finest rivers in the world.” During his Presidency Washington always tried to pass the summer at home. Jefferson’s opinion of the healthiness of the Potomac region was so different that he, during his Presidency, absolutely refused to spend any part of August or September in the city of Washington, which is up the Potomac from Mount Vernon. “Nothing,” he wrote Gallatin, “should induce me to do it . . . Grumble who will, I will never pass those two months on tide-water.”

Mount Vernon and the various industries which he carried on there were merely Washington’s answer to the problem of income for everyday use. The great fortune of which he dreamed was to be acquired otherwise. There were those uncounted millions of acres of undeveloped, fertile territory across the mountains. There was the Potomac, “one of the finest rivers in the world,” which only wanted clearing and the digging of a few canals to make it the natural gateway to the west. There was the great stretch of the Dismal Swamp in southern Virginia crying to be drained and turned into fine agricultural land.

During his military service Washington always kept on the lookout for good, undeveloped land. The officers and men of the Virginia Regiment had been promised a bonus of two hundred thousand acres and, as commander, Washington would receive the largest individual share. At the close of the war the government apparently intended to forget all about this promise. Washington struggled with the authorities for years in an endeavor to get it carried out. The government in London added a complication by forbidding all settlements in the Ohio Valley. London intended this as a permanent policy but Washington was convinced that this prohibition “must fall, of course, in a few years.” Shortly after he was settled at Mount Vernon he made an arrangement with a Pennsylvania frontiersman to explore the western country and stake out claims. Washington was to advance the out-of-pocket expenses and the frontiersman was to have an interest in the land they acquired. Washington made similar arrangements with other men but always on the condition that the tracts they acquired must be unusually rich. It would be long, he felt, before it would be profitable to cultivate land of mediocre quality in the interior.

It was always an axiom with Washington to attend to as much as possible himself. In the fall of 1763 he explored the Dismal Swamp and in the following year became one of the stockholders in a company which was organized to drain it. A few years later he went on an extensive exploration of the western country. He started at the beginning of October and was absent from home a total of nine weeks. He went as far as Pittsburgh on horseback. There he procured a canoe and explored both banks of the Ohio as far as the mouth of the Kanawha. He kept an extensive journal of this expedition which is filled chiefly with notes on the quality of the land.

The general impression one gets from reading Washington’s business letters is that all his deals turned out badly. It is true that he was frequently pressed for ready money but this is due to the fact that he made it a practice to invest his money as rapidly as possible and did not keep an adequate cash reserve. “It is not a custom with me,” he wrote to his stepson, “to keep money to look at.” It is also probable that he lost heavily as a result of the inflation during the Revolutionary War, as a result of his long absence from personal attention to his business and as a result of the depression which followed the war. But there is a more fundamental reason for this impression.

He was, in modern business parlance, a poor mouth. He never spoke of his gains but he liked to talk of his losses. It was a manifestation of that extreme caution which alternated with the physical rashness which he displayed in battle. When the wild man slumbered, Washington’s habitual cast of mind was pessimistic. “He was naturally distrustful of men, and inclined to gloomy apprehensions” was Jefferson’s way of putting it. In Washington’s business transactions this natural distrust of men reached a point where it can be honestly said his motto was “Don’t trust nobody.”

A glance at the fortune he left at his death makes it plain that he had seldom been overreached. None of his property was mortgaged and he did not owe any debts of consequence. His will starts with specific bequests of a sentimental nature. His wife is given a life estate in all the rest of his property, and after her death the real division is to begin. The slaves are to be freed. Four thousand acres of Mount Vernon, including the Mansion House, are left to a nephew, Bushrod Washington, whom John Adams had appointed a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Two thousand acres of the remainder were left to two young nephews in common. The balance of Mount Vernon, including two thousand acres of farm land, the mill and the distillery, were left jointly to another nephew and that nephew’s wife who was a granddaughter of Mrs. Washington. A grandson of Mrs. Washington received twelve hundred acres “in the vicinity of Alexandria,” and “my entire square, numbering twenty one, in the city of Washington.” The rest of the estate is ordered to be sold and the proceeds divided as directed.

To assist his executors, Washington added a detailed schedule of the properties to be sold and of the minimum prices at which they should be sold. They consisted of tracts of land scattered all over Virginia, of tracts in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and even New York; of town-lots in various cities; of United States bonds; of stock in a number of companies, and of all the live-stock at Mount Vernon. The total of Washington’s minimum prices for these properties was five hundred and thirty thousand dollars. The aggregate value of his specific bequests must have been nearly as much, so it is probable that at his death he was worth around a million dollars.

Washington had inherited a few hundred acres and ten slaves from his father. He had inherited twenty-five hundred acres of Mount Vernon from his half-brother. This latter devise was subject to a life estate which George bought out. His wife’s share of the Custis estate may have had a total value of twenty thousand pounds, but most of this was real estate and thus never became his property. Most of the estate which Washington left at his death he had acquired for himself.

Washington had financial difficulties in the years between the Revolutionary War and the Presidency but they were not difficulties which arose from a want of wealth. They arose from a want of income. The war, the inflation and the refusal of the British to negotiate a commercial treaty had created a general poverty, but, at the best, much of Washington’s wealth was non-income-producing. For the most part, he did not try to develop his scattered holdings but concentrated his activities on Mount Vernon. “Middling land under a man’s own eye,” he wrote to his stepson, “is more profitable than rich land at a distance.” Nor was he a land speculator. He never acquired any land with the intention of selling it again. He was still close to the English tradition of a landed aristocracy. His early dream was to be the founder of a great family of country squires living on the rents collected from their tenant farmers. As his hopes of progeny faded he lost interest in building up a great family fortune. His public position made it difficult for him to attend to his private concerns and in the latter part of his life his guiding principle was to reduce his wealth to a form in which it would produce the most income with the least trouble.

As soon as he began to acquire western lands he had by newspaper advertisements and otherwise attempted to obtain tenants. He was willing to assist the tenants in all possible ways to get settled and he was satisfied to accept very low rents at first. He did obtain a few tenants this way but, he wrote in his old age of a neighboring woman who wanted to rent her plantation, “I can assure her from an experience of more than twenty five years that there is a very wide difference between getting Tenants and getting rents.”

Washington realized that Americans were not tenant-minded. When the outbreak of revolutionary activity interrupted him he was trying actively to obtain tenants from the Rhine Valley. He proposed to advance the cost of transportation and of supporting the immigrants “till they can raise a crop for their own subsistence.” The immigrants were to be bound jointly for the repayment of the sums thus advanced, with interest. “Otherwise,” he wrote to the shipmaster whom he wished to employ to obtain the immigrants, “I must be an inevitable loser by every death or other accident.”

In a few places he had, by the use of indentured servants, started to develop his lands. “Where there is neither house built, nor land cleared,” his letter to the shipmaster continued, “I will allow them an exemption of rent four years; and, where there is a house erected, and five acres of land cleared and fit for cultivation, two years.

“They shall have the land upon lease for twenty-one years, under the usual covenants; and also at an annual rent, after the first becomes due, of four pounds sterling for each hundred acres, allowing each family to take more or less, as inclination and convenience may prompt. And I will, moreover, engage to renew the leases at the expiration of the above twenty-one years; and, in like manner, at the end of every seven years afterwards, upon an increased rent, to be agreed on between the landlord and tenant; or, in order to fix the matter absolutely, if this should be more agreeable, the rent may be increased at these periods in proportion to the increased value of that, or the adjoining lands possessed of equal advantages of soil and situation.”

He did not rely entirely on economic inducements to get tenants from Germany. “It may not be amiss further to observe,” his letter concluded, “that I see no prospect of these people, being restrained in the smallest degree, either in their civil or religious principles; which I take notice of, because these are privileges, which mankind are solicitous to enjoy, and upon which emigrants must be anxious to be informed.” He had none of Jefferson’s fear of the effects of immigration. In this, as in so many other ways, Washington represented what was to be the American attitude—at least the American attitude of the nineteenth century, if not of the twentieth—more completely than did any of his contemporaries. It is true that when he tried to get German immigrants for his western lands he had in mind a personal advantage. It was that which made him so peculiarly American. He wanted to exploit the country; to make a profit doing it; but at the same time to improve the living conditions of others. He was in business for profit but he was convinced that the carrying on of that business was for the general good. “The Western country,” he wrote Jefferson, “promises to afford a capacious asylum for the poor and persecuted of the earth.” Washington was almost poetic in an earlier expression of the same idea to Lafayette. “I wish to see the sons and daughters of the world in Peace and busily employed in the more agreeable amusement of fulfilling the first and great commandment—Increase and Multiply: as an encouragement to which we have opened the fertile plains of the Ohio to the poor, the needy and the oppressed of the Earth; any one therefore who is heavy laden or who wants land to cultivate, may repair thither & abound, as in the Land of promise, with milk and honey.”

Washington’s ties with England were much closer than were those of most colonials. Even though he had never seen that country, his earlier letters refer to it as “home.” He wrote to a British relative apologizing for the unfavorable impressions which a brother had brought back from England. “My Brother is safe arrivd but little benefitted in point of Health by his Trip to England. The longing desire, which for many years I have had of visiting the great Matrapolis of that Kingdom is not in the least abated by his prejudices.”

Washington’s closest associations were with the most English elements in the colonies. There was old Lord Fairfax, who certainly never regarded himself as anything but an Englishman. There were Washington’s close friends, the younger Fairfax of Belvoir and his wife, who spent the entire period of the Revolutionary War at “home” in England. From Dinwiddie onward Washington had been the friend and confidant of the successive governors of Virginia. On the very day, in 1774, that Dunmore, the last royal governor, dissolved the House of Burgesses because of its resolutions of sympathy with Massachusetts, the entry in Washington’s journal is “dined and spent the Eveng. at the Governor’s.” The following day the entry is “Rid out with the Govr. to his Farm and Breakfasted with him there.”

Washington knew all the British officials. His journal records that in 1773 Governor Eden of Maryland had stayed a night at Mount Vernon and that Washington, when he went to Annapolis for the races, stayed with the Governor. Earlier in that year Washington had taken Jacky Custis to New York in the vain hope that King’s College would be able to put a little book learning into his head. On the way, Washington dined and breakfasted with Governor Penn of Pennsylvania and dined with Governor Franklin of New Jersey. When he reached New York he dined on different occasions with Lieutenant-General Gage, commander-in-chief in British America, and with James De Lancey, who was later to be the colonel of a famous royalist regiment. That was the circle in which Washington moved—a very different one from that of Henry and the Adamses—different, even, from that of Jefferson and Hancock.

There is another side to the picture. Socially, Fairfax and Braddock, Dunmore and Gage, treated Washington as an English gentleman. He had early learned that politically he was not accepted as such. There had been the incident of his inability to serve on Braddock’s staff in any other capacity than as a private gentleman—as a volunteer aid. He had had many other experiences of the contempt in which British officers held colonial commissions. As commander-in-chief of the Virginian forces he had been plagued with a Maryland captain who claimed a right to command Washington on the ground that he, the Maryland captain, had once held a commission in the British army. A real royal captain, one Mackaye, had once joined Washington’s forces with his company. Mackaye refused to order his men to assist in road-building on the ground that such work was not expected of British soldiers. Washington was glad to see him depart. “To suffer them to march at their ease, whilst our faithful soldiers arc laboriously employed, carry’s an air of such distinction,” he wrote, that it can only lead to trouble. Dinwiddle had an idea for the elimination of these disputes which must ever rank as a masterpiece of stupidity. His idea was to suggest to the authorities in London that they issue orders that no colonial should ever be allowed to hold a rank higher than captain.

In enumerating the causes of the Revolution, John Adams refers to “the time when Brigadier Timothy Ruggles, commander-in-chief of Massachusetts troops, was put under the command of a British ensign for a whole campaign.” Yet Ruggles never rebelled. Most Americans thought that as President of the Stamp Act Congress he betrayed their interests.

Tory pamphleteers were fond of ascribing Washington’s rebellion to these early disputes about rank. They had, of course, by that time become a matter of indifference to the wealthy Mr. Washington of Mount Vernon. But they had taught their lesson, he had always spoken of himself and thought of himself as an Englishman. These disputes were the first indication to him that, however loyal an Englishman he might be, he was, in the estimation of other Englishmen, an inferior sort of Englishman.

The colonial concept was meaningless to him. The idea that as a colonial he was a born inferior never entered his head. His very intimacy with the representatives of British authority helped. He knew Braddock and Dinwiddie and Dunmore and Gates too well to think they belonged to a superior race. The most potent argument for submission among the members of his class was the assumed axiom that Americans could never hope to resist a British army. Washington had seen British troops in action.

So far as he was concerned, the argument was quite simple: So long as other Englishmen treated him as an Englishman, he was proud to be an Englishman. If other Englishmen insisted that he was to be treated as a sort of lower-caste Englishman, he would fight it out.

“At a time, when our lordly masters in Great Britain will be satisfied with nothing less than the deprivation of American freedom,” he wrote in 1769 six years before Lexington, “it seems highly necessary that something should be done to avert the stroke, and maintain the liberty, which we have derived from our ancestors . . . no man should scruple, or hesitate a moment, to use arms in defence of so valuable a blessing, on which all the good and evil of life depends.”

As the storm gathered, Washington made it a point to read the various publications on the subject but, as he wrote Bryan Fairfax in 1774, “an innate spirit of freedom first told me, that the measures, which administration hath for some time been, and now are most violently pursuing, are repugnant to every principle of natural justice; whilst much abler heads than my own hath fully convinced me, that it is not only repugnant to natural right, but subversive of the laws and constitution of Great Britain itself.” This Bryan Fairfax was later to succeed to the family title. He now addressed many letters to Washington in the hope of keeping him from running into treason. Washington’s lengthy replies constitute the most articulate expression of his views. “Does it not appear, as clear as the sun in its meridian brightness,” he wrote to Bryan Fairfax in the summer of 1774, “that there is a regular, systematic plan formed to fix the right and practice of taxation upon us? Does not the uniform conduct of Parliament for some years past confirm this? Do not all the debates, especially those just brought to us, in the House of Commons on the side of government, expressly declare that America must be taxed in aid of the British funds, and that she has no longer resources within herself? Is there any thing to be expected from petitioning after this? Is not the attack upon the liberty and property of the people of Boston, before restitution of the loss to the India Company was demanded, a plain and self-evident proof of what they are aiming at? Do not the subsequent bills (now I dare say acts), for depriving the Massachusetts Bay of its charter, and for transporting offenders into other colonies or to Great Britain for trial, where it is impossible from the nature of the thing that justice can be obtained, convince us that the administration is determined to stick at nothing to carry its point? Ought we not, then, to put our virtue and fortitude to the severest test?”

The man who six years before the outbreak of hostilities had said that “no man should scruple, or hesitate a moment, to use arms’’ never backed away from that statement. The British reaction to Bunker Hill was enough to convince him that reconciliation was impossible. “My countrymen I know,” he wrote in the early part of 1776, “from their form of government, and steady attachment heretofore to royalty, will come reluctantly into the idea of independence, but time and persecution bring many wonderful things to pass.” Later, as the years rolled on without a military decision, his fear was that the people would be allured by British promises and agree to some terms short of absolute independence. By that time Washington was convinced that “Our cause is noble. It is the cause of mankind.”

The war drained the very life-blood out of Washington. He was only a few months past forty-three when he took command under the elm tree in Brattle Square, Cambridge. He came home eight years later.

When he returned he was still the same spare, erect figure. His bones were still large, his shoulders broad, his chest rather flat, his waist narrow, his hips broad, his arms and legs long, and his hands and feet big. His eyes were still blue, his skin light, colorless and easily tanned, and his dark-brown hair still hung down his back in a long queue. He still rode about his farms from breakfast until dinner, inspecting everything. He was still fond of hunting in any form, whether riding after the hounds in pursuit of a fox or deer, or out shooting for ducks or pheasants. He would still, on occasions, strip his coat off and go to work with his laborers. He could not do it so often now, for there were attacks of rheumatism which sometimes were so severe that he had to carry his arm in a sling. His teeth had always been bad and many of them were now gone. Sometime in the course of the war he had reached the point where he had to use glasses for reading. Otherwise, he was outwardly much the same.

He still wrote the same sharp, sarcastic letters; on rare occasions he could still lose his temper. But the old drive was gone. For the rest of his career he gives the impression of a very tired man. He had accepted the command of the army with diffidence but without any real disinclination. Once in command, it was not in his nature to resign because of criticism which he considered unjustified. When the war was over he had no further personal ambition. It was only with the utmost importunity that he was prevailed upon to go to the Constitutional Convention, to be its president and, later, to be the first President under the constitution. He wished somebody else would undertake those duties; he wished to spend the rest of his life in peace and quiet far away from criticism and responsibility. Once in office, of course, his sense of duty drove him on to perform the obligation which he had undertaken to the best of his ability. But it was not a natural drive; it was the drive of a man who is overtaxing himself, who is forcing himself.

The most striking aspect of his military career during the Revolutionary War is that he made “a destructive, expensive, and disorderly mob” give at least the political semblance of an army. There are a few, a very few, other men in history who might have done that. What made him unique was that he did it while, in the words of Jefferson, “scrupulously obeying the laws through the whole of his career, civil and military, of which the history of the world furnishes no other example.”

It was indeed without example. The reason Washington’s recommendations as commander-in-chief were so frequently disregarded was not that the members of Congress could not understand his arguments but that they started from different premises. Sometimes they reasoned from antiquity, but the all-important analogy to their own situation, in the minds of the political leaders, was the English civil war of the previous century. Parliament had struggled along with the mediocre generalship and traditionally organized army of Essex. Then it took Cromwell’s advice. It got from that advice the best army in Europe—and a tyranny. Congress wanted victories, of course. But it did not want any Cromwellian victories. In the nature of things, so the congressional reasoning ran, republicanism, democracy, call it what you will, is inefficient. This inefficiency is the price men must pay for freedom. Better struggle along with the militia. They might be poor soldiers. That was because they were citizens and only amateur soldiers. But no citizen militia would ever create a Lord Protector. No Monk would ever have a chance to sell the people’s birthright for a title.

Nothing in Washington’s career impressed his contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic so much as his surrender of his commission at the end of the war. Whatever the social causes which lay behind, revolutions, as the eighteenth century understood them, usually revolved around different branches of a royal family or different families each with a colorable claim to the throne. The great exception was the English revolution of the seventeenth century. And Cromwell never surrendered his commission. Neither, the later contemporaries of Washington noted, did Bonaparte.

The surrender of his commission was the symbolic act which highlighted Washington to his contemporaries. It was representative of his conduct throughout the war. When his army was unable to march for want of shoes, when his men were clamoring for pay, when he had to dismiss troops for lack of food, when he wrote in the winter before Valley Forge that “many” of his men were “entirely naked and most so thinly clad as to be unfit for service” there was a way to get shoes and pay and food and clothing. When the trails of his soldiers could be followed in the snow at Valley Forge by the blood from their bare feet, when the half-naked men had to sleep around campfires without blankets, on empty stomachs, in the middle of a Pennsylvania winter, he was not encamped in a wilderness. He was in the center of the richest agricultural region of the United States. There was no famine. Suppose he had simply taken over the government of eastern Pennsylvania and the Hudson Valley and levied taxes and requisitions. What was there to stop him? Certainly his army would have viewed the prospect of food and clothing with joy. Public opinion? If ever a man could have made the plea of emergency, he could. Congress? That body was rapidly sinking into utter contempt, and in any event had neither men nor money. The British? They were cooped up in Philadelphia, victims of the eighteenth-century fetish of winter-quarters. In the central states there was an almost complete breakdown of government. If Washington had taken upon himself to assume authority, public opinion might well have supported him.

He occasionally did use force when the food situation became desperate. After all, if his army dissolved for lack of food, his soldiers would not lie down and starve. They would simply have become brigands and taken what they wanted. When Washington seized a farmer’s cattle by force, it usually meant that if the army did not take them today, the brigands would tomorrow. As it was, Washington told Congress about a year after he took command that “our own Troops ... are become infinitely more formidable to the poor Farmers and Inhabitants than the common Enemy.”

What was a commander-in-chief to do when on the same day (December 22, 1777) he received letters from two of his generals such as the following:

I received an order to hold my brigade in readiness to march. Fighting will be by far preferable to starving. My brigade are out of provisions, nor can the commissary obtain any meat . . . I have used every argument my imagination can invent to make the soldiers easy, but I despair of being able to do it much longer.

According to the saying of Solomon, hunger will break through a stonewall. It is therefore a very pleasing circumstance to the division under my command, that there is a probability of their marching. Three days successively we have been destitute of bread. Two days we have been entirely without meat.

The next day Washington wrote to the President of Congress that on receiving word that the British had sent out a considerable foraging party he had ordered his army to march “when behold . . . I was not only informed, but convinced, that the men were unable to stir on account of provision, and that a dangerous mutiny, begun the night before, and which with difficulty was suppressed by the spirited exertions of some officers, was still much to be apprehended for want of this article . . . The soap, vinegar, and other articles allowed by Congress, we see none of. . . . The first, indeed, we have now little occasion for; few men having more than one shirt, many only the moiety of one, and some none at all . . . we have, by a field-return this day made, no less than two thousand eight hundred and ninety-eight men now in camp unfit for duty, because they are barefoot and otherwise naked.” As against this, his returns showed twenty-eight hundred men fit for duty. He had just learned that the Pennsylvania legislature had passed a resolution rebuking him for going into winter quarters. “I can assure those gentlemen, that it is a much easier and less distressing thing to draw remonstrances in a comfortable room by a good fireside, than to occupy a cold, bleak hill, and sleep under frost and snow, without clothes or blankets. However, although they seem to have little feeling for the naked and distressed soldiers, I feel superabundantly for them, and, from my soul, I pity those miseries, which it is neither in my power to relieve or prevent.”

These distresses, instead of lessening, became worse as the war proceeded. As late as 1780 Washington informed Congress that besides other “embarrassments” there was one “of a very painful and humiliating nature. We have no shirts.” The next year he wrote one of his aids (in cipher), “our Troops are approaching fast to nakedness. . . . we have nothing to cloathe them with . . . our Hospitals are without medicines and our sick without nutriment except such as well men eat , , , But why need I run into the detail, when it may be declared in a word, that we are at the end of our tether.”

If it was a choice between dissolving his army and supplying it by force, Washington used force. He was always very chary of force and at first used it only to tide him over imminent emergencies. “It will never answer,” he wrote Congress from Valley Forge, “to procure supplies of clothing or provision by coercive measures. The small seizures made of the former a few days ago, in consequence of the most pressing and absolute necessity, when that, or to dissolve, was the alternative, excited the greatest alarm and uneasiness . . . Such procedures may give a momentary relief; but, if repeated, will prove of the most pernicious consequence. Besides spreading disaffection, jealousy, and fear in the people, they never fail, even in the most veteran troops under the most rigid and exact discipline, to raise in the soldiery a disposition to licentiousness, to plunder and robbery, difficult to suppress afterwards, and which has proved not only ruinous to the inhabitants, but, in many instances, to armies themselves.” Valley Forge has attained an unenviable notoriety but it did not represent the ultimate in American troubles. Two years after Valley Forge, Washington wrote from Orange, New Jersey, to Governor Trumbull of Connecticut (a man pre-eminent among the state governors for his cooperation) that “I am now arranging matters to make a forage on this impoverished people having no other alternative left me, from which I could draw the least possible relief; and even from this, though it will ruin them, I expect to derive the most trifling succor.”

This forage came some months after he had addressed a circular letter “To the Magistrates of New Jersey” which speaks for itself, “The present situation of the army, with respect to provisions, is the most distressing of any we have experienced since the beginning of the war. For a fortnight past the troops, both officers and men, have been almost perishing for want. They have been alternately without bread or meat the whole time, with a very scanty allowance of either and frequently destitute of both. They have borne their sufferings with a patience that merits the approbation and ought to excite the sympathy of their countrymen. But they are now reduced to an extremity no longer to be supported. Their distress has in some instances prompted the men to commit depredations on the property of the inhabitants, which at any other period would be punished with exemplary severity, but which can now be only lamented, as the effect of an unfortunate necessity.”

He goes on to state that he has established a quota of grain and cattle which each county in the state should furnish 5 that while there may be no particular law governing the situation, he is sure the magistrates will get the grain and cattle together in the most equitable manner possible. “While I have entire confidence,” he added, that this method will supply the army with food, nevertheless, “I think it my duty to inform you, that, should we be disappointed in our hopes, the extremity of the case will compel us to have recourse to a different mode, which will be disagreeable to me on every account.”

As President, Washington was the object of much scurrilous abuse. Forged letters which the British had published during the war as his, for the purpose of blackening his private character, were republished as genuine. No libel was too gross. It is remarkable that his enemies did not concentrate on these seizures. There, it would seem, was an ideal issue with which to destroy his popularity. It is true that certificates were given to the people whose property was seized. These certificates theoretically entitled the holders to payment in worthless currency from the empty continental treasury. At the best, such seizures are bound to result in much hardship and injustice. In addition to the seizures, much property was destroyed from time to time by his order. Nothing gives more point to Washington’s reputation for impartial justice than his ability to maintain that reputation while seizing property at the point of the bayonet. 

He was well aware of the danger. “I am confident,” he wrote to Congress in the spring of 1781, “the measures we have hitherto been pursuing, cannot be much longer made use of without imminent danger of bringing the people to an open resistance.” Some time before, he had pointed out the dangers on the other side to George Clinton. “Naked and starving as they are, we cannot enough admire the incomparable patience and fidelity of the soldiery, that they have not been ere this excited by their suffering to a general mutiny and dispersion. Strong symptoms, however, of discontent have appeared in particular instances j and nothing but the most active efforts everywhere can long avert so shocking a catastrophe.” It was in arbitrating between a starving soldiery and a plundered populace that Washington earned his reputation for a rigid sense of justice.

He always managed to obtain supplies by force just in time to prevent the dissolution of his army. He also always managed to refrain from seizing supplies until public opinion was ready to sanction the use of force. He always treated the civil authorities with the greatest deference and tried to act through them. The extent of this deference appears most strikingly in the smallpox problem.

This scourge was not only fatal to armies; the fear of it was one of the greatest deterrents to recruiting. Washington was himself a firm believer in inoculation. In this he was so far in advance of his age that inoculation was for practical purposes forbidden by law in Virginia. He urged Patrick Henry to try to get this law repealed. In the meantime, Washington made it a rule to inoculate all recruits. Nevertheless, when he was encamped in New York and the Provincial Congress passed a resolution against inoculation he promptly issued orders that “No person whatever, belonging to the Army is to be innoculated for the Small pox.” A number of his officers were arrested for attempting to have themselves inoculated in violation of this order. At the time her husband was issuing these orders Mrs. Washington was being inoculated at the home of the Hancocks in Philadelphia.

The commander-in-chief, of course, never reached the point where he was without a shirt. But much of the time his own style of life was far from comfortable. In the winter of 1780 he complains that although he has been encamped at Morristown, New Jersey, for nearly two months he still does not have “a Kitchen to cook a Dinner in.” All his servants “and all Mrs. Ford’s, are crowded together in her Kitchen, and scarce one of them able to speak for the colds they have caught.”

The previous summer his headquarters were at West Point. “Since our arrival at this happy spot,” he wrote in extending a dinner invitation, “we have had a ham, (sometimes a shoulder) of Bacon, to grace the head of the Table; a piece of roast Beef adorns the foot; and a dish of beans, or greens, (almost imperceptible,) decorates the center. When the cook has a mind to cut a figure, (which I presume will be the case tomorrow,) we have two Beef-steak pyes, or dishes of crabs, in addition, one on each side the center dish, dividing the space & reducing the distance between dish & dish to about 6 feet, which without them would be near i2 feet apart. Of late he has had the surprising sagacity to discover, that apples will make pyes; and its a question, if, in the violence of his efforts, we do not get one of apples, instead of having both of Beef-steaks. If the ladies can put up with such entertainment, and will submit to partake of it on plates, once Tin but now Iron —(not become so by the labor of scouring), I shall be happy to see them.”

His orderly book is full of general invitations to different classes of officers to dine with him. In inactive seasons he tried to have his wife with him. When time hung on their hands he was always fond of an informal dance.

When Washington took command he made it clear that he never expected any pay. Today such a declaration might not seem very important. But the eighteenth century was the zenith of money influence. It was then that property was all important. In Europe army commissions and judgeships were legally sold. The principle that those who owned a country should govern it was universally accepted. No act of Washington’s ever inspired more trust than his refusal of pay, but he made it clear that he did not expect others to follow his example. He was constantly asking Congress for increases in the pay of his officers and as President his advocacy of substantial salaries for government employees was interpreted by many as evidence of a leaning towards monarchy.

All through the war he stuck at his post. He fretted when he thought of the tangle into which his business affairs were getting but he could not find any time in which to attend to them. He had had his vision and he was willing to sacrifice everything to make it come true. He did not see Mount Vernon for over six years and then it was only for brief stops on the way to and from Yorktown. It was another two years before the British evacuated New York and he could set off for Annapolis, where Congress was sitting, to surrender his commission. On his way he accumulated a supply of toys for the fatherless children of Jacky Custis, who were now living with their mother at Mount Vernon.

The outbreak of the Revolution had been accompanied by an outburst of national feeling; by a feeling that New Englanders, Pennsylvanians, Virginians, and Carolinians all had something fundamental in common; they were Americans rather than Europeans. Washington’s dispatches frequently refer to the enemy as “the Europeans” but the public attitude on which this was based did not last long. The army more and more became an allied army rather than the army of one country. As he wrote in 1780, “I believe a newly appointed brigadr. from the Southern Troops would at this day be disagreeable to an Eastern Brigade, and vice versa?”

This attitude struck Washington as absurd on the general ground of efficiency. It did more; it interfered with his dream of an America which should be a place of refuge for all the oppressed of the world and in which men should devote their attention to the exploitation of the earth rather than to the extermination of one another. There was so much wealth to be brought out of this virgin land; why should men waste their time quarreling about trifles.

Washington was not gifted with great imagination but he had come to believe that republican government offered the greatest hope for mankind—if it could be made to work. At his death he was probably still doubtful of its practicability. “He has often declared to me,” Jefferson testifies, “that he considered our new constitution as an experiment on the practicability of republican government, and with what dose of liberty man could be trusted for his own good; that he was determined the experiment should have a fair trial, and would lose the last drop of his blood in support of it.”

His career as commander-in-chief had given him much practical experience of governments. He had found out the true nature of the powers of Congress—that there were none. He had had ample experience of what cooperation among thirteen independent state governments meant. He had come to some very definite conclusions and, after mature deliberation, he determined that his last official communication to the governors of the states should be a circular letter on political matters.

“The citizens of America,” he wrote, are “placed in the most enviable condition, as the sole lords and proprietors of a vast tract of continent, comprehending all the various soils and climates of the world, and abounding with all the necessaries and conveniences of life . . . Heaven has crowned all its other blessings, by giving a fairer opportunity for political happiness, than any other nation has ever been favored with . . . The foundation of our empire was not laid in the gloomy age of ignorance and superstition; but at an epocha when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period . . . At this auspicious period, the United States came into existence as a nation; and, if their citizens should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be entirely their own.”

The great danger is that the individual states will “become the sport of European politics.” The problem is to keep America from becoming merely an extension of Europe. Four things are necessary. First, “An indissoluble union of the States under one federal head.” Secondly, “A sacred regard to public justice.” Thirdly, “The adoption of a proper peace establishment,” i. e., a military and naval force for defense. Fourthly, the cultivation of a disposition “among the people of the United States . . . to forget their local prejudices and policies.”

This advice was by no means liked. “The murmur is free and general against what is called the unsolicited obtrusion of his advice,” Edmund Randolph wrote to Madison. The popular reaction was that a form of government which had been sufficient to fight a war of independence against Great Britain ought to be sufficient for peace time. Washington’s view was that the war had been won by something little short of a miracle and in spite of the incompetence of the government. Nor did he like to think of the extent of French assistance. He had always been afraid of that assistance. He suspected the French of planning to obtain some sort of unofficial protectorate over the new states.

He followed up this circular with many private letters in which he urged the necessity of establishing a strong federal government. He did not discuss the framework of such a government but contented himself with urging that greater powers be conferred upon Congress. Meanwhile, the progress of events was bringing many other people around to the same view.

Much against his will he was persuaded to become a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. He was escorted into Philadelphia by many dignitaries and the city Light Horse. The church bells were chiming. He alighted at the tavern where he had intended to stay but on the insistence of Robert Morris he finally went home with him. As usual, Washington was on time. When the Convention assembled the next day the only two states represented were Virginia and Pennsylvania. Twelve days later there was finally a quorum, seven out of the thirteen states being represented. Washington was unanimously elected President. The Convention resolved that its deliberations should be secret and, as a consequence, Washington wrote in his journal “no minutes of the proceedings has [sic] been, or will be inserted in this diary.”

He did not take a great part in the proceedings. He preferred to sit in the chair and listen to Madison and Hamilton, Ellsworth and Rutledge, Mason and Gorham debate. For one thing, Washington did not feel particularly well qualified. For another, he liked to be enlightened by listening to debate. As commander-in-chief he had shown himself fond of councils of war. When he was in doubt he would call his generals together and let them argue the question out in his presence. As President, he followed the same procedure. It was the reason for those frequent debates in the cabinet which Jefferson hated so much. It was Washington’s way of making up his mind. He liked to listen to Hamilton and Jefferson argue.

There was another aspect to this trait. Washington did not ask his generals and his cabinet merely for advice. He treated them more as colleagues. His sense of republicanism was so strong that even as commander-in-chief he sometimes regarded himself as bound against his better judgment by a vote of a Council of War, so now Washington listened. There were only two aspects of the proposed government which he regarded as really important. It must be republican in form and it must be strong. If the constitution which was finally evolved had those two aspects he would be for it no matter what were the details.

There were times during that summer in Philadelphia when he almost gave up hope. “I almost despair,” he wrote to Hamilton, who had gone home in disgust, “of seeing a favorable issue to the proceedings of our convention, and do therefore repent having had any agency in the business.

“The men, who oppose a strong and energetic government, are in my opinion narrow-minded politicians, or are under the influence of local views. The apprehension expressed by them, that the people will not accede to the form proposed, is the ostensible not the real cause of opposition. But, admitting that the present sentiment is as they prognosticate, the proper question ought nevertheless to be. Is it, or is it not, the best form that such a country as this can adopt? If it be the best, recommend it, and it will assuredly obtain, maugre opposition. I am sorry you went away. I wish you were back. The crisis is equally important and alarming.”

He varied his activities by fishing parties. On one of these he went with Gouverneur Morris to a place “in the vicinity of Valley Forge to get Trout.” The association was too strong, and while Morris fished Washington rode over his old camp-ground. On his return he entered into conversation with some farmers who were planting buckwheat. He made careful notes of what they told him as to the method of cultivating that grain.

His view of the instrument which the convention finally produced was that it “is not free from imperfections, but there are as few radical defects in it as could well be expected, considering the heterogenious mass of which the Convention was composed and the diversity of interests that are to be attended to. As a Constitutional door is opened for future amendments and alterations, I think it would be wise in the People to accept what is offered to them.” The disputes which arose seemed to him ridiculous. “It is a little strange,” he wrote, “that the men of large property in the south should be more afraid that the constitution will produce an aristocracy or a monarchy, than the genuine democratical people of the east.” The whole issue, he wrote his nephew Bushrod, boiled down to the question “Is it best for the States to unite or not to unite?”

It took considerable persuasion before he could be brought to believe that it was essential he accept the Presidency. He would never have run for the office. The reason he gave in at last was that he was brought to see the manifest impossibility of obtaining anything like a unanimous electoral vote for any other candidate. For unless the nation united in support of the new government he did not expect it to last long.

In order to increase the feeling of union he made a series of journeys through the country. The fall after he took office he spent about a month touring New England in which he went as far north as New Hampshire. He avoided Rhode Island, since that state had not yet ratified the constitution. When it did so, he made a special trip there. The second spring he was in office he toured Long Island. The third spring was spent on the intolerable roads of the South. He went as far as Georgia.

The receptions which he everywhere received testified that the nation was united in its respect for him. He would have liked to have seen it united in policy as well. He was well aware that the bane of free government in Europe had been factionalism—a factionalism in which each faction was supported by a foreign power. Every Polish election meant a diplomatic crisis in Europe. Only a few years before taking office he had seen the Netherlands torn between the House of Orange faction which favored continuance of the alliance with England and the aristocratic faction which favored a closer relationship with France. This was why he had such a great dread of factionalism— political parties. It was not because he cherished the chimerical hope that men would always agree. It was because the existence of permanent political parties meant that men had agreed to disagree; that whatever one group proposed, the other was bound to oppose. The creation of such groups was merely the creation of tools by which foreign nations could interfere in the affairs of the United States.

How was that unity for which he hoped to be obtained? Every important measure which came up during his administration was the subject of acrimonious debate and the vote in the House of Representatives was always narrow. One measure actually led to armed resistance—the Whiskey Rebellion. He marched to the scene of disturbance at the head of a large militia army. He was pleased when the rebels submitted without bloodshed.

The most disturbing thing to him about all these disputes was that it was always the same people who opposed the measures which he regarded as wise. The disagreement, he began to fear, did not represent an honest difference of opinion. The opposition opposed because it was the opposition; because it made it its business to oppose.

Even the element of a foreign connection was not long absent. Part of the nation regarded the Reign of Terror with horror. It regarded a British victory as essential to the security of the United States and believed that every possible aid should be given to England. Another part of the nation regarded the French Revolution as the brother of the American Revolution. This group organized democratic clubs in imitation of those of France; wore French emblems; enlisted in privateers commissioned by the French to prey on British commerce, and loudly hoped that the French would successfully invade England.

Washington’s fear that this factionalism was bringing the United States to the condition of Poland or the Netherlands was almost confirmed when in his second four years Edmund Randolph, who had succeeded Jefferson as Secretary of State, was on reasonable grounds suspected of asking the French minister for assistance with which to stir up a civil war. This fear of foreign interference in the domestic politics of the United States was not chimerical. Washington himself, before he died, saw the refusal of one faction to support the government when, in the administration of his successor, it became involved in an undeclared war with France. That the other faction was no better was demonstrated later. When the United States was at war with England in the Madison administration the New England states, to the intense indignation of John Adams, refused to support the government. The New Englanders called it “Mr. Madison’s war” and, at its conclusion, they were actually plotting to secede from the United States and join the British Empire.

Washington personally was spared in the political debates by the responsible leaders. But the libels which were known as newspapers were less polite. Their tone may be judged from a public letter addressed to him by Thomas Paine. “As to you, sir, treacherous in private friendship and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide, whether you are an apostate or an imposter; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any?”

Washington realized that “a number of accidental circumstances” had helped out the new government. “The harvests of wheat,” he wrote an English correspondent, “have been remarkably good, the demand for that article from abroad is great, the increase of commerce is visible in every port, and the number of new manufactures introduced in one year is astonishing.” It puzzled Washington all the more as to the visible unpopularity of the government in Virginia. He consulted a Dr. Stuart, who had married the widow of Jacky Custis. The first answer was that the Virginians felt the government was controlled by and operated in the interests of the eastern states. Washington’s reply to this was that of course the eastern states looked after their own interests but did not the southern states do the same? “And I will ask another question, of the highest magnitude in my mind, to wit, if the eastern and northern States are dangerous in union, will they be less so in separation?” Stuart’s next answer was that a rumor had spread through Virginia that the new government intended to free the slaves. “This occasioned such an alarm,” he wrote, “that many were sold for the merest trifle.” This rumor had hardly proved false when the question of the assumption of the state debts arose. Washington’s reply was that in his private opinion assumption was just. But Stuart finally opened with his greatest gun: The new government tended toward monarchy; this was proved by the pomp which its officers assumed. There were, for example, Washington’s own levees.

This institution of the presidential levee had a political importance of ridiculous proportions. Washington wrote Stuart that a few days’ experience had convinced him of the necessity of “appointing certain days to receive” visits. “By the time I had done breakfast, and thence till dinner, and afterwards till bed-time, I could not get relieved from the ceremony of one visit, before I had to attend to another.” The way the institution actually worked was that any one who had an introduction which he hoped would enable him to shake the President’s hand but no special business with the President was told to present himself at three o’clock on the following Tuesday. At that time Washington’s dining-room was cleared. He himself stood in front of the fire-place and each visitor, as he entered, was conducted to him. Washington had an unusual facility for remembering names and insisted that the name of each visitor be announced very distinctly. The President greeted each visitor with a bow, “the best,” he wrote Stuart, “I was master of.” The visitor then took a place at the side of the room. At quarter-after-three the door was closed. Washington then began at the right, spoke to each visitor, and, on completing the circuit, again stood in front of the fireplace. Each visitor then approached him, bowed, and retired.

“What pomp there is in all this,” Washington wrote Stuart, “I am unable to discover. Perhaps it consists in not sitting. To this, two reasons are opposed: first, it is unusual; secondly, which is a more substantial one, because I have no room large enough to contain a third of the chairs, which would be sufficient to admit it. If it is supposed, that ostentation, or the fashions of courts (which, by the by, I believe originate oftener in convenience, not to say necessity, than is generally imagined), gave rise to this custom, I will boldly affirm, that no supposition was ever more erroneous.”

That same convenience and necessity, Washington said, had made him adopt a rule to accept no invitations and return no visits. He did not apply the latter part of this rule when he first came to New York. “This day,” Senator Maclay’s diary entry for April 28, 1789 reads, “I ought to note with some extraordinary mark. I had dressed and was about to set out, when General Washington, the greatest man in the world, paid me a visit. I met him at the foot of the stairs. Mr. Wynkoop just came in. We asked him to take a seat. He excused himself on account of the number of his visits. We accompanied him to the door. He made us complaisant bows—one before he mounted and the other as he went away on horseback.”

Washington had decided these social questions as carefully as he ever decided anything. Before coming to New York he had written to Madison asking him to secure lodgings. Both Governor Clinton and Secretary Jay had invited him to stay at their homes until he secured a permanent residence. Both invitations had been declined for Washington meant to go into no “lodgings . . . but hired ones.” They should not be elaborate. “I am not anxious to be placed early in a situation for entertaining; for which reason private lodgings, till I can feel the way a little, would not only be more agreeable to my own wishes, but possibly more consistent with sound policy.”

There was a custom, probably dating back to Hancock, by which the presidents of the old Congress had entertained indiscriminately. On investigating the effect of this custom, Washington concluded that the table of the President of the Congress had been “considered as a public one, and every person, who could get introduced, conceived that he had a right to be invited to it. This, although the table was always crowded . . . was in its nature impracticable, and as many offences given as if no table had been kept.” tie therefore decided to confine his entertaining to “official characters.”

Senator Maclay’s turn to dine with the President came in August, 1789. “The company were,” Maclay recorded in his diary, “President and Mrs. Washington, Vice-President and Mrs. Adams, the Governor [George Clinton] and his wife, Mr. Jay and wife, Mr. Langdon and wife, Mr. Dalton and a lady (perhaps his wife), and a Mr. Smith, Mr. Bassett, myself, Lear, Lewis, the President’s two secretaries. The President and Mrs. Washington sat opposite each other in the middle of the table; the two secretaries, one at each end. It was a great dinner, and the best of the kind I ever was at. The room, however, was disagreeably warm.

“First was the soup; fish roasted and boiled; meats, gammon, fowls, etc. This was the dinner. The middle of the table was garnished in the usual tasty way, with small images, flowers (artificial), etc. The dessert was, first apple-pies, pudding, etc.; then iced creams, jellies, etc.; then water-melons, musk-melons, apples, peaches, nuts.

“It was the most solemn dinner ever I sat at. Not a health drank; scarce a word said until the cloth was taken away. Then the President, filling a glass of wine, with great formality drank to the health of every individual by name round the table. Everybody imitated him, charged glasses, and such a buzz of health, sir,’ and health, madam,’ and thank you, sir,’ and thank you, madam,’ never had I heard before . . . The ladies sat a good while, and the bottles passed about; but there was a dead silence almost. Mrs. Washington at last withdrew with the ladies.

“I expected the men would now begin, but the same stillness remained. The President told of a New England clergyman who had lost a hat and wig in passing a river called the Brunks [Bronx]. He smiled, and everybody else laughed. He now and then said a sentence or two on some common subject, and what he said was not amiss. Mr. Jay tried to make a laugh . . . The President kept a fork in his hand, when the cloth was taken away, I thought for the purpose of picking nuts. He ate no nuts, however, but played with the fork, striking on the edge of the table with it.”

Washington presided at these dinners as a disagreeable duty. His own tastes in food were very simple. Even at his own elaborate banquets he usually confined his eating to one dish and that of the simpler sort, and drank between a half-pint and a pint of Madeira. His breakfast consisted of “Indian hoecakes,” honey and tea—usually about three hoecakes and three cups of tea. Lunch had not yet been invented and he apparently usually omitted supper. So far as his contemporaries could discover, his only particular tastes were for fish, fruit of all kinds, honey, melons and nuts. His regular Sunday dinner was salted codfish. Maclay noted that Washington did not eat any nuts. At his state dinners he merely played with a fork to pass the time away. When the conversation was interesting he ate nuts steadily after dinner, hour after hour, only interrupting the process occasionally to propose a toast.

This mode of entertaining cost President Washington about six hundred dollars a month for servants’ wages and food, exclusive of wine. The staff consisted of a steward and fourteen lower servants.

If Washington’s social customs as President did not meet with public approval it certainly was not because he had not tried to satisfy public opinion. Shortly after he took office he prepared a lengthy list of “queries” in regard to the social rules he should follow. Copies were submitted to Madison and Jay who were the two men on whom he relied most for advice at that time. These queries are framed in the third person and went into such detail as to inquire “in what light would his appearance rarely at tea-parties be considered?”

In this, as throughout his administration, his object was to satisfy public opinion. His difficulty was to find out what public opinion was. There were circles in New York and Philadelphia which liked to talk of “the republican court”; which insisted on calling the President’s formal receptions “levees.” This only irritated those who thought Washington was surrounded by a group who, under the cloak of his name, were trying to prepare the country for hereditary monarchy.

He was more successful in his appointments to office. No relationship or friendship ever had the slightest weight with him in making appointments. He obtained all the information possible and then judged to the best of his ability. Yet the very integrity with which he made appointments left one very embarrassing situation to his successor.

Washington had sharply refused his nephew Bushrod’s request to be appointed a federal district attorney, but just before he left the Presidency he appointed John Quincy Adams minister to Portugal. John Quincy’s continuance in the diplomatic service while his father was President was to be made the occasion for many newspaper attacks on the elder Adams. John Quincy now wrote a letter to his mother indicating that he thought he ought to retire from the diplomatic service because of his father’s election. John Adams forwarded the letter to Washington. His reply expressed “a strong hope, that you will not withhold merited promotion from Mr. John Adams because he is your son . . . I give it as my decided opinion that Mr. Adams is the most valuable public character we have abroad, and . . . there remains no doubt in my mind that he will prove himself to be the ablest of all our diplomatic corps.”

This desire to satisfy public opinion made Washington a much more regular church attendant when President than he was at any other time. At Mount Vernon, Sunday was his day to write letters and post accounts. This did not prevent him, in 1773, from being the high bidder on a sale of pews in the Alexandria Church but he did not attend very often. As President, he recognized that the people expected him to attend church and he went even when he got caught on a Sunday in York, Pennsylvania. “There being no Episcopal Minister present in the place,” he entered in his journal, “I went to hear morning Service performed in the Dutch reformed Church—which, being in that language not a word of which I understood I was in no danger of becoming a proselyte to its religion by the eloquence of the Preacher.” On his trip through New England, he made it a practice to attend an Episcopal service in the morning and a Congregational service in the afternoon. As he was returning, Sunday found him in a village in Connecticut. “It being contrary to law and disagreeable to the People of this State (Connecticut),” he entered in his journal, “to travel on the Sabbath day—and my horses, after passing through such intolerable roads, wanting rest, I stayed at Perkins tavern (which, by the bye, is not a good one,) all day—and a meeting-house being within few rods of the door, I attended morning and evening service, and heard very lame discourses from a Mr. Pond.”

But there was a limit to the extent of his conformity. It was noted that he never knelt but always stood during prayers. His invariable custom of leaving before communion and sending his carriage back for his wife, who as invariably took communion, attracted even more attention. It attracted so much attention that the minister of the church which Washington attended in Philadelphia preached a sermon on “the unhappy tendency of example” as evidenced by “those in elevated stations, who invariably turned their backs upon the celebration of the Lord's Supper.”

Washington, according to the minister, sent him word by a senator that “he had received a very just reproof from the pulpit, for always leaving the church before the administration of the Sacrament; that he honored the preacher for his integrity and candour; that he had never considered the influence of his example; that he would never again give cause for the repetition of the reproof; and that, as he had never been a communicant, were he to become one then, it would be imputed to an ostentatious display of religious zeal arising altogether from his elevated station. Accordingly, he afterwards never came on the morning of Sacrament Sunday.”

There was considerable curiosity among Washington’s contemporaries as to his religious faith. They noted that he frequently referred to Providence, never to God; that as commander-in-chief he had said that the number of chaplains allowed for the army was insufficient; that when in a conspicuous position he made it a point to attend church. It was not a curiosity which he proposed to gratify. The clergy of Philadelphia decided to make him a public address which should be so framed that he would be forced to reveal his religious sentiments in his reply. However, Rush told Jefferson, “the old fox was too cunning for them.” Jefferson adds that “I know that Gouverneur Morris, who pretended to be in his secrets & believed himself to be so, has often told me that Genl. Washington believed no more of that system [Christianity] than he himself did.”

Washington did not retire from the Presidency a happy man. That national unity and freedom from foreign influence for which he longed seemed to become more impossible every day. He looked on the Jeffersonians as the tools of France; he was less observant of the stronger bias of the Hamiltonians in favor of England. For the most part, the Jeffersonian leaders had spared him personally in their attacks on the monarchists. Indeed, their congressional leader, Madison, had been the man on whom Washington had relied most heavily for advice at the beginning of his administration. Jefferson’s view was that Washington’s mind was weakened by old age. Maclay, after entering in his journal that he had attended a levee, says he did so only from “fear of being charged with a want of respect to General Washington. If there is treason in the wish I retract it, but would to God this same General Washington were in heaven! We would not then have him brought forward as the constant cover to every unconstitutional and irrepublican act.”

The entreaties of political leaders of all persuasions were sufficient to induce Washington to stay for a second term. But then his mind was made up. His dream had been fulfilled. The thirteen states had united in one federal republic with adequate powers for its purpose. He very much feared that the fulfillment would not last long; that there was a faction in the country determined to destroy the republic with the assistance of France and to tie the fortunes of the American people to the power politics of Europe. He had done his best. If the American republic could only survive so long as he watched over it, it was not a true republic. So he retired to Mount Vernon.

He was not allowed to rest in peace. So soon as war with France appeared probable, there was a universal demand that he head the American army. He finally consented on condition he was to be allowed to remain at Mount Vernon until it was necessary to take the field. It was an ideal situation for an intriguer such as Hamilton. Neither Washington nor Adams understood what was going on. Washington did not go to Philadelphia and Adams did not go to Mount Vernon. Their medium of communication was a despicable creature by the name of McHenry who was Secretary of War. He was completely under the control of Hamilton, as were Pickering, the Secretary of State, and Wolcott, the Secretary of the Treasury.

The object of this clique was to govern the country by playing off the President against the national hero. Their success may be judged from one circumstance; On July 14, 1798 Washington wrote Hamilton that it was absolutely necessary that Pinckney be second in command. On August 9, Washington advised Knox that “Colo. Hamilton was designated second in command, and first, if I should decline an acceptance, by the federal characters of Congress; whence alone anything like a public sentiment relative thereto could be deduced” and that therefore Washington had decided that Hamilton must be second in command. Those “federal characters” were the group which followed Hamilton blindly.

The Hamiltonians were successful in creating ill-will between Washington and Adams; they were successful in having their way in regard to appointments in the army; they failed in more important matters. Jefferson was always convinced that if he could have had a private meeting with Washington in these latter years the “malignant insinuations” of the Hamiltonians “should have been dissipated before his just judgment, as mists before the sun.” Adams could have said the same thing. He and Washington had never been very friendly and Washington was highly irritated by some of Adams’ actions as President. Adams, for one thing, did not regard the army which Washington had been selected to command as necessary. Even here the two men were not completely at variance. Washington regarded the army as a useful precaution; he did not—as the Hamiltonians professed to do—regard a French invasion as imminent. On the other hand, he never suspected the truth, which was that the Hamiltonians were using the French scare as an excuse to raise an army for which they had other uses. When the test came, he refused to go along with the Hamiltonians. His first reaction to the news that Adams intended to send another mission to France was as wrathful as Hamilton or Pickering could wish. But he refused to allow his name to be used to head the opposition. “As men will view the same thing in different lights,” he wrote Pickering, “I would now fain hope, that the President has caught the true one.”

Washington’s early ambition had been for fame. He had had enough of that guarding the frontier from the French and Indians. It had been succeeded by a desire to make the earth bring forth its fulness. That had been interrupted by British interference. In the course of the ensuing struggle his dominant ambition had become to establish a great republic—founded on more just principles than any government yet known—in which the oppressed and weary of all the world could forget their miserable squabbles in a common ambition to exploit the earth. Now he was weary. He still mounted his horse in the morning and rode over his farms. But what could he expect of farms which he had neglected for so many years? The average clip per sheep was but a trifle of what it should be. And what was the use? He did not have any children to inherit his fortune; he was doubtful whether the republic he had founded would outlast him.

Then there was the everlasting stream of visitors who came from all over with all sorts of introductions. They stayed to dinner; they stayed the night. Alexandria was on the principal road north and south. No one who could dig up an introduction ever passed through without going the few miles out of his route to see the great man at Mount Vernon. Washington received them all, no matter how flimsy their credentials, if they could pass for gentlemen. America had not yet developed the hordes of tourists which plagued Jefferson’s later days.

Mount Vernon was very different now than it had been in the time of Lawrence Washington. After his marriage, George had materially enlarged the house. When he returned from the Revolutionary War he again thought his house too small. This time he added a banquet-hall at one end, a library and dining-room at the other, and a story to the whole. His journal records innumerable operations for the beautifying of the grounds.

He continued to manage Mount Vernon but he found it more burdensome than before. He would have liked to rent out all of it except the farm adjacent to the house—the Mansion-House Farm. He still occasionally labored as well as supervised. Only a few weeks before his death he personally surveyed a tract of land. But the violent spirit of Conotocarius had given many indications that it was wearing out the great strength of Washington.

On Thursday, December 12, 1799, he rode out to inspect his farms as usual. Shortly after he left the house, a mixture of rain, hail and snow began to fall. He did not return until after three, which was the dinner hour. As he was late, he did not follow his usual custom of dressing for dinner. His secretary, Lear, expressed some concern over this, but Washington insisted that his overcoat had sufficiently protected him from the weather. However, he told Lear not to send a servant to the post-office as the weather was too bad.

The next day Washington had a cold. As was his custom, he refused all remedies, saying, “Let it go as it came.” At about two o’clock in the morning he awakened his wife and said he was very unwell. She started to get up to call a servant but he would not permit it lest she catch cold. In the morning she sent for an overseer who had some experience in bleeding people to bleed her husband. Lear meanwhile sent for Dr. Craik of Alexandria, one of Washington’s oldest and most intimate friends. When Craik arrived he continued the bleeding and two other physicians who were also summoned could think of nothing better. Washington soon made up his mind that he had reached the end, and took it calmly and unconcernedly. After he had lost the power of speaking he noticed that his servant Christopher had been standing by his bed for a long time. Washington made a motion for him to sit down. About eleven o’clock in the evening Washington was seen feeling his own pulse. Soon his hand fell from his wrist. Lear picked up the hand. “Is he gone?” asked Mrs. Washington. Lear silently indicated an affirmative answer.

On the surface, Washington was much of the eighteenth century. The dignified Stuart portraits reproduced on postage stamps and dollar bills have impressed themselves on the consciousness of the nation. Washington came down to posterity as the Washington of his presidential levees—not as Conotocarius. The most frequent conception of him is as he appeared at his formal receptions, clad in purple or black velvet, with his hair powdered and worn in a bag, with his cocked hat in his hand, bowing stiffly and somewhat coldly to each guest in turn. It seems the epitome of the eighteenth century. Was the extravagant praise which he received in his life-time due to a feeling that he was typical? Obviously not. Those eighteenth-century Europeans—Polish poets and French noblemen—who worshipped at his feet did not do so because they thought of him as typical. It was because, somehow, to them he was entirely different.

They still spoke in terms of the past. He was still Cincinnatus—the great man who was willing to plow. This was because they were brought up in the Arcadian tradition—a belief in the golden age of long-ago. Jefferson personified the attempt to restore that golden age. He was in favor of forbidding immigration, of building a wall against the world, and of leaving the virtuous and Arcadian Americans gradually to spread their self-sufficient farms across a continent, free from the contaminating vices of urban life.

Jefferson’s Arcadianism expressed an ideal which the eighteenth century learned as a matter of course in school. As a matter of course, it was an ideal, not to be taken seriously by practical men. It had existed from time immemorial, yet it was suddenly showing an astonishing vitality. There were Rousseau and others—people who seemed to feel it was really possible at this late date to restore the golden age. Europeans were beginning to hope that that ideal might be made practical—many Americans believed they already had it, or something so nearly approximating it that the chief problem for them was to protect what they had from contamination.

John Adams gave up the contest. He did not hope for an Arcadian America, but he had no ideal to suggest in its place. The United States to him was no different from other nations. It could expect the same class struggles and the same vicissitudes as other nations. Internally, it should design a form of government which should neutralize the undesirable effects of those struggles better than had been done by any nation theretofore. Externally, it should be prepared to repel foreign interference—they were all, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, agreed as to that, they only differed as to the means.

Samuel Adams, like Jefferson, did not look for the millennium of the future, but for the golden age of the past. Both of them thought more of preserving what they had than of trying to approach nearer to their ideal. But there was a great difference between them. Jefferson’s golden age was the same golden age about which the sages of Greece and Rome had dreamed. Samuel Adams’ dream was strictly limited. He did not have Jefferson’s national outlook. He did not hope so much that the creation of a new nation would mean a nation devoted to his ideal as that the new nation would enable him to carry out his ideal for his own Boston—to make it the Christian Sparta.

None of these outlooks had any great appeal for Washington. He had no sympathy with Jefferson’s hope of preserving America as an agricultural Arcadia; he had as little sympathy with John Adams’ idea that America would, in any event, be like every other nation and should prepare itself accordingly. Without having found the word, he had found the idea of progress. It is hackneyed now. But the eighteenth century knew not of progress. It knew of virtue and its opposite—luxury. In the remote past the people had had virtue; now they were corrupted by luxury. Men were divided between those who believed that luxury could not be eradicated and those who believed that virtue could be restored. The former class were the pessimists; the people who believed the world could not be improved. The latter class were the optimists; the people who believed it was still possible to restore the world to its primitive simplicity and purity. These classes cannot be designated as conservative and progressive. Such designations can only be made in an atmosphere which is permeated with the idea that such a thing as progress exists.

Washington and, to a lesser extent, Patrick Henry, had the idea of progress. Both of them welcomed banks and factories and cities; both of them thought such things would add to the happiness of the citizens. Henry thought these things could be introduced without affecting the fundamentals of the Virginian social structure. When he was convinced that those fundamentals were in danger he drew back—after being for years one of the most ardent advocates of a union among the states, he changed his mind when he became convinced a union would endanger the institution of slavery. Washington’s thinking was not impeded by the same obstacle.

He, more than any other man of his time, would have been pleased with the kind of country which actually came out of their united efforts. He would have rejoiced as he saw railroads span the continent, factories on every hand, mines, new products, irrigation works, new forms of machinery. That was what he liked to do—to make the earth yield its riches. He would have rejoiced still more as he saw the millions of immigrants crossing the ocean, fleeing from famine or tyranny. He did not fear the result. Naturally pessimistic, he had determined that it was worth all his effort to try one great experiment—whether men, if left to their own devices, could govern themselves and exploit the earth better than when in leading strings. At times his natural impatience made him very angry at political developments. ‘‘Democratical States,” he wrote Lafayette, “must always feel before they can see:—it is this that makes their Governments slow—but the people will be right at last.” Once, in an optimistic mood, he described himself to Lafayette as a “citizen of the great republic of humanity . . . I consider how mankind may be connected like one great family in fraternal ties . . . the world is evidently much less barbarous than it has been, its melioration must still be progressive.”

It was the personality of Washington which held the army, and with it the nation, together through the darkest days of the war his character was the guaranty which induced the states to adopt the constitution; his vision of the future of the new nation more closely approximated what actually developed than did that of any of the other founding fathers. He was, in very truth, the father of his country.

 Notes

Thomas Jefferson

1. The rule of descent for the island was different than for the earldom, and thus Man had passed out of the hands of the earls of Derby a few years before. Back

2.  Italics added. Back

John Hancock

1. James Truslow Adams, Portrait of an Empty Barrel, Harper's Magazine, September, 1930. Back

Bibliographical Note

The quotations from Jefferson are chiefly from P. L. Ford’s edition of his writings; from John Adams, from his grandson’s edition of his Works; from Washington, from W. C. Ford’s edition. Other books from which I have quoted largely are:

Charles Francis Adams (editor): Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife,

Charles Francis Adams (editor): Letters of Mrs. Adams.

Abram English Brown: John Hancock His Book.

Harry Alonzo Cushing (editor): The Writings of Samuel Adams. 

John C. Fitzpatrick (editor): The Diaries of George Washington. 

Paul Leicester Ford: George Washington.

William Wirt Henry: Patrick Henry's Life, Correspondence and Speeches.

William Maclay: Journal. (I have used the edition published in 1927, containing an introduction by Charles A. Beard).

Henry S. Randall: The Life of Thomas Jefferson.

Moses Coit Tyler: Patrick Henry.

William V. Wells: The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams.

This does not begin to be a list of the books I have read. Nor does it purport to be a bibliography of the subject. Since I have not identified my quotations by footnotes, my object in making this note is to give the reader a clue to their source. Even so, it is not complete. A few quotations from Washington and Jefferson, for example, are to be found in other editions than those referred to above.

K. B. U.

It is perhaps needless to point out how much I am indebted for my analysis of “Jeffersonianism” to J. B. Bury’s The Idea of Progress. The influence of the various works of Professor Charles M. Andrews should also be apparent in my analysis of eighteenth-century English colonial politics.

Index

This reproduction of the index contains all the entries and subentries in the original print edition.