Chapter II BEGINNINGS I

THE general poverty of fact and record concerning Mr. Jefferson’s early years is threadbare in the matter of his marriage. No one knows how he met his wife, or what she was like. There is a tradition that her daughter Mary, or Maria, as she later came to be known, resembled her. As far as this tradition goes, therefore, there is ground for thinking she was a slender brunette of medium height, gentle, pretty and amiable, and otherwise not greatly gifted. Probably she was somewhat musical, though as it was then more or less the conventional thing for a girl to thrum on a spinet for general results, if she could afford to have one, there is no certainty about this. Mr. Jefferson himself played the violin diligently for years, practising, he says, three hours a day over a long period. When travelling, he habitually carried the type of small violin called a kit, for the sake of employing his odd moments in practice. He is represented as having a keen virtuoso taste in music ; but this again is uncertain, for nearly every youth in the social life of that day was some sort of township expert on the fiddle, and there is no clear evidence that Mr. Jefferson’s taste and skill were much above the average, and there is a little—a very little—to show that it was not. After the battle of Saratoga, the prisoners of General Burgoyne’s army were concentrated in Virginia, some in Mr. Jefferson’s neighbourhood, where he treated them with great kindness and hospitality. Among these was an English captain named Bibby, who fiddled duets with Mr. Jefferson, and said he was one of the best violinists he ever heard. Still, Captain Bibby’s heart was warmed by circumstances; and besides, no one really knows how well qualified he was to have an opinion. On the other hand, after Mr. Jefferson had set up housekeeping at Monticello, he wrote to a European correspondent whose name is unknown, asking him to look up some amateur musicians in the labouring class, and send them over; and in this letter one must remark with doubt the rather special character of the ensemble he contemplates setting up. “The bounds of an American fortune will not admit the indulgence of a domestic band of musicians, yet I have thought that a passion for music might be reconciled with that economy which we are obliged to observe. I retain among my domestic servants a gardener, a weaver, a cabinet-maker and a stone-cutter, to which I would add a vigneron. In a country where, like yours, music is cultivated and practised by every class of men, I suppose there might be found persons of these trades who could perform on the French horn, clarinet or hautboy, and bassoon, so that one might have a band of two French horns, two clarinets, two hautboys and a bassoon, without enlarging their domestic expense.” Again, he writes some years later from Paris to his friend Hopkinson, somewhat exaggerating, it would seem, the importance of “your project with the Harmonica, and the prospect of your succeeding in the application of Keys to it. It will be the greatest present which has been made to the musical world this century, not excepting the Piano-forte.”

However, tradition says that Mr. Jefferson was a good musician, and that he loved music there can be no doubt. “This is the favorite passion of my soul, and fortune has cast my lot in a country where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism.” It was something, certainly, to be so clearly aware of this. He played with Governor Fauquier and “two or three other amateurs in his weekly concerts.” The year before his marriage, he ordered a clavichord for Monticello, but almost immediately countermanded the order, saying, “I have since seen a Forte-piano and am charmed with it. Send me this instrument then instead of the clavichord: let the case be of fine mahogany, solid, not veneered, the compass from Double G to F in alt., a plenty of spare strings: and the workmanship of the whole very handsome and worthy the acceptance of a lady for whom I intend it.” Whether this was in appreciation of his sweetheart’s proficiency, or to tempt her to become more proficient, or both, no one knows. Tradition says, again, that his musical accomplishments, whatever they were, put him ahead of other suitors for the much-courted lady who became his wife, and that they fixed her choice.

The marriage took place on New Year’s Day, 1772; the marriage license-bond, drawn up in Mr. Jefferson’s own handwriting, is still in existence, calling for the payment “to our sovereign lord the King” of the sum of fifty pounds current money of Virginia, in case there should be found any “lawful cause to obstruct a marriage intended to be had and solemnized between the above-bound Thomas Jefferson and Martha Skelton, of the county of Charles City, widow.” The bond shows an odd momentary lapse of attention to his wife’s status, for he mechanically wrote in the usual word “spinster,” then crossed it out and wrote “widow.” His wife was the daughter of John Wayles, a prosperous lawyer. She was twenty-three years old, and had lived an uneventful life of two years with her first husband, Bathurst Skelton, by whom she had one child, a son who died in infancy. Her father died a year after her second marriage, and her inheritance, after the clearance of Mr. Wayles’s debts, which Mr. Jefferson observes “were very considerable,” came to an amount “about equal to my own patrimony, and consequently doubled the ease of our circumstances.”

While at college, Mr. Jefferson thought of building a house at Williamsburg. “No castle, though, I assure you,” he wrote John Page, “only a small house which shall contain a room for myself and another for you, and no more, unless Belinda should think proper to favour us with her company, in which case I will enlarge the place as much as she pleases.” But when Belinda’s whims disappeared from consideration, the plan disappeared too; and in 1769, just before his mother’s house at Shadwell burned down, he took steps toward making a home on the top of a small mountain which formed part of his estate in Albemarle, near the present city of Charlottesville. By the time of his marriage, he had completed a small structure here, a story-and-a-half brick pavilion, as the beginning of an ambitious architectural design; and thither he took his bride in a two-horse phaeton, from her home in the county of Charles City, a distance of one hundred miles over indescribable roads, in midwinter of one of the hardest seasons that Virginia had ever seen. Before leaving, he got out his pocket account-book and entered every item of expense that the wedding had cost him, including the fees he gave to the two officiating clergymen and some small fees to musicians and servants.

As they went up the country, the snow deepened until finally they were obliged to abandon the phaeton and go forward on horseback. The last eight miles of the journey lay over no better than a kind of bridle-path, two feet deep in snow; and when they reached Monticello late at night, the pavilion was deserted, there was no fire in it and nothing to make one of, nothing to eat or drink save part of a bottle of wine that they rummaged from a shelf behind some books, and not a servant anywhere within call. The general historical value of Virginian family tradition may not too unfairly be suggested by the statement given out on authority of the Jeffersons’ oldest daughter, that “tempers too sunny to be ruffled by many ten times as serious annoyances in after life, now found but sources of diversion in these ludicrous contretemps, and the horrible dreariness was lit up with song and merriment and laughter.”

Mrs. Jefferson somehow managed to live ten years. The Marquis de Chastellux, who visited Monticello in the year of her death, speaks of her as “a mild and amiable wife.” She was presumably literate, and her husband was an indefatigable letter-writter. His part in public affairs from 1772 to 1782 kept him a good deal away from home, and a considerable correspondence must have passed between them. Of this, however, nothing remains. Except for entries in some household accounts which may have been hers, and an appeal addressed to the women of Virginia during the Revolution, there is probably not a line of her writing in existence. Mr. Jefferson’s published letters refer to her perhaps half-a-dozen times, and then usually to remark his anxiety over her persistent bad health. Mrs. Jefferson bore her first child a little less than ten months after her marriage, and the family register kept by Mr. Jefferson on a leaf of his prayer-book is a record of the progressive inanition that ended in her death:

Martha Jefferson was born September 27, 1772, at 1 o’clock A.M.

Jane Randolph Jefferson, born April 3, 1774, at 11 o’clock A.M. She died September——, 1775.

A son, born May 28, 1777, at 10 o’clock P.M. Died June 14, at 10 o’clock and 20 minutes A.M.

Mary Jefferson, born August 1, 1778, at I o’clock and 30 minutes A.M. Died April 17, 1804, between 8 and 9 P.M.

A daughter, born in Richmond, November 3, 1780, at 10 o’clock and 45 minutes P.M. Died April 15, 1781, at 10 o’clock A.M.

Lucy Elizabeth Jefferson, born May 8, 1782, at 1 o’clock A.M. Died ——,. 1784.

---

Martha Wayles Jefferson died September 6, 1782, at 11 o’clock, 45 minutes A.M.

But if all Mr. Jefferson’s family correspondence lay open to view, no doubt it would have value only for its implications. Hide thy life, said Epicurus; and no one ever succeeded better than Thomas Jefferson at hiding his inner springs of sentiment. He was the most approachable and the most impenetrable of men, easy and delightful of acquaintance, impossible of knowledge. In matters of opinion, principle or public policy he was always ready to speak out, and did speak out, with a frankness sometimes astonishing; but in more intimate matters, especially in matters of affection and feeling, he never spoke out. Undoubtedly he had great regard for his father and mother, but he seldom mentions either. His memoirs say nothing of his mother, beyond giving record of her name and family; and the few words about his father are quite impersonal. His letters are silent about his mother, and speak of his father only once, by way of gratitude for having had him taught Greek and Latin. “I thank on my knees him who directed my early education,” he writes Dr. Priestley in 1800, “for having put into my possession this rich source of delight.” Even here one feels the sense of constriction and effort in the realm of the emotions; he does not say straight out, “I thank my father” in his usual plain style, but resorts to a Miltonian paraphrase. There is no doubt that he had an extraordinary faculty of attaching people to himself, though no one can know how he did it, and he has the record, remarkable under the circumstances, of never having forfeited an attachment; his few breaks, notably the one with John Adams, being but temporary, and healing without a mark. It is hard to see how affections as deep and strong as his undoubtedly were, can flow indefinitely without revealing some at least of their channels of communication; but in his case, there is no sign of them. Undoubtedly Mr. Jefferson loved his wife with an extraordinary depth of devotion. It must have been so, for there is a clear record that when she died he was inconsolable, and that he remained always quietly faithful to her memory, never finding room in his heart for any other woman. Probably she may have had her moments of understanding him, yet one is forced to wonder what their aggregate amounted to.

While she lived, this mild and amiable wife made her achievements, whatever they were, by indirection and the sacrifice of personality; and to earn the posthumous reward they got, they must have been considerable, though of a nature that puts them beyond any power of assessment. Her death, curiously, continued her in the rôle of achievement by indirection and sacrifice, for it determined her husband’s return to public life. Since his marriage in 1772, Mr. Jefferson had served in the Continental Congress, drafted the Declaration of Independence, served in the Virginia Assembly, done most of the work on the committee appointed to revise the laws of Virginia, and served two terms as Governor of Virginia. In 1782 he decided that he had done enough in public office to earn the right to uninterrupted enjoyment of “my family, my friends, my farm and books” thenceforth. He wrote a long letter to Monroe, protesting against the idea that the State had a right to commandeer indefinitely the political services of its members. This, he says, “would be slavery, and not that liberty which the Bill of Rights has made inviolable,” and for his part, he had a clear conscience about retiring. He had his own measure; he was aware that a person can best do, and should do, the kind of thing that really interests him. “Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science,” he told Dupont de Nemours, “by rendering them my supreme delight.” But just at the intended turn in his career, his wife died, leaving him in “the stupor of mind which had rendered me as dead to the world as was she whose loss occasioned it.” His scheme of life had been determined. “I had folded myself in the arms of retirement,” he wrote the Marquis de Chastellux three months later, “and rested all prospects of future happiness on domestic and literary objects. A single event wiped away all my plans, and left me a blank which I had not the spirits to fill up. In this state of mind an appointment from Congress found me, requiring me to cross the Atlantic,” as one of the commissioners to negotiate peace with Great Britain.

Monticello and its memories had become insupportable to him; his mind went back to the trip to Europe that he had promised himself so long ago, in the gay days of Belinda and his correspondence with John Page—the trip that, what with the uncongenial routine of revolutions, drafts of declarations, revising statutes, office-holding and the like, had never come off. He accepted the appointment, but even then the trip did not come off. Before his ship sailed, word came that the peace was already in a way to be concluded, and Congress recalled his appointment. But his scheme of life was now recast; he still had his seat in Congress; and, for good or ill, he put aside his plans for employing the rest of his days in the tranquil pursuits of science, with his family, his friends, his farm and books. What heart could be in it, without “the cherished companion of my life, in whose affections, unabated on both sides, I had lived the last ten years in unchequered happiness”? It was then nineteen years since that September night when, on his way back to Williamsburg, he wrote from Richmond to William Fleming, “Dear Will, I have thought of the cleverest plan of life that can be imagined. You exchange lands for Edgehill, or I mine for Fairfields, you marry Sukey Potter, I marry Rebecca Burwell, join and get a pole chair and a pair of keen horses, practise the law in the same courts, and drive about to all the dances in the county together. How do you like it?”

II

When Mr. Jefferson graduated from the society of Fauquier, Small and Wythe, set up for himself and brought his bride to Monticello, he brought with her a profession and a trade. He was a lawyer as well as a farmer, having been admitted to practice after going through his paces in Mr. Wythe’s office. He practised law but a very short time, however, only until Governor Fauquier’s successor, Lord Dunmore, of unpleasant memory, closed the Virginian courts; then he retired forever from the profession, closing out his practice to Edmund Randolph, whom Washington subsequently made Attorney-General. Being well-to-do, he could choose his practice, and having a distaste for the life of an advocate or jury lawyer, he became a consultant. He had little respect for the court lawyer’s attainments, having cut his eye-teeth on them some years before, when Patrick Henry, “the laziest man in reading I ever knew,” turned up at Williamsburg for a license to practise law on the strength of six weeks’ study, and actually got it, George Wythe being the only one of four examiners with conscience enough to refuse consent. Mr. Jefferson was circumspectly fascinated by Henry, as by some kind of living curiosity; he regularly shared his quarters with him when Henry came to Williamsburg to attend court. He was always just to Henry’s talents as a popular orator, and to the service he did in the revolutionary cause. He says that Henry’s gifts for spellbinding “were great indeed; such as I never heard from any other man. He appeared to me to speak as Homer wrote.” Yet it was sheer spellbinding. “I have frequently shut my eyes while he spoke, and when he was done asked myself what he had said, without being able to recollect a word of it.” Appreciating Henry fully, however, and really liking him, Mr. Jefferson had no respect for his professional type; and as the type increased and multiplied after its kind, this aversion was reinforced by an acute sense of the detriment done the profession. After retiring from practice, he writes Mr. Wythe that he thinks the bar of the General Court a good training-ground for judges, “if it be so regulated that science may be encouraged and may live there. But this can never be,” he goes on indignantly, “if an inundation of insects is permitted to come from the county courts and consume the harvest. . . . Men of science then (if there were to be any) would only be employed as auxiliary counsel in difficult cases. But can they live by that? Certainly not. The present members of that kind therefore must turn marauders in the county courts; and in future none will have leisure to acquire science.”

Experience, in short, bred the same squeamishness towards law that he entertained towards medicine—“it is not to physic that I object so much as to physicians”—even though he himself could afford to keep aloof from “the mob of the profession,” and even though all he knew about their temptations, fortunately, was by hearsay. As a consulting lawyer he did extremely well. His accounts show earnings of about three thousand dollars per year from his profession, as against something like two thousand dollars from his trade of farming; and this was a good income, for the time. But his distaste grew steadily, and even after he gave up practice, it kept on growing. His earlier experience in practical politics and in government-building, where he saw the worst degeneration of legal theory and practice, their frankest dissociation from anything resembling justice and the public good, increased his detestation of lawyers; and it was brought to full growth by the chicanery that he found in high triumphant progress on his return to America in 1789, after five years of ambassadorship in Europe. As he passed into old age, it became inveterate. In 1810, advising a namesake on the choice of an occupation, he remarks that if a physician ends his days conscious that he has saved some lives and not killed anybody through carelessness, he will have “the happy reflection of not having lived in vain; while the lawyer has only to recollect how many, by his dexterity, have been cheated out of their right and reduced to beggary.” If Congressmen talk too much, “how can it be otherwise,” he writes contemptuously in 1821, “in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?”

While his practice lasted, nevertheless, the disciple of Small brought to it all the scholarship, industry, precision and speed of a true “man of science,” as well as the touch of distinction and elevation which he contrived to put upon everything he did. Virginia had taken over English law in the gross, largely because the colonial lawyers—at all events, the “men of science” among them—already knew it, but chiefly, perhaps, because it was the only code written in a language that American lawyers could read. When the time came for Virginia to revise her statutes in conformity with her new political relations, Mr. Jefferson was a member of the Assembly. He took his seat in October, 1776. A month before this, he had resigned his seat in the Continental Congress, where he had already had some instructive experience with lawyers in their deliberative capacity. “As the old Congress always sat with closed doors,” said John Jay, years afterwards, “the public knew no more of what passed within than what it was deemed expedient to disclose.” When Mr. Jefferson left Congress, he also declined an appointment to go to France with Franklin to negotiate a treaty of alliance and commerce. To a man who liked preferment for its own sake, this appointment was flattering enough, but it was not otherwise an interesting commission. France had to be gotten into the war on the side of America, by hook or by crook, and in a hurry, too, for the military fortunes of the Revolution were at their lowest ebb; and Mr. Jefferson may reasonably have felt himself lacking in the peculiar gifts of persuasion and bargaining required for that kind of service. His own account of the matter, however, is not to be disparaged. His wife was ill—there was no doubt about that—and even Philadelphia, let alone Paris, was too far away from home. Besides, there were plenty of fish to be fried in Virginia. “I knew that our legislation, under the regal government, had many very vicious points which urgently required reformation, and I thought I could be of more use in forwarding that work.” So, for the next five years, he abandoned national interests and stuck to Virginia, always impatiently looking forward to the time when, having done what was to be done in helping his own State to weather through the period of war and reconstruction, he might call his “tour of service” finished for good and all.

With all his distaste for lawyers and the ways of lawyers, his professional training stood him in well during his service in the Virginia Assembly. He drafted and brought in a great flock of bills of a routine character, and four which represented the groundwork of his whole legislative scheme. These he considered as “forming a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of ancient or future aristocracy, and a foundation laid for a government truly republican.” They are chiefly interesting now as showing how short a way they went towards these desirable ends. One was for repealing the laws of entail; and this, he quite sincerely believed, “would prevent the accumulation and perpetuation of wealth in select families, and preserve the soil of the country from being daily more and more absorbed in mortmain.” Another was for the abolition of primogeniture, substituting the equal partition of estates, which he called “the best of all agrarian laws.” A third was for religious liberty, to relieve the people from taxation for the support of a State church. The old days in Williamsburg had shown Mr. Jefferson quite enough of a State-owned religious monopoly, its establishment being “truly of the religion of the rich, the dissenting sects being entirely composed of the less wealthy people.” The fourth bill comprised a scheme for general popular education, which he thought would qualify the citizenry “to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government.”

So great an advance did these measures represent that they had a hard time passing into law, and the education bill never did pass in its entirety. Yet they were popular measures, all but the education bill which had no warm friends worth speaking of; the others touched a popular sentiment. As a desire for free trade was the animating spirit of the Revolution in one section of the country—that is to say, among the merchants and traders of New England—so free land was the desideratum among Virginians. They wanted to see the great royal land-grants broken up; they hated this monopoly as much as the Massachusetts merchant hated the British monopoly of his trade, and for the same reason: the merchant would do better in a free competitive market, and the Virginian would do better if he could get hold of some of the monopolized land for himself. Bills like Mr. Jefferson’s, therefore, which squinted in the direction of this popular desire, were well received. Actually, the Virginian never got his free land; the royal patentee was dislodged only to give place to the speculator. Still, like Patrick Henry and many others, he might turn speculator himself, which was even better—there was always the chance of that—so Mr. Jefferson’s bills were good bills. They had, however, to run the gauntlet of a small and compact opposition, in which a number of motives had place, and as many prejudices, social, economic and religious. Washington and Patrick Henry, for instance, were not for pure voluntaryism in religion. They were for a compromise, whereby a general tax should be imposed for the support of churches, but leaving the individual taxpayer free to designate the denomination to which his contribution should go. “Although no man’s sentiments are more opposed to any kind of restraint upon religious principles than mine are,” Washington wrote to George Mason, “yet I confess that I am not among the number of those who are so much alarmed at the thoughts of making people pay towards the support of that which they profess.” Washington was not impressed, apparently, by the prompt degeneration of a State-owned church into a mere political agency, which was the fact that chiefly impressed Mr. Jefferson, as it had impressed John Adams; and it lay at the root of the disestablishment-bill.

The Virginia Legislature shilly-shallied over these measures interminably; and not only over these, but over a general ratification of the work of the committee appointed to revise the existing statutes; which work was practically all done by Mr. Jefferson and George Wythe. There was nothing startling in this revision; nothing new, for instance, on the subject of slavery. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate,” said Mr. Jefferson, “than that these people are to be free.” But he became well aware—wearily aware—that “the public mind would not yet bear the proposition.” Indeed, if the temper of the Legislature was any index of the public mind, it would not until 1796 bear even the proposition to limit the death penalty to cases of murder and treason, or to eliminate the lex talionis from the criminal code. The revisers did the best they could, but their report still expressed to a great degree what Mr. Jefferson called the “revolting principle” of retaliation; it retained such penal measures as gibbeting, executing poisoners by poison, punishing maiming by maiming, and the like; and yet the Legislature paltered along over the routine portions of the revision “until after the general peace in 1785, when by the unwearied exertions of Mr. Madison, in opposition to the endless quibbles, chicaneries, perversions, vexations and delays of lawyers and demi-lawyers, most of the bills were passed by the Legislature with little alteration”—and eleven years later, in 1796, the criminal code, which was lost by one vote in 1785, was finally passed.

Mr. Jefferson’s professional training came handy to him occasionally also in his subsequent long career of office-holding; sometimes in drafting opinions as Secretary of State under Washington, and once notably during his own Presidency, in the celebrated Batture Case, to evict Edward Livingston from possession of a flat or shoal in the Mississippi, near New Orleans, called the Batture Sainte Marie. Mr. Jefferson’s papers in this case, and particularly the recapitulatory brief which he drew up for use of his counsel when Livingston brought suit against him in 1811, are the work of a great lawyer, a great “man of science,” and none the less great for being disillusioned. When John Adams read it, he said, “You have brought up to the view of the young generation of lawyers in our country, tracts and regions of legal information of which they never had dreamed.” Mr. Jefferson’s profession owed him nothing; the time and energy put in on it were well spent. “Every political measure,” he wrote, “will forever have an intimate connexion with the laws of the land; and he who knows nothing of these will always be perplexed and often foiled by adversaries having the advantage of that knowledge over him.”

Under pressure of a disillusionment essentially similar, his disposition to take part in public affairs evaporated with his interest in his profession. Apart from any question of abstract faith in republicanism and the parliamentary principle, he had quite got his fill of parliamentary bodies. The Continental Congress was bad enough; its tedious pettiness, its factions and feuds, its incessant collisions of self-interest and local interest, made its service profoundly distasteful. Yet after he had drawn in his horns and retired to his own State, there was the Virginia Assembly which was even worse. After trying to work with it as a legislator, he tried working for it as an executive; he served two years as Governor, during 1779 and 1780, in succession to Patrick Henry. He took office at the worst possible time. The State was defenceless, at the mercy of the British; it was without military resources. He was as helpless at withstanding the enemy’s incursions as Henry had been at anticipating them. He had to endure the popular complaint that is always made in such circumstances; and like any parliamentary body in such circumstances, the Assembly was always ready to make a scapegoat of the Executive. A motion for his impeachment, however, came to nothing; the charges were preposterous; indeed, the affair ended by the Assembly offering Mr. Jefferson a unanimous and handsome resolution of amends. This was all very well; it was a time of great stress and some allowances must be made. Yet it is a humiliating and repugnant business to put oneself at the mercy of a crew of third-rate people who do not know their own mind and have no self-reliance. Had there not, indeed, been a strong movement in the Assembly to throw over republican government in the crisis, and set up a dictator? Of this Mr. Jefferson wrote indignantly that “the very thought alone was treason against the people; was treason against mankind in general; as rivetting forever the chains which bow down their necks, by giving to their oppressors a proof, which they would have trumpetted through the universe, of the imbecility of republican government, in times of pressing danger, to shield them from harm.”

But should one go on indefinitely exposing oneself to the brunt of ignorance, slackness, stupidity, irresponsibility and petty self-interest? Replying to Monroe’s remonstrances, he says that “however I might have comforted myself under the disapprobation of the well-meaning but uninformed people, yet that of their representatives was a shock on which I had not calculated.” Mr. Jefferson had not perhaps yet learned the official character of representatives, but he was learning fast, and his own feeling was that he had learned enough. He was forty years old, and more than half his life was yet before him. He had been, as he wrote Monroe, thirteen years engaged in the public service in one way and another; and “during that time I had so totally abandoned all attention to my private affairs as to permit them to run into great disorder and ruin.” So much was enough. Enough of public affairs, enough of representative parliamentary bodies, enough of lawyers! Henceforth he would live as a farmer, a student and an organizer of civilized amenities at Monticello. “I have taken my final leave,” he writes Edmund Randolph, “. . . I have returned to my farm, my family and books, from which I think nothing will ever more separate me.” This letter is dated September 16th, 1781; and one year later, lacking ten days, Mrs. Jefferson died.

III

Mr. Jefferson wrote his own epitaph, in which he describes himself as “author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.” We have his own word for it that these are the three achievements by which he most wished to be remembered; although he may have regarded them more impersonally than his words suggest, as illustrative of certain principles in which he was most interested. He seems so rarely to have taken a personal view of anything that this latter interpretation bears some probability. There is in existence, however, a brief note or memorandum, unfinished, undated, but evidently written when he was well along in years, a mere scrap, which lists in part his achievements for the public good. They are run off so informally that one may perhaps discern a suggestion of the relative importance that he assigned them in his own mind. The list begins abruptly:

I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all. I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things; but they would have been done by others; some of them, perhaps, a little better.

The first item on the list is this:

The Rivanna had never been used for navigation; scarcely an empty canoe had ever passed down it. Soon after I came of age, I examined its obstructions, set on foot a subscription for removing them, got an Act of Assembly passed and the thing effected, so as to be used completely and fully for carrying down all our produce.

Then follows a bare notation of the Declaration of Independence; and the several items of his work on the Virginia statutes stand without comment. After this, he mentions his importation of olive trees from France in 1789 and 1790, for experimental planting in South Carolina and Georgia, and of heavy upland rice from Africa in 1790, “which I sent to Charleston in hopes it might supersede the culture of the wet rice which renders South Carolina and Georgia so pestilential through the summer.” His paramount interest then comes out in the remark that “the greatest service which can be rendered to any country is to add a useful plant to its culture, especially a bread grain; next in value to bread is oil.” Politics, as Homer said of words, “may make this way or that way,” but to live at all, people must eat food; and the only way that food can be provided for them is by some one “labouring the earth” to produce it.

This dry but fundamental truth seems never to have been far out of Mr. Jefferson’s mind. It governed his estimate of politics, of trade and commerce, of banking and manufacturing. “When first he dabbled in public affairs, in pre-Revolution days, he was aware that whatever community of interest prevailed among the colonies was purely temporary and factitious. Massachussetts and Virginia, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, had for the time being to hang together, as Franklin said, lest all hands should hang separately later in London. All must unite to make the Revolution a success, but it was clear that as soon as this occasional interest was disposed of, the collision between their permanent interests would take place; and Mr. Jefferson made up his mind early—or, rather, his mind made itself up—about the side he was on. While Secretary of State in 1793, when the battle of economic interests was well under way, he wrote to an unidentified correspondent, “When I first entered on the stage of public life (now twenty-four years ago) I came to a resolution never . . . to wear any other character than that of a farmer.”

But even as Virginian farming went in those days, he was not a good practical farmer. “To keep a Virginia estate together,” he wrote mournfully to Monroe in the last year of his life, when his poverty amounted to destitution, “requires in the owner both skill and attention. Skill I never had, and attention I could not have; and really, when I reflect on all circumstances, my wonder is that I should have been so long as sixty years in reaching the result to which I am now reduced.” If he had kept to his great resolution of 1781—that is to say, if his wife had not died—he might have become a better farmer than he was. Still, he was right about himself; skill he never had, and it is doubtful that he could have had it. He was careful, assiduous, diligent, ingenious and no end wissenschaftlich—in all respects a man after Dr. Small’s own heart—nor was he quite the type of scientific adventurer who knows everything except what to do with his knowledge. Apparently he managed well, and he managed under uncommon difficulties; yet with all allowances made, he somehow lacked the knack of making more than fair-to-middling success. The Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, who visited him in 1796, compliments the high quality of his management, especially complimenting the excellent treatment of his slaves; but he is struck with all a thrifty Frenchman’s horror at the wastefulness of the “detestable method” of exhausting the soil and abandoning it, piece by piece, to recover as best it may. He remarks dryly that Mr. Jefferson “has drawn the principles of culture either from works which treat on this subject, or from conversation,” which might perhaps do for Virginia, and he hopes for the best, but which he must say is often a misleading kind of knowledge, “and at all times insufficient in a country where agriculture is well understood,” as in France, for example. Perhaps the distinguished exile compared the hillside fields of Albemarle with those of the Auvergne, coddled and coaxed to the limit of fertility as long ago, probably, as when they were swept by the vigilant eye of Vercingetorix. The Duke mentions with dismay that on worked-over land—land that had been exhausted and left for a while to recuperate—the farmers of Albemarle got only about four bushels of wheat to the acre; and Mr. Jefferson himself writes in 1815 to the French economist Say, that “our best farmers (such as Mr. Randolph, my son-in-law) get from ten to twenty bushels of wheat to the acre; our worst (such as myself) from six to eighteen”!

Yet some of Mr. Jefferson’s anticipations in the science of agriculture are interesting. He seems, for instance, to have done something in the way of efficiency studies, though the purpose to which they were directed is not clear.

Julius Shard fills the two-wheeled barrow in 3 minutes, and carries it 30 yards in 1 ½ minutes more. Now this is four loads of the common barrow with one wheel. So that suppose the 4 loads put in at the same time viz. 3 minutes, 4 trips will take 4 × 1½ minutes = 6, which added to 3 minutes filling = 9 minutes to fill and carry the same earth which was filled and carried in the two-wheeled barrow in 4½. From a trial I made with the same two-wheeled barrow, I found that a man could dig and carry to the distance of 50 yds, 5 cubical yds of earth in a day of 12 hours length. Ford’s Phill did it; not overlooked [i.e. supervised] and having to mount his loaded barrow up a bank 2 f. high and tolerably steep.

When Mr. Jefferson ventured into this special technique, he also took on something of the efficiency-engineer’s slowness to see that the human being is not for all purposes a machine. His farm-book has this note on the rye and wheat harvest of 1795:

Were the harvest to go over again with the same force, the following arrangement should take place:

The treading-floors should be laid down before harvest. ½ a doz. spare scythes should be mounted, and fingers for ½ a dozen more ready formed, bent and mortised, and some posts should be provided.

1, Great George, with tools and grindstone mounted in the single mule cart, should be constantly employed mending cradles and grinding scythes. The same cart would carry about the liquor, moving from tree to tree as the work advanced.

18 cradlers should work constantly.

18 binders, of the women and abler boys.

6 gatherers, to wit. 5 smallest boys and 1 large for a foreman.

3 loaders, Moses, Shepherd and Joe, leading the carts successively with the drivers.

6 stackers,

2 cooks,

4 carters

---

58

8 would remain to keep half the ploughs a-going.

---

66

In this way the whole machine would move in exact equilibrio, no part of the force could be lessened without retarding the whole, nor increased without a waste of force.

This force would cut, bring in and shock 54 acres a day, and complete my harvest of 320 acres in 6 days.

As a matter of mathematics, there could be no doubt about this. Yet when the plan was put in practice on the next harvest, the imponderabilia, as Bismarck called them, stepped in and wrecked his calculations. The whole machine did not move in exact equilibrio—far from it. On July 2, we have the entry, “We stopped our ploughs, the pickers not keeping up with the cutters.” Again: “Though 18 mowers had been fixed on and furnished with 27 scythes, yet the wheat was so heavy for the most part that we had not more than 13 or 14 mowers cutting on an average.” Finally, alas! for the calculation of a complete harvest, cut, brought in and shocked in six days, though Dr. Small himself might have put the great seal of his certification on every figure, “13 cutters × 12 days = 156, which gives near 2 acres a day for each cutter, supposing 300 acres.” ¹

Remembering Poe’s acute observation that the truly practical man must be a balanced combination of mathematician and poet, one often finds the sheer mathematician predominating in Mr. Jefferson’s dealings with human nature on the farm; as, for instance, in the observation that “a barrel of fish costing seven dollars goes as far with the labourers as two hundred pounds of pork costing fourteen dollars.” Many entries, too, seem over-curious. “Cart. H. Harrison tells me it is generally allowed that 250 lb. green pork makes 220 lb. pickled.” His own experiment turned out that “100 lb. of green pork makes 88 lb. pickled do. or 75 lb. of bacon.” He weighed a ham and shoulder when green: “The one weighed 24 lb. the other 17 lb. After they were made into bacon each had lost exactly a fourth.” Then the really important fact is dropped in with somewhat the air of an afterthought, “They were of cornf ed hogs.” In considering his grain harvest, he makes note that “G. Divers supposes that every cubic yard of a stack of wheat yields generally 2 bushels of grain,” and that “Jo. Watkins says he knows from actual experiment that wheat loses 2 lb. in the bushel weight from Oct. to January, which is 1 pr. cent pr. month”; also “it is thought that any ground will yeild as much wheat as rye, and that wheat exhausts less than rye.”

There is too little of the poet also in his minute observation that the interstices in corded wood, according to one authority, make one-third of the whole volume; remarking, however, that “various experiments giving from 10 parts solid for from 3½ to 8 interstices, averaged on the whole 3 parts solid to 2 void, so that the interstices are 2/5 and the solid 3/5.” The predominant mathematician is not content to know that cutting firewood with a saw is faster and less wasteful than cutting it with an axe. “The loss of wood in cutting firewood with an axe is 15 pr. cent, and takes twice as long as the saw, a tree of 18 i. being crosscutted in 4 minutes, and cut with the axe in 8 minutes.” Again: “The circuit of the base of Monticello is 5¼ miles; the area of the base about 890 acres. Within the limits of that base I this day tried the temperature of 15 springs, 10 on the South and 5 on the N. side of the mountain, the outward air being generally about 75° of Farenheit.” He then tabulates the result of this investigation, but there is nothing remarkable about the figures, and one can not make out from them any reason why he should have taken all this trouble to get them. Again: “Tom with his 3 small mules brings 15 bundles of nailrod = 840 lb. in his cart from Milton, which he considers is a very heavy load.” “Phill’s 3 mules bring 1600 lb. from Milton, a very heavy load for them. It was 25 bundles of nailrod and 200 lb. bar iron.”

Yet entries like these, little practical as they may be, are not quite worthless. They may be taken as a parallel to that other category of entries which runs along with them, noting the appearance of leaves, flowers and wild fruits, and the motion of birds and insects. Late in January of one year, for example, after record of the temperature comes the entry, “blue-birds are here.” On March 11, “blackbirds here”; on the 17th, “almonds bloom”; on the first of April, the single word “lilac”; on the second, “whippoorwill”; on the ninth, “martins appear.” In June, there is note of “a solar eclipse, almost total”; later in the month, “aurora borealis at 10 h. pm, ab^t 45° high on the horizon”; and still later, “a feild lark at Shadwell, the first I ever saw so far Westerly.” In the autumn again, in October, there is the line, “walnut and mulberry lost leaves.” Later in the month, the sobering record, “Cherry, common locust, lost leaves. First frost at Montic.”; and a week afterwards, “Poplars, white mulberry, wild crab, nearly stripped of leaves.” The winter was near.

The Duke of Saxe-Weimar paid a visit to Monticello in the last year of Mr. Jefferson’s life. He saw him in his setting of long, laborious days beginning at dawn—“the sun has not caught me in bed in fifty years”—noting carefully the wind and the weather, his eye on the leaves and flowers, his ear open to the birds’ note; isolated among “plain, honest and rational neighbours, some of them well informed and men of reading, all superintending their farms, hospitable and friendly, and speaking nothing but English”; intensely curious about the most insignificant of nature’s doings, getting opinions about them from the experience of fellow-labourers like G. Divers and Jo. Watkins, and diligently recording what he learned. In the English version of the Duke’s reminiscences, there is an odd and unusual translation of the German word ehrwürdig, which somehow sticks in one’s mind as most appropriate. On the morning of his departure, he says, “after breakfast, which we took with the family, we bid the respectable old man farewell, and set out upon our return to Charlottesville.”

IV

Mr. Jefferson’s farming managed to pay its way for a time, but not by a comfortable margin. At almost any point in his history one is prepared to find him anticipating the modern lawyer-farmer, who practises law to keep the farm going. He had an immense amount of land; so much that if land had been taxed even nominally, he would have been land-poor. He owned more than a dozen properties, with a total of nearly eleven thousand acres; half of it in Albemarle County, half in Bedford and Campbell. In 1774 he became owner, by land-patent, of the Natural Bridge, in Rockbridge County, a matter of about 150 acres. He acquired this out of a sheer art-collector’s spirit; he was in love with the place, “the most sublime of nature’s works. . . . It is impossible for the sensations arising from the sublime to be felt beyond what they are here. . . . The rapture of the spectator is really indescribable.” He had thoughts now and then “of building a little hermitage at the Natural Bridge (for it is my property) and of passing there a part of the year at least”; but his building operations were always more or less over-extended, and he never got around to this one. Not one-fifth of his land in Albemarle was under cultivation, and not one-sixth of his property in Bedford. The property at Monticello came to a little more than one thousand acres, and it barely sufficed to keep the household going; it did not—if one can believe it—yield enough surplus to feed the guests. True, the household was large; the house-servants alone numbered between thirty and forty. Guests, moreover, came not singly or occasionally, but in hordes, with horses and carriages and servants; in the last twenty years of Mr. Jefferson’s life, it may be said literally and without exaggeration that they ate him out of house and home. There was a good deal of hill-side farming, too, on the Monticello property. But making every possible allowance for everything, almost any kind of farming ought to enable a thousand acre property to give a better account of itself than Monticello ever gave; for in 1794 he records that on this property “on both sides of the river we have made thirty-seven and a half bushels of wheat above what has been sowed for next year”!

He complains of “the ravages of overseers,” during his protracted absences on public duty, and no doubt they were bad. With a touch of grim humour he speaks his mind about overseers, and also about the Virginian implantation of Scots-Irish, in a letter to William Wirt, written in 1815 in reply to a question concerning class-distinctions in early Virginian society. “Certain families had risen to splendour by wealth and the preservation of it from generation to generation under the law [of] entails; some had produced a series of men of talents, families in general had remained stationary on the grounds of their forefathers, for there was no emigration to the westward in those days. The wild Irish, who had gotten possession of the valley between the Blue Ridge and North Mountain, forming a barrier over which none ventured to leap, and would still less venture to settle among. . . . There were then aristocrats, half-breeds, pretenders; a solid independent yeomanry, looking askance at those above, yet not venturing to jostle them; and, last and lowest, a fæculum of beings called overseers, the most abject, degraded and unprincipled race, always cap in hand to the Dons who employed them, and furnishing material for the exercise of their pride, insolence and spirit of domination.” In his farm-book he makes note of “articles for contracts with overseers,” in one of which there is the odd provision that overseers are “not allowed to keep a horse or a goose, or to keep a woman out of the crop for waiting on them.” Some light on the ways of overseers, perhaps, appears in the agreement that the overseer shall “exchange clear profits with his employer at the end of the year, if the employer chuses it.” The overseer, too, must “pay his share of liquor and hiring at harvest,” as a measure for promoting economy in the use of both.

Bad as the ravages of overseers may have been, however, there were worse, due to the military policy of terrorism established in Virginia by Cornwallis. Mr. Jefferson’s interest in the four thousand prisoners of Burgoyne’s army, quartered in Virginia, had been substantial. He helped them establish themselves comfortably, made their officers at home in his house, and came publicly to their defence when the rural population, in a silly panic over a possible scarcity of food, was bringing pressure on Governor Henry to make them move out. For this he got their lasting gratitude and friendship, and with some of them, such as von Riedesel, von Geismer, and von Unger, he kept up acquaintance for a long time. His philosophy of the occasion is shown in a letter to the British major-general Phillips, acknowledging some complimentary phrases, and remarking that “the great cause which divides our countries is not to be decided by individual animosities. The harmony of private societies can not weaken national efforts. To contribute by neighbourly intercourse and attention to make others happy, is the shortest and surest way of being happy ourselves.” This novel doctrine no doubt puzzled Phillips considerably, for he was a good soldier, with a soldier’s mentality and a soldier’s sense of the public value of “individual animosities” in time of war; but it seems, nevertheless, to have made some impression on him.

Thus it was, probably, that some of the bread which Mr. Jefferson sowed on the turbid waters of nationalist hatred came back to him at the hands of Tarleton, one of the subordinate British commanders in eastern Virginia. The unexpected strength shown by the Americans in the North, and the unexpected obstinacy of their resistance, caused the British to turn their attention to Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia, in a campaign of devastation. Phillips and Arnold ravaged the Tidewater and Piedmont sections of Virginia, and Tarleton moved on Albemarle County to disperse the Assembly which was in session at Charlottesville. By this time Mr. Jefferson had succeeded Patrick Henry in the Governorship. While gathering up and bagging what stray legislators he could find, Tarleton, who despite his profession seems to have been much of a man, sent a detachment to Monticello under Captain McLeod, to go through the motions of capturing Governor Jefferson.¹ The expedition really amounted to no more than this. Tarleton gave strict orders that nothing at Monticello should be injured. Mr. Jefferson rode away from the house on horseback no more than five minutes before McLeod appeared, and no serious effort was made to overtake him. Captain McLeod remained at Monticello for a day, reconnoitring in a perfunctory fashion, and then moved off. Some of his men chivvied the negro house-servants a little, merely by way of entertaining themselves, but no harm was done to anyone or to anything.

In general, however, the British did their work with great thoroughness. “History will never relate the horrors committed by the British army in the Southern States of America,” Mr. Jefferson wrote to Dr. Gordon. “They raged in Virginia six months only. . . . I suppose their whole devastations during those six months amounted to about three millions sterling.” Mr. Jefferson’s properties outside Albemarle fell under the hand of Cornwallis himself, who seems to have been untroubled by scruples of any kind. “He destroyed all my growing crops of corn and tobacco. He burned all my barns containing the same articles of the last year, having first taken what corn he wanted; he used, as was to be expected, all my stock of cattle, sheep and 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 thirty slaves. Had this been to give them freedom, he would have done right; but it was to consign them to inevitable death from the small pox and putrid fever, then raging in his camp. . . . Wherever he went, the dwelling-houses were plundered of everything which could be carried off.”

Severe as these losses were, Mr. Jefferson never alluded to them publicly, as far as is known, until seven years afterward, when in answer to Dr. Gordon’s inquiries, he wrote the foregoing account of them in a characteristically objective fashion. He contented himself with entering his “losses by the British in 1781” as a bare business item in his farm-book. From his Cumberland property, eight slaves “fled to the enemy and died.” Of twenty-seven others from his various properties, some “caught small pox from enemy and died”; some “joined enemy, returned and died.” Some stay-at-homes “caught the camp fever from the negroes who returned, and died.” He was faithful to the sick runaways, even to those who were too far gone to have any further value as property, bringing them back on mattresses and stretchers, and giving them care. “Expenses seeking and bringing back some” are put down at twenty pounds sterling, and he “paid Doctors attending sick” sixty-five pounds.

These interruptions and devastations were bad for farming. In this same year, 1781, Mr. Jefferson records that most of the crops which he had on his undamaged properties were “lost for want of labourers.” With the drawbacks of war, long absence, intense preoccupation with public affairs, “the ravages of overseers,” slave labour and a series of bad seasons, all added to the fact that Mr. Jefferson, notwithstanding his science, ability and diligence, had not much of the humbler man’s natural knack with practical farming, one is not surprised that his agricultural operations went on three legs to the end. The astonishing thing, as he himself says, is that they should have managed to drag on for so long a time as sixty years before coming to their final breakdown in bankruptcy.

V

One great bar to his prosperity in early days was Mrs. Jefferson’s share of a debt incurred by her father to some British creditors. This amounted, in round numbers, to four thousand pounds sterling; and various depreciations of currency and fluctuations in exchange resulted actually in his paying the debt three times over, at a sacrifice of nearly half his estate. The general matter of debts due from the colonists to British creditors was an important public question which remained unsettled until the adoption of the Constitution. It was felt by many that since these debts had been in large part brought about by deliberate manipulation in the English market, they might fairly be repudiated. Several States, in fact, had enabled their repudiation, more or less directly. Mr. Jefferson was not unsympathetic towards this view, but declined to exercise it in his own interest. “What the laws of Virginia are or may be,” he wrote his creditors, “will in no wise influence my conduct. Substantial justice is my object, as decided by reason, and not by authority or compulsion.” The damages inflicted on him by Cornwallis more than offset the debt; still, that was a matter of public policy, while the debt was a private affair, the British creditors were private persons, and he thought that the line between private and public responsibility should be kept as clear as the line between private animosities and public issues. He finally satisfied his creditors by selling his land on virtual terms of a forced sale. His first sale for this purpose amounted to £4200, and he afterwards told his grandchildren in grim jest that he got only enough out of it in real money to pay for a new overcoat; for he sold at hard-money prices, taking in payment bonds which were subsequently redeemed in paper money worth about two cents in the dollar.

He carried on some manufacturing operations on his properties under stress of necessity, for the rural proprietors in Virginia had to make nearly everything they used. “Every article is made on his farm,” wrote the Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. “His negroes are cabinetmakers, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, smiths, etc. The young and old negresses spin for the clothing of the rest.” Mr. Jefferson did not go in for clothmaking on a large scale, however, until some years after the Duke’s visit, when commerce with Europe was interrupted by the circumstances which led up to the war of 1812; then, vowing his independence of foreign manufacturers, he put in improved machinery which, “costing $150 only, and worked by two women and two girls, will more than furnish” the two thousand yards of linen, cotton and woollen goods which he needed yearly. He employed slaves at shoemaking, noting in his farm-book that “a side of upper leather and a side of soal make 6 pr. shoes and take ½ lb. thread, so that a hide and 1 lb. of thread shoe 6 negroes.” His cost-accounting system brings the “worth of a pair of shoes,” reckoning labour at two shillings, to eight shillings sixpence. It seems a good price, though slave labour was slow and inefficient. Every line of work, indeed, felt this steady drag of inefficiency. “Johnny Hemings began the body of a Landau Jan. 12, and finished it this day, being 9 weeks + 5 days. He had not more help from Lewis than made up for his interruptions. The smith’s work employed the 2 smiths perhaps of the same time.” Again: “Johnny Hem. and Lewis began a dressing-table and finished it in exactly 6 weeks of which 4 weeks was such dreadful weather that, even within doors, nothing like full work could be done.”

One of the perplexities incidental to the employment of slave labour lay in finding something for the children to do. Mr. Jefferson’s way was perhaps as good as any. “Children till 10 years old to serve as nurses; from 10 to 16 the boys make nails, the girls spin; at 16 go into the ground [i.e. go at farm-work] or learn trades.” Mr. Jefferson’s nailery and his grist-mill on the Rivanna were the only enterprises that he operated for profit; and here again it appears that the cheapest labour is the dearest. His cost-sheet on the nailery, or “Estimate on the actual work of the autumn of 1794,” with its record of nearly one-fourth net wastage, is a remarkable exhibit of industrial inefficiency.

But what better could be done with these boys? They could not be effectively disciplined. They could not be discharged; they were slave-children, permanently on one’s hands. It was to no purpose to try to educate them beyond their slave-status; and even if one killed them off, their place would be taken almost immediately by others precisely like them.

VI

While Mr. Jefferson’s services to practical agriculture netted him little or nothing, they were of great benefit to the nation at large. Whenever he heard of a new device that bore upon farming, he promptly looked it up and wrote about it to his fellow-farmers. In the midst of the turmoil of 1793, when as Washington’s Secretary of State he saw the Administration fast going on the rocks, the country at the boiling point over the economic implications of the Constitution, and himself “worn down with labours from morning to night and day to day, knowing them as fruitless to others as they are vexatious to myself,” he asks Madison whether he had “ever taken notice of Tull’s horse-hoeing plow,” and says it is of doubtful value. Two months later, when the French minister Genêt had “thrown down the gauntlet to the President,” and one of Genêt’s consuls had employed armed force against a United States marshal in the matter of the seizure of two vessels in Boston harbour; when pestilence, of which “at first 3 out of 4 died, and now about 1 out of 3,” was ravaging Philadelphia, the temporary capital—he informs Madison that his threshing machine has arrived, and that “fortunately the workman who made it (a millwright) is come in the same vessel to settle in America. I have written to persuade him to go on immediately to Richmond, offering him the use of my model to exhibit, and to give him letters to get him into immediate employ in making them.” Shortly after this, he writes with enthusiasm about a new seed-box which “reduces the expense of seeding from six shillings to two shillings and threepence the acre, and does the business better than is possible to be done by the human hand.”

He found leisure to work out several devices of his own, but never patented one of them, “never having thought of monopolizing by patent any useful idea which happens to offer itself to me.” On the contrary, whenever he devised anything useful, he always published a description of it. Of his hemp-beater, for example, he says, “As soon as I can speak of its effect with certainty I shall probably describe it anonymously in the public papers, in order to forestall the prevention of its use by some interloping patentee.” He was stepmotherly towards patents. “Nobody wishes more than I do that ingenuity should receive a liberal encouragement,” and no doubt “an inventor ought to be allowed a right to the benefit of his invention for some certain time.” Yet on the other hand, “it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention are as fruitful . . . in new and useful devices” as England, the only country which granted them. The line between use and abuse was hard to draw; and it should in any case be drawn by “men of science” rather than by lawyers and legislators, since “we might in vain turn over all the lubberly volumes of the law to find a single ray which would lighten the path of the mechanic or the mathematician.” Mr. Jefferson’s bill of 1791 “to Promote the Progress of the Useful Arts” represented probably the best practical compromise that could be made between the interests of the inventor and those of the public; and it is no doubt due to him that the course of American patent law has borne no harder upon the public’s interests than it has.

For himself, however, he would have nothing to do with patents. He had no taste for money made out of any form of monopoly. In 1810, when the country was pursuing a policy of commercial isolation, it was a mark of high patriotism not to use imported goods. About this time, merino sheep were introduced with a view to improving the wool of domestic textiles, and the demand for them at once opened a harvest for the alert profiteer. “I have been so disgusted with the scandalous extortions lately practised in the sale of these animals, and with the ascription of patriotism and praise to the sellers, as if the thousands of dollars apiece they have not been ashamed to receive were not rewards enough, that I am disposed to consider as right whatever is the reverse of what they have done.” He accordingly writes to President Madison, suggesting a plan for the gradual co-operative distribution of the merino stock, gratis, among all the farmers of Virginia. “No sentiment is more acknowledged in the family of agriculturists than that the few who can afford it should incur the risk and expense of all new improvements, and give the benefit freely to the many of more restricted circumstances.” From doing this in the case of the merinos, he says there will “more satisfaction result to ourselves than money ever administered to the bosom of a shaver”; and then, remembering how Madison’s inveterate cautiousness was sharpened by residence in the White House, he adds characteristically, “There will be danger that what is here proposed, though but an act of ordinary duty, may be perverted into one of ostentation; but malice will always find bad motives for good actions. Shall we therefore never do good?”

He did his best to promote the culture of the fig, mulberry and sugar maple, as especially suitable to a slave-holding country, because it afforded light and appropriate labour for women and children, who were “often employed in labours disproportioned to their sex and age.”

CHART OF THE STATE OF THE VEGETABLE MARKET IN WASHINGTON FROM 1800 TO 1809

He experimented with a peach-orchard to prove that “five acres of peach trees at twenty-one feet apart will furnish dead wood enough to supply a fireplace all winter, and may be kept up at the trouble of only planting about seventy peach stones a year.” Each year that he was in the White House he kept record of the first and last appearance of every variety of vegetable—thirty-seven in all—put on sale in the Washington market; and he made a neat tabulation at the end, covering the whole period of eight years. He projected a kind of co-operative volunteer weather bureau, and actually did something with the idea, but his life was so much interrupted by long absences that it could not be fully carried out. Observing that the type of plough in general use could be improved, he worked out the mathematical formula, which still governs the shape of ploughshares, for a mould-board of least resistance. The French national institute of agriculture examined one of his ploughs, and gave him a prize for it. This plough was still on view in Paris a few years ago, and probably may be seen there even now. Timepieces were scarce among the poorer farmers of Virginia; so in 1811, while laid up with a run of rheumatism at Poplar Forest, “I have amused myself with calculating the hour-lines of a horizontal dial for the latitude of this place, which I find to be 37° 22′ 26″.” He sent the formula with directions for making the sun-dial, to a friend in Williamsburg, suggesting that it be passed along, since the calculations “would serve for all the counties in the line between that place and this, for your own place, New London, and Lynchburg in this neighbourhood.” He devised the leather buggy-top which is still in use. When phosphoric matches came out, he was among the first to try them, and he turned himself into a kind of volunteer agency for advertising and distributing them as “a beautiful discovery and very useful, especially to heads which, like yours and mine, can not at all times be got to sleep.” About this time, also, or perhaps a little later, he conferred an unintended benefit upon the bureaucracies of all civilized lands, by inventing the swivel-chair.

¹ Shortly after this time, the Southern planters generally began to make studies in industrial efficiency, and developed a highly effective technique in scientific management, although, like Molière’s hero, they did not call it by that name, or indeed, by any name. With this development came the rise of excellent agricultural journals which still repay perusal from a practical as well as an antiquarian interest. Some of their reports make depressing reading. There is, for instance, an actuarial estimate, well worked out and doubtless accurate, that the life of a labourer in the rice-fields would last eight years. In reckoning depreciation of capital, therefore, the planter calculated that his investment in a slave would evaporate in that period, and he managed accordingly.

¹ Mr. Jefferson’s term had, in fact, expired two days before Tarleton’s demonstration.