Chapter VIII ADVESPERASCIT I

WHEN he left the Presidency, Mr. Jefferson was about twenty thousand dollars in debt. His own Embargo Act had hit him hard, in common with all agrarian producers. He had accepted certain obligations of others, in addition to his own, some for his son-in-law, Martha’s husband, who had sunk into despondency and inertness, and some for a friend as unfortunate as himself. Hence his later years were a continuous and unsuccessful struggle against insolvency. In a normal market, his property would have come to a total value of perhaps two hundred thousand dollars; enough to make him feel, by any kind of reasonable expectation, that his debts were not excessive, and that they were well secured—“not beyond the effect of some lopping of property,” as he wrote Madison, “which would have been but little felt.” But there is never a normal market for a forced sale. He even believed that in time he could have paid his debts out of income, “had crops and prices for several years been such as to maintain a steady competition of substantial bidders,” and it is just possible that he might have done so. But by 1825 the screws had been put hard down on the agrarian; “a long succession of unfruitful years, long-continued low prices, oppressive tariffs levied on other branches (of industry) to maintain that of manufactures, . . . calamitous fluctuations in the value of our circulating medium . . . had been long undermining the state of agriculture.” This kind of thing was already an old story. Besides, the rich new lands of the West stood in desolating competition with the relatively poor, mismanaged and largely exhausted lands of Virginia. Aside from use-value, too, since the government permitted unlimited private ownership in these new lands and in whatever resources of minerals and timber they might be found to contain, they held out the lure of an incalculable speculative value. This also was an old story in the year 1825.

Mr. Jefferson had already sold his library. When the first Congressional Library was burned by the British in 1814, he offered his books to Congress at their own price, as the nucleus of a new collection. The Congress behaved a good deal better about this, on the whole, than one would expect. They wrangled a good deal. It was said that some of Mr. Jefferson’s books were of an immoral and atheistical tendency. They had been told that his library contained one book at least, maybe more, by a man named John Locke, and something by another man named Rousseau, who was thought to be a Frenchman. These were reputed to be subversive, perhaps specifically, perhaps only in a general way—they were under suspicion, at allevents—and it would be a matter of evil example for the Congress to buy them and make them accessible. Furthermore, many of Mr. Jefferson’s books were printed in foreign languages, and therefore of no use whatever to the members of Congress. Still, for some reason, there was a good deal of public feeling in favour of the purchase; the newspapers had been very strong about it. So it was finally decided that if the library could be had at something under half price, it would probably be about the fair thing all round, and the purchase might be made. The Congress accordingly appraised the library at a little under twenty-four thousand dollars; Mr. Jefferson accepted the offer and never permitted himself to comment upon it. He threw in a catalogue and a classification for good measure, gratis; and his classification remained in official use in the Library of Congress for seventy-five years.

This transaction was closed in 1815. Within the next ten years, things went into such desperate straits that in 1826—within two months of eighty-three, within six months of death, and with the responsibility of several dependents—Mr. Jefferson faced the prospect of being turned out of doors. He had only landed property, and everywhere in Virginia this had “lost the character of being a resource for debts.” Buyers were few, at best; and those who might buy held off for a bottom price, knowing that the sale was forced. In these circumstances, he thought of putting a fair valuation on his property, and disposing of it by lottery. This was a regular practice, “often resorted to before the Revolution to effect large sales, and still in constant use in every State for individual as well as corporation purposes.” But the Legislature of Virginia had taken over the licensing and regulation of lotteries, which made it necessary to move for the passage of a special Act. There was no alternative, nothing else to do. “If it is permitted in my case,” he wrote Madison, “my lands here alone, with the mills, etc., will pay everything and leave me Monticello and a farm, free. If refused, I must sell everything here, and perhaps considerably in Bedford, move thither with my family where I have not even a log hut to put my head into, and whether ground for burial, will depend on the depredations which, under the name of sales, shall have been committed on my property.”

He accepted the bitter choice of appealing to the Legislature. There were great searchings of heart about the propriety of his proposals. Lotteries were immoral, somewhat like games of chance with cards or dice. They were immoral because they offered something for nothing, which was really gambling, and gambling was wrong—wrong in a broad general sense, that is, and admitting certain definite exceptions, like transactions in stocks and governmental securities, and holding land for a rise. The Legislature had grave doubts; the moral and religious sentiment of the State was very sensitive on the subject of lotteries, and this sentiment was probably sound. Its soundness or unsoundness was of little practical moment, however, for an unsound sentiment expresses itself at the polls as effectively as a sound one. Something should be done for Mr. Jefferson, no doubt. Perhaps he might accept a loan from the Treasury, of eighty thousand dollars, without interest, for the rest of his life. This could be managed; the proposer of this alternative might take it up tactfully with Mr. Jefferson, and see how he felt about it.

It would not do. “In any case I wish nothing from the Treasury,” Mr. Jefferson replied. He had always been paid the full wage of his various offices, and he could countenance no further claim on his behalf. “The pecuniary compensations I have received for my services from time to time, have been fully to my own satisfaction.” Yet he had no false pride. When private persons voluntarily brought relief, he saw nothing against taking it. It was in the service of the great majority of his countrymen that he had been ruined, and when some of them came forward, in the only way they could, “to repay me, and save an old servant from being turned like a dog out of doors,” he could find neither antipathy nor scruple against their “pure and unsolicited offering of love.” But public money, “wrung from the taxpayer,” who had no choice but to pay, was another matter, and he would have none of it. It was regrettable that the Virginia Legislature saw reason to fear a compromising precedent in the proposed lottery, but he could not complain; the decision was theirs to abide by, and therefore it must be theirs to make. “I had hoped the length and character of my services might have prevented the fear in the Legislature of the indulgence asked being quoted as a precedent in future cases. But I find no fault with their adherence to a rule generally useful, although relaxable in some cases, under their discretion, of which they are the proper judges.”

The interests that Mr. Jefferson had served all his life were too unorganized, immobile and inattentive to do much for him. Their view of him was indistinct, as of one of a generation not their own. They knew in a vague way that he was supposed to have been more or less on their side, but they could hardly say how, or to what extent. He had always been reputed rich, and his fellow-producers, in so far as incessant preoccupation with the problems of labour and livelihood permitted them to think of him at all, still thought of him as rich; and even when his condition became known to them, what was every one’s business was no one’s. It was the “rich and wellborn” who came to his rescue, and they were by no means out of character in doing so. The fact is interesting that while taking excellent care of their own advocates and servants, “the rich and well-born” are not often averse to doing the generous thing by a fallen enemy, if they are sure he has fallen for good and will not rise again. The moment the Eastern cities had the news that Mr. Jefferson was in straits, the mayor of New York picked up the first few thousand dollars he could lay his hands on at short notice, and sent it on with the cordial assurance that there was plenty more where it came from. Philadelphia, where but a few years before people refused to speak to Mr. Jefferson on the street, and turned corners to avoid a meeting with him, extemporized a similar emergency-contribution, as did Baltimore and other cities. At this time, moreover, the lottery was finally sanctioned by the Legislature, after months of earnest lobbying; but the inflow of unsolicited gifts made it for the moment seem unnecessary, and it was never held.

Mr. Jefferson died in the belief that his debts were taken care of, and his family assured of a permanent home at Monticello. His last few weeks were therefore truly happy; as he said, his gratification “closed with a cloudless sun a long and serene day of life.” But within six months most of his personal property was sold for debt, and all of it within a year. His lands were sold as soon as the depressed market would permit. His daughter and her family were turned out of their home; they received some assistance, but lived more or less poorly and precariously, getting on as best they might; and Monticello was alienated for a century, to serve as an object of idle sentiment and yet more idle curiosity to generations which its builder knew not, and which knew not him.

II

A dominant sense of form and order, a commanding instinct for measure, harmony and balance, unfailingly maintained for fourscore years towards the primary facts of human life—towards discipline and training, towards love, parenthood, domesticity, art, science, religion, friendship, business, social and communal relations—will find its final triumph and vindication when confronting the great fact of death, “the great problem,” Mr. Jefferson wrote Correa, “untried by the living, unreported by the dead.” Looking back over his experience of life, he found it good; so good, so interesting and desirable, as to be well worth having over again— “You ask,” he wrote John Adams, “if I would agree to live my seventy, or rather seventy-three, years over again? To which I say, yea. I think with you, that it is a good world on the whole; that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us. There are indeed (who might say nay) gloomy and hypochondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present and despairing of the future; always counting the worst will happen because it may happen. To these I say, How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened! My temperament is sanguine. . . . My hopes indeed sometimes fail, but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.”

Yet though life had been good, though to relive it were desirable, in the appointed time of its relinquishment it was a thing to be relinquished willingly and with satisfaction. “Depart then satisfied,” was the last great injunction that Marcus Aurelius laid upon himself, “for he also who releases thee is satisfied.” In this forecast of departure there was none of the pain, the horror and the ugliness of dying. Like a guest unexpectedly summoned from a banquet, one would rise quietly from one’s place and go one’s way without reluctance, glad of one’s participation, and in turn glad to go. “Our next meeting,” Mr. Jefferson wrote Mrs. Adams, “must be in the country to which [the past years] have flown—a country for us not now very distant. For this journey we shall need neither gold nor silver in our purse, nor scrip nor coats nor staves. Nor is the provision for it more easy than the preparation has been kind. Nothing proves more than this, that the Being who presides over the world is essentially benevolent. Stealing from us one by one the faculties of enjoyment, searing our sensibilities, leading us like the horse in his mill, round and round the same beaten circle, . . . until, satiated and fatigued with this leaden iteration, we ask our own congé. I heard once a very old friend, who had troubled himself with neither poets nor philosophers, say the same thing in plain prose, that he was tired of pulling off his shoes and stockings at night, and putting them on again in the morning.”

The last letter that Mr. Jefferson ever wrote was in acknowledgment of an invitation from the city of Washington, to take part in a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In this, the wisdom which comes with death guided him into a singularly happy formulation, the clearest and most forceful that he ever made, of his lifelong contention “that the mass of mankind was not born with saddles on their backs, nor a favoured few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” Then, almost at once, his last illness, which was rather a debility than an illness, came upon him. As he grew weaker, it became evident that his mind was being much revisited by events of half a century before. On the night of the third of July, he sat up in bed, went through the motions of writing, and said some words, only partly intelligible, about the Revolutionary Committee of Safety. He seemed to wish to live until the Fourth; he never spoke out plainly about it, but once or twice inquired whether it was yet the Fourth, and when told at last that it was, he appeared satisfied. He died painlessly at one o’clock in the afternoon, about five hours before his old friend and fellow, John Adams; it was the only time he ever took precedence of him, having been all his life “secondary to him in every situation” except this one.

After his death, his daughter Martha opened a paper that he had handed her two days before. It contained words which he never spoke—words which one does not speak—words of loving thankfulness for her devotion to him, declaring that the thought of parting from her was “the last pang of life,” and promising to bear her love to the “two seraphs,” her mother and her little sister, long shrouded in death, who now awaited him.

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VIRO EXIMIO
EDGARDO SPEYER
HUNC LIBELLUM
PROBARI CUPIT
ALBERTUS IAIIUS NOCK