tration while he was Vice President of the United States; no doubt he did seek to make himself the acknowledged head of his party; and to all this, there are thousands who will add, no doubt too, he had his eye steadily fixed upon "the recompense of reward." His manifold services in the legislature of Virginia are next presented; and lest it should be thought that the grant to him of a lottery, which he was soliciting from the legislature as a mode of procuring more money for his estate than he could obtain by an ordinary sale, would be a dangerous precedent, he insists upon it that no other man is ever likely to have so strong a claim as his. "Let those (says he) who shall quote the precedent bring their case within the same measure. Have they, as in this case, devoted three score years and one of their lives, uninterruptedly, to the service of their country? Have the times of those services been as trying as those which have embraced our revolution? Have the stations of their trial been of equal importance? Has the share they have borne in holding their new government to its genuine principles, been equally marked ?"*

Now we desire to be understood in this matter: our remarks are intended simply to exhibit the high opinion Mr. Jefferson entertained of himself and his doings; we are endeavoring to develope a trait of character, to prove the existence of a self-love which made him covetous of admiration and applause, to account for his extreme sensitiveness to attacks made upon him. He could not listen with a generous gratification to the commendations bestowed upon such of his compeers, as were likely to stand toward him in an attitude of rivalry. Of General Washington he could sometimes, though not always, speak favorably; for he had nothing to apprehend from his claims. The country had acknowledged them, and that great and good man was retiring from the scene, not entering upon it. No rivalry was to be apprehended there; but not so with others. Thus, in that remarkable chronicle of slander and second-hand abuse, the Ana, Hamilton is assailed no less than seventeen times; just one-fourth of all Mr. Jefferson's on dits are levelled against the man whom he felt to be, of all others, his most dangerous competitor for the highest honors of his country.

Another feature in the character of Mr. Jefferson, we are obliged to say, was insincerity. Professor Tucker informs us, that he "was a consummate politician, whenever he deemed a resort to policy expedient and allowable; and few men then had more penetration in fathoming the purposes of others, or

* Correspondence, Vol. iv, p. 437.

concealing his own." Vol. ii. p. 345. In obtaining money from the Virginia legislature for the University, "his knowledge of the springs of human action," "his address in putting it into operation," and his "consummate skill," are made the subject of eulogy by his biographer. He was, beyond doubt, not unskilled in the art of what is called management; and we fear that his tact was something, which simple minded men of honesty usually stigmatize by the hard name of duplicity. professed, commonly, a great degree of friendship for General Washington. If he truly felt it, then did he grossly violate the sacredness of its claims, as we will show directly; and if he did not possess it, then was he guilty of the basest hypocrisy. In either case, the evidence of insincerity is complete.

He

In the instance of abused friendship, to which we have alluded, some of our readers will probably anticipate the evidence which we purpose to adduce. They will at once recall the celebrated "letter to Mazzei." It is of this we mean to speak, more especially as the elaborate effort at apology and explanation, on the part of the biographer is, in our opinion, a signal failure. A word as to the facts may be necessary for the young, whose memories reach not back to the transaction. An Italian, named Mazzei, came to this country and lived near Mr. Jefferson; an intimacy was formed between them, and continued until the return of the foreigner to Tuscany, some time prior to the year 1796. On the 24th of April, in that year, Mr. Jefferson wrote to him a letter, in which he used the following language

"The aspect of our politics has wonderfully changed since you left us. In place of that noble love of liberty and republican government which carried us triumphantly through the war, an Anglican monarchical and aristocratical party has sprung up, whose avowed object is to draw over us the substance, as they have already done the forms, of the British government. The main body of our citizens, however, remain true to their republican principles; the whole landed interest is republican, and so is a great mass of the talents. Against us are the executive, the judiciary, two out of three branch-X es of the legislature, all the officers of the government, all who want to be officers, all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty, British merchants and Americans trading on British capitals, speculators and holders in the banks and public funds, a contrivance invented for the purposes of corruption, and for assimilating us in all things to the rotten as well as the sound parts of the British model. It would give you a fever, were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England. In short, we are

*Correspondence, vol. iii, p. 327.

likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors and perils. But we shall preserve it; and our mass of weight and wealth on the good side is so great, as to leave no danger that force will ever be attempted against us. We have only to awake and snap the Lilliputian cords with which they have been entangling us during the first sleep which succeeded our labors."

General Washington, at the time this was written, was president of the United States; and now, supposing no controversy ever to have arisen concerning this letter, what, we ask, would have been the interpretation put upon it by any plain man of common sense? When he remembered that, in the language of the day then, (even as it is now,) nothing was more usual than to apply the phrase, "THE EXECUTIVE," to our president, as contradistinguished from the two houses of the general legislature; when he called to mind that Mr. Jefferson himself, in common with the rest of his countrymen, did so use the phrase ;* what could he have supposed the letter to mean but this:That there was a party in the country, so friendly to a system like that of the English monarchy, that they openly avowed a purpose of introducing, not the mere forms, the ceremonies of the British government; but something which went beyond forms, even the substance of the English system, which is monarchy, and, legislature partly hereditary and partly elective :That to this party belonged the president of the United States, "the Executive;" the judges of the United States' court, "the judiciary;" and either the Senate, or House of Representatives, which, together with the Executive, already enumerated, would form "two out of three branches of the legislature:"That there was no man in the United States who better deserved to be called a "Samson in the field," than George Washington; and that as he had already been designated as one of the monarchical party, he was here again marked out by an additional description, as an "apostate" from republican principles ?

Now this was precisely the interpretation which plain men, of ordinary understanding, did put upon this letter, when it appeared for the first time in a French official newspaper. Its publication greatly annoyed Mr. Jefferson, as appears from a letter of his to Mr. Madison, in which, after some attempts to show that the substitution of the word form for forms, was vastly important, (though the more unequivocal and unexceptionable term, substance, remained in full force,) he thus proceeds :

* He has so used it in a letter to Mr. Burr, published in the "Correspondence." See Tucker, vol. ii. p. 380.

"Now it would be impossible for me to explain this publicly without bringing on a personal difference between General Washington and myself, which nothing, before the publication of this letter, has ever done."*

Accordingly, Mr. Jefferson was for a long time silent. At length, in June, 1824, he addressed a letter to Mr. Van Buren, in which he enters upon a labored explanation of what he did mean. In this he states that, by Samsons in the field, he meant the society of the Cincinnati-dwells upon the change of forms to form-says not one syllable explicitly as to whom he did intend to designate by the term "the Executive," though he did not mean, he says, the president—and, informing his correspondent that General Washington was completely under the influence of the federal, monarchical party, he adds :

"His measures consequently took more the hue of the party in whose hands he was. These measures were certainly not approved by the republicans; yet were they not imputed to him, but to the counsellors around him and his prudence so far restrained their impassioned course and bias, that no act of strong mark, during the remainder of his administration, excited much dissatisfaction. He lived too short a time after, and too much withdrawn from information, to correct the views into which he had been deluded; and the continued assiduities of the party drew him into the vortex of their intemperate career, separated him still farther from his real friends, and excited him to actions and expressions of dissatisfaction, which grieved them, but could not loosen their affections from him."†

And as to the assertion, that "two out of the three branches of the legislature" were favourable to monarchy, Mr. Jefferson informs Mr. Van Buren that there was an obvious exception of the president, "it being well known that the majorities in the two branches of Senate and Representatives were the very instruments which carried, in opposition to the old and real republicans, the measures which were the subjects of condemnation in this letter." Now we cannot help remarking, that, if this had been so, it was clearly needless to name the Executive at all, unless it were intended to implicate him also: but more of this hereafter.

The defence made by professor Tucker is substantially this: that Mr. Jefferson, in his writings always considered General Washington as a republican; and therefore could not have designed to represent him to Mazzei as a monarchist; that he meant "Hamilton, Adams, Jay, the Pinckneys, and some others," who, as he tells us, "then guided the executive councils, but who by their Anglican attachments and antigallican

* Correspondence, vol. iii. 363. + Correspondence, vol. iv. p. 407.

prejudices, were endeavoring as much as they could to assimilate our government to that of Great Britain." Vol. i, p. 523.

The explanation therefore is, in few words, that the heads of departments, the judiciary, &c. were monarchists, and that they were the individuals responsible for the lurking treason which Mr. Jefferson's sagacity had discovered, and not the president. George Washington, good easy man, was one who in the hands of these dexterous traitors was even as clay in the hands of the potter! He wanted both wisdom and firmness to appreciate and uphold a government for which he had through seven long years periled life, fame and fortune! But let that pass. This whole matter may be brought within a very narrow compass without needlessly multiplying words. Either General Washington was influenced by his cabinet to fall in with their monarchical predilections, or he was not: if he was, then he was a monarchist, and Mr. Jefferson has only to stand by his assertion concerning "the Executive;" it is true, and therefore needs neither apology nor explanation: if he was not a monarchist, (and Mr. Jefferson says he was not) then does it strike us as marvellously strange that the only explanation offered by Mr. Jefferson, is an attempt to show that he was, by his having been influenced by his cabinet to the adoption of monarchical opinions.

It only remains on this subject to say a word as to Mr. Jefferson's declaration to Mr. Van Buren, that by two out of three branches of the legislature he meant the two houses of Congress, both of whom he said were in opposition to the old republican principles. Now this is notoriously untrue, and professor Tucker is obliged to admit that Mr. Jefferson himself has elsewhere acknowledged that a majority of the house of representatives were of the republican party. "This must be conceded; but it is only an evidence of his lapse of memory, in grounding an argument on a subordinate fact in support of what he knew to be the truth." Vol. i, p. 525.

A subordinate fact! Why this very subordinate fact, as our author is pleased to term it, is the real jugulum causa: the precise question at issue is, which two of the three branches of the legislature were implicated in Mr. Jefferson's charge. If he meant the two houses, as he has specifically named the executive also, he should have said "all the three branches are against us." And, in investigating what was his meaning, it is of primary importance to know that one of the three branches was on his side, and that he was aware of the fact. Having ascertained these two things, there can be no doubt as to his meaning, if he understood the use of language: and the pretence of a lapse