Every man should be protected in his lawful acts. --

TITLE: To Isaac McPherson.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 175.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

We were far from considering you as the author of all the measures we blamed. They were placed under the protection of your name, but we were satisfied they wanted much of your approbation. We ascribed them to their real authors, the Pickerings, Wolcotts, the Tracys, the Sedgwicks, et id genus omne, with whom we supposed you in a state of duresse. I well remember a conversation with you in the morning of the day on which you nominated to the Senate a substitute for Pickering, in which you expressed a just impatience under “the legacy of secretaries which General Washington had left you,” and whom you seemed, therefore, to consider as under public protection. Many other incidents showed how differently you would have acted with less impassioned advisers; and subsequent events have proved that your minds were not together. You would do me great injustice, therefore, by taking to yourself what was intended for men who were then your secret, as they are now your open enemies. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 126.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 387.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: June. 1813

John Adams was the pillar of its [Declaration of Independence] support on the floor of Congress; its ablest advocate and defender against the multifarious assaults it encountered. For many excellent persons opposed it on doubts whether we were provided sufficiently with the means of supporting it, whether the minds of our constituents were yet prepared to receive it &c., who, after it was decided, united zealously in the measures it called for. --

TITLE: To William P. Gardner.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 377.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

Duty tells me that the public interest is so deeply concerned in your perfect knowledge of the characters employed in its high stations, that nothing should be withheld which can give you useful information. --

TITLE: To President Madison.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 101.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

There is no degree of affliction, produced by the loss of those dear to us, which experience has not taught me to estimate. I have ever found time and silence the only medicine, and these but assuage, they never can suppress, the deep drawn sigh which recollection forever brings up, until recollection and life are extinguished together. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 221.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

-- With honesty and self-government for her portion, agriculture may abandon contentedly to others the fruits of commerce and corruption. --

TITLE: To Henry Middleton.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 91.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813

The European nations constitute a separate division of the globe; their treaties make them part of a distinct system; they have a set of interests of their own in which it is our business never to engage ourselves. America has a hemisphere to itself. It must have its separate system of interests, which must not be subordinated to those of Europe. The insulated state in which nature has placed the American continent, should so far avail it that no spark of war kil dled in the other quarters of the globe should be wafted across the wide oceans which separate us from them. And it will be so. --

TITLE: To Baron Von Humboldt.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 268.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 431.

DATE: Dec. 1813
See Canada, Colonies, South America, United States.

Anglomany, monarchy, and separation are the principles of the Essex federalists. Anglomany and monarchy, those of the Hamiltonians, and Anglomany alone, that of the portion of the people who call themselves federalists. --

TITLE: To John Melish.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 96.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 375.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

Annuities for single lives are also beyond our powers, because the single life May pass the term of a generation. This last practice is objectionable too, as encouraging celibacy, and the disinherison of heirs. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 198.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 397.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: 1813 1813 gt;
See Generations.

I have been long endeavoring to procure the cork tree from Europe, but without success. A plant which I brought with me from Paris died after languishing some time, and of several parcels of acorns received from a correspondent at Marseilles, not one has ever vegetated. I shall continue my endeavors, although disheartened by the nonchalance of our southern fellow citizens, with whom alone they can thrive. --

TITLE: To James Ronaldson.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 92.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 370.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. Formerly, bodily powers gave place among the aristoi. But since the invention of gunpowder has armed the weak as well as the strong with missile death, bodily strength, like beauty, good humor, politeness and other accomplishments, has become but an auxiliary ground of distinction. There is, also, an artificial aristocracy, founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents: for with these it would belong to the first class. The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. And indeed, it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society. May we not even say, that that form of government is the best, which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government? The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendency. On the question, what is the best provision, you and I differ; but we differ as rational friends, using the free exercise of our own reason, and mutually indulging its errors. You think it best to put the pseudo-aristoi into a separate chamber of legislation, where they may be hindered from doing mischief by their coordinate branches and where, also, they may be a protection to wealth against the agrarian and plundering enterprises of the majority of the people. I think that to give them power in order to prevent them from doing mischief, is arming them for it, and increasing instead of remedying the evil. For, if the coordinate branches can arrest their action, so may they that of the coordinates. Mischief may be done negatively as well as positively. Of this, a cabal in the Senate of the United States has furnished many proofs. Nor do I believe them necessary to protect the wealthy; because enough of these will find their way into every branch of the legislature to protect themselves. From fifteen to twenty legislatures of our own, in action for thirty years past, have proved that no fears of an equalization of property are to be apprehended from them. I think the best remedy is exactly that provided by all our

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 223.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 425.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

The bill [of the Revised Code of Virginia] for the more general diffusion of learning proposed to divide every county into wards of five or six miles square, like the [New England] townships; to establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing and common arithmetic; to provide for the annual selection of the best subjects from these schools, who might receive, at the public expense, a higher degree of education at a district school; and from these district schools to select a certain number of the most promising subjects, to be completed at an University, where all the useful sciences should be taught. Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 225.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 427.
PLACE: Paris
DATE: 1813

This bill on education would have raised the mass of the people to the high ground of moral respectability necessary to their own safety, and to orderly government; and would have completed the great object of qualifying them to secure the veritable aristoi for the trusts of government to the exclusion of the pseudalists. [* * *] Although this law has not yet been acted on but in a small and inefficient degree, it is still considered as before the Legislature, [* * *] and I have great hope that some patriotic spirit will, at a favorable moment, call it up, and make it the key stone of the arch of our government. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 226.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 428.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

But even in Europe a change has sensibly taken place in the mind of man. Science has liberated the ideas of those who read and reflect, and the American example has kindled feelings of right in the people. An insurrection has consequently begun of science, talents, and courage, against rank and birth, which have fallen into contempt. It has failed in its first effort, because the mobs of the cities, the instrument used for its accomplishment, debased by ignorance, poverty and vice, could not be restrained to rational action. But the world will soon recover from the panic of this first catastrophe. Science is progressive, and talents and enterprise are on the alert. Resort may be had to the people of the country, a more governable power from their principles and subordination; and rank, and birth, and tinsel-aristocracy will finally shrink into insignificance, even there. This, however, we have no right to meddle with. It suffices for us, if the moral and physical condition of our own citizens qualifies them to select the able and good for the direction of their government, with a recurrence of elections at such short periods as will enable them to displace an unfaithful servant, before the mischief he meditates may be irremediable. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 227.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 429.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

The law for religious freedom, [* * *] put down the aristocracy of the clergy [in Virginia] and restored to the citizen the freedom of the mind. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 226.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 428.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

From what I have seen of Massachusetts and Connecticut myself, and still more from what I have heard, and the character given of the former by yourself, who know them so much better, there seems to be in those two States a traditionary reverence for certain families, which has rendered the offices of the government nearly hereditary in those families. I presume that from an early period of your history, members of those families happening to possess virtue and talents, have honestly exercised them for the good of the people, and by their services have endeared their names to them. In coupling Connecticut with you, I mean it politically only, not morally. For having made the Bible the common law of their land, they seem to have modeled their morality on the story of Jacob and Laban. But although this hereditary succession to office with you, may, in some degree, be founded in real family merit, yet in a much higher degree, it has proceeded from your strict alliance of Church and State. Those families are canonized in the eyes of the people on common principles, “you tickle me, and I will tickle you.” --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 224.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 426.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

In Virginia, we have no traditional reverence for certain families. Our clergy, before the Revolution, having been secured against rivalship by fixed salaries, did not give themselves the trouble of acquiring influence over the people. Of wealth, there were great accumulations in particular families, handed down from generation to generation, under the English law of entails. But the only object of ambition for the wealthy was a seat in the King's council. All their court was paid to the crown and its creatures; and they Philipised in all collisions between the King and the people. Hence they were unpopular; and that unpopularity continues attached to their [Col 2] names. A Randolph, a Carter, or a Burwell must have great personal superiority over a common competitor to be elected by the people even at this day. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 224.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 426.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

At the first session of our Legislature after the Declaration of Independence, we passed a law abolishing entails. And this was followed by one abolishing the privilege of primogeniture, and dividing the lands of intestates equally among all the children, or other representatives. These laws, drawn by myself, laid the axe to the root of pseudo-aristocracy. And had another which I had prepared been adopted by the Legislature, our work would have been complete. It was a bill for the more general diffusion of learning. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 225.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 427.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

I have long ago in my heart congratulated my country on your call to the place you now occupy. [* * *] Whatever you do in office, I know will be honestly and ably done, and although we who do not see the whole ground may sometimes impute error, it will be because we, not you, are in the wrong; or because your views are defeated by the wickedness or incompetence of those you are obliged to trust with their execution. --

TITLE: To General John Armstrong.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 103.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Feb. 1813

Tardy enlistments proceed from the happiness of our people at home. --

TITLE: To James Monroe.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 130.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: June. 1813

It is more a subject of joy [than of regret] that we have so few of the desperate characters which compose modern regular armies. But it proves more forcibly the necessity of obliging every citizen to be a soldier; this was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free State. Where there is no oppression there can be no pauper hirelings. --

TITLE: To James Monroe.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 130.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: June. 1813

The unfortunate obstinacy of the Senate in preferring the greatest blockhead to the greatest military genius, if one day longer in commission, renders it doubly important to sift well the candidates for command in new corps, and to marshal them at first, towards the head, in proportion to their qualifications. --

TITLE: To General Armstrong.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 380.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Feb. 1813

There is not, I believe, a service on earth where seniority is permitted to give a right to advance beyond the grade of captain. --

TITLE: To General Armstrong.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 380.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Feb. 1813

We are doomed. [* * *] to sacrifice the lives of our citizens by thousands to this blind principle, for fear the peculiar interest and responsibility of our Executive should not be sufficient to guard his selection of officers against favoritism. --

TITLE: To General Armstrong.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 380.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

When you have new corps to raise you are free to prefer merit: and our mechanical law of promotion, when once men have been set in their places, makes it most interesting indeed to place them originally according to their capacities. It is not for me even to ask whether in the raw regiments now to be raised, it would not be advisable to draw from the former the few officers who may already have discovered military talent, and to bring them forward [Col 2] in the new corps to those higher grades, to which, in the old, the blocks in their way do not permit you to advance them? --

TITLE: To General Armstrong.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 380.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Feb. 1813
See Generals.

I learn with great pleasure the progress you have made towards an establishment on Columbia river. I view it as the germ of a great, free, and independent empire on that side of our continent, and that liberty and self-government spreading from that as well as from this side, will insure their complete establishment over the whole. It must be still more gratifying to yourself to foresee that your name will be handed down with that of Columbus and Raleigh, as the father of the establishment and [Col 2] founder of such an empire. It would be an afflicting thing, indeed, should the English be able to break up the settlement. Their bigotry to the bastard liberty of their own country, and habitual hostility to every degree of freedom in any other, will induce the attempt; they would not lose the sale of a bale of furs for the empire of the whole world. But I hope your party will be able to maintain themselves [* * *] and have no doubt our government will do for its success whatever they have power to do and especially that at the negotiations for peace, they will provide, by convention with the English, for the safety and independence of that country, and an acknowledgment of our right of patronizing the Indians in all cases of injury from foreign nations. --

TITLE: To John Jacob Astor.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 247.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813
See Fur Trade.

It seems to me that in proportion as commercial avarice and corruption advance on us from the North and East, the principles of free government are to retire to the agricultural States of the South and West, as their last asylum and bulwark. --

TITLE: To Henry Middleton.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 91.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

After the loss of the Philadelphia, Captain Bainbridge had a character to redeem. He has done it most honorably, and no one is more gratified by it than myself. --

TITLE: To Matthew Carr.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 132.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

The scheme is for Congress to establish [Col 2] a national bank, suppose of thirty millions capital, of which they shall contribute ten millions in six per cent. stock, the States ten millions, and individuals ten millions, one half of the two last contributions to be of a similar stock, for which the parties are to give cash to Congress; the whole, however, to be under the exclusive management of the individual subscribers, who are to name all the directors; neither Congress nor the States having any power of interference in its administration. Discounts are to be at five per cent., but the profits are expected to be at seven per cent. Congress then will be paying six per cent. on twenty millions, and receiving seven per cent. on ten millions, being its third of the institution; so that on the ten millions cash which they receive from the States and individuals, they will, in fact, have to pay but five per cent. interest. This is the bait. The charter is proposed to be for forty or fifty years, and if any future augmentations should take place, the individual proprietors are to have the privilege of being the sole subscribers for that. Congress are further allowed to issue to the amount of three millions of notes, bearing interest, which they are to receive back in payment for lands at a premium of five or ten per cent., or as subscriptions for canals, roads, and bridges, in which undertakings they are, of course, to be engaged. This is a summary of the case as I understand it; but it is very possible I may not understand it in all its parts, these schemes being always made unintelligible for the gulls who are to enter into them. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 228.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 403.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

The advantages and disadvantages shall be noted promiscuously as they occur; leaving out the speculation of canals &c., which, being an episode only in the scheme, may be omitted, to disentangle it as much as we can. 1. Congress are to receive five millions from the States (if they will enter into this partnership, which few probably will), and five millions from the individual subscribers, in exchange for ten millions of six per cent. stock, one per cent. of which, however, they will make on their ten millions of stock remaining in bank, and so reduce it, in effect, to a loan of ten millions at five per cent. interest. This is good; but, 2. They authorize this bank to throw into circulation ninety millions of dollars (three times the capital), which increases our circulating medium fifty per cent.; depreciates proportionably the present value of a dollar, and raises the price of all future purchases in the same proportion. 3. This loan of ten millions at five per cent., is to be once for all, only. Neither the terms of the scheme, nor their own prudence could ever permit them to add to the circulation in the same, or any other way, for the supplies of the succeeding years of the war. These succeeding years then are to be left unprovided for, and the means of doing it in a great measure precluded. 4. The individual subscribers, on

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 229.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 403.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

Let us examine these causes and proofs of the want of our increase of medium, one by one. 1. The additional industry created to supply a variety of articles for troops, ammunition, &c. Now, I had always supposed that war produced a diminution of industry, by the number of hands it withdraws from industrious pursuits for employment in arms, &c., which are totally unproductive. And if it calls for new industry in the articles of ammunition and other military supplies, the hands are borrowed from other branches on which the demand is slackened by the war; so that it is but a shifting of these hands from one pursuit to another. 2. The cash sent to the frontiers occasions a vacuum in the trading towns, which requires a new supply. Let us examine what are the calls for money to the frontiers. Not for clothing, tents, ammunition, arms, which are all bought in the trading towns. Not for provisions; for although these are bought [Col 2] partly in the immediate country, bank bills are more acceptable there than even in the trading towns. The pay of the army calls for some cash, but not a great deal, as bank notes are as acceptable with the military men, perhaps more so; and what cash is sent must find its way back again in exchange for the wants of the upper from the lower country. For we are not to suppose that cash stays accumulating there forever. 3. This scarcity has been occasioned by the late loans. But does the government borrow money to keep it in their coffers? Is it not instantly restored to circulation by payment for its necessary supplies? And are we to restore a vacuum of twenty millions of dollars by an emission of ninety millions? 4. The want of medium is proved by the recurrence of individuals with good paper to brokers at exorbitant interest; and 5. By the numerous applications to the State governments for additional banks; New York wanting eighteen millions, Pennsylvania ten millions, &c. But say more correctly, the speculators and spendthrifts of New York and Pennsylvania, but never consider them as being the States of New York and Pennsylvania. These two items shall be considered together. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 231.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 405.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

It is a litigated question, whether the circulation of paper, rather than of specie, is a good or an evil. In the opinion of England and of English writers it is a good; in that of all other nations it is an evil; and excepting England and her copyist, the United States, there is not a nation existing, I believe, which tolerates a paper circulation. The experiment is going on, however, desperately in England, pretty boldly with us, and at the end of the chapter, we shall see which opinion experience approves: for I believe it to be one of those cases where mercantile clamor will bear down reason, until it is corrected by ruin. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 232.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 405.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

After the solemn decision of Congress against the renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States, and the grounds of that decision (the want of constitutional power), I had imagined that question at rest, and that no more applications would be made to them for the incorporation of banks. The opposition on that ground to its first establishment, the small majority by which it was overborne, and the means practiced for obtaining it, cannot be already forgotten. The law having passed, however, by a majority, its opponents, true to the sacred principle of submission to a majority, suffered the law to flow through its term without obstruction. During this, the nation had time to consider the constitutional question, and when the renewal was proposed, they condemned it, not by their representatives in Congress only, but by express instructions from different organs of their will. Here

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 232.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 406.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

The idea of creating a national bank, I do not concur in, because it seems now decided that Congress has not that power (although I sincerely wish they had it exclusively), and because I think there is already a vast redundancy, rather than a scarcity of paper medium. The rapid rise in the nominal price of land and labor (while war and blockade should produce a fall) proves the progressive state of the depreciation of our medium. --

TITLE: To Thomas Law.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 433.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

At the time we were funding our national debt, we heard much about “a public debt being a public blessing”; that the stock representing it was a creation of active capital for the aliment of commerce, manufactures and agriculture. This paradox was well adapted to the minds of believers in dreams, and the gulls of that size entered bonâ fide into it. But the art and mystery of banks is a wonderful improvement on that. It is established on the principle that “private debts are a public blessing.” That the evidences of those private debts, called bank notes, become active capital, and aliment the whole commerce, manufactures, and agriculture of the United States. Here are a set of people, for instance, who have bestowed on us the great blessing of running in our debt about two hundred millions of dollars, without our knowing who they are, where they are, or what property they have to pay this debt when called on; nay, who have made us so sensible of the blessings of letting them run in our debt, that we have exempted them by law from the repayment of these debts beyond a given proportion (generally estimated at one-third). And to fill up the measure of blessing, instead of paying, they receive an interest on what they owe from those to whom they owe; for all the notes, or evidences of what they owe, which we see in circulation, have been lent to somebody on an interest which is levied again on us through the medium of commerce. And they are so ready still to deal out their liberalities to us, that they are now willing to let themselves run in our debt ninety millions more, on our paying them the same premium of six or eight per cent. interest, and on the same legal exemption from the repayment of more than thirty millions of the debt, when it shall be called for. But let us look at this principle in its original form, and its copy will then be equally understood. “A public debt is a public blessing.” That our debt was juggled from forty-three up to eighty millions, and funded at that amount, according to this opinion was a great public blessing, because the evidences of it could be vested in commerce, and thus converted into active capital, and then the more the debt was made to be, the more active capital was created. That is to say, the creditors could now employ in commerce the money due them from the public, and make from it an annual profit of five per cent., or four millions of dollars. But observe, that the public were at the same time paying on it an interest of exactly the same

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 239.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 411.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

Capital may be produced by industry, and accumulated by economy; but jugglers only will propose to create it by legerdemain tricks with paper. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 241.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 413.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

Banks of deposit, where cash should be lodged, and a paper acknowledgment taken out as its representative, entitled to a return of the cash on demand, would be convenient for remittances, traveling persons, &c. But, liable as its cash would be to be plifered and robbed, and its paper to be fraudulently reissued, or issued without deposit, it would require skilful and strict regulation. This would differ from the bank of Amsterdam, in the circumstance that the cash could be redeemed on returning the note. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 247.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 417.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

My original disapprobation of banks circulating paper is not unknown, nor have I since observed any effects either on the morals or fortunes of our citizens, which are any counter balance for the public evils produced. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 203.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 402.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: Sep. 1813

The toleration of banks of paper-discount costs the United States one half their war taxes; or, in other words, doubles the expense of every war. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 201.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 400.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: Sep. 1813

The States should be applied to, to transfer the

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 140.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 393.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: June. 1813

The States should be urged to concede to the General Government, with a saving of chartered rights, the exclusive power of establishing banks of discount for paper. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 427.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 417.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

I still believe that on proper representations of the subject, a great proportion of the Legislatures would cede to Congress their power of establishing banks, saving the charter rights already granted. And this should be asked, not by way of amendment to the Constitution, because until three-fourths should consent, nothing could be done; but accepted from them one by one, singly, as their consent might be obtained. Any single State, even if no other should come into the measure, would find its interest in arresting foreign bank paper immediately, and its own by degrees. Specie would flow in on them as paper disappeared. Their own banks would call in and pay off their notes gradually, and their constituents would thus be saved from the general wreck. Should the greater part of the States concede, as is expected, their power over banks to Congress, besides insuring their own safety, the paper of the non-conceding States might be so checked and circumscribed, by prohibiting its receipt in any of the conceding States, and even in the non-conceding as to duties, taxes, judgments, or other demands of the United States, or of the citizens of other States, that it would soon die of itself, and the medium of gold and silver be universally restored. This is what ought to be done. But it will not be done. Carthago non delibitur. The overbearing clamor of merchants, speculators, and projectors, will drive us before them with our eyes open, until, as in France, under the Mississippi bubble, our citizens will be overtaken by the crash of this baseless fabric, without other satisfaction than that of execrations on the heads of those functionaries, who, from ignorance, pusillanimity or corruption, have betrayed the fruits of their industry into the hands of projectors and swindlers. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 245.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 415.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

Private fortunes, in the present state of our circulation, are at the mercy of those selfcreated money-lenders, and are prostrated by the floods of nominal money with which their avarice deluges us. He who lent his money to the public or to an individual, before the institution of the United States Bank, twenty years ago, when wheat was well sold at a dollar the bushel, and receives now his nominal sum when it sells at two dollars, is cheated of half his fortune; and by whom? By the banks, which, since that, have thrown into circulation ten dollars of their nominal money where there was one at that time. --

TITLE: To John W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 142.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 394.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: June. 1813

Instead of yielding to the cries of scarcity of medium set up by speculators, projectors and commercial gamblers, no endeavors should be spared to begin the work of reducing it by such gradual means as may give

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 246.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 417.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

We are called on to add ninety millions more to the circulation. Proceeding in this career, it is infallible, that we must end where the Revolutionary paper ended. Two hundred millions was the whole amount of all the emissions of the old Congress, at which point their bills ceased to circulate. We are now at that sum, but with treble the population, and of course a longer tether. Our depreciation is, as yet, but about two for one. Owing to the support its credit receives from the small reservoirs of specie in the vaults of the banks, it is impossible to say at what point their notes will stop. Nothing is necessary to effect it but a general alarm; and that may take place whenever the public shall begin to reflect on, and perceive the impossibility that the banks should repay this sum. At present, caution is inspired no farther than to keep prudent men from selling property on long payments. Let us suppose the panic to arise at three hundred millions, a point to which every session of the Legislature hastens us by long strides. Nobody dreams that they would have three hundred millions of specie to satisfy the holders of their notes. Were they even to stop now, no one supposes they have two hundred millions in cash, or even the sixty-six and two-third millions, to which amount alone the law compels them to repay. One hundred and thirtythree and one-third millions of loss, then, is thrown on the public by law; and as to the sixty-six and two-thirds, which they are legally bound to pay, and ought to have in their vaults, every one knows there is no such amount of cash in the United States, and what would be the course with what they really have there? Their notes are refused. Cash is called for. The inhabitants of the banking towns will get what is in the vaults, until a few banks declare their insolvency; when, the general crush becoming evident, the others will withdraw even the cash they have, declare their bankruptcy at once, and have an empty house and empty coffers for the holders of their notes. In this scramble of creditors, the country gets nothing, the towns but little. What are they to do? Bring suits? A million of creditors bring a million of suits against John Nokes and Robert Styles, wheresoever to be found? All nonsense. The loss is total. And a sum is thus swindled from our citizens, of seven times the amount of the real debt, and four times that of the fictitious one of the United States, at the close of the war. All this they will justly charge on their Legislatures; but this will be poor satisfaction for the two or three hundred millions they will have lost. It is time, then, for the public functionaries to look to this. Perhaps it may not be too late. Perhaps, by giving time to the banks, they May call in and pay off their paper by degrees. But no remedy is ever to be expected while it rests with the State Legislatures. Personal [Col 2] motive can be excited through so many avenues to their will, that, in their hands, it will continue to go on from bad to worse, until the catastrophe overwhelms us. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 243.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, . 414.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

But, it will be asked, are we to have no banks? Are merchants and others to be deprived of the resource of short accommodations, found so convenient? I answer, let us have banks; but let them be such as are alone to be found in any country on earth, except Great Britain. There is not a bank of discount on the continent

TITLE: To John W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 141.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 394.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: June. 1813

Let banks continue if they please, but let them discount for cash alone or for treasury notes. They discount for cash alone in every other country on earth except Great Britain, and her too often unfortunate copyist, the United States. If taken in time they may be rectified by degrees, but if let alone till the alternative forces itself on us, of submitting to the enemy for want of funds, or the suppression of bank paper, either by law or by convulsion, we cannot foresee how it will end. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 199.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 399.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: Sep. 1813

To the existence of banks of discount for cash, as on the continent of Europe, there can be no objection, because there can be no danger of abuse, and they are a convenience both to merchants and individuals. I think they should even be encouraged, by allowing them a larger than legal interest on short discounts, and tapering thence in proportion as the term of discount is lengthened, down to legal interest on those of a year or more. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 247.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 417.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

No man on earth has stronger detestation than myself of the unprincipled tyrant who is deluging the continent of Europe with blood. No one was more gratified by his disasters of the last campaign. ⁵¹ --

TITLE: To Dr. George Logan.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 216.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 423.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Oct. 1813

-- To complete and universalize the desolation of the globe, it has been the will of Providence to raise up, at the same time, a tyrant as unprincipled and as overwhelming, for the ocean. Not in the poor maniac George, but in his government and nation. Bonaparte will die, and his tyrannies with him. But a nation never dies. The English government, and its piratical principles and practices, have no fixed term of duration. Europe feels, and is writhing under the scorpion whips of Bonaparte. We are assailed by those of England. The one continent thus placed under the gripe of England, and the other of Bonaparte, each has to grapple with the enemy immediately pressing on itself. We must extinguish the fire kindled in our own house, and leave to our friends beyond the water that which is consuming theirs. --

TITLE: To Madame de Stael.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 115.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: May. 1813

I know nothing which can so severely try the heart and spirit of man, and especially of the man of science, as the necessity of a passive acquiescence under the abominations of an unprincipled tyrant who is deluging the earth with blood to acquire for himself the reputation of a Cartouche or a Robin Hood. The petty larcenies of the Blackbeards and Buccaneers of the ocean, the more immediately exercised on us, are dirty and grovelling things addressed to our contempt, while the horrors excited by the Scelerat of France are beyond all human execrations. --

TITLE: To Dr. Morrell.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 100.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Feb. 1813

Robespierre met the fate, and his memory the execration, he so justly merited. The rich were his victims, and perished by thousands. It is by millions that Bonaparte destroys the poor, and he is eulogized and deified by the sycophants even of science. These merit more than the mere oblivion to which they will be consigned: and the day will come when a just posterity will give to their hero the only preeminence he has earned, that of having been the greatest of the destroyers of the human race. What year of his military life has not consigned a million of human beings to death, to poverty and wretchedness! What field in Europe may not raise a monument of the murders, the burnings, the desolations, the famines, and miseries it has witnessed from him? And all [Col 2] this to acquire a reputation, which Cartouche attained with less injury to mankind, of being fearless of God or man. --

TITLE: To Madame de Stael.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 114.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: May. 1813

A ruthless tyrant, drenching Europe in blood to obtain through future time the character of the destroyer of mankind. --

TITLE: To Henry Middleton.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 91.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813

We have taken Upper Canada, [* * *] and hope to remove the British fully and finally from our continent. --

TITLE: To Madame de Tesse.
EDITION: Washington ed. iv, 273.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 440.

DATE: Dec. 1813

We have a great and a just claim of indemnifications against the British for the thousand ships they have taken piratically, and six thousand seamen impressed. Whether we can, on this score, successfully insist on curtailing their American possessions, by the meridian of Lake Huron, so as to cut them off from the Indians bordering on us, would be matter for conversation and experiment at the treaty of pacification. --

TITLE: To William Short.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 129.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: June. 1813

Could we acquire that country, we might perhaps insist successfully at St. Petersburg on retaining all [westward] of the meridian of Lake Huron, or of Ontario, or of Montreal, according to the pulse of the place, as an indemnification for the past and security for the future. To cut them off from

TITLE: To James Monroe.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 131.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: June. 1813

A thousand ships taken unjustifiably in time of peace, and thousands of our citizens impressed, warrant expectations of indemnification; such a Western frontier, perhaps, given to Canada, as may put it out of their power to employ the tomahawk and scalping knife of the Indians on our women and children; or, what would be nearly equivalent, the exclusive right to the Lakes. --

TITLE: To Dr. George Logan.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 216.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 422.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Oct. 1813

The conduct of the British during the war in exciting the Indian hordes to murder and scalp the women and children on our frontier, renders peace forever impossible but on the establishment of such a meridian boundary to their possessions, as that they never more can have such influence with the savages as to excite again the same barbarities. The thousand ships, too, they took from us in peace, and the six thousand seamen impressed call for this indemnification. --

TITLE: To Don. V. Toronda Coruna.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 275.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Dec. 1813

If the war is lengthened we shall take Canada, which will relieve us from Indians, and Halifax, which will put an end to their occupation of the American Seas, because every vessel must then go to England to repair every accident. To retain these would become objects of first importance to us, and of great importance to Europe, as the means of curtailing the British marine. But at present, being merely in posse, they should not be an impediment to peace. --

TITLE: To William Short.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 129.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: June. 1813

Capital may be produced by industry, and accumulated by economy; but jugglers only will propose to create it by legerdemain tricks with paper. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 241.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 413.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

-- Every citizen [should] be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free State. --

TITLE: To James Monroe.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 131.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

My principle has ever been that war should not suspend either exports or imports. --

TITLE: To William Short.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 128.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

A constitution has been acquired, which, though neither of us thinks perfect, yet both consider as competent to render our fellow citizens the happiest and the securest on whom the sun has ever shone. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 227.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 429.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

As to myself, I shall take no part in any discussions. I leave others to judge of what I have done, and to give me exactly the place which they shall think I have occupied. Marshall has written libels on one side; others, I suppose, will be written on the other side; and the world will sift both and separate the truth as well as they can. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 127.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 388.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

I found him one of the most learned and amiable of men. --

TITLE: To Baron von Humboldt.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 267.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 430.
PLACE: [none given]
DATE: 1813

It seems to me that in proportion as commercial avarice and corruption advance on us from the North and East, the principles of free government are to retire to the agricultural States of the South and West as their last asylum and bulwark. --

TITLE: To Henry Middleton.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 91.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

It is a wise rule, and should be a fundamental in a government disposed to cherish its credit, and at the same time to restrain the use of it within the limits of its faculties, “never to borrow a dollar without laying a tax in the same instant for paying the interest annually, and the principal within a given term; and to

TITLE: To John W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 136.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 389.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: June. 1813

I confess that when I heard of the atrocities committed by the English troops at Hampton, I did not believe them, but subsequent evidence has placed them beyond doubt. To this has been added information from another quarter which proves the violation of women to be their habitual practice in war. Mr. Hamilton, a son of Alexander Hamilton, of course, a federalist and Angloman, and who was with the British army in Spain, declares it is their constant practice, and that at the taking of Badajoz, he was himself eye

TITLE: To Josiah Meigs.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 419.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813
See Cornwallis and Retaliation.

That we are bound to defray the expenses of the war within our own time, and unauthorized to burthen posterity with them, I suppose to have been proved in my former letter. I will place the question nevertheless in one additional point of view. The former regarded their independent right over the earth; this over their own persons. There have existed nations, and civilized and learned nations, who have thought that a father had a right to sell his child as a slave, in perpetuity; that he could alienate his body and industry conjointly, and à fortiari his industry separately; and consume its fruits himself. A nation asserting this fratricide right might well suppose they could burthen with public as well as private debt their nati natorum, et qui nascentur ab illis. But we, this age, and in this country especially, are advanced beyond those notions of natural law. We acknowledge that our children are born free; that that freedom is the gift of nature, and not of him who begot them; that though under our care during infancy, and therefore of necessity, under a duly tempered authority, that care is confided to us to be exercised for the good of the child only; and his labors during youth are given as a retribution for the charges of infancy. As he was never the property of his father, so when adult he is sui juris, entitled himself to the use of his own limbs and the fruits of his own exertions: so far we are advanced, without mind enough, it seems, to take the whole step. We believe, or we act as if we believed, that although an individual father cannot alienate the labor of his son, the aggregate body of fathers may alienate the labor of all their sons, or of their posterity in the aggregate, and oblige them to pay for all the enterprises, just or unjust, profitable or ruinous, into which our vices, our passions, or our personal interests may lead us. But I trust that this proposition needs only to be looked at by an American to be seen in its true point of view, and that we shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves; and consequently within what May be deemed the period of a generation, or the life of the majority. [* * *] We must raise, then, ourselves the money for this war, either by taxes within the year, or by loans; and if by loans, we must repay them ourselves, proscribing forever the English practice of perpetual funding; the ruinous consequences of which, putting right out of the question,

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 196.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 396.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: Sep. 1813
See Generations.

The public expenses of England during the present reign have amounted to the fee simple value of the whole island. If its whole soil could be sold, farm by farm, for its present market price, it would not defray the cost of governing it during the reign of the present King, as managed by him. Ought not then the right of each successive generation to be guaranteed against the dissipations and corruptions of those preceding, by a fundamental provision in our Constitution? And, if that has not been made, does it exist the less; there being between generation and generation, as between nation and nation, no other law than that of nature? And is it the less dishonest to do what is wrong, because not expressly prohibited by written law? Let us hope our moral principles are not yet in that stage of degeneracy, and that in instituting the system of finance to be hereafter pursued, we shall adopt the only safe, the only lawful and honest one, of borrowing on such short terms of reimbursement of interest and principal as will fall within the accomplishment of our own lives. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 199.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 398.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: Sep. 1813

What is to hinder [the government] from creating a perpetual debt? The laws of nature, I answer. The earth belongs to the living not to the dead. The will and the power of man expire with his life, by nature's law. Some societies give it an artificial continuance, for the encouragement of industry; some refuse it, as our aboriginal neighbors, whom we call barbarians. The generations of men may be considered as bodies or corporations. Each generation has the usufruct of the earth during the period of its continuance. When it ceases to exist the usufruct passes on to the succeeding generation, free and unincumbered, and so on, successively, from one generation to another forever. We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country. Or the case may be likened to the ordinary one of a tenant for life, who may hypothecate the land for his debts, during the continuance of his usufruct; but at his death, the reversioner (who is also for life only) receives it exonerated from all burden. The period of a generation, or the term of its life, is determined by the laws of mortality, which, varying a little only in different climates, offer a general average to be found by observation. I turn, for instance, to Buffon's tables, of twenty-three thousand nine hundred and ninety-four deaths, and the ages at which they happened, and I find that of the numbers of all ages living at one moment, half will be dead in twenty-four years and eight months. But (leaving out minors, who have not the power of self-government) of the adults (of twenty-one years of age) living at one moment, a majority of whom act for the society, one-half will be dead in eighteen years and eight months. At nineteen years, then, from the date of a contract, the majority of the contractors are dead, and their contract with them. Let this general theory be applied to a particular case. Suppose the annual births of the State of New York to be twenty-three thousand nine hundred and ninety-four the whole number of its inhabitants, according to Buffon, will be six hundred and seventeen thousand, seven hundred and three of all ages. Of these there would constantly be two hundred and sixty-nine thousand two hundred and eighty-six minors, and three hundred and forty-eight thousand four hundred and seventeen adults, of which last, one hundred and seventy-four thousand two hundred and nine will be a majority. Suppose that majority, on the first day of the year 1794, had borrowed a sum of money equal to the fee-simple value of the State, and to have consumed it in eating, drinking and

TITLE: To John Wayles Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 136.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 389.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: June. 1813
See Generations.

At the time we were funding our national debt, we heard much about “a public debt being a public blessing”; that the stock representing it was a creation of active capital for the aliment of commerce, manufactures and agriculture. This paradox was well adapted to the minds of believers in dreams, and the gulls of that size entered bonâ fide into it. But the art and mystery of banks is a wonderful improvement on that. It is established on the principle that “private debts are a public blessing ”; that the evidences of those private debts, called bank notes, become active capital, and aliment the whole commerce, manufactures, and agriculture of the United States. Here are a set of people, for instance, who have bestowed on us the great blessing of running in our debt about two hundred millions of dollars, without our knowing who they are, where they are, or want property they have to pay this debt when called on; nay, who have made us so sensible of the blessings of letting them run in our debt, that we have exempted them by law from the re [Col 2] payment of these debts beyond a given proportion (generally estimated at one-third). And to fill up the measure of blessing, instead of paying, they receive an interest on what they owe from those to whom they owe; for all the notes, or evidences of what they owe, which we see in circulation, have been lent to somebody on an interest which is levied again on us through the medium of commerce. And they are so ready still to deal out their liberalities to us, that they are now willing to let themselves run in our debt ninety millions more, on our paying them the same premium of six or eight per cent. interest, and on the same legal exemption from the repayment of more than thirty millions of the debt when it shall be called for. But let us look at this principle in its original form, and its copy will then be equally understood. “A public debt is a public blessing.” That our debt was juggled from forty-three to eighty millions, and funded at that amount, according to this opinion a great public blessing, because the evidences of it could be vested in commerce, and thus converted into active capital, and then the more the debt was made to be, the more active capital was created. That is to say, the creditors could now employ in commerce the money due them from the public, and make from it an annual profit of five per cent., or four millions of dollars. But observe, that the public were at the same time paying on it an interest of exactly the same amount of four millions of dollars. Where, then, is the gain to either party, which makes it a public blessing? There is no change in the state of things, but of persons only. A has a debt due to him from the public, of which he holds their certificate as evidence, and on which he is receiving an annual interest. He wishes, however, to have the money itself, and to go into business with it. B has an equal sum of money in business, but wishes now to retire, and live on the interest. He therefore gives it to A in exchange for A's certificates of public stock. Now, then, A has the money to employ in business, which B so employed before. B has the money on interest to live on, which A lived on before; and the public pays the interest to B which they paid to A before. Here is no new creation of capital, no additional money employed, nor even a change in the employment of a single dollar. The only change is of place between A and B in which we discover no creation of capital, nor public blessing. Suppose, again, the public to owe nothing. Then A not having lent his money to the public, would be in possession of it himself, and would go into business without the previous operation of selling stock. Here, again, the same quantity of capital is employed as in the former case, though no public debt exists. In neither case is there any creation of active capital, nor other difference than that there is a public debt in the first case, and none in the last; and we may safely ask which of the two situations is most truly a public blessing? If, then, a public debt be no public blessing, we

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 239.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 411.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

Many excellent persons opposed it on doubts whether we were provided sufficiently with the means of supporting it, whether the minds of our constituents were yet prepared to receive, &c., who, after it was decided, united zealously in the measures it called for. --

TITLE: To William P. Gardner.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 377.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

Mr. Barralet's sketch of the ornaments proposed to accompany the publication of the Declaration of Independence, contemplated by Mr. Murray and yourself, has been received. I am too little versed in the art of design to be able to offer any suggestions to the artist. As far as I am a judge, the composition appears to be judicious and well-imagined. Were I to hazard a suggestion, it should be that Mr. Hancock, as President of Congress, should occupy the middle and principal place. No man better merited than did Mr. John Adams to hold a most conspicuous place in the design. --

TITLE: To William P. Gardner.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 377.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Feb. 1813

Of the papers of July, 1775, I recollect well that Mr. Dickinson drew the petition to the King. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 194.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 419.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

I prefer public benefit to all personal considerations. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 203.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 402.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: Sep. 1813

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead. The will and the power of man expire with his life, by nature's law. Some societies give it an artificial continuance, for the encouragement of industry: some refuse it, as our aboriginal neighbors, whom we call barbarians. The generations of men may be considered as bodies or corporations. Each generation has the usufruct of the earth during the period of its continuance. When it ceases to exist. the usufruct passes on to the succeeding generation, free and unencumbered, and so on, successively, from one generation to another forever. --

TITLE: To John Wayles Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 136.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 389.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: June. 1813

The soil is the gift of God to the living. --

TITLE: To John W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 138.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 391. M.,
PLACE: [none given]
DATE: 1813
See Generations.

We must make military instruction a regular part of collegiate education. We can never be safe till this is done. ¹⁵⁵ --

TITLE: To James Monroe.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 131.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

The English government never dies because their King is no part of it; he is a mere formality and the real government is the aristocracy of the country, for the House of Commons is of that class. --

TITLE: To Doctor Samuel Brown.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 165.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

Our lot happens to have been cast in an age when two nations to whom circumstances have given a temporary superiority over others, the one by land, the other by sea, throwing off all restraints of morality, all pride of national character, forgetting the mutability of fortune, and the inevitable doom which the laws of nature pronounce against departure from justice, individual or national, have declared to treat her reclamations with derision, and to set up force instead of reason as the umpire of nations. Degrading themselves thus from the character of lawful societies into lawless bands of robbers and pirates, they are abusing their brief ascendency by desolating the world with blood and rapine. Against such a banditti, war had become less ruinous than peace, for then peace was a war on one side only. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 195.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 396.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: Sep. 1813

How much to be lamented that the world cannot unite and destroy these two land and sea monsters. The one drenching the earth with human gore, the [Col 2] other ravaging the ocean with lawless piracies and plunder. --

TITLE: To Dr. Samuel Brown.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 165.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: July. 1813

A nation of buccaneers, urged by sordid avarice, and embarked in the flagitious enterprise of seizing to itself the maritime resources and rights of all other nations. --

TITLE: To Henry Middleton.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 91.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813

During the eight years of my administration. there was not a year that England did not give us such cause as would have provoked a war from any European government. But I always hoped that time and friendly remonstrances would bring her to a sounder view of her own interests, and convince her that these would be promoted by a return to justice and friendship towards us. --

TITLE: To Dr. George Logan.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 215.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 421.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Oct. 1813

Among that section of our citizens called federalists, there are three shades of opinion. Distinguishing between the leaders and people who compose it, the leaders consider the English constitution as a model of perfection, some, with a correction of its vices, others, with all its corruptions and abuses. This last was Alexander Hamilton's opinion, which others, as well as myself, have often heard him declare, and that a correction of what are called its vices, would render the English an impracticable government. This government they wished to have established here, and only accepted and held fast at first, to the present Constitution, as a stepping stone to the final

TITLE: To John Mellish.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 95.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 374.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813

I am sorry to learn that a banditti from our country are taking part in the domestic contests of the country adjoining you; and the more so as from the known laxity of execution in our laws, they cannot be punished. It will give a wrongful hue to a rightful act of taking possession of Mobile, and will be imputed to the national authority, as Miranda's enterprise was, because not punished by it. --

TITLE: To Dr. Samuel Brown.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 165.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

We are in a state of semi-warfare with your adjoining colonies, the Floridas. We do not consider this as affecting our peace with Spain, or any other of her former possessions. We wish her and them well; and under her present difficulties at home, and her doubtful future relations with her colonies, both wisdom and interest will, I presume, induce her to leave them to settle themselves the quarrels they draw on themselves from their neighbors. The commanding officers in the Floridas have excited and armed the neighboring savages to war against us, and to murder and scalp many of our women and children as well as men, taken by surprise -- poor creatures! They have paid for it with the loss of the flower of their strength, and have given us the right, as we possess the power, to exterminate or to expatriate them beyond the Mississippi. This conduct of the Spanish officers will probably oblige us to take possession of the Floridas, and the rather as we believe the English will otherwise seize them, and use them as stations to distract and annoy us. But should we possess ourselves of them, and Spain retain her other colonies in this hemisphere, I presume we shall consider them in our hands as subjects of negotiation. --

TITLE: To Don V. Toranda Coruna.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 274.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Dec. 1813

Private fortunes, in the present state of our circulation, are at the mercy of those selfcreated money-lenders, and are prostrated by the floods of nominal money with which their avarice deluges us. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 142.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 394.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

The Creator has not thought proper to mark those in the forehead who are of stuff to make good generals. We are first, therefore, to seek them blindfold, and let them learn the trade at the expense of great losses. --

TITLE: To General Bailey.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 100.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Feb. 1813

Our only hope is that these misfortunes will at length elicit by trial the characters qualified by nature from those unqualified, to be entrusted with the destinies of their fellow citizens. --

TITLE: To General Armstrong.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 380.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Feb. 1813

Our war on the land has commenced most inauspiciously. I fear we are to expect reverses until we can find out who are qualified for command, and until these can learn their profession. --

TITLE: To William Duane.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 99.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813

It is unfortunate that heaven has not set its stamp on the foreheads of those whom it has qualified for military achievement; that it has left us to draw for them in a lottery of so many blanks to a prize, and where the blank is to be manifested only by the public misfortunes. If nature had planted the fœnum in cornu on the front of treachery, of cowardice, of imbecility, the unfortunate dèbut we have made on the theatre of war would not have sunk our spirits at home, and our character abroad. --

TITLE: To General John Armstrong.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 103.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Feb. 1813

These experiments will at least have the good effect of bringing forward those whom nature has qualified for military trust. --

TITLE: To President Madison.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 380.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Feb. 1813

Whenever we have good commanders, we shall have good soldiers, and good successes. --

TITLE: To President Madison.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 380.
PLACE: [none given]
DATE: 1813

On the land, indeed, we have been most unfortunate; so wretched a succession of generals never before destroyed the fairest expectations of a nation, counting on the bravery of its citizens, which has proved itself on all these trials. --

TITLE: To Dr. Benjamin Rush.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 106.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: March. 1813

I am happy to observe the public mind not discouraged, and that it does not associate its government with these unfortunate agents. --

TITLE: To President Madison.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 380.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Feb. 1813

During the first campaign [in the war of 1812] we suffered several checks, from the want of capable and tried officers; all the higher ones of the Revolution having died off during an [Col 2] interval of thirty years of peace. --

TITLE: To Don V. T. Coruna.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 275.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

Perhaps we ought to expect such trials after deperdition of all military science consequent on so long a peace. --

TITLE: To President Madison.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 380.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Feb. 1813

Three frigates taken by our gallant navy, do not balance in my mind three armies lost by the treachery, cowardice, or incapacity of those to whom they were intrusted. I see that our men are good, and only want generals. --

TITLE: To William Duane.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 110.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: April. 1813

The proof of a general, to know whether he will stand fire, costs a more serious price than that of a cannon; these proofs have already cost us thousands of good men, and deplorable degradation of reputation, and as yet have elicited but a few negative and a few positive characters. But we must persevere till we recover the rank we are entitled to. --

TITLE: To William Duane.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 99.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

We are doomed [* * *] to sacrifice the lives of our citizens by thousands to this blind principle [seniority] , for fear the peculiar interest and responsibility of our Executive should not be sufficient to guard his selection of officers against favoritism. --

TITLE: To General Armstrong.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 380.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

We may yet hope that the talents which always exist among men will show themselves with opportunity, and that it will be found that this age also can produce able and honest defenders of their country, at what further expense, however, of blood and treasure is yet to be seen. --

TITLE: To William Duane.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 110.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: April. 1813

Another general, it seems, has given proof of his military qualifications by the loss of another thousand men; for there cannot be a surprise but through the fault of the commanders, and especially by an enemy who has given us heretofore so many of these lessons. --

TITLE: To President Madison.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 379.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Feb. 1813

Our men are good, but our generals unqualified. Every failure we have incurred has been the fault of the general, the men evincing courage in every instance. --

TITLE: To Dr. Samuel Brown.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 165.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: July. 1813

Our men are good, but force without conduct is easily baffled. --

TITLE: To General Bailey.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 100.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

I am happier while reading the history of ancient than of modern times. The total banishment of all moral principle from the code which governs the intercourse of nations, the melancholy reflection that after the mean, wicked and cowardly cunning of the cabinets of the age of Machiavelli had given place to the integrity and good faith which dignified the succeeding one of a Chatham and Turgot, that this is to be swept away again by the daring profligacy and avowed destitution of all moral principle of a Cartouche and a Blackbeard, sicken my soul unto death. I turn from the contemplation with loathing, and take refuge in the histories of other times, where, if they also furnished their Tarquins, their Catalines and Caligulas, their stories are handed to us under the brand of a Livy, a Sallust and a Tacitus, and we are comforted with the reflection that the condemnation of all succeeding generations has confirmed the sentence of the historian, and consigned their memories to everlasting infamy, a solace we cannot have with the Georges and Napoleons but by anticipation. --

TITLE: To William Duane.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 109.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: April. 1813

Why omit all mention of the scandalous campaigns of Commodore Morris? A two years' command of an effective squadron, with discretionary instructions, wasted in sailing from port to port of the Mediterranean, and a single half day before the port of the enemy against which he was sent. All this can be seen in the proceedings of the court on which he was dismissed; and it is due to the honorable truths with which the book abounds, to publish those which are not so. --

TITLE: To Matthew Carr.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 132.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

Continued impressments of our seamen by her naval commanders, whose interest it was to mistake them for theirs, her innovations on the law of nations to cover real piracies, could illy be borne; and perhaps would not have been borne, had not contraventions of the same law by France, fewer in number but equally illegal, rendered it difficult to single the object of war. England, at length, singled herself, and took up the gauntlet, when the unlawful decrees of France being revoked as to us, she, by the proclamation of her Prince Regent, protested to the world that she would never revoke hers until those of France should be removed as to all nations. Her minister, too, about the same time, in an official conversation with our Chargé, rejected our substitute for her practice of impressment; proposed no other; and declared explicitly that no admissible one for this abuse could be proposed. Negotiation being thus cut short, no alternative remained but war, or the abandonment of the persons and property of our citizens on the ocean. The last one, I presume, no American would have preferred. War was therefore declared, and justly declared; but accompanied with immediate offers of peace on simply doing us justice. --

TITLE: To Dr. George Logan.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 215.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 422.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Oct. 1813

Moreton's deduction of the origin of our Indians from the fugitive Trojans, [* * *] and his manner of accounting for the sprinkling of their Latin with Greek, is really amusing. Adair makes them talk Hebrew. Reinold Foster derives them from the soldiers sent by Kouli Khan to conquer Japan. Brerewood, from the Tartars, as well as our bears, wolves, foxes, &c., which, he says, “must of necessity fetch their beginning from Noah's ark, which rested, after the deluge in Asia, seeing they could not proceed by the course of nature, as the imperfect sort of living creatures do, from putrefaction”. Bernard Romans is of opinion that God created an original man and woman in this part of the globe. Doctor Barton thinks they are not specifically different from the Persians; but, taking afterwards a broader range, he thinks, “that in all the vast countries of America, there is but one language, nay, that it may be proven, or rendered highly probable, that all the languages of the earth bear some affinity together”. This reduces it to a question of definition, in which every one is free to use his own: to wit, what constitutes identity, or difference in two things, in the common acceptation of sameness. All languages may be called the same, as being all made up of the same primitive sounds, expressed by the letters of the different alphabets. But, in this sense, all things on earth are the same as consisting of matter. This gives up the useful distribution into genera and species, which we form, arbitrarily indeed, for the relief of our imperfect memories. To aid the question, from whence our Indian tribes are descended, some have gone into their religion, their morals, their manners, customs, habits, and physical forms. By such helps it may be learnedly proved, that our trees and plants of every kind are descended from those of Europe; because, like them, they have no locomotion, they draw nourishment from the earth, they clothe themselves with leaves in spring, of which they divest themselves in autumn for the sleep of winter, &c. Our animals, too, must be descended from those of Europe, because our wolves eat lambs, our deer are gregarious, our ants hoard, &c. But, when for convenience we distribute languages, according to common understanding, into classes originally

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 121.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: May. 1813
See Aborigines.

You ask if the usage of hunting in circles has ever been known among any of our tribes of Indians? It has been practiced by them all; and is to this day, by those still remote from the settlements of the whites. But their numbers and enabling them like Genghis Khan's seven hundred thousand, to form themselves into circles of one hundred miles diameter, they make their circle by firing the leaves fallen on the ground, which gradually forcing the animals to a centre, they there slaughter them with arrows, darts and other missiles. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 122.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

You know the benevolent plan we were pursuing here for the happiness of the aboriginal inhabitants in our vicinities. We spared nothing to keep them at peace with one another. To teach them agriculture and the rudiments of the most necessary arts, and to encourage industry by establishing among them separate property. In this way they would have been enabled to subsist and multiply on a moderate scale of landed possession. They would have mixed their blood with ours, and been amalgamated and indentified with us within no distant period of time. On the commencement of the present war [with Great Britain] , we pressed on them the observance of peace and neutrality, but the interested and unprincipled policy of England has defeated all our labors for the salvation of these unfortunate people. They have seduced the greater part of the tribes within our neighborhood, to take up the hatchet against us, and the cruel massacres they have committed on the women and children of our frontiers taken by surprise will oblige us now to pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach. [* * *] The confirmed brutalization, if not the extermination of this race in our America, is therefore to form an additional chapter in the English history of the same colored man in Asia, and of the brethren of their own color in Ireland and wherever else Anglo-mercantile cupidity can find a two-penny interest in deluging the earth with human blood. --

TITLE: To Baron de Humboldt.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 269.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 431.

DATE: Dec. 1813

For authority to apply the surplus [taxes imposed for the support of the government and the payment of the Revolutionary debt] to objects of [internal] improvement, an amendment of the Constitution would have been necessary. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 195.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 395.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: Sep. 1813

The fondest wish of my heart ever was that the surplus portion of these taxes, destined for the payment of that [Revolutionary] debt, should, when that object was accomplished, be continued by annual or biennial reenactments, and applied, in time of peace, to the improvement of our country by canals, roads and useful institutions, literary or others; and in time of war to the maintenance of the war. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 195.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 395.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: 1813 1813 gt;

It has been pretended by some (and in England especially) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when the relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is give late in the progress of society. It would be curious, then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature. When she made them like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices. --

TITLE: To Isaac McPherson.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 180.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

I am much indebted to you for the memoirs of the Margrave of Bayreuth. This singular morsel of history has given us a certain view of kings, queens and princes, disrobed of their formalities. It is a peep into the state of the Egyptian God Apis. It would not be easy to find grosser manners, coarser vices, or more meanness in the poorest huts of our peasantry. The princess shows herself the legitimate sister of

TITLE: To Madame de Tesse.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 271.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 437.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

The memoirs of Mrs. Clarke and of her darling prince, and the book, emphatically so called, because it is the Biblia Sacra Deorum et Diarum subc œlestium, the Prince Regent, his Princess and the minor deities of his sphere, form a worthy sequel to the memoirs of Bayreuth; instead of the vulgarity of the court of Berlin, giving us the vulgarity and profusion of that of London, and the gross stupidity and profligacy of the latter, in lieu of the genius and misanthropism of the former. The whole might be published as a supplement to M. de Buffon, under the title of the “Natural History of Kings and Princes”, or as a separate work and called “Medicine for Monarchists”. The “Intercepted Letters”, a later English publication of great wit and humor, has put them to their proper use by holding them up as butts for the ridicule and contempt of mankind. Yet by such worthless beings is a great nation to be governed and even made to deify their old king because he is only a fool and a maniac, and to forgive and forget his having lost to them a great and flourishing empire, added nine hundred millions sterling to their debt, for which the fee simple of the whole island would not sell, if offered farm by farm at public auction, and increased their annual taxes from eight to seventy millions sterling, more than the whole rentroll of the island. What must be the dreary prospect from the son when such a father is deplored as a national loss? But let us drop these odious beings and pass to those of an higher order, the plants of the field. --

TITLE: To Madame de Tesse.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 271.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 437.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

I concur entirely with you in opposition to purists, who would destroy all strength and beauty of style, by subjecting it to a rigorous compliance with their rules. Fill up all the ellipses and syllepses of Tacitus, Sallust, Livy, &c., and the elegance and force of their sententious brevity are extinguished. “Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus, imperium appellant”. “ Deorum injurias, diis curæ”. “Alieni appetens, sui profusus; ardens in cupiditatibus; satis loquentiæ, sapientiæ parum”. “Annibal, peto pacem”. “Per diem Sol non uret te, neque Luna per noctem”. Wire-draw these expressions by filling up the whole syntax and sense, and they become dull paraphrases on rich sentiments. We may say then truly with Quintilian, “Aliud est Grammaticé, aliud Latiné loqui ”. I am no friend, therefore, to what is called purism. --

TITLE: To John Waldo.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 184.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

The omission of a caution which would have been right, does not justify the doing what is wrong. Nor ought it to be presumed that the Legislature meant to use a phrase in an unjustifiable sense, if by rules of construction it can be ever strained to what is just. --

TITLE: To Isaac McPherson.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 176.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

The sentiment that ex post facto laws are against natural right, is so strong in the United States, that few, if any, of the State Constitutions have failed to proscribe them. The Federal Constitution, indeed, interdicts them in criminal cases only; but they are equally unjust in civil as in criminal cases, and the omission of a caution which would have been right, does not justify the doing what is wrong. --

TITLE: To Isaac McPherson.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 176.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

Every man should be protected in his lawful acts, and be certain that no ex post facto law shall punish or endanger him for them. --

TITLE: To Isaac McPherson.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 175.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Aug. 1813

[John] Marshall, in the first volume of his history [of Washington] , chap. 3, p. 180, ascribes the petition to the King, of 1774 (1 Journ. Cong. 67) to the pen of Richard Henry Lee. I think myself certain it was not written by him, as well from what I recollect to have heard, as from the internal evidence of style. His was loose, vague, frothy, rhetorical. He was a poorer writer than his brother Arthur; and Arthur's standing may be seen in his Monitor's letters, to insure the sale of which, they took the precaution of tacking to them a new edition of the Farmers' letters like Mezentins, who, “Mortua jungebat corpora vivis”. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 193.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 418.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

May you see France reestablished in that temperate portion of lib

TITLE: To Madame de Stael.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 120.

DATE: May. 1813

Of the modes which are within the limits of right, that of raising within the year its whole expenses by taxation, might be beyond the abilities of our [Col 2] citizens to bear. It is, moreover, generally desirable that the public contribution should be as uniform as practicable from year to year, that our habits of industry and expense May become adapted to them; and that they May be duly digested and incorporated with our annual economy. There remains, then, for us but the method of limited anticipation, the laying taxes for a term of years within that of our right, which may be sold for a present sum equal to the expenses of the year; in other words, to obtain a loan equal to the expenses of the year, laying a tax adequate to its interest, and to such a surplus as will reimburse, by growing instalments, the whole principle within the term. This is, in fact, what has been called raising money on the sale of annuities for years. In this way a new loan, and of course a new tax, is requisite every year during the continuance of the war; and should that be so long as to produce an accumulation of tax beyond our ability, in time of war the resource would be an enactment of the taxes requisite to ensure good terms, by securing the lender, with a suspension of the payment of instalments of principal and perhaps of interest also, until the restoration of peace. This method of anticipating our taxes, or of borrowing on annuities for years, insures repayment to the lender, guards the rights of posterity, prevents a perpetual alienation of the public contributions, and consequent destitution of every resource even for the ordinary support of government. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 198.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 398.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: Sep. 1813

Our government has not, as yet, begun to act on the rule of loans and taxation going hand in hand. Had any loan taken place in my time, I should have strongly urged a redeeming tax. For the loan which has been made since the last session of Congress, we should now set the example of appropriating some particular tax, sufficient to pay the interest annually, and the principal within a fixed term, less than nineteen years. I hope yourself and your committee will render the immortal service of introducing this practice. --

TITLE: To John W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 138.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 391.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: June. 1813
See Generations.

The question will be asked and ought to be looked at, what is to be the resource if loans cannot be obtained? There is but one, “Carthago delenda est”. Bank paper must be suppressed, and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation to whom it belongs. It is the only fund on which they can rely for loans; it is the only resource which can never fail them, and it is an abundant one for every necessary purpose. Treasury bills, bottomed on taxes, bearing or not bearing interest, as may be found necessary, thrown into circulation will take the place of so much gold and silver, which last, when crowded, will find an efflux into other countries, and thus keep the quantum of medium at its salutary level. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 199.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 399.

DATE: Sep. 1813

That your efforts did much towards preventing declared war with France, I am satisfied. Of those with England, I am not equally informed. --

TITLE: To Dr. George Logan.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 215.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 421.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Oct. 1813

In all cases I am satisfied you are doing what is for the best, as far as the means put into your hands will enable you, and this thought quiets me under every occurrence. --

TITLE: To President Madison.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 114.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 384.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: May. 1813

The unwarrantable ideas often expressed in the newspapers, and by persons who ought to know better, that I intermeddle in the Executive councils, and the indecent expressions, sometimes, of a hope that Mr. Madison will pursue the principles of my administration, expressions so disrespectful to his known abilities and dispositions, have rendered it improper in me to hazard suggestions to him, on occasions even where ideas might occur to me, that might accidentally escape him. --

TITLE: To James Monroe.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 123.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

During a long life, as much devoted to study as a faithful transaction of the trusts committed to me would permit, no subject has occupied more of my consideration than our relations with all the beings around us, our duties to them, and our future prospects. After reading and hearing everything which probably can be suggested respecting them, I have formed the best judgment I could as to the course they prescribe, and in the due observance of that course, I have no recollections which give me uneasiness. --

TITLE: To William Canby.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 210.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

I have not formerly been an advocate for great manufactories. I doubted whether our labor, employed in agriculture, and aided by the spontaneous ener [Col 2] gies of the earth, would not procure us more than we could make ourselves of other necessaries. But other considerations entering into the question, have settled my doubts. --

TITLE: To John Melish.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 94.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 373.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813

If the piracies of France and England are to be adopted as the law of nations, or should become their practice, it will oblige us to manufacture at home all the material comforts. This may furnish a reason to check imports until necessary manufactures are established among us. This offers the advantage, too, of placing the consumer of our produce near the producer. --

TITLE: To William Short.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 128.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

I have hitherto myself depended entirely on foreign manufactures; but I have now thirty-five spindles agoing, a hand carding machine, and looms with the flying shuttle, for the supply of my own farms, which will never be relinquished in my time. The continuance of the war will fix the habit generally, and out of the evils of impressment and of the Orders of Council, a great blessing for us will grow. --

TITLE: To John Melish.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 94.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 373.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813

Small spinning jennies of from half a dozen to twenty spindles, will soon make their way into the humblest cottages, as well as the richest houses [in the South] ; and nothing is more certain, than that the coarse and middling clothing for our families, will forever hereafter continue to be made within ourselves. --

TITLE: To John Melish.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 94.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 373.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813

Household manufacture is taking deep root with us. I have a carding machine, two spinning machines, and looms with the flying shuttle in full operation for clothing my own family; and I verily believe that by the next winter this State will not need a yard of imported coarse or middling cloth. I think we have already a sheep for every inhabitant, which will suffice for clothing; and one-third more, which a single year will add, will furnish blanketing. --

TITLE: To James Ronaldson.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 92.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 371.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813

We hope to remove the British fully and finally from our continent. And what they will feel more, for they value their colonies only for the bales of cloth they take from them, we have established manufactures, not only sufficient to supersede our demand from them, but to rivalize them in foreign markets. --

TITLE: To Madame de Tesse.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 273.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 440.

DATE: Dec. 1813

With respect to marine hospitals, I presume you know that such establishments have been made by the General Government in the several States, that a portion of seamen's wages is drawn for their support, and the Government furnishes what is deficient. Mr. Gallatin is attentive to them, and they will grow with our growth. --

TITLE: To James Ronaldson.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 92.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 371.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813

The conduct of Massachusetts, which is the subject of your address to Mr. Quincy is serious, as embarrassing the operations of the war, and jeopardizing its issue; and is still more so, as an example of contumacy against the Constitution. One method of proving their purpose would be to call a convention of their State, and to require them to declare themselves members of the Union, and obedient to its determinations, or not members, and let them go. Put this question solemnly to their people, and their answer cannot be doubtful. One half of them are republicans, and would cling to the Union from principle. Of the other half, the dispassionate part would consider, first, that they do not raise bread sufficient for their own subsistence, and must look to Europe for the deficiency if excluded from our ports, which vital interests would force us to do. Secondly, that they are navigating people without a stick of timber for the hull of a ship, nor a pound of anything to export in it, which would be admitted at any market. Thirdly, that they are also a manufacturing people, and left by the exclusive system of Europe without a market but ours. Fourthly, that as rivals of England in manufactures, in commerce, in navigation, and fisheries, they would meet her competition in everp point. Fifthly, that England would feel no scruples in making the abandonment and ruin of such a rival the price of a treaty with the producing States; whose interest too it would be to nourish a navigation beyond the Atlantic, rather than a hostile one at our own door. And sixthly, that in case of war with the Union, which occurrences between coterminous nations frequently produce, it would be a contest of one against fifteen. The remaining portion of the federal moiety of the State would, I believe, brave all these obstacles, because they are monarchists in principle, bear [Col 2] ing deadly hatred to their republican fellow citizens, impatient under the ascendency of republican principles, devoted in their attachment to England, and preferring to be placed under her despotism, if they cannot hold the helm of government here. I see, in their separation, no evil but the example, and I believe that the effect of that would be corrected by an early and humiliating return to the Union, after losing much of the population of their country, insufficient in its own resources to feed her numerous inhabitants, and inferior in all its allurements to the more inviting soils, climates, and governments of the other States. Whether a dispassionate discussion before the public, of the advantages and disadvantages of separation to both parties, would be the best medicine of this dialytic fever, or to consider it as a sacrilege ever to touch the question, may be doubted. I am, myself, generally disposed to indulge, and to follow reason; and believe that in no case would it be safer than in the present. Their refractory course, however, will not be unpunished by the indignation of their co-States, their loss of influence with them, the censures of history, and the stain on the character of their State. --

TITLE: To James Martin.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 213.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 420.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Sep. 1813
See Federalists, Hartford Convention, and Parties.

We must train and classify the whole of our male citizens, and make military instruction a regular part of collegiate education. We can never be safe till this is done. --

TITLE: To James Monroe.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 131.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

If the marching of the militia into an enemy's country be once ceded as unconstitutional (which I hope it never will be), then will [the British] force [in Canada] , as now strengthened, bid us permanent defiance. --

TITLE: To James Monroe.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 131.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: June. 1813

The adequate price of a thing depends on the capital and labor nec [Col 2] essary to produce it. In the term capital, I mean to include science, because capital as well as labor has been employed to acquire it. Two things requiring the same capital and labor, should be of the same price. If a gallon of wine requires for its production the same capital and labor with a bushel of wheat, they should be expressed by the same price, derived from the application of a common measure to them. The comparative prices of things being thus to be estimated and expressed by a common measure, we May proceed to observe that were a country so insulated as to have no commercial intercourse with any other, to confine the interchange of all its wants and supplies within itself, the amount of circulating medium, as a common measure for adjusting these exchanges, would be quite immaterial. If their circulation, for instance, were a million of dollars, and the annual produce of their industry equivalent to ten millions of bushels of wheat, the price of a bushel of wheat might be one dollar. If, then, by a progressive coinage, their medium should be doubled, the price of a bushel of wheat might become progressively two dollars, and without inconvenience. Whatever be the proportion of the circulating medium to the value of the annual produce of industry, it may be considered as the representative of that industry. In the first case, a bushel of wheat will be represented by one dollar; in the second, by two dollars. This is well explained by Hume, and seems to be admitted by Adam Smith. But where a nation is in a full course of interchange of wants and supplies with all others, the proportion of its medium to its produce is no longer indifferent. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 233.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 406.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

One of the great advantages of specie as a medium is, that being of universal value, it will keep itself at a general level, flowing out from where it is too high into parts where it is lower. Whereas, if the medium be of local value only, as paper money, if too little, indeed, gold and silver will flow in to supply the deficiency; but if too much, it accumulates, banishes the gold and silver not locked up in vaults and hoards, and depreciates itself; that is to say, its proportion to the annual produce of industry being raised, more of it is required to represent any particular article of produce than in the other countries. This is agreed to by [Adam] Smith the principal advocate for a paper circulation; but advocating it on the sole condition that it be strictly regulated. He admits, nevertheless, that “the commerce and industry of a country cannot be so secure when suspended on the Dædalian wings of paper money, as on the solid ground of gold and silver; and that in time of war, the insecurity is greatly increased, and great confusion possible where the circulation is for the greater part in paper”. But in a country where loans are uncertain, and a specie circulation the only sure resource for them, the preference of that circulation assumes a

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 233.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 407.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

The only advantage which [Adam] Smith proposes by substituting paper in the room of gold and silver money, B. 2. c. 2. 434, is “to replace an expensive instrument with one much less costly, and sometimes equally convenient”; that is to say, page 437, “to allow the gold and silver to be sent abroad and converted into foreign goods”, and to substitute paper as being a cheaper measure. But this makes no addition to the stock or capital of the nation. The coin sent was worth as much, while in the country, as the goods imported and taking its place. It is only, then, a change of form in a part of the national capital, from that of gold and silver to other goods. He admits, too, that while a part of the goods received in exchange for the coin exported may be materials, tools and provisions for the employment of an additional industry, a part, also, may be taken back in foreign wines, silks, &c., to be consumed by idle people who produce nothing; and so far the substitution promotes prodigality, increases expense and corruption, without increasing production. So far also, then, it lessens the capital of the nation. What may be the amount which the conversion of the part exchanged for productive goods may add to the former productive mass, it is not easy to ascertain, because, as he says, page 441, “it is impossible to determine what is the proportion which the circulating money of any country bears to the whole value of the annual produce. It has been computed by different authors, from a fifth to a thirtieth of that value”. In the United States it must be less than in any other part of the commercial world; because the great mass of their inhabitants being in responsible circumstances, the great mass of their exchanges in the country is effected on credit, in their merchants' ledger, who supplies all their wants through the year, and at the end of it receives the produce of their farms, or other articles of their industry. It is a fact that a farmer with a revenue of ten thousand dollars a year, may obtain all his supplies from his merchant, and liquidate them at the end of the year by the sale of his produce to him, without the intervention of a single dollar of cash. This, then, is merely barter, and in this way of barter a great portion of the annual produce of the United States is exchanged without the intermediation of cash. We might safely, then, state our medium at the minimum of one-thirtieth. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 234.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 407.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

But what is one-thirtieth of the value of the annual produce of the industry of the United States? Or what is the whole value of the annual produce of the United States? An able writer and competent judge of the subject, in 1799, on as good grounds as probably could be taken, estimated it, on the then population of four and a half millions of inhabitants, to be thirty- [Col 2] seven and a half millions sterling, or one hundred and sixty-eight and three-fourths millions of dollars. According to the same estimate for our present population, it will be three hundred millions of dollars, onethirtieth of which, Smith's minimum, would be ten millions, and one-fifth, his maximum, would be sixty millions for the quantum of circulation. But suppose that instead of our needing the least circulating medium of any nation, from the circumstance before mentioned, we should place ourselves in the middle term of the calculation, to wit: at thirty-five millions. One-fifth of this, at the least, Smith thinks, should be retained in specie, which would leave twenty-eight millions of specie to be exported in exchange for other commodities; and if fifteen millions of that should be returned in productive goods, and not in articles of prodigality, that would be the amount of capital which this operation would add to the existing mass. But to what mass? Not that of the three hundred millions, which is only its gross annual produce, but to that capital of which the three hundred millions are but the annual produce. But this being gross, we may infer from it the value of the capital by considering that the rent of lands is generally fixed at one-third of the gross produce, and is deemed its net profit, and twenty times that its fee simple value. The profits on landed capital may, with accuracy enough for our purpose, be supposed to be on a par with those of other capital. This would give us, then, for the United States, a capital of two thousand millions, all in active employment, and exclusive of unimproved lands lying in a great degree dormant. Of this, fifteen millions would be the hundred and thirty-third part. And it is for this petty addition to the capital of the nation, this minimum of one dollar, added to one hundred and thirty-three and a third or three-fourths per cent., that we are to give up our gold and silver medium, its intrinsic solidity, its universal value, and its saving powers in time of war, and to substitute for it paper, with all its train of evils, moral, political, and physical, which I will not pretend to enumerate. There is another authority to which we may appeal for the proper quantity of circulating medium for the United States. The old Congress, when we were estimated at about two millions of people, on a long and able discussion, June 22, 1775, decided the sufficient quantity to be two millions of dollars, which sum they then emitted, ³³⁵ According to this, it should be eight millions, now that we are eight millions of people. This differs little from Smith's minimum of ten millions, and strengthens our respect for that estimate. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 234.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 408.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813
See Banks and Debt.

Specie is the most perfect medium because it will preserve its own level;

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 246.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 416.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

It would be best that our medium should be so proportioned to our produce, as to be on a par with that of the countries with which we trade, and whose medium is in a sound state. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 246.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 416.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

Instead of yielding to the cries of scarcity of medium set up by speculators, projectors and commercial gamblers, no endeavors should be spared to begin the work of reducing it by such gradual means as may give time to private fortunes to preserve their poise, and settle down with the subsiding medium. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 246.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 417.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

We are already at ten or twenty times the due quantity of medium; insomuch, that no man knows what his property is now worth, because it is bloating while he is calculating; and still less what it will be worth when the medium shall be relieved from its present dropsical state. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 246.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 417.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

To trade on equal terms, the common measure of values should be as nearly as possible on a par with that of its corresponding nations, whose medium is in a sound state; that is to say, not in an accidental state of excess or deficiency. Now, one of the great advantages of specie as a medium is, that being of universal value, it will keep itself at a general level, flowing out from where it is too high into parts where it is lower. Whereas, if the medium be of local value only, as paper money, if too little, indeed, gold and silver will flow in to supply the deficiency; but if too much, it accumulates, banishes the gold and silver not locked up in vaults and hoards, and depreciates itself; that is to say, its proportion to the annual produce of industry being raised, more of it is required to represent any particular article of produce than in the other countries. This is agreed by [Adam] Smith, (B. 2. c. 2. 437,) the principal advocate for a paper circulation; but advocating it on the sole condition that it be strictly regulated. He admits, nevertheless, that “the commerce and industry of a country cannot be so secure when suspended on the Dædalian wings of paper money, as on the solid ground of gold and silver; and that in time of war, the insecurity is greatly increased, and great confusion possible where the circulation is for the greater part in paper”. (B. 2. c. 2. 484.) But in a country where loans are uncertain, and a specie circulation the only sure re [Col 2] source for them, the preference of that circulation assumes a far different degree of importance. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 233.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 407.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

The question will be asked and ought to be looked at, what is to be the resource if loans cannot be obtained? There is but one, “Carthago delenda est”. Bank paper must be suppressed, and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation to whom it belongs. It is the only fund on which they can rely for loans; it is the only resource which can never fail them and it is an abundant one for every necessary purpose. Treasury bills, bottomed on taxes, bearing or not bearing interest, as may be found necessary, thrown into circulation will take the place of so much gold and silver, which last, when crowded, will find an efflux into other countries, and thus keep the quantum of medium at its salutary level. Let banks continue if they please, but let them discount for cash alone or for treasury notes. They discount for cash alone in every other country on earth except Great Britain, and her too often unfortunate copyist, the United States. If taken in time, they may be rectified by degrees, and without injustice, but if let alone till the alternative forces itself on us, of submitting to the enemy for want of funds, or the suppression of bank paper, either by law or by convulsion, we cannot foresee how it will end. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 199.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 399.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: Sep. 1813

I am sorry to see our loans begin at so exorbitant an interest. And yet, even at that you will soon be at the bottom of the loan-bag. We are an agricultural nation. Such an one employs its sparings in the purchase or improvement of land or stocks. The lendable money among them is chiefly that of orphans and wards in the hands of executors and guardians, and that which the former lays by till he has enough for the purchase in view. In such a nation there is one, and only one, resource for loans, sufficient to carry them through the expense of a war; and that will always be sufficient, and in the power of an honest government, punctual in the preservation of its faith. The fund I mean, is the mass of circulating coin. Every one knows, that although not literally, it is nearly true, that every paper dollar emitted banishes a silver one from the circulation. A nation, therefore, making its purchases and payments with bills fitted for circulation, thrusts an equal sum of coin out of circulation. This is equivalent to borrowing that sum, and yet the vendor, receiving in payment a medium as effectual as coin for his purchases or payments, has no claim to interest. And so the nation May continue to issue its bills as far as its wants require, and the limits of the circulation will admit. Those limits are understood to extend with us at present, to two hundred millions of dollars, a greater sum than would be necessary for any war. But this, the only resource which the government could command with certainty, the States have unfortunately fooled away, nay corruptly alienated to swindlers and shavers, under the cover of private banks. Say, too, as an additional evil, that the disposal funds of individuals, to this great amount, have thus been withdrawn from improvement and useful enterprise, and employed in the useless, usu [Col 2] rious and demoralizing practices of bank directors and their accomplices. In the year 1775, our State [Virginia] availed itself of this fund by issuing a paper money, bottomed on a specific tax for its redemption, and, to insure its credit, bearing an interest of five per cent. Within a very short time, not a bill of this emission was to be found in circulation. It was locked up in the chests of executors, guardians, widows, farmers, &c. We then issued bills bottomed on a redeeming tax, but bearing no interest. These were readily received, and never depreciated a single farthing. In the Revolutionary war, the old Congress and the States issued bills without interest, and without a tax. They occupied the channels of circulation very freely, till those channels were overflowed by an excess beyond all the calls of circulation. But, although we have so improvidently suffered the field of circulating medium to be filched from us by private individuals, yet I think we May recover it in part, and even in the whole, if the States will cooperate with us. If Treasury bills are emitted on a tax appropriated for their redemption in fifteen years, and (to ensure preference in the first moments of competition) bearing an interest of six per cent. there is no one who would not take them in preference to the bank paper now afloat, on a principle of patriotism as well as interest; and they would be withdrawn from circulation into private hoards to a considerable amount. Their credit once established, others might be emitted, bottomed also on a tax, but not bearing interest, and if even their credit faltered, open public loans, on which these bills alone should be received as specie. These, operating as a sinking fund, would reduce the quantity in circulation, so as to maintain that in an equilibrium with specie. It is not easy to estimate the obstacles which, in the beginning, we should encounter in ousting the banks from their possession of the circulation; but a steady and judicious alternation of emissions and loans, would reduce them in time. But while this is going on, another measure should be pressed, to recover ultimately our right to the circulation. The States should be applied to, to transfer the right of issuing circulating paper to Congress exclusively, in perpetuum, if possible, but during the war at least, with a saving of charter rights. I believe that every State west and south of the Connecticut River, except Delaware, would immediately do it; and the others would follow in time. Congress would, of course, begin by obliging unchartered banks to wind up their affairs within a short time, and the others as their charters expired, forbidding the subsequent circulation of their paper. This, they would supply with their own, bottomed, every emission, on an adequate tax, and bearing or not bearing interest, as the state of the public pulse should indicate. Even in the non-complying States, these bills would make their way, and supplant the unfunded paper of their banks, by their solidity, by the universality of their currency, and by their receivability

TITLE: To John Wayles Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 139.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 391.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: June. 1813

I like well your idea of issuing treasury notes bearing interest, because I am persuaded they would soon be withdrawn from circulation and locked up in vaults in private hoards. It would put it in the power of every man to lend his $100 or $1000, though not able to go forward on the great scale, and be the most advantageous way of obtaining a loan. --

TITLE: To Thomas Law.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 433.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

Laws abridging the natural right of the citizen, should be restrained by rigorous constructions within their narrowest limits. --

TITLE: To Isaac McPherson.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 176.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813
See Duty (Natural)

Our public ships have done wonders. They have saved our military reputation sacrificed on the shores of Canada. --

TITLE: To General Bailey.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 101.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Feb. 1813

No one has been more gratified than myself by the brilliant achievements of our little navy. They have deeply wounded the pride of our enemy, and been balm to ours, humiliated on the land where our real strength was felt to lie. --

TITLE: To President Madison.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 112.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 383.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: May. 1813

I sincerely congratulate you on the successes of our little navy; which must be more gratifying to you than to most men, as having been the early and constant advocate of wooden walls. If I have differed with you on this ground, it was not on the principle, but the time; supposing that we cannot build or maintain a navy, which will not immediately fall into the gulf which has swallowed not only the minor navies, but even those of the great second-rate powers of the sea. Whenever these can be resuscitated, and brought so near to a balance with England that we can turn the scale, then is my epoch for aiming at a navy. In the meantime, one competent to keep the Barbary States in order, is necessary; these being the only smaller powers disposed to quarrel with us. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 122.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: May. 1813

At sea we have rescued our character; but the chief fruit of our victories there is to prove to those who have fleets, that the English are not invincible at sea, as Alexander has proved that Bonaparte is not invincible by land. --

TITLE: To Samuel Brown.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 165.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: July. 1813

I congratulate you on the brilliant affair of the Enterprise and Boxer. No heart is more rejoiced than mine at these mortifications of English pride, and lessons to Europe that the English are not invincible at sea. If these successes do not lead us too far into the navy mania, all will be well. --

TITLE: To William Duane.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 211.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Sep. 1813

Strange reverse of expectations that our land force should be under the wing of our little navy. --

TITLE: To William Duane.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 212.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Sep. 1813

On the water we have proved to the world the error of British invincibility, and shown that with equal force and well-trained officers, they can be beaten by other nations as brave as themselves. --

TITLE: To Don V. Toronda Coruna.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 275.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Dec. 1813

I am no friend to what is called Purism, but a zealous one to the Neology which has introduced these two words without the authority of any dictionary. I consider the one as destroying the nerve and beauty of language, while the other improves both, and adds to its copiousness. I have been not a little disappointed, and made suspicious of my own judgment, on seeing the Edinburgh Reviewers, the ablest critics of the age, set their faces against the introduction of new words into the English language; they are particularly apprehensive that the writers of the United States will adulterate it. Certainly so great growing a population, spread [Col 2] over such an extent of country, with such a variety of climates, of productions, of arts, must enlarge their language, to make it answer its purpose of expressing all ideas, the new as well as the old. The new circumstances under which we are placed, call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects. An American dialect will, therefore, be formed; so will a West-Indian and Asiatic, as a Scotch and an Irish are already formed. But whether will these adulterate, or enrich the English language? Has the beautiful poetry of Burns, or his Scottish dialect, disfigured it? Did the Athenians consider the Doric, the Ionian, the Aeolic, and other dialects, as disfiguring or as beautifying their language? Did they fastidiously disavow Herodotus, Pindar, Theocritus, Sappho, Alcæus, as Grecian writers? On the contrary, they were sensible that the variety of dialects, still infinitely varied by poetical license, constituted the riches of their language, and made the Grecian Homer the first of poets, as he must ever remain, until a language equally ductile and copious shall again be spoken. --

TITLE: To John Waldo.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 184.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

I have ascertained that on Mr. Nicholas no impression unfavorable to you was made by [* * *] [the removal of Secretary Robert Smith] , and that his friendship for you has never felt a moment's abatement. Indeed we might have been sure of this from his integrity, his good sense, and his sound judgment of men and things. --

TITLE: To President Madison.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 378.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Feb. 1813

Ever since the rupture of the treaty of Amiens, the object of Great Britain has visibly been the permanent conquest of the ocean, and levying a tribute on every vessel she permits to sail on it, as the Barbary powers do on the Mediterranean, which they call their sea. --

TITLE: To William Short.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 128.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: June. 1813
See Embargo and Impressment.

The duties of office are a corvée which must be undertaken on far other considerations than those of personal happiness. --

TITLE: To General Armstrong.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 103.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

When I retired from the government four years ago; it was extremely my wish to withdraw myself from all concern with public affairs, and to enjoy with my fellow citizens the protection of government, under the auspices and direction of those to whom it was so worthily committed. Solicitations from my friends, however, to aid them in their applications for office, drew from me an unwary compliance, till at length these became so numerous as to occupy a great portion of my time in writing letters to the President and heads of departments, and although these were attended to by them with great indulgence, yet I was sensible they could not fail of being very embarrassing. They kept me, at the same time, standing forever in the attitude of a suppliant before them, daily asking favors as humiliating and afflicting to my own mind, as they were unreasonable from their multitude. I was long sensible of putting an end to these unceasing importunities, when a change in the heads of the two departments to which they were chiefly addressed, presented me an opportunity. I come to a resolution, therefore, on that change, never to make another application. I have adhered to it strictly, and find that on its rigid observance, my own happiness and the friendship of the government too much depend, for me to swerve from it in future. --

TITLE: To Thomas Paine M'Matron.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 108.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

It is now twenty-five years since I sent my southern fellow citizens two shipments (about 500 plants) of the olive tree of Aix, the finest olives in the world. If any of them still exist, it is merely as a curiosity in their gardens; not a single orchard of them has been planted. --

TITLE: To James Ronaldson.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 92.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 371.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813

Opinions, which are equally honest on both sides, should not affect personal esteem or social intercourse. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 146.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

Paper is liable to be abused, has been, is, and forever will be abused, in every country in which it is permitted. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 246.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 416.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

Paper is already at a term of abuse in these States, which has never been reached by any other nation, France excepted, whose dreadful catastrophe should be a warning against the instrument which produced it. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 246.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 416.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

When I speak comparatively of the paper emission of the old Congress and the present banks, let it not be imagined that I cover them under the same mantle. The object of the former was a holy one; for if ever there was a holy war it was that which saved our liberties and gave us independence. The object of the latter is to enrich swindlers at the expense of the honest and industrious part of the nation. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 246.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 416.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

There is, indeed, a convenience in paper; its easy transmission from one place to another. But this may be mainly supplied by bills of exchange, so as to prevent any great displacement of actual coin. Two places trading together balance their dealings, for the most part, by their mutual supplies, and the debtor individuals of either may, instead of cash, remit the bills of those who are creditor in the same dealings; or may obtain them through some third place with which both have dealings. The cases would be rare where such bills could not be obtained, either directly or circuitously, and too unimportant to the nation to overweigh the train of evils flowing from paper circulation. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 237.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 409.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

The rapid rise in the nominal price of land and labor (while war and blockade should produce a fall) proves the progressive state of the depreciation of our medium. --

TITLE: To Thomas Law.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 433.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

The trifling economy of paper, as a cheaper medium, or its convenience for transmission, weighs nothing in opposition to the advantages of the precious metals. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 246.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 416.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

The Mississippi scheme, it is well known, ended in France in the bankruptcy of the public treasury, the crash of thousands and thousands of private fortunes, and scenes of desolation and distress equal to those of an invading army, burning and laying waste all before it. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 239.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 411.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

It is said that our paper is as good as silver, because we may have silver for it at the bank where it issues. This is not true. One, two, or three persons might have it; but a general application would soon exhaust their vaults, and leave a ruinous proportion of their paper in its intrinsic worthless form. It is a fallacious pretence, for another reason. The inhabitants [Col 2] of the banking cities might obtain cash for their paper, as far as the cash of the vaults would hold out, but distance puts it out of the power of the country to do this. A farmer having a note of a Boston or Charleston bank, distant hundreds of miles, has no means of calling for the cash. And while these calls are impracticable for the country, the banks have no fear of their being made from the towns; because their inhabitants are mostly on their books, and there on sufferance only, and during good behavior. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 243.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 414.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

The unlimited emission of bank paper has banished all Great Britain's specie, and is now, by a depreciation acknowledged by her own statesmen, carrying her rapidly to bankruptcy, as it did France, as it did us, and will do us again, and every country permitting paper money to be circulated, other than that by public authority, rigorously limited to the just measure for circulation. --

TITLE: To John W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 142.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 394.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: June. 1813

If this war continues, bank circulation must be suppressed, or the government shaken to its foundation by the weight of taxes, and impracticability to raise funds on them. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 204.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 402.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: Sep. 1813
See Banks, Dollar, Money, and National Currency.

That each party endeavors to get into the administration of the government, and exclude the other from power, is true, and may be stated as a motive of action: but this is only secondary; the primary motive being a real and radical difference of political principle. I sincerely wish our differences were but personally who should govern, and that the principles of our Constitution were those of both parties. Unfortunately, it is otherwise; and the question of preference between monarchy and republicanism, which has so long divided mankind elsewhere, threatens a permanent division here. --

TITLE: To John Melish.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 95.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 374.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813

Men have differed in opinion, and been divided into parties by these opinions, from the first origin of societies, and in all governments where they have been permitted freely to think and to speak. The same political parties which now agitate the United States, have existed through all time. Whether the power of the people or that of the &agr;&rgr;&igr;&sfgr;&tgr;&ogr;&igr; should prevail, were questions which kept the States of Greece and Rome in eternal convulsions, as they now schismatize every people whose minds and mouths are not shut up by the gag of a despot. And in fact, the terms of whig and tory belong to natural as well as to civil history. They denote the temper and constitution of mind of different individuals. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 143.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

To me it appears that there have been differences of opinion and party differences, from the first establishment of government to the present day, and on the same question which now divides our own country; that these will continue through all future time; that every one takes his side in favor of the many, or of the few, according to his constitution, and the circumstances in which he is placed; that opinions which are equally honest on both sides, should not affect personal esteem or social intercourse; that as we judge between the Claudii and the Gracchi, the Wentworths and the Hampdens of past ages, so of those among us whose names may happen to be remembered for awhile, the next generations will judge favorably or unfavorably, according to the complexion of individual minds, and the side they shall themselves have taken; that nothing new can be added by you or me in support of the conflicting opinions on government; and that wisdom and duty dictate an humble resignation to the verdict of our future peers. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 145.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

To come to our own country, and to the times when you and I became first acquainted, we well remember the violent parties which agitated the old Congress, and their bitter contests. There you and I were together, and the Jays, and the Dickinsons, and other anti-independents, were arrayed against us. They cherished the monarchy of England, and we the rights of our countrymen. When our present government was in the mew, passing from Confederation to Union, how bitter was the schism between the “Feds” and the “Antis”. Here you and I were together again. For although, for a moment, separated by the Atlantic from the scene of action, I favored the opinion that nine States should confirm the Constitution, in order to secure it, and the others hold off until certain amendments, deemed favorable to freedom, should be made. I rallied in the first instant to the wiser proposition of Massachusetts, that all should confirm, and then all instruct their delegates to urge those amendments. The amendments were made, and all were reconciled to the government. But as soon as it was put into motion, the line of division was again drawn. We broke into two parties, each wishing to give the government a different direction; the one to strengthen the most popular branch, the other the more permanent branches, and to extend their permanence. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 143.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

Here you and I separated for the first time, and as we had been longer than most others on the public theatre, and our names were more familiar to our countrymen, the party which considered you as thinking with them, placed your name at [Col 2] their head; the other, for the same reason, selected mine. But neither decency nor inclination permitted us to become the advocates of ourselves, or to take part personally in the violent contests which followed. We suffered ourselves, as you so well expressed it, to be passive subjects of public discussion. And these discussions, whether relating to men, measures or opinions, were conducted by the parties with an animosity, a bitterness and an indecency which had never been exceeded. All the resources of reason and of wrath were exhausted by each party in support of its own, and to prostrate the adversary opinions; one was upbraided with receiving the anti-federalists, the other the old tories and refugees, into their bosom. Of this acrimony, the public papers of the day exhibit ample testimony, in the debates of Congress, of State Legislatures, of stump-orators, in addresses, answers, and newspaper essays; and to these, without question, may be added the private correspondences of individuals; and the less guarded in these, because not meant for the public eye, not restrained by the respect due to that, but poured forth from the overflowings of the heart into the bosom of a friend, as a momentary easement of our feelings. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 144.
PLACE: [none given]
DATE: 1813

You expected to discover the difference of our party principles in General Washington's valedictory, and my inaugural address. Not at all. General Washington did not harbor one principle of federalism. He was neither an Angloman, a monarchist, nor a separatist. He sincerely wished the people to have as much self-government as they were competent to exercise themselves. The only point on which he and I ever differed in opinion, was, that I had more confidence than he had in the natural integrity and discretion of the people, and in the safety and extent to which they might trust themselves with a control of their government. He has asseverated to me a thousand times his determination that the existing government should have a fair trial, and that in support of it he would spend [Col 2] the last drop of his blood. He did this the more repeatedly, because he knew General Hamilton's political bias, and my apprehensions from it. It is a mere calumny, therefore, in the monarchists, to associate General Washington with their principles. But that may have happened in this case which has been often seen in ordinary cases, that, by oft repeating an untruth, men come to believe it themselves. It is a mere artifice in this party to bolster themselves up on the revered name of that first of our worthies. --

TITLE: To John Melish.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 97.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 376.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813
See Federalists, Hartford Convention, Monarchists, Republicanism and Republicans.

Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not. As a member of the patent board for several years, while the law authorized a board to grant or refuse patents, I saw with what slow progress a system of general rules could be matured. Some, however, were established by that board. One of these was, that a machine of which we were possessed, might be applied to every man to any use of which it is susceptible, and that this right ought not to be taken from him and given to a monopolist, because the first perhaps had occasion to apply it. Thus a screw for crushing plaster might be employed for crushing corncobs. And a chain-pump for raising water might be used for raising wheat; this being merely a change of application. Another rule was that a change of material should not give title to a patent. [* * *] A third was that a mere change of form should give no right to a patent. [* * *] But there were still abundance of cases which could not be brought under rule, until they should have presented themselves under all their aspects; and these investigations occupying more time of the members of the board than they could spare from higher duties, the whole was turned over to the judiciary, to be matured into a system, under which every one might know when his actions were safe and lawful. Instead of refusing a patent in the first instance, as the board was authorized to do, the patent now issues of course, subject to be declared void on such principles as should be established by the courts of law. This business, however, is but little analogous to their course of reading, 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. It is more within the information of a board of academical professors, and a previous refusal of patent would better guard our citizens against harassment by lawsuits. But England had given it to her judges, and the usual predominancy of her examples carried it to ours. --

TITLE: To Isaac McPherson.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 181.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

Having seen the people of all other nations bowed down to the earth under the wars and prodigalities of their rulers, I have cherished their opposites, peace, economy, and riddance of public debt, believing that these were the high road to public as well as private prosperity and happiness. --

TITLE: To Henry Middleton.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 90.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813

I have ever cherished the same spirit with all nations, from a consciousness that peace, prosperity, liberty and morals, have an intimate connection. --

TITLE: To Dr. George Logan.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 215.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix. 421.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

He died in the arms of victory gained over the enemies of his country. [* * *] [He was] an honest and zealous patriot who lived and died for his country. --

TITLE: To Baron von Humboldt.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 270.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 432.
PLACE: [none given]
DATE: 1813

The European nations constitute a separate division of the globe; their localities make them part of a distinct system; they have a set of interests of their own in which it is our business never to engage ourselves. --

TITLE: To Baron von Humboldt.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 268.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 431.

DATE: Dec. 1813

The promotion of the arts and sciences [* * *] becomes peculiarly interesting to us, at this time, when the total demoralization of the governments of Europe, has rendered it safest, by cherishing internal resources, to lessen the occasions of intercourse with them. --

TITLE: To Dr. John L. E. W. Shecut.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 153.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

America has a hemisphere to itself. It must have its separate system of interests, which must not be subordinated to those of Europe. --

TITLE: To Baron von Humboldt.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 268.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 431.

DATE: Dec. 1813

The insulated state in which nature has placed the American continent, [Col 2] should so far avail it that no spark of war kindled in the other quarters of the globe should be wafted across the wide oceans which separate us from them. And it will be so. In fifty years more the United States alone will contain fifty millions of inhabitants, and fifty years are soon gone over. The peace of 1763 is within that period. I was then twenty years old, and of course remember well all the transactions of the war preceding it. And you will live to see the period equally ahead of us; and the numbers which will then be spread over the other parts of the American hemisphere, catching long before that the principles of our portion of it, and concurring with us in the maintenance of the same system. [* * *] I am anticipating events of which you will be the bearer to me in the Elysian fields fifty years hence. --

TITLE: To Baron von Humboldt.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 268.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 431.

DATE: Dec. 1813

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens. And considering as the only offices of power those conferred by the people directly, that is to say, the Executive and Legislative functions of the General and State Governments, the common refusal of these, and multiplied resignations, are proofs sufficient that power is not alluring to pure minds, and is not with them, the primary principle of contest. This is my belief of it; it is that on which I have acted; and had it been a mere contest who should be permitted to administer the Government according to its genuine republican principles, there has never been a moment of my life in which I should have relinquished for it the enjoyments of my family, my farm, my friends and books. --

TITLE: To John Melish.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 96.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 376.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

The adequate price of a thing depends on the capital and labor necessary to produce it. In the term capital, I mean to include science, because capital as well as labor has been employed to acquire it. Two things requiring the same capital and labor, should be of the same price. If a gallon of wine requires for its production the same capital and labor with a bushed of wheat, they should be expressed by the same price, derived from the application of a common measure to them. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 233.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 406.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

The average price of wheat on the continent of Europe, at the commencement of its present war with England, was about a French crown, of one hundred and ten cents, the bushel. With us it was one hundred cents, and consequently we could send it there in competition with their own. That ordinary price has now doubled with us, and more than doubled in England; and although a part of this augmentation May proceed from the war demand, yet from the extraordinary nominal rise in the prices of land and labor here, both of which have nearly doubled in that period, and are still rising with every new bank, it is evident that were a general peace to take place to-morrow, and time allowed for the reestablishment of commerce, justice and order, we could not raise wheat for

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 242.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 414.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Nov. 1813

The happiness of the domestic fireside is the first boon of heaven; and it is well it is so, since it is that which is the lot of the mass of mankind --

TITLE: To General Armstrong.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 103.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Feb. 1813

Our ships of force will undoubtedly be blockaded by the enemy, and we shall have no means of annoying them at sea but by small, swift-sailing vessels; these will be better managed and more multiplied in the hands of individuals than of the government. In short, they are our true and only weapon in a war against Great Britain, when once Canada and Nova Scotia shall have been rescued from them. The opposition to them in Congress is merely partial. It is a part of the navy fever, and proceeds from the desire of securing men for the public ships by suppressing all other employments from them. But I do not apprehend that this ill-judged principle is that of a majority of Congress. I hope, on the contrary, they will spare no encouragement to that kind of enterprise. Our public ships, to be sure, have done wonders. They have saved our military reputation sacrificed on the shores of Canada; but in point of real injury and depredation on the enemy, our privateers without question have been most effectual. Both species of force have their peculiar value. --

TITLE: To General Bailey.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 100.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Feb. 1813

One of the questions, you know, on which our parties took different sides, was on the improvability of the human mind in science, in ethics, in government, &c. Those who advocated reformation of institutions, pari passu with the progress of science, maintained that no definite limits could be assigned to that progress. The enemies of reform, on the other hand, denied improvement, and advocated steady adherence to the principles, practices and institutions of our fathers, which they represented as the consummation of wisdom, and acme of excellence, beyond which the human mind could never advance. Although in the passage of your answer alluded to, you expressly disclaim the wish to influence the freedom of inquiry, you predict that that will produce nothing more worthy of transmission to posterity than the principles, institutions and systems of education received from their ancestors. I do not consider this as your deliberate opinion. You possess, yourself, too much science, not to see how much is still ahead of you, unexplained and unexplored. Your own consciousness must place you as far before our ancestors as in the rear of posterity. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 126.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 387.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

Inventions cannot in nature be a subject of property. --

TITLE: To Isaac McPherson.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 181.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813
See Inventions and Patents.

By an universal law, indeed, whatever [property] , whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. --

TITLE: To Isaac McPherson.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 180.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

I acknowledge all the merit of the hymn of Cleanthes to Jupiter, which you ascribe to it. It is as highly sublime as a chaste and correct imagination can permit itself to go. Yet in the contemplation of a Being so superlative, the hyperbolic flights of the Psalmist may often be followed, with approbation, even with rapture; and I have no hesitation in giving him the palm over all the hymnists of every language and of every time. Turn to the 148th psalm, in Brady and Tate's version. Have such conceptions been ever before expressed? Their version of the 15th psalm is more to be esteemed for its pithiness than its poetry. Even Sternhold, the leaden Sternhold, kindles, in a single instance, with the sublimity of his original, and expresses the majesty of God descending on the earth, in terms not unworthy of the subject:

“The Lord descended from above, And bowed the heav'ns most high, And underneath His feet He cast, The darkness of the sky. On Cherubim and Seraphim Full royally He rode; And on the wings of mighty winds Came flying all abroad.”

TITLE: -- Psalm xviii.

[* * *] The best collection of these psalms is that of the Octagonian dissenters of Liverpool. [* * *] Indeed, bad is the best of the English versions; not a ray of poetical genius having ever been employed on them. And how much depends on this, may be seen by comparing Brady and Tate's 15th psalm with Blacklock's Justum et tenacem propositi virum of Horace. A translation of David in this style, or in that of Pompei's Cleanthes, might give us some idea of the merit of the original. The character, too, of the poetry of these hymns is singular to us: written in monostichs, each divided into strophe and anti-strophe, the sentiment of the first member responded with amplification or antithesis in the second. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: vi, 220.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

A fair and honest narrative of the bad, is a voucher for the truth of the good. In this way the old Congress set an example to the world, for which the world amply repaid them, by giving unlimited credit to whatever was stamped with the name of Charles Thomson. It is known that this was never put to an untruth but once, and that where Congress was misled by the credulity of their General (Sullivan). The first misfortune of the Revolutionary war, induced a motion to suppress or garble the account of it. It was rejected with indignation. The whole truth was given in all its details, and there never was another attempt in that body to disguise it. --

TITLE: To Matthew Carr.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 133.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

The passage you quote from Theognis, I think has an ethical rather than a political object. The whole piece is a moral exhortation, [* * *] and this passage particularly seems to be a reproof to man, who, while with his domestic animals he is curious to improve the race, by employing always the finest male, pays no attention to the improvement of his own race, but intermarries with the vicious, the ugly or the old, for considerations of wealth or ambition. It is in conformity with the principle adopted afterwards by the Pythagoreans, and expressed by Ocellus in another form [* * *] which, as literally as intelligibility will admit, may be thus translated, “concerning the interprocreation of men, how, and of whom it shall be, in a perfect manner, and according to the laws of modesty and sanctity, conjointly, this is what I think right. First, to lay it down that we do not commix for the sake of pleasure, but of the procreation of children. For the powers, the organs and desires for coition have not been given by God to man for the sake of pleasure, but for the procreation of the race. For as it were incongruous, for a mortal born to partake of divine life, the immortality of the race being

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 222.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 424.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

Every man's own reason must be his oracle. --

TITLE: To Dr. Benjamin Rush.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 106.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

If thinking men would have the courage to think for themselves, and to speak what they think, it would be found they do not differ in religious opinions as much as is supposed. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 191.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 410.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

I have considered religion as a matter between every man and his Maker, in which no other, and far less the public had a right to intermeddle. --

TITLE: To Richard Rush.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 385.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker, in which no other, and far less the public had a right to intermeddle. --

TITLE: To Richard Rush.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 385.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

I am for responsibilities at short periods, seeing neither reason nor safety in making public functionaries independent of the nation for life, or even for long terms of years. --

TITLE: To James Martin.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 213.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 420.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Sep. 1813

The numbers of our countrymen betrayed into the hands of the enemy by the treachery, cowardice or incompetence of our high officers, reduce us to the humiliating necessity of acquiescing in the brutal conduct observed towards them. When, during the last war, I put Governor Hamilton and Major Hay into a dungeon and in irons for having themselves personally done the same to the American prisoners who had fallen into their hands, and was threatened with retaliation by Phillips, then returned to New York, I declared to him I would load ten of their Saratoga prisoners (then under my care and within half a dozen miles of my house) with double irons for every American they should misuse under pretence of retaliation, and it put an end to the practice. But the ten for one are now with them. --

TITLE: To William Duane.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 211.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Sep. 1813

The upland rice which I procured fresh from Africa and sent them [the South] , has been preserved and spread in the upper parts of Georgia, and I believe in Kentucky. --

TITLE: To James Ronaldson.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 92.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 371.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813

Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us. --

TITLE: To President Madison.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 112.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 382.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

My principle is to do whatever is right, and leave the consequences to Him who has the disposal of them. --

TITLE: To Dr. George Logan.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 217.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 423.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

Every man should be protected in his lawful acts. --

TITLE: To Isaac McPherson.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 175.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

Robespierre met the fate, and his memory the execration, he so justly merited. The rich were his victims, and perished by thousands. --

TITLE: To Madame de Stael.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 114.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: May. 1813

I am for responsibilities at short periods, seeing neither reason nor safety in making the public functionaries independent of the nation for life, or even for a long term of years. On this principle I prefer the Presidential term of four years to that of seven years which I myself had at first suggested, annexing to it, however, ineligibility to it forever after; and I wish it were now annexed to the second quadrennial election of President. --

TITLE: To James Martin.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 213.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 420.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813
See Third Term.

A better man than Rush could not have left us; more benevolent, more learned, of finer genius, or more honest. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 120.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

His virtues rendered him dear to all who knew him, and his benevolence led him to do all men every good in his power. Much he was able to do, and much, therefore, will be missed. --

TITLE: To Richard Rush.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 385.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

The seamen which our navigation raises had better be of our own. It is neither our wish nor our interest ever to employ [those of England] . --

TITLE: To William Short.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 128.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: June. 1813

Before the establishment of the American States, nothing was known to history but the man of the old world, crowded within limits either small or overcharged, and steeped in the vices which that situation generates. A government adapted to such men would be one thing; but a very different one, that for the man of these States. Here every man may have land to labor for himself, if he chooses; or, preferring the exercise of any other industry, may exact for it such compensation as not only to afford a comfortable subsistence, but wherewith to provide for a cessation from labor in old age. Every one, by his property, or by his satisfactory situation, is interested in the support of law and order. And such men may safely and advantageously reserve to themselves a wholesome control over their public affairs, and a degree of freedom, which, in the hands of the canaille of the cities of Europe, would be instantly per [Col 2] verted to the demolition and destruction of everything public and private. The history of the last twenty-five years of France, and of the last forty years in America, nay of its last two hundred years, proves the truth of both parts of this observation. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 226.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 428.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

My bill for the more general diffusion of learning had for a further object to impart to these wards those portions of self-government for which they are best qualified, by confiding to them the care of their poor, their roads, police, elections, the nomination of jurors, administration of justice in small cases, elementary exercises of militia; in short, to have made them little republics, with a warden at the head of each, for all those concerns which, being under their eye, they would better manage than the larger republics of the county or State. A general call of ward meetings by their wardens on the same day through the State, would at any time produce the genuine sense of the people on any required point, and would enable the State to act in mass, as [the New England] people have so often done, and with so much effect by their town meetings. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 225.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 427.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813
See Wards.

I fear the Spaniards are too heavily oppressed by ignorance and superstition for self-government, and whether a change from foreign to domestic despotism will be to their advantage remains to be seen. --

TITLE: To Dr. Samuel Brown.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 165.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

Mischief may be done negatively as well [Col 2] as positively. Of this a cabal in the Senate of the United States has furnished many proofs. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 224.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 426.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

The term of office to our Senate, like that of the judges, is too long for my approbation. --

TITLE: To James Martin.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 213.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 420.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Sep. 1813

Had it been my good fortune to preserve at the age of seventy, all the activity of body and mind which I enjoyed in earlier life, I should have employed it now, as then, in incessant labors to serve those to whom I could be useful. --

TITLE: To M. de Lomerie.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 107.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

Opinions, which are equally honest on both sides, should not affect personal esteem or social intercourse. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 146.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

An expression in your letter [* * *] that “the human understanding is a revelation from its Maker”, gives the best solution that I believe can be given of the question, “what did Socrates mean by his Dæmon”? He was too wise to believe, and too honest to pretend that he had real and familiar converse with a superior and invisible being. He probably considered the suggestions of his conscience, or reason, as revelations, or inspirations from the Supreme Mind, bestowed, on important occasions, by a special superintending Providence. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 220.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

I see with pleasure another proof that South Carolina is ever true to the principles of free government. --

TITLE: To Henry Middleton.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 91.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813

The most advantageous relation in which Spain can stand with her American colonies is that of independent friendship, secured by the ties of consanguinity, sameness of language, religion, manners, and habits, and certain from the influence of these, of a preference in her commerce, if, instead of the eternal irritations, thwartings, machinations against their new governments, the insults and aggressions which Great Britain has so unwisely practiced towards us, to force us to hate her against our natural inclinations, Spain yields, like a genuine parent, to the forisfamiliation of her colonies, now at maturity, if she extends to them her affections, her aid, her patronage in every court and country, it will weave a bond of union indissoluble by time. --

TITLE: To Don V. de Toronda Coruna.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 274.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Dec. 1813

That Spain's divorce from its American colonies, which is now unavoidable, will be a great blessing, it is impossible not to pronounce on a review of what she was when she acquired them, and of her gradual descent from that proud eminence to the condition in which her present war found her. Nature has formed that peninsula to be the second, and why not the first nation in Europe? Give equal habits of energy to the bodies, and of science to the minds of her citizens, and where could her superior be found? --

TITLE: To Don V. de Toronda Coruna.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 274.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Dec. 1813

That they will throw off their European dependence I have no doubt; but in what kind of government their revolution will end I am not so certain. History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. The vicinity of New Spain to the United States, and their consequent intercourse, may furnish schools for the higher, and example for the lower classes of their citizens. And Mexico, where we learn from you that men of science are not wanting, may revolutionize itself under better auspices than the Southern provinces. These last, I fear, must end in military despotisms. The different castes of their inhabitants, their mutual hatreds and jealousies, their profound ignorance and bigotry, will be played off by cunning leaders, and each be made the instrument of enslaving others. [* * *] But in whatever governments they end they will be American governments, no longer to be involved in the never-ceasing broils of Europe. --

TITLE: To Baron von Humboldt.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 267.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 430.

DATE: Dec. 1813

A change has been long desired in English orthography, such as might render it an easy and true index of the pronunciation of words. The want of conformity between the combinations of letters, and the sounds they should represent, increases to foreigners the difficulty of acquiring the language, occasions great loss of time to children in learning to read, and renders correct spelling rare but in those who read much. In England a variety of plans and propositions has been made for the reformation of their orthography. Passing over these, two of our countrymen, Dr. Franklin and Dr. Thornton, have also engaged in the enterprise; the former proposing an addition of two or three new characters only, the latter a reformation of the whole alphabet nearly. But these attempts in England, as well as here, have been without effect. About the middle of the last century an attempt was made to banish the letter d from the words bridge, judge, hedge, knowledge, &c., others of that termination, and to write them as we write age, cage, sacrilege, privilege; but with little success. The attempt was also made, which you mention, [* * *] to drop the letter u in words of Latin derivation ending in our, and to write honor, candor, rigor, &c., instead of honour, candour, rigour. But the u having been picked up in the passage of these words from the Latin, through the French, to us, is still preserved by those who consider it as a memorial of our title to the words. Other partial attempts have been made by individual writers, but with as little success. Pluralizing nouns in y and ey, by adding s only, as you propose, would certainly simplify the spelling, and be analogous to the general idiom of the language. It would be a step gained in the progress of general reformation, if it could prevail. But my opinion being requested I must give it candidly, that judging of the future by the past, I expect no better fortune to this than similar preceding propositions have experienced. It is very difficult to persuade the great body of mankind to give up what they have once learned, and are now masters of, for something to be learned anew. Time alone insensibly wears down old habits, and produces small changes at long intervals, and to this process we must all accommodate ourselves, and be content to follow those who will not follow us. Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors had twenty ways of spelling the word “many”. Ten centuries have dropped all of them and substituted that which we now use. I now return your MS. ⁴⁶³ without being able, with the gentlemen whose letters are cited, to encourage hope as to its effect. I am bound, however, to acknowledge that this is a subject to which I have not paid much attention; and that my [Col 2] doubts, therefore, should weigh nothing against their more favorable expectations. That these may be fulfilled, and mine prove unfounded, I sincerely wish, because I am a friend to the reformation generally of whatever can be made better. --

TITLE: To John Wilson.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 190.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 396.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

[I assure you] of my sincere sympathies for the share which you bear in the afflictions of your country, and the deprivation to which a lawless will has subjected you. In return, you enjoy the dignified satisfaction of having met them, rather than be yoked with the abject, to his car; and that, in withdrawing from oppression, you have followed the virtuous example of a father whose name will ever be dear to your country and to mankind. --

TITLE: To Madame de Stael.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 119.

DATE: May. 1813

The public contributions should be as uniform as practicable from year to year, that our habits of industry and of expense may become adapted to them; and that they may be duly digested and incorporated with our annual economy. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 198.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 398.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: Sep. 1813

The objects of finance in the United States have hitherto been very simple; merely to provide for the support of the government on its peace establishment, and to pay the debt contracted in the Revolutionary war. The means provided for these objects were ample, and resting on a consumption which little affected the poor, may be said to have been felt by none. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 194.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 395.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: Sep. 1813

No tax should ever be yielded for a longer term than that of the Congress wanting it, except when pledged for the reimbursement of a loan. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 195.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 395.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: Sep. 1813

Taxes should be continued by annual or biennial reenactments. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 195.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 395.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: Sep. 1813

Taxes should be continued by annuel or biennial reenactments, because a constant hold, by the nation, of the strings of the public purse, is a salutary restraint from which an honest government ought not to wish, nor a corrupt one to be permitted to be free. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 195.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 395.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: Sep. 1813

I am for responsibilities at short periods, seeing neither reason nor safety in making public functionaries independent of the nation for life, or even for long terms of years. On this principle I prefer the Presidential term of four years, to that of seven years, which I myself had at first suggested, annexing to it, however, ineligibility forever after; and I wish it were now annexed to the second quadrennial election of President. --

TITLE: To James Martin.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 213.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 420.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Sep. 1813

The raising money by Tontine, more practiced on the continent of Europe than in England, is liable to the same objection [as funding] , of encroachment on the independent rights of posterity; because the annuities not expiring gradually, with the lives on which they rest, but all on the death of the last survivor only, they will, of course, overpass the term of a generation, and the more probably as the subjects on whose lives the annuities depend, are generally chosen of the ages, constitutions, and occupations most favorable to long life. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 197.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 397.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: 1813 1813 gt;

No man has a natural right to the trade of a money lender but he who has the money to lend. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 141.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 394.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

The summum bonum with me is now truly epicurean, ease of body and tranquillity of mind. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 143.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

I have been long endeavoring to procure the cork tree from Europe but without success. A plant which I brought with me from Paris died after languishing some time. --

TITLE: To James Ronaldson.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 92.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 370.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

I know nothing of the veterinary institution of London [* * *] . I know well the Veterinary school of Paris, of long standing, and saw many of its publications during my residence there. They were classically written, announced a want of nothing but certainty as to their facts, which granted, the hypotheses were learned and plausible. The coach-horses of the rich of Paris were availed of the institution; but the farmers even of the neighborhood could not afford to call a veterinary doctor to their plough horses in the country, or to send them to a livery stable to be attended in the city. On the whole, I was not a convert to the utility of the Institution. --

TITLE: To Dr. Benjamin Rush.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 105.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

That there are certain diseases of the human body, so distinctly pronounced by well-articulated symptoms, and recurring so often, as not to be mistaken, wherein experience has proved that certain substances applied, will restore order, I cannot doubt. [* * *] But there are also a great mass of indistinct diseases, presenting themselves under no form clearly characterized, nor exactly recognized as having occurred before, and to which of course, the application of no particular substance can be known to have been made, nor its effect on the case experienced. These May be called unknown cases, and they may in time be lessened by the progress of observation and experiment. Observing that there are in the construction of the animal system some means provided unknown to us, which have a tendency to restore order, when disturbed by accident, called by physicians the vis medicatrix naturœ, I think it safer to trust to this power in the unknown cases, than to uncertain conjectures built on the ever-changing hypothetical systems of medicine. Now in the Veterinary department all are unknown cases. Man can tell his physician the seat of his pain, its nature, history, and sometimes its cause, and can follow his directions for the curative process; but the poor dumb horse cannot signify where his pain is, what it is, or when or whence it came, and resists all process for its cure. If in the case of man, then, the benefit of medical interference in such cases admits of question, what must it be in that of the horse? And to what narrow limits is the real importance of the veterinary art reduced? --

TITLE: To Dr. Benjamin Rush.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 105.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

The insulated state in which nature has placed the American continent should so far avail it that no spark of war kindled in the other quarters of the globe should be wafted across the wide oceans which separate us from them. --

TITLE: To Baron Humboldt.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 268.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 431.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

If ever there was a holy war, it was that which saved our liberties and gave us independence. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 246.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 416.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

The war of the Revolution will be sanctioned by the approbation of posterity through all future ages. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 194.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 395.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: Sep. 1813

On the final and formal declarations of England, that she never would repeal her Orders of Council as to us, until those of France should be repealed as to other nations as well as us, and that no practicable arrangement against her impressment of our seamen could be proposed or devised, war was justly declared, and ought to have been declared. --

TITLE: To J. W. Eppes.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 196.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 396.
PLACE: Popular Forest, Va. ,,
DATE: Sep. 1813

We are now at the close of our second campaign with England. During the first we suffered several checks, from the want of capable and tried officers; all the higher ones of the Revolution having died off during an interval of thirty years of peace. But this second campaign has been more successful, having given us all the Lakes and country of Upper Canada, except the single post of Kingston, at its lower extremity. --

TITLE: To Don V. Toronda Coruna.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 275.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Dec. 1813

[The declaration of war was] accompanied with immediate offers of peace on simply doing us justice. These offers were made through Russel, through Admiral Warren, through the government of Canada, and the mediation proposed by her best friend Alexander, and the greatest enemy of Bonaparte, was accepted without hesitation. --

TITLE: To Dr. George Logan.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 216.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 422.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Oct. 1813

To keep the war popular, we must keep open the markets. As long as good prices can be had, the people will support the war cheerfully. --

TITLE: To James Ronaldson.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 93.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 372.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813

England has misrepresented to all Europe this ground of the war [of 1812] . She has called it a new pretension, set up since the repeal of her Orders of Council. She knows there has never been a moment of suspension of our reclamation against it, from General Washington's time inclusive, to the present day; and that it is distinctly stated in our declaration of war, as one of its principal causes. --

TITLE: To Madame de Stael.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 118.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: May. 1813

She has pretended we have entered into the war to establish the principle of “free bottoms, free goods”, or to protect her seamen against her own rights over them. We contend for neither of these. --

TITLE: To Madame de Stael.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 118.

DATE: May. 1813

She pretends we are partial to France; that we have observed a [Col 2] fraudulent and unfaithful neutrality between her and her enemy. She knows this to be false, and that if there has been any inequality in our proceedings towards the belligerents, it has been in her favor. Her ministers are in possession of full proofs of this. Our accepting at once, and sincerely, the mediation of the virtuous Alexander, their greatest friend, and the most aggravated enemy of Bonaparte, sufficiently proves whether we have partialities on the side of her enemy. I sincerely pray that this mediation may produce a just peace. --

TITLE: To Madame de Stael.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 119.

DATE: May. 1813

-- As soon as we heard of her partial repeal of her Orders of Council, we offered instantly to suspend hostilities by an armistice, if she would suspend her impressments, and meet us in arrangements for securing our citizens against them. She refused to do it, because impracticable by any arrangement, as she pretends; but, in truth, because a body of sixty to eighty thousand of the finest seamen in the world, which we possess, is too great a resource for manning her exaggerated navy, to be relinquished, as long as she can keep it open. Peace is in her hand, whenever she will renounce the practice of aggression on the persons of our citizens. If she thinks it worth eternal war, eternal war we must have. She alleges that the sameness of language, of manners, of appearance, renders it impossible to distinguish us from her subjects. But because we speak English, and look like them, are we to be punished? Are free and independent men to be submitted to their bondage? --

TITLE: To Madame de Stael.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 118.

DATE: May. 1813

Nothing but the total prostration of all moral principle could have produced the enormities which have forced us at length into the war. On one hand, a ruthless tyrant, drenching Europe in blood to obtain through future time the character of the destroyer of mankind; on the other, a nation of buccaneers, urged by sordid avarice, and embarked in the flagitious enterprise of seizing to itself the maritime resources and rights of all other nations, have left no means of peace to reason and moderation. And yet there are beings among us who think we ought still to have acquiesced. As if while full war was waging on one side, we could lose by making some reprisal on the other. --

TITLE: To Henry Middleton.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 91.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813

Perhaps this Russian mediation May cut short the history of the present war, and leave to us the laurels of the sea, while our enemies are bedecked with those of the land.

TITLE: To William Duane.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 110.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: April. 1813

Enough wealthy men will find their way into every branch of the legislature to protect themselves. --

TITLE: To John Adams.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 224.
EDITION: Ford ed., ix, 426.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: 1813

It seems to me that in proportion as commercial avarice and corruption advance on us from the north and east, the principles of free government are to retire to the agricultural States of the south and west, as their last asylum and bulwark. With honesty and self-government for her portion, agriculture may abandon contentedly to others the fruits of commerce and corruption. --

TITLE: To Henry Middleton.
EDITION: Washington ed. vi, 91.
PLACE: Monticello
DATE: Jan. 1813