Chapter II

BEGINNINGS

I

THE general poverty of fact and record concerning Mr. Jefferson’s early years is threadbare in the matter of his marriage. No one knows how he met his wife, or what she was like. There is a tradition that her daughter Mary, or Maria, as she later came to be known, resembled her. As far as this tradition goes, therefore, there is ground for thinking she was a slender brunette of medium height, gentle, pretty and amiable, and otherwise not greatly gifted.

Chapter III

1784-1789

I

IN 1784 John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were in Europe, as ministers plenipotentiary to negotiate treaties of commerce, struggling to revive the wilted credit of America and galvanize its palsied trade. On the seventh of May, the Congress resolved to add a third minister to its foreign staff. Age and infirmity were telling on Franklin; he wanted to come home, and it would be a hard matter to fill his place.

Chapter IV

1784-1789 (Continued)

I

ALTHOUGH business on the whole was dull, the American representative finally got a few concessions on minor lines of trade, such as fish-oil, potash, ship-timber and hides. He could do little about tobacco. His efforts to loosen the tobacco-monopoly, indeed, were not wholly well thought of even at home.

Chapter V

WASHINGTON, HAMILTON, ADAMS

I

MR. JEFFERSON landed at Norfolk late in the autumn of 1789, bringing with him his fine French clothes, and all the furnishings that he had bought for his two houses in Paris, carefully packed and ready for further use at Monticello; all the toile de Jouy, nearly a thousand francs worth of it, the lawn curtains, the red damask window-curtains, the blue damask bed-curtains, the pictures and ornaments.

Chapter VI

EIGHT YEARS OF “SPLENDID MISERY”

I

PREVIOUS to the election of the elder Adams to the Presidency, a most veracious stump orator from Providence addressed the Old Britoners and Hardscrabblers, on which occasion . . .

Chapter VII

RECOMMENCEMENTS

I

REACHING Monticello in the middle of March, “having found the roads excessively bad, although I have seen them worse,” Mr. Jefferson immediately wrote a letter to his successor in the White House, giving him news of the great world of reality outside the realm of politics. “The spring is remarkably backward,” is his first observation to the man who was facing the problems of possible war with Old England and possible secession in New England.

Chapter VIII

ADVESPERASCIT

I

WHEN he left the Presidency, Mr. Jefferson was about twenty thousand dollars in debt. His own Embargo Act had hit him hard, in common with all agrarian producers. He had accepted certain obligations of others, in addition to his own, some for his son-in-law, Martha’s husband, who had sunk into despondency and inertness, and some for a friend as unfortunate as himself. Hence his later years were a continuous and unsuccessful struggle against insolvency.

Bibliographical Note

THE Memorial Edition of Mr. Jefferson’s writings contains an excellent bibliography down to twenty-five years ago. There seems no need to reproduce it here. Of later books that are easily available, Mr. Muzzey’s short biography is very competent. Mr. Bowers’s Jefferson and Hamilton gives a capital account of political history in the decade 1790-1800. If any one wishes to know the worst that a good attorney can make of Mr. Jefferson, it is to be found in Mr. Beveridge’s biography of John Marshall.

INDEX

Adams, John, 16, 34, 44, 45, 75, 92, 103, 105, 107–109, 115, 128, 150, 164, 175, 183, 194, 206, 217, 218, 220–228, 230–233, 238, 241, 273, 278, 292, 294, 295, 300, 305, 310, 329, 331

Adams, Mrs. John, 116, 129, 230, 305, 330, 331

Adams, Samuel, 218, 244, 260

Agriculture, 51–61, 64, 68, 70, 72, 73, 104, 158, 167–171, 191, 195, 274, 280, 323

Aix, visit to, 153–164

Alien Sedition Acts, 228–230