politics." Having "gladly laid down the distressing burthen of power," he had "exchanged the newspapers for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid." "The swaggering on deck as a passenger," he playfully wrote to his son-in-law, John Eppes, in 1813, "is so much more pleasant than climbing the ropes as a seaman"-and much more in the same vein.

But in this matter Jefferson yielded somewhat to a besetting temptation of his nature, namely, that of self-deception through the fervor of his own protestations. He was far too active a man and far too thoroughly identified with the life of the Republican party and solicitous of its fortunes to abjure politics during the exciting days of the War of 1812, and the uncertain days of national reconstruction which followed. Especially when the chief magistracy was held for sixteen of the seventeen years of his retirement by two of his closest friends and political lieutenants. Presidents Madison and Monroe consulted the oracle of Monticello on every important crisis of their administrations. Their published correspondence with Jefferson contains only a partial record of their indebtedness to him, for they frequently made the pilgrimage in person to Monticello for long and intimate conferences.

A striking example of the influence he exerted on the administration at Washington is furnished by a letter which he wrote on October 24, 1823, in his

eighty-first year, to President Monroe, in answer to the latter's request for his opinion on Canning's proposal of joint action between Great Britain and the United States to warn the Holy Alliance to keep its hands off the western hemisphere. The letter was written six weeks before the President announced his famous Monroe Doctrine to Congress. It reads: "Our first and fundamental maxim should be never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe. Our second, never to suffer Europe to meddle with cis-Atlantic affairs. America, north and south, has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe and peculiarly her own. . . . I could honestly, therefore, join in the declaration . that we will oppose with all our means the forcible interposition of any other power, as auxiliary, stipendiary, or under any other form or pretext, and most especially their [the former colonies of Spain in the western hemisphere] transfer to any power by conquest, coercion, or acquisition in any other way." Monroe put these ideas into his message of December 2, 1823.

Jefferson's political prognostications, however, were not always right, nor his judgments always sound. He was curiously mistaken in his prophecy of the course of the War of 1812, when he wrote to his old friend, General Kosciusko, June 28, 1812: “Our present enemy will have the sea to herself, while we shall be equally predominant at land, and shall

strip her of all her possessions on this continent." Great Britain did not have the sea to herself, and Detroit, Bladensburg, and Sackett's Harbor are a sufficient commentary on our "predominance at land." The easy optimism with which the Southern statesmen, from the knightly young Clay to the venerable Jefferson, assumed a rapid and jaunty conquest of Canada by our militia, is still a matter of wonder to the historian. "The acquisition of Canada this year as far as the neighborhood of Quebec," wrote Jefferson to Duane, in August, 1812, "will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us experience for the attack of Halifax the next and the final expulsion of England from the American continent." Jefferson didn't go quite to the length that Clay did, however, in declaring that the conquest of Canada could be accomplished by a thousand Kentucky riflemen!

On the whole, it seems as though Jefferson in his later years reverted to the particularistic theories of government from which he had grown away during his tenure of office. The Hartford Convention, the nationalist tendencies in the increase of the army, the raising of the tariff, the re-establishment of the bank, the movement for internal improvements at national expense, revived his apprehension of the renaissance of Federalism. Perhaps, too, in the reminiscences of his earlier days of jealous combat against the centralizing tendencies of Alexander

Hamilton, and in the ordering and editing of those random notes which he had jotted down during his official career in Philadelphia and Washington-the famous and regrettable Anas-he experienced a fresh realization of the dangers of Federal usurpation. Nor could he have been indifferent to the rapid growth of the power of the Federal judiciary at the expense of States' rights in the successive decisions of the supreme court under the influence of Chief Justice Marshall, or to the appearance of Marshall's elaborate Life of Washington (1805), which gave a powerful Federalist interpretation of our government in its inaugural years. His purpose in publishing the Anas was chiefly to counteract the influence of Marshall's book, and he appealed to Madison and the younger men of the Republican party to take care that the people of the country should not be left without an adequate apologetic for Republican principles and policies. He feared that the Republican party, under its new and enthusiastic leaders, like Calhoun, Porter, Cheves, and Clay, might drift from the true course.

It is undoubtedly to this renewed fidelity to the doctrines of particularism and States' rights that we must attribute Jefferson's disappointing and reactionary attitude on the Missouri question. No man in America had championed the cause of negro emancipation with more consistency and vigor than Thomas Jefferson. From his entrance into the Vir

ginia House of Burgesses in 1769 to his retirement from the presidency, forty years later, his every public utterance and private opinion on the subject of slavery had been in favor of abolition. In the first draft of the Declaration of Independence he had made the encouragement of the slave-trade one of the heads of indictment against George III. Chosen with Wythe and Pendleton to revise the Virginia law code in 1779, he prepared an amendment emancipating all slaves born in the State after the passing of the act, and providing for their being educated in farming and the mechanical arts at public expense until they came of age, and then being colonized to some suitable place, supplied with arms, household implements, tools, seeds, domestic animals, and kept under the "alliance and protection" of the State until they should be numerous and strong enough to protect themselves.

Shortly after his futile attempt to get emancipation written into the revised Virginia law code, Jefferson composed his Notes on Virginia (published in Paris, in 1784), in which he deplored the evil effects of slavery on the manners and morals of the community. "The whole commerce between master and slave," he wrote, "is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it. . . . And can the liberties of a nation