The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 4 (of 9)

Accept my friendly salutations, and assurances of great esteem and respect.

TO MR. GALLATIN

Washington, December 13, 1803.

The Attorney General having considered and decided that the prescription in the law for establishing a bank, that the officers in the subordinate offices of discount and deposit, shall be appointed "on the same terms and in the same manner practised in the principal bank," does not extend to them the principle of rotation, established by the Legislature in the body of directors in the principal bank, it follows that the extension of that principle has been merely a voluntary and prudential act of the principal bank, from which they are free to depart. I think the extension was wise and proper on their part, because the Legislature having deemed rotation useful in the principal bank constituted by them, there would be the same reason for it in the subordinate banks to be established by the principal. It breaks in upon the esprit du corps so apt to prevail in permanent bodies; it gives a chance for the public eye penetrating into the sanctuary of those proceedings and practices, which the avarice of the directors may introduce for their personal emolument, and which the resentments of excluded directors, or the honesty of those duly admitted, might betray to the public; and it gives an opportunity at the end of the year, or at other periods, of correcting a choice, which, on trial, proves to have been unfortunate; an evil of which themselves complain in their distant institutions. Whether, however, they have a power to alter this, or not, the executive has no right to decide; and their consultation with you has been merely an act of complaisance, or from a desire to shield so important an innovation under the cover of executive sanction. But ought we to volunteer our sanction in such a case? Ought we to disarm ourselves of any fair right of animadversion, whenever that institution shall be a legitimate subject of consideration? I own, I think the most proper answer would be, that we do not think ourselves authorized to give an opinion on the question.

From a passage in the letter of the President, I observe an idea of establishing a branch bank of the United States in New Orleans. This institution is one of the most deadly hostility existing, against the principles and form of our Constitution. The nation is, at this time, so strong and united in its sentiments, that it cannot be shaken at this moment. But suppose a series of untoward events should occur, sufficient to bring into doubt the competency of a republican government to meet a crisis of great danger, or to unhinge the confidence of the people in the public functionaries; an institution like this, penetrating by its branches every part of the Union, acting by command and in phalanx, may, in a critical moment, upset the government. I deem no government safe which is under the vassalage of any self-constituted authorities, or any other authority than that of the nation, or its regular functionaries. What an obstruction could not this bank of the United States, with all its branch banks, be in time of war? It might dictate to us the peace we should accept, or withdraw its aids. Ought we then to give further growth to an institution so powerful, so hostile? That it is so hostile we know, 1, from a knowledge of the principles of the persons composing the body of directors in every bank, principal or branch; and those of most of the stockholders: 2, from their opposition to the measures and principles of the government, and to the election of those friendly to them: and 3, from the sentiments of the newspapers they support. Now, while we are strong, it is the greatest duty we owe to the safety of our Constitution, to bring this powerful enemy to a perfect subordination under its authorities. The first measure would be to reduce them to an equal footing only with other banks, as to the favors of the government. But, in order to be able to meet a general combination of the banks against us, in a critical emergency, could we not make a beginning towards an independent use of our own money, towards holding our own bank in all the deposits where it is received, and letting the treasurer give his draft or note, for payment at any particular place, which, in a well-conducted government, ought to have as much credit as any private draft, or bank note, or bill, and would give us the same facilities which we derive from the banks? I pray you to turn this subject in your mind, and to give it the benefit of your knowledge of details; whereas, I have only very general views of the subject. Affectionate salutations.

TO GOVERNOR CLINTON

Washington, December 31, 1803.

Dear Sir,—I received last night your favor of the 22d, written on the occasion of the libellous pamphlet lately published with you. I began to read it, but the dulness of the first page made me give up the reading for a dip into here and there a passage, till I came to what respected myself. The falsehood of that gave me a test for the rest of the work, and considering it always useless to read lies, I threw it by. As to yourself, be assured no contradiction was necessary. The uniform tenor of a man's life furnishes better evidence of what he has said or done on any particular occasion than the word of an enemy, and of an enemy too who shows that he prefers the use of falsehoods which suit him to truths which do not. Little squibs in certain papers had long ago apprized me of a design to sow tares between particular republican characters, but to divide those by lying tales whom truths cannot divide, is the hackneyed policy of the gossips of every society. Our business is to march straight forward to the object which has occupied us for eight and twenty years, without either turning to the right or left. My opinion is that two or three years more will bring back to the fold of republicanism all our wandering brethren whom the cry of "wolf" scattered in 1798. Till that is done, let every man stand to his post, and hazard nothing by change. And when that is done, you and I may retire to the tranquillity which our years begin to call for, and revise with satisfaction the efforts of the age we happened to be born in, crowned with complete success. In the hour of death we shall have the consolation to see established in the land of our fathers the most wonderful work of wisdom and disinterested patriotism that has ever yet appeared on the globe.

In confidence that you will not be weary in well doing, I tender my wishes that your future days may be as happy as your past ones have been useful, and pray you to accept my friendly salutations and assurances of high consideration and respect.

TO CAPTAIN MERIWETHER LEWIS

Washington, January 22, 1804.

Dear Sir,—My letters since your departure have been of July 11th and 15th, November 16th, and January 13th. Yours received are of July 8th, 15th, 22d, and 25th, September 25th and 30th, and October 3d. Since the date of the last we have no certain information of your movements. With mine of November 16th, I sent you some extracts made by myself from the journal of an agent of the trading company of St. Louis up the Missouri. I now enclose a translation of that journal in full for your information. In that of the 13th instant I enclosed you a map of a Mr. Evans, a Welshman, employed by the Spanish government for that purpose, but whose original object I believe had been to go in search of the Welsh Indians, said to be up the Missouri. On this subject a Mr. Rees, of the same nation, established in the western part of Pennsylvania, will write to you. New Orleans was delivered to us on the 20th of December, and our garrisons and government established there. The orders for the delivery of the upper ports were to leave New Orleans on the 28th, and we presume all those ports will be occupied by our troops by the last day of the present month. When your instructions were penned, this new position was not so authentically known as to affect the complexion of your instructions. Being now become sovereigns of the country, without, however, any diminution of the Indian rights of occupancy, we are authorized to propose to them in direct terms the institution of commerce with them. It will now be proper you should inform those through whose country you will pass, or whom you may meet, that their late fathers, the Spaniards, have agreed to withdraw all their troops from all the waters and country of the Mississippi and Missouri. That they have surrendered to us all their subjects, Spanish and French, settled there and all their posts and lands; that henceforward we become their fathers and friends, and that we shall endeavor that they shall have no cause to lament the change; that we have sent you to inquire into the nature of the country and the nations inhabiting it, to know at what places and times we must establish stores of goods among them, to exchange for their peltries; that as soon as you return with the necessary information, we shall prepare supplies of goods and persons to carry them, and make the proper establishments; that in the meantime the same traders who reside among us visit them, and who now are a part of us, will continue to supply them as usual; that we shall endeavor to become acquainted with them as soon as possible; and that they will find in us faithful friends and protectors. Although you will pass through no settlements of the Sioux (except seceders) yet you will probably meet with parties of them. On that nation we wish most particularly to make a friendly impression, because of their immense power, and because we learn that they are very desirous of being on the most friendly terms with us.

I enclose you a letter, which I believe is from some one on the part of the Philosophical Society. They have made you a member, and your diploma is lodged with me; but I suppose it safest to keep it here and not to send it after you. Mr. Harvie departs to-morrow for France, as the bearer of the Louisiana stock to Paris. Captain William Brent takes his place with me. Congress will probably continue in session through the month of March. Your friends here and in Albemarle, as far as I recollect, are well. Trist will be the collector of New Orleans, and his family will go to him in the spring. Dr. Bache is now in Philadelphia, and probably will not return to New Orleans. Accept my friendly salutations, and assurances of affectionate esteem and respect.

TO TIMOTHY BLOODWORTH, ESQ

Washington, January 29, 1804.

Dear Sir,—I thank you for the seed of the fly-trap. It is the first I have ever been able to obtain, and shall take great care of it. I am well pleased to hear of the progress of republicanism with you. To do without a land tax, excise, stamp tax and the other internal taxes, to supply their place by economies, so as still to support the government properly, and to apply $7,300,000 a year steadily to the payment of the public debt; to discontinue a great portion of the expenses on armies and navies, yet protect our country and its commerce with what remains; to purchase a country as large and more fertile than the one we possessed before, yet ask neither a new tax, nor another soldier to be added, but to provide that that country shall by its own income, pay for itself before the purchase money is due; to preserve peace with all nations, and particularly an equal friendship to the two great rival powers France and England, and to maintain the credit and character of the nation in as high a degree as it has ever enjoyed, are measures which I think must reconcile the great body of those who thought themselves our enemies; but were in truth only the enemies of certain Jacobinical, atheistical, anarchical, imaginary caricatures, which existed only in the land of the raw head and bloody bones, beings created to frighten the credulous. By this time they see enough of us to judge our characters by what we do, and not by what we never did, nor thought of doing, but in the lying chronicles of the newspapers. I know indeed there are some characters who have been too prominent to retract, too proud and impassioned to relent, too greedy after office and profit to relinquish their longings, and who have covered their devotion to monarchism under the mantle of federalism, who never can be cured of their enmities. These are incurable maniacs, for whom the hospitable doors of Bedlam are ready to open, but they are permitted to walk abroad while they refrain from personal assault.

The applications for Louisiana are so numerous that it would be immoral to give a hope to the friends you mention. The rage for going to that country seems universal. Accept my affectionate salutations, and assurances of great esteem and respect.

TO DOCTOR PRIESTLEY

Washington, January 29, 1804.

Dear Sir,—Your favor of December the 12th came duly to hand, as did the second letter to Doctor Linn, and the treatise on Phlogiston, for which I pray you to accept my thanks. The copy for Mr. Livingston has been delivered, together with your letter to him, to Mr. Harvie, my secretary, who departs in a day or two for Paris, and will deliver them himself to Mr. Livingston, whose attention to your matter cannot be doubted. I have also to add my thanks to Mr. Priestley, your son, for the copy of your Harmony, which I have gone through with great satisfaction. It is the first I have been able to meet with, which is clear of those long repetitions of the same transaction, as if it were a different one because related with some different circumstances.

I rejoice that you have undertaken the task of comparing the moral doctrines of Jesus with those of the ancient Philosophers. You are so much in possession of the whole subject, that you will do it easier and better than any other person living. I think you cannot avoid giving, as preliminary to the comparison, a digest of his moral doctrines, extracted in his own words from the Evangelists, and leaving out everything relative to his personal history and character. It would be short and precious. With a view to do this for my own satisfaction, I had sent to Philadelphia to get two testaments (Greek) of the same edition, and two English, with a design to cut out the morsels of morality, and paste them on the leaves of a book, in the manner you describe as having been pursued in forming your Harmony. But I shall now get the thing done by better hands.

I very early saw that Louisiana was indeed a speck in our horizon which was to burst in a tornado; and the public are unapprised how near this catastrophe was. Nothing but a frank and friendly development of causes and effects on our part, and good sense enough in Bonaparte to see that the train was unavoidable, and would change the face of the world, saved us from that storm. I did not expect he would yield till a war took place between France and England, and my hope was to palliate and endure, if Messrs. Ross, Morris, &c. did not force a premature rupture, until that event. I believed the event not very distant, but acknowledge it came on sooner than I had expected. Whether, however, the good sense of Bonaparte might not see the course predicted to be necessary and unavoidable, even before a war should be imminent, was a chance which we thought it our duty to try; but the immediate prospect of rupture brought the case to immediate decision. The denouement has been happy; and I confess I look to this duplication of area for the extending a government so free and economical as ours, as a great achievement to the mass of happiness which is to ensue. Whether we remain in one confederacy, or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies, I believe not very important to the happiness of either part. Those of the western confederacy will be as much our children and descendants as those of the eastern, and I feel myself as much identified with that country, in future time, as with this; and did I now foresee a separation at some future day, yet I should feel the duty and the desire to promote the western interests as zealously as the eastern, doing all the good for both portions of our future family which should fall within my power.

Have you seen the new work of Malthus on population? It is one of the ablest I have ever seen. Although his main object is to delineate the effects of redundancy of population, and to test the poor laws of England, and other palliations for that evil, several important questions in political economy, allied to his subject incidentally, are treated with a masterly hand. It is a single octavo volume, and I have been only able to read a borrowed copy, the only one I have yet heard of. Probably our friends in England will think of you, and give you an opportunity of reading it. Accept my affectionate salutations, and assurances of great esteem and respect.

TO MR. SAY

Washington, February 1, 1804.

Dear Sir,—I have to acknowledge the receipt of your obliging letter, and with it, of two very interesting volumes on Political Economy. These found me engaged in giving the leisure moments I rarely find, to the perusal of Malthus' work on population, a work of sound logic, in which some of the opinions of Adam Smith, as well as of the economists, are ably examined. I was pleased, on turning to some chapters where you treat the same questions, to find his opinions corroborated by yours. I shall proceed to the reading of your work with great pleasure. In the meantime, the present conveyance, by a gentlemen of my family going to Paris, is too safe to hazard a delay in making my acknowledgments for this mark of attention, and for having afforded to me a satisfaction, which the ordinary course of literary communications could not have given me for a considerable time.

The differences of circumstance between this and the old countries of Europe, furnish differences of fact whereon to reason, in questions of political economy, and will consequently produce sometimes a difference of result. There, for instance, the quantity of food is fixed, or increasing in a slow and only arithmetical ratio, and the proportion is limited by the same ratio. Supernumerary births consequently add only to your mortality. Here the immense extent of uncultivated and fertile lands enables every one who will labor to marry young, and to raise a family of any size. Our food, then, may increase geometrically with our laborers, and our births, however multiplied, become effective. Again, there the best distribution of labor is supposed to be that which places the manufacturing hands alongside the agricultural; so that the one part shall feed both, and the other part furnish both with clothes and other comforts. Would that be best here? Egoism and first appearances say yes. Or would it be better that all our laborers should be employed in agriculture? In this case a double or treble portion of fertile lands would be brought into culture; a double or treble creation of food be produced, and its surplus go to nourish the now perishing births of Europe, who in return would manufacture and send us in exchange our clothes and other comforts. Morality listens to this, and so invariably do the laws of nature create our duties and interests, that when they seem to be at variance, we ought to suspect some fallacy in our reasonings. In solving this question, too, we should allow its just weight to the moral and physical preference of the agricultural, over the manufacturing, man. My occupations permit me only to ask questions. They deny me the time, if I had the information, to answer them. Perhaps, as worthy the attention of the author of the Traité d'Economie Politique, I shall find them answered in that work. If they are not, the reason will have been that you wrote for Europe; while I shall have asked them because I think for America. Accept, Sir, my respectful salutations, and assurances of great consideration.

TO RUFUS KING, ESQ

Washington, February 17, 1804.

Dear Sir,—I now return you the manuscript history of Bacon's rebellion, with many thanks for the communication. It is really a valuable morsel in the history of Virginia. That transaction is the more marked, as it was the only rebellion or insurrection which had ever taken place in the colony before the American Revolution. Neither its cause nor course have been well understood, the public records containing little on the subject. It is very long since I read the several histories of Virginia, but the impression remaining on my mind was not at all that which the writer gives; and it is impossible to refuse assent to the candor and simplicity of history. I have taken the liberty of copying it, which has been the reason of the detention of it. I had an opportunity, too, of communicating it to a person who was just putting into the press a history of Virginia, but all in a situation to be corrected. I think it possible that among the ancient manuscripts I possess at Monticello, I may be able to trace the author. I shall endeavor to do it the first visit I make to that place, and if with success, I will do myself the pleasure of communicating it to you. From the public records there is no hope, as they were destroyed by the British, I believe, very completely, during their invasion of Virginia. Accept my salutations, and assurances of high consideration and respect.

TO THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY

February 19, 1804.

Doctor Stevens having been sent by the preceding administration, in 1798, to St. Domingo, with the commission of consul-general, and also with authorities as an agent additional to the consular powers, under a stipulation that his expenses should be borne; an account of these is now exhibited to the Secretary of State, and the questions arise whether the payment can be authorized by the Executive, and out of what fund?

The Constitution has made the Executive the organ for managing our intercourse with foreign nations. It authorizes him to appoint and receive ambassadors, other public ministers, and consuls. The term minister being applicable to other agents as well as diplomatic, the constant practice of the government, considered as a commentary, established this broad meaning; and the public interest approves it; because it would be extravagant to employ a diplomatic minister for a business which a mere rider would execute. The Executive being thus charged with the foreign intercourse, no law has undertaken to prescribe its specific duties. The permanent act of 1801, however, first, where he uses the agency of a minister plenipotentiary, or chargé, restricts him in the sums to be allowed for outfit, salary, return, and a secretary; and second, when any law has appropriated a sum for the contingent expenses of foreign intercourse, leaves to his discretion to dispense with the exhibition of the vouchers of its expenditure in the public offices. Under these two standing provisions there is annually a sum appropriated for the expenses of intercourse with foreign nations. The purposes of the appropriation being expressed by the law, in terms as general as the duties are by the Constitution, the application of the money is left as much to the discretion of the Executive, as the performance of the duties, saving always the provisions of 1801.

It is true that this appropriation is usually made on an estimate, given by the Secretary of State to the Secretary of the Treasury, and by him reported to Congress. But Congress, aware that too minute a specification has its evil as well as a too general one, does not make the estimate a part of their law, but gives a sum in gross, trusting the Executive discretion for that year and that sum only; so in other departments, as of war for instance, the estimate of the Secretary specifies all the items of clothing, subsistence, pay, &c., of the army. And Congress throws this into such masses as they think best, to wit, a sum in gross for clothing, another for subsistence, a third for pay, &c., binding up the Executive discretion only by the sum, and the object generalized to a certain degree. The minute details of the estimate are thus dispensed with in point of obligation, and the discretion of the officer is enlarged to the limits of the classification, which Congress thinks it best for the public interest to make. In the case before us, then, the sum appropriated may be applied to any agency with a foreign nation, which the Constitution has made a part of the duty of the President, as the organ of foreign intercourse.

The sum appropriated is generally the exact amount of the estimate, but not always. In the present instance the estimate, being for 1803, was only of $62,550, (including two outfits,) and the appropriation was of $75,562, leaving a difference of $13,012. If indeed, there be not enough of this appropriation left to pay Dr. Stevens' just demands, they cannot be paid until Congress shall make some appropriation applicable to them. I say his just demands, because by the undertaking of the then administration to pay his expenses, justice as well as law will understand his reasonable expenses. These must be tried by the scale which law and usage have established, whereon the Minister, Chargé, and Secretary, are given as fixed terms of comparison. The undefined agency of Dr. Stevens must be placed opposite to that term of the scale, with which it may fairly be thought to correspond; and if he has gone beyond that, his expenses should be reduced to it. I think them beyond it, and suppose that Dr. Stevens, viewing himself as a merchant, as well as a public agent, found it answer his purposes as a merchant to apply a part of his receipts in that character in addition to what he might reasonably expect from the public, not then meaning to charge to his public character the extraordinary style of expense which he believed at the time he could afford out of his mercantile profits.