Drummond's official report, "in so determined a manner were the American attacks directed against his guns, that his artillerymen were bayoneted by them in the very act of loading, and the muzzles of the American guns were advanced within a few yards of his own;" when in the thick darkness regiments fired and charged by the light of each others volleys; when but one out of four of the whole American force escaped death or wounds; and when the Americans drove their enemy entirely from the field, and then retired at their own time, and in perfect order, to their camp-they were opposed to a superior number of the same officers and men who had aided to tame the pride of Victor, Massena, Marmont and Soult.'

The war of 1812 closed in a blaze of American triumph. The incidents of the negotiation and the particular terms of the treaty do not belong here. The latter was concluded in December, 1814, and proclaimed in the United States in February, 1815. It left the boundaries and relations of the two nations as before the war. As it contained no stipulations against British impressments, it has been often asserted by the detractors of Mr. Madison's Administration and of the Republican party, that it failed in securing the first and principal object for which the war had been undertaken. Those who take this view, look at the form, and disregard the substance. The orders in council had been repealed. Impressments ceased. It is true, that with the peace then reigning in Europe, England had no further immediate occasion for impressment; but if she renewed it, we could also renew the war with the return of the occasionstrengthened by our intermediate growth, and by the assistance of her enemy, whose hostilities should again force her to resort to this method of filling her navy. Our resistance and retaliation would thus be at least co-existent with the practical aggression. Jefferson, so peculiarly decided on the subject of impressment, approved of the peace on the terms in which it was made, and by one of those felicitous characterizations habitual to him

1 And in illustration of the material of the American soldier, the statement ought not to be omitted that six or seven hundred of those who won the field of Bridgewater, were volunteers. They took full part in the action, and the commander-in-chief himself kore witness that " Porter's volunteers were not excelled by the regulars in meeting the charge" that "precipitated by the incitement of their gallant commander," they fell upon the enemy's line hand to hand, broke it, and compelled many to surrender. The literal massacre of New Orleans, inflicted in part by irregular troops, also fell upon the English veterans from Spain, three to one more numerous than the victors.

in politics, he defined its character, and established a national policy for the future. He wrote to the President, before learning that the treaty was ratified: "I presume that, having spared to the pride of England her formal acknowledgment of the atrocity of impressment in an article of the treaty, she will concur in a convention for relinquishing it. Without this, she must understand that the present is but a truce, determinable on the first act of impressment of an American citizen, committed by any officer of hers." He wrote to a former member of his Cabinet, General Dearborn, March 17th, 1815:

"Peace was indeed desirable; yet it would not have been as welcome without the successes of New Orleans. These last have established truths too important not to be valued; that the people of Louisiana are sincerely attached to the Union; that their city can be defended; that the Western States make its defence their peculiar concern; that the militia are brave; that their deadly aim countervails the manoeuvering skill of their enemy; that we have officers of natural genius now starting forward from the mass; and that, putting together all our conflicts, we can beat the British by sea and by land, with equal numbers. All this being now proved, I am glad of the pacification of Ghent, and shall still be more so, if, by a reasonable arrangement against impressment, they will make it truly a treaty of peace, and not a mere truce, as we must all consider it, until the principle of the war is settled."

And the following to another Cabinet associate, Rodney, discloses his secret feelings towards England at this period. After condemning in burning language the conduct of the rulers of both France and England, and the deep "hatred" of the latter towards the United States, he continued:

"What nourishment and support would not England receive from an hundred millions of industrious descendants, whom some of her people now born will live to see here. What their energies are, she has lately tried. And what has she not to fear from an hundred millions of such men, if she continues her maniac course of hatred and hostility to them. I hope in God she will change. There is not a nation on the globe with whom I have more carnestly wished a friendly intercourse on equal conditions. On no other would I hold out the hand of friendship to any. I know that their creatures represent me as personally an enemy to England. But fools only can believe this, or those who think me a fool. I am an enemy to her insults and injuries. I am an enemy to the flagitious principles of her administration, and to those which govern her conduct towards other nations. But would she give to morality some place in her political code, and especially would she exercise decency, and at least neutral passions towards us, there is not, I repeat it, a people on earth with whom I would sacrifice so much to be in friendship."

The "truce," or "armistice," as Mr. Jefferson termed it in

other letters, was never broken. Having learned that the United States had finally and firmly resolved to fight rather than endure the impressment of their citizens, England forever relinquished the practice. There were good reasons enough, without treaty stipulations, for her discontinuing a method of recruiting her navy which cost her the lives of more men than she thus obtained, and also ten times the price of obtaining an equal number of men by subsidy.'

An "armistice" on purely equal terms was not very discreditable when made with a power which, after twelve years of such war as the world never before witnessed, had finally sent Napoleon a captive to St. Helena, and now had her thousand cruisers, her unemployed armies, and those resources which had subsidized Europe to devote exclusively to the struggle with us. Nor was it very discreditable for the United States to make peace, when the practical causes of the war were removed, though we failed to extort that formal relinquishment from our antagonist which the Armed Neutrality (consisting of Russia, France, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Prussia, Denmark, Sweden, Holland and Naples) had thirty years earlier failed to extort from the same power. We had achieved our great object-for henceforth we were in fact, as well as in name, an independent

nation.

Mr. Jefferson's correspondence during 1814 is unusually large and interesting. A letter to Thomas Leiper, January 1st, discloses the fruitful sources of so many contemporaneous and more especially posthumous attacks on himself:

"Thus am I situated. I receive letters from all quarters, some from known friends, some from those who write like friends, on various subjects. What am I to do? Am I to button myself up in Jesuitical reserve, rudely declining any answer, or answering in terms so unmeaning, as only to prove my distrust? Must

1 Jefferson wrote to the Rev. Mr. Worcester, January 29th, 1816:

"It is alleged that Great Britain took from us before the late war near one thousand vessels, and that during the war we took from her fourteen hundred. That before the war she seized and made slaves of six thousand of our citizens, and that in the war we killed more than six thousand of her subjects, and caused her to expend such a sum as amounted to four or five thousand guineas a head for every slave she made. She might have purchased the vessels she took for less than the value of those she lost, and have used the six thousand of her men killed for the purposes to which she applied ours, have saved the four or five thousand guineas a head, and obtained a character of justice which is valuable to a nation as to an individual. These considerations, therefore, leave her without inducement to plunder property and take men in future on such dear terms. I neither affirm nor deny the truth of these allegations."

Where he speaks of "making slaves," he alludes of course to impressments into the British navy.

I withdraw myself from all interchange of sentiment with the world. I cannot do this. It is at war with my habits and temper. I cannot act as if all men were unfaithful, because some are so; nor believe that all will betray me, because some do. I had rather be the victim of occasional infidelities, than relinquish my general confidence in the honesty of man."

In a letter to Dr. Walter Jones, January 2d, we get the fullest connected delineation of General Washington which ever proceeded from Mr. Jefferson's pen. Its date shows that it was his matured, his final conception of the subject-that undoubtedly on which he chose to go before the bar of posterity. In this point of view, it possesses an interest independent of its intrinsic value. Considering it too long for insertion here, and not willing to present it except in its entire form, we shall transfer it to the Appendix of these volumes.'

In answer to a letter from Mr. Samuel Greenhow, who applied to him for aid to a Bible society, and who stated to him. that there were families in Virginia destitute of the Bible, Mr. Jefferson (January 31st) expressed his surprise at the latter assertion, but presuming that the society "had evidence of the fact," he inclosed a draft of fifty dollars to his correspondent, "sincerely agreeing with him that there never was a more pure and sublime system of morality delivered to man than is to be found in the four Evangelists."

He wrote his friend Joseph C. Cabell, January 31st, in answer to the question, "whether the States could add any qualifications to those which the Constitution had prescribed for their members of Congress," that he had never reflected on the subject, but had "taken up an off-hand opinion" that they could not. Further consideration suggested doubts, the grounds of which are stated; but he virtually recommended that no present legislative action be taken on the subject. His opinion becomes somewhat illustrative of his political character, from the fact that it really applied to an attempt then making by the Republicans, in the Virginia Legislature, to prohibit Congressional districts from electing non-residents as their members of Congress-aimed, it was said, against the expected election of John Randolph by a district beyond the Blue Ridge, provided he should be beaten, as was then anticipated, in his own. Mr. Jefferson expressed the wish that his opinions be permitted to go no

VOL. III.-26

1 See APPENDIX No. 26.

further. He said "he wanted to be quiet," and "in general, to let it be understood that he meddled little or not at all with public affairs;" but he added: "There are two subjects, indeed, which I shall claim a right to further as long as I breathe, the public education, and the subdivision of counties into wards; I consider the continuance of republican government as absolutely hanging on these two hooks."

A letter to Gideon Granger, of March 9th, gives the testimony of the writer on various questions of fact in the political history of his own administration, which were much mooted in their day, and in regard to which controversy has hardly yet died away.' He wrote Horatio G. Spafford, March 17th:

"Blackstone and Hume have made tories of all England, and are making tories of those young Americans whose native feelings of independence do not place them above the wily sophistries of a Hume or a Blackstone. These two books, but especially the former, have done more towards the suppression of the liberties of man, than all the million of men in arms of Bonaparte and the millions of human lives with the sacrifice of which he will stand loaded before the judgment seat of his Maker. I fear nothing for our liberty from the assaults of force; but I have seen and felt much, and fear more from English books, English prejudices, English manners, and the apes, the dupes, and designs among our professional crafts."

He wrote Thomas Cooper, September 10th, on the suspension of specie payments by the banks:

"The crisis, then, of the abuses of banking is arrived. The banks have pronounced their own sentence of death. Between two and three hundred millions of dollars of their promissory notes are in the hands of the people, for solid pro

1 To the second of these "hooks" Mr. Jefferson was thought, by many of his neighbors, to attach a very disproportionate importance. The investigations of later writers, and particularly of De Tocqueville, have diffused much additional information on the subject among those who, unfamiliar with the practical effects of town or ward governments, were disposed to regard them as unimportant. Mr. Jefferson's political system would have lacked its apex, or rather its foundation, had he not thus distinctly recognized the principle that the more nearly government is brought home to the people, the more purely, efficiently and cheaply will it be administered; and that every community is the best judge of its own individual concerns. On any other theory, it would be difficult to say why we need our county and State organizations, each independent of all others in a certain sphere. On any other theory, pure consolidation would present the standard of utility.

2 It appears from this letter that Granger sent an agent to Virginia in 1800, to give information" of the danger resulting" from Burr's "intrigues;" that in 1803-4, Jeffer son, on Granger's advice, "procured Erastus Granger to inform De Witt Clinton of the plan to elevate Burr in New York;" that in 1803-4, Jefferson believed Burr to be at the bottom of the intrigues to form a coalition of the five eastern States with New York and New Jersey, "either to overawe the Union by the combination of their power and their will, or by threats of separating themselves from it;" that Jefferson employed G. Granger to procure the dismission of the prosecutions for libels on himself, commenced in Connecticut during his presidency. The letter also points out all the earliest sources of his information in regard to the conspiracy of Burr in 1805-6.

The opinion expressed that Burr was at the bottom of the eastern disunion intrigues of 1803-4 will recall Plumer's account of a conversation between Burr and some of the Federal leaders on that subject, given in an earlier cited number of the Appendix.