184301Editorial Note: Opinions on the Constitutionality of the Residence Bill (Jefferson Papers)
Probably the most celebrated and most controverted coalition in American history is that by which Thomas Jefferson and James Madison came to the aid of Alexander Hamilton’s plan to assume the states’ war debts and thus insured its adoption. It is a remarkable fact that one aspect of the opposition that they encountered, involving legislative construction of the constitution and an effort to...
184302Editorial Note: Plans and Estimates for the Diplomatic Establishment (Jefferson Papers)
Soon after the passage of the Act providing the means of intercourse with foreign nations, a writer in the New-York Journal declared that the appropriation of $40,000 would cause “ambassadors … to be maintained at splendid courts, by a nation which has recently compounded with its creditors, and postponed payment, because she felt herself barren in ways and means.” He asked rhetorically: “Has...
184303Editorial Note: The Consular Establishment (Jefferson Papers)
At the time that Jefferson arrived in New York, only one consular appointment had been made by Washington, that of Samuel Shaw for the port of Canton. On his initial consultation with the president in regard to diplomatic and consular offices, he brought forth the letter of 14 Nov. 1788 that he had written to Jay at the time of the signing of the Consular Convention. In that letter Jefferson...
184304Editorial Note: Documents Relating to Departmental Personnel and Services (Jefferson Papers)
Following passage of the Residence Act various departmental details obtruded upon the attention Jefferson was giving to Indian affairs, fiscal and commercial policy, British aims in the northwest, the Mississippi Question, and the secret mission to Spain. Few in government could have found personnel vacancies and office routines less congenial than he, for clerical chores had been one of the...
184305Editorial Note: Fixing the Seat of Government on the Potomac (Jefferson Papers)
Washington, Madison, and Jefferson—as well as Richard Bland Lee, Alexander White, Daniel Carroll, John Page, and other members of the Virginia and Maryland delegations—headed homeward at the end of the second session in full awareness of the fact that mere enactment of the Residence Act was by no means a guarantee that the permanent seat of government would ever come to the Potomac. They could...
184306Editorial Note: The Northwest Territory (Jefferson Papers)
If a poor man … should ask of me, where shall I go in order to live more at my ease, without the aid of oxen and horses? I would say to him, go upon the banks of some rivulet on the Plains of Scioto; there you will obtain permission of the savages of the neighbouring villages to scratch the surface of the earth, and deposit your rye, your corn, your potatoes, your tobacco, &c. leave the rest...
184307Enclosure VIII: Map of the Reserved Tract including Fort Chartres (Jefferson Papers)
MS ( DNA : RG 46, Senate Records, 1st. Cong., 3rd. sess.).
184308Editorial Note: Commercial and Diplomatic Relations with Great Britain (Jefferson Papers)
In a remarkable series of reports to the President and to the House of Representatives during six crucial weeks of the third session of the First Congress—on trade with the Mediterranean, on the related problem with Algiers, on the status of the fisheries, on the emerging difficulties over impressment, on the French representation on the tonnage acts, on the consular establishment, even on the...
184309Editorial Note: The Impressment of Hugh Purdie and Others (Jefferson Papers)
In mid-December, at Washington’s request, Jefferson reviewed the entire correspondence relating to the abortive mission of Gouverneur Morris. He concluded and the President agreed that any further initiative for a commercial treaty and an exchange of ministers would have to come from England. This, however, was far from being a policy of passive waiting on the decisions of a foreign ministry....
184310Editorial Note: Reports on Mediterranean Trade and Algerine Captives (Jefferson Papers)
For two and a half centuries after the brothers Barbarossa of Algiers had ceased to terrorize the Mediterranean, the great powers of Europe stood silent and subservient before their petty successors, allowing and even encouraging them to carry on their piracies because, as makeweights in the grand scales of politics, their usefulness seemed to counterbalance their cost in lives, tribute, and...
184311Editorial Note: Coinage and the Unit of Money (Jefferson Papers)
In late November Jefferson received newspapers from William Short that seemed to provide a means for opening up the subject of coinage with the Secretary of the Treasury, then engaged in preparing his report on the establishment of a mint. In the Gazette Nationale of 3 Aug. 1790 that Short had sent, he observed a report by Naurissat on billon which so impressed him that he made detailed notes...
184312Editorial Note: Representation by France against the Tonnage Acts (Jefferson Papers)
The importance of the union in a commercial sense, Alexander Hamilton wrote in the eleventh Federalist , was one of those arguments for the proposed constitution on which there was least room for a difference of opinion and to which, in fact, a general assent had been given. Few informed readers could have disagreed with the assertion and none could have misunderstood him when he said that the...
184313Editorial Note: Locating the Federal District (Jefferson Papers)
In the fall of 1790 competition for the Federal District—the second of three stages in the delicate task of providing a permanent location for the seat of government—stirred enterprizing citizens to activity along the entire stretch of the Potomac comprehended in the terms of the Residence Act. From Carrollsburg on the Eastern Branch to Williamsport at the mouth of the Conococheague,...
184314Editorial Note: Death of Franklin (Jefferson Papers)
News of the death of Benjamin Franklin arrived in New York City on 22 April 1790. That same day James Madison arose in the House of Representatives, voiced a brief, moving tribute, and proposed that the members wear badges of mourning for a month. This, he said, should be done in respect for “a citizen whose native genius was not more an ornament to human nature, than his various exertions of...
184315Editorial Note: Memoranda and Statistics on American Commerce (Jefferson Papers)
This appeal to the legislators of America and Europe to base their commercial regulations on facts accurately ascertained and candidly stated could not have met with a more interested or more receptive public official than the American Secretary of State. Nor could it have found one better grounded, both by habit of mind and by legislative and diplomatic experience, in the art of political...
184316Editorial Note: Report on the Fisheries (Jefferson Papers)
I During the peace negotiations of 1782, John Adams not only feared that the fisheries would be used as a makeweight by European powers: he also saw this nursery of seamen as a source of internal contention and discord. The bitter sectional debates in Congress—a “long struggle over cod and haddock,” one delegate called it—convinced him that his fellow New Englanders regarded treaty protection...
184317Editorial Note: Consular Problems (Jefferson Papers)
In the summer of 1790, shortly after Washington sent to the Senate the first group of nominees for consular posts and thus in effect inaugurated the American consular service, Louis Guillaume Otto professed to see in the designation of a larger number of consuls for France than for England proof that the entire Cabinet was deeply impressed with the need of maintaining amicable relations with...
184318Editorial Note: The Admission of Kentucky and Vermont to the Union (Jefferson Papers)
A piece of doggerel in Bache’s General Advertiser at the opening of Congress voiced the politics of equilibrium underlying this first of a series of compromises for achieving sectional balance within the nation: But Kentucky had not been given to the union. Six years of persistent effort on the part of her people and their leaders lay back of the Virginia-Kentucky compact of 1790 which awaited...
184319Editorial Note: The Judicial Appointment of Joseph Anderson (Jefferson Papers)
Joseph Inslee Anderson’s first appointment to civil office initiated a long career on the bench, in the Senate, and in the federal administration. But it brought anxiety and embarrassment to the candidate, disturbed his political sponsors, and, for the first time, obliged the President to confront the question whether he should withhold a commission even after the Senate had confirmed his...
184320Editorial Note: Threat of Disunion in the West (Jefferson Papers)
Early in 1791 there arose an urgent demand by Georgia planters for the return of slaves that had escaped into the Floridas. Simultaneously, Kentucky leaders, already angry over fumbling measures of frontier defense taken by the federal government and long embittered by its inattention to their need for access to the sea, intensified their old threats of separation in warnings as candid as they...
184321Editorial Note: The Great Collaborators (Jefferson Papers)
The subject of that day’s dinner conversation—the French protest against the tonnage acts of 1789 and 1790 and its impact on the political contests that were dividing the government —was indeed important. But not a word exchanged between the Virginia Congressman and the Secretary of State on that winter day has been preserved. What Madison—and of course Jefferson—gained then and later in their...
184322Editorial Note: Search for a European Concert on Navigation Law (Jefferson Papers)
In March 1791 the anxiety that Hamilton and his supporters felt about the threatened enactment of a navigation bill at the next Congress was matched by Jefferson’s fear that the sheet anchor of the commercial connection with France was about to give way. On both sides the apprehensions were fully warranted. Also on both sides preparations for the coming contest were under way. For his part,...
184323Editorial Note: Experiments in Desalination of Sea Water (Jefferson Papers)
There can be little doubt that Jacob Isaacks—an aged, infirm, and poor resident of Newport, but one who enjoyed the esteem of some of the leading citizens of Rhode Island—was convinced that he had made an original discovery for desalinating sea water by quick and inexpensive means, including a secret mixture as well as a tin tube attached to a ship’s caboose. He was indeed so persistent in...
184324Editorial Note: Fixing the Seat of Government (Jefferson Papers)
Adams’ observation, apt at the time and prophetic of what was to come, was made during the embittered debates of the First Session when, quite unexpectedly, the old and divisive issue of fixing the permanent seat of government disturbed the councils of the new government. In that contest the North was pitted against the South and the West against both in the struggle to determine whether the...
184325Editorial Note: Unofficial Diplomacy on Indian Affairs (Jefferson Papers)
In the spring of 1791 the governments of Great Britain and the United States became suddenly aware that mounting hostilities between American frontiersmen and western Indians threatened to jeopardize larger interests, thus complicating still further the relations between the two countries. On the initial stage of his journey southward, Washington received the “truly alarming” news of the...
184326Editorial Note: The Debt to France: The Proposals of Schweitzer, Jeanneret & Cie. (Jefferson Papers)
The question of liquidating the loans made by France to the United States not only affected the relations of the two countries: it also added another element to the domestic partisan conflicts which increasingly made the alliance an uneasy one. Throughout his years as minister to France, Jefferson had been deeply concerned about the accumulating arrearages of interest and the delinquent...
184327Editorial Note: Tench Coxe Seeks Office as Comptroller of the Treasury (Jefferson Papers)
In his pioneering work The Federalists , Leonard D. White, an able scholar in the field of administrative history, agreed with both friendly and hostile critics of Hamilton that the Secretary of the Treasury went far beyond the limits of his own department in seeking to give effect to his policies. “Hamilton’s active intervention in the field of foreign affairs,” he wrote, “set off an...
184328Editorial Note: Rights of Man: The “Contest of Burke and Paine … in America” (Jefferson Papers)
What James Monroe called “the contest of Burke and Paine, as reviv’d in America,” bore a distinctly different character from its European counterpart. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Paine’s Rights of Man , two of the most notable political tracts in the English language, set forth in memorable terms their authors’ commitment to diametrically opposed views of man and...
184329Editorial Note: The Northern Journey of Jefferson and Madison (Jefferson Papers)
Long before Hamilton’s friend Robert Troup made this observation he had become convinced that the enemies of the Secretary of the Treasury were resolved to defeat his policies by destroying him politically. He saw this danger most ominously manifested in the southern states, particularly in Virginia. Now, as Jefferson and Madison paused in New York City at the beginning of their northward...
184330Editorial Note: The American Consul at London (Jefferson Papers)
When news arrived early in the summer of 1790 that England and Spain were on the verge of war, the administration firmly committed itself to a policy of neutrality, while at the same time seizing the opportunity to free the United States as much as possible from commercial restraints imposed by both powers. No one doubted that, if war came, there would be increasing resort to the usages of...
184331Editorial Note: Jefferson, Freneau, and the Founding of the National Gazette (Jefferson Papers)
The Editor of the “National Gazette” receives a salary from government. Quere —whether this salary is paid him for translations : or for publications , the design of which is to vilify those to whom the voice of the people has committed the administration of our public affairs—to oppose the measures of government, and by false insinuations, to disturb the public peace? In common life it is...
184332Editorial Note: The “Anas” (Jefferson Papers)
The following is the earliest document in the compilation made by TJ that has come to be known by the strange and perhaps ungrammatical title of “Anas.” The work presents special problems because TJ apparently never gave it the title himself and because it has been published under that title in at least five editions since 1829, two of which differ in important particulars. It is necessary to...
184333Editorial Note: The Settlement of Jefferson’s Accounts as Minister Plenipotentiary in France (Jefferson Papers)
The submission of Jefferson’s accounts with the United States and supporting documentation to Auditor Richard Harrison was a key step in the protracted settlement of his financial transactions as Minister Plenipotentiary in France. Destruction of the original accounts and related records in the Register’s Office at the Treasury Department in the fire that engulfed Washington during the British...
184334Editorial Note: Jefferson and André Michaux’s Proposed Western Expedition (Jefferson Papers)
Discovered in the vault of the American Philosophical Society in 1979 with supporting financial papers described below, this signed text of the subscription for André Michaux, together with the instructions to the French botanist printed under 30 Apr. 1793, represents the fullest expression, previous to the expedition of Lewis and Clark, of Jefferson’s longstanding interest in promoting...
184335Editorial Note: Jefferson’s Questions and Observations on the Application of France (Jefferson Papers)
The four documents printed below illuminate an obscure episode in the Secretary of State’s continuing political contest with his great antagonist in the Treasury Department. As Republican critics in the National Gazette and the House of Representatives mounted their assault on Alexander Hamilton’s management of public finances, this chapter in Jefferson’s conflict with the Treasury Secretary...
184336Editorial Note: Jefferson and the Giles Resolutions (Jefferson Papers)
The draft resolutions printed below as Document I represent Thomas Jefferson’s climactic contribution to the unsuccessful Republican effort in the House of Representatives early in 1793 to censure Alexander Hamilton’s administration as Secretary of the Treasury and bring about his removal from office. This drive against Jefferson’s great antagonist was the high point of the first phase of the...
184337Editorial Note: Jefferson’s Opinion on the Treaties with France (Jefferson Papers)
Thomas Jefferson’s carefully qualified opinion in favor of the continued validity of the 1778 treaties of alliance and commerce with France was designed to resolve a neutrality question of fundamental importance raised by Alexander Hamilton in response to the arrival in Philadelphia early in April 1793 of reliable intelligence of the French Republic’s declaration of war on Great Britain and...
184338Editorial Note: Jefferson and the American Debt to France (Jefferson Papers)
The documents printed below have been grouped here in order to record more clearly, with the benefit of Jefferson’s connecting commentary, the process by which the Washington administration rejected Edmond Charles Genet’s request for a substantial advance payment of the American debt to France. On instructions from the Provisional Executive Council of France, Genet had pledged to use the...
184339Editorial Note: The Referral of Neutrality Questions to the Supreme Court (Jefferson Papers)
The number and complexity of questions about what constituted neutral behavior by the United States with respect to the warring nations of Europe grew rapidly in the summer of 1793 in the face of Edmond Charles Genet’s persistent challenges to American neutrality policy. With its energies increasingly tied up in the resolution of proliferating appeals by foreign diplomats, especially British...
184340Editorial Note: The Recall of Edmond Charles Genet (Jefferson Papers)
The decision to demand Edmond Charles Genet’s recall less than three months after his arrival in Philadelphia as the French Republic’s first minister to the United States resulted from the irrepressible conflict between the Washington administration’s insistence on maintaining strict American neutrality during the War of the First Coalition and Genet’s mandate from his Girondin superiors to...
184341Editorial Note: Report on Commerce (Jefferson Papers)
Jefferson’s report on commerce was his last effort as Secretary of State to achieve his longstanding goal of fundamentally reordering the new republic’s political economy by lessening American economic dependence on Great Britain and fostering closer commercial ties with France. Based upon almost two decades of study and practical experience, it reflected Jefferson’s vision of the United...
184342Contemporary Translation: From Josef de Jaudenes and Josef Ignacio de Viar, 26 December 1793 (Jefferson Papers)
A part of the contents of the letter with which you honored us on the 21. instant, in answer to our two last, does not permit us to pass in silence, some reflections which occur to us on that subject. You consider as a base calumny, the expressions of the Governor of Louisiana, when he speaks of the reward of 500 dollars offered for the head of an individual, by the americans . As, from the...
184343Memorandums to Henry Remsen, 31 August 1790 (Jefferson Papers)
Note to the digital edition: A revised version of this document, transcribed from manuscript, has been added to Volume 17 in its chronological position as Memorandums to Henry Remsen, Jr., 31 August 1790
184344Editorial Note: Jefferson’s Letter to Philip Mazzei (Jefferson Papers)
On 24 Apr. 1796, Jefferson wrote a lengthy epistle to his former neighbor Philip Mazzei, who was by then living in Pisa ( Document I ). While the letter primarily discussed Mazzei’s lingering business affairs in Virginia and relayed news of his old friends, a single paragraph transformed this piece of private correspondence into the notorious “Mazzei letter” that plagued Jefferson for the...
184345Editorial Note: Documents Relating to the 1796 Campaign for Electors in Virginia (Jefferson Papers)
While Jefferson’s correspondence makes no mention of the Virginia campaign for presidential electors in 1796, a group of documents pertaining to the election, including three letters, five depositions or certificates (two of which are printed below, the first dealing with Jefferson’s indebtedness and the second with his relations with Aaron Burr), and a handbill are in his papers at the...
184346Editorial Note: Jefferson’s Letter to John Adams (Jefferson Papers)
Anticipating an administration headed by John Adams with himself as vice president, Jefferson apparently hoped with this letter to restore a political relationship that had become frayed following the unintended publication in 1791 of his endorsement of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and his implicit criticism of Adams’s “political heresies” (see Editorial Note and documents at 26 Apr. 1791,...
184347Editorial Note: Jefferson’s Letter to James Madison (Jefferson Papers)
Jefferson uncharacteristically failed to retain a press copy of this letter, making instead, as he did with the 28 Dec. letter to John Adams that he enclosed in this one, a “statement” of the contents based on recollection. It is not known if he indeed made the copy entirely from unaided memory, but if he drew on any draft or notes of the letter they have not been located. The effort he made...
184348Suit Against the Estate of William Ronald: Order and Report, 10 July 1797 (Jefferson Papers)
In the Court of Chancery Virginia: Between Thomas Jefferson plt and William Bentley administrator of the goods, and chattels of William Ronald deceased, and Betsey Ronald and Nancy Ronald infants under the age of twenty one years and Co-heiresses of the said William Ronald by the said William Bentley their guardian defendts. This cause, by consent of parties, came on this thirteenth day of...
184349Editorial Note: Petition to Virginia House of Delegates (Jefferson Papers)
It is not clear when Jefferson decided to take it upon himself to respond to the grand jury presentment against Samuel J. Cabell (see TJ to Peregrine Fitzhugh, 4 June 1797 ), but he must have begun working on the draft of a petition to the Virginia House of Delegates soon after he returned to Monticello. Believing it was dangerous to let the attack on circular letters to constituents go...
184350Editorial Note: Jefferson, the Aurora, and Delamotte’s Letter from France (Jefferson Papers)
When the Philadelphia Aurora of 3 Apr. 1798 printed a translation of “a letter from a well informed merchant in France to his friend in this city,” the newspaper gave no hint that the “friend” was Jefferson, or that the “merchant” was the U. S. vice-consul at Le Havre, F. C. A. Delamotte. The date of the letter had also been altered, from 23 Jan. to 1 Feb. 1798. Jefferson himself did not...