To Thomas Jefferson from James Lovell, 4 July 1805
From James Lovell
Boston July 4 25 1805
Sir
When in August 1802 I first “spread myself with sincerity,” before your official Chair, as we are taught to do, when we go for our daily bread, before an Altar; I hinted my odd yet serious intention of a public attempt to “rarify some of the clouds of our Religion and Polity.” That intention has been hiterto artfully frustrated; which has driven me to the necessity of letting loose (after a few days) some Copies of what I now cover to You in print.
I meditate a repetition of this kind of freedom, whenever I shall have been informed by any kind of private communication that You are not offended at this present.
The People, of every grade, ought to be told, in the plainest language, that “the Liberty of the Press” was introduced into a “Bill of Rights” for the same reason and purpose accurately as an executive “Veto” was introduced into our “Constitutions,” and for no other vizt. for individual & social defence: And, that both are prostituted alike when used for offence. When You nominated for the Land Office in Massachusetts a Person who is judged, by very many as well as by Myself, to have been long a vicious intriguing deceiver of the Populace, and an abuser of Federal-Officers, I was pleased with that strong proof of presidential Contempt of party-assaults from licentious-scriblers. It is really, Sir, an Extinguisher: Because the Creature is in fact an Accomplant, and of such Fortune as to make him trust-worthy in his place. This latter circumstance indeed gives Chagrin at his Luck, to several of the dirty junto of his old co-adjutors, who cannot avoid envious desires to occupy It themselves as often as they put their hands into their own lean pockets.
I was in hope of making that event subservient to my own designs, by sending a satyrical and justly-severe “Address to Honestus” (directed to Austin with my Name subscribed) to be printed by an high federal partizan Editor, then personally unknown to me. But, the “Managers” knew me so well as to smoke-me-out by the following last sentence of the address “and now, whilst you are contemplating your Patron and mine as the greatest Man upon earth, I will be preparing to inform him how little I think him, in more respects than One.” The Rogues defeated me; and thereby postponed my display of a Veto which protects your Dignity & Emoluments from a vicious attack of a Legislative-majority as far up only as to two thirds, and then, leaves You to the same dernier resort as my humble self and my lawfull earnings vizt to the Opinion of “Independent Judges” and the Sympathy of “Peers” The odds to be sure is much against me; because one single casting vote of the meanest number of an acting-legislature may, in the bold highway mode, rob me of 11/12ths of my fees; or, in the sly pick-pocket contingent mode, may go to the same length.
I am with the courage of a man of Integrity and with the calmness of a conscious Protegé Sir your obliged Friend
James Lovell
P.S. I must mention a Chagrin which awaits You and every one who possesses a spirit of Tolleration like yours—pages 162/3 of Notes on Virginia and No. III of the appendix Editn. 1800—
The powerfull Author of “Discourses upon Davila” in his 93d page, leaving the rich materials of his own great magazine, borrows some Chips from the two conducting-Pillars of Moses, Chips capable of producing Smoke or Fire, alternately, for party-purposes, during the continuance of man upon earth. Alas! alas! Such is the lasting, too-potent effect of an Infant’s exposure to the House-Maid’s System of “Raw-head & Bloody-bones!”
I do not know what is the Hebrew of “Vulgus vult decipi,” but Melchizedek must have felt the Idea.
RC (ViW: Tucker-Coleman Collection); at head of text: “Philosopher of Montecello”; endorsed by TJ as a letter of 4 July received 8 Aug. and so recorded in SJL. Enclosure: printed tract, framed as a letter from Lovell to the president of the United States, 4 July, from Boston; while ill, Lovell read with satisfaction John Adams’s Discourses on Davila; he fears that Adams’s “timeglass and mine also will be more than cracked” before they can apply their understanding, and he looks to TJ to accomplish “some changes for the better in our general Government”; TJ must be aware of the similarities between religious leaders and printers; a free press is a defense of liberty but also a tool of “Offence in the hand of Licentiousness”; the author objects to the distinction drawn between actions and words, which “may be as offensive as any of those other actions directed plumply” into one’s face; although religious leaders are losing power, the “Bigotry of the Press demands the watchful eyes of Government, because it is rapidly gaining” the capacity to tyrannize; freedom of the mind lags in the United States because of partisan divisions; he hopes that the nation will support “one single Free Press, devoted to Truth,” or else “truth itself” will be “regularly tortured, for the purpose of Dissention” (printed as Copy of a Letter of July 4, 1805, to the President of the United States, Supposed by the Writer, to Be Fitted, Specially, for the Eye and Courage of the “Young Federal Republicans of Boston,” and Also to Be Calculated, Generally, to Promote the Comfort of All Grey-Headed As Well As Green-Headed “Free Citizens,” Every Where [Boston, 1805]).
before your official Chair: not found, but see Vol. 39:283-5.
Land Office in Massachusetts: that is, the commissioner of loans, Benjamin Austin, Jr., who published pamphlets under the pseudonym Honestus (Vol. 40:621n).
Chagrin which awaits You: Lovell was referring to TJ’s warning in Notes on the State of Virginia that religious liberty through disestablishment needed to be accomplished before revolutionary ideals faded, and to the printing of Virginia’s “Act for establishing Religious Freedom” as the third appendix (Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia; with the Appendixes—Complete [Baltimore, 1800]).
powerfull Author: John Adams, who in 1805 published an edition of Discourses on Davila, which originally appeared as a series of papers in 1790.
Children were frequently frightened with tales of the Raw-head and Bloody Bones, two folk bogeymen ().
Vulgus vult decipi: that is, the people want to be deceived. Melchizideck, king of Salem and “priest of the most high God,” offered bread and wine to Abram and blessed him after the latter’s victory in battle (Genesis 14:18-20).