The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Volume 28: January 1794 to February 1796

Abstract

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Volume 28: January 1794 to February 1796. Edited by John Catanzariti. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xxxx, 683. Illustrations, maps. $99.50.) John Adams marveled at how well Plants grow in Shade. Since continual Day light & sun shine, show our faults and record he believed that the mode of becoming great to (J. Adams to Abigail Adams, Jan. 14, 1797, Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, microfilm reel 383). Although he referred to James Madison, who in 1797 stepped down as a member of Virginia's congressional delegation, Thomas Jefferson-who resigned his post as George Washington's first secretary of state on final day of 1793-could not have been far from Adams's mind. This latest addition to Princeton University Press's venerable collection of Jefferson's papers-a work in progress for more than half a century-helps to confirm wisdom of Adams's remarks. Between January 1794 and February 1796, new nation endured a series of gutwrenching controversies. While Washington administration grappled with western Pennsylvania's Whiskey Rebels, questioned legitimacy of popular Democratic-Republican Societies, and agitated an increasingly polarized public by endorsing John Jay's treaty with Great Britain, Jefferson delighted in eating peaches, grapes and figs of my own garden (455). Removed from national stage, insulated from charges of ambition, and tom between his self-professed desire to remain in retirement and a growing sense that ship of state had veered off course, embattled and bruised former secretary of state licked his wounds and rehabilitated his political prospects. Jefferson boasted about his supposed estrangement from national affairs. On a single day in September 1795, for example, he informed no fewer than three correspondents that he had little interest in Jay Treaty debate. To one of them, his friend and former neighbor Philip Mazzei, he wrote that treaty, which is thought to have stipulated some things beyond power of President and Senate, had excited a more general disgust than any public transaction since 1770s. Even so, he maintained, he would continue to pursue my farm and my nailery, pay my taxes, and leave public measures to those who have longer to live under them (457). To another correspondent, Federalist diplomat Thomas Pinckney, Jefferson reported that treaty had provided noise of day in political field.... But no body so little able as myself to say what public opinion is. I take no newspaper and by that device keep myself in a much loved ignorance (458). Did Jefferson protest too much? Despite these avowals of aloofness, which accompanied astute synopses of controversy, one week later he thanked Sampson Crosby, his former state department assistant, for bound volumes of newspapers and wrote that he was anxious to receive more (467). Months earlier, after railing against hypocrisy of Monocrats who supported self-created and hereditary Society of Cincinnati but at same time denounced Democratic-Republican clubs, whose avowed object nourishment of republican principles of our constitution (228), Jefferson had urged James Madison, his protege, not to retire unless to a more splendid and efficacious post. …