Free land 1. Free land, to be had for the taking, had been from the beginning the basis of American democracy. In colonial times it had protected the artisan against attempts by the aristocratic classes to keep down his wages by law since he could lay aside his trade for a farm. So, too, in 1800, free land for some meant better wages and industrial freedom for all the working classes. True, wages and the standard of living were still low; but this was because no great amount of wealth had been accumulated. Such wealth and comfort as existed was distributed less unequally than now. For the farming class itself, too, free land meant that only the best soils had to be used, and that, even on them, there was no such demand for costly fertilizing as in the Old World. Agriculture, the main American industry, was amazingly productive, even with the primitive methods of that day. This free land, however, was already becoming "less free.” At the close of the Revolution, Virginia and other States with large unsettled territory paid their soldiers largely in military "land warrants." Each such warrant authorized the holder to locate and get title to a certain amount of any of the State's wild land. But such lands were mainly at some distance from the settlements, and multitudes of soldiers sold their land warrants often for a song to large speculators, who then secured vast tracts in the most desirable districts. As early as 1784, Washington declared that such "forestallers" had left hardly a valuable spot in Virginia's lands within reach of the Ohio. He had reason to know, for he was just back from the West where he himself had located enormous holdings, partly on military warrants purchased from soldiers. alertness in 2. The second consideration was even more important. In every Old-World land the men who tilled the Intellectual soil were a peasantry slow, stolid, unenter- tillers of the prising, wholly distinct from the rest of society. soil Here, in 1800, the men who tilled the soil to quote Francis A. Walker's passage: "were the same kind of men precisely as those who filled the professions or were engaged in commercial or mechanical pursuits. Of two sons of the same mother, one [the weakling of the family A COLONIAL SPINNING WHEEL, now preserved in Daniel Webster's old home in Marshfield, Massachusetts. In Webster's boyhood, his mother, in the farm home, spun the wool for his clothing on this wheel or on one like it. perhaps, and so thought unfit for a farmer] became a lawyer, perhaps a judge, or went down to the city and became a merchant, or gave himself to political affairs and became a governor or a member of Congress. The other stayed upon the ancestral homestead, or made a new one for himself and his children out of the public domain, remaining all his life a plain hardworking farmer [the children of the two families mingling without suspicion of social or in tellectual distinction]. . . . There was then no other country in the world, . . . where equal mental activity and alertness [were] applied to the soil as to trade and industry." 3. Of mechanical insight and invention, to quote General Walker again, "There is only one nation in the world to Mechanical the mass of whose population this form of genius invention can be attributed. That nation is our own. There are few Americans of American stock . . . who have not mechanical aptitude in a measure which elsewhere would make them marked men. 'The American invents as the Greek chiselled, as the Venetian painted, as the modern Italian sings." CHAPTER XIX THE REVOLUTION OF 1800 As real a revolution in the principles of our government, as that of 1776 was in its form. -THOMAS JEFFERSON. A Republic, you tell me, is a government in which the People have an essential share in the Sovereignty. Is not the whole Sovereignty, my friend, essentially in the People?· SAMUEL ADAMS, in a letter to John Adams. FROM 1801 to 1809, American history is sometimes called "the biography of Thomas Jefferson." The nation believed in him; Congress swayed to his wish; Thomas his great Secretaries (Madison for State affairs, Jefferson and Gallatin' for the Treasury) admired and followed him. Jefferson was six feet, two and a half inches tall. His frame was vigorous but loose-jointed. His hair was sandy; and his face irregular, freckled, and sunny. He was an athletic and reckless horseman, an enthusiastic farmer, and the valued correspondent of the most famous scholars of Europe. The accounts of contemporaries show him, sitting on one hip with neglected dress and slippers down-at-theheel, chatting with rambling charm; or, with methodical industry, recording minutest weather details; or drawing up neat tables to show, through a period of several years, the dates for the appearance of thirty-seven vegetables in the Washington markets; or reporting judicial decisions in the first American Reports; or devising rules for parliamentary procedure again the first volume of its kind; or directing, with gentle suggestion, the politics of a distant State; or discussing with a French scientist the latest 1 Gallatin was a Swiss emigrant, and, for some years past, a leader of the radical Republican party in Pennsylvania. He had criticized Hamilton's financial policy keenly, and had even been identified with the earlier stages of the movement that resulted in the Whisky Rebellion. career discovery in that celebrity's special field; or inditing some other form of that voluminous correspondence which well earns him the title "the greatest American letter-writer." In 1800 Jefferson had already had a distinguished career. He entered the Virginia Assembly in the memorable session His earlier of 1769. Four years later he was one of the leaders in that body in organizing the first Intercolonial Committee of Correspondence. In 1775 he became a delegate to the Continental Congress. A year later he was again in the Virginia Assembly, to lead a social revolution in that State, by legislation, amid all the turmoil of war. Reforms in Under his guidance, the reform party, in 1777Virginia 1778, (1) prohibited further importation of slaves into the State; (2) swept away the church establishment, along with every vestige of ancient checks upon religious freedom; (3) overthrew entail and primogeniture — the semifeudal bulwarks of the landed aristocracy; and (4) replaced the complex barbarities of the old legal system by a new code simple, compact, and humane. In all this struggle Jefferson was supported by the solid backing of the western Scotch-Irish counties. His victory Americanized Virginia and consolidated there the Democratic party he was afterward to organize for the nation at large. The aristocratic opposition was particularly bitter against the abolition of the rule of primogeniture. The leaders pleaded for at least a double inheritance for the oldest son. Not unless it can be shown that the oldest son needs twice as much to feed and clothe him, replied Jefferson. Soon after, Jefferson's only son, a babe, died from exposure in a midwinter flight from a Tory raid; and the aristocratic planters were not ashamed to call this calamity a "righteous judgment of God," "destroying the family of the man who had wished to destroy all families." Jefferson's views had been even more far-reaching than the actual accomplishment. He had hoped for gradual emancipation of slaves and for a noble system of public schools. The latter scheme he returned to enthusiasti THOMAS JEFFERSON 355 cally, but with little result, in his old age; and he did at last carry out his plans for reorganizing the University of Virginia on the main lines along which the State universities were afterwards to develop. Life in 1785-1789 For the next two years (1779-1780) Jefferson served as governor of Virginia. Then after brief retirement, due to private griefs, he reappeared in the Continental Congress in 1783, for brief but distinguished service (pages 252, 255). Next we see him American Minister in France. There he watched the early stages of the French Revolution with eager sympathy, and while preserving France, in public the impartial attitude proper for a foreign minister, he was in private the valued adviser of Lafayette and other reformers, whose inexperienced enthusiasm he was sometimes able to direct wisely. French thought now secured a strong influence upon him; but his admiration for that country in no way weakened his Americanism. He urged Monroe to come to Europe, "because it will make you adore your own country, its soil, climate, equality, liberty, laws, people, manners"; and he predicted that, while many Europeans would remove to America, no man then living would see an American seek a home in Europe. In 1790 he returned to America to take a place in Washington's Cabinet, and then to build skillfully the party of the people, which triumphed in his election to the presidency. It is characteristic that, at the close of his brief Autobiography, in counting up his services to his fellows, Jefferson gives prominent place to his efforts in making navigable a Virginia creek and to his introducing into South Carolina a heavier and better rice than was before grown in America. "The greatest service which can be rendered to any country," he comments, "is to add a useful plant to its cultivation." The two things that men remember against this broad background of varied activity are that Jefferson gave immortal form to the principles of the political Revolution of 1776, in the Declaration of Independence, and that he stood for the democratic aspirations of the social “revolution of |