Jefferson and his Colleagues, A Chronicle of the Virginia | Page 6

a Canning, they appeared provincial in their
ways and limited in their sympathetic understanding of statesmen of the
Old World.
Next to that of Madison, Jefferson valued the friendship of Albert
Gallatin, whom he made Secretary of the Treasury by a recess
appointment, since there was some reason to fear that the Federalist
Senate would not confirm the nomination. The Federalists could never
forget that Gallatin was a Swiss by birth--an alien of supposedly radical
tendencies. The partisan press never exhibited its crass provincialism
more shamefully than when it made fun of Gallatin's imperfect
pronunciation of English. He had come to America, indeed, too late to
acquire a perfect control of a new tongue, but not too late to become a
loyal son of his adopted country. He brought to Jefferson's group of
advisers not only a thorough knowledge of public finance but a sound
judgment and a statesmanlike vision, which were often needed to
rectify the political vagaries of his chief.
The last of his Cabinet appointments made, Jefferson returned to his
country seat at Monticello for August and September, for he was
determined not to pass those two "bilious months" in Washington. "I
have not done it these forty years," he wrote to Gallatin. "Grumble who
will, I will never pass those two months on tidewater." To Monticello,
indeed, Jefferson turned whenever his duties permitted and not merely
in the sickly months of summer, for when the roads were good the
journey was rapidly and easily made by stage or chaise. There, in his
garden and farm, he found relief from the distractions of public life.
"No occupation is so delightful to me," he confessed, "as the culture of
the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden." At
Monticello, too, he could gratify his delight in the natural sciences, for

he was a true child of the eighteenth century in his insatiable curiosity
about the physical universe and in his desire to reduce that universe to
an intelligible mechanism. He was by instinct a rationalist and a foe to
superstition in any form, whether in science or religion. His
indefatigable pen was as ready to discuss vaccination and yellow fever
with Dr. Benjamin Rush as it was to exchange views with Dr. Priestley
on the ethics of Jesus.
The diversity of Jefferson's interests is truly remarkable. Monticello is a
monument to his almost Yankee-like ingenuity. He writes to his friend
Thomas Paine to assure him that the semi-cylindrical form of roof after
the De Lorme pattern, which he proposes for his house, is entirely
practicable, for he himself had "used it at home for a dome, being 120
degrees of an oblong octagon." He was characteristically American in
his receptivity to new ideas from any source. A chance item about Eli
Whitney of New Haven arrests his attention and forthwith he writes to
Madison recommending a "Mr. Whitney at Connecticut, a mechanic of
the first order of ingenuity, who invented the cotton gin," and who has
recently invented "molds and machines for making all the pieces of his
[musket] locks so exactly equal that take one hundred locks to pieces
and mingle their parts and the hundred locks may be put together as
well by taking the first pieces which come to hand." To Robert Fulton,
then laboring to perfect his torpedoes and submarine, Jefferson wrote
encouragingly: "I have ever looked to the submarine boat as most to be
depended on for attaching them [i. e., torpedoes]....I am in hopes it is
not to be abandoned as impracticable."
It was not wholly affectation, therefore, when Jefferson wrote, "Nature
intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my
supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived,
have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself
on the boisterous ocean of political passions." One can readily picture
this Virginia farmer-philosopher ruefully closing his study door, taking
a last look over the gardens and fields of Monticello, in the golden days
of October, and mounting Wildair, his handsome thoroughbred, setting
out on the dusty road for that little political world at Washington,
where rumor so often got the better of reason and where gossip was so
likely to destroy philosophic serenity.
Jefferson had been a widower for many years; and so, since his

daughters were married and had households of their own, he was forced
to preside over his menage at Washington without the feminine touch
and tact so much needed at this American court. Perhaps it was this
unhappy circumstance quite as much as his dislike for ceremonies and
formalities that made Jefferson do away with the weekly levees of his
predecessors and appoint only two days, the First of January and the
Fourth of July,