tion of Mr. Jefferson's side of their correspondence to declare, whether, or in what degree, he conspired in those schemes which projected the shadow of a "dim eclipse" between the glory of Washington and the admiration of his fellow-citizens; and which, while the lustre of his name shone unclouded in other lands, caused it, for a space, to shed but pale and struggling beams upon his native country.

LETTER VII.

It is now necessary to depart from the order of time observed in Mr. Jefferson's correspondence, and to transfer your attention to the explanation with which he was so kind as to drug Mr. Van Buren, twenty-seven years after he had administered to Mr. Madison the dose which has just been analysed.

The place and power to which at the earlier era Mr. Jefferson was aspiring, at the latter he had gained and enjoyed. The object of his care had therefore become apparent consistency, and of his ambition, posthumous fame. The reputation of Gen. Washington, canonized by death, had recovered from the effects of his arts and calumnies, and regained its natural pre-eminence in his country's affection. Despairing to rival Washington with posterity, he was content to seek the second place in fame, and praised that illustrious man when dead, from the same selfish motive, with which, when living, he had disparaged and traduced him.

The letter to Mr. Van Buren (29th June, 1824, Vol. IV. p. 399,) is too long for insertion. It appears to be in answer to one from that gentleman (then a Senator of the United States, from New York,) enclosing a publication of Mr. Pickering, which contained among other controversial matters, some remarks on thisletter to Mazzei. The first passage that I shall notice is the following "The other allegation respecting myself, is equally false. In page 34, Mr. Pickering quotes Dr. Stuart, as having twenty years ago informed him that Gen. Washington, 'when he became a private citizen,' called me to account for expressions in a letter to Mazzei, requiring in a tone of unusual severity an explanation of that letter. He adds of himself, 'in what manner the latter humbled himself, and appeased the just resentment of Washington, will never be known, as some time after his death, the correspondence was not to be found, and a diary for an important period of his presidency was also missing! The diary being of transactions

during his presidency, the letter to Mazzei not known until some time after he became a private citizen, and the pretended correspondence of course after that, I know not why this lost diary and supposed correspondence are brought together here, unless for insinuations worthy of the letter itself. The correspondence could not be found, indeed, because it had never existed. I do affirm that there never passed a word, written or verbal, directly or indirectly, between Gen. Washington and myself on the subject of that letter. He would never have degraded himself so far as to take to himself the imputation in that letter on the Samsons in combat." The whole story is a fabrication, and I defy the framers of it, and all mankind to produce the scrip of a pen between Gen. Washington and myself on the subject, or any other evidence more worthy of credit than the suspicions, suppositions, and presumptions of the two persons here quoting and quoted for it. With Dr. Stuart I had not much acquaintance. I supposed him to be an honest man, knew him to be a very weak one, and, like Mr. Pickering, very prone to antipathies, boiling with party passions, and under the dominion of these, readily welcoming fancies for facts. But come the story from whomsoever it might, it is an unqualified falsehood."

The assertion here attributed to Dr. Stuart, had been frequently repeated in Virginia, on other authority, as every one, acquainted with "the body of the time," will remember. As Mr. Pickering, however warm in his party feelings, was admitted on all hands, to be a man of truth, there is no reason to doubt that Dr. Stuart made the assertion; and you will be able to recollect that the statement made on Mr. Pickering's own authority-"added of himself”— respecting "the lost diary and supposed correspondence," was current in society, and credited by the friends of Gen. Washington, and by all who were familiar with those friends. If these, or such of them as survive should, as is probable, be led to recur to President Jefferson's unexpected appointment and remote relegation of Gen. Washington's secretary, events which corresponded in date with and were supposed to have proceeded from, the loss of this diary and correspondence; they will be apt to conclude that by the same instrumentality Mr. Jefferson acquired his occult but confident acquaintance with Gen. Lee's private letters to Gen. Washington.*

As for Dr. Stuart, he was a man of excellent character-a gen

[* If the reader will bear in mind that Gen. Lee promised Gen. Washington not to mention to any one else the table conversation which he communicated by letter, and that it is highly improbable that Washington would have talked of it, the supposition that Mr. Jefferson had a secret informant in Gen. Washington's closet seems irresistible. This is further confirmed by a statement in the concluding part of the letter to Mr. Van Buren, that Gen. Washington was "copiously nourished with falsehoods by a neighbour of mine who ambitioned to be his correspondent." How should Mr. Jefferson know any thing of the contents of the letters of Mr. Nicholas (the neighbour alluded to) to Gen. Washington, unless he was clandestinely informed of them?]

tleman, of studious habits, inoffensive deportment, and good family. He married the widow of Mrs. Gen. Washington's son by her first husband; and becoming from this connexion intimate in the family, by his uniform integrity and irreproachable life, engaged, and preserved in a remarkable degree, Gen. Washington's confidence and friendship. A recorded proof of this traditionary fact, may be found in Marshall's Life of Washington;* and as the subject there treated forms one point in Mr. Jefferson's second explanation of this letter to Mazzei, the following quotations are doubly apposite. "Not long after the government came into operation, Dr. Stuart, a gentleman nearly connected with the President in friendship and by marriage, addressed to him a letter stating the accusations which were commonly circulating in Virginia on various subjects, and especially against the regal manners of those who administered the affairs of the nation." Gen. Washington's answer to this letter is succeeded by the following passage. "In a subsequent letter written to the same gentleman, after his levées had been openly censured by the enemies of the administration, he thus expressed himself; "Before the custom was established which now accommodates foreign characters, strangers, and others, who from motives of curiosity, respect to the chief magistrate, or any other cause, are induced to call upon me, I was unable to attend to any business whatever. For gentlemen, consulting their own convenience, rather than mine, were calling from the time I rose from breakfast-often before-until I sat down to dinner. This, as I resolved not to neglect my public duties, reduced me to the choice of one of these alternatives; either to refuse them altogether, or to appropriate a time for the reception of them. The first would, I well knew be disgusting to many-the latter I expected, would undergo animadversion from those who would find fault, with or without cause. I therefore adopted that line of conduct which combined public advantage with private convenience, and which in my judgment was unexceptionable in itself. These visits are optional. They are made without invitation. Between the hours of three and four, every Tuesday, I am prepared to receive them. Gentlemen, often in great numbers, come and go;-chat with each other and act as they please. A porter shows them into the room; and they return from it when they choose, and without ceremony. At their first entrance they salute me, and I them, and as many as I can talk to, I do. What pomp there is in all this I am unable to discover."

These extracts, while they show the intimacy which subsisted between Gen. Washington and Dr. Stuart, afford an exact account of a social observance, which Mr. Jefferson distorts into a form of government, and of which his correction consisted in diminishing its frequency. For on New Year's day, the 4th of March, and the

4th of July, he and his successors, besides the weekly levées of the Lady, have continued to hold these harmless re-unions.

His own positive denial of the statement derived by Mr. Pickering from Dr. Stuart, is attempted to be confirmed by positions, which although of no great force, tend rather to weaken it. He suggests that inasmuch as the lost diary' related to transactions during the presidency of Washington, and the 'pretended correspondence' could not have taken place until after his presidency, the mentioning these two subjects together, betrays malice and falsehood in the statement. Whereas, this apparent incongruity shows that the assertion was founded on facts either actual or supposed, and was not fabricated in a shape designed to slide it into credit-was not in fact prepared from a press copy. Political zeal which he ascribed in an equal degree to Dr. Stuart and Mr. Pickering, though it leads men to draw false inferences, is not supposed to make them misstate facts. If that were the case, zeal alone, would be sufficient to discredit every assertion of Mr. Jefferson, in relation to the conduct of the federal party, not only in the letter under consideration, but in his four volumes.

If Dr. Stuart made the assertion at all, as we have every reason to believe from the nature of the circumstances connected with the subject of it, from the existence of an impression to that effect among the friends of Gen. Washington at the time, and from the positive and public declaration of a man of distinguished character and admitted veracity, it is impossible to conceive that in doing so, he "welcomed fancies for facts"-or dealt in "suspicions, suppositions, or presumptions. He must have made a deliberate statement-which in the nature of things, must have been either positively true, or absolutely false. And Mr. Jefferson in treating it as a fancy, a suspicion, and a supposition, discovers how apprehensive he was of its force in a direct and tangible shape.

The next passage proper for consideration, respects the letter to Mazzei, and is as follows. "Now Gen. Washington perfectly understood what I meant by these forms, as they were frequent subjects of conversation between us. When, on my return from Europe, I joined the government in March, 1790, at New York, I was much astonished, indeed, at the mimicry I found established, of royal forms and ceremonies, and more alarmed at the unexpected phenomenon, by the monarchical sentiments I heard expressed and openly maintained in every company; and among others, by the high members of the government, executive and judiciary, (Gen. Washington alone excepted,) and by a great part of the legislature, save only some members who had been of the old congress, and a very few of recent introduction. I took occasion at various times, of expressing to Gen. Washington, my disappointment at these symptoms of a change of principle, and that I thought them encouraged by the forms and ceremonies which I found prevailing, not at all in character with the simplicity of republican govern

ment, and looking as if wishfully to those of European courts. His general explanations were, that when he arrived at New York, to enter on the executive administration of the new government, he observed to those who were to assist him, that placed as he was in an office entirely new to him, unacquainted with the forms and ceremonies of other governments, still less apprised of those which might be properly established here, and himself perfectly indifferent to all forms, he wished them to consider and prescribe what they should be; and the task was assigned particularly to Gen. Knox, a man of parade, and to Col. Humphreys, who had resided some time at a foreign court. They, he said, were the authors of the present regulations, and that others were proposed so highly strained that he absolutely rejected them. Attentive to the difference of opinion prevailing on this subject, when the term of his second election arrived he called the heads of departments together; observed to them the situation in which he had been at the commencement of the government, the advice he had taken, and the course he had observed in compliance with it; that a proper occasion had now arrived of reviewing that course, of correcting in it any particulars, not approved by experience; and desired us to consult together, agree on any changes we should think for the better, and that he should willingly conform to what we should advise. We met at

my office. Hamilton and myself agreed at once, that there was too much ceremony, for the character of our government; and particularly, that the parade of the installation at New York ought not to be copied on the present occasion, that the president should desire the chief justice to attend him at his chambers, that he should administer the oath of office to him in the presence of the higher officers of the government, and that the certificate of the fact should be delivered to the Secretary of State to be recorded. Randolph and Knox differed from us, the latter vehemently. They thought it not advisable to change any of the established forms; and we authorized Randolph to report our opinions to the President. As these opinions were divided, and no positive advice given as to any change, no change was made. Thus the forms which I had censured in my letter to Mazzei, were perfectly understood by Gen. Washington, and were those which he himself but barely tolerated. He had furnished me a proper occasion for proposing their reformation, and my opinion not prevailing, he knew I could not have meant any part of the censure for him."

These conversations-which are perfectly inconclusive in regard to the point for the maintenance of which they are adduced-if they ever took place, are probably misrepresented, for this among other reasons, that they are inconsistent with the statements of the principal interlocutors, upon the same subject. In the letter to Dr. Stuart which has been already cited, Gen. Washington declares that he found himself compelled by the incessant calls of visiters, "either to refuse them altogether, or to appropriate a time