Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson Volume IV Part 44

But can they be made unchangeable? Can one generation bind another, and all others, in succession for ever? I think not. The Creator has made the earth for the living, not the dead. Rights and powrers can only belong to persons, not to things, not to mere matter, unendowed with will. The dead are not even things. The particles of matter which composed their bodies, make part now of the bodies of other animals, vegetables, or minerals, of a thousand forms. To what then are attached the rights and powers they held while in the form of men? A generation may bind itself as long as its majority continues in life; when that has disappeared, another majority is in place, holds all the rights and powers their predecessors once held, and may change their laws and inst.i.tutions to suit themselves. Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.

I was glad to find in your book a formal contradiction, at length, of the judiciary usurpation of legislative powers; for such the judges have usurped in their repeated decisions, that Christianity is a part of the common law. The proof of the contrary, which you have adduced, is incontrovertible; to wit, that the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet Pagans, at a time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ p.r.o.nounced, or knew that such a character had ever existed. But it may amuse you, to show when, and by what means, they stole this law in upon us. In a case of _quare impedit_ in the Year-book, 34. H. 6. folio 38. (anno 1458,) a question was made, how far the ecclesiastical law was to be respected in a common law court. And Prisot, Chief Justice, gives his opinion in these words. '_A tiel leis qu'ils de seint eglise ont enancien scripture, covient a nous a donner credence; car ceo common ley stir quels touts manners leis sont fondes.

Et auxy, Sir, nous sumus obliges de conustre lour ley de saint eglise: et semblablement ils sont obliges de conustre nostre ley. Et, Sir, si poit apperer or a nous que Pevesque ad fait come un ordinary fera en tiel cas, adong nous devons ceo adju-ger bon,ou auterment nemy_,' &c.

See S. C. Fitzh.Abr. Qu. imp. 89. Bro. Abr. Qu. imp. 12. Finch in his first book, c. 3. is the first afterwards who quotes this case, and mistakes it thus. 'To such laws of the church as have warrant in holy scripture, our law giveth credence.' And cites Prisot; mistranslating 'ancien scripture' into 'holy scripture.' Whereas, Prisot palpably says, 'to such laws as those of holy church have in ancient writing, it is proper for us to give credence;' to wit, to their ancient written laws.

This was in 1613, a century and a half after the dictum of Prisot.

Wingate, in 1658, erects this false translation into a maxim of the common law, copying the words of Finch, but citing Prisot. Wing. Max.

3. and Sheppard, t.i.tle, 'Religion,' in 1675, copies the same mistranslation, quoting the Y. B. Finch and Win-gate. Hale expresses it in these words; 'Christianity is parcel of the laws of England.' 1 Ventr. 293, 3 Keb. 607. But he quotes no authority. By these echoings and re-echoings from one to another, it had become so established in 1728, that in the case of the King vs. Woolston, 2 Stra. 834, the court would not suffer it to be debated, whether to write against Christianity was punishable in the temporal court at common law. Wood, therefore, 409, ventures still to vary the phrase and say, that all blasphemy and profaneness are offences by the common law; and cites 2 Stra.

Then Blackstone, in 1763, IV. 59, repeats the words of Hale, that 'Christianity is part of the laws of England,' citing Ventris and Strange. And finally, Lord Mansfield, with a little qualification, in Evans's case, in 1767, says, that 'the essential principles of revealed religion are part of the common law.' Thus ingulphing Bible, Testament, and all into the common law, without citing any authority. And thus we find this chain of authorities hanging link by link, one upon another, and all ultimately on one and the same hook, and that a mistranslation of the words 'ancien scripture,' used by Prisot. Finch quotes Prisot; Wingate does the same. Sheppard quotes Prisot, Finch, and Wingate.

Hale cites n.o.body. The court, in Woolston's case, cite Hale. Wood cites Woolston's case. Blackstone quotes Woolston's case and Hale. And Lord Mansfield, like Hale, ventures it on his own authority. Here I might defy the best read lawyer to produce another scrip of authority for this judiciary forgery; and I might go on further to show, how some of the Anglo-Saxon priests interpolated into the text of Alfred's laws, the 20th, 21st, 22nd, and 23rd chapters of Exodus, and the 15th of the Acts of the Apostles, from the 23rd to the 29th verses. But this would lead my pen and your patience too far. What a conspiracy this, between Church and State! Sing Tantarara, rogues all, rogues all, Sing Tantarara, rogues all!

I must still add to this long and rambling letter, my acknowledgments for your good wishes to the University we are now establis.h.i.+ng in this State. There are some novelties in it. Of that of a professors.h.i.+p of the principles of government, you express your approbation. They will be founded in the rights of man. That of agriculture, I am sure, you will approve: and that also of Anglo-Saxon. As the histories and laws left us in that type and dialect, must be the text-books of the reading of the learners, they will imbibe with the language their free principles of government. The volumes you have been so kind as to send, shall be placed in the library of the University. Having at this time in England a person sent for the purpose of selecting some Professors, a Mr.

Gilmer of my neighborhood, I cannot but recommend him to your patronage, counsel, and guardians.h.i.+p, against imposition, misinformation, and the deceptions of partial and false recommendations, in the selection of characters. He is a gentleman of great worth and correctness, my particular friend, well educated in various branches of science, and worthy of entire confidence.

Your age of eighty-four and mine of eighty-one years, insure us a speedy meeting. We may then commune at leisure, and more fully, on the good and evil, which in the course of our long lives, we have.both witnessed; and in the mean time, I pray you to accept a.s.surances of my high veneration and esteem for your person and character.

Th: Jefferson.

LETTER CLx.x.xII.--TO MARTIN VAN BUREN, June 29, 1824

TO MARTIN VAN BUREN.

Monticello, June 29, 1824.

Dear Sir,

I have to thank you for Mr. Pickering's elaborate philippic against Mr.

Adams, Gerry, Smith, and myself; and I have delayed the acknowledgment until I could read it and make some observations on it.

I could not have believed, that for so many years, and to such a period of advanced age, he could have nourished pa.s.sions so vehement and viperous. It appears, that for thirty years past, he has been industriously collecting materials for vituperating the characters he had marked for his hatred; some of whom certainly, if enmities towards him had ever existed, had forgotten them all, or buried them in the grave with themselves. As to myself, there never had been any thing personal between us, nothing but the general opposition of party sentiment; and our personal intercourse had been that of urbanity, as himself says. But it seems he has been all this time brooding over an enmity which I had never felt, and that with respect to myself, as well as others, he has been writing far and near, and in every direction, to get hold of original letters, where he could, copies, where he could not, certificates and journals, catching at every gossipping story he could hear of in any quarter, supplying by suspicions what he could find no where else, and then arguing on this motley farrago, as if established on gospel evidence. And while expressing his wonder, 'at the age of eighty-eight, the strong pa.s.sions of Mr. Adams should not have cooled '; that on the contrary, 'they had acquired the mastery of his soul,' (p. 100 ;) that 'where these were enlisted, no reliance could be placed on his statements,' (p. 104 ;) the facility and little truth with which he could represent facts and occurrences, concerning persons who were the objects of his hatred, (p. 3 ;) that 'he is capable of making the grossest misrepresentations, and, from detached facts, and often from bare suspicions, of drawing unwarrantable inferences,' if suited to his purpose at the instant,' (p. 174;) while making such charges, I say, on Mr. Adams, instead of his '_ecce h.o.m.o_,'

(p. 100;) how justly might we say to him, '_Mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur_.' For the a.s.siduity and industry he has employed in his benevolent researches after matter of crimination against us, I refer to his pages 13, 14, 34, 36, 46, 71, 79, 90, bis. 92, 93, bis. 101, ter.

104, 116, 118, 141, 143, 146,150,151,153, 168, 171, 172. That Mr.

Adams's strictures on him, written and pointed, should have excited some notice on his part, was not perhaps to be wondered at. But the sufficiency of his motive for the large attack on me may be more questionable. He says, (p. 4) 'of Mr. Jefferson I should have said nothing, but for his letter to Mr. Adams, of October the 12th, 1823.'

Now the object of that letter was to soothe the feelings of a friend, wounded by a publication which I thought an 'outrage on private confidence.' Not a word or allusion in it respecting Mr. Pickering, nor was it suspected that it would draw forth his pen in justification of this infidelity, which he has, however, undertaken in the course of his pamphlet, but more particularly in its conclusion.

He arraigns me on two grounds, my actions, and my motives. The very actions, however, which he arraigns, have been such as the great majority of my fellow-citizens have approved. The approbation of Mr.

Pickering, and of those who thought with him, I had no right to expect.

My motives he chooses to ascribe to hypocrisy, to ambition, and a pa.s.sion for popularity. Of these the world must judge between us. It is no office of his or mine. To that tribunal I have ever submitted my actions and motives, without ransacking the Union for certificates, letters, journals, and gossiping tales, to justify myself and weary them. Nor shall I do this on the present occasion, but leave still to them these antiquated party diatribes, now newly revamped and paraded, as if they had not been already a thousand times repeated, refuted, and adjudged against him, by the nation itself. If no action is to be deemed virtuous for which malice can imagine a sinister motive, then there never was a virtuous action; no, not even in the life of our Savior himself. But he has taught us to judge the tree by its fruit, and to leave motives to him who can alone see into them.

But whilst I leave to its fate the libel of Mr. Pickering, with the thousands of others like it, to which I have given no other answer than a steady course of similar action, there are two facts or fancies of his which I must set to rights. The one respects Mr. Adams, the other myself. He observes, that my letter of October the 12th, 1823, acknowledges the receipt of one from Mr. Adams, of September the 18th, which, having been written a few days after Cunningham's publication, he says was no doubt written to apologize to me for the pointed reproaches he had uttered against me in his confidential letters to Cunningham.

And thus having 'no doubt' of his conjecture, he considers it as proven, goes on to suppose the contents of the letter (19, 22), makes it place Mr. Adams at my feet suing for pardon, and continues to rant upon it, as an undoubted fact. Now I do most solemnly declare, that so far from being a letter of apology, as Mr. Pickering so undoubtingly a.s.sumes, there was not a word or allusion in it respecting Cunningham's publication.

The other allegation respecting myself, is equally false. In page 34, he quotes Doctor Stuart, as having, twenty years ago, informed him that General Was.h.i.+ngton, '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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 here 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 pa.s.sed a word, written or verbal, directly or indirectly, between General Was.h.i.+ngton 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 a scrip of a pen between General Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Doctor 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 p.r.o.ne to antipathies, boiling with party pa.s.sions, and, under the dominion of these, readily welcoming fancies for facts. But, come the story from whomsoever it might, it is an unqualified falsehood.

This letter to Mazzei has been a precious theme of crimination for federal malice. It was a long letter of business, in which was inserted a single paragraph only of political information as to the state of our country. In this information there was not one word which would not then have been, or would not now be approved by every republican in the United States, looking back to those times, as you will see by a faithful copy now enclosed of the whole of what that letter said on the subject of the United States, or of its government. This paragraph, extracted and translated, got into a Paris paper at a time when the persons in power there were laboring under very general disfavor, and their friends were eager to catch even at straws to buoy them up. 'To them, therefore, I have always imputed the interpolation of an entire paragraph additional to mine, which makes me charge my own country with ingrat.i.tude and injustice to France. There was not a word in my letter respecting France, or any of the proceedings or relations between this country and that. Yet this interpolated paragraph has been the burden of federal calumny, has been constantly quoted by them, made the subject of unceasing and virulent abuse, and is still quoted, as you see, by Mr.

Pickering, (page 33,) as if it were genuine, and really written by me.

And even Judge Marshall makes history descend from its dignity, and the ermine from its sanct.i.ty, to exaggerate, to record, and to sanction this forgery. In the very last note of his book, he says, 'A letter from Mr. Jefferson to Mr. Mazzei, an Italian, was published in Florence, and republished in the Moniteur, with very severe strictures on the conduct of the United States.' And instead of the letter itself, he copies what he says are the remarks of the editor, which are an exaggerated commentary on the fabricated paragraph itself, and silently leaves to his reader to make the ready inference that these were the sentiments of the letter. Proof is the duty of the affirmative side. A negative cannot be possibly proved. But, in defect of impossible proof of what was not in the original letter, I have its press-copy still in my possession. It has been shown to several, and is open to any one who wishes to see it.

I have presumed only that the interpolation was done in Paris. But I never saw the letter in either its Italian or French dress, and it may have been done here, with the commentary handed down to posterity by the judge. The genuine paragraph, re-translated through Italian and French into English, as it appeared here in a federal paper, besides the mutilated hue which these translations and re-translations of it produced generally, gave a mistranslation of a single word, which entirely perverted its meaning, and made it a pliant and fertile text of misrepresentation of my political principles. The original, speaking of an Anglican, monarchical, and aristocratical party, which had sprung up since he had left us, states their object to be 'to draw over us the substance, as they had already done the forms of the British government.' Now the 'forms' here meant, were the levees, birth-days, the pompous cavalcade to the State House on the meeting of Congress, the formal speech from the throne, the procession of Congress in a body to re-echo the speech in an answer, &c. &c. But the translator here, by subst.i.tuting form in the singular number, for forms in the plural, made it mean the frame or organization of our government, or its form of legislative, executive, and judiciary authorities, co-ordinate and independent: to which form it was to be inferred that I was an enemy. In this sense they always quoted it, and in this sense Mr. Pickering still quotes, it (pages 34, 35, 38), and countenances the inference. Now General Was.h.i.+ngton 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 (General Was.h.i.+ngton 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 General Was.h.i.+ngton 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 government, and looking as if wishfully to those of European courts.

His general explanations to me 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 a.s.sist him, that placed as he was in an office entirely new to him, unacquainted with the forms and ceremonies of other governments, still less apprized 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 a.s.signed particularly to General Knox, a man of parade, and to Colonel Humphreys, who had resided some time at a foreign court.

They, he said, were the author's 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 revising that course, of correcting in it any particulars not approved in experience; and he 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 General Was.h.i.+ngton, 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.

Mr. Pickering quotes too (page 34) the expression in the letter, of 'the men who were Samsons in the field, and Solomons in the council, but who had had their heads shorn by the harlot England' or, as expressed in their re-translation, the men who were Solomons in council, and Samsons in combat, but whose hair had been cut off by the wh.o.r.e England.' Now this expression also was perfectly understood by General Was.h.i.+ngton. He knew that I meant it for the Cincinnati generally, and that, from what had pa.s.sed between us at the commencement of that inst.i.tution, I could not mean to include him. When the first meeting was called for its establishment, I was a member of the Congress then sitting at Annapolis.

General Was.h.i.+ngton wrote to me, asking my opinion on that proposition, and the course, if any, which I thought Congress would observe respecting it. I wrote him frankly my own disapprobation of it; that I found the members of Congress generally in the same sentiment; that I thought they would take no express notice of it, but that in all appointments of trust, honor, or profit, they would silently pa.s.s by all candidates of that order, and give an uniform preference to others. On his way to the first meeting in Philadelphia, which I think was in the spring of 1784, he called on me at Annapolis. It was a little after candle-light, and he sat with me till after midnight, conversing, almost exclusively, on that subject. While he was feelingly indulgent to the motives which might induce the officers to promote it, he concurred with me entirely in condemning it; and when I expressed an idea that, if the hereditary quality were suppressed, the inst.i.tution might perhaps be indulged during the lives of the officers now living, and who had actually served; 'No,' he said, 'not a fibre of it ought, to be left, to be an eye-sore to the public, a ground of dissatisfaction, and a line of separation between them and their country': and he left me with a determination to use all his influence for its entire suppression. On his return from the meeting, he called on me again, and related to me the course the thing had taken. He. said, that, from the beginning, he had used every endeavor to prevail on the officers to renounce the project altogether, urging the many considerations which would render it odious to their fellow-citizens, and disreputable and injurious to themselves; that he had at length prevailed on most of the old officers to reject it, although with great and warm opposition from others, and especially the younger ones, among whom he named Colonel W. S. Smith as particularly intemperate. But that in this state of things, when he thought the question safe, and the meeting drawing to a close, Major L'Enfant arrived from France with a bundle of eagles, for which he had been sent there, with letters from the French officers who had served in. America, praying for admission into the order, and a solemn act of their King permitting them to wear its ensign. This, he said, changed the face of matters at once, produced an entire revolution of sentiment, and turned the torrent so strongly in an opposite direction, that it could be no longer withstood: all he could then obtain, was a suppression of the hereditary quality. He added, that it was the French applications, and respect for the approbation of the King, which saved the establishment in its modified and temporary form. Disapproving thus of the inst.i.tution as much as I did, and conscious that I knew him to do so, he could never suppose that I meant to include him among the Samsons in the field, whose object was to draw over us the form, as they made the letter say, of the British government, and especially its aristocractic member, an hereditary House of Lords. Add to this, that the letter saying, 'that two out of the three branches of legislature were against us,' was an obvious exception of him; it being well known that the majorities in the two branches of Senate and Representatives were the very instruments which carried, in opposition to the old and real republicans, the measures which were the subjects of condemnation in this letter. General Was.h.i.+ngton, then, understanding perfectly what and whom I meant to designate, in both phrases, and that they could not have any application or view to himself, could find in neither any cause of offence to himself; and therefore neither needed, nor ever asked any explanation of them from me. Had it even been otherwise, they must know very little of General Was.h.i.+ngton, who should believe to be within the laws of his character what Doctor Stuart is said to have imputed to him. Be this, however, as it may, the story is infamously false in every article of it. My last parting with General Was.h.i.+ngton was at the inauguration of Mr. Adams, in March, 1797, and was warmly affectionate; and I never had any reason to believe any change on his part, as there certainly was none on mine. But one session of Congress intervened between that and his death, the year following, in my pa.s.sage to and from which, as it happened to be not convenient to call on him, I never had another opportunity; and as to the cessation of correspondence observed during that short interval, no particular circ.u.mstance occurred for epistolary communication, and both of us were too much oppressed with letter-writing, to trouble either the other, with a letter about nothing.

The truth is, that the federalists, pretending to be the exclusive friends of General Was.h.i.+ngton, have ever done what they could to sink his character, by hanging theirs on it, and by representing as the enemy of republicans him, who, of all men, is best ent.i.tled to the appellation of the father of that republic which they were endeavoring to subvert, and the republicans to maintain. They cannot deny, because the elections proclaimed the truth, that the great body of the nation approved the republican measures. General Was.h.i.+ngton was himself sincerely a friend to the republican principles of our const.i.tution. His faith, perhaps, in its duration, might not have been as confident as mine; but he repeatedly declared to me, that he was determined it should have a fair chance for success, and that he would lose the last drop of his blood in its support, against any attempt which, might be made to change it from its republican form. He made these declarations the oftener, because he knew my suspicions that Hamilton had other views, and he wished to quiet my jealousies on this subject. For Hamilton frankly avowed, that he considered the British const.i.tution, with all the corruptions of its administration, as the most perfect model of government which had ever been devised by the wit of man; professing, however, at the same time, that the spirit of this country was so fundamentally republican, that it would be visionary to think of introducing monarchy here, and that, therefore, it was the duty of its administrators to conduct it on the principles their const.i.tuents had elected.

General Was.h.i.+ngton, after the retirement of his first cabinet, and the composition of his second, entirely federal, and at the head of which was Mr. Pickering himself, had no opportunity of hearing both sides of any question. His measures, consequently, took more the hue of the party in whose hands he was. These measures were certainly not approved by the republicans; yet were they not imputed, to him, but to the counsellors around him; and his prudence so far restrained their impa.s.sioned course and bias, that no act of strong mark, during the remainder of his administration, excited much dissatisfaction. He lived too short a time after, and too much withdrawn from information, to correct the views into which he had been deluded; and the continued a.s.siduities of the party drew him into the vortex of their intemperate career; separated him still farther from his real friends, and excited him to actions and expressions of dissatisfaction, which grieved them, but could not loosen their affections from him. They would not suffer the temporary aberration to weigh against the immeasurable merits of his life; and although they tumbled his seducers from their places, they preserved his memory embalmed in their hearts, with undiminished love and devotion; and there it for ever will remain embalmed, in entire oblivion of every temporary thing which might cloud the glories of his splendid life. It is vain, then, for Mr. Pickering and his friends to endeavor to falsify his character, by representing him as an enemy to republicans and republican principles, and as exclusively the friend of those who were so; and had he lived longer, he would have returned to his ancient and unbia.s.sed opinions, would have replaced his confidence in those whom the people approved and supported, and would have seen that they were only restoring and acting on the principles of his own first administration.

I find, my dear Sir, that I have written you a very long letter or rather a history. The civility of having sent me a copy of Mr.

Pickering's diatribe, would scarcely justify its address to you. I do not publish these things, because my rule of life has been never to hara.s.s the public with fendings and provings of personal slanders; and least of all would I descend into the arena of slander with such a champion as Mr. Pickering. I have ever trusted to the justice and consideration of my fellow-citizens, and have no reason to repent it, or to change my course. At this time of life, too, tranquillity is the _summum bonum_. But although I decline all newspaper controversy, yet when falsehoods have been advanced, within the knowledge of no one so much as myself, I have sometimes deposited a contradiction in the hands of a friend, which, if worth preservation, may, when I am no more, nor those whom I might offend, throw light on history, and recall that into the path of truth. And if of no other value, the present communication may amuse you with anecdotes not known to every one.

I had meant to have added some views on the amalgamation of parties, to which your favor of the 8th has some allusion; an amalgamation of name, but not of principle. Tories are tories still, by whatever name they may be called. But my letter is already too unmercifully long, and I close it here with a.s.surances of my great esteem and respectful consideration.

Th: Jefferson.

LETTER CLx.x.xIII.--TO EDWARD EVERETT, October 15, 1824

TO EDWARD EVERETT.

Monticello, October 15, 1824.

Dear Sir,

I have yet to thank you for your O. B. K. oration, delivered in presence of General la Fayette. It is all excellent, much of it sublimely so, well worthy of its author and his subject, of whom we may truly say, as was said of Germanicus, '_Fruitur fama sui_.'

Your letter of September the 10th gave me the first information that mine to Major Cartwright had got into the newspapers; and the first notice, indeed, that he had received it. I was a stranger to his person, but not to his respectable and patriotic character. I received from him a long and interesting letter, and answered it with frankness, going without reserve into several subjects, to which his letter had led, but on which I did not suppose I was writing for the newspapers. The publication of a letter in such a case, without the consent of the writer, is not a fair practice.

The part which you quote, may draw on me the host of judges and divines.

They may cavil, but cannot refute it. Those who read Prisot's opinion with a candid view to understand, and not to chicane it, cannot mistake its meaning. The reports in the Year-books were taken very short. The opinions of the judges were written down sententiously, as notes or memoranda, and not with all the developement which they probably used in delivering them. Prisot's opinion, to be fully expressed, should be thus paraphrased. 'To such laws as those of holy church have recorded, and preserved in their ancient books and writings, it is proper for us to give credence; for so is, or so says, the common law, or law of the land, on which all manner of other laws rest for their authority, or are founded; that is to say, the common law, or the law of the land common to us all, and established by the authority of us all, is that from which is derived the authority of all other special and subordinate branches of law, such as the canon law, law merchant, law maritime, law of Gavelkind, Borough English, corporation laws, local customs and usages, to all of which the common law requires its judges to permit authority in the special or local cases belonging to them. The evidence of these laws is preserved in their ancient treatises, books, and writings, in like manner as our own common law itself is known, the text-of its original enactments having been long lost, and its substance only preserved in ancient and traditionary writings. And if it appears, from their ancient books, writings, and records, that the bishop, in this case, according to the rules prescribed by these authorities, has done what an ordinary would have done, in such case, then we should adjudge it good, otherwise not.' To decide this question, they would have to turn to the ancient writings and records of the canon law, in which they would find evidence of the laws of advowsons, _quare impedit_, the duties of bishops and ordinaries, for which terms Prisot could never have meant to refer them to the Old or New Testament, _les saincts scriptures_, where surely they would not be found. A license which should permit 'ancien scripture' to be translated 'holy scripture,' annihilates at once all the evidence of language. With such a license, we might reverse the sixth commandment into 'Thou shalt not omit murder.' It would be the more extraordinary in this case, where the mistranslation was to effect the adoption of the whole code of the Jewish and Christian laws into the text of our statutes, to convert religious offences into temporal crimes, to make the breach of every religious precept a subject of indictment, submit the question of idolatry, for example, to the trial of a jury, and to a court, its punishment, to the third and fourth generation of the offender. Do we allow to our judges this lumping legislation?

The term 'common law,' although it has more than one meaning, is perfectly definite, _secundum subjectam materiem_. Its most probable origin was on the conquest of the Heptarchy by Alfred, and the amalgamation of their several codes of law into one, which became common to them all. The authentic text of these enactments has not been preserved; but their substance has been committed to many ancient books and writings, so faithfully as to have been deemed genuine from generation to generation, and obeyed as such by all. We have some fragments of them collected by Lambard, Wilkins, and others, but abounding with proofs of their spurious authenticity. Magna Charta is the earliest statute, the text of which has come down to us in an authentic form, and thence downward we have them entire. We do not know exactly when the common law and statute law, the _lex scripta et non scripta_, began to be contra-distinguished, so as to give a second acceptation to the former term; whether before or after Prisot's day, at which time we know that nearly two centuries and a half of statutes were in preservation. In later times, on the introduction of the chancery branch of law, the term common law began to be used in a third sense, as the correlative of chancery law. This, however, having been long after Prisot's time, could not have been the sense in which he used the term.

He must have meant the ancient _lex, non scripta_, because, had he used it as inclusive of the _lex scripta_, he would have put his finger on the statute which had enjoined on the judges a deference to the laws of holy church. But no such statute existing, he must have referred to the common law in the sense of a _lex non scripta_. Whenever, then, the term common law is used in either of these senses, and it is never employed in any other, it is readily known in which of them by the context and subject matter under consideration; which, in the present case, leave no room for doubt. I do not remember the occasion which led me to take up this subject, while a pract.i.tioner of the law. But I know I went into it with all the research which a very copious law library enabled me to indulge; and I fear not for the accuracy of any of my quotations.

The doctrine might be disproved by many other and different topics of reasoning; but having satisfied myself of the origin of the forgery, and found how, like a rolling snow-ball, it had gathered volume, I leave its further pursuit to those who need further proof, and perhaps I have already gone further than the feeble doubt you expressed might require, I salute you with great esteem and respect.

Th: Jefferson.

LETTER CLx.x.xIV.--TO JOSEPH C. CABELL, January 11, 1825