left Monticello on the 1st of March, 1790, arrived at New-York, the then seat of Government, on the 21st, and immediately entered on the duties of his station.

In the short interval which he passed at Monticello, his eldest daughter was married to Thomas M. Randolph, eldest son of the Tuckahoe branch of Randolphs. He was a young gentleman of genius, science, and honorable mind, who afterwards filled a dignified station in the General Government, and, at length, the executive chair of Virginia, with credit, for a number of years.

CHAPTER X.

Mr. Jefferson's arrival at the seat of government, in the character of Secretary of State, completed the organization of the first national administration under the present Constitution of the United States. The new system had been in operation about one year. George Washington had been unanimously elected President, and inaugurated on the 30th of April, 1789. John Adams was Vice President; Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury; Henry Knox, Secretary of War; and Edmund Randolph, Attorney

General.

Of this cabinet, it is matter of historical notoriety, that Alexander Hamilton was the Ajax Telemon. To a mind of extraordinary endowments, he united the unlimited confidence of the Presiident, during the first stages of his executive action, which, aided by a series of fiscal operations, enabling him to insinuate his power into both branches of the legislature, gave him a preponderating and almost irresistable influence in directing the measures of the Administration. But his political opinions, with such advantages of personal ascendency, rendered him a dangerous minister, at the crisis of the birth of our present government. The political characters of the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Vice President, are drawn with a powerful and discriminating hand, by Mr. Jefferson, in his private memoranda of that period.

"Hamilton was not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption. In proof of this, I will relate an anecdote,

for the truth of which I attest the God who made me. Before the President set out on his southern tour in April, 1791, he addressed a letter of the fourth of that month, from Mount Vernon, to the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and War, desiring that if any serious and important cases should arise during his absence, they would consult and act on them. And he requested that the Vice President should also be consulted. This was the only occasion on which that officer was ever requested to take part in a cabinet question. Some occasion for consultation arising, I invited those gentlemen (and the Attorney General as well as I remember,) to dine with me, in order to confer on the subject. After the cloth was removed, and our question agreed and dismissed, conversation began on other matters, and, by some circumstance, was led to the British Constitution, on which Mr. Adams observed, 'Purge that constitution of its corruption, and give to its popular branch equality of representation, and it would be the most perfect constitution ever devised by the wit of man.' Hamilton paused and said, 'Purge it of its corruption, and give to its popular branch equality of representation, and it would become an impracticable government; as it stands at present, with all its supposed defects, it is the most perfect government which ever existed.' And this was assuredly the exact line which separated the political creeds of these two gentlemen. The one was for two hereditary branches and an honest elective one; the other for an hereditary King, with a House of Lords and Commons corrupted to his will, and standing between him and the people. Hamilton was, indeed, a singular character. Of acute understanding, disinterested, honest, and honorable in all private transactions, amiable in society, and duly valuing virtue in private life, yet so bewitched and perverted by the British example, as to be under thorough conviction that corruption was essential to the government of a nation.

"Mr. Adams had originally been a republican. The glare of royalty and nobility, during his mission to England, had made him believe their fascination a necessary ingredient in government; and Shays's rebellion, not sufficiently understood where he then was, seemed to prove that the absence of want and oppression, was not a sufficient guarantee of order. His book on the American Constitutions having made known his political bias, he was taken up by the monarchical federalists in his absence, and, on his re turn to the United States, he was by them made to believe that the general disposition of our citizens was favorable to monarchy. He here wrote his Davila, as a supplement to the former work, and his election to the Presidency confirmed him in his errors. Innumerable addresses too, artfully and industriously poured in upon him, deceived him into a confidence that he was on a pinnacle of popu larity, when the gulph was yawning at his feet, which was to swallow up him and his deceivers. For when General Washing

ton was withdrawn, these energumeni of royalism, kept in check hitherto by the dread of his honesty, his firmness, his patriotism, and the authority of his name, now mounted on the car of State and free from control, like Phaeton on that of the sun, drove headlong and wild, looking neither to right nor left, nor regarding any thing but the objects they were driving at; until, displaying these fully, the eyes of the nation were opened, and a general disbandment of them from the public councils took place."

The following note of a conversation with Mr. Hamilton, dated August 13th, 1791, presents a more favorable view of his sentiments, and seems due to him as a matter of justice.

"Alexander Hamilton condemning Mr. Adams' writings, and most particularly Davila, as having a tendency to weaken the present government, declared in substance as follows: 'I own it is my own opinion, though I do not publish it in Dan or Beersheba, that the present government is not that which will answer the ends of society, by giving stability and protection to its rights, and that it will probably be found expedient to go into the British form. However, since we have undertaken the experiment, I am for giving it a fair course, whatever my expectations may be. The success, indeed, so far, is greater than I had expected, and therefore, at present, success seems more possible than it had done heretofore, and there are still other and other stages of improvement, which, if the present does not succeed, may be tried, and ought to be tried, before we give up the republican form altogether; for that mind must be really depraved, which would not prefer the equality of political rights, which is the foundation of pure republicanism, if it can be obtained consistently with order. Therefore, whoever by his writings disturbs the present order of things, is really blameable, however pure his intentions may be, and he was sure Mr. Adams' were pure. This is the substance of a declaration made in much more lengthy terms, and which seemed to be more formal than usual for a private conversation between two, and as if intended to qualify some less guarded expressions which had been dropped on former occasions. Th. Jefferson has committed it to writing in the moment of A. Hamilton's leaving the room."

The Secretary of War, General Knox, was a gentleman of great military reputation, but wedded to the splendor, the pompous parade and ceremonies of royalty, to which he had been trained by military habit. He is understood to have proposed to General Washington, to decide the question of a monarchical or a republican gov ernment, by his army, before its disbandment, and to assume himself the crown, on the assurance of their support. The indignation with which the Commander in Chief rejected this liberticide

proposition, was equally worthy his virtue and wisdom. His next proposition was the establishment of an hereditary order, in the name of the Cincinnati, in which he succeeded.

Such were the strong monarchical elements which entered into the composition of General Washington's cabinet. Against this weight of opinion, Mr. Jefferson constituted the great republican check, and the only one, except on some occasions of support from the Attorney General. What were the scenes of trial, of mortification, of anguish, and indignity, through which he was called to pass? They have not yet fully penetrated the veil of secrecy; nor is it probable history will ever be able to do justice to the political conflicts of that day. The developments, however, which have been lately made, have thrown a flood of light upon them. They were conflicts of principle, between the advocates of republican, and those of kingly government, and had not the former, with their acknowledged leader, put forth the unmeasured and unceasing efforts which they did, our government would have been, at an early day, a very different thing from what the success of those efforts has made it. His first entrance upon the political stage, at New York, discovered to him a state of affairs which will appear almost incredible at the present day.

"Here, certainly, I found a state of things which, of all I had ever contemplated, I the least expected. I had left France in the first year of her revolution, in the fervor of natural rights, and zeal for reformation. My conscientious devotion to these rights could not be heightened, but it had been aroused and excited by daily exercise. The President received me cordially, and my colleagues and the circle of principal citizens, apparantly with welcome. The courtesies of dinner parties given me, as a stranger newly arrived among them, placed me at once in their familiar society. But I cannot describe the wonder and mortification with which the table conversations filled me. Politics were the chief topic, and a preference of kingly over republican government, was evidently the favorite sentiment. An apostate I could not be, nor yet a hypocrite, and I found myself, for the most part, the only advocate on the republican side of the question, unless among the guests there chanced to be some member of that party from the legislative Houses. Hamilton's financial system had then passed. It had two objects; 1, as a puzzle, to exclude popular understanding and inquiry; 2, as a machine for the corruption of the legislature: for he avowed the opinion, that man could be governed by one of two motives only, force or interest: force, he observed, in this country,

was out of the question, and the interests, therefore, of the members must be laid hold of, to keep the legislature in unison with the executive. And with grief and shame it must be acknowledged, that his machine was not without effect; that even in this, the birth of our government, some members were found sordid enough to bend their duty to their interests, and to look after personal rather than public good."

Hamilton's financial system, considered as a whole, comprehended three great operations, which were carried through in the order in which they are mentioned. 1. The funding the debts of the Union, foreign and domestic, upon certain principles recommended by him. 2. The assumption, by the United States, of the debts of the several States, and the funding of these also, upon similar principles. 3d. The establishment of a National Bank. The first of these measures had passed when Mr. Jefferson arrived at the seat of government. Some acquaintance, however, with its general principles, and those of the financial system generally, is requisite to an intelligible estimate of his opinions, and of the causes of opposition to the Hamiltonian administration.

It is well known that during the war, the greatest difficulty we experienced, was the want of money or means to pay the soldiers who fought our battles, or the farmers, manufacturers, and merchants who furnished them the necessary supplies of food and clothing. After the expedient of paper money had exhausted itself, certificates of debt were given to the individual creditors, with assurances of payment, so soon as the United States should be able. But the distresses of these people often obliged them to part with their certificates for the half, the fifth, and even the tenth of their value. This state of things produced a greedy and desolating career of speculation, all over the country; and the speculators made a trade of cozening the public securities from the holders, by the most fraudulent practices and persuasions that they would never be paid. But this species of gambling in the public paper, at the expense of the poor and honest creditors of the government, would have prevailed to a limited extent only, had not the government itself encouraged and sanctioned it by a deliberate act. It then became swindling on a large and legalized scale. In the bill for funding and paying the domestic debt, Hamilton made no distinction between the original holders, and the fraudulent purchasers of the public securities. Great and just disapprobation arose at put