CHAPTER XXIII. JEFFERSON AND HIS CABINET. 'HE man who took the oath of office as President of THE the United States in 1801 believed that his adminis Jefferson's tration was to introduce a new era in the history of the world. For the first time, he thought, men were to see a government for the sake of the governed. When government was devoted to such a purpose he believed that its customary incidents-armies, navies, national debts, banking systems, internal taxes, wars-could be almost entirely dispensed with. The confident optimism and serene disregard of the teachings of the past which are so characteristic of Americans found their perfect expression in Jefferson; he saw in the selfishness of the governing classes a satisfactory explanation of the miseries of mankind. It never occurred to him that his administration should be made to signalize itself merely by its rigid and consistent adherence to a strict construction of the constitution. As Hamilton hoped to increase the powers conferred upon the government by the constitution through construction, so Jefferson, consciously or unconsciously, aimed to decrease them by disuse. The changes which Jefferson hoped in this way to make in the constitution related both to foreign and to domestic matters. Considering the state governments to be the guardians of the liberties of the people, he thought the general government should exercise none Jefferson's theory of the proper work of the federal government. of the powers conferred upon it by the constitution when such exercise tended to increase its powers at the expense of those of the states. He did indeed use language which implied that he thought the constitution had intended to confine the general government to foreign affairs, leaving all matters of domestic concern to the states. In an important letter to Gideon Granger in August, 1800, he said: "The true theory of our constitution is surely the wisest and best-that the states are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign nations. Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our general government may be reduced to a very simple organization and a very inexpensive one-a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants."* Twenty-one years later, in 1821, he repeated the same idea, although in not quite so unqualified a form: "The people to whom all authority belongs have divided the powers of government into two distinct departments, the leading characters of which are foreign and domestic; Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Ford's Edition), VII., 421, and they have appointed for each a distinct set of functionaries. These they have made co-ordinate, checking and balancing each other, like the three cardinal departments in the individual states-each equally supreme as to the powers delegated to itself, and neither authorized ultimately to decide what belongs to itself or to its copartner in government; as independent, in fact, as different nations. A spirit of forbearance and compromise, therefore, and not of encroachment and usurpation, is the healing balm of such a constitution."* Three years later, in 1824, he repeated the same opinion: "The federal is in truth our foreign government, which department alone is taken from the sovereignty of the separate states." † But Jefferson was not in the habit of expressing himself with scientific accuracy, and the evidence makes it clear that he did not mean what an accurate writer would have meant by such language. For he stated the same opinion in 1787 in speaking of the sort of constitution he thought the country ought to have, although in the same letter he expressed his disapproval of the constitution. "My own general idea was," he wrote in 1787, "that the states should severally preserve their sovereignty in whatever concerns themselves alone, and that whatever may concern another state or any foreign nation should be made a part of the federal sovereignty." * Jefferson's Works (Washington's Edition), VII., 213, 214. † Ibid., 336. It is clear, therefore, that in saying that the general government was the foreign, and the state governments were the domestic, branch of our governmental system, he was not expounding what he thought the framers of the constitution intended them to be, but what he thought they ought to be and what, by precedent and construction, they could be made to be. His opinion of the excise in 1793 is a further confirmation of this conclusion. He said that the excise tax was an infernal one; that the first error was to admit it by the constitution; the second, to act on that admission. Congress was not justified in laying an excise by the fact that it had the power. For the imposition of such a tax, he believed, tended to increase the powers of the general government at the expense of those of the states. From the quotations already made, in connection with a passage in his inaugural address, we are enabled to define the limit to which Jefferson thought the power of the national government should be restricted, whether or not the constitution gave it the right to exceed it. His theory was that, except to encourage commerce and agriculture and diffuse information (these exceptions were made in the inaugural address), the general government should undertake no domestic functions; these should be left to the states. With the above trifling exceptions, the whole function of the national government was confined to the management and control of our foreign affairs. "Let the eign con cerns." general government be reduced to foreign concerns," he had written to Granger. But what was his theory of foreign concerns? His private correspond- Jefferson's ence contains the answer to this question. theory of forIn a letter to Thomas Paine written March 18, 1801, he said: "Determined as we are to avoid, if possible, wasting the energies of our people in war and destruction, we shall avoid implicating ourselves with the powers of Europe even in support of principles which we mean to pursue. We believe we can enforce these principles as to ourselves by peaceable means, now that we are likely to have our public counsels detached from foreign views."* How were we to enforce our principles by peaceable means? A letter to a Dr. Logan written three days later contains the answer: "Our commerce is so valuable to them that they will be glad to purchase it when the only price we ask is to do us justice. I believe we have in our hands the means of peaceable coercion; and that the moment they see our government so united as that we can make use of it, they will, for their own interest, be disposed to do us justice." † Are we then to take these statements as indicative of Jefferson's whole theory of "foreign concerns"? His answers to this question are conflicting. Sometimes he talks as though peaceable coercion could be exercised on * Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Ford), VIII., 18. + Ibid., 23, |