THE PAPERS OF

JAMES P. McCLURE general editor

THE PAPERS OF Thomas Jefferson Volume 43 11 March to 30 June 1804

JAMES P. McCLURE, EDITOR elaine weber pascu, senior associate editor tom downey, martha j. king, and w. bland whitley, associate editors andrew j. b. fagal and merry ellen scofield, assistant editors linny schenck, editorial associate linda monaco, editorial assistant john e. little, research associate

princeton and oxford princeton university press

2017 Copyright © 2017 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In The United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

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ISBN 978-0-691-17772-4

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ADOLPH S. OCHS publisher of the new york times

1896-1935 who by the example of a responsible press enlarged and fortified the jeffersonian concept of a free press ADVISORY COMMITTEE

DAVID A. BELL JAN ELLEN LEWIS LESLIE GREENE BOWMAN J. JEFFERSON LOONEY ANDREW BURSTEIN JAMES M. McPHERSON PETER J. DOUGHERTY ROBERT C. RITCHIE JAMES A. DUN SARAH RIVETT CHRISTOPHER L. EISGRUBER DANIEL T. RODGERS ANNETTE GORDON-REED JACK ROSENTHAL HENDRIK HARTOG HERBERT E. SLOAN RONALD HOFFMAN ALAN TAYLOR WILLIAM C. JORDAN SEAN WILENTZ STANLEY N. KATZ GORDON S. WOOD THOMAS H. KEAN

CONSULTANTS

FRANÇOIS P. RIGOLOT and CAROL RIGOLOT, Consultants in French SIMONE MARCHESI, Consultant in Italian

SUPPORTERS This edition was made possible by an initial grant of $200,000 from the New York Times Company to Princeton University. Contributions from many foundations and individuals have sustained the endeavor since then. For their unprecedented generous support, we are also indebted to the Princeton Univer- sity History Department and Christopher L. Eisgruber, president of the uni- versity. The Packard Humanities Institute (through Founding Fathers Papers, Inc.), the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission have been crucial to progress on the edi- tion. Support has come from the Florence Gould Foundation, the National Trust for the Humanities and the Cinco Hermanos Fund, the New York Times Company Foundation, the Dyson Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Founda- tion, and the Pew Charitable Trusts. Other contributors have been the Ford Foundation, the Lyn and Norman Lear Foundation, the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, the Charlotte Palmer Phillips Foundation, the L. J. Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation, the John Ben Snow Memorial Trust, Time, Inc., Robert C. Baron, B. Batmanghelidj, David K. E. Bruce, and James Russell Wiggins. Benefactions from a greatly expanded roster of dedicated individuals have underwritten the volumes: Sara and James Adler, Helen and Peter Bing, Diane and John Cooke, Judy and Carl Ferenbach III, Mary-Love and William Harman, Frederick P. and Mary Buford Hitz, Governor Thomas H. Kean, Ruth and Sidney Lapidus, Lisa and Willem Mesdag, Tim and Lisa Robertson, Ann and Andrew C. Rose, Sara Lee and Axel Schupf, the Sulzberger family through the Hillandale Foundation, Richard W. Thaler, Tad and Sue Thompson, the Wendt Family Charitable Foundation, and Susan and John O. Wynne. For their vision and extraordinary efforts to provide for this edition, we owe special thanks to John S. Dyson, Governor Kean, H. L. Lenfest and the Lenfest Foundation, Rebecca Rimel, and Jack Rosenthal. FOREWORD

efferson suffered a great loss in the spring of 1804. His Jdaughter Mary Jefferson Eppes, the younger of the two surviv- ing daughters from his marriage to Martha Wayles Jefferson, was 25 years old, the mother of a young son, and had given birth in mid- February to a baby girl. In March, a problem in Mary’s breast de- veloped into a general infection of her system. Her husband, Eppes, describing her as “a mere walking shadow,” moved her to Monticello, but her father, detained in until Con- gress adjourned, was not able to reach home until 4 April. A few days later he reported to : “I found my daughter Eppes at Monticello, whither she had been brought on a litter by hand; so weak as barely to be able to stand, her stomach so disordered as to reject almost every thing she took into it, a constant small fever, & an imposthume rising in her breast.” Mary, known in the family as Maria or Polly, did not improve, and she died on the morning of 17 April. “How the President will get over this blow I cannot pronounce,” his other son-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph, confided to Caesar A. Rodney (see Jefferson’s letter to Madison at 17 April). Jefferson informed Madison that “a desire to see my family in a state of more composure before we separate” would prevent him from returning to Washington right away. He had already begun to seek means by which members of the cabinet, individually and as a group, could decide some matters without him. But he did not stay idle. He wrote a legal document known as a declaration of trust to establish his relationship with Craven Peyton, who acted as his agent in ac- quiring property in and around the town of Milton from the heirs of Bennett Henderson. He collected information relating to the transac- tions with the Hendersons and composed a bill in chancery, an exten- sive claim to be presented in equity court. That filing was in Peyton’s name, with no mention of Jefferson. Jefferson also acted under cover when he wrote a piece in the guise of “A Bystander” for the Virginia Argus in response to an attack in the Washington Federalist about a contention over a parcel of land. For both the “Bystander” essay and the bill in chancery, Jefferson went to considerable effort to present his position without revealing his involvement. He returned to Washington in mid-May. As he resumed his atten- tion to public affairs, he hoped, as he had earlier, for concurrence of opinion among the officers of government. That alignment was not always to be had. With Madison and Albert Gallatin, he worked to  vii  FOREWORD resolve the expense claims of Edward Stevens, who during ’s presidency had gone to Saint-Domingue as consul. In the chaotic state of affairs on the island, Stevens had made expenditures for which there was no prior authorization. “I think we had better endeavor at some such modification of the principle as, uniting prac- ticability with legal authority and constitutional safety, may enable us to act in union,” Jefferson wrote to Gallatin in April. The president found, however, that his advisers were not in agreement on the subject. Gallatin held to a restrictive interpretation, while Madison thought that the circumstances in which Stevens had found himself called for some flexibility. Each wrote a detailed explanation, but nei- ther could convince the other to change his mind. “I have always been in hopes that you and he would by discussion come to a common opinion,” Jefferson wrote to Gallatin on 9 June. “I suppose however this has not taken place: and the views of our constitution in prefer- ring a single Executive to a plurality having been to prevent the effect of divided opinions, and to ensure an unity of purpose and action, I presume I must decide between the opinions, however reluctantly.” Gallatin responded by stating that although he still held to his posi- tion, he would not stand in the way. Jefferson in turn accepted some of Gallatin’s points in his decision of the case, along with some of Madison’s. After Henry Dearborn became involved in countering slanders from New England against Dolley Madison and her sisters, he felt that he should offer to leave the cabinet if the president thought that his ac- tions had caused the administration any embarrassment. Jefferson assured him that their “mutual satisfaction of reciprocal confidence” was unchanged. As Jefferson and Benjamin Henry Latrobe worked out architectural and decorative details of the Capitol, Latrobe and William Thornton, the building’s original designer, continued their feuding. Jefferson thought that the Republicans in pre- sented “a jumble of subdivision.” From Baltimore he received an anonymous epistle that, in fewer than 120 words, called him a “Son of a Bitch” three times and made reference to the color of his hair four times. (Jefferson dryly labeled the letter, which is printed below at 13 June, “scurrilities.”) It was a contentious world also beyond the nation’s borders. James Monroe, the American minister to Great Britain, wrote from London on 15 March that the British “view the rapid advanc’ment we have made & are making with no very favorable eye. They seem to con- sider our prosperity not simply as a reproach to them, but as impair- ing or detracting from theirs.” Jefferson believed that Britain was “a  viii  FOREWORD living example that no nation, however powerful, any more than an individual, can be unjust with impunity.” It was important to him that other nations take the United States seriously. When he learned that France, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire might intervene on behalf of the captured officers and crew of the frigate Philadelphia in Tripoli, he did not welcome the aid. Rather, he lamented that Euro- pean diplomacy might preempt what he had planned to accomplish by a show of force to validate the course taken by the United States when other nations ceased their armed resistance to Tripoli’s de- mands. As he declared to Madison, “we were free to beg or to fight. we chose the latter.” In May, he received the satisfying news that earlier in the year an American raiding party under Lieutenant Ste- phen Decatur, Jr., had managed to destroy the Philadelphia (although the ship’s company were still prisoners). Fulfilling a longstanding request by Robert R. Livingston to step down as minister to France, Jefferson appointed Livingston’s brother-in-law, John Armstrong, to the post. He would not learn until summer that France had trans- formed itself into an empire with Napoleon as its ruler. From St. Louis in May, William Clark and Meriwether Lewis sent a first load of specimens: maps, minerals, a live horned lizard, a hair- ball from the stomach of a bison. Yet Jefferson, with a limited appro- priation from Congress, had to postpone his plans for multiple new expeditions into the trans-Mississippi west. He must settle, at least in the short run, for just one probe to explore the Arkansas and Red Rivers. But he had the great boon of a visit to Washington by the Prussian natural scientist and geographer Alexander von Humboldt, who was on his way back to Europe after extended travels in Spanish America. Humboldt, calling Jefferson a philosopher statesman (“un Magistrat philosophe”) whom he had admired for as long as he could remember, shared the president’s eagerness to talk and exchange in- formation. Jefferson was particularly interested in learning what Hum- boldt knew about the Spanish provinces that adjoined Louisiana. Although perfect political harmony may have been lacking, John Tyler assured Jefferson on 10 June that “you have brought peace to our Country and comfort to our Souls.” Jefferson wrote a long reply on the 28th, affirming that “amidst the direct falsehoods, the mis- representations of truth, the calumnies & the insults resorted to by a faction to mislead the public mind, & to overwhelm those intrusted with its interests, our support is to be found in the approving voice of our conscience and country, in the testimony of our fellow citizens that their confidence is not shaken by these artifices.” He avowed that “no experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying,  ix  FOREWORD & which we trust will end in establishing the fact that man may be governed by reason and truth.” Tyler was not the only American who thought that the president was a source of comfort to the citizenry. In May, after news of the burning of the Philadelphia reached the United States, Jefferson received a memorial from Charles Biddle, James Gamble, and John Douglass, prominent Philadelphians whose sons were among the mariners still held captive in Tripoli. It was “a re- quest dictated by the strongest feelings of paternal Concern,” and he was able to assure them that the government was doing everything possible to get the captives back. Writing from New York City, Mar- garet Mitchell, a “bereaved & afflicted Mother,” addressed him as “Chief Magistrate of my Country,” as a philosopher, as “a Man & a Gentleman,” and “more powerfully, than all—as a Parent!” She re- counted how her teenage son had been abducted in England, enrolled in the British army, and shipped off for service in India. Jefferson instructed the State Department to investigate. John Freeman, an enslaved man hired from his Maryland owner to work on the President’s House staff, had a unique and special request of Jefferson in April. Having accompanied Jefferson to Monticello, Freeman felt the need in the immediate aftermath of Mary Jefferson Eppes’s death to ask the grieving president what would become of Melinda Colbert, one of Mary’s slaves. Freeman and Colbert intended to marry, and Freeman was compelled to take the matter up with Jef- ferson. His letter (at 18 April) is a rare example of a letter from an enslaved person to Jefferson. The loss of Mary brought condolences from old friends, including John Page and Wilson Cary Nicholas. And more—, after some hesitation, wrote on 20 May. She explained that “reasons of various kinds withheld my pen, untill the powerfull feelings of my heart, have burst through the restraint.” She and her husband had had no contact with Jefferson for some time; but she had formed a bond with Mary in 1787. The Adamses hosted her in London for a few weeks that year when, as a girl of nine, she made the journey from Virginia in the company of to join her father and sister in France. In reply, Jefferson wrote that Mary’s regard for Abi- gail Adams had been equally strong: “in giving you this assurance I perform a sacred duty for her.” He was so impressed by the letter from Quincy that he forwarded it to Mary’s husband and hoped that his daughter Martha might see it also. He thought that the ice between him and the Adamses was thawing. Yet although they exchanged a few more letters in 1804, she did not care for his explanations of their political differences. “I will not Sir,” she would write in October,  x  FOREWORD “any further intrude upon your time.” True reconciliation would have to wait. Mary’s death wrought a tremendous change in his life. As he wrote to Nicholas on 3 May, the loss “is the more felt as it leaves, whatever of comfort remains, hanging on the slender thread of a single life.” The representation of frail human life hanging suspended by a thread came from the Roman poet Ovid (Epistulae ex Ponto, 4.3.35). Jeffer- son employed the allegory again in a letter to Page on 25 June: “my evening prospects now hang on the slender thread of a single life.” That thread was his daughter Martha, the remaining survivor of the family he had had with his wife. He had surely not forgotten his grand- children, who included Mary’s son and infant daughter, but he did not put them in the same category as he did his daughters. As Annette Gordon-Reed has noted, Jefferson’s allusion overlooked other threads. The Washington Federalist commentary to which he replied as “A Bystander” contained a reference to the influence of a “mahogany-colored Jezebel.” In January 1805, Sally Hemings gave birth to a son she named, at Dolley Madison’s request, after James Madison. Sixty-eight years later in a long recollection for an Ohio newspaper, identified Thomas Jefferson as his fa- ther and the father of his older brother and sister, Beverley Hemings and Harriet Hemings. They were about six years old and three years old, respectively, at the time of Mary’s death. They were, by a pre- ponderance of evidence if not by their father’s acknowledgment, his children, as Martha Randolph and Mary Eppes were; but they, like their mother, make no appearance in Jefferson’s papers in the period spanned by this volume (Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family [New York, 2008], 591-2; Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy [Charlottesville, 1997], 245-8). From Connecticut on 26 March, in a letter that Jefferson received a day before his daughter’s death, a former slave and Revolutionary War veteran named Thomas Harris described his wish to give a “humble tribute of respect” to the president as the “defender of free- dom and sheild of the oppressed.” Harris paid that tribute by naming his twin sons—“black twin boys,” he emphasized—Thomas and Jef- ferson. “The consideration that my boys, (should I be able to support them in existance) are under your Excellency’s government, a gov- ernment which at once secures to all, whithe rich or poor, white or black, thier equal rights and priviliges, is comforting and encourag- ing,” Harris declared. “I cannot find words to express the pleasure I feel, that under your Excellency’s government and the prevalence of  xi  FOREWORD your principles, my boys are safe from slavery, if not from cold and hunger.”

With this volume we say farewell to three long-serving and ex- traordinarily accomplished members of the editorial team. For two decades Linda Monaco played an essential role in getting our work to the printed page. She had to learn a succession of technical systems, most notably PageWright and later XML, and mastered in each of those environments the requirements for formatting complex and id- iosyncratic documents for publication. Along with her expertise, she has shared with us her boundless goodwill. John Little joined us after his retirement from a career as an associ- ate editor with the Papers of Woodrow Wilson. Superbly educated at Harvard and Princeton, he has combined meticulous attention to de- tail with a keenly intelligent historian’s assessment of sources, fact, and explanation. We are privileged to have had him as our colleague for 16 volumes and grateful that he chose to spend his second career with us. Elaine Weber Pascu came to this project as, among other accom- plishments, an expert on the papers of Albert Gallatin. Like Gallatin, she has taken on a wide range of subjects, and like Gallatin, she has done extraordinary work on all of them. She has been a leading mem- ber of the editorial team from the beginning of her service with this project, approaching big issues of editorial policy and minute prob- lems of detail with equal energy and insight. It is fitting that she was the 2014 recipient of the Lyman H. Butterfield Award of the Associa- tion for Documentary Editing. She is incomparable, and it has been our pleasure and honor to work with her, John, and Linda.

 xii  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

any individuals have given the Editors the benefit of their aid in Mthe preparation of this volume, and we offer them our thanks. At Princeton, we are grateful to William C. Jordan, Judith Hanson, and Debora Macy in the Department of History; in the libraries, Karin A. Trainer, university librarian emeritus, and Elizabeth Z. Bennett, Colleen M. Burlingham, Maria DiFalco-Orofino, Tracy Mincher Hall, Stephen Ferguson, Eugene Kaganovich, Peggy Kehrer, Daniel J. Linke, Deborah T. Paparone, AnnaLee Pauls, Ben Primer, and Don C. Skemer; in the Office of the Dean of the Faculty, Assistant Dean Lisa M. Scalice; and for administrative and other support from vari- ous offices, Mary Ferlise, Ann Halliday, Rand Mirante, Thomas Rod- denbery, Steven Semenuk, Gary Tesler, Janet Upperco, and Barbara Zlotnik. We owe much to the skill of Gretchen Oberfranc in reading each volume. For assistance with language translations, we thank Pro- fessor Jordan, Valeria Escauriaza-Lopez Fadul, and Neil Ann Stuckey Levine. We are indebted to Lucia C. Stanton for sharing her wisdom and knowledge. Those who helped us use manuscript collections, answered research queries, or advised in other ways are Julie Miller, Jeffrey Flannery, and their colleagues in the Manuscript Division of the ; Peter Drummey, Anna Clutterbuck-Cook, Elaine Heavey, and Nancy Heywood of the Massachusetts Historical Society; Anna Berkes and Endrina Tay of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello; Molly Kodner of the Missouri History Mu- seum Library and Research Center; Paige Newman of the Virginia Historical Society; Nicole Bouché, Christina Deane, Regina Rush, and Penny White at the Library; Beatriz Hardy and Susan A. Riggs of Swem Library at the College of William and Mary; John Deal and Brent Tarter, Library of Virginia; Patrick Spero, librarian and director, the American Philosophical Society; Carolyn Vega and Kaitlyn Krieg of the Morgan Library & Museum; Holly Snyder of the John Hay Library at Brown University; the staff of the Huntington Library; the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the New-York Historical Society; the American Anti- quarian Society; Charles M. Harris of the Papers of William Thorn- ton; and our friends and fellow editors at the Thomas Jefferson Re- tirement Series at Monticello, the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Papers of James Madison and the Papers of George Washington at the University of Virginia, the James Mon- roe Papers at the University of Mary Washington, and the Papers of  xiii  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Benjamin Franklin at Yale University. For assistance with illustra- tions, we are indebted to Alfred L. Bush and Martha A. Sandweiss of Princeton and to Jaime Bourassa at the Missouri History Museum; Susannah Carroll of the Franklin Institute; Debra Hashim, Smithso- nian Institution; Connie S. Griffith Houchins at the Andalusia Foun- dation; Marilyn Ibach, Library of Congress; James Stimpert, Sheri- dan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University; and Emily B. Snedden Yates at the Mütter Museum, College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Jason Bush, Paul Hayslett, and Helen Langone of IDM provided essential technical support. We are grateful to have the continuing benefit of the advice of Kathleen Williams and Darrell Meadows of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and Lydia Medici of the Division of Research Programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Our collaborative partners at Princeton University Press have our deepest admiration and appreciation, especially Peter J. Dougherty, director, and Lauren Lepow, senior editor. We also appreciate the contributions of Carmina Alvarez-Gaffin, Leslie Flis, Adam Fortgang, Meghan Kanabay, Dimitri Karetnikov, Neil Litt, Erin Suydam, and Brigitta van Rheinberg. At the University of Virginia Press, we are indebted to Mark Saunders, director, and David Sewell, manager of digital initiatives. We mourn the loss of Joyce Appleby, who played an important role as a member of the edition’s Advisory Committee for Volumes 24 through 42. Those volumes spanned some of the most interesting years of Jefferson’s career, from 1792 into 1804. Professor Appleby’s contribution was especially valuable as we considered how best to han- dle the papers of Jefferson’s presidency. She was an esteemed scholar and a great friend to this edition.

 xiv 