Thomas Jefferson Essay Research Paper Jefferson was — страница 2

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off the foreign slave trade. But he succeeded in ridding the land system of feudal vestiges, such as entail and primogeniture, and he was the moving spirit in the disestablishment of the church. In 1779, with George Wythe and Edmund Pendleton, he drew a highly significant report on the revising of the laws. His most famous single bill is the Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom (adopted in 1786). His fundamental purposes were to destroy artificial privilege of every sort, to promote social mobility, and to make way for the natural aristocracy of talent and virtue, which should provide leadership for a free society. As governor from 1779 to 1781, Jefferson had little power, and he suffered inevitable discredit when the British invaders overran Virginia. An inquiry into his

conduct during his last year in office was voted by the legislature after his retirement in June 1781. He was fully vindicated by the next legislature, but these charges were afterward exaggerated by political enemies, and he was hounded by them to some extent throughout his national career. The most important immediate effect of his troubles was to create in his own mind a distaste for public life that persisted in acute form until the death of his wife on Sept. 6, 1782, which reconciled him to a return to office. He also acquired an aversion to controversy and censure from which he never wholly recovered. During this brief private interval (1781-1783) he began to compile his Notes on the State of Virginia, which was first published when he was in France (1785). This work was

described at the time by competent authority as “a most excellent natural history not merely of Virginia but of North America.” Undertaken in response to a series of queries by the secretary of the French legation, it was ostensibly an account of the resources, productions, government, and society of a single state. But it spanned a continent and contained reflections on religion, slavery, and the Indians. It afterward appeared in many editions and was the literary foundation of his deserved reputation as a scientist. In the Continental Congress (1783-1784), Jefferson’s most notable services were connected with the adoption of the decimal system of coinage, which later as secretary of state he tried vainly to extend to weights and measures, and with the Ordinance of 1784.

Though not adopted, the latter foreshadowed many features of the famous Ordinance of 1787, which established the Northwest Territory. Jefferson went so far as to advocate the prohibition of slavery in all the territories. Minister to France Jefferson’s stay in France (1784-1789), where he was first a commissioner to negotiate commercial treaties and then Benjamin Franklin’s successor as minister, was in many ways the richest period of his life. He gained genuine commercial concessions from the French, negotiated an important consular convention in 1788, and served the interests of his own weak government with diligence and skill. He was confirmed in his opinion that France was a natural friend of the United States, and Britain at this stage a natural rival, and thus his

foreign policy assumed the orientation it was to maintain until the eve of the Louisiana Purchase. The publication of his book on Virginia symbolized his unofficial service of information to the French. His services to his own countrymen were exemplified by the books, the seeds and plants, the statues and architectural models, and the scientific information that he sent home. His stay in Europe contributed greatly to that universality of spirit and diversity of achievement in which he was equaled by no other American statesman, except possibly Franklin. Toward the end of his mission he reported with scrupulous care the unfolding revolution in France. His personal part in it was slight, and such advice as he gave was moderate. Doubting the readiness of the people for

self-government of the American type, he now favored a limited monarchy for France, and he cautioned his liberal friends not to risk the loss of their gains by going too fast. Though always aware of the importance of French developments in the worldwide struggle for greater freedom and happiness, he tended to stress this more after he returned home and perceived the dangers of political reaction in his own country. Eventually he was repelled by the excesses of the French Revolution, and he thoroughly disapproved of it when it passed into an openly imperialistic phase under Napoleon. But insofar as it represented a revolt against despotism, he continued to believe that its spirit could never die. Because of his absence in Europe, Jefferson had no direct part in the framing or