Letters of Thomas Jefferson

1817 - 1818

“Horizontal Ploughing”

DEAR SIR, -- I am indebted to you for your favor of Apr. 22, and for the copy of the Agricultural magazine it covered, which is indeed a very useful work.  While I was an amateur in Agricultural science (for practical knolege my course of life never permitted me) I was very partial to the drilled husbandry of Tull, and thought still better of it when reformed by Young to 12 rows.  But I had not time to try it while young, and now grown old I have not the requisite activity either of body or mind.

With respect to field culture of vegetables for cattle, instead of the carrot and potato recommended by yourself and the magazine, & the best of others, we find the Jerusalem artichoke best for winter, & the Succory for Summer use.  This last was brought over from France to England by Arthur Young, as you will see in his travels thro’ France, & some of the seed sent by him to Genl. Washington, who spared me a part of it.  It is as productive as the Lucerne, without its laborious culture, & indeed without any culture except the keeping it clean the first year.  The Jerusalem artichoke far exceeds the potato in produce, and remains in the ground thro’ the winter to be dug as wanted.  A method of ploughing over hill sides horizontally, introduced into the most hilly part of our country by Colo. T. M. Randolph, my son in law, may be worth mentioning to you. He has practised it a dozen or 15 years, and it’s advantages were so immediately observed that it has already become very general, and has entirely changed and renovated the face of our country.  Every rain, before that, while it gave a temporary refreshment, did permanent evil by carrying off our soil: and fields were no sooner cleared than wasted.  At present we may say that we lose none of our soil, the rain not absorbed in the moment of it’s fall being retained in the hollows between the beds until it can be absorbed.  Our practice is when we first enter on this process, with a rafter level of 10 f. span, to lay off guide lines conducted horizontally around the hill or valley from one end to the other of the field, and about 30 yards apart.  The steps of the level on the ground are marked by a stroke of a hoe, and immediately followed by a plough to preserve the trace.  A man or a lad, with the level, and two small boys, the one with sticks, the other with the hoe, will do an acre of this in an hour, and when once done it is forever done.  We generally level a field the year it is put into Indian corn laying it into beds of 6 ft. wide, with a large water furrow between the beds, until all the fields have been once leveled.  The intermediate furrows are run by the eye of the ploughman governed by these guide lines, & occasion gores which are thrown into short beds.  As in ploughing very steep hill sides horizontally the common ploughman can scarcely throw the furrow uphill, Colo. Randolph has contrived a very simple alteration of the share, which throws the furrow down hill both going and coming.  It is as if two shares were welded together at their straight side, and at a right angle with each other.  This turns on it’s bar as on a pivot, so as to lay either share horizontal, when the other becoming verticle acts as a mould board.  This is done by the ploughman in an instant by a single motion of the hand, at the end of every furrow.  I enclose a bit of paper cut into the form of the double share, which being opened at the fold to a right angle, will give an idea of it’s general principle.  Horizontal and deep ploughing, with the use of plaister and clover, which are but beginning to be used here will, as we believe, restore this part of our country to it’s original fertility, which was exceeded by no upland in the state.  Believing that some of these things might be acceptable to you I have hazarded them as testimonials of my great esteem & respect.

“Era of Good Feelings”

Although, dear Sir, much retired from the world, and meddling little in its concerns, yet I think it almost a religious duty to salute at times my old friends, were it only to say and to know that “all’s well.”  Our hobby has been politics; but all here is so quiet, and with you so desperate, that little matter is furnished us for active attention.  With you too, it has long been forbidden ground, and therefore imprudent for a foreign friend to tread, in writing to you.  But although our speculations might be intrusive, our prayers cannot but be acceptable, and mine are sincerely offered for the well-being of France.  What government she can bear, depends not on the state of science, however exalted, in a select band of enlightened men, but on the condition of the general mind.  That, I am sure, is advanced and will advance; and the last change of government was fortunate, inasmuch as the new will be less obstructive to the effects of that advancement.  For I consider your foreign military oppressions as an ephemeral obstacle only.

Here all is quiet.  The British war has left us in debt; but that is a cheap price for the good it has done us.  The establishment of the necessary manufactures among ourselves, the proof that our government is solid, can stand the shock of war, and is superior even to civil schism, are precious facts for us; and of these the strongest proofs were furnished, when, with four eastern States tied to us, as dead to living bodies, all doubt was removed as to the achievements of the war, had it continued.  But its best effect has been the complete suppression of party.  The federalists who were truly American, and their great mass was so, have separated from their brethren who were mere Anglomen, and are received with cordiality into the republican ranks.  Even Connecticut, as a State, and the last one expected to yield its steady habits (which were essentially bigoted in politics as well as religion), has chosen a republican governor, and republican legislature. Massachusetts indeed still lags; because most deeply involved in the parricide crimes and treasons of the war.  But her gangrene is contracting, the sound flesh advancing on it, and all there will be well.  I mentioned Connecticut as the most hopeless of our States.  Little Delaware had escaped my attention.  That is essentially a Quaker State, the fragment of a religious sect which, there, in the other States, in England, are a homogeneous mass, acting with one mind, and that directed by the mother society in England.  Dispersed, as the Jews, they still form, as those do, one nation, foreign to the land they live in.  They are Protestant Jesuits, implicitly devoted to the will of their superior, and forgetting all duties to their country in the execution of the policy of their order.  When war is proposed with England, they have religious scruples; but when with France, these are laid by, and they become clamorous for it.  They are, however, silent, passive, and give no other trouble than of whipping them along.  Nor is the election of Monroe an inefficient circumstance in our felicities.  Four and twenty years, which he will accomplish, of administration in republican forms and principles, will so consecrate them in the eyes of the people as to secure them against the danger of change.  The evanition of party dissensions has harmonized intercourse, and sweetened society beyond imagination.  The war then has done us all this good, and the further one of assuring the world, that although attached to peace from a sense of its blessings, we will meet war when it is made necessary.

I wish I could give better hopes of our southern brethren.  The achievement of their independence of Spain is no longer a question.  But it is a very serious one, what will then become of them? Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government.  They will fall under military despotism, and become the murderous tools of the ambition of their respective Bonapartes; and whether this will be for their greater happiness, the rule of one only has taught you to judge.  No one, I hope, can doubt my wish to see them and all mankind exercising self-government, and capable of exercising it.  But the question is not what we wish, but what is practicable?  As their sincere friend and brother then, I do believe the best thing for them, would be for themselves to come to an accord with Spain, under the guarantee of France, Russia, Holland, and the United States, allowing to Spain a nominal supremacy, with authority only to keep the peace among them, leaving them otherwise all the powers of self-government, until their experience in them, their emancipation from their priests, and advancement in information, shall prepare them for complete independence.  I exclude England from this confederacy, because her selfish principles render her incapable of honorable patronage or disinterested co-operation; unless, indeed, what seems now probable, a revolution should restore to her an honest government, one which will permit the world to live in peace. Portugal, grasping at an extension of her dominion in the south, has lost her great northern province of Pernambuco, and I shall not wonder if Brazil should revolt in mass, and send their royal family back to Portugal.  Brazil is more populous, more wealthy, more energetic, and as wise as Portugal.  I have been insensibly led, my dear friend, while writing to you, to indulge in that line of sentiment in which we have been always associated, forgetting that these are matters not belonging to my time.  Not so with you, who have still many years to be a spectator of these events.  That these years may indeed be many and happy, is the sincere prayer of your affectionate friend.

“The Flatteries of Hope”

I thank you, dear Sir, for the copy of the interesting narrative of the Complet d’Arnold, which you have been so kind as to send me.  It throws light on that incident of history which we did not possess before.  An incident which merits to be known as a lesson to mankind, in all its details.  This mark of your attention recalls to my mind the earlier period of life at which I had the pleasure of your personal acquaintance, and renews the sentiments of high respect and esteem with which that acquaintance inspired me.  I had not failed to accompany your personal sufferings during the civil convulsions of your country, and had sincerely sympathized with them.  An awful period, indeed, has passed in Europe since our first acquaintance.  When I left France at the close of ’89, your revolution was, as I thought, under the direction of able and honest men.  But the madness of some of their successors, the vices of others, the malicious intrigues of an envious and corrupting neighbor, the tracasserie of the Directory, the usurpations, the havoc, and devastations of your Attila, and the equal usurpations, depredations and oppressions of your hypocritical deliverers, will form a mournful period in the history of man, a period of which the last chapter will not be seen in your day or mine, and one which I still fear is to be written in characters of blood.  Had Bonaparte reflected that such is the moral construction of the world, that no national crime passes unpunished in the long run, he would not now be in the cage of St. Helena; and were your present oppressors to reflect on the same truth, they would spare to their own countries the penalties on their present wrongs which will be inflicted on them on future times.  The seeds of hatred and revenge which they are now sowing with a large hand, will not fail to produce their fruits in time.  Like their brother robbers on the highway, they suppose the escape of the moment a final escape, and deem infamy and future risk countervailed by present gain.  Our lot has been happier.  When you witnessed our first struggles in the war of independence, you little calculated, more than we did, on the rapid growth and prosperity of this country; on the practical demonstration it was about to exhibit, of the happy truth that man is capable of self-government, and only rendered otherwise by the moral degradation designedly superinduced on him by the wicked acts of his tyrants.

I have much confidence that we shall proceed successfully for ages to come, and that, contrary to the principle of Montesquieu, it will be seen that the larger the extent of country, the more firm its republican structure, if founded, not on conquest, but in principles of compact and equality.  My hope of its duration is built much on the enlargement of the resources of life going hand in hand with the enlargement of territory, and the belief that men(are disposed to live honestly, if the means of doing so are open to them.  With the consolation of this belief in the future result of our labors, I have that of other prophets who foretell distant events, that I shall not live to see it falsified.  My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter than the gloom of despair.  I wish to yourself a long life of honors, health and happiness.

“Female Education”

DEAR SIR, -- Your letter of February 17th found me suffering under an attack of rheumatism, which has but now left me at sufficient ease to attend to the letters I have received.  A plan of female education has never been a subject of systematic contemplation with me.  It has occupied my attention so far only as the education of my own daughters occasionally required.  Considering that they would be placed in a country situation, where little aid could be obtained from abroad, I thought it essential to give them a solid education, which might enable them, when become mothers, to educate their own daughters, and even to direct the course for sons, should their fathers be lost, or incapable, or inattentive.  My surviving daughter accordingly, the mother of many daughters as well as sons, has made their education the object of her life, and being a better judge of the practical part than myself, it is with her aid and that of one of her eleves that I shall subjoin a catalogue of the books for such a course of reading as we have practiced.

A great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels, and the time lost in that reading which should be instructively employed.  When this poison infects the mind, it destroys its tone and revolts it against wholesome reading.  Reason and fact, plain and unadorned, are rejected.  Nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy, and nothing so bedecked comes amiss.  The result is a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the real businesses of life.  This mass of trash, however, is not without some distinction; some few modelling their narratives, although fictitious, on the incidents of real life, have been able to make them interesting and useful vehicles of sound morality.  Such, I think, are Marmontel’s new moral tales, but not his old ones, which are really immoral.  Such are the writings of Miss Edgeworth, and some of those of Madame Genlis.  For a like reason, too, much poetry should not be indulged.  Some is useful for forming style and taste.  Pope, Dryden, Thompson, Shakspeare, and of the French, Moliere, Racine, the Corneilles, may be read with pleasure and improvement.

The French language, become that of the general intercourse of nations, and from their extraordinary advances, now the depository of all science, is an indispensable part of education for both sexes.  In the subjoined catalogue, therefore, I have placed the books of both languages indifferently, according as the one or the other offers what is best.

The ornaments too, and the amusements of life, are entitled to their portion of attention.  These, for a female, are dancing, drawing, and music.  The first is a healthy exercise, elegant and very attractive for young people.  Every affectionate parent would be pleased to see his daughter qualified to participate with her companions, and without awkwardness at least, in the circles of festivity, of which she occasionally becomes a part.  It is a necessary accomplishment, therefore, although of short use, for the French rule is wise, that no lady dances after marriage.  This is founded in solid physical reasons, gestation and nursing leaving little time to a married lady when this exercise can be either safe or innocent.  Drawing is thought less of in this country than in Europe.  It is an innocent and engaging amusement, often useful, and a qualification not to be neglected in one who is to become a mother and an instructor.  Music is invaluable where a person has an ear.  Where they have not, it should not be attempted.  It furnishes a delightful recreation for the hours of respite from the cares of the day, and lasts us through life.  The taste of this country, too, calls for this accomplishment more strongly than for either of the others.

I need say nothing of household economy, in which the mothers of our country are generally skilled, and generally careful to instruct their daughters.  We all know its value, and that diligence and dexterity in all its processes are inestimable treasures.  The order and economy of a house are as honorable to the mistress as those of the farm to the master, and if either be neglected, ruin follows, and children destitute of the means of living.

This, Sir, is offered as a summary sketch on a subject on which I have not thought much.  It probably contains nothing but what has already occurred to yourself, and claims your acceptance on no other ground than as a testimony of my respect for your wishes, and of my great esteem and respect.

“The Classical Press”

You must have thought me very tardy in acknoleging the receipt of your letter of Jan. 13. and in returning my thanks, which I now do, for the very handsome copy of Cicero’s works from your press, which you have been so kind as to present me.  I waited first the receipt of that and the books accompanying it, but I happened at the time of their arrival to be reading the 5th book of Cicero’s Tusculans, which I followed by that of his Offices, and concluded to lay aside the variorum edition, and to use yours, after which I might write more understandingly on the subject.  Having been extremely disgusted with the Philadelphia and New York Delphin editions, some of which I had read, and altho executed with a good type on good paper, yet so full of errors of the press as not to be worth the paper they were printed on, I wished to see the state of the classical press with you.  Their editions had on an average about one error for every page.  I read therefore the portions of your’s above mentioned with a pretty sharp eye, and in something upwards of 200. pages I found the errors noted on the paper inclosed, being an average of one for every 13. pages.  This is a good advance on the presses of N.Y. and Philada., and gives hopes of rapid improvements.  The errors in the Variorum editions however are fewer than these, the Elzevirs still fewer: but the perfection of accuracy is to be found in the folio edition of Homer by the Foulis of Glasgow.  I have understood they offered 1000 guineas for the discovery of any error in it, even of an accent, and that the reward was never claimed.  I am glad to find you are thinking of printing Livy.  There should be no hesitation between that and Quinctilian.  This last is little wanting.  We have Blair’s and Adams’s books which give us the rhetoric of our own language and that of a foreign and a dead one will interest few readers.  But of Livy there is not, nor ever has been an edition meriting the name of an editio optima.  The Delphin edition might have been, but for it’s numerous errors of the press, and unmanageable size in 4to.  It’s notes are valuable, and it hasthe whole of Freinsheim’s supplement with the marginal references to his authorities.  Clerk’s edition is of a handy size, has the whole of Freinsheim, but without the references, which we often wish to turn to, and it is without notes.  The late Paris edition of La Malle has only the supplement of the 2d decad and no notes.  I possess these two last mentioned editions, but would gladly become a subscriber to such a one as I describe, that is to say, an 8vo edition with the Delphin notes and all Freinsheim’s supplements and references.  If correctly executed it would be the editio optima, be called for in Europe and do us honor there.  Since consigning my library to Congress I have supplied myself from Europe with most of the classics, and of the best editions, in which I have been much aided by Mr. Ticknor, your most learned and valuable countryman.

I make you my acknolegement for the sermon on the Unity of God, and am glad to see our countrymen looking that question in the face.  It must end in a return to primitive christianity, and the disbandment of the unintelligible Athanasian jargon of 3. being 1. and 1. being 3.  This sermon is one of the strongest pieces against it.  I observe you are about printing a work of Belsham’s on the same subject, for which I wish to be a subscriber, and inclose you a 5 D. bill, there being none of fractional denominations.  The surplus therefore may stand as I shall be calling for other things.  Accept the assurance of my great respect.