On the morning of March 4, 1801, Mr. Jefferson tied his horse to the fence and walked alone into the Capitol to take the oath of office as President. Mr. Madison was not present at that perfunctory ceremony, the death of his aged father detaining him at home. He soon after, however, assumed the duties of the station to which Mr. Jefferson had called him, and there he remained till he took the presidential office, in his turn, eight years afterward.

The new dynasty entered upon its course under happy circumstances. There was, of course, much to fear from the condition of affairs in Europe; for the United States must needs be in a perilous position so long as the struggle for supremacy continued between France and England, and that would be while Napoleon could command an army. But the danger of war with France was no longer imminent, since Mr. Adams had wisely re?stablished friendly relations, though many of the leading Federalists believed it was at the cost of ruin to his own party. English aggressions upon American commerce had for the moment ceased, as[243] fourteen years afterward they ceased altogether, when the provocation disappeared with the permanent establishment of peace in Europe. In the temporary lull of the tempest the sun shone out of a serene sky, and the land was blessed with quiet and prosperity. "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none," the President said in his inaugural address, were among "the essential principles of our government, and consequently those which ought to shape its administration." The condition of the country was in accord with the thought and may even have suggested it. "We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists," said Jefferson in his inaugural: it was meant, however, as an avowal of a tolerant belief in the patriotism of both parties, rather than, as has sometimes been supposed, an assertion that party lines, so clearly drawn in the election, were at length obliterated. But hardly a year had passed before this seemed to be almost literally true. One after another, States hitherto Federal, both at the North and at the South, went over in their state elections to the Republican or Democratic party; till, with the exception of Delaware, there was not a single Federal State outside of New England; and even in that stronghold one State, Rhode Island, had marched off with the majority. "Everywhere," wrote Madison in October, "the progress of the public sentiment mocks the cavils and clamors of the malignant adversaries of the administration."

[244]If it may not be asserted that this overthrow of the Federal rule was fortunate at that juncture,—as nothing is more idle in history than speculation upon what might have been,—it may at least be said that Jefferson's administration for his first four years was a happy one for his country and acceptable to his countrymen. None since Washington's has ever been so popular; and no other, except Lincoln's, has ever been so successful. Nor can it be said of it that it was a happy period because it is without a history; for it included acts of moment, accepted then with an approbation and enthusiasm which time has justified. Not less shallow is that view of his character and of those years of his administration, taken by many of his contemporaries, who neither loved nor respected him, and who attributed his success and his popularity to his good fortune. This was a favorite and easy way, among his political opponents, of explaining a disagreeable fact. Parton notes in his Life that C. C. Pinckney could only understand Jefferson's hold upon public confidence as "the infatuation of the people." John Quincy Adams said: "Fortune has taken a pleasure in making Jefferson's greatest weaknesses and follies issue more successfully than if he had been inspired with the profoundest wisdom." "When the people," said Gouverneur Morris, "have been long enough drunk, they will get sober; but while the frolic lasts, to reason with them is useless." There has been more than one occasion of late years, and[245] in more than one place, where this may be truly said of popular political enthusiasm; but it was not true of that which prevailed for the first four years of this century; and Mr. Adams's sarcasm can hardly fail to recall the fact that when Mr. Jefferson, in his second term, was really guilty of a great folly in adhering to a prolonged embargo, it was Mr. Adams who committed one of the few follies of his own life in abandoning his party to give his support to the President's blunder.

Though there were many changes in Mr. Jefferson's cabinet in the course of eight years, they were not the result of dissensions. Yet he was, perhaps, more an absolute President than any other man who has ever held that position. He sought and listened to counsel, no doubt; but taking it was another matter. He certainly did not take it if it did not suit him; and if it was not likely to suit him, he was in no hurry to ask for it. It was in his own fertile brain, not in the suggestions of others, that important measures had their birth. That trait in his character which phrenologists have named secretiveness largely governed his actions. It was natural for him to bring things about quietly and skillfully by setting others to do what he wanted done, without himself being seen, though sometimes there was no other motive than the mere gratification of secretiveness. He preferred often to suggest measures quietly to congressmen rather than to Congress, though the result in either case might be the same.[246] At other times, where the end to be attained was of great importance and he was absolutely sure only of himself, he boldly took the responsibility, as he did in the purchase of Louisiana, and in the suppression of the Monroe-Pinckney treaty with England in his second term. It is not surprising, therefore, that Madison's part, during the eight years of Jefferson's presidency, is found to be more a secondary one than is usual with a secretary of state, or than was usual with him. He was in perfect accord with his chief, who held always in the highest esteem his knowledge and judgment, and sought, no doubt, his sound and moderate advice when he thought he needed advice from anybody. But Madison's influence is less visible in Jefferson's administration than in Washington's, when he was in the opposition. Washington, where he doubted his own ability to decide a question and felt the need of enlightenment, was accustomed to call in Madison, though he did not always accept his friend's conclusions. It was rarely that Jefferson was troubled with any doubt of his own judgment in the discussion or decision of any question that might come before him.

The most important measure of his administration was peculiarly his own, and when once determined upon it was pushed to a conclusion with vigor and courage. Nobody doubts now, or has doubted since the abolition of slavery, that the purchase of Louisiana was an act of sound statesmanship. Jefferson did not foresee that the acqui[247]sition of that fertile territory would stimulate a domestic trade in slaves, as profitable to the slave-breeding as to the slave-consuming States; or that, as slavery increased and brought prosperity and power to a class, there would grow up an oligarchy, resting on ownership in negroes, which, within sixty years, would have to be uprooted at an enormous cost. But his aim was to secure the peaceful possession of the Mississippi territory on both its banks, as a permanent settlement of a question which, so long as it remained open, was a perpetual menace of war with one or another European power. That danger would always involve the possibility of the Appalachian range becoming the western boundary of the United States; in which case the valley of the Mississippi, and the vast region west of it, would fall into the power of an alien people. So far was plain to Mr. Jefferson; but the result of the rebellion of 1861 proves that he was wiser than he knew when he acquired the territory stretching to the Sabine and the foot of the Rocky Mountains for the occupation of a free people.

It is not necessary to repeat here the story of the purchase. The news of it reached Washington in Jul............