The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
PERSONAL CHARACTER / SLANDER AGAINST
Your favor of July the 19th has been received, and received with the
tribute of respect due to a person, who, unurged by motives of
personal friendship or acquaintance, and unaided by particular
information, will so far exercise his justice as to advert to the
proofs of approbation given a public character by his own State and by
the United States, and weigh them in the scale against the fatherless
calumnies he hears uttered against him. These public acts are known
even to those who know nothing of my private life, and surely are
better evidence to a mind disposed to truth, than slanders which no
man will affirm on his own knowledge, or ever saw one who would. From
the moment that a portion of my fellow citizens looked towards me with
a view to one of their highest offices, the floodgates of calumny have
been opened upon me; not where I am personally known, where their
slanders would be instantly judged and suppressed, from a general
sense of their falsehood; but in the remote parts of the union, where
the means of detection are not at hand, and the trouble of an inquiry
is greater than would suit the hearers to undertake. I know that I
might have filled the courts of the United States with actions for
these slanders, and have ruined perhaps many persons who are not
innocent. But this would be no equivalent to the loss of character. I
leave them, therefore, to the reproof of their own consciences. If
these do not condemn them, there will yet come a day when the false
witness will meet a judge who has not slept over his slanders. If the
Reverend Cotton Mather Smith of Shena believed this as firmly as I do,
he would surely never have affirmed that "I had obtained my
property by fraud and robbery; that in one instance, I had defrauded
and robbed a widow and fatherless children of an estate to which I was
executor, of ten thousand pounds sterling, by keeping the property and
paying them in money at the nominal rate, when it was worth no more
than forty for one; and that all this could be proved." Every
tittle of it is fable; there not having existed a single circumstance
of my life to which any part of it can hang. I never was executor but
in two instances, both of which having taken place about the beginning
of the Revolution, which withdrew me immediately from all private
pursuits, I never meddled in either executorship. In one of the cases
only, were there a widow and children. She was my sister. She retained
and managed the estate in her own hands, and no part of it was ever in
mine. In the other, I was a copartner, and only received on a division
the equal portion allotted me. To neither of these executorships,
therefore, could Mr. Smith refer. Again, my property is all
patrimonial, except about seven or eight hundred pounds' worth of
lands, purchased by myself and paid for, not to widows and orphans,
but to the very gentleman from whom I purchased. If Mr. Smith,
therefore, thinks the precepts of the gospel intended for those who
preach them as well as for others, he will doubtless some day feel the
duties of repentance, and of acknowledgment in such forms as to
correct the wrong he has done. Perhaps he will have to wait till the
passions of the moment have passed away. All this is left to his own
conscience.
to Uriah McGregory, 13 August 1800
|