The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
BONAPARTE, NAPOLEON / ASSESSMENT OF
I have just finished reading O'Meara's Bonaparte. It places him in a
higher scale of understanding than I had allotted him. I had thought
him the greatest of all military captains, but an indifferent
statesman, and misled by unworthy passions. The flashes, however,
which escaped from him in these conversations with O'Meara, prove a
mind of great expansion, although not of distinct development and
reasoning. He seizes results with rapidity and penetration, but never
explains logically the process of reasoning by which he arrives at
them. This book, too, makes us forget his atrocities for a moment, in
commiseration of his sufferings. I will not say that the authorities
of the world, charged with the care of their country and people, had
not a right to confine him for life, as a lion or tiger, on the
principle of self-preservation. There was no safety to nations while
he was permitted to roam at large. But the putting him to death in
cold blood, by lingering tortures of mind, by vexations, insults and
deprivations, was a degree of inhumanity to which the poisonings and
assassinations of the school of Borgia, and the den of Marat never
attained. The book proves, also, that nature had denied him the moral
sense, the first excellence of well-organized man. If he could
seriously and repeatedly affirm that he had raised himself to power
without ever having committed a crime, it proves that he wanted
totally the sense of right and wrong. If he could consider the
millions of human lives which he had destroyed, or caused to be
destroyed, the desolations of countries by plunderings, burnings, and
famine, the dethronements of lawful rulers of the world without the
consent of their constituents, to place his brothers and sisters on
their thrones, the cutting up of established societies of men and
jumbling them discordantly together again at his caprice, the
demolition of the fairest hopes of mankind for the recovery of their
rights and amelioration of their condition, and all the numberless
train of his other enormities; the man, I say, who could consider all
these as no crimes, must have been a moral monster, against whom every
hand should have been lifted to slay him.
to John Adams, 25 February 1823
|