nedict Arnold was able to
ascend the James River to Richmond, dispersing the Legislature and
burning the town. Tarleton afterward penetrated as far as
Charlottesville--Jefferson and the Legislature narrowly escaping
capture. Jefferson felt keenly the situation, and at the expiration of
his term retired to Monticello, humiliated and overwhelmed by unjust
criticism and undeserved censure. His gloom and melancholy were made
still more sad at this period, by the death of his wife, whom he had
married in 1772. But the privilege of neither obscurity nor rest was
reserved for him. The winter session of 1783 found him again in the
General Congress abolishing the English system of coinage and providing
for the government of the Northwestern territory, which had been ceded
to the confederation by Virginia.

In 1784 he was named as a minister plenipotentiary to Europe at large,
to assist Adams and Franklin in the negotiation of commercial treaties.
In 1785 he became minister to France in the place of Dr. Franklin, who
had resigned; and in March, 1790, in pursuance of a previous acceptance,
he entered the Cabinet of President Washington as Secretary of State.

Already the germs of two great conflicting parties had been sown. The
debates in the convention that framed the Constitution, and still more
manifestly the controversies in the State Conventions called to consider
the adoption of the instrument, had developed the differences, which, in
theory at least, have distinguished political parties ever since. The
colonies had been chiefly settled by Englishmen. No people are more
tenacious than they of preconceived opinions, or more averse to the
abandonment of ancient forms and customs. A strong attachment to the
institutions of England still remained with the people of the colonies.
With many of them the whole object of the revolution was political
separation from the mother country. They heartily desired independence
and freedom, and they had willingly risked their lives to secure them.
But the freedom they sought was the right, if they chose, to establish
and perpetuate those cherished institutions of the mother-country for
themselves. They would enjoy them still, and make them a lasting
inheritance for their posterity, but free from the power and dominion of
Europe.

Such persons had revolted not against England, but against England's
wrongful acts; not against the authority of law, but against the
perversion of law. To them t