atesmen or hackmen.

Now, in Jefferson's letter to Dr. Gordon,--written in 1788,--he is greatly
stirred by his own recital of the shameful ravages on his property by the
British army. Just at the moment when his indignation was at the hottest,
there shot out of his heart, and off his pen, one of these side-thoughts,
one of these fragments of the man's ground-idea, which, at such moments,
truth-seekers always watch for. Jefferson says of Cornwallis,--

"He destroyed all my growing crops of corn and tobacco; he burned
all my barns containing the same articles of the last year, having
first taken what corn he wanted; he used, as was to be expected,
all my stock of cattle, sheep, and hogs, for the sustenance of his
army, and carried off all the horses capable of service,--of those
too young for service he cut the throats; and he burned all the
fences in the plantation, so as to make it an absolute waste. _He
carried off also about thirty slaves. Had this been to give them
their freedom, he would have done right_."

But we turn to a seeming discrepancy between these thousand earnest
declarations of Jefferson the private citizen, and the cold, formal tone
of Jefferson the Secretary of State. In this high office he reclaims
slaves from the Spanish power in Florida, and demands compensation for
slaves carried off by the British at the evacuation of New York. For a
moment that transition from personal warmth to diplomatic coolness is as
the Russian plunge from steam-bath to snow-heap.

Yet, if truth-seekers do not stop to moan, they may easily find a complete
explanation. As private citizen, in a State, dealing with his home
Government, Jefferson had the right to move heaven and earth against
slavery, and bravely he did it; but, as public servant of the nation,
dealing with foreign Governments, his rights and duties were different,
and his tone must be different. As a private person, writing for man as
man, Jefferson forgot readily enough all differences of nation. He wrote
as readily and fully of the hideousness of slavery to Meusnier and
Warville in France, or to Price and Priestley in England, as to any of his
neighbors; but, as public servant of the nation, writing to Hammond or
Viar, representatives of foreign powers, he made no apology for our
miseries. England might be ready enough to act the part of Dives, but
Jefferson was not the statesman to put America in the attitude of
Lazarus