he part he had taken in the nurture of
the young republic in the feeble days of its infancy. Of his own
administration and the events of that time he had much less to say than
of the true interpretation of the Constitution, of the intent of its
framers, and the circumstances that influenced their deliberations. His
voluminous correspondence shows the bent of his mind as a legislator and
a student of fundamental law; and on that, rather than on his ability
and success as the chief magistrate of the nation, rests his true fame.

These twenty years, though passed in retirement, were not years of
leisure. "I have rarely," he wrote in 1827, "during the period of my
public life, found my time less at my disposal than since I took my
leave of it; nor have I the consolation of finding, that as my powers of
application necessarily decline, the demands on them proportionally
decrease." Much as he wrote upon questions of an earlier period, there
were no topics of the current time that did not arouse his interest.
Upon the subject of slavery he thought much and wrote much and always
earnestly and humanely. How to get rid of it was a problem which he
never solved to his own satisfaction. Though it was one he always
longed to see through, it never occurred to him that the way to abolish
slavery was--to abolish it. How kind he was as a master, Paul Jennings
bears witness. "I never," he says, "saw him in a passion, and never knew
him to strike a slave, though he had over a hundred; neither would he
allow an overseer to do it." He rebuked those who were in fault; but,
adds Jennings, he would "never mortify them by doing it before others."
It will be remembered that on the first occasion of his being a
candidate for public office he refused to follow the universal Virginian
habit of "treating" the electors. To the principle which governed him
then he adhered through life, and his letters show the warm interest he
always took in every phase of the temperance movement. "I don't think he
drank a quart of brandy in his whole life," says Jennings. A single
glass of wine was all he ever took at dinner, and this he diluted with
water, when, says the same witness, "he had hard drinkers at his table
who had put away his choice madeira pretty freely." This will go for
something, considering the times, with even the most zealous of the
modern supporters of that cause; but they must be quite satisfied to
know that "for the last fifteen years of his l