lender thread of a single life. Perhaps
I may be destined to see even this last cord of parental affection broken.
The hope with which I have looked forward to the moment when, resigning
public cares to younger hands, I was to retire to that domestic comfort
from which the last great step is to be taken, is fearfully blighted."

XI

SECOND PRESIDENTIAL TERM

The purchase of Louisiana increased Jefferson's popularity, and in 1805,
at the age of sixty-two, he was elected to his second term as President by
an overwhelming majority. Even Massachusetts was carried by the
Republicans, and the total vote in the electoral college stood: 162 for
Jefferson and Clinton; 14 for C. C. Pinckney and Rufus King, the Federal
candidates.

This result was due in part to the fact that Jefferson had stolen the
thunder of the Federalists. His Louisiana purchase, though bitterly
opposed by the leading Federalists, who were blinded by their hatred of
the President, was far more consonant with Federal than with Republican
principles; and in his second inaugural address Jefferson went even
farther in the direction of a strong central government, for he said:
"Redemption once effected, the revenue thereby liberated may, by a just
repartition among the States, and a corresponding amendment of the
Constitution, be applied _in time of peace_ to rivers, canals, roads,
arts, manufactures, education, and other great objects within each State.
In time of war, ... aided by other measures reserved for that crisis, it
may meet within the year all the expenses of the year without encroaching
on the rights of future generations by burdening them with the debts of
the past."

This proposal flatly contradicted what the President had said in his first
inaugural address, and was in strange contrast with his criticism made
years before upon a similar Federal scheme of public improvement, that the
mines of Peru would not supply the moneys which would be wasted on this
object. In later years, after his permanent retirement to Monticello,
Jefferson seems to have reverted to his earlier views, and he condemned
the measures of John Quincy Adams for making public improvements with
national funds.

But the President was no longer to enjoy a smooth course. One domestic
affair gave him much annoyance, and our foreign relations were a continual
source of anxiety and mortification.

Aaron Burr