ow
individuals among them as good patriots as we have.

I thank you for the kind wishes and sentiments towards myself, expressed
in your letter, and sincerely wish to yourself the blessings of health
and happiness.

Th: Jefferson.

LETTER LXXXVIII.--TO GENERAL KOSCIUSKO, February 26, 1810

TO GENERAL KOSCIUSKO.

Monticello, February 26, 1810.

My Dear General and Friend,

I have rarely written to you; never but by safe conveyances; and
avoiding every thing political, lest coming from one in the station I
then held, it might be imputed injuriously to our country, or perhaps
even excite jealousy of you. Hence my letters were necessarily dry.
Retired now from public concerns, totally unconnected with them, and
avoiding all curiosity about what is done or intended, what I say is
from myself only, the workings of my own mind, imputable to nobody else.

The anxieties which I know you have felt, on seeing exposed to the
justlings of a warring world, a country to which, in early life, you
devoted your sword and services when oppressed by foreign dominion, were
worthy of your philanthropy and disinterested attachment to the freedom
and happiness of man. Although we have not made all the provisions which
might be necessary for a war in the field of Europe, yet we have not
been inattentive to such as would be necessary here. From the moment
that the affair of the Chesapeake rendered the prospect of war imminent,
every faculty was exerted to be prepared for it, and I think I may
venture to solace you with the assurance, that we are, in a good degree,
prepared. Military stores for many campaigns are on hand, all the
necessary articles (sulphur excepted), and the art of preparing them
among ourselves, abundantly; arms in our magazines for more men than
will ever be required in the field, and forty thousand new stand yearly
added, of our own fabrication, superior to any we have ever seen from
Europe; heavy artillery much beyond our need; an increasing stock of
field-pieces, several founderies casting one every other day each; a
military school of about fifty students, which has been in operation a
dozen years; and the manufacture of men constantly going on, and adding
forty thousand young soldiers to our force every year that the war is
deferred: at all our sea-port towns of the least consequence we have
erected works of defence, and assigned them gunboats, carrying one or
two heavy pieces, either eighteen, twenty-fo