pon you to
forego any longer the indulgence of your desire for private life, the
event, however anxious I am to avert it, must be submitted to.

"But I can not suffer you to leave your station without assuring you
that the opinion which I had formed of your integrity and talents, and
which dictated your original nomination, has been confirmed by the
fullest experience, and that both have been eminently displayed in the
discharge of your duty.

"Let a conviction of my most earnest prayers for your happiness
accompany you in your retirement; and while I accept, with the warmest
thanks, your solicitude for my welfare, I beg you to believe that I
always am, dear sir, &c."

Edmund Randolph, the attorney-general, took Jefferson's place in the
cabinet, and his own was filled by William Bradford, of Pennsylvania.
Mr. Jefferson left the seat of government as soon as possible after
withdrawing from public life; and a fortnight after his resignation he
arrived at Monticello, his beautiful home in the interior of Virginia,
in full view of the Blue Ridge along a continuous line of almost sixty
miles. He was then fifty years of age. His whole family, with all his
servants, were at his home to receive him; and so delightful was this,
his first experience of private life for many long years, that he
resolved to abandon himself to it entirely.

He boasted, almost a month after he left Philadelphia, that he had not
seen a newspaper since his flight from the cares of government, and he
declared that he thought of never taking one again. "I think it is
Montaigne," he wrote to Edmund Randolph on the third of February, "who
has said that ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest
his head. I am sure it is true, as to anything political, and shall
endeavor to estrange myself to everything of that character." But his
hatred of Hamilton, and his persistence in regarding the political
friends of that gentleman as necessarily corrupt, would not allow party
feud to sleep in his mind, and he added, in the next sentence, "I
indulge myself on one political topic only; that is, in declaring to my
countrymen the shameless corruption of a portion of the representatives
to the first and second Congress, and their implicit devotion to the
treasury."

Meanwhile, the report of Jefferson on commercial affairs was eliciting
warm debates in Congress. In that report he had suggested two methods
for modifying or removing commercial restriction