e into this.
But I hope the great body of our fellow-citizens will do it. I will
sacrifice every thing but principle to procure it. A few examples of
justice on officers who have perverted their functions to the oppression
of their fellow-citizens, must, in justice to those citizens, be made.
But opinion, and the just maintenance of it, shall never be a crime in
my view; nor bring injury on the individual. Those whose misconduct in
office ought to have produced their removal even by my predecessor,
must not be protected by the delicacy due only to honest men. How much
I lament that time has deprived me of your aid. It would have been a
day of glory which should have called you to the first office of the
administration. But give us your counsel, my friend, and give us your
blessing: and be assured that there exists not in the heart of man a
more faithful esteem than mine to you, and that I shall ever bear you
the most affectionate veneration and respect.

Th: Jefferson*

LETTER CCLXXXIII..--TO ELBRIDGE GERRY, March 29, 1801

TO ELBRIDGE GERRY.

Washington, March 29, 1801,

My Dear Sir,

Your two letters of January the 5th and February the 24th came safely to
hand, and I thank you for the history of a transaction which will ever
be interesting in our affairs. It has been very precisely as I had
imagined. I thought, on your return, that if you had come forward
boldly, and appealed to the public by a full statement, it would have
had a great effect in your favor personally, and that of the republican
cause then oppressed almost unto death. But I judged from a tact of the
southern pulse. I suspect that of the north was different, and decided
your conduct: and perhaps it has been as well. If the revolution of
sentiment has been later, it has perhaps been not less sure. At length
it has arrived. What with the natural current of opinion which has been
setting over to us for eighteen months, and the immense impetus which
was given it from the 11th to the 17th of February, we may now say that
the United States, from New York southwardly, are as unanimous in the
principles of '76, as they were in '76. The only difference is, that the
leaders who remain behind are more numerous and colder than the apostles
of toryism in '76. The reason is, that we are now justly more tolerant
than we could safely have been then, circumstanced as we were. Your part
of the Union, though as absolutely republican as ours, had drunk deepe