Jefferson and his Colleagues [42]
him a revolutionist in 1776 and a passionate advocate of peace in 1807 deserve some consideration. The charge made by contemporaries of Jefferson that his aversion to war sprang from personal cowardice may be dismissed at once, as it was by him, with contempt. Nor was his hatred of war merely an instinctive abhorrence of bloodshed. He had not hesitated to wage naval war on the Barbary Corsairs. It is true that he was temperamentally averse to the use of force under ordinary circumstances. He did not belong to that type of full-blooded men who find self-expression in adventurous activity. Mere physical effort without conscious purpose never appealed to him. He was at the opposite pole of life from a man like Aaron Burr. He never, so far as history records, had an affair of honor; he never fought a duel; he never performed active military service; he never took human life. Yet he was not a non-resistant. "My hope of preserving peace for our country," he wrote on one occasion, "is not founded in the Quaker principle of nonresistance under every wrong." The true sources of Jefferson's pacifism must be sought in his rationalistic philosophy, which accorded the widest scope to the principle of self-direction and self determination, whether on the part of the individual or of groups of individuals. To impose one's will upon another was to enslave, according to his notion; to coerce by war was to enslave a community; and to enslave a community was to provoke revolution. Jefferson's thought gravitated inevitably to the center of his rational universe--to the principle of enlightened self-interest. Men and women are not to be permanently moved by force but by appeals to their interests. He completed his thought as follows in the letter already quoted: "But [my hope of preserving peace is founded] in the belief that a just and friendly conduct on our part will procure justice and friendship from others. In the existing contest, each of the combatants will find an interest in our friendship." It was a chaotic world in which this philosopher-statesman was called upon to act--a world in which international law and neutral rights had been well-nigh submerged in twelve years of almost continuous war. Yet with amazing self-assurance President Jefferson believed that he held in his hand a master-key which would unlock all doors that had been shut to the commerce of neutrals. He called this master-key "peaceable coercion," and he explained its magic potency in this wise: "Our commerce is so valuable to them [the European belligerents] that they will be glad to purchase it when the only price we ask is to do us justice. I believe that we have in our hands the means of peaceable coercion; and that the moment they see our government so united as that they can make use of it, they will for their own interest be disposed to do us justice." The idea of using commercial restrictions as a weapon to secure recognition of rights was of course not original with Jefferson, but it was now to be given a trial without parallel in the history of the nation. Non-importation agreements had proved efficacious in the struggle of the colonies with the mother country; it seemed not unreasonable to suppose that a well-sustained refusal to traffic in English goods would meet the emergency of 1807, when the ruling of British admiralty courts threatened to cut off the lucrative commerce between Europe and the West Indies. With this theory in view, the President and his Secretary of State advocated the NonImportation Bill of April 18, 1806, which forbade the entry of certain specified goods of British manufacture. The opposition found a leader in Randolph, who now broke once and for all with the Administration. "Never in the course of my life," he exclaimed, "have I witnessed such a scene of indignity and inefficiency as this measure holds forth to the world. What is it? A milk-and-water bill! A dose of chicken-broth to be taken nine months hence! . . . It is too contemptible to be the object of consideration, or to excite the feelings of the pettiest state in Europe."