This Day in Revolutionary War History (Arnold Raid on Richmond Rattles Jefferson)

Jan. 5, 1781—Facing only token opposition, Royal troops in Virginia under their notorious new commander, Benedict Arnold, plundered and destroyed at will public buildings and private residences in Richmond, the recently designated capital of the commonwealth.

The attack was so unexpected that few troops were available to stand in the way of the traitor who, for all his double-dealing, continued to display the energy and skill that had once made him so valuable to the Continental Army.

Having no clue until too late as to Arnold’s ultimate destination, Governor Thomas Jefferson (pictured) tried in vain to instigate a military counter-offensive and maintain civil authority in the small community he had done so much to bring into being as the new seat of government in Virginia, leading to charges of incompetence and even cowardice that dogged him for the rest of his life.

Arnold's raid—as well as the larger five-month campaign he conducted in the interior—also had consequences for Jefferson’s personal life. To avoid capture by the English, he sent his wife Martha and young children packing for Tuckahoe, the plantation where he had spent much of his childhood. That journey through the wilderness in the deepest heart of the winter led to his five-week-old daughter Lucy catching a cold that worsened until she died in mid-April.

Forty years ago, in a college seminar on the American Presidency, our professor was fond of pointing out that for many Presidents, their prior experiences as governor foreshadowed how they would act in the White House. How, then, should we view Jefferson’s performance as an executive?

Unlike fellow Virginian George Washington, the “Sage of Monticello” had no experience of physical combat. Unlikely as it might seem, he had even less appetite for political combat. He left after two terms as both governor and President exhausted from the struggle, with the braying of his enemies ringing in his ears.

It is true that the powers of the Virginia governor were weak, requiring consensus by an eight-man Council of State. It is also true that any occupant of the office would be handicapped by the inability to raise funds at that time.

On the positive side, Jefferson had enough popularity to win a second term, and enough foresight to have drawn up, four years before, enabling legislation to move the commonwealth’s capital away from Williamsburg—easily accessible to invading troops attacking with a navy—to a more defensible interior location in Richmond. Moreover, he took care to move arms and necessary papers to safety.

But Jefferson lacked the personal charisma of predecessor Patrick Henry, Washington’s hard-won recognition of the many ways that things could go wrong in a military campaign—or the willingness to exercise the authority of his office up to its constitutional limits. Thus, he did not receive word until late that Arnold was pressing inland from the coast; did not notify Washington in time that Continental troops were needed to repel the invaders; did not guess correctly that Arnold would press towards Richmond rather than Petersburg; and did not call out the militia in time to defend the capital.

(In the case of the militia, Jefferson—suspicious of the threat posed by a standing army to republican government—remained, even three decades later, deeply naïve about the ability of poorly trained soldiers, signed up for limited service, to carry out significant military duties. His belief that Canada could be captured as a result of “a mere matter of marching” turned out to be spectacularly wrong, and the burning of Washington under his successor, James Madison, echoed his own experiences with Richmond.)

Unable to capture Jefferson himself, the redcoats took some of his slaves from the governor’s residence in Richmond. They then proceeded to Portsmouth, establishing there a base from which they could continue to launch raids in the countryside.

With Jefferson’s second term drawing to a close in early summer and no successor in sight, the English reached the Monticello, the mountain estate that he thought would be safe from English deprivation. Again he was wrong, forcing him to gallop away so hurriedly that some mistook it for cowardice.

Following an embarrassing inquiry into his conduct of the defense of Richmond, the legislature adopted a resolution praising his “ability, rectitude and integrity.” But critics began to complain about his lack of decisiveness in directing the campaign—notably Major General Baron von Steuben, who had won Washington’s gratitude and trust for intensively training Continental troops. Steuben was indignant that Jefferson had not used his office to order militiamen or even slaves to construct a fort at Hood’s Point.

Just a few weeks before his death in 1826, Jefferson had been willing to sit down with a son of onetime critic Henry Lee to provide documents justifying his role in the Richmond campaign. But the former President was too exhausted by what proved to be his death struggle to respond at the necessary length.

Photo of the Day: A Leader With a Sense of Right and Wrong

I have encountered this bronze equestrian statue of George Washington several times while walking near New York’s Union Square Park. My most recent sighting not only led me to take this photo, but to think about why it resonates with me so much. 

The oldest statue in New York City’s parks collection, this creation by Henry Kirke Brown (1814-1886) has withstood a great deal—the elements, of course, and movement from a traffic island at the southeast corner of the square to its central location in the south plaza. But it remains a point of reference for New Yorkers—most dramatically after 9/11, where it became a de facto shrine.

When I did a Google search to find out the number of statues in this country in honor of this iconic figure, the results amounted to a collective throwing up of the hands. You might as well try to count the number of grains of sand by the ocean. Heck, there’s even a monument to the first American President in London’s Trafalgar Square.

That last bit of unlikely recognition might owe something to the same instinct that led King George III to exclaim that the former American commander-in-chief’s renunciation of the Presidency after two terms “placed him in a light the most distinguished of any man living...the greatest character of the age."

Okay, now how many statues of Benedict Arnold are there in the United States? Less than a quarter of a statue. The national park containing Saratoga battlefield in upstate New York honors  the “memory of the most brilliant soldier of the Continental army, who was desperately wounded on this spot, winning for his countrymen the decisive battle of the American Revolution, and for himself the rank of Major General.”

Because Benedict Arnold tried to betray his country three years after Saratoga by handing West Point over to the British, the whole man could not be honored, not even named, only that part of him displaying courage—his boot.

Over time, Americans have become fascinated by our rogues while taking our heroes for granted—even feeling the need to take them down a peg. And so, the man once hailed by one of the men he commanded in the American Revolution, “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, as “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen” is having his contributions slighted, when not outright forgotten.

Right-wing Republicans delight in mocking progressives for their politically correct tendency to remove statues. They have a point—until, that is, some of them reveal who their real idea of a hero is.

And so, a few weeks ago, listening to one of the Sunday morning news shows, I heard an admirer of the current White House incumbent hail him as our greatest President—ever.

(By the way, I refuse in this post to include the incumbent’s name. It only feeds his maniacal desire for attention. Instead, I’ll refer to him with an epithet first used by Spy Magazine three decades ago that serves equally well today: “short-fingered vulgarian”—SFV for short.)

No matter how ludicrous, ignorant, insane—okay, downright morally offensive—that judgment might be, this woman is by no means an outlier in the current GOP. A poll this past December by The Economist/YouGov found that a majority (53%) of GOP respondents think SFV is a better president than Abraham Lincoln. If that’s how they feel about the incumbent versus Honest Abe, another Republican, I’m afraid that poor George doesn’t stand a chance.

It's worthwhile, then, going over again why Americans valued the example of Washington for so long—and why Arnold was loathed.

The difference between the traitor and the hero—as well as their motives—are summed up extremely well in Nathaniel Philbrick’s Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution: 

“[Benedict] Arnold had never worried about the consequences of his actions. Guilt was simply not a part of his make-up since everything he did was, to his own mind, at least, justifiable….[But] Washington's sense of right and wrong existed outside the impulsive demands of his own self-interest. Rules mattered to Washington. Even though Congress had made his life miserable for the last four years, he had found ways to do what he considered best for his army and his country without challenging the supremacy of civil authority. To do otherwise, to declare himself, like the seventeenth-century English revolutionary Oliver Cromwell, master of his army and his country, would require him to become 'lost to my own character.’”

By a stroke of luck, Arnold narrowly evaded being brought to justice for colluding with a foreign power. Boiling with resentment, set on recrimination, he felt unleashed as a newly commissioned Brigadier General in the British army, laying waste to Virginia. 

In the end, it did him no good. The British lost. Reviled alike by the countrymen whose trust he betrayed and the foreign handlers whose favors he bargained for, Arnold died, feeling more unappreciated than ever, two decades later, unforgiven for wildly conflating the public interest with his own private one.

That “sense of right and wrong” that mattered so much to his old commander—well, for a certain part of the populace that once hailed the stress on "characters" only a couple of decades ago, it seems so old-fashioned, much like the 110 “Rules of Civility,” which Washington copied out as a schoolboy and spent the rest of his life practicing. 

We are going to see soon if we continue to live in Washington’s America or the one desired by Arnold—animated by greed, dancing to the tune of outside forces who abominate democracy.

If we ever erect a statue in honor of the SFV so preferred by so many Republicans, I suggest that it be, in the manner of Arnold’s at Saratoga, not a Washington-style equestrian figure but something more appropriate—an upraised middle finger.

This Day in Revolutionary War History (Political Fortunes Shift at Saratoga)

October 17, 1777—The surrender of British general John Burgoyne at Saratoga, N.Y., did more than just take out of commission one-fifth of British troops fighting in America. With the results persuading King Louis XVI that the American colonists had a fighting chance against their mother country, the patriot victory brought into the American Revolution a force that eventually tipped the scales in their favor—and led to such a strain on the French treasury that it arguably produced a revolution in that country a dozen years later, too.

It might be said that the fate of American history depended on two battles that affected a foreign power’s decision to take sides in a war on American soil. The first battle was Saratoga; the second, the Battle of Antietam, 125 years later, when it was Britain’s turn to make a crucial choice about a revolutionary struggle. In the latter case, however, a Union victory, coupled with Abraham Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, convinced Foreign Minister Lord John Russell not to recognize the Confederacy. (See my prior post on this.)

The ironies of history don’t end there. Burgoyne’s surrender can be seen as the culmination of a year-long campaign to foil the British plan to cut off New England and New York from each other and the rest of the colonies. The soldier most responsible for defeating that strategy—a general who, three times over the prior 12 months, had delayed, disrupted, derailed and depleted British forces in upstate New York—was the patriot who, in three years, became synonymous with betraying the American Revolution: Benedict Arnold.

The entrance of France into the revolution underscored the geopolitical aspects of this worldwide struggle. The fates of Burgoyne, Arnold, and the three American commanders caught in the fallout of the Saratoga campaign—Philip Schuyler, Horatio Gates and George Washington—illustrated how politics inevitably affected who led the battles, and how:

·        

     * John Burgoyne: “Gentleman Johnny,” born under ambiguous circumstances (some suggested he was the illegitimate son of Lord Bingley, Chancellor of the Exchequer under Queen Anne), took to soldiering, a common career path for sons of the nobility. Though skilled at working enough levers to rise in the British Army, he found himself with few friends when he lost the Saratoga campaign. After he was paroled with his troops (with a promise not to fight again) and returned home, a Parliamentary inquiry into his conduct proved inconclusive. He never again commanded armies in America.

·         * Philip Schuyler: The New York aristocrat-general, friendly with George Washington, became involved in a dispute with Gates over command of the Continental Army’s Northern Department—a quarrel that the Continental Congress fanned into being by not immediately establishing a clear line of command in this area. While Schuyler was the favorite of soldiers in his home state, Gates won the loyalty of New Englanders. Schuyler’s campaign of harassment against British forces would later prove essential to victory, but his loss of Fort Ticonderoga gave his enemies ammunition. By the time a court of inquiry absolved him of fault in the campaign, he had lost his command.

·         * Horatio Gates: Before long, this English-born patriot was not only clashing with Schuyler but with Arnold, a favorite of the New Yorker as well as of Washington. When Gates failed to credit Arnold with any share of the victory for the first phase of the Saratoga campaign, Arnold quarreled bitterly with him. Gates' victory at Saratoga was more the result of the leadership of Arnold and General Dan Morgan than his own strategy.

·        *  George Washington: A faction in the Continental Congress was looking to replace the army commander in chief with “Granny Gates,” particularly since, following the Battle of Brandywine, the Virginian had lost control of Philadelphia to the British. Gates would not be discredited--and Washington's position made comparatively secure--until three years later at the Battle of Camden, the worst military defeat suffered by American forces in the entire war.

·         * Benedict Arnold: The hypersensitive New Englander had earned the hard-won respect of Washington for slowing the British advance into the New York interior at the Battle of Valcour Island, for tricking Britain’s sizable Indian allied force into abandoning Burgoyne, and for turning the tide of the second major engagement of the Saratoga campaign—the Battle of Bemis Heights---by jumping on his horse and leading a vigorous charge against the enemy—after he had resigned in a huff after an argument with Gates and had decided to go home. But Arnold had been badly wounded in the latter engagement. Washington’s well-meaning attempt to recognize his gallant but sidelined soldier with a stint as military governor of Philadelphia (now back in American hands following the British evacuation) turned out to be disastrous for Arnold, as he was accused of war profiteering. The charges (though true this time) so enraged him that in 1780, he attempted—unsuccessfully—to hand West Point over to the British.

   Nearly 150 years after the battle, Americans finally conceived of a way to commemorate the valor of the man most responsible for victory at Saratoga. The "Boot Memorial" (see the image accompanying this post) honors Arnold, who is unnamed. The thinking was that the leg--key to his triumph at Saratoga--was the only part of the patriot-turned-traitor that could not be connected to his subsequent treachery.

Flashback, October 1776: Arnold’s Valor at Valcour Island

Before he betrayed his country, Benedict Arnold, America’s most notorious traitor, saved it twice in hours of maximum peril. The second time occurred at Saratoga, where his impetuous charge turned the tide of battle and brought the French into the American Revolution against the British. The earlier time when Arnold kept the patriot cause alive did not bring a victory, but it foiled the redcoats’ plans to split the Northern colonies in two.

From first to last, the Battle of Valcour Island bore all the distinctive characteristics of Arnold: intelligence, energy, daring and valor. Arnold’s engagement with the British on this island on Lake Champlain, from October 11 to 13, 1776, pitted his hopelessly outmanned and outgunned force against Sir Guy Carleton, Governor-General of Canada. Against all odds, Arnold managed to check the advance of the larger fleet, delaying the redcoats’ attempt to divide the Middle Colonies from New England for another year--long enough to buy the colonials precious time.

The odd thing about this battle, considering the other operations where Arnold made (and, at West Point, unmade) his reputation, is that it was naval. Yet Arnold was one of the few, if not only, American commanders who could have led a fleet as credibly as a land force, since he had been a shipmaster in Connecticut before the revolution.

With no long roads existing in the upstate, frontier area of New York, Carleton was ready to follow up on his successful defense of Canada that winter and spring by traversing Lake Champlain on boats built and operated by the Royal Navy. Guessing his plans, with no time to waste, Arnold embarked on a breathless campaign in the summer of 1776 to put to work every woodsman, carpenter, armorer, and crewman he could find.

The makeshift flotilla, thus put together on a wing and a prayer, consisted of 15 galleys, schooners and gunboats--hardly anything to speak of against Carleton’s five boats armed with 18 12-pound cannon, along with 20 gunboats and 28 barges containing troops and Indian allies.

Arnold hardly had a chance (his one advantage, during September: heavily wooded Valcour Island allowed him to keep the British under surveillance without them detecting him in turn), and he knew it. But this campaign wasn’t about his forces standing a chance, but about giving the other Americans downstate the opportunity to have one. That led him to disregard a member of his council of war who advised that the Americans shouuld slip away before the British fleet spotted them.

Carleton’s fleet finally encountered Arnold’s on October 11. The Americans fought desperately and well for seven hours, even severely damaging several British ships, until the leading redcoat vessel, Inflexible, found Continental boats in range and blew gaping, damaging holes in them.

Arnold’s council of war that night was grim, as losses and options were assessed. But the general now presented and put into action one of his best--certainly most daring--ideas of the war. With muffled oars, the battered American ships that night slipped in single file past the British line, with lanterns hung in the stern the only guides through the darkness and fog.

By the next morning, Carleton found that the man the Indians would call “Dark Eagle” had escaped. Most of Arnold’s ships made it to Fort Ticonderoga. But a light wind left some idling in the lake, and Carleton at last intercepted these lagging vessels on the 13^th.

Rather than let the ships or his men fall into enemy hands, Arnold acted as he had at the conclusion of his heroic but failed campaign against Montreal earlier that year: he was among the last group of soldiers to guard the getaway of his remaining men. Once assured of that, he ran his remaining ships aground on the shore of Lake Champlain, burned them, and made his way toward Crown Point.

Arnold had lost his motley fleet but prevented most of his men from falling into enemy hands. More important, as Nathanael Greene would demonstrate anew in the final year of the war, he had proven that even a loss could have beneficial effects, if it meant the frustration of enemy war movements and aims. In this case, the capable but cautious-to-a-fault Carleton decided he had lost too many days already and that, rather than leave his troops vulnerable to a wilderness winter in a country they didn’t know, it was better to head back to Montreal.


The next year, Arnold would use equally stunning craftiness in the Saratoga campaign. (My favorite gambit of his: sending a half-wit to convince Indians surrounding a patriot-held fort that he was coming with a relief force “as numerous as the leaves on the trees,” inducing the Indians to retreat and leave the pleasantly surprised garrison alone.) Until he fell, painfully wounded, at his great Saratoga charge, Arnold had shown repeatedly that he was, as Willard Sterne Randall claimed in his excellent biography, Benedict Arnold: Patriot and Traitor, “the best field commander in the war on either side.”

A prior post of mine discussed the war profiteering and infatuation with his beautiful young wife, a Tory sympathizer, that led Arnold fatally astray—and, of course, into his infamous turn to the British he had once fought so resolutely.

In fact, it might be argued, the anger and despair of his Continental colleagues about his betrayal ran so deeply because Arnold shone the brightest of the entire group. If he could go over to the enemy, who among them could be trusted?

Flashback, June 1781: “Other Midnight Ride” Saves Jefferson

In her cockamamie way, Sarah Palin’s recent visit to Boston has reminded Americans again about how Paul Revere’s ride serves as our eternal symbol of patriotic vigilance. The Beantown jack-of-all-trades got lucky in the afterlife in being lionized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (though I imagine he’s turning over in his grave, angry and thoroughly confused, at the thought that a contemporary politician believed he “warned the British” about their own plans).

To my knowledge, no versifier of similar renown has performed such magic for Jack Jouett Jr. But without the all-night ride, completed June 4, 1781, of this Virginian, not only might Thomas Jefferson have been executed, but the American Revolution as a whole might have been snuffed out with Britain’s capture of members of the government of the large, strategically important state of Virginia.

For the rest of Jefferson’s life, opponents would charge that Jouett’s arduous and brave ride would not have been necessary at all if the Sage of Monticello had adequately performed his duties as governor of Virginia. As with so many politically inspired charges down to this very day, this aspersion on Jefferson’s record blended manifest unfairness with at least some amount of truth.

In my American Presidency seminar in college, our professor tossed out the possibility of one theme for the semester: the performance of those Presidents who served as governors before they reached the White House. Their triumphs and disasters in state capitals, he thought, often foreshadowed how they performed as President.

That observation was especially true of Jefferson’s two years as governor of Virginia. The best way to gauge what he thought of it can be glimpsed by observing the three achievements mentioned on his tombstone at Monticello: “author of the Declaration of Independence and of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia."

Those three items are primarily intellectual, not political, achievements. Nowhere does Jefferson mention that he had gained the highest office in both his state and nation. No wonder: In both cases, he left office profoundly depressed, with his achievements called into question by near-disasters that were at least partly of his own making.

Jefferson had just finished his second one-year term as governor the day before Jouett, a resident of Charlottesville, took off to warn him that the British were on their way to capture him. Jefferson couldn’t have been happier to relinquish his post: Virginia, suspicious of executive power, had not only vested its governor with no independent veto power, no appointive power, no power to call out the militia, but had left him bound by the decisions of an eight-man Council of State elected by the Assembly.

At key moments in the developing military crisis of early 1781, the Council of State hamstrung Jefferson, being unable several times to meet a quorum and, in one instance, rejecting his plea to create a standing Virginia army. However, in several ways, Jefferson made critical errors of his own in dealing with British invaders into Virginia’s heartland:

* he had ignored intelligence, in September and December 1780, from both Generals Horatio Gates and George Washington, that the British were planning assaults southward from New York or, more specifically, directly at Portsmouth;
* he had dispatched as many troops from the state as he could to assist George Rogers Clark on his military mission into present-day Ohio, Indiana and Illinois—giving later American negotiators in Paris an invaluable assist in claiming this as American territory, but in the meantime leaving Viriginia's coastal defenses badly undermanned;
* he had waited two days after learning that unknown ships had landed in the Chesapeake before calling out the militia or requesting an emergency meeting of the Council of State.

One element in particular made Jefferson’s two terms as governor an unfortunate dress rehearsal for his two terms as President: a ghastly underestimation of the value of naval power. After six weeks in office, he had concluded that “we should be gainers were we to burn our whole navy.” Thirty years later, as the War of 1812 was just about to ensue, the ex-President advised one confidante that seizing Canada would be “a mere matter of marching,” and his belief that small coastal gunboats instead of frigates would be sufficient to defend the country proved a dismal failure when the British came ashore and burned Washington.

It’s hard to know how Jefferson, who implemented so many ingenious schemes around Monticello, could be so impractical about defense matters. Perhaps it was a byproduct of a visionary nature that could see so much in the distance but so little in front of his own nose. (Of the three Virginian Democratic-Republicans, it was James Monroe, the one judged blessed with the smallest amount of intellect, who had the best grasp of military matters—but that might have resulted from his three years he spent in the Continental Army—three years more than Jefferson and Madison spent combined.)

The result, in the first half of 1781, was a pair of near-catastrophes at the hands of two of the British army’s most despised officers. In early January, Jefferson and the legislature had to flee Richmond (a site chosen as state capital because, ironically, it would be easier to defend that Williamsburg, located closer to the coast) to avoid capture at the hands of Benedict Arnold. Then in early June, Col. Banastre Tarleton made a dash toward Charlottesville to capture the assembly, which were planning to reconvene there following Arnold’s raid on Richmond.

Several prominent patriots—including Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee in town and Jefferson in Monticello—were within the reach of the man that the patriots had taken to calling “Bloody Ban” for what they saw as his war crimes. In his characteristic vigorous fashion, Tarleton had covered tremendous ground in bringing his troops to this point.

Tarleton had stopped his men to rest on June 3 at a tavern when Jouett overheard their plans. As inconspicuously as he could, the 26-year-old Charlottesville resident—a bear of a man—dashed out of the Cuckoo Tavern and made his extraordinary ride to Charlottesville.

Though Jouett’s adventures over the next 24 hours are unsung nowadays, his ride was more astounding than Revere’s:

* Revere’s ride to Concord was only 15 miles; Jouett’s was more than 40;
* Revere had the help of two other riders, William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, the last of whom actually completed the ride to Concord; Jouett made the trip entirely by himself.
* Jouett, to escape British detection, rode virtually the entire way on backroads, through vines, brambles, and potholes.

Jouett reached Jefferson by 4:30 in the morning. The latter is said to have coolly offered the rider some of his choice Madeira to fortify him for the last leg of his trip to Charlottesville to warn members of the assembly gathered there to leave.

You can only imagine how Jefferson must have felt when he heard this latest bit of news from Jouett: anxiety for his household, relief that he’d be able to make his getaway just in time, but also a feeling something like that great line from Dorothy Parker: “What fresh hell is this?” His wife Martha had just experienced another difficult pregnancy, and she was showing less resiliency than before. (She would, in fact, die a year later, leaving her husband so disconsolate that he refused to leave his room for three weeks.)

Now Jefferson had to deal with a government that he technically no longer headed but whose successor was weeks away from taking office, as well as a household on the brink of danger. (Some historians have argued that, contrary to his reputation as “Bloody Ban,” Tarleton had given strict orders that private property would not be harmed. But even if that were true, the British would still be practicing a kind of predecessor of the neutron bomb: i.e., minimizing property damage while maximizing the pain felt by people. Thus, having put his signature to the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson would be on the short list of politicians measured by the British for the noose if captured.)

After sending his wife and family to safety at a friend’s home, Jefferson rode off, leaving the estate in the care of two slaves, Martin Hemings and Caesar. From the stories passed down over the years, the slaves suffered more at the hands of the British than their master did. When the first British horseman rode up to Monticello, Hemings slammed down the floorboard of the east portico on poor Caesar, who was hiding the silver plates there. For the next three days, Caesar was trapped under the porch until the redcoats departed. Martin, if the family legend is true, had an even closer call, refusing to divulge Jefferson’ s whereabouts to the redcoats despite a gun pressed against his chest.

What Jefferson faced next was not musket fire from redcoats, but potshots from his countrymen. His conduct during the defense of Richmond had disgusted the Continental Army’s General von Steuben, and now his conduct during Tarleton’s raid led to charges of cowardice. A few days after the enemy had departed, the legislature took up the issue. An impassioned defense by Jefferson led the legislators not only to withdraw the charges, but to thank him for his “impartial, upright, and attentive administration, whilst in office.”

Nevertheless, Jefferson could not embrace private life readily enough after that. That same attitude would be repeated in March 1809, after the Embargo Act--passed by his administration to punish Britain for its impressment of their former sailors on American ships—only ended up devastating American shipping, and plunging his own popularity to its great depth during his eight years as President. Now on the brink of retiring, he couldn’t wait once again to stop sailing on “the boisterous ocean of political passions.”