Page:Lamb - History of the city of New York - Volume 3.djvu/38

366 an hour by day and one at night; but his horses were led, and he mounted one of them from time to time to relieve his fatigue. At Philadelphia he visited Franklin, who, although in bed and very feeble, listened with excited interest to a detailed account of the French Revolution.

Jay, Hamilton, Knox, Osgood, Livingston, and the circle of New York’s principal citizens, hastened to do honor to the new Secretary of State. “The courtesies of dinner-parties,” wrote Jefferson, “placed me at once in their familiar society.” He tried to obtain a house on Broadway, but not succeeding rented a small cottage in Maiden Lane, near the residence of Thomas Hartley, member of Congress from Pennsylvania. Business had accumulated in expectation of his arrival, and he was quickly immersed in its perplexing details. But he was amazed at the tenor of table conversations. When he went abroad the democratic tendencies of his own country were at full tide, and he found France heaving with the coming earthquake. His house in Paris had been the resort of the leaders of political reform, and he had taken a deep interest in the success of the revolutionists; had even traveled through their country on foot, entered the hovels of the peasants, peeped into the pot to learn what the poor woman was preparing for dinner, handled the miserable black bread that mothers gave their hungry children, and felt of the bed, on which he had taken care to sit, to ascertain its material and quality. “My conscientious devotion to natural rights cannot be heightened,” he wrote, “but it is roused and excited by daily exercise.” He had returned home to find the favorite sentiment, according to his observations, a “preference for kingly instead of republican government.” He was disappointed with the Constitution. There was, moreover, a practical question before Congress, the assumption of the State debts, which disturbed his sense of justice; and Hamilton’s project of a national bank he regarded as an evil of superlative magnitude — a fountain of demoralization.

In personal appearance Jefferson was not altogether prepossessing. He had reached the age of forty-seven, was nearly as tall as Washington, well-built but awkward and loose-jointed, with a fair complexion, cold-blue eyes, and reddish hair. His wife dying many years before, he had filled the place of both parents to his lovely daughters, and was a tender and indulgent father, whom they venerated as wiser and better than other men. He possessed original and solid merit, together with great magnetism of intellect, and matchless intensity of convictions upon all subjects to which he gave his attention.

It was at Hamilton’s dinner-table that he first advocated aiding France to throw off her monarchial yoke. Hamilton shook his head and