A passage from one of Mr. Jefferson’s letters which the historian Sparks records, may here be given, as its spirit covers the private as well as public life of Washington.  Mr. Jefferson withdrew his services as Secretary of State from the administration of Washington towards the close of his first term in the Presidency.  His retirement from that post took place when party spirit was violent and bitter in the extreme; never was it more so in the annals of our country; and it was known that he had differed from Washington on political questions of the greatest importance.  Nevertheless, writing of him at a later period Mr. Jefferson says:  “His integrity was most pure; his justice the most inflexible I have ever known; no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision.  He was, indeed, in every sense of the word, a wise, a good, and a great man.”

I return to his letters to Mr. Lear.  In superintending his domestic affairs, these letters exhibit him as the head of a well-ordered family, himself the regulator of it all under maxims that best conduce to order because not too rigid.  We see that he was truly hospitable; kind; devoted to his kindred whom he gathers around him, interesting himself in their education and welfare; cheering them with a welcome at Mount Vernon, and soothing them in sickness and sorrow.  The kindred of Mrs. Washington alike share his solicitudes, paternal care, and constant kindness.  All this is discernible from the facts that drop out in these letters.  They point to a heart affectionately alive to the best social and family feelings.  We see his attention to the comfort of his servants, slaves, and others.  His government of them, upper and subordinate, appears to have been perfect by his union of discipline with liberality.  He knew that his postilions, if they slept over the stable, would carry lights there whether he forbade it or not, for they would do it when he knew nothing about it and not tell on each other.  He therefore allowed no sleeping there at all.

I could not avoid remarking, as characteristic throughout the whole of this correspondence, that there is never any complaining of his labors.  Letter-writing alone would have been a heavy labor to him but for his system and industry.  Promptitude in using his pen there must necessarily have been, or he could not have written so much.  The history of the times will show that when he wrote these letters he was simultaneously writing others on public business, which, as the world knows, he never neglected in any jot or tittle no matter what else he might be doing.  The domestic letters must therefore have been struck off with great facility.  Let us call to mind also the more than two hundred volumes of folio manuscript of his public correspondence which Congress purchased, and then remember that the sum of all he wrote is as nothing to what he did in his long career of activity in his country’s service, military and civil.