But Jefferson’s hatred of slavery is not less fierce in his letters.

Dr. Price writes a pamphlet in England against slavery, and straightway Jefferson seizes his pen to urge him to write more, and more clearly for America, and more directly at American young men, saying, in encouragement,—­“Northward of the Chesapeake you may find, here and there, an opponent to your doctrine, as you may find, here and there, a murderer.”  He speaks hopefully of the disposition in Virginia to “redress this enormity,”—­calls the fight against slavery “the interesting spectacle of justice in conflict with avarice and oppression,”—­speaks of the side hostile to slavery as “the sacred side.”  The date is 1785.

This welcome to Dr. Price’s onslaught will serve as antidote to Mr. Randall’s poisonous declaration, that Jefferson was opposed to interference with slave institutions by those living outside of Slave States.

In 1786 Jefferson wrote to correct M. de Meusnier’s statement of the efforts already made for emancipation; and, referring to the holding of slaves by a people who had clamored loudly and fought bravely for freedom, he says,—­

“What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man,—­who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself, in vindication of his own liberty, and, in the next moment, be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow-men a bondage one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose!”

Here, in Jefferson himself, then, is the source of that venom with which earnest men, throughout the land, are stinging to death the organization which stole his name to destroy his ideas.

In 1788, Jefferson, being Minister at Paris, receives a note from M. de Warville tendering him membership in the Society for the Abolition of the Slave-Trade.  Jefferson is forced by his peculiar position to decline, but he takes pains to say,—­“You know that nobody wishes more ardently to see an abolition not only of the trade, but of the condition of slavery.”

Here is no non-committalism, no wistful casting about for loop-holes, no sly putting out of hooks to catch backers, not the feeblest germ of quibble or lie.  The man answers more than he is asked.  Is there not, in the present dearth, something refreshing in this old candor?

But some have thought Jefferson’s later expressions against slavery wanting in heartiness.  Let us examine.

The whole world knows, that, when a wrong stings a man, making him fierce and loud, his direct expressions have often small value; but that his parenthetical expressions often have great value.  This is one of the simplest principles in homely every-day criticism, serving truth-seekers, wherever wordy war rages, whether among statesmen or hackmen.

Now, in Jefferson’s letter to Dr. Gordon,—­written in 1788,—­he is greatly stirred by his own recital of the shameful ravages on his property by the British army.  Just at the moment when his indignation was at the hottest, there shot out of his heart, and off his pen, one of these side-thoughts, one of these fragments of the man’s ground-idea, which, at such moments, truth-seekers always watch for.  Jefferson says of Cornwallis,—­