Th:  Jefferson”

LETTER CLXXX.—­TO EDWARD LIVINGSTON, April 4, 1824

TO EDWARD LIVINGSTON.

Monticello, April 4, 1824.

Dear Sir,

It was with great pleasure I learned that the good people of New Orleans had restored you again to the councils of our country.  I did not doubt the aid it would bring to the remains of our old school in Congress, in which your early labors had been so useful.  You will find, I suppose, on revisiting our maritime States, the names of things more changed than the things themselves; that though our old opponents have given up their appellation, they have not, in assuming ours, abandoned their views, and that they are as strong nearly as they ever were.  These cares, however, are no longer mine.  I resign myself cheerfully to the managers of the ship, and the more contentedly, as I am near the end of my voyage.  I have learned to be less confident in the conclusions of human reason, and give more credit to the honesty of contrary opinions.  The radical idea of the character of the constitution of our government, which I have adopted as a key in cases of doubtful construction, is, that the whole field of government is divided into two departments, domestic and foreign, (the States in their mutual relations being of the latter) that the former department is reserved exclusively to the respective States within their own limits, and the latter assigned to a separate set of functionaries, constituting what may be called the, foreign branch, which, instead of a federal basis, is established as a distinct government quo ad hoc, acting as the domestic branch does on the citizens directly and coercively; that these departments have distinct directories, co-ordinate, and equally independent and supreme, each within its own sphere of action.  Whenever a doubt arises to which of these branches a power belongs, I try it by this test.  I recollect no case where a question simply between citizens of the same State has been transferred to the foreign department, except that of inhibiting tenders but of metallic money, and ex post facto legislation.  The causes of these singularities are well remembered.

I thank you for the copy of your speech on the question of national improvement, which I have read with great pleasure, and recognise in it those powers of reasoning and persuasion of which I had formerly seen from you so many proofs.  Yet, in candor, I must say it has not removed, in my mind, all the difficulties of the question.  And I should really be alarmed at a difference of opinion with you, and suspicious of my own, were it not that I have, as companions in sentiment, the Madisons, the Monroes, the Randolphs, the Macons, all good men and true, of primitive principles.  In one sentiment of the speech I particularly concur.  ’If we have a doubt relative to any power, we ought not to exercise it.’  When we consider