his inauguration, discoursing with Pinckney, Gallatin, Madison,
Burr, Randolph, Giles, Macon, and many another good Republican,
and evolving the policies of his Administration.



CHAPTER II. PUTTING THE SHIP ON HER REPUBLICAN TACK

President Jefferson took office in a spirit of exultation which
he made no effort to disguise in his private letters. "The tough
sides of our Argosie," he wrote to John Dickinson, "have been
thoroughly tried. Her strength has stood the waves into which she
was steered with a view to sink her. We shall put her on her
Republican tack, and she will now show by the beauty of her
motion the skill of her builders." In him as in his two
intimates, Gallatin and Madison, there was a touch of that
philosophy which colored the thought of reformers on the eve of
the French Revolution, a naive confidence in the perfectability
of man and the essential worthiness of his aspirations. Strike
from man the shackles of despotism and superstition and accord to
him a free government, and he would rise to unsuspected felicity.
Republican government was the strongest government on earth,
because it was founded on free will and imposed the fewest checks
on the legitimate desires of men. Only one thing was wanting to
make the American people happy and prosperous, said the President
in his Inaugural Address "a wise and frugal government, which
shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave
them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry
and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the
bread it has earned." This, he believed, was the sum of good