Appendix L: Excerpt from Letter to Samuel Kercheval (1816)

AuthorArthur Rizer
ProfessionDirector of Justice Policy and a senior fellow at the R Street Institute
Pages257-259
257
APPENDIX L
Excerpt from Letter to
Samuel Kercheval (1816)
Jeerson’s letter to Samuel Kercheval oers us some of Jeerson’s reections on
the experiment in democracy from the distance of four decades after the Dec-
laration of Independence truly sparked that experiment.
SIR,
I duly received your favor of June the 13th, with the copy of the letters on
the calling a convention, on which you are pleased to ask my opinion. I have
not been in the habit of mysterious reserve on any subject, nor of buttoning
up my opinions within my own doublet. On the contrary, while in public
service especially, I thought the public entitled to frankness, and intimately to
know whom they employed. But I am now retired: I resign myself, as a pas-
senger, with condence to those at present at the helm, and ask but for rest,
peace and good will. e question you propose, on equal representation, has
become a party one, in which I wish to take no public share. Yet, if it be asked
for your own satisfaction only, and not to be quoted before the public, I have
no motive to withhold it, and the less from you, as it coincides with your own.
At the birth of our republic, I committed that opinion to the world, in the
draught of a constitution annexed to the “Notes on Virginia,” in which a
provision was inserted for a representation permanently equal. e infancy of
the subject at that moment, and our inexperience of self-government,
occasioned gross departures in that draught from genuine republican canons.
Intruth, the abuses of monarchy had so much lled all the space of politi-
calcontemplation, that we imagined everything republican which was not

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