Federalist Senate would not confirm the nomination. The Federalists could never forget that Gallatin was a Swiss by birth--an alien of supposedly radical tendencies. The partisan press never exhibited its crass provincialism more shamefully than when it made fun of Gallatin's imperfect pronunciation of English. He had come to America, indeed, too late to acquire a perfect control of a new tongue, but not too late to become a loyal son of his adopted country. He brought to Jefferson's group of advisers not only a thorough knowledge of public finance but a sound judgment and a statesmanlike vision, which were often needed to rectify the political vagaries of his chief.

The last of his Cabinet appointments made, Jefferson returned to his country seat at Monticello for August and September, for he was determined not to pass those two "bilious months" in Washington. "I have not done it these forty years," he wrote to Gallatin. "Grumble who will, I will never pass those two months on tidewater." To Monticello, indeed, Jefferson turned whenever his duties permitted and not merely in the sickly months of summer, for when the roads were good the journey was rapidly and easily made by stage or chaise. There, in his garden and farm, he found relief from the distractions of public life. "No occupation is so delightful to me," he confessed, "as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden." At Monticello, too, he could gratify his delight in the natural sciences, for he was a true child of the eighteenth century in his insatiable curiosity about the physical universe and in his desire to reduce that universe to an intelligible mechanism. He was by instinct a rationalist and a foe to superstition in any form, whether in science or religion. His indefatigable pen was as ready to discuss vaccination and yellow fever with Dr. Benjamin Rush as it was to exchange views with Dr. Priestley on the ethics of Jesus.

The diversity of Jefferson's interests is truly remarkable. Monticello is a monument to his almost Yankee-like ingenuity. He writes to his friend Thomas Paine to assure him that the semi-cylindrical form of roof after the De Lorme pattern, which he proposes for his house, is entirely practicable, for he himself had "used it at home for a dome, being 120 degrees of an oblong octagon." He was characteristically American in his receptivity to new ideas from any source. A chance item about Eli Whitney of New Haven arrests his attention and forthwith he writes to Madison recommending a "Mr. Whitney at Connecticut, a mechanic of the first order of ingenuity, who invented the cotton gin," and who has recently invented "molds and machines for making all the pieces of his [musket] locks so exactly equal that take one hundred locks to pieces and mingle their parts and the hundred locks may be put together as well by taking the first pieces which come to hand." To Robert Fulton, then laboring to perfect his torpedoes and submarine, Jefferson wrote encouragingly: "I have ever looked to the submarine boat as most to be depended on for attaching them [i. e., torpedoes]....I am in hopes it is not to be abandoned as impracticable."

It was not wholly affectation, therefore, when Jefferson wrote, "Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived, have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions." One can readily picture this Virginia farmer-philosopher ruefully closing his study door, taking a last look over the gardens and fields of Monticello, in the golden days of October, and mounting Wildair, his handsome thoroughbred, setting out on the dusty road for that little political world at Washington, where rumor so often got the better of reason and where gossip was so likely to destroy philosophic serenity.