[19] Jefferson's dislike of a navy was due to his desire for an economical administration and for peace. Shortly after his inauguration he expressed a desire to lay up the larger men of war in the eastern branch of the Potomac, where they would require only "one set of plunderers to take care of them." To Thomas Paine he wrote in 1807: "I believe that gunboats are the only _water_ defence which can be useful to us and protect us from the ruinous folly of a navy." (_Works_, Ford ed., ix. 137.) The gunboats desired by Jefferson were small, cheap craft equipped with one or two guns and kept on shore under sheds until actually needed, when they were to be launched and manned by a sort of naval militia. A large number of these boats were constructed and they afforded some protection to coasting vessels against privateers, but in bad weather, or when employed against a frigate, they were worse than useless, and Jefferson's "gunboat system" was admittedly a failure. [20] See e.g. his letters in 1787 on the Shays' rebellion, and his speculations on the doctrine that one generation may not bind another by paper documents. With the latter may be compared present-day movements like the initiative and referendum, and not a few discussions of national debts. Jefferson's distrust of governments was nothing exceptional for a consistent individualist. [21] In his last years he carefully sifted and revised his contemporary notes evidencing, as he believed, the existence of such a party, and they remain as his _Ana_ (chiefly Hamiltoniana). The only just judgment of these notes is to be obtained by looking at them, and by testing his suspicions with the letters of Hamilton, Ames, Oliver Wolcott, Theodore Sedgwick, George Cabot and the other Hamiltonians. Such a comparison measures also the relative judgment, temper and charity of these writers and Jefferson. It must still remain true, however, that Jefferson's _Ana_ present him in a far from engaging light. [22] "Jefferson, in 1789, wrote some such stuff about the will of majorities, as a New Englander would lose his rank among men of sense to avow."--Fisher Ames (Jan. 1800). [23] He was classed as a "French infidel" and atheist. His attitude toward religion was in fact deeply reverent and sincere, but he insisted that religion was purely an individual matter, "evidenced, as concerns the world by each one's daily life," and demanded absolute freedom of private judgment. He looked on Unitarianism with much sympathy and desired its growth. "I am a Christian," he wrote in 1823, "in the only sense in which he (Jesus) wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other."