Long before there were levelers in France, Jefferson was a leveler in Virginia; and because he was a leveler in Virginia, the reactionaries who resented his reforms were afterward to charge his democracy to the influence of the levelers of Paris. His democracy was inherent, in part inherited from a pioneer father. His dislike of the aristocratic system amounted to a prejudice, and he could not bear the novels of Scott because of his detestation of the institutions of medieval times.[375] Having written the Declaration of Independence in the house of a bricklayer, he declined a reëlection to Congress to enter the House of Burgesses in Virginia to revamp the institutions of the State along democratic lines. When he finished his work there, he had made himself one of the foremost democrats of all times--and the French Revolution was still in the distance. The Virginia system had been made for caste society; the landed aristocracy were as much a caste as that in England--minus the titles. They had the same love of land, the same obsession that the alienation of any part of their possessions was treason to the family. Through the system of entail, the lands and slaves of the aristocracy could be passed on down through the generations, proof against the extravagance and inefficiency of the owners and the attacks of creditors. The law of primogeniture was designed to serve the same general end of preventing the disruption of the great estates. With a fine audacity, Jefferson sallied forth quite gayly to attack them both. Even Henry thought this was radicalism gone mad. Pendleton was more hurt than outraged. The aristocratic members of his mother’s family looked upon him as a matricide. Undaunted by the hate engendered, he put his hand to the plough and kept it there until he had ploughed the field and prepared it for a democratic harvest. His friend Pendleton begged a compromise on primogeniture giving the eldest son a double share of the land. ‘Yes,’ replied the leveler, ‘when he can eat twice the allowance of food and do double the allowance of work.’ It was his purpose to eradicate ‘every fibre of ancient or future aristocracy.’[376] The outraged landed aristocracy never forgave him. He was the first American to invite the hate of a class, and from the beginning he turned his back on the aristocracy and made his appeal to the middle-class yeomanry.[377] All this was behind him when he went to Paris before the Revolution there began. There the tall, slender American in the elegant house on the Grande Route des Champs Elysées, with its extensive gardens and court, was an impressive figure. ‘You replace Doctor Franklin, I hear,’ said Vergennes, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. ‘I succeed him,’ Jefferson replied; ‘nobody could replace him.’ There could have been no more ingratiating reply, for his predecessor had been greatly admired and loved.