"In December, 1776, our circumstances being much distressed, it was proposed in the House of Delegates to create a dictator, invested with every power legislative, executive, and judiciary, civil and military, of life and death, over our persons and over our properties.... One who entered into this contest from a pure love of liberty, and a sense of injured rights, who determined to make every sacrifice and to meet every danger, for the reestablishment of those rights on a firm basis, ... must stand confounded and dismayed when he is told that a considerable portion of" the House "had meditated the surrender of them into a single hand, and in lieu of a limited monarchy, to deliver him over to a despotic one.... The very thought alone was treason against the people; was treason against man in general; as riveting forever the chains which bow down their necks, by giving to their oppressors a proof, which they would have trumpeted through the universe, of the imbecility of republican government, in times of pressing danger, to shield them from harm.... Those who meant well, of the advocates of this measure (and most of them meant well, for I know them personally, had been their fellow-laborer in the common cause, and had often proved the purity of their principles), had been seduced in their judgment by the example of an ancient republic, whose constitution and circumstances were fundamentally different."[269] With that artistic tact and that excellent prudence which seem never to have failed Jefferson in any of his enterprises for the disparagement of his associates, he here avoids, as will be observed, all mention of the name of the person for whose fatal promotion this classic conspiracy was formed,--leaving that interesting item to come out, as it did many years afterward, when the most of those who could have borne testimony upon the subject were in their graves, and when the damning stigma could be comfortably fastened to the name of Patrick Henry without the direct intervention of Jefferson's own hands. Accordingly, in 1816, a French gentleman, Girardin, a near neighbor of Jefferson's, who enjoyed "the incalculable benefit of a free access to Mr. Jefferson's library,"[270] and who wrote the continuation of Burk's "History of Virginia" under Jefferson's very eye,[271] gave in that work a highly wrought account of the alleged conspiracy of December, 1776, as involving "nothing less than the substitution of a despotic in lieu of a limited monarch;" and then proceeded to bring the accusation down from those lurid generalities of condemnation in which Jefferson himself had cautiously left it, by adding this sentence: "That Mr. Henry was the person in view for the dictatorship, is well ascertained."[272]