Jefferson was 75, half-retired at Monticello and, by his own account in this very letter, reading almost nothing but ancient history — “I read no newspaper now but Ritchie’s, and in that chiefly the advertisments, for they contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.”
What roused him was money. The letter is a small tirade about the collapse of stable value in the post-1815 banking boom — eighteen dollars for a yard of broadcloth that used to cost eighteen shillings — and about “swindlers and shavers” who would close their careers in fraudulent bankruptcy. The famous line is his consolation at the end of that complaint: whatever else the next generation lacks, he hopes it will at least have worked out that honesty comes first.
A line about bank fraud, not a motto about character.
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The aphorism travels as a standalone sentence with a capital H and a full stop. Jefferson wrote it lowercase, as a subordinate clause, at the end of a sentence beginning “Whether the succeeding generation is to be more virtuous than their predecessors, I cannot say…” — a hedge, not a proclamation.
He signs off by apologising for the length: “I have made a great exertion to write you thus much; my antipathy to taking up a pen being so intense that I have never given you a stronger proof… how much I value you.”