Gilbert Chinard

The peoples of the Old World worship at the birthplaces of their national heroes and bury their mortal remains in splendid mausoleums, pantheons or Westminster Abbeys. By a significant and symbolic contrast, the memories of Washington and Jefferson are enshrined in no ancestral homes, but in the mansions planned with loving care, in which they so expressed themselves that their very spirit seems to haunt the deserted rooms of Mount Vernon and Monticello. They are buried according to their wishes on their own land, at the very center of the acres they had themselves surveyed and reclaimed from the wilderness, close to nature and Mother Earth. However great may be their debt to the past and their remote ancestors, they stand by themselves at the threshold of America's national history,—master builders who wrestled with gigantic tasks and first thought of their country as the future home of unborn millions.

The boy who was born on April 2, 1743, in the recently erected farmhouse at Shadwell, on the bank of the Rivanna, never gave much thought to his lineage in his later life. Yet Virginians of good stock were always proud of their ancestry, and more than once he was told by his mother that the Randolphs could "trace their pedigree far back in England and Scotland." Jefferson's mother and John Marshall's grandmother were descended from William Randolph and Mary Isham, both of the English gentry, and Jane Randolph, issued from the best blood in the Old Dominion, had married when she was nineteen a man without means, whose education had been neglected, but sturdy and industrious and belonging to one of the proudest and most aristocratic lines of old Virginians.

Of his mother, Jefferson has told us very little either in his letters or in his "Autobiography." We may surmise she had the refined, modest, unobtrusive and yet efficient qualities so marked in the Virginia girls of the Colonial days and so often noticed by travelers. Sons are apt to mold their feminine ideal on the memory of their mother, and Jefferson may have been thinking both of her and of his wife when, many years later, he contrasted French frivolity with Virginian virtues:

In America, the society of your husband, the fond cares for the children, the arrangements of the house, the improvements of the grounds, fill every moment with a useful and healthy activity.... The intervals of leisure are filled by the society of real friends, whose affections are not thinned to cobweb, by being spread over a thousand objects. This is the picture, in the light it is presented to my mind.[1]

The fond cares for her children would have been ample to fill all the minutes of Jefferson's mother. Large families were the rule in Virginia; fifteen children were born to Thomas Marshall and Mary Keith, and Jefferson's family was no exception to the rule. Between 1740 and 1755, Jane Randolph gave ten children to Peter Jefferson; Thomas was the third child and the first son.

What information he gave about his father has to be completed from other sources. The tradition in the family was that "the first paternal ancestor came from Wales, and from near the mountain of Snowdon, the highest in Great Britain." Peter Jefferson, landowner, practical surveyor, of gigantic stature and strength, had the sturdy qualities and ambition of the pioneer. He received a colonelcy in the militia, became a member of the House of Burgesses in 1755, and in 1749 had been chosen with Joshua Fry, professor of mathematics in William and Mary College, to continue the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina. "He was afterwards employed with the same Mr. Fry to make the first map of Virginia which was ever made." Besides his association with Fry, from whom he drew the theoretical knowledge of mathematics in which he was lacking, Peter Jefferson improved himself by much reading, not novels, but the serious and sound books which constituted the ordinary family library in colonial Virginia,—historians, essayists, and most of all Shakespeare. For in Virginia as well as in New England, Shakespeare and the Bible were the two books found in every household, the two richest springs of the modern English language. Religion took up as much of their life as in New England. Prayers were said three and sometimes four times a day, and from his earliest infancy, Jefferson became familiar with the liturgy of the Church of England, and had stamped in his memory the strong old words, vigorous phrases and noble speech of King James' version.

He was only five years old when his father, already planning to give him the education of which he himself had been deprived, decided to send the boy to the best school in the neighborhood. He stayed two years at the English school; then, when nine, he went to the school of Mr. Douglas, a Scotch clergyman, who taught him French and the rudiments of Latin and Greek. Most of his childhood was spent away from home, as a boarding student, and the silence maintained by Jefferson with reference to his parents is thus easily explained. It explains also the lack of spontaneity and the awkwardness which always prevented him from expressing freely his emotions and sentiments. What may seem in him a national characteristic was largely a matter of training and early discipline.

He was fourteen when his father died, with a last recommendation that his son be given a classical education. Still a mere boy, Thomas Jefferson had become the oldest living male of the family and to a certain extent its head. Whether he was at first fully aware of his new responsibility is very doubtful. He could not remember without a retrospective fear in his later years how close he had come to wasting his whole life:

When I recollect that at fourteen years of age, the whole care and direction of myself was thrown on myself entirely, without a relation or friend, qualified to advise or guide me, and recollect the various sorts of bad company with which I associated from time to time, I am astonished I did not turn off with some of them, and become as worthless to society as they were.[2]

The next two years were spent as a boarding student with Reverend Mr. Maury, "a correct classical scholar"—probably not a very inspiring one, if we interpret rightly the adjective used by Jefferson. We may well imagine him at sixteen, a tall, slim boy, with auburn hair and clear eyes, fond of fowling, horse-riding and outdoors, fond of reading also, but disposing of very few books; for his father's library was not large and, if the Reverend Mr. Maury followed the tradition of many old schoolmasters, he seldom opened his library to his students. Still, he knew his Bible, had read a few English classics, was well grounded in Greek and Latin, and had perfected his knowledge of French; but it is doubtful whether he was acquainted with any French writer except the old standard authors—"TÉlÉmaque", Berquin, perhaps "Gil Blas" and Pascal's "PensÉes." But, even at that age, Jefferson necessarily knew something of the many duties of a landowner; for the slaves he was the young master, and during the summer he had to become somewhat acquainted with the management of a large estate. The education he had received was not exactly a frontier education with the usual connotations of that word. He had not been brought up in a log cabin, he had never engaged in back-breaking tasks of felling trees or of splitting rails; he probably had never put his hand to the plow except as an experiment.

He had heard his father tell of long journeys in the wilderness and of treacherous Indians, but no Red Men roamed the forests near Shadwell. The only Indians he knew were peaceful, almost romantic characters who stopped at the house of Colonel Jefferson on their way to Williamsburg.

I knew much—he said—of the great OntasserÉ, the warrior and orator of the Cherokees; he was always the guest of my father on his journeys to and from Williamsburg. I was in his camp when he made his great farewell oration to his people, the evening before his departure for England. The moon was in full splendor, and to her he seemed to address himself in his prayers for his own safety on the voyage, and that of his people during his absence; his sounding voice, distinct articulation, animated action, and the solemn silence of his people at their several fires, filled me with awe and admiration.[3]

This youthful impression left an indelible mark on his mind and was not without some influence on the "Notes on Virginia" as well as on the letters he wrote to Indian chiefs when he was President.

Nor was Shadwell exactly in the "howling wilderness", even if there was no large city near it. It was located on the road to Williamsburg, and many travelers stopped at the house on their way to the capital. Hospitality to friends and strangers was a sacred rite and most scrupulously observed. Much visiting was done in Virginia, and men particularly spent considerable time traveling from house to house; slaves were put up, horses were sent to the stable, while the best was spread on the table for the master. During the summer months, when roads were not made impassable by deep mudholes, one visitor had hardly left when another came. They had to be entertained, sometimes at a considerable expense, always at a considerable loss of time. Young Jefferson soon realized, after returning to Shadwell, that he would never amount to much and would probably become an idler, if he stayed on the estate like so many of his young friends. The wasting of precious moments irritated and disturbed him when he wanted to do some reading or some study, and he felt that the condition of the estate hardly warranted such a generous hospitality. He therefore decided to leave, and the letter he wrote on this occasion to his guardian, Mr. John Hervey of Bellemont, shows him fully aware of his responsibilities and perfectly definite in his plans.[4]

In the spring of 1760, the young man, then exactly seventeen, went to Williamsburg and enrolled in the College of William and Mary. Quite possibly it was his first visit to the capital of Virginia, his first contact with urban life. It was, for the time, a place of very respectable size and considerable activity. Old Professor Hugh Jones, a man much traveled and much read, described it enthusiastically in his "Present State of Virginia", published in London in 1724:

Williamsburg is a market town, and is governed by a mayor and aldermen. It is a town well stocked with rich stores, all sorts of goods, and well furnished with the best provisions and liquors. Here dwell several good families, and more reside here in their own houses at publick times. They live in the same neat manner, dress after the same modes, and behave themselves exactly as the Gentry in London; most families of note having a coach, chariot, Berlin, or chaize.... Thus they dwell comfortably, genteely, pleasantly, and plentifully in this delightful, healthful, and (I hope) pleasant city of Virginia.

Great occasions were receptions given by the Governor, meetings of the Assembly, occasional performances by regular companies from New York, semi-professional players and later, by the Virginian Company of Comedians. Horse races attracted every year a large concourse of people, for every true Virginian is a lover of horseflesh. Betting was active and large sums of money changed hands, particularly for the four-mile heat race given each year on the course adjoining the town.

Ladies in all the glory of their imported dresses, gentlemen in brilliantly colored knee breeches and coats, with elegantly chased swords at their sides and the best beaver hats made in London under their arms, attended the receptions, the dances, the theater, and more than once adjourned to the famous Apollo room in the Raleigh Tavern, where they indulged in much drinking of "punch, beer, Nantes rum, brandy, Madeira and French claret." The first time young Jefferson went to the Raleigh he was probably shown the largest punch bowl in the house, which had played a part in the purchase of Shadwell, for had not Colonel Jefferson bought the site from William Randolph of Tuckahoe, for "Henry Weatherbourne's biggest bowl of arrack punch"?

The college itself was no less an attraction than the town. Built originally on the plans of Christopher Wren, it had unfortunately been remodeled after a fire, "a rude, misshapen pile, which but it had a roof would be taken for a brick-kiln", wrote Jefferson in his "Notes on Virginia." Such as it was, however, with the Capitol, of much better style, it was the first large building and monument the young man had ever seen and he probably admired it at the time as much as most Virginians did.

It was by no means a university, not even a real college. Like most institutions of learning in the colonies, it had been established "to the end that the church of Virginia may be furnished with a seminary for ministers of the gospel, and that the youth may be piously educated in good letters and manners, and that the Christian faith may be propagated amongst the Western Indians, to the glory of the Almighty."

The lack of preparation of the students, the fact that the sons of the wealthiest were sent to England to finish their education, perhaps also an aristocratic scorn for specialized and intensive learning among the gentry of Virginia, all had contributed to keep down the standards of the institution. Much to his disgust, Jefferson found

Thus the problem of caring for the many, the danger of keeping together in college the prepared and the unprepared students, which is still with us, existed already in America one hundred and fifty years ago. Evidently Jefferson considered himself as one of those young gentlemen who were prepared for entering upon the study of the sciences; he was certainly more mature for his years than most of his fellow students and looked down upon them as well, we may surmise, as upon the teachers themselves. On the other hand, the town offered many temptations and he probably yielded to some of them. He was often thrown into the society of horse-racers, card-players, fox-hunters, and at the end of his first year in college it appeared to him that he had spent more than his share of the income of the estate. He therefore wrote to his guardian to charge his expenses to his share of the property: "No," Colonel Walker is reported to have said,—"if you have sowed your wild oats thus, the estate may well afford to pay the bill."

We possess no precise information upon the amount spent by Jefferson nor any account book for that year, but we may surmise that Colonel Walker would not have been so lenient if the total sum had been spent in reprehensible dissipations. Williamsburg boasted of a large bookstore, and in 1775 Dixon and Hunter published a list of more than three hundred titles in their stock. Book lovers are born and not made. Jefferson had never been able to satisfy fully his passion for books, and as the college library offered him only very meager resources, he must have plunged with delight in the bookshop of Williamsburg and bought extravagantly, an expense the estate "could well afford to pay." But the fact remained that what he had learned he had learned by himself, and that college life had not furnished him the guidance and direction he was looking for.

It was at this juncture that Doctor Small, professor of mathematics, was appointed ad interim professor of philosophy and soon developed an interest in the young Virginian. Jefferson himself paid a grateful tribute to the man who just in time rescued him from his frivolous companions and brought back to his mind the serious purpose he had entertained when he entered William and Mary.

For Jefferson Doctor Small was the prime awakener and inspirer. Through him the young man was introduced to George Wythe who soon accepted him as a student of law, and through him again he was received by Governor Fauquier.

Such were the first really cultured men with whom Jefferson ever came in contact: William Small, the mathematician and philosopher, would not have been a true Scot if he had not had that passionate love for discussion and logic which seems the innate gift of so many sons of the Highlands. Francis Fauquier, "the ornament and delight of Virginia", generous, liberal, elegant in his manners and requirements, was the son of Doctor Fauquier of Floirac, near Bordeaux, who had worked under Newton in the mint and become a director of the Bank of England. His early biographer Burke, the Virginia historian, has chiefly emphasized his propensity to gaming. But Fauquier was an economist of no mean distinction and had written an important tract on the basis of taxation. He was interested in physics or natural philosophy and had become a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was a student of natural phenomena and sent to the Society the description of a hail-storm in Virginia. Finally, there was George Wythe, whose virtue was of the purest tint, his integrity inflexible, and his justice exact. Last and most important of all his qualities, perhaps, was the characteristic peculiarity mentioned by Jefferson in the sketch he wrote after the death of his old master: "he was firm in his philosophy, and neither troubling, nor perhaps trusting any one with his religion."

Such were the true masters of Thomas Jefferson, and from their conversations around the table, after bottles of port had been brought, he learned more than any student at William and Mary ever acquired in college. It was a rare privilege for a young man of Jefferson's age to be admitted to the "parties carrÉes", and he must have already given singular promise to have been invited at all into the society of these three luminaries of Virginia. What topics were discussed among them can easily be imagined. Fauquier would speak of old England, the theaters of London, the monuments and works of art, of his colleagues of the Royal Society, or discuss a problem of taxation or a recent meteorological phenomenon. A man of the world, a friend of Admiral Anson whom he had met after his circumnavigation of the globe, a director of the South Sea Company, he would speak of ships, strange lands, and reveal to the young man the existence of a world extending far beyond his native Virginia. Thus was born in Jefferson that ardent desire to travel and most of all to see England which appears in some letters written in the early sixties.

Philosophical and religious subjects perhaps were introduced, although that is rather doubtful, in my opinion. The passage on George Wythe, already quoted, mentions his reticence on religion. Whatever may have been the propensity of Fauquier to gaming, he was never accused by his contemporaries of being a religious libertine. It is also very doubtful whether any of the group would naturally have discussed such subjects, particularly in the presence of a young student whose education had been deeply religious. Finally it must be remembered that in Virginia, as well as in New England, there always existed some "reserved questions", that it was not good form to criticize established institutions and current beliefs. It is quite possible that Fauquier may have lent to Jefferson certain volumes of Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke, but in spite of the contrary opinion expressed by some biographers of Jefferson, it seems very unlikely that any of the three older men should have undertaken to shake the foundations of his faith. The "parties carrÉes" could not have lasted very long, since William Small went back to Scotland in 1762. But Jefferson's acquaintance with Fauquier and Wythe was continued for many years after the departure of the philosopher and, in both cases, until the death of the older men.

The master of Shadwell had sown his wild oats; he had had his brief flight of dissipation and had reformed; but he had by no means become a hermit. He had not entirely given up attending horse races and fox hunts.

What young man has not thus dreamed of serving his country and devoting himself to some noble cause, what student preparing for the bar has not pictured himself winning a difficult case, forcing the judge's attention and swaying a reluctant jury? The ambition to become an orator may have been awakened in his mind by the acquaintance he had made of the "uncultured Demosthenes" of the Old Dominion. In the winter of 1759-1760, he had met at the house of Mr. Dandrige, in Hanover, a tall, ascetic-looking fellow, rather disdainful of finery and careless in his wearing apparel, but "with such strains of native eloquence as Homer wrote in"—"I never heard anything that deserved to be called by the same name with what flowed from him," wrote Jefferson later, "and where he got that torrent of language is unconceivable. I have frequently shut my eyes while he spoke, and, when he was done, asked myself what he had said, without being able to recollect a word of it. He was no logician. He was truly a great man, however—one of enlarged views."

His name was Patrick Henry. Far less uncultured than Jefferson's portrait would lead us to believe, related to very good families, although poor and a complete failure as a merchant, Patrick Henry had suddenly decided to enter the legal profession, and after borrowing a "Coke upon Littleton" and a "Digest of the Virginia Acts", he had appeared after six weeks' preparation before the board of examiners. He won his diploma through logic, clear presentation and common sense rather than through his knowledge of the law, and commenced practicing in the fall of the same year. Whenever a case appeared before the General Court sitting at Williamsburg and consisting of the Governor and his council, "he used to put up" with Jefferson, borrowing books which he seldom read, always ready with stories of the backwoods. Fame came to him soon after, when his fiery eloquence in the "parson's case" drew down upon him clerical hostility and public admiration. "Instead of feeding the hungry and clothing the naked," he cried out in the courtroom, "these religious harpies would, were their powers equal to their will, snatch from the hearth of their honest parishioner his last hoe-cake, from the widow and her orphan children their last milch cow, the last bed, nay, the last blanket, from the lying-in woman."[8] Not even in the days of the Convention did the halls of Paris echo with more vehement vituperations and more indignant denunciations. A magnetic power, an emotional appeal to elementary passion, to a sense of justice in the mass rather than to the letter of the law fitted him for political life. He was soon to have his opportunity; in the meantime he awoke in Jefferson a revolt against clerical usurpations that was to bear its fruit in time. Usually passed over by Jefferson's biographers, the plea made by Patrick Henry in the "parson's case" seems to have been the incident that called the young man's attention to the position occupied by the established Church in its relations to the civil power. It started in him the train of thought that culminated in the "Bill for religious freedom."

It has been sometimes said that Jefferson used to spend fourteen hours a day in study when he was at Williamsburg; his correspondence with John Page shows him in a very different light. He was not in any sense a bookworm, even though he read enormously, but he played as strenuously as he studied. A good horseman, a good violin player, a good dancer, he was a much-sought-after young man. He had a keen eye for the ladies, and very early in 1762 he had fallen in love with Miss Rebecca Burwell, the Bell-in-day, Belinda, campana in die, Adnileb of his letters to Page. The young lady had given him her profile cut in black paper which he carried in his watch case. Far from her, life lost all interest: "all things appear to me to trudge in one and the same round: we rise in the morning that we may eat breakfast, dinner and supper, and to go to bed again, that we may get up the next morning and do the same, so that you never saw two peas more alike than our yesterday and to-day." He had in mind to go back to Williamsburg, to propose, receive his sentence and be no longer in suspense: "but reason says, if you go, and your attempts prove unsuccessful, you will be ten times more wretched than ever."[9] Spring, then summer came, and he could not muster up enough courage to declare himself. Madly in love as he was, he was not intending to marry at once. He had formed great plans for traveling. He was dreaming of hoisting his sail and visiting England, Holland, France, Spain, Italy (where I would buy me a good fiddle), and Egypt, and return home through the British provinces to the northward. This would take him two or three years. Was it fair to ask Belinda to wait so long for him? And yet he could not leave without speaking and remain in suspense and cruel uncertainty during the whole trip. "If I am to meet with a disappointment, the sooner I know it, the more of life I shall have to wear if off ... If Belinda will not accept of my service, it will never be offered to another. That she may I pray most sincerely: but that she will, she never gave me reason to hope."[10]

When college opened again at the beginning of October, he had made up his mind to make his position clear. A dance was to be given in the Apollo room of the Raleigh Tavern. He dressed up in all his finery, he rehearsed in his head such thoughts as occurred to him and made a complete fiasco. "A few broken sentences, uttered in great disorder, and interrupted with pauses of uncommon length were the too visible marks of my strange confusion" (October 7, 1763). Belinda did not say a word to relieve him in his embarrassment, did not manifest in any way that she understood his purpose, and several months were to elapse before Jefferson had another opportunity to express himself. This time he had learnt his piece perfectly, and from what we know of him already it is probable that he made a very clear presentation of his case, too clear and too logical even, for he concluded by saying that the decision rested with her and that a new interview would not serve any purpose. A strange lover indeed, apparently as madly in love as a young man could be, and yet too respectful of the free will of his beloved to attempt to sweep her off her feet by too frequent interviews and too passionate pleas! Belinda listened attentively but did not give any indication that Jefferson's speech had convinced her and won her heart. A few weeks later the bashful suitor heard indirectly of her answer when she announced her marriage to Mr. B ... Whether it was "for money, beauty, or principle will be so nice a dispute, that no one will venture to pronounce", wrote Jefferson at the time. To crown the joke, his happy rival, who evidently had been kept in blissful ignorance of Jefferson's sentiments, asked him to act as a best man at the wedding. A more ironical trick of fate could scarcely be imagined; but, all considered, Belinda was not altogether to blame.

Thomas Jefferson did not think of committing suicide, he did not swear revenge, nor did he curse the ungrateful one in any of his letters. We have some reason to believe, however, that his affair with Belinda marked a decisive turn in his life. It killed whatever romantic strains may have existed in his heart; it matured him, and it was probably at that time that the long-belated metaphysical crisis took place, the disappointed lover evolving a certain philosophy of life which he was to retain to the end of his days.

CHAPTER II