To a young Virginian of Jefferson’s standing but two active careers were open, law and politics, and in almost every case these two, sooner or later, merged in one. The condition of Virginia was very different from that of New England,—neither the clerical nor the medical profession was held in esteem. There were no manufactures, and there was no general commerce.

Nature has divided Virginia into two parts: the mountainous region to the west and the broad level plain between the mountains and the sea, intersected by numerous rivers, in which, far back from the ocean, the tide ebbs and flows. In this tide-water region were situated the tobacco plantations which constituted the wealth and were inhabited by the aristocracy of the colony. Almost every planter lived near a river and had his own [pg 17]wharf, whence a schooner carried his tobacco to London, and brought back wines, silks, velvets, guns, saddles, and shoes.

The small proprietors of land were comparatively few in number, and the whole constitution of the colony, political and social, was aristocratic. Both real estate and slaves descended by force of law to the eldest son, so that the great properties were kept intact. There were no townships and no town meetings. The political unit was the parish; for the Episcopal church was the established church,—a state institution; and the parishes were of great extent, there being, as a rule, but one or two parishes in a county.

The clergy, though belonging to an establishment, were poorly paid, and not revered as a class. They held the same position of inferiority in respect to the rich planters which the clergy of England held in respect to the country gentry at the same period. Being appointed by the crown, they were selected without much regard to fitness, and they were demoralized by want of supervision, for there were no resident bishops, and, [pg 18]further, by the uncertain character of their incomes, which, being paid in tobacco, were subject to great fluctuations. A few were men of learning and virtue who performed their duties faithfully, and eked out their incomes by taking pupils. “It was these few,” remarks Mr. Parton, “who saved civilization in the colony.” A few others became cultivators of tobacco, and acquired wealth. But the greater part of the clergy were companions and hangers-on of the rich planters,—examples of that type which Thackeray so well describes in the character of Parson Sampson in “The Virginians.” Strange tales were told of these old Virginia parsons. One is spoken of as pocketing annually a hundred dollars, the revenue of a legacy for preaching four sermons a year against atheism, gambling, racing, and swearing,—for all of which vices, except the first, he was notorious.

This period, the middle half of the eighteenth century, was, as the reader need not be reminded, that in which the English church sank to its lowest point. It was the [pg 19]era when the typical country parson was a convivial fox-hunter; when the Fellows of colleges sat over their wine from four o’clock, their dinner hour, till midnight or after; when the highest type of bishop was a learned man who spent more time in his private studies than in the duties of his office; when the cathedrals were neglected and dirty, and the parish churches were closed from Sunday to Sunday. In England, the reaction produced Methodism, and, later, the Tractarian movement; and we are told that even in Virginia, “swarms of Methodists, Moravians, and New-Light Presbyterians came over the border from Pennsylvania, and pervaded the colony.”

Taxation pressed with very unequal force upon the poor, and the right of voting was confined to freeholders. There was no system of public schools, and the great mass of the people were ignorant and coarse, but morally and physically sound,—a good substructure for an aristocratic society. Wealth being concentrated mainly in the hands of a few, Virginia presented striking contrasts of [pg 20]luxury and destitution, whereas in the neighboring colony of Pennsylvania, where wealth was more distributed and society more democratic, thrift and prosperity were far more common.

“In Pennsylvania,” relates a foreign traveler, “one sees great numbers of wagons drawn by four or more fine fat horses.... In the slave States we sometimes meet a ragged black boy or girl driving a team consisting of a lean cow and a mule; and I have seen a mule, a bull, and a cow, each miserable in its appearance, composing one team, with a half-naked black slave or two riding or driving as occasion suited.” And yet between Richmond and Fredericksburg, “in the afternoon, as our road lay through the woods, I was surprised to meet a family party traveling along in as elegant a coach as is usually met with in the neighborhood of London, and attended by several gayly dressed footmen.”

Virginia society just before the Revolution perfectly illustrated Buckle’s remark about leisure: “Without leisure, science is impos[pg 21]sible; and when leisure has been won, most of the class possessing it will waste it in the pursuit of pleasure, and a few will employ it in the pursuit of knowledge.” Men like Jefferson, George Wythe, and Madison used their leisure for the good of their fellow-beings and for the cultivation of their minds; whereas the greater part of the planters—and the poor whites imitated them—spent their ample leisure in sports, in drinking, and in absolute idleness. “In spite of the Virginians’ love for dissipation,” wrote a famous French traveler, “the taste for reading is commoner among men of the first rank than in any other part of America; but the populace is perhaps more ignorant there than elsewhere.” “The Virginia virtues,” says Mr. Henry Adams, “were those of the field and farm—the simple and straightforward mind, the notions of courage and truth, the absence of mercantile sharpness and quickness, the rusticity and open-handed hospitality.” Virginians of the upper class were remarkable for their high-bred courtesy,—a trait so inherent that it rarely disappeared [pg 22]even in the bitterness of political disputes and divisions. This, too, was the natural product of a society based not on trade or commerce, but on land. “I blush for my own people,” wrote Dr. Channing, from Virginia, in 1791, “when I compare the selfish prudence of a Yankee with the generous confidence of a Virginian. Here I find great vices, but greater virtues than I left behind me.” There was a largeness of temper and of feeling in the Virginia aristocracy, which seems to be inseparable from people living in a new country, upon the outskirts of civilization. They had the pride of birth, but they recognized other claims to consideration, and were as far as possible from estimating a man according to the amount of his wealth.

Slavery itself was probably a factor for good in the character of such a man as Jefferson,—it afforded a daily exercise in the virtues of benevolence and self-control. How he treated the blacks may be gathered from a story, told by his superintendent, of a slave named Jim who had been caught stealing [pg 23]nails from the nail-factory: “When Mr. Jefferson came, I sent for Jim, and I never saw any person, white or black, feel as badly as he did when he saw his master. The tears streamed down his face, and he begged for pardon over and over again. I felt very badly myself. Mr. Jefferson turned to me and said, ‘Ah, sir, we can’t punish him. He has suffered enough already.’ He then talked to him, gave him a heap of good advice, and sent him to the shop.... Jim said: ‘Well I’se been a-seeking religion a long time, but I never heard anything before that sounded so, or made me feel so, as I did when Master said, “Go, and don’t do so any more,” and now I’se determined to seek religion till I find it;’ and sure enough he afterwards came to me for a permit to go and be baptized.... He was always a good servant afterward.”

Another element that contributed to the efficiency and the high standard of the early Virginia statesman was a good, old-fashioned classical education. They were familiar, to use Matthew Arnold’s famous expression, [pg 24]“with the best that has ever been said or done.” This was no small advantage to men who were called upon to act as founders of a republic different indeed from the republics of Greece and Rome, but still based upon the same principles, and demanding an exercise of the same heroic virtues. The American Revolution would never have cut quite the figure in the world which history assigns to it, had it not been conducted with a kind of classic dignity and decency; and to this result nobody contributed more than Jefferson.

Such was Virginia in the eighteenth century,—at the base of society, the slaves; next, a lower class, rough, ignorant, and somewhat brutal, but still wholesome, and possessing the primitive virtues of courage and truth; and at the top, the landed gentry, luxurious, proud, idle and dissipated for the most part, and yet blossoming into a few characters of a type so high that the world has hardly seen a better. Had he been born in Europe, Jefferson would doubtless have devoted himself to music, or to [pg 25]architecture, or to literature, or to science,—for in all these directions his taste was nearly equally strong; but these careers being closed to him by the circumstances of the colony, he became a lawyer, and then, under pressure of the Revolution, a politician and statesman.

During the four years following his graduation, Jefferson spent most of the winter months at Williamsburg, pursuing his legal and other studies, and the rest of the year upon the family plantation, the management of which had devolved upon him. Now, as always, he was the most industrious of men. He lived, as Mr. Parton remarks, “with a pen in his hand.” He kept a garden book, a farm book, a weather book, a receipt book, a cash book, and, while he practiced law, a fee book. Many of these books are still preserved, and the entries are as legible now as when they were first written down in Jefferson’s small but clear and graceful hand,—the hand of an artist. Jefferson, as one of his old friends once remarked, hated superficial knowledge; and he dug to the roots of [pg 26]the common law, reading deeply in old reports written in law French and law Latin, and especially studying Magna Charta and Bracton.

He found time also for riding, for music, and dancing; and in his twentieth year he became enamored of Miss Rebecca Burwell, a Williamsburg belle more distinguished, tradition reports, for beauty than for cleverness. But Jefferson was not yet in a position to marry,—he even contemplated a foreign tour; and the girl, somewhat abruptly, married another lover. The wound seems not to have been a deep one. Jefferson, in fact, though he found his chief happiness in family affection, and though capable of strong and lasting attachments, was not the man for a romantic passion. He was a philosopher of the reasonable, eighteenth-century type. No one was more kind and just in the treatment of his slaves, but he did not free them, as George Wythe, perhaps foolishly, did; and he was even cautious about promulgating his views as to the folly and wickedness of slavery, though he did his [pg 27]best to promote its abolition by legislative measures. There was not in Jefferson the material for a martyr or a Don Quixote; but that was Nature’s fault, not his. It may be said of every particular man that there is a certain depth to which he cannot sink, and there is a certain height to which he cannot rise. Within the intermediate zone there is ample exercise for free-will; and no man struggled harder than Jefferson to fulfill all the obligations which, as he conceived, were laid upon him.