*The Riverside Biographical Series*
NUMBER 5
THOMAS JEFFERSON
BY
HENRY CHILDS MERWIN
[Illustration: Th. Jefferson]
THOMAS JEFFERSON
BY
HENRY CHILDS MERWIN
[Publisher’s emblem]
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
Boston: 4 Park Street; New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street
Chicago: 378-388 Wabash Avenue
*The Riverside Press, Cambridge*
COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY HENRY C. MERWIN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. YOUTH AND TRAINING 1
II. VIRGINIA IN JEFFERSON’S DAY 16
III. MONTICELLO AND ITS HOUSEHOLD 28
IV. JEFFERSON IN THE REVOLUTION 36
V. REFORM WORK IN VIRGINIA 45
VI. GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA 59
VII. ENVOY AT PARIS 71
VIII. SECRETARY OF STATE 82
IX. THE TWO PARTIES 98
X. PRESIDENT JEFFERSON 114
XI. SECOND PRESIDENTIAL TERM 130
XII. A PUBLIC MAN IN PRIVATE LIFE 149
THOMAS JEFFERSON
I
YOUTH AND TRAINING
Thomas Jefferson was born upon a frontier estate in Albemarle County,
Virginia, April 13, 1743. His father, Peter Jefferson, was of Welsh
descent, not of aristocratic birth, but of that yeoman class which
constitutes the backbone of all societies. The elder Jefferson had
uncommon powers both of mind and body. His strength was such that he could
simultaneously “head up”—that is, raise from their sides to an upright
position—two hogsheads of tobacco, weighing nearly one thousand pounds
apiece. Like Washington, he was a surveyor; and there is a tradition that
once, while running his lines through a vast wilderness, his assistants
gave out from famine and fatigue, and Peter Jefferson pushed on alone,
sleeping at night in hollow trees, amidst howling beasts of prey, and
subsisting on the flesh of a pack mule which he had been obliged to kill.
Thomas Jefferson inherited from his father a love of mathematics and of
literature. Peter Jefferson had not received a classical education, but he
was a diligent reader of a few good books, chiefly Shakespeare, The
Spectator, Pope, and Swift; and in mastering these he was forming his mind
on great literature after the manner of many another Virginian,—for the
houses of that colony held English books as they held English furniture.
The edition of Shakespeare (and it is a handsome one) which Peter
Jefferson used is still preserved among the heirlooms of his descendants.
It was probably in his capacity of surveyor that Mr. Jefferson made the
acquaintance of the Randolph family, and he soon became the bosom friend
of William Randolph, the young proprietor of Tuckahoe. The Randolphs had
been for ages a family of consideration in the midland counties of
England, claiming descent from the Scotch Earls of Murray, and connected
by blood or marriage with many of the English nobility. In 1735 Peter
Jefferson established himself as a planter by patenting a thousand acres
of land in Goochland County, his estate lying near and partly including
the outlying hills, which form a sort of picket line for the Blue Mountain
range. At the same time his friend William Randolph patented an adjoining
estate of twenty-four hundred acres; and inasmuch as there was no good
site for a house on Jefferson’s estate, Mr. Randolph conveyed to him four
hundred acres for that purpose, the consideration expressed in the deed,
which is still extant, being “Henry Weatherbourne’s biggest bowl of Arrack
punch.”
Here Peter Jefferson built his house, and here, three years later, he
brought his bride,—a handsome girl of nineteen, and a kinswoman of William
Randolph, being Jane, oldest child of Isham Randolph, then
Adjutant-General of Virginia. She was born in London, in the parish of
Shadwell, and Shadwell was the name given by Peter Jefferson to his
estate. This marriage was a fortunate union of the best aristocratic and
yeoman strains in Virginia.
In the year 1744 the new County of Albemarle was carved out of Goochland
County, and Peter Jefferson was appointed one of the three justices who
constituted the county court and were the real rulers of the shire. He was
made also Surveyor, and later Colonel of the county. This last office was
regarded as the chief provincial honor in Virginia, and it was especially
important when he held it, for it was the time of the French war, and
Albemarle was in the debatable land.
In the midst of that war, in August, 1757, Peter Jefferson died suddenly,
of a disease which is not recorded, but which was probably produced by
fatigue and exposure. He was a strong, just, kindly man, sought for as a
protector of the widow and the orphan, and respected and loved by Indians
as well as white men. Upon his deathbed he left two injunctions regarding
his son Thomas: one, that he should receive a classical education; the
other, that he should never be permitted to neglect the physical exercises
necessary for health and strength. Of these dying commands his son often
spoke with gratitude; and he used to say that if he were obliged to choose
between the education and the estate which his father gave him, he would
choose the education. Peter Jefferson left eight children, but only one
son besides Thomas, and that one died in infancy. Less is known of
Jefferson’s mother; but he derived from her a love of music, an
extraordinary keenness of susceptibility, and a corresponding refinement
of taste.
His father’s death left Jefferson his own master. In one of his later
letters he says: “At fourteen years of age the whole care and direction of
myself were thrown on myself entirely, without a relative or a friend
qualified to advise or guide me.”
The first use that he made of his liberty was to change his school, and to
become a pupil of the Rev. James Maury,—an excellent clergyman and
scholar, of Huguenot descent, who had recently settled in Albemarle
County. With him young Jefferson continued for two years, studying Greek
and Latin, and becoming noted, as a schoolmate afterward reported, for
scholarship, industry, and shyness. He was a good runner, a keen
fox-hunter, and a bold and graceful rider.
At the age of sixteen, in the spring of 1760, he set out on horseback for
Williamsburg, the capital of Virginia, where he proposed to enter the
college of William and Mary. Up to this time he had never seen a town, or
even a village, except the hamlet of Charlottesville, which is about four
miles from Shadwell. Williamsburg—described in contemporary language as
“the centre of taste, fashion, and refinement”—was an unpaved village, of
about one thousand inhabitants, surrounded by an expanse of dark green
tobacco fields as far as the eye could reach. It was, however, well
situated upon a plateau midway between the York and James rivers, and was
swept by breezes which tempered the heat of the summer sun and kept the
town free from mosquitoes.
Williamsburg was also well laid out, and it has the honor of having served
as a model for the city of Washington. It consisted chiefly of a single
street, one hundred feet broad and three quarters of a mile long, with the
capitol at one end, the college at the other, and a ten-acre square with
public buildings in the middle. Here in his palace lived the colonial
governor. The town also contained “ten or twelve gentlemen’s families,
besides merchants and tradesmen.” These were the permanent inhabitants;
and during the “season”—the midwinter months—the planters’ families came
to town in their coaches, the gentlemen on horseback, and the little
capital was then a scene of gayety and dissipation.
Such was Williamsburg in 1760 when Thomas Jefferson, the frontier
planter’s son, rode slowly into town at the close of an early spring day,
surveying with the outward indifference, but keen inward curiosity of a
countryman, the place which was to be his residence for seven years,—in
one sense the most important, because the most formative, period of his
life. He was a tall stripling, rather slightly built,—after the model of
the Randolphs,—but extremely well-knit, muscular, and agile. His face was
freckled, and his features were somewhat pointed. His hair is variously
described as red, reddish, and sandy, and the color of his eyes as blue,
gray, and also hazel. The expression of his face was frank, cheerful, and
engaging. He was not handsome in youth, but “a very good-looking man in
middle age, and quite a handsome old man.” At maturity he stood six feet
two and a half inches. “Mr. Jefferson,” said Mr. Bacon, at one time the
superintendent of his estate, “was well proportioned and straight as a
gun-barrel. He was like a fine horse, he had no surplus flesh. He had an
iron constitution, and was very strong.”
Jefferson was always the most cheerful and optimistic of men. He once
said, after remarking that something must depend “on the chapter of
events:” “I am in the habit of turning over the next leaf with hope, and,
though it often fails me, there is still another and another behind.” No
doubt this sanguine trait was due in part at least to his almost perfect
health. He was, to use his own language, “blessed with organs of digestion
which accepted and concocted, without ever murmuring, whatever the palate
chose to consign to them.” His habits through life were good. He never
smoked, he drank wine in moderation, he went to bed early, he was regular
in taking exercise, either by walking or, more commonly, by riding on
horseback.
The college of William and Mary in Jefferson’s day is described by Mr.
Parton as “a medley of college, Indian mission, and grammar school,
ill-governed, and distracted by dissensions among its ruling powers.” But
Jefferson had a thirst for knowledge and a capacity for acquiring it,
which made him almost independent of institutions of learning. Moreover,
there was one professor who had a large share in the formation of his
mind. “It was my great good fortune,” he wrote in his brief autobiography,
“and what probably fixed the destinies of my life, that Dr. William Small,
of Scotland, was then professor of mathematics; a man profound in most of
the useful branches of science, with a happy talent of communication and
an enlarged liberal mind. He, most happily for me, soon became attached to
me, and made me his daily companion when not engaged in the school; and
from his conversation I got my first views of the expansion of science,
and of the system of things in which we are placed.”
Jefferson, like all well-bred Virginians, was brought up as an
Episcopalian; but as a young man, perhaps owing in part to the influence
of Dr. Small, he ceased to believe in Christianity as a religion, though
he always at home attended the Episcopal church, and though his daughters
were brought up in that faith. If any theological term is to be applied to
him, he should be called a Deist. Upon the subject of his religious faith,
Jefferson was always extremely reticent. To one or two friends only did he
disclose his creed, and that was in letters which were published after his
death. When asked, even by one of his own family, for his opinion upon any
religious matter, he invariably refused to express it, saying that every
person was bound to look into the subject for himself, and to decide upon
it conscientiously, unbiased by the opinions of others.
Dr. Small introduced Jefferson to other valuable acquaintances; and, boy
though he was, he soon became the fourth in a group of friends which
embraced the three most notable men in the little metropolis. These were,
beside Dr. Small, Francis Fauquier, the acting governor of the province,
appointed by the crown, and George Wythe. Fauquier was a courtly,
honorable, highly cultivated man of the world, a disciple of Voltaire, and
a confirmed gambler, who had in this respect an unfortunate influence upon
the Virginia gentry,—not, however, upon Jefferson, who, though a lover of
horses, and a frequenter of races, never in his life gambled or even
played cards. Wythe was then just beginning a long and honorable career as
lawyer, statesman, professor, and judge. He remained always a firm and
intimate friend of Jefferson, who spoke of him, after his death, as “my
second father.” It is an interesting fact that Thomas Jefferson, John
Marshall, and Henry Clay were all, in succession, law students in the
office of George Wythe.
Many of the government officials and planters who flocked to Williamsburg
in the winter were related to Jefferson on his mother’s side, and they
opened their houses to him with Virginia hospitality. We read also of
dances in the “Apollo,” the ball-room of the old Raleigh tavern, and of
musical parties at Gov. Fauquier’s house, in which Jefferson, who was a
skillful and enthusiastic fiddler, always took part. “I suppose,” he
remarked in his old age, “that during at least a dozen years of my life, I
played no less than three hours a day.”
At this period he was somewhat of a dandy, very particular about his
clothes and equipage, and devoted, as indeed he remained through life, to
fine horses. Virginia imported more thoroughbred horses than any other
colony, and to this day there is probably a greater admixture of
thoroughbred blood there than in any other State. Diomed, winner of the
first English Derby, was brought over to Virginia in 1799, and founded a
family which, even now, is highly esteemed as a source of speed and
endurance. Jefferson had some of his colts; and both for the saddle and
for his carriage he always used high-bred horses.
Referring to the Williamsburg period of his life, he wrote once to a
grandson: “When I 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.... But I had the
good fortune to become acquainted very early with some characters of very
high standing, and to feel the incessant wish that I could ever become
what they were. Under temptations and difficulties, I would ask myself
what would Dr. Small, Mr. Wythe, Peyton Randolph do in this situation?
What course in it will assure me their approbation? I am certain that this
mode of deciding on my conduct tended more to correctness than any
reasoning powers that I possesed.”
This passage throws a light upon Jefferson’s character. It does not seem
to occur to him that a young man might require some stronger motive to
keep his passions in check than could be furnished either by the wish to
imitate a good example or by his “reasoning powers.” To Jefferson’s
well-regulated mind the desire for approbation was a sufficient motive. He
was particularly sensitive, perhaps morbidly so, to disapprobation. The
respect, the good-will, the affection of his countrymen were so dear to
him that the desire to retain them exercised a great, it may be at times,
an undue influence upon him. “I find,” he once said, “the pain of a little
censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of
much praise.”
During his second year at college, Jefferson laid aside all frivolities.
He sent home his horses, contenting himself with a mile run out and back
at nightfall for exercise, and studying, if we may believe the biographer,
no less than fifteen hours a day. This intense application reduced the
time of his college course by one half; and after the second winter at
Williamsburg he went home with a degree in his pocket, and a volume of
Coke upon Lytleton in his trunk.
II
VIRGINIA IN JEFFERSON’S DAY
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 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, 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 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 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 impossible; 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 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 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,
“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
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 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 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.
III
MONTICELLO AND ITS HOUSEHOLD
In April, 1764, Jefferson came of age, and his first public act was a
characteristic one. For the benefit of the neighborhood, he procured the
passage of a statute to authorize the dredging of the Rivanna River upon
which his own estate bordered in part. He then by private subscriptions
raised a sum sufficient for carrying out this purpose; and in a short time
the stream, upon which before a bark canoe would hardly have floated, was
made available for the transportation of farm produce to the James River,
and thence to the sea.
In 1766, he made a journey to Philadelphia, in order to be inoculated for
smallpox, traveling in a light gig drawn by a high-spirited horse, and
narrowly escaping death by drowning in one of the numerous rivers which
had to be forded between Charlottesville and Philadelphia. In the
following year, about the time of his twenty-fourth birthday, he was
admitted to the bar, and entered almost immediately upon a large and
lucrative practice. He remained at the bar only seven years, but during
most of this time his professional income averaged more than £2500 a year;
and he increased his paternal estate from 1900 acres to 5000 acres. He
argued with force and fluency, but his voice was not suitable for public
speaking, and soon became husky. Moreover, Jefferson had an intense
repugnance to the arena. He shrank with a kind of nervous horror from a
personal contest, and hated to be drawn into a discussion. The turmoil and
confusion of a public body were hideous to him;—it was as a writer, not as
a speaker, that he won fame, first in the Virginia Assembly, and afterward
in the Continental Congress.
In October, 1768, Jefferson was chosen to represent Albemarle County in
the House of Burgesses of Virginia; and thus began his long political
career of forty years. A resolution which he formed at the outset is
stated in the following letter written in 1792 to a friend who had offered
him a share in an undertaking which promised to be profitable:—
“When I first entered on the stage of public life (now twenty-four years
ago) I came to a resolution never to engage, while in public office, in
any kind of enterprise for the improvement of my fortune, nor to wear any
other character than that of a farmer. I have never departed from it in a
single instance; and I have in multiplied instances found myself happy in
being able to decide and to act as a public servant, clear of all
interest, in the multiform questions that have arisen, wherein I have seen
others embarrassed and biased by having got themselves in a more
interested situation.”
During the next few years there was a lull in political affairs,—a sullen
calm before the storm of the Revolution; but they were important years in
Mr. Jefferson’s life. In February, 1770, the house at Shadwell, where he
lived with his mother and sisters, was burned to the ground, while the
family were away. “Were none of my books saved?” Jefferson asked of the
negro who came to him, breathless, with news of the disaster. “No,
master,” was the reply, “but we saved the fiddle.”
In giving his friend Page an account of the fire, Jefferson wrote: “On a
reasonable estimate, I calculate the cost of the books burned to have been
£200. Would to God it had been the money,—then had it never cost me a
sigh!” Beside the books, Jefferson lost most of his notes and papers; but
no mishap, not caused by his own fault, ever troubled his peace of mind.
After the fire, his mother and the children took temporary refuge in the
home of an overseer, and Jefferson repaired to Monticello,—as he had named
the elevated spot on the paternal estate where he had already begun to
build the house which was his home for the remainder of his life.
Monticello is a small outlying peak, upon the outskirts of the mountainous
part of Virginia, west of the tide-water region, and rising 580 feet above
the plain at its foot. Upon its summit there is a space of about six
acres, leveled partly by nature and partly by art; and here, one hundred
feet back from the brow of the hill, Jefferson built his house. It is a
long, low building,—still standing,—with a Grecian portico in front,
surmounted by a cupola. The road by which it is approached winds round and
round, so as to make the ascent less difficult. In front of the house
three long terraces, terminating in small pavilions, were constructed; and
upon the northern terrace, or in its pavilion, Jefferson and his friends
used to sit on summer nights gazing off toward the Blue Ridge, some eighty
miles distant, or upon the nearer peaks of the Ragged Mountains. The
altitude is such that neither dew nor mosquitoes can reach it.
To this beautiful but as yet uncompleted mountain home, Jefferson, in
January, 1772, brought his bride. She was Martha Skelton, who had been
left a widow at nineteen, and was now twenty-two, a daughter of John
Wayles, a leading and opulent lawyer. Martha Skelton was a tall,
beautiful, highly educated young woman, of graceful carriage, with hazel
eyes, literary in her tastes, a skillful performer upon the spinnet, and a
notable housewife whose neatly kept account books are still preserved.
They were married at “The Forest,” her father’s estate in Charles City
County, and immediately set out for Monticello.
Two years later, in 1774, died Dabney Carr, a brilliant and patriotic
young lawyer, Jefferson’s most intimate friend, and the husband of his
sister Martha. Dabney Carr left six small children, whom, with their
mother, Jefferson took under his wing, and they were brought up at
Monticello as if they had been his own children. Jefferson loved children,
and he had, in common with that very different character, Aaron Burr, an
instinct for teaching. While still a young man himself, he was often
called upon to direct the studies of other young men,—Madison and Monroe
were in this sense his pupils; and the founding of the University of
Virginia was an achievement long anticipated by him and enthusiastically
performed.
Jefferson was somewhat unfortunate in his own children, for, of the six
that were born to him, only two, Martha and Maria, lived to grow up. Maria
married but died young, leaving one child. Martha, the first-born, was a
brilliant, cheerful, wholesome woman. She married Thomas Mann Randolph,
afterward governor of Virginia. “She was just like her father, in this
respect,” says Mr. Bacon, the superintendent,—“she was always busy. If she
wasn’t reading or writing, she was always doing something. She used to sit
in Mr. Jefferson’s room a great deal, and sew, or read, or talk, as he
would be busy about something else.” John Randolph of Roanoke once toasted
her—and it was after his quarrel with her father—as the sweetest woman in
Virginia. She left ten children, and many of her descendants are still
living.
To her, and to his other daughter, Maria, who is described as being more
beautiful and no less amiable than her sister, but not so intellectual,
Jefferson owed the chief happiness of his life. Like many another man who
has won fame and a high position in the world, he counted these things but
as dust and ashes in comparison with family affection.
IV
JEFFERSON IN THE REVOLUTION
Shortly after Mr. Jefferson’s marriage, the preliminary movements of the
Revolution began, and though he took an active part in them it was not
without reluctance. Even after the battle of Bunker Hill, namely, in
November, 1775, he wrote to a kinsman that there was not a man in the
British Empire who more cordially loved a union with Great Britain than he
did. John Jay said after the Revolution: “During the course of my life,
and until the second petition of Congress in 1775, I never did hear any
American of any class or description express a wish for the independence
of the colonies.”
But these friendly feelings were first outraged and then extinguished by a
long series of ill-considered and oppressive acts, covering, with some
intermissions, a period of about twelve years. Of these the most
noteworthy were the Stamp Act, which amounted to taxation without
representation, and the impost on tea, which was coupled with a provision
that the receipts should be applied to the salaries of officers of the
crown, thus placing them beyond the control of the local assemblies. The
crown officers were also authorized to grant salaries and pensions at
their discretion; and a board of revenue commissioners for the whole
country was established at Boston, and armed with despotic powers. These
proceedings amounted to a deprivation of liberty, and they were aggravated
by the king’s contemptuous rejection of the petitions addressed to him by
the colonists. We know what followed,—the burning of the British war
schooner, Gaspee, by leading citizens of Providence, and the famous
tea-party in Boston harbor.
Meanwhile Virginia had not been inactive. In March, 1772, a few young men,
members of the House of Burgesses, met at the Raleigh Tavern in
Williamsburg. They were Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee and his brother,
Thomas Jefferson, and a few others. They drew up several resolutions, the
most important of which called for the appointment of a standing committee
and for an invitation to the other colonies to appoint like committees for
mutual information and assistance in the struggle against the crown. A
similar resolution had been adopted in Massachusetts two years before, but
without any practical result. The Virginia resolution was passed the next
day by the House of Burgesses, and it gave rise to those proceedings which
ushered in the Revolution.
The first Continental Congress was to meet in Philadelphia, in September,
1774; and Jefferson, in anticipation, prepared a draft of instructions for
the delegates who were to be elected by Virginia. Being taken ill himself,
on his way to the convention, he sent forward a copy of these
instructions. They were considered too drastic to be adopted by the
convention; but some of the members caused them to be published under the
title of “A Summary View of the Rights of America.” The pamphlet was
extensively read in this country, and a copy which had been sent to London
falling into the hands of Edmund Burke, he had it reprinted in England,
where it ran through edition after edition. Jefferson’s name thus became
known throughout the colonies and in England.
The “Summary View” is in reality a political essay. Its author wasted no
time in discussing the specific legal and constitutional questions which
had arisen between the colonies and the crown; but he went to the root of
the matter, and with one or two generalizations as bold and original as if
they had been made by Rousseau, he cut the Gordian knot, and severed
America from the Parliament of Great Britain. He admitted some sort of
dependence upon the crown, but his two main principles were these: (1)
that the soil of this country belonged to the people who had settled and
improved it, and that the crown had no right to sell or give it away; (2)
that the right of self-government was a right natural to every people, and
that Parliament, therefore, had no authority to make laws for America.
Jefferson was always about a century in advance of his time; and the
“Summary View” substantially anticipated what is now the acknowledged
relation of England to her colonies.
Jefferson was elected a member of the Continental Congress at its second
session; and he made a rapid journey to Philadelphia in a chaise, with two
led horses behind, reaching there the night before Washington set out for
Cambridge. The Congress was composed mainly of young men. Franklin, the
oldest member, was seventy-one, and a few others were past sixty.
Washington was forty-three; John Adams, forty; Patrick Henry, a year or
two younger; John Rutledge, thirty-six; his brother, twenty-six; John
Langdon and William Paca, thirty-five, John Jay, thirty; Thomas Stone,
thirty-two, and Jefferson, thirty-two.
Jefferson soon became intimate with John Adams, who in later years said of
him: “Though a silent member of Congress, he was so prompt, frank,
explicit, and decisive upon committees and in conversation—not even Samuel
Adams was more so—that he soon seized upon my heart.”
Jefferson, as we have seen, was not fitted to shine as an orator, still
less in debate. But as a writer he had that capacity for style which
comes, if it comes at all, as a gift of nature; which needs to be
supplemented, but which cannot be supplied, by practice and study. In some
of his early letters there are slight reminders of Dr. Johnson’s manner,
and still more of Sterne’s. Sterne indeed was one of his favorite authors.
However, these early traces of imitation were absorbed very quickly; and,
before he was thirty, Jefferson became master of a clear, smooth,
polished, picturesque, and individual style. To him, therefore, his
associates naturally turned when they needed such a proclamation to the
world as the Declaration of Independence; and that document is very
characteristic of its author. It was imagination that gave distinction to
Jefferson both as a man and as a writer. He never dashed off a letter
which did not contain some play of fancy; and whether he was inventing a
plough or forecasting the destinies of a great Democracy, imagination
qualified the performance.
One of the most effective forms in which imagination displays itself in
prose is by the use of a common word in such a manner and context that it
conveys an uncommon meaning. There are many examples of this rhetorical
art in Jefferson’s writings, but the most notable one occurs in the noble
first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: “When, in the course
of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the
political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume
among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the
Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the
opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which
impel them to the separation.”
Upon this paragraph Mr. Parton eloquently observes: “The noblest utterance
of the whole composition is the reason given for making the
Declaration,—‘_A decent __respect for the opinions of mankind_.’ This
touches the heart. Among the best emotions that human nature knows is the
veneration of man for man. This recognition of the public opinion of the
world—the sum of human sense—as the final arbiter in all such
controversies is the single phrase of the document which Jefferson alone,
perhaps, of all the Congress, could have originated; and in point of merit
it was worth all the rest.”
Franklin and John Adams, who were on the committee with Jefferson, made a
few verbal changes in his draught of the Declaration, and it was then
discussed and reviewed by Congress for three days. Congress made eighteen
suppressions, six additions, and ten alterations; and it must be admitted
that most of these were improvements. For example, Jefferson had framed a
paragraph in which the king was severely censured for opposing certain
measures looking to the suppression of the slave trade. This would have
come with an ill grace from the Americans, since for a century New England
had been enriching herself by that trade, and the southern colonies had
subsisted upon the labor which it brought them. Congress wisely struck out
the paragraph.
The Declaration of Independence was received with rapture throughout the
country. Everywhere it was read aloud to the people who gathered to hear
it, amid the booming of guns, the ringing of bells, and the display of
fireworks. In Philadelphia, after the reading, the late king’s coat of
arms was burned in Independence Square; in New York the leaden statue, in
Bowling Green, of George III. was “laid prostrate in the dust,” and
ordered to be run into bullets. Virginia had already stricken the king’s
name from her prayer-book; and Rhode Island now forbade her people to pray
for the king, as king, under a penalty of one hundred thousand pounds! The
Declaration of Independence, both as a political and literary document,
has stood the test of time. It has all the classic qualities of an oration
by Demosthenes; and even that passage in it which has been
criticised—that, namely, which pronounces all men to be created equal—is
true in a sense, the truth of which it will take a century or two yet to
develop.
V
REFORM WORK IN VIRGINIA
In September, 1776, Jefferson, having resigned his seat in Congress to
engage in duties nearer home, returned to Monticello. A few weeks later, a
messenger from Congress arrived to inform him that he had been elected a
joint commissioner with Dr. Franklin and Silas Deane to represent at Paris
the newly formed nation. His heart had long been set upon foreign travel;
but he felt obliged to decline this appointment, first on account of the
ill health of his wife, and secondly, because he was needed in Virginia as
a legislator. Not since Lycurgus gave laws to the Spartans had there been
such an opportunity as then existed in the United States. John Adams
declared: “The best lawgivers of antiquity would rejoice to live at a
period like this when, for the first time in the history of the world,
three millions of people are deliberately _choosing_ their government and
institutions.”
Of all the colonies, Virginia offered the best field for reform, because,
as we have already seen, she had by far the most aristocratic political
and social system; and it is extraordinary how quickly the reform was
effected by Jefferson and his friends. In ordinary times of peace the task
would have been impossible; but in throwing off the English yoke, the
colonists had opened their minds to new ideas; change had become familiar
to them, and in the general upheaval the rights of the people were
recognized. A year later, Jefferson wrote to Franklin: “With respect to
the State of Virginia, in particular, the people seem to have laid aside
the monarchical and taken up the republican government with as much ease
as would have attended their throwing off an old and putting on a new set
of clothes.”
Jefferson’s greatness lay in this, that he was the first statesman who
trusted the mass of the people. He alone had divined the fact that they
were competent, morally and mentally, for self-government. It is almost
impossible for us to appreciate Jefferson’s originality in this respect,
because the bold and untried theories for which he contended are now
regarded as commonplace maxims. He may have derived his political ideas in
part from the French philosophical writers of the eighteenth century,
although there is no evidence to that effect; but he was certainly the
first statesman to grasp the idea of democracy as a form of government,
just as, at a later day, Walt Whitman was the first poet to grasp the idea
of equality as a social system. Hamilton, John Adams, Pinckney, Gouverneur
Morris, even Washington himself, all believed that popular government
would be unsafe and revolutionary unless held in check by a strong
executive and by an aristocratic senate.
Jefferson in his lifetime was often charged with gross inconsistency in
his political views and conduct; but the inconsistency was more apparent
than real. At times he strictly construed, and at times he almost set
aside the Constitution; but the clue to his conduct can usually be found
in the fundamental principle that the only proper function of government
or constitutions is to express the will of the people, and that the people
are morally and mentally competent to govern. “I am sure,” he wrote in
1796, “that the mass of citizens in these United States mean well, and I
firmly believe that they will always act well, whenever they can obtain a
right understanding of matters.” And Jefferson’s lifelong endeavor was to
enable the people to form this “right understanding” by educating them.
His ideas of the scope of public education went far beyond those which
prevailed in his time, and considerably beyond those which prevail even
now. For example, a free university course for the most apt pupils
graduated at the grammar schools made part of his scheme,—an idea most
nearly realized in the Western States; and those States received their
impetus in educational matters from the Ordinance of 1787, which was
largely the product of Jefferson’s foresight.