by John Ferling
He may even have hoped to gain renown someday in London, much as Benjamin Franklin had by the 1760s. Through Professor Small and others, and from things that he now and then saw in print, Jefferson would have known that the colonial gentry were viewed with condescension within ruling circles in the parent state. The supposedly parvenu nature of American gentlemen was a core belief among the elite in the metropolis, who snobbishly dismissed the colonials as unmannered rustics. Not a few colonial gentry worked very hard at becoming cultivated gentlemen, and Jefferson was the prime example of those who pursued gentility in all its stylizing forms, including intellectual advancement, literary and artistic fecundity, and displaying good taste in one’s dwelling and its furnishings.27
Hurt and ambition may have gnawed at Jefferson in equal proportions. He would not have been the first to seek recognition as a balm for his pain, even to see acclaim as the means of avenging those who had wounded him. Six long years passed during which Jefferson made no attempt to court any woman. Numerous literary passages that he copied into his journal during this period reeked of enmity, even rage, toward women. Some extracts characterized women as “damnable, deceitful” and the source of untold “ills.” Others suggested that “female Snares” were men’s greatest “curse,” and portrayed marriage as captivity.28 Yet, while drawn to these writings, Jefferson also spoke of his married friends as the “happiest [men] in the universe” and portrayed himself as wretchedly unhappy. At age twenty-seven, years removed from his only stab at a relationship with a woman, Jefferson wrote a remarkably reckless letter to John Page, his now-married friend, a missive that laid bare his loneliness and despair. Jefferson not only gushed over Page’s wife’s charms, but in what he termed his “treasonable thoughts,” he also mused about living with the couple so that the threesome could “pull down the moon.”29 Page did not respond for a very long time and, when he did, he ignored Jefferson’s startling suggestion.
Jefferson’s letter to Page was the second act of impropriety occasioned by his forlorn and disordered state of mind. In June 1768, Jack Walker, who lived at Belvoir, seven miles northeast of Shadwell, asked Jefferson to look after his young wife, Betsey, and infant daughter while he was away on a diplomatic mission for Virginia. Walker and Jefferson were old friends and classmates, and Walker’s father, who had been an executor of Peter Jefferson’s will, had authorized, even encouraged, Jefferson’s enrollment at William and Mary.
During the four months that Jack Walker was away serving the province in the summer and fall of 1768, Jefferson frequently rode to Belvoir. His visits were more than neighborly: He attempted to seduce Betsy Walker. On more than one occasion, in fact, he made improper advances. Betsy remained silent about Jefferson’s behavior for sixteen years. When she finally told her husband, Betsy claimed that during an eleven-year span beginning in 1768, Jefferson had persisted in his unseemly conduct. Nearly a quarter century passed before Jefferson was confronted with the allegations. He learned of the charges when they were splashed in the nation’s newspapers during his presidency. They got into print after Walker divulged his wife’s story to Jefferson’s political enemies. Jefferson promptly confessed to once having “offered love to a handsome lady” while her husband was away in 1768. It occurred when he was “young and single,” he said. He denied the accusation of continued misconduct toward Betsy Walker, most of which supposedly occurred while he was married.30
As with nearly all he-said, she-said imbroglios, it is impossible to know who told the truth. Jefferson may have lied to protect his reputation and presidency, but Betsy Walker also had a motive for fabricating her story. She wanted Jefferson removed as executor of the family’s will, likely fearing the authority he might exercise over her should she be widowed. Relating the story of Jefferson’s allegedly unbecoming behavior did the trick. Jack Walker changed his will, designating another executor.31
Jefferson may have been disconsolate and reclusive for years, but he was never dysfunctional. During his lonely years after Rebecca Burwell’s rejection, he completed his legal studies and established himself as a successful lawyer. He had carefully prepared for his legal career. Aware that he was a poor public speaker, he envisaged difficulties practicing in the county courts, where success hinged on winning over juries of poorly educated small farmers. He felt that he would do better trying cases in the General Court of Judicature, where there were no juries and where verdicts were rendered by panels of judges. Greater preparation was required to practice at that level, but he was drawn to the challenge. He liked the idea of matching his intellectual skills with those of other lawyers at this level, and he found it appealing that the General Court was in session only about eight weeks of the year. That meant he would have abundant time for building and managing his own plantation and for reading, writing, and traveling.32
In 1767, at age twenty-four, Jefferson finally began to practice law. He could not entirely ignore the lower courts if he was to realize a substantial income, and in fact from the outset he represented numerous clients in cases concerning land claims and titles. His ascent was breathtakingly swift. Whereas John Adams had but a single client during his first year in practice, Jefferson handled sixty-eight items of business, and his caseload doubled nearly every year thereafter. By the early 1770s he averaged some five hundred cases annually and was earning about £175 a year, roughly seven times the annual income of most urban tradesmen.33
It was also during these years that Jefferson commenced construction of Monticello. Designing and building one’s home was no more an ordinary preoccupation of a young male just beyond adolescence at that time than it is today, but as Peyton Randolph once said, Jefferson’s absorption with all things pertaining to the fine arts—including architecture—“ran before the times in which he was born.”34 During his second year as a lawyer, and seven months prior to his election to the assembly, he set his slaves to work leveling the top of a tall hill on the other side of the Rivanna River from Shadwell. It was slow going. Nearly two years passed before Jefferson noted in his memorandum book: “Moved to Monticello.” Actually, he moved into only “one room, which,” he wrote, “serves me for parlour for kitchen and hall … for bed chamber and study too.” He said that he hoped to have “more elbow room” shortly, but the construction of Monticello had only just begun and would require years to complete.35
Eighteen months after launching his legal practice, Jefferson stood for election to the House of Burgesses. It was the first election in three years, and the first since he had completed his studies in Williamsburg with Wythe. Jefferson was seeking the seat his father had held. Shy and reserved, Jefferson may not have been a backslapper or a spellbinding orator, but he hailed from an influential family and was willing to spend money to treat the voters to food and liquor. He won the election.
Jefferson entered the House of Burgesses in the spring of 1769 and immediately zoomed ahead of some who had held their seats for years. The crucial business of the assembly was performed in five committees. Some members were never appointed to one of these committees and most faced a long wait to obtain such a choice assignment. Jefferson landed on two of the plum committees on his first day as a burgess. It did him no harm that Peyton Randolph, a relative, was Speaker of the House, nor that Wythe was an influential assemblyman. Jefferson’s reputation for erudition had probably also spread during the preceding two years while he practiced law. The scholar who most closely studied the practices of the House of Burgesses concluded that on occasion “a man’s career in the House … in some measure was determined before he participated in any of its deliberations.”36 That was true of Jefferson, who rapidly emerged as chair of one of the powerful committees.
But prior to the War of Independence, which erupted six years after he entered the house, Jefferson was never part of the legislative leadership team. To some degree, he remained a second-tier legislator because his legislative responsibilities were of secondary consideration for him. He was preoccupied with his law practic
e and the construction of his mansion, and something even more distracting: In the fall of 1770, Jefferson began to court Martha Wayles Skelton.
At age twenty-seven, Jefferson was more mature and self-confident than when he had unsuccessfully tried to court Rebecca Burwell. An assemblyman with a flourishing law practice, he had also broken away from the confining solitude of Shadwell. He had traveled to other colonies and throughout Virginia, and between 1767 and 1770 his legal work and legislative schedule compelled him to spend roughly a quarter of each year in Williamsburg.37
Jefferson courted Martha for at least fifteen months. When he first called on her, Martha was a twenty-two-year-old widow with a three-year-old son, John. She was living at the Forest, the estate of her father, John Wayles, about twenty miles west of Williamsburg. Not much is known of her, as Jefferson burned Martha’s correspondence following her death. Nor did she ever sit for an artist. One of Jefferson’s slaves later described her as short and pretty, though family members said she was “above medium height,” slender with auburn hair and large, expressive hazel eyes, good-natured, and sprightly. Like Jefferson, she loved books and music. She played the spinet and harpsichord, he the violin, and both enjoyed singing. She was experienced in presiding over a plantation’s domestic workers and in managing children. Given his predilections, Jefferson must have thought her compliant. The icing on the cake was that Martha was the daughter of an extremely wealthy man. John Wayles had amassed a fortune from the practice of law, but mostly from tobacco, slave trading, and land speculation.38
Jefferson was instantly smitten. Within three months he told a friend that he was “wishing to take to himself a wife.” In fact, he might have married then, but numerous obstacles stood in the way. Shadwell had burned nine months before he first called on Martha, and more construction was required at Monticello if he was to have a home for himself and his bride. Jefferson also faced another election campaign in 1771, as well as the autumn sessions of the assembly and General Court. Waiting impatiently, he confessed that in “every scheme of happiness” he could imagine, Martha was “in the foreground of the picture, as the principal figure.”39
He deferred marriage no longer than necessary. The couple wed on New Year’s Day 1772 in a ceremony conducted by two Anglican priests, after which they enjoyed a traditional wedding feast that included a huge chocolate cake. Two weeks later they set out in a phaeton on their days-long winter journey to Monticello. In the course of their trip, the pale winter sun gave way to somber-gray clouds, and before long snow began falling. As they approached Charlottesville, it became apparent that they were caught in a blizzard of epic proportions. The couple decided to press onward, since they were close to their destination, though they abandoned the phaeton and switched to riding horseback. By the time the shivering newlyweds reached Jefferson’s hill, the snowbanks were three feet deep. The horses struggled up the treacherous, winding road to the windswept summit, where at midnight Jefferson and his half-frozen bride alighted and dashed into his one-room, brick bachelor’s cottage. As the servants had long since retired for the night, there was no fire, and the temperature in the dwelling must have hovered around freezing. Jefferson rapidly got a fire going, and he and Martha, numb and exhausted after their long and frigid ordeal, began to thaw. Martha then and ever after thought the abode a dreary place, but her husband adoringly called it their “Honeymoon Lodge.” Nine months later their first child—Martha, or Patsy, as she would be called—was born.40
In his memoirs, Jefferson almost conveys the impression that his life began the day of his marriage. Breezing through his first twenty-nine years in four brief paragraphs, he rapturously recollected his wife as the “cherished companion of my life, in whose affections, unabated on both sides, I … lived … in unchequered happiness.”41
While Martha gave meaning to his previously barren life, so did his role in politics. Jefferson wrote about his early political activism in his memoirs, but nearly everything he said about his service in the House of Burgesses prior to the American Revolution was misleading. Though he portrayed himself as a crusader who fought to end slavery in Virginia, his efforts were more modest. He supported a move by the assembly to end the importation of slaves into Virginia and all thirteen mainland colonies. This was not an uphill battle. Virginia had been importing slaves for more than a century and was surfeited with bondsmen. But South Carolina and Georgia, flourishing rice-producing colonies in the Low Country, had an insatiable appetite for new chattel. If the slave trade to North America was terminated, there would be shortages of labor in the rice colonies, enabling Virginia’s planters to sell their excess slaves for princely sums. It was a clever move, but the king, George III, refused to play along.
Jefferson also exaggerated his influence in the assembly during his first several years in the body. In his account, the leaders included him in secret meetings to plot strategy against the royal governor and colleagues beseeched his assistance. But it is extremely unlikely that Jefferson was a legislative kingpin before the American Revolution. He served on important committees, but as was his lifelong habit as a legislator, he seldom even spoke or joined in the floor debates.42 That he was not a leader was due somewhat to his temperament, but mostly to his absorption with private affairs.
* * *
Seventeen-year-old Alexander Hamilton arrived in the British mainland colonies less than a year after Jefferson married. Jefferson had been five years older when he had made his first long trip from home, the trek that took him as far away as New York, and he had been accompanied by at least one attendant. Hamilton, whose life of travail on St. Croix had made him incredibly self-reliant, traveled alone across the perilous sea and into a land filled with strangers. It was a venture for a hardy soul, one with an iron will and a propulsive ambition. Hamilton booked passage on a vessel bound for Boston. He barely survived the journey. Before reaching the North American coast, his ship caught fire. The crew succeeded in saving it only after taking heroic measures, and the badly damaged brig limped into Boston Harbor. Friendless, Hamilton on his own had to find transportation to Manhattan.
Hamilton’s backers in Christiansted had hoped for his prompt admission to Princeton. However, given the deficiencies in his education, Princeton rejected Hamilton’s application for admission, though it guided him to a preparatory academy in what now is Elizabeth, New Jersey. This schooling, and all that followed, was paid for from the subscription fund established by his benefactors on St. Croix.
Through introductory letters written by Reverend Knox, Hamilton met several influential figures in New Jersey, including William Livingston, Elias Boudinot, and William Alexander, who called himself Lord Stirling. Each would subsequently play an important role in the American Revolution. As with Hamilton’s patrons in Christiansted, each must have glimpsed something extraordinary in the young West Indian, and each took Hamilton under his wing. Meanwhile, Hamilton on his own initiative bonded with others, including fellow students, with whom he was popular, and men with ties to the mercantile company that was partially bankrolling his education. Whereas Jefferson was reserved, even withdrawn, Hamilton was self-assured, gregarious, resilient, and never one to conceal his abilities.
Hamilton’s assertive nature took him only so far. After several months in the prep school, he again failed to gain admission to Princeton. He later said that he had been turned down because he had requested admittance on an accelerated track, though it is possible that he remained academically deficient.43 At some point following his second rebuff, Hamilton moved to Manhattan and prepared on his own. Finally, a year or more after his arrival in British North America—it was probably in late 1773 or early 1774—Hamilton was admitted to King’s College (now Columbia University), an institution tied to the Anglican Church. It consisted of three faculty and about twenty students in a single large building on a rambling wooded campus near the outskirts of New York City, which then took up just the southern part of Manhattan Island.44
King’s was
widely seen as a conservative school with Royalist predilections, more so than William and Mary. King’s president, Myles Cooper, was an Anglican clergyman who subsequently became a leading foe of the American Revolution. Students attended chapel each morning at sunrise, vespers after every sunset, and two worship services on Sunday. Some fellow students later remembered Hamilton as a “zealous believer” who daily prayed “upon his knees both night and morning,” and once even composed a hymn, “The Soul Entering into Bliss.”45
Hamilton was admitted to King’s College as a charity student, a pupil who was fast-tracked because his financial resources were limited but who was judged capable of handling the rigors of a heavy academic load. He was permitted to audit classes and take free tutorials. Given his formidable intellect, incredible industry, and seemingly inexhaustible energy, Hamilton flourished, somehow even finding the time and stamina to organize a debating club and take part in several literary societies. Like Jefferson, Hamilton gave a wide berth to his less serious peers. His close friends were mostly the sober and serious students who stayed out of trouble. He was closest to Robert Troup, who hailed from a middle-rung background and went on to serve as an officer in the Continental army and ultimately as a federal judge.
From painful experience, Hamilton knew that life was filled with vicissitude. A college degree would serve as a stabilizer. Though security was crucial for him, he wanted more. Hamilton wanted to be somebody. Mere respect was insufficient; he was driven to gain prominence, authority, and acceptance.