Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  They indulged common passions for the woods and for music. Jane sang hymns for her brother, and together they would sing psalms, and “many a winter evening, round the family fireside, and many a soft summer twilight, on the wooded banks of the Rivanna, heard their voices, accompanied by the notes of his violin, thus ascending together.” He paid her the highest of compliments: “He ever regarded her as fully his own equal in understanding.”

  At nine years old, Thomas was sent to study classics and French with the Reverend William Douglas, rector of St. James Northam Parish near Tuckahoe in Goochland County. For five years, excepting only the summers, Thomas lived with Douglas. The mature Jefferson later thought Douglas “but a superficial Latinist, less instructed in Greek, but with the rudiments of these languages he taught me French.”

  Later Jefferson boarded with the Reverend James Maury, whom he described as “a correct classical scholar.” Maury did splendidly by Jefferson, grounding him in the classics and giving him a sense of order. Jefferson warmly recalled his years with Maury, both at study and at play. Much later in life, in a letter to Maury’s son, Jefferson said that should they meet again they “would beguile our lingering hours with talking over our youthful exploits, our hunts … and feel, by recollection at least, a momentary flash of youth.”

  One source of his happiness at Maury’s school was Dabney Carr, a fellow student who became the central friend of Jefferson’s youth. Born in 1743—the same year as Jefferson—Carr came from Louisa County. The two young men shared a love of literature, learning, and the landscape of their Virginia neighborhood. When at Shadwell, they took the books they happened to be reading and climbed through the woods of the mountain Jefferson later called Monticello, talking and thinking together, coming to rest at the base of an oak near the summit. There, Jefferson and Carr read their books and spoke of many things. To Jefferson, Dabney Carr was the best of friends, and their minds took flight with each other. No man, Jefferson recalled later, had “more of the milk of human kindness, of indulgence, of softness, of pleasantry of conversation and conduct.” In the way of young friendships, there was an intensity and a seriousness—a sense that their lives were linked, their shared hours sacred. They made a pact. Whoever survived the other was to bury the one to die first beneath the favored oak.

  At school James Maury cultivated Jefferson’s engagement with the literature, history, and philosophy of the ancients. In a Dissertation on Education written in 1762, Maury explained that the classics were not for everyone—but they were for a young man like Jefferson. “An acquaintance with the languages, anciently spoken in Greece and Italy, is necessary, absolutely necessary, for those who wish to make any reputable figure in divinity, medicine, or law,” Maury wrote. Greek and Latin were also critical for men who might take places in society “to which the privilege of birth, the voice of their country, or the choice of their prince may call them.”

  Jefferson valued his education—and education in general—above all things, remarking that, given the choice, he would take the classical training his father arranged for him over the estate his father left him.

  His father’s death in 1757—Peter Jefferson was forty-nine, Thomas fourteen—propelled Thomas into the role, if not the reality, of man of the house. He did not recall the sudden transition fondly. “At 14 years of age the whole care and direction of myself was thrown on my self entirely, without a relative or friend qualified to advise or guide me,” he later wrote to a grandson.

  There would be no more evenings spent in the first-floor study, looking over maps, listening to tales of brave expeditions, tinkering with the tools of surveying, discussing Shakespeare or The Spectator. Those hours with his father were now to live only in memory, with the image of Peter Jefferson before him, inspiring and daunting.

  Thomas Jefferson was nearly seventeen when he arrived for the 1759–60 holidays at Chatsworth, his mother’s cousin Peter Randolph’s house on the James near the ancestral Turkey Island plantation. During the visit, Peter Randolph advised Jefferson to enroll at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, the wisest step beyond the Reverend Maury’s tutelage in classical studies. “By going to the College,” Jefferson wrote, “I shall get a more universal acquaintance which may hereafter be serviceable to me.… [and] I can pursue my studies in the Greek and Latin as well there as here, and likewise learn something of the mathematics.”

  The standards for admission to William and Mary were not onerous. According to the college, the test for potential students was “whether they have made due progress in their Latin and Greek.… And let no blockhead or lazy fellow in his studies be elected.”

  Jefferson was neither, and so he left Albemarle County in 1760, bound for Williamsburg. The capital of Virginia, it was home to the House of Burgesses, to theaters, to taverns—and to a circle of men who would change Jefferson’s life forever.

  TWO

  WHAT FIXED THE DESTINIES OF MY LIFE

  Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.… Nothing is required for this enlightenment … except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters.

  —IMMANUEL KANT, “What Is Enlightenment?”

  The best news I can tell you is that Williamsburg begins to brighten up and look very clever.

  —PEYTON RANDOLPH

  WILLIAMSBURG, THE COLONIAL CAPITAL, suited Jefferson wonderfully. It had an intellectual climate informed by the very latest in books and a social swirl that included Virginia’s most charming women and most prominent men. It had the professor William Small, the lawyer George Wythe, the royal governor Francis Fauquier, and the statesman Peyton Randolph, all of whom became critical in Jefferson’s life. It had lively distractions. Jefferson gambled on horses and hunted foxes; he gossiped and courted and danced. Above all, Williamsburg had an ethos that was to enthrall Jefferson: the drama and glamour of politics.

  To Jefferson, this was the great world, and the college was an integral part of Virginia life. George Washington received his surveying certificate from William and Mary; other alumni included future chief justice John Marshall, future president James Monroe, and some seventeen governors of Virginia.

  Jefferson was enrolled in William and Mary from the time he was seventeen until he was nineteen, then was in and out of the city for an additional five years as he studied law. Williamsburg had as lasting an influence on the man Jefferson became as Shadwell did. In decades to come, in moments of crisis and of calm, he returned there in his mind’s eye, finding direction in the political lessons he learned and guidance in the ideas he explored.

  College life centered on the Wren Building, which was, in 1760, a three-and-a-half-story, brick-walled structure topped by a cupola. A chapel and crypt had been added in the previous thirty years. Three blocks east along Duke of Gloucester Street was Bruton Parish Church on the left, followed by the Palace Green leading to the Governor’s Palace. Farther down Duke of Gloucester sat the brick capitol, home to the House of Burgesses and the General Court. There, then, in not quite half a square mile, no one landmark more than a few minutes’ walk—or an even briefer ride in one of the carriages that were so prominent when Williamsburg was full and busy with the public business—was the whole structure of public power in Jefferson’s Virginia. No one could have loved it all more than Jefferson himself.

  There were also reminders of the grim facts of life in Virginia. In the mid-1760s a French traveler saw “three Negroes hanging at the gallows” for robbery.

  For Jefferson, William and Mary was largely about what university life is supposed to be about: reading books, enjoying the company of the like-minded, and savoring teachers who seem to be ambassadors from other, richer, brighter worlds. Jefferson believed Williamsburg “the finest school of manners and morals that ever existed in America.”

  The man who put
him on the path toward that hyperbolic but heartfelt conclusion was Dr. William Small, a Scottish layman and professor who brought an Enlightenment worldview to Williamsburg. It was fortuitous that Jefferson encountered Small at all, for Small’s stay on the faculty at William and Mary lasted only six years, from 1758 to 1764—the right period to overlap with Jefferson, who revered him. “It was my great good fortune, 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, correct and gentlemanly manners, and an enlarged and liberal mind,” Jefferson said.

  Born in Scotland in 1734—he was less than a decade older than Jefferson—Small was, in addition to professor of mathematics at the college, the interim professor of moral philosophy. Described by a contemporary in Virginia as a “polite, well-bred man,” Small lived in two rooms in the college. The accommodations, it was said, were “by no means elegant,” but Small and his colleagues were “very well satisfied with the homeliness of their appearance, though at first sight [they were] rather disgusting.” Small furnished his rooms with six chairs, a table, a grate, and a bed and bedstead. A bit more care seems to have been taken with clothing than with interior decoration. Faculty were expected to have a suit of “handsome full-dressed silk clothes to wear on the King’s birthday at the Governor’s,” where it was “expected that all English gentlemen attend and pay their respects.”

  Small taught ethics, rhetoric, and belles lettres as well as natural philosophy—what we think of as the sciences—and mathematics, lecturing in the mornings and holding seminar-like sessions in the afternoons in which the professor and his students discussed the material. Conversant with the thought of Bacon, Locke, Newton, Adam Smith, and the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Small introduced Jefferson to the key insight of the new intellectual age: that reason, not revelation or unquestioned tradition or superstition, deserved pride of place in human affairs.

  Under Small’s influence Jefferson came to share Immanuel Kant’s 1784 definition of the spirit of the era: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” Kant wrote. “Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.”

  This was Small’s message to his charges at William and Mary. Jefferson was entranced, later giving Small the noblest of accolades when he recalled that Small was “to me … a father.”

  It was said that Jefferson studied fifteen hours a day, rising at dawn and reading until two o’clock each morning. At twilight in Williamsburg he exercised by running to a stone a mile from town; at Shadwell, he rowed a small canoe of his own across the Rivanna River and climbed the mountain he was to call Monticello. For Jefferson laziness was a sin. “Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so silent, yet so baneful, a tooth, as indolence,” he told one of his daughters. Time spent at study was never wasted. “Knowledge,” Jefferson said, is “indeed is a desirable, a lovely possession.”

  Like his father, he believed in the virtues of riding and of walking, holding that a vigorous body helped create a vigorous mind. “Not less than two hours a day should be devoted to exercise, and the weather should be little regarded,” Jefferson once said. In fact, Jefferson believed the rainier and the colder the better. “A person not sick will not be injured by getting wet,” he said. “It is but taking a cold bath, which never gives a cold to any one. Brute animals are the most healthy, and they are exposed to all weather, and of men, those are healthiest who are the most exposed.”

  Aspiring attorneys, he said, should devote their mornings to the law, but variety was key. “Having ascribed proper hours to exercise, divide what remain (I mean of your vacant hours) into three portions. Give the principal to History, the other two, which should be shorter, to Philosophy and Poetry.”

  Jefferson was always asking questions. With “the mechanic as well as the man of science,” a descendant recalled, Jefferson learned all he could, “whether it was the construction of a wheel or the anatomy of an extinct species of animals,” and then went home to transcribe what he had heard. He would soon be known as a “walking encyclopedia.”

  Jefferson could play as hard as he worked. Worrying that he had spent too much money in his first year in what the nineteenth-century biographer Henry Randall called “a little too showy style of living—particularly in the article of fine horses”—Jefferson wrote a guardian offering to charge the whole of his bills to his separate share of the estate. (More amused than alarmed, the guardian declined Jefferson’s offer.) Later in life, Jefferson wrote: “I was often thrown into the society of horse racers, and card players, fox hunters, scientific and professional men.… Many a time have I asked myself, in the enthusiastic moment of the death of a fox, the victory of a favorite horse, the issue of a question eloquently argued at the bar … Well, which of these kinds of reputation should I prefer? That of a horse jockey? A fox hunter? An orator? Or the honest advocate of my country’s rights?”

  In truth these things are not mutually exclusive, which Jefferson knew. He spent his Williamsburg years in ways that suggest he understood that the pursuit of knowledge could coexist with the pursuit of pleasure. The motto at Williamsburg’s popular Raleigh Tavern had it right: “Jollity, offspring of wisdom and good living.”

  It was in the Governor’s Palace, not at the Raleigh, that Jefferson’s most intensive tutorial in the art of living well—as measured in elegance and conversation, two things he cherished—took place.

  Francis Fauquier, the royal governor of the colony of Virginia, held frequent gatherings with William Small and George Wythe, one of Virginia’s greatest lawyers. Thomas Jefferson made a fourth at what Jefferson called Fauquier’s “familiar table.” There was dinner, conversation, and music. The older men nurtured Jefferson’s passion for the violin, and Jefferson was invited to join Fauquier on the governor’s musical evenings, performing in the palace.

  Fauquier was born in 1703, only five years before Peter Jefferson, and so was roughly the age Jefferson’s father would have been had Peter Jefferson survived. The governor loved science, fine food, good music, and spirited card playing.

  No dry philosopher, Fauquier also had a worldly, even rakish air. The story was told that he came to office in the New World through the good grace of Lord Anson, the British admiral who had circumnavigated the globe, after Fauquier lost everything he had to Anson in a single night of cards. However embellished that tale, its currency shows that the man Jefferson encountered at this impressionable age led a life in which the pursuits of pleasure, power, and erudition unfolded simultaneously.

  Fauquier’s father was a Huguenot physician who worked with Sir Isaac Newton at the Royal Mint and became a director of the Bank of England. The son, too, was interested in science and became a fellow of the Royal Society as well as a director of the South Sea Company—evidence of his keeping a hand in both the world of ideas and of practical power, something the young Jefferson may have noticed.

  Fauquier was energetic. Within weeks of his arrival in Virginia in 1758, there was an unusual July hailstorm. The ice smashed the windows on the north side of the Governor’s Palace. Fascinated, Fauquier wrote a scientific paper about the phenomenon and dispatched it to his brother, who presented it to the Royal Society in London.

  Born in 1726 in Elizabeth City County, Virginia, the lawyer George Wythe was also a noted statesman. Hawk-nosed and, in Jefferson’s description, “of the middle size, well formed and proportioned,” Wythe was wise, intellectually curious, and probably had more direct influence on Jefferson’s thinking than Small simply by virtue of longevity. Wythe taught Jefferson in the law and other subjects for five years, an unusually long period of time. The older m
an lived in a house near Bruton Parish Church, in the center of Williamsburg. “Mr. Wythe continued to be my faithful and beloved mentor in youth, and my most affectionate friend through life,” Jefferson recalled.

  In Wythe, the man with whom Jefferson spent the most time in the period from roughly 1765 to 1772, Jefferson had a teacher in both liberty and luxury. The older man had expensive tastes, sending to London for satin cloaks for his wife, velvet breeches and black silk stockings for himself, and, for them both, “an elegant set of table and tea china, with bowls of the same of different sizes, decanters and drinking glasses, a handsome service of glass for a dessert, four middle-sized and six lesser dishes, and … a handsome well-built chariot.” The Wythes also loved to entertain. “Mrs. Wythe puts 1⁄10 very rich Malmsey to a dry Madeira and makes a fine wine,” Jefferson once noted appreciatively.

  In a literary commonplace book in which he copied passages that struck him as important, Jefferson quoted Euripides during the years with Wythe: “There is nothing better than a trusty friend, neither wealth nor princely power; mere number is a senseless thing to set off against a noble friend.”

  In 1767, Wythe introduced Jefferson to the practice of law at the bar of the General Court, inaugurating Jefferson’s legal career—a phase of Jefferson’s life that consumed him from 1767 until 1774, when the work of the Revolution drew him into politics and diplomacy.

  When those close to Jefferson surveyed his life and career, they returned to the Governor’s Palace and to the influence of the bright men who moved through those elegant, high-ceilinged rooms. “Apart from the intellectual improvement derived from such an intercourse,” wrote Henry Randall, “Mr. Jefferson, it is said, owed that polish of manner which distinguished him through life, to his habitual mingling with the elegant society which Governor Fauquier collected about him.”