When Shadwell caught fire, Jefferson had already begun building at Monticello. The fact that he would possess a great new home of his own design located at a place of his own choosing no doubt mitigated the sense of loss he may have felt with the destruction of the mansion house at Shadwell. Though construction had not progressed far enough to make the place habitable, in his mind’s eye he could see it completed, from the outside as well as from within. In terms of Jefferson’s personal development, the Shadwell fire came at a propitious time: the building of Monticello and the rebuilding of his library would occur simultaneously. He saw each as an outward reflection of his personality and imagined both on a grand scale.
Completed or not, Monticello held great symbolic value for Thomas Jefferson. Beyond its importance as an architectural landmark, it remains valuable as a symbol of his mind. For him, Monticello represented a retreat from public life. When he was there, he could indulge himself in the pleasures of scholarship and family. When his public responsibilities kept him away from home, he could imaginatively return to Monticello.
Though Jefferson’s patriotism and his dedication to liberty and justice, not to mention his ambition, drew him to politics and government, his personal and intellectual inclinations made him seek sanctuary in a home of his own design, a place where he could pursue his interests in art, music, science, and literature. Contemplating his experiences after his retirement from public office, he observed, “The whole of my life … has been a war with my natural tastes, feelings and wishes. Domestic life and literary pursuits, were my first and my latest inclinations, circumstances and not my desires led me to the path I have trod.”28
Both before and after it was completed, Monticello represented in Jefferson’s mind an ideal place to which he could always return. The story of his life is a story of a man whose profound commitment to the public welfare compelled him to a life of leadership yet who always longed for an ideal world where he could enjoy the life of the mind.
CHAPTER 2
A Boy and His Books
The chapman was a familiar figure along the byways of colonial America. With a pack on his back filled with a variety of inexpensive goods both useful and entertaining, the chapman crisscrossed the colonies selling his wares. Men and women, boys and girls, all came to know the chapman and eagerly anticipated his visits. Among his wares, he usually kept a stock of books. They were known not only as Chapman’s books, but also as “little books,” “small books,” or, regardless of their largely fictional nature, “small histories.” Some people just called them “histories.” The most ambitious chapmen stocked a good selection of titles. Chapbook texts popular in eighteenth-century America included Dr. Faustus, The Famous History of the Seven Champions of Christendom, The History of Fortunatus, The History of Parismus, The History of Tom Thumb, Jack the Giant Killer, Reynard the Fox, Valentin and Orson, and The Wise Men of Gotham. These entertaining storybooks captured the attention of numerous young readers in colonial America—Thomas Jefferson included.
Though often printed thousands at a time, few of these chapbooks survive. None survive with evidence of Jefferson’s ownership. If he saved any beyond his childhood, then they perished in the Shadwell fire. Chances are they did not last that long. They may have lasted long enough for his younger sisters Elizabeth and Martha to read once their precocious brother had outgrown them. Usually, chapbooks were read and read and read again until they fell apart, at which time they became so much waste paper: tinder for fires, wrapping paper for dried goods, or, quite frankly, lavatory paper.
Jefferson’s later correspondence offers a clue to his earliest childhood reading. Writing to Maria Cosway after she had returned to England while he remained in Paris, Jefferson imagined a fanciful way for them to be together:
I wish they had formed us like the birds of the air, able to fly where we please. I would have exchanged for this many of the boasted preeminences of man. I was so unlucky when very young, as to read the history of Fortunatus. He had a cap of such virtues that when he put it on his head, and wished himself anywhere, he was there. I have been all my life sighing for this cap. Yet if I had it, I question if I should use it but once. I should wish myself with you, and not wish myself away again.1
As his reference to the work suggests, The History of Fortunatus told a fantastic tale about an adventurous man who acquired an inexhaustible purse and a magic cap that not only made him invisible but also transported him anywhere he wished to go. The work was so widely known that Fortunatus’s purse and cap had become proverbial.2
The sigh Jefferson let escape in the letter to Maria Cosway is an obvious affectation meant to endear her, yet it also signals how fondly he remembered reading Fortunatus, a work he would continue to recall. In response to an American correspondent who had written to relay information about his family, Jefferson replied from Paris:
The distance to which I am removed renders that kind of intelligence more interesting, more welcome, as it seems to have given a keener edge to all the friendly affections of the mind. Time, absence, and comparison render my own country much dearer, and give a lustre to all it contains which I did not before know that it merited. Fortunatus’s wishing cap was always the object of my desire, but never so much as lately. With it I should soon be seated at your fireside to enjoy the society of yourself and family.3
Jefferson’s surviving correspondence also alludes to The History of Tom Thumb.4 His familiarity with the tales of Fortunatus and Tom Thumb make likely his familiarity with many of the day’s other chap-book stories, but it is impossible to know which ones he read as a child. Suffice it to say that his well-known preference for small-format books stretches back to his earliest reading.
Jefferson and John Page were almost exact contemporaries—the two had been born within a few days of one another—and Page’s boyhood experience reading these little books resembles Jefferson’s attention to Fortunatus. Page became quite fond of reading at a young age. Remembering what he read prior to entering a Latin grammar school at the age of nine, he recalled “the little amusing and instructing books” his grandmother had given him. After entering this school, he initially found the study of Latin difficult because it interrupted his “delightful reading of Histories and Novels.”5
These little books cast a spell over their young readers they found difficult to break. Chapbook stories revealed strange new worlds—strange not only because they were fantastic but also because they described places where the ordinary rules of society did not apply. Chap-books fired the imaginations of young colonial American readers and allowed them to picture worlds very different from their own.
When Thomas was five, his father placed him at an English school. Jefferson’s autobiography is the sole authority for this information; most agree that he attended the school conducted at Tuckahoe and studied with the Randolph children. Here, he improved his reading proficiency with Aesop’s Fables and Robinson Crusoe, works that many children in colonial America read around this same age. Jefferson later purchased some books of fables for Polly Randolph, a member of the family’s next generation, when she was six years old. Another time he bought a copy of Robinson Crusoe for a different young member of the Randolph family. Jefferson came to know both works well, and they would remain lifelong favorites, especially Aesop’s Fables. He would eventually acquire several editions of Aesop in Greek, sometimes with Latin translations and usually with learned commentary. Outlining a program of Native American education, he emphasized the importance of teaching Indians how to read English and specifically mentioned two books the reading Indians he knew particularly enjoyed: Aesop’s Fables and Robinson Crusoe.6
The numerous references to Aesop’s Fables in his correspondence display the lifelong influence the work had on Jefferson. Serving as a member of Congress during the early 1780s and having to cope with several contentious legislators, he appreciated a letter from his friend Francis Hopkinson, who had sent him the latest science news from Philadelphia’s intelle
ctual world. Responding to Hopkinson, Jefferson commented, “In truth amidst this eternal surfeit of politics wherein one subject succeeds another like Aesop’s feast of tongues a small entremêt of philosophy is relieving.”7 These words reflect a sentiment that frequently recurs in Jefferson’s correspondence. For much of his adult life, politics would provide the main course while philosophy—the term then incorporated all the sciences—offered a temporarily diverting side dish.
In this letter to Hopkinson, Jefferson alluded to an episode from one of the fabulous lives of Aesop, which prefaced contemporary collections of Aesop’s fables. As the story goes, Aesop’s master, the philosopher Xanthus, having invited his disciples home for dinner, ordered Aesop to serve a fine, savory meal. Aesop served tongue as the first course, for which the disciples praised Xanthus, finding tongue a dish appropriate to philosophical discourse. When Aesop brought the second course—another tongue dish—the disciples, at first taken aback, finally approved the dish, for they realized that one tongue could sharpen another. When Aesop brought out more tongue for the third course, the disciples could think of nothing good to say about it. Xanthus threatened to beat Aesop, who proceeded to explain the propriety of his culinary choice: every doctrine and all philosophy are established and propagated by the tongue.
The next day Xanthus planned another dinner for his disciples. Hoping to avoid the fiasco of the previous day, he ordered Aesop to prepare the worst meal he could. Aesop served exactly the same dishes. Asked for an explanation, he responded that nothing could be worse than the tongue. Men perished and cities were destroyed by rumors the tongue spreads; in short, nothing propagated evil more than the tongue.
It is not difficult to understand why this anecdote stayed with Jefferson: the literal and figurative connotations of the word “tongue” would remain significant to him throughout his life. While emphasizing the tongue’s physicality, the anecdote also uses the word abstractly to represent the entire process of communication. Both literally and figuratively, the tongue serves as the conduit through which ideas are converted into words. Being the physical organ that makes speech possible, the tongue had become a synonym for language and been extended to connote the written word. Whenever Jefferson wished to deepen his study of any particular subject, he sought to learn the language most pertinent to his studies. For him, the study of different tongues would be a lifelong pursuit.
He remembered other fables of Aesop’s, especially those that were useful as political allegories, like the one about the miller, his son, and their ass. By trying to please everyone, the miller ends up pleasing no one and loses his ass in the bargain.8 Elsewhere Jefferson referred to the fable in which wolves negotiate a peace treaty with some sheep, stipulating only that the sheep give up their dogs. As soon as the sheep meet the terms of the treaty, the wolves devour them. When some Federalist opponents expressed a desire for a monarchical form of government, Jefferson compared them to Aesop’s frogs, which implore Jupiter to send them a king. Jupiter eventually chooses as their king a heron, which eats up all its amphibious subjects.9
Jefferson also appreciated Aesop’s fable about the old man and his sons. Nearing his death, the old man asks his sons to bring him a bundle of slender rods. As requested, one son brings him the bundle, and the old man hands it to each son in turn and asks them to break the rods that had been bound together. None can do so. Next, the father asks them to break the rods one by one. They easily break every rod. “My sons,” the old man tells them, “if you are all of the same mind, then no one can do you any harm, no matter how great his power. But if your intentions differ from one another, then what happened to the single rods is what will happen to each of you!” During the summer of 1776, as members of the Continental Congress were designing a seal for the United States of America, Jefferson recalled Aesop’s fable and suggested that instead of a coat of arms, a more appropriate emblem for the United States of America would be an image of the father presenting the bundle of rods to his sons.
As an adolescent, Jefferson also encountered a poem from Thomas White’s Little Book for Little Children.10 He remembered lines from it all his life and recalled them in a letter to his granddaughter Cornelia a half century later:
I’ve seen the sea all in a blaze of fire
I’ve seen a house high as the moon and higher
I’ve seen the sun at twelve oclock at night
I’ve seen the man who saw this wondrous sight.
These lines present paradoxes intended to force younger readers to study their geography and discover where in the world these contradictory phenomena could possibly occur. Such paradoxes encouraged adolescents to use their brains to solve difficult problems.
In 1752 Jefferson entered the Latin grammar school run by the Reverend William Douglas, rector of St. James-Northam Parish in Goochland County. Born in Scotland in 1708, Douglas, by his own account, was educated “in the learned Languages, Geography, Mathematics and Chronology.” He subsequently attended the College of Glasgow for two years, where he studied ethics, logic, metaphysics, and other branches of philosophy. Leaving Glasgow, he attend the College of Edinburgh, where he studied church history, divinity, French, Hebrew, moral philosophy, and physics.11
Douglas worked as a private tutor in Virginia during the mid-1740s. Late that decade he returned to Great Britain to be ordained. On October 5, 1749, the Reverend Mr. William Douglas received the King’s bounty for Virginia, which meant that he obtained the passage money provided to clergymen licensed by the Bishop of London to serve in the colonies. Back in Virginia in 1750, Douglas assumed the rectorship at Goochland, which had been vacated upon the death of the Reverend Anthony Gavin the previous year.12
Besides teaching Jefferson the fundamentals of ancient and modern languages, Douglas likely inculcated his young pupil in matters of conduct. Biographical evidence, though scant, suggests Douglas’s concern for the piety of the children in his charge. His messages to his nieces are filled with advice to read good books and to achieve happiness through industry, frugality, and careful planning. From Douglas’s viewpoint, Philip Doddridge’s Sermons to Young Persons offered ideal advice for the coming generation. His knowledge of books extended well beyond such works of popular piety, however. He owned a fairly extensive personal library: at his death it was valued at £150. Though his executors did not inventory the titles it contained, its recorded value indicates a substantial collection.13
The single best record of Douglas’s personality and his intellectual predilections is the record book he kept during the course of his career as rector of St. James-Northam Parish and maintained after leaving the parish in 1777. This detailed record of births, baptisms, marriages, and deaths represents a model of record-keeping and is more thorough than any similar Virginia records of the time. He went so far as to note the maiden names of mothers when their children were born or baptized. Remarkably, he often recorded slave marriages and christenings, too. The Douglas register forms a major contribution to American genealogical literature.
It is difficult to assess how Douglas’s record-keeping manifested itself in his teaching methods. On one hand, the register may indicate that he took his pastoral duties more seriously than his role as a teacher. On the other, the register embodies a level of meticulousness Douglas demanded of himself and may have demanded from his students. As an adult, Jefferson himself would develop a reputation as a meticulous record-keeper.
Among the births and deaths of his parishioners, Douglas also included references to the deaths of many literary figures. Though no inventory of his library survives, the names of authors mentioned in the register indicate the cast of his mind. Names of the founders and leaders of the Protestant Reformation confirm Douglas’s dedication to his faith. He also mentioned many widely read devotional authors: Richard Baxter, Presbyterian divine and prolific author; Isaac Watts, best remembered as a hymnist but also a prolific author of popular schoolbooks; John Scott, whom Douglas identified as the author of a book titled
The Christian Life; John Tillotson, whom Douglas included in a list of “several renowned old worthys famous for their holy useful writings and zeal for the reformation”; and William Wollaston, the author of The Religion of Nature Delineated and “an eminent Writer” in Douglas’s words. Jefferson would not share his teacher’s opinion of this last author. He later referred to the philosophy underlying Wollaston’s work as a whimsical theory of moral principles.14
Douglas’s list of worthies is not restricted to authors of divinity. He recorded the death of Grotius: “Aug: 28. 1645—Grotius died 71: 4 months—his age. ‘Be serious’ was his last advice.” Recording Grotius’s death date a second time in the register, Douglas referred to him as “the great statesman and scholar.” He also listed the death dates of John Gay, “the famous poet”; John Locke, “the Philosopher”; and Sir Isaac Newton. The entries he made after Jefferson had left his school include the following: “Aug: 25 1776—Mr. Da: Hume the Historian died a meer sceptist.”
These names convey Douglas’s knowledge of an array of subjects from political philosophy to belles lettres to history and science. Douglas’s hodgepodge of names from Western intellectual history indicates a quirky curiosity about the ideas they represent and the fame their words and ideas brought them. Taken together, these various names form a collective memento mori. Regardless how great their ideas or how wide their fame, all met their earthly end.
The Road to Monticello Page 3