What Jefferson bought at the printing office reveals much about his personality—so does what he did not buy. Decks of playing cards were nearly always available here. Jefferson’s friends and neighbors bought several decks for an evening’s entertainment. Harry cards—those depicting Henry VIII—were the finest grade of playing cards. Local gamblers bought them half a dozen packs at a time; William Byrd III, the most notorious gambler in colonial Virginia, occasionally bought Harry cards a dozen packs at a time. During the period covered by the surviving daybooks, not once did Jefferson purchase playing cards at the printing office. Only blackguards played cards, he said.1 He was not averse to games of chance: he often bet modest sums playing quoits or attending horse races. But the willingness with which many Virginia planters wagered their hard-earned fortunes on the turn of a card dismayed and disgusted him.
The books he brought to the Gazette office this early October day included two diverse works: William Rastell’s Collection in English of the Statutes Now in Force and Mark Akenside’s philosophical poem The Pleasures of Imagination.2 Jefferson’s attention to Rastell’s Statutes is understandable. Since its initial appearance in 1557, the work had become England’s leading statutory compilation. New editions had appeared after nearly every Parliament to 1625. Containing statutes from the Magna Charta through the reign of James I, the work took even the most diligent students many weeks to read and analyze.3 Given its title, The Pleasures of Imagination would seem to offer a pleasant diversion from the relatively irksome task of reading crowded lists of statutes printed in black letter. It is easy to imagine Jefferson temporarily setting aside old Black Letter to refresh himself with a little poetry.
Akenside’s poem is not exactly light reading, though. The Pleasures of Imagination is a highly erudite work with ramifications well beyond the imaginative world it purports to explain. Akenside not only attempted to integrate poetry and philosophy, he also tried to reconcile Platonic rationalism and Baconian empiricism.4 Akenside’s detailed notes reinforce his scholarly bent: references to figures ranging from the historians and philosophers of ancient Greece to the astronomers and mathematicians of modern Europe crowd the back pages of his book.
Written in Miltonic blank verse, The Pleasures of Imagination plumbs the poet’s creative process. Introducing his topic in the opening lines, the speaker of the poem stresses the originality of his purpose:
Oft have the laws of each poetic strain
The critic-verse imploy’d; yet still unsung
Lay this prime subject, tho’ importing most
A poet’s name: for fruitless is th’ attempt
By dull obedience and the curb of rules,
For creeping toil to climb the hard ascent
Of high Parnassus. Nature’s kindling breath
Must fire the chosen genius; nature’s hand
Must point the path …
In other words, a great poet does not compose his work simply by following the rules of poetic meter, rhyme, and diction. Rather, he must let nature serve as guide—only by following nature can the poet scale the lofty heights of Parnassus. Akenside’s concept of nature is typical of much eighteenth-century English verse, including the work of his better known contemporary, Alexander Pope, whom Jefferson was also reading.
Perhaps the works of Rastell and Akenside are not as diverse as they might seem. In absolute terms, both concern themselves with law: whereas Rastell’s Statutes exemplify positive law, Akenside’s lengthy poem embodies the idea that man should not necessarily obey man-made rules but instead should follow nature. When it comes to matters of either law or poetry, according to ideas that were becoming increasingly prevalent during the eighteenth century, nature should serve as guide. Ideally, positive law should jibe with natural law. Before another year would pass, Jefferson would realize how disparate the two could be. The breach between natural law and English constitutional law, as interpreted by Parliament regarding the American colonies, became so great over the following year it prompted in Jefferson’s mind an intellectual crisis, a crisis requiring much study on his part before it could be resolved.
Jefferson spent the winter of 1764–65 reading law at Shadwell, but he was back in Williamsburg for the spring session of the General Court, which convened in April. Once the General Court adjourned, he stayed in town to continue his study under Wythe’s supervision. During his time in Williamsburg that spring, Jefferson took the opportunity to observe the House of Burgesses in action. There was no gallery overlooking the legislative chamber, but interested parties were welcome to listen to the proceedings from the lobby doorway. Before this session ended, Jefferson would witness a seminal event in the movement toward American independence.
By late May, the Virginia Assembly was winding down, so much so that many of the burgesses were leaving town for their plantations. The last week of the month, fewer than forty members of the House were left to transact what legislative business remained. On Wednesday, May 29, 1765, a copy of the Stamp Act was introduced into the House of Burgesses. Or, in the suggestive words of Governor Fauquier, it “crept into the house.”5 A motion to consider the Act was made and passed. According to tradition, Patrick Henry drafted seven resolutions onto a blank leaf of an old law book he had on hand. He would move these resolutions the following day.
Standing in the lobby doorway Thursday as Henry presented and defended these resolutions, Jefferson heard a speech he would remember for a lifetime. Many years later, he recalled, “I write this from memory: but the impression made on me, at the time, was such as to fix the facts indelibly in my mind.”6 Even after witnessing the proceedings of the French National Assembly on a daily basis during his last year in Paris, he still thought Henry a superior orator. “Henry spoke wonderfully,” Jefferson told an acquaintance. “Call it oratory or what you please, but I never heard any thing like it. He had more command over the passions than any man I ever knew; I heard all the celebrated orators of the National Assembly of France, but there was none equal to Patrick Henry.”7
Listening to the proceedings with Jefferson was a mysterious French traveler, whose journal represents the only known contemporary account of the famous speech Henry delivered that Thursday. Reaching Williamsburg at noon, the stranger proceeded to the House of Burgesses, where he “was entertained with very strong Debates.”8 Given its relative immediacy, this French traveler’s tale offers a more accurate rendering of Henry’s speech than the one reconstructed by William Wirt for Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry. “In former times Tarquin and Julius had their Brutus, Charles had his Cromwell,” Henry vociferated as his oration reached its climax. He did not doubt that “some good American would stand up, in favour of his country.”
Stories of Henry’s powerful speech circulated rapidly through Williamsburg and back to England. Hearing about the speech secondhand, Commissary William Robinson, for example, reported to the Bishop of London that Henry had “blazed out in a violent speech against the Authority of parliament and the King.”9
Jefferson made several testaments to Henry’s eloquence. For the most part, his surviving comments occur in three different places. A series of letters he wrote William Wirt constitute his fullest known comments. He made additional remarks in his autobiography and in conversation with Daniel Webster, who visited Monticello in 1824 and kept detailed notes of their conversation. Taken together, Jefferson’s comments have largely determined how history has portrayed Henry’s intellect.
While researching his Life of Patrick Henry, Wirt asked Jefferson to supply as much information as he could remember. Jefferson responded with a brief letter, which included a lengthy reminiscence by way of postscript, and offered further details in several follow-up letters. Wirt, whose writing idealizes Henry, did not use all the information he received—Jefferson’s portrayal of him in the correspondence is occasionally quite critical. Wirt did accept Jefferson’s depiction of Henry as a child of nature, someone whose knowledge and insight came not from boo
ks but from natural intuition.
Writing his autobiography after Wirt had published his life of Henry, Jefferson introduced additional comments supplementing what he had written privately to Wirt. In conversation with Webster, he portrayed Henry similarly. Consistent with one another, all three portraits seem fraught with internal contradiction. Jefferson himself admitted that his understanding of Henry’s character was “of mixed aspect.”10 Though he used both great praise and harsh invective to portray Henry, his inconsistencies are not irreconcilable.
Generally speaking, Jefferson praised Henry’s oratory yet critiqued his learning. Recalling the Caesar-had-his-Brutus speech, Jefferson appreciated “the splendid display of Mr. Henry’s talents as a popular orator. They were great indeed,” he continued, “such as I have never heard from any other man. He appeared to me to speak as Homer wrote.” The comparison between Henry and Homer, one of Jefferson’s favorite authors, is unusual. The Greek orator Demosthenes was a more common touchstone for describing Henry. Using a favorite epithet of the time, one contemporary Virginian, for instance, called Henry “our homespun Demosthenes.” When Lord Byron characterized Henry as “the forest-born Demosthenes, / Whose thunder shook the Phillip of the seas,” he was repeating an epithet that was already well established in American culture.11
In his first letter to Wirt on the subject, Jefferson described Henry as “the best humored man in society I almost ever knew, and the greatest orator that ever lived. He had a consumate knoledge of the human heart which directing the efforts of his eloquence enabled him to attain a degree of popularity with the people at large never perhaps equalled.” In his reminiscence, Jefferson applauded his “torrents of sublime eloquence.” Jefferson reinforced his impressions of Henry’s oratorical ability by asserting that his “imagination was copious, poetical, sublime; but vague also. He said the strongest things in the finest language, but without logic, without arrangement, desultorily.”12 Linking the sublime quality of Henry’s oratory with its vagueness, Jefferson echoed ideas from The Pleasures of Imagination. Akenside had argued that the imagination is stimulated by a combination of the sublime, the uncommon, and the beautiful.
The words Henry spoke had a delightful, almost hypnotic quality. Recalling times when the two faced one another in court, Jefferson explained, “When he had spoken in opposition to my opinion, had produced a great effect, and I myself been highly delighted and moved, I have asked myself when he ceased, ‘What the Devil has he said,’ and could never answer the enquiry.” In conversation with Webster, Jefferson characterized Henry’s eloquence as “impressive and sublime beyond what can be imagined.”13
Throughout Jefferson’s various descriptions of Henry’s oratory, the word “sublime” recurs more frequently than any other. He used the same term to describe both Virginia’s Natural Bridge and the poetry of Ossian, the legendary epic bard of ancient Scottish times. Henry’s oratorical ability, Jefferson believed, was a natural phenomenon, capable of soaring to beautiful heights. Taken as a whole, Jefferson’s comments suggest why he found Homer a more appropriate comparison than Demosthenes. Given its sublime quality, Henry’s oratory more closely resembled classical epic verse than logical argument.
Describing Henry’s lack of intellectual accomplishments and poor work habits in his autobiography, Jefferson called him “the laziest man in reading I ever knew.” As harsh as this remark seems, Jefferson’s comments to Webster regarding Henry’s intellectual powers are even more absolute: “He was a man of very little knowledge of any sort, he read nothing and had no books.” For proof, Jefferson offered the following anecdote: “Returning one November from Albemarle Court, he borrowed of me Hume’s Essays, in two vols. saying he should have leisure in the winter for reading. In the Spring he returned them, and declared he had not been able to go farther than twenty or thirty pages, in the first volume.”14
Henry’s passion for the outdoors took time away from more bookish activities. He was especially fond of hunting—when the courts adjourned in the winter, according to Jefferson, Henry would lead a party of poor hunters from his neighborhood to the piney woods of Fluvanna, where he would pass weeks camping out, hunting deer, staying up into the small hours with “overseers and such like people,” and cracking jokes around the campfire. He covered “all the dirt of his dress with a hunting shirt”—“the same shirt the whole time.” As Jefferson depicted him, Henry was capable of sublime eloquence yet lacked the manners characteristic of Virginia’s finest social circles.15
In his effort to understand Henry, Jefferson made use of the stage theory, a prevalent cultural theory of the day. By this theory, civilization has evolved through a series of stages. Whereas Europe had already progressed through the stages leading to the establishment of civilization, North America was experiencing cultural development at several stages simultaneously. As Jefferson portrayed him, Henry symbolized the recreation of early ancient Greece on the American frontier. His image of Henry embodies the idea that the cultural evolution of North America recapitulated the development of Western civilization.
Jefferson’s fullest articulation of this idea comes in a letter he wrote late in life:
Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains, eastwardly towards our sea-coast. These he would observe in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature, subscribing and covering themselves with the flesh and skins of wild beasts. He would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting. Then succeed our own semi-barbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance of civilization, and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns. This, in fact, is equivalent to a survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day.16
Read with Jefferson’s personal description of Henry in mind, this passage places Patrick Henry within Jefferson’s scheme of the stages of development. There he is, rubbing his buckskin-clad elbows with the “semi-barbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance of civilization.”
Another phrase from this passage identifies the place of law within the development of civilization. In Jefferson’s view, the westernmost inhabitants of North America live “under no law but that of nature.” Implicitly, the continent’s easternmost inhabitants live more fully under positive law than natural law. Situated on the frontier among the “semi-barbarous citizens,” Henry was more in touch with natural law and natural rights than with Virginia’s more refined citizenry.
In one letter to Wirt, Jefferson explained how Henry came to understand natural law and natural rights so well. He might have known about early Virginia charters from reading such works as William Stith’s History of Virginia, but “no man ever more undervalued chartered titles than himself. He drew all natural rights from a purer source, the feelings of his own breast.”17 As Jefferson understood him, Henry could interpret and articulate law from the perspective of natural rights not because he was well read but because he lived much closer to nature than those who were well read.
Before Henry concluded his Caesar-had-his-Brutus speech, Speaker of the House John Robinson, whom Jefferson remembered as “an excellent man, liberal, friendly and rich,” rose to interrupt him, calling his harangue treasonous. Robinson also expressed dismay with his fellow burgesses because none had seen fit to stop Henry.18
After the interruption, Henry rose to apologize, explaining that if he had offended the speaker, or the House, he sincerely asked their pardon. He further stated that he was willing to prove his loyalty to the crown with “the last Drop of his blood.” He had meant no affront. The words he had spoken were addressed “to the Interest of his Country’s Dying liberty which he had at heart, and the heat of passion might have led him to have said something more than he intended.”19 Other members of the House rose in his support, the issue died down, and the proceedings continued.<
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The burgesses had passed five of the resolutions by the day’s end. Collectively, these resolutions emphasized the idea that representative government was the distinguishing characteristic of the British Constitution. In short, the Stamp Act threatened to topple the very principles on which English constitutional law was based. The strongest of the resolutions or, in Governor Fauquier’s words, the “most offensive” passed this day stipulated that such efforts to impose power over the colonists had “a manifest Tendency to destroy British as well as American Freedom.” The debate over this resolution, Jefferson recalled, was “most bloody,” and it passed by a single vote.20 When the House adjourned for the day, its members streamed from the legislative chambers still discussing the resolutions that had been passed.
“By God, I would have given five hundred guineas for a single vote!” Peyton Randolph exclaimed as he walked from the House into the adjacent lobby. One more negative would have divided the House, leaving the deciding vote to Robinson, who opposed the Virginia resolutions. Randolph’s comments were recorded by Jefferson himself, who lingered in the lobby as the burgesses exited, enthralled with what was transpiring.
Randolph and the others who opposed the resolutions passed on Thursday were determined to reverse them on Friday. Hours before the House was scheduled to reconvene, Jefferson went to the legislative chambers, where he found Peter Randolph, a member of the governor’s Council and a cousin of Peyton’s, at the clerk’s desk searching the Journals of the House of Burgesses for a precedent to expunge a vote. Jefferson remained with Peter Randolph until the bell rang to announce the start of the day’s session.
Like Jefferson, the mysterious stranger who was visiting Williamsburg was also curious to see how the clash over these resolutions would end. He returned to the lobby, where he heard some “very hot Debates” about the stamp duties. Patrick Henry, believing his work finished, had mounted his horse Thursday night and left Williamsburg. Why, he “rode off in triumph,” one observer commented. As a result, Henry was not around to defend the resolutions. The first four withstood Friday’s debates, but the House carried a motion to expunge the fifth one. The removal of this single resolution did not placate Governor Fauquier, who dissolved the Assembly. Reporting the events that occurred to the Board of Trade, the governor explained that the older, more experienced members of the House “were overpowered by the Young, hot, and Giddy Members.”21
The Road to Monticello Page 11