Required to wait a year before starting his law practice, Jefferson had no intentions of remaining idle during that time. His relationship with Rind shows that even before he began his law practice or served in his first elected office, he was taking an active role in an effort to shape public opinion. The waiting period gave him leisure time he had not known since his boyhood and would not know again until his retirement from public office decades later. He spent the time actively engaged in a variety of pursuits. For one, he deepened his legal studies.
To that end, he maintained his legal commonplace book. The consecutively numbered entries are undated, but Jefferson seems to have made many in 1766. At the end of each entry, he carefully cited his source. He mostly commonplaced reports of cases during the mid-1760s, but he also excerpted some theoretical works. As the decade of the Stamp Act gave way to the decade of Revolution, the content of his entries shifted from legal reports to legal and political theory.5
Jefferson took an approach to his legal commonplace book that differed significantly from that of his literary one. Excerpting belles lettres, he usually transcribed passages verbatim. Occasionally he skipped intervening text between two notable passages and marked the gap with an ellipsis, but for the most part he recorded the written word as he found it. When it came to legal texts, precise wording was less important than capturing the gist of a case or an argument, so he sought to summarize legal theories and reports of cases as briefly as possible. Before long, he could reduce ideas to their essence.
Advice he gave those studying for the bar offers a good indication of Jefferson’s method of keeping a legal commonplace book. When commonplacing reports of cases, he advised, enter “every case of value, condensed into the narrowest compass possible which will admit of presenting distinctly the principles of the case. This operation is doubly useful, inasmuch as it obliges the student to seek out the pith of the case, and habituates him to a condensation of thought, and to an acquisition of the most valuable of all talents, that of never using two words where one will do.”6
To his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph, he described how he developed this method with his own legal commonplace book:
At first I could shorten it very little: but after a while I was able to put a page of a book into 2. or 3. sentences, without omitting any portion of the substance. Go on therefore with courage and you will find it grows easier and easier. Besides obliging you to understand the subject, and fixing it in your memory, it will learn you the most valuable art of condensing your thoughts and expressing them in the fewest words possible. No stile of writing is so delightful as that which is all pith, which never omits a necessary word, nor uses an unnecessary one. The finest models of this existing are Sallust and Tacitus, which on that account are worthy of constant study.7
Primarily important for understanding the development of his legal thought, the entries are doubly useful for understanding Jefferson’s literary life. The legal commonplace book shows him in metamorphosis from reader to writer. As examples of his ability to reduce arguments to their essentials, his entries in this notebook anticipate his subsequent writings. Jefferson’s greatest works are masterpieces of concision. In addition, the footnotes he occasionally appended to his entries reveal his ongoing interests in belles lettres and his recognition of the interrelationships among different types of writing. Lawyers and poets can share ideas—they simply have different ways of expressing them.
Entry 557, one of the lengthier ones in the legal commonplace book, offers an excellent opportunity to see Jefferson’s mind at work. He derived this and several subsequent entries from Lord Kames’s Historical Law Tracts. In this pioneering work of legal history, Kames brought together several works on a variety of legal subjects, synthesizing his ideas about the historical development of the law. Each of Jefferson’s entries from this volume derives from a separate tract. The first tract, “History of the Criminal Law,” occupies eighty-nine octavo pages in the edition of Kames he owned. Jefferson condensed it to an amount of space that fills just over eight pages in the modern edition of the commonplace book—one-tenth its original size.8 Never use ten words where one will do, he might have said.
Jefferson eliminated Kames’s first three sentences. All concern basic principles of criminal law he knew well and did not need to repeat. His first sentence, therefore, is a paraphrase of Kames’s fourth. Kames had written:
Upon certain Actions, hurtful to others, the Stamp of impropriety and wrong is impressed in legible characters, visible to all, not excepting even the Delinquent.9
Jefferson wrote:
On certain actions hurtful to others the stamp of wrong is impressed in characters legible even to the delinquent himself.
The departures he made from his source show Jefferson deliberately eliminating unnecessary words. He saw no reason to use the conjoined word pair, “impropriety and wrong”—he omitted the latinate word and kept the more straightforward and forceful Anglo-Saxon term. In the right hands, of course, such verbal pairs can be rhetorically and stylistically effective. Think of Hamlet—“the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” “the whips and scorns of time.” Jefferson himself would use conjoined pairs of words masterfully in his most persuasive writings.
Entry 557 reveals other ways Jefferson abbreviated his source. As part of his revision, he largely eliminated Kames’s supporting examples and illustrative footnotes. At one point Kames took the Hottentots for example to verify his ideas regarding criminal behavior. Seeing no need to repeat this derogatory and racist example, Jefferson eliminated it altogether. Though he excised most of Kames’s quotations from other sources, he did retain a few, those from Lucan and Homer.
Regardless of his desire for brevity, Jefferson expanded his source in several places to make reference to other texts. Copying a sentence from Kames expressing how heinous transgressions of the laws of nature prompted public indignation and elicited a public desire to punish criminals, Jefferson added a footnote, expanding Kames with two lines of Greek from Euripides’ Hecuba. The lines can be translated, “For ’tis ever a good man’s duty to succour the right, and to punish evil-doers wherever found.”10
Brief as it is, Jefferson’s footnote conveys much. Kames had asserted the universality of man’s indignation toward evildoers. Enhancing Kames with an ancient Greek quotation, Jefferson verified the assertion by showing how the same idea had been expressed in a different time, place, and language. Kames had emphasized the importance of understanding law in terms of its historical development; Jefferson’s footnote shows him doing just that. For him, law and literature offered different ways to codify universal values.
The same quotation from Hecuba occurs among numerous other Greek excerpts from Euripides in Jefferson’s literary commonplace book. Chances are he did not reread Euripides to gloss Kames. More likely he consulted his literary commonplace book. The two notebooks could work in tandem. Whereas one recorded legal ideas and the other quoted passages from belletristic literature, the ideas they articulated occasionally coincided. When they did, Jefferson noticed.
Later in entry 557, he added another literary footnote. Annotating a passage discussing the practice of convicted criminals who designated substitutes to assume their debts—to suffer their punishments for them—Jefferson transcribed some twenty lines from Paradise Lost articulating the same idea. Milton had drawn an analogy between this legal practice and the offer the Son of God makes to his Father in order to assume the debt of the sinner, Man, and be crucified for his sins. The passage Jefferson extracted from Milton ends with Christ speaking to his Father:
Behold me then; me for him, life for life
I offer; on me let thine anger fall;
Account me men …
This Miltonic footnote fulfills the same functions as the earlier Euripides note, but it does something more: it indicates the extraordinary power of literature to exalt an idea to the realm of the sublime. Taking a legal concept and borrowing legal diction, Milton ex
pressed the sacrifice the Son of God makes on man’s behalf. Jefferson’s footnote shows him doing precisely what he told John Bernard he had been doing at this time: “I was bred…to the law; that gave me a view of the darkside of humanity. Then I read poetry to qualify it with a gaze on the bright side.”11
Historical Law Tracts was one of several works by Kames that Jefferson was reading in the mid-1760s. About half of his equity commonplace book derives from Kames’s Principles of Equity.12 Often considered Kames’s most important work, Principles of Equity contained much to allure Jefferson. Using the comparative method, Kames contrasted Scottish and English legal theory to reveal their similarities and differences. While Kames’s treatment of equity law is primarily theoretical, he addressed many important practical legal issues, too.13
Jefferson also read Kames’s Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion around this time, as something he wrote nearly a half century later suggests. In a letter dated 1814, he calls Lord Kames “one of the ablest of our advocates, who goes so far as to say, in his Principles of Natural religion, that a man owes no duty to which he is not urged by some impulsive feeling. This is correct if referred to the standard of general feeling in the given case, and not to the feeling of a single individual. Perhaps I may misquote him, it being fifty years since I read his book.”14 Jefferson ultimately acquired several other works by Kames, including Elements of Criticism, in which Kames takes an innovative approach to derive critical principles from human nature. Elements of Criticism influenced Jefferson’s literary aesthetic significantly.15
The legal and equity commonplace books indicate the level of intensity and seriousness with which Jefferson approached his studies. But he did not spend the whole time between passing the bar and beginning his legal practice with his nose in a book. He also attuned himself to the rhythms of nature and maintained a regimen of vigorous outdoor exercise. His long walks through the countryside gave him ample opportunity to watch the seasons turn.
As the Virginia mountains shed their coat of snow and pushed out the year’s new growth, Jefferson carefully observed the earliest wildflowers bloom. The colorful flowers were tinged with melancholy that year. According to family tradition, Jane Jefferson had first introduced her brother to the pleasures of wildflowers. Since childhood the two had often accompanied each other on walks through the woods. That spring, for the first time, he could not share his delight with his sister. Without her, he recorded the observations into a notebook that has become known as his Garden Book. It did not start out as such; none of the entries he made in 1766 concern gardening at all. They mention neither the flowers he planted nor the vegetables he grew. For instance, he planted strawberries this year, but nowhere in the entries he made for the year does he mention planting strawberries. He solely recorded his observations on wildflowers.16
Written after his sister’s death, the entries for 1766 assume the quality of a poem in the carpe diem tradition. In terms of form, however, Jefferson’s observations read almost like modernist verse:
Purple hyacinth begins to bloom.
Narcissus and Puckoon open.
Puckoon flowers fallen.
a bluish colored, funnel-formed flower in lowgrounds in bloom
purple flag blooms. Hyacinth and Narcissus gone.
Wild honeysuckle in our woods open.—also the Dwarf
flag and Violets
blue flower in low grounds vanished.
the purple flag, Dwarf flag, Violet and wild
Honeysuckle still in bloom.
Each line in this passage save the last one records when blossoms either appeared or disappeared. The last records that the latest flowers to blossom remained in bloom. Perhaps Jefferson made this particular note because he could not wait until the bloom was off the honeysuckle: he was leaving on a trip through Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York. He could tarry in Virginia no longer. Regardless, this last line does have the effect of seizing a moment in time.
If Jefferson brought a notebook with him to keep a journal of his trip north, it perished in the Shadwell fire. No evidence of a travel notebook survives. The fullest information regarding the journey comes in a letter he wrote John Page from Annapolis. Jefferson would do much more travel writing in Europe a decade and a half later. His letter to Page shows that he was already a pretty fair travel writer. His ostensible purpose for the trip was to visit Philadelphia to be inoculated against smallpox, but he also wanted to take advantage of the time before starting his law practice to see more of North America. Who could say when he might have another opportunity?
The letter to Page begins with a humorous description of his misfortunes along the road and echoes a passage from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which itself echoes the storm scene from King Lear. Literary history is a set of nesting boxes: an allusion to one work often means an allusion to many. Personifying fortune as a mean-spirited duchess, Tristram Shandy claims that “in every stage of my life, and at every turn and corner where she could get fairly at me, the ungracious duchess has pelted me with a set of as pitiful misadventures and cross accidents as ever small Hero sustained.”17 Narrating his own experiences on the road, Jefferson observed:
Surely never did small hero experience greater misadventures than I did on the first two or three days of my travelling. Twice did my horse run away with me and greatly endanger the breaking [of] my neck on the first day. On the second I drove two hours through as copious a rain as ever I have seen, without meeting with a single house to which I could repair for shelter. On the third in going through Pamunkey, being unacquainted with the ford, I passed through water so deep as to run over the cushion as I sat on it, and to add to the danger, at that instant one wheel mounted a rock which I am confident was as high as the axle, and rendered it necessary for me to exercise all my skill in the doctrine of gravity.18
Depicting himself with the seat of his pants soaking wet, Jefferson used the same kind of self-effacing humor characteristic of the finest travel writers. His reference to the doctrine of gravity contributes to the humor as it conveys the absurdity of formal learning in a precarious situation.
Jefferson followed these adventures on the road with an account of what he saw in Annapolis. His visit to the provincial capital coincided with the Maryland Assembly. Accompanied by a local acquaintance, Jefferson saw the lower house in session: “I went into the lower, sitting in an old courthouse, which, judging from its form and appearance, was built in the year one.” The Maryland State House was not quite that old, but it was getting on in years. Having been built the first decade of the eighteenth century, it had become much too small for its present purpose, and the Marylanders had been neglecting its maintenance for years. Before another decade passed, it would be razed to make way for a new state house.
Approaching the chamber in which the lower house met, Jefferson was surprised “to hear as great a noise and hubbub as you will usually observe at a publick meeting of the planters in Virginia.” The appearance of the Speaker of the House, Colonel Robert Lloyd, immediately drew his attention: “The first object which struck me after my entrance was the figure of a little old man dressed but indifferently, with a yellow queüe wig on, and mounted in the judge’s chair.” This unkempt little man scarcely seemed like the speaker of the House.
Jefferson went on to describe both the clerk of the Assembly and the members of the House as a whole. The clerk read a bill before the House “with a schoolboy tone and an abrupt pause at every half dozen words.” The assemblymen or
mob (for such was their appearance) sat covered on the justices’ and lawyers’ benches, and were divided into little clubs amusing themselves in the common chit chat way. I was surprised to see them address the speaker without rising from their seats, and three, four, and five at a time without being checked. When a motion was made, the speaker instead of putting the question in the usual form only asked the gentleman whether they chose that such or such a thing should be done, and was answered by a yes
sir, or no sir: and tho’ the voices appeared frequently to be divided, they never would go to the trouble of dividing the house, but the clerk entered the resolutions, I supposed, as he thought proper. In short every thing seems to be carried without the house in general’s knowing what was proposed.19
Years later Jefferson would write the standard work in the field of parliamentary procedure, A Manual of Parliamentary Practice. This passage shows that he was already intrigued with the formal legislative process.
His account of Annapolis ends with a description of the city, which proved more complimentary than his depiction of the Maryland legislature. He especially enjoyed its handsome natural scenery and the usefulness of its deepwater port—the beautiful and the practical.
When he was in Annapolis, news arrived that Parliament had repealed the Stamp Act. As he told Page, people there celebrated its repeal with verve. Similar celebrations took place in other colonial cities up and down the seaboard. All were short-lived. Directly after repealing the Stamp Act, Parliament passed the Declaratory Act, which gave it the right to bind the American colonies to whatever legislation it felt necessary. Jefferson considered it a legislative sword of Damocles.
From Annapolis he traveled to Philadelphia. The city presented an extraordinary sight for provincial eyes. Fellow Virginian William Gregory of Fredericksburg, who visited for the first time some months earlier, had been especially impressed with the port: “I went and took a view of the Shipping. I never saw so many vessels at one time, at one Port. I dare say there may be 250 vessels that go to sea.”20 Jefferson experienced a similar sense of awe. In Philadelphia he found the most beautiful city he had ever seen, an opinion he reasserted even after he had seen London and Paris.
The Road to Monticello Page 13