Jefferson also enjoyed the bookbuying opportunities the city had to offer. His activities in Philadelphia during this visit have gone undocumented, but if his subsequent behavior is any indication, he visited all of the bookstores in town and made purchases at most.
He carried with him a letter of introduction to the prominent Philadelphia physician John Morgan. The previous year, Morgan had returned to the city after being in Europe for an extended period of time. A distinguished man of science, he was also a connoisseur and collector of art. While taking the Grand Tour of Europe, he met many of the day’s leading scientists and artists and collected several fine paintings and other objets d’art. Dr. Morgan’s personal qualities and intellectual accomplishments were similar to those of Jefferson’s friends in the Williamsburg circle. To Jefferson, Morgan presented a model of a successful professional man dedicated to the advancement of science and culture.
The smallpox inoculation kept Jefferson incapacitated for some days. Little else is known of his time in Philadelphia that year, but a letter he wrote some fifty years later dates his friendship with Charles Thomson from this visit to Philadelphia.21 In terms of both intellect and ideology, Jefferson found in him a kindred spirit. During the Stamp Act crisis, Thomson had become a leader of Philadelphia’s Sons of Liberty. In the coming years, he would work tirelessly to prevent the importation of British goods into Philadelphia and serve as secretary to the Continental Congress. Jefferson developed a deep and abiding respect for Thomson’s mind. He would seek his help when he revised and expanded Notes on the State of Virginia.
Jefferson eventually left Philadelphia and traveled to New York, where he happened to lodge with Elbridge Gerry. Short and wiry, Gerry’s slender frame did nothing to mask his great intellect or his passion for freedom. He was already dedicated to the cause of American liberty and would become a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He had recently completed his master’s degree at Harvard College, where he wrote a thesis arguing the question, “Can the new prohibitory duties which made it useless for the people to engage in commerce, be evaded by them as faithful subjects?” It is easy to imagine the heated conversations about law and liberty that took place between Gerry and Jefferson early that summer. Before the month of July was out, Jefferson returned to Virginia by water.
Little evidence survives to document his activities during the second half of 1766. In February 1767 he resumed note-taking in matters concerning his garden, this time with a greater sense of purpose. He continued to record the coming and going of wildflowers that year, but these observations are interspersed with information about planting vegetables and flowers. The twentieth of that month he made the year’s first garden-related entry, noting that he had sowed two beds of peas, his favorite vegetable.22 On April 2, he sowed seeds for carnations, marigolds, pansies, violets, and yellow-flowered primrose. In addition to sowing seeds for these and many other varieties of flowers, he also planted cayenne peppers. On April 24, he recorded that the peas he had planted in February came to the table.
The notes he took show him in the process not only of cultivating his garden, they also show him in the process of learning how to garden. Unlike more scholarly fields of inquiry, gardening could not be learned solely from books. Few topics were more local in terms of the specific knowledge required. The classic British treatises on the subject might do well at Kew Gardens, but their information was of limited value in the Virginia Piedmont. To be a successful gardener, Jefferson needed local information, information that generally could be found only by word of mouth.
Starting in 1767, and continuing for many years after, he noted gardening hints he gleaned from friends and neighbors. That year, for example, he recorded a conversation he had had with a neighbor concerning how and when to plant artichokes. Later he noted conversations with two others about planting cucumbers and watermelons. After noting these conversations, he transcribed additional information about planting cucumbers from Philip Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary, the foremost horticultural and agricultural handbook in the eighteenth century. Jefferson was obviously checking to see how his neighbor’s information jibed with what his books told him. When it came to the matter of gardening, Jefferson used the printed word to ascertain the spoken.
His memorandum books, in turn, combine print and manuscript. Starting his legal career in 1767, he needed an accurate way to keep track of how the cases he accepted were proceeding. Careful record-keeping was especially important since legal cases often took years to resolve. His memorandum books not only supply details of his professional legal activities, they also document his day-to-day expenses.
Through the 1770s, he kept his memoranda in a series of interleaved almanacs. When an almanac for the coming year was published around November, Jefferson would acquire a copy and have it bound up with enough blank leaves to provide sufficient space for a year’s worth of notes. The pocket-sized almanac, even after it was bulked up with blank leaves, remained portable enough to carry with him throughout the year. At the beginning of the volume, he would enter his legal notations. For his financial accounts he would turn the volume over—making the back the front—and enter his daily expenditures. The extra blank leaves at the center of each volume provided space for miscellaneous notes.
Eventually Jefferson began carrying an ivory table-book to keep his daily accounts. Although pocket-sized memorandum books made of blank leaves were part of a tradition in English letters that extended at least as far back as the sixteenth century, the use of ivory for table-books was a late-seventeenth-century innovation. Sometimes called a writing tablet, a writing table, or even simply a table, the table-book gave users a way to take notes on the fly. Fashioned from several oblong strips of ivory attached together at one end so that they could be spread out like a fan, the set of leaves could be inscribed, wiped clean, and reinscribed. Ivory table-books had many advantages over interleaved almanacs: they were reusable, durable, and waterproof.23 Its reusability was its defining feature. Benjamin Franklin used an ivory table-book to record his plan for self-examination, staining the ivory leaves with his week-long chart in indelible red ink and using a lead pencil to mark the chart, which he would erase at week’s end.
The portability and erasability of table-books made them ideal for the peripatetic man of letters. These same features intrigued Renaissance dramatists, who made creative use of them. Hamlet makes figurative and literal use of these memorandum books within the course of a single speech. The knowledge that Claudius has murdered his own brother destroys the concept of the world Hamlet has formed, and he resolves to erase his mind like a table-book:
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observations copied there.
Hamlet’s knowledge of Claudius’s duplicity prompts him to start his table-book afresh: “O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! My tables—meet it is I set it down / That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!”
Ivory Table-Books. (Monticello, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc.)
Records that Jefferson kept in his ivory table-book were less dramatic, but they did allow him to keep his life in order on a day-to-day basis. He inscribed notes, expenditures, and other quotidian details in his table-book, transferred them to his memorandum books later, and then erased the table-book to use it again.
The legal notations and financial accounts in his memorandum books are fairly bland, but the miscellaneous memoranda contain a variety of unusual topics, entered in considerably more detail than any of the day-by-day accounts. One year he used the extra space in his interleaved almanac to write a detailed, yet emotional description of Virginia’s Natural Bridge, which would form the basis of his description in Notes on the State of Virginia. Another year he used the spare blank pages to write out some ideas about landscaping Monticello. His interleaved copy of the 1775 Virginia Almanack conta
ins a transcription of the famous speech of Chief Logan. The speech greatly impressed Jefferson and would remain important to him throughout his life. He entered it when he first encountered the speech in late 1774, thus ensuring its preservation and allowing him to refer to its text whenever he wished.
Accompanying the speech in his pocket almanac is a detailed account of the circumstances in which it was delivered. After narrating the events leading to Logan’s speech, Jefferson entered its complete text:
I appeal to any white man to say if ever he entered Logan’s cabbin hungry, and he gave him not meat; if ever he came cold and naked and he cloathed him not. During the course of the last long and bloody war, Logan remained idle in his cabbin, an advocate for peace. Nay such was my affection for the Whites, that my countrymen hooted as they passed by and said, “Logan is the friend of White men.” I had even thought to have lived with you, but for the injuries of one man. Colo. Cresap, the last spring, in cold blood, and unprovoked, cut off all the Relations of Logan; not sparing even my women or children. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any human creature. This called on me for revenge. I have sought it; I have killed many: I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country I rejoice at the beams of peace, but do not harbor a thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan?—Not one.24
Such inclusions imbue the memorandum books with a literary quality they otherwise lack. Despite the absence of artistry, Jefferson took pride in his meticulous records. Writing in the 1780s, after he had been keeping accounts for more than fifteen years, he boasted that he had kept his memorandum books “with such scrupulous fidelity that I shall not be afraid to justify them on the bed of death, and so exact that in the course of 15 years which they comprehend, I never discovered that I had made but one omission of a paiment.”25 The irony of Jefferson’s financial memoranda is that though he maintained a meticulous record of his expenditures, he never balanced his accounts. He was chronically in debt yet seldom faced that fact. As his editors have explained, the records gave an artificial sense of order to Jefferson’s oftentimes chaotic financial situation.26
His record-keeping was so meticulous that his memorandum books can function as a chronicle of where he went and how much he spent. The most niggling amounts were recorded. Though he recorded what he spent, he did not always record what he bought. When he went to the coffeehouse in Williamsburg and spent six pence on coffee, the expenditure was duly recorded. When he went to the printing office to buy books, he recorded the expenditure, but not the titles of the books. From 1767, his memorandum books provide the only information regarding his purchases from either of the Virginia Gazette offices. Despite his meticulousness, Jefferson’s record of book purchases is frustratingly inadequate.
As a record of expenditures, the accounts are most useful for documenting the time Jefferson spent away from Monticello. At home in the mountains, he seldom needed to spend money. He often went several days without opening his memorandum book. Overseers kept separate account books for his plantations, but few of these survive. Though the memorandum books display his meticulous—some might say obsessive—record-keeping, they otherwise say little about his personality. Never revealing the total man, they do supply a collection of curious details that shed light on the quotidian even as they keep the corners of his mind in the dark.
Returning to Shadwell in November 1767 having successfully appeared before the bar of the General Court for the first time, Jefferson came home with a much greater sense of public responsibility. That same month he was elected to the vestry of Fredericksville parish, a capacity in which he would continue to serve for several years. This position marks Jefferson’s official entry into local leadership. The vestry of each parish consisted of intelligent, prosperous gentlemen who collectively oversaw the welfare of their fellow parishioners. Generally characterizing Virginia vestrymen, Jefferson explained that they “are well acquainted with the details and economy of private life, and they find sufficient inducements to execute their charge well, in their philanthropy, in the approbation of their neighbors, and the distinction which that gives them.”27
As a vestryman, Jefferson gave neighbors and parishioners the opportunity to see that the weedy youth they had known as one of the Reverend Mr. Maury’s students had transformed himself into a polite, well-mannered, and well-rounded young man. His role as vestryman paved the way for his election to the House of Burgesses the following year. Henceforth, Jefferson’s life would not merely be inscribed in his private notebooks—it would become a part of the annals of Virginia and of a new nation.
CHAPTER 8
Becoming a Burgess
Since starting college, Jefferson had been traveling back and forth from Shadwell to Williamsburg at least twice a year. To him Williamsburg was not only the place where he received his professional education, but also a place where he learned the social graces and developed his love of science and literature through the conviviality of friends he made there. Arriving in town a week before the spring session of General Court was scheduled to convene in 1768, he found his familiar Williamsburg world irreparably changed: his dear friend Lieutenant Governor Francis Fauquier had passed away the previous month.
His death meant not only the end of the pleasant intellectual conversation around the dinner table at the Governor’s Palace that Jefferson so enjoyed, but also the end of their ensemble musical performances. Even after his death, Fauquier still contributed to the advancement of scientific inquiry in Virginia: his will stipulated that in case he died of undetermined causes, his body should be used for purposes of scientific research.1
Fauquier had been the ablest man to fill the role of lieutenant governor of colonial Virginia, Jefferson believed. Regardless how his friend’s death affected him, he apparently did not dwell on it. The night after reaching Williamsburg that year, he attended the opening performance of William Verling’s Virginia Company of Comedians at the Waller Street theater, the first of several performances he would attend there that season. Jefferson had long been an aficionado of the stage. Evidence of his previous theatergoing is sparse, but a few years earlier, after reading law at Shadwell for several months, he considered a study break in the form of an excursion to Petersburg to attend the theater there.2
That evening, the company performed Douglas, a tragedy by John Home, who was currently being touted as the Scottish Shakespeare. Since its opening in Edinburgh the previous decade, this tragedy had been performed throughout Great Britain and had become a favorite on the London stage. Like so much other literature that appealed to Jefferson, this play incorporated themes and motifs exemplifying neoclassical thought yet anticipating Romantic ideals. While stressing the importance of civic duty and private virtue, the play derives from an old Scots ballad, takes places in the Scottish Highlands, and is overlaid with an atmosphere of brooding melancholy.3 Douglas contains many of the same elements that would draw Jefferson to the poems of Ossian in the coming years.
As an afterpiece, Verling’s company performed The Honest Yorkshire-Man, a ballad farce written and composed by Henry Carey. The title phrase represents the English prototype of the character known in America as Yankee Jonathan, a bucolic bumbler who could see through duplicity and voice universal truths despite his naiveté. Carey’s Virginia audience related well to the play, which contrasts the healthy virtues of the provinces with the pomp and frivolity of the metropolis. For American colonists, some of Carey’s lines resonated beyond the farcical context in which they were voiced.
Virginians who attended the theater as a diversion from their legal and business activities heard poignant phrases from Carey’s pen that resembled their increasingly claustrophobic situation as colonial subjects. Henrietta Osborne, one of the most recognizable and well-liked faces on the early American stage, played Arabella, the female lead. Trapped inside her apartment with her maid, she sang words with political ramifications f
or her colonial audience:
In vain you mention pleasure
To one confin’d like me,
Ah what is wealth or treasure,
Compar’d to liberty.
Regardless how Jefferson took this ballad farce, witnessing a musical performance on stage, as much as he enjoyed it, was still no substitute for playing music. Governor Fauquier, the man most responsible for keeping amateur musical performance alive and well in Williamsburg, may have died, but Jefferson was not going to let the music stop. Though good-quality musical instruments were sometimes difficult to obtain, they could be found occasionally. William Pasteur, who ran the apothecary shop on the Duke of Gloucester Street, imported a variety of goods, including musical instruments. The last week in May Jefferson visited Pasteur’s shop, where he bought a new violin.4 The frequency with which Jefferson purchased violin strings over the next few years affirms that he was continuing the musical traditions Fauquier had helped establish.
He was also augmenting his library. That spring he purchased several volumes from the library of Philip Ludwell, a prominent member of the Virginia Council who had recently passed away. Most of the titles he acquired from Ludwell’s estate concern law, but one, John Toland’s late-seventeenth-century work The Militia Reformed, gave him other ideas. Toland emphasized the value of a well-trained militia and offered some practical suggestions to keep it prepared and ready. He particularly stressed the importance of making the militia consist of men of property committed to the public good.
Before long, Jefferson would find himself in a position to test some of Toland’s ideas. Within the next two years, in fact, he would be commissioned county lieutenant of the Albemarle militia, a position that entitled him to be called colonel. He accepted the responsibility of the commission, but unlike so many of his Virginia contemporaries, he eschewed the title that came with it. Never did he style himself “Colonel Jefferson.”
The Road to Monticello Page 14