The Road to Monticello

by Hayes, Kevin J. ;

  He made no effort to mask his anger. A contemporary observer captured the scene from the moment the burgesses entered the Council chamber. This time Governor Botetourt “was dressed in a suit of plain scarlet. The speaker advanced toward him, the members following.” Imagine a group of men slowly advancing in the shape of a wedge, with the imposing figure of Peyton Randolph in the lead. At the proper distance from the governor, Randolph stopped. After a “solemn pause of a minute or two,” Governor Botetourt, “with an assumed stern countenance and with considerable power, addressed the speaker and members of the house.”26

  “Mr. Speaker, and Gentlemen of the House of Burgesses,” he stated. “I have heard of your Resolves, and augur ill of their Effect: You have made it my Duty to dissolve you; and you are dissolved accordingly.”27

  Suddenly, Thomas Jefferson’s first term as a burgess had ended just ten days after it had begun. Some of the more experienced burgesses had suspected what the governor would do once he heard of their resolves and already knew what they would do in turn. To preserve Virginia’s interests, they agreed to reconstitute themselves as an extralegislative body. They left the capitol and proceeded to the Raleigh Tavern—about a hundred paces as measured by Jefferson’s lanky stride. Inside, they gathered in the spacious Apollo Room, where they formed an association and then adjourned until the next morning, when they would consider possible courses of action.

  After debating different possibilities, these erstwhile burgesses ultimately drafted a set of nonimportation resolutions “in Hopes that our Example will induce the good People of this Colony to be frugal in the Use and Consumption of British Manufactures, and that the Merchants and Manufacturers of Great-Britain may, from Motives of Interest, friendship, and Justice, be engaged to exert themselves to obtain for us a Redress of those Grievances, under which the Trade and Inhabitants of America at present labour.”28 No longer would subscribers be able to import a variety of manufactured goods from Great Britain or articles of British manufacture from other nations. The resolutions specified a lengthy list of items, including candles, chairs, clocks, hats, jewelry, joiners’ and cabinet work of all kinds, lace, looking glasses, pewter, saddles, silversmith’s work of all sorts, spirits, tables, and upholstery. To this list Jefferson and the others affixed their names.

  Happily, the list did not prevent its subscribers from ordering books from Great Britain. This legislative session revealed to Jefferson significant gaps in his knowledge, which he intended to remedy. Short as it was, his first term in the House of Burgesses sparked his curiosity and left him with many unanswered questions regarding legal and political theory and procedure. The books he ordered around this time show him in the process of grappling with the relationship between Great Britain and America.

  The comparative approach always appealed to Jefferson. One way he sought to understand the colonists’ relationship to the mother country was by examining the relationship between England and Ireland. To that end, he acquired copies of Sir William Petty’s Political Survey of Ireland and two well-respected works by the miscellaneous writer Ferdinando Warner, The History of Ireland and The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in Ireland. Dissatisfied by the absence of a good general history, Warner had traveled to Ireland, acquainted himself with the Irish antiquarians, and delved into whatever primary research materials he could find. The histories resulting from his research show the respect he developed for the Irish people and their culture, although, a man of his times, Warner stopped short of condoning Irish Catholicism. Regardless, he created a reliable Irish history useful for comparing what had happened in Ireland with what was happening in America.29

  Other works Jefferson ordered that year treat law and politics from a more general and theoretical perspective: Anthony Ellys’s Tracts of the Liberty, Spiritual and Temporal, of Protestants in England, a work largely devoted to the topic of constitutional liberty that found other readers elsewhere in colonial America;30 Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society, which would significantly shape Jefferson’s ideas concerning man’s responsibility to his fellow man; a three-volume French edition of Montesquieu’s collected works; and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government.

  All these books reached Virginia that December. Though some would perish in the fire at Shadwell the following year, their ideas remained in Jefferson’s mind, where they began to meld with one another and to be applied to the unique political situation he was now facing. Combined with his ongoing attention to the study of natural law, Jefferson’s study of parliamentary history and political theory gave him the basis for developing and applying his own original political thought.

  Another item left off the list of goods that Virginians were forbidden from importing was musical instruments. Jefferson’s accounts show that in 1769 he ordered a kind of stringed instrument very different from his violin: an Aeolian harp. Placing his order in September, he would likely receive the instrument by late spring, a time when he could throw open the windows of his home, place it lengthwise on the casement, and listen to the hauntingly beautiful music made as the wind wafted over its strings. Whereas his violin allowed Jefferson to recreate sound precisely composed and arranged by European musicians, the Aeolian harp was controlled solely by the wind. It had an unusual and irregular sound, “a soft floating witchery of sound,” Samuel Coleridge called it. Beyond opening the window to let the breeze blow across it, there was no other way to control the sounds of an Aeolian harp—nature alone determined its sound. Even in music Jefferson was letting his tastes drift from the man-made and rule-governed to the natural. But he would never hear the sound of an Aeolian harp in his home at Shadwell. By the time spring came around, the mansion house there would be no more.

  PART II

  FAMILY AND NATION

  CHAPTER 9

  Domestic Life and Literary Pursuits

  Upon learning of the fire at Shadwell, Jefferson’s friends were quick to respond with sympathy and offers of help. Secretary of Virginia Thomas Nelson, for one, expressed his concern and offered to lend books from his personal library. His son, Thomas Nelson, Jr., upon receiving a letter from Jefferson listing several necessary books, forwarded the request to his bookseller. George Wythe sent some publishers’ catalogues and, regardless of the fire, some agricultural specimens: grapevines plus nectarine and apricot grafts.1 Though coincidence might seem the only connection between the grafts and the book catalogues, they functioned similarly. Just as a graft can improve the quality of fruit a tree bears, books can give readers new ideas to splice onto their existing knowledge. For Jefferson, trees laden with nectarines and shelves laden with books were both symbols of the ideal life he imagined at Monticello.

  The catalogues Wythe sent were issued by Foulis, the Glasgow publishing house known for its distinguished series of literary classics. Foulis editions were products of good bookmanship. Handsome yet portable volumes containing reliably edited texts, they suited Jefferson’s tastes nicely. The Foulis promotional material touted its series of Greek texts for their capacity “to render the reading of the Greek Historians more convenient for Gentlemen in active life.”2 Taking advantage of his mentor’s recommendations, Jefferson acquired many Foulis editions.

  There is no telling precisely how many titles he ordered from the catalogues Wythe sent, but a number of Foulis editions in his library date from before 1770, including works by such classical authors as Aeschylus, Callimachus, and Epictetus. Foulis made a point of keeping titles in print; many of the books in stock during the 1770s dated from the time the Foulis brothers first went into business in the early 1740s.3 So Jefferson could have ordered many older editions from the catalogues he received in 1770.

  He continued to appreciate the products of this press for years to come, acquiring several more Foulis editions later and also recommending them to others. Ordering a set of ancient Greek historians in Greek/Latin parallel text editions for Peter Carr in the 1780s, Jefferson stipulated that all should be in duodeci
mo Foulis editions.4 Though best known for such elegant small-format editions, Foulis also published large-format works, some of which Jefferson also acquired.

  The folio edition of Homer’s Iliad may be the handsomest item the firm ever published. The cataloguer of Jefferson’s library called the Foulis Iliad “one of the most beautiful books ever printed, so beautiful that it makes you think you can read Greek even if you can’t.” The Foulis Iliad found favor with other discriminating bookmen: Benjamin Franklin also owned a copy of it. Though Jefferson enjoyed the beauty of this edition, he appreciated it for other reasons, as well. Discussing the art of bookmaking with a correspondent, he observed, “The perfection of accuracy is to be found in the folio edition of Homer by the Foulis of Glasgow. I have understood they offered 1000 guineas for the discovery of any error in it, even of an accent, and that the reward was never claimed.”5 The perfection of accuracy: with all of his record-keeping and note-taking and measuring and calculating, Jefferson sought such accuracy himself and appreciated it in others.

  Though a major inconvenience, the destructive fire at Shadwell did not really affect Jefferson’s home-building plans. Informing John Page of the fire, he wrote, “If this conflagration, by which I am burned out of a home, had come before I had advanced so far in preparing another, I do not know but I might have cherished some treasonable thoughts of leaving these my native hills.”6 This statement is another of Jefferson’s deliberate fictions written to please his old friend. He had no desire to exchange his native Piedmont for Tidewater. He had spent a good part of his early life shuttling back and forth between the two regions, but his heart belonged to the mountains of Virginia.

  Without changing his plans, the fire did accelerate them. Preparations for building atop Monticello had begun three years earlier, when Jefferson had the initial batch of lumber prepared and ordered some window glass. He subsequently contracted with a local entrepreneur to have the top of Monticello leveled in preparation for building there. The contract stipulated that the work be completed by Christmas 1768. Slowly, the place of Jefferson’s boyhood reveries was on its way to becoming his permanent home. At the time of the Shadwell fire, construction struction at Monticello had not advanced far enough to let him move into his new home. After the fire, he sought to make the place habitable as soon as possible. It would still take another nine months before any part of it was fit to inhabit.

  By late November, the south pavilion, the first brick building at Monticello, was completed. The laconic entry Jefferson made in his almanac on Monday, November 26, 1770—“Moved to Monticello”—masks his glee. A letter to the Reverend James Ogilvie written from Jefferson’s early months in his new home offers a more detailed, and charming, view of living conditions at Monticello: “I have here but one room, which, like the cobler’s, serves me for parlour for kitchen and hall. I may add, for bed chamber and study too. My friends sometimes take a temperate dinner with me and then retire to look for beds elsewhere. I have hopes however of getting more elbow room this summer. But be this as may happen, whether my tenements be great or small homely or elegant they will always receive you with a hearty welcome.”7

  Jefferson’s proverbial expression—“elbow room”—had long been a part of colonial American discourse. In what may be the earliest occurrence of the phrase in American literature, Thomas Morton used it in New English Canaan to discuss an area of land in New England he claimed was large enough to provide elbow room for hundreds of thousands of people. In the 1670s, Increase Mather critiqued New Englanders who settled far inland “without any Ministry amongst them, which is to prefer the world before the Gospel.” Though such people professed the Puritan faith, they possessed “an insatiable desire after Land, and worldly Accommodations, yea, so as to forsake Churches and Ordinances, and to live like Heathen, only that so they might have Elbow-room enough in the world.” In his Histories of the Dividing Line, William Byrd related how seventeenth-century New Englanders, “thinking they wanted Elbow-room,” branched out into Connecticut.8 To early American colonists, this proverbial phrase offered a convenient verbal formula to justify moving westward from the coastal settlements. Few words more aptly convey what has become a defining aspect of the American character, the desire for land, for spaces wide enough to permit freedom to stretch the limbs and, by extension, freedom to think and act.

  As 1770 gave way to the new year, Jefferson became even more motivated to continue his building activities at Monticello—for one particular reason. With the passing of his friend Bathurst Skelton, he was beginning to see the widow Skelton in a new light. Following her husband’s death, Martha Skelton had moved back to The Forest, the home of her father and stepmother, John Wayles and his wife, Elizabeth, who was the widow of Martha’s brother-in-law, Reuben Skelton. In October 1770 Jefferson made his earliest known visit to The Forest.

  The friendship he developed with the father facilitated his courtship with the daughter. Many years later, Jefferson characterized Wayles as “a lawyer of much practice, to which he was introduced more by his great industry, punctuality and practical readiness, than to eminence in the science of his profession. He was a most agreeable companion, full of pleasantry and good humor, and welcomed in every society.”9 Wayles owned an excellent library, which his marriage to Elizabeth Skelton had greatly enhanced. Elizabeth had inherited Reuben Skelton’s fine collection of books. Jefferson admired Wayles’s library, which gave them much to discuss.

  Little is known about Martha or, as Jefferson often called her, Patsy or, sometimes, Patty. Since Jefferson, ever protective of their privacy, destroyed the letters they exchanged, hardly any evidence survives to document their relationship or reveal her personality. A few people who knew Martha left brief comments in their reminiscences. Former slave Isaac Jefferson, whose recollections constitute one of the most important resources for understanding the domestic life at Monticello, remembered her as small of stature yet quite pretty. Others found her sprightly and amiable. An accomplished musician, she could play the harpsichord and the pianoforte.

  The destruction of their letters has also meant the loss of an important aspect of Jefferson’s literary life. As a belletrist, he was at his best when writing to women. Contemporary testimony provides a slight hint of the literary quality of his letters to Martha. Mrs. Drummond, a Williamsburg woman who read one of them, said that it “bars all the Romantic, Poetical, ones I ever read.” She called his writing beautiful and complimented Jefferson’s “Miltonic stile.”10

  In the absence of his letters to Martha, those to other women must serve as surrogates, the fondness he expressed in them offering a rough approximation of the tenderness he conveyed to her. To Lucy Chiswell Nelson, for example, Jefferson wrote, “Fortune seems to have drawn a line of separation between us. Though often in the same neighborhood some unlucky star has still shuffled us asunder. When I count backwards the years since I had last the happiness of seeing you in this place, and recur to my own lively memory of our friendship, I am almost induced to discredit my arithmetic.”11 This he wrote to a female friend. Imagine what he wrote to the woman he loved.

  Their courtship progressed significantly in the ensuing months. Before 1771 was half over, Jefferson found himself ordering a gift for her lavish enough to be a wedding present. He wrote Thomas Adams in London to request a pianoforte. Jefferson supplied some specific requirements regarding its construction: he wanted it made from solid mahogany, not veneer, and stipulated that its workmanship be “very handsome, and worthy the acceptance of a lady for whom I intend it.”12

  By midsummer, he had become so enamored of Martha that he could hardly imagine life without her. As he told a friend, “In every scheme of happiness she is placed in the fore-ground of the picture, as the principal figure. Take that away and it is no picture for me.”13 Jefferson’s metaphor captures his visual sensibilities. Imagining his future happiness, he foresaw it as a beautiful painting. She eventually saw him in a similar light. She grew to love him and accepted hi
s proposal of marriage. He took out a marriage license, and the two were wed at The Forest on January 1, 1772.

  The Reverend William Coutts performed the ceremony. There was much celebrating afterward, the dances accompanied by a local fiddler. The newlyweds left The Forest in their phaeton, a light, four-wheeled open carriage drawn by a pair of horses and designed to carry two people. Jefferson preferred the phaeton over other vehicles, but it could be temperamental. They took a side trip to Shirley, the plantation of Charles Carter. They may have intended to go farther, but their phaeton broke down. The newlyweds had to stop and get their vehicle repaired before they could get back on the road again. Once the phaeton was fixed, they returned to The Forest and soon started toward Monticello.

  Snow covered the land as they left her father’s home. The road leading from The Forest was passable, but as the couple neared the mountains, the snow became much deeper. Jefferson told family members afterward that the inclement weather brought him and his bride to a halt eight miles from Monticello. The snow, three feet deep in places—the “deepest snow we have ever seen”—had become too much for the phaeton.14

  The couple left the comfort of their carriage and proceeded on horseback. The trek was cold, slow-going, treacherous in spots, but romantically beautiful. They did not reach Monticello until late that evening. The house was dark and all the fires out. Irked at first, they made the best of the situation. Remembering a bottle of wine “on a shelf behind some books,” Jefferson retrieved it, and soon he and his bride were making merry. Their first daughter, Martha, or Patsy, as she was known in the family, was born September 27, 1772.15