Part 2

Another element that contributed to the efficiency and the high standard of the early Virginia statesman was a good, old-fashioned classical education. They were familiar, to use Matthew Arnold’s famous expression, “with the best that has ever been said or done.” This was no small advantage to men who were called upon to act as founders of a republic different indeed from the republics of Greece and Rome, but still based upon the same principles, and demanding an exercise of the same heroic virtues. The American Revolution would never have cut quite the figure in the world which history assigns to it, had it not been conducted with a kind of classic dignity and decency; and to this result nobody contributed more than Jefferson.

Such was Virginia in the eighteenth century,—at the base of society, the slaves; next, a lower class, rough, ignorant, and somewhat brutal, but still wholesome, and possessing the primitive virtues of courage and truth; and at the top, the landed gentry, luxurious, proud, idle and dissipated for the most part, and yet blossoming into a few characters of a type so high that the world has hardly seen a better. Had he been born in Europe, Jefferson would doubtless have devoted himself to music, or to architecture, or to literature, or to science,—for in all these directions his taste was nearly equally strong; but these careers being closed to him by the circumstances of the colony, he became a lawyer, and then, under pressure of the Revolution, a politician and statesman.

During the four years following his graduation, Jefferson spent most of the winter months at Williamsburg, pursuing his legal and other studies, and the rest of the year upon the family plantation, the management of which had devolved upon him. Now, as always, he was the most industrious of men. He lived, as Mr. Parton remarks, “with a pen in his hand.” He kept a garden book, a farm book, a weather book, a receipt book, a cash book, and, while he practiced law, a fee book. Many of these books are still preserved, and the entries are as legible now as when they were first written down in Jefferson’s small but clear and graceful hand,—the hand of an artist. Jefferson, as one of his old friends once remarked, _hated_ superficial knowledge; and he dug to the roots of the common law, reading deeply in old reports written in law French and law Latin, and especially studying Magna Charta and Bracton.

He found time also for riding, for music, and dancing; and in his twentieth year he became enamored of Miss Rebecca Burwell, a Williamsburg belle more distinguished, tradition reports, for beauty than for cleverness. But Jefferson was not yet in a position to marry,—he even contemplated a foreign tour; and the girl, somewhat abruptly, married another lover. The wound seems not to have been a deep one. Jefferson, in fact, though he found his chief happiness in family affection, and though capable of strong and lasting attachments, was not the man for a romantic passion. He was a philosopher of the reasonable, eighteenth-century type. No one was more kind and just in the treatment of his slaves, but he did not free them, as George Wythe, perhaps foolishly, did; and he was even cautious about promulgating his views as to the folly and wickedness of slavery, though he did his best to promote its abolition by legislative measures. There was not in Jefferson the material for a martyr or a Don Quixote; but that was Nature’s fault, not his. It may be said of every particular man that there is a certain depth to which he cannot sink, and there is a certain height to which he cannot rise. Within the intermediate zone there is ample exercise for free-will; and no man struggled harder than Jefferson to fulfill all the obligations which, as he conceived, were laid upon him.

III

MONTICELLO AND ITS HOUSEHOLD

In April, 1764, Jefferson came of age, and his first public act was a characteristic one. For the benefit of the neighborhood, he procured the passage of a statute to authorize the dredging of the Rivanna River upon which his own estate bordered in part. He then by private subscriptions raised a sum sufficient for carrying out this purpose; and in a short time the stream, upon which before a bark canoe would hardly have floated, was made available for the transportation of farm produce to the James River, and thence to the sea.

In 1766, he made a journey to Philadelphia, in order to be inoculated for smallpox, traveling in a light gig drawn by a high-spirited horse, and narrowly escaping death by drowning in one of the numerous rivers which had to be forded between Charlottesville and Philadelphia. In the following year, about the time of his twenty-fourth birthday, he was admitted to the bar, and entered almost immediately upon a large and lucrative practice. He remained at the bar only seven years, but during most of this time his professional income averaged more than £2500 a year; and he increased his paternal estate from 1900 acres to 5000 acres. He argued with force and fluency, but his voice was not suitable for public speaking, and soon became husky. Moreover, Jefferson had an intense repugnance to the arena. He shrank with a kind of nervous horror from a personal contest, and hated to be drawn into a discussion. The turmoil and confusion of a public body were hideous to him;—it was as a writer, not as a speaker, that he won fame, first in the Virginia Assembly, and afterward in the Continental Congress.

In October, 1768, Jefferson was chosen to represent Albemarle County in the House of Burgesses of Virginia; and thus began his long political career of forty years. A resolution which he formed at the outset is stated in the following letter written in 1792 to a friend who had offered him a share in an undertaking which promised to be profitable:—

“When I first entered on the stage of public life (now twenty-four years ago) I came to a resolution never to engage, while in public office, in any kind of enterprise for the improvement of my fortune, nor to wear any other character than that of a farmer. I have never departed from it in a single instance; and I have in multiplied instances found myself happy in being able to decide and to act as a public servant, clear of all interest, in the multiform questions that have arisen, wherein I have seen others embarrassed and biased by having got themselves in a more interested situation.”

During the next few years there was a lull in political affairs,—a sullen calm before the storm of the Revolution; but they were important years in Mr. Jefferson’s life. In February, 1770, the house at Shadwell, where he lived with his mother and sisters, was burned to the ground, while the family were away. “Were none of my books saved?” Jefferson asked of the negro who came to him, breathless, with news of the disaster. “No, master,” was the reply, “but we saved the fiddle.”

In giving his friend Page an account of the fire, Jefferson wrote: “On a reasonable estimate, I calculate the cost of the books burned to have been £200. Would to God it had been the money,—then had it never cost me a sigh!” Beside the books, Jefferson lost most of his notes and papers; but no mishap, not caused by his own fault, ever troubled his peace of mind.

After the fire, his mother and the children took temporary refuge in the home of an overseer, and Jefferson repaired to Monticello,—as he had named the elevated spot on the paternal estate where he had already begun to build the house which was his home for the remainder of his life.

Monticello is a small outlying peak, upon the outskirts of the mountainous part of Virginia, west of the tide-water region, and rising 580 feet above the plain at its foot. Upon its summit there is a space of about six acres, leveled partly by nature and partly by art; and here, one hundred feet back from the brow of the hill, Jefferson built his house. It is a long, low building,—still standing,—with a Grecian portico in front, surmounted by a cupola. The road by which it is approached winds round and round, so as to make the ascent less difficult. In front of the house three long terraces, terminating in small pavilions, were constructed; and upon the northern terrace, or in its pavilion, Jefferson and his friends used to sit on summer nights gazing off toward the Blue Ridge, some eighty miles distant, or upon the nearer peaks of the Ragged Mountains. The altitude is such that neither dew nor mosquitoes can reach it.

To this beautiful but as yet uncompleted mountain home, Jefferson, in January, 1772, brought his bride. She was Martha Skelton, who had been left a widow at nineteen, and was now twenty-two, a daughter of John Wayles, a leading and opulent lawyer. Martha Skelton was a tall, beautiful, highly educated young woman, of graceful carriage, with hazel eyes, literary in her tastes, a skillful performer upon the spinnet, and a notable housewife whose neatly kept account books are still preserved. They were married at “The Forest,” her father’s estate in Charles City County, and immediately set out for Monticello.

Two years later, in 1774, died Dabney Carr, a brilliant and patriotic young lawyer, Jefferson’s most intimate friend, and the husband of his sister Martha. Dabney Carr left six small children, whom, with their mother, Jefferson took under his wing, and they were brought up at Monticello as if they had been his own children. Jefferson loved children, and he had, in common with that very different character, Aaron Burr, an instinct for teaching. While still a young man himself, he was often called upon to direct the studies of other young men,—Madison and Monroe were in this sense his pupils; and the founding of the University of Virginia was an achievement long anticipated by him and enthusiastically performed.

Jefferson was somewhat unfortunate in his own children, for, of the six that were born to him, only two, Martha and Maria, lived to grow up. Maria married but died young, leaving one child. Martha, the first-born, was a brilliant, cheerful, wholesome woman. She married Thomas Mann Randolph, afterward governor of Virginia. “She was just like her father, in this respect,” says Mr. Bacon, the superintendent,—“she was always busy. If she wasn’t reading or writing, she was always doing something. She used to sit in Mr. Jefferson’s room a great deal, and sew, or read, or talk, as he would be busy about something else.” John Randolph of Roanoke once toasted her—and it was after his quarrel with her father—as the sweetest woman in Virginia. She left ten children, and many of her descendants are still living.

To her, and to his other daughter, Maria, who is described as being more beautiful and no less amiable than her sister, but not so intellectual, Jefferson owed the chief happiness of his life. Like many another man who has won fame and a high position in the world, he counted these things but as dust and ashes in comparison with family affection.

IV

JEFFERSON IN THE REVOLUTION

Shortly after Mr. Jefferson’s marriage, the preliminary movements of the Revolution began, and though he took an active part in them it was not without reluctance. Even after the battle of Bunker Hill, namely, in November, 1775, he wrote to a kinsman that there was not a man in the British Empire who more cordially loved a union with Great Britain than he did. John Jay said after the Revolution: “During the course of my life, and until the second petition of Congress in 1775, I never did hear any American of any class or description express a wish for the independence of the colonies.”

But these friendly feelings were first outraged and then extinguished by a long series of ill-considered and oppressive acts, covering, with some intermissions, a period of about twelve years. Of these the most noteworthy were the Stamp Act, which amounted to taxation without representation, and the impost on tea, which was coupled with a provision that the receipts should be applied to the salaries of officers of the crown, thus placing them beyond the control of the local assemblies. The crown officers were also authorized to grant salaries and pensions at their discretion; and a board of revenue commissioners for the whole country was established at Boston, and armed with despotic powers. These proceedings amounted to a deprivation of liberty, and they were aggravated by the king’s contemptuous rejection of the petitions addressed to him by the colonists. We know what followed,—the burning of the British war schooner, Gaspee, by leading citizens of Providence, and the famous tea-party in Boston harbor.

Meanwhile Virginia had not been inactive. In March, 1772, a few young men, members of the House of Burgesses, met at the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg. They were Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee and his brother, Thomas Jefferson, and a few others. They drew up several resolutions, the most important of which called for the appointment of a standing committee and for an invitation to the other colonies to appoint like committees for mutual information and assistance in the struggle against the crown. A similar resolution had been adopted in Massachusetts two years before, but without any practical result. The Virginia resolution was passed the next day by the House of Burgesses, and it gave rise to those proceedings which ushered in the Revolution.

The first Continental Congress was to meet in Philadelphia, in September, 1774; and Jefferson, in anticipation, prepared a draft of instructions for the delegates who were to be elected by Virginia. Being taken ill himself, on his way to the convention, he sent forward a copy of these instructions. They were considered too drastic to be adopted by the convention; but some of the members caused them to be published under the title of “A Summary View of the Rights of America.” The pamphlet was extensively read in this country, and a copy which had been sent to London falling into the hands of Edmund Burke, he had it reprinted in England, where it ran through edition after edition. Jefferson’s name thus became known throughout the colonies and in England.

The “Summary View” is in reality a political essay. Its author wasted no time in discussing the specific legal and constitutional questions which had arisen between the colonies and the crown; but he went to the root of the matter, and with one or two generalizations as bold and original as if they had been made by Rousseau, he cut the Gordian knot, and severed America from the Parliament of Great Britain. He admitted some sort of dependence upon the crown, but his two main principles were these: (1) that the soil of this country belonged to the people who had settled and improved it, and that the crown had no right to sell or give it away; (2) that the right of self-government was a right natural to every people, and that Parliament, therefore, had no authority to make laws for America. Jefferson was always about a century in advance of his time; and the “Summary View” substantially anticipated what is now the acknowledged relation of England to her colonies.

Jefferson was elected a member of the Continental Congress at its second session; and he made a rapid journey to Philadelphia in a chaise, with two led horses behind, reaching there the night before Washington set out for Cambridge. The Congress was composed mainly of young men. Franklin, the oldest member, was seventy-one, and a few others were past sixty. Washington was forty-three; John Adams, forty; Patrick Henry, a year or two younger; John Rutledge, thirty-six; his brother, twenty-six; John Langdon and William Paca, thirty-five, John Jay, thirty; Thomas Stone, thirty-two, and Jefferson, thirty-two.

Jefferson soon became intimate with John Adams, who in later years said of him: “Though a silent member of Congress, he was so prompt, frank, explicit, and decisive upon committees and in conversation—not even Samuel Adams was more so—that he soon seized upon my heart.”

Jefferson, as we have seen, was not fitted to shine as an orator, still less in debate. But as a writer he had that capacity for style which comes, if it comes at all, as a gift of nature; which needs to be supplemented, but which cannot be supplied, by practice and study. In some of his early letters there are slight reminders of Dr. Johnson’s manner, and still more of Sterne’s. Sterne indeed was one of his favorite authors. However, these early traces of imitation were absorbed very quickly; and, before he was thirty, Jefferson became master of a clear, smooth, polished, picturesque, and individual style. To him, therefore, his associates naturally turned when they needed such a proclamation to the world as the Declaration of Independence; and that document is very characteristic of its author. It was imagination that gave distinction to Jefferson both as a man and as a writer. He never dashed off a letter which did not contain some play of fancy; and whether he was inventing a plough or forecasting the destinies of a great Democracy, imagination qualified the performance.

One of the most effective forms in which imagination displays itself in prose is by the use of a common word in such a manner and context that it conveys an uncommon meaning. There are many examples of this rhetorical art in Jefferson’s writings, but the most notable one occurs in the noble first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Upon this paragraph Mr. Parton eloquently observes: “The noblest utterance of the whole composition is the reason given for making the Declaration,—‘_A decent __respect for the opinions of mankind_.’ This touches the heart. Among the best emotions that human nature knows is the veneration of man for man. This recognition of the public opinion of the world—the sum of human sense—as the final arbiter in all such controversies is the single phrase of the document which Jefferson alone, perhaps, of all the Congress, could have originated; and in point of merit it was worth all the rest.”

Franklin and John Adams, who were on the committee with Jefferson, made a few verbal changes in his draught of the Declaration, and it was then discussed and reviewed by Congress for three days. Congress made eighteen suppressions, six additions, and ten alterations; and it must be admitted that most of these were improvements. For example, Jefferson had framed a paragraph in which the king was severely censured for opposing certain measures looking to the suppression of the slave trade. This would have come with an ill grace from the Americans, since for a century New England had been enriching herself by that trade, and the southern colonies had subsisted upon the labor which it brought them. Congress wisely struck out the paragraph.

The Declaration of Independence was received with rapture throughout the country. Everywhere it was read aloud to the people who gathered to hear it, amid the booming of guns, the ringing of bells, and the display of fireworks. In Philadelphia, after the reading, the late king’s coat of arms was burned in Independence Square; in New York the leaden statue, in Bowling Green, of George III. was “laid prostrate in the dust,” and ordered to be run into bullets. Virginia had already stricken the king’s name from her prayer-book; and Rhode Island now forbade her people to pray for the king, as king, under a penalty of one hundred thousand pounds! The Declaration of Independence, both as a political and literary document, has stood the test of time. It has all the classic qualities of an oration by Demosthenes; and even that passage in it which has been criticised—that, namely, which pronounces all men to be created equal—is true in a sense, the truth of which it will take a century or two yet to develop.

V

REFORM WORK IN VIRGINIA

In September, 1776, Jefferson, having resigned his seat in Congress to engage in duties nearer home, returned to Monticello. A few weeks later, a messenger from Congress arrived to inform him that he had been elected a joint commissioner with Dr. Franklin and Silas Deane to represent at Paris the newly formed nation. His heart had long been set upon foreign travel; but he felt obliged to decline this appointment, first on account of the ill health of his wife, and secondly, because he was needed in Virginia as a legislator. Not since Lycurgus gave laws to the Spartans had there been such an opportunity as then existed in the United States. John Adams declared: “The best lawgivers of antiquity would rejoice to live at a period like this when, for the first time in the history of the world, three millions of people are deliberately _choosing_ their government and institutions.”

Of all the colonies, Virginia offered the best field for reform, because, as we have already seen, she had by far the most aristocratic political and social system; and it is extraordinary how quickly the reform was effected by Jefferson and his friends. In ordinary times of peace the task would have been impossible; but in throwing off the English yoke, the colonists had opened their minds to new ideas; change had become familiar to them, and in the general upheaval the rights of the people were recognized. A year later, Jefferson wrote to Franklin: “With respect to the State of Virginia, in particular, the people seem to have laid aside the monarchical and taken up the republican government with as much ease as would have attended their throwing off an old and putting on a new set of clothes.”

Jefferson’s greatness lay in this, that he was the first statesman who trusted the mass of the people. He alone had divined the fact that they were competent, morally and mentally, for self-government. It is almost impossible for us to appreciate Jefferson’s originality in this respect, because the bold and untried theories for which he contended are now regarded as commonplace maxims. He may have derived his political ideas in part from the French philosophical writers of the eighteenth century, although there is no evidence to that effect; but he was certainly the first statesman to grasp the idea of democracy as a form of government, just as, at a later day, Walt Whitman was the first poet to grasp the idea of equality as a social system. Hamilton, John Adams, Pinckney, Gouverneur Morris, even Washington himself, all believed that popular government would be unsafe and revolutionary unless held in check by a strong executive and by an aristocratic senate.