Life of Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States

Front matter

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Contents

ClAFTKE. 7A "

I.— Colonel Peter Jefferson ... . •

H— The Mother of Jefferson ... . .8

Chapter I. Colonel Peter Jefferson

JEFFEBSON was a stripling of seventeen, tall, raw-boned, freckled, and sandy-haired, when, in 1760, he came to Williamsburg, from the Far West of Virginia, to enter the College of William and Mary. With his large feet and hands, his thick wrists, and prominent cheek-bones and chin, he could not have been accounted handsome or graceful. He is described, however, as a fresh, bright, healthy-looking youth, as straight as a gun-barrel, sinewy and strong, with that alertness of movement which comes of early familiarity with saddle, gun, canoe, minuet, and contradance, — that sure, elastic tread, and ease of bearing, which we still observe in country-bred lads who have been exempt from the ruder toils of agriculture, while enjoying in full measure the freedom and the sports of the country. His teeth, too, were perfect, which alone redeems a countenance destitute of other charm. His eyes, which were of hazel-gray, were beaming and expressive ; and his demeanor gave assurance of a gentle heart, and a sympathetic, inquisitive mind.

Such lads, eager and unformed, still come to college from honest country homes, in regions where agriculture is carried on upon a scale that allows some leisure to the farmer's family, some liberality of expenditure, books, music, a tincture of art, and hospitabk habits. How welcome, how dear, to instructors worthy of them, are such unhackneyed minds In bodies unimpaired !

The abode of this youth was a hundred and fifty miles to the north-west of Williamsburg, among the mountains of Central Virginia, near where the River Rivanna, an important tributary, enters the James. His home was a plain, spacious farm-house, a story and a half high, with four large rooms and a wide entry on the groundfloor, and many garret chambers above. The farm was nineteen hundred acres of land, part of it densely wooded, and some of it so steep and rocky as to be unfit for cultivation. The fields near the river were strong land, not yet (though soon to be) worn past the profitable culture of tobacco; but the upper portions were weh suited to the grains and roots familiar to the farmers of the Middle States. For sixty years the staple product of all that fine mountain region, with its elevated fields, its far-reaching valleys, and rapid streams, was wheat ; which the swift tributaries ground into flour, and the yellow James bore down its tranquil tide to Richmond, distant from the Jefferson home two days' ride. The rustle of wheat-ears was familiar music to Thomas Jefferson from infancy to hoary age.

The farm was tilled at this period by thirty slaves, — ■ equivalent to about fifteen farm-hands. The circumstances of the family were easy, not affluent. Almost every common thing they consumed was grown or made at home, — all the common fabrics and ordinary clothing ; and of home-made commodities they had an abundance : but the thirty pounds sterling per annum in cash, which the student was to expend at Williamsburg for his board and tuition, was not so light a charge upon the estate as it sounds to us. The entire expense of his maintenance away from home may have been fifty pounds a year ; which was, probably, not less than half the sum that could be taken properly from the annual product of the farm and shops, after all the home charges had been paid. The yeomen of Virginia, though they enjoyed a profusion of the necessaries of life, «rere sometimes sorely put to it when a sum of money was to be raised.

This student of seventeen, through the death of his father three years before, was already the head of the family, and, under a guardian, the owner of the Shadwell Farm, the best portion of his father's estate.

The happy results that spring from the intermingling, by marriage, of families long cultured with families more vigorous and less

COLONEL PETER JEFFERSON. 8

refined, has been often remarked. Such conjunctions gave us Shakspeare and Goethe. A novelist of the day tells us of a ducal house, which, on system, married a plebeian estate every other generation, which renewed at once its blood and its fortunes. The material point was the renewal of the blood, which brings with it the brain, the stamina, and the self-control by which great houses are founded, and all great things are done. If at the present time there is an aristocracy in Europe, which, in any respectable degree, 3arns its wages, it is that aristocracy which has oftenest renewed itself by the strenuous blood of men who have won commanding places by sheer strength of mind and purpose. The world would never have heard of the Palmerstons, if the second lord had not won the admirable daughter of a Dublin tradesman ; nor of Brougham, if the father of the late lord had married, as he intended, in his native country and class. Nature so delights in uniting opposites, that she seals with the unmistakable signet of her approbation the coming-together of opposites artificially produced, — ancient culture and unlettered force.

Peter Jefferson, the father of the student, was a superb specimen of a class, nearly extinct in Great Britain, which used to be called yeomen, — farmers who owned the soil they tilled, but had no pretensions to aristocratic rank, — a class intermediate in a parish between the squire and his tenants. In old Virginia, yeomen were farmers, who, beginning life with little capital besides a strong arm and an energetic will, had taken up a tract of land to the westward of the great tobacco-region of Virginia, and gradually worked their way to the possession of a cleared farm, and a few families of slaves. In this manner Peter Jefferson, and his father before him, had achieved an independent position : stanch both, of strong self-tutored sense, and of signal ability in the conduct of business ; enterprising And methodical ; liberal, but exact ; good at figures, with a clear, ( areful handwriting, and an aptitude for mechanics. The family was >: Welsh extraction. The first of the name in Virginia, it is well worth noting, was a member of that Virginia Assembly of 1619, the Irst legislative body ever convened on the western continent, the summoning of which ended the twelve years' anarchy that followed the planting of the colony, and notified the colonists, that, in crossing the sea, they had lost none of the rights of Englishmen. All that is important, characteristic, and hopeful, in the history of America, dates from the meeting of that Assembly; and an ancestor of Thomas Jefferson was a member of it. Virginia then contained Bix hundred white inhabitants. The church nearest his farm was called the "Jefferson Church" for a hundred years after his death, and the ruins of it were visible as late as 1856.

Peter Jefferson, a younger son, and therefore having little to expect from his father, made his entrance into responsible life by the door which, many years later, admitted the son of another Virginia yeoman, George Washington. He learned the art of surveying land, — a kind of liberal profession in a new country. He practised this profession in his native county of Chesterfield, and in all the region trodden by Confederate armies and torn by Federal cannon during the long siege of Richmond and Petersburg, — cities which then existed only in the prophetic minds of men like Colonel Byrd, who marked both as the sites of towns when as yet not a tree of the primeval forest had been felled. Like George Washington, too, this young surveyor owed his rise in the social scale to a marriage ; though it was Peter Jefferson's happier fortune to win a maiden heart, and to create for her the home over which he asked her to preside.

Chapter II. The Mother Of Jefferson

What a pretty romance it was ! The athletic youth, master of

his surveyor's chain and knowledge, a natural prince of the frontier,

becomes knit in an ardent, young man's friendship with William

iolph, son of one of those flourishing Randolphs who lived in

lordly state, in the good old barbaric days, when the soil of

;inia was still unworn, when negroes were twenty-five guineas

bead," and tobacco brought four pence a pound in London

cs. Together they visit an uncle of William Randolph, seated

i vast plantation on the James, some miles below the mouth of

Rivanna, — one of the few grand houses of Virginia wherein

vledge and taste were more conspicuous than pride and pro-

»n. Isham Randolph was the name of this tobacco lord, and

ddest daughter was Jane. She was born while the family were

ug in London, where her father knew Peter Collinson, wool-

;hant, botanist, and friend of Pennsylvania; also Hans Sloane,

der of the British Museum, and all that circle of the Royal

ety's more active members.

ie was not too lightly won, this daughter of a stately house.

ir Jefferson was twenty-eight, and she seventeen, when he

nted and rode a hundred miles to the northwest of his home,

fifty miles beyond hers, and bought his first thousand acres on

Rivanna, and began to hew out a farm and home. Within half a

s ride, the smoke of only three or four settlers' cabins floated up

■ugh small clearings to the sky, and the trail of Indians was to be

i in the woods. For two years he wrought there in the forest,

»d doubtless, by a slave family or two ; and when he had cleared a

d built something a little better than a cabin, he went

i, and brought home his bride, Jane Randolph. To do her honoi, he nam 3d their ahode Shadwell, because it was in a London parish of that name that she first saw the light. He waa married in 1738. Five years after, — April 13, 1743, — his third child was born, whom he named Thomas, that student who stands at the threshold of William and Mary College, waiting our convenience to be admitted.

Of this adventurous lady, who gave her hand to Peter Jefferson and rode by his side to their home in the woods, we only know that she was the child of an intelligent and hospitable father; and this one fact comes to us by a strange and pleasant chance. There was a Quaker farmer near Philadelphia, at the beginning of the last century, named John Bartram, who, while he was resting from the plough one day, under a tree, pulling a daisy to pieces, and observing some of the more obvious marvels of its construction, suddenly awoke to his pitiful ignorance of the vegetable wonders in the midst of which he had lived and labored from childhood. He resumed his toil, but not with that stolid content with his ignorance that he had enjoyed so long. On the fourth day after, raging for knowledge, he hired a man to hold his plough, while he rode to Philadelphia, and brought home a work upon botany in Latin, and a Latin grammar. In three months, by a teacher's aid, he could grope his way in the Latin book ; in a year he had botanized all over the region round about, and cast longing eyes over the border into Maryland and Virginia. By good management of his farm and servants, — emancipated slaves, — he was able to spend the rest of his life in the study of Nature, making wide excursions into neighboring colonies, until he knew every plant that grew between the Alleghany range and the Atlantic Ocean; becoming at length botanist to the king, at fifty guineas a year, and founding on the banks of the Schuylkill the first botanical garden of America. He and his garden flourished together to a green old age; and he died, \t the approach of the British army during the Bevolutionary War, •„ r terror lest the pride of his life should be trampled into ruin by ths troops. Among his European correspondents was that assiduous friend of Pennsylvania and of Franklin, Peter Collinson, with whom for fifty years he exchanged letters, seeds, roots, trees, slips, nuts, grafts, birds, turtles, squirrels, and other animals ; and it is to their correspondence that Europe owes the profusion of American *;rees and shrubs that adorn so many parks, gardens, and highways

THE MOTHER OF JEFFERSON. 7

To the same interchange America was indebted, among other benefits, for those rare kinds of plums, cherries, apricots, gooseberries, and other fruits, that flourished for a time, though the climate has since proved too harsh and exacting for them. In a singularly quiet, homely way, those two excellent men, at the cost of a few guineas per annum, conferred solid and lasting benefits upon countless generations of the inhabitants of two continents.

It is in the letters of Peter Collinson to his American friend, that we find allusions to the father of our Jefferson's mother. William Bartram may have seen Peter Jefferson and Jane Randolph married ; for a few months before that event, when the botanist was about to make a botanical tour in Virginia, Collinson sends him the names of three or four gentlemen of that province who were interested in " our science," one of whom was Isham Randolph. " ~No one," he remarks, "will make thee more welcome;" and he adds, " I take his house to be a very suitable place to make a settlement at, for to take several days' excursions all round, and to return to his house at night." The worthy Quaker favors his somewhat too plain American friend, who was also of Quaker family, with a piece of advice, that gives us some information. " One thing," he says, " I must desire of thee, and do insist that thee oblige me therein : that thou make up that drugget clothes " (a present from Collinson to Bartram), " to go to Virginia in, and not appear to disgrace thyself or me ; for, though I should not esteem thee less to come to me in what dress thou will, yet these Virginians " (having in his mind's eye his old acquaintances, Isham Randolph and his young family) " are a very gentle, well-dressed people, and look, perhaps, more at a m's outside than his inside. For these and other reasons, pray go ry clean, neat, and handsomely dressed, in Virginia. Never mind y clothes : I will send more another time." The benevolent Peter .s a dealer in woollens, and sent the rustic Bartram many a good of cloth to wear at the great houses in the country. The botanist visited Isham Randolph's mansion on the James, in d about which, it is said, a hundred servants attended. There he ist have seen the eldest daughter of the house at the time when e was busy with preparations for her marriage ; and he may have taid to the wedding-feast, and cheered the bride and bridegroom they rode away on horseback to their new home. He had gen- >us entertainment, of which he sent grateful accounts to his pa-

8 LIFE OF THOMAri JEFFERSON.

tron in London. Collinson replies, that it was no more than he expected of his friend Isham : " I did not doubt his civility to thee. I only wish to have been there, and shared it with thee." In another letter, the worthy merchant mentions that "our friend, Isham Randolph (a generous, good-natured gentleman, and well respected by most who are acquainted with him) " had agreed to correspond with him on their beloved science. When the news came of Isham Randolph's death, Collinson wrote of him as " the good man " who had gone to his long home, and, he doubted not, was happy.

These glimpses of the father of Jefferson's mother are slight, but they are the more interesting because they confirm the tradition that it was from his mother he derived his temper, his disposition, and bis sympathy with living nature.

Chapter III

our jefferson's childhood.

Though his mother had been the tenderest of women, his father had strength to match her tenderness. Tradition, current in the county where he lived, and gathered by Mr. Eandall, whose extensive and sympathetic work * must remain the great reservoir of information respecting the Jeffersons, reports Peter Jefferson a wonder of physical force and stature. He had the strength of three strong men. Two hogsheads of tobacco, each weighing a thousand pounds, he could raise at once from their sides, and stand them upright. When surveying in the wilderness, he could tire out his assistants, and tire out his mules ; then eat his mules, and still press on, sleeping alone by night in a hollow tree, to the howling of the wolves, till his task was done. He loved mathematics. He managed his affairs so well, that, in twenty years, he was master of a competent estate, and could assign a good plantation to his younger son, after leaving the bulk of his estate to his eldest. But with this strength of character there was genuine intelligence. He relished Shakspeare ; and Shakspeare alone can be a liberal education. His fine edition of Shakspeare, still preserved among his relics, attests, by its appearance, that the man whose property it was loved it, and repaired often to it during many years for solace and delight. The Spectator, a new work in his day, and some volumes r f Swift, are among the books, once his, that his descendants pos-

iS.

County honors, which at that time and place could mean nothing t public duties, always difficult, often perilous, never compensated, ide him at length the unquestioned chief of the frontier region.

• The Life of Thomas Jefferson, by Henry B. Randall, LL.D. Three vols. New York, I.

When the county was set off and named Albemarle, Peter 3 efferson was appointed one of its three justices of the peace ; afterwards county surveyor ; then colonel of the county, chief of provincial honors in old Virginia, in which capacity he was the defender of the frontier against the Indians ; finally he was sent to represent his county in the House of Burgesses, which sat at Williamsburg, the capital of the Province. In politics he was a British Whig, like most of the Western yeomen of the early day ; the great planters of the lower country generally affecting Tory politics. For many years he was vestryman of his parish church.

His qualifications were recognized by the royal government. He was out, when his boy was six years old, for several weeks, on the line between Virginia and North Carolina, as joint commissioner with Joshua Fry, professor of mathematics in William and Mary College, completing the boundary between these two Provinces. Two years after, he was associated with Professor Fry in the construction of the first map of Virginia ever attempted since Captain John Smith's conjectural sketch of 1609. The boy of eight must have seen the surveys and broad sheets spread upon the great table in the family room. Perhaps this honorable connection with one of the college professors may have strengthened, may have originated, the fondest purpose of Peter Jefferson's heart, which was to give his eon the best chance for education the colony afforded.

From this natural chief of men, Thomas Jefferson derived his stature, his erectness, his bodily strength, — in which only his father excelled him of all the men known or remembered in that county, — his self-reliance, his habit of waiting upon himself, his aversion to parade and ceremony, his tendency to humane politics, his curious exactness in matters of business, his strong bias toward matherr ics, mechanics, and architecture. He may have derived from h too, some traits that limited his ability as an executive chief. ( of his father's maxims was, " Never ask another to do for you w you can do for yourself." A man who has to direct extensive affc and control many men, must reverse this maxim, and never do thing himself which he can properly get another to do.

We can hardly imagine a boy better placed for the equal deve ment of mind, body, and character, than Thomas Jefferson during his father's lifetime. That region combines both the cha »nd the advantages of mountain and plain ; for the heights are our jefferson's childhood. 11

too difficult for access, and the lowlands are not insalubrious. He 30uld shoot wild turkeys, deer, and all flying game, without going off his father's estate ; and past his native fields flowed a river, over which he was early taught to swim his horse. The primeval wilderness covered the mountains, and waved luxuriant in many a valley, the most conspicuous fact of nature around him till he was long past boyhood. But by the time he was a well-grown lad, there were neighbors near and numerous enough for society. His father's official position made him the arbiter between contentious men, and the minister of justice. The lad must have seen his father try many a petty case, and settle many a difference, as well between white men as between whites and Indians.

That liking for Indians, which we observe in the writings of Jefferson, resulted from his early acquaintance with some of the best of the uncorrupted chiefs, who used to visit and stay with his father on their journeys to and from the capital of Virginia. The Indians held his father in that entire respect which they were apt to feel for men who never feared and never deceived them. One of the most vivid recollections of his boyhood was of a famous chief of the Cherokees, named Ontassete, who went to England on behalf of his people. The boy was in the camp of this chief the evening before his departure for England, and heard him deliver his farewell oration to his tribe, — a scene that he used to describe with animation seventy years after its occurrence. The moon was in full splendor that evening ; and it seemed as if it was to that lustrous orb the impassioned orator addressed prayers for his own safety, and the protection of his people during his absence. The powerful voice of the speaker, his distinct articulation, his animated gesture, and the ~ :i i e of the listening Indians sitting motionless in groups by their tl fires, filled him with awe and veneration, although he did derstand a word that was spoken.

he important circumstances of his home come to mind as we T er scattered indications in old and new Virginia books. We lee that giant of a father, steadfast, reserved, even austere, but not ungentle, busy with official labors and the details of farm and barn during the day, and in the evening giving his boy (his only son for many years) lessons in book-keeping and arithmetic ; two elder 6isters, perhaps, taking their turn at slate and pencil, or sitting with thei ing the needle . the father not unfrequently, treating the group to a favorite paper from the Spectator. The morning scene, too, with the mother and her servants, we can infer with much probability from descriptions of similar interiors preserved from that period.

Deeply as Jefferson came to hate slavery, clearly as he foretold the ruin enclosed in the system, he saw it only in its better aspects at his own home. He saw his father patiently drilling negroes, not long from their native Africa, into carpenters, millers, wheelrights, shoemakers, and farmers. He saw his mother of a morning in her sitting-room, which was well furnished with contrivances for facilitating labor, seated with her daughters and her servants, like Andromache surrounded by her maidens, all busy with household tasks. We possess authority for the picture. Have we not been favored with a glimpse of Mrs. Washington's morning-room at Mount Vernon, — that room which was so " nicely fixed for all sorts of work " ? " On one side sits the chambermaid with her knitting ; on the other, a little colored pet, learning to sew. An old, decent woman was there with her table and shears, cutting out the negroes' winter clothes, while the good old lady directs them all, incessantly knitting herself. She points out to me several pairs of nice colored stockings and gloves she had just finished, and presents me with a pair half done, which she begs I will finish and wear for her sake." Bishop Meade, who quotes this interesting passage from an old Virginia manuscript, adds that, in other houses (like the home of the Jeffersons) less opulent and containing many children, the mother would have her daughters with her in the same apartment, one spinning, another basting, another winding yarn, another churning, — all vigorously at work : for at that day a plantation was obliged to be nearly self-supplying ; and the family at the great house had to do the thinking, contriving, cutting, and doctoring for a family of ae many helpless, improvident children as there were slaves.

In such a busj 7 , healthy home as this, with father, mother, tw«> elder sisters, four younger sisters, and a little brother, Thomas Jef ferson lived in his boyhood. He was happy in his eldest sister, Jane, whose mind was akin to his own. She was his confidant and companion, and shared his taste for the arts, particularly his early love of music. The family were all reared and baptized in the Church of England ; and this sister greatly excelled in singing the few fine old psalm-tunes which then constituted the whole psalmody

OUR JEFFERSON'S CHILDHOOD. 13

»f the Protestant world. For a century, it is said, there were but five tunes sung in the colonial churches. By the fireside in the winter evenings, and on the banks of their river in the soft, summer twilight, there were family singings, Jane Jefferson's melodious voice leading the choir ; to which was added, as the years went on, the accompaniment of her brother's violin. There must have been much musical feeling in the family to have generated in this boy so profound a passion for music as he exhibited. He speaks of three early tastes as " the passion of his soul," — music, mathematics, and architecture ; and of these the one first developed was music.

The massive instruments with which we are familiar — the piano and the organ — would have been unattainable in a Virginia farm-house at that period, even if they had been sufficiently perfected to warrant transportation so far. The violin, called by its old-fashioned name of the fiddle, king of instruments, was almost the only one generally known in the back countries of the colonies. In Virginia, when Jefferson and Patrick Henry were merry lads together, both of whom played the fiddle, it appears that almost every farm-house which had a boy in it could boast a fiddle also. Mr. E-ives, in his " Life of Madison," among many other precious things, preserves the programme of the rustic festivities arranged for St. Andrew's Day in 1737, in the next county but one to Jefferson's, Albemarle. It throws light on his early violin, besides showing how English the tone of Virginia was at that period.

First, twenty horses were to run round a three-mile course for a prize of five pounds, no one " to put up a horse unless he had subscribed for the entertainment and paid half a pistole." Next, a hat of the value of twenty shillings was to be cudgelled for. Then, a violin was to be played for by twenty fiddlers, — " no person to have the liberty of playing, unless he bring a fiddle with him" When the prize had been awarded, all the performers were to play together, each a different tune, and to be treated by the company. Next twelve boys, twelve years of age, were to run a hundred and twelve yards for a hat worth twelve shillings. A " quire of ballads were to be sung for by a number of songsters, all of them to have liquor sufficient to clear their windpipes." A pair of silver buckles was to be wrestled for by " a number of brisk young men." " A pair of handsome shoes " was to be " danced for." A pair of handsome silk Btockings of one pistole value was to be given to " the handsomest young country maid that appears in the field." A "handsome entertainment " was also to be provided for the subscribers and their wives ; " and such of them as are not so happy as to have wives may treat any other lady." Drums, trumpets, and hautboys were to play ; and, at the feast, the healths of the king and of the governor were to be drunk. The programme concluded by notifying the public, that, " as this mirth is designed to be purely innocent and void of offence, all persons resorting to these are desired to behave themselves with decency and sobriety ; the subscribers being resolved to discountenance all immorality with the utmost rigor."

The prominence assigned to the violin contest in these festivities explains the frequent allusions to it in the early memorials of Virginia, and lessens our surprise at Jefferson's statement, that, during twelve years of his early life, he practised on the violin three hours a day. The innocent instrument, it appears, had an ill name among the stricter religious people of the mountain counties, where " evangelical " principles prevailed. Our zealous young amateur may have heard a sermon once preached in a parish church near his home by Rev. Charles Clay, — cousin of the eloquent Kentuckian, — in which the preacher warned his hearers against the " profanation " of Christmas Day by " fiddling, dancing, drinking, and such like ; " practices, he said, which were only too common in Albemarle. Then, as now, it was the drink that did the mischief, though the fiddle and the dance had to share the blame.