Jefferson Read online

  JEFFERSON

  JEFFERSON

  BY

  ALBERT JAY NOCK

  NEW YORK

  HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

  COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY

  HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

  PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY

  OUINN a BODEN COMPANY, INC.

  RAHWAY. N. J.

  Contents

  I. Youth

  II. Beginnings

  III. 1784-1789

  IV. 1784-1789 (continued)

  V. Washington, Hamilton, Adams

  VI. Eight Years of “Splendid Misery”

  VII. Recommencements

  VIII. Advesperascit

  Index

  Illustrations

  Portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Gilbert Stuart

  Chart of the State of the Vegetable Market in Washington from 1800 to 1809

  Page of Account Book

  Bust of Thomas Jefferson by R. I. Aitken

  Chapter I

  YOUTH

  I

  IN the year 1760, Williamsburg was the capital of colonial Virginia. It was a winter rendezvous for the low land gentry, who set the pitch for a social life that was not without interest, but which, like the plantation-life of the period, has been the subject of an immense amount of romantic exaggeration. The town itself was unattractive, save to those who knew nothing better; and south of Philadelphia there was nothing much better. Williamsburg grew up on the regular pattern of American country towns, in a straggling string of buildings lining each side of a broad road which was unlighted, dusty in summer and muddy in winter, torn and churned by horse-traffic, for there was no such thing as pavement in all Virginia, and no one who had ever seen any. The Capitol stood at one end of this road, and at the other stood the College of William and Mary; while, midway the road expanded into a kind of public square, ornamented with a church and some public buildings.

  In point of architecture, these edifices were not impressive. Indeed, the art of building was at a low level all over Virginia. “The genius of architecture,” said a cultivated native, “seems to have shed its maledictions over this land.” The college and hospital at Williamsburg, according to the same authority, “are rude, misshapen piles which, but that they have roofs, would be taken for brick-kilns.” The public buildings, however, quite stood comparison with the private dwellings that flanked them. There were about two hundred of these, mostly built of wood, on account of the belief that brick or stone construction was unhealthful. “The private dwellings are very rarely constructed of stone or brick, much the greatest portion being of scantling and boards, plastered with lime. It is impossible to devise things more ugly, uncomfortable and, happily, more perishable. . . . The poorest people build huts of logs, laid horizontally in pens, stopping the interstices with mud.” There was no plumbing, drainage or sewerage in Williamsburg; not a furnace or a stove; not a match; nothing to read by but candles, and little to read—few books and a single newspaper, such as it was, the only one published in Virginia. There were no shops worth speaking of, and money was little used. Goods were exchanged by primitive barter, and the general standard currency was tobacco. Williamsburg had a population of about one thousand persons who, like all the colonists, were pretty strictly on their own resources. They made what they used, largely, and extemporized their own amusements, dancing, gaming, hunting, fiddling, fighting. Some of the developments that came out of this life seem odd in their perspective. The first glimpse we have of Patrick Henry, for instance, is as a kind of vagabond, a bankrupt trader in his twenties, incorrigibily lazy, hanging about Williamsburg, fiddling at dances in the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern, and making himself the life and soul of any crew of loafers that his talent for story-telling might draw together.

  The College of William and Mary, named for the sovereigns who had chartered it under the auspices of the Church of England, was the second institution of the higher learning set up on this continent. For the time, it was well endowed. Among its sources of revenue were twenty thousand acres of land, which it held on the odd condition that every year, on the fifth day of March, the president should wait upon the Colonial Governor with two copies of a complimentary address done in Latin verse. The college followed “the grand old fortifying classical curriculum”; that is to say, it offered the student Latin, Greek, mathematics, moral philosophy, and a favourable view of the Christian faith as held by the Church of England.

  But the institution never did well. Its management was poor, and its instruction worse. The Bishop of London had the spiritual direction of the colony, and he could not always resist the temptation to unload upon Virginia such of his clergy as for one reason or another he thought could be best employed away from home. The same policy often governed his appointments to professorships at William and Mary. Then too, a certain Mr. Boyle, a pious but rather unimaginative Englishman, had given the college an endowment for evangelizing and educating such Indians as could be induced to go there. A great deal of energy was frittered away on this enterprise, and the general cultural level of the college was kept low by it. Parton remarks with unconscious humour that “if the college had any success with an Indian youth, he was no sooner tamed than he sickened and died.” Those who held out, he adds, threw off their clothes at the first glad moment of emancipation from Williamsburg, “and ran whooping into the forest.”

  The college shared the privileged position of the Church, however, so there was little incentive to pull up its slack. The Church of England was “established by law” in the colony; it was, as it still is in England, a branch of the civil service, like the Post-office, and the laws protecting its monopoly were severe. At one period, the Virginian had to go to church twice on Sunday under penalty of a fine for the first offence, flogging for the second, and death for the third. To speak lightly of any article of the Christian faith was a capital crime, and one was liable to be flogged for disparaging a clergyman. Swearing was punishable, for the second offence, by having one’s tongue bored through with an awl; for the third offence, by death. Heretics were liable to be burned at the stake. These laws were no more regularly or impartially enforced than such laws ever are; but while they tended to become obsolete, they nevertheless remained as potential instruments against those whom the authorities might dislike for other reasons. The colony had no more religious liberty than civil liberty; Great Britain’s policy towards it was in every respect a policy of sheer dragooning. Hence the Church got on only in a perfunctory and disreputable fashion, and progressively less serious heed was paid it.

  In 1760, an oddly-assorted company of four persons drew together at Williamsburg, and remained in close association, helping one another make what they could of a rather dull life, for the better part of two years. These alien spirits met at dinner at least once a week; and half a century later, one of the group, after a long experience of the best social life in both hemispheres, left record that “at these dinners I have heard more good sense, more rational and philosophical conversations, than in all my life besides.” The most significant member of the group is the one who has, unfortunately, left the faintest mark on history. The little that is known of him is only enough to make us wish we knew more. This was Dr. William Small, a Scotsman, professor of mathematics at William and Mary. He seems to have been a sort of Abelard in omne re scibili, for at one time or another he also taught moral philosophy, rhetoric and literature, and carried on some work in applied science. No one knows what circumstances brought him to the college; but once there, he seems quickly to have had enough of a dissolute, time-serving clergy, of riotous students, and of the prevailing incompetence, indolence and wrangling. In 1762, he went back to England, and became “the great Dr. Small of Birmingham.” But there too he left a provokingly sl
ight account of himself. He was a friend of the elder Darwin; there were dark hints against his orthodoxy; and he helped James Watt in developing the steam-engine. Probably, as Chateaubriand said of Joubert, he was more interested in perfection than in making a name for himself; at all events, his influence seems to have been quite disproportionate to his reputation. Such a man’s great fascination is that one can never be sure of one’s estimate of him, that he continually raises questions about himself and stimulates conjecture—caret quia vate sacro.

  The second of the company was a lawyer named George Wythe, subsequently Chancellor of Virginia, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and law-tutor of John Marshall and Henry Clay. Self-educated, except perhaps for Latin, he was said to be the best Greek scholar in the colony. He had some of the eccentricities common to vigorous self-trained minds. In his later years, for example, he peppered his judicial decisions with Greek, to the bitter distress of copyists; and, again, disgusted with the slow progress of measures for the general abolition of slavery, he suddenly freed all his slaves at a stroke, apparently without any question whether they would fare better or worse for the change. His integrity was high and fine, and he was equally eminent in his profession and in the esteem of colonial society.

  Third in the group was the Governor of the colony, Francis Fauquier, a remarkable exception to the general run of British proconsular officers. He was the most accomplished person that Virginia had ever seen, a cultivated man of the world, with every distinction and charm of manner; an excellent musician and linguist, a discerning traveller who had sampled civilized society almost everywhere in Europe. A strange passion for gambling had stood in his way. The tradition is that having gambled away all his property at a sitting, he was glad to get the appointment to Virginia to keep himself going. He spread the contagion of his failing among the Virginian landed gentry; but otherwise he was singularly scrupulous in private and public life, and his sympathies were largely with the colonists in their growing restlessness under the blind voracity of British mercantilism.

  These men who found themselves marooned in the uncongenial life of Williamsburg, were well on towards middle age. Governor Fauquier was fifty-six, Mr. Wythe was thirty-four. Dr. William Small’s age is not known, but there is probably some ground for thinking he would be rather over than under forty-five. The fourth member of the group was a boy of seventeen, who had entered college early in the year. He was tall and loose-jointed, with hazel-grey eyes and sandy hair, an extremely thin skin that peeled on exposure to sun or wind, stout wrists, large hands and feet. His name was Thomas Jefferson.

  II

  The lad was a well-to-do half-orphan, who had come down from the Virginia frontier, one hundred and fifty miles to the northwest, from the county of Albemarle, where his father, Peter Jefferson, had operated a virgin plantation, originally of one thousand acres, but presently augmented by a purchase of four hundred acres from a neighbour for what seems a moderate price, namely: “Henry Weatherbourne’s biggest bowl of arrack punch.” Peter Jefferson was a pioneer yeoman of Welsh descent, who married Jane Randolph, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Isham Randolph of Dungeness, in the county of Goochland. Thomas Jefferson’s autobiography, written at the age of seventy-seven, gives but a scanty account of either family, remarking dryly that the Randolphs “trace their pedigree far back in England and Scotland, to which let every one ascribe the faith and merit he chooses.” Peter Jefferson was a man of great strength, both of body and mind, and a correspondingly independent spirit. Uneducated, but with a turn for learning, he read whatever he could find to read; and, like Washington, he somehow managed to rub up enough mathematics and rule-of-thumb to qualify as a surveyor. He helped Professor Fry in making the first actual map of Virginia, and in running the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina. He died at fifty, probably from overwork. Thomas, his elder son, was then fourteen, and by the British law of primogeniture then in force in the colony, would inherit the larger share of property. Before death, Peter Jefferson had formally made known two wishes for this son and heir: that he should grow up strong and healthy, and that he should have a thorough classical education. It does not appear that he ever expressed any definite desires for his other eight children.

  Both wishes were granted. Health and strength came as much by good luck as good management, in those days. The frail died young; there was nothing else for them to do; but if one could weather through until well past thirty, one might fairly count on reaching old age. Of Peter Jefferson’s nine children, one died at twenty-nine, one at twenty-five, one at two months, one at birth—the fate of the average family, perhaps, or a little better—but the elder son had the luck to stand up under the hardships of existence, and realize his father’s hopes. Throughout his life he seldom had any indisposition, beyond periodical headaches of a somewhat severe type, at long intervals. His teeth were perfect, and his eyesight practically unimpaired, until the day of his death; so the two major curses of old age, one of which scourged Washington incessantly, passed him by.

  One of Thomas Jefferson’s letters, written late in life, gives an idea of what constitutional strength was like in that heroic period, and it also throws light on the current practice of medicine. He complains of being annoyed at the moment by “a slight salivation” caused by a dose of calomel and jalap, “though it contained no more than eight or nine grains of the former.” The weak, obviously, had little chance against this kind of thing. Mr. Jefferson always had a healthy man’s scepticism about the various theories of medicine, and spoke of them in the vein of Daniel Defoe. “I believe we may safely affirm that the inexperienced and presumptuous band of medical tyros let loose upon the world destroys more of human life in one year than all the Robin Hoods, Cartouches and Macheaths do in a century.” He remarked on one occasion that he never saw three physicians talking together, without glancing up to see if there were not a turkey-buzzard hovering overhead. His own theory of medicine anticipated the modern belief that “the judicious, the moral, the humane physician should stop” with the attempt merely to assist “the salutary effort which nature makes to re-establish the disordered functions.” Yet, on the other hand, he was one of the first to undergo vaccination, or “inoculation for the small pox,” as practiced by Dr. Shippen of Philadelphia, stopping there for that purpose in the course of a journey to New York at the age of thirty-three.1

  One circumstance which made for health was that anything like what we would now call a sedentary life was then impracticable. It was hard to avoid enough exercise to keep fit. Peter Jefferson trained his son to be a good shot, and put him in the way of being one of the best horsemen of his time. Thomas Jefferson always rode hard, even after he was unable to walk; he took a hard ride within three weeks of his death at the age of eighty-three. Yet he thought that at best “a horse gives but a kind of half-exercise,” and he had his doubts whether “we have not lost more than we have gained by the use of this animal. No one has occasioned so much the degeneracy of the human body.” As for driving, he said summarily that “a carriage is no better than a cradle.” Telling a young protege that of all forms of exercise walking is the best, he advised him always to carry a gun on his walks. “While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind,” in contrast to “games played with ball, and others of that nature,” which, he said, “are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind.” He was a true son of his father in believing that health is worth more than learning, in his distrust of drugs and coddling, and in his faith in hard exercise—at least two hours of it every day—as “the sovereign invigorator of the body.” It is a robust doctrine, and only a robust person could live up to Mr. Jefferson’s idea of it. For him, it worked well; but it would no doubt almost instantly have broken down his neighbour and bosom friend, James Madison, whose little body after all somehow managed to hold out for eighty-five years, two years longer than Mr. Jefferson’s own.

  Luck, again,
which had so much to do with the fulfilment of Peter Jefferson’s first wish, played almost as large a part with the second. There were no schools on the frontier; none of any account, indeed, in the whole colony. Clergymen sometimes took pupils; and by luck, Thomas Jefferson fell into the hands of a couple of clergymen who had some gift for teaching. Both were Scots. Passing from the Scotsman Douglas to the Scotsman Maury, and then to the Scotsman Small, at Williamsburg, he had a Scots education throughout. He says in his memoirs that his father “placed me at the English school at five years of age; and at the Latin at nine, where I continued until his death.” His going to William and Mary, rather than to Harvard or Princeton, looked as if his uninterrupted good luck had failed at last. The choice was his own; he wrote a stiff little letter to his guardian suggesting it, though, boy-like, he cannily shifts the responsibility to his mother’s cousin:

  Shadwell, January 14th, 1760.

  Sir: I was at Colo. Peter Randolph’s about a Fortnight ago, and my Schooling falling into Discourse, he said he thought it would be to my Advantage to go to the College, and was desirous I should go, as indeed I am myself for several Reasons. In the first place, as long as I stay at the Mountain, the loss of one-fourth of my Time is inevitable, by Company’s coming here and detaining me from School. And likewise my Absence will in a great measure, put a stop to so much Company, and by that Means lessen the Expenses of the Estate in Housekeeping. And on the other Hand, by going to the College, I shall get a more universal Acquaintance, which may hereafter be serviceable to me; and I suppose I can pursue my Studies in the Greek and Latin as well there as here, and likewise learn something of the Mathematics. I shall be glad of your opinion.