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  This ingratiating and persuasive letter is the first of all those recorded from Mr. Jefferson’s pen. It seems to have had its way with his guardian; as well it might, if only for the delightful touch of unintended irony at the end. This guarded estimate of William and Mary was really pretty generous, for most people who could afford the expense were sending their sons to England for an education, or to schools in the North. But the boy’s haphazard choice of William and Mary turned out to be eminently in his vein of good luck. Nowhere else, probably, were to be found just the influences suited to his temperament and type of mind. For a reflective person, two years in Williamsburg was in itself a pretty sound education in social philosophy. A capital that was nothing but a capital, housing nothing but politics, without any considerable trade or industry, or more than a handful of population, Williamsburg stood as a kind of stark exponent of exploitation through politics. Through its secular arm, the British State, in its devotion to the doctrine of mercantilism, ruthlessly and stupidly exploited the labour of the colonists. Through the church it exploited their intellect and spirit by the inculcation of a specious patriotism—“superstition in religion exciting superstition in politics,” as John Adams said, “and both united in directing military force.” Williamsburg was the focus of this process. It was not without point that Thomas Jefferson soon fell into the way of dating his youthful letters from “Devilsburg.”

  The situation, moreover, had its interpreters. Three alien spirits, drawn together as much by a common distrust of their circumstances as by their common interests and tastes, admitted him, by some miracle of good luck, to their company—formally, at any rate, as an equal. Like some other men of his period, notably Franklin, he seems to have been born with a certain maturity which made him at home in this association. He remained always the disciple of the cultivated man of science, the scholarly lawyer, and the experienced man of the world. Almost the only trace of fervency that one finds in his writings is when, late in life, he records his admiration for Governor Fauquier, Mr. Wythe, and Dr. Small, who “was to me as a father,” and whose presence at Williamsburg “probably fixed the destinies of my life.” Indeed, there is hardly a line of his activity that can not be run back to one or another of these three men.

  III

  There is little to be known of Thomas Jefferson’s early life. In 1770, his mother’s house at Shadwell burned down, with the loss “of every paper I had in the world, and almost every book.” By some chance, half-a-dozen of his youthful letters, most of them written at college to his friend John Page, have been preserved, and also some of his pocket account-books and memoranda. The first letter to Page was written from Fairfield, on Christmas Day, 1762, when Mr. Jefferson was in his twentieth year. It has value for the light it throws on the tendency of historians and novelists to exaggerate the elegance of Virginian colonial life. On his way home from Williamsburg to Shadwell, Mr. Jefferson stopped over to spend Christmas with a well-to-do friend who lived in rather sumptuous style at Fairfield. He took along his fiddle and some new minuets, to do his share in the season’s entertainment. Next morning he reports to Page, with no suggestion that he found it unusual or startling, that while he slept, “the cursed rats” had eaten up his pocket-book “which was in my pocket, within a foot of my head. And not contented with plenty for the present, they carried away my jemmy-worked silk garters and half-a-dozen new minuets I had just got.”

  He does not complain of this. He observes judicially: “Of this I should not have accused the devil (because you know rats will be rats, and hunger, without addition of his instigation, might have urged them to do this) if something worse, and from a different quarter, had not happened.” It seems—again with no suggestion of its being unusual—that he had been put to sleep in the attic; for “when I went to bed I laid my watch in the usual place, and going to take her up after I arose this morning, I found her in the same place, it’s true, but quantum mutatus ab illo! all afloat in water let in at a leak in the roof of the house, and as silent and still as the rats that had eat my pocketbook.” Even this was not the worst. He had the picture of a brevet-sweetheart in his watch-case, and the rain soaked picture and watch-paper to pulp, so that in trying to take them out to dry them, “my cursed fingers gave them such a rent as I fear I shall never get over.” Nevertheless, after two more sentences, his self-command is sufficiently rallied to permit an easy transition into the practical matter of his law studies. “And now, although the picture be defaced, there is so lively an image of her imprinted in my mind that I shall think of her too often, I fear, for my peace of mind; and too often, I am sure, to get through old Coke this winter; for God knows I have not seen him since I packed him up in my trunk at Williamsburg. Well, Page, I do wish the devil had old Coke, for I am sure I never was so tired of an old dull scoundrel in my life.”

  The damsel in question was Miss Rebecca Burwell, whom Mr. Jefferson, in subsequent letters to Page, celebrated after the Restoration fashion, under the name of Belinda. He seems to have done this partly out of poetic fancy, and partly for fear of some tampering with this weighty correspondence. A missive dated “Devilsburg, January 23, 1764,” reports that one of Page’s letters, “sent by the Secretary’s boy,” had been undelivered, and expresses apprehension about one of his own, though “Sukey Potter, to whom I sent it, told me yesterday she delivered it to Mr. T. Nelson, the younger, who had delivered it to you—I hope with his own hand.” This uneasiness leads him to write obscurely about his charmer, and to adopt devices of a clumsy transparency, such as using masculine instead of feminine pronouns, and writing the name Belinda in Greek characters, sometimes reversing them. Page, apparently, thought it enough insurance of secrecy to write in Latin, for Mr. Jefferson, speaking of his overdue letter, says, “I wish I had followed your example and wrote it in Latin, and that I had called my dear campana in die1 instead of αδviλεß.” The disciple of Dr. Small, however, resolves to be thoroughgoing—even in veiling the allusions to one’s love-affairs, one must keep a proper respect for whatever is wissenschaftlich. “We must fall on some scheme of communicating our thoughts to each other, which shall be totally unintelligible to every one but ourselves. I will send you some of these days Shelton’s Tachygraphical Alphabet, and directions.”

  Rebecca Burwell did not take the young man’s attentions any too seriously. No question she might have married him if she had liked, for marriage was the only occupation open to Virginian women, and they brought a correspondingly high professional skill to bear on managing themselves into it. Her cautious suitor had some thought of making her a proposal. A month after his experience with the rain and rats at Fairfield, he asks Page, “How does R. B. do? Had I better stay here and do nothing, or go down and do less? . . . Inclination tells me to go, receive my sentence, and be no longer in suspense; but reason says, If you go and your attempt proves unsuccessful, you will be ten times more wretched than ever.” Again, he thinks he may go to Petersburg in May to see some stage-plays, and “if I do, I do not know but I may keep on to Williamsburg.” However, he does neither; he remains at Shadwell all summer, tranquilly farming and reading law. At the end of May, the watchful Page tells him he has a rival, and urges quick action, offering to serve as his attorney and negotiate an option on Miss Burwell’s affections, if only he will hurry down from Shadwell and take the option up. No reply for a long month; then a letter full of high quietistic philosophy. “The rival you mention I know not whether to think formidable or not, as there has been so great an opening for him during my absence”—but still he sticks on at Shadwell.

  This looks like craven diffidence, but really it is nothing of the kind. Aware that his attitude would strike Page as pretty lukewarm, he finally discloses his actual state of mind. He was fairly certain that he loved Miss Burwell, but wholly certain that he wanted to go travelling. “I shall visit particularly England, Holland, France, Spain, Italy (where I would buy me a good fiddle) and Egypt,” and return home by way of Canada. The ideal thing would
be to manage both enterprises; to get the trip, say a matter of only two or three years at most, and then get Miss Burwell—would Page look the situation over and see what could be done? He had an instinctive uneasiness about submitting this project in person to her keen professional appraisal. “I should be scared to death at making her so unreasonable a proposal as that of waiting until I return from Britain, unless she could first be prepared for it. I am afraid it will make my chance of succeeding considerably worse.” In the face of any hazard, however, he remains the disciple of the great Dr. Small of Birmingham: “But the event at last must be this, that if she consents, I shall be happy; if she does not, I must endeavour to be as much so as possible.”

  Once started in the way of these exalted reflections, indeed, the young philosopher becomes animated, and treats Page to a whole paragraph of impassioned determinism:

  The most fortunate of us, in our journey through life, frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which may greatly afflict us; and to fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes should be one of the principal studies and endeavours of our lives. The only method of doing this is to assume a perfect resignation to the Divine will, to consider that whatever does happen must happen; and that by our uneasiness we cannot prevent the blow before it does fall, but we may add to its force after it has fallen. These considerations, and others such as these, may enable us in some measure to surmount the difficulties thrown in our way; to bear up with a tolerable degree of patience under this burthen of life; and to proceed with a pious and unshaken resignation till we arrive at our journey’s end, when we may deliver up our trust into the hands of Him who gave it, and receive such reward as to Him shall seem proportioned to our merit. Such, dear Page, will be the language of the man who considers his situation in this life, and such should be the language of every man who would wish to render that situation as easy as the nature of it will admit. Few things will disturb him at all; nothing will disturb him much.

  John Page earned a martyr’s crown by stalking down Miss Burwell and putting the matter manfully before her. Whether he showed her the letter, with its very remarkable and splendid philosophical excursus, is not known. But even without that, Miss Burwell could easily appraise the situation by all the force of that superiority in realism which comes of a purely professional training; besides, she had another string to her bow. So it is not surprising that she demurely accepted in principle Page’s proposal to maintain the diplomatic status quo until her swain should make his leisurely way back to Williamsburg in October and offer her a formal understanding upon all points covered by the protocol—his heartfelt devotion, the trip to Europe, the new fiddle, and marriage.

  October came. “Last night, as merry as agreeable company and dancing with Belinda in the Apollo1 could make me, I never thought the succeeding sun would have seen me so wretched as I now am. I was prepared to say a great deal” in the intervals between dances, but all it came to was “a few broken sentences uttered in great disorder and interrupted with pauses of uncommon length.” Trying again a week later, he finally managed to compass the terrible business of a conditional proposal. “I asked no question which would admit of a categorical answer; but I assured αδviλεß that such questions would one day be asked.” He left her “satisfied that I shall make her an offer, and if she intends to accept of it, she will disregard those made by others,” and if, on the other hand, her “present resolutions” are not favourable, “it is out of my power to say anything to make them so, which I have not said already.”

  No doubt while Miss Burwell laughed herself to sleep that autumn night, she felt the indulgent pity which the kindly professional feels for the amateur—the awkward amateur, who trained every cannon in Dr. Small’s whole philosophical arsenal on the poor butterfly of boy-love. All this, however, lay behind her when next morning she put a firm professional hand to her second string, and pulled it. She almost immediately married the none-toodreaded, none-too-hated rival. Her slacktwisted lover survived, as most lovers do, even when they have not the moral support of a Small and a Fauquier; six years later he is urging Page to reassemble a house-party of young ladies, promising in quite the old sprightly vein to “carry Sally Nicholas in the green chair to Newquarter, where your periagua . . . will meet us, automaton-like, of its own accord.” He never got his Belinda; it was long before he got a trip to Europe, and indeed the trip to Europe he never got; a dozen years dragged by before he got the new fiddle; and on the ninth of April, 1764, the name of Belinda fades forever from his correspondence.

  IV

  During the last year of his Presidency, Mr. Jefferson wrote a letter of general good advice to a grandson, in which he says: “When I recollect that at fourteen years of age the whole care and direction of myself was thrown on myself entirely, without a relation or friend qualified to advise or guide me, and recollect the various sorts of bad company with which I associated from time to time, I am astonished I did not turn off with some of them and become as worthless to society as they were.” Here he himself intimates rather artlessly the most interesting question that a survey of his early years brings out. Tobacco was the staple of Virginia’s commerce; he raised it, dealt in it, and never used it. The planter’s table, Mr. Jefferson’s own table notably, was abundant; and he was always the most abstemious of men, practically a vegetarian, “eating little animal food, and that not as an aliment so much as a condiment for the vegetables which constitute my principal diet.” Surrounded by heavy drinking, he drank little, using “the weak wines only. The ardent wines I can not drink, nor do I use ardent spirits in any form.” The society that surrounded him gambled at a great rate; and he never even had a card in his house. He was one of the best horsemen in the world, kept excellent horses, enjoyed watching a horse-race; and once, only, he gingerly entered one of his horses for a race, and then turned his back on the race-course forever, save as an occasional spectator. He did his share of dancing and flirting with the pretty girls at Williamsburg and Rosewell, thought fondly of Belinda, sent gallant messages to Betsy Moore and Judy Burwell, bet a pair of garters with Alice Corbin, pinch-hit as a beau for Sally Nicholas, made a wry face over serving as best man for one of his acquaintances; yet his interest in these diversions seems to have left his inner nature curiously untroubled. He had a great many house-servants; yet when he rose, he always built his own fire in his bedroom. His working day, even in college, averaged fifteen hours. John Page confesses that he himself was “too sociable to study as Mr. Jefferson did, who could tear himself away from his dearest friends and fly to his studies.”

  A few words in a letter to a relative contain all he ever said about the authoritarianism which seems to have been responsible for these anomalies, and about its relative disciplinary advantages. “I had the good fortune to become acquainted very early with some characters of very high standing, and to feel the incessant wish that I could ever become what they were. Under temptations and difficulties, I would ask myself what would Dr. Small, Mr. Wythe, Peyton Randolph, do in this situation. . . . Knowing the even and dignified line they pursued, I could never doubt for a moment which of two courses would be in character for them. Whereas, seeking the same object through a process of moral reasoning, and with the jaundiced eye of youth, I should often have erred.”

  1 In 1806, he wrote a complimentary letter to Jenner, in which he speaks of himself as “having been among the early converts.” Whatever Dr. Shippen’s mode of practice may have been, the general method of inoculation was a terrible business, and it must have taken a deal of resolution to go through with it. Among the Jefferson MSS. in the Library of Congress is a copy of the Virginia Almanac for 1770, “containing several interesting Pieces in Prose and Verse,” one of which, by Dr. Thomas Dimsdale, gives the process as follows:

  First, the patient should abstain from animal food, spices and fermented liquors, “except small beer,” for ten days. During this period he takes three doses, each of———

&n
bsp; 8 gr. calomel,

  8 gr. compound powder of crab’s claws,

  gr. tartar emetic.

  Then follows the inoculation, practically as now, save for any attempt at asepsis. Indeed, the instructions specify that the wound should not be covered. The second day after inoculation he takes———

  3 gr. calomel,

  3 gr. crab’s claws,

  gr. tartar emetic.

  As soon as the vaccination begins to “take,” he has the same dose again, “given overnight,” and as a follow-up next morning, he takes———

  2 oz. infusion of senna,

  ½ oz. manna,

  2 dr. tincture of jalap.

  1 I.e., “bell-in-day.”

  1 The Apollo Room in the Raleigh Tavern, where the colony’s first retaliatory measures against Great Britain were subsequently organized.

  Chapter II

  BEGINNINGS

  I

  THE general poverty of fact and record concerning Mr. Jefferson’s early years is threadbare in the matter of his marriage. No one knows how he met his wife, or what she was like. There is a tradition that her daughter Mary, or Maria, as she later came to be known, resembled her. As far as this tradition goes, therefore, there is ground for thinking she was a slender brunette of medium height, gentle, pretty and amiable, and otherwise not greatly gifted. Probably she was somewhat musical, though as it was then more or less the conventional thing for a girl to thrum on a spinet for general results, if she could afford to have one, there is no certainty about this. Mr. Jefferson himself played the violin diligently for years, practising, he says, three hours a day over a long period. When travelling, he habitually carried the type of small violin called a kit, for the sake of employing his odd moments in practice. He is represented as having a keen virtuoso taste in music ; but this again is uncertain, for nearly every youth in the social life of that day was some sort of township expert on the fiddle, and there is no clear evidence that Mr. Jefferson’s taste and skill were much above the average, and there is a little—a very little—to show that it was not. After the battle of Saratoga, the prisoners of General Burgoyne’s army were concentrated in Virginia, some in Mr. Jefferson’s neighbourhood, where he treated them with great kindness and hospitality. Among these was an English captain named Bibby, who fiddled duets with Mr. Jefferson, and said he was one of the best violinists he ever heard. Still, Captain Bibby’s heart was warmed by circumstances; and besides, no one really knows how well qualified he was to have an opinion. On the other hand, after Mr. Jefferson had set up housekeeping at Monticello, he wrote to a European correspondent whose name is unknown, asking him to look up some amateur musicians in the labouring class, and send them over; and in this letter one must remark with doubt the rather special character of the ensemble he contemplates setting up. “The bounds of an American fortune will not admit the indulgence of a domestic band of musicians, yet I have thought that a passion for music might be reconciled with that economy which we are obliged to observe. I retain among my domestic servants a gardener, a weaver, a cabinet-maker and a stone-cutter, to which I would add a vigneron. In a country where, like yours, music is cultivated and practised by every class of men, I suppose there might be found persons of these trades who could perform on the French horn, clarinet or hautboy, and bassoon, so that one might have a band of two French horns, two clarinets, two hautboys and a bassoon, without enlarging their domestic expense.” Again, he writes some years later from Paris to his friend Hopkinson, somewhat exaggerating, it would seem, the importance of “your project with the Harmonica, and the prospect of your succeeding in the application of Keys to it. It will be the greatest present which has been made to the musical world this century, not excepting the Piano-forte.”