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 slight 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.

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———

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.