Thomas learned to ride and swim well, but it was through his mind that he intended to lift himself above the friends sunk in sport and pleasure. He had begun to judge his contemporaries and his elders harshly. Patrick Henry struck him as somewhat coarse and shallow, and when Thomas reached William and Mary, at the age of seventeen, he found his classmates even more disappointing. Low standards of admission had “filled the college with children,” he complained, which made classes disagreeable, even degrading, to a properly prepared student like himself.
Instead of mixing with boys his own age, Thomas moved gratefully into a circle of cultured older men. Dr. William Small, a Scotsman who taught mathematics and philosophy, introduced Thomas to George Wythe, a distinguished lawyer, and to the colony’s lieutenant governor, Francis Fauquier. That quartet, united by a love of music, often dined at the Governor’s Palace. Fauquier had arrived in Virginia two years before Jefferson entered William and Mary. According to rumor, he had been given the post after an influential lord in London had won his entire inheritance at the gaming tables, felt sorry for him and helped him to a royal appointment in America. The story, true or not, may have contributed to Jefferson’s lifelong dislike of cards; when he set up his own house, he did not allow them.
The governor may also have influenced Thomas to observe closely the world around him. During Fauquier’s first year in Virginia, a freak hailstorm struck the capital and broke every window on the north side of the Governor’s Palace. Fauquier used the ice to cool his wine and freeze his cream, but he also sent a precise report on the phenomenon to London, where it was delivered to the Royal Society.
Of his three older companions, Jefferson came to know George Wythe best, because Wythe agreed to tutor him when he decided to study law. Thomas was already measuring himself intellectually against every man he met, and although he considered his teacher a little slow in grasping an issue, Wythe always reached a sound conclusion. He also kept his religious creed, whatever it might be, out of their discussions, and Thomas found that reticence attractive.
Jefferson was now studying fifteen hours a day. He gave up riding and let his study of the violin lapse, though he had shown some talent. Rising at dawn, he stopped his studies only at twilight for a one-mile run out of Williamsburg and back. Progressing in the law, Jefferson cursed the impenetrable Coke as John Adams had done a decade before. “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.”
Apart from musicales at the Governor’s Palace, Thomas occasionally visited the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg and the surrounding plantations. Young women caught his eye regularly, and he traded gossip with his male friends, but he foundered in his mild attempts at courtship. As the years passed, Jefferson would grow into his large hands and feet, his ungainly height would come to seem imposing and his ginger-red hair a distinction, but in his youth he approached women with a diffidence that made him easy to refuse. Rebecca Burwell, the orphaned daughter of a past acting governor, was one favorite. Like John Adams courting Abigail Smith, Jefferson concocted a number of fanciful names for her. She was “Belinda” and, backward, “Adnileb.” Jefferson was twenty and deep in his study of the law; Rebecca was sixteen. He considered himself profoundly in love, and yet he wanted to see the world before he settled down. He wrote to ask his friend John Page whether he would sail with him to Europe. They would go to Italy, where Jefferson could buy a good violin. Then they would move on to Egypt and finally travel home by way of Canada. Surely, he asked Page, the young lady would wait for him? After all, he wouldn’t be gone forever—two or three years at the most. But Miss Burwell wasn’t holding out much encouragement. What if he called his ship the Rebecca? His letters to Page were already suggesting Jefferson’s lifelong battle between a warm heart and a cool head. He seemed to hope to watch from the sidelines, cheering on each part of himself impartially.
Jefferson began to see how his beloved might greet his travel plans and took refuge in youthful fatalism. “This should be a man’s attitude: ‘Few things will disturb him at all; nothing will disturb him much.’ ”
Throughout his young manhood, Jefferson’s heart usually prevailed. When he was twenty-five and still not involved with a woman, another boyhood friend, John Walker, was called away on business to the Indian territories. Jefferson had been a member of Walker’s wedding party, and it seemed natural for Walker to ask him to look after his young wife and infant daughter. Walker spent four months on the frontier. When he returned, he was puzzled that his wife kept asking him why he trusted his friend Jefferson.
A year or two later, the Walkers visited Shadwell, and Jefferson seized a few furtive opportunities to caress Mrs. Walker. He also slipped a note about the innocence of promiscuous love into the sleeve of her gown. Mrs. Walker destroyed it and told her husband nothing. Jefferson was as stirred by Mrs. Walker as George Washington had been over Sally Fairfax, though with perhaps less encouragement. One night when both Jefferson and the Walkers were staying at a militia colonel’s house, he waited until the ladies had retired to bed, then claimed a headache and left Walker and the other men sitting over their drinks. He found the room where Mrs. Walker was undressing and slipped inside. Only her threat to scream sent him hurrying away.
Those escapades became known only much later, after Jefferson had learned to cope with desire more discreetly. “When young and single,” he explained then, “I offered love to a handsome lady.”
Jefferson had begun to settle into domesticity even before he found a wife to share it. On a slope across the Rivanna River from Shadwell he started grafting an orchard of cherry trees. He called the site by its Italian name—Monticello, little mountain. He was determined to put a mansion on top of his mountain, which meant setting himself dozens of technical problems. Simply getting water to the summit was a challenge. But from the crest the view of rolling woods across the lower hills would justify everything.
Excavation had already begun in February 1770, when the family house at Shadwell burned to the ground. A slave was sent to Jefferson, who was visiting in Charlottesville, to tell him of the disaster. The young lawyer asked, Did they save my books? “No, master,” said the slave, “but we saved your fiddle.” It was not the good instrument he had hoped to buy in Italy. Jefferson had not gone abroad, after all, and his violin had cost him only five pounds.
—
It was at this time that Jefferson provided rum and cakes for the voters and was elected to the Burgesses. A year later, he met a young and wealthy widow, Martha Wayles Skelton. During their courtship throughout 1771, Jefferson came to believe that he might be entitled to a coat of arms. When he investigated the possibility his inquiries were wry and offhand. He wrote to a London agent that if a family arms did exist he would buy it, since the novelist Laurence Sterne had assured the world that a coat of arms could be purchased as cheaply as any other coat.
On Christmas Eve 1771, Jefferson left the cottage that was the rough beginnings of his mansion and set off to be married. When he filled out his license form on the last day of the year, he wrote “spinster” in the space for designating his bride. Someone crossed that out and wrote “widow” instead. Martha Skelton had a four-year-old son, but she was only twenty-three and had been widowed for three years. She was small and pretty, with large brown eyes and dark-red hair, and she smiled and laughed in ways that complemented Jefferson’s gravity. He had courted her by playing his violin to her harpsichord. In music or in language, he could release a sensuality that troubled him. Nine months after the wedding, Martha Jefferson gave birth to a daughter, also named Martha, and eighteen months after that to a second girl.
Jefferson devoted the first two years of his marriage to his family and his law practice. But by 1774 events were racing toward a break with England, and Jefferson was recruited into Patrick Henry’s circle of patriots. He was thirty-one when he was elected to go to Philadelphia.
During one of his respites back in Virginia in August
1775, the Jeffersons lost their second daughter. The death caused Jefferson to linger at home, and for the moment his political sentiments were divided. He could see the desirability of reconciling with England, but the stories of British cruelty so outraged him that he felt willing to sink the whole island in the sea.
When he returned to Philadelphia in the fall of 1775, the other members of the Congress voted to sacrifice their December recess in order to cope with the crisis facing the Continental Army. Jefferson chose instead to ride home to Monticello, where he stayed, out of touch with public business, for four months. In Philadelphia, men who liked and admired him wondered whether he was being swayed by the Tories or by his wife. In February 1776 a fellow delegate urged Jefferson to bring his wife to the Congress if she was what was keeping him away. Jefferson also received the copy of Common Sense. It had moved a nation but it couldn’t dislodge Jefferson from home.
Then, late in March 1776, Jefferson’s mother died unexpectedly. Writing to relatives in England, Jefferson treated her death laconically—“We supposed it to have been apoplectic”—but he was struck down by a headache so severe that returning to Philadelphia was unthinkable. It was not the first time Jefferson had been afflicted; his head had ached for two days after he learned that Rebecca Burwell was marrying another man. But this was the worst attack, and it lasted six weeks. He described paroxysms of excruciating pain that reversed the pattern of the sun—they descended on him at dawn and lifted only with nightfall. After the ordeal had finally ended, Jefferson rode to Philadelphia in mid-May 1776, feeling almost like a new man.
It was in that spirit of deliverance that he began to compose the document Congress was expecting from him.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Independence
1776
GIVEN A CHOICE, Thomas Jefferson would have joined John Adams in letting someone else draft a statement of independence. Delegates in Virginia had begun drawing up a new constitution, and Jefferson was alarmed that they were basing it closely on the existing one. Jefferson believed that building a proper foundation for his colony far outweighed drawing up another list of indictments against the king. He asked permission to return for the debate and mentioned his wife’s uncertain health, but the leaders in Virginia directed him to stay in Philadelphia.
Jefferson was determined to be heard, however, and in less than two weeks he wrote three drafts of his own constitution for Virginia. Even that headlong dash came too late. Convention delegates had finished the bulk of their work before Jefferson’s version reached Williamsburg. Debate was reopened to include a few of Jefferson’s points, but his most radical thinking was ignored.
Many of his proposals had stressed civil rights. He wanted to extend the right to vote; allow independent farmers to develop the West; guarantee decent treatment for Indians; reform the inheritance laws and provide for civilian control of the military. Jefferson’s Virginia would have been a freer, fairer, more humane society, with full religious freedom and no capital punishment. He watched helplessly from Philadelphia as his colony turned away from those principles.
—
Jefferson did not intend his statement of independence to be original. He saw his assignment as setting down as clearly as possible the opinions commonly held by Americans and their Congress. The ideas he would be including had been in the air for many years, and he knew the arguments so well that he didn’t need books or pamphlets in front of him as he wrote. His rivals would try much later to emphasize Jefferson’s debt to other writers, especially John Locke. But as he began to write in June 1776, Jefferson borrowed most extensively from himself. As a preamble to his Virginia constitution, he had drawn up a list of King George’s crimes, which he copied into this document.
Jefferson had rented a parlor and bedroom on the second floor of a new brick house on Market Street. There he set up a folding writing box that a cabinetmaker had built from his design. He made no claims for its beauty, but the box was plain and neat and took up no more room on the table in his parlor than any moderately sized book.
Jefferson wrote quickly in a small but legible hand, with no attempt at elegance. He made continual changes. First he wrote, “A declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in General Congress Assembled.” Then he went back and changed the phrase to “A declaration of . . .”
Next came “When in the course of human events . . .” That stately beginning survived all subsequent readings and drafts. He wrote that the people had to advance from subordination, then strengthened it to “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” But the document’s purpose remained the same throughout the rewriting—to satisfy “a decent respect to the opinion of mankind” and declare the causes that were impelling the colonists to this separation.
Jefferson then produced language that justified the Congress in asking him to speak for America.
“We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” he wrote. Five years earlier, he had given a friend his list of essential books. Along with Locke, Jefferson had included Inquiry into the Human Mind, by Thomas Reid, who argued that moral truths were divided into those that were reached through reason and those that were self-evident to every man of understanding and morality. Jefferson struck out “sacred and undeniable” and wrote in “self evident.” He continued through his draft, paring words away to make his language bolder. From “that all men are created equal and independent” he dropped “and independent.” “Rights inherent and inalienable” became “unalienable rights.” His next phrase came straight from his pen and could not be improved. Jefferson struck off those rights as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Jefferson’s third right represented his attempt to set the Continental Congress on a track that his own colony had rejected. Drawing from Locke, men had usually spoken of “life, liberty and property.” But Jefferson recognized the way property reduced the power of men who didn’t have it. If property was in fact power, couldn’t it threaten liberty? Jefferson offered as his third unalienable right a substitute that provided a rhetorical flourish. By endorsing the pursuit of happiness, he wasn’t lapsing into metaphysics or turning from political concerns to personal ones. His colleagues in the Congress would understand that Jefferson was speaking of the practice of happiness, not the questing after it. He used the phrase in the way that men spoke of pursuing law or pursuing medicine. Twelve years earlier, James Otis had argued in his Rights of the British Colonies that the duty of government was “to provide for the security, the quiet and happy enjoyment of life, liberty and property.” At the time of the Stamp Act, New Yorkers had petitioned the king to protect the liberty that lay at the base of all their enjoyments. His subjects could be neither happy nor rich, they said, as long as there were restraints on their property. The patriots believed that men needn’t seek happiness. If their government stopped abusing them, they would practice it.
Next, Jefferson made only slight revisions in seventy-five words that achieved what Samuel Adams and John Adams, the “Pennsylvania Farmer” and the Boston Gazette, Thomas Paine and the writers of a thousand patriot essays had been groping toward:
“That, to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
Jefferson passed to his indictment against George III, calling the king “his present majesty” and claiming that George was bent on establishing an absolute tyranny over America. As proof, Jefferson set down more than two dozen examples. For years America had been railing against Parliament, but Jefferson didn’t mention either House. Although Thomas Paine had attacked the monarchy, many Americans still felt an allegiance to the
throne and to the man who occupied it. Jefferson would prove to the world that George was not a fit king. His attack would be specific and personal. He would write nothing to alarm the other crowned heads of Europe.
The first dozen charges retraced the complaints common to most of the colonies: George III had refused to approve essential laws; had convened provincial legislatures at inconvenient sites and then dissolved them; had obstructed the nationalizing of foreigners; had made judges dependent on the crown; had kept standing armies in the colonies without the consent of their legislatures.
Some accusations were better founded than others, but they touched on grievances from every region. Over the last fifteen years Massachusetts had not been the only colony to have its legislature moved. During the rebellious days of the Stamp Act, South Carolina’s assembly had been transferred from Charleston to Beaufort. Virginia, Massachusetts and South Carolina had all had their legislatures dissolved for refusing to rescind or ignore the Massachusetts circular letter. In 1771 North Carolina had passed a law exempting immigrants from all taxes for four years, but London had ruled that the measure might attract farmers from Scotland and damage agricultural production in Britain, and the act was disallowed.
In his next round of charges, Jefferson reminded the world of the cost to the colonies of quartering British troops, which long had been a sore point in New York. He denounced the act that permitted British appointees charged with crimes in America to be taken to England for trial—“protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states.” Reviewing his first draft, Jefferson remembered the way the Quebec Act had undercut revolutionary zeal in Canada and inserted a reference attacking George III for abolishing the system of English laws in a neighboring province. Occasionally, the logic behind a charge was specious. “He is, at this time, transporting large Armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny,” Jefferson began one of his final accusations. But during the French and Indian War Americans had welcomed those same mercenaries as allies.
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