TWO
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.… Nothing is required for this enlightenment … except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters.
—IMMANUEL KANT, “What Is Enlightenment?”
The best news I can tell you is that Williamsburg begins to brighten up and look very clever.
—PEYTON RANDOLPH
WILLIAMSBURG, THE COLONIAL CAPITAL, suited Jefferson wonderfully. It had an intellectual climate informed by the very latest in books and a social swirl that included Virginia’s most charming women and most prominent men. It had the professor William Small, the lawyer George Wythe, the royal governor Francis Fauquier, and the statesman Peyton Randolph, all of whom became critical in Jefferson’s life. It had lively distractions. Jefferson gambled on horses and hunted foxes; he gossiped and courted and danced. Above all, Williamsburg had an ethos that was to enthrall Jefferson: the drama and glamour of politics.
To Jefferson, this was the great world, and the college was an integral part of Virginia life. George Washington received his surveying certificate from William and Mary; other alumni included future chief justice John Marshall, future president James Monroe, and some seventeen governors of Virginia.
Jefferson was enrolled in William and Mary from the time he was seventeen until he was nineteen, then was in and out of the city for an additional five years as he studied law. Williamsburg had as lasting an influence on the man Jefferson became as Shadwell did. In decades to come, in moments of crisis and of calm, he returned there in his mind’s eye, finding direction in the political lessons he learned and guidance in the ideas he explored.
College life centered on the Wren Building, which was, in 1760, a three-and-a-half-story, brick-walled structure topped by a cupola. A chapel and crypt had been added in the previous thirty years. Three blocks east along Duke of Gloucester Street was Bruton Parish Church on the left, followed by the Palace Green leading to the Governor’s Palace. Farther down Duke of Gloucester sat the brick capitol, home to the House of Burgesses and the General Court. There, then, in not quite half a square mile, no one landmark more than a few minutes’ walk—or an even briefer ride in one of the carriages that were so prominent when Williamsburg was full and busy with the public business—was the whole structure of public power in Jefferson’s Virginia. No one could have loved it all more than Jefferson himself.
There were also reminders of the grim facts of life in Virginia. In the mid-1760s a French traveler saw “three Negroes hanging at the gallows” for robbery.
For Jefferson, William and Mary was largely about what university life is supposed to be about: reading books, enjoying the company of the like-minded, and savoring teachers who seem to be ambassadors from other, richer, brighter worlds. Jefferson believed Williamsburg “the finest school of manners and morals that ever existed in America.”
The man who put him on the path toward that hyperbolic but heartfelt conclusion was Dr. William Small, a Scottish layman and professor who brought an Enlightenment worldview to Williamsburg. It was fortuitous that Jefferson encountered Small at all, for Small’s stay on the faculty at William and Mary lasted only six years, from 1758 to 1764—the right period to overlap with Jefferson, who revered him. “It was my great good fortune, and what probably fixed the destinies of my life, that Dr. William Small of Scotland, was then professor of mathematics, a man profound in most of the useful branches of science, with a happy talent of communication, correct and gentlemanly manners, and an enlarged and liberal mind,” Jefferson said.
Born in Scotland in 1734—he was less than a decade older than Jefferson—Small was, in addition to professor of mathematics at the college, the interim professor of moral philosophy. Described by a contemporary in Virginia as a “polite, well-bred man,” Small lived in two rooms in the college. The accommodations, it was said, were “by no means elegant,” but Small and his colleagues were “very well satisfied with the homeliness of their appearance, though at first sight [they were] rather disgusting.” Small furnished his rooms with six chairs, a table, a grate, and a bed and bedstead. A bit more care seems to have been taken with clothing than with interior decoration. Faculty were expected to have a suit of “handsome full-dressed silk clothes to wear on the King’s birthday at the Governor’s,” where it was “expected that all English gentlemen attend and pay their respects.”
Small taught ethics, rhetoric, and belles lettres as well as natural philosophy—what we think of as the sciences—and mathematics, lecturing in the mornings and holding seminar-like sessions in the afternoons in which the professor and his students discussed the material. Conversant with the thought of Bacon, Locke, Newton, Adam Smith, and the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Small introduced Jefferson to the key insight of the new intellectual age: that reason, not revelation or unquestioned tradition or superstition, deserved pride of place in human affairs.
Under Small’s influence Jefferson came to share Immanuel Kant’s 1784 definition of the spirit of the era: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” Kant wrote. “Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.”
This was Small’s message to his charges at William and Mary. Jefferson was entranced, later giving Small the noblest of accolades when he recalled that Small was “to me … a father.”
It was said that Jefferson studied fifteen hours a day, rising at dawn and reading until two o’clock each morning. At twilight in Williamsburg he exercised by running to a stone a mile from town; at Shadwell, he rowed a small canoe of his own across the Rivanna River and climbed the mountain he was to call Monticello. For Jefferson laziness was a sin. “Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so silent, yet so baneful, a tooth, as indolence,” he told one of his daughters. Time spent at study was never wasted. “Knowledge,” Jefferson said, is “indeed is a desirable, a lovely possession.”
Like his father, he believed in the virtues of riding and of walking, holding that a vigorous body helped create a vigorous mind. “Not less than two hours a day should be devoted to exercise, and the weather should be little regarded,” Jefferson once said. In fact, Jefferson believed the rainier and the colder the better. “A person not sick will not be injured by getting wet,” he said. “It is but taking a cold bath, which never gives a cold to any one. Brute animals are the most healthy, and they are exposed to all weather, and of men, those are healthiest who are the most exposed.”
Aspiring attorneys, he said, should devote their mornings to the law, but variety was key. “Having ascribed proper hours to exercise, divide what remain (I mean of your vacant hours) into three portions. Give the principal to History, the other two, which should be shorter, to Philosophy and Poetry.”
Jefferson was always asking questions. With “the mechanic as well as the man of science,” a descendant recalled, Jefferson learned all he could, “whether it was the construction of a wheel or the anatomy of an extinct species of animals,” and then went home to transcribe what he had heard. He would soon be known as a “walking encyclopedia.”
Jefferson could play as hard as he worked. Worrying that he had spent too much money in his first year in what the nineteenth-century biographer Henry Randall called “a little too showy style of living—particularly in the article of fine horses”—Jefferson wrote a guardian offering to charge the whole of his bills to his separate share of the estate. (More amused than alarmed, the guardian declined Jefferson’s offer.) Later in life, Jefferson wrote: “I was often thrown into the society of horse racers, and card players, fox hunters, scientific and professional men.… Many a time have I asked myself, in the enthusiastic moment of the death of a fox, the victory of a favorite horse, the issue of a question eloquently argued at the bar … Well, which of these kinds of reputation should I prefer? That of a horse jockey? A fox hunter? An orator? Or the honest advocate of my country’s rights?”
In truth these things are not mutually exclusive, which Jefferson knew. He spent his Williamsburg years in ways that suggest he understood that the pursuit of knowledge could coexist with the pursuit of pleasure. The motto at Williamsburg’s popular Raleigh Tavern had it right: “Jollity, offspring of wisdom and good living.”
It was in the Governor’s Palace, not at the Raleigh, that Jefferson’s most intensive tutorial in the art of living well—as measured in elegance and conversation, two things he cherished—took place.
Francis Fauquier, the royal governor of the colony of Virginia, held frequent gatherings with William Small and George Wythe, one of Virginia’s greatest lawyers. Thomas Jefferson made a fourth at what Jefferson called Fauquier’s “familiar table.” There was dinner, conversation, and music. The older men nurtured Jefferson’s passion for the violin, and Jefferson was invited to join Fauquier on the governor’s musical evenings, performing in the palace.
Fauquier was born in 1703, only five years before Peter Jefferson, and so was roughly the age Jefferson’s father would have been had Peter Jefferson survived. The governor loved science, fine food, good music, and spirited card playing.
No dry philosopher, Fauquier also had a worldly, even rakish air. The story was told that he came to office in the New World through the good grace of Lord Anson, the British admiral who had circumnavigated the globe, after Fauquier lost everything he had to Anson in a single night of cards. However embellished that tale, its currency shows that the man Jefferson encountered at this impressionable age led a life in which the pursuits of pleasure, power, and erudition unfolded simultaneously.
Fauquier’s father was a Huguenot physician who worked with Sir Isaac Newton at the Royal Mint and became a director of the Bank of England. The son, too, was interested in science and became a fellow of the Royal Society as well as a director of the South Sea Company—evidence of his keeping a hand in both the world of ideas and of practical power, something the young Jefferson may have noticed.
Fauquier was energetic. Within weeks of his arrival in Virginia in 1758, there was an unusual July hailstorm. The ice smashed the windows on the north side of the Governor’s Palace. Fascinated, Fauquier wrote a scientific paper about the phenomenon and dispatched it to his brother, who presented it to the Royal Society in London.
Born in 1726 in Elizabeth City County, Virginia, the lawyer George Wythe was also a noted statesman. Hawk-nosed and, in Jefferson’s description, “of the middle size, well formed and proportioned,” Wythe was wise, intellectually curious, and probably had more direct influence on Jefferson’s thinking than Small simply by virtue of longevity. Wythe taught Jefferson in the law and other subjects for five years, an unusually long period of time. The older man lived in a house near Bruton Parish Church, in the center of Williamsburg. “Mr. Wythe continued to be my faithful and beloved mentor in youth, and my most affectionate friend through life,” Jefferson recalled.
In Wythe, the man with whom Jefferson spent the most time in the period from roughly 1765 to 1772, Jefferson had a teacher in both liberty and luxury. The older man had expensive tastes, sending to London for satin cloaks for his wife, velvet breeches and black silk stockings for himself, and, for them both, “an elegant set of table and tea china, with bowls of the same of different sizes, decanters and drinking glasses, a handsome service of glass for a dessert, four middle-sized and six lesser dishes, and … a handsome well-built chariot.” The Wythes also loved to entertain. “Mrs. Wythe puts 1⁄10 very rich Malmsey to a dry Madeira and makes a fine wine,” Jefferson once noted appreciatively.
In a literary commonplace book in which he copied passages that struck him as important, Jefferson quoted Euripides during the years with Wythe: “There is nothing better than a trusty friend, neither wealth nor princely power; mere number is a senseless thing to set off against a noble friend.”
In 1767, Wythe introduced Jefferson to the practice of law at the bar of the General Court, inaugurating Jefferson’s legal career—a phase of Jefferson’s life that consumed him from 1767 until 1774, when the work of the Revolution drew him into politics and diplomacy.
When those close to Jefferson surveyed his life and career, they returned to the Governor’s Palace and to the influence of the bright men who moved through those elegant, high-ceilinged rooms. “Apart from the intellectual improvement derived from such an intercourse,” wrote Henry Randall, “Mr. Jefferson, it is said, owed that polish of manner which distinguished him through life, to his habitual mingling with the elegant society which Governor Fauquier collected about him.”
For the rest of his life Jefferson sought to replicate the spirit and substance of these long Williamsburg nights. At his round dining table at Monticello, in the salons of Paris, and in the common rooms of boardinghouses and taverns in Philadelphia and New York, and finally at the President’s House in Washington, D.C., Jefferson craved talk of the latest in science and the arts and adored conversation with the beautiful women, politicians, and men of affairs who made the world run on both sides of the Atlantic.
In this elite number Jefferson also included his cousin Peyton Randolph, attorney general of Virginia, Speaker of the House of Burgesses, and the first president of the Continental Congress. Born in 1721, Randolph was at once convivial and imposing. On meeting him, Silas Deane of Connecticut wrote that Peyton Randolph was “of an affable, open and majestic deportment, large in size, though not out of proportion”; he also “commands respect and esteem by his very aspect, independent of the high character he sustains.”
Small, Wythe, Fauquier, and Peyton Randolph established the standards by which Jefferson judged everyone else. They represented a love of engaging company, a devotion to the life of the mind, and a commitment to the responsible execution of political duties for the larger good. “Under temptations and difficulties,” he told a grandson, “I would ask myself—what would Dr. Small, Mr. Wythe, Peyton Randolph do in this situation? What course in it will ensure me their approbation?”
Jefferson was to be always guided by experience and example, thinking about what men of the world—men he respected and loved—might do, for in their day their decisions had given them, in Jefferson’s words, “very high standing,” standing that Jefferson felt “the incessant wish” to match, and surpass.
In pursuit of that standing, Jefferson never cut himself off from the social and cultural currents of his time. When on holiday from Williamsburg, he played his part in the rites of Virginia hospitality, often hosting others at Shadwell or visiting friends at their plantations.
On a visit one winter to Colonel Nathaniel Dandridge’s place in Hanover County, Jefferson met Patrick Henry, a young man living in Louisa County. Jefferson recalled that the two “passed perhaps a fortnight together at the revelries of the neighborhood and season. His manners had something of the coarseness of the society he had frequented; his passion was fiddling, dancing and pleasantry. He excelled in the last, and it attached every one to him.”
Jefferson conceived of life in social terms, and he believed that his own identity was bound up with the world around him. A slave was always in attendance. Family, neighbors, and callers were more or less constant presences. “I am convinced our own happiness requires that we should continue to mix with the world, and to keep pace with it as it goes,” he once wrote to one of his daughters.
He was a political man in the purest sense of the term. He lived among others, engaged in the business of living in community, and enjoyed being at the center of everything no matter what the everything was: He was a happy member of the FHC (or Flat Hat Club) at William and Mary, a secret society that, as Jefferson put it, “had no useful object.”
Even the bustle of a plantation paled in contrast to the charms of Williamsburg. When away from the capital, he longed for intelligence about what he might be missing. “If there is any news stirring in town or country, such as deaths, courtships and marriages in the circle of my acquaintance let me know it,” Jefferson wrote his college friend John Page.
For a time in the early 1760s, Jefferson was in love—passionately if ineffectually—with a young woman named Rebecca Lewis Burwell, the sister of his classmate Lewis Burwell, Jr., of Gloucester County. His letters on the subject are about what one would expect of a young man not quite twenty years old: overstated, breathless, self-serious, and melodramatic. His attempts at humor and self-mockery in his correspondence about Rebecca Burwell fall largely flat, and the episode is chiefly interesting for the light it sheds on Jefferson’s sensitivity to rejection, disorder, and criticism.
Little about the courtship went well. Even rats and rain seemed to conspire against him. On Christmas Eve 1762, Jefferson went to bed as usual, leaving his pocketbook, garters, and watch in his room. The watch held a paper drawing of Rebecca Burwell, the single token Jefferson appears to have had of the object of his affections.
Awaking on Christmas morning, Jefferson discovered not only that rats had gotten into his room and gnawed at his pocketbook and garters—the rodents spent part of the night only inches from Jefferson’s head—but that rain in the night had leaked into the house, soaking the watch and destroying the image of his beloved. To the lovesick Jefferson the accidents seemed terrible omens.
In this season he compared himself to Job and wondered, “Is there any such thing as happiness in this world?” His answer: “No.” About a month later, in January 1763, writing from Fairfields, a brother-in-law’s place in Goochland County, Jefferson was still gloomy. “All things here appear to me to trudge on in one and the same round: we rise in the morning that we may eat breakfast, dinner and supper and go to bed again that we may get up the next morning and do the same: so that you never saw two peas more alike than our yesterday and to-day,” he wrote John Page.
Jefferson always wanted some level of control, too, and he savored secrecy. “We must fall on some scheme of communicating our thoughts to each other, which shall be totally unintelligible to everyone but to ourselves,” he wrote Page as they shared gossip about courtships, dances, and lovers’ maneuverings.
His feelings for Rebecca grew stronger as the year wore on. Nine months later, on Thursday, October 6, 1763, Jefferson decided to declare himself.
There was a dance that evening in the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, with its brightly lit banqueting hall.
In this elegant setting Jefferson believed his hour had come. “I was prepared to say a great deal: I had dressed up in my own mind such thoughts as occurred to me, in as moving language as I knew how, and expected to have performed in a tolerably creditable manner,” Jefferson wrote the next day. He was dancing with Rebecca in an “agreeable company.” Everything appeared set.
He tried to speak, and it all fell apart. “But, good God!” Jefferson wrote afterward. “When I had an opportunity of venting them, a few broken sentences, uttered in great disorder, and interrupted with pauses of uncommon length, were the too visible signs of my strange confusion!”
His humiliation was nearly complete. Yet he did not capitulate totally, not without one additional attempt: a conversation in which Jefferson “opened my mind more freely and more fully.” He had plans (not then realized) to travel to England, but his heart was Rebecca’s if she would have it—sort of.
As Jefferson told the story to his friend John Page in January 1764, he made his intentions clear to Rebecca without committing himself, which gave Jefferson a degree of dignity and control: “I asked no question which would admit of a categorical answer, but assured [her] that such questions would one day be asked.” In the end there were no further questions—there were, in fact, no further interviews of any kind between the two. Defeated, he made his retreat. After he was rejected by Rebecca, Jefferson experienced what may have been the first instance of an ailment that was to recur at times of stress: a painful prolonged headache.
Characterizing himself as “abominably indolent” in a letter to a friend written late on a March evening, Jefferson said that his “scheme” to marry Rebecca was now “totally frustrated” by her impending marriage to the wealthy Jacquelin Ambler of Yorktown, which took place in May 1764.
Then, in an apparent allusion to prostitution or to sexual activity with enslaved women or with women in the servant class—it is unclear which, but these seem the likeliest possibilities—Jefferson wrote: “Many and great are the comforts of a single state, and neither of the reasons you urge can have any influence with an inhabitant and a young inhabitant too of Williamsburg. For St. Paul only says that it is better to be married than to burn. Now I presume that if that apostle had known that providence would at an after day be so kind to any particular set of people as to furnish them with other means of extinguishing their fire than those of matrimony, he would have earnestly recommended them to their practice.”
It was nearing midnight as he wrote these words. He was suffering from his headache as the candle burned down and Jupiter, his personal slave, fell asleep. Perhaps it was the intimacy of the hour that encouraged his candor; perhaps he was boasting vainly. But Jefferson had some reason to say that “providence” had given men like himself the “means” to satisfy his sexual appetites—means he appears to have made use of. This much was clear: Jefferson needed to get his mind off his lost love. Fortunately for him, he was a man of wide interests—interests his teachers and mentors were nurturing as his lovesickness faded.