Thomas Jefferson's Education Read online

  The riot troubled Virginia’s leading men because it enlisted their sons under professors from Britain. Colonial leaders feared that British influence might win over young Virginians, drawn by the allure of a cosmopolitan empire to reject the ways of their colonial parents. Peyton Randolph had a special reason to worry, for he was a preeminent politician attentive to his young cousin Jefferson. But the young man soon put his cousin’s fears to rest. After the briefest flirtation with college rioting, Jefferson became the best and brightest of students. During the 1770s, he would help lead the colonial resistance to the British Empire and the church and state establishment in Virginia.

  Virginia

  Virginia embraced Chesapeake Bay: a vast, two-hundred-mile-long estuary replenished by the many rivers of a humid climate. On the expansive western shore, the Appomattox, James, York, Rappahannock, and Potomac Rivers framed peninsulas thrusting into the bay. Virginians distinguished between the low, relatively flat “Tidewater” region, located along the lower rivers, and the rolling hills of the “Piedmont” to the west. At the headwaters lay the mountainous Blue Ridge and, on its other side, the long and fertile Shenandoah Valley, which ran from northeast to southwest. Beyond the valley, westernmost Virginia featured heavily forested mountains.2

  Tidewater’s navigable rivers provided ships with many dispersed landings beside farms and plantations, a landscape that discouraged the development of commercial centers. Tidewater had only two: the capital at Williamsburg and the leading seaport, Norfolk, neither with populations over 3,000. Newer, more promising towns emerged along the Fall Line, the first rapids in the rivers, where the Piedmont met the Tidewater. Millers tapped the waterpower to grind wheat into flour, and merchants loaded boats with barrels of wheat or tobacco. These commercial centers included Petersburg on the Appomattox; Richmond on the James; Fredericksburg on the Rappahannock; and Alexandria on the Potomac.3

  Virginia’s searing summer heat and dense humidity shocked newcomers from cool and clammy Britain. Jonathan Boucher moaned that the heat “fevers the blood & sets all the animal Spirits in an uproar.” He added, “Hence we think & act tumultuously & all in a flutter, & are Strangers to that cool Steadiness which you in England justly value yourselves upon.” During prolonged midsummer droughts, a fierce sun withered crops and discouraged free people from working. Then a sudden thunderstorm might smash the plants with wind and hail and fill the streams and rivers with torrents of rain, sweeping away riverside mills and crops. A planter complained of “this cursed climate” during summer: “After being scorched with a drought of nearly three months’ continuance, we have been deluged for a fortnight past with tropical floods of water to the utter destruction of all that the drought had not ruined before.”4

  The robust nature both enthralled and sickened. In spring, the forest blossomed with flowering plants and trees rich “with odoriferous perfumes.” Summer brought abundant “fruits of exquisite relish and flavor,” especially peaches. The woods resonated with singing birds, croaking frogs, and clacking cicadas. But, a planter lamented, “The air swarms with insects thirsting for the blood of man.” Tidewater’s mosquitoes carried an endemic and debilitating malaria locally known as “ague and fever,” which spiked in August and September.5

  Colonists exploited the long growing season (about two hundred days) to cultivate tobacco for export to Britain. Virginians also raised pigs and corn for local consumption and kept peach orchards to make brandy. In the Piedmont, the farms and plantations grew more wheat and less tobacco, save in the southern portion, known as the Southside, between the James River to the north and the North Carolina boundary on the south. People and goods moved more easily along the rivers in boats than by wagons over land. The roads were rutted, stumpy, and clogged with mud—save in the droughts of midsummer.6

  Virginia was a woody countryside pocketed with farms and plantations. Wealthy planters built brick mansions of two or three stories on bluffs beside the rivers, and within they hung oil portraits of ancestors. Their compounds were small villages featuring wooden kitchens, smokehouses, barns, and workshops for enslaved artisans. Enslaved field hands dwelled in scattered “quarters” composed of log huts with stick-and-clay chimneys and earthen floors. White families of middling means lived in small log or plank cabins with stone chimneys and wooden floors. They lacked paint, inside or out. Instead of glass windows, most common houses had wooden shutters, open on nice days and closed in the cold and rain. A visitor reported, “Now & then a solitary farm house was to be seen, a narrow wood building, two stories high, with gable ends & a small portico over the central door. A cluster of small, miserable negro huts, a canoe & a brood of little negroes paddling in the mud completed the landscape.” Jefferson added, “It is impossible to devise things more ugly, uncomfortable, and happily more perishable.” Zigzag fences of wooden rails surrounded fields, while cattle and pigs roamed in the surrounding forest.7

  To ease their rural isolation, genteel Virginians welcomed visitors, who could linger for a week or two of feasting, drinking, hunting, talking, singing, and laughing—particularly over Christmas. Boucher noted, “They are the most hospitable, generous People I ever saw. . . . And really they have the Art of Enjoying Life.” Travelers marveled at the heaping meals of bacon, eggs, chicken, ham, and beef, bread and butter washed down with wine, brandy, tea, and coffee. Languid leisure as well as abundant food displayed freedom in a land of slavery and long, hot summers. Enslaved people mocked and envied the laziness of their master, likening him to the hog who “does not do anything except eat, drink and stroll about; he lies down when the fancy takes him; he lives like a gentleman.”8

  Rather than take pride in their work, Virginians boasted of their hospitality, praising their own generosity as superior to all others, particularly those frosty colonists dwelling to the north. When reminded of any fault in their character or society, Virginians insisted that their congeniality redeemed all. Called indolent, wasteful, boastful, and superficial—that mattered little to the Virginian proud of gregarious generosity as the consummate merit.9

  Inequality prevailed in colonial Virginia. A traveler noted, “There is a greater distinction supported between the different classes of life here, than perhaps in any of the rest of the colonies.” Wealthy and genteel planters dominated the more numerous common whites. A French visitor noted the many “miserable huts inhabited by whites, whose wan looks and ragged garments bespeak poverty.” Common whites disdained education, Boucher explained, because they lived among illiterate slaves, for the white man “whilst he sees others who are still lower, he ceases to be ashamed of his deficiencies.” Enslaved people comprised two-fifths of Virginia’s inhabitants. Wielding clubs and whips, masters compelled field hands to work long, hard days in ragged clothes, with scant food, before retiring to sleep in crude cabins.10

  Because of their inequalities, Virginians fussed over external appearances to display status and read that of others. Seeking the latest British fashions in clothing and furniture, the gentry ran up debts beyond what their crops could pay. A traveler received this apt advice: “Virginians are a very gentle, well-dressed people, & look p[er]haps, more at a Man’s Outside than his Inside. . . . Pray go very Clean, neat & handsomely Dressed in Virginia.”11

  To consolidate wealth, genteel sons and daughters married into related families, turning the ruling gentry into an extended cousinage. Blands, Blairs, Burwells, Byrds, Carters, Corbins, Harrisons, Lees, Ludwells, Nelsons, Nicholases, Pages, and Randolphs led their counties as justices of the court, vestries of the church parish, officers of the militia, and representatives in a legislature, known as the House of Burgesses. Each patriarch owned thousands of acres and scores of slaves, but a few also dabbled in the law.12

  The gentry relied on common whites to control enslaved people and fight Indians on the western frontier. At elections, commoners selected between ambitious gentlemen competing for seats in the legislature. Every county, no matter how populous or small, chose two represe
ntatives. Only a white man who owned a farm or shop could vote, for gender, poverty, or race disqualified most adults from civic rights. Women, children, slaves, indentured servants, free blacks, or white men without property seemed too dependent on others to exercise free choice. Even widows with land lacked the vote because the culture denigrated all females as unstable and untrustworthy.13

  The preeminent gentlemen held lifetime appointments in the smaller house of the legislature—the Council—that advised the governor, managed patronage in the counties, and controlled grants of frontier lands. Often in the thousands of acres, those grants favored younger members and protégés of elite families in a process that extended their power westward and into the next generation.14

  The gentry educated their sons to claim cultural and social superiority by mastering sacred, classical, and legal texts. Education in the Greek and Latin classics elevated a young man far above the common folk. Learning also improved diction, avoiding the drawling speech of commoners. Nathaniel Burwell declared that an uneducated young man was “unfit for any Gentleman’s conversation & therefore a Scandalous person & a Shame to his Relations.” Virginians measured learning as an ability to shine in conversation.15

  Rather than support public schools for all, gentlemen hired tutors to board with them and teach their children and those of nearby friends. Few Virginians became tutors because that role smacked of dependence and required study, so planters imported them from the northern colonies or Britain. After a few years with a tutor, the boys (but not girls) could venture off to a boarding school kept by an Anglican clergyman.16

  To cap an elite education, genteel sons went to college, usually the College of William & Mary or the College of New Jersey (the future Princeton). Some families could afford to send sons to a British university, which offered the finest learning and most polished manners in the empire. Richard Ambler shipped his boys to England to procure “such an Education as may set you above the common level & drudgery of Life.” Ambler reminded them “that many Children capable of learning are condemned to the necessity of Labouring hard, for want of ability in their Parents to give them an Education. You cannot, therefore, sufficiently Adore the Divine Providence, who has placed your Parents above the lower Class and thereby enabled them to be at the expense of giving you such an Education which (if not now neglected by you) will preserve you in the same Class & Rank among mankind.”17

  Relishing the advantages of birth and higher education, Virginia gentlemen dreaded social mobility, lest it elevate commoners and reduce their own sons to the lower ranks. They defended an unequal social order with themselves at the top, common whites in the middle, and slaves on the bottom. Colonel Richard Bland explained, “Societies of men could not subsist unless there were a subordination of one to another, and that from the highest to the lowest degree. . . . That in this subordination, the department of slaves must be filled by some, or there would be a defect in the scale of order.”18

  Virginians struck outsiders as paradoxes prone to extremes. An English visitor concluded: “In short, take them all together, they form a strange combination of incongruous, contradictory qualities and principles directly opposite; the best and the worst, the most valuable and the most worthless, elegant accomplishments and savage brutality, being in many of them most unaccountably blended.” This was Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia.19

  Inheritance

  Birth entitled Jefferson to a privileged place in an unequal society. His father, Peter Jefferson, was an ambitious land surveyor and speculator who had grown wealthy by helping to extend planter society westward into the Piedmont during the 1730s. He settled in Albemarle County, on the red clay hills around the upper James River and its tributary, the Rivanna. These navigable rivers linked the county to Tidewater society and the transatlantic market with Britain. Eastern gentlemen hired Peter Jefferson to find and survey the best tracts of frontier land beside the rivers. Then they secured large grants from the royal governor and Council for themselves and Jefferson. The grantees brought in scores of slaves to work their core plantations and sold marginal plots to common farmers. A visitor to Albemarle County reported that the enslaved could “seldom get anything to eat than [a] bread made of corn. . . . They are very poorly clad, almost half naked.” Albemarle was a land of opportunity for free folk because they exploited the labor of slaves just as their parents and grandparents did in the Tidewater.20

  In Albemarle, Peter Jefferson acquired 7,200 acres and more than 60 slaves, who tended the house and cultivated corn and tobacco. His enslaved artisans worked as blacksmiths, carpenters, and boatmen. He erected a riverside mill to grind grain for his household and earn fees from common farmers. No raw frontiersman, Jefferson built a fine mansion named Shadwell, which he stuffed with fashionable furniture and British books. Shadwell replicated elite Tidewater ways designed for raising refined children and hosting genteel guests. His wealth and congeniality qualified him to become the county surveyor, commander of the local militia, a court justice, and parish vestryman. An active, able, and wealthy man, he represented Albemarle County in the House of Burgesses. Jefferson also benefited from a fortunate marriage, for his wife Jane came from the prestigious Randolph family and was the daughter of a wealthy merchant with London connections. Jefferson ranked in the top 1 percent of the county’s property owners, with enslaved people making up three-quarters of the value of his estate.21

  Born in 1743, Thomas Jefferson was the couple’s second child but eldest son, and male privilege favored him over his older sister Jane. Slavery was literally in the mother’s milk that nourished him. The prompt birth of another child a year after Thomas indicates that his mother Jane did not nurse him for long. Considering breast-feeding debilitating, a Virginia lady relied on an enslaved wet nurse, who had milk because of the recent birth of her own child. By nursing the master’s son, she partially deprived her son or daughter.22

  Jefferson grew up with the contrasts of a plantation, where masters ate huge meals, wore fine clothes, rode fast horses, slept in a grand house, entertained genteel guests, and commanded, bought, sold, and punished enslaved people, who could do none of those nice things. Slaves prepared and served food, cleared and washed dishes, cleaned the house, tended at births, nursed children, repaired carriages, made clothing, shoed horses, and tended the garden. They also hoed, weeded, harvested, cured, packed, and shipped tobacco to market. The son of a master often became sexually active by exploiting an enslaved woman. More than some abstraction, slaves were familiar faces, who knew all too well those who owned them.23

  In 1757, at age forty-nine, Peter Jefferson died, leaving Jane a widow responsible for eight living children. His will carefully distributed that property to preserve genteel standards for his children while differentiating among them to specify roles based on gender and age. Each daughter received £200 in money plus one house slave. Fourteen-year-old Thomas inherited most of the slaves and land, including the Shadwell estate. He also obtained key tokens of Peter’s learning and authority: his desk, silver sword, books, mathematical instruments, and the estate’s most valuable slave, a valet named Sawney. But until Thomas Jefferson turned twenty-one, four executors managed the property.24

  In 1758, Jefferson went to the school kept by Reverend James Maury, an Anglican who held the parish near Shadwell and had delivered the funeral sermon for Peter Jefferson. Praising Maury as “a correct classical scholar,” Jefferson declared, “I thank on my knees him who directed my early education for having put into my possession this rich source of delight.” Jefferson cherished his school days and mates: “Reviewing the course of a long & sufficiently successful life, I find in no portion of it, happier moments than those were.” In his last, ailing months of life, Jefferson wrote to a classmate, declaring that he would “welcome the hour which shall once more reassemble our ant[ient] class with its venerable head,” James Maury. Jefferson did not often write about heaven, but he anticipated a school reunion there.25

  Born in Ireland
to a Protestant family of French origins, Maury came to Virginia as an infant with his parents. Educated at William & Mary, he settled in Albemarle, where he secured a large farm. Learned, energetic, and genial, Maury was a clear thinker, elegant writer, and eloquent speaker. Jefferson recalled that Maury lost his composure on just one subject: “I was at school with Mr. Maury during the years 1758 & 1759 and often heard him inveigh against the iniquity of the act of 1758 called the two-penny act.” Passed by the House of Burgesses, that act threatened to degrade the social standing of parsons beneath that of the gentry.26

  Parsons

  Virginia’s gentry were proud of living in the oldest, largest, richest, and most populous colony of British America. A fifth of the continent’s British colonists and half of the enslaved people lived in Virginia, which a resident boasted was “the brightest gem in his Majesty’s crown.” Gentlemen delighted in British books, plays, and fashions, and they revered the king and his empire. After dining with a gentry family, an Englishman noted, “The first toasts which are given by the Master of the family, are the King; the Queen and royal family; the Governour and Virginia; a good price for Tobacco.” To demonstrate that loyalty, the House of Burgesses committed men and money to fight the Indians and French on the western frontier.27

  Thanks to their loyalty, power, and contributions, Virginia’s gentry claimed a privileged position in the empire. They expected imperial support for their own vast claims to frontier lands that stretched west to the Mississippi and north to the Great Lakes. This projected empire included about 359,480 square miles, most of it still held by Indians and their allies, the French based in Canada and Louisiana. Determined to build an American empire within the global British Empire, Virginians wanted acceptance as partners with the aristocrats who governed in London. Because Lord Botetourt flattered that conception, he became the most popular of Virginia’s royal governors. Botetourt imported a grand and gilded coach with a Latin motto on the side: En dat Virginia quartam, which translates as Virginia rules a quarter of the world. This vision of imperial grandeur meant, however, that Virginians bristled at any British interference in the management of their counties, slaves, and clergymen.28