Monticello Speakers Forum: Thomas Jefferson's Formative Years

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Transcript of Thomas Jefferson's Formative Years

Part 1

Now, I'm going to ask you to play a scene with me it was a scene I had to, can you hear me back there? Good. My first time of going into the period of history when Jefferson was a boy, was not about Jefferson at all, it was O Beulah Land, the first book of my quintet, which I found because I lived in England, that I had to find in a British Museum, well, now this is a little difficult since I needed primordial forests , I needed pumas , I needed slave owners, I needed it all.

And, I can, as yet, I can't think of the great façade of the British Museum without, for me, it being the new River Gorge. So, you see, if I can do it, you can do it. I thought, my God, what will these people have, I didn't remember quite that we were them. The great papers, everything, were in the British Museum, I had a golden time there. And, I first ran into Mr. Jefferson in the British Museum, because I wanted to go to the map room.

By that time I'd been there for several years and people were used to me asking odd questions. I wanted to go to the map room so I went out, found the map room, walked in and said, do you have the Frye-Jefferson maps? Oh, yes, we have the, well, they knew me so well that they let me sit on the back of the chair with my feet on here, leaning over a huge magnifying glass, so that I could see Albemarle County and Louisa County. And, writing with a pen I, I still can't get over the fact that the pen at least wasn't taken away from me. The Fry Jefferson Maps are on, well, the one that's in the hall there is a smaller edition of the original map, I'm just, would, would be about this big. And, the rest of the Fry Jefferson Maps are in this wonderful huge book, that, that it's a nice gesture, you go like that to the next map.

I came to a blank page and I said to the man, what belongs here, what happened to this? He said, we paid for it, we own it, but you chaps won't give it back. I like the idea that Mr. Peter Jefferson's Map, which he did, I mean, it was he who did it, is not in the British Museum, I don't think his son would have liked that. Now, I have my imprimatur from Jefferson himself, he says, the letters of a person, especially one whose business had been chiefly transacted by letters, form the only full and genuine journal of his life. Alas, there are 21 volumes. I'm on volume two. I'll see you in a couple of years.

Part 2

And, now we're going to play. I want you to forget that this beautiful house is behind me, I want you to forget that it's a lawn, it's a clearing in the woods and the woods look like that tree, this huge primordial forest that people were literally digging their way into. Peter Jefferson came here in about 1739 or '40. He had to clear both those farms down, Shadwell and the farm next to it, because that took years and years in the beginning, and it was only the Shadwell Farm, but he got it going before, and I'm sure everybody knows this, but I, I need to go through it for a reason.

Before Peter Jefferson was asked by, is it William Randolph in his will to, thanks, to come to Tuckahoe and look after the place until his eldest son was of age. Now, the eldest son was a small child at that point. Peter Jefferson went and did it, comes the first mystery, why after seven years did he bring his family of six daughters, a wife and two sons back to Shadwell? Well, nobody knows, but I'm going to find out. I have clues. One of the clues strangely enough is that Jefferson was almost unable to raise his voice, and I guess it's well known that the second inaugural address was given in such a whisper that nobody heard it. And, yet he yearned to be as noisy as Patrick Henry.

Now, taking that, two years old, and he mentions in his autobiography that all he remembers of Shadwell was being taken on a pillow on a, with, by a slave riding a horse. So, in effect, you come with him, he did not see his most beloved place in the world until he was nine years old. Up to that time, he had lived on a huge plantation that had seven overseers. Well, now there's something in that move that's a little bit of a clue. I’m just going to read you what he thought, that Eastern, Virginia looked like. And, this is a letter from much later.

”There were then aristocrats, half breeds, pretenders of solid independent yeomanry looking askance at those above, yet not venturing to jostle them, and last and lowest a secular set of human beings called overseers, the most abject, degraded, and unprincipled race, always cap and hand to the dons who employed them, and furnishing material for the exercise of their pride, insolence, and spirit of domination.

You know, I suspect that that small boy didn't like Tuckahoe very much. One of the reasons he may not have liked it was that he absolutely adored his father. As you know, he was the leading, so he and, and Joshua Fry, who was the mathematics professor at William and Mary, were the two who surveyed all of the, all of the boundaries of Virginia

Part 3

And the only thing that sounds like he liked it was “a solid independent yeomanry looking askance at those in power. The yeoman farmer, which was his ideal, and as a matter of fact, he tried to lay claim to lands, and set a law so that nobody could come in and grab 200,000 acres of it. And, when he bought the Louisiana Purchase, it was this boy living in a tiny village farm, just a few miles from a tiny, tiny village, with only one building, a courthouse. Not, not the one you see now, I'm trying to find, I know it was logged, but I want to find out if it was, if they were up, upscale enough to clapboard it, that might be nice to know.

Anyway, peter Jefferson was one of the first four people in this part of what was then Louisa County, so he knew, so young Jefferson knew how, how his father, not only had taught himself Greek and Latin and mathematics, but also had wielded an axe to help clear the land for the farm. It's almost claustrophobic to think of us in these towering trees, and the odd thing is, that he never would have been able to see that cleared farms from up here. So, this was a dream and it was a dream that came true as a piece of land.

If you see it from, from 64, you see trees and then a cut, and then more trees, it's still the same way. One of the things that I found in the British Museum was something that did not astonish me, I'm a West Virginian, and by the way, oh, oh, that's right. I found that the first attempts at succession from Eastern Virginia were in Lexington, Virginia, which now calls itself, what is it, the Crown of the South or the hot tub of the South?

So, I don’t think he liked them. The derisive name and this just comes out like a banner for me, the derisive name that Western Virginians had for Eastern Virginians was he's a Tuckahoe, the very name, the very plantation that Jefferson spent the first, well, he didn't spend the first nine years of his life, it was only seven years, because he was two when he was taken there. And, he came back to this and it became the love of his life, I doubt if any human being was a love like that.

Part4

In Spain, when I was there, I began to learn some Spanish, oh, it was terrible. One of the things I learned was as a mountain person myself we have a sense of place and this isn't on a state or a county or what, it's where the river flows and where the mountains come up on either side of it, that's your place. My place, I went through on the, on the sea, well, what used to be the sea, now God knows what it is now, in the daytime from Huntington right through the Kanawha Valley, and up through the New River Gorge, and I was passing all the things that had happened to me, the, the meeting place of my parents, this, that and the other.

And, I thought this is my patria chica and that's a, a Spaniard will always tell you by saying where he's from, my patria chica, my little country is so and so. I think Jefferson had the same and I think he must have had it from the time he saw it, it was a vast relief in getting away from Tuckahoe. He was surrounded by, at nine, by what the people in Eastern Virginia call Cohee , how many of you have heard the word Cohee? Oh, good, somebody has. Wonderful.

I had a terrible time trying to find out what it actually meant, it, it was used for Scottish immigrants, and a lot of the people who came into the county, which the years before Jefferson was born became Albemarle County, it was sliced out of Louisa County, they were formed into counties because it was too far to get to the courthouse. So, they, the, the place of the courthouse demanded the place of the county, not the other way around. They didn't say, oh, this would be a nice county, let's put a courthouse there. So, think about it the other way.

And, now the pride comes, he writes in a letter about the, and I think it must have been the, the great revival, everybody got religion in Virginia, Lord have mercy, you know, I mean, they, they had some shouting , but they also had prayer field tea parties, and can't you see the ladies of Richmond praying. All right, this is what he puts us, and remember what's on his tombstone, that third one about religion.

”In our village of Charlottesville, there is a great deal of religion, with a small spice only of fanaticism. We have four sects, but without either church or meetinghouse, the courthouse is the common temple, one Sunday in the month for each. Here Episcopalian and Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist meet together, join in hymning their maker, listen with attention and devotion to each other's preachers, and all mix in society with perfect harmony, and in many as I have subscribed to the building of an Episcopal Church, $200, a Presbyterian, $60, and a Baptist, $25.

Part 5

I think that part of the shyness of Jefferson, he was a shy man, the most open man I have ever read, he, he hid nothing, but when certain historians read it, they can't find what they're looking for, you know, the smiling charismatic face, coming bang off the page. He was too shy for that, but he was very, very loquacious, God knows I'm finding out. Not only could he not raise his voice, but he wrote to his friend John Paige, this was after he'd gone to the college as he called it.

we must fall on some scheme of communicating our thoughts to each other, which shall be totally unintelligible to anyone but ourselves. I will send you some of these days, Sheldon's tachiagraphical alphabet and directions.”

Obviously, a letter had gone astray and they hadn't had to, and they, since they talked about a cook who they didn't like, and girls who they did like, as law students, they didn't want anybody finding things out so they could tease them. Now, this, I think would have been after some time in, because, when he was 12 or 13 they could have gone hunting, anyway, this is what he says,

”From the circumstances of my position, I was often thrown into the society of horse racers, card players, fox hunters, scientific and professional men.”

Okay, I'm going to stop right there for a minute. The scientific and professional men were the men who his father knew, and to whom his father was a mentor. Peter Jefferson has, has never been given the weight of his father ship of, of this boy. The fact that he, look at those precise drawings in that house behind me, down to the hundredth of an inch or whatever, at least that's what somebody told me. Okay. So, that the scientific and professional men were Joshua Fry, his father, and other surveyors and other people who were involved with the land.

”And, many a time, I've asked myself in the enthusiastic moment of the death of a fox, the victory of a favorite horse, the issue of a question elegantly argued at the bar, which of these kind of reputations should I prefer, that of a horse jockey, fox hunter, or” at a, or at “the honest advocate of my country's rights.”

I, I picked these for you because you could begin to get, can't you, the voice coming out of these letters, the references. We know from what he wrote about the East that he didn't like it, but what was the affect on him, a brilliant child from nine to 14 of being in the two most politically extreme parts of the country, of the colony, Tuckahoe in the East, Cohee in the West. And, how he must have had to choose and he did choose, he chose the yeoman farmer, and it looks like he chose a little bit of card playing, too.

Part 6

Now, his father died when he was 14, the one person he deeply trusted and loved. He obviously was not close to his mother and it could have had to do with the fact, and this also could have had to do with the fact of his being taken away from Tuckahoe and that is, the Randolphs looked down on Peter Jefferson. Because they thought that their cousin Jane had married beneath her, so you see, women don't change very much.

All right, adored his father, just tried to ignore his mother. And, was left at 14, expected to be the man of the house to a mother and six sisters. Can you imagine anything worse? Stuck out in the country with a, a mother you didn't like very much and six bawling sisters. And, he writes about those years, there were only two. What I recollect . . .

“When I recollect that at 14 years of age the whole care and direction of myself was thrown upon myself entirely without a relative or friend qualified to advise or guide me, and recollected various sorts of bad company, with which I associated from time to time, I am astonished that I did not turn off with some of them and become as worthless to society as they were. I had the good fortune to become acquainted very early with some characters of very high standing, and feel the incessant wish that I would ever become as they were.” Now these are the professional friends of his father's.

”Under temptations and difficulties, I would ask myself, what would Dr. Small.” That was his mathematics and philosophy professor at the college. “Mr. Wythe (who taught him to be a lawyer) and Peyton Randolph do in this situation, what course in it would ensure me their approbation , I am certain that this mode of deciding on my conduct tended more to correctness than any reasoning powers I possessed.”

Don't you feel sorry for this 14-year-old boy having to decide good or bad for himself, temptations all around? And, he gets through it, he gets through it quietly, but he gets, absolutely gets through it as we all know.

And, then at 16 he has taken matters into his own hands, and this, I think, is the only Jefferson letter I may be wrong about this, that survives from the great excuse for American Jefferson historians, we don't write before the Shadwell Fire. It's in quotes, before the Shadwell fire, this is a letter, saved by someone else before the Shadwell fire.

And, of course, I'm just going to plunge right in before the Shadwell Fire and see what's there. After all, his father was Sheriff, his father was the magistrate, there was a courthouse, the courthouse kept records, it will be there. I was at, and this is so diplomatic, but remember he's 16, and he's in effect begging to get out of this situation.

”I was at Colonel 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, it was desirous I should go, as indeed, I am, myself, for several reasons.”

Can't you see a quill in hand, while saying that?

”In the first place, as long as I stay at the mountains, the loss of one-fourth of my time is inevitable. By companies coming here and detaining me from school, and likewise, my presence would 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, not going to the college, I shall get a more universal acquaintance, which may have to be serviceable to me. And, I suppose I can pursue my studies in Greek and Latin as well there as here, likewise, learn something of the mathematics. I shall be glad of your opinion.”

When he got, now this is something that was not, I tried to let people off the hook, it was his, the fact that his father was Peter Jefferson that gave him the entrée with older men, including the governor and Dr. Small, and Dr. Small's connected in a way I'll tell you in a minute.

This was not a, a, a young college boy, you know, running around without, well, he did plenty of that, but he also had an entrée through his father, who was very, very well known.