PUBLICATION DATE: Fall 2022
HIS MASTERLY PEN: A BIOGRAPHY OF JEFFERSON THE WRITER
DEDICATION: In Memoriam: Rhoda Ackerson Weyr
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Chapter One: MY WATCH HAS LOST ITS SPEECH, 1743-1765
Chapter Two: BUILDING HOUSES, 1765-1773
Chapter Three: OUR GREAT GRIEVANCES, 1773-1776
Chapter Four: WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS, 1774 – 1776
Chapter Five: AN ANGEL IN THE WHIRLWIND, 1776 – 1781
Chapter Six: UNMEASUREABLE LOSS, 1781-1782
Chapter Seven: PERPETUAL GRATITUDE, 1783-1786
Chapter Eight: GETTING INTO A SCRAPE, 1786-1787
Chapter Nine: THE ELOQUENCE OF DEBT, 1786-1788
Chapter Ten: HIS MASTERLY PEN, 1787-1789
Chapter Eleven: THE STAGE OF PUBLIC LIFE, 1789-1794
Chapter Twelve: THE CHAINS OF THE CONSTITUTION, 1794-1801
Chapter Thirteen: THE FUGITIVE OCCURRENCE, 1801-1805
Chapter Fourteen: THE LADIES OF WILLIAMSBURG, 1805-1809
Chapter Fifteen: UNMERCIFULLY LONG or SOWING THE WIND, 1809-1826
ENDNOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHRY [?]
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PREFACE
Thomas Jefferson is the most controversial Founding Father for our times, above all due to his relationship with slavery. He inherited slaves, bought and sold slaves, and, after the death of his wife, had six children by Sally Hemings, a slave woman who was a half-sister to his wife. It is that part of his life that we condemn today. It is useful to keep in mind, however, that Jefferson was also hated by many of his contemporaries as a Jacobean revolutionary, a populist demagogue, an agnostic or atheist, a slave-holder who believed in liberty in principle but not in practice, who preached against big government and centralized power but did not hesitate to use it in the interest of his policies, and a man whose vision of America’s future minimized banking, industry, and urbanization. All of which is to say, Jefferson has always been a controversial figure and our attitudes towards him will be divided for as long as we study and reflect on our history. Indeed, his legacy, especially his Declaration of Independence which says that “all men are created equal,” is so central to the American experience and the reality of the United States today that Jefferson is the Founding Father who cannot be ignored. What I hope my readers will find in this book is an increased understanding of Jefferson as a whole, his strengths and weaknesses, and particularly the degree to which his brilliance as a writer is a key to his personality and public service; and that his words still have meaning and resonance.
The distinction of this book is that it anchors the framework of the narrative in Jefferson's growth and development as a writer: the relationship between his literary gifts, his personal life, and his public service. They are an inseparable triad. This, then, is a narrative in which Jefferson often has pen in hand, a dynamic element in his life and career from his earliest letters to A Summary View of British America, the Declaration of Independence, and Notes on the State of Virginia, to his religious and scientific writings, his inaugural addresses, his correspondence with Washington, Madison, and Adams, his relationships with his wife, daughters, grandchildren, and slaves, his letters to male and females friends, and his brief, self-concealing autobiography. The narrative is biographical but selective. It proceeds chronologically by highlighting key moments when Jefferson had pen in hand. It is a pen used both to reveal and conceal. This master writer is a master of the shifting line between concealing and revealing from others and himself the complications, the inconsistencies, and the contradictions between his principles and his policies, between his optimistic view of human nature and the realities of his personal situation and the world he lived in.
Jefferson was constantly in the act of defining himself by literary acts, from his first letters to his self-created description for his tombstone. Only occasionally did he write explicitly about himself – his feelings, experiences, and relationships, and almost always in letters. These are among his most powerful and self-expressive writings. To approach Jefferson through his writings helps us get into his mind and feelings; it contributes to our understanding of his strengths and limitations; it fosters an appreciation of his role as a propagandist of the Revolution; of how he both made and recorded crucial aspects of the history of the first years of our republic; it shows how Jefferson wrote in different voices to different people and groups, his ability to change tone and language, as in his addresses to Indian nations, adjusting his appeal to the needs of his audience; and it also allows a focus on Jefferson as a revisionist historian attempting to mold the historical record in favor of himself and his policies. To focus on what and how he wrote helps us better understand his personal and political tensions; it also helps reveal the complexity and fullness of his personality. Perhaps, importantly, it allows us to read and appreciate prose of the highest literary and intellectual quality. It bookmarks Jefferson with Lincoln as a master of the English language. Jefferson was a writer of superb distinction, with a genius particularly suited to the needs of his role as a Virginia legislator, wartime propagandist, governor, Congressional delegate, secretary of state, vice president, president, and the premier intellectual, cultural, and moral voice of the republic he helped create and lived in for fifty years.
Jefferson gave eloquent articulation to the founding ideas of the United States. Many are still the bell weather values of American society. He channeled the widespread sentiment and language of rebellion into a declaration whose first paragraph became a world-wide affirmation of personal liberty and republican government. As a leader in the Virginia legislature, his path-breaking proposals on issues from religious liberty to inheritance reform resonate with a set of values that the country was to embrace over time. And in his few years in the Confederation Congress, his writing talent, his gift for logical organization, concision, and precision, his assiduous work ethic, and his diplomatic tactfulness made him a prominent force in moving disparate interests toward a more unified expression of national priorities. He and his colleagues recognized the need for the confederated states to have a national Congress responsible for interstate commerce and foreign affairs, though how to do this and how far to go required a consensus difficult to achieve. As the second US minister to France, Jefferson’s work ethic, social amiability, writing skills, and aristocratic bearing made him the right person for the assignment. When, in 1789, he returned to America to become its first secretary of state, he had already contributed to the making of the new nation what most others would have considered a full career. As secretary of state and president, he advocated his version of republican values, emphasizing frugality, decentralization, agriculture, westward expansion, and an extension of the franchise.
As he had reason to know, his greatest strength was his pen. Jefferson, though, was a public man who preferred his private home to the civic square. He could not, in March 1809, leave Washington fast enough. Much of it was personal. But he also had intimations of an American future of which he did not approve. He disapproved of the federal court system, especially the Supreme Court as the unelected determiner of the Constitution’s meaning; of the influential role of banks, paper currency, and stock markets in an emerging commercial nation; and of the power of money to influence legislation. He also believed that over time the American people were always right. Jefferson embodies the paradox of an elitist who preached populist rule on the assumption that the people would always elect people like him. In his last decade, with the likelihood that of Andrew Jackson, whom he detested, would become president, he discovered to his horror that his assumption was wrong. And he died a disillusioned man, touched with an edge of bitterness, so distraught was he by the way in which the country was defining itself. The populace did not always elect the best people. And by 1826 the country had rejected his vision of a pastoral republic. It was well on its way to embracing financial and industrial activism. In that regard also, he was considerably out of step with history. Even in his own day, Americans cared very much about many things Jefferson thought they should care less about, especially money and material objects. And they had few of Jefferson’s scruples about how to get them. He would have been appalled at 21st-century America.
Chapter One
MY WATCH HAS LOST ITS SPEECH
1743-1765
On a cold, sun-struck January day in 1961, at the inauguration of the youngest American president ever, the poet Robert Frost, his white hair touched by the wind, his puckish elderly face lined with years and griefs, had a message for America. It reached from the present to the past, from one end of the continent to the other. His raspy New England voice was rich with the tones and substance of American history. His gift to John F. Kennedy and to the huge audience he addressed was a poem called “The Gift Outright.” It is a good poem with which to begin this biography of Thomas Jefferson:
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
For Jefferson and his contemporaries, the land was everything. And they wanted more of it, more fully than they had it in 1743, the year in which Jefferson was born. They were to get it more fully in the next decades. It was, though, never to be fully enough possessed, as Frost noted, until many wars, treaties, and extensions later. It was to extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Bering Sea to the Rio Grande. It should have contained, many Americans believed, especially in Jefferson’s day, Canada and Cuba. They were near misses. All this, as it was gained, was both a conquest and a bequest. Most Americans believed that some force or power, from God to guns, had given the land to them. It began with Massachusetts and Virginia, the two places where the possession started in depth and in earnest. And the commitment to be possessed by the possessions gradually became paramount. America began to define itself, its people and values, in terms of the land they occupied, from small farms to plantations, from “sea to shining sea.” And then in big cities of the sort that Jefferson not only disapproved of but thought already were (and were to become even more so) black holes of moral degeneration. Eventually, one became the possession of the land one possessed. It was the key to moral values and national character.
That was especially so for Virginians. It was from the land itself and from what one built on it that Americans like Jefferson drew their self-identity and sustenance. Americans were more than house proud. They were land hungry. From the start, Jefferson called Virginia his “country.” The Union came afterward. Important as it was, for many, especially Southerners, it was a construct, a convenience, until in 1861 it wasn’t convenient any more. The nation that Jefferson helped create was based on the belief in the right of land possession. To have it for oneself, with as few restrictions or constraints as possible. It was a legal as well as a moral matter. To grow one’s crop and be master of it was the essence of personal and communal pride. Jefferson was the archetype of the house -proud American. And it included the right to extend ownership and wealth westward, to possess more land to be possessed by. Real estate was the highest form of material wealth.
But that wealth was also psychological, spiritual, and self-affirming. It provided self-worth, moral stature, and civic power. Without land ownership or its equivalent, one did not have the right to vote. The more one had, the better, and one needed private ownership of guns to defend it from enemies, internal and external. In Virginia, the elites, like Jefferson, who owned large plantations, needed slaves to keep their cash flow positive, their self-worth affirmed. From the start, they needed a non-white labor force. Tobacco was a labor-demanding, soil-destroying staple. It made it hard to possess the land and it exacted a heavy price from those who were possessed by it. But it had international market value. Fragile and unreliable as it was, it was the wealth Virginia provided. Even those who had little or no land still approved of that distinctive form of wealth. Slaves were part of the land. They were possessions inseparable from the soil and the buildings. Jefferson built Monticello as an act of possession. Eventually, it possessed him. He owned slaves as a necessary component of the wealth his land created. His slaves, as extensions of the land, also possessed him.
Robert Frost visualized the act of creating America, from Jefferson to John F. Kennedy and beyond, as an act of language, as a story-telling enterprise, a narrative that over time became increasingly rich and complex. To have a story, a myth, a narrative about what one had was to have it emphatically, to possess it entirely. Language helps make reality; it makes, guides, improves, and projects forward a people and a nation. And the story can and usually does exist on multiple levels, from the simple to the sophisticated, from the borrowed to the stolen, from the honest to the dishonest. It’s written in the textbooks and monuments, the scholarship and politics, the facts and fictions. At first, in 17th and 18th-century America, as the land went from colony to independent nation, it was “still unstoried, artless, unenhanced.” The poet implies that the narrative Jefferson’s predecessors and his own generation constructed was simple and unsophisticated . They were “artless” story-tellers,” in Frost’s words, history-describers, myth-creators. Not entirely. Colonial Americans, especially in Virginia and Massachusetts, were from the start sophisticated story tellers about themselves, their origins, their settlements, and their relationship to those who lived there before them, with the people, red and black, they subjugated or owned. Their stories were also about their connection to the mother country, Great Britain, from which most had come, stressing whom they owed their allegiance to and from whom they got the right to possess the land they had settled. Usually they knew exactly what they were doing and why. Fact and fiction, reality and desire, action and thought, aspiration and imagination, history, natural science, and theology, the access through language to narrative patterns and claims were part of the American experience from the start. The earliest settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts began the making of American identity. Jefferson was one of its most gifted and influential story-tellers.
In 1757, at the age of fourteen, Jefferson inherited a large share of the property his father had amassed, “the lands,” he later wrote, “on which I was born and live.” Peter Jefferson was the largest property owner in Albemarle County in west central Virginia. A surveyor, cartographer, planter, and slave-owner, he had married upwards. A native Virginian, he came from a moderately well-to-do but not wealthy family. His wife, Jane Randolph, made him and their ten children, two of whom were sons, kin to one of the most influential families in the colony. Peter and Jane Randolph Jefferson’s children belonged to the privileged elite. Peter had an eye for wealth, power, and adventures, for settlement and expansion, and even for books, which his eldest son inherited. In his will, he made customary provision for his wife, his daughters, and his sons. It was an unusually equitable will for its time. Beyond specific bequests to each child, at his death at the age of forty-nine Peter Jefferson bequeathed “unto [his eldest] son Thomas all the residue of my Estate whether real or Personal of what kind soever,” the plantations and slaves to be held in trust for him until he came of age. The eldest son benefited from the custom though not the letter of “primogeniture,” one of numbers of laws to keep estates intact. It was a feature of “entail,” requiring future generations to keep or pass on their property according to restrictions created by previous owners. It was meant to keep estates intact, to keep wealth and power concentrated. None of Thomas’ sisters inherited land. They inherited domestic slaves, a small amount of money, and their educations at the expense of the estate. Peter Jefferson’s wife got life tenancy of the family home, Shadwell, about three miles from the small village of Charlottesville. The will provided that each son should inherit either one of two large properties, one on the Fluvanna River, about 2300 acres, the other on the Rivanna River. The Rivanna land, including Shadwell, was on the southern part of the lower ridge of the South Mountains, which ran north to south for about 80 miles, about 30 miles east of the Blue Ridge. Its highest point was almost 1500 feet above sea level. As the first son to come of age, Thomas chose the land on the Rivanna, about 5000 acres.
HIS MASTERLY PEN: A BIOGRAPHY OF JEFFERSON THE WRITER
DEDICATION: In Memoriam: Rhoda Ackerson Weyr
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Chapter One: MY WATCH HAS LOST ITS SPEECH, 1743-1765
Chapter Two: BUILDING HOUSES, 1765-1773
Chapter Three: OUR GREAT GRIEVANCES, 1773-1776
Chapter Four: WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS, 1774 – 1776
Chapter Five: AN ANGEL IN THE WHIRLWIND, 1776 – 1781
Chapter Six: UNMEASUREABLE LOSS, 1781-1782
Chapter Seven: PERPETUAL GRATITUDE, 1783-1786
Chapter Eight: GETTING INTO A SCRAPE, 1786-1787
Chapter Nine: THE ELOQUENCE OF DEBT, 1786-1788
Chapter Ten: HIS MASTERLY PEN, 1787-1789
Chapter Eleven: THE STAGE OF PUBLIC LIFE, 1789-1794
Chapter Twelve: THE CHAINS OF THE CONSTITUTION, 1794-1801
Chapter Thirteen: THE FUGITIVE OCCURRENCE, 1801-1805
Chapter Fourteen: THE LADIES OF WILLIAMSBURG, 1805-1809
Chapter Fifteen: UNMERCIFULLY LONG or SOWING THE WIND, 1809-1826
ENDNOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHRY [?]
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PREFACE
Thomas Jefferson is the most controversial Founding Father for our times, above all due to his relationship with slavery. He inherited slaves, bought and sold slaves, and, after the death of his wife, had six children by Sally Hemings, a slave woman who was a half-sister to his wife. It is that part of his life that we condemn today. It is useful to keep in mind, however, that Jefferson was also hated by many of his contemporaries as a Jacobean revolutionary, a populist demagogue, an agnostic or atheist, a slave-holder who believed in liberty in principle but not in practice, who preached against big government and centralized power but did not hesitate to use it in the interest of his policies, and a man whose vision of America’s future minimized banking, industry, and urbanization. All of which is to say, Jefferson has always been a controversial figure and our attitudes towards him will be divided for as long as we study and reflect on our history. Indeed, his legacy, especially his Declaration of Independence which says that “all men are created equal,” is so central to the American experience and the reality of the United States today that Jefferson is the Founding Father who cannot be ignored. What I hope my readers will find in this book is an increased understanding of Jefferson as a whole, his strengths and weaknesses, and particularly the degree to which his brilliance as a writer is a key to his personality and public service; and that his words still have meaning and resonance.
The distinction of this book is that it anchors the framework of the narrative in Jefferson's growth and development as a writer: the relationship between his literary gifts, his personal life, and his public service. They are an inseparable triad. This, then, is a narrative in which Jefferson often has pen in hand, a dynamic element in his life and career from his earliest letters to A Summary View of British America, the Declaration of Independence, and Notes on the State of Virginia, to his religious and scientific writings, his inaugural addresses, his correspondence with Washington, Madison, and Adams, his relationships with his wife, daughters, grandchildren, and slaves, his letters to male and females friends, and his brief, self-concealing autobiography. The narrative is biographical but selective. It proceeds chronologically by highlighting key moments when Jefferson had pen in hand. It is a pen used both to reveal and conceal. This master writer is a master of the shifting line between concealing and revealing from others and himself the complications, the inconsistencies, and the contradictions between his principles and his policies, between his optimistic view of human nature and the realities of his personal situation and the world he lived in.
Jefferson was constantly in the act of defining himself by literary acts, from his first letters to his self-created description for his tombstone. Only occasionally did he write explicitly about himself – his feelings, experiences, and relationships, and almost always in letters. These are among his most powerful and self-expressive writings. To approach Jefferson through his writings helps us get into his mind and feelings; it contributes to our understanding of his strengths and limitations; it fosters an appreciation of his role as a propagandist of the Revolution; of how he both made and recorded crucial aspects of the history of the first years of our republic; it shows how Jefferson wrote in different voices to different people and groups, his ability to change tone and language, as in his addresses to Indian nations, adjusting his appeal to the needs of his audience; and it also allows a focus on Jefferson as a revisionist historian attempting to mold the historical record in favor of himself and his policies. To focus on what and how he wrote helps us better understand his personal and political tensions; it also helps reveal the complexity and fullness of his personality. Perhaps, importantly, it allows us to read and appreciate prose of the highest literary and intellectual quality. It bookmarks Jefferson with Lincoln as a master of the English language. Jefferson was a writer of superb distinction, with a genius particularly suited to the needs of his role as a Virginia legislator, wartime propagandist, governor, Congressional delegate, secretary of state, vice president, president, and the premier intellectual, cultural, and moral voice of the republic he helped create and lived in for fifty years.
Jefferson gave eloquent articulation to the founding ideas of the United States. Many are still the bell weather values of American society. He channeled the widespread sentiment and language of rebellion into a declaration whose first paragraph became a world-wide affirmation of personal liberty and republican government. As a leader in the Virginia legislature, his path-breaking proposals on issues from religious liberty to inheritance reform resonate with a set of values that the country was to embrace over time. And in his few years in the Confederation Congress, his writing talent, his gift for logical organization, concision, and precision, his assiduous work ethic, and his diplomatic tactfulness made him a prominent force in moving disparate interests toward a more unified expression of national priorities. He and his colleagues recognized the need for the confederated states to have a national Congress responsible for interstate commerce and foreign affairs, though how to do this and how far to go required a consensus difficult to achieve. As the second US minister to France, Jefferson’s work ethic, social amiability, writing skills, and aristocratic bearing made him the right person for the assignment. When, in 1789, he returned to America to become its first secretary of state, he had already contributed to the making of the new nation what most others would have considered a full career. As secretary of state and president, he advocated his version of republican values, emphasizing frugality, decentralization, agriculture, westward expansion, and an extension of the franchise.
As he had reason to know, his greatest strength was his pen. Jefferson, though, was a public man who preferred his private home to the civic square. He could not, in March 1809, leave Washington fast enough. Much of it was personal. But he also had intimations of an American future of which he did not approve. He disapproved of the federal court system, especially the Supreme Court as the unelected determiner of the Constitution’s meaning; of the influential role of banks, paper currency, and stock markets in an emerging commercial nation; and of the power of money to influence legislation. He also believed that over time the American people were always right. Jefferson embodies the paradox of an elitist who preached populist rule on the assumption that the people would always elect people like him. In his last decade, with the likelihood that of Andrew Jackson, whom he detested, would become president, he discovered to his horror that his assumption was wrong. And he died a disillusioned man, touched with an edge of bitterness, so distraught was he by the way in which the country was defining itself. The populace did not always elect the best people. And by 1826 the country had rejected his vision of a pastoral republic. It was well on its way to embracing financial and industrial activism. In that regard also, he was considerably out of step with history. Even in his own day, Americans cared very much about many things Jefferson thought they should care less about, especially money and material objects. And they had few of Jefferson’s scruples about how to get them. He would have been appalled at 21st-century America.
Chapter One
MY WATCH HAS LOST ITS SPEECH
1743-1765
On a cold, sun-struck January day in 1961, at the inauguration of the youngest American president ever, the poet Robert Frost, his white hair touched by the wind, his puckish elderly face lined with years and griefs, had a message for America. It reached from the present to the past, from one end of the continent to the other. His raspy New England voice was rich with the tones and substance of American history. His gift to John F. Kennedy and to the huge audience he addressed was a poem called “The Gift Outright.” It is a good poem with which to begin this biography of Thomas Jefferson:
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
For Jefferson and his contemporaries, the land was everything. And they wanted more of it, more fully than they had it in 1743, the year in which Jefferson was born. They were to get it more fully in the next decades. It was, though, never to be fully enough possessed, as Frost noted, until many wars, treaties, and extensions later. It was to extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Bering Sea to the Rio Grande. It should have contained, many Americans believed, especially in Jefferson’s day, Canada and Cuba. They were near misses. All this, as it was gained, was both a conquest and a bequest. Most Americans believed that some force or power, from God to guns, had given the land to them. It began with Massachusetts and Virginia, the two places where the possession started in depth and in earnest. And the commitment to be possessed by the possessions gradually became paramount. America began to define itself, its people and values, in terms of the land they occupied, from small farms to plantations, from “sea to shining sea.” And then in big cities of the sort that Jefferson not only disapproved of but thought already were (and were to become even more so) black holes of moral degeneration. Eventually, one became the possession of the land one possessed. It was the key to moral values and national character.
That was especially so for Virginians. It was from the land itself and from what one built on it that Americans like Jefferson drew their self-identity and sustenance. Americans were more than house proud. They were land hungry. From the start, Jefferson called Virginia his “country.” The Union came afterward. Important as it was, for many, especially Southerners, it was a construct, a convenience, until in 1861 it wasn’t convenient any more. The nation that Jefferson helped create was based on the belief in the right of land possession. To have it for oneself, with as few restrictions or constraints as possible. It was a legal as well as a moral matter. To grow one’s crop and be master of it was the essence of personal and communal pride. Jefferson was the archetype of the house -proud American. And it included the right to extend ownership and wealth westward, to possess more land to be possessed by. Real estate was the highest form of material wealth.
But that wealth was also psychological, spiritual, and self-affirming. It provided self-worth, moral stature, and civic power. Without land ownership or its equivalent, one did not have the right to vote. The more one had, the better, and one needed private ownership of guns to defend it from enemies, internal and external. In Virginia, the elites, like Jefferson, who owned large plantations, needed slaves to keep their cash flow positive, their self-worth affirmed. From the start, they needed a non-white labor force. Tobacco was a labor-demanding, soil-destroying staple. It made it hard to possess the land and it exacted a heavy price from those who were possessed by it. But it had international market value. Fragile and unreliable as it was, it was the wealth Virginia provided. Even those who had little or no land still approved of that distinctive form of wealth. Slaves were part of the land. They were possessions inseparable from the soil and the buildings. Jefferson built Monticello as an act of possession. Eventually, it possessed him. He owned slaves as a necessary component of the wealth his land created. His slaves, as extensions of the land, also possessed him.
Robert Frost visualized the act of creating America, from Jefferson to John F. Kennedy and beyond, as an act of language, as a story-telling enterprise, a narrative that over time became increasingly rich and complex. To have a story, a myth, a narrative about what one had was to have it emphatically, to possess it entirely. Language helps make reality; it makes, guides, improves, and projects forward a people and a nation. And the story can and usually does exist on multiple levels, from the simple to the sophisticated, from the borrowed to the stolen, from the honest to the dishonest. It’s written in the textbooks and monuments, the scholarship and politics, the facts and fictions. At first, in 17th and 18th-century America, as the land went from colony to independent nation, it was “still unstoried, artless, unenhanced.” The poet implies that the narrative Jefferson’s predecessors and his own generation constructed was simple and unsophisticated . They were “artless” story-tellers,” in Frost’s words, history-describers, myth-creators. Not entirely. Colonial Americans, especially in Virginia and Massachusetts, were from the start sophisticated story tellers about themselves, their origins, their settlements, and their relationship to those who lived there before them, with the people, red and black, they subjugated or owned. Their stories were also about their connection to the mother country, Great Britain, from which most had come, stressing whom they owed their allegiance to and from whom they got the right to possess the land they had settled. Usually they knew exactly what they were doing and why. Fact and fiction, reality and desire, action and thought, aspiration and imagination, history, natural science, and theology, the access through language to narrative patterns and claims were part of the American experience from the start. The earliest settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts began the making of American identity. Jefferson was one of its most gifted and influential story-tellers.
In 1757, at the age of fourteen, Jefferson inherited a large share of the property his father had amassed, “the lands,” he later wrote, “on which I was born and live.” Peter Jefferson was the largest property owner in Albemarle County in west central Virginia. A surveyor, cartographer, planter, and slave-owner, he had married upwards. A native Virginian, he came from a moderately well-to-do but not wealthy family. His wife, Jane Randolph, made him and their ten children, two of whom were sons, kin to one of the most influential families in the colony. Peter and Jane Randolph Jefferson’s children belonged to the privileged elite. Peter had an eye for wealth, power, and adventures, for settlement and expansion, and even for books, which his eldest son inherited. In his will, he made customary provision for his wife, his daughters, and his sons. It was an unusually equitable will for its time. Beyond specific bequests to each child, at his death at the age of forty-nine Peter Jefferson bequeathed “unto [his eldest] son Thomas all the residue of my Estate whether real or Personal of what kind soever,” the plantations and slaves to be held in trust for him until he came of age. The eldest son benefited from the custom though not the letter of “primogeniture,” one of numbers of laws to keep estates intact. It was a feature of “entail,” requiring future generations to keep or pass on their property according to restrictions created by previous owners. It was meant to keep estates intact, to keep wealth and power concentrated. None of Thomas’ sisters inherited land. They inherited domestic slaves, a small amount of money, and their educations at the expense of the estate. Peter Jefferson’s wife got life tenancy of the family home, Shadwell, about three miles from the small village of Charlottesville. The will provided that each son should inherit either one of two large properties, one on the Fluvanna River, about 2300 acres, the other on the Rivanna River. The Rivanna land, including Shadwell, was on the southern part of the lower ridge of the South Mountains, which ran north to south for about 80 miles, about 30 miles east of the Blue Ridge. Its highest point was almost 1500 feet above sea level. As the first son to come of age, Thomas chose the land on the Rivanna, about 5000 acres.
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