Thomas Jefferlson Author of America

July 17, 2005
'Thomas Jefferson'
By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Born on April 13, 1743 (April 2 until the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1758), Thomas Jefferson was the offspring of stable planter stock in the native aristocracy of Virginia. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a surveyor and cartographer whose immigrant parents were said to have come from the Snowdonia district of northern Wales. Peter's marriage to Jane Randolph, whose own family was one of the "names" of traditional Virginia society, can only have improved his standing. Perhaps it was young Jefferson's evident contempt and dislike for his mother - to whom he almost never alluded - or his apparent indifference to aristocracy, but when he came to write his own very brief Autobiography in 1821, he spoke of these matters of bloodline and provenance and "pedigree," especially in his mother's case, with an affected indifference. "Let everyone," he wrote, "ascribe the faith and merit he chooses," to such trifling questions. Since Jefferson always founded American claims of right upon the ancient Saxon autonomy supposedly established by the near-mythical English kings Hengist and Horsa, who had left Saxony and established a form of self-rule in southern England (he even wished to see their imagined likeness on the first Great Seal of the United States), we are confronted at once with his fondness for, if not indeed his need for, the negation of one of his positions by another.

We cannot hope to peer very far past the opaque curtain that is always in evidence (and also not in evidence) when a young man seemingly reveres his father and is indifferent to his mother. However, the nature of individual humans is not radically different and it's no great surprise to discover that the adolescent Thomas felt himself liable at one point to go to seed and to waste his time on loose company. We find, also, an excruciating account of a "bad date" at the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern when, nerving himself to make advances to the much sought-after Rebecca Burwell, he made an utter hash of the approach and a more or less complete fool of himself. ("Good God!" he wrote to a friend the following morning. Later, news that Miss Burwell - the sister of a classmate and the daughter of a family estate in York County - was betrothed to another man was to give young Thomas the first of the many migraine attacks that plagued him intermittently through life.) That this initial reverse was a sting is not to be doubted. Nor is it to be doubted that it was followed by still another fiasco, when he made a crass and unsuccessful attempt to seduce the wife of his friend John Walker. I mention this because it demonstrates that Jefferson was ardent by nature when it came to females, and also made reticent and cautious by experience. This is worth knowing from the start, and would scarcely need to be observed at all if it were not for the generations of historians who have written, until the present day, as if he were not a male mammal at all.

He recovered from his early instability in three principal ways: by adopting the study of the classics, by pursuing the practice of law, and by making an excellent marriage. These avenues converged on a single spot, still revered by Americans and also made part of the small change of their experience by featuring in image on the reverse of the humble nickel, or five-cent coin. A Palladian house named Monticello, on a mountaintop in the Virginia wilderness (and built with its front facing the untamed West), emerged as the centerpiece of a life which could well, were it not for some accidents of history, have been devoted to uxoriousness, agricultural husbandry, hunting, bibliophilia, and the ingenious prolongation of chattel slavery.

The difference was made by Jefferson's attendance, between 1760 and 1762, at William and Mary College in Williamsburg. Here, he had the best luck that a young man can have, in that he was fortunate with his tutors. In particular, he fell in with Dr. William Small, a Scots-born teacher of the scientific method, and with the great George Wythe, who taught the law as an aspect of history and logic and humanism and who seems to have adopted the young man as a personal protégé. Once aroused, the thirst for learning was unslakeable in Jefferson for the rest of his life; as unappeasable, in fact, as his longing for the possession of books and the acquisition of their contents. Among the authors whose work he assimilated at this time was Lord Bolingbroke, a pioneer critic of organized Christianity. For anyone even reasonably attuned, the air was full of Enlightenment thinking at the time, and blowing from England and Scotland as well as from France. (It was to waft Thomas Paine across the Atlantic, among other things, bearing a letter of introduction from the learned Dr. Benjamin Franklin.) Private in this as in so many things, Jefferson never made any ostentatious renunciation of religion, but his early detachment from its mystical or "revealed" elements was to manifest itself throughout his mature life.

To have a proper photograph of Shakespeare, Susan Sontag once wrote, would be the modern equivalent of possessing a splinter from the True Cross. We naturally do not possess a photograph of Thomas Jefferson, but we have a number of portraits of him at numerous stages of his life, and a wealth of eyewitness descriptions. By the time he came to Williamsburg, he was very tall for his age and indeed very tall for his times, standing two inches above six feet. He was neither clumsy nor particularly graceful, having long but somewhat loose limbs. Reddish of hair and freckled of complexion, he possessed hazel eyes, thin lips, and a rather prominent nose and chin. If one plays the parlor game - "If he were to be an animal, which animal would he be?" - we are almost compelled to think of a large and rather resourceful fox. . . .