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with him: that was his heart. Amid the social pleasures of the capital, he had looked long and fondly into the eyes of Rebecca Burwell, an heiress and a flamboyant and cruel beauty. Now that he was separated from her, he found that the image of the girl had burned itself into his soul, and that his peace of mind was gone. Upon leaving college he had made arrangements to read law under the direction of his friend Wythe, and had taken home his Coke and Littleton. "But to the devil with Coke; Coke is an old scoundrel," wrote the miserable youth to his friend Page. After the manner of young men in love for the first time, he bitterly bemoaned his fate. Numerous letters in which he describes his wretched condition have been preserved. "Inclination tells me to go," he writes to Page, "receive my sentence and be no longer in suspense; but reason says if you go and your attempt proves unsuccessful, you will be ten times more wretched than ever. If Belinda (a love-name for Rebecca) will not accept of my service, it shall never be offered to another." To be sure not! But the asseveration does credit to his heart.

Sometimes he is more hopeful, as when he writes to his friend Fleming: "I have thought of the cleverest plan of life that can be imagined. You exchange lands for Edgehill, or I mine for Fairfields; you marry Sukey Potter, I marry Rebecca Burwell, join and get a pole-chair and a pair of keen horses, and drive about to all the dances in the country together. How do you like it?" A fine program, but in a few short months he wrote to Fleming again: "With regard to the scheme I proposed to you sometime since, I am sorry to tell you it is totally frustrated by Miss Rebecca Burwell's marriage with Jacquelin Ambler."

The young man drowned his disappointment in dull old Coke. He read deeply of the law, following its history back beyond Coke, beyond Littleton, beyond Bracton, even to its Anglo-Saxon origins. Abstracts from Jefferson's note-book, kept while he was a student of the law, have come down to us, and these show that he had the instincts of a scholar, patient, accurate and fearless in his investigations. For four years he

pursued his law studies, spending his winters in Williamsburg and his summers on his estate of Shadwell. Once he left his books to take a journey and get a glimpse of the outside world. In a one-horse chaise he traveled north as far as New York, passing through Annapolis and Philadelphia. At the latter place, in obedience to his penchant for science, he had himself inoculated for small-pox. In New York he made the acquaintance of Elbridge Gerry, a young man whose ideals and aims were similar to his own. The young men conceived a deep regard for each other and for many years were political allies, Gerry being the most powerful supporter of Jefferson in New England. Soon after his return from this trip, Jefferson was admitted to the practice of the law at the bar of the General Court of Virginia. He was now in his twenty-fourth year.

JEFFERSON AS A FARMER AND LAWYER.

The civilization of Virginia in the eighteenth century was uniformly and universally rural. When Jefferson at the age of seventeen entered Williamsburg, he had never in his life seen a collection of houses numbering as many as a dozen. There were no large towns, no manufacturing industries, no intercounty or inter-colonial commerce. Farming was the one occupation of the people, and tobacco the one product of the farm. Tobacco, as has been pithily said, was king. The farms -large tracts of land consisting sometimes of thousands of acres were tilled by slaves. Slavery and tobacco formed the < basis of society. Jefferson was a farmer, owned slaves, and impoverished his land by the cultivation of tobacco. He esteemed farmers as God's chosen people and he never ceased to praise agriculture* as the only moral and ennobling vocation. As the oldest son of Peter Jefferson he inherited, besides a number of slaves, the homestead, Shadwell-an estate of nineteen hundred acres of the finest land in Virginia, situated on the Rivanna, a tributary of the James. When the young man took possession of his lands the Rivanna was unnavigable for

*See Agriculture, page 135.

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со

THE LIFE AND WRITINGS

boats of any kind, but it was not long before he had its channels deepened and the stream rendered useful to himself and his neighbors a servicet which he deemed worthy of being ranked among the greatest of his life. The management of the plantation was assumed by Jefferson, who throughout his life was what we should call, in these days, a scientific farmer. His "garden-book," a monument of detail and patience, shows that he was deeply interested in the processes of nature, and that he brought to bear the keenest observation and the most careful reflection upon numberless experiments in garden, orchard, and field. His avowed ambition was to make two blades of grass grow where one had grown before. Although much given to theory, he was sufficiently practical to make his farm pay. For many years it yielded him an annual income of two thousand dollars, which, combined with an income of three thousand dollars made by the practice of the law, enabled him by the year 1774 to increase the number of his acres from nineteen hundred to five thousand and the number of his slaves from thirty to fifty-four. It is but just to say, however, that no slaves were ever bought as an investment. We shall see that Jefferson was quite incapable of engaging in such a traffic.

As a lawyer Jefferson was successful from the beginning. He was no orator; he was not even an agreeable public speaker. When elevated, his voice grew husky and indistinct. Yet in other respects he was admirably qualified for the bar. His talent for investigation enabled him to bring his cases into court thoroughly prepared, and a faculty for summarizing a case, however complex or vast, in a few short sentences, made it possible for him to dispense with the tricks of the fluent advocate. During the first year of his practice he had sixty cases before the General Court of Virginia. The second year brought him one hundred and fifteen cases. Among his clients were the Blands, Burwells, Carters, Harrisons, Randolphs, Lees, Nelsons, Pages. He continued in a lucrative practice until 1774, when the duties of public office practically ended his career as an attorney.

†See Services of Jefferson, page 381.

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Jefferson began his public life as a vestryman of the parish church and justice of the county court, offices which his father before him had filled. In 1769 he presented himself to the voters of Albemarle County as candidate for the House of Burgesses, an office which had also been held by his father. In accordance with the democratic custom of the time, the candidate went from voter to voter and made personal solicitations. He was elected as a matter of course. Indeed, he may be said to have inherited the seat of his father.

It was a critical and troublous period when he took his seat. Throughout the colonies there was a growing distrust of George III. and Parliament. Virginia imagined herself loyal, but outward forms apart, she was drifting with the general tide away from the home government. The great proprietors, the royal officers, and the clergy, partly through interest, partly through affection, were unshaken in their fidelity to the old order of things; but there were appearing upon the scene leaders who, like Otis and Adams in the north, were determined to resist to the last the encroachments of the crown. Jefferson fell in with those threatening revolution as naturally as a duck takes to water. He liked rebellion for its own sake. It cleared up the political atmosphere, he thought; a country without a rebellion,* say every century, he regarded as being in a dangerous way. Among his colleagues in the legislature were George Washington and Patrick Henry. These three men conducted }. the Revolution in Virginia. Washington was its sword, Henry its tongue, and Jefferson its pen. At the opening of the first session the member from Albemarle drafted a reply to the Governor's address, but his effort was rejected as being deficient in both style and contents. mortified, but his propensity to draw up addresses, constituThe young man was doubtless tions, etc., was deeply rooted, and we shall find him trying his hand again upon the first and all succeeding occasions.

On the Thursday after the opening of the session the House passed resolutions which, after denying the right of taxation

*See Rebellion, page 354.

without representation, and the right of trying accused Americans in English courts, declared the right of the colonies to concur and co-operate in seeking redress of grievances. On account of those resolutions Lord Botetourt, the royal Governor, promptly dissolved the Burgesses, who, as private citizens, immediately met in the Apollo room of the famous Raleigh Tavern and, following the example of Massachusetts, pledged themselves to refrain from trade with England until such time as she should show a disposition to treat the colonies justly. When in a few months word was brought that the English government had relented, and that at the next session of Parliament a proposition would be made to remove the obnoxious duties, the governor reassembled the Burgesses in the hope that the trouble would be tided over. At this session, advancing about a century ahead of his time, Jefferson introduced a bill making it lawful for a master to emancipate his slaves. The prompt and emphatic rejection of the bill caused him to lose hope of the speedy settlement of the slavery question in Virginia, but it did not shake his belief in the justice of the cause.

In 1770 Jefferson's home at Shadwell was destroyed by fire, and with it his furniture, books and law-papers. Only a highly prized violin was rescued from the flames. About two miles from the Shadwell house was a hill named by Jefferson, Monticello* (little mount). This eminence commands a view of surpassing beauty, and was chosen by Jefferson as the site of a mansion that should embody his ideas of architecture—an art upon which he expended much thought, and in which he was more than an amateur. After the fire the building of a new house upon the "little mount" was pushed rapidly, and in something more than a year a section was ready for occupancy.

In 1772 Jefferson married and brought to his new mansion Martha Skelton, a childless widow of twenty-two, the daughter of John Wayles, a wealthy lawyer of Williamsburg. A story of the wooing is told by Randall, Jefferson's most faithful biographer. The widow Skelton, it seems, had many suitors. "Upon

*See Monticello, page 311.