The abode of this youth was a hundred and fifty miles to the north-west of Williamsburg, among the mountains of Central Virginia, near where the River Rivanna, an important tributary, enters the James. His home was a plain, spacious farm-house, a story and a half high, with four large rooms and a wide entry on the groundfloor, and many garret chambers above. The farm was nineteen hundred acres of land, part of it densely wooded, and some of it so steep and rocky as to be unfit for cultivation. The fields near the river were strong land, not yet (though soon to be) worn past the profitable culture of tobacco; but the upper portions were well suited to the grains and roots familiar to the farmers of the Middle States. For sixty years the staple product of all that fine mountain region, with its elevated fields, its far-reaching valleys, and rapid streams, was wheat; which the swift tributaries ground into flour, and the yellow James bore down its tranquil tide to Richmond, distant from the Jefferson home two days' ride. The rustle of wheat-ears was familiar music to Thomas Jefferson from infancy to hoary age. The farm was tilled at this period by thirty slaves, — equivalent to about fifteen farm-hands. The circumstances of the family were easy, not affluent. Almost every common thing they consumed was grown or made at home, all the common fabrics and ordinary clothing; and of home-made commodities they had an abundance: but the thirty pounds sterling per annum in cash, which the student was to expend at Williamsburg for his board and tuition, was not so light a charge upon the estate as it sounds to us. The entire expense of his maintenance away from home may have been fifty pounds a year; which was, probably, not less than half the sum that could be taken properly from the annual product of the farm and shops, after all the home charges had been paid. The yeomen of Virginia, though they enjoyed a profusion of the necessaries of life, were sometimes sorely put to it when a sum of money was to be raised. This student of seventeen, through the death of his father three years before, was already the head of the family, and, under a guardian, the owner of the Shadwell Farm, the best portion of his father's estate. The happy results that spring from the intermingling, by marriage, of families long cultured with families more vigorous and less refined, has been often remarked. Such conjunctions gave us Shakspeare and Goethe. A novelist of the day tells us of a ducal house, which, on system, married a plebeian estate every other generation, which renewed at once its blood and its fortunes. The material point was the renewal of the blood, which brings with it the brain, the stamina, and the self-control by which great houses are founded, and all great things are done. If at the present time there is an aristocracy in Europe, which, in any respectable degree, earns its wages, it is that aristocracy which has oftenest renewed itself by the strenuous blood of men who have won commanding places by sheer strength of mind and purpose. The world would never have heard of the Palmerstons, if the second lord had not won the admirable daughter of a Dublin tradesman; nor of Brougham, if the father of the late lord had married, as he intended, in his native country and class. Nature so delights in uniting opposites, that she seals with the unmistakable signet of her approbation the coming-together of opposites artificially produced, ancient culture and unlettered force. - Peter Jefferson, the father of the student, was a superb specimen of a class, nearly extinct in Great Britain, which used to be called yeomen, farmers who owned the soil they tilled, but had no pretensions to aristocratic rank, a class intermediate in a parish between the squire and his tenants. In old Virginia, yeomen were farmers, who, beginning life with little capital besides a strong arm and an energetic will, had taken up a tract of land to the westward of the great tobacco-region of Virginia, and gradually worked their way to the possession of a cleared farm, and a few families of slaves. In this manner Peter Jefferson, and his father before him, had achieved an independent position: stanch both, of strong self-tutored sense, anl of signal ability in the conduct of business; enterprising and methodical; liberal, but exact; good at figures, with a clear, careful handwriting, and an aptitude for mechanics. The family was of Welsh extraction. The first of the name in Virginia, it is well worth noting, was a member of that Virginia Assembly of 1619, the first legislative body ever convened on the western continent, the summoning of which ended the twelve years' anarchy that followed the planting of the colony, and notified the colonists, that, in crossing the sea, they had lost none of the rights of Englishmen. All that is important, characteristic, and hopeful, in the history of America, dates from the meeting of that Assembly; and an ancestor of Thomas Jefferson was a member of it. Virginia then contained six hundred white inhabitants. The church nearest his farm was called the "Jefferson Church" for a hundred years after his death, and the ruins of it were visible as late as 1856. Peter Jefferson, a younger son, and therefore having little to expect from his father, made his entrance into responsible life by the door which, many years later, admitted the son of another Virginia yeoman, George Washington. He learned the art of surveying land, a kind of liberal profession in a new country. He practised this profession in his native county of Chesterfield, and in all the region trodden by Confederate armies and torn by Federal cannon during the long siege of Richmond and Petersburg, - cities which then existed only in the prophetic minds of men like Colonel Byrd, who marked both as the sites of towns when as yet not a tree of the primeval forest had been felled. Like George Washington, too, this young surveyor owed his rise in the social scale to a marriage; though it was Peter Jefferson's happier fortune to win a maiden heart, and to create for her the home over which he asked her to preside. CHAPTER II. THE MOTHER OF JEFFERSON. WHAT a pretty romance it was! The athletic youth, master of his surveyor's chain and knowledge, a natural prince of the frontier, becomes knit in an ardent, young man's friendship with William Randolph, son of one of those flourishing Randolphs who lived in such lordly state, in the good old barbaric days, when the soil of Virginia was still unworn, when negroes were twenty-five guineas "a head," and tobacco brought four pence a pound in London docks. Together they visit an uncle of William Randolph, seated on a vast plantation on the James, some miles below the mouth of the Rivanna, one of the few grand houses of Virginia wherein knowledge and taste were more conspicuous than pride and profusion. Isham Randolph was the name of this tobacco lord, and his eldest daughter was Jane. She was born while the family were living in London, where her father knew Peter Collinson, woolmerchant, botanist, and friend of Pennsylvania; also Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum, and all that circle of the Royal Society's more active members. She was not too lightly won, this daughter of a stately house. Peter Jefferson was twenty-eight, and she seventeen, when he mounted and rode a hundred miles to the northwest of his home, and fifty miles beyond hers, and bought his first thousand acres on the Rivanna, and began to hew out a farm and home. Within half a day's ride, the smoke of only three or four settlers' cabins floated up through small clearings to the sky, and the trail of Indians was to be seen in the woods. For two years he wrought there in the forest, aided, doubtless, by a slave family or two; and when he had cleared a few fields, and built something a little better than a cabin, he went to Dungeness, and brought home his bride, Jane Randolph. To do her honor, he named their abode Shadwell, because it was in a London parish of that name that she first saw the light. He was married in 1738. Five years after,-April 13, 1743,- his third child was born, whom he named Thomas, that student who stands at the threshold of William and Mary College, waiting our convenience to be admitted. Of this adventurous lady, who gave her hand to Peter Jefferson and rode by his side to their home in the woods, we only know that she was the child of an intelligent and hospitable father; and this one fact comes to us by a strange and pleasant chance. There was a Quaker farmer near Philadelphia, at the beginning of the last century, named John Bartram, who, while he was resting from the plough one day, under a tree, pulling a daisy to pieces, and observing some of the more obvious marvels of its construction, suddenly awoke to his pitiful ignorance of the vegetable wonders in the midst of which he had lived and labored from childhood. He resumed his toil, but not with that stolid content with his ignorance that he had enjoyed so long. On the fourth day after, raging for knowledge, he hired a man to hold his plough, while he rode to Philadelphia, and brought home a work upon botany in Latin, and a Latin grammar. In three months, by a teacher's aid, he could grope his way in the Latin book; in a year he had botanized all over the region round about, and cast longing eyes over the border into Maryland and Virginia. By good management of his farm and servants, emancipated slaves, he was able to spend the rest of his life in the study of Nature, making wide excursions into neighboring colonies, until he knew every plant that grew between the Alleghany range and the Atlantic Ocean; becoming at length botanist to the king, at fifty guineas a year, and founding on the banks of the Schuylkill the first botanical garden of America. He and his garden flourished together to a green old age; and he died, at the approach of the British army during the Revolutionary War, of terror lest the pride of his life should be trampled into ruin by the troops. Among his European correspondents was that assiduous friend of Pennsylvania and of Franklin, Peter Collinson, with whom for fifty years he exchanged letters, seeds, roots, trees, slips, nuts, grafts, birds, turtles, squirrels, and other animals; and it is to their correspondence that Europe owes the profusion of American trees and shrubs that adorn so many parks, gardens, and highways. |