THOMAS JEFFERSON CHAPTER I EQUIPMENT AND APPRENTICESHIP But exercise produces habit, and in the instance of which we speak the exercise being of the moral feelings, produces a habit of thinking and acting virtuously. (Jefferson to Robert Skipwith, August 3, 1771.) A FEW years after the affable and indolent King Charles II returned from his "travels" and took up his abode in the royal palace of Whitehall, which had been polluted by the presence of Oliver and his saints, a certain William Randolph, gentleman, from Warwickshire, who had sacrificed most of his patrimony in the defense of Charles's martyred father, came to the royal colony of Virginia and started his fortunes anew at Turkey Island, on the broad banks of the lower James. Randolph traced his descent through a long line of nobles, warriors, and statesmen to the royal Earl of Murray, half-brother of the ill-fated Mary, Queen of the Scots. He married Mary Isham, daughter of a baronet, and from this distinguished couple descended a goodly number of 1 the men who have made the name of the Old Dominion illustrious.1 In the year 1738 a daughter of the house of Randolph left the rich halls of the "tidewater aristocracy" to follow her more plebeian husband up the river to his frontier farm of a thousand acres in the foot-hills of the Blue Ridge, where five years later she became the mother of Thomas Jefferson. The Jeffersons could make no boast of gentle blood, but their yeoman stock was not without honor in the colony. Their ancestor had come from Wales, so the tradition ran, from beneath the shadow of Mount Snowdon. A Jefferson had sat for Flower de Hundred in the famous House of Burgesses convened by Governor Yeardley in the little church at Jamestown in 1619-the first legislative body on the soil of America; and Jeffersons of the seventeenth century were accepted as sons-in-law by the burgesses and even by a speaker of the house. But the true founder of the family was the man who in 1738 took Jane Randolph into the wilderness, "where the trails of the hostile Monacons or Tuscaroras were yet fresh on the lands." Peter Jefferson, 1 Besides the Randolphs themselves (Peyton, first president of the Continental Congress; John the eccentric, of Roanoke; Edmund, attorney-general and secretary of state in Washington's cabinet); William Stith, the historian of Virginia; John Marshall, for thirtyfour years chief justice of the supreme court; Richard Bland, the celebrated Revolutionary leader; Robert E. Lee, the idol of the Southern Confederacy, and Thomas Jefferson could trace their descent directly to the aristocratic ancestors of Turkey Island. |