Independence (61 page)

After losing Rebecca, Jefferson made no attempt at courtship for eight years. Immersed in his studies, distracted by the launching of his legal practice, and perhaps fearing both rejection and commitment, Jefferson remained withdrawn and reclusive during long stretches between 1762 and 1770. Embittered by Rebecca’s rebuff, which he acknowledged had shattered his dreams, a growing misogyny appeared to take hold of him for a time.
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Nevertheless, he continued to crave the warmth and happiness that a family could bring, the very comforts that he had found lacking in his youth.

As painful as these years were, Jefferson was never dysfunctional. He completed his legal training, established a flourishing legal practice, undertook the construction of Monticello—his own mansion, which he planned for a hilltop within sight of Shadwell—and in 1768 was elected to fill the seat his father had once occupied in the House of Burgesses. Jefferson’s life was coming together. Some fifteen months after he entered the assembly, he was “touched by heaven,” as he put it.
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He met and began to court Martha Skelton, a twenty-one-year-old widow who lived with her wealthy planter father at the Forest, a plantation near Williamsburg. Like many shy men, Jefferson may have fallen in love with the first woman who took notice of him, but it is just as likely that, with his personal affairs at last in order, he felt at liberty for the first time to fall in love. Family members, and some who worked at Monticello, described Martha as “pretty,” a slight, graceful, shapely woman of medium height with auburn hair and large, vivid eyes. As was true of her suitor, Martha was musically inclined, intelligent, and well read. She exhibited a pleasant demeanor and struck everyone as a good conversationalist. Her appeal was enhanced by her experience in managing a plantation and by her wealth.
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Thomas and Martha were married on New Year’s Day 1772. Jefferson was twenty-eight, rather old for matrimony by eighteenth-century standards, but not unusually so for an ambitious man who had set his sights on going places. Washington, Samuel Adams, and John Adams had each married at nearly the same age.

Jefferson had completed two terms of the Burgesses by the time he married and had shown promise that one day he would play a leading role in the assembly. His education and remarkable intellect were obvious attributes, and he literally stood out physically. At six feet two inches in height, he towered six inches or more above most assemblymen. Slender, with sinewy arms and legs, Jefferson had sandy-red hair and struck others as pleasant-looking, if not exactly handsome. But what many observers first noticed, aside from his height and exceptional intellect, was his poor posture and somewhat awkward manner. One onlooker commented on his lack of “external grace,” and another said that Jefferson reminded him “of a tall, large-boned farmer.”

Jefferson’s greatest obstacle to success as a legislator stemmed from his reserved demeanor. Some of his more gregarious colleagues thought him cold and unfriendly, though Jefferson worked hard to be “considerate to all persons.” In time, most of his fellow assemblymen appear to have come to see him as kind, gentle, and affectionate. When Jefferson grew comfortable with an acquaintance, he relaxed and was more open, so that in time his associates found him to be a provocative and humorous conversationalist. But Jefferson could never overcome his innate shyness. He shrank from the backslapping and bonhomie that was second nature to the most successful legislators. Aware of his defects as a public speaker, he rarely joined in the floor debates in the legislature. He may have been self-conscious of his voice, described by a female observer as “femininely soft and gentle” and by numerous others as weak and barely audible. Whatever held him back, no one remembered Jefferson being a frequent participant in the give-and-take among the assemblymen. Nor did anyone recall ever hearing him deliver a rousing speech.
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Jefferson appears to have remained a secondary figure in the Burgesses until the eve of the American Revolution. His shortcomings as a legislator had something to do with this, but the distractions in his private life were more responsible. He and Martha had two children prior to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, though only one, Patsy, lived beyond infancy. Jefferson was a doting father and loving husband, a man who found marriage to be as blissful as he had imagined it would be. He abandoned his legal career, hoping to spend more time at home with his family. Jefferson was so content that, had the Anglo-American crisis somehow been peacefully resolved, he might have been content to play only an insubstantial role as a legislator. Living at Monticello, raising his family, reading books, playing music, and from time to time writing an essay for publication might have been sufficient for his happiness.

But Jefferson entered public life during a troubled time, taking his seat in the Burgesses during the Townshend Duties crisis. In 1772, his fifth year as a legislator, he joined with Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee in a campaign to link the colonies with committees of correspondence. It was the first sign that he aspired to play a greater role as a legislator. By the next year he chaired one of the six major committees in the assembly, an essential step on the road to becoming a leading assemblyman.
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By then his views on Anglo-American relations had taken shape. Jefferson’s surviving papers from the early 1770s, though spare to be sure, suggest that above all he was concerned that the autonomy of the colonists was being “circumscribed within narrow limits” and that London was bent on compelling Americans “to direct all labors in subservience to her [Great Britain’s] interests.”
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He was doubtless thinking of the dangers threatened by parliamentary taxation, but as a large land holder, tobacco grower and exporter, and slave owner—his “family,” as he was wont to say, included some 175 slaves by 1774—Jefferson’s economic interests sometimes suffered in the face of imperial policies.

Like Washington, Jefferson was distressed by London’s failure to open the lands west of the mountains that had been wrested from France in the Treaty of Paris. In addition, as was true of all tobacco planters, he was compelled by Parliament’s trade laws to export his crop solely to British markets. Tobacco prices suffered after 1750 and many planters attributed their woes to the lack of free markets. Virginia’s planters were convinced that, had they been able to trade in Europe and elsewhere, the value of their tobacco crops, and their earnings, would have increased. Jefferson did not address that issue directly, but he spoke heatedly of forces beyond the control of Virginia’s planters. He also alluded to royal officials who “might sweep away the whole of my little fortune.”
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Faced with distressed markets, many planters additionally found themselves in possession of an oversupply of bondsmen. In 1772 the House of Burgesses voted unanimously to petition the Crown to disallow the Atlantic slave trade, a move aimed at producing shortages of slaves in Georgia and South Carolina, where rice—and slavery—flourished. If the imperial authorities consented, Virginia would be able to sell its excess slaves to the low-country South. But George III refused to play along. The Crown not only turned a deaf ear to Virginia’s petition; it also vetoed acts passed in 1767 and 1769 by the House of Burgesses that would have stopped slave imports into the Old Dominion. The king’s actions prompted one planter to exclaim that never before had Virginians felt such a “galling yoke of dependence.” Jefferson sensed that and something else as well. The king’s conduct, he thought, demonstrated with crystal clarity that the Crown preferred England’s slave merchants “to the lasting interests of the American states.”
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Jefferson’s sense of how the policies of a faraway British government damaged his personal interests was filtered through his understanding of Enlightenment liberalism, the law, and the history of English government. From reading John Locke and English Whigs who had produced a remarkable abundance of radical tracts two or three generations earlier, Jefferson came to think of England as a decaying and corrupt land drifting toward tyranny. Already persuaded that England had been defiled for centuries by a feudal monarchical system, Jefferson by 1774 was convinced that not only did the mother country threaten to contaminate America but also that London schemed to reduce “a free and happy People to a Wretched & miserable state of slavery.”
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On the eve of the First Continental Congress, Jefferson said that he hoped the colonies could “establish union” with Great Britain “on a generous plan,” a remark that suggests that he already believed the traditional terms of the Anglo-American union to be obsolete.
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Jefferson played an important role in Virginia’s radical activities in 1774. When Governor Dunmore prorogued the House of Burgesses in the spring, in retaliation for its resolutions denouncing the Coercive Acts, the legislators met defiantly in the Apollo Tavern—a few steps down dusty Duke of Gloucester Street from the capitol—and urged a national congress. It also agreed to meet again in August to select the delegates to the conclave, if the other colonies had by then consented to such a body. Jefferson might have been included in Virginia’s delegation to the First Congress, but while en route to the August assembly session, he fell ill with either a migraine or a cluster headache, which sent him to bed for several days. (Jefferson had suffered his first such agonizing headache eleven years earlier, when he learned of Rebecca Burwell’s engagement. Over the years the affliction recurred in moments of great tension and anxiety until his retirement from public life in 1809, after which he never again endured another debilitating headache.)
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Earlier in the torrid summer of 1774, Jefferson had written a lengthy set of instructions—in reality, a learned essay—for the guidance of Virginia’s delegates. In all likelihood, he hoped that his composition would lead to his inclusion in Virginia’s delegation to Congress. The Virginia Convention spurned his ideas as too radical, but friends published what he had written as a pamphlet titled
A Summary View of the Rights of British America
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Much that Jefferson wrote had been said by others. But he went further than most pamphleteers in elaborating how the colonists had founded, maintained, and expanded their provinces without British help. Jefferson also advanced the unique argument that the Americans had chosen to be part of Great Britain through their voluntary consent. Nor had they ever relinquished their rights as freeborn Englishmen. He wrote in a graceful, flowing manner, reminiscent of Dickinson’s in
Letters from a Farmer
, and with a refreshing brevity that few could equal. Although Jefferson missed the First Congress, his
Summary View
was widely read before war broke out, establishing his reputation as a literary craftsman. John Adams, for instance, called it “a very handsome public Paper” that gave Jefferson “the Character of a fine Writer.”
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Virginia sent the same delegation back to Philadelphia for the Second Congress in May 1775, but Peyton Randolph returned home after only two weeks, preferring to preside over the provincial assembly rather than to serve as the president of Congress. Chosen by his fellow legislators as Randolph’s replacement, Jefferson hurried northward in June 1775 to take his seat. In mid-June he arrived in Philadelphia in an expensive carriage drawn by two horses and attended by two slaves.
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Jefferson was no different as a congressman than he had been as a Virginia assemblyman. He rarely entered the floor debates—Adams later said that he never heard Jefferson “utter three Sentences together” in Congress—but he was less inhibited as a member of small committees, where his associates found him to be “frank, explicit, and decisive.”
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Nonetheless, his colleagues did not see much of him. Jefferson had been in Congress only six weeks when it recessed at the beginning of August 1775. After a month in Virginia, he returned to Philadelphia and served from early October until late December, when, like numerous other delegates, he asked for a leave to return home. He planned on remaining with Martha for about ninety days, more than twice the time spent at home that winter by most congressmen, but Jefferson’s absence was considerably longer than he had anticipated. Late in March he fell ill with another excruciating headache, brought on perhaps by his mother’s death on March 31 or by anxiety over his imminent departure. He did not leave Monticello for five more weeks, finally taking up his seat in Congress again in mid-May. On this occasion, he made the long trip from Albemarle County on horseback attended only by fourteen-year-old Robert Hemings, his personal servant, or body slave.
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Within three weeks of his return to Philadelphia, Jefferson sat down to compose the Declaration of Independence.
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Jefferson had moved to a new residence when he returned to Philadelphia. Previously, he had lived on the east side of downtown, but he was bothered by the city’s “excessive heats” in the summer, finding Philadelphia far hotter and stickier than his remote hilltop in Virginia. He was now lodged on the second floor of the three-story, red brick home owned by Jacob Graff, a successful mason. The apartment was not only cooler but also, with a bedroom and parlor, larger.
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