Thomas Jefferson a Virginia Lawyer

HE was admitted to the bar at a fortunate time for a profession that thrives most when the community has ceased to thrive.

During the flush period, when Virginia seemed to be so flourishing because she was living on her capital,— the virgin soil of the river valleys, — the people indulged to the full that antipathy to lawyers which appears natural to the rustic mind. Far back in Charles I.’s reign, in 1642, the Assembly had passed a law that “ all mercenary attorneys be wholly expelled” from the courts of Virginia; meaning by “ mercenary attorneys,” paid attorneys. The reason assigned for this act was, that “ many troublesome suits are multiplied by the unskilfulness and covetousness of attorneys, who have more intended their own profit and their inordinate lucre than the good and benefit of their clients.” The very tautologies of this law seem to betray the trembling eagerness of the honest burgess who drew it.

For nearly eleven years not a lawyer in Virginia could lawfully take a fee for serving a client in court. But, of course, the rogues evaded the act; and this the Assembly tried to prevent by enacting a supplement, to the effect that no attorney should “ take any recompense, directly or indirectly,” for any legal service ; but in case a judge should perceive that a man was likely to lose his cause merely by his inability to plead it, he was “ to appoint some fitt man out of the people” to plead it for him, who was to be paid such a fee as the court should deem just. The plan was plausible, but it did not answer. The act was repealed ; and such attorneys as were licensed were bound by a stringent oath not to oppress clients nor foment suits. But no sooner were the lawyers in the courts again, than they behaved in such a way as to become more odious than ever. Then the House of Burgesses — in 1657, his Highness, Oliver Cromwell, being Lord Protector — took up the subject anew, and debated this question : Shall we attempt “ a regulation or totall ejection of lawyers ” ? The House decided for " totall ejection,” and framed a law which they thought would be too much even for a lawyer’s cunning to evade : “ Noe person or persons within this collony, either lawyers or any other,” shall plead for pay in a court, nor give counsel in any cause or controversy, for any kind of compensation, under a penalty of five thousand pounds of tobacco for every offence ; “ and because the breakers thereof through their subtillity cannot easily be discerned,” every man pleading for another must take an oath that he is not “ a breaker of the act.”

But the governor and council had a veto on the acts of the Assembly. It reveals to us the intensity of the odium in which lawyers were held, that the governor and council did not directly veto so preposterous a law, but attempted to parry it by sending this message : “ The governor and council will consent to this proposition so farr as it shall be agreeable to Magna Charta.” The Assembly made “ humble reply,” that they had considered Magna Charta, but found nothing therein applicable to the case ; and as lawyers had been kept out of the courts for more than ten years by the act of a former House, “ wee humbly conceive that wee have no less power” to eject them again. The humble reply seems to have convinced the governor and council ; for the law appears in the statutes, and remained in force for twenty-three years !

But our complicated modern world cannot do without lawyers, not even simple, rustic old Virginia. And accordingly, in 1680, thirty-second of Charles II., we find a House of Burgesses— farmers to a man — enacting the lawyers back again, and giving good reasons therefor : “ Whereas all courts in this country are many tymes hindred and troubled in their judiciall proceedings by the impertinent discourses of many busy and ignorant men who will pretend to assist their friend in his busines and to cleare the matter more plainly to the court, although never desired or requested thereunto by the person whome they pretended to assist, and many tymes to the destruction of his cause, and the greate trouble and hindrance of the court; for prevention whereof to the future, Bee it enacted,” that no one shall in future presume to plead in any court of this Colony without license “ first obtained and had,” under penalties of six hundred or of two thousand pounds of tobacco, according to the dignity of the court in which the offence shall have been committed.

This act terminated a controversy which had lasted thirty-eight years; and the Assembly, having admitted lawyers, fixed their compensation at rates which were meant to be liberal. For conducting a cause in the chief court of the Colony an attorney was allowed to charge five hundred pounds of tobacco, and in the county courts, one hundred and fifty pounds, — splendid compensation if tobacco could only have been kept up to a shilling a pound.

When John Rolfe, not yet husband of Pocahontas, planted the first tobacco seed in Jamestown in 1612, good tobacco sold in London docks at five shillings a pound, or two hundred and fifty pounds sterling for a hogshead of a thousand pounds’ weight. Fatal facility of money-making ! It was this that diverted all labor, capital, and enterprise into one channel, and caused that first ship-load of negroes in the James River to be so welcome. The planter could have had but one object, — to get more slaves in order to raise more tobacco. Hence, the price was ever on the decline, drooping first from shillings to pence, and then going down the scale of pence, until it remained for some years at an average of about two pence a pound in Virginia, and three pence in London. In Virginia, it often fell below two pence ; as, during brief periods of scarcity, it would rise to six pence and seven pence. A fee of five hundred pounds of tobacco, from 1680 to 1750 might average about three guineas ; and a fee of one hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco, something less than one guinea. These sums, small as they seem to us, sufficed to create the profession of the law in Virginia, and to draw into it a few of the younger sons of great planters, and the eldest sons of western yeomen.

But these fees were the highest that could be charged. It is evident from Jefferson’s own books, that his usual compensation was somewhat less ; for he records, that during his first year at the bar, 1767, he was employed in sixtyeight cases before the General Court, — business that must have brought with it many cases in county courts ; but his entire emolument for the year was a little more than two hundred pounds sterling ; or, in the currency of Virginia, as set down by himself, with Jeffersonian exactness, £293 4ˢ 5¾d. From the accounts of later years, I should conclude that his cases, one with another, yielded him about one pound sterling profit ; for the number of his cases and the number of pounds of his law income are never far from equal, in the busier years of his practice. Translating the pounds of that period into the dollars of this, it was as though a lawyer of the present day should receive fifty dollars for arguing a cause before the Supreme Court of the United States, ten dollars for a cause before a local court, two dollars for a verbal opinion, and five for a written one. As late as 1792, when lawyers’ fees were again fixed by law in Virginia, the most eminent lawyer in the State could not legally charge, for the most elaborate written opinion on the most abstruse question relating to real estate, more than sixteen dollars and sixty-six cents ; and when lawyers attended at a distance from their homes, they could charge for their time not more than three dollars and fifty-eight cents per day. Well might Mr. Webster say, that in that age lawyers “ worked hard, lived well, and died poor.”

Nevertheless, it was a good time for a lawyer when Jefferson began to practise ; for he could make up for the smallness of his fees by the number of his cases. Everybody almost was in law. After a hundred years of profusion, pay-day, postponed by mortgage and other devices, was at hand, and the shadow of coming ruin darkened many a stately house.

Old Virginia is a pathetic chapter in Political Economy. Old Virginia, indeed ! She reached decrepitude while contemporary communities were enjoying the first vigor of youth ; while New York was executing the task which Virginia’s George Washington had suggested and foretold, that of connecting the waters of the great West with, the ocean ; while New England was careering gayly over the sea, following the whale to his most distant retreat, and feeding belligerent nations with her superabundance. One little century of seeming prosperity, — three generations of spendthrifts, — then the lawyer and the sheriff! Nothing was invested, nothing was saved for the future. There were no manufactures, no commerce, no towns, no internal trade, no great middle class. As fast as that virgin richness of soil could be converted into tobacco, and sold in London docks, the proceeds were expended in vast, ugly mansions, heavy furniture, costly apparel, Madeira wine, fine horses, huge coaches, and more slaves. The planters lived as though virgin soil were revenue, not capital. They tried to maintain in Virginia the lordly style of English grandees, without any Birmingham, Staffordshire, Sheffield, or London docks to pay for it. Their short-lived prosperity consisted of three elements, —virgin soil, low-priced slaves, high-priced tobacco. The virgin soil was rapidly exhausted ; the price of negroes was always on the increase ; and the price of tobacco was always tending downward. Their sole chance of founding a stable commonwealth was to invest the proceeds of their tobacco in something that would absorb their labor, and yield them profit, when the soil would no longer produce tobacco.

But their laborers were ignorant slaves, the possession of whom destroyed their energy, swelled their pride, and dulled their understandings. Virginia’s case was hopeless from the day on which that Dutch ship landed the first twenty slaves ; and when the time of reckoning came, the people had nothing to show for their long occupation of one of the finest estates in the world, except great hordes of negroes, breeding with the rapidity of rabbits ; upon whose annual increase Virginia subsisted until the most glorious and beneficial of all wars set the white race free, and gave Virginia her second opportunity.

All this was nobody’s fault. It was a combination of circumstances against which the unenlightened human nature of that period could not possibly have made head. No man saw anything wrong in slavery. No man knew much about the laws that control the prosperity of states. No man understood the science of agriculture. Every one with whom those proud and thoughtless planters dealt plundered them, and the mother country discouraged every attempt of the colonists to manufacture their own supplies. There were so many charges upon tobacco in its course from the planter’s packinghouse to the consumer’s pipe, that it was no very uncommon thing, in dull years, for the planter to receive from his agent in London, in return for his hogsheads of tobacco, not a pleasant sum of money, nor even a box of clothes, but a bill of charges which the price of the tobacco had not covered. One of the hardships of which the clergy complained was, that they did not “ dare ” to send their tobacco to London, for fear of being brought in debt by it ; but had to sell it on the spot to speculators much below the London price. The old Virginia laws and records so abound in tobacco information, that we can follow a hogshead of tobacco from its native plantation on the James, to the shop of the tobacconist in London.

In the absence of farm vehicles, — many planters who kept a coach had no wagons, — each hogshead was attached to a pair of shafts with a horse between them, and “rolled” to a shed on the bank of the stream. When a ship arrived in the river from London, it anchored opposite each plantation which it served, and set ashore the portion of the cargo belonging to it ; continuing its upward course until the hold was empty. Then, descending the river, it stopped at the different plantations, taking in from each its hogsheads of tobacco ; and the captain receiving long lists of articles to be bought in London with the proceeds of the tobacco. The rivers of Virginia, particularly the Potomac and the James, are wide and shallow, with a deep channel far from either shore ; so that the transfer of the tobacco front the shore to the ship, in the general absence of landings, was troublesome and costly. To this day, as readers remember, the piers on the James present to the wondering passenger from the North a stretch of pine planks, from an eighth to half a mile long. The ship is full, at length ; drops down past Newport News, salutes the fort upon Old Point Comfort, and glides out between the capes into the ocean.

Suppose her now safe in London docks, say about the year 1735, the middle of the prosperous period, when the great houses were building in Virginia, with stabling for “a hundred horses,” and pretext of work for “a hundred servants.” By the time she is fast at her berth the vultures have alighted upon her deck. Two “landwaiters ” represent the authorities of the custom-house, and are sworn to see that the king gets his own. A personage called the “ ship’s husband ” is not long behind them. He, representing the merchant to whom the tobacco is consigned, would naturally be the antagonist of the land-waiters, but he is only too glad to establish an understanding with them ; and behind each of these two powers there is a train of hangers-on,hungry for a morsel of the prey. There is already a charge of two pounds for freight upon each hogshead. As soon as the ship is reported at the custom-house, the king demands his “old subsidy” of three farthings upon every pound of tobacco on board, — more than three pounds sterling on a hogshead of a thousand pounds weight. The “duty” of five and one third pence per pound has next to be calculated, and a bond given for its payment when the tobacco is sold for home consumption. The purchaser, it is true, pays these duties, but the planter is responsible and bound for the payment.

Then there is a continuous fire of petty charges at each unfortunate hogshead, some of which it is difficult now to explain. I copy the following items from an agent’s bill of 1733 : “primage, 6 ͩ.” ; “ wharfage and lighterage, 6 ͩ.” ; “Mr Perry, 3 ͩ.”; “husbanding the ship, 4 ͩ.”; “ watching and drink, 3 ͩ.”; “entry inwards and bonds, 6 ͩ.”; “ land - waiters’ fees, 3 ͩ.” ; “dinners, breakfasts to the husband and officers while landing the ship, with other incident expenses, 9 ͩ.” ; “entry outwards and searchers, 8 ͩ.” ; “ cocket ¹ money, etc., 3 ͩ.”; “debentures one with another, 13 ͩ.” ; “ cooperage on board, 2 ͩ.” “ditto, landing, I ˢ.” ; “ditto, outwards, 9 ͩ.” ; “refusing and hoops, I ͩ.” ; “ porterage, rehousing, and extraordinary rummaging, 6 ͩ.” ; “weighing and shipping, 6 ͩ.” ; “ wharfage and lighterage outwards, 6 ͩ.”; “cartage, I ˢ.” “ warehouse rent for three months, 1 s. 6 d.” ; “ brokerage, 2 s.” ; “ postage, as charged by the postoffice ” ; “agent’s commission, 2½ per cent.” In other bills I observe such words as “ suttle,” ² and the old familiar “ tare ” and “ tret.”

Besides these vexatious charges, each of which could be a pretext for fraud, the London agent had other modes of despoiling the planter who was quaffing his Madeira or chasing the fox three thousand miles away. Two pounds of tobacco were allowed to be taken from each hogshead for a sample ; but a cooper who knew what was due to a British merchant and to himself could draw eight pounds as well as two ; and a weigher who had been previously “ seen ” could mark down the weight of a hogshead two hundred pounds or ten pounds, according to the size of the hogshead ; leaving the planter to decide whether his scales or those of the London CustomHouse were untrustworthy. In a word, all those fraudulent devices complained of by honest merchants in the bad days of the New York Custom-House were familiar in the custom-house of London in 1733 ; and the frauds were concealed by precisely the same means. Upon the arrival of a ship, the merchant to whom the tobacco was consigned would apply for the services of certain land-waiters, “ whose friendship he could rely upon,” to superintend the landing of his tobacco. Perhaps they were engaged at the time. Then he delayed landing his tobacco till they were at leisure. The rest can be imagined. The weighers, the coopers, and the “ ship’s husband ” understand one another, and “ if,” as an old Remonstrance has it, “any two of them agree in their account, the third alters his book to make it agree with theirs.” ³ We read, besides, of British merchants sweeping the refuse of their warehouses into casks, putting a little good tobacco at the top and bottom ; and, after getting a drawback of duty from their own government, sending this mass of dust and stalks to defraud a foreign country. In 1750, when tobacco yielded the British government one hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling per annum, it gave the planter an average profit of one pound sterling per hogshead.

The same factors who sold the Virginia tobacco were usually charged to purchase the merchandise which the planters required. Doubtless, many of them performed both duties with sufficient correctness ; but, down to the Revolution, it was a standing complaint with the planters, that their tobacco brought them less and their merchandise cost them more than they had expected. Readers remember the emphatic expostulations of General Washington on both these points. The very ships that carried the tobacco and brought back the merchandise were nearly all owned in London. When a Yankee merchant had a prosperous year or made a lucky voyage, he built another schooner ; so that when Jefferson made his first bow to a jury in 1767, New England owned seven eighths of the shipping that frequented New England ports. But of all the great fleet trading with Virginia,—about three hundred vessels in 1767,—seven eighths belonged to British merchants. The Yankee’s new schooner proved a better investment than the Virginian’s “ likely negro wenches,” whom the Yankee’s schooner brought for him from the coast of Guinea ; and the Virginian’s pipes of Madeira consumed his acres, while the Yankee with his New England rum added acres to his estate.

How little the planters foresaw the desolation of their Province is affectingly attested by many of the relics of their brief affluence. They built their parish churches to last centuries, like the churches to which they were accustomed “at home.” In neighborhoods where now a congregation of fifty persons could not be collected there are the ruins of churches that were evidently built for the accommodation of numerous and wealthy communities; a forest, in some instances, has grown up all around them, making it difficult to get near the imperishable walls. Sometimes the wooden roof has fallen in, and one huge tree, rooted among the monumental slabs of the middle aisle, has filled all the interior. Other old churches long stood solitary in old fields, the roof sound, but the door standing open, in which the beasts found nightly shelter ; and into which the passing horseman rode and sat on his horse before the altar till the storm passed. Others have been used by farmers as wagon-houses, by fishermen to hang their seines in, by gatherers of turpentine as storehouses. One was a distillery, and another was a barn. A poor drunken wretch reeled for shelter into an abandoned church of Chesterfield County, — the county of the first Jeffersons, — and he died in a drunken sleep at the foot of the reading-desk, where he lay undiscovered until his face was devoured by rats. An ancient font was found doing duty as a tavern punch-bowl; and a tombstone, which served as the floor of an oven, used to print memorial words upon loaves of bread. Fragments of richly colored altar-pieces, fine pulpitcloths, and pieces of old carving used to be preserved in farm-houses, and shown to visitors. When the late Bishop Meade began his rounds, forty years ago, elderly people would bring to him sets of communion plate and single vessels, which had once belonged to the parish church, long deserted, and beg him to take charge of them.

Those pretty girls of the Apollo who turned young Jefferson’s head in 1762, and most of the other bright spirits of that generation, — where does their dust repose ? In cemeteries so densely covered with trees and tangled shrubbery, that no traces of their tombstones can be discovered ; in cemeteries, over which the plough and the harrow pass ; in cemeteries, through the walls of which some stream has broken, and where the bones and skulls of the dead may be seen afloat upon the slime.

The suddenness of the collapse was most remarkable. Westmoreland County, the birthplace of Washington, Madison, Monroe, and Marshall, called absurdly enough “ the Athens of Virginia,” was still the most polite and wealthy region of Virginia when Thomas Jefferson was a young lawyer. In thirty years it became waste and desolate. A picket-guard, in 1813, posted on the Potomac to watch for the expected British fleet, were seeking one day a place to encamp, when they came upon an old church the condition of which revealed at once the completeness and the recentness of the ruin. It stood in a lonely dell, where the silence was broken only by the breeze whispering through the pines and cedars and dense shrubbery that closed the entrance. Huge oaks standing near the walls enveloped the root with their long, interlacing branches. The doors all stood wide open ; the windows were broken ; the roof was rotten and had partly fallen in ; and a giant pine, uprooted by a tempest, was lying against the front, choking up the principal door. The churchyard, which was extensive, and enclosed by a high brick wall of costly structure, was densely covered all over with tombstones and monuments, many of which, though they bore names once held in honor throughout Virginia, were broken to pieces or prostrate, with brambles and weeds growing thick and tangled between them everywhere. The parish had been important enough to have a separate building for a vestry just outside the churchyard wall. This had rotted away from its chimney, which stood erect in a mass of ruin.

With some difficulty the soldiers forced their way through the fine old porch between massive doors into the church. What a picture of desolation was disclosed ! The roof, rotted away at the corners, had let in for years the snow and rain, staining and spoiling the interior. The galleries, where, in the olden time, the grandees of the parish sat, in their square, high pews, were sloping and leaning down upon the pews on the floor, and, on one side, had quite fallen out. The remains of the great Bible still lay open on the desk, and the tattered canvas that hung from the walls showed traces of the Creed and Commandments which had once been written upon it. The marble font was gone ; it was a punchbowl, the commander of the picket was told. The communion-table, which had been a superb piece of work, of antique pattern, with a heavy walnut top, was in its place, but roughened and stained by exposure. It was afterwards used as a chopping - block. The brick aisles showed that the church was the resort of animals, and the wooden ceiling was alive with squirrels and snakes. The few inhabitants of the vicinity — white trash — held the old church and its wilderness of graves in dread, and scarcely dared enter the tangled dell in which they were. It was only the runaway slave, overcome by a greater terror, flying from a being more awful than any ghost, — savage man, — that ventured to go into the church itself, and crouch among the broken pews.

Such is the ruin that befalls a community which subsists upon its capital. We have seen the end of it. Mr. Jefferson, admitted to the bar in 1767, saw the beginning of it, and doubled his estate by it in seven years’ practice. He was present as a spectator in the House of Burgesses in 1765, when an attempt was made to bolster the falling fortunes of leading members by loans of public money. Patrick Henry exploded the scheme by an epigram. The Speaker of the House, who was also the treasurer of the Province, had been in the habit for years of lending sums of the public money to distressed members and others, becoming himself responsible to the government for the repayment. But those planters were doomed never to be again in a paying condition. Many of them borrowed, few repaid, until his deficit was a hundred and thirty thousand pounds. A Ring was formed in the Assembly for the double purpose of relieving the Speaker’s estate from this menacing obligation, and of enabling him to accommodate others of the Ring with further loans of public money. A public loan office was proposed, a sort of Bank of Virginia, authorized to lend the public money on good security. It was the intention of this Ring to make the scheme work backward, and include the loans already effected. Mr. Speaker Robinson, in fact, intended to slip his shoulders out from under his burden and leave it saddled upon Virginia. The bill being introduced, the borrowing gentlemen supported it by the usual argument. Many men in the Colony of large property had been obliged to contract debts, the immediate exaction of which would cause their ruin ; but, with a little time and a little seasonable assistance, they could pay everything they owed with ease. Patrick Henry was not the most solvent of men, but he saw the fallacy of this argument as applied to the lavish aristocrats of Eastern Virginia.

“ What, sir,”he cried, condensing his speech into a sentence, “is it proposed, then, to reclaim the spendthrift from his dissipation and extravagance by filling his pockets with money ? ”

There was an end of the scheme of a loan office. That rending sentence penetrated the understandings of Western yeomen, the solvent class of Virginia, and they were too numerous for the insolvent aristocrats to carry a measure against them. The Speaker died next year ; the deficit could no longer be concealed ; the real object of the scheme became apparent; and the Speaker’s estate had to make good the loss.

All this sank deeply into the mind of the young man who stood listening to the debate at the door of the chamber. That epigram of his guest stuck in his memory, and remained fixed there while memory held her seat. In scenes widely different from these, at a time many years distant, this debate and the impressive commentary upon it disclosed by the Speaker’s death may have influenced him too much, may have made him too distrustful of institutions which enable men of business to apply the superabundance of next month to the insufficiency of this.

For the present, behold him a busy, thriving young lawyer, in the midst of the general embarrassment of the great planters. Sixty-eight cases before the chief court of the Province the first year of his practice ; the second year, one hundred and fifteen ; the third, one hundred and ninety - eight ; the fourth, one hundred and twenty-one ; the fifth, one hundred and thirty-seven ; the sixth, one hundred and fifty-four; the seventh, one hundred and twentyseven ; the eighth, — which was 1774, — only twenty-nine, for by that time Virginia had other work for him. This account, which Mr. Randall copied from Jefferson’s own books, shows a falling off from the year 1769. But it was a falling off only from his practice in that one court. As the new party lines were formed and party feeling waxed hot, he lost some practice in the General Court, but more than made up for the loss by an increase of office business and county-court cases. In 1771 he was engaged in a hundred and thirty-seven causes before the General Court; but the whole number of his cases that year was four hundred and thirty ; since the politics that may have repelled the tobacco lords of Lower Virginia attracted clients in the mountain counties. To the income of four hundred pounds a rear, derived from his farm, a professional revenue was now added that averaged more than five hundred pounds a year ; which made him, with his excellent habits, a prosperous young gentleman indeed, able to add a few hundred acres to his estate, from time to time, until his home farm of nineteen hundred acres had become in 1774 a number of farms and tracts, five thousand acres in all. and “ all paid for.” There was nothing in which a thriving Virginian of that day could invest his surplus income except land and slaves. Every one had the mania for possessing vast tracts of land, hoping one day to have negroes enough to clear and work them. Jefferson, however, appears never to have bought slaves as an investment. The thirty slaves inherited from his father in 1757 had become but fifty-four in 1774 ; and his further increase in this kind of property came to him by other ways than purchase.

It is not clear to us what he could have done with his stores of legal knowledge, practising before such courts as they had then in Virginia. The General Court, of which we read so much, what was it ? It was not a bench of learned judges, raised from the bar by their superior ability and judicial cast of mind. It was composed of the governor and a quorum (five) of the council ; the council being a dozen or so of the great planters, appointed by the king, and selected, as we are told, for their “ wealth, station, and loyalty.” This council was a little House of Lords to the Province ; and, like the British House of Lords, it was the Supreme Court as well, without a learned chancellor on the woolsack. Governor Fauquier, one would think, was better fitted to decide a card-table dispute, a point of drawing-room etiquette, or the scanning of a line in Horace, than knotty questions of law ; but he was the legal head of this court as long as he filled the place of governor. Nor is it to be supposed that the wealthy planters of the council had either inclination or ability to make up judgments from the reasoning of the Wythes and the Jeffersons that conducted causes in their hearing. But the English have had ways of neutralizing the errors of their system. They know how, among a crowd of pleasureloving, unlearned peers, to get a few “law lords” ; and how, into a committee or a commission of five or seven illustrious incapables, to insert one real person, who is appointed for the purpose of doing the work ! So, in Virginia, there appears to have usually been in the body of councillors one learned and able man, who performed the duty of listening, weighing, and deciding.

Jefferson had most of the requisites of a great lawyer: industry, so quiet, methodical, and sustained, that it amounted to a gift; learning, multifarious and exact ; skill and rapidity in handling books ; the instinct of research, that leads him who has it to the fact he wants, as surely as the hound scents the game ; a serenity of temper which neither the inaptitude of witnesses nor the badgering of counsel could ever disturb ; a habit of getting everything upon paper, in such a way that all his stores of knowledge could be marshalled and brought into action ; a ready sympathy with a client’s mind ; an intuitive sense of what is due to the opinions, prejudices, and errors of others; a knowledge of the few avenues by which alone unwelcome truth can find access to a human mind ; and the power to state a case with the dearness and brevity that often make argument superfluous. And surely it ought to be reckoned among the qualifications of a lawyer — a trained servant of justice — that he is himself just and a lover of whatever is right, fair, and equal between a man and his brother. A grandson of Mr. Jefferson once asked an old man who, in his youth, had often heard him plead causes, how he ranked as a speaker. “Well,” said the old man, “it is hard to tell, because he always took the right side.”⁴

He was no orator. He knew too much, and was too much, to be eloquent. He once defined a lawyer as a person whose trade it is to contest everything, concede nothing, and talk by the hour. He could not talk by the hour. Besides the mental impediment, there was a physical impediment to his addressing a large company. If he spoke in a tone much above that of conversation, his voice soon became husky and inarticulate. But Madison, to whom we owe the preservation of this fact, used also to say, that when he was a student, he heard his friend Jefferson plead a cause before a court, and be acquitted himself well, speaking with fluency as well as force. He could not have been wanting in such speech as was oftenest required before a jury, because we find his practice always increasing in the county courts. If he had lived in these times, Patrick Henry and himself would have formed a law partnership, perhaps ; Jefferson getting up the cases, and Henry pleading such as gave scope and opportunity to his magnificent talent. It takes two men to make a man. What a power would have been wielded by a firm, one member of which was possessed of an unequalled gift of uttering the truth which the other was singularly gifted to investigate ! The two talents have never been possessed in an eminent degree by one individual.

This young lawyer loved his work, and took an interest in it, apart from the exigencies of the moment. He was one of the first of his countrymen to form historical collections, — a taste since developed into mania. As Virginia was late in becoming familiar with the printing-press, the early laws had been supplied to the counties in manuscript at public expense, and without any adequate provision for their preservation. He found extreme difficulty in procuring copies of some of them; some appeared to have perished; others existed in one copy so rotten with age that a leaf would fall into powder on being touched. “ I set myself, therefore, to work,” he says, “to collect all which were then existing, in order that when the day should come in which the public should advert to the magnitude of their loss in these precious monuments of our property and our history, a part of their regret might be spared by information that a portion had been saved from the wreck, which is worthy of their attention and preservation. In searching after these remains, I spared neither time, trouble, nor expense.” The more ancient manuscripts he preserved in oiled silk, some of them being so far gone, that having been laid open for copying, they could never be gathered up again, but perished of the operation. Others he had bound into volumes. If the reader will turn over the volumes of Hening’s Statutes at Large, a publication suggested by Jefferson, and the most important work relating to the early history of Virginia which now exists, he will discover that a very large number of the most curious documents and earliest laws are credited by the editor to Mr. Jefferson’s collection.

It belonged to his position in Albemarle to represent that county in the House of Burgesses ; but in imitation of the British Parliament, the little parliament of Virginia usually lasted seven years, and consequently there had been no general election since he came of age. In 1767 Governor Fauquier died, aged sixty-five, and there was an interregnum of a year, during which the duties of governor devolved upon the President of the Council, John Blair. But there was no pause in the course of political events. The king held to his purpose of raising a revenue in the Colonies ; and an obliging Ministry having, as they supposed, learned wisdom from the failure of their predecessors to enforce the Stamp Act, endeavored next “ to raise a revenue from the Colonies without giving them any offence.” These words of Charles Townsend give us the key to the policy of the Ministry. The Colonies were to be flattered and conciliated. They had objected to an internal tax ; very well, they should be accommodated with external duties, collected at the custom-houses, — trifling duties on glass, tea, paper, and painters’ materials. Anything to oblige Colonies so loyal, so willing to assist a gracious young king. In the spring of 1768 an express came riding into Williamsburg, bearing a despatch from Massachusetts to the House of Burgesses, announcing the firm resolve of Massachusetts to resist these duties by all constitutional means, and asking the concurrence and co-operation of Virginia. The messenger, having delivered his despatch, rode southward to deliver copies of the same to the Carolinas and Georgia.

The Virginians, in the absence of a royal governor, could give full play to their opposition ; for John Blair was in accord with the popular feeling. Another remonstrance was addressed to Great Britain, asserting strongly, but with dignity and moderation, the old principle: “No power on earth has a right to impose taxes on the people, or take the smallest portion of their property, without their consent given by their representatives.” It is remarkable with what clearness this truth was perceived by every creature in America who had capacity to perceive any truth. Nearly everybody seems, at first, to have understood that this principle was, as our loyal Virginians said on this occasion, “ the chief pillar of the Constitution,” without which “ no man could be said to have the least shadow of liberty”; since no man could be truly said to possess anything, if other men could lawfully take any portion of it.

A royal governor of amplest dignity was coming over the sea. In accordance with the new imbecility of flattering the Colonies, it was determined that in future the governor-in-chief should reside in Virginia, instead of governing his Province by a lieutenant. Virginia was thrilled by the announcement that a personage of no less note than the Right Honorable Norborne Baron de Botecourt was coming in person to govern them. In October, 1768, he arrived with a prodigious train of servants and baggage, and a gorgeous state-coach, the gift of the king, and milk-white steeds to draw it, which some historians say were eight in number, others six. Virginia, no less loyal to the king than to Magna Charta, rose to the occasion, and gave the Right Honorable Norborne Baron de Botecourt a reception worthy of his name. One relic of this ceremonial is an “ Ode ” published in the “ Virginia Gazette,” which swells with the importance of the occasion. If this “Ode” was actually sung in the presence of Lord Botecourt, he must have been hard put to it to preserve the gravity of his countenance.

It is difficult to conceive of such an outburst as this coming from the community that sent forth a series of such manly and able papers on the rights of men and citizens. But they were all still under the illusion of royalty. Jefferson himself, perhaps, in 1768, could have accompanied this performance on his violin without violent grimaces.

To business. As when a new king comes to the throne Parliament is dissolved, so, on the arrival of a new governor, the House of Burgesses was dismissed, and a general election ordered. Thomas Jefferson announced himself a candidate for the county of Albemarle ; and during the winter of 1768-69 he canvassed his county for votes, — visiting each voter, asking him for his vote and influence, getting his promise, if possible ; keeping open house and full punch-bowl as long as the canvass lasted. Every voter was rightly compelled to vote at every election, under penalty of a hundred pounds of tobacco. During the three election days the candidates supplied unlimited punch and lunch, attended personally at the polls, and made a low bow as often as they heard themselves voted for. No candidate was so strong that he could omit the treating or the canvassing. James Madison was the first who tried it in Virginia, in 1777, and he lost his election by it. The withdrawal of the punch-bowl was ascribed to parsimony, and the omission of the canvassing to pride.

Jefferson’s election was a matter of course. Nevertheless, he accepted the honorable trust with seriousness, and formed a resolution, the wisdom of which every year of the existence of free government has only the more clearly shown. We owe the record of this resolution to his own pen. At a later stage of his public life, a friend having invited him to share in some enterprise that promised profit, he made this reply : —

“ When I first entered on the stage of public life (now twenty-four years ago), I came to a resolution never to engage, while in public office, in any kind of enterprise for the improvement of my fortune, nor to wear any other character than that of a farmer. I have never departed from it in a single instance ; and I have in multiplied instances found myself happy in being able to decide and to act as a public servant, clear of all interest, in the multiform questions that have arisen, wherein I have seen others embarrassed and biassed by having got themselves in a more interested situation. Thus I have thought myself richer in contentment than I should have been with any increase of fortune. Certainly, I should have been much wealthier had I remained in that private condition which renders it lawful and even laudable to use proper efforts to better it.”

It was in this spirit that he began his public life of forty years. At the same time, he was very desirous of distinguishing himself. He desired most ardently the approval of his countrymen. He avowed to Madison, long after that, in the earlier years of his public service, “ the esteem of the world was, perhaps, of higher value in his eyes than everything in it.”

The Assembly convened on the IIth of May, 1769, nearly a hundred members in attendance, Colonel George Washington among them. It must have been a great day for the children and negroes of Williamsburg, for Lord Botecourt was to ride, for the first time, in his splendid state-coach, a king’s gift, from the palace to the Capitol, to open the provincial parliament in person. Posterity will, perhaps, never know with certainty whether his Lordship was drawn on this occasion by six milk-white steeds, or by eight, because historians differ on the point, and Mr. Burk says eight on one page of his history, and six on another. The yeomen of the western counties, and indeed the members generally, though much conciliated by the frank and friendly manner of the governor, eyed this grand coach with disfavor, regarding it as a college youth might the present of a large hummingtop sent by a relative on the other side of the globe. He is past hummingtops. “ Poor old uncle,” says the lad, as he feels his nascent mustache, “ he still thinks of me as the boy I was.” We can well believe, however, that as the milk-white steeds, covered with the showy trappings of the time, slowly drew the gaudy coach between lines of faces, black and white, the spectacle was greeted with acclamations. Upon reaching the Capitol, at the other end of the avenue, the governor alighted, and ascended, with stately steps and slow, to the Council Chamber, the Council being the Senate or Hlouse of Lords of Virginia.

How amusingly formal the opening of the little parliament! Young Jefferson might well be surprised at the free-and-easy ways of the Maryland Legislature ; for at Williamsburg all the etiquette of legislation was observed with rigor. Imagine the members, new and old, strolling into the chamber toward ten in the morning, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, perhaps, going up together from their lodging-house. When the bell rings, Jefferson need not now withdraw to the lobby door. Two members of the Council are in attendance, at the governor’s command, to administer the oath to the Burgesses, standing and uncovered : —

“You and every one of you shall swear upon the Holy Evangelists, and in the sight of God, to deliver your opinion faithfully, justly, and honestly, according to your best understanding and conscience, for the general good and prosperity of this country, and every particular member thereof. And to do your utmost endeavor to prosecute that without mingling with it any particular interest of any person or persons whatever. So help you God, and the contents of this book.”

The members having taken their seats and resumed their hats, the Clerk of the General Assembly appears, and pronounces these words : “ Gentlemen, the governor commands this House to attend his Excellency immediately, in the Council Chamber.” The Burgesses obey this command, and being gathered about his Excellency, seated on his viceregal throne, are thus addressed by him : “ Gentlemen of the House of Burgesses, you must return to your House, and immediately proceed to the choice of a Speaker.” This command also the House obeys ; and when they are once more in their seats and silent, the Clerk being at his desk, a member rises and says, “ Mr. Clerk.” The Clerk then stands up, points to the member without speaking, and sits down again. The member speaks : “ I move that Peyton Randolph, Esquire, take the chair of this House as Speaker, which office he has before filled with such distinguished abilities, steadiness, and impartiality, as have given entire satisfaction to the public.” Mr. Randolph is unanimously elected. Two members attend him, one on each side, from his seat to the uppermost step of the platform, which having ascended, and being left there alone, he turns and addresses the House, thanking them for their unanimous vote, and asking their indulgence for the future. As soon as he has taken his seat in the Speaker’s chair, the mace, which until that moment has lain under the table, is placed upon it.

Is the House now ready to transact business ? By no means. It is next ordered that two members bear a message to the governor, informing him that, in obedience to his commands, they have elected a Speaker, and desire to know his Excellency’s pleasure when they shall wait upon him to present their Speaker to him. To this message the governor replies that he will send an answer by a messenger of his own. Accordingly, the Clerk of the General Assembly soon reappears in the House and delivers the governor’s answer : “ The governor commands this House to attend his Excellency immediately in the Council Chamber.” Once more, the Burgesses march to the apartment, but this time with a Speaker at their head ; and when the Speaker has been presented to the governor, his Excellency is pleased to say that he approves their choice. Then the Speaker, on behalf of the House, lays claim to all its ancient rights and privileges, — freedom of speech, untrammelled debate, exemption from arrest, and protection of their estates from attachment. Finally, he asks the governor not to impute to the House any errors their Speaker may commit. The governor answers that he shall take care to defend them in all their rights and privileges. Then the governor reads his speech, conceived on the plan of a king’s speech, addressing first the Council and the Burgesses, then the Burgesses alone, and finally both houses once more.

The speech being finished, the Speaker asks a copy for the guidance of the House of Burgesses; which is furnished him, and the Burgesses return to their own chamber. The Speaker ascends to his chair, whence he makes a formal report of what they had just witnessed. He informs them that the governor had made a speech to the Council and Burgesses, of which, “ to prevent mistakes,” he had obtained a copy ; which he proceeds to read to the House. Not till this formality is over is the House ready to perform an act of its own.

To such a point of decorum had the House been brought since the time, 1664, when it was necessary to impose a fine of twenty pounds of tobacco upon “ every member that shall pipe it” after the roll had begun to be called, unless, in an interval of business, he obtained “ public license from the major part of the House.” The same code was stringent with regard to all breaches of decorum. Any member adjudged by the majority to be “disguised with drink” was fined, for the first offence, one hundred pounds of tobacco; for the second, three hundred pounds ; and for the third, a thousand. To interrupt a member cost the offender a thousand pounds of tobacco ; and to speak of a member with disrespect, five hundred. As the pay of members was a hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco per day, with a further allowance for travelling expenses and servants, these fines were severe ; and doubtless they had their share in making this Virginian parliament the dignified and decorous body we know it to have been. Its influence lives to-day in every legislative hall in the country, transmitted by Jefferson’s Manual.

One of its kindly and courteous customs brought to the new member from Albemarle a cutting mortification on the first day of the session. It was usual to assign some formal duty to young members by way of introducing them to public business and giving them an opportunity to air their talents. As soon as the Speaker had finished reading the governor’s speech, it was in order to appoint a committee to make the draught of a reply ; and, to assist this committee, the House was accustomed to pass resolutions, the substance of which was to be incorporated in the draught. Jefferson, in compliance with the request of Mr. Pendleton, a leading member, wrote these resolutions ; which the House accepted ; and he was named one of the committee to prepare the address. His elders, Mr. Pendleton and Mr. Nicholas, assigned him this duty also. He wrote the draught, on the too obvious plan of sticking close to the resolutions, employing much of their very language. Upon reading his draught to the committee, — pluming himself, as he confesses, upon the neatness and finish of his performance, — the elder members were totally dissatisfied with it. It would not do at all. The resolutions, they said, should be regarded only as hints, to be amplified into a flowing and original discourse. Jefferson’s draught was set aside, and Mr. Nicholas, his chief critic, the head of the bar of Virginia, was appointed to produce a more suitable composition. The old hand could not be at a loss in expanding and rewording the compact resolutions of the tyro ; and his draught was accepted both by the committee and the House. “ Being a young man,” wrote Jefferson, long after, “as well as a young member, it made on me an impression proportioned to the sensibility of that time of life.”Thus the man who was destined to gain by his pen the parliamentary distinction usually won only by the tongue, began his career, as so many illustrious orators have done, by a failure.

These lofty civilities between the governor and the Legislature consumed, as it seems, two days. What next? Lord Botecourt in his speech had made no particular suggestions ; and in the minds of members there was but one thought, — to resist the lawless taxation of the Colonies by Parliament, and the reckless outrage of sending persons accused of treason to be tried on the other side of the ocean. The spirited behavior of Massachusetts in inviting the concurrence of the other Colonies in constitutional opposition to these measures had been severely commented upon in England ; and this was a new cause of irritation. The milk-white steeds, too, and the gaudy coach, had increased suspicion in some minds. Indeed, at just this stage of the controversy there was a near approach to unanimity of feeling along the whole line of the Thirteen Colonies, and in none of them a nearer than in loyal Virginia. And they were all equally mistaken in attributing the false policy of the mother country to Parliament and ministers, instead of the king and his Scotch tutors.

On the third day were introduced the Four Resolutions, which a precipitate governor was to stamp with the seal of his reprobation, and so send them ringing round the world: 1. No taxation without representation ; 2. The Colonies may concur and co-operate in seeking redress of grievances; 3. Sending accused persons away from their country for trial is an inexpressible complexity of wrong; 4. We will send an address on these topics to the “ father of all his people,” beseeching his “royal interposition.” The resolutions being passed almost unanimously, the Speaker was ordered to send a copy of the same to every legislative Assembly “on this continent.” After such a day’s work, the House adjourned. That, for your milk-white steeds ! The next day the address to the king was reported, revised, agreed to, and ordered to be forwarded to the king’s most excellent Majesty, through the Colony’s London agent, and afterwards published in the English newspapers On the day following, at noon, Lord Botecourt’s secretary entered the chamber. He pronounced the formula: “The governor commands this House to attend his Excellency in the Council Chamber.” The members tramped to the other end of the building, and ranged themselves expectant about the throne. No one, I think (though tradition has it otherwise), anticipated the governor’s extreme course, and all appear to have been astounded to hear the “ ominous and alarming words,” as Burk styles them, which fell from his lips : —•

“ Mr. Speaker and gentlemen of the House of Burgesses : I have heard of your resolves, and augur ill of their effects. You have made it my duty to dissolve you, and you are dissolved accordingly.”

Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues were by these words changed, in an instant, from a legislative Assembly into a hundred and eight private gentlemen. Such was the law of the British Empire. The new member from Albemarle, after all his canvassing and treating, enjoyed the honor of representing his native county five days, during one of which he had received a snub. But now the whole House, Virginia, Magna Charta, the rights and dignity of man, had been mocked and made of no account.

What an afternoon and evening Williamsburg must have experienced after that abrupt dismissal of the House ! It is strange that, among so many writers, no one should have left a more minute record than has yet come to light. How did Colonel Washington take it? By birth and feeling he was a yeoman ; and he had narrowly escaped going to sea before the mast to work his way, if he could, up to the command of a merchant-ship. But his brilliant gallantry in the field and a rich widow’s hand and fortune had placed him among the aristocrats. No man can quite avoid the reigning foible of his class and time. Washington’s sense of justice, however, was sure and keen, and he had been, from the first rumor of the Stamp Act, on the right side of this great controversy. He was no milksop. There was a fund—a whole volcano—of suppressed fire in him ; and being still a young man, all unschooled to the prudential reticence of the statesman, he doubtless favored the company with his sentiments. I suppose he dined that afternoon at the old Raleigh tavern, with many other members, and amid the roar of talk his voice was occasionally heard, uttering those hearty exclamations with which the Virginians of that day used to relieve their minds. We can fancy Patrick Henry, too, surrounded as he must have been at such a time, holding high discourse in the evening on the piazza; and all Williamsburg standing in groups, discussing the great event of the day, and the greater events expected to-morrow. Jefferson, probably, and other writing members, were closeted somewhere in the town, preparing for the next day’s work. A hundred gentlemen may not be a House of Burgesses, but they can hold a meeting ; and a meeting they mean to hold to-morrow in the Apollo, the great room of the Raleigh tavern, where so many of them have danced the minuet.

They met accordingly. We only know what they did on the occasion, not how they did it. Following the example set by Massachusetts the year before, they agreed to recommend their constituents to try and starve a little good sense into the minds of British manufacturers and merchants. It was America that gave Great Britain the deadly wealth — ill-distributed wealth is always deadly — with which she is now struggling for life. These Virginians, acting upon Franklin’s hint, and Massachusetts’s example, agreed : 1. To be a great deal more saving and industrious than they ever were before ; 2. Never again, as long as time should endure, to buy an article taxed by Parliament for the sake of raising a revenue in America, excepting alone low qualities of paper, without which the business of life could not go on ; 3. Never, until the repeal of the recent act, to import any article from Britain, or in British ships, which it was possible to do without; 4. They would save all their lambs for wool. And lest any weak brother should choose to misunderstand the terms of the compact, they enumerated the forbidden articles, — an interesting catalogue, because it shows how dependent Virginia then was upon Europe for everything except some of the coarser staples of food and raiment. The list was : —

Spirits, wine, cider, perry, beer, ale, malt, barley, pease, beef, pork, fish, butter, cheese, tallow, candles, oil, fruit, sugar, pickles, confectionery, pewter, hoes, axes, watches, clocks, tables, chairs, looking-glasses, carriages, joiners’ and cabinet work, upholstery, trinkets, jewelry, plate and gold, silverware, ribbons, millinery, lace, India goods except spices, silks except sewing-silk, cambric, lawn, muslin, gauze, except bolting-cloths, calico, cotton or linen stuffs above 2 s. per yard, woollens above Is. 6 d., broadcloths above 8s., narrow cloths above 3 s., hats, stockings, shoes, boots, saddles, and all leather-work.

Eighty-eight members of the House of Burgesses signed this agreement. As it was seldom that more than ninetyfive members were in attendance on the same day, this was a near approach to unanimity. Virginia accepted the compact made by her representatives. Every man who signed the agreement was re-elected. Every man who refused lost his election.

The respectful tone of the document, the perfect decency of the proceedings in the Apollo, the dignified character of the men who led the movement, made the deepest impression upon the mind of Lord Botecourt. He had been told in London — I need not say what. We all know how England has misinterpreted America always. America has generally loved that step-mother too much ; England has never loved America at all. What Lord Botecourt found in Virginia we know, and he had understanding enough to discern the truth. He wrote home to the Ministry that these Virginians were not rebellious, nor factious, nor indifferent to the needs of the empire, but loyal subjects, contending for the birthright of Englishmen with intelligence and dignity. There was vacillation in the counsels of the king, and the party opposed to the taxation of the Colonies gained a brief ascendency.

Lord Botecourt, therefore, before many months had gone by, had the pleasure of summoning the Assembly ; and again there passed between them those elaborate formalities described above. When, at length, he had reached the point of delivering his speech, what a joyful announcement it was his privilege to make!

“ I have been assured by the Earl of Hillsborough, that his Majesty’s present administration have at no time entertained a design to propose to Parliament to lay any further taxes upon America for the purpose of raising a revenue, and that it is their intention to propose in the next session of Parliament to take off the duties upon glass, paper, and colors, upon consideration of such duties having been laid contrary to the true principles of commerce.”

These words thrilled every heart. Joy glistened in every eye. No one seems to have noticed the omission of the word tea from the list. The governor, now in the fullest sympathy with the people of his Province, could not be content without adding some assurances for the remoter future ; and he proceeded to utter words that, in all probability, cost him his life. He was a gentleman of the nicest sense of honor, in whose mind a promise of his own unfulfilled might rankle mortally. A Ministry, he observed, is not immortal; what then of their successors ? Upon this point, he said, he could give only a personal assurance.

“ It is my firm opinion, that the plan I have stated to you will certainly take place, and that it will never be departed from ; and so determined am I ever to abide by it, that I will be content to be declared infamous if I do not, to the last hour of my life, at all times, in all places, and upon all occasions, exert every power with which I am or shall be legally invested, in order to obtain and maintain for the continent of America that satisfaction which I have been authorized to promise this day by the confidential servants of our gracious sovereign, who, to my certain knowledge, rates his honor so high, that he would rather part with his crown than preserve it by deceit.”

Almost while he uttered these words, which seemed to pledge the honor of the king, the Ministry, and himself, Lord North came into power, and renewed the strife. Lord Botecourt with indignation demanded his recall; but before he obtained it, he died, as is supposed, of mortification at his inability to make good his emphatic assurances. Virginia did justice to his character, and placed his statue in the public square of Williamsburg.

For the present, however, all minds were content, and the parliament of Virginia proceeded with alacrity to business. The member from Albemarle received, during his second session, a rebuff more decided and more public than when his draught was so summarily set aside in his first.

What an absurd creature is man ! This sanguine young burgess, now that all danger seemed past of his white countrymen being, as they termed it, “reduced to slavery,” thought it a good time to endeavor to mitigate the oppression of his black countrymen, who were reduced to slavery already. He soon had the hornets about his ears. At that time, no man could free his slave without sending him out of Virginia. Jefferson desired the repeal of this law. He wished to throw around the slaves what he calls “certain moderate extensions of the protection of the laws.” With the proper modesty of a young member, he called the attention of Colonel Bland to this subject, secured his co-operation, and induced him to introduce the bill. “ I seconded his motion,” records Jefferson, “and, as a younger member, was more spared in the debate ; but he was denounced as an enemy to his country, and was treated with the greatest indecorum ” ! And this, too, although Colonel Bland was “one of the oldest, ablest, and most respected members” ! Jefferson attributes this conduct to the habitual subservience of members to the interests of the mother country. “ During the regal government,” he says, “ nothing liberal could expect success.” Under no government has an assembly of slaveholders ever been otherwise than restive under attempts to limit their power over their slaves.

This year, 1769, so fruitful of public events, was a busy and interesting one to the member from Albemarle in his private capacity. He was now in the fullest tide of practice at the bar, —one hundred and ninety-eight cases before the General Court, the greatest number he ever reached in a year. Already he had chosen Monticello as the site of his future home. He had had men chopping and clearing on the summit for some time, and, in the spring of this year, he had an orchard planted on one of its slopes. Between the two sessions he superintended the construction of a brick wing of the coming mansion, one pretty large room with a chamber or two over it, under the roof. The General Court sat in April. During December and January, he was preparing for the court, making briefs, taking notes, collecting precedents ; getting everything, according to his custom, upon paper, and then dismissing it from his mind. On the 1st of February, 1770, his mother and himself went from home to visit a neighbor. While they were at the neighbor’s house, a slave came to them, breathless, to say that their house and all its contents were burned. After the man had finished his account of the catastrophe, the master asked, “ But were none of my books saved ? ” A grin of exultation overspread the sable countenance. “ No, master,” said the negro, " but we saved the fiddle ! ”

Two hundred pounds’ worth of books gone, besides all his law-papers, and notes of cases coming on in April for trial! Nothing saved but a few old volumes of his father’s library, and some unimportant manuscript books of his own. His mother and the children found temporary shelter in the house of an overseer, and he repaired to his unfinished nest on the mountain-top, where he vainly strove to reconstruct his cases for the coming term. It was an iron rule of that primitive court, never to grant an adjournment of a case to another term. How he made it up with his clients and the court, no one has told us.

That nest which he was constructing on Monticello was strangely in his thoughts during the next year or two. When he was far away from home he brooded over it, and he used to solace the tedium of country inns by elaborately recording dreams of its coming fitness and beauty. It was his resolve that there should be one mansion in Virginia, for the design of which the genius of architecture should, at least, be invoked. He meant that there should be one home in Virginia worthy the occupation of perfectly civilized beings ; in which art, taste, and utility should unite to produce an admirable result. What a piece of work it was to place such an abode on the summit of that little mountain, with no architect but himself, few workmen but slaves, no landscape-gardener within three thousand miles, no models to copy, no grounds to imitate, no tincture of high gardening in the Province. The bricks had to be made, the trees felled, the timber hewn, the nails wrought, the vehicles constructed, the laborers trained, on the scene of operations. No fine commodities could be bought nearer than Williamsburg, a hundred and fifty miles distant, nor many nearer than Europe. He had to send even for his sashes to London, where one lot was detained a month to let the putty harden! Nothing but the coarsest, roughest work could go on in his absence ; and often the business stood still for weeks, for months, for years, while he was in public service. But he kept on with an indomitable pertinacity for a quarter of a century, at the expiration of which he had the most agreeable and refined abode in Virginia, filled with objects of taste and the means of instruction, and surrounded by beautiful lawns, groves, and gardens.

At present all this existed only in his thoughts. He used to write, in one of his numerous blank-books, minute plans for various parts of the grounds, still rough with the primeval stumps. A most unlawyerlike tone breathes through these written musings. What spell was upon him when, in dreaming of a future cemetery, he could begin his entry with a sentence like this ? “ Choose out for a burial-place some unfrequented vale in the park, where is ‘ no sound to break the stillness but a brook, that bubbling winds among the weeds ; no mark of any human shape that had been there, unless the skeleton of some poor wretch who sought that place out to despair and die in.’ ” The rest of the description is in a similar taste. The park in general was to be a grassy expanse, adorned with every fragrant shrub, with trees and groves, and it was to be the haunt of every animal and bird pleasing to man. “ Court them to it by laying food for them in proper places. Procure a buck-elk to be, as it were, monarch of the wood ; but keep him shy, that his appearance may not lose its effect by too much familiarity. A buffalo might be confined also. Inscriptions in various places, on the bark of trees or metal plates, suited to the character and expression of the particular spot.” Whence these broodings over the mountain nest that was forming under his eye ? Could it be love ? Seven years before, he had solemnly assured his friend, John Page, that if Belinda would not accept his service, it should never be offered to another.

But the mightiest capacity which this man possessed was the capacity to love. In every other quality and grace of human nature he has been often equalled, sometimes excelled; but where has there ever been a lover so tender, so warm, so constant as he ? Love was his life. Few men have had so many sources of pleasure, so many agreeable tastes and pursuits ; but he knew no satisfying joy, at any period of his life, except through his affections. And there is none other for any of us. There is only one thing that makes it worth while to live : it is love. Not the wild passion that plagues us in our youth, but the tranquil happiness, the solid peace, to which that is but the tumultuous prelude, — the joy of living with people whose mere presence rests, cheers, improves, and satisfies us. He who achieves that needs no catechism to tell him what is the chief end of man. That is the chief end of man. Nothing else is of any account, except so far as it ministers to that. Jefferson was making this beautiful mountain nest for a mate whom he meant to ask to come and share it with him.

Among his associates at the Williamsburg bar was John Wayles, a lawyer in great practice, who had an estate near by, upon which he lived, called The Forest. He, too, had thriven upon the decline of Virginia ; and he had invested his fees in lands and slaves, until, in 1771, he had a dozen farms and tracts in various parts of the Province, and four hundred slaves. At his home (which was not so far from Williamsburg that a young barrister could not ride to it occasionally with a violin under his arm) there lived with him his widowed daughter, Martha Skelton, childless, a beauty, fond of music, and twenty-two. We all know how delightfully the piano and the violin go together when both are nicely touched. It was the same with the spinet and the violin. Jefferson had improved in person and in position since he had danced with Belinda in the Apollo, seven years before. It was observed of him that he constantly grew better looking as he advanced in life, — plain in youth, good-looking in his prime, handsome as an old man. And he had now advanced from the bashful student to the condition of a remarkably successful lawyer and member of the Assembly. The wooing appears to have been long. She was a widow in 1768, and there are slight indications of a new love in one of his letters of 1770; but they were not married till New-Year’s day, 1772.

How fixed his habit was of recording every item of expense is shown by the page of his pocket-diary for his wedding-day. The fees of the two clergymen in attendance, the sums given to musicians and servants, all are set down in order, quite as usual. On one of the early days of January, 1772, the newly married pair started from The Forest, where the ceremony had been performed, for Monticello, their future abode, more than a hundred miles distant, in a two-horse chaise.

As the day lengthens the cold strengthens. In Virginia there is often no serious winter till after NewYear’s, when all at once it comes rushing down from the North in a tempest of wind and snow. There was some snow on the ground when they left the bride’s home, and it grew deeper as they went toward the mountains, until it was too deep for their vehicle. They were obliged, at last, to leave the carriage, and mount the horses. At sunset on the last day of their journey, when they were still eight miles from Monticello, the snow was nearly two feet deep. A friend’s house gave them rest for a while, but they would plod on, and get home that night. They reached the foot of the mountain, ploughed up the long ascent, and stood, at length, late at night, cold and tired, before their door.

In old Virginia, servants seldom lodged in their master’s house, but in cabins of their own, to which they returned after their work was done. No light saluted the arriving pair. No voice welcomed them. No door opened to receive them. The servants had given them up long before, and gone home to bed. Worst of all, the fires were out, and the house was cold, dark, and dismal. What a welcome to a bride on a cold night in January ! They burst into the house, and flooded it with the warmth and light of their own unquenchable good-humor ! Who could wish a better place for a honeymoon than a snug brick cottage, lifted five hundred and eighty feet above the world, with half a dozen counties in sight, and three feet of snow blocking out all intruders ? What readings of Ossian there must have been ! I hope she enjoyed them as well as he. For his part, the poems of that ancient bard — if he was ancient — were curiously associated in his mind with the tender feelings ; and now, shut in with his love in his mountain home, he grew so enamored of the poet, that nothing would content him but studying him in the original Gaelic.

He wrote to his acquaintance, Charles Macpherson, cousin of the translator, that “ merely for the pleasure of reading Ossian’s works, he was desirous to learn the language in which he sung.” He begs Macpherson to send him from Scotland, not only a grammar, a dictionary, a catalogue of Gaelic works, and whatever other apparatus might be necessary, but copies of all the Ossianic poems in the original Gaelic. If they had been printed, he would have them in print. If not, “my petition is, that you would be so good as to use your interest with Mr. Macpherson to obtain leave to take a manuscript copy of them, and to procure it to be done. I would choose it in a fair, round hand, with a good margin, bound in parchments as elegantly as possible, lettered on the back, and marbled or gilt on the edges of the leaves. I would not regard expense in doing this.” He tells him, that if there are any other Gaelic manuscript poems accessible, it would at any time give him “the greatest happiness” to receive them ; for “ the glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.”

Public events prevented the execution of this scheme. It is remarkable that, here in the woods of America, a young man, inspired by love, should have hit upon the method, very simple and obvious, it is true, which, a hundred years after, has apparently cleared up the Ossianic mystery, by showing that Macpherson’s Ossian is a poor, slurring translation of poems really existing in the Gaelic language.⁵ Among a thousand babblers, it is the man who goes out of his way and looks at the thing with his own eyes who is likely to understand it first.

Next year, the death of his wife’s father brought them forty thousand acres of land and one hundred and thirty-five slaves. When their share of the debts upon Mr. Wayles’s estate had been paid, the fortunes of the wife and of the husband were about equal. The Natural Bridge, eighty miles from Monticello, was upon one of the tracts now added to their property.

Fames Parton.