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Chapter One: The Well-Ordered Dreamworld
Thomas Jefferson believed that he did his most effective thinking and writing at Monticello. Here he organized, tabulated, cataloged, and filed, kept records of daily temperatures and the growth of fruits and flowers, and inventoried the letters he wrote and received. Here he established such daily routines as bathing his feet in cold water to prevent colds and riding on horseback for exercise. Here he built the most impressive library in America, raised his family, and entertained his friends. Monticello brimmed with life, yet it was the image of escape as well. As a structure it expressed its architect's creative spirit. It was for Jefferson, as Jack McLaughlin has written, "a dwelling that mirrored himself."
Monticello did not arise spontaneously. Like everything else in Thomas Jefferson's life, it was carefully planned. It was begun only after Jefferson had proceeded far enough in life to bring it forth and fashion it as part of his self-fashioning. To appreciate Monticello, the mirror of Jefferson's inner life, we must appreciate the world it occupied, the geographic and psychological limits of its owner's early socialization.
Jefferson's Albemarle
The young Jefferson, raised on Virginia's western frontier in the 1740s and 1750s, was exposed to the tidewater aristocracy at the colonial capital of Williamsburg in the 1760s and returned to his native Albemarle County to reestablish himself. From that point on, the master of Monticello brought the world to him, first by forming an unrivaled private library and then, as the frontier receded, by attracting ambitious travelers and Enlightenment intellects. Though he spent much of his life away from home fulfilling public obligations, he consistently wrote of his yearning for the peace and tranquillity that it offered.
Thomas Jefferson's father, Peter Jefferson, was an accomplished, strong-minded, self-reliant frontiersman. He had been among the first, in 1737, to settle in Albemarle County. His wife, Jane Randolph Jefferson, was of a distinguished Virginia family. The daughter of a sea captain and born in England, she gave him two daughters before their first son, Thomas, was born on April 13, 1743, at Shadwell, in a one-and-a-half-story farmhouse set on a small prominence. There were four large downstairs rooms and "garret chambers" above. Two years later Peter Jefferson removed his family some sixty-five miles east to assume responsibility for the lands of his deceased friend William Randolph of Tuckahoe. Young Thomas enjoyed the company of his mother's relatives for six or seven years before the Jeffersons' returned to Shadwell.
A few hundred yards south of the Jeffersons' clearing ran the Rivanna River (across it, two miles southwest, was the little mountain that would become Monticello), and looking north, Thomas could see the Southwest Mountains. As a teenager he hunted in these mountains and came to know the plantations of Dr. Thomas Walker of Castle Hill and Scottish-born John Harvie, men of substance who lived beyond the 2,600 contiguous acres owned by Peter Jefferson.
The only organized religious life in the county centered on the parishes of St. Anne's in the south and Fredericksville in the north. Neither had a regular minister during extended periods before the Revolution, when there was frequent turnover in any case. Throughout the colony religious observance was informal. Baptisms and funerals commonly took place in the home. Unlike New England, where Harvard- and Yale-educated ministers assumed an active role in sustaining their well-ordered towns, here amid the sprawling plantation culture, community spokesmen were generally secular rather than religious voices, sociable men with a talent for public discourse. Jefferson in retirement reflected in a letter to John Adams, "Our clergy, before the revolution, having been secured against rivalship by fixed salaries, did not give themselves the trouble of acquiring influence over the people."
Albemarle's founders lived their lives as tobacco planters, militiamen, road builders; they were ambitious, practical, businesslike individuals. Planters large and small transported their tobacco or wheat on tied-together canoes along the Rivanna River (three feet deep in most places during the navigable months of November to June) and eastward along the James. Most roads were forest paths, such as the Richmond-Albemarle passage skirting Shadwell that was called Three-Notched Road for the tree notches chopped by early trailblazers to keep travelers from becoming lost in the wilderness.
The first turnpike in the county was not constructed until Jefferson's second term as president. In 1797 Jefferson advised James Madison in advance of a scheduled trip to Monticello: "I write this to inform you that I have had the Shadwell&Secretary's ford both well cleared. If you come the lower road, the Shadwell ford is the proper one. It is a little deepened but clear of stone&perfectly safe. If you come the upper road, you will cross at the Secretary's ford, turning in at the gate on the road soon after you enter the 3. notched road. The draught up the mountain that way is steady and uniform." Horses could always ply the roads, but carriages were commonly waylaid by poor drainage, which caused ruts and impassable mud. as late as the summer of 1828, Margaret Bayard Smith could find herself lost over "a wild, woody track of ground" the day she and her husband traveled from Jefferson's to Madison's estate; "the road was so rugged and broken, that the carriage passed it with difficulty."
In colonial times rural taverns, or "ordinaries," dotted the primary routes, far enough apart that the lack of competition meant lodgers had to endure wretched conditions. The rough way of life Jefferson's contemporaries knew is also borne out by punishments recorded in Albemarle's court records: a pillory and stocks were built, debtors whipped, and grand juries called to investigate "fighting, stabbing and stealing" in addition to adultery, selling liquor without a license, and related threats to the public order. Thomas Jefferson knew no town of any consequence until he went off to college. In fact, at the time he sat down to write the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, the largest town of Albemarle, Charlottesville, still contained only a dozen houses. Albemarle was, as Dumas Malone has described it, "a silent country of far-flung patriarchal seats" without architectural pretention.
Well-to-do planters were distinguished from common farmers by their crafted furniture, fine linen and woolen clothes, silver buckles and satin shoes, the sugar, coffee, tea, and wine on their tables, and the books on their shelves. John Harvie, who died in 1768, bequeathed 189 titles to his beneficiaries; in his will Peter Jefferson left 24 titles, including Addison's works, Instructions for Indians, a history of England, and Anson's Voyage round the World. Such a collection indicated a lively interest in affairs of the day. Peter Jefferson and Joshua Fry, an Oxford-educated professor of mathematics, together surveyed and published a well-regarded map of Virginia in 1751. Three years later Colonel Fry commanded young Lieutenant Colonel George Washington in the French and Indian War.
While Albemarle's first settlers struggled to establish themselves, hostile Indians still inhabited the county to the west. The Jefferson house was a popular way station for the friendly Cherokees whose embassies were bound for Williamsburg. Jefferson long after reflected on his early attachment to Indians, writing to John Adams of his presence in the warrior-orator Outasette's camp on the eve of that Indian's journey to England: "The moon was in full splendor.... His sounding voice, distinct articulation, animated action, the solemn silence of his people at their several fires, filled me with awe and veneration, altho' I did not understand a word he uttered." Jefferson was impressed by the Indian's use of words to make a noble display of his humanity, to move others.
In contrast to Albemarle stood the manors of the coastal plain or tidewater, the symbols of high culture in pre-Revolutionary Virginia. Sturdy brick homes and orderly gardens lent urbanity to rural life, and expanding libraries supported dignified dinner discussions. Country gentlemen conceived that they were living like the English aristocrats on whom their lives were modeled. As Rhys Isaac has written, the great houses "served to replicate in the colony certain established European architectural norms that were expressive of social position". The strong sense of gradations of dominance and submission " in architecture corresponded with the owners' consciousness of their stature in the extended community. The tidewater gentry were sociable people in periwigs and ruffles who self-consciously practiced the courtesies of gentlefolk in order to separate themselves from the boorish people who lacked means. In idealizing their role at the pinnacle of a hierarchical society, they cultivated virtue through responsible public service in the governor's council, the General Court, and the House of Burgesses. During the first half of the eighteenth century, some had sent their teenage sons to England to be educated; after midcentury the College of William and Mary in the colonial capital came to be viewed as a proper alternative to Virginians increasingly proud of their native institutions.
Virginia gentry, in a certain sense, lived on the edge. In the decade and a half leading up to the Revolution, they came to fear for their honor as they amassed great personal debt. Producing and shipping tobacco to England in a time of fluctuating prices, they nonetheless fashionably indulged themselves, importing the finest of the mother country's manufactures through their tobacco brokers. They remained close to their land - Virginia's dispersed settlement pattern owing in part to the nature of tobacco cultivation - and sought to increase their wealth without displaying a too obvious interest in commerce. As debt came to compromise their personal independence, they kept up appearances, continuing to relish their extensive familial and social ties, acting to inspire confidence in their social lessers.
Because distances held greater significance in a time of few good roads, impressions of Virginia, beyond its northern boundaries, were formed by word of mouth contacts and were necessarily vague. New Englanders for the most part considered Virginians wilderness people, rough and unrefined, and Virginians themselves were conflicted about what kind of people they were and would become. When Princeton-educated Philip Fithian arrived in the Old Dominion in 1773 to tutor the children of tidewater planter Robert Carter, he wrote in his journal that at church "Almost every Lady wears a red Cloak; and when they ride out they tye a white handkerchief over their Head and face.... I was distress'd whenever I saw a Lady, for I thought She had the Tooth-Ach!" Despite such strange habits, young Philip encountered only polite, hospitable, good-humored Virginians. He previously heard "that this country is notorious for Gaming" but found no evidence even of a pack of cards or dice. To the Reverend Enoch Green of Philadelphia, he wrote: "As to what is commonly said concerning Virginia that it is difficult to avoid being corrupted with the manners of the people, I believe it is founded in a wholly mistaken notion that persons must, when here frequent all promiscuous assemblies; but this is so far from the truth.... I believe that the virginians of late altered their manner very much."
Jefferson later noted that he himself had not been immune to temptations. As a grandfather advising his eldest grandson, he wrote, referring to the early loss of his father: "When I recollect that at 14 years of age, the whole care and direction of my self was thrown on my self entirely, without a relation or friend qualified to advise and guide me, and recollect the various sorts of bad company with which I associated from time to time, I am astonished I did not turn off with some of them, and become as worthless to society as they were.... From the circumstances of my position I was often thrown into the society of horseracers, cardplayers, Foxhunters." Fortunately, "characters of high standing" had entered his life and served as proper so that he could shun gambling for the "steady pursuits of what is right."
Thomas Jefferson's education was begun at the Latin school of the Reverend William Douglas in Goochland County (between Shadwell and Tuckahoe), were he boarded during the school year from the age of nine. His exposure to the classics continued at James Maury's log-house school in 1758-59 after Peter Jefferson's death. Maury was the financially pressed rector of Fredericksville Parish in the northern part of Albemarle, and Jefferson was able to travel home on weekends. At the College of William and Mary, where he matriculated in 1760, he formed important connections among the tidewater gentry, "a more universal Acquaintance, which may hereafter be serviceable to me," as Jefferson predicted in his first extant letter. His determined pursuit of knowledge made him stand out in college. The patronage of two distinguished men, first the philosophical Scotsman William Small and then George Wythe, lawyer in the General Court and member of the House of Burgesses, pointed Jefferson toward a legal career. While in Williamsburg (the better part of the years 1760 to 1765), he socialized with the well-to-do, danced at the Raleigh Tavern, and met the political leaders of the day. His closest friend and guide to the tidewater social scene of Virginia's most illustrious names and lived in a stately mansion. (Page's aunt was the wife of Peter Jefferson's friend William Randolph of Tuckahoe.) Jefferson's correspondence with Page in 1763-64 suggests that he felt he was missing out on events of importance during the months each year he spent back in Albemarle.
It was not until 1766, at age twenty-three, that Jefferson ventures outside Virginia for the first, traveling to Annapolis, Philadelphia, and New York. In the Maryland capital he witnessed as Jefferson's first reckoning of the "community of colonial interests." But, even if for a time he considered his origins provincial, he always was drawn back to the red soil and pristine images of that part of Virginia his father had first explored.
In 1767, as a new attorney, Jefferson began to appear in Williamsburg, before the General Court, whose proceedings he had watched as a student four years earlier. In addition to work on behalf of his Albemarle neighbors, he traveled across the Blue Ridge Mountains to Augusta County to represent the property interests of clients there. As one of the few General Court lawyers with a western clientele, Jefferson met people from all walks of life when the rural county courts were in quarterly session and brought their problems before the seat of authority in Williamsburg, where inferior court decisions were appealed.
Jefferson broke ground at Monticello in 1769, a year in which he was involved in 198 law cases, significantly more than in any other year of his practice. In the same year he entered the House of Burgesses and began his political career by drafting what Malone characterized as "stereotyped resolutions" suited to the pomp and circumstance dictated ny the colonial governor. Jefferson remained silent in formal sessions of the legislative body, expressing himself more forcefully in small group meetings. In February 1770 his mother's Shadwell home - his birthplace - burned, destroying his already valuable collection of books. This personal tragedy hastened Jefferson's move to his mountain.
Palladio and Pliny
We must view the importance of Jefferson's dwelling in two ways: as a practical symbol of its architect's spirit and as the sanctuary he established for those he loved. The story of Monticello itself is a fluid one, as the mountaintop estate was remodeled and restored time and again over a period of forty years. The interior seen today was completed in 1809. The exterior porticoes were not finished until 1923, when Jefferson was eighty.
Jefferson did not build on property his father had bequeathed him along the Rivanna River, the logistically convenient and commercially prudent choice. He chose instead to level the top of an 867-foot mountain, a process requiring as well the clearing of dense forest for roads. One visitor in 1815 wrote, "The ascent of this steep hill, was as pensive and slow as Satan's ascent to Paradise."
Site selection was not the only way in which Jefferson differed from other Virginia plantation owners. He summed up his dismissive attitude toward standard building practices in the one book he wrote, the fact-filled (and argument-prone) Notes on Virginia, which he put together largely in 1781. Declaring architecture an "elegant and useful art," Jefferson wrote: "The genius of architecture seems to have shed its maledictions over this land. Buildings are often erected, by individuals, of considerable expence. To give these symmetry and taste would not increase their cost.... But the first principles of the are unknown, and there exists scarcely a model among us sufficiently chaste to give an idea of them." In what is arguably Jefferson's most self-revealing letter, his "My Head and My Heart" dialogue, he disclosed that his sensible, rational Head typically conjured architectural "diagrams and crotchets" (jointed wood used a building supports) to lull his restive mind to sleep.
Jefferson the independent country gentleman was impressed with two related aesthetic traditions that he translated into a lifestyle: the Palladian, rooted in the monuments of Western antiquity, and the classical Roman itself, He fashioned his home from both his Head and his Heart, believing that he could know nature through mathematical formulas and through the delight of the senses in imitating the divine work of creation.
Andreas Palladio was a sixteenth-century Italian architect whose work was popular in England during the first half of the eighteenth century. Jefferson owned the manual Palladio wrote, providing simple rules for building that the classically educated nobleman could follow. He preferred to work directly from Palladio's text than to follow the Georgian adaptation of Palladio visible in Williamsburg. Palladio's villas has symbolized rural retirement in Palladio's own time, and they tended to be built in built in "cleveland and agreeable places," to use Palladio's words. They featured harmony of proportion and offered choices of column styles according to the desired effect, masculine,, feminine, or rustic. McLaughlin has written, "The grammar of the orders is a prescriptive as the syntax of language."
Jefferson's early drawings, based on the illustrated books he owned, show a compulsiveness in mechanical effort and a fascination with numbers. He carried out his measurements to four or five decimal places at a time when carpenters and bricklayers were rarely able to keep to the inch, let alone fractions. Before Monticello, in fact, few homes in colonial Virginia had been built from anything more than sketches. The original house, before the dome, featured a vintage Palladian double portico (one atop the other). The underlying concept was twofold: to consolidate functions - covered passageways provided access to kitchen, stable, and storehouse - and to make a statement of the occupant's social status. Stately rising columns framed an airy, many-windowed manor. The choice of octagon rooms in Jefferson's expansion of the house represented a gifted amateur's decision to tinker with Palladian plans and, as some have suggested, to create an enclosed, protected place, a "nest" or "bosom," by this changed geometry.
Jefferson, the neoclassicist architect, did not stop in his historic reverie with the sixteenth-century Palladio. Indeed, the classic example was to him more chaste and at once more vital, more majestic, than the Palladian refinement of the original. The quintessential Roman villa conjured that vision of rural urbanity which Jefferson embraced. He owned the illustrated Villas of the Ancients by Robert Castell, published in 1728, which stressed the taste of Pliny. Pliny wrote often of his surroundings; no one had better expressed the classical art of living well.
Even at the end of his life, Jefferson was found absorbed in Pliny's letters. Two of these go on at length about the beauty and repose his villas afforded, the first being at Laurentinum: "The landscape on all sides is extremely diversified, the prospect in some places being confined by woods, in others extending over large and beautiful meadows, where numberless flocks ... fatten in the warmth of this rich pasturage. My villa is large enough to afford conveniences, without being extensive."
Pliny described the interior of the home, from porch to drawing rooms, where the family was "sheltered from all winds except those which are generally attended with clouds." The dining room was "exceedingly warmed and enlightened not only to the direct rays of the sun, but by their reflection from the sea." The reader is led from room to room, reaching a terrace "perfumed with violets, and warmed by the reflection of the sun from the portico, which as it retains the rays, so it keeps off the northeast wind." We can imagine Jefferson reading and responding to Pliny's orchestration of nature and the elements, for Jefferson was similarly sensitive to the time of day each room received sun, a concern shared as well by Palladio. There was at Monticello, as at Laurentinum, only one "defect," the absence of a running stream. Pliny's wells, however, proved more reliable than Jefferson's.
The second of Pliny's villas described in his correspondence was in Tuscany, far from the sea and with a commanding view. Its prospect was nearly that of Monticello:
The winters are severe and cold, so that the myrtles, olives, and trees of
that kind which delight in constant warmth will not flourish here; but it
produces bay trees in great perfection.... The summers are exceedingly
temperate, and continually attended with refreshing breezes, which are
seldom interrupted by high winds.... The disposition of the country is
the most beautiful that can be imagined: figure to yourself an immense
amphitheater; but such as the hand of nature could only form. Before
you lies a vast extended plain bounded by a range of mountains, whole
summits are crowned with lofty and venerable woods, which supply variety
of game ... fertility is nothing inferior to the lowest ground ... from
the top of our neighboring mountains, you would imagine that not a
real, but some painted landscape lay before you, drawing with the most
exquisite beauty and exactness; such an harmonious and regular variety
charms the eye which way soever it throws itself. My villa is so advantageously
situated that it commands a full view of the country round.
The attention Pliny gave his fertile and scenic mountain-bounded estate is mirrored in Jefferson's garden record keeping and loving descriptions of "my native woods and feilds." To the much-heralded Philadelphia botanist William Hamilton, he wrote: "Of prospect I have rich profusion and offering itself at every point of the compass. Mountains distant and near, smooth&shaggy, single&in ridges, a little river hiding itself among the hills so as to shew in lagoons only, cultivated grounds under the eye and two small villages."
Jefferson's eclectic vision, combining antique and Palladian concepts, was accomplished with mechanical precision and represented, in Karl Lehmann's words, "the law of nature in architectural terms." Absorbed in expressing an innate sense of beauty and bringing system to nature, Jefferson was typical of eighteenth-century philosophers who sought a "universal intelligibility" in man's surroundings. Classic style at once represented the power of symmetry and order (natural simplicity) and a time in history when the human spirit rose to great heights.
Beauty and function were inseparable in Jefferson's mind. For the government buildings he would design, he tampered less with the classical effect: imposing columns symbolized the grand scale of legislative decisions and inspired awe. Creating a place for cultivation of his own self entailed more modest expression and emphasized comfort over nobility. This explains the unobtrusive stairways and dumbwaiters and such clever touches as skylights and triple-sash windows for seasonally adjusted ventilation. As a further expression of his desire to reach beyond what he could actually touch, Jefferson thought to incorporate as many of the world's cultures as could fit into his well-ordered dreamworld, including the Chinese lattice railings that skirt the house.
Of course, a very visible - and permanent - part of Jefferson's Monticello was the presence of slaves and hired laborers. Jefferson's earliest memory, according to family lore, was of being carried to Tuckahoe on a pillow by a mounted slave. His much younger brother Randolph would later fiddle and dance in the slave quarters, but to what extent Jefferson himself cared for - or even knew - the stories and songs of that culture, we cannot be certain. Among the more than twenty slaves he inherited from his father was his coachman Jupiter, born at Shadwell the same year as Jefferson, who traveled almost everywhere with his master until his death in the year Jefferson was elected president. In the months before Jefferson's wedding, he was often dispatching Jupiter to purchase staples: butter, bread, corn, candles. To the slaves Jefferson inherited soon were added 135 from his father-in-law, including domestic servants Ursula, who would nurse his children, her husband, the blacksmith known as King George, and the Hemingses, a large family of "bright" mulattoes. Though he referred to his slaves when he made written accounts as "my family," Jefferson did not consciously, in moral terms, register their contribution to his happiness. It was not expected that he should. He separated himself emotionally from them and - while considering them inferior to whites in the exercise of reason - intellectually celebrated their humanity. His 1771 Account Book paints a picture: Jefferson distantly fantasized a "Burying place" on his mountain where, in the midst of his family, he proposed to inter "a favorite and faithful servant" beneath a pyramid of "rough rock-stone," with a pedestal "made to receive an inscription." Jefferson did erect a cemetery not long after, but he ultimately reserved it for white friends and family. He was a fair master but not uncomfortable in the role of master. He wished that his slaves would live "without want" and intermarry with others on the estate so that he could keep families intact; but they were still in his mind part of an inheritance and no greater part of his vision than the white laborers he hired to lay bricks.
Jefferson loved to doodle with numbers and lines and seemed never to be without some plan for Monticello. He sketched everything from parquet floors to hanging blinds between the columns of porticoes, designed the grounds, and when at all possible supervised construction personally. He preserved private spaces more than most eighteenth-century home builders, which some commentators have related to his willingness to accommodate guests. He set apart and restricted access to his own bedroom, study, and library, placing guests in the front two bedrooms on the other side of the main entrance hall and upstairs. Friends and learned acquaintances visited regularly, and Jefferson became known for his hospitality (fig. 1).
In envisioning the world of Monticello, Jefferson did not confine his thought to the man-made. God had to place, too. Jefferson had familiarized himself with the Bible at an early age and, though he did not express enthusiasm about his religious training, occasionally referred to its lessons. On his own he consulted religious texts periodically to refine his philosophy of life. while he unequivocally shunned all mystical suggestions. To be acceptable God has to be perceived as a Workman-Creator, as a builder of order. Jefferson did not look to God for guidance in public affairs; like a majority of the Virginia gentry, he articulated the sense that his countrymen's safety and prosperity would be secured by the force of knowledge, by scientific inquiry, by man's moral sense.
He thought of the grounds of Monticello in comparable terms, stopping to marvel at what was beyond human manipulation. God's genius appeared in the visible forms of nature and elicited respect from the philosophical Virginian, who, in the Newtonian tradition, sought an understanding of the infinite through scientific observation and experimentation: he emulated his Creator as a nurturer as well as a builder. Or as Ernst Cassirer has written of the Enlightenment understanding as it developed from Spinoza, "Just as surely as nature is a work of God, so too it radiates the image of the divine spirit; it mirrors God's immutability and eternity." Jefferson was infinitely patient with natural processes. Monticello was first an attempt to display sensitivity to the natural prospect and, next, a reflection of Jefferson's desire to give life to something distinctive and durable. He was drawn to the idea of a home that was as solid as the great tidewater manors, mathematically consonant, supportive of invention and convenience, and reminiscent of the grandeur of antiquity. Transcending all this was the sublime genius that made the land bear fruit. As yet, Jefferson had not traveled widely, except through his books; but it was primarily those imaginative excursions which had led him to this point. He made his home an attraction and delighted in its aesthetic variations. Tasteful in its day, Monticello became a monument to one man's expansive mind ever after.
There were two dramatic periods, architecturally speaking, in which Monticello was built. The first was its initial construction, as the designer readied his home for his bride, Martha ("Patty") Wayles Skelton Jefferson. The second period of great activity was the decade of the 1790s, once Jefferson had returned from five years in Europe, a traveler who had ventured toward the lands of Roman greatness. He was inspired by firsthand contact with the Old World to double the size of the original house and to add the distinctive dome, though this visually appealing feature where some of his grandchildren later bunked may have been the least useful of Jefferson's creative compulsions.
"Thou, Good Young Man, Persevere"
Jefferson associated the construction of Monticello with the life he dreamed for Patty and himself and their offspring. We cannot analyze their love story through Jefferson's written words, because this private man, deeply shaken by his wife's untimely death in 1782 at the age of thirty-three, destroyed (in what was, for many at this time, a customary means of carrying on with life) a rich and no doubt revealing correspondence. Having restored his emotional system over the next decade, Jefferson projected his retirement from politics and his return to Monticello in 1793. By then he had conceived this second spurt of building in terms of a sanctuary for the family who remained for him to dote upon. His elder daughter Martha was to see all but one of her twelve children reach adulthood. Younger daughter Maria, resembling her mother in looks and in spirit, was a teenager when her father reestablished himself on the mountain. Visitors from the 1790s through Jefferson's last years all recorded the constant activity of the grandchildren growing up, and the grandchildren described Jefferson as a highly attentive grandfather.
We must probe the provocative beginnings of Monticello, the marriage of Thomas and Patty Jefferson, if we are to move beyond the aesthetics of the architect and approach an understanding of the emotion of the husband and father. After watching his adolescent friends wed early and undertake their family responsibilities, Jefferson, not quite twenty-seven, fell in love with the musical young widow Martha Wayles Skelton. The courtship apparently began early in 1770, judging from a hint in one of Jefferson's letters to happily married John Page, wherein he noted the "I am become an advocate for the passion: for I too am coelo tactus [touched by heaven]." This was close to the time when Jefferson changed the name of his home from "The Hermitage" to the more clever "Monticello," Italian for "little mountain."
He was living there in February 1771 when he wrote to James Ogilvie, a Virginia friend gone to London, whose stunted career Jefferson was attempting to improve by soliciting letters attesting to Ogilvies's characters. As the letter writer turned to gossip, his subject became the trials of a mutual friend "wishing to take himself a wife," who was at odds with his prospective father-in-law. This led to mention of Jefferson's own situation. "I too am in that way; and have still greater difficulties to encounter not from the frowardness for parents, nor perhaps want of feeling in the fair one," but from the destruction fire that had claimed Shadwell and most of his possessions. With "a very few books ... I have lately removed to the mountain from whence this is dated and with which you are not unacquainted. I have here but one room, which, like the cobler's, serves me for parlour for kitchen and hall. I may add, for bed chamber and study too. My friends sometimes take a temperature dinner with me and then retire to look for beds elsewhere. I have hopes however of getting more elbow room this summer."
Jefferson worked hard to make his mountain livable, seeking grafts and seeds for the planting of garden vegetables, fruit trees, and flowers. Mrs. Drummond, a Williamsburg acquaintance of George Wythe, procured some of these things for her "Amiable friend" Jefferson. In March she wrote a spirited reply to a letter from Jefferson, long lost, in which she took pleasure in his match. Praising his "Romantic, Poetical" description, no doubt of his bride-to-be, she commented: "Thou wonderful Young Man, so piously entertaining, thro out that, exalted Letter. Indeed I shal' think, Spirits of a higher order, Inhabits Yr. Aerey Mountains,-or rather Mountain, which I may contemplate, but never can aspire too." Taken with his enthusiasm, Mrs. Drummond urged him to "persever thou, good Young Man, persevere," that he might achieve "the full completion, of all Yr. wishes, both as to the Lady and every thing else."
In June, Jefferson wrote from Monticello to his tobacco broker, Thomas Adams, then in London, to change his order for a clavichord to a pianoforte, for he was "charmed" with one he had recently seen. Spare nothing in procuring the best quality, Jefferson implored; "let the case be of fine mahogany, solid, not vineered ... worthy the acceptance of a lady for whom I intend it." Adding India cotton stockings and "a large Umbrella with brass ribs covered with green silk," for all of which he would compensate with tobacco, Jefferson reiterated his urgent priority. Send these things "as soon as you receive this ... particularly the Forte-piano for which I will be very impatient."
Henry S. Randall related an anecdote passed down through the family. As a vivacious young woman, Patty had more than just the one suitor. When two young bachelors appeared on her doorstep one day, they were treated to the sounds of Patty's harpsichord and Jefferson's violin and the two harmonizing voices. Perceiving real romance in these melodic strains, the would-be suitors took their hats and promptly left.
Jefferson's letter of August 1771 to Robert Skipwith, who had married Patty's half sister Tabitha, displayed a convivial regard for one connected to his "new family" (fig. 2). Addressing merely "Thomas Jefferson Esquire" (without a destination) and depositing the envelope "to the care of Miss Wayles," Skipwith had requested a list of books "suited to the capacity of a common reader who understands little of the classicks and who has not leisure for any intricate or tedious study." The total cost was not to exceed 30 [pounds]. In his enthusiastic reply Jefferson revealed a lot about his self-cultivation. Citing the contributions of literature to improvement of the mind, he extolled the merits of pure story-telling: "We never reflect whether the story we read be truth or fiction. If the painting be lively, and a tolerable picture of nature, we are thrown into a reverie, from which if we awaken it is fault of the writer." In another natural metaphor he referred to the "spacious field of the imagination," approving a view of nature by which the mind is free to wander. But literature bore a decisive moral responsibility as well. Shakespeare's King Lear better exemplified "a lively and lasting sense of filial duty" than "all the dry volumes of ethics and divinity." History was a "moral exercise" which needed literature to help "excite ... the sympathetic emotion of virtue." As Jay Fliegelman has observed, reading in the post-Lockean age had become "a primary emotional experience itself, a constituent of identity, a way of understanding and making one's self." And Jefferson, exemplifying this theme, was faithful to a definition of truth as "truthfulness to feelings rather than to facts,"
The letter to Skipwith contains rare insight into the consciousness of the young Jefferson, the Jefferson who had yet to apply his passion for reading to the composition of written documents of public import. The sociable, soon-to-be-wed Virginian perceived in the study of the Greek and Roman classics, Shakespeare, and the Bible critical lessons of moral conduct. Beyond this, he firmly rejected any dogma which abandoned common sense to faith in miracles. Thus, under the heading "History, Antient," he listed the Bible, along, with Livy, Tacitus, Plutarch, and Charles Rollin's popular multivolume history of the Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, and Greeks. Under "Religion," he placed at the top "Locke's conduct of the mind in search of truth," then listed several non-Christian example from the ancient world: Cicero, Xenophon, Epictetus, and Seneca. These titles were followed by Bolingbroke's "Philosophical works," the essays of David Hume, and Lord Kames's Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, three authors who rejected those Christian beliefs which contradicted "sense" and the laws of nature.39 Also under "Religion," however, was one near contemporary, and the only collection of Christian sermons on the list: those of the Anglican clergyman and novelist Laurence Sterne (1713-1768).
The seven-volume set of Sterne's Sermons, which Jefferson so admired, were not unusual as sermons, but they repeatedly stressed the individual's obligation both to self and to others. Jefferson's list of religious books, insofar as it represented an everyday course in moral-philosophical judgment, shows a certain earnestness in approaching his own obligations as friend. The common theme on Jefferson's list is enlightenment, whether produced through literature's ability to excite the "sympathetic emotion of virtue" or through some other moral authority. In either case it reveals an inner voice which binds reason and sentiment in Jefferson.
During the intoxicating months of courtship, then, Jefferson continued to carry on his legal practice, never one to lose his Hard; but he was particularly attentive to moral matters governed by the Heart, as he was aroused by the sudden opportunity to be of use to a charming, available lady. Enclosing for Skipwith his carefully tabulated list of books, "a general collection" costing thrice the 30 [pounds] proposed, the at once dreamy and lucid Jefferson was careful not to hold himself at too great a distance from his less scholarly correspondent. He extended to Skipwith a warm invitation: "Come to the new Rowanty, from which you may reach your hand to a library formed on more extensive plan. Separated from each other but a few paces, the possessions of each would be open to the other. A spring, centrically situated, might be the scene of every evening's joy. There we should talk of the lessons of the day, or lose them in Musick, Chess, or the merriments of our family companions.... Come then and bring our dear Tibby [Tabitha] with you; the first in your affections, and second in mine. Offer prayers for me too at that shrine to which, tho' absent, I pay continual devotion. In every scheme of happiness she is placed in the foreground of the picture, as the principal figure. Take that away, and it is no picture for me."
His invitation to the "new Rowanty" was Jefferson's lighthearted manner of expressing good-fellowship. Rowantee was the name of an old Nottoway Indian village, by which Skipwith referred to his own home in Dinwiddie County that Jefferson perhaps had never visited. For Jefferson this was a playful way to equate the lives and aspirations of the two of them, brought together by their attraction to half sisters. The spring he alluded to, never built, was to be a cascade whose reservoir would sit within a storied temple. The "shrine" to which Jefferson paid continual devotion, of course, was Patty. Happiness was a "scheme," a state of affairs subject to design and (one might imagine) even "diagrams and crotchets" such as he had dreamed of in planning his happy shelter on the mountain. He visualized that happiness by placing Patty in his mental pictures.
The construction of Monticello was meant to support Jefferson's dual ideal of intellectual enjoyment and amiable society. As his later friendships with James Madison and others would make even clearer, he consistently pursued a life in which he could daily occupy himself with literary and philosophical interests to be shared with others, challenging conversation, music, chess, and, after Paris, exquisite dining. Having discussed "the lessons of the day," this ideal society of friends would have time for "the merriments of our family companions." And the combination of activities, as he assured Skipwith, would lighten the heart.
According to family tradition Patty was "distinguished for her beauty." She was not tall (Jefferson stood 6 feet 2 1/2 inches), with "large, expressive eyes of the richest shade of hazel" (as were Jefferson's). She was "frank, warm-hearted and somewhat impulsive." In his reply to Jefferson's book suggestions, Robert Skipwith described Patty's quality glowingly. She had "the greatest fund of good nature ... all that sprightliness and sensibility which promises to ensure you the greatest happiness mortals are capable of enjoying."
Prophetically, her mother had died young, a week after Patty's birth in the autumn of 1748. Martha Eppes had married John Wayles in 1746 and bore twins who died and then Patty, her only child to survive. Patty's father, a successful lawyer whom Jefferson found to be "a most agreeable companion, full of pleasantly and good humor," outlived a second wife and married for a third time in 1760. In 1766, at the age of eighteen, Patty married Bathurst Skelton, then twenty-two, and gave him a son a year later. But Skelton, a college acquaintance of Jefferson, died in 1968. Presumably, this widow of two years, with a three-year-old son, met Thomas Jefferson at a party in Williamsburg. In courting her at the Forest, her father's estate located between Williamsburg and Richmond, Jefferson was fully prepared to become stepfather to the boy, who, however, died in June 1771, six months before the marriage.
The wedding was held on New Year's Day, 1772, at the Forest. After the ceremony it was Jefferson, not the bride's father, who paid the Reverend Mr. Davies the marriage fee of five shillings and gave a fiddler ten. Leaving the Wayles place "after a fall of snow not very deep," the newlyweds found rougher going each mile, gave up their carriage for horseback, and arrived at a snowbound Monticello late at night, where "one of the Pavillons only was tenantable." Nine months later, their first daughter, Martha ("Patsy"), was born.
This must have been a time of domestic tranquillity-to use a term of which Jefferson was fond-for it was not until Patsy was a toddler that her father began to devote considerable time to politics. In the first few years he gave attention to the productivity of his land, experimenting with new plants, such as rice. He harvested his first fruit in 1772 and added fruit trees the following year. In 1773, the year before he gave up his law practice, his receipts totaled more than the previous four years combined; he was ordering massive quantities of bricks as well as glass and glass windows. Having surrounded himself with a family, Jefferson was absorbed in expanding Monticello in all directions.