Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham Read Free Book Online

exercise, and the weather should be little regarded,” Jefferson once said. In fact, Jefferson believed the rainier and the colder the better. “A person not sick will not be injured by getting wet,” he said. “It is but taking a cold bath, which never gives a cold to any one. Brute animals are the most healthy, and they are exposed to all weather, and of men, those are healthiest who are the most exposed.”
    Aspiring attorneys, he said, should devote their mornings to the law, but variety was key. “Having ascribed proper hours to exercise, divide what remain (I mean of your vacant hours) into three portions. Give the principal to History, the other two, which should be shorter, to Philosophy and Poetry.”
    Jefferson was always asking questions. With “the mechanic as well as the man of science,” a descendant recalled, Jefferson learned all he could, “whether it was the construction of a wheel or the anatomy of an extinct species of animals,” and then went home to transcribe what he had heard. He would soon be known as a “walking encyclopedia.”
    Jefferson could play as hard as he worked. Worrying that he had spent too much money in his first year in what the nineteenth-century biographer Henry Randall called “a little too showy style of living—particularly in the article of fine horses”—Jefferson wrote a guardian offering to charge the whole of his bills to his separate share of the estate. (More amused than alarmed, the guardian declined Jefferson’s offer.) Later in life, Jefferson wrote: “I was often thrown into the society of horse racers, and card players, fox hunters, scientific and professional men.… Many a time have I asked myself, in the enthusiastic moment of the death of a fox, the victory of a favorite horse, the issue of a question eloquently argued at the bar … Well, which of these kinds of reputation should I prefer? That of a horse jockey? A fox hunter? An orator? Or the honest advocate of my country’s rights?”
    In truth these things are not mutually exclusive, which Jefferson knew. He spent his Williamsburg years in ways that suggest he understood that the pursuit of knowledge could coexist with the pursuit of pleasure. The motto at Williamsburg’s popular Raleigh Tavern had it right: “Jollity, offspring of wisdom and good living.”
    I t was in the Governor’s Palace, not at the Raleigh, that Jefferson’s most intensive tutorial in the art of living well—as measured in elegance and conversation, two things he cherished—took place.
    Francis Fauquier, the royal governor of the colony of Virginia, held frequent gatherings with William Small and George Wythe, one of Virginia’s greatest lawyers. Thomas Jefferson made a fourth at what Jefferson called Fauquier’s “familiar table.” There was dinner, conversation, and music. The older men nurtured Jefferson’s passion for the violin, and Jefferson was invited to join Fauquier on the governor’s musical evenings, performing in the palace.
    Fauquier was born in 1703, only five years before Peter Jefferson, and so was roughly the age Jefferson’s father would have been had Peter Jefferson survived. The governor loved science, fine food, good music, and spirited card playing.
    No dry philosopher, Fauquier also had a worldly, even rakish air. The story was told that he came to office in the New World through the good grace of Lord Anson, the British admiral who had circumnavigated the globe, after Fauquier lost everything he had to Anson in a single night of cards. However embellished that tale, its currency shows that the man Jefferson encountered at this impressionable age led a life in which the pursuits of pleasure, power, and erudition unfolded simultaneously.
    Fauquier’s father was a Huguenot physician who worked with Sir Isaac Newton at the Royal Mint and became a director of the Bank