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

of England. The son, too, was interested in science and became a fellow of the Royal Society as well as a director of the South Sea Company—evidence of his keeping a hand in both the world of ideas and of practical power, something the young Jefferson may have noticed.
    Fauquier was energetic. Within weeks of his arrival in Virginia in 1758, there was an unusual July hailstorm. The ice smashed the windows on the north side of the Governor’s Palace. Fascinated, Fauquier wrote a scientific paper about the phenomenon and dispatched it to his brother, who presented it to the Royal Society in London.
    Born in 1726 in Elizabeth City County, Virginia, the lawyer George Wythe was also a noted statesman. Hawk-nosed and, in Jefferson’s description, “of the middle size, well formed and proportioned,” Wythe was wise, intellectually curious, and probably had more direct influence on Jefferson’s thinking than Small simply by virtue of longevity. Wythe taught Jefferson in the law and other subjects for five years, an unusually long period of time. The older man lived in a house near Bruton Parish Church, in the center of Williamsburg. “Mr. Wythe continued to be my faithful and beloved mentor in youth, and my most affectionate friend through life,” Jefferson recalled.
    In Wythe, the man with whom Jefferson spent the most time in the period from roughly 1765 to 1772, Jefferson had a teacher in both liberty and luxury. The older man had expensive tastes, sending to London for satin cloaks for his wife, velvet breeches and black silk stockings for himself, and, for them both, “an elegant set of table and tea china, with bowls of the same of different sizes, decanters and drinking glasses, a handsome service of glass for a dessert, four middle-sized and six lesser dishes, and … a handsome well-built chariot.” The Wythes also loved to entertain. “Mrs. Wythe puts 1 ⁄ 10 very rich Malmsey to a dry Madeira and makes a fine wine,” Jefferson once noted appreciatively.
    In a literary commonplace book in which he copied passages that struck him as important, Jefferson quoted Euripides during the years with Wythe: “There is nothing better than a trusty friend, neither wealth nor princely power; mere number is a senseless thing to set off against a noble friend.”
    In 1767, Wythe introduced Jefferson to the practice of law at the bar of the General Court, inaugurating Jefferson’s legal career—a phase of Jefferson’s life that consumed him from 1767 until 1774, when the work of the Revolution drew him into politics and diplomacy.
    When those close to Jefferson surveyed his life and career, they returned to the Governor’s Palace and to the influence of the bright men who moved through those elegant, high-ceilinged rooms. “Apart from the intellectual improvement derived from such an intercourse,” wrote Henry Randall, “Mr. Jefferson, it is said, owed that polish of manner which distinguished him through life, to his habitual mingling with the elegant society which Governor Fauquier collected about him.”
    For the rest of his life Jefferson sought to replicate the spirit and substance of these long Williamsburg nights. At his round dining table at Monticello, in the salons of Paris, and in the common rooms of boardinghouses and taverns in Philadelphia and New York, and finally at the President’s House in Washington, D.C., Jefferson craved talk of the latest in science and the arts and adored conversation with the beautiful women, politicians, and men of affairs who made the world run on both sides of the Atlantic.
    In this elite number Jefferson also included his cousin Peyton Randolph, attorney general of Virginia, Speaker of the House of Burgesses, and the first president of the Continental Congress. Born in 1721, Randolph was at once convivial and imposing. On meeting him, Silas Deane of Connecticut wrote that Peyton Randolph was