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

“of an affable, open and majestic deportment, large in size, though not out of proportion”; he also “commands respect and esteem by his very aspect, independent of the high character he sustains.”
    Small, Wythe, Fauquier, and Peyton Randolph established the standards by which Jefferson judged everyone else. They represented a love of engaging company, a devotion to the life of the mind, and a commitment to the responsible execution of political duties for the larger good. “Under temptations and difficulties,” he told a grandson, “I would ask myself—what would Dr. Small, Mr. Wythe, Peyton Randolph do in this situation? What course in it will ensure me their approbation?”
    Jefferson was to be always guided by experience and example, thinking about what men of the world—men he respected and loved—might do, for in their day their decisions had given them, in Jefferson’s words, “very high standing,” standing that Jefferson felt “the incessant wish” to match, and surpass.
    In pursuit of that standing, Jefferson never cut himself off from the social and cultural currents of his time. When on holiday from Williamsburg, he played his part in the rites of Virginia hospitality, often hosting others at Shadwell or visiting friends at their plantations.
    On a visit one winter to Colonel Nathaniel Dandridge’s place in Hanover County, Jefferson met Patrick Henry, a young man living in Louisa County. Jefferson recalled that the two “passed perhaps a fortnight together at the revelries of the neighborhood and season. His manners had something of the coarseness of the society he had frequented; his passion was fiddling, dancing and pleasantry. He excelled in the last, and it attached every one to him.”
    Jefferson conceived of life in social terms, and he believed that his own identity was bound up with the world around him. A slave was always in attendance. Family, neighbors, and callers were more or less constant presences. “I am convinced our own happiness requires that we should continue to mix with the world, and to keep pace with it as it goes,” he once wrote to one of his daughters.
    He was a political man in the purest sense of the term. He lived among others, engaged in the business of living in community, and enjoyed being at the center of everything no matter what the everything was: He was a happy member of the FHC (or Flat Hat Club) at William and Mary, a secret society that, as Jefferson put it, “had no useful object.”
    Even the bustle of a plantation paled in contrast to the charms of Williamsburg. When away from the capital, he longed for intelligence about what he might be missing. “If there is any news stirring in town or country, such as deaths, courtships and marriages in the circle of my acquaintance let me know it,” Jefferson wrote his college friend John Page.
    F or a time in the early 1760s, Jefferson was in love—passionately if ineffectually—with a young woman named Rebecca Lewis Burwell, the sister of his classmate Lewis Burwell, Jr., of Gloucester County. His letters on the subject are about what one would expect of a young man not quite twenty years old: overstated, breathless, self-serious, and melodramatic. His attempts at humor and self-mockery in his correspondence about Rebecca Burwell fall largely flat, and the episode is chiefly interesting for the light it sheds on Jefferson’s sensitivity to rejection, disorder, and criticism.
    Little about the courtship went well. Even rats and rain seemed to conspire against him. On Christmas Eve 1762, Jefferson went to bed as usual, leaving his pocketbook, garters, and watch in his room. The watch held a paper drawing of Rebecca Burwell, the single token Jefferson appears to have had of the object of his affections.
    Awaking on Christmas morning, Jefferson discovered not only that rats had gotten into his room and gnawed at his