Thomas Jefferson
wandered from the family house during a thunderstorm and was found dead after the storm cleared.” He revered his older sister Jane and shared her love of music. He often accompanied her singing with his violin playing. According to Parton, when Jane, “the best of [Jefferson’s] friends,” died, there was a “void in the home and the heart [of Jefferson] that was never quite fi lled” (45). Jefferson also had several younger siblings, one younger brother and two younger sisters. Jefferson was educated at home until the age of nine, when he went to a local private school run by the Reverend William Douglass from Scotland. There he learned Latin, Greek, and French nearly exclusively. In 1757, the year his father died, Jefferson added classical literature and mathematics to his list of subjects, now under the Reverend James Maury. Feeling he learned everything he could from Maury, Jefferson petitioned one of his guardians, John Harvie, to allow him to enter the College of William and Mary. He entered in 1760 and stayed until 1762. It was at William and Mary that he met a man who was to be one of his lifelong friends and confidants, as well as his law teacher and bar sponsor, George Wythe. Jefferson met Wythe through Professor William Small, a mathematics, natural philosophy, and eventually moral philosophy professor. It was also through Small that Jefferson entered the circle of Virginia’s lieutenant governor, France Fauquier, also a compulsive gambler. Wythe, on the other hand, was a much better influence and role model for Jefferson. When Jefferson met him, he was one of the two leading attorneys in Virginia and was already “famous for his learning and culture” (Bernstein 5). Unlike some of the other students of law during Jefferson’s time, Wythe “refused to let Jefferson’s legal training rest on the familiar, threadbare formula of Coke and copying. Rather, he used an educational plan modeled on his own habits of thought and reading that was designed to inspire love of the law as a body of learning, devotion to its study, and adherence to rigorous standards of legal research and argument” (Bernstein 6). This would seem to suit Jefferson’s love of learning, as
215
he claimed that he spent at least 15 hours a day at his studies during his time at William and Mary. It is no surprise then that he constructed for himself a rigorous schedule for his study of law. Jefferson studied law under Wythe for five years, more than double the regular course of study. In 1767, Jefferson was admitted to the Virginia bar, with George Wythe as his sponsor. The following year, 1768, Jefferson, following in his father’s footsteps, was elected to his fi rst political post, in the lower house of the Virginia legislature, the House of Burgesses. He was 25. Jefferson joined the radical bloc, including Patrick Henry and George Washington, against those backing the royal governor; they sought to govern themselves. The seeds of independence had already been planted in Jefferson. In 1765, two years before Jefferson was admitted to the bar, the British Parliament and King George III enacted the Stamp Act against the colonies. This began the colonies’ argument against taxation without representation. Though Jefferson was not yet part of the legislature when the Stamp Act Congress met—it was the fi rst intercolonial gathering to oppose British policies—the desire to see the colonies united was something Jefferson believed in. Even though Jefferson “insisted that the colonists were freeborn Englishman,” he also insisted that he was a Virginian and “a Virginian gentleman was as good as—and entitled to the same rights as—any native born Englishman” (Bernstein 19, 20). As such, Jefferson was one of the earliest proponents of the American cause. So in 1773, Jefferson, Dabney Carr, and Richard Henry Lee proposed a “committee of correspondence.” This was to be a “group of politicians who would write letters to like-minded politicians in other colonies to share ideas, spread news, and coordinate political strategy and tactics in resisting British colonial practices” (Bernstein 20). After the Boston Tea Party, “Virginia took the lead in organizing colonial resistance” with Jefferson as a crucial figure. The First Continental Congress was formed as a result, and the instructions Jefferson wrote for the Virginian delegates, though considered too radical, were published by his friends as