Independence (53 page)

Detail from Trumbull's
Declaration of Independence
. John Adams, the shortest of the five, stands on the left. Richard Sherman is next to him. Robert R. Livingston is in the middle. Thomas Jefferson, the tallest individual, is to Livingston's left. Benjamin Franklin is at the far right. (Architect of the Capitol.)

Once the committee came to an accord on the outline of the Declaration of Independence, it agreed on who should draft the document. In his memoirs, written in 1805, and in a letter to Timothy Pickering in 1822, Adams said not only that the committee asked him and Jefferson to form a subcommittee and jointly write the draft but also that Jefferson appealed to him to retire to “make the Draught.” According to his two accounts, Adams said that he declined both the committee's and Jefferson's invitations on three grounds: It would be better to have someone other than a New Englander write the document; his “obnoxious … and constant Zeal” on behalf of independence had made him many enemies, which might increase the difficulty of securing approval of any document that he authored; and he thought Jefferson was the superior writer. When Jefferson was an octogenarian, he learned of Adams's version of events. He provided his own account of what had transpired, telling James Madison in 1823 that the committee “pressed on myself alone to make the draught,” and he consented.
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Memory is often weak bedrock for a historian, and particularly so when trying to decide who had the best recollection of something that had occurred nearly fifty years earlier. Some scholars have given the nod to Jefferson's recollection because Adams noted in his diary only three years after the event that “We appointed Jefferson … to draw it up.” That might at first blush seem conclusive, except that in the same passage Adams muddied the waters by demonstrating even then that his memory of the events of June 1776 was hardly infallible. He evidently had forgotten that Sherman and Livingston had served on the committee, for in his 1779 diary entry Adams recollected that Virginia's Benjamin Harrison and a mysterious “Mr. R.”—in all likelihood Edward Rutledge—were among the committee's five members.
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That Adams's memory was untrustworthy when it came to the Declaration of Independence imparts some weight to Jefferson's recollection. However, circumstantial evidence also lends support to Jefferson's version of events. During the previous two years, Congress had put together innumerable committees for the purpose of writing addresses, resolutions, petitions, and declarations, and the committees nearly always made a habit of selecting one member, and only one, to prepare a draft. The Committee of Five probably acted in a similar manner.

Neither Adams nor Jefferson recalled that the committee ever considered any of the three other members as a possible draftsman. It is improbable that Livingston or Sherman would have been thought of for the task. Ordinarily, Franklin would have been a candidate for authoring the document, as he had few equals as a writer. But he had only recently returned from his grueling Canadian mission and was exhausted and in poor health. When he reached Philadelphia, about ten days prior to the committee's creation, he was suffering from boils, edema, and possibly psoriasis. A few days later he fell ill with “a severe Fit of the Gout.” Franklin appears to have attended the June 3 and 4 sessions of Congress, but none thereafter until July, and he may not even have attended any meetings of the Committee of Five.
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Assigned the task of drafting the document, Jefferson returned to his apartment at the corner of Market and Seventh streets, west of the State House, and set to work. No one could have doubted that declaring independence would be the most momentous step that Congress had ever taken, and no one presumed that the Declaration of Independence would be inconsequential. But there is no reason to believe that Jefferson could have imagined the impact his composition would have on his contemporaries, much less how it would inspire generations in decades to come. Nor could any of Jefferson's colleagues have foreseen what would spring from his pen. While he was acknowledged to be a talented writer, nothing that Jefferson had previously authored was regarded as an unforgettable achievement.
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Born in 1743 at Shadwell, a plantation surrounded by the lush green hills of frontier Albemarle County, Virginia, Jefferson was the third child and first son of Peter and Jane Randolph Jefferson. Peter Jefferson was a self-made man. Obsessed with wealth and status, he had learned to survey, a trade that facilitated his slow, steady accumulation of land and slaves. In time, Peter had sufficient amounts of both to elevate him to a planter's rank, joining what passed as the aristocracy in colonial Virginia. A third-generation American, Peter had surpassed his colonial predecessors. He owned six times as much land as, and scores more slaves than, his grandfather, and he ultimately became the first in his family to sit in Virginia's House of Burgesses. But when Thomas Jefferson was only fourteen years old, Peter succumbed to one of the perilous fevers that stalked the southern landscape.

Brave, adventurous, and driven, Peter had lived long enough to acquaint his son with a masculine world that exalted ingenuity and fortitude. He taught Thomas to survey and, probably mostly by example, how to manage a plantation and its labor force. He made Thomas a good horseman and saw to it that the young man was comfortable with the outdoors, including the dense forests surrounding Shadwell. Thomas inherited his father's ambition, all-consuming materialism, and love of books and learning, but in many ways the youngster appears to have been cut from a different cloth. Thomas seems to have been more a dreamer and thinker than a doer, more at home indoors reading poetry, singing, playing the violin, and contemplating architecture.

The differences in father and son were not surprising. Whereas Peter had been self-taught, Thomas had received a formal education, and a good one. It began around age five, when he was sent to Tuckahoe, his mother's ancestral home, a sprawling estate on the James River. Thomas studied there under a tutor, after which he spent nine years in Latin schools, one on the James and another a few miles from Shadwell. He subsequently described his schooling as the happiest phase of his youth. James Maury, one of his teachers, was an Anglican minister who lavished love and attention on him, perhaps more than young Jefferson had ever received at home. Maury additionally introduced his pupil to the best scientific and literary works of the blossoming age of Enlightenment, opening to Thomas a new world of ideas and questions that challenged traditional assumptions. It was like a beacon of light that shone into his dark and dreary adolescent years.

Late in life Jefferson looked back on his youth as an unhappy time that he would not wish to repeat, a time so painful that he equated it with “colonial subservience.” Thomas was proud of his father's achievements and saw him as a larger-than-life figure. He said little about his mother, though his tone hints at a relationship that he found lacking in love and affirmation. If Thomas esteemed his father, he loved Reverend Maury, who had acquainted him with the means through which he could set himself free from the real or imagined fetters of his youth.
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At age seventeen, Thomas had already received more schooling than most planters and was due to receive five thousand acres and more than two score slaves when he reached his majority. But he never considered terminating his education. He wanted to attend college, both because of his love of learning and because he thought a college degree was essential for his ascent in public life. In the fall of 1760 Jefferson enrolled at William and Mary College in Williamsburg, a small school that consisted of two buildings on a leafy campus. The college may not have been physically impressive, but in the quarter century between 1750 and the Revolutionary War, it graduated two United States congressmen, a chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, a renowned political theorist, an Anglican bishop, numerous Virginia assemblymen, and Thomas Jefferson. Once in college, Jefferson traveled further down the road that Maury had opened to him. He described himself as a “hard student” who was enjoying “the passion of my life.” His classmates thought him obsessive, as he studied several hours each day and, unlike them, could rarely be tugged from his books to the gaming table or other diversions. At least some of the seven faculty members appear to have regarded him as one of the best students they encountered. The school's most distinguished professor, William Small, took Jefferson under his wing and introduced him to the governor and lieutenant governor of Virginia, as well as to George Wythe, a local attorney who some thought possessed the best legal mind in the colony.
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Jefferson graduated after two years, half the time it had taken Samuel and John Adams to complete their studies at Harvard, and immediately began a legal apprenticeship under Wythe. He planned to enter public life and saw the law as essential if he was to have a chance to become a notable public official. Living with Wythe in Williamsburg some of the time, otherwise studying on his own at Shadwell, Jefferson obtained his license to practice law in three years. He came to love Wythe, calling him his “beloved mentor and … most affectionate friend” and saying that no one else had a more “salutary influence on the course of my life.” But Jefferson never demonstrated a fondness for practicing law. Though he rapidly established a successful practice—it had taken John Adams several years to garner as many clients as Jefferson had in his first year—Jefferson was uncomfortable addressing judges and juries, did not find the law to be intellectually stimulating, and grew contemptuous of most lawyers. He described lawyers as a “disagreeable crowd” that, like parasites, subsisted off the greed and malice of others. He practiced law for seven years, largely because his earnings facilitated his avid consumerism.
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Jefferson's dissatisfaction with practicing law came about in some measure because he had never aspired to a lifelong legal career. He had always looked on the law as a means to other ends: to further his political ambitions or perhaps to facilitate his expensive tastes. In addition, his legal career coincided with another dark, melancholy phase of his life, a period about which he could find nothing good to say in the brief memoirs that he penned much later. Twenty-four years old when he opened his legal practice, Jefferson was single and living a solitary existence in remote Albemarle County. Most of his classmates had married when they graduated from college several years earlier, and Jefferson was openly envious of them. Profoundly shy and socially awkward, he had failed in his one attempt at courtship while in college.

Bewitched by sixteen-year-old Rebecca Burwell, who lived at her uncle's estate near Williamsburg, the nineteen-year-old Jefferson apparently wished to ask her to marry him. He attempted to propose on two separate occasions, but floundered badly each time. On his first attempt, he said, he was overcome by a “strange confusion” that rendered him able only to stammer “a few broken sentences … interrupted with pauses of uncommon length.” On his second try, Jefferson told Rebecca that he wanted to marry but that matrimony would have to wait until he returned from England in perhaps eighteen months or two years. Curiously, there is no indication that Jefferson planned a trip to England. That he was in love is beyond dispute; he evidently wanted to postpone marriage until he had completed his legal studies and had an active practice. But Jefferson could not bring himself to admit that to Rebecca, possibly fearing she would spurn his proposal if confronted with what might be a long and indeterminate wait. As it turned out, Rebecca refused his fumbling proposal and within a short time was engaged to another man, whom she married in 1764.
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After losing Rebecca, Jefferson made no attempt at courtship for eight years. Immersed in his studies, distracted by the launching of his legal practice, and perhaps fearing both rejection and commitment, Jefferson remained withdrawn and reclusive during long stretches between 1762 and 1770. Embittered by Rebecca's rebuff, which he acknowledged had shattered his dreams, a growing misogyny appeared to take hold of him for a time.
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Nevertheless, he continued to crave the warmth and happiness that a family could bring, the very comforts that he had found lacking in his youth.

As painful as these years were, Jefferson was never dysfunctional. He completed his legal training, established a flourishing legal practice, undertook the construction of Monticello—his own mansion, which he planned for a hilltop within sight of Shadwell—and in 1768 was elected to fill the seat his father had once occupied in the House of Burgesses. Jefferson's life was coming together. Some fifteen months after he entered the assembly, he was “touched by heaven,” as he put it.
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He met and began to court Martha Skelton, a twenty-one-year-old widow who lived with her wealthy planter father at the Forest, a plantation near Williamsburg. Like many shy men, Jefferson may have fallen in love with the first woman who took notice of him, but it is just as likely that, with his personal affairs at last in order, he felt at liberty for the first time to fall in love. Family members, and some who worked at Monticello, described Martha as “pretty,” a slight, graceful, shapely woman of medium height with auburn hair and large, vivid eyes. As was true of her suitor, Martha was musically inclined, intelligent, and well read. She exhibited a pleasant demeanor and struck everyone as a good conversationalist. Her appeal was enhanced by her experience in managing a plantation and by her wealth.
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Thomas and Martha were married on New Year's Day 1772. Jefferson was twenty-eight, rather old for matrimony by eighteenth-century standards, but not unusually so for an ambitious man who had set his sights on going places. Washington, Samuel Adams, and John Adams had each married at nearly the same age.