Jefferson and Hamilton (4 page)

Thomas Jefferson was born to Peter and Jane Randolph Jefferson in 1743 at Shadwell, a sprawling country estate of 1,400 acres in the lush, mountainous terrain of frontier Albemarle County, Virginia. Young Thomas revered his father, a self-made man who, through industry, quick wits, and a good marriage, had risen to a planter’s status, colonial Virginia’s equivalent of aristocratic rank. Born in humble circumstances, Peter worked for years as a surveyor, growing steadily more affluent. Substance brought influence, which led in turn to a string of local posts, including justice of the peace, county surveyor, and sheriff. After marrying Jane Randolph, the daughter of a James River baron, Peter’s ascent gathered momentum. Soon he was second in command of his county militia and sat in the House of Burgesses, Virginia’s assembly. In the four years before Thomas’s birth, Peter built Shadwell, a six-room, one-and-a-half-story farmhouse that sat atop a ridge and looked toward the Rivanna River. He modeled it on homes that were fashionable with the English gentry, though Shadwell was more modest. Peter acquired ever more land and eventually also came to possess some three hundred head of livestock, a sizable library, and scores of slaves.
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Though Peter was not what colonial Americans considered a well-educated gentleman, Jefferson recollected his father as a man of good judgment with a keen taste for learning. In Thomas’s rendering, Peter had rounded off the coarse edges of his persona and was equally at home in a gentleman’s drawing room as on the untamed frontier.

Though born to a family of wealth and influence, young Thomas Jefferson thought something was missing. Because Shadwell burned in 1770, destroying nearly every letter he had written before the age of twenty-six, information on Jefferson’s youth is elusive, but clues exist to the causes of his unhappy early life.

He was sent away to school at age nine, separating him for the better part of each year from Shadwell, and from his parents and his six sisters and a brother. Four years later he was separated forever from his father, who died in 1757 at age forty-nine. The two experiences may have left young Jefferson feeling abandoned and stripped of the gratification and security of a family. His mother was there, but not for him, or at least that is what he appears to have felt. Only four references to her can be found in the thousands of Jefferson’s letters that have survived, none of them even remotely endearing. Whatever their true relationship, Jefferson must have felt that she did not nurture him with sufficient love and attention. A measure of his troubled sensations can be divined from his subsequent remark, “at 14 years of age, the whole care and direction of my self was thrown on my self entirely, without a relation … to advise or guide me.” As Jefferson later recalled, lacking guidance he developed poor habits and ran with “bad company.” He was amazed, he said, that he had not turned out to be “worthless.” Things worked out for the best, he added, only because of his own “prudent selections” based on his “reasoning powers.” Much of this sounds fanciful, and it may have been Jefferson’s way of persuading himself that, like his father, he was a self-made man.
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Alexander Hamilton’s early years were laced with material deprivation and emotional pain. Like Jefferson, he said little about his youth, and nothing that he said was in the least effusive.

Hamilton’s mother, Rachel Faucette, was the daughter of a sugar planter on Nevis in the British West Indies. At age sixteen, in 1745, after inheriting what her son later called a “
snug
fortune,” she moved with her mother, who was legally separated from her husband, to the nearby Danish island of St. Croix. In no time she married Johann Michael Lavien, a thirty-year-old Dane who was struggling without success to turn around an undercapitalized sugar plantation named—or, perhaps from Rachel’s perspective, misnamed—Contentment. After five years, Rachel walked away from her unhappy marriage. Enraged and humiliated, Lavien had her jailed for a few weeks on what may have been trumped-up charges of adultery. As soon as she was released, Rachel fled to St. Kitts, leaving Lavien for good and abandoning her only child, Peter.

Not long passed before Rachel met James Hamilton, a thirtysomething Scotsman who had come to the West Indies to seek his fortune as a merchant.
He never found it. The reasons for his failures are not clear, though his son later attributed it to James’s “indolence” and lack of the unsparing toughness and preoccupation needed to succeed in business. By the time James encountered Rachel, his career was on the descent. He was scraping by in an unskilled job, possibly that of watchman.

Rachel, who appears to have been a risk taker given to impulsive behavior and bad decisions—traits that were passed on to her son—took up with James, despite his “indigent circumstances” and the fact that she was still legally married to Lavien. Though she and James never wed, they had several children, two of whom survived childhood. James Jr. was born in 1753. His younger sibling, Alexander, was most likely born in January 1755.
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Four years after Alexander’s birth, Lavien suddenly resurfaced and filed for divorce from Rachel. Charging that she was given to “whoring with everyone,” he told the court that she had “completely forgotten her duty” to her legitimate child. Lavien had no difficulty gaining the divorce. The judge, in fact, decreed that Rachel could never again legally marry and that her “whore-children” were not entitled to Lavien’s property.

It is unclear what James Hamilton did to support his family during the fifteen or so years that he was with Rachel, or precisely how comfortably he and his family lived. He probably worked some of the time and Rachel may have as well. What is known is that she had inherited three of her mother’s female slaves in the year after Alexander’s birth and that they almost certainly were hired out to generate income for the family. Somehow, Rachel found the resources to see that Alexander—who outshone his brother as a student—received a few years of schooling. Given the prejudices of the day, young Alexander was denied formal schooling because of his illegitimate birth, but he studied with a private tutor.

In 1765, James found work in Christiansted on St. Croix and moved Rachel and the boys with him. He did not linger long. A year later, James deserted his family. Alexander, who was eleven, never again saw his father, who skipped around the Caribbean for the next three decades.

The emotional toll on young Alexander had to be considerable. He coped with the knowledge that his mother was widely seen as scandalous, with his father’s desertion, and with the painful discrimination occasioned by his illegitimate birth. He never spoke ill of either parent, and when older and successful he invited his father to his wedding and sent him money.
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But what Hamilton felt when the searing pain was fresh during his youth is unknown. The most obvious legacy of the burden that he carried was an obsessive fervor to prevail over the hand that fate had dealt him.

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Despite his decidedly dissimilar background, Jefferson, like Hamilton, was prodded by what he later called a “spice of ambition.”
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He was the son of a father who strove to get ahead. It stretches credulity to imagine that Peter had not done his utmost to instill his habits in his son—especially as the only other male child in the family, Randolph, possessed only modest abilities. If one of the boys was to excel, it had to be Thomas. Nor is it unlikely that a youngster who clearly idolized his father would seek to equal, and probably surpass, him in many ways.

In 1752 nine-year-old Thomas completed his preparatory education at Tuckahoe, the Randolph’s vast estate on the James River. Thereafter, his parents enrolled him in a Latin school run by Reverend William Douglas, a native of Scotland. The school was well to the east of Shadwell in Goochland County, the site of Douglas’s Anglican parish. Jefferson spent more than five years with Douglas and was introduced to Latin, Greek, and French. This prepared him for a superior classical school run by another Anglican clergyman, James Maury. Jefferson had little good to say about his time with Douglas, but he looked on his nearly thirty months with Maury as transformative. The product of a distinguished Virginia family and a graduate of the College of William and Mary, Maury had much to offer, though the timing of Jefferson’s enrollment in his academy may have been crucial. Jefferson encountered Maury at a decisive moment, scant months following Peter Jefferson’s death. Jefferson boarded with Maury and his wife, and they became his surrogate family. Jefferson was impressed by his mentor’s collection of books, the most extensive library he had yet seen, but what was pivotal was Jefferson’s discovery that learning could be a “rich source of delight.” A new world opened to him. Under the guidance of this teacher, whom he called a “correct classical scholar,” Jefferson encountered the wisdom of the ancients in their own languages, which he subsequently said was a training ground for “fine composition.” Perhaps most important, Jefferson was introduced to the liberating scientific and political thought of the modern European Enlightenment.
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Young Jefferson likely had been adrift before he enrolled in Maury’s small log cabin school. Thereafter, while he yet expected to spend his life on a secluded plantation, Jefferson had found a means of bringing the world, old and new, to his remote corner.

Jefferson’s experience with Maury touched something else. It awakened his ambition. He wanted to be part of the wider world that he had found through Maury. All along he had been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, holding public office, possibly someday even sitting in the Virginia assembly. Jefferson still wished to take that path, and he doubtless dreamed of more. It was almost certainly at this juncture that he first coveted the qualities
of a natural aristocrat, the learning, grace, and refinement that set such an individual apart from others, causing him to be seen as a natural leader because of his enlightenment, taste, and urbanity. At age sixteen, he wrote to his guardian asking that he be permitted to attend the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. What he learned there, as well as the “more universal Acquaintance” that he would make among his classmates and professors, would “hereafter be serviceable to me,” he said.
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Jefferson had begun to wish for more from life than running a plantation.

Jefferson enrolled in the college in March 1760, just a few days before his seventeenth birthday. The institution had existed for about sixty years. Its leafy, bucolic campus consisted of three brick buildings, one of them the President’s House. The president and six professors made up the faculty. There were between seventy-five and one hundred students, though some were in the prep school and around 10 percent were Indians who studied a nonclassical curriculum. Williamsburg was Virginia’s capital, and over the years it had swelled to some 1,500 inhabitants. It was the largest town Jefferson had ever seen.

Jefferson was the rare student who came to college already knowing that there could be joy through study, and in Williamsburg he flourished under the tutelage of William Small, a Scotsman with a degree in medicine who was only eight years his senior. According to one student, Small was noted for his “liberality of sentiment.” Jefferson was drawn to that, and he and Small forged a bond cast from their mutual delight in mathematics, science, philosophy, and rational inquiry. Above all, Small was committed to questioning conventional wisdom, and he instilled this trait in Jefferson.
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Years later Jefferson said that it had been his “great good fortune” to have studied with Small, whom he characterized as “correct and gentlemanly” with “an enlarged and liberal mind.” To a greater degree than any other person, he said, Small “fixed the destinies of my life.”
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But Jefferson took some of the credit. He had been “a hard student,” he once said, a description confirmed by classmates who remembered that he would not permit “the allurement of pleasure [to] drive or seduce him” from his studies. He was contemptuous of those who did not take learning seriously, in later years looking back on them as wastrels who had been “worthless to society.” Nevertheless, Jefferson was never unsocial. He formed close, lasting relationships with several college chums. Nor did he study continuously. He adhered to a daily regimen of exercise that included walking, running, or swimming, and he allotted ample time for his violin practice.
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Jefferson need not have attended college. According to Peter’s will, he was to receive five thousand acres and numerous slaves when he turned twenty-one, enabling him to live comfortably. Nor did he need to study further after
completing college. But his formative experiences left him yearning for something more than the life of an affluent planter. He wished for a “
very
high standing” as a distinguished attorney or prominent public figure, someone such as Peyton Randolph, he said, a planter-lawyer who had sat in the House of Burgesses for years as the representative of Williamsburg and the College of William and Mary.
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When Jefferson said that Professor Small had set him toward his destiny, he did not mean that this was due solely to their classroom encounters. Small had introduced his student to George Wythe, an esteemed Williamsburg lawyer who was also a member of the House of Burgesses, and to the royal governor of the colony, Francis Fauquier, whose residence was near the campus. Jefferson later said that he had been brought into their circle, dining and playing music with the three illustrious older men. Clearly, Small saw young Jefferson as a student of unusual talent. How Jefferson saw himself is not known, but it could not have escaped him that his was an exceptional intellect. Not only had he outpaced the other students, but also he had been welcomed into distinguished company. Had Jefferson ever doubted his abilities, by the time he completed his studies he had to have been convinced that he could go places. He saw that practicing law, or at least having a thorough understanding of the law, might help in the fulfillment of his ambitions, and in April 1762 he became an apprentice law student under Wythe. He told a friend that he wished to become a lawyer so that he would “be admired,” but he knew that attaining recognition and eminence in the legal field might unlock the door to an elevated position in public life, a prospect that he thought inviting.
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