America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation Read Online Free PDF Page B

Peter Jefferson and Jane Randolph; he had nine brothers and sisters, seven of whom would survive until adulthood. A modest country squire who owned about 1,500 acres of farmland along with two slaves at the time of his marriage, Peter Jefferson was an imposing physical specimen; it was said he could lift a thousand pounds of tobacco from the ground to an upright position with each hand simultaneously. The laconic advocate of self-reliance often reminded his children, “Never ask another to do for you what you can do for yourself.” The Virginia native didn’t attend college, but he was an avid reader of Shakespeare who made sure that his eldest son received the best education that money could buy. At nine, Tom boarded at the house of a local clergyman, William Douglas, where he began studying the classics. No slouch with numbers, Peter Jefferson kept his own detailed account books—his payments to Douglas came to sixteen pounds per annum—and was a talented surveyor who coauthored a widely used map of the southern United States. According to Randall, “the lessons of system, punctuality, energy and perseverance” were passed down from the father, who also served his community as a justice of the peace, a colonel in the militia, and a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses.
    While Thomas Jefferson later spoke affectionately about his father, he almost never mentioned his mother, even though her family stood at the center of Virginia’s aristocracy. “By his own reckoning,” one biographer has written, “she was a zero quantity in his life.” His desire to erase his mother from his history suggests, most Jefferson scholars agree, that the relationship was marked by tension. One common hypothesis is that she had a habit of barking out injunctions to him, just as he would later do with his daughters. Whatever the source of the friction, its effects may well have been considerable; after all, Jane Randolph constantly hovered over him. Except for his student years in Williamsburg, he continued to live with her at Shadwell until he moved to Monticello at the age of twenty-seven. And the boy who felt alienated from his mother would evolve into a loner who had difficulty forging intimate bonds with other human beings, particularly women.
    Details about Tom’s early years are scant. Shadwell burned down in 1770, destroying many of his papers. Eager to protect his privacy, Jefferson would later burn his entire correspondence with both his mother and his wife. And his unfinished memoir, written in 1821, like his various accounts books, focuses mostly on the data. “At the age of 77,” he wrote in the introduction to this hundred-page autobiographical fragment, which describes political events rather than personal experiences, “I begin to make some memoranda and state some recollections of dates and facts concerning myself, for my own ready reference and for the information of my family.” The septuagenarian had little interest in remembering for himself, much less in revealing to others, his life as he had actually lived it. “I am already,” Jefferson noted about a third of the way through, “tired of talking about myself.”
    Tom would be forced to grow up much too fast. In August 1757, when he was fourteen, his beloved father died. In his will, Peter Jefferson left his eldest son a “body servant,” his library of forty-two books—then a not insignificant number—and his mathematical instruments. But Tom would not inherit any property until he reached twenty-one. In the meantime, he would have to cater to those who wielded authority over the family—namely, his mother and the five executors of his father’s estate, whose approval he would need for his expenses. According to one biographer, this was the primary reason why Jefferson began counting every penny and became “obsessed by accountability.” Sadly, even though the adolescent had little control over his own quotidian life, he was saddled with