Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power Read Online Free PDF

and Jefferson families at Tuckahoe.
    The roots of the adult Jefferson’s dislike of personal confrontation may lie partly in the years he spent at Tuckahoe as a member of a large combined family. Though the eldest son of Peter and Jane Jefferson, Thomas was spending some formative years in a house not his own. His nearest contemporary, Thomas Mann Randolph, was two years older than he was, and this Thomas Randolph was the heir of the Tuckahoe property. Whether such distinctions manifested themselves when the children were so young is unknowable, but Jefferson emerged from his childhood devoted to avoiding conflict at just about any cost. It is possible his years at Tuckahoe set him on a path toward favoring comity over controversy in face-to-face relations.
    It was also at Tuckahoe that Thomas Jefferson, as he grew into childhood, first consciously encountered the complexities of life in slave-owning Virginia. Decades later, in Notes on the State of Virginia, he wrote: “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal.… The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.”
    Tuckahoe was the scene of another small childhood moment. Anxious for school to be over, Thomas slipped away, hid, and repeated the Lord’s Prayer in hopes of hastening the end of school. His prayer went unanswered. He would come to believe that orthodox Christianity was not all it was said to be.
    I n 1752, the Jeffersons moved back to Shadwell, a plantation dominated by Thomas’s mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, who almost certainly exerted as great an influence on her eldest son as the legend of Peter Jefferson did—but in subtler ways.
    To all appearances, Jane ran things as she saw fit. Literate, social, fond of cultivated things—from fancy plate and crockery and well-made tables to fine clothing—she was to endure the death of a husband, cope with the deaths of children, and remain in control to the end, immersed in the universe around her and in the lives of those she loved.
    That her eldest son grew to become just such an unflinching, resilient aristocrat is no surprise. Thomas Jefferson’s bravery in the face of domestic tragedy and his determination to have his own way on his own land among his own people could owe something to the example of a mother from whom he learned much about negotiating the storms of life.
    On the death of her husband Jane Jefferson became both mistress and master at Shadwell. At the age of thirty-seven she was the mother of eight surviving children—the oldest, Jane, was seventeen; Thomas was fourteen; the youngest were two-year-old twins. Her great-great-granddaughter later reported a family tradition that Mrs. Jefferson was “a woman of a clear and strong understanding.” She would have to have been in order to manage her children and the complexities of Shadwell, with its sixty slaves and at least 2,750 acres (which included the thousand-acre tract that became Monticello). From the family Bible that has survived from Shadwell, Jane Jefferson emerges as a meticulous record keeper (a habit her son inherited).
    There was death and fire and family tragedy. One of Jane’s eight children—Thomas’s sister Elizabeth—appears to have been disabled. “The most fortunate of us all in our journey through life frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which may greatly afflict us,” Jefferson once wrote, and “to fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes should be one