Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the principal studies and endeavors of our lives.” His mother had survived such debacles. It was the work of his own life to do so as well.
    As a woman wielding authority over her family, her hired laborers, and her slaves, Mrs. Jefferson probably developed a fine tactical sense. “She was an agreeable, intelligent woman, as well educated as the other Virginia ladies of the day, of her own elevated rank in society … and … she was a notable housekeeper,” wrote a great-granddaughter. “She possessed a most amiable and affectionate disposition, a lively, cheerful temper, and a great fund of humor. She was fond of writing, particularly letters, and wrote readily and well.”
    Jane Jefferson came from a family that did not doubt its place, and her husband had often been away when he was alive, leaving her to run things in his absence at both Tuckahoe and Shadwell. That Jane Jefferson was a determined woman can be further deduced from the fact that she rebuilt Shadwell after it burned in 1770 rather than moving. It was her world in the way Monticello became her son’s, and she sought to arrange reality as she wanted it to be.
    In an autobiographical sketch he began when he was seventy-seven, Jefferson talked of his mother only in relation to his father. Of Peter Jefferson, Thomas wrote: “He was born February 29th, 1708, and intermarried 1739 with Jane Randolph, of the age of 19, daughter of Isham Randolph, one of the seven sons of that name and family settled at Dungeness in Goochland.” After describing his father’s surveying and mapmaking, Thomas wrote: “He died August 17th, 1757, leaving my mother a widow who lived till 1776, with six daughters and two sons, myself the elder.”
    Except for a brief mention in a letter to a Randolph relative in England several months after her death and for a notation of his paying a clergyman for conducting her funeral, Mrs. Jefferson is absent from the surviving written record of her son’s life.
    Letters between the two burned in the Shadwell fire of 1770, and Jefferson apparently destroyed any subsequent correspondence. Generations of biographers have speculated that Jefferson and his mother were somehow estranged. Yet Jefferson chose to live in proximity to her for many of the nineteen years that she survived her husband—long into Jefferson’s adulthood. Mrs. Jefferson did not die until 1776, the year her son, at age thirty-three, authored the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson made his home at Shadwell while he was away at school and during his early years of law practice. The first was to be expected, but to have headquartered himself after college, as a young lawyer, in what he called “my mother’s house,” is a sign that things between them were not hopelessly hostile, and may not have been hostile at all. He did not move to Monticello, his “little mountain,” until November 1770, when the Shadwell fire upended the family’s domestic arrangements. The rebuilt house at Shadwell would be much smaller than the original.
    J efferson, in any event, always enjoyed the company of women. His most intimate friend among his siblings was his elder sister, also named Jane. Born in 1740, the first child of Peter and Jane, the younger Jane was reported to have been her younger brother’s “constant companion when at home, and the confidant of all his youthful feelings.”
    They indulged common passions for the woods and for music. Jane sang hymns for her brother, and together they would sing psalms, and “many a winter evening, round the family fireside, and many a soft summer twilight, on the wooded banks of the Rivanna, heard their voices, accompanied by the notes of his violin, thus ascending together.” He paid her the highest of compliments: “He ever regarded her as fully his own equal in understanding.”
    A t nine years old, Thomas was sent to study