American Sphinx by Joseph J. Ellis

memory, when he was only about three years old, “was of being carried on a pillow by a mounted slave on the journey from Shadwell to Tuckahoe,” perhaps a kind of early premonition of his Philadelphia entry. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a moderately successful planter with a local reputation for physical strength and a flair for adventure as an explorer and surveyor of western lands. When he died in 1757, he left behind two hundred hogs, seventy head of cattle, twenty-five horses, sixty slaves, six daughters, two sons and his widow, Jane Randolph Jefferson.
    Little is known of her (the problem of the Shadwell fire again), except that as a Randolph she was descended from one of the most prominent families in Virginia. There is reason to believe that Jefferson’s relationship with his mother was strained, especially after his father’s death, when, as the eldest son, he did everything he could to remove himself from her supervision. But all inspired speculation on this point is really pure guesswork; no explicit evidence exists. After boarding with the local schoolmaster to learn his Latin and Greek, he went off to the College of William and Mary in 1760. There he gained a reputation among his classmates as an obsessive student, sometimes spending fifteen hours with his books, three hours practicing his violin and the remaining six hours eating and sleeping. He was an extremely serious young man. 5
    After graduating in 1762, he brought his highly disciplined regime to the study of the law in Williamsburg under the tutelage of George Wythe (pronounced
with
). Then, after a long, five-year apprenticeship, he began to practice on his own, mostly representing small-scale planters from the western counties in cases involving land claims and titles. Although he broke no legal ground and handled no landmark cases, he gained a reputation in the Williamsburg court as an extremely well-prepared barrister, an indifferent speaker before the bench but a formidable legal scholar. 6
    In 1768 he made two important decisions: first, to build his own home atop an 867-foot-high mountain on land that he had inherited from his father; second, to offer himself as a candidate for the House of Burgesses. The first decision reflected what was to become his lifelong urge to withdraw into his own very private world. The name he first picked for his prospective home was The Hermitage, a retreat that soon became Monticello, his mansion on a mountain and lifetime architectural project. The second decision reflected his political ambition and growing reputation within the transmontane region of the Old Dominion, as well as his emerging stature within the planter elite of the Tidewater. He took his seat in the House of Burgesses in May 1769, then quickly became a protégé of two established Tidewater grandees: Peyton Randolph, an uncle on his mother’s side as well as the most powerful figure in the legislature, and Edmund Pendleton, the shrewd and famously agile apologist for the planter aristocracy. 7
    On New Year’s Day of 1772 he completed his self-image as an aspiring “paterfamilias” by marrying Martha Wales Skelton, an attractive and delicate young widow whose dowry more than doubled his holdings in land and slaves. Marriage seemed to steady him. Up until the early 1770s the various account and commonplace books that he kept for recording his dealings and readings seemed to have been written by a series of different people. The handwriting varies wildly with wholly different slants, penmanship styles and spacing. Around the time of his marriage this unconscious experimentation stopped; his writing settled into the clear, unpretentious form that it retained until old age and that is now enshrined in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence. 8
    His political identity, on the other hand, remained shadowy and marginal. The first vivid image of Jefferson in the House of Burgesses proved emblematic. As a young law student in