Thomas Fleming - Young Jefferson

Down a narrow, rutted dirt road, past fields where brown tobacco leaves mellowed in the sun, rode a rangy, rusty-haired man of twenty-seven on a muscular bay horse. The man was in an exuberant mood. His blue-gray eyes devoured the vivid colors of the changing woods in the rich fall sunshine. Other travelers on the road got a cheerful good morning. Occasionally, he would hum a song.

None of this was unusual. Thomas Jefferson was fond of saying: There is not a sprig of grass that grows uninteresting to me. He could give without hesitation the ponderous botanical names for almost every tree and bush he passed. As a true-born Virginian, he was proud, too, of his courtesy. It did not matter if a fellow traveler was black and a slave. Each person Jefferson met received the same gracious, soft-voiced greeting. As for humming songs, this long-limbed straight-up six-footer was always singing as he strode about his plantation.

Even more than most Virginians of his day, Thomas Jefferson loved music. A few feet behind the young lawyer rode his slave, Jupiter, the guardian of Jeffersons most precious possession - his violin. It may have been Jupiter who nine months before rode frantically into Charlottesville to bring Jefferson the worst possible news. His family home, Shadwell, had been destroyed by a wind-whipped fire. In anguish, Jefferson asked if anything - above all his 1,000-book library - had been rescued. No, marster, all lost, was the reply, but we save your fiddle.

Most of the melodies Tom Jefferson was humming on this journey in the fall of 1770 were love songs. The words were absurd, in the plaintive romantic tradition of the day.

Enraptured I gaze when my Delia is by

And drink the sweet poison of love from her eye;

I feel the soft passion pervade every part

And pleasures unusual play round my fond heart.

A few months before, this young man of the world would have laughed cynically at such bathos. But now he was on his way to make his first visit to a house called The Forest. A tall, rather ungainly wooden structure, it sat on a knoll overlooking the broad James River, the main highway of Virginia that flowed serenely from Richmond to the sea. The great planters of the Old Dominion - the Carters, the Shirleys, the Randolphs - had far more magnificent houses, near-palaces of resplendent red brick. Only a mile and a half from The Forest was one of the finest, Shirley, where the agreeable and well-known Jefferson would have been equally welcome. But The Forest was his destination on this fine October day. There was someone waiting there who seemed to listen with a special attention to the young attorneys strenuous opinions on topics as various as slavery, architecture, the political rights of colonial Americans, and the importance of scientific farming.

Her name was Martha Wayles Skelton and her hair was a rich auburn, her large eyes hazel. A fragile, diminutive beauty of twenty-two, she was the widow of Bathhurst Skelton, one of a lively group of young men with whom Tom Jefferson had shared his student days at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. He had probably met Martha Wayles then, along with a host of other girls whose names still twinkle in his youthful letters - Rebecca Burwell, Suzanna Potter, Alice Corbin, Nancy Randolph. Jefferson had spent the years between twenty and twenty-three adoring Rebecca, an orphan descended from some of the best families of Virginia. The heiress to a considerable fortune, Rebecca lived with the wealthy William Nelsons of Yorktown.

Enthusiasm was the word her contemporaries used to sum up Rebecca in later years. To the eighteenth century, this meant a vivid, strongly emotional personality. For months, Jefferson had carried with him in his watch a silhouette of her that she had cut out with her own hands - surely a sign that she did not treat his courtship with complete disdain. But this memento met a fate that might have made a more superstitious man suspect worse disasters to come. Visiting over the Christmas holidays with another set of friends, Jefferson put the watch containing the dear picture, as he called it, on a table beside his bed. During the night, it rained. Jefferson woke to find his watch all afloat in water let in by a leak in the roof. When he attempted to rescue Rebeccas image from the deluge, his cursed fingers gave it a rip that fatally mangled it.

For over two years, the romance percolated, but Jefferson could not seem to bring himself to ask the ultimate question. He rhapsodized in letters about Belinda - the romantic name he gave Rebecca in the vain hope of disguising her identity among his friends - but he knew that marriage in eighteenth-century Virginia meant the end of youth, a sad farewell to the bachelors freedom. For Jefferson, it would also mean the extinction of his dream of traveling to that distant, fascinating old world of England, France, and Italy, about which he had read so much.

Once, alone with Rebecca in a garden, he had hinted strongly that if she would promise to wait a year or two, he would begin his grand tour instantly. But the young ladys frown seemed to cast a shadow on this idea. The would-be lawyer returned to his struggles with Old Coke, as he called Sir Edward Coke, the great British jurist whose commentaries on the laws of England were famed for their crabbed style and uncouth but cunning learning. Retreating to Shadwell, Jefferson lamented that he was certain to spend his time thinking of Rebecca too often, I fear, for my peace of mind, and too often, I am sure, to get through Old Cooke [Coke] this winter: for God knows I have not seen him since I packed him up in my trunk in Williamsburg.

A month later, he was writing to his same friend, John Page, asking plaintively, How does RB do? What do you think of my affair, or what would you advise me to do? Had I better stay here and do nothing or go down and do less? He decided on the first choice and spent his days and nights struggling with Coke and planning a voyage in an imaginary ship called The Rebecca in which he would visit England, Holland, France, Spain, Italy (where I would buy me a good fiddle), and Egypt.

Meanwhile, another college mate, Jacquelin Ambler, began visiting Jeffersons unattainable damsel. All through the following spring and summer, Jefferson stayed home and philosophized: If she consents, I shall be happy; if she does not, I must endeavor to be so as much as possible... Perfect happiness, I believe, was never intended by the Deity to be the lot of any one of his creatures in this world.

His friend Page, acting both as adviser and ambassador, warned Jefferson that Ambler was making ominous progress. So at last the philosophic lover bestirred himself and came down to Williamsburg for the social season. He was soon giving Ambler strong competition.

Then came a climactic night at Raleigh Tavern, the favorite gathering place of the young bloods and their belles. The tables were cleared, and the ladies and gentlemen arrived for a ball. The ladies were dressed in that gay and splendid style that made Virginia famous, their hair craped high with rolls on each side, topped by caps of gauze and lace. The men looked nearly as splendid in their clockwork silk stockings, lace ruffles, gold-and silver-laced cocked hats, and breeches and waistcoats of blue, green, scarlet, or peach. The idea was to see and be seen, to charm and be charmed.

Jefferson had spent the hours before the dance composing a whole series of romantic compliments, witty remarks, and bright observations. I was prepared to say a great deal, he told his friend Page. I had dressed up in my own mind such thoughts as occurred to me in as moving language as I knew how and expected to have performed in a tolerably creditable manner.