A History of the American People

manure.' Yet he said of Washington: The moderation and virtue of a single character has probably prevented this revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.' No one did more than he did to create the United States of America. Yet he referred to Virginia asmy country' and to the Congress as a foreign legislature.' His favorite books were Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy. Yet he lacked a sense of humor. After the early death of his wife, he kept-it was alleged-a black mistress. Yet he was priggish, censorious of bawdy jokes and bad language, and cultivated a weare-not-amused expression. He could use the most inflammatory language. Yet he always spoke with a quiet, low voice and despised oratory as such. His lifelong passion was books. He collected them in enormous quantity, beyond his means, and then had to sell them all to Congress to raise money. He kept as detailed daily accounts as it is possible to conceive but failed to realize that he was running deeply and irreversibly into debt. He was a man of hyperbole. But he loved exactitude-he noted all figures, weights, distances, and quantities in minute detail; his carriage had a device to record the revolutions of its wheels; his house was crowded with barometers, rain-gauges, thermometers and anemometers. The motto of his seal-ring, chosen by himself, wasRebellion to tyrants is
obedience to God.' Yet he shrank from violence and did not believe God existed.
Jefferson inherited 5,000 acres at fourteen from his father. He married a wealthy widow,
Martha Wayles Skelton, and when her father died he acquired a further 11,000 acres. It was
natural for this young patrician to enter Virginia's House of Burgesses, which he did in 1769,
meeting Washington there. He had an extraordinarily godlike impact on the assembly from the
start, by virtue of his presence, not his speeches. Abigail Adams later remarked that his
appearance was not unworthy of a God.' A British officer said thatif he was put besides any
king in Europe, that king would appear to be his laquey.' His first hero was his fellow-Virginian
Patrick Henry (1736-99), who seemed to be everything Jefferson was not: a firebrand, a man of
extremes, a rabblerouser, and an unreflective man of action. He had been a miserable failure as a
planter and storekeeper, then found his metier in the lawcourts and politics. Jefferson met him
when he was seventeen and he was present in 1765 when Henry acquired instant fame for his
flamboyant denunciation of the Stamp Act. Jefferson admired him no doubt for possessing the
one gift he himself lacked-the power to rouse men's emotions by the spoken word.
Jefferson had a more important quality, however: the power to analyze a historic situation in
depth, to propose a course of conduct, and present it in such a way as to shape the minds of a
deliberative assembly. In the decade between the Stamp Act agitation and the Boston Tea Party,
many able pens had set out constitutional solutions for America's dilemma. But it was Jefferson,
in 1774, who encapsulated the entire debate in one brilliant treatise-Summary View of the Rights
of British America. Like the works of his predecessors in the march to independence James Otis'
Rights of the British Colonists Asserted (1764), Richard Bland's An Inquiry into the Rights of the
British Colonists (1766), and Samuel Adams' A Statement of the rights of the Colonies (1772)
Jefferson relied heavily on Chapter Five of John Locke's Second Treatise on Government, which
set out the virtues of a meritocracy, in which men rise by virtue, talent, and industry. Locke
argued that the acquisition of wealth, even on a large scale, was neither unjust nor morally
wrong, provided it was fairly acquired. So, he said, society is necessarily stratified, but by merit,
not by birth. This doctrine of industry as opposed to idleness as the determining factor in a just
society militated strongly against kings, against governments of nobles and their placemen, and
in favor of representative republicanism.