gave relief to the Canadian Catholics and set Upper and Lower Canada firmly on the road to self-
government and dominion status. It was designed to keep the Canadians, especially the French-
speaking ones, loyal to the crown, and succeeded; but it infuriated the American Protestants and
made them suspicious that some long-plotted conspiracy was afoot to reimpose what John
Adams called the hated despotism of the Stuarts.' In the current emotional atmosphere, anything could be believed. At all events, these legislative measures, which included the compulsory quartering of troops on American citizens in Boston and elsewhere, were lumped together by the American media under the term theIntolerable Acts.' They mark the true beginning of the
American War of Independence.
We must now shift the eyewitness focus yet again and see how things appeared to Thomas
Jefferson (1743-1826), then in his early thirties and already a prominent politician in Virginia.
He came from the same background as George Washington, and was related to many families in
the Virginia gentry, such as the Randolphs and the Marshalls. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a
surveyor who mapped the Northern Wilderness part of Lord Fairfax's great domain. Jefferson
was one of ten children and owed a great deal to his devoted elder sister Jane, who taught him to
read books and, equally important, to love music. He learned to play the violin well and carried a
small instrument with him on all his travels. He delighted to sing French and Italian songs. When
he went to William and Mary College, aged sixteen, he was already fluent in Latin and Greek,
and could ride, hunt, and dance well. He had a gift for friendship and became a devoted pupil of
his Scots teacher, William Small, as well as a disciple of the gifted Virginia jurist George Wythe,
seventeen years his senior. Small secured for the college the finest collection of scientific
instruments in America and the two together, said Jefferson, fixed the destinies of my life.' Wythe was another of the enterprising polymaths whom America produced in such numbers at this time and had many clever guests at his house. Jefferson was in some ways the archetypal figure of the entire Enlightenment, and he first learned to blossom in Wythe's circle.' In terms of all-round learning, gifts, sensibilities, and accomplishments, there has never been an American like him, and generations of educated Americans have rated him higher even than Washington and Lincoln. A 1985 poll of members of the Senate showed that conservative and liberal senators alike regarded him as theirfavorite hero.'
We know a great deal about this remarkable man, or think we do. His Writings, on a
bewildering variety of subjects, have been published in twenty volumes. In addition, twenty-five
volumes of his papers have appeared so far, plus various collections of his correspondence,
including three thick volumes of his letters to his follower and successor James Madison alone.,'
In some ways he was a mass of contradictions. He thought slavery an evil institution, which
corrupted the master even more than it oppressed the chattel. But he owned, bought, sold, and
bred slaves all his adult life. He was a deist, possibly even a sceptic; yet he was also a closet theologian,' who read daily from a multilingual edition of the New Testament. He was an elitist in education-'By this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually'- but he also complained bitterly of elites,those who, rising above the swinish multitude, always
contrive to nestle themselves into places of power and profit.' He was a democrat, who said he
would always have a jealous care of the right of election by the people.' Yet he opposed direct election by the Senate on the ground thata choice by the people themselves is not generally
distinguished for its wisdom.' He could be an extremist, glorying in the violence of revolution:
`What country before ever existed a century and a half without rebellion? ... The tree of liberty
must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural