Such was the Jefferson seen superficially by his contemporaries.
II
Those who prefer to think of Jefferson as an aristocrat, born to the purple, who departed from the paths of his fathers, refer only to the maternal ancestry. The American founder of this branch of the family liked to think of himself as the descendant of gentlemen of title and of the half-brother of Queen Mary. Jefferson preferred to dismiss this claim on the aristocracy with the statement that his mother’s family traced ‘their pedigree far back in England and Scotland, to which let every one ascribe the faith and merit he chooses.’ From the Randolphs he probably inherited his love of beauty, his fondness for luxury, but they failed utterly to transmit to him any aristocratic notions of government. There was a reason—his father was a middle-class farmer, and it was from him and his early environment that he received his earliest and most lasting political impressions.
This father was no ordinary man. Physically a giant, he was big in mind and strong in character. By the light of the log fire in the evenings, he was wont to read Shakespeare, Swift, and Addison to his family. An ardent Whig with advanced democratic ideas, he as a magistrate manifested sympathy for the plain people.[370] His thousand acres at Shadwell were in the wilderness and on the frontier, and his son was as much a Westerner in his boyhood as is the boy of Idaho to-day, for the West is a relative term.
This Western boy at the most impressionable age was sent to school in Louisa County, which was then the hot-bed of radical democracy and Presbyterian dissent. The natives about him were in buckskin breeches and Indian moccasins, and, with no coat over their rough hunting shirts, they covered their heads with coon-skin caps. It was a long cry from the polished circles of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia to this typical Western scene; if one was the East, the other was the West. The small proprietor farmers lived in crude cabins, and theirs was the hard lot of the pioneer. Thus Jefferson’s training was that of the Westerner.[371]
The boy was father to the man. When he entered college at Williamsburg, he found himself in the headquarters of the aristocracy, for there, at the capital, the lords of the land had their winter homes where lavish hospitality was displayed. Into this society Jefferson was thrown, and he moved therein as to the manor born—at heart a Western man with Eastern polish.[372] It was not for nothing that there was Randolph blood in his veins.
Even as he moved among the hard-drinking, fox-hunting imitators of the English squires, his sympathies were enlisted in the growing democratic movement of the small farmers among the upper rivers, the tobacco-growers, the hunters and trappers of the Alleghany slopes. The western counties, then the western frontier, had been populated by the Scotch-Irish and Germans—earnest, hard-working, hard-thinking men, who wrestled with nature as with their consciences, built churches in the woods, and school-houses in the clearing. These men were democrats, and their cause became the cause of Jefferson even while he was in college. Volumes have been written to explain Jefferson, but it was reserved for Professor William E. Dodd to do it in a paragraph:
It is not difficult ... to see how the great principle of Jefferson’s life—absolute faith in democracy—came to him. He was the product of the first West in American history; he grew up with men who ruled their country well, who fought the Indians valiantly.... Jefferson loved his backwoods neighbors, and he, in turn, was loved by them.[373]
If in college he was confirming his faith in democracy, born of his schooling in the land of the small farmers, he was burnishing his weapons for the fight. It is significant that he disliked Blackstone and liked Coke because he found the former a teacher of Toryism and the latter a reflector of the philosophy of the Whigs. His training in the law was thorough, for he studied under George Wythe, with whom both Marshall and Clay received their legal schooling. The friendship of Professor Small encouraged his natural spirit of toleration and investigation; and at the ‘palace’ of Francis Fauquier, the gay and brilliant royal governor—‘a gentleman of the school of Louis XV translated into England by Charles II, and into English by Lord Chesterfield’[374] he formed his literary tastes and learned the virtues of literary style. Thus assiduous in his studies, reasonably circumspect in his morals, and profiting immeasurably by contact with superior minds, he was receiving an intensive preparation for his future labors. In the seclusion of his room he communed with Coke and Milton, Harrington and Locke, and the time was to come when his most notable literary production was to disclose, in word and phrase, the influence of the latter. Locke, not Rousseau, was the well from which he drew; and there is no sillier assertion in history than that his democracy was born of association with the men of the French Revolution.