Excerpts

Part One Morning and Midday Chapter 1 A Society of Would-be Country Squires The Virginia Piedmont, to which Thomas Jefferson returned upon his retirement from the presidency early in 1809, had not changed much since his birth there on April 13, 1743. Jefferson was born at his father's tobacco plantation, Shadwell, on the Rivanna River, which flows through a gap in a small range called the Southwest Mountains. A few miles west of Shadwell, on the far side of the Southwest Mountains, the town of Charlottesville would be established. Just past Charlottesville stood the Blue Ridge Mountains, beyond which lay the Shenandoah Valley, walled off by the more imposing Alleghenies. On the other side of the Alleghenies stretched the great American West. This was rugged territory in 1734, when Peter Jefferson received his first land grant in what would become Albemarle County, and it would remain rugged for decades to come. As late as the American Revolution, a halfcentury after Shadwell was built, Albemarle was a "dreary region of woods and wretchedness," in the words of Thomas Anburey, a British officer held prisoner near Monticello but, as a gentleman, given considerable freedom of movement. Wild horses roamed at will, "and have no proprietors, but those on whose lands they are found," Anburey observed. Hogs ran wild, and packs of wolves preyed on the deer as well as on any sheep the planters kept. Even in Jefferson's time, a Monticello slave would recall, "you could see the wolves in gangs runnin' and howlin', same as a drove of hogs." The Indians that had once lived there and left traces of their existence--an abandoned burial mound stood on Peter Jefferson's property--had moved south and west or vanished altogether by the time the Englishmen began to build their houses. The countryside where Peter Jefferson established his family was unlike that of the Virginia Tidewater, where wide and deep rivers--the James, Potomac, York, Rappahannock, and Appomattox--cut through vast expanses of fertile flatlands. Forty or fifty miles west of Richmond, as the Blue Ridge comes into view, the land becomes hilly; the valleys between the hills are cobwebbed with creeks, a geography that presented a greater agricultural challenge than the planters of the Tidewater were accustomed to, as Peter Jefferson and other settlers would soon discover. These settlers, unlike the Jeffersons, were not all of English derivation. There were also scores of Scots-Irish and Germans who had come down from Pennsylvania through the Shenandoah Valley. These were farmers who made tidy livings from small but well-tended plots of ground, as John Hammond Moore has written in his history of Albemarle County, "doing their own work, with the help of sons, relatives, and hired hands." Having never depended upon slaves to labor for them, these hardworking men (and women) either had little patience for the pretensions of the lordly slaveholders--or were intimidated by them. Two years after Thomas Jefferson's birth, when the first list of Albemarle County "tithables," or white males eighteen and older, was compiled, there were only 1,394 taxpayers in the entire county. The total population of Albemarle--male and female, young and old, white and black, was about 4,250. About half of the people of Albemarle were enslaved, many just brought over from Africa. The smallest group, though they wielded by far the greatest influence, were the self-styled gentlemen who had come from the East, bringing their slaves, their liquor, and sometimes their libraries. The most influential of the English settlers were the Jeffersons and the future president's maternal relatives, the Randolphs. To clear Albemarle's hilly land and grow crops on it proved challenging to all the settlers Excerpted from Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson by Alan Pell Crawford All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.