Free Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham Page A

an alliance that pleased Jefferson beyond measure. The Carrs set up housekeeping in Goochland County, at a place called Spring Forest that was along Jefferson’s route to and from Williamsburg.
    Young and bright, beloved and respected by his teachers in Williamsburg, popular in the aristocratic circles of Virginia, and with the Rebecca Burwell debacle fading from his memory, Jefferson thought the world a largely happy place.
    Then, on Tuesday, October 1, 1765, his sister Jane died, reminding him anew, in the manner of his father’s death and of the failed romance with Burwell, of the fragility of life.
    He had loved Jane, and his grief as the autumn of 1765 gave way to the new year was so deep that it endured in family lore. “The loss of such a sister to such a brother was irreparable,” a great-granddaughter wrote. Drawing on the works of the English poet William Shenstone, a writer much interested in mourning and in the virtues of rural seclusion, Jefferson composed an epitaph in Latin for Jane, which reads in translation:
    Ah, Joanna, best of girls.
    Ah, torn away from the bloom of vigorous age.
    May the earth be light upon you.
    Farewell, forever and ever.
    In the last week of March 1766, nearly six months after Jane died, Jefferson began his garden book, an episodic record of the lives—and deaths—of flowers and vegetables. He longed for spring. “Purple hyacinth begins to bloom,” he wrote on Sunday, March 30, 1766. “Narcissus and Puckoon open,” he noted on April 6. The “puckoons,” or bloodroot, were not long for this world. A week later, on his birthday, the “Puckoon flowers fallen.”
    Still mourning Jane, he was torn between home and the larger world. As the weeks fell away, he planned an excursion north. His first journey outside Virginia foreshadowed much in his life: his ability to conceal anxiety beneath a cool veneer and his urge to engage the world of politics. Setting out in the spring of 1766, Jefferson, always concerned with combating and controlling diseases, stopped at Philadelphia to see Dr. William Shippen, Jr., to be inoculated against smallpox. Jefferson continued on to New York, where, in a sign of the intimacy of the American elite, he boarded in a house along with Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, a future Revolutionary friend and ally.
    It was a perilous trip. Twice on the first day Jefferson’s horse broke away from him, “greatly endanger[ing] the breaking [of] my neck.” The second day brought terrible rains, and Jefferson could find no shelter on the road. The third day he was fording a stream and was nearly swamped by unexpectedly deep water. He was among strangers, too, for the first time in his life, seeing “no face known to me before.”
    Stopping in Annapolis, which he found “extremely beautiful” and whose houses he thought rather better than those in Williamsburg, Jefferson was drawn to the Maryland colonial assembly. His descriptions of the chambers, which he found wanting, and of the lawmakers, whom he also found wanting, are rich in detail. He was not impressed by the appearance and the seriousness of the Maryland legislators.
    He was snobbish about his fellow colonists. “I was surprised on approaching it to hear as great a hubbub as you will usually observe at a public meeting of the planters in Virginia,” Jefferson told John Page. He noted that the Speaker’s wig was yellowed, and, to the young Virginian, the man had “very little the air of a speaker.” The close cataloging of the assembly suggests his interest in the workings of power. It was natural for Jefferson, now a son of Williamsburg, to document his impressions of the seat of a neighboring colony. The spirit of the hour, meanwhile, was momentous: “I would give you an account of the rejoicings here on the repeal of the Stamp Act but this you will probably see in print before my letter can reach you.”
    In