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

London, Parliament had stood down from the stamp duties, but passed the Declaratory Act asserting its view that it possessed the power to levy taxes on its colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” For Jefferson, the story of the Stamp Act had begun in the lobby of the House of Burgesses. That it ended for him when he was on the road gave him his first tactile evidence that the American story, and the American cause, was larger than Williamsburg and larger than Virginia. His conception of the American nation may owe something to the celebrations he watched on the Maryland shore.
    I n 1767, Jefferson was admitted to the bar of the General Court of Virginia after his study with George Wythe. He lived at Shadwell with his mother but traveled often. Cases took him to courthouses from Staunton to Winchester. His sister Martha wrote him a report from the garden in early June, noting that his carnations were in bloom, seventy-one days after being planted. His interest in the garden and the farm was practical as well as ornamental. In late November 1767, he calculated how much hay he would need to store up to feed his horses through the winter nights.
    Contemporaries recalled Jefferson as a bright, enthusiastic, and intellectually curious lawyer. His practice was eclectic. One case involved the theft of a bottle of whiskey and a shirt, another a charge of slander in which a David Frame sued a man for saying “he saw [Frame] who is a married man in bed with Elizabeth Burkin, etc.”
    Jefferson’s friends loved him, his clients appreciated him, his elders admired him. He was the kind of man other men thought well of and believed they could trust—unless, as one of his best friends was to discover, a beautiful young wife was in the picture.

FOUR
    TEMPTATIONS AND TRIALS
    You will perceive that I plead guilty to one of their charges, that when young and single I offered love to a handsome lady.
    â€”J EFFERSON , in an 1805 acknowledgment of his infatuation with Elizabeth Moore Walker
    All men are born free [and] everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person and using it at his own will.
    â€”J EFFERSON in the Howell slavery case, 1770
    I T WOULD HAVE BEEN ADULTERY , but Jefferson was too much in love (or thought he was) to care. Attractive and virile, a powerful and charismatic man, he wanted what he wanted, and he did not give up easily.
    Elizabeth Walker was what he wanted. She was the bride of his friend John Walker, a man he had known virtually all his life. The connections between the two men were old and deep. Peter Jefferson had made Walker’s father one of his own executors: Dr. Thomas Walker of Castle Hill was among those who had watched over young Thomas. The two boys followed a similar path, boarding at James Maury’s school before going to the College of William and Mary. “We had previously grown up together at a private school and our boys’ acquaintance was strengthened at college,” John Walker recalled of his friendship with Jefferson. “We loved (at least I did sincerely) each other.”
    Elizabeth Moore, known as Betsy, was a granddaughter of a royal governor and daughter of Bernard Moore, the master of Chelsea, a Tidewater plantation in King William County. Two of her brothers attended William and Mary with Jefferson and her future husband. In January 1764—a period in which he remained gloomy about Rebecca Burwell—Jefferson had reported his friend’s impending marriage. “Jack Walker is engaged to Betsy Moore,” Jefferson wrote John Page from Williamsburg, “and desired all his brethren might be made acquainted with his happiness.”
    There is irony in the phrasing, and perhaps envy. Still smarting from his rejection by Rebecca, Jefferson was in no mood to celebrate another man’s romantic good fortune. His melancholy was exacerbated by the absence of his horses, which he had sent “up the country.” Without them he