Free The Fabric of America by Andro Linklater

[where she died] in a state of insensibility by his sister, Mrs. Carr, who, with great difficulty, got him into his library, where he fainted, and remained so long insensible that they feared he would never revive. The scene that followed I did not witness, but the violence of his emotion, when almost by stealth, I entered his room at night, to this day I dare not trust myself to describe.”
    For weeks afterward, he could scarcely bring himself to talk to anyone, and the smallest reminder of her death left him overcome. “I ever thought him to rank domestic happiness in the first class of the chief good,” wrote his kinsman Edmund Randolph, astonished at the extent of his misery, “but scarcely supposed that his grief would be so violent as to justify the circulating report of his swooning away whenever he sees his children.”
    The very violence of his emotion, however, throws a light on the inner being of this most private, enigmatic character, “the Great Sphinx of American history,” as his biographer Joseph Ellis termed him. It indicates better than Jefferson’s public explanation the depths of passion that drove hispolitical commitment, a passion he did his best to conceal. His preferred guise was to present himself not as a politician or statesman, but as a scientist. “ Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight,” ran one typical explanation, “but the enormities of the times in which I have lived have forced me to take a part in resisting them and to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passion.”
    There was enough truth in this to make it plausible. His command of botany, the most highly developed science of the time, was evident in his
Notes on the State of Virginia
and spilled over into his magpielike hunger for information about anthropology, agriculture, and meteorology. He took huge pride in succeeding Franklin as president of the American Philosophical Society. And to a degree unmatched by the other Founding Fathers, he saw democracy and the new United States of America as opportunities for experiment.
    In June 1783 he accepted an appointment to fill a vacancy as one of Virginia’s representatives to the Continental Congress, and the ferocious energy Jefferson brought to bear on the vexed question of the territory beyond the Appalachians would only have surprised someone ignorant of the extreme passion of which he was capable. Among the ideas he wished to test out were the advantages of a decimal system of measurement and a decimal coinage, the abolition of primogeniture or inheritance of property by the eldest child, the guarantee of religious liberty, the restriction of ownership of property to one generation, the limitation of contracts to a period of thirty years, the universal provision of free education, and many others more or less practicable. The most far-reaching of his theories, however, concerned the distribution of land and its effect upon society.

    Thomas Jefferson
    His model was an image of Saxon England, before the Norman conquest in 1066. Instead of the Normans’ feudal belief that the land fundamentally belonged to the king and that all his subjects merely held their share of it from him, the Saxon system was based on alodial law, which held that the person who worked the land owned it outright. “The opinion that our lands were allodial possessions is one which I have very long held,” Jefferson told his friend Edmund Pendleton in August 1776. Just as the Norman system was conducive to monarchy because it concentrated ownership of the land in one person, the Saxon structure created democracy by making ownership available to everyone. “Is it not better now that we return at once into that happy system of our [Saxon] ancestors,” he suggested to Pendleton, “the wisest & most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man?”
    In the model he envisioned,