jefferson’s intellectual development
Jefferson was born and raised during the Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Reason), a cultural movement that originated in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries among intellectuals who sought to reform human society through reason and understanding. advancement of knowledge. Enlightenment ideals had a profound impact on Jefferson and influenced the content of his library.
his father, peter jefferson, was a surveyor and a self-made man who lacked a formal education but “read a lot and got better.” Like many sons of wealthy Virginia planters in the eighteenth century, Jefferson received a classical education. From the age of five, he was instructed in the basics of English grammar, spelling, and composition while living with his family and cousins on the Tuckahoe plantation in Goochland County. when his family returned home to shadwell in albemarle county in 1752, jefferson attended reverend william douglas’s latin school, where he learned “the rudiments” of latin, greek, and french. After his father’s death in 1757, Jefferson was sent to study with the Reverend James Maury, whom Jefferson referred to as a “proper classical scholar,” at his school in the parish of Fredericksville on the border of Albemarle counties. and Louisa. At fourteen, Jefferson would have become familiar with many of the volumes in his father’s Shadwell Library. But it was Maury’s extensive library of some 400 books and 44 pamphlets that broadened Jefferson’s intellectual world. During this formative period, Jefferson developed his lifelong love of classical literature, poetry, history, mathematics, and geography. He read Horace, Virgil, Cicero, and Ovid, and copied passages from their Book of Common Places, along with favorite lines from poets and playwrights such as Alexander Pope, John Milton, John Dryden, and William Shakespeare, among others. he later described reading Latin and Greek authors in their original language as a “sublime luxury” and “a rich source of delight.”
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in 1760, jefferson enrolled at william and mary college in williamsburg and for two years was under the tutelage of william small. Jefferson described Small, the professor of natural philosophy and mathematics, as a man “profound in most useful branches of science,” with “a broad & liberal mind.” small introduced jefferson to the latest developments in science and mathematics, ethics and natural law, and to the ideas of enlightened thinkers and empiricists such as isaac newton, francis bacon, and john locke.sixty years later, jefferson would reflect on small’s presence at the university as “my great good fortune and what probably determined the destiny of my life.”
in 1762, jefferson began law school in williamsburg with small’s friend george wythe, who would become jefferson’s mentor and “most affectionate friend of all life”. there were no law schools at the time and students trained as apprentices under a practicing lawyer. Under Wythe, Jefferson studied English common law and equity. He learned about court procedures and precedents and transcribed passages from procedure manuals, legal treatises, and reports in his book of legal platitudes.
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Jefferson was admitted to the Virginia Bar in 1767 and was elected to represent Albemarle County in the House of Burgesses the following year. As a practicing lawyer and legislator, Jefferson found himself at the center of Virginia politics. The overwhelming majority of histories and legal authorities that Jefferson read and consulted held as the historical ideal the mythical Anglo-Saxon democracy in England before the Norman invasion of 1066: a society ruled by an elected monarch and a popular assembly, where the land- tenure systems were not controlled by any sovereign or government. Enlightenment philosophers also looked to the Golden Age of Athens and Republican Rome for guidance in their search for ideas and solutions to the problems of freedom and self-government. In addition to Greek and Roman historians such as Tacitus and Thucydides, Jefferson also valued the study of modern history, particularly French and British history, in addressing the contemporary political and social issues of his day.
As Jefferson witnessed the growing tensions between the colony and the crown, he drew on his reading of the political history, government, and natural law of the likes of Henry St. John, Mr Bolingbroke; algernon sydney; and John Locke to write what would become an abridged vision of the rights of British America.
In 1776, Jefferson expanded on these arguments when, as one of Virginia’s delegates to the Continental Congress, he was asked to draft the Declaration of Independence. As a member of the General Assembly, Jefferson drew on his understanding of Anglo-Saxon history and natural law when he drafted a constitution for Virginia and, following its break with Great Britain, revised his laws to remove all vestiges of feudal practices. . his study of the Saxon past also contributed to his mistrust of the established church. In his statute to establish religious freedom, he argued that “almighty god has created the mind free,” while his draft of the Virginia Constitution of 1776 stated that Virginians should have “full and free freedom of religious opinion” and not be “compelled to attend or maintain any religious institution.”
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