The Man from Monticello

In his commonplace book, Thomas Jefferson has included a favorite quotation from Euripides: "For with slight efforts, how should one obtain great results? It is foolish even to desire it." Those few words aptly characterize Jefferson himself. He has never done anything lightly or halfheartedly, and all his life the young author of the Declaration of Independence has made great efforts to obtain great results.

A native Virginian, Jefferson, 33, shares with other wealthy tobacco planters a love of good food, good wine and fast horses. Unlike most of his neighbors in the Piedmont or Tidewater, however, Jefferson has been a lifelong student of natural philosophy and the arts, a man who reads easily in Greek, Latin, French and Italian, and who, when he can, still practices three hours a day on the violin.

Jefferson comes from a well-to-do but not rich family with important political and social connections. his father. Peter Jefferson, who was known for his great physical strength, made his own way as a planter. When he died two decades ago, he left about 7,500 acres and more than 60 slaves, to be equally divided between Thomas and his younger brother Randolph, and generous dowries for his six daughters. Jefferson's mother, Jane, who died only last March, was a Randolph, and thus a member of one of the colony's first families.

Freckled, red-haired Tom Jefferson was originally tutored, along with his older sisters and Randolph cousins, in a one-room building on the Randolph estate. When he was nine, he began studying Greek, Latin and French, and at 14 he luckily fell under the tutelage of an excellent classicist, the Reverend James Maury. Even at that early age, this somewhat aloof intellectual was what he himself calls "a hard student," and his long hours and rigid selfdiscipline are legendary among his friends. Today, winter as well as summer, he bathes his feet in cold water every morning, a regimen he credits with making him impervious to colds and agues. He does occasionally suffer, however, from severe headaches.

When he was 17, Jefferson entered college at William and Mary in Williamsburg, capital of the colony. his principal teacher, a Scot named William Small, imparted to the youth his own searching cast of mind as well as a thorough grounding in natural philosophy and mathematics. The invaluable Small also introduced his student to two other figures whose influence still marks him: Francis Fauquier, a humane, generous, formidably literate man who was then Virginia's acting Royal Governor, and George Wythe, a Williamsburg lawyer and an expert classicist. The four often dined together at the Governor's Palace and enjoyed the musicales there, Jefferson himself participating on the violin. The three older men, drawn by the grace and intellect of the country youth, helped polish his manners while they discussed the theories of Isaac Newton or John Locke.

After college, Jefferson began the study of law with Wythe, moving frequently, as he acquired his own practice, between Williamsburg and his family's estate at Shadwell, 90 miles to the northwest. At 21 he came into his inheritance, and in 1769 he began work on his own estate, four miles from Shadwell, which is still uncompleted and which he calls Monticello, the Italian for "little mountain." (Its elevation is only 500 feet, but it provides a view of 20 miles to the Blue Ridge Mountains.)

With a love of classical architecture inspired by his study of Italian Architect Andrea Palladio, Jefferson began designing the house himself, sketching perfectly symmetrical octagonal wings extending from a central section. It will make an admirable setting for one of the most notable private libraries in the Colonies (more than 1,200 volumes).

A methodical, almost obsessively orderly man, Jefferson has long kept a garden book in which he jots down when the flowers bloom at Monticello and when they die, as well as various account books in which even the smallest expenditure and receipt are entered. More recently, he has begun a farm book to record his plantings and crops, and in another ledger he has started recording each day's temperature. Last week, on the day his Declaration was accepted, he observed not only that the temperature was 68DEG at 6 o'clock in the morning but that it was 72 1/4DEG at 9, 76DEG at 1 in the afternoon and 73 1/2DEG at 9 that night.

A tall man (6 feet 2 inches), but not particularly handsome, Jefferson married relatively late, at 28. his wife, lovely, musical Martha Wayles Skelton, was the widow of his college friend Bathurst Skelton. According to the family story --he himself is reticent about his private life--Jefferson apparently misjudged the traveling time and arrived with his new bride at Monticello in the snow late one night. Only a one-room building for his use was completed at the tune, and the servants had all gone to bed, leaving no fires burning. Despite that inauspicious beginning, the Jeffersons appear unusually contented. They have one daughter, Martha, 4 (a second daughter died this year at two), and Mrs. Jefferson is thought to be expecting another child early next year. Jefferson, who used to love to travel about with his black servant Jupiter at his side, now tries to avoid any duty that calls him away from Monticello for long.

At that he has been notably unsuccessful. In 1768, the year before he began work on the Monticello property, Jefferson was elected to a seat in Virginia's House of Burgesses. He is a shy man who has always avoided open debate --he also has a frail voice and occasionally stammers. But his facile pen and broad intellectual background soon made him an important advocate of American resistance to Parliament. his best-known work until now was his A Summary View of the Rights of British America, a pamphlet of 23 pages that appeared in 1774 and passionately attacked Britain for its intransigence toward the Colonies, particularly the closing of the port of Boston. He wrote that Americans' "own blood was spilt in acquiring lands for their settlement ... For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold." Last week, two years later, that idea was adopted by all the Colonies.

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