Thomas Jefferson

Chapter One

All Politics Is Local:
Virginia to Philadelphia

Born on April 13, 1743 (April 2 until the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1758), Thomas Jefferson was the offspring of stable planter stock in the native aristocracy of Virginia. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a surveyor and cartographer whose immigrant parents were said to have come from the Snowdonia district of northern Wales. Peter's marriage to Jane Randolph, whose own family was one of the "names" of traditional Virginia society, can only have improved his standing. Perhaps it was young Jefferson's evident contempt and dislike for his mother -- to whom he almost never alluded-- or his apparent indifference to aristocracy, but when he came to write his own very brief Autobiography in 1821, he spoke of these matters of bloodline and provenance and "pedigree," especially in his mother's case, with an affected indifference. "Let everyone," he wrote, "ascribe the faith and merit he chooses," to such trifling questions. Since Jefferson always founded American claims of right upon the ancient Saxon autonomy supposedly established by the nearmythical English kings Hengist and Horsa, who had left Saxo ... read full excerpt from: Thomas Jefferson ebook