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قراءة كتاب Thomas Jefferson, the Apostle of Americanism
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BOOK SIX: The Sage of Monticello
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
| Bust of Thomas Jefferson by Houdon In the possession of the New York Historical Society |
Frontispiece |
| A Page of Jefferson's Reflections on the Articles of Confederation From the manuscript in the possession of the Library of Congress |
80 |
| A Page from Jefferson's "Commonplace Book" From the manuscript in the possession of the Library of Congress |
102 |
| Lafayette After a lithograph from the portrait by Grevedon |
206 |
| Alexander Hamilton From the painting by John Trumbull in the possession of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass. |
256 |
| Thomas Jefferson From the portrait by Rembrandt Peale |
290 |
| Monticello as It Appears To-day | 314 |
| Thomas Jefferson From the portrait by Kosciuszko |
468 |
BOOK ONE
The Virginian
CHAPTER I
A VIRGINIA BOYHOOD
The peoples of the Old World worship at the birthplaces of their national heroes and bury their mortal remains in splendid mausoleums, pantheons or Westminster Abbeys. By a significant and symbolic contrast, the memories of Washington and Jefferson are enshrined in no ancestral homes, but in the mansions planned with loving care, in which they so expressed themselves that their very spirit seems to haunt the deserted rooms of Mount Vernon and Monticello. They are buried according to their wishes on their own land, at the very center of the acres they had themselves surveyed and reclaimed from the wilderness, close to nature and Mother Earth. However great may be their debt to the past and their remote ancestors, they stand by themselves at the threshold of America's national history,—master builders who wrestled with gigantic tasks and first thought of their country as the future home of unborn millions.
The boy who was born on April 2, 1743, in the recently erected farmhouse at Shadwell, on the bank of the Rivanna, never gave much thought to his lineage in his later life. Yet Virginians of good stock were always proud of their ancestry, and more than once he was told by his mother that the Randolphs could "trace their pedigree far back in England and Scotland." Jefferson's mother and John Marshall's grandmother were descended from William Randolph and Mary Isham, both of the English gentry, and Jane Randolph, issued from the best blood in the Old Dominion, had married when she was nineteen a man without means, whose education had been neglected, but sturdy and industrious and belonging to one of the proudest and most aristocratic lines of old Virginians.
Of his mother, Jefferson has told us very little either in his letters or in his "Autobiography." We may surmise she had the refined, modest, unobtrusive and yet efficient qualities so marked in the Virginia girls of the Colonial days and so often noticed by travelers. Sons are apt to mold their feminine ideal on the memory of their mother, and Jefferson