When thee proceeds home, I know no person who will make thee more welcome than Isham Randolph. He lives thirty or forty miles above the falls of James River, in Goochland, above the other settlements. Now, I take his house to be a very suitable place to make a settlement at, for to take several days' excursions all round, and to return to his house at night. … One thing I must desire of thee, and do insist that thee must oblige me therein: that thou make up that drugget clothes, to go to Virginia in, and not appear to disgrace thyself or me; for though I should not esteem thee the less to come to me in what dress thou wilt, yet these Virginians are a very gentle, well-dressed people, and look, perhaps, more at a man's outside than his inside. For these and other reasons, pray go very clean, neat, and handsomely-dressed to Virginia. Never mind thy clothes; I will send thee more another year.
In reply to Bartram's account of the kind welcome which he received from Isham Randolph, he writes: "As for my friend Isham, who I am also personally known to, I did not doubt his civility to thee. I only wish I had been there and shared it with thee." Again, after Randolph's death, he writes to Bartram that "the good man is gone to his long home, and, I doubt not, is happy."
Such was Jefferson's maternal grandfather. His mother, from whom he inherited his cheerful and hopeful temper and disposition, was a woman of a clear and strong understanding, and, in every respect, worthy of the love of such a man as Peter Jefferson.
Isham Randolph's nephew, Colonel William Randolph, of Tuckahoe, was Peter Jefferson's most intimate friend. A pleasing incident preserved in the family records proves how warm and generous their friendship was. Two or three days before Jefferson took out a patent for a thousand acres of land on the Rivanna River, Randolph had taken out one for twenty-four hundred acres adjoining. Jefferson, not finding a good site for a house on his land, his friend sold him four hundred acres of his tract, the price paid for these four hundred acres being, as the deed still in the possession of the family proves, "Henry Weatherbourne's biggest bowl of arrack punch."
Colonel Jefferson called his estate "Shadwell," after the parish in England where his wife was born, while Randolph's was named "Edgehill," in honor of the field on which the Cavaliers and Roundheads first crossed swords. By an intermarriage between their grandchildren, these two estates passed into the possession of descendants common to them both, in whose hands they have been preserved down to the present day.
On the four hundred acres thus added by Jefferson to his original patent, he erected a plain weather-boarded house, to which he took his young bride immediately after his marriage, and where they remained until the death of Colonel William Randolph, of Tuckahoe, in 1745.
It was the dying request of Colonel Randolph, that his friend Peter Jefferson should undertake the management of his estates and the guardianship of his young son, Thomas Mann Randolph. Being unable to fulfill this request while living at Shadwell, Colonel Jefferson removed his family to Tuckahoe, and remained there seven years, sacredly guarding, like a Knight of the Round Table, the solemn charge intrusted to him, without any other reward than the satisfaction of fully keeping the promise made to his dying friend. That he refused to receive any other compensation for his services as guardian is not only proved by the frequent assertion of his son in after years, but by his accounts as executor, which have ever remained unchallenged.[2]
Thomas Jefferson was not more than two years old when his father moved to Tuckahoe, yet he often declared that his earliest recollection in life was of being, on that occasion, handed up to a servant on horseback, by whom he was carried on a pillow for a long distance. He also remembered that later, when five years old, he one day became impatient for his school to be out, and, going out, knelt behind the house, and there repeated the Lord's Prayer, hoping thereby to hurry up the desired hour.
Colonel Jefferson's house at Shadwell was near the public highway, and in those days of primitive hospitality was the stopping-place for all passers-by, and, in the true spirit of Old Virginia hospitality, was thrown open to every guest. Here, too, the great Indian Chiefs stopped, on their journeys to and from the colonial capital, and it was thus that young Jefferson first became acquainted with and interested in them and their people. More than half a century later we find him writing to John Adams:
I know much of the great Ontasseté, the warrior and orator of the Cherokees; he was always the guest of my father on his journeys to and from Williamsburg. I was in his camp when he made his great farewell oration to his people, the evening before his departure for England. The moon was in full splendor, and to her he seemed to address himself in his prayers for his own safety on the voyage, and that of his people during his absence; his sounding voice, distinct articulation, animated action, and the solemn silence of his people at their several fires, filled me with awe and veneration.
The lives led by our forefathers were certainly filled with ease and leisure. One of Thomas Jefferson's grandsons asked him, on one occasion, how the men of his father's day spent their time. He smiled, and, in reply, said, "My father had a devoted friend, to whose house he would go, dine, spend the night, dine with him again on the second day, and return to Shadwell in the evening. His friend, in the course of a day or two, returned the visit, and spent the same length of time at his house. This occurred once every week; and thus, you see, they were together four days out of the seven."
This is, perhaps, a fair picture of the ease and leisure of the life of an old Virginian, and to the causes which produced this style of life was due, also, the great hospitality for which Virginians have ever been so renowned. The process of farming was then so simple that the labor and cultivation of an estate were easily and most profitably carried on by an overseer and the slaves, the master only riding occasionally over his plantation to see that his general orders were executed.
In the school of such a life, however, were reared and developed the characters of the men who rose to such eminence in the struggles of the Revolution, and who, as giants in intellect and virtue, must ever be a prominent group among the great historical characters of the world. Their devotion to the chase, to horsemanship, and to all the manly sports of the day, and the perils and adventures to be encountered in a new country, developed their physical strength, and inspired them with that bold and dashing spirit which still characterizes their descendants, while the leisure of their lives gave them time to devote to study and reflection.
The city of Williamsburg, being the capital of the colony and the residence of the governor, was the seat of intelligence, refinement, and elegance, and offered every advantage for social intercourse. There it was that those graceful manners were formed which made men belonging to the old colonial school so celebrated for the cordial ease and courtesy of their address. As there were no large towns in the colony, the inducements and temptations offered for the accumulation of wealth were few, while the abundance of the good things of the earth found on his own plantation rendered the Virginian lavish in his expenditures, and hence his unbounded hospitality. Of this we have ample proof in the accounts which have been handed down to us of their mode of life. Thomas Mann Randolph, of Tuckahoe, it is said, consumed annually a thousand barrels of corn at his family stable; while the princely abode of Colonel Byrd, of Westover, with its offices, covered a space of two acres. The prices of corn were what seem to us now fabulously low. The old chroniclers tell us that one year the price rose to the enormous sum of thirty-three cents a bushel, and that year was ever after known as the "ten-shilling year"—ten shillings being the price per barrel.
In looking over Colonel Peter Jefferson's account-books, one