From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com   
      
   A FORTUNATE SON   
      
   It is the strong in body who are both the strong and free in mind. —Peter   
   Jefferson, the father of Thomas Jefferson   
      
   He was the kind of man people noticed. An imposing, prosperous, well-liked   
   farmer known for his feats of strength and his capacity for endurance in the   
   wilderness, Peter Jefferson had amassed large tracts of land and scores of   
   slaves in and around what    
   became Albemarle County, Virginia. There, along the Rivanna, he built   
   Shadwell, named after the London parish where his wife, Jane, had been   
   baptized.   
      
   The first half of the eighteenth century was a thrilling time to be young,   
   white, male, wealthy, and Virginian. Money was to be made, property to be   
   claimed, tobacco to be planted and sold. There were plenty of ambitious men   
   about—men with the    
   boldness and the drive to create farms, build houses, and accumulate fortunes   
   in land and slaves in the wilderness of the mid-Atlantic.   
      
   As a surveyor and a planter, Peter Jefferson thrived there, and his eldest   
   son, Thomas, born on April 13, 1743, understood his father was a man other men   
   admired.   
      
   Celebrated for his courage, Peter Jefferson excelled at riding and hunting.   
   His son recalled that the father once single handedly pulled down a wooden   
   shed that had stood impervious to the exertions of three slaves who had been   
   ordered to destroy the    
   building. On another occasion, Peter was said to have uprighted two huge   
   hogsheads of tobacco that weighed a thousand pounds each—a remarkable, if   
   mythical, achievement.   
      
   The father’s standing mattered greatly to the son, who remembered him in a   
   superlative and sentimental light. “The tradition in my father’s family   
   was that their ancestor came to this country from Wales, and from near the   
   mountain of Snowden, the    
   highest in Great Britain,” Jefferson wrote. The connection to Snowdon (the   
   modern spelling) was the only detail of the Jeffersons’ old-world origins   
   known to pass from generation to generation. Everything else about the ancient   
   roots of the paternal    
   clan slipped into the mists, save for this: that they came from a place of   
   height and of distinction—if not of birth, then of strength.   
      
   Thomas Jefferson was his father’s son. He was raised to wield power. By   
   example and perhaps explicitly he was taught that to be great—to be   
   heeded—one had to grow comfortable with authority and with responsibility.   
   An able student and eager reader,    
   Jefferson was practical as well as scholarly, resourceful as well as   
   analytical.   
      
   Jefferson learned the importance of endurance and improvisation early, and he   
   learned it the way his father wanted him to: through action, not theory. At   
   age ten, Thomas was sent into the woods alone, with a gun. The a   
   signment—the expectation—was    
   that he was to come home with evidence that he could survive on his own in the   
   wild.   
      
   The test did not begin well. He killed nothing, had nothing to show for   
   himself. The woods were forbidding. Everything around the boy— the trees and   
   the thickets and the rocks and the river—was frightening and frustrating.   
      
   He refused to give up or give in. He soldiered on until his luck fi- nally   
   changed. “Finding a wild turkey caught in a pen,” the family story went,   
   “he tied it with his garter to a tree, shot it, and carried it home in   
   triumph.”   
      
   The trial in the forest foreshadowed much in Jefferson’s life. When stymied,   
   he learned to press forward. Presented with an unexpected opening, he figured   
   out how to take full advantage. Victorious, he en- joyed his success.   
      
   Jefferson was taught by his father and mother, and later by his teachers and   
   mentors, that a gentleman owed service to his family, to his neighborhood, to   
   his county, to his colony, and to his king. An eldest son in the Virginia of   
   his time grew up    
   expecting to lead—and to be followed. Thomas Jefferson came of age with the   
   confidence that con- trolling the destinies of others was the most natural   
   thing in the world. He was born for command. He never knew anything else.   
      
   The family had immigrated to Virginia from England in 1612, and in the New   
   World they had moved quickly toward prosperity and respectability. A Jefferson   
   was listed among the delegates of an assembly convened at Jamestown in 1619.   
   The future president’   
   s great- grandfather was a planter who married the daughter of a justice in   
   Charles City County and speculated in land at Yorktown. He died about 1698,   
   leaving an estate of land, slaves, furniture, and livestock. His son, the   
   future president’s    
   grandfather, rose further in colonial society, owning a racehorse and serving   
   as sheriff and justice of the peace in Henrico County. He kept a good house,   
   in turn leaving his son, Peter Jefferson, silver spoons and a substantial   
   amount of furniture. As a    
   captain of the militia, Thomas Jefferson’s grandfather once hosted Colonel   
   William Byrd II, one of Virginia’s greatest men, for a dinner of roast beef   
   and persico wine.   
      
   Born in Chesterfield County in 1708, Peter Jefferson built on the work of his   
   fathers. Peter, with Joshua Fry, professor of mathematics at the College of   
   William and Mary, drew the first authoritative map of Virginia and ran the   
   boundary line between    
   Virginia and North Car- olina, an achievement all the more remarkable given   
   Peter Jefferson’s intellectual background. “My father’s education had   
   been quite ne- glected; but being of a strong mind, sound judgment and eager   
   after information,”    
   Thomas Jefferson wrote, “he read much and improved himself.” Self taught,   
   Peter Jefferson became a colonel of the militia, vestryman, and member of the   
   Virginia House of Burgesses.   
      
   On that expedition to fix the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina,   
   the father proved himself a hero of the frontier. Working their way across the   
   Blue Ridge, Peter Jefferson and his colleagues fought off “the attacks of   
   wild beasts during the    
   day, and at night found but a broken rest, sleeping—as they were obliged to   
   do for safety—in trees,” as a family chronicler wrote.   
      
   Low on food, exhausted, and faint, the band faltered—save for Jefferson, who   
   subsisted on the raw flesh of animals (“or whatever could be found to   
   sustain life,” as the family story had it) until the job was done.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)