CHAP. II.]

A PECULIARITY IN CONVERSATION.

45

grouped into systems, to establish great truths in science or social economy. If half the men who fret and bustle in brief importance in public or private, would each devote themselves for life to the constant observation of a single plant, or insect, or in perfecting the manipulations of the most trivial economic process, and record the result of their observations, they would unquestionably effect more good, and therefore live to better purpose, than they now do. Any discovery that brings the smallest appreciable gain to the individual, brings a stupendous gain to mankind in the aggregate, and especially to the aggregate of mankind through all coming ages. Who is above such labor? And when he who performs well his part in every ordinary, social, political and other relation-nay, far surpasses most of his fellows in them-can still find time to add something useful to the stock of every-day human knowledgethough it be not making two blades of grass grow where but one grew before, but only making five grow where four grew before shall his pursuit be ridiculed by those who spend the same time in vacuity or mere sensuous employment? Above all, shall a man, whose great deeds fill the trump of fame, be pronounced a small man for condescending to be also useful in small things?

One source of Mr. Jefferson's small facts, not mentioned, calls for notice, for it discloses a persistent habit of his life. Col. Thomas J. Randolph writes us :

"His powers of conversation were great, yet he always turned it to subjects most familiar to those with whom he conversed, whether laborer, mechanic, or other; and if they displayed sound judgment and a knowledge of the subject, entered the information they gave under appropriate heads for reference, embodying thus a mass of facts upon the practical details of every-day life.”

That this desire for information was blended, a little, with the desire to give pleasure to those he conversed with, by allowing each man to canter his own hobby, is very possible. A most intelligent and dignified Virginia matron of the old school, and famous for her cuisine-whose guest Mr. Jefferson often was, and whose acquaintance and friendship followed him through every step of his career-was wont to boast that he never failed to inquire with great particularity how her best dishes were compounded and cooked. "I know this was half

46

ADMITTED TO THE BAR.

[CHAP. II.

to please me," she would smilingly say, "but he's a nice judge of things, and you may depend upon it, he won't throw away anything he learns worth knowing."

The remark about his entering information under " appropriate heads," suggests to us to say, that he observed this rule in regard to all facts thought worthy of record. Thus his agricultural observations are ultimately arranged under seventeen general heads, and these into upwards of fifty subdivisions. Everything, even to his expense accounts, has a paged index, made by himself. We look in vain for an illegibly scrawled word or figure-though we shall find him on one occasion, by and by, making all his entries, for two or three months, with his left hand, owing to a broken wrist. He could, therefore, turn at a moment's warning to any fact in his possession. It was thus he combined his facts into systems, deduced rules and made practical applications.

In May, 1766, Mr. Jefferson made a journey north to Annapolis, Philadelphia and New York. He was in Annapolis when the people were celebrating the repeal of the Stamp Act. In Philadelphia, he stopped to be inoculated for the small pox by the celebrated Dr. Shippen. To this point, at least, he made his journey, in a one-horse chair, and his adventures by field and flood, equalling those which would now attend a trip to the Rocky Mountains, are duly chronicled in a letter to Page. At New York he put up at the same house with, and made the acquaintance of, Elbridge Gerry,' a young man of about the same age, a traveller from Massachusetts-destined to be a conspicuous co-actor in the drama of coming events.

In 1767, Mr. Jefferson, now twenty-four years old, was introduced to the practice of the law, at the bar of the General Court of Virginia, by "his faithful and beloved Mentor in youth, and most affectionate friend through life," Mr. Wythe. If sufficiently decisive indications of the attainments which he carried with him into his profession, are not made to appear by his success, they are furnished by his writings.

A partisan historian, who has as signally failed in depicting the private as the public character of Mr. Jefferson, and who

He mentions this in a letter to Gerry, June 11th, 1812, but erroneously places the period of the visit in 1764. He cannot refer to another and preceding visit, for his various memoranda in our possession clearly prove that he made none such.

CHAP. II.]

EXTENT OF HIS PRACTICE.

47

991

apparently never hesitates to substitute a conjecture, or vague impression drawn from newspaper statements (and generally hostile ones) for facts, in regard to that private character, says: "He [Jefferson] had been educated to the law, but he had little taste for the technicalities and chicanery of that profession." Literally, this is true. But the spirit of the remark, namely, that he had little taste for law practice as he found it in the courts of Virginia, is unsupported by a particle of authority. And this conjectural compliment (for so it appears designed), at the expense of his profession, would have probably been quite as offensive to the subject of it, as those equally conjectural calumnies, from the same source, to which it was doubtless designed as some offset, in the way of establishing a claim to impartiality! Mr. Jefferson was neither ignorant enough, nor prejudiced enough, to consider the fixed and adjudicated forms of English law, then practised in Virginia, "technicalities,” as the same author elsewhere remarks, " in nine cases out of ten, obstacles to justice," nor fair practice under those forms, "chicanery." He loved his profession-keenly relished the study and the practice of it-and continued both with unabated zeal, until the Colonial Courts were closed by the Revolution.

His register of cases, already referred to, shows that he was employed in sixty-eight cases in 1767; in one hundred and fifteen in 1768; in one hundred and ninety-eight in 1769; in one hundred and twenty-one in 1770; in one hundred and thirty-seven in 1771; in one hundred and fifty-four in 1772; in one hundred and twenty-seven in 1773; in twenty-nine in 1774. On the 11th of August, the latter year, he gave up his business to Edmund Randolph.' The above being confined to the Gene ral Court, does not indicate the whole amount of his business. In one of the pocket account books, it appears, for example, that he was retained as attorney or counsel in no less than four hundred and thirty cases, in all, in 1771, and in three hundred and forty-seven in 1772. In the account book of 1771, the

Hildreth's History of the United States, 2d series, vol. ii. p. 549.

The curious reader who would see every contemporaneous, bitter, personal, and political attack on Mr. Jefferson, made in times of high party heat, as carefully preserved as the dead wasps in an entomological cabinet, will find it done con gusto in the pages of Hildreth.

The son of Attorney-General John, and grandson of Attorney-General Sir John. Edmund was afterwards Governor of Virginia, Attorney-General and Secretary of State of the United States, etc.

48

STANDING AS A LAWYER.

[CHAP. II. annual amount of his fees to that year is given-the proportion of each fee-bill, paid and unpaid, stated-and each entry is carried out with characteristic exactitude to pence and half pence. To enable "the profession" to catch a glimpse of the ante-Revolutionary scale of fees, we subjoin these: The "total profits" of 1767 were £293 48. 54d.; those of 1768, £304 88. 5d.; those of 1769, £370 118.; those of 1770, £421 58. 103d. The increase during the remaining four years must have been proportionably rapid, for his executor informs us that his average annual profits, for his whole term of practice, reached three thousand dollars. With the very low rate of fees then paid in Virginia,' this was a decidedly successful practice for a young lawyer, or indeed for a lawyer of any age, unless possibly with the exception of three or four of the greatest old luminaries of the bar, like Wythe, Pendleton, Peyton and John Randolph, and Nicholas.

Mr. Jefferson's marked position in his profession, admits of no question. He was employed in important causes by the most distinguished citizens of the colony, and not unfrequently by gentlemen of standing in the other colonies and in England. Among his Virginia clients appear in the register such names as those of the Blands, Burwells, Byrds, Carters, Careys, Harrisons, Lees, Nelsons, Pages, and Randolphs. The list embraces several Royal Councillors of State, and other crown officersthe foremost of the lowland grandees-the most prominent men of the colony in all particulars, who were not themselves lawyers. We find him in various instances associated in the trial of causes with Mr. Wythe, Mr. Pendleton, or Peyton Randolph; and, in one case, retained as associate counsel with the Attorney-General, by Colonel Corbin (the Receiver-General), who himself acted as the attorney, in a suit brought by Ex-Governor Dinwiddie, then in England, against a citizen of Virginia.

Mr. Wirt, in his Life of Henry (page 95), says:

"I find that in January, 1773, Robert C. Nicholas, who had enjoyed the first practice at the bar, and who, by virtue of his office of Treasurer, was forced to relinquish that practice, committed, by a public advertisement, his unfinished business to Mr. Henry-a step which a man so remarkably scrupulous in the discharge

1 The entries in the Register show this and the same fact is stated by Henning, we think, in his Statutes at Large of Virginia. At least there is no doubt of the fact.

CHAP. II.] HIS ERUDITION AND ABILITY AS A LAWYER.

49

of every moral duty, would not have taken had there been any incompetency on the part of his substitute."

This was not done, however, until two years after Colonel Nicholas had offered his unfinished business to Mr. Jefferson, and until the latter, after having actually taken it on his hands for a few months, relinquished it-probably from the pressure of his own practice, and, we make no doubt, in favor of, or recommending, Mr. Henry as his successor. The following is an entry from his register:

"1771, Oct. 31.-Robert Carter Nicholas, Esq., having retired from the bar, put his business into my hands, to be finished, about April last. Finding myself, however, under the necessity of declining it, I make no entries of cases, nor charge anything but what I actually received, which has been as follows: [Then follow the titles of a few cases, and the sums received in them.] See entries of these apart by themselves, on the cover of rough memorandum book for 1771."

It appears from this, that Mr. Wirt was mistaken as to the time of Colonel Nicholas's retirement-if he means to be understood that it took place in 1773-or else, and this is a very probable solution, Mr. Jefferson's relinquishment of Nicholas's business induced the latter to again take the closing up of it on his own hands, until he found a successor for Mr. Jefferson in Mr. Henry. The office of treasurer, which Mr. Wirt mentions as the cause of Mr. Nicholas's retirement, was conferred on him, we believe, in 1766.

Of Mr. Jefferson's erudition and ability as a lawyer, the most substantial proofs remain. They are to be found in his portion of the revision of the laws of Virginia-and, we may add, in the actual post of pre-eminence assigned him in that revision by such colleagues as Wythe and Pendleton-in his Reports of the Decisions of the General Court of Virginia-in his Notes on Virginia-in his written opinions and papers as Secretary of State-in his Parliamentary Manual-in his paper prepared for the use of counsel in the Batture case-in his correspondenceand in a multitude of citations and annotations, scattered through his books. Of several of the above productions, there will be occasion to speak more fully when they are reached, in the chronological order of this narrative. Taken together, no intelligent investigator will presume to deny that they show him to have been one of the most learned and discriminating

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