Dumas Malone

born in 1892 AD; died in 1986 AD (age ~94)


Quotes (Authored)

Nobody can live Jefferson's long and eventful life all over again, and nobody in our age is likely to match his universality.

  • about Thomas Jefferson

    • Here is a volume covering the first major period of [Thomas Jefferson]'s life. Another, covering a second period, is just behind it, and, God willing, there will eventually be two more after these.

    No historic American, except possibly Benjamin Franklin, played so notable a part in so many important fields of activity and thought: government, law, education, agriculture, architecture, science, philosophy.

  • about Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin

    • [Thomas Jefferson's fame] was dimmed toward the middle of the nineteenth century, when slaveholders tended to deride his sayings about human equality and Unionists to deplore his emphasis on State rights.

  • about Thomas Jefferson

    • Jefferson believed that he was sharing in cosmic events in that era, and in the perspective of history he undoubtedly was. [...] The sort of faith it called for he had in rare measure, and maintained afterwards more persistently than almost any other leader. This in itself is a supremely important historical fact.

  • about Thomas Jefferson

    • It was not as a commander like Washington, nor a fiery orator like Patrick Henry, that he gained his chief title to fame — it was as the draftsman of state papers and legislative bills and legal statutes.

  • about Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Patrick Henry

    • During the American Revolution, when Jefferson said "my country" he meant Virginia.

  • about Thomas Jefferson

    • Only in the sense that he believed that society should be governed by those who are really the best qualified can he possibly be regarded as a political aristocrat, and it did not take him long to discover that native ability and high character are the sole possession of no class.

  • about Thomas Jefferson

    • If he must be given a single designation, he was a liberal. Liberty was his chief concern, and his major emphasis was on the freedom of the spirit and the mind.

  • about Thomas Jefferson

    • After Benjamin Franklin [Thomas Jefferson] may be regarded as the fullest American embodiment of the ideals of the Enlightenment. Both in his intellectual and his public life he represented them in action.

  • about Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin

    • If he ever wanted the [governorship of Virginia], which is doubtful, he certainly ceased doing so within a very few weeks.

  • about Thomas Jefferson

    • ...this shy and highly intellectual gentleman might never have got started in politics had he begun his career in a more democratic age.

  • about Thomas Jefferson

    • He was exceedingly domestic, concentrating on his little family an intensity of devotion which is unusual among men.

  • about Thomas Jefferson

    • He had no desire to be the master of others but he applied the most rigorous discipline to himself. That in itself must have made him seem rather formidable as a human being.

  • about Thomas Jefferson

    • Jefferson was born on the fringe of western settlement, and some will say that he thus became a child of the American frontier.

  • about Thomas Jefferson

    • Rowe and the Master of the grammar school became far too merry and led the college boys in a row with the boys of the town. Consequently, one of these clergymen was summarily dismissed and the other resigned... Almost a year passed before a successor to the deposed professor of moral philosophy was installed, and in the interim Small added all or many of Rowe's subjects to his own.

  • about Thomas Jefferson, William Small, Reverend Jacob Rowe

    • The most important early fact about Thomas Jefferson is not that he appeared on the edge of settlement but that he was born in the Province of Virginia and that, from his first days, he was numbered among its gentry.

  • about Thomas Jefferson

    • Neither in financial power nor worldly wisdom were the early Jeffersons a match for the early Byrds.

    The Colonel [Peter Jefferson] was never much of a talker, however; he was a man of action.

  • about Peter Jefferson

    • Nobody can live Jefferson's long and eventful life over again, and nobody in our age is likely to match his universality.

  • about Thomas Jefferson

      • The road to riches and power lay open to those who acquired land while it was still easy to get, and who somehow found labor with which to exploit it. The distinct advantage lay with those who had influence and capital. Labor was always scarcer than land, and slaves rather than acreage came to be the major criterion of prosperity.

      He died at the age of fifty-seven, in November, 1742 — three years after the marriage of his daughter to Peter Jefferson, and only a few months before the birth of their first son.

    • about Isham Randolph, Thomas Jefferson, Peter Jefferson, Jane Randolph Jefferson

      • [Peter Jefferson]'s wife had been promsed a dowry of two hundred pounds sterling, but Isham had not paid it by the time he made his will. Jane Randolph probably took a body servant or so with her but she seems to have brought her husband no land.

    • about Isham Randolph, Peter Jefferson, Jane Randolph Jefferson

      • The name of Joshua Fry is linked with that of Peter Jefferson in the most important of the latter's activities as a surveyor. In effect if not in fact the two men constituted a partnership. Somewhat more than three years after they helped set up the Fairfax Stone, they surveyed the dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina for ninety miles beyond the point where William Byrd and his fellow commissioners had left it a score of years before.

    • about Peter Jefferson, Joshua Fry

      • Some months later the Acting Governor, following a directive from the Lords of Trade, selected [Peter Jefferson and Joshua Fry] as the best qualified persons to draw a map of the inhabited part of Virginia.

    • about Peter Jefferson, Joshua Fry

      • [Peter Jefferson] drew no more major boundary lines, but he was county surveyor in Goochland that year; he was again a magistrate of Albemarle by the following spring, and a couple of years after that he became county surveyor there in succession to Joshua Fry, who had just died at Fort Cumberland while commanding the Virginia forces on the frontier. George Washington was his lieutenant. Fry has been credited with being the chief constructive influence in the life of Peter Jefferson, and not improperly. His good will continued to manifest itself after he was dead. He named his associate an executor of his will, left him the surveying instruments which they had used together, and in effect bequeathed him his major public offices.

    • about George Washington, Peter Jefferson, Joshua Fry

      • The ridge of the Southwest Mountains, which is broken at this gap, enters the present Country in the extreme northeast and there it reaches its greatest height, fifteen hundred feet, in a knob which came to be called Peter's Mountain for Colonel Jefferson.

    • about Peter Jefferson

      • Peter build up for his sons two estates of practically the same size, one centering at Shadwell and the other on the South Fork of the James, sometimes called the Fluvanna.

    • about Peter Jefferson

      • When Peter Jefferson knew the region and his son was a boy, [Ablemarle County] was a silent country of far-flung patriarchal seats, though these were without architectural pretension. Afterwards, plain farmhouses on smaller clearings increased in number.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, Peter Jefferson

      • Residents of Albemarle remembered that Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson had penetrated uncharted territory, and men associated with the County followed their example. Thomas Walker of Castle Hill carried on the dividing line from the point where they had left it; and George Rogers Clark, who was born across the Southwest Mountains from Shadwell just about the time that Peter returned, conquered the Northwest during the Revolution. His younger and equally redheaded brother, William Clark, was born in another county after his family had left this one, but Meriwether Lewis, whose name is linked with his in the history of exploration, was a native. Under the direction of President Jefferson they crossed a continent. The tradition of the wilderness persisted in Ablemarle.

    • about George Rogers Clark, Thomas Jefferson, Peter Jefferson, Joshua Fry, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark

      • [Peter Jefferson] died when he was still less than fifty. His elder son, [was] then... fourteen.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, Peter Jefferson

      • He had become a man of substantial property, though it would be an exaggeration to call him a land baron. The Rivanna and Fluvanna tracts together comprised not far from five thousand acres and he had at least half that many more, chiefly in [Ablemarle] County as then constituted.

    • about Peter Jefferson

      • The list of his slaves is impressive; he had more than sixty of them, along with twenty-five horses, seventy head of cattle, and two hundred hogs.

    • about Peter Jefferson

      • ...to each of his daughters [Peter Jefferson left] a carefully safeguarded portion of two hundred pounds to be paid within a year of her marriage or twenty-first birthday. He fully maintained the standard of Isham Randolph and he was determined that future husbands should not be kept waiting.

    • about Isham Randolph, Peter Jefferson

      • When he became twenty-one Thomas was to have either the lands on the Rivanna or the Fluvanna as he should choose, along with a proper share of the lifestock, half of the slaves not otherwise disposed of, and the residue of the estate. The lands that he did not choose were to go ultimately to his brother Randolph, along with a similar portion of the slaves and stock. As the residuary legatee he got the larger share, but the distribution of property between him and his young brother was certainly far more equitable than the distribution of talents. Thomas also got his father's books, mathematical instruments, cherry-tree desk and bookcase; and his designated servant, the "mulatto fellow Sawney," was the most valuable slave.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, Peter Jefferson, Randolph Jefferson

      • One reason for leaving him the bookcase was that he had gone to it very frequently already. The forty volumes he is known to have inherited constituted an insignificant library in the light of his mature standards, but they formed the nucleus of his first collection.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, Peter Jefferson

      • Thomas Jefferson's statement in old age about his father's neglected education must be coupled with the further comment that he had strong native intelligence and improved himself.

    • about Peter Jefferson

      • For all his lack of book learning he deeply appreciated it, and it was he more than anyone else who caused his son to be well schooled. The tradition is that his dying instruction was that the boy should receive a thorough classical education, and Thomas himself said that he was more grateful for this than for all the other privileges which his father's care had placed within his reach. If he had to choose between his estate and a liberal education he would have taken the latter, but no choice was necessary, for he was given both

    • about Thomas Jefferson, Peter Jefferson

      • He said much less about Jane Randolph Jefferson, however, than about his father. He Various entries in his financial records after he became a man reveal his solicitude for her welfare, and his almost complete failure to mention her name elsewhere may be attributed to his characteristic reticence about the women of his family. Nevertheless, the only remark he is known to have made about her influence was negative, and he probably did not value her counsel very highly.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, Jane Randolph Jefferson

      • He must have inherited some of his diverse talent from his mother, but there is no positive testimony about her personality, and she remains a shadowy figure.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, Jane Randolph Jefferson

      • The family tradition was that she was affectionate, cheerful, humorous, and a ready writer.

    • about Jane Randolph Jefferson

      • ...almost the only thing about her that we can be sure of is that she had physical endurance beyond the average. She suffered inevitable hardships in connection with successive moves; she bore ten children altogether and brought up eight of them; and she survived her husband.

    • about Jane Randolph Jefferson

      • Because of the death of the two infant boys at Tuckahoe, daughters predominated in the household and there was a distinct gap between the five older children [Jane, Mary, Thomas, Elizabeth, Martha] and the three younger [Lucy, Anna Scott, Randolph], who were born after the return to Shadwell.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, Randolph Jefferson, Martha Jefferson Carr, Jane Jefferson, Mary Jefferson Bolling, Elizabeth Jefferson, Lucy Jefferson Lewis, Anne Scott Jefferson Marks

      • Thomas's sisters Jane and Martha meant more than the others in his life. Jane, nearly three years older than he, was his first favorite... It is said that she, more than any other member of the family, stimulated his boyish ambitions and encouraged him in his reading and his cultivation of music... he was only twenty-two when she died unmarried and he wrote for her a Latin epitaph.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, Martha Jefferson Carr, Jane Jefferson

      • In 1752, when he was nine, his father placed him in the Latin school of the Reverend William Douglas, minister of St. James Parish, Northam. He boarded at the clergyman's house during the school term and remained under his instruction until the year that Colonel Jefferson died.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, Peter Jefferson, Reverend William Douglas

      • Because of the dispersed population and lack of towns in Virginia, education was on an individual rather than a civic basis, and opportunity was largely restricted to the gentry. The sons of the greater landowners had all the advantages and disadvantages that go with private instruction. The quality of this instruction was often high, but it naturally varied with the tutors who were available. More often than not they were clergymen.

      Much nearer home a competent classicist was awaiting him, and he probably became aware of the limitations of the Reverend William Douglas after he had begun to study under the Reverend James Maury.

      Early in 1758, when he was fourteen, he began to attend Maury's little school. The clergyman was then forty years old and for six years had been officiating in Fredericksville Parish, which how included the part of Albemarle lying north and west of the Rivanna.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, Reverend William Douglas, Reverend James Maury

      • ...pointed out, many years later, the place designated for a race between Tom Jefferson's slow pony and Dabney Carr's swift horse. Tom had suggested that this should occur on February 30, and not until the last day of the month did the others discover that they had been taken in. This early Jeffersonian hoax produced no lasting ill will, however; the disappointed rider of the swift horse was, for a dozen years, the closest friend that the owner of the slow pony had.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, Dabney Carr

      • From his first notable teacher, Jefferson gained none of his characteristic political principles or religious ideas. He was indebted to him, however, more than to any other man, for his training in the classics. After two years in this school he was able to read Greek and Roman authors in the original, and this he continued to do throughout his long life.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, Reverend James Maury

      • Thomas regarded George Washington as the best horseman of the age, but he himself was described in later life as an "uncommonly fine rider" and the family remembered him as a fearless one.

    • about Thomas Jefferson

      • In a country without large settlements and where plantation seats were far apart, riding was not a matter of occasional diversion but of daily necessity, and good horsemanship was taken for granted among the gentry.

      [Thomas Jefferson] came to believe that the taming of the horse had resulted in the degeneracy of the human body, and he commended walking for exercise from the time that he began to advise the young.

    • about Thomas Jefferson

      • The family preserved a story about his first adventures as a huntsman. When he was ten he was given a gun by his father and sent into the forest alone in order to develop self-reliance. The inexperienced boy was wholly unsuccessful at first in his quest of quarry; but at length he found a wild turkey caught in a pen, tied it to a tree with his garter, shot it, and brought it home in triumph.

    • about Thomas Jefferson

      • It is said that while he was still at Maury's his favorite indoor amusement was playing on the violin, and that he was already proficient for his years.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, Reverend James Maury

      • Lodging and eating at the College were not compulsory for "paying scholars," but the surviving records imply that he did not avail himself of the privilege of living in town. He began to pay board on March 25, 1760, and continued to do so for two years and one month. Then, so far as the records show, his college career was over.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, College of William & Mary

      • With the single but important exception of William Small, professor of natural philosophy, the members of the William and Mary faculty were Anglican clergymen.

    • about College of William & Mary, William Small

      • When Jefferson arrived on the scene, [William Small] was there, teaching physics, metaphysics, and mathematics, and through force of circumstances was soon teaching practically everything else.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, College of William & Mary, William Small

      • Jefferson's other teacher at first was the Reverend Jacob Rowe, professor of moral philosophy, whose field comprised rhetoric, logic, and ethics.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, Reverend Jacob Rowe

      • For nearly half of Jefferson's course Small appears to have been the only regular teacher that he had. Whatever may be thought about the organization, administration, and discipline of the College, here was one of those rare personal influences which prove unforgettable and elicit immortal tribute. He afterwards said that Small probably fixed the destinies of his life.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, College of William & Mary, William Small

      • It is a highly significant fact, also, that the early teacher who did most to fix the destinies of his life was the only layman in the faculty of the College.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, College of William & Mary, William Small

      • The surviving record of the influential layman is all too brief. He was a Scotchman, designated as "Mr. William Small" when he was appointed in 1758. He remained in Williamsburg six years, returned to England where he is said to have been the friend of James Watt and Erasmus Darwin, and died at Birmingham in 1775, listed as "William Small, M.D." He had assumed the title after he left Virginia.

    • about William Small, James Watt, Erasmus Darwin

      • What he learned from his favorite teacher was not obedience to authority but delight in the exercise of his mind.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, William Small

      • John Page, in the last year of his own life, referred to this same teacher as "illustrious," and credited to him the beginnings of his own abiding interest in all branches of mathematics.

    • about William Small, John Page

      • [Mathematics] was always his favorite subject, he said. "We have no theories here, no uncertainties remain on the mind; all is demonstration and satisfaction. I have forgotten much, and recover it with more difficulty than when in the vigor of my mind I originally acquired it." But, as he soon wrote to another, "thanks to the good foundation laid at college by my old master and friend Small, I am doing it with a delight and success beyond my expectation."

    • by Dumas Malone, Thomas Jefferson
    • about Thomas Jefferson, William Small

      • John Page called him his "ever to be beloved professor"

    • by Dumas Malone, John Page
    • about William Small, John Page

      • Jefferson said that he gave to his studies enlightened and affectionate guidance and was like a father to him. Actually, this unmarried teacher, whose chief complaint about his position was its loneliness, made a daily companion of young Jefferson, and taught him no less through informal talk than by his memorable lectures.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, William Small

      • There is some testimony that Small's influence persisted in the College. It has been said that he, more than any other teacher, was responsible for the liberality of spirit which came to characterize William and Mary. Some people called it "skepticism" and thought it dangerous, but Jefferson and his kindred spirits regarded it as the first step towards true knowledge. Historically, William Small was a minor torchbearer of the Enlightenment, and by any reckoning he was one of those rare men who point the way, who show new paths, who open doors before the mind.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, College of William & Mary, William Small

      • To Jefferson [Small] also opened the door of George Wythe's law office, and he and Wythe ushered this inquiring young man into the Governor's Palace.

    • about Thomas Jefferson, William Small, George Wythe, Francis Fauquier