One August afternoon, on a visit to Colonial Williamsburg, the Virginia skies opened up without warning; a rainstorm struck like none I had ever experienced.
Growing up in Oklahoma’s tornado alley and living the past 30 years in Seattle, I knew something about stormy weather. My daughter and I found shelter beneath a porch near the Governor’s Palace, and for an hour we stood there with another family whose tour also was cut short. There was no other place to go. Standing there on an 18th Century portico, the town seemed to drift back in time. There were no vehicles, no lights, and no sounds, except for the bellows of a few cows in an adjacent pasture. I began to imagine Thomas Jefferson, then just a teenager, making his way from the campus of William and Mary to an afternoon dinner, where he might play his fiddle and debate with his distinguished mentors, which included America’s first law professor, George Wythe, and the Royal Governor, Lord Fauquier.
That night, back at the hotel, I couldn’t sleep without better understanding who those Jeffersonian mentors were. On my Kindle, I managed to find an obscure book, Jefferson’s Godfather, the man behind the man: George Wythe, mentor to the founding father by Suzanne Harman Munson. We had visited the Wythe household just hours earlier. I went on reading and found an intriguing passage:
Dr. Small, his first mentor, took a personal interest in the youth, introducing his precocious pupil to prominent adults, and setting him on a strong academic course for two years before sailing for England, never to return. Professor Small acquainted his pupil with the works of great scientists like Sir Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon and introduced him to the principles of an ordered universe. From Dr. Small, Jefferson said that he received ‘first views of the expansion of science and the system of things in which we are placed.’ At the time, mathematics was the ‘passion of my life,’ Jefferson recalled. This training would be invaluable later as Jefferson developed his skill as master architect, transforming the landscapes of Virginia and beyond.
Jefferson’s first mentor? More important than Wythe or Franklin? Who was this Dr. William Small? I could see that he was a mathematician, scientist, and philosopher. True enough, Jefferson was a founding father keenly interested in math, science, and innovation. But Jefferson is remembered primarily as the founding father who championed states’ rights and religious freedom. He is now, rightly so, being reassessed for his role as author of the Declaration of Independence while also being a slaveholder.