Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 310, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 December 1920 — Five Minute Chats on Our Presidents [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Five Minute Chats on Our Presidents

By JAMES MORGAN

(CopyrWfct, im. by Jum Mor*an.) PEN OF THE REVOLUTION

-1743—April 13, born at Shadwell, Va. ’ ! ; > 1787—Admitted to the bar. 1789-74—Member ass House of Burgee—s. 1774-78—Member es congress. 1778-7*—Member Virginia assembly. * 1779-81 —Governor. 1783- Member of congress. 1784- —Minister to France. 179*93—Secretary of state.

THOMAS JEFFERSON as much as Abraham Lincoln, Was nursed at the breast * Of tbe unexhausted West At the time of his birth beneath one ot its' foothills the Bine Ridge es Virginia was the American frontier. The farm on which be was born had been cleared In the wild forest by his pioneer father when the smoke of a neighbor’s chimney hardly could be seen fro** his cabin door. When he rode east, with his darling fiddle nnder his am, to be a student at William and Mary college, the tall, slender, sandy-haired, snnb-nosed, freckled-faced seventeen-year-old boy of the frontiersman never had seen a mansion, a church or a village of twenty houses, and he looked with a stranger’*', eyes upon the baronial

pride and display of the old families who formed the viceregal court at Williamsburg. »' . ■ To support the large family of his mother on their too small farm Jefferson turned to the law. In seven years at .the bar he doubled his estate and increased his slaves to 400. Buying the little mountain at whose feet he wad born, he built upon its summit from plads of his own drawing, with bricks of hip own making- and with wood of his own cutting, the noblest house In all Virginia. There at Monticello he made his home ever after.' Jefferson’s law practice continued rapidly to grow until it amounted to $2,500 a year, when he abandoned it forever to prosecute George'm in the great and general court of mankind. He had heard the first call of the’ Revolution while a law student In Williamsburg. «Jts clarion hqd been ringing In Bis ears ever since he stood, an eager looker-on, In the door of tfie house of burgesses. He saw Washington In his seat and he saw his own friend, Patrick Henry, a fiddling Virginian like himself, holding the floor amid cries of treason as he invited the king to profit by the example of sar, who had his Brutus, and Chariest, L who bad his Cromwell. The sword, the tongue and the pen of American freedom were well met that memorable day. After the pen had waited twelve years for Its turn to speak Jefferson sat In the congress at Philadelphia. The squire of Monticello was a silent member, as silent as the squire of Mount Vernon. Opportunity aqd duty went straight to those two speechless congressmen as the needle leaps to a loadstone. After serving as governor of Virginia and member of congress Jefferson was Sent as minister to the court of France. “Yon replace Doctor Franklin” the Count Vergennes said to him on his arrival In Pails. . *T him," the new envoy happily replied; “no one can replace Doctor Franklin." 81x weeks and a day after he had seen that old France of the Bourbons crash beneath the walls of the Bastille to face across me cabinet table with - By nature and training the two were as opposite In their political opinions as in their chalra and teey found

Jefferson In 1775.