A rapid survey of the Jefferson papers in the Library of Congress and in the Massachusetts Historical Society soon convinced me that the subject had scarcely been touched, notwithstanding the controversy that had been raging about the origin of Jefferson's political ideas for more than a century. Hundreds of letters written to Jefferson by French correspondents were preserved in the precious archives, and had apparently never been consulted. Many days were spent in the rotunda of the Manuscript Division, turning the leaves of the two hundred and thirty volumes of the Jefferson papers. Documents after documents threw a new light on the mind of the great American--letters hastily written, rough drafts corrected and recorrected, press copies blurred and hardly decipherable, yellowed scraps of paper crumbling to pieces but piously restored; more letters in a regular, precise hand, the hand of a man who had been a surveyor and who drew rather than wrote. Fifty years of the most eventful period of American history, told by the chief participants, rose from the old documents, and day by day was revealed more clearly the clean-cut figure of Jefferson the American. First of all, the tall, lanky boy, born in a frame dwelling by the Rivanna,--not a farmer boy by any means, but the son of an ambitious, energetic and respected surveyor, a landowner and a colonel in the militia, and of a mother in whose veins ran the best blood of Virginia. The stern and pious education received in the family, the reading of the Bible and Shakespeare, the lessons of Reverend Maury, the son of a Huguenot who took the boy as a boarding student, the years at William and Mary College in the brilliant, animated, but small capital of Virginia, the conversations with Mr. Small, Mr. Wythe and Governor Fauquier, the Apollo tavern, the first love affair, and the long roamings in the hills surrounding Shadwell. More years as a student of law and as a law practitioner, quickly followed by his marriage with a Virginia "belle", and Thomas Jefferson had settled down, a promising young man, a talented lawyer, a respectable landowner, an omnivorous reader who culled from hundreds of authors moral maxims, bits of poetry, historical, legal and philosophical disquisitions and copied them in a neat hand in his commonplace books. But curiously enough during these formative years, the direct influence of the French philosophers was almost negligible. He knew Montesquieu's "Esprit des Lois" and Voltaire's "Essai sur les moeurs", but he used both books as repertories of facts rather than as founts of ideas. His masters were the Greeks of old, Homer and Euripides, then Cicero and Horace, finally Bolingbroke and above all the historians of the English law in whose works he studied the principles, development and degeneration of free institutions.