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classics and French with the Reverend William Douglas, rector of St. James Northam Parish near Tuckahoe in Goochland County. For five years, excepting only the summers, Thomas lived with Douglas. The mature Jefferson later thought Douglas “but a superficial Latinist, less instructed in Greek, but with the rudiments of these languages he taught me French.”
    Later Jefferson boarded with the Reverend James Maury, whom he described as “a correct classical scholar.” Maury did splendidly by Jefferson, grounding him in the classics and giving him a sense of order. Jefferson warmly recalled his years with Maury, both at study and at play. Much later in life, in a letter to Maury’s son, Jefferson said that should they meet again they “would beguile our lingering hours with talking over our youthful exploits, our hunts … and feel, by recollection at least, a momentary flash of youth.”
    One source of his happiness at Maury’s school was Dabney Carr, a fellow student who became the central friend of Jefferson’s youth. Born in 1743—the same year as Jefferson—Carr came from Louisa County. The two young men shared a love of literature, learning, and the landscape of their Virginia neighborhood. When at Shadwell, they took the books they happened to be reading and climbed through the woods of the mou ntain Jefferson later called Monticello, talking and thinking together, coming to rest at the base of an oak near the summit. There, Jefferson and Carr read their books and spoke of many things. To Jefferson, Dabney Carr was the best of friends, and their minds took flight with each other. No man, Jefferson recalled later, had “more of the milk of human kindness, of indulgence, of softness, of pleasantry of conversation and conduct.” In the way of young friendships, there was an inte nsity and a seriousness—a sense that their lives were linked, their shared hours sacred. They made a pact. Whoever survived the other was to bury the one to die first beneath the favored oak.
    A t school James Maury cultivated Jefferson’s engagement with the literature, history, and philosophy of the ancients. In a Dissertation on Education written in 1762, Maury explained that the classics were not for everyone—but they were for a young man like Jefferson. “An acquaintance with the languages, anciently spoken in Greece and Italy, is necessary, absolutely necessary, for those who wish to make any reputable figure in divinity, medicine, or law,” Maury wrote. Greek and Latin were also critical for men who might take places in society “to which the privilege of birth, the voice of their country, or the choice of their prince may call them.”
    Jefferson valued his education—and education in general—above all things, remarking that, given the choice, he would take the classical training his father arranged for him over the estate his father left him.
    His father’s death in 1757—Peter Jefferson was forty-nine, Thomas fourteen—propelled Thomas into the role, if not the reality, of man of the house. He did not recall the sudden transition fondly. “At 14 years of age the whole care and direction of myself was thrown on my self entirely, without a relative or friend qualified to advise or guide me,” he later wrote to a grandson.
    There would be no more evenings spent in the first-floor study, looking over maps, listening to tales of brave expeditions, tinkering with the tools of surveying, discussing Shakespeare or The Spectator . Those hours with his father were now to live only in memory, with the image of Peter Jefferson before him, inspiring and daunting.
    T homas Jefferson was nearly seventeen when he arrived for the 1759–60 holidays at Chatsworth, his mother’s cousin Peter Randolph’s house on the James near the ancestral Turkey Island plantation. During the visit, Peter Randolph advised Jefferson to enroll at the