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College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, the wisest step beyond the Reverend Maury’s tutelage in classical studies. “By going to the College,” Jefferson wrote, “I shall get a more universal acquaintance which may hereafter be serviceable to me.… [and] I can pursue my studies in the Greek and Latin as well there as here, and likewise learn something of the mathematics.”
    The standards for admission to William and Mary were not onerous. According to the college, the test for potential students was “whether they have made due progress in their Latin and Greek.… And let no blockhead or lazy fellow in his studies be elected.”
    Jefferson was neither, and so he left Albemarle County in 1760, bound for Williamsburg. The capital of Virginia, it was home to the House of Burgesses, to theaters, to taverns—and to a circle of men who would change Jefferson’s life forever.

TWO
    WHAT FIXED THE DESTINIES OF MY LIFE
    Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity .…  Nothing is required for this enlightenment … except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters.
    â€”I MMANUEL K ANT , “What Is Enlightenment?”
    The best news I can tell you is that Williamsburg begins to brighten up and look very clever.
    â€”P EY TON R ANDOLPH
    W ILLIAMSBURG , THE COLONIAL CAPITAL , suited Jefferson wonderfully. It had an intellectual climate informed by the very latest in books and a social swirl that included Virginia’s most charming women and most prominent men. It had the professor William Small, the lawyer George Wythe, the royal governor Francis Fauquier, and the statesman Peyton Randolph, all of whom became critical in Jefferson’s life. It had lively distractions. Jefferson gambled on horses and hunted foxes; he gossiped and courted and danced. Above all, Williamsburg had an ethos that was to enthrall Jefferson: the drama and glamour of politics.
    To Jefferson, this was the great world, and the college was an integral part of Virginia life. George Washington received his surveying certificate from William and Mary; other alumni included future chief justice John Marshall, future president James Monroe, and some seventeen governors of Virginia.
    Jefferson was enrolled in William and Mary from the time he was seventeen until he was nineteen, then was in and out of the city for an additional five years as he studied law. Williamsburg had as lasting an influence on the man Jefferson became as Shadwell did. In decades to come, in moments of crisis and of calm, he returned there in his mind’s eye, finding direction in the political lessons he learned and guidance in the ideas he explored.
    College life centered on the Wren Building, which was, in 1760, a three-and-a-half-story, brick-walled structure topped by a cupola. A chapel and crypt had been added in the previous thirty years. Three blocks east along Duke of Gloucester Street was Bruton Parish Church on the left, followed by the Palace Green leading to the Governor’s Palace. Farther down Duke of Gloucester sat the brick capitol, home to the House of Burgesses and the General Court. There, then, in not quite half a square mile, no one landmark more than a few minutes’ walk—or an even briefer ride in one of the carriages that were so prominent when Williamsburg was full and busy with the public business—was the whole structure of public power in Jefferson’s Virginia. No one could have loved it all more than Jefferson himself.
    There were also reminders of the grim facts of life in Virginia. In the mid-1760s a French traveler saw “three Negroes hanging at the gallows” for robbery.
    For Jefferson, William and Mary was largely about what university life is supposed to be about: reading books, enjoying the company of the like-minded, and savoring teachers who