His thin legs were clothed in a disreputable old pair of homemade linsey-woolsey breeches, his woolen stockings sagging around his ankles. His daughter looked at him and sighed, forbearing to nag at him, since he had promised to be properly and elegantly dressed for the Christmas dinner.
“I wish he’d dress up,” she murmured to her daughter, Ann. “Aunt Anna will be driving in soon and whenever he looks shabby and uncared for, Aunt Anna always looks at me as though it were my fault.”
“Let him be,” urged Ann. “He’s old, Mother, and tired and he has earned the right to do as he pleases in his own house. At least he is letting us have a real Christmas, so maybe people will stop saying Thomas Jefferson is a great man but that he is also a heathen.”
“Do they say things like that, Ann?” asked her mother anxiously. “Surely not.”
“I’ve heard them. So has Jeff. So I asked him straightway this morning, ‘Grandfather, do you really believe in God?’”
“He didn’t speak at all till he had taken me by the arm and led me over to that long window. Then he pointed at the far mountains and there was a cloud lying on top with a little touch of sun like gold shining over it. ‘Did any man make that?’ he asked me. Then he went back to his book again and never looked up.”
“At least you have your answer. Daughter, a great man is like a pillar that stands a little higher than the commonalty. There is always an itch in the crowd of lesser humanity to throw rocks and mud at it. It was the new laws he wrote for Virginia that started that infidel canard. The law freed the people of the state from being taxed to support the Church. It left them free to worship and pay tithes where they pleased, and naturally the bishops and other clergy resented it. So the story was circulated that Thomas Jefferson had no religion, and to my knowledge he has never spoken one word to refute that libel.”
“He disdained to answer it, Mother. He knew what he was and what he believed and to his mind it was no concern of any one else. He was Jefferson who belonged to the people, but what was in his heart and mind belonged only to himself. Now, at Monticello, he belongs to himself and he is just learning how to live with himself.”