Sunday Meditation
"This was not a pious culture, nor an especially law-abiding one,
but it was convivial."

William Hogarth: The Rake's Progress -- At The Gambling House
(via Art of the Print)

Excerpt from Alan Pell Crawford's "Twilight At Monticello--The Final Years
of Thomas Jefferson (Random House, $27.00, or, 10 $2 bills with Jefferson on the front and the Trumbull's "Signing of the Declaration of Independence" on the back; a $5 with Lincoln, and two ones with Washington, plus tax. Not bad company.)
Here, Crawford sets the context for Jefferson's 18th century Virginia upbringing and the rather wild and woolly behaviors of his social class.

"Most Virginians, black and white, lived in cabins or shacks, but here and there, on the hills overlooking the Rivanna, stood crude manor houses that their builders often called mansions, surrounded by unpainted wooden outbuildings, stables and slave quarters. These plantations were, for the most part, self-contained, self-supporting communities and the closest approximation of towns or cities for miles around.
Travel between these plantations and to the towns back east--sixty miles east to Richmond, say, or a hundred forty to Williamsburg--could be perilous. The dirt roads and carriage trails that connected the plantations were often impassable. Finished goods, like crops, moved mostly by boat. So, quite often, did the settlers. Whether they went by boat or made their way along the crude roads, people traveling to visit neighbors frequently found themselves facing clouds of black smoke from farmers' fires.
Because Virginians lived at such distances from each other, they took every opportunity to socialize. They endured considerable hardships to attend barbecues, fish fries and horse races, and at all of these events drunkenness was commonplace. The society into which Thomas Jefferson was born aspired to gentility but rarely achieved it. Taverns predated houses of worship, which, although established by the Church of England, were attended but grudgingly by the colonials they had been built to serve.
Under English common law, which prevailed through the colonial period, Virginians could be fined for missing church once, flogged for a second infraction, and put to death for a third. Until Thomas Jefferson, as a member of the Virginia legislature, recommended revisions to the penal code, free-thinkers could find their children taken away. During Jefferon's childhood such laws, though rarely, if ever, enforced, remained on the books.
This was not a pious culture, nor an especially law-abiding one, but it was convivial. As soon as work was done, when holidays rolled around, or there was business to attend to at the courthouse, the leading men of the county--entertained themselves in raucous fashion, playing cards, dice, and billiards, often for high stakes. Violence often followed, "it not being the fashion of the day," Jeff Randolph's words, "for men to restrain their tempers."
In 1748, five years after Jefferson's birth, fighting had gotten so vicious that Virginia's colonial legislature passed a general statute against maiming, making it a felony to cut out another person's tongue, put out his eye, or bite his nose or lip; thirty years later, just before the Revolution, the lawmakers added a prohibition against "gouging, plucking or putting out an eye, biting, kicking or stomping upon" a fellow subject of the British crown."