Jefferson in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

A Man of Easy and Ingratiating Manners (1849)

[141] kkk [A Man of Easy and Ingratiating Manners] (1849) Francis T. Brooke Born at Smithfield in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, Francis T. Brooke (1763– 1851) joined the Continental Army as a lieutenant at sixteen and served in Virginia and the southern theater for the remainder of the Revolutionary War. While in command of the magazine at Westham, Virginia, Brooke first met Thomas Jefferson, then serving as governor, who came to Westham with Archibald Blair, clerk of the council. In A Narrative of My Life (1849), written seventy years after the fact, Brooke is imprecise about dates, but Jefferson recorded visiting the iron foundry at Westham on 30 March 1780, where the public arsenal and weapons factory were located, so this may have been when they met (Jefferson’s Memorandum Books, 1: 494). Restless after the war, Brooke studied history and medicine before settling on a career in law. He obtained his law license in 1788 and started a practice but turned to politics the following decade, being elected to the House of Delegates in 1794 and the senate of Virginia in 1800. When the Virginia Senate unanimously elected him its speaker two years later, Jefferson sent Brooke a copy of A Manual of Parliamentary Practice (1801), the handbook of parliamentary procedure he had compiled for the use of the U.S. Senate. The Virginia Senate was one of many legislative bodies across the United States and, indeed, around the world that adopted Jefferson’s Manual. Brooke appreciated President Jefferson’s opinion about Mary Champe Carter, the woman Brooke would marry on 14 February 1804. That same year Brooke became a judge of the General Court of Virginia and, in 1811, the Virginia Court of Appeals. Twenty years later, when the court was renamed the Supreme Court of Appeals, Judge Brooke was still serving on its bench, which he continued to do until his death twenty years after that. As a veteran officer of the Revolutionary War, Brooke was active in the Society of the Cincinnati, serving as the vice president of the Cincinnati Society of Virginia. In 1807, the Virginia Society resolved that it would eventually present its funds to Washington Academy (later, Washington and Lee University) provided it maintain a military school at its campus in Lexington, Virginia. Unsure whether Washington Academy could meet this condition, Thomas jefferson in his own time [142] Jefferson and Joseph C. Cabell, his aide-de-camp in the financial planning for the University of Virginia or, as it was called in the planning stages, Central College, thought they might secure the funds. They approached Brooke, who promised to do what he could. In an 8 December 1817 letter to Jefferson, Cabell remarked, “Judge Brooke is very friendly to our cause” (Early History of the University of Virginia, 87). having been set on shore on the north side of the river, when we arrived in Richmond, I was ordered to take the command of the Magazine and Laboratory at Westham, seven miles above that place. [. . .] In a few days after I took the command of the Magazine, I saw Mr. Jefferson , then Governor of the State, for the first time. He came to Westham with one of his council, Mr. Blair, whom I had known before, and who informed me they wanted to go into the Magazine. I replied they could not, on which they introduced me to Mr. Jefferson as the Governor. I turned out the guard, he was saluted, and permitted to go in. They were looking for flints for the Army of the South, and of the North, and found an abundant supply. [. . .] The shock I received on the death of my wife, I cannot well describe; but my father had left me a legacy better than property, his fine alacrity of spirits (God bless him), which have never forsaken me; and in the summer afterwards, I was advised to go to the Virginia Springs, and began to look out for another wife, to supply the place to my children of their mother. While at the Warm Springs, with Mr. Giles and some others, a carriage arrived with ladies; there is something in destiny, for as soon as I took hold of the hand of Mary Champe Carter (though I had seen her before and admired her very much), I felt that she would amply supply the place of my lost wife. I began my attentions to her from that moment. In person and in face she was very...