Barrister and Politician, 1767 to 1773
fourth year and stepped almost at once into a good practice, which continued, as he says, "until the Revolution shut up the Courts of Justice."
Jefferson kept a register of all his general court cases. In his first year he had sixty-eight, and in all subsequent years to the end of 1773 over a hundred. In 1774 when all business began to be upset by the turmoil of Revolution, his practice declined; and in August he transferred it to his kinsman Edmund Randolph, son of Sir John Randolph, nephew of Peyton Randolph, and afterwards Attorney General in Washington's first Administration. There is no record extant of his work in the county courts. But we know that he was retained in no less than 430 cases during the year 1771. In those days it was not possible to make a great fortune at the Bar of Virginia.[1] Jefferson's profits averaged about three thousand dollars a year; and it is thought that only Wythe, Pendleton, Patrick Henry, and perhaps two or three others enjoyed a larger income. Of his legal ability and acumen there can be no doubt, nor that he would have distinguished himself as judge or jurist, if he had preferred professional advancement to the public service. True it is that he was no orator, but then oratory was not often required in the Court Room. His voice, we are told, if raised much above conversational tones, "became husky and sank in his throat." Madison gave this as the reason why Jefferson never addressed speeches of more than a few sentences to popular legislative bodies; but he had heard him argue a case before a judge "fluently and well." Jefferson Randolph, anxious to learn about his grandfather's reputation at the Bar, once asked an old man who had often heard him in court, how he ranked as
- ↑ The maximum fees were fixed by a Virginian Statute at 500 pounds of tobacco in the Supreme or General Court and at 150 pounds in the county courts.
[45]
