Alan Pell Crawford

“A remarkably disciplined scholar, Jefferson spent money on books the way less purposeful young men spent it on whiskey or women.”
― Alan Pell Crawford, Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson

“At Douglas’s school, Jefferson began to perfect his political and diplomatic skills. Seeking changes in the curriculum, but reluctant to confront the teacher directly, Jefferson sent another student in his stead. “For his temerity,” the historian John Chester Miller has written, “the hapless accomplice was roundly rebuked by the clergyman-pedagogue while Jefferson himself remained undetected and unscathed. Jefferson, one of the great managers of men, began his career as a manager of children.”
― Alan Pell Crawford, Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson