In Pursuit with Colleen Shogan
May 5, 2026 · 22 min · 13 segments
What faith did Thomas Jefferson place in future Americans to accomplish what the revolutionary generation could not? Colleen Shogan talks with Andrew Davenport about Jefferson’s Virginia, the…
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Colleen ShoganHost
Tell us a little bit what the Virginia countryside looks like at that point in time.
It was the western frontier of British colonial North America at the time, and Jefferson's born really pressed right up against the Blue Ridge Mountains, and on the other side, of course, Native territory.
And when Jefferson is coming up through adolescence, the western territory beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains is really a war zone, a theater of the Seven Years' War.
And so Jefferson has early on these inklings of what a empire of liberty could look like in British North America, but he begins, of course, as loyal British subject, as were his parents.
His father a little bit less so from the Jefferson line, who'd been in Virginia longer than the Randolphs had, but had not had the same material success.
So when the Jeffersons and the Randolphs come together, it's really advantageous for the Jefferson family especially.
He was, uh, very civically engaged locally, but his real fortune comes through marriage, marriage to a Randolph, and also his knowledge of the local land.
So as a surveyor, he has a keen land savvy sense, and he's one of the first Europeans to settle in what is now Albemarle County in this Virginia Piedmont area in the central part of the Commonwealth, what is now the state, and he has a thousand-acre home site beginning quite early in the 1730s and '40s.
Doesn't have a home yet, the proper land to fit a proper home that he would like, so through one of his cousins by marriage, in exchange for a very tall drink of rum from a colonial tavern in Williamsburg, Peter Jefferson inherits Shadwell Plantation in Albemarle County.
It's where he will make the Jefferson home, and it's the home that Jefferson is born into in 1743.
So we're talking tobacco as the main crop, and Jefferson grows up in this slave society in Albemarle County, and of course, he's born into the gentry.
Tell us a little bit what the Virginia countryside looks like at that point in time.
It was the western frontier of British colonial North America at the time, and Jefferson's born really pressed right up against the Blue Ridge Mountains, and on the other side, of course, Native territory.
And when Jefferson is coming up through adolescence, the western territory beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains is really a war zone, a theater of the Seven Years' War.
And so Jefferson has early on these inklings of what a empire of liberty could look like in British North America, but he begins, of course, as loyal British subject, as were his parents.
His father a little bit less so from the Jefferson line, who'd been in Virginia longer than the Randolphs had, but had not had the same material success.
So when the Jeffersons and the Randolphs come together, it's really advantageous for the Jefferson family especially.
He was, uh, very civically engaged locally, but his real fortune comes through marriage, marriage to a Randolph, and also his knowledge of the local land.
So as a surveyor, he has a keen land savvy sense, and he's one of the first Europeans to settle in what is now Albemarle County in this Virginia Piedmont area in the central part of the Commonwealth, what is now the state, and he has a thousand-acre home site beginning quite early in the 1730s and '40s.
Doesn't have a home yet, the proper land to fit a proper home that he would like, so through one of his cousins by marriage, in exchange for a very tall drink of rum from a colonial tavern in Williamsburg, Peter Jefferson inherits Shadwell Plantation in Albemarle County.
It's where he will make the Jefferson home, and it's the home that Jefferson is born into in 1743.
So we're talking tobacco as the main crop, and Jefferson grows up in this slave society in Albemarle County, and of course, he's born into the gentry.
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