He was a major spokesman in the eighteenth-century revival of the Greek and Roman ethical thought of the Stoic and Epicurean schools, making the ideas and the language of those schools a part of subsequent American values and language. Important as an early writer against a state-established church, he was also a key figure in the lateeighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century revolt against Calvinism, replacing the dogmas of depravity, damnation, and predestination with an enlightenment typology of faith in human nature, and progress through education and free will.
Jefferson's early years were spent at Tuckahoe on the James River, not far from Richmond. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a self-made man. Tradition says he was of Welsh stock. Jefferson's mother was a Virginia Randolph. "They trace their pedigree far back in England and Scotland," Jefferson observed in his autobiography, "to which let everyone ascribe the faith and merit he chooses." At nine, Jefferson attended the school of the Reverend William Douglas, the minister of St. James Parish, Northam, remaining there until 1757, the year his father died. Early the following year Jefferson entered the Reverend James Maury's school in Fredericksville Parish. His admiration for the classics, which dates from this early schooling, was not simply as a discipline of the mind, nor as a help to mastering English.
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