Thomas Jefferson And The Art Of Pigfesting

Our third president, Thomas Jefferson, was quite the Pigfester.

It all began in his days in Williamsburg, Virginia. Jefferson enrolled in the college of William and Mary in 1760. He was mentored by Scottish Enlightenment thinker Dr. William Small. Small took his star pupil to the house of Governor Francis Fauquier for dinner and scintillating conversation. They were joined by the brilliant legal scholar, George Wythe.

Dennis Montgomery writes,

His [Jefferson's] scholarship was less the product of the classroom than the extramural inspirations of a maverick professor who recognized and cultivated frecklefaced Jefferson's budding genius. A torchbearer of the Scottish Enlightenment, Dr. William Small taught natural history. Under his tutelage, Jefferson toiled with the triumvirate of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, and gained admittance to the charmed circle of Governor Francis Fauquier. At the Palace with Small and George Wythe, he dined with three of Virginia's best minds, feasted on science and philosophy, bowed the fiddle, debated ethics, and polished his manners. They quickened his interests in the world, interests he would apply to the heavens, weather, music, mathematics, paleontology, surveying, gadgets, linguistics, education, literature, physics, metaphysics, architecture, art, history, antiquities, medicine, natural law, religion, government, and scientific agriculture. They opened his mind.

Young Jefferson's mind was stretched and challenged at those early Williamsburg Pigfests. He was also a close companion of Pigfester Benjamin Franklin when the two of them were in France. James Gabler explores this fascinating relationship in his book of fictional conversations between Franklin and Jefferson, An Evening With Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Dinner, Wine and Conversation.

Thomas Jefferson continued his Pigfesting while serving as the nation's third President. He used" dumbwaiters" to serve his meals.

When he had any persons dining with him, with whom he wished to enjoy a free and unrestricted flow of conversation, the number of persons at table never exceed four, and by each individual was placed a dumb-waiter, containing everything necessary for the progress of the dinner from beginning to end, so as to make the attendance of servants entirely unnecessary, believing as he did, that much of the domestic and even public discord was produced by the mutilated and misconstructed repetition of free conversation at dinner tables, by these mute but not inattentive listeners.

Jefferson's dinner parties became known for their pêle-mêle style in which visitors sat without regard to rank, and the presentation of food was no less unusual. By employing dumbwaiters, Jefferson reduced the number of servants or slaves required to serve the meal (customarily one servant per diner), but more than that, these dinners provided a mechanism for conversation among powerful political elites. Jefferson recorded the outcomes of his dinners by tracking the actions of legislators after they had personally learned of Jefferson's stance on a subject.

The "pell mell" seating at Jefferson's table stirred things up a bit with the soceity of his day. Gone were the days when the nobility were seated first. Jefferson would allow guests to sit randomly. Though it offended some, Jefferson lived consistently with his famous words : "all men are created equal".

Jefferson was a thinker, a musician, an architect, a scientist, a president ... but above all, Jefferson was a Pigfester.