by Max Byrd
“I mean to retire,” Jefferson wrote a friend. “Public service is private misery.” He watched in despair as his young wife more or less ceased to function in the household. She sat for hours in her room or wandered the big unfinished house (all that Southern clutter) without speaking. The house slaves took over the purchases and records for the kitchen, the garden and laundry came to a halt, and the governor galloped helplessly back and forth between Richmond and Monticello as often as he could break away from those swaggering, ineffective, whiskey-stained legislators. But Tarleton’s raid and the flight to Carter’s Mountain, if they shook Martha Wayles Jefferson back into a semblance of life, had just the opposite effect on him.
Those who visited the small cabin called Poplar Forest, where he kept his family in retreat for two or three months, say that the tumble from Caractacus broke Jefferson’s spirit more than his bones. Now Melancholy took him for its own. Now it was his turn to be confined to his room and nursed—“I am reduced,” he wrote General Washington, “to a state of perpetual decrepitude” (he was thirty-eight!). Even though Tarleton’s troops had raged over his property in a spirit of total extermination, sparing the house at Monticello but destroying virtually all of his crops, all of his Elk Hill plantation, driving off slaves, cattle, horses (they slashed the throats of the colts too young for riding)—even with so much work to do (and doctor bills, in that inflated currency, of £600), Jefferson stayed whole days silent in bed, writing steadily on a board he held across his knees. Toward the end of summer he would leave his bed and sit propped by a mountain of cushions at his desk, writing for hours at a time, barely eating, rarely speaking. Yet strangely enough, during this whole period he wrote almost no letters at all, just two or three like the one to Washington.
The worst moments, the slough of despondence so to speak, came when Jefferson finally put down his pen and returned with his wife and daughters to Monticello. There he received first the news of the inquiry into his conduct (his supposed cowardice) and a few months afterward the notice of his election once again to the state Assembly at Richmond.
He refused to serve.
He wrote a letter of resignation. He raged in his house. He exchanged decrepitude for a chill, bitter, month-long anger, and when poor young James Monroe came to Monticello to urge him to serve (James Madison was more perceptive, as always, and simply kept his distance), Jefferson told him bluntly that no man was obliged to “everlasting servitude” for the sake of the public. “In thirteen years of service I have sought nothing except the affection of my countrymen,” he told Monroe—they were pacing back and forth (Monroe remembers) on the lush green lawn of the west portico, looking toward Carter’s Mountain. Jefferson would reach the end of the grass, stare at the mountain, and turn abruptly, like the lash of a tail. “I have stood arraigned in my own country for incompetence and cowardice,” he said (Monroe wrote down every word later), “for treason of the heart. With this investigation the Commonwealth has inflicted on me an injury that will be cured only by the all-healing grave.”
The reference to the grave must have shocked the twenty-four-year-old Monroe far more than Jefferson’s anger. Anyone who came to Monticello in the spring of 1782 could see that Mrs. Jefferson was about to deliver again, this about one year after the death of the little girl that had plunged her into such depression, and her features were gaunt to the point of exhaustion. She was always a small, frail woman—odd to see next to the tall, indefatigable Jefferson—and she ought not to have been having children at all (Monroe thought, daringly), let alone seven of them. The grave indeed. A fine and private place. Jefferson’s thoughts were clearly running to his wife’s health and the ordeal she was about to undergo. But as he paced back and forth with Monroe, he justified his refusal solely on legal grounds. With cold eloquence he cited cases where other men had been elected to office and declined to serve. He invoked English common law. He weighed at length the duties of public service against the duties of home and the cost of neglecting his farm. But he made no reference or mention of his wife’s condition. And it was not merely (Monroe thought) that in Virginia a gentleman doesn’t speak of such things in public. It was (stiff, unimaginative Monroe attempted a rare flight of image) as if, with all his marvelous power of language, the former governor were building a fence of precedents and theory to keep out a wolf.
“They may take this in Richmond,” Jefferson said ironically, turning on his heel and citing his own ultimate precedent, “as my declaration of independence.”
On May 8, two days after Monroe’s visit to Monticello, Mrs. Jefferson gave birth to another daughter, whom they named Lucy Elizabeth, the same name as that of the child who had died the year before, a common Virginia custom. Now there were three daughters in the household, plus the six children of Jefferson’s widowed sister: plenty of life for a man in search of affection.
But summer came relentlessly on, as Virginia summers do. And in Albemarle County the summer of 1782 was long and hot and parching dry. The new baby, Lucy Elizabeth, thrived. She had red hair like her father and her sister Patsy and fierce good lungs that she put to use in the service of an early colic; a delightful child, likely to live. But Martha Wayles Jefferson saw little of her baby, or any of the other children. Through the whole long miserable season she was too weak to nurse and too weak to rise. She simply stayed in the narrow bed where she had given birth, her eyes growing larger and larger as her face wasted. Two women attended her constantly—Jefferson’s sister Martha Carr and Martha Jefferson’s own sister—but it was Jefferson himself who gave the sick woman her medicine, poured her the water, pressed the wet handkerchiefs to her temple. A few days after the birth he wrote to Monroe, repeating almost word for word what he had said in defense of his resignation—the reaction in Richmond was scornful, he was taking a sulky “revenge” out of spite—but thereafter he wrote no letters at all, none to anybody. For four full months he was never out of her calling. And yet just as at Poplar Forest, when he wasn’t directly at his wife’s side he was writing constantly—he had a small room that opened directly at the head of her bed. Writing what? More fences against the wolf?
For the wolf had come clear, teeth, claws, and all. One day late in August, Martha Wayles Jefferson sat up in bed, supported by bolsters and cushions, and penned a few lines:
Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen. The days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of a windy day, never to return more—everything presses on …
Her hand faltered and stopped. The passage was from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a novel that Jefferson had read over and over; read aloud to her often in the days of their courtship. He took the pen from her hand and finished the quotation:
… and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.
In Virginia, with its swampy malarial climate, they call late summer and early fall “the dying time.” By the first day of September, Martha had begun to weep uncontrollably when she saw her children. The servants remember that on the fourth Jefferson stood by the bed, holding her frail hand in his, while she asked him to promise that he would never marry again, never, never bring a stepmother in over her children. On the morning of the sixth, Dr. Gilmer, who would accept no payment except the loan of some salt, called all the family and servants in. They stood in silent rows around the bed. A moment before the final scene, Jefferson, unable to stand or sit, was led from the room by his sister Mrs. Carr. She took him to his library, where he fainted and collapsed on the bare floor and remained insensible so long that they feared he would never revive.
For three weeks he kept to this room, walking incessantly day and night, lying down only when he was completely exhausted, and then only in the thin little straw pallet that had been brought in when he fainted. The violence of his emotion was what everyone remarked on—his neighbor Colonel Randolph, who was a hard, violent
man himself, but violent in another direction, wrote Madison contemptuously that even a month after his wife’s death, Jefferson still swooned like a woman whenever he saw their three children. Madison wrote back with precise indignation that his story was “incredible.”
Somehow Jefferson managed to write in his account book for September 6: “My dear wife died this day at 11:45. a.m.” Then in an act of extreme—not violence but privacy, he gathered all her letters, all the notes and letters that had ever passed between them, every slip, and burned the whole mass in the fireplace. He ordered an inscription in Greek for her tombstone. Five days after her death, he picked up his pen again for the first time and wrote in his garden book (I have seen it and checked the dates):
September 11, 1792
W. Hornsby’s method of preserving birds.
Make a small incision between the legs of the bird; take out the entrails & eyes, wipe the inside & with a quill force a passage through the throat into the body that the ingredients may find a way into the stomach & so pass off through the mouth, fill the bird with a composition of ⅔ common salt & ⅓ nitre pounded in a mortar with two tablespoonfuls of black or Indian pepper to a pound hang it up by it’s legs 8 or 10 weeks, & if the bird be small it will be sufficiently preserved in that time, if it be large, the process is the same, but greater attention will be necessary.
A fence indeed. Who could get past that? Was he thinking of his wife’s body and its inevitable dissolution in the grave? Or was it an example—spectacular—of that precise, objective scientific curiosity that his enemies claim made him so cool? Or is this really a recipe for preserving something beautiful and dead that you cannot bring yourself even to name? Virginians are strange. In the five years I lived with him in Paris, I never once heard Jefferson refer to his wife.
Abigail Adams, energetic as a hurricane, sent over by messenger that evening a prescription to cure Jefferson’s “seasoning” once and for all.
“I made the mistake last night,” Jefferson explained, lifting his head and smiling at Short, “of describing my symptoms to her.”
“You mentioned the dreaded grippe?” Short asked. They had each taken a chair near the coal fire in the library, the tea table spread between them, Jefferson in his mildest, most expansive mood. Short thought they were like two English dukes stretching their legs in their manor.
“I gave it full credit, the grippe, the headaches, the fever—all of them ad seriatim. I was the ideal dinner guest, presenting a new and fascinating symptom for each course. It was a shameful appeal for sympathy. I only neglected to expire completely when dessert was served. Now. She writes, ‘Dear Sir, I once found great benefit in treating the same disorders by taking an ounce of Castile soap and a pint of Bristol beer, dividing it into three portions, and taking it three mornings in a row, fasting.’ ”
Short groaned. Jefferson smiled again and folded the note away.
“You won’t take it,” Short said firmly.
“She’s a wonderful woman.” Jefferson placed his teacup on the silver tray. “John Adams’s greatest asset. But no, this is only the New England way of making certain they drink beer somehow or other, and at the same time making sure they suffer a little for the pleasure. Franklin once told me he never drank so much beer as in Puritan Boston. ‘Conscience,’ he said, ‘makes you thirsty.’ ”
“You seem well in any case, almost cured.”
Jefferson stood—unfolded himself in stages—and began to walk in front of his shelves of books, humming snatches of an Italian song. He was forty-one years old, Short reminded himself—forty-two in less than three months, on April thirteenth—and in fact he did not look well at all, not cured at all.
“You show great self-control.” Jefferson broke off his song and looked back with an expression still mild and ironic. “I had assumed that you would be filled with questions about Franklin’s departure—what it means, why he does it, what the future of the delegation is to be. But you seem content to analyze la grippe.”
“Dr. Franklin is an old man,” Short said tentatively.
“Dr. Franklin wants to go home to die,” Jefferson replied. “He has a horror of dying in a foreign country. He keeps young Temple Franklin with him, he says, because he wants to know that a blood relation is on hand to close his eyes and bury him.”
Short stirred uncomfortably. There was altogether too much dying in this conversation.
“And of course—” Jefferson moved farther along the shelves, humming, running his hands across the spines of his books. A born sensualist, Short thought, the hands of a great painter, a great artist. He strokes the bindings of his books (an unworthy simile) the way another man would stroke a woman. And a sensualist is sensitive, will collapse when coarser men are unbothered. Jefferson had the frame and body of a Virginia mountaineer, he should have effortlessly knocked aside Paris’s effete headaches and grippes—John Adams had, Humphreys had, Short himself—instead Jefferson looked pale and fragile. With his red hair and feverish skin he looked like a burning stick.
“Of course,” Jefferson said. He looked at a title, frowned, pushed the book back. Then he crossed and sat down in another chair farther from the fire. “Of course, there is no business for our delegation. That discourages Franklin and makes him willing to leave. That discourages everyone. No country will negotiate with us—”
“They think our government is unstable.”
“They think our Articles of Confederation leave us without a central power, and they may be right. The Comte de Vergennes insists that he sees thirteen separate governments, not one United States. He frankly doubts we can make commercial treaties that will bind.”
“So they stall and wait to see how stable we prove.”
Jefferson made a tall steeple of his fingers. He wore no rings, no jewelry of any kind. According to the old Virginia custom he had only one first name—Thomas Jefferson—while the northerners liked to have two at least (John Quincy Adams, Short thought, remembering the Adams son), and the French positively rioted in them: Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Moher de Lafayette. When he spoke again, Jefferson’s voice took on the rich visionary energy it always did if he spoke of the future.
“Whale oil, tobacco, timber.” He ticked them off on his long fingers. “Rice, fish, lumber, fur—the wealth of our United States, the potential wealth is astonishing. If the barriers of trade would go down here, our ships and farms could feed—Europe!” He cocked his head and smiled wryly, as if conscious of the criticism his political enemies always made, that Mr. Jefferson was greatly addicted to hyperbole. “When Lafayette returns next week, we mean to make an all-out assault on the tobacco monopoly here at least.”
“I think,” Short said, venturing an opinion that he had overheard John Adams give, “that the French resent our continuing trade with England. We still trade three-fourths of our goods with our former enemy.”
Jefferson nodded absently and rubbed his face with one hand, suddenly, obviously tired. “Politics in Europe is the systematic organization of hatreds. It should never come to that in America.”
He stood up and seemed to sag for a moment.
“You’ve tired yourself out,” Short said, rising quickly.
“I’m fine, I’m well.” Jefferson turned and walked in his rather shambling, loose-limbed way to the door. He rested one hand on the handle. “I have an invitation for you from Patsy,” he said, “by the way.”
“Ah.” Short clicked his heels. Patsy was Martha, Jefferson’s twelve-year-old daughter, fashionably immured in Panthemont, the Catholic convent school across the Seine, a tall, rangy, big-footed girl with sandy red hair—Jefferson’s daughter!—and Short made a game of treating her with mock-French gallantry.
“She reports,” Jefferson said with something like renewed energy, “that the drawing master is less severe than the one in Virginia, she does not like reading Livy, and the other girls call her ‘Jeff.’ ”
Short grinned, Jefferson smiled. Jefferson had once told h
im that domestic happiness was the highest good in life. Without a wife, he now lavished all his affection on the three girls; Lucy and Mary in Virginia, Patsy in Paris. Patsy most of all. To Short, given to erotic rather than domestic reverie, it was wonderful to see how the mention of any one of the girls could brighten Jefferson’s face.
“Tomorrow morning,” Jefferson said, “we are to assemble early at Panthemont to witness a ceremony—two French girls take the veil: they call it ‘dying to life.’ ”
Short’s grin faded. Jefferson appeared not to notice. Humming, he pulled at the brass handle of the door and opened it. At the end of the hallway his black servant James could be seen, backlit by the candles in their scalloped holders along the stairs. He carried a small flat tray with Jefferson’s glass and crystal water bottle.
“I may send for Castile soap after all,” Jefferson said, a gravelly weariness coming back to his voice. In an uncharacteristic gesture—Short remembered it afterward as a premonition—he touched the younger man’s arm for an instant before turning away.
“ ‘France alters everybody,’ ” Miss Adams said with Adams decision and an Adams lift of her chin. “That is Dr. Franklin’s favorite saying. But I think it has metamorphosed our family most in their heads.”