Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  An additional fact: Jane Jefferson had been born in England, the meddling, arrogant, imperious country Jefferson absolutely hated; all her life, even in the backwoods of Virginia, she kept a London accent. When Peter Jefferson died, did she become (as mothers sometimes do) a kind of benevolent tyrant over the gawky, fatherless boy? Jefferson never liked authoritative, domineering women. For years after his return to America he used to privately denounce poor Marie-Antoinette as inflexible of will and stupidly obstinate; the real, disastrous power behind the French throne. Had there been no queen, he used to say, there would have been no French Revolution.

  Martha Wayles Jefferson, no tyrant at all, was a widow when Jefferson first met her. Some five years earlier, at age eighteen, she had married Bathurst Skelton, a college friend of Jefferson, and given birth in due course to a son, John; but Skelton died unexpectedly one August afternoon, as men do in the dying time in Virginia, and nineteen-year-old Martha had moved back with her child to the vast Williamsburg plantation of her father, John Wayles, a barrel-chested, big-tempered man of fifty, who had already outlived three wives and settled finally (as all the countryside knew) on a black concubine named Betty Hemings.

  I met Mrs. Jefferson once. Unlike her father, she was petite, an odd but charming sight next to the six-foot-plus Jefferson; auburn hair, much deeper red than Jefferson’s sandy color; pale, nearly translucent skin that showed the endless dark veins in her arms and neck, as if she were made of blue twigs under white silk skin. Fragile body, soft, yielding manners—the very opposite, one guesses, of the English-born mother he fled as soon as he was able. Martha Wayles Skelton was known for her skill at the harpsichord; she sang beautifully, she wrote music. She was much courted, as a rich young widow would be. I have heard James Madison tell more than once how two other suitors rode up to Martha’s house one afternoon and were shown by a servant into the parlor. From the next room they heard the sound of a harpsichord. They looked at each other. Then behind the door two voices rose in harmony, her’s and Jefferson’s. The suitors looked at each other again, picked up their hats, and left.

  Marriage was Jefferson’s object from the start. He has the female instinct, if one may say it, always to be building his nest, pulling together his family under his wing. Almost the first thing he designed at Monticello—right after the site of the house itself—was the family cemetery, where (ghoulishly) he had his favorite sister Jane’s exhumed remains brought and reburied. Dabney Carr, his best friend in the world, married Jefferson’s sister Martha and then, like so many other Virginians, went down two summers later before the great harvesting fever. Jefferson chose the burying place himself, on the hillside at Monticello, under an oak. He hired two laborers to dig the grave, and when they had finished he neatly calculated in his journal that one man digging at that steady rate could grub an acre in four days. (Look into that window.)

  Now if you set out to make the hundred-mile journey from Williamsburg to Monticello in the summer, an easy day and a half on horseback will do it. If you set out in winter, as the newlywed Jeffersons did in January 1772, married on the first day of the new year, you must usually battle mud and snow and figure at least three days of hard travel. For their wedding trip Martha and Thomas Jefferson left little John Skelton with his grandfather and rode in a phaeton as far as Tuckahoe, eight miles from Charlottesville. There they visited Colonel Carter, and then—in the aftermath of a blinding snowstorm—pointed their horses toward Monticello, where all that existed yet was the little graveyard down the hill and a one-room brick house somewhat apart from the cleared spot on which Jefferson meant to build. Foolishly enough, they had lingered till sunset and so climbed steadily up a winding mountain track, not even a road, in darkness and whirling snow almost two feet deep. They arrived very late, soaking wet. The fires were all out, and the servants had retired to their own shacks near the garden. In the one-room house itself, as Martha shook the snow out of her hair and clothes, Jefferson reached gleefully behind a shelf of books (he had books and graves before anything else) and pulled out a bottle of wine he had hidden. They sat down to drink, to startle the black, cold Virginia night with songs, and to begin what Jefferson called, with typical mathematical precision, his “ten years of uncheckered happiness.”

  As always, of course, he exaggerated. Little John Skelton joined them in April, died suddenly in June. Patsy was born in September; survived. Another daughter, Jane Randolph, died in 1775. Mary survived; an unnamed son died in 1777. Martha failed slowly, under shock after shock of birth and death. Jefferson rose to great heights, fell from his mountain.…

  A decade earlier he had begun his garden book, a little blank volume in which he first took up his obsessive habit of recording the temperature and weather each day and the dates that flowers bloomed and died. He carried it all the way to Paris with him, where I used to file it with his other records, and sometimes sneak a curious look. I can still remember by heart the strangely poignant entries on the first page: March 20, 1776, “Purple hyacinth begins to bloom.” April 6, “Narcissus and Puckoon open.” April 13, Jefferson’s thirty-third birthday, “Puckoon flowers fallen.” Every week in the book a new flower bloomed, another started to fade. Jefferson recorded them all. Monticello, Paris, Philadelphia. As President, in the White House, he would send a servant out to the Georgetown flower market to note the arrival of flowers or plants he didn’t see himself.

  Which Jefferson kept these records? Not the Rebel. Not the Roman. The cool and unforgiving son? The Father, the Husband?

  Flowers die and return. Flowers are born again and again, every year. If your father dies, your children, your mother, your sister, your friend, your wife, perhaps at last you fold your arms across your chest and put up fences, just as Clérisseau said. Fences, defenses. You shift your fear away from people onto plants. You place your faith in visible forms of renewal.

  I myself have never married.

  “In the case of General Washington,” Richard Cosway said, smirking, “everyone in Europe expects he will be king. Nobody believes for a moment that a so-called democracy will last. And of course, you know him.”

  Trumbull stroked his chin solemnly and took his time before answering. “I knew him,” he said slowly. “I know him. General Washington never changes. He’s always the same. And he won’t be king.”

  “Maria says you were his personal aide-de-camp.… I didn’t realize that.” Cosway bared his teeth at his wife. Maria smiled back sweetly.

  “Aide-de-camp, yes; that would about describe it.” Trumbull wore a smug, self-satisfied expression, as if the term in fact came nowhere near describing him, and Maria found that she couldn’t stand to be with either of them a moment longer. Over Richard’s shoulder—Richard’s fire-red shoulder, because he had purchased two days ago a new coat of China silk the color of an exploding rocket—over the little rubbery puff of color that was her husband, she could see Jefferson and the printer, old Monsieur Hoffman, still doing something mysterious with copper plates and phials of acid. If she ever had children, she thought, they would be born wearing silk coats and baby white wigs like their father, monkey-people. Monsieur Hoffman had a slight, dancing-master’s build, and Jefferson literally towered over him.

  “They are discussing politics,” she told Jefferson, crossing the room and coming up beside him, “which you would prefer a lady not hear.”

  Jefferson showed her a square copper plate the size of his hand. “Some subjects are not fit for a lady’s ear. Tell me what you think of our experiment so far.”

  Hoffman understood bits of English, and he jumped forward with a little French hop and a bow to show her the tin plate that matched the copper one Jefferson held, both of them having been dipped in fluid and pressed together a quarter of an hour before. It had been Jefferson’s impulsive idea, as the four of them had strolled along the Boulevard des Italiens—but knowing him now, she suspected he had planned it all days before—his idea that they come upstairs to Hoffman’s shop and witness the ne
w engraving process called polytype.

  “The sentences you wrote on the copper plate, with the metal pencil”—Maria frowned (she knew) prettily—“now they’re being transferred to the tin plate?”

  “Which was hot, made hot, heated,” Hoffman declared with a little pantomime of touching his finger against an imaginary plate and a snakelike hiss.

  “Then you see,” Jefferson explained, “the special ink burns into the soft tin from the copper, reverses the script, and you use that plate to print as many copies as you need, of whatever you’ve written.”

  “You cannot,” Hoffman declared, “tell the original from the copy.”

  Maria blinked. If the original was written on a copper plate, obviously you could tell; but the Frenchman was racing on ahead of his logic. “Franklin came here, you know, just when I started, and he wrote a souvenir for me.” Behind her she felt rather than heard the approach of Trumbull and Richard. “Here.”

  From the crisscrossed stacks of paper and metal on his table, Hoffman pulled a much-thumbed piece of letter-size parchment on which someone had written in a round, cheerful hand. Trumbull pushed in beside her and read aloud, one eye closed: “ ‘A Wit’s a Feather, and a chief is a Rod; an honest Man’s the noblest work of God. Pope. Passy, April 24, 1783. B.F.’ ”

  Maria shook her head, uncomprehending.

  “Another quotation from Alexander Pope.” Trumbull tossed the paper back on the worktable. “You really should read more, Maria.”

  “Franklin,” Cosway said, a red blossom at Jefferson’s shoulder. “You knew him too?”

  “Richard has been hearing from his friends,” Trumbull said. At the worktable Hoffman had begun to insert his tin plate in a little roller copying press. “They tell him that Washington’s house has been burned down by mobs, Congress has fled Philadelphia in a panic; the whole country, in other words, one long scene of tumult and anarchy from north to south.”

  “Mr. Cosway’s friends,” Jefferson said courteously, but keeping his eyes on Hoffman, “have undoubtedly been taking their news from the British papers.”

  “They lie, you think,” Cosway said with too much emphasis. “The British press lie?”

  “A strong word.” Jefferson now turned to look down at him, smiling diplomatically. “But assuredly they don’t tell the truth.”

  “Ah.”

  “For as long as I’ve been in Europe,” Jefferson said, “the British newspapers have been reporting the collapse of the American government. By my count, Washington’s house has been burned to the ground four times at least, poor Franklin has been stoned and resurrected a dozen times—I think, to be candid, the Grown wishes to discredit our experiment in democracy and rebellion, so they plant false information in the press.”

  “They are jealous?” Cosway’s last word hung in the air for a long moment as he and Jefferson gazed at each other.

  Maria turned quickly to Hoffman’s table. “He’s finished!” she declared, pointing.

  Hoffman held up a stiff rectangular paper, slightly larger than a calling card. With a little flourish of wrist and arm he extended it to Jefferson, who took a pen from the worktable, bent over the card for a moment, and then presented it—hesitating—to Cosway.

  “He doesn’t give me one.” Trumbull told Maria in a sardonic aside, “because I’m leaving Paris tomorrow. Why waste paper?”

  Cosway passed the card to his wife.

  “He writes in your name here,” Hoffman said over her shoulder. “He writes in what date there. You see? Now it looks just like he wrote it all himself. I make one hundred copies today, in fifteen minutes. Watch!”

  “The great advantage,” Jefferson told her as Hoffman turned back to his copying press, “is that you print a supply of blanks, use them, print a new supply as often as you like.” Maria looked from the card to his enthusiastic face, then back again. To her eye the printer’s dark ink and the ink from Jefferson’s pen were so different in shade as to make the card quite ugly. But Jefferson’s pleasure was unmistakable.

  “You can save hours of copying,” he said, “and then you simply store the master plate till you need it again.”

  “Can you copy drawings, engravings?” Trumbull took the card from her fingers.

  Jefferson shook his head. “The details are lost, the quality isn’t as fine as an artist would want—excellent for handwriting, less good for designs. In fact, I have an idea for changing the mixture of chemicals in the ink.…”

  As he spoke, Maria raised her face to catch Richard’s eye, but as always Richard had contrived to look elsewhere. His right hand brushed imaginary lint from his left shoulder, his wig slipped backward with the motion, exposing an inch of mottled white skin.

  “You don’t agree, then, that George Washington will be king?” With a little bounce Richard interrupted Jefferson’s disquisition on ink.

  Jefferson glanced past her to Trumbull—he has also looked at me today just once, Maria thought; a sign of what?—and moved a step or two away from the thump-thump of Hoffman’s press. “I think no one will be king in America,” he said levelly.

  “Now three years ago,” Trumbull drawled, “then you would have had a case, then we were very near to succumbing.”

  “To a king?”

  “Oh, worse.”

  “He means,” Jefferson said, “a military dictatorship, a coup d’état by the army.”

  “Ah!” Cosway fairly wriggled in delight. “Just as I said—Washington the sovereign, call him whatever you like.”

  Jefferson had a mild way of instructing, Maria thought. He savored his words, he made large, expressive gestures with his hands (his large hands), he seemed almost to caress his famous facts. You could see the effect on Short, who would stand by him like a schoolboy, thirstily absorbing every word. Trumbull’s gruffness fooled nobody as to his admiration. Even Richard’s face softened, his pose relaxed, as Jefferson began to talk. She searched her vocabulary for two hard, precise, contradictory words: he was an intellectual sensualist.

  “In Europe,” Jefferson said, “the general impression is that America won the war in ’81 at Yorktown, when Cornwallis surrendered to Washington. But the truth is, the war went on almost two years longer. Cornwallis commanded only a quarter of the British forces—an enormous army still occupied New York and much of New England, and though they never fought another serious battle, Washington had to keep his army together as long as the British kept theirs.”

  “No pay,” Trumbull said concisely, “no supplies, no food.”

  “Meanwhile the British dragged out the treaty negotiations in Paris, month after month after month. By spring ’83, the army was a powder keg about to blow. The soldiers were in rags, starving, clamoring for Washington to march on Congress in Philadelphia and demand their back pay, two years’ worth. The officers wanted even more—they were plotting by the hundreds to rebel and establish Washington as their king.”

  “Colonel Hamilton wrote him a letter proposing it,” Trumbull interposed. “ ‘Call yourself king, regent—whatever title you like,’ the colonel said. I saw the damned thing.”

  “But every country is ruled by a king.” Cosway bared his teeth again in his monkey’s smile.

  “We believe, oddly,” Jefferson said, and Maria lifted her eyes at the combination of idealism and irony in his voice, “that all men are equal. The people choose their government, not the army.”

  “Washington wouldn’t hear of it,” Trumbull said, “so the officers decided they would rebel anyway and choose somebody else—General Gates, probably, because he hated Washington. I was there, Newburgh, New York.”

  “Newburgh,” Jefferson said, addressing Maria directly, who felt herself flush at the unexpectedness of it, “was the army’s winter camp on the banks of the Hudson River. In early March ’83 the soldiers reached such a pitch of anger that the officers called an illegal meeting to organize a march. Washington was horrified. He saw civil war, chaos, the collapse of the whole nation if the army set out on it
s own.”

  “What did he do?” Cosway’s smile had faded. Behind him Hoffman had finished printing the blank invitations and now stood with them in his hand, watching Jefferson’s face.

  “He called a meeting of his own. March 15, 1783. The single most important meeting ever held in the history of America.”

  “You were there?”

  “I was there,” Trumbull said. “They had built a stage out of wood and cannon wagons, and about dusk Washington suddenly strode out on it and started to speak. Half a dozen of us wrote it down, every word. He said he had served all these years without pay himself, just for love of country. The officers’ faces didn’t soften. He said the country they meant to set a dictator over was in fact their own wives and children and neighbors. How could they fight for freedom, then call for tyranny? Not a face softened. He said democratic government was slow, but eventually it would give them justice. If they marched now, they would destroy their own future and wade into a rising empire of blood.” Trumbull paused. “Faces like stone.”

  “And then …?”

  “And then a great thing happened,” Trumbull said. “The general had finished his speech, clearly, but nobody was convinced. He hesitated up on the stage, then he said he remembered he had a reassuring letter from someone in Congress, and he pulled it out of his pocket. Now you have to understand—Washington is the most magnificent physical specimen you have ever seen. Six feet tall, built like a gladiator, he used to lead every charge of his army, out front in the middle of rifle fire, cannon fire, pistol fire—he would come back to us, his uniform riddled with holes and cuts, tatters, but himself unharmed, always. Once, they said, in the French and Indian wars his units broke in half and started to fire on each other by mistake, and Washington rode between them on his white horse knocking up their musket barrels with his swords—you never saw such a man. But he was fifty-one years old at Newburgh, he was growing old. He pulled out the letter and stared at it and swallowed helplessly. And all the officers in the audience leaned forward, suddenly anxious. He looked up, he looked to his left, square at me. Then he pulled out of his other pocket something only his closest aides had ever seen him wear—a pair of little wire eyeglasses—and he put them on. Then he said, ‘Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.’ ”