Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  Henry approached the end of his speech. He halted in front of the speaker’s bench, then slammed a rough fist down on the railing, under the nose of the king’s attorney-general, Jefferson’s spectacularly rich, spectacularly fat old cousin Peyton Randolph and, ignoring Randolph’s huge red face, launched into his peroration. “Caesar had his Brutus. Charles the First his Cromwell. And George the Third”—here the room rocked with noise and protest. “Treason!” screeched Randolph, struggling to his fat feet. On the other side of the floor Jefferson’s own professor of law, George Wythe, sprang from his chair: “Treason!” Half a dozen voices joined the cry. Black-clad Patrick Henry simply stood, hands on his hips, in calm defiance. When the cries of treason began to fall away, he raked the room with a look, reared on his heels, and finished thunderously—“and George the Third may profit from their example. If this be treason, make the most of it!”

  Afterward, defeated nineteen to twenty, shoving past Jefferson in the lobby, Peyton Randolph swore to his followers that he would have given five hundred guineas that day for a single vote. Presumably his lean young cousin did not offer his own opinion then, though he repeated it in awe for weeks after, that Patrick Henry had gifts as an orator beyond anything Jefferson had ever imagined—“He appeared to me,” he told his friend John Page, paying a characteristically bookish compliment, “to speak as Homer wrote.”

  Query: Did this rebellious admiration come from Jefferson’s own miserable limitations as a speaker? Or was he merely engaged, as always, in some kind of inner debate, choosing sides (for the moment) between the crude upland energies of his own people, out in the wilderness of Albemarle County, as against the smug, self-oiling political machine of the Tidewater sophisticates? Are politics the mere extension of our childhood? Peyton Randolph was his cousin on his mother’s side. Patrick Henry came out of the backwoods frontier world that belonged to his father. The day after his speech, Henry was seen starting for home along the Duke of Gloucester Street, wearing torn buckskin breeches, saddlebags over his arm, leading his horse.

  And query: Was Patrick Henry what the mild, rational, self-disciplined Jefferson was not: “sublime”?

  Scene Two. Ten years later, March 23, 1775. The old white clapboard Church of St. John, on one of the seven hilltops of Richmond, where the Burgesses, now much less smug and smooth, are gathered illegally to debate the momentous question whether, in this year of crisis, Virginia ought to arm its militia like other colonies and prepare for civil war.

  Jefferson, seated as a member of the Burgesses, now a prosperous young lawyer, and author the previous year of a brilliantly hot-headed pamphlet called A Summary View of the Rights of British America, which had succeeded in placing his name on a list of “traitors” marked by the British Parliament for hanging. Patrick Henry coming to his feet once again and striding down the aisle to the tiny space in front left cleared for speakers, while up and down, in every pew, the audience, which knows their man by now, stirs in expectation.

  It was so unseasonably hot that morning, Jefferson once told me, that all the church windows were flung open (townspeople leaning in to listen) and the air burned when it moved. Henry’s face was pale white, but his eyes also burned (if you can credit some of the more melodramatic witnesses) and glowed like coals. As always, he began with the appearance of deliberation. It is a question of freedom or slavery, he said. He has only one lamp by which to guide his feet in this question, and that is experience. Experience tells him that the British ministry will respond to more petitions and more addresses, just as they have already in Boston, with sneers and soldiers. What do we have to oppose them? Shall we try argument? We have been trying that for the last decade. Have we anything new to offer them on the subject of American rights? Nothing. There is no need for Virginians to deceive themselves. The storm is ready to break.

  Henry was a legendary master of the orator’s pause, the long, daring moment of silence. He liked to stop and draw his body up out of its slouch and wait rigid till his audience had grown unbearably tense. James Madison used to claim that when he had argued a case in patient detail for two hours, Henry would get up slowly, pause and stare at the jury, and undo everything before he had uttered a word. Now he simply broke off in the middle of his speech and glowered at the ceiling. Then: They say America is weak and can never stand firm against Great Britain. We are not weak. We are three millions strong.

  And more than that—I sat one long afternoon on a porch front in Williamsburg and listened to three old men act out by turns the way Henry had suddenly exploded into his tremendous conclusion. The oldest one of them even wrote it down for me, word for word, with every gesture he remembered.

  “Besides, Sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery. Our chains are forged. Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston. The war is inevitable. And let it come! I repeat, sir, let it come!

  “Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. What is it that gentlemen wish? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” Here, the old men said, Henry stood in the attitude of a condemned galley slave, loaded with fetters, awaiting his doom. His shoulders were bowed; his wrists were crossed; his face was twisted into helplessness and agony. After a long, long pause he raised his eyes and his chained hands toward heaven and burst out, “Forbid it, Almighty God!”

  Then he turned toward the part of the church where the Loyalists had taken seats together, and he slowly bent his form nearer and nearer the floor and said, “I know not what course others may take,” and his hands were still crossed, his face was heartbroken and hopeless. Another pause, longer even than before, so that you could imagine the Loyalists imagining the condition of Virginia under the chains and iron heels of the invading British Army. Suddenly he rose straight and proud—“But as for me”—and his thin body was thrown back, every muscle and tendon seemed to strain against the invisible fetters that bound him, and he hissed the words through clenched teeth. Then the loud, clear, triumphant notes, “Give me liberty,” and as each syllable of the word Liberty echoed through the church, his fetters were shivered; his arms were hurled apart; and the links of his chains were scattered to the winds. When he finished the word Liberty his hands were open, and his arms elevated and extended, and after a momentary pause, only long enough to permit the ringing echo of “liberty” to cease, he let fall his left hand to his side and squeezed his right hand firmly, as if holding the point of a dagger toward his breast. And he closed the grand appeal with the solemn words, “or give me death!” and suited the action to the word by a blow upon the left breast with the right hand, which seemed to drive the dagger straight to his heart.

  Query: How many people in St. John’s Church that hot March morning knew that Patrick Henry, loaded down with rhetorical chains, struggling against invisible British coils like Laocoön against the serpents—how many people knew that Henry had a wife who had been insane for years, tied up in a leather strait-jacket and padlocked chains and kept in a basement room of the house, with a trap-door entrance in the hall down which Henry climbed every day to feed her?

  How many people thought about what other kinds of chains and liberty he meant?

  And query: Who can picture—for one instant—Thomas Jefferson in such theatrics?

  The privacy of pen and ink was Jefferson’s medium. As President he could hardly bear the thought of standing up before an audience; apart from his inaugural address, he sent every message, including the State of the Union, in letter form to Congress. But a little-known fact, a footnote: When Patrick Henry had finished his “Liberty or Death” oration, his audience, as you might expect, lay collapsed, prostrate with emotion around the sweltering church. One man even fell to his knees at the last words, weeping, and raised his hands and shouted, “Let me be buried on this very spot!” But so ab
solute was Jefferson’s dedication to liberty, to the cause, that after all that he nonetheless had the courage to rise and walk to the rostrum himself, something he dreaded to his very core, and then he too gave a speech in support of going to war. Nobody heard a word of it. But for twenty minutes he held the floor, arguing for freedom. He told me it cost him a month of headaches afterward.

  Did the sublime Henry ever acknowledge Jefferson’s greatness?

  When he wrote his Summary View in 1774, Jefferson was too shy or diffident actually to give it as a speech before the Burgesses as it was intended to be. He set out from Monticello for Williamsburg with two copies of it in his saddlebags, meaning to speak. But somewhere along the road he began to suffer one of those attacks of diarrhea (like the headaches) that seemed to come to him in crises. Was he thinking perhaps of the notorious British punishment for treason: hanging, but cutting down the victim while he was still alive and ripping out his intestines, then burning them before his eyes? Or was he thinking (more likely) of the hundreds of eyes that would be staring up at him while he gave his speech? He turned back to Monticello. He sent one copy to Peyton Randolph (now a dedicated rebel), one to Patrick Henry. Randolph thought the speech was so brilliant he had it printed at once. Henry never mentioned it—“he probably left it on a tavern table,” Jefferson would say scornfully, later. “Patrick Henry was the laziest man in reading I’ve ever known.”

  Hard words from Jefferson. Hardest possible words, given the books that filled every room of his house, on whose backs he always rode. But if Jefferson had chosen sides once at the age of twenty-two, by the time of the Revolution he had seen ten more years of life, and Patrick Henry, the backwoods Homer, had lost his power to charm. What kind of hero, after all, was forever playing his “fiddle” by a campfire and watching the farmers dance? (The fiddle versus the violin.) Or joked his way through his bar examination (“I never studied law six weeks in my life,” he told Jefferson, snickering)? Or rose to speak for liberty in front of any audience that would hear him, almost like an actor hired for the part, but rarely stuck around for the long, tedious committee work that followed? Henry was a geyser of rage next to Jefferson, a wild creature of ignorance and passion. When the two finally parted political company, Henry set out to ruin Jefferson with his incessant talk of impeachment and cowardice and flights from Monticello. In his turn, Jefferson stubbornly believed (without any evidence) that the great orator for liberty had plotted in the last year of the Revolution to make himself Dictator of Virginia. Even after the Revolution was over, he wrote Madison (another mumbling, inaudible speaker) that “While Mr. Henry lives, another bad constitution would be formed and saddled forever on us. What we have to do, I think, is devoutly to pray for his death.”

  Jefferson had no sense at all of the mysterious in life; every sense of the uncontrollable.

  “Père Grasse at our school says that God speaks perfect French as well as Hebrew. What do you say, Mr. Short?”

  Patsy Jefferson put down the glass of wine that she was permitted to hold, ceremonially, on Sunday afternoons and made an ironic little curtsy as Short entered the parlor. At fourteen, Jefferson’s oldest daughter was already as tall as most men, but spindly as a colt. Deliberately she lifted her chin away from her father and looked at the cold November rain outside the window. It was precisely one month since Maria Cosway had departed Paris.

  “You may answer in either French or Hebrew, Guillaume,” Clérisseau said from the sofa, where he lounged in front of the fire.

  At Patsy’s side, holding his own wineglass in his left hand, his right hand still cradled in a sling, Jefferson smiled. “If triangles worshiped a god,” he told his daughter, “no doubt it would have three sides.”

  “Montesquieu.” Clérisseau stabbed at the coals with a poker and looked up at Patsy. “Your father quotes Montesquieu and hides his skepticism behind his erudition. As a Frenchman I am flattered, as a Catholic I am outraged.”

  “As a guest,” Jefferson responded, “you are hungry. We can certainly go into the dining room now.” And he offered Patsy his left arm.

  “Mr. Short,” the girl said, ignoring her father’s arm, “has been upstairs writing correspondence”—she hesitated a moment, as if to go back and edit her awkward phrase—“his wrist being perfectly sound and uninjured. He should lead us in, as a reward.”

  “Mr. Short,” Jefferson said mildly, “is always a favorite of the ladies.” Patsy turned her back.

  “I shall have wives,” Clérisseau muttered to Short as they took their places at the table, “but never daughters.”

  His words or his tone caught Patsy’s ear, and she snapped her red head around to glare.

  “I’ve received yet another package from John Paul Jones,” Short said quickly (a diplomat is a man who always has another subject ready). “He sends us medallions this time, you know.” Wind racing from the Atlantic up the Seine rattled the window panes, setting the candles flickering. “A new set of bronze medallions commemorating the Bonhomme Richard and the Serapis. He wants us to hold them for him in our strongbox till he comes back.”

  “Admiral Jones is now commanding a squadron of Russian ships for the Empress Catherine,” Jefferson explained to Clérisseau. “He sends us, alternately, requests for money and valuable personal items to store. You know Short’s hydrophobia. I think William trembles at the very thought of anyone sailing in a ship, on the water.”

  “Very wise.” Clérisseau took the decanter from James Hemings’s hand and poured for himself. “If it were up to me, the seas would be filled with wine.”

  “A commode,” Short said. “This time, along with the medallions, Jones also sent us an enormous porcelain commode ‘of superior workmanship and quality,’ I quote—from Amsterdam; it took two men just to carry it up the steps. He wrote ‘Keep but do not use’ on the wrapping.”

  Jefferson laughed, and Clérisseau arched a Gallic eyebrow. Hands in her lap, studying her wineglass as if it were a viper, the unforgiving Patsy waited for silence. “Perhaps Mrs. Cosway has painted it with her immortal brush, which makes it so valuable,” she said bitterly, eyes on her father.

  Jefferson’s mildness was unruffled.

  “Mrs. Cosway,” he said, “writes me that she and her husband plan to return to Paris next spring—we can ask her then.”

  Patsy leaned forward, picked up her wineglass, and drained it.

  Afterward, because Jefferson’s wrist made any motion painful, Short climbed (warily) into the carriage to accompany her back to the convent school at Panthemont. When their carriage crossed the Pont Royal and began to wind up the rue du Bac, he cleared his throat to break the silence.

  “Number forty-six?”

  Patsy kept her gaze sullenly on the rain.

  “Quarante-six, faites attention.”

  On her first day at the school—could it really have been two years ago?—Patsy had been assigned the number 46; it was sewn into the collar of her uniforms, tagged onto her belongings, even written across her books and drawings.

  “Number forty-six, how is school? How is Miss Tufton and the dull, slow Miss Annesley of Great Britain? I haven’t heard about any of your friends lately.”

  As they passed a streetlamp, Patsy’s red hair flared in the dark carriage like a match. “My father says she plans to come back in the spring. Did you hear him?”

  Short sighed. “She and Mr. Cosway may come back. Nothing is ever certain.”

  “She’s married,” Patsy said, spinning to face him. “That’s certain. And he spends every day he can with her just the same.”

  “They visit galleries, painters. They talk about painting, everybody in Paris talks about painting.”

  Patsy folded her arms across her chest in a fence-building gesture, Short decided, exactly like her father’s.

  On the rue de Grenelle the carriage splashed to a halt in front of the school gates. With a voice barely loud enough to be heard over the rain, Patsy said good-bye to Short and hurried past the conci
erge’s booth. Once inside she shook rain from her hood, stamped her feet (like a horse, she thought, looking glumly at her shoes; tall girl, long feet). Then she climbed the familiar flight of stairs to the dormitory.

  All of the girls slept in one cavernous room on the second floor. Four rows of identical beds, twelve to a row. Locked wooden boxes at the foot of each bed held clothes, books, the few (very few) personal items the nuns permitted; no room for John Paul Jones’s commode. At one end a tall sinuous crucifix, painted a glossy white and gold, that caught the eye no matter where you turned; at the other end, near Patsy’s bed, another door leading to the salle de bain, more stairs.

  The sister on duty looked up from her little desk, squinted over the candle flame, and acknowledged Patsy with a tiny nod. Two or three girls looked up without curiosity from their beds. On Sundays almost everyone left the school to visit. Even the three English girls were generally hauled out to spend the day with an obliging relative or family friend visiting in Paris. Patsy took off her damp hood and cape and sat on the end of the bed.

  Mrs. Maria Cosway. In her mind Patsy sounded each syllable of the name. Mr. Richard Cosway. At home in Virginia wives and husbands were firmly, decisively placed; if men … misbehaved, they were unmarried men, the kind you saw lazing on the porches of taverns, or working in dirty shirts out in the sun, exuding an aroma of whiskey and sweat and tobacco as you passed. Or else they were men you sometimes saw strolling out of a slave’s house, buttoning their trousers, rubbing their whiskers. But in France—