by Max Byrd
She stood up abruptly and opened the box at the end of her bed. Nabby Adams had liked to say France changed everyone—look at her mother at the ballet, look at Dr. Franklin cheering balloons. Patsy pulled out the leather portfolio of landscape drawings she was to complete by Tuesday; her worst subject. Nabby Adams was married now—she had written Patsy a special letter signed Mrs. William Stephens Smith—and her husband worked for her father in London just the way, precisely, that William Short worked for her father.
“Did you have your bain yesterday, Jeff? Or did you get dispense?”
Julia Annesley, pastiest and pestiest of the three British girls, had wandered over from her bed to stare at Patsy’s things; or else simply to talk—the girls were forbidden to speak in the open rooms outside of classes and only in low voices in the dormitory, but Sunday evenings were lax. During the day the sisters all carried “clacks,” two pieces of wood that could be snapped together to bring a girl to attention.
“It was cold.” Julia peered at the portfolio of drawings. “And the sisters said there couldn’t be a fire yet because of the holy water.”
Patsy nodded briskly. As a veteran of two winters at Panthemont, she had learned not to think of fire or warmth until the Christmas holidays, if then. The sisters had an inflexible rule: No fires in the fireplaces before ice formed in the chapel’s basin of holy water. Meanwhile girls studied in their hoods and capes, teeth chattering, sisters taught in the whitewashed classrooms wearing gray woolen gloves and scarves and puffing smoke with every breath.
“So I didn’t have a bain yesterday, à cause de la froideur,” Julia said, now leaning forward and actually picking up some of the books in Patsy’s box. “And also”—she dropped her voice—“because Sister Yvonne was on duty, and I think she’s”—Julia swiveled her head to look at the hooded nun bent over her candle like an enormous black crow—“she’s too attentive.”
“Yes.” Patsy had had this conversation many times with Julia. On Saturday the girls were supposed to bathe, one by one, in a large portable tub brought into the salle de bain. You wore a chemise de bain (with your number tagged on it, of course), and the sister bathing you would reach under the chemise with a sponge and scrub. Sister Yvonne was noted for letting the sponge fall accidentally into the water and continuing to rub with her hands. “Wait for Sister Denise—elle est plus gentille.”
“ ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ” Julia read.
Patsy took the book from her hands. It was a small octavo volume bound in red Italian leather with her name “Martha Jefferson” stamped in gold on the lower cover; a gift from her father last Christmas. She tucked it away beneath the drawings and listened with only part of her mind to Julia’s bright meaningless chirpings, now turning to the subject of Romeo’s love for Juliet, his glorious romantic speeches—the passionate way Père Grasse would read them aloud; if, of course, Père Grasse knew English.
The glass of wine had made Patsy feel first giddy, then sleepy. When Julia wandered away at last to greet another returning girl, Patsy quickly ducked behind one of the dressing screens and changed into her nightdress, then dove for her covers. At the door the Sister was putting out superfluous candles, preparing for evening prayer, which Protestant girls did not have to join in. The crucifix on the wall moved in the flickering shadows like a living person, and the two spots of red on its palms suddenly glowed with reflected light; blood, wax. Mrs. Cosway was Catholic. She was also delicate. If she were punished, she would probably sicken and die. Patsy shifted on the hard mattress and thought of punishment. The sisters were not allowed to strike the girls, though Sister Yvonne sometimes did. In the Hôpital des Vénériens, Patsy had been told by one of the French girls, patients were given a daily spanking before their dose of mercury to punish them for having caught syphilis.
She turned again in the bed. France changed everyone. Mr. Short, it was generally conceded by her friends, was very handsome; he had a “sweet amour”—Elizabeth Tufton’s word—in Saint-Germain, he might even (but he never smelled of whiskey or sweat) have visited one of those places where … She let the thought fade, fall into the maw of sleep. At parties and dinners, Mr. Short stared at the young, pretty Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld, and she was married. And her father watched always with a cold, stern face. A necklace of raindrops slid down the window, white pearls, into the dark. At this very moment Mr. Short was probably visiting at someone’s salon in the Louvre, bowing to the young duchesse, kissing her perfumed hand.
But at that moment Short was merely, unperfumedly holding his pen over a paper in Jefferson’s second-floor study.
“John Stockdale in London,” Jefferson said. He hugged himself with his left arm, right arm still in the sling, and stood closer to the fireplace, more sensitive to cold than anyone Short had ever known. “The map surveyed by my father, corrections, terms; also the French translation of Sanford and Merton he wants.”
Short scribbled two more lines on his list. John Stockdale supplied Jefferson with English books and now had written twice proposing that he publish Notes on Virginia for general sale.
“A volume of Homer for Madame de Tott.”
“The fair Grecian,” Short murmured. Madame de Tessé’s protégée Sophie-Ernestine was, Jefferson claimed, Greek in origin, though nobody knew for certain, since she rarely spoke in company and (French-like rather than Greek) never answered a direct question.
“Letters to Madison, John Jay, Ezra Stiles—”
Short finished the list from his notes: “Franklin, Mrs. Trist, General Washington, Calonne, Vaughn about magnets.” As always, the sheer range of Jefferson’s correspondence exhausted Short.
“I gave you the treaty proposal to copy.”
“Yes, sir.” Short fumbled in his stack of papers. Until the wrist had healed, he had the additional duty of copying over Jefferson’s official papers in a fair hand.
“If John Paul Jones had not taken up with Our Lady of the North,” Jefferson said, turning his other side to the fire.
“He is always a favorite with the ladies,” Short said, hoping to provoke a question about young Patsy’s state of mind. But Jefferson, impenetrable on the subject of his family, had returned to his favorite theme of forming a coalition against the Barbary pirates, six nations that would support Jones and an international fleet of warships. Last year he had proposed another extraordinary venture—the elimination of national passports and political barriers, the free condition of “universal citizen” for travelers—but this had been too visionary even to merit a response from Jay or Vergennes.
“It is almost pointless,” Jefferson said, studying the fire. A jet rose suddenly six inches out of the coals, a blue ghost. “France teeters on the edge of bankruptcy, we do no better. The king—” By the strange form of mental telepathy that existed between them, he looked up an instant before James Hemings entered the room, bearing a tray with a decanter of honey-brown Madeira. While he poured a glass for them each, Jefferson worked the little copy press beside his desk, swiveled his chair back and forth, manipulated with one hand the shackle of a new miniature lock.
“As for Washington’s letter,” Short began when James had left the room again.
“On the abominable subject of the abominable Society of Cincinnati,” Jefferson said.
Short nodded, trying in fact to remember. The Society of Cincinnati, latest scheme of what Jefferson always called the monarchical faction, was intended to perpetuate, through hereditary membership, the officer class of the Continental Army. Washington had been named, automatically, its honorary head, but Jefferson had instantly written to point out the incompatibility of a democracy and an hereditary, de facto aristocracy.
“Washington asks my advice: should he attend their general meeting in Philadelphia? I wrote him yesterday, left-handed scribble. I told him that I have not yet met a person in France who does not consider the whole plan destructive to our government. I said”—Jefferson began to quote himself in a soft, murmuring voice—“I said, ‘To k
now the mass of evil which must flow from an aristocracy, a person must be in France; he must see the finest soil, the finest climate, the most compact state, the most benevolent character of people, and every earthly advantage combined, insufficient to prevent this scourge from rendering existence a curse to twenty-four out of twenty-five parts of the inhabitants of this country.’ ”
He put down his Madeira and picked up a sheet of paper from his desk. “I told him, the South is already aristocratical in its disposition, as you and I have reason to know. That spirit can always spread.” He paused a long moment. “I do not flatter myself with the immortality of our governments, but I shall think little also of their longevity unless this germ of aristocracy be taken out.”
His left hand crumpled the sheet of paper into a spiky ball. “Liberty,” he said softly. “Liberty, liberty.”
The two of them sat in mute contemplation of the crumpled paper. Then Short, feeling obscurely embarrassed, looked down at the topmost name on his list. “Madison writes that a new federal convention will be held next spring, to revise the Articles of Confederation.” He raised the idea tentatively. In some part of his mind he was afraid that Jefferson would insist on attending it and therefore leave him alone, without a position in Paris, or afraid he would drag him back to America. For less than an instant, one tick of Jefferson’s handsome new mantel clock, he allowed himself to picture the house, the ambassador’s office devolving upon William Short. But Jefferson was oddly uninterested in the convention.
“Do you know, William, I have long believed that in New England and in Virginia we have different understandings of the very word, the basic word. Liberty.”
Short stirred at his desk; flexed his fingers, cramped from so much writing.
“In New England.” Jefferson raised the Madeira almost to his lips; Short noticed the thinness of his left wrist, the increasingly angular cut of his profile. “In New England they think, John Adams thinks, in terms of liberty and order, the freedom to do what is right—in Massachusetts you are free to serve God, and you had better; if you don’t, the church will tell you. But in Virginia we think of it as freedom from—we are free from compulsion, free from churches and tyrannies. We trust a man to make his own mistakes, think as he pleases, go where he wants. My father carved his land out of the wilderness, by himself. In Virginia we have freedom from tyranny. In Virginia the opposite of freedom is slavery.”
Memoirs of Jefferson—8
ON ONE OTHER OCCASION, FIVE YEARS before Patrick Henry’s great “Liberty or Death” speech, Jefferson tried to speak out boldly, like an orator. He made an utter, un-Henry-like failure of it.
The scene was a Richmond courtroom, and ironically enough, Jefferson’s law professor George Wythe was sitting there as the opposing attorney. Between Wythe and his prize pupil, in the plaintiffs chair, hunched a bright mulatto slave.
Now George Wythe was a book lover and collector even more enthusiastic than Jefferson. He liked nothing better than to sit in the study of the old red brick house in Williamsburg—his wife’s house, designed by her architect father—and wave his hand at the shelves and shelves of books he had installed. “They say the law sharpens the mind by narrowing it.” He would smile disbelievingly. “But not in this room.”
So when Jefferson had come as his apprentice student, fresh from William and Mary College, Wythe laid out a program of reading so broad and stupendous and superhuman that it eventually took five years, beginning on the top shelf with Plato and Greek philosophy (Jefferson’s sole linguistic weakness) and proceeding down the mahogany tiers through poetry, religion, belles lettres, Roman rhetoric, history, and (sometimes) law. At what point Wythe started to utter antislavery remarks nobody knows—after his wife’s death his young black maid bore a mulatto son; respectable Williamsburg was silent—but certainly he belonged to that trio of “enlightened” thinkers in the city (Professor William Small and Governor Fauquier the others) who introduced young Jefferson to the future by way of the scholarly, progressive past.
And yet … I have in my hand as I write an advertisement Jefferson placed in the Virginia Gazette, September 7, 1769, offering a forty-shilling reward for a runaway slave named Sandy, a mulatto shoemaker and carpenter who stole a horse from Monticello and disappeared into the hot tar of a Virginia night. Jefferson’s distaste fairly shakes off the page.
He is greatly addicted to drink, and when drunk is insolent and disorderly, in his conversation he swears much, and in his behavior is artful and knavish.
But not eight months later, in April 1770, Jefferson sits down on the left-hand side of the Richmond courtroom and, if he feels distaste now, subdues it by sheer will, enlightened principle.
On the other side of the aisle, George Wythe, big hook nose in profile, child’s legs barely reaching the floor, likewise stares straight ahead at the judge’s bench.
Neither of them looks at one Samuel Howell, Jefferson’s client (without fee), a mulatto possessing the nerve, courage, desperation actually to sue his owner Joshua Netherland for his freedom.
The case was thus: Howell’s grandmother had been the daughter of a white woman and a black slave—whether or not by rape, Jefferson would argue, was immaterial; but for the record the court assumed that no white woman would willingly lie down with a black and so entered “rape.” The daughter was bound to serve as a slave to her father’s master until the age of thirty-one; during that time she gave birth to a daughter, also bound to serve till thirty-one. And finally that daughter, Howell’s mother, gave birth to him, still unmistakably mulatto, and he too was bound to his master Netherland until the age of thirty-one.
Jefferson had written his brief. He stood up to summarize. In Virginia law, he reminded the court, the status of a slave was determined, not by color, but by the status of the mother. Howell’s grandmother had been completely white, pure white. By statute and law her descendants should have been free.
George Wythe folded his tiny hands in his lap and listened while his learned pupil next began to cite, in his reed-thin voice, precedent after precedent, case after case, Greek authorities, Roman authorities, Blackstone, Coke. They might as well have been back in his book-lined study. The jury sagged, the courtroom sagged.
And then suddenly, in the midst of assembling his precedents, Jefferson simply stopped and put down the book he was holding. He fixed his gaze on some point past the judge’s shoulder, as if he were about to shake off the legal dust and speak for himself. A year earlier, with sly modesty, he had persuaded his ambitious cousin Richard Bland to introduce in the Burgesses a bill that Jefferson himself had drafted—a declaration that any slaveowner was exempt from all previous restrictions and could, if he chose, emancipate any or all of his slaves, just by registering the fact in a court. Jefferson seconded his own motion but never spoke, and the bill went down to blazing defeat. Poor Bland was denounced from half the godly pulpits in Virginia. Now Jefferson recalled Bland’s discredited argument again. The sins of a father, he said to the spot on the wall, ought not be visited on a child to the third generation, and certainly not to a generation without end.
The judge interrupted. What law was the gentleman citing?
“Under the law of nature,” Jefferson said loudly—I have copied his very words from his casebook—“all men are born free, and every one comes into the world with a perfect right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will.”
The judge rose and snatched his gavel.
“It was not proved that slave law applied to the first woman’s children.” Jefferson continued to stare at the blank wall, his hands now fists on the table. “It remains for some future legislature to extend the law of bondage to grandchildren and beyond, if any legislators can be found wicked enough.”
The gavel hammered, hammered. Samuel Howell slumped in his chair. With a final, furious swing of his arm the judge dismissed the case on the spot, not bothering to call on the defense for a word, a syllable, of rebuttal. “
Law of nature,” he muttered as he swept past Jefferson toward the door, wig, gown, heels flying. Wythe made a courtly, ironic bow to his student.
Which Jefferson wrote the advertisement for Sandy?
George Wythe had refused six years earlier to sign Patrick Henry’s license to practice law, on the grounds that Henry knew next to nothing about anything. But Henry knew how to talk to people and carry his point; Henry had blown through the courtrooms of Virginia like an Old Testament prophet; when Henry spoke, juries swayed like corn in the wind, judges nodded. When Jefferson talked—
One last irony, in such a meditation on orators and freedom. George Wythe died scandalously in 1806, poisoned by his nephew, who crept downstairs early one June morning and dumped arsenic into the coffee pot on the kitchen stove. Wythe succumbed, as did his Negro maid’s handsome mulatto son Michael, who was being taught Latin and Greek by Wythe and who had just, to the jealous rage of the nephew, been named co-beneficiary of the old man’s will. The Negro maid survived, and the nephew would have been convicted of murder without doubt, except that in Virginia, even in 1806, thanks to the state penal code written by Wythe and Jefferson themselves, a black was not permitted to stand up in court and testify against a white. As far as the law was concerned, black was silent: everywhere seen, nowhere heard.
Like his father before him, Wythe bequeathed to Jefferson all of his splendid books.
In the bedroom two doors down the hallway from where Short sat writing, Jefferson carried a brass-plated whale-oil lamp to his desk. In every room that he used regularly he had a desk. On the blotting tablet, tied together with a blue ribbon, lay the two short letters that Maria Cosway had so far written.