Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  “And these?” At the end of the tour I indicated two marble busts on pedestals that flanked the main door. One was a larger-than-life bust of Jefferson himself; the other I could not place.

  “Hamilton,” Jefferson said with a laugh, finally putting on his glasses. “Opposed in death as in life.”

  In the morning he took me through the library, book by book, then showed me his adjoining study (the sanctum sanctorum, Patsy told me; not even a servant could enter without her father’s permission). He had furnished it with more bookcases, of course, a desk and a swiveling chair that he had designed himself, and a telescope on a tripod, aimed at Carter’s Mountain.

  In the parlor he had jammed the walls with three full tiers of paintings purchased during his Paris years. By the French doors stood a harpsichord that I recognized from the Hôtel de Langeac. The dining room held a dumbwaiter built into the walls (he explained, as if I could not guess) so that his guests could speak their minds on any subject without the inhibiting presence of servants.

  In the afternoon I saw the ex-President on his hands and knees playing with two grandchildren by the fishpond.

  At dinner, while the dumbwaiters hummed and turned, he described his plans for the new university he had at last persuaded the Virginia legislature to establish at Charlottesville, and for which he was designing both the buildings and the curriculum. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,” he said with all the old Roman firmness, “it expects what never was and never will be.”

  Did I believe he kept a “Congo harem”?

  On the second afternoon I strolled with one of the other guests, a French woman, wife of a former British diplomat, who asked with Gallic thoroughness about every fact and scrap of my life with Jefferson. No, I had not succeeded him as Minister to Paris. Gouverneur Morris had. (The teeth of memory are still very sharp.) Yes, I had stayed through the worst of the revolution, and had lost many friends to the Terror. Who? I named Lafayette, exiled and imprisoned; certain French américains; the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, who was dragged from his carriage and stoned to death by rioters while his family watched in horror, and whose young widow had thereafter remained true to his memory, never leaving France, though her friends, some of her friends, one of them, had importuned her with passion.

  We had by that time reached the edge of the west lawn, from which we looked down on the slave shacks that lined the lower patio beside the lawn. Directly in front of us three middle-aged black men dressed in gray cotton work clothes stood in a circle, leaning on their rakes. What was my profession now? Madame Thornton asked. Was I also a plantation owner? I scarcely heard the questions. I had visited Jefferson twice or three times in Washington when he was President; once briefly in Monticello when I first returned from France, but the house had no second-story roof then, the daughters lived in other places, I had no stomach for southern realities—I had fled in a day to Philadelphia. And after that I had simply stayed away from Virginia.

  What in fact did I do? Madame Thornton repeated her question. I lived on my investments, I told her modestly (money had in fact rained on me for forty days and forty nights from the Philadelphia skies). Thanks to the two magic words real estate. And I had just begun a term as an officer of the American Colonization Society, whose goal was the emancipation of Negro slaves and their return to Africa, in a new country of their own.

  “You are an abolitionist then?”

  “My ideas were formed under our host,” I said carefully, gesturing toward the white dome of the house (there was no denying Jefferson’s liking for breastlike domes). “Who predicted in a book long ago that black and white could never live together permanently here.” It was amazing how well my mind retained Jefferson’s very phrases. “Slavery will eventually ‘divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.’ ”

  She was far from shy or indirect, Madame Thornton. She stood, hands on hips, with that pugnacious, sparrowlike tilt of her head that I had seen in other French ladies. “The mulatto servant at dinner last night,” she said, “looked exactly like Mr. Jefferson, down to his red hair and freckles.”

  “His nephew Peter Carr,” I said, clearing my throat. I fumbled for the glasses I too used for reading. “Is the acknowledged father.”

  “By the family acknowledged.” She switched to French, the language of moral precision. “That housemaid with the big smile is his mistress, yes?”

  I put my hand to my mouth and, with great originality, cleared my throat again; a diplomat forever.

  “The source of that story was an alcoholic Scotsman named James Callender, Madame. It is a fact that Callender left England after writing an attack on George III and being charged with sedition. In America he set up as an anti-Federalist and went after Hamilton first, whose private life perhaps was not spotless. He subsequently wrote that John Adams was a British spy. That Washington personally robbed the army treasury. That Adams (again) imported for his pleasures not one, but two young mistresses from Europe, one French and one German, then tired of the German and sent her back.” I did not add that Adams thought this outrageous charge, which secretly flattered him, had cost him Pennsylvania in his first election, where the Pennsylvania Dutch could never forgive his supposed preference for a French girl over a German.

  “The man was encouraged by Jefferson, for a short time only. But after Jefferson rejected his tactics and refused to pay him money, Callender turned on him too and published those … reports. As it happens, I have known Sally Hemings since she was fourteen years old and a household servant in Paris, which is where, incidentally, Callender says the affair began.”

  Madame Thornton had begun to stroll again, leading us away from Mulberry Row toward a painted wooden bench and a bed of bright autumnal flowers.

  “That is a lawyer’s answer, my dear Chort,” she said, reverting to English. “It comes from the head, not the heart.” She mocked my pompousness. “ ‘It is a fact that—Subsequently he wrote that.’ Why doesn’t Jefferson merely free his slaves? Or deny these charges?”

  “He did deny them once.” We sat on the bench, facing the splendid house with its dome and its Palladian facade and little roofed pavilion where Jefferson and his wife had spent their wedding night. Stacks of bricks lay to one side of the pavilion, and a wheelbarrow full of trowels and mortar. Like every other house Jefferson had lived in, Monticello was perpetually unfinished. “He did deny the charges in a letter to a friend. I have seen it. But he refused to allow the letter to be published. He is a very private man.”

  The tall, angular profile of our host was just visible now, passing from one room to another. My mind took an odd turn. Jefferson loved windows, he needed sunlight daily, he had told me once; but wherever he lived, invariably he put up shutters or blinds on all the windows, as if to let in light but keep himself hidden. While I watched he vanished into the shadows of his study. A second odd association. At dinner yesterday, pouring my wine, he had said that Maria Cosway’s husband had died and she was now in Italy, a nun.

  “And as for freeing them, Mr. Jefferson believes it is right to wait till they can earn their own livings, with a skill. He has set some free already.” James Hemings for one, who had left Monticello and looked me up in Philadelphia; then returned to Monticello, left again, finally committed suicide in a drunken stupor. I would not tell Madame Thornton. Nor would I tell her that Jefferson’s wealth, such as it was, now consisted almost entirely of slaves. If he freed more, he would soon have nothing, leave nothing for his grandchildren to inherit. My own view (brutally correct, as it turned out) was that he would die a bankrupt.

  Madame Thornton was now sitting on the edge of the bench, looking up at me quite curiously.

  “I notice that you always answer what Mr. Jefferson thinks. You never speak for yourself,” she said.

  I took a deep breath and looked up into the cloudless blue Virginian sky.

  “Then I don’t believe a word
of it,” I said, speaking for myself, freely, from the heart.

  “Because he is your hero,” she said simply.

  Yes.

  Note

  There was really a William Short. I have brought him back early from his Italian trip and altered a few other minor dates; I have also returned Lafayette to Paris on one occasion when he was away and have moved Vergennes’s office around at Versailles. And as Clérisseau rightly suspected, I have transferred one famous Parisian anecdote from Franklin to Jefferson. Otherwise, Jefferson keeps to the generally agreed-upon facts as I have found them in Short’s papers (now in the Library of Congress) and numerous other contemporary letters and diaries, above all in the vast annotated edition of Jefferson’s writings published by Princeton University Press under the editorship of Julian Boyd.

  I am grateful to the research staff at Monticello for many kindnesses, particularly to Lucia Stanton, who allowed me to study the proofsheets of her forthcoming edition (with James A. Bear, Jr.) of Jefferson’s account books. Jack McLaughlin, author of Jefferson and Monticello, and Douglas Wilson, editor of Jefferson’s Commonplace Book, have been generous correspondents. For information about Jefferson’s most celebrated work I have drawn on Jay Fliegelman’s Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance.

  I thank Diana Dulaney for computing my words into prose and Janet Biehl for scrupulously checking my history. I likewise thank the staff at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, whose beautiful rooms date back to the years when Jefferson knew Paris. And finally, I am most deeply grateful to Steve Rubin, who first suggested this project, to Virginia Barber, who knows, only encouraging words, and to Kate Miciak, who is a wonderful, wonderful editor.

  A Conversation with Max Byrd

  We asked Max Byrd to imagine what it would be like if Andrew Jackson somehow interviewed Thomas Jefferson, out in the timeless Valhalla of early American history. Here is what he thought.

  Andrew Jackson: I start with the simplest question, Mr. Jefferson. Why do you hate me?

  Thomas Jefferson: My dear General.

  Jackson: [Pushing his ornamental sword firmly to one side as he sits down.] I am a candid person, Mr. Jefferson. I ask you to be the same. Question repeated: Why, then, Sir, do you hate me so much?

  Jefferson: The word “candid”—did you know, General Jackson, that in the French language candide means “gullible,” as in Voltaire’s little story of that name, written in the year 1759? It is what grammarians call a faux ami—false friend.

  Jackson: I don’t know French, or Latin, or Greek, as you are well aware. I was born poor. I never had college schooling like you, or traveled to vaunted Europe like you. I know some words of Choctaw, a little Spanish. I know a lot about false friends. Enemies.

  Jefferson: Enemies.

  Jackson: In an interview, Sir, you answer my questions. You don’t repeat what I say like Poll Parrot. I ask the question because it is on the record. When that pair of young Harvard peacocks Francis Calley Gray and George Ticknor came to visit you at Monticello in January of 1815, it was only a week or so after my victory at New Orleans. Despite the distance and the season, rumors of that victory had already started to reach the East, so of course you might have already heard rumbles. But those two boys wrote in their private letters—people always show me letters—that it was reported in the Charlottesville newspaper the very morning of their departure, brought to your very door at dawn. At breakfast they talked of nothing else. But when you came to sit down and have your French tea in your French porcelain cup, you said you hadn’t seen the newspaper yet and didn’t plan to look at it for some time.

  Jefferson: I had been out late the night before. A dam on my property …

  Jackson: Had burst and flooded some fields and would cost $30,000 to repair, yes, but when they told you the news and Ticknor said, “Why that victory might just make General Jackson the next President,” did you not burst out in one of your furies that Jackson had uncontrollable passions and was “the most dangerous man in America”?

  Jefferson: “One of my furies”?

  Jackson: You think I don’t control my passions. I manage my passions like an actor, Sir. You conceal yours, mostly. But you hate. You hate. Even before Ticknor and Gray came to visit, you had kept me out of Madison’s cabinet by telling that little prune-faced sh-t that I was wild and temper-prone, pardon my French, Sir. And you told Daniel Webster the same thing. And when they had a celebration of my victory in Charlottesville and you had to come down from your mountain, you gave the most tepid toast possible. I remember every lukewarm word of it. “Honor and gratitude to those who have filled the measure of their country’s honor.” Very pretty. I don’t know what it means.

  Jefferson: We are different characters, General Jackson, you with your sword, me with my pen. I favor restraint and balance in all things, especially in my prose. And for the sake of balance, let me remind you that when I was President and Aaron Burr was on trial for treason in 1807, you came to Richmond and stood on the courthouse steps and made the most outrageous speeches against me.

  Jackson: I did more than that. You had allied yourself against Burr and with that fat sack of slops James Wilkinson, and I told anyone who would listen, in Richmond or out of it, that I had loved Mr. Jefferson as a man and adored him as a president, but if he could support such a base, corrupt lump of poison as that conspirator Wilkinson, then I must have misjudged his character and I withdrew my confidence in him. I think you were blinded by your hate for Burr—a very undigestible man, I agree—but you kept it mostly bottled up. I use my fury to clear my vision. You keep yours out of sight, you let it go about its work out of sight, on its belly, like a serpent. You told Madison, quietly, that you wished someone would kill Patrick Henry. I would have shot out his heart in a duel. Balance and restraint, from somebody who started a Revolution!

  Jefferson: We are too different to talk.

  Jackson: No, Sir. You hated Hamilton, I hated the Bank. You pushed the power of the President far beyond what the Founders expected, as did I—if you hadn’t bought Louisiana, I would have seized it at the point of a gun. We were both democrats, both men of the people, Sir, only I knew the people up close, unwashed, raw of mind but good of heart, and you saw them dimly, from your library.

  Jefferson: You confuse the people with the mob. It was the mob that came to your first Inauguration and rioted like savages in the President’s Mansion, celebrating with whiskey and tobacco till you had to flee the house for fear of their violent happiness. They were not Jeffersonians.

  Jackson: The people are not very good at balance and restraint. The bankers and lawyers are much worse, of course. Neither of us had much luck with them. We are alike in most things, Mr. Jefferson, except that I am you turned inside out. The Jacksonian persuasion was Democracy without its fine French clothes and book-learned theories. We are cracked mirrors held up to each other.

  Jefferson: No.

  Jackson: Which is why you hate me.

  NOVELS BY MAX BYRD

  Shooting the Sun

  Grant

  Jackson

  Jefferson

  About the Author

  MAX BYRD is the author of the acclaimed historical novels Jefferson, Jackson, and Grant. An authority on eighteenth-century literature, Byrd makes his home in Davis, California, where he is at work on his next novel.