A Wilderness So Immense

by Jon Kukla

  In the months since his arrival to succeed Benjamin Franklin as minister to France, the charms of Paris had not yet enthralled the Virginian. He found the climate cold and damp—at least at first. Injury makes us vulnerable, we feel the cold more intensely, and Jefferson had come to Paris profoundly wounded by personal tragedy and the ingratitude of political life. In truth, Thomas Jefferson had fled to Paris and found refuge there in his study and his work.

  A chilly morning was no time to dawdle out of doors, and on this particular Wednesday there was much to be done. At long last, Jefferson’s final architectural drawings for the new Capitol of Virginia were ready for shipment to Richmond, and a reliable courier was leaving for America the next day. Ezra Bates could be entrusted with all the correspondence that Thomas Jefferson’s one-man office could prepare for his Thursday departure. Then the minister could relax with his thirteen-year-old daughter, Martha, a student in residence at the Abbaye Royale de Panthémont, a convent school favored by English families. Panthémont was regarded as the most genteel school in Paris, and Patsy, as she was known to her father—she was “Jeffy” to her schoolmates—had been admitted on the recommendation of a friend of the marquis de Lafayette. She spent Thursdays and Sundays with her father, and they indulged a shared passion for music by playing together on the violin and harpsichord.9

  Patsy’s visits were the bright moments of Jefferson’s early years in Paris. As governor of Virginia near the end of the American Revolution, Jefferson and his government had been embarrassed when British cavalry led by Benedict Arnold and Banistre Tarleton raided Richmond, Charlottesville, and Monticello. Like chess players quickly moving their pieces to avoid capture or checkmate, Governor Jefferson had scrambled south to his Bedford County retreat, Poplar Forest, while his councillors and the legislature had scurried over the Blue Ridge Mountains to Staunton. When the danger was long gone—after the American army and French navy engineered the siege and surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown—a legislative inquiry formally exonerated Jefferson of any hint of misconduct during the emergency. But the inquiry itself still rankled him.

  Tall and lanky, Jefferson had the fair and sometimes freckled complexion of a redheaded Englishman. After retiring from the presidency in 1809 he cultivated an air of philosophic serenity, high above the rough and tumble of politics, but as a younger man Governor Jefferson was thin-skinned and easily stung by criticism. By the 1780s he had devoted a dozen years to public service, and the legislative inquest seemed an ungrateful insult. Enough was enough. On the day the legislature of Virginia unanimously voted its gratitude for “his impartial, upright, and attentive administration whilst in office”—on the day the senators and representatives of the Old Dominion voiced their “high opinion … of Mr. Jefferson’s ability, rectitude, and integrity, as Chief Magistrate of this Commonwealth”—on that very day Jefferson declined election as a delegate to Congress.10

  “I am fond of quiet,” Jefferson confided later to his friend Abigail Adams, “willing to do my duty, but irritable by slander and apt to be forced by it to abandon my post.” He was more specific in a letter to James Monroe. “I might have comforted myself under the disapprobation of the well-meaning but uninformed people,” he wrote,

  yet that of their representatives was a shock…. And I felt that these injuries, for such they have been since acknowledged, had inflicted a wound on my spirit which will only be cured by the all-healing grave.

  Bruised by the public indignities of politics, Jefferson set aside his bitterness to tell Abigail that “Mrs. Jefferson has added another daughter to our family,” but “has been ever since and still continues very dangerously ill.”11

  Martha Wayles Jefferson languished in her bed after the birth of Lucy Elizabeth. Jefferson nursed her through the summer, “never out of Calling. When not at her bed side he was writing in a small room at the head of her bed.” Ten months after the legislature’s clumsy effort “to obviate and remove all unmerited censure” about his actions during Tarleton’s raid, private grief compounded Jefferson’s public embarrassment.12

  When Martha Wayles Jefferson died on September 6, 1782, her husband “was led from the room almost in a state of insensibility … into his library where he fainted and remained so long insensible that they feared he never would revive.” He kept to his room for three weeks, pacing the floor night and day, ignoring the beauty of Monticello in early autumn, as buttery maple leaves floated above the morning fog or gleamed in the afternoon sun.13

  The legislature convened in Richmond, and his friends dispatched one of their number to Monticello. Jefferson was “inconsolable,” cloistered away on his mountain, stricken with a grief “so violent as to justify the circulating report of his swooning away whenever he sees his children.”14

  Outside, on the hills around Monticello in the middle of October, tawny oak leaves diffuse the midday sun until it drifts to the ground without casting a shadow, and the horizontal rays of the setting sun silhouette the trees and light up the ruby foliage of dogwoods and sumac like candlelight through a glass of vintage claret. The beauty of autumn in Virginia escaped his notice. “When at last he left his room,” Jefferson “was incessantly on horseback rambling about the mountain.”15

  As the trees went bare, their bony fingers warned of the approaching winter, a landscape suitably bleak for his “melancholy rambles.” Young Martha was “a solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief”—until the 25th of October, when a courier arrived at Monticello with a letter from Philadelphia. Congress wanted to send Jefferson to Paris as a peace commissioner to help negotiate the treaty that would end the American Revolution. Perhaps, his friends hoped, the appointment might lure him back into public life and assuage his private grief.16

  Their ploy worked. Under the cover of duty, he could flee to France. After eleven weeks of virtual silence since Martha’s death, Jefferson began “emerging from that stupor of mind which had rendered me as dead to the world as was she whose loss occasioned it.” When he had left office at the end of his term as governor, Jefferson had told the marquis d’Chastellux that he had “folded [him]self in the arms of retirement, and rested all prospects of future happiness on domestic and literary objects”—including the composition of his Notes on the State of Virginia—but

  a single event wiped away all my plans and left me a blank which I had not the spirits to fill up. In this state of mind an appointment from Congress found [them] requiring me to cross die Atlantic.17

  He would escape his grief by traveling to France and immersing himself in work.

  Jefferson’s morning ritual of jotting the temperature into his ivory notebooks had therapeutic as well as scientific value, for his heart was “a blank” and “dead to the world.” The pain of Martha’s death was still with him, and of their six children, only two survived. Two daughters had died at five months. A son had lived only seventeen days. Most recently, word had come from Virginia to Paris that whooping cough, “most horrible of all disorders,” had claimed his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Lucy Elizabeth. Jefferson had left Lucy and her sister Mary in the care of his relatives, Elizabeth and Francis Eppes, at Eppington, in Chesterfield County. Arrangements were soon under way to retrieve Mary from the plantation south of Richmond and reunite her in Paris with her father and only surviving sister—a feat that took nearly two years to accomplish.18

  Mary Jefferson, later known as Maria, reached London in June 1787 and stayed with John and Abigail Adams, who called her Polly. Her companion crossing the Atlantic was not the mature slave woman Isabel, whom Jefferson had requested, but James Hemings’s fourteen-year-old sister. “The old Nurse whom you expected,” Abigail wrote announcing Polly’s safe arrival in London, “was sick and unable to come. She has a Girl about 15 or 16 with her, the Sister of the Servant you have with you.”19

  Their own children were in their teens and twenties, and the Adamses welcomed Jefferson’s nine-year-old Polly “and the maid” into their not-quite-empty nest. Abigail
did all “such things as I should have done had they been my own.” Polly had been “5 weeks at sea, and with men only, so that on the first day of her arrival, she was as rough as a little sailor,” but the next day Abigail took her shopping “and purchased her a few articles which she could not well do without”—spending about £12 on clothing for Polly and “the maid.” In a few days Polly was “the favorite of every creature in the House”—“She stands by me while I write and asks if I write every day to her pappa?”20

  Jefferson immediately dispatched Adrienne Petit across the Channel to fetch Polly. He was profoundly grateful for Abigail’s “kind attention to my little daughter,” and yet fearful (as fathers at heart-wrenching distance often are) that good intentions might be misunderstood. Having “formed an attachment to you,” he lamented to Abigail, “she will think I am made only to tear her from her affections. I wish I could have come myself.” For her part, having come to know Jefferson’s “amiable lovely Child” and “dear little Girl,” Abigail Adams could not “but feel Sir, how many pleasures you must lose by committing her to a convent. Yet situated as you are, you cannot keep her with you.”21

  At first glance, Sally Hemings struck Abigail Adams as older than her years: “about 15 or 16.” Abigail never mentioned Sally’s name in her letters to Jefferson (and John Adams did not mention either of the girls in his correspondence), but that did not matter. There was something that only folks from Monticello knew about “the girl,” or “the maid,” and her brother. James and Sally Hemings were family.22

  Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, had outlived three wives and then openly settled his affections on his mulatto slave Elizabeth Hemings. They had six children together. Sally was the youngest, born in 1773, the same year that Wayles’s death brought Elizabeth Hemings and her family to Monticello. Sally Hemings was Patsy and Polly Jefferson’s aunt. Her brother James, busy mastering French cuisine at the Hotel de Langeac, was their uncle. Now fourteen but easily mistaken for sixteen, the fair-complected Sally Hemings was said to resemble her half-sister Martha Wayles, the girl Jefferson had married when she was twenty-three and for whom he still grieved. Once Polly Jefferson came to Paris and joined her sister Patsy at the convent school of the Abbaye Royale de Panthémont in 1787, perhaps the only employee lacking in the Jefferson household was a chaperone—although it seems likely that Jefferson’s sexual relationship with Sally Hemings began only after they returned to Virginia.

  Folding the ivory notebook and slipping it into a pocket, Jefferson carried his thermometer across the burnished floors of the Hotel de Langeac and retired upstairs to his study. His penknife and goose quill rested near the inkwell and a stack of rag paper. A sheaf of maps were on hand, as were the neatly packaged final architectural drawings of his design for the new Capitol of Virginia. The comfort of busyness awaited him.

  First, Jefferson dashed off a confidential note to John Jay, the New York jurist and former diplomat to Paris and Madrid. As secretary for foreign affairs, Jay was the chief diplomatic officer of the United States under the Articles of Confederation, and Jefferson was happy to report that an unnamed “person”—neither of them called him a gentleman—had passed quietly through Paris en route to Warsaw.23

  The traveler in question was a young Virginia-born soldier of fortune, Lewis Littlepage, who had resided briefly with Jay’s family in Paris, forged Jay’s signature on bills of credit totaling more than £1,000, challenged Jay to a duel, and, most recently, filled the columns of a New York newspaper with malicious falsehoods before sailing to Europe. Jay had answered the charges in a forthright pamphlet, and the contretemps evaporated as a mere waste of time unworthy of any further notice, then or now, unless for some reason, as some whispered in New York, Littlepage’s venture into journalism had been abetted by French officials there. That irksome prospect was dispelled by Jefferson’s report that the young scoundrel had passed through Paris entirely unheralded and ridden on toward well-deserved oblivion as a chamberlain to the last king of Poland.

  The next item on Jefferson’s Wednesday agenda was a short letter to John Banister, a trusted source for transatlantic commercial advice. The Virginia businessman had studied law at the Middle Temple in London, served as a lieutenant colonel of cavalry under Washington during the Yorktown campaign, and helped enact both Virginia’s state constitution and the Articles of Confederation. Battersea, his Palladian home near Petersburg, overlooked the Appomattox River and its bateaux carrying tobacco, iron, and other commodities from the Piedmont to the James River and the world beyond. This time Jefferson asked Banister for the eighteenth-century equivalent of a Dun and Bradstreet report about the credit and reputation of a firm doing business in France and America. The letter closed with greetings to Anne Banister and a quick report that Jefferson had seen their son John in good health prior to the boy’s departure for Italy and the grand tour.

  Jefferson’s third letter of the day went to the Philadelphia astronomer, inventor, and mathematician David Rittenhouse along with a copy of the French edition of Notes on the State of Virginia (the only book Jefferson ever wrote) and nautical almanacs for 1786 through 1790, “which are as late as they are published.” Jefferson was grateful for details of frontier geography that Rittenhouse had sent in September—in a letter that journeyed for four months to Paris and had reached him only “a few days ago”—but the future president of the United States pressed him for facts about “the Western boundary beyond the Meridian of Pittsburgh.” Jefferson told Rittenhouse merely that he needed this information “to enable me to trace that boundary in my map.” He was more expansive, however, with his thoughts on fossils, shells, and other “curiosities of the Western country” that he had written about in Notes on the State of Virginia. He knew that Rittenhouse, the self-taught Quaker genius who designed and built sophisticated instruments for the American Philosophical Society and taught at the University of Pennsylvania, would share his curiosity about a new reflecting telescope developed by the Abbé Rochon using “the metal called Platina,” which could be polished to a mirror finish as fine as gold or silver with less chance of tarnishing.

  Finally, having attended to the immediate demands of diplomacy, business, and science, Jefferson’s thoughts turned to Virginia and a letter that his young protégé Archibald Stuart had posted toward Paris in October. “Nothing is so grateful to me at this distance as details both great and small of what is passing in my own country,” he told Stuart. A graduate of William and Mary, member of Phi Beta Kappa, and veteran of the Carolina and Yorktown campaigns of the American Revolution, Stuart had declined the chair in mathematics at his alma mater to read law with Jefferson. With clients throughout the Valley of Virginia, at twenty-five he had won election to the lower house of the Virginia legislature from Botetourt County, across the Blue Ridge some eighty miles southwest of Jefferson’s Monticello. While Jefferson was writing to him from Paris, Stuart was attending the legislature in Richmond, where thirty-four-year-old James Madison was engineering the passage of Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom—one of the three achievements the author of the Declaration of Independence and founder of the University of Virginia would choose to inscribe on his gravestone.

  About three o’clock, Jefferson took his thermometer outside and noted that the skies had cleared and the temperature risen to 51 degrees—but there was no FedEx truck idling at the curb, Ezra Bates was not leaving until tomorrow, and in January 1786 humanity had not yet substituted data for thought and surrendered to the technology of instantaneous miscommunication. Archibald Stuart’s news “of what is passing in my own country” had drawn Thomas Jefferson into profound contemplation.

  “The quiet of Europe at this moment,” Jefferson told Stuart, “furnishes little which can attract your notice, nor will that quiet be soon disturbed, at least for the current year.” The current peace in Europe “perhaps … hangs on the life of the King of Prussia,” the American minister informed his young friend, “and that hangs by a very slender
thread.” Jefferson was not the only statesmen alert for news from Potsdam, just outside Berlin, where Frederick the Great had retired to spend his last months in the company of his dogs and library at Sans Souci palace. Several times since 1700, the death of a European monarch had brought war as rivals scrambled for territory or advantage. Frederick himself, in the first year of his reign, had attacked Austria on such an occasion, and Jefferson presumed that his death (which finally occurred in August 1786 at the age of seventy-four) might force another violent realignment among the great powers. Europe’s other enlightened despots—Catherine the Great in Moscow, Joseph II in Vienna, Gustav III in Stockholm, and Carlos III in Madrid—as well as the constitutional monarch George III in London and the relative royal newcomer, Louis XVI at Versailles, were equally alert for news.

  Among these liberal autocrats and philosophe kings, none was more able or eminent (or was now more elderly) than the king who came to the throne of Prussia three years before Jefferson was born. Frederick the Great had transformed Prussia into a world power by his military genius, administrative talent, and political skill. Renowned as a patron of the arts, music, and education, a talented flautist and prolific writer, a longtime friend of Voltaire and an admirer of George Washington, Frederick II had opened his reign in 1740 with the publication of his Antimachiavell (in which he denounced statecraft in favor of peaceful and enlightened rule) and the invasion of Austria. By the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Frederick’s victorious armies in Europe (along with Britain’s great navy and its redcoats in North America) had entirely redrawn political boundaries on both sides of the North Atlantic. France had been forced to surrender Canada to England and Louisiana to Spain, while Prussia began to challenge the Austrian Habsburgs for domination of the German states on the Continent.