Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  Very shortly thereafter, Jefferson argued the case of Samuel Howell v. Wade Netherland. At issue was a matter of perennial concern to the planter class: To what extent were the descendants of mixed-race parents bound into servitude? Jefferson argued that his client, Samuel Howell, a grandson of a white woman and a black man, should be free despite Virginia statutes that said he should be held in servitude until the age of thirty-one.

  Jefferson took the occasion to make a natural-law argument, writing that “everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person and using it at his own will,” Jefferson said. “This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the author of nature, because it is necessary for his own sustenance.” He lost the case.

  At different moments in his legislative and public life, Jefferson said things or proposed courses of action that could conceivably have led to the end of a slave society. The Howell brief suggests a Jeffersonian openness to such an eventuality, but for him abolition was always to be an eventuality for future generations, not a reality that he would ever see. The reaction to the Bland bill and of the court in Howell could not have failed to leave an impression, too, on the young lawyer-legislator so anxious for popularity. Wounded by the defeats of his progressive efforts on slavery, Jefferson was finally to retreat to a more conventional position.

  Jefferson sought refuge from the anxieties of the Shadwell fire, the toll of trial work, and the capturing of runaways in a familiar pastime: flirting. “I reflect often with pleasure on the philosophical evenings I passed at Rosewell in my last visits there,” Jefferson wrote in a section of a letter addressed to his friend and classmate John Page’s wife. “I was always fond of philosophy even in its drier forms, but from a ruby lip it comes with charms irresistible.” Writing about another friend in love, Jefferson said: “I do not mean, madam, to advise him against it. On the contrary I am become an advocate for the passion: for I too am coelo tactus.” The last Latin phrase translates as “struck by.”

  Jefferson, it seemed, was also in love.

  FIVE

  A WORLD OF DESIRE AND DENIAL

  Harmony in the marriage state is the very first object to be aimed at.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON

  THE WOMAN IN QUESTION was a rich widow. Accomplished and intelligent, with what family tradition held to be “a lithe and exquisitely formed figure,” Martha Wayles Skelton had been born at a plantation called the Forest, in Charles City County, Virginia, in 1748. She was five and a half years younger than Jefferson.

  Known to intimates as Patty, she was beautiful, musical, and well-read—and Jefferson adored her. She was said to be striking looking. “Her complexion was brilliant—her large expressive eyes of the richest shade of hazel—her luxuriant hair of the finest tinge of auburn,” Henry Randall wrote after interviewing her descendants. She was, a contemporary said, a woman of “good sense and good nature.” Patty and Thomas shared tastes in literature and in wide-ranging conversation. One kinsman thought the Jeffersons “a couple … well calculated and disposed to communicate knowledge and pleasure.” Patty taught her children and her nieces and nephews what tradition calls “the beginnings of knowledge,” suggesting an interest in education similar to Jefferson’s.

  In her, Jefferson found the most congenial of companions, a woman who spoke his language. Their nights were filled with music and wine and talk—talk of everything. They seem to have fully shared their lives with each other. He confided in her about politics. A granddaughter recalled Patty’s “passionate attachment” to Jefferson and her “exalted opinion of him.” For his part, Jefferson’s “conduct as a husband had been admirable in its ensemble, charming in its detail.”

  Patty once complained that some instance of Jefferson’s generosity had gone unappreciated by its recipient. “But it was always so with him,” Mrs. Jefferson is said to have remarked. “He is so good himself, that he cannot understand how bad other people may be.”

  Smart and strong willed, Patty liked having her way. She was insistent on discipline. Jefferson once gently rebuked her for reminding their eldest daughter, Patsy, of an old childhood crime. “My dear, a fault in so young a child once punished should be forgotten,” Jefferson said to Patty. (Patsy recalled feeling a “warm gush of gratitude” for her father’s support.)

  Patty was not a woman of retiring nature or of quiet views. She had a mind of her own and could be assertive and acerbic. “My grandmother Jefferson had a vivacity of temper which might sometimes border on tartness, but which, in her intercourse with her husband, was completely subdued by her exceeding affection for him,” said Ellen Randolph Coolidge, a Jefferson granddaughter.

  Perhaps not always, however. Jefferson may have been speaking from marital experience when he advised a daughter: “Much better … if our companion views a thing in a light different from what we do, to leave him in quiet possession of his view. What is the use of rectifying him if the thing be unimportant; and if important let it pass for the present, and wait a softer moment and more conciliatory occasion of revising the subject together.”

  Yet Patty could reassure and calm her husband, who was given to worry and restlessness. Easing Thomas Jefferson’s emotional tensions was a difficult task. He was acutely sensitive. At first blush, the fact that such a man was drawn to politics—where approval is fleeting and criticism constant—may seem contradictory. The connection between Jefferson’s interior and exterior lives, however, follows a familiar pattern found in politicians from age to age. Ambition creates a hunger for action and acclaim, and those who crave applause have a particular aversion to criticism. His wife appears to have been one of the few people who could soothe him.

  Patty Wayles Jefferson was the daughter of a man who had risen far in Virginia. Born to a poor, undistinguished family in Lancaster, England, John Wayles made his fortune in America as a lawyer, debt collector, slave trader, and planter. John Wayles’s first wife, Martha Eppes, was the daughter of Francis Eppes of the Bermuda Hundred plantation. They had married in 1746. In the autumn of 1748, a daughter named Martha, called Patty, was born. The child lived but the mother did not. John Wayles married twice more, producing four other daughters, three of whom survived.

  Patty Wayles grew up, then, in an uncertain household. She never knew her own mother, and two stepmothers came and went. Her experience with her father’s wives was unhappy enough that she never wanted her own children to face the possibility of having a stepmother. On her deathbed she is said to have extracted a promise from Jefferson never to marry again. From the loss of her mother to the shifting cast of characters in the domestic life of the Forest, Patty learned early that the world was perilous and changeable.

  Her father’s livelihood partly depended on precariousness in the lives of others. As what was called an “agent” for Farrell and Jones, a British merchant house, John Wayles was a debt collector—a detail Jefferson neglected to mention in his description of his father-in-law in his Autobiography. “Mr. Wayles was a lawyer of much practice, to which he was introduced more by his great industry, punctuality and practical readiness, than to eminence in the science of his profession,” Jefferson wrote of his father-in-law. “He was a most agreeable companion, full of pleasantry and good humor, and welcomed in every society.”

  There are notes of both condescension and insecurity in Jefferson’s account of his father-in-law. The assessment of Wayles’s legal career is that of a much more learned lawyer, as Jefferson was. More interesting still is the phrase “welcomed into every society”—why assert a man’s inclusion in social circles unless exclusion was a threat or even an occasional reality? The point accomplishes the opposite of what Jefferson intended, for it raises the question of Wayles’s standing in colonial society.

  That standing was at risk in the circles in which Jefferson moved, for Wayles embodied one of the two worst fears of any planter. If slave insurrections ranked first,
being made to pay one’s (usually enormous) debts was a near second. The sight of Wayles coming into view provoked anxiety among the planters, many of whom appear to have taken steps to avoid his collection calls.

  A mocking poem in The Virginia Gazette of Thursday, January 1, 1767, refers to John Wayles as “ill bred.” The context of the remark was a controversial murder trial in Williamsburg. Wayles, who was representing the accused, had been charged with lying in a deposition. That Patty’s father was not a man as established as, say, a Randolph, suggests there was more love than calculation in Jefferson’s decision to take his chances with the man’s daughter.

  Jefferson undertook legal work for Wayles beginning in 1768. Two years before, in November 1766, Patty, who had just turned eighteen, married Bathurst Skelton. She bore him a son, John, a year later. Patty lost her husband in September 1768, and their son, John, died in the summer of 1771.

  The bereaved Mrs. Skelton had returned to the Forest, her father’s house, where, as an attractive widow, she had no want of company. Suitors lurked about, hoping they might succeed the late Mr. Skelton.

  Patty Wayles Skelton was, taken on her own, immensely appealing to a man like Jefferson. He was her elder, but she had seen and experienced much. There would have been little frivolity in her manner. No coquette, she had more in common with Betsy Walker than with Rebecca Burwell. Patty was a woman who had lost her mother, her husband, her son, and who understood what it took to run complex households.

  One of the chief complexities of domestic life on Virginia’s plantations—a complexity Patty knew well—lay in negotiating the questions of blood, sex, and dominion that bound white and enslaved families in largely unspoken ways.

  The Forest was rife with such issues. Around 1735, a man named Hemings, the white English captain of a trading ship, fathered a daughter with a “full-blooded African” woman. The African woman’s child was named Elizabeth, also known as Betty. (The details come from the account of Madison Hemings, a great-grandson of Captain Hemings and of the African woman.) Mother and daughter ended up as slaves of the Eppes family of Bermuda Hundred—the Eppes family from which John Wayles would take his first bride, Martha, who died in childbirth. By 1746—the year Wayles married Martha Eppes—Elizabeth Hemings, then about eleven years old, became Wayles’s property and moved to the Forest. There, beginning at age eighteen, she gave birth to several children.

  Wayles, meanwhile, outlived his daughter’s two stepmothers. After the third Mrs. Wayles died in February 1761, Elizabeth Hemings, now twenty-six years old, was “taken by the widower Wayles as his concubine,” said Madison Hemings. Beginning in 1762, Elizabeth Hemings bore five children to Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law: Robert, James, Thenia, Critta, and Peter. In 1773 came a sixth: Sarah, who was to be known by the nickname Sally.

  Such arrangements were not uncommon in slave-owning Virginia. In the nineteenth century, South Carolinian Mary Boykin Chestnut noted something about white women that was equally true in the eighteenth: “Any lady is able to tell who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but their own. Those she seems to think drop from the clouds.”

  It was a world of desire and denial. Sex across the color line—sex between owner and property—was pervasive yet rarely directly addressed or alluded to. The strange intermingling of blood and affection and silence suffused the world of the Forest that Jefferson came to know in 1770, the year he turned up as one of the candidates for Patty’s hand. It was to suffuse Monticello, too, in the fullness of time.

  Jefferson’s success in wooing the Widow Skelton was not assured, which may have made him work all the harder. By the first months of 1771, Jefferson was in full pursuit. He wrote a “romantic, poetical” description of her to a correspondent in Williamsburg named Mrs. Drummond, an elderly woman who was friendly with the George Wythes. “No pen but yours could surely so beautifully describe” Patty, wrote Mrs. Drummond, who praised Jefferson’s (now lost) “Miltonic” lines and said she did not know whether Patty’s heart was “engaged already.”

  How to capture her? Music was one means, books another. In family lore, Jefferson and Patty were destined for each other. A pair of competing suitors once arrived at the Forest, where they heard Patty and Jefferson playing and singing beautifully together. Looking at each other, the two callers were said to have recognized the inevitable and departed without announcing themselves.

  As always, music was Jefferson’s ally. To him singing or the playing of the violin or the pianoforte was more than entertainment, more than the means of passing the hours when time grew heavy. Music, rather, offered a window into a man’s soul—or into a woman’s. In his literary commonplace book Jefferson transcribed these lines from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice:

  The Man who has not Music in his Soul,

  Or is not touch’d with Concord of sweet Sounds,

  Is fit for Treason, Stratagems, and Spoils,

  The Motions of his Mind are dull as Night,

  And his Affections dark as Erebus:

  Let no such man be trusted.

  Jefferson’s mind was considering the defining human themes, always returning to the central question of politics: How is a man, as an intrinsically social animal, to live in relative peace and charity with his neighbors in a world given to passion and conflict? There was no single answer, only the enduring effort to bring clashing elements into harmony—and perhaps the most significant decision a man could make in fighting this lifelong battle was whom to marry. Jefferson needed a woman who shared his passion for music and all that music represented—sophistication, transcendence, and the life of the imagination and the heart, as well as that of flesh and blood. Patty Wayles Skelton was such a woman.

  Jefferson was determined to have her and to give her the best of everything. He was even briefly interested in his own aristocratic heritage in the Old World. “I have what I have been told were the family arms, but on what authority I know not,” Jefferson wrote his English agent, Thomas Adams, on the eve of his wedding. “It is possible there may be none. If so, I would with your assistance become a purchaser, having Sterne’s word for it that a coat of arms may be purchased as cheap as any other coat.” He usually affected an air of indifference about his mother’s ancestry and, with the allusion to the novelist Laurence Sterne’s dismissive remark about heraldry, managed to poke fun at his own request even as he was making it. Yet the inquiry was a sign of curiosity if nothing else.

  Jefferson was more interested in buying his bride larger things. He ordered a clavichord (from Hamburg, he said, “because they are better made there, and much cheaper”), but soon fell in love with a pianoforte that he had to have. He was, he told his British agent, “charmed” by the pianoforte, and he canceled the clavichord request. The pianoforte was the thing, and he wanted it right away. “Let the case be of fine mahogany, solid, not veneered. The compass from Double G. to F. in alt. a plenty of spare strings; and the workmanship of the whole very handsome, and worthy [of] the acceptance of a lady for whom I intend it.” He also needed a half-dozen white silk cotton stockings and a very particular umbrella—“large … with brass ribs covered with green silk, and neatly finished”—but the instrument was crucial. He was, he said, “very impatient” to have it by October. If it made it, it would be just in time for the wedding.

  Thomas Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton on New Year’s Day 1772. He was twenty-eight; she was twenty-three.

  It was a winter Wednesday. The Anglican ceremony, conducted by the Reverend William Coutts, was held at her father’s house, and the celebrations ran for several days. (Jefferson paid the clergyman £5 and tipped Elizabeth Hemings—Sally’s mother’s first appearance in his account books.) On January 2, The Virginia Gazette reported the marriage: “Thomas Jefferson, Esquire, one of the Representatives for Albemarle, to Mrs. Martha Skelton, Relict of Mr. Bathurst Skelton.”

 
The Skelton connection was not something Jefferson thought much about. Captivated by visions of their new life together, he had unconsciously edited Patty’s first husband out of the picture in his preparations for the wedding. In his bond for a marriage license, dated December 30, 1771, Jefferson mistakenly referred to her as a “spinster.” On the document, another hand crossed it out and inserted “Widow.”

  Her widowhood is more than an incidental detail. Though younger, Patty already knew more of marriage and its consolations and demands than Jefferson did—a fact that may have given her more confidence in herself as she embarked on a new life.

  In the depths of the first weeks of the snowy winter of 1772, Jefferson was a satisfied man. Given his wife’s numerous pregnancies in the following years, there was no shortage of physical passion between them. Their first child, Martha, nicknamed Patsy, was born at one o’clock in the morning of Sunday, September 27, 1772—nine months and twenty-six days after the marriage at the Forest.

  After their wedding, the Jeffersons remained at the Forest for some days before setting out for Monticello through ever-worsening snowy weather. As they approached Shadwell and Monticello, the snow had grown too deep for their phaeton to continue. He and Patty then got on horseback and pressed on through the forests and the wind and the snow and the ice and, as the shadows lengthened, through the gathering darkness.

  At sunset, they began their ascent, slowly and miserably taking the mountain’s 867 feet. The trees along the path up to Monticello were likely weighed down by ice and snow. The Jeffersons may have had to pass through thickets of frozen branches hanging low across the trail.

  When they arrived, they found themselves on a lonely mountaintop, cold and unexpected. The fires were out and the slaves were elsewhere. “The horrible dreariness of such a house, at the end of such a journey, I have often heard both relate,” said their daughter Patsy.