by Jon Meacham
Another opportunity for Jefferson to serve as an envoy in France came in September—a further sign that Jefferson’s performance as governor, while no one’s finest hour (with the possible exceptions of Jouett and of Martin Hemings), was not politically fatal. Yet Jefferson declined the diplomatic appointment. He had, he said, “taken my final leave of everything of that nature, have retired to my farm, my family and books from which I think nothing will evermore separate me.”
With this disinterested assertion of bucolic retirement, though, came a determination to stay in Virginia politics long enough to clear his name. “A desire to leave public office with a reputation not more blotted than it has deserved will oblige me to emerge at the next session of our assembly and perhaps to accept of a seat in it, but as I go with a single object, I shall withdraw when that shall be accomplished,” he said in September 1781. He was to stay out of office for about a year and a half—a period in which he suffered much from the pain of the rumors about his governorship. Yet he could never totally withdraw from the world—and the world’s opinion still mattered to him.
In October 1781, the Americans triumphed at Yorktown, effectively ending the war. Still captive, as were several other Jefferson slaves, Isaac Granger Jefferson witnessed the battle. “There was tremendous firing and smoke—seemed like heaven and earth was come together,” he recalled. He remembered hearing the cries of the wounded. “When the smoke blow off, you see the dead men laying on the ground.”
The war was won, and to most appearances, Thomas Jefferson had triumphed, his cause vindicated and victorious. A French visitor to Monticello in 1782, the Marquis de Chastellux, came away dazzled by its master.
Let me describe to you a man, not yet forty, tall, and with a mild and pleasing countenance, but whose mind and understanding are ample substitutes for every exterior grace. An American, who without ever having quitted his own country, is at once a musician, skilled in drawing, a geometrician, an astronomer, a natural philosopher, legislator, and statesman. A senator of America, who sat for two years in that famous Congress which brought about the revolution … a governor of Virginia, who filled this difficult station during the invasions of Arnold, of Phillips, and of Cornwallis; a philosopher, in voluntary retirement from the world and public business because he loves the world, inasmuch only as he can flatter himself with being useful to mankind.… For no object had escaped Mr. Jefferson; and it seemed as if from his youth he had placed his mind, as he has done his house, on an elevated situation, from which he might contemplate the universe.
This was how Jefferson wanted to be seen. The reality, he felt, was rather different. He believed himself a failure. Even the American victory could not take Jefferson’s mind completely off his controversial final hours as governor. He told James Monroe that one of the worst aspects of the legislative inquiry was the possibility that the public would believe that he “stood arraigned for treasons of the heart and not mere weakness of the head.” Attacks on his service, he said, “had inflicted a wound on my spirit which will only be cured by the all-healing grave.”
He added a final note: “Mrs. Jefferson has added another daughter to our family.” The child was named Lucy Elizabeth, after the sister who had died not long before her own birth. Patty had no more strength. There were no reserves to draw on, no means by which to rally. “She has been ever since,” Jefferson said, “and still continues, very dangerously ill.”
FOURTEEN
TO BURN ON THROUGH DEATH
Mrs. Jefferson has at last shaken off her tormenting pains, by yielding to them, and has left our friend inconsolable.
—Jefferson friend EDMUND RANDOLPH to James Madison
HIS WIFE WAS DYING. The latest child, the second Lucy Elizabeth, was Patty Jefferson’s sixth in ten years. Patty was only thirty-three, but her body was exhausted. The tensions and exertions of the war, culminating in the family’s evacuation of Monticello, exacerbated the state of her health. She may have suffered from tuberculosis. By the early summer of 1782 she was confined to her bed.
Her husband refused to leave her side. Day after day, week after week, month after month, Jefferson “was never out of calling,” his daughter Patsy recalled long afterward. He spared himself few details of his wife’s care, helping her take medicines and guiding cups to her lips.
Either at her bed or in a small room nearby that opened onto hers, he kept vigil. Patty, too, craved Jefferson’s company. “Her eyes ever rested on him, ever followed him,” according to family tradition. “When he spoke, no other sound could reach her ear or attract her attention. When she waked from slumber, she looked momentarily alarmed and distressed, and even appeared to be frightened, if the customary form was not bending over her, the customary look upon her.” Monticello and each other became their only reality.
She had strength enough to begin writing some lines from Sterne—they were from Tristram Shandy—on a small piece of paper.
Time wastes too fast: every letter
I trace tells me with what rapidity
Life follows my pen. The days and hours
Of it are flying over our heads like
Clouds of windy day never to return—
More every thing presses on—
She faded at this point. Jefferson finished the passage for her:
And every
Time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which
Follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation
Which we are shortly to make!
Sterne’s message here is tragic, unrelentingly so, for even moments of human communion and love are seen not as fulfilling in themselves but ephemeral: a stark yet realistic vision of life.
James Monroe sensed the scope of the crisis and the depth of his patron’s sadness. “I have been much distressed upon the subject of Mrs. Jefferson and have feared … that the report of each succeeding day would inform me she was no more.” Monroe called on God for her recovery. “It may please heaven to restore our amiable friend to health and thereby to you a friend whose loss you would always lament, and to your children a parent which no change of circumstances would ever compensate for.”
The prayer was futile. It was nearly noon on Friday, September 6, 1782, when the end came. According to Monticello tradition, “the house servants,” including Elizabeth Hemings and her daughter Sally, were among those with Patty Jefferson as she lay dying. Edmund Bacon, who managed the plantation in later decades, said that the Monticello slaves “have often told my wife that when Mrs. Jefferson died they stood around the bed. Mr. Jefferson sat by her, and she gave him directions about a good many things that she wanted done.”
Like her late mother-in-law, Patty was commanding to the last. “When she came to the children, she wept and could not speak for some time. Finally she held up her hand, and … told him she could not die happy if she thought her … children were ever to have a stepmother brought in over them.” To extract a promise of eternal faithfulness from a man like Jefferson—vital, sexually energetic, only thirty-nine—could be seen as a selfish deathbed request. Patty, however, was most likely thinking of her children and their happiness. She may have believed that the combined maternal influences of the girls’ aunts and perhaps of Elizabeth Hemings—whom Patty had known so long and so intimately—were sufficient without risking the introduction of an unknown woman as mistress of the house. Patsy was nearly ten, Polly four, Lucy an infant. Jefferson was rich, celebrated, and charming. But he gave his promise. He would, he assured his dying wife, never marry again.
Among the reported witnesses to that pledge was Sally Hemings, Patty’s half sister, who was not quite ten years old.
At a quarter to twelve on that Friday, Patty Jefferson died. In the final moments, Jefferson’s sister Martha Carr had to help the grieving husband from his wife’s bedside. He was, his daughter recalled, “in a state of
insensibility” when Mrs. Carr “with great difficulty, got him into the library, where he fainted”—and not for a brief moment. Jefferson “remained so long insensible that they feared he would never revive.”
When he did come to, he was incoherent with grief, and perhaps surrendered to rage. There is a hint that he lost all control in the calamity of Patty’s death. According to his daughter Patsy, “The scene that followed I did not witness”—presumably “the scene” unfolded in the library when he revived—“but the violence of his emotion, when, almost by stealth, I entered his room by night, to this day I dare not describe to myself.” (Patsy was writing half a century later.)
A pallet to lie on was brought to give him some comfort in the little library. Yet his grief drove him out of doors in a kind of frenzy. Patsy attached herself to her father, as if clinging to the one remaining constant in her life. For her, siblings had come and gone, and now her mother was dead. Given the demands of his wartime leadership, Jefferson would have seemed a loving if somewhat distant figure to her. Yet he adored his family, idealizing it in many ways, and he would have seen in Patsy—with her strength and evident maturity in dealing with a father in the grip of grief—images of his mother, of his sister Jane, and, of course, of Patty. He held her close; she held him close. The pattern of warmth and intimacy between father and daughter that set in during this dark spell of despair persisted for the rest of their lives.
“He kept his room [for] three weeks, and I was never a moment from his side,” Patsy said. “He walked almost incessantly night and day, only lying down occasionally, when nature was completely exhausted, on a pallet that had been brought in during his long fainting fit. My aunts remained constantly with him for some weeks—I do not remember how many.”
He could not remain still. “When at last he left his room, he rode out, and from that time he was incessantly on horseback, rambling about the mountain, in the least frequented roads, and just as often through the woods. In those melancholy rambles I was his constant companion—a solitary witness to many a burst of grief, the remembrance of which has consecrated particular scenes of that lost home beyond the power of time to obliterate.” He drove himself as though sheer movement could alleviate his loss. In one of the first letters he wrote after the disaster of September 6, 1782, he said, “I had had some thoughts of abstracting myself awhile from this state by a journey to Philadelphia or somewhere else Northwardly.”
Rumor had Jefferson nearing madness. “I ever thought him to rank domestic happiness in the first class of the chief good,” Edmund Randolph told James Madison, “but scarcely supposed that his grief would be so violent as to justify the circulating report of his swooning away whenever he sees his children.”
His epitaph for Patty came from Homer, from the heart of the Iliad. He had the words inscribed in Greek—only the educated would be able to share in his memorial to his wife. Alexander Pope had translated the lines Jefferson selected this way:
If in the melancholy shades below,
The flames of friends and lovers cease to glow,
Yet mine shall sacred last; mine undecay’d
Burn on through death and animate my shade.
In his mind the connection with Patty was eternal, able even to overcome the customs of Hades. For now, though, a phrase on the tombstone captured the unavoidable truth: “Martha Jefferson … Intermarried with Thomas Jefferson January 1st, 1772; Torn from him by death September 6th, 1782.”
A month later he was alluding to the possibility of suicide. “This miserable kind of existence is really too burdensome to be borne,” he wrote, “and were it not for the infidelity of deserting the sacred charge left me, I could not wish its continuance a moment.” His world seemed to have died with Patty. “All my plans of comfort and happiness reversed by a single event and nothing answering in prospect before me but a gloom unbrightened with one cheerful expectation,” he wrote his sister-in-law Elizabeth Eppes.
He would endure for Patsy, Polly, and Lucy. He knew his duty to his children and to his neighbors. “I will endeavor to … keep what I feel to myself that I may not dispirit you from a communication with us,” he told Mrs. Eppes. “I say nothing of coming to Eppington because I promised you this should not be till I could support such a countenance as might not cast a damp on the cheerfulness of others.”
He was a long way from that point. His wanderings in the woods and his rides with Patsy were all he could manage.
FIFTEEN
RETURN TO THE ARENA
The states will go to war with each other in defiance of Congress; one will call in France to her assistance; another Great Britain, and so we shall have all the wars of Europe brought to our own doors.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON, on his fears about a weak national government
HE WAS NEARLY FORTY years old, and, until recently, he had never really failed at anything. A favored son, a brilliant student, a legislator of his state at age twenty-five, author of the Summary View at thirty-one and of the Declaration of Independence at thirty-three, governor of Virginia at thirty-six: Thomas Jefferson was accustomed to public success and popular praise, to moving from strength to strength and from glory to glory.
No more. His beloved wife had died. His administration of Virginia in the face of the attacks of Benedict Arnold and Charles Cornwallis was widely seen as little less than disastrous. The details did not much matter. The fact was that people thought Jefferson’s leadership had been found wanting. It was a fact Jefferson hated, but it was a fact nonetheless.
Like the poet Dante, who found himself “in a dark wood wandering” at about the same age, Jefferson was forced to make his peace with the bitterness of his recent experience. He had to come to terms with the reality that he was no longer an immaculately golden public figure. Unless he convinced himself that no great life was without its mishaps and its mistakes, he would not be able to return to the arena.
Musing on the perils of fame as he prepared to put himself before the world again, he wrote George Rogers Clark, who had won celebrated victories during the war and faced criticism: “That you have enemies you must not doubt, when you reflect that you have made yourself eminent.”
It is impossible to read these lines without thinking of how they applied to their author as they did to his correspondent. “If you meant to escape malice you should have confined yourself within the sleepy line of regular duty,” Jefferson wrote Clark. “When you transgressed this and enterprised deeds which will hand down your name with honor to future times, you made yourself a mark for malice and envy to shoot at. Of these there is enough both in and out of office.”
Anguish was the price a public man paid for adulation. Since his governorship, Jefferson understood that in a way he never had before. He also knew that pressing ahead was the only way to leave the past behind. There was no other way to do it, unless one chose to retire forever, which could make things worse. Given that adversity itself was an intrinsic element of the political life Jefferson had chosen, the test of such a life came when one had to choose which path to take in adversity’s wake.
The personal and political miseries of 1781 and 1782—the invasions by the British, the aspersions on his character, and the death of his wife—might well have sent lesser men back to their plantations in bitterness and in anger at the injustice of it all.
Not Jefferson. He chose advance over retreat.
When news of Patty Jefferson’s death reached Philadelphia, Jefferson’s allies in the Congress asked him to serve on the Paris peace commission in France tasked with crafting the postwar order.
Jefferson accepted with alacrity. “I had two months before that lost the cherished companion of my life, in whose affections, unabated on both sides, I had lived the last ten years in unchequered happiness,” Jefferson recalled. “With the public interests, the state of my mind concurred in recommending the change of scene pr
oposed.”
Tuesday, November 26, 1782, proved something of a turning point in Jefferson’s life. Visiting Ampthill, the plantation on the James River near Falling Creek that belonged to Archibald Cary, a revolutionary colleague, Jefferson was overseeing family inoculations for smallpox when he fully reengaged with his correspondence, and with the world beyond the one delineated by his grief of the previous three months.
In a draft message accepting his appointment as an envoy to France, Jefferson said that he intended to “pursue the object of my mission with integrity and impartial regard to the good of the whole states.” His emphasis on his broader vision and global portfolio served, he may have hoped, to turn the page on the last unhappy chapter in his political career. He was, in any event, eager to get started. “I shall lose no moment,” Jefferson said, “in preparing for my departure.”
In a letter to the Marquis de Chastellux he returned to the grim events of that autumn. He had not replied to earlier correspondence, Jefferson said, for he was only now “a little emerging from that stupor of mind which had rendered me as dead to the world as she was whose loss occasioned it.”
He left his two younger children, Polly and Lucy, with Francis and Elizabeth Eppes, his brother-in-law and sister. The eldest, Patsy, was to travel with her father to his new assignment in Paris. From Monticello on Sunday, December 15, 1782, Jefferson published a notice in The Virginia Gazette announcing that he had “confided the care of his affairs” to his brother-in-law Francis Eppes of Chesterfield and to his friend Nicholas Lewis of Albemarle County. Jefferson and Patsy left home four days later. He did not know when they would return.