America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation

by Joshua Kendall

  Jefferson’s two one-year terms as Virginia’s governor proved to be the low point of his political career. Elected by the legislature on June 1, 1779, to replace Patrick Henry, who was prohibited by law from serving a fourth consecutive term, he accepted the post reluctantly. “[E]specially in times like these,” Jefferson wrote to Richard Henry Lee a couple of weeks later, “public offices are burthens to those appointed to them.” Inflation in Virginia, as in the rest of the struggling nation, was spiraling out of control; the price of a duck, just a few shillings in 1779, would skyrocket to fifty pounds by 1781. And British forces, having recently taken Savannah, Georgia, were starting to attack the Virginia coast. Despite—or perhaps because of—all the stress, Jefferson’s minutiae mania was as fervent as ever. When presented by his assistants with a list of all the furniture in the Governor’s Palace after a few weeks in office, he personally checked off each of the roughly fifty items, including the pair of blue and white butter boats. And after completing his inventory, Jefferson wrote the following note: “things omitted. 2 delft [a town in Holland known for its ceramic products] wash basons. 4 blankets.” A year later, in response to a request from the Marquis de Marbois, secretary of the French legation to the United States, who was asking all thirteen governors for information about their states, Jefferson got cracking on a thorough inventory of Virginia. “I take every occasion which presents itself of procuring answers,” he wrote to another French friend in November 1780. This was the beginning of his only full-length book, Notes on the State of Virginia, which he kept expanding and revising over the next several years. Besides climate, Jefferson covered a variety of topics, including boundaries, landscape, and population; the chapter on Virginia’s natural history, its minerals, vegetables, and animals, was the longest, comprising about one-fourth of the text. Marbois, who didn’t get much of a response from any other governor, was bowled over by what Jefferson sent to him. “I cannot express to you,” the Frenchman wrote to Jefferson in March 1782, “how grateful I am for the trouble you have taken to draft detailed responses to the questions I had taken the liberty of addressing to you.” For Jefferson, of course, gathering this material and doing the concomitant number crunching—according to his statistical analysis, Virginia’s 1781 population of 567,614 was projected to reach 4,540,912 by 1862¾—was anything but trouble. Though containing many a trivial factoid, his treatise also presented important scientific findings. As the editor of an annotated edition, published a half century ago, has put it, Jefferson crafted “one of America’s first permanent literary and intellectual landmarks.”

  Facing crisis after crisis, Governor Jefferson succeeded in doing little but moving the seat of government out of Williamsburg, first to Richmond and then to Charlottesville. On June 2, 1781, with the Brits coming directly after both him and the members of the legislature, he fled Monticello on horseback. He would soon join the rest of his family at his other plantation at Poplar Forest, ninety miles away. While Jefferson had already announced his retirement, his successor wouldn’t be chosen until the legislature reconvened in Staunton a few days later. Since he had still technically been governor at the time of his escape, his political enemies, led by the poorly read Patrick Henry, who were bent on giving the state’s new chief executive dictatorial powers, immediately seized on the appearance of impropriety. On June 12, the House ordered an investigation into Jefferson’s conduct during the whole last year of his administration. Six months later, the humiliated ex-governor had to defend himself in a public hearing against a series of charges, including whether he had abandoned his post and the citizens of Virginia. Even after he was cleared of all wrongdoing and had received a public apology from the Assembly, Jefferson remained furious. The following spring, when the freeholders of Albemarle County elected him once again to the House of Delegates, he declined to serve. On May 20, 1782, he wrote to James Monroe, then a freshman member of the state legislature, that the inquiry “had inflicted a wound on my spirit which will only be cured by the all-healing grave.…Reason and inclination unite in justifying my retirement.”

  Jefferson had another compelling reason for avoiding public service. His wife, Martha, who on May 8 had given birth to the couple’s sixth child, Lucy Elizabeth—of the other five, only two were still alive, Martha (Patsy), born in 1772, and Mary (Polly), born in 1778—was gravely ill. Childbirth had never been easy for the frail Martha, and this time, as Jefferson quickly realized, she would not recover. For the next four months, he sat either at her bedside or at his writing desk, which had been transplanted into a small room that opened at the head of her bed. “My dear wife,” he noted in his account book on September 6, 1782, “died this day at 11:45 am.” His devastation was palpable. For the next three weeks, he shut himself in his bedroom. Though Patsy was still a month shy of her tenth birthday, Jefferson did not hesitate to lean on her for emotional support. Late in life, he would describe his eldest daughter as “the cherished companion of my early life and the nurse of my age.” But the nursing actually began decades earlier. “I was never a moment from his side,” Patsy later recalled of her whereabouts in the weeks following her mother’s death. Once the distraught Jefferson summoned up the energy to leave the house, all he wanted to do was go on horseback rides with Patsy. “In those melancholy rambles,” she added, “I was…a solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief.” His frequent emotional outbursts must have frightened her and made her loss all the more excruciating. But Jefferson was too self-absorbed to be at all attentive to what the nine-year-old was experiencing.

  The characterologically challenged father could not recognize his favorite daughter’s emotional needs or even her separateness. For him, parental love meant teaching her how to be a good obsessive. In his first letter to Patsy, written at the end of 1783 while she was living with a family friend in Philadelphia, he recommended that the eleven-year-old adhere to the following schedule:

  from 8. to 10 o’clock practice music

  from 10. to 1. dance one day and draw another

  from 1. to 2. draw on the day you dance, and write a letter the next day

  from 3. to 4. read French

  from 4. to 5. exercise yourself in music

  from 5. till bedtime read English, write & c.

  As part of the program, he also insisted on perfection in her appearance. “Nothing is so disgusting,” ran his startling injunction, “to our sex as a want of cleanliness and delicacy in yours.…Your first work will be to dress yourself in such style, as that you may be seen by any gentleman without his being able to discover a pin amiss, or any other circumstance of neatness wanting.” A few years later, the meticulous keeper of account books stressed to her the importance of “never buying anything which you have not money in your pocket to pay for.” “Learn yourself,” the meta-rule man added, “the habit of adhering rigorously to the rules you lay down for yourself.” In Patsy, who would forever idealize him, Jefferson created the dutiful and industrious daughter whom he needed.

  Jefferson would never get over the death of his wife. In November 1782, he wrote a friend that he was “a little emerging from the stupor of mind which has rendered me as dead to the world as she whose loss occasioned it.” In an attempt to short-circuit his mourning, he jumped back into politics. In June 1783, Jefferson was one of five delegates selected by the Virginia General Assembly to serve in the new Continental Congress. On May 7, 1784, Congress appointed him a minister plenipotentiary; his assignment was to travel to Paris to assist Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in negotiating commercial treaties with European nations. To prepare himself for his new job, the data collector went into overdrive. Over the next two months, as he made the trek from Annapolis, where Congress was meeting, to Boston, from where his ship was to leave, he gathered massive amounts of economic information on each state that he passed through. His twelve-part questionnaire, which he filled out by meeting with leading merchants and public figures, covered everything from the wages of carpenters to the size of
fishing vessels.

  On July 5, 1784, Jefferson, accompanied by Patsy, boarded the Ceres, which was bound for Cowes. He entrusted his younger daughters, Polly and Lucy—the two-year-old would die of whooping cough just a few months later—to the care of an aunt back in Virginia. Traversing the Atlantic did not stop him from piling up factoids. Every day at noon, he recorded in his account book numerous measurements, including latitude and longitude, the mileage since the previous day, the temperature, and wind direction. (Two decades later, President Jefferson would know whereof he spoke when he instructed his personal secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to take “observations of latitude and longitude at all remarkable points on the [Missouri] river…with great pains and accuracy.”) And during the three-week journey to England, he also interviewed the owner of the ship, the Newburyport merchant Nathaniel Tracy, to complete his Massachusetts questionnaire. As he learned from Tracy, carpenters in the Bay State were now making about $7 a day, up from $3–$6 before the war.

  Father and daughter arrived in Paris on August 6. On August 30, the forty-one-year-old diplomat met for the first time with his elders on the commission, Adams and Franklin, at the latter’s home in Passy. Revered by the French for his scientific knowledge and sophistication, Franklin would introduce Jefferson to the nation’s leading philosophes, artists, and writers. When Philadelphia’s polymath returned to America the following year, Jefferson became minister to France, a post he would hold until after the storming of the Bastille in 1789. “No one can replace him [Franklin],” Jefferson would repeatedly insist. “I am only his successor.” In 1787, his slave Sally Hemings escorted his eight-year-old daughter Polly from Virginia to Paris. His two girls would both attend the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont, an exclusive convent school, where, as Jefferson was assured, “not a word is ever spoken on the subject of religion.”

  After a difficult first winter, when he was sidelined both by ill health and by the news of Lucy’s death, this “savage of the mountains of America,” as Jefferson described himself in 1785, began to acclimate to his new surroundings. Despite his lifelong antipathy toward big cities, which he later characterized as “pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man,” he couldn’t help but adore the architecture, sculpture, music, and art that now surrounded him. Jefferson was also fascinated by Paris’s technological marvels, such as its suspension bridges and gadgets; he enjoyed going to the Café Mécanique, where wine was served by dumbwaiters (as would later be the case in Monticello). The hot-air balloon enthusiast, who, before leaving Annapolis, had compiled a detailed list of recent French ascensions for a friend, rarely missed a chance to view a launch in the flesh. For the self-confessed bibliomaniac, the French capital’s ubiquitous bookstalls—such as those lining the Quai des Grands-Augustins—also proved irresistible. Though Jefferson forced himself to “submit to the rule of buying only at reasonable prices,” he ended up acquiring for himself about fifty feet of books a year, all of which he eventually had shipped back to Virginia. He also sent books back to several American friends—most notably, dozens on law and government to James Madison, just as his protégé was beginning to draft the Constitution. He soon found himself missing little about Virginia except for its factoids. “I thank you again and again,” he wrote in September 1785 to the Scottish physician James Currie, then in Richmond, “for the details it [your last letter] contains, these being precisely of the nature I would wish.…But I can persuade nobody to believe that the small facts which they see passing daily under their eyes are precious to me at this distance; much more interesting to the heart than events of higher rank.…Continue then to give me facts, little facts.”

  The following September, Jefferson was, as Dumas Malone has put it, “quite swept off his supposedly well-planted feet.” The new object of affection for the forty-three-year-old widower was Maria Cosway, a petite, blue-eyed, twenty-six-year-old artist, who was visiting from London where she lived with her husband, Richard Cosway, a successful portrait painter. The American ambassador first met the beautiful and musically talented Italian-born Maria—not only was she a composer, but she also played both the harpsichord and harp—on September 3, 1786, at the Halle au Blé, the domed Parisian grain market. Jefferson was accompanied by the American artist John Trumbull, who introduced him to both Cosways. Twenty years older than his wife, Richard Cosway was then in the personal employ of the Prince of Wales (later King George IV). With her family down on its luck after the death of her father, Maria had succumbed to her mother’s demand to marry the socialite with the deep pockets. The vapid and mercurial Cosway had little else to offer; as numerous contemporaries noted, he had “a monkey face” and couldn’t keep his hands off other women. Jefferson was instantly taken by Maria, whom he later called “the most superb thing on earth”; within minutes, he came up with an excuse to cancel his dinner engagement with the Duchess D’Anville. His long evening with the Cosways didn’t end until an impromptu harp concert in the wee hours at the home of the Bohemian composer Johann Baptist Krumpholtz. “When I came home…and looked back to the morning,” Jefferson later wrote Maria of their first meeting, “it seemed to have been a month gone.”

  For the next two weeks, Jefferson and Maria were inseparable. Either alone or in the company of others such as Maria’s husband, Trumbull, William Short (Jefferson’s personal secretary), or his daughter Patsy, the mutually infatuated couple played tourist, heading to one scenic attraction after another. They gallivanted to the Royal Library (today the Bibliothèque Nationale), the Louvre, Versailles, and the Théâtre-Italien, as well as to the hills along the Seine. Whether Jefferson and Maria ever consummated their love has been the source of lively debate among Jefferson scholars. While the fragmentary evidence points to little but the likelihood that they both harbored fantasies about sexual union, physical intimacy is not out of the question; after all, given her marriage of convenience, Maria felt as lonely as Jefferson, as he probably picked up quickly, and their outings took place in the city that was then widely considered the world’s capital of illicit love. (Jefferson’s secretary, Short, would manage to have a couple of affairs during his Parisian sojourn, including one with the young wife of Duc de La Rochefoucauld.) On September 18, Jefferson severely injured his wrist while strolling with Maria near the Champs-Élysées. Due to the intense pain, he retreated to his home for a few weeks; and though Maria intended to visit, she could never squirm away from her husband. On Friday, October 6, a still ailing Jefferson accompanied the Cosways to the town of St. Denis, where they boarded a carriage for the trip back to London.

  Over the next few days, Jefferson wrote out with his left hand what Julian Boyd, an editor of his collected papers, has called “one of the notable love letters in the English language.” Its form was distinctly Jeffersonian. The man who had difficulty romancing women with words (as opposed to music) declared his love in a curious 4,600-word missive, which pivots around a philosophical dialogue between his “Head” and his “Heart.” As with his clumsy second proposal to Burwell, an anxious Jefferson once again pretended as if the woman of his dreams did not exist. Rather than expressing his feelings directly to Maria, he dramatized his own internal conflict. As Jefferson framed the imaginary debate, at the same time as his rational side was chastising him as “the most incorrigible of all the beings that ever sinned” for the decision to spend so much time with her, his emotional side was “rent into fragments by the force of my grief.” While “Head” would have the last word, the insistence by “Heart” that he give up trying to see Maria again and turn his attention back to his male friends such as the brilliant French mathematician Nicolas de Condorcet seemed to carry the day.

  All this philosophizing left Maria thoroughly confused, leading her to compose, as Boyd has put it, “a baffled…response.” “How I wish I could answer,” she began her first letter from London on October 30, “the Dialogue!” She reported that her heart was simultaneously both “mute” and “ready to burst with all the variety of se
ntiments, which a very feeling one is capable of.” Not knowing what to say, she lapsed into a friendly but matter-of-fact message in her native Italian. Whatever romantic longings she had harbored for Jefferson, his bewildering words had extinguished. She returned to Paris in late August 1787 without her husband, but much to Jefferson’s disappointment, he didn’t get to spend much time with her. “From the mere effect of chance,” Jefferson wrote to Trumbull on November 13, in what was perhaps an attempt to rationalize his hurt feelings, “she has happened to be from home several times when I have called her, and I, when she has called on me. I hope for better luck hereafter.” It never came. She left Paris a month later, and they never saw each other again. The intermittent epistolary friendship, however, would continue for the rest of their lives. Maria eventually did leave her husband to start a convent school outside of Milan, where she died at the age of seventy-eight in 1838.

  Just as the romance with Maria was cooling off, another woman marched into his life. On July 15, 1787, when Sally Hemings arrived with Polly at his Paris abode, the Hotel de Langeac, she was just fourteen. His slave was a half sister of his late wife; described by contemporaries as “an industrious and orderly creature in her behavior,” the light-skinned and attractive Sally, with her long, straight hair, also bore a clear physical resemblance to Martha Wayles. She was the product of the union between John Wayles and Betty Hemings, a slave who became his concubine after the death of his third wife. Upon the death of John Wayles in 1773, Jefferson inherited the infant Sally. In France, she served as a lady’s maid to his two daughters; Jefferson encouraged her to learn French and generously provided for her. According to his account books, he spent nearly two hundred francs in April 1789 on her clothes—a considerable amount, given that gloves cost only two francs.