Still, one wonders if Martha had her doubts before the wedding. She later said that “her sufferings were greatly increased” when her father threw a dinner party on her wedding day. Understanding full well the legal suicide they committed as they took their vows, it was hardly unusual for eighteenth-century brides to express distress on the eve of their weddings, as Bettie Hawkins had done so plaintively with Martha. The choice of a husband was, as Abigail Adams’s sister had once starkly put it, “the important Crisis upon which our Fate depends.” Even so, most brides described nerves, jitters, or even anxieties, but not sufferings. For his part, Tom was sure very early on; by early December he knew that he loved her “and her only, with all of my faculties.” Perhaps Martha was grief-stricken at the prospect of her father’s imminent departure for New York or, as another historian has suggested, rebellious in the face of her father’s new relationship with Sally Hemings. Either way, the strain of forced smiles during the great celebration could well have felt to her like suffering. Years later, she left a clue that she regretted the early timing of her marriage when she told a daughter’s suitor that at seventeen “you are both too young to be entangled by an engagement which will decide the happiness, or wretchedness of your lives.”
But as she pledged her life to Tom Randolph, the future held promise, if no guarantees, for both the new couple and the new nation to which they had returned. The Revolution had bound thirteen disparate states into a common cause proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence, but that union was a fragile one. In the years immediately after 1776, the infant United States had only two national institutions, the Continental Army and the Congress, both of which were relatively weak. General George Washington spent the war trying to hold his army together in spite of terms of enlistment that regularly expired, insufficient provisions for his men, mutinies, and runaway inflation that made it impossible to pay his soldiers. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress functioned more as a league of friendship among sovereign states than as a central government. Each state had one vote, and delegates vociferously defended their own state’s interests. Any amendment to the articles required a unanimous vote, effectively preventing any change. Hamstrung by such a weak system, Congress could only requisition, not require, the necessary money and supplies for the army. Washington’s correspondence throughout the conflict is replete with his frustration at congressional inefficiency, but the delegates’ fear of a strong central government frequently overrode the imperatives of war.
The joyous celebrations after the Treaty of Paris that formally ended the fighting in 1783, bringing international recognition of the new nation, did little to change this picture. Congress remained helpless to pay its war debts or to curb inflation. Instead state legislatures struggled on their own to combat the economic depression that followed the war. Some printed more currency to help their people pay their debts. When Massachusetts lawmakers refused to do so in the fall of 1786, however, farmers led by the former Continental Army captain Daniel Shays actually shouldered their arms again to close down the courts that were foreclosing on their farms, and to force measures that would relieve the widespread economic distress.
The violence of the Shays uprising made starkly clear the need for reform. In the summer of 1787, twelve states sent fifty-five delegates to Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation. Instead the convention produced a wholly new constitution that created a strong central government and changed the terms of the states’ relationship with one another. Unlike the old articles, the new Constitution empowered the federal government to tax, mint currency, regulate interstate commerce, resolve interstate disputes, and raise an army. Significantly, the Constitution resolved the question of sovereignty that had first propelled the colonies to war with Britain. The interim answer under the articles had been to invest sovereignty in the states, but the Framers in Philadelphia hammered out a new way of thinking about representative government. States would have equal weight in the Senate, but in the House, representation would reflect the people, proportionate to each state’s population. But unlike the English and French systems, which balanced competing ranks of people (monarch, nobles, and commoners), the American system balanced powers: executive, legislative, and judicial. Most important, in the new federal system, sovereignty lay with the people rather than in any institution or claim to noble birth.
It was a bold experiment. As Jefferson headed to New York City in March 1790, the nation’s financial center and the capital since 1785, he ruminated on the challenges of transforming a paper document into a functioning government. The Constitution had been in effect since June 1788, and George Washington had been inaugurated as the first president in April of the following year. Like all Americans, Jefferson had been kept in the dark about the convention’s work in the summer of 1787, hearing about it from his friend James Madison only when he had been released from the delegates’ pledge of secrecy. Madison had been highly instrumental in shaping the Framers’ debates and the document they created. He fought hard for ratification in his home state of Virginia and, with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, famously contributed to the Federalist Papers, a series of eighty-nine essays that persuaded New York to vote for ratification. Reading Madison’s letter and the enclosed Constitution in France, Jefferson raised only two objections: the Constitution lacked a Bill of Rights and term limits for the chief executive. Both were answered in relatively short order, with the Bill of Rights ratified by the end of 1791, and Washington’s retirement from office in 1796 after two terms.
The Framers were not the only ones to think deeply about what it meant to be an American; so, too, did the people. Old patterns of deference began to slip away in the new republic. Artisans and tradesmen marched together in parades, proud of the skills and hard work that had secured independence and now proved their own fitness to stand as an equal with any man at the ballot box. Cheering women lined parade routes and attended politically sponsored balls and barbecues. Educators began to think about the best ways to teach both boys and girls, now that they were no longer subjects to a monarch but future citizens. Noah Webster compiled a dictionary to standardize spelling, rejecting British conventions such as the u in colour to reflect the direct and plainspoken citizenry of the new republic. Print proliferated in these early years, knitting together newly literate readers in a common culture. There had only been twenty-three newspapers in British colonial America in 1764; by the end of the Revolution, that number had more than doubled to fifty-eight; by 1800 it had risen to 150. After the overthrow of King George III, magazines printed essays that questioned whether husbands in a republic should hold tyrannical sway over their wives; short stories about notable women gave readers models of exemplary female behavior. Novels spun plots that also challenged the old order, allowing women to imagine that the Revolution had opened a new world for them as well. In these ways, and many others, newly freed Americans sought to create a culture of their own to demonstrate and celebrate their break with the vestiges of the Old World.
Despite her intimate connection with the new secretary of state, the new Mrs. Randolph watched these developments from the sidelines of rural Virginia. She put a good face on her transformed life, announcing her marriage bravely to her Paris schoolmates. Less than a month after Martha’s wedding, Elizabeth Tufton wrote from London that she was “most agreeably surprized in receiving a letter” that contained the announcement, adding, “How greatly my satisfaction was increased in finding you were so happy.” Caroline Tufton and her uncle the duke congratulated her on “being settled so much to your own satisfaction.”
The new bride may not have felt she had a choice. She did not want to disappoint friends who wanted the details of her new life and eagerly anticipated that “in the course of years our letters will make quite an history.” When Bettie Hawkins moved back to London in the spring of 1788, she had been unable to write because “for this month past I have been in a continual bustle. We enter into all the amusements of the g
ay metropolis.” She wrote gleefully of the number of her partners at a ball “that you cannot wonder at, as there were many people of taste there.” From Paris, Marie de Botidoux continued to press Martha with gossip of courtships gone awry, her own beaux (sometimes four at a time), the latest scandal at Panthemont (one of the nuns fled and sold her story to a French newspaper), and the goings-on at the National Assembly, which she apparently attended. What adventures of interest could life in Virginia possibly produce that would satisfy her friends’ dearest wish that her exploits continue?
The truth was that reentry had not been easy. So easily did French roll off her tongue, she had difficulty reverting back to English on her return. Martha’s life could not have been more different from Paris, as she learned how to be a Virginian again. As she had made her way home, the view outside her carriage window was not Parisian architecture but a rolling landscape of fields, planted with tobacco or lying fallow, dotted with rude plantation homes, slave quarters, and the ubiquitous curing sheds. This agricultural world was marked by the rhythms of the seasons rather than the social calendar of the beau monde. She could see no apparent prospects for culture or amusements. The contrast between the world she left behind and the one to which her marriage had committed her could not have been greater. For the new Martha Randolph, the life of wife, mother, and plantation mistress—a goal to which all other white Virginia girls aspired—was, after Paris, a trial so arduous as to require heroism to be endured.
After a round of nuptial visits, Martha remained behind at Eppington, where her aunt Eppes gave her a crash course in the particulars of housekeeping that a planter’s wife should know. Tom traveled to inspect Varina plantation, his father’s wedding gift to them. Just south of Richmond and about eighty-five miles southeast of Monticello, the estate occupied 950 acres on the James River. But on that first visit, Varina presented a dismal prospect to Tom: It had only two two-room houses, sat on low-lying land, and in May was already broiling under the Virginia sun. Tom complained about the rashes and boils that so assailed him from the heat and humidity that he could only spend an hour outdoors each day. Worse, he knew, his father’s gift was encumbered with a large mortgage. He rapidly concluded that he would need to pursue married life and work elsewhere. In the meantime, Martha was impatient to begin her life as mistress of her own plantation rather than continuing to impose on her aunt Eppes. But she was pleased that as Tom reevaluated his options, he began to consider Albemarle County; she had privately confessed to her father that she was “much averse” to living so far away from Monticello at Varina.
Negotiations soon began with Tom’s father for his acreage called Edgehill, just across the Rivanna River, barely two miles from Monticello. Recently widowed, however, the senior Randolph had decided to remarry and, as part of the nuptial agreement, planned to sell Edgehill to his new father-in-law. Jefferson quietly intervened in the negotiations, determined to establish his daughter close to him. But he was unable to prevent the rupture that occurred between father and son, when the elder Randolph abruptly changed his mind about the price he and Jefferson had agreed upon. Young Tom “took fire,” as Martha anxiously observed, at his father’s reversal. Tempers cooled, fortunately, and the elder Randolph eventually agreed to sell the fifteen-hundred-acre property to his son. But his father’s remarriage posed another, greater threat to Tom’s plans for his future: the inheritance of Tuckahoe. Fifty-year-old Randolph Senior’s new bride was still in her teens and, as Martha and Tom feared, produced a son (whom, inexplicably, they also named Thomas Mann). Martha’s hopes to become mistress of Tuckahoe were blasted. Jefferson’s consolation letter makes clear that Martha had made her own premarital calculations, just as Bettie Hawkins had before her wedding, about the estate (if not a title) her future husband would be in line to inherit. Only four months into her marriage, she was already bitterly disappointed.
So painful was the disjuncture between her hopes and disappointments, she ducked it with silence. Begging for a letter in April 1790, Bettie warned her, “Take care my dear girl you do not justify my former apprehensions, remember how much you laughed at them & assured me our friendship was reciprocal & would be of long duration!” Elizabeth Tufton breathed a sigh of relief when she heard from Martha. “To own the truth I began almost to fear new connextions and friends had entirely obliterated in my dear Mrs. Randolph the remembrance of one.” Marie de Botidoux, unaware even of Martha’s marriage, scolded her roundly in May. “You are truly unbelievable for not having written anyone for six months. Lady Elizabeth [Tufton] tells me she believes your father has forbidden it. That’s not possible because it doesn’t make sense, what would he do that for?” she demanded. Marie hoped to bump into William Short in Paris so that she could find out if he had gotten over his infatuation with Martha. “I think so. You aren’t worth getting attached to,” she finished, pained by her friend’s silence.
When Mrs. Randolph finally responded to her friends, she did so sparingly, reporting her satisfaction with her situation generally rather than supplying particulars. As she adjusted to the requirements of married life, she quickly realized that it would not be hers to command; rather it would be ordered by her husband’s career and by her father’s. On his return home from Edinburgh, Tom had hoped to continue his studies by reading in law to prepare for a political career. Marriage to Jefferson’s daughter altered that plan, when he assumed the double responsibility of providing for a wife and managing his father-in-law’s plantations in his frequent absences. But until Tom could wrestle Edgehill from his father, build a home, and establish a thriving plantation on that property, the couple would spend the first years of their married life largely migrating between Varina and Monticello.
After a discouraging summer at Varina, Martha and Tom returned to Monticello in September. Jefferson was visiting, his first respite from six months as secretary of state. Pregnant with her first child, Martha remained there when her father returned to work, this time to Philadelphia, the new temporary capital city. It was in Philadelphia that Jefferson received the news of the birth of his first grandchild, a girl, in January 1791. Martha was determined that her father should name the child, but not until his letter of March 24, when Jefferson responded to the new mother’s repeated requests, was she called Anne Cary, after Tom’s mother.
The following spring, Tom’s father relented and sold Edgehill to his son. Staying at Monticello, Tom could much more conveniently begin to farm his new property. His family expanded that September, with the birth of his son, Thomas Jefferson, who they would call Jeff. But worryingly for the young father, financial difficulties also arose that year, with a disappointing wheat crop and the spoilage of his tobacco crop that had been pelted by rain as Tom moved it to market. His responsibilities mounted with his father’s death in November 1793 and the birth of his third child, Ellen, in 1794. Hoping to sell Varina, Tom gradually began to establish roots in Albemarle County. In 1794, he became a justice of the peace, an office typically held by the county’s leading men, and applied for and won a commission as captain of the local militia.
The rhythm of the Randolphs’ lives changed with Jefferson’s resignation from Washington’s cabinet in December 1793, however, and his return to Monticello. Embroiled from the start of his term in a bitter political rivalry with Alexander Hamilton, Jefferson felt his advice ignored as the president sided with his treasury secretary on most policy decisions. Their battles had spilled over to the press with escalating acrimony. In the midst of it all, he had written to Martha of his desire to exchange the “labour, envy, and malice” of political life in Philadelphia for the “ease, domestic occupation, and domestic love” of his family. But as the attacks on him mounted, Jefferson decided to remain in hopes of forcing Hamilton to leave instead. By December, however, it was Jefferson who was packing for home.
Jefferson remained at Monticello for three years, in a semiretirement that he swore no political office would ever tempt him to abandon. He told a friend he had happi
ly given himself up to “the enjoyment of my farm, my family and my books.” His contentment was a startling contrast to the miseries that assailed Tom and Martha, beginning in 1794. Tom fell victim to mysterious illnesses that plagued him for the better part of three years, prompting trips to Boston and New York in search of treatment. His doctors were baffled. He sought relief in the healing springs of western Virginia. Several times Martha went with him, their children remaining behind at Monticello. Once, however, nursing eight-month-old Ellen, the young mother brought her along. They had gotten as far as Staunton, barely forty miles away, when Ellen died. Sending her little body back to Monticello for burial, the heartbroken parents pushed on in search of a cure for Tom.
The only respite for Martha during these difficult times were the birth of another daughter in 1796, whom she named Ellen after her dead baby, and a visit from one of her French classmates, Brunette Salimbeni, in the spring of 1797. Bruny, as Martha called her, spent two months with her at Varina. Together they took long walks and lingered over meals, recapturing the old candor and friendship from their days in Paris in countless hours of conversation. When in 1800, Bruny recalled her visit, she hoped that Martha was finally settled at Edgehill. “It was all you wished,” Bruny still remembered vividly. On her return to France, Bruny immediately contacted their old friend Marie de Botidoux; it was the first Botidoux had heard of Martha in eight years. “Bruny has told me in some detail of your life,” Botidoux wrote to Martha in October 1798. “I know that despite the loss of the fortune of your father-in-law you are happy, that you have three charming children, an amiable and good husband who loves you very much and who you love the same.” Botidoux shook her head as she tried to reconcile the image of the fond mother with her girlhood friend who loved to take the stairs at Panthemont four at a time. “Have you become reasonable?” she asked. “I can’t see you a mother of a family.”
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