Jefferson's Daughters

by Catherine Kerrison

  It was Jefferson’s election to the vice presidency in 1796 that finally committed the Randolphs to Albemarle County. Tom had not yet been able to sell Varina, but he was needed to manage his father-in-law’s plantations during his four-year term serving under President John Adams. They spent the summer of 1797 at Monticello and then for the next two years rented a neighboring farm from which Tom could more easily keep an eye on Jefferson’s interests as well as his own at Edgehill. After ten years of shuttling from one farm to another, Martha and Tom finally moved into their new home at Edgehill in 1800. A modest two-story frame house, Martha’s home was sited for the view of Monticello, prominently visible not two miles away through the intervening hills. The biggest window facing that direction was in a second-floor bedroom—the largest, and most likely Martha and Tom’s during their marriage.

  Perhaps the most stark adjustment Martha had to make on her return to Virginia was learning to live in the slave society she had left as a girl. In Paris, she had spoken of her hatred of slavery to her European friends and to her father as well. “I wish with all my soul that the poor negroes were all freed,” she had written to him two months before Sally Hemings’s fateful arrival in Paris. “It grieves my heart when I think that these our fellow creatures should be treated so terribly as they are by many of our country men.” She had clearly shared her hopes with Elizabeth Tufton that the American Revolution had forced change during their absence, for Elizabeth optimistically predicted that on Martha’s return, “we shall see the newspapers as full of the progress of slavery there when you arrive in America as they are now of that of liberty in France.”

  Tom was no more enamored of slavery than was his wife. He had banned the whip on his own plantations and, unlike most white Virginians (including his father-in-law), acknowledged that slaves too were capable of moral character. “All men have a right to liberty,” he believed; he thought it “impossible that the slave system should continue, without some check on their increase, and not in the end produce a great, long, and obstinate struggle.” In fact, when Jefferson was pressing him to buy Edgehill, Tom had hesitated initially because of his “aversion to increase the number of my negroes” that would be required to farm over fifteen hundred acres. But, in fact, the young couple made the accommodation in fairly short order. By 1799, as the owner of thirty-eight men, women, and children, Tom Randolph was one of the largest slaveholders in the county. And as she and Tom struggled to get on their financial feet, Martha might have been hard-pressed to explain the necessity of such a thing to aristocratic French visitors who sought out the author of the Declaration of Independence. In Virginia, she knew, one could not make a living without controlling labor. But, despite her French education, perhaps she was not so very different from most white Virginia slaveholders in her privileged blindness to the evils of slavery. Not until she was in her fifties, as she reflected on the practice of selling family members away from each other, did she admit that slavery’s “sorrows in all their bitterness I had never before conceived.”

  By the time they moved to Edgehill, Martha was an experienced mother; another daughter, Cornelia, had been born in 1799. Martha had probably long forgotten Bettie Hawkins’s girlhood incredulity at a male acquaintance’s assumption that motherhood was every girl’s fantasy. “I wonder he could imagine a young girl would like to become in one day mother of half-dozen squalling brats—the man must be crazy,” Bettie concluded. Rather, it is more likely that Martha remembered better Bettie’s besotted introduction of her infant son in a letter she sent in July 1789, “my little darling, who is a remarkable handsome child, his eyes are large & of a very dark Blue, the rest of his face is as like his mother’s as possible.” At Edgehill, Martha tended to Tom’s illnesses and her own—her stomach frequently rebelled at the plentiful amounts of radishes and milk in their diet—as she lived in a perpetual cycle of pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation. Within eight years, they had added four more children to their ever-expanding brood: Virginia (b. 1801), Mary (b. 1803), James Madison (b. 1806), and Benjamin Franklin (b. 1808). After Ben’s safe delivery, Martha confided to Dolley Madison that she “hoped tis her last.” At thirty-six, Martha was already the mother of seven.

  A long way from French fashion, urban life, and conversation, Martha gradually realized that she could re-create at least a version of it by giving her children the kind of rigorous and sophisticated instruction she had experienced at Panthemont. After ten years of marriage, she declared that she had grown tired of company, pronouncing instead that “the education of my children to which I have long devoted every moment that I could command” was her principal pleasure. Her children adored her and yearned to imitate her industry in reading and writing. Anne was days shy of her second birthday when she asked her mother to tell Jefferson that she was “yiting” (writing) a letter to him. He was not expected to be able to decipher the transcript, however; even her doting mother couldn’t always understand her. The toddler loved to tell stories, earnestly supplying many details, Martha recounted merrily, “but in such broken language and with so many gestures as renders it highly diverting to hear her.” Five-year-old Ellen also wrote to Jefferson, hoping he would bring some books back from Washington, urging him home quickly so she could show off her new bookcase and complaining condescendingly of the “children,” who made so much noise, she could not write well. She treasured her first Shakespeare volume and writing desk, both gifts presented by her grandfather. Years later, Virginia recalled the dark winter evenings of her childhood, when the family gathered around the glow and warmth of the fireside, the slaves lit the candles, and “all was quiet immediately” when her mother and grandfather began to read. As the children grew old enough to follow suit, Virginia—the middle child of the seven—recalled, she saw Jefferson “raise his eye from his own book, and look round on the little circle of readers and smile, and make some remark to mamma about it.”

  Although the Randolphs no doubt welcomed many visitors to Edgehill, no account survives describing the family’s daily routine there. However, Margaret Bayard Smith has left a detailed description of the precision with which her good friend Martha demarcated each day at Monticello. “After breakfast, I soon learned that it was the habit of the family each separately to pursue their occupations,” she wrote the morning after her arrival in August 1809, when Martha was a matron of thirty-six. While Jefferson retired to his study, and Martha’s husband, Tom, left for his farms, Martha organized the day’s housekeeping chores with the house slaves and then gathered her children for a full day’s instruction. Thus occupied, the family was not sighted again by visitors until the bell rang to assemble them for dinner, between four and five o’clock. Smith delighted in her long “agreeable and instructive conversation” with Jefferson that followed the meal, as he lingered at the table with the guests he had not made himself available to see until then. Frequently a group walk around the grounds closed the day.

  Martha was determined to establish a household culture and raise her children with the Enlightenment lessons she had learned in Paris. With the proper education and nurturing, Enlightenment thinkers believed, even children could be trained in habits of self-discipline. In this attribute, Martha set a sterling example, not only in the order of her days but in her habits of industry that were remarked upon by all who observed her. Her father’s overseer for twenty years, Edmund Bacon, commented that “Mrs. Randolph was just like her father…she was always busy. If she wasn’t reading or writing, she was always doing something….As her daughters grew up, she taught them to be industrious like herself.”

  Martha had also learned Enlightenment lessons of rational self-control. “Few such women ever lived,” Bacon recalled admiringly. “I was with Mr. Jefferson twenty years and saw her frequently every week. I never saw her at all out of temper. I can truly say that I never saw two such persons in this respect as she and her father.” And Martha was clearly successful in imparting this lesson to her many children. Her friend Margaret Bay
ard Smith was astonished at their impeccable behavior (eight had been born by the time of her visit in 1809) at the breakfast table at Monticello. “All Mrs. R’s. children eat at the family table, but are in such excellent order, that you would not know, if you did not see them, that a child was present.” As any parent knows, such behavior in children is not cultivated overnight; the admirable discipline Bayard Smith observed in action was the product of Martha’s years of unflagging mothering at Edgehill.

  So as her little children began to string together sentences with their broken language and endearing gestures, and her thoughts turned to their education, she drew on the French memories that remained so strong. They shaped her vision of motherhood to which she would devote the rest of her life, while the work of revolution and republic-building carried on without her. She would teach her children French, the value of reading and writing, and the all-important practice of self-discipline in their studies, whether in ancient history or the fortepiano. For her daughters, for example, she stipulated an hour’s practice at the piano each day, “honest practicing,” she emphasized smilingly, not easily fooled. It would not be painless, Martha knew, but as she remembered from her own parent’s insistence when she resisted her Titus Livius, “the habit will in time be formed.” She would practice what she preached: In spite of all the pain and disappointments of life, she refused to brood. As her father had for her, Martha prescribed exercise when her children were out of temper; a walk or a ride could reverse the downward slide in spirits like nothing else, she believed. Again, one hears the voice of experience in her advice to her children.

  The new Mrs. Randolph had to work at maintaining that cheerful temper that had been so easy and magnetic in Paris. Rural Virginia presented a host of challenges to a worldly, well-educated young woman, and in her identification with her Parisian education and Jefferson’s intellectual life, Martha Jefferson Randolph found a way to transcend them: She would launch a career as her children’s teacher.

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  MARTHA ALREADY HAD OPPORTUNITY to practice her teaching skills even before her children were born, when Jefferson delegated to her the supervision of her sister’s education. He had left Maria behind with the newlyweds while he settled into life in New York City as secretary of state. Maria remained with them through the spring of 1790 but must have been impatient at her delayed return to Eppington. The newlyweds had not been able to satisfy Maria’s heartfelt wish to stay with her aunt Eppes; they lacked horses for the trip, and Tom was reluctant to ask his father to spare his own workhorses for so long a time. So Maria trailed Martha and Tom while they paid the requisite wedding visits to other relatives.

  In the meantime, Martha directed Maria’s continued studies, a challenge when they were so frequently on the road. Maria could work neither on her translation of Don Quixote (“the dictionary is too large to go in the pocket of the chariot,” she protested) nor practice the fortepiano while she traveled. She may have been reading some American history, reciting some English grammar, and sewing under Martha’s direction, but her schooling during these months remained a mystery to her father. “Your last letter told me what you were not doing,” Jefferson wrote with exasperation. “I hope your next will tell me what you are doing.” By the end of May, however, Maria was happily ensconced in Eppington, reading her Don Quixote daily, reciting her Spanish grammar under the tender tutelage of her aunt Eppes, and continuing her history. Elizabeth Eppes also provided the training in housewifery necessary for young girls; Maria had already been taught to make a pudding and, with her cousin Mary Bolling, had charge of a hen and her chickens. Jefferson was pleased. “You must make the most of your time while you are with so good an aunt who can learn you every thing,” he wrote approvingly.

  By September, however, when Jefferson returned to Monticello for a month’s visit, both daughters were there to greet him. There they remained through the winter. In spite of being well along in her first pregnancy, Martha was a diligent teacher to her sister. Maria “improves visibly in her Spanish,” Martha reported to her father, although “she was surprised that I should think of making her look for all the words and the parts of the verb.” Maria’s nonsense translations, as Martha called them, may have passed muster under her aunt’s more indulgent tutoring, but Martha was more exacting. “Finding me inexorable she is at last reconciled to her dictionary with whom she had for some time past been on very bad terms,” she told Jefferson. She also intended to make Maria toe the line with her music practice. Martha had had their harpsichord repaired and tuned, but Maria was little interested. She was dismayed at Maria’s laziness. To the officious older sister, it seemed that the younger was making the most of her father’s absence, neglecting anything that she thought would not be noticed.

  It is difficult to reconcile Martha’s picture of the recalcitrant pupil with the girl of whom Abigail Adams had observed, “Books are her delight.” Someone—Elizabeth Eppes or maybe her son Jack—had taught her early to love books. In Cowes, where the family had broken their return journey to Virginia, Captain Cutting had been completely taken with the tableau he happened upon as he entered the breakfast parlor one morning and found Jefferson giving eleven-year-old Maria a Spanish lesson. “The lovely girl was all attention,” he recorded in his diary; and as Adams had before him, Cutting observed a “degree of sagacity and observation beyond her years, in the very pertinent queries she put to her excellent Preceptor.” In Maria’s astute questions and the progress she was making in her Spanish, history, and geography lessons, Cutting saw the presage of the accomplished woman he was confident she would become.

  So what caused this transformation of the reluctant pupil? Several things, we can venture. It was one thing to bask in the glow of her father’s undivided attention, attending carefully to his Spanish lesson on the conquest of Mexico and plying him with intelligent questions as she sought to please him. But the father whom she had just gotten to know after a four-year separation had departed again. Leaving her behind. Again. His parting letter filled with life lessons—urging her to be good, warning her against the faults of anger and envy, and enjoining her to give rather than receive—was a poor substitute from a “vagrant” father (as he put it himself) for his daily presence. Over the years, Maria had blossomed in the Eppes household, as Jefferson well understood. “I am really jealous of you,” Jefferson admitted to Elizabeth Eppes, “for I have always found that you disputed with me the first place in her affections.”

  But Eppes had never demanded academic excellence as the price of her approval; after all, just how critical was Spanish for a young lady in Albemarle County? Maybe effort was enough to satisfy her aunt, which is why Maria was so startled when her sister required accuracy as well. Martha may have been trying to live up to Jefferson’s charge, rendered when she was still a young student at Panthemont, to be a mother to her sister when they met again in Paris. And as a young wife, Martha would have felt that responsibility even more keenly. But Maria may have bristled at the strict instruction of a sister not even six years older than herself. In any event, what does an ability to translate Don Quixote signify, when her father is gone, she already possesses the loving approval of the Eppes family, and she lives in rural Virginia, far from the academic discipline of Panthemont?

  Unmoved by Martha’s lessons, Maria was much more charmed with her first niece, born to her sister on January 23, 1791. “She is very pretty, has beautiful deep blue eyes,” Maria told her father of three-week-old Anne, “and is a very fine child.” But how helpful twelve-year-old Maria was to the new mother is questionable; she had not even known that Martha was on the verge of giving birth on January 22, when she wrote to the anxious grandfather-to-be that all was well. In fact, unbeknown to Maria, who spent the entire day in another part of the house, Martha had been in the throes of labor all that day. To relieve Martha as her time drew near, Maria and Jenny (Virginia) Randolph, Tom’s younger sister, had been trading off weekly housekeeping duties, although how effectively is a
nyone’s guess. In any event, when Jefferson’s summer visit to Monticello came to an end that year and he took Maria with him to be schooled in Philadelphia, it is not likely that she was missed for her domestic skills.

  They left Monticello on October 12, 1791, and broke their trip twice, first at Montpelier to pick up James Madison and then at Mount Vernon for a visit with the Washingtons. Arriving there on the sixteenth, the travelers discovered the president in a flurry of preparations to leave for Philadelphia, having just learned that Congress was meeting a week earlier than he had thought. “I had no more idea that Monday the 24th inst was the day appointed for the meetings of Congress, than I had of its being dooms-day,” Washington had complained furiously to his treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton. The next day, the three statesmen drove the twenty miles to Georgetown in a hard rain that did not let up in the ensuing five days it took them to reach Philadelphia. In the press of the men’s urgency, Martha Washington took charge of Maria and brought her safely to Philadelphia in her own coach.

  As they approached the city, Maria could spot the imposing spire of Christ Church—the tallest building in colonial America—from the hilltop as they drew near the Schuylkill River. They had taken the route used by travelers coming from the south, crossing the river at Grays Ferry, a floating bridge that had been built by the British during their occupation of the city in 1777 (today marked by Grays Ferry Avenue). It was an unimpressive sight in 1791, narrow and spindly. But Martha Washington likely diverted her young charge with the story of how, just two years earlier, Philadelphians had bedecked the bridge with the laurels, liberty caps, and flags—important symbols of the newly free republic—to welcome her husband as he made his way from Mount Vernon to New York City to take his oath of office as the nation’s first president. As Washington passed under the arch fashioned at the entrance to the bridge, it was said, a laurel wreath fell precisely to his head, as Philadelphians borrowed an ancient custom from the Roman republic to honor their own military hero.