Jefferson's Daughters

by Catherine Kerrison

  Music was probably the most important of the decorative arts for young women to master. “Among genteel ranks, lord and master understood that idleness of his wife and daughters was a necessary feature of his prestige as a gentleman,” music historian Arthur Loesser explained, but “it looked more ladylike to do something uselessly pretty than to do nothing.” Maria had had something of a checkered musical career by the time she arrived in Philadelphia: On one hand, she had studied the harpsichord under the renowned Claude Balbastre in Paris; on the other, she had successfully ducked practice time despite her sister’s attempts to sit her down at her instrument at Monticello. But Jefferson was determined, in spite of Maria’s indifference. Now in Philadelphia, Maria was redirected to her music under Mrs. Pine’s supervision. Jefferson had brought a spinet to Philadelphia for the purpose, and he hired John Christopher Moller, one of the most prominent organists in the city, as a music teacher.

  Just as the company of the Rittenhouse girls had made Martha’s drawing lessons more tolerable, Nelly Custis may have been enlisted to encourage Maria’s musical proficiency. Jefferson knew that Martha Washington shared his views on the matter; Nelly’s brother later recalled his sister’s practice sessions: “The poor girl would play and cry, and cry and play, for long hours, under the immediate eye of her grandmother, a rigid disciplinarian in all things.” “They often practiced together” was Jefferson’s bland report to his son-in-law about the two girls. Perhaps his stratagem was successful; almost two months after her arrival, Maria was writing to Tom, asking in some desperation about some of her things that had yet to arrive in Philadelphia. “I am in great want of them,” she wrote, “particularly my music.”

  Interestingly, Jefferson had not chosen for Maria one of the best-known girls’ schools in the country: the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia, founded in 1787. Located on Third Street, just a short walk from his home, the academy offered courses in rhetoric and bookkeeping in addition to all the subjects Mrs. Pine offered her students. Significantly, it did not offer classes in needlework. One of the academy’s sponsors was Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a lifelong friend of Jefferson’s even after their politics took them down opposing paths. Rush had written a model curriculum for the academy, training young girls for their futures as wives of industrious American men. Rejecting European modes of female education, he emphasized the practical and dismissed the ornamental, which he believed unsuitable for citizens of the new republic.

  If Rush’s plan had been meant for boys, Jefferson would have heartily approved. But he would not have seen rhetoric as a subject necessary for girls. Of what use would it be to a girl to know how to frame and deliver an argument? Rhetoric certainly prepared academy students for the annual public examinations they would take to graduate, but both Jefferson and Maria herself would have found unpalatable such public displays of female intellect: Jefferson’s patriarchal sensibilities had revolted in Paris as he listened to outspoken French women, and Maria would have cringed in agonies of shyness. The academy graduate Priscilla Mason’s 1793 valedictory speech, condemning the exclusion of women from higher learning and the professions, likewise would have disgusted them. As the historian Margaret Nash has observed, with a fair degree of understatement, whatever Rush’s intentions, the academy did not produce the most pliant of wives.

  In Paris, Martha’s association with worldly French women had augmented her classroom education and understanding of how the world worked beyond the prescriptions of books, but Maria’s associations with the leading circles of the new republic would have strengthened, rather than challenged, conventional gender attitudes. Abigail Adams is a case in point. Although Adams took an avid interest in politics and by 1794 would describe herself as a pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist English author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), her views of women’s involvement in politics by the 1790s had become somewhat more conventional. Yes, Adams had distributed copies of Thomas Paine’s revolutionary Common Sense in the early months of 1776 and had insisted that her husband keep her informed of political developments, but she did not believe that women should participate in politics. She had not joined in the fund drives spearheaded by Philadelphia women in 1780 to raise money for the soldiers of the Continental Army and imitated by women around the country. Rather, she believed women’s patriotism to be qualitatively different from men’s: It was purer because it was disinterested, that is, women did not stand to gain from victory in the war, since they were excluded from the polity. Nor did she follow that observation with a plea for inclusion. Now meeting Maria again in the early 1790s in Philadelphia, she was becoming even more politically conservative as the horrors of the French Revolution unfolded.

  As one of America’s most cosmopolitan and forward-thinking women, then, even Abigail Adams would not compare with Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, who by 1789 (when Martha met her in Paris) had already openly campaigned for the Whig party in England, or with Madame de Staël, who would be exiled by Napoleon for her outspoken political views. Like many American women, Adams fully supported Wollstonecraft’s ideas that men and women were intellectual equals and that a woman should be a companion, rather than a helpless dependent, of her husband. But she drew back from Wollstonecraft’s more radical claim that women enjoyed the same natural rights as men. Still, if American women rejected Wollstonecraft’s more radical ideas, they nonetheless conducted avid conversations about her book. This was particularly true in Philadelphia, where one of the city’s booksellers had printed fifteen hundred copies of it for sale. But Jefferson apparently never owned a copy of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman; nor did Martha or Maria ever discuss it in their letters.

  It is not likely that Maria’s circle of friends would have prompted feminist political musings, either. Deeply suspicious of the French Revolution, for example, Nelly Custis once declared she would not trust the revolutionary French government with the “life of a cat.” Nor did the return of the aristocratically minded Mrs. Pine to England in June 1792 and Maria’s transfer to Valeria Fullerton’s school that fall seem to encourage those considerations. Unlike Mrs. Pine, Fullerton was American, the young widow of a Revolutionary War veteran, Richard Fullerton. He had risen to some prominence in the city, organizing processions to commemorate Independence Day and eventually winning a seat in the state assembly and the Common Council. When he died unexpectedly at age thirty-five, his widow opened her school, and Jefferson enrolled Maria there in October 1792.

  Maria boarded at Valeria Fullerton’s school on Mulberry (now Arch) Street. She was very happy there, she assured her brother-in-law. “Mrs Fullerton…is so kind to us that we cannot be otherwise.” She visited her father on Sundays, just a few blocks away. In Fullerton’s congenial household, Maria acquired more independence from him as she developed her friendships. Sarah (Sally) Corbin Cropper, a year older than Maria, was a good friend. She was the daughter of General John Cropper of Maryland, a member of the Continental Congress whose reputation for patriotism was matched only by his hatred for Tories. Sally and Maria became close, continuing to correspond after Maria’s departure from Philadelphia. Family lore told of a romance Sally had during her school days with a Thomas Sergeant, who later became a judge in Pennsylvania. But this would have been several years after Maria’s tenure at Fullerton’s school. Still, the story, passed down in a family history, hints at the same kinds of preoccupations with love, courtship, and marriage among the young girls at Mrs. Fullerton’s school that Martha had known at Panthemont.

  It may have been in Philadelphia that Maria felt the first stirrings of love for her cousin and childhood friend Jack Eppes. Jack had arrived in the city by the middle of May 1791, where he may have lived with Jefferson, who was supervising his studies at the University of Pennsylvania. At the very least, Jack visited frequently; Jefferson’s memorandum book regularly noted money given to Jack. Jack’s day was rigorous: “2. to 4. hours a day at the College, completin
g his courses of sciences, and 4 hours at the law.” In addition, Jefferson recommended “an hour or two to learn the stile of business and acquire a habit of writing,” and reading “something in history and government.” It was a two-year program that Jack completed in the spring of 1793, when he returned to Virginia to establish a law practice. By that time, the beautiful Maria was almost fifteen and may have thrown a wrench into Jefferson’s plan to keep the young man “out of love” so that “he will be able to go strait forward, and to make good way.” There are no family traditions or letters to suggest the flowering of a romance in Philadelphia that would culminate in marriage, but it is certainly possible that the cousins took another look at each other as Maria was leaving her childhood behind.

  Of the curriculum at her new school and other details of Maria’s life in Philadelphia, we know very little. Her distaste for writing hampers all efforts to recover her life in Philadelphia. If one week she wrote to her aunt at Eppington, her family at Monticello would have to wait until the next to hear from her. Jefferson likened her letters to the biblical Isaac’s blessings, which were “but one at a time.” When Maria did write, the process was tedious and the result meager. On one occasion, Maria spent three hours “scribbling and rubbing out” a letter to Tom Randolph; “we’ll see how her labours end,” the resigned father sighed. Her surviving letters to Tom typically comprised five sentences at most and frustratingly lacked detail. One letter to her sister took more than two weeks to complete; like all but one of Maria’s other letters, Martha did not think it worth keeping.

  Other sources offer a slightly clearer glimpse of Maria’s life. Jefferson’s memorandum book shows that he took full advantage of living in the bustling commercial center, regularly buying shoes, stockings, shawls, ribbons, and muslin for his daughter to equip her for a social life of visits and the occasional play or assembly. With the pocket money he gave her, Maria could make her own choices in the Philadelphia shops she passed every day. In January 1793, she accompanied her father to the yard of the Walnut Street prison—the largest open-air square in the city—to watch the ascension of a hot-air balloon. Jean Pierre Blanchard had already acquired an international reputation when he flew across the English Channel in 1785, so this event generated real excitement in Philadelphia. An enormous crowd had gathered to watch the launch, the first successful manned ascent in America. Blanchard’s fifteen-mile trip to Gloucester County, New Jersey, demonstrated to Jefferson “the security of the thing,” and he yearned for a balloon for himself to reduce his normal ten-day trip to Monticello to mere hours. Although Jefferson reported the flight to his daughter Martha, he deliberately saved the details for Maria to recount, since she was always at a loss for what to write about. Maria’s letter to Tom disappoints, however. “I have been very much entertained by a balloon that went off” was all she had to say, noting only “the gentleman was in it himself.”

  By April 1793, Jefferson had taken a house outside the city, near Grays Ferry on the Schuylkill River. The bucolic setting took him out of both the urban and political environments that he found so odious, yet kept him close enough to keep an eye on enemies like Hamilton. An image painted that year shows an unimposing yellow two-story house; but it was beautifully situated on a rise above the river and under a cluster of trees, with a long sloping lawn that led from a sizable front porch to the water’s edge. By the summer, Maria began spending more time with him there, two or three days a week. Father and daughter loved the riverfront property. Jefferson spent the summer outdoors. The tall plane trees that sheltered the house were a revelation to him. “Under them I breakfast, dine, write, read and receive my company,” he told Martha. “I never before knew the full value of trees,” he sighed contentedly. Maria enjoyed picnicking with her father on summer peaches and corn and sauntering along the riverbank. Across the river, she could see Bartram’s Garden, modeled after the public pleasure gardens in London.

  Maria invited friends out of the city to stay. Sally Cropper was probably visiting when Jefferson attempted to think of something to occupy “two young ladies at his house whose time hangs heavily on their hands.” Since the drawing master was unable to come that day, Jefferson asked his friend David Rittenhouse if he could borrow Rittenhouse’s camera obscura (a box device that refracts light, giving off an inverted image) so that the girls could create their own botanical sketches with nature herself as their teacher.

  Jefferson rented this house near Grays Ferry during his last months as secretary of state. Father and daughter loved its beauty and remove from the city. Jefferson delighted in spending his days under the trees; Maria loved walking the lawns, where across the river she could see Bartram’s Garden, today the oldest botanical garden on the continent.

  Maria’s social life may have been hampered by ill health during these years. Jefferson had complained that her first winter in Philadelphia, 1791–1792, was “long and severe.” She was plagued with colds from the first, just as Jefferson and Martha had been during their first winter in Paris. Maria’s health had never truly recovered from her illness in their last winter in Paris. Years later Martha wondered if Maria had suffered brain damage during her almost fatal bout with typhus, “having always retained a torpor which I thought was not natural to her.” The following winter of 1792–1793 was little better. In the midst of packing up his city townhouse in March to move to Grays Ferry, Jefferson had also been preoccupied with Maria. In early April, he wrote with concern that Maria had been plagued for several weeks with mild fevers, nausea, and lack of appetite. He tried to minimize his worry. “Doctors always flatter, and parents always fear,” he told his sister; but still he fretted, “It remains to see which is right.” Even with the warmer weather, the best he could report was that she was “well…tho not in flourishing health.” At least the yellow fever epidemic that struck the city so catastrophically in the fall of 1793 spared them both. Their pastoral location west of the crowded city enabled them to escape the epidemic’s worst effects, which claimed four thousand lives in mere weeks. Still, by mid-August, both Maria and Jefferson were counting the weeks till they could go home to Albemarle.

  They finally left the fever-stricken city on September 17, 1793, crossed the Schuylkill River at Grays Ferry, and headed for home. Maria’s departure spelled the end of her formal education. Martha had been five months short of seventeen when her father withdrew her from Panthemont, although tutoring continued until their departure from Paris. But as she left Philadelphia behind, Maria had only just celebrated her fifteenth birthday. What had Philadelphia meant to her? It was clear that Jefferson was not thinking about Maria’s education as seriously as he had her cousin Peter Carr’s, or perhaps even Martha’s. The school’s proximity to his home, rather than its quality, had been his top consideration. In any event, Mrs. Pine’s school was no Panthemont, and Mrs. Fullerton, a widow scraping to survive and struggling to hold her school together, was a far cry from the aristocratic Madame l’Abbess, who knew how to extract money from disinclined bishops. Maria does not appear to have been befriended by the kind of women that Martha had known in Paris. In the 1790s, Anne Willing Bingham hosted brilliant parties in her elegant Philadelphia home, trying to create a public space for female political participation in the new republic modeled on the Paris salons she had loved, but young Maria would not have attended any of them. Instead she seems to have lived the conventional, sheltered life typical of a young girl of her class, her education more a continuation of genteel grooming than a transformation.

  This was precisely what her father intended. It explains why he packed up a spinet—a badge of his family’s gentility—to ship to Philadelphia in 1791 and had paid to have it repaired and tuned at least twice. It explains why he joined forces with Martha Washington, insisting that Maria practice, and why Maria needed to locate the trunk that contained all her music. Maria had resisted, perhaps because she already saw that Martha’s abilities exceeded her own in music as well as their other studies. Or maybe she was l
azy, as her father and sister believed. Or she just may have considered such accomplishment superfluous. Endowed with a beautiful face, charming manners, and a desire to endear herself to the people she loved, she had in abundance the currency eighteenth-century girls needed to attract a husband and succeed in life. And if she had already decided that she would marry into the Eppes family, further ornamentation was hardly required for their approval. They already loved her mightily, she knew. But as they prepared to leave Philadelphia, Jefferson carefully crated Maria’s instrument again and shipped it back to Monticello, even correcting the steward’s entry on the packing list from “forte piano” to “the Spinet.” Her formal grooming complete and her spinet safely ensconced on a ship to Richmond, Maria Jefferson headed south for home.

  THERE IS NO INDICATION THAT Maria mourned separation from her school and friends, or even from city life, as Martha had after leaving Panthemont. Perhaps she looked forward to the tranquility of rural Virginia, where she would be closer to her much-loved Eppes relations. She may well have been quite ready to begin that next stage of her life, training for marriage, that her father directed her to do immediately upon their return: “Follow closely your music, reading, sewing, housekeeping.”