Jefferson’s reply is lost but can be deduced from Jack’s next letter on the subject: He offered Jack a loan. Jack politely refused to tie up Jefferson’s money when it was needed for Jefferson’s own enormous renovation project at Monticello. Significantly, Jack would return only his thanks for the kind offer from his father-in-law but no more, since he was at Mont Blanco and Maria was at Eppington, taking the air. “As she is equally interested in the contents of your letter,” Jack told Jefferson, “I shall postpone my answer until we have an opportunity of perusing it together.”
In the meantime, Jack was laying an even firmer groundwork for his independence from Jefferson. Unlike Tom Randolph, who started to establish himself as a political figure in Albemarle County before he had officially moved there from Varina, Eppes quickly put down political roots near Eppington in his home county of Chesterfield. In 1801, he ran successfully for a seat in the Virginia Assembly as a representative from Chesterfield County. Asked to stand for reelection in 1802, his candidacy required that he maintain his residence there, so Jack could more easily reject Jefferson’s offer without offending him. To live at Monticello was “out of my power,” Jack wrote, employing the phrase much used in this period to foreclose any further discussion.
How remarkable for Maria—who had been shuttled across the Atlantic and back, and up to Philadelphia and back, without regard for her feelings on the subject—to have married a man who would not even consider entering into a financial discussion with her father without speaking with her first. Rendered a legal nonentity by her marriage through the law of coverture, Maria would have been legally hamstrung if Jack had entered into any contracts with Jefferson that she disliked. But she had married a man who considered her opinion on their home indispensable to his decision. Jefferson, who had told Maria—not three months after her wedding—that a wife’s patient submission to her husband was crucial to marital harmony, would simply have to wait for her return home to Jack for his answer.
Jack’s letter reveals the extent to which their marriage was a companionate one. True, Maria’s travel plans depended on Jack’s work schedule or his plowing needs; this was the nineteenth century, after all, when white men were expected to be the household head and enjoyed all the legal, social, political, and economic privileges necessary to ensure their primacy at home. Still, Maria’s letters caressing her “best beloved husband” and Jack’s respect for her vision of their lives together mark a significant change in marital expectations from Jefferson’s time to their own. They made their decisions together and faced her father as a marital unit. This was not the dynamic of marital relations that characterized Martha and Tom’s marriage, in which Jefferson clearly remained his daughter’s emotional anchor. In one of many such instances, Martha had looked forward to Jefferson’s homecoming from Philadelphia in 1798 with “raptures and palpitations not to be described,” assuring him that “the first sensations of my life were affection and respect for you and none others in the course of it have weakened or surpassed that,” including, presumably, her husband and children. With his illnesses, both physical and emotional, Tom required her care almost as much as her children did. “The agonies of Mr. Randolph’s mind seemed to call forth every energy of mine,” she wrote in 1801, when she was at the breaking point, caring for three children struck by whooping cough. Not only did she have to shoulder the burden of nursing three seriously ill children; her husband was as one of them.
This may be why Maria often found herself explaining to Jefferson that she could love him as much as her sister did, even as she also loved her husband. She frequently compared herself to her elder sister and in many ways had found herself lacking, but never in her love for their father. When she visited Martha at Varina early in 1796, Maria was impressed with how efficient a household manager Martha had become. “The more I see of her the more I am sensible how much more deserving she is of you than I am,” Maria observed, “but, my dear papa, suffer me to tell you that the love, the gratitude she has for you could never surpass mine: it would not be possible.” On another occasion, she ruminated that the deep affection she felt for her sister helped her understand Jefferson’s love for Martha; still, Maria insisted, “in the most tender love to him I yield to no one.” Jefferson replied immediately, assuring her in the most strenuous tone that there was no difference in his love for his daughters. But still Maria continually strove to assure him of her love. However inadequate her letters, she hoped they would nonetheless prove to him that love she could never quite express to him was part of her, “interwoven with her existence.”
These letters have convinced Jefferson scholars that Maria was painfully conscious of her inferiority to Martha and of Jefferson’s preference for her sister, and that she competed—unsuccessfully—with Martha for their father’s love and attention. But these conclusions have always followed questions that placed Jefferson at the center of the inquiry: How did the sisters vie for his affection? Who pleased him the most? Whom did he love best? Or they follow Martha’s daughter Ellen’s obviously biased assessment of her aunt, endlessly repeated by succeeding generations of descendants, that Martha was “intellectually very greatly superior to her sister. A truth I never heard called in question,” and so Maria “mourned over the fear that her father must prefer her sister’s society, and could not take the same pleasure in hers.”
But Maria was speaking a different language of love than Martha or even Jefferson may have understood. Close geographic proximity was a key idiom of Martha and Jefferson’s shared language; so, too, was the expectation—like a silent vowel, never explicitly stated but clearly understood—that Jefferson would remain foremost in his daughters’ hearts. But even as a little girl, Maria had insisted on the legitimacy of her feelings and desires. “If I must go I will, but I cannot help crying so pray don’t ask me to,” she had told Abigail Adams as she left London for Paris. And when she was grown, she would marry the man of her own choosing, and she would control where she wanted to go and when. Precisely because her way of loving Jefferson was different from her sister’s—he was one of many, rather than foremost—she had to reassure him constantly that love was not diminished the more it was shared, and that her love for her husband did not lessen her love and devotion for her father. Indeed, one could argue that Maria exhibited an emotional maturity that has been entirely overlooked because scholars have let Jefferson and Martha’s daughter and Dumas Malone set the standard. Today we would applaud the emotional and financial independence of an adult child who marries, moves out, and raises a family, rather than the one who brings a brood back home for grandparental support.
Taken from Edgehill, today a working cattle farm, this photo conveys the view from Martha Jefferson Randolph’s home. Framed by branches, her father’s house is shaded by the stand of trees at the crest of the mountain. It was always in her sight, as her home was in his.
But as long as Jefferson (and his complaints) remains our central focus, we lose sight of the strength of Maria’s marriage and the wise choice she made for herself. And we miss entirely the ways that Maria Jefferson Eppes hit the jackpot in the marital lottery that eighteenth-century marriage could be for so many wives, her winnings much in excess of her sister’s.
In the childbearing sector of that lottery, however, Maria Jefferson Eppes lost bitterly. She suffered a miscarriage the first summer after her wedding. Letters from July 1798 recount an unnamed illness that prevented her visit to Monticello. From the third of July, Jefferson had been impatiently awaiting her arrival, certain that “every sound we heard was that of the carriage which was once more to bring us together.” It had taken ten days to hear that she had been unwell, but he still did not know the nature of her complaint. “A preceding letter of Jack’s…must have miscarried,” he guessed, unwittingly using the word that would have given Maria the most pain. Still, he urged her to “nurse yourself therefore with all possible care for your own sake, for mine, and…do not attempt to move sooner or quicker than your hea
lth admits.” Impatient with the delays of the post, the anxious father sent an express rider to Eppington the next day to find out what ailed his daughter. Not until 1802 did Jack confirm what one suspects, naming “her miscarriage at Eppington” as the “unfortunate accident” that he had thought was at the root of her ill health for the previous two years. By the fall of 1798, however, Maria was much recovered, suffering only a cold because she had been “too thinly clad.”
The couple tried again, and by the spring of 1799, Maria was pregnant. After Jack settled some overseer problems at Bermuda Hundred, they moved to Mont Blanco, south of Petersburg. “From Mont Blanco to Petersburg, opportunities are so rare that it is seldom in our power to write,” Maria explained to Jefferson that summer. She had been unable to visit Monticello. Although Jack was as eager for a visit as she was, she assured him, his affairs in Chesterfield County required his attention. By the end of the year, when it was time for Maria’s lying-in, they repaired to Eppington and the loving care of “her dear mother,” Elizabeth Eppes. From there, on the first of January 1800, Jack joyfully wrote to Jefferson to announce the birth of his daughter the day before. The new father was jubilant now that he was able to make his father-in-law “a sharer in a species of happiness from which my Mary and myself have heretofore been debarred.” Their daughter, “tho’ very small has every appearance of good health,” Jack reported happily, and Maria had made it safely through the birth, evading the fever that frequently felled new mothers. Childbed fever, also called then puerperal fever, could kill as infection invaded the uterus after delivery. Long before doctors understood the importance of cleanliness in avoiding infection, and the invention of antibiotics, expectant mothers prepared as much for their death as for the new life they would bring into the world. Jack was relieved that Maria showed no such symptoms.
Their joy was short-lived. Within two weeks, their little girl was dead and Maria was suffering greatly from abscesses on her breasts. It is possible that she had been instructed, as many eighteenth-century mothers were, to withhold milk for the infant’s first few days. Today’s mothers know that colostrum, the first secretions of the breast after childbirth, contain a rich combination of vitamins and anti-allergens that protect newborns. In the eighteenth century, however, colostrum was thought to be toxic, so mothers waited for what they considered a purer milk flow to be established before nursing. But the baby’s death suggests that she had difficulty nursing, rendering Maria vulnerable to mastitis and infections. The milk ducts in her right breast became clogged, and, inflamed with infection and pus, sores broke through to her skin in several places. With the outbreaks, her fever rose worryingly. The Eppeses called in their trusted physician, Dr. Philip Turpin, to attend her. He prescribed bed rest and the daily administration of a few drops of medicines such as Elixir Vitae (literally, the elixir of life, probably a combination of alcohol and water), in addition to hefty doses of castor oil to reduce the inflammation. But the doctor’s remedies made Maria worse, as the infection roared on essentially unchecked, utterly debilitating the patient.
Maria had been bedridden for a full month before word reached Martha and Tom at Edgehill about the loss of her child and her illness. A snowstorm that dropped over two feet of snow on Albemarle prevented them from setting out immediately. Martha was frantic, her heart broken by the loss of her cherished sister’s fondest hopes for a child. She chafed at the two-week delay, wanting desperately to comfort her. She had been unable to be present for Maria’s lying-in, detained at Monticello by a horrifying series of deaths of several slaves who had become seriously ill after taking medication (likely poisons) from a traveling quack doctor. Finally packing up their children, Martha and Tom undertook the dangerous three-day journey on the snowy roads and arrived at Eppington on February 18. Their arrival, Jack was relieved to see, “revived a little the drooping spirits of my poor Mary.”
The Randolphs, on the other hand, were aghast at what they found. “We found Maria much worse than we expected,” Tom told Jefferson, “still confined to her bed, greatly reduced in flesh and strength and suffering extremely from inflammation and suppuration of both breasts.” A quick survey of the situation made clear to Tom that although Turpin was a doctor long known and much beloved by the Eppes family, his treatments were making her worse rather than better. Tom outdid himself with his tactful intervention. In spite of strong family opposition, even from Jack, Tom and Martha gently persuaded Maria to get out of bed and to stop taking the prescribed medicines, convincing her instead that her continued illness was the result of lying in bed in a stifling sickroom. They urged her to take gentle exercise and some fresh air. Tom even coordinated a visit to Maria by his own trusted physician and neighbor, Dr. William Bache, engineering it as a social call that Bache was making especially to see Tom, to avoid offending Turpin and the family.
In Philadelphia, where he was serving his last year as vice president, Jefferson heard with relief that within a week Maria had begun to respond to her new regimen. Jefferson was usually nonchalant about the childbirth process. He once told Maria that “some female friend of your Mama’s (I forget whom) used to say it was no more than a knock of the elbow.” But his alarm had increased with the length of Maria’s persistent illness. “The continuance of her indisposition is far beyond any case of the same kind I have ever known before,” he confessed to Jack. Her recovery was tediously slow, however. It would be almost another month before Jack could write that Maria was well enough to go from her room to an adjoining one, although she was not yet ready to go downstairs. But he remained consumed with worry. “The sores on her breast have proved most obstinate & will not I fear be easily healed without the aid of the knife to which she feels as is natural a great repugnance.” Martha stayed at Eppington to continue to nurse her sister, while Jack left her side only once to make a quick trip to Richmond.
Finally, toward the end of April, nearly four months after the birth, Jack happily reported to Jefferson that Maria’s health and spirits were entirely restored. He was much relieved. So well did she look, he said, it was not possible to tell that she had ever been ill. In fact, the relieved husband wrote, “she has not I am certain appeared more blooming for two years past.” They took their leave from Eppington and settled back happily at Mont Blanco. Jack could even joke about the lame excuse Maria asked him to relay to her father about why she had not written. It was so bad, Jack laughed, he refused to waste his father-in-law’s time by including it.
It was a happy ending to what had been a miserable winter for them all. Although Tom and Martha had finally moved into their new home at Edgehill, it had not been quite ready to receive them. They had been forced to live with smoky fireplaces, leaky windows, and mud tracked throughout the house from the dirt floor of the flooded cellar, in addition to the anxieties and dangers of their trip to Eppington. Jefferson had been wretchedly embroiled in fierce political battles while vice president. They all looked forward to their family reunion in May at Monticello. It was an indication of the severity of his anxiety about Maria that Jefferson traveled home by circuitous way of Richmond and Eppington, to collect his daughter himself for their summer visit.
The prospect of Jefferson’s election to the presidency in 1800 meant a further postponement to his plans for a quiet life in retirement among his family at Monticello. When Washington retired from politics in 1796, whatever restraint his presidency had exerted on the developing and warring factions within his government evaporated. Part of the conflict was a result of a distinct flaw in the Constitution. Because its framers had not anticipated the party system that would emerge in the nineteenth century, the Constitution did not distinguish between president and vice president when the electors of the electoral college came together to vote. The winner became president; the runner-up became vice president. This is how John Adams, Washington’s heir apparent, was saddled in 1796 with a vice president who opposed all his policies.
It had been a turbulent four years, as Vice President Jef
ferson emerged as the de facto leader of the opposition. His French sympathies induced him to oppose the administration’s Quasi War with France, an undeclared naval war on French shipping that followed a period of worsening relations with France’s frequently changing revolutionary governments. Provoked by French seizure of American ships and the demand by French diplomats of a bribe before they would arrange a meeting to discuss their differences, Congress finally suspended diplomatic relations with France in July 1798. Adams then sent to Congress the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, measures that sought to protect the United States at war by deporting threatening aliens and to protect his government by silencing its critics. Jefferson was so appalled that he, together with James Madison, secretly penned the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which argued that states could and should “interpose” (Madison’s carefully chosen word) their authority over congressional acts they deemed unconstitutional. Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolution even argued that states could nullify unconstitutional federal law. Such a proposal itself would have been cause for Jefferson’s arrest under the Sedition Act had his authorship been known.
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