In such harrowing circumstances, when it seemed that the very fate of the American experiment was hanging in the balance, Jefferson stood for election against his Federalist foe John Adams in the fall of 1800. Ironically, his fiercest opposition came not from Adams but from his supposed running mate, New York’s Aaron Burr, with whom Jefferson was tied at the end of the electors’ voting. Following the procedure set out in the Constitution, the election was then thrown to the House of Representatives, where it took six days and thirty-six ballots to finally elect Jefferson president. Jefferson and his supporters would later refer to the election as the Revolution of 1800, in which the government was taken from the hands of the monarchist Federalists and returned to the people.
As he awaited the outcome of that bitter election in the first weeks of 1801, Jefferson’s thoughts were already turning to how his new position would affect his family in Virginia. He immediately seized upon the shorter distance to Charlottesville from Washington, D.C., where the capital had moved in 1800 from Philadelphia, as more convenient for both mail and visits. “The distance is so moderate that I should hope a journey to this place would be scarcely more inconvenient than one to Monticello,” he told Maria brightly. His daughters were anxious about the outcome of the election, loyally wanting his happiness but also dreading continued separations. Maria assured him that if he won, she would be happy for all those who voted for him, although she would prefer to have him at home to herself. Martha agreed. Her letter at the end of January 1801 was the first one she had written to him in two months. Her silence seems to have sprung from her hurt that he had spent so little time with her on his earlier visits home. “Always in a crowd,” she said resentfully, he was inaccessible to her, even when he was at Monticello. He might as well have remained away. Their lives during a Jefferson presidency, she suspected, would be more of the same.
In the meantime, Maria and Jack had apparently decided that Bermuda Hundred would be their homestead. “The carpenters are still at work in the house,” Maria told her father, “but we have two rooms that are comfortable and I prefer it infinitely to living in a rented place.” They were still awaiting the arrival of their furniture from Mont Blanco, but the mild winter had made the inconveniences of the move bearable. So too had the prospect of permanence and stability in a home of their own. By February, Jack could inform Jefferson that Maria was once again pregnant; his letter (now lost) probably also begged off travel to Monticello for Jefferson’s spring visit on that account. Having suffered two grievous losses, the couple was unwilling to risk a third. Jefferson conceded that he could not “regret entirely the disappointment…because of the cause.” Still, he pressed them to think about going to Monticello anyway, perhaps earlier in her pregnancy when it would be safer, he argued, before travel became too difficult for her. As an added enticement, he placed his house, its contents, and his slaves entirely at their disposal.
Jack declined the offer. For the time being, they were conveniently situated near his family, where Maria could count on the experienced help of her mother-in-law, only thirty-five miles away, if anything went wrong. That Jefferson would not be there for much of the time only made it easier to refuse. Maria wrote her excuses as well, adding, “the servants we shall carry up will be more than sufficient for ourselves and you would perhaps prefer yours being employed in some way or other.” Whether or not she knew that Sally Hemings was also pregnant at this very moment, Maria tactfully gave advance notice that she neither wanted nor expected her former maid’s service if, in fact, she was able to visit.
Maria waited out the early stages of her pregnancy at home until the most likely time for a miscarriage had passed. In June she left for Eppington, where she visited with Elizabeth and Francis while Jack, who had his hands full with coordinating the work of overseers and slaves at harvest time, attended to his farm. They eventually pressed on to Monticello in mid-July to await Jefferson’s summer visit. When Jefferson arrived on August 2, the family reunion was complete. Martha did not think Maria looked well, as the sisters settled in to await the births of their children. Virginia Jefferson Randolph was born on August 22, 1801; her cousin Francis Wayles Eppes, named for his other grandfather, followed on September 20. Attended by a local midwife who enjoyed Jefferson’s complete confidence, Francis’s birth apparently went well. Nor did Maria endure nearly the postpartum sufferings with Francis that she had with her daughter.
There were other terrors that season, however. No sooner had Jefferson returned to Washington than his daughters’ families faced an outbreak of whooping cough. “We have considerable apprehensions about the whooping cough which rages in every part of this neighbourhood,” Jack told Jefferson from Monticello, and its spread, he feared, brought it so near, it would be impossible to escape. Maria’s infant was not yet six weeks old when he caught it. “He has now struggled with it eleven days,” Maria told her father, when she could finally bring herself to write about the ordeal. But, she hoped, “tho he coughs most violently so as to become perfectly black with it in the face he is so little affected by it otherwise that my hopes are great that he will go through with it.”
The young mother must have been worried to distraction during those eleven long days. The whooping cough could not have failed to dredge up memories of loss and grief from her childhood at Eppington. Would it claim her son, as it had her sister Lucy? At Edgehill, Martha frantically nursed Ellen, Cornelia, and infant Virginia through fevers and coughs. Not until the crisis had passed could she bear to write about her own maternal agonies watching helplessly her two daughters in their delirium, one laughing and singing, the other gloomy and terrified. “My God what a moment for a parent,” she cried.
By mid-November, Maria was satisfied that little Francis could make the journey safely home and began preparations to leave. Martha still thought him “in a very precarious state of being…the most delicate creature I ever beheld.” But by early January, Jack could assure Jefferson that “Maria was entirely reestablished in her health, and her breast quite well. The little boy too was well and healthy.” For the rest of her life, Maria dedicated herself to keeping him that way. She was anxious at his continued fussing but explained it as caused by teething. Both parents were relieved when the baby’s distress disappeared even when no teeth were forthcoming but realized their past experiences had heightened their anxiety. “The perils he has passed through render him doubly dear to us,” Jack explained to Jefferson when Francis was almost six months old, and they only gradually had learned to relinquish their apprehensions on his account. “The happiness we experience in his daily acquisition of strength, size and ideas,” Jack reported gratefully, “is not at present dampt by the dread of losing him.”
After a busy spring session in 1802—in which Congress had reorganized the federal judiciary, created a precedent for the admission of new states with the addition of Ohio to the Union, and at the president’s behest authorized the establishment of a military academy at West Point—Jefferson looked forward to the summer recess. When he issued his annual summons for the family to join him at Monticello, however, an outbreak of measles in that neighborhood revived all of Maria’s old fears. She had been very sick that June, unable to keep anything down and suffering constant mild fevers that she transmitted to Francis. Hearing of her illness, Elizabeth Eppes hastened to Bermuda Hundred to care for her. Eppes devotedly nursed Maria there until she was well enough to make the journey to Eppington, where her mother-in-law could more conveniently look after her. The measles outbreak in Albemarle filled Maria with a greater fear for Francis than had the whooping cough. There followed a flurry of letters between Washington, Edgehill, and Eppington. Were Martha’s children clear of the infection? Jefferson asked. “We are entirely free from the measles here now,” Martha replied from Edgehill with relief. What about the enslaved children on the mountain? Maria wondered. “There are no young children there but Bet’s and Sally’s [Hemings],” Jefferson replied, and he was sure the disease had alrea
dy cleared them safely. “I think therefore you may be there in perfect security,” he assured them from Washington.
Maria was not convinced, and neither, it seems, was Jack. “Mr. Eppes thinks we had best remain here My Dear Papa till we hear further from you about the measles….Write as soon as you can conveniently after arriving at Monticello,” she finished. Jack wrote to Jefferson as well, begging him to understand “how large a portion of our happiness depends on the safety of our child” and reminding him that they trusted him to let them know the soonest they could come without endangering Francis. Maria’s hesitation was neither resistant nor undutiful; her letter makes clear her disappointment in their delayed arrival.
Francis’s birth had been unremarkable to Jefferson; he had told a friend after the birth of Maria’s first child that his elder daughter had made grandchildren “cease to be novelties—she has four children.” But it was exactly the opposite for the young parents. Francis was the delight of Maria’s life. She thrilled to his attempts to totter about the room, “with his hands extended to balance himself.” He brought light to days darkened by illness and by Jack’s absences during legislative sessions or the harvest. But the terror of losing her child was never far from her mind. On a cold February day in 1803, as Tom Randolph escorted Maria and her toddler back to Eppington from Edgehill, Jack told Jefferson, Maria came “very near losing our little Francis.” For no apparent reason, “he became lifeless in an instant in the carriage and most probably would have expired but for the friendly aid of Mr. Randolph.” Not willing to rely on the slow progress of the carriage, Tom clutched the child in his arms, and took off on foot to a house close by the road. There, Jack wrote, he “procured a warm bath by which Francis was gradually restored.” Even when Francis had all the appearance of good health, Maria could not rest easy. “It is in the best health allways,” Martha had noticed, “that he has been attacked with those dreadful fits,” which she guessed was epilepsy, with its “noise in the throat the foaming at the mouth and drawing back of the head.”
Looking more closely at these details of Maria’s life weakens the interpretation of her as the petulant child who refused to be molded into her father’s image. From the days of her childhood longing for the “baby” that her father had promised her from Philadelphia, Maria had wanted a family of her own. As an adult, her desire to create and preserve her own family with her husband was paramount, and Jack’s letters to Jefferson show that he was as fully invested in that vision as his wife was. Finally, after two heartbreaking disappointments, they had their son. But he was sickly and delicate, as even others saw. Maria’s reluctance to travel and expose Francis to disease was not the response of a peevish daughter or a neurotic mother but of a young couple united in their determination to preserve the fragile life of their child.
This charming little sketch of four-year-old Francis Eppes reflects the delicacy of his health, which so worried his parents. He lived a long life, however. After his move to Florida in 1828, he was a successful planter and an energetic civil servant in Tallahassee. Undoubtedly influenced by his grandfather’s example, he was a founder of the West Florida Seminary, the precursor of Florida State University.
There are very few letters that allow us to see this marital bond in action, but those that survive attest to its strength. Jack and Maria Eppes planned their lives to allow the least amount of time apart, as Jack served first in the state legislature in 1801–1803 and then in the House of Representatives in 1803–1804. When Maria accompanied Martha to Washington in November 1802 to visit their father, leaving Jack behind in Virginia, she was immediately pulled into rituals of visiting and company. Yet shortly after her arrival at the White House, as she waited for her dress to be ironed, Maria stole a few minutes to write to her husband. Francis had borne the trip well, she said, although it had been rough. As she wrote, he was “now venturing across the room alone & begins to do it very boldly.” Maria sighed, wishing that Jack “could behold his dear little figure.” Although they were just four days into a weeks-long stay, Maria assured the “most beloved of my heart” that “nothing can equal the joy with which I shall return to you after so long a separation.” This was a distinctly different pattern from the reluctant letter writer Jefferson described to Kitty Church (Maria’s friend from Paris), who “resolved to answer” Kitty’s letter “every day for a month” but didn’t, and who would do anything to prove her love “except writing letters.”
In the winter of 1803–1804, Jack’s election to the House of Representatives forced another separation. Pregnant again, Maria joined her sister, who was expecting her sixth child, at Edgehill for the winter, since Tom also had stood for election and won. Both men made their way to Washington for the convening of the Eighth Congress in mid-October, while the sisters kept each other company through their pregnancies. Martha named Mary Jefferson Randolph, born on November 2, after Maria. All went well, and Jefferson hoped that Maria would find Martha’s success in childbirth an example that would cheer. But Maria’s spirits were low, Martha told her father wearily, in part because her sister’s past experiences precluded “every thing like comfort or cheerfulness.” Maria’s pregnancies had never been easy, and even after Francis she had struggled with pain in her breasts. Without Jack’s heartening presence to encourage her, Maria sank more easily into dejection during what she called “this tedious interval.” Even seven-year-old Ellen noticed that her aunt Maria’s “temper, naturally mild, became I think, saddened by ill-health.” Martha thought the long winter’s separation, while Jack served in Congress, was particularly difficult for Maria to bear. Although caring for a newborn herself in addition to five other children, Martha was striving to take as good care of Maria as Jack would have done if he were there. But she knew that she was a poor substitute for Maria’s doting husband.
Jack’s letters were not as frequent as Maria had hoped, as he dove into his new job with relish. A strong supporter of Jefferson’s efforts to shrink government, Jack introduced a resolution that the House Ways and Means Committee look into methods to cut wasteful spending, and he energetically engaged the debates that followed. In January, as tempers frayed at Edgehill, Maria could not help but express her hurt at her husband’s neglect. “I confess I think a little hard of not receiving a single line from you by the last post,” she admitted, “yet though hurt I cannot let an opportunity pass without giving you the only proof in my power of the tenderness which I feel & with which I think of you.” Perhaps it was Martha’s exhaustion, supervising a household of young children, a baby at her breast, and the absence of both fathers that prompted her spiteful suggestion that she address Maria’s reply to Jack, “by way of retaliation.” Martha’s handwriting would raise Jack’s expectations for a humorous and newsy letter. But Maria could not agree. She would not subject her husband to “so much disappointment from a letter of mine.” Neither, it seems, was there any room in her marriage for petty reprisals, even when her husband had disappointed her.
In late January, Jefferson wrote confidently that hereafter, the mail would be more regular with the institution of twice-weekly delivery from Milton, the Monticello neighborhood’s post office; he also hoped that Congress might rise in March, rather than April, allowing him an early return home. That prospect, Maria told Jack in the last letter she would ever write to him, “would revive me more than any thing. I find it often hard to bear up against sickness, confinement and a separation from you,” she confessed. Her health was gradually worsening. Unable to keep anything down, she was growing weak. But she took comfort that her trials could only last a week or two longer, when she would present him with “so sweet an addition to our felicity” that she was sure “would more than compensate for almost any suffering.” She closed on a note of happy expectation to her “best beloved of my soul.” “I live but in the anticipation of the happiness I shall feel when we meet again,” she told him. Poignantly unaware that two months later they would be separated forever, she added, “it is not a litt
le increased in knowing that it will not be followed by another separation.” For the rest of his life, Jack kept these last letters.
She gave birth to a daughter, Maria Jefferson Eppes, just a week later, on February 15. On the twenty-sixth, Jefferson wrote his congratulations immediately after receiving a quick note from Martha about the birth. He had been hoping that Maria might deliver a little later, and Congress rise a little earlier, so that they could all be there for the event, but ultimately he rejoiced that all went well. Within days, however, things took a rapid change for the worse. Although informed the morning of March 3 of her illness, Jefferson was forced to remain in Washington until Congress had finished its business. But Jack Eppes bolted from Washington immediately, with Jefferson’s anxious pleas pressed upon him to be kept informed by every post.
Everything seemed to go wrong for the frantic husband as he made his way to Edgehill. High winds made the ferry crossing over the Potomac River impossible, he got lost in the dark trying to find an alternate route, and more than once was forced “to get down and brake the Ice before my Horse could get forward.” But he was somewhat cheered by what he found when he got there. “I found Maria on my arrival here free from fever and sitting up—She has no complaint at present but weakness—Her appetite is improving daily,” he wrote Jefferson with relief. “I have no fear,” he added optimistically, “but that in a short time she will be restored to health.” She had lost her milk, so Martha was nursing little Maria along with her own infant, Mary.
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