This process of transformation required self-discipline, as Genlis understood from her own preparations to teach her two daughters and the four children (including the future Louis-Philippe) of the Duc d’Orléans, cousin to the king. Rather than assuming all the prerogatives that accompanied rank in prerevolutionary France, Genlis believed that she and her students needed to work to earn their privileges. As their teacher, she had to cultivate her own mind and talents, and in turn her students had to earn their position in society by their responsible behavior. But this approach only functioned to explain what these privileged students already knew about their lives in a hierarchal society: why they deserved the position into which they had been born. So in spite of declaring the equality of the female intellect, Genlis did not teach Martha Jefferson Randolph to make an argument that demolished notions of so-called natural hierarchies, whether of gender, of class, or, at home in the United States, of race. But she did provide her with a model for finding meaning in her life, both in Paris and in Virginia. Women’s capacity for rational thought, combined with the rigors of self-discipline in study, rendered them as capable as men of asserting rank in a meritocracy based on intellect and character.
This use of education to validate status was not quite the same thing as republican motherhood, a new idea developing in private letters and in the pages of newspapers and magazines in America about the role of women in the new nation. Emerging from a history as monarchical subjects and creating a new one as republican citizens, Americans in the early republic were redefining what citizenship meant. A long history stretching back to Ancient Greece (a history that Martha’s daughters were reading) emphasized that governing was a task that belonged to men only. And increasingly, white American men of all ranks asserted their equality in a system that became defined by “one man, one vote.” An egalitarian rhetoric both promoted and reflected these changes, as the franchise broadened, state by state, cutting down the property requirements that previously barred less affluent white men from the ballot box. Jefferson’s own party took the lead in this direction, although not incidentally disenfranchising free black men in the process. Barred from the ballot box, some American women nonetheless claimed the language and philosophy of republicanism in their writing, teaching, and mothering of future citizens.
But egalitarianism was not what Genlis had in mind; rather, she aimed for the preservation of rank by the cultivation of the rational mind through rigorous self-discipline. In France, her students could look forward to court life and the salons; but where, in the new republic, would American women display their learning and rank? Federalist women, sharing the inclinations of George Washington and John Adams in 1790s Philadelphia, attempted to counter the growing democratizing tendencies of the Jeffersonian Republicans by organizing a genteel life around visits, promenades, and salons that served as visible markers of elite status in the new nation. Several women who had experienced salon life in Paris even attempted to re-create it in Philadelphia. Anne Willing Bingham’s gatherings in her mansion at the corner of Third and Spruce were particularly notable. Inviting Philadelphia’s most fashionable people and her husband’s Federalist connections, she hoped to establish a political salon in which women could exert influence, as she had seen in France. Federalist women from both northern and southern states found the national capital of Philadelphia a perfect ground for the visible display of women of status as a part of political society.
But the salons survived neither the move to Washington City nor the transition of power from the Federalists to the Jeffersonian Republicans in the election of 1800. Connected to the Virginia dynasty of presidents, some women such as Dolley Madison and Jefferson’s friend and admirer Margaret Bayard Smith remained political players in social settings until the presidency of Andrew Jackson in 1829. Years after Jefferson’s death, for example, Martha tapped her connection with Smith to secure a clerkship for her son-in-law and a position in the fledgling Navy for her son. But privileged women attempting to exercise political muscle had become suspect in the young republic. By the 1840s, all white men enjoyed the vote, and with the evolution of the two-party system, the wheeling and dealing of politics now took place in party caucuses, behind doors firmly closed to women.
And indeed, Martha Jefferson Randolph never did visit Philadelphia when it was the nation’s capital; and when she visited her father in Washington during his presidency, she performed the filial duties of a loving daughter rather than the presiding duties of a salon hostess. At home in Virginia, she followed Genlis’s precepts, devoting herself to the service of her students in her exclusive mountaintop home school, teaching them to deserve the elite position into which they had been born. Martha’s life followed the formula by which Genlis herself had lived, if not quite as strictly. In 1781, Genlis’s daughter Caroline mused, “It is curious indeed that at her age, when she was still young, pretty, and so talented, that she would renounce society life and all its pleasures in order to devote herself to her children and to their education….I don’t know how Mama withstands the life she leads: ten lessons to give every day, after which she works at her desk until two or three o’clock in the morning.”
Martha’s self-discipline was also evident in the scheduled order of her days and in her habits of industry, which were remarked upon by all who observed her. Jefferson’s overseer for twenty years 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.” Not quite twenty-two, Virginia was so desperate to find a place at Monticello where she could study uninterrupted, she converted a wasp-infested attic space into her “fairy palace,” furnishing it with a couple of cast-off chairs, a sofa (that had lost its cushions), and two small tables. Counseling her daughter Septimia, who was struggling with her schoolwork, Martha spoke from experience when she admitted that desultory application to lessons “will weary you and you will not retain much of what you read under such circumstances. But,” she reassured her, good study habits “will in time be formed and the improvement to your own mind and character my dear Septimia will repay you most amply for the weariness of your initiation.” Through self-disciplined application to study, Martha was convinced that “to cultivate the good, and smother the bad [was] in the power of every rational creature.”
For her strenuous efforts on their behalf, Genlis was rewarded by the devotion of her children. Caroline declared that she “preferred a thousand times more a quarter hour of conversation with Mama to all the parties and pleasures of Paris.” Her words could just as easily have come from any of Martha’s children about her. “She is our sun,” Virginia once asserted with emphasis. Away from home and worrying about her mother’s health, Ellen was cheered to hear from Martha that her brother Jeff was taking good care of her, which was just what Ellen expected, given his “devoted attachment to you; an attachment which all your children feel to a degree that makes it a ruling passion.” Ellen agreed entirely with her grandfather when he reflected upon the “excellences” of her siblings and attributed it to the “education and the influence of example” that Martha had provided.
But no matter how advanced their curriculum, how brilliant their minds, how steadfast their study habits, or how devoted they were to the life of the mind and to each other, Martha and her daughters were still confronted with the powerful message of that house every day. Architectural historians have helped us understand that buildings are not neutral; they are designed to convey messages, whether it is the cathedral spire that points to heaven or the snug bungalow that enchants a first-time home buyer. Aristocratic homes, both in England and Virginia, showcased the power of their owners. In the fortress-style houses of medieval England, visitors easily identified the center of power and understood their relationship to him: Their host sat upon a dais, elevated over them. By Jefferson’s day, that personal mode of signifying order and rank had changed, now built into
the very design of the house. In the sprawling classical country houses (think Blenheim, near Oxford, or even the fictional Downton Abbey), the family occupied the central quarters; guests, servants, and services were located progressively farther away from the center. With the increasing compartmentalization and privacy evident in these houses, the hierarchy of the people who lived and worked in them was spelled out. As a result the house itself actually structured how the family head, family members (male and female), guests, and servants (or slaves, as in Virginia) related to one another, in ways that were seemingly impersonal and immutable but actually quite carefully calculated.
A visit to Monticello makes the point crystal clear: the central quarters, where the master lived, at the home’s core; the comfortable guest quarters at a distance from the master’s, although on the same floor; the small rooms up a narrow staircase where his daughter and her family lived; and the kitchens and stables below the terraces that extended outward from the core of the house. Jefferson did not have to be home for his family, visitors, or slaves to understand where power resided. It is disconcerting to realize that in a household so devoted to the life of the mind, nowhere was space dedicated to the reading and writing that was utterly central to the Randolph women’s existence. Instead their letters to be read and answered were scattered all over the house; whenever they could, they stole minutes from supervisory perches in the cellar or kitchen to scratch out a quick note. Never would they have presumed to use their grandfather’s well-equipped study, even though he vacated it for several hours every day for his afternoon rides.
It was Jefferson’s intention, then, rather than oversight or error, to design his home in a way that imposed order on his mountain: women and children relegated to the invisible upper floors, slaves and their work hidden beneath the terraces. For the Randolph daughters, these spatial arrangements were significant in reducing their access to knowledge, because, as one architectural historian explained, “gendered spaces separate women from knowledge used by men to produce and reproduce power and privilege,” so “by controlling access to knowledge and resources through the control of space, the dominant group’s ability to retain and reinforce its position is enhanced.” The locked doors of Jefferson’s library effected exactly that.
The bonds of blood and affection did not permit Jefferson’s daughter and granddaughters to escape that order, much less challenge it. Rather, they became subject to it. Perhaps remembering those first awkward months of married life in which she knew nothing of managing a household, Martha remedied her own educational deficiency by instituting a monthly system in which the keys of housekeeping rotated from daughter to daughter. The keys certainly served as a symbol of their authority, since household valuables were locked up to prevent theft by slaves. But the Randolphs did not relish that authority; instead the keys’ physical and psychic weight was palpable in the girls’ complaints: Virginia could finally find time to write to Ellen, because she had just given up the keys after “one of the most troublesome months of housekeeping that I ever had.” Mary complained of all she could not do since she had “carried the keys.” Cornelia, the most artistic of Martha’s daughters, bemoaned her “books lying covered with unmolested dust, my drawing boxes locked and never opened, the letters of my correspondents filling my desk and reproaching me for my neglecting to answer them” while she held the keys. The world was not to benefit from their intellectual gifts; instead these learned women would learn the female chores of running a household.
The spatial boundaries of Monticello maintained the inequality between master and female family, but there were at least brief moments of escape. In a world organized into separate gendered spaces, the solution for the studious Randolph girls was, literally, to change places. This explains why Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen felt most truly herself when she was at Poplar Forest. A retreat Jefferson built for himself to avoid the throngs of uninvited visitors at Monticello, Poplar Forest became a favorite getaway for his granddaughters as well. Aside from Jefferson’s bedroom, the compact design of the house provided one other bedroom, a large center hall that served as a dining room, and a reading salon (south-facing, of course, for light and warmth). It was not a house that encouraged visitors, and few came. Here the Randolph daughters were able to spend far fewer hours in the kinds of housekeeping and hostess duties that bore down on them at Monticello, and many more in their intellectual pursuits. This was a house built for reading, long conversations, and evening walks on the terrace, and they adored their grandfather for sharing it with them.
They particularly loved having Jefferson all to themselves. It was not something they could count on, even when he was living at home with them at Monticello. Their mother had once complained to him—still bitter nine months after the fact—that during one of Jefferson’s visits home from Philadelphia, she had not enjoyed “the pleasure of passing one sociable moment” with him. But it took three days over rough country roads to cover the ninety-three miles to their Poplar Forest retreat, and Jefferson was all theirs from the moment they left his mountain. On the way, they always stayed at the same little inns. Virginia treasured memories of these trips when Jefferson would choose a roadside spot at which to pull over for lunch. “Our cold dinner was always put up by his own hands,” she recalled; “he was the carver and helped us to our cold fowl and ham, and mixed the wine and water to drink with it.”
Designed in the octagon shape that Jefferson loved, the house at Poplar Forest had a square dining room in the center, encircled by bedrooms at the east and west sides of the house, two small rooms to the north, and a reading parlor to the south. Built for quiet study rather than entertaining, the house was a refuge as well for his granddaughters, who cherished their evening walks with him on the terrace that topped the service wing, extending out from the east side of the house’s lower level.
Their destination was a country house, furnished simply with four small bookcases, three dining tables, and four tea tables. The girls’ room did not even have a set of drawers for their clothes until Ellen managed to persuade Jefferson to have them made at the woodworking shop at Monticello and carted to Poplar Forest. The sparseness of the furnishings is even more apparent when we consider a list of taxable items (kitchen and bedrooms were exempt) which were not in the house. Jefferson owed no taxes for anything in category 30, which included portraits, pictures, prints, mirrors, fortepianos, harpsichords, organs, and harps; nor for category 31, which included bureaus, secretaries, and drawers; nor did he own the niceties that suggest entertaining, enumerated in category 32: urns for coffee or tea; candlestick lamp chandeliers, decanters, pitchers, bowls, and goblets. Ellen missed her music, though, worrying that she would “be falling off there” without a piano.
The four small bookcases that furnished the reading room were filled with duodecimos, tiny books—perhaps seven by five inches—formed by folding a sheet of printing press paper into twelve leaves. The small size allowed portability as Jefferson and his granddaughters packed for a month or two of solid reading. As Cornelia blissfully anticipated her turn to take the trip, the two months ahead seemed “as long as two years.” But when she surveyed “the long row of books I brought,” she confessed that “I began to think the time was scarcely sufficient to do it in.” Requests for forgotten books were always flying between Monticello and Poplar Forest. Cornelia asked for a “little English dictionary…very small” for “Daddy” (slave John Hemings) in one letter; in another, she asked for a “key” or index to a domestic encyclopedia kept at Poplar Forest.
When Jefferson sold his duodecimos to Congress in 1815, they were valued at a dollar apiece (about fifteen dollars today), a far cry from his elegant folios, which were at least seventeen by twenty inches in size. His three-volume set in folio of Theodore de Bry’s Great and Small Voyages alone was worth £400 sterling (almost twenty-nine thousand dollars today). Folios were intentionally weighty books, their size commensurate with the importance of their subject. By contrast, women�
��s reading was typically printed in duodecimo: intellectually less weighty but also cheaper, smaller, and easier to carry in one’s pocket in case a quiet moment presented itself during a busy day of housekeeping. But at Poplar Forest, the physical aspects of their books did not separate Jefferson’s reading from his granddaughters’, which may have encouraged them to feel that their study paralleled his.
With a heart brimming with nostalgic gratitude for the enchantment of these weeks at Poplar Forest, Ellen years later wrote a full description of a typical “cheerful and uneventful” day. Together they would take a leisurely breakfast, then break for the morning’s reading—Jefferson to the sunny drawing room, the girls to their bedroom. Dinner was at three, which “like all his other meals, he took leisurely.” As he lingered over his wine (“he never took more than three glasses,” Ellen observed), they delighted in his conversation. It was, she recalled, “easy, flowing, and full of anecdote.” Many times he would tell them stories of his long-dead wife, “whose memory he cherished with deep and tender affection. He often quoted to us her sayings and opinions and would preface his own advice with ‘Your grandmother would have told you,’ and ‘Your grandmother always said.’ ” After dinner, they again separated for work, until they took their afternoon walk on the terrace. They spent the remainder of the day with him, drinking tea and reading, occasionally pausing to read aloud an interesting passage to the others.
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