Jefferson's Daughters

by Catherine Kerrison

  Jefferson had not meant to leave his daughter penniless, but neither had he confronted his deplorable financial situation until the waning months of his life. He had racked up considerable debt from decades of spending, and his creditors were becoming insistent. Further, after Tom’s financial reverses, he had taken over the support of his daughter’s large family and then found himself on the hook for a friend’s note for twenty thousand dollars, which he had guaranteed with his own signature. With the slide in land values during the financial Panic of 1819, Jefferson’s hopes to recoup his own fortunes had turned bleak.

  In desperation, Jefferson proposed that Virginia hold a lottery; the prize would be his mills and a thousand acres. The proceeds, he hoped, would bail him out of the financial morass he could no longer ignore. The legislature authorized the lottery but attached a condition: Jefferson’s beloved Monticello must be included in the prize. Jefferson blanched when his grandson broke the news, incapable of speech, but he acquiesced when assured that the winner would not take immediate possession of the house. Jefferson could remain in his home until his death, and his daughter would be guaranteed residence there for at least two years beyond that.

  Reassured that he had provided for his daughter and her family, Jefferson died at peace. He “cheerfully committed his soul to his god,” Jeff wrote a week later, and “his child to his country.” He never knew that the lottery would fail and that the auction would not draw even half of what was needed. Indeed, buoyed by renewed hope, the very last letter he wrote arranged to pay custom duties to release a shipment of the expensive French wines he loved so much.

  Martha fled the mountain (and her husband) after her father’s death to stay with her daughter Ellen in Boston. She did not return until 1828, after an absence of almost two years. Virginia and her husband, Nicholas, served as caretakers in the meantime, adjusting their lifestyle to their reduced circumstances after the auction had left them with little furniture and few slaves. To economize, they learned to live in discrete sections of the big house, and Virginia drew up a plan to make do with a skeletal staff. Hearing of her cutbacks, Ellen warned from Boston that Virginia would need to leave behind the old ways of life. “You will be obliged dear Virginia, to adopt Yankee habits if you follow Yankee fashions,” she said with wry humor. Just before Martha’s return, Tom Randolph applied to Nicholas for permission to return to Monticello. In March 1828 he took up residence in the north pavilion, living apart from the family. Just three months later he died there at age fifty-nine, having reconciled at last with his wife and eldest son.

  This portrait of Martha Jefferson Randolph, painted in Philadelphia a year before her death, illustrates the “delicate likeness” she bore to her father, as well as her lively intelligence and cheerful temper, famously unruffled despite the many storms of her life.

  With Monticello’s sale in 1831, Martha Jefferson Randolph was homeless. She spent the rest of her life shuttling among the homes of her children, from Boston to Washington to Virginia, constantly battling financial insolvency and the indifference of an ungrateful public who did not feel obliged to maintain Jefferson’s family to demonstrate their appreciation of his legacy. “Supporting a large family in genteel society, upon very limited means” was a challenge, she said, even in a Washington rental. Outfitting her daughters for the winter social scene (a key venue for husband-hunting) was a constant drain, although she cut corners by remaking and trimming dresses and doing her daughters’ hair, “at which I am quite a proficient,” she crowed, as she had been since her first days in Paris. And winter days found the whole household—sometimes as many as nineteen, including the slaves—all crowded about the same fire, “without the possibility of enjoying elbow room or quiet or privacy even for an hour in the day,” she complained. In spite of all her efforts, she had never been able to make the money stretch far enough.

  Jeff owned that he bitterly regretted Jefferson’s decision to pursue the lottery that left his family vulnerable to “the mortification of neglect from an ungrateful country,” but his sisters uttered no such reproach of their grandfather. It seems surprising that Monticello—an uncomfortable house (Martha called it “a comfortless winter residence”) in which they had been relegated to the household duties of their sex—should have been the object of Jefferson’s granddaughters’ yearnings in the years after his death. But with its vistas, gardens, woods, paths, and hideaways, the mountain had been for them shelter, comfort, and a world apart, even as it had been a magnet for visitors.

  Martha herself had experienced those woods as solace and healer. When she gazed out from the terraces of her father’s home, feeling that “ ‘all the Kingdoms of the world, and the glory there of’ lay spread before me,” she reflected in her daughter Mary’s commonplace notebook, “every feature of that landscape has it’s own spell upon my heart, can bring back the living breathing presence, of those long mingled with the clods of the valley[;] can renew for a moment youth itself. Youth, with it’s exquisite enjoyments, it’s ardent friendships, and oh! dearer than all, it’s first, purest, truest love!” Those woods had been consecrated by her father’s grief after his wife’s death; no wonder that every square foot seemed to bring back his “living breathing presence” for her.

  Martha’s daughters poured out their grief and memories in Mary’s book as well. Ellen copied the poetry of Byron: “There is pleasure in the pathless woods….There is society where none intrudes.” Cornelia inscribed lines she attributed to Goethe: “Know’st thou the mountain? And its Lonely peak / Know’st thou it well? Tis there, ’tis there! / Oh father lies our way! Let us go there.” Aching for Monticello after its sale, Mary copied a prayer for resignation, that in the “tranquility of nature” she might learn “the beautiful order of thy works / [to] Learn to conform the order of our lives!”

  For Ellen and Virginia, the pain of their memories outweighed their pleasure; but for Cornelia, whose artist’s eye noted the evening’s “deep indigo & bold outline of the blue ridge…against the bright gold coloured or orange western sky,” the landscape sometimes brought “unmixed delight.” Still, as she prepared to vacate the mountain, she acknowledged that “I do not feel at home or happy anywhere but at Monticello. I miss the very emotion excited by that beautiful scenery….I want those familiar haunts which…seem as if grandpapa was still there.”

  Married and living in Boston, far removed from these bittersweet scenes, Ellen found it strange that when she dreamed of Monticello, “I never find myself within the house; I am always wandering through the grounds or walking on the terrace.” There, in her dreams, the “glorious prospect lays open before me. I seem to have ‘leaped a gulf’ of fifteen years, to have retraced my steps, and losing sight of all present ties, forgetting even my children, to be what I was at sixteen.” Cornelia well understood that their pleasure in the beautiful Monticello views was because “every thing is so strongly associated with our dear grand father that he seems yet to be present.” But their nostalgia for the mountain landscape tells us more: It also helps explain their view of themselves as accomplished intellectuals, a Jeffersonian aristocracy, in spite of the limits of the house and their sex. The glorious prospects from the mountain promised infinitely more than the crowded rooms on the second floor to which they had been shunted.

  Ellen’s dreams allowed her to return to her girlhood, when the world was her oyster because she was the charming, well-educated, and distinguished granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson. Her dreams of the future could still take flight, unencumbered by the weight of household keys or maternal responsibility. Older now, her subconscious had filtered out all memory of the gendered constraints that the house (and its architect) had imposed on her. Martha had taught her daughters that, like their grandfather, they too could enjoy the life of the mind, and she had encouraged them to seek out spaces—architectural and interior—to develop their minds and to break free of the chains by which gender conventions bound them. The sisters mourned the loss of the apparently bound
less landscape at Monticello precisely because it had suggested possibilities for an internal terrain so vast in its potential, they could overlook and maybe even transcend the physical limits of their upper-floor rooms and attic hideaway. In their veneration of Jefferson after his death, his granddaughters attempted to claim that legacy of the mind he bequeathed to them.

  They were to be disappointed at every turn. Ellen realized early that her mother’s efforts had raised her daughters’ expectations to an unattainable level. “I was brought up too tenderly—rendered unfit for an ordinary destiny,” Ellen reflected ruefully at thirty-two. “My friends, in their love, seem to have thought that I could command fortune and direct the events of my life.” But as it turned out, not even the daughter and granddaughters of the author of the Declaration of Independence would be permitted that freedom; in spite of their scholarly attainments, they remained, after all, women.

  Ellen had begun to understand this, even before Jefferson’s death. Once, ruminating on her childhood education, she regretted that she had not earlier read English philosopher John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke had argued that people were not born with innate ideas; rather the mind was a tabula rasa, a blank slate, whose ideas were shaped over time by education and circumstances. “In former years,” Ellen recalled, “I read because it amused me and because I wished to make myself a companion for those intelligent and well-informed persons in whose society I most delighted.” Until she read Locke, however, “it never occurred to me that it was necessary to do anything but read….Understanding what I read…I conceived to be nothing more than to have an image presented to my mind.” Not until she was almost thirty did she become aware that “the proper and healthy employment of the mind is to think, and not to dream.” She was tempted to start her education all over again, she said, beginning with a child’s hornbook. “As it is,” she despaired, however, “I am nothing but a woman, and could promise myself no competent reward for so much trouble.”

  Without any apparent destination for female education, then, Ellen even questioned the journey. Despite all the attention that Martha Jefferson Randolph devoted to her children’s education, it was not meant—for her daughters, at least—to cultivate the Revolutionary ideal of an autonomous self, able, in Jefferson’s words, to judge “what will endanger or secure his liberty.” Rather, it was a discipline of behavior and practice, Ellen realized, to teach the “praise of method and order.” (One historian’s description of the ideal woman of the early republic as “astute enough to be politically null” fits the Jefferson and Randolph daughters perfectly.) So despite its apparent similarities to an Enlightenment education, that which Martha gave to her daughters failed to reach its benchmark: a rigorous discipline of critical thought that resulted in the development of an independent, self-sufficient person.

  But that was not what Martha had ever intended. She never meant to challenge a structure in which men were the acknowledged political actors. Rather, shaped with reference to the past, from which she learned how elite women influence men rather than make history, she trained cultivated and pleasing women. At Monticello, they willingly enacted the roles the Scottish Enlightenment had created for them: placing female education at the disposal of the head of the household and offering the rational society and ordered calm that restored men buffeted by the storms of political life. It was surely no coincidence that Martha named a daughter after Cornelia, the Roman matron who refused to remarry after her husband’s death and who spent the rest of her life selflessly promoting her sons for the good of Rome.

  Martha Jefferson Randolph’s story, like those of Mesdames de Genlis and de Staël, highlights the doggedness of traditional gender conventions even in the age of the transatlantic revolutions that, it has been said, ushered in the modern world. As it turned out, both Genlis and Staël were shunted out of France, while women’s tentative claims to participation in politics were similarly thrust aside in the United States. Even a postrevolutionary world was not prepared to receive such educated women.

  But these women themselves did not always understand that the power of their intellect was sufficient ground for claiming the authority men enjoyed. It is striking that Madame de Staël, who was such a thorn in the side of the emperor Napoléon that he banished her and her salon from Paris, did not even own a desk until after the successful reception of her second novel, Corinne. “I really want a big table,” she told her cousin longingly; “it seems to me that I now have the right to one.” Martha’s great convent revolt, which her father had stymied in Paris, would fizzle to the “regular siege” she mounted—at age forty-nine—to persuade her father to turn an alcove in her bedroom into a closet. Whether it housed her clothing or a tiny writing space, complete with table, chair, and writing implements, we shall never know. However she used it, she was pleased with her small victory. “You have no idea how much it has added to my comfort,” she sighed with satisfaction.

  In addition to her diligent cultivation of the life of the mind, Martha also leveraged her great devotion to her father to offset the stultifying life of a rural plantation wife. She taught her daughters to treasure the blood ties with Jefferson that, in their view, gave them more than any marriage could have. In their association and identification with their famous grandfather, the Randolph women were different, and they knew it. “Ellen would be greatly admired if she had not such a tell-tale countenance,” a neighbor once said of her; “she shows too plainly that she feels her superiority.” Cornelia could not contain her disdain of Richmond society; one letter dripped so “full of slanders,” her aunt feared that if it got into the wrong hands they would have to “take horse and leave Richmond with all speed.” Even Martha’s daughter-in-law once puzzled, “I don’t think they think like other people.” Nor could Cornelia conceal her contempt for those “prophane” people “who respect no more the house of Thomas Jefferson than that of one of themselves & who would turn it into a boarding house.” They were utterly incredulous that the public had no interest in maintaining Monticello as a shrine to the dead president or in purchasing the volumes of Jefferson’s correspondence they had labored many a tedious hour to transcribe.

  In spite of all their hopes, however, in the end their association with Jefferson could not protect them. Their lives make clear the benefits and perils for women of relying upon men—even wealthy, well-intentioned men of reputation—for one’s life’s meaning and livelihood. Martha had been left destitute, her education, brilliant mind and manners, and famous connection all insufficient defenses against the vagaries of life. Not until 1878 could her daughter Virginia bring herself to acknowledge that connections alone did not suffice to support women. “Girls should be brought up to be able to maintain themselves in these days,” she asserted, almost ninety years after Massachusetts’s Judith Sargent Murray had argued the same thing in the wake of the Revolution. Even in our own time, a strategy to rely on the male breadwinner with the higher salary may seem to make sense in the short term, but it leaves mothers and their children economically vulnerable in the long run. As Jefferson’s daughter and granddaughters learned in the nineteenth century, today’s highly educated women—lagging behind in wages and leadership positions—are also discovering that love, good intentions, and connections are not enough to soften patriarchy’s very rough edges.

  Of course, female education in the early republic was not calculated to produce self-sufficient women, any more than it had been in the colonial period. Such women would have presented too much of a challenge to a patriarchal system that insisted on the preservation of the male prerogative in all areas of life. And if Martha Jefferson Randolph had little interest in changing this system, Maria Jefferson Eppes had even less. She had been raised deep in rural Virginia by a gentry slaveholding family, so firmly rooted there that even in their great distress over sending her to Paris it apparently never occurred to them to pack up and take her there themselves. In a society so strictly demarcated by race and gender, whi
te girls learned to use their racial superiority to offset their gender inferiority. They would be the least likely to dispute that order, then, since to do so would upset the fragility of the slave society on which white Virginians depended, and their privileged place in it.

  In her aspirations for a husband, children, and a stable family life of her own, Maria Jefferson Eppes was typical of Virginia gentry women of the late eighteenth century. She had little interest in excelling in her studies or her music or her writing. Intellectual challenges, such as attempting to read Don Quixote in the original Spanish, did not delight her. Before he left for France in 1784, Jefferson had borrowed a copy, bought a Spanish dictionary, and occupied the long hours of the voyage teaching himself Spanish. He would insist that his daughter Martha follow suit, and as a young matron Martha required that Maria do the same. The year before she died at eighty, Virginia congratulated herself that she had finally read the novel in the original Spanish, in what had become something of a family tradition almost one hundred years after Jefferson accomplished the same feat. Maria, on the other hand, had looked for any excuse not to cart the book and her Spanish dictionary about as she accompanied her newlywed sister on her honeymoon visits.