The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  The “aery mountain” Mrs. Drummond mentioned was a conical 857-foot peak little more than a mile outside Charlottesville. In their teens, Jefferson and Dabney Carr used to ramble the slopes of this oddly isolated little elevation, which Jefferson had inherited from his father. Jefferson found the crest of the mountain exhilarating. One day he told Carr that he planned to build a house on it. The idea might have remained an adolescent dream—but fire destroyed Shadwell in 1770, and his mountaintop house suddenly became a real possibility.

  After a year of labor by slaves and white artisans, Jefferson had managed to construct only a one-room brick cottage. But he was so much in love with his mountain that he moved into the tiny house, vowing he would get “more elbow room this summer.” Only Martha Wayles Skelton and a handful of other people had any idea of the magnificent mansion Jefferson had already sketched and planned down to the precise proportions of every room. The gifts that would make him the father of American architecture were beginning to flower. In his college years he had pored over the sketchbooks of the great Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, and from them he had conceived an American style that would have the same chaste lines and carefully calculated symmetry.

  In his bachelor days, Jefferson had called his mountain mansion “The Hermitage.” Now, with the prospect of Martha Wayles Skelton joining him, it became Monticello—a name with a sweetly romantic ring. But the name would mean nothing unless Jefferson remembered Mrs. Drummond’s advice to persevere. From England he ordered an expensive “fortepiano,” the very latest in musical instruments. It was obviously intended for only one player. He also asked his British purchasing agent to search the herald’s office for the coat of arms of the Jefferson family. “It is possible there may be none,” he wrote. “If so, I would with your assistance become a purchaser, having [Laurence] Sterne’s word for it that a coat of arms may be purchased as cheap as any other coat.”13

  The suitor was straining to persuade John Wayles that the Jefferson family lineage was not a wholly worthless Welsh concoction, only a few millimeters above the subterranean Irish. All these efforts, plus more visits to The Forest, had their inevitable effect. John Wayles realized that his daughter had no intention of loving anyone but Thomas Jefferson. On November 11, 1771, the no longer unfeeling parent gave his permission. The young couple set the wedding date for January 1, 1772—visible proof of their impatience. An exuberant Jefferson scattered two- and three-pound tips to The Forest’s servants and galloped back to Albermarle to prepare his family for the wedding.

  VII

  As the happy day approached, Jefferson put his legal training to good use. He wrote out the license-bond for the wedding, in which he and his best man, Francis Eppes (his future wife’s brother-in-law), pledged fifty pounds to support their joint declaration that there was no known cause to obstruct a marriage between “the aforementioned Thomas Jefferson and Martha Skelton.” After Skelton, Jefferson wrote a word that again suggested a division between spiritual and sexual love in his soul: spinster. Someone else, probably his best man, crossed it out and wrote widow. Why was Jefferson unconsciously denying that Martha had already submitted to another man’s desire? Apparently he could not tolerate the thought—even though there had been living proof—her son, John Skelton, who had died six months earlier, in June 1771.14

  The wedding celebration lasted two and a half weeks—not unusual, and proof of how much Virginians loved a party. Not until January eighteenth did the newlyweds set out for Monticello. On the way they made a sentimental stop at Tuckahoe, where Jefferson had spent some of his boyhood while his father managed the estate of his friend and in-law, William Randolph. From there they set out on the final miles to Monticello, undeterred by a veritable blizzard, which forced them to shift from phaeton to horses.

  It was midnight when they reached the whitened mountaintop. Jefferson led Martha to the one-room brick cottage where he had pictured himself whiling away his days as a bachelor hermit. While Martha shivered beneath her cloak, the bridegroom built a fire. Soon a roaring blaze sent waves of warmth and light against the walls of their refuge, turning the blizzard’s howl into a curiously comforting sound. They lay down before the blaze wrapped in each other’s arms.

  Suddenly Jefferson leaped up, remembering a hidden treasure. From behind a shelf of books he flourished a half bottle of wine. With bodies warmed and glasses full, they lolled before the fire. Martha’s auburn head bent low, her hazel eyes shining over the latest sketches of the magnificent house in which Jefferson vowed they would grow old together. It was a night they would remember for the rest of their lives.15

  THE TRAUMAS OF HAPPINESS

  The great world of Virginia—the courthouses, the mansions—saw nothing of Thomas and Martha Jefferson for two months after they arrived at Monticello. The House of Burgesses met in Williamsburg without the twenty-seven-year-old delegate from Albemarle County. The bridegroom did not bother to jot a single note about money or other matters in his usually busy pocket diary. Not until April did the Jeffersons end their honeymoon and descend their mountain for a journey to Williamsburg.

  They enjoyed the capital’s lively spring season, going to the theater frequently and riding out to visit friends in the vicinity. They also visited a Dr. Brown. On the way back, they stopped for a month-long visit with John Wayles, Martha’s father. By the time they reached Monticello it was almost summer; the flowers and fruit trees planted by Jefferson before his marriage were blooming, and so was Martha Jefferson. She was expecting their first child.

  On September 27, 1771, an hour after midnight, Martha gave birth to a daughter. Jefferson promptly named the child after her mother. The next months were an anxious time. The baby was underweight, and she did not seem to thrive at Martha’s breast. Not until someone, perhaps Jefferson, suggested letting one of the Monticello slaves nurse her did tiny Martha begin to grow plump and healthy. The ordeal left her mother weak and virtually bedridden.1

  Her husband relieved his tension by concentrating on the mansion he was in the process of building. By now its basic structure was visible. It was organized around a spacious central room with an octagonal section, facing west, that Jefferson called the parlor. This was entered from a hall on the east side, through a classic white pillared portico. Flanking the parlor was a smaller, square dining room to the north, balanced by a second square room to the south, which could also be used as a dining room. Off the hall was to be a large staircase to the roomy library, above the parlor. On either side of the library were two bedrooms. The ceilings of the downstairs rooms were eighteen feet high—twice the height of an ordinary plantation house. The decorations on the portico, on the mantels and indoor friezes, were carefully selected for variety and beauty from the classic architectural “orders”—Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. The goal was a house that elevated the soul and comforted the body.

  For Martha, perhaps the best proof of her husband’s originality was Jefferson’s decision to put all the outbuildings that marred the appearance of many Virginia mansions below the ground under two L-shaped terraces that ran from the house to their honeymoon cottage in one direction and to a matching stone cottage in the other direction. A kitchen, a laundry, a pantry, a dairy—there was room underground for all the house’s necessities in this ingenious plan. Soon Martha was conferring with their cook and other servants about who would work in these places, and ordering furniture and rugs to decorate the mansion that was emerging before her delighted eyes.2

  II

  In the summer of 1773, Martha Jefferson became pregnant again. Theoretically, she and her husband considered it good news. She may even have rejoiced with him. Like most males, Jefferson wanted a son to continue the family name and lineage. In days when three out of every four babies failed to survive childhood, a woman accepted the need to have many children as a fact of life. But there was probably an undercurrent of worry in the Jeffersons’ joy. A man as sensitive as Jefferson could not help noticing that for Martha, childbirth
was a source of more than normal anxiety. Her own mother had died giving birth to her, and her father’s next wife seems to have been notably unkind to Martha. This doubled her fears—her death could mean future unhappiness for her infant daughter.

  By now, Jefferson had returned to the practice of law. This meant he was away from Monticello for weeks at a time, defending clients in various county courtrooms around Virginia. Only one of his cases compels our attention in this study of his private life—a 1770 attempt to free a mulatto named Samuel Howell. Jefferson represented him without charging a fee. Howell’s grandmother had been the product of a marriage between a black man and a white woman. According to a Virginia law, she remained a slave until she was thirty-one. (The law had been passed to discourage such liaisons.) During her years in bondage, she had given birth to Howell’s mother, who also was required to remain a slave until thirty-one. Howell was similarly enslaved until he reached the same age. He claimed he was a free man.

  Jefferson agreed with him. Under the law of nature, he told the startled judge, “we are all born free.” He contended it was bad enough that the law required a person born of a slave to remain in servitude for thirty-one years, and then extended this statute to her children. But only a new law passed by some future legislature, “if any could be found wicked enough,” would inflict this fate on a grandchild. The judge found no merit in Jefferson’s argument, and Howell remained enslaved. The defeated lawyer proceeded to do something highly irregular: he loaned his client $10. There may have been some verbal advice included with the money. Howell soon ran away and was never seen in Virginia again. The case not only revealed Jefferson’s dislike of slavery but his sympathy for mulattoes whom he considered especially victimized by the system.3

  II

  Another side of Jefferson’s career also kept him away from home and more than a little distracted while he was in residence at Monticello: politics. The British were determined to enforce the empire’s laws against smuggling with new rigor. They decreed that anyone who interfered with the royal navy in its execution of this policy would be punished by death—and the trial would take place in England, rather than America. The House of Burgesses was enraged and bombarded the British with fiery protests.

  Jefferson was an admirer of the leading protestor against this British policy—the backwoods lawyer Patrick Henry. He had been a law student in 1765, paying a visit to the Houses of Burgesses, when Henry roared his defiance of the Stamp Act: “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles The First his Cromwell—and George The Third may profit from their example! If this be treason, make the most of it!”

  Jefferson and his best friend and brother-in-law, Dabney Carr, continued to support Henry. In 1773, Jefferson wrote a series of resolutions warning that Virginians would not tolerate the loss of their “ancient legal and constitutional rights.” They further resolved to create a committee of correspondence to keep in touch with fellow protestors in other colonies. They knew all too well that this move would give the British a bad case of the jitters. Jefferson, aware that oratory was not one of his gifts, encouraged Dabney Carr to present the proposal to the House of Burgesses. Carr performed magnificently, making more than one listener wonder whether Patrick Henry had a serious rival to his claim to be Virginia’s Demosthenes.

  Thirty-five days after his brilliant debut, Dabney Carr died of a “bilious fever” in Williamsburg. No one had any clear idea what the medical term meant—beyond its deadly effect. The fever was probably an acute form of malaria or typhus. By the time Jefferson, away on legal business, returned to Monticello, Carr was already buried at Shadwell. His grief-stricken friend brought the body to Monticello and wrote his epitaph, making clear it was a tribute from “Thomas Jefferson, who of all men living loved him the most.” To his grieving widow (Jefferson’s sister, Martha) and her six children, Jefferson opened the doors of Monticello. Henceforth, he declared, he would regard the children as his own.4

  III

  Two weeks later in 1773 came more grim news: John Wayles was dead at fifty-eight. His death did not cause the pain of Dabney Carr’s loss, but Martha and her husband were saddened nonetheless. Jefferson had come to like this genial man, even if he did not respect him very much as a lawyer. Wayles had returned the friendly feelings, making his new son-in-law the executor of his will. Jefferson soon realized that he and Martha were rich. They had inherited 11,000 additional acres of land and 142 slaves. There were heavy debts to British merchants, but Jefferson sold almost half the land to settle them.

  Most of John Wayles’s slaves stayed on the three plantations the Jeffersons had inherited from him. Some came to Monticello. These included a family of mulattoes who, like Samuel Howell, had a last name: Hemings. They reportedly were John Wayles’s children by Elizabeth Hemings, who was the daughter of a white British sea captain and a black slave mother. After his third wife died, John Wayles had apparently taken Elizabeth (usually called Betty) as his mistress, and she had six children by him, three sons and three daughters. Jefferson was probably unhappy with this inheritance. As we have seen in Howell’s case, he did not believe that mulatto grandchildren should be raised as slaves. But the laws of Virginia remained inflexible on this point, and the Hemingses came to Monticello as Martha’s property.5

  Who was responsible for bringing them there? As we have seen in the case of George Washington’s supposed son, West Ford, white parents or relatives of illegitimate mulatto children were often inclined to feel a special concern for them. In the eighteenth century, blood was a powerful bond between people of the same family, including nieces, nephews, and often distant cousins. There is a strong likelihood that Martha Jefferson persuaded her husband to bring the Hemingses to Monticello. The children were her half sisters and brothers, and she may have hoped that eventually she could take steps to move them beyond slavery—or at the very least to offer them her protection from sale, which often broke family ties. Another motive may have been a desire to conceal her father’s liaison with Elizabeth Hemings. Although it was not at all uncommon for white masters (and their sons) to take enslaved women as mistresses, it was not a practice that was publicly condoned, much less approved.

  IV

  Next came a decision that flowed from the unexpected wealth bestowed by John Wayles’s will. It also revealed something about the Jefferson marriage. The man who had spent so many hours wrestling with “Old Coke” and worn out horses up and down Virginia’s wretched roads to build a thriving law practice abandoned his profession. He sold his client list to a cousin, twenty-one-year-old Edmund Randolph, and henceforth became a man with only two pursuits, husband and farmer.

  Giving up his law practice may have been a sacrifice Jefferson made to prove to Martha Wayles that there was nothing in his life more important than her happiness. Martha wanted Jefferson within reach of her hand. She needed the touch of his reassuring lips to banish the anxiety swirling in her soul as her pregnancy advanced. For the next months, he devoted himself to her and Monticello.

  By now the house was reaching the first stage of its perfection. No one, including Jefferson, imagined that in a few years he would tear it down and build another, even more remarkable version. He cut winding trails that he called roundabouts through the little mountain’s forested slopes. Ultimately he created four of these paths for woodland wandering, connecting them by oblique roads. He planted more fruit trees and a vegetable garden on the southeastern slope. He was like a man attempting to create his own Garden of Eden for the woman he loved.

  Martha gave birth on April 3, 1774. Everyone, above all the worried father, was hoping for a boy. But it was another girl, whom Jefferson named Jane Randolph in honor of his mother. One suspects that the name was really a tribute to his dead sister, with the “Randolph” a gesture of respect to his mother, still very much alive only a few miles away in his rebuilt boyhood home, Shadwell.

  This was a minor matter, compared with Jefferson’s concern for Martha. Once more she recovered slowly from the ordeal. Jeffer
son fussed over her, repeatedly assuring her he was the happiest man on the planet, with a loving wife and two thriving daughters. He played with little Martha, toddling at eighteen months, and began schooling Peter Carr, Dabney’s oldest son.

  In the evenings, he and Martha read to each other from their favorite books, Tristram Shandy or Jefferson’s other favorite, The Poems of Ossian by James McPherson. These were supposed to be the works of a Celtic Homer who flourished in the dawn of Scotch-Irish history, discovered by the learned McPherson in the Scottish highlands. In fact, McPherson had created Ossian and the poems in his imagination. Today the fakery is a minor matter. The poems are a vivid example of the extravagant style of the romantic movement in literature. Here is one of Jefferson’s favorite passages from “The Songs of Selma”: 6

  Star of descending night!

  Fair is thy light in the West!

  Thou liftest my unshorn head from thy cloud

  Thy steps are stately on thy hill

  What does thou behold in the plains?

  The stormy winds are laid

  The murmur of the torrent comes from afar

  Roaring waves climb the distant rock.

  The flies of evening are on their feeble wings

  The hum of their course on the field

  What dost thou behold, fair light?

  But thou dost smile and depart.

  The waves come with joy around thee:

  They bathe thy lovely hair

  Farewell thou silent beam!

  Let the light of Ossian’s soul arise!

  The goal of such poetry was the emotion Jefferson called “the sublime.” The word reveals the mystic side of Thomas Jefferson’s soul. On Monticello’s summit his spirit soared in every direction. The days and nights became an almost continuous enjoyment of beauty in books, in the woman he loved and the children she had given him, in the bountiful blooming world of nature that fascinated both his eyes and his mind. It is easy to see how this sensitive man treasured almost every hour he lived on his mountain, and would willingly have spent the rest of his life there, yielding with reluctance the few days a year he was required to sit in the House of Burgesses. But events beyond the horizon of the world Jefferson commanded from his hilltop were about to force him to surrender that dream.