The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  As Martha and the children vanished down the road, Jefferson gave orders to the house servants to hide as much of the silver and other valuables as they could grab. The mortified ex-governor (his term had legally expired two days earlier) told other servants to walk his horse from the blacksmith’s to a point in the road between Monticello and adjoining Carter’s Mountain. He legged it ignominiously into the woods, cutting across his own property to rendezvous with the horse.

  On Carter’s Mountain, Jefferson resorted to his telescope again and saw no trace of Tarleton’s green-coated horsemen. He was about to return to Monticello when Charlottesville’s main street swarmed with sabre-waving horsemen in exultant pursuit of scurrying legislators. Jefferson rode hastily down the other side of Carter’s Mountain and soon joined Martha and his daughters for midday dinner at Blenheim Plantation, their temporary refuge.

  Martha’s anxiety remained acute, and so did Jefferson’s mortification. Tarleton’s incursion was a savage final commentary on his failed governorship. With more than fifty thousand militiamen on its rolls, Virginia under his leadership was unable to stop 180 British dragoons from riding into the heart of the state. No one had fired a shot at them. Jefferson decided to take Martha and the children to Poplar Forest, his small plantation in Bedford County, seventy miles away, where the British were unlikely to come—and he did not have to face angry legislators when they returned from their hiding places in the woods.

  Almost as if evil spirits were pursuing him, at Poplar Forest Jefferson cantered out for a morning ride on his favorite horse, Caractacus. The steed reared and pitched his master from the saddle, breaking his left wrist. Badly shaken up by the fall, he took six weeks to recover. Then came a letter from a friend, telling him that the Virginia legislature had approved a resolution calling for an investigation of his governorship. Behind this nasty move was Jefferson’s former friend Patrick Henry. He may well have been sincerely disgusted with Jefferson’s performance, but it was also a chance to ruin a potential political rival. The assembly had adjourned until the fall, leaving Jefferson dangling between guilt and innocence.

  XI

  During these months of Jefferson’s woes, something close to a political and military miracle occurred in Virginia. A huge French fleet appeared off the coast and blockaded Chesapeake Bay and the port of Yorktown, which the British army was using as its headquarters. Simultaneously, George Washington led the American army and a French expeditionary force on a forced march from New York, trapping the British in a deadly grip. On October 19, 1781, the British army surrendered. Suddenly peace and independence seemed real possibilities.

  Shortly after the good news reached Monticello, Jefferson wrote George Washington a letter, congratulating him and explaining why he had not come to Yorktown to say this in person, “notwithstanding the decrepitude to which I am unfortunately reduced.” He was referring to his broken wrist. It may also have been an oblique comment on his political status. He was a mere “private individual” now, and there was no reason why Washington should waste time talking to him. This almost incoherent letter was written by a man in the grip of acute anxiety.13

  News of the resolution to investigate Jefferson’s governorship had plunged him into depression. This state of mind made him doubly vulnerable to a familiar but ever new anxiety: Martha was pregnant again. It was her sixth pregnancy, and the shocks of the war years—three frantic flights from marauding British and the deaths of her son and little Lucy Elizabeth—had dangerously weakened her already delicate health. Soon, Jefferson was telling friends that the investigation of his governorship and its implication that he had been an inept and incompetent chief executive justified his total withdrawal from public life.

  “I have retired to my farm, my family and my books, from which I think nothing will evermore separate me,” Jefferson wrote to his former law colleague Edmund Randolph. The astonished Randolph replied, “If you can justify this resolution to yourself, I am confident you cannot to the world.”14 When the legislature met late in the fall of 1781, Jefferson attended and declared he was ready to defend himself against any and all accusations. The ex-governor read a list of the charges that his chief accuser (a Patrick Henry pawn) had sent to him, and his answers to them. Without a word of debate, the assembly passed a resolution declaring their high opinion of Jefferson’s “ability, rectitude and integrity as chief magistrate of this commonwealth.” One might think this would have satisfied Jefferson, but he went back to Monticello still vowing the experience had forever soured him on future public service. He resigned from the legislature and refused an appointment to the Continental Congress.

  On May 8, 1782, Martha Jefferson gave birth to another baby girl. Perhaps hoping to raise her spirits, Jefferson named the child Lucy Elizabeth, a kind of defiance of the fate that had deprived them of the daughter with that name while they were “refugeeing” around Richmond. According to a family legend, the baby was huge—perhaps sixteen pounds. If so, it suggests that Martha Jefferson may have suffered from diabetes. Women with that disease tend to have ever larger children until childbirth finally overwhelms their bodies.15

  Now began the four worst months of Jefferson’s life. Martha did not rally after this exhausting birth. Day by day she became weaker and more wasted, in anguishing contrast to the blooming spring and summer outside her bedroom windows. Jefferson’s mounting anxiety was worsened by a summons from the Virginia Assembly. He had been elected against his wishes as a delegate from Albermarle and refused to serve. James Monroe, an ex-soldier who had become a Jefferson disciple, warned him that many people were criticizing him. The speaker of the House of Delegates informed Jefferson that he might be dragged to Richmond under arrest if he persisted in his refusal to serve.

  Jefferson wrote Monroe a frantic letter, claiming that the investigation of his governorship had been an injury that would be cured only “by the all-healing grave.” At the close of this wild diatribe, he blurted out the real reason for his refusal: “Mrs. Jefferson has added another daughter to our family. She has been ever since and still continues dangerously ill.” Monroe wrote a compassionate and understanding reply, which Jefferson never answered. He spent the rest of the summer watching Martha slip away from him.16 He had summoned his sister, Martha Carr, and Martha’s sister, Elizabeth Eppes, to help him. But he did most of the nursing himself. He sat beside Martha’s bed for hours, reading to her from her favorite books when she was awake. When she slept, he retreated to a small room adjoining the bedroom, where he tried to work on a book he was writing, Notes on Virginia, a response to a set of queries sent to him by an inquisitive French writer. Years later, his daughter Martha, who was ten at the time, remembered that her father “was never out of [her mother’s] calling” during these four scarifying months.

  Husband and wife could not conceal from each other, no matter how hard each tried, that both knew what was happening. One day, Martha took a pen from her bedside and wrote on a piece of paper words from their favorite book, Tristram Shandy:

  Time wastes too fast: every letter

  I trace tells me with what rapidity

  Life follows my pen. The days and hours

  Of it are flying over our heads

  Like clouds of windy day, never to return

  More everything presses on—

  Her handwriting faltered and stopped with those words. But she knew the rest of the passage as well as Jefferson. A few hours later, he took the paper and completed it in his strong hand:

  —and every

  Time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu,

  Every sentence which follows it, are preludes to

  that eternal separation

  Which we are shortly to make!

  Jefferson saved the paper for the rest of his life, adding to it a lock of Martha’s hair.17

  On Friday, September 6, Jefferson watched Martha’s breath grow more and more labored. Beside him was his grieving sister, Martha Carr, and sister-in-law, Elizabeth Eppes. Nearby stood Mar
tha’s favorite household slaves—Monticello’s cook, Ursula, Elizabeth Hemings, and some of her daughters.

  Martha Jefferson knew the end was near. She began giving her husband instructions about things she wanted done after her death. When she came to the children, tears streamed down her sunken cheeks. Finally she held up her hand and told her husband she “could not die happy” if she thought her daughters “were ever to have a stepmother brought in over them.” It was testimony to the still painful memory of her own mother’s death and her unhappy childhood with her father’s second wife. “Holding her other hand in his,” the witnesses later recalled, “Mr. Jefferson promised her solemnly that he would never marry again.”18

  This is a tragic moment—so tragic, it is difficult to think rationally about Martha’s request. It was an extraordinary demand to make on a thirty-nine-year-old man, especially when we consider how frequently Virginia men—and women—remarried after losing a spouse. It revives the suspicion that Martha Jefferson never approved of her husband’s revolutionary career. If we factor in Martha’s virtual summons for Jefferson to abandon his post in Philadelphia and return to her in 1776, and contrast it with Abigail Adams’s relinquishment of her husband in the name of patriotism, the motive grows even darker. Beneath Martha’s concern for her children, was there a bitter farewell message? I don’t want you to neglect them the way you neglected me. Few men would be more vulnerable than Thomas Jefferson to such an accusation.

  As Martha sank into a coma and her breath became the shallow gasps of the dying, Jefferson blacked out. Martha Carr seized him before he toppled to the floor and with some help from Mrs. Eppes and the household slaves, they half dragged, half carried him into the library, where he lost consciousness. For a while the agitated women thought he, too, was dying. It took the better part of an hour to revive him. His grief was so terrifying, their fear of his death was replaced by fear of madness. For three weeks he did not come out of the library. Hour after hour he paced up and down, collapsing onto a couch only when, in the words of his daughter Martha, “nature was completely exhausted.”19

  Two weeks after Martha died, Edmund Randolph visited Monticello. A few minutes with Jefferson convinced him that the rumors he had heard of his friend and mentor’s “inconsolable grief” were true—to the point of “his swooning away whenever he sees his children.” Other friends, such as James Madison, refused to believe Randolph’s eyewitness account. They could not connect the intensity of his grief to Jefferson’s “philosophical temper.”

  None of these people were psychologists; rather the opposite. Today we would say that Jefferson was experiencing a trauma, a psychic wound so intense it affected his relationship with women for the rest of his life. Martha’s death was the climax of a series of personal losses, compounded by his failures as a political leader during his governorship. The two streams of anguish blended into a terrible regret for the time he had given to pursuing his public career. He could not avoid thinking that the separations, the frantic flights from British raiders, were the reasons for Martha’s death. He had sacrificed her to the Revolution, and for what? All he had gotten in return was a blotted name and sneers from foes, and even from friends, that he was a man who preferred “domestic pleasures” to serving his country.

  No one watched or remembered these terrible days and weeks with more anguish than Jefferson’s oldest daughter, Martha. Writing fifty years later, she confessed, “The violence of his emotion, of his grief…to this day I do not trust myself to describe.” When Jefferson emerged from his library like a ghost from a tomb, he was still a haunted man. All he could do was ride around the countryside hour after hour, swaying in the saddle like a corpse. Ten-year-old Martha rode beside him, reaching out to this reeling, incoherent man to hold him erect, offering herself as a mostly wordless companion on their aimless rambles along unfrequented roads.

  By now Martha knew from the household slaves or from her aunts that Jefferson had promised never to marry again, for her and her sisters’ sakes. It was the beginning of a bond between father and daughter that became stronger and more meaningful to both of them with the passage of the years.

  On October third, Jefferson wrote to Elizabeth Eppes, who had returned to her home, Elk Hill. He told of Patsy (Martha) riding with him and her determination to accompany him to Elk Hill when he made a visit that he had apparently promised Mrs. Eppes. “When that may be…I cannot tell,” he wrote. “Finding myself absolutely unable to attend to business.” His grief burst uncontrollably onto the page: “This miserable kind of existence is really too burthensome to be borne and were it not for the infidelity of deserting the sacred charge left to me, I could not wish its continuance for a moment. For what could it be wished?” He did not write another letter for eight weeks.20

  Martha Jefferson was buried beneath the great oak on the side of the mountain, near Jefferson’s friend Dabney Carr and her lost children. Over her grave, on a plain horizontal slab of white marble, Jefferson placed an inscription:

  TO THE MEMORY OF

  MARTHA JEFFERSON

  DAUGHTER OF JOHN WAYLES;

  BORN OCTOBER 19TH 1748

  INTERMARRIED WITH

  THOMAS JEFFERSON

  JANUARY 1ST, 1772;

  TORN FROM HIM BY DEATH

  SEPTEMBER 6, 1782

  THIS MONUMENT OF HIS LOVE IS INSCRIBED

  IF IN THE HOUSE OF HADES MEN FORGET THEIR DEAD

  YET WILL I EVEN THERE REMEMBER YOU, DEAR COMPANION

  Those last words were a quotation from the Iliad, in Greek.

  The most deeply felt dream of Thomas Jefferson’s life was over. The figure who stood “always in the forefront” of his vision of happiness was gone. Could he find another vision to replace it? It would take almost a decade for him to realize the words he had written in Philadelphia about everyone’s right to freedom and equality required defense and interpretation if they were to become the guiding credo of the new nation. But in all the twists and turns of a renewed public career that would transform America, Martha Wayles Jefferson remained a presence in her husband’s mind and heart.

  HEAD VERSUS HEART

  In the months after Martha Wayles’s death, Thomas Jefferson’s friends launched a campaign to lure him away from Monticello, a place that could do nothing for the moment but deepen his despair. In the Continental Congress, James Madison persuaded Congress to reappoint Jefferson as a commissioner to negotiate a peace treaty. Madison immediately wrote to Edmund Randolph in Virginia: “The resolution passed a few minutes ago…Let it be known to Mr. Jefferson as quickly as secrecy will permit. An official notification will follow…This will prepare him for it.” Knowing Jefferson’s sensitivity about his inglorious governorship, Madison added, “It passed unanimously, and without a single adverse remark.”1

  The news reached Jefferson at a plantation near Monticello, where he was having his three daughters inoculated against smallpox. In a letter to a French friend, he confessed he was “a little emerging from the stupor of mind which had rendered me as dead to the world as she was whose loss occasioned it.” That same day he wrote to Madison and to the president of Congress, accepting the appointment. Leaving his daughters with Francis and Elizabeth Eppes, he journeyed to Philadelphia and then to Baltimore, where a French ship was supposed to take him to France. But before he could sail, word arrived in America that Benjamin Franklin and his fellow diplomats had signed a satisfactory peace treaty, and he returned to Monticello.

  Madison, back in Virginia, persuaded the state legislature to appoint Jefferson to Congress. He accepted, but soon found that politics did little to ease the gloom that shrouded his spirit. He was tormented by migraine headaches and a host of minor illnesses common to people suffering from depression. Nevertheless, he performed admirably and industriously as a drafter of committee reports and bills. In the spring of 1784, the delegates chose Jefferson to join Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in negotiating commercial treaties with other European states. The politicians w
ere trying to loosen Britain’s grip on America’s import and export trade. Again, Jefferson accepted, and after two false starts, he arrived in France to begin a five-year exploration of the Old World that he had dreamed of making since the age of twenty.2

  Now he was an older, wiser, and much sadder man. To lessen the pain of separation, he took his twelve-year-old daughter Martha with him. He left the two younger girls, Mary, whom Jefferson called “Polly,” and Lucy Elizabeth, whom he called “Lu,” with their aunt, Elizabeth Eppes. Jefferson also took one of Elizabeth Hemings’s sons, James, to Paris with him. A bright, lively young man, James had welcomed his master’s offer to apprentice him to a French traiteur (caterer), where he could learn the art of French cooking.

  Benjamin Franklin and John Adams gave Jefferson the warmest of greetings and opened doors for him throughout Paris. Soon Jefferson was enjoying the French talent for charming visitors. “They were so polite,” he remarked in one letter, “that it seems as if one might glide through a whole life among them without a jostle.” He also liked their temperance. He seldom if ever saw anyone drunk. One of his favorite people was the Comtesse de la Rochefoucauld d’Anville, immensely dignified and sarcastic but with an amazing enthusiasm for America. Her son, Louis-Alexandre, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld d’Anville, lived in a magnificent mansion, where Jefferson met intellectuals such as the Marquis de Condorcet, one of the philosophes who were hoping to transform French society. Pretty, charming Madame de Corny, wife of one of the Marquis de Lafayette’s closest friends, liked Jefferson so much that they began walking together in the leafy Bois de Boulougne. Jefferson was delighted by her exquisite femininity, which she combined with a penetrating intelligence.3