Maria Cosway was not a stupid woman. She had no difficulty reading the fundamental message Jefferson was sending her: My heart adores you as an ideal, as a woman who stirs my soul. But my wary, controlling head will never allow me to propose a flight to some hidden valley in Italy or the south of France, or a headlong escape to America, where we will defy your despicable husband and the rest of the supposedly respectable world in days and nights of rapturous love. This was the sort of thing an impassioned lover would propose—but the widowed Thomas Jefferson was not this kind of man.
Using the same guarded style that Jefferson relied on to conceal his personal message, Maria wrote that her muted heart was bursting “with a variety of sentiments”—her sense of loss “at separating from the friends I left in Paris”—and her joy “of meeting my friends in London.” It was enough to “tear my mind to pieces,” but she would not go into it because he was “such a master on this subject”—presumably a mind torn to pieces—“Whatever I may say will appear trifling.” This is not the language of a woman aflame with passion. If anything they are the words of a somewhat disappointed woman, who only dimly understands the reason for her dismay.
A year later Maria Cosway returned to Paris, without her husband. She stayed almost six months—and saw Thomas Jefferson only twice, both times at large dinner parties, one of which he gave for her. They corresponded off and on for the next forty years. Their letters were affectionate, but there was no attempt to rekindle the aborted passion of Paris.16
VI
Meanwhile, Jefferson became deeply involved in negotiations with a much younger member of the opposite sex. He decided that nine-year-old Mary Jefferson (now called Maria, probably at her insistence) must come to Europe. Her presence would complete the family circle and relieve him of the dread of receiving a message that she had followed little Lu into the shadows. Jefferson’s letters to his daughter Martha suggested a streak of sternness in his parenting—he was constantly exhorting her to study hard, to become an accomplished woman. With Maria, Jefferson was the total opposite. Miss Polly, as she was often called, was to be persuaded, not ordered, to embark for Paris. It is more than a little interesting that Polly/ Maria was often described as an almost exact replica of her mother both in looks and temperament.
The young lady turned out to be a challenge that taxed Jefferson’s formidable rhetorical powers. In his first letter, he promised her innumerable French dolls and other toys in Paris, plus the chance to learn to play the harpsichord, to draw, to dance, to read and talk French, to see her sister Martha and, it need hardly be added, her lonely father. Maria replied: I am very sorry that you have sent for me. I don’t want to go to France. I had rather stay with Aunt Eppes. Further attempts at parental persuasion got similar replies. I cannot go to France and hope that you and sister Patsy are well. The final riposte was: I want to see you and sister Patsy but you must come to Uncle Eppes’s house.17
The baffled Jefferson finally resorted to deception. A ship was chosen, passage was booked, and her Eppes cousins joined Polly aboard the vessel for several days before it sailed. They cheerfully romped above and below decks. On the day of departure, Polly was allowed to play until night shrouded the ship and she tottered into a cabin and fell asleep. When she awoke, the ship was at sea. With her was Sally Hemings, a pretty mulatto girl of fourteen, the youngest daughter of Elizabeth Hemings. Sally had been pressed into service at the last moment, when an older, more reliable nurse became ill and could not make the voyage.
Polly (Maria) became the pet of the ship. She grew so attached to the captain and his crew that by the time the voyage ended, there was more trouble prying her off the vessel. The captain took her and Sally to London and handed them over to Abigail Adams, who was soon telling Jefferson that Polly “was a child of the quickest sensibility and the maturest understanding that I have ever met with for years…. I never felt so attached to a child in my life on so short an acquaintance.” She described her escort, Sally Hemings, as “a girl of about 15 or 16” but “quite a child.” Abigail reported that the captain of the ship had said Sally had been useless as Polly’s nurse and he might as well bring her back to America on his return voyage. But Abigail thought she seemed fond of Polly and “appears good naturd.”
Abigail—and Polly—assumed that Jefferson would rush from Paris to collect her. Instead he sent his French butler, Petit, whose English was primitive. When Petit arrived, Polly threw another tantrum and refused to leave Abigail Adams. In fact, she would not let that lady out of her sight, complaining bitterly of the way she had been deceived into leaving her Aunt Eppes.
Polly/Maria told Abigail she did not remember her father but had been taught to think of him with affection. Now she wondered whether that was another deception. He had forced her to leave all her friends in Virginia. She had expected him to come to England for her. Instead he had sent a man who could barely speak English! Her indignation inspired John Adams to write Jefferson a reproachful letter for failing to “come for your daughter in person.” It took the better part of a week to persuade Polly to depart for Paris with Petit and Sally Hemings. At one point, she threw her arms around Abigail and cried, “Why are you sending me away—when I’ve just begun to love you!” Before the battle ended, Abigail was more distraught than Polly.18
Jefferson was totally delighted by this imperious young lady. He wrote to Abigail Adams about how Polly “flushed, she whitened, she flushed again” when she received a letter from Abigail. The pleasure Jefferson took in this performance leaves little doubt that in looks and manner, Maria was a vivid copy of her dead mother. After a week of showing her the sights of Paris, he enrolled her in the convent school with Patsy (Martha), where, he told Mrs. Eppes, she soon became “a universal favorite with the young ladies and their mistresses.”19
VII
For the next year, Jefferson’s personal life was overshadowed by another historical upheaval. Looming bankruptcy began to ravage the French government. Primarily the crisis was due to their antiquated tax system, which exempted most of the aristocrats from paying anything. The king was forced to summon a parliament called the Estates General to overhaul the system. The Estates numbered twelve hundred members, much too large an assembly to function efficiently as a governing body. Soon there were four distinct groups within the conclave, and Jefferson feared the possibility of civil war.
Meanwhile, the independent United States of America was entering a new phase of its existence. A convention met in Philadelphia in 1787, and Jefferson’s friend James Madison had played a leading role in creating a new federal constitution for the republic, far stronger than the Articles of Confederation under which the Continental Congress had labored so ineffectually. Elections had been held, and a new government, with George Washington as the first president, had been chosen by the voters.
This transformation of the federal government made Jefferson decide it was time to return to America. He was also growing concerned about his neglected farms. The income from them had dwindled toward zero. Another reason was his daughters. They were becoming more French than American. A sort of climax in this department was Martha’s announcement that she wanted to join the Roman Catholic Church and become a nun. Jefferson went to her convent school and had a talk with the abbess in charge. She agreed that it might be best if Martha and Polly withdrew from the school. Jefferson would supervise their education until they returned to America.
Another problem confronted Jefferson within the walls of his ambassadorial residence. James Hemings informed him that he did not want to go home. In Paris, slavery had been banned by the local Parlement (a semi-judicial ruling council), although it was tolerated elsewhere in France and was the economic backbone of the nation’s overseas empire. James and his sister Sally were theoretically free. James did not want to relinquish this status for slavery in Virginia. Whether Sally Hemings also voiced a similar desire is less certain. James had a skill that would enable him to support himself. Both Hemingses had probab
ly made contact with some of the estimated one thousand free blacks in Paris, where friends may have urged James and perhaps Sally to assert their freedom.20
Jefferson talked James out of this reach for independence with a combination of promises and appeals to his gratitude. James had become ill not long after he arrived in Paris, and Jefferson had spent a considerable amount of money on a doctor and nurse to help him regain his health. The ambassador had also paid for James’s cooking lessons with one of the best chefs in Paris. If James returned to America, Jefferson promised him his freedom as soon as he trained one of his younger brothers to do the cooking for Monticello. Jefferson also promised to pay James a salary, which would enable him to save enough money to sustain himself when he went looking for work as a free man. Without James to support and protect her, Sally Hemings had little choice but to return to Monticello with her brother.
As Jefferson’s agreement to free James Hemings made clear, he thought third-generation mulattoes should not be enslaved in America or in Paris, and he may have also told Sally this. In any event, he would never have allowed an attractive teenage girl to remain alone in Paris. She would very likely have become the mistress of a predatory young Frenchman, who would discard her after a few years and consign her to the ranks of Paris’s sixty thousand prostitutes—the fate of many of the “opera girls” who had stirred Abigail Adams’s sympathy.
The ambassador sailed for home on October 22, 1789, reserving cabins aboard the ship for his daughters and Sally Hemings, who probably functioned as their maid. He asked that Sally be given a cabin near them. Arriving in Virginia after a smooth twenty-nine-day voyage, he was astonished to read in the newspapers rumors that President Washington was going to appoint him secretary of state. He had planned to stay in America only long enough to get his daughters settled—probably with their Aunt Eppes, where Polly had been so happy—and restore his farms to prosperity with the help of expert overseers. He assumed he would return to France as ambassador. He felt that he was uniquely qualified to cement good relations between America and Revolutionary France.
At Eppington, the Eppes plantation, he found a letter from President Washington confirming the newspaper reports. Jefferson’s admiration for Washington was so strong that he soon agreed to become secretary of state. By this time he was back at Monticello. As the Jeffersons’ carriage appeared at the foot of the mountain, the slaves raced to welcome him in their brightest Sunday clothes. Cheering and shouting, they unhitched the horses, and the men hauled the carriage up the steep winding road to the summit. “When the door of the carriage was opened,” Martha Jefferson later recalled, “They crowd[ed] around him, some…crying, others laughing.” They lifted the protesting Jefferson in their arms and carried him to the portico. Martha and Maria Jefferson and James and Sally Hemings received equally warm greetings.21
There was much more than affection for Jefferson involved in this greeting. If Jefferson had died in Paris, or had been lost at sea, Monticello’s slaves would have faced catastrophe. They would have been sold or handed over to Jefferson’s heirs, with only minimal attention to preserving families or rewarding those who had established themselves as artisans or acquired other skills such as weaving cloth. Jefferson’s safe return after five long years of uncertainty about their fates was more than enough reason to celebrate.
As Jefferson struggled to deal with the painful memories Monticello evoked, and make some progress on restoring the productivity of his farms, he had a surprise that gladdened his heart. Toward the end of December, Monticello had a visitor—a tall, dark-haired, swarthy young gentleman named Thomas Mann Randolph. He was warmly welcomed as the son of a man who had been Jefferson’s playmate in his boyhood, when he spent seven years at the Randolph plantation, Tuckahoe. Thomas Mann Randolph’s grandfather, William, had been Peter Jefferson’s closest friend. When the elder Randolph died suddenly at age thirty-three, he had asked Peter in his will to take over the plantation and raise his orphaned children. Their mother had died a year or two before her husband.
The younger Randolph had conducted a lengthy correspondence with Jefferson while he was studying in Edinburgh. For a while, Jefferson had more or less taken charge of his education. After some pleasant small talk, Randolph informed Jefferson that he hoped to become his son-in-law. He had met Martha Jefferson not long after she arrived home, and the two young people had felt an instant attraction. One of Randolph’s appeals for Martha was his European education. She had not been enthusiastic about returning to rural Albermarle County after five years of sophisticated Paris. Like Martha’s father, Randolph was fascinated by politics, and he hoped to make it his career. He also had a strong interest in science and its Virginia subdivision, scientific farming. Almost as important was his six-foot-two-inch height. Martha had inherited her father’s long-limbed body and dreaded the thought of marrying someone who was noticeably shorter than she. At least as influential was their families’ long and intimate friendship.22
Jefferson gave his warmest assent to the match—and immediately began trying to arrange things so that Martha would remain within his paternal orbit. He urged Randolph to buy land near Monticello. The young man’s father owned an excellent farm, Edgehill, only a few miles away. For the moment, Martha—and her husband—resisted his persuasion. Randolph’s father had given him land in a distant section of Virginia and the young people, in a burst of independence, announced they were going to start their lives together far from both their homes.
Jefferson cheerfully acquiesced, but he by no means abandoned his determination to retain his daughter. For the moment, politics was absorbing his attention. He was about to depart for New York to join President Washington’s cabinet; he would be gone for months, possibly years, which would make an objection to Martha’s departure seem especially disagreeable. He contented himself with a son-in-law he liked and a daughter aglow with love.
In New York he wrote a revealing letter to Martha: “I feel heavily these separations from you. It is a…consolation to know you are happier and to see a prospect of its continuance in the prudence and even temper of both Mr. Randolph and yourself…. Continue to love me as you have done, and to render my life a blessing by the prospect it may hold up to me of seeing you happy.”
Martha promptly replied: “I hope you have not given over coming to Virginia this fall as I assure you my dear papa my happiness can never be complete without your company.” She assured him that “Mr. Randolph” was a wonderful husband and she was determined to please him in “every thing.” All other aspects of her life would be secondary to that goal “except my love for you.”23
Meanwhile, Jefferson had decided to let Maria Jefferson, now thirteen, stay where she had been happiest—with her Aunt Eppes and her cousins at Eppington. He had taken Martha to Philadelphia with him when she was the same age, to advance her education. But Jefferson had long since realized that Maria was a totally different child who needed the companionship of loving friends and family to keep her contented. This solution worked so well that before the end of the decade Maria would marry her cousin, Jack Eppes.
With the two most important people in his life in happy situations, Jefferson headed for New York and its politics. He was a man with a mission. Conversations with James Madison, already his closest friend and advisor, had convinced him that there were tendencies in the United States that had to be exposed and defeated, lest the American Revolution end in betrayal of the ideals he had enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. In a speech in Alexandria, on the way to New York, he had told his audience the Republican form of government was the only one that was not “at open or secret war” with the rights of mankind.
On March 21, 1790, Jefferson reported to President Washington as a citizen soldier of the republic, ready for duty. He would soon discover that this duty was far more complex and emotionally abrasive than any task he had yet confronted. He would find himself virtually at war with men who had shared the task of achieving independence. His frien
dships with John Adams and George Washington would be ruined by vicious partisan politics. Worst of all, Jefferson would face devastating accusations about his personal life that threatened his growing fame as a founding father.
THE WAGES OF FAME
In ten years, Thomas Jefferson went from an untried, relatively unknown secretary of state in George Washington’s cabinet to president of the United States. This amazing ascent owed a great deal to the way the Declaration of Independence became a major force in American politics. Almost from the moment Jefferson joined President Washington’s administration, he clashed with Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton about their radically differing views of the French Revolution and America’s political and economic future. As we have seen, from this conflict emerged two political parties, something the founders had never anticipated and at first deplored. When the Federalists flaunted the Constitution as their handiwork, the Jeffersonian Republicans retaliated with the Declaration of Independence as their sacred document and lavished praise on Jefferson as the author, adding cubits to his stature.1
As the political discussions grew more intense, anything Jefferson said or wrote became grist for the journalistic slander mills. One editor printed a letter he had dashed off to an Italian friend, Phillip Mazzei, which included a derogatory comment on Washington. Mazzei leaked it to a newspaper in Europe and it soon crossed the Atlantic. In the letter, Jefferson criticized America’s declaration of neutrality in the war between Britain and Revolutionary France and described Washington as an “apostate” from the cause of liberty. He had been a “Samson” in the war for independence, but as president had allowed his head to be shaved “by the harlot England.” The overheated comparison ended Jefferson’s friendship with Washington. In Philadelphia, where Jefferson was serving as vice president during John Adams’s presidency, people crossed the street to avoid speaking to him.2
The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers Page 36