The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  In 1803, Randolph ran for Congress without consulting the president and defeated an old Jefferson friend by a handful of votes, turning the loser into a potential enemy. Jefferson did his best to repair the political damage and invited Randolph to live in the presidential palace with him and Jack Eppes. Randolph accepted, but in 1806 he decided that the president preferred Jack’s conversation to his and picked a quarrel with his brother-in-law. Randolph wrote an incoherent letter to the president and moved into a boarding house at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, populated almost entirely by Federalists.

  Engulfed in gloom, Randolph ate most of his meals in his room and seldom spoke to anyone. The frantic president assured him that he loved him “as I would a son” and begged him to return to the executive mansion. Randolph refused, and one friend warned Jefferson that he might commit suicide. Randolph became ill with a virulent fever that brought him to the brink of death. Jefferson sent a doctor and a series of friends who virtually camped at his bedside until Randolph recovered.17

  This behavior was the beginning of a long sad history of personal and marital unhappiness. Randolph quit Congress but became little more than a supernumerary in Martha Jefferson’s emotional life. One of the most telling signs of his sense of inferiority was his policy of permitting Jefferson to name his children. Jefferson did not ask for the privilege. Once, when he delayed, obviously hoping Randolph would name a new baby, Martha begged her father to produce a name so the child could be baptized. Of all the children, only one—their first daughter, Anne Cary—had a Randolph family name. Randolph took equally little interest in their education and development.18

  VIII

  Each of the Randolph children became part of Jefferson’s family. While he was president, he carried on a delightful correspondence with the older ones. He debated with the oldest girl, Anne, about whether she should change her name to Anastasia. When Ellen, the second oldest, began reading romantic poetry, she signed her letters Eleanora, which Jefferson warmly approved. Anne was his favorite gardener. He sent her flowering peas from Arkansas, found by Meriwether Lewis and his partner, William Clark, in their famous exploration of the continent in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase. When someone sent the president rare Algerian chickens, these, too, were shipped to Anne to be raised at Monticello.

  Ellen Randolph had strong intellectual interests. When she found herself puzzled by a question such as “What is the Seventh Art?” she forwarded it to the president. Jefferson replied that he thought gardening was almost as important as poetry. The shrewd grandfather suspected that Anne and Ellen exchanged their letters from him and Ellen might be ready to claim she was the one he liked best. Ellen submitted an impressive reading list to her grandfather; it included “Grecian history” in which she was “very much interested” and Plutarch’s Lives in French. Jefferson’s praise was lavish.19

  From the start of their correspondence, the president insisted the young ladies had to answer every letter he wrote to them and he felt obligated to do the same. At one point, he claimed that Ellen was five letters behind in “her account” and threatened to “send the sheriff after you.”20 Sometimes the nation’s chief executive had to deal with urgent political problems, such as former vice president Aaron Burr’s attempt to separate the western states from the union in 1806. Jefferson apologized to Ellen for falling behind in his “epistolary account.”

  Later, when Grandpapa fell behind again and admitted it, a delighted Ellen triumphantly responded, “Your fear of being bankrupt is well founded.” Jefferson wondered in an answering letter whether this meant Ellen had more “industry or less to do than myself.” Ten-year-old Ellen gravely replied that she had made a real effort to spend as little time in “idleness” as possible that winter but she was inclined to suspect the president had “a great deal more to do than I have.”

  Equally delightful was an exchange the president had with his four-year-old granddaughter, Mary Randolph. He told Ellen to thank Mary for her letter, which was an indecipherable scrawl. “But tell her it is written in a cipher of which I have not the key. She must, therefore, tell it all to me when I come home.” Ellen replied, “Mary says she would tell you what was in her letter if she knew herself.”

  As Jefferson neared the end of his second term, he urged Martha and her children to move to Monticello permanently, and she rapturously agreed. She assured him that her “first and most important object” would be “chearing your old age by every endearment of filial tenderness.” She could barely wait to see him “seated by your own fireside surrounded by your grandchildren contending for the pleasure of waiting upon you.” Her husband, Thomas Mann Randolph, was ominously absent from this vision of future happiness.21

  IX

  Most of Martha’s children were girls who became worshippers of their grandfather. “From him seemed to flow all the pleasures of my life,” Ellen later wrote. “When I was about fifteen years old, I began to think of a watch, but knew the state of my father’s finances promised no such indulgence.” One day a packet addressed to Jefferson arrived from Philadelphia. He opened it and presented Ellen with “an elegant lady’s watch with chain and seals.” Similar presents arrived for her as she grew older: “my first handsome writing desk, my first leghorn hat, my first silk dress.”22

  The other granddaughters received similar gifts. When Jefferson overheard ten-year-old Cornelia say, with a sob in her voice, “I never had a silk dress in my life,” a splendid garment arrived from nearby Charlottesville the next day. To make sure there were no more tears, a pair of lovely dresses for Cornelia’s two younger sisters was in the package. Mary Randolph heard that a neighbor was moving west and wanted to sell a guitar. But the price was far beyond the reach of her father’s wallet. One morning when she came down to breakfast, there was the guitar in her chair. Grandpa Jefferson said it was hers, if she solemnly promised to learn to play it.23

  X

  Jefferson persisted in this generosity to his grandchildren in the face of ever-mounting money worries. His debts were partly a result of his expensive lifestyle and partly caused by the long recession into which Virginia sank in the years after he left the presidency. He stubbornly maintained the free-spending habits of his youth and middle age, above all the tradition of southern hospitality. As his postpresidential fame continued to grow, visitors thronged to Monticello. So did relatives and close friends. It took thirty-seven house servants to keep Monticello running. No expenses were spared to provide the visitors with sumptuous meals, while their horses consumed staggering amounts of expensive feed. Meanwhile the prices Jefferson and other Virginia farmers could obtain for their crops remained low.

  For a while Jefferson tried other ways to raise money. Perhaps his best-known experiment was his nailery. He launched it in the 1790s to make nails for rebuilding Monticello. It was hard, hot work, toiling with molten metal at temperatures between 600 and 700 degrees centigrade. About a dozen slave boys between the ages of ten and sixteen produced ten thousand nails a day. Jefferson rewarded the hardest workers with money and clothing, and sometimes disciplined those who hated the work and ran away. Not a few people have criticized him for forcing boys to labor so hard.

  For a while Jefferson sold his surplus nails at a brisk and profitable pace. But by the time he left the presidency, cheaper English-made nails were on the market, and the nailery became a losing proposition. Similar bad luck dogged a flour mill that Jefferson tried to build on the nearby Rivanna River. It was destroyed in a storm and abandoned for want of funds to rebuild it.24

  Jefferson worsened his financial burden by cosigning a large loan for one of his most devoted political followers. The man died bankrupt, and the entire sum was added to Jefferson’s debt, which soon totaled over $100,000—more than two million dollars in modern money.25 In his last years, Jefferson made desperate efforts to pay his more and more impatient creditors. He tried to sell some of his land but found no takers. A financial panic in 1819 had sent land prices plummeting everyw
here. With cheaper lands available in the West, Virginia farms no longer seemed a good investment.

  In desperation, Jefferson petitioned the legislature to permit him to raise money through a lottery. He hoped to make enough to pay his debts and leave a surplus for Martha and her children. The legislators at first demurred, claiming lotteries were immoral. But Jefferson’s friends finally persuaded them to approve the venture. Alas, ticket sales in debt-ridden Virginia were disappointing. Attempts by his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph to sell tickets in other states also failed.

  Jefferson’s family rallied around him. Maria’s son, Francis Eppes, returned property Jefferson had deeded to him as part of his mother’s inheritance. “You have been to me ever, an affectionate and tender father, and you will find me ever, a loving and devoted son,” he wrote. But Francis and other relatives were engulfed by the economic collapse that overwhelmed so many Virginians.

  XI

  One of the saddest victims of the collapse was Thomas Mann Randolph. The ex-congressman sank into ever deeper debt. Randolph worsened things by plunging into inexplicable mood swings at crucial moments. He would harvest a bumper crop of wheat, then leave it in his barns or send his overseers to Richmond to sell it too late to catch the top of the market. Neighbors remarked that “no man made better crops than Colonel Randolph and no one sold his crops for worse prices.”26

  In 1819, Randolph ran for governor of Virginia and won, but his performance in office was awful. He quarreled with everyone—the legislature, his council, even the board of the University of Virginia. He tried to expand the powers of the governor, claiming he disdained to be a mere “signing clerk,” and failed disastrously. He finally retreated to Monticello, where Martha prepared one of the “skylight” bedrooms in the dome room for him. The peace and quiet enabled him to get a grip on his ravaged nerves for a little while. But the years following this respite saw a final slide into financial bankruptcy and the total collapse of his self-esteem. His marriage to Martha also deteriorated; his black moods and outbursts of bad temper finally forced her to tell him she would no longer share a bedroom with him.

  The emotional and financial agonies of his daughter and son-in-law added weight to Jefferson’s own mountain of debt in the final year of his life. When he tried to console Randolph by offering to deed all his property to him, Randolph went berserk and accused Jefferson of being indifferent and coldhearted. He stormed out of Monticello and became a hermit in the only piece of property his creditors had left to him, a five-room cottage in North Milton, several miles away.27

  XII

  Threaded through these Job-like woes was the tragic story of Jefferson’s oldest granddaughter, Anne. She married a man named Charles Bankhead, whose solution to Virginia’s economic woes was alcohol. He abused and beat Anne, even when her horrified mother was present, and at one point stabbed her brother, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, when they exchanged insults on the street in Charlottesville. Anne finally fled back to Monticello and in the first months of 1826, died while her grandfather wept beside her bed.

  Meanwhile, Jefferson’s debts and the mounting impatience of his creditors made his gesture of assistance to Thomas Mann Randolph meaningless. When the lottery failed, Jefferson took to his bed, suffering from an acute form of diarrhea. He sensed (or perhaps wished) he was dying and wrote farewell letters to James Madison and other close friends. In the letter to Madison, he revealed his concern for his future fame. “You have been a pillar of support through life. Take care of me when dead,” he wrote, “and be assured I will leave with you my last affections.”28

  On March 16, 1826, Jefferson made his will. In it he gave freedom to five slaves. Two were Madison and Eston Hemings, sons of Sally Hemings, who had been trained as carpenters. He requested that the legislature permit them to remain in the state. Freed slaves were required by law to leave Virginia, lest they use their freedom to incite rebellion. This enabled the two young men to continue to serve as assistants to Monticello’s aging chief carpenter, John Hemings, who was also freed. Earlier in the 1820s, Jefferson had permitted Sally’s two older children, Harriet and Beverly, to leave Monticello. The two other men freed in the will were also members of Elizabeth Hemings’s family. But there was no mention of Sally Hemings.

  Jefferson slipped slowly downward, his strength ebbing. His mind remained amazingly clear and firm. He corresponded with President John Quincy Adams about treaties of commerce that he had helped negotiate decades ago. In another letter he recalled in vivid detail his memories of Benedict Arnold’s Virginia raid during his ill-fated governorship. He sent these recollections to Henry Lee, a son of the cavalry hero “Light Horse” Harry Lee, who was revising his father’s memoirs of the Revolution. Another letter went to Ellen Randolph, who had married a New Englander, Joseph Coolidge. He also wrote witty and charming comments about suitors arriving at Monticello in pursuit of the younger granddaughters.

  As the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approached, a renewed wave of admiration for Jefferson and his by now legendary document swept the nation. In a letter to James Madison, Jefferson said the Declaration was “the fundamental act of union in these states.” Perpetuating its principles was “a holy purpose.”29 The mayor of Washington invited him to be the leading figure in a great celebration on July 4, 1826. Jefferson was too ill to travel, but he sent a memorable statement of the Declaration’s meaning not merely for their own era but for all time.

  XIII

  On July 2, Jefferson invited his family to his bedside and said farewell to each of them individually. He told Martha he had left a gift for her in a dresser drawer. He urged each grandchild to “pursue virtue, be true and truthful.” Eight-year-old George Wythe Randolph looked bewildered. Jefferson smiled gently at him. “George does not know what all this means,” he said.

  Perhaps in answer to a request by Martha, Jefferson said he would not object to meeting with the Reverend Frederick Hatch, pastor of the Episcopal church in Charlottesville. But the priest should understand they would only talk as neighbors. That was his gentle way of telling Martha that he had no fear of approaching death, nor did he feel he had committed moral failures—sins—for which he had to seek absolution.

  Several times Jefferson told his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who was constantly at his bedside, that he hoped he would live until the Fourth of July. On July third he seemed to be drifting down into the darkness. His private secretary, Nicholas Trist, who had married his granddaughter Virginia, could not bear to watch his agony and told him that the Fourth had arrived. Jefferson ceased struggling for life, but he continued to breathe. About 7 p.m. he awoke and found his doctor, Robley Dunglison, beside his bed. He was puzzled by his continued presence and asked him, “Is it the Fourth?”

  “It soon will be,” the doctor said. Studying him, Dunglison predicted he would die in a few minutes. But Jefferson remained alive. At last the clock’s hands passed midnight, and those keeping watch in the bedroom breathed a sigh of relief. To their amazement, Jefferson lived another twelve hours, dying at ten minutes before noon on the Fourth, his wish fulfilled.

  John Adams had died on the same day in his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. Most people agreed with President John Quincy Adams, who wrote in his diary that it was fresh evidence that America had a special destiny in this world. Humbly, the president—and the nation—stood “in grateful and silent adoration before the Ruler of the Universe.”

  On the evening of the Fourth, as the church bells in Charlottesville tolled, Thomas Mann Randolph appeared at Monticello, supposedly to mourn his father-in-law. Noticing that Martha was not weeping, he began to taunt her, saying she was too coldhearted to shed a tear. He asked Dr. Dunglison to give Martha some sort of medicine that would produce evidence of grief. Thomas Jefferson Randolph lost his temper and accused his father of hating Jefferson and behaving abominably.30

  Martha Jefferson Randolph fled this appalling scene. In her bedroom, she remembered the gift Jeffers
on had left for her. She opened her dresser drawer and found a poem:

  A Deathbed Adieu from Th. J. to M.R.

  Life’s visions have vanished, its dreams are no more

  Dear friend of my busom, why bathed in tears?

  I go to my fathers, I welcome the shore

  Which crowns all my hopes and buries my cares

  Then farewell my dear, my loved daughter, adieu

  The last pang of life is in parting with you!

  Two seraphs await me long shrouded in death

  I will bear them your love on my last parting breath.

  The seraphs were Martha Wayles Jefferson and Maria Jefferson Eppes, those two exquisite women that fate had torn from Jefferson’s life. The next day, he was buried beside Martha and Maria in the Monticello graveyard. On his gravestone he asked his family to place this inscription:

  HERE WAS BURIED THOMAS JEFFERSON

  AUTHOR OF THE

  DECLARATION

  OF

  AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

  OF THE

  STATUTE OF VIRGINIA

  FOR

  RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

  AND FATHER OF THE

  UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

  Ignoring his numerous high offices, from governor to president, Jefferson chose to reiterate his commitment to freedom. Above him on the mountain he left another epitaph, Monticello, his vision of the purpose of this freedom, a place where head and heart, architecture and art and science joined hands in the pursuit of happiness. For much of the next two hundred and fifty years, generations of Americans accepted this vision—and the man who created it—as the epitome of all that was good and fine in America.