The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  Shortly after Eston’s birth, Randolph married again. His new wife was considered “a controlling woman.” Someone with a sharper tongue called her a “jade of genuine bottom.” She seems to have been more than capable of ending Randolph’s inclinations for Sally and any other woman toward whom his eye wandered. Sally had no more children after Eston. For generations, Eston’s children and grandchildren described themselves as descended from a Jefferson uncle. Only after Fawn Brodie, the first Jefferson biographer to assert his guilt, talked to later descendants in the 1970s did they begin to claim Thomas Jefferson was their ancestor.39

  XXI

  A sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings will always remain a possibility. But is it a probability? The writer of history must factor into the puzzle so many contrary realities, from Samuel F. Wetmore the abolitionist propagandist to explanations of how Eston Hemings’s descendants might have acquired Jefferson DNA to eyewitness claims that other men were Sally’s lovers. Not to be dismissed is Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s documented refutation of the Wetmore-ghosted Israel Jefferson’s story. That prompts a skeptic to suspect a similar indifference to the truth in Wetmore’s Madison Hemings story, which has been proclaimed by some pro-paternity advocates as a kind of gospel truth. At least as important is Thomas Jefferson’s acute sensitivity to slurs on his reputation and his denial of Callender’s accusation to close friends. In this light, the word “probability” retreats from the certainty that the pro-paternity advocates claim for it.

  Hardest of all the pro-paternity claims to believe is the assertion that the relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings lasted thirty-eight years. Thirty-eight years of furtive sex in a house swarming with visitors and grandchildren? A respected historian of Monticello has suggested that the entire controversy should be considered a historical Rorschach test that tells us more about the person who believes—or doubts—than it reveals about Jefferson.40

  One thing seems clear: the American public remains emotionally involved with the story. In the fall of 2007, this writer discussed the current atmosphere at Monticello with a young historian on the University of Virginia faculty. He had been asked to serve as a guide at Monticello for several weeks. The foundation’s latest policy, he was told, was not to mention Sally Hemings. He obeyed this dictum, but at the end of virtually every tour he conducted, someone asked him. “Is it true about Jefferson and Sally?”

  The controversy has unquestionably played a part in the reevaluation of Jefferson’s role in America’s founding. A new generation of historians has faulted him for his failure to take a stronger stand against the continuation of slavery. A focus on his duplicity in his political dealings with George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams has made it hard to see him as a spotless icon of American idealism. Doubt has even been cast on his role as the author of the Declaration of Independence.41

  Jefferson’s fame will nevertheless remain large. But he is no longer a demigod who looms above the other founding fathers as a unique symbol of America. In a 2001 poll, when Americans were asked to rate the greatest president, Jefferson received only 1 percent of the vote. In recent polls he has done better. A 2009 C-Span survey ranked him number seven behind Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy.42

  This moderation of Jefferson’s fame is not such a bad thing. Whether Thomas Jefferson is right or wrong—whether he is, in the words of historian Peter Onuf, “a proxy for America”—should not be, and never should have been, crucial in Americans’ political vision of themselves. None of the founding fathers, not even George Washington, need or deserve that sort of sanctification to retain their importance in our national memory.

  Beyond these large political thoughts, we should not allow differences about Sally Hemings to obscure the other women in Jefferson’s life. Hundreds of vivid letters tell us how much he loved those two beautiful tragedy-haunted “seraphs,” Martha Wayles Jefferson and Maria Jefferson Eppes, whom he hoped to greet beyond death’s darkness—and the tall, earnest daughter who devoted her life to him, Martha Jefferson Randolph.

  BOOK SIX

  James Madison

  A SHY GENIUS MAKES A CONQUEST

  In December 1779, in response to a plea from George Washington that Virginia send her “ablest men” to the Continental Congress, the state legislature, with Governor Thomas Jefferson’s warm approval, nominated James Madison. It was not quite the tribute that some biographers have tried to make it. As the year 1780 began, Congress’s prestige had fallen so low that it was difficult to find anyone willing to waste his time in Philadelphia. In the year 1779, Virginia had named sixteen men as delegates. Seven resigned, four failed to serve or went home, and four did not show up until the following spring.

  The war for independence had become interminable, and Congress had made a colossal mess out of the country’s finances. With $230 million in circulation, Continental currency was turning into waste paper. Military and civilian morale plunged with the dwindling power of the dollar. “Congress” had become a word tinged with contempt. Some people may have thought that the short, thin, morbidly shy new delegate was the best Congress could expect for its mediocre ranks.

  One delegate described the twenty-nine-year-old Madison as “just from college”—a graphic indication of the first impression he made. The wife of another Virginia delegate, Martha Bland, described him as a “gloomy stiff creature” with “nothing engaging…in his manners—the most unsociable creature in existence.” But even this nasty critic—her husband, Theodorick Bland was a windbag who became Madison’s political enemy—eventually admitted that Madison was “clever in Congress.”1

  James Madison’s brilliant mind, and his readiness to work hard and think even harder, gradually made him a leader in this feckless legislature. For the next four years, Madison grappled with the problems of the faltering war effort, rancorous quarrels between political factions inside Congress, and the struggle to unify thirteen often recalcitrant states. Washington’s triumph at Yorktown in 1781 put independence within America’s grasp, but it seemed to only exacerbate the problem of creating a nation.

  At Thomas Jefferson’s suggestion, Madison lived in a boardinghouse on the corner of Fifth and Market streets. The landlady’s daughter, Mrs. Eliza Trist, was a charming woman described by one historian as the house’s “presiding angel.” Jefferson urged Madison to “cultivate her affection.” It soon became apparent that she and Jefferson were partners in trying to help Madison cope with his shyness. Mrs. Trist developed a protective attitude toward him. When there was talk of electing him governor of Virginia, she wrote to Jefferson, strongly advising against it. “He has a soul replete with gentleness, humanity and every social virtue,” she said. But his “amiable” disposition would never be able to tolerate the abuse that went with the governorship. “It will hurt his feelings and injure his health, take my word.”2

  Among the congressmen in the boardinghouse was William Floyd of New York, who had brought his wife and three children with him. The youngest of these offspring was thirteen-year-old Kitty, who was extremely pretty, vivacious, and talented at the piano. By 1782, when Madison was thirty-one and Kitty was fifteen, the congressman was in love with her. Jefferson joined forces with Mrs. Trist to encourage the match. In fact, everyone in the boardinghouse seemed to concur in urging Miss Kitty to say yes. The elders did not seem to realize that this was a poor tactic when dealing with someone from a different generation.

  In a scene that can readily be imagined as agonizing, Madison finally asked Kitty whether she was willing and her answer was yes. By this time, we are in 1783 and Kitty was sixteen. Although the age gap might sound wide to modern ears, Madison was not robbing the cradle. Marriage at sixteen or seventeen was not unusual for a woman in this era. Martha Jefferson was seventeen when she married Thomas Mann Randolph Jr. Madison was elated by Kitty’s response and rushed the news to Jefferson. The wedding would have to wait until the end of the congressional year. Madison expressed his g
ratitude for Jefferson’s interest in his quest. It confirmed feelings of friendship that Madison “reciprocated.”3

  In the spring of 1783, Congressman Floyd took Kitty and the rest of his family home to Long Island. Madison rode with them to New Brunswick, New Jersey, a distance of sixty miles—strong evidence of how deeply his feelings were engaged. Embroiled most of the time in the struggle to rescue the bankrupt United States from chaos, the congressman did not realize he had a rival. Nineteen-year-old William Clarkson, a medical student and son of a prominent Philadelphia doctor, spent a great deal of time in the Trist boardinghouse, much of it leaning on the harpsichord admiring Kitty’s playing.

  There is a tradition in the Floyd family that someone around Kitty’s age in the Trist ménage secretly encouraged her to look with favor on the smitten Clarkson. Back on Long Island, beyond the reach of the pro-Madison pressure group, Kitty thought things over and decided her heart was voting for Clarkson. Her embarrassed parents told her to write Madison a letter. She obeyed, displaying very little grace. Soon he was telling Jefferson about the “profession of indifference” he had received from Kitty and the “disappointment” of his plans “by one of those incidents to which such affairs are liable.”4

  Fifty years later, when James Madison was editing his papers, the wound was still painful enough to prompt him to scratch out most of the letter. Biographers have been able to decipher only a few phrases, such as having hoped for a “more propitious fate.” Jefferson did his best to console his friend. He confessed that “no event has been more contrary to my expectations.” If Kitty’s decision were final, Jefferson philosophized that “the world presents the same resources for happiness and you possess many within yourself.” To relieve his friend’s pain, he urged “firmness of mind and unremitting occupations.”5

  Consoling though it was to have such a sympathetic friend, Madison’s humiliation must have been intense. In Congress he dealt each day with the most momentous imaginable issues—how to raise enough money to prevent the American army from overthrowing the government, how to persuade the various states to cede their conflicting claims to western territory to Congress, and how to improve the unworkable Articles of Confederation under which the nation was supposed to govern itself. The French ambassador considered him a man of weight and decision. But he had been bested in a contest for the affection of a beautiful young woman by a lowly medical student.

  II

  James Madison was born in 1751—making him nineteen years younger than George Washington and eight years younger than Thomas Jefferson. In 1764, when John Adams married Abigail Smith, Madison was just emerging from boyhood on his father’s four-thousand-acre plantation in the wooded hill country of Orange County, Virginia. Like the Washingtons, the Madisons traced their ancestry back to an Englishman who arrived in Virginia in the middle of the seventeenth century. They had prospered tilling the rich, reddish soil of the Virginia Piedmont.

  Madison’s boyhood was uneventful and happy. His mother, Nelly Conway, gave birth to eleven more children after James’s arrival, seven of whom survived to adulthood. He had brothers and sisters to play with, and there were other large families on neighboring plantations. His parents were affectionate and devoted to their brood. James’s only distress was his frail physique. He never grew beyond five feet six or exceeded one hundred pounds, and his health was poor. He suffered from a severe digestive complaint, cholera morbus, which forced him to live on gruel much of the time. This made him something of an anomaly in a society that prized masculinity and physical prowess.

  As the oldest son, James Madison Jr. was strongly influenced by his father, who was the largest landowner and leading citizen of Orange County. As his family multiplied, James Madison built a spacious mansion, Montpelier (the Mount of the Pilgrim), to house them. Deprived of his own father at the age of nine, he was a deeply paternal man who instilled in his namesake a strong sense of public responsibility.

  James Sr. worried about James’s poor health. He decided to send his son to the College of New Jersey in distant Princeton rather than to William and Mary, where most Virginians went. Both Madisons feared the endemic fevers of the Virginia lowlands. Neither realized the decision would turn out to be one of those transformative moments that would alter the course of James Madison Jr.’s life.

  Before he left for Princeton, James had acquired a first-class education from some of the best teachers in Virginia. He read Latin, Greek, and French and was well versed in English literature. Arriving in Princeton in the fall of 1769, he easily passed examinations that enabled him to skip his freshman year. In massive Nassau Hall, the college’s main—and only—building, he plunged into a regimen that called for hard study and serious thought. The president of the college was a recently arrived Scottish minister, the Reverend John Witherspoon, a tall, stern, beak-nosed man of God who was determined to make the school the best in America.

  Behind the rigorous facade, however, college boys remained college boys. Dormitory life was full of practical jokes and rampant teasing of newcomers, forbidden midnight feasts smuggled from nearby taverns, and ingenious assaults on tutors and anyone else who suffered from a surfeit of self-importance. Only the imperious Witherspoon was exempted from such high-jinks.

  James Madison seems to have participated in these indoor sports with zest. He was a ribald rhymester who penned raucous attacks on members of the Cliosophic Society, a mostly New England group who were the eternal rivals of the Whig Society, to which James belonged:

  Great Allen founder of the crew

  If right I guess must keep a stew

  The lecherous rascal there will find

  A place just suited to his mind

  May whore and pimp and drink and swear

  Nor more the garb of Christians wear

  And free Nassau from such a pest

  A dunce a fool an ass at best.

  Moses Allen, the target of this jape, did not take it seriously, any more than Samuel Spring, the poet laureate of the Clios, resented Madison describing him paying a visit to Clio in her private room and emerging a eunuch, “my voice to render more melodious.” It was all in fun, and Madison’s participation in it reveals a side of him that his public personality long concealed. He made dozens of friends at Princeton, most of them from other colonies, many of them young men of talent, such as poet Philip Freneau and Hugh Henry Brackenridge, America’s first novelist.

  III

  On the serious side, Madison decided to cram three years into two and save his father money. Virginia was mired in recession during his college years. Part of it was caused by droughts and other varieties of bad weather, part by the boycotts of English commerce that the Americans imposed in their mounting quarrel with Parliament. In several letters to his father, Madison apologized for spending too much money. Apparently, the father, with two other sons to educate and four daughters who would need dowries, expected his oldest son to help him deal with severe financial stress.

  Telescoping his college years was a tribute to Madison’s powers of concentration, but it was a serious mistake. James added to his woes by staying at Princeton for another year of intense study. When he returned to Virginia in 1772, he was exhausted. He began suffering epileptic-like seizures that caused him to lose consciousness. No one has ever satisfactorily diagnosed this illness. It might be simplest to describe it as a nervous collapse from overwork. For the next three years, Madison did little but stay home and read and correspond with college friends such as William Bradford, scion of a wealthy Philadelphia printing family.

  In one letter, he told Bradford he was “too dull and infirm” to expect anything extraordinary in his future. In fact, he had all but resigned himself to a short, unhappy life. Sounding like a septuagenarian, he envied Bradford’s “health, youth, fire and genius.” Bradford replied by scoffing at his hypochondria and expectations of imminent demise. He remarked that Madison’s worries about his health might have an opposite effect—guarantee him a long life. It wa
s an offhand prophecy that would prove to be uncannily on the mark. Madison would outlive most of his contemporaries, including Bradford.6

  Two more years found Madison healthier but still undecided about his future. He made a pass at studying law but found Old Coke’s leaden prose intolerable. The ministry, another obvious choice for a Princeton graduate, was equally unappealing. Early in 1774, Madison was well enough to embark on a trip to Philadelphia to visit Bradford and other college friends. He saw the street demonstrations in support of the Bostonians who had recently defied royal authority by throwing 9,659 pounds of English tea into Boston harbor.

  Energy began surging through Madison’s frail frame. At Princeton he had been indoctrinated in a Presbyterian hostility to arbitrary power. Back in Virginia, he begged Bradford to send him the latest political news. When the First Continental Congress met in September 1774, Madison bemoaned taking his trip earlier in the year. He yearned to be with Bradford, watching the delegates grapple with the natural rights of Americans versus the legal rights of Parliament. The art and science of government fascinated Madison. As one historian has put it, he found his vocation in the American Revolution.

  IV

  When the shooting war began, Madison was elected colonel of the Orange County militia. It was largely a tribute to his father’s local prestige. It may also have been a fatherly attempt to lure James out of the library. His poor health never permitted him to serve a day as a soldier, and he soon resigned the appointment. His younger brother William joined the army to uphold the family honor.

  Another paternal power play had a more positive effect. Madison was elected to the Virginia Convention, the extralegal legislature that had replaced the colonial House of Burgesses. In April 1776, at the age of twenty-five, James decided to risk the miasmas of Williamsburg and took his seat among this body of politicians.