Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

by Barbara Hambly

  “What’s his name?” asked Dolley, liking the lilt of joyful pride in this woman’s voice when she spoke of her child.

  “Andrew. For his father.” And at the sound of General Jackson’s voice from the other side of the room, her eyes softened and changed, and Dolley realized who this had to be.

  “Thou’rt not Mrs. Jackson?” she exclaimed.

  The woman hesitated, genuinely unwilling to put herself forward, then said, “Yes, I am. I’m sorry—”

  Dolley held out her hand impulsively. “And I’m Mrs. Madison. Drat these public assemblies where they haven’t a proper receiving-line. I have so wanted to meet thee.” She recalled someone—Sophie?—telling her there had been some scandal attached to Rachel Jackson’s name—bigamy? But her impression was that the woman had been more sinned against than sinning. In any case General Jackson had already fought a number of duels whose ostensible cause was his wife’s reputation.

  And this soft-voiced Virginia lady was a far cry indeed from the pipe-smoking frontierswoman she’d been led to expect, although of course it was perfectly possible that Mrs. Jackson did smoke a pipe in the privacy of her own front porch. She herself would certainly have killed for a pinch of snuff at the moment.

  “Rot!” She heard Jackson’s strange, hoarse voice slash out over the general din. “That’s the business of the States, not the Congress. There’s no reason on earth why a State shouldn’t have the sovereign right to—”

  Dolley’s eyes met Mrs. Jackson’s. The two women wheeled as one toward the far end of the room, where the red-haired General seemed to be working himself up to the point of physical assault on Congressman Webster beside the punch-bowl. Rachel Jackson headed straight for her husband with the air of one who has matter-of-factly defused a thousand such arguments.

  Before Dolley could reach the scene, her sister Anna had appeared as if by magic at Webster’s elbow; Dolley could almost hear her asking breathlessly, as Dolley had taught her, for some information about farming—specific to Webster’s own New England acres. Jackson turned aside at the touch of his wife’s hand on his sleeve.

  Beside her, Dolley heard Eliza Custis Law’s booming voice declare, “Horribly common—”

  “Yet men will follow him,” murmured Sophie, reappearing at Dolley’s other side. “I take it the lady in blue is Mrs. Jackson?” Watching the pair of them together, Dolley was startled and touched at the transformation of the General’s cold blue eyes, as he looked down into the face of his wife. “I have this for you,” she added, taking something from her reticule. Dolley saw that it was her old tortoiseshell snuffbox, the one she’d left in the desk-drawer at the Mansion before her flight.

  When Dolley looked at her in astonishment, Sophie went on, “I found it only this afternoon, in a pawnshop in Alexandria, when I went to fit Mrs. Harrison for that red dress she’s wearing that makes her look like an animate petunia.”

  “A looter must have got to the parlor desk,” said Dolley wonderingly, “before the Mansion was burned. I wonder if they took the Queen’s mirror as well? It was in the same drawer—”

  “And is obviously worth twenty times as much,” Sophie reminded her. “I believe we can safely assume that in time, the mirror, too, will return to the light. So it might do to alert Mrs. Jackson to be on the lookout for it, when she returns to Washington as Presidentress herself.” She glanced sidelong at Dolley, then back at Jackson, and sniffed. “God help you—us—all.”

  Dolley turned the snuffbox over in her gloved fingers, her own gaze following Sophie’s across to the General and his Rachel.

  “Yes,” she said slowly. “Yes, I believe God will help us all. In spite of ourselves. Jemmy hath always said that the point of the Constitution—the point of all that we have sacrificed ourselves for—is that no matter who is captain, the ship is able to move forward. And it is the ship, and her cargo, that is important.”

  She looked back, smiling, into her friend’s eyes. “They shall play their part, as we have played ours: thou and I both, Sophie. I trust,” she added quietly, “that thou wilt remain to see it?”

  “To tell the truth,” drawled Sophie, “I came here tonight intending to tell you that I was returning to England. Since my business here seems to be at an end.” She didn’t say what business, and Dolley didn’t ask.

  “But do you know,” she went on, looking about her at the candle-lit room, the illuminated city in the darkness beyond, “I just might find another business, and stay.”

  Dolley couldn’t resist the urge to say, “Possibly even dressmaking?” and caught a sidelong glance of startled enlightenment, before Sophie’s features softened into a smile.

  “Maybe even that,” Sophie agreed.

  “Gentlemen, I regard it as the duty of the government to improve the lives and affairs of its citizens,” Henry Clay was saying in that gorgeous voice, and Jackson’s head swiveled in his direction like an artillery-piece sighting.

  “It is nothing of the kind, sir!”

  He surged in Clay’s direction. As she, Sophie, and Rachel moved to head off again the volcanic violence that always seemed to bubble beneath the surface of politics, Dolley wondered if anything ever really changed.

  Watching the dance of politics and civility, of what is said and what is shown, it seemed to her almost as if the War that she remembered so clearly were in another lifetime, a hundred years ago and not thirty-five. As if the storm of ink and invective had not almost torn the new Republic apart, had not severed friends, had not brought men within a step of tearing up the Constitution and throwing away everything for which they had risked their lives and those of their families. The great patriots had all gone home. Mr. Adams to his Abigail, Jefferson to his Patsy—and his Sally, in their ambiguous private world. General Washington and Martha to their “happily ever after” at last.

  And in another fifty years, thought Dolley, we shall all of us be gone, too.

  But the ship would sail on.

  Carrying Payne, she thought with mingled foreboding and love.

  Carrying General Jackson and his Rachel, young Johnny Adams and his gently bred bride, the Custis girls and Jefferson’s children and grandchildren both white and black, forward into a world she could not even imagine.

  New quarrels, new issues, new leaders; new answers to the same questions of Federal and State, taxes and debts, principle and compromise, liberty and love.

  She laid her hand on Mr. Clay’s arm just as Rachel caught her husband’s sleeve once more, unobtrusively, each woman turning the man aside from a quarrel that could transform a celebration into a brawl. By the time Jemmy and Jim Monroe sprang into action from their chimney-corner to head off the fracas they hadn’t even seen coming, Dolley had deftly passed Clay along to Nelly Lewis; she heard Rachel making some innocuous query of her husband about the lineage of a horse, and almost laughed.

  Jemmy slipped an arm around Dolley’s waist.

  “I knew I might count on you,” he whispered. Then, more loudly, he added, “Gentlemen, a toast.” He raised his cup, looked to the General to propose it.

  Jackson’s glance touched Rachel’s, and she nodded shyly. He raised his cup to Dolley, and said, “I shall leave that to the Presidentress.”

  Dolley caught the smile in those chilly pale eyes, saw how close he, too, kept one arm around Rachel, as if guarding her from harm. Not a complete barbarian, after all.

  She raised her glass, and said, “To the world to come.”

  POSTSCRIPTUM

  Rachel Jackson never inhabited the White House. She died in 1828, just after her husband was elected seventh President of the United States.

  Abigail Adams died in 1818, at the age of seventy-four. Both the house in which she raised her children in Quincy, Massachusetts, and the one she shared with John after their return from Europe—Stonyfield (later Peacefield) Farm—still stand. The roses and lilac she brought back from England to plant in the garden still grow there.

  Her niece Louisa never married, rema
ining Abigail’s companion until the old lady’s death. Louisa herself died in 1857, at the age of eighty-four.

  Johnny—John Quincy Adams—was elected sixth U.S. President in a four-way split that threw the hotly contested election of 1824 into the House of Representatives. He was the first second-generation President. He was also the only U.S. President to serve in the House of Representatives after his Presidential term, which he did with great distinction, for the rest of his life, literally, dying there after a stroke in 1848.

  John Adams lived til 1826, dying at the age of ninety on the Fourth of July, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. A few hours earlier that same day, Thomas Jefferson, aged eighty-three, died at Monticello, almost bankrupt and living under the knowledge that his treasured mountaintop haven would have to be sold to pay his debts.

  With Jefferson’s death, Patsy Jefferson Randolph fled her husband and lived with her daughter Ellen in Boston until Randolph was on his deathbed, in 1828. Monticello was sold after Randolph’s death, but can—like Mount Vernon and Peacefield Farm, and Montpelier (in the process of restoration as this book is being written)—be visited today.

  Martha’s beloved granddaughter Nelly went on to a life of depression and loss, seeing seven of her eight children die before her, and her ailing husband fritter away most of her share of the Custis fortune. She died in 1852, at the age of seventy-three. Wash Custis came into his share of the Custis estate and with it built the house now known as Arlington. His one surviving child by his marriage to Mary Fitzhugh—also named Mary—married the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, and they made their home at Arlington until after the Civil War, when the estate was confiscated for back taxes and turned into a national cemetery. Many Washington family mementos—including a lock of George’s hair, and Martha’s Sunday-best blue-and-white china—can be seen at Arlington today.

  Payne Todd went on to a career of gambling debts and dissipations that impoverished James Madison and exhausted Dolley; in the end Dolley’s friends convinced her to tie up her money in a trust so that Payne couldn’t get his hands on it. To the end of her life, her son was trying to get from her what money he could, including trying to force her to sign a will giving him the small share she had intended to pass along to her beloved sisters Anna and Lucy, who cared for her in her final days.

  Dolley lived til 1849 as the most popular hostess in Washington, to which she returned after Jemmy’s death. She was a regular guest of all five Presidents between Monroe and Polk, and the heartbeat of Washington society, though by that time she was living on the cheerfully offered charity of her many friends. Dolley Todd Madison was given what amounted to a state funeral when she died.

  Payne Todd died in poverty and obscurity only three years later, at the age of sixty-one.

  James Madison lived to the age of eighty-five, dying at Montpelier a few days before the Fourth of July, 1836.

  He was the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence.

  Aaron Burr outlived him by ten weeks.

  SALLY HEMINGS

  In the course of putting this book together, I realized that no matter how I told the story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, I was going to offend and anger someone.

  And yet, in a book about the first First Ladies, to omit the issue would leave a gaping and obvious hole.

  I have done the best I can, to re-create one possible version of a relationship whose actual nature is—in the words of Fawn Brodie’s romanticized biography—simply “nonrecoverable.”

  Were Thomas Jefferson to be asked on Judgment Day whether he loved Sally Hemings, my personal opinion is that he would reply defensively that he loved all his slaves: which is not the same thing as saying that he thought they were of the same species as himself. Jefferson is the most elusive (some historians would say, “two-faced”) of the Founding Fathers, saying one thing and doing another so frequently that it is almost impossible to pin down what he actually thought or felt.

  The Civil War, the polemical arguments for and against abolition of slavery, the bitterness of Reconstruction and the long disgrace of race relations which followed it have so altered modern perceptions of black and white that any re-creation of even a simple relationship would be difficult to achieve, and the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings was, I believe, far from simple.

  One of the most striking features I have come across in my own studies of slave accounts of slavery has been the enormous degree to which the conditions of any individual slave’s life depended upon the individual slave-owner. Situations of what appear to be warm affection existed side by side with truly subhuman cruelty and jaw-dropping callousness. It all depended on who and where you were, each slave-owning household a microclimate from which, for a slave, there was no possibility of legal redress.

  I have made the arbitrary decision, based on the good opinion of Jefferson held by his friends (and in the few recorded instances, by his slaves also—though the ones who didn’t like him probably wouldn’t have felt able to say so), that he wasn’t the kind of man who would force or coerce sex with an unwilling fifteen-year-old girl.

  I have also made the arbitrary decision that there was more to the relationship than a bargain for sexual favors in exchange for protection, privilege, and freedom for Sally’s children.

  Jefferson kept Sally as his concubine despite the scandal in 1802 (their youngest two children were born in 1805 and 1808), and after he took Sally as his concubine in 1788, there is not even speculation that he was involved with any other woman, white or black. Their older surviving sons, Tom and Beverly, simply vanish from the Monticello records; according to their son Madison Hemings in an interview in March of 1873, their daughter Harriet (the second daughter of that name, born in 1801) “married a white man in good standing in Washington City.” Madison and Eston, presumably because their features were too African to allow them to “pass,” were freed in Jefferson’s will.

  I have chosen to follow Fawn Brodie (and James Callendar) in portraying Young Tom as alive and present at Monticello at least up to 1800, rather than simply accepting Madison Hemings’s assertion that his eldest brother “died soon after” birth. Either way, Young Tom was probably gone from Monticello before Madison Hemings was born.

  It must be remembered that Jefferson—and Sally—both grew up in a society in which it was acceptable (among men, anyway) and fairly commonplace—though by no means universal—for men to have mistresses, and for Southern slaveholders to have sexual relations with the women they legally owned. I think it should also be borne in mind that Sally had known Jefferson literally all her life, and that the Hemings family formed a sort of sub-caste at Monticello, somewhere between ordinary slaves and the sort of shadow-families that in French Louisiana would have been free and informally acknowledged.

  One can only speculate as to why Jefferson did not free Sally in his will. Patsy Randolph—who left her husband shortly after Jefferson’s death in 1826—freed her, and took great care to solemnly assure her sons that Sally Hemings’s children had been fathered by Jefferson’s nephew Peter Carr. Sally went to live with her sons Madison and Eston in a house near Monticello, until her death in 1835.

  Whether Sally knew anything about Gabriel Prosser’s attempted revolt or not—or what she would have chosen to do if she had known—I have not the slightest idea.

  All writers of fiction about historical personages have to make choices about how to portray events and relationships for which there is little or no evidence. I have done my best to be true to the known facts, about Jefferson and Sally and about the world in which they lived. To those who feel I should have told the story otherwise—and to those who have been offended by my choices—I apologize.

  I have used the word “concubine” in its original literal meaning, that of a servant or slave-woman who sleeps with the master on a regular or semiregular basis.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Real life is not tidy, and the story
of any couple is the story of their families as well (and in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this included servants). I have dates for some; for others I do not. For others I have found several different birth and death dates, with as much as ten years’ variation for the same person. Fictional characters are marked with an asterisk*. Though many characters overlap from section to section, I have listed them by the section in which they primarily occur; and by the name under which they are primarily known in the book. A woman’s maiden name and alternate married names are in parentheses, alternate first names (either nicknames or real names for those dozen or so women all named Martha) are in brackets.

  MARTHA

  Anna Maria (Dandridge) Bassett 1739–1777—Favorite sister of Martha, married Burwell Bassett in 1757. Mother of Fanny Bassett Washington Lear, one of Martha’s many surrogate daughters.

  Fanny (Bassett) Washington (Lear) 1767–1796—Martha’s favorite niece, successively married to George’s nephew (and secretary) Augustine Washington, then at his death to George’s secretary Tobias Lear.

  Aaron Burr 1756–1836—The dark star of the Founding Fathers; briefly Washington’s aide-de-camp, then Colonel in the Continental Army, Senator from New York, Thomas Jefferson’s Vice President (and so far the only United States Vice President to serve while under indictment for murder), and would-be Emperor of Mexico.

  Eleanor (Calvert) Custis (Stuart) 1758–1811—Jacky’s wife and mother of Martha’s four grandchildren. After Jacky’s death she married Dr. David Stuart of Alexandria, and had numerous (twelve in some accounts, sixteen in others) children by him.

  Daniel Parke Custis 1710–1757—First husband of Martha Washington and father of her four children.

  Jacky Custis 1754–1781—[John Parke Custis] Only child of Martha and Daniel Custis to survive to adulthood, father (by Eleanor Calvert) of Martha’s four grandchildren.