Once Captain Wright returned from Cowes Friday evening, the Jeffersons could prepare to leave Le Havre. But recurring storms created further delays. The captain intended to sail on Tuesday, October 6, but the weather—the squally, dirty, tempestuous weather—postponed their voyage. Jefferson spent the day searching for a pair of sheepdogs to take to Virginia for breeding purposes. Not a great dog fancier, he did like Normandy sheepdogs, which he called “the most careful intelligent dogs in the world.” Besides, such dogs were essential to his plans for raising sheep in Virginia. The search proved exhausting. Jefferson related, “We walked 10. miles, clambering the cliffs in quest of the shepherds, during the most furious tempest of wind and rain I was ever in. The journey was fruitless.”2
Returning to town, they encountered a gruesome sight, “the body of a man who had that moment shot himself. His pistol had dropped at his feet,” Jefferson observed, “and himself fallen backward without ever moving. The shot had completely separated his whole face from the forehead to the chin and so torn it to atoms that it could not be known. The center of the head was entirely laid bare.”3 Jefferson reacted to the sight of this suicide like a modern-day forensic scientist. Besides getting a good look at the destruction the bullet did to the man’s face, he also noticed the position of the gun and its relationship to the position of the man’s body. His description is neither emotional nor judgmental. Jefferson saw suicide as the result of mental disease and sought to understand it as such.4
Apparently, the sight of the dead man did not hurt Jefferson’s appetite. That evening he had dinner with a local merchant, complete with a variety of excellent wines. After dinner they viewed their host’s collection of valuable prints. Walking in the rain Wednesday, Jefferson encountered a visibly pregnant Normandy sheepdog, which he purchased and named Bergère. Buzzy, as its French name came to be pronounced in Virginia, turned out to be a great favorite at Monticello.5
The care with which Cutting treated the Jeffersons before, during, and after the passage to the Isle of Wight is touching. He arranged for coaches to take them from their hotel to the point of embarkation and saw them all safely aboard before midnight. A southerly breeze hurried them along at first, but the wind shifted to the north partway through the voyage and slowed them considerably. Regardless which way the wind was blowing, all the Jeffersons became seasick. Rain and contrary winds persisted though Thursday evening. Finally, around two o’clock Friday morning, they anchored in Cowes harbor. Cutting went ashore, found accommodations at the Fountain Inn, and returned to accompany them to their lodgings.
The Jeffersons did not reach the inn until four that morning. Five hours later, Cutting was amazed to find them seated in the breakfast room enjoying hot buttered rolls and tea. He wrote, “I had the pleasure to see a vivifying smile upon those countenances over which the nausea marina yesterday threw the palid Veil of weakness and discouragement.”6
Aware they would soon part ways, Cutting took advantage of their time together and enjoyed breakfast with them the next three mornings. Coming down about half past eight one morning, he saw Jefferson and his younger daughter seated before an open copy of Don Antonio de Solís’s Historia de la Conquista de México. Cutting noted how tenderly Jefferson oversaw the education of his daughters. While in Paris, he had purchased other books for Mary, including a copy of Pierre Coste’s tiny two-volume edition of Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables Choisies.7 Cutting’s diary supplements the story of the Jefferson girls. Most of the other evidence concerning Jefferson’s relationship with Martha and Mary or, as she now insisted upon being called, Maria comes from his letters. Writing his daughters while separated from them, he typically admonished them to pursue their studies with diligence. In these letters, Jefferson comes off as a stern taskmaster. Cutting’s diary, alternatively, shows how tender-hearted he could be as he helped Maria with her Spanish.
The diary also captures how Cutting felt upon seeing father and daughter bent over a book together: “I was prodigiously pleased with his method of instilling into her tender mind an accurate knowledge of Geography at the same time that he inculcated the purest principles of the Language.”8 In his educational writings, Jefferson had advocated the importance of teaching foreign tongues in conjunction with other subjects such as history and geography. In practice, he did just that. Cutting continued, “The lovely Girl was all attention, and discover’d a degree of sagacity and observation beyond her years, in the very pertinent queries she put to her excellent Preceptor. I could not help participating [in] the pleasure this indulgent Parent must experience in the Delightful Task! To rear the tender thought and teach the young idea how to shoot!”
Cutting’s words echo lines from James Thomson’s Spring, which captures the joy of teaching:
Delightful Task! to rear the tender Thought
To teach the young idea how to shoot,
To pour the fresh Instruction o’er the Mind,
To breathe th’ enlivening Spirit, and to fix
The generous Purpose in the glowing Breast.
These oft-quoted lines embody a view of education that both Jefferson and Thomson shared with John Locke. The organic metaphor in Spring nicely conveys Jefferson’s personal attitude toward education. Ideas must be planted in the mind and then carefully nurtured to ensure that they take root.
After saying his final goodbyes, Cutting reflected upon the friendship he had formed with the Jeffersons. His reflections, duly recorded in the pages of his diary, constitute the fullest contemporary description of the Jefferson family from their time in Europe. In addition, Cutting’s heartfelt words and affectionate tone affirm the devotion Jefferson could inspire in articulate, sensitive men:
I never remember to have experienced so much regret at parting from a Family with whom I had so short an acquaintance. I have found Mr. Jefferson a man of infinite information and sound Judgement, becoming gravity, and engaging affability mark his deportment. His general abilities are such as would do honor to any age or Country. His eldest Daughter is an amiable girl about 17 years of age, tall and genteel, has been 5 years in France, principally in a convent, for her Education, and though she has been so long resident in a Country remarkable for its Levity and the forward indelicacy of its manners, yet she retains all that winning simplicity, and good humour’d reserve that are evident proofs of innate Virtue and an happy disposition.—Characteristicks which eminently distinguish the Women of America from those of any other Country. The youngest Daughter is a lovely Girl about 11 years of age. The perfect pattern of good temper, an engaging smile ever animates her Countenance, and the chearful attention which she pays to the judisious instructions and advice of her worthy Father, the Pertinent queries which she puts to him, and the evident improvement she makes in her knowledge of Foreign Languages, History and Geography, afford a pleasing Presage that when her faculties attain their maturity, she will be the delight of her Friends, and a distinguish’d ornament to her sex.9
The word “ornament,” in this sense, has fallen from usage, but it was not uncommon in the day. Basically, Cutting meant that Maria would mature into a person who adds distinction to her time, place, sex, and station.
The Jeffersons remained in Cowes a few weeks after Cutting’s departure. John Trumbull had booked passage for them aboard the Clermont, which embarked from London and made a special stop at Cowes to pick up the Jefferson party. Once aboard the Clermont, they wereplagued by seasickness for the first five days of the journey, but the remainder of the crossing turned out to be quite pleasant. In Jefferson’s words, they experienced “the finest autumn weather it was possible to have the wind having never blown harder than we would have desired it.”10
Buzzy gave birth to puppies either at Cowes or during the journey, but otherwise the crossing was uneventful—until the Clermont approached the Virginia capes, where thick fog made it impossible to locate a pilot boat. For three days they searched but to no avail. The captain of the Clermont finally decided to brave the capes and enter
the Chesapeake on his own. Martha Jefferson remembered the experience well:
After beating about for three days the captain, who was a bold as well as an experienced seaman determined to run in at a venture without having seen the capes. We were near running upon what he conjectured to be the middle ground when we cast anchor at ten o’clock at night. The wind rose, the vessel drifted down dragging her anchors one or more miles, but we had got within the capes whilst a number of vessels less bold were blown off the coast some of them lost and all of them kept out three or four weeks longer. We had to beat up against a strong head wind which carried away our topsails and were very near being run down by a brig coming out of port who having the wind in her favor was almost upon us before we could get out of the way. We escaped however with only a loss only of a part of our rigging.11
Mooring safely at Norfolk on Monday afternoon, November 23, the Jeffersons disembarked, thinking their adventures over, but an hour or two later, before their luggage had been unloaded, the Clermont caught fire. The fire started in the middle steerage, and the flames burst through the cabin and out the windows. Happily, their luggage escaped the conflagration. Martha’s account explains that their trunks had been put in their staterooms and “the doors pulled to accidentally as our Captain acknowledged but seeing them open he thought it as well to shut them. They were so close that the flames did not penetrate, but the powder in a musket in our room was silently consumed and the thickness of the travelling trunks alone saved their contents from the excessive heat. I understood at the time that the state rooms alone of all the internal partitions escaped burning.”12
Accommodations in Norfolk were limited, but a couple of gentlemen staying at Lindsay’s Hotel gave up their rooms for the Jeffersons. Once they settled in, Jefferson got himself caught up on the news. He was surprised to read in the papers that President Washington had appointed him secretary of state. “I made light of it,” he said later, “supposing I had only to say ‘no’ and there would be an end of it.”13 Saying no to George Washington would be more difficult than Jefferson imagined.
They took the roundabout way to Monticello, stopping at the homes of many friends. In fact, they did not reach Monticello until a month after they touched at Norfolk. Word of their arrival preceded them—Martha recalled what happened as they neared home:
The negroes discovered the approach of the carriage as soon as it reached Shadwell and such a scene I never witnessed in my life. They collected in crowds around it and almost drew it up the mountain by hand. The shouting etc had been sufficiently obstreperous before but the moment it arrived at the top it reached the climax. When the door of the carriage was opened they received him in their arms and bore him to the house, crowding round and kissing his hands and feet some blubbering and crying others laughing. It seemed impossible to satisfy their anxiety to touch and kiss the very earth which bore him. These were the first ebulitions of joy for his return after a long absence which they would of course feel.14
Written decades after the fact, Martha’s recollection embodies the rhetoric of the antebellum plantation novels in its depiction of the gratitude of the slaves and the benevolence of the master. Other evidence confirms her description, however.15
Shortly after the Jeffersons returned to Monticello, Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., came courting. While a student at the University of Edinburgh, he had visited the Jeffersons in Paris, where his romance with Martha may have begun. Now back in Virginia, their courtship progressed rapidly, and soon young Randolph asked for Martha’s hand.
Her father, a little disappointed that the marriage would cut short his daughter’s studies, was otherwise pleased with the match. By God, she had beaten the odds and escaped marrying a blockhead. Randolph was “a young gentleman of genius, science and honorable mind.” To a European correspondent, Jefferson explained that Randolph’s “talents, dispositions, connections and fortune were such as he would have made him my own first choice, yet according to the usage of my country, I scrupulously suppressed my wishes, that my daughter might indulge her own sentiments freely. It ended in their marriage.”16
The wedding took place the last Tuesday of February 1790, the Reverend Matthew Maury performing the ceremony. Once the wedding festivities wound down, Jefferson had no time to spare. Saying no to George Washington had proven more than difficult: it had proven impossible. Accepting the appointment, he came to understand what Washington already knew: Thomas Jefferson was the most qualified man in the nation to serve as secretary of state. Before leaving for New York, the nation’s temporary capital, he made arrangements for Maria to live with the Eppes family at Eppington. He insisted she study her Spanish grammar in his absence and read at least ten pages a day in Don Quixote.
There were good reasons why the coming generation needed to know Spanish. The commercial and diplomatic relationship between Spain and the United States, Jefferson told young Randolph, “is already important and will become daily more so. Besides this the antient part of American history is written chiefly in Spanish.” Jefferson took his own advice to heart. Having expanded his collection of Spanish Americana in Europe, he was now busily reading it. Packing his bags for New York, he included a book by Francisco López de Gómara, the Spanish historian who served as secretary to Hernando Cortés.17
Leaving Monticello on Monday, March 1, accompanied by James Hemings, Jefferson stopped in Richmond for a week to take care of some additional business. Much construction had occurred at the state capital in his absence. There was one street that, to Jefferson’s eyes, could “be considered as handsomely built in any city of Europe.” He especially enjoyed seeing the new state capitol building under construction. Some adjustments were necessary to make it conform to his original plans, but by and large he felt great pride even as he realized that it would take much time to finish. Once completed, the capitol would be “an edifice of first rate dignity,” one “worthy of being exhibited along side the most celebrated remains of antiquity.”18
From Richmond, Jefferson and James Hemings took the stagecoach to Alexandria, where they met Robert Hemings, who had driven the phaeton from Monticello. They reached Alexandria on Wednesday, the tenth, staying over that night and the next on the occasion of a public dinner in Jefferson’s honor at the Fountain Tavern. Finding a vessel bound from Alexandria for France, Jefferson took the opportunity to write William Short, asking him to wind up his affairs in France and providing detailed instructions about how to pack all of his books for shipment. The fine library Jefferson had assembled in Paris would be coming to Monticello.
He had planned to drive his phaeton from Alexandria to New York, but an unexpected storm dumped eighteen inches of snow on the city overnight. With no desire to drive through such slop, Jefferson sent the phaeton to New York by water and decided to “bump it” in the stagecoach himself. The overland route turned out to be bumpier than he imagined. As he wrote his new son-in-law upon reaching his destination, “The roads thro the whole were so bad that we could never go more than three miles an hour, sometimes not more than two, and in the night but one.”19 He could have walked all the way to New York faster.
The month after he reached the city, he subscribed to Christopher Colles’s Survey of the Roads of the United States. The earliest American road guide, Colles’s Survey was based on maps prepared on George Washington’s orders during the Revolutionary War. It contained a series of copperplate engravings illustrating routes from Connecticut to Virginia. The journey from Alexandria had shown Jefferson how much roadwork was needed. Subscribing to Colles’s Survey, he encouraged the improvement of American travel conditions.
In Philadelphia, he paused long enough to visit Benjamin Franklin. Since returning, Franklin had added a three-story wing to his home, largely to accommodate the fine library he had assembled in Paris. Franklin avoided placing a staircase in the new wing of his home: he did not want to take precious space away from his books. Similarly, Jefferson would minimize the staircases at Monticello to maximize inte
rior space. In the past, the two bookmen had discussed their libraries at length. On this occasion, Franklin’s physical condition dampened his guest’s enthusiasm: Jefferson found his old friend on his deathbed.20
Despite his failing health, Franklin had many questions about mutual friends in Paris, which he asked “with a rapidity and animation almost too much for his strength.”
Jefferson had heard that Franklin was continuing to write his autobiography and asked him about it.
“I cannot say much of that,” Franklin replied, “but I will give you a sample of what I shall leave.”
Thomas Jefferson, engraved by H. B. Hall’s Sons, New York. From Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography (1915). (Collection of Kevin J. Hayes)
Saying these words, he directed his grandson Billy Bache to hand him the manuscript from atop a nearby table. Bache did so, and Franklin gave the manuscript to Jefferson, urging him to take it with him and read it as his leisure. The manuscript he presented was a narrative describing the informal discussions that took place in 1774 and 1775 between Franklin and some British representatives, who met secretly to try to restore amicable relations between Great Britain and America.
Jefferson glanced at the manuscript and, realizing what it was, thanked Franklin for letting him read it and assured him he would return it.
“No, keep it,” Franklin replied.
Unsure precisely what Franklin meant, Jefferson glanced at the manuscript again, folded it, and reassured him again that he would return it.
“No,” Franklin insisted. “Keep it.”
Jefferson put the manuscript in his pocket and took leave of his old friend. Franklin would pass away the following month. After his death, Jefferson pronounced him “the greatest man and ornament of the age and country in which he lived.” He further observed, “His memory will be preserved and venerated as long as the thunders of heaven shall be heard or feared.”21
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