Page 24 of America’s First Daughter

Chapter Twenty-three

Monticello, 27 April 1795

From Thomas Jefferson to James Madison

My retirement from office had been meant from all office high or low, without exception . . . the little spice of ambition, which I had in my younger days, has long since evaporated, and I set less store in a posthumous than present name.

T WO YEARS AFTER MY FATHER wrote these words, he lost the election for the presidency of the United States. My sister and I believed this to be an utter calamity, but not because he had lost the presidency. It was a calamity because, through a quirk in our system, having won the second highest number of votes, he would now be obliged to serve as vice president to John Adams—the very man he’d run against, and whose political sentiments he opposed.

We urged him to refuse the office for fear he’d again be the subject of scrutiny, censure, and newspaper attack. He’d again have to leave his plantation and his people and his family. And this time, he wouldn’t even have James to look after him, for Sally’s brother had since quit the plantation with his freedom to travel the world.

Sally didn’t like the idea of my father returning to public office any better than we did. The three of us sulked, as if the combined weight of his womenfolk’s displeasure might bring my strong father to his knees.

But in the end, Papa said he feared to weaken our fledgling system of government by refusing the office, and he wouldn’t be moved on this point.

In all, my father’s retirement had lasted only two eventful years during which it seemed every friend of liberty we’d known in France was either dead, jailed, or in exile. And we’d been consumed with tumult and tragedies closer to home. Polly fell through the rotting floorboards into the cellar of my father’s half-demolished house, upon which he’d begun more ambitious renovations. Miraculously, there wasn’t a scrape on her, but others didn’t fare as well. At Bizarre, Richard Randolph died, quite suddenly, of some mysterious ailment, leaving Judith and Nancy in dire straits.

And I lost a child—a little angel named Ellen, not even a year old.

She had apple cheeks and the longest toes of any baby I ever saw. I held her in my arms as she struggled for her last little gasps through lips tinged with blue. And when she closed her eyes for the last time—the tiny veins beneath her porcelain skin pulsing once, twice, then no more—the grief was unfathomable. The pain was like a burr, the kind that only digs deeper when you try to pluck free of it. So I just let the pain dig into me deep, where I keep it to this day, since I couldn’t keep my baby girl.

But after we buried her, the grief put Tom into a nearly hopeless state. My husband was struggling with what the doctors called a nervous condition. He took mineral water at the hot springs, but I knew it’d do no good. After all, no magic elixir was going to transform him into the master of Tuckahoe, and we could never be happy at Varina, where we’d moved to build up Tom’s only inheritance.

And oh, how I hated Varina.

Not because it was filled with memories of that first miser able summer we spent as newlyweds. Not because there weren’t enough rooms for the children and our servants. No, I hated Varina because whenever Tom came home from overseeing the fields, he’d stand on the porch with a glass too-full of whiskey, his eyes on the blue horizon, as if he could see his father’s malevolent ghost hovering over the childhood home at which we’d never again be welcome.

As if he sensed Colonel Randolph looking down on us, standing in judgment.

And I hurt for my husband. Truly, I did.

Tom seldom spoke of the lawsuit he was fighting with his father’s creditors, but it weighed on him. My husband was likely to lose, which would saddle us with even more of Colonel Randolph’s debt. I would’ve sold bloody Varina and left everything having to do with Colonel Randolph behind, but Tom couldn’t stomach it, which meant that my husband’s only hope of paying the mortgage was to get in a few good crops, and sell them at a profit—a nearly impossible feat, given British tariffs on our goods.

That’s why I was so alarmed when Tom announced, “I’m going to stand for the state legislature.”

He was standing on the porch, deep in his cups, so I wasn’t entirely sure he meant it. And I didn’t like the idea at all. Tom was a better farmer than most, but inconstant with his attention to his own plantations—always distracted on some errand for my father. It was so much worse now with Papa away in the capital. Polly had come to live with us at Varina, which meant Tom and I were both struggling to make a functioning household with our sisters and our little children underfoot. I didn’t know how we’d manage it if Tom took on public duties besides. “What of . . . what of the farmsteads?”

My husband squinted. “Patsy, I’ve always wanted to serve in public office. That’s why I went to Edinburgh. It’s why I admire Mr. Jefferson so much. My father never thought I could do it. He wanted me here, digging in the dirt . . . but it’s these little specks of land which prevent mental effort and accomplishment in youth.”

My family had already suffered enough for public ambitions, but because I thought the source of my husband’s recurring illness might be that he’d so long denied himself a political career, I forced myself to say, “I suppose the country needs good Republicans.” Tom was no great revolutionary thinker, like my father, but he was intelligent and honorable. Two things I thought might put him in good standing with the public.

Which shows you just how much I still had to learn about politics.

Tom declared his candidacy. Unfortunately, he did little more than that. Maybe he thought he didn’t need to; he had the Randolph name, after all, and the support of Thomas Jefferson, Virginia’s favorite son. Hadn’t my father just been elected to the vice presidency without campaigning for it?

But when it came to the state legislature, a presence was expected. Candidates were to go to the town square to press flesh and charm country voters over barrels of whiskey. When Tom ought to have been putting on his finery and practicing speeches and witty barbs, he decided upon another course altogether.

“There’s a doctor in Charlottesville who will be administrating smallpox inoculations,” Tom said. “I’m taking the children to have it done.”

It always moved me that he was so intent on the welfare of our children, but smallpox also struck terror in my heart. “But they’re so young.”

“Best to do it while they’re young,” Tom said.

That had been my father’s thinking, too. Unfortunately, a mother’s heart is, of all things in nature, the least subject to reason. The idea of exposing my children to such a disorder made me perfectly miserable. Polly and I and our dearly departed little Lucy had made it through. Sally, too. But sometimes the treatment killed the patient, and knowing that made me clutch my babies tight against my skirts. “It takes some time—we can’t leave them without a nurse to tend them. I’ll have to go with you.”

“I need you here at Varina,” Tom insisted. “Someone’s got to look after the girls.”

His little sisters, he meant, including little Jenny, who was still with us now, as if she’d been our daughter to start with. His father hadn’t left him the estate, but Tom had still taken on the responsibility of the family.

“I can look after everything,” Polly broke in. “I’m eighteen now, Patsy. You can go watch over your children and I’ll play mistress of Varina for a time.”

Tom and I looked at my delicate little sister where she was indolently reclining upon a sofa in nothing but a slip of a gown, with all her chores undone. And the decision was made in one glance. Tom would take the children, and I’d stay behind.

On the appointed day that first week of April, my eyes filled with tears at the thought that when I said good-bye to my little angels, it might be for the last time. I consoled myself with the certain knowledge that Tom would be a tender and attentive nurse; he could be gruff with Jeff, but he was always sweetness itself with Ann. What I didn’t expect was that he would tarry there with the doctor, studying the science of the thing, sitting at the bedside of his children on election day itself.

Tom never showed up in the town square.

Never slapped any backs. Never cracked open a barrel of whiskey. Never gave a speech. Never thanked his supporters—not even the local militiamen who came out to rally in my father’s name. By the time I realized it—when a neighbor came riding up to the house in a cloud of dust to ask if something terrible had befallen my husband—Tom had already lost the election and looked like a sore, brooding loser to boot.

Not knowing what else to do, I hurriedly sat down at the table to scribble a letter to be read out to interested parties, explaining that my husband was tending to sick children. But it arrived too late to do any good, and the humiliating rumors spread like wild fire, such that they reached even my father in the capital, who was obliged to apologize on my husband’s behalf.

When I finally heard Tom’s wagon roll up that warm day, I grabbed up my skirts and raced out into the yard to scoop up my children, kissing them all over their faces in relief to see them alive. But Ann pressed shyly against my bodice, whispering, “My papa isn’t well.”

Tom was drunk. It was the middle of the day and he was drunk—so red-faced and staggering I wondered how he’d driven the horses. “Go,” he barked at the children. “Get on in the house.”

When they ran off, my husband put his finger in my face and drew near enough that I could smell whiskey on his breath. “You think you’re so much above me, don’t you, Patsy? All that convent learning . . .” Scarcely knowing what I’d done to anger him, I was struck by his sudden resemblance to his father. And while I stood there in bewilderment, winding my hands in my apron, he shouted, “Don’t you ever apologize for me.”

So he’d seen the letter I’d written to excuse his absence on election day. “I only thought—”

“Who are you to apologize for me? You’re Mrs. Thomas Mann Randolph. That’s who you are. You’re the wife of a man who has been erased by a younger brother, rejected by the voters of Virginia, and can do nothing whatsoever right. You’re that man’s wife and that’s all you are.”

With that he shoved past me, leaving me to stare off in the horizon, where I, too, fancied I could see the shadow of Colonel Randolph. But I decided then and there that old tyrant could only haunt my husband.

Not me.

I wasn’t just Mrs. Thomas Mann Randolph. I was first, foremost, and above all, Thomas Jefferson’s daughter. So while Tom slept off his hangover, I packed up my sister and my children, and returned to Monticello.

Philadelphia, 8 June 1797

To Martha Jefferson Randolph from Thomas Jefferson

I receive with inexpressible pleasure the news of Jack’s proposal of marriage to your sister. After your own happy establishment, which has given me an inestimable friend to whom I can leave the care of everything I love, the only anxiety I had remaining was to ensure Maria’s happiness. If she had the whole earth free to choose a partner, she could not have done so more to my wishes. I now see our fireside formed into a group, no one member of which has a fiber in their composition which can ever produce any jarring or jealousies among us.

“I do believe you’re faking,” I said to my limping sister, helping her with her stomacher. “If you don’t stay still and let me finish dressing you, I’m going to tell everyone that you turned your weak ankle on purpose to force Jack Eppes to carry you over the threshold of your wedding chamber.”

“I’m not that clever,” my sister protested, radiant in her best gown, and blushing. “Besides, why would any bride willingly forgo dancing at her own wedding? It’s not my fault that Papa’s house is in perpetual disarray. Silly me for expecting there to be a stair under the door to step down onto!”

I’d regretted the dangers of returning to Monticello’s permanent chaos of construction as Papa’s Italian-inspired architecture took shape into a domed manor house that would have three stories while appearing only to have one. And yet, we were still happier here amongst hammers and plaster dust and tarps than we’d been at Varina. When Tom discovered that I’d left, he’d been enraged. But I’d only meant to strike a little fear into his heart, not mount a rebellion, so I lied to him about the reasons why. I told him that in his shamefully drunken state, he’d commanded me to go so he could put all his attention on the harvest.

And when Polly—who disapproved of men who drank— confirmed my story, Tom was too embarrassed to admit that he couldn’t remember what he’d said. I sensed there lingered in him a fear that he had a willful wife who might not always tolerate his outbursts, which suited me.

And I saw some of the same sincere regret he’d shown after he’d struck me. But more happily, our return to Monticello had coincided with a visit from Jack Eppes, our country cousin with whom Polly had spent many years. He’d proposed marriage, and she’d agreed straightaway.

Jack Eppes wasn’t as handsome as my own husband, but then few men were. Still, Jack had a sunny disposition. He seemed amenable to my father’s plan to have us all live close together when he retired from office. And so we were all very optimistic that autumn. We anticipated long sojourns here at Monticello, which would—Papa promised—be completely renovated and habitable by New Year’s Day.

Sally herself was with child again, which seemed to give my father great pleasure, though he never said so. He guarded the privacy of his rooms, which must have been their lovers’ sanctuary, but I wondered where Sally took herself on days like this one, when our country neighbors and relations gathered for Polly’s wedding.

Kissing my sister’s cheeks, I said, “ Mon Dieu, Polly. You are a beautiful bride.”

“It’s Maria!” she cried, laughing in exasperation.

“Maria,” I agreed, with a grin.

She beamed, taking up a bouquet of lavender, feverfew, and coneflowers. “You are my very best sister, and I promise, when we live apart, I’ll write you every day.”

At this, I snorted back a laugh. “That’s what you said when you went off with Papa to Philadelphia, but I can scarcely count one letter you sent me. I’m afraid you deal much in promises, but very little in deeds performed with a pen, Maria .”

“I’ll do better,” she said solemnly, staring at her reflection in the mirror.

Though I doubted it, I kissed her again, for it was a day for joy.

Alas, after the vows were exchanged, I found my husband miserable, leaning against the rail of the gallery, a glass in hand, watching everyone else dance in the entrance hall below. “Martha,” he said stiffly.

Since the day I’d left Varina, we’d scarcely spoken a word, so I simply answered, “Mr. Randolph.”

“They make a handsome couple,” my husband said, eyeing Jack, who whirled my sister around so that her petticoats swirled up under her skirt, heedless of her injured ankle. “Your father says Jack’s a talented lawyer.”

Truthfully, Jack wasn’t terribly talented at anything in my opinion. Certainly, my sister’s new husband didn’t have Tom’s intellect or scientific curiosity. And where my husband had a manly swagger, Jack still presented himself as a pudgy-cheeked boy. There wasn’t anything better about Jack Eppes but his temper.

Yet, he had a patrimony and a father who loved him.

Two things Tom envied.

Two things Tom would never have.

And I hurt for him, but I couldn’t let my husband’s jealousy or fears put a damper on my sister’s wedding. So I put my hand on his arm, where it rested upon the colorful buffalo robe on display over the rail, and said, “I think I forgot to tell you—my father is hoping to compare his meteorology book with yours. He doesn’t trust anyone else’s.” Shaking my head with feigned bewilderment, I added, “You two and your record keeping. Two peas in a pod, you are. I can’t imagine how your scientific minds work.”

“Your father likes Jack,” Tom said, an edge in his voice.

Frustrated, I said, “Everybody likes Jack. And Jack likes everybody.”

“No, he doesn’t. He’s all pretense,” Tom said, finishing his drink in one gulp. “He proposed to your sister because his parents wanted him to.”

Which—even if true—was no bad reason for marriage.

“Don’t spoil things, Tom.”

Setting his glass down, he lowered his eyes. “Say what you will, Martha, but I wanted you . . . and I still do.”

It softened me to hear it, and I smoothed my hands over the bodice of my gown, knowing that the striped silk taffeta in shades of gold brought out the fiery hues in my curled hair. “Then why don’t you come downstairs and dance with me.” Taking his hand, I drew it to my hip. “Look at our guests flapping about without any grace. They need our example.”

“Patsy,” Tom said, his fist balling within my grasp. “I’m trying to tell you something.” His throat bobbed, as if he was mustering courage. “It pains me to be an embarrassment to you, but I don’t know how to remedy my flaws. All I know is that whenever I feel strongly compelled to any act, a doubt always arises. And whereas the voice of reason is low and persuasive, passion is loud and imperious.”

It was a kind of apology. And I was reminded again that there was no guile in my husband. What he thought, what he felt, was always there on his skin. He wasn’t a diplomat; he wrestled every day with the necessary fictions of gentility that came so easily to me and my father, born politicians that we were. Sometimes Tom’s directness was refreshing, intoxicating, even.

Tom finished by saying, “I wish I knew what part of my nature prevents me from being happy.”

I knew exactly what part of his nature was to blame. It was the Randolph in him. And when I considered his miserable father, his shameless sisters, and all his selfish, hotheaded kin, I counted it a miracle that Tom was, at heart, a good man. That he wasn’t a happy man couldn’t be counted much against him.

So I pushed onto my toes and kissed him, very softly, at the corner of his mouth. “Ask me to dance, Mr. Randolph.” And when he finally swept me onto the dance floor, I whispered, “I’ll tell you a secret about being happy, Tom. Sometimes you just have to pretend at it until it becomes real.”

Monticello, 11 October 1798

From Thomas Jefferson to Stevens Thomson Mason

These Alien & Sedition laws are merely an experiment on the American mind to see how far it will bear a violation of the constitution. If this goes down, we shall see another act of Congress declaring a hereditary President for life or the restoration of his most gracious majesty George the third. That these things are in contemplation I have no doubt after the dupery of which our countrymen have shown themselves susceptible.

My husband snapped open his paper at the breakfast table. “This damnable Jay Treaty is going to be our undoing.”

I wish he hadn’t said it, only because I didn’t want Papa agitated about politics during his visit. It some ways, we all lived in a state of suspended animation until my father came home each autumn, and I didn’t want to spoil our time together.

Unfortunately, Tom’s words worked Papa into a rare state of heat. “For President Adams to side with Britain against France.” Papa fumed, glancing at Tom’s paper and adjusting the spectacles he’d purchased for his sore eyes. “Against our sister Republic, our lone ally in a world of monarchies!”

The treaty had gone down badly. Violence between political factions broke out in Philadelphia and had to be dispersed by light cavalry—much as in Paris on the eve of revolution. What’s more, President Adams had authorized the prosecution of critics of the president’s administration, which now included my father, his vice president.

Federalists claimed these measures were necessary to keep anarchy—and the guillotine—from American shores. But we saw in this the possibility for the very end of the American experiment with liberty. We were afraid to write political letters of any kind for fear of being jailed—especially since Papa was certain his were being intercepted and read.

He removed his spectacles and rested them upon the ledge of the small mahogany lap desk he once used to draft the Declaration of Independence itself, then gave a mournful sigh. “I know not which mortifies me most—that I should fear to write what I think or that my country bears such a state of things.”

“Papa,” I said, trying to soothe him. “Perhaps you should resign the vice presidency in protest. Retire early, because in a very short time, there will be another election and it shall all be someone else’s worry.”

Papa should’ve agreed with me. He might at least have pretended to think about it, especially considering the weight it would take off Tom. Instead, Papa snapped, “This reign of witches must end!”

That was the moment I realized my father was going to run for the presidency. Not be reluctantly volunteered. But actively campaign for the office.

He was ready for rebellion. Papa’s powerful, implacable, political outrage reminded me that underneath his gentility, he would always be a revolutionary. He wouldn’t retire. He’d run for the presidency of the United States, and this time, he wanted to win.

Like a soldier readying for battle, he’d returned to Monticello only to regroup in the bosom of his family. A thing made even plainer to me when he groused, “Where the devil is Maria? I gave Jack my chariot to make it easier to come, and assured them both the house and servants would be ready to receive them.”

But Jack hadn’t seen fit to bring my sister home. In fact, we’d scarcely seen Polly since her wedding the year before. In that time, Sally had lost poor little Harriet to some childhood illness and borne my father another child—a boy named Beverly. It must’ve been some consolation, but babies were fragile, and Papa had already lost so many children he was apt to guard his heart against loving the new ones too dearly. So, my father centered his anxieties on my sister. “Is she ill?”

“Just a newlywed,” I said, because if it was an illness, it mysteriously reoccurred whenever it served to excuse a visit to Monti cello, and I began to harbor a belief the Eppes family was keeping my sister from us once again.

My husband had cause to know how very much this upset me and as we prepared for bed one night, he attempted to raise my spirits against the specter of a holiday without my sister. “You ought to chaperone the Christmas Ball in Charlottesville, Patsy. It promises to be a gay season.”

I didn’t know about that. I knew Nancy intended to try to find a husband there, in spite of her blackened reputation. And Tom’s littlest sister, Jenny, would come out into society for the first time. I myself hadn’t been out in society in years and couldn’t imagine that it’d make me feel any better about missing Polly or about losing my father to politics for another four years.

But then Tom added, “I’ll go to the Christmas Ball with you. It occurs to me you need a chaperone. One never knows what kind of trouble you might get up to without me, young lady.”

Lighthearted flirtation didn’t come naturally to Tom, and it warmed me to know that in spite of all his own struggles, he was trying to help me with mine. In my nightdress, I sat on the edge of the bed, my fingers trailing along the neckline. “Mr. Randolph, it’s your sisters you need worry about. I’m an old woman of twenty-six years and quite above reproach.”

Tom tugged me against the strong muscles of his bare chest and playfully leaned his face close to mine. “But I might like to give you a stern reprimand or two anyway.”

He wanted me. That hadn’t changed. Not since the day he decided he must have me did his desire wane. Sometimes I thought it was because whenever he made love to me, he was reaching inside me for something more than the love I bore him, reaching for something I couldn’t give. But as long as he kept reaching, I thought it would hold us together.

So that Christmas, we loaded up Jenny and everyone else we could stuff into the carriage. Tom and I danced and exhausted the youngsters, putting them to shame. We were still laughing when we returned, much to the consternation of our children at Monticello, where we’d left them in Sally’s care.

When Tom smooched my cheek, our six-year-old son Jeff—a little heathen who refused to wear shoes even in coldest winter—made an ugly face. His older sister Ann complained bitterly of the unfairness that we hadn’t allowed her to come with us, threatening to go to Phildelphy with her grandpapa who would surely spoil her with cake. And two-year-old Ellen—a child I named after the daughter I’d lost, promising myself to love her enough for two angels—babbled her complaints, clinging to my skirts.

Oh, how I loved my little cherubs, and by springtime, I was expecting another. At this news, my husband leapt from his chair to spin me around. Tom wanted another boy—of course he did. And the knowledge we had another baby coming set him off on a manic fit of activity, building us a new house at Edgehill.

Tobacco was in the ground, and everyone was predicting high prices. “This will be a good year, Patsy,” Tom said. “We’ll get a good harvest, sell at the peak of the market, pay off debts, and live easy the rest of our lives. Just you wait and see.”