The first woman close to his own age who stirred Thomas Jefferson’s affection was his older sister, Jane. She shared his enthusiasm for music and books, which was not widespread in the Jefferson household. In later years, Jefferson described Jane as “a singer of uncommon skill and sweetness.” Often on summer nights, he would play songs on his violin and the two would sing together. Even in his old age, Jefferson spoke of her to his granddaughters “in terms of warm admiration and love.”
Jane remained a spinster until she died in 1765 at the age of twenty-five. One suspects she had fastidious tastes, like her younger brother. No one mourned her more than Jefferson. Years later, when he began planning to build a house on a nearby small mountain, one of its features was going to be a family cemetery; at its center would be a small stone altar, dedicated to Jane’s memory. In one of his account books, after describing this memorial, Jefferson wrote a touching epitaph:
Ah! Joanna puellarum optima!
Ah! Aevi virentis flore praerpta!
Sit sibi terra laevis!
Longe, longeque valeto!1
(Ah! Jane, best of girls!
Ah! Plucked too soon from your blooming youth!
Why was your native soil so unfavorable!
Long, long shall I bid you farewell!)
II
Jefferson’s father, Peter Jefferson, was another rural strong man, on the model of Augustine Washington. His main interest in his son seems to have been figuring out how to toughen the skinny, dreamy youth to qualify him for manhood, Virginia style. Peter died when Tom was fourteen, probably suspecting he had not succeeded. At an early age, Tom was sent into the woods with a gun to bring back a wild turkey. He blazed away but hit nothing until he found a turkey trapped in some sort of pen. He pinned the bird in place with a garter and shot him at point-blank range. We can be fairly sure that his father was not pleased by this performance. Tom continued to spend most of his time with his head in a book—or practicing his violin as many as three hours a day.
With his mother, Jane Randolph, Jefferson seems to have had an uneasy relationship. It was not as overtly turbulent as George Washington’s conflicts with Mary Ball Washington. But there are hints in Jefferson’s papers that he chafed under his mother’s role—or rule—as overseer of the family’s finances until her death in 1776. Even when he was twenty-five and a practicing attorney, she seems to have expected him to submit all his accounts to her for approval.
There are also hints that Jane Randolph tended to play up her family’s heritage, which supposedly went back to Scottish and English nobility, at the expense of the Jeffersons’ more mundane Welsh origins. Jefferson had a lifelong habit of making disparaging remarks about coats of arms and noble ancestors. Jane was the daughter of one of the seven sons of William Randolph and Mary Isham, who are sometimes called the Adam and Eve of Virginia. Their numerous descendants married into virtually every notable family in the colony.
Jane Randolph Jefferson was born in London, where her father was living as a merchant, and the Jefferson home, Shadwell, was named for the London parish in which she had lived. At least one psychobiographer has speculated that Jane Jefferson disapproved of her son’s participation in the Revolution. One of Jane’s brothers was so disgusted by the upheaval that he sold his Virginia lands and moved to England. Another brother was already living there.
As the older son (his brother Randolph was twelve years younger), Tom inherited the pick of Peter Jefferson’s lands along the Rivanna River and elsewhere, totaling more than five thousand prime acres. The income from these fruitful fields left him free of financial worries. At seventeen, Jefferson enrolled in the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, the little town that served as colonial Virginia’s capital.
The year was 1760. A new king, George III, had just ascended the British throne. The British Empire was in the process of winning the Seven Years’ War. The American side of it, usually called The French and Indian War, had already ended in victory with the capitulation of Canada. Ex-Colonel George Washington was discovering unexpected happiness in his marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis and working hard to wring a profit from Mount Vernon’s mediocre soil. Benjamin Franklin was in London, enjoying the international celebrity he had achieved for his epochal discoveries in electricity.
As a country boy, Jefferson approached the scions of Virginia’s first families—and their sisters—with not a little diffidence. He was thin-skinned and rather shy, and he feared rebuffs. He concealed his inclination to be sociable behind a facade of studiousness. “He used to be seen with his Greek grammar in his hand while his comrades were enjoying relaxation,” one friend recalled.
Family legend has him studying fifteen hours a day, but other evidence indicates that he knew how to have a good time, like most Virginians. He joined the Flat Hat Club, a college society that recorded its zany doings in mock-Latin verse. He made lifelong friends such as John Page, a descendant of “King” Carter, who invited him to Rosewell, the magnificent three-story mansion in which Page had grown up. There and in other great houses to which his Randolph kinship opened doors, Tom discovered the fascinations of the female sex. Their names still twinkle in his youthful letters: Rebecca Burwell, Susanna Porter, Alice Corbin, Nancy Randolph.
Tom spent the years between nineteen and twenty-three adoring Rebecca, an heiress from Yorktown whose parents were long dead. “Enthusiasm” was the word her contemporaries used to sum up Rebecca in later years. In the eighteenth century this meant a strongly emotional personality. In the early decades of the century, when the severe, controlled classicism of Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson dominated English taste and wild-eyed revivalists had Americans leaping and shouting in their churches, the word had a negative timbre. But by the 1760s, romanticism was in the air, and people with vivid emotions were not only tolerated, they were admired.
For two years, the romance percolated while Jefferson struggled to bring himself to ask the ultimate question. He rhapsodized in letters about “Belinda”—the exotic name he gave Rebecca. But something about her tied his tongue in knots. Perhaps it was the simple knowledge that marriage meant the end of youth, farewell to the bachelor’s freedom. Perhaps it was another hint that his parents’ marriage had not been very happy and he was wary of choosing a member of Virginia’s aristocracy as his wife.
For Jefferson, marriage also meant the extinction of his ambition to travel to Europe to see the monuments and palaces and paintings of England and France and Italy, about which he had read so much. Once, in a garden with Rebecca, he hinted that he would begin his grand tour at once if she promised to wait two years for his return. But her frown cast a shadow on this idea, and Jefferson returned to his studies. By this time he had passed from college Greek and Latin to the hard work of mastering “Old Coke”—Sir Edward Coke, the English jurist whose commentaries on the laws of England were famed for their crabbed style and “uncouth but cunning learning.” The young man had decided to become a lawyer.
Retreating to Shadwell, he lamented that he was certain to spend his time thinking of Rebecca “too often, I fear, for my peace of mind, and too often, I am sure, to get through Old Cooke [Coke] this winter.” A month later, he was writing plaintively to his friend John Page: “How does RB do? What do you think of my affair, or what would you advise me to do? Had I better stay here and do nothing or go down [to Williamsburg] and do less?” He decided on the first choice, and spent his days and nights struggling with Coke and planning a voyage in an imaginary ship called The Rebecca in which he would visit “England, Holland, France, Spain, Italy (where I would buy me a good fiddle) and Egypt.”2
Jefferson was not the first lover in history to be tongue-tied at the sight of his beloved. But the duration of his reluctance is significant. He seemed to revel in the idea of love, the beauty and transcendence of it, and to recoil or at least hesitate from its physical expression. He seemed to enjoy the brooding, the semisweet despair of his frustration. This experience was becoming familiar in the emerging romantic movement in Europe. Lovers devoted themselves to unattainable women and sometimes shunned consummation to prove the depths of their devotion. It would gradually become apparent that this division was an important part of Jefferson’s psyche.
Another college friend, Jacquelin Ambler, began pursuing Tom’s unattainable damsel. All through the following spring and summer, Jefferson stayed home, philosophizing: “If she consents I shall be happy, if she does not I must endeavor to be so as much as possible…. Perfect happiness, I believe, was never intended by the Deity to be the lot of any one of his creatures in this world.”
His friend Page, acting as both adviser and ambassador, warned Tom that Ambler was making ominous progress. So the philosophic lover came to Williamsburg for the social season. He was soon giving Ambler strong competition—until a climactic night at the Raleigh Tavern, the favorite gathering place of the young bloods and their belles. Arriving for a ball, the ladies were dressed in that “gay and splendid” style that made Virginia famous, their hair “craped” high with rolls on each side, topped by caps of gauze and lace. The men looked almost as splendid in clockwork silk stockings, lace ruffles, gold- and silver-laced cocked hats, and breeches and waistcoats of blue, green, scarlet, or peach.
Jefferson had spent the hours before the ball composing a whole series of romantic compliments, witty remarks, and bright observations for Rebecca. “I was prepared to say a great deal,” he told his friend John Page. “I had dressed up in my own mind such thoughts as occurred to me in as moving a language as I knew how, and expected to have performed in a tolerably creditable manner.”
But when the lover came face to face with Rebecca in her finery, “Good God!…a few broken sentences uttered in great disorder and interrupted with pauses of uncommon length were the too visible marks of my strange confusion!”
“Last night,” the despairing suitor groaned, “I never could have thought the succeeding sun would have seen me so wretched as I now am!”3
The following year, Rebecca became engaged to Jacquelin Ambler, and Jefferson was stricken with the first attack of what he called “the headache”—a disabling migraine-like disorder that would periodically torment him for the next forty years.4
III
Jefferson retreated once more to philosophizing—and making matches for his friends. He proposed to Sukey Potter for his fellow lawyer William Fleming. A few weeks later, he was cheerfully reporting to Page the fate of their friend Warner Lewis: “Poor fellow, never did I see one more sincerely captived in my life. He walked to Indian camp with her yesterday, by which means he had an opportunity of giving her two or three love squeezes by the hand, and like a true Arcadian swain, has been so enraptured ever since that he is company for no one.”5
These examples of romantic bliss did not impress Jefferson. After his disaster with Rebecca Burwell, he settled down to practicing law and enjoying life. He dated his Williamsburg letters “Devilsburgh” and needled friends such as Fleming for falling in love. Soon he was making cynical comments on the matchmaking all around him. When William Bland won Betsey Yates, Jefferson wryly remarked, “Whether it was for money, beauty, or principle, it will be so nice a dispute that no one will venture to pronounce.”6
The beleaguered Jefferson began copying from his favorite books dour quotations that traced a frequent evolution of the bachelor’s psychology:
Wed her?
No! Were she all desire could wish, as fair
As would the vainest of her sex be thought
With wealth beyond what woman’s pride could waste
She could not cheat me of my freedom7
Here, too, we can see a recoil from the power of the erotic, which compels a man to surrender to his physical desire for a woman. In the eighteenth century, this meant a surrender of not only sexual freedom, but a host of other freedoms. Jefferson placed more and more value on the company of his men friends, conveniently ignoring the fact that most of them had married. One day he was writing John Page about how much he enjoyed “the philosophical evenings” at Roswell. The next day he was copying, I’d leave the world for him that hates a woman, woman the fountain of all human frailty.
IV
The remarks about frailty may have special significance. Around this time, the roving bachelor became involved in an affair that he would bitterly regret in later years. One of his close friends in Albermarle County was Jack Walker. He had married a buxom miss named Betsey Moore and was living only a few miles from Shadwell. Young Walker was offered the job of clerk to a Virginia commission negotiating a treaty with the Indians at Fort Stanwix in northern New York. He made a will before he departed, making Jefferson his executor if some warrior planted a hatchet in his skull or he drowned in the cold, swift waters of the Mohawk River. During Jack’s four-month absence, Jefferson frequently visited Betsey and her baby daughter to make sure all was well.
What began as a favor to a friend suddenly erupted into desire. Jefferson had no interest in idealizing, much less marrying, Betsey Walker. Perhaps the sophisticated lawyer began assuring Betsey that there was nothing wrong with a little fling—everyone did it. To back him up, he may have quoted Ovid and other poets on the delights of illicit love. Perhaps Betsey encouraged him, either deliberately or inadvertently. Although they were supposed to feign disinterest, many women in the eighteenth century enjoyed sex, and Betsey had been married for well over a year. She may have resented her husband abandoning her for a jaunt to the northern woods.
We know only this much: after tantalizing him long enough to send the bachelor into a frenzy of frustration, Betsey said no at the crucial moment, and Jefferson retreated with nothing to show for his efforts but a wounded ego. Betsey waited twenty years to tell her husband about the episode, which did not prevent Jack Walker from making Jefferson’s next ten years miserable with public and private accusations. By that time Walker was an ally of Jefferson’s political enemies.8
Fortunately, at this point a healthier influence entered Jefferson’s life. He had another friend from Albermarle. His name was Dabney Carr, and he was also pursuing the law as a career. In 1765, Carr married Jefferson’s younger sister, Martha. Their happiness made a deep impression on the disillusioned bachelor. Writing to John Page, Jefferson confessed his amazement at the way Carr “speaks, thinks and dreams of nothing but his young son. This friend of ours…in a very small house, with a table, half a dozen chairs, and one or two servants, is the happiest man in the universe.”9
Seeing Page himself happily married, with two growing children and a wife who shared his love for books and good talk, also impressed Jefferson. After a 1770 visit to Roswell, the Page estate, he wrote, “I was always fond of philosophy even in its dryer forms, but from a ruby lip it comes with charms irresistible. Such a feast of sentiment must exhilarate life…at least as much as the feast of the sensualist shortens it.”
V
Seven months after he wrote these words, the fast-fading bachelor was singing love songs. In Martha Wayles Skelton, Jefferson found a woman who routed the cynic in his nature and renewed his yearning for ideal love. She lived in The Forest, a tall, rather ungainly wooden mansion on a knoll overlooking the broad James River, the main highway of Virginia. A fragile, delicately boned beauty of twenty-two, she was the widow of a college friend, Bathhurst Skelton, by whom she had a young son, John. Martha had in abundance the virtue that Jefferson put first in a list of wifely attributes he compiled for one of his many notebooks: sweetness of temper. Again, there is a suggestion that this was a virtue Jane Randolph Jefferson lacked.
Two other qualities were attractive to this most romantic of the founders: “spriteliness and sensibility.” The latter had become especially important to Virginians. It, too, was an offshoot of the growing fondness for emotion in poetry and novels. A woman, especially, felt inferior if she was deficient in sensibility. One belle reported proudly to a friend her reaction to the latest work of the popular author Lady Julia Mandeville: “I never cried more in my life reading a novel.”
To Jefferson’s delight, Martha shared his enthusiasm for the younger generation’s favorite novel, Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. This comic masterpiece was the black humor of its day, considered a little naughty by the straitlaced but fervently admired by the rising generation for the way it spoofed musty academic writing, windy doctors of medicine, boring old soldiers, and a dozen other favorite targets of the young, while bathing in sentiment such inevitabilities as true love and premature death.
Martha Wayles Skelton’s fondness for Tristram Shandy was not her only recommendation. She also shared Jefferson’s love of music, and played beautifully on the spinet and harpsichord. Add to these accomplishments a natural grace when walking and riding, large, expressive eyes of the richest shade of hazel, and luxuriant hair of the finest tinge of auburn, and you know why Thomas Jefferson was soon wearing out his horseflesh on the road to The Forest.
To his alarm, Jefferson discovered there were other suitors. Martha was not only beautiful, she was rich. Her father was, in Jefferson’s words, “a lawyer of much practice” who also made hefty profits as a slave trader. Martha had inherited still more wealth from her two-year marriage to the late Bathhurst Skelton. Martha’s industrious father had trained her “to business” and urged her to find a good manager for her estate. Jefferson certainly qualified in this category. At twenty-seven, he was already a member of the House of Burgesses and a well-established lawyer with a handsome income from his practice and his flourishing farms.
Jefferson soon had not the slightest doubt that he and Martha were in love. But he was confronted by an unexpected obstacle: John Wayles did not want him as a son-in-law. Wayles may have had higher ambitions for his daughter. Socially, the Jeffersons were comparative nobodies; their Randolph connection had been diluted by that family’s prodigious fecundity.
John Wayles may have contributed to Jefferson’s hostility to “the cyphers of the aristocracy” who had immense social influence in the Virginia of his youth. Not that Wayles himself was an aristocrat: he had come to Virginia as a servant boy and risen high thanks to his brainpower and industry. Unfortunately, that sort of man was even more likely to seek confirmation of his status by a connection with one of Virginia’s great families. On February 20, 1771, Jefferson complained to a friend about how “the unfeeling temper of a parent” could obstruct a marriage.10
There is another possible, even probable, explanation for John Wayles’s hostility. Like most first-generation English emigrants to America, Wayles may have retained a strong loyalty to the king. Jefferson was already an outspoken advocate of American rights in the imperial quarrel that had been simmering since 1765.
The love-smitten patriot did not let John Wayles’s opposition discourage him. Seldom did two weeks go by without seeing Jefferson and his traveling companion, the slave Jupiter, ride up the hill to The Forest. His suit may have been helped by a temporary suspension of transatlantic hostilities that began in 1770 and made some people think the dispute with the mother country would simply go away.
VI
Jefferson spread his devotion to Martha Wayles Skelton all over Virginia. In August 1771, he asked Robert Skipwith, who was courting Martha’s younger sister, Tabitha, to “offer prayers for me at that shrine to which though absent I pray continual devotions. In every scheme of happiness she is placed in the foreground of the picture, as the principal figure. Take that away, and there is no picture for me.”11
From Williamsburg in the spring of 1771 came a letter from Mrs. Drummond, an older woman friend for whom Jefferson had described Martha in extravagant terms. “Let me recollect your discription,” she wrote, “which bars all the romantic poetical ones I ever read…Thou wonderful young man, indeed I shall think spirits of an higher order inhabits yr aery mountains—or rather mountain, which I may contemplate but never aspire to…Persevere, thou good young man, persevere—she has good sence, and good nature and I hope will not refuse (the blessing shal I say) why not as I think it,—of yr hand, if her heart’s not ingaged allready.”12
The “aery mountain” Mrs. Drummond mentioned was a conical 857-foot peak little more than a mile outside Charlottesville. In their teens, Jefferson and Dabney Carr used to ramble the slopes of this oddly isolated little elevation, which Jefferson had inherited from his father. Jefferson found the crest of the mountain exhilarating. One day he told Carr that he planned to build a house on it. The idea might have remained an adolescent dream—but fire destroyed Shadwell in 1770, and his mountaintop house suddenly became a real possibility.
After a year of labor by slaves and white artisans, Jefferson had managed to construct only a one-room brick cottage. But he was so much in love with his mountain that he moved into the tiny house, vowing he would get “more elbow room this summer.” Only Martha Wayles Skelton and a handful of other people had any idea of the magnificent mansion Jefferson had already sketched and planned down to the precise proportions of every room. The gifts that would make him the father of American architecture were beginning to flower. In his college years he had pored over the sketchbooks of the great Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, and from them he had conceived an American style that would have the same chaste lines and carefully calculated symmetry.
In his bachelor days, Jefferson had called his mountain mansion “The Hermitage.” Now, with the prospect of Martha Wayles Skelton joining him, it became Monticello—a name with a sweetly romantic ring. But the name would mean nothing unless Jefferson remembered Mrs. Drummond’s advice to persevere. From England he ordered an expensive “fortepiano,” the very latest in musical instruments. It was obviously intended for only one player. He also asked his British purchasing agent to search the herald’s office for the coat of arms of the Jefferson family. “It is possible there may be none,” he wrote. “If so, I would with your assistance become a purchaser, having [Laurence] Sterne’s word for it that a coat of arms may be purchased as cheap as any other coat.”13
The suitor was straining to persuade John Wayles that the Jefferson family lineage was not a wholly worthless Welsh concoction, only a few millimeters above the subterranean Irish. All these efforts, plus more visits to The Forest, had their inevitable effect. John Wayles realized that his daughter had no intention of loving anyone but Thomas Jefferson. On November 11, 1771, the no longer unfeeling parent gave his permission. The young couple set the wedding date for January 1, 1772—visible proof of their impatience. An exuberant Jefferson scattered two- and three-pound tips to The Forest’s servants and galloped back to Albermarle to prepare his family for the wedding.
VII
As the happy day approached, Jefferson put his legal training to good use. He wrote out the license-bond for the wedding, in which he and his best man, Francis Eppes (his future wife’s brother-in-law), pledged fifty pounds to support their joint declaration that there was no known cause to obstruct a marriage between “the aforementioned Thomas Jefferson and Martha Skelton.” After Skelton, Jefferson wrote a word that again suggested a division between spiritual and sexual love in his soul: spinster. Someone else, probably his best man, crossed it out and wrote widow. Why was Jefferson unconsciously denying that Martha had already submitted to another man’s desire? Apparently he could not tolerate the thought—even though there had been living proof—her son, John Skelton, who had died six months earlier, in June 1771.14
The wedding celebration lasted two and a half weeks—not unusual, and proof of how much Virginians loved a party. Not until January eighteenth did the newlyweds set out for Monticello. On the way they made a sentimental stop at Tuckahoe, where Jefferson had spent some of his boyhood while his father managed the estate of his friend and in-law, William Randolph. From there they set out on the final miles to Monticello, undeterred by a veritable blizzard, which forced them to shift from phaeton to horses.
It was midnight when they reached the whitened mountaintop. Jefferson led Martha to the one-room brick cottage where he had pictured himself whiling away his days as a bachelor hermit. While Martha shivered beneath her cloak, the bridegroom built a fire. Soon a roaring blaze sent waves of warmth and light against the walls of their refuge, turning the blizzard’s howl into a curiously comforting sound. They lay down before the blaze wrapped in each other’s arms.
Suddenly Jefferson leaped up, remembering a hidden treasure. From behind a shelf of books he flourished a half bottle of wine. With bodies warmed and glasses full, they lolled before the fire. Martha’s auburn head bent low, her hazel eyes shining over the latest sketches of the magnificent house in which Jefferson vowed they would grow old together. It was a night they would remember for the rest of their lives.15