In the months after Martha Wayles’s death, Thomas Jefferson’s friends launched a campaign to lure him away from Monticello, a place that could do nothing for the moment but deepen his despair. In the Continental Congress, James Madison persuaded Congress to reappoint Jefferson as a commissioner to negotiate a peace treaty. Madison immediately wrote to Edmund Randolph in Virginia: “The resolution passed a few minutes ago…Let it be known to Mr. Jefferson as quickly as secrecy will permit. An official notification will follow…This will prepare him for it.” Knowing Jefferson’s sensitivity about his inglorious governorship, Madison added, “It passed unanimously, and without a single adverse remark.”1
The news reached Jefferson at a plantation near Monticello, where he was having his three daughters inoculated against smallpox. In a letter to a French friend, he confessed he was “a little emerging from the stupor of mind which had rendered me as dead to the world as she was whose loss occasioned it.” That same day he wrote to Madison and to the president of Congress, accepting the appointment. Leaving his daughters with Francis and Elizabeth Eppes, he journeyed to Philadelphia and then to Baltimore, where a French ship was supposed to take him to France. But before he could sail, word arrived in America that Benjamin Franklin and his fellow diplomats had signed a satisfactory peace treaty, and he returned to Monticello.
Madison, back in Virginia, persuaded the state legislature to appoint Jefferson to Congress. He accepted, but soon found that politics did little to ease the gloom that shrouded his spirit. He was tormented by migraine headaches and a host of minor illnesses common to people suffering from depression. Nevertheless, he performed admirably and industriously as a drafter of committee reports and bills. In the spring of 1784, the delegates chose Jefferson to join Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in negotiating commercial treaties with other European states. The politicians were trying to loosen Britain’s grip on America’s import and export trade. Again, Jefferson accepted, and after two false starts, he arrived in France to begin a five-year exploration of the Old World that he had dreamed of making since the age of twenty.2
Now he was an older, wiser, and much sadder man. To lessen the pain of separation, he took his twelve-year-old daughter Martha with him. He left the two younger girls, Mary, whom Jefferson called “Polly,” and Lucy Elizabeth, whom he called “Lu,” with their aunt, Elizabeth Eppes. Jefferson also took one of Elizabeth Hemings’s sons, James, to Paris with him. A bright, lively young man, James had welcomed his master’s offer to apprentice him to a French traiteur (caterer), where he could learn the art of French cooking.
Benjamin Franklin and John Adams gave Jefferson the warmest of greetings and opened doors for him throughout Paris. Soon Jefferson was enjoying the French talent for charming visitors. “They were so polite,” he remarked in one letter, “that it seems as if one might glide through a whole life among them without a jostle.” He also liked their temperance. He seldom if ever saw anyone drunk. One of his favorite people was the Comtesse de la Rochefoucauld d’Anville, immensely dignified and sarcastic but with an amazing enthusiasm for America. Her son, Louis-Alexandre, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld d’Anville, lived in a magnificent mansion, where Jefferson met intellectuals such as the Marquis de Condorcet, one of the philosophes who were hoping to transform French society. Pretty, charming Madame de Corny, wife of one of the Marquis de Lafayette’s closest friends, liked Jefferson so much that they began walking together in the leafy Bois de Boulougne. Jefferson was delighted by her exquisite femininity, which she combined with a penetrating intelligence.3
Young Martha Jefferson, still very much a country girl, was more amused than dazzled by French femininity. She and her father were barely settled in their lodgings, she told a friend, when “we were obliged to send immediately for the stay maker, the mantua maker, the millner and even a shoemaker before I could go out.” She also submitted to a friseur (hairdresser) once, but “soon got rid of him and turned my hair down in spite of all they could say.” Thereafter she put off Monsieur Friseur as long as possible, “for I think it always too soon to suffer.”4
With the help of Lafayette’s wife, Jefferson soon found a school for Martha, the Abbaye de Panthemont. The abbess, the father was assured, “was a woman of the world who understands young Protestant girls.” Martha did not speak French, and none of her fellow pupils spoke English. But in the Abbaye lived fifty or more older women “pensioners” from good families, who quickly taught her the language. Soon everyone called her “Jeffy,” and she was “charmed with my situation.” Her father visited her often and found no fault with the education she was receiving.5
II
Outwardly, most people saw a serene, confident diplomat, vastly enjoying the architecture, the paintings, the plays, and operas of Paris, a city that was the artistic center of the civilized world. But for a year, Jefferson found it difficult and frequently impossible to shake off his depression. In November 1784, he wrote to a friend that he had “relapsed into that state of ill health, in which you saw me in Annapolis (where Congress met in 1783) but more severe. I have had few hours wherein I could do anything.”
In January 1785 came a devastating letter: little “Lu” Jefferson was dead, “a martyr to the complicated evils of teething, worms and hooping cough.” Jefferson relapsed into almost total gloom. He was sure his “sun of happiness” had clouded over, “never again to brighten.” Throughout the winter, he was dogged by migraine, poor digestion, and lassitude. John Adams’s wife, Abigail, who had become fond of him, reported he was “very weak and feeble” in March. Jefferson told his friend James Monroe he was “confined the greater part” of the winter.6
Spring sunshine—and new responsibilities—lifted his spirits. Benjamin Franklin returned to America, and Jefferson was appointed ambassador to France in his place. John Adams went to London as the ambassador to Britain. Jefferson soon realized his new role was “a lesson in humility.” When a French man or woman asked if he was replacing Dr. Franklin, Jefferson invariably replied, “No one can replace him. I am his successor.”
This reply underscores an aspect of Jefferson’s career that has escaped almost everyone’s attention. In the Revolution, he had not achieved a degree of fame even close to the dimensions of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. The leadership and political skills of these two men had sustained the Revolutionary struggle. Thanks to Lafayette, Jefferson’s role as the author of the Declaration of Independence was better known in France than in America. His part in the following seven years of struggle with Britain had been negligible, and even tinged with failure, thanks to his poor performance as Virginia’s governor.
III
After Jefferson had been in Paris almost a year, he began to pass judgment on the country he had so long yearned to visit. The power and privileges of the king and the ruling class of aristocrats troubled him. He told one American correspondent that “the great mass of the people were suffering under physical and moral oppression.” Even the nobility did not possess the happiness “enjoyed in America by every class of people.” The older nobles never stopped intriguing for political power. Younger aristocrats spent most of their time pursuing beautiful women. “Conjugal love” between a husband and a wife was virtually nonexistent. He contrasted this national tendency to the American ideal of a happy marriage.7
Perhaps influenced by William Temple Franklin’s inglorious example, Jefferson declined to encourage young Americans to come to Europe. He was particularly emphatic on this point with his favorite nephew, Peter Carr, who corresponded with him throughout Jefferson’s stay in France. Jefferson was full of advice to Carr on what he should be studying to prepare himself to become a man of distinction. He had asked his friend James Madison to become Peter’s tutor, and he shipped him boxes of books from Paris. He had intimated when he left Monticello that he might invite him for a visit. But when Carr asked if the time had come, Jefferson informed him that he was now “thoroughly cured of that idea.”
Jefferson explained why in scathing terms. If he came to Paris, Carr would probably pick up habits that would “poison” his spiritual and psychological health. Young Americans tend to succumb to “the strongest of all human passions” and become involved in “female intrigue[s] destructive of his and others’ happiness.” Or he would develop “a passion for whores destructive of his health.” Either route taught the young American to consider “fidelity to the marriage bed as an ungentlemanly practice.” These temptations were almost impossible to resist with “beauty begging on every street.” Peter did not need foreign travel to make himself “precious to your country, dear to your friends, and happy within yourself.”8
Young Martha Jefferson did not view French morals as gloomily as her father. This may have been a tribute to Jefferson’s success in insulating her from the worst aspects of Parisian amorality—the prostitutes swarming on the boulevards, the brothels on the side streets. “There was a gentleman a few days ago,” she told her father, “that killed himself because he thought his wife did not love him. They had been married ten years. I believe that if every husband in Paris was to do as much, there would be nothing but widows left.”9
Jefferson was also uneasy with the Gallic fondness for racy jokes and overt sexual references. His secretary, William Short, reported he “blushed like a boy” when a French friend made an off-color remark. But he was not a puritan like John Adams, frowning disapproval on everyone who yielded or even admitted to sexual desire. Although he may have feared the worst, the new ambassador made no objection when William Short began a liaison with the beautiful young wife of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld. Eventually the affair plunged Short into a decade of misery—fulfilling Jefferson’s remark to Peter Carr that such intrigues destroyed happiness on both sides of the erotic equation.
Although Jefferson commented acidly on infidelity as a way of life in most upper-class French marriages, he was far more disturbed by French women’s passion for politics. He repeatedly deplored their intrigues and interference, calling them “Amazons” and contrasting them to American wives, who were “angels,” faithful to their spouses and soothers of their husbands’ nerves when they “returned [home] ruffled from political debate.” He persisted in this opinion, even when he met and enjoyed the company of an extremely political American woman in Paris, Abigail Adams. The intensity of his feelings on this subject renews the suspicion that a woman in his own family did not approve of his revolutionary activities.10
In spite of his negative opinions, the ambassador had a lively social life. He was constantly invited to dine with the Marquis de Lafayette and his charming wife, Adrienne. Jefferson was already admired as the author of the Declaration of Independence when news from Virginia added to his reputation. James Madison reported that Jefferson’s proposal to establish freedom of religion had passed the state legislature. French intellectuals, eager to escape the grip of the Catholic Church, were enthralled.
Yet Jefferson’s melancholy frequently returned to haunt him. “I am burning the candle of life without present pleasure or future object,” he told one American friend. “I take all the fault on myself, as it is impossible to be among people who wish more to make one happy.”11
IV
Lurking just around a bend in time was a cure for this recurring gloom. Her name was Maria Cosway. Jefferson met her one late summer day in 1786 strolling in the Halle aux Bles, Paris’s great domed marketplace, on the arm of the American painter John Trumbull. A mass of golden curls crowned an oval face and exquisite rosebud lips. Liquid blue eyes shaded by an intriguing melancholy and a soft, fluttery voice that spoke English with a piquant Italian accent completed a style so meltingly feminine, the ambassador was mesmerized.
Maria had been the rage of fashionable London for several seasons. She had been born in Italy of Anglo-Irish parents and was in Paris with her husband, the miniature painter Richard Cosway, who stood beside her in an almost blinding array of colors. One of the great fops of the era, Cosway was a gnomish little man twice her age. He strutted around in “macaroni”-style outfits—mulberry silk coats embroidered in scarlet strawberries—and purple shoes.
Jefferson barely glanced at Mr. Cosway. Enthralled by Maria, he persuaded the Cosways and Trumbull to revise their social calendar for the day while he did likewise and declared himself ready and eager to be Maria’s eyes and ears for a tour of Paris. (It was her first visit.) He hustled them into his ambassadorial carriage, and they rattled off to the royal park of St. Cloud, with its sun-dappled green lanes and magnificent fountains. They dined and strolled through the gallery of the Royal Palace, with its dazzling mythological murals. Back in Paris in the dusk, Jefferson led them to a pleasure garden designed by two ingenious Italians, featuring spectacular fireworks that created “pantomimes” in the night sky—Vulcan toiling at his forge, Mars in combat. Maria cried out with pleasure at these heavenly visions. The day ended with a visit to the most gifted harpist in Europe, who told Maria about his improvements in her favorite instrument while his wife played some of his exquisite compositions.12
For the next two weeks, the ambassador’s carriage stopped at the Cosways’ house almost every day to whirl Maria off for another six- or seven-hour tour of Paris or its environs. Richard Cosway was busy painting miniatures for a royal patron, the Duke D’Orleans and his family, and John Trumbull returned to London to paint (at Jefferson’s suggestion) “The Declaration of Independence,” which would make him famous. But the loss of these chaperones did not deter Maria and her enthralled admirer from spending whole days together, visiting new Parisian wonders such as the Bagatelle, a park containing exotic gardens and an elegant casino. They enjoyed cold suppers at a small inn near Marly-le-Roi, the favorite palace of long dead King Louis XIV, where pavilions were crowded with beautiful statues of gods and demigods.
Maria told Jefferson the story of her unhappy life. Educated in an Italian convent, she had seriously considered becoming a nun. Her Protestant mother had forbidden her even to think of it and when her father died, took her to London, where for several years she had scores of wealthy sons of noblemen and East India Company merchants panting after her. She was repelled by all of them, and her mother, perhaps to punish her, perhaps feeling it did not make much difference, ordered her to marry the physically repellent Cosway. Once more she obeyed, but her unhappiness only deepened. Cosway encouraged her to display her considerable talents as a painter and musician, but he was flagrantly unfaithful with lovers of both sexes and frequently rude. She was an ornament for his drawing room, nothing more.
Pity blended with the desire that Maria’s beauty was stirring in Jefferson’s psyche. There was an innocence about her that made her Italian-flavored coquetry seem harmless, unintentional, even when it was wreaking havoc on his emotions. He gazed into her mournful eyes as she told him that she yearned to do something important with her life. How she envied Jefferson, who had already helped to create a new nation and written some of its laws! As he listened and sympathized, Jefferson saw “music, modesty, beauty and that softness of disposition” that stirred memories of Martha Wayles Jefferson. He began reading poetry and copying passages in which “every word teems with latent meaning.” Some were clearly references to Martha:
Ye who e’er lost an angel, pity me!
O how self fettered was my groveling soul!
To every sod which wraps the dead…
Other selections seemed to reflect his desire for Maria:
And I loved her the more when I heard
Such tenderness fall from her tongue.
But still other selections suggested a contrary emotion:
But be still my fond heart! This emotion give o’er’
Fain would’st thou forget thou must love her no more.
Jefferson continued to see Maria almost daily. He talked vividly about the natural beauties of Virginia, its rivers and mountains that would make perfect subjects for her brush—she was especially skilled in painting landscapes. A glimpse of Jefferson’s high spirits is visible in a letter he wrote to Abigail Adams in London in which he declared that the French “have as much happiness in one year as an Englishman in ten.” Everywhere he looked in Paris, he saw “singing, dancing, laugh[ing], and merriment.”
This ebullience may explain what happened on September 18, 1786, as he and Maria strolled along the Seine. Full of exuberant energy, the no longer young ambassador tried to vault a fence or hedge, forgetting that Virginians, virtually born on horseback, were by no means agile on their own feet. He may have been telling Maria about the special thrill of the hunt, the soaring leaps over ditches and fences, and the crunching contact with earth on the other side. In Paris it was the ambassador, not his horse, who crashed to earth. When Jefferson staggered to his feet, his right hand dangled helplessly. He made light of it and strolled cheerfully to his own house, where he told Maria he had dislocated his wrist and had better call a surgeon. He would send her home in his carriage.13
For two weeks Jefferson was in constant pain. He slept little and no doubt wondered why he had made such a fool of himself. He was not a boy of twenty; he was forty-four years old. Maria sent him sympathetic notes and visited him several times, but a sickroom was hardly the place for further romance. Not until October fourth did Jefferson venture out with Maria again. It was her last day in Paris, and she had begged him to share it with her. The jouncing carriage jarred and possibly dislocated the damaged wrist again; Jefferson spent the night in agony. But another note from Maria, begging to see him one more time, nerved him to call his carriage and join the Cosways as they began their journey to Antwerp to board a ship for London. Maria had told him that her husband had promised to bring her back to Paris in April. “I…shall long for next spring,” her note all but sighed. They had a last meal together in the village of St. Denis and exchanged wrenching farewells.
V
Jefferson spent the next two weeks writing one of the longest, most revealing letters of his life. He began by telling Maria that he had stumbled back to his carriage after saying goodbye to her, “more dead than alive.” At home, “solitary and sad,” he sat before the fireside and heard a dialogue begin between his head and his heart:
Head: Well, friend, you seem to be in a pretty trim.
Heart: I am indeed the most wretched of all earthly beings. Overwhelmed with grief, every fiber of my frame distended beyond its natural powers to bear, I would willingly meet whatever catastrophe should leave me no more to feel or to fear.
Head: These are the eternal consequences of your warmth and precipitation. This is one of the scrapes into which you are ever leading us. You confess your follies indeed: but still you hug and cherish them, and no reformation can be hoped where there is no repentance.
So it went for twelve electrifying pages, written with Jefferson’s left hand. The heart blamed all its troubles on Jefferson’s head, which had taken them to visit the Halle aux Bles, the marketplace where he had met the Cosways, because the head wanted to sketch its magnificent dome. The head acerbically retorted that a chance encounter with a beautiful woman was no excuse for succumbing to a frenzy of love.
Opinions of this remarkable document have differed almost as violently as Jefferson’s head differed with his heart. Some people have called it a great love letter. Others are put off by the way Jefferson frequently speaks of his fondness for both Maria and her husband. This complaint is easily dismissed. Jefferson was protecting both himself and Maria from scandal if a stranger or, worse, a newspaper got hold of the letter. But this dialogue between head and heart remains a very strange love letter.
Most love letters passionately avow devotion and adoration without any qualification. Those are the ones recipients save for the rest of their lives. But this dialogue between the head and the heart does not affirm that sort of passion. On the contrary, the heart’s protestations of its rights and pleasures are repeatedly rebuked and checked by the head.
Here is the head telling the heart how to find tranquility:
The art of life is the art of avoiding pain: and he is the best pilot who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it [life] is beset…. Those which depend on ourselves, are the only pleasures a wise man will count on: for nothing is ours which another may deprive us of. Hence the inestimable value of intellectual pleasures. Ever in our power, always leading us to something else and never cloying, we ride, serene and sublime above the concerns of this mortal world.
Carried away by its own eloquence, the head goes much too far. It tells the heart to avoid friendships. Friends get sick, die, lose their money or their wives, and require exhausting amounts of sympathy. The heart replies eloquently that there is deep pleasure in consoling a friend or caring for him during an illness. Working itself into a fury, the heart decries “sublimated philosophers” and their “frigid speculations.” If just once they experienced the “solid pleasure of one generous spasm of the heart,” they would instantly change their arid minds. Defiantly, the heart tells the head it intends to go on loving people, especially Mrs. Cosway, who has promised to return in the spring. He is sure she (and her husband) will reappear in Paris’s May sunshine. Even if she fails to come and fate places them on opposite sides of the globe, his “affections shall pervade the whole mass to reach them.”14 With those brave words, the heart wins a victory of sorts. But it is hardly a resounding one. Perhaps the best proof that this is a very special kind of love letter is the lady’s reaction to it. “How I wish I could answer that dialogue,” Maria wrote wistfully. “But I honestly think my heart is invisible and mute….”15
Maria Cosway was not a stupid woman. She had no difficulty reading the fundamental message Jefferson was sending her: My heart adores you as an ideal, as a woman who stirs my soul. But my wary, controlling head will never allow me to propose a flight to some hidden valley in Italy or the south of France, or a headlong escape to America, where we will defy your despicable husband and the rest of the supposedly respectable world in days and nights of rapturous love. This was the sort of thing an impassioned lover would propose—but the widowed Thomas Jefferson was not this kind of man.
Using the same guarded style that Jefferson relied on to conceal his personal message, Maria wrote that her muted heart was bursting “with a variety of sentiments”—her sense of loss “at separating from the friends I left in Paris”—and her joy “of meeting my friends in London.” It was enough to “tear my mind to pieces,” but she would not go into it because he was “such a master on this subject”—presumably a mind torn to pieces—“Whatever I may say will appear trifling.” This is not the language of a woman aflame with passion. If anything they are the words of a somewhat disappointed woman, who only dimly understands the reason for her dismay.
A year later Maria Cosway returned to Paris, without her husband. She stayed almost six months—and saw Thomas Jefferson only twice, both times at large dinner parties, one of which he gave for her. They corresponded off and on for the next forty years. Their letters were affectionate, but there was no attempt to rekindle the aborted passion of Paris.16
VI
Meanwhile, Jefferson became deeply involved in negotiations with a much younger member of the opposite sex. He decided that nine-year-old Mary Jefferson (now called Maria, probably at her insistence) must come to Europe. Her presence would complete the family circle and relieve him of the dread of receiving a message that she had followed little Lu into the shadows. Jefferson’s letters to his daughter Martha suggested a streak of sternness in his parenting—he was constantly exhorting her to study hard, to become an accomplished woman. With Maria, Jefferson was the total opposite. Miss Polly, as she was often called, was to be persuaded, not ordered, to embark for Paris. It is more than a little interesting that Polly/ Maria was often described as an almost exact replica of her mother both in looks and temperament.
The young lady turned out to be a challenge that taxed Jefferson’s formidable rhetorical powers. In his first letter, he promised her innumerable French dolls and other toys in Paris, plus the chance to learn to play the harpsichord, to draw, to dance, to read and talk French, to see her sister Martha and, it need hardly be added, her lonely father. Maria replied: I am very sorry that you have sent for me. I don’t want to go to France. I had rather stay with Aunt Eppes. Further attempts at parental persuasion got similar replies. I cannot go to France and hope that you and sister Patsy are well. The final riposte was: I want to see you and sister Patsy but you must come to Uncle Eppes’s house.17
The baffled Jefferson finally resorted to deception. A ship was chosen, passage was booked, and her Eppes cousins joined Polly aboard the vessel for several days before it sailed. They cheerfully romped above and below decks. On the day of departure, Polly was allowed to play until night shrouded the ship and she tottered into a cabin and fell asleep. When she awoke, the ship was at sea. With her was Sally Hemings, a pretty mulatto girl of fourteen, the youngest daughter of Elizabeth Hemings. Sally had been pressed into service at the last moment, when an older, more reliable nurse became ill and could not make the voyage.
Polly (Maria) became the pet of the ship. She grew so attached to the captain and his crew that by the time the voyage ended, there was more trouble prying her off the vessel. The captain took her and Sally to London and handed them over to Abigail Adams, who was soon telling Jefferson that Polly “was a child of the quickest sensibility and the maturest understanding that I have ever met with for years…. I never felt so attached to a child in my life on so short an acquaintance.” She described her escort, Sally Hemings, as “a girl of about 15 or 16” but “quite a child.” Abigail reported that the captain of the ship had said Sally had been useless as Polly’s nurse and he might as well bring her back to America on his return voyage. But Abigail thought she seemed fond of Polly and “appears good naturd.”
Abigail—and Polly—assumed that Jefferson would rush from Paris to collect her. Instead he sent his French butler, Petit, whose English was primitive. When Petit arrived, Polly threw another tantrum and refused to leave Abigail Adams. In fact, she would not let that lady out of her sight, complaining bitterly of the way she had been deceived into leaving her Aunt Eppes.
Polly/Maria told Abigail she did not remember her father but had been taught to think of him with affection. Now she wondered whether that was another deception. He had forced her to leave all her friends in Virginia. She had expected him to come to England for her. Instead he had sent a man who could barely speak English! Her indignation inspired John Adams to write Jefferson a reproachful letter for failing to “come for your daughter in person.” It took the better part of a week to persuade Polly to depart for Paris with Petit and Sally Hemings. At one point, she threw her arms around Abigail and cried, “Why are you sending me away—when I’ve just begun to love you!” Before the battle ended, Abigail was more distraught than Polly.18
Jefferson was totally delighted by this imperious young lady. He wrote to Abigail Adams about how Polly “flushed, she whitened, she flushed again” when she received a letter from Abigail. The pleasure Jefferson took in this performance leaves little doubt that in looks and manner, Maria was a vivid copy of her dead mother. After a week of showing her the sights of Paris, he enrolled her in the convent school with Patsy (Martha), where, he told Mrs. Eppes, she soon became “a universal favorite with the young ladies and their mistresses.”19
VII
For the next year, Jefferson’s personal life was overshadowed by another historical upheaval. Looming bankruptcy began to ravage the French government. Primarily the crisis was due to their antiquated tax system, which exempted most of the aristocrats from paying anything. The king was forced to summon a parliament called the Estates General to overhaul the system. The Estates numbered twelve hundred members, much too large an assembly to function efficiently as a governing body. Soon there were four distinct groups within the conclave, and Jefferson feared the possibility of civil war.
Meanwhile, the independent United States of America was entering a new phase of its existence. A convention met in Philadelphia in 1787, and Jefferson’s friend James Madison had played a leading role in creating a new federal constitution for the republic, far stronger than the Articles of Confederation under which the Continental Congress had labored so ineffectually. Elections had been held, and a new government, with George Washington as the first president, had been chosen by the voters.
This transformation of the federal government made Jefferson decide it was time to return to America. He was also growing concerned about his neglected farms. The income from them had dwindled toward zero. Another reason was his daughters. They were becoming more French than American. A sort of climax in this department was Martha’s announcement that she wanted to join the Roman Catholic Church and become a nun. Jefferson went to her convent school and had a talk with the abbess in charge. She agreed that it might be best if Martha and Polly withdrew from the school. Jefferson would supervise their education until they returned to America.
Another problem confronted Jefferson within the walls of his ambassadorial residence. James Hemings informed him that he did not want to go home. In Paris, slavery had been banned by the local Parlement (a semi-judicial ruling council), although it was tolerated elsewhere in France and was the economic backbone of the nation’s overseas empire. James and his sister Sally were theoretically free. James did not want to relinquish this status for slavery in Virginia. Whether Sally Hemings also voiced a similar desire is less certain. James had a skill that would enable him to support himself. Both Hemingses had probably made contact with some of the estimated one thousand free blacks in Paris, where friends may have urged James and perhaps Sally to assert their freedom.20
Jefferson talked James out of this reach for independence with a combination of promises and appeals to his gratitude. James had become ill not long after he arrived in Paris, and Jefferson had spent a considerable amount of money on a doctor and nurse to help him regain his health. The ambassador had also paid for James’s cooking lessons with one of the best chefs in Paris. If James returned to America, Jefferson promised him his freedom as soon as he trained one of his younger brothers to do the cooking for Monticello. Jefferson also promised to pay James a salary, which would enable him to save enough money to sustain himself when he went looking for work as a free man. Without James to support and protect her, Sally Hemings had little choice but to return to Monticello with her brother.
As Jefferson’s agreement to free James Hemings made clear, he thought third-generation mulattoes should not be enslaved in America or in Paris, and he may have also told Sally this. In any event, he would never have allowed an attractive teenage girl to remain alone in Paris. She would very likely have become the mistress of a predatory young Frenchman, who would discard her after a few years and consign her to the ranks of Paris’s sixty thousand prostitutes—the fate of many of the “opera girls” who had stirred Abigail Adams’s sympathy.
The ambassador sailed for home on October 22, 1789, reserving cabins aboard the ship for his daughters and Sally Hemings, who probably functioned as their maid. He asked that Sally be given a cabin near them. Arriving in Virginia after a smooth twenty-nine-day voyage, he was astonished to read in the newspapers rumors that President Washington was going to appoint him secretary of state. He had planned to stay in America only long enough to get his daughters settled—probably with their Aunt Eppes, where Polly had been so happy—and restore his farms to prosperity with the help of expert overseers. He assumed he would return to France as ambassador. He felt that he was uniquely qualified to cement good relations between America and Revolutionary France.
At Eppington, the Eppes plantation, he found a letter from President Washington confirming the newspaper reports. Jefferson’s admiration for Washington was so strong that he soon agreed to become secretary of state. By this time he was back at Monticello. As the Jeffersons’ carriage appeared at the foot of the mountain, the slaves raced to welcome him in their brightest Sunday clothes. Cheering and shouting, they unhitched the horses, and the men hauled the carriage up the steep winding road to the summit. “When the door of the carriage was opened,” Martha Jefferson later recalled, “They crowd[ed] around him, some…crying, others laughing.” They lifted the protesting Jefferson in their arms and carried him to the portico. Martha and Maria Jefferson and James and Sally Hemings received equally warm greetings.21
There was much more than affection for Jefferson involved in this greeting. If Jefferson had died in Paris, or had been lost at sea, Monticello’s slaves would have faced catastrophe. They would have been sold or handed over to Jefferson’s heirs, with only minimal attention to preserving families or rewarding those who had established themselves as artisans or acquired other skills such as weaving cloth. Jefferson’s safe return after five long years of uncertainty about their fates was more than enough reason to celebrate.
As Jefferson struggled to deal with the painful memories Monticello evoked, and make some progress on restoring the productivity of his farms, he had a surprise that gladdened his heart. Toward the end of December, Monticello had a visitor—a tall, dark-haired, swarthy young gentleman named Thomas Mann Randolph. He was warmly welcomed as the son of a man who had been Jefferson’s playmate in his boyhood, when he spent seven years at the Randolph plantation, Tuckahoe. Thomas Mann Randolph’s grandfather, William, had been Peter Jefferson’s closest friend. When the elder Randolph died suddenly at age thirty-three, he had asked Peter in his will to take over the plantation and raise his orphaned children. Their mother had died a year or two before her husband.
The younger Randolph had conducted a lengthy correspondence with Jefferson while he was studying in Edinburgh. For a while, Jefferson had more or less taken charge of his education. After some pleasant small talk, Randolph informed Jefferson that he hoped to become his son-in-law. He had met Martha Jefferson not long after she arrived home, and the two young people had felt an instant attraction. One of Randolph’s appeals for Martha was his European education. She had not been enthusiastic about returning to rural Albermarle County after five years of sophisticated Paris. Like Martha’s father, Randolph was fascinated by politics, and he hoped to make it his career. He also had a strong interest in science and its Virginia subdivision, scientific farming. Almost as important was his six-foot-two-inch height. Martha had inherited her father’s long-limbed body and dreaded the thought of marrying someone who was noticeably shorter than she. At least as influential was their families’ long and intimate friendship.22
Jefferson gave his warmest assent to the match—and immediately began trying to arrange things so that Martha would remain within his paternal orbit. He urged Randolph to buy land near Monticello. The young man’s father owned an excellent farm, Edgehill, only a few miles away. For the moment, Martha—and her husband—resisted his persuasion. Randolph’s father had given him land in a distant section of Virginia and the young people, in a burst of independence, announced they were going to start their lives together far from both their homes.
Jefferson cheerfully acquiesced, but he by no means abandoned his determination to retain his daughter. For the moment, politics was absorbing his attention. He was about to depart for New York to join President Washington’s cabinet; he would be gone for months, possibly years, which would make an objection to Martha’s departure seem especially disagreeable. He contented himself with a son-in-law he liked and a daughter aglow with love.
In New York he wrote a revealing letter to Martha: “I feel heavily these separations from you. It is a…consolation to know you are happier and to see a prospect of its continuance in the prudence and even temper of both Mr. Randolph and yourself…. Continue to love me as you have done, and to render my life a blessing by the prospect it may hold up to me of seeing you happy.”
Martha promptly replied: “I hope you have not given over coming to Virginia this fall as I assure you my dear papa my happiness can never be complete without your company.” She assured him that “Mr. Randolph” was a wonderful husband and she was determined to please him in “every thing.” All other aspects of her life would be secondary to that goal “except my love for you.”23
Meanwhile, Jefferson had decided to let Maria Jefferson, now thirteen, stay where she had been happiest—with her Aunt Eppes and her cousins at Eppington. He had taken Martha to Philadelphia with him when she was the same age, to advance her education. But Jefferson had long since realized that Maria was a totally different child who needed the companionship of loving friends and family to keep her contented. This solution worked so well that before the end of the decade Maria would marry her cousin, Jack Eppes.
With the two most important people in his life in happy situations, Jefferson headed for New York and its politics. He was a man with a mission. Conversations with James Madison, already his closest friend and advisor, had convinced him that there were tendencies in the United States that had to be exposed and defeated, lest the American Revolution end in betrayal of the ideals he had enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. In a speech in Alexandria, on the way to New York, he had told his audience the Republican form of government was the only one that was not “at open or secret war” with the rights of mankind.
On March 21, 1790, Jefferson reported to President Washington as a citizen soldier of the republic, ready for duty. He would soon discover that this duty was far more complex and emotionally abrasive than any task he had yet confronted. He would find himself virtually at war with men who had shared the task of achieving independence. His friendships with John Adams and George Washington would be ruined by vicious partisan politics. Worst of all, Jefferson would face devastating accusations about his personal life that threatened his growing fame as a founding father.