In ten years, Thomas Jefferson went from an untried, relatively unknown secretary of state in George Washington’s cabinet to president of the United States. This amazing ascent owed a great deal to the way the Declaration of Independence became a major force in American politics. Almost from the moment Jefferson joined President Washington’s administration, he clashed with Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton about their radically differing views of the French Revolution and America’s political and economic future. As we have seen, from this conflict emerged two political parties, something the founders had never anticipated and at first deplored. When the Federalists flaunted the Constitution as their handiwork, the Jeffersonian Republicans retaliated with the Declaration of Independence as their sacred document and lavished praise on Jefferson as the author, adding cubits to his stature.1
As the political discussions grew more intense, anything Jefferson said or wrote became grist for the journalistic slander mills. One editor printed a letter he had dashed off to an Italian friend, Phillip Mazzei, which included a derogatory comment on Washington. Mazzei leaked it to a newspaper in Europe and it soon crossed the Atlantic. In the letter, Jefferson criticized America’s declaration of neutrality in the war between Britain and Revolutionary France and described Washington as an “apostate” from the cause of liberty. He had been a “Samson” in the war for independence, but as president had allowed his head to be shaved “by the harlot England.” The overheated comparison ended Jefferson’s friendship with Washington. In Philadelphia, where Jefferson was serving as vice president during John Adams’s presidency, people crossed the street to avoid speaking to him.2
Jefferson became involved with Scottish-born James Thomson Callender, a newspaperman who attacked George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton with reckless accusations. Jefferson praised one of his effusions: “Such papers cannot fail to produce the best effect. They inform the thinking part of the nation,” he told Callender. The journalist was a heavy drinker with a paranoid streak that widened appreciably when he was jailed under the Sedition Act, the law that made it a crime to criticize a president. Jefferson, who believed the law was unconstitutional, gave Callender money and sympathy. When Jefferson became president in 1800, he pardoned the journalist.
Only minimally grateful, Callender demanded that he be appointed postmaster of Richmond, Virginia, as a reward for his services to the Republican cause. When President Jefferson balked, Callender retaliated with a series of vicious articles in his Richmond newspaper. He revealed that Jefferson had paid him substantial sums to support his slanderous labors and quoted the president’s words of approval. Next, the inflamed scribe accused Jefferson of fathering several children by Sally Hemings, the young mulatto who had escorted Maria Jefferson to Paris. It was “well known” among Jefferson’s neighbors that he had kept Sally “as his concubine” for many years, Callender declared. One of their children was a boy of about twelve named “Tom,” with red hair and a striking resemblance to Jefferson. Supposedly, Tom had been conceived in Paris, when Sally escorted Maria Jefferson across the Atlantic to join her father. Everyone in the vicinity of Monticello knew about Sally. So did James Madison, when he urged Americans to vote for Jefferson because of his “virtue.”3
Federalist editors leaped on the Sally story and gleefully reprinted it in their newspapers throughout the nation. As the Federalists saw it, they were retaliating against the Jeffersonian Republican editors who had revived the British slanders about Washington’s supposed sexual sins in the Revolution and exposed Alexander Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reynolds. The Boston Gazette published a song about Sally, supposedly written by the “Sage of Monticello” to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.” Callender reprinted it in his Virginia paper, making the accusation difficult for Jefferson’s friends and family to ignore:
Of all the damsels on the green
On mountain or in valley
A lass so luscious ne’er was seen
As Monticellian Sally
(chorus) Yankee Doodle, who’s the noodle?
What wife was half so handy?
To breed a flock of slaves for stock
A blackamoor’s the dandy
When pressed by load of state affairs
I seek to sport and dally
The sweetest solace of my cares
Is in the lap of Sally.4
Next, Callender revealed that Jefferson’s former friend John Walker, now a fierce Federalist, accused him of trying to seduce his wife, Betsey, thirty years ago. Although Walker had known the story for over a decade, he claimed to be outraged and threatened to challenge Jefferson to a duel. As Walker talked and wrote about it, the story took on even more lurid dimensions. He claimed that Jefferson had pursued Betsey as late as 1779, when he was a married man living in supposed contentment with Martha Wayles. Jefferson’s friend Thomas Paine attempted to defend him against the ten-year extension of the story. “We have heard of a ten year siege of Troy,” Paine wrote. “But who ever heard of a ten year siege to seduce?” Both stories became national sensations.5
II
Until this explosion, there was scarcely a mention of Sally Hemings in Jefferson’s letters or the records he kept at Monticello in his Farm Book and Account Book. Sally had begun having children in 1795 and by 1802 had given birth to two girls and a boy. There was no record of a child who would approximate the age of the boy Callender described; he would have been born not long after Jefferson, his daughters, and James and Sally Hemings returned from France. The journalist claimed that Sally had as many as thirty other lovers beside President Jefferson. She was “a slut as common as the pavement.”6
In accordance with their agreement, Jefferson had freed Sally’s older brother, James Hemings, after he had trained his younger brother, Peter, to become Monticello’s cook. It took James four years to complete this task. One reason may have been James’s fondness for alcohol, a habit he apparently acquired in Paris. James used the money Jefferson paid him during these years to return to France. But he found revolutionary Paris a strange and unsettling place, and soon sailed back to America. He paid a visit to Monticello and was cordially welcomed by Jefferson. James talked grandly of perhaps going to Spain to find work there. Jefferson noted in a letter that he seemed to have gotten control of his drinking, a hopeful sign.
Alas, it was only a temporary reform. In the fall of 1801, penniless and depressed by his addiction to alcohol, James Hemings committed suicide in Philadelphia. Jefferson was deeply distressed by this tragic news. James had been one of his most capable and devoted servants for many years. He had served as his coachman and butler before becoming a chef. When Jefferson became president, he had offered James the post of chef at the executive mansion in Washington, D.C. But Hemings, perhaps reluctant to resume the master–servant relationship, had turned him down.
By this time it had become clear that Jefferson considered all the children born to Betty Hemings and John Wayles entitled to various degrees of freedom. They were permitted to travel around Virginia, to marry men and women of their choice, and to make arrangements with employers as far away as Richmond. They kept all the money they made. Jefferson apparently believed they were ultimately entitled to complete freedom, as third-generation mulattoes. Also important was their blood relationship to Martha Wayles; he continued to express her special concern for them by this privileged treatment.
In 1794, Jefferson freed Robert Hemings, James’s older brother, who had been trained as a barber. Robert had married an enslaved woman in Fredericksburg. He persuaded her master to pay Jefferson to free Robert, who in turn promised to repay him and purchase his wife’s freedom. Jefferson was not pleased by Robert’s abrupt demand for freedom, which left him without a barber. But he gave Robert his certificate of manumission. The couple lived in Richmond for the rest of their lives.
In April 1792, Jefferson had given Sally’s older sister, Mary, a form of freedom. She had been hired as a servant by Colonel Thomas Bell, a Charlottesville storekeeper. They apparently became lovers and soon had two children. Mary had previously had children by an unnamed father at Monticello. Jefferson kept these children under his control but agreed to sell Mary and her Bell children to the colonel. Thereafter they lived as man and wife, and no one in Charlottesville said a censorious word. That is not entirely surprising. Like her sisters and brothers, Mary’s skin was probably white. When Bell died in 1800, he freed Mary and their children and made them his beneficiaries.7
III
President Jefferson was staggered by James Callender’s assaults on his personal character. Friends such as James Madison came to his defense with scathing denials and denunciations of Callender. Madison dismissed the story as “incredible.” But Jefferson made no attempt to answer the charges publicly. Only in private letters to close friends and political allies, he admitted he had, while single, “offered love to a handsome lady.” This was the only charge that was true, he insisted, implicitly denying Callender’s story about Sally Hemings. Eventually he negotiated a private admission of guilt with John Walker that avoided further altercation and a duel.8
A troubled Jefferson asked Martha and Maria to join him in the executive mansion in Washington. Opinions vary in respect to his motives. Friends thought he was trying to protect them from the ugly gossip swirling through Virginia in the wake of Callender’s assault. His political foes sneered that he was trying to portray himself as a man who had retained the devotion of his two daughters and was therefore innocent of Callender’s charges.
Martha and Maria left their husbands and children in Virginia and joined the president in response to his summons. For six weeks, they participated in a stream of formal dinners with congressmen and senators. Jefferson insisted on paying all their expenses, including new dresses and bonnets for Maria. One Federalist guest reported that the two daughters appeared to be “well-accomplished young women…very delicate and tolerably handsome.” Martha enjoyed the experience, but Maria found it tiresome to make conversation with so many strangers. She was even more troubled by how much their visit had cost Jefferson. She wrote him a touching note after she returned home, hinting rather strongly that she wished he had a wife: “How much do I think of you at the hours which we have been accustomed to be with you alone and how much pain it gives me to think of the…solitary manner in which you sleep upstairs. Adieu much beloved of fathers…You are the first and dearest to my heart.”9
IV
Callender’s assault came as President Jefferson was undergoing terrific political stress as president. He had taken office hoping to reverse a decade of hostility between America and France. But his vision of the French as America’s natural allies vanished in a cascade of reports and rumors that France’s new leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, planned to send an army to New Orleans to create a rival nation in the Louisiana Territory, a vast swath of the continent between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains. France had given it to Spain in 1763 to compensate for Spanish losses in the Seven Years’ War with Britain, but Napoleon had pressured Spain into secretly ceding it back to France. Another French army invaded St. Dominique (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), determined to regain control of this wealthy sugar island from rebellious slaves who had seized it with the encouragement of the Federalists.
In collusion with the French, the Spanish closed the port of New Orleans, cutting off the western states’ export trade. The Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, called for war, and numerous Jefferson supporters in the West joined the cry. Jefferson sent James Monroe to Paris as a special envoy to try to resolve the crisis. The president discovered, to his and everyone else’s amazement, that Napoleon was prepared to sell New Orleans and the entire territory of Louisiana to the United States. The French army in St. Dominique had been decimated by yellow fever and other diseases, and Bonaparte had decided to cut his losses and abandon his scheme to revive the French empire in America. Although there was nothing in the Constitution that permitted the acquisition of more territory, Jefferson accepted the offer, doubling the size of the United States.10
The purchase of the Louisiana Territory made Jefferson immensely popular—and defused the Federalists’ attacks on his personal life. He was reelected in 1804, winning four out of every five votes. The Federalist party was reduced to a hapless minority. Callender, the one man in the nation who might have continued to attack Jefferson about “dusky Sally,” conveniently drowned in the James River in three feet of water, a few months after he had been beaten over the head by the federal district attorney for Virginia.11 But no one seemed to notice or care. Jefferson’s fame soared to unparalleled heights. His followers compared him to George Washington and found him superior because he had acquired “an empire for liberty” without firing a shot or losing a single soldier—and without raising taxes.12
V
In the midst of this improbable ascension from the depths of disgrace to the heights of fame, Jefferson’s personal life received a devastating blow. His beloved younger daughter, Maria, had enjoyed a happy marriage with her cousin, Jack Eppes. He adored her with a fervor that more than matched her father’s devotion to Martha Wayles. Jack won election to Congress, where he supported his father-in-law with wit and eloquence. Jefferson liked him so much that he invited him to live at the “palace,” as the presidential residence was often called in its early years.
Unfortunately, Maria had inherited not only her mother’s beauty and temperament but also her fragile physique. Her first baby, a daughter, was born prematurely and lived less than a month. Maria spent the next two years suffering from a variety of illnesses, including a breast infection and excruciating back pains thst reduced her to invalidism. Her next baby, a boy whom she named Francis after her father-in-law, survived but was a frail child, subject to alarming convulsions that made the family fear he was an epileptic.
Pregnant again, Maria gave birth to a girl on February 15, 1804. Before the birth she described herself as “depressed and low in spirits.” Afterward she was so ill that she was unable to nurse the child. She again developed a breast abscess and suffered from constant nausea, which made it almost impossible for her to digest food. Her anguished father, hearing these reports, rushed from Washington the moment that Congress adjourned. In a letter he sent by express, Jefferson urged Jack Eppes to take Maria to Monticello. Jefferson had convinced himself that the house would work some kind of magic on her—a sign of how distracted he was. The equally distraught Eppes ordered his slaves to make a litter and carry Maria to the top of the mountain.
In a hasty letter to James Madison, Jefferson reported that Maria was going to recover, thanks to being “favorably affected by my being with her.” Alas, Maria’s will to live dwindled away, in a heartbreaking imitation of her mother’s decline. On April 13, 1804, his sixty-first birthday, Jefferson reported to James Madison that Maria “rather weakens.” She continued to have a “small and constant” fever and found it impossible to keep any food in her stomach. On April 17, 1804, Jefferson wrote in his account book: “This morning between 8 and 9 o’clock my dear daughter Maria Eppes died.”13
Jefferson was almost as prostrated as he had been after Martha’s death. It took him two months to express his feelings to anyone, and then it was a cry of almost unbearable anguish: “Others may lose of their abundance but I, of my want, have lost even the half of all I had. My evening prospects now hang on the slender thread of a single life,” he told John Page. Jefferson was referring to Martha Jefferson Randolph. It was difficult for anyone who did not know him intimately to grasp the centrality of his family to Jefferson’s vision of happiness.14
VI
Another woman who had once been close to Jefferson heard about Maria’s death and wrote him a letter. It took Abigail Adams almost a month to overcome the bitterness her soured friendship with the president had left in her heart. She began by telling him that if he were “no other than the private inhabitant of Monticello,” she would have written to him immediately. Only when “the powerful feelings of my heart burst through” her restraint did she feel compelled to shed “tears of sorrow…over your beloved and deserving daughter.” She realized, thinking of her son Charles, that they had the loss of a beloved child in common. She knew the pain a parent feels when chords of affection are “snapped asunder.” She had “tasted the bitter cup” and she could only hope Jefferson would learn to accept it as a decree of “over-ruling providence.”
Deeply moved, Jefferson sent the letter to Maria’s husband, Jack Eppes, who pronounced it “the generous effusions of an excellent heart.” His son-in-law advised Jefferson to answer it expressing only “the sentiments of your heart.” He urged him to avoid any mention of ex-president John Adams. Unfortunately, Jefferson replied to Abigail before he received this good advice. He began by declaring he would never forget her kindness to Maria in London. He added that her letter gave him a chance to express his regret for the “circumstances” that seemed to have “draw(n) a line of separation between us.”
At first Abigail responded with assurances that she felt the same way. Encouraged, Jefferson proceeded to get into how John Adams had been “personally unkind” by appointing a raft of Federalist judges on his last night as president. Portia rushed to defend her dearest friend and soon she was condemning Jefferson for hiring “the wretch,” James Thomson Callender, to defame John with “the basest libel, the lowest and vilest slander which malice could invent.” When Jefferson tried to put his connection to Callender in a better light, Abigail exploded: “The serpent you cherished and warmed [has] bit the hand that cherished him and gave you sufficient specimens of his talents, his gratitude, his justice and his truth.”
A discouraged Jefferson, after more futile letters, finally replied, “Perhaps I trespassed too far on your attention.” Abigail, probably feeling renewed sympathy for his loss of Maria, told him that in a tribute to their lost friendship, “I would forgive, as I hope to be forgiven.” She wished him success in administering the government “with a just and impartial hand.” Abigail waited weeks to tell John Adams about this correspondence. After reading the letters, he wisely chose to say nothing about them.15
VII
Fortunately for Jefferson’s peace of mind, Martha Jefferson Randolph was a remarkably healthy young woman. She gave birth to twelve children in the course of her marriage, and eleven lived to maturity. But Martha’s—and Jefferson’s—confidence in a happy private life slowly eroded as Thomas Mann Randolph revealed an emotional instability that ran like a dark thread through his family’s history. He suffered from crushing depressions, and he slowly acquired a grievance against his wife. Martha had persuaded him to buy the Edgehill plantation, only four miles from Monticello. Whenever Jefferson returned to his hilltop mansion, Martha joined him with her children, leaving Randolph little choice but to follow them.
More and more, Randolph felt he was in competition with the great Thomas Jefferson for his wife’s affections, and was an inevitable loser. At one point he wrote Jefferson a bitter letter, saying he felt like “the proverbial silly bird” who could not “feel at ease among swans.” He accused Martha of looking down on him and undervaluing his talents. At another point, he made plans to sell Edgehill and move to Mississippi to raise cotton, as many other Virginians were doing. His constantly growing family meant he was slipping into debt. The soil in Virginia was depleted and the market for its crops was depressed because of the abundant harvests from new farms in Kentucky, Tennessee, and other western states. With Martha’s help, a distraught Jefferson talked him out of this reach for independence.16
In 1803, Randolph ran for Congress without consulting the president and defeated an old Jefferson friend by a handful of votes, turning the loser into a potential enemy. Jefferson did his best to repair the political damage and invited Randolph to live in the presidential palace with him and Jack Eppes. Randolph accepted, but in 1806 he decided that the president preferred Jack’s conversation to his and picked a quarrel with his brother-in-law. Randolph wrote an incoherent letter to the president and moved into a boarding house at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, populated almost entirely by Federalists.
Engulfed in gloom, Randolph ate most of his meals in his room and seldom spoke to anyone. The frantic president assured him that he loved him “as I would a son” and begged him to return to the executive mansion. Randolph refused, and one friend warned Jefferson that he might commit suicide. Randolph became ill with a virulent fever that brought him to the brink of death. Jefferson sent a doctor and a series of friends who virtually camped at his bedside until Randolph recovered.17
This behavior was the beginning of a long sad history of personal and marital unhappiness. Randolph quit Congress but became little more than a supernumerary in Martha Jefferson’s emotional life. One of the most telling signs of his sense of inferiority was his policy of permitting Jefferson to name his children. Jefferson did not ask for the privilege. Once, when he delayed, obviously hoping Randolph would name a new baby, Martha begged her father to produce a name so the child could be baptized. Of all the children, only one—their first daughter, Anne Cary—had a Randolph family name. Randolph took equally little interest in their education and development.18
VIII
Each of the Randolph children became part of Jefferson’s family. While he was president, he carried on a delightful correspondence with the older ones. He debated with the oldest girl, Anne, about whether she should change her name to Anastasia. When Ellen, the second oldest, began reading romantic poetry, she signed her letters Eleanora, which Jefferson warmly approved. Anne was his favorite gardener. He sent her flowering peas from Arkansas, found by Meriwether Lewis and his partner, William Clark, in their famous exploration of the continent in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase. When someone sent the president rare Algerian chickens, these, too, were shipped to Anne to be raised at Monticello.
Ellen Randolph had strong intellectual interests. When she found herself puzzled by a question such as “What is the Seventh Art?” she forwarded it to the president. Jefferson replied that he thought gardening was almost as important as poetry. The shrewd grandfather suspected that Anne and Ellen exchanged their letters from him and Ellen might be ready to claim she was the one he liked best. Ellen submitted an impressive reading list to her grandfather; it included “Grecian history” in which she was “very much interested” and Plutarch’s Lives in French. Jefferson’s praise was lavish.19
From the start of their correspondence, the president insisted the young ladies had to answer every letter he wrote to them and he felt obligated to do the same. At one point, he claimed that Ellen was five letters behind in “her account” and threatened to “send the sheriff after you.”20 Sometimes the nation’s chief executive had to deal with urgent political problems, such as former vice president Aaron Burr’s attempt to separate the western states from the union in 1806. Jefferson apologized to Ellen for falling behind in his “epistolary account.”
Later, when Grandpapa fell behind again and admitted it, a delighted Ellen triumphantly responded, “Your fear of being bankrupt is well founded.” Jefferson wondered in an answering letter whether this meant Ellen had more “industry or less to do than myself.” Ten-year-old Ellen gravely replied that she had made a real effort to spend as little time in “idleness” as possible that winter but she was inclined to suspect the president had “a great deal more to do than I have.”
Equally delightful was an exchange the president had with his four-year-old granddaughter, Mary Randolph. He told Ellen to thank Mary for her letter, which was an indecipherable scrawl. “But tell her it is written in a cipher of which I have not the key. She must, therefore, tell it all to me when I come home.” Ellen replied, “Mary says she would tell you what was in her letter if she knew herself.”
As Jefferson neared the end of his second term, he urged Martha and her children to move to Monticello permanently, and she rapturously agreed. She assured him that her “first and most important object” would be “chearing your old age by every endearment of filial tenderness.” She could barely wait to see him “seated by your own fireside surrounded by your grandchildren contending for the pleasure of waiting upon you.” Her husband, Thomas Mann Randolph, was ominously absent from this vision of future happiness.21
IX
Most of Martha’s children were girls who became worshippers of their grandfather. “From him seemed to flow all the pleasures of my life,” Ellen later wrote. “When I was about fifteen years old, I began to think of a watch, but knew the state of my father’s finances promised no such indulgence.” One day a packet addressed to Jefferson arrived from Philadelphia. He opened it and presented Ellen with “an elegant lady’s watch with chain and seals.” Similar presents arrived for her as she grew older: “my first handsome writing desk, my first leghorn hat, my first silk dress.”22
The other granddaughters received similar gifts. When Jefferson overheard ten-year-old Cornelia say, with a sob in her voice, “I never had a silk dress in my life,” a splendid garment arrived from nearby Charlottesville the next day. To make sure there were no more tears, a pair of lovely dresses for Cornelia’s two younger sisters was in the package. Mary Randolph heard that a neighbor was moving west and wanted to sell a guitar. But the price was far beyond the reach of her father’s wallet. One morning when she came down to breakfast, there was the guitar in her chair. Grandpa Jefferson said it was hers, if she solemnly promised to learn to play it.23
X
Jefferson persisted in this generosity to his grandchildren in the face of ever-mounting money worries. His debts were partly a result of his expensive lifestyle and partly caused by the long recession into which Virginia sank in the years after he left the presidency. He stubbornly maintained the free-spending habits of his youth and middle age, above all the tradition of southern hospitality. As his postpresidential fame continued to grow, visitors thronged to Monticello. So did relatives and close friends. It took thirty-seven house servants to keep Monticello running. No expenses were spared to provide the visitors with sumptuous meals, while their horses consumed staggering amounts of expensive feed. Meanwhile the prices Jefferson and other Virginia farmers could obtain for their crops remained low.
For a while Jefferson tried other ways to raise money. Perhaps his best-known experiment was his nailery. He launched it in the 1790s to make nails for rebuilding Monticello. It was hard, hot work, toiling with molten metal at temperatures between 600 and 700 degrees centigrade. About a dozen slave boys between the ages of ten and sixteen produced ten thousand nails a day. Jefferson rewarded the hardest workers with money and clothing, and sometimes disciplined those who hated the work and ran away. Not a few people have criticized him for forcing boys to labor so hard.
For a while Jefferson sold his surplus nails at a brisk and profitable pace. But by the time he left the presidency, cheaper English-made nails were on the market, and the nailery became a losing proposition. Similar bad luck dogged a flour mill that Jefferson tried to build on the nearby Rivanna River. It was destroyed in a storm and abandoned for want of funds to rebuild it.24
Jefferson worsened his financial burden by cosigning a large loan for one of his most devoted political followers. The man died bankrupt, and the entire sum was added to Jefferson’s debt, which soon totaled over $100,000—more than two million dollars in modern money.25 In his last years, Jefferson made desperate efforts to pay his more and more impatient creditors. He tried to sell some of his land but found no takers. A financial panic in 1819 had sent land prices plummeting everywhere. With cheaper lands available in the West, Virginia farms no longer seemed a good investment.
In desperation, Jefferson petitioned the legislature to permit him to raise money through a lottery. He hoped to make enough to pay his debts and leave a surplus for Martha and her children. The legislators at first demurred, claiming lotteries were immoral. But Jefferson’s friends finally persuaded them to approve the venture. Alas, ticket sales in debt-ridden Virginia were disappointing. Attempts by his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph to sell tickets in other states also failed.
Jefferson’s family rallied around him. Maria’s son, Francis Eppes, returned property Jefferson had deeded to him as part of his mother’s inheritance. “You have been to me ever, an affectionate and tender father, and you will find me ever, a loving and devoted son,” he wrote. But Francis and other relatives were engulfed by the economic collapse that overwhelmed so many Virginians.
XI
One of the saddest victims of the collapse was Thomas Mann Randolph. The ex-congressman sank into ever deeper debt. Randolph worsened things by plunging into inexplicable mood swings at crucial moments. He would harvest a bumper crop of wheat, then leave it in his barns or send his overseers to Richmond to sell it too late to catch the top of the market. Neighbors remarked that “no man made better crops than Colonel Randolph and no one sold his crops for worse prices.”26
In 1819, Randolph ran for governor of Virginia and won, but his performance in office was awful. He quarreled with everyone—the legislature, his council, even the board of the University of Virginia. He tried to expand the powers of the governor, claiming he disdained to be a mere “signing clerk,” and failed disastrously. He finally retreated to Monticello, where Martha prepared one of the “skylight” bedrooms in the dome room for him. The peace and quiet enabled him to get a grip on his ravaged nerves for a little while. But the years following this respite saw a final slide into financial bankruptcy and the total collapse of his self-esteem. His marriage to Martha also deteriorated; his black moods and outbursts of bad temper finally forced her to tell him she would no longer share a bedroom with him.
The emotional and financial agonies of his daughter and son-in-law added weight to Jefferson’s own mountain of debt in the final year of his life. When he tried to console Randolph by offering to deed all his property to him, Randolph went berserk and accused Jefferson of being indifferent and coldhearted. He stormed out of Monticello and became a hermit in the only piece of property his creditors had left to him, a five-room cottage in North Milton, several miles away.27
XII
Threaded through these Job-like woes was the tragic story of Jefferson’s oldest granddaughter, Anne. She married a man named Charles Bankhead, whose solution to Virginia’s economic woes was alcohol. He abused and beat Anne, even when her horrified mother was present, and at one point stabbed her brother, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, when they exchanged insults on the street in Charlottesville. Anne finally fled back to Monticello and in the first months of 1826, died while her grandfather wept beside her bed.
Meanwhile, Jefferson’s debts and the mounting impatience of his creditors made his gesture of assistance to Thomas Mann Randolph meaningless. When the lottery failed, Jefferson took to his bed, suffering from an acute form of diarrhea. He sensed (or perhaps wished) he was dying and wrote farewell letters to James Madison and other close friends. In the letter to Madison, he revealed his concern for his future fame. “You have been a pillar of support through life. Take care of me when dead,” he wrote, “and be assured I will leave with you my last affections.”28
On March 16, 1826, Jefferson made his will. In it he gave freedom to five slaves. Two were Madison and Eston Hemings, sons of Sally Hemings, who had been trained as carpenters. He requested that the legislature permit them to remain in the state. Freed slaves were required by law to leave Virginia, lest they use their freedom to incite rebellion. This enabled the two young men to continue to serve as assistants to Monticello’s aging chief carpenter, John Hemings, who was also freed. Earlier in the 1820s, Jefferson had permitted Sally’s two older children, Harriet and Beverly, to leave Monticello. The two other men freed in the will were also members of Elizabeth Hemings’s family. But there was no mention of Sally Hemings.
Jefferson slipped slowly downward, his strength ebbing. His mind remained amazingly clear and firm. He corresponded with President John Quincy Adams about treaties of commerce that he had helped negotiate decades ago. In another letter he recalled in vivid detail his memories of Benedict Arnold’s Virginia raid during his ill-fated governorship. He sent these recollections to Henry Lee, a son of the cavalry hero “Light Horse” Harry Lee, who was revising his father’s memoirs of the Revolution. Another letter went to Ellen Randolph, who had married a New Englander, Joseph Coolidge. He also wrote witty and charming comments about suitors arriving at Monticello in pursuit of the younger granddaughters.
As the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approached, a renewed wave of admiration for Jefferson and his by now legendary document swept the nation. In a letter to James Madison, Jefferson said the Declaration was “the fundamental act of union in these states.” Perpetuating its principles was “a holy purpose.”29 The mayor of Washington invited him to be the leading figure in a great celebration on July 4, 1826. Jefferson was too ill to travel, but he sent a memorable statement of the Declaration’s meaning not merely for their own era but for all time.
XIII
On July 2, Jefferson invited his family to his bedside and said farewell to each of them individually. He told Martha he had left a gift for her in a dresser drawer. He urged each grandchild to “pursue virtue, be true and truthful.” Eight-year-old George Wythe Randolph looked bewildered. Jefferson smiled gently at him. “George does not know what all this means,” he said.
Perhaps in answer to a request by Martha, Jefferson said he would not object to meeting with the Reverend Frederick Hatch, pastor of the Episcopal church in Charlottesville. But the priest should understand they would only talk as neighbors. That was his gentle way of telling Martha that he had no fear of approaching death, nor did he feel he had committed moral failures—sins—for which he had to seek absolution.
Several times Jefferson told his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who was constantly at his bedside, that he hoped he would live until the Fourth of July. On July third he seemed to be drifting down into the darkness. His private secretary, Nicholas Trist, who had married his granddaughter Virginia, could not bear to watch his agony and told him that the Fourth had arrived. Jefferson ceased struggling for life, but he continued to breathe. About 7 p.m. he awoke and found his doctor, Robley Dunglison, beside his bed. He was puzzled by his continued presence and asked him, “Is it the Fourth?”
“It soon will be,” the doctor said. Studying him, Dunglison predicted he would die in a few minutes. But Jefferson remained alive. At last the clock’s hands passed midnight, and those keeping watch in the bedroom breathed a sigh of relief. To their amazement, Jefferson lived another twelve hours, dying at ten minutes before noon on the Fourth, his wish fulfilled.
John Adams had died on the same day in his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. Most people agreed with President John Quincy Adams, who wrote in his diary that it was fresh evidence that America had a special destiny in this world. Humbly, the president—and the nation—stood “in grateful and silent adoration before the Ruler of the Universe.”
On the evening of the Fourth, as the church bells in Charlottesville tolled, Thomas Mann Randolph appeared at Monticello, supposedly to mourn his father-in-law. Noticing that Martha was not weeping, he began to taunt her, saying she was too coldhearted to shed a tear. He asked Dr. Dunglison to give Martha some sort of medicine that would produce evidence of grief. Thomas Jefferson Randolph lost his temper and accused his father of hating Jefferson and behaving abominably.30
Martha Jefferson Randolph fled this appalling scene. In her bedroom, she remembered the gift Jefferson had left for her. She opened her dresser drawer and found a poem:
A Deathbed Adieu from Th. J. to M.R.
Life’s visions have vanished, its dreams are no more
Dear friend of my busom, why bathed in tears?
I go to my fathers, I welcome the shore
Which crowns all my hopes and buries my cares
Then farewell my dear, my loved daughter, adieu
The last pang of life is in parting with you!
Two seraphs await me long shrouded in death
I will bear them your love on my last parting breath.
The seraphs were Martha Wayles Jefferson and Maria Jefferson Eppes, those two exquisite women that fate had torn from Jefferson’s life. The next day, he was buried beside Martha and Maria in the Monticello graveyard. On his gravestone he asked his family to place this inscription:
HERE WAS BURIED THOMAS JEFFERSON
AUTHOR OF THE
DECLARATION
OF
AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE
OF THE
STATUTE OF VIRGINIA
FOR
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
AND FATHER OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
Ignoring his numerous high offices, from governor to president, Jefferson chose to reiterate his commitment to freedom. Above him on the mountain he left another epitaph, Monticello, his vision of the purpose of this freedom, a place where head and heart, architecture and art and science joined hands in the pursuit of happiness. For much of the next two hundred and fifty years, generations of Americans accepted this vision—and the man who created it—as the epitome of all that was good and fine in America.
XIV
Six months after Jefferson’s death, an auction took place at Monticello. It was advertised in the Charlottesville Central Gazette as the sale of “the whole of the residue of the personal estate of Thomas Jefferson, dec, consisting of 130 VALUABLE NEGROES, stock, crop &C Household and Kitchen furniture.” The slaves, claimed the ad, were the “most valuable for their number ever offered at one time in the state of Virginia.” There were also “valuable historical and portrait paintings” including a bust of Jefferson, and the polygraph, the copying instrument he used when he wrote letters, plus “various other articles curious and useful to men of business and private families.”31
Martha Jefferson was not present at this ordeal. She had fled to Boston with her two youngest children to live with Ellen Randolph Coolidge. For five days, her unmarried children and the executor of the estate, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, watched as the mansion was virtually stripped bare of furnishings. Even more painful was the sale of the slaves. Many members of the Hemings extended family—sons and daughters and grandchildren of Elizabeth Hemings by fathers other than John Wayles—were sold to strangers. Years later, Thomas Jefferson Randolph remembered his anguish. “I had known all of them from childhood and had strong attachments to many,” he said. “I was powerless to relieve them.”32 Fifty-three-year-old Sally Hemings was not among the sold. Martha Jefferson later freed her, using a device known as giving a slave his or her “time.” Technically she remained a slave and was not required to leave the state like other freed slaves. She moved to Charlottesville, where she lived with her sons, Madison and Eston, until her death in 1835.
The sale did not come close to paying Thomas Jefferson’s debts. Nor did the sale of the mansion itself, a few years later, for a pathetic $7,000. But Thomas Jefferson Randolph grimly vowed that he would repay his grandfather’s debts “to the last copper” if it took the rest of his life. The effort required another twenty years of backbreaking toil on the plantation he had inherited from his bankrupt father, Edgehill, and the sacrifice of all comforts and luxuries. The big, burly grandson made this personal sacrifice to redeem the good name of the grandfather he loved.
Martha Jefferson Randolph returned from Massachusetts and did everything in her power to assist her son. At one point, she and her unmarried daughters helped him copy and edit the first collection of Jefferson’s writings. They launched a school for young women that flourished for many years. Martha permitted friends to persuade the legislatures of South Carolina and Louisiana to send her gifts of $10,000, which she passed on to her son. In 1836 Martha died suddenly, apparently of a stroke, at the age of sixty-four. She was buried in Monticello’s graveyard beside the father she had never ceased to love.33