Jefferson (20 page)

Friends of Jefferson during his student years—and these include his early twenties, when he was still an apprentice lawyer—all speak of two distinct traits. First, Jefferson could study longer and harder than any other student who ever entered William and Mary College. Fifteen hours at a crack, said his friend John Page, and then he would get up from the books, stretch his long arms over his head, and disappear for a two-mile run in the forest. Second, he was most interested in girls.

We have everybody’s word for it. We have, in fact (thanks to Page and another amused friend, William Fleming), a number of letters that Jefferson wrote, starting around age seventeen, that dwell on the female question. For that matter, we have (
I
have) Jefferson’s own rather wry memory of certain youthful “turbulences” and his confession that during these years, unable to sleep,
he often lay in his bed formulating “love and murder novels” that he intended to write in his spare time. (
Love and Murder
, by Thomas Jefferson!)

The ambivalence of “love and murder” is nice. And ambivalence is what he felt (I am sometimes tempted in these pages to say that ambivalence was the core of the Jeffersonian character; only there are so many things—democracy, freedom of religion, freedom of speech—about which he felt no ambivalence whatever).

The letters that Page and Fleming saved all have to do with a sixteen-year-old beauty to whom Jefferson refers as R.B., Becca, Belinda, Campana in die, and best of all, Adnileb, which is
Belinda
spelled backward. This Proteus of young womanhood was in reality Rebecca Burwell, whose father served as governor back in the days when Peter Jefferson reported to Williamsburg with his famous map of Virginia; by the time Jefferson met her, she was an orphan, under the care of her uncle William Nelson (one of the horse-racing Nelsons from York, famous for piety and bloodstock), and he, Jefferson, was twenty or so, still studying at Williamsburg and the favorite of Dr. Small, who taught him philosophy and mathematics, and Dr. Wythe, who taught him (it is said) to dislike slavery.

Page claimed that Jefferson wanted to marry her; that he rehearsed long speeches he intended to make to her (stood outside the Apollo Room in the Raleigh Tavern and quoted swaths of poetry to himself); that he told Page he would die if he lost her; that at last he declared he would buy a boat (the
Rebecca
) to sail the world in and cure himself of love. Always the reluctant speaker, he missed asking for her hand once because a mysterious case of “red-eye” kept him at home during a crucial month. He missed winning her (perhaps) anyway when he finally told her that (stammering) he had thought out a life-plan that included her, but before he could ask her, it was absolutely necessary that he go abroad on a trip to England and Europe for a year or so, as part of his education: Rebecca wouldn’t wait, would she?

Rebecca wouldn’t. While Jefferson was still seesawing between love and study, marriage and freedom, Belinda and Adnileb (his old love of code), she simply married Jack Ambler.

James Monroe has told me that the day he received the news was the first time Jefferson ever suffered one of those terrible
“megrim” headaches that attacked him periodically all the rest of his life and left him sprawled in his bed, unable to work for weeks.

Rebecca Burwell rejected him in 1764. From that time on he devoted himself to studying the law and then to building his house at Monticello, where he was finally to bring a bride, Martha Wayles Skelton, on New Year’s Day 1772.

But—and now I approach my two contradictory stories—around the year 1768 the man who considered himself Jefferson’s “best friend” came to him with a request. John Walker had been at school with Jefferson from the age of fourteen, five boys cooped up in a log cabin on the Reverend James Maury’s shabby place in the South-West Mountains, and afterward had gone to William and Mary with him. Their fathers had been close friends: In his will, in fact, Peter Jefferson named Thomas Walker his chief executor. When he married, John and his new wife Betsy had settled at Belvoir, about six miles downriver from Shadwell, where Jefferson still lived. So it was natural enough that John ride over one day and announce that because he was traveling to Fort Stanwix to negotiate a treaty with the Indians, he had made a will himself (the Indian wars, even at that date, were brutal affairs) and in it he named Jefferson chief executor. Jefferson bowed. And therefore, as Jefferson’s best friend, John Walker asked him to keep a close eye on the health and safety of Betsy and their little baby daughter while he was away. Doubtless Jefferson bowed again.

All agree that the executor kept too close an eye on Betsy.

Weekly visits became daily. John Walker lingered four months in Indian territory. Jefferson was twenty-five, unmarried, strong, and vigorous. At some point in the four months, he has admitted (but with a lawyer’s distancing, indefinite nouns), “I offered love to a handsome woman. I acknowledge its incorrectness.”

What happened?

Betsy Walker told her husband her version—but not until many years later, when Jefferson was about to leave the country and set out for France as commissioner. And John Walker in his turn waited to dictate his grievance to Henry Lee (never a friend to Jefferson) until 1802 or 1803, when Jefferson was president and Walker had become his bitter political foe. These are Walker’s own words:

In 68 I was called to Fort Stanwix, being secretary or clerk to the Virginia commission at the treaty with the Indians there.

I left my wife and infant daughter at home, relying on Mr. Jefferson as my neighbor & fast friend, having in my will made before my departure named him first among my executors.

I returned in November, having been absent more than four months.

During my absence Mr. Jefferson’s conduct to Mrs. Walker was improper, so much so as to have laid the foundation of her constant objection to my leaving Mr. Jefferson my executor, telling me she wondered why I could place such confidence in him.

At Shadwell, his own house, in 69 or 70, on a visit common to us being neighbors & as I felt true friends, he renewed his caresses. He placed in Mrs. Walker’s sleeve cuff a paper tending to convince her of the innocence of promiscuous love.

This Mrs. Walker on the first glance tore to pieces.

After this we went on a visit to Colonel Coles, a mutual acquaintance & distant neighbor. Mr. Jefferson was there. On the ladies retiring to bed, he pretended to be sick, complained of a headache & left the gentlemen, among whom I was.

Instead of going to bed he stole into my room where my wife was undressing or in bed.

He was repulsed with indignation & menaces of alarm & ran off.

In 71 Mr. Jefferson was married and yet continued his efforts to destroy my peace until the latter end of the year 79.

One particular instance I remember.

My old house had a passage upstairs with a room on each side & opposite doors.

Mr. Jefferson and wife slept in one. I & my wife in the other. At one end of the passage was a small room used by my wife as her private apartment.

She visited it early & late. On this morning Mr. Jefferson knowing her custom was found in his shirt ready to seize her on her way from her chamber—indecent in manner.

In 83 Mr. Jefferson went to France, his wife died previously.

From 79 Mr. Jefferson desisted in his attempts on my peace. All this time I believed him to be my
best friend
& so felt & acted toward him.
in Williamsburg, when I had just started out on my brief, unsatisfactory career as a lawyer. He was a short, squarish man, florid and patchy of complexion, ineffective, intellectually dim. Walker looked ten years older than Jefferson; rumor whispered that he had lost half his plantation because of poor management and debt; he wandered Duke of Gloucester Street talking compulsively to anyone he saw. By contrast, the month after Walker returned from Fort Stanwix, Jefferson had been elected overwhelmingly, triumphantly, to the House of Burgesses. Shortly thereafter he had gone to the Continental Congress, written pamphlets—
written the Declaration of Independence
—then served two terms as governor, then secretary of state; when the Walker story appeared, he was President. Why
wouldn’t
she say those things? In her own (poisonous) way Betsy Walker had made it known to the world that, insignificant as her husband might be, nonetheless one of the great men of Virginia had found her irresistible. Whatever else happened, the celebrated writer and statesman and paragon of virtue Thomas Jefferson had once fallen under her mesmerizing spell. If her husband was a cipher,
she
counted.

Do I defend Jefferson too vigorously? I doubt it. As long as men stand for elections, scandals like this will follow. And as for that
other
Jefferson scandal,
that
one—what can I truly say about
its
“incorrectness”?

Light-headed, trembling slightly with fever, Short forced himself to get out of his chair and cross to the window.

When he had left Lafayette’s house an hour ago, the moon was just rising over the river. Now it stood directly above the rooftops, bathing the Champs-Élysées in a blue-white glow. From the window of his new bedroom in the Hôtel de Langeac he could see, as he had predicted, every detail of the massive customs wall and the Farmers-General toll gate, called these days by the innocent name Grille de Chaillot, after the little tree-covered hill that sloped away westward behind it.

Short glanced at his watch. Past nine. Jefferson and the others would have just sat down at the theater. A movement below caught his eye, and he snapped the watch lid closed. At the nearest turnstile a peasant was struggling to replace a tottering stack of
in Williamsburg, when I had just started out on my brief, unsatisfactory career as a lawyer. He was a short, squarish man, florid and patchy of complexion, ineffective, intellectually dim. Walker looked ten years older than Jefferson; rumor whispered that he had lost half his plantation because of poor management and debt; he wandered Duke of Gloucester Street talking compulsively to anyone he saw. By contrast, the month after Walker returned from Fort Stanwix, Jefferson had been elected overwhelmingly, triumphantly, to the House of Burgesses. Shortly thereafter he had gone to the Continental Congress, written pamphlets—
written the Declaration of Independence
—then served two terms as governor, then secretary of state; when the Walker story appeared, he was President. Why
wouldn’t
she say those things? In her own (poisonous) way Betsy Walker had made it known to the world that, insignificant as her husband might be, nonetheless one of the great men of Virginia had found her irresistible. Whatever else happened, the celebrated writer and statesman and paragon of virtue Thomas Jefferson had once fallen under her mesmerizing spell. If her husband was a cipher,
she
counted.

Do I defend Jefferson too vigorously? I doubt it. As long as men stand for elections, scandals like this will follow. And as for that
other
Jefferson scandal,
that
one—what can I truly say about
its
“incorrectness”?