Jefferson (41 page)

And yet … I have in my hand as I write an advertisement Jefferson placed in the
Virginia Gazette
, September 7, 1769, offering a forty-shilling reward for a runaway slave named Sandy, a mulatto shoemaker and carpenter who stole a horse from Monticello and disappeared into the hot tar of a Virginia night. Jefferson’s distaste fairly shakes off the page.

But not eight months later, in April 1770, Jefferson sits down on the left-hand side of the Richmond courtroom and, if he feels distaste now, subdues it by sheer will, enlightened principle.

On the other side of the aisle, George Wythe, big hook nose in profile, child’s legs barely reaching the floor, likewise stares straight ahead at the judge’s bench.

Neither of them looks at one Samuel Howell, Jefferson’s client (without fee), a mulatto possessing the nerve, courage, desperation actually to sue his owner Joshua Netherland for his freedom.

The case was thus: Howell’s grandmother had been the daughter of a white woman and a black slave—whether or not by rape, Jefferson would argue, was immaterial; but for the record the court assumed that no white woman would willingly lie down with a black and so entered “rape.” The daughter was bound to serve as a slave to her father’s master until the age of thirty-one; during that time
she
gave birth to a daughter, also bound to serve till thirty-one. And finally that daughter, Howell’s mother, gave birth
to him, still unmistakably mulatto, and he too was bound to his master Netherland until the age of thirty-one.

Jefferson had written his brief. He stood up to summarize. In Virginia law, he reminded the court, the status of a slave was determined, not by color, but by the status of the mother. Howell’s grandmother had been completely white, pure white. By statute and law her descendants should have been free.

George Wythe folded his tiny hands in his lap and listened while his learned pupil next began to cite, in his reed-thin voice, precedent after precedent, case after case, Greek authorities, Roman authorities, Blackstone, Coke. They might as well have been back in his book-lined study. The jury sagged, the courtroom sagged.

And then suddenly, in the midst of assembling his precedents, Jefferson simply stopped and put down the book he was holding. He fixed his gaze on some point past the judge’s shoulder, as if he were about to shake off the legal dust and speak for himself. A year earlier, with sly modesty, he had persuaded his ambitious cousin Richard Bland to introduce in the Burgesses a bill that Jefferson himself had drafted—a declaration that any slaveowner was exempt from all previous restrictions and could, if he chose, emancipate any or all of his slaves, just by registering the fact in a court. Jefferson seconded his own motion but never spoke, and the bill went down to blazing defeat. Poor Bland was denounced from half the godly pulpits in Virginia. Now Jefferson recalled Bland’s discredited argument again. The sins of a father, he said to the spot on the wall, ought not be visited on a child to the third generation, and certainly not to a generation without end.

The judge interrupted. What law was the gentleman citing?

“Under the law of nature,” Jefferson said loudly—I have copied his very words from his casebook—“
all men are born free
, and every one comes into the world with a perfect right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will.”

The judge rose and snatched his gavel.

“It was not proved that slave law applied to the first woman’s children.” Jefferson continued to stare at the blank wall, his hands now fists on the table. “It remains for some future legislature to
extend the law of bondage to grandchildren and beyond,
if any legislators can be found wicked enough
.”

The gavel hammered, hammered. Samuel Howell slumped in his chair. With a final, furious swing of his arm the judge dismissed the case on the spot, not bothering to call on the defense for a word, a syllable, of rebuttal. “Law of nature,” he muttered as he swept past Jefferson toward the door, wig, gown, heels flying. Wythe made a courtly, ironic bow to his student.

Which Jefferson wrote the advertisement for Sandy?

George Wythe had refused six years earlier to sign Patrick Henry’s license to practice law, on the grounds that Henry knew next to nothing about anything. But Henry knew how to talk to people and carry his point; Henry had blown through the courtrooms of Virginia like an Old Testament prophet; when Henry spoke, juries swayed like corn in the wind, judges nodded. When Jefferson talked—

One last irony, in such a meditation on orators and freedom. George Wythe died scandalously in 1806, poisoned by his nephew, who crept downstairs early one June morning and dumped arsenic into the coffee pot on the kitchen stove. Wythe succumbed, as did his Negro maid’s handsome mulatto son Michael, who was being taught Latin and Greek by Wythe and who had just, to the jealous rage of the nephew, been named co-beneficiary of the old man’s will. The Negro maid survived, and the nephew would have been convicted of murder without doubt, except that in Virginia, even in 1806, thanks to the state penal code
written by Wythe and Jefferson themselves
, a black was not permitted to stand up in court and testify against a white. As far as the law was concerned, black was silent: everywhere seen, nowhere heard.

Like his father before him, Wythe bequeathed to Jefferson all of his splendid books.

In the bedroom two doors down the hallway from where Short sat writing, Jefferson carried a brass-plated whale-oil lamp to his desk. In every room that he used regularly he had a desk. On the blotting tablet, tied together with a blue ribbon, lay the two short letters that Maria Cosway had so far written.

He took Short’s list from his pocket. Still to write: letters to R. and A. Garvey regarding a new copy press. To Wilt, Delmestre & Co. on tariff regulations, to Vergennes on tobacco, to Elizabeth Eppes, Francis Eppes. The last letter on the list was for Eliza House Trist, the comfortable, unpretentious young widow with whom he and Madison and Edmund Randolph had lodged eleven years ago in Philadelphia. A personal letter, not part of the official business of a minister plenipotentiary. Rain drummed its white fingers against the window.

Jefferson dipped his pen in the inkwell; placed his right wrist gingerly on the blotter. Twenty lines of gossip, which Mrs. Trist loved; compliments. For a moment he curled his right hand gentry around his throat, as if to guard his voice. Then:
“I of ten wish myself among my countrymen, dear Madam, as I am burning the candle of life without present pleasure, or future object. A dozen or twenty years ago this scene would have amused me. But I am past the age for changing habits. I take all the fault on myself, as it is impossible to be among people who wish more to make one happy. Yet living from day to day, without a plan for four and twenty hours to come, I form no catalogue of impossible events. Laid up in port, for life, as I thought myself at one time, I am thrown out to sea, and an unknown one to me. By so slender a thread do all our plans of life hang!—My hand denies itself further, every letter admonishing me, by a pain, that it is time to finish.…

Rain became sunshine, dense blue sky.

At eleven the next morning Short looked up curiously when James Hemings announced Mr. and Mrs. Bentalou from South Carolina. Jefferson unfolded himself from his desk and signaled to Short that he should stay.

Mrs. Bentalou, massive in a new bell-shaped jupe and bustle, required an armless chair; James was dispatched to fetch one. Both of them accepted Jefferson’s offer of coffee (but no pastry, “Lord, no, not another crumb,” Mrs. Bentalou sighed, patting her hips), and James was dispatched again.

Paul Bentalou exported rice from his plantation in South Carolina—or would, if Vergennes and the Farmers-General ever put into practice the theoretical reforms Jefferson had made last year—and at first Short assumed (one eye on his stack of waiting
correspondence) that the visit concerned the all-important, all-dreary subject of tariffs.

Bentalou crossed his legs, rubbed the toe of his new silver-buckled shoe. His wife explained between bites (having changed her mind about the pastry, which James cooked himself) that they had spent three days and three fortunes at least in the shops on the rue Saint-Honoré before coming to trouble his Excellency.

“Please, please.” Jefferson waved away the title. As always, Short noted, when conversation from strangers touched him personally, he parried with a schoolmasterly fact. “Did you stop at Mademoiselle Bertin’s dress shop?” he asked. Mrs. Bentalou nodded and fluffed the jupe; her husband made a noise like a man shot. Mademoiselle Bertin had gained a European fame for the cost and frequency of her fashions, which she announced by mailing to her customers small wax dolls dressed in models of her newest outfits. “Well now, here’s a curious thing,” Jefferson said. “Her shop is on the north side of the street, as you saw, but she told me once, when I went with a friend”—he paused—“she told me her rent is much higher, and her prices, too, than if she were on the south side of the street. I couldn’t think why.”

Bentalou was a compact man with a farmer’s spade-sized hands. He used them now to shift his legs and pinch the toe of the other shoe.

“I don’t know about cities,” he apologized.

“But the fact is,” Jefferson persisted, “it has to do with the sun—we’re both farmers—it has to do with how much sunlight comes in her big glass windows. On the north side of the street you get the winter sun; it keeps the shop warmer, displays the goods better. In Paris, rent’s always higher on the north side of a street.”

Bentalou rubbed his chin. “We have a problem, your Excellency … a consultation.”

Jefferson sank back in his chair in the “jackknife” pose that Short could have drawn with his eyes closed: sitting on his bony hip, knees up, left shoulder higher than the right. Despite the sling, the fingers of both hands touched in a steeple.

“We’re traveling, you know, for ten months or a year, and we brought our servant with us.…”

“Just a boy,” Mrs. Bentalou deprecated. “He runs errands, keeps Mr. Bentalou’s clothes.”

“He is Negro,” Jefferson said.

“Two or three days ago,” Bentalou said, “in our hotel one of the guests, a Dutchman he was, told us that in this country, legally, a servant is free; you can’t keep him if he wants to go. Nobody said that when we arrived at Le Havre, but this Dutchman insisted this was so. So we came to you, as our … ambassador. Can we keep our slave?”

Short made himself invisible at his desk.

Jefferson tapped gently the tips of his steeple. For a long moment Short heard only the rustle of Mrs. Bentalou’s new crinoline, the asthmatic rasp of her husband’s breath.

When he finally answered, Jefferson was lawyerlike, neutral. “The laws of France do give him freedom if he claims it, and in such a case it would be difficult if not impossible to interrupt the course of the law. Slavery is illegal in France, no matter what the status or nationality of the owner may be. Nevertheless, I have known an instance where a person, bringing in a slave, and saying nothing about it, has not been disturbed in his possession.”