The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (40 page)

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 expen
sive 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