America's First Daughter: A Novel (37 page)

“My apologies for intruding, then,” Tom said stiffly, sensing he’d pressed the matter as far as he could in another man’s house about another man’s wife.

But Polly wasn’t only the wife of Jack Eppes, she was also my sister. I wasn’t about to leave it alone.

That night, after the fire burned low, I left Polly in the care of her maid Betsy—another Hemings girl—and went to find Jack, where he was shutting up for the night. “My sister wants to stretch her legs. Breathe in fresh air. Get a little food into her without castor oil purging it. Surely you don’t want her confined forever, do you?”

“Oh, Patsy,” Jack said, giving me a genial pat. “I want her alive and well!”

Jack was smiling that glib smile of his, and I had the most unladylike urge to punch it from his face. He was supposed to take care of my sister. To love her and take seriously her ailments. The fact that he could smile at me like that while she wasted away hardened me. “If you truly want her alive and well, Jack, then understand that she can’t ever have more children.”

A planter needed sons and it was a wife’s duty to produce them. I considered it my duty, certainly, but my mother had considered it hers, too, and died trying. “My sister wasn’t made for it, Jack. You take one honest look at her, and you’ll know it’s true—”

“What am I supposed to do about it if it is?” he asked, an edge of anger in his voice. And maybe he had a right to be angry with me. This was an interference of the highest order, but in the past months, I had not been vigilant enough.

“Stay off her,” I said. “For the love of God, Jack. Stay off her.”

He stared at me a moment, shocked, but then all the masks fell away and he hung his head, as if in shame. I put a hand on his shoulder, to soothe him, and was rewarded with Jack’s teary nod.

P
APA WAS DEAD.

Or so it was reported that summer, when the presidential campaign for the election of 1800 was in full swing and the newspapers were hard at work with vile slanders. My father was said to be dead, an atheist, and a coward. President Adams was said to be a tyrant and a criminal. My father was said to be “a swindler begot by a mulatto upon a half-breed Indian squaw.” President Adams was said to be a hermaphrodite.

It would’ve been laughable if the stakes weren’t so high.

Indeed, I worried that my poor sister would hear the news of my father’s passing before we could tell her the truth, and that it might stop her frail heart. It vexed me that she wasn’t with us at Monticello, where Papa desired us all to join him. Jack Eppes had promised they’d come, but now he pled the excuse of the harvest, even though we all knew perfectly well my sister would be of no use to him on the farm. If Jack had let her come with us, I wouldn’t have to fret for her like I did. Or, at the very least, I’d have someone other than Sally with whom to share my amazement at the circus in my father’s house that summer. . . .

Though we lived in the same house, I scarcely saw Papa, for he was always in a crowd. Politicians, financiers, and newspapermen flocked to our mountaintop to pay court to the man they wanted for their next president. They behaved as if he belonged to them, and I suppose he must have. But at night, when he retired to his private chambers, he belonged to Sally. For even though we had a house full of guests, he’d recklessly got her with child again by autumn.

And while Sally tended to Papa, I was left to cater to my father’s guests—men and their wives who hadn’t waited on an invitation, but nevertheless, needed to be fed and offered every hospitality. They ran over us like locusts, and it reminded me of the weeks we were under siege by the British, and the legislators gathered together at Monticello to avoid capture. There were no dragoons hunting us now, but there may as well have been for all the chaos. As if, in campaigning for the presidency, they were bringing about a new revolution.

For my part, I wanted none of it.

If only Papa’s candidacy had been the most troubling thing we faced.

In early September, alarming news reached us from our longtime friend and neighbor, Mr. Monroe, now the governor of Virginia.

“I’ve just received word,” Papa said, indicating a letter he held in a shaking hand, and a crowd drew round him in the entryway. “The planned slave insurrection in Henrico has been clearly proved. Ten Negroes have already been condemned and executed, and there are upward of forty more to be tried.”

While the crowd of men murmured at the news, I held my breath. News of a possible slave rebellion near Richmond had reached us days before, but the terrifying specifics of the plot were just now becoming clear.

Varina
was in Henrico County. Had Tom’s slaves been involved? And what if Tom had been at Varina when the violence began?

“As many as forty more you say?” one of the men asked, as if startled to learn so many slaves would be willing to take up against their masters in concerted effort. To imagine slaves killing whites and setting fire to the Virginia countryside—not in far-off Haiti, but actually
here
—was a thing of which not a few slaveholders’ nightmares were made.

Though he usually hung back in a crowd, Tom frowned and shook his head, saying, “Were it not for a thunderstorm thwarting their plans, who knows how many more might have joined them?”

This comment caused an uproar with our guests, some of whom opined that these rebel slaves ought to be made terrible example of. But Papa wandered off while they ranted, and they didn’t seem to notice his leaving.

Tom and I followed him into the solitude of his study, where the wavering candlelight cast Papa’s big shadow upon the octagonal walls. I looked from my husband’s face to the parchment in Papa’s hand, and dared to ask, “What else does Mr. Monroe say?”

Papa sighed and rubbed his forehead. “He wishes to know my opinion on how to deal with the conspirators.” This had been a frequent topic of conversation at our dinner table amongst Papa’s guests, who also wished to know his thoughts, as it seemed everyone did on every topic these days.

After a long moment of silence, I asked, “What will you say?”

Laying the letter upon an open ledger, Papa sat in his red revolving chair. “This is unquestionably the most serious and formidable conspiracy we’ve ever known in these parts. But there’s been hanging enough.”

Tom nodded his agreement. “We open ourselves for condemnation if we indulge in a principle of revenge, or go one step beyond absolute necessity.”

“Indeed,” Papa said. “The problem is how to strike the balance between justice and public safety.” Sally knocked as she came in from the greenhouse, interrupting the conversation with the news that more guests had arrived.

“I’ll greet them,” I said wearily, gathering my skirts. As I passed Sally, I wondered what she knew of this rebellion. What did any of the slaves at Monticello know of it? For, the instigators had reportedly gathered support from slaves as far away as Charlottesville. And I’d long ago seen proof of how quickly important news traveled amongst the slaves.

Out in the hall, I took a moment to gather myself before I greeted our visitors. My father had once said on the eve of the Constitutional Convention, with respect to the dangers of a failed rebellion in Massachusetts, that
the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants
.

Only, here and now, with so much in turmoil in our young nation, I couldn’t help but wonder who was who.

Washington City, 16 January 1801

From Thomas Jefferson to Martha Jefferson Randolph

Here one feels in an enemy’s country. It is an unpleasant circumstance, if I am destined to stay here, that the great proportion are Federalists, most of them of the violent kind. Some have been so personally bitter that they threaten a dissolution of the government if I’m elected.

W
E WERE INFESTED.
Not merely with the vermin and detritus of politics, but also with the dreaded itch at Edgehill. “Hold still,” I told my son Jeff, shearing off as much of his hair as possible to rid him of the nits he’d caught running about with an apprentice boy. Though it was winter, I was covered in sweat from the nearby cauldron in our yard where I was boiling his clothes.

And I felt agitated and upset at every little thing.

Why, I was even cross with Ann because I’d told her to finish her Latin translation, but she’d abandoned her books to watch her brother’s delousing.

In truth, since taking upon myself the education of the children, I was beginning to believe that both of my eldest were uncommonly backward. Jeff was a willful hooligan who couldn’t read without moving his lips. Ann had a good memory but never applied it without prompting. Only four-year-old Ellen—who was smart enough for
two
little girls—showed any aptitude for learn ing. I knew I ought to have been satisfied if my children turned out well with regard to morals, but I could never sit quietly under the idea of my father’s grandchildren being blockheads. Still, I told myself to be content with the idea of my son as a simple but industrious farmer because blockheads weren’t likely to run for president.

That’s what I was thinking when my stomach cramped so hard that I doubled over. I went down onto the cold ground to retch. Heaving into the grass, I was so very sick I had to crawl my way back into the house. The sickness came in waves, and I could tolerate neither meat, nor milk, nor coffee.

We thought I might be with child again.

I
was
with child, as it happened. But Tom thought it was more than that. “It isn’t healthful the way you hold your feelings in, and push them down,” he said, as if I’d somehow reached the limit of emotions my body would allow me to suppress.

Sitting on the edge of my bed, his big hand closing reassuringly on my knee, Tom said, “I know the election worries you, but nothing is going to happen to your father.”

“You can’t know that,” I said, vexed that Tom had somehow guessed at exactly the fears that consumed me. “He’s surrounded by violent men who will do anything to prevent him coming to power.”

“He’s beloved of the people—”

“Lafayette was beloved of the people, too. And they threw him in a dungeon anyway.” Unlike Tom, I’d already lived through two revolutions, and I was certain we were in the paroxysms of a third. The Federalists bayed that if my father were allowed to take the presidency, murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest would be openly practiced, the soil soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes. Which made me sure that they meant to kill him or usurp the government. I was equally sure there’d be chains, dungeons, and the gibbet for his supporters . . . to say nothing of his children and grandchildren.

I wasn’t alone in my fears.

Everyone now talked of civil war, and militias were being mustered. I’d seen this before in France—shouts of violence turned into bloody mayhem. I couldn’t count the revolutionaries I’d known who had, in the end, been eaten by the nation they birthed. As it was, the French Republic was still careening from constitution to directorship to the authority of General Bonaparte, and
still
the will of the people hadn’t triumphed.

So even though my father’s Republican Party had swept the election, taking both houses of Congress and the presidency besides, the Federalists weren’t prepared to surrender the government. A constitutional defect had allowed a tie between my father and his running mate, Aaron Burr. And now, in a spirit of perpetual war, the vanquished monarchists threatened to make mischief by elevating Burr to the presidency instead of Papa.

But I knew there was a far easier way to keep my father from the presidency. They could, for example, send him the bullet I’d been shielding him from since I was a child. . . .

And I couldn’t sleep, eat, or defeat the guilt consuming me for having secretly wished the Federalists would prevail. For having wished Papa would lose the election and come home to set things right, because it was all,
everything,
coming apart.

Even my silence.

“I’m so very worried, Tom. We have four children and another on the way. We’ve a house that’s cold, and wet, and too small.” I bit my lip. I knew wives weren’t supposed to know anything about the business of planting, but I was expected to manage the economy of the household, and how could I do it without knowing how bad off we were? “How are we going to pay our debts? How will we survive?”

“We’ll live on the profits from wheat this year,” Tom said, rising to pace at the foot of my bed. “And give up on tobacco.”

I peered up at him through bleary eyes. “I hope so, Tom.”

Then a sudden clenching pain had me groaning and curling into a sweaty ball. Tom rushed back to swab my forehead with a cool cloth on the nightstand. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he rubbed my back and whispered soothingly until the cramps eased off.

Later, after I’d managed a few hours of fitful sleep, he came back with some tea, still warm from the kettle. “You’re letting everything frighten you, Patsy. Trust in me to take care of you. Trust in your father to take care of himself. The Federalists don’t have to kill Mr. Jefferson to keep him from claiming the presidency. They just have to resort to legal trickery, and they’ve shown a willingness to do it. Because of the tie vote, the House of Representatives says they may choose neither candidate and settle upon John Marshall instead.”

John Marshall. I remembered that man from the trial of Richard Randolph—his cool eyes appraising me as I stood there with lies on my tongue and my hand on his Bible. It horrified me to think he might become president.

But my husband continued on with his thoughtful, and admittedly well-reasoned, assessment. “Either way, it won’t come to a fight. In spite of all the saber rattling, your father won’t lead us into war. He doesn’t want the presidency
that
much. The Federalists won’t go to war either, because above all, they cannot bear anarchy and disorder . . . that’s the one thing they have in common with your father.”

He was right. My father was a man of routines, civility, and particularity. In France, at the height of the danger, he’d encouraged Lafayette and the others to principled stands, but pragmatic compromise. He often told them to take what they could get in the hopes of pressing for more later. Papa could write fiery screeds, but he was, in fact, an even-tempered, rational actor.

And in the end we were all saved by it. By my father’s temperament, his reputation, and the respect of his enemies. What else can explain the way Alexander Hamilton stepped into the breach to resolve the crisis? Yes, my father’s bitterest foe threw his full weight behind my father’s election to the presidency. Hamilton hated my father. But he hated Aaron Burr—and perhaps John Marshall—much more.

After the House of Representatives voted thirty-five times in a deadlock, on the thirty-sixth ballot my father was elected, peacefully and democratically, to the presidency of the United States.

P
APA AND HIS PARTISANS
called it the Revolution of 1800.

Our countrymen delivered the nation into my father’s hands—with much hue and outcry and paroxysms of bitter slander—but ultimately, without blood. Power passed from one faction to the other in accordance with the wishes of the people, and the rule of law was obeyed. It was the first time such a thing had ever happened in our country, or perhaps anywhere.

Papa wanted my sister and I to rejoice, insisting we make annual visits to the presidential mansion and promising that he’d return to Monticello so often we’d be together four or five months of the year. But it was a plan that ignored reality. With all our little children running afoot, Tom couldn’t do without me. And Jack Eppes couldn’t stay off my sister.

Polly gave birth to a little boy at the end of September, and somehow, it didn’t kill her. But she was so ill that she fled to me, fearful of the physicians near Eppington.

When I felt how thin she was in my embrace, I cried, “Polly, you look so unwell.” My nephew was a fragile creature who had still somehow robbed his mother of nearly all her life’s blood. Her pallor was deathly, and as unreasonable as it was, I blamed Jack Eppes for that. “You’re white as a ghost and thin as a scarecrow!”

Cradling her delicate new baby boy, she smiled softly. “Mr. Eppes is so happy to have a son that he says I’ve never looked prettier. Besides, we can’t all breed so easily and often as you do, Patsy. Why look at you, set to give birth yourself any day now and you’re trying to haul my baggage into your house!”

“I’ll carry it,” my son Jeff said, always a little helper even then. Though I couldn’t get him to crack open a book without bribery or threat, he was a sweet boy. And I was grateful that he dragged my sister’s trunk into the house so I could get her inside.

“I’m fine, Patsy,” Polly insisted as my daughters crowded around. But she wasn’t fine. She was so weak she needed to be helped up the stairs. At which point I realized how much nursing she required. And given how ill I had been during the election, and how ailing I still felt now, I determined that I’d have to have my baby at Monticello, where at least I could count on Sally’s help.

Truly, I longed for my father’s house, the attentions of his servants, windows that didn’t leak, and a bed to birth my baby that was comfortable and clean. After all the terrors of the election, I wanted nothing more than sweet seclusion with my family now.

But in that simple desire, I was to be utterly thwarted. For when Papa came riding up his mountain that summer to fetch us home, he was accompanied by a multitude. Neighbors, relatives, well-wishers, sycophants, and every manner of hanger-on all ascended with him, calling, “President Jefferson! President Jefferson!” He rejected all trappings of monarchy, but our guests fluttered about him like courtiers attending a king.

Except royal courtiers—as I recalled from France—had duties and obligations to their sovereign. Royal courtiers were bound by strict rules of etiquette and social niceties. Royal courtiers didn’t demand berths without invitation. Royal courtiers didn’t lounge about in various states of dress, insolently ordering servants who were not theirs to command.

There was very little I could do about it, however, because my father insisted that as a man of the people, there must be no formality in our entertaining.

During the mornings, I planned the menu then waddled up and down the narrow staircase with my big pregnant belly to unlock the storerooms and cabinets so the servants could keep our guests fed. After meals, I played music to entertain or chased after the children, though my ankles had swollen up so much that my shoes were painful. And by evening, I tended to my sister, who was still too weak to leave her bed.

Perhaps realizing how weary I was, Papa promised, “Next time I visit, I’m resolved to do a flying visit by stealth, telling no one but you that I’m coming.”

On the night my labor pains started, I surprised myself with the thought that I was happy for the pain, because it’d confine me to childbed, where I could rest. After a hard night of panting and pushing, I gave birth to a little girl. And Sally swaddled my baby with crisp efficiency. Later, she and Polly sat with me while I nursed my newborn child, the three of us reminiscing about Paris, a time when all options were open before us. Those memories were preserved forever in our minds like bubbles suspended eternally in glittering glass.

Sally liked to speak of them, though whenever she spoke in French, it annoyed the other slaves. It set her apart. Served as a reminder that she was my father’s pretty, genteel, sophisticated mistress. Sometimes I worried about those resentments and jealousies . . . but on this night, I only enjoyed our reunion, all three of us with babies at the breast.

Sally was nursing little Harriet, named after her poor daughter who died. But
this
Harriet, who was as pale and rosy as any little white child, also had my father’s piercing blue eyes. I think Sally loved her best, and how couldn’t she? After all, Harriet, like my Ellen, must be treasured enough for two daughters.

But, of course, daughters were of little help to a planter. Sons were prized—even ones who foamed at the mouth in fits like my sister’s baby, Francis. “Poor little thing,” Sally said to me when my sister drifted to sleep. I thought she meant Francis, but her amber eyes settled on Polly with as much worry as I felt in my own heart. “Miss Polly won’t survive another. She gave Mr. Eppes a son now. That ought to be enough for him.”

No other slave would ever dare say such a thing, but I wouldn’t scold Sally for it. She was only confiding in me what no one else had the courage to say.