The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (35 page)

V

The Revolution that exploded in Boston soon swept Virginia and the rest of the American colonies into the growing upheaval. Jefferson’s talented pen was pressed into service by his colleagues in the House of Burgesses. His fierce essay “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” was soon being read by Americans in other colonies and even in London, where Britons sympathetic to the Americans’ grievances distributed it with enthusiasm. Jefferson was not among the delegates chosen for the First Continental Congress in 1774; they were all a decade or more older. But in 1775, as the clash veered toward full-
scale war, some of the older men such as Patrick Henry stayed home to guide Virginia, and Jefferson was selected for the Second Continental Congress.

There he was engulfed by the excitement of being at the center of the Revolutionary ferment. This is what Congress became, after the news of the blood spilled at Lexington and Concord reached Philadelphia. He met Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, who was already a hero to Jefferson. He had been in his early teens when Colonel Washington became Virginia’s most admired soldier.

New Englanders came within Jefferson’s orbit for the first time. Several Yankees who had read the “Summary View” referred to its writer as “the famous Mr. Jefferson.” John and Samuel Adams did not hesitate to say to people they trusted that they were for independence—the sooner the better. They met no opposition from Thomas Jefferson. John Adams later recalled that Jefferson was so frank, explicit, and decisive on committees and in private conversation, he soon “seized upon my heart.”
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When Congress adjourned for a few weeks in August 1775, Jefferson rushed back to Virginia. His letters from Martha made it all too clear that she missed him desperately. Worse, their little daughter, Jane Randolph Jefferson, was ailing. En route, Jefferson bought a rare violin from his cousin, John Randolph, father of the man to whom he had sold his law practice. Randolph had decided his loyalty to the king required him to resign as attorney general of Virginia and sail for England.

In an exchange of notes, Jefferson revealed how much politics was dividing his soul. He told Randolph he yearned for the day when “this unnatural contest” with Great Britain would end with “a restoration of our just rights.” That would enable him to achieve his deepest wish—to “withdraw myself totally from the public stage and pass the rest of my days in domestic ease and tranquility.”
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The emotional intensity in these words suggests the strong possibility that there were people in Jefferson’s own family who were making him feel the revolutionary contest was unnatural. The two prime candidates are his mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, and his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson. The revolution had been percolating for six years before Jefferson married Martha—more than enough time for her to hear her father express his disapproval of troublemakers like Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry.

Alas, there was little tranquility for Jefferson at Monticello. A few weeks after he returned, he watched little Jane Randolph Jefferson die in her weeping mother’s arms. Unable to bear the thought of leaving Martha alone, Jefferson persuaded her to pay a visit to her half sister, Elizabeth Eppes, and her husband, Francis, while he headed back to Philadelphia in his phaeton. Martha found the separation unendurable. She sank into a depression and was too ill to write a single letter.

Jefferson devoted one day a week to writing letters home to Martha and his numerous friends. When a month passed without a response from Martha, he grew almost frantic. He wrote to Francis Eppes, begging him for news. Eppes assured him Martha was not seriously ill, but the distraught—and perhaps guilt-ridden—Jefferson replied that he wanted to hear that news from her own hand.

VI

In the last week of December 1775, Jefferson abruptly abandoned Congress and returned to Monticello for the next four months. He supervised the continued work on the house and did his utmost to restore Martha’s health and happiness. On March 31, 1776, another woman in his life gave him a shock: Jane Randolph Jefferson died suddenly at the age of fifty-seven. Within a few hours, Jefferson experienced a violent headache that incapacitated him for the next five weeks. It was far worse than the pain he had experienced when he lost Rebecca Burwell.

What was the source of this migraine-like agony? Jefferson never revealed a trace of sorrow about his mother’s death in a letter or notebook. It adds weight to the suspicion that she did not approve of his revolutionary activities. We have noted a hint of this disapproval in his emotional letter to John Randolph. Martha’s health no doubt complicated Jefferson’s feelings. If he was doing the “wrong” thing (in his mother’s view) by joining the Revolution, was his wife’s illness a kind of punishment? Rationally, such thinking makes no sense. But in the subconscious, reason has to compete with the heart’s unreasoning demands. Jefferson’s guilt only intensified his wish to do everything in his power to make Martha well. He had planned to return to Congress at the end of March. Now he postponed his departure for another month.

VII

By May 13, 1776, Jefferson was back in Philadelphia. The mood in Congress had changed dramatically. Much of the reason for it was a tough talking pamphlet called “Common Sense” by a recently arrived Englishman, Thomas Paine. A friend had sent Jefferson a copy in February. Paine heaped scorn on George III and urged the Americans to declare their independence. Two days after Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia, the Virginia Convention under the leadership of Patrick Henry voted in favor of the explosive word. The news soon reached the colony’s delegates in Philadelphia, and their chief spokesman, Richard Henry Lee, reported the decision to Congress in sonorously historic words: “These united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states.”

In the midst of this turmoil, Jefferson’s ongoing anxiety for Martha almost derailed his rendezvous with history. He wrote two letters to friends in the Virginia Convention saying he did not want to be reappointed as a delegate to Congress—and requested permission to return home as soon as possible. Edmund Randolph, the purchaser of Jefferson’s law practice, presented his request to the Convention and found himself “with a swarm of wasps around my ears.” Dismissing Randolph’s plea, the Convention elected Jefferson a delegate for another year.

A few weeks later, John Adams chose Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence, a task that became the foundation of his fame. As the unforgettable words flowed from his pen, his heart and mind remained clotted with dread. Post rider after post rider had arrived from Virginia with no letter from Martha. The declaration was proclaimed and read throughout America, changing the war from a colonial quarrel to a world-transforming upheaval. But for the moment, Jefferson’s role was known to only a handful of his friends and fellow congressmen. Not until 1784 would he be mentioned in a newspaper as its author.
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A letter finally arrived from Martha, begging him to come home as soon as possible. Whether she was seriously ill or simply thought she was remains a mystery. Jefferson impulsively assured her that he would be at Monticello by the middle of August. But he soon discovered that the older members of the Virginia delegation were deciding to go home without asking anyone’s permission. Soon, Jefferson was the only Virginian in Congress. If he departed, the state would lose its vote. He wrote to Rich
ard Henry Lee, begging him to return to Philadelphia as soon as possible. “The state of Mrs. Jefferson’s health” made it “impossible for me to disappoint her expectation of seeing me.” At the bottom of the letter, after a few sentences about congressional business, he scribbled, “I pray you to come. I am under a sacred obligation to go home.”
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Lee, whose own wife was in poor health, refused to be hurried, and left Jefferson wracked with worry for the entire sweltering month of August. On September 1, 1776, he could stand the agony no longer and set out for Monticello, leaving his state unrepresented in Congress. As he departed, he wrote an almost hysterical letter to Edmund Pendleton, the chairman of the Virginia Convention, telling him he wanted to retire from politics.

VIII

Back at Monticello, Jefferson’s neighbors urged him to participate in the Virginia Convention, which was rewriting the new state’s laws. He took Martha to Williamsburg with him. They lived in the comfortable house of his friend and mentor George Wythe, who was serving in Congress. Soon they were lovers again and Martha became pregnant. Jefferson consulted the best doctor in Williamsburg on Martha’s behalf, but he could only tell the anxious husband that she was a fragile woman whose health would always be uncertain.

A few weeks later, the president of Congress, John Hancock, asked Jefferson to join Benjamin Franklin in an embassy to Paris to seek French aid. It was flattering evidence of how much Jefferson had impressed his fellow congressmen. It also confronted him with an agonizing decision. Here was a chance to see Europe, something he had yearned to do since he was a student at William and Mary. Hancock told him his “great abilities and unshaken virtue” made him Congress’s choice for this task, which was crucial to the future survival of America.

For three days, Jefferson was a man in torment. Could he take Martha with him? The way she leaned on his arm like an invalid when they walked in George Wythe’s garden scotched that idea. Only someone in the best physical health could endure six or eight weeks on the Atlantic in late autumn. Could he go alone? Martha would give him her permission of course. But she had been unable to tolerate a separation of a few months while he was in Philadelphia. This ambassadorship meant an absence of
at least a year and probably two. Jefferson could not even bring himself to discuss it with her.

Instead, he wrote the most painful letter of his life, turning down the appointment. He tried desperately to defend himself against the imputation of cowardice or self-interest. “No cares of my own person or yet for my private affairs would have induced one moment’s hesitation” to accept the appointment, he avowed. “But circumstances very peculiar to my family, such as neither permit me to leave nor to carry it,” compelled him to refuse the offer. Those tormented words won him nothing but a scathing rebuke from Richard Henry Lee, who almost certainly spoke for other Virginia congressmen. “No man feels more deeply than I do, the love of and the loss of, private enjoyment,” Lee wrote. But if everyone followed Jefferson’s example, America was “beyond redemption, lost in the deep perdition of slavery.”
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IX

Meanwhile, Martha’s pregnancy advanced, and her anxiety mounted with it. Once more there was the swirling dread as the day of delivery approached. On May 28, 1777, an all but distracted Jefferson waited on the first floor of his still unfinished mansion while Martha gasped and sobbed in labor. At last, down the stairs came his friend, Dr. George Gilmer, with a broad smile on his face. In his arms was a tiny red body swathed in blankets. It was a boy! Thomas Jefferson had a son!

Seventeen days later, Jefferson scrawled in his pocket diary: “Our son died 10 H. 20 M P.M.” Letters came to Monticello from John Adams and Richard Henry Lee, telling him how badly he was needed in Congress. Lee’s missive was unmistakably insulting. Jefferson did not bother to answer either letter. He retreated from national politics, paying only sporadic attention to the ongoing war, with its unnerving mixture of victories and defeats. He continued to accept election as a delegate to the Virginia Convention, but his attendance was erratic, depending largely on Martha’s health.

On August 1, 1778, Martha gave birth to another child, a girl whom Jefferson named Mary. She survived the first months, when so many babies died, and Martha also made a rapid recovery. An exultant Jefferson plunged into a near frenzy of planting and building. Determined to finish
Monticello, he ordered no less than 190,000 red bricks. Some of this energy was inspired by good news about the war. France had signed a treaty of alliance, and the British army had abandoned its grip on the American capital, Philadelphia. General Washington pursued the retreating redcoats and claimed a victory in a brutal clash at Monmouth, New Jersey. Jefferson and many other Americans assumed peace and independence were imminent. In May 1779, Jefferson informed his friend Edmund Pendleton that he was planning to retire from both state and national politics.

Instead of seeking peace, the British were goaded to fresh fury by the intrusion of their ancient French enemy and embarked on a new strategy. They shifted the war to the South. An army rampaged up from Florida and subdued Georgia. Alarmed patriots in South Carolina begged for reinforcements. In this threatening atmosphere, Jefferson’s friends elected him governor of Virginia. The news eased the pain of the letters he had received implying he was letting “domestic pleasures” impede his patriotism, and he accepted the post. It soon became the major misfortune of his life.

X

Jefferson took Martha and the two children with him, first to the old colonial capital, Williamsburg, and then to Richmond, to which the legislature decided to move because it was less vulnerable to seaborne assaults from the enemy. But the British landed troops from their ubiquitous fleet with almost ridiculous ease, and Governor Jefferson could do little to stop them. Virginia’s militia law was so lax, a man could refuse to turn out by giving almost any excuse. In the fall of 1779, Martha and the children had to flee Richmond to a nearby plantation until British raiders withdrew.

In 1780, Martha became pregnant again, adding another worry to Governor Jefferson’s lengthening list of woes. In November of that year, in a small Richmond house the governor had rented from Martha’s uncle, she gave birth to another daughter, whom Jefferson named Lucy Elizabeth. Both the baby and her mother recovered quickly—the first good fortune to come Jefferson’s way in months.

Little more than a month later, another British raid, led by the traitor Benedict Arnold, now a British brigadier general, sailed boldly up the James River, and Martha and her children again were forced to flee, this time in
foul winter weather, while Governor Jefferson frantically tried to rally the state’s militia. Barely two hundred men turned out, and he had to sit helplessly on his horse on the south side of the James River and watch Arnold burn millions of dollars worth of cotton, tobacco, and other property in Richmond.