The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (39 page)

VII

For the next year, Jefferson’s personal life was overshadowed by another historical upheaval. Looming bankruptcy began to ravage the French government. Primarily the crisis was due to their antiquated tax system, which exempted most of the aristocrats from paying anything. The king was forced to summon a parliament called the Estates General to overhaul the system. The Estates numbered twelve hundred members, much too large an assembly to function efficiently as a governing body. Soon there were four distinct groups within the conclave, and Jefferson feared the possibility of civil war.

Meanwhile, the independent United States of America was entering a new phase of its existence. A convention met in Philadelphia in 1787, and Jefferson’s friend James Madison had played a leading role in creating a new federal constitution for the republic, far stronger than the Articles of Confederation under which the Continental Congress had labored so ineffectually. Elections had been held, and a new government, with George Washington as the first president, had been chosen by the voters.

This transformation of the federal government made Jefferson decide it was time to return to America. He was also growing concerned about his neglected farms. The income from them had dwindled toward zero. Another reason was his daughters. They were becoming more French than American. A sort of climax in this department was Martha’s announcement that she wanted to join the Roman Catholic Church and become a nun. Jefferson went to her convent school and had a talk with the abbess in charge. She agreed that it might be best if Martha and Polly withdrew from the school. Jefferson would supervise their education until they returned to America.

Another problem confronted Jefferson within the walls of his ambassadorial residence. James Hemings informed him that he did not want to go home. In Paris, slavery had been banned by the local Parlement (a semi-judicial ruling council), although it was tolerated elsewhere in France and was the economic backbone of the nation’s overseas empire. James and his sister Sally were theoretically free. James did not want to relinquish this status for slavery in Virginia. Whether Sally Hemings also voiced a similar desire is less certain. James had a skill that would enable him to support himself. Both Hemingses had probably made contact with some of the estimated one thousand free blacks in Paris, where friends may have urged James and perhaps Sally to assert their freedom.
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Jefferson talked James out of this reach for independence with a combination of promises and appeals to his gratitude. James had become ill not long after he arrived in Paris, and Jefferson had spent a considerable amount of money on a doctor and nurse to help him regain his health. The ambassador had also paid for James’s cooking lessons with one of the best chefs in Paris. If James returned to America, Jefferson promised him his freedom as soon as he trained one of his younger brothers to do the cooking for Monticello. Jefferson also promised to pay James a salary, which would enable him to save enough money to sustain himself when he went looking for work as a free man. Without James to support and protect her, Sally Hemings had little choice but to return to Monticello with her brother.

As Jefferson’s agreement to free James Hemings made clear, he thought third-generation mulattoes should not be enslaved in America or in Paris, and he may have also told Sally this. In any event, he would never have allowed an attractive teenage girl to remain alone in Paris. She would very
likely have become the mistress of a predatory young Frenchman, who would discard her after a few years and consign her to the ranks of Paris’s sixty thousand prostitutes—the fate of many of the “opera girls” who had stirred Abigail Adams’s sympathy.

The ambassador sailed for home on October 22, 1789, reserving cabins aboard the ship for his daughters and Sally Hemings, who probably functioned as their maid. He asked that Sally be given a cabin near them. Arriving in Virginia after a smooth twenty-nine-day voyage, he was astonished to read in the newspapers rumors that President Washington was going to appoint him secretary of state. He had planned to stay in America only long enough to get his daughters settled—probably with their Aunt Eppes, where Polly had been so happy—and restore his farms to prosperity with the help of expert overseers. He assumed he would return to France as ambassador. He felt that he was uniquely qualified to cement good relations between America and Revolutionary France.

At Eppington, the Eppes plantation, he found a letter from President Washington confirming the newspaper reports. Jefferson’s admiration for Washington was so strong that he soon agreed to become secretary of state. By this time he was back at Monticello. As the Jeffersons’ carriage appeared at the foot of the mountain, the slaves raced to welcome him in their brightest Sunday clothes. Cheering and shouting, they unhitched the horses, and the men hauled the carriage up the steep winding road to the summit. “When the door of the carriage was opened,” Martha Jefferson later recalled, “They crowd[ed] around him, some…crying, others laughing.” They lifted the protesting Jefferson in their arms and carried him to the portico. Martha and Maria Jefferson and James and Sally Hemings received equally warm greetings.
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There was much more than affection for Jefferson involved in this greeting. If Jefferson had died in Paris, or had been lost at sea, Monticello’s slaves would have faced catastrophe. They would have been sold or handed over to Jefferson’s heirs, with only minimal attention to preserving families or rewarding those who had established themselves as artisans or acquired other skills such as weaving cloth. Jefferson’s safe return after five long years of uncertainty about their fates was more than enough reason to celebrate.

As Jefferson struggled to deal with the painful memories Monticello evoked, and make some progress on restoring the productivity of his
farms, he had a surprise that gladdened his heart. Toward the end of December, Monticello had a visitor—a tall, dark-haired, swarthy young gentleman named Thomas Mann Randolph. He was warmly welcomed as the son of a man who had been Jefferson’s playmate in his boyhood, when he spent seven years at the Randolph plantation, Tuckahoe. Thomas Mann Randolph’s grandfather, William, had been Peter Jefferson’s closest friend. When the elder Randolph died suddenly at age thirty-three, he had asked Peter in his will to take over the plantation and raise his orphaned children. Their mother had died a year or two before her husband.

The younger Randolph had conducted a lengthy correspondence with Jefferson while he was studying in Edinburgh. For a while, Jefferson had more or less taken charge of his education. After some pleasant small talk, Randolph informed Jefferson that he hoped to become his son-in-law. He had met Martha Jefferson not long after she arrived home, and the two young people had felt an instant attraction. One of Randolph’s appeals for Martha was his European education. She had not been enthusiastic about returning to rural Albermarle County after five years of sophisticated Paris. Like Martha’s father, Randolph was fascinated by politics, and he hoped to make it his career. He also had a strong interest in science and its Virginia subdivision, scientific farming. Almost as important was his six-foot-two-inch height. Martha had inherited her father’s long-limbed body and dreaded the thought of marrying someone who was noticeably shorter than she. At least as influential was their families’ long and intimate friendship.
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Jefferson gave his warmest assent to the match—and immediately began trying to arrange things so that Martha would remain within his paternal orbit. He urged Randolph to buy land near Monticello. The young man’s father owned an excellent farm, Edgehill, only a few miles away. For the moment, Martha—and her husband—resisted his persuasion. Randolph’s father had given him land in a distant section of Virginia and the young people, in a burst of independence, announced they were going to start their lives together far from both their homes.

Jefferson cheerfully acquiesced, but he by no means abandoned his determination to retain his daughter. For the moment, politics was absorbing his attention. He was about to depart for New York to join President Washington’s cabinet; he would be gone for months, possibly years, which would make an objection to Martha’s departure seem especially disagreeable. He contented himself with a son-in-law he liked and a daughter aglow with love.

In New York he wrote a revealing letter to Martha: “I feel heavily these separations from you. It is a…consolation to know you are happier and to see a prospect of its continuance in the prudence and even temper of both Mr. Randolph and yourself…. Continue to love me as you have done, and to render my life a blessing by the prospect it may hold up to me of seeing you happy.”

Martha promptly replied: “I hope you have not given over coming to Virginia this fall as I assure you my dear papa my happiness can never be complete without your company.” She assured him that “Mr. Randolph” was a wonderful husband and she was determined to please him in “every thing.” All other aspects of her life would be secondary to that goal “
except
my love for you.”
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Meanwhile, Jefferson had decided to let Maria Jefferson, now thirteen, stay where she had been happiest—with her Aunt Eppes and her cousins at Eppington. He had taken Martha to Philadelphia with him when she was the same age, to advance her education. But Jefferson had long since realized that Maria was a totally different child who needed the companionship of loving friends and family to keep her contented. This solution worked so well that before the end of the decade Maria would marry her cousin, Jack Eppes.

With the two most important people in his life in happy situations, Jefferson headed for New York and its politics. He was a man with a mission. Conversations with James Madison, already his closest friend and advisor, had convinced him that there were tendencies in the United States that had to be exposed and defeated, lest the American Revolution end in betrayal of the ideals he had enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. In a speech in Alexandria, on the way to New York, he had told his audience the Republican form of government was the only one that was not “at open or secret war” with the rights of mankind.

On March 21, 1790, Jefferson reported to President Washington as a citizen soldier of the republic, ready for duty. He would soon discover that this duty was far more complex and emotionally abrasive than any task he had yet confronted. He would find himself virtually at war with men who had shared the task of achieving independence. His friendships with John Adams and George Washington would be ruined by vicious partisan politics. Worst of all, Jefferson would face devastating accusations about his personal life that threatened his growing fame as a founding father.

I
n ten years, Thomas Jefferson went from an untried, relatively unknown secretary of state in George Washington’s cabinet to president of the United States. This amazing ascent owed a great deal to the way the Declaration of Independence became a major force in American politics. Almost from the moment Jefferson joined President Washington’s administration, he clashed with Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton about their radically differing views of the French Revolution and America’s political and economic future. As we have seen, from this conflict emerged two political parties, something the founders had never anticipated and at first deplored. When the Federalists flaunted the Constitution as their handiwork, the Jeffersonian Republicans retaliated with the Declaration of Independence as their sacred document and lavished praise on Jefferson as the author, adding cubits to his stature.
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As the political discussions grew more intense, anything Jefferson said or wrote became grist for the journalistic slander mills. One editor printed a letter he had dashed off to an Italian friend, Phillip Mazzei, which included a derogatory comment on Washington. Mazzei leaked it to a newspaper in Europe and it soon crossed the Atlantic. In the letter, Jefferson criticized America’s declaration of neutrality in the war between Britain and Revolutionary France and described Washington as an “apostate” from the cause of liberty. He had been a “Samson” in the war for independence, but as president had allowed his head to be
shaved “by the harlot England.” The overheated comparison ended Jefferson’s friendship with Washington. In Philadelphia, where Jefferson was serving as vice president during John Adams’s presidency, people crossed the street to avoid speaking to him.
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Jefferson became involved with Scottish-born James Thomson Callender, a newspaperman who attacked George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton with reckless accusations. Jefferson praised one of his effusions: “Such papers cannot fail to produce the best effect. They inform the thinking part of the nation,” he told Callender. The journalist was a heavy drinker with a paranoid streak that widened appreciably when he was jailed under the Sedition Act, the law that made it a crime to criticize a president. Jefferson, who believed the law was unconstitutional, gave Callender money and sympathy. When Jefferson became president in 1800, he pardoned the journalist.

Only minimally grateful, Callender demanded that he be appointed postmaster of Richmond, Virginia, as a reward for his services to the Republican cause. When President Jefferson balked, Callender retaliated with a series of vicious articles in his Richmond newspaper. He revealed that Jefferson had paid him substantial sums to support his slanderous labors and quoted the president’s words of approval. Next, the inflamed scribe accused Jefferson of fathering several children by Sally Hemings, the young mulatto who had escorted Maria Jefferson to Paris. It was “well known” among Jefferson’s neighbors that he had kept Sally “as his concubine” for many years, Callender declared. One of their children was a boy of about twelve named “Tom,” with red hair and a striking resemblance to Jefferson. Supposedly, Tom had been conceived in Paris, when Sally escorted Maria Jefferson across the Atlantic to join her father. Everyone in the vicinity of Monticello knew about Sally. So did James Madison, when he urged Americans to vote for Jefferson because of his “virtue.”
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Federalist editors leaped on the Sally story and gleefully reprinted it in their newspapers throughout the nation. As the Federalists saw it, they were retaliating against the Jeffersonian Republican editors who had revived the British slanders about Washington’s supposed sexual sins in the Revolution and exposed Alexander Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reynolds. The
Boston Gazette
published a song about Sally, supposedly written by the “Sage of Monticello” to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.” Cal
lender reprinted it in his Virginia paper, making the accusation difficult for Jefferson’s friends and family to ignore:

Next, Callender revealed that Jefferson’s former friend John Walker, now a fierce Federalist, accused him of trying to seduce his wife, Betsey, thirty years ago. Although Walker had known the story for over a decade, he claimed to be outraged and threatened to challenge Jefferson to a duel. As Walker talked and wrote about it, the story took on even more lurid dimensions. He claimed that Jefferson had pursued Betsey as late as 1779, when he was a married man living in supposed contentment with Martha Wayles. Jefferson’s friend Thomas Paine attempted to defend him against the ten-year extension of the story. “We have heard of a ten year siege of Troy,” Paine wrote. “But who ever heard of a ten year siege to seduce?” Both stories became national sensations.
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II

Until this explosion, there was scarcely a mention of Sally Hemings in Jefferson’s letters or the records he kept at Monticello in his Farm Book and Account Book. Sally had begun having children in 1795 and by 1802 had given birth to two girls and a boy. There was no record of a child who would approximate the age of the boy Callender described; he would
have been born not long after Jefferson, his daughters, and James and Sally Hemings returned from France. The journalist claimed that Sally had as many as thirty other lovers beside President Jefferson. She was “a slut as common as the pavement.”
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In accordance with their agreement, Jefferson had freed Sally’s older brother, James Hemings, after he had trained his younger brother, Peter, to become Monticello’s cook. It took James four years to complete this task. One reason may have been James’s fondness for alcohol, a habit he apparently acquired in Paris. James used the money Jefferson paid him during these years to return to France. But he found revolutionary Paris a strange and unsettling place, and soon sailed back to America. He paid a visit to Monticello and was cordially welcomed by Jefferson. James talked grandly of perhaps going to Spain to find work there. Jefferson noted in a letter that he seemed to have gotten control of his drinking, a hopeful sign.

Alas, it was only a temporary reform. In the fall of 1801, penniless and depressed by his addiction to alcohol, James Hemings committed suicide in Philadelphia. Jefferson was deeply distressed by this tragic news. James had been one of his most capable and devoted servants for many years. He had served as his coachman and butler before becoming a chef. When Jefferson became president, he had offered James the post of chef at the executive mansion in Washington, D.C. But Hemings, perhaps reluctant to resume the master–servant relationship, had turned him down.

By this time it had become clear that Jefferson considered all the children born to Betty Hemings and John Wayles entitled to various degrees of freedom. They were permitted to travel around Virginia, to marry men and women of their choice, and to make arrangements with employers as far away as Richmond. They kept all the money they made. Jefferson apparently believed they were ultimately entitled to complete freedom, as third-generation mulattoes. Also important was their blood relationship to Martha Wayles; he continued to express her special concern for them by this privileged treatment.

In 1794, Jefferson freed Robert Hemings, James’s older brother, who had been trained as a barber. Robert had married an enslaved woman in Fredericksburg. He persuaded her master to pay Jefferson to free Robert, who in turn promised to repay him and purchase his wife’s freedom. Jefferson was not pleased by Robert’s abrupt demand for freedom, which left him without a barber. But he gave Robert his certificate of manumission. The couple lived in Richmond for the rest of their lives.

In April 1792, Jefferson had given Sally’s older sister, Mary, a form of freedom. She had been hired as a servant by Colonel Thomas Bell, a Charlottesville storekeeper. They apparently became lovers and soon had two children. Mary had previously had children by an unnamed father at Monticello. Jefferson kept these children under his control but agreed to sell Mary and her Bell children to the colonel. Thereafter they lived as man and wife, and no one in Charlottesville said a censorious word. That is not entirely surprising. Like her sisters and brothers, Mary’s skin was probably white. When Bell died in 1800, he freed Mary and their children and made them his beneficiaries.
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III

President Jefferson was staggered by James Callender’s assaults on his personal character. Friends such as James Madison came to his defense with scathing denials and denunciations of Callender. Madison dismissed the story as “incredible.” But Jefferson made no attempt to answer the charges publicly. Only in private letters to close friends and political allies, he admitted he had, while single, “offered love to a handsome lady.” This was the only charge that was true, he insisted, implicitly denying Callender’s story about Sally Hemings. Eventually he negotiated a private admission of guilt with John Walker that avoided further altercation and a duel.
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A troubled Jefferson asked Martha and Maria to join him in the executive mansion in Washington. Opinions vary in respect to his motives. Friends thought he was trying to protect them from the ugly gossip swirling through Virginia in the wake of Callender’s assault. His political foes sneered that he was trying to portray himself as a man who had retained the devotion of his two daughters and was therefore innocent of Callender’s charges.

Martha and Maria left their husbands and children in Virginia and joined the president in response to his summons. For six weeks, they participated in a stream of formal dinners with congressmen and senators. Jefferson insisted on paying all their expenses, including new dresses and bonnets for Maria. One Federalist guest reported that the two daughters appeared to be “well-accomplished young women…very delicate and tolerably handsome.” Martha enjoyed the experience, but Maria found it tiresome to make conversation with so many strangers. She was even more troubled by how much their visit had cost Jefferson. She wrote him
a touching note after she returned home, hinting rather strongly that she wished he had a wife: “How much do I think of you at the hours which we have been accustomed to be with you alone and how much pain it gives me to think of the…solitary manner in which you sleep upstairs. Adieu much beloved of fathers…You are the first and dearest to my heart.”
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IV

Callender’s assault came as President Jefferson was undergoing terrific political stress as president. He had taken office hoping to reverse a decade of hostility between America and France. But his vision of the French as America’s natural allies vanished in a cascade of reports and rumors that France’s new leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, planned to send an army to New Orleans to create a rival nation in the Louisiana Territory, a vast swath of the continent between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains. France had given it to Spain in 1763 to compensate for Spanish losses in the Seven Years’ War with Britain, but Napoleon had pressured Spain into secretly ceding it back to France. Another French army invaded St. Dominique (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), determined to regain control of this wealthy sugar island from rebellious slaves who had seized it with the encouragement of the Federalists.

In collusion with the French, the Spanish closed the port of New Orleans, cutting off the western states’ export trade. The Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, called for war, and numerous Jefferson supporters in the West joined the cry. Jefferson sent James Monroe to Paris as a special envoy to try to resolve the crisis. The president discovered, to his and everyone else’s amazement, that Napoleon was prepared to sell New Orleans and the entire territory of Louisiana to the United States. The French army in St. Dominique had been decimated by yellow fever and other diseases, and Bonaparte had decided to cut his losses and abandon his scheme to revive the French empire in America. Although there was nothing in the Constitution that permitted the acquisition of more territory, Jefferson accepted the offer, doubling the size of the United States.
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The purchase of the Louisiana Territory made Jefferson immensely popular—and defused the Federalists’ attacks on his personal life. He was reelected in 1804, winning four out of every five votes. The Federalist party was reduced to a hapless minority. Callender, the one man in the nation who
might have continued to attack Jefferson about “dusky Sally,” conveniently drowned in the James River in three feet of water, a few months after he had been beaten over the head by the federal district attorney for Virginia.
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But no one seemed to notice or care. Jefferson’s fame soared to unparalleled heights. His followers compared him to George Washington and found him superior because he had acquired “an empire for liberty” without firing a shot or losing a single soldier—and without raising taxes.
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V

In the midst of this improbable ascension from the depths of disgrace to the heights of fame, Jefferson’s personal life received a devastating blow. His beloved younger daughter, Maria, had enjoyed a happy marriage with her cousin, Jack Eppes. He adored her with a fervor that more than matched her father’s devotion to Martha Wayles. Jack won election to Congress, where he supported his father-in-law with wit and eloquence. Jefferson liked him so much that he invited him to live at the “palace,” as the presidential residence was often called in its early years.