Christmas at Monticello
with
_Thomas Jefferson_
BY
HELEN TOPPING MILLER
LONGMANS, GREEN & CO.
NEW YORK · LONDON · TORONTO
1959
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., INC.
119 WEST 40th STREET, NEW YORK 18
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., Ltd.
6 & 7 CLIFFORD STREET, LONDON W 1
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
20 CRANFIELD ROAD, TORONTO 16
CHRISTMAS AT MONTICELLO
WITH THOMAS JEFFERSON
COPYRIGHT © 1959
BY HELEN TOPPING MILLER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK, OR ANY
PORTION THEREOF, IN ANY FORM
PUBLISHED SIMULTANEOUSLY IN THE DOMINION OF CANADA BY
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., TORONTO
FIRST EDITION
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 59-11264
Printed in the United States of America
[Illustration: Decorative glyph]
_Christmas Tales_
_By_ Helen Topping Miller
_Christmas for Tad_
_No Tears for Christmas_
_Christmas at Mount Vernon_
_Her Christmas at the Hermitage_
_Christmas with Robert E. Lee_
1
_Washington: March, 1809_
Suddenly, as he climbed the long, curving flight of stairs, he knew that
now he was an old man.
Sixty-six last April, and, though his sandy red hair had merely faded
instead of turning gray, there were twinges in his knees that reminded
him of too many miles in the saddle, in cold rain and sleet, too many
hours standing at his writing table, too much tension, not enough rest.
But now he could rest.
In the half-furnished rooms of the White House below, the crowd still
danced at the Inaugural Ball, with the wife of the new president,
sparkling, vivacious Dolly Madison, a gay and charming hostess in a
sweeping white cambric dress and the inevitable enormous turban on her
head.
He was grateful, Thomas Jefferson was thinking as he toiled up the
stairs, that he had been able to see his good friend, Jemmy Madison,
inaugurated president of these new and struggling United States. But he
was even more grateful that his own years of service were at an end.
“No third term,” he had told them when they importuned him. “No, never!
My work is done. I am going home.”
If only he could have left a government in peace, but, for this new
nation that he had worked a lifetime to build, it appeared sadly that
there could be no peace. Off the coasts of his country British and
French ships prowled and battled, seizing American shipping, taking off
sailors at gunpoint, confiscating cargoes. Would James Madison be able
to keep the nation out of another war? he worried, as he entered the
disordered bedroom where his half-packed possessions were strewn about,
books stacked on the floor, papers spread over the bed. Down below in
some of the empty rooms of the mansion were piled other boxes of papers
already sorted and made ready to travel by barge and wagon back to his
“Little Mountain” in Albemarle County, his beloved Monticello.
As he closed the door of the room, there was a little whistle and a whir
of wings, and his pet mockingbird came charging through the air, all
reaching feet and stiffened wings, to perch on Jefferson’s shoulder.
“We’re going home, boy,” he told the bird, turning his face to avoid the
inquisitive bill. “Burwell will see to it that you get back to
Monticello safely, where all the other mockingbirds will probably be
swollen with envy when they see you lording it over the place. No, I
haven’t any sugar tonight. When we get home my grandchildren will feed
you sugar till you’ll probably die of obesity.”
He sat wearily on the side of the bed and began turning over papers,
studying each, laying them in neat piles. There were too many of them
but each was important to him. A soft rap came at the door; it opened a
crack and his daughter, Martha Randolph, always called “Patsy,” put a
turbaned head in.
“Papa, may I come in?”
“It would seem that you are already in,” he smiled. “You should be
downstairs being gay with the rest of them.”
“Oh, Papa, I’m an old woman now. I’m thirty-six. Old enough for caps and
a chimney corner, too old for frolicking.”
“The chimney corner hasn’t been built that can hold you long. You were
born restless like your father. You always want to be on to the next
activity, Patsy, no matter what it is.”
“I didn’t come away down here through all that cold mud to dance and
frivol,” she argued, arranging her wide skirt so she could sit beside
him on the high bed. “I came to help you pack and fetch you home, but
from the looks of things we’re doomed never to get there. What are all
these pages and pages full of strange words?”
“Look out!” He rescued some sheets from her hand. “Don’t mix them up.”
He straightened the papers lovingly, his long freckled fingers deft.
“These are my Indian vocabularies. I’ve been setting down words from the
different Indian tongues, comparing them and trying to find a common
origin.”
“So that’s why someone said the other day that you believed that all the
Indians were originally Russians!” Patsy laid the pages in neat piles.
“Papa, you continually astound me! With all the frightful
responsibilities you’ve had all these years—buying Louisiana, the
country continually in a row with England and France and this bank
business, not to mention Aaron Burr—you’ve found time to learn Indian
languages.”
“I haven’t learned many—only a few words here and there. It kept my mind
off unpleasant things, like having all the Federalists hate me
vehemently and make no bones about it.” He quirked his long mouth in an
ironic grimace. “Do you know that at this moment there are half a dozen
banquets being eaten in this city where the Federalists are proposing
insulting toasts to the despised ‘Virginian,’ gloating over my
departure, telling each other, ‘Thank God, at last we’re rid of
Jefferson!’?”
“Papa, please don’t remember those things,” pleaded his daughter. “Leave
every bitter memory right here on the shores of this dirty Potomac. Up
on the Rivanna on your mountain the children are already counting hours,
eager for Grandfather to come home. Now, can’t we lay all these papers
in a box so this bed can be used for the purpose for which it was
intended? I’ll call Burwell. I could drag your boots off myself but it’s
hard for me to stoop or bend over in these murderous stays. Back home I
shall never wear them, no matter if my fashion-minded daughters faint
with horror.”
“Don’t tell me the Misses Randolph have deserted dolls and toad houses
built of mud and gone running after fur-belows! Maybe I had too many
mirrors sent home from France.” He began obediently to lay the papers in
a stout wooden box. “Come in, Burwell. The tyrannical Madam Patsy
Randolph says this ex-president has to go to bed.”
“With a hot posset and a warm brick at his feet, Burwell,” Martha
instructed the faithful servant. “I wonder if anybody in the future
history of this nation will ever get this old barn of a mansion really
warm? There are more goose-pimples than dimples and beauty patches on
those bare shoulders downstairs this minute and Dolly Madison whispered
to me that she wished that protocol demanded ermine capes with velvet
linings for officials in this country such as the kings and lords wear
in England. Well, good night, Papa. I’ll see you in the morning before I
leave. I do have to hurry home. Remember there is a large family of
small people there all in need of discipline before you get back to
spoil them all outrageously.”
“I never spoil children. I teach them to use their eyes and their
minds,” he protested, grunting as Burwell eased off the tight polished
slippers and put shabby old carpet slippers on his feet. “There’s one
thing I determine, Madam. If you can throw away stays when you are back
at Monticello, I shall discard all fancy boots and slippers, stocks and
tight cravats, and those confounded, silly lacy affairs down my front.
You haven’t given away my good green breeches, I hope?”
“Everything of yours is exactly as you left it, Papa. The moths got at
that awful old homespun coat but I suppose you’ll wear it anyway.”
“It comforts my old shoulders and the pockets are all in the right
places,” he asserted.
“Very likely full of rocks and arrowheads and dried leaves and dead
butterflies at this moment.” She bent and kissed him, her fancy
headdress slipping a little. She pulled it off freeing reddish brown
curls to fall over her ears. “I’m going to bed myself. Those fiddles and
trombones can squawk all night but they won’t keep me awake.”
Left alone, Thomas Jefferson dug a comfortable hollow in his pillow and
tried to sleep. But too much went coursing through his mind. That
resolution passed by the Virginia Assembly, especially the words at the
end: “You carry with you the sweetest of awards, the recollection of a
life well spent in the service of your country.”
That sentiment assuaged a little some of the bitterer things. Young
Alexander Hamilton, George Washington’s handsome protégé and Thomas
Jefferson’s relentless enemy, dying, after he had fired dramatically in
the air, from the bullet of Aaron Burr. And there had been Burr, as
Jefferson knew, always plotting, dreaming up his grandiose schemes to
set up an empire of his own in the West, fleeing to England when his
treasonable activities were discovered, forfeiting his bail.
John Marshall had been to blame for that. John Marshall, John Adams’
midnight appointee, named for petty spite, and the sworn and bitter
enemy of Thomas Jefferson, had so muddled Burr’s trial that a jury had
acquitted the man of treason and altered the charge to some trivial
misdemeanor. And then Marshall had had the effrontery to subpoena the
President of the United States as a witness!
These are they who had worked all manner of evil against me, the words
ran through the old man’s tired brain. Yet do I stand and my arm
prevails against them. Curious how darkness and silence always brought
back to him some line or other from the thousands of books he had read.
That was something he would do at Monticello to fill up his
days—catalogue all his books, almost ten thousand of them there must be
now, for he had sent home boxes full every year. He would teach his
older grandsons, Jefferson Randolph and Francis Eppes, to appreciate
books too, and some of the girls might show some signs of possessing an
eager mind like his Patsy’s.
Someone opened a door below and the blare of a marching tune came to his
ears which likely meant that the dancing company were going down the
chilly halls to the unfurnished rooms where the collation was spread on
trestle tables. Jefferson found himself drumming his fingers on his
chest in time to the music. There had been so much martial music in his
life. He thought of Patrick Henry riding into Williamsburg on that
cloudy morning at the head of his militia. Gallant, shabby Patrick, who
had stood so tall in his run-down boots and worn leather breeches, his
coat out at the elbows, who had twice sent great words ringing on the
air of America, words that were so trumpet-strong and stirring that they
still echoed in the ears of men and made a small thrill quiver in the
breast of Thomas Jefferson himself.
“If this be treason, make the most of it!” And “Give me Liberty or give
me Death!” He would hear them again and again so long as he lived,
remembering that they had challenged the hesitant hearts of rebelling
Virginians until they were ready to dare even the great guns of the
Third George of Hanover.
But now, Jefferson was thinking, how early the fires of patriotism had
cooled in Patrick Henry. Patrick had been successful at Red Hill, his
plantation. He had made some money, grown old before his time, and been
content the last time Jefferson had seen him to sit under a green tree
with a jug of cool spring water near by and his grandchildren playing
around. Ease and security—were they the drugs that abated the eternal
challenge in the minds of men? And did nations like men grow sluggish
and apathetic when they were well fed and bodily comfortable, Jefferson
wondered?
Patrick Henry was dead now, and George Washington was dead. One by one
the passionately dedicated builders of the temple of the Republic had
vanished from the arena, leaving the affairs of state to the younger,
noisier men who had not known the travail, the risks, the fiery trials
of the beginning. I am a lone dead leaf hanging on the tree, the old man
told himself. I am that despised democrat who greeted pompous envoys in
a shabby coat, the one they called Infidel.
That had been his own private joke, his personal secret—his belief, his
relationship with the Almighty. When he was dead, someone would find the
little book in which he had pasted and annotated all the sayings of
Jesus and know how wrong they had been in their hasty judgment. But now
it did not matter. Nothing mattered now that he was going home. He had
refused a third term as president, adhering to the precedent of George
Washington. Turmoil and trouble were hot in the air, but somehow his
nostrils did not dilate with the old war-horse eagerness at the threat
of conflict. Now he felt no stallion urge to go charging armed with
words into the midst of any fray. How well life was organized, he
thought, as he found a softer spot in the pillow. Old age crept on a man
unaware, bringing its own opiate to dull any lingering sense of loss.
At length, letting the weight of weariness have its way with him, Thomas
Jefferson fell asleep. Martha Randolph, tiptoeing in later, shading a
candle with her hand, saw his face upturned, eyes closed, nose pinched a
little, some brown freckles standing out on the gray, drained cheeks,
and caught the eagle look about him.
He will look like that when he is dead, she thought, as she blew out the
candle and quietly slipped away.
It was snowing hard when Jefferson awoke early in the morning.
The raw ugliness of this new city of Washington was being charitably
hidden under a blanket of downy feathers. The stumps where the big tulip
poplars and oaks had been cut down to open up streets and clear space
for building were now, all of them, so many thrones cushioned with
ermine. The cutting of those trees had grieved Jefferson’s heart. How he
hated to see a tree go down, though he had slaughtered a young forest in
his younger years to clear the top of his little mountain for the home
he visioned there.
He looked down at the narrow streets where sleighs and wagons were
already churning up dark mud to profane the virgin beauty of the snow.
Martha came in early accompanied by two aides. Jefferson, half dressed,
was eating the breakfast Burwell had brought up, picking the meat from a
fried fish with his fingers, dipping bits of corn bread into new cane
syrup. He dried his fingers quickly on his handkerchief, gulped the last
swallow of tea, and motioned Burwell to take the food away.
“And what brings you here so early, my dear Patsy?” he inquired. “I
thought you would be starting out for Richmond and Charlottesville on
the next coach?”
“I knew you’d never finish this packing alone or let any one help you.”
She kissed his forehead, smoothing back his rough motley of hair. “I
declare, Burwell, if you don’t cut his hair soon, he’ll be riding the
country looking like a mangy old lion!” she scolded. “Trim this on top
and fix him a proper cue, or I shall go out and buy you a stylish wig,
Mr. Ex-President.”
“Can’t stand the things! They’re dirty,” he snorted. “I’ll get
everything packed, Patsy. These boys will help me. You go along home and
get a good fire going to thaw out my old bones after that long three
days in that drafty coach.”
“You will never finish packing,” she fussed. “You’ll find some book or
paper you haven’t seen in a long time and spend hours poring over it. I
know you, Thomas Jefferson. You gentlemen bring in all those boxes and,
Burwell, see that Mr. Jefferson’s trunks and carpetbag are packed. This
baggage will be taken off the barge at Shadwell, Father, and we’ll have
wagons sent down to carry it to Monticello.”
“Nothing must be lost!” worried Jefferson. “Nothing! Every paper and
pamphlet I’ve saved is important. They contain the history of an era,
the story of the birth of this nation.”
“Then,” said Martha, “it would seem that most of them should be in the
Library of Congress.”
“Never, while they house that library in such makeshift quarters,” he
argued. “Patsy, my dear, I beg of you, go on to Monticello as we
planned. I shall arrive later with everything I own intact. Just
remember that your father has knocked about the world on his own for a
long time, and I am not yet senile nor decrepit.”
“But you will admit that you are tired to the bone,” she persisted, “and
that long trip in this cold weather is not going to be easy.”
“I’ll admit anything, only get out of here now so that I can get out of
this dressing gown and into my breeches! Burwell, see that my satin
breeches and the broadcloth coat are well aired before you pack them. It
will be a long day before I shall want to be dressed up and elegant
again.”
“You were quite the beau at that dance last night,” Martha remarked.
“Several women said to me that they had never before seen you so witty
and gay. And more than one remarked that it was a great pity that you
were leaving Washington.”
“They had never seen me before without the sad old albatross of
responsibility hung on my back,” he retorted. “When I gave it over to
Jemmy Madison, I felt twenty years younger in twenty minutes and even
several pounds lighter. Once I’m back on my own mountain you’ll see, I
shall be merry as a grig—whatever a grig is.”
“In my youth, when you were feeding me huge, nauseous doses of Plato and
Livy, you would have ordered me to go and look that word up,” Patsy
reminded him. “I can hear you very sternly directing me never to use a
word unless I knew its exact meaning. Fortunately, I know what a grig
is.”
“It’s a cricket,” spoke up one of the aides. “My granny told me a long
time ago, a grig is a cricket. When I was a young-un, sir.”
“It’s a kind of grasshopper,” disputed the other aide. “A little
grasshopper that fiddles tunes with its hind legs, Mr. President, sir.”
“Mr. Ex-President, Carver. An ex being something that has been crossed
out, obliterated, ignored. I’m obliterated but I can still go on being a
grig. Even though I can’t fiddle any more since I broke this wrist in
France. I miss my music, too.—Well, good-by again, Madam Randolph. Be
sure you take along a warm robe and a shawl. That coach can be mighty
damp and dreary.”
“And you do the same, Papa, and don’t you climb down halfway home and
start out on horseback in this foul weather. Nothing ever created by
Heaven is so treacherous and mean as this month of March. If they would
leave it off all the calendars, it would please me well.”
“Keep plenty of elmbark stewing on the hob till I get home,” he ordered.
“It will cure any phthisic ever contracted.”
“He’s so stubborn,” he heard his daughter say to the aide as she went
out. “I shan’t be surprised at all to see him come riding home on that
horse. If he wants to do it, he’ll do it if it kills him.”
“It won’t kill him, ma’am,” the man murmured. “Mister Jefferson is still
a mighty stout fellow.”
2
_Monticello: Spring, 1809_
Why, why had he saved so many things? Yet they were all important, all
precious. One small box full of rocks, little packets of earth, dried
leaves, and the desiccated bodies of insects. These George Clark and
Meriwether Lewis had brought back to him from the long exploring journey
they had made, crossing the country to the Pacific Ocean. Jefferson held
out one small, rattling mummy of a creature in his palm.
“Ever see a bug like this, Burwell?” he asked.
“Looks like some kind of scawpin. Got he tail in air like one too.” The
old Negro studied the dried object skittishly. “Stinger in that tail, I
bet you. You watch out, Mister Tom, mought be p’ison even if he daid.”
“There are desert places out there, they told me, where everything has
thorn and stings or stinks.” Jefferson wrapped the desert scorpion
carefully in cotton lint. “I’ll have to have a glass case built at home
to display all these things. These trophies from Europe too. And this
piece of cannonball that was fired at Ticonderoga. I suppose every
president from this time on will be sent weird mementoes of some battle
or discovery or other. John Adams got an Iroquois scalp and a jawbone
some settler had plowed up in his field, but nothing quite so gruesome
has ever come to me. Now we must count all these boxes and I must see
that they all go aboard the boat.”
The storm did not abate. Rather, it grew worse, changing from snow to
sleet and then to icy hostile rain that made quagmires of the roads and
treacherous slippery deadfalls of every slope. The coach horses slipped
and stumbled, the coach swayed and lurched in the ruts, splashing muddy
water everywhere. Jefferson’s bones ached from the jolting; his elbows
were sore from being continually slammed against the hard leather of the
seats. The floor was cold and wet.
At Shadwell, where the barge landed, having made inquiry and been
assured that all his baggage had been transferred to wagons, he left the
coach and mounted his bay horse, the patient animal having been led
behind at a dragging pace for many miles. Snow was still thick in the
air, but once in the saddle Jefferson leaned into the wind, gave the bay
his head, and let him warm his sluggish blood in a brisk canter. Sensing
that he was heading home, the horse loped along, shaking his head in
irritation at the snow that stung his eyelids, but keeping steadily on
until the mountains loomed at last, dark blue and chill upon the
horizon.
Martha’s husband, Thomas Randolph, had written that all the people of
Albemarle County would be out to meet him with fife and drum and banner,
but Jefferson had urged Martha to see that there was no public
demonstration. “I’ll likely be delayed on the way. I may even get home
in the middle of the night. Head off any hoorah. This is no hero; this
is plain Farmer Jefferson coming home.”
When he turned off the highway into the narrow winding road up his hill,
he could restrain the bay no longer. Weary as the animal was, he broke
into a reaching gallop, and now the brick house was in sight, and
streaming out from every door came people running, bareheaded and
shouting through the storm. His daughter, his son-in-law, all his
grandchildren, and every slave on the place, he was certain. They
swarmed about him, lifting him off his horse, the jubilant Negroes
pressing forward to kiss his hands, his boots, even his horse.
The children screamed joyfully, “Grandfather is home for ever and ever!”
With so many arms lifting him, he was half carried in to the house. In
the lofty hall, the ceiling almost two full stories high, a great fire
burned on the hearth and shone on the trophy-covered walls and the great
clock over the door that worked by cannon ball weights and faced both
indoors and out.
Jefferson sank wearily into a deep chair. He was more worn and chilled
than he wanted to admit, but a great sigh of contentment made his lips
tremble. All around him were all the things he loved, that he had built,
contrived, designed, invented. The weather indicator on the ceiling that
was controlled by a vane on the roof outside—his eyes turned up toward
it.
“Still works,” he remarked, “and from the set of the wind there’ll be no
good weather for another day at least. Did the wagons get here?”
“No, Papa, not yet. But the roads are mighty bad, as you know.”
“Freezing mud. Makes slow traveling. Now, baby,” he protested to a young
granddaughter, “Grandpapa can take off his own boots.”
“No, you can’t,” insisted young Cornelia, “because I’m going to do it
for you. Ellen’s fetching some wool socks she knit—and, Grandpa, one is
too long but please don’t mention it.”
“I won’t, I promise. Not if it reaches halfway to my neck.”
“I found these old slippers in your wardrobe. A mouse had started to
build a nest in one but I brushed it out and aired it. Thank goodness,
he hadn’t gnawed any holes in it.” She jumped up.
“Ah, my dear sir,” he looked up gratefully at Thomas Randolph, who was
followed by a servant with a steaming mug on a server, “you save my
life!”
“Just what you need to heat up your blood, sir.” said Randolph. “Another
log on the fire, Cassius, and tend the fires in Mr. Jefferson’s library
and bedroom.”
Jefferson sipped the warm punch slowly while his granddaughters busied
themselves dressing his feet in warm hose and old slippers.
“Your breeches are damp, Grandpa,” one said. “But we can’t do anything
about that.”
“I am marvelously served already.” He pulled them close to kiss their
flushed young faces. “Burwell will find me some dry clothes presently as
soon as I am warmed and rested. I see that our Paris lamp hasn’t
tarnished very much, Patsy.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Remember what
a time we had packing that thing? I remember you stuffed the globes full
of hose and shirts and winced every time the box was moved.”
“I expected it to arrive here a mass of scraps and splinters,” she said,
“and after you had paid such an outrageous price for it, too.”
“It was that painting you made the worst fuss about.” Jefferson emptied
the bowl, handed it to the waiting servant, and got to his feet. “Ah, my
old knees are stiff! But they still seem willing to support me. Now, I
want to see everything. Yes”—he halted at the door of the high-ceiled
drawing room—“there’s poor old John the Baptist whom you hated, Patsy.”
He went nearer to study the painting over the mantel.
“It was Polly who loathed it most,” Martha said. “Not poor old John, all
head and no body, but Salome lugging him on that charger wearing modern
clothes and a very proper turban at that. I’d still like to throw that
picture away, Papa. It used to give little Francis Eppes the horrors.
Every time he had to pass through this room he’d have nightmares.”
“Nice polish on this floor, Patsy,” commended Jefferson, artfully
turning her mind away from criticism of one of his favorite paintings by
complimenting the gleam of the parquet floor. It was the first such oak
floor laid in America and he was very proud of the way it reflected the
glitter of the gilt chairs and sofas he had brought from Paris. They had
cost fabulous amounts too, more than he could afford, but in his
philosophy the things a man wanted and admired, that made life richer,
were worth whatever they cost.
A brief nagging jerk of realism struck him—that now he would have to
count the cost of things. Let that wait, let it wait until tomorrow.
Tomorrow he would look over his lands, his farms; he would see how
Randolph’s management had benefited them, and study what more must be
done to the still unfinished house. Martha, catching his roving look,
interrupted it with a protest.
“Papa, please! Don’t begin right away tearing down something and
building it over. The house is fine as it is and we all love it—and you
are so tired.”
“My dear, I should be even more tired with no occupation,” he argued.
“Of course it will take me some little time to arrange and dispose of
all my books and papers. Did they build those shelves I wrote you about
in November?”
“Yes, Papa, come and see. I gave them the drawing you made and I’m quite
sure they followed it exactly.” She walked ahead of him through the
great hall and the narrow passage that led to the southern wing of the
house which contained the library, Jefferson’s study, and his bedroom,
with the bed alcove between and the steep winding stairs to the
mezzanine-like second story.
There in the familiar rooms were all the homely things he had missed—his
shabby old revolving chair, the painted wooden bench with its leather
cushion that just fitted his lean, weary legs, the round revolving table
he had had built with the legs set right so that the bench would slide
under them and make of table, chair, and bench a comfortable kind of
chaise longue with a high back to shut out the drafts. There was his
file table with octagonal sides, each side holding a filing drawer
labeled with a group of letters, and his high drawing table with drawers
and shelves that could be adjusted at any angle.
Beside the library fireplace stood a high-backed leather chair, a
pompous and official looking piece of furniture. Jefferson glared at it.
“And how came that thing here?” he demanded.
“Why, Papa, don’t you recognize it? It’s the chair you sat in all the
time you were vice-president. Mr. Madison had it sent up by the barge.
He thought you would like to have it,” explained Martha.
He snorted. “I have spent more eternal hours of boredom in that
miserable chair than in any seat whereon a man has ever rested his
breeches!” he grumbled. “Stick it in a dark corner somewhere. Send it
down to the servants’ quarters. The office of vice-president is about as
tedious an insult to a man’s intelligence as could be conceived. To have
to suffer it for four years is bad enough, but to be reminded of it the
rest of his life is pure persecution. However, I shall take pains to
thank Jemmy Madison properly. He meant this as a handsome gift. I’ll
receive it in the same spirit, but I don’t want it around where I have
to look at it and be reminded of Senator Bingham and of John Adams’s
being urged to slay a thousand Republicans with the jawbone of Thomas
Jefferson.”
“Oh, Papa, don’t let past times rankle. Look back on the happy ones,”
begged Martha. “We did have fun in Paris, didn’t we?”
“And you went to school there,” mourned one of her daughters—Jefferson
was not yet entirely sure which was which—“and saw all those fashionable
people and the king and Napoleon and spoke French all the time, and we
have to learn French with that stupid Miss Fraker. You should hear her,
Grandpa. She pronounces French as it is spelled in English.”
“She says ‘Owy Owy,’ and we know it should be ‘wee wee,’” piped up a
smaller one. Was this Virginia or Ellen? He would have to put his family
tree in order soon before he mortally offended some of them.
“Grandfather will teach you proper French when he gets time,” promised
their mother. “He spent four years over there and I went to school there
and so did Aunt Maria. But not all that we saw was happy. We saw too
many beggars and hungry people in the streets, something you will never
see in Virginia.”
“We see blind Remus when we go to church,” said one child. “He sits on
the path with his hat in his hand and says, ‘Please, li’l missy, give
ole Remus a penny?’”
“And if we put our penny in his hat, then we have nothing when the
verger comes around with the alms basin and he gives us a disgusted
look,” said another.
“Remus doesn’t have to beg,” said Jefferson. “He is owned by a family
able to take care of him.”
“Maybe he likes it. Sitting in the sun and hearing people pass.”
“If he’s sitting there now, he’s being snowed on,” said young Francis
Eppes gravely, standing at the window. It was the first time the quiet,
brown-haired boy had spoken and Jefferson from his seat in the old
revolving chair looked at him sharply. This was his beloved younger
daughter Maria’s only child. Maria, christened Mary, called Polly, and
later changing her name in the convent to Maria, pronounced in the
Italian fashion. Maria was gone now these four years but the pain of her
loss was still a quivering fiber of anguish in Thomas Jefferson’s heart.
She had died, as his own young wife had died, when her daughters were
small, having borne too many children, wasting away after the last
childbirth, fading slowly day by day. Polly’s young husband, Jack Eppes,
still lived at Eppington not far away, but Francis spent a great deal of
time at Monticello with Martha’s healthy, noisy brood.
“Come here, Francis,” Jefferson called gently. “Come here and let your
grandfather look at you.”
“He’s always moping and looking out windows,” volunteered a young
Randolph. “It’s because he hasn’t any mother.”
“Come and talk to me, Francis,” urged Jefferson. “You and I should be
friends. I have no mother either.”
The boy came obediently and stood by the arm of the chair, his big eyes,
so like Polly’s, very sober.
“Old people don’t have mothers, sir,” he said.
“But I did. Till I was a grown up man. I had a handsome mother whose
name was Jane and I still think about her when I stand and look out of
windows. I wonder if I’m the kind of a man she would have wanted me to
be.”
“I can’t be what my mother wanted me to be,” said small Francis
plaintively. “My father says she wanted me to be a great man like my
grandfather, but how can I be like you, sir? All the things you’ve done
won’t ever be done again, ever, will they? There will never be another
Declaration of Independence and you wrote that. I know. My father told
me.”
Jefferson circled the lad with an arm. All about, clustered close to the
fire, the young Randolphs were abruptly and amazingly quiet.
“That’s so,” the old man agreed. “I did write that paper, didn’t I? And
after I’d written it, four other men sat around in Philadelphia for
about a week and picked it to pieces and made changes in it and couldn’t
make up their minds whether to adopt it or not. I guess they never would
have made up their minds and we’d still be British subjects and paying
taxes to the king. But at last they all decided to accept the
Declaration of Independence, leaving out some parts I had labored hard
to make perfect. So—we declared ourselves independent of Great Britain.”
The small Randolphs were convulsed in a hysteria of giggles but young
Francis kept a grave face.
“On the fourth of July, 1776,” he said, “and I know the names of those
other men too, Grandfather.”
“So do I!” piped up a cousin. “One was John Adams and one was Benjamin
Franklin—”
“And Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Robert Livingston of New York,”
finished Francis, “and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. But you should have
been the first man to sign it, Grandfather. Why did you let John Hancock
beat you?”
“He was the president of the Congress, my son. It was his right to put
his name first. Have you read the Declaration, any of you?”
“Ha!” shouted some older ones. “We know it by heart.” And straightway
there began a chanting recitation, the big ones trying to drown out the
smaller ones.
Jefferson jumped up, waving his hands for silence. “Enough! Enough! You
know it. I concede that you know it. Better than your grandfather no
doubt, for I have to think hard at times to remember parts of it.”
It was Ann, the oldest Randolph daughter, who broke up the conclave
around the fire.
“Grandfather, the wagons have come!” she announced from the door. “Do
you want all those boxes brought in here?”
“All of them.” He jumped up and was quickly at the door. Now he would
open and arrange all his papers at his leisure. Slaves tramped in and
out through the outer library, endlessly piling up heavy parcels.
“Twenty-nine,” counted Martha finally. “Papa, there should be thirty. I
know. I counted them twice in Washington.”
“Something has been lost or stolen,” he worried, “and I won’t know what
it is until I have emptied every box.”
“I know what it is!” she cried, studying the pile. “It’s that wooden box
we packed in your bedroom—there at the last. The one that had all your
Indian writing in it.”
“My comparative study of all the Indian languages,” he fretted. “Some
one must go back at once. Thomas, send two boys down the river in a
canoe tomorrow to search the bank where all these parcels were unloaded
from the barge. That Indian work could be valuable. I meant to pursue it
further. It must not be lost.”
The lost box was found a few days later. It had been torn open on the
muddy river bank and obviously the thieves, seeking for money, had been
disappointed in the contents, for the precious papers were torn and
scattered far and wide. What little could be salvaged, Martha dried and
pressed but little was legible on the sodden sheets.
Thomas Jefferson’s years of study of the Indian tongues was forever
lost.
3
_Monticello: Summer, 1809_
Spring came burgeoning over the Virginia hills, warming quickly into
promise of summer. The bulbs Thomas Jefferson and his lost wife Martha
had planted so long ago pushed up through the damp earth and the
children came running excitedly to call him whenever a bud showed, tight
and green-sheathed above its protecting sword blades.
“Grandfather, come quick! The Roman Empress tulip has a big bud showing
and a teeny one.”
“Fine, Virginia.” She was one of the younger ones, still small enough so
that he could toss her on his shoulder. “We’ll go and see but not
touch.”
“We know. They turn brown and don’t open out to be flowers. Francis
pinched the Queen of the Amazons last spring and it never bloomed at
all.”
“And some little girl tattled, which isn’t nice, do you think?” he
teased, waiting for the others who invariably like hungry chicks came
flying out several doors whenever he walked on the lawn.
“Francis thinks he is kind of special because he doesn’t live here all
the time,” said Ellen, “but he does stay for long times and he has
lessons with us and so he shouldn’t be any different.”
“Francis,” explained Jefferson, “does not have a lot of people to love
him. He’s not rich in love like all the Randolphs. Now let us look into
the case of this foreign woman, the Roman Empress.”
He bent over the bed where the nubby little buds ventured up into the
thin, warming sun of spring. An old pain, long kept hidden deep stirred
again in him, stabbing at his heart, clasping icy fingers at his throat
to make an aching cramp there. Martha, his own Martha, so long gone, so
always present and living still in that deep place where no person, no
plaudit, no antagonism or ambition had ever been permitted. He could
almost see her long white fingers now, as they had pressed the warm
earth down lovingly over the dry, somnolent bulbs, always so delicately
careful not to break an embryo root or smother too deep the promise of
the crown.
She had been heavy with child that spring day, carrying the son who had
only lived a few days, and when he protested that she must not tire
herself she had given him a little push and said, “No, I must do it, I
must plant them. Don’t you know that whatever I plant now will grow?”
The years—the years! Almost thirty of them now since she had looked at
him with dimming eyes, and said, “Promise that my children will never
have a stepmother.”
He had kept that promise. No other woman had ever approached the
walled-off chamber of his heart where she was enshrined. There were
times when, observing Patsy’s healthy brood, an impatient bitterness
colored with a haunting kind of guilt would burn in him. Too many
children—six of them in ten years—had been too much for Martha’s frail
strength; yet Patsy had borne eleven easily and naturally. Childbirth to
her had not been the draining, killing ordeal that had taken Martha, and
their well-loved Maria also. He wondered often if Jack Eppes, Maria’s
young husband, felt too that continuing, sickening weight of
self-accusation.
He got to his feet quickly, bidding the sad ghosts of the past to
depart. “Off with you all now,” he ordered. “It’s time for lessons. Run,
before your mother scolds you and me too.”
“Race you?” screamed one Randolph to his sisters.
“No, no—start fair!” they shrieked in protest.
Jefferson called a halt. “Line up. Smallest one three paces ahead of the
next. You here, Cornelia.”
“I’m Ellen, Grandfather.”
“All right. Some day I shall hang labels around all your necks. No
inching forward now! You—big fellow, three paces to the rear. Now, when
I drop my handkerchief—go!”
Small feet flew, braids flopped, hats fell off, and happy squeals and
shouts made pandemonium. Flushed and hot and breathless they straggled
back to the dreariness of lessons, the older ones knowing that they must
learn history and Latin verbs well, for inevitably before the day ended
their grandfather would be catechizing them and putting on a sober,
disappointed look if they missed the correct answers.
There were letters waiting for replies and papers to be gone over and
sorted in his study, but Jefferson discovered a reluctance in himself to
begin these tasks. Pacing the long terrace to the south he came to the
door of a little one-room building. This was what had always been called
Honeymoon Cottage, the first room built at Monticello. He had lived a
bachelor’s life in that one room in ’71 and, when Shadwell, his mother’s
home, had burned, it had become his only and permanent home.
He took from his pocket the big iron key he had carried for so many
years, turned the stiff lock slowly lest some rusted part should snap,
and opened the door. Long unused, as it had been for years, the room
still held a fresh, sweetish smell of femininity. Patsy had obviously
kept it aired and cleaned, knowing that it was still the secret abode of
his tired old heart. At the windows the dimity curtains were fresh and
starched, the valance and tester of the bed still bright with
old-fashioned wool embroidery. His own mother had worked those many-hued
flowers and curious fruits, coloring the wool in her own dye pots with
homemade dyes set with alum and vinegar.
The slender posts of the bed were polished, as was the brass fender of
the fireplace. An armchair stood on the hearth rug and Jefferson sank
into it, relaxing his long legs, staring into the cold fireplace where
three dry logs rested on the andirons.
His mind whet, far back in time, thirty-six years back, to a snowy
January night in ’72, when he had brought his bride, Martha Wayles
Skelton, to this room, the only home he had to offer her.
Monticello had been a beginning then, some walls raised, part of a wing
roofed over, windows boarded up, floors rough laid and strewn with
scraps and sawdust where they were laid at all. But nowhere within the
ambitiously planned structure a room complete enough for a lady, and the
winter snows had halted all work until a thaw came.
Thomas Jefferson could almost visualize that spindle-legged,
freckle-faced bridegroom, that brash twenty-nine-year-old fiddler who
had charmed his lady with his music and won her away from a swarm of
admirers by tricking them with a clever stratagem. It had never occurred
to him in those courting days at the Wayles’ place, The Forest, that he
might likely be catalogued with some of Martha’s other swains as an
ambitious country boy and embryo lawyer set on improving his state by
marrying a rich young widow. He had cared too much for Martha, loving
her, he was arrogantly certain, as no man had ever loved a woman before,
and he had brought her here to this cold little room so confident of her
love and courage that a chill or two did not matter.
Now he thought back on that snowy ride up from Blenheim, where, because
of the deepening snow, they had been obliged to leave the chaise in
which they had started out from Williamsburg, as well as the warm robes
and blankets with which it had been loaded. There had been a debate, he
remembered now, about whether they should ride on or wait for morning,
but Martha had laughed his misgivings down.
“I can weather any storm that you can weather, Thomas Jefferson.”
So saddle horses had been brought, his own tired team stabled, and the
slave who had driven the chaise sent to bed with orders to drive to
Monticello in the morning. Jefferson recalled now his dubious concern
when he discovered that the snow on the mountain road was eighteen
inches deep.
He had ridden ahead, breaking a track for Martha’s horse, trying to
shield her as best he could from the storm that stung their eyelids and
sifted inside collars and up sleeves. But Martha had been undismayed.
She had shouted jokes at him through the wind, ordering him to wait now
and then while she wiped the snow off her face. Eight miles they had had
to climb, the horses sliding, stumbling, and blowing through the dark
until at last they saw the brick piles and scaffolding of what was to be
their home through the weird snow light.
Not a light showed, not a feather of smoke lay on the air. Where were
all the black people who should have been there ready to serve them with
warm fires and a hot meal? Jefferson burned with hot angry impatience;
then common sense prevailed. No one could possibly have expected them
home at this hour. It was far past midnight.
The honeymoon cottage felt a trifle chilly now to his old bones, but on
that January night long ago it had held a tomblike cold. Just as he had
done on that night, now he rummaged the old brass pot beside the hearth,
finding scraps of slivers of kindling, mounding them into a heap under
the logs, struck flint, and fired a bit of bark. The tiny flame wavered
and grew as he blew upon it and coaxed fire to burn, as he had done for
his beloved. Finally it leaped in a bright blaze to the resinous pine
logs and Jefferson dropped into the chair again, trying to vision her
there, shaking the snow off her riding skirt, holding one foot and then
the other near to the blaze while he held her up with a supporting arm.
They had been very silly that night, he knew now, and was glad of the
gay nonsense that had lightened the beginning for them. Life had been
grim enough afterward. He was happy now to recall the laughter. There
had been a mouse who came calling and Martha had not screamed or leaped
on a chair as his sisters did. Instead, she had waggled her fingers at
the mouse, as it sat upright blinking at them, and had exclaimed,
“Thomas, it has big brown eyes!”
He had played the fiddle for her then, the same fiddle faithful Jupiter
had saved from the burning ruin of Shadwell. Now, he could not play any
more. Just as well. His music had belonged to people he loved. To
Martha, to Dabney Carr, who had married his sister and been his heart’s
best friend until his untimely death. Dabney Carr lay now out on this
hill, under the oak where they two had sat together while young Thomas
Jefferson blithely planned the place he would have here someday. They
had sworn then that the two of them would both be buried under those
trees. Jefferson had kept that promise. His music had belonged for a
while with his friendship for Patrick Henry, another fiddler and a
blithe and restless spirit, but most especially it had been for Martha.
He had wooed her with that fiddle—their duets had excluded her other
suitors—now it was as well that it would be forever silent, now that
there were no more loved ears to hear.
Ten years he had had before she faded away, and he had been too much
away from home in those years. First as a member of the rebellious House
of Burgesses that had been peremptorily dissolved by Governor Dunmore.
That assembly had marched off to hold meetings in the tavern and out of
their angry discussions had grown the idea of the Colonial Congress.
Their first year had brought him his little daughter, the other Martha
who had been promptly called Patsy because there were already two
Marthas, her mother and her aunt, Jefferson’s sister.
For too much of the time, Jefferson knew now, he had kept to himself
when he was at home, shut away with his books. Out of the works of the
old and new philosophers and historians he had striven to evolve some
plan that could help a troubled America. While hammering went on around
him, as the house of his dreams slowly took form and shape, he had
struggled to put his ideas into words. But the essay he finally evolved
with much labor was called too bold by the members of the assembly.
Then, in that miasmic summer of ’73, the fever had laid him low and his
best friend, Dabney Carr, had died.
I left her too much alone, he told himself as he watched the fire burn
low. She had been ill so often, weak and sorrowful because of the loss
of three children, two stillborn, while he was off riding for days to
reach Philadelphia, there to have a part in the birth of the new nation.
Now that nation lived, but a part of his life was forever dead and lay
on that grassy slope down the climbing road.
A loud knock at the door broke off his gloomy reverie. The door was
pushed open and Burwell pushed his head in hesitantly.
“Mister Tom, it past one o’clock,” the old Negro complained, “and they
got that horse out here waiting for you so long he done pawed a hole
mighty nigh deep enough to bury hisself.”
“Sorry, Burwell.” Jefferson jumped up. “I was just sitting here thinking
about old times. I’ll ride now as soon as I change my breeches.”
“Yes, suh, Mister Tom. I done looked everywhere for you. Then I seen
this little bitty smoke comin’ out this yere chimney. Ain’t been nobody
in this little room for a time now ’cept Miss Martha. She fetch the gals
in here to clean it up good before you come home.”
“There won’t be anybody in here from now on, Burwell. Cover this fire so
it will be safe. This place is too full of ghosts and ghosts are sad
company when you are getting old.”