carefully over the dying embers. “You peert as a lot of young men. Might
get you a young wife yet. Out in the quarters the people been saying,
now Mister Tom come home for good likely he get him a lady of his own.
Miss Patsy, she a fine woman but she got Mister Tom Randolph and all
them chillen and you ain’t got nobody.”
“I’ve got you, Burwell. And all the others. They’re all mine.” He took
out the iron key and carefully locked the door. Ghosts, he was thinking,
had so little respect for locks. Even the grim locks a man closed upon
his own heart.
4
_Monticello: Late summer, 1809_
The house was almost complete now. He had torn away what did not please
him and rebuilt some parts to suit his matured ideas. New white paint
gleamed on the cornices; the square windows in what he had called his
“sky room” on the third floor had been replaced by round and half-round
openings. But now in what he had wished would be a quiet summer he was
plagued by the same hosts that for several years had made George
Washington’s life miserable.
Too many visitors came to Monticello. They came uninvited to see the man
who had written the Declaration of Independence. They came from miles
away, some on horseback, some in carriages, some even in ox-drawn
wagons. Patsy, who had hoped to return to her own place at Bedford long
enough to see to the preservation of the vegetables and fruits for
winter, abandoned the idea and stayed on with her children.
“These people, these strangers—what are we to do with them?” she
worried. “Some of them come great distances. They have to be kept for
the night; they must be fed. Your pet steward, Petit, is getting really
fractious, Papa, and I have to keep the people cooking practically night
and day. They look at this handsome house and believe that Thomas
Jefferson is a rich man, that he can afford to entertain them—people
we’ve never seen before and will likely never see again—and, Papa, you
know it isn’t true. You aren’t rich enough to afford housing and feeding
so many. The farms don’t pay as they should, and we are often hard
pressed to feed and clothe our own people.”
“I know,” he said heavily, “but what is a Virginia gentleman to do? We
cannot turn people away. There is no inn anywhere near where they can
buy food or lodging.”
“Why not put up some barriers?” suggested young Jefferson Randolph.
“Charge everyone a shilling to come in. We might make enough to pay the
taxes.”
“A poor joke, my son. We would outrage every tradition of Southern
hospitality. But I do wish that some part of this house that I built for
my family could be private and belong only to us. They invade every
corner without leave or apology. Yesterday they were all over my study.
They wanted to see everything. They even pulled out the drawers in my
desk and turned over some personal papers. And these were people of some
quality too—from Delaware, they said.”
In the dining room Jefferson had devised a dumb-waiter at either end of
the mantelpiece. These ingenious carriers descended into the basement
close by the wine cellars and were used to bring things up from the cool
rooms below by an easy pull on the rope. Not long since he had found a
man in the dining room fascinated by the device and happily running the
carriers up and down.
“What do you reckon he’s got this here for?” he demanded of Jefferson.
“Was he fixing a place to hide quick from the Injuns?”
Courteously Jefferson explained the working of the device. “It has never
talked back in all the years it has been in operation,” he said, “so we
call it a dumb-waiter.”
“These rich people got it mighty fine,” commented the stranger. “My old
lady took a fancy to that bed he’s got in yonder,” said the intruder
blandly, “one pulls up out of the way in daytime. We only got a two-room
house. Be mighty handy to have one of them there, put the young-uns in
it, and haul ’em out of sight when we get tired of their racket. All
these young-uns ain’t Jefferson’s, I figure? Got quite a passel of ’em
around, ain’t he?”
“Most of these are my grandchildren—some are nieces and nephews. Are
those your children in there?” Jefferson pointed with some annoyance to
four towheaded youngsters, none of them too clean, who were bouncing up
and down on the tapestried seats of the gilt chairs in the drawing room.
“Yeh, them’s my brats. Reckon they’re gettin’ kind of hungry. Old lady
said we’d ought to leave ’em home down Culpepper way but I said, No,
this here Thomas Jefferson was the people’s friend, even if he did get
to be president, and they’d ought to git a chance to see him. He around
here any place?”
“I am Thomas Jefferson,” said the ex-president coolly. “And I suggest
that you educate your children to have respect for the property of other
people, sir. Those chairs they are jumping about on were brought all the
way from France.”
The stranger stared incredulously at the elderly figure before him.
Shabby old brown coat. Faded velveteen breeches. Home-knit hose that
showed signs of much mending, and, most unbelievable of all, a pair of
old run-down carpet slippers.
“Law, sir!” he exclaimed. “I took you for a butler or a footman or
something. You, Caleb and Beulah! Get away from them fancy cheers. Git
outside, all you-uns, and go sit in the wagon.”
Dreadful as some of them were, they could not be sent away hungry. Food
that should have been sent to market to provide money for the family
expenses, these visitors ate and ate like locusts. Patsy rebelled at
using the beautiful Chippendale table that had been given Jefferson by
his old friend and teacher, George Wythe of Williamsburg. So trestle
tables were set up in the warming kitchens in the basement and picnic
hampers passed about by servants on the lawn on fine days. A few
important and genteel groups were dined in the big dining room, but
there were often too many of those. All those letters that her father
wrote, she thought impatiently, probably half of them were invitations
to people in Philadelphia or Washington or New York to come to
Monticello for long visits.
“Where shall I sleep thirty-one people?” she worried, on a July night.
“And, Papa, we had better plan on having a lot more linen woven right
away. The woman washed fifty sheets yesterday. They’ll wear out fast at
that rate.”
Jefferson sighed. “I came home to find peace and there is no peace. What
have I done in my past, my dear, that such hordes of admirers should
descend upon me? I’ve been a very ordinary fellow. I’ve always been
homely, ungainly, entirely unprepossessing. No one was more surprised
than I when your mother agreed to marry me. There she was—a beautiful
and gracious woman with a fortune of her own—and I a struggling young
lawyer, a long-legged shide-poke of a fellow, freckled and coarse-maned
as a lion, with no grace except that I could fiddle. And you know I was
an unpopular president. The number of them that hated me was legion.”
“Not the good plain people. Not these people who come up here in old
carts or riding raw-boned nags just to get a glimpse of Thomas
Jefferson, champion of the people,” his daughter said. “Two words of
yours will never die in their ears: ‘Free and Equal.’ And because you
made them feel free and equal, they come to see you—in droves!”
“I haven’t slept in my own bed all summer,” complained Ann, the oldest
daughter. “I’ve slept on hard pallets laid down on the floor till all my
bones are worn raw.”
“The worst is the curious women—the young ones,” said Ellen. “They open
our wardrobes and finger our clothes. They even open drawers and jewel
boxes. We should have locks on everything, Grandfather. One girl from
away down on the Eastern Shore asked me to give her my chip-straw
bonnet. The one Mrs. Adams sent me last summer. She said we were all
rich and her folks were terribly poor and she hadn’t a decent bonnet to
get married in because they were fishermen and the run of shad had been
bad this year.”
“You could have given her the bonnet, Ellen. I would have bought you
another one,” said her grandfather.
And gone in debt for it, thought his daughter, with a tinge of
exasperation—when he had so many debts already!
Jefferson put his arms about his granddaughters. “Soon, my dears, there
will come a frost and deep snows and sleet and the roads will become
difficult or impassable. Then nobody will come to see us and you will be
moping around the house because you are bored and lonely.”
“Ann won’t,” declared her sister, “not if young Mister Bankhead has a
horse long-legged enough to wade the drifts.”
“And you,” flashed back her sister, “will be primping and ordering all
the servants and the children about in case young Mister Coolidge should
decide to come riding down the road.”
“Mother says I’m too young,” sighed Ellen, “but you know, Grandfather,
that fourteen isn’t terribly young. Why, mother was only seventeen when
she married.”
“And look what happened to me!” cried her mother. “Six of you great
greedy daughters, all clamoring that you should have beaux before you
are out of pinafores.”
“When you are seventeen, Ellen,” Jefferson assured the girl, “I
personally shall dispatch a very polite invitation to young Mister
Coolidge, whoever he is, to come calling at Monticello.”
“He won’t want to come then. He’ll think I’m an old maid and I will be!
He’ll be looking for somebody young and fresh like Virginia.”
“Hah! I wouldn’t look at him,” sniffed redheaded Virginia, who had a
crop of bright coppery freckles like her grandfather. “By the time he’s
an old man he’ll be fat as a pig and probably grunt when he moves and
squeal when he’s fed.”
“He will not!” flared Ellen. “Anyway you’re just jealous. She doesn’t
like having red hair, Grandfather, and she hates every one of us who
haven’t got it.”
“Why, I have red hair and I’m very proud of it!” he exclaimed. “Shame on
you all for quarreling among yourselves. I used to have a wise old
friend named Benjamin Franklin—”
“We know about him. You told us before.”
“We know what he said too,” put in Ellen patiently. “If we don’t hang
together we may all hang separately.” Definitely, she was thinking,
grandfather could at times be a bit tiresome. “And a penny saved is a
penny earned.”
“But not one of us ever sees a penny!”
“A sad situation,” remarked Jefferson, rummaging through the pocket of
his worn old green breeches. “Ah, I do seem to have a few pennies. Let
me count. There must be one apiece. Now”—he announced as he laid a coin
in each warm eager palm—“you have each the foundation for a fortune.
Guard it well, for there are long years ahead of you.”
The years ahead of them! Thinking of those years brought back the old
touch of anxiety. What would he be able to do for them, for these young
things, born of his blood, hostages to fortune?
“He who watches the pence need not be anxious about the pounds,” he
quoted more of his old friend Franklin, dubiously aware that his
audience were no longer listening. Slowly he walked back to his study,
turning to close the door almost in the face of a man who escorted three
women.
“I am sorry, sir,” Jefferson said as the three stared indignantly. “I am
Thomas Jefferson. You are very welcome in my house but at this moment I
must beg to be excused and be about some urgent business.” And he turned
the key in the lock.
The letter lay in the drawer where he had left it. He took it out,
lifted the seal again, and let the single sheet slide out into his hand.
It was a very brief and slightly curt note from a Philadelphia banker. A
friend for whom Jefferson had felt a sudden compassion and whom he had
trusted had abruptly gone bankrupt. The note Jefferson had endorsed for
this friend, with the hope of helping him recoup his fortunes, was now
long overdue, unpaid and collectible; since Mr. Jefferson had put his
personal endorsement upon the paper he was now legally assumed to be
liable for the full amount of payment.
The note was drawn for twenty thousand dollars.
5
_Monticello: Autumn, 1809_
With a frantic kind of energy that early autumn, Jefferson forsook his
books and set himself to the job of assaying and recuperating his own
personal estate. During his long absences, Thomas Randolph, and his son,
young Jefferson after him, had done their best by the vast property—the
acres about Monticello, and the farm, Poplar Grove, a few miles away.
But many fields had been neglected and weeds and brush had taken over;
the slaves, having no firm master, had learned to shirk tasks cleverly
and leave much undone.
Thomas Jefferson had never been a harsh master, but now he became a
stern and demanding one. Nails must be made and bricks burned, both for
his own building plans and for sale in the market. His French friend, Du
Pont de Nemours, on his last visit had brought him a small flock of
merino sheep. Jefferson enjoyed supervising the shearing of these sheep,
and the washing of the wool, and watched the carding, spinning, and
weaving going on under Martha’s supervision. He decided to have a suit
of clothes made from his own fine woolen cloth and busied himself
drawing patterns, measuring, and figuring for days.
The wrist that had been broken in Paris had never been properly set, and
he found using drawing tools and writing letters more and more of a
painful chore. And always he was interrupted by guests. Some he had
invited, regretting later his hospitable impulse, but the uninvited
continued to find their way up the winding road to his mountain.
He must, he determined, have a place that was his own where he could
study and work undisturbed either by the family or by these strangers,
most of whom he was certain had only one desire—to be able to go home
and boast that they had seen the great Thomas Jefferson and the fabulous
house he had created.
He would have a study built at the far end of the north promenade
immediately. So promptly he set about having seasoned lumber hauled from
the sawmill, bricks burned, and nails and hardware forged in the smithy.
He spent a day drawing a plan for a small, one-room building.
Meanwhile he found an opportunity occasionally to slip away with one or
two grandchildren for a brief stay at Poplar Grove, his farm, where he
could have a little quiet and relaxation. But always an impelling
urgency drove him. He must write letters. He must counsel James Madison
about whether or not it would be wise to keep America out of war, with
conflicts raging all over Europe. Napoleon was running wild and perhaps
the British should be left alone to contain and subdue him.
He must write, too, to his old friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, and
invite him to Monticello for a visit. Lafayette had been in prison, and
suffered hardships and loss of fortune. The debt America owed Lafayette
had never been paid, and, to Jefferson’s mind, had never been adequately
acknowledged, and he felt responsibility to prod the consciences of men
in power to do something about that. All these ideas possessed him, then
at times were diminished by a kind of inner irony. Who was he, to be so
concerned about a debt owed to any man when he himself was likely faced
with a weight of debts he had not yet had the courage to calculate?
Some time soon when his private lair was completed he must sit down for
a day or a week and put all his books and accounts in order. It was a
kind of cowardice in him, he knew, that put off the reckoning from one
day to another.
Meanwhile his new wool suit was finished and he was more pleased than
ever with the fineness of the material. With the coming of winter,
Martha had taken her own brood back to their plantation, but when she
returned for a brief visit Jefferson dressed up in his new clothes and
paraded before her, grinning like a happy boy.
Martha gave a little surprise shriek. “Papa! Pantaloons! I never would
have believed you would give up those old knee breeches and long
stockings.”
“They’re warmer,” Jefferson turned and posed naively, “and the London
papers that still come through in spite of the embargo say that they are
the new style in England. Jemmy Madison wrote that he had a pair
made—black broadcloth. Every hair and bit of lint sticks to that stuff.
I’m sending Jemmy enough of this goods to have himself a suit made. With
the president wearing it, we might be able to sell more in Washington.
Some friends who were here last week said the cloth was better than the
finest wool that comes from England.”
“It will certainly help if you can find a new product to market. All
these visitors this summer devoured so much of our substance that should
have gone for ready money, and money, Papa, is what you need badly, as
I’m sure you know.”
“Too well, Patsy. Too well! I’m admitting now to you what you must have
surmised or suspected for a long time. I am a fine farmer on paper. I’ve
been full of wonderful plans and theories, and on paper they looked fine
and profitable, but somehow they have all failed to pay off in cash. All
those vineyards and olive groves I planted so hopefully—I have just
compelled myself to compute the cost and returns on that venture. The
whole project adds up to a substantial loss.”
“And because of this trouble with the shipping your wheat is mildewing
in the bins because it can’t be shipped to market,” she reminded him.
“And across the ocean people in need of bread are starving,” he added
sorrowfully. “If there were any way to give the stuff away to those who
suffer for lack of it—but alas, there is none!”
The people, always the people, thought his daughter. A world full of
people, and if he had his way he would free and feed all of them. In the
meantime he was dubious about spending the money for a new pair of
spectacles, but bent close to his desk peering through an old pair that
had one bow mended with black thread stiffened with glue.
“You’d better have a new cushion in that old chair, Papa,” she
suggested. “If you sit on that thin one in those wool breeches, they’ll
be worn to a shine and show thin spots mighty quickly. I’ll tell one of
the women to stitch up a stout canvas cover and stuff it with plenty of
feathers.” She moved to the high window and looked off across the hill.
“Those mountains look like winter,” she observed. “In spring and summer
a blue haze makes them dim and far and restful to look at, but in winter
their crests stand out sharp and blue and cold and a bit hostile. I hope
you’ve had plenty of wood cut and piled. You’ll need big fires,
especially if everyone comes home for Christmas.”
He frowned a little, looked startled. “Christmas?” he repeated. “Is it
near—and is it so important?”
She drew back a little. “Of course it’s important! Don’t tell me, Papa,
that those people who called you Jefferson the Infidel had any truth to
back up their accusations? Don’t tell me that you don’t believe that the
Son of God was born on Christmas day and that it is a holy day to be
remembered?”
“I am not an infidel,” he said soberly. “I have never denied the
existence and the power of God. And I have studied extensively the
sayings of Jesus. I have also never discovered in all my reading any
proof that he was born on the twenty-fifth of December—especially as the
calendar has been changed several times since the period began that men
call Anno Domini.”
“It is the day the Church sets apart as a holy day. For me, Papa, and
for my children, that’s enough,” said Martha a bit tartly. “Surely there
have been times when Christmas was important in your life, though you’ve
been at home so little?”
“Oh, yes.” He was quick to try to mollify her. Patsy in an acid mood, he
remembered, could be a trifle difficult. “I remember times at Shadwell
when my mother was alive. And before my father died there was always
some kind of feasting, a goose saved and fattened and a fat pig killed
for the Negroes, and mother usually had suckets of some sort for the
young ones and opened her best brandied peaches and preserves.”
“I remember when Mama was alive,” she looked off pensively into the
lonely blue of the hills, “we had one Christmas. The people brought in
holly and you mixed punch in a big bowl and people came, unless the snow
was too deep. And once I remember you took my mother to church, but she
came home unhappy because you stood outside and talked politics all
through the service. But after that you were seldom at home.”
“I made her unhappy too often,” he reproached himself. “I was trying to
help build a nation, Patsy. We were living in perilous times. Why, you
must remember the war—when Tarleton came to Monticello? I rode sixty
miles in one night to get here in time to get you all safely away from
the British dragoons.”
“I was five. I remember. Aunt Martha Carr was here with her boys and we
were all piled into the chaise, with some of the servants sitting on
behind with their legs dangling and old Jupiter lashing the horses to a
gallop. Mother cried because she was sure they would capture you and
burn the house down. She said that if Tarleton could capture the man who
wrote the Declaration of Independence, the king would make him a
general.”
“Not to speak boastfully, that likely was true. But he didn’t capture me
nor burn the house. Instead Captain McLeod made himself very comfortable
in it for two days, while poor old black Caesar was hidden under the
planks of the portico, where he had crawled to hide all our silver. He
had pried up the floor and dropped down under, and black Martin saw some
horsemen galloping up the drive and dropped the planks back, and there
was faithful old Caesar underneath, hungry and scared for two days.”
“I remember hearing about it,” said Martha, “and about the soldier who
pushed a gun into Martin’s face and ordered him to tell which way you
had gone or he would shoot. Martin said, ‘Go ahead, shoot!’ And after
that he never got tired of telling it. But, Papa, we were supposed to be
talking about Christmas!”
How could he make himself clear to her, how could he explain to his
literal downright-minded daughter, that harried and anxious Thomas
Jefferson had been turned away by destiny from all the simple folkways
and beliefs? From all the prosaic and ordinary things that were good and
dedicated to wholesome living into a world of desperate struggle,
intrigue, cabal, tragedy, and strife?
Now that he was becalmed in this quiet backwater of life he could see
his own career and know that it had been always headlong, more than a
little frenzied, and too much of it precipitate and unpredictable and
little under his own control—and in that chaotic whirling by of history
there had been too little time for a man to meditate and even assay his
own beliefs.
“I,” he said, “have lived, Patsy, like a man snatched up by a whirlwind.
That is why I am so disassociated from simple things like celebrating
Christmas. Give me time to adjust and learn the value of things. You
know that I do not even yet fit smoothly into the rhythms of life, even
here at Monticello. I still want to alter and tear down and rebuild and
that distresses you; but I am trying, my dear—I am sincerely trying.
Ultimately I shall learn to be a quiescent ancient, grateful for a
fireside and an easy chair. And if you wish to celebrate Christmas, by
all means let us celebrate Christmas. Shall we have a great house full
of guests and much feasting and merrymaking?”
“Oh, no!” she lifted both hands. “Papa, you know you can’t afford it!”
He laughed. “And how are we to celebrate if we lack the proper materials
and incentive? Shall we merely hang the holly high and slaughter the
goose and carol a few stanzas under the mistletoe?”
“Do you realize, sir,” she faced him sternly, “that you have not spent a
Christmas day in this house since I was a little girl?”
“You have kept count all these years?”
“I have kept count. And so has every one at Monticello. You owe
something to Monticello in my opinion.”
“Then by all means, that is one debt that I shall pay,” he smiled,
letting his long, thin lips relax, and his voice sink to a caressing
murmur. “Plan it all, Daughter. Plan it all well and then simply tell
your old father what it is that you want him to do.”
6
_Monticello: Christmas, 1809_
Of all the people on Jefferson’s Little Mountain, old Burwell was
happiest in those lowering, chilly December days.