America's First Daughter: A Novel (56 page)

The general wasn’t shy to confront my father in the presence of our servants. Their faces strained to show indifference, but I wasn’t blind to the way their bodies leaned in, how they made themselves busy in such a way as to best hear every word when Lafayette said, “I gave my best services to, and spent my fortune on behalf of Americans because I felt you were fighting for a great and noble principle—the freedom of mankind. But instead of all being free, a portion were held in bondage. My old friend, surely you must concur that it would be mutually beneficial to masters and slaves if the latter were educated and emancipated.”

“Indeed,” Papa replied easily. “I believe there’ll come a time when the slaves will all be free, but I leave its accomplishment to the work of another generation. At the age of eighty-two, with one foot in the grave and the other uplifted to follow it, I do not permit myself to take part in any new enterprises.” Of course, Tom’s experiences as governor taught us the difficulty of the enterprise. But my father was ever an optimist, and spoke those words with confidence and conviction. “I do favor teaching slaves to read . . . but to teach them to write will enable them to forge papers.”

“For the better!” Lafayette had insisted. “I’ve heard it argued that black faces cannot make their way in white society,” he said, his eyes flicking briefly upon Madison and Eston Hemings where they readied to entertain us with their violins. “But I put this to you. Whatever be the complexion of the enslaved, it does not, in my opinion, alter the complexion of the crime the enslaver commits. A crime much blacker than any African face. It’s a matter of great anxiety and concern to find that this trade is sometimes carried on under the flag of liberty, our dear and noble stripes, to which virtue and glory have been constant standard-bearers.”

My father was unaccustomed to anyone speaking so baldly to him on the matter. But Lafayette was more than a guest. He’d saved our lives and our Revolution and enabled us to live in this beautiful house atop the mountain in Virginia. He had the right, more than any man alive, to harangue us.

My father endured it gracefully and I could never bring myself to be angry at Lafayette. Not only because of all I owed him, and all he’d inspired in me, but also because he was the only guest present who never asked me to account for the absence of my husband.

Tom had left himself, and us, without a fig leaf. We couldn’t say that he was ill, because he was seen in taverns by our neighbors. We couldn’t say he was about urgent business, since everyone seemed to know he was ruined. So we employed artful dodges when possible and inartful ones the rest of the time.

In spite of this, I was enormously relieved not to have him there. He left no lonely gap in our society, no awkward place at the dinner table. His absence left us strangely comfortable as a family. And as I hosted the greatest patriots of our age, I was as content as I’d never been before in my place as the mistress of Monticello.

Monticello, 5 June 1825

From Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph

You can never want a necessary or comfort of life while I possess anything. All I have is devoted to the comfortable maintenance of yourself and the family. I have no other use for property. Restore yourself to the bosom of your family and friends. They will cherish your happiness as warmly as they ever did.

I
SHOULD BURN THIS LETTER
for what it reveals about my husband’s abandonment of me—and perhaps mine of him. But these words are a testament to my father’s character. Proof of how warmly he reached out to my husband, when I could scarcely find it within myself to do the same.

That spring, I found Tom brooding in a little white house in Milton he said he was using as an office, alone, drunk, unshaven, and in squalor. In the dark recesses of the entryway—for he’d shut the curtains against the sunlight—Tom heard my plea, then said, “I’ll never go back to Monticello with you.”

“I’m not asking for myself,” I said, trying to quell my rising anger. “I’m asking for Ellen. She wants you at her wedding.”

“Of course you’re not asking for
you
. You’d have been happier if I died in the war.”

“That’s not true,” I said, knowing that most of the bitterness between us had arisen precisely because I was desperate to keep him from dying in that war!

Tom snorted. “I won’t subject myself to the supercilious stares of your father’s guests. So get out, Martha. Go.”

I stood there, wringing my hands, wishing I knew the words that might help matters—but it occurred to me that everything we’d ever had to say to one another of import we’d said skin to skin. And though he was still, even at his age, rugged and well made, my desire for him had died completely.

“I said get out!” Tom shouted, launching his boot at me. Fortunately, his drunken aim was so poor that the boot sailed harmlessly by my head and crashed with a clatter into the wooden door behind me. “Just go and be grateful that I haven’t taken the children from their whore of a mother.”

A chill swept over me—not for the insult, but for the threat. Tom couldn’t take the older boys because they wouldn’t go. But Lewis, Septimia, and little George . . . my husband
could
take them. I’d simply never believed he’d be so monstrous as to try. Why, he was more cruel, barbarous, and fiend-like than ever!

Ignoring the stench of an unclean plate upon his table in the room beyond, I wrapped my shawl around me. “However much you blame me, surely you wouldn’t make the children suffer.”

“Oh, I do blame you, Martha. But I blame my ungrateful son even more. Understand that if my children step one toe over Jeff’s threshold, you’ll never see them again. Don’t think I can’t do it, for it’s the only thing still in my legal power, and by God, not even your father can stop me.”

I didn’t stay to argue with him.

When I told Ellen, she straightened before the mirror and smoothed her wedding gown. “My father ought not be made to suffer embarrassment because he has no dowry to give me. His pride has already endured too many blows. How could I be happy today knowing I’d brought him low?”

She was devoted to her father, in spite of his weaknesses, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. My dear daughter, still as precious as two angels in one . . .

And so Ellen married Joseph Coolidge in the drawing room of Monticello, without her father, her hands shaking so badly she could scarcely hold a prayer book. Her sisters sent her to Boston with gifts they made themselves. Cornelia fashioned for her a painted screen to shade her from the sun, Mary packed a basket of cakes and wine, and Septimia presented her with a bracelet of chinaberries she’d strung like beads. Then our dear, witty Ellen was gone, leaving her grandfather lonely.

My other daughters took turns sitting with him, but Papa confided, “I didn’t know what a void Ellen would leave in our family.”

I didn’t despair at losing Ellen. To the contrary, I
gloried
in her escape from the sinking ship upon which the rest of us now sailed.

In December of that year, Edgehill went up for auction with all its slaves and livestock. I worried that the notice would attract traffickers in human blood, Negro buyers who’d take my husband’s slaves deep into the South to grow cotton or rice, putting them to such hard use it’d leave them in the ground. And I couldn’t stomach the sorrow of seeing our house servants and their children sold out of the family.

“There’s nothing you can do for them,” Jeff said, trying to reassure me. “I can try to arrange for buyers for them amongst our friends and neighbors, and failing that, I can bid myself on your household favorites, but there’s nothing
you
can do to spare the slaves from sale at all. You mustn’t blame yourself, Mother.”

Then why did I feel to blame?

In the face of such a system of injustice, I determined a course of action. Having learned bitter lessons from the unhappy fate of so many ruined friends and relatives, I said, “There is something I can do. If I give up my dower rights in my husband’s holdings, I’m entitled to one-ninth of his estate before the creditors are satisfied. And if I take that value in slaves . . .”

My son’s eyes bulged. “You’d be better off to take—”

“No,” I said, twisting a kerchief in my fists, understanding the import of what I was saying. “I’ll take the slaves.”

And with those desperate words, I agreed to become a slaveholder.

For the first time in my life, I’d own human beings whose entire fate would rest in my hands. It shattered me to do it, but would’ve shattered me more to do nothing. Better that they were mine than given over to some breeding farm or a field in the Deep South.

I spared from the block Sally’s relations—the wives of her brothers. But I did so over Jeff’s objections. “They’re aged, Mother. They wouldn’t have sold for much. If slaves are all you’re taking from the estate, you need strong young men.”

But I went on sparing the women. I took eleven in all, including Burwell’s daughters, though my son thought my choices emotional and without good sense.

What I’d done was all that kept me sane on the bitter winter day of the auction. First on the block was Susan, so bad a servant, so negligent, so heartless, and of a family of such bad disposition generally that we ought to have been glad to be rid of her. But I was overcome with nausea when the auctioneer cried out into the biting winter wind. “Five hundred, five hundred! This nubile girl, strong arms, wide hips. Five hundred, do I hear six?”

The discomfort of slavery I had borne all my life, but its sorrows in all their bitterness I’d never before conceived. Tears slid down Susan’s black cheeks when a man offered a higher bid. And feeling a fracturing in my soul, I lost all sense of decorum.

Rushing to her, I begged that she be allowed to choose for herself amongst the buyers—a thing that embarrassed my son as he pulled me away, mumbling apologies to the bidders. “You aren’t planning to do something even more foolish, are you? You cannot rely now on my father for anything anymore. What you’ve taken in human property is now all you have of your own to provide for the six children you still have in your care, all under the age of seventeen.”

He was afraid that I’d free them. And I might’ve. But just because I couldn’t bear to see these slaves naked on a wooden block for rich men to inspect, didn’t mean I’d cast them out into the world without any way to support themselves. That’s what I was thinking when the auctioneers cried out the price for Edgehill’s parcels, hour after hour. “Sixteen an acre! Do I hear seventeen?”

Standing there as everything Tom and I built was sold away—earth, animal, and human—I felt my husband’s accusing eyes on me. But however much he hated me that day, I hated myself more. I hated myself, and slavery, and Virginia, and everything.

Everything
.

For four hours the auctioneers cried out, extolling the virtues of Edgehill, a plantation with the healthiest climate of the whole earth, sheltered from cold winds, well watered with pure springs, nestled amongst woods of oak, hickory, walnut, and ash . . . until finally, at the end of the fourth hour, with bidders beginning to go off, my son offered seventeen and took the whole of Edgehill.

“You
swindler,
” Tom sneered, drawing so near to my son I thought they might come to blows. “You took advantage of a father’s distress to get possession of his property and turn him adrift in his old age, penniless. You didn’t even raise enough to satisfy my creditors and now they’ll consume my earnings for the rest of my life. You’ve even taken from me a roof over my head—”

He reached for our son’s bad arm, as if to wrench it, and I stepped between them. “Tom, you can never want for a home while my father possesses one. And our son won’t leave you—”

“I’ll take nothing from a thief.” Tom trembled like a man swept up in a storm, clutching at his chest, all the color gone from him. Then he limped away.

To escape the prying eyes of onlookers, I hastened to the carriage, murmuring, “He’s ill.” For I knew no other name for it. “His health’s failing from excessive anxiety of mind.”

Handing me into the carriage, Jeff said, “I cannot have yours doing the same, so I’ve made arrangements with a common friend to assist him. He won’t accept help from me, but he’ll take it from a friend, and I’ll reimburse that man for his pains.”

I grasped his hand, grateful beyond measure. This’d been no easier on Jeff than on any of us, but he’d borne it. “Your father won’t appreciate it, but I do.”

The tapestry of my life was unraveling, one strand at a time.

Once the grandeur and radiance of Lafayette’s visit was gone, I looked around me and saw everything at Monticello in disrepair. The paint flaked off the walls and railings and molding. The roof let in melting snow and rain. My father, so proud of his house, so fastidious and attentive to its appearance, didn’t seem to notice, and I told myself that Jeff had been too busy with the calamity of my husband’s bankruptcy to give my father’s estate his attention.

But that winter one of my father’s loans had come due . . . and Papa couldn’t pay.

“What can you mean that he can’t pay?” I asked Jeff as the carriage jostled us along, having relied upon my father’s promises to look after me and the children, no matter what befell my husband’s fortunes.

“Grandfather overestimated the value of his holdings,” Jeff told me, gravely. “Monticello is difficult to make profitable. Water and supplies must be hauled up. The house itself requires an enormous amount of firewood to heat it. There’s the expense of supporting the Negroes. We’ll have to move the family to Poplar Forest.”

I didn’t understand what he was saying.

And he braced himself, continuing on. “We’ll take with us only the necessary furniture and a small household of servants. Then we’ll sell or rent the whole of Monticello and auction as many Negroes as we can to pay the debts.”

The blood drained from me so suddenly I sank into the cushions of the carriage in a near swoon. This had already been the ugliest day of a life filled with its share of ugly days, and this blow nearly stopped a heart that was already broken.

Leave Monticello? It’d been the constant star, the steady anchor in all our troubles. Surely Jeff was overstating the financial situation in which we found ourselves. “But the price of crops will go up. They do. Up and down.”

“Mother,” Jeff said, covered in a sweat in spite of the cold. “You’ve no notion of the debts Grandpapa has acquired. More than my father’s debts. More by far. And the crisis is at hand. To delay it will be complete ruin only a few years down the road, without a home to shelter you or the children.”

I couldn’t fathom selling Monticello. It’d be a bitter sacrifice to leave its comforts, but nothing compared to the anguish of seeing my father turned out of his house and deprived in his old age of the few pleasures he was still capable of enjoying. “Have you told your grandfather this plan? It’ll kill him!”

And it nearly did.

I was there, holding my father’s hand, when Jeff delivered the news, and the shock was as dreadful as we foresaw. My father—my strong, giant of a father—began to weep. “I’ve lived too long. My death can only be an advantage to my family now.”

“You’re very wrong!” I cried, for his death was the thing I most feared all my life.

My son, always pragmatic, echoed my horror but explained the financial reality, too. “Grandpapa, even independent of our love for you, your death under existing circumstances would be a calamity of frightful magnitude. Your life isn’t only precious to our hearts, but necessary to the interests of your daughter and grandchildren.”

What he meant was that just by living, my legendary father cast a shield over us all. While he was alive, the most ruthless of our creditors wouldn’t dare to strip us bare.

They say tragedies come in threes. There was first the auction of Edgehill. Next the blow that we might lose Monticello. And then my daughter Ann came to us in the dead of winter, battered, bleeding, and bruised.