Jefferson (2 page)

Memoirs of Jefferson—1

J
UNE 4
,
1781
—
CHARLOTTESVILLE, DAWN
.

The Lord Cornwallis’s troops menacing Virginia once more, not six months after Benedict Arnold had stormed by surprise through Richmond, burning half the ramshackle wooden city to the ground and tossing the governor’s own private books and papers—the governor who lived by ink—into the silky brown James River. That same governor, Thomas Jefferson, still sleeping now at dawn in a dark unpainted room at Monticello or else beginning to stir and think about his houseguests and their breakfast.

Seven hours earlier, thirty miles away, a huge young man, small-faced as a bear but taller even than Governor Jefferson, had suddenly put down his glass of whiskey and cocked his ear to listen. His father owned a tavern in Charlottesville, and filial Jack Jouett had just stopped in at the Cuckoo, opposite the Louisa Courthouse, for a last drink at midnight and then a dirty bunk upstairs. Even in the warm June night Jack still wore his long
scarlet militia coat of the Virginia Guard and his new captain’s bars, which he meant to show his father tomorrow. If there was anyone else in the room besides the sleepy bartender, legend has utterly lost him.

Jack Jouett put down his drink and cocked his ear and finally crossed the floor to the window. On the other side of the square, fifty yards distant, he heard harnesses clinking, spurs, the rattle of swords, the unmistakable rub and thump of horses. There was a quarter moon blanketed off and on by clouds that night. Through the Cuckoo’s shutters he could see only indistinct figures and shadows; then a candle came down the steps of the courthouse and plumed caps sprang into silhouette.

If he had waited another ten minutes, Jack Jouett could have seen the red-coated foot soldiers coming uphill at a quick march, bayonets flashing, to join the green-jacketed mounted dragoons at the Louisa Courthouse, wheeling and backing now as they re-formed their columns. And in their midst, holding the candle over a map on his saddle, he would have seen Colonel Banastre Tarleton himself.
Tarleton!—
in London, Sir Joshua Reynolds had painted his famous full-length portrait, a beautiful baby-faced English dandy in skintight trousers, with a girl’s red lips and blond spit curls turned delicately up in place of sideburns. But in Virginia, after they had found the five heads in a Williamsburg farmhouse, severed crudely from the bodies and lined neatly along the mantel, after they had buried the pregnant housewife, stabbed in the belly, the bloody words “No more Rebels” smeared on her homespun sheets, after Tarleton had ordered his troops to charge full speed into Abraham Buford’s surrendered army—in Virginia after that Colonel Banastre Tarleton was known simply as the Butcher, the man who gave “Tarleton’s quarter.”

Jack Jouett never saw him. He was on his horse and thundering through the shadowed backwoods before the first foot soldiers ever reached the courthouse, backwoods and paths and alleys Jack Jouett had ridden all his life, night and day, sober and drunk, man and boy. Because whiskey or not, he was still clearheaded enough to guess that a troop of British cavalry mounted and armed at midnight was planning no harmless bivouac stopover at Louisa but was heading north toward Charlottesville to do
what the furious Arnold had only just missed doing—capture the sleeping governor and all the rebel legislators with him.

Jack Jouett rode till his horses heart nearly burst—down black tunnels of overarched catalpa and pine, parallel to the highway but far inland, gaining a mile an hour over Tarleton’s emerald-coated dragoons even before they stopped again at Thomas Walker’s estate called Castle Hill—father of that John Walker whose beautiful wife the governor had watched too closely years before—stopped and for the sheer malice of it burned half a dozen wagons and sheds.

By the time Jack Jouett pounded into Charlottesville, the sun was rising behind him and his face was whipped bloody with cuts from branches and tree limbs (scarred all his life, his family said). He paused long enough to hammer at doors along Locust Street, rousing some of his militia cohorts, then he kicked his horse again, more sweat and lather than horse by now, and started uphill to the mountaintop where Jefferson had been building his mansion off and on for the past ten years.

Down the unfinished steps of the east portico—he would trip and break his left wrist on the same steps forty years later, making it
both
wrists that he oddly broke in falls—down these steps Jefferson came in shirt-sleeves, hugging his torso. Afterward, Jack Jouett would swear that Jefferson made him sit down and drink not one but two leisurely glasses of Madeira wine before he even listened to his message, but the legislators who had been his houseguests (Patrick Henry’s friends, to be sure) swore just as hard that Jefferson had turned instantly pale as milk and raced over the lawn to the telescope he kept mounted by a wall. When he trained it downhill on Charlottesville and saw nobody in the streets yet, nothing but spokes of pure white sunlight crowning a blue-green Virginia haze, the governor raised his voice for his servants and disappeared running toward the stables.

This was the moment, Patrick Henry afterward declared, when the great god Panic laid his hand on Jefferson. His shouts woke all the slaves, who came piling out of their shacks on Mulberry Row. Upstairs in the half-finished house, the sleepy lawmakers stumbled to the windows and looked down on a scene of amazing hysteria. Jefferson—Jefferson the sworn governor—was dashing
back and forth in a mob of screaming blacks, gathering his armloads of silver, his gold-framed paintings, and his fine English bone china, and the slaves were shoving it all helter-skelter, as fast as it came, under the mansion floor.

The lawmakers, of course, when they could pry the news out of him, took to their horses and scattered down the hill to warn the city. Jefferson meanwhile—with no thought for the rest of the government, no dispatches off to General Steuben, not a word—stayed frantically wrapping his goods in yellow oilcloth (what other leader in all the Revolution was ever so
fastidious
?) till he heard the slaves out by the garden beginning to call.

“They’s started up the hill!”

It was black Martin Hemings (yes!) who saw them first, a squadron of green-backed wasps swarming up from Charlottesville toward the governor’s lonely hilltop. And it was Martin Hemings who led the governor’s huge bay stallion Caractacus up to the steps and boosted the governor into the saddle. Even then Jefferson kept one arm filled with treasures and galloped off to the west clutching his silver.

Say what you will about the Declaration of Independence, the years in the Continental Congress, the double terms as governor—by universal consent (Virginia consent), this
fiasco
undid it all—it was the nadir of Jefferson’s political career, the absolute low black point of his reputation as a leader and a man, and in Virginia, despite everything that followed, he never recovered from it.

“Our illustrious,
scampering
, governor,” said Betsy Ambler with her sweetest irony, “took neither rest nor food for man or horse till he passed over Carter’s Mountain and rode to safety twenty good miles from Monticello.” Once hidden from the green-coats he promptly fell off his bay horse and broke his arm, so he had to stay in the woods for six weeks, until the Virginia legislature met to impeach him for cowardice.

“Caractacus who unseated him,” Betsy would add with withering scorn, “was of course the name of a British king.”

Even in retrospect I pause and sigh.

Because this is the
first
version of the story I heard, a tale told by Jefferson’s political enemies but corroborated, it was said, by half a dozen more-or-less neutral witnesses at Monticello. And
when he became president twenty years later, the Federalist press would resurrect it, outrageously embellished: “Jefferson’s Great Shame.” “Jefferson in Flight.” “Jefferson the Horseback Governor, Galloping Away.”

But who that knew Jefferson could really believe it? In fact, as I soon discovered, it is only one of two completely contradictory versions. (The Federalists never printed the other.) The truth is—the enduring riddle of Jefferson’s character is—if you ask another (smaller) set of more-or-less neutral witnesses what happened that day at Monticello, then
this
is the story you get.

J
UNE 4
,
1781
—
CHARLOTTESVILLE, DAWN
.

The Lord Cornwallis’s troops menacing Virginia once more, raiding inland as far as Richmond and swinging a torch against every rebel building and field in reach. The sun rising like a torch itself through the blue-green haze of the eastern mountains, a blazing white disk balanced ominously on a finger-ridge of shadow.…

At Monticello when the slaves started to shout, Jack Jouett was crashing on his horse through the dense undergrowth near their cabins. With a huge whoop and a yell he burst free of the last bushes and charged uphill over the lawn and out of his saddle. And Jefferson, who never slept late a day in his life, was already coming down the steps to catch his arm as he staggered, leading him into the north cabinet that would later become the tea room, sitting him down in a fine chair, and calmly saying his name. He knew Jack Jouett and he knew his father, and before he let the boy talk, he called for strong wine—Madeira was what they had by—and poured him two large glasses. Afterward they would say in New England that Paul Revere had got his poet and so his fame—Virginia always long of horses, short of poets—but the truth was, inept, unlucky Paul Revere had been stopped and captured by the British before he even reached Concord (who remembers that now?), while Jack Jouett had out-ridden and out-lasted seventy of George III’s finest cavalry over thirty miles of tar-black
wilderness and thereby saved the life of the author of the Declaration of Independence.

What that author did first was walk to the end of the lawn and carefully study the horizon. Seeing no troops, he came back to the house and brought his guests calmly down to breakfast. Then, although he had legally stopped being governor two days before, he gathered together all the official papers he still had in his possession and started to burn or hide them—no secret would ever fall into enemy hands if he could help it. Meanwhile, on his instructions the houseguests hurried down the mountain to warn Charlottesville and the outlying settlements (when they woke a boozy Patrick Henry at Cismont, he disappeared so fast that he forgot one shoe). The state’s papers safely hidden, Jefferson sent his family west to a friendly plantation, and he himself rode halfway down the mountain to a lookout point. Legend says he looked through his telescope and saw nothing, so started back; then he realized that he had dropped his sword at the lookout point, and when he returned and stopped a second time, he saw Tarleton’s soldiers winding uphill like a green-backed snake.

Indisputably, he rode back to the house and warned the servants. By the time the British horsemen reached the first roundabout, he was gone again and Martin Hemings (twenty-six and known to everyone as the “sullen” Hemings) was handing the last pieces of family silver to a slave named Caesar, who was hiding them under the floorboards. As the British tore over the lawn, Martin slammed the plank down, trapping Caesar under the floor. The first officer through the door shoved a pistol against his chest and threatened to fire if he didn’t say where Thomas Jefferson was, and sullen Martin Hemings put his hands in his pockets and scowled and muttered, “Fire away then.”