Jefferson (66 page)

In another moment the girls were joined in the carriage by Sally Hemings, resplendent in a new green traveling robe, grinning from ear to ear at the prospect of going home; James Hemings, no less resplendent (but scowling) in a blue-and-gold coat and new boots, climbed a mountain of trunks and settled onto the bench beside the driver.

Beside Short, Madame de Tessé waited with a handkerchief pressed to the corner of one eye. “I have such
prémonitions
,” she whispered over and over, until both of them looked with relief at the gay, roguish figure of Gouverneur Morris stumping up the Champs-Élysées.

“I’ve been at the National Assembly, listening to Necker and Mirabeau,” he announced cheerfully, “but thought I would stop by for
le grand départ
.” Jefferson bowed to the last servant in his personal gauntlet, pressed a coin in the man’s hand, and joined them.

“A few letters, my friend,” Morris said, handing him a set of envelopes, “which I beg you to deliver as convenient. One is to General Washington.”

“I heard you mention Necker.”

“An extinct volcano of a man. No longer a power. You may quote me on the other side.”

Jefferson smiled and placed the letters in the outer pocket of his blue jacket. “You make it sound as if I’m about to cross the Avernus rather than the Atlantic.”

“Your classical allusion would turn Virginia into Hades.” Morris winked at Short. “Much my own view, of course.”

Jefferson appeared not to have heard. “I will send you shiploads of new plants for Chaville,” he told Madame de Tessé, “in meager return for the pedestal.” He bent to take her hand, kissed it gallantly, then straightened his tall frame as if to look around once more.

“Dieu vous protège,”
whispered Madame de Tessé.

“You will be late reaching Le Havre,” Short said.

The Roman grasped his hand and covered it with both of his. In the glare of the French sunlight Jefferson’s strong features somehow slipped in and out of focus. Symbolic, Short thought ironically;
of something. He clung to the solid grip of Jefferson’s hands. Then Petit appeared, leading Jefferson’s horse, and Jefferson turned to wipe its neck with a handkerchief.

There would be no whip today. He swung easily into the saddle, and they all followed the carriage into the Champs-Élysées, even the servants, where, standing dangerously in the midst of passing wagons and coaches, they waved their hats and handkerchiefs over their heads. From one side of the carriage Sally Hemings leaned out and waved back; from the other side the two girls did the same. Dolphinlike the carriage rose over a hump of light in the road and dropped out of sight. At the last moment, so far away that Short could hardly be sure, Jefferson’s horse broke into a gallop.

Memoirs of Jefferson—13

T
HE MORNING JEFFERSON WAS INAUGURATED
as President for the first time, March 4, 1801, he walked down Pennsylvania Avenue with a group of friends from his boardinghouse and entered the still domeless new Capitol building under construction (he had a hand, and more, in choosing the design) to give his speech.

Inaudible, of course, beyond the first two rows. When people read it later, they learned that he had extended the olive branch to his enemies—“We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists”—and even called on the “Infinite Power” to guide him, a mild shock for the New England delegations, which habitually referred to him as “Atheist Tom.”

After he finished his speech—I was in Europe still, but I heard the story a hundred times—he walked back to Conrad’s boardinghouse and found that all the comfortable places at the head of the table, by the fireplace, were already taken. Nobody offered the new President his seat, until a Mrs. John Brown, wife of a senator from Kentucky, shyly stood up. Jefferson refused, with exquisite
Virginia politeness (and shrewd Republican simplicity) and took his usual chair at the very foot of the table.

He was to keep up this pose—not pose but fact—of Republican simplicity all eight years of his presidency. The President’s House was barnlike and unfinished most of the time he lived there. The roof leaked, the East Room had no paint or furniture (Abigail Adams had used it for her laundry), and the master of the house, though he entertained constantly, generally received daytime visitors in his old slippers and threadbare red waistcoat, just as if he were at home in Monticello. In private, when he was under no obligation to extend the olive branch, he liked to sit with a bottle of his good French wine and describe his election as the “Revolution of 1800.”

That was in the beginning. That was when he pushed success after success through the Congress—sent off his gunboats to beat down the Barbary pirates (something he had dreamed of doing since Paris); sent off his agents, secretly, to make the Louisiana Purchase (the most acquisitive man in the world, Clérisseau had said; in 1812 Jefferson wanted to march into Canada and annex it too). Sent off his secretary Meriwether Lewis to explore Louisiana pretty much as the king had sent Peter Jefferson fifty years before, to survey the Fairfax Line. For a time, among the common people, Jefferson was as popular, almost, as George Washington.

Did I bring him bad luck? Does a part of me like to think so?

I returned to America in the summer of 1802, not rich and not married, in the pursuit of happiness. At almost the same moment a frustrated office-seeker and journalist, one James Callender, reported in the Richmond
Recorder
the “fact” that Jefferson kept a slave concubine at Monticello, a “black Venus” named Sally Hemings, who had so far borne him five mulatto children.

I still have copies—filed away in my office, for whatever motives—of some of the virulent, unspeakable effusions that followed. The New England newspapers, always staunchly anti-Jefferson, could hardly restrain their glee. The President kept a “Congo harem,” they wrote in Massachusetts; he rushed back from Washington at every chance to sink between Sally’s “mahogany thighs.” A thirteen-year-old New York boy named William Cullen Bryant won applause with a poem called “The Embargo”

(“Go wretch, resign the presidential chair”)
. The Philadelphia
Port Folio
published a poem to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”:

Did I believe it?

Is one’s answer the key, the ultimate clue to Jefferson’s character?

In the early autumn twilight of a September afternoon, in the not-so-distant year of 1819, long after Jefferson had surrendered the presidency to the next Virginian in line, I walked up the steps of the east portico at Monticello and the servant who opened the door and took my hand and greeted me in French (I recognized her instantly) was Sally Hemings.

Patsy was next, tumbling on Sally Hemings’s heels, trailing grandchildren, speaking French, too, reminding me with Jeffersonian tenaciousness of memory that she and I had promised each other in Paris that one day we would speak French in Monticello, but who could have guessed it would take us twenty-five years?

She led me into the entrance hall, where I stood, flabbergasted first at the
clutter
(not for nothing had I fled the South forever), then, as I sorted it out, the nature of the clutter.

Where anyone else would have had a coatrack, a bench, and a table of hospitable flowers, Jefferson had created, higgledy-piggledy, a private museum. There was a ceiling-high weekly calendar and clock on my left, constructed out of old cannon balls, pulleys, and ropes. There were moth-eaten buffalo heads on the walls, framed maps (Peter Jefferson’s map of Virginia among them), paintings of various subjects, curios. One table held a scientific collection (I suppose) of rocks and fossils, neatly labeled.
Another had horns and antlers from every cornute creature on the planet (I thought of Clérisseau
à la mode de moose
). In front of the fireplace reclined a life-sized marble statue of Ariadne with a serpent coiled around her naked arm. Indian bows and arrows and painted skins covered every other available space.

Sally Hemings took my hat and cloak. Patsy introduced me to her husband, Mr. Randolph. I craned my head to look up at the balcony that circled the second floor, where dozens (it seemed) of wide-eyed children stared down like owls on a perch. And then from the door on my left, the library, Jefferson entered.

He was seventy-six years old by then, growing deaf, growing (that fine red hair) quite gray, but otherwise unbowed by time. He wore his presidential slippers, his old red waistcoat (likewise growing gray), and octagonal reading spectacles, which he promptly took off and held as he conducted me on a guided tour of the hall. The fossil table was much depleted, he explained, since he had recently sent a shipment to the Museum of Natural History in Paris; claiming yet again, as if Buffon had not been in his grave these thirty years, the preeminent size of American mammals over European. The Indian artifacts reflected his latest interest; in his spare time he was making a dictionary of tribal languages.

“And these?” At the end of the tour I indicated two marble busts on pedestals that flanked the main door. One was a larger-than-life bust of Jefferson himself; the other I could not place.

“Hamilton,” Jefferson said with a laugh, finally putting on his glasses. “Opposed in death as in life.”

In the morning he took me through the library, book by book, then showed me his adjoining study (the
sanctum sanctorum
, Patsy told me; not even a servant could enter without her father’s permission). He had furnished it with more bookcases, of course, a desk and a swiveling chair that he had designed himself, and a telescope on a tripod, aimed at Carter’s Mountain.

In the parlor he had jammed the walls with three full tiers of paintings purchased during his Paris years. By the French doors stood a harpsichord that I recognized from the Hôtel de Langeac. The dining room held a dumbwaiter built into the walls (he explained, as if I could not guess) so that his guests could speak their minds on any subject without the inhibiting presence of servants.

In the afternoon I saw the ex-President on his hands and knees playing with two grandchildren by the fishpond.

At dinner, while the dumbwaiters hummed and turned, he described his plans for the new university he had at last persuaded the Virginia legislature to establish at Charlottesville, and for which he was designing both the buildings and the curriculum. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,” he said with all the old Roman firmness, “it expects what never was and never will be.”

Did I believe he kept a “Congo harem”?

On the second afternoon I strolled with one of the other guests, a French woman, wife of a former British diplomat, who asked with Gallic thoroughness about every fact and scrap of my life with Jefferson. No, I had not succeeded him as Minister to Paris. Gouverneur Morris had. (The teeth of memory are still very sharp.) Yes, I had stayed through the worst of the revolution, and had lost many friends to the Terror. Who? I named Lafayette, exiled and imprisoned; certain French
américains;
the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, who was dragged from his carriage and stoned to death by rioters while his family watched in horror, and whose young widow had thereafter remained true to his memory, never leaving France, though her friends, some of her friends, one of them, had importuned her with passion.

We had by that time reached the edge of the west lawn, from which we looked down on the slave shacks that lined the lower patio beside the lawn. Directly in front of us three middle-aged black men dressed in gray cotton work clothes stood in a circle, leaning on their rakes. What was my profession now? Madame Thornton asked. Was I also a plantation owner? I scarcely heard the questions. I had visited Jefferson twice or three times in Washington when he was President; once briefly in Monticello when I first returned from France, but the house had no second-story roof then, the daughters lived in other places, I had no stomach for southern realities—I had fled in a day to Philadelphia. And after that I had simply stayed away from Virginia.