The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (36 page)

Governor Jefferson brought Martha and the children back to the ravaged capital and struggled to keep a semblance of government alive. As spring approached, his spirits seemed to be reviving. But on April 15, a raw, rainy day, came a devastating personal blow. “Our daughter Lucy Elizabeth died about 10 o’clock a.m. this day,” Jefferson wrote in his account book. Martha was inconsolable. Jefferson did not even dare leave her to walk a few dozen steps to the nearby house where his council met. He sent these gentlemen a note, saying that Mrs. Jefferson’s “situation” made it impossible for him to attend their daily session. Three days later, Jefferson wrote to a friend, “I mean shortly to retire.”
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For the next months, Martha was apparently too ill to supervise Jefferson’s household. The house slaves took charge of buying food and caring for the two surviving children. The harassed governor had little or no time to spare for his family. A few weeks later, the main British army in the south invaded Virginia with seven thousand men. In spite of this crisis, Jefferson informed his council and the state legislature that he was not going to accept a third one-year term as governor. Not a few people, unaware of his reason for retiring, saw this decision as a shameful abandonment of his post when he was most needed. Among the most scornful critics was Jefferson’s old friend, former governor Patrick Henry.

The legislature and the governor decided to transfer their operations to Charlottesville, which they thought was deep enough in Virginia’s interior to be immune from British attack. Jefferson took Martha and the children to nearby Monticello and joined the lawmakers in the little town, where he reiterated his intention to resign.

At dawn on June 4, a huge horseman came pounding up the winding road to Monticello’s portico. Jack Jouett was the bearer of bad news. A strike force of 180 British dragoons commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton, the most feared cavalry leader of the war, was heading for Charlottesville to capture the retiring governor and the legislature.

Jefferson gave Jouett a glass of Madeira and told him to head for Charlottesville to warn the legislators. No one, including Jouett, knew when Tarleton and his horsemen might arrive. But it seemed probable that Vir
ginia’s Paul Revere had made far better time than the dragoons, riding in formation and limited to the pace of the slowest horses. In Charlottesville, Jouett had barely sounded the alarm when another Virginian reported Tarleton was only minutes away. The lawmakers scattered in all directions, many barely dressed, all shorn of any semblance of dignity.

On Monticello’s crest, Jefferson remained calm, studying the empty road through a telescope. He decided he had time to collect important personal papers and hide them in the woods. As he began to give orders to his house slaves, a man named Hudson came pounding to the portico to shout that part of the British raiding force was at the foot of the mountain.

Underscoring his desire to bag Jefferson—and his contempt for Virginia’s ability to stop him—Lieutenant Colonel Tarleton had divided his small force and ordered Captain Kenneth McLeod to take a detachment of dragoons to Monticello. A wild scramble ensued. Jefferson had to hurry Martha and their daughters into a carriage and send them off to nearby Blenheim Plantation.

It is not hard to imagine Martha’s terror. Not even at Monticello were she and her children safe! If they captured her husband, the British might hang him on the spot or transport him to England for a degrading show trial as a traitor followed by an even more grisly execution. At the very least, these rampaging dragoons were likely to loot Monticello and burn it to the ground.

As Martha and the children vanished down the road, Jefferson gave orders to the house servants to hide as much of the silver and other valuables as they could grab. The mortified ex-governor (his term had legally expired two days earlier) told other servants to walk his horse from the blacksmith’s to a point in the road between Monticello and adjoining Carter’s Mountain. He legged it ignominiously into the woods, cutting across his own property to rendezvous with the horse.

On Carter’s Mountain, Jefferson resorted to his telescope again and saw no trace of Tarleton’s green-coated horsemen. He was about to return to Monticello when Charlottesville’s main street swarmed with sabre-waving horsemen in exultant pursuit of scurrying legislators. Jefferson rode hastily down the other side of Carter’s Mountain and soon joined Martha and his daughters for midday dinner at Blenheim Plantation, their temporary refuge.

Martha’s anxiety remained acute, and so did Jefferson’s mortification.
Tarleton’s incursion was a savage final commentary on his failed governorship. With more than fifty thousand militiamen on its rolls, Virginia under his leadership was unable to stop 180 British dragoons from riding into the heart of the state. No one had fired a shot at them. Jefferson decided to take Martha and the children to Poplar Forest, his small plantation in Bedford County, seventy miles away, where the British were unlikely to come—and he did not have to face angry legislators when they returned from their hiding places in the woods.

Almost as if evil spirits were pursuing him, at Poplar Forest Jefferson cantered out for a morning ride on his favorite horse, Caractacus. The steed reared and pitched his master from the saddle, breaking his left wrist. Badly shaken up by the fall, he took six weeks to recover. Then came a letter from a friend, telling him that the Virginia legislature had approved a resolution calling for an investigation of his governorship. Behind this nasty move was Jefferson’s former friend Patrick Henry. He may well have been sincerely disgusted with Jefferson’s performance, but it was also a chance to ruin a potential political rival. The assembly had adjourned until the fall, leaving Jefferson dangling between guilt and innocence.

XI

During these months of Jefferson’s woes, something close to a political and military miracle occurred in Virginia. A huge French fleet appeared off the coast and blockaded Chesapeake Bay and the port of Yorktown, which the British army was using as its headquarters. Simultaneously, George Washington led the American army and a French expeditionary force on a forced march from New York, trapping the British in a deadly grip. On October 19, 1781, the British army surrendered. Suddenly peace and independence seemed real possibilities.

Shortly after the good news reached Monticello, Jefferson wrote George Washington a letter, congratulating him and explaining why he had not come to Yorktown to say this in person, “notwithstanding the decrepitude to which I am unfortunately reduced.” He was referring to his broken wrist. It may also have been an oblique comment on his political status. He was a mere “private individual” now, and there was no reason why Washington should waste time talking to him. This almost incoherent letter was written by a man in the grip of acute anxiety.
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News of the resolution to investigate Jefferson’s governorship had plunged him into depression. This state of mind made him doubly vulnerable to a familiar but ever new anxiety: Martha was pregnant again. It was her sixth pregnancy, and the shocks of the war years—three frantic flights from marauding British and the deaths of her son and little Lucy Elizabeth—had dangerously weakened her already delicate health. Soon, Jefferson was telling friends that the investigation of his governorship and its implication that he had been an inept and incompetent chief executive justified his total withdrawal from public life.

“I have retired to my farm, my family and my books, from which I think nothing will evermore separate me,” Jefferson wrote to his former law colleague Edmund Randolph. The astonished Randolph replied, “If you can justify this resolution to yourself, I am confident you cannot to the world.”
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When the legislature met late in the fall of 1781, Jefferson attended and declared he was ready to defend himself against any and all accusations. The ex-governor read a list of the charges that his chief accuser (a Patrick Henry pawn) had sent to him, and his answers to them. Without a word of debate, the assembly passed a resolution declaring their high opinion of Jefferson’s “ability, rectitude and integrity as chief magistrate of this commonwealth.” One might think this would have satisfied Jefferson, but he went back to Monticello still vowing the experience had forever soured him on future public service. He resigned from the legislature and refused an appointment to the Continental Congress.

On May 8, 1782, Martha Jefferson gave birth to another baby girl. Perhaps hoping to raise her spirits, Jefferson named the child Lucy Elizabeth, a kind of defiance of the fate that had deprived them of the daughter with that name while they were “refugeeing” around Richmond. According to a family legend, the baby was huge—perhaps sixteen pounds. If so, it suggests that Martha Jefferson may have suffered from diabetes. Women with that disease tend to have ever larger children until childbirth finally overwhelms their bodies.
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Now began the four worst months of Jefferson’s life. Martha did not rally after this exhausting birth. Day by day she became weaker and more wasted, in anguishing contrast to the blooming spring and summer outside her bedroom windows. Jefferson’s mounting anxiety was worsened by a summons from the Virginia Assembly. He had been elected against his wishes as a delegate from Albermarle and refused to serve. James Mon
roe, an ex-soldier who had become a Jefferson disciple, warned him that many people were criticizing him. The speaker of the House of Delegates informed Jefferson that he might be dragged to Richmond under arrest if he persisted in his refusal to serve.

Jefferson wrote Monroe a frantic letter, claiming that the investigation of his governorship had been an injury that would be cured only “by the all-healing grave.” At the close of this wild diatribe, he blurted out the real reason for his refusal: “Mrs. Jefferson has added another daughter to our family. She has been ever since and still continues dangerously ill.” Monroe wrote a compassionate and understanding reply, which Jefferson never answered. He spent the rest of the summer watching Martha slip away from him.
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He had summoned his sister, Martha Carr, and Martha’s sister, Elizabeth Eppes, to help him. But he did most of the nursing himself. He sat beside Martha’s bed for hours, reading to her from her favorite books when she was awake. When she slept, he retreated to a small room adjoining the bedroom, where he tried to work on a book he was writing,
Notes on Virginia
, a response to a set of queries sent to him by an inquisitive French writer. Years later, his daughter Martha, who was ten at the time, remembered that her father “was never out of [her mother’s] calling” during these four scarifying months.

Husband and wife could not conceal from each other, no matter how hard each tried, that both knew what was happening. One day, Martha took a pen from her bedside and wrote on a piece of paper words from their favorite book,
Tristram Shandy
:

Her handwriting faltered and stopped with those words. But she knew the rest of the passage as well as Jefferson. A few hours later, he took the paper and completed it in his strong hand:

Jefferson saved the paper for the rest of his life, adding to it a lock of Martha’s hair.
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On Friday, September 6, Jefferson watched Martha’s breath grow more and more labored. Beside him was his grieving sister, Martha Carr, and sister-in-law, Elizabeth Eppes. Nearby stood Martha’s favorite household slaves—Monticello’s cook, Ursula, Elizabeth Hemings, and some of her daughters.

Martha Jefferson knew the end was near. She began giving her husband instructions about things she wanted done after her death. When she came to the children, tears streamed down her sunken cheeks. Finally she held up her hand and told her husband she “could not die happy” if she thought her daughters “were ever to have a stepmother brought in over them.” It was testimony to the still painful memory of her own mother’s death and her unhappy childhood with her father’s second wife. “Holding her other hand in his,” the witnesses later recalled, “Mr. Jefferson promised her solemnly that he would never marry again.”
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This is a tragic moment—so tragic, it is difficult to think rationally about Martha’s request. It was an extraordinary demand to make on a thirty-nine-year-old man, especially when we consider how frequently Virginia men—and women—remarried after losing a spouse. It revives the suspicion that Martha Jefferson never approved of her husband’s revolutionary career. If we factor in Martha’s virtual summons for Jefferson to abandon his post in Philadelphia and return to her in 1776, and contrast it with Abigail Adams’s relinquishment of her husband in the name of patriotism, the motive grows even darker. Beneath Martha’s concern for her children, was there a bitter farewell message?
I don’t want you to neglect them the way you neglected me
. Few men would be more vulnerable than Thomas Jefferson to such an accusation.

As Martha sank into a coma and her breath became the shallow gasps of the dying, Jefferson blacked out. Martha Carr seized him before he toppled to the floor and with some help from Mrs. Eppes and the household slaves, they half dragged, half carried him into the library, where he lost consciousness. For a while the agitated women thought he, too, was dying. It took the better part of an hour to revive him. His grief was so terrifying, their fear of his death was replaced by fear of madness. For three weeks he
did not come out of the library. Hour after hour he paced up and down, collapsing onto a couch only when, in the words of his daughter Martha, “nature was completely exhausted.”
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