Christmas at Monticello with Thomas Jefferson
Date: 2021-07-09T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Christmas stories; Biographical fiction; Jefferson; Thomas; 1743-1826 -- Fiction; Presidents -- United States -- Fiction; Monticello (Va.) -- Fiction

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Title: Christmas at Monticello with Thomas Jefferson

Author: Helen Topping Miller

Release date: July 9, 2021 [eBook #65806]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHRISTMAS AT MONTICELLO WITH THOMAS JEFFERSON ***

Christmas at Monticello
with
Thomas Jefferson

BY
HELEN TOPPING MILLER

LONGMANS, GREEN & CO.
NEW YORK · LONDON · TORONTO
1959

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., INC.
119 WEST 40th STREET, NEW YORK 18

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., Ltd.
6 & 7 CLIFFORD STREET, LONDON W 1

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
20 CRANFIELD ROAD, TORONTO 16

CHRISTMAS AT MONTICELLO
WITH THOMAS JEFFERSON

COPYRIGHT © 1959
BY HELEN TOPPING MILLER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK, OR ANY PORTION THEREOF, IN ANY FORM

PUBLISHED SIMULTANEOUSLY IN THE DOMINION OF CANADA BY
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., TORONTO

FIRST EDITION

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 59-11264

Printed in the United States of America

5

Christmas Tales

By Helen Topping Miller

Christmas for Tad
No Tears for Christmas
Christmas at Mount Vernon
Her Christmas at the Hermitage
Christmas with Robert E. Lee

7

1

Washington: March, 1809

Suddenly, as he climbed the long, curving flight of stairs, he knew that now he was an old man.

Sixty-six last April, and, though his sandy red hair had merely faded instead of turning gray, there were twinges in his knees that reminded him of too many miles in the saddle, in cold rain and sleet, too many hours standing at his writing table, too much tension, not enough rest. But now he could rest.

In the half-furnished rooms of the White House below, the crowd still danced at the Inaugural Ball, with the wife of the new president, sparkling, vivacious Dolly Madison, a gay and charming hostess in a sweeping white cambric dress and the inevitable enormous turban on her head.

He was grateful, Thomas Jefferson was thinking as he toiled up the stairs, that he had been able to see his good friend, Jemmy Madison, inaugurated president of these new and struggling United States. But he was even more grateful that his own years of service were at an end.

“No third term,” he had told them when they importuned 8 him. “No, never! My work is done. I am going home.”

If only he could have left a government in peace, but, for this new nation that he had worked a lifetime to build, it appeared sadly that there could be no peace. Off the coasts of his country British and French ships prowled and battled, seizing American shipping, taking off sailors at gunpoint, confiscating cargoes. Would James Madison be able to keep the nation out of another war? he worried, as he entered the disordered bedroom where his half-packed possessions were strewn about, books stacked on the floor, papers spread over the bed. Down below in some of the empty rooms of the mansion were piled other boxes of papers already sorted and made ready to travel by barge and wagon back to his “Little Mountain” in Albemarle County, his beloved Monticello.

As he closed the door of the room, there was a little whistle and a whir of wings, and his pet mockingbird came charging through the air, all reaching feet and stiffened wings, to perch on Jefferson’s shoulder.

“We’re going home, boy,” he told the bird, turning his face to avoid the inquisitive bill. “Burwell will see to it that you get back to Monticello safely, where all the other mockingbirds will probably be swollen with envy when they see you lording it over the place. No, I haven’t any sugar tonight. When we get home my grandchildren will feed you sugar till you’ll probably die of obesity.”

He sat wearily on the side of the bed and began turning over papers, studying each, laying them in neat piles. There were too many of them but each was important to him. A soft rap came at the door; it opened a crack and his daughter, Martha Randolph, always called “Patsy,” put a turbaned head in.

9

“Papa, may I come in?”

“It would seem that you are already in,” he smiled. “You should be downstairs being gay with the rest of them.”

“Oh, Papa, I’m an old woman now. I’m thirty-six. Old enough for caps and a chimney corner, too old for frolicking.”

“The chimney corner hasn’t been built that can hold you long. You were born restless like your father. You always want to be on to the next activity, Patsy, no matter what it is.”

“I didn’t come away down here through all that cold mud to dance and frivol,” she argued, arranging her wide skirt so she could sit beside him on the high bed. “I came to help you pack and fetch you home, but from the looks of things we’re doomed never to get there. What are all these pages and pages full of strange words?”

“Look out!” He rescued some sheets from her hand. “Don’t mix them up.” He straightened the papers lovingly, his long freckled fingers deft. “These are my Indian vocabularies. I’ve been setting down words from the different Indian tongues, comparing them and trying to find a common origin.”

“So that’s why someone said the other day that you believed that all the Indians were originally Russians!” Patsy laid the pages in neat piles. “Papa, you continually astound me! With all the frightful responsibilities you’ve had all these years—buying Louisiana, the country continually in a row with England and France and this bank business, not to mention Aaron Burr—you’ve found time to learn Indian languages.”

“I haven’t learned many—only a few words here and there. It kept my mind off unpleasant things, like having 10 all the Federalists hate me vehemently and make no bones about it.” He quirked his long mouth in an ironic grimace. “Do you know that at this moment there are half a dozen banquets being eaten in this city where the Federalists are proposing insulting toasts to the despised ‘Virginian,’ gloating over my departure, telling each other, ‘Thank God, at last we’re rid of Jefferson!’?”

“Papa, please don’t remember those things,” pleaded his daughter. “Leave every bitter memory right here on the shores of this dirty Potomac. Up on the Rivanna on your mountain the children are already counting hours, eager for Grandfather to come home. Now, can’t we lay all these papers in a box so this bed can be used for the purpose for which it was intended? I’ll call Burwell. I could drag your boots off myself but it’s hard for me to stoop or bend over in these murderous stays. Back home I shall never wear them, no matter if my fashion-minded daughters faint with horror.”

“Don’t tell me the Misses Randolph have deserted dolls and toad houses built of mud and gone running after fur-belows! Maybe I had too many mirrors sent home from France.” He began obediently to lay the papers in a stout wooden box. “Come in, Burwell. The tyrannical Madam Patsy Randolph says this ex-president has to go to bed.”

“With a hot posset and a warm brick at his feet, Burwell,” Martha instructed the faithful servant. “I wonder if anybody in the future history of this nation will ever get this old barn of a mansion really warm? There are more goose-pimples than dimples and beauty patches on those bare shoulders downstairs this minute and Dolly Madison whispered to me that she wished that protocol demanded ermine capes with velvet linings for officials in this country such as the kings and lords wear in England. Well, good night, 11 Papa. I’ll see you in the morning before I leave. I do have to hurry home. Remember there is a large family of small people there all in need of discipline before you get back to spoil them all outrageously.”

“I never spoil children. I teach them to use their eyes and their minds,” he protested, grunting as Burwell eased off the tight polished slippers and put shabby old carpet slippers on his feet. “There’s one thing I determine, Madam. If you can throw away stays when you are back at Monticello, I shall discard all fancy boots and slippers, stocks and tight cravats, and those confounded, silly lacy affairs down my front. You haven’t given away my good green breeches, I hope?”

“Everything of yours is exactly as you left it, Papa. The moths got at that awful old homespun coat but I suppose you’ll wear it anyway.”

“It comforts my old shoulders and the pockets are all in the right places,” he asserted.

“Very likely full of rocks and arrowheads and dried leaves and dead butterflies at this moment.” She bent and kissed him, her fancy headdress slipping a little. She pulled it off freeing reddish brown curls to fall over her ears. “I’m going to bed myself. Those fiddles and trombones can squawk all night but they won’t keep me awake.”

Left alone, Thomas Jefferson dug a comfortable hollow in his pillow and tried to sleep. But too much went coursing through his mind. That resolution passed by the Virginia Assembly, especially the words at the end: “You carry with you the sweetest of awards, the recollection of a life well spent in the service of your country.”

That sentiment assuaged a little some of the bitterer things. Young Alexander Hamilton, George Washington’s handsome protégé and Thomas Jefferson’s relentless enemy, 12 dying, after he had fired dramatically in the air, from the bullet of Aaron Burr. And there had been Burr, as Jefferson knew, always plotting, dreaming up his grandiose schemes to set up an empire of his own in the West, fleeing to England when his treasonable activities were discovered, forfeiting his bail.

John Marshall had been to blame for that. John Marshall, John Adams’ midnight appointee, named for petty spite, and the sworn and bitter enemy of Thomas Jefferson, had so muddled Burr’s trial that a jury had acquitted the man of treason and altered the charge to some trivial misdemeanor. And then Marshall had had the effrontery to subpoena the President of the United States as a witness!

These are they who had worked all manner of evil against me, the words ran through the old man’s tired brain. Yet do I stand and my arm prevails against them. Curious how darkness and silence always brought back to him some line or other from the thousands of books he had read. That was something he would do at Monticello to fill up his days—catalogue all his books, almost ten thousand of them there must be now, for he had sent home boxes full every year. He would teach his older grandsons, Jefferson Randolph and Francis Eppes, to appreciate books too, and some of the girls might show some signs of possessing an eager mind like his Patsy’s.

Someone opened a door below and the blare of a marching tune came to his ears which likely meant that the dancing company were going down the chilly halls to the unfurnished rooms where the collation was spread on trestle tables. Jefferson found himself drumming his fingers on his chest in time to the music. There had been so much martial music in his life. He thought of Patrick Henry riding into Williamsburg on that cloudy morning at the head of his 13 militia. Gallant, shabby Patrick, who had stood so tall in his run-down boots and worn leather breeches, his coat out at the elbows, who had twice sent great words ringing on the air of America, words that were so trumpet-strong and stirring that they still echoed in the ears of men and made a small thrill quiver in the breast of Thomas Jefferson himself.

“If this be treason, make the most of it!” And “Give me Liberty or give me Death!” He would hear them again and again so long as he lived, remembering that they had challenged the hesitant hearts of rebelling Virginians until they were ready to dare even the great guns of the Third George of Hanover.

But now, Jefferson was thinking, how early the fires of patriotism had cooled in Patrick Henry. Patrick had been successful at Red Hill, his plantation. He had made some money, grown old before his time, and been content the last time Jefferson had seen him to sit under a green tree with a jug of cool spring water near by and his grandchildren playing around. Ease and security—were they the drugs that abated the eternal challenge in the minds of men? And did nations like men grow sluggish and apathetic when they were well fed and bodily comfortable, Jefferson wondered?

Patrick Henry was dead now, and George Washington was dead. One by one the passionately dedicated builders of the temple of the Republic had vanished from the arena, leaving the affairs of state to the younger, noisier men who had not known the travail, the risks, the fiery trials of the beginning. I am a lone dead leaf hanging on the tree, the old man told himself. I am that despised democrat who greeted pompous envoys in a shabby coat, the one they called Infidel.

That had been his own private joke, his personal secret—his 14 belief, his relationship with the Almighty. When he was dead, someone would find the little book in which he had pasted and annotated all the sayings of Jesus and know how wrong they had been in their hasty judgment. But now it did not matter. Nothing mattered now that he was going home. He had refused a third term as president, adhering to the precedent of George Washington. Turmoil and trouble were hot in the air, but somehow his nostrils did not dilate with the old war-horse eagerness at the threat of conflict. Now he felt no stallion urge to go charging armed with words into the midst of any fray. How well life was organized, he thought, as he found a softer spot in the pillow. Old age crept on a man unaware, bringing its own opiate to dull any lingering sense of loss.

At length, letting the weight of weariness have its way with him, Thomas Jefferson fell asleep. Martha Randolph, tiptoeing in later, shading a candle with her hand, saw his face upturned, eyes closed, nose pinched a little, some brown freckles standing out on the gray, drained cheeks, and caught the eagle look about him.

He will look like that when he is dead, she thought, as she blew out the candle and quietly slipped away.

It was snowing hard when Jefferson awoke early in the morning.

The raw ugliness of this new city of Washington was being charitably hidden under a blanket of downy feathers. The stumps where the big tulip poplars and oaks had been cut down to open up streets and clear space for building were now, all of them, so many thrones cushioned with ermine. The cutting of those trees had grieved Jefferson’s heart. How he hated to see a tree go down, though he had slaughtered a young forest in his younger years to clear the 15 top of his little mountain for the home he visioned there.

He looked down at the narrow streets where sleighs and wagons were already churning up dark mud to profane the virgin beauty of the snow.

Martha came in early accompanied by two aides. Jefferson, half dressed, was eating the breakfast Burwell had brought up, picking the meat from a fried fish with his fingers, dipping bits of corn bread into new cane syrup. He dried his fingers quickly on his handkerchief, gulped the last swallow of tea, and motioned Burwell to take the food away.

“And what brings you here so early, my dear Patsy?” he inquired. “I thought you would be starting out for Richmond and Charlottesville on the next coach?”

“I knew you’d never finish this packing alone or let any one help you.” She kissed his forehead, smoothing back his rough motley of hair. “I declare, Burwell, if you don’t cut his hair soon, he’ll be riding the country looking like a mangy old lion!” she scolded. “Trim this on top and fix him a proper cue, or I shall go out and buy you a stylish wig, Mr. Ex-President.”

“Can’t stand the things! They’re dirty,” he snorted. “I’ll get everything packed, Patsy. These boys will help me. You go along home and get a good fire going to thaw out my old bones after that long three days in that drafty coach.”

“You will never finish packing,” she fussed. “You’ll find some book or paper you haven’t seen in a long time and spend hours poring over it. I know you, Thomas Jefferson. You gentlemen bring in all those boxes and, Burwell, see that Mr. Jefferson’s trunks and carpetbag are packed. This baggage will be taken off the barge at Shadwell, Father, and we’ll have wagons sent down to carry it to Monticello.”

“Nothing must be lost!” worried Jefferson. “Nothing! 16 Every paper and pamphlet I’ve saved is important. They contain the history of an era, the story of the birth of this nation.”

“Then,” said Martha, “it would seem that most of them should be in the Library of Congress.”

“Never, while they house that library in such makeshift quarters,” he argued. “Patsy, my dear, I beg of you, go on to Monticello as we planned. I shall arrive later with everything I own intact. Just remember that your father has knocked about the world on his own for a long time, and I am not yet senile nor decrepit.”

“But you will admit that you are tired to the bone,” she persisted, “and that long trip in this cold weather is not going to be easy.”

“I’ll admit anything, only get out of here now so that I can get out of this dressing gown and into my breeches! Burwell, see that my satin breeches and the broadcloth coat are well aired before you pack them. It will be a long day before I shall want to be dressed up and elegant again.”

“You were quite the beau at that dance last night,” Martha remarked. “Several women said to me that they had never before seen you so witty and gay. And more than one remarked that it was a great pity that you were leaving Washington.”

“They had never seen me before without the sad old albatross of responsibility hung on my back,” he retorted. “When I gave it over to Jemmy Madison, I felt twenty years younger in twenty minutes and even several pounds lighter. Once I’m back on my own mountain you’ll see, I shall be merry as a grig—whatever a grig is.”

“In my youth, when you were feeding me huge, nauseous doses of Plato and Livy, you would have ordered me to go and look that word up,” Patsy reminded him. “I can hear 17 you very sternly directing me never to use a word unless I knew its exact meaning. Fortunately, I know what a grig is.”

“It’s a cricket,” spoke up one of the aides. “My granny told me a long time ago, a grig is a cricket. When I was a young-un, sir.”

“It’s a kind of grasshopper,” disputed the other aide. “A little grasshopper that fiddles tunes with its hind legs, Mr. President, sir.”

“Mr. Ex-President, Carver. An ex being something that has been crossed out, obliterated, ignored. I’m obliterated but I can still go on being a grig. Even though I can’t fiddle any more since I broke this wrist in France. I miss my music, too.—Well, good-by again, Madam Randolph. Be sure you take along a warm robe and a shawl. That coach can be mighty damp and dreary.”

“And you do the same, Papa, and don’t you climb down halfway home and start out on horseback in this foul weather. Nothing ever created by Heaven is so treacherous and mean as this month of March. If they would leave it off all the calendars, it would please me well.”

“Keep plenty of elmbark stewing on the hob till I get home,” he ordered. “It will cure any phthisic ever contracted.”

“He’s so stubborn,” he heard his daughter say to the aide as she went out. “I shan’t be surprised at all to see him come riding home on that horse. If he wants to do it, he’ll do it if it kills him.”

“It won’t kill him, ma’am,” the man murmured. “Mister Jefferson is still a mighty stout fellow.”

18

2

Monticello: Spring, 1809

Why, why had he saved so many things? Yet they were all important, all precious. One small box full of rocks, little packets of earth, dried leaves, and the desiccated bodies of insects. These George Clark and Meriwether Lewis had brought back to him from the long exploring journey they had made, crossing the country to the Pacific Ocean. Jefferson held out one small, rattling mummy of a creature in his palm.

“Ever see a bug like this, Burwell?” he asked.

“Looks like some kind of scawpin. Got he tail in air like one too.” The old Negro studied the dried object skittishly. “Stinger in that tail, I bet you. You watch out, Mister Tom, mought be p’ison even if he daid.”

“There are desert places out there, they told me, where everything has thorn and stings or stinks.” Jefferson wrapped the desert scorpion carefully in cotton lint. “I’ll have to have a glass case built at home to display all these things. These trophies from Europe too. And this piece of cannonball that was fired at Ticonderoga. I suppose every president from this time on will be sent weird mementoes 19 of some battle or discovery or other. John Adams got an Iroquois scalp and a jawbone some settler had plowed up in his field, but nothing quite so gruesome has ever come to me. Now we must count all these boxes and I must see that they all go aboard the boat.”

The storm did not abate. Rather, it grew worse, changing from snow to sleet and then to icy hostile rain that made quagmires of the roads and treacherous slippery deadfalls of every slope. The coach horses slipped and stumbled, the coach swayed and lurched in the ruts, splashing muddy water everywhere. Jefferson’s bones ached from the jolting; his elbows were sore from being continually slammed against the hard leather of the seats. The floor was cold and wet.

At Shadwell, where the barge landed, having made inquiry and been assured that all his baggage had been transferred to wagons, he left the coach and mounted his bay horse, the patient animal having been led behind at a dragging pace for many miles. Snow was still thick in the air, but once in the saddle Jefferson leaned into the wind, gave the bay his head, and let him warm his sluggish blood in a brisk canter. Sensing that he was heading home, the horse loped along, shaking his head in irritation at the snow that stung his eyelids, but keeping steadily on until the mountains loomed at last, dark blue and chill upon the horizon.

Martha’s husband, Thomas Randolph, had written that all the people of Albemarle County would be out to meet him with fife and drum and banner, but Jefferson had urged Martha to see that there was no public demonstration. “I’ll likely be delayed on the way. I may even get home in the middle of the night. Head off any hoorah. This is no hero; this is plain Farmer Jefferson coming home.”

20

When he turned off the highway into the narrow winding road up his hill, he could restrain the bay no longer. Weary as the animal was, he broke into a reaching gallop, and now the brick house was in sight, and streaming out from every door came people running, bareheaded and shouting through the storm. His daughter, his son-in-law, all his grandchildren, and every slave on the place, he was certain. They swarmed about him, lifting him off his horse, the jubilant Negroes pressing forward to kiss his hands, his boots, even his horse.

The children screamed joyfully, “Grandfather is home for ever and ever!” With so many arms lifting him, he was half carried in to the house. In the lofty hall, the ceiling almost two full stories high, a great fire burned on the hearth and shone on the trophy-covered walls and the great clock over the door that worked by cannon ball weights and faced both indoors and out.

Jefferson sank wearily into a deep chair. He was more worn and chilled than he wanted to admit, but a great sigh of contentment made his lips tremble. All around him were all the things he loved, that he had built, contrived, designed, invented. The weather indicator on the ceiling that was controlled by a vane on the roof outside—his eyes turned up toward it.

“Still works,” he remarked, “and from the set of the wind there’ll be no good weather for another day at least. Did the wagons get here?”

“No, Papa, not yet. But the roads are mighty bad, as you know.”

“Freezing mud. Makes slow traveling. Now, baby,” he protested to a young granddaughter, “Grandpapa can take off his own boots.”

“No, you can’t,” insisted young Cornelia, “because I’m 21 going to do it for you. Ellen’s fetching some wool socks she knit—and, Grandpa, one is too long but please don’t mention it.”

“I won’t, I promise. Not if it reaches halfway to my neck.”

“I found these old slippers in your wardrobe. A mouse had started to build a nest in one but I brushed it out and aired it. Thank goodness, he hadn’t gnawed any holes in it.” She jumped up.

“Ah, my dear sir,” he looked up gratefully at Thomas Randolph, who was followed by a servant with a steaming mug on a server, “you save my life!”

“Just what you need to heat up your blood, sir.” said Randolph. “Another log on the fire, Cassius, and tend the fires in Mr. Jefferson’s library and bedroom.”

Jefferson sipped the warm punch slowly while his granddaughters busied themselves dressing his feet in warm hose and old slippers.

“Your breeches are damp, Grandpa,” one said. “But we can’t do anything about that.”

“I am marvelously served already.” He pulled them close to kiss their flushed young faces. “Burwell will find me some dry clothes presently as soon as I am warmed and rested. I see that our Paris lamp hasn’t tarnished very much, Patsy.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Remember what a time we had packing that thing? I remember you stuffed the globes full of hose and shirts and winced every time the box was moved.”

“I expected it to arrive here a mass of scraps and splinters,” she said, “and after you had paid such an outrageous price for it, too.”

“It was that painting you made the worst fuss about.” Jefferson emptied the bowl, handed it to the waiting servant, 22 and got to his feet. “Ah, my old knees are stiff! But they still seem willing to support me. Now, I want to see everything. Yes”—he halted at the door of the high-ceiled drawing room—“there’s poor old John the Baptist whom you hated, Patsy.” He went nearer to study the painting over the mantel.

“It was Polly who loathed it most,” Martha said. “Not poor old John, all head and no body, but Salome lugging him on that charger wearing modern clothes and a very proper turban at that. I’d still like to throw that picture away, Papa. It used to give little Francis Eppes the horrors. Every time he had to pass through this room he’d have nightmares.”

“Nice polish on this floor, Patsy,” commended Jefferson, artfully turning her mind away from criticism of one of his favorite paintings by complimenting the gleam of the parquet floor. It was the first such oak floor laid in America and he was very proud of the way it reflected the glitter of the gilt chairs and sofas he had brought from Paris. They had cost fabulous amounts too, more than he could afford, but in his philosophy the things a man wanted and admired, that made life richer, were worth whatever they cost.

A brief nagging jerk of realism struck him—that now he would have to count the cost of things. Let that wait, let it wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow he would look over his lands, his farms; he would see how Randolph’s management had benefited them, and study what more must be done to the still unfinished house. Martha, catching his roving look, interrupted it with a protest.

“Papa, please! Don’t begin right away tearing down something and building it over. The house is fine as it is and we all love it—and you are so tired.”

“My dear, I should be even more tired with no occupation,” 23 he argued. “Of course it will take me some little time to arrange and dispose of all my books and papers. Did they build those shelves I wrote you about in November?”

“Yes, Papa, come and see. I gave them the drawing you made and I’m quite sure they followed it exactly.” She walked ahead of him through the great hall and the narrow passage that led to the southern wing of the house which contained the library, Jefferson’s study, and his bedroom, with the bed alcove between and the steep winding stairs to the mezzanine-like second story.

There in the familiar rooms were all the homely things he had missed—his shabby old revolving chair, the painted wooden bench with its leather cushion that just fitted his lean, weary legs, the round revolving table he had had built with the legs set right so that the bench would slide under them and make of table, chair, and bench a comfortable kind of chaise longue with a high back to shut out the drafts. There was his file table with octagonal sides, each side holding a filing drawer labeled with a group of letters, and his high drawing table with drawers and shelves that could be adjusted at any angle.

Beside the library fireplace stood a high-backed leather chair, a pompous and official looking piece of furniture. Jefferson glared at it.

“And how came that thing here?” he demanded.

“Why, Papa, don’t you recognize it? It’s the chair you sat in all the time you were vice-president. Mr. Madison had it sent up by the barge. He thought you would like to have it,” explained Martha.

He snorted. “I have spent more eternal hours of boredom in that miserable chair than in any seat whereon a man has ever rested his breeches!” he grumbled. “Stick it in a dark 24 corner somewhere. Send it down to the servants’ quarters. The office of vice-president is about as tedious an insult to a man’s intelligence as could be conceived. To have to suffer it for four years is bad enough, but to be reminded of it the rest of his life is pure persecution. However, I shall take pains to thank Jemmy Madison properly. He meant this as a handsome gift. I’ll receive it in the same spirit, but I don’t want it around where I have to look at it and be reminded of Senator Bingham and of John Adams’s being urged to slay a thousand Republicans with the jawbone of Thomas Jefferson.”

“Oh, Papa, don’t let past times rankle. Look back on the happy ones,” begged Martha. “We did have fun in Paris, didn’t we?”

“And you went to school there,” mourned one of her daughters—Jefferson was not yet entirely sure which was which—“and saw all those fashionable people and the king and Napoleon and spoke French all the time, and we have to learn French with that stupid Miss Fraker. You should hear her, Grandpa. She pronounces French as it is spelled in English.”

“She says ‘Owy Owy,’ and we know it should be ‘wee wee,’” piped up a smaller one. Was this Virginia or Ellen? He would have to put his family tree in order soon before he mortally offended some of them.

“Grandfather will teach you proper French when he gets time,” promised their mother. “He spent four years over there and I went to school there and so did Aunt Maria. But not all that we saw was happy. We saw too many beggars and hungry people in the streets, something you will never see in Virginia.”

“We see blind Remus when we go to church,” said one child. “He sits on the path with his hat in his hand 25 and says, ‘Please, li’l missy, give ole Remus a penny?’”

“And if we put our penny in his hat, then we have nothing when the verger comes around with the alms basin and he gives us a disgusted look,” said another.

“Remus doesn’t have to beg,” said Jefferson. “He is owned by a family able to take care of him.”

“Maybe he likes it. Sitting in the sun and hearing people pass.”

“If he’s sitting there now, he’s being snowed on,” said young Francis Eppes gravely, standing at the window. It was the first time the quiet, brown-haired boy had spoken and Jefferson from his seat in the old revolving chair looked at him sharply. This was his beloved younger daughter Maria’s only child. Maria, christened Mary, called Polly, and later changing her name in the convent to Maria, pronounced in the Italian fashion. Maria was gone now these four years but the pain of her loss was still a quivering fiber of anguish in Thomas Jefferson’s heart. She had died, as his own young wife had died, when her daughters were small, having borne too many children, wasting away after the last childbirth, fading slowly day by day. Polly’s young husband, Jack Eppes, still lived at Eppington not far away, but Francis spent a great deal of time at Monticello with Martha’s healthy, noisy brood.

“Come here, Francis,” Jefferson called gently. “Come here and let your grandfather look at you.”

“He’s always moping and looking out windows,” volunteered a young Randolph. “It’s because he hasn’t any mother.”

“Come and talk to me, Francis,” urged Jefferson. “You and I should be friends. I have no mother either.”

The boy came obediently and stood by the arm of the chair, his big eyes, so like Polly’s, very sober.

26

“Old people don’t have mothers, sir,” he said.

“But I did. Till I was a grown up man. I had a handsome mother whose name was Jane and I still think about her when I stand and look out of windows. I wonder if I’m the kind of a man she would have wanted me to be.”

“I can’t be what my mother wanted me to be,” said small Francis plaintively. “My father says she wanted me to be a great man like my grandfather, but how can I be like you, sir? All the things you’ve done won’t ever be done again, ever, will they? There will never be another Declaration of Independence and you wrote that. I know. My father told me.”

Jefferson circled the lad with an arm. All about, clustered close to the fire, the young Randolphs were abruptly and amazingly quiet.

“That’s so,” the old man agreed. “I did write that paper, didn’t I? And after I’d written it, four other men sat around in Philadelphia for about a week and picked it to pieces and made changes in it and couldn’t make up their minds whether to adopt it or not. I guess they never would have made up their minds and we’d still be British subjects and paying taxes to the king. But at last they all decided to accept the Declaration of Independence, leaving out some parts I had labored hard to make perfect. So—we declared ourselves independent of Great Britain.”

The small Randolphs were convulsed in a hysteria of giggles but young Francis kept a grave face.

“On the fourth of July, 1776,” he said, “and I know the names of those other men too, Grandfather.”

“So do I!” piped up a cousin. “One was John Adams and one was Benjamin Franklin—”

“And Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Robert Livingston of New York,” finished Francis, “and Thomas Jefferson 27 of Virginia. But you should have been the first man to sign it, Grandfather. Why did you let John Hancock beat you?”

“He was the president of the Congress, my son. It was his right to put his name first. Have you read the Declaration, any of you?”

“Ha!” shouted some older ones. “We know it by heart.” And straightway there began a chanting recitation, the big ones trying to drown out the smaller ones.

Jefferson jumped up, waving his hands for silence. “Enough! Enough! You know it. I concede that you know it. Better than your grandfather no doubt, for I have to think hard at times to remember parts of it.”

It was Ann, the oldest Randolph daughter, who broke up the conclave around the fire.

“Grandfather, the wagons have come!” she announced from the door. “Do you want all those boxes brought in here?”

“All of them.” He jumped up and was quickly at the door. Now he would open and arrange all his papers at his leisure. Slaves tramped in and out through the outer library, endlessly piling up heavy parcels.

“Twenty-nine,” counted Martha finally. “Papa, there should be thirty. I know. I counted them twice in Washington.”

“Something has been lost or stolen,” he worried, “and I won’t know what it is until I have emptied every box.”

“I know what it is!” she cried, studying the pile. “It’s that wooden box we packed in your bedroom—there at the last. The one that had all your Indian writing in it.”

“My comparative study of all the Indian languages,” he fretted. “Some one must go back at once. Thomas, send two boys down the river in a canoe tomorrow to search the 28 bank where all these parcels were unloaded from the barge. That Indian work could be valuable. I meant to pursue it further. It must not be lost.”

The lost box was found a few days later. It had been torn open on the muddy river bank and obviously the thieves, seeking for money, had been disappointed in the contents, for the precious papers were torn and scattered far and wide. What little could be salvaged, Martha dried and pressed but little was legible on the sodden sheets.

Thomas Jefferson’s years of study of the Indian tongues was forever lost.

29

3

Monticello: Summer, 1809

Spring came burgeoning over the Virginia hills, warming quickly into promise of summer. The bulbs Thomas Jefferson and his lost wife Martha had planted so long ago pushed up through the damp earth and the children came running excitedly to call him whenever a bud showed, tight and green-sheathed above its protecting sword blades.

“Grandfather, come quick! The Roman Empress tulip has a big bud showing and a teeny one.”

“Fine, Virginia.” She was one of the younger ones, still small enough so that he could toss her on his shoulder. “We’ll go and see but not touch.”

“We know. They turn brown and don’t open out to be flowers. Francis pinched the Queen of the Amazons last spring and it never bloomed at all.”

“And some little girl tattled, which isn’t nice, do you think?” he teased, waiting for the others who invariably like hungry chicks came flying out several doors whenever he walked on the lawn.

“Francis thinks he is kind of special because he doesn’t 30 live here all the time,” said Ellen, “but he does stay for long times and he has lessons with us and so he shouldn’t be any different.”

“Francis,” explained Jefferson, “does not have a lot of people to love him. He’s not rich in love like all the Randolphs. Now let us look into the case of this foreign woman, the Roman Empress.”

He bent over the bed where the nubby little buds ventured up into the thin, warming sun of spring. An old pain, long kept hidden deep stirred again in him, stabbing at his heart, clasping icy fingers at his throat to make an aching cramp there. Martha, his own Martha, so long gone, so always present and living still in that deep place where no person, no plaudit, no antagonism or ambition had ever been permitted. He could almost see her long white fingers now, as they had pressed the warm earth down lovingly over the dry, somnolent bulbs, always so delicately careful not to break an embryo root or smother too deep the promise of the crown.

She had been heavy with child that spring day, carrying the son who had only lived a few days, and when he protested that she must not tire herself she had given him a little push and said, “No, I must do it, I must plant them. Don’t you know that whatever I plant now will grow?”

The years—the years! Almost thirty of them now since she had looked at him with dimming eyes, and said, “Promise that my children will never have a stepmother.”

He had kept that promise. No other woman had ever approached the walled-off chamber of his heart where she was enshrined. There were times when, observing Patsy’s healthy brood, an impatient bitterness colored with a haunting kind of guilt would burn in him. Too many children—six of them in ten years—had been too much for Martha’s 31 frail strength; yet Patsy had borne eleven easily and naturally. Childbirth to her had not been the draining, killing ordeal that had taken Martha, and their well-loved Maria also. He wondered often if Jack Eppes, Maria’s young husband, felt too that continuing, sickening weight of self-accusation.

He got to his feet quickly, bidding the sad ghosts of the past to depart. “Off with you all now,” he ordered. “It’s time for lessons. Run, before your mother scolds you and me too.”

“Race you?” screamed one Randolph to his sisters.

“No, no—start fair!” they shrieked in protest.

Jefferson called a halt. “Line up. Smallest one three paces ahead of the next. You here, Cornelia.”

“I’m Ellen, Grandfather.”

“All right. Some day I shall hang labels around all your necks. No inching forward now! You—big fellow, three paces to the rear. Now, when I drop my handkerchief—go!”

Small feet flew, braids flopped, hats fell off, and happy squeals and shouts made pandemonium. Flushed and hot and breathless they straggled back to the dreariness of lessons, the older ones knowing that they must learn history and Latin verbs well, for inevitably before the day ended their grandfather would be catechizing them and putting on a sober, disappointed look if they missed the correct answers.

There were letters waiting for replies and papers to be gone over and sorted in his study, but Jefferson discovered a reluctance in himself to begin these tasks. Pacing the long terrace to the south he came to the door of a little one-room building. This was what had always been called Honeymoon Cottage, the first room built at Monticello. He had lived a bachelor’s life in that one room in ’71 and, when 32 Shadwell, his mother’s home, had burned, it had become his only and permanent home.

He took from his pocket the big iron key he had carried for so many years, turned the stiff lock slowly lest some rusted part should snap, and opened the door. Long unused, as it had been for years, the room still held a fresh, sweetish smell of femininity. Patsy had obviously kept it aired and cleaned, knowing that it was still the secret abode of his tired old heart. At the windows the dimity curtains were fresh and starched, the valance and tester of the bed still bright with old-fashioned wool embroidery. His own mother had worked those many-hued flowers and curious fruits, coloring the wool in her own dye pots with homemade dyes set with alum and vinegar.

The slender posts of the bed were polished, as was the brass fender of the fireplace. An armchair stood on the hearth rug and Jefferson sank into it, relaxing his long legs, staring into the cold fireplace where three dry logs rested on the andirons.

His mind whet, far back in time, thirty-six years back, to a snowy January night in ’72, when he had brought his bride, Martha Wayles Skelton, to this room, the only home he had to offer her.

Monticello had been a beginning then, some walls raised, part of a wing roofed over, windows boarded up, floors rough laid and strewn with scraps and sawdust where they were laid at all. But nowhere within the ambitiously planned structure a room complete enough for a lady, and the winter snows had halted all work until a thaw came.

Thomas Jefferson could almost visualize that spindle-legged, freckle-faced bridegroom, that brash twenty-nine-year-old fiddler who had charmed his lady with his music and won her away from a swarm of admirers by tricking 33 them with a clever stratagem. It had never occurred to him in those courting days at the Wayles’ place, The Forest, that he might likely be catalogued with some of Martha’s other swains as an ambitious country boy and embryo lawyer set on improving his state by marrying a rich young widow. He had cared too much for Martha, loving her, he was arrogantly certain, as no man had ever loved a woman before, and he had brought her here to this cold little room so confident of her love and courage that a chill or two did not matter.

Now he thought back on that snowy ride up from Blenheim, where, because of the deepening snow, they had been obliged to leave the chaise in which they had started out from Williamsburg, as well as the warm robes and blankets with which it had been loaded. There had been a debate, he remembered now, about whether they should ride on or wait for morning, but Martha had laughed his misgivings down.

“I can weather any storm that you can weather, Thomas Jefferson.”

So saddle horses had been brought, his own tired team stabled, and the slave who had driven the chaise sent to bed with orders to drive to Monticello in the morning. Jefferson recalled now his dubious concern when he discovered that the snow on the mountain road was eighteen inches deep.

He had ridden ahead, breaking a track for Martha’s horse, trying to shield her as best he could from the storm that stung their eyelids and sifted inside collars and up sleeves. But Martha had been undismayed. She had shouted jokes at him through the wind, ordering him to wait now and then while she wiped the snow off her face. Eight miles they had had to climb, the horses sliding, stumbling, and 34 blowing through the dark until at last they saw the brick piles and scaffolding of what was to be their home through the weird snow light.

Not a light showed, not a feather of smoke lay on the air. Where were all the black people who should have been there ready to serve them with warm fires and a hot meal? Jefferson burned with hot angry impatience; then common sense prevailed. No one could possibly have expected them home at this hour. It was far past midnight.

The honeymoon cottage felt a trifle chilly now to his old bones, but on that January night long ago it had held a tomblike cold. Just as he had done on that night, now he rummaged the old brass pot beside the hearth, finding scraps of slivers of kindling, mounding them into a heap under the logs, struck flint, and fired a bit of bark. The tiny flame wavered and grew as he blew upon it and coaxed fire to burn, as he had done for his beloved. Finally it leaped in a bright blaze to the resinous pine logs and Jefferson dropped into the chair again, trying to vision her there, shaking the snow off her riding skirt, holding one foot and then the other near to the blaze while he held her up with a supporting arm.

They had been very silly that night, he knew now, and was glad of the gay nonsense that had lightened the beginning for them. Life had been grim enough afterward. He was happy now to recall the laughter. There had been a mouse who came calling and Martha had not screamed or leaped on a chair as his sisters did. Instead, she had waggled her fingers at the mouse, as it sat upright blinking at them, and had exclaimed, “Thomas, it has big brown eyes!”

He had played the fiddle for her then, the same fiddle faithful Jupiter had saved from the burning ruin of Shadwell. Now, he could not play any more. Just as well. His 35 music had belonged to people he loved. To Martha, to Dabney Carr, who had married his sister and been his heart’s best friend until his untimely death. Dabney Carr lay now out on this hill, under the oak where they two had sat together while young Thomas Jefferson blithely planned the place he would have here someday. They had sworn then that the two of them would both be buried under those trees. Jefferson had kept that promise. His music had belonged for a while with his friendship for Patrick Henry, another fiddler and a blithe and restless spirit, but most especially it had been for Martha. He had wooed her with that fiddle—their duets had excluded her other suitors—now it was as well that it would be forever silent, now that there were no more loved ears to hear.

Ten years he had had before she faded away, and he had been too much away from home in those years. First as a member of the rebellious House of Burgesses that had been peremptorily dissolved by Governor Dunmore. That assembly had marched off to hold meetings in the tavern and out of their angry discussions had grown the idea of the Colonial Congress.

Their first year had brought him his little daughter, the other Martha who had been promptly called Patsy because there were already two Marthas, her mother and her aunt, Jefferson’s sister.

For too much of the time, Jefferson knew now, he had kept to himself when he was at home, shut away with his books. Out of the works of the old and new philosophers and historians he had striven to evolve some plan that could help a troubled America. While hammering went on around him, as the house of his dreams slowly took form and shape, he had struggled to put his ideas into words. But the essay he finally evolved with much labor was called too bold by 36 the members of the assembly. Then, in that miasmic summer of ’73, the fever had laid him low and his best friend, Dabney Carr, had died.

I left her too much alone, he told himself as he watched the fire burn low. She had been ill so often, weak and sorrowful because of the loss of three children, two stillborn, while he was off riding for days to reach Philadelphia, there to have a part in the birth of the new nation. Now that nation lived, but a part of his life was forever dead and lay on that grassy slope down the climbing road.

A loud knock at the door broke off his gloomy reverie. The door was pushed open and Burwell pushed his head in hesitantly.

“Mister Tom, it past one o’clock,” the old Negro complained, “and they got that horse out here waiting for you so long he done pawed a hole mighty nigh deep enough to bury hisself.”

“Sorry, Burwell.” Jefferson jumped up. “I was just sitting here thinking about old times. I’ll ride now as soon as I change my breeches.”

“Yes, suh, Mister Tom. I done looked everywhere for you. Then I seen this little bitty smoke comin’ out this yere chimney. Ain’t been nobody in this little room for a time now ’cept Miss Martha. She fetch the gals in here to clean it up good before you come home.”

“There won’t be anybody in here from now on, Burwell. Cover this fire so it will be safe. This place is too full of ghosts and ghosts are sad company when you are getting old.”

“Law, you ain’t old, Mister Tom,” protested the slave, shoveling ashes 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 37 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.

38

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. 39 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 40 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, 41 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 42 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 43 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.”

44

“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 45 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.

46

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 47 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 48 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 49 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 50 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 51 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 52 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 53 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.”

54

6

Monticello: Christmas, 1809

Of all the people on Jefferson’s Little Mountain, old Burwell was happiest in those lowering, chilly December days.

This, the old man orated happily in the servant’s quarters below stairs, was the way things ought to be on a gentleman’s estate in Virginia. Plenty of cider cooling ready to be sent posthaste up to the dining room, riding Mister Tom’s dumb-waiter. Women running up and down the steep, narrow curving stairways at either end of the house carrying pitchers of hot water and clean sheets, and heating irons in the rooms below to press voluminous dresses for the young misses. Trula, the laundress, kept a whole row of sadirons heating on the hearth of her little brick-floored room, and in the warming kitchens were rows of clean scrubbed bricks heating too, ready to be wrapped in flannel and carried upstairs should some members of the family find the clean linen sheets too icy for their feet.

Mr. Jack Eppes had come riding up from Eppington, bringing a haunch of venison that he had hung for days to tender it, and now it was turning slowly on a great iron 55 spit, with a half-grown Negro boy sitting by with a mop of clean lint to dip into melted fat and wine vinegar whenever the meat needed basting. For days the service yard had been full of squawkings and drifting feathers as the women killed and dressed turkeys and geese. A fat ham simmered, and plump plum puddings boiled and bubbled, with sauce being beaten up in earthen bowls.

“This here now,” stated Burwell, pompously, “is going to be a sure-enough Christmas.”

All the fine china had been taken down from the cupboards and washed, and every wineglass on the place rubbed to a shine. Burwell himself had polished the silver, not trusting any other servant to that special task because Mister Tom wanted things right when he took a fancy notion. Right now he had the notion and had it through and through.

Cayce, the new young body servant Burwell was training, was pressing his master’s new wool pantaloons and the old Negro stood by, supervising and grumbling.

“Old times in Washington,” he declared, “Mister Tom wouldn’t be seen in old plain long-leg breeches like them there. Up there we got him up all dandified in white satin knee breeches and long silk stockings and a swingy-tail coat. Ruffles all starched.—Boy, did he strut! ‘Mister President!’ everybody say, and bow, and some ladies scrooch way down till they petticoats lay all out on the floor. Won’t see no more times like that. But anyhow, we puttin’ the big pot in the little one, this Christmas.”

“He got Dely ironing a ruffled shirt right now,” insisted Cayce, “but he say he ain’t wearin’ no buckle shoes. They hurt his feet. Dunno how I git them old slippers off’n him, but Miss Patsy say I got it to do.”

The young Randolphs and Carrs and Francis Eppes, all 56 red-cheeked and excited, were running in and out of the house, lugging in branches of cedar and pine and holly, scattering needles and berries and trash over the shining floors so that two women had to follow around with brooms and mops to shine up to suit Miss Patsy. But in the library, where a great fire burned under the mirrored mantel and bookshelves mounted to the ceiling on every wall, Thomas Jefferson sat in his revolving chair and looked long into the gold and scarlet leap of the flames.

His thin legs were clothed in a disreputable old pair of homemade linsey-woolsey breeches, his woolen stockings sagging around his ankles. His daughter looked at him and sighed, forbearing to nag at him, since he had promised to be properly and elegantly dressed for the Christmas dinner.

“I wish he’d dress up,” she murmured to her daughter, Ann. “Aunt Anna will be driving in soon and whenever he looks shabby and uncared for, Aunt Anna always looks at me as though it were my fault.”

“Let him be,” urged Ann. “He’s old, Mother, and tired and he has earned the right to do as he pleases in his own house. At least he is letting us have a real Christmas, so maybe people will stop saying Thomas Jefferson is a great man but that he is also a heathen.”

“Do they say things like that, Ann?” asked her mother anxiously. “Surely not.”

“I’ve heard them. So has Jeff. So I asked him straightway this morning, ‘Grandfather, do you really believe in God?’”

“And what did he answer?”

“He didn’t speak at all till he had taken me by the arm and led me over to that long window. Then he pointed at the far mountains and there was a cloud lying on top with a little touch of sun like gold shining over it. ‘Did any man 57 make that?’ he asked me. Then he went back to his book again and never looked up.”

“At least you have your answer. Daughter, a great man is like a pillar that stands a little higher than the commonalty. There is always an itch in the crowd of lesser humanity to throw rocks and mud at it. It was the new laws he wrote for Virginia that started that infidel canard. The law freed the people of the state from being taxed to support the Church. It left them free to worship and pay tithes where they pleased, and naturally the bishops and other clergy resented it. So the story was circulated that Thomas Jefferson had no religion, and to my knowledge he has never spoken one word to refute that libel.”

“He disdained to answer it, Mother. He knew what he was and what he believed and to his mind it was no concern of any one else. He was Jefferson who belonged to the people, but what was in his heart and mind belonged only to himself. Now, at Monticello, he belongs to himself and he is just learning how to live with himself.”

Martha sighed as she bent to rescue a falling pine cone that had shattered down on the hearth. “The children haven’t secured these wreaths very well,” she remarked, “and that one in the drawing room is hung too low. The fire will dry it out and it might begin to burn. I’ll tell Burwell to do something about it. Ever since Shadwell burned before ever father was married, he has been uneasy about fire. He lost all his precious books and papers then and nothing was saved but his fiddle.”

“I wish he’d play again,” sighed Ann. “I’ve never heard him since I was very small.”

“He and my mother played together constantly,” Martha said. “When you grow older memories sharpen and sometimes 58 they hurt. I doubt if he will ever play again. He made both Polly and me learn to play in France, but after we came home again we could never persuade him to play with us. He said we couldn’t keep time like Mama, but I knew even then that he couldn’t bear to remember.”

“What was she like, Mother—your mama?”

“Slender and lovely—and she held herself proudly. But in the years I remember she had children too fast and she was ill and weak a great deal of the time. And Polly inherited her frailty and faded away so very young. I’m glad you are all stout and healthy,” said her mother.

“Ellen is letting herself get fat. She eats too many sweets and won’t walk ten steps if she can help it. I scold her all the time. Ellen could be pretty, if she doesn’t ruin her face with too many chins.”

“Don’t be critical of your sisters.—Ah, here’s Aunt Anna’s carriage now. Do run and call Cayce and tell him to replenish the fire in the south bedroom. Aunt Anna has refused to climb our crooked stairs for years.” Martha hurried away to welcome Thomas Jefferson’s sister and led her into the library. “Papa, here’s Aunt Anna!”

Jefferson came forward, his hands outstretched. He loved this younger sister and pulled her down into a deep chair without giving her time to take off her bonnet.

“Toast your feet,” he ordered. “I know how this first cold gets into old bones.”

“Old?” she laughed. “Since when did you decide to be old, Tom Jefferson? You’ll be hammering up things on this hill twenty years from now.—Well, Randolph wouldn’t come,” she went on in a tone of disgust. “Only twenty miles and he said it was too hard a trip in cold weather. That’s your only brother for you, Tom. How long since you have seen him?”

59

“Two years,” Jefferson pulled a chair up beside her. “He came over and brought me a cask of young carp for my fish pond. He stayed one night.”

“Uncle Randolph said he couldn’t sleep,” put in young Jefferson. “He said he was expecting every minute that his bed would go crashing up against the ceiling.”

“Tom and his tinkering.” She had a hearty laugh. “Well, my bed will have a stout chore to do if it hoists me to the ceiling tonight. For Heavens’ sake, Tom, get yourself elected governor again so we can have some decent roads in Virginia. Even on that turnpike the mud was hub deep and my horses traveled grunting like oxen. But if you do get elected, Tom,” she gave him an amiable prod with her knuckles, “get yourself a haircut! What’s the matter with Burwell? Has old age caught up with him too?”

“We’ll arrange to be barbered up beautifully this afternoon,” Jefferson assured her. “The people have all been busy. They are bound this shall be the most elaborate Christmas ever celebrated in Albemarle County.”

“Time there was some life in this house,” she said bluntly. “One thing you must never do is shut yourself up here like a hermit. He will, Patsy, unless you keep after him. He’ll read ten thousand books and never know his stockings are bagging down around his ankles.”

“Papa,” began Martha, hesitantly, “there’s a Christmas Eve service at the church tonight. It’s not snowing—and it’s only three miles. Would you go, Papa?”

He looked up at her with a direct, searching look. “What are you thinking, Patsy? Though I think I can read it in your face. You think it would have made her happy. Very well. Order the chaise around—but, as for me, I shall ride Eagle. I’ll go to church with you.”

“How people will stare!” whispered Ellen, in their 60 room as the girls dressed for supper. “Nobody will even look at the minister.”

“Grandfather won’t even know they are staring,” declared Cornelia. “He’s been stared at with bands playing and soldiers standing at attention.”

“Grandfather,” remarked Ann, “is as aloof and untouchable as one of those mountains out there.”

“But people love him. Look how they swarmed over this place all summer.”

“Have you noticed how low and gently he speaks lately? Even to the servants, some of the stupidest ones, he never raises his voice. And they scramble like anything to do what he wants done.”

“It’s because he knows he is great and famous. Like the mountains. They know they are going to be there forever and nothing can ever destroy them. Greatness, real greatness, is always simple,” insisted Ann.

There was the fragrance of evergreens and of many candles burning in the church and a feebly burning wood fire strove to take a bit of the chill off the place. Martha wrapped her heavy cloak around her knees, then lifted a fold of it and spread it over her father’s thin legs as he sat, stiffly upright beside her on the hard pew. There was a silence as the minister came in, his vestment and stole very white in the dim light. Then in the gallery high at the back came a humming, and the slaves seated there began singing, low at first, then higher and clearer, rich deep harmony filling the raftered spaces above where candle smoke softly drifted.

Who got weary? Christmas day! Christmas day!

Oh, no, Lawd! Ain’t nobody weary. Nobody weary Christmas day!

61

Thomas Jefferson gripped his daughter’s hand hard. “She sang that,” he whispered. “She liked that song.”

The age-old words rang out: “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid.”

Martha Randolph saw her father’s lips moving. Was he praying? No, his eyes were not cast down and there was no humility in the set of his shoulders. He was looking straight ahead and upward, into the high lift of the ceiling above the chancel where a round window framed an indigo-dark circle of the sky. She caught the faint whisper from his lips.

“I am here,” he was saying to some vision unseen, “I am here, beloved.”

Transcriber’s Notes

- Silently corrected a few typos.

- Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook is public-domain in the country of publication.

- In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by _underscores_.

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Table of Contents

- Christmas at Monticello with Thomas Jefferson

- Christmas Tales
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- Transcriber’s Notes
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