Jefferson's Daughters Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Catherine Kerrison

  Map copyright © 2018 by Mapping Specialists, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Image credits begin on this page.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS: “Harriet Hemings: Daughter of the President’s Slave” by Catherine Kerrison from Virginia Women: Their Lives and Times, Vol. 1, edited by Cynthia Kierner and Sandra Treadway, copyright © 2015 by the University of Georgia Press. Reprinted by permission.

  UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS: “The French Education of Martha Jefferson Randolph” by Catherine Kerrison, Early American Studies, v. 11, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 349–394; copyright © 2013 by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  NAMES: Kerrison, Catherine, author.

  TITLE: Jefferson’s daughters : three sisters, white and black, in a young America / Catherine Kerrison.

  DESCRIPTION: First edition. | New York : Ballantine Books, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2017043540 | ISBN 9781101886243 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781101886250 (ebook)

  SUBJECTS: LCSH: Randolph, Martha Jefferson, 1772–1836. | Eppes, Maria, 1778–1804. | Hemings, Harriet, 1801– | Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826—Family. | Women—United States—History—18th century. | Women—United States—History—19th century.

  CLASSIFICATION: LCC E332.25 .K47 2018 | DDC 973.4/60922—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017043540

  Ebook ISBN 9781101886250

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: theBookDesigners

  Cover images: Jill Hyland (woman on left), Collaboration JS (women in middle and at right), Katya Evdokimova (background architectural detail), Phil Cardamone/Getty Images (Monticello, after an engraving by E. Clement in Bryant and Gay, A Popular History of the United States)

  v5.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Author’s Note

  Partial Hemings Family Tree

  Map

  Chapter 1: First Monticello

  Chapter 2: To Paris

  Chapter 3: School Life

  Chapter 4: Families Reunited

  Chapter 5: Transitions

  Chapter 6: Becoming American Again

  Chapter 7: A Virginia Wife

  Chapter 8: Harriet’s Monticello

  Chapter 9: An Enlightened Household

  Chapter 10: Departure

  Chapter 11: Passing

  Chapter 12: Legacies

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Image Credits

  About the Author

  SUMMER 1789

  IT WAS A DECEPTIVELY QUIET Sunday in Paris. The very air of these summer months seemed laden with menace, as news of peasant revolts in the countryside filtered into the city and apprehensive Parisians watched the king position his troops to defend it. Political tumult had convulsed the city that summer as well, as the king, nobles, and bishops had stridently resisted the urgings of commoners to join them in their newly formed National Assembly. But finally, in a clear nod to the people’s will, Louis XVI conceded and a crisis appeared to have been averted. As the carriage of Thomas Jefferson, American minister to the French court, rattled through the streets that day, he was confident that with its “victory…complete,” the assembly was “in complete and undisputed possession of the sovereignty.”

  Unbeknownst to Jefferson, however, that very day infuriated aristocrats had forced the king to backpedal. As “news of this change began to be known at Paris about 1. or 2. o’clock,” Jefferson later recalled, the city began to stir again. Passing through the elegant Place Louis XV (now the Place de la Concorde), Jefferson saw, with a start, three hundred mounted German and Swiss mercenaries amassed along one side. Along the other, an angry crowd had gathered and “posted themselves on and behind large piles of stones, large and small, collected in that Place for a bridge which was to be built adjacent to it.” Jefferson found himself in the thick of it. No sooner had he passed through than their fury erupted, as the people pelted the cavalry with the rocks. On the front lines, the Germans drove their horses toward the crowd but were resolutely beaten back. Leaving one of their number dead, they abandoned the square. It was, Jefferson recognized in retrospect, “the signal for universal insurrection.” Two days later, on July 14, another Paris crowd would storm the Bastille to arm themselves for the fight.

  —

  JEFFERSON HAD BEEN IN PARIS since 1784. After his wife’s premature death, Congress had asked him to represent the United States at the peace table with Great Britain, and he grasped at the appointment as a drowning man would a rope. Escaping the painful memories etched into the very landscape of his home at Monticello, Jefferson crossed the ocean to France with his twelve-year-old daughter, Martha. Three years later, Martha’s younger sister, Maria, joined them, accompanied by her slave, Sally Hemings.

  By that fateful summer of 1789, Paris had changed them all. Famous for his role in drafting the American Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was sought after by French revolutionary moderates who persuaded him to host meetings as they hammered out their ideas to reform their government. But Paris was also the place where he had adopted the aristocratic wigs and elegant silk suits made fashionable by the French, and where he had fallen in love with their art, architecture, furniture, and books. Like her father, Martha took an eager interest in the political ferment. Sporting a revolutionary cockade, she was the envy of her friends when General Lafayette, riding through the streets of Paris, recognized her with a chivalrous doff of his hat. Even little Maria was changed. Initially left behind in Virginia, she had not wanted to go to Paris when Jefferson wrote to have her join him. But once arrived, the nine-year-old became so acclimated to the beauties of Paris that she broke down in tears on their return to Virginia as she surveyed the burnt-out ruins of Norfolk, their port of arrival. Sally Hemings had learned how to care for Jefferson’s silk suits and linens, as well as the fashionable clothing of his daughters. She also learned French. By this pivotal moment in French (and Jefferson family) history, then, she had learned marketable skills and had seen the possibility of a way of life that was different from the slavery she had known in Virginia.

  In the fall of 1789, however, she would agree to join Jefferson and his daughters as they boarded the Clermont, bound for Virginia. But what kind of nation awaited them? As the newly elected president, George Washington, assembled his government, he faced the challenge of transforming the political system inscribed on paper in the Constitution into a working and workable government. Chief among the questions to be resolved was who, exactly, was included in the ringing phrase “We the People” with which that document opened. In this age of revolutions, the idea of independence did not only refer to a national government, free of monarchical ties. It also meant individual self-determination. But who was eligible to claim that right? More particularly, what changes might the American Revolution begin to effect, especially for women, free blacks, and slaves?

  As the Jefferson party sailed h
ome, they would have pondered these questions in very different ways. But Paris remained imprinted upon them all forever, shaping the courses of their lives and the choices they would make.

  EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NAMING, spelling, and punctuation conventions can pose a challenge to twenty-first-century readers. Thomas Jefferson’s daughters, named Martha and Mary at birth, were called different names during their lifetimes: Martha was called Patsy as a girl and Martha in adulthood, and Mary was called Polly as a child and, later, Maria, although she continued to sign her letters “Mary.” For the reader’s convenience, however, I will use their adult names, Martha and Maria, throughout the text.

  Eighteenth-century spellings were not yet standardized; to remain faithful to the original, I have retained the writer’s spelling. Where needed for clarity, I have silently corrected quotations for twenty-first-century punctuation, and I have supplied the full spelling when the writer used an abbreviation.

  For ease of reading in some quotations, I have sometimes inserted my own words in square brackets.

  A FAVORITE TALE, RETOLD COUNTLESS TIMES at the Jefferson family hearth, was the story of Martha Wayles Jefferson’s arrival at Monticello as a new bride. A beautiful young widow, Martha married Thomas Jefferson at her father’s estate in Charles City County, just up the James River from Williamsburg, on New Year’s Day in 1772. The beaming couple were well matched. At six feet two inches tall, Jefferson carried his lanky frame erect, towering over his bride. Although petite, Martha carried her slim figure with the elegance of a queen. She had auburn hair and hazel eyes that sparkled with wit and vivacity. Her groom was likewise fair, although his red hair was lighter and his eyes blue. Although no one ever described Jefferson as handsome, one of his earliest biographers said his face shone with “intelligence, with benevolence, and with the cheerful vivacity of a happy, hopeful spirit.” A young lawyer and planter, Jefferson was just beginning his political career, having won his seat in the Virginia legislature barely three years earlier. With his prospects and the good-humored temperament they each possessed, they were confident their future boded fair.

  Immediately after the wedding festivities, Martha and her new husband left for the home Jefferson had only just begun building in Albemarle County, almost a hundred miles west. Although it had begun to snow as they set out, it was not heavy, so they were taken aback as the storm got progressively worse as they traveled westward. Forced to abandon both their carriage and the main road, they unhitched the horses and rode them for the last eight miles of their journey, trudging along the mountain track Jefferson knew so well, despite the two feet of snow that covered it.

  The south pavilion (left) was the first structure Jefferson finished at Monticello and served as his bedroom, office, and dining room. It was also his honeymoon cottage and the site of the birth of his first child, Martha. The south wing connected it to the main house by an L-shaped “dependency,” featuring a walking terrace above and essential services, such as the kitchen, laundry, and dairy, below. The south wing also contained the room in which Sally Hemings would live and raise her four children.

  Their destination that January night was a tiny one-room building, today an appendage connected to Monticello by a long terrace, but then Jefferson’s home, furnished only with a bed and books. “They arrived late in the night, the fires all out and the servants retired to their own houses for the night,” their daughter Martha wrote, remembering the story her parents loved to tell during her childhood. Still, the groom was not entirely unprepared. They broke out a bottle of wine he had stowed away behind his books and lit up the night with their songs and laughter. It was the beginning of ten years of “unchequered happiness,” as Jefferson would lovingly recall. On that night, with a beloved wife in his arms, he could lay out his hopes for the future for his family, plantation home, and successful political career.

  —

  THOMAS JEFFERSON HAD CHOSEN the location of his home carefully; he had been born at Shadwell, within sight of the mountain he would call Monticello. In his youth, he would walk its summit and sit there for hours, reading and plotting the future with his boyhood friend Dabney Carr. He and Carr made a pact to be buried at the very oak tree under which they had spent countless hours together. Peter Jefferson, Thomas’s westward-looking surveyor father, and Jane Randolph Jefferson, his elegant mother, shaped his vision of what he would build there. Their influence was unmistakable in the finished house, in which specimens of the New World from the Lewis and Clark westering expedition mixed with the art, plate, and silver of the Old.

  Peter Jefferson was an up-and-comer in colonial Virginia. At his father’s death in 1731, Peter had inherited lands in Goochland County, just west of where Richmond would be founded six years later. But he hankered after additional lands farther west. For the price of a bowl of arrack punch in a Williamsburg tavern, a family story goes, he bought four hundred acres on the Rivanna River, adjacent to land he already owned, thanks to a good friend. He named the new tract Shadwell, honoring his wife’s home parish in England. His later career as a surveyor positioned him to see and claim the most desirable land first as Virginia settlers pushed west. By the time he died in 1757, he had amassed seventy-five hundred acres, more than sixty slaves, and a substantial inventory of horses, cattle, and hogs. Even so, his son was prouder still of his father’s other accomplishments. For Thomas, Peter’s chief legacies were the map he had drawn (which was published in 1757) after a grueling surveying expedition, the “first map of Virginia which had ever been made, that of Captain [John] Smith being merely conjectural,” Jefferson noted dismissively in his memoirs; and that his father was one of the founders of Albemarle County, “the third or fourth settler, about the year 1737.” For Thomas Jefferson, nothing in the Old World could compare to the natural beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the promise that lay beyond them to the west.

  Jefferson’s mother, Jane Randolph, came from a family that was wealthy and socially prominent in both England and Virginia. Jane’s father had been born in Virginia but moved back to England in the course of a seafaring career. He later returned to Virginia in 1725, with a wife and two children, when little Jane was just five. Armed with wealth and plenty of family connections, Isham Randolph entered into the highly lucrative slave trade. It may bring us up short today to hear that his great-great-granddaughter characterized him as a man “whose name associated itself in his day with all that was good and wise,” but Randolph’s success as a slave trader, tobacco planter, and military man would have commended him to his contemporaries. Jane Randolph was proud of a lineage that she traced far back to England and Scotland. No hardscrabble backcountry farmers, then, the Randolphs built a lavish Virginia estate, known for its hospitality. There Jane learned how to supervise the labor of a plantation household, from setting a table to slaughtering hogs. She was also taught to dance a minuet, to embroider, and to preside over her husband’s dinner table. From her, Thomas gained his appreciation of fine food and wine, beautifully bound books, and elegant furniture.

  Peter Jefferson’s genius in situating his house surely inspired his son’s choice thirty years later, when he selected his site for Monticello eight miles due west. “To the south,” a great-granddaughter reported of Shadwell, “are seen the picturesque valley and banks of the Rivanna, with an extensive peaceful-looking horizon view, lying like a sleeping beauty, in the east; while long rolling hills, occasionally rising into mountain ranges…stretch westward.” The whole panorama, she sighed, presented “landscapes whose exquisite enchantment must ever charm the beholder.” While one cannot see the Rivanna River from Monticello, the view from the plateau carved from the top of Jefferson’s mountain likewise charms. To the east, the rolling valleys seem to stretch endlessly toward the Chesapeake Bay; a French visitor in 1796 believed that “the Atlantic might be seen were it not for the greatness of the distance.” To the west, the Blue Ridge Mountains bear the color, in infinite variations, of their name. Summer fog sometimes scatters small c
louds about the mountain, so that, viewed from the valley below, the house seems set apart from the rest of the earth.

  Slaves, many of them hired from neighbors, began the backbreaking work of leveling the top of the mountain in the spring of 1768. By the following year, the hilltop site of Thomas Jefferson’s future home was ready for the cellar to be dug. Because the land lacked a water source, a well had to be dug through sixty-five feet of rock. By 1770, the south pavilion, just twenty by twenty feet, in which Jefferson would honeymoon with his bride, had been completed. The following year, the dining room in the north wing had been built.

  Scholars differ about some of the chronological details of the building of the house, since Jefferson did not keep a diary tracking its rise. But there is no doubt that it was to a construction site, rather than to a home, that Jefferson brought his new bride. He had hoped for “more elbow room” by the summer, he wrote to a friend in February 1771, eleven months before his wedding. The completion of the dining room by the end of that year may have relieved the Jeffersons from taking their meals in the tiny pavilion. But it would be two years before the first stories of the north wing and central block were completed and the south wing begun, another two years before the upper story of the central block was begun, and not until 1778 were the attics begun and completed. Yet even this litany of progress refers only to the outer shell of the house; finishing touches on the interior, the work of expert joiners, would not be completed until 1783. It is unlikely that these rooms bore even a simple plastered finish much before then.

  Thus Martha Jefferson would live out her married life in a noisy, dusty construction zone—except for the times she left Monticello. Indeed, it was only a matter of days after her first arrival that she and her husband left their new home for Elk Hill, the house she had shared with her first husband, Bathurst Skelton. After just two short years of marriage that produced a son, John, Bathurst died suddenly, leaving his twenty-year-old widow in possession of their house at Elk Hill. In the course of her married life with Jefferson, she would live a peripatetic existence: now with one sister or another in their homes, while her husband served as a representative of his county in the colonial assembly in Williamsburg or later as a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia; at Elk Hill; in Williamsburg and Richmond as the governor’s wife; or on the run, fleeing the British incursions deep into Virginia during the Revolution. To the extent that it is possible to track from the records, Monticello was her home for only a little over half of her married life.