Jefferson's Daughters Read online

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  HOW DIFFERENT PARIS WAS from Eppington, the plantation home of her beloved aunt and uncle Eppes. Francis Eppes was a wealthy man, but the frame home he had built in Chesterfield County, twelve miles west of Petersburg, could not compare with Monticello, much less Paris. It stood about a mile from the Appomattox River on a ridge overlooking the valley. Winterpock Creek ran through his property and for decades had given its name to the Eppes estate. By 1782, when Eppes returned after the war to resume work on the house he had begun a dozen years earlier, he had renamed it Eppington.

  Today, approached by a winding rural lane, the vista of the house pleases as it comes into view. Visitors admire the lovely wide lawns and the double rows of Lombardy poplars that frame the house. But it was to a considerably smaller home that Maria Jefferson had moved in the fall of 1783: just two large rooms on the ground floor and two bedrooms upstairs. The front door opened into a narrow passage, barely three feet across, that ran along the length of one room, from which stairs rose to the second floor. Maria stepped from one construction zone to another, as Eppes had just begun his expansion plans, which continued through the 1790s.

  Still, to cross the threshold into this home was to enter a joyous if somewhat noisy household, whose warm hospitality welcomed visitors and made them loath to leave. At its center was Elizabeth Wayles Eppes, a half sister of Jefferson’s wife. The two sisters were obviously close: Martha had spent many an anxious month during the war at The Forest in refuge, and she had traveled there to help her sister nurse their father in his final illness. Elizabeth Eppes had been at her sister’s deathbed. It was to her that Jefferson had poured out his anguished heart in a rare display of trust from a man who typically kept his feelings tightly tethered. “This miserable kind of existence is too burthensome to be borne,” he cried to his sympathetic sister-in-law three weeks after Martha’s death. If it were not for the three little daughters who depended on him, he would “not wish its continuance for a moment.”

  Jefferson took comfort in his relationship with Elizabeth Eppes, whom he considered “mightily like her sister” and whose warmth radiated beyond the members of her extended family to all who came to her door. When traveler Benjamin Latrobe visited in 1796, he planned no more than a quick stop to pay his respects to Francis Eppes, the leading man of the neighborhood. Instead he was waylaid by their conviviality. “Here all is good humor, kindness, and mirth,” he wrote in his journal. “We breakfasted with him and his charming family, and forgot ourselves so far as to stay almost till noon.” Jefferson regretted that during her visit to Virginia in 1786, the Philadelphian Eliza Trist had not visited Elizabeth Eppes, whom, he declared, “you would have found among the most amiable women on earth. I doubt whether you would ever have got away from her.”

  Eppes’s cordial empathy, her likeness to her sister, and their long friendship no doubt explain why Jefferson felt unlimited confidence, as he told her husband, in leaving his two younger daughters with her during his anticipated two-year absence. It may be something of an overstatement to say, as has one historian, that four-year-old Maria Jefferson was scarred by a “terror of abandonment” after her mother’s death, but certainly the motherly Elizabeth Eppes was the perfect person to embrace and raise her and her baby sister, Lucy. Jefferson’s sister Martha Jefferson Carr, who spent five or six weeks at Eppington in the summer of 1786, “very much admired that amiable Ladies management of the little Girls. She pays the upmost attention to them and harmony seems to rein among them.” To ease Maria’s homesickness, Eppes had even proposed taking her home to Monticello for a month’s holiday. Eppes coordinated her plans with Martha Carr to meet there in September 1786, although in the end their plans were foiled when one of Eppes’s own children took sick.

  Although larger than most Virginia houses, Eppington was considerably smaller than Monticello, particularly during Maria Jefferson’s childhood stay, before either wing had been added to the house. Unlike Monticello, its architecture was entirely conventional. But Eppington, more than Monticello or Paris, shaped Maria’s life; here she found the warmth and stability to which she happily returned again and again.

  Recognizing a kindred spirit, Maria responded fully to Eppes’s mothering. “Dear little Polly (who shares an equal proportion of her tenderness) appears more attached to her than her own” children, Carr reported to her brother. Nonetheless it was an adjustment, and Maria missed her father and sister. “Polly,” as her family called her during this period, “often mentions you…and begs you to make haste home, for she longs to see you,” Francis Eppes told Jefferson in December 1783, three months after he had left her at Eppington. As he bid his daughters goodbye, Jefferson may have pried himself away with promises of dolls he could buy for her in Philadelphia. Almost immediately after his arrival in that city, he asked Eppes to tell his “dear Poll” that he had not been able to find a ship “to send with the babies” he had promised her. By the following spring, Maria was growing impatient for her doll. At her dictation, Elizabeth Eppes obligingly wrote, “I was mighty glad of my sash’s,” which her father had sent to adorn her dresses. But with a child’s tenacious grip on a parental pledge, Maria still wanted to know “what day you are going to come and see me, and if you will bring Sister Patsy, and my baby with you.”

  But sashes and dolls were poor substitutes for an absentee father, so Maria entered fully into the life of the Eppes household and its growing family. Francis and Elizabeth Eppes had eight children, born between their marriage in 1769 and 1788, six of whom survived infancy. Maria’s cousin Jack was ten when she arrived at Eppington. There were at least two daughters as well, Martha Bolling (like Maria, born in 1778) and Lucy Elizabeth (likely the daughter whose November birth Francis Eppes announced in a letter to Jefferson). The arrival of two young cousins and a new daughter certainly took a great deal of Elizabeth Eppes’s attention, but according to Jefferson’s sister, she clearly met the challenge.

  Elizabeth Eppes attended as well to the girls’ education. Although she served as secretary for Maria Jefferson’s first letter to her father, ever after Jefferson received letters written in the large, awkward hand of a child. At six years old, Maria could read “prittyly,” Martha Jefferson Carr reported. “Mrs Eppes is Extreemly anxious for her Improvement & pays the greatest attention to her,” she added later. At almost eight years old, Maria was “a Sweet Girl, reads & Sews prettily & dances gracefully.” Her education included all the necessary lessons for Virginia girls of her class, but Elizabeth Eppes wanted more for her charges. It was probably at her urging that Francis Eppes wrote to Jefferson in the summer of 1786, inquiring about proper tutors (over forty years of age) who could school the girls in “French English erethmatick and musick.”

  So successful was Eppes in her efforts that by the time Maria arrived in London she had acquired a love for reading. “Books are her delight,” Abigail Adams wrote to Jefferson, “and she reads to me by the hour with great distinctness.” But even more, Maria had learned to think about what she was reading, for Adams added that she “comments on what she reads with much propriety.” Maria also learned to appreciate music. As she listened to her sister play a haunting composition of Francis Hopkinson’s in their Paris home, her father noticed that she had dissolved in tears. Concerned, he asked if she was sick. “No,” she replied, “but the tune was so mournful.”

  Elizabeth Eppes taught Maria Jefferson how to behave in company, as well as among family. An inventory taken of her home in 1810 allows us to imagine the large rooms on the first floor and their care to put guests at ease. Ten beds (three curtained), a cradle for the ever-present infant (her own or Jefferson’s), and four extra mattresses ensured a place to sleep; seventeen counterpanes (bedspreads, perhaps worked by Elizabeth Eppes and her slaves), four pairs of blankets, and fourteen pairs of sheets ensured comfort and warmth. Her several dining tables and sixty-six chairs enabled large parties, but she also had several additional small tables and forty-six more chairs to accomm
odate any overflow. Towels, napkins, tankards, silver, ladles, serving vessels, china, brandy snifters, decanters, and card tables spoke to the hospitable entertaining that had rendered Benjamin Latrobe blissfully ignorant of the time.

  Very young girls did not participate in adult dinners, card games, or parties. Nonetheless, they needed to learn how to make themselves agreeable in company and how to perform their “courtesies” (bows for boys and curtsies for girls) for introductions and meetings. Elizabeth Eppes sent a very polished young girl to Europe. Abigail Adams was impressed with the “quickest sensibility and the maturest understanding, that I have ever met with for her years” that she found in Maria Jefferson. No matter where she went in her young life, Maria endeared herself to adults, from her Virginia relations to the sea captain she encountered during her Atlantic crossing to fellow travelers in a French stagecoach to the wives of government officials.

  But life in eighteenth-century Virginia was not an idyll, even in this hospitable household. Tragedy struck shortly into Maria’s stay, precipitating further wrenching change for her. Whooping cough carried off her younger sister, two-year-old Lucy, and the Eppes’s youngest, also named Lucy Elizabeth, in October 1784. Francis Eppes had sent a worriedly foreboding letter to Jefferson in September, unable to reassure him of his daughters’ health. “They as well as our own are laid up with the hooping cough. Your little Lucy and our youngest [Lucy, born in November 1783] and [five-year-old] Bolling are I think very ill.” One month later Elizabeth Eppes, stricken with grief, forced herself to deliver the news to Jefferson. “It is almost impossible to paint the anguish of my heart on this melancholy occasion,” she wrote through her tears. “A most unfortunate Hooping cough has deprived you, and us of two sweet Lucys, within a week. Ours was the first that fell a sacrifice. She was thrown into violent convulsions linger’d out a week and then expired. Your dear angel was confined a week to her bed, her sufferings were great though nothing like a fit. She retain’d her sense perfectly, calld me a few moments before she died, and asked distinctly for water.” Older, Maria was able to fight the wracking coughs without even taking to her bed. “Dear Polly,” Eppes added, “is now quite recovered.” But the heartbroken mother was beside herself with grief and worry. “My heart shudders for my poor Bolling, who is reduced to a skeleton, and the cough still very obstinate. Life is scarcely supportable under such severe afflictions,” she concluded, echoing Jefferson’s own cry of grief after his wife’s death.

  Jefferson received the news not from the Eppes’s letters, which took almost seven months to reach him, but from Dr. James Currie, who had been called to attend the sick children. Hand-delivered by the Marquis de Lafayette on January 26, 1785, Currie’s letter attributed Lucy’s death to “the Complicated evils of teething, Worms and Hooping Cough.” A bacterial infection easily transmitted through sneezing and coughing, the cough had been “carried there by the Virus of their friends without their knowing it was in their train.” Currie was called “too late to do any thing but procrastinate the settled fate of the poor Innocent.” Even today the antibiotics used to treat the disease have limited if any effectiveness if the victim has been ill for three weeks or more. The strain that struck the Eppes household must have been particularly virulent; just one child in a hundred who suffers from it is seized with convulsions, although infants, like Lucy Eppes, are particularly susceptible. Only with difficulty was Currie able to save Bolling, who was Maria’s age. Lucy Jefferson’s heartbroken relatives pressed her father with her praises; not quite two, she “prattles Every thing she hears”; at two and a half, she was a “Child Of the most Auspicious hopes” and had inherited from her parents “among other early Shining qualities an ear nicely and critically musical.”

  Jefferson was stunned. “It is in vain to endeavor to describe the situation of my mind,” he told Francis Eppes days after receiving Currie’s letter. “It would pour balm neither into your wounds nor mine; I will therefore pass on from the subject.” He and Martha canceled social engagements for months and withdrew into a grief almost as incapacitating as when his wife had died giving birth to this child who now lay in a Virginia grave. Watching them relive this grief anew, Nabby Adams was deeply touched. “Mr Jefferson is a man of great sensibility and parental affection. His wife died when this child was born,” she noted insightfully, “and he was almost in a confirmed state of melancholy, confined himself from the world and even from his friends for a long time, and this news has greately affected him and his daughter.”

  Not two weeks before receiving Currie’s letter, Jefferson had toyed with his “wish to have Polly brought,” but believing that he would soon be returning to Virginia, he discarded the idea. By May, however, Jefferson learned that his stay in France was to be extended. Benjamin Franklin was going home, and Jefferson would take his place as the American ambassador. On the eleventh of May, his mind made up, he wrote to Francis Eppes. That letter is lost, but the terse notes in the summary journal he kept of his correspondence remain. “I must have Polly. As would not have her at sea but between 1st Apr and Sep, this will allow time for a decision—is there any woman in Virginia who could be hired to come.” What did the Eppeses think, he wanted to know? Hearing nothing, Jefferson wrote again on August 30. Thoughts of his last daughter in Virginia “hang on my mind night and day,” he said. “I must now repeat my wish to have Polly sent to me next summer.” Again he was precise about how this should be accomplished: in the summer months to avoid storms, in a ship that had been tested on the Atlantic but had not plied those waters for more than four or five years, and with a suitable companion: “some good lady…or a careful gentleman.” Even “a careful negro woman, as Isabel, for instance,” he wrote, suggesting his slave Isabel Hern, “if she has had the small pox, would suffice under the patronage of a gentleman.” This time he did not ask the Eppeses what they thought of his plan.

  Jefferson did not hear from Eppington until June 1786, when Francis Eppes’s reply, dated April 11, came to hand. Eppes bemoaned “some strange fatality attending our correspondence,” insisting he had received only the May 1785 letter, which had not acknowledged the letters Eppes had written the previous fall and winter. But then, emphatically, he came to the point. “In my two last, I gave my opinion very fully with respect to Polly’s trip to France,” he declared, and since they did not arrive, he repeated, “I think it impossible she shou’d ever reach France, even if you insisted on its being attempted.” He had mentioned the idea frequently to Maria, but “the situation it throws her into satisfies me that the scheme is inpracticable.” Martha Jefferson Carr agreed. Although she was not at Eppington, she had heard of Maria’s aversion to the plan. Maria may have overheard the adults discuss ways around her intransigence, for Carr reported that she was “very much afraid they will fool her and carry her there.”

  Jefferson’s request threw the Eppes household into uproar. Yet another letter from Jefferson—this one warning about the possibility of capture on the high seas by warring Barbary powers—unleashed a barrage of protest from Virginia. Martha Carr attempted to intervene with her brother by presenting the distraught child’s case. Jefferson’s letter precipitated a torrent of tears from Maria, “tho after much ado she is so far pacified as to wipe her eyes and set down to write to you.” The adults tried to make France sound more appealing by describing all the amusements and luxuries to be found there, but to no avail. Certain that her father’s wishes would prevail, however, Maria eyed her relatives’ suggestions warily. Her shrewd watchfulness would make it all but impossible for the adults to trick her into submission, Carr warned her brother. So convinced was Maria that Elizabeth Eppes was her only ally, that even after a two-week visit, Carr could not persuade Maria to accompany her on a visit to a nearby relative’s home. Refusing to leave Elizabeth Eppes’s side, the little girl “cannot be carried off without compultion,” Carr concluded helplessly.

  Francis Eppes agreed. “Nothing but force will bring it about,” he told Jefferson. Eppes r
ashly suggested that Jefferson could cross the ocean to meet her in Philadelphia, where Eppes himself would carry her. But since even this offer had “no affect except distressing her,” he resolved to do nothing until he heard further from Jefferson. Buying Maria another year, Eppes would later blame his procrastination on the late receipt of Jefferson’s letters and the difficulty of inoculating slave Isabel Hern for the trip. Even twelve-year-old Jack rushed to Maria’s aid, assuring his uncle Thomas that “not withstanding your great desire to have Cousin Polly with you, it cannot be effected without forcing her, for she seems very much averse to it.”

  For her part, Elizabeth Eppes could not believe what she was hearing. Utterly “unhinged” by her brother-in-law’s suggestion, she could not bring herself to add to the packet of protesting letters. “She says she has once written to you very fully on the subject,” Martha Jefferson Carr wrote to her brother, “and concludes that her letter has not reached you or that the multiplicity of business you are engaged in has prevented your acknowledging the receipt of it.” Disbelieving that a fond father would insist upon his young daughter crossing the ocean, Eppes told herself and all within earshot, he must not have received her letter. Surely he would not have continued to insist, after having the dangers laid out for him. How could he?