Varina Plantation, 1 July 1799
To Thomas Jefferson from Thomas Mann Randolph Jr.
There is a story of an ancient king whose touch turned everything to gold. You will recognize in me the makings of Midas, except that everything I touch turns to dust.
NOTHING CAME UP out of the dirt that summer.
What plants did grow were small and sickly things. Most farmers lost their entire crop; we lost most of ours. Tom worked desperately to salvage what he could. In the end, he had to rely on tobacco, which was his undoing.
That summer prices reached dizzying heights, but the odious Federalists had suspended commerce with France—the biggest market for Virginia tobacco. By autumn, prices crashed, and we couldn’t give it away. My husband had gambled and lost, but he wasn’t the only one—not the only one by far. Every man in Virginia suffered that year.
That’s why I burn this old letter.
I thrust it into the flame and watch the edges curl, happy to protect my husband’s too-earnest heart, as he was never able to do for himself. Tom’s bitterness was a cause of much misery in my life, but he came by some of it so honestly that I can’t bear to think of people reading this letter and mocking his pain.
And so I burn it, gladly, to ash.
At the time he wrote this letter, of course, Tom kept from me the magnitude of the financial disaster. It wasn’t a wife’s place to know the particulars. I was meant to concern myself with raising our children—four in all now, including baby Cornelia, who we’d named after the famous Roman matron, in keeping with the revolutionary spirits of the time. But in the midst of chasing after the little ones, I had guessed that he wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage on Varina and tried to comfort him, hushing baby Cornelia in my arms. “You couldn’t know the right time to sell the tobacco, Tom. Nobody could. Besides, the trade embargo with France will expire in the new year and you can sell then.”
“By which time it will all have rotted, with my luck!” Tom’s shout reverberated throughout the house. Then he turned and smashed the wood window frame, sending a crash of icicles down from the impact. He kept punching and punching with his fist until I feared he might break his hand, or the window, or both.
“Tom!” I cried, and from somewhere in the house, I heard one of the older children whimper. My heart hurt to think they might live in fear of their father’s temper. I thought it might do us some good to go somewhere. Get away from our troubles for the Christmas holiday, as we’d done the year before. We’d been happy dancing in Charlottesville. Maybe we could be happy somewhere Tom didn’t feel the walls closing in on him.
When he finally stopped punching, I appraised his bleeding knuckles and said, “We should go to Eppington for the holiday. I want to be with Polly for her lying-in.”
My sister was pregnant for the first time, and it was only natural that I’d want to be with her, but Tom gave me a baleful stare. “You’re going nowhere, Martha. You’re scarcely out of childbed yourself.”
It wasn’t true. Cornelia was nearly five months old. Old enough to travel. So I argued, “I’m worried for my sister. You know she’s prone to illness. Always too sick to come to visit us or to have visitors.”
Tom snorted. “So says Jack Eppes.”
He had a point. Papa had gone from persuasion to pleading to bribery when it came to luring Jack to bring my sister for a visit, but we hadn’t seen her in nearly two years. “She’s all I can think about, Tom.”
“All I can think about is tobacco.”
“There’s nothing you can do about the tobacco. Nothing but brood.” Working myself up into a true lather, I said, “My mother died in childbirth, and Polly has her frame. I have a moral duty to be with my sister now.”
“It’s only your anxiety that makes it so,” Tom said, pacing. Oh, the irony of Tom accusing me of being overly anxious! But before I could protest, he announced, “You’re not going, Martha, and that’s the end of it.”
I wanted to argue, but there was something inside my husband that kept twisting and twisting in on itself, and it left him wound so tight I was afraid he might strike me if I dared to argue. Instead, I went downstairs with him and helped dress Jeff.
I got one shoe on my son just as he removed the other, which exasperated me, because he needed his shoes and a breakfast of bread and milk before he could make the two-mile walk to school. And while I tried to wrestle him into his shoes, my squirming son delivered an accidental kick to my belly. I cried out in surprise at the pain, which set my already-furious husband off like a powder keg.
Tom grabbed our boy and shook him, screaming in his face, “You ever kick your mother again and I’ll beat you bloody! Do you hear? I’ll beat you down until you can’t ever get up again.”