After a long moment of silence, I asked, “What will you say?”
Laying the letter upon an open ledger, Papa sat in his red revolving chair. “This is unquestionably the most serious and formidable conspiracy we’ve ever known in these parts. But there’s been hanging enough.”
Tom nodded his agreement. “We open ourselves for condemnation if we indulge in a principle of revenge, or go one step beyond absolute necessity.”
“Indeed,” Papa said. “The problem is how to strike the balance between justice and public safety.” Sally knocked as she came in from the greenhouse, interrupting the conversation with the news that more guests had arrived.
“I’ll greet them,” I said wearily, gathering my skirts. As I passed Sally, I wondered what she knew of this rebellion. What did any of the slaves at Monticello know of it? For, the instigators had reportedly gathered support from slaves as far away as Charlottesville. And I’d long ago seen proof of how quickly important news traveled amongst the slaves.
Out in the hall, I took a moment to gather myself before I greeted our visitors. My father had once said on the eve of the Constitutional Convention, with respect to the dangers of a failed rebellion in Massachusetts, that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Only, here and now, with so much in turmoil in our young nation, I couldn’t help but wonder who was who.
Chapter Twenty-five
Washington City, 16 January 1801
From Thomas Jefferson to Martha Jefferson Randolph
Here one feels in an enemy’s country. It is an unpleasant circumstance, if I am destined to stay here, that the great proportion are Federalists, most of them of the violent kind. Some have been so personally bitter that they threaten a dissolution of the government if I’m elected.
WE WERE INFESTED. Not merely with the vermin and detritus of politics, but also with the dreaded itch at Edgehill. “Hold still,” I told my son Jeff, shearing off as much of his hair as possible to rid him of the nits he’d caught running about with an apprentice boy. Though it was winter, I was covered in sweat from the nearby cauldron in our yard where I was boiling his clothes.
And I felt agitated and upset at every little thing.
Why, I was even cross with Ann because I’d told her to finish her Latin translation, but she’d abandoned her books to watch her brother’s delousing.
In truth, since taking upon myself the education of the children, I was beginning to believe that both of my eldest were uncommonly backward. Jeff was a willful hooligan who couldn’t read without moving his lips. Ann had a good memory but never applied it without prompting. Only four-year-old Ellen—who was smart enough for two little girls—showed any aptitude for learn ing. I knew I ought to have been satisfied if my children turned out well with regard to morals, but I could never sit quietly under the idea of my father’s grandchildren being blockheads. Still, I told myself to be content with the idea of my son as a simple but industrious farmer because blockheads weren’t likely to run for president.
That’s what I was thinking when my stomach cramped so hard that I doubled over. I went down onto the cold ground to retch. Heaving into the grass, I was so very sick I had to crawl my way back into the house. The sickness came in waves, and I could tolerate neither meat, nor milk, nor coffee.
We thought I might be with child again.
I was with child, as it happened. But Tom thought it was more than that. “It isn’t healthful the way you hold your feelings in, and push them down,” he said, as if I’d somehow reached the limit of emotions my body would allow me to suppress.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, his big hand closing reassuringly on my knee, Tom said, “I know the election worries you, but nothing is going to happen to your father.”
“You can’t know that,” I said, vexed that Tom had somehow guessed at exactly the fears that consumed me. “He’s surrounded by violent men who will do anything to prevent him coming to power.”
“He’s beloved of the people—”
“Lafayette was beloved of the people, too. And they threw him in a dungeon anyway.” Unlike Tom, I’d already lived through two revolutions, and I was certain we were in the paroxysms of a third. The Federalists bayed that if my father were allowed to take the presidency, murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest would be openly practiced, the soil soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes. Which made me sure that they meant to kill him or usurp the government. I was equally sure there’d be chains, dungeons, and the gibbet for his supporters . . . to say nothing of his children and grandchildren.