He embraced me, planting a thousand kisses on my cheeks. “What a lucky man I am to have you for a wife,” he said, holding my face in his hands. “Don’t you worry about the farms. I have a plan.”
I was worried. If Tom won, he’d be absent from home, just as my father was perpetually absent. Our already shaky fortunes would suffer. I wasn’t worried about Monticello; in Papa’s absence, the Hemings family ran everything there from the blacksmith shop to the dairy. We only needed to send an overseer there once a week to discipline the nail boys. But the outlying farms . . . slaves could do the planting, but the operations would need to be overseen every day, and I doubted we could recoup the expense of a more permanent overseer. Though I’d found more strength in me than I knew I had while nursing my entire family back to health through the whooping cough and managing a household besides, I feared that along with the children, and the house, and the outbuildings, the responsibility for the farms and the crops would now fall to me. And that I might not prove worthy of the challenge.
So I girded myself for his answer. “What plan?”
“Cotton,” Tom said as he began to describe his scheme. “It’s like printing money, it’s so profitable.”
This confused me utterly. “I hadn’t thought cotton a profitable crop in Virginia.”
He nodded. “That’s why I’m going to Georgia. I thought, originally, to try the Mississippi territory, but every white man there is outnumbered by slaves and dangerous Indians. So I’m going to purchase land in Georgia.”
The blood drained from my face. It was, of course, a husband’s prerogative to decide where his family would go. But if Tom thought I’d submit to dragging our children into parts hitherto unknown, he’d misjudged me thoroughly. My voice actually quavered when I said, “You want to pack up and move to Georgia?”
He stroked my hair. “No, no. Of course not. I can’t hold a congressional seat in Virginia if we make a home in Georgia, can I? No. I’ll go to Georgia to prospect land, and when I find a good place, I’ll establish all our Negroes there.” My horrified expression must not have changed a whit, because he quickly added, “I know you’re worried about our people, Patsy. I have nothing but the deepest concern for those whose happiness fortune has thrown upon our will. We won’t break up any families—we’ll send them all together. I promise you, the culture of cotton is the least laborious of any ever practiced. It’s a gentle labor.”
Maybe. But what about domestic servants? Even if I could part with them, I couldn’t bear to see them sent away in fear. “They’ll be terrified, Tom.”
“We’ll have to ease them into it,” he agreed. “We’ll have to tell them that we’re all going. My slaves are willing to accompany me anywhere, but their attachment to you would make their departure very heavy unless they believed you were to follow soon.”
No wonder my husband never liked deception. Even when he could muster up the stomach for a lie, he had no talent for it. There was no earthly way we could fool our domestic servants, who watched our every move and listened to our every word. And if our domestic servants knew we weren’t going with them to Georgia, our field hands would soon learn it, too, at which point the entire thing would be completely unmanageable.
Which is why I agreed to it.
I knew it would never work. Like every other wild-eyed scheme of easy fortune I’d ever heard, this one would require a sharp focus that my husband could never bring to bear while campaigning for a seat in Congress. A campaign he’d decidedly lose, after which maybe we could get back to the sensible business of paying off the debts on farms he already owned.
In the end, I was half right.
Tom’s interest in cotton came to nothing. He never even made the trip to Georgia. But he and Jack both won a seat in Congress. Jack by a landslide. My husband by thirteen votes.
And I was now the daughter of the president and the wife of a congressman.
Chapter Twenty-six
Monticello, 12 August 1802
From Thomas Jefferson to William Short
Will you not come and pass the months of August and September with us at Monticello? Make this place your home while I am here. You will find none more healthy, none so convenient for your affairs and certainly none where you will be so cordially welcome.
THIS ISN’T THE FIRST TIME I’ve found William’s name while thumbing through my father’s papers. Not even the first time I’ve traced the lettering of his name with a bittersweet ache. Since our break in Paris, William continued to exchange letters with my father, though Papa was always prudent enough not to speak of them to me beyond the occasional Mr. Short sends his regards.
At the time, it had seemed perfectly natural that William would—upon finally returning to America—call upon his mentor. But I never knew, until finding this letter, that it was my father’s invitation that brought William back into my life.