I shouldn’t have said it. Should never have taken that tone. And the reward for my foolishness was a resounding slap to the face. It didn’t knock me to the ground. It wouldn’t bruise me. But because it made me feel like both a desperate wife and a chastened child I stood there gawping in shock, holding my face where it turned red.
My husband hadn’t struck me since the last time he was in a fit of rage inspired by one of the Randolph brothers of Bizarre. And now Tom seemed just as shocked as I was, his eyes filling with shame at the sight of me holding my stinging cheek. With tears in his eyes, he shouted, “God dammit, Martha. Look what you’ve made me do! Look what you made me do.”
He never dueled John Randolph.
But it wasn’t because of my father’s letter, or my pleas, or because good sense prevailed. It was because he’d struck me, in spite of his promise never to do so again. He’d dishonored himself in his own eyes and, in so doing, lost all appetite for a duel of honor. I knew this, deep down where we know such things about the men we marry, and counted it well worth the price. I would’ve provoked him to strike me a thousand times to keep him from dooming our family to utter ruin.
But the price I didn’t understand was one exacted from Tom’s soul. For he was never without his pistols ever after, and I feel certain he was keeping a bullet ready for himself.
He had inside him the kind of wound that left a man staring at pistols in the night. The kind of wound that left a man without a head, lying on the ground with a gun in his hand. The kind of wound the men in my life all seemed to suffer. And for the first time, I wondered if those wounds were put there by God or if it was something about me that brought them about.
Washington City, 2 July 1807
A Proclamation by Thomas Jefferson
During the wars among the powers of Europe, the United States of America have observed neutrality. At length a deed, transcending all we’ve hitherto seen or suffered, brings our forbearance to a necessary pause. A frigate of the United States, trusting a state of peace, has been attacked by a British vessel of war. This was not only without provocation, or justifiable cause, but committed with the avowed purpose of taking by force, a part of her crew.
An attack. An insult. An act of war.
Publicly, my father prepared for battle. Privately, he confided we weren’t ready.
The fate of our nation was, as always, caught between England and France, and my father no longer harbored a preference for either, observing, “France is a conqueror, roaming over the earth with havoc. And Britain is a pirate, spreading misery and ruin over the ocean. Fortunately for us, the Mammoth cannot swim nor the Leviathan move on dry land. And if we keep out of their way, they cannot get at us.”
Thus came about the Embargo Act of 1807.
Did Papa know he put the fate of the nation in the hands of its ladies? If we couldn’t buy tea, clothes, or goods from overseas, then wives and daughters would have to make them at home. And if women weren’t willing, the embargo would fail. After all, what did men know about making homespun?
I set about straightaway to oversee the production of cloth both at Edgehill and Monticello, where we transformed the stone workmen’s house into a weaver’s cottage. And in this endeavor, I found an ally in Sally Hemings, who’d always been a talented seamstress and whose six-year-old daughter, Harriet, was becoming one, too. I tried never to think that fair and freckled Harriet was my sister, but was pleased at how well the girl took to the spinning jennies and was so impressed by her deft use of the flying shuttle on the clattering loom that I could scarcely pull my attention away when Sally said, “With the help of the women who don’t get put in the ground come harvest, we can make a thousand yards of cloth by springtime.”
To that end, Sally and her children moved from a slave cabin into the weaver’s cottage, using another room in the southern dependency by the dairy, too, and as naturally as that, she defined for herself on the plantation a home and office of her own.
After that, I decided my children could do no less for the effort than hers. I told Ann, “We’re all going to learn to manufacture cloth. In the meantime, look through your dresses and put away anything that wasn’t made at home.”
My eldest had recently caught the eye of the young and dashing Charles Bankhead, who’d complimented her on the fashionable dresses she’d worn when we’d attended dinners at the President’s House. And now that she had a suitor, Ann wanted nothing to do with my scheme. “Slaves wear homespun. How will we look wearing such things?”
“We’ll look like patriots,” I said, with a reassuring smile.
Ann pouted. “Charles won’t like it. I don’t see why I should have to.”
I kissed the top of her head. “Because you’re the president’s granddaughter.”
And that was that.