JEFF’S FATHER-IN-LAW DIED in the autumn of 1820, leaving everything and everyone ruined: his people, his plantation, his once-haughty widow, and quite likely my father, too.
The only good news was that Jeff was moving his arm. It still pained him, but he had the use of it, which improved my spirits and Tom’s, too. Returning from Richmond for Sunday dinner, my husband set down a carefully folded piece of paper onto the writing table beside me. “A letter from Nancy for you.”
I smiled, blandly, not wanting to tell him all the letters we’d exchanged since I took her part against Randolph of Roanoke.
“Nancy sent crayons for Cornelia,” Tom continued, rubbing the back of his neck. “And the girls tell me she sent you an extraordinary cup and saucer.” He turned, his muscles knotting tightly beneath his white shirt. “Martha, I know what you and your lady friends did for Jack Eppes during his campaign against John Randolph.”
My stomach clenched because I couldn’t be sure who my husband hated more. Jack or John . . . or me? “We did it for your sister. But it didn’t work.”
“Oh, it worked,” Tom said, turning to face me, again. “Mr. Morris took my sister’s side in the matter before he died, didn’t he?” Thankfully, that death couldn’t be blamed on Nancy—having come about due to Mr. Morris’s botched self-surgery with a whalebone to remove a blockage from his urinary tract. “My sister is a wealthy widow now, and she has you to thank. You kept the villain from doing real mischief.”
“But John Randolph won the election anyway,” I said, bitterly.
“Doesn’t matter. He’ll think twice before going after Nancy again. Besides, anyone could’ve beat Jack Eppes in that election. With the war over and Virginians so angry, Jolly Jack would never make a proper representation for popular rage.”
He didn’t use the word jolly in any complimentary way. Nevertheless, it was, I thought, a correct assessment. “I’m glad to have been any help.”
“You’re adept at influencing people, Martha,” he said, staring out the window at the mountain’s turning leaves, as if contemplating the bleak winter to come. “You’re clever at social discourse. You’d be an asset to me in the Governor’s Mansion.”
By that point, we’d lived apart for nearly two years, during which I’d learned to prefer loneliness to my husband’s hostility. I’d assumed he was happier without me. That’s what gave me pause. But Tom took my hesitation for something else, and snapped, “Martha, without you, I’ll lose this upcoming election and the salary that goes with it. You ought to do at least one of your duties by me, since I’m not holding you to the others.”
Our marriage bed, he meant, which irritated me enough to resist. “My father needs me here—”
“Are you his wife or mine? Sometimes, I wonder!”
I didn’t dignify the question with an answer. Instead, I fumed, no longer able to soothe my temper by reminding myself that ladies were never angry. “Are you so very unpopular a governor, Tom?”
He crossed his arms. “If I’m not now, I soon will be. Because I intend to introduce a bill for the emancipation and deportation of slaves in Virginia once they reach the age of puberty. I want to abolish slavery in Virginia.” The import of these words crashed down upon me like a house in collapse. Congress had just wrangled its way through an unhappy compromise to admit the new state of Missouri to the union while prohibiting slavery north of it. There was no cause of greater controversy, and now my husband wanted to take up the antislavery banner. “Martha, I decry the new morality which tolerates slavery in perpetuity.”
“As do I,” I said, swiftly, because I felt accused. “Of course.”
“Your father says the same, but he won’t lend his support to my proposition. His voice would carry enormous weight, but he says he must leave the accomplishment of ending slavery to the work of another generation.”
That startled me, though it oughtn’t have. For years, Papa had been asked to advocate more actively against slavery. William Short had all but begged him. Friends like the Coles who had sheltered us in our flight from the British all those years ago had tried to shame him into it. And now my father was old, tired, and often in ill health. Sometimes I believed the love of Virginians—the love of the nation—was all that sustained him. To throw his weight against the slaveholders of the South would surely be a struggle for him beyond his strength.
But as his daughter . . . I might serve as a symbol of his authority. And I realized with some astonishment that Tom was asking me to be just that. He was looking to me to help him tackle the moral problem of our time. And if he deserved my obedience in anything, it was in this.
But it would be more than obedience. For Tom’s request rekindled in me an old flame of Parisian idealism that I thought long snuffed out. I wanted to play a part in dismantling the system of pain and degradation that undermined our union. My father said that the work of ending slavery belonged to another generation. Maybe he was right.
Maybe it belonged to me and mine.