The general wasn’t shy to confront my father in the presence of our servants. Their faces strained to show indifference, but I wasn’t blind to the way their bodies leaned in, how they made themselves busy in such a way as to best hear every word when Lafayette said, “I gave my best services to, and spent my fortune on behalf of Americans because I felt you were fighting for a great and noble principle—the freedom of mankind. But instead of all being free, a portion were held in bondage. My old friend, surely you must concur that it would be mutually beneficial to masters and slaves if the latter were educated and emancipated.”
“Indeed,” Papa replied easily. “I believe there’ll come a time when the slaves will all be free, but I leave its accomplishment to the work of another generation. At the age of eighty-two, with one foot in the grave and the other uplifted to follow it, I do not permit myself to take part in any new enterprises.” Of course, Tom’s experiences as governor taught us the difficulty of the enterprise. But my father was ever an optimist, and spoke those words with confidence and conviction. “I do favor teaching slaves to read . . . but to teach them to write will enable them to forge papers.”
“For the better!” Lafayette had insisted. “I’ve heard it argued that black faces cannot make their way in white society,” he said, his eyes flicking briefly upon Madison and Eston Hemings where they readied to entertain us with their violins. “But I put this to you. Whatever be the complexion of the enslaved, it does not, in my opinion, alter the complexion of the crime the enslaver commits. A crime much blacker than any African face. It’s a matter of great anxiety and concern to find that this trade is sometimes carried on under the flag of liberty, our dear and noble stripes, to which virtue and glory have been constant standard-bearers.”
My father was unaccustomed to anyone speaking so baldly to him on the matter. But Lafayette was more than a guest. He’d saved our lives and our Revolution and enabled us to live in this beautiful house atop the mountain in Virginia. He had the right, more than any man alive, to harangue us.
My father endured it gracefully and I could never bring myself to be angry at Lafayette. Not only because of all I owed him, and all he’d inspired in me, but also because he was the only guest present who never asked me to account for the absence of my husband.
Tom had left himself, and us, without a fig leaf. We couldn’t say that he was ill, because he was seen in taverns by our neighbors. We couldn’t say he was about urgent business, since everyone seemed to know he was ruined. So we employed artful dodges when possible and inartful ones the rest of the time.
In spite of this, I was enormously relieved not to have him there. He left no lonely gap in our society, no awkward place at the dinner table. His absence left us strangely comfortable as a family. And as I hosted the greatest patriots of our age, I was as content as I’d never been before in my place as the mistress of Monticello.
Chapter Forty
Monticello, 5 June 1825
From Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph
You can never want a necessary or comfort of life while I possess anything. All I have is devoted to the comfortable maintenance of yourself and the family. I have no other use for property. Restore yourself to the bosom of your family and friends. They will cherish your happiness as warmly as they ever did.
I SHOULD BURN THIS LETTER for what it reveals about my husband’s abandonment of me—and perhaps mine of him. But these words are a testament to my father’s character. Proof of how warmly he reached out to my husband, when I could scarcely find it within myself to do the same.
That spring, I found Tom brooding in a little white house in Milton he said he was using as an office, alone, drunk, unshaven, and in squalor. In the dark recesses of the entryway—for he’d shut the curtains against the sunlight—Tom heard my plea, then said, “I’ll never go back to Monticello with you.”
“I’m not asking for myself,” I said, trying to quell my rising anger. “I’m asking for Ellen. She wants you at her wedding.”
“Of course you’re not asking for you. You’d have been happier if I died in the war.”
“That’s not true,” I said, knowing that most of the bitterness between us had arisen precisely because I was desperate to keep him from dying in that war!
Tom snorted. “I won’t subject myself to the supercilious stares of your father’s guests. So get out, Martha. Go.”
I stood there, wringing my hands, wishing I knew the words that might help matters—but it occurred to me that everything we’d ever had to say to one another of import we’d said skin to skin. And though he was still, even at his age, rugged and well made, my desire for him had died completely.
“I said get out!” Tom shouted, launching his boot at me. Fortunately, his drunken aim was so poor that the boot sailed harmlessly by my head and crashed with a clatter into the wooden door behind me. “Just go and be grateful that I haven’t taken the children from their whore of a mother.”
A chill swept over me—not for the insult, but for the threat. Tom couldn’t take the older boys because they wouldn’t go. But Lewis, Septimia, and little George . . . my husband could take them. I’d simply never believed he’d be so monstrous as to try. Why, he was more cruel, barbarous, and fiend-like than ever!