Episode 3.2 Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson

[Transcript]

Hello, and welcome to America’s First Ladies. I’m your host, Risa Weaver-Enion.

Episode 3.2 Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson

We left off last week in January 1772 as Thomas and Patty Jefferson traveled through a snowstorm to reach his plantation called Monticello. It was still very much a work in progress, and when they arrived, the only part of the house that could be lived in was a 400-square-foot one-room brick structure. Family members later recalled that Patty told them of the “horrible dreariness of such a house, at the end of such a journey.” But she and Thomas managed to find a bottle of wine and made the best of their first night in their home as newlyweds.

For the next two months, Patty and Thomas remained at home at Monticello. Thomas was technically a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, but he didn’t even bother traveling to Williamsburg for the sessions. He wrote to Henry Knox, “I live on my horse from morning to night. I rarely look into a book or take up a pen. I have proscribed newspapers.”

Thomas kept a rather detailed pocket diary throughout his life, jotting down notes about his day, his activities, and his purchases. But he didn’t record anything for these first couple of months of marriage. Apparently, he and Patty were just enjoying each other’s company. They also were likely reviewing and revising Thomas’s plans for the grand house at Monticello.

Thomas wanted to build Monticello in the Palladian style, which was named after the Italian architect who pioneered it, Andrea Palladio. Its hallmark is symmetry and mathematical proportions. It’s based on classical Greek and Roman architecture, so picture lots of columns.

There were to be two wings that would incorporate all of the outbuildings that were usually found on plantation properties. You’ll recognize these from our season 1 description of Patsy Dandridge aka Martha Washington’s youth. 

The southern wing of Monticello was to include a brewing room, smoke room, dairy, laundry, kitchen, pantry, and summer dairy. Opposite to this wing would be a northern wing containing the stables, a chariot house, and a saddle room. Each wing would have servants’ quarters, privies, and a “hosterie,” which was a room for the servants of visitors. There were also plans for a number of storage rooms.

It would take years for Thomas’s vision to come to life, and even then, he continually revised and rebuilt throughout his life.

In April 1772, Patty and Thomas finally ventured forth from Monticello, setting out for Williamsburg where they enjoyed the spring social season. They attended the theater frequently and visited with friends who lived nearby. They then spent a month visiting at The Forest before traveling back to Monticello.

Much like our friend Abigail Adams in season 2, Patty was quite possibly already pregnant when she married Thomas Jefferson. Their first child was born 38 ½ weeks after their wedding. Now 38 ½ weeks isn’t nearly as premature as 34 weeks, so it’s possible that Patty got pregnant on their wedding night, rather than before their wedding. But it’s a close call.

In the wee hours of September 27, 1772, Patty gave birth to a daughter. They named her Martha (of course) and called her Patsy. This little baby is the second main subject of our current season. Despite being underweight and a little frail at birth (probably because she was slightly premature), Patsy Jefferson lived to adulthood, bore 12 children of her own, and was a close companion of her father. We’re going to learn much, much more about her as this season plays out.

For the first six months of her life, Patsy Jefferson was sickly. Patty had difficulty with childbirth and difficulty with breastfeeding. When they finally resorted to a wet nurse for Patsy, the baby began to thrive. The wet nurse was a woman named Ursula, the housekeeper and one of their many slaves. Sadly, Ursula’s baby, the one that allowed her to serve as wet nurse to Patsy, died a couple of years later.

The story of how the Jeffersons acquired Ursula is one of the few insights we have into how Patty felt about slavery. We have no idea how much she knew or what she thought about her father’s involvement in the slave trade. Slavery was a fact of life for her, growing up in Virginia. But when Thomas purchased Ursula at auction, Patty made sure he also purchased Ursula’s two children so the family could stay together. They also found and purchased Ursula’s husband George from a different planter so the family could reunite at Monticello. None of this condones the fact that they were, you know, buying people. But much like the Washingtons, they at least tried to treat their slaves as human beings with feelings.

Young Patsy grew up in relative isolation at Monticello. The road up the mountain to Monticello took at least half an hour to travel, and even though they were reasonably close to Charlottesville, there wasn’t all that much in Charlottesville. There was a courthouse, a tavern, and about a dozen houses. That’s it.

Patty and Thomas presumably doted on little Patsy. Knowing what we do about the lives of well-off plantation owners, it’s likely that Patsy had her own slave nursemaid, in addition to being breastfed by Ursula. As the housekeeper, Ursula would not have had time to care for the baby, dressing her, changing her diapers, etc.

Patsy’s parents were also quite busy with their lives. Thomas was still practicing law and serving in the House of Burgesses. Patty would have had her hands full overseeing the household and farms. They had planted a variety of fruit trees and were delighted to harvest their first peaches in the fall of 1772.

Patty made sure the house was regularly supplied with fresh meat, eggs, butter, and fruit, which could all be provided by their farms. Patty often bought vegetables, poultry, and eggs from the various slaves, who could make a small income this way. Patty also oversaw the brewing of beer, slaughtering of ducks, geese, and hogs, weaving, sewing, soapmaking, and candlemaking. 

Monticello produced a variety of fabrics: fine linen for Thomas’s shirts, mixed cloth for the children’s and house slaves’ clothing, and coarse linen for the field slaves’ clothing. Fabric for Patty’s gowns was presumably purchased and imported from England. One thing they couldn’t produce at Monticello was silk.

Monticello must have had an impressive number of hogs. Not only did Patty trade bacon to the slaves in exchange for their chickens, there are also notes about how many supplies of meat they had on hand: “packed up for our own eating 28 hams of bacon, 21 shoulders, 27 middlengs. Packed up for workmen 40 hams, 50 shoulders.” That’s a lot of pork.

On May 16, 1773, Thomas Jefferson’s best friend, Dabney Carr, who also was married to his sister Martha, died at age 30 of a virulent fever, leaving behind six children. Thomas was devastated by the loss—you may recall I said in episode 3.1 that Dabney Carr was one of only three people Thomas ever wrote an epitaph for. The other two were his sister Jane and his wife. Dabney Carr was the first person buried in the graveyard at Monticello.

Not even two weeks later, on May 28, 1773, Patty’s father, John Wayles, died. His estate was divided among his three surviving daughters, Patty, Betsy, and Nancy. Tibby had apparently died before her father. Wayles left a substantial estate, but it was also encumbered by some debts, which was a little ironic, considering that part of his work involved debt collection.

Best estimates put the size of the estate at around 30,000 pounds sterling, with about 12,500 pounds sterling in debt. The portion that came to Patty, and therefore to Thomas, basically doubled their net worth. There also, of course, were a number of slaves included in the estate. Patty and Thomas inherited 135 slaves from her father, including the Hemings family.

You may recall from episode 3.1 that Patty was her mother’s sole heir. Patty’s mother Martha had inherited a slave named Betty Hemings from her brother Francis Eppes. Betty was to be passed down to Patty and her heirs. It seems that Betty and her children had remained at The Forest, even after Patty married Thomas and moved to Monticello.

We need to take a slight detour here to address a historical controversy. Betty Hemings had 12 children in total. Four of them were born prior to 1760, and their father was reportedly another slave. Now, I can neither confirm nor deny the truth of what I’m about to tell you. Some sources take it as a given, but others cast aspersions on the possibility. I’m not sure anyone actually knows the truth or ever will. 

Supposedly, after John Wayles’s third wife died in 1761, he took Betty Hemings as his mistress. Betty gave birth to six children between 1762 and 1773, the year John Wayles died. One of those children was Sally Hemings, who we’ll hear more about later.

If it’s true that these six children were fathered by John Wayles, that would make them half-siblings to Patty Wayles Skelton Jefferson. It would also make the children ¾ white, because Betty herself was born of an African mother, who was enslaved, and a white father. As we learned in season 1, slave status passed through the mother. So if your mother was a slave, you were born a slave, regardless of paternity or racial percentages.

When John Wayles died in 1773, Patty and Thomas Jefferson inherited Betty Hemings and her 10 children, and they all moved to Monticello. Betty would later have two more children while living at Monticello. One was supposedly fathered by an Irish workman and the other was supposedly fathered by another slave.

I hesitate to call the situation between John Wayles and Betty Hemings a “relationship” because it’s hard to say how much coercion is involved when a white male slave owner has sex with one of his black female slaves. But I can’t think of a better word, so relationship, it is. Anyway, there’s no real documentary or genetic evidence of the relationship between John Wayles and Betty Hemings. It seems to hinge entirely on the oral history told by one of Betty’s grandsons, Madison Hemings.

You’ll want to keep all of this in mind when we later get to the so-called “relationship” between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. But we’re not there yet!

Returning to our main storyline, on April 3, 1774, Patty gave birth to her second child with Thomas, another girl, who was named Jane in honor of Thomas’s mother. Much like Martha Washington’s daughter-in-law, Nelly Calvert Custis Stuart, Patty did not bear children easily. Every one of her deliveries was difficult and left her exhausted and ill for quite some time. 

During her 10 years of marriage to Thomas Jefferson, Patty was pregnant nearly half the time—54 out of 128 months. She gave birth to six children during their marriage, and therefore spent the majority of her time either pregnant, recovering from childbirth, nursing children, or mourning their death. Of her six children with Thomas, only two survived to adulthood.

Little Jane only lived for about a year and a half, dying in September 1775 of unknown causes. You may have noticed that we’ve made it to the fall of 1775 without talking much about the Revolutionary War. We covered it in so much detail in seasons 1 and 2 that I don’t feel the need to rehash it all again. By now you all know that the Boston Massacre was in March 1770, the Boston Tea Party was in December 1773, the First Continental Congress was held in September 1774, the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, and the Second Continental Congress began in May 1775.

Thomas Jefferson served as a delegate for Virginia at the Second Continental Congress. This is where he first met John Adams. Thomas almost certainly already knew George Washington, because they had both served in the Virginia House of Burgesses. In fact, there’s some evidence that Jefferson and Washington had met at the theater in Williamsburg in 1768, before Jefferson was even elected to the Virginia legislature. It doesn’t seem likely that Patty Jefferson ever met the Washingtons or the Adamses, because she never traveled outside of Virginia, and there’s no evidence that she ever visited Mount Vernon.

We know that Martha Washington and Patty Jefferson corresponded at least once though. You’ll recall how badly provisioned the Continental Army was during the war. The Pennsylvania governor’s wife, Esther Reed, sent letters to many notable women of the various colonies/states asking for their support of the soldiers. Patty seems to have learned of this endeavor from Martha Washington. 

There’s only one surviving letter written by Patty Jefferson, and it relates to this cause to support the soldiers. Patty wrote of it to a friend, saying, “Mrs. Washington has done me the honor of communicating the enclosed proposition of our sisters in Pennsylvania and of informing me that the same grateful sentiments are displaying themselves in Maryland. … I undertake with cheerfulness the duty of furnishing to my countrywomen an opportunity of proving that they also participate of those virtuous feelings.”

After approximately nine million quotes from Abigail Adams’s letters in season 2, that’s the only Patty Jefferson quote you’re going to get.

Patty also quite certainly supported the other patriotic activities undertaken by women during the war and the lead up to the war, such as boycotting British goods, resolving not to drink British tea, and making as much cloth at home as possible, rather than purchasing it from abroad. How can we be so sure that she supported these efforts? Well, her husband is the one who wrote the Virginia resolution calling for the boycott, so yeah, it’s safe to say she was on board.

When Thomas was in Williamsburg, serving in the House of Burgesses, Patty stayed behind at Monticello with the children. Much like Abigail Adams took over running the Adams family farms while John was away, Patty was handling day-to-day management of all the plantations in the family, not just Monticello, but also Elk Hill and other, smaller estates. She carefully recorded all of the farm notes that she knew Thomas would be interested in—when the cherries from their trees were the most ripe, when the first peas of the season appeared, and so on.

Thomas expanded his boycott resolution into a pamphlet called A Summary View of the Rights of British America. Written in 1774, it was aimed at the delegates serving in the First Continental Congress, even though Thomas wasn’t among them. In the pamphlet, he laid out grievances against King George III and Parliament and argued that Britain had no right to govern the colonies. He also made some interesting claims about slavery, which I’m going to quote.

“The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa; yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty’s negative (note: he means veto). Thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few African corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice.” He was essentially saying that the American colonies would love to get rid of slavery, but King George wouldn’t let them.

The First Continental Congress included a watered down version of this in its Petition to the King, but some of Thomas’s friends had his original Summary published in its entirety. It’s likely that this is what established Thomas as a writer of renown. And he would go on to author the Declaration of Independence, which we’ll get to shortly.

When Thomas was appointed as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress in 1775, he was only 32, and one of the youngest delegates to Congress. Patty once again stayed behind with the children while Thomas traveled to Philadelphia. In late 1775, the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, bombarded the coastal towns of Hampton and Norfolk, destroying homes and injuring and killing Virginians. Patty and the children were thankfully far from the coast.

During Thomas’s absences either in Williamsburg or Philadelphia, he relied on Virginia family and friends to help Patty and keep her company. Patty’s half-sister Betsy still lived at The Forest with her husband and children. Her husband was another Francis Eppes, which you may or may not recall had been the name of Patty’s uncle and grandfather on her mother’s side. This new Francis Eppes was of a later generation and was a cousin of some degree. 

Patty, Patsy, and baby Jane spent July and August 1775 at The Forest visiting the Eppeses. It must have been after their return to Monticello that the baby Jane died in September that year. The following spring, March 31, 1776, to be exact, Jane’s namesake, Thomas’s mother Jane Randolph Jefferson, died at the age of 56, although, strangely, Thomas notated her death in his diary, writing, “My Mother died about 8 o’clock this morning—in the 57th year of her age.”

The sources seem to agree that Jane Randolph Jefferson had been born in February 1720, which would have made her 56 in March 1776. No one seems to agree about the exact date, with some sources claiming February 9 and some claiming February 10. And the biography of Patty written by William Hyland Jr. says Jane was born in 1721, which seems to be just plain wrong. This is the kind of uncertainty I’m dealing with here.

Thomas didn’t write anything else about the death of his mother. His financial records show that he had paid a doctor to visit Jane Randolph Jefferson several times, so she was probably ill for a few months leading up to her death. She may have been living at Monticello when she died. The cause of death seems to have been a stroke. Thomas referred to it as “apoplectic” in a letter to his uncle, and apoplexy is an old-fashioned term for stroke.

Unlike the comings and goings of Martha Washington and John Adams during the war years, I don’t have a detailed itinerary of when Thomas was in Philadelphia, when he was in Williamsburg, and when he was home at Monticello. Based on the records surrounding Jane Randolph Jefferson’s death in March, Thomas was at Monticello at that time. According to David McCullough, Thomas arrived in Philadelphia on May 14, 1776, accompanied by one of his slaves, Betty Hemings’s son Bob.

We know from our discussion in episode 2.4 that the Continental Congress had turned its attention toward independence by the early summer of 1776. After Richard Lee’s independence resolution of June 8 was tabled due to lack of unanimous support, a committee was formed to draft a declaration of independence to be ready when Congress was.

As recently as August 1775, Thomas had written to a Randolph relative that he was “looking with fondness towards a reconciliation with Great Britain” and “the return of the happy period when, consistently with duty, I may withdraw myself totally from the public stage, and pass the rest of my days in domestic ease and tranquility, banishing every desire of afterwards even hearing what passes in the world.”

If there’s one thing all these Founding Fathers seem to have in common, it’s a desire to get out of the limelight and back to their farms.

But by spring 1776, Thomas was as committed to independence as anyone, and so was the colony of Virginia. The new Virginia House of Delegates in Williamsburg was drafting a new state constitution for Virginia, and on May 15, word arrived that the Virginia House had voted unanimously to instruct the delegation in Philadelphia “to declare the United Colonies free and independent states.”

The Continental Congress created a committee to write a declaration of independence. Thomas Jefferson was on the committee, along with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and Robert Livingston of New York. Adams felt that Thomas would be the right person to draft the declaration, both because he was an excellent writer and because he was a Virginian.

As David McCullough writes in John Adams, “That there would be political advantage in having the declaration written by a Virginian was clear, for the same reason there had been political advantage in having the Virginian Washington in command of the army. But be that as it may, Jefferson, with his ‘peculiar felicity of expression,’ as Adams had said, was the best choice for the task, just as Washington had been the best choice to command the Continental Army, and again Adams had played a key part. Had his contribution as a member of Congress been only that of casting the two Virginians in their respective, fateful roles, his service to the American cause would have been very great.”

Thomas holed up in his rented room and wrote the Declaration of Independence from June 11 until the 28th. He drew heavily from pre-existing materials, among them a draft of the Virginia state constitution he had previously written, the Virginia Declaration of Rights that George Mason had drafted, and a 1774 pamphlet published by Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson. All three of them wrote of the equality of men, and all three of them drew on prior works of philosophy and government by John Locke, David Hume, and Cicero.

Thomas’s original draft of the declaration of independence was not the final version that passed Congress on July 4. There was a whole section on slavery, much like what was in his A Summary View of the Rights of British America that I read to you earlier, but it was cut. 

After reading Thomas’s first draft, John Adams wrote, “I was delighted with its high tone and flights of oratory with which it abounded, especially that concerning Negro slavery, which, though I knew his southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly would never oppose. There were other expressions which I would not have inserted, if I had drawn it up, particularly that which called the King tyrant. … I thought the expression too passionate; and too much like scolding, for so grave and solemn a document; but as Franklin and Sherman were to inspect it afterwards, I thought it would not become me to strike it out.”

Around one-fourth of Thomas’s draft was cut before the final vote to approve the text was held on July 4. Reportedly, Thomas sat in silence as delegates to Congress slashed away at his creation. He would later describe it as “the ceaseless action of gravity weighing upon us night and day.” South Carolina and Georgia objected to the passage on slavery, and it was removed. 

Even though Thomas voiced no objection to any of the cuts, John Adams voiced objection on his behalf. Thomas wrote that Adams was “fighting fearlessly for every word. No man better merited than Mr. John Adams to hold a most conspicuous place in the design. He was the pillar of its support on the floor of Congress, its ablest advocate and defender against the multifarious assaults encountered.” Clearly, Thomas was not a fan of having his work butchered. Who would be?

We already covered the drama of the passage of the Declaration of Independence in episode 2.4, so I won’t go into it again. When the printed declaration was formally signed by the delegates on August 2, Thomas was present in Philadelphia with the rest of his delegation. But he must have returned to Monticello nearly immediately after that, because nine months later, in May 1777, Patty Jefferson gave birth to a baby that was likely conceived in August 1776.

This baby born on May 28, 1777 was the only son of Patty and Thomas Jefferson. Unfortunately, he died weeks later. His name is unknown, but sources speculate that the boy was named Thomas. This makes a lot of sense, given what we know about the propensity of parents to name their children after themselves.

After his return to Virginia in the late summer of 1776, Thomas was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, which was finalizing the state constitution. Presumably he split his time between Williamsburg and Monticello. Patsy Jefferson would have been around 4 years old in the fall of 1776, and she later recalled time spent with her father during her early years, so he must have been around enough to have made an impression on the young girl.

Interestingly, after the American victory at Saratoga in October 1777, a large number of British and German prisoners were moved south to Virginia and interred in and around Charlottesville. The enemy officers were granted a large amount of leeway, which went as far as allowing them to host social engagements at the plantations where they were held captive.

I’ll quote here from Cynthia Kierner’s book, Martha Jefferson Randolph: Daughter of Monticello, “Although the Jeffersons did not socialize with the common soldiers who were imprisoned in Albemarle [County], the presence of officers, who were educated members of Europe’s upper social strata, afforded Patsy her first exposure to genteel cosmopolitan society. A family dinner at nearby Blenheim plantation, hosted by a captive British major general, included an invitation for seven-year-old ‘Miss Jefferson’ and her parents, along with Baron von Riedesel and his wife and three daughters, who had accompanied the Hessian officer on his tour of duty in America. 

The Monticello family especially enjoyed the agreeable society of the accomplished, English-speaking Riedesel, whose eldest daughter, Augusta, was a year older than Patsy. The Jeffersons hosted many musical evenings for the Riedesels and other paroled officers and their families. Patsy’s mother played the harpsichord or pianoforte, and the Baroness von Riedesel often sang.”

War really was different in the 18th century.

On August 1, 1778, Patty Jefferson gave birth to another daughter. They named her Mary, but she is sometimes referred to as Maria, which is spelled like Maria, but apparently the Virginians pronounced Maria as Mariah. Her nickname was Polly. This is the little girl who traveled to England on a ship at the age of 8 and stayed with Abigail and John Adams for a few days before joining her father in Paris.

Unlike Patsy, who took after Thomas, Polly was more like Patty. She inherited Patty’s lithe figure, mannerisms, and fragile health. One of the Jeffersons’ slaves, Isaac, is quoted as saying, “Patsy Jefferson was tall like her father. Polly low like her mother and longways the handsomest, pretty lady, just like her mother.”

In June 1779, Thomas Jefferson was chosen to be Governor of Virginia by the Virginia House of Delegates. The capital of Virginia was still Williamsburg, and that’s where the Governor’s Palace was located. This time, Thomas took his family with him. At this point, the family consisted of Patty, Patsy, and Polly. And the slaves, of course. 

The Governor’s Palace was at the end of a majestic, tree-lined avenue. It was a brick building with a two-stage cupola and a pair of massive brick chimneys. On the east side were the stables and on the west side, the kitchen. A long wing in the rear contained a ballroom and supper room, and then there was a large formal garden. There was an elegant courtyard in front where guests and visitors could dismount from horses or carriages.

The entry hall was decorated with ornamental weapons—swords, muskets, and pistols—and served as a reception space where the butler and footmen greeted guests and assigned them priority for access to the governor. There was also a parlor space where guests could wait, and where Patty could serve tea to dinner guests before the meal. This room also may have served as the “withdrawing room,” where Patty and other ladies would retire after dinner to wait for the gentlemen to rejoin them. The dining room was at the back of the palace.

The family’s rooms were on the second floor. In addition to the sleeping rooms, there was a suite where Thomas could meet visitors on official business, as well as a private library where he could work or meet with close confidantes.

Despite the size and elegance of the Governor’s Palace, Thomas had many ideas about how to improve it. Historian Fiske Kimball once wrote, “Jefferson never occupied a house that he did not attempt to remodel.”

Next week, we’ll join the Jeffersons in the Governor’s Palace, and the war will come quite literally to their doorstep.

Thanks for listening to this episode, it was produced by me, and the music is by Matthew Dull. Please leave a rating or review in Apple Podcasts or Spotify so I can share these stories with more people. Thanks!