Episode 3.5 Marriage and Motherhood

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

Episode 3.5 Marriage and Motherhood

We left off last week in the summer of 1789. Thomas, Patsy, and Polly were preparing to leave Paris and head home to Virginia, and events were occurring in Paris that would later be recognized as the first steps toward the French Revolution.

Now, I definitely don’t want to get bogged down in the mess that is the French Revolution, but since some pivotal moments happened while the Jeffersons were in Paris, I thought we would at least cover those. If you want to do a deep dive into the French Revolution, I will once again direct you to a podcast called Revolutions. Season 3 covers the French Revolution in all its bloody detail.

By 1789 France’s finances were a mess. France was an absolute monarchy, and absolute monarchs tended to live as if money were no object and more could be procured at any moment. The government was deeply in debt, and it didn’t help that the United States was behind on paying interest on the loans France had extended to fund the American Revolution.

The majority of France’s 20 million citizens were poor peasants, living in rural towns, barely getting by and avoiding starvation. The French government of King Louis XVI wanted Parliament to approve new loans to keep the government afloat, but Parliament didn’t. The only body that could levy taxes in 18th century France was something called the Estates-General, which hadn’t met since 1614. Through a long, round-about process, the Estates-General were finally called and assembled in May 1789.

There were three parts to the Estates-General: The First Estate was the clergy, The Second Estate was the nobility, and The Third Estate was everyone else, the commoners. The first two estates had all the power, despite having the smallest proportion of the population, and their votes outweighed the Third Estate, but the Third Estate wanted to make things more equal so they had more of a say. Long story, short: after meeting for about a month without making any headway, the Third Estate, with some support from some members of the first two estates, declared itself a new organization called the National Assembly representing all of France. They resolved to draft a constitution for France, converting it from an absolute monarchy into a constitutional monarchy, which was more like the monarchy in Britain.

As Thomas wrote to John Jay around this time, “A tremendous cloud hovers over this nation. If the King and his ministers were to side openly with the Commons the revolution would be completed without a convulsion, by the establishment of a constitution, tolerably free, and in which the distinction of Noble and Commoner would be suppressed. But this is scarcely possible. The king is honest and wishes to the good of his people, but the expediency of an hereditary aristocracy is too difficult a question for him.”

Things began to get heated in Paris, with armed citizen mobs squaring off against the king’s armed troops. On July 14, some members of Paris’s volunteer guard went to the Bastille prison to get guns to help defend themselves. For some reason, more than 30,000 guns were stored at the Bastille (which we Americans pronounce as Bastille). A crowd gathered, tempers flared, and before anyone knew it, the unruly crowd had made its way into the prison courtyard. Four of them were shot by prison guards, and then everything went to hell. The crowd overran the prison, killing the governor of the prison along with six soldiers and 98 others. They mounted the governor’s head on a stake and paraded it through the streets of Paris. And this ignominious event is what is celebrated in France as Le Quatorze Juillet, which means 14th July. They don’t actually call it Bastille Day, even though we Americans know it under that name.

Anyway, Thomas received a first-hand account of the events at the Bastille and then informed John Jay of the events, writing, “A more dangerous scene of war I never saw in America, than what Paris has presented for 5. days past.” It was going to get much, much worse, but the Jeffersons would not be there for it.

A few days after the storming of the Bastille, King Louis entered the city from Versailles, and Patsy watched his procession from a window at Hôtel de Langeac. Like her father, she supported the revolutionary citizens, and wore the tricolor cockade to show her support. Thomas Jefferson would maintain an unhealthy level of support for the French Revolution even as it descended into the chaos of the Reign of Terror. Patsy derived most of her political ideas from her father. If they had stayed in Paris and witnessed the carnage and bloodshed first-hand, they might have held less idealistic views of France’s revolution. But instead, they left.

On September 26, 1789, the three Jeffersons, along with James and Sally Hemings, left Paris by carriage for the coastal town of Le Havre. The Hemingses could have stayed in Paris and been free, but there’s some evidence that Thomas made them various promises in order to get them to come back to Virginia with him as slaves. 

James was by this point a chef trained in French cooking, and Thomas very much wanted him to be his chef at Monticello. But it seems likely that Thomas enticed him back to Virginia by promising to emancipate him, after he trained a replacement for himself. (To Jefferson’s credit, this is actually what later happened.)

Sally’s situation was far more complicated. Unlike the disputed sexual relationship between John Wayles and his slave Betty Hemings, there’s no question that Thomas Jefferson had a wildly inappropriate sexual relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings. Subsequent DNA testing has established that Sally Hemings’s descendants are blood relations of Thomas Jefferson’s legitimate white descendants via Patsy and Polly. I could go into details about y-chromosomes and haplotypes etc etc, but this isn’t a genetics podcast. Let’s just stipulate that the relationship is established and not seriously questioned by anyone reputable.

This relationship between Thomas and Sally most likely began during the Paris years, because according to Sally’s son, James Madison Hemings, Sally was pregnant with one of Thomas’s offspring when they left Paris.

So not only did Thomas initiate a sexual relationship with one of his slaves, but Sally was, at most, 16 years old when it began. She had arrived in Paris in 1787 at the age of 14, so she would have been 16 when they left in 1789. Thomas was 46 in 1789. And then add in the fact that Sally was probably the half-sister of Thomas’s dead wife Patty, and you get to something that can only be termed wildly inappropriate.

Madison Hemings claims that Sally initially refused to leave Paris but that Thomas enticed her with the promise that she would be granted “extraordinary privileges” and that her children would be freed at the age of 21. How magnanimous of him.

It’s unclear what Patsy and Polly thought about their father’s relationship with Sally, or even if they knew anything about it. The Hôtel de Langeac was certainly large enough that Thomas and Sally could have kept their relationship a secret, even once the girls were no longer living at Panthemont. Again, I hesitate to use the word “relationship” to describe a situation where a much older man was having what easily could have been coerced sex with a young slave. There’s no reason for us to think that Sally’s participation was voluntary. But there’s no other word that easily encapsulates it, so we’re sticking with relationship.

The party was delayed by bad weather at Le Havre, long enough for Thomas to purchase a pregnant shepherd dog to bring home with him. On October 8 they all boarded a ship and crossed the English Channel, which took 26 hours, thanks to continuing bad weather. They landed on the Isle of Wight, where the dog gave birth to two puppies who made the rest of the journey with them. They spent two weeks on the Isle of Wight waiting for a ship. They finally boarded the Clermont on October 29 and set sail for Virginia.

They were the only passengers on Clermont, so Thomas and his daughters shared one large stateroom, and the two Hemingses shared the other one. The voyage was uneventful, and they arrived into Norfolk harbor on November 23. It took them another month to reach Monticello, stopping in Williamsburg, Richmond, Eppington, and other family residences along the way. As Cynthia Kierner puts it in Martha Jefferson Randolph: Daughter of Monticello, “That journey reintroduced Patsy to once-familiar people and places, perhaps easing her reentry into a society and culture that was far different from what she left behind [in Paris]. She had left Virginia as a shy and unsophisticated ten-year-old in 1782. Now, seven years later, she returned as an accomplished young lady on the threshold of what were the most critical decisions of an eighteenth-century woman’s life.”

She’s referring, of course, to choosing a husband.

By the time the Jeffersons returned to America at the end of 1789, the new U.S. Constitution had been ratified, the first election had been held, and George Washington had been inaugurated in April 1789 as the first president. Shortly after his return to Virginia, Thomas was asked by Washington to become Secretary of State, which meant moving to New York, the current national capital.

Polly was going back to live at Eppington, and would continue her education, albeit probably not as enlightened an education as she had gotten in Paris. But Thomas concluded that 17-year-old Patsy had nothing more to learn from “mere city education.” She had two options: live at Eppington with her Aunt and Uncle Eppes and learn what she needed to know about running a plantation household from her aunt, or get married. It’s unclear why she chose the latter, but she did, and within a couple of months of arriving back in America, Patsy was engaged to her cousin, Thomas Mann Randolph Jr.

Because we already have one main character named Thomas this season, from here on out I’ll refer to Patsy’s husband as Tom. So Thomas is Thomas Jefferson, Tom is Thomas Mann Randolph Jr. Got it? Great.

Technically, Patsy and Tom were third cousins. Her paternal grandmother, Jane Randolph, had been first cousins with Tom’s paternal grandfather, William Randolph. Tom was the eldest son of Thomas Mann Randolph and Ann Cary Randolph. He had nine siblings—two brothers and seven sisters. His mother had recently died, in March 1789.

Tom and Patsy had met at least twice before as children when the Jeffersons visited the Randolphs at their plantation called Tuckahoe. Family lore claims that Tom had visited Patsy in Paris and that’s where they fell in love, but there’s no evidence for that. He had gone to school in Edinburgh, Scotland, so it’s maybe not as far-fetched as it sounds for him to go to Paris. But like I said, there’s no evidence to support that. Tuckahoe was one of the stops the Jeffersons made on their way from Norfolk harbor back to Monticello, so Patsy and Tom probably renewed their youthful friendship on that visit.

Tom’s sister Judith was married on December 31, 1789, and it’s possible that the Jeffersons were invited. It’s also possible that Judith’s wedding inspired Tom and Patsy, because they were engaged shortly afterward. Judith was only 17 when she married, which was young even by Virginia standards. Prior to her death, Judith and Tom’s mother Ann had tried to delay her daughter’s marriage, with many wise words about what a monumental decision it was.

Ann didn’t want her seven daughters to marry “‘till they were old enough to form a proper judgment of Mankind, well knowing that a Woman’s happiness depends intirely [sic] on the Husband she is united to. The risk is doubled when they marry very young [because] young people cannot have a sufficient knowledge of the World to teach them the necessity of making a proper allowance for the foibles…of Humanity [and] when the delirium of love is over, and Reason is allowed to reascend her Throne…if they are not so happy, as to find in each other a similarity of Temper, and good qualities enough to excite esteem and Friendship, they must be wretched without a remedy.” Remember, no divorce back than. 

Patsy was 17, the same age as Judith, and Tom was only 21, so they were both too young to be making important decisions about marriage. Why Thomas Jefferson let his beloved eldest daughter rush into marriage at a young age is anyone’s guess. He certainly had no ambitions for Patsy greater than marriage and motherhood, but there also was no reason for her to hurry into it. But he did nothing to delay the intended marriage, and everything to hasten it.

And so, on February 23, 1790, Patsy Jefferson married Tom Randolph at Monticello. There’s no record of their wedding aside from one of Thomas’s characteristically bland diary notations, “My daughter Martha is this day married to Thos. Mann Randolph junr.” 

You’ll note that he called her Martha there, rather than Patsy. Upon her marriage Patsy began going by Martha, and from that point on, Thomas referred to her as Martha or “my daughter Randolph.” Her husband Tom generally called her Patsy, but outside the family she was now known as Martha or Mrs. Randolph. So from this point forward, we’re going to call her Martha as well.

The newlyweds’ fathers endowed them with a good deal of property upon their marriage. Thomas Randolph gave Tom a 950-acre plantation called Varina in Henrico County, along with “40 negroes…belonging to the same tract and the stocks and utensils thereto also belonging.” Thomas Jefferson gave Martha 1000 acres in Bedford County and “all the stock of work horses, cattle, hogs and sheep and the plantation utensils” on that land. 

This acreage was part of the Poplar Forest plantation, which you may recall from episode 3.3 is where the Jeffersons spent six weeks hiding from the British Army during the war. Along with the land, Martha received five enslaved families who already lived at Poplar Forest, plus one more enslaved family of seven who were currently at Monticello, but would have to relocate to Poplar Forest.

After the wedding, the Randolphs set out for a round of family visits. Thomas traveled with them to Richmond, and then he departed for New York. Polly was also with them, and they left her at Eppington after visiting there.

The question of where the Randolphs would live was thornier than it should have been. The traditional option would have been for them to live at Tom’s plantation, Varina, which was close to Tuckahoe but far from Monticello. There was no suitable house at Varina yet, so Martha stayed at Eppington with Polly, and Tom started farming and building a house at Varina. 

As early as April 1790, only a couple of months after their marriage, Martha basically began plotting to not have to move to Varina. She enlisted the help of her father, who also would have been happier to have her close to Monticello, even though he technically lived in New York now, as secretary of state. 

Tom and Martha lived at Varina through the late spring and summer of 1790, but Henrico County was much hotter than Albemarle County, which was where Monticello was located. Albemarle was known for the “freshness and elasticity in the air.” By mid-summer, suffering excessively from the Henrico County heat, the Randolphs were in agreement that Albemarle County would be preferable. 

Thomas spent September and October 1790 at Monticello, and invited the Randolphs and Polly to join him, which they did. When Thomas returned to his government post in November, Martha, Tom, and Polly all stayed at Monticello. By this point, Martha was four months pregnant with her first child, so it was probably a relief for her to remain in the familiar surroundings of her childhood home.

Except that Martha was now in charge of running her childhood home, and she had not been properly prepared for this responsibility. Her mother had never taught her the ways of running a plantation household, and she certainly hadn’t learned it at boarding school in Philadelphia or at the convent school in Paris. She did the best she could and tried to learn by doing. Years later she would recall that she acquired “the arts of housewifery with pain & difficulty, by untiring perseverance, so soon as [I] was placed in a situation which rendered a knowledge of them essential for the comfort of others.”

By January 1791, Martha felt that she had finally mastered her new role as plantation mistress, writing to Thomas, “Nothing comes in or goes out without my knowledge and I believe there is as little waste as possible.” She oversaw the kitchen, smokehouse, chicken coops, and butchering of livestock. Slaves did the actual work, of course. She also was in charge of Polly’s education, which kept her quite busy.

On January 23, 1791, Martha gave birth to her first child, a girl. As we know from past seasons, women generally had their female relatives attend to them during childbirth. But Martha’s mother was dead, and her only sister was young. So she had to rely on extended family instead. Tom went to fetch his aunt, Mary Randolph Fleming, but he was still on this long-distance errand when Martha went into labor a month early. So a neighbor, Mary Walker Lewis, assisted Martha with the birth instead. Mary was a mother of twelve and an experienced nurse, so she was probably a good choice. Not that there was a choice.

Martha seems to have not suffered from childbirth as much as her late mother did, which was a relief to everyone. Aunt Mary Fleming stayed to help Martha learn how to nurse her infant and to help her recuperate. The child remained nameless for two months because the Randolphs wanted Thomas Jefferson to choose the name. We know Patsy was devoted to her father, but this seems like a bridge too far. And it seems surprising that Tom would have gone along with this, but he was unusually close to Thomas Jefferson as well. His relationship with his father was strained, and Jefferson had been a mentor to him for some years, well before he married Martha.

So after much slow correspondence between Monticello and Philadelphia, where the federal government was now located, Jefferson decided on the name Anne, which had been Tom’s mother’s name, and also was a family name on Martha’s side. Martha and Tom added the middle name Cary, which had been Tom’s mother’s maiden name. So their first child was Anne Cary Randolph.

The Randolphs remained at Monticello throughout 1791. Polly continued to live there and be educated by Martha. But she also helped with housekeeping. Tom’s youngest sister Virginia also lived with them, but she was only four or five years old. It’s not made clear by the biographers why Virginia lived with Martha and Tom, but Tom’s widowed father had remarried a MUCH younger woman at the end of 1790, and I get the sense that maybe this woman didn’t want to be saddled with raising her husband’s young daughter.

Throughout 1791, negotiations were on-going between Tom, his father, and Thomas Jefferson regarding a potential home for Martha and Tom. Tom’s father owned a large plantation called Edgehill, which was only a few miles from Monticello. Thomas Jefferson wanted Thomas Mann Randolph to sell a portion of it to his son Tom, so Tom and Martha could live there. In January 1792, this transaction was finally completed, and the Randolphs now had a property in the vicinity of Monticello. But there was no suitable house on this new property, so they all continued to live at Monticello.

In September 1792, Martha gave birth to her second child, a boy they named Thomas Jefferson Randolph. Because what this season definitely needs is more people named Thomas. Presumably it didn’t take them two months to come up with that one.

In November 1793, Tom’s father died, leaving behind a huge estate, and massive debts. Also, an infant son (maddeningly also named Thomas Mann Randolph) who had been named as the heir to Tuckahoe, supplanting Tom, who should have inherited the flagship plantation because he was the eldest son. Instead, Tom was saddled with being co-executor of his father’s will, along with his brother William, which he referred to as “an invidious, dangerous, and difficult [job].”

Thomas Jefferson resigned as secretary of state on December 31, 1793 and headed home to Monticello. He had been home earlier that year in September and had brought Polly with him and left her there, perhaps knowing that he wouldn’t be staying long in Philadelphia when he went back. At the age of 15, Polly’s formal education was now at an end.

Martha and Tom spent the mid-1790s bouncing between Monticello and Varina. In September 1794, Martha gave birth to her third child and second daughter, Ellen Wayles Randolph, at Monticello. Tom continued farming at Varina, but also became a justice of the peace in April 1794, which was a prestigious appointment. When Thomas Jefferson was sworn in as Vice President in March 1797, Tom mostly took over the management of the Jefferson plantations in addition to his own, so he kept quite busy.

The mid-1790s were also a challenge for Tom’s health. He had never been a robust child or young man, and he suffered from various ailments including a skin disorder exacerbated by the summer heat in Henrico County, dysentery in July 1793, and what might have been gout in 1794. He spent a lot of time traveling to try to alleviate his health problems. He went to Boston and New York, leaving Martha and the children behind at Monticello. Then in July 1795, Martha, Tom, and baby Ellen set out for the warm springs in Western Virginia. This will be familiar to you from season one when all the Washington relatives who had tuberculosis tried “taking the waters” without any effect.

Sadly, while they were on their way to the warm springs, Ellen, who was not quite 1 year old, died suddenly. This was their first (and only, as it would happen) child to die in infancy, so it must have been a devastating loss. What’s weird though is that they didn’t all turn around and immediately go back to Monticello. They sent baby Ellen’s body back to Monticello to be buried, but Martha and Tom continued on to the warm springs. Maybe Tom was so ill that they deemed it necessary to continue their journey, but it still seems like a weird choice.

Martha’s responsibilities during this first decade of marriage primarily involved running the plantation houses, looking out for the health of her children and husband, and managing the education of her children as they got older. Her education had been specifically tailored toward preparing her to educate her own children, and she seems to have taken great pride in this responsibility. In one letter to her father, she wrote “I have lost my relish for what is usually deemed pleasure, and duties incompatible with it have surplanted [sic] all other enjoyments in my breast—the education of my Children to which I have long devoted every moment that I could command.”

She did worry that her two elder children, Anne and Jeff, which is thankfully what they called the young Thomas Jefferson Randolph, were not good enough students, writing to her father that they “are uncommonly backward in every thing much more so than were many others who have not had half the pains taken with them.” Although little Ellen was “wonderfully apt, the two others excite serious anxiety with regard to their intellect.” 

I should clarify that she’s not referring to Ellen, the baby who died in 1795. She had another daughter in October 1796, and they gave her the same name as her dead sister: Ellen Wayles Randolph. You may recall that Thomas and Patty Jefferson did the same thing with their two daughters named Lucy Elizabeth Jefferson. It was a common, if somewhat morbid, practice.

In October 1797, Polly Jefferson married John Wayles Eppes, who went by Jack. He and Polly were first cousins, and they had known each other well as children, because Jack’s parents were the Uncle and Aunt Eppes of Eppington where Polly had lived when Thomas and Patsy first went to Paris. You’ll recall that Aunt Eppes was Elizabeth “Betsy” Wayles, one of Patty Wayles Jefferson’s half sisters from her father’s second marriage. She had married one of Patty’s Eppes cousins. So many cousin marriages in this family.

In January 1800, just about 10 years after their wedding, Martha and Tom finally moved into their own home at their Edgehill plantation, just a few miles from Monticello. Up until this point they had been living either at Monticello itself, which was currently under construction thanks to Thomas’s never-ending ideas for improving the property, or in a too-small residence on the Varina plantation. Maybe it was a relief for Martha to finally be in her own home, or maybe she would have rather stayed at Monticello to be closer to her father. Martha had given birth again in July 1799, to another daughter, this one named Cornelia Jefferson Randolph. So the Randolphs now had four living children: three girls and one boy.

It wouldn’t have much mattered if she had stayed at Monticello—her father wasn’t going to be there much. In February 1801, Thomas Jefferson was elected president by the House of Representatives on the 35th ballot after the Electoral College had resulted in a tie between Jefferson and Aaron Burr. So Thomas would be moving to the capital city of Washington to serve as president.

What did this mean for Martha? Not much, honestly. She and her family would not be relocating to Washington, and she would have no official role as the president’s daughter. But the fact that Thomas had no wife meant that Martha would occasionally act as hostess on her father’s behalf, which is the whole reason we’re spending more than half of this season talking about her.

Next week, we’ll cover the presidential years and learn more about how Martha helped her father with his social responsibilities.

Thanks for listening to this episode. It was produced by me, and the music is by Matthew Dull.