Hello, and welcome to America’s First Ladies. I’m your host, Risa Weaver-Enion.
Episode 3.6 The President’s Daughter
We left off last week in February 1801, when Thomas Jefferson found out he had been elected president by the House of Representatives, to whom the U.S. Constitution gives that responsibility if there’s an Electoral College tie. He would have to live in Washington City, where the President’s House was located. We heard about the unfinished state of the new residence in season 2 when John and Abigail Adams were the first couple to inhabit it at the end of 1800. By the time Thomas moved it, it wasn’t in much better shape.
Washington itself wasn’t much to speak of either. As Thomas began his presidency, Washington had about 200 houses and some government buildings. When compared to Philadelphia, it was tiny, with only about 500 families and 300 government officials in residence. Even Richmond, Virginia, never anyone’s idea of a cosmopolitan city, had over 5000 citizens and could afford some semblance of society. Two years into Thomas’s first term, a visitor to Washington said, “The Federal city is in reality neither town nor village. …There sits the President…like a pelican in the wilderness, or a sparrow upon the housetop.”
There wasn’t much in Washington to entice Martha or Polly, now going by Maria since her marriage a few years prior, to visit the capital city. And besides, Martha was much too busy. The Randolph family finances were not in good shape. Tom’s father had encumbered the estate with many debts, and ever since his father’s death, Tom had been struggling to manage the estates, pay off the debts, and provide for his sisters under the terms of his father’s will.
Martha was aware of all of this, and tried her best to economize and help Tom manage the various estates. With her father away in Washington, Martha was also taking on a lot of responsibility for managing Monticello. Add to that the education of her four small children, plus being pregnant, and she had her hands full. Martha gave birth in August 1801 to her sixth child overall (and fifth surviving child), a girl named Virginia Jefferson Randolph. She now had five children under the age of 11.
Thomas pressed both of his daughters to come to Washington, but Polly/Maria had also given birth in 1801, and was preoccupied with her first child, a son named Francis Wayles Eppes. Thomas’s daughters were busy living their lives as wives and mothers, which is exactly what he had always intended for them. His reasons for wanting them in Washington probably had more to do with his loneliness as a bachelor president than with wanting them to be involved in the Washington scene.
In fact, Thomas had very negative views of women interacting in politics. I’m going to quote a long passage from Cynthia Kierner’s book, Martha Jefferson Randolph: Daughter of Monticello, which includes several internal quotes from Jefferson. Hopefully it won’t be confusing when read aloud.
“Martha and her sister…knew that their father often disapproved of politically minded women. In Paris, he balanced his admiration and respect for Abigail Adams with disdain for French women who talked politics with men in their salons or, worse still, sought to influence the government and its functionaries. Jefferson condemned elite and educated French salonnières as well as plebian women who led bread riots in the streets of Paris, and he eventually blamed Queen Marie-Antoinette’s influence over the king for ‘plung[ing] the world into crimes and calamities which will forever stain the pages of modern history.’
During his years in Paris, Jefferson took comfort in the notion that American women were altogether domestic and ‘too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics.’ Arguing that women’s involvement in politics was detrimental both to the polity and to their own happiness, he smugly declared that female influence ‘does not endeavour to extend itself in our country beyond the domestic line.’ Committed to preserving his daughters’ American identity and attributes, Jefferson must have shared these opinions with them from time to time.”
So yeah, Thomas Jefferson was a sexist and possibly a misogynist too. Good times.
Thomas did away with many of the social conventions that had been established during the presidency of George Washington and continued during John Adams’s tenure. You may recall from seasons 1 and 2 that there was a weekly levée for gentlemen and a weekly Drawing Room Reception for ladies. Both of these had somewhat been modeled on traditions at the British and French courts, which is exactly why Thomas hated them so much.
One of the starkest divides between the Federalists (Washington, Adams, Hamilton, etc.) and the Republicans (Jefferson, Madison, Burr, etc.) was that the Republicans thought the Federalists had adopted and implemented too many monarchical elements into United States government. At some point during his stay in Paris, Thomas had written in a letter to George Washington, “I was much an enemy to monarchy before I came to Europe. I am ten thousand times more so since I have seen what they are.”
Thomas thought the levées and Drawing Room receptions were elitist and afforded women too much opportunity to mix with politicians and exert influence and, god forbid, have opinions. He wanted to steer Washington society into a more domestic feel, closer to the way he ran Monticello. And for that, he wanted his daughters.
As Cynthia Kierner puts it, “In sum, the president wanted his daughters to come to Washington to help him domesticate the capital’s official society. When women attended his presidential dinners, their roles, which replicated gender distinctions prevalent at Monticello and other elite American domiciles, reflected his priorities. …
He seated a dozen or fewer guests at a round table to facilitate conversation and signify a rough equality among diners. Because he…believed that the society of virtuous women made men more agreeable and temperate, he sometimes relied on a feminine presence to encourage civility. Having served their function, the ladies then withdrew with their hostess, leaving the men to their political business. Women’s ideal role at these events, then, was essentially domestic, therapeutic, and ornamental.”
He often relied on Dolley Madison, wife of secretary of state and future president James Madison, to fill the hostess role. We’ll hear a lot more about Dolley Madison next season.
But then, Thomas got his wish, and his daughters finally came to Washington. And it couldn’t have come at a better time. On September 1, 1802, a Federalist newspaper, the Richmond Recorder, published an accusation related to Thomas and Sally Hemings. “It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is SALLY. … By this wench Sally, our president has several children. … The AFRICAN VENUS is said to officiate, as housekeeper at Monticello.”
Leaving aside all the racist and sexist verbiage in this announcement, it was the first time the rumors and whisperings of an affair between Thomas Jefferson and one of his slaves had been publicly proclaimed. And the author of the proclamation was James Callender, a former ally of Thomas’s, which perhaps made the accusations more believable. Thomas refused to dignify the accusation with a response, and most people were inclined to believe or disbelieve it depending on whether they were a Federalist or a Republican. But it was a good time for Thomas’s daughters to come to Washington and give him the veneer of respectable father and family man.
On November 17, 1802, Martha, Maria, 10-year-old Jeff, and 6-year-old Ellen set out from Virginia, taking five days to reach Washington. We don’t have any surviving correspondence of the sisters’ to describe what they did while in Washington, but we do have some accounts of people who met them during their time there.
Shortly after their arrival, they joined a dinner party with their father, James and Dolley Madison, and the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe. They also attended a dinner party where the guests were mostly Federalists—I’m not sure what the circumstances were that prompted Thomas to host a bunch of people from the opposite political party— and Martha and Maria were described by one guest as “well-accomplished…very delicate and tolerably handsome.” They also attended the large New Year’s Day open house reception, which apparently was one tradition that Thomas was unable to get rid of.
Margaret Bayard Smith, the wife of Republican newspaper editor Samuel Harrison Smith, described Martha as “one of the most lovely women I have ever met with. … Her manners [were] so frank and affectionate, that you know her at once, and feel perfectly at ease with her.”
Thomas and his daughters also attended religious services weekly during their six-week visit, which helped counter Federalist accusations that Thomas was an atheist. All in all, Martha and Maria were the perfect set pieces to allow Thomas to project the public image he wanted, and to offset the salacious accusations of his opponents.
At the end of December 1802, Tom arrived in Washington to retrieve his wife, children, and sister-in-law. They arrived back at Edgehill on January 10. Martha and Maria both spent most of 1803 pregnant, and both of their husbands decided to run for Congress. Jack was running unopposed, so it was probably not all that surprising when he won. Tom ran against a man who had only narrowly won his previous election, and Tom also won.
Tom and Jack both had to be in Washington for the beginning of the 1803-04 legislative session. At that time, Congress met for one short session. It began sometime between October and December and ran until March or April of the following year. Most Congressional wives did not join their husbands in Washington. Cynthia Kierner lays out the difficulties, “Wives with grown children or who had daughters of marriageable age sometimes came to the capital for the social season, but the boardinghouse life of a member of Congress in a city with few amenities was not well suited to nurturing and educating youngsters.
At least equally important were the costs of moving the whole family to Washington and maintaining two households, coupled with the loss of women’s domestic productivity and oversight of the family’s resources at home. For most congressional families, the disadvantages of coming to the capital outweighed the potential benefits. Thus, in 1807, presumably a typical year, only 9 of 164 members of Congress brought their wives with them to Washington.”
Thus, Tom and Martha were not together in November 1803 when she gave birth for the seventh time, to another daughter, this one named Mary Jefferson Randolph. A few months later, on February 15, 1804, Maria gave birth to her second child, a daughter named Maria Jefferson Eppes. So technically, the child now had the exact same name as the mother.
But much like her mother and grandmother before her, Maria did not tolerate childbirth well. She was feverish and unable to produce milk after the baby’s birth, so Martha nursed both her infant daughter and her sister’s. Martha also watched closely over her ill sister, prompting Ellen Jefferson Randolph to recall years later, “the tender devoted care of my mother, how she watched over her sister, and with what anxious affection she anticipated her every want.”
Jack had left Washington in a rush when news of the baby’s arrival reached him. Then Thomas left Washington to join his family and his ailing daughter at Monticello, where she had been moved, hoping the mountain air would aid her recovery. On April 17, 1804, Maria “Polly” Jefferson Eppes died. Of Thomas and Patty’s six children, only Martha remained.
The loss of her sister was a debilitating blow to Martha. Her grief manifested itself in physical symptoms such as cramps, spasms, and difficulty breathing. She seems to have remained ill for most of 1804. Thomas, clearly worried about losing his only living child, wrote to her “Consider my dear Martha to what degree, and how many persons have the happiness of their lives depending on you, and consider it as a duty to take every care of yourself that you would think of for the dearest of those about you.”
By April 1805, when Tom returned from Washington, Martha had recovered and had even regained all the weight she had lost during her illness. Thomas Jefferson was reelected as president in the election of 1804, and once Martha had regained her health, he began pressing her to come to Washington again, this time with all her children and for a longer stay.
On November 23, 1805, Martha, Tom, their six children, and a handful of servants left Edgehill and traveled by carriage to Washington. Martha was pregnant again, so they took seven days to make the trip. The family stayed in the upstairs rooms at the President’s House, and Thomas arranged for a rented carriage to be made available to them during their stay. Their financial situation had not improved, and Thomas knew they were worried about money. Thomas was himself in debt, but he wanted to make sure his beloved daughter was provided for. He told Martha to “consider every thing which your self or the family will want here as to be furnished by me so that the visit may not at all affect Mr. Randolph’s pecuniary arrangements.”
Washington had grown a bit since Martha’s previous visit three years before. There were now about 5000 residents, more homes, and more government buildings. The Capitol Building was still under construction, but progress was being made. There were now a few churches, three market-houses, and a jail. There were even some artisans making boots, shoes, hats, and other items. Previously, everything one needed had to be purchased elsewhere, usually in Philadelphia.
Martha and her children once again played their role in the tableau of domestic happiness that Thomas wanted to portray. Margaret Bayard Smith described a visit to the President’s House in the spring of 1806: when she arrived, the president and his daughter were sitting on a sofa with the “lovely children playing around them.” One child had her arms around the president’s neck, while two others were sitting on his knees. The president was “in one of his most communicative social moods.”
Martha and her children were in Washington for the entirety of the 1805-1806 Congressional session, in which her husband Tom was once again serving. During this time, Thomas hosted 63 dinners, sometimes as many as four in one week. He even hosted a dinner on the day that Martha gave birth upstairs to her eighth child, a boy they named James Madison Randolph. Presumably she missed that dinner.
James Madison Randolph was born on January 17, 1806. One year prior, on January 19, 1805, Sally Hemings had also given birth to a son. His name: James Madison Hemings. Note to Thomas Jefferson: if you want to discourage people from thinking that you’re impregnating one of your slaves, maybe don’t give your illegitimate son the name of one of your best friends and famous political allies. And definitely don’t then let your daughter name your grandson with the same name. For real though, dude.
Because Martha and other family members were not included on official guest lists prepared for presidential dinners, it’s hard to say exactly how many of Thomas’s dinners she attended. And her daughter Anne, who turned 15 in January 1806, may have served as unofficial hostess at some of the dinners Martha couldn’t attend while recovering from childbirth. We know that both Martha and Anne were present at a dinner on December 9, 1805, because faithful diarist John Quincy Adams noted, “Mrs. Randolph, the President’s daughter, and her daughter were the only ladies [present].”
Martha returned to Edgehill in the spring of 1806, after Congress adjourned on April 21. She had arrived in Washington with six children; she returned with seven. And it wouldn’t be too long before she had eight.
After the legislative session that ended in the spring of 1807, Tom decided not to run for Congress again. Martha became pregnant again later that year.
Most of the Randolph children were girls: Anne, Ellen, Cornelia, Virginia, and Mary. Jeff and James were the only boys, and James was still a baby in 1807. Anne was 16, so her education was probably mostly complete by this point, but Martha still had her hands full with her other daughters.
The state of Virginia and the United States as a whole had a good number of private schools and academies for girls by the early 19th century, but the Randolph girls continued to be educated at home. One concern may have been cost, since the Randolphs had never-ending money woes. But also, considering how well educated Martha was, she may have been more qualified to educate her daughters than the headmistresses of the girls’ schools were. Not only was Martha a source of knowledge for the Randolph girls, but they had access to Thomas’s library at Monticello, which contained more than 6000 volumes. One of the reasons Thomas Jefferson died in debt is that he liked to buy things. And what he liked to buy more than anything else was books.
Martha taught her daughters to read and write, as well as French and Latin, which Martha had learned at the Panthemont convent school. The girls also studied music, becoming proficient at the harpsichord, just like their mother and grandmother. They also learned geography, history, mathematics, and poetry.
Martha used stories to teach her daughters lessons about life. She had a lot of life experiences to draw from, often using stories about girls she had known in Paris to make whatever point she was trying to convey. Years later, her daughter Ellen recalled that the stories, “combined for us, all the interest of fiction with the force of truth. The facts were undoubted and the persons so far removed from us by time and distance that although we had…an intimate personal acquaintance with them, we could have no feelings personal to ourselves when they were held up before us as patterns and warnings. The English Misses and French Mademoiselles became to us objects of emulation or warning as effectually as if they had been placed bodily before our eyes and observation.”
But remembering how ill-prepared she had been to be a housewife and plantation mistress, Martha also made sure to teach her daughters what they would need to know to fill those roles. Much like her own father, Martha had no greater ambitions for her daughters other than becoming wives and mothers.
Jeff, on the other hand, was sent to school. Several schools, actually. But much like Jack Custis and Wash Custis, he proved to be a lackadaisical student. You may remember that Martha had been worried about his intellectual acumen and potential for learning ever since he was a boy. Thomas offered to pay to send Jeff to study science at the University of Pennsylvania, but Martha thought it would not be a good use of money.
She wrote, “With regard to Jefferson our objections were incurring so great an expense with out any certain benefit. His education is too back ward I am afraid to enable him to profit by any instructions conveyed by lectures and his indolence so great as to render it doubtfull whether he can be trusted to himself as much as he would be [away from home]. …it would be wrong to incur a certain evil [meaning debt] for a very uncertain benefit and perhaps the danger of giving expense for one who certainly has very little prospect at present of any thing more than bare competency.”
Those are pretty harsh words for a mother. But at least she was being honest. Spoiler alert: Jeff goes on to be arguably the most successful of her offspring.
Thomas was having none of it though, and he insisted on paying for Jeff to attend the University of Pennsylvania. In October 1808, Jeff left for Philadelphia, stopping to visit his grandfather in Washington along the way.
That’s not all that happened in 1808. In May, Sally Hemings gave birth to what would be her final child, a boy named Thomas Eston Hemings, who was named after one of Thomas Jefferson’s cousins. Seriously guys, it’s like you’re not even trying to keep this relationship a secret.
In July, Martha gave birth to her ninth child, another boy, this one named Benjamin Franklin Randolph. So for those keeping track, her three sons are Thomas Jefferson Randolph, James Madison Randolph, and Benjamin Franklin Randolph. Martha confessed to her friend Dolley Madison that she hoped this child would be her last, but it was not to be.
And in September 1808, following in her mother’s footsteps, 17-year-old Anne Cary Randolph married Charles Lewis Bankhead at Monticello. I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing that Thomas’s diary for that date merely stated, “On this day, my eldest granddaughter Anne married at Monticello,” or something equally understated.
Thomas Jefferson’s service as President was also coming to an end. Following the custom set by George Washington, Thomas did not stand for reelection to a third term. Instead, the election of 1808 was won by his close friend and secretary of state, James Madison. More on him next season.
So to recap the presidential years, Thomas served 8 years as president, and Martha made two visits to Washington: one six-week visit during his first term, and one five-month visit during his second term. Honestly, that’s not a lot of time spent in Washington. But hey, she was busy! Maybe it wasn’t enough time to justify spending more than half of this season on the younger Martha Jefferson, but like I said after Patty Jefferson died, it would have been a really short season if we had just covered her.
Now, we’re not finished with Martha Jefferson Randolph just yet. She lives for another 27 years after her father leaves Washington. She’s still got three more babies to give birth to, for crying out loud! So let’s carry on.
Shortly after James Madison was inaugurated as the fourth U.S. president in March 1809, Thomas Jefferson returned home to his beloved Monticello, where his devoted daughter had been making preparations for his return. Martha and her daughters had essentially moved into Monticello, which would end up causing no small amount of marital discord between her and Tom. I’ll let Cynthia Kierner set the stage,
“[F]or Martha, her father’s retirement posed both opportunities and potential problems. On the one hand, she looked forward to spending more time with Jefferson once he returned to private life. She truly enjoyed his company, and despite the cramped sleeping quarters her family occupied on Monticello’s upper floor, they probably appreciated the house’s comparative spaciousness overall. On the other hand, Thomas Mann Randolph, who had farms of his own to tend, came to resent the removal of his family to Monticello.”
Both Jefferson and Randolph were in debt, although the younger Tom was probably in a worse financial position. It was a source of stress for Martha that both her father and her husband were in financial difficulties, but her ability to address the situation was limited. She did consent to the sale of the land her father had given her upon her marriage to Tom—this was property in far away Bedford County. They sold most of the land, and gave the rest to Charles Bankhead as a belated marriage settlement on behalf of their daughter Anne.
One reason Jefferson was in financial difficulties was the vast sums he had spent over the decades improving, tearing down, and re-improving Monticello. By 1809, the 11,000 square foot mansion was essentially complete. Living at Monticello were Thomas, Martha, Tom, their eight children, including married Anne and her husband, Thomas’s sister Harriet and her children, plus 16 of Tom’s slaves in addition to the regular complement of Monticello slaves, which of course included Sally Hemings and her children. There’s no doubt they made good use of all 11,000 of those square feet of space.
The daily routine at Monticello was one that will sound familiar. Everyone breakfasted together at 8 am, then Thomas went to his library and Tom went to Edgehill to work on his farm. Guests were left to read, walk, or ride, while Martha and the girls did light housework and then began their daily educational tasks. The family reassembled around 4 or 5 pm for dinner. After dinner, Thomas usually played with his grandchildren while Martha attended to various household tasks. They reunited for tea and a light meal around 9 pm, and then everyone went to bed.
In the summer of 1809, Martha and Tom became grandparents for the first time when Anne gave birth to her first child, a premature baby boy who was never named because he died shortly after birth. Anne inherited more of her grandmother and aunt’s inability to bear pregnancy and childbirth than her mother’s sturdy constitution, and she was confined to bed for at least a month after the birth and death of her child.
Martha was also pregnant again in 1809, and she gave birth to her tenth child overall, and ninth living child, Meriwether Lewis Randolph, in January 1810. And yes, the child was named after the famous explorer Meriwether Lewis of Lewis and Clark. He was a neighbor of theirs in Virginia and they had known him for years.
Another addition to the household came in late 1809 when Francis Wayles Eppes came to stay at Monticello for many months. Just as a reminder, this is Polly/Maria’s eldest child. After she died in 1804, her widowed husband Jack remarried, and then the daughter Polly had given birth to shortly before dying also died. So Francis was Thomas and Martha’s last living connection to Polly.
In December 1810, Martha and Tom became grandparents again when Anne gave birth to another boy, who lived. They named him John Warner Bankhead, and shortly after his birth, Charles purchased a plantation called Carlton, which was not far from Monticello. The Bankhead family moved out of Monticello at that point.
In the summer of 1811, Martha suffered a miscarriage during the fourth month of a pregnancy, but then she became pregnant again in 1813 and gave birth to Septimia Anne Randolph on January 3, 1814. This was Martha’s 11th childbirth, and her tenth surviving child. She and Tom now had six daughters and four sons, ranging in age from newborn to 23.
Their eldest son, Jeff, was developing into a capable farmer and businessman. You may recall that when he was a child, Martha was concerned for his lack of aptitude, but it turns out he just wasn’t meant for book-learning. He was so capable, in fact, that his grandfather turned over management of Monticello to Jeff in 1815, which was another source of irritation for Tom, who felt like he was being passed over in favor of his son. Jealousy of one’s children is not a good look, Tom.
In March 1815, 22-year-old Jeff married 17-year-old Jane Hollins Nicholas, and they joined the rest of the extended family at Monticello. Jeff and Jane had a successful marriage, and would eventually have 13 children. Jeff’s older sister, Anne, on the other hand, was trapped in a marriage with an increasingly abusive and alcoholic husband, Charles Bankhead.
The prospects for the remaining Randolph daughters were not great. Most women of this time period attracted a promising husband by having a good deal of property to bring to the marriage, but the Randolphs' finances were such that there was no property to bestow on any of the younger girls.
Ellen, Cornelia, and Virginia were all teenagers in the mid-1810s, and at various times they went to Richmond or Washington to socialize in the hopes of meeting some eligible young man. Virginia needn’t have gone that far, for she had attracted the eye of Nicholas Trist, the grandson of Martha’s lifelong friend Elizabeth Trist, whom she had met in Philadelphia on her first visit there as a girl way back in 1782. Nicholas had been living at Monticello for a year, studying law with the great Thomas Jefferson and preparing to attend West Point military academy.
In 1818, the 18-year-old Nicholas wrote and asked Martha’s permission to propose to 17-year-old Virginia. After marrying young herself, and allowing her eldest daughter to marry young, it seems that Martha had finally learned her lesson. Her reply to Nicholas was that they were “both too young to be entangled by an engagement which will decide the happiness, or wretchedness of your lives.” Nicholas agreed to defer his proposal until he returned from West Point, “cherishing the hope that on my return, I may find the heart of Miss Virginia as free as mine shall be devoted, and that I may one day be entitled to the appellation of your Son.”
Also in 1818, Martha Jefferson Randolph gave birth to her 12th and final child, finally. She was 45 years old at the time, so it’s amazing that this child was healthy. It was another boy, and they named him George Wythe Randolph. I say “they named him” as if his parents named him. But George Wythe had been Thomas Jefferson’s legal mentor many years ago. It was no doubt yet another thorn in Tom Randolph’s side that his last two children were named for close friends of his father-in-law.
And that seems as good a place as any to wrap up this already overly long episode! Next week, we’ll say goodbye to Thomas Jefferson and follow Martha through mid-life, financial despair, and family drama.
Thanks for listening to this episode. It was produced by me, and the music is by Matthew Dull.
