Jefferson Page 3
However, tradition says that Mr. Jefferson was a good musician, and that he loved music there can be no doubt. “This is the favorite passion of my soul, and fortune has cast my lot in a country where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism.” It was something, certainly, to be so clearly aware of this. He played with Governor Fauquier and “two or three other amateurs in his weekly concerts.” The year before his marriage, he ordered a clavichord for Monticello, but almost immediately countermanded the order, saying, “I have since seen a Forte-piano and am charmed with it. Send me this instrument then instead of the clavichord: let the case be of fine mahogany, solid, not veneered, the compass from Double G to F in alt., a plenty of spare strings: and the workmanship of the whole very handsome and worthy the acceptance of a lady for whom I intend it.” Whether this was in appreciation of his sweetheart’s proficiency, or to tempt her to become more proficient, or both, no one knows. Tradition says, again, that his musical accomplishments, whatever they were, put him ahead of other suitors for the much-courted lady who became his wife, and that they fixed her choice.
The marriage took place on New Year’s Day, 1772; the marriage license-bond, drawn up in Mr. Jefferson’s own handwriting, is still in existence, calling for the payment “to our sovereign lord the King” of the sum of fifty pounds current money of Virginia, in case there should be found any “lawful cause to obstruct a marriage intended to be had and solemnized between the above-bound Thomas Jefferson and Martha Skelton, of the county of Charles City, widow.” The bond shows an odd momentary lapse of attention to his wife’s status, for he mechanically wrote in the usual word “spinster,” then crossed it out and wrote “widow.” His wife was the daughter of John Wayles, a prosperous lawyer. She was twenty-three years old, and had lived an uneventful life of two years with her first husband, Bathurst Skelton, by whom she had one child, a son who died in infancy. Her father died a year after her second marriage, and her inheritance, after the clearance of Mr. Wayles’s debts, which Mr. Jefferson observes “were very considerable,” came to an amount “about equal to my own patrimony, and consequently doubled the ease of our circumstances.”
While at college, Mr. Jefferson thought of building a house at Williamsburg. “No castle, though, I assure you,” he wrote John Page, “only a small house which shall contain a room for myself and another for you, and no more, unless Belinda should think proper to favour us with her company, in which case I will enlarge the place as much as she pleases.” But when Belinda’s whims disappeared from consideration, the plan disappeared too; and in 1769, just before his mother’s house at Shadwell burned down, he took steps toward making a home on the top of a small mountain which formed part of his estate in Albemarle, near the present city of Charlottesville. By the time of his marriage, he had completed a small structure here, a story-and-a-half brick pavilion, as the beginning of an ambitious architectural design; and thither he took his bride in a two-horse phaeton, from her home in the county of Charles City, a distance of one hundred miles over indescribable roads, in midwinter of one of the hardest seasons that Virginia had ever seen. Before leaving, he got out his pocket account-book and entered every item of expense that the wedding had cost him, including the fees he gave to the two officiating clergymen and some small fees to musicians and servants.
As they went up the country, the snow deepened until finally they were obliged to abandon the phaeton and go forward on horseback. The last eight miles of the journey lay over no better than a kind of bridle-path, two feet deep in snow; and when they reached Monticello late at night, the pavilion was deserted, there was no fire in it and nothing to make one of, nothing to eat or drink save part of a bottle of wine that they rummaged from a shelf behind some books, and not a servant anywhere within call. The general historical value of Virginian family tradition may not too unfairly be suggested by the statement given out on authority of the Jeffersons’ oldest daughter, that “tempers too sunny to be ruffled by many ten times as serious annoyances in after life, now found but sources of diversion in these ludicrous contretemps, and the horrible dreariness was lit up with song and merriment and laughter.”
Mrs. Jefferson somehow managed to live ten years. The Marquis de Chastellux, who visited Monticello in the year of her death, speaks of her as “a mild and amiable wife.” She was presumably literate, and her husband was an indefatigable letter-writter. His part in public affairs from 1772 to 1782 kept him a good deal away from home, and a considerable correspondence must have passed between them. Of this, however, nothing remains. Except for entries in some household accounts which may have been hers, and an appeal addressed to the women of Virginia during the Revolution, there is probably not a line of her writing in existence. Mr. Jefferson’s published letters refer to her perhaps half-a-dozen times, and then usually to remark his anxiety over her persistent bad health. Mrs. Jefferson bore her first child a little less than ten months after her marriage, and the family register kept by Mr. Jefferson on a leaf of his prayer-book is a record of the progressive inanition that ended in her death:
Martha Jefferson was born September 27, 1772, at 1 o’clock A.M.
Jane Randolph Jefferson, born April 3, 1774, at 11 o’clock A.M. She died September——, 1775.
A son, born May 28, 1777, at 10 o’clock P.M. Died June 14, at 10 o’clock and 20 minutes A.M.
Mary Jefferson, born August 1, 1778, at I o’clock and 30 minutes A.M. Died April 17, 1804, between 8 and 9 P.M.
A daughter, born in Richmond, November 3, 1780, at 10 o’clock and 45 minutes P.M. Died April 15, 1781, at 10 o’clock A.M.
Lucy Elizabeth Jefferson, born May 8, 1782, at 1 o’clock A.M. Died ——,. 1784.
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Martha Wayles Jefferson died September 6, 1782, at 11 o’clock, 45 minutes A.M.
But if all Mr. Jefferson’s family correspondence lay open to view, no doubt it would have value only for its implications. Hide thy life, said Epicurus; and no one ever succeeded better than Thomas Jefferson at hiding his inner springs of sentiment. He was the most approachable and the most impenetrable of men, easy and delightful of acquaintance, impossible of knowledge. In matters of opinion, principle or public policy he was always ready to speak out, and did speak out, with a frankness sometimes astonishing; but in more intimate matters, especially in matters of affection and feeling, he never spoke out. Undoubtedly he had great regard for his father and mother, but he seldom mentions either. His memoirs say nothing of his mother, beyond giving record of her name and family; and the few words about his father are quite impersonal. His letters are silent about his mother, and speak of his father only once, by way of gratitude for having had him taught Greek and Latin. “I thank on my knees him who directed my early education,” he writes Dr. Priestley in 1800, “for having put into my possession this rich source of delight.” Even here one feels the sense of constriction and effort in the realm of the emotions; he does not say straight out, “I thank my father” in his usual plain style, but resorts to a Miltonian paraphrase. There is no doubt that he had an extraordinary faculty of attaching people to himself, though no one can know how he did it, and he has the record, remarkable under the circumstances, of never having forfeited an attachment; his few breaks, notably the one with John Adams, being but temporary, and healing without a mark. It is hard to see how affections as deep and strong as his undoubtedly were, can flow indefinitely without revealing some at least of their channels of communication; but in his case, there is no sign of them. Undoubtedly Mr. Jefferson loved his wife with an extraordinary depth of devotion. It must have been so, for there is a clear record that when she died he was inconsolable, and that he remained always quietly faithful to her memory, never finding room in his heart for any other woman. Probably she may have had her moments of understanding him, yet one is forced to wonder what their aggregate amounted to.
While she lived, this mild and amiable wife made her achievements, whatever they were, by indirection and the sacrifice of personality; and to e
arn the posthumous reward they got, they must have been considerable, though of a nature that puts them beyond any power of assessment. Her death, curiously, continued her in the rôle of achievement by indirection and sacrifice, for it determined her husband’s return to public life. Since his marriage in 1772, Mr. Jefferson had served in the Continental Congress, drafted the Declaration of Independence, served in the Virginia Assembly, done most of the work on the committee appointed to revise the laws of Virginia, and served two terms as Governor of Virginia. In 1782 he decided that he had done enough in public office to earn the right to uninterrupted enjoyment of “my family, my friends, my farm and books” thenceforth. He wrote a long letter to Monroe, protesting against the idea that the State had a right to commandeer indefinitely the political services of its members. This, he says, “would be slavery, and not that liberty which the Bill of Rights has made inviolable,” and for his part, he had a clear conscience about retiring. He had his own measure; he was aware that a person can best do, and should do, the kind of thing that really interests him. “Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science,” he told Dupont de Nemours, “by rendering them my supreme delight.” But just at the intended turn in his career, his wife died, leaving him in “the stupor of mind which had rendered me as dead to the world as was she whose loss occasioned it.” His scheme of life had been determined. “I had folded myself in the arms of retirement,” he wrote the Marquis de Chastellux three months later, “and rested all prospects of future happiness on domestic and literary objects. A single event wiped away all my plans, and left me a blank which I had not the spirits to fill up. In this state of mind an appointment from Congress found me, requiring me to cross the Atlantic,” as one of the commissioners to negotiate peace with Great Britain.
Monticello and its memories had become insupportable to him; his mind went back to the trip to Europe that he had promised himself so long ago, in the gay days of Belinda and his correspondence with John Page—the trip that, what with the uncongenial routine of revolutions, drafts of declarations, revising statutes, office-holding and the like, had never come off. He accepted the appointment, but even then the trip did not come off. Before his ship sailed, word came that the peace was already in a way to be concluded, and Congress recalled his appointment. But his scheme of life was now recast; he still had his seat in Congress; and, for good or ill, he put aside his plans for employing the rest of his days in the tranquil pursuits of science, with his family, his friends, his farm and books. What heart could be in it, without “the cherished companion of my life, in whose affections, unabated on both sides, I had lived the last ten years in unchequered happiness”? It was then nineteen years since that September night when, on his way back to Williamsburg, he wrote from Richmond to William Fleming, “Dear Will, I have thought of the cleverest plan of life that can be imagined. You exchange lands for Edgehill, or I mine for Fairfields, you marry Sukey Potter, I marry Rebecca Burwell, join and get a pole chair and a pair of keen horses, practise the law in the same courts, and drive about to all the dances in the county together. How do you like it?”
II
When Mr. Jefferson graduated from the society of Fauquier, Small and Wythe, set up for himself and brought his bride to Monticello, he brought with her a profession and a trade. He was a lawyer as well as a farmer, having been admitted to practice after going through his paces in Mr. Wythe’s office. He practised law but a very short time, however, only until Governor Fauquier’s successor, Lord Dunmore, of unpleasant memory, closed the Virginian courts; then he retired forever from the profession, closing out his practice to Edmund Randolph, whom Washington subsequently made Attorney-General. Being well-to-do, he could choose his practice, and having a distaste for the life of an advocate or jury lawyer, he became a consultant. He had little respect for the court lawyer’s attainments, having cut his eye-teeth on them some years before, when Patrick Henry, “the laziest man in reading I ever knew,” turned up at Williamsburg for a license to practise law on the strength of six weeks’ study, and actually got it, George Wythe being the only one of four examiners with conscience enough to refuse consent. Mr. Jefferson was circumspectly fascinated by Henry, as by some kind of living curiosity; he regularly shared his quarters with him when Henry came to Williamsburg to attend court. He was always just to Henry’s talents as a popular orator, and to the service he did in the revolutionary cause. He says that Henry’s gifts for spellbinding “were great indeed; such as I never heard from any other man. He appeared to me to speak as Homer wrote.” Yet it was sheer spellbinding. “I have frequently shut my eyes while he spoke, and when he was done asked myself what he had said, without being able to recollect a word of it.” Appreciating Henry fully, however, and really liking him, Mr. Jefferson had no respect for his professional type; and as the type increased and multiplied after its kind, this aversion was reinforced by an acute sense of the detriment done the profession. After retiring from practice, he writes Mr. Wythe that he thinks the bar of the General Court a good training-ground for judges, “if it be so regulated that science may be encouraged and may live there. But this can never be,” he goes on indignantly, “if an inundation of insects is permitted to come from the county courts and consume the harvest. . . . Men of science then (if there were to be any) would only be employed as auxiliary counsel in difficult cases. But can they live by that? Certainly not. The present members of that kind therefore must turn marauders in the county courts; and in future none will have leisure to acquire science.”
Experience, in short, bred the same squeamishness towards law that he entertained towards medicine—“it is not to physic that I object so much as to physicians”—even though he himself could afford to keep aloof from “the mob of the profession,” and even though all he knew about their temptations, fortunately, was by hearsay. As a consulting lawyer he did extremely well. His accounts show earnings of about three thousand dollars per year from his profession, as against something like two thousand dollars from his trade of farming; and this was a good income, for the time. But his distaste grew steadily, and even after he gave up practice, it kept on growing. His earlier experience in practical politics and in government-building, where he saw the worst degeneration of legal theory and practice, their frankest dissociation from anything resembling justice and the public good, increased his detestation of lawyers; and it was brought to full growth by the chicanery that he found in high triumphant progress on his return to America in 1789, after five years of ambassadorship in Europe. As he passed into old age, it became inveterate. In 1810, advising a namesake on the choice of an occupation, he remarks that if a physician ends his days conscious that he has saved some lives and not killed anybody through carelessness, he will have “the happy reflection of not having lived in vain; while the lawyer has only to recollect how many, by his dexterity, have been cheated out of their right and reduced to beggary.” If Congressmen talk too much, “how can it be otherwise,” he writes contemptuously in 1821, “in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?”
While his practice lasted, nevertheless, the disciple of Small brought to it all the scholarship, industry, precision and speed of a true “man of science,” as well as the touch of distinction and elevation which he contrived to put upon everything he did. Virginia had taken over English law in the gross, largely because the colonial lawyers—at all events, the “men of science” among them—already knew it, but chiefly, perhaps, because it was the only code written in a language that American lawyers could read. When the time came for Virginia to revise her statutes in conformity with her new political relations, Mr. Jefferson was a member of the Assembly. He took his seat in October, 1776. A month before this, he had resigned his seat in the Continental Congress, where he had already had some instructive experience with lawyers in their deliberative capacity. “As the old Congress always sat with closed doors,” said John Jay, years afte
rwards, “the public knew no more of what passed within than what it was deemed expedient to disclose.” When Mr. Jefferson left Congress, he also declined an appointment to go to France with Franklin to negotiate a treaty of alliance and commerce. To a man who liked preferment for its own sake, this appointment was flattering enough, but it was not otherwise an interesting commission. France had to be gotten into the war on the side of America, by hook or by crook, and in a hurry, too, for the military fortunes of the Revolution were at their lowest ebb; and Mr. Jefferson may reasonably have felt himself lacking in the peculiar gifts of persuasion and bargaining required for that kind of service. His own account of the matter, however, is not to be disparaged. His wife was ill—there was no doubt about that—and even Philadelphia, let alone Paris, was too far away from home. Besides, there were plenty of fish to be fried in Virginia. “I knew that our legislation, under the regal government, had many very vicious points which urgently required reformation, and I thought I could be of more use in forwarding that work.” So, for the next five years, he abandoned national interests and stuck to Virginia, always impatiently looking forward to the time when, having done what was to be done in helping his own State to weather through the period of war and reconstruction, he might call his “tour of service” finished for good and all.