America's First Daughter: A Novel (38 page)

“It ought to be enough,” I said.

But I feared it wouldn’t.

“W
E’LL CALL THE NEW BABY
V
IRGINIA
—Ginny for short,” Tom said, and I didn’t gainsay him, because I felt his disappointment. A son could help in the fields, but a daughter was another mouth to feed and another bride to dower. He had four daughters, a plantation deeply in debt, and failed crops. And so, at a time when I ought to have been filled with joy for the beautiful new daughter in my arms, I was still sick with worry.

That is, until the day came that I realized I couldn’t afford to be sick with worry.

It started with a cough. First Sally’s children, then my sister’s child, then mine. The illness spread so quickly that our flight from Monticello in the autumn came too late. “It’s the whooping cough,” Polly insisted, wringing her tiny hands. “I’d know that sound anywhere!” She’d been young when she’d taken the cough at Eppington, but she hadn’t forgotten. She’d survived the illness, but our little sister Lucy hadn’t. And at the memory, Polly’s eyes filled with tears.

What could I say to comfort her or myself when our children fell ill, one by one? My clever five-year-old Ellen, after composing her very first letter to her grandfather, promptly fell into a fever and slowly began to strangle with the rest. The children were afflicted with coughing fits that made their eyes bulge, their ribs ache, and their throats so raw they sometimes vomited blood and sobbed. My newborn baby turned blue in the face and gasped for breath. My Ellen and Cornelia both cuddled together under the last clean, dry blanket I had. In her delirium, Cornelia laughed and sang to some unseen spirit above her. But Ellen had the good sense to be gloomy and terrified by her own hallucinations.

“My God, they are
dying,
” Tom whispered when I passed him in the doorway to the nursery to fetch some honeyed water for the little ones to sip.

Unwilling to credit his whisper, I asked, “Would you do me the favor of fetching my cloak? The blankets and linens I washed aren’t dry yet. But I can keep the girls warm and covered with my cloak.”

Tom took a deep, shuddering breath, then dropped his face into his hands. “We’re going to lose them. Our precious baby girls.”

“We can’t think it,” I said, almost as weary as I was terrified. Then, edging past him, I hurried down the stairs and into the kitchen to scrape the last of our honey from its jar.

Tom was right behind me, his big frame all atremble, and he spoke in a panicked whisper, “I can’t think of anything else, Patsy. I dreamed it last night. Little coffins!”

How was I to hear such a thing and not sink to my knees? But I
couldn’t
sink to my knees, because our precious children needed me. “Please, Tom. Please stop.”

“It’s my curse, Patsy. Everything I do goes wrong. Everything I make withers away. Now my daughters,” he cried, grabbing hold of my shoulder and sobbing into my hair. “My
daughters
.”

He was so strong, so hardened from horse riding and laboring in the fields, that I couldn’t push him away if I tried. It wasn’t as if I didn’t want to cling to him. That I didn’t want to offer him solace—and receive it in return. But in his state, I knew Tom couldn’t help himself, or me.

Stroking his hair, I called to my son. “Jeff, fetch my cloak for the girls.”

A moment later, Jeff came into the kitchen. “They’ll only spit up on your cloak. Why not—” His eyes widened at the sight of his father weeping in my arms.

And Tom roared in a sudden rage that burned away all his tears like a brushfire. “Don’t you backtalk your mother!” Then my husband’s long arm snapped out, and a slap sent our boy reeling back, stumbling for balance.

“Tom!” I cried, half in disbelief as he tore himself away from me and grabbed up our boy by the shirt, pushing him against the wall. I couldn’t guess what had turned his mood so swiftly, but my voice came sharp like the crack of a musket. “
Tom
.”

My husband never laid a violent hand on our daughters—never seemed to take anything but delight in Ann, who cowered in the doorway, at the edge of tears. But Jeff worked my husband’s every last nerve. I suspected this time, it was simply that Tom couldn’t bear the thought that his son had seen him weep. He stood there, his chest heaving as he glowered at the scared little boy, then let him go with a shove. “Go do as your mother told you.”

With a hand to his stinging red cheek, Jeff ran off for my cloak. And I turned to Ann. “Your father is tired. Won’t you take him into the other room and read him one of the little newspaper stories Grandpapa cut out of the paper for you?”

Pretty Ann bobbed her head in obedience with a little hiccup before leading Tom out. And I was glad he went with her, even if half in a daze. For I was half in a daze myself. I turned back to my pitcher of honeyed water and stirred the honey into it, catching a glimpse of myself in the surface of the water once it stilled.

Then I took a deep breath as something snapped inside me. I’d told myself that Tom would one day recover from the blow of his father’s death and rejection. Just as my father had come through his madness. That given enough love and time, my husband would stand up like the man he wanted to be, and I could lean on him in times of trouble.

Now I knew better.

I could never, ever, lean on him or my sister or anyone else. I hadn’t chosen a life in which I might be cared for and pampered. I’d chosen a different path. And I ought to be grateful to Tom, I told myself, for having obliged me to exert all the strength and energy I had at my disposal. Because in this exercise, the mind acquires strength to bear up against evils that would otherwise overcome it.

Realizing it, my aches and pains and ailments melted away, to leave me in more perfect health than I had enjoyed in years. For if I wanted to hold my family together, if I wanted my children to survive, I could neither be tired nor ill. If I wanted to carve out anything for myself or anyone I loved, I couldn’t lean or waver.

I’d have to be the pillar to hold it all up . . . if
only
because I was Thomas Jefferson’s daughter.

Washington, 18 April 1802

From Thomas Jefferson to Robert R. Livingston

The cession of Louisiana by Spain to France will form a new epoch in our political course. Of all nations France is our natural friend. Her growth we viewed as our own, her misfortunes ours. But it’s impossible that France and the US can continue long friends when they meet in so irritable a position as they do now. The day France takes possession of New Orleans we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.

My father was not, as the Federalists suggested, blind to the dangers of Napoleon. Rather, I believe it was his well-known sympathy for France that made possible—in a way it wouldn’t have been possible for any other president—the successful purchase of Louisiana.

Even before it was completed in the third year of his presidency, it was plain that the Louisiana Purchase would be one of his greatest achievements, a staggering success of careful and opportunistic statecraft that doubled the size of the country. And the Federalists could scarcely mount up an opposition to it.

My father’s political victory had been
a bloodless revolution,
we said . . . but there had been blood. Hamilton’s blood. Spilled from the body of his eldest son in defense of his honor. One of my father’s supporters had claimed Mr. Hamilton intended to overthrow the government to stop a Jeffersonian presidency. That claim now proven utterly untrue, Philip Hamilton confronted his father’s accuser in a duel and was shot dead.

It was a reminder to me that public life could be fatal, exert ing a toll on families that was difficult to underestimate. So my husband couldn’t have astonished me more if he’d grown a horn in the middle of his head, when, before the purchase of Louisiana was negotiated, he said, “Jack Eppes is running for Congress. I’m going to do the same.”

My sister’s husband was running in a newly created district where his chances of victory were good. The seat Tom wanted was already occupied by one of my father’s strongest supporters. If Tom lost, it’d not only alienate the man against my father, but would also crush my husband utterly. And even if Tom won, they’d say he hadn’t earned his seat in Congress on his own merits, but on my father’s name; for both of Jefferson’s sons-in-laws to run together was to invite rumor of a Jeffersonian dynasty.

But when Tom told me, there was an earnest pride and eagerness in his expression, one I hadn’t seen since he was a boy, gazing up at my father with admiration. I realized what it would mean to him to win a seat in Congress. What it would mean to him to
succeed
. Tom had never wanted to be a planter. His responsibilities as a father and a husband had probably put a legal career out of reach forever. But he didn’t need that to serve in Congress.

I didn’t know how we’d manage the plantations without Tom or my father, but I didn’t have the heart to discourage my husband; I simply didn’t have the heart. “Why, I think it’s a wonderful idea, Tom.”

He embraced me, planting a thousand kisses on my cheeks. “What a lucky man I am to have you for a wife,” he said, holding my face in his hands. “Don’t you worry about the farms. I have a plan.”

I
was
worried. If Tom won, he’d be absent from home, just as my father was perpetually absent. Our already shaky fortunes would suffer. I wasn’t worried about Monticello; in Papa’s absence, the Hemings family ran everything there from the blacksmith shop to the dairy. We only needed to send an overseer there once a week to discipline the nail boys. But the outlying farms . . . slaves could do the planting, but the operations would need to be overseen every day, and I doubted we could recoup the expense of a more permanent overseer. Though I’d found more strength in me than I knew I had while nursing my entire family back to health through the whooping cough and managing a household besides, I feared that along with the children, and the house, and the outbuildings, the responsibility for the farms and the crops would now fall to me. And that I might not prove worthy of the challenge.

So I girded myself for his answer. “What plan?”

“
Cotton,
” Tom said as he began to describe his scheme. “It’s like printing money, it’s so profitable.”

This confused me utterly. “I hadn’t thought cotton a profitable crop in Virginia.”

He nodded. “That’s why I’m going to Georgia. I thought, originally, to try the Mississippi territory, but every white man there is outnumbered by slaves and dangerous Indians. So I’m going to purchase land in Georgia.”

The blood drained from my face. It was, of course, a husband’s prerogative to decide where his family would go. But if Tom thought I’d submit to dragging our children into parts hitherto unknown, he’d misjudged me thoroughly. My voice actually quavered when I said, “You want to pack up and move to Georgia?”

He stroked my hair. “No, no. Of course not. I can’t hold a congressional seat in Virginia if we make a home in Georgia, can I? No. I’ll go to Georgia to prospect land, and when I find a good place, I’ll establish all our Negroes there.” My horrified expression must not have changed a whit, because he quickly added, “I know you’re worried about our people, Patsy. I have nothing but the deepest concern for those whose happiness fortune has thrown upon our will. We won’t break up any families—we’ll send them all together. I promise you, the culture of cotton is the least laborious of any ever practiced. It’s a gentle labor.”

Maybe. But what about domestic servants? Even if I could part with them, I couldn’t bear to see them sent away in fear. “They’ll be terrified, Tom.”

“We’ll have to ease them into it,” he agreed. “We’ll have to tell them that we’re all going. My slaves are willing to accompany me anywhere, but their attachment to you would make their departure very heavy unless they believed you were to follow soon.”

No wonder my husband never liked deception. Even when he could muster up the stomach for a lie, he had no talent for it. There was no earthly way we could fool our domestic servants, who watched our every move and listened to our every word. And if our domestic servants knew we weren’t going with them to Georgia, our field hands would soon learn it, too, at which point the entire thing would be completely unmanageable.