Patriot Hearts (51 page)

By 1796, Maximilien Robespierre had perished on his own guillotine and the revolutionary National Assembly in France had been crushed by the five-man Directorate. In the United States, with the Presidency at stake, the war of political libel began in earnest.

It is all-important to our country that Washington’s successor shall be a safe man. But it is far less important who…may be named…than that it shall not be Jefferson.

He was an atheist, a puppet of France, inept, indecisive, a foe of Washington and of the Union. Jeers were written of his flight from the British forces during the Revolution that had first occupied Richmond, then almost trapped him at Monticello.

Not to be outdone, the pro-Jefferson
Philadelphia Aurora
crowned Adams “His Rotundity,” and declared him unfit to lead the country, the “champion of kings, ranks, and titles.” It warned that he was scheming to transform the Presidency into a hereditary monarchy in order to pass it along to his son. Jefferson, concluded the paper proudly, had only daughters.

Dolley, who by that time had met nearly everyone concerned, could only imagine what Abigail Adams would have said to
that
piece of reasoning.

She remembered Callendar from Philadelphia that winter, a dark-haired Scotsman with a head that seemed too large for his body and an indefinable air of physical crookedness about him. He’d been standing near the fireplace during one of the receptions at the house she and Jemmy had rented from Jim Monroe on Spruce Street, railing about the injustices of tyrants who sought to chain not only the body, but the mind, and the minds of children down to the tenth generation, in a harsh wild voice like that of an Old Testament prophet.

“Jefferson’s wisdom is the hope of our nation,” he had pronounced, and coming close, Dolley had been struck by the rankness of his body, and the thick odor of Jemmy’s best port on his breath. “The sweetness of Xenophon and the force of Polybius, information without parade, eloquence without effort. How can any hear Thomas Jefferson and remain unmoved?”

And he was right, Dolley reflected, watching Payne trot importantly alongside the carriage on his pony, his gold hair catching the patchy brilliance of the April sun. But there was some people’s praise that reflected as badly on their object as outright insults, and James Callendar was one of those people.

“Watch me, Mama!” Payne kicked his mount into a canter, effortlessly cleared a fallen tree-trunk near the road, and flourished his hat to his mother’s applause.

“I’ve jumped him over fences, too,” the boy said, trotting back to the carriage. “Jeff and I, we took out Annie’s horse back at Edgehill, and there wasn’t any trouble. I’m big enough to have a horse of my own, not a pony. Annie’s only a few months older than me, and she has a horse. You have to tell Papa I’m big enough.”

Dolley pretended to frown in concentration. “I’m to tell thy papa thou’rt big enough to be a horse-thief? Well, all right…”

He crowed with laughter, and swiped the air with his riding-whip. “You know what I mean!” And cantered ahead to jump the little creek, singing as he rode.

Fair as Dolley’s sister Lucy, and with the promise of Lucy’s good looks and their father’s height, Payne had slipped easily into the role of a planter’s son. Maybe too easily, Dolley thought. John Todd had believed devoutly in education, not simply because his own father was a schoolmaster but because he saw learning as the gateway to an honorable career. And Jemmy, of course, was one of the most erudite men in Virginia.

But from the moment Payne had realized that his stepfather was a wealthy planter, with ten thousand acres and over a hundred slaves at his beck and call, he seemed to have understood that the issue of his future livelihood was already taken care of. And as the years had passed and Dolley had realized, first with disbelief and then with an agony of regret, that Jemmy’s seed could find no root in her womb, it had become harder and harder for her to discipline Payne, or to endure his sullen wretchedness on those few occasions when his will was thwarted. During one of those miserable battles of will when he was five—Dolley recalled it was over his first pony—he had sobbed,
You wish I’d died so you could marry Papa!
Papa being Jemmy. The words, and the way he’d turned from her, had gone like a knife-blade into her heart.

In all other things, Dolley believed herself to be fairly rational: firm with the slaves, since there was no keeping house unless one learned to be firm; tactful with her tribe of new sisters-in-law; adept at balancing the demands of running a plantation household against the constant stream of Virginia hospitality and her own need for a quiet hour now and then.

But with Payne she was helpless.

It was a good thing, she reflected, that the boy was so good-hearted. She had been less concerned during the first two years of her marriage, when she and Jemmy had wintered in Philadelphia every year for the sessions of Congress. Payne had had his familiar friends around him. Only in the summers had they returned to the relative isolation of Montpelier, where Payne’s only company was the children of either slaveholders or slaves.

But in 1797, so many things had changed.

The vicious Presidential election of 1796 had gone to Adams by three electoral votes. And because the Constitution had been written before the emergence of distinct political parties—not to mention before such events as the bloody Revolution in France and England’s ruthless decision to seize American ships, cargoes, and seamen—Thomas Jefferson had emerged from retirement to become Vice President to his former friend, whose political views were now in direct opposition to his own. (“One can’t think of everything,” Jemmy had sighed.)

But the country’s unofficial Vice President—the man who privately gave orders to, and received privileged information from, the new President’s Cabinet—was Alexander Hamilton. A man who had never been elected to any office in his life.

Standing in the crowd of Philadelphians outside Congress Hall on a chilly March day in 1797, Dolley had watched Jefferson go up to take office as president of the Senate, tall and lanky in a long-tailed blue coat. And she’d smiled a little, remembering him two years earlier, when Jemmy had first brought her to Monticello. Untidy and eccentric-looking in the old clothes he wore while gardening, he strode down the front steps—that was before he’d started tearing the house apart—with his hands held out to greet his old friend. “Jemmy! I do hope you know what you’ve let yourself in for, my dear Mrs. Madison,” he’d added in his soft voice, bowing over her hand. “When you marry a Virginian, you marry his entire family
and
his friends—”

“—And their horses and dogs and Negroes—” Jemmy added with his dry smile.

“—in season and out, bed and board—”

“My dear Mr. Jefferson,” Dolley drew herself up with an air of assumed haughtiness and a twinkle in her eyes. “I see you mistake me for a Philadelphian. I happen to
be
a Virginian, born and raised. There is nothing about the feeding and housing of two dozen strangers at five minutes’ notice that I hadn’t mastered before the age of twelve.”

His eyes widened with pleasure. Instantly, it was as if they’d known one another for years. “Really? What county?”

“Hanover, if you please.”

“Good Lord! There are some quite remarkable remains of a Pamunkey Indian village on the banks of—”

“Mrs. Madison,” interposed Jemmy patiently, “please permit me to introduce my friend Mr. Jefferson. Mr. Jefferson, my wife. And I warn you, Dolley, that if you encourage Tom with the smallest query about the Indians, or fossil mammoths, or what varieties of alfalfa best grow in these mountains, you shall be kept awake until dawn with the natural history of the entire region.”

Two years after that meeting, moving through the crowd around Congress Hall, Jefferson had looked grave and collected, Dolley thought, and a little grim. The Federalists were strong in the Senate, and feelings were running so high about whether to ally with a domineering Britain or revolutionary France that there had been outbreaks of mob violence.

Even so, she thought, as she watched George Washington cross the State House yard, kingly in black velvet, with stout little gray-clad Mr. Adams bobbing in his wake, she had been aware that she was seeing something that no one in the world had ever seen before: the ruler of a nation quietly handing off power to his successor, then returning home to private life.

“No severed heads—no daggers in the dark—no rioting in the streets,” she murmured to Anna, who stood at her side. “No blood on the steps of the throne—no more fuss, really, than taking over as vestryman of the parish. Flat dull, in fact,” she added with a laugh. “Canst think of another time in history, when the transfer of rulership from one man to another did not involve someone dying?”

At her elbow, the black-clothed widow Sophie Hallam responded with a wintry smile. “We do indeed witness a remarkable event. Yet I’m sure that somewhere, Dolley, someone has died for it.”

Sophie had returned to Philadelphia in time to attend that same Christmas reception of 1796 at which Dolley had first encountered James Callendar. Across the very crowded double-parlor, the black and gray of second mourning had caught Dolley’s eye, striking in a room filled with women determined to show off their best. As she approached, Dolley saw the woman was in conversation with Aaron Burr—who stood several inches shorter—and coming close heard her voice, a wry alto like smoke and honey: “One must allow it’s an effective way to raise money: If your people are too poor to tax, send your army on a looting-expedition across the border into your neighbor’s territory.”

Bonaparte.
Dolley identified the topic of conversation at once and with an inner sigh. Since the Directorate of France had begun sending its troops into Italy, very little else was being talked about.

And the next instant, identified the voice.

“Sophie!”

The woman in gray turned, her cool sardonic smile melting into an expression of genuine pleasure. “Dearest!” The two women clasped hands, then, impulsively, embraced. “My mother always vowed you should marry a planter! She would be pleased to see herself proved right.”

Dolley’s eye flickered over the exquisitely fashionable somberness of her friend’s dress, and she bit back her query,
And how is thy dear mother…?
Sophie seemed to read both her unspoken words and her instantaneous afterthought, and added, more quietly, “She would have been pleased to see you looking so well, too, Dolley. She always said you were the best of my friends.”

That time, the past tense was unmistakable.

“I’m sorry.”

Sophie shook her head, though her features tightened momentarily with some unsaid and bitter reflection. “In many ways I miss her more than I miss Mr. Hallam—who was a good husband, as husbands go….” She waved away his specter dismissively, and smiled her sidelong smile. “I am a mere dressmaker these days, but as we live in a democracy now, both Colonel Burr and Lady Washington assured me there would be no objection to my accompanying him here.”