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Washington: March, 1809

Suddenly, as he climbed the long, curving flight of stairs, he knew that now he was an old man.

Sixty-six last April, and, though his sandy red hair had merely faded instead of turning gray, there were twinges in his knees that reminded him of too many miles in the saddle, in cold rain and sleet, too many hours standing at his writing table, too much tension, not enough rest. But now he could rest.

In the half-furnished rooms of the White House below, the crowd still danced at the Inaugural Ball, with the wife of the new president, sparkling, vivacious Dolly Madison, a gay and charming hostess in a sweeping white cambric dress and the inevitable enormous turban on her head.

He was grateful, Thomas Jefferson was thinking as he toiled up the stairs, that he had been able to see his good friend, Jemmy Madison, inaugurated president of these new and struggling United States. But he was even more grateful that his own years of service were at an end.

“No third term,” he had told them when they importuned him. “No, never! My work is done. I am going home.”

If only he could have left a government in peace, but, for this new nation that he had worked a lifetime to build, it appeared sadly that there could be no peace. Off the coasts of his country British and French ships prowled and battled, seizing American shipping, taking off sailors at gunpoint, confiscating cargoes. Would James Madison be able to keep the nation out of another war? he worried, as he entered the disordered bedroom where his half-packed possessions were strewn about, books stacked on the floor, papers spread over the bed. Down below in some of the empty rooms of the mansion were piled other boxes of papers already sorted and made ready to travel by barge and wagon back to his “Little Mountain” in Albemarle County, his beloved Monticello.

As he closed the door of the room, there was a little whistle and a whir of wings, and his pet mockingbird came charging through the air, all reaching feet and stiffened wings, to perch on Jefferson’s shoulder.

“We’re going home, boy,” he told the bird, turning his face to avoid the inquisitive bill. “Burwell will see to it that you get back to Monticello safely, where all the other mockingbirds will probably be swollen with envy when they see you lording it over the place. No, I haven’t any sugar tonight. When we get home my grandchildren will feed you sugar till you’ll probably die of obesity.”

He sat wearily on the side of the bed and began turning over papers, studying each, laying them in neat piles. There were too many of them but each was important to him. A soft rap came at the door; it opened a crack and his daughter, Martha Randolph, always called “Patsy,” put a turbaned head in.

“Papa, may I come in?”

“It would seem that you are already in,” he smiled. “You should be downstairs being gay with the rest of them.”

“Oh, Papa, I’m an old woman now. I’m thirty-six. Old enough for caps and a chimney corner, too old for frolicking.”

“The chimney corner hasn’t been built that can hold you long. You were born restless like your father. You always want to be on to the next activity, Patsy, no matter what it is.”

“I didn’t come away down here through all that cold mud to dance and frivol,” she argued, arranging her wide skirt so she could sit beside him on the high bed. “I came to help you pack and fetch you home, but from the looks of things we’re doomed never to get there. What are all these pages and pages full of strange words?”

“Look out!” He rescued some sheets from her hand. “Don’t mix them up.” He straightened the papers lovingly, his long freckled fingers deft. “These are my Indian vocabularies. I’ve been setting down words from the different Indian tongues, comparing them and trying to find a common origin.”

“So that’s why someone said the other day that you believed that all the Indians were originally Russians!” Patsy laid the pages in neat piles. “Papa, you continually astound me! With all the frightful responsibilities you’ve had all these years—buying Louisiana, the country continually in a row with England and France and this bank business, not to mention Aaron Burr—you’ve found time to learn Indian languages.”

“I haven’t learned many—only a few words here and there. It kept my mind off unpleasant things, like having all the Federalists hate me vehemently and make no bones about it.” He quirked his long mouth in an ironic grimace. “Do you know that at this moment there are half a dozen banquets being eaten in this city where the Federalists are proposing insulting toasts to the despised ‘Virginian,’ gloating over my departure, telling each other, ‘Thank God, at last we’re rid of Jefferson!’?”

“Papa, please don’t remember those things,” pleaded his daughter. “Leave every bitter memory right here on the shores of this dirty Potomac. Up on the Rivanna on your mountain the children are already counting hours, eager for Grandfather to come home. Now, can’t we lay all these papers in a box so this bed can be used for the purpose for which it was intended? I’ll call Burwell. I could drag your boots off myself but it’s hard for me to stoop or bend over in these murderous stays. Back home I shall never wear them, no matter if my fashion-minded daughters faint with horror.”

“Don’t tell me the Misses Randolph have deserted dolls and toad houses built of mud and gone running after fur-belows! Maybe I had too many mirrors sent home from France.” He began obediently to lay the papers in a stout wooden box. “Come in, Burwell. The tyrannical Madam Patsy Randolph says this ex-president has to go to bed.”

“With a hot posset and a warm brick at his feet, Burwell,” Martha instructed the faithful servant. “I wonder if anybody in the future history of this nation will ever get this old barn of a mansion really warm? There are more goose-pimples than dimples and beauty patches on those bare shoulders downstairs this minute and Dolly Madison whispered to me that she wished that protocol demanded ermine capes with velvet linings for officials in this country such as the kings and lords wear in England. Well, good night, Papa. I’ll see you in the morning before I leave. I do have to hurry home. Remember there is a large family of small people there all in need of discipline before you get back to spoil them all outrageously.”

“I never spoil children. I teach them to use their eyes and their minds,” he protested, grunting as Burwell eased off the tight polished slippers and put shabby old carpet slippers on his feet. “There’s one thing I determine, Madam. If you can throw away stays when you are back at Monticello, I shall discard all fancy boots and slippers, stocks and tight cravats, and those confounded, silly lacy affairs down my front. You haven’t given away my good green breeches, I hope?”

“Everything of yours is exactly as you left it, Papa. The moths got at that awful old homespun coat but I suppose you’ll wear it anyway.”

“It comforts my old shoulders and the pockets are all in the right places,” he asserted.

“Very likely full of rocks and arrowheads and dried leaves and dead butterflies at this moment.” She bent and kissed him, her fancy headdress slipping a little. She pulled it off freeing reddish brown curls to fall over her ears. “I’m going to bed myself. Those fiddles and trombones can squawk all night but they won’t keep me awake.”

Left alone, Thomas Jefferson dug a comfortable hollow in his pillow and tried to sleep. But too much went coursing through his mind. That resolution passed by the Virginia Assembly, especially the words at the end: “You carry with you the sweetest of awards, the recollection of a life well spent in the service of your country.”

That sentiment assuaged a little some of the bitterer things. Young Alexander Hamilton, George Washington’s handsome protégé and Thomas Jefferson’s relentless enemy, dying, after he had fired dramatically in the air, from the bullet of Aaron Burr. And there had been Burr, as Jefferson knew, always plotting, dreaming up his grandiose schemes to set up an empire of his own in the West, fleeing to England when his treasonable activities were discovered, forfeiting his bail.

John Marshall had been to blame for that. John Marshall, John Adams’ midnight appointee, named for petty spite, and the sworn and bitter enemy of Thomas Jefferson, had so muddled Burr’s trial that a jury had acquitted the man of treason and altered the charge to some trivial misdemeanor. And then Marshall had had the effrontery to subpoena the President of the United States as a witness!

These are they who had worked all manner of evil against me, the words ran through the old man’s tired brain. Yet do I stand and my arm prevails against them. Curious how darkness and silence always brought back to him some line or other from the thousands of books he had read. That was something he would do at Monticello to fill up his days—catalogue all his books, almost ten thousand of them there must be now, for he had sent home boxes full every year. He would teach his older grandsons, Jefferson Randolph and Francis Eppes, to appreciate books too, and some of the girls might show some signs of possessing an eager mind like his Patsy’s.

Someone opened a door below and the blare of a marching tune came to his ears which likely meant that the dancing company were going down the chilly halls to the unfurnished rooms where the collation was spread on trestle tables. Jefferson found himself drumming his fingers on his chest in time to the music. There had been so much martial music in his life. He thought of Patrick Henry riding into Williamsburg on that cloudy morning at the head of his militia. Gallant, shabby Patrick, who had stood so tall in his run-down boots and worn leather breeches, his coat out at the elbows, who had twice sent great words ringing on the air of America, words that were so trumpet-strong and stirring that they still echoed in the ears of men and made a small thrill quiver in the breast of Thomas Jefferson himself.

“If this be treason, make the most of it!” And “Give me Liberty or give me Death!” He would hear them again and again so long as he lived, remembering that they had challenged the hesitant hearts of rebelling Virginians until they were ready to dare even the great guns of the Third George of Hanover.

But now, Jefferson was thinking, how early the fires of patriotism had cooled in Patrick Henry. Patrick had been successful at Red Hill, his plantation. He had made some money, grown old before his time, and been content the last time Jefferson had seen him to sit under a green tree with a jug of cool spring water near by and his grandchildren playing around. Ease and security—were they the drugs that abated the eternal challenge in the minds of men? And did nations like men grow sluggish and apathetic when they were well fed and bodily comfortable, Jefferson wondered?

Patrick Henry was dead now, and George Washington was dead. One by one the passionately dedicated builders of the temple of the Republic had vanished from the arena, leaving the affairs of state to the younger, noisier men who had not known the travail, the risks, the fiery trials of the beginning. I am a lone dead leaf hanging on the tree, the old man told himself. I am that despised democrat who greeted pompous envoys in a shabby coat, the one they called Infidel.

That had been his own private joke, his personal secret—his belief, his relationship with the Almighty. When he was dead, someone would find the little book in which he had pasted and annotated all the sayings of Jesus and know how wrong they had been in their hasty judgment. But now it did not matter. Nothing mattered now that he was going home. He had refused a third term as president, adhering to the precedent of George Washington. Turmoil and trouble were hot in the air, but somehow his nostrils did not dilate with the old war-horse eagerness at the threat of conflict. Now he felt no stallion urge to go charging armed with words into the midst of any fray. How well life was organized, he thought, as he found a softer spot in the pillow. Old age crept on a man unaware, bringing its own opiate to dull any lingering sense of loss.

At length, letting the weight of weariness have its way with him, Thomas Jefferson fell asleep. Martha Randolph, tiptoeing in later, shading a candle with her hand, saw his face upturned, eyes closed, nose pinched a little, some brown freckles standing out on the gray, drained cheeks, and caught the eagle look about him.

He will look like that when he is dead, she thought, as she blew out the candle and quietly slipped away.

It was snowing hard when Jefferson awoke early in the morning.

The raw ugliness of this new city of Washington was being charitably hidden under a blanket of downy feathers. The stumps where the big tulip poplars and oaks had been cut down to open up streets and clear space for building were now, all of them, so many thrones cushioned with ermine. The cutting of those trees had grieved Jefferson’s heart. How he hated to see a tree go down, though he had slaughtered a young forest in his younger years to clear the top of his little mountain for the home he visioned there.

He looked down at the narrow streets where sleighs and wagons were already churning up dark mud to profane the virgin beauty of the snow.

Martha came in early accompanied by two aides. Jefferson, half dressed, was eating the breakfast Burwell had brought up, picking the meat from a fried fish with his fingers, dipping bits of corn bread into new cane syrup. He dried his fingers quickly on his handkerchief, gulped the last swallow of tea, and motioned Burwell to take the food away.

“And what brings you here so early, my dear Patsy?” he inquired. “I thought you would be starting out for Richmond and Charlottesville on the next coach?”

“I knew you’d never finish this packing alone or let any one help you.” She kissed his forehead, smoothing back his rough motley of hair. “I declare, Burwell, if you don’t cut his hair soon, he’ll be riding the country looking like a mangy old lion!” she scolded. “Trim this on top and fix him a proper cue, or I shall go out and buy you a stylish wig, Mr. Ex-President.”

“Can’t stand the things! They’re dirty,” he snorted. “I’ll get everything packed, Patsy. These boys will help me. You go along home and get a good fire going to thaw out my old bones after that long three days in that drafty coach.”

“You will never finish packing,” she fussed. “You’ll find some book or paper you haven’t seen in a long time and spend hours poring over it. I know you, Thomas Jefferson. You gentlemen bring in all those boxes and, Burwell, see that Mr. Jefferson’s trunks and carpetbag are packed. This baggage will be taken off the barge at Shadwell, Father, and we’ll have wagons sent down to carry it to Monticello.”

“Nothing must be lost!” worried Jefferson. “Nothing! Every paper and pamphlet I’ve saved is important. They contain the history of an era, the story of the birth of this nation.”

“Then,” said Martha, “it would seem that most of them should be in the Library of Congress.”

“Never, while they house that library in such makeshift quarters,” he argued. “Patsy, my dear, I beg of you, go on to Monticello as we planned. I shall arrive later with everything I own intact. Just remember that your father has knocked about the world on his own for a long time, and I am not yet senile nor decrepit.”

“But you will admit that you are tired to the bone,” she persisted, “and that long trip in this cold weather is not going to be easy.”

“I’ll admit anything, only get out of here now so that I can get out of this dressing gown and into my breeches! Burwell, see that my satin breeches and the broadcloth coat are well aired before you pack them. It will be a long day before I shall want to be dressed up and elegant again.”

“You were quite the beau at that dance last night,” Martha remarked. “Several women said to me that they had never before seen you so witty and gay. And more than one remarked that it was a great pity that you were leaving Washington.”

“They had never seen me before without the sad old albatross of responsibility hung on my back,” he retorted. “When I gave it over to Jemmy Madison, I felt twenty years younger in twenty minutes and even several pounds lighter. Once I’m back on my own mountain you’ll see, I shall be merry as a grig—whatever a grig is.”

“In my youth, when you were feeding me huge, nauseous doses of Plato and Livy, you would have ordered me to go and look that word up,” Patsy reminded him. “I can hear you very sternly directing me never to use a word unless I knew its exact meaning. Fortunately, I know what a grig is.”

“It’s a cricket,” spoke up one of the aides. “My granny told me a long time ago, a grig is a cricket. When I was a young-un, sir.”

“It’s a kind of grasshopper,” disputed the other aide. “A little grasshopper that fiddles tunes with its hind legs, Mr. President, sir.”

“Mr. Ex-President, Carver. An ex being something that has been crossed out, obliterated, ignored. I’m obliterated but I can still go on being a grig. Even though I can’t fiddle any more since I broke this wrist in France. I miss my music, too.—Well, good-by again, Madam Randolph. Be sure you take along a warm robe and a shawl. That coach can be mighty damp and dreary.”

“And you do the same, Papa, and don’t you climb down halfway home and start out on horseback in this foul weather. Nothing ever created by Heaven is so treacherous and mean as this month of March. If they would leave it off all the calendars, it would please me well.”

“Keep plenty of elmbark stewing on the hob till I get home,” he ordered. “It will cure any phthisic ever contracted.”

“He’s so stubborn,” he heard his daughter say to the aide as she went out. “I shan’t be surprised at all to see him come riding home on that horse. If he wants to do it, he’ll do it if it kills him.”

“It won’t kill him, ma’am,” the man murmured. “Mister Jefferson is still a mighty stout fellow.”