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Monticello: Spring, 1809

Why, why had he saved so many things? Yet they were all important, all precious. One small box full of rocks, little packets of earth, dried leaves, and the desiccated bodies of insects. These George Clark and Meriwether Lewis had brought back to him from the long exploring journey they had made, crossing the country to the Pacific Ocean. Jefferson held out one small, rattling mummy of a creature in his palm.

“Ever see a bug like this, Burwell?” he asked.

“Looks like some kind of scawpin. Got he tail in air like one too.” The old Negro studied the dried object skittishly. “Stinger in that tail, I bet you. You watch out, Mister Tom, mought be p’ison even if he daid.”

“There are desert places out there, they told me, where everything has thorn and stings or stinks.” Jefferson wrapped the desert scorpion carefully in cotton lint. “I’ll have to have a glass case built at home to display all these things. These trophies from Europe too. And this piece of cannonball that was fired at Ticonderoga. I suppose every president from this time on will be sent weird mementoes of some battle or discovery or other. John Adams got an Iroquois scalp and a jawbone some settler had plowed up in his field, but nothing quite so gruesome has ever come to me. Now we must count all these boxes and I must see that they all go aboard the boat.”

The storm did not abate. Rather, it grew worse, changing from snow to sleet and then to icy hostile rain that made quagmires of the roads and treacherous slippery deadfalls of every slope. The coach horses slipped and stumbled, the coach swayed and lurched in the ruts, splashing muddy water everywhere. Jefferson’s bones ached from the jolting; his elbows were sore from being continually slammed against the hard leather of the seats. The floor was cold and wet.

At Shadwell, where the barge landed, having made inquiry and been assured that all his baggage had been transferred to wagons, he left the coach and mounted his bay horse, the patient animal having been led behind at a dragging pace for many miles. Snow was still thick in the air, but once in the saddle Jefferson leaned into the wind, gave the bay his head, and let him warm his sluggish blood in a brisk canter. Sensing that he was heading home, the horse loped along, shaking his head in irritation at the snow that stung his eyelids, but keeping steadily on until the mountains loomed at last, dark blue and chill upon the horizon.

Martha’s husband, Thomas Randolph, had written that all the people of Albemarle County would be out to meet him with fife and drum and banner, but Jefferson had urged Martha to see that there was no public demonstration. “I’ll likely be delayed on the way. I may even get home in the middle of the night. Head off any hoorah. This is no hero; this is plain Farmer Jefferson coming home.”

When he turned off the highway into the narrow winding road up his hill, he could restrain the bay no longer. Weary as the animal was, he broke into a reaching gallop, and now the brick house was in sight, and streaming out from every door came people running, bareheaded and shouting through the storm. His daughter, his son-in-law, all his grandchildren, and every slave on the place, he was certain. They swarmed about him, lifting him off his horse, the jubilant Negroes pressing forward to kiss his hands, his boots, even his horse.

The children screamed joyfully, “Grandfather is home for ever and ever!” With so many arms lifting him, he was half carried in to the house. In the lofty hall, the ceiling almost two full stories high, a great fire burned on the hearth and shone on the trophy-covered walls and the great clock over the door that worked by cannon ball weights and faced both indoors and out.

Jefferson sank wearily into a deep chair. He was more worn and chilled than he wanted to admit, but a great sigh of contentment made his lips tremble. All around him were all the things he loved, that he had built, contrived, designed, invented. The weather indicator on the ceiling that was controlled by a vane on the roof outside—his eyes turned up toward it.

“Still works,” he remarked, “and from the set of the wind there’ll be no good weather for another day at least. Did the wagons get here?”

“No, Papa, not yet. But the roads are mighty bad, as you know.”

“Freezing mud. Makes slow traveling. Now, baby,” he protested to a young granddaughter, “Grandpapa can take off his own boots.”

“No, you can’t,” insisted young Cornelia, “because I’m going to do it for you. Ellen’s fetching some wool socks she knit—and, Grandpa, one is too long but please don’t mention it.”

“I won’t, I promise. Not if it reaches halfway to my neck.”

“I found these old slippers in your wardrobe. A mouse had started to build a nest in one but I brushed it out and aired it. Thank goodness, he hadn’t gnawed any holes in it.” She jumped up.

“Ah, my dear sir,” he looked up gratefully at Thomas Randolph, who was followed by a servant with a steaming mug on a server, “you save my life!”

“Just what you need to heat up your blood, sir.” said Randolph. “Another log on the fire, Cassius, and tend the fires in Mr. Jefferson’s library and bedroom.”

Jefferson sipped the warm punch slowly while his granddaughters busied themselves dressing his feet in warm hose and old slippers.

“Your breeches are damp, Grandpa,” one said. “But we can’t do anything about that.”

“I am marvelously served already.” He pulled them close to kiss their flushed young faces. “Burwell will find me some dry clothes presently as soon as I am warmed and rested. I see that our Paris lamp hasn’t tarnished very much, Patsy.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Remember what a time we had packing that thing? I remember you stuffed the globes full of hose and shirts and winced every time the box was moved.”

“I expected it to arrive here a mass of scraps and splinters,” she said, “and after you had paid such an outrageous price for it, too.”

“It was that painting you made the worst fuss about.” Jefferson emptied the bowl, handed it to the waiting servant, and got to his feet. “Ah, my old knees are stiff! But they still seem willing to support me. Now, I want to see everything. Yes”—he halted at the door of the high-ceiled drawing room—“there’s poor old John the Baptist whom you hated, Patsy.” He went nearer to study the painting over the mantel.

“It was Polly who loathed it most,” Martha said. “Not poor old John, all head and no body, but Salome lugging him on that charger wearing modern clothes and a very proper turban at that. I’d still like to throw that picture away, Papa. It used to give little Francis Eppes the horrors. Every time he had to pass through this room he’d have nightmares.”

“Nice polish on this floor, Patsy,” commended Jefferson, artfully turning her mind away from criticism of one of his favorite paintings by complimenting the gleam of the parquet floor. It was the first such oak floor laid in America and he was very proud of the way it reflected the glitter of the gilt chairs and sofas he had brought from Paris. They had cost fabulous amounts too, more than he could afford, but in his philosophy the things a man wanted and admired, that made life richer, were worth whatever they cost.

A brief nagging jerk of realism struck him—that now he would have to count the cost of things. Let that wait, let it wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow he would look over his lands, his farms; he would see how Randolph’s management had benefited them, and study what more must be done to the still unfinished house. Martha, catching his roving look, interrupted it with a protest.

“Papa, please! Don’t begin right away tearing down something and building it over. The house is fine as it is and we all love it—and you are so tired.”

“My dear, I should be even more tired with no occupation,” he argued. “Of course it will take me some little time to arrange and dispose of all my books and papers. Did they build those shelves I wrote you about in November?”

“Yes, Papa, come and see. I gave them the drawing you made and I’m quite sure they followed it exactly.” She walked ahead of him through the great hall and the narrow passage that led to the southern wing of the house which contained the library, Jefferson’s study, and his bedroom, with the bed alcove between and the steep winding stairs to the mezzanine-like second story.

There in the familiar rooms were all the homely things he had missed—his shabby old revolving chair, the painted wooden bench with its leather cushion that just fitted his lean, weary legs, the round revolving table he had had built with the legs set right so that the bench would slide under them and make of table, chair, and bench a comfortable kind of chaise longue with a high back to shut out the drafts. There was his file table with octagonal sides, each side holding a filing drawer labeled with a group of letters, and his high drawing table with drawers and shelves that could be adjusted at any angle.

Beside the library fireplace stood a high-backed leather chair, a pompous and official looking piece of furniture. Jefferson glared at it.

“And how came that thing here?” he demanded.

“Why, Papa, don’t you recognize it? It’s the chair you sat in all the time you were vice-president. Mr. Madison had it sent up by the barge. He thought you would like to have it,” explained Martha.

He snorted. “I have spent more eternal hours of boredom in that miserable chair than in any seat whereon a man has ever rested his breeches!” he grumbled. “Stick it in a dark corner somewhere. Send it down to the servants’ quarters. The office of vice-president is about as tedious an insult to a man’s intelligence as could be conceived. To have to suffer it for four years is bad enough, but to be reminded of it the rest of his life is pure persecution. However, I shall take pains to thank Jemmy Madison properly. He meant this as a handsome gift. I’ll receive it in the same spirit, but I don’t want it around where I have to look at it and be reminded of Senator Bingham and of John Adams’s being urged to slay a thousand Republicans with the jawbone of Thomas Jefferson.”

“Oh, Papa, don’t let past times rankle. Look back on the happy ones,” begged Martha. “We did have fun in Paris, didn’t we?”

“And you went to school there,” mourned one of her daughters—Jefferson was not yet entirely sure which was which—“and saw all those fashionable people and the king and Napoleon and spoke French all the time, and we have to learn French with that stupid Miss Fraker. You should hear her, Grandpa. She pronounces French as it is spelled in English.”

“She says ‘Owy Owy,’ and we know it should be ‘wee wee,’” piped up a smaller one. Was this Virginia or Ellen? He would have to put his family tree in order soon before he mortally offended some of them.

“Grandfather will teach you proper French when he gets time,” promised their mother. “He spent four years over there and I went to school there and so did Aunt Maria. But not all that we saw was happy. We saw too many beggars and hungry people in the streets, something you will never see in Virginia.”

“We see blind Remus when we go to church,” said one child. “He sits on the path with his hat in his hand and says, ‘Please, li’l missy, give ole Remus a penny?’”

“And if we put our penny in his hat, then we have nothing when the verger comes around with the alms basin and he gives us a disgusted look,” said another.

“Remus doesn’t have to beg,” said Jefferson. “He is owned by a family able to take care of him.”

“Maybe he likes it. Sitting in the sun and hearing people pass.”

“If he’s sitting there now, he’s being snowed on,” said young Francis Eppes gravely, standing at the window. It was the first time the quiet, brown-haired boy had spoken and Jefferson from his seat in the old revolving chair looked at him sharply. This was his beloved younger daughter Maria’s only child. Maria, christened Mary, called Polly, and later changing her name in the convent to Maria, pronounced in the Italian fashion. Maria was gone now these four years but the pain of her loss was still a quivering fiber of anguish in Thomas Jefferson’s heart. She had died, as his own young wife had died, when her daughters were small, having borne too many children, wasting away after the last childbirth, fading slowly day by day. Polly’s young husband, Jack Eppes, still lived at Eppington not far away, but Francis spent a great deal of time at Monticello with Martha’s healthy, noisy brood.

“Come here, Francis,” Jefferson called gently. “Come here and let your grandfather look at you.”

“He’s always moping and looking out windows,” volunteered a young Randolph. “It’s because he hasn’t any mother.”

“Come and talk to me, Francis,” urged Jefferson. “You and I should be friends. I have no mother either.”

The boy came obediently and stood by the arm of the chair, his big eyes, so like Polly’s, very sober.

“Old people don’t have mothers, sir,” he said.

“But I did. Till I was a grown up man. I had a handsome mother whose name was Jane and I still think about her when I stand and look out of windows. I wonder if I’m the kind of a man she would have wanted me to be.”

“I can’t be what my mother wanted me to be,” said small Francis plaintively. “My father says she wanted me to be a great man like my grandfather, but how can I be like you, sir? All the things you’ve done won’t ever be done again, ever, will they? There will never be another Declaration of Independence and you wrote that. I know. My father told me.”

Jefferson circled the lad with an arm. All about, clustered close to the fire, the young Randolphs were abruptly and amazingly quiet.

“That’s so,” the old man agreed. “I did write that paper, didn’t I? And after I’d written it, four other men sat around in Philadelphia for about a week and picked it to pieces and made changes in it and couldn’t make up their minds whether to adopt it or not. I guess they never would have made up their minds and we’d still be British subjects and paying taxes to the king. But at last they all decided to accept the Declaration of Independence, leaving out some parts I had labored hard to make perfect. So—we declared ourselves independent of Great Britain.”

The small Randolphs were convulsed in a hysteria of giggles but young Francis kept a grave face.

“On the fourth of July, 1776,” he said, “and I know the names of those other men too, Grandfather.”

“So do I!” piped up a cousin. “One was John Adams and one was Benjamin Franklin—”

“And Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Robert Livingston of New York,” finished Francis, “and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. But you should have been the first man to sign it, Grandfather. Why did you let John Hancock beat you?”

“He was the president of the Congress, my son. It was his right to put his name first. Have you read the Declaration, any of you?”

“Ha!” shouted some older ones. “We know it by heart.” And straightway there began a chanting recitation, the big ones trying to drown out the smaller ones.

Jefferson jumped up, waving his hands for silence. “Enough! Enough! You know it. I concede that you know it. Better than your grandfather no doubt, for I have to think hard at times to remember parts of it.”

It was Ann, the oldest Randolph daughter, who broke up the conclave around the fire.

“Grandfather, the wagons have come!” she announced from the door. “Do you want all those boxes brought in here?”

“All of them.” He jumped up and was quickly at the door. Now he would open and arrange all his papers at his leisure. Slaves tramped in and out through the outer library, endlessly piling up heavy parcels.

“Twenty-nine,” counted Martha finally. “Papa, there should be thirty. I know. I counted them twice in Washington.”

“Something has been lost or stolen,” he worried, “and I won’t know what it is until I have emptied every box.”

“I know what it is!” she cried, studying the pile. “It’s that wooden box we packed in your bedroom—there at the last. The one that had all your Indian writing in it.”

“My comparative study of all the Indian languages,” he fretted. “Some one must go back at once. Thomas, send two boys down the river in a canoe tomorrow to search the bank where all these parcels were unloaded from the barge. That Indian work could be valuable. I meant to pursue it further. It must not be lost.”

The lost box was found a few days later. It had been torn open on the muddy river bank and obviously the thieves, seeking for money, had been disappointed in the contents, for the precious papers were torn and scattered far and wide. What little could be salvaged, Martha dried and pressed but little was legible on the sodden sheets.

Thomas Jefferson’s years of study of the Indian tongues was forever lost.