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Monticello: Autumn, 1809

With a frantic kind of energy that early autumn, Jefferson forsook his books and set himself to the job of assaying and recuperating his own personal estate. During his long absences, Thomas Randolph, and his son, young Jefferson after him, had done their best by the vast property—the acres about Monticello, and the farm, Poplar Grove, a few miles away. But many fields had been neglected and weeds and brush had taken over; the slaves, having no firm master, had learned to shirk tasks cleverly and leave much undone.

Thomas Jefferson had never been a harsh master, but now he became a stern and demanding one. Nails must be made and bricks burned, both for his own building plans and for sale in the market. His French friend, Du Pont de Nemours, on his last visit had brought him a small flock of merino sheep. Jefferson enjoyed supervising the shearing of these sheep, and the washing of the wool, and watched the carding, spinning, and weaving going on under Martha’s supervision. He decided to have a suit of clothes made from his own fine woolen cloth and busied himself drawing patterns, measuring, and figuring for days.

The wrist that had been broken in Paris had never been properly set, and he found using drawing tools and writing letters more and more of a painful chore. And always he was interrupted by guests. Some he had invited, regretting later his hospitable impulse, but the uninvited continued to find their way up the winding road to his mountain.

He must, he determined, have a place that was his own where he could study and work undisturbed either by the family or by these strangers, most of whom he was certain had only one desire—to be able to go home and boast that they had seen the great Thomas Jefferson and the fabulous house he had created.

He would have a study built at the far end of the north promenade immediately. So promptly he set about having seasoned lumber hauled from the sawmill, bricks burned, and nails and hardware forged in the smithy. He spent a day drawing a plan for a small, one-room building.

Meanwhile he found an opportunity occasionally to slip away with one or two grandchildren for a brief stay at Poplar Grove, his farm, where he could have a little quiet and relaxation. But always an impelling urgency drove him. He must write letters. He must counsel James Madison about whether or not it would be wise to keep America out of war, with conflicts raging all over Europe. Napoleon was running wild and perhaps the British should be left alone to contain and subdue him.

He must write, too, to his old friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, and invite him to Monticello for a visit. Lafayette had been in prison, and suffered hardships and loss of fortune. The debt America owed Lafayette had never been paid, and, to Jefferson’s mind, had never been adequately acknowledged, and he felt responsibility to prod the consciences of men in power to do something about that. All these ideas possessed him, then at times were diminished by a kind of inner irony. Who was he, to be so concerned about a debt owed to any man when he himself was likely faced with a weight of debts he had not yet had the courage to calculate?

Some time soon when his private lair was completed he must sit down for a day or a week and put all his books and accounts in order. It was a kind of cowardice in him, he knew, that put off the reckoning from one day to another.

Meanwhile his new wool suit was finished and he was more pleased than ever with the fineness of the material. With the coming of winter, Martha had taken her own brood back to their plantation, but when she returned for a brief visit Jefferson dressed up in his new clothes and paraded before her, grinning like a happy boy.

Martha gave a little surprise shriek. “Papa! Pantaloons! I never would have believed you would give up those old knee breeches and long stockings.”

“They’re warmer,” Jefferson turned and posed naively, “and the London papers that still come through in spite of the embargo say that they are the new style in England. Jemmy Madison wrote that he had a pair made—black broadcloth. Every hair and bit of lint sticks to that stuff. I’m sending Jemmy enough of this goods to have himself a suit made. With the president wearing it, we might be able to sell more in Washington. Some friends who were here last week said the cloth was better than the finest wool that comes from England.”

“It will certainly help if you can find a new product to market. All these visitors this summer devoured so much of our substance that should have gone for ready money, and money, Papa, is what you need badly, as I’m sure you know.”

“Too well, Patsy. Too well! I’m admitting now to you what you must have surmised or suspected for a long time. I am a fine farmer on paper. I’ve been full of wonderful plans and theories, and on paper they looked fine and profitable, but somehow they have all failed to pay off in cash. All those vineyards and olive groves I planted so hopefully—I have just compelled myself to compute the cost and returns on that venture. The whole project adds up to a substantial loss.”

“And because of this trouble with the shipping your wheat is mildewing in the bins because it can’t be shipped to market,” she reminded him.

“And across the ocean people in need of bread are starving,” he added sorrowfully. “If there were any way to give the stuff away to those who suffer for lack of it—but alas, there is none!”

The people, always the people, thought his daughter. A world full of people, and if he had his way he would free and feed all of them. In the meantime he was dubious about spending the money for a new pair of spectacles, but bent close to his desk peering through an old pair that had one bow mended with black thread stiffened with glue.

“You’d better have a new cushion in that old chair, Papa,” she suggested. “If you sit on that thin one in those wool breeches, they’ll be worn to a shine and show thin spots mighty quickly. I’ll tell one of the women to stitch up a stout canvas cover and stuff it with plenty of feathers.” She moved to the high window and looked off across the hill. “Those mountains look like winter,” she observed. “In spring and summer a blue haze makes them dim and far and restful to look at, but in winter their crests stand out sharp and blue and cold and a bit hostile. I hope you’ve had plenty of wood cut and piled. You’ll need big fires, especially if everyone comes home for Christmas.”

He frowned a little, looked startled. “Christmas?” he repeated. “Is it near—and is it so important?”

She drew back a little. “Of course it’s important! Don’t tell me, Papa, that those people who called you Jefferson the Infidel had any truth to back up their accusations? Don’t tell me that you don’t believe that the Son of God was born on Christmas day and that it is a holy day to be remembered?”

“I am not an infidel,” he said soberly. “I have never denied the existence and the power of God. And I have studied extensively the sayings of Jesus. I have also never discovered in all my reading any proof that he was born on the twenty-fifth of December—especially as the calendar has been changed several times since the period began that men call Anno Domini.”

“It is the day the Church sets apart as a holy day. For me, Papa, and for my children, that’s enough,” said Martha a bit tartly. “Surely there have been times when Christmas was important in your life, though you’ve been at home so little?”

“Oh, yes.” He was quick to try to mollify her. Patsy in an acid mood, he remembered, could be a trifle difficult. “I remember times at Shadwell when my mother was alive. And before my father died there was always some kind of feasting, a goose saved and fattened and a fat pig killed for the Negroes, and mother usually had suckets of some sort for the young ones and opened her best brandied peaches and preserves.”

“I remember when Mama was alive,” she looked off pensively into the lonely blue of the hills, “we had one Christmas. The people brought in holly and you mixed punch in a big bowl and people came, unless the snow was too deep. And once I remember you took my mother to church, but she came home unhappy because you stood outside and talked politics all through the service. But after that you were seldom at home.”

“I made her unhappy too often,” he reproached himself. “I was trying to help build a nation, Patsy. We were living in perilous times. Why, you must remember the war—when Tarleton came to Monticello? I rode sixty miles in one night to get here in time to get you all safely away from the British dragoons.”

“I was five. I remember. Aunt Martha Carr was here with her boys and we were all piled into the chaise, with some of the servants sitting on behind with their legs dangling and old Jupiter lashing the horses to a gallop. Mother cried because she was sure they would capture you and burn the house down. She said that if Tarleton could capture the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, the king would make him a general.”

“Not to speak boastfully, that likely was true. But he didn’t capture me nor burn the house. Instead Captain McLeod made himself very comfortable in it for two days, while poor old black Caesar was hidden under the planks of the portico, where he had crawled to hide all our silver. He had pried up the floor and dropped down under, and black Martin saw some horsemen galloping up the drive and dropped the planks back, and there was faithful old Caesar underneath, hungry and scared for two days.”

“I remember hearing about it,” said Martha, “and about the soldier who pushed a gun into Martin’s face and ordered him to tell which way you had gone or he would shoot. Martin said, ‘Go ahead, shoot!’ And after that he never got tired of telling it. But, Papa, we were supposed to be talking about Christmas!”

How could he make himself clear to her, how could he explain to his literal downright-minded daughter, that harried and anxious Thomas Jefferson had been turned away by destiny from all the simple folkways and beliefs? From all the prosaic and ordinary things that were good and dedicated to wholesome living into a world of desperate struggle, intrigue, cabal, tragedy, and strife?

Now that he was becalmed in this quiet backwater of life he could see his own career and know that it had been always headlong, more than a little frenzied, and too much of it precipitate and unpredictable and little under his own control—and in that chaotic whirling by of history there had been too little time for a man to meditate and even assay his own beliefs.

“I,” he said, “have lived, Patsy, like a man snatched up by a whirlwind. That is why I am so disassociated from simple things like celebrating Christmas. Give me time to adjust and learn the value of things. You know that I do not even yet fit smoothly into the rhythms of life, even here at Monticello. I still want to alter and tear down and rebuild and that distresses you; but I am trying, my dear—I am sincerely trying. Ultimately I shall learn to be a quiescent ancient, grateful for a fireside and an easy chair. And if you wish to celebrate Christmas, by all means let us celebrate Christmas. Shall we have a great house full of guests and much feasting and merrymaking?”

“Oh, no!” she lifted both hands. “Papa, you know you can’t afford it!”

He laughed. “And how are we to celebrate if we lack the proper materials and incentive? Shall we merely hang the holly high and slaughter the goose and carol a few stanzas under the mistletoe?”

“Do you realize, sir,” she faced him sternly, “that you have not spent a Christmas day in this house since I was a little girl?”

“You have kept count all these years?”

“I have kept count. And so has every one at Monticello. You owe something to Monticello in my opinion.”

“Then by all means, that is one debt that I shall pay,” he smiled, letting his long, thin lips relax, and his voice sink to a caressing murmur. “Plan it all, Daughter. Plan it all well and then simply tell your old father what it is that you want him to do.”