FOURTEEN
Mrs. Jefferson has at last shaken off her tormenting pains, by yielding to them, and has left our friend inconsolable.
—Jefferson friend EDMUND RANDOLPH to James Madison
HIS WIFE WAS DYING. The latest child, the second Lucy Elizabeth, was Patty Jefferson’s sixth in ten years. Patty was only thirty-three, but her body was exhausted. The tensions and exertions of the war, culminating in the family’s evacuation of Monticello, exacerbated the state of her health. She may have suffered from tuberculosis. By the early summer of 1782 she was confined to her bed.
Her husband refused to leave her side. Day after day, week after week, month after month, Jefferson “was never out of calling,” his daughter Patsy recalled long afterward. He spared himself few details of his wife’s care, helping her take medicines and guiding cups to her lips.
Either at her bed or in a small room nearby that opened onto hers, he kept vigil. Patty, too, craved Jefferson’s company. “Her eyes ever rested on him, ever followed him,” according to family tradition. “When he spoke, no other sound could reach her ear or attract her attention. When she waked from slumber, she looked momentarily alarmed and distressed, and even appeared to be frightened, if the customary form was not bending over her, the customary look upon her.” Monticello and each other became their only reality.
She had strength enough to begin writing some lines from Sterne—they were from Tristram Shandy—on a small piece of paper.
Time wastes too fast: every letter
I trace tells me with what rapidity
Life follows my pen. The days and hours
Of it are flying over our heads like
Clouds of windy day never to return—
More every thing presses on—
She faded at this point. Jefferson finished the passage for her:
And every
Time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which
Follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation
Which we are shortly to make!
Sterne’s message here is tragic, unrelentingly so, for even moments of human communion and love are seen not as fulfilling in themselves but ephemeral: a stark yet realistic vision of life.
James Monroe sensed the scope of the crisis and the depth of his patron’s sadness. “I have been much distressed upon the subject of Mrs. Jefferson and have feared … that the report of each succeeding day would inform me she was no more.” Monroe called on God for her recovery. “It may please heaven to restore our amiable friend to health and thereby to you a friend whose loss you would always lament, and to your children a parent which no change of circumstances would ever compensate for.”
The prayer was futile. It was nearly noon on Friday, September 6, 1782, when the end came. According to Monticello tradition, “the house servants,” including Elizabeth Hemings and her daughter Sally, were among those with Patty Jefferson as she lay dying. Edmund Bacon, who managed the plantation in later decades, said that the Monticello slaves “have often told my wife that when Mrs. Jefferson died they stood around the bed. Mr. Jefferson sat by her, and she gave him directions about a good many things that she wanted done.”
Like her late mother-in-law, Patty was commanding to the last. “When she came to the children, she wept and could not speak for some time. Finally she held up her hand, and … told him she could not die happy if she thought her … children were ever to have a stepmother brought in over them.” To extract a promise of eternal faithfulness from a man like Jefferson—vital, sexually energetic, only thirty-nine—could be seen as a selfish deathbed request. Patty, however, was most likely thinking of her children and their happiness. She may have believed that the combined maternal influences of the girls’ aunts and perhaps of Elizabeth Hemings—whom Patty had known so long and so intimately—were sufficient without risking the introduction of an unknown woman as mistress of the house. Patsy was nearly ten, Polly four, Lucy an infant. Jefferson was rich, celebrated, and charming. But he gave his promise. He would, he assured his dying wife, never marry again.
Among the reported witnesses to that pledge was Sally Hemings, Patty’s half sister, who was not quite ten years old.
At a quarter to twelve on that Friday, Patty Jefferson died. In the final moments, Jefferson’s sister Martha Carr had to help the grieving husband from his wife’s bedside. He was, his daughter recalled, “in a state of insensibility” when Mrs. Carr “with great difficulty, got him into the library, where he fainted”—and not for a brief moment. Jefferson “remained so long insensible that they feared he would never revive.”
When he did come to, he was incoherent with grief, and perhaps surrendered to rage. There is a hint that he lost all control in the calamity of Patty’s death. According to his daughter Patsy, “The scene that followed I did not witness”—presumably “the scene” unfolded in the library when he revived—“but the violence of his emotion, when, almost by stealth, I entered his room by night, to this day I dare not describe to myself.” (Patsy was writing half a century later.)
A pallet to lie on was brought to give him some comfort in the little library. Yet his grief drove him out of doors in a kind of frenzy. Patsy attached herself to her father, as if clinging to the one remaining constant in her life. For her, siblings had come and gone, and now her mother was dead. Given the demands of his wartime leadership, Jefferson would have seemed a loving if somewhat distant figure to her. Yet he adored his family, idealizing it in many ways, and he would have seen in Patsy—with her strength and evident maturity in dealing with a father in the grip of grief—images of his mother, of his sister Jane, and, of course, of Patty. He held her close; she held him close. The pattern of warmth and intimacy between father and daughter that set in during this dark spell of despair persisted for the rest of their lives.
“He kept his room [for] three weeks, and I was never a moment from his side,” Patsy said. “He walked almost incessantly night and day, only lying down occasionally, when nature was completely exhausted, on a pallet that had been brought in during his long fainting fit. My aunts remained constantly with him for some weeks—I do not remember how many.”
He could not remain still. “When at last he left his room, he rode out, and from that time he was incessantly on horseback, rambling about the mountain, in the least frequented roads, and just as often through the woods. In those melancholy rambles I was his constant companion—a solitary witness to many a burst of grief, the remembrance of which has consecrated particular scenes of that lost home beyond the power of time to obliterate.” He drove himself as though sheer movement could alleviate his loss. In one of the first letters he wrote after the disaster of September 6, 1782, he said, “I had had some thoughts of abstracting myself awhile from this state by a journey to Philadelphia or somewhere else Northwardly.”
Rumor had Jefferson nearing madness. “I ever thought him to rank domestic happiness in the first class of the chief good,” Edmund Randolph told James Madison, “but scarcely supposed that his grief would be so violent as to justify the circulating report of his swooning away whenever he sees his children.”
His epitaph for Patty came from Homer, from the heart of the Iliad. He had the words inscribed in Greek—only the educated would be able to share in his memorial to his wife. Alexander Pope had translated the lines Jefferson selected this way:
If in the melancholy shades below,
The flames of friends and lovers cease to glow,
Yet mine shall sacred last; mine undecay’d
Burn on through death and animate my shade.
In his mind the connection with Patty was eternal, able even to overcome the customs of Hades. For now, though, a phrase on the tombstone captured the unavoidable truth: “Martha Jefferson … Intermarried with Thomas Jefferson January 1st, 1772; Torn from him by death September 6th, 1782.”
A month later he was alluding to the possibility of suicide. “This miserable kind of existence is really too burdensome to be borne,” he wrote, “and were it not for the infidelity of deserting the sacred charge left me, I could not wish its continuance a moment.” His world seemed to have died with Patty. “All my plans of comfort and happiness reversed by a single event and nothing answering in prospect before me but a gloom unbrightened with one cheerful expectation,” he wrote his sister-in-law Elizabeth Eppes.
He would endure for Patsy, Polly, and Lucy. He knew his duty to his children and to his neighbors. “I will endeavor to … keep what I feel to myself that I may not dispirit you from a communication with us,” he told Mrs. Eppes. “I say nothing of coming to Eppington because I promised you this should not be till I could support such a countenance as might not cast a damp on the cheerfulness of others.”
He was a long way from that point. His wanderings in the woods and his rides with Patsy were all he could manage.