America's First Daughter: A Novel(117)
My father was not, as the Federalists suggested, blind to the dangers of Napoleon. Rather, I believe it was his well-known sympathy for France that made possible—in a way it wouldn’t have been possible for any other president—the successful purchase of Louisiana.
Even before it was completed in the third year of his presidency, it was plain that the Louisiana Purchase would be one of his greatest achievements, a staggering success of careful and opportunistic statecraft that doubled the size of the country. And the Federalists could scarcely mount up an opposition to it.
My father’s political victory had been a bloodless revolution, we said . . . but there had been blood. Hamilton’s blood. Spilled from the body of his eldest son in defense of his honor. One of my father’s supporters had claimed Mr. Hamilton intended to overthrow the government to stop a Jeffersonian presidency. That claim now proven utterly untrue, Philip Hamilton confronted his father’s accuser in a duel and was shot dead.
It was a reminder to me that public life could be fatal, exert ing a toll on families that was difficult to underestimate. So my husband couldn’t have astonished me more if he’d grown a horn in the middle of his head, when, before the purchase of Louisiana was negotiated, he said, “Jack Eppes is running for Congress. I’m going to do the same.”
My sister’s husband was running in a newly created district where his chances of victory were good. The seat Tom wanted was already occupied by one of my father’s strongest supporters. If Tom lost, it’d not only alienate the man against my father, but would also crush my husband utterly. And even if Tom won, they’d say he hadn’t earned his seat in Congress on his own merits, but on my father’s name; for both of Jefferson’s sons-in-laws to run together was to invite rumor of a Jeffersonian dynasty.
But when Tom told me, there was an earnest pride and eagerness in his expression, one I hadn’t seen since he was a boy, gazing up at my father with admiration. I realized what it would mean to him to win a seat in Congress. What it would mean to him to succeed. Tom had never wanted to be a planter. His responsibilities as a father and a husband had probably put a legal career out of reach forever. But he didn’t need that to serve in Congress.
I didn’t know how we’d manage the plantations without Tom or my father, but I didn’t have the heart to discourage my husband; I simply didn’t have the heart. “Why, I think it’s a wonderful idea, Tom.”
He embraced me, planting a thousand kisses on my cheeks. “What a lucky man I am to have you for a wife,” he said, holding my face in his hands. “Don’t you worry about the farms. I have a plan.”
I was worried. If Tom won, he’d be absent from home, just as my father was perpetually absent. Our already shaky fortunes would suffer. I wasn’t worried about Monticello; in Papa’s absence, the Hemings family ran everything there from the blacksmith shop to the dairy. We only needed to send an overseer there once a week to discipline the nail boys. But the outlying farms . . . slaves could do the planting, but the operations would need to be overseen every day, and I doubted we could recoup the expense of a more permanent overseer. Though I’d found more strength in me than I knew I had while nursing my entire family back to health through the whooping cough and managing a household besides, I feared that along with the children, and the house, and the outbuildings, the responsibility for the farms and the crops would now fall to me. And that I might not prove worthy of the challenge.
So I girded myself for his answer. “What plan?”
“Cotton,” Tom said as he began to describe his scheme. “It’s like printing money, it’s so profitable.”
This confused me utterly. “I hadn’t thought cotton a profitable crop in Virginia.”
He nodded. “That’s why I’m going to Georgia. I thought, originally, to try the Mississippi territory, but every white man there is outnumbered by slaves and dangerous Indians. So I’m going to purchase land in Georgia.”
The blood drained from my face. It was, of course, a husband’s prerogative to decide where his family would go. But if Tom thought I’d submit to dragging our children into parts hitherto unknown, he’d misjudged me thoroughly. My voice actually quavered when I said, “You want to pack up and move to Georgia?”
He stroked my hair. “No, no. Of course not. I can’t hold a congressional seat in Virginia if we make a home in Georgia, can I? No. I’ll go to Georgia to prospect land, and when I find a good place, I’ll establish all our Negroes there.” My horrified expression must not have changed a whit, because he quickly added, “I know you’re worried about our people, Patsy. I have nothing but the deepest concern for those whose happiness fortune has thrown upon our will. We won’t break up any families—we’ll send them all together. I promise you, the culture of cotton is the least laborious of any ever practiced. It’s a gentle labor.”
Maybe. But what about domestic servants? Even if I could part with them, I couldn’t bear to see them sent away in fear. “They’ll be terrified, Tom.”
“We’ll have to ease them into it,” he agreed. “We’ll have to tell them that we’re all going. My slaves are willing to accompany me anywhere, but their attachment to you would make their departure very heavy unless they believed you were to follow soon.”
No wonder my husband never liked deception. Even when he could muster up the stomach for a lie, he had no talent for it. There was no earthly way we could fool our domestic servants, who watched our every move and listened to our every word. And if our domestic servants knew we weren’t going with them to Georgia, our field hands would soon learn it, too, at which point the entire thing would be completely unmanageable.