America's First Daughter: A Novel(162)

Mr. Campbell’s eyes were cold, though he spoke with a chuckle. “You ought to beg your husband’s pardon.”

I had begged my husband’s pardon. I’d begged it a hundred times. But never did I think Tom would confide our troubles to an outsider, especially when no one need ever have known that I took part in his reassignment. Tom might have spared himself the greater part of the humiliation he felt if only he’d kept quiet about it!

But alas, self-command was never one of Tom’s virtues. And in that moment, I feared it wasn’t going to be mine. “Mr. Campbell, during my visit I’ve become acquainted with a number of rare creatures. They’re my favorite curiosities. So I’m afraid you must excuse me, as I’m in search of that rare creature still left in Richmond called a gentleman.”

With that, I left him.

Mr. Campbell later wrote that I was cold, vain, and sarcastic.

But I was satisfied, there in the crowded gallery on the cold winter day when my husband was reelected to the governorship, feeling within myself a stoic satisfaction in my duty well done.

Would that I could’ve been as effective when it came to my husband’s policies. Papa had worked the levers of power with geniality and personal charm, but he’d always properly gauged the public mood. I remembered a time no gentleman of Virginia would ever advocate for slavery, even if none of them took steps to change it. But that was all changed now within a generation. My husband’s proposal to emancipate the slaves was met with fierce and bitter opposition, even though it promised to compensate slave owners for the loss of their property. No matter what Tom said to the legislators and no matter what I said to their wives, our efforts to cleanse Virginia of slavery fell upon deaf ears.

For Virginians now argued that slavery was a moral good, encouraged by the Bible. I thought it had more to do with the fact they were discovering that slaves were more than an asset in and of themselves; they could be bred. They could be bred for sale to barbarous plantations in Georgia and South Carolina. Though Tom was ready to empty the state’s treasury to bring about an end to the evil, the gentry resisted the antislavery movement as nothing but northerners bent on consolidating power by taking advantage of the virtuous feelings of the people.

I was ashamed of Virginia that year.

Tom’s proposal would’ve failed even if my father had supported it. But because it failed without Papa’s support it further embittered Tom.

It also revealed my father’s paralysis on the matter of slavery, a paralysis brought about by his true intimacy with it. For there was one “wolf” Papa could neither safely hold nor safely let go.

The last time I saw Beverly Hemings was at Christmas the next year, just before he took his violin outside into the snow to play holiday songs for the slaves on Mulberry Row. Shortly thereafter, he left Monticello and didn’t return.

I was there when my father grimly took up his pen and listed Beverly as a runaway in his record book. “I’ll send his sister to him on a stagecoach with enough money to establish herself.” Papa said, eyeing me, as if anticipating some objection to the money he meant to give his illegitimate children.

I put my hand atop his withered one. “You’re a kind and generous father.”

He looked away, and my heart broke for him. Because I could imagine the pain I’d feel to send my children away, knowing I’d never see them again. But I believed it was a generosity to part with Beverly and Harriet this way. Beverly might never be known as a gentleman, but Harriet had a good chance of becoming a gentleman’s wife. She’d come of age in a genteel household and could both read and write. She’d been trained in the womanly arts of spinning and sewing and keeping house. She was more beautiful than her mother had been, which meant that so long as Harriet disavowed all connection to the Hemingses of Monticello, she might do better than my own daughters in securing her future.

And in the end, I was right about Sally. Her fierce determination that her children should be free overcame all other instincts. I saw her on the terrace, her arms round her only surviving daughter’s neck. When they finally parted, Sally stood there, staring after her daughter’s carriage, knowing it was likely to be the last time she ever laid eyes on her. Then Sally quietly walked to her room by the dairy and shut herself inside.

For weeks, Sally didn’t take meals nor did she answer the door when her youngest two sons knocked, nor even when my father sent for her. She pled illness, and my father pretended to believe her. For with the departure of Beverly and Harriet, our gentler way of life was more fiction than it had ever been before.





Chapter Thirty-seven


Monticello, 26 January 1822

From Thomas Jefferson to Alexander Keech

It’s not in my power to give you a definite idea of when our University may be expected to open. We shall be truly gratified should it become an instrument of nourishing those brotherly affections with our neighboring states which it is so much our interest and wish to strengthen.

WHAT A PAIR of schoolmasters we’ve become,” my father said when my youngest boys dragged their school desks from my sitting room into a circle round his stuffed leather chair for a Latin lesson. Having recently taken a fall that put his arm in a sling, and with the winter weather harder on his bones than it used to be, Papa was housebound.

The weather kept visitors away, so during our quiet winter respite, we made a little university out of Monticello. And because Sally was less and less at my father’s side since her eldest children left Monticello, Papa looked increasingly to me for his happiness.