American Sphinx (23 page)

Certain features in this idyllic scene, especially the family dimension, apparently did come together for Jefferson at least momentarily in the mid-1790s. Patsy, now a full-grown woman whom Jefferson addressed as Martha, had married Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., in 1790, soon after her return from France. When she was a young girl studying in Paris, Jefferson had worried out loud about the chances “that in marriage she will draw a blockhead,” but Randolph put those worries to rest. A Virginia gentleman of the finest pedigree, Randolph had been educated at Edinburgh and in fact modeled himself after his new father-in-law. Tall, sinewy, like Jefferson, but with black hair and a dark complexion, he was a splendid horseman, one of the few Virginians who could outride Jefferson; as a young man he possessed the dashing charm and beguiling eccentricities associated with other male members of the Randolph clan, like saluting nonchalantly as his horse cleared a formidable fence. By 1795 he and Martha had already produced two grandchildren for Jefferson. Nine more were on the way. In addition to substantial holdings at Varina on the James River below Richmond, in 1792 Randolph purchased Edgehill, a fifteen-hundred-acre estate only two miles from Monticello, so he and Martha could be regular presences in Jefferson’s domestic circle and full-fledged residents of Monticello throughout the summers.
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In June of 1796 a visiting French nobleman, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, who was one of the aristocratic refugees from the current bloodbath in France, described Jefferson supervising his wheat harvest in the fields with Randolph alongside him, commenting that “from, the affection he [Jefferson] bears him,” Randolph “seems to be his son rather than his son-in-law.” La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt then went on to describe the other member of Jefferson’s family unit at Monticello, the former Polly, now old enough to turn heads among all the eligible bachelors of Albemarle County and be referred to by her proper name: “Miss Maria constantly resides with her father; but as she is seventeen years old, and is remarkably handsome, she will, doubtless, soon find that there are duties which it is still sweeter to perform than those of a daughter.” A year later Maria fulfilled this prediction by becoming engaged to John Wayles Eppes, whom Jefferson described as just the young man he would have chosen for his stunningly beautiful daughter “if I had had the whole earth free to have chosen a partner for her.” Jefferson then explained to Martha how Maria’s looming marriage provided the final ingredient for his long-standing plan of domestic harmony: “I now see our fireside formed in a group, no one member has a fibre in their composition which can ever produce any jarring or jealousies among us. No irregular passions, no dangerous bias, which may render problematic the future fortunes and happiness of our descendants. We are quieted as to their condition for at least one generation more.”
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Like many of Jefferson’s fondest and most heartfelt visions, this one proved too good to be true. Despite her father’s wedding gift of eight hundred acres within sight of Monticello, designed to keep her close, Maria preferred to live on her husband’s family lands at Eppington. And like her mother, she died prematurely during childbirth in 1804. Meanwhile Thomas Mann Randolph became afflicted with a mysterious nervous disorder soon after Jefferson took up residence as paterfamilias. Neither a tour through the cooler climate of New England nor several visits to the hot springs of Virginia produced the desired cure, leaving Jefferson himself to wonder what ailed his beloved son-in-law. Alcoholism became a problem in the ensuing years, and rumors began to circulate that young Randolph had inherited a streak of the eccentric behavior—enemies called it outright lunacy—that stalked the Randolph line. By 1802 he was confessing his feelings of inadequacy as a member of the Jefferson family, “like something extraneous, fallen in by accident and destroying the homogeneity,” the self-declared “silly bird” who could never feel at ease among the swans.
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Indeed the only persevering portion of Jefferson’s domestic dream was Martha, who devoted herself to her father and her children in the selfless fashion in which she had been reared, never talked about her husband’s mounting emotional problems, in fact acknowledged in 1798 that her love for her husband had never really displaced “the first and best of nature,” meaning her feelings for her father. Whether this rather extreme version of daughterly affection had something to do with Thomas Mann Randolph’s slide into despair and eventual destitution is not clear. What is clear is that despite what must have been many idyllic moments soon after Jefferson’s retirement, expectations of an abiding form of domestic bliss on his mountaintop were forced to adjust themselves to the emotional rivalries that had infiltrated his domestic circle.
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Jefferson’s attitude toward whatever psychological conflicts were steadily eroding those dreams was self-conscious silence. When Maria once mentioned the dilemma posed by the persistent alcoholism of a distant relative, Jefferson advised her to avoid discussing the subject. “What is the use of rectifying him if the thing be unimportant,” he asked rhetorically, “and if important, let it pass for the present. . . . It is wonderful how many persons are rendered unhappy by inattention to these little rules of prudence.” Such acts of prudent obliviousness also had the decided advantage of sustaining the imaginary ideal. In the Jeffersonian family code, one not only kept secrets from outsiders; one kept secrets from oneself.
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Much like his domestic ideal, Jefferson’s agrarian ideal was utterly sincere, an honest expression of how he wished to see himself but set so far from the messy and mundane realities of plantation life in postrevolutionary Virginia that collisions between interior preferences and exterior limitations were unavoidable, in the end tragically so. One of his most famous utterances, trailing only his classic statement on human rights in the Declaration of Independence as an eloquent contribution to American prose history, is the following passage from
Notes on Virginia:
“Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit of genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.” As one modern-day scholar and farmer has observed, American agriculture has never quite recovered from this resounding compliment. Indeed the entire history of farming in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America can be written as a clash between the mythical status of the Jeffersonian tiller of the soil and the harsh realities of capricious weather and equally capricious markets. That long and often paradoxical story, it turns out, actually had its origins in the experience of Jefferson himself.
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Reality came at Jefferson in several overlapping waves, but the most elemental fact was that he was not an independent yeoman farmer but an indebted Virginia planter. By the time of his retirement as secretary of state he owed about forty-five hundred pounds to English creditors in Bristol and another two thousand pounds to a Glasgow firm. The bulk of this debt had been incurred in the 1770s, when he inherited the burdened estate of his father-in-law, John Wayles. But what he called his “thralldom of debt” had been further complicated by the wartime inflation that rendered his efforts at payment valueless, by the declining productivity of his lands during his long absences from Monticello from 1784 to 1794, as well as by his apparently constitutional inability to live within a budget or deny himself books, fine furnishings, expensive wines or other essentials of the good life. During the latter phase of his ministry in France he had become increasingly aware of the growing gap between his income and his expenses, indeed almost obsessively aware that the interest on his debts was compounding at a faster rate than his payments on the principal. When he left public office in 1794, while he had sounded the familiar Ciceronian note about his craving for bucolic simplicity, he apprised Washington, more practically, that he had retired in order to rescue himself from debt and his lands from “the ravages of overseers [which] has brought on them a degree of degredation far beyond what I had expected.”
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His financial predicament was serious. Comparisons in modern-day terms are notoriously tricky to calculate, but can conservatively be estimated in the range of several hundred thousand dollars. But they were also fairly typical for the planter class of postrevolutionary Virginia. In 1790 residents of the Old Dominion owed £2.3 million to English and Scottish creditors, and the most prominent families of Virginia were also the most prominent names on the list of more than thirty thousand delinquent debtors kept by British merchants. Jefferson was profoundly aware of the massive indebtedness afflicting his friends and neighbors, once even explaining to a French admirer that the debts of Virginia’s planters were “hereditary from father to son for so many generations, so that the planters were a species of property, annexed to certain mercantile houses in London.” He said pretty much the same thing to his younger daughter: “The unprofitable condition of Virginia estates in general leaves it next to impossible for the holder of one to avoid ruin. And this condition will continue until some change takes place in the mode of working them. In the mean time, nothing can save us and our children from beggary but a determination to get a year beforehand, and restrain ourselves vigorously to the clear profits of the last. If a debt is once contracted by a farmer, it is never paid but by a sale [of the estate.]” Given his own indulged habits of consumption and the eventual fate of his beloved Monticello, this proved to be a highly ironic statement. But in the middle years of the 1790s he could neither foresee the future nor appreciate irony. What he could do, or at least try mightily to do, was make his lands more productive and pay off his debts. Farming, then, meant making money.
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His landed assets were impressive, but deceptively so. Jefferson owned nearly eleven thousand acres, about equally divided between estates surrounding Monticello in Albemarle County and western lands concentrated in Bedford County, about ninety miles away. He had sold off additional acreage lying along the James River to the southeast in Goochland and Cumberland counties, in part to pay off debts and in part to consolidate his holdings. Despite the sale, Jefferson remained one of the largest landowners in the state. One of the reasons he found it difficult to accept the full implications of his indebtedness was that he thought of wealth like an old-style Virginia aristocrat, in terms of land rather than money or more liquid forms of capital. For Jefferson, land was the best measure of a man’s worth and, as he put it, “that of which I am the most tenacious.” Despite the haunting presence of his English and Scottish creditors, he thought of himself as a landed and therefore a wealthy man.
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He expected the land to rescue him from those creditors once he took personal charge of managing its cultivation. His plan was clear. He would abandon tobacco as his chief cash crop in favor of wheat. In his
Notes on Virginia
he had described tobacco growing as “a culture productive of infinite wretchedness,” in part because the noxious weed served no earthly purpose other than to feed a nasty habit, but also because the plant possessed an almost unique capacity to kill the land. Because his own lands were, as he put it, “as yet reclaimed from the barbarous state in which the slovenly business of tobacco making had left them,” he would insist upon the adoption of a seven-step long-term plan of crop rotation designed to permit the soil to recover its former fertility. Throughout the spring and summer of 1794 Jefferson focused the bulk of his considerable energies on the details of his seven-step rotation plan, giving it all the concentrated attention he had previously given to American domestic politics or foreign policy.
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At least at the theoretical level, which was where Jefferson always did his most impressive thinking, his plan had much to recommend it. Wheat was becoming the crop of choice among Virginia’s more progressive planters (Washington had helped lead the way here) because it did less damage to the soil and enjoyed several market advantages over tobacco, the chief ones being that people needed to eat more than they needed to smoke and that the ongoing war between England and France presented a golden opportunity to capture the European market for foodstuffs. The elaborateness of his seven-step rotation program meant that it would take a long time, at least seven years, before his fields were fully ready for extensive wheat cultivation, but that seemed a price worth paying to do the job right. The plan provides additional evidence that Jefferson saw himself as remaining at Monticello for the duration. He was planning for the long haul.

Of all the reasons why the plan failed—and after some initial success it did fail in just about every way possible—perhaps the main culprit was the bane of all farmers: bad weather and bad luck. Droughts and early frosts damaged Jefferson’s wheat crop three years in succession. Heavy rains soaked his grain while it was being shipped by barge downriver. Later on the dreaded Hessian fly settled over his fields at regular intervals, consuming whatever had managed to survive the capricious elements. One cannot read through his
Farm Book,
where Jefferson recorded his seasonal encounters with the vagaries of the weather and the countless impediments to his best-laid plans, without concluding that however fortunate he was as a public figure, he was an extremely unlucky farmer.
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Beyond bad luck, however, there were two elemental reasons why Jefferson’s plantations were not really capable of producing cash crops at a level sufficient to generate substantial profits. First, he simply did not have enough land under cultivation. When one conjures up the image of an eleven-thousand-acre plantation, it is difficult not to be influenced by the popular iconography of the huge agrarian factories of the antebellum South with their vast fields and gangs of slave laborers organized in quasi-military units. But Jefferson’s lands, and indeed most of Virginia’s plantations in the eighteenth century, did not look or function at all like that. Instead of one large tract stretching out to the horizon, Jefferson owned seven separate and disparate farms: Monticello, Shadwell, Tufton and Lego in Albemarle County; and Poplar Forest, Bear Creek and Tomahawk in Bedford. Moreover, only about a thousand acres of his total holdings were under cultivation. The rest was forest. In effect, Jefferson did not oversee a unified plantation in the familiar sense of the term so much as a series of modest-sized farms. Taken together, these scattered agrarian communities were capable of producing enough corn, oats, potatoes, rye, peas, barley and flax to support themselves and, in good years, to show a small profit. That in fact is what they managed to do year in and year out. But the acreage under cultivation was too small, and the organization of the enterprise too decentralized to permit much more.
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