Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

  Ultimately what set off the Adams marriage from those of the other Founders was the quantity and quality of their correspondence with each other. Because John was so much away from home—at first riding the circuit courts as a young attorney, then attending the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and later as minister in Europe—he and Abigail exchanged letters, about twelve hundred of them. For some of the Founders and their wives, we have virtually no letters at all. Even if we had letters between Jefferson, Washington, and their wives, it is hard to imagine that they would resemble those between John and Abigail. The Adamses’ correspondence has an openness and candor and intellectual character that could come only from two people who regarded each other as intellectual comrades. Their correspondence, as John pointed out, was a conversation between “two friendly Souls.”40

  In their many letters John and Abigail exchanged views on everything from the politics of the Continental Congress to the price of clover seed. “I want to sit down and converse with you, every evening,” wrote Abigail, and she did.41 She told her husband about the local news of Braintree, her dinner guests, the local rumors, the weather, the state of their farm. She read widely and was eager to display to her husband the range of her knowledge. In her letters she quoted from an extraordinary array of writers, often from memory: John Dryden, Alexander Pope, William Collins, Edward Young, Shakespeare, the Bible, Polybius, and Charles Rollin’s ancient history, among others. No issue was too small or too large for her comment, and she had strong views about everything, including slavery. In 1774 Abigail reminded John that slavery had “always appeared a most iniquitous Scheme to me—[to] fight ourselfs for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have. You know my mind on this Subject.”42 She was especially outspoken on politics; indeed, she was, as Federalist Fisher Ames later observed, “as complete a politician as any lady in the old French Court.”43

  • • •

  JEFFERSON’S EXPERIENCE in courting and marrying was different from Adams’s. Although Jefferson was far more sophisticated and worldly than Adams, as a young man he seems to have been equally uncomfortable with women, especially with unmarried women. In Jefferson’s youthful correspondence, which his chief biographer says he probably would have burned if he could, he expressed some of the same anxieties Adams voiced while courting.44 While many of his friends courted and married, Jefferson remained single. Finally in October 1763, Jefferson at the age of twenty became smitten with an attractive seventeen-year-old named Rebecca Burwell and proposed marriage to her. But Jefferson mishandled the proposal—his carefully prepared speech, he told his friend John Page, dissolved into “a few broken sentences, uttered in great disorder, and interrupted with pauses of uncommon length.”45

  Miss Burwell gave Jefferson a second chance later that year, but he bungled that one as well. In the second meeting he revealed to her “the necessity of my going to England” and “the delays” that would follow from that. He told Page that he asked Rebecca Burwell “no question” that would require “a categorical answer,” but he assured her “that such questions would one day be asked.” Somehow Jefferson thought he had convinced Miss Burwell of his “sincerity” and he didn’t have to do anything more. Months went on, and he avoided seeing her.46

  Yet he was stunned when, in March 1764, he discovered that his prospective fiancée was going to marry the wealthy Jaquelin “Jack” Ambler. “Can you believe it?” he asked his friend William Fleming. His dream of marriage was now “totally frustrated.” He hadn’t heard the decision from Rebecca Burwell herself, since he admitted that he had “been so abominably indolent as not to have seen her since last October,” that is, six months earlier. Still, he was “as well satisfied that it is true as if she had told me.” His immediate reaction was “Well the lord bless her I say.” 47

  Jefferson went on to cite St. Paul’s advice that “it is better to be married than to burn.” To quench their sexual passions was the reason his friends Fleming and Page were determined to get married as soon as possible, and why they advised him to do the same. “No thank ye,” said Jefferson, “I will consider it first. Many and great are the comforts of a single state.” Besides, he said to Fleming, for young men burning with sexual passion there were “other means of extinguishing their fire than those of matrimony.” Indeed, said Jefferson, if St. Paul had known about them, he would have earnestly recommended these “other means.” Perhaps, it has been shrewdly suggested, Jefferson was simply acknowledging that young Virginia aristocrats had available female slaves to satisfy their sexual urges, something that St. Paul apparently had not anticipated.48

  At any rate, the disappointment with Rebecca Burwell triggered the first of the many severe headaches brought on by tension and stress that would torment Jefferson through much of his life; only after he retired from the presidency in 1809 did they cease.49

  Jefferson’s frustration from the failed courtship of Miss Burwell also aggravated a deep mistrust of women that he may have developed early, even in his teenage years. He seems to have had problems with his mother—his few references to her in his papers were cold and unfeeling; and in the years between his courtship of Rebecca Burwell and his marriage in 1772 he found his relationship with women to be especially difficult and awkward.50 From about 1760 or so until his marriage, he entered in his memorandum and commonplace books a number of passages drawn from his reading that expressed suspicion and hostility toward women.51 In 1770, for example, he penned on the inside of the front cover of his memorandum book a Latin poem from the minor poet Pentadius that can be translated as:

  Entrust a ship to the winds, do not trust your heart to girls.

  For the surge (of the sea) is safer than a woman’s loyalty:

  No woman is good; but if a good one has befallen anyone

  I know not by what fate an evil thing has become a good one.52

  Notations like this run through his memorandum and commonplace books: “A fickle and changeful thing is woman ever” he quoted from Virgil. “Yes, men should have begotten children from some other source, no female race existing; thus would no evil ever have fallen on mankind” he selected from Euripides.53 He copied two more passages from Milton’s Paradise Lost that expressed mistrust of women. Misogynous lines in the plays of Restoration dramatist Thomas Otway especially caught his eye and his mood.

  I’d leave the World for him that hates a Woman.

  Woman the Fountain of all human Frailty!

  What mighty ills have not been done by Woman?

  Jefferson’s irate response to news of Rebecca Burwell’s engagement to Jack Ambler found expression in another passage copied from Otway’s play The Orphan; or, The Unhappy Marriage:

  —Wed her!

  No! were she all Desire could wish, as fair

  As would the vainest of her Sex be thought,

  With Wealth beyond what Woman’s Pride could waste,

  She should not cheat me of my Freedom. Marry!

  When I am old and weary of the World.

  I may grow desperate,

  And take a Wife to mortify withal.54

  Too much should not be made of these youthful displays of misogyny, though historians, of course, have had a field day with them. Jefferson was probably merely expressing adolescent frustration over his inability to find a proper sexual partner. Once he married, his exquisitely polite manners seem to have made possible easy and normal relationships with women, better perhaps than Adams in his social awkwardness was able to manage.

  • • •

  ALTHOUGH ADAMS in his diary revealed his adolescent emotions and passions in the most open and fulsome manner, he never expressed anything resembling Jefferson’s misogyny. Quite the contrary. In 1777 he reminded Abigail how often he had observed to her in conversation the fact that most “illustrious Men” owed “a great part of their Merit” to “some Female about them in the Relatio
n of Mother or Wife or Sister.”55 Whatever personal problems Adams had with repression and resentment, they did not seem to involve his rapport with women, at least American women. He did later confess to being overawed by European women of “genius Taste Learning Observation and Reflection.”56 Once he had married Abigail, however, his subsequent relationship with other women was intellectual and not sexual. He took his marriage vows seriously.

  Late in life he severely criticized the letters of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, who had dominated the salons of Enlightenment philosophes, saying that he had “never read any thing with more ennui, disgust and loathing.” That woman “was constantly in love with other women’s husbands, constantly violating her fidelity to her own keepers with other women’s husbands, constantly tormented with remorse and regrets . . . and constantly threatening to put herself to death.” All in all, the letters revealed to Adams just how backward and decadent were the society and manners of the ancien régime of France during the “age of reason.”57

  Maybe it was the Puritan-soaked culture of Massachusetts or maybe it was his own moralistic restraint, but in matters of sex Adams seems to have been nowhere near as intense and lustful as Jefferson. In all the years of separation from Abigail there was never the slightest rumor of Adams making any advances on any woman. Indeed, in his autobiography he emphatically declared that he never had any improper relationship with any woman.58 By contemporary French standards Jefferson was something of a puritan too, and there is no evidence that he was ever unfaithful to his wife while she was alive. But he certainly seems to have been more sexually passionate than Adams.

  • • •

  IN 1768, FOUR YEARS AFTER the ending of his courtship of Rebecca Burwell, Jefferson was unable to control his passions. Jefferson ended up trying to seduce the wife of a close college friend, John Walker. The Virginia government had commissioned Walker’s father, Dr. Thomas Walker, and Colonel Andrew Lewis to attend a conference with several Indian tribes at Fort Stanwix in western New York. Walker’s father wanted his son to accompany the mission as secretary. Knowing that the negotiations might take months, John Walker asked his good friend Jefferson to look after his wife, Elizabeth Moore Walker, and their infant daughter while he was away; he had in fact named Jefferson first among his executors. Elizabeth Walker was an attractive woman, and Jefferson tried to take advantage of the situation but was unsuccessful. When Walker returned four months later, Elizabeth Walker said nothing about Jefferson’s advances during her husband’s absence.

  According to John Walker, Jefferson kept up his adulterous advances on Betsy Walker for a decade, even after Jefferson had married in 1772—a charge that was probably not true. Only after he had left for France in 1784 did Mrs. Walker reveal to her husband Jefferson’s aggressive advances. Walker finally realized why his wife had constantly questioned the confidence he had placed in Jefferson in making him his executor. He said his wife apologized “for her past silence from her fear of its consequence which might have been fatal to me.” The two former friends fell out, and Walker rewrote his will.59

  Only during Jefferson’s presidency was the affair publicly revealed, and it became a scandal. In the highly partisan atmosphere of 1802 the notorious journalist James Thomson Callender accused Jefferson of many things, including a relationship with a slave named Sally Hemings and the affair with Mrs. Walker. Both Walker and Jefferson tried to suppress news of the affair, and with Henry Lee, whose wife was a niece of Mrs. Walker, as mediator, Jefferson sought to assuage Walker’s honor and prevent a duel. Finally, in 1805, Jefferson acknowledged to friends that he was willing to plead guilty to one of the charges against him—“that when young and single I offered love to a handsome lady. . . . It is,” he said, “the only one, founded in truth among all their allegations against me.”60 He apparently never admitted that he might have made advances on Walker’s wife after he himself was married.

  Following the frustrations of his advances on Betsy Walker, Jefferson suddenly changed his mind about his earlier preference for the comforts of bachelorhood to marriage. Or perhaps, as has been suggested, the ease of his approach to Mrs. Walker convinced him that marriage might be possible with women who had already been married.61 At any rate, in the fall of 1770 he made his first recorded visit to the Charles City County home of the twenty-two-year-old widow Martha Wayles Skelton.

  Little is known of the courtship, but obviously Jefferson tried to make himself as appealing as possible. Early in 1771 he began investigating his genealogy with the hope of acquiring the coat of arms of his family—an acquisition common among the Virginia aristocrats. He asked his merchant-agent, who moved between Virginia and England, to search the Herald’s Office in London. He said he had what he was told was the family’s coat of arms, “but on what authority I know not.” It was possible that the family had none. If so, he asked his agent to purchase one; and then he added jokingly, as if to cover his embarrassment at making such a request, he had Anglican Irish writer Laurence “Sterne’s word for it that a coat of arms may be purchased as cheap as any other coat.”62

  Jefferson’s ability to play the violin may have been more important to his courtship than a coat of arms. A story passed down through the family had two rival suitors arriving at Martha Wayles Skelton’s house at the same time. Ushered into the hall, the two men heard from an adjoining room the young widow’s harpsichord and soprano voice blending with Jefferson’s violin and tenor voice in wonderful harmony. After listening for a stanza or two, the two suitors, realizing what they were up against, took their hats and retired, never to return.63

  Jefferson had been playing the violin since he was a teenager. He may have been unusual, for in America, as he told his European correspondent, music was “in a state of barbarism.”64 Martha Wayles Skelton’s musical talents made her all the more attractive to Jefferson. At the end of 1770 he initially planned on giving her a small clavichord. But by June 1771 he had seen a pianoforte and been “charmed” by it, and wanted it instead. He specified that the case should be “of fine mahogany, solid, not veneered,” and “the workmanship of the whole very handsome, and worthy the acceptance of a lady for whom I intend it.”65 He married the young widow on New Year’s Day 1772.

  Martha Wayles Skelton had more than musical talent to make her attractive. As a widow she already possessed an ample estate with the promise of more from her father. She had married Bathurst Skelton in 1766, and her husband had died in 1768 after a sudden illness. Just before Martha’s husband’s death, Jefferson had taken on her father, John Wayles, as a legal client, and this is when he may have first met Martha Wayles Skelton.66 John Wayles had been born in England and had acquired not only a large legal practice in Virginia but a large landed estate as well. A month after Martha was born in 1748, Wayles’s first wife died. After losing two more wives, Wayles in 1761 began living openly with one of his slaves, a mulatto named Betty Hemings (her father was an English ship captain), and fathered six children with her, including one named Sally Hemings, who was born in 1773, the year Wayles died.67

  Wayles left his son-in-law Jefferson a considerable amount of property, including Betty Hemings and all of her offspring. Jefferson brought the Hemings slaves to Monticello, where they were given special privileges. After all, not only were six of the Hemings slaves blood relatives of his wife, Martha, but because they possessed white blood they were in Jefferson’s mind necessarily superior to pure blacks. Jefferson believed that blacks who were the offspring of racial mixing (as long as the mixing was between white men and black women) were improved in both “body and mind.” Everyone knew this, he claimed; for him it proved that the black slaves’ “inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life.”68

  Martha’s share of her father’s estate, Jefferson later wrote in his autobiography, “was about equal to my own patrimony, and consequently doubled the ease of our circumstances.”69 Indeed, he had acquired from the division of Wayles’s esta
te more than eleven thousand acres of land and 135 slaves, which when added to the 52 slaves inherited from his father made him the second-largest slaveholder in Albemarle County. Jefferson now owned four major plantations in Virginia—Monticello, Poplar Forest ninety miles to the southwest, and Elk Hill and Willis Creek forty miles to the east; eventually only Monticello and Poplar Forest were retained. Although he had to sell about six thousand acres to settle some of Wayles’s many debts, Jefferson had suddenly become one of the wealthiest planters in all of Virginia.70

  Martha was beautiful and talented and a devoted wife. But she was not an intellectual companion to her husband in the way Abigail Adams was; indeed, none of the wives of the Founders resembled Abigail in that respect. Nor did Martha, like Abigail, arise at dawn to skim the milk; she had slaves to do that. Jefferson’s marriage was a traditional patriarchal one, with his wife having the principal responsibility for promoting the well-being of her husband. That “trade” of being a dutiful housewife, as he once called it, was what he expected all marriages to be.71 “Sweetness of temper, affection to a husband, and attention to his interests,” Jefferson told his eldest daughter, Martha (sometimes called Patsy), on the eve of her own marriage, “constitute the duties of a wife and form the basis of matrimonial felicity.” Wives, he said, must realize that their happiness depended “on the continuing to please a single person.”72

  In Jefferson’s conception of the ideal marriage, even the husband’s failings could be laid at the feet of his wife. If the marriage developed difficulties, Jefferson advised his daughter, the wife must not “allways look for their cause in the injustice of her lord,” for “they may proceed from many trifling errors in her own conduct.” Above all, a wife must never communicate to others any want of duty or tenderness she thinks she has perceived in her husband, for “this untwists, at once, those delicate cords, which preserve the unity of the marriage engagement.” If third parties witness the failings of a marriage, “its sacredness is broken forever.”73