19
MONTICELLO, VIRGINIA
AUGUST 1, 1778
MORNING
Thomas Jefferson is safe.
The Virginian is now thirty-four and hundreds of miles away from the British threat here at his five-thousand-acre mountaintop refuge. Unlike at Valley Forge, there is no lack of food, clothing, or wine. Monticello’s stunning 360-degree views of the American frontier offer the Virginian no sign of conflict. Indeed, it is a time of celebration.
“Our third daughter born,” Jefferson records in his “Account Book,” adding that the child came into the world this morning at 1:30. Her name is Mary.
The baby appears to be healthy, but whether she will survive the next few weeks and grow to adulthood is unknown. The infant deaths of his daughter and son in 1775 and 1777, respectively, left six-year-old Patsy as Jefferson’s sole surviving child. At least for now, she has a new sister.
The Virginian is elated by his new daughter’s birth but is also wary, as has become his custom. There is no such thing as easy childrearing in the late eighteenth century.
Closing his Account Book, Jefferson sets off for a morning in the fields. Martha sleeps fitfully in her mahogany bed on this sweltering day, her physical health once again deeply compromised by the act of bringing a baby into the world.
Jefferson leaves her to sleep, knowing that his wife’s every need will be attended to by her personal slaves. As he steps out into the morning sunshine, the remainder of the Virginian’s vast plantation is a beehive of activity—a place of building, planting, and hard work under a blazing August sun.
The humidity is so thick that Jefferson begins to sweat as he strides toward the South Orchard. At this pivotal time in his life, Jefferson is working with his own bare hands to transform the estate. While his slaves and skilled laborers are in the process of laying ninety thousand bricks to establish three new stone columns to the front of the house, the great thinker is spending the summer with thirty-one-year-old Italian gardener Antonio Giannini, planting hundreds of new apple, cherry, nectarine, walnut, apricot, and peach trees in the orchard on the south slope. This is no random planting, but a strict following of the plan Jefferson prepared during his spare time while serving in the Virginia legislature last year. In all, 312 trees are being added, spaced in rows at deliberate intervals between twenty and forty feet to ensure an eye-pleasing aesthetic. In fact, everywhere Jefferson looks, from the builders carefully troweling mortar to the pens of oxen, chicken, guinea fowl, peacocks, and turkeys, Monticello is vibrant with life.
The main house is atop the small mountain Thomas Jefferson has grown to love. The estate is comprised of four farms: Monticello, Shadwell, Tufton, and Lego. Slaves are quartered in log cabins near the fields. Children start working at the age of ten—sometimes younger—but those who show promise are taught a trade at sixteen. It is in Jefferson’s best interests to keep his slaves well fed, in order to ensure optimal productivity during the long days of planting, hoeing, weeding, and harvesting. A typical food allotment for each slave is eight quarts of cornmeal per week, four salted fish, and a half pound of pork or beef. In their time off in the evenings or on Sundays, slaves often supplement this diet through fishing and possum hunting.
It has been ten years since Jefferson leveled the mountaintop to begin the house construction, and seven years since he moved into what is now known as the South Pavilion. As the plantation has grown, Jefferson has increased the slave population. At first, he owned fifty men, women, and children, but now possesses more than one hundred, some working in the house, others in the fields, and others doing sundry manual labor as needed.
Jefferson is known for being a rather lenient slave master, offering cash incentives for hard work and productivity, and allowing his slaves to visit the Sunday market in nearby Charlottesville. He forbids his plantation overseers from using a whip and rarely punishes slaves for anything other than fighting and stealing. However, it is common for these orders to be ignored whenever Jefferson is away on business. In extreme cases, disruptive slaves are simply sold to a faraway plantation as punishment, separated from their families forever.
The Virginian once wrote that “all men are created equal” and has written treatises deriding the institution of slavery, but the truth is that he would no more sell his slaves than turn himself over to the British to be hanged. In Jefferson’s lifetime, he will own six hundred slaves, buying and selling men, women, and children to suit the needs and debts of Monticello. It is perfectly legal, and he needs the free manual labor to make his plantation profitable. Setting his slaves free in a bold act of humanity would completely disrupt the fabric of Virginia society.
Jefferson was born in 1743, the same year as Jupiter, one of his personal slaves. At one time, they were fast friends and childhood companions. Despite that friendship, Jefferson considers blacks to be lesser human beings. Three years from now he will write that “blacks … are inferior to whites in the endowments of both body and mind.”1
One slave family in particular is accorded a loftier status at Monticello. Betty Hemings has borne Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, six children out of wedlock. Betty was herself born of mixed-race parentage, meaning that this forty-one-year-old slave’s children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will be partially European in ancestry and partially black. Yet, these mixed-race offspring, despite their fair skin and Roman noses, are all destined to a life of slavery.
The youngest of Betty Hemings’s children by John Wayles is named Sally. She was born in 1773, just around the time Wayles died. She is now five years old. As a girl of just fourteen, she will become the personal slave of Mary Jefferson, the newborn infant who has just come into the world. Thanks to Sally’s mother’s sexual relations with Wayles, Thomas Jefferson’s wife, Martha, is a blood relation to Sally Hemings, her half sister.
Even more shocking is that once she comes of age, and for twenty years after that, Sally Hemings will share Master Jefferson’s bed as his lover.2
* * *
Thomas Jefferson loves his pleasures, and the fruits of the orchard are for his personal enjoyment, as is the expansion of the main house and the tall rows of hops he grows to brew beer. Not so for the tobacco fields being tilled farther down the mountain, tended to by the largest percentage of his slaves. Tobacco is serious business, providing almost all Thomas Jefferson’s income.
There is no profit in being a legislator—indeed, the cost of renting lodgings and purchasing meals while in Williamsburg means that Jefferson loses money while serving. Thus, he depends upon the plantation to stay afloat. Tobacco is Monticello’s cash crop, one upon which Jefferson relies to indulge himself in a life of intellectual rigor. He is intent on expanding his personal library by purchasing as many books as possible. Tobacco is the currency making this happen.
Though Jefferson temporarily removed himself from the Virginia legislature to be with Martha during her pregnancy, he keeps in touch through letters with friends and colleagues. It has been almost two months since the British abandoned Philadelphia, fleeing back to New York for fear that the city will fall into French hands. Jefferson knows that during the British retreat, George Washington’s revitalized army successfully battled the redcoats to a standstill at the Battle of Monmouth in New Jersey. Gen. Charles Lee, recently returned to the Americans in a prisoner exchange, was among Washington’s commanding generals. Unfortunately, the volatile Lee disobeyed orders, which led to his dismissal and eventual court-martial.
Jefferson believes that the French entering the war means the conflict will soon be over. He is not aware, however, that George Washington is guarding against this false sense of security, and is even calling Jefferson out by name to reengage in the conflict by coming back to Congress. Indeed, Jefferson’s withdrawal into private life is becoming common throughout the new states. The fanatical patriotism of 1775 has been replaced by apathy toward the war in many places, and even disdain for American soldiers. Jefferson’s Declaration of
Independence may have ignited the rebel fire, but the embers are beginning to cool.
As the Virginian begins to work on his plantation this hot day, he has no idea that a confrontation will soon arrive—that the war will find its way to the front door of Monticello. On that day, as the British Army comes for his head, no amount of intellectual idealism or newly planted orchards will help Thomas Jefferson—quite simply, he will flee for his life.
The truth is, Jefferson’s very existence, and the welfare of the entire new nation, will be placed in jeopardy by one of the most heinous acts of betrayal in world history.
And unbeknownst to Jefferson—or even George Washington—that act of treason is about to unfold.
20
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
CHRISTMAS DAY, 1778
EVENING
George Washington is in no mood to celebrate Christmas.
The general has been summoned to Philadelphia by the Congress to explain his battle plans for the coming year. The redcoats are gone—having abandoned the city to consolidate strength in New York, so that a sizable number of troops could be sent to protect valuable islands in the West Indies from French attacks. London is fearful that French forces will soon attack the British stronghold on Manhattan. Therefore, the city must be defended at all costs.
As Washington’s army enters its second month of winter camp at nearby Middlebrook, New Jersey, Washington spends Christmas sixty miles away with Martha, at the opulent mansion of Henry Laurens, a South Carolina slave trader and rice grower who has just stepped down as president of the Second Continental Congress.1 His presence has greatly excited the crème de la crème of Philadelphia society, and there is no lack of chauffeured carriages off-loading the wealthy and privileged at the mansion’s door to pay their respects and drink heartily.
George Washington knows that his army is in capable hands, thanks to the stern presence of General von Steuben. Washington himself supervised the construction of log cabin barracks before undertaking the horseback ride to Philadelphia, so he is also content in the knowledge that his soldiers are not sleeping in the open. This has been the mildest winter in many years, and even though the army supply system is still deeply inefficient, there is now plenty of food and supplies for the American fighting men.
There is also little threat from the British Army. Commander in chief William Howe has been recalled to London, where he will soon be ordered to defend himself against charges that he abandoned Gen. John Burgoyne at Saratoga and thus effected the humiliating British surrender that brought France into the war. Howe’s successor is Gen. Henry Clinton, a forty-eight-year-old career officer and member of Parliament who is even more unwilling to fight than Howe—and yet he must now wage war in both the American states and the West Indies, against a French foe as well as the Americans. Thus, the war has settled into a protracted engagement between an occupying force that has no intention of leaving and a rebel army lacking the firepower to evict it.
Washington’s only battle this year occurred in June. After all the hardship and training at Valley Forge, the lone chance to display American’s newfound military expertise came just ten days after the troops broke camp, on June 28, 1778, at a place known as Monmouth, halfway between Philadelphia and New York City. On a brutally hot and humid summer day, with temperatures reaching one hundred degrees, Washington unleashed five thousand men in a surprise attack on a British column commanded by Lt. Gen. Charles Cornwallis. Although they do not succeed in their attempt to capture the British baggage train, the new military concepts learned under the demanding eye of Baron von Steuben allow them to thwart a vigorous British counterattack.
The fighting raged back and forth until dusk, when both sides held their lines as darkness called a halt to the battle. The finale would have to wait until morning. The cool of the night was a welcome arrival. Scores lay dead on both sides, some bodies completely obliterated by cannon fire. In addition, a total of more than a hundred men perished from heat stroke.
The British troops were not defeated, and were able to resume their march to New York City, where they arrived a few days later. But the Americans had held their own in the sort of pitched battle that had proven disastrous in previous years. Washington’s troops have made an impression on Clinton. Already hampered by limited forces, he must pursue a different sort of warfare against his now much more professional foe.
Besides the eight thousand troops sent to the West Indies, British troops were dispatched south by ship to invade Georgia in a tactical gambit to open a new front in the war. Not only will the capture of Savannah put another of America’s major ports in British hands, it is believed that much of the southern population is loyal to the Crown and will flock to join the British forces. The move places a large British force in closer proximity to the wealthy English sugar-producing colonies in Barbados and Jamaica, which are now in danger of French naval attack.2
Just one month ago, George Washington allowed himself to dream that the war would finally be over. “I had expectations,” the general wrote in a letter to his brother John, “that the enemy were about to evacuate New York and bid adieu to the United States.”
That has not happened. But now, on this Christmas Day in Philadelphia, George Washington is struggling to enjoy the comforts of a big city. In the four years since his becoming commander in chief, this is his first yuletide without fear of attack.
Washington sleeps each night with Martha by his side, and feasts on prime rib and succulent pig at lavish dinners that go well into the evening. There are drinks, refined conversation, and the perfumed aroma of beautiful women. Nowhere to be seen or felt is the harsh rigor or personal anxiety of Valley Forge from just one year ago.
Still, the general cannot relax.
Indeed, Washington finds the atmosphere in Philadelphia deeply troubling. All around him, people behave as if victory were a mere formality.
Yet, no matter what citizens believe, Washington knows independence is not assured.
Soon, brutal fighting will erupt again.
* * *
As George Washington walks the streets of Philadelphia, he sees the devastation the British inflicted upon it.
He notices that there is an absence of trees, wooden fences, and church pews, thanks to the British reliance on burning Philadelphia’s wood supply rather than venturing into rebel territory to fell a tree. The basements of many houses and city alleyways were used as redcoat toilets, and the disgusting work of cleanup is still under way. The British and their Hessian allies were fond of moving into homes and stealing furniture from nearby residences. Now, the returning people of Philadelphia look for their missing belongings and return possessions that do not belong to them. Churchgoers are aghast to find their houses of worship desecrated because the British used them to stable horses.
Not as visible, but far more deeply felt, are the scars borne by the women who remained behind in Philadelphia, young and old, many of them defiled by British soldiers. In some cases, even when the women were loyal to the Crown, it was actual rape. In others, a choice, as British officers and soldiers frequented Philadelphia’s many bordellos.3
“Most of the young ladies who were in the city with the enemy and wear the present fashionable dresses have purchased them at the expense of their virtue. It is agreed on all hands that the British officers played the devil with the girls,” one resident observes. “The privates, I suppose, were satisfied with the common prostitutes.”
As George Washington begins what will become a six-week residence in the city of Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia’s wounds haunt him, for he is a man of great compassion and well remembers what the city looked like before the British occupation.
But he is just as burdened by the “idleness and dissipation” he sees each night in the society parties.
The delegates to Congress returned from their exile in York, Pennsylvania, in June and held their first session in Philadelphia on July 2, 1778. It is not lost on Washington that this me
eting coincided with the date just two years ago when the vote for independence was passed, for he has not forgotten the strong character and vision of the men who signed the Declaration.
Some of those delegates remain in Congress, but most new representatives are, to the general’s eyes, mediocre. There is no longer a Jefferson, an Adams, a Franklin, or even a John Hancock deliberating deep into the night on the meaning of freedom. The chairs in which those great men once sat have long since been burned as firewood. Eventually, their original meeting place will become known as Independence Hall, but during the British occupation, the building was converted into a hospital for wounded American prisoners. When the enemy departed, it became necessary to scrub blood from the floors and fumigate to eliminate the odors of decomposition and filled bedpans.4
From Christmas until his departure back to his men on February 2, 1779, Washington spends his nights enduring the dreary debauchery of Philadelphia society and his days battling Congress. The delegates have authorized him to “superintend and direct the military operations in all the departments in these States,” but they refuse to allocate the hard currency the general needs to pay his soldiers.
Washington considers this Congress “the great impediment.”
One of the general’s officers, Lt. Col. Ebenezer Huntington of Connecticut, is not as diplomatic. “I despise my countrymen,” he writes. “I wish I could say I was not born in America. I once gloried in it but am now ashamed of it.… You must immediately fill your regiments and pay your troops in hard monies. They cannot exist as soldiers otherwise. The insults and neglects which the army have met from the country beggars all description … and all this for my cowardly countrymen who flinch at the very time their exertions are wanted and hold their purse strings as though they would damn the world rather than part with a dollar to their army.”
* * *
Killing England Page 18
