America's First Daughter: A Novel

by Stephanie Dray

  Had I somehow betrayed my feelings for William in a way that brought Tom’s insecurities about? Lacing my fingers with his, I said, “You really are a silly bird if you think Jack Eppes is better than you in any way at all. You’re more thoughtful than he is, and the country needs men like you, Congressman Randolph. My father needs you.”

  I did mean that, even though the thought was eclipsed the next day when I came across the strangely nostalgic scene of William Short in the hallway, lurking near Papa’s door like he used to in my father’s times of trouble.

  In his hand, he held folded pages, newsprint upon his fingers.

  Another man—any other man—would’ve told me it wasn’t fit for ladies to read. But William merely reddened, saying, “You need to see this, Patsy. Though you won’t thank me for showing you.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  *

  THE RICHMOND RECORDER

  *

  1 September 1802

  It is well known that the man whom it delights the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is TOM. His features are said to bear a striking although sable resemblance to those of the president himself. The boy is ten or twelve years of age. His mother went to France in the same vessel with Mr. Jefferson and his two daughters. The delicacy of this arrangement must strike every person of common sensibility. What a sublime example for an American ambassador to place before the eyes of two young ladies!

  PAPA KEPT THIS CLIPPING.

  It’s here in his wooden filing presses amidst his belongings, as if it were no more than a passing memorandum, or a recipe, or a scrap of poem, and not a devastating exposure that set the political world aflame.

  It was also a betrayal, written by James Callender, one of my father’s partisans turned odious blackmailer. So I burn this clipping, even knowing there are a thousand more like it in the world. And worse things were printed after it.

  The newspapers brought me and my sister into the scandal directly, offering sympathies for the supposed humiliations my father had visited upon us by forcing us to see illegitimate mulatto sisters and brothers enjoying the same parental affection with ourselves. They asked why Papa hadn’t married a worthy woman of his own complexion. They lampooned him as a bad father, a bad owner, a bad president.

  But this first article—the one that William Short showed me—somehow did the most damage. “I’m sorry, Patsy,” William had said. “This is going to be a very difficult time for all of you.”

  My hand came to my mouth as my eyes traced over the words a second time. Anger curled inside my belly. Would the entirety of my father’s presidency find him under constant attack? “How could they print such a thing?”

  He gave me a sad, sympathetic look. “Because partisanship has made anything fair, which honor and propriety might once have kept quiet.”

  Shaking my head, I stared at him. “I don’t … how will we …”

  William looked down for a moment, his brow furrowing as he gathered his thoughts, and then his eyes returned to mine. “Well, do you think it’s possible that your father has been given a rare opportunity? He could simply acknowledge Sally. Bring her out from the shadows—”

  “You’ve no idea what you’re saying,” I hissed. Did I not hold in my hands the evidence of exactly why he could never do such a thing? “It would bring down his presidency.”

  William lowered his voice, conciliatory. “Even in the short time I’ve been back in this country, I’ve heard about a certain Mr. Bell who recently died and left everything to his wife. Everyone in Charlottesville seems happy to treat Mary Hemings Bell as his widow, and a free white woman.”

  Did he think my father could take Sally as his wife? It was the kind of madness only William would advocate, and I tried to fan away my anger with the paper in my hands. “Mr. Bell was a store owner.”

  “And your father is the president of the United States. It isn’t the same. I understand, but—”

  “No, I don’t think you do understand.”

  I don’t think anyone did. Which is why I left William standing in the hall and took the newspaper to my father myself.

  My father and I had never had an open discussion about Sally Hemings. It wasn’t our way. But now we’d have to. I tapped only once upon the glass-paned door before unlocking and entering the sanctuary of his cabinet, where Papa sat enthroned upon his whirligig chair, his theodolite aimed at the window behind him like a scepter, a number of books open before him. As president he might be a man of the people, but at home, he was a king in his castle. And, glancing at the newspaper in my hands, he knew exactly why I’d come.

  “I intend to say nothing about it, Patsy.”

  “But, Papa—”

  He pressed his fingers to his temples, as if staving off one of his infamous headaches. “I’ve never allowed myself to be compelled to comment publicly on any private matter.”

  Certainly, that was the truth. I’d learned long ago that he would never be compelled to speak about anything he didn’t want to. It was a source of great frustration to me as a girl, but a wonderment now that I was grown. I wished I could follow his example, but I didn’t have the self-discipline. “The Federalists are trying to destroy you with this.”

  “They’ve been trying for years. They’ve said I’m a mixed breed, a swindler, a coward. Why, they’ve even said I was dead. This is no different.”

  “But this is different. This is—”

  True, I thought. Those were lies and this was true.

  Oh, the papers were wrong about many of the details. But Sally’s children were living, breathing proof of the scandal. My father’s reputation would suffer amongst those who had no understanding of how it was with our slaves. This had a salacious element to it.

  I knew perfectly well how damaging scandals like that could be. William’s affair had tarnished him and limited his career. A marital infidelity had damaged the once-formidable Alexander Hamilton’s reputation beyond repair. And an incestuous liaison had nearly sent my sister-in-law and brother-in-law to the gallows.

  But there was more to this than bedroom matters. This was about race. The papers emphasized how my father’s relationship with Sally was long-standing. It was to be read as an insult to whites that my father could prefer Sally when he could have his choice of any white woman. Sally had been branded a slut as common as the pavement to imply my father must have a degraded character to have cared for her or enjoyed her for more than one night.

  It was a calamity, and I couldn’t imagine how my father remained so calm. “There must be some reply, Papa.”

  “No reply is owed. If I’ve stood for anything, it’s that the essence of liberty is to be found in the sanctity of a man’s home and private life.”

  My father always held back some part of himself. He didn’t belong to the people wholly. Maybe he belonged to no one, wholly. Not even my mother or me. But I took his reluctance for a desire not to serve up Sally to a slobbering, condemning, Federalist party. “Deny it. Just deny it all.”

  Papa said nothing. He merely stared at me with shock and surprise.

  “Papa, you must deny it! If you won’t, then let Tom do it. He can publish a letter in the papers saying—”

  “Patsy.” My father said my name with such a quiet agony that it silenced me. “I won’t answer the charges. I won’t deny it. The storm will pass, just as all the others do. I don’t care what people think.”

  I did not believe that for one moment. My father was, like all Virginians, extraordinarily sensitive to censure. Neither could I agree that the storm would pass. For my father was still tarnished by the lie that he’d fled the British in cowardly fashion when they invaded our mountaintop, a story that had originated more than twenty years before. He was still pained by that, too.

  Trying to protect him, I said, “If you won’t deny it, at least send Sally and her children to live with me at Edgehill.”
/>   “Monticello is her home.”

  And that’s all he had to say on the subject. He wouldn’t send Sally away, not even long enough to quiet a scandal that threatened the reputation of his whole family. His presidency was meant to prove that we could live freely in a republic, but he was willing to endanger that, too.

  He hadn’t been able to let Sally go in Paris and he wasn’t going to give her up now. He wouldn’t send her away. He wouldn’t speak of her or against her. And I didn’t know whether to count him a stubborn, selfish old fool or to admire him for it.

  Here we were, once again, in the little chamber where I once watched him pace, fighting with madness when my mother died. When he believed that every private happiness had been torn from him because of his commitment to the cause. But now he’d found some measure of contentment in a woman who ought to have posed no threat to anyone.

  He was right, I decided. This part of him belonged to no one but Sally Hemings.

  I had decided this even before he said, “I can bear the contempt of others, but the children… .”

  My children, he meant. His adoring grandchildren.

  “They’ll never know,” I said.

  He wouldn’t deny it, but I would. To my dying breath.

  His shoulders rounded and his head drooped. “Patsy, I am heartsick to know how this must lessen your love for me—”

  “Never,” I said, tears brimming. “You must never think that, Papa. Whenever you come home, I look forward to it with raptures and palpitations not to be described. The heart swellings convince me of the folly of those who dare to think that any new ties can weaken the first and best of nature. The first sensations of my life were affection and respect for you and nothing has weakened or surpassed that.”

  Papa’s eyes misted. “Please believe that my absence from you always teaches me how essential your society is to my happiness.” Reaching for my hand and bringing it to his lips with more than courtly emotion, drawing the warm palm of it against his cheek, he said, “When it comes to my character, I offer you and your sister as my defense. Neither of you have ever by a word or deed given me one moment’s uneasiness; on the contrary, I have felt perpetual gratitude to heaven for having given me, in you, a source of so much pure and unmixed happiness and pride. That is why I need you in Washington City. Your sister, too.”

  We’d been in a very long sulk over his return to public life, but I decided then and there that if he needed us in Washington City, that’s where we would go.

  I WAS SEVENTEEN the last time I ventured out into any kind of political society. Now, I was almost thirty.

  The shimmering bronze gown from my debut in Paris was nothing but a faded memory. Every stylish gown had long since been moth-eaten or worn away to scraps for the quilts on my children’s beds. And I was anxious for how I should go out into the new capital when long seclusion had rendered me unfit for public life.

  Moreover, I could scarcely afford a new dress.

  But Papa insisted on paying for every little thing, directing my sister and me to charge to his account all the fancy gowns and bonnets we could ever want. And he’d hear absolutely no excuse from my sister this time. When Polly tried to demur by saying that she was too unaccustomed to the attentions she might receive as the daughter of the president, my father sent her an essay on the dangers of withdrawing from society. When she said she couldn’t meet us at Monticello to make preparations because Jack wouldn’t spare the horses from his plow, my father said he’d hire a coach to fetch her. When she worried that little Francis might catch the measles, Papa vowed to clear the mountain of every child but mine within a mile and a half of the place.

  There might be no bribe Papa could make that’d induce Jack Eppes to become our neighbor, but my father had finally decided that he was the president of the United States, and if he wanted both his daughters with him, he would have us.

  Papa needed us, so we’d join him in Washington City in November, and that was all there was to it.

  “Martha, don’t fret!” Dolley said, adjusting the lace of my shawl. “All you need are some new dresses that flatter your bosom. Something distinctive and stylish. You’re already a lovely and charming hostess, so it’ll be no difficulty to transform you into what your father so desperately needs.”

  It pained me that my father should so desperately need anything. Dolley was too much of a southern lady to ask if the stories about Sally were true. She didn’t even acknowledge them, but she knew. Everyone knew.

  Dolley retrieved her bonnet from where it lay upon the alcove bed in the octagonal bedroom she and Mr. Madison always used when they visited Monticello. Trellis wallpaper in green and white covered the walls, a relic Papa brought home with him from France. “What your father needs right now is a … a first lady. And given that he’s a widower, a first daughter will have to do. There needs to be a woman of grace and good sense at the presidential mansion, since there hasn’t been one there before now. Mrs. Washington retreated, and her daughter flitted about at parties like a shameless princess, born to deference. And that’s to say nothing of Her Majesty, Mrs. President Adams, who received visitors seated like royalty in Buckingham Palace.”

  Though I still harbored soft affections for Abigail Adams, I knew better than to say so to Dolley, despite the fact that this conversation reminded me of one I’d had long ago with Mrs. Adams as she guided me through what fashions I’d require in France.

  “I shouldn’t like to cause any sort of scandal by doing the wrong thing,” I said, glancing out the window toward the corner terrace.

  “Martha, your father’s presidency is a new start,” Dolley replied. “Our first real experience with a republic. That’s why they’re trying so hard to bring him down. President Jefferson needs a hostess to set the example, making no distinction between our people and theirs. Everyone will look to you for a model of what a virtuous daughter, wife, and mother of the republic should be. So don’t you worry about gowns. I’ll order everything for you and your sister. Hairpieces and every fashionable thing universally worn by ladies in society today. You must simply play the part.”

  THE PUMPKINS WERE FINALLY RIPE, perfect for pies and breads. So I was grateful when Tom came upon me in the garden and instead of scolding me for not leaving the task to Wormley Hughes, he helped me lift the heavy pumpkins into the wheelbarrow. “Sally knows,” Tom said, wiping sweat from his brow on his forearm.

  I bit my lip. He didn’t have to say more. He meant that Sally knew what was being printed about her in the papers, and also that I wanted her gone from my father’s mountain. I sighed, shaking my head that my truce with Sally Hemings was now imperiled.

  We’d long ago patched up our quarrel and reached accommodation. When I was away, Sally was mistress of Monticello, but when Papa returned with his entourage of guests, she made herself scarce, giving way to my sister and me, certain not to intrude on our time with Papa. In recent years, whenever Sally and I crossed paths, it was always a pleasant, cordial encounter. Sometimes even an affectionate one.

  But in the days after the story broke, such a chill descended between us that I worried to touch her, lest I find myself bitten with frost. And at the precise moment Sally Hemings ought to have made herself invisible, she was at my father’s side every moment of the day, serving his food, doing his mending, massaging at the damaged hands and wrists he needed for his writing.

  And her mixed-race children were at his knee, alongside mine.

  Sally was—by nature or practice, I could never tell which—amiable and eager to please, but she was never a simpering coward. She could, in a crisis, carry herself like an amber-eyed queen, wreathed in a mantle of golden dignity that left her quite beyond reach. And she’d let me know—with a tight-lipped stare as she removed her lace mobcap at the end of the day—that she resented my suggestion to put her out of the way.

  “She must be terrified,” Tom said as he turned to place two pumpkins into the barrow.

  “What do you mean?”
I asked, kneeling over a vine.

  My husband glanced at me and narrowed his eyes. “She must be terrified your father is going to sell her and the children away. Pained, too, by the things they’re saying in the newspapers.”

  And at that moment, I felt suddenly shamed. Whoever had been telling tales to the newspapers knew how many times Sally had been pregnant, but not how many of her children had survived. Knew that she was pregnant in France, but not that her son had died. To anger whites about the president’s black son, the papers were saying that Sally’s first boy grew up to be a man, and was now strutting about the plantation like a gentleman born to the manor. My heart seized at the thought of how much Sally must’ve wished her eldest son had lived to do just that. For Sally, these revelations must have been a torment.

  And it was my husband who had to remind me of that simple fact. I’d worried for my father’s reputation; William had worried about the principles of the matter. Only Tom had given any care to the pain of an enslaved woman. My husband understood fear and sadness and suffering, and because he did, my heart filled with love for him. It made it easier to content myself with being his wife when William Short was sleeping under the same roof.

  Easier still, when William began his preparations to leave Monticello.

  He didn’t bother making pleasantries when I found him at the carriage house, placing his gentleman’s grooming kit on the seat of his chariot. “He’s not going to reply to the revelations in the papers, is he, Patsy?”

  I knew—could see in his every gesture—that William was disappointed that my father would never serve as the champion of equality that he wanted him to be. But William’s ideals were wild-eyed. It was a comfort to know he hadn’t changed and that he wasn’t afraid to challenge Papa, but it angered me to see how eagerly he wanted to be off.

  “So you’re going to abandon us again?”

  William bristled at my question, spinning to face me. “You can ask me that?”