America's First Daughter: A Novel

by Stephanie Dray

  A chill swept over me—not for the insult, but for the threat. Tom couldn’t take the older boys because they wouldn’t go. But Lewis, Septimia, and little George … my husband could take them. I’d simply never believed he’d be so monstrous as to try. Why, he was more cruel, barbarous, and fiend-like than ever!

  Ignoring the stench of an unclean plate upon his table in the room beyond, I wrapped my shawl around me. “However much you blame me, surely you wouldn’t make the children suffer.”

  “Oh, I do blame you, Martha. But I blame my ungrateful son even more. Understand that if my children step one toe over Jeff’s threshold, you’ll never see them again. Don’t think I can’t do it, for it’s the only thing still in my legal power, and by God, not even your father can stop me.”

  I didn’t stay to argue with him.

  When I told Ellen, she straightened before the mirror and smoothed her wedding gown. “My father ought not be made to suffer embarrassment because he has no dowry to give me. His pride has already endured too many blows. How could I be happy today knowing I’d brought him low?”

  She was devoted to her father, in spite of his weaknesses, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. My dear daughter, still as precious as two angels in one …

  And so Ellen married Joseph Coolidge in the drawing room of Monticello, without her father, her hands shaking so badly she could scarcely hold a prayer book. Her sisters sent her to Boston with gifts they made themselves. Cornelia fashioned for her a painted screen to shade her from the sun, Mary packed a basket of cakes and wine, and Septimia presented her with a bracelet of chinaberries she’d strung like beads. Then our dear, witty Ellen was gone, leaving her grandfather lonely.

  My other daughters took turns sitting with him, but Papa confided, “I didn’t know what a void Ellen would leave in our family.”

  I didn’t despair at losing Ellen. To the contrary, I gloried in her escape from the sinking ship upon which the rest of us now sailed.

  In December of that year, Edgehill went up for auction with all its slaves and livestock. I worried that the notice would attract traffickers in human blood, Negro buyers who’d take my husband’s slaves deep into the South to grow cotton or rice, putting them to such hard use it’d leave them in the ground. And I couldn’t stomach the sorrow of seeing our house servants and their children sold out of the family.

  “There’s nothing you can do for them,” Jeff said, trying to reassure me. “I can try to arrange for buyers for them amongst our friends and neighbors, and failing that, I can bid myself on your household favorites, but there’s nothing you can do to spare the slaves from sale at all. You mustn’t blame yourself, Mother.”

  Then why did I feel to blame?

  In the face of such a system of injustice, I determined a course of action. Having learned bitter lessons from the unhappy fate of so many ruined friends and relatives, I said, “There is something I can do. If I give up my dower rights in my husband’s holdings, I’m entitled to one-ninth of his estate before the creditors are satisfied. And if I take that value in slaves …”

  My son’s eyes bulged. “You’d be better off to take—”

  “No,” I said, twisting a kerchief in my fists, understanding the import of what I was saying. “I’ll take the slaves.”

  And with those desperate words, I agreed to become a slaveholder.

  For the first time in my life, I’d own human beings whose entire fate would rest in my hands. It shattered me to do it, but would’ve shattered me more to do nothing. Better that they were mine than given over to some breeding farm or a field in the Deep South.

  I spared from the block Sally’s relations—the wives of her brothers. But I did so over Jeff’s objections. “They’re aged, Mother. They wouldn’t have sold for much. If slaves are all you’re taking from the estate, you need strong young men.”

  But I went on sparing the women. I took eleven in all, including Burwell’s daughters, though my son thought my choices emotional and without good sense.

  What I’d done was all that kept me sane on the bitter winter day of the auction. First on the block was Susan, so bad a servant, so negligent, so heartless, and of a family of such bad disposition generally that we ought to have been glad to be rid of her. But I was overcome with nausea when the auctioneer cried out into the biting winter wind. “Five hundred, five hundred! This nubile girl, strong arms, wide hips. Five hundred, do I hear six?”

  The discomfort of slavery I had borne all my life, but its sorrows in all their bitterness I’d never before conceived. Tears slid down Susan’s black cheeks when a man offered a higher bid. And feeling a fracturing in my soul, I lost all sense of decorum.

  Rushing to her, I begged that she be allowed to choose for herself amongst the buyers—a thing that embarrassed my son as he pulled me away, mumbling apologies to the bidders. “You aren’t planning to do something even more foolish, are you? You cannot rely now on my father for anything anymore. What you’ve taken in human property is now all you have of your own to provide for the six children you still have in your care, all under the age of seventeen.”

  He was afraid that I’d free them. And I might’ve. But just because I couldn’t bear to see these slaves naked on a wooden block for rich men to inspect, didn’t mean I’d cast them out into the world without any way to support themselves. That’s what I was thinking when the auctioneers cried out the price for Edgehill’s parcels, hour after hour. “Sixteen an acre! Do I hear seventeen?”

  Standing there as everything Tom and I built was sold away—earth, animal, and human—I felt my husband’s accusing eyes on me. But however much he hated me that day, I hated myself more. I hated myself, and slavery, and Virginia, and everything.

  Everything.

  For four hours the auctioneers cried out, extolling the virtues of Edgehill, a plantation with the healthiest climate of the whole earth, sheltered from cold winds, well watered with pure springs, nestled amongst woods of oak, hickory, walnut, and ash … until finally, at the end of the fourth hour, with bidders beginning to go off, my son offered seventeen and took the whole of Edgehill.

  “You swindler,” Tom sneered, drawing so near to my son I thought they might come to blows. “You took advantage of a father’s distress to get possession of his property and turn him adrift in his old age, penniless. You didn’t even raise enough to satisfy my creditors and now they’ll consume my earnings for the rest of my life. You’ve even taken from me a roof over my head—”

  He reached for our son’s bad arm, as if to wrench it, and I stepped between them. “Tom, you can never want for a home while my father possesses one. And our son won’t leave you—”

  “I’ll take nothing from a thief.” Tom trembled like a man swept up in a storm, clutching at his chest, all the color gone from him. Then he limped away.

  To escape the prying eyes of onlookers, I hastened to the carriage, murmuring, “He’s ill.” For I knew no other name for it. “His health’s failing from excessive anxiety of mind.”

  Handing me into the carriage, Jeff said, “I cannot have yours doing the same, so I’ve made arrangements with a common friend to assist him. He won’t accept help from me, but he’ll take it from a friend, and I’ll reimburse that man for his pains.”

  I grasped his hand, grateful beyond measure. This’d been no easier on Jeff than on any of us, but he’d borne it. “Your father won’t appreciate it, but I do.”

  The tapestry of my life was unraveling, one strand at a time.

  Once the grandeur and radiance of Lafayette’s visit was gone, I looked around me and saw everything at Monticello in disrepair. The paint flaked off the walls and railings and molding. The roof let in melting snow and rain. My father, so proud of his house, so fastidious and attentive to its appearance, didn’t seem to notice, and I told myself that Jeff had been too busy with the calamity of my husband’s bankruptcy to give my father’s estate his attention.

  But that winter one of my father’s loans had come d
ue … and Papa couldn’t pay.

  “What can you mean that he can’t pay?” I asked Jeff as the carriage jostled us along, having relied upon my father’s promises to look after me and the children, no matter what befell my husband’s fortunes.

  “Grandfather overestimated the value of his holdings,” Jeff told me, gravely. “Monticello is difficult to make profitable. Water and supplies must be hauled up. The house itself requires an enormous amount of firewood to heat it. There’s the expense of supporting the Negroes. We’ll have to move the family to Poplar Forest.”

  I didn’t understand what he was saying.

  And he braced himself, continuing on. “We’ll take with us only the necessary furniture and a small household of servants. Then we’ll sell or rent the whole of Monticello and auction as many Negroes as we can to pay the debts.”

  The blood drained from me so suddenly I sank into the cushions of the carriage in a near swoon. This had already been the ugliest day of a life filled with its share of ugly days, and this blow nearly stopped a heart that was already broken.

  Leave Monticello? It’d been the constant star, the steady anchor in all our troubles. Surely Jeff was overstating the financial situation in which we found ourselves. “But the price of crops will go up. They do. Up and down.”

  “Mother,” Jeff said, covered in a sweat in spite of the cold. “You’ve no notion of the debts Grandpapa has acquired. More than my father’s debts. More by far. And the crisis is at hand. To delay it will be complete ruin only a few years down the road, without a home to shelter you or the children.”

  I couldn’t fathom selling Monticello. It’d be a bitter sacrifice to leave its comforts, but nothing compared to the anguish of seeing my father turned out of his house and deprived in his old age of the few pleasures he was still capable of enjoying. “Have you told your grandfather this plan? It’ll kill him!”

  And it nearly did.

  I was there, holding my father’s hand, when Jeff delivered the news, and the shock was as dreadful as we foresaw. My father—my strong, giant of a father—began to weep. “I’ve lived too long. My death can only be an advantage to my family now.”

  “You’re very wrong!” I cried, for his death was the thing I most feared all my life.

  My son, always pragmatic, echoed my horror but explained the financial reality, too. “Grandpapa, even independent of our love for you, your death under existing circumstances would be a calamity of frightful magnitude. Your life isn’t only precious to our hearts, but necessary to the interests of your daughter and grandchildren.”

  What he meant was that just by living, my legendary father cast a shield over us all. While he was alive, the most ruthless of our creditors wouldn’t dare to strip us bare.

  They say tragedies come in threes. There was first the auction of Edgehill. Next the blow that we might lose Monticello. And then my daughter Ann came to us in the dead of winter, battered, bleeding, and bruised.

  ANN STAGGERED INTO MONTICELLO clutching a threadbare shawl too small to cover her swollen stomach. She’d been badly beaten—her eye half-shut with swelling, bleeding scrapes on her elbows and knees. Ann wasn’t very heavy, even with her rounded pregnant belly; she was nothing but shivering skin and bones. “I can’t stay with Charles,” she said, weeping, as if we were in any doubt. And when we got her in front of a fire, she said, “He’ll kill me. I fear he’s already killed the baby in my womb. Please don’t tell Jeff I’m here. He’ll convince Grandpapa to turn me out, and I’d deserve it. I’d deserve it.”

  “Never,” I said, rocking her as if she were still a small child. “Jeff’s in Richmond on your grandfather’s business, but even if he were here, he wouldn’t turn you out. Nor would your Grandpapa ever hear of it. You’re safe here, my precious Ann.”

  “How will I face my sisters? The last time Cornelia saw me, she nearly turned me to stone with those gorgon eyes.”

  “Your sisters will be as delighted to see you as I am.” And if they weren’t, I’d make them pretend. Because Ann had never been taught to do anything but honor and obey a husband, and none of this was her fault.

  Ann was too weak to go up the steep stairs to the family bedrooms, so we put her into the same bed Jeff had used to recover from his stabbing. And for the same reason. Both my children were victims of that vile wretch Charles Bankhead!

  Would he come after her? Would he dare? My husband had abandoned us, my father was frail, and none of the slaves, or even the overseers, were brave enough to confront Bankhead with the force required. So I made my own plans to defend us.

  My sons James, Ben, and Lewis were all young men now, between the ages of sixteen and twenty. While closing every paneled shutter over the windows of the house, I told them to arm themselves—not with a horsewhip or a fire iron, but with pistols. Because if the moment came, I didn’t want them to injure Bankhead, but to see him to his grave.

  Instead, we saw Ann to hers.

  In scream-inducing pain, she gave birth to a little boy. Seeing the bruises on her body and the bleeding that wouldn’t stop, the physician dosed her heavily with laudanum. Ann didn’t want it, and I protested the physician’s prescription. But the doctor said my daughter had internal wounds that couldn’t be repaired. Then he gave her a dose that left her speechless and insensible.

  Slipping into much the same condition, I lingered with Ann, holding her hand. Such was the state of my own distress that, for a moment, I saw not only my beloved daughter dying in childbed, but also my dear, sweet sister, who’d lost her life in childbed. I’d blink at Ann’s brown hair, and for a moment see my sister, then my mother, then my daughter again.

  I was so lost in time and place, I scarcely heard the words of the doctor, who finally said, “Mrs. Bankhead is past hope.”

  I suppose I heard these words. They were simply too shattering to accept. Inside my head, I screamed a glass-shattering scream, but in truth I made not a sound. I sat there with my dying child—the grief swirling like fury in my skull—blind and deaf to the whole world.

  I couldn’t rise until afternoon, after Ann breathed her last. Even then, it was only because, like a sudden dam that must be built to fend off the flood of anguish, I was frantic to do for my child the very last thing that I could do for her in this world.

  I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t swoon away. I couldn’t lock myself in my room and pace the floor howling and smashing and breaking things. I couldn’t ride through the woods in madness, though I wanted to. How desperately I wanted to!

  Instead, I went to my father and said, “We must arrange for her burial.”

  “Our poor, dear Ann.” My father wept. “My little garden fairy. I’ll never see flowers again but with her in heaven. Though now, heaven seems to be overwhelming us with every form of misfortune, and I expect the next will give me the coup de grâce.”

  I couldn’t hear it, couldn’t accept how frail and dispirited and heartbroken my father was, because I needed him now as I’d perhaps never needed him before. “Send for Bankhead.”

  My father cried, indignant, “Charles?”

  “Yes.” My mind was quite made up. “Send for Bankhead and ask him to bring the children and Ann’s best dress.”

  “Surely a servant—”

  “We must send for Bankhead,” I insisted again, speaking to my father with a commanding tone I’d never employed before, and scarcely recognized within myself. “We must welcome him home to bury his wife. We must offer hope at reconciliation after so many bitter years. We must elicit from him a warm glow of gratitude in his grief and guilt. And in the moment he’s most vulnerable, we must ask him to leave the children with us.”

  I said this with perfect clarity of mind and terrible resolve. I wouldn’t lose Ann’s children as I’d lost Polly’s. And not to a man like Charles. I believed, sincerely and utterly, that even if we were fated to abject poverty, my grandchildren would still be better off with me than at the mercy of that drunk, violent monster.

  I’d swal
low down any poison to wrest Ann’s babies from her murderer. And so I felt no compunction in demanding cooperation from the family. “The natural consequence of our having the children will be a reconciliation with their father. When Bankhead arrives, there’ll be no accusations, no recriminations, no coolness to him in any respect. We’ll smile at him and make up our quarrel—even you, Jeff.”

  Something in my voice, something in my dry eyes, seemed to frighten the family into perfect obedience. And when the slaves shoveled dirt over my daughter’s grave, Charles sank to his knees by Ann’s grave, trembling, and retching in guilt and grief. There was no hope for Ann and there was no hope for him. The only hope was that my grandchildren might be saved, so I did the most difficult thing I’d ever had to do in my life.

  I forced myself to put a hand upon Bankhead’s accursed shoulder and offered him the solace and forgiveness that would bend him to my will. Then I whispered sweetly in the ear of my daughter’s murderer how her babies would be best left with me …

  … until, at length, he agreed.

  And I am not sorry for it to this day.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Monticello, 17 February 1826

  From Thomas Jefferson to James Madison

  If a lottery is permitted, my lands will pay everything. If refused I must sell every thing here and move with my family where I have not even a log-hut to put my head into. The friendship which has subsisted between us, now half a century, and the harmony of our political principles and pursuits, have been sources of constant happiness. To myself you have been a pillar of support through life. Take care of me when I’m dead and be assured that I shall leave with you my last affections.

  I LEARNED THAT MY FATHER had concocted a lottery scheme from the newspaper. When I confronted him, holding Ann’s orphaned infant in my arms, Papa explained that one night, awake with painful thoughts, a solution to our financial problems came to him like an inspiration from the realms of bliss. “If the state legislature approves the plan, we’ll sell tickets all across the country for a chance to win some of my lands—the most beautiful and valuable property in Virginia. And the profits will save Monticello.”