America's First Daughter: A Novel

by Stephanie Dray

  “What if I were?” Jackson asks, loud enough that everyone may hear. “After all, I’m the president and you’re America’s First Daughter.”

  The guests all laugh at his wordplay, and I flush with triumph at this acknowledgment. It’s a victory as complete as I could ever ask for, tainted only by the bittersweet stare of my secret sister behind her mask.

  For if I’m America’s daughter, so is she… .

  WILLIAM AND I CANNOT MARRY because I promised Tom I’d never take another husband. Nor can we live in scandal. But at our age, who could censure our private visits?

  Especially when I travel so often as to never rouse suspicion. I’ve been to Washington, New York, Boston. Why not Philadelphia?

  When I go there, William and I stroll together the cobblestone streets I’ve not seen since I was a girl, and my heart fills to brimming at the constancy of his heart. But in other matters, he has changed. “I thought you believed that the races should commingle?” I ask.

  “I do. But I fear that whites will never allow freed slaves to achieve equality here,” he says, explaining his latest philanthropic efforts for the colonization of an African nation called Liberia. He’s still struggling with the sin that taints our founding, and I still struggle, too. Though I know I have no right to sacrifice the happiness of a fellow creature, black or white, and I try to do right by all the people in my care, the truth remains that I am a slaveholder, even still, and will probably be until the day I die. It must tarnish me in his eyes, but I feel as if our sparring helps me do better.

  When we’re alone, he presses a fond kiss to my brow. “You must have your portrait made before you leave to visit your daughter in Boston. I’d like for everyone to see you so clear-eyed, so pragmatic, your father’s traits in the planes of your face.”

  “Who would want such a portrait? And think of the expense,” I complain.

  But he won’t hear of it, and before the visit is over, I’m painted for posterity. William observes the final portrait with approval. “Your eyes are sparkling, your color heightened, and your whole countenance lit up!”

  Ginny agrees. “Mama, I had no idea the attentions of an artist would do you such good.”

  It is not the attentions of the artist, but of William Short, that have invigorated me. The touch of his hand when we dine alone, the candlelight so soft I could almost mistake him for the young son of liberty in France … and the darkness of another, kinder alcove bed, where two sweethearts from an imaginary painting long ago finally find their happiness.

  But further recollections of this kind are not to be written or spoken of or mused about while my daughter looks on, oblivious. Like my father, I, too, have a secret passion in my old age. Stolen kisses. Clandestine assignations. Love letters that are burnt after they are read.

  For our love belongs to William and me alone.

  And it is a love that endures.

  William reads my mind, a smile of complicit mischief upon his aging face, his eyes still twinkling. “You must be looking forward to your adventure, Mrs. Randolph.”

  Indeed I am. For I’m to travel, for the first time, upon a railway train. It is a marvelous invention. A machine of such power and potential my father would’ve wanted to know the workings of it from the engine to the smallest gear. And on his behalf, I’m more excited to see it than I was to see air balloons as a child.

  William goes with us as far as Providence, where my children and I crowd together in a little car by the train engine. As the fire is fed and the roar of the machine begins, I wave to William on the platform, which is draped in flags of red, white, and blue.

  Then sparks fly through the air and burn little holes in my dress where they land. And I don’t care, because they look to me like fireworks bursting in celebration of our American Independence, and I’m exhilarated with the possibility and promise of our extraordinary journey.

  Note from the Authors

  MARTHA “PATSY” JEFFERSON RANDOLPH’S relationship with her father, the third president of the United States, not only defined her life but also shaped the identity of our nation. For nearly everything we know of the author of our independence is what she let pass to us in posterity.

  She came of age in a time of war. Colonial girls of her age and social station scarcely left the plantation, but she accompanied her father across the country and to foreign shores. At a time when women were dissuaded from involvement in politics, her father made her witness to two revolutions and the secret torments of the men who fought them.

  Intelligent, highly educated, and fiercely loyal, she lived an extraordinary life of her own, while defending her father’s legacy. And in his shadow, she became one of the most quietly influential women in American history. We wanted to write that history through her eyes, ever mindful that it would be biased in favor of her father and his politics. Knowing, too, that her perspective would be as flawed as she was. For what Patsy likely believed to be acts of family loyalty or even patriotism can be seen now in a much more troubling light.

  At the time of this writing, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and most historians believe that given the weight of the historical evidence—including DNA testing—Jefferson fathered the children of Sally Hemings. If true, it’s all but impossible that Jefferson’s daughter didn’t know about it.

  And if she knew, a very different picture emerges.

  A picture painted in this book.

  A picture only hinted at in her famous portrait by Thomas Sully—the one she posed for at the end of this story.

  In her time, Patsy was known as a conventional woman of perfect temper, but our research revealed her to be as complicated a heroine as any writer could wish for. She was a privileged, passive-aggressive, morally conflicted, gritty survivor with a facile relationship with the truth. She was also heroically devoted and capable of both enormous compassion and sacrifice. Her contradictions captivated us, and we hope you enjoyed reading the story she inspired.

  Now, to the explanation of the choices we made.

  WE COULDN’T HAVE INVENTED William Short if he didn’t exist. A political acolyte who was present at the most crucial junctures in the president’s life, and also carried on a doomed romance with Jefferson’s daughter? A man of radically progressive ideals for his time who challenged his mentor on matters of race and equality?

  No one would have believed it.

  But the romantic relationship has a basis in history, as explained by Patsy’s biographer, Cynthia Kierner. We did not have to invent William’s gallantry in procuring a miniature of Jefferson for Patsy, nor even William’s request to keep his involvement secret. Nor did we have to invent William’s indecorously frequent visits to Patsy at the convent in her father’s absence. Marie Botidoux believed that William was still in love with Patsy even after she left France, and we adopted that view.

  Though the seriousness and duration of this romance is not known, nor even if Jefferson was aware of it, the remarkable frequency with which William Short’s life intersected Patsy’s at crucial junctions is astonishing. Short was reportedly there when her family fled Monticello. He was there in Paris, where their flirtation began. He was present when the Sally Hemings scandal broke. He visited Monticello just prior to the final destruction of Patsy’s marriage. And he was apparently involved in discouraging anyone from buying Monticello for her once it was put up for sale. Consequently, we’ve romanticized him for dramatic purposes and assumed that theirs was a very long love story.

  Of course, when it comes to the personal lives of the Jefferson family, much must be assumed.

  The Jefferson family papers were edited for posterity—a laborious family project. The letters they chose to share with the public are fascinating. But from what they held back or destroyed, much can also be discerned. With predictable regularity, letters missing in the historical record coincide with events that might prove embarrassing. One such example is Thomas Mann Randolph Jr.’s first election loss, where Jefferson’s letters hint at a t
roubling episode, but Tom’s letters from this period—the existence of which are recorded in Jefferson’s notes—are missing.

  There is also the mysterious case of Jefferson’s letter index for the crucial year of 1788—the only volume missing from a forty-three-year record of correspondence. Even letters have disappeared to and from Jefferson’s daughters during this year, which is when the relationship with Sally Hemings is thought to have begun. Additionally, the very letters most likely to shed light on Sally’s pregnancy and whereabouts during the spring of 1790 are gone. All of which, of course, fits a very specific pattern supporting the charge of obfuscation by Jefferson’s heirs.

  No note to or from Sally has ever been found. That may be because Sally wasn’t literate, or because Jefferson never wrote her, or because someone made sure such letters vanished—and if so, that someone was assuredly his daughter Patsy. If Sally Hemings was with child upon her return from France, no evidence of that child remains—which left us to incorporate the contemporary rumors that the child was a boy and named after the president. And the Jefferson family would have had many reasons to keep all of this quiet, including a little-known fact that sexual congress between a man and his wife’s sister held the taint of incest until the nineteenth century.

  As with most works of historical fiction, the most outlandish bits are the true ones. Patsy did, indeed, want to be a nun—an ambition frustrated by her father. Newly released private letters shared with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation reveal that she was also highly sought after by the eligible bachelors of Paris, including the Duke of Dorset who offered a diamond ring. The unsigned love poem we attributed to William Short is real but may have come from any one of her suitors, or possibly one of her convent friends, who, like Marie, expressed utter despair at her departure.

  Patsy did give suspicious testimony after the scandal at Bizarre plantation. The colorful characters in that strange case are all drawn from history. The duels and threatened duels are all a matter of public record. Bankhead did beat his wife, Ann, at Monticello. He was set upon by Tom with a fire poker. He did stab Jefferson Randolph and live as a fugitive, even as the family sought to quiet matters, and Patsy mused on ways to let him finish himself off. Harriet and Beverly Hemings were permitted to “run away” from Monticello. Lafayette did, in fact, bow to Patsy Jefferson on that fateful day he escorted the king to Paris. And did also praise her publicly upon his return to America.

  Tom tormenting Patsy in her time of grief and instigating grave site drama is a matter of record. And while we cannot know what Jefferson’s daughter saw when she came upon her father the night of her mother’s death—for she wrote that she dared not describe it—Jefferson’s letters reveal that he was suicidal at this time.

  Pistols didn’t seem a far stretch and dovetailed nicely into the equally strange-but-true encounter he’d later have with a man who’d just blown off his head.

  As for Patsy’s estrangement from her husband, it’s impossible to know whether Tom beat her, but we know that he beat her children. And those same children said that she suffered from his sullen moods and angry fancies. It is our belief that his documented behavior fits the pattern of a classic abuser, so we adopted that interpretation and faithfully followed the chronological deterioration of their marriage, stemming largely from financial problems, alcohol, resentments, and possible mental illness.

  But we couldn’t help but notice that Patsy’s daughter Ellen mysteriously blamed the marital trouble—in part—upon Tom’s hatred for Patsy’s best friends.

  William Short might’ve been one of them.

  We confess to a reckless disregard for the almanac and a certain ruthlessness in condensing our heroine’s story. Patsy’s life was a long and full one, shared with one of the most iconic men of all time, a man who wrote so many letters that we know where he was, and what he was doing, almost every day of his adult life. In fact, some of his biographers required several volumes to tell the tale. Entire books are dedicated to the flight from Monticello and the Paris years alone. And because Patsy’s life was so tied up in her father’s, it was a challenge to tell her story in the space of a novel.

  Extremely painful omissions had to be made. There simply wasn’t enough room to explore all the fascinating people in Patsy’s life, like the colorful Aunt Marks and the omnipresent Priscilla Hemings. Nor was there space for all the details of Patsy’s political and family circumstances, or even all the important contemporary events she witnessed.

  Instead we’ve combined or simplified events for maximum dramatic punch, and the astute reader might notice subtle changes in the time line. For example, Jefferson’s famous headache in Paris occurred in September before his departure. However, we posited it slightly earlier, in our desire to consolidate the maelstrom of emotional and revolutionary events in Paris during the summer of 1789. The Merry Affair actually erupted in late 1803, but we moved it to accompany our heroine’s documented comeback. The secret trip Jefferson made to Monticello to deal with the Walker scandal coincided with a secret letter he sent to his daughter in 1803, but because the possibility of a duel dragged out for another few years, we portrayed the whole thing at once in 1805.

  In short, where a shift in the chronology didn’t fundamentally change the choices faced by the people involved, we erred on the side of brevity. And to give the reader a front-row seat, we’ve sparingly placed our protagonist and other characters where they might not have been. For example, Patsy seems not to have been at her mother’s deathbed though she describes the immediate aftermath in great detail. She and her sisters were inoculated from smallpox away from Monticello. And there’s no documented evidence of Patsy attending a ball at Versailles. But during her sixteenth year her father described himself as being at Versailles “almost daily” and she was known to have danced with a member of the Polignac family—then in residence at Versailles—so it seemed a reasonable conclusion to draw. Another example is Susan, the slave that we describe as being sold on the block, who actually arranged for her own sale with the help of the Randolphs. However, since it prompted Patsy’s embittered rant against the horrors of the auction she never actually described, we thought it proper to shift the date of the sale by a few months. Moreover, where a witness appears to have been in error, such as overseer Bacon’s account of how many children Jefferson’s wife had, when she held up her fingers on her deathbed, we’ve simply corrected it.

  And what of the villains? Did Charles Bankhead beat his wife to the point it hastened her death? We don’t know, but Jefferson feared for his granddaughter and took “for granted that she would fall by his hands.” What really happened at Bizarre? Again, we can’t know, so we named a culprit that best fit our story.

  As for Monticello itself, we made a good-faith attempt to portray the architectural evolution, with occasional diversions, such as painting the dining room chrome yellow slightly earlier than is likely. We were aided in these endeavors by our visits to Monticello, where we were struck by the fact that Patsy is buried not beside her husband, but at her father’s feet.

  Jefferson is between them in death, as he was in life.

  In closing, there is no child, or nation, that is ever born without leaving scars. We have done our best to be forthright and fair about the injustices and hypocrisies of our Founding Fathers. We hope the balance struck is one that furthers understanding and creates more interest.

  For a more detailed explanation of our sources, choices, and changes, visit AmericasFirstDaughter.com.

  Acknowledgments

  OUR DEEPEST APPRECIATION goes to the skilled and devoted staff at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc. Tour guides at Monticello were patient with our sometimes outlandish questions, and Tom Nash gave us Patsy’s quip about her father and his peas. Monticello historian Christa Dierksheide was particularly generous with her time, expertise, and insights, and not least of all included the suggestion that Ann Bankhead may have “married what she knew.”

  We’d have been lost witho
ut the amazing resources at Monti cello.org and the cache of digitized letters the National Archives makes available at founders.archives.gov.

  We’d also like to thank our families for their cheerleading and support. Our thanks, too, to Megan Brett for helping us to research things like judicial wigs, and for retrieving photographs of original letters for us from the University of Virginia. Additionally, we’d like to thank Jean Slattery for buying Stephanie that first Jefferson book all those years ago and inspiring an obsession; our editor, Amanda Bergeron, for being as excited about this story as we were; our agent, Kevan Lyon, for being our lioness on this project; Leslie Carrol for details about prerevolutionary France; and Kate Quinn for critiquing the manuscript.

  Our bibliography is too extensive to list here, but we wanted to acknowledge especially our reliance on the letters of Jefferson, his family, friends, colleagues, contemporaries, and biographers in providing period-appropriate language, descriptions, and viewpoints. Additionally, we must cite the authoritative Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello and Scandal at Bizarre: Rumor and Reputation in Jefferson’s America by Cynthia Kierner, from whom we adopted many theories and characterizations; also, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed, by which we were heavily influenced; Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Portrait by Fawn Brodie, whose groundbreaking work helped inspire this book; Flight from Monticello: Jefferson at War by Michael Kranish; Sally Hemings, the beautiful novel written by Barbara Chase-Riboud, whose iconic portrayal of Sally inspired our own; Jefferson’s Adoptive Son by George Green Shackelford; The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris and The French Revolution of 1789 as viewed in light of republican institutions by John Stevens Cabot Abbott, whose descriptions of France and the chronology of the revolution we adopted; The Plantation Mistress by Catherine Clinton, whose exploration of the complaints of women on plantations our heroine echoes; Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves by Henry Wiencek whose controversial book gave us a much needed counterweight to our heroine’s too-cheery assessment of her father; Twilight at Monticello by Alan Pell Crawford; the memoirs of Casanova, for inspiring period-appropriate romantic gestures; The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson by William Howard Adams; The Women Jefferson Loved by Virginia Scharff; and Parlor Politics by Catherine Allgor. More sources and resources can be found at AmericasFirstDaughter.com.