Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

DOLLEY

Edgehill Plantation

Albemarle County, Virginia

Sunday, April 6, 1800

Mrs. Madison?”

At the sound of the voice, Dolley looked around, and to her great surprise recognized Sally Hemings standing beside the garden gate.

“Please forgive my being so bold, ma’am, but might I have a few words with you?” The young woman—Dolley guessed her age at not quite thirty—stood just on the other side of the white wooden palings that separated Patsy Jefferson Randolph’s beloved beds of tulips and azalea from the still-greater beauty of the spring woods. With her turquoise-green eyes, and the morning’s mistiness still clinging to the gray-barked trees around her, she looked rather like a spirit in a tale who cannot cross cold iron, ready to evaporate when the day grew bright.

“Of course, dear.” Dolley cast a quick glance back toward the frame house where Thomas Randolph’s butler was just emerging from the back door, a wicker tray of breakfast leftovers in hand. With Patsy going into her fourth day of a devastating migraine, Dolley hoped somebody would remember to round up eight-year-old Payne and seven-year-old Jeff Randolph for lessons before they disappeared into the woods. Patsy ruled her household with a kid-gloved hand of iron and when she had a headache, everything tended to slither fairly speedily into rack and ruin.

On the other hand, Dolley had never expected to see Sally Hemings set foot on Patsy’s property. Whatever had brought the young slave here, it had to be important.

Dolley folded her shawl more closely around her shoulders and stepped out through the garden gate. For all her years in Philadelphia, she had slipped quickly back into the Virginia habit of thinking: It was almost without awareness that she made sure she and Sally couldn’t be seen from the house.

“Is all well at Monticello?” Even as she said the words she thought, If anything happened to Jefferson, word would come here, or to Jemmy, first….

“Yes, ma’am, quite well.” Sally had a pleasing soft alto whose gentle refinement had impressed Dolley, on the few occasions she’d heard her speak. Since she’d first visited Monticello with Jemmy in 1795, she’d seen the beautiful maidservant any number of times, and had easily believed her own maid, Sukey’s, matter-of-fact gossip: She Mr. Jefferson’s woman, you know. Had believed it even before she’d observed that Patsy Randolph never spoke of or to Sally and looked through her as if she were a pane of glass. This didn’t happen often, because Sally was unobtrusively never in the same room with Patsy if she could help it.

And Jefferson, like every other Virginia planter Dolley had ever met, appeared to notice none of these interactions.

Dolley may have been a Quaker, but her Coles cousins down in Hanover County hadn’t been, and she’d learned everything there was to know about concubinage by the time she was ten.

Like most of the concubines Dolley had seen over the past five years—and Sukey could point out every one for six counties around—Sally was very light-skinned, and well dressed even for a maid at Monticello, where the house-servants were clothed as well as many Philadelphia artisans. In Spanish cities like New Orleans or Mobile, according to Aaron Burr, such a woman would have been a free courtesan, kept by her protector with an establishment of her own. It was only in the United States that there existed no place for such a woman.

“I’m not sure whether this is any of my business, ma’am,” Sally went on softly, “or to whom I should speak of it. But it touches Mr. Jefferson; I believe he may need to know.”

Dolley said, “Go on.”

The young woman was silent for a moment, as if arranging her thoughts. Though her green muslin dress was reasonably new and had clearly been made for her, not handed down from someone else, she wore no jewelry beyond a thin gold chain around her neck. Considering the way other women in her position were sometimes decked, this spoke well for either Jefferson’s taste or her own. It impressed Dolley, too, that she was matter-of-fact, as if she knew Dolley knew perfectly well who she was, but was neither bold nor coy about it.

It was a fact, that was all.

“Have you heard Mr. Jefferson speak of a gentleman named Mr. Callendar, ma’am? Mr. James Callendar?”

Dolley felt her lips compress at the name. Only the system that required every person of color to speak of any white man as a “gentleman”—usually on pain of a beating—could have given Callendar that title, as far as Dolley was concerned.

“I’m acquainted with him,” she replied evenly. “He’s the editor of the Richmond Enquirer.” She didn’t add that upon the few occasions she had met James Callendar, she always wanted to go wash afterwards.

Sally’s eyes flickered to her face, then away. She kept her voice neutral, as any slave learned to, when speaking about any white. “Yes, ma’am. And I know he’s a friend of Mr. Jefferson, and that his newspaper supports him. But my niece Betsie, who lives near Richmond—at Eppington, you know—”

Dolley nodded. Tom Jefferson’s younger daughter had married her handsome cousin Jack Eppes three years ago—Dolley had come to Monticello for the wedding. She recalled Jemmy telling her that Jefferson had given the newlyweds a number of slaves, as part of the dowry. Betsie Hemings must have been one of them.

“Betsie’s told me that Mr. Callendar has been asking questions around town, about Mr. Jefferson. Questions about scandal and rumor.” Her troubled glance touched Dolley’s again. “There was a woman, the wife of one of Mr. Jefferson’s friends, that Mr. Jefferson fell in love with when he was young…that kind of thing. Scandal that’s really nobody’s business. Things everybody knows about everybody, that get passed around among the colored and the poor whites, and talked of in the taverns.”

“In that case I believe Mr. Callendar must hear a great deal of it,” said Dolley drily. Across the younger woman’s face, quick wry appreciation of the comment flitted, instantly sponged away.

“As you say, ma’am. Betsie—my niece—says she hears from the potboys there that Mr. Callendar is always asking where and when, when the talk touches Mr. Jefferson. Then he buys men extra drinks to get them talking more. I don’t know what Mr. Callendar is up to, but I’ve seen the kind of thing he writes. I think Mr. Jefferson ought to know what’s going on.”

Dolley never swore herself, but at times like this she understood why someone would want to. A number of Jemmy’s favorite expressions passed through her mind.

“I know it isn’t my place to speak against a white man, ma’am, nor to pass along gossip,” concluded Sally. “But I know Mr. Madison is working to make Mr. Jefferson the President, writing to the newspapers and meeting with men in the legislature. The kind of rumor Mr. Callendar is asking about isn’t anything that will be helpful, if it goes beyond Virginia.”

Again their eyes met, and this time they held. Dolley knew exactly the first rumor James Callendar would have heard upon his arrival in Richmond eighteen months ago: the same one Sukey had first whispered into her ear. She Mr. Jefferson’s woman….

Sukey had spoken without innuendo or judgment, merely as a piece of information that her mistress would need in adapting to the household. She’d used the same tone to remark that Aunt Carr had a room up on the attic floor, and that there’d been another sister, Miss Elizabeth, who’d been not right in her head and had died in a snowstorm many years ago. In Virginia—in the whole of the South—concubinage and its more casual variations were simply part of the landscape, like mosquitoes in summer, although among slave-owners it was considered extremely bad form to talk about it.

For a man looking to discredit a political opponent, particularly in the North, it was a smutty treasure-house of innuendo.

And the logical defense against it would be to send the woman away.

Dolley said quietly, “Thank you, Sally. It will most likely come to nothing, for Mr. Callendar is after all one of Mr. Jefferson’s most loyal supporters. But thou’rt quite right to be concerned for his reputation, and thou art quite right in letting him know what thou hast heard. I’ll write to him this evening, since I don’t believe he’ll be back until the end of May.” She’d heard from Sukey that Sally Hemings could write, but whether it would be safe for a slave to write to her master—particularly in the vicious political climate of the approaching election—was another matter. She added, “I will keep to myself that thou wert the one who told me.”

“Thank you, ma’am. I do appreciate that. I hope Mrs. Randolph is better? Shep said that she was bad enough that you’d been sent for, to help with the household.” Shep was one of the slaves who worked in Jefferson’s nail-factory on Monticello. “I hope she’s feeling more herself?”

“She was a little better this morning,” said Dolley. “I thank thee for asking. Migraines usually pass off quite suddenly, don’t they? ’Tis hoped she’ll feel better today.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Sally curtseyed. “I am sorry to have disturbed you, ma’am, and if I may I’ll leave you to get back to your family.”

“Of course. My thanks again.”

For a time Dolley stood watching as the other woman retreated along one of the narrow foot-traces that threaded through the woods behind the Edgehill home-place, her green muslin dress flickering in and out of the thin-leafed pale trees.

In the carriage on the way back to Montpelier later that day, Dolley turned them over in her mind: Sally, and Tom Jefferson; James Callendar, and the election that would take place at the end of the year.

The election that would—it was hoped—peacefully alter the growing strength of the central government into something the States were willing to live with, before the dominance of the one and the independence of the others led again to violence.

Only Jefferson, Jemmy said, had the stature, and the popularity, to draw the votes of both the North and an increasingly angry South. Having avidly read every newspaper she could get her hands on for three years, Dolley had to agree with her husband. The thought of a vicious little scandalmonger like Callendar turning against Jefferson at this stage made her shiver, as if a rat had run across her flesh.

It was in Philadelphia in 1796, Jemmy’s last year in Congress, that Dolley had first encountered James Callendar.

That was the year General Washington—to Martha’s unspeakable relief—had announced that he would not seek a third term as President. That he would at last go home to Mount Vernon to stay.

It was the year that the new nation had held its first true election, between candidates who held radically different opinions about how the nation should be governed and with whom it should ally itself.

It was the year when every newspaper in the country—pro-Jefferson or pro-Adams—had felt called upon to vomit every reason, real or fancied, political or personal, hysterical or merely scurrilous, for voters to elect their perceived Savior and reject the man whom they felt to be the Antichrist.

And the most vivid and copious producer of this verbal sewage was James Thompson Callendar.

Four years previously—the year of Payne’s birth, when Dolley had been no more than a good Quaker bride—newspapers had backed Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton in another round of mud-slinging, with Jefferson referred to as an “intriguing incendiary,” a “concealed voluptuary,” and “the promoter of national disunion, national insignificance, public disorder, and discredit.” Dolley had read with interest Jemmy’s clearheaded defense of Jefferson, and that written by the third of the loyal Virginia triumvirate, quiet, tactful, perpetually rumpled Jim Monroe, who was now Governor of the State. Rather less creditably, Jefferson’s clerk in the State Department, Phillip Freneau, in his newly founded paper the National Gazette, had attacked both John Adams and Hamilton, the one as an “unprincipled libeler” and the other as “not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption.”

By 1796, Maximilien Robespierre had perished on his own guillotine and the revolutionary National Assembly in France had been crushed by the five-man Directorate. In the United States, with the Presidency at stake, the war of political libel began in earnest.

It is all-important to our country that Washington’s successor shall be a safe man. But it is far less important who…may be named…than that it shall not be Jefferson.

He was an atheist, a puppet of France, inept, indecisive, a foe of Washington and of the Union. Jeers were written of his flight from the British forces during the Revolution that had first occupied Richmond, then almost trapped him at Monticello.

Not to be outdone, the pro-Jefferson Philadelphia Aurora crowned Adams “His Rotundity,” and declared him unfit to lead the country, the “champion of kings, ranks, and titles.” It warned that he was scheming to transform the Presidency into a hereditary monarchy in order to pass it along to his son. Jefferson, concluded the paper proudly, had only daughters.

Dolley, who by that time had met nearly everyone concerned, could only imagine what Abigail Adams would have said to that piece of reasoning.

She remembered Callendar from Philadelphia that winter, a dark-haired Scotsman with a head that seemed too large for his body and an indefinable air of physical crookedness about him. He’d been standing near the fireplace during one of the receptions at the house she and Jemmy had rented from Jim Monroe on Spruce Street, railing about the injustices of tyrants who sought to chain not only the body, but the mind, and the minds of children down to the tenth generation, in a harsh wild voice like that of an Old Testament prophet.

“Jefferson’s wisdom is the hope of our nation,” he had pronounced, and coming close, Dolley had been struck by the rankness of his body, and the thick odor of Jemmy’s best port on his breath. “The sweetness of Xenophon and the force of Polybius, information without parade, eloquence without effort. How can any hear Thomas Jefferson and remain unmoved?”

And he was right, Dolley reflected, watching Payne trot importantly alongside the carriage on his pony, his gold hair catching the patchy brilliance of the April sun. But there was some people’s praise that reflected as badly on their object as outright insults, and James Callendar was one of those people.

“Watch me, Mama!” Payne kicked his mount into a canter, effortlessly cleared a fallen tree-trunk near the road, and flourished his hat to his mother’s applause.

“I’ve jumped him over fences, too,” the boy said, trotting back to the carriage. “Jeff and I, we took out Annie’s horse back at Edgehill, and there wasn’t any trouble. I’m big enough to have a horse of my own, not a pony. Annie’s only a few months older than me, and she has a horse. You have to tell Papa I’m big enough.”

Dolley pretended to frown in concentration. “I’m to tell thy papa thou’rt big enough to be a horse-thief? Well, all right…”

He crowed with laughter, and swiped the air with his riding-whip. “You know what I mean!” And cantered ahead to jump the little creek, singing as he rode.

Fair as Dolley’s sister Lucy, and with the promise of Lucy’s good looks and their father’s height, Payne had slipped easily into the role of a planter’s son. Maybe too easily, Dolley thought. John Todd had believed devoutly in education, not simply because his own father was a schoolmaster but because he saw learning as the gateway to an honorable career. And Jemmy, of course, was one of the most erudite men in Virginia.

But from the moment Payne had realized that his stepfather was a wealthy planter, with ten thousand acres and over a hundred slaves at his beck and call, he seemed to have understood that the issue of his future livelihood was already taken care of. And as the years had passed and Dolley had realized, first with disbelief and then with an agony of regret, that Jemmy’s seed could find no root in her womb, it had become harder and harder for her to discipline Payne, or to endure his sullen wretchedness on those few occasions when his will was thwarted. During one of those miserable battles of will when he was five—Dolley recalled it was over his first pony—he had sobbed, You wish I’d died so you could marry Papa! Papa being Jemmy. The words, and the way he’d turned from her, had gone like a knife-blade into her heart.

In all other things, Dolley believed herself to be fairly rational: firm with the slaves, since there was no keeping house unless one learned to be firm; tactful with her tribe of new sisters-in-law; adept at balancing the demands of running a plantation household against the constant stream of Virginia hospitality and her own need for a quiet hour now and then.

But with Payne she was helpless.

It was a good thing, she reflected, that the boy was so good-hearted. She had been less concerned during the first two years of her marriage, when she and Jemmy had wintered in Philadelphia every year for the sessions of Congress. Payne had had his familiar friends around him. Only in the summers had they returned to the relative isolation of Montpelier, where Payne’s only company was the children of either slaveholders or slaves.

But in 1797, so many things had changed.

The vicious Presidential election of 1796 had gone to Adams by three electoral votes. And because the Constitution had been written before the emergence of distinct political parties—not to mention before such events as the bloody Revolution in France and England’s ruthless decision to seize American ships, cargoes, and seamen—Thomas Jefferson had emerged from retirement to become Vice President to his former friend, whose political views were now in direct opposition to his own. (“One can’t think of everything,” Jemmy had sighed.)

But the country’s unofficial Vice President—the man who privately gave orders to, and received privileged information from, the new President’s Cabinet—was Alexander Hamilton. A man who had never been elected to any office in his life.

Standing in the crowd of Philadelphians outside Congress Hall on a chilly March day in 1797, Dolley had watched Jefferson go up to take office as president of the Senate, tall and lanky in a long-tailed blue coat. And she’d smiled a little, remembering him two years earlier, when Jemmy had first brought her to Monticello. Untidy and eccentric-looking in the old clothes he wore while gardening, he strode down the front steps—that was before he’d started tearing the house apart—with his hands held out to greet his old friend. “Jemmy! I do hope you know what you’ve let yourself in for, my dear Mrs. Madison,” he’d added in his soft voice, bowing over her hand. “When you marry a Virginian, you marry his entire family and his friends—”

“—And their horses and dogs and Negroes—” Jemmy added with his dry smile.

“—in season and out, bed and board—”

“My dear Mr. Jefferson,” Dolley drew herself up with an air of assumed haughtiness and a twinkle in her eyes. “I see you mistake me for a Philadelphian. I happen to be a Virginian, born and raised. There is nothing about the feeding and housing of two dozen strangers at five minutes’ notice that I hadn’t mastered before the age of twelve.”

His eyes widened with pleasure. Instantly, it was as if they’d known one another for years. “Really? What county?”

“Hanover, if you please.”

“Good Lord! There are some quite remarkable remains of a Pamunkey Indian village on the banks of—”

“Mrs. Madison,” interposed Jemmy patiently, “please permit me to introduce my friend Mr. Jefferson. Mr. Jefferson, my wife. And I warn you, Dolley, that if you encourage Tom with the smallest query about the Indians, or fossil mammoths, or what varieties of alfalfa best grow in these mountains, you shall be kept awake until dawn with the natural history of the entire region.”

Two years after that meeting, moving through the crowd around Congress Hall, Jefferson had looked grave and collected, Dolley thought, and a little grim. The Federalists were strong in the Senate, and feelings were running so high about whether to ally with a domineering Britain or revolutionary France that there had been outbreaks of mob violence.

Even so, she thought, as she watched George Washington cross the State House yard, kingly in black velvet, with stout little gray-clad Mr. Adams bobbing in his wake, she had been aware that she was seeing something that no one in the world had ever seen before: the ruler of a nation quietly handing off power to his successor, then returning home to private life.

“No severed heads—no daggers in the dark—no rioting in the streets,” she murmured to Anna, who stood at her side. “No blood on the steps of the throne—no more fuss, really, than taking over as vestryman of the parish. Flat dull, in fact,” she added with a laugh. “Canst think of another time in history, when the transfer of rulership from one man to another did not involve someone dying?”

At her elbow, the black-clothed widow Sophie Hallam responded with a wintry smile. “We do indeed witness a remarkable event. Yet I’m sure that somewhere, Dolley, someone has died for it.”

Sophie had returned to Philadelphia in time to attend that same Christmas reception of 1796 at which Dolley had first encountered James Callendar. Across the very crowded double-parlor, the black and gray of second mourning had caught Dolley’s eye, striking in a room filled with women determined to show off their best. As she approached, Dolley saw the woman was in conversation with Aaron Burr—who stood several inches shorter—and coming close heard her voice, a wry alto like smoke and honey: “One must allow it’s an effective way to raise money: If your people are too poor to tax, send your army on a looting-expedition across the border into your neighbor’s territory.”

Bonaparte. Dolley identified the topic of conversation at once and with an inner sigh. Since the Directorate of France had begun sending its troops into Italy, very little else was being talked about.

And the next instant, identified the voice.

“Sophie!”

The woman in gray turned, her cool sardonic smile melting into an expression of genuine pleasure. “Dearest!” The two women clasped hands, then, impulsively, embraced. “My mother always vowed you should marry a planter! She would be pleased to see herself proved right.”

Dolley’s eye flickered over the exquisitely fashionable somberness of her friend’s dress, and she bit back her query, And how is thy dear mother…? Sophie seemed to read both her unspoken words and her instantaneous afterthought, and added, more quietly, “She would have been pleased to see you looking so well, too, Dolley. She always said you were the best of my friends.”

That time, the past tense was unmistakable.

“I’m sorry.”

Sophie shook her head, though her features tightened momentarily with some unsaid and bitter reflection. “In many ways I miss her more than I miss Mr. Hallam—who was a good husband, as husbands go….” She waved away his specter dismissively, and smiled her sidelong smile. “I am a mere dressmaker these days, but as we live in a democracy now, both Colonel Burr and Lady Washington assured me there would be no objection to my accompanying him here.”

“Mrs. Hallam? Art thou the Mrs. Hallam whose needlework Lady Washington doth praise so highly? She hath said she knew thee as a child—”

“And so she did. My father consulted with her on her own health and her daughter Patcy’s, when she’d bring her into Williamsburg. I owe Lady Washington a good deal.”

And Dolley thought, as Aaron Burr turned aside to bow over Maria Morris’s hand, that the diminutive Senator gave Sophie a curious, speculative look.

After years of wondering, Dolley had learned almost by chance from Tom Jefferson that her friend had made it to Cornwallis’s camp at Yorktown, and that she had done nursing for a Yorktown doctor in the final year of the War. Later, Patsy Jefferson Randolph had spoken of meeting Sophie again in Paris. Dolley learned that Sophie and her mother had taken ship with the departing British troops in 1783, and that her mother had died on the voyage. Hence, Sophie remarked with brittle lightness, her stint as a paid companion to an Englishwoman in Paris when all Hell was about to break loose. But how she had gotten out of Paris, who Mr. Hallam had been, and how and why Sophie had returned to Philadelphia to take up life as a seamstress, she would not say.

Because of her friendship with Martha Washington, and because of her undeniable good breeding and wit as well as her skill at cutting a gown, Sophie Hallam rapidly made herself a fixture in Philadelphia society. She knew everyone and everything, and was welcome in both Federalist and Republican circles. For she had early issued her own Proclamation of Neutrality, she claimed, in imitation of the President’s: listening to any gossip and never passing a word of it along.

Which was odd, Dolley thought, in a woman whom she recalled as being sharply outspoken in her loyalty, long ago, to the Crown.

Certainly Sophie’s letters had enlivened the next few years.

Only weeks before John Todd’s death, Jemmy’s brother Ambrose had died back at Montpelier. Each summer after that, when Jemmy and Dolley had returned to the plantation, it had been to find more tasks undone, more bills unsettled, more finances entangled by debt and poor management as old Colonel Madison grew less and less able to ride his own acres daily the way he once had. Thus it was that when Virginians gathered to elect their representatives to the Fifth Congress, Jemmy stepped aside. For the first time since the Revolution, he returned to private life.

Watching the sunlight on the flanks of the carriage-team, on Payne’s gold hair as the boy galloped his pony into the green stillness of the wooded hills, Dolley was still hard-put to piece together how the country had come, so swiftly, from that point—that astonishingly peaceful handover of power from Washington to Adams—to the very verge of darkness that threatened to undo everything Jemmy, and Tom, and Mr. Adams himself had fought for.

Tyranny masquerading as the necessary actions of reasonable men, the way it now did in France.

Even as a permanent resident at Montpelier, of course, Jemmy was never completely detached from politics. He would always, Dolley reflected wryly, be a kingmaker at heart.

Sophie, and Lizzie Collins, and Aaron Burr kept them up on the gossip of the capital, sending them clippings from newspapers and, as Sophie phrased it, reports on the gales in various tea-pots around town. It was Sophie who sent them the tracts published by James Callendar entitled The History of the United States for the Year 1796, which detailed Alexander Hamilton’s 1792 affair with a certain Mrs. Maria Reynolds, whose husband was involved in speculation with Hamilton’s Treasury funds to the tune of thirty thousand dollars. So much correspondence could not refer exclusively to wenching, Callendar wrote of the letters which he claimed Hamilton had helped Mrs. Reynolds forge. No man of sense can believe that it did.

Hamilton, livid, had challenged Jim Monroe to a duel on the grounds that Monroe, to whom Mrs. Reynolds’s husband had sent proof of the affair in an effort at blackmail back in ’92, had, after four years, passed along the details to Callendar. After words like “liar” and “scoundrel” had been exchanged, the two opponents had been talked out of bloodshed by Aaron Burr. Instead, Hamilton published a confession in the Gazette of the United States: The charge against me is a connection with one James Reynolds for purposes of improper pecuniary speculation, he wrote. My real crime is an amorous connection with his wife.

Alexander Hamilton, who had already retired as Secretary of the Treasury, never held public office again, which as far as Dolley was concerned was just as well. Sophie noted—goodness knew what her sources were—that when Hamilton’s books were examined, his assistant (a cousin of his wife) was found to be $238,000 short.

Sophie related all this with a kind of relish, as if profoundly entertained by the murderous infighting of men who had begun their careers as traitors to the King. “The Constitution gives your friend every right to laugh at us to our faces,” sighed Jemmy, as he laid down the letter that contained the Gazette confession. “God help this country, if she could not say of us whatever she wished.”

But Jefferson’s letters were first disquieting, and then frightening. In May of 1797, in response to the treaty Washington had negotiated with England, France started seizing American ships and cargoes. The new President Adams sent a delegation to Paris to iron things out, and mortally offended his Vice President and half the Congress by requesting “measures of defense.”

Adams’s Cabinet consisted mainly of men hand-picked by Hamilton, and the second President found himself surrounded by pro-British New England merchants and bankers. No doubt remembering Jefferson’s championship of Citizen Genêt, Adams shut his Vice President out of nearly every aspect of the government. By November of that year, with Bonaparte preparing, it was said, to conquer Switzerland and then invade England, anti-French hysteria had reached dangerous proportions.

By January of ’98 feelings in Congress were running so high that the Honorable Representative of Vermont (Republican) crossed the floor of the House chamber to spit in the face of the Honorable Representative of Connecticut (Federalist). This in turn led to a brawl on the floor with a cane and some fire-tongs as weapons. (“Not,” wrote Sophie, who’d been in the gallery, “the Congress’s finest hour.”)

By the following April, when word came to Philadelphia that French Foreign Minister Tallyrand had refused to receive the American envoys unless they lent France twelve million dollars and gave the Foreign Minister himself a further quarter million as a “sweetener,” anti-French mobs were storming the streets of Philadelphia, and the country was clamoring for war.

In June, a Naturalization Act was passed. Effectively blocking the citizenship of émigrés from both France and Ireland, it was followed, a week later, by the Aliens Act, which permitted the President to summarily banish any foreigner he personally deemed a threat (for instance, Jefferson’s staunch supporter Albert Gallatin).

And in the blazing heat of July, the Sedition Act was passed, forbidding any newspaper to print attacks on the President—in direct disregard of the Constitution.

“It is a reign of witches,” declared Jefferson softly, as he paced the darkness of Montpelier’s pillared porch in the heat of a July night in 1798. He’d arrived after a day of blistering sun; Dolley, sitting at Jemmy’s side, had heard in the throb of the cicadas, smelled in the damp thick air, the coming of storm. “Because one Frenchman is dishonest, and another is greedy, they seek to go to war with the only nation strong enough to counterbalance England’s desire to swallow us up, to transform us back into her colonies again. To hold us not in chains of iron this time but of gold. It is enough to give you a fever.”

July 2, 1798. Twenty-two years to the day, Dolley remembered, since the Congress had voted to declare independence.

Bitter years. Since taking up his office again, Jefferson had been spending as little time in Philadelphia as he could manage, coming home from the capital in early July and not returning until December. During those long summers and falls he was in and out of Montpelier, and Jemmy and Dolley would go to stay with him at Monticello, where the older man seemed to take refuge from his savage frustration in the remodeling of the Big House: Dolley hoped by the time they went for their next stay there would at least be a roof.

So preoccupied had their friend been with what was happening in Philadelphia, she wasn’t certain he’d notice whether he was sleeping under the stars or not.

“Now Adams has called for an army, to fight the French—Does he really believe that Bonaparte will invade our shores? They’ve even got Washington to come out of retirement to lead it—”

Dolley had wondered what Martha had had to say to that.

“—which of course he is too old to do. So he’s demanded that Hamilton—Hamilton!—be his second in command: in effect, the generalissimo in the field.”

She asked, “Can the President ask the Congress to set aside the Constitution?”

“He certainly has,” replied Jemmy, grimly.

And Jefferson whispered fiercely, “Who’s to stop him? With a standing army in the field, they’ve made the President into a sort of elective King, and the State Representatives his subjects, not his partners in rule. Adams tells them what he wishes, and they do it—which I understood was the entire reason we fought in ’76.”

In the dark that followed the lightning, Dolley could sense his eyes meeting Jemmy’s. “I think it is for the States, don’t you, to tell Adams that he’s overstepped his bounds? It is we who made the Constitution, we—the States—who agreed to give up our individual liberties and enter into the Union. It is up to us, to abrogate the laws which violate it.”

More silence followed, broken only by the rumble of thunder on the mountains, and, some minutes later, the patter of the rain. The house behind them was dark, that long house of yellow brick whose southern half—completely separated from the north end where Jemmy, Dolley, Payne, and Anna lived—still housed the Old Colonel and Mother Madison, Jemmy’s sister Fanny, and, since March, his brother Ambrose’s orphaned daughter Nell.

The house that seemed some days so profoundly peaceful, and some nights, as if it were isolated from the world by the endless miles of the sea.

Jemmy said at last, “I think you’re right, Tom. And I think we must speak further of this. Speak,” he added quietly, “not write. Nor commit a word to paper, until we are ready for the States to draft resolutions to that effect. For if we appear to be urging the adoption of such resolutions, that would set the States in opposition to the Congress, I think that you and I, my friend, would find ourselves in danger of prosecution. For conspiracy, certainly. And I would not put it past Hamilton, to bring a charge against us of treason.”

As the carriage emerged from the trees at the foot of Montpelier’s long hill, Dolley saw at once that something was going on. Every window in the house was illuminated, and even at that distance she could see far more people than usual moving about the porch.

Her mind still on that July night twenty-one months ago—the legislatures of both Virginia and Kentucky had adopted resolutions declaring that the central government of the United States could not assume powers not specifically granted by the Constitution (such as arresting people for making rude comments about the President’s rather ample bottom)—Dolley felt an instant’s surge of panic at the sight. She rose in the carriage and called out, “Payne, no!” as the boy spurred his pony off into the gloom.

Anna, who had sat quietly at her side through most of the drive from Edgehill, looked up at her in surprise. “What’s wrong, dear? It just looks like company.”

A great deal of company, thought Dolley, her heart racing. And at an hour when everyone should have been indoors.

Jemmy stood waiting for her in the shadows of the porch. His sister Fanny was beside him, and with her her fiancé Dr. Rose: Both Jemmy and Fanny, Dolley saw at once, were clothed in black. “Who is it?” she demanded, as Jemmy stepped forward to hand her down from the carriage. “Not thy father—?”

Jemmy shook his head. “Francis,” he answered.

It took Dolley a moment to register who they knew named Francis. “Thy brother Francis?” Past his shoulder she could see through the door of the south parlor—the parlor of the Old Colonel’s section of the double house—a coffin resting on a black-draped table.

“He was driving back from Gordonsville yesterday evening,” said Jemmy. “His horse took fright at something just where the road goes through the woods near the old tobacco-barn.”

Dolley shuddered—having one’s horse bolt when pulling a vehicle was far more dangerous than when under saddle—but privately she wondered if brother Francis had been sober.

“I sent a man to you with word this morning—”

“We would have missed him, if he rode cross-country.” Dolley looked around her, glimpsing the figures hurrying about in the half-gloom: Jemmy’s sister Sarah Macon from Somerset Plantation, and several children of their neighbor, Tom Barbour, plus brother Will’s black valet and at least two servants she didn’t recognize. “Shall Susannah and Francis’s children stay here the night, then, for the funeral?”

Francis, two years younger than his brother Jemmy, had been a quarrelsome man, self-pitying and inclined to drink. There had been trouble between him and his father over the boundary of the land the Old Colonel had given him when he’d married, back before the War, and everyone in the family had taken sides. As a result, the only times Dolley had seen him had been at the Old Colonel’s New Year’s parties. No wonder it had taken her a moment to recognize his name.

But family was family. And in Virginia, family was all. So Dolley caught Payne—his grave face telling her that he’d already heard the news from the grooms—and made sure he knew he’d be sharing his attic room with several small boy cousins: “And if I hear one peep out of the lot of you, sirrah, I shall know who to send out to sleep in the barn.”

Payne laughed—since they both knew Dolley would no more have made good on the threat than she’d have thrown him down the well—and kissed her: “Will Aunt Patsy and Uncle Randolph be coming tomorrow, then? I can take Thundercloud and ride back with a message—”

Dolley suspected Payne’s offer had more to do with the drama of galloping a full-sized horse over hill and dale than it did with any real concern for Jefferson’s daughter.

“The messenger will have got there by this time.”

Everyone for five counties around would be coming for the funeral, Dolley knew, which meant a visit to the kitchen would be in order at once. No wonder the place had the air of a kicked anthill.

For several hours after that Dolley was on her feet, supervising preparations far into the night for what she knew would be an exceedingly long and trying day tomorrow. Starting early in the morning, Dolley knew the entire county would be on hand to condole them in their loss.

The women would bring pies and spoon bread, rolls and butter and thick pots of greens, but the sheer logistics of dinner and hospitality would outstrip those helpful contributions, not to speak of finding sleeping-space for fifty guests tomorrow night, along with their grooms, valets, and maids. Dolley consulted with Hannah the cook, counted up chickens in the runs, turkeys, ducks, eggs on hand and likely to be gathered at this season of the year, hams and sausages in the smokehouse, tea and coffee and sugarloaves, and calculated when the baking needed to be started for bread, beans, molasses pies. She drafted the plantation cooper and carpenter to the job of carrying additional water and wood, made sure Joe in the stables would have more helpers than usual to deal with the guests’ horses, ascertained that there were sheets, blankets, and pallets clean, aired, and ready to be laid down everywhere in the house there was room for them at the end of the day tomorrow. She made lists on her ivory housekeeping tablets and ticked them off in pencil: money for the preacher. Letter to Jefferson. Lend Buster to Susannah—her new-widowed sister-in-law would certainly need the extra help.

She tried not to reflect that it was characteristic of Francis to die in the height of the tobacco-planting season, when no one had help to spare.

Between all that she slipped back into the house and up the stairs to the guest-room, to make sure her sister-in-law was comfortable, and sat talking quietly until the widow had cried herself out, and whispered she thought she could sleep now. Dolley felt again the ache of grief for poor tiny Willie, like a heated nail driven into her soul.

And not for Willie alone. For her oldest brother Walter, lost at sea the year the War ended. For her brothers William and Isaac, both dead just after her marriage to Jemmy. No wonder she treasured Payne so!

The kitchen was in turmoil, when she stopped there to heat cocoa for old Mother Madison. Whatever Francis’s peccadilloes, the old lady had still lost a son. Dolley entered her mother-in-law’s little parlor to find Mother Madison dozing in her chair beside the fire, a shawl around her knees and another laid over her like a blanket. Huddled in her chair, she looked more like the withered mummy of a child than a living woman.

As silently as she could, Dolley set the pewter chocolate-pot where it would stay warm by the heat of the hearth. From behind the Old Colonel’s closed door she could hear the murmur of the old man’s voice, hoarse and strong for all his years.

As soon as whoever was with him should leave, she decided, she would gently wake her mother-in-law and help her to bed. On her way in she’d heard the little wall-clock in the hall strike, and knew it was close to midnight. The big brick house was growing still at last.

From the corner of the desk she took a battered copy of A New System of Agriculture, or, A Speedy Way to Grow Rich, and concentrated her mind on the four-course system and Tull’s Drill, and the advantages of rape-seed cakes over pigeon-dung as a fertilizer. On the other side of the door the Old Colonel’s voice droned on. Words rose above the murmur like fragments of rock above a churning sea: “—have the lot of them on my hands as well as Ambrose’s lands now—” “—put you in charge—” (He must be talking to Jemmy, she thought.) “You’re the only one who knows how to work, the only one who knows how much work it takes—”

As the Old Colonel had grown feebler, his proud spirit had grown more autocratic, and his hold on the acres that had been his since his father’s death, when he himself was a boy of nine, more unyielding. The Virginia Piedmont was his world, the only world he cared about; his neighbors, his family, and his slaves, the only people who mattered to him.

The words “debt” and “damned stupid overseers” cut in, over the softer murmur of Jemmy’s replies: “Won’t see it fooled away like that idiot Randolph’s—”

Jemmy must have made some further protestation, because the old man suddenly shouted, “Damn it, boy, you owe me!”

Dolley’s glance shot quickly to her mother-in-law, but the old woman did not stir.

“And you owe your family! Your brother Will’s as poor a farmer as you could find in this county! I need you, more than Tom Jefferson or your damn Congress does! This land needs you! What gives you the right to turn your back on us?”

I should leave, thought Dolley. This isn’t my business.

“Get out, then! Go to your damned Philadelphia, if that’s what matters to you. But you have your head on wrong way round, boy! And your heart as well.”

“Father—”

“The world crawls with politicos, Jemmy, like meat with maggots. And every one of ’em will put you in the street next week, if they take a dislike to the cut of your coat, without a word of thanks for all you’ve given to them. It’s only family that matters, Son. Family and the land. And if you believe different, for all those books you read, you’re the damnedest fool in Christendom and I pity you from the bottom of my heart.”

“It isn’t that Father doesn’t understand,” said Jemmy quietly, when at last he and Dolley were together in their bedroom, and the door was shut upon the world. He unlaced her—Sukey having long since been sent to bed—and sat on the bed behind her, to brush out her hair. The fire whispered in the grate. Outside the window, the mountain silence lay oceans deep.

“He does understand,” Jemmy told her. “He’s been sheriff and magistrate in this county, has watched Virginia go through war and revolution. He knows perfectly well that those who would make a despotism of our country must be stopped. He simply doesn’t think it’s more important than keeping Montpelier running as well as it’s always run.”

“No, and I understand his point.” Dolley rose, and went to the dresser to pour water from ewer to basin, to wash from her face the dust of the road that afternoon. She had not, she realized, even changed her dress, much less had anything resembling supper. “Even had he not been—been pushed to reflect upon his mortality, by the death of a son. He hath seen the way people behave, in politics. In truth I can’t even completely blame Mr. Adams, for wanting to make it illegal to call him names in the press when he’s doing what he feels to be his best.”

She was silent for a moment, recalling the peppery New Englander who’d come to one of her dinners back in Philadelphia: the towering erudition and the kindly questions asked about Payne and her mother. “Will Jefferson go against Mr. Adams again, for the Presidency?” she asked. “For if he does—I was told something today that disquieted me very much.”

Jemmy listened gravely to Dolley’s account of what she’d heard that morning beside Patsy Randolph’s garden gate. When she had finished he said, “Right now Callendar has a bigger target for his spleen. But he hates injustice more than he hates the mighty. It may be he is gathering material to blackmail Tom with—and certainly we must write and warn Tom at once. But it may also be that he gathers it to confront him with what he perceives as hypocrisy.”

Dolley opened her mouth to say, And is it not hypocrisy?

Is accepting from thee the gift of a woman as a wedding-present? Is keeping such a woman, so as not to offend thy dear good parents or upset thy political standing among thy neighbors?

How long would it be, she wondered, before Payne began asking for a slave of his own?

Tom Jefferson is right, when he speaks of slavery as corrupting all it touches. And she asked herself, not for the first time, if she had not done Payne a terrible disservice, in marrying a slaveholder. In bringing her son here to Virginia to grow up in an atmosphere that she sensed was dangerous, even to those who meant well.

Yet from the first evening she’d spent in Jemmy’s company she could conceive of living with no one else.

The Great Little Madison, tired and shivering in his scuffed brown velvet wrapper, as he always shivered when he was tired. His long white hair hanging to his shoulders, he paced to the window, where the white rainbow of stars burned above the trees.

“Tom must run for President, Dolley,” said Jemmy wearily. “He is the only one with the stature for it. He is the one whose name everyone knows.”

Just as everyone knew Washington’s name, thirteen years before, Dolley thought. When the country was falling apart and someone had to be found to hold up as a beacon of personal loyalty, to draw men’s approval to the Constitution.

Poor Martha. She recalled her friend’s reserve when she and Jemmy had driven down to Mount Vernon only a few months ago, on a visit of condolence after the old General’s death. Martha understood—and had known how her husband loved and respected Jemmy’s judgment. But despite Martha’s exquisite manners, the strain had shown through.

“Tom must run against John Adams, and he must win.” In the fire’s sinking glow Jemmy’s pale, wrinkled face was as intent as Dolley had ever seen it. “They will eviscerate the Constitution—Hamilton, and the men around him who think that freedom of speech applies only to speech they deem appropriate, and freedom of ideas only to what they consider proper and safe. They have already begun the process.

“Hamilton—and the bankers and merchants who would make up his court—would have this country be like the other nations of Europe, nations ruled by the ‘right sort of men,’ who are ‘right’ because they’re like themselves. But this is a country that isn’t like the nations of Europe, and has never been. It isn’t despotism only that I fear, Dolley. I fear the dissolution of the Union that will inevitably follow. Men like my father—and Jefferson, if you put a pistol to his head—would choose Liberty over unity. And no single state is strong enough to withstand conquest, by England from Canada or France from the Caribbean or Spain from Louisiana and Mexico. We were lucky to have won through the first time.

“This country is more fragile than men think, my beloved. And both its strength and its weakness lie in the hearts of its citizens. Jefferson must win. And if he wins, it is you and I who must go with him—not to Philadelphia, but to this new capital they’ve built—to make certain that the government does not fall victim to a clique of the wealthy again.”

His hands closed over hers, but his gaze turned back to the window, and to the mountain night beyond. In the profound stillness, a hunting owl hooted in the woods, where even in darkness the dogwood shone white, like drifts of snow.

Within a squirrel’s jump of Heaven.

A retirement I dote on, Jefferson had described his mountaintop world, living like an antediluvian patriarch among my children and grandchildren, and tilling my soil. I cherish tranquility….

And little enough he hath had lately of that, Dolley reflected, recalling the things the newspapers had called him. It crossed her mind to hope that Sally took good care of him.

“I had thought I could finish, and come home when Father needed me,” Jemmy said. “I see now that isn’t true. Maybe none of us can finish, ever.”

“Nonsense.” Dolley tightened her grip on his hand, which was smaller than her own, and smiled up into his eyes. “If Mr. Jefferson is correct, and the genius of humankind doth fling forth the truth in its consensus, then the coming generation shall engender minds every bit as great as his or thine. They will take the load of the sky from off thy shoulders, when it shall be time to do so.”

But her heart lifted at the thought of returning to the center of government again, wherever that center would be.

Jemmy chuckled. “Then let us hold up the sky for them, my darling, til they’re grown.”