Christmas at Monticello with Thomas Jefferson

by Helen Topping Miller

Monticello had been a beginning then, some walls raised, part of a wing roofed over, windows boarded up, floors rough laid and strewn with scraps and sawdust where they were laid at all. But nowhere within the ambitiously planned structure a room complete enough for a lady, and the winter snows had halted all work until a thaw came.

Thomas Jefferson could almost visualize that spindle-legged, freckle-faced bridegroom, that brash twenty-nine-year-old fiddler who had charmed his lady with his music and won her away from a swarm of admirers by tricking them with a clever stratagem. It had never occurred to him in those courting days at the Wayles’ place, The Forest, that he might likely be catalogued with some of Martha’s other swains as an ambitious country boy and embryo lawyer set on improving his state by marrying a rich young widow. He had cared too much for Martha, loving her, he was arrogantly certain, as no man had ever loved a woman before, and he had brought her here to this cold little room so confident of her love and courage that a chill or two did not matter.

Now he thought back on that snowy ride up from Blenheim, where, because of the deepening snow, they had been obliged to leave the chaise in which they had started out from Williamsburg, as well as the warm robes and blankets with which it had been loaded. There had been a debate, he remembered now, about whether they should ride on or wait for morning, but Martha had laughed his misgivings down.

“I can weather any storm that you can weather, Thomas Jefferson.”

So saddle horses had been brought, his own tired team stabled, and the slave who had driven the chaise sent to bed with orders to drive to Monticello in the morning. Jefferson recalled now his dubious concern when he discovered that the snow on the mountain road was eighteen inches deep.

He had ridden ahead, breaking a track for Martha’s horse, trying to shield her as best he could from the storm that stung their eyelids and sifted inside collars and up sleeves. But Martha had been undismayed. She had shouted jokes at him through the wind, ordering him to wait now and then while she wiped the snow off her face. Eight miles they had had to climb, the horses sliding, stumbling, and blowing through the dark until at last they saw the brick piles and scaffolding of what was to be their home through the weird snow light.

Not a light showed, not a feather of smoke lay on the air. Where were all the black people who should have been there ready to serve them with warm fires and a hot meal? Jefferson burned with hot angry impatience; then common sense prevailed. No one could possibly have expected them home at this hour. It was far past midnight.

The honeymoon cottage felt a trifle chilly now to his old bones, but on that January night long ago it had held a tomblike cold. Just as he had done on that night, now he rummaged the old brass pot beside the hearth, finding scraps of slivers of kindling, mounding them into a heap under the logs, struck flint, and fired a bit of bark. The tiny flame wavered and grew as he blew upon it and coaxed fire to burn, as he had done for his beloved. Finally it leaped in a bright blaze to the resinous pine logs and Jefferson dropped into the chair again, trying to vision her there, shaking the snow off her riding skirt, holding one foot and then the other near to the blaze while he held her up with a supporting arm.

They had been very silly that night, he knew now, and was glad of the gay nonsense that had lightened the beginning for them. Life had been grim enough afterward. He was happy now to recall the laughter. There had been a mouse who came calling and Martha had not screamed or leaped on a chair as his sisters did. Instead, she had waggled her fingers at the mouse, as it sat upright blinking at them, and had exclaimed, “Thomas, it has big brown eyes!”

He had played the fiddle for her then, the same fiddle faithful Jupiter had saved from the burning ruin of Shadwell. Now, he could not play any more. Just as well. His music had belonged to people he loved. To Martha, to Dabney Carr, who had married his sister and been his heart’s best friend until his untimely death. Dabney Carr lay now out on this hill, under the oak where they two had sat together while young Thomas Jefferson blithely planned the place he would have here someday. They had sworn then that the two of them would both be buried under those trees. Jefferson had kept that promise. His music had belonged for a while with his friendship for Patrick Henry, another fiddler and a blithe and restless spirit, but most especially it had been for Martha. He had wooed her with that fiddle—their duets had excluded her other suitors—now it was as well that it would be forever silent, now that there were no more loved ears to hear.