Jefferson: A Novel

by Max Byrd

Genres: Biographical; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

As he did with Presidents Jackson and Grant in those magnificent novels, Max Byrd now reveals Thomas Jefferson as we’ve never seen before. Byrd transports us to 1784, as Jefferson, the newly appointed American ambassador to the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, arrives in Paris—a city adrift in intrigue, upheaval, and temptation that will challenge his principles, incite his passions, and change him forever.
 
Through the eyes of his impressionable young secretary, William Short, readers watch as the future president builds his dream of America with fellow patriots John Adams and Ben Franklin, while struggling between political ambition and an unexpected crisis of the heart with a woman who has the power to destroy him. Behind the face this complex Virginian shows the world, Thomas Jefferson is an enigmatic statesman who fights for individual liberty even as he keeps slaves, who champions free will even as he denies it to his daughters, and who holds men to the highest standards of honor—even as he embarks on a shadowy double life of his own.
 
“Max Byrd’s historical novels about the third and seventh presidents bring both men alive in ways that only a literary imagination can.”—George F. Will, The Washington Post
 
“Jefferson has the organic intimacy of a novel that has sprung full-blown from the imagination of its creator.”—The New York Times
 
“Superb . . . fascinating in the psychological insight it provides to one of the greatest Americans . . . a truly memorable book.”—W. Jackson Bate, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Samuel Johnson and John Keats
 
“Absolutely splendid historical fiction that resonates with international, provincial, and individual passion and drama.”—Booklist
 
“A real tour de force.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Release date: February 12, 2013

Publisher: Bantam

Print pages: 448

Sample

There were two facts about Jefferson that I never could reconcile.
 
Fact one: When he first spoke to someone he invariably stood with his arms folded tightly across his chest. The day I arrived in Paris, twenty-six years old, so naive and enthusiastic I blush at the memory now, four wretched weeks beating across the wet Atlantic to rejoin him—that November morning I leapt out of my carriage and rushed through the house on rue Taitbout, calling his name at every room and finding him at last in the innermost study, seated with a book in a wing-backed chair; or slouched in the chair Virginia-fashion rather, with his knees higher than his head, like a half-open knife. He stood up at once to greet me—all six feet and more of him, always taller than anyone he met—but in the same motion the arms and the book came mechanically up and crossed over his chest. Even after he had taken my hand and shaken it, the arms sprang back to his chest, crossed, and stayed there, clasped. I was to see him do it a thousand times, I suppose, in the same way exactly, no matter whether in Paris with little French counts and countesses bobbing up and down like dolls, or in New York with brusque Federalist men of business or even with his own poor bullied daughters. In the end, observing the ritual from my discreet corner of the room by the secretary’s desk, I came to think of it as a gesture of keeping something away, instinctive fence-building for a shy and reserved man.
 
His French architect Clérisseau said I was exactly wrong, of course: It was the instinctive gesture of a cold man locking something in.
 
The other fact was his singing. He sang constantly—in my old age now I turn over the myriad accounts of him stacked on my table, reminiscences of friends, enemies, comrades, and I never see it mentioned anywhere, but sing he did. Snatches hummed or more often actually sung in that soft, reedy voice that made him such a bad public speaker. He sang while he rode—more than once I rode with him from the hôtel he had rented on the Champs-Élysées to the palace at Versailles and heard not a word from his lips all morning except those quiet little songs. He sang when he wrote (and he never stopped writing). Italian songs most often, or French ones. Nothing could have been more serene in effect, or truer to the impression of cheerful imperturbability he always gave his friends (and enemies). Nothing could have been less like the rigidity of those folded arms.
 
Having written this much of these little memoirs of Jefferson, I am reminded of a third trait. He was a superb rider all his life, even for a Virginian, and we are born to horses. But before he rode, every time, he performed a strange personal ritual, such as I’ve never seen another man do. While the groom held the bridle, Jefferson always wiped off the horse’s back and neck meticulously with a clean white handkerchief. More than once I watched him then put away the kerchief and moments later take the whip to his poor wiped horse—and as the miserable animal wheeled round and round, rearing and shying and kicking, he would grip the reins short in one hand and smash the leather thongs down furiously again and again till the flesh bled in buckets. I never saw a more violent horseman.
 
Why did he do it? Was he teaching the horse who was master? Was he venting some internal anger—or guilt—hidden from everyone else, kept locked away in that remote, unapproachable, fenced-away center of Jeffersonian privacy?
 
Did the great democrat whip his black slaves that way? Clérisseau would ask with an ugly grin.
—WILLIAM SHORT                 
PHILADELPHIA, JULY 4, 1826
 
 
Memoirs of Jefferson—1
 
JUNE 4, 1781 — CHARLOTTESVILLE, DAWN.
The Lord Cornwallis’s troops menacing Virginia once more, not six months after Benedict Arnold had stormed by surprise through Richmond, burning half the ramshackle wooden city to the ground and tossing the governor’s own private books and papers—the governor who lived by ink—into the silky brown James River. That same governor, Thomas Jefferson, still sleeping now at dawn in a dark unpainted room at Monticello or else beginning to stir and think about his houseguests and their breakfast.
 
Seven hours earlier, thirty miles away, a huge young man, small-faced as a bear but taller even than Governor Jefferson, had suddenly put down his glass of whiskey and cocked his ear to listen. His father owned a tavern in Charlottesville, and filial Jack Jouett had just stopped in at the Cuckoo, opposite the Louisa Courthouse, for a last drink at midnight and then a dirty bunk upstairs. Even in the warm June night Jack still wore his long scarlet militia coat of the Virginia Guard and his new captain’s bars, which he meant to show his father tomorrow. If there was anyone else in the room besides the sleepy bartender, legend has utterly lost him.
 
Jack Jouett put down his drink and cocked his ear and finally crossed the floor to the window. On the other side of the square, fifty yards distant, he heard harnesses clinking, spurs, the rattle of swords, the unmistakable rub and thump of horses. There was a quarter moon blanketed off and on by clouds that night. Through the Cuckoo’s shutters he could see only indistinct figures and shadows; then a candle came down the steps of the courthouse and plumed caps sprang into silhouette.
 
If he had waited another ten minutes, Jack Jouett could have seen the red-coated foot soldiers coming uphill at a quick march, bayonets flashing, to join the green-jacketed mounted dragoons at the Louisa Courthouse, wheeling and backing now as they re-formed their columns. And in their midst, holding the candle over a map on his saddle, he would have seen Colonel Banastre Tarleton himself. Tarleton!—in London, Sir Joshua Reynolds had painted his famous full-length portrait, a beautiful baby-faced English dandy in skintight trousers, with a girl’s red lips and blond spit curls turned delicately up in place of sideburns. But in Virginia, after they had found the five heads in a Williamsburg farmhouse, severed crudely from the bodies and lined neatly along the mantel, after they had buried the pregnant housewife, stabbed in the belly, the bloody words “No more Rebels” smeared on her homespun sheets, after Tarleton had ordered his troops to charge full speed into Abraham Buford’s surrendered army—in Virginia after that Colonel Banastre Tarleton was known simply as the Butcher, the man who gave “Tarleton’s quarter.”
 
Jack Jouett never saw him. He was on his horse and thundering through the shadowed backwoods before the first foot soldiers ever reached the courthouse, backwoods and paths and alleys Jack Jouett had ridden all his life, night and day, sober and drunk, man and boy. Because whiskey or not, he was still clearheaded enough to guess that a troop of British cavalry mounted and armed at midnight was planning no harmless bivouac stopover at Louisa but was heading north toward Charlottesville to do what the furious Arnold had only just missed doing—capture the sleeping governor and all the rebel legislators with him.
 
Jack Jouett rode till his horses heart nearly burst—down black tunnels of overarched catalpa and pine, parallel to the highway but far inland, gaining a mile an hour over Tarleton’s emerald-coated dragoons even before they stopped again at Thomas Walker’s estate called Castle Hill—father of that John Walker whose beautiful wife the governor had watched too closely years before—stopped and for the sheer malice of it burned half a dozen wagons and sheds.
 
By the time Jack Jouett pounded into Charlottesville, the sun was rising behind him and his face was whipped bloody with cuts from branches and tree limbs (scarred all his life, his family said). He paused long enough to hammer at doors along Locust Street, rousing some of his militia cohorts, then he kicked his horse again, more sweat and lather than horse by now, and started uphill to the mountaintop where Jefferson had been building his mansion off and on for the past ten years.
 
Down the unfinished steps of the east portico—he would trip and break his left wrist on the same steps forty years later, making it both wrists that he oddly broke in falls—down these steps Jefferson came in shirt-sleeves, hugging his torso. Afterward, Jack Jouett would swear that Jefferson made him sit down and drink not one but two leisurely glasses of Madeira wine before he even listened to his message, but the legislators who had been his houseguests (Patrick Henry’s friends, to be sure) swore just as hard that Jefferson had turned instantly pale as milk and raced over the lawn to the telescope he kept mounted by a wall. When he trained it downhill on Charlottesville and saw nobody in the streets yet, nothing but spokes of pure white sunlight crowning a blue-green Virginia haze, the governor raised his voice for his servants and disappeared running toward the stables.
 
This was the moment, Patrick Henry afterward declared, when the great god Panic laid his hand on Jefferson. His shouts woke all the slaves, who came piling out of their shacks on Mulberry Row. Upstairs in the half-finished house, the sleepy lawmakers stumbled to the windows and looked down on a scene of amazing hysteria. Jefferson—Jefferson the sworn governor—was dashing back and forth in a mob of screaming blacks, gathering his armloads of silver, his gold-framed paintings, and his fine English bone china, and the slaves were shoving it all helter-skelter, as fast as it came, under the mansion floor.
 
The lawmakers, of course, when they could pry the news out of him, took to their horses and scattered down the hill to warn the city. Jefferson meanwhile—with no thought for the rest of the government, no dispatches off to General Steuben, not a word—stayed frantically wrapping his goods in yellow oilcloth (what other leader in all the Revolution was ever so fastidious?) till he heard the slaves out by the garden beginning to call.
 
“They’s started up the hill!”
 
It was black Martin Hemings (yes!) who saw them first, a squadron of green-backed wasps swarming up from Charlottesville toward the governor’s lonely hilltop. And it was Martin Hemings who led the governor’s huge bay stallion Caractacus up to the steps and boosted the governor into the saddle. Even then Jefferson kept one arm filled with treasures and galloped off to the west clutching his silver.
 
Say what you will about the Declaration of Independence, the years in the Continental Congress, the double terms as governor—by universal consent (Virginia consent), this fiasco undid it all—it was the nadir of Jefferson’s political career, the absolute low black point of his reputation as a leader and a man, and in Virginia, despite everything that followed, he never recovered from it.
 
“Our illustrious, scampering, governor,” said Betsy Ambler with her sweetest irony, “took neither rest nor food for man or horse till he passed over Carter’s Mountain and rode to safety twenty good miles from Monticello.” Once hidden from the green-coats he promptly fell off his bay horse and broke his arm, so he had to stay in the woods for six weeks, until the Virginia legislature met to impeach him for cowardice.
 
“Caractacus who unseated him,” Betsy would add with withering scorn, “was of course the name of a British king.”
 
Even in retrospect I pause and sigh.
 
Because this is the first version of the story I heard, a tale told by Jefferson’s political enemies but corroborated, it was said, by half a dozen more-or-less neutral witnesses at Monticello. And when he became president twenty years later, the Federalist press would resurrect it, outrageously embellished: “Jefferson’s Great Shame.” “Jefferson in Flight.” “Jefferson the Horseback Governor, Galloping Away.”
 
But who that knew Jefferson could really believe it? In fact, as I soon discovered, it is only one of two completely contradictory versions. (The Federalists never printed the other.) The truth is—the enduring riddle of Jefferson’s character is—if you ask another (smaller) set of more-or-less neutral witnesses what happened that day at Monticello, then this is the story you get.