The Virginia Dynasty by Lynne Cheney

Author:Lynne Cheney [Cheney, Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

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At the beginning of 1804, Jefferson was even more optimistic than usual. The Republicans, who overwhelmingly controlled both the House and Senate, had nominated him for a second term, and he had every reason to look forward to winning in a landslide. Not only had he nearly doubled the size of the United States, he had, thanks to his brilliant secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, overseen a decline in the national debt and the end of internal taxes.

All too soon grief intruded. About the time of his nomination, Jefferson received a letter from Maria, his beautiful and fragile younger daughter. Nearing the end of her third pregnancy, she told her “dear Papa” of being “low in spirits and health.” Jefferson worried about her as he worked on a project to extract the teachings of Jesus from the New Testament. Using a blade, he cut “morsels of morality” from two Bibles he had purchased and pasted them to blank pages that he subsequently had bound. In the forty-six-page document he created, miracles were absent as was anything that failed the test of reason. What remained, Jefferson believed, was the essence of Jesus’s most admirable philosophy.74

When Jefferson learned that Maria had given birth to a daughter, he wished her “a thousand joys,” but she continued to decline. He arrived at Monticello in early April to find that she could barely stand, was unable to eat, and suffered from an abscess on her breast. Her sister Martha, who had recently had a baby, nursed Maria’s along with her own.75

On April 17, Maria died. Jefferson’s granddaughter remembered her mother, Martha, telling her that on the day of Maria’s death, she came upon Jefferson holding a Bible. The story would be easy to dismiss as a daughter’s or granddaughter’s attempt to protect Jefferson from accusations that he was an unbeliever. He had, after all, recently rejected all but small portions of Scripture. Maria’s death, however, seemed to turn his thoughts toward what he had dismissed. In a letter to John Page, an old friend, Jefferson lamented his daughter’s death and the deaths of so many whom he and Page had known:

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