Sally of Monticello: Founding Mother the story continues...

80After struggling to ease Thomas’s pain from a host of boils allover his body, I’ve coaxed him into a comfortable slumber in thealcove bed.Aging Isabel Hern and I, bathing him, found him lucid at first.We understood what he described as success at a Rockfish Gapmeeting concerning the university. But his strength gave way soon andhe began to slur his words.Before falling asleep he grasped my wrist, pulled me closer, andwhispered what sounded like, “Sally, I love you.”I was having trouble believing he actually said the words I’velonged to hear for thirty years. Probably in delirium he said somethingelse and I imagined I’d heard that sweet declaration. Or he could havebeen in such pain he thought he was dying, and he needed to say whathe felt.I compounded today’s confusion by dismissing a local physicianwho’d foolishly applied ointment of mercury and sulphur. PriscillaHemings pointed out how the medicine had worsened the eruptions,thus the bathing of Thomas with extreme caution.He’d gone from the meeting of university site commissioners atRockfish Gap to Warm Springs, believing the baths there wouldrelieve rheumatism. Instead, his soaking in the warm waters day afterday not only bored him but produced the boils, infections fromevidently unsanitary conditions. He then traveled in torment severaldays to return, feverish, to Monticello. Here it was the final day ofAugust, 1818, and he’d carried the boils, untreated, for too long.Isabel has returned to her cabin. I admitted Martha Randolph,who carried in her five-month-old, but when the infant begancaterwauling I hustled them from the bedchamber to enforce Thomas’sresting. I was sure she resented that and would hold it against me, but Ididn’t care.Even sturdy Martha was slowing with age. She would turn fortysixnext month. Little George Wythe Randolph—her twelfthdelivery—was likely to be her last. The Democratic-Republicans weretrumpeting her husband as Virginia’s next Governor. I doubted Marthawould accompany Mr. Randolph to Richmond.As for Thomas, now seventy-five, he no longer rode every dayand sometimes used a walking stick to get around. He was subject tolong-lasting sieges of severe headaches. And, of course, there was theproblem of recurring diarrhea.The university project also took its toll on his health andstamina. Thomas was involved in every detail—the layout of thebuildings, their architectural design, the hiring of construction crews,what subjects were to be taught and what kind of professors shouldteach them, how the institution was to be administered, the financingof the venture, and so on and so on.Before the meeting at Rockfish Gap the first of this month,Thomas wrote every county clerk in the state for information aboutpopulation and about travel conditions to Charlottesville.Then, almost mysteriously, he put together a list of everyoneeighty years of age or older in Albemarle County. With this and theclerks’ information in hand, he schemed for what I knew would besome sort of coup de théâtre.As we bathed him he spoke excitedly past the pain to tell Isabeland me how things went at Rockfish Gap.The group of twenty-one men elected him commission chairmanand straightaway discussed alternative sites for locating what willbecome the University of Virginia. Naturally, other cities were incontention with Charlottesville.Thomas listened in silence until debate reached a stalemate,whereupon he rose to make the point that Charlottesville deservedselection because of its salubrious climate. To support that, heproduced his list of octogenarians.Then, from a leather case, he pulled a cardboard map in theshape of Virginia and set it on a table. He showed that Charlottesvillewas the geographical center of the state, easily accessible from allcorners. He had yet another map showing the distribution of the state’speople. Again, Albemarle County was the center of the state’spopulation, factoring out slaves, of course.The commission was overwhelmed, Thomas said, and agreedthat the Central College site here in Charlottesville was the right placeto establish the state university. Final approval was up to the Virginialegislature, which was expected to endorse the commission’sconclusions.I’ve never seen Thomas commit his energies so fully to anythingas this university, but he was doing it in such a way and at a time oflife that would kill any other man. He wanted something unique andunaffiliated with a church, an institution offering technical andpractical studies in addition to classical subjects.I watched Thomas as he slept. His breathing became even. Hisface lost the look of pain and acquired an easier appearance.When I was certain he wouldn’t wake, I went around the foot ofthe alcove to his study—what he often referred to as his “cabinet.”There, to satisfy new suspicions, I opened his memorandum books forthe first time in several months.The Charlottesville merchant, James Leitch, had been lendingThomas large amounts of cash all through the summer. Mr. Leitch’ssupport evidently made it possible for Thomas to travel to RockfishGap.We’ve had a ruinous drought this year, so despite grandsonJefferson Randolph’s able management of the plantations and Mr.Bacon’s experienced overseeing, there was little if any profit to beexpected from farm operations.And then I read something that made me gasp and cry out.From the study side of the bed I could see that I hadn’t wokenThomas. I held my hand to my face from shock.Oh, God.On the first of May, Thomas had endorsed loans by the Bank ofthe United States at Richmond for twenty thousand dollars to WilsonCary Nicholas. Of course, last year Mr. Nicholas had endorsed a loanfor Thomas, but the amount was a fraction of this.Regardless whether the borrower was father-in-law to Thomas’sfavorite grandson, Jefferson Randolph, Thomas had no businessputting his name to a loan this size.If Mr. Nicholas should default—I pictured my dear friends and kin being rounded up as theloan’s collateral, loaded into wagons and carted away for auction,families broken up forever.A sound of wails along Mulberry Row rose in my imagination.The cries spilled down the mountain, tearing people’s hearts out andbreaking mine.I could see white men with whips, ripping clothes off youngslave women like Sukey or Dolly or Sandy, feeling their buttocks andbreasts, placing hands between their legs.Thomas, what have you done this time?