Dolley caught the smile in those chilly pale eyes, saw how close he, too, kept one arm around Rachel, as if guarding her from harm. Not a complete barbarian, after all.

She raised her glass, and said, “To the world to come.”

POSTSCRIPTUM

Rachel Jackson never inhabited the White House. She died in 1828, just after her husband was elected seventh President of the United States.

Abigail Adams died in 1818, at the age of seventy-four. Both the house in which she raised her children in Quincy, Massachusetts, and the one she shared with John after their return from Europe—Stonyfield (later Peacefield) Farm—still stand. The roses and lilac she brought back from England to plant in the garden still grow there.

Her niece Louisa never married, remaining Abigail’s companion until the old lady’s death. Louisa herself died in 1857, at the age of eighty-four.

Johnny—John Quincy Adams—was elected sixth U.S. President in a four-way split that threw the hotly contested election of 1824 into the House of Representatives. He was the first second-generation President. He was also the only U.S. President to serve in the House of Representatives after his Presidential term, which he did with great distinction, for the rest of his life, literally, dying there after a stroke in 1848.

John Adams lived til 1826, dying at the age of ninety on the Fourth of July, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. A few hours earlier that same day, Thomas Jefferson, aged eighty-three, died at Monticello, almost bankrupt and living under the knowledge that his treasured mountaintop haven would have to be sold to pay his debts.

With Jefferson’s death, Patsy Jefferson Randolph fled her husband and lived with her daughter Ellen in Boston until Randolph was on his deathbed, in 1828. Monticello was sold after Randolph’s death, but can—like Mount Vernon and Peacefield Farm, and Montpelier (in the process of restoration as this book is being written)—be visited today.

Martha’s beloved granddaughter Nelly went on to a life of depression and loss, seeing seven of her eight children die before her, and her ailing husband fritter away most of her share of the Custis fortune. She died in 1852, at the age of seventy-three. Wash Custis came into his share of the Custis estate and with it built the house now known as Arlington. His one surviving child by his marriage to Mary Fitzhugh—also named Mary—married the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, and they made their home at Arlington until after the Civil War, when the estate was confiscated for back taxes and turned into a national cemetery. Many Washington family mementos—including a lock of George’s hair, and Martha’s Sunday-best blue-and-white china—can be seen at Arlington today.

Payne Todd went on to a career of gambling debts and dissipations that impoverished James Madison and exhausted Dolley; in the end Dolley’s friends convinced her to tie up her money in a trust so that Payne couldn’t get his hands on it. To the end of her life, her son was trying to get from her what money he could, including trying to force her to sign a will giving him the small share she had intended to pass along to her beloved sisters Anna and Lucy, who cared for her in her final days.

Dolley lived til 1849 as the most popular hostess in Washington, to which she returned after Jemmy’s death. She was a regular guest of all five Presidents between Monroe and Polk, and the heartbeat of Washington society, though by that time she was living on the cheerfully offered charity of her many friends. Dolley Todd Madison was given what amounted to a state funeral when she died.

Payne Todd died in poverty and obscurity only three years later, at the age of sixty-one.

James Madison lived to the age of eighty-five, dying at Montpelier a few days before the Fourth of July, 1836.

He was the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Aaron Burr outlived him by ten weeks.

SALLY HEMINGS

In the course of putting this book together, I realized that no matter how I told the story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, I was going to offend and anger someone.

And yet, in a book about the first First Ladies, to omit the issue would leave a gaping and obvious hole.

I have done the best I can, to re-create one possible version of a relationship whose actual nature is—in the words of Fawn Brodie’s romanticized biography—simply “nonrecoverable.”

Were Thomas Jefferson to be asked on Judgment Day whether he loved Sally Hemings, my personal opinion is that he would reply defensively that he loved all his slaves: which is not the same thing as saying that he thought they were of the same species as himself. Jefferson is the most elusive (some historians would say, “two-faced”) of the Founding Fathers, saying one thing and doing another so frequently that it is almost impossible to pin down what he actually thought or felt.

The Civil War, the polemical arguments for and against abolition of slavery, the bitterness of Reconstruction and the long disgrace of race relations which followed it have so altered modern perceptions of black and white that any re-creation of even a simple relationship would be difficult to achieve, and the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings was, I believe, far from simple.

One of the most striking features I have come across in my own studies of slave accounts of slavery has been the enormous degree to which the conditions of any individual slave’s life depended upon the individual slave-owner. Situations of what appear to be warm affection existed side by side with truly subhuman cruelty and jaw-dropping callousness. It all depended on who and where you were, each slave-owning household a microclimate from which, for a slave, there was no possibility of legal redress.

I have made the arbitrary decision, based on the good opinion of Jefferson held by his friends (and in the few recorded instances, by his slaves also—though the ones who didn’t like him probably wouldn’t have felt able to say so), that he wasn’t the kind of man who would force or coerce sex with an unwilling fifteen-year-old girl.

I have also made the arbitrary decision that there was more to the relationship than a bargain for sexual favors in exchange for protection, privilege, and freedom for Sally’s children.

Jefferson kept Sally as his concubine despite the scandal in 1802 (their youngest two children were born in 1805 and 1808), and after he took Sally as his concubine in 1788, there is not even speculation that he was involved with any other woman, white or black. Their older surviving sons, Tom and Beverly, simply vanish from the Monticello records; according to their son Madison Hemings in an interview in March of 1873, their daughter Harriet (the second daughter of that name, born in 1801) “married a white man in good standing in Washington City.” Madison and Eston, presumably because their features were too African to allow them to “pass,” were freed in Jefferson’s will.

I have chosen to follow Fawn Brodie (and James Callendar) in portraying Young Tom as alive and present at Monticello at least up to 1800, rather than simply accepting Madison Hemings’s assertion that his eldest brother “died soon after” birth. Either way, Young Tom was probably gone from Monticello before Madison Hemings was born.

It must be remembered that Jefferson—and Sally—both grew up in a society in which it was acceptable (among men, anyway) and fairly commonplace—though by no means universal—for men to have mistresses, and for Southern slaveholders to have sexual relations with the women they legally owned. I think it should also be borne in mind that Sally had known Jefferson literally all her life, and that the Hemings family formed a sort of sub-caste at Monticello, somewhere between ordinary slaves and the sort of shadow-families that in French Louisiana would have been free and informally acknowledged.

One can only speculate as to why Jefferson did not free Sally in his will. Patsy Randolph—who left her husband shortly after Jefferson’s death in 1826—freed her, and took great care to solemnly assure her sons that Sally Hemings’s children had been fathered by Jefferson’s nephew Peter Carr. Sally went to live with her sons Madison and Eston in a house near Monticello, until her death in 1835.

Whether Sally knew anything about Gabriel Prosser’s attempted revolt or not—or what she would have chosen to do if she had known—I have not the slightest idea.

All writers of fiction about historical personages have to make choices about how to portray events and relationships for which there is little or no evidence. I have done my best to be true to the known facts, about Jefferson and Sally and about the world in which they lived. To those who feel I should have told the story otherwise—and to those who have been offended by my choices—I apologize.

I have used the word “concubine” in its original literal meaning, that of a servant or slave-woman who sleeps with the master on a regular or semiregular basis.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Real life is not tidy, and the story of any couple is the story of their families as well (and in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this included servants). I have dates for some; for others I do not. For others I have found several different birth and death dates, with as much as ten years’ variation for the same person. Fictional characters are marked with an asterisk*. Though many characters overlap from section to section, I have listed them by the section in which they primarily occur; and by the name under which they are primarily known in the book. A woman’s maiden name and alternate married names are in parentheses, alternate first names (either nicknames or real names for those dozen or so women all named Martha) are in brackets.