Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson (1748–1782)

Early Life and Adolescence

Martha Wayles was born on October 30, 1748 (October 19, 1748, in the Julian, or Old Style, Calendar) to John Wayles and Martha Eppes at The Forest plantation in Charles City. From infancy to adolescence, her life was marked by loss. Martha’s mother died less than a week after her birth, leaving her with a substantial inheritance of land, property, and enslaved people. She acquired and lost two stepmothers by the age of thirteen. Martha grew up with at least three half-sisters:  Tabitha, Elizabeth, and Anne.

The most constant adult figures in her life during childhood were her father, John Wayles, and an enslaved woman named Elizabeth “Betty” Hemings, who gave birth to six children by John Wayles. Elizabeth Hemings and her children—Critta, Thenia, James, Robert, Peter, and Sally—would eventually be enslaved by Martha Jefferson, who would never recognize their biological relationship. Other members of the Hemings family, including Martin and Betty Brown, were the first enslaved people that Martha brought to Monticello after her marriage to Thomas Jefferson.

There are no existing portraits of Martha Jefferson, and few physical descriptions survive from her contemporaries. In his Memoirs of a Monticello Slave, Isaac Granger Jefferson described her as “small” and said one of her daughters was “pretty … like her mother.” A granddaughter later recalled that stories of her grandmother illustrated a “vivacity of temper that might sometimes border on tartness.”

Marriages and Family Life

Shortly after Martha turned eighteen, she married Bathurst Skelton on November 20, 1766. They moved to Elk Hill, a plantation owned by her father. Her son, John Skelton, was born on November 7, 1767. Bathurst Skelton died in September 1768. Thomas Jefferson likely began courting Martha Wayles Skelton around 1770, when he was a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer and member of the House of Burgesses. John Skelton passed away on June 10, 1771, six months before her marriage to Jefferson on January 1, 1772. Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson and Thomas Jefferson spent the early years of their marriage in a one-room brick pavilion at Monticello, which was under construction, and at Elk Hill.

Martha Jefferson gave birth to six children during her ten-year marriage to Thomas Jefferson. Martha “Patsy” Jefferson was born on September 27, 1772; Jane Randolph Jefferson was born on April 3, 1774, and died in infancy; an unnamed son who lived for only seventeen days was born in May 1777; Mary (Maria) “Polly” Jefferson was born on August 1, 1778; Lucy Elizabeth Jefferson was born on November 3, 1780, and died in infancy; and her namesake, Lucy Elizabeth, was born on May 8,1782, and died in 1784.

Only Martha “Patsy” Jefferson Randolph, who married Thomas Mann Randolph, governor of Virginia from 1819 to 1822, and Maria Jefferson Eppes, who married the prominent lawyer and politician John Wayles Eppes, would survive to adulthood.

Over the course of her marriage, Martha Jefferson endured increasingly difficult pregnancies and apparently had trouble breastfeeding. Ursula Granger, an enslaved cook and domestic servant at Monticello, served as a wet nurse to Martha Jefferson’s firstborn, Patsy. (Her own son, Archy, who was born about the same time, did not survive past infancy.) Martha Jefferson also suffered postpartum complications, including a possible prolapsed uterus, after the birth of Jane in 1774. She apparently suffered a miscarriage in late June 1776 while her husband was in Philadelphia drafting the Declaration of Independence. On about June 30, Jefferson wrote to Edmund Pendleton, president of the Virginia Committee of Safety, asking to be replaced in the Continental Congress so that he could return home because “the situation of my domestic affairs renders it indispensably necessary,” but his request was denied. Martha Jefferson remained in poor health throughout the summer, but Thomas Jefferson was not able to leave Philadelphia until September 3, arriving at Monticello on September 9. He did not leave Virginia again for the next six years, largely due to his wife’s poor health and his devotion to her.

Plantation Life

One of the few surviving documents in Martha Jefferson’s own hand is her household account book, a rare window into the domestic life of a late-eighteenth-century Piedmont plantation. Her thirty-page account book begins on February 10, 1772, shortly after her marriage to Thomas Jefferson and her arrival at Monticello, and concludes on May 1, 1782, shortly before the birth of her last child. In a neat, looping script, Jefferson recorded the slaughtering of hogs, shoats, lambs, turkeys, and geese; the brewing of beer; the making of soap and candles; and the weaving of cloth, with most of the labor done by people enslaved at Monticello. She noted the material and color of clothing distributed to enslaved people and the blankets given to paid white laborers constructing Monticello. She documented the goods she bought or bartered from enslaved people at Monticello, who created their own economy on the plantation, purchasing chickens with “an old shirt” or bacon. These transactions illustrate the complex economic relationships between white and Black women within Virginia’s plantation economy. Martha Jefferson’s precise entries not only demonstrate her active role in managing the enslaved workforce at Monticello but also show her to be an educated, meticulous woman influenced by the Enlightenment principles of knowledge, observation, and experimentation.

As her health declined and the uncertainties of the Revolutionary War came closer to Monticello, Martha Jefferson’s entries in the account book decreased until they ceased altogether between April 1778 and July 1781. After Thomas Jefferson was elected the second governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia on June 1, 1779, the family lived in Williamsburg and Richmond, and the account book likely stayed at Monticello.

The family lived in the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg from June 1779 until spring 1780, when the capital was relocated to Richmond, which was safer from British invasion and more centrally located. Martha Jefferson and her children fled Richmond in January 1781 as the turncoat British general Benedict Arnold raided throughout the Tidewater. They fled from the British again in June 1781, this time from Monticello to Poplar Forest, during Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton’s cavalry raid that nearly captured Thomas Jefferson.

The American Revolution

Martha Jefferson played a number of important roles during the American Revolution. Jefferson
shared political and personal news with his wife—from the death of Peyton Randolph in Philadelphia to how their family might escape capture by John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore—trusting that she would share it with the wider family network. When Martha Jefferson was staying with her sister, Elizabeth Eppes, and her husband, Francis Eppes, in the fall of 1775 while Thomas Jefferson served in the Second Continental Congress, he told his brother-in-law that he would “refer you to Patty” (his nickname for his wife) for specific details of political happenings. Like other elite women during the Revolution, she demonstrated her commitment to the Patriot cause by wearing and using “homespun” cloth in a boycott of British goods. Her account book lists numerous shirts, petticoats, and tablecloths made of “Virginia cloth,” a type of homespun fabric likely produced by enslaved women at Monticello. According to Martha Jefferson’s account book, a young, enslaved woman named Aggey or Aggy was spinning textiles for gowns, stockings, gloves, chair covers, and other uses in 1776 and 1777.

Martha Jefferson also lent her name to the Revolutionary cause. In August 1780, she served as “Treasuress” of Virginia for a fundraising scheme started by Esther de Berdt Reed and backed by Martha Washington to organize women to raise money for the Revolutionary cause. On August 8, Martha Jefferson wrote to her personal and family contacts across the Commonwealth of Virginia endorsing the plan, which, she said, would give “my country women an opportunity of proving that they also participate of those virtuous feelings which gave birth to it.”

A public announcement of the fundraising drive was made in Dixon and Nicolson’s Virginia Gazette on August 9 with the publication of Reed’s “The Sentiments of an American Woman,” which justified women’s entrance into the political world by citing the “heroines of antiquity,” calling on women to “render themselves more really useful.” This was followed by a Virginia postscript in largely the same language used by Martha Jefferson in her letter announcing that donations would be accepted “at places of religious worship” from “all those who may conveniently attend.” Thanks to her involvement, women across Virginia collectively raised more than $100,000 in paper money, jewelry, and hard specie, an enormous sum at the time, although the funds were misplaced and never made it to their destination.

Death and Legacy

Worn down by repeated difficult pregnancies and the stress of wartime, Martha Jefferson never recovered from the birth of Lucy Elizabeth on May 8, 1782. Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Monroe on May 20 that Martha “still continues very dangerously ill.” Martha Jefferson died on September 6, 1782. “Mrs. Jefferson has at last shaken off her tormenting pains by yielding to them, and has left our friend inconsolable,” Edmund Randolph told James Madison.

According to Edmund Bacon, an overseer at Monticello from 1806 to 1822 who heard the story secondhand from members of the Hemings family, enslaved women, including Betty Brown, Sally, Critta, and Betty Hemings, “stood around the bed” during Martha Jefferson’s final moments. She reportedly told her husband she “could not die happy” if her children were to have a stepmother, and Thomas Jefferson promised “solemnly” never to marry again. While he never remarried, he fathered at least six children with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman at Monticello and Martha Jefferson’s half-sister.

Martha Jefferson was buried in the graveyard at Monticello. Thomas Jefferson concluded her epitaph with lines in Greek from The Iliad, spoken by Achilles as he lamented the loss of Patroclus: “Nay if even in the house of Hades the dead forget their dead, yet will I even there be mindful of my dear comrade.”

Thomas Jefferson kept a lock of his wife’s hair beneath the beveled crystal of a watch key that he had made after her death and used it daily to wind his pocket watch. He likely destroyed most of his wife’s letters following her death, leaving little material trace of a life of strength and resiliency.