ENTRY

Martha Jefferson Randolph (1772–1836)

SUMMARY

Martha Jefferson Randolph was the daughter of Thomas Jefferson and the wife of Thomas Mann Randolph, who served as governor of Virginia from 1819 to 1822. She grew up at Monticello and spent time in Williamsburg, Richmond, and Philadelphia before accompanying her widowed father to Paris, France, where she attended the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont, a prestigious convent school. After she returned to Virginia, she married and bore twelve children, eleven of whom survived to adulthood. Although she was the daughter of a president, the wife of a governor, and arguably the most highly educated woman in Virginia, Randolph’s life was in many ways representative. Widely admired for her intelligence, sociability, and conversational skills, she was an exemplar of genteel white womanhood who was said to possess a “perfect temper” and who immersed herself in the trials and joys of marriage, motherhood, and plantation life. Randolph and her children lived mainly at Monticello, although her husband owned the nearby plantation Edgehill. Occasionally during her father’s presidency, and throughout his retirement, she acted as hostess. Her presence reinforced Jefferson’s image as a devoted family man with a stable domestic life, though fulfilling this role in her father’s life may have exacerbated her already strained marriage. Both father and husband struggled and ultimately failed to remain solvent. After their deaths in 1826 and 1828, respectively, Randolph lived with her married children. She died at Edgehill on October 10, 1836.

Early Years

GROWN LADIES &c. taught to DANCE

Martha Jefferson was born at Monticello in Albemarle County on September 27, 1772, the first of five children (and one of only two who survived to adulthood) of Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson and Thomas Jefferson. She received her earliest education from her parents at Monticello, where the Jeffersons lived genteelly despite the deepening imperial crisis and the resulting American war for independence. In June 1779 Jefferson became governor of Virginia and moved his family with him to the capital, Williamsburg, where Patsy, as she was known in childhood, took dancing lessons, and then to Richmond when the government moved there in 1780. In May 1781, the family fled advancing enemy armies, ultimately escaping to Poplar Forest, Jefferson’s Bedford County estate.

Patsy’s childhood effectively ended on September 6, 1782, when her mother died from complications due to childbirth. She became her father’s “constant companion,” she recalled years later, “a solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief.” When Jefferson accepted a diplomatic post in Paris later that year, there was never any doubt that Patsy would accompany him. Her younger sisters, Mary (known as Polly, and later as Maria) and the infant Lucy Elizabeth, stayed with relatives in Virginia.

In December 1782, father and daughter went to Philadelphia, where Patsy boarded with a local family and continued her education while Jefferson attended to politics. She passed more than a year in this comparatively cosmopolitan city, studying music, drawing, dancing, and French with private tutors. Jefferson prescribed for her a daily schedule of virtually nonstop reading, writing, and lessons and instructed Patsy to “take care that you never spell a word wrong” because “it produces great praise to a lady to spell well.” He also cautioned his sometimes-untidy daughter to have her clothes “clean, whole, and properly put on” because sartorial propriety signified moral character and “nothing is so disgusting to our sex as a want of cleanliness and delicacy in yours.”

A Virginian in Paris

Martha Patsy “Jefferson’s Education in Paris”

On July 5, 1784, Patsy and her father finally left for Europe, accompanied by James Hemings, a Monticello slave and likely the mixed-race son of Patsy’s maternal grandfather. Arriving in Paris in August, Patsy soon entered the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont, a prestigious convent boarding school that educated mainly daughters of Catholic aristocrats. Largely because of her schooldays at the Panthemont, Martha considered the years she spent in Paris the “brightest part” of her life. A gregarious adolescent who liked jokes, mixed readily with others, and relished her limited independence, she quickly became fluent in French and popular among her classmates. She also received a first-rate education, studying arithmetic, geography, history, Latin, and four modern languages, along with music and drawing—making her arguably the most highly educated Virginia woman of her generation.

After the youngest Jefferson child, Lucy, died of whooping cough in Virginia in October 1784, arrangements were made for Polly to travel to Paris, accompanied by the enslaved house servant Sally Hemings. Polly joined Patsy at the Panthemont in July 1787. They spent much of the winter of 1788–1789 in their father’s house battling typhus, and concluded their studies at the Panthemont the following spring. That summer the seventeen-year-old Patsy attended balls, concerts, and other social gatherings. During these final months in Paris, she also witnessed the dramatic early events of the French Revolution, wearing a tricolor cockade to show support for the reformist party. In September, the Jeffersons and the Hemingses left Paris. Within two months, their ship docked in Norfolk and they began the last leg of their journey home to Monticello.

Wife, Mother, Plantation Mistress

Thomas Mann Randolph

En route to Monticello the travelers stopped at Tuckahoe, the home of Jefferson’s boyhood friend Thomas Mann Randolph, where Patsy became reacquainted with his twenty-one-year-old son, also named Thomas Mann Randolph. Educated at the university in Edinburgh and presumptive heir to his father’s vast Goochland County estate, Tom Randolph was seemingly an ideal suitor. Both fathers approved of the match, and the couple married at Monticello on February 23, 1790. She was seventeen years old.

Martha Randolph, as she became known, enjoyed close relationships with several of her husband’s sisters, but the Randolphs were a difficult and troubled family. In 1792 and 1793, scandal ensued when Richard Randolph, of the Cumberland County plantation Bizarre and the husband of Tom Randolph’s sister Judith Randolph, was accused of having helped another sister, Nancy Randolph, who also lived at Bizarre, to commit infanticide. Widely presumed to be the father of the allegedly murdered infant, Richard Randolph defended himself in court at a hearing at which Martha Randolph appeared as a witness. Although he was acquitted, he and the two sisters remained tainted by scandal, and Martha Randolph feared that the situation might have a negative impact on her own family’s reputation. Meanwhile, Tom Randolph’s father, a widower, had taken a teenaged bride in September 1790; their son, born in 1792 and also named Thomas Mann Randolph, supplanted Martha Randolph’s husband as heir to Tuckahoe. When the elder Thomas Mann Randolph died in 1793, he made Tom Randolph his executor, but left him and his nine siblings less property than debt.

As a young wife, Randolph learned the basics of household management. Having lost her mother at a young age and come of age in an urban environment, she was by her own account ill-prepared for life as a plantation mistress. She mastered the “arts of housewifery with pain & difficulty, by untiring perseverance,” her daughter Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge related, “so soon as she was placed in a situation which rendered a knowledge of them essential for the comfort of others.” In the 1790s, she presided over households at Monticello and Varina, her husband’s plantation in Henrico County. In 1800, the Randolphs settled full-time in Albemarle, building a small house at Edgehill, a plantation that her husband had purchased from his father so that she could live closer to Monticello.

Randolph endured thirteen pregnancies between 1790 and 1818, which was roughly typical for white southern women of her era. Her pregnancies, however, were unusually successful, resulting in the birth of twelve healthy children (of whom one died young) and only one miscarriage. Unlike her mother, sister, and oldest daughter—who all suffered miserably in childbirth and ultimately died as a result of it—Randolph was generally in robust health. From the birth of her first child, Anne Cary Randolph, in January 1791, she was a self-consciously devoted mother who took special pride in her children’s education.

The President’s Daughter

On March 4, 1801, Thomas Jefferson became president after a bitterly contested election. Although Randolph clearly supported her father and his Republican party—whom she called the “friends of Liberty”—Jefferson’s victory gave her no special status: Americans rejected the idea of an unelected first family, which seemed to smack of royalty. Randolph spent most of her father’s presidency in Albemarle, tending her children and managing the Edgehill and Monticello households. Her oversight of the family’s affairs, especially after her husband’s election to Congress in 1803, made the men’s absence less onerous. However, Jefferson repeatedly asked Randolph and her sister to join him in the capital. In two carefully timed visits, her forays into public life helped Jefferson to manage his public image and Washington’s official social life.

The President

In November 1802, Randolph traveled with two of her children and her sister to Washington, where they stayed through early January. The sisters socialized with influential Washington women, attended religious services, dined with diplomats and members of Congress, and appeared with their father at his well-attended New Year’s reception. Randolph impressed people with her good manners, obvious intelligence, and easy sociability. Her presence enabled Jefferson to project a public image that stood in marked contrast to pervasive rumors about his sexual relations with the enslaved woman Sally Hemings, which had appeared in print for the first time that September.

Beginning in December 1805, Randolph and her entire family spent five months in Washington, where she gave birth to her eighth child that January. Resentful of “the most cruel slanders” of her father’s critics, she became a calming influence at official dinners and other social functions. Her company gave Jefferson a respite from politics, while allowing him to present himself to visitors in a wholesome domestic context. As one shrewd but sympathetic visitor noted, such domestic tableaux were for Jefferson “the best refutation of all the calumnies that have been heaped upon him.”

Randolph protected her famous father’s image for the rest of her life. She, along with her son Thomas Jefferson Randolph and her daughters Cornelia Jefferson Randolph and Mary Jefferson Randolph, compiled and edited the first collection of Jefferson’s writings for publication, taking special care to select the manuscripts that presented him in the most flattering light. Randolph also defended her father against criticism regarding his poor finances and rumors that Jefferson was the father of Hemings’s light-skinned children. The oft-repeated argument that Jefferson was not at Monticello when at least one of Hemings’s children was conceived originated with Randolph, though subsequent research has proven that claim untrue. Her efforts to construct and burnish her father’s reputation were unique, but overall her political activities, like those of the best-informed Virginia women of her era, were intermittent and circumspect.

Mistress of Monticello

Thomas Jefferson: A Philosepher a Patriote and a Friend

When Jefferson retired from politics in March 1809, Randolph and her family moved to Monticello. Although the vastness of the house and its fine library probably influenced the Randolphs’ choice of residence, her utter devotion to her father proved decisive. At Monticello, she oversaw various household and plantation operations, including the production of cloth during the stoppage of trade with Britain preceding the War of 1812. Randolph also offered hospitality to a steady stream of familiar and sometimes famous guests, increasingly mediating visitors’ access to her aging father.

Approaching middle age in a hectic and crowded household, Randolph also worried about her family’s deteriorating finances. Both her father and her husband were debt-ridden planters whose failed crops, needy relatives, risky investments, and declining land values thwarted their efforts to regain solvency. Though she supported war with Britain in 1812, she fretted that her husband’s acceptance of a military commission would worsen their financial situation, so she persuaded President James Madison to give him a temporary tax collectorship, a safer and more lucrative post. When Tom Randolph served three years as governor (1819–1822), she remained in Albemarle, in part to save money, with the exception of one brief visit to Richmond, where she was popular in society and relished appearing “fashionably drest and looking like a lady.

Edgehill

Financial ruin was imminent, however, with profound consequences for Randolph and her children. Forced to liquidate his estate and resentful of the solvency of his oldest son, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who purchased Edgehill at auction in 1826, a penniless Tom Randolph became estranged from his family at Monticello. After Jefferson died in July 1826, most of his property, too, was sold for debt. While the loss of her father was emotionally devastating, a broken marriage and the expected sale of Monticello forced Randolph to assess her options.

Later Years

In October 1826 Randolph and her two youngest children visited her daughter Ellen Coolidge and her husband, Joseph Coolidge, a Boston merchant. Although Randolph and her two elder unmarried daughters, Cornelia Randolph and Mary Randolph, planned to open a school in Albemarle to generate income, she delayed her return until May 1828. She was at Tom Randolph’s bedside when he died that June and stayed with her son’s family at Edgehill until November 1829, when she joined her daughter Virginia Trist and son-in-law Nicholas Philip Trist in Washington. Essentially homeless, Randolph would spend her remaining years living with her married children in Washington, Boston, and Albemarle.

George Wythe Randolph

In Washington, Randolph benefited from her connection to President Andrew Jackson, who valued the friendship of Jefferson’s daughter for the legitimacy it conferred on his newly installed Democratic administration. Her willingness to attend official dinners with Margaret O’Neal Timberlake Eaton (a cabinet wife whose allegedly sordid past caused the ladies of Washington to shun any functions she attended) earned her the gratitude of both Jackson and Martin Van Buren, his secretary of state. Nicholas Trist, who obtained his initial government clerkship from Secretary of State Henry Clay, retained his post under Van Buren and eventually became consul to Havana and, under James K. Polk, the commissioner charged with negotiating an end to the Mexcian-American War. Randolph’s youngest child, George Wythe Randolph, received a naval berth. Another son became secretary to the governor of the Arkansas Territory.

Randolph received modest stipends from her father’s estate and from bank stock donated by the states of South Carolina and Louisiana in tribute to Jefferson, but her most valuable assets were her remaining slaves, whom she hired out to generate income. Like many white Virginians, Randolph claimed to hate slavery but consistently placed her family’s financial interests ahead of the happiness of her bondspeople, separating black families as needed to make profits. After Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831, she and her family considered moving to a free state, and she applauded the efforts of her son Thomas Jefferson Randolph to promote a statewide plan to abolish slavery gradually and colonize former slaves in Africa, though he was ultimately unsuccessful. She emancipated several enslaved people in both of her wills, but for her entire life she depended on and profited from slave labor.

Will of Martha Jefferson Randolph

In May 1836, Randolph left Boston, bound for Virginia, with many stops along the way, arriving at Edgehill two months later. On October 10, 1836, she died suddenly at Edgehill, surrounded by her family. She was buried two days later in the Jefferson graveyard at Monticello. A two-sentence obituary in the Charlottesville Jeffersonian Republican reported the death of “Mrs. Martha Randolph, the widow of the late Thomas Mann Randolph, and the daughter of Thomas Jefferson,” declaring simply, “The character of this distinguished lady must be drawn by an abler hand than ours.”

MAP
TIMELINE
September 27, 1772
Martha Jefferson is born at Monticello to Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson and Thomas Jefferson.
June 1, 1779
Thomas Jefferson is elected governor of Virginia. He moves his family to Williamsburg, the capital, and then to Richmond when the government is moved there in 1780.
September 6, 1782
Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson dies at Monticello from complications related to the birth of her daughter Lucy.
December 1782—May 1784
Martha "Patsy" Jefferson resides mostly in Philadelphia while Thomas Jefferson awaits orders from Congress to go to France. She studies music, drawing, dancing, and French.
July 5, 1784
Thomas Jefferson, his daughter Martha, and James Hemings sail from Boston, Massachusetts, to Europe on the ship Ceres.
August 6, 1784
Thomas Jefferson, his daughter Martha, and James Hemings arrive in Paris.
August 1784—April 1789
Martha "Patsy" Jefferson is educated at the prestigious Abbaye Royale de Panthemont in Paris. Her younger sister Mary (later known as Maria) joins her there in July 1787.
September 26, 1789
Thomas Jefferson, his daughters Martha and Mary (later known as Maria), and the enslaved servants and siblings James and Sally Hemings leave Paris, France.
November 23, 1789
The Clermont, the ship carrying Thomas Jefferson, his daughters, and James and Sally Hemings, arrives in Norfolk.
Late November 1789
Thomas Jefferson, his daughters, and James and Sally Hemings visit the family of Thomas Mann Randolph at Tuckahoe.
December 23, 1789
Thomas Jefferson, his daughters Martha and Mary (now known as Maria), and the enslaved servants and siblings James and Sally Hemings arrive at Monticello.
February 23, 1790
Martha Jefferson and Thomas Mann Randolph marry at Monticello.
January 23, 1791
Anne Cary Randolph is born at Monticello. She is the first child born to Martha Jefferson Randolph and Thomas Mann Randolph.
April 22, 1793
Martha Jefferson Randolph is a witness in the case of Commonwealth v. Richard Randolph. The defendant, the husband of Thomas Mann Randolph's sister Judith Randolph, is charged with helping his sister-in-law, Nancy Randolph, murder an infant that many believed he fathered.
July 1795—October 1795
Martha Jefferson Randolph and Thomas Mann Randolph visit the Virginia springs in hopes of improving his bad health. Their infant daughter, Ellen, dies suddenly en route.
January 1800
After spending their first decade of married life at Monticello and Varina (their plantation in Henrico County), Martha Jefferson Randolph and Thomas Mann Randolph, along with their children, move into a newly built, modest frame house at Edgehill, near Monticello.
1801—1809
Thomas Mann Randolph and Martha Jefferson Randolph oversee Thomas Jefferson's property in Albemarle County during his two terms as president. Martha Randolph bears the brunt of this responsibility during her husband's two terms of service in Washington in the House of Representatives between 1803 and 1807.
November 17, 1802—January 5, 1803
Martha Jefferson Randolph and her sister, Maria Jefferson Eppes, visit their father in Washington.
December 1, 1805—April 1806
Martha Jefferson Randolph, Thomas Mann Randolph, and their five daughters and one son visit Thomas Jefferson in Washington. A second son, James Madison Randolph, is born there on January 17.
March 15, 1809
Thomas Jefferson, the newly retired president, arrives at Monticello. Martha Randolph takes charge of her father's household. Thomas Mann Randolph maintains his plantation at Edgehill, but he and his family reside mostly at Monticello.
September 1813
Martha Jefferson Randolph successfully presses President James Madison to find a government post for her husband, Thomas Mann Randolph, who had accepted a military commission after the United States declared war on Britain in 1812.
March 10, 1818
George Wythe Randolph is born at Monticello, in Albemarle County, the twelfth surviving child of Thomas Mann Randolph and Martha Jefferson Randolph.
1819—1822
Thomas Mann Randolph serves as governor of Virginia. His wife and children remain in Albemarle, with the exception of an extended visit from Martha Jefferson Randolph from December 1820 to January 1821.
January 1824
Martha Jefferson Randolph learns the extent of her husband Thomas Mann Randolph's financial problems, which precipitates their estrangement, especially after the sale of Edgehill to the Randolphs' oldest son, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, in January 1826.
July 1826
Thomas Jefferson's will bequeaths to his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph in trust for Martha Jefferson Randolph the scant remains of his estate after the payment of his debts. Shortly thereafter, the states of South Carolina and Louisiana set aside $10,000 in bank stock for Martha Randolph's support, in tribute to Jefferson's service.
July 4, 1826
Thomas Jefferson dies at Monticello.
October 1826—May 1828
Martha Jefferson Randolph and her younger children reside in Boston, Massachusetts, at the home of her daughter and son-in-law Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge and Joseph Coolidge and in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She and her unmarried daughters Cornelia Randolph and Mary Randolph plan to open a school at Edgehill.
January 1827
To satisfy Thomas Jefferson's creditors, his heirs hold an auction of Jefferson's household goods, furnishings, and 130 enslaved people.
June 20, 1828
Thomas Mann Randolph dies at Monticello with his estranged wife, Martha Jefferson Randolph, at his bedside.
September 1829
Martha Jefferson Randolph, who lives at Edgehill, visits Monticello for the last time.
November 1829—May 1831
Martha Jefferson Randolph resides with the family of her daughter and son-in-law Virginia Jefferson Randolph Trist and Nicholas Philip Trist in Washington, where she is a friend and supporter of President Andrew Jackson.
1831
Martha Jefferson Randolph and her unmarried daughters establish a school for girls at Edgehill, where she teaches on and off until her death.
August 1831
James Turner Barclay, a Charlottesville apothecary, purchases the Monticello house and grounds (except the family graveyard). He hopes to turn a profit by cultivating silkworms on the plantation.
August 22, 1831
Nat Turner's insurrection, in Southampton County, leads the Randolph family to consider moving to a free state. Martha Jefferson Randolph supports gradual emancipation in Virginia and the subsequent colonization of former slaves, a plan that Thomas Jefferson Randolph unsuccessfully champions in the General Assembly.
November 1831—July 1832
Martha Randolph returns to Washington after spending six months at Edgehill, where she taught music at the family school.
July 1832—June 1833
Martha Jefferson Randolph resides in Boston, Massachusetts, with her daughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge while Coolidge's husband, Joseph Coolidge, is in China.
June—August 1833
Martha Randolph moves with her daughter and son-in-law Virginia Jefferson Randolph Trist and Nicholas Philip Trist into a large new house in Washington. When the house proves to be too expensive for the family, she sells two slaves, finds a tenant for the house, and returns to Edgehill.
April 18, 1834
In Washington, a seriously ill Martha Jefferson Randolph dictates a brief will to her daughter Virginia Randolph Trist. She emancipates two slaves and gives three others, including Sally Hemings, their de facto freedom. She also insists that Thomas Jefferson was not the father of Sally Hemings's light-skinned children.
December 1834—June 1835
Martha Jefferson Randolph returns to Washington.
June 1835
Martha Randolph travels to Boston, Massachusetts, to stay with the Coolidges after Nicholas Philip Trist's appointment as consul at Havana results in the liquidation of the family's Washington household.
January 24, 1836
Martha Randolph writes a second will as she suffers through a harsh New England winter.
May 1836
Martha Randolph leaves Boston, Massachusetts, traveling to Edgehill by way of Philadelphia, where Thomas Sully paints her portrait.
October 10, 1836
Martha Jefferson Randolph dies suddenly at Edgehill. She is buried two days later in the family graveyard at Monticello.
FURTHER READING
  • Kierner, Cynthia A. Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello: Her Life and Times. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
  • Kierner, Cynthia A. Scandal at Bizarre: Rumor and Reputation in Jefferson’s America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
  • Kukla, Jon. Mr. Jefferson’s Women. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
  • Lewis, Jan. The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson’s Virginia. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
  • Scharff, Virginia. The Women Jefferson Loved. New York: Harper, 2011.
CITE THIS ENTRY
APA Citation:
Kierner, Cynthia. Martha Jefferson Randolph (1772–1836). (2020, December 07). In Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/randolph-martha-jefferson-1772-1836.
MLA Citation:
Kierner, Cynthia. "Martha Jefferson Randolph (1772–1836)" Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, (07 Dec. 2020). Web. 28 Sep. 2023
Last updated: 2021, December 22
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