Alas, my husband was not a man who could comfortably pretend at anything . . .
Chapter Thirty-Four
The African Venus is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello.
—JAMES CALLENDER
September 1802
Harlem
HAVE YOU SEEN this?” Angelica cried, bursting into our house with a stack of newspapers. I knew it must be important for her to have made the trip from the city, especially when she didn’t bother to remove her coat or hat before racing into the parlor. My stomach knotted the moment she lay the papers before me because they were copies of the Richmond Recorder, where that despicable scandalmonger, James Callender, plied his vicious trade.
How many years had he hounded us? How cruelly he’d aimed his poison pen at my family in exposing the Reynolds Affair. And even though Angelica’s expression was peculiar—something between fury and glee—I told myself that I mustn’t be surprised by the depths to which the papers might sink to hurt us now.
But I was surprised.
For the article was not aimed at us, but at Thomas Jefferson, the president of the United States, who, it breathlessly revealed to the world, had for many years kept an enslaved woman for his mistress.
We’d known this, of course. Given my sister’s intimacy with Jefferson, she was privy to a number of his secret liaisons, including one with this enslaved mulatto, Sally Hemings—and whispers said she was the half-sister of his dead wife, besides.
I took some petty satisfaction that Jefferson might suffer for this, but it was all very unseemly and uncomfortable to see anyone’s intimate life splashed across the papers again. When I said as much, Angelica shook her head. “Keep reading. Where is Hamilton?” She went to the tall windows overlooking the veranda and squinted. “What the devil is he doing out there in the dirt?”
“He was planting thirteen sweet gum trees this morning—one for each of the original colonies. I’m not sure what he’s doing now.”
“A garden is a very usual refuge of a disappointed politician,” he explained a few minutes later when we went outside to show him the news.
For Angelica had been right. There was something we didn’t already know.
That indecent creature, that reptile Callender, had been paid to destroy us.
“Thirteen years ago, Jefferson hired him to print seditious libels,” I said, indignantly shaking the page before Alexander’s eyes. I wasn’t sure if we should frame it, set it afire, or bury it as fertilizer in the garden. But what I was sure of was that we’d been vindicated. “All those years ago, Jefferson paid Callender to write that Washington was a traitor, a robber, and a perjurer. Paid him to print foul slanders against President Adams and against you.”
Dark eyes flashing, Angelica added, “And now that Jefferson is president, and won’t pay anymore, the serpent turns and bites the hand that fed him.”
Alexander had always suspected as much but now seemed taken aback by our vehemence and heaved a great sigh. “We live in a world full of evil.”
I blinked. That was all he had to say about it? The man who’d once designed governments had set his mind on our farm, deciding the ground of our orchard was too wet, that we must have grass, that we must plant watermelons, and that our cows must not be allowed to range.
We’d kept our heads ducked since Jefferson took the presidency, and what had our reward been? A dead son. Our fears of guillotines in the streets were not realized—my husband had, perhaps, been right to believe Jefferson a more cautious man than I had supposed—but if we were going to live in this country, if we were going to remain vulnerable to his rabid followers, then I did not think we should passively endure it.
And, truthfully, anger felt so much better than grief. “Alexander, you gave Jefferson the presidency. You and that horrific clause in the Constitution that allows slaves to be counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation. Jefferson would have never been elected otherwise, and now he disgraces the place he unjustly fills and produces immorality by his example. If this bit about the scandalmonger is true, Jefferson must be abominably wicked and weak. I think you have a duty to the Constitution—”
“Perhaps no man has sacrificed or done more for the present Constitution than myself,” Alexander said, bracing his hands upon the shovel’s pole. “I’ve labored to prop the frail and worthless fabric in spite of all my predictions that it will fail. Yet I have the murmurs of its friends no less than the curses of its foes for reward. Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me. What can I do better than withdraw?”