Martha was an accomplished musician who played the pianoforte and spinet, and also sang. When she was 18, she married Bathurst Skelton with whom she had a child named John, but less than two years after the marriage, Bathurst became ill and died in 1768. After the acceptable period of mourning was over, the wealthy and beautiful (all physical accounts of her describe her as such) new widow began attracting many suitors, including Thomas Jefferson. Thomas fell in love with Martha nearly straightaway, however, she did not share the same feelings for him when he first started calling on her. Neither did her father tho, who didn’t approve of the lower status Thomas Jefferson’s interests in his daughter. Thomas proposed to Martha in early 1771, but she did not accept. Thanks to an encouraging letter written to him by a friend, Mrs. Drummond, Thomas continued to pursue the relationship. According to family lore, two men waiting outside the Wayles’ house to see Martha heard her and Thomas, who got there before the other men, playing music and singing together. Upon hearing this, they gave up and went home, realising the tenderness between the two. Bonding over things, such as their mutual love of music and literature, Martha accepted Thomas’ proposal by June, 1771. Unlike marriages of generations past that considered monetary and social reasons for tying the knot over romantic feelings, the couple was one of a growing number of couples getting married out of love.Their wedding was planned for later that summer, however, the bad luck in child rearing that followed the Eppes-Wayles-Jefferson families around struck and caused them to postpone. Martha’s son died at just three and a half years old. The heartbroken Martha and Thomas rescheduled the wedding. During their courtship, Thomas Jefferson’s passion for Martha was so great that it caused him to ignore some of his revolutionary principles. In a blatant violation of the colonial boycott of British goods, Thomas ordered a “forte-piano” from England—along with special instructions about its construction to make sure it would be “worthy the acceptance of a lady for whom I intend it”. Thomas also had is work in progress, Monticello, renovated so it would be less of a bachelor pad and more of a family home. On December 23, he wrote out a wedding bond for the couple. In it, he described Martha as a “spinster”, later crossed out and replaced with “widow,” most likely by Martha’s brother-in-law and Thomas’ witness while writing the bond. The Skelton connection was not something Jefferson thought much about. Captivated by visions of their new life together, he had unconsciously edited Patty’s first husband out of the picture in his preparations for the wedding. On January 1, 1772, Martha and Thomas were married at Martha’s family’s home. After the wedding, to have their honeymoon at Monticello, they made the 100-mile trip in one of the worst snowstorms to hit Virginia. Eight miles from their destination, their carriage bogged down in 2–3 feet of snow and they had to proceed on horseback, riding the remaining distance over a rough mountain track. Arriving at Monticello late at night after the servants had banked the fires and retired, the couple settled in the freezing one-room, twenty-foot-square brick building, still known by its nickname, the ‘Honeymoon Cottage’.Thomas lit a fire in the fireplace to get some warmth and they toasted their new home with a leftover half-bottle of french wine hidden behind a shelf of books, and “song and merriment and laughter”.Of his beloved wife, Jefferson once wrote, “in every scheme of happiness she is placed in the foreground of the picture as the principal figure. Take that away, and there is no picture for me.”Nine months after she and Thomas were married, Martha gave birth to the couple’s first of six children, also named Martha but called “Patsy.” Of the six kids, only Patsy and another daughter, Mary, survived childhood, and Patsy is the only one to live a long life. The loss of so many children took its toll on Martha, as did the pregnancies and childbirths themselves (Martha is described as being frail and her health declined with each pregnancy, as they all were physically tough and left her bedridden). When Thomas was Governor of Virginia, she twice had to flee Richmond and Monticello with her children when the British raided both locations. The state of her health during and post-pregnancies kept Thomas as close to home as possible so he could be with his ailing wife, sometimes choosing local Virginia politics over national roles. John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, asked him to go on a diplomatic trip to Paris, which he declined so he could stay home with Martha. During the summer of 1776, Thomas had been receiving letters from Martha asking him to come home from the Continental Congress as soon as he could because she was very ill. On September 1, 1776, Thomas Jefferson, the only delegate from the state of Virginia still in Philadelphia, left his state with no vote to attend to his wife. His fears were not unfounded –Martha, like her mother and Mary at the age of 25, would eventually succumb to the difficulties of childbirth.When she was in good health, Martha and Thomas spent their time reading with each other and performing musical duets for themselves and guests. They each seem to be equally devoted to the other. Martha also proved to be very adept at running a home and managing a large plantation. As Jon Meacham noticed in his biography ‘Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power’, Thomas found “In Martha, the most congenial of companions, a woman who spoke his language. Their nights were filled with music and wine and talk—talk of everything. They seemed to have fully shared their lives with each other. He confided in her about politics (…) Smart and strong willed, she liked having her way, was not a woman of retiring nature or of quiet views. She had a mind of her own.”During the Revolutionary War, “ladies’ associations” begun in many states with the goal of collecting money and making clothing for the Continental Army. In 1780, Martha Washington nominated Martha Jefferson for the head of Virginia’s ladies association. In a letter to Eleanor Conway Madison (the only surviving complete letter written by Martha), she says, “I undertake with chearfulness the duty of furnishing to my country women an opportunity of proving that they also participate of those virtuous feelings with gave birth to it.”In May, 1782, Martha gave birth to her last child and never recovered from the ordeal. Thomas wrote a letter to close friend, James Monroe, stating, “Mrs. Jefferson has added another daughter to our family. She has ever since and still continues very dangerously ill.” *WARNING: tearjerker anecdote* While on her deathbed, Martha and Thomas copied lines from one of their favorite novels, “Tristram Shandy” by Laurence Sterne. As she lay dying in their bed at just 33, Martha began writing a passage from the book but too weak, Thomas finished it, transforming the passage into a final dialogue between husband and wife: [written by Martha] Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen. The days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of windy day, never to return - more every thing presses on - [written by Thomas] and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which follows it, are preludes to the eternal separation which we are shortly to make!It seems like Thomas didn’t have the strength to finish the entire quote: —Heaven have mercy upon us both.On September 6, 1782, a devastated Thomas could only bring himself to write simply in his account book, “My dear wife died this day at 11:45 A.M.” He was inconsolable in his loss and “was led from the room almost in a state of insensibility by his sister Mrs. Carr, who, with great difficulty, got him into his library where he fainted” —and not for a brief moment. Jefferson “remained so long insensible that they feared he would never revive.” After the funeral, he withdrew to his room for three weeks, pacing constantly, only allowing his sister to visit him.He was incoherent with grief, and perhaps surrendered to rage. There is a hint that he lost all control, according to his daughter Patsy, the “witness to many violent bursts of grief” : “the scene that followed (…) when, almost by stealth, I entered his room by night, to this day I dare not describe to myself”. He destroyed all her letters and didn’t keep any of her belongings -just a few survived-. In a letter to his sister-in-law, he even was alluding to the possibility of suicide: “This miserable kind of existence is really too burdensome to be borne (…) I could not wish its continuance a moment”, but he would endure for their children. Jefferson remained “inconsolable” – a word used by many biographers and Jefferson’s contemporaries to describe his condition – for months. He sobbed deeply at night, broke down when he tried to appear in public and talk about his deceased wife, and news of his grief and shattered condition spread through the colony.Not until after long weeks did Jefferson begin to resume a normal life when he wrote, “emerging from that stupor of mind which had rendered me as dead to the world as was she whose loss occasioned it. All my plans of comfort and happiness were reversed by a single event.” Jefferson erected a marble tombstone for his wife at Monticello, with the inscription stating she had been “torn from him by death.” On her gravestone, as a part of the epitaph, Jefferson added lines from Homer’s The Iliad: Nay if even in the house of Hades the dead forget their dead, yet will I even there be mindful of my dear comrade ; and below: This monument of his love is inscribed.Keeping a promise he allegedly made to Martha, he never remarried. Thomas never fully recovered form her death. He never mentioned his wife, even to his closest firends, and almost 40 years after her death, he still referred to her in his autobiography as “the cherished companion of my life, in whose affections, unabated on both sides, I had lived the last ten years in unchequered happiness.”After Jefferson’s death, in a secret drawer beside his bed, a folded paper with the “Tristram Shandy” text written by Martha on her deathbed was found –a lock of her hair carefully hidden inside–. Its wear showed that it was opened and refolded often.
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