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Polly Jefferson and Her Father


ISSUE:  Winter 1931

She was born on a mountain top at half-past one in the morning. Her father, a most methodical man, duly recorded the exact moment. She would have been more welcome had she been a boy. Of the three children already borne by her patient mother on that mountain only a girl had lingered. For a fortnight once her father had boasted a son and heir, but that little candle had flickered feebly and then gone out. Two sisters were destined to follow her, though not for long.

This was about a century and a half ago. Science had done little to reduce the wastefulness of nature, and the toll of infants and mothers was appalling in even such well-favored homes as this. One made a new entry every year or so with little assurance that aught would be left except a name. “Mary Jefferson, August 1st, 1778,” was hopefully recorded by the master of the mountain, an amazingly tender man who loved children, even girls. She lived long enough to receive many solicitous letters from heu fluent father, many more than he ever got from her much less active pen. In childhood she was known as Polly. Later he addressed her and finally lost her as Maria.

The elevation upon which lived the four Jeffersons, Thomas, Martha his wife, and the two little girls, commanded a wide view of wild tree-grown country stretching in majestic sweep to a mountain barrier of blue and lavender on the west. The master, who was given to dreaming with his eyes open, Was so enamored of this glorious prospect and so oblivious of practical difficulties that he had leveled the hilltop and begun to erect in that inaccessible place a stately house, destined to fame as Monticello. He was a Virginia planter, rich in lands and slaves, if not in pounds and shillings. Within two years he had made a memorable trip to Philadelphia, where he had penned an immortal document declaring these United States to be free and independent. Soon he was to be chosen governor of his commonwealth and be driven from his fastness by disrespectful redcoats. Of these things Polly knew little and cared less. Indeed, she knew hardly anything about him for years.

Nor was she able to remember her mother, who died when she was four. Martha Wayles bore the master of Monti-cello six children in ten years, and she had previously borne another to her first husband, John Skelton. These exhausting and generally futile efforts undoubtedly hastened her death, which occurred at the untimely age of thirty-three, the year before the American states achieved independence. She was laid in the family burying ground on the eastern slope of the mountain, where the others in succession were to join her, though not in the order she may have expected. Whatever she may or may not have been, and we know little, her husband never seriously thought of replacing her, though it would have been regarded as more natural then than now and he, more than most men, valued and needed a woman’s hand. She lived on in her three daughters: Martha, or Patsy, who was destined to grow tall and rather homely like her father; Polly, who was to be beautiful, bashful, and frail; and an infant in arms, who was to cough herself to death while her father was far away.

Polly could not have appreciated her father’s distress when her mother died. She did not know that he relinquished cherished plans for literary and agricultural solitude when he went away, from the beloved mountain for the longest absence of his life. She learned, as soon as she could at all understand it, that he and her sister Patsy had gone in a boat to a place called Paris, where he was doing something for the government. She herself, with her little sister, had gone from Monticello and was living with her Aunt Eppes, her mother’s half-sister, at a delightful place, which was below the James whether she knew it or not. Here, at Ep-pington, in a pleasant white frame house, with green blinds, hipped roof, and two projecting one-story wings, she found a home.

Her father, who was given to grandiloquent exaggeration, said that Francis Eppes was the best horticulturist in America. Polly would at least have agreed in praise of her uncle’s lawn and abundant orchard. In her amiable aunt she found the oniy mother she ever knew. Elizabeth Eppes, like her half-sister, was pre-eminently a housewife and mother. Her brother-in-law once congratulated her from France on the double blessing of twins and her obvious improvement in “her trade.” No more successful than her sister in creating young life, she was better at preserving it. One of her children died of whooping cough along with the youngest Jefferson, but of those who romped at Eppington five grew up, among them a boy named Jack, five years older than Polly and destined to become her husband.

The tranquility of the happy group on the Southside plantation was soon disturbed by injunctions which came across the sea from a parent who was unwilling to remain a legend. The American minister to the Court of Versailles first required letters of his little daughter, then demanded her presence. Though she began early to write through adult agency, Polly showed herself from the beginning a reluctant correspondent. She thanked him for sashes, proudly stated at the age of six that she could almost read, and politely inquired when she might expect a visit from her absent parent. She was seven when he began, with dubious playfulness, to reproach her for not writing, and to tell her that she must join him and her sister in France since they could not live without her. There she could acquire many graces: she could learn to play on the harpsichord, draw, dance, read and talk French. None of these prospective accomplishments greatly appealed to her. The promise of an unlimited number of dolls and playthings was more to the point, but the prudential exhortation with which the parental letter closed was not reassuring. She may have inherited her father’s thin skin and tendency to freckles, but it seemed a bit harsh to warn her not to go without her bonnet lest she become ugly and unlovely.

This untactful admonition was politely ignored in her childish reply. Yes, she wanted to see him and Sister Patsy and she wanted a doll, but she preferred to stay with Aunt Eppes. She would not go to France. They must come to Uncle Eppes’s. Her father had voiced to her aunt his great fears for her in crossing the ocean—he dropped his pen at the thought—yet she must come. His fears were premature; Polly wasn’t coming. He hadn’t really expected her until she was eight, but had written long ahead and given very specific instructions. She must sail between April and July, not earlier or later on account of the equinoxes. They must find a vessel that had performed at least one voyage, but was not more than four or five years old. Though determined, he was taking no chances.

Perhaps they couldn’t find a vessel mature but not decrepit. Perhaps they didn’t really try. Polly did not go the summer she was eight. Her father’s arguments were strong, from his own point of view. He did not want her to be weaned away from him and Patsy, however well off she might be at Eppington. They were quite unconvincing to Polly, who was unattracted by a prospect which seemed alluring to her young cousins. The summer of her ninth year her father and sister were expecting her. Patsy, who was fifteen, had been instructed in virtues that she might pass them on. The Eppes family, reluctantly employing successive strategems, finally lured Polly, aboard a boat, where she innocently played with her little cousins until she began to feel at home. When she fell asleep they were speeded away, and when she awoke the voyage had begun. Under the skillful direction of Captain Ramsay, she and her colored servant had a fine passage, without storms equinoctial or otherwise.

Captain Ramsay brought her to London, where she was to be delivered to Abigail Adams, then in exile from Massachusetts at the Court of St. James’s. The separation from the Captain, however, was not easily effected. “Her attachment to those who are kind to her has resulted in successive distresses,” her father later said. She had to be decoyed from the gallant seaman. Later she had to be beguiled to leave Abigail. John Adams’s wife, naturally ignorant of future rivalry, then thought very highly of Jefferson, whom she termed “one of the choice ones of the earth,” but her Jeffersonian affections were soon centered on Polly. The exiled little Virginian clung to the staunch New Englander as a shipwrecked sailor might have clung to a floating spar. Abigail opened her heart to this beautiful little creature who talked tearfully of her Aunt Eppes and her small cousins. The three weeks’ stay proved unforgettable. Nor could Polly understand why, as soon as she made friends, she was deprived of them. Her father had sent a trusted servant, perhaps Petit, his mdtre d’hotel, with whom, after much persuasion, she agreed to extend her travels to the Continent. Almost nine, she arrived in Paris to find two strange people claiming to be her father and sister. But for assurances passed on from Captain Ramsay to Abigail Adams and then to the latest guardian, her new relatives would not have known her.

At Paris she was established with her sister in a convent, where, however, her father understood religion was not discussed. Here she began the acquisition of the proposed accomplishments: French first, then drawing and music, and at length Spanish. According to her father she was perfectly happy. Her side of the story we do not know. Since both her new-found relatives were extremely kind, though the elder of them was given to moralizing, she doubtless responded to their kindness quickly as was her wont. The French liked “Mademoiselle Polie,” as they first called her, very much. Later her English Mary became Marie, and finally in American evolved into Maria, which it remained unto the end.

She visited her father once or twice a week, From him she learned that one of the new twins at Eppington had been named for her, and she forthwith volunteered to teach her French. Though her face kindled at the mention of her aunt’s name, she found it amazingly difficult to write to her. She collected all her apparatus, set herself formally to the task, then turned in perplexity, to her father for aid. Words flowed easily from his skilled pen, if not from Polly’s, but he would not help her. He always hoped she would learn to write, but she inherited none of his verbal fluency. When the three of them were together, they talked of Eppington and Monticello. We may be sure that Polly thought most of Eppington, for that was her true home. It was hard for her to learn to be her father’s daughter.

We cannot follow her through every day of her Parisian exile. Since she was near her father she was relieved of the burden of writing and left no literary record. She made some progress with her accomplishments, for in later life she showed considerable interest in music and could read Spanish when assisted by the dictionary. In the autumn of her eleventh birthday she came back to Virginia. Her father called it “my country” long after the Union of states was established; she undoubtedly, regarded it as hers. They had an exciting voyage, by way of England, long as all voyages were in those days and not without its perils. Within the Virginia Capes an outgoing brig nearly ran them down in the fog and did carry away part of their rigging. Their ship caught fire two hours after they landed, but was finally saved together with their luggage, including the precious papers of the American minister.

Leaving Norfolk they visited at Eppington en route to Monticello, where they arrived two days before Christmas and nearly three months after they left Paris. According to the well-known story, their carriage was drawn up the mountain by the rejoicing slaves and the master was carried to his door by strong black hands. It is said that “the little fairy-like Maria” advanced, timidly we may be sure, between the lines of grinning darkies, escorted by her future husband, Jack Eppes, who had then attained the majestic age of sixteen. One Tom Randolph was probably not far away. Two months later to the day he was married to his cousin Martha. A week later Jefferson set out for New York where he had another one of those wretched governmental positions which interfered so grievously with family life.

Polly was for a time with the newlyweds, doubtless unwelcome. Part of the summer she spent at her beloved Eppington. In September all were at Monticello to welcome the Secretary of State after a six months’ absence. He left them again ere long, this time for Philadelphia, whither the peripatetic government had moved. He hoped to have Polly with him in the spring but had to wait another year. He thought of sending her to Eppington, though not a little jealous of Mrs. Eppes, who disputed with him the first place in her affections. He finally left her with the Randolphs at Monticello and tried by correspondence to keep strong the ties that bound her to her “vagrant” father.

From time to time she received from him specific questions which she must answer forthwith: “Do you see the sun rise every day? How many pages a day do you read in Don Quixote? How many hours a day do you sew? Do you keep up your music? Do you know how to make a pudding, cut out a beefsteak, sow spinach or set a hen?” He was trying to establish her in a strict regimen of occupation and improvement, quite in accord with his own philosophy, of interesting employment but doubtless appalling to one so young. With his questions he coupled many exhortations to be good, loving, and unselfish. After two months she wrote him in some awe, but with obvious desire to please, and answered such of his questions as she could remember. She had read Don Quixote when she could. She had been given a hen and chickens. With one of her numerous aunts she had made a pudding. Her delighted father swore that he would eat one of her culinary concoctions the moment that he returned. One summer, while sailing on Lake George, he wrote her on a piece of birch-bark a letter containing various exhortations to industry and virtue. He said he would question her about the geography of Lake George. She liked the birch-bark better than geography, but was most interested in her new niece, who had deep blue eyes, she said, and was a very fine child. “My, sweet Anne,” she reported, “grows prettier every day.”

Continually from her exacting parent she had complaints that she would not write. In correspondence as in money matters, he said, one must discharge one’s obligations. In this respect she was a perpetual debtor, he a remorseless creditor. She responded little to his efforts to make her systematic. From New York he wrote that they had peas and strawberries the same day as the whippoorwills, and inquired whether the same combination of phenomena had been observed in Virginia. She was able to tell him when they had peas and strawberries, but could not say how closely their appearance synchronized with the coming of the birds. She was so taken up with her chickens, of which she was so unfortunate as to lose half, that she didn’t attend to the martins, swallows, and whippoorwills. Oddly enough, she was not entirely reliable as a botanical and zoological correspondent, and did not share her father’s passionate interest in comparative climates. Had it been left to her rather than to Thomas Mann Randolph, Jefferson would never have known the daily readings of the thermometer at Monticello during his many absences. Polly, finished Don Quixote, though, in the original, and wanted a piece of cloth like the sample she enclosed. She got it—got more than she asked for. She could always count on generosity from her exacting father.

The autumn after she was thirteen Polly returned to Philadelphia with him and was established at school, where she doubtless proceeded with her accomplishments. She solemnly received visits from her old friend Mrs. Adams, from Mrs. Edmund Randolph and Mrs. Rittenhouse, wife of the astronomer. She spent two or three days each week with her father, under the trees, and was well and lazy, he said. Specifically, she did not write letters to her sister. The last autumn he served as Secretary of State, she was left at Monticello, Yellow fever was raging in Philadelphia and he himself stayed at Germantown, where for a time he had a bed in the corner of the public room in a tavern. Early in the next year, abandoning with light heart the cares of state, he returned to Monticello, to busy himself for three years with crops and architecture. Polly was with him so they exchanged no letters. Without remorse she could give her attention to nieces and chickens to the entire disregard of epistolary literature.

Then this annoying business of governing the country again interfered with prized domestic tranquility. Jefferson, passionate lover of home, was elected Vice-President and had to go back to Philadelphia. Polly did not go with him then or afterward. First she went visiting, as her father encouraged her to do in order that she might enjoy more social life than isolated Monticello provided. On the eve of important developments, she wrote him with a tenderness which gave him “infinite delight”; and late in the spring she announced to him through her sister that she was to be married. Her father may have expected something of the sort, for she was lovely and eighteen and he was neither blind nor stupid. If he had not already given his tacit approval, young people at the end of the eighteenth century took things more into their own hands than one ordinarily, supposes.

Polly’s father had known John Wayles Eppes all that young gentleman’s twenty-three years, had directed his education in Philadelphia, and was convinced that she might have combed the whole earth and not found a more suitable partner. Ostensibly he did not begrudge the strengthening of the already strong tie between his daughter and the South-side plantation, and he had no thought that Albemarle would henceforth know her only as a visitor. Indeed he had plans, which never went further than the building of a hen-house, to establish the young couple at Pantops, across the valley from Monticello. He rejoiced in the thought that the family fireside would continue harmonious, without jarring discords or petty rivalries.

In his account book, where he recorded matters of grave personal import along with the most trifling expenditures, he wrote on October 18,1797, “My daughter Maria married this day.” At nineteen she became an Eppes in name as she had so long been in spirit. Recognizing Jack’s new dignity, his father-in-law henceforth referred to him as ‘Mr.” The young couple spent the first months of their married life at Eppington, and later were for a time at Mont Blanco, near Petersburg. They, were not even at Monticello that first summer, though the Vice-President returned in glad expectation of finding them there and for ten days thought every sound was that of his daughter’s approaching carriage.

She would have come had she been able to, but the fact that she had changed her place of residence was not without significance. Modern psychologists would probably say that she suffered from an inferiority complex; less scientific observers will find her modesty quite endearing. She gained no consolation from the thought of her own loveliness. In her father’s presence she sighed for talents such as had been bestowed so lavishly on him, and more generously upon her sister, she felt, than upon herself. Though no man could have been more tender than her father, there are disadvantages in living in the shadow of a giant. The intellectual atmosphere at Eppington was less rarefied. Jack was something of a scholar himself, but he and Aunt Eppes were undoubtedly more comfortable.

Though the days of parental tutelage were really over, Jefferson could not refrain from giving his daughter much advice about the married life. Sage counsel it was, from the masculine point of view, about the avoidance of small differences that “weary out” a man, though Polly probably did not need it. Acutely conscious of the financial burden which had for years oppressed him, he reminded her that the wife of a planter in a depressed agricultural community must be economical. Economy, however, he recommended least in matters of dress, because in the married state each must continue to please the other. He could not have feared that she would cease to please, but he knew her indifference to dress and ornament and thought it unnatural and undesirable.

That Maria Jefferson Eppes was like her mother in temperament seems probable; that she was like her in experience is certain. Essentially a housewife and mother in an age when motherhood was continuous and precarious, she was not very successful at what her father had once jokingly termed a woman’s trade. “My daughter Eppes . . .” he wrote in the course of time to a friend who knew and loved her, “lately presented me with the first fruits of a grandfather on her part. Mrs Randolph has made them cease to be novelties—she has four children.” Martha was destined to have others and be apparently none the worse for them. Polly’s first-born went the way of so many of her mother’s children, The science of pediatrics was undeveloped. Weeks later her father wrote that hers had been “a long and painful case” and his anxieties had been “excessive.”

The autumn after he became President and was kept by an unkind fate in the new capital at Washington, she again made him a grandfather. She had been brought to Monticello during the summer, at a snail’s pace over rough Virginia roads, and at the paternal seat her son was born. Named Francis for his other grandfather, he lived to be the object of much Jeffersonian solicitude and to carry on the line. The President revived his plans to establish the family at Pantops, or at Poplar Forest, but mother and child went back to Eppington for the spring. Her health continued to be feeble and she returned to Albemarle in the summer with even greater difficulty than before. Her father sent very detailed instructions: they, must make very short stages, be off at daylight, and stop at ten; they must not go by Edgehill, where Martha’s family were, because they had measles there. So far as we know, they did not pause in the danger zone. Polly and Francis were safe at Monticello when Jefferson arrived. By winter she was strong enough to travel without danger to Washington, the wilderness village whence the federal government was conducted.

The third President lived at the end of a morass called Pennsylvania Avenue, in a box of a house, without porticoes, or wall around its prospective garden, or even plaster on all its ceilings. Here, in the second winter of his administration, he had as passing guests his two daughters, who provided a feminine touch the Executive Mansion sorely needed. The younger of them, averse to society, had been reluctant about coming. He could have assured her that he dispensed simple and unostentatious though generous hospitality, just as he was accustomed to do at home, that precedence was waived, whatever the diplomats might say about it, and that nobody need be embarrassed.

The beautiful Mrs. Eppes, one kindly observer said, was “simplicity and timidity personified in company,” but when alone with one was of “communicative and winning manners.” Martha Randolph, however, made the better impression. Though rather homely, “a delicate likeness of her father,” she also inherited his conversational gifts and beamed with intelligence and benevolence. Polly did not have the vigor which vivacity requires. Her r61e had become a negative one. She didn’t want to be any trouble and apologized to her father, who bore the expenses of the trip, for what she termed her extravagance. His admonitions to economy had returned to plague him. With characteristic generosity, he hastened to say that she had not indulged herself as freely in Washington as he had wished and that he himself had suffered from ignorance of the articles that might suit her. It would not have been characteristic of her to tell him.

Meanwhile, both Thomas, Mann Randolph and Jack Eppes were elected to Congress. The prospect seemed to Jefferson most alluring. The dreariness of other Washington winters would be relieved by the presence of his daughters. As luck would have it, though, the sisters spent the next winter together’ in Albemarle, while the three statesmen endured as best they could “the desolate vastness and mean accommodations of the unshaped metropolis.” Other things had to be endured at Edgehill. Martha had another “bantling,” her sixth, and Maria was with her, fearfully awaiting the coming of her third. There she received from her father, who never lost the moralizing habit, the exhortation to be courageous like a soldier. Of her “expected indisposition” he wrote: “Some friend of your mamma’s (I forget whom) used to say it was no more than a jog of the elbow.” Rather uncomprehending in one who had so much reason to know better, though he may have been whistling to keep up courage. He at least recognized that it was important to have “scientific aid” in readiness, in case anything uncommon should take place.

In the last January of her life her father wrote her that Congress would probably, rise the second of March (which it did not do), and that Mr. Eppes might reach her sooner. He hoped, though, that she would let them see that she had resources of courage within herself not requiring the presence of anybody. He expected a good deal. About the same made him a grandfather. She had been brought to Monticello during the summer, at a snail’s pace over rough Virginia roads, and at the paternal seat her son was born. Named Francis for his other grandfather, he lived to be the object of much Jeffersonian solicitude and to carry on the line. The President revived his plans to establish the family at Pantops, or at Poplar Forest, but mother and child went back to Eppington for the spring. Her health continued to be feeble and she returned to Albemarle in the summer with even greater difficulty than before. Her father sent very detailed instructions: they, must make very short stages, be off at daylight, and stop at ten; they must not go by Edgehill, where Martha’s family were, because they had measles there. So far as we know, they did not pause in the danger zone. Polly and Francis were safe at Monticello when Jefferson arrived. By winter she was strong enough to travel without danger to Washington, the wilderness village whence the federal government was conducted.

The third President lived at the end of a morass called Pennsylvania Avenue, in a box of a house, without porticoes, or wall around its prospective garden, or even plaster on all its ceilings. Here, in the second winter of his administration, he had as passing guests his two daughters, who provided a feminine touch the Executive Mansion sorely needed. The younger of them, averse to society, had been reluctant about coming. He could have assured her that he dispensed simple and unostentatious though generous hospitality, just as he was accustomed to do at home, that precedence was waived, whatever the diplomats might say about it, and that nobody need be embarrassed.

The beautiful Mrs. Eppes, one kindly observer said, was “simplicity, and timidity personified in company,” but when alone with one was of “communicative and winning manners.” Martha Randolph, however, made the better impression. Though rather homely, “a delicate likeness of her father,” she also inherited his conversational gifts and beamed with intelligence and benevolence. Polly did not have the vigor which vivacity requires. Her role had become a negative one. She didn’t want to be any trouble and apologized to her father, who bore the expenses of the trip, for what she termed her extravagance. His admonitions to economy had returned to plague him. With characteristic generosity, he hastened to say that she had not indulged herself as freely in Washington as he had wished and that he himself had suffered from ignorance of the articles that might suit her. It would not have been characteristic of her to tell him.

Meanwhile, both Thomas Mann Randolph and Jack Eppes were elected to Congress. The prospect seemed to Jefferson most alluring. The dreariness of other Washington winters would be relieved by the presence of his daughters. As luck would have it, though, the sisters spent the next winter together in Albemarle, while the three statesmen endured as best they could “the desolate vastness and mean accommodations of the unshaped metropolis.” Other things had to be endured at Edgehill. Martha had another “bantling,” her sixth, and Maria was with her, fearfully awaiting the coming of her third. There she received from her father, who never lost the moralizing habit, the exhortation to be courageous like a soldier. Of her “expected indisposition” he wrote: “Some friend of your mamma’s (I forget whom) used to say it was no more than a jog of the elbow.” Rather uncomprehending in one who had so much reason to know better, though he may have been whistling to keep up courage. Pie at least recognized that it was important to have “scientific aid” in readiness, in case anything uncommon should take place,

In the last January of her life her father wrote her that Congress would probably, rise the second of March (which it did not do), and that Mr. Eppes might reach her sooner. He hoped, though, that she would let them see that she had resources of courage within herself not requiring the presence of anybody. He expected a good deal. About the same time, Maria was writing her husband that she found it hard to bear up against sickness, confinement, and separation from him. “Do not however be uneasy my dearest husband,” she wrote. “The hope that in a week or two . . . I shall be able to give you the intelligence most interesting and most desired makes me support it with patience, to present you when we meet with so sweet an addition to our felicity would more than compensate for allmost any suffering.” She apologized for sending him a letter which would give him so little pleasure, and addressed him as “best beloved of my soul.” Martha Randolph, in an almost lyrical love letter to her father, once told him that not even her marriage could ever deprive him of that primacy which he, who had been to her both father and mother, had so long enjoyed. In Polly’s affections, the President of the United States did not come first.

Jack Eppes, however, was not at Edgehill when her time came. There were no telegrams and one could not go from Washington to Charlottesville in three hours. It took three days. But he did not await the rising of Congress, as his father-in-law had to. She was very ill when he came; he reported she was better; he reported she was worse. At length, on a man-borne litter, she was carried the four miles from Edgehill to Monticello, and there from time to time she was drawn slowly in .a carriage about the lawn. She had not entirely, faded when her father came. Four days after his own sixty-first birthday, when the bloom of mid-April was on the mountainside, he made the entry which closed her simple history. It was less than twenty-six years since he had hopefully recorded her arrival.

To the alienated Abigail Adams, reading the newspapers in Quincy, came poignant memories of a little girl who once clung to her in a foreign land, tearfully protesting against separation from a new-found friend. She did not now, nor ever, quite forgive Jefferson for political offenses, but, as she wrote him, “The powerful feelings of my heart burst through the restraint, and called upon me to shed the tear of sorrow over the departed remains of your beloved and deserving daughter.” Full reconciliation between the third President and his predecessor was to come only after Abigail’s death, which caused Jefferson in turn to send condolences, but in the meantime he found what consolation he could in this spontaneous tribute. Judging from his letter to John Page, he needed it. He wrote his boyhood friend that he had lost the half of all he had, and that his evening prospects hung on the slender thread of a single life.

The infant, also named Maria, whom his second daughter left behind, slipped away after a few years, leaving only Francis as a living link between Polly and her father. Pan-tops, with its hen-house, was sold. Jack Eppes in the course of time remarried and passed from the family scene, leaving Jefferson in undisputed possession of Monticello and all that it contained. There in the hillside burying-ground, the four Jeffersons remain united. The author of the Declaration of Independence did not succeed in molding his second daughter in his own image, and may never have won first place in her heart, but in death he kept her as his own. Polly’s spirit may have flown to Eppington, where her aunt was still waiting to welcome her, but her dust lies at Monticello. There she is, and will ever be, her father’s daughter.

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