President Thomas Jefferson and his daughter Martha “Patsy” Jefferson Randolph were two of the most well-traveled people from eighteenth-century Virginia. Patsy herself lived in Charlottesville, VA (and environs), Philadelphia, PA, Washington, DC, and Paris, France. She also visited or spent time in Richmond, VA, Boston, MA, Versailles, France, and southern England. There are numerous historical sites associated with them both, but today I’m going to share several sites most associated with Patsy Jefferson as she appears in my novel, America’s First Daughter, co-authored with Stephanie Dray.
Located in Charlottesville, Virginia, Monticello sits atop Thomas Jefferson’s cherished little mountain, offering vast views of Virginia’s landscape. Thomas and his wife Martha first moved to the mountaintop in 1770. The young family lived in an outbuilding now known as the South Pavilion while he worked on constructing the main part of the house until Martha died from complications of childbirth in 1782. Patsy was just ten.
Deeply grieving his wife’s passing, Jefferson traveled for much of the next decade, including his five-year appointment as Minister to France during which time he took Patsy to move with him. He set up residence at the Hôtel de Langeac, a historic townhouse located at the corner of the Champs-Élysées and Rue de Berri. Though the home no longer exists, the landmark is commemorated with signage today.
While Patsy spent time at Langeac, she also attended a prestigious Catholic convent boarding school for girls called the Panthemont (or Pentemont) Abbey located at the corner of Rue de Grenelle and Rue de Bellechasse. Originally built in the early 1600s with a multi-decade renovation that finished a few years before Patsy’s arrival, it until recently served as the French Ministry of Defense. The interior courtyard served as a place where the girls could receive visitors, and its grandeur survives despite its more utilitarian uses in recent times.
Upon their return to Virginia, Patsy married Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., of Tuckahoe Plantation near Richmond, VA. Built between the 1730s-1740s, Tuckahoe is an H-shaped house with a central passage that connects two mirrored wings. The plantation also has one of the oldest intact plantation streets in Virginia. Thomas Jefferson lived and received his early education at Tuckahoe as his father and the Randolph patriarch were friends and relations. It was at Tuckahoe that Jefferson developed his earliest thinking on the immorality of slavery.
Thomas Mann Randolph, Sr., was a difficult man. After his first wife, Ann Cary Randolph, died in March 1789, he married a 17-year-old girl who promptly set about redecorating to do away with Ann’s influences, causing resentments that led someone to carve Ann’s death date into the window glass in the parlor. All of the newlywed couple’s relationships with Randolph, Sr.’s adult children were strained at best, including with his son Tom, Patsy’s husband. Tom and Patsy even took in several of his siblings to free them from the chaos at Tuckahoe.
The neoclassical house that we know as Monticello today largely dates from the period 1794-1809, with Patsy sometimes living on site to supervise both the work and the plantation itself and other times living in the new capital of Washington City to help as her father’s hostess in what is now known as the White House (then, the President’s Mansion). During one of her sojourns in the city, Patsy became the first woman to give birth in the White House, to a son named James Madison Randolph.
After Thomas retired from the presidency in 1809, he lived at Monticello for the rest of his life and continued his famous tinkering with the house–constantly making updates and renovations, including decorating his front parlor with maps, fossils, statues, and artifacts, some of which had been brought back by Lewis and Clark from their famous expedition.
Estranged from her husband Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., Patsy primarily lived apart from him during those same years, instead serving as the Mistress of Monticello as she had in earlier years when her father was in Washington serving as president. Whereas Jefferson’s first-floor suite of rooms looks out over his gardens and the distant vista, Patsy’s second-floor bedroom had a full view of the sunken plantation street known as Mulberry Row, a physical illustration of the way that she more directly confronted and interacted with the institution of slavery during these years compared to her father.
Her father was a loving grandfather, doting on Patsy’s many children who largely grew up and lived at Monticello. Patsy’s daughters loved to make necklaces using strings of chinaberries from the estate’s trees and to hide away from the plantation’s many guests in the second-floor “cuddy” located off the second-floor’s domed room. The girls set up this unventilated attic space overlooking the West Front lawn as a private sitting room, which is how it remains interpreted to this day.
Patsy worked as hostess to those many guests, finding accommodations for them in one of the house’s bedrooms, arranging dinners in the yellow dining room, and organizing balls in the parlor that overlooked the grand lawn and many gardens that Jefferson cherished and loved to experiment in. Twenty or more people resided in the house during these years, until Thomas Jefferson’s death on July 4, 1826, after which Patsy was forced to sell the house to pay their debts.
Thomas, his wife, Patsy, her husband, and other members of the family are buried in the cemetery at Monticello. Thomas left behind the design for the obelisk and its inscription, which Patsy would’ve seen implemented. Patsy died after both her father and her husband, so it would likely have been her decision to be buried next to her father instead of her husband, the symbolism of which is interesting given the couple’s estrangement.
Today, Monticello is a National Historic Landmark and a UNESCO World Heritage site operated as a house museum and educational institution by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.
A New York Times Bestseller, LAURA KAMOIE has always been fascinated by the people, stories, and physical presence of the past, which led her to a lifetime of historical and archaeological study, training, and teaching. She holds a doctoral degree in early American history from The College of William and Mary, published two non-fiction books on early America, and most recently held the position of Associate Professor of History at the U.S. Naval Academy before transitioning to a full-time career writing fiction.
America’s First Daughter tells the fascinating, untold story of Thomas Jefferson’s eldest daughter, Martha “Patsy” Jefferson Randolph–a woman who kept the secrets of our most enigmatic Founding Father and shaped an American legacy.
