Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham Page B

peace and charity with his neighbors in a world given to passion and conflict? There was no single answer, only the enduring effort to bring clashing elements into harmony—and perhaps the most significant decision a man could make in fighting this lifelong battle was whom to marry. Jefferson needed a woman who shared his passion for music and all that music represented—sophistication, transcendence, and the life of the imagination and the heart, as well as that of flesh and blood. Patty Wayles Skelton was such a woman.
    Jefferson was determined to have her and to give her the best of everything. He was even briefly interested in his own aristocratic heritage in the Old World. “I have what I have been told were the family arms, but on what authority I know not,” Jefferson wrote his English agent, Thomas Adams, on the eve of his wedding. “It is possible there may be none. If so, I would with your assistance become a purchaser, having Sterne’s word for it that a coat of arms may be purchased as cheap as any other coat.” He usually affected an air of indifference about his mother’s ancestry and, with the allusion to the novelist Laurence Sterne’s dismissive remark about heraldry, managed to poke fun at his own request even as he was making it. Yet the inquiry was a sign of curiosity if nothing else.
    Jefferson was more interested in buying his bride larger things. He ordered a clavichord (from Hamburg, he said, “because they are better made there, and much cheaper”), but soon fell in love with a pianoforte that he had to have. He was, he told his British agent, “charmed” by the pianoforte, and he canceled the clavichord request. The pianoforte was the thing, and he wanted it right away. “Let the case be of fine mahogany, solid, not veneered. The compass from Double G. to F. in alt. a plenty of spare strings; and the workmanship of the whole very handsome, and worthy [of] the acceptance of a lady for whom I intend it.” He also needed a half-dozen white silk cotton stockings and a very particular umbrella—“large … with brass ribs covered with green silk, and neatly finished”—but the instrument was crucial. He was, he said, “very impatient” to have it by October. If it made it, it would be just in time for the wedding.
    T homas Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton on New Year’s Day 1772. He was twenty-eight; she was twenty-three.
    It was a winter Wednesday. The Anglican ceremony, conducted by the Reverend William Coutts, was held at her father’s house, and the celebrations ran for several days. (Jefferson paid the clergyman £5 and tipped Elizabeth Hemings—Sally’s mother’s first appearance in his account books.) On January 2, The Virginia Gazette reported the marriage: “ Thomas Jefferson, Esquire, one of the Representatives for Albemarle, to Mrs. Martha Skelton, Relict of Mr. Bathurst Skelton .”
    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. In his bond for a marriage license, dated December 30, 1771, Jefferson mistakenly referred to her as a “spinster.” On the document, another hand crossed it out and inserted “Widow.”
    Her widowhood is more than an incidental detail. Though younger, Patty already knew more of marriage and its consolations and demands than Jefferson did—a fact that may have given her more confidence in herself as she embarked on a new life.
    In the depths of the first weeks of the snowy winter of 1772, Jefferson was a satisfied man. Given his wife’s numerous pregnancies in the following years, there was no shortage of physical passion between them. Their first child, Martha, nicknamed Patsy, was born at one o’clock in the morning of Sunday,