Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

collector, slave trader, and planter. John Wayles’s first wife, Martha Eppes, was the daughter of Francis Eppes of the Bermuda Hundred plantation. They had married in 1746. In the autumn of 1748, a daughter named Martha, called Patty, was born. The child lived but the mother did not. John Wayles married twice more, producing four other daughters, three of whom survived.
    Patty Wayles grew up, then, in an uncertain household. She never knew her own mother, and two stepmothers came and went. Her experience with her father’s wives was unhappy enough that she never wanted her own children to face the possibility of having a stepmother. On her deathbed she is said to have extracted a promise from Jefferson never to marry again. From the loss of her mother to the shifting cast of characters in the domestic life of the Forest, Patty learned early that the world was perilous and changeable.
    Her father’s livelihood partly depended on precariousness in the lives of others. As what was called an “agent” for Farrell and Jones, a British merchant house, John Wayles was a debt collector—a detail Jefferson neglected to mention in his description of his father-in-law in his Autobiography . “Mr. Wayles was a lawyer of much practice, to which he was introduced more by his great industry, punctuality and practical readiness, than to eminence in the science of his profession,” Jefferson wrote of his father-in-law. “He was a most agreeable companion, full of pleasantry and good humor, and welcomed in every society.”
    There are notes of both condescension and insecurity in Jefferson’s account of his father-in-law. The assessment of Wayles’s legal career is that of a much more learned lawyer, as Jefferson was. More interesting still is the phrase “welcomed into every society”—why assert a man’s inclusion in social circles unless exclusion was a threat or even an occasional reality? The point accomplishes the opposite of what Jefferson intended, for it raises the question of Wayles’s standing in colonial society.
    That standing was at risk in the circles in which Jefferson moved, for Wayles embodied one of the two worst fears of any planter. If slave insurrections ranked first, being made to pay one’s (usually enormous) debts was a near second. The sight of Wayles coming into view provoked anxiety among the planters, many of whom appear to have taken steps to avoid his collection calls.
    A mocking poem in The Virginia Gazette of Thursday, January 1, 1767, refers to John Wayles as “ill bred.” The context of the remark was a controversial murder trial in Williamsburg. Wayles, who was representing the accused, had been charged with lying in a deposition. That Patty’s father was not a man as established as, say, a Randolph, suggests there was more love than calculation in Jefferson’s decision to take his chances with the man’s daughter.
    Jefferson undertook legal work for Wayles beginning in 1768. Two years before, in November 1766, Patty, who had just turned eighteen, married Bathurst Skelton. She bore him a son, John, a year later. Patty lost her husband in September 1768, and their son, John, died in the summer of 1771.
    The bereaved Mrs. Skelton had returned to the Forest, her father’s house, where, as an attractive widow, she had no want of company. Suitors lurked about, hoping they might succeed the late Mr. Skelton.
    Patty Wayles Skelton was, taken on her own, immensely appealing to a man like Jefferson. He was her elder, but she had seen and experienced much. There would have been little frivolity in her manner. No coquette, she had more in common with Betsy Walker than with Rebecca Burwell. Patty was a woman who had lost her mother, her husband, her son, and who understood what it took to run complex households.
    O ne of the chief complexities of domestic life on Virginia’s plantations—a complexity Patty knew