Biography

Wife of Thomas Jefferson. She died only ten years into their marriage. There are no known portraits of Martha Jefferson, and only a few descriptions of her appearance. During her lifetime Martha Jefferson bore seven children, one with her first husband and six with Jefferson. However, only two daughter survived to adulthood. The exact cause of Martha's death is not known. A letter from Jefferson to the Marquis de Chastellux would indicate that she never recovered from the birth of her last child. He wrote ". . .the state of dreadful suspense in which I had been kept all the summer and the catastrophe which closed it," and then adds, "A single event wiped away all my plans and left me a blank which I had not the spirits to fill up." Jefferson buried his wife in the graveyard at Monticello, and as a part of her epitaph added lines in Greek from Homer's The Iliad.