05/? historical otps ✧ martha & thomas jefferson Thomas Jefferson → Stephen DillaneMart
05/? historical otps ✧ martha & thomas jefferson Thomas Jefferson → Stephen DillaneMartha Jefferson → Maria Bonnevie Martha and Thomas met in 1768. The courtship will last 3 years, just after the death of her first husband. They married in 1772. Throughout their almost eleven-year marriage, the Jeffersons had been deeply devoted to each other, sharing common passion for music, literature and a mutual suport. On 1782, Ms. Jefferson’s health took a turn to the worse, and Martha died on September 6. Thomas was so distraught, he did not remarry and remained a widower for the rest of his life, as he promised to his wife. He was inconsolable and “was led from the room almost in a state of insensibility by his sister Mrs. Carr, who, with great difficulty, got him into his library where he fainted, and remained so long insensible that they feared he would never revive.” After the funeral, he withdrew to his room for three weeks. Afterward he spent hours riding horseback alone around Monticello. His daughter wrote, “In those melancholy rambles I was his constant companion, a solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief.” Not until mid-October did Jefferson begin to resume a normal life when he wrote, “emerging from that stupor of mind which had rendered me as dead to the world as was she whose loss occasioned it.(…)All my plans of comfort and happiness were reversed by a single event…” He carried a folded piece of paper with her handwriting with him the rest of his life along with a lock of her hair. -- source link
#thomas jefferson#stephen dillane#martha jefferson#maria bonnevie#history#stannisbaratheon#18th century