“To intimate the circumstances which you wish him to know”

As I recounted yesterday, in March 1790 Edmund Randolph wrote from Williamsburg, Virginia, to Rep. James Madison (shown here) in New York.

The sad news was that Randolph’s wife Elizabeth appeared to have lost the unborn child she was carrying.

The more dire news was that Randolph wouldn’t be able to come back to New York to resume his job as U.S. attorney general until Elizabeth had passed the fetus and was out of danger—and he wanted Madison to tell that to President George Washington.

On 23 March, Randolph sent Madison his third letter in the space of two weeks: “My dear wife is not better, than when I wrote to you last. I expect something determinate in a few days.”

The mail was unusually slow, so Madison didn’t respond to any of Randolph’s missives until 30 March:

Your favr. of the 15. which requests an immediate acknowledgment, by some irregularity did not come to hand till I had recd. that of the 18, nor till it was too late to comply with the request by the last mail. I have been so unlucky also as to miss seeing the President twice that I have waited on him in order to intimate the circumstances which you wish him to know. I shall continue to repeat my efforts until I shall have an opportunity of executing your commands.

As the end of April approached, Elizabeth Randolph still had the unmoving fetus inside her, and Edmund was feeling even more torn. On 27 April he told Madison:

I have been looking most anxiously for the second communication, which you promised me, as soon as you should have had an interview with the President.

Many times have I endeavoured to break in an easy way to my wife the necessity of my return to N. Y; in order to try her spirits, should I go off. As often has she been thrown into an agitation of real agony.

Prepared as I am, I would have entered upon the journey long ago; and were her indisposition of a common kind, or her situation no more than an usual approach to the increase of our family, I should quit her without hesitation. But she is impressed with a belief, that she cannot escape death, and, altho’ tolerably lively now, would sink, I suspect, into despair, were I to leave her.

What am I to do?

Stay with a wife who’s afraid she’s about to die or hurry back to President Washington? A tough choice for an eighteenth-century American gentleman!

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?