Notes for Nicholas Phillip Trist: Manuscripts Department Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
SOUTHERN HISTORICAL COLLECTION
#2104 NICHOLAS PHILIP TRIST PAPERS Inventory
Abstract: Nicholas Philip Trist, student at West Point, 1818-1821; Louisiana planter, 1821-1824; U.S. State Dept. clerk, 1828-1834; consul to Havana, Cuba, 1834-1840; State Dept. chief clerk, 1845-1847; and chief negotiator of treaty ending Mexican War, 184 Trist was also a lawyer and worked as paymaster for the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad Company, and postmaster at Alexandria, Va. He married Virginia Jefferson Randolph (fl. 1818-1875), Thomas Jefferson's granddaughter, in 1824 and lived at Monticello. Other Trist family members were his grandmother, Elizabeth House Trist (d. 1828); his brother, Hore Browse Trist (1802-1856), sugar planter of Lafourche Parish, La.; Virginia's mother, Martha Jefferson Randolph (1772-1836); and Nicholas and Virginia's children, Martha Jefferson Trist Burke (Pattie) of Alexandria, Va.; Thomas Jefferson Trist of Philadelphia, Pa., who was deaf; and Hore Browse Trist, physician of Baltimore, Md., and Washington, D.C. Chiefly family correspondence of the Trist and Randolph families. Especially prominent among the correspondents are Elizabeth Trist and the Randolph women, Martha Jefferson and her daughters and her granddaughter, Martha Jefferson Trist Burke. Most letters relate to family life, but Nicholas Trist's career as a West Point cadet; the functioning of the family plantations in Lafourche Parish, La.; the education of the Trist children, including that of Jefferson, who attended the Philadelphia Institute for the Deaf and Dumb, and Nicholas's various professional activities are covered to varying degrees. Also included are letters between Virginia's sister Cornelia and her literary agent, Thomas Bulfinch (1796-1867). Correspondence also documents life in the various locations where the Trists lived: from 1765 to 1828 in Louisiana and Charlottesville, Va., including Nicholas and Virginia's early married life at Monticello; from 1828 to 1833 in Washington, D.C.; from 1834 to 1845 in Havana, Cuba; and, in later years, in New York, Philadelphia, and Alexandria, Va. Online Catalog Terms: Agriculture--Louisiana--History--19th century. Alexandria (Va.)--Social life and customs--19th century. Bulfinch, Thomas, 1796-1867. Burke, Martha Jefferson Trist. Charlottesville (Va.)--Social life and customs--19th century. Deaf--Education--History--19th century. Family--Virginia--Social life and customs--19th century. Havana (Cuba)--Social life and customs--History--19th century. Jefferson, Thomas, 1743-1826. Lafourche Parish (La.)--Social life and customs--19th century. Monticello (Va.). New York (New York)--Social life and customs--19th century. Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad Company. Philadelphia Institute for the Deaf and Dumb. Philadelphia (Pa.)--Social life and customs--19th century. Plantations--Louisiana--Lafourche Parish. Randolph, Cornelia, fl. 1860s. Randolph, Martha Jefferson, 1772-1836. Randolph family. Trist, Elizabeth House, d. 1828. Trist, Hore Browse, 1802-1856. Trist, Nicholas Philip, 1800-1874. Trist, Virginia Jefferson Randolph, 1818-1875. Trist family. United States Military Academy--Students--History--19th century. United States--Diplomatic and consular service--Cuba. United States--History--War with Mexico, 1845-1848. United States. Dept. of State--Officials and employees-- History--19th century. Washington (D.C.)--Social life and customs--19th century. Women--Virginia--Social conditions--19th century. Women authors--Virginia--History--19th century.
Biographical Note
Thomas Jefferson became acquainted with the Trist family during the Continental Congress in Philadelphia while boarding at the home of Mary House. Her daughter, Elizabeth Trist, assumed the role of a surrogate mother to Jefferson's daughter Martha on their visits to Philadelphia. After the death of Elizabeth Trist's husband, she and her son, Hore Browse Trist, moved to Charlottesville, Va. There he practiced law and married Mary Brown. Nicholas Philip Trist was born in Charlottesville in 1800. In 1802, Jefferson appointed Hore Browse Trist to be customs collector at Natchez in the Louisiana territory. Mary Brown Trist remained in Charlottesville with her young sons Nicholas and Hore Browse while their father moved to the Louisiana territory to assume his post and establish a plantation. The Trists were reunited early in 1803, but Hore Browse died of yellow fever a few months later. Mary Brown Trist remarried two more times. Her second husband, Philip Livingston Jones, was a prominent lawyer from New Orleans who enrolled Nicholas and his brother in school there. When Nicholas was about ten years old, Jones died and his mother married a wealthy cotton and sugar planter named Tournillon. Nicholas graduated from the College of Orleans in 1817, and, at the invitation of Thomas Jefferson, moved to Monticello to study law. There he became reacquainted with Jefferson's daughter Martha, who had married Thomas Mann Randolph. Nicholas fell in love with the Randolphs' daughter, Virginia Jefferson Randolph, and, at the age of eighteen, he proposed marriage. The family urged him to postpone the marriage because of his youth and financial instability. Nicholas entered West Point in 1818, but chafed at the military lifestyle. In 1821, he left West Point and returned to Louisiana to earn enough money to marry. He helped his brother Hore Browse manage the family plantation and resumed his law studies. From Louisiana, Nicholas continued his courtship of Virginia Randolph, who refused to leave her home in Virginia. Nicholas finally returned to Monticello in 1824 to marry her and finish his studies with Jefferson. During this time, he worked closely with the aging statesman, who appointed Nicholas an executor of his estate. When Thomas Jefferson died, Nicholas Trist found himself in charge of a heavily indebted Monticello and was forced to sell the estate piecemeal. In 1828, Henry Clay offered Nicholas a clerkship in the State Department to relieve the financial difficulties of Jefferson's daughter, the recently widowed Martha Jefferson Randolph, who was dependent on Nicholas for support. Nicholas worked in the State Department from 1828 to 1833. The Trist household in Washington included the three Trist children--Martha Jefferson (Pattie); Thomas Jefferson (Jefferson), who was deaf; and Hore Browse (Browse)--as well as Martha Jefferson Randolph, whose unmarried daughters, Mary and Cornelia, paid extended visits. In 1834, the family was separated when Nicholas moved to Havana, Cuba, to begin his duties as Consul. Virginia spent the first two years of her husband's tenure at Edgehill in Albemarle County, Va. Jefferson Trist was enrolled in the Philadelphia Institute for the Deaf and Dumb. Martha Randolph died in 1837, soon after her daughter moved to Cuba. From 1839 to 1841, while Nicholas continued his work in Cuba, Virginia took Pattie and Browse to school in France. Trist was removed from office by the Whigs in 1840, but the family decided to make their home in Havana, where they stayed until 1845, living on a small farm overlooking the harbor, taking in boarders, and receiving a small income from Hore Browse Trist, who managed the family sugar plantation in Louisiana. In 1845, Nicholas returned to Washington to work in the Polk administration as chief clerk of the State Department under James Buchanan. It was in this role that, in 1847, he received the fateful commission to negotiate the treaty to end the war with Mexico. During that mission, Nicholas defied a presidential recall, thereby ending his political career and condemning the Trists to a nomadic, debt-ridden life. After 1848, Nicholas worked as an attorney in the firm of Fowler & Wells in New York City and made several unsuccessful business investments. The family achieved a semblance of stability when they moved to Philadelphia in 1854. Nicholas went to work for the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad Company, and Virginia contributed to the family income by taking in boarders and attempting to open a school for girls. During the Civil War, the Trists were Unionists, although they maintained ties with Randolph relatives who served the Confederacy, and Browse worked briefly as a surgeon in the Confederate army. After the war, Browse became a doctor in Washington, D.C. In 1870, Nicholas received an appointment as postmaster at Alexandria, Va., where his daughter Pattie lived with her husband John Burke and their children. This appointment helped to relieve the desperate financial conditions Nicholas and Virginia had long endured and seemed to Trist a kind of vindication of his actions in Mexico. Nicholas died in 1874.
There are three major streams of correspondence for this period: early Randolph family correspondence, including letters from Governor Thomas Mann Randolph at Tuckahoe and members of the family living at Monticello; letters of Elizabeth Trist, Nicholas's grandmother, to various family members including Thomas Jefferson; and Louisiana correspondence from Nicholas's parents Hore Browse and Mary Brown Trist. Randolph family letters contain a variety of information about life at Monticello and in Charlottesville, Va. The Elizabeth Trist letters show her as a powerful force in the family. In addition to dispensing frequent advice to Randolph and Trist kin, she wrote several times to Thomas Jefferson during his presidency, offering political advice and requesting political favors. Her influence is further attested to by the letters of introduction she wrote during this period for various people. Nicholas's father, Hore Browse Trist, spent several months in England during 1796 apparently visiting kin and conducting business. Trist seems to have owned a dry goods store in Virginia, but, in 1802, he moved from Charlottesville to Louisiana. He bought a plantation near Natchez in Adams Parish and was appointed "Collector of the Mississippi District and Inspector of the Revenue of Port Adams." From Louisiana, Hore Browse Trist wrote frequently to his family in Virginia, where they remained until he could afford to move them west. His letters home are full of political opinion and reveal his strong anti-Federalist position. He died in 1804, but the Louisiana correspondence continues from Nicholas Trist at school in New Orleans and grandmother Elizabeth, who had moved to Louisiana. Her letters from 1811 reveal her efforts to clear title to the Trist plantation near Natchez. There is little information about Mary Brown Trist's second marriage to Philip Livingston Jones, a prominent New Orleans lawyer. However, many letters (some written in French) document her third marriage to a sugar planter named Tournillon, who owned a plantation near Donaldsonville in Lafourche Parish, La. In 1817, letters show that Nicholas returned to Charlottesville, Va., and fell in love with Virginia Jefferson Randolph, Thomas Jefferson's granddaughter. At the age of eighteen, he expressed his intention to marry her, but the family thought him too young and impecunious to seal the bond. Nicholas entered West Point in 1818.
Letters documenting Nicholas Trist's education at West Point, his courtship of Virginia Jefferson Randolph, and his early married years. Letters exchanged between Nicholas and his relatives reveal anxiety over the conflict between cadets and faculty at West Point. According to her letter dated 2 January 1819, Elizabeth Trist, once again in Virginia, worried that her grandson might even be expelled. In May 1821, Trist assured Thomas Mann Randolph that he was more interested in a legal career than in a military commission. Trist also received letters from his mother and step-father (in French), documenting the financial straits of the family still in Louisiana. Also in Louisiana, Hore Browse Trist began what became a lifelong correspondence with his brother. Virginia Randolph appears as a recipient of correspondence rather than a correspondent herself during this period. She received scattered letters from Randolph kin at Monticello, Charlottesville, and the Randolph plantation, Edgehill. There are no letters here Virginia to Nicholas during this period, but there is much correspondence between her suitor and her mother. On 9 July 1821, Nicholas again requested Virginia's hand in marriage. The family, including Virginia, seems to have been reluctant because of his financial difficulties and her desire to stay in Albemarle rather than move to Louisiana. The Randolphs had financial worries of their own, as shown in letters that discuss selling Monticello. In 1822, Nicholas returned to Louisiana with the idea of making enough money to marry Virginia. His letters to her reveal the difficulties he and his brother experienced in their attempt to make the family plantation at Donaldsonville, in Lafourche Parish, profitable. In 1823, correspondence chiefly concerns Nicholas's unsuccessful attempts to sell the plantation in order to return to Virginia. Finally, in 1824, Nicholas left the plantation under his brother's management and returned to Monticello to marry Virginia. They lived at Monticello for the first few years of their marriage. Letters from Hore Browse Trist continue to document activities in Louisiana at the family sugar plantation.
There are three major streams of correspondence during this time period: letters of Nicholas and Virginia Randolph Trist; letters of Nicholas and his brother, Hore Browse Trist, in Louisiana; and letters of Virginia and her Randolph relatives. The latter chiefly involves Virginia's mother, Martha Jefferson Randolph, who, after the family sold Monticello, lived for most of the year in Boston with the Coolidges, family of her married daughter, Ellen, who was also a significant family correspondent, and Virginia's sister Cornelia, who often lived with the Trists. The voluminous correspondence of Elizabeth Trist ended with her death in 1828. At the beginning of 1828, letters show that Nicholas was managing the Randolph farming interests in Virginia and studying law in hopes of becoming a professor. He even bought an interest in the Charlottesville Press. However, his life took an unexpected turn before the year was out, when Nicholas moved to Washington to work for the U.S. State Department. Virginia remained at Edgehill, the Randolph family plantation in Albemarle County, Va. Detailed correspondence between them documents the birth of their second child and Nicholas's life in the boarding houses of Washington, D.C. During this period, the Trists had three children: Thomas Jefferson (Jefferson), who was deaf; Martha Jefferson (Pattie), and Hore Browse (Browse). Virginia and the children joined Nicholas in Washington in 1829. Her letters home to the Randolphs document the family's life in the capital. Although Nicholas's duties in the State Department required him to work closely with President Andrew Jackson, correspondence contains only fleeting references to his official duties. Instead, Trist and Randolph correspondents wrote long, detailed letters ranging through a wide variety of topics including health (for example, Nicholas took his daughter to Philadelphia in July 1830 to have her tonsils removed and described the procedure in a letter to Virginia), opinions of various cultural events, reading habits, social routines, scenes of the capital (including a detailed floor plan of the Trist residence near the White House, 8 May 1829), and other topics of family interest. In 1833, Nicholas was appointed consul to Havana and the family made plans to move to Cuba. Letters relating to the life of the Trist family in Cuba and the early education of the Trist children. The Trists enrolled Jefferson in the Philadelphia Institute for the Deaf and Dumb, and family correspondence shows that Virginia, Pattie, and Browse lived at Edgehill for the first two years of Nicholas's tenure as U.S. consul in Havana. They joined him in Cuba in 1836. In March 1839, Virginia took Pattie and Browse to school in France. They stayed until 1841, and extensive correspondence to Nicholas documents their activities. Scattered correspondence from Philadelphia also documents Jefferson's progress. In 1841, the Whigs removed Nicholas from office, but the family continued to live in Cuba until 1845. According to family letters, they bought a farm on a hill overlooking Havana harbor. By mid-1845, the political winds had shifted, and Nicholas returned to Washington to work for the State Department. Virginia joined him after a visit to Edgehill and a shopping spree in New York to establish her new household in the capital. Also included in correspondence from this period are letters from Hore Browse Trist containing much information about the family sugar plantation in Louisiana and letters from Randolphs in Virginia and Coolidges in Boston, chiefly about family matters.
Chiefly letters documenting a nomadic period in the life of the Trist family. Soon after returning to Washington, Nicholas was commissioned by the Treasury Department to conclude a peace treaty with Mexico. Except for instructions from the Treasury Department and a letter of introduction from the Secretary of State James Buchanan, there is little information about his official activities; there are no letters written from Mexico in this collection. However, letters of sympathy to the family demonstrate support for Nicholas's unauthorized actions that not only succeeded in ending hostilities, but also ended Nicholas's political career. He returned from Mexico in the spring of 1848. With the loss of his government position, family finances deteriorated dramatically. Letters reveal that family members were often separated from each other, living at various times in Pennsylvania or New York. Scattered business correspondence documents Nicholas's investment in risky projects, such as the Maryland Mining Company in 1848 and a washing machine business in England in the early 1850s. These ventures further undermined the financial stability of the family. Nicholas was also an apparently unsuccessful as an attorney with the firm of Fowler & Wells of New York City. Correspondence during this period is chiefly between daughter Pattie and her parents and friends. Nicholas's letters show his attempts to help his children make an independent income. On 19 May 1849, he wrote a long letter to Major General Winfield Scott requesting a clerkship for Jefferson and describing his deaf son's training as an artist. At the same time Nicholas declared to Scott his own intention never to hold public office again. Jefferson's letters show that, instead of a Washington appointment, he was apprenticed to an artist named Cropsey and worked at the Philadelphia Institute for the Deaf and Dumb. Nicholas also assisted his brother, Hore Browse, in Louisiana in his attempts to educate his sons. In 1850, the Trists moved to New York and Browse matriculated at the University of Virginia. The Trist's reestablished their connections to England when Nicholas visited his Pendarves cousins in Cornwall. In 1853, Virginia and Pattie wrote often from Bowden plantation in Louisiana where they lived much of the year. Family correspondence in this period includes a letter in which Virginia diagrammed four floors of their house in New York, 3 March 1850; one from Virginia in New York voicing her opinion of a lecture by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 17 January 1852; and a letter from Nicholas about a pamphlet entitled "Woman and Her Wishes" that he had previously sent to female relatives, 5 November 1853. In the latter, Nicholas declared, "I am most decidedly a Woman's Rights man... ." Nicholas's failure to provide for the family and the family's mounting debt compelled Virginia to take matters into her own hands. In 1854, she moved permanently to Philadelphia and opened a boarding school for girls. She wrote on 14 July of the family's desperate financial situation, having only a small income from Bowdon, the Trist plantation in Louisiana. "Our means were gradually melting away, and I thought while we yet had something left it was better to enter upon some plan of supporting ourselves. The school seemed to me the best, and that which pleased my friends most." Nicholas found work as a clerk at the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad Company.
Chiefly letters to Pattie Trist documenting Virginia Trist's attempts to establish a boarding school for girls in Philadelphia, the continuing economic decline of the family, and the young adult lives of the Trist children. Virginia wrote to her daughter often of the difficulties related to opening a boarding school, especially such problems as advertising and housekeeping. At the same time, Nicholas wrote of the hopeless indebtedness of the family; in a 11 November 1856 letter to William B. Randolph (Beverly), Nicholas declared that the family was in debt for "all of the common necessaries of life," including coal, bread, and "everything that we consume." Apparently, the difficulties of opening a school combined with the family debt compelled the Trists to take in boarders. Letters from the Trist children indicate that Pattie had married John W. Burke and moved to Alexandria, Va., by 1859. Before settling in Alexandria, Pattie visited Bowden Plantation in Louisiana and reported to her father the death of his brother, Hore Browse Trist, in November 1856. Son Browse earned a medical degree from Jefferson Medical College in March 1857 and joined the Navy, writing many letters from Latin American ports about the local culture and his experiences on the sea. Nicholas's letters to William B. Randolph, a clerk in the Treasury Department in Washington, indicate continuing attempts to secure a clerkship for Jefferson, and contain accounts of various disastrous business investments that Nicholas had made on Randolph's advice. Letters also document Nicholas's partnership with Thomas Briggs Smith, inventor of a new kind of rail for railroads. Nicholas eventually became paymaster of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad Company. Also of note during this period are several long letters that Virginia wrote defending her husband's actions during his mission to Mexico in 1847. Correspondence about family matters continued from Ellen Coolidge in Boston and from Cornelia, who sometimes lived at Edgehill. Family letters contain little discussion of events leading up to the Civil War. Letters documenting family life and the home front during the Civil War. With the exception of the Battles of Bull Run (21 July 1861) and Gettysburg (July 1863), there is little direct reference to the war or to sectional animosities. Letters contain detailed information about the Trist family, their social life, domestic concerns, personal health, and financial difficulties. The majority of the letters were written by the women of the family--Virginia, Cornelia, Ellen, and Pattie. According to family correspondence, Browse married a Miss Waring of Savannah, Ga., in the spring of 1861 and moved with his wife to that state. He briefly enlisted in the Confederate army as a surgeon, but soon resigned his commission. There is no correspondence from him during the remainder of the war. Other members of the immediate Trist family were unionists, though many of their Virginia relations sympathized with the South. There appears to have been a tacit agreement not to discuss the divisive politics of the period in correspondence. Included are descriptions of the northern homefront during the war. Letters were regularly exchanged between Philadelphia, Alexandria, Virginia, Boston, and, occasionally, New York. In addition to the usual family news, correspondents often commented on the economic well-being of their communities, the effects of the war, and the general mood of the times. Letters show that Cornelia translated and, in 1861, published Parlour Gardens, a book about house plants. Thomas Bulfinch (1796-1867) served as her agent in this venture. The work was modestly successful. Cornelia also wrote several short stories and sought advice on their publication from Bulfinch and author Anne Brewster.
Chief correspondents during this period include Virginia Trist, Pattie Trist Burke (who signed her letters M. J. Burke), Cornelia Randolph, Nicholas Trist, and, occasionally, Browse Trist and Pattie's husband, John Burke. Correspondence shows that Nicholas's job as paymaster of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad Company required a great deal of travel. Letters from Pattie in Alexandria, Va., to her parents in Philadelphia contain comments on the growth of the Burke family, Pattie's onerous housekeeping duties, and her complaints about servants. Pattie employed Irish servants when possible, and her letters reveal dramatic changes in racial relationships brought about by the end of slavery. Indeed, the effects of Reconstruction in Alexandria are interpreted primarily through Pattie's letters. For example, on 21 February 1868, she wrote, "There are an immense number of idlers supported by the [Freedman's] 'bureau.' I think it a bad institution unless this abuse of it could be obviated." During this period Browse started a medical practice in Washington, D.C. His brief letters to family members suggest some of the difficulties he encountered and the time-consuming nature of his profession. Correspondence between Cornelia and Thomas Bulfinch continues through about 1866. Family letters also continue to defend Nicholas Trist's activities in Mexico in 1847. Of particular interest during this period, is correspondence between Nicholas and James Cloke documenting Nicholas's investment in a cattle ranch in Illinois that was managed by Cloke. In 1869, Nicholas turned 69 and wrote to his children of his desire to relocate Cloke and his cattle operation to Florida. Concerns about his own and Virginia's health also prompted him to suggest they might move. By the end of the year, Nicholas and Virginia had moved to Alexandria.
Chief correspondents for this period include Browse in Washington and Baltimore and Jefferson Trist in Philadelphia. Jefferson, who was an infrequent correspondent while his parents lived in Philadelphia, wrote many letters to them in Alexandria about his activities in Philadelphia and yearly vacations in Bar Harbor, Me. His wife, Ellen, experienced some kind of mental disease and, by 1873, Jefferson was living again at the Deaf and Dumb Institute in Philadelphia. Browse also had marital trouble during this period when his wife went blind in 1870, possibly because of a brain tumor. There are letters of Virginia and Nicholas when they visited Rawley Springs in the Virginia mountains near Harrisonburg in 1870 and when Virginia briefly visited Philadelphia and Edgehill in 1872. Nicholas died in 1874. Thereafter, letters are chiefly to Virginia from Jefferson and Browse. Also among the correspondents during this period are Ellen Coolidge, Mary Randolph (Virginia's sister at Edgehill), and a cousin, Alice Mickleham. In 1884, Pattie's cousin, H. B. Trist, wrote from New Orleans about his attempts to reconstruct the family genealogy. (See Subseries 2.3 for information he apparently collected between 1884 and 1903).
Financial and legal papers of Nicholas Trist and members of his family from 1784 to 1882. Included are accounts and legal papers pertaining to the administration of the Trist plantations in Louisiana; bills, receipts, and promissory notes (including many in Spanish and some in French) dating from Nicholas's years as consul to Cuba; and other items chiefly concerning Trist's business and personal finances. (Note that although most items relating to the Louisiana plantations are in folder 272, some items in folders 274-278 may also relate to these plantations.) Also included are the wills of Nicholas and Virginia Trist, which were written in Cuba; the will of Nicholas's grandfather, Nicholas Trist, written in Louisiana in 1784; and Nicholas's diplomatic commission to negotiate terms for peace with Mexico in 1847. A marital agreement of 1824 shows that Nicholas and Virginia were entitled to one fourth of the profits from the Louisiana plantations.
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Manuscripts Department Library of the University of North Carolina
More About Nicholas Phillip Trist and Virginia Jefferson Randolph: Marriage: 11 Sep 1824, Monticello, Virginia, America.
Children of Nicholas Phillip Trist and Virginia Jefferson Randolph are:
Thomas Jefferson Trist, b. 13 Nov 1828, Monticello, AlbermarleCounty, Virginia, America31, d. 26 Apr 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, America31.
Nicholas Phillip Trist (b. 02 Jun 1800, d. 1874)
Notes for Nicholas Phillip Trist: