hostess at times, until she died in 1804 during childbirth. Politically attuned Dolley Madison often performed hostess duties for Jefferson. Her husband, James Madison, was then the Secretary of State. Jefferson found that when women attended gatherings at the White House, the conversation would be less contentious and interjected women's viewpoints on government affairs. After the White House Randolph and her children lived primarily at Monticello after Thomas Jefferson's retirement in 1809. While her husband was the governor of Virginia from 1819 to 1822, she continued to live at Monticello. This was done partly to save money. She managed the household activities at the plantation. She had her own room at Monticello where she was generally on her own. Her husband, growingly estranged from his family, visited Monticello occasionally. Concerned about the family's finances and loss of income if her husband served in the military during the War of 1812, Randolph convinced President James Monroe to give him a more lucrative, temporary tax collectorship post. With three of her children—Mary, Cornelia, and Thomas—she edited the first collection of Jefferson's writings for publication. She worked at spreading untrue claims that denied his paternity of the Hemings children and that would put her father in the best light. Randolph devoted much of her life to her father's declining years. She had separated from her husband, who was said to suffer from alcoholism and mental instability. By the summer of 1825, Tom Randolph lived in a small house he owned in North Milton. Debt Randolph dealt with the strain of financial concerns over the debts of her husband, her father-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph Sr., and her father upon their deaths. They became indebted due to declining land values, risky investments, failed crops and needy relatives. As a result, Randolph's daughters were threatened to live a life of sprinsterhood. Thomas Mann Randolph sold the Varina plantation in 1825 to Pleasant Akin or Aiken of Petersburg. Edge Hill plantation, along with its crops, buildings, animals, and slaves, was foreclosed in 1825 and the sale proceeds failed to pay back all the family's creditors. The purchaser at the foreclosure auction, who took possession in January 1826, was Randolph's eldest son, Thomas Jefferson Randolph. Later years and death Jefferson describes Randolph as the "cherished companion of his youth and the nurse of his old age". Shortly before his death, he said that the "last pang of life