While away in France, Jefferson did not know that Madison was focusing his attention on land speculation nearly as much as he was reading up on the law. His father and two brothers, Ambrose and William, had purchased sixteen thousand acres in Kentucky while James, Jr., was serving in Congress; now the ex-congressman wanted to make up for lost time. It was risky business, he well knew, because in the midst of a fluctuating economy most people borrowed on credit in order to buy land.
His gaze was northward first, westward second. One reason the Mohawk Valley appealed to him was that onetime surveyor George Washington assured him it was a good investment. During 1784–85, in the wake of Lafayette’s tour, Madison made repeated visits to the retired commander at his Mount Vernon estate, and the two graduated from a proper and respectful acquaintance to a warm and affectionate friendship. Accepting Washington’s advice, Madison prepared to take the plunge with his cash-poor friend Monroe. They resolved to buy one thousand acres located between what would soon become the towns of Utica and Rome; but they could not settle their finances in a timely way and subsequently decided to wait until they could travel there together. In mid-1785 Madison let his friend Edmund Randolph in on the scheme, saying that he planned to take up Monroe on his invitation to join him for “a ramble of curiosity.” One thing or another prevented them from carrying out their plan. Later, the two did invest on a very small scale. While Madison remained convinced that Mohawk lands would bring massive profit, in the end he was too cautious to risk any more of his small fortune.45
“Almighty God Hath Created the Mind Free”
In November 1784, after a five-year hiatus, Patrick Henry was once more elected governor, without opposition. In some ways it strengthened him. But given the executive’s limited power under the state constitution, he was in a weakened position when issues he had previously championed were raised again in the House of Delegates. He had recently brought to the floor a bill to strengthen “Teachers of the Christian Religion” through a general tax, unleashing what historian Ralph Ketcham has termed “a torrent of eloquence” to make his case. But without his vocal attention to it, the same bill proved unsustainable in 1785, paving the way for Madison’s reintroduction of its opposite: the bill for religious freedom that Jefferson had drawn up early in the war, nearly a decade past.
Firm in his belief, eager in his resolve, and nonconfrontational in his personal style, Madison authored one of the most vivid and striking position pieces of his long political career. His “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” roused his colleagues to immediate action. It was so strongly worded, in fact, that he told his friends he wanted his name disassociated from it. Although many, as far away as New England, knew that Madison’s hand had penned the “Memorial and Remonstrance,” it was not until after Jefferson’s death in 1826 that he unequivocally admitted his authorship to the grandson of its chief promoter, George Mason. The other prime mover in the effort to disallow state-subsidized religion was George Nicholas, the young legislator previously allied with Patrick Henry who, in 1781, had launched the investigation into Jefferson’s conduct as governor but had since reconciled with both Madison and Jefferson.
The Anglican church in Virginia was weaker now than it had been before the Revolution, in spite of the honest determination of such advocates of establishment as Edmund Pendleton and John Page, the staunch friends of Madison and Jefferson. Richmond itself, the state capital, had only one church in 1784. Madison declared in his “Memorial and Remonstrance” that to make any civil magistrate a judge of religious life was not just “an arrogant pretension” and “an unhallowed perversion” but “a contradiction of the Christian Religion itself,” which “disavows a dependence on the powers of this world.” He argued that religious life had historically “flourished … without the support of human laws,” while “rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty … found an established Clergy convenient auxiliaries” as they formed their ignoble plans. What had religious establishment brought to civilization in past centuries? Madison pressed. His unequivocal answer: “Superstition, bigotry, and persecution.”
Ecclesiastical establishment not only destroyed the purity of religion, he insisted, it also contributed to “pride and indolence” in the favored clergy and stood to “erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the Civil authority.” Establishment lessened the chance that a lawful post-Revolutionary society could sustain “moderation and harmony,” and it threatened America’s image as a sanctuary for the victims of religious oppression abroad. This is vintage Madison. He argued principles and tried to hide his scorn.
Madison successfully contested Henry by showing that a bill in support of any one Christian sect was a violation of the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights, which he himself had helped to draft in his first season as a member of the Virginia Convention. He could now say, with much greater clout than before, what he could only mildly offer in 1776: that religion was not the business of political society, period. A religious establishment covets power. And that cannot be good.46
Madison’s writings were of a piece with Jefferson’s, who wrote incisively in his Notes on Virginia: “Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.”47 The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom passed easily. It would stand as a model for the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and a primary accomplishment of the Madison-Jefferson partnership.
Its long preamble rolls flamboyantly: “Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint …” The statute goes on to assert that “civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than [on] our opinions in physics or geometry”; and it warns against “coercions” and the “impious presumptions” of “fallible and uninspired men.” Its sharpest rebuke comes in the phrasing: “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.” All citizens were free to profess their religious views without these having any effect on their rights or civil capacity. Elated, Madison told Jefferson that Virginia had “extinguished for ever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.” They were alike convinced that the “multiplicity” of religious sects would support the cause of religious liberty in America.48
With this important victory, a majority of the other, less contentious bills that Jefferson composed from 1776 to 1779 were destined to sail through the Virginia Assembly.
“Too Valuable Not to Be Made Known”
What Jefferson termed his “seasoning” in Paris took a good many months. When he was not too sick to go outdoors, he communed with fellow commissioners Franklin and Adams, still on hand, who hoped to conclude treaties of amity and commerce with friendly states in Europe. Franklin, troubled by gout and bladder problems, was always being sought out by his French admirers, which left the senior statesman a modest amount of time for his Virginia associate. In the spring of 1785, entering his eightieth year, Benjamin Franklin sailed home one last time. Jefferson succeeded him as the U.S. minister to France, while Adams accepted appointment as minister to England.
Jefferson had come to speak passable French. He placed Patsy in a well-regarded convent school, apprenticed James Hemings to a French chef, hired a valet, Adrien Petit, and eventually took out a lease on the two-story Hôtel Langeac, located at one corner of the Champs-Élysées. He tried to live well off his meager salary, doing what an eighteenth-century aesthete could scarcely avoid and what Jefferson did most of his life: overspend. His immediate family and the people he legally owned would pay the ultimate price after his death, but for now Jefferson was obliged to live like those in his social circle.
In France, as in America, he was an accomplished host. Livi
ng at the center of a great city, he became an incurable collector of paintings, wines, objects, and curiosities. He commissioned from the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon busts of Washington, Franklin, Lafayette, and himself, all for display at Monticello; plus a large statue of Washington for the statehouse in Richmond.49
Once Lafayette returned to France in 1785, he and Jefferson saw a good deal of each other. Upon his return, however, the marquis delivered a letter that imparted sad news from Virginia: the death of two-year-old Lucy Jefferson, the daughter of Thomas and Patty born a few short months before her mother’s death. She and one of her Chesterfield County, Virginia, cousins had succumbed to the whooping cough. Jefferson would now insist on having his six-year-old daughter Maria join him in Paris, to be reunited with her sister Patsy, who was receiving a superior education at a convent school that catered to the French nobility.
Lafayette and Jefferson became regular companions. The marquis used his influence to help Jefferson advance America’s commercial interests: duties placed on American whale oil were removed, as Jefferson sought to direct more of the trade in tobacco to France that was presently going through English intermediaries. Lafayette wrote glowingly of Jefferson to Marylander James McHenry, his wartime aide: “No better minister could be sent to France. He is every thing that is good, upright, enlightened and clever, and is respected and beloved by every one that knows him.” Jefferson favored Lafayette with one of the first copies of his momentous book, which had been incubating for several years. He brought the manuscript with him to France, where he had put the finishing touches on what was now so much more than the gift (“a dozen or 20 copies to be given to my friends”) that Jefferson first envisioned.50
As a composition modeled on Enlightenment philosophy, Notes on the State of Virginia is one thing on the surface—geography, products of nature, customs and manners of the inhabitants—and quite another as one reads into it: an inquiry into the human condition, an exploration of social policies, a work meant to illuminate. It captures Jefferson’s obsession with detail and marks his desire to pronounce the merits of the part of America that he was proud to call home. His ambition was nothing less than to define the contours of Virginia in cultural and political as well as topographical terms.51
While an encyclopedic work, Notes on Virginia exhibits clear biases. As such, Jefferson first placed the revised and enlarged version in the hands of a small number of liberal European intellectuals whose opinions he wished to shape. It is significant that the only two copies that he sent to the United States went to Madison and Monroe. He asked Madison to judge whether any wider publication would give too much offense to certain Virginia politicians. In Jefferson’s words, “There are sentiments on some subjects which I apprehend might be displeasing to the country perhaps to the assembly or to some who lead it. I do not wish to be exposed to their censure.” This was more than idle concern, just as his request for Madison’s editorial suggestions represented more than good manners. “Answer me soon and without reserve,” Jefferson pleaded. “Do not view me as an author, and attached to what he has written. I am neither.”
In their still-secure cipher, Madison replied that he, in consultation with “several judicious friends,” recognized the risk of placing Jefferson once again in the center of controversy, but he and they considered Notes on Virginia “too valuable not to be made known.” Reverend Madison was even more definitive than his cousin, goading Jefferson: “Such a work should not be kept in private. Let it have ye broad Light of the American Sun.” After receiving his copy of the edition produced in London, Reverend Madison beamed: “Your Notes on Virginia I shall always highly esteem not only on Account of their intrinsic worth, but also, the Hand from which they came … I hope your Notes judiciously distributed among our young Men here, will tend to excite the spirit of philosophical observation amongst us.—Never was there a finer Range for the Exercise of such a Spirit, than this Country presents.”52
Though Jefferson repeatedly called his book “imperfect,” it is emphatically the product of a methodical mind that is equally concerned with natural (physical) phenomena and human agency. When Madison learned from Jefferson of its impending publication in French, he recommended that Jefferson authorize an English-language publication to prevent misinterpretation of its more delicate content. Late in life Jefferson recounted what happened next: a Frenchman to whom he had given an original copy died, and the book came into the hands of a Parisian bookseller, who took it upon himself to translate the Notes from English into French and print it himself. “I never had seen so wretched an attempt at translation,” Jefferson would write in 1821. “Interverted, abridged, mutilated, and often reversing the sense of the original, I found it a blotch of errors from beginning to end.” So he consented to publication in London, hub of the printing trade, accepting that he could not control its circulation.53
While the book is best known today for its unpalatable remarks about racial differences, it was regarded at the time as a celebration of America’s attributes as much as Virginia’s and as a defense of republicanism. Taking up the blessings of an agriculturally based economy, Jefferson offered a mild critique of Virginians’ indolence and extravagance; yet the Virginia of his imagination was indisputably his idealized America, where westward settlement would add power as well as population amid the peaceful exploitation of a naturally rich and promising continent.54
The lists Jefferson compiled show his fascination with cataloging nature. Of rivers, between the Atlantic coast and the Mississippi, he indicates depths and breadth, navigability, rapidity of flow, frequency of floods, and varieties of fish; without apology for his hyperbole, he called the Ohio, which he had never seen, “the most beautiful river on earth.” Of mountains, he was similarly thorough and similarly rapturous in description: “The passage of the Patowmac through the Blue ridge is perhaps one of the most stupendous scenes in nature.” The Natural Bridge, which the young surveyor George Washington had seen at midcentury and Jefferson himself purchased from King George III in 1774, lay eighty miles southwest of Monticello, an impressive earth and limestone arch and “the most sublime of Nature’s works,” according to Jefferson in Notes. He rhapsodized: “It is impossible for the emotions, rising from the sublime, to be felt beyond what they are here.”
As a scientific investigator, Jefferson doubled as a promoter. As part of his celebration of the land, he wanted his readers, men of broad interests, to register what it meant that the United States possessed buried treasure. Reserves of coal, iron, copper, limestone, and marble were abundant in Virginia and the western Alleghenies; there were precious stones to be found as well. Jefferson touted the climate of his own backyard: “I have known frosts so severe as to kill the hickory trees round about Monticello, and yet not injure the tender fruit blossoms then in bloom on the top and higher parts of the mountain.” He had discerned which of Virginia’s medicinal springs were “indubitably efficacious” and which owed their popularity to mere whimsy. Page after page, he named the plants native to Virginia’s vast holdings (those territories that the state still claimed in the early 1780s). He gave both local and Linnaean designations for each, ranging from yellow pine to black birch and from wild cherries to whortleberries.
He applied the rigorous eighteenth-century perspective on the aesthetics of power, an understanding of which brings us a step closer to the psyches of eighteenth-century elite men and women. As the ornamental gardens of English manors showed (on an even larger scale than Jefferson’s Monticello), social authority accrued from the collection of seeds and grafts, and from the cultivation of rare and beautiful plants. The Euro-American aesthete tamed nature by knowing what to expect of it. Nature, as spectacle, was convertible into personal, but also public, power. That was what Jefferson was reaching for in his Notes. He thought of himself as the assembler of a catalog of knowledge. He quietly boasted America’s healthful surroundings and listed the relative sizes and weights of the animals of the Old and New worlds, in order
to contest the assumption made by Europe’s greatest authority, the Count de Buffon, that animals common to both continents were smaller in America.55
In this same vein, Jefferson defended the Native American against Buffon’s claim that the Indian, though not shorter in stature, was “feeble,” with “small organs of generation … and no ardor whatever for his female.” Jefferson wrote at length of the affectionate character, admirable capacity for friendship, and healthy passions of the American Indian. And he famously retold the story of Chief Logan, who on the eve of the Revolution justified his act of vengeance against the whites for murdering his family. The speech of Logan, directed to Lord Dunmore, was, Jefferson asserted, an example of eloquence not excelled by the classical oratory of Demosthenes and Cicero.
History has not forgiven Thomas Jefferson for his comparative treatment of Indians and African Americans in the Notes. Indians, he stated, were ignorant because of their lack of exposure to the word of letters; the climate of America did not hold them back, as Buffon and others had insisted. On the other hand, Jefferson construed that blacks were of diminished capacity, a “blot” on America, whose numbers were growing only because they were well cared for: “Under the mild treatment our slaves experience, and their wholesome, though coarse, food, this blot on our country increases as fast, or faster, than the whites.” While he acknowledged that slavery was a “great political and moral evil,” he could not acknowledge blacks’ potential in any meaningful way.
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