For Jefferson, white faces varied in appealing ways. Was their natural expressivenesss, he posed, not “preferable to that eternal monotony which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?” The delicacy of description—this “immoveable veil” of the “other” race—made use of the vocabulary of sensibility through the imagery of light versus darkness, in order to suggest the alien character of the African without making Jefferson sound entirely devoid of compassion.
Claiming that the African was outwardly unappealing, he added “scientific” observations revealing of essential deficiencies. He felt that blacks’ inelegance and lack of reasoning ability were natural traits rather than the result of their oppression; this made them incapable of genuine love, which Jefferson defined, in the spirit of his times, as “a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation.” Accepting that blacks equaled whites in memory, or “recollection,” he still did not consider them to be as educable as Indians. “Their griefs are transient,” he insisted; “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” In this way, he placed in opposition the African’s depressing dreariness and the Indian’s cleverness, artistry, and imaginative speechmaking.
For Jefferson, the African lacked a poetic consciousness. If his lovemaking was a matter of ardent impulse only, and enlightened emotions no part of his makeup, then banal communication was all the African could ever know. Wrote Jefferson, with an appalling provincialism: “Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration.” He concluded that, when freed, all slaves must be returned to Africa or recolonized elsewhere, “beyond the reach of mixture,” where, he assumed, they could be coaxed into remaining allies of the United States—albeit distant allies.
Jefferson’s was a peculiar calculus of race, reflecting a unique combination of “enlightened” science and “enlightened” sensibility. How he constructed his argument was unusual—his racism was not. Even Madison did not think to rein in Jefferson when he floated preliminary ideas about racial difference that were bound to stir up political passions later. In fact, at this moment, Jefferson was more intent on speaking his mind about religion and power than about race and power. He expected to anger conservative forces by insisting on the rights of conscience in his merciless appraisal of state-sponsored religion. As for race, he did not fear northern mockery of his assumptions any more than he feared an angry African-American reaction to his language; but he anticipated that he would be alienating many in the South for bringing up emancipation at all. In the 1780s few northern whites would have taken offense at what Jefferson imagined as scientifically based conclusions. But he knew that his fellow southerners would react harshly to his recognition of the “ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained,” unenumerated but undeniable wounds that Jefferson deemed likely to “produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” In his later section on the manners of the American people, he returned to the issue and unabashedly stated that the institution of slavery had so poisoned America that it stood as “unremitting despotism” at odds with republicanism. White children, “nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny,” learned by “odious” example to ignore the humanity of the slave. Indeed, he pondered in this regard, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”56
John Adams notably called Jefferson’s observations on slavery “gems,” without discriminating between those that appealed for eventual emancipation and those that belittled the natural capacities of African Americans. Adams himself, in defending the British troops accused of murder in the 1770 Boston Massacre, had focused on the part-black, part-Indian provocateur Crispus Attucks, one of the dead, “whose very looks,” Adams claimed, “was enough to terrify any person.” To make his case, he said that the others who faced down the redcoats included “saucy boys, negroes and molottoes.” New Englanders had little sympathy for the disadvantaged African American, felt science had yet to clarify the nature of racial difference, and exhibited no particular discomfort with most racial stereotypes.57
By modern standards, or even mid-nineteenth-century standards, Madison and Jefferson did not do nearly enough to relieve suffering and extend rights—certainly not if we compare their dynamic efforts as critics of organized religion, a cause they prioritized. Jefferson could easily have downplayed the problem of race in his native state, but instead he addressed it head-on. He ventured his opinions as one of a distinct community. It would be some time before a significant number of his fellow citizens found his opinions troubling.
In debating with himself and relying on Madison’s counsel, Jefferson probably would have preferred to leave his name off the title page of his Notes. Even if he had, and removed first-person references in the text, certain passages would instantly have given away the book’s authorship. Yet in his approach to the work, Jefferson was trying to signal that he was interested in promoting himself as a thinker only. Like any author, he wanted a certain amount of exposure, but he was not concerned with financial profit—only with reaffirming his status as a Virginia gentleman whose mind was comprehensive and whose purpose was to be useful to society.58
“The Present Paroxysm of Our Affairs”
At the end of the year 1785, Madison wondered whether significant agreement among the states was still possible. The wartime consensus had receded, and the voices of his strongest allies were hushed. George Mason wrote from Gunston Hall that he was suffering “Fits of the Convulsive Cholic.” George Washington was supportive of Madison’s efforts in the Virginia Assembly but impatient with the provincialism prevailing in that body: “We are either a United people or we are not,” he fulminated. “If the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation … If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending it.” The subject at hand was commercial policy. Madison too feared for the health of the confederacy, given the “caprice, jealousy, and diversity of opinions” that abounded, plus Virginia’s “illiberal animosities … towards the Northern States.” He was uncertain what to expect from other states, but did not hesitate in condemning Virginia’s immobility either.59
Also at the end of 1785, the District of Kentucky announced its aim to separate peacefully from its parent Virginia. It would become the first state west of the Appalachian Mountains. Its leaders determined to set up a number of constituent counties, including one called Fayette, after the marquis, where the town of Lexington lies; one called Madison, where Daniel Boone built his fort in 1775; and one called Jefferson, in which Louisville, the town founded in 1778 by George Rogers Clark, is situated. These names and associations, all precious to Virginia, were now to be associated with a new sovereign state. But much work remained to be done to advance the union of the states.60
“Everything is quiet in Europe,” Jefferson wrote Madison early in 1786. It would be an entirely different picture three years later, of course, when he would be witness to the noisy beginnings of an increasingly bloody and turbulent revolution in France. He was becoming progressively more comfortable in Paris, though he was unimpressed with King Louis XVI and the ceremonies he attended at Versailles. Among the many social opportunities he enjoyed, none surpassed his visits to the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, the intellectually gifted humanitarian whose neighbors and tenants alike appreciated his reformist ways; nor did the duke seem to be concerned by the attentions that Jefferson’s secretary, William Short, paid to his second wife, the blue-eyed Rosalie. The duke was fifty-four and she twenty-four, theirs an expedient, rather than romantic, mariage de convenance. Short, at twenty-seven, was beloved. Everyone seemed happy.61
As spring neared, Jefferson traveled to London, where he rejoined John and Abigail Adams. He was presented to, and disdainfully treated by, the same King George III whose tyrannical ways he had censured so unsparingly in the Declaration of Independence ten years earlier. If Adams-J
efferson diplomacy had no appreciable effect on the British, whose anti-Americanism flowed liberally from the royal court, Jefferson profited from his weeks in England in other ways. He became quite chummy with Mrs. Adams, visited exquisite gardens that he never forgot, and attended a series of plays and operas. His account books show that he did a fair amount of shopping.
Later, Jefferson gave Madison a blunt (encoded) reappraisal of the man he called “my friend Mr. Adams.” For reasons that seem a bit disingenuous, he reminded Madison that he had been blind to Adams’s shortcomings before Madison and Edmund Randolph jointly persuaded him of the New Englander’s vanity. As a consequence, the self-appointed investigator Jefferson had felt it incumbent to look more closely at a man he continued to call “disinterested,” “profound,” and “amiable.” Time, he now told Madison, had confirmed Adams to be “vain, irritable, and a bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men.” He was a good judge of most things, reported Jefferson, but a bad judge “where knowledge of the world is necessary.” This stinging evaluation suggests that he had sized up Adams as a man who sifted through learned treatises with deftness and decision but had no patience with, or was oblivious to, anything that required an understanding of personality or culture. In other words, he was likable but thick. In the same paragraph, Jefferson outlined the idiosyncrasies of other “public characters” Madison might want to know about, and he updated his opinion on the zealous and “efficacious” Marquis de Lafayette: “His foible is a canine appetite for popularity and fame. But he will get above this.”62
While Jefferson was accepting the Adamses’ hospitality, Madison and Monroe were growing closer too, though there was one piece of crucial intelligence Monroe chose to hide until the last minute: in February 1786 he married a New York merchant’s daughter, Elizabeth Kortright, but he only intimated the event to Madison a few days before he tied the knot, saying nothing more than “I will present you to a young lady who will be adopted a citizen of Virga.”
Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, fellow Princetonian, Revolutionary general, and new member of Congress, reopened a correspondence with Madison by frivolously labeling Monroe a “Benedict,” by which he meant the traitor Arnold. The quip from Lee was a reference to the newly wedded legislator’s betrayal of the fraternity of single men. Monroe was six years Madison’s and five years Lee’s junior and was therefore, by his comic calculation, acting out of turn. Madison read of Monroe’s nuptial in the newspaper and duly congratulated his friend on his “inauguration into the mysteries of Wedlock.” William Grayson, another of Virginia’s representatives in Congress and an old friend of Washington’s, supplied Madison with a longer list of congressmen who had recently married, describing the trend coarsely as “a conjunction copulative.” He prodded Madison: “I heartily wish you were here: as I have a great desire to see you figure in the character of a married man.”63
As Jefferson roamed the streets of London, Madison wrote from Orange, telling his unofficial overseas agent how much he appreciated his many book purchases—“the literary cargo for which I am so much indebted to your friendship.” In the same letter, he informed Jefferson about an upcoming convention of the states in Annapolis, designed as a “remedial experiment” to put the shaky national economy on surer footing. He anticipated that the addition of western states to the Confederation would make unanimity even less likely than it already was, reducing the amount of legislation that would pass Congress. Westerners, Madison said, possessed “sentiments and interests” that were not “congenial” with those of the Atlantic states. “I almost despair of success,” he sighed. He conveyed the same apprehension to Lafayette, unsure whether the branches of the Mississippi would spawn “so many distinct Societies, or only an expansion of the same Society.” So as Madison pondered the future in 1786, he imagined that state jealousies would only get worse as the West developed. Virginia’s land cessions had eliminated one thorny problem and created another.64
Madison was just as explicit about the states and their disparate aims when he addressed Monroe on the subject of a hoped-for, but as yet amorphous, “Continental Convention.” “I am far from entertaining sanguine expectations from it,” he remarked doubtfully. “Yet on the whole I cannot disapprove of the experiment.” A few days later he wrote again to Monroe: “I am not in general an advocate for temporizing or partial remedies. But a rigor in this respect, if pushed too far may hazard every thing.”
He wondered whether the means existed to point the states toward consensus. What prudent strategy could Virginians pursue that would not be rejected by their distrustful sister states? The language he used at this moment was a type that Madison rarely resorted to, as nervous and angst-ridden as when he told Jefferson in 1782 that Virginia was being “persecuted” by the rest of the states on the land cession issue. “If the present paroxysm of our affairs be totally neglected,” he warned Monroe, “our case may become desperate.” Crucial change lay on the horizon: “If any thing comes of the Convention it will probably be of a permanent not a temporary nature, which I think will be a great point.” A “great point” did not mean a positive outcome, but a major watershed that would either help or humble Virginia.
After the Civil War, scholars began to refer to the immediate post-Revolutionary years as “the critical period” in American history. One reason is that many of Madison’s cohort shared his concerns about the destabilizing factors facing them: money matters within and among the states and their tenuous commitment to nationhood. Madison’s general pessimism was offset only by his belief that “the trouble & uncertainty” of having to proceed in small steps would make the delegates of the various states psychologically disposed to negotiating a coherent, systematic treatment for the many palpable defects in the existing Confederation. This marks the first moment when we can identify Madison’s dynamic commitment to what, in the end, became the Constitutional Convention.65
Finance was always at or near the head of the list of concerns. Some Americans owing British creditors rationalized that depredations during the war negated their prewar debts, but both Madison and Jefferson were among those who acknowledged the rights of the creditor and wanted Anglo-American commercial relations to get back on track. Interest that accrued on Americans’ debt during the war was a hazier ethical question. The British expected the interest to be paid. All knew that America needed to trade.
Domestic debt was hardly a simple matter either. The states were ineffective in their attempts to pressure debtors or even to collect taxes. Part of the problem was the decline in output among small-scale farmers who had been away from home serving in the army. Another problem was the declining value of paper money. In Virginia, the gentry accepted the higher taxes the Assembly demanded of them, agreeing in principle that their relative power in state politics should be matched by a higher tax rate. This alleviated, to a certain degree, the burden on those with fewer advantages. But it did not end complaints or bring real stability.
“No supplies have gone to the federal treasury,” Madison lamented. “Our internal embarrassments torment us exceedingly.” He would feel this torment in spades as Patrick Henry tried to push through the Virginia Assembly a new issuance of paper money, which Madison was sure would “rather feed than cure the spirit of extravagance.”66 Experiments in paper money would fail everywhere: it was “morally certain,” as he put it to Jefferson. And Virginia was only a small part of the problem. The sovereign states, taken together, were not contributing enough to the Union. The general government was fiscally unsound.
International repercussions were real and immediate. When Jefferson wrote to Madison from London that the British “sufficiently value our commerce; but they are quite persuaded that they shall enjoy it on their own terms,” both understood that America’s standing among the nations of Europe would be seriously hurt if discordant notes at home ruined the chance to build a sustainable union. Somewhat later, after negotiating alongside John Adams in Holland
on behalf of the U.S. Treasury, Jefferson would remind George Washington of the danger of losing credit in Europe: “Were we without credit we might be crushed by a nation of much inferior resources but possessing higher credit … It remains that we cultivate our credit with the utmost attention.”67
The foreign policy issues that preoccupied Madison were invariably ones with sectional ramifications. John Jay, in his role as secretary for foreign affairs of the Confederation Congress, was engaged in negotiations with Spain’s envoy, Diego de Gardoqui, concerning the boundary between U.S. and Spanish possessions in the Southwest. The specific point of argument rested upon whether U.S. commercial traffic was to be permitted along the Mississippi River. On other commercial subjects, Gardoqui extended rights that the United States desired, but he held firm that the Confederation should agree to a twenty-five-year waiting period before navigation rights on the Mississippi were granted.
Jay and the New England interests were content with such an arrangement, believing the Southwest of little value in the short run—plenty of upstate New York land remained to be settled. Madison and the Virginians were outraged. To them, the Mississippi symbolized a future of agricultural wealth and a replication of the South’s economy on contiguous lands. Madison had vehemently opposed Vermont’s admission to the Union back in 1781, so as not to add another northern vote in Congress. Now, in the spring of 1786, Virginians could read the Jay-Gardoqui recommendation as proof that the Northeast wished to dominate the Union. Terming the negotiations “a ticklish situation,” Madison proposed that Congress transfer responsibility from Jay to Jefferson, sending the Paris-based minister directly to Madrid. Meanwhile Monroe told Patrick Henry that men of Massachusetts were openly speaking of a separate northern confederacy if Virginia and the South continued to resist them.68
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