Madison and Jefferson
Page 20
Madison gave Jefferson a lengthy report. As he digested the news, Jefferson painted an equally bleak scenario: the western settlers would recognize that they had been sold out by the United States. Prone to feelings of vengeance, they would then launch an attack on the militarily underprepared Spanish, to “rescue the navigation of the Missisipi River out of Spanish hands, and to add New Orleans to their own territory.” In the process they would cease to identify with the eastern states and would move to establish a separate confederation. If the United States helped westerners in their war with Spain, they might rethink; but there would be no certainty of reunion once the ball started rolling.69
All this was happening as Madison readied himself for the special convention held in Annapolis in September 1786. Eight states sent delegates to consider the intertwined issues of commercial policy and regionalism. It was clear that without larger common purposes, without a sense of justice transcending sectional interests, the Union was doomed to fail. Unable to proceed very far in their deliberations, the delegates who met in Annapolis resolved that a more thoroughgoing convention would have to be organized. They announced that it would take place in Philadelphia in May 1787.
“In Imagination”
During the summer and autumn of 1786, five years after the death of his wife, Jefferson entered into an intense, if short-lived, relationship with the London-based Anglo-Italian artist Maria Hadfield Cosway. She was sixteen years younger than he, charming by all accounts, and in a loveless marriage with a successful painter, the miniaturist Richard Cosway, who is often depicted as sexually ambiguous and outlandish in his tastes.
The complete character of Jefferson’s relationship with Mrs. Cosway cannot be known. But the tenor of the correspondence, and the fact that the more passionate of their letters were intentionally excluded from the posthumous multivolume collection of Jefferson’s writings edited by his grandson, suggest a romantic relationship. They picnicked as a couple, attended museums and plays, and observed the city’s architecture when Richard Cosway was elsewhere engaged.
Jefferson was acutely aware that in France the meaning of marriage was not quite the same as in America. Members of the nobility with whom he interacted married for social and economic reasons. Husbands and wives had sexual partners other than their spouses. The prim, more rigid Adamses flatly disapproved. In letters to fellow Virginians, Jefferson, at least rhetorically, also rejected this aspect of the French way of life and love. Marriage always had to have a moral component, he insisted.
How sincere was his protest against “a passion for whores” when he discussed the prospect of a young American seeing Europe and facing its temptations? Years later his correspondence shows him condoning French license—for the French, at least. It was fine for them to distort what nature intended, but Americans could not live that way. So it became something of a mantra for Jefferson to use the French example as a contrast when he wished to paint American manners as pure.
He complained reflexively of “female intrigue,” because he subscribed to the medical Enlightenment no less than to the liberal political Enlightenment. The prevailing literature categorized the female constitution in sexual language, as prone to powerful urges and needing her natural curiosity gratified. Men, for their part, required an outlet; they could not abstain from sex without forfeiting their mental and physical health.
On this foundation, eighteenth-century philosophic medicine had fashioned an elite culture that did not view sex as sinful, in the way the later Victorians would. A man of breeding, especially a widower like Jefferson, could rationalize his engagement in discreet sexual activity with an available, attractive young woman of any social station. In the world he knew, the educated and privileged made their own rules; they escaped the kind of censure that the courts imposed on those, male and female, who were presumed vulgar and bad and whose individual efforts to resist laws concerning adultery or interracial sex received little sympathy.70
In one of his many letters to Maria Cosway, Jefferson complained about the prurient eyes that he feared would waylay any of their letters that were committed to the public post. A diplomat had to shield himself from possible blackmail. As the lover of a married duchess, William Short was no prude; constantly at Jefferson’s beck and call, completely trusted by him, Short had to have been privy to whatever was happening in the relationship. Imploring Jefferson to visit her in London, Mrs. Cosway flirtatiously brought up Short’s amorous tendencies, informing Jefferson that “the beauty he lost his heart by,” the duchess Rosalie, “is here keeling [i.e., killing] every body with her beweching Eyes.” Jefferson wrote to Maria that he wished he could fly to her side: “I am always thinking of you. If I cannot be with you in reality, I will in imagination.” As the Jefferson-Cosway correspondence proceeded, there was usually a hint of romance, or else of disappointed yearnings.71
At no time did Jefferson commit to paper the name “Maria Cosway,” even to note her existence, when he wrote to his intimates Madison and Monroe. Only the cautious couriers of their private letters knew anything.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Division of Power
1787
Nothing can exceed the universal anxiety for the event of the meeting here. Reports and conjectures abound … The public, however, is certainly in the dark with regard to it. The Convention is equally in the dark as to the reception which may be given to it on its publication.
—MADISON TO JEFFERSON, FROM THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION, SEPTEMBER 6, 1787
It is my principle that the will of the Majority should always prevail. If they approve the proposed Convention in all it’s parts, I shall concur in it chearfully, in hopes that they will amend it whenever they shall find it work wrong.
—JEFFERSON TO MADISON, FROM PARIS, DECEMBER 20, 1787
THE FEDERAL SYSTEM SET FORTH IN THE ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION was unproductive. The United States of America was not being governed effectively. Frustration had been slowly building, and financial hardship made it difficult to sustain either the confidence expressed in print or the thanksgiving expressed in sermons of 1783, when the war ended. Nor did the wanderings of Congress encourage great confidence.
As George Washington surveyed the postwar world, bidding farewell to Lafayette at the end of 1784, he wrote to General Henry Knox, the Boston-born artillery specialist who had spent much of the Revolution by Washington’s side: “Would to God our own countrymen, who are entrusted with the management of the political machine, could view things by that large and extensive scale upon which it is measured by foreigners, and by the statesmen of Europe, who see what we might be, and predict what we will come to.” It was not an optimistic appraisal of the American spirit.
Others expressed the same sentiment. Looking ahead to the Constitutional Convention, Madison wrote to Jefferson in March 1787: “What may be the result of this political experiment cannot be foreseen.” Contrasting Washington and himself with those who feared a too-powerful federal system, Madison saw a certain inevitability facing the states: “The difficulties which present themselves are on one side almost sufficient to dismay the most sanguine, whilst on the other side the most timid are compelled to encounter them by the mortal diseases of the existing constitution.”
Real change would have to come. Knox refused to hedge his bet when he told Washington that the Articles of Confederation would have to be altered “by wisdom and agreement, or by force.” Here was one of General Washington’s most trusted, noting the reluctance of some states to send delegates to a national convention of any kind; he found himself recommending that Washington assume the presidency of the convention, so as to lend it greater legitimacy.1
Richard Henry Lee, relieved to learn that George Mason had agreed to attend, vowed that he would be amenable to “alterations beneficial” in the Articles. He suspected, though, that the real problem government faced was in the hearts and minds of citizens. “I fear,” he wrote, “it is more in vicious manners, than mistakes in form, that
we must seek for the causes of the present discontent.” Lee went on to voice the same complaint Madison had over the noncompliance of the independent states when it came to necessary federal expenditures, especially debt repayment and matters of trade. In Virginia and elsewhere, leading voices argued that the states were powerless as agents of moral correction.2
As for Madison, the busy constitutionalist continued to lay the groundwork for his performance at the upcoming convention. He had formulated two essentials: first, to attain national strength by creating a national legislature with sufficient weight to counteract “dangerous passions” at the state level; second, to empower the center to expand national power westward. In devising his strategy, Madison was thinking of protecting a national intellectual elite class of men. He was less concerned with the financial health of the common man, and still less with democratic principles.
Jefferson was too far from home to feel the pressure as Madison did. In fact, he was acquiring in France a strong sense of the damage done to society by ever-widening distinctions between those possessing land and those without land or opportunity. In 1786 Madison received a letter from Jefferson, written with extreme pathos, that recounted a solitary walk he had taken while aiming to discover something about the laboring poor. Encountering a “wretched” French peasant woman, he listened to her tale of woe and gave her a sum of cash; she burst into tears of gratitude. Why was her life this way? Because most of the French people had no choices. “The property of this country is absolutely concentrated in a very few hands,” he explained. “These employ the flower of the country as servants.” The poorest of the poor could not find work and lived close to starvation. He prescribed an axiom: “The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on.” Government had to provide opportunities for the poor to become industrious. Morality and the presumption of natural rights demanded it.
Responding eight months later to the story of his encounter with the peasant woman, Madison agreed with Jefferson that America had to avoid the trap France had fallen into. “I have no doubt,” he wrote, “that the misery of the lower classes will be found to abate wherever the Government assumes a freer aspect, and the laws force a subdivision of property.” But Madison also believed that the more consequential factor in explaining why the mass of Americans lived better than their European counterparts was their low population and not any political advantages they might claim. Feeling less than Jefferson did the struggle of the poor, Madison continued to concentrate his thinking on the imposition of a guiding structure that would condition citizens’ behavior.
It was not simply that Madison had little desire to reduce inequality. He was fearful that a state legislature composed of less elite men would eventually result in a dangerous leveling of society, with the jealous poor demanding a redistribution of property. He did not agree with Jefferson that the poor represented the nation’s potential, or that they were the glistening “flower of the country.”
If Jefferson could derive a universal truth from a single encounter, Madison could not. Refusing to think in terms of human perfectibility, Madison spoke philosophically to principles of political economy. He surmised that no form of government could cope with a surplus population (“the redundant members of a populous society”), no matter what land distribution laws were in place. He concurred with Jefferson only to the extent that “a more equal partition of property must result in a greater simplicity of manners” and fewer idle poor. But the improvement must be partial, not general. There were no absolutes to be found in Madison’s thinking, because there was no perfectibility to be had. He suggested to Jefferson that, before he jumped to conclusions, he should compare French conditions to those of other societies—“the indigent part of other communities in Europe where the like causes of wretchedness exist in a less degree.” With sufficient data, they would then be able to direct American lawmakers toward practical policies.3
“A Negative in All Cases Whatsoever”
When James Madison left for Philadelphia to attend the Constitutional Convention in the spring of 1787, he was eager to debate the science of government. Four years earlier, after his retirement from Congress, he had committed himself to an intense course of legal study, spurred on by any new book Jefferson sent his way. Jefferson supplied him with the principal texts of the French Enlightenment, which supplemented works in classical political theory that he already owned. Madison then began to compile notes on the “defects” (the word he and Jefferson both used) of confederated governments throughout history. His collected papers show that he relied on extensive outlines whenever he was gathering his thoughts for a public presentation. In this instance he produced thirty-nine pages of notes, which he titled, “Of Ancient and Modern Confederacies.” By exposing what had gone wrong in the past, he would make sense of the defects in America’s imperfect union of states.4
Building a case against the Articles of Confederation, he needed to explain why the United States was so ill equipped to accomplish the basic tasks of raising money, making treaties, and regulating commerce. By April 1787 he had a diagnosis in hand. He called it “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” and it became his working manifesto, a summary view at the end of his first decade as a state and national politician.
Chief among the vices Madison identified was the undue power lodged in the individual states. Having held a seat in Congress longer than anyone else (four years), he had come to feel that the Confederation was barely a government at all. Like most confederations, the U.S. system was a voluntary compact, a weak “league of friendship” among the states, and subject to internal dissensions. It lacked executive and judicial components; it rarely if ever represented the collective will of the people.
At best, Congress was an auxiliary arm of the thirteen states, a quasi-diplomatic body whose members were emissaries. The Articles of Confederation granted Congress certain prerogatives but no real authority. Madison had seen revenue legislation blocked at every turn, often because one or two states voted against tax bills endorsed by the majority. States routinely violated treaties, while imposing commercial restrictions on each other. Such “irregularities,” Madison complained in “Vices,” damaged the reputation of the United States in Europe. Beyond his extended term in Congress, his three years in the Virginia state legislature had exposed him to what he called the “imbecility” of government on the local level. Laws were “indigested,” rather than carefully devised, and often rushed through the legislature at the last minute. He adjudged many of his fellow state representatives to be intellectually meek and unable to appreciate the elements of good government.5
Madison saw little to be gained in rescuing the Confederation. It was a dysfunctional system, its flaws too ingrained for it to be made energetic or even stable. Congress was a headless body, and the Confederation a government at war with itself. Moreover, the aggrandizing state legislatures of the 1780s resembled nothing so much as a group of rambunctious children refusing to play together fairly. They endangered property rights and by undoing one session’s laws the next year failed to take their own legislation seriously. Damning the states unmercifully, Madison found his solution in a centralizing government.
Paternalism and moralism ran deep in his assessment. He found “want of wisdom,” “vicious legislation,” and “impetuosities” in the state legislatures. By this Madison meant rash, unthinking, and impulsive behavior. Virginia assemblymen struck him as uninformed and undisciplined, their actions dictated by selfish motives. He envisioned a strong central government with the authority to give guidance and even provide moral supervision.
Anger lurks below the surface of Madison’s austere prose. It was not simply that the Confederation was inefficient: the childlike states wielded power unwisely, and they were too easily misled by self-serving demagogues. If the states could not be trusted to govern themselves, how could they unite a nation? Madison explained his thinking to George Washington shortly before the Constitutional Co
nvention was set to open. There was only one way to save the nation, he said. The states had to be made “subordinately useful.” 6
Washington was instrumental. Any cause was helped by his participation. His national stature as the soldier-turned-statesman and his reputation for promoting national unity were invaluable assets. As a member of the Virginia Assembly in 1785, Madison had urged the state to dispatch commissioners to meet with representatives from Maryland at Washington’s Mount Vernon home. The immediate agenda of the meeting was to convince the two states to agree on navigational rights along the Potomac. The meeting was, in fact, a preview of the Annapolis convention of 1786, where several more states came together to discuss commercial remedies for defects in the Confederation. Step by step, and with growing purpose, Madison rose to advocate decisive, large-scale government reform, with Washington on his side.7
A number of historians have dismissed the Annapolis meeting as a ruse, whose only purpose was to justify calling a second, more representative convention in Philadelphia. But for Madison, the value of Annapolis derived from his success in corralling members of the Virginia Assembly. Their unanimous recommendation to proceed made him more optimistic about the Philadelphia convention. As he put it to Jefferson, even the “most obstinate adversaries to reform” were now in agreement that the Confederation suffered from “dangerous defects.”8
With Jefferson abroad, Madison turned to his friend Edmund Randolph, the former state attorney general who was Virginia’s governor in 1787. Randolph had attended the Annapolis meeting, where he convinced Alexander Hamilton to revise his heavy-handed draft of the call for a Philadelphia convention. Convivial yet cautious, Randolph possessed other skills that appealed to Madison. In a world where eloquence mattered, he was a natural orator, more fluid and pleasing in his style than Madison, whose manner of speech was impressive and methodical but unexciting. As governor of their state, Randolph was able to shape the delegation that went to Philadelphia. He was Madison’s point man as well as the head of Virginia’s delegation. He would be the one to present Virginia’s proposal to the convention.9