Washington had to be recruited. Both Madison and Randolph bombarded him with letters, urging him to attend. Eventually Madison persuaded Washington that his presence in Philadelphia was essential—not as a Virginian but as a unifier. He would reinforce the bond between the Virginia and Pennsylvania delegations. The Virginians could accomplish little unless another large state backed them, and their most likely ally was Pennsylvania. Madison would cozy up to Robert Morris, former superintendent of finance for the Confederation. Since 1782, as Morris called for the federal impost (tax on imports), a funding program, and a national bank, Madison had consistently defended his agenda. This kept the flagging finances of Congress afloat in the crucial days before Yorktown. Both Robert Morris and Gouverneur Morris (no relation) would be delegates from Pennsylvania to the Constitutional Convention, two men who shared an economic outlook and were extremely close to Washington.10
George Mason was another major player. Mason, Madison, and Washington were all aggressive promoters of western expansion, envisioning commercial growth based on a direct water route from the Chesapeake Bay to the Ohio River. As a prominent speculator in western lands, Mason had had a material stake in securing an agreement with Maryland at the Mount Vernon meeting. Both inside and outside the state, he was respected for his draft of the Declaration of Rights and for his help in shaping the Virginia Constitution of 1776. But at sixty-two, Mason was the oldest member of the Virginia delegation. Madison knew he was unpredictable, “not fully cured of Antifederal prejudices” with respect to national control of international trade; but on the “great points,” as he told Jefferson, Mason could be counted on.11
Virginia sent three other men, George Wythe, Judge John Blair, and James McClurg, to Philadelphia, for a total of seven. The final three, however, contributed little at the convention. Wythe was still a professor of law at the College of William and Mary. Blair was recognized for his superior legal training at Middle Temple in London; his uncle was a founder of the College of William and Mary. Madison had put McClurg’s name forward after Patrick Henry, then former governor Thomas Nelson, and finally Richard Henry Lee all turned down the appointment. “He was on the spot,” Madison confessed to Jefferson. McClurg had earned an M.D. at the prestigious University of Edinburgh and had no legal training at all.
When, in April 1787, the Virginia delegation was complete, Madison sent carefully crafted letters to Randolph and Washington, prodding them again to think about what the convention should accomplish. He told Washington forthrightly that he felt radical change was needed; but he took a slightly softer tone with Randolph, arguing that the most “valuable articles” of the Confederation should be preserved, but only as part of a new system that did more than simply “engraft” onto the old.12
The first change had to be in the principle of representation. The unicameral Confederation Congress, in which the vote of Delaware meant as much as the vote of Virginia or Massachusetts, was acceptable no longer. “No one,” he told Washington, “will deny that Virginia and Massts. have more weight and influence.” Proportional representation made the most sense: the number of legislative seats should be allocated according to a state’s total population or its aggregate wealth.
This was not a new idea. It had been raised in 1774, at the First Continental Congress, but had been dismissed because of the pressing need for unanimity as war loomed. Rather than estrange delegates from smaller, less populated states, Congress had agreed to the practice of granting to each colony (later each state) one vote. Aware that a precedent had been set, Madison knew how persuasive he would have to be to end the practice of equal representation. At the same time he knew that delegates from the large states would not automatically be Virginia’s allies. They had to be assuaged on other matters. If the new system granted the federal government the power to tax and to regulate commerce, as Madison proposed, then vital economic interests would be at stake. Some laws were bound to favor some states or regions, and discriminate against others.13
How could he make a majority of the delegates comfortable? And why would the large states agree to dramatic change? He observed that the northern states were the most populous, while the southern states were projecting faster growth in the future. Both would see their interests served, if he played his cards right.14 There would be holdouts among the small states, but he dismissed them as irrelevant. The small states “must in every event yield to the predominant will,” he pronounced coldly in a letter to Washington, assuring him that New Hampshire, Delaware, and the like could be pressed into agreement.15
Madison immediately saw the need for a federal judiciary, but he was noncommittal on the organization of the executive branch. He did see the value, at least, in a “council of revision,” as he called it at the time, through which members of the judiciary and executive would come together, with the power to veto legislation. Congress would still be the main pillar of government, as it was under the Confederation. But to be a well-ordered government with extensive powers, Congress had to be composed of two branches. Increased powers required a smaller, more select body of men in the upper house, or Senate. They would watch over and curb the less steady, more impulsive lower house of Congress.16
The central government that Madison envisioned had a clear capacity for coercion. It would, without question, exercise authority over the states. He proposed to both Randolph and Washington that the federal government be granted “a negative in all cases whatsoever,” that is, a U.S. Senate with the same power to override state legislation once reserved for the king of England. Although having a check on the states would constitute a form of paternalism at odds with the democratic impulse, it would “controul the necessary vicissitudes” of the irresponsible states and overturn unjust lawmaking.17
Madison’s sponsorship of the Senate’s absolute negative rested on the theories of John Locke—not on the more often cited Two Treatises on Government, but on Some Thoughts Concerning Education. During his college years at Princeton, Madison had been attracted to enlightened pedagogy, and Locke’s influence remained with him. Good government was meant to steer and to guide; the invisible hand of moral authority conditioned citizens, like children, to reach proper decisions; only tyrannical parents and despotic governments relied on brute force. Persuasion, or a well-defined guardianship, held out the likeliest chance of seeing good results. In defending the negative to Jefferson at the end of the Constitutional Convention, Madison adopted the Lockean vocabulary: “guardianship” produced good government by influencing the “disposition” of wayward states.18
Supervision was central to Madison’s thinking about the U.S. Senate. A senatorial negative offered the “mildest expedient” to state “mischiefs,” a deterrent to those who might otherwise be impelled to rash actions. Military force against the states was impractical and unwanted in a republican form of government; Madison knew Americans would never tolerate it. So like a good parent, the central government would use its negative to publicly chastise misbehavior. Bad laws would be vetoed, the states shamed into right action.19
The negative was a radical idea. Jefferson frowned on so sweeping an innovation, telling Madison unequivocally in June: “I do not like it.” Employing the metaphor of an old outfit that was to be stitched back together, he wrote, “Instead of mending the hole, the proposed patch would cover the entire garment.”20 Randolph and Mason were less troubled by the proposition but not entirely on board. By the time of the convention, they supported a modified version of Madison’s plan. Washington did not weigh in.
“Rambling Through the Fields and Farms”
Jefferson gave Madison his thoughts about the negative after returning from a four-month tour of the south of France and northern Italy. It may be pure coincidence, but just as he had escaped the memories of his deceased wife by leaving Monticello for an extended period after September 1782, he left Paris for the south as he was fighting off his feelings for the married artist Maria Cosway. He all but ceased writing to her.
William Short took charge of official business and was in constant communication with his boss. Meanwhile Jefferson the contemplative traveler recorded his days in great detail: vineyards, canals, castles, Roman ruins. To Short and others he was effusive, but his tone was subdued when he finally wrote again to the forsaken Maria Cosway. When she retorted with short, pouty letters, he assured her that he remained devoted, but it was not the passionate refrain it had been previously. As he distanced himself from her, his imagination found other channels of enjoyment and instruction.21
When he left on his tour, Jefferson also left his fifteen-year-old daughter Patsy behind at her convent school. Upon his return, he learned that his younger daughter Maria (at this age called Polly) had sailed from Virginia, according to his instruction, and was en route to England. There she was met and cared for by the maternal and always forthright Abigail Adams, who praised the child’s good sense. Maria’s inexperienced fifteen-year-old maid, Sally Hemings, who had shared the five-week ocean passage, came with her to Paris, where Patsy was reunited with her sister and Sally with her brother James.22
One month after this alteration in his domestic life, Jefferson wrote to an Albemarle neighbor: “All my wishes end, where I hope my days will end, at Monticello.” It had been three years since he left America, and he was detached enough from past frustrations that he took pleasure in nostalgia. In part, this was made possible by his recent travels. He had ridden on mules and drifted on the water; he had stared at people and they had stared back. Something clicked, and he turned his mind to the creative opportunities ahead of him in exploiting the productive potential of his Albemarle and Bedford County lands. Seeing the output of the French and Italian countryside inspired him to perform a service for the economies of South Carolina and Georgia by supplying those states with olive plants and a particular strain of rice. Seeing the trouble their plows were causing farmers in the vicinity of Nancy, he drew a rough sketch of what would later become his award-winning design of a “mouldboard plough of least resistance.” His excursions (“rambling through the fields and farms,” as he put it in a letter to Lafayette during his road trip) taught Jefferson to appreciate the spirit of agricultural enterprise in a new way.
Always reaching out, he felt compelled to share what he had learned. He put up with filthy lodgings, one after the next, to gain a unique education. When, as a part of his study, he spied on simple farmers, he figured they saw him, too, as a curiosity. He cast himself almost as the hero of a first-person novel, a truth seeker wrapped up in nature, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau was in his late years. This was a uniquely meditative period of Jefferson’s life, not to be so well exhibited in correspondence again until his postpresidential retirement. As one who frequently complained that political ambition was a disease that, once contracted, resisted treatment, he apparently thought he had found the cure through travel. His hatred of politics appeared less of a rhetorical ploy amid exposure to the byways of western Europe. Diversion always seemed to do him good.
Jefferson was now rich in information about the European landscape as well as the European mind. He was attuned to advances in science and economy, and he could characterize the poisoned political scene better than any other living American. In his well-appointed quarters at the hub of Paris, when not entertaining the local literati, he was receiving visitors from home—notably the sons of Philadelphians and the sons of southern gentlemen. In letters home, he touted America’s superiority to Europe. Inviting James Monroe to visit him, he indulged in quintessentially Jeffersonian hyperbole, writing: “I will venture to say no man now living will ever see an instance of an American removing to settle in Europe and continuing there.”23
It can be said that by the middle of 1787 the author of the encyclopedic Notes on Virginia was past the peak of his fascination with the Old World. When consulted by the compiler of the authoritative Encyclopédie méthodique, he made a concerted effort to correct what he regarded as inaccuracies about the United States. He was careful to absolve his Virginia colleagues and himself from foot-dragging on legislating an end to slavery. Meanwhile, impressed with South Carolinian David Ramsay’s strategy of pairing an account of his home state during the Revolution with a thoroughgoing history of the American Revolution, Jefferson helped arrange a French translation. He was taking no chances as to how America’s war for independence would be drawn for a scholarly European audience.24
For the determined diplomat, America’s image abroad was no less consequential in 1787 than it had been when he composed the Declaration of Independence for a “candid world.” Yet Jefferson had clearly come to view the Old World as America’s inferior. He wrote to Monroe of the “utility” in seeing Europe, but the ultimate result of the experience was to remind him of what he had left behind. “My God!” he declared. “How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy. I confess I had no idea of it myself.”25
It is of interest that Jefferson did not write to Madison even once during his four-month excursion, though he continued to collect books for him. Back in Paris, Jefferson examined all that Madison had written that arrived in his absence, so that he was generally aware of preparations for the Constitutional Convention. With the average transatlantic voyage requiring five or six weeks, though, he would not see news from Philadelphia for some time to come.
“An Assembly of Demigods”
Madison came to town earlier than most, on May 3. He settled in, as before, with the House-Trist family. Intent on a strategy, he began consulting with members of the Pennsylvania delegation right away. He dined lavishly at Robert Morris’s impressive three-story mansion. There he was introduced to the Scotsman James Wilson, another member of the so-called financiers’ faction. Wilson was hard to miss, with a stocky build and a ruddy face like a workingman’s. Thick glasses, however, marked him as a man of letters. He had studied at three different colleges in Scotland without ever earning a degree. Highly knowledgeable about world history, law, and government, he was an articulate advocate of national reform and one of the stars of the convention.26
Madison visited with Benjamin Franklin for the very first time. Entertaining the delegates at his home, Franklin had little trouble demonstrating that his mind was as sharp as ever. He told amusing stories and showed that he still relished a good glass of porter. But at eighty-one, he was physically frail. For most of the convention he remained seated, and often relied on others to read his prepared statements.27
Madison was especially pleased by the warm welcome accorded Washington on his arrival in Philadelphia. He was met with cannon fire, the ringing of bells, and huzzas from the crowd. Beyond the giddy “acclamations of the people,” Madison informed Jefferson, the retired general was also shown “more sober marks of affection and veneration.”
Sobriety, gravity, and steadiness were the qualities Madison had come to expect of the leadership corps in the new national system he visualized, and Washington embodied them all. Robert Morris conveyed the “First of Men” to his fine mansion, where the general would reside for the duration of the convention. Blair and Wythe landed in Philadelphia a week after Madison, establishing a quorum for the Virginia group. As a sign of things to come, the two most energetic delegations, Virginia and Pennsylvania, officially opened the convention on May 14. The next day Randolph and McClurg rode into town, and as Mason finally showed up, the Virginia contingent was complete.28
On May 20 all of the Virginia delegates, save Washington, attended a Catholic mass. They did so, as Mason reported, “more out of Compliment than Religion, & more out of Curiosity than compliment.” The constant “Tinckling of a little Bell” reminded him of nothing so much as the curtain’s rise at a puppet show. In his next letter home, Mason’s tone was heavier. He felt a weight upon him, realizing that he was in the company of the “first Characters” of the country. “The Eyes of the United States are turn’d upon this Assembly, & their Expectations raised to a very a
nxious Degree,” he surmised. “The Revolt against Great Britain, & the Formations of our new Governments at that time, were nothing compared with the great Business now before us.” Though debate had just gotten under way, he already sensed that the convention’s decisions would affect the lives of “millions yet unborn.”29
On May 25, seven state delegations being present, the convention took up formal business. Its first task was to elect Washington as the presiding officer, which was done “una voca” (by unanimous voice vote), as Madison reported to Jefferson. Like Mason, Madison was impressed with the talent that surrounded him. Jefferson gushed in a letter across the Channel to John Adams: “It is really an assembly of demigods.”30
The fifty-five men who sat in convention were, without exception, drawn from a ruling elite. None of them could be called representative of the common man. Most had received a superior education, having attended the finest colleges in Great Britain or the best schools in the colonies—Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary. Hardly a disinterested lot, they were either wealthy merchants or large planters with experience in overseas trade. Many were large-scale speculators in land and government securities.31
Even the few delegates whose origins were humbler had married into families with large fortunes and imposing connections. Up-and-coming lawyers Alexander Hamilton and Rufus King wed the daughters of two of New York State’s richest men. James Wilson had studied the law with Philadelphian John Dickinson, now a delegate from Delaware; Virginia-born John Francis Mercer, a member of the Maryland delegation, had Jefferson to thank for his legal apprenticeship. New Jersey sent its chief justice and its former attorney general. Maryland’s attorney general, Luther Martin, was present. Connecticut dispatched Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth, both of whom sat on the superior court. All were committed to the protection of property rights and class privilege. Madison had reason to expect that they and he were of one mind.32
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