Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  The congressman from Orange, Virginia, showed little restraint on the floor of the House. He was vigorously opposed to the use of illustrious titles for officers of the national government, and the vote on how to address the president and vice president pleased him. “I am not afraid of titles because I fear the danger of any power they could confer,” he said with a grand gesture after the Senate’s suggestions were sent to the House, “but I am against them because they are not very reconcilable with the nature of our Government or the genius of the people.” With a clear majority in agreement, the First Congress rejected monarchical and aristocratic pretension.58

  When he related the debate to Jefferson, Madison used the phrase “degrading appendages” for titles such as “Excellency.” The top officers in government would be known with “republican simplicity” as “President” and “Vice President” and nothing more. Madison was not surprised by stuffy John Adams’s preference for the cumbersome “His Highness the President of the U.S. and protector of their liberties”; but he had not expected Senator Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, an old enemy of aristocracy, to go along. For Jefferson, the episode corroborated his growing critique of Adams, whose scholarship stirred him, whose quirks did not sour him, and whose company he genuinely enjoyed. Still, the title proposed for the president—“superlatively ridiculous,” Jefferson erupted—prompted him to repeat for Madison the words Benjamin Franklin had used to describe Adams: “Always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes absolutely mad.” Edmund Randolph subsequently reported to Madison that a greatly perturbed Washington was rumored to have written Adams that if titles were employed in the American republic, he would resign.59

  Madison’s influence over Washington was profound and would not be eclipsed by Hamilton’s for some time yet. In the opening year of Washington’s presidency, Madison was the president’s closest confidant; and in the first two sessions of the First Congress of the United States, he was the dominant force. In the busy first month after Washington’s inauguration, he virtually dictated the legislative agenda. He argued for the creation of the three cabinet departments—State, Treasury, and War—while reasoning in Congress that the president was vested with the authority to remove the appointed heads of executive departments whenever he chose. This would make the president responsible for the conduct of his top appointees. The president would subject himself to impeachment if he should countenance the commission of any high crime or misdemeanor by any of these individuals. In crucial ways, Madison was shaping the new government.60

  Madison schooled himself, as he had throughout the 1780s, before taking his initiatives to the Congress. He never aimed to convince by harangue or bluster. He did not make loud, disapproving signs, and he rarely made exaggerated claims. Though his voice was naturally calm, there was no docility to him at all. He concentrated his thoughts and spoke to influence. His was the art of persuasion rather than the art of captivation. As the anti-Henry, he exhibited little of the nervous energy that wowed a crowd. Requiring few notes, Henry tended to listen to his opponent and then respond as if out of hunger. In contrast, Madison was all about note-taking, thinking through his points in advance. Since he had years in the state legislature and national congresses to his credit, and with a well-earned reputation for meticulousness and thoroughness, others allowed him to set the legislative agenda.

  We have to read between the lines of the sober record-keeping that descends to us from that First Congress to recognize that Madison was not all business. Among his peers he was quite personable; he may have been warmer and more demonstrative, in this way, than his outwardly undisturbed friend Jefferson. He found the time to write to his longtime landlady, Eliza House Trist, of quirks and eccentricities he found among the congressmen, and at moments such as this his personality can be captured.

  The blunt Virginian William Grayson was someone he and Eliza knew well. A former delegate to the Confederation Congress and now a U.S. senator, Grayson called attention to himself with his liberated language. Newly published proceedings of the Virginia Ratifying Convention of 1788 made this abundantly clear to Madison, who quoted back Grayson’s remarks to his landlady: were Virginia to reject the Constitution, Grayson was to have said, “Penna. and Maryland are to fall upon us from the North like Goths & Vandals of old … And the Carolinians from the South, mounted on Alligators I presume, are to come & destroy our corn fields & eat up our little children.” As a politician, Madison may not have been known for his use of hyperbole, but he clearly got a kick out of the tendency in others to get carried away.61

  “Frenchified”

  This is not to say impressions of Madison were unmixed. A new House colleague from Massachusetts, Fisher Ames, later a political foe of his and Jefferson’s, sized him up to a friend after their first divergence of opinion. Describing him as “a man of sense, reading, address, and integrity” who spoke in soft tones and used language concisely, Ames was suspicious of Madison’s “Frenchified,” or liberal-activist, style of politics. “Pardon me if I add that I think him a little too much of a book politician,” Ames confided. Madison’s responsiveness to the needs and wants of his fellow Virginians troubled Ames as well: he “thinks that state the land of promise, but is afraid of their state politics and of his popularity there more than I think he should be.”62

  “A book politician” did not mean simply bookish. It meant that his range of social engagement was too circumscribed and his knowledge of human emotions weak. In truth, Madison was not as provincial or as awkward as Ames ungenerously implied. He socialized. While Congress was in New York, he became enamored with the widow Henrietta Colden, a Scottish émigrée attached to a prominent Loyalist family. Manhattan insider Samuel L. Mitchill, Columbia College professor of medicine and later a congressman, described her as “celebrated” for a “masculine understanding,” which meant a rich intellect that combined nicely with the feminine graces.

  Little is known of Henrietta Colden, and less is known of her relationship with Madison. She was friendly with Madison’s Princeton classmate Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee and Lee’s wife, Matilda. If it was not the Lees who introduced Madison to the widow, then he likely met her at one of the polite gatherings taking place in the city. As the first seat of the national government, New York had a vibrant salon culture. Martha Washington staged drawing-room receptions every Friday night, in which men and women drank tea and conversed. In May 1789 Madison asked Jefferson to provide introductions for one of Mrs. Colden’s sons, who was traveling to France. As he neared forty, Madison was not about to give up on the idea of marriage or the pleasures of female company.63

  He was receiving a steady stream of correspondence from Virginia. With his regular salutation to “My dear friend,” Edmund Randolph opened a letter to Madison noting that Assembly elections had taken place in a “tolerably judicious” manner, though the hostile Henry (with whom he had traded personal barbs at the ratifying convention) would not back off. He was brief in characterizing their common foe: “Mr. H___y is said to have made a great parade in refusing to be reelected; but reelected he is, and will serve.” For a while, anyway.

  This was to be Henry’s last hurrah as a Virginia legislator. He could no longer deny the dismal state of his personal finances. With a large family to support, he would have to return to his law practice full-time. For Randolph, the wait paid off. That summer he was able to gloat after a three-day trial, during which, as opposing counsel, he had tangled with the famed pleader over a land issue. Randolph won the case for his client. Henry, he told Madison, was “mortified” on being bested.

  His home base still in Williamsburg, Randolph would shortly be asked by President Washington to come north and serve as the first attorney general of the United States. As he did on all pressing appointments at the start of his administration, Washington consulted with Madison before acting, though in this instance he hardly needed to. The president knew how close Randolph and Madison were and confessed to Madison at the close of
one letter that he preferred Randolph to other prospective candidates for the job, “from habit of intimacy with him.”64

  There were other vacant posts in the executive branch. Madison had sent three letters to Jefferson during May. Using their cipher, the influential congressman passed on an inquiry from the president: “whether any appointment at home would be agreeable to you.” He explained the need to fill “auxiliary offices to the President,” as the cabinet was tentatively being described. “One for finance” would go either to John Jay or Alexander Hamilton. “The latter is perhaps best qualified for that species of business,” Madison remarked fatefully.65

  At this point Jefferson expected that he would return to America for a short sabbatical and then sail back to France. The pace of events required a diligent and perceptive diplomat on the scene, and he had come to understand well the social forces operating in Paris. He compressed his news of European affairs in the spring of 1789 by deriding the madness of King George III, which had left the unlamented monarch “in a state of imbecility and melancholy.” And he lauded the incipient revolution in France, proceeding as it was, he said, “with the most unexampled success hitherto.” In June and the early days of July, Jefferson pinned his hopes on the Marquis de Lafayette, his frequent companion, as the two exchanged opinions on how best to present republican ideas to a nation caught up in “unexampled” unrest. Based on the conversations he had had already, Jefferson believed that cautious and gradual political change would take place. He did not see an armed insurrection coming.

  One of Jefferson’s warmest friends in France was an eyewitness to the attack on the Bastille. Ethis de Corny, an aide to Lafayette during the American Revolution, a state prosecutor in Paris in the mid-1780s, watched from close by as a small number of people took control of the seemingly impregnable fortress. Once Jefferson had learned, firsthand, of the dramatic events of July 14, 1789, he gave a blow-by-blow account to John Jay, secretary of foreign affairs under the old Confederation Congress, whom he would replace the following spring when he became secretary of state in the Washington administration. He explained to Jay that prisoners were freed, arms and ammunition taken, officials put to death—and that competing explanations made it hard to know for certain how it all had come about.

  Writing Madison the following week, Jefferson declared that events already past would be “for ever memorable in history.” Lafayette was in command of the militia, riding at the head of a train of joyous citizens. A number of the king’s ministers had fled the country, but the uninspired Louis XVI, having submitted to the popular will, was safe for the moment. So were those members of the nobility and clergy who, as a measure of self-protection, voiced their support for the aims of the revolution.

  When the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was adopted in August, Jefferson had new reason to hope that law would triumph and that the republican transformation of France would proceed without any major disruptions. At Lafayette’s beckoning, he hosted a secret dinner for a group of political leaders that lasted six hours. All matters of constitutional change, a favorite subject of Jefferson’s, were on the table. In the summer of 1789, then, Jefferson was not just of value to France as one familiar with the character of America’s republican revolution; he may be said to have symbolized the stature of an American in that country in that unforgettable year.66

  In the second letter he wrote to Madison after the fall of the Bastille, Jefferson responded to Madison’s report on John Adams’s proposal of a lavish title for the U.S. president, bombastically telling Madison that he wished Adams had witnessed the events in Paris: “If he could then have had one fibre of aristocracy left in his frame he would have been a proper subject for bedlam.” A month later, writing again to Madison, he was wildly optimistic that there would soon be a new system of justice in France, “a good deal like ours, with trial by jury in criminal cases certainly, perhaps also in civil. The provinces will have assemblies for their provincial government, and the cities a municipal body for municipal government, all founded on the basis of popular election.” Concerning America’s reputation among the French, he was no less ecstatic: “It is impossible to desire better dispositions towards us, than prevail in the [national] assembly. Our proceedings have been viewed as a model for them on every occasion.”

  Jefferson envisioned a new order of things and wished to project a U.S. foreign policy that gave preferential treatment to its proven friend over its proven adversary. Lafayette’s countrymen had voluntarily exposed themselves to a “ruinous war” with Great Britain to save America. France had “opened her bosom to us in peace,” while England “moved heaven, earth and hell to exterminate us in war … and libeled us in foreign nations.” A new nation that behaved according to high principles showed itself to the world as “honest, masculine and dignified,” he told Madison. Gratitude should occupy an important place in foreign affairs, and on this basis the Washington administration should back France and discriminate against England until England mended its ways.

  Without as yet knowing of the fall of the Bastille, Monroe was telling Madison the same thing. He observed that “without restraints from us, we have nothing to expect from the liberality of G.B.” Monroe’s was a no-nonsense approach: giving advantages to the commerce of France “as well to compensate for those benefits she has already extended to us, as to induce her to grant others.” If seen by his peers as unoriginal, Monroe certainly had an adept understanding of power.67

  “I Like It As Far As It Goes”

  One of Madison’s first pieces of business in the House of Representatives was the Bill of Rights. As one might expect, he found himself in a difficult position. Between the convention and ratification, he had added up the reasons why constitutional amendments were unnecessary. He had dismissed the idea in The Federalist. Now, in a strange turn of events, it was Madison who took charge of the issue in the First Congress, pushing and prodding the unenthusiastic national legislature to add amendments. Without his doggedness, in fact, the Bill of Rights that modern Americans venerate would never have become a part of the constitutional system.68

  Madison had neatly summarized his objections in October 1788, after Jefferson directly told him that the omission of a bill of rights was unacceptable. At the time Madison felt that individual liberties were secure under the Constitution, because all rights not enumerated in the document were reserved to the states. He had calculated, too, that the New Englanders would oppose any guarantee of religious liberty. And he judged that the federal system, with its built-in tension between the states and national government, would be able to provide more protection than any of what he called “parchment barriers” might achieve. Finally, and more cynically, he explained that declarations of rights were routinely violated at the state level, and that the real danger came from a majority oppressing a minority—not the central government infringing on those below. For Madison, a bill of rights had no real power in a republic.

  Despite this seemingly uncompromising outlook, he was willing to concede that some social benefits were to be had from such a charter. The most promising was that it could be used as a tool to educate the public and shape the opinion and manners of the American people generally. “Political truths declared in a solemn manner” could be woven into the “national sentiment,” he told Jefferson. Although he believed it highly unlikely that the federal government would abuse individual liberties, he conceded that a bill of rights might prove useful in mobilizing the public to resist such encroachments. Otherwise, “parchment barriers” had limited force, and national emergencies might demand the temporary suspension of rights, such as habeas corpus (protection from unlawful detention), if another Shays’s Rebellion were to occur.69

  Months went by before Jefferson answered Madison. He did not, as some have suggested, convince Madison to support a bill of rights. But he did provide Madison with ammunition to use before the new Congress. A bill of rights in the hands of a judiciary composed of such independent men
as “Wythe, [Williamsburg jurist John] Blair, and Pendleton” (Jefferson’s examples) could be an effective check. Lacking Madison’s automatic trust in the Constitution, Jefferson regarded a bill of rights as a “supplement” to contend with any unforeseen deficiencies in the text. “Half a loaf is better than no bread,” he wrote, certain that a perfect bill of rights was not to be drafted all at once.

  Jefferson believed that a bill of rights would reinforce the tension that naturally existed between the federal government and the states. Amendments would enable each to defend its guaranteed powers against incursions from the other. Although bills of rights were not “absolutely efficacious under all circumstances,” he argued that they acted as a kind of architectural “brace” supporting the government. On the subject of rights, Jefferson was at his best, and Madison found his friend’s line of reasoning astute. As a result of their correspondence, he inserted Jefferson’s concern with judicial review into a speech before Congress.70

  Though less theoretically committed to a bill of rights than Jefferson, Madison made a campaign pledge in January 1789 to support it, circulating letters to this effect. A man of conviction, he was also a determined politician. He knew that there were still those in Virginia pressing for a second convention. By supporting uncontroversial amendments aimed at protecting individual liberties, he was able to put a stop to the disruptive tactics of Henry’s allies who preferred to see him retired from politics.71