Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  To think in terms of generations suited Jefferson’s mind. Upon his return from Europe, he went back to the drawing board and scoped out a plan to tear up and rebuild Monticello, based on what he had seen in France. One might say that he was launching a generational restructuring of his home: architectural historians identify the pre-1790 house as the “first” Monticello, managed jointly by Patty and him, and the post-1790 house as the “second” Monticello, doubled in size and more dignified in appearance.

  More to the point, when Jefferson thought of the structure of a generation, he was thinking legalistically. The theory he embraced was an extension of his earlier attempts to reform the laws of Virginia by ridding society of entail and primogeniture. Entail had allowed the dead to control the destiny of future generations by circumscribing how land could be distributed; primogeniture in effect disinherited younger offspring by automatically bequeathing the main estate to the eldest son.

  When he imagined being able to reshape society, Jefferson was, on some level, thinking as a lawyer. The concept of “usufruct,” originally part of Roman law, dictated that land, houses, slaves, and livestock (property not consumed by use) were to benefit the user only until his death. Each generation enjoyed the profits and advantages of a piece of property, but no person should be burdened by unfair debts or legal restrictions left over from the past. Jefferson believed that one generation could not be trusted to safeguard the interests of the next. As in 1776, when he undertook his revisal of the laws of Virginia, once again Jefferson was convinced of the need for moral constraints to be imposed by law—he continued to believe in social engineering.88

  While he was largely thinking of usufruct metaphorically, Jefferson was making the case to Madison that the people deriving benefits from the federal Constitution had to be the living users of the text. The Constitution’s meaning could not be stagnant; its understood benefits had to be progressively redefined. “No society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law,” wrote Jefferson unambiguously. He meant, too, that there was no original intent: the founding generation could not make the Constitution into a property monopolized by its authors, eternally empowering themselves to control its value and its application.

  Jefferson’s letter to Madison has been dissected by various historians for its intrinsic meaning and what it says about their opposing perspectives on the world. It is easy to jump to the conclusion that Jefferson was dreaming, or preparing to unleash social and political chaos, needing Madison to talk him out of it. But Jefferson was not prescribing policy so much as opening a conversation about an issue he and Madison both cared about: possible ways to fix limits on public debt so as to keep the people from having to face unending taxes. But he did, as well, consider his theory as a way to move in a new political direction—government flexibility on issues affecting the happiness of future generations. Even Dumas Malone, Jefferson’s most prolific and adoring twentieth-century biographer, described his subject as a man who was married to his theories. “Few men in American public life,” Malone wrote, “have taken general principles more seriously; more often than he should, perhaps, he regarded these as universal truths.” Though he did not agree with his friend’s prescription, Madison surely understood why Jefferson was thinking in the manner he was.89

  In his measured reply to Jefferson’s letter, Madison cautioned against too much mutability or volatility in government. Seeing monarchical Europe as moribund, Jefferson warmed to the notion that each generation had to shake things up, and that society would profit from the exercise. But Madison read past his curious proposition and saw what was dangerous and disruptive in it. As each generation prepared itself to redraft its constitutional charter, factions would inevitably form for the express purpose of manipulating the process. To undermine property law would destroy land values; to eliminate all debts would negate the social good that grew from the protection of contractual obligations.

  As a realist, Madison disagreed strongly with the idea that the nation could, in effect, return to the state of nature every nineteen years, rebuilding governing institutions and sanctifying new laws with the active consent of the people. He thought Jefferson too enamored with the principle of majority rule, by which governments attained legitimacy only through the consent of their living subjects. Drawing on Locke and other social contract theorists, Madison defended the idea of civil society and the rule of law, whereby citizens voluntarily gave up some of their natural rights in exchange for civil protections.

  As every constitution relied on, in Madison’s words, “tacit and implied consent,” he had to reject Jefferson’s contention that majority will superseded all other law. There was only one conclusion to draw: if it were to be implemented, Jefferson’s theory would require that every new member of society (every person who came of age) give his consent to every law. That was impractical, if not impossible.

  Madison tried to mollify Jefferson, acknowledging that it was easier to criticize than to create a new theoretical framework. But he knew all too well that Congress had no taste for what he called “philosophical legislation”; Jefferson’s unfiltered theory could never get off the ground. The prevailing wind in the First Congress was for curtailing the “licentiousness of the people,” not for trying out an ideal notion of majority will, Madison explained. It would be a good long time before “the sublime truths which are seen thro’ the medium of Philosophy, become visible to the naked eye of the ordinary Politician.” He was letting Jefferson down easy.90

  Madison was predisposed toward a structure that bent but did not break. No matter the issue, he always sought to uphold the usefulness of civil institutions. Jefferson, in contrast, celebrated the unfettered freedom of natural rights, the sovereignty of the individual, and his entitlement to protest whatever law curtailed personal liberty. Madison and Jefferson did not merely have different priorities; their manner of thinking was fundamentally different.

  “Our Country Is Already Sufficiently Large”

  Madison and Jefferson had shared purposes that transcended their differences. This was not at all the case with Hamilton, whose first inclination that Madison and he had a different agenda came five months into Washington’s presidency, if not before. In October 1789 Hamilton had a long conversation with George Beckwith, the unofficial British minister to the new government. Fresh from London, Beckwith relayed his nation’s displeasure with Congress’s attitude toward commercial arrangements. In the course of their conversation, as Beckwith alluded nonspecifically to the hostility of some members of Congress to British interests, Hamilton reflexively answered him: “You mean Mr. Maddison from Virginia. I confess I was likewise rather surprized at it, as well as that the only opposition to General Washington was from thence.” Madison’s opposition to reasonable policy was, according to Hamilton, a manifestation of his provincialism: “He is very little Acquainted with the world.”

  The words sound flippant, so it must be allowed that some part of Hamilton’s posturing may have been by design: to tell the Englishman what he wanted to hear. The treasury secretary was not above trying to soften up a British diplomat. If opposed on principle, he went on to say, Madison was “uncorrupted and incorruptible.” It would appear that there was still a basis for mutual respect to develop, if Hamilton and Madison alike chose to move in that direction.91

  Hamilton’s ungenerous remark about Madison’s experience was a close cousin to Jefferson’s statement to Madison three years earlier about John Adams, whom he had called a poor judge “where knowledge of the world is necessary.” The difference between Jefferson’s and Hamilton’s jibes lay in Jefferson’s assumption that Adams was not naïve but misguided. Hamilton seemed to be claiming that Madison was ignorant of how the real world worked. Jefferson needed to get something off his chest when he wrote to Madison, while Hamilton’s words show the condescension and self-importance that would soon come between the Virginians and him and influence national politics for an entire decade.

  Ham
ilton told Beckwith of his own fondness for all things English. “I have always preferred a Connexion with you, to that of any other Country,” he said, notably, changing back and forth from “I” to “We in America,” as he gave encouragement to his visitor. “We think in English, and have a similarity of prejudices, and of predilections.” Hamilton took liberties that President Washington would hardly have approved: “I am free to say, that Although France has been indulgent to us, in certain points, yet, what she can furnish, is by no means so Essential or so suited to us as Your productions, nor do our raw Materials suit her so well as they do you … We wish to form a Commercial treaty with you to Every Extent, to which you may think it for Your interest to go.” As yet, the U.S. government had no commercial treaty with its late enemy.

  Revolutionary France was still in its republican phase and largely in the hands of the liberal nobility. Lafayette, who was Hamilton’s friend as well as Madison’s and Jefferson’s, represented the hope of a successful transformation. Yet Hamilton made his prejudices to Beckwith plain and would at no time give positive signals to the French. Moving to a discussion of Spain’s control of the lower Mississippi, he assured Beckwith that the United States had no ambition to expand into the northern reaches of the magnificent river, where London maintained interests. But he was clear that western settlers would not accept Spain’s refusal of navigation rights. At this point in the conversation, Hamilton made another obsequious remark, which Beckwith recorded alongside the others: “Our Country is already sufficiently large, more so perhaps than prudence might wish.” Its extent weakened the federal government, Hamilton assured the Briton.92

  At nearly the same time as Madison was reading Jefferson’s letter recommending that the new administration show a clear preference to its wartime ally France, Hamilton was telling a high-level British representative the complete opposite. Battle lines were being drawn in this and other ways. While the secretary of the treasury aimed to concentrate investment in northeastern cities, Madison and Jefferson were intent on privileging southern interests and westward expansion. Simply put, as Jefferson prepared to enter the cabinet, the Washington administration was already speaking with more than one voice.

  THE PATHOLOGICAL DECADE AND BEYOND

  CHAPTER SIX

  Attachments and Resentments

  1790–1792

  Every man seems to think himself born a Legislator, and is generally so tenacious of his own darling sentiment, that unless it is adopted, he is continually complaining.

  —“POLITICIANS—A SCRAP,” NEWPORT (PA.) HERALD, APRIL 8, 1790

  Be ADAMS to your nation still endear’d!

  And be the powers of JEFFERSON rever’d!

  Be MADISON for eloquence renown’d!

  Still various worth in HAMILTON be found!

  Truth soon must flourish, enmity decrease—

  They come, the patrons of true worth, and peace!

  —STANZAS ON THE MOVEMENT OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FROM NEW YORK TO PHILADELPHIA, AND THE ARRIVAL THERE OF CONGRESS, FEDERAL GAZETTE, DECEMBER 6, 1790

  JEFFERSON REMAINED AT MONTICELLO THROUGH FEBRUARY 1790, as his daughter Patsy married her second cousin, Thomas Mann Randolph. He then traveled to Richmond to arrange for payment of outstanding debts to British creditors (the interest now representing more than half of the principal). Afterward he rode north, stopping in Philadelphia to pay his respects to Benjamin Franklin, eighty-four and near death.1

  The colorful, garrulous Senator William Grayson of Virginia, age fifty, predeceased Franklin by a few weeks. There was talk of a contest for his seat between Madison and Patrick Henry, but it was just talk. Madison wrote to William Short, matter-of-factly, that Henry would be offered first, was likely to refuse, and that “Col. Monroe has been spoken of” also. For reasons not immediately apparent, Madison was at the same time querying Edmund Pendleton as to whether Henry’s role in calling for resistance to the Stamp Act, a quarter-century before, had really been preeminent. The rationale he gave Pendleton for posing the question was that the American Revolution was such a consequential event for the world that “every circumstance connected with it … will be more and more a matter of investigation.” As to the Senate seat, George Mason was offered it first and declined. John Walker, Jefferson’s Albemarle neighbor, filled the vacancy. A year later James Monroe would inherit the office.2

  On March 21, 1790, Jefferson reached New York City and joined the president’s cabinet. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, his coequal counterpart (it was too soon to describe him as Jefferson’s opposite number), had had a number of months to adapt and to initiate. Hamilton was regarded as highly knowledgeable yet entirely tactless; the Madisonians in Congress were offended by him even before Jefferson arrived on the scene.

  If the incoming secretary of state was exhibiting signs of strain, Hamilton had nothing to do with it. As Madison reported to Edmund Randolph, Jefferson’s final push north had been slowed by the appearance of his “periodical head-Ach,” devastating migraines that kept him out of the public eye for weeks. Madison himself was suffering from an attack of dysentery for the second time that year. The good-hearted Reverend Madison gave his cousin some encouragement: “The Disappointments of the best Politicians are not perhaps less frequent than those of other Men; but they must console themselves with having erected Lights, which tho’ the unwary Mariner may not avail himself of at present, will, most probably be of future Utility.” The question before James Madison the politician was whether his guarded approach to government would persuade in an age of heightened passion.3

  Dissent and social conflict are as much a part of America’s historical landscape as the hunger for land itself. Sectarians challenged the religious establishment; freethinkers scoffed at biblical revelation and church dogma; provincials decried English arrogance. The Revolution had had multiple purposes: it was fought to liberate colonial elites from constraints put upon them by officials in distant London. It was fought for the right to induce the Indians to part with more land. It was fought against whatever stood in the way of greater prosperity.

  Among the middling sorts of people, hope of a new social order died hard. But as the average soldier found out, the ruling gentry had not gone to war to make liberty infectious or democracy possible. The egalitarian ideal proved useful in rallying support for independence among a wider public, but the simple fact was that colonial elites aimed principally to replace the British as America’s lawgivers. They went to war for themselves.

  The stakes had been high in 1775–76 and remained high in 1789–90, as power was being negotiated. We are often told that the debate over the Constitution divided the republic, momentarily, neatly, into two camps: federalists and antifederalists. But that way of seeing the founding generation misses what could not be intellectualized—it misses all that lay submerged.

  Once George Washington became president, the Constitution of the United States was no longer a theory of government. The federal republic had to undergo field trials. And so the decade of the 1790s was reactive: it saw conflicts instigated by words as well as events. Even when it seemed to be otherwise, the most important catalyst behind the traumatic disturbances of the 1790s remained state jealousies and sectional identities, in no small measure due to the tenacity of Virginians. But even that did not explain the violence of mind and the nearly nonstop public bickering of a nation in flux, in what deserves to be dubbed the pathological decade of American history.

  “A Public Evil”

  When he assumed the presidency, Washington intended to preside, not to command or demand. The federal Constitution implied that Congress would be the most active of the three branches of government, and in 1789 Washington had no ambitious legislative program to push. It was, instead, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton who promptly took up the nation’s fiscal health and charted a dynamic course for the administration. That eager embrace of power during the first year of Washington’s presidency set a tone for the fractio
us decade by creating a permanent distance between Madison, the leading voice in Congress, and Hamilton, the leading voice in the administration.

  When Hamilton had his conversation with George Beckwith in October 1789, he was still getting a feel for Madison’s position on the credit and debt issues. But by the time he introduced his Report on Public Credit, in January 1790, he must have known that Madison would lead the opposition in Congress. Hamilton wanted the federal government to assume not only its debts to European bankers (which all parties agreed was a matter of national honor) but also the states’ remaining debts, which were considerable. The plan became more controversial when Hamilton announced how he intended to fund these debts: renegotiating interest rates and terms of repayment to the states’ creditors. The government was to issue new securities to existing creditors, which could be easily sold and traded—an attractive opportunity for investors because the interest rates were generous and the government’s backing was real.4

  Madison took it hard. He immediately revolted against the injustice of rewarding the holders of the outstanding securities, who were wealthy speculators, predominantly northerners, some of them members of Congress. They had bought up the notes from the original holders: ordinary farmers, the financially strapped veterans of the Revolutionary War. These men had sold their government IOUs for ready cash, and many had received only ten cents on the dollar. Madison insisted that they receive fair compensation. When his motion on behalf of America’s neglected citizens failed to impress a majority, the Pennsylvania Gazette printed a satirical poem that exposed a heartless Congress with this couplet: “In war, to heroes let’s be just / In peace, we’ll write their toils in dust.”