Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  No doubt Jefferson made it a point to show Madison this letter, in which Adams denied that he was “Publicola.” It was, in fact, his twenty-five-year-old son John Quincy, as yet unnamed, who had embarked on his column without his father’s immediate knowledge. Jefferson, more ready than Madison to maintain a courteous conversation with the vice president, reaped what he had sown, as Adams, after lecturing, gave him warm assurances: “The friendship which has Subsisted for fifteen years between Us, without the Smallest Interruption, and untill this occasion without the Slightest Suspicion, ever has been and Still is, very dear to my heart.”31

  “A Very Respectable Mathematician”

  Much of the Rights of Man controversy had taken place while Madison and Jefferson were traveling. In 1784 Madison had visited upstate New York with Lafayette, but Jefferson was as yet unfamiliar with the region. In May 1791, after conversations in lower Manhattan with Madison’s college friend and roommate Philip Freneau, a poet, and U.S. senator Aaron Burr, who had recently bested Hamilton’s father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, in a tense election, the two Virginians sailed up the Hudson. In the state capital of Albany, on a day when the temperature reached ninety-four, one of the city’s newspapers announced that it was “honored with the presence of Mr. Jefferson, Secretary of State, accompanied by the Charles Fox of America, the celebrated Madison.” Fox was a Whig leader in the British Parliament who had vocally supported the American Revolution and who now, no less controversially, welcomed the French Revolution.32

  Their trip was billed as a nature expedition, and the travelers’ journals suggest that it truly was, though it would be absurd to think that political strategizing had not occurred to them as they took in their surroundings and met with prominent citizens. Beyond rumors that flowed through the pen of a Hamilton intimate, there is no evidence of machinations, no meeting to establish an alliance with Governor George Clinton of New York, who eventually would serve as vice president under both Virginians. But there is, ironically, a record of a cordial get-together with the defeated Senator Schuyler.33

  Madison and Jefferson traveled as far north as Lake Champlain, visiting Fort Ticonderoga and the Revolutionary battlefield of Saratoga. They paddled a canoe and went fishing on Lake George. They took in Bennington, Vermont, site of another battle of the Revolution, and traversed western Massachusetts and the Connecticut Valley. They then sailed forty miles across Long Island Sound to pay a visit to William Floyd, the former New York congressman whose daughter Madison had unsuccessfully courted. Madison biographer Ralph Ketcham has sardonically, yet aptly, described this crossing as “probably the longest sea voyage of his life.” Altogether Madison and Jefferson traveled nearly one thousand miles before they ferried from bucolic Brooklyn and ended up again in busy Manhattan.34

  At every stage of their journey, the two paid close attention to the regional economy. Madison’s notes make reference to a thriving free black farmer who employed white laborers, “and by his industry and good management” operated an efficient farm. The congressman was impressed by the man’s native intelligence as well as his accounting skills. Jefferson’s notes were dominated by scientific measurements and rigorous observations on trees and fruits, so we have no way to know whether the farmer made an impression on him.

  But there are other indications of Jefferson’s fairly static thinking about race. Shortly after he and Madison returned to Philadelphia, he had an exchange of letters with the Baltimore-area mathematician Benjamin Banneker, a sixty-nine-year-old free black. Jefferson’s one-page reply to Banneker stands alongside Notes on Virginia as our best evidence of his perplexity with regard to African Americans’ intellectual attainments.

  The mathematician’s prose is wrapped in the gallantry that eighteenth-century epistolary culture favored. His uninvited communication implored Jefferson to recognize an essential equality among all peoples: “I suppose it is a truth too well attested to you, to need a proof here, that we are a race of beings, who have long labored under the abuse and censure of the world; that we have long been looked upon with an eye of contempt; and that we have long been considered rather as brutish than human, and scarcely capable of mental endowments.” He presumed that Jefferson was better than most whites, “a man far less inflexible in sentiments of this nature, than many others; that you are measurably friendly, and well disposed towards us; and that you are willing and ready to lend your aid and assistance to our relief, from those many distresses, and numerous calamities, to which we are reduced.” Quoting back the self-evident truths contained in the text of the Declaration of Independence, Banneker counted on Jefferson to call publicly for an end to the “inhuman captivity, to which too many of my brethren are doomed.”

  The largely self-taught Marylander, having illustrated his literacy and refinement, enclosed a copy of the almanac he had published. It revealed complex mathematical calculations and indicated his skill in the science of astronomy, a favorite pastime of Jefferson’s since his days as a student. In his reply, the secretary of state appears magnanimous, commending Banneker on the quality of his work: “No body wishes more than I do, to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men; and that the appearance of the want of them, is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America.”

  On the same day that he sent his compliments to Banneker, Jefferson wrote to the fervently pro-American French philosopher Condorcet, his good friend and one of the great optimists about human nature. The statement was framed as if it were announcing a scientific discovery: “I am happy to be able to inform you that we have now in the United States a negro, the son of a black man born in Africa, and a black woman born in the United States, who is a very respectable Mathematician.” Repeating the language he had used in his Notes on Virginia, he expressed hope that science would eventually reveal that “the want of talents observed in [blacks] is merely the effect of their degraded condition, and not proceeding from any difference in the structure of the parts on which intellect depends.” This may have qualified as liberal sentiment in the eighteenth century, but it showed too that Jefferson was separating science (or philosophy of the mind) from the politics of emancipation.

  In fact, Jefferson thought that one almanac and one well-written letter constituted but little proof of the qualities of mind attaching to a whole race of men. His reservations became clearer in his comments to others, wherein his first line of defense was to rationalize that Banneker’s ancestry contained European blood. Or perhaps a white associate had helped him. Or perhaps the taste of trigonometry he offered was the extent of his natural gift. Justifying his doubts in later years, after Banneker was dead, Jefferson recalled that his impression of the mathematician was “a mind of very common stature,” and he went so far as to claim that there was a “childish and trivial” quality to Banneker’s writing.35

  In that Jefferson’s history shows a constant suspicion about the African’s mental powers and a fixed disregard for any evidence offered to him, the letter to Condorcet appears to have been a momentary detour. Madison’s greater curiosity and openness with regard to the black farmer in upstate New York attests to the suppleness of his thought; yet it would be wrong to see him as an integrationist either. He might have been entirely comfortable living in the North, but he never strayed far from Jefferson’s call for the recolonization of blacks beyond America’s borders.

  “Public Opinion”

  In early 1791, as the contradiction between the Madison-Jefferson and Hamiltonian visions for America became impossible to resolve through cordial means, Madison encouraged his college roommate Philip Freneau to open a newspaper that would talk back to the administration. John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States was staunchly defending whatever Hamilton proposed. Fenno was of modest means, an entrepreneur who identified with the interests of the ruling circle and saw profits flowing from being its mouthpiece. He had, as yet, no competitor in the ma
rketplace of ideas.

  Freneau was just scraping by when Madison and Jefferson agreed to assist him in signing up subscribers. They also guaranteed that any losses would be covered. Though a Princetonian with literary gifts, Freneau did not come from wealth. The son of a New York merchant, he had been the captain of a privateer during the Revolution and was captured by the British. Confined to a noxious prison ship in the Hudson River, he made a daring escape. Even more important to his patrons than his Revolutionary heroism, Freneau was a time-tested republican, an intellectual who despised banks and speculators and had published articles on the subject. Madison fully trusted him, which was why Jefferson did as well. Another of the Princeton legion, General Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, eagerly signed on to the project.36

  Financing problems delayed publication for some months. Naysayers, Madison wrote, “practiced some artifice” in their attempt to scare off the would-be editor. But in the end Freneau, like Jefferson before him, found Madison’s call to service overpowering. Freneau accepted a low-paying position in the State Department as a translator—incontrovertible proof of how closely Madison and Jefferson were cooperating at this moment. The noncoincidence would be exploited by an outraged Hamilton, who naturally read intrigue into the Freneau appointment. Jefferson maintained just enough distance that he could deny any unseemly involvement, while Madison agreed to stay abreast of all financial details of the prospective opinion journal. He even enlisted his father to round up subscribers in central Virginia.37

  The National Gazette published its first issue in Philadelphia on October 31, 1791. Three weeks later Madison anonymously authored the first of eighteen essays for his friend’s paper. It was titled “Population and Emigration.” Essentially nonpartisan, it revisited Benjamin Franklin’s observations on the safety-valve effect of westward expansion. Madison described migration from the Old World to the New as a natural process that stood to benefit both the United States and Europe. Creating a healthier, happier Euro-American population would add eager new consumers of European goods while ridding Europe of its laboring poor. According to Madison’s theory, immigrants would continue to desire what Europe produced, even as they became American in their pursuit of economic uplift. While it appeared politically innocuous, the essay established a template, a guide for further argument.38

  As a political journalist, Madison was to offer step-by-step instruction in republicanism—how to talk back, how to push back against Hamilton’s British-style plan of government. Given Hamilton’s consolidation of power in the executive branch, normal checks and balances embodied in the federal system were no longer adequate, and quiet tactics were outmoded. Madison’s unceasing work in Congress had failed to stop an agenda overtly aimed at Anglicizing the new republic; so he would now tap the best minds in the country to help him salvage the constitutional framework. His answer to Hamilton was simple and straightforward: “public opinion.”

  Madison did not employ the term in the way we understand it today, as raw poll data. By public opinion, he meant educated opinion, the output of influential critics. His earlier conception of the federal republic, the carefully drawn, thoroughly unpopular Virginia Plan, had hoped to empower an educated class of people’s representatives to filter and refine the collective opinion of “the people.” Now, disappointed in the overall output of the people’s elected representatives, he turned to what he called “the class of literati,” enlightened opinion makers, cultivators of ideas and manners, who he hoped would use the press to educate.39

  There were few self-imposed limitations in what he wrote. In the notes he took as he conceived the National Gazette essays—ideas that he thought twice about and abandoned—Madison showed that he wanted to blast slavery for perpetuating aristocracy in the state governments of the South. He could not have done this in Congress without losing his southern allies, but in the “public opinion” format he thought, for a moment at least, that he would speak truth to power. In the end, he realized he could not risk what would happen if his anonymity were compromised—alienating the southerners whose opinions he and Jefferson wished to mobilize against Hamilton’s policies.40

  On December 5, 1791, two weeks after “Population and Emigration,” Madison contributed his second essay, “Consolidation.” It extended his theory of public opinion by focusing on the role it played in securing the republic. “Consolidation” regarded Hamilton’s capture of executive energy as an incipient move in the direction of monarchy, which stood to dissolve the states and consolidate (or concentrate) wealth and power at the center. Congress would lose its effectiveness; the people’s voice would go silent. Citing values of “reason, benevolence, and brotherly affection,” Madison drew upon the vocabulary of political sympathy (ordinarily Jefferson’s specialty), calling on the “great body of the people” to transcend their state identities, sympathize, and act in concert. When the federal government overstepped its authority, the collective people had to become a truer union than the established structure and “consolidate their defense of the public liberty.” Madison’s sense of collectivity described a people enlightened by public opinion; Jefferson’s described a people actuated by their native intelligence. Rethinking his definition of “the people,” Madison found himself philosophically closer to Jefferson and increasingly remote from Hamilton.41

  He enlarged on the same question two weeks later as he opened a new National Gazette editorial with an axiom: “Public opinion sets bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign in every free one.” There were instances, he explained, when government must obey public opinion and instances when public opinion would be influenced by government. In the coming years, his and Jefferson’s detractors would obsess on the first instance and challenge their belief in the second.

  This essay is significant, because it was a departure from Madison’s argument in Federalist 10, wherein he had relied on the widening contours of the republic to prevent the abuses caused by factional majorities. In 1787 he had thought that geography held the key to preventing demagogic appeals from spreading. Now he believed something different: that circulation of public opinion over that broad expanse—the addition of critical voices—was the essential balancing element in political society. He endorsed “a general intercourse of sentiments, as good roads, domestic commerce, a free press, and particularly a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people.” In Congress, he argued for lowering the postage on newspapers.42

  After justifying the power of public opinion, Madison gave his attention to all things British in Hamilton’s policies. In the essay “Universal Peace,” he contested the practice of perpetual debt to facilitate wars. “Each generation should be made to bear the burdens of its own wars, instead of leaving the expense for other generations,” he wrote. He thought there was something sinister about Hamilton’s ploy to keep taxes low and indirect while allowing the government to mobilize large sums for war or other empire-building activities. It was not the prize—western land—that Madison objected to, of course, but the necessary by-product of funding a great military machine: the all-powerful central government, mirror image of Great Britain.43

  On December 5, 1791, the day Madison published “Consolidation,” Hamilton gave him further cause for grievance with the release of his long-researched Report on Manufactures. Confirming Madison’s worst suspicions, the treasury secretary laid out a complex plan to enlist the federal government in promoting new industries. Madison’s objection was to financial inducements from the government. The practice, as he understood it, would create an entrenched cadre of moneyed patrons or, in modern parlance, lobbyists. Earlier in the year, as an experiment, Hamilton had backed a state-chartered cotton textile firm in Paterson, New Jersey, which was capitalized at $1 million and incorporated shortly before the Report on Manufactures was announced. So the report was more than theoretical.44

  For Madison, the evidence was clear. Each of Hamilton’s programs sucked the United States deeper into the British or
bit of foreign investment and capital. The republic would soon become a miniature version of its once and future enemy. Hamilton was extending the government’s powers beyond what the Constitution allowed, interpreting the preamble’s call to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty” as a blank check. Madison wrote Henry Lee, who was about to become Virginia’s governor, that any executive seizure of power could be justified based on Hamilton’s unrestrained reading of the republic’s charter. He concluded ruefully: “The parchment had better be thrown into the fire at once.” Lee’s response was even more cynical. He charged that Hamilton was trying to create a new species of American, a more docile race. Instead of the “stout muscular ploughman full of health … with eight or ten blooming children,” the secretary seemed to prefer “squat bloated fellows all belly & no legs who … manufacture a little.”45

  As a member of the president’s cabinet, Jefferson was in a difficult position. He could not oppose Hamilton’s report directly. Washington had made it clear that the development of a manufacturing economy was a high priority of his presidency; he asked the secretary of state to cooperate with particular inventors and artisans who were bringing British technology to America.

  The most aggressive promoter of manufactures in the government was Tench Coxe, Hamilton’s associate at Treasury, with whom Jefferson was friendly. This made the process bearable. So while Jefferson carried out the president’s orders, Coxe ran interference between Jefferson and Hamilton, taking the lead in organizing the Paterson corporation (called the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures). Jefferson, who exhibited an intellectual interest in all technological innovation, accompanied President Washington, the first lady, and Secretary Hamilton and his wife to visit the “cotton manufactory,” or machine shop, in Philadelphia, where the new and improved double looms for Paterson were being constructed. He did not do so as a concession to Hamilton—it was a command performance at the behest of the president of the United States.46