Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  Jefferson knew full well that Washington was the force behind manufactures, which meant that Madison knew it too. Yet Madison had no qualms about attacking the Report on Manufactures in several of his later Gazette essays. In one notable instance, he returned to the cause of agrarianism, a subject generally associated with Jefferson. Praising the health, virtue, intelligence, and competence of the husbandman, Madison drew a contrast between the contentment of the self-employed and the pitiful condition of the exploited sailor—his symbol of the pervasive inequality within Britain’s maritime economy. “His mind, like his body, is imprisoned in the bark that transports him,” Madison wrote of the sailor, echoing Jefferson’s theory as he equated social well-being with freedom of movement and the creative exercise of human faculties.

  More hard-hitting essays followed. In “Fashion,” Madison described the capricious character of manufacturing in merry old England. He recounted the plight of twenty thousand buckle factory workers who suddenly found themselves on the streets in 1786, owing to the fickleness of fashion. This highly specialized kind of production was exactly what Hamilton wished to encourage, but for Madison it represented the “lowest point of servility.” In his avid embrace of the rurally based economy and the healthy physical environment that promoted contentment among the masses, Madison continued speaking in Jefferson’s voice. Jefferson, meanwhile, was either under an official charge to remain silent on this issue or was uncharacteristically detached from it.47

  “Its Real Friends”

  Madison and Hamilton had diametrically opposed views of economic expansion, but both men wore ideological blinders. Madison saw what was wrong: government should benefit a majority of the people and not artificially stimulate the economy in ways that favored one class over another. But in his calculation, he missed the real losers in a Hamiltonian universe: women, children, and the poor who were to be exploited as factory laborers as America developed its industrial economy. Hamilton relegated these elements of the white population to the status of surplus labor—virtual slaves. For his part, Madison invoked the independent yeoman as a hero without seeing how small farmers were turning increasingly to slave owning.

  The point is simple. All American economic theory at this time was mechanistic; none of it was humanistic. The independent yeoman had to produce—to use Henry Lee’s words—“eight or ten blooming children.” In the yeoman’s paradise to which Madison and Jefferson subscribed, women were breeders; they were reproducers more than producers (though wives were, in fact, the chief producers of homespun clothing). This was not independence. It is curious that in post-Revolutionary America, enlightened men failed to think more creatively with respect to the physical costs of childbirth in a medically dangerous environment. Jefferson had lost his wife Patty in 1782, after a series of difficult pregnancies. In 1790 Henry Lee mourned his “Divine Matilda,” when she succumbed after the birth of her fourth child. Postpartum death was a common occurrence. Yet somehow the fantasy of the happy and fecund farmer’s wife persisted, as attention was redirected to Hamilton’s ostensibly unhealthy plan of federally supported industries.48

  In another National Gazette piece, with the unambiguous title of “The Union: Who Are Its Real Friends,” Madison sketched out a partisan creed, rendering his argument in the negative. The Union’s real friends were “not those who charge others with not being its friends, whilst their own conduct is wantonly multiplying its enemies”; “not those who favor measures, which by pampering the spirit of speculation within and without the government, disgust the best friends of the Union”; “not those who promote unnecessary accumulations of the debt of the Union, instead of the best means of discharging it as fast as possible”; “not those who … pervert the limited government of the Union, into a government of unlimited discretion, contrary to the will and subversive of the authority of the people.” So, finally, who were the real friends of the Union? Madison’s positive answer: “friends to the authority of the people,” “friends to liberty,” “friends to the limited and republican system of government,” and “enemies to every public measure that might smooth the way to hereditary government.”49

  Jefferson would soon coin the term monocrat to describe the proponents of Hamiltonianism. But it was Madison who, at this juncture, publicly associated himself with a philosophy of republicanism and denounced those who would sabotage it. President Washington could not have been pleased by what was happening. He supported Hamilton’s general plan to strengthen the national economy, though he continued to hear the opinions of both Madison and Jefferson. For as long as Jefferson and Attorney General Edmund Randolph remained in the cabinet, Washington would try not to take sides.

  Shortly after Madison’s combustible “The Union: Who Are Its Real Friends” appeared, the president met with the congressman and brought him into a conversation he had hitherto carried on only with individual cabinet members. He was collecting opinions: Should he resign the presidency at the conclusion of his term? According to Madison’s notes of their meeting, Washington said he was “disinclined” to continue in office another four years. He saw Adams, Jefferson, and John Jay as potential successors. He noted Jefferson’s vaunted “repugnance to public life & anxiety to exchange it for his farm & his philosophy.” He also alluded to the “obnoxious” views of Adams and Jay: the former’s positions were generally repellent because of unconcealed “monarchical principles”; the latter disqualified himself because of his unpopular diplomatic activity in selling out western interests by supporting Spanish rights to navigation of the Mississippi. The president did not mention Hamilton as a potential successor. And if he was upset about Madison’s intimacy with Freneau, he did not show it.

  As each member of the president’s cabinet had done, Madison too pressed Washington to remain in office and try to conciliate the competing interests in the federal government. The president, in turn, asked Madison to help him draft a message to Congress, one that sidestepped the issue of his desire to leave office. In delaying his decision on a second term, Washington appears to have felt he could do little to avert the ripening disagreement he saw coming, and he was not eager to preside over it.

  Jefferson was beginning to express his vexation, at least in private correspondence, by identifying Hamiltonian politicians as “tories” and “monarchists.” Meanwhile the “tories” and “monarchists” belittled the critics of Hamilton’s centralizing program as an illegitimate “faction” of antifederalists. The name-calling had begun.50

  In 1792 the volume of party strife grew louder. Using a variety of pseudonyms, Hamilton took up his pen in July and August, targeting Madison and Jefferson in the Gazette of the United States. He went easier on Madison, mentioning only Jefferson by name. Perhaps Hamilton recognized that Madison had a well-defined legislative role to play, whereas the secretary of state, as a member of the executive cabinet, competed directly with him for the president’s ear. But that is a rational explanation, and politics is an irrational business driven by strong personalities and skewed perceptions. Hamilton may also have thought Madison’s ambitions stopped at the national legislature, and that Jefferson more directly threatened him because of his “worldly” experience.

  Hamilton understood perfectly well that Madison posed at least as great a threat to him as Jefferson. Privately he said so. It was only in the public press that he placed Jefferson ahead of Madison in the symbolic hierarchy of the anti-administration bloc. Madison and Jefferson had not established a chain of command, and their circle was at this point comprised of select Virginians only; it did not even include a majority of their state’s assemblymen, whose focus, with the exception of the assumption issue, remained local. The so-called republican interest had yet to develop a national character.51

  But Hamilton made it apparent in his newspaper offensive that he thought of Jefferson as a man whose pretension to literary and scientific erudition covered up what were really “weak judgments.” He was ready to go toe-to-toe with Jefferson on intellectu
al matters, but he reserved his sternest criticism for Jefferson’s political performance, enlarging the Freneau appointment into a symbol of sleaze and the National Gazette as a “pernicious” instrument, “eminently calculated to disturb the public peace, and corrupt the morals of the people.” The essay was meant to expose Jefferson as a backhanded operator, a flat-out deceiver, who did what he did out of personal animus toward Hamilton. Freneau had been Madison’s friend, a fellow Princetonian. Hamilton could just as easily have pointed to Madison, but he chose Jefferson instead.52

  In the piece he signed “An American,” Hamilton accused Jefferson of being a weak patriot, objecting to the Constitution in the main and having recommended it only “on the ground of expediency, in certain contingencies.” This was an obvious exaggeration, but an effective slur. At the end of the long essay, Hamilton went the distance: “Mr. Jefferson is emulous of being the head of a party, whose politics have constantly aimed at elevating State-power, upon the ruins of National Authority.”

  Again in the fall of 1792, Hamilton wrote contemptuously of Jefferson as a selfish and covetous plotter, “the ambitious and intriguing head of a party,” a demagogue. The contempt compounded: “Plain Thomas J——; wonderful humility on all occasions—the flimsy veil of inordinate ambition.” One can only imagine the level of Hamilton’s exasperation, as well as scorn, when he wrote: “Mr. Jefferson fears in Mr. Hamilton a formidable rival in the competition for the presidential chair.”53

  This was the quintessential Hamilton, a warrior. “Plain Thomas J” did not answer in kind, but Madison did. Two more contributions to the National Gazette guaranteed the dynamic congressman his central position in the war of words. “A Candid State of Parties” declared that there was a “Republican” party comprised of those who wished well to republican government; and an “antirepublican” party (no one yet mentioned the word federalist as a party designation) that accepted the “active and insinuating influence” of the moneyed men to whom they were beholden.

  Madison’s next essay, “Who Are the Best Keepers of the People’s Liberties?” was an inelegant debate between a generic republican and antirepublican, in which one embraced the “sacred trust” of a liberty-loving people and the other attacked the masses as a “stupid, suspicious, licentious” group that needed to be taught submission and obedience. Madison saw the emergence not so much of a two-party system as of two party personalities—one patriotic and republican, the other “debauched” and weak, having turned traitor to the ideals of the republic. Madison’s moralism had reached what was, for him, an extreme.54

  A political war was now unavoidable. The colicky George Mason, whose unending opposition to the Constitution had soured him on the new establishment, must have been pleased by the fight he saw in Madison. On most occasions when he traveled south, Madison dutifully stopped at Gunston Hall to consult and would likely have done so again. But in October 1792 Mason died at home, age sixty-seven. Jefferson had seen him just a week before, finding Mason “perfectly communicative” though weak.

  Jefferson knew he needed to enlist influential allies if he was to counteract Hamilton’s defamatory labors effectively. Yet he remained intent never to write for the partisan press. Aiming to set the record straight, he went from Gunston Hall to Mount Vernon to see Hamilton’s boss. As usual, Washington was cooperative, and Jefferson thought he had gotten through. He told Madison he had enjoyed a “full, free, and confidential conversation with the President” and would fill him in on the details when next they met.55

  “A Plot Thickens”

  A lot was happening beyond the power struggle between Hamilton and the two Virginians. As the election of 1792 approached, the lines of division began to play out on the state level in the large states of New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Those who did not care for John Adams’s so-called heresies hoped to replace him as vice president with a different northerner.

  New characters were emerging. Jamaica-born Philadelphian Alexander James Dallas, who had edited the successful antifederalist Columbian Magazine, traveled to a gathering in New York in 1792, where he and like-minded men launched a concerted effort to unseat Vice President Adams. Dallas was confident that Senator Aaron Burr possessed the credentials that Pennsylvania republicans were looking for. The Philadelphia physician and educator Benjamin Rush, who over the course of a lifetime maintained friendships with Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, urged Burr: “Your friends everywhere look to you to take an active part in removing the monarchical rubbish of our government.”

  New York was another battleground, where antifederalist George Clinton, the incumbent governor, faced an intense reelection bid in 1792. His two likeliest competitors were the unaligned moderate with antifederalist leanings, Senator Burr, and the prominent federalist, Supreme Court chief justice John Jay. At that point, none of the three was identified with a national party: in the press, there were only “Jay-ites,” “Clintonians,” “anti-Clintonians,” and in time “Burrites” as well. Before the contest heated up, Burr withdrew; he felt he could not get enough backing. But he refused to transfer his support to either of the other two.

  The New York gubernatorial election was dogged by charges of corruption. Clinton won, but only after the votes of three upstate counties were thrown out because of a technicality. Burr was asked to take part in its adjudication. While there appears to have been no impropriety, the tenor of state politics was affected. Even Jefferson thought that Clinton should yield to Jay to avoid any unseemliness.

  Practiced at pulling strings, Hamilton paid close attention to what was taking place in his home state. Though he held a national appointment, he resolved to blunt the electoral careers of the New Yorkers he opposed. With so many hostile forces present, suspicions stretched up and down the state. Postelection Clintonians saw the federal government ever more as a corporation that would attack liberty and plunder the states. Jay was compared to a crocodile lying in wait. And Hamilton did not quite know what to expect of Burr, who had ties to Madison and Jefferson and could not be forgiven for ending Philip Schuyler’s political career. Everything Burr did seemed to produce some misgiving in Hamilton’s mind.

  A few months after Clinton’s reelection, Madison and Jefferson began to seek opinions on whether to run Clinton or Burr against Adams. There was a vice-presidential contest only in 1792, as no elector would think of withholding his vote from the incumbent president. Monroe entered the conversation with Madison and Jefferson, and the three Virginians ultimately opted to support Clinton. While Clinton’s questionable reelection had left a bad taste, Burr was only thirty-six, seventeen years Clinton’s junior, and considered too green for the vice presidency. The youngest in the triumvirate, Monroe, was relatively comfortable with Burr as a national candidate, aware that in the key state of Pennsylvania Burr had support and Clinton did not. But Madison and Jefferson were the heavyweights; they overruled the Pennsylvanians and insisted on Clinton, proving that long before there was a “Virginia Dynasty” of presidents, and even before there was a Democratic-Republican Party, there was a “Virginia interest” managing politics at the national level.56

  Hamilton suddenly warmed up to the man who appeared the least objectionable at the moment. He wrote to Adams to commiserate on the Clinton challenge. Cultivating an us-against-them mind-set, Hamilton made reference to the nastiness in the newspapers, Freneau’s in particular, as he egged on the irritable Adams with a panicky view of the situation: “You will have perceived that a plot thickens & that something very like a serious design to subvert the Government discloses itself.” Though the plot was, indeed, thickening, Adams received a good many more votes than Clinton and retained his second position in the federal system.57

  “I Like His Manners Better”

  During Jefferson’s nearly four years as secretary of state, one of his critical duties was to receive French and British envoys and to discuss political and commercial topics with them before reporting to the president. Where matters of trade interv
ened, Hamilton met with the same envoys. The first official French minister to the United States was Jean-Baptiste Ternant. He was fiftyish and had taken part in the American Revolution. Lafayette thought highly of him. The first British minister was the under-thirty George Hammond. Neither was on the scene during the inaugural year of Washington’s administration.

  Jefferson and Hamilton saw foreign representatives separately and sometimes spoke at cross-purposes. Hamilton suspended payment of outstanding U.S. debts to Revolutionary France until a government deemed legitimate was installed. Not surprisingly, he and Jefferson disagreed on what defined political legitimacy.

  While the United States was struggling to speak with a single voice at home and abroad, relations among the nations of Europe remained in flux. Distances made the dissemination of essential information slow and uncertain, and diplomacy took place in multiple stages with changing personnel. In 1791 the unofficial British envoy George Beckwith, closely connected to the governor-general of Canada, remained a fixture on the American scene. He took up lodgings in Philadelphia at, of all places, the House-Trist establishment. Jefferson thought this might make Madison uneasy and, with his usual aplomb, suggested that they move in together. He had refrained from making the proposition while Madison was daily enjoying “agreeable Congressional society”; but now that the complexion of things had changed, he urged: “Come and take a bed and plate with me.” Jefferson was living a few short blocks away and had four spare rooms in his rented house, any of which Madison could have moved into at a moment’s notice. “Let me intreat you, my dear Sir, to do it,” he repeated. “To me it will be a relief from a solitude of which I have too much.” He bribed Madison with the convenience of an exceptional private library.