Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  “The memorable Declaration of American Independence is said to have been penned by him.” In June 1784, a Providence, Rhode Island, newspaper takes note of Jefferson’s arrival in town en route to Boston and his first transatlantic voyage.

  “Intercepted Letter from Tall Tommy to Little Jemmy.” Federalist contempt for the diminutive President Madison is unmistakable in the opening lines of a satirical poem published in the Alexandria Gazette in 1810.

  “I met the P[resident] on the road.… Always & affect[ionate]ly yours.” The congressman shares news with his chief political ally. Madison to Jefferson, June 12, 1792. Library of Congress

  “The motion of my blood no longer keeps time with the tumult of the world.” The secretary of state explains why he is leaving government. Jefferson to Madison, June 9, 1793. Library of Congress

  “The conduct of Mr. A. is not such as was to have been wished or perhaps expected. Instead of smoothing the path for his successor, he plays into the hands of those who are endeavoring to strew it with as many difficulties as possible.” Madison complains about John Adams’s behavior in the days before Jefferson’s inauguration as president. Madison to Jefferson, February 28, 1801. Library of Congress

  “Take care of me when dead.” Sensing that he will not survive much longer, Jefferson asks his trusted friend of fifty years to defend his historical reputation. Jefferson to Madison, February 17, 1826. Library of Congress

  Montpelier, Madison’s home. Photograph taken prior to 1884.

  Monticello, Jefferson’s home. From an engraving in Gleason’s Pictorial (Boston), 1854.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Effects of Whiskey on Reputation

  1794–1795

  On the subject of the Debt, the Treasury faction is spouting on the policy of paying it off as a great evil … Hamilton has made a long Valedictory Rept. on the subject. It is not yet printed, and I have not read it. It is said to contain a number of improper things.

  —MADISON TO JEFFERSON, JANUARY 26, 1795

  Hamilton is really a colossus to the antirepublican party. Without numbers, he is an host within himself.

  —JEFFERSON TO MADISON, SEPTEMBER 21, 1795

  ON JANUARY 3, 1794, MADISON OPENED A NEW SESSION OF CONGRESS by introducing a bill that discriminated against nations with which the United States had no commercial treaty. Without naming Britain, the proposed legislation was meant to serve as a bargaining chip in ongoing negotiations. Madison reasoned that trade policy should be based on reciprocity, not fear.

  New England merchants carried on a thriving business with Great Britain, which they did not want to see disturbed. Ninety percent of American imports of manufactured goods were British. Twice as much was imported than sold to Britain. In contrast, France purchased from the United States seven times what she sold to it. Even as he brought these statistics to the attention of Congress, Madison felt he was making little headway. He wrote to Jefferson of “vast exertions by the British party to mislead the people of the eastern states.” By “British party,” he meant, of course, the pro-British element in Congress.

  No longer in the cabinet since the first of January, Jefferson had removed himself from active politics. He was a full-time planter again, secure in the separate world he had fashioned for himself at Monticello. Though he and Madison had formulated the commerce bill in tandem, he fully expected Madison to bear the brunt of their opponents’ criticisms—“the most artful and wicked calumnies,” as Madison was soon telling him. It was Madison’s name that was associated with the universally discredited Genet mission now. Farmer Jefferson was happy to be out of contention; a few white hairs had begun to appear on his head, and his married daughter Patsy had given him a granddaughter, Anne, and a grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph.1

  As Madison pursued his agenda, a New York newspaper commented on his oratory. He spoke in Congress on trade matters for two and a half hours during which, it was said, “one might hear a pin fall.”2 Yet for all the encomiums heaped upon him as a force in the legislature, he did not universally impress. A new representative from Connecticut wrote to a friend: “A hollow, feeble voice—an awkward, uninteresting manner—a correct style without energy or copiousness—are his distinguishing traits.” While crediting him for precision and judgment that were “solid,” the critic could not understand why Madison had received so much acclaim for his forensic abilities: “He is wholly destitute of vigour or genius, ardour of mind, and brilliancy of imagination. He has no fire, no enthusiasm, no animation.” The new legislator did not deny, however, that the Virginian retained “the most personal influence of any man in the House of Representatives.”3

  Madison’s experience in Congress would not be enough to give his party the edge. The various characters we identify as the leaders of the Revolutionary generation understood their peers to be men driven by complex motives. They recognized the growth of partisanship as more than a momentary phenomenon. No one could predict at this point how long the United States would hold together. Allegiances were shifting; schooldays and wartime friendships cooled.

  With Jefferson’s departure from Philadelphia and the sinking of Madison’s proposal to impose discriminatory duties on British merchant ships, a distinct change took place in the executive. As the generally moderate Edmund Randolph tried to fill Jefferson’s shoes at the State Department, and the increasingly persuasive Hamilton continued to advise the president, the power dynamic should have been instantly obvious. It was obvious, at least, to George Nicholas, the attorney general of the newly admitted state of Kentucky, whose brother Wilson Cary Nicholas was a standout in the Virginia House of Delegates. Writing to his old acquaintance Madison, he likened Randolph’s new situation to a “bed of thorns,” convinced that the exchange of cabinet positions would make him “the mark at which all who are dissatisfied with public measures, will aim their shafts.” Nicholas was right on target. What awaited Randolph was sheer misery.4

  Another change in the executive was the addition of William Bradford. Madison’s best friend from Princeton days moved into the attorney generalship. These days, Bradford’s politics were much closer to Hamilton’s than to Madison’s, and the old friends appear not to have had any meaningful contact. From Jefferson’s perspective, Washington was being inundated with advice from one side only. Many years later, in his desire to shape historical memory, Jefferson would look back on this time and decide that the president had sunk into senility—for how else could a true republican have bowed to Tory principles?

  The senility rationale is not convincing. Washington was not browbeaten into submission: he had expressed plenty of anti-English views over the years. More important, though, the politician-general was greatly sensitive to reputation and wished to be known for wise decisions. Neither Madison, nor Jefferson, nor anyone else could have convinced him that Revolutionary France was moving in the direction of greater stability. As a surrogate father to the inspired Marquis de Lafayette, he appreciated that the wide-eyed French teenager had first sailed to America because he believed in the words of the Declaration of Independence and in national self-determination. But something else prevailed in Washington’s mind now: the unruliness of Lafayette’s people. This judgment, combined with his recognition of the value of commerce to America’s fiscal health, amended his earlier conviction that the United States should not yield to pressure from Britain. In spite of London’s refusal to allow American vessels to trade directly with the British West Indies, and in spite of its refusal to abandon the western forts, Washington lent a willing ear to Hamilton, digested his appeals, and decided to risk a less-than-ideal agreement with the late enemy.

  It was a foregone conclusion that the president was willing to distance himself from Madison, whose supple mind he had counted on most in 1789–90, while laboring over how to erect a practical, functioning executive. The two would never reconstitute the relationship they had earlier enjoyed, or anything close to it. Their diametrically opposed outlook on democratic speech and de
mocratic societies was leading the president to doubt the congressman’s personal loyalty. By 1794 Washington and Madison no longer interacted outside of public functions. Otherwise secure in his judgments, Washington had one weakness that he readily acknowledged: an insufficient knowledge of matters legal and constitutional. Without Madison, he turned almost exclusively to Hamilton for guidance.5

  At Monticello, Jefferson was making up for the time he had spent away. He paid his back taxes to the county, hired a Scottish gardener, experimented with seeds, set up a nail manufactory manned by teenage slaves, and produced his “mouldboard plough of least resistance,” for which the French bestowed a prize. He was also remodeling the house to include its signature dome, based on a design he had seen in Paris. A month into his retirement, he wrote to Edmund Randolph and reiterated how happy he was to be divorced from political squabbles: “I think it is Montaigne who has said that ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head. I am sure it is true as to every thing political, and shall endeavor to estrange myself to every thing of that character.” Being Jefferson, he could not stop there and ended up confessing to the man who had inherited his position that he still had leftover concerns: “I indulge myself on one political topic only, that is, in [dis]closing to my countrymen the shameless corruption of a [por]tion of the representatives in the 1st. and 2nd. Congresses and their implicit devotion to the treasury.” He would not lay his head on that pillow of ignorance.6

  Madison kept in constant touch. In March alone he wrote to Jefferson seven times, largely to report on the mood in Philadelphia. To undermine Madison’s agenda, Hamilton was feeding speeches to William Loughton Smith, a congressman from South Carolina. “Every tittle of it is Hamilton’s except the introduction,” Jefferson assured Madison after reading one of these. “The sophistry is too fine, too ingenious even to have been comprehended by Smith, much less devised by him.” Jefferson also told Madison: “I have never seen a Philadelphia paper since I left it, till those you inclosed me … and believe I never shall take another newspaper of any sort. I find my mind totally absorbed in my rural occupations.”7

  Whether or not Jefferson was inviting news briefs, the reports from Philadelphia were not all bad. Madison told him that the new French minister, Jean-Antoine-Joseph Fauchet, was reversing the errors of Genet: “He has the aspect of moderation. His account of things in France is very favorable on the whole. He takes particular pains to assure all who talk with him of the perseverance of France in her attachment to us.” However, Madison had also heard that arms for the British were being purchased in New York and elsewhere in the Northeast and shipped on American vessels to the British West Indies. “This is really horrible,” he wrote. “Whilst we allow the British to stop our supplies to the French Dominions, we allow our citizens to carry supplies to hers.”

  Jefferson proposed taking a hard line and challenging Britain militarily if it decided to go after French possessions in the Caribbean. “Not that the Monocrats and Papermen in Congress want war,” he said snidely, with Hamilton’s Anglophilia in mind. “But they want armies and debts.” It was hard to say what bothered him more: maintaining a national debt that could be used to build a menacing national military, or repressing the military option by making allowances for British power.

  To understand why Jefferson felt this way is to grasp a key feature of American politics in the 1790s. If Hamilton were to control America’s destiny, the new nation would emulate the British model of courtly power and courtly corruption. To a republican, a powerful central government built up the public debt and funded aggressive standing armies—this was how Tom Paine had explained the workings of the British government in The Rights of Man.

  From a purely financial standpoint, Hamilton’s system threatened to keep the debt growing. Jefferson’s deepest fear was that the engine of debt was being passed on to the next generation, making citizens the pawns of a Hamiltonian quasi-king bent on pursuing power-engrossing wars. The secretary of state had clamored for retirement and finally had his wish, but his irritation was not checked by an altered schedule and rural circumstances. Eager to convince himself that he was done with politics, he was doing his best to keep Madison fired up.8

  He did not have to. Even Federalists in Congress were ready to take action when the British stepped up their belligerent activities in the Caribbean. In April 1794 a thirty-day embargo was passed. “French arms continue to prosper,” Madison wrote tentatively, apprising Jefferson that the prospect of another American war against England so alarmed Washington that a special diplomatic mission to London was in the works. The president’s choice to head the mission would be John Jay of New York.9

  “Bad Precedent”

  In this season of debate, Madison still had the presence of mind to devote himself to personal considerations. How long his attraction to a certain young lady had been building one can only guess. Dolley Payne Todd had been living in Philadelphia since the age of fifteen, after a childhood in Hanover County, Virginia. Her Quaker father opposed slavery and had emancipated the slaves he owned before moving north. In this way, the twenty-six-year-old widow already had a firsthand acquaintance with America’s homegrown tyranny when, in May 1794, she met “the great little Madison”—this was how she reportedly spoke of her forty-three-year-old suitor. Madison had earlier approached a mutual friend of theirs, the recent widower Aaron Burr, and requested a formal introduction.

  It had been a decade since Madison’s abortive courtship of Kitty Floyd. Aside from his undefined friendship with the widow Henrietta Colden in Manhattan, no evidence exists to suggest romantic (or sexual) activity of any kind prior to the congressman’s courtship of Dolley, which did not drag out very long. “He thinks so much of you in the day that he has Lost his Tongue,” the wife of a Virginia congressman wrote to Dolley. “At night he Dreames of you and Starts in his Sleep a Calling on you to relieve his Flame.” While this tender account is entirely undependable, the embattled legislator married the young mother at the home of Dolley’s brother-in-law, a nephew of George Washington’s, who was living in what is today West Virginia.

  That was not the only curious element in Dolley’s genealogy. Her great-grandfather, a Virginia Quaker, was also the grandfather of Patrick Henry. Among the Virginians, such ties were to be expected. Recall that a similar connection existed between the Madison and Pendleton clans, and between the Jeffersons and the Randolphs. Jefferson had knowledge of the Madisons’ courtship in advance, though any written mention of it has been lost. Two weeks after the ceremony, when Madison next wrote to Jefferson, he denoted September 15, 1794, his wedding date, as “the epoch at which I had the happiness to accomplish the alliance which I intimated to you I had been some time soliciting.” Dolley was less circuitous. Without waiting, she wrote to a close friend on the fifteenth: “In the course of this day I give my hand to the man of all others I most admire.” Before sealing the letter that evening, having taken his name, she added an emphatic postscript: “Dolley Madison! Alass! Alass!”10

  Politics did not take a honeymoon, because America’s relationships with the warring European powers remained unresolved. The two main branches of government were still trying to establish credit abroad and grow maritime commerce. President Washington counted on his London-bound envoy to make things right. He had been personally comfortable with John Jay ever since the late 1770s, when the Revolution was in trouble and Jay, then president of Congress, staunchly supported the commanding general against those who wanted him replaced. To some, Jay was vain, condescending, and aristocratic in manner, but Washington had known him only as a well-trained, right-thinking public servant. During the Confederation period, Jay served as U.S. secretary of foreign affairs and, since 1789, as chief justice of the Supreme Court. The Court was not nearly as active as it would later be, and Washington thought that Jay could be spared from judicial duties long enough to travel to London to negotiate a commercial treaty and avert war.

  The appointment would p
rove to be a bad choice for a president who was pushing against the increasing pressure of faction. But this did not matter to Washington. A letter he wrote to Hamilton toward the end of his presidency, marked “Private,” summed up his turn of mind: “I have a very high opinion of Mr. Jay’s judgment, candour, honor and discretion (tho’ I am not in the habit of writing so freely to him as to you).” In or out of office, Hamilton was the president’s chief aide. It was Hamilton, in fact, who first proposed Jay’s name to Washington when his own selection became unlikely. The consequence of the Virginian Washington having thrown in with New Yorkers Hamilton and Jay would prove far-reaching.11

  James Monroe, soon to be dispatched to Paris to placate the French, stood in opposition to Jay’s confirmation. As a U.S. senator, he had also voted against Morris’s appointment as minister to France. His reasons for opposing Jay now were no different from Madison’s and Jefferson’s: Jay’s weakness in dealing with the Spanish in the past made it doubtful that he could be a tough negotiator with the British. If less obnoxious than Hamilton, Jay was nonetheless one of those “Anglomen” whom Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe all distrusted. The ostensibly objective Edmund Randolph advised Washington not to send Jay because it would be a “bad precedent that a chief justice should be taught to look for executive honors … while he retained his judicial seat.” Good reasoning, perhaps, but it went unheeded. Republicans in the Senate would make sure this violation of the separation of powers remained an issue.