Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  Terms of abuse were tossed around with irreligious fervor. Though most of the “self created” democratic societies would disappear by the end of 1796, Cobbett’s “Peter Porcupine” identified a conspiracy against the government when he repeated the toasts delivered by southern Republicans at a Franco-American function. The first glass was lifted to “Democratic Societies throughout the world—may they be the watchful guardians of Liberty”; the second to “Citizen Maddison and the Republican party in Congress.” In a long, discursive pamphlet titled A Little Plain English, “Porcupine” mocked the all-too-clever names Republicans had come up with for their domestic enemy: “Aristocrat, King’s man, Loyalist, Royalist, Clergyman, Englishman.” Cobbett happily embraced the last of these, as he wrote in support of social distinctions: “As an Englishman, I shall be excused for not thinking myself upon a level with every patriot, every negro, and every democrat, that pleases to call me his fellow citizen.” Democracy meant erasing all social distinctions.

  According to Cobbett, the “French faction” in America was “perverse” in its thinking; the treaty’s opponents thrived on “frothy declamation and vaunting bombast … ambiguity and confusion … every passion that can disgrace the heart of man.” Directly disparaging the author of Letters of Franklin as “this fawning mob orator,” Cobbett insisted that President Washington had done the right thing by resisting the mob’s demand for a pro-French policy. To condemn Washington was to imitate the ungrateful pirate crew “who, having safely arrived in port, cut the throat of their pilot.”47

  “To Generalise a Whole Nation”

  As the parties were forming and newspapers waged partisan warfare, American slavery received relatively scant attention. In July 1795, however, once Washington had submitted Jay’s treaty to the Senate and recommended its passage, Hamilton, as an informal legal adviser to the president, responded to the president’s solicitation of advice on how to treat southerners’ claims against the British for “seducing away our negroes during the War.” It was one of the issues Jay was meant to have addressed during negotiations.

  Hamilton called the wartime seduction of slaves “infamous” behavior, “an indelible stain” in the annals of the British Empire. But it would have been “still more infamous” if, after defeat, the British had returned the runaways to their masters. Within the law of nations, he wrote, restoration of property was one thing, and “the surrender of persons to slavery” quite another. Citing Emerich de Vattel, the eighteenth century’s foremost expert in international law, Hamilton maintained that to keep slaves was to maintain a state of war with them—this interpretation more or less coincided with Jefferson’s theory of African Americans as a captive nation. Hamilton raised but did not resolve the question, “Is there any thing which exempts negroes more than other articles of personal property from capture & confiscation as booty?” In the end, he gave Washington some law to chew on, without recommending a clear course of action.48

  In December 1794 Jefferson freed Robert Hemings, age thirty-two, who as a teenager had accompanied him to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Bob was the first slave Jefferson formally, if reluctantly, emancipated. Just over nine months after Bob’s emancipation, in October 1795, his younger sister Sally delivered a daughter at Monticello. It was the first of her children whose birth Jefferson recorded in one of his domestic account books. Sally and her infant, despite their slave status, were tended to full-time by a nine-year-old slave girl, possible evidence of special treatment ordered by Jefferson. Over the next thirteen years the biracial Sally Hemings, described by one who knew her as “mighty near white,” would bear five more Jefferson children. And all who survived to adulthood would be freed.49

  Though he did not have the responsibilities placed upon him that Jefferson did when he came into his patrimony, James Madison, Jr., was now a husband with concerns beyond public service. He contemplated farming experiments to be tried at Montpelier when he left Congress for good, and his wife Dolley, despite her antislavery Quaker education, recognized that she was in no position to question the labor arrangements in Orange, Virginia. There she made a home for herself and her fatherless son and accepted the reality of slavery.

  If anyone could have made inroads at this time, it was Dolley’s husband. Back in 1785, at the height of his interest in acquiring land in New York’s Mohawk region, he said he wished “to depend as little as possible on the labor of slaves.” Although Madison did not often discuss his private misgivings about slavery, he set down in a private journal a year or so before he and Dolley met: “In proportion as slavery prevails in a State, the Government, however democratic in name, must be Aristocratic in fact.” Refusing to shrink from the implications of his words, he acknowledged directly that the northern states were more democratic than the southern. While many of the thoughts in this particular notebook found their way into his newspaper pieces, the slavery passages did not. Madison obviously felt it would have been imprudent for him to introduce a subject on which Virginians were so vulnerable. Political society was already in great flux. He would not consciously spark new unrest.50

  Madison was thinking of the word democratic in its classical sense and not as a partisan slur used by northern Federalists in the mid-1790s. As election year 1796 approached, the “democratic” North of his theorizing had its share of democracy-hating, Republican-baiting men. Made defensive by those who tarred them as aristocrats, the Federalists conventionally declared themselves to be people of good sense; they assumed the collective mantle of a deserving leadership corps, a steadying influence in government. Anxious about the visibility and rising popularity of men of “indecent” ambition, the Federalists tried to shout them down; they claimed that the “Mads” did not even care if their actions served to break down the structure of government. A representative newspaper stated that protest over the Jay Treaty proved that “Jefferson, Madison, and Burr, itching for high offices in our government, will leave untried no probable means of accomplishing their views.” In linking the cagey Virginians with one cagey New Yorker, Federalists assumed that the Democratic-Republican Party had devised a North-South plot.

  This was much overstated; it was a tentative alliance. Just a half year earlier Jefferson had identified the “Southern interest” as the segment of the political population that he was principally concerned about. If the “Southern interest,” he told Madison, had “any chance of prevailing,” the executive could not be allowed to fall into northern Federalist hands. The Federalists saw a marriage in the works that Jefferson, at least, was shying away from.51

  It would be wrong to read too much into Jefferson’s choice of words, but it would be just as unwise to ignore it. His supposedly undeviating plan of retirement contained many holes and detours. As he contemplated how to respond to a German historian and geographer who was undertaking a multivolume work on the North American continent, Jefferson rejoined the conflict. Christoph Daniel Ebeling had written to the author of Notes on Virginia asking for information. Made aware that two northern Federalists who had toured the South were supplying the German professor with material from their travels, Jefferson instinctively disputed their findings by declaring that one cannot know a region just by staying at inns along the road and communing with “idle, drunken individuals who pass their time lounging in taverns.” Without even knowing whether the professor’s correspondents had characterized the southern political economy in critical terms, Jefferson warned against what it would mean “to generalise a whole nation from these specimens.” But then he did some general cataloging of his own, presenting a conspiratorial picture of the essential division between republican and antirepublican in the United States. As before, he identified the misdirected people (“old tories,” “timid whigs,” and “American merchants trading on British capital”) who worshipped the British model; he claimed they were “hoping monarchy might be the remedy if a state of complete anarchy could be brought on.” In contrast, true republicans could be defined as “the entire
body of landholders” and “the body of labourers, not being landholders, whether in husbandry or the arts.” This would seem to exclude only Americans of an urban and speculating character. Jefferson was designating the Federalist as substantially a northern creature, who up to this point had monopolized the power in government and who would ultimately be upended by a republican electorate.

  Taken together, Jefferson’s confidential evocation of the “Southern interest” in the letter to Madison, and his notes for the German historian, suggest that he envisioned a solid South that would combine in the political furnace with landed yeomen of the North, South, and West to forge an electable consensus. From their no-less-heated perspective, the Federalists saw a Frenchified America waiting in the wings. Having witnessed the birth and expansion of democratic societies, a rebellion among taxpayers in the backcountry, and agitation against a commercial treaty with England, they were now concerned with the prospect of the Republicans gaining adherents in Pennsylvania, New York, and interior parts of New England. They saw their opposition as moblike.52

  Angry as he was over Hamilton’s orchestrated takeover, Jefferson was genuinely repelled by politics and reluctant to reenter the lists. Madison was able to wear down his resistance only because he knew that his semiretired friend saw the situation as desperate. We are left with the question of why Madison did not pick up on Jefferson’s suggestion that he seek the presidency. Given Madison’s personality, it is possible that he regarded himself not as a singular administrator but as a floor manager. He would not envision otherwise until he had labored by a president’s side for eight years.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Danger, Real or Pretended

  1796–1799

  [I] begin to entertain serious doubts whether this is the country we inhabited 12. or 15. years ago: whether we have not by some accident been thrown to another region of the globe, or even some other planet.

  —JAMES MONROE TO JAMES MADISON, DECEMBER 10, 1797

  There never was perhaps a greater contrast between two characters than between those of the present President [Adams] and of his predecessor, although it is the boast and prop of the present that he treads in the steps of his predecessor. The one cold considerate and cautious, the other headlong and kindled into flame by every spark that lights on his passions.

  —JAMES MADISON TO THOMAS JEFFERSON, FEBRUARY 18, 1798

  IN THE SPRING OF 1796 JAMES MADISON LED THE FINAL FIGHT IN the House of Representatives to stop the Jay Treaty. He argued that while the Senate alone ratified treaties, the House, due to its role in appropriating public funds, had a right to review this or any treaty before its implementation. It was a novel approach, and although a majority in Congress sided with him, some Republicans, even at this late date, chose not to humiliate Washington, who claimed executive privilege and contested their right to inspect his instructions to Jay or any notes or correspondence relating to treaty negotiations.1

  Madison sent Jefferson a copy of Washington’s challenge to Congress. The president’s “absolute refusal” to show his hand was, he charged, “as unexpected as the tone and tenor of the message [was] improper and indelicate.” Madison felt cheated. He saw the hand of Hamilton in the president’s gambit, but he believed Republicans in Congress would muster “sufficient firmness” to face down the threat, without having to stage a direct confrontation with Washington. But whatever subtlety Madison might choose to employ, Benjamin Franklin Bache had his own strategy: to inflame the public further, he decided to publish the debates over the treaty.2

  Washington’s challenge should not have surprised Madison, who was, after all, stretching the meaning of the Constitution. Hamilton had assured the president that the House was to be excluded from the treaty process on the basis of the one precedent Madison ought to have understood and yielded to: the original meaning of the Constitution as established by the debates at the Constitutional Convention. While Madison’s allies begged him to draw on his detailed notes from the convention, he had to realize that it would have been a lost cause to do so. Instead, he invoked the ratifying conventions, and especially Virginia’s. These conventions, he now held, were responsible for breathing life into the Constitution. They had called forth the “voice of the people” and had transformed a “dead letter” into a living document. Therefore one could obtain a properly nuanced interpretation of the Constitution only by reckoning how the states understood it. Refusing, in his words, to treat the Constitutional Convention as an “oracular guide,” Madison creatively countered the Washington-Hamilton line by insisting that the Constitution had acquired “validity” only through its reception in the popularly elected ratifying conventions. He was improvising, of course, because at this moment his political agenda took precedence over constitutional correctness. 3

  Madison was wrong to substitute the ratifying conventions for the authority of the federal Constitution, and he was wrong as well about the firmness of the Republicans in the House. He pressed his colleagues to refuse appropriations and force renegotiation of the treaty, just as he told Jefferson he would do; but two unexpected absences and “a few wrongheads,” as he put it, finally sank his hopes. He gave Jefferson news of “defections among our friends,” which he said was owing to an unfounded fear of war with England.4

  After a close vote, resistance to the Jay Treaty died. And once again it was Hamilton who worked hardest to keep the Federalist position in public view. Writing as “New Yorker,” he prepared a broadside that raised the fear of what would happen if the treaty were not implemented: “The CONSTITUTION and PEACE are in one scale—the overthrow of the CONSTITUTION and war in the other. Which do you prefer?” Lest there be any doubt who represented the domestic problem, he ended his piece with an unabashed attack on the Madisonians: “Do not second the ambition of a VIRGINIAN FACTION, constantly endeavoring to govern the United States.”5

  In the early months of 1796, Madison thought he had rallied his forces effectively but found that he could not arrest their inclination to accommodate Washington. As a result, he grew deeply disillusioned. “Alas! Poor Madison!” one Federalist proclaimed. “He seems to have dwindled into nothing.” The Federalists had won the battle, without a very sophisticated argument. The Republicans looked weak.6

  “How Political Plants Grow in the Shade”

  Madison led the Republicans in Congress, but he did not control them. Sometimes they reacted too impulsively for his taste, as Edward Livingston of New York and William Branch Giles of Virginia had recently. But Madison adapted, as he always did, and resumed an active role in debate. These days, Albert Gallatin was his most trusted ally. Jefferson was not there, but he reinforced Madison’s instincts by telling him that if Gallatin would only look into the chaotic state of the nation’s finances and make better sense of them, “he will merit immortal honor.” Quick to launch into a republican refrain, Jefferson reduced his thought to a straightforward maxim: “The accounts of the U.S. ought to be, and may be, made, as simple as those of a common farmer.” When it came to fiscal health, he demanded transparency, literally wanting the government’s records so basic that the average cultivator understood them. This, he believed, would weaken the grip of the commercial class on the national government.

  Jefferson’s hostility toward the central government had had time to incubate over the past two years of a midcareer retirement to Monticello. Hoping to see the national budget shrink—to see less government—he chided Madison for supporting a post road bill. “Boundless patronage” would result, he feared, in “jobbing to members of Congress.” No good could emerge from a “bottomless abyss of public money.” It pleased him that Virginia’s roads were administered by each county. “The roads of America are the best in the world,” he cooed, “except for those of France and England.” It was an admission that America had far to go, but the devotee of yeoman decency saw no reason to hurry things along.

  Here Madison thought Jefferson all wrong. The good roads were in the northeastern states. Those s
outh of Richmond were vastly inferior, and the roads west were the worst. Massachusetts Federalist Chauncey Goodrich described southern roadways as “little better than in a state of nature.” Madison would put the government in charge so that, in carrying newspapers far and wide, post offices could keep postage low. As impossible as unity was for the time being, his priority remained to bring Americans closer. An efficient system of communication would ensure the vigorous dissemination of news and public opinion.

  But what if someone from New Hampshire were to “mark out a road” for Georgia? Jefferson fretted. In much the same way Patrick Henry, at the Virginia Ratifying Convention, had imagined swarms of northern tax collectors imposing themselves on the hospitality of the South. Restless about others’ meddling intentions, Jefferson aimed to convince Madison that the states should be self-sufficient in all their domestic matters. He had been away from Philadelphia long enough to see through southern eyes exclusively. 7

  With passage of the Jay Treaty, Madison began to count the days to Washington’s retirement. All he could look forward to now, as he confirmed to Monroe, was the hope of a Jefferson presidency. But this seemed doubtful, as Federalists controlled the New York legislature, which would determine presidential electors. The use of a general ticket in Pennsylvania—giving all of its electoral votes to the person receiving a plurality—also seemed to favor the Federalists. Jefferson could not win without some northern support.8