Madison and Jefferson
Page 44
Madison was convinced, even as John Jay’s name was being floated as a possible Federalist presidential candidate, that John Adams would run. It is not clear whether Adams knew the extent to which Madison disliked him. He had dined with James and Dolley at the end of February 1796, writing to his wife that “Mrs. Madison is a fine Woman.” Insofar as he and Jefferson were still corresponding cordially, he may have assumed that the straight-shooting Madison shared some of Jefferson’s forbearance. But as the treaty vote loomed, he classed Madison among his hardened, habitual foes. “The Anarchical Warriours are beat out of all their Entrenchments by the Arguments of the Friends of Peace and order,” he told Abigail colorfully. “But Party Spirit is blind and deaf, totally destitute of Candour, unfeeling to every candid sentiment.” He observed the toll it was taking on his recent dinner companion: “Mr. Madison looks worried to death. Pale, withered, haggard.” And of Madison’s vocal associates, new congressmen Edward Livingston and Albert Gallatin: “They have brought themselves into great Embarrassment.”9
It was the “great little Madison” who put the Republican engine in motion, who argued, strategized, and paved the way for Jefferson in 1796. Although Aaron Burr made a pilgrimage to Monticello at the end of 1795, hoping to win Virginia’s support in his vice-presidential bid, Jefferson’s correspondence reveals that he did precious little to shape the Republican organization or to promote himself personally. While he acquiesced to Madison’s management of his candidacy for high office, he certainly did nothing to encourage it—even in the middle months of election year 1796. There was only one party leader now: Madison.10
Within the Commonwealth of Virginia, Jefferson was largely inactive, while Madison kept an eye on the county-level political organizations. But whereas Madison and Jefferson were focused on national issues that they saw as potentially ruinous for the country, Virginia voters of 1796 were largely apathetic. Elite men were elected and reelected to the state assembly based on their social stature rather than their political viewpoints. County-level Federalists, whose Federalism consisted of little more than opposing anyone who criticized Washington, were content to tread water.11
Once the campaign season began, coordinating Virginia Republicans across twenty-one far-flung electoral districts was no simple matter for the Madison-Jefferson interest. Knowing that Adams’s candidacy excited almost no one in the Old Dominion, Federalists turned their eyes toward Patrick Henry, whose statewide popularity, even now, probably exceeded Jefferson’s. Before he finally, grudgingly, offered his support to Adams, Hamilton covertly sought a southern Federalist to run for president. He asked Virginians John Marshall and Henry Lee whether Patrick Henry might be drafted. The game was to divert just enough votes to Henry to deny Jefferson the presidency. But Henry was unresponsive.12
A handful of political operatives knew quite well that Jefferson was in the running, even if he was not running. Most notable was London-born John Beckley, a former indentured servant, now clerk of the House of Representatives. Though of humble stock, Beckley had climbed the political ladder through access to the Virginia gentry. His first patron, Edmund Randolph, brought him to the attention of Richmond politicos, and he was named clerk of the Virginia House of Delegates. It was Madison who spoke for him in 1789 and helped to facilitate his clerkship in the national legislature. Despite his visibility, Beckley never escaped his lowly origins; he occasionally performed errands for the powerful, for example, racing about Philadelphia trying to track down a suitable house for the Madisons to rent. He communed easily with the tavern-going crowd, warming up to radical émigrés in the Tom Paine mold. He was the bridge between the Baches of the political world and the Madisons and Jeffersons, making sure that gentlemen who had political axes to grind, but did not wish to get their hands dirty, had someone to run interference for them.13
So Jefferson stood for high office as “the man of the people” without having to run with a plebeian crowd. A letter to Monroe in September 1796, if it is to be taken literally, suggests that even at this late date Madison was conspiring to keep Jefferson from resisting his own election. “I have not seen Jefferson,” Madison wrote—Dolley helping him to encode the letter—“and have thought it best to present him no opportunity of protesting to his friends against being embarked in the contest.” As the times seemed to demand, Madison added with a groan: “His enemies are as indefatigable as they are malignant.”14
Slow to accept Adams, Hamilton urged his Federalist friends to favor Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, who he hoped might yet attract more electoral votes than either Adams or Jefferson. For the moment, Pinckney was a hero to many across America for his having negotiated a favorable treaty with Spain that opened the Mississippi River to commerce. It had occurred just as John Jay was being accused of folding his cards in London.
Inflexible in his beliefs, but prescient about many things, Adams reckoned he knew what James Madison’s future held. He told his wife that Madison would soon leave Congress, return to his Virginia plantation, and eventually reenter national politics and run for president. “It seems the Mode of becoming great is to retire,” he noted on the eve of his own inauguration. “Madison I suppose, after a Retirement of a few years, is to become President or V.P. It is marvellous how political Plants grow in the shade.” Of course, that last line may have been penned with Jefferson in mind.15
“This Disgusting Dish of Old Fragments”
Jefferson’s last interaction with George Washington occurred in June 1796. Until then, they had been safely exchanging intelligence on farming methods, and Jefferson scrupulously avoided any allusion to unpleasant political matters. But in the letter of June he opened with a resolute denial of having leaked a paper to Benjamin Franklin Bache, which was published in the Aurora and showed the president to have been contemplating an anti-French policy in 1793: “I can say with truth that not a line for the press was ever communicated by me.” The only person with whom he might have shared the leaked text, Jefferson said, was the “one person who possesses all my confidence as he has possessed yours.” Washington, of course, knew that he meant Madison. “I was in the habit of unlimited trust and counsel with him.” Note that Jefferson said Madison “has possessed” rather than “possesses” Washington’s confidence. Why should he pretend otherwise? The relationship between Washington and Madison, once reckoned as indissoluble, no longer rose to the present tense.
Delicacy was Jefferson’s epistolary bottom line. The recipients of his letters, he believed, understood that sincerity declared above his signature was the same as a sworn affidavit. On that basis, he could not resist taking a last stab at convincing Washington of the purity of his motives and the integrity of his principles. Someone, he said (without naming), “has thought it worth his while to try to sow tares between you and me, by representing me as still engaged in the bustle of politics, and in turbulence and intrigue against the government … Political conversation I really dislike … But when urged by others, I have never conceived that having been in public life requires me not to bely [sic] my sentiments, nor even to conceal them.” Jefferson was often in the habit of explaining himself, something that Madison almost never felt the urgency to do. Leaping to a new paragraph, Jefferson breathed a figurative sigh as he took an easier tack: “I put away this disgusting dish of old fragments, and talk to you of my peas and clover.”16
Washington replied generously and with apparent candor. He had been told of Jefferson’s remarks, he acknowledged, the gist of which was that as a lame duck president, he was “a person under a dangerous influence; and that, if I would listen more to some other opinions all would be well.” This certainly appears to be an accurate representation of what Jefferson had been saying. But, Washington went on, shifting his emphasis, “My answer invariably has been, that I had never discovered any thing in the conduct of Mr. Jefferson to raise suspicions, in my mind, of his insincerity.”
What came next is no less interesting. Denying that he was in such isolation that a
ny person or faction could capture his political mind, Washington contended he was “no party man myself,” and “if parties did exist” he wished only “to reconcile them.” He expressed amazement at what had taken place: “I had no conception that Parties Would, or even could go, the length I have been Witness to,” or that he would ever be accused of favoring Britain over France, or doing anything other than “steering a steady course, to preserve this Country from the horrors of a devastating war.” And then, like Jefferson, he launched into a discussion of peas and clover.17
Madison, for his part, offered Washington one final supportive gesture. He endorsed the plan for a national university that the president had put forward in his last annual address to the Congress. Washington wished it built in the federal city, on land he himself would donate. While many Republicans were wary of the plan, Madison made two speeches in its favor—not surprising, since it was Madison who had first made such a proposal during the Constitutional Convention. (Washington had to have remembered this.) Symbolically, at least, the two were able to put aside “party spirit” to speak briefly to their common agenda. Neither was able to rally his followers behind the initiative, however, and the national university idea died.18
In 1792, before he reluctantly consented to a second term in office, Washington had relied on Madison to draft a valedictory that the president intended to deliver to the nation as he went into retirement. He retained Madison’s draft over the next four years and then turned it over to Hamilton. For the greater national interest, Washington hoped that Hamilton would acknowledge Madison’s contributions to the Farewell Address.
Some historians have concluded that President Washington sought to reverse the trend toward a cynical politics and permanent party alignments by inviting Madison to see him in mid-May 1796. Doubt remains, however, as to whether the two former intimates met at this time or whether Washington was even predisposed to try. It is recorded that he wanted Hamilton to insert Madison’s name into the text of the updated address—which, more likely than not, was a tactic to neutralize Madison rather than credit him justly. In any case, Hamilton would not comply. The untidy dispute over Jay’s treaty had made even the smallest accommodation objectionable. In the end, Washington accepted Hamilton’s revisions to the text, leaving only faint traces of Madison’s original language.19
The president’s Farewell Address, completed in the fall of 1796, said nothing of the emotional bond with France dating to the Revolutionary War. Rather, it set America on a middle course, avoiding “entangling alliances” with any foreign power. The U.S. ought to have healthy commercial ties and “as little political connection as possible” with Europe. It was his desire, he said, to see a moderation in “the fury of party spirit” in American life. Not only were the president’s words disingenuous; they were, in fact, the obvious contrivances of Hamilton, who gave Washington the means to renounce the Republicans. They were, allegedly, the ones solely responsible for domestic discord, “designing men,” organizers of “faction,” “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled.” He did not have to say “Republican”; he did not have to name Jefferson. But that was what was meant by his warning: “sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction” would fulfill his private ambition “on the ruins of public liberty.”20
Virginia Republicans were decidedly unimpressed with Washington’s insincere appeal to harmony. Others were disturbed by the president’s call for “religion and morality as indispensable supports” of the national government, which sounded too much like a plea for a national religion. Washington had lost his ability to rise above party squabbles, and the Farewell Address did little if anything to heal wounds. George Washington was a Federalist first and a Virginian second.21
“The Sublime Delights of Riding in the Storm”
The 1796 presidential campaign featured newspaper attack ads that modern Americans would recognize. “Will you,” a Philadelphia handbill asked rhetorically, “make the avowed friend of monarchy, President?” John Adams had sons who might succeed him, the paper reminded voters, while Jefferson had only daughters. One candidate was the “fond admirer” of the British system; the other “likes better our Federal Constitution, and thinks the British full of deformity, corruption, and wickedness.”22
Both sides applied scare tactics. Jefferson came under fire for views critical of organized religion, as gleaned from Notes on Virginia—views fortified during his five years in France. The Gazette of the United States noted with disdain Jefferson’s witticism, “It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” “What?” the shocked editor exclaimed. “Do I receive no injury as a member of society if I am surrounded with atheists?”
According to the Gazette, Jefferson had been heard to say that his philosophical Parisian friends were atheists. Both he and his protégé, fellow Francophile “Citizen Monroe,” were intimates of Tom Paine, who in 1793–94 had followed up his Rights of Man with The Age of Reason. The latter work was regarded as a frontal assault on Christianity. Were Jefferson returned to the executive and promoted to the first rank, the “impious and blasphemous” Paine would take a seat at the president’s dinner table. As kindred philosophers and tools of French Revolutionary atheism, they would unleash chaos in America. There was a real difference between freedom of religion and freedom from religion. Was Jefferson the fit successor to the “virtuous” Washington? And what “good effects” were ever produced by his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom?23
If atheism were not enough of a disqualification, Jefferson could be charged with “timidity” and “cowardice” for having abandoned the governor’s chair in the midst of the British invasion of Virginia. He had resigned his position as secretary of state at a critical moment as well. To such charges, his defenders reflexively answered that a lack of ambition to govern men was a mark of trustworthiness, not timidity. And when Jefferson’s deviation from Washington’s line of thinking was used as a rationale for denying him the presidency, an incredulous columnist quickly countered: Who differs from Washington more than John Adams?24
Republican newspapers were beginning to make casual references to Jefferson’s role in the Second Continental Congress. In Savannah, Georgia, he was toasted on July 4, 1793, as “chairman of the committee that reported the declaration of independence”; in Bache’s Aurora, and in neighboring New Jersey, in 1795, he was “the illustrious framer of the declaration of independence”; and again, a few months later, “he who penned the declaration of independence.”25
As the French Revolution cast a shadow over political discourse in America, the durability of the two young republics remained a central question. Newspapermen intent on making their mark reckoned with extremes only, which they could do because it was impossible for anyone to predict what a post-Washington government would look like. In a sense, the public’s anxiety boiled down to the question of who was able to distinguish between what was real and what was illusory. Those with their heads in the wrong books became “crazy projectors.”
Abstract ideas feed speculation in any age, but they were never so violently imagined as they were in the period that is imperfectly remembered as the Age of Reason. In Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, Charleston, and other places, the talk of the town consisted of a vocabulary that is in less frequent use today: “innovation” courted “instability,” “imagination” clouded “judgment,” and “effete” or “decadent” tendencies (or in individual cases, “relaxed nerves”) led to unproductive behavior or the blind acceptance of unrepublican rule. All recognized that change was coming, but what kind of change? Good order devolving into chaos? Freedom dissolving before monarchical tyranny? There was no in between. One was either attached to the old order or willing to bear a dangerous political experiment. Partisan oversimplification had become a contagion.26
Sectionalism shaped the election season as much as personalities or foreign alliances. “Pelham,” a writer for the
Connecticut Courant, saw the contest on a grand scale: northerners would have to decide whether they wanted to stay in the Union and remain accomplices of the institution of slavery. “Pelham” was offended by the unwieldy clause in the Constitution by which House seats were apportioned and electoral votes assigned preferentially to the South—each slave state inflating its population by adding three-fifths of a person for every noncitizen kept as property. Years before arch-Federalist Timothy Pickering tarred Jefferson as the “negro president,” elected only because of the three-fifths advantage, a host of New Englanders were already expressing ample resentment over the inequity.
As the “Pelham” essays made the rounds in Virginia, Joseph Jones wrote to Madison about them. The sarcastic Connecticut columnist had charged that slaves were “the CATTLE of citizens of the Southern states”—and if their self-indulgent masters had found them “good for food,” they would surely have eaten them already. Jones’s reaction was tongue-in-cheek: “He does not degrade us to the servile office of toad eaters [i.e., toadies], but exalts us to the honourable Station of Can[n]ibals.” Not in the least uncomfortable, Jones presumed that the writer’s feeling was dictated by partisan, not ethical, considerations. Whether or not spoken of directly, North versus South was clearly the subtext when the presidential choice was between Adams and Jefferson.27
Though he was the ostensible leader of the Republicans, Madison had to admit to one Virginia ally that he was “little informed on the present state of electioneering politics, either in or out of Virginia.” Having been unable to do very much to coordinate a Republican ticket in his home state, he could not prevent many Virginia electors from throwing away their second votes. Consequently, they wrote in Samuel Adams, George Clinton, or George Washington and gave only a single vote to Aaron Burr.