Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  It was the height of nerve and perhaps the best example of Lafayette’s “canine” appetite for fame that Jefferson had long before described in a letter to Madison. Still, the Frenchman had a sincere and irreducible commitment to the United States. Only the death of George Washington could stop him from sailing. As a result, he would not cross the ocean again for another quarter-century, at which time he who was once the youngest American general would be within a year of the age Washington was when laid to rest.

  Lafayette’s only open criticism of America concerned the sin of slavery. In the mid-1780s he had urged the land-rich Washington to resettle slaves as tenants on his property in the West—an experiment other planters could imitate. But the suggestion fell on deaf ears. At the time Washington claimed that his financial future remained in some doubt, and he saw slave ownership as an “imperious necessity” for him.

  Washington, credited in history for having resolved to free his slaves after his death, could do so because he had no sons or daughters of his own and had earned an income from lands he leased out over the years, lands he had surveyed or received as bounties for his military service. The ambivalent emancipator made it clear that Mount Vernon would retain its slaves while his widow Martha lived. He claimed to have done all he could to provide an “easy and comfortable” way of life to those whose “ignorance” prohibited the adoption of any more liberal policy. He did nothing as president to draw the public’s attention to the politics or morals of race enslavement.93

  Other matters took precedence. It is tempting in the twenty-first century to collapse time, reduce the distant past to an easy logic, and assign the greatest share of blame for slavery to certain well-known names or to censure the entire Revolutionary generation for failing to live up to its grand ideals. But doing so risks imputing to them a sense of priority and a vision of collective action that matches our own cherished cultural views. While it is true that Quakers and Methodists agitated for an end to slavery, widespread prejudices such as those George Washington unhesitatingly voiced always stood in the way. We may never really know what conscience dictated to historical actors, but a wise beginning for the modern questioner would be to assess everyday fears and political pressures and to analyze, in this context, how they rationalized their behavior.

  Nor was Washington’s passing an occasion on which to reexamine the slavery issue. It was, however, a time when many chose to recall the Revolution appreciatively. As one would expect, the second half of December 1799 and the first part of the year 1800 produced an outpouring of ceremony and tribute, the most memorable of which was the succinct phrasing of Henry Lee: “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Less well known is the more hyperbolic language contained in General Lee’s address: “When our monuments shall be done away; when nations now existing shall be no more; when even our young and far-spreading empire shall have perished, still will our Washington’s glory unfaded shine, and die not.” Other eulogists went even further to paint the first president as an instrument of God’s providence. As hard as it is to imagine in light of Washington’s posthumous reputation, there was backlash in select places too. At the College of William and Mary, Bishop James Madison—the reverend had been named bishop in 1790—authorized black armbands to be worn, but a number of students refused.94

  In the Virginia House of Delegates, Madison rose to report the tragic news: “Death has robbed our country of its most distinguished ornament, and the world one of its greatest benefactors.” As he had done in Congress on the death of Benjamin Franklin in 1790, in Richmond now he introduced a motion calling on the members of the legislature to wear badges of mourning for the length of the current session.

  On the day before Washington’s death, in curious contrast, a similar resolution honoring the “eloquence and superior talents” of Patrick Henry was put forward. It was rejected. Fifteen years earlier, when Henry was frustrating reform in the Assembly, Jefferson had said in a letter to Madison: “What we have to do I think is devoutly to pray for his death.” Perhaps Henry’s political death was all he meant. Now Henry was in all ways dead, and a new era had arrived in Virginia politics in which the party of George Washington was a dwindling minority.95

  Though their politics had diverged sharply, Madison could not dislike Washington the man. He convinced himself that Washington’s opinions were similar to his own, and that the older man had little patience for John Adams’s argumentative manner and less adept management of the presidency. Madison surely believed that Washington had been misled by the High Federalists, and while he did not describe the phenomenon as a function of senility, as Jefferson later did, he preferred not to think that Washington was lumping Madison together with all those who had made his second term unpleasant. But the truth is, he was. He did not, however, consider Madison sneaky or dishonest.

  Jefferson was a different story. At the end of his life, Washington refused to forgive Jefferson for the betrayal that the Mazzei letter represented, thinking little more of him than he did the newspaper editor Benjamin Franklin Bache, whose fulminations in print soured his moods and caused him to question the longevity of the Union. Madison, it appears, was caught keeping company with those who most infuriated Washington, and it served to end too soon what had been a good and vigorous collaboration.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Inhaling Republicanism

  1800–1802

  The late brilliant triumph of republicanism appears to have

  given to the public mind an animation only equalled by that

  which attended our revolutionary struggle.

  —NATIONAL INTELLIGENCER (WASHINGTON, D.C.), MARCH 13, 1801, ONE WEEK AFTER JEFFERSON TOOK THE OATH OF OFFICE

  Our republic is undoubtedly “the world’s best hope”; the elysium of earthly residence. If it perish, twenty centuries more may elapse before another arise.

  —AMERICAN CITIZEN (NEW YORK), FEBRUARY 8, 1802

  A NEW, MORE FORWARD STYLE OF POLITICAL ACTION HAD COME into vogue that centered on the understood power of print in the enterprise of party building. By this measure, Republicans were gaining. They communicated. They knew how to organize.

  The discourse of election year 1800 retained a vocabulary of extremes. To the Federalists, if Jefferson defeated Adams, upending a government of “order,” he would introduce in its place a government of dangerous “experiment,” with the country devolving into atheism and anarchy. To Republicans, of course, “order” had slaughtered liberty. Madison, Jefferson, and their allies felt temperatures rising.

  Republicans never doubted that Thomas Jefferson was to be their national candidate in 1800. No one within the party preferred another or believed anyone else could defeat Adams. During the months when government business kept him in Philadelphia, Vice President Jefferson began to take an unusually direct role in raising funds for a new Republican newspaper. The paper never got off the ground, but he was not deterred. In the coming year, both he and Madison would contribute to emerging newspapers in the federal city of Washington, where the next president would be taking the oath of office. And they would pay close attention to the activities of Republican organizers.1

  While he sat in the Virginia House of Delegates, Madison continued to function as Jefferson’s campaign manager. He felt he had to clear up any remaining confusion about the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, the true authorship of which remained a closely guarded secret. His Report of 1800, passed by the state legislature on January 7, essentially disavowed the nullification principle; at the same time, it went to great lengths to show how the Sedition Act threatened a fair presidential election. There had to be open discussion about the candidates—he meant, of course, an open discussion of Adams’s record—without critics having to fear prosecution for “freely examining” the president’s public character and decisions.

  Madison put forward an unambiguous definition of free speech, more far-reaching than he had ever done before. Freedom of speech was the foundat
ion of republicanism, a principle “equally and completely exempted from all authority whatever of the United States.” Neither federal nor state law could restrict it. Subversive ideas had fueled the American Revolution and circulated again during the ratification period. Had a sedition act been enforced against the press at such times, he asked, “might not the United States have been languishing to this day, under the infirmities of a sickly confederation? Might they not possibly be miserable colonies, groaning under a foreign yoke?”

  He was not forgetting the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. Rather, he was softening those elements contained in them that might otherwise be found dangerous to the health and well-being of the Union. By the end of the report, Madison reduced the Virginia Resolutions to mere “expressions of opinion,” with no presumed effect greater than “exciting reflection.” States could and should communicate freely with other states; their legislatures could “originate amendments to the constitution,” without being deemed radical or destructive. Jefferson read Madison’s report with satisfaction and had high hopes for it, but it sparked little reaction outside of Richmond. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions were already old news.2

  With that matter taken off the table, attention turned to Europe. Once again domestic politics must be understood in the light of developments abroad. Foreign intelligence ordinarily reached Philadelphia first, yet it was Madison, in Orange, who approached Vice President Jefferson in February 1800 with the observation: “We see by the late papers that a new scene is presented on the French Theatre, which leaves the denôuement more a problem than ever.” He hesitated to say that absolutism would be the result of the ten-year-old French Revolution, but “melancholy evidence appears that the destiny of the Revolution is transferred from the Civil to the military authority.” The facts did not suggest to Madison that Republicans in the United States would have more to explain on the subject of their identification with the French. Rather, the lesson to be drawn from Napoleon’s rise to the rank of first consul (after a coup that overthrew the constitutional government) was that the American public needed to be more wary of military usurpation coming from within its own government.3

  Jefferson was counting heads, examining the balance of power in Congress. To an even greater degree, perhaps, he was assessing the balance of power in key state legislatures, particularly New York, where presidential electors were about to be chosen. “All depends on the success of the city election,” he told Madison encouragingly, noting that Aaron Burr and Edward Livingston, the primary and secondary strategists there, “entertain no doubt on the event of that election.” They had assured him that Republicans were in a position to reverse the 1796 result, when Adams and Pinckney had won all of the state’s electoral votes.

  Victory in New York was critical, because Pennsylvania, the one northern state Jefferson had carried in 1796, remained in jeopardy. Its state legislature was engaged in a sharp debate over the method by which presidential electors would be chosen. New Jersey, where Philadelphians exerted influence, was leaning Republican, if not yet in the composition of the state legislature, then certainly in congressional contests. Clerk of the House of Representatives John Beckley, a key Jefferson ally, coordinated with the Garden State’s leading voice, thirty-year-old Princeton graduate Mahlon Dickerson, who practiced law in Philadelphia and wrote for the Aurora.

  Chastened, no doubt, by the sectional results of the election that relegated Jefferson to the vice presidency, the southern-dominated party was embracing new elements and rallying support beyond its home base. “Peter Porcupine” saw the trend. The Philadelphia Republicans were making his blood boil, and he vented to a friend in England: “If I could exterminate the whole race, I know not how I should set bounds to my vengeance … Damnation seize them, body and soul! If I can give them a foretaste of the torments of hell, I will do it.” After doing the math, Jefferson reconfirmed that New York City held the key to the election of 1800.4

  There Burr was outmaneuvering Hamilton. He had built a party organization in Manhattan and selected an unbeatable slate of candidates. Energetically addressing citizens on the importance of the upcoming election, he got the results he wanted: the Republicans carried all thirteen assembly seats in the city, which assured that they would get to name the state’s presidential electors. Caught off guard, Hamilton rushed off a letter to Governor John Jay, requesting a lame duck session of the legislature. He wanted Jay to change the rules so that the Federalists would not be deprived of seats—Hamilton was trying to overturn a fair election. Jay recognized the ploy as a mere “party measure” and refused to go along. His sense of ethics salvaged Burr’s victory and seems to have convinced Virginians that Burr deserved to be Jefferson’s running mate.5

  In April 1800, Jefferson reported on a stimulating visit he had had from the French political economist Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, a near victim of the guillotine who became his lifelong friend—“one of the very great men of the age,” he told Madison. Nonetheless, Jefferson refrained from expressing sentiments about the larger picture in France. It was Madison who reopened the subject. Without crediting Adams (who had already dispatched a pair of unprejudiced envoys), he expressed comfort with the new approach to Old World diplomacy. “The posture of Europe,” wrote Madison, “tho’ dreadful to humanity in general, will I trust enforce the disposition of France to come to a proper adjustment with us.”6

  This did not mean that the Republicans, as the antiwar element in the country, should or would let their guard down. The first year of a new century was, after all, an election year, or as it was also called, an “Electoral epoch,” and in times such as these nothing could be taken for granted. Madison was candid about his concern. The Federalists might provoke a war hotter than “quasi-war” in order to create an atmosphere that would dictate against changing administrations. “The situation of the party bent on war is such,” he said, “that every stratagem ought to be suspected that may afford a chance of prolonging their ascendancy. The horrors which they evidently feel at the approach of the Electoral epoch are sufficient warning of the desperate game by which they will be apt to characterize the interval.” He promised to enlighten Jefferson on the appointment of presidential electors by the Virginia Assembly. Both men were equally focused on the electoral count.

  In a close campaign, every vote counted. Because they had control of the legislature, Virginia’s Republicans opted to amend the system that had been in place in 1796. At that time, the vote of each electoral district was separately tallied, making it possible for the state’s electoral votes to be divided among the candidates. In 1800 all of Virginia’s electoral votes, undivided, would be awarded to the candidate who won a majority. (This is the general ticket system, comparable to the system under which electoral votes are counted in modern U.S. presidential elections.) Predictably, Jefferson was strongest in heavily agricultural districts: Albemarle (563 votes to 33), Orange (337 to 7), and Pendleton’s and Taylor’s Caroline County (370 to 5). Richmond was almost evenly divided, owing to the strength of pro-Federalist commercial interests there; and the busy port of Norfolk went for Adams. The electors, chosen by the voters of each district, included the names of men long associated with Jefferson: Edmund Pendleton, George Wythe, John Page, Joseph Jones, William Branch Giles, and James Madison. All of Virginia’s twenty-one electoral votes were going to the native son, and none to Adams.7

  Virginia was not representative. Jefferson knew that as the campaign proceeded, he would have to withstand another wave of newspaper assaults. Every aspect of his past that was contained in the public record would be exploited for partisan purposes. And so Jefferson’s supporters turned to 1776 as a protective device, and the Declaration of Independence as a sacred symbol. Nearly a quarter-century had passed without his being known widely as the author of the Declaration. By July 4, 1800, this fact had become an integral part of his reputation; it also generated significant blowback from the other side. As Rhode Island’s Providence Journal indiffer
ently reported, “From the frequent mention that Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence, ignorant people might be led to doubt whether others, who were esteemed patriots, approved the measure. If Jefferson penned the declaration, it probably was an accidental honour in the arrangement of committees.” The distinction drawn between authorship and penmanship was a meaningful one.8

  Demonstrating just how much tabloid fascination drove the press in 1800, a rumor begun in Virginia reached Philadelphia, New York, and outlying areas by midyear, claiming that candidate Jefferson had died. Eventually the story unraveled: “A negro man who formerly belonged to the family of Mr. Jefferson, and had taken the family name, died very suddenly near Winchester, where a young lad thought it a good Virginia Joke to spread a report of the death of Citizen Tom Jefferson, without comment;—the report spread like wildfire.” The article went on to accuse Madison of having callously fancied himself in the “great chair” before ultimately discovering the inaccuracy of the report.9

  The Hamiltonian explanation of Madison’s desertion of his Federalist Papers coauthor—his supposed seduction by Jefferson—had by now become central to the Federalist critique. “No sooner did Mr. Jefferson return from Europe,” reported both the New-York Spectator and Courier of New-Hampshire, “than Mr. Madison commenced an opposition to the measures of government.” The conspiratorial tone of the article intensified as it took on the delicate subject of sectional prejudice and the common assumption that Virginia planters possessed a proud air of inherited superiority, which they had transferred to their state: Virginia had developed such “pride in her greatness” that “she cannot brook the idea of losing … her supposed right to command.”

  A presidential election is a zero-sum game. For someone to win, someone else must lose. To this terrified writer, Madison and Jefferson both appeared amenable to social revolution; and so an adverse outcome could only mean national catastrophe. “Mr. Jefferson’s men declare there is no conciliation,” he interpolated from rumors and questionable news sources. Unless the Federalists held on to power, the best America could expect was an uneasy peace between North and South and a return to state sovereignty as it existed under the Articles of Confederation. Then a series of popular disturbances would result either in a military takeover or in a brutal civil war.10