Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  It hardly matters why he identified Madison as corrupt or at least complicit in a fraud. In an age of malcontents, Randolph was arguably the most malcontented; in a time of Republican ascendancy, he held out impossible expectations of political purity, which ultimately served to marginalize him. The movement he started took Virginia provincialism to unprecedented lengths and complicated the lives of Madison and Jefferson—precisely what the pesky congressman intended.

  “I Feel Relief from Being Unbosomed”

  The year 1804 was one of mixed emotions for President Jefferson. In April his younger daughter was in failing health. “Our spring is remarkably uncheary,” Jefferson wrote to Madison from Monticello on the day he turned sixty-one. “A North West wind has been blowing for three days. Our peach trees blossomed on the 1st. day of this month, the poplar began to leaf … But my [flower] beds are in a state of total neglect.”

  He was watching Maria, at twenty-five, succumb to the effects of a difficult childbirth, as her mother had done when she was a toddler. She had been a charming and delicate child and, over the years, the recipient of her father’s most indulgent letters. Now she was the wife of her cousin, the thirty-one-year-old first-term Virginia congressman John Wayles Eppes. Maria’s death on April 17 left Jefferson bereft. It meant that the only surviving child of his ten-year marriage was Patsy, also thirty-one, and the mother of six living children. His old friend John Page wrote a letter of condolence, and in his response Jefferson lamented their having outlived so many beloved friends and family: “When you and I look out on the country over which we have passed, what a field of slaughter does it exhibit.” Thinking toward final retirement, the president acknowledged that Patsy was “the slender thread” on which his “evening prospects” now hung, and he tempted fate by questioning whether she would outlive him.56

  Maria’s death led to one of the most moving of epistolary exchanges in the literal republic of letters. On reading of Jefferson’s personal loss in a newspaper, Abigail Adams opened a straightforward dialogue with the man who had ousted her husband from office. She had adored nine-year-old Maria in 1787, caring for the child in London while she and her husband were residing there and Maria was en route from Virginia to Paris to rejoin the father she had not seen in three years. Maria had clutched her when it was time to leave, crying out: “O! now that I have learnt to Love you, why will they tear me from you?” That memory was why the former first lady put pen to paper now, in spite of the ill will she harbored toward Jefferson the president.

  “Reasons of various kinds withheld my pen,” she admitted, until “the powerfull feelings of my heart, have burst through the restraint.” Jefferson responded feelingly, and with the assurance that “the friendship with which you honoured me has ever been valued.” He assigned responsibility for the ugliness of politics to unnamed others and expected her to appreciate his version of his history with her husband when he said, “We never stood in each other’s way.” Jefferson’s letter was twice the length of hers and professed near the end: “I feel relief from being unbosomed.” Then he asked her forgiveness for turning from subjects of grief and loss to the unkind nature of politics.57

  Mrs. Adams answered promptly, in a letter nearly twice the length of his, which picked apart much of what Jefferson had said. She introduced matters he had failed to bring up that continued to gnaw at her, and told him exactly how she felt as the election of 1800 unfolded. Her phrases contained no softness and nothing of Jefferson’s apologetic tone. “I have never felt any enmity towards you Sir for being elected president,” she affirmed. “But the instruments made use of, and the means which were practised to effect a change, have my utter abhorrence and detestation.” And then she announced: “I will freely disclose to you what has severed the bonds of former Friendship.”

  Dropping all affectation of politeness, she confronted Jefferson directly. The subject was Callender. “One of the first acts of your administration,” she charged, “was to liberate a wretch who was suffering the just punishment of the Law due to his crimes for writing and publishing the basest libel, the lowest and vilest Slander, which malice could invent, or calumny exhibit against the Character and reputation of your predecessor, of him for whom you profess the highest esteem and Friendship.” She devoted three paragraphs to the man she termed “the serpent you cherished and warmed,” finding ways to vary her epithets and reminding Jefferson that the spiteful snake had “bit the hand that nourished him.” Having scolded him enough, she concluded her letter with charitable lines—“I bear no malice I cherish no enmity”—leaving Jefferson seriously wounded, as she put down her pen.

  His reply on the Callender matter was weak. He claimed to have cared no more for the adjudication of Callender’s case than for that of anyone else who had been imprisoned under the Sedition Law. “I knew nothing of his private character,” he wrote, clearly hoping that she would see his relationship to Callender’s attacks on her husband as no different from John Adams’s relationship to the poisoned arrows aimed at Jefferson by Federalist newspaper editors “Peter Porcupine” or John Fenno.

  The exchange continued. Her next letter addressed the state of parties concretely and contained some harsh words that Jefferson could not but have agreed with: “Party spirit is blind malevolent uncandid, ungenerous, unjust and unforgiving.” It was no more welcome for her in Federalist papers than in Republican papers. “Party hatred by its deadly poison blinds the Eyes and envenoms the heart … It sees not that wisdom dwells with moderation.”

  Jefferson ended his part in this flurry of letters with one political and one personal sentiment. The political sentiment was his decided belief that both parties pursued the public good, differing because the Federalists feared the ignorance of the people at large, whereas the Republicans feared the selfishness of rulers not accountable to them. The personal sentiment was his appreciation for her “candour” and “sincere prayers for your health and happiness that yourself and Mr. Adams may long enjoy the tranquility you desire and merit.”

  Abigail Adams had opened their correspondence, and she would bring it to a close. It was six months now since Maria’s death. “Affection still lingers in the Bosom, even after Esteem has taken flight,” she wrote, disliking Jefferson less yet standing at a distance from any more yielding embrace. As to the distinction he drew between the two political parties, she had an effective rejoinder: “Time Sir must determine, and posterity will judge with more candour, and impartiality I hope than the conflicting parties of our day, what measures have best promoted the happiness of the people.” To show Jefferson—who must have been wondering—that the second president had had no hand in any of the preceding compositions, John Adams scrawled at the bottom of the final letter: “The whole of this Correspondence was begun and conducted without my Knowledge or Suspicion. Last Evening and this Morning at the desire of Mrs. Adams I read the whole. I have no remarks to make upon it at this time and in this place.” And so things would stand for another seven and a half years.58

  Overall, Jefferson appeared the more accommodating. But the authenticity of some parts of his self-vindication (and not just as to Callender) remain open to question. Was he really as prompt to forgive lame duck John Adams for his “midnight” appointments in 1801 as he maintained? He was dexterous, but how genuine? Was he trying, and failing, to match Abigail Adams in emotional genuineness? In the words of historian Edith Gelles: “She measured justice by its impact on people, not by abstract principle.” Jefferson argued from principles while he worked to gain the political upper hand, whereas Mrs. Adams, in this case, framed her argument on the basis of a belief that personal relationships were meant to be defended and friendship preserved at all costs.59

  “The Sun of Federalism Is Indeed Set”

  Senator William Plumer of New Hampshire provides us with an apt generalization of where partisan politics stood as the election of 1804 approached. A Federalist who socialized with the political opposition, he confided to a friend: “The southe
rn Democrats fear New England Federalists. Though our numbers are small, we are both feared and respected. We can seldom carry any measure; but we prevent the ruling party from doing much mischief.” Plumer, relatively new on the national political stage, was still optimistic.60

  Joseph Dennie was another story. The Port Folio had been hammering away at southern democrats week by week. “In Virginia, where churches are out of fashion,” he wrote in July 1804, “democracy is most in fashion. In Connecticut, where they have yet more room for their Meeting Houses and Schools and less for whiskey shops and brothels, there is less of democracy and more of federalism.” Right when the Republicans were beginning to take pride in the unpopular word democrat, Dennie grabbed onto it and tried to pull it backward so that it could only connote chaos.

  In the following issue, he called up some of the shibboleths of election year 1800, hoping to get new traction by renewing his critique of Notes on Virginia—especially its “tendency to Subvert Religion.” Jefferson’s “tendency” could be traced back to another whom the cranky critic deemed morally suspect. “Whereas Franklin has made one man frugal,” Dennie wrote aphoristically, “he has converted a hundred to Deism.” But what Dennie appeared to despise most about Thomas Jefferson was his stealthy and manipulative vocabulary, and here the Port Folio went on a tear: “With respect to Mr. Jefferson’s style, I cannot better express my opinion than by saying, that it is just such a style as Betty, my cookmaid, uses, in writing to her lovers … Betty is a long-sided, red-haired slut, and, like Mr. Jefferson always hankering to have a mob of dirty fellows about her.” New England Federalism of the Dennie sort found most appalling what it saw as the vulgarity of popular appeal.61

  Alexander Hamilton was yet another story. Despite regular opinion pieces in the newspaper he had founded in Manhattan, Hamilton was long out of office and had less influence than ever. His correspondence suggests he was feeling sorry for himself. He continued to distinguish between the “cool and discerning Men,” whom he called “real friends to the national government,” and those who had been “successful in perverting public opinion, and in cheating the people out of their confidence.” These “mad Democrats” were now “advancing with rapid strides in the work of disorganization—the sure fore-runner of tyranny,” which for Hamilton meant “the horrors of anarchy.”

  Hamilton’s fear-mongering language was the equal of Jefferson’s. The difference was that when Jefferson invoked his “reign of witches” imagery to symbolize High Federalist rule, he immediately predicted that the reign would soon end, and the republic would be saved. Hamilton had no such vision. But he did have salient points to make, because he still hoped to quiet the pro-administration press before it could completely rewrite the founding and make the Hamilton of 1788 into a moribund monarchist. The problem, he wrote in one sharp editorial, lay with the arbitrariness of terminology: monarchy did not necessarily connote despotism. It could as easily mean any government in which the executive was a single individual, even an elected one. Great Britain, with its hereditary king, was easily spoken of as a commonwealth and as a republic. And so to try to distance the Hamilton of 1788 from the Madison of 1788 by describing the former as an exponent of monarchical government was fatuous.

  Hamilton knew the Republicans in power were trying to discredit his political theory as something morally inferior to their supposedly genuine republicanism. This, he charged, was “worse than arrogance.” The Virginia delegation at the Constitutional Convention, Madison prominent among them, had voted for “the most energetic form of government”—for a strong national authority. Showing that old disputes persisted, some months after Hamilton wrote these words, the National Intelligencer explained that when Federalists used the term energetic government, “they mean that government which shall introduce privileged orders, and the oppression of the poor and industrious.” It was a good comeback, but by then Hamilton was already dead.

  All this swatting around of political language eventually led the Jefferson administration to become proactive. A paragraph of Dennie’s printed in April 1803, and largely ignored by Republican newspapers at the time, would later become evidence in the editor’s trial for seditious libel. “A democracy is scarcely tolerable at any period of national history,” wrote Dennie. “Its omens are always sinister, and its powers are unpropitious … It has been tried in France, and has terminated in despotism. It is on trial here, and the issue will be civil war, desolation, and anarchy.”

  While Dennie raged, Hamilton was too realistic to calculate on an end to Democratic-Republican rule. Insisting “mine is an odd destiny,” he wept for his own fallen star in a pair of letters to Gouverneur Morris, now U.S. senator from New York: “What can I do better than withdraw from the Scene? Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me.”62

  Of course, he was right about that, but not as he intended. In the spring of 1804 the doomed partisan turned his attention to Aaron Burr’s campaign for the governorship of New York. Jefferson’s vice president had long since been shown the door, as it were, given clear signals that Madison and Jefferson did not want to cede the national stage to any but a trusted Virginian. Looking to reestablish himself in his home state, Burr was drawn into an affair of honor with his old colleague and occasional cocounsel. It was not the first time that Hamilton had sought to deny Burr elected office by resorting to character assassination—their political competition went back a full decade. In the past Hamilton had apologized. But not this time. The result of his stubbornness in the affair with Burr was an avoidable duel and Hamilton’s untimely death at the approximate age of forty-nine.63

  Neither Madison nor Jefferson left their true feelings about the death of Hamilton to the historical record, just as they were careful not to publicly comment on Callender’s drowning. Senator Plumer, however, noted with disquiet when members of the administration who had formerly distanced themselves from Burr began to embrace him. “I never had any doubts of their joy for the death of Hamilton,” he wrote of congressional Republicans; “my only doubts were whether they would manifest that joy, by carressing [sic] his murderer. Those doubts are now dispelled.” Gallatin, who had long looked favorably on Burr’s republicanism, was known to have spent two hours meeting privately with the vice president. William Branch Giles, the impulsive Virginia congressman, now U.S. senator, was urging the governor of New Jersey—in whose state the duelists met for their “interview”—to void the pending indictment of Burr and declare the duel fair. But Madison had “taken his murderer into his carriage,” on a ride that mystified Plumer, because it brought them to the home of the French minister. And Jefferson had “shewn more attention” to Burr than was becoming, inviting him into the President’s House. It amazed Plumer what had happened to the U.S. government: “The high office of the President is filled by an infidel, and that of Vice President by a murderer.” Yet the day after he penned this last sentiment, he dined with the infidel and found him “dressed better than I ever saw him”; his scarlet vest new, his hair powdered, and his stockings clean. Not to disappoint the Federalist fashion police, Jefferson’s slippers were old, the senator reported, and his coat “thread bare.” No secrets fell from the president’s lips.64

  Though Dennie had long kept alive his hopes for a Federalist revival, he was forced to admit in September 1804, on lamenting the death of Hamilton: “The sun of federalism is indeed set, and unless it rise again, nothing remains for us but to be subjected to the dominion of Virginia.” The Federalists remained active with their pens but were unable to stir the electorate. Jefferson, renominated by his party in February 1804, awaited a reelection that was all but inevitable, and the Washington newspaper that routinely defended him, the National Intelligencer, celebrated the prospect of a second term: “While the world around him has been in a state of mutation, it is his distinction to have remained the same. Who more fit to preside over the destinies of a republic than such a man?”65

  Republicans were a bit
complacent. That fall the newspaper Republican Farmer, in Federalist Connecticut, challenged the neighborhood gossip concerning Jefferson’s alleged failure to appoint northerners to key posts by pointing to his cabinet. “His magnanimity and impartiality are conspicuous,” the editor proclaimed.66

  “Fields of Futurity”

  The president issued his fourth annual message on November 8, 1804, presenting the executive’s outlook on the still-simmering issues of France and Haiti, Spain and Florida. Senator Plumer expressed frustration at the lack of substance in the address. Bringing up the U.S. boundary with Spanish Florida, Jefferson stated that America’s object had been “misunderstood on the part of Spain”; on the related matter of Madrid’s discomfort with America’s title to the larger Louisiana Territory, he expressed equal confidence that the issue would be easily resolved. But to Plumer, this was all wishful thinking. Only the “irresistible arm” of France had convinced Spain to accede, he wrote, and only for the moment.

  Jefferson was feeding Congress mere crumbs of information. Probably his secretary of state was the one who made sure that nothing more specific was being conveyed. Madison had been unyielding in his posture toward France, but especially toward Spain. He preferred to negotiate with Madrid to buy the arc of land abutting the Gulf of Mexico; but in letters to diplomats Monroe and Pinckney, his language suggested that, with or without an agreement, and lest it fall into British hands, he would have the United States move into the disputed borderland that was known as West Florida—east of New Orleans, past Mobile and Pensacola, and nearly to Tallahassee. His claim to this land was certainly debatable; but just as he had few qualms about proceeding with the Louisiana Purchase without consulting Congress, he put the law second after what he regarded as national security.