Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Madison Lives to Tell the Tale

  1817–1836

  To myself you have been a pillar of support thro’ life. Take care of me when dead, and be assured that I shall leave with you my last affections.

  —JEFFERSON TO MADISON, FEBRUARY 17, 1826

  You cannot look back to the long period of our private friendship and political harmony, with more affecting recollections than I do.

  —MADISON TO JEFFERSON, FEBRUARY 24, 1826

  MADISON AND JEFFERSON EACH KEPT UP A SPIRITED CORRESPONDENCE with state and national figures. But as their friend and neighbor Monroe assumed the presidency, their impact on current political debates was less direct and, to a certain degree, self-limited. When asked by the younger generation to clarify some past action or intent, they would do what they could to give a durable answer. As gentlemen, it mattered to them how they were received; as Revolutionaries who had lived through a highly partisan age, they cared how they would be thought of by posterity.

  The political environment in which they had come of age was fast receding. Men born in the 1770s, and even the 1780s, were now the dominant voices in statehouses and the U.S. Congress. In 1813, when Benjamin Rush passed away, Jefferson and John Adams were already tallying the names of those signers of the Declaration of Independence whose obituaries had yet to be published. “I am the only one South of the Patomac,” Jefferson reported.1

  As, one by one, the Revolutionary generation began to die off, Madison and Jefferson both took more of an interest in replenishing the earth—that is, in scientific farming. Some of their most involved correspondence addressed matters of agriculture, and Madison became president of the agricultural society of Jefferson’s Albemarle County. The pair were as concerned now with the exhaustion of Virginia’s soil as they had been with Virginia’s stake in the American Union.

  On March 4, 1817, outgoing President Madison was on hand for his successor’s inaugural address. It was delivered outdoors because the rebuilt Capitol would not be reoccupied until 1819. “National honor is national property of the highest value,” Monroe pronounced. “The sentiment in the mind of every citizen is national strength.” The style of address was not Madisonian, but it expressed a continuation of policy. At the end of Monroe’s oration, just as Madison had used the same occasion eight years earlier to ask to be “pardoned for not suppressing” his heartfelt sympathy with the retiring President Jefferson, Monroe said: “Of my immediate predecessor …, I shall be pardoned for expressing my earnest wishes that he may long enjoy in his retirement the affections of a grateful country, the best reward of exalted talents and the most faithful and meritorious service.”

  Like Jefferson in 1809, Madison in 1817 remained in Washington to participate in celebrations in honor of the new president. And like Jefferson, he would never return to Washington after his retirement to central Virginia. “I shall hasten my departure from this place as much as possible,” he told Jefferson in mid-February, “but I fear I shall be detained longer after the 4th of March than I wish.” In fact it was a whole month into the Monroe administration before Madison rode home.2

  The New Yorker James Kirke Paulding accompanied him by steamboat along the Potomac on the first leg of the journey. Nationally known for both political satire and romantic fiction, Paulding had pseudonymously authored a lovely farce, The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan, as the War of 1812 began. Madison enjoyed it immensely, complimenting it before knowing its author and calling it to Jefferson’s attention. In 1815 he gave Paulding his first Washington job, an appointment to the Board of Navy Commissioners. In the waning months of the Madison presidency, they relaxed on a good many evenings, after the day’s business was behind. “I have several times made the President laugh in a way altogether unbecoming a great man,” Paulding wrote then. “He enjoys a joke hugely.” Aboard the steamboat on his way to retirement, Madison was, Paulding reported, “as playful as a child.” He “talked and jested with every body on board, & reminded me of a school Boy on a long vacation.” Later in 1817 the author of The Diverting History found that he could be easily diverted himself. Jim Paulding spent several leisurely weeks in Madison’s company at Montpelier, as much taken by Madison’s wit as by his stock of old anecdotes—“for he was a capital story teller.” Others said the same thing about this man whom history has painted too soberly.

  The ex-president’s mother, Nelly Conway Madison, was then in her mid-eighties and would thrive for another dozen years. James and Dolley called on her each day in the wing of the mansion where she sequestered herself. Mornings, as Madison and the affectionate Paulding rode out the front gate of the estate for a tour of farming operations, the younger man was enthralled by his host’s dexterous use of a crooked stick to pry open the gate from atop his horse. As they discussed the past, Paulding was particularly struck by the ex-president’s insistence that accounts of historic events written by political men tended to be unreliable. It was difficult, Madison said, even for one at the center of unfolding events to remember how a course was chosen—how, “from a multiplicity of motives,” one thing led to another.3

  “Heretofore Ascribed to Mr. Hamilton”

  Jefferson the inveterate letter writer and seasoned communicator never denied that he wished to have an impact on the future. It was in the very fabric of his being. By 1817, when he was seventy-four, the executive experimenter had turned executive educator. What he had early conceived and fancifully termed “an Academical Village” became precisely that and more. Mr. Jefferson’s university, as it would be familiarly known, used space in new ways. A combination of classical architecture and creative design, it began as a horizontal society, splendid pavilions spread across a lawn, rather than a conventional college revolving around an administrative core. Its villagelike setting encouraged it to function as a diverse community. Beyond the lecture halls, library, and student and faculty residences, a proctor, serving as a kind of permanent contractor, kept the “village” in shape. Vegetable gardens, farm animals, storage structures, washhouses, and other outbuildings were to support a growing student and faculty population and a paid and unpaid workforce. Some of the self-sufficiency Jefferson had developed on his mountaintop he sought to build into his university plan.4

  From the purchase of acreage to its opening not long before Jefferson’s death, the University of Virginia took eight years to build. In the spring of Monroe’s first year as president and Madison’s first year of retirement, Jefferson staged a meeting in Charlottesville, making sure to involve both men as members of the governing Board of Visitors of what was at that time still known as Central College. On the very day of their meeting, Jefferson wrote of Madison’s retirement prospects to John Adams: “Such a mind as his, fraught with information, and with matter for reflection, can never know ennui. Besides, there will always be work enough cut out for him to continue his active usefulness to his country.” And then, with wonderful understatement, he gave Adams a suitable example of their collaborative “usefulness”: “a collegiate institution to be established in our neighborhood.”

  After prevailing on his fellow presidents to attend the foundational gathering in person, Jefferson gradually came to demand less of their time and attention as he saw the necessity that he make the day-to-day decisions himself. Jefferson wrote of his university-in-embryo with a gardener’s loving concern: “I look to it as a germ from which a great tree may spread itself.”

  Jefferson’s pet project did more than take up his time—it enthralled him. He designed the curriculum, cast a wide net in search of worthy professors, and monitored all expenditures. He would not resist having “Father of the University of Virginia” (though not “President of the United States”) carved into his tombstone. Jefferson had been contemplating the establishment of a university since his unhappy term as vice president. He had cultivated a young state senator, Joseph Carrington Cabell, during the years of Madison’s presidency. Cabell obligingly served as
Jefferson’s surrogate in Richmond, stepping forward and squeezing essential funds out of the parsimonious Virginia Assembly. Many years later, Cabell would preside over Mr. Jefferson’s university as rector. The land itself, once but no longer owned by Monroe, was close enough that Jefferson could peer through his telescope from the lawn of Monticello and watch construction as it unfolded.5

  While engaged in building his university, Jefferson made a concerted effort to forget all political contention. The one and only newspaper he read in the years after the War of 1812 ended was Thomas Ritchie’s Richmond Enquirer. When Ritchie began sending him a new offshoot of that paper, the Richmond Compiler, which focused attention not on national news but the Virginia economy, Jefferson politely declined it. He discontinued his subscription to William Duane’s Philadelphia Aurora. To the always-friendly publisher of Washington’s National Intelligencer, he was unequivocal when he rejected that paper too, saying, “It is useless to be recieving newspapers which I never open.” He explained that he read Ritchie’s Enquirer “chiefly for the advertisements”; of outside events in general, he insisted, “I scarcely enquire or wish to know what is passing.” He did not allude to the nine essays published in the Enquirer that were authored by William Branch Giles, a longtime ally, who had now turned to mocking Jefferson as the “prince of philosophers” and an eccentric. Giles strongly opposed the ex-president’s activism when it came to overhauling Virginia’s system of education. But this was one field in which Jefferson’s passion to chart a course and build a legacy was unstoppable, as Giles would learn.6

  At the time he was swearing off newspapers, Jefferson was compiling his Anas, piecing back together the fragmentary notes of conversations and meetings that had taken place while he was secretary of state. He believed that this record was superior to anyone’s memory, and that it could and should be used by historians to recount Alexander Hamilton’s power-hungry designs and Jefferson’s purposeful embrace of real republicanism. Not long afterward, in 1819, at the age of seventy-six, he described his accession to the presidency as the “Revolution of 1800,” a transformational moment. History was meant to record the change in the principles and functions of government that took place then. In Jefferson’s reconstruction of events, from 1801 forward, the federal government began to favor the interests of ordinary citizens rather than accord artificial advantages to a moneyed elite.

  It is in his final years’ correspondence that we see Jefferson’s most concerted effort to enlist others in drawing on original documents, stored at Monticello, to contest Federalist historiography. Madison is harder to assess, because as usual the records he left are more subtle. He clearly evidenced pride in the outcome of the War of 1812, though without directly claiming that success had been a function of his stewardship. In a retrospective glance at the two wars he had lived through, written less than a year after his presidency came to an end, he unostentatiously donned the laurels of the victorious commander in chief and gave what amounted to a benediction. “If our first struggle was a war of our infancy,” he said of the Revolution, “this last was that of our youth; and the issue of both, wisely improved, may long postpone, if not forever prevent a necessity for exerting the strength of our Manhood.”7

  We do know that getting history “right” had long mattered to Jefferson. Recall that as president, in 1802, he tried to induce the poet Joel Barlow to compose the counternarrative to Chief Justice John Marshall’s biased Life of George Washington, the last (and most offending) volume of which was not published until 1807. Jefferson was still seeking vindication nineteen years later, in the weeks before he died, when he pressed the volatile son and namesake of the volatile General Henry Lee to inspect his papers at Monticello. In between, he leaned on several others, including an associate justice of the Supreme Court, to draw on his handwritten records and prepare a history akin to what he had expected of Barlow. Marshall, who would still be on the bench several years after Jefferson’s death, tormented him. Jefferson wanted a Republicanized “History of Parties,” as he termed it, to serve as the antidote to the “five volumed libel” of the long-active chief justice.

  Henry Lee IV pursued both Jefferson and Madison. The former may have been desperate enough to count on the first-time biographer’s objectivity, but the latter was a good deal less encouraging. This gifted but unpredictable scion of an old and distinguished Virginia family appealed to Madison in altogether flattering terms, saying that if he were allowed to write the president’s biography, he would “make your memory as illustrious as your life has been distinguished and useful.” He was ambitious enough to say that he planned to write the biographies of the greatest living Virginians: Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Marshall.

  Madison’s rejoinder to Lee was to say that he did not want his life examined except posthumously. He explained that the best material was already in the public record and would constitute an intellectual history at some later date. That was far from the whole story. Madison was not about to reveal to Lee what he really felt.8

  In 1818 William Plumer of New Hampshire, contemplating an end to public life, wrote Madison familiarly: “Like you I hope to devote the remainder of my days to agricultural & historical pursuits.” He was probably referring to the reading of historical works, a sentiment Madison had shared with him. But Madison was not merely a passive reader of history in his early retirement years. Unlike Jefferson, he never explicitly forswore newspapers, and he carried on avid conversations concerning matters of constitutional law and policy. He remained issue-oriented.9

  At nearly the same time as Plumer’s letter came to him, Madison received a “handsome copy” of a brand-new edition of The Federalist, published in Washington by Jacob Gideon. It was the third edition and, surprisingly, the first that Madison had had a hand in. That is why it matters. He had been in transit when Alexander Hamilton made arrangements for the 1788 printing and, for partisan reasons, was not consulted at the time Hamilton authorized the 1802 revised edition. So when Gideon had approached him and asked for the loan of a first edition, Madison had happily obliged, supplying an annotated copy, corrected to show who had actually authored each of the numbers. This time Hamilton was not around to oversee the process. Had Hamilton intentionally, or the initial publisher inadvertently, assigned authorship of some Madison numbers to Hamilton? Or was Madison’s memory imperfect? The most accomplished modern editor of The Federalist sides with Madison in most cases.

  Gideon responded favorably to Madison’s recommendation that he include for added interest and clarification the Articles of Confederation that the Constitution was designed to replace. He also took it upon himself to include the “Pacificus” and “Helvidius” letters of 1793, in which Hamilton and Madison had argued key constitutional issues. At that time Hamilton, striking first, had asserted that the executive’s role in the making of foreign policy was paramount; Madison gave as good as he got, as certain that the executive’s aggrandizement of powers reserved for Congress threatened to ruin the constitutional balance the framers wished to preserve. The substance of their debate, as things turn out, remains current in the twenty-first century.

  Madison was initially opposed to the insertion of the point-counterpoint of “Helvidius” versus “Pacificus” and told the publisher so. In Madison’s mind, The Federalist showcased a collaboration; the 1793 essays, though constitutionally relevant, pitted the same pair in opposition—to add them, he said, would be a “double incongruity,” serving to confuse the reading public. But Gideon had gotten his idea from the last edition (1802), inspired by Hamilton, which highlighted “Pacificus” by itself, without Madison’s counterargument. Gideon wanted to give Madison equal time. Madison dropped his protest; he ended up correcting errors from a previous publication of “Helvidius” and submitted an authorized version. The 1818 edition of The Federalist, with its additions and alterations, advertised Madison’s involvement on its title page.

  The exchange of letters between Madison and Gideon confirms Madis
on’s interest in seizing every opportunity to set the record straight. In the end, the publisher flattered both himself and the ex-president when he assured Madison that the public welcomed the new edition as “the first work of merit published within the district of Columbia.” Its historical value was already being felt, he added, in that the new edition would “tend much to stop the many misrepresentations” by which several numbers “heretofore ascribed to Mr. Hamilton” would now be known to have been written by Madison.10

  “Interference & Excitement”

  After perusing Gideon’s edition of The Federalist, Madison rode to Monticello and accompanied Jefferson west to the Blue Ridge Mountains. There, at Rockfish Gap, Jefferson made a personal appeal to a special state commission on education and secured for Charlottesville the permanent location of the state’s university, which until that moment had yet to be formalized. The towns of Staunton and Lexington presented themselves as alternative sites, but the mere presence of the two former presidents seemed to be enough for the commission to grant them their wish. Unfortunately for Jefferson, rather than ride home with Madison, he opted to travel north to Virginia’s Warm Springs, to treat his rheumatism. And instead of getting better, he contracted a fever along with a painful skin infection. Boils broke out across his backside—“a large swelling on my seat,” he informed his daughter. He required months to recuperate.11

  Meanwhile President Monroe earned short-lived credit for ushering in the “Era of Good Feelings,” after his postinaugural tour of Federalist New England restored faith that the business of America lay in creating new opportunities for growth. The president’s tour included dinner with John Adams and other former adversaries. Amid the healing that took place, the President’s House received a postwar makeover and was painted a vivid white, making it possible for citizens to begin to call it the White House. Social events there in the Monroe years lacked the warmth and amusement that the bubbly Dolley Madison had famously provided; the current president and first lady were both widely regarded as colorless and preferred to keep to themselves. It was Monroe’s dynamic cabinet members who maintained ties with congressional allies, allowing the president his executive privacy, when he wanted it, without alienating lawmakers.12