Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  Madison’s parable lacked a rousing conclusion, and the compromise worked out over Missouri statehood proved to be nothing more than a holding action. As every student of history knows, the estrangement of North and South resulted four decades later in the unimaginably bloody Civil War. Not until 1835, the year before he died, did Madison finally permit the Southern Literary Messenger to publish “Jonathan and Mary Bull.”22

  The reactions of Madison and Jefferson to the crisis of union were dissimilar. The two shared a “foreboding” about the future, as the historian Peter Onuf has written, but whereas Madison remained privately cynical, Jefferson was jumpy. He had slipped into the radical Old Republican camp of John Taylor of Caroline and Virginia Appeals Court judge Spencer Roane. At the height of the Missouri debate, the latter cautioned President Monroe that Virginians were already surrounded by blacks and refused to be “dammed up in a land of slaves.” Jefferson was, in Onuf’s words, “self-dramatizing” and “dangerously doctrinaire,” as he pursued a “solipsistic fantasy of death and destruction.” He supposed that the republic founded on common consent and common lineage was now held together by mere threads. Acknowledging that the Missouri question had aroused him from political slumber, he wrote nervously to his onetime protégé William Short, who now lived in Philadelphia: “The old schism of federal & republican, threatened nothing because it existed in every state.” Partisanship along sectional lines spelled a far greater danger, and Jefferson knew it.23

  After 1821 the sound of the “fire bell” was more muffled, and while Jefferson’s alarmed sense of an overreaching federal power did not quiet much, he was able to reinvest his heart in the university and in watching his grandchildren (and even great-grandchildren) grow. He turned his financial affairs over to his eldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph. Though in earlier years “Jeff” had proved less studious than his grandfather had hoped, he resourcefully negotiated with bankers and worked tirelessly to manage the former president’s mounting debts.

  The slave economy did not offer Jefferson any comfort in his retirement. Madison too encountered significant problems of economy as he aged. Whereas Jefferson had his large family to think about, Madison, like Washington before him, had no children to whom he would will his land. Just as Washington had freed his slaves, effective upon the death of his widow, Madison anticipated that he would be able to do the same. But even he would find such a plan impossible to carry out, as the Virginia economy continued to experience decline.24

  “Civilities and Softness of Expression”

  During the Monroe years, politicized Virginians could not help but notice Judge Spencer Roane. Residing in John Marshall’s hometown of Richmond, he had become the southern states’ rights answer to the chief justice. It was Roane who had the loudest voice among the alliance known as the Richmond Junto, speaking through Thomas Ritchie’s Enquirer. Even the National Intelligencer had come to support Marshall’s rulings, causing Roane to perceive the nationalizing trend in dire terms. His opinion pieces grew more and more acerbic; his appeals always sounded ominous.25

  During the middle months of 1821, at his wit’s end, Judge Roane tried to convince Madison to take a public position against the Marshall Court. Two Marshall decisions in particular alarmed him so much that he solicited the man whom, he said, Virginians regarded as the greatest living constitutional thinker, to come out of retirement. “They see in your pen,” he coaxed, “the only certain antidote” to Marshall. The case of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) privileged the national bank by refusing to allow the states to tax any of its branches that operated within their borders. The case of Cohens v. Virginia (1821) asserted the right of a lottery firm set up by Congress to practice in contravention of Virginia law, thus thoroughly demeaning states’ rights theory. Both decisions expanded federal power and undermined the strict construction of the Constitution that Madison and Jefferson had favored.26

  Before he decided to address Madison, Roane had published several newspaper essays under the pseudonym of “Algernon Sydney,” in which he called Cohens v. Virginia a “most monstrous” decision. He hearkened back to what he termed “the glorious revolution of 1799,” the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which had affirmed the state legislatures’ right to overturn unpalatable acts of Congress. The judge was hoping that Madison might reenlist in the same cause now. But it had been twenty years, and Madison now considered the situation of the states far from dismal. Writing out of respect to Roane, he agreed that “the Gordian Knot of the Constitution seems to lie in the collision between the federal and State powers.” But going into great detail to explain his current perspective, he seemed entirely comfortable with a nationalist agenda: Marshall’s lack of tact was unfortunate but not unconstitutional. “It is to be regretted,” he said, “that the Court is so much in the practice of mingling with their judgments pronounced comments and reasonings of a scope beyond them; and that there is often apparent disposition to amplify the authorities of the Union at the expense of the States … The constitutional boundary between them should be impartially maintained.” He did not give Roane any further support.27

  It is ironic that at this moment Jefferson was closer to Judge Roane in his thinking than to Madison, given how quickly Roane came to the defense of the memory of his late father-in-law, Patrick Henry. But Roane and Jefferson shared a strong personal antipathy toward Chief Justice Marshall. And they were deeply concerned that strengthening the federal government through judicial decisions made more intrusive constitutional revision in the future—such as the abolition of slavery—likely. “The great object of my fear,” Jefferson wrote Roane in March 1821, “is the federal judiciary. That body, like Gravity, ever acting with noiseless foot, & unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is ingulphing [sic] insidiously the special governments [i.e., the states] into the jaws of that which feeds them.” Like Henry’s son-in-law Roane, and like Pendleton’s nephew John Taylor, Jefferson took sustenance in the “recall to first principles” and hoped their combined call would be “heard & obeyed” by Virginia. “Let the eye of vigilance never be closed,” he intoned.

  From this impassioned charge, Jefferson went on to divulge to Roane what he could not block out of his mind. “Last and most portentous of all is the Missouri question. It is smeared over for the present: but it’s geographical demarcation is indelible. What is to become I see not; and leave to those who will live to see it.” Having emptied his gut of its fears, he had finally landed in a sentimental place. “The University will give employment to my remaining years,” he breathed, “and quite enough for my senile faculties. It is the last act of usefulness I can render, and could I see it open I would not ask an hour more of life. To you I hope many will still be given.” But Roane, nineteen years Jefferson’s junior, died in 1822.28

  Curiously, as all of this was occurring, Jefferson was moved to undertake what is now referred to as his autobiography. He did not mean to advertise it either as a concrete whole or as a self-exposition, as modern memoirists do. De-emphasizing its public value, he opened with a disclaimer: “At the age of 77. I begin to make some memoranda and state some dates & facts concerning myself for my own more ready reference & for the inform[atio]n of my family.” Doubtless, his extended “memoranda” were meant to be available to friendly historians, as an authoritative record to form a part of a larger work on founding-era politics.29

  After the disclaimer, he detailed the Jefferson family’s Welsh ancestry and his mother’s Randolph lineage to England and Scotland. He outlined his father’s role in Virginia settlement and his own formal education; his awareness, as a young attorney, of the issues that led to the Revolution; and his interactions with the key figures, older than himself. Jefferson’s anatomical dissection of his time in the Continental Congress is perhaps the most self-indulgent portion of the “memoranda,” though his assignment and writing of the Declaration of Independence is cast in the humblest of language: “The committee for drawing the
declaration of Independence desired me to do it. It was accordingly done.” The superlatives employed in Jefferson’s ostensible autobiography are reserved for his introduction of James Madison into the narrative:

  Mr. Madison came into the House in 1776. a new member and young; which circumstances, concurring with his extreme modesty, prevented his venturing himself in debate before his removal to the Council of State in Nov. 77. From thence he went to Congress, then consisting of few members. Trained in these successive schools, he acquired a habit of self-possession which placed at ready command the rich resources of his luminous and discriminating mind, & of his extensive information, and rendered him the first of every assembly afterwards of which he became a member. Never wandering from his subject into vain declamation, but pursuing it closely in language pure, classical, and copious, soothing always the feelings of his adversaries by civilities and softness of expression, he rose to the eminent station which he held in the great National convention of 1787, and in that of Virginia which followed, he sustained the new constitution in all its parts, bearing off the palm against the logic of George Mason, and the fervid declamation of Mr. Henry. With these consummate powers were united a pure and spotless virtue which no calumny has ever attempted to sully. Of the powers and polish of his pen, and of the wisdom of his administration in the highest office of the nation, I need say nothing. They have spoken, and will forever speak for themselves.30

  This is the tenderest tribute Jefferson ever wrote about anyone.

  After six months on the project, Jefferson gave up—or felt he had done enough to advance his perspective on the history of the Revolution. He completed the work with an extensive accounting of his five years in Europe, finally putting down his pen after noting his arrival in New York in the spring of 1790. Presumably he meant for the already collated Anas to serve as a companion to the memoranda, a primary source of importance in exposing the delicate history of his conflict with Hamilton in Washington’s cabinet. As to his two terms as chief executive, Jefferson must have expected his biographer to find materials in the vast correspondence that his grandson would eventually publish, beyond what lay in public archives.31

  Benjamin Franklin’s famed autobiography was also left incomplete, though probably not by its author’s design. So did Jefferson and Madison discuss what each was doing independently to speak to future generations? There must have been moments when they did, though we have no clear record.

  “A Subject Which Ruffles the Surface of Public Affairs”

  Madison and Jefferson actively reviewed the names of prospective faculty for the university. Both men considered it essential that the professors should be amenable to their political as well as pedagogical perspectives. This was especially true in the case of the law faculty. “The most effectual safeguard against heretical intrusions into the School of Politics,” wrote Madison, “will be an Able and Orthodox Professor, whose course of instruction will be an example to his successors.”

  The ex-presidents took special interest in the law and government texts they would assign to the first crop of students. In conceiving a curriculum, Madison displayed his fear of declension from republican traditions. He wrote that John Locke and Algernon Sydney, a seventeenth-century critic of the British monarchy (whose name Spencer Roane had adopted in his newspaper essays), were “admirably calculated to impress on young minds the rights of Nations to establish their Governments, and to inspire a love of free ones.” But he also noted that these same thinkers “afford no aid in guarding our Republican charters against constructive violations.” And “tho’ rich in fundamental principles,” the Declaration of Independence, he said, “falls nearly under like observation.” Thinking of Jacob Gideon’s recent republication of The Federalist, he commented that as a text for law students, it “may fairly enough be regarded as the most authentic exposition of the text of the federal Constitution … Yet it did not foresee all the misconstructions which have occurred; nor prevent some that it did foresee.” It seems Madison was still wishing to refine, as well as redefine, the work.32

  As Madison contemplated the meaning of The Federalist for a new generation, Jefferson had to fight revisionism in order to reclaim the Declaration of Independence. In 1823 the hostile and unrepentant Timothy Pickering delivered a provocative Fourth of July address, announcing that the Declaration was as much Adams’s as Jefferson’s and a rather undistinguished piece of work besides. Jefferson, despite his declared ignorance of what was in the newspapers, assured Madison that he retained his original drafts—self-evident historical truth—and “written notes, taken by myself at the moment and on the spot.” He dredged up every past criticism that came to mind, not just Pickering’s. “Richard Henry Lee charged it as copied from Locke’s treatise on government,” he recalled. “Whether I gathered my ideas from reading or reflection I do not know. I know only that I turned to neither book or pamphlet while writing it.” Madison, obligingly, replied: “Nothing can be more absurd than the cavil that the Declaration contains known and not new truths. The object was to assert not to discover truths, and to make them the basis of the Revolutionary Act. The merit of the Draught could consist only in a lucid communication of human rights … in a style and tone appropriate to the great occasion.” Jefferson could not have said it better.33

  Although Madison held firm in the conviction that his notes from the Constitutional Convention should remain unpublished until after his death, both he and Jefferson retained personal measures of political orthodoxy. Jefferson’s was to ensure that his story of the Declaration remained the standard; and Madison’s was to privilege The Federalist in sanctifying his plan of government. The primary texts at the University of Virginia were to be, then: “1. The Declaration of Independence, as the fundamental act of Union of these States.” “2. the book known by the title of the ‘Federalist,’ being an authority to which appeal is habitually made by all … as evidence of the general opinion of those who framed and those who accepted the Constitution of the U. States on questions as to its genuine meaning.” “3. the Resolutions of the General Assembly of Virga in 1799, on the subject of the Alien and Sedition laws …” “4. The Inaugural Speech and Farewell Address of President Washington, as conveying political lessons of peculiar value.” These texts would enshrine the spirit of 1776, Madison’s moment as a nation builder, and Jefferson’s self-proclaimed Revolution of 1800, all the while reclaiming the republican heart and mind of George Washington, a man whose farewell address actually reflected Hamilton’s critique and who died rejecting the common vision of Madison and Jefferson.34

  While Jefferson concurred with Madison’s selections, this did not mean that their perspectives on a party-free, or post-party, America were identical. In an 1822 letter to Gallatin that was more panic-stricken than politically perceptive, Jefferson saw a clandestine resurgence of the Federalist threat, which had been thought defunct: “You are told indeed that there are no longer parties among us …, [that] the lion and the lamb lie down together in peace. Do not believe a word of it. The same parties exist now as ever did.” No one would get a single vote running as a Federalist after 1820; but Jefferson still insisted that those who had once been avowed monarchists were settling now for “consolidated government”—an overbearing federal presence, undermining states’ rights. In Congress, he asserted, “you see many, calling themselves Republicans, and preaching the rankest doctrines of the old Federalists.” It was more than the punishing presence of the Marshall Court that he feared. For Jefferson, the battle was far from over.35

  In the autumn of 1823 Jefferson saluted a foreign friend. “We have gone through too many trying scenes together, to forget the sympathies and affections they nourished,” he addressed the Marquis de Lafayette, before going on to describe the latter-day “agitation” in American political life. “The Hartford Convention, the victory of [New] Orleans, the peace of Ghent, prostrated the name of federalism,” he declared. “Its votaries abandoned it through shame and mortification; and no
w call themselves republicans. But the name alone is changed, the principles are the same.” The morbid tone resembled that of his warning to Gallatin, but this time Jefferson found a universal truth: “The parties of Whig and Tory, are those of nature. They exist in all countries, whether called by these names or by those of Aristocrats and Democrats, Coté Droite et Coté Gauche, Ultras and Radicals, Servile and Liberals. The sickly, weakly, timid man, fears the people, and is a Tory by nature. The healthy, strong and bold, cherishes them, and is formed a Whig by nature.”

  Back to the particulars of American politics, he called up the Missouri question yet again, insisting that it had been raised as a “false front” by those who pretended to care about ending slavery but who actually intended to produce “a geographical division of parties, which might insure them the next President.” Predisposed, as he had been in the 1790s, to mourn the opposition’s ability to dupe a part of the public, he charged: “The people of the North went blindfold into the snare.” At the end of the 1790s, in Jefferson’s political lexicon, the people had “recovered their sight”; after Missouri they gradually saw through “the trick of hypocrisy.” He was apparently accepting that his correspondent Senator John Holmes of Maine represented a broader awakening. “The line of division now is the preservation of the State rights, as reserved in the Constitution, or by strained constructions of that instrument, to merge all into a consolidated government. The Tories are for strengthening the Executive and General Government.” With consolidation in place, Jefferson warned, there was only one direction the United States could head in: it “must immediately generate monarchy.”36

  At the end of the 1790s Madison might have regarded monarchy as a distant possibility for Federalist America, if trends were not reversed; he might have thought Tories a still-relevant term. But in the 1820s such thoughts were extreme, and Jefferson’s imagery unconvincing. Their divergence as retired presidents is evident in the letter Madison wrote to Lafayette as the Missouri debate was still simmering late in 1820. Allowing that he was keenly aware of Lafayette’s strong abolitionist sentiments, we can see, even so, Madison’s acceptance that the issue was neither simple nor stark. Missouri was, he wrote, “a subject which ruffles the surface of public affairs”—not a subject tearing apart the nation’s viscera. “A Govt like ours has so many safety valves giving vent to overheated passions that it carries within itself a relief ag[ain]st the infirmities from which the best of human Institutions can not be exempt.” The republic in the 1820s was, for Madison, a system prone to internal convulsion, but a self-healing system nonetheless.