Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  He coolly reported to Lafayette that the question of Missouri centered upon “whether a toleration or prohibition of slavery Westward of the Mississippi would extend its evils.” He had no easy answer: “The humane part of the argument against the prohibition turns on the position that … a diffusion of those in the Country tends at once to meliorate their actual condition, and to facilitate their eventual emancipation.” That was Madison’s conviction as well. Like Jefferson, he did not want to see the black population grow for any reason. He figured that national debate would continue until the fate of free blacks was resolved. Missouri’s constitution excluded free blacks from the state, which was not unusual. Surveying the Union, Madison told Lafayette: “The Constitutions & laws of the different States are much at variance in the civic character given to free people of colour; those of most of the States, not excepting such as have abolished slavery, imposing various disqualifications which degrade them from the rank & rights of white persons. All these perplexities develope more & more the dreadful fruitfulness of the original sin of the African trade.” He was saying that ambiguities in the laws made America’s race problem more complex than a good-hearted republican would prefer to imagine. He may have come down on Jefferson’s side of the argument, but it was not a “fire bell in the night” to him. The Missouri question did not destroy Madison’s calm. To judge by his epistolary persona, he remained solemn, unexcitable, and unafraid.37

  “All Power in Human Hands Is Liable to Be Abused”

  The election of 1824 was one of the most thrilling and contentious in the annals of U.S. history. Campaigning began even before Monroe embarked on a second term, when newspapers decided to speculate on the future prospects of a new breed of politician. Change was eagerly anticipated.

  For one of the few times in the quadrennial election cycle, party identities were indistinct and there were more than two viable candidates in the running. John Quincy Adams had New England locked up, but not much else; Henry Clay of Kentucky, Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, and William Crawford of Georgia vied for the South and West. Three of the four had been overseas envoys during the Madison administration; the fourth was the most conspicuous military hero since George Washington and had recently entered the U.S. Senate for the purpose of announcing his availability.

  Jefferson hoped for Crawford, who seemed most likely to protect Virginia’s interests—and in fact, the Georgian would go on to win Virginia’s electoral votes. And while he said nothing for public consumption, Jefferson’s feelings about Andrew Jackson were shaped by his knowledge of the general’s ungovernable temper and lack of intellectual curiosity. The rough and ready Tennessean was an admirer of Napoleon and known in some circles as “Napoleon des bois,” or “Napoleon of the woods.” Jefferson despised the French emperor and held nothing back when he labeled the Corsican a “scoundrel.” Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, who visited Monticello prior to the election of 1824, heard Jefferson express his distaste for Jackson. Webster quoted him as having called the general a “dangerous” man.

  Jefferson did not live long enough to see Jackson inaugurated, so it is difficult to say whether he would have been more gracious in evaluating the energetic and imposing seventh president. Jefferson’s unofficial private secretary, Nicholas Trist, who married one of Jefferson’s granddaughters, served as a State Department clerk in the John Quincy Adams administration before becoming a trusted Jackson aide. Madison, who lived until the end of the Tennessean’s second term, did nothing to steal his thunder and earned the respect of the hard-edged old general as the years went by. It was indeed a time of flux in American politics.38

  Madison and Crawford got on well, and in April 1824, when the candidate asked the ex-president to help him refute charges of improper ambition—solicitation of office—dating to Madison’s second term, Madison responded promptly and positively. Madison was not as close to Clay, but they communicated unceremoniously. When in the midst of the 1824 campaign, Clay shared with Madison his argument in favor of a protective tariff, Madison explained collegially, candidly, and at length why he could not support the plan. Though Jefferson had always been more at ease with the elder Adams than Madison had been, Madison was decidedly more comfortable with John Quincy than Jefferson was. Monroe was not only pleased with the performance of the younger Adams, his secretary of state, but was personally fond of him too; and he had rather mixed feelings about Crawford, his secretary of the treasury, whom he came close to firing. Monroe strained to do all he could not to play favorites in his second term.39

  Jefferson thought he was sorting out a mess when, in advance of the election, he viewed the competition to succeed Monroe and predicted that it would come down to two candidates: “a Northern & Southern one, as usual.”40 No one at the time could have predicted the course of this extraordinary political contest—whose result was as unplanned as the awkward tie between Jefferson and Burr in 1800.

  Variables were present that Republicans in the past had not encountered. The nominating caucus no longer meant what it had. Ohio had more electoral votes than any southern state except Virginia. Crawford, the Virginians’ favorite, suffered a stroke in 1823 yet remained on the ballot. And in eighteen of twenty-four states, popular votes were translated into electoral votes for the first time. But when all ballots were cast, none of the four leading candidates had received enough to win the presidency outright, though Jackson led all competitors by a clear margin in both popular and electoral votes. According to the Constitution, the House of Representatives would have to determine Monroe’s successor.

  Newspapers around the country indulged in speculation but with less acrimony than in past elections. Far from the action, in Maine, editors collected their thoughts as they collected the newspapers of Boston, New York, and points south. The Portland Advertiser, while lauding Jackson as “the candidate of the people,” noticed “the superior popularity of Mr. Adams, above that of General Jackson, with the members of the House of Representatives.” The Advertiser’s editor absorbed reports in Thomas Ritchie’s Richmond Enquirer. Reading what he called the “Oracle of the Ancient dominion,” the New Englander sensed correctly that Virginia’s House delegation would deny Jackson.41

  When the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, the fourth-place finisher, Henry Clay, was excluded from the three-person runoff, according to the rules laid down in the Constitution. Clay used his influence as longtime Speaker of the House to deliver key state delegations to Adams. And Adams, never afraid to act in accordance with the dictates of his conscience, committed a massive political error. By making the capable but controversial Clay his secretary of state, cries of a “corrupt bargain” rang out, which pretty much assured that the stubborn sixth president would be a one-term president, as his father was before him.42

  Though Madison and Jefferson were largely spectators to the 1824 election, they shared a certain defensiveness on behalf of their native state. In February 1825, as Adams’s controversial victory was broadcast through the national press, Madison wrote to Jefferson about the viability of one particular candidate for the professorship in moral philosophy at the university. The choice had to be made carefully, he said, because responsibilities included the teaching of finance; and the gentleman in question exhibited a doubtful adherence to the “Virginia Creed,” after having become “a convert to the constitutionality of canals.” It was quite unusual for Madison, not just in his retirement years but at any time, to state directly that he looked for evidence of the “Virginia Creed” when assessing a person’s political character.

  The professor he was writing about was George Tucker, a three-term Virginia congressman. Whether the “Virginia Creed” had any relationship to one’s view of slavery is unclear. But Tucker had just published a novel, The Valley of the Shenandoah, that told of the deterioration of a Virginia plantation family and illustrated the wretchedness of slavery. When all was said and done, Madison and Jefferson agreed that it was worth taking a chance on Professor Tu
cker, despite the one “flaw,” as Madison referred to his position on internal improvements. His educational “fitness,” combined with a “great amiableness of temper,” helped them overcome their suspicions. From the Virginia perspective, their trust was rewarded: in 1837, Tucker published a friendly biography of Jefferson. And he remained on the university faculty until 1845.43

  In 1825 the constitutional question of funding improvements to the growing nation’s transportation networks dominated Madison’s thoughts. “It seems strange,” he wrote to Jefferson, “but it is a certain fact, that there are several instances of distinguished politicians who reject the general heresies of federalism, most decidedly the amalgamating magic of the terms ‘General Welfare,’ who yet admit the authority of Congress as to roads and canals, which they squeeze out of the enumerated articles.” He was wary of utility, a seductive word that could be used to rationalize any departure from constitutional correctness—what he now called “Constitutional orthodoxy.” Both Madison and Jefferson felt that the current craze of canal building was a state and not a national responsibility. Using the same argument they did in opposition to federal interference with slavery in the territories, Madison feared that the popularity of a measure would overcome any constitutional objection, even when the Constitution was impossible to misconstrue. This was why his last act as president had been to veto the popular but, to him, unconstitutional Bonus Bill. Eight years later he was hopeful that the Supreme Court would steer clear of this issue. “The will of the nation being omnipotent for right, is so for wrong also,” he opined for Jefferson.44

  At the end of 1825 Madison was still on the case. Jefferson considered the matter as desperate. On Christmas Eve he wrote to Madison, enclosing a paper he had been asked to write by a neighbor who sat in the House of Delegates. It disavowed the notion that Congress had authority under the “General Welfare” clause to fund canals, and it assured skeptics at the same time of Virginians’ continuing commitment to the Union. Written, Jefferson said, as “an example of a temperate mode of opposition,” he thought it might at best “intimidate the wavering,” and at worst “delay the measure a year at least.” He wanted Madison to look it over. If Madison approved it, Jefferson would pass it on; if he frowned on it, “it shall be suppressed”; if it had merit but needed work, “make what alterations you please.” Their collaborative engine was still in operation.45

  Madison thought that Jefferson’s paper, titled a “Solemn Declaration and Protest,” was too strongly worded. He was worried that Jefferson would only be adding to the animosity many northerners felt toward Virginia. But he could hardly have disapproved of Jefferson’s conclusion that a constitutional amendment was required to extend the canal-building power to the federal government. Madison himself had proposed at the Constitutional Convention a clause that would have empowered Congress to build canals.

  What concerned him was Jefferson’s reference to the “sister states” as “co-parties” to the constitutional compact. These terms were dangerously close to the extreme states’ rights language that supported a state’s right to nullify acts of Congress. Jefferson also used the inflammatory words usurpation and degeneracy when he referred to the increased use of federal power—language that Madison, the more cautious constitutionalist, would never have approved. Language one might expect to find in a Jefferson production was missing here: he did not mention “majority will,” presumably because the majority will was now united against him. As Madison picked apart the proposed document, he showed Jefferson how it could do more harm than good.

  Unbeknownst to Jefferson, Madison had already been asked by Ritchie, of the Richmond Enquirer, to prepare a like paper. The state legislature was in session, and as much as Jefferson’s local delegate was feeling anxious, the politically savvy editor wanted to reach as many decision makers as he could. Madison sent Jefferson what he had sent Ritchie, a carefully outlined brief designed to aid the legislature in deciding what to do (and what not to do) to express Virginia’s opposition to federally funded roads and canals. “All power in human hands is liable to be abused,” he wrote epigrammatically. But if Virginia was free to exercise its right to call attention to a constitutional violation, that was all it could do.

  For supporters of internal improvements, the federal government had every right to appropriate funds, just as, in regulating foreign commerce, Congress was authorized to deepen harbors and establish roads to assist in developing trade with Indians. Madison was not prepared to go back to the Virginia Resolutions, where the threat posed by the Alien and Sedition Acts struck him as a “deliberate, palpable, and dangerous” extension of federal power. The present issue did not rise to that level of danger; nor could it be described in dire terms.

  His opposition was intellectually rooted, though of more than intellectual interest. But if he saw eye to eye with Jefferson on internal improvements, he still recognized that his state was on the losing side of this particular battle and should acquiesce. One thing had not changed: Virginians were still trapped in their inherited sense of bigness, as much as they were in 1776 and 1787; they were poised to defend against a tyranny that was unlikely ever to present itself.

  Madison concluded his letter to Thomas Ritchie with a humble admission: “I find myself every day more indisposed, and, as may be presumed, less fit, for reappearance on the political Arena.” He was accepting of the shift that was under way.46

  “Mr. M. Feels His Departure Dearly”

  In his letter to Lafayette on the Missouri question in 1820, Madison had written that if the Frenchman ever paid a visit to Montpelier, he would find “as zealous a farmer, tho not so well cultivated a farm as [Lafayette’s estate] Lagrange presents.” Madison, who had never made an ocean voyage, knew he was too old to give it a whirl. Nor did he expect the marquis, now in his sixties, to find his way back to Virginia. He wrote, without expectation: “I may infer from a comparison of our ages a better chance of your crossing the Atlantic than of mine.” Lafayette had not set foot in America since 1784.47

  As it happened, Madison and Jefferson would twice more be able to cast their eyes on their old friend. In advance of the fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution, Congress and President Monroe had invited Lafayette to return to the United States to see how it had grown, and how beloved he still was. It was no exaggeration. During his thirteen-month tour, from August 1824 to September 1825, the last surviving commander of Continental Army troops grabbed headlines week after week. Accompanied by his son, George Washington Lafayette, he was heralded everywhere as “the nation’s guest.” In spite of the wear and tear on his aging frame, he obligingly visited every one of the twenty-four states.

  Plainly dressed, with ample belly and undistinguished features, Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette was, all the same, an icon. Mothers presented their children to him, that he might confer his blessing; adulatory crowds spontaneously formed wherever he was spotted. Young ladies competed to set flower wreaths upon his head; balls were held and toasts drunk. In Newburgh, New York, citizens impulsively took to the streets in protest when it was learned that Lafayette was to shorten his stay and depart at night, before they could glimpse him.48

  In mid-October 1824 the marquis was joined by Chief Justice Marshall and other notables at the Yorktown battlefield. From there he traveled west to Richmond, where he was again feted and where, in his aide’s words, he witnessed “those bursts of frank and hearty merriment so distinctive of the inhabitants of Virginia.” Finally the general was able to satisfy his desire to see Monticello, riding up the mountain in early November and embracing his host outside the columned home. Eyewitnesses were moved to tears. Jefferson took “the nation’s guest” to the university, largely completed but for some of the brickwork and plastering of interior rooms. At the banquet staged at the unfinished Rotunda, Lafayette sat between Jefferson and Madison, the latter of whom toasted the Frenchman with memorable words: “To liberty, with virtue for her guest, and gratitude for the feast.” Jefferso
n, protesting that his voice was too weak to be heard, had his prepared remarks read aloud by someone else.

  Departing Monticello, Lafayette rode on to Montpelier, where the Madisons proved themselves ideal hosts. “Mr. Madison at the time of our visit was seventy-four years of age,” recorded Lafayette’s aide, Auguste Levasseur, “but his well preserved frame contained a youthful soul full of sensibility.” Despite the “severity” of his outward appearance, “all the impressions of his heart are rapidly depicted in his features, and his conversation is usually animated with a gentle gaiety.” At both Monticello and Montpelier—Lafayette stayed for several days at each—the subject of slavery came up more than once in conversation. Lafayette did not hold Madison and Jefferson personally responsible for the persistence of slavery; but he did not disguise his discomfort and, in his evening conversations with Madison’s planter neighbors, voiced disgust that such a class of men could so easily condemn their fellow human beings to lives unfree and degraded.49

  Once he had finished touring the interior states, Lafayette returned to Virginia in the late summer of 1825, before sailing back to France. Madison accompanied him through the Virginia countryside to Monticello, and Monroe, still in office when Lafayette first landed and now an ex-president, joined them there. Over the intervening months Jefferson had become quite frail and was confined to the house. Their visit took on a woefully expectant air. “I shall not attempt to depict the sadness which prevailed at this cruel separation,” wrote Levasseur.50