Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  The University of Virginia opened in May 1825. The curriculum of Jefferson and Madison was broader than that offered by older American colleges. For several years now the pair had scoured the national book market for seed texts to fill the shelves of the university’s library. The faculty, largely imported from Great Britain, was meant to train a native corps of professors who would eventually succeed them. Among these men was a young professor of medicine, Robley Dunglison, who became Jefferson’s personal physician as he went into decline.

  In September 1825, shortly after Lafayette’s departure, Jefferson informed Madison: “The state of my health renders it perfectly certain that I shall not be able to attend the next meeting of the [Board of] Visitors at the University.” And so he called for the meeting to take place at Monticello. Madison was his designated successor as rector of the university, just as he had been preselected to succeed Jefferson in the presidency.51

  Even in the first year of the school’s operation, the students who came together in Charlottesville had more on their minds than an education. The ailing Jefferson had worries beyond those of finance and general administration. He may have delighted in having the faculty wives join their husbands for dinner at Monticello, but if he allowed himself to think his job of extending enlightened society was finished, events soon proved otherwise. Liquor, gambling, tobacco, and weapons were all prohibited on the grounds; but the students were not well behaved, and Jefferson himself reckoned that one-third could be best described as “idle ramblers.” At length it became clear that alcohol had been smuggled into students’ rooms, when someone launched a bottle through a window. Two professors were physically harassed, one of them hit by a rock. It was night when this occurred; the offenders stole away, and no student could be found to betray his classmates. A few days later the students were assembled, and with the eminent founders Madison and Jefferson both present, the culprits came clean.

  According to one who was there, Jefferson attempted to address the students, but because of his deep and wounded feelings, he said little before he felt impelled to turn over control of the meeting to another of the Visitors. In pain when he walked and taking regular doses of the opiate laudanum, he was forced to confront anarchy in his own backyard during the last autumn he was to see. It could not have been easy.

  Looking over a lifetime of his correspondence, one cannot but conclude that Jefferson’s pen was most animated when he was able to express optimism. Once faculty authority was reasserted a short time later, his mood improved. “Every thing is going smoothly at the University,” he told Madison. But then he added ominously: “My rides to the University have brought on me great sufferings, reducing my intervals of ease from 45. to 20. minutes. This is a good index of the changes occurring.”52

  On February 17, 1826, Jefferson wrote Madison a letter that began, as much of their correspondence had of late, with remarks about hiring faculty and constructing more classrooms. As the second year of instruction was to begin, the number of students continued to grow, and the dormitories would be filled. At this point, though, Jefferson broke into a long explanation of his personal finances, at the end of which he said: “But why afflict you with these details? I cannot tell, indeed, unless pains are lessened by communication with a friend.” There was a tone of anticipation, if not finality, in his words: “The friendship which has subsisted between us, now half a century, and the harmony of our political principles and pursuits, have been sources of constant happiness to me through that long period. And if I remove beyond the reach of attentions to the University, or beyond the bourne of life itself, as I soon must, it is a comfort to leave that institution under your care.”

  Jefferson did not stop there; he wanted to record some testament to their larger purposes as public men. “It has also been a great solace to me,” he said earnestly, “to believe you are engaged in vindicating to posterity the course we have pursued for preserving to them, in all their purity, the blessings of self-government.” Though, in his mind, no satisfactory history of their collective labor had yet been published, he knew he could count on Madison to interpose, should his character again come under attack. “To myself you have been a pillar of support through life,” he said as he concluded the richly appreciative letter. “Take care of me when dead, and be assured that I shall leave you with my last affections.” A short time after this, Thomas Jefferson sketched his own tombstone, a small, crudely formed obelisk.53

  Madison’s reply echoed the sentiment. Assuring Jefferson of his commitment to the university, he compared himself unfavorably to his friend—“the Tutelary Genius of the Sanctuary”—and bade Jefferson hang on until the institution was strong enough that it did not need either of them. His own health was flagging, Madison said, empathizing: “The past year has given me sufficient intimation of the infirmities in wait for me.” Turning, as Jefferson did, to their common political legacy, he added warmly: “You cannot look back to the long period of our private friendship and political harmony, with more affecting recollections than I do … And I indulge a confidence that sufficient evidence will find its way to another generation, to ensure, after we are gone, whatever justice may be withheld whilst we are here.” It is hard to imagine a better testament of mutual devotion.54

  At the end of his days Jefferson stood straight and continued to read eagerly. His mind was vigorous, his memory good, and his eyesight remarkable for a man of eighty-three. As the month of May 1826 began, he was able to report to Madison that “in comparison with my sufferings of the last year, my health, although not restored, is greatly better.” He wished he could be spending more time reading and less answering letters, as civility demanded. Madison suggested that he should deal with his “epistolary taxation” by relying on a young family member to acknowledge his correspondence and to limit each reply to an expression of thanks. This was their last exchange of letters before Jefferson took a turn for the worse.55

  The octogenarian moved slowly, while facing prostate problems and episodes of gastrointestinal distress. He was fortunate to have a physician on call. Robley Dunglison, born in Cumberland County, England, was just twenty-seven when he became the first professor of anatomy and surgery at the University of Virginia. Though they had known each other for only one year, he and the man who was both his employer and his patient built a close relationship. They talked textbooks and pharmacology.56

  If only that had been all. Before he sank into his grave, Jefferson was forced to confront the result of a lifetime of indebtedness. Since at least the early 1790s, when he argued against Hamilton’s view of the utility of a public debt as a key to long-term prosperity, he remained troubled by thoughts of the republic losing its way. He was, even then, sinking under his own interest-payment obligations. In 1809, at the end of his presidency, he was completely conscious of the distance he had to go before his debts were retired, and he vowed to his daughter that he would alter his spending habits. It was easier said than done. In 1818 he added to the nightmare by imprudently cosigning a sizable loan at the behest of his old friend Wilson Cary Nicholas, whose daughter had recently married his grandson. Nicholas defaulted and soon after died.

  Retired from public life, Jefferson had held on to his hopes as long as he could, continuing to operate the Monticello nailery and to lease out his nearby mill. Year by year he waited to see greater profitability on his farms. Gradually he disposed of thousands of acres; but even this could not rescue the future. A state-sponsored lottery was launched in the early months of 1826, aimed at saving Monticello for his surviving family. One who contributed to the rescue effort was the wealthy William Short. He and Jefferson had remained warm friends and regular correspondents over the years, but Short had soured on the slave economy and saw states’ rights thinking as stingy and backward. He was a staunch advocate of federally funded internal improvements and had made a fortune in New York land, Mississippi River steamboats, and other investments in the North. Not so Jefferson, who had first introduced Short to the e
ngineering marvel of canals in France but who, with respect to personal investments, preferred to think small.57

  The insolvent patriarch was spared the knowledge that the lottery effort had failed in its purpose. Monticello was lost, his daughter left with little. The slaves of Monticello faced the auction block, and families were split up. It was a most unbecoming conclusion to a life devoted to the promotion of fiscal discipline, modest government, and a serene vision of contentment in the bosom of a prosperous and productive nature. Jefferson’s example proved that Virginia’s economy would be in trouble for as long as slaves represented a commodity of comparable value to the planter as his actual crops.58

  In a flight of fancy back in 1771, Jefferson had recorded a romantic idea in his account book: “Chuse out for a Burying place some unfrequented vale in the park where ‘No sound to break the silence but a brook.’ ” Here among “antient and venerable oaks” and “gloomy evergreens,” he would lay his family to rest and apportion half the area to “strangers” and “servants.” The grave of his favorite slave would support a pyramid of “rough rock stone.” But as things turned out, only immediate family were interred in that cemetery, and only Jefferson’s plot featured that “rough rock stone” capped by a small pyramid. No servants were ever interred in the family plot.59

  Dr. Dunglison recorded that Jefferson “spoke freely of his approaching death” and that his mind remained clear at all times. On his last night the dying man slept fitfully, even after the doctor had administered laudanum. He imagined himself back in the Revolution and thrashed with his hand, half-consciously calling for the Committee of Safety to prepare for attack. At around four A.M. on July 4, 1826, he called to his servants “in a strong and clear voice,” though none of his words were recorded. He was conscious enough at ten A.M. to signal that he wanted his pillow adjusted. Then his breathing slowed, and he finally gave in at fifty minutes past noon. It was the day on which patriotic citizens across the country were gathering to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of American independence; and the day on which ninety-year-old John Adams died as well.60

  Madison had been prepared for Jefferson’s death by the detailed prognosis he received from Dr. Dunglison on July 2. A note from grandson-in-law Nicholas Trist confirmed that Jefferson had died on the fourth—no comment was needed as to the significance of the date. Madison was unable to attend the July 5 funeral, but he commiserated with Trist in a letter of July 6: “We are more than consoled for the loss … by the assurance that he lives & will live in the memory and gratitude of the wise & good as a luminary of Science, as a votary of liberty, as a model of patriotism, as a benefactor of human kind.”61

  In the will Jefferson had composed three months before, he left to Madison a “gold-mounted walking staff of animal horn, as a token of the cordial and affectionate friendship which for nearly now an half century, has united us in the same principles and pursuits of what we have deemed for the greatest good of our country.” It was delivered by Dr. Dunglison, on instructions from Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who requested of Madison that he continue to make Monticello his “head quarters” whenever he visited the university. “The article bequeathed to me by your grandfather,” Madison wrote in reply, “was received with all the feelings due to such a token of the place I held in the friendship of one whom I so much revered & loved when living, and whose memory can never cease to be dear to me.” Dolley Madison confirmed the sentiment in a letter to her son, then in New York: “Mr. M. feels his departure dearly.”62

  “That Peculiar Feature in Our Community”

  As he promised he would, Madison took over Jefferson’s responsibilities as rector of the University of Virginia, holding that position for eight years—until he was the age Jefferson was when he died. In an extended visit to Charlottesville at the end of 1826, he endured winter storms and presided over students’ examinations. He was constantly in communication with the other, younger members of the Board of Advisors, seeing to it that they did not convert a secular institution into one with a religious affiliation. He watched the library expand to ten thousand volumes. During difficult times Madison remained a resource for his late friend’s family; but there was only so much he could do, writing to Lafayette of the “pinching poverty” that the white family of Monticello faced, as Jefferson’s creditors descended upon them.63

  He helped to oversee the preparation and publication of Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies, from the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, which was printed and bound in Charlottesville in 1829; in Boston shortly after; and subsequently in Paris. At first Randolph planned just to publish Jefferson’s partial autobiography (the Memoir that appears in his eventual title). Asked to pen a preface to it, Madison did so punctually. But then Jeff Randolph was persuaded that the autobiography was too little for a hungry public; and for a good many months he took pains to pore over his grandfather’s lifetime of stored correspondence, selecting the letters and official addresses that ultimately came to comprise four volumes. He chose to include the lengthy dialogue between “My Head and My Heart,” a letter of longing that Jefferson wrote to Maria Cosway in 1786, because it would be read as a proper treatise on friendship; but he appended none of the widower’s more suggestive notes to the unhappily married Anglo-Italian artist. Also, Randolph failed to include the long, accusatory letter of September 1792 to George Washington, in which Jefferson referred to the foreign-born Hamilton as “a tissue of machinations” against the country that had “heaped” honors on his head. In an effort to avoid controversy, Randolph also removed any evidence of Jefferson’s support for James T. Callender, the stubborn journalist who had first exposed Hamilton’s extramarital affair, then called John Adams, when he was president, a “hoary-headed incendiary,” and went on to publicize President Jefferson’s long-standing relationship with Sally Hemings. Any criticism of the still-living Chief Justice John Marshall, whom Jefferson had regularly and roundly criticized in highly partisan literary rants, was excluded too.

  Despite these editorial decisions, Randolph was less careful in his selections than Madison would have preferred. Prompted by Nicholas Trist to examine some passages, the former president called Randolph’s attention to questionable remarks about John Adams that reflected poorly on both Jefferson and himself. Madison also worried about reaction from Hamilton’s defenders, of whom there were yet many. In Hamilton’s handling of the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion and his “dishonorable agency” in the election of 1800, Madison felt that “the implied charge of corruption” could “hardly fail to produce calls for proofs by those sympathizing most with the fame of the accused.” He did not wish to open up his own cache of letters to refight old battles.

  Although the Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies brought remuneration to the Randolphs, the four volumes breathed new life into old debates over Jefferson’s politics and personality. The collection contained the highly politicized Anas, “scraps” of unedited notes in “three volumes bound in marbled paper,” detailing Jefferson’s early suspicions about Hamilton’s policies. As an editor, Randolph dropped sentences in the middle where they alluded to nasty business. And it was impossible not to notice that despite the insertion of sixty-nine letters from Jefferson to Madison, years go by in the chronology without the inclusion of any letters crucial to an understanding of the development of the Democratic-Republican Party or intra-party politics. There are none from September 1789 to April 1794, or from August 1804 to March 1809.64

  In retirement, Jefferson had articulated his concerns rather differently from Madison. Most notable was his extraordinary fear of consolidated government. One of the last letters in Jefferson Randolph’s collection, dated December 26, 1825, is addressed to William Branch Giles. Here, Jefferson expresses his fear for the “plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry” subject to the rule of a monied aristocracy; he wants the federal “usurpation” of states’ rights to be denounced “in the most peremptory terms.”

  Madison, of
course, refrained from such language. He clarified the difference in their styles most instructively in a letter of 1832 to Nicholas Trist. One had to be careful, he said, not to read too much into Jeffersonian hyperbole, especially when it came to his fearful prognoses of sectional discord. “As in others of great genius,” he explained, Jefferson had the habit “of expressing in strong and round terms, impressions of the moment.”65

  Probably the most crucial rescuing of Jefferson’s reputation that Madison undertook during Andrew Jackson’s two terms as president was his insistence in 1831 that Jefferson would have had nothing to do with South Carolina’s nullifiers. The issue that grew into the nullification crisis had materialized three years before, when William Branch Giles and Thomas Ritchie combined in an effort to divide the third and fourth presidents. These staunch defenders of what Madison not too many years before had praised as the “Virginia Creed” now claimed Jefferson for themselves and hoped to wrest his legacy from Madison, if Madison should refuse to side with them in a highly explosive debate on tariffs.

  Giles was Virginia’s governor from 1827 to 1830, while Ritchie remained at the helm of the Richmond Enquirer. Congress had passed a protective tariff, a patchwork of high and low duties on a range of goods and manufactures—wool, woolens, iron, hemp, and molasses—which no one entirely understood and many in the South feared would impoverish their section and enrich New England, the Middle States, and the West. Earlier in the decade Madison had politely but firmly disagreed with Henry Clay’s aggressive approach to tariff policy, but Clay was not involved in the present mess. Weighing in on the constitutional principle, Madison felt strongly that there was already ample precedent in favor of congressional justification in using tariffs to regulate commerce when these were shown to be in the national interest.