Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  Later, in the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, Hamilton once again roped Washington into confronting a minor protest that was built up to appear a major threat to civil order. Hamilton’s magic, for as long as it lasted, was the ability to make himself appear essential to the Federalist cause, or to a forceful government run by the “right” men. He exploited the Washington image as no one else could. By the mid-1790s neither Madison nor Jefferson, old and trusted associates of Washington’s, could reverse what was happening; but they clung to their former view that Washington, deep down, was still one of them, still a Virginia republican.

  Had Madison been in Jefferson’s place in the cabinet, perhaps the dynamic would have been slightly altered. Madison maintained what Jefferson described in his autobiography as “a habit of self-possession”; and so while he would have argued at least as forcefully against Hamilton’s ideas, he might not have reacted with the level of outrage Jefferson exuded. But as public outcry over the Jay Treaty reached its zenith in 1796, Hamilton had Madison in mind no less than Jefferson when he laid down the gauntlet in a major broadside: “The CONSTITUTION and PEACE are in one scale,” he charged, “the overthrow of the CONSTITUTION and WAR in the other. Which do you prefer?” It was, he insisted, “the ambition of a VIRGINIAN FACTION” that threatened the Constitution.15

  For a time, Hamilton maintained the erroneous belief that Madison concurred in his desire for “energetic” government. In fact, though, Hamilton looked to the creative possibilities in constructing a powerful machine, whereas Madison saw government’s role as that of moral disciplinarian, acting to trim excesses and check the impulse to magnify power. For Hamilton, when government ran into a problem the answer was always to enhance its authority; for Madison, the threats to government came from different places, which made government most effective when it mediated, when it adapted. In that Madison allowed for fluidity, he was able to come to terms with Jefferson’s instinctive fear of monocrats and embrace of an educable citizenry.

  History has imagined that Madison looked up to Jefferson, read his mind, and found ways to pursue policies in partnership without any concern that he was subordinating himself. Reading backward, students of history want to see Jefferson as the executive, the primary instigator, because he was in Washington’s cabinet and he was president for eight years before it was Madison’s turn. Madison, with the less pronounced ego, did not serve as an executive until a decade after Jefferson, when Jefferson appointed him secretary of state, a position Jefferson had occupied and therefore knew how to instruct his friend in.

  As the reader now knows, nothing in the historical record supports the convenient narrative in which Madison yields to Jefferson’s stronger position or stronger views. Indeed, from 1793, when Jefferson lost his influence with Washington and the executive branch lost Jefferson as a counterweight to Hamilton’s aggrandizing interpretation of governmental authority, Madison became the clearest voice of a spirited resistance. Unquestionably, Jefferson remained instrumental behind the scenes, but Madison led.

  There were qualitative differences—meaningful differences—in these two friends’ approaches to friendship. Jefferson was drawn to men whose intellectual curiosity matched his, but also to those whom he could mentor or make into useful political allies. The special friendship he developed with Madison was probably more important to him than it was to Madison, if only because Madison more typically centered his friendships upon commitment to an agenda: he liked people because they could get things done.

  In such matters, the record is always incomplete, but as it stands, Madison exhibited less of a need for emotional reinforcement than Jefferson (again, his “habit of self-possession” that Jefferson remarked upon). In advance of the Constitutional Convention, Madison was close to elder statesman George Mason, knowing Mason’s unpredictability but still expecting that they would be able to collaborate. He was closest to George Washington in the period 1787–90, when they saw eye to eye on the need for a take-charge government. No doubt Madison could express personal warmth—that is not at issue. But he seems to have preferred a business model to other approaches. That is, personal warmth grew over the course of business. And when business was finished, as in the case of Washington’s complete surrender to the Hamiltonian system, the warmth receded. Yet Madisonian relationships did not turn acrimonious. Here is another instructive example: When Jefferson blamed Edmund Randolph for failing to uniformly echo his vote in cabinet meetings, he abandoned Randolph completely; it was highly personal. Madison did not turn against Randolph. He did not feel the same degree of animus, not nearly.

  As an adviser to Jefferson during wartime, Madison initially looked for common ground so that they could coordinate policy together. There does not appear to have been an emotional connection until sometime later, and it no doubt arose at Jefferson’s bidding. It was Jefferson who repeatedly advanced the idea of a “partie quarree,” permanently bringing Madison, Monroe, and Short to Albemarle to form his ideal neighborhood. Madison resisted, or at least was not inspired to change his circumstances in order to fulfill Jefferson’s dream.

  The story of the long friendship of Madison and Jefferson was embellished as the years went by in order to suit the Republican narrative—and, eventually, to give historians what they craved. As we have shown, however, the relationship, as close as it was, was not the symbiosis imagined. Jefferson was more dependent on Madison than Madison was on Jefferson. In a sense, Madison was Jefferson’s political crutch. He would put himself in Madison’s hands, let Madison decide the tenor of debate. A prime example is Jefferson’s willingness to give Madison the last word when it came to the conciliatory letter Jefferson wanted to present to John Adams just after the election of 1796. Jefferson wrote with emotion; Madison censored Jefferson’s emotion. This was how they worked best, and it was what Jefferson agreed to. To the extent that Jefferson found he was unable to contain himself when he took pen in hand, Madison stopped him before he made his next mistake. Jefferson miscalculated, or fell into error, because he wished to trust others. Madison had fewer illusions. For this reason, he did not need Jefferson in the same way—as insurance against overcommitment and disappointment.

  “Different,—Yet Equal”

  Beyond the famous twosome were many others, more than minor characters in our narrative of the “Age of Madison and Jefferson.” After the Virginians and their presidential dynasty, the most critically important of the politicos was the Swiss-born Pennsylvanian Albert Gallatin, who had a lasting influence on Madison and Jefferson and on the politics and economy of the early republic. His voice was routinely heard, his ideas seriously weighed; he cannot be called an adjunct or mere subordinate any more than Madison deserves to be reduced in stature by being called Jefferson’s lieutenant. The Lee dynasty of Virginia and the Livingston dynasty of New York were dynasties of a different sort, but they and others like them mattered on both the state and national scene. As Clintonians and Burrites crossed swords with the Livingstons, they fell in and out of line with the Virginia Republicans.

  Madison and Jefferson did not exist in a bubble. They might have expected that anything they did would be opposed by a Patrick Henry or mocked by a Timothy Pickering, but they could never afford to operate as though larger family- or issue-based groups—entities that cannot be strictly defined as political parties—did not exist. Add to these elite groupings the Shaysites and Whiskey rebels and others like them, and the picture only sharpens. An unvarnished portrait of politics shows us how incomplete the singular political biography can be.

  Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Bache, traded on his family name, as did the Lees and Livingstons, and established the fact that historic “great men” did not act alone. Newspaper editors and pamphleteers, though attached to parties, were far from pawns. Some were ambassadors to the expanding electorate, others independent critics, still others irrepressible troublemakers who took American politics to new levels of partisanship from the 1790s on. The nation would have
been a much different place without the less-than-deferential Bache or the Jefferson-baiters William Cobbett, Joseph Dennie, and James T. Callender.

  What do we mean? Simply that Madison, Jefferson, and the founding generation represented not a school of philosophy, as The Federalist Papers would have us believe, but a school for politics. Though the third and fourth presidents did not always agree, they developed a unique and powerful trust. They took up their pens or came together to confer every time an issue arose or one or the other saw a trend that he disliked. They shared observations. They tested theories. They reinforced each other.

  Henry Clay of Kentucky was as well known for his personal warmth and sociability as he was for his deeply affecting oratory and political acumen. In 1829, at an informal gathering in Washington just days after his nemesis Andrew Jackson was inaugurated as president, he entertained company with his personal reflections, repeating the almost clichéd distinction we have heard others relate: that Jefferson possessed “genius” and Madison “judgment and common sense.” When Clay elaborated, saying that Jefferson was “a visionary and theorist, often betrayed by his enthusiasm into rash and imprudent and impractical measures,” the man sitting beside him, Samuel Harrison Smith, founding editor of the National Intelligencer, vigorously defended Jefferson. According to Smith, Jefferson’s remarkable “power and energy” enabled him to steer his country through crises that Madison was less well equipped to handle. Clay disputed him, saying: “Prudence and caution would have produced the same results.” At the end of their protracted dinner debate, Clay and Smith agreed on the essentials: Madison and Jefferson were “different,—yet equal.”16

  How much do we actually learn from this argument? In terms of detail, quite little. As meaningful as the access to Madison and Jefferson was that each enjoyed, Clay and Smith appear not to acknowledge that the “power and energy” of Jefferson’s presidency was no less Madison’s than Jefferson’s. Jefferson would not have undertaken any of the measures he did if Madison had strongly opposed him.

  What Jeffersonian act could be considered “rash” that Madison did not have a hand in? There are perhaps two, and two only, of enduring significance: the prosecution of Justice Samuel Chase in 1805 and the prosecution of Aaron Burr in 1807, which Madison would not have embarked on but evidently did not contest. During Jefferson’s two terms as president, the historic record shows no “daylight” between their perspectives. The differences to which Clay and Smith were alluding appear to be matters of style more than substance.

  “The Negro Is an Accident”

  Thirty-five years ago the historian David Brion Davis noted that in the Age of Revolution, antislavery was merely “one of the many harmless philanthropic fashions of the late Enlightenment,” until the issue was addressed head on at the Constitutional Convention and in deliberative bodies in France and England. We would shift the date from 1787 to the start of the Revolution, when slavery became politicized in the patriots’ rhetoric; but it is true that humanitarian concern stood little chance of being translated into concerted action in Congress at any time prior. A poignantly worded 1786 petition to the Virginia Assembly cast the matter in terms of the political values of the Revolution: “What doth plead with greater Force for the emancipation of our Slaves in proportion as the oppression exercised over them exceeds the oppression formerly exercised by Great Britain over these States.” Davis spoke to the “perishability of Revolutionary time,” in identifying a disturbing phenomenon: as memory of the Revolution receded, a creed extolling liberty and an economy based on slavery coexisted without embarrassing its practitioners.17

  Virginians were not blind to the problem. Half of America’s blacks lived in the Chesapeake in 1776, and the free black population of Virginia grew nearly tenfold from the end of the Revolution to the end of Jefferson’s presidency. This was in large measure due to individual manumissions and the commitment of slaves, once freed, to work and save in order to free their loved ones. But the issue of race and citizenship was never taken up. Free blacks and biracial Americans were understood, in civic terms, to be of a “degraded” character—mere “denizens” of America, unequal before the law and perennially lacking the rights of citizens. And it was never suggested in Congress that the federal government could interfere with any slave owner’s personal property.18

  Madison and Jefferson were party to a general failure to combat slavery. If we remove moral considerations from the calculus, their participation can be boiled down to a problem of logic. They believed the southern agrarian economy, with its dependence on slave labor, was viable; if so, why were they not troubled enough by their own unmet financial obligations and the debts accrued by their fellow planters to question the system on grounds of its practicality? There had always been fluctuations in market prices, so principles of credit and borrowing alone could hardly explain Virginia’s economic decline as the North prospered.

  In 1808 slave imports from abroad ended because of a provision in the federal Constitution. Afterward, as a matter of planters’ short-term economic self-interest, Virginia became a site for slave breeding and increased sales to other, newer states. In conjunction, whites’ rhetorical abhorrence for race mixing intensified. Expulsion (colonization abroad) became a fantasy solution, because all southerners understood that white-black unions—sex across the color line—was otherwise unstoppable.

  The end of 1791 was the last time either Madison or Jefferson thought of criticizing slavery publicly. That was when Madison prepared notes for a National Gazette essay, never published, in which he asserted that slavery and republicanism were incompatible. It was not until after 1820 that Lafayette, an advocate of emancipation since at least the 1788 founding of the group Amis des noirs, demanded of the pair some justification for their inaction. As post-Napoleonic France enjoyed a new dawn, and the Virginia Dynasty of presidents neared its end, he pressed Jefferson to become again the activist he had been when they first met. Recalling conversations they had had in Richmond in 1781 and outside Paris in 1789, Lafayette gloried that their world was a safer place now, and in his opinion “The Great Work of General Enfranchisement” could start over.

  The French patriot said he was uncharacteristically tongue-tied on the subject of American slavery. “While I feel an inexpressible delight in the progress of every thing that is Noble minded, Honourable, and Useful throughout the United States,” he wrote, “I find, in the Negro Slavery, a Great draw Back Upon My Enjoyments.” Friends who knew of his affection for the United States frequently asked him to account for the persistence of slavery, and he had to admit that he had no defense. “Let me Confess, My dear friend,” he addressed Jefferson, “I Have Not Been Convinced, and the less as I think More of it, By Your Argument in favor of dissemination.” Understanding that it was easier to criticize from abroad, he gently but firmly protested that “this wide Blot of American Philanthropy is ever thrown in My face.”19

  Today the problematic character of “American philanthropy” is often thrown in Jefferson’s face. He has been the target of intense criticism because of both his candor and his confusion. He never reconsidered the repugnant view he espoused regarding the presumed intellectual inferiority of Africa-descended Americans. He was not above suggesting that the free black mathematician Benjamin Banneker was an anomaly, or even a fraud. When his mentor George Wythe was murdered in 1806, a new Wythe protégé, the biracial Michael Brown, was killed along with him. Wythe’s will provided for Jefferson to oversee Brown’s further education, and Jefferson wrote that he would gladly have taken on the responsibility. The irony, of course, is that Wythe undertook Brown’s education to disprove the general assumption of black intellectual inferiority endorsed by Jefferson. Jefferson’s motivation in stating that he would have honored Wythe’s will speaks not to his concurrence with Wythe’s hypothesis about racial equality but only to his sympathy and devotion to Wythe himself.20

  On the solution Jefferson promoted from the 1780s until his retirement years, the g
radual but certain expulsion of blacks through colonization abroad, he did not stop to consider the needs and wants of free Negroes. Too few white Americans did. Jokes based on stereotypes mocking black pretensions to gentility were common across the North—not just the South—from the Revolution to the Civil War. Not even the European critics who left Lafayette speechless exhibited the nuanced perspective of the modern scholar who, in tracing the rise of abolitionist sentiment, is able to show that in New England the end of slavery was not simply a function of popular belief in the natural rights of all people. Historian John Wood Sweet describes the reality of it: “As the value of slaves in the northern states fell, incentives for selling them southward rose.”

  North of the Mason-Dixon Line, it is not clear that a majority reflected the culture of sensibility (cultivated sympathy) or even the slightly less noble emotion of pity. Nor was it just men of business who refused to feel for African Americans. In 1795 John Adams wrote of the situation in Massachusetts, where he adjudged slaves to have grown “lazy, idle, proud, vicious, and at length wholly useless to their masters, to such a degree that the abolition of slavery became a measure of œconony.” So much for pure motives, at least in the first half-century of Madison’s and Jefferson’s lives.21

  Pennsylvania was the first state to rule in its courts that free blacks were not citizens and were ineligible to vote. Massachusetts, in 1786, passed the Solemnization of Marriage Act, forbidding interracial unions. Rhode Island’s state assembly, in 1800, constrained black women from suing white men for child support. In 1821, just after the Missouri Compromise was hammered out, a good many delegates to New York’s constitutional convention agitated for the disenfranchisement of free blacks—one contended that they were “a peculiar people” lacking “discretion, prudence, or independence” of thought. In sum, the legal degradation of African Americans was not simply a function of the institution of slavery.22