Madison and Jefferson
Page 87
Jefferson never doubted that the descendants of those who had been kidnapped from West Africa deserved better. On his own lands, he mixed patience and a system of rewards with expectations of industry and devotion. He regarded himself as a kind patriarch and his biracial slaves as subordinate family members. He, and Madison too, reckoned there were many in Virginia who acted in this way. But when thinking generically of the dark skinned in their midst, they were unsentimental and legalistic.
Jefferson saw nationhood in racially untainted hues. He feebly addressed outsiders’ concerns, offering bland wishes. Madison did not do much better. Returning blacks to West Africa was costly and unrealistic, even as the American Colonization Society was thriving during Monroe’s two terms as president. That society, founded in 1816 and heavily invested with Virginia slave owners, proposed to organize regular, voluntary removals of African Americans to Liberia. Madison lent his name to the organization and never abandoned it, while Jefferson steered clear of commitment. To offer the reader a longer view, it bears saying that for most of his career in politics, the “Great Emancipator,” Abraham Lincoln, saw the merits of a voluntary removal plan.
Colonization as envisioned by white reformers encroached on free blacks more than it consulted their interest. Between 1782 and 1802 private manumissions occurred with regularity, but after 1802 state law required that emancipated slaves leave Virginia within one year. From this moment on, it became increasingly difficult for Virginians to conceive of a way to phase out slavery. Their uncertainty as to a proper course of action made room for a new southern literature. That literature described an illusion: contented slaves and a sinless, or at least humane, white planter class.
The slow pace of sailings under the auspices of the American Colonization Society, relative to the growth of the African-American population, made it perfectly plain that the society had limited hopes of succeeding. Like most of their cohort, Madison and Jefferson were ready to put off doing anything of substance. The covertly hostile program of colonization relied on the regular publication of poems and essays glorifying the prospective return of a long-lost people to their roots: “Oh, unhappy Africa,” one representative writer lamented in 1825. “How long must thy soil be washed with the tears of those who weep for their nearest and dearest relatives, who have been torn away from them, and dragged into bondage.”23
In 1829, three years after Jefferson’s death, Virginian John Hartwell Cocke sat on the Board of Visitors of Jefferson’s university. A devout Presbyterian, he wished to couple emancipation with colonization and in later years was to bemoan the example set by Jefferson in having had a slave concubine. William Short, seventy years old in 1829 and living in Philadelphia, wrote to Cocke and expressed puzzlement over Jefferson’s original formulation in Notes on Virginia. As Jefferson’s personal secretary when Notes was first printed, he revealed his dismay in unambiguous language. “Sending vessels charged with a number of one color & bringing back the same number of another [i.e., European peasants] always appeared to me to be among the wildest & most impracticable that could be imagined,” he wrote, with respect to Jefferson’s scheme. Short believed that “the best remedy” for the evil of slavery was for Virginia’s state legislature to convert slaves into “serfs” in the manner that they existed in northern Europe. This, he said, would constitute “the gentlest alleviation” of slaves’ current status as property, while saving their masters from having to acknowledge moral accountability in being born to slave ownership. He doubted that the Virginia Assembly would countenance even this small alteration in the status of Virginia’s enslaved population. Nor would a redefinition of this sort whiten Virginia, which the planter elite wished to accomplish. So if his notion was no more practical than Jefferson’s was in the 1780s, William Short’s thinking does serve as a guide to the limits of imagination prior to the explosion of abolitionist sentiment in the North.24
Shortly after the Missouri crisis, Jefferson’s favorite granddaughter, the most intellectually resilient of the family, married and became a Bostonian. Seeing a society without slaves, she expressed disgust with the perpetuation of slavery in the South. The females in her family at Monticello felt similarly. The patriarch of that family, who had found a way to validate the violence that attended the French Revolution, and who believed that rebellion against tyranny was justified, did nothing to address how future catastrophe might be averted or how Virginians could avoid being classed with the world’s tyrants. The “mildness” of the slavery that Virginia planters practiced was one of several convenient rationales for continued delay.
Madison appears not to have internalized Jefferson’s assumptions about black inferiority. He did not fixate on racial “amalgamation” or “blood admixture” as his friend did. Madison’s personal behavior is demonstrably less troublesome than Jefferson’s: he behaved more than courteously to freed Virginia slave Christopher McPherson, who became a clerk in the Virginia High Court of the Chancery in 1800. When McPherson delivered a packet of books and a letter sent by Jefferson, the Madisons invited him to stay for dinner, and they treated him as an equal at their table. The ex-slave described the encounter: “I sat at Table Even[in]g & morn[in]g with Mr. M and his Lady & Company & enjoyed a full share of the Convers[ation].” Jefferson apparently felt less comfortable with McPherson as a free man. Writing Madison that same year, he used McPherson’s slave name, identifying him as “Mr Ross’s man Kitt,” thus reaffirming his status as an inferior.25
Madison looked past color and saw intelligence and ability, but he did not think that the vast majority of white Americans ever could. Like Jefferson, he was quick to defend his fellow Virginia slaveholders for consistently acting to improve the lives of those they owned. Since the Revolution, he wrote in 1819, slaves were “better fed, better clad, better lodged, and better treated in every respect.” Gradual improvement was good enough for him. His compromise solution to slavery was similar to that of slave-owning Colonization Society supporters Henry Clay and John Randolph: colonization would improve the ratio of whites to blacks. These national politicians had convinced themselves that some blacks would be grateful after receiving a new lease on life on the coast of West Africa.26
Madison and Jefferson attended to the needs of those of their color and class. They could not betray their own kind, those agreeable white landowners with whom they had interacted closely since youth, who wanted the good life to continue. Nor could they ignore the aspirations of their neighbors’ land-hungry offspring who would be taking their slaves west. This dual biography, after all, is as much a collective biography of the Virginians whose weight and whose prejudices were brought to bear on their state and nation: Edmund Pendleton and Edmund Randolph, John Randolph of Roanoke and John Taylor of Caroline, Patrick Henry and his son-in-law Judge Spencer Roane, George Mason and George Washington. Friendly congressmen and loyal state legislators who regularly corresponded with Madison and Jefferson influenced their thoughts and conditioned their actions. Add to the list John Page and Wilson Cary Nicholas, John Wayles Eppes and William Branch Giles, and append to them the unnamed subscribers to Thomas Ritchie’s Richmond newspaper.
These men’s common conviction was that every free American’s birthright was an opportunity for advancement and renewal through land ownership. Property conferred honor. If they had a choice between freeing their slaves and sustaining their fathers’ vision of the good life, they, like Madison and Jefferson, chose the latter. It was a rare individual, such as Edward Coles, who made common cause with the men and women he had inherited as property.
Looking back to the first chapter of this book, we can ask: Would the common desire to uphold white power in Virginia have been so entrenched if the British had not fomented slave defections in 1775–76; and if, as General Washington reluctantly acknowledged, southerners had grown comfortable with blacks fighting for their freedom as patriot soldiers? It is impossible to answer with certainty, though at the time of the Revolution, Jefferson was more open to exte
nding legal protections to African Americans than he subsequently became. After America’s independence was recognized, southern discomfort grew by the decade. In 1792, at a time when Madison was in Congress and Jefferson in the executive, the state assembly in Virginia defined, for legal purposes, what “white” meant. In 1805 the same assembly updated a colonial injunction against teaching slaves to read by extending the ban to free black children. This was the spirit of the times.27
Does the evasiveness, the ambivalence, of a Jefferson or a Madison make them loathsome? Or simply weak? Their political generation, like every generation, worked around ethical issues when clarity was not immediately forthcoming. Slavery may be the most striking example, but it is only one of many examples of Madison’s and Jefferson’s indecision—because theirs, as ours, was a wait-and-see, reactive political world. Public men did not necessarily take collective public action at the first sign of trouble or the first recognition that a moral dilemma existed. That is not an explanation for the persistence of slavery, but it is the way of American politics. Our expectations from past historical actors are ultimately irrelevant, and our final judgment on them brings us satisfaction only insofar as it reflects on how we wish to change the world we inhabit for the better.
No one denies that white Americans have been responsible for the telling of U.S. history for most of the past 250 years, and they have shaped the story of national origins in ways that protected (when they did not justify outright) white jurisdiction over that past. In a recent investigation of what he refers to as “the absence of black people in the master narrative,” the historian Clarence Walker neatly synthesizes the problem of ownership when he cites the words of a white southern editor in 1902, in disavowing African Americans: “The Negro is an accident—an unwilling, a blameless, but an unwholesome, unwelcome, helpless, unassimilable element in our civilization.” These words are emblematic of an anxious, needy strain prevalent among racists and nativists of the twentieth century, and one that echoes as well the attitude Jefferson came to symbolize. When his former presidential secretary freed his slaves and moved with them from Virginia to Illinois in 1819, Madison was up front about the long-term implications of white prejudice. “I wish your philanthropy could compleat its object,” he told Edward Coles, “by changing their colour as well as their legal condition.”28
Despite their common inability to address issues of race in a truly enlightened way, Madison and Jefferson subscribed to the Enlightenment in ethereal form: its adoration of science and philosophy and its treatment of religious dogma as hopeless fallacy; its focus on grand nature and human nature; its teaching that we should privilege rational understanding over passionate conviction.
The Paris Jefferson inhabited in the 1780s was a congenial city, the modern Athens, a place of soaring aesthetics and cultivation of the broadest kind. He brought it home to Madison through the books he sent, which Madison hungrily consumed. Belles lettres and scholarly treatises were equally the ornaments of their private libraries. Books inspired the two Virginians to do practical things as well as to philosophize: aside from constitutional considerations, for instance, making scientific farming an essential course of study helped them draw up economic plans and regard the prospects of rural America. As collectors of the latest research, they maintained a constant correspondence with other readers and thinkers, bringing the wider republic of letters closer while saving them from boredom.
At its root the Enlightenment ideal was just that: an intellectual’s ideal, a visionary program combining individual awareness with the impulse to engineer social improvement. Politics, on the other hand, was a cumbersome process involving methods of organization that philosophy did not easily address. As they sought to implement a better system of governance than what they had inherited, Madison and Jefferson understood that man’s failings lay in his ignorance—and ignorance, they knew, was no less a function of democracy than it was of monarchy. That is why their cause began with an appeal to those whose educational opportunities resembled their own, whose experience within book culture made them receptive to new ways of thinking.
Their affinity for books also fed a strong sense of justice and injustice. Madison and Jefferson adopted an enlightened approach to freedom of conscience, as they spoke out against religious bigotry. This was how their relationship began. They rejected the notion that anyone knew the right way to be a Christian. As an ex-president, Madison was prouder of his forward role in support of freedom of religion, which ended the colonial-era persecution of religious dissenters, than he was of any other accomplishment. Jefferson’s self-composed epitaph pronounced him “Author of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom.” His words of 1800 to Benjamin Rush wrap around the interior of his domed monument in Washington, D.C.: “I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”29
What held true for clerical imitators and imposters held true for kingly inheritance too. No English monarch or aristocratic body had ever welcomed progress. On the strength of this simple formulation, Madison and Jefferson advocated a republican government that kept power out of the hands of the undeserving and transferred it to new guardians of the public trust. Republican government extended happiness by minimizing taxes and maximizing individual freedom. This is their legacy. But in doing almost nothing to advance the cause of liberty for those enslaved, Madison and Jefferson also knowingly acquiesced to an American tyranny.
It is hard for most to think of Madison and Jefferson and admit that they were Virginians first, Americans second. But this fact seems beyond dispute. Virginians felt they had to act to protect the interests of the Old Dominion, or else, before long, they would become marginalized by a northern-dominated economy. Virginians who thought in terms of the profit to be reaped in land were often reluctant to invest in manufacturing enterprises. The real tragedy is that they chose to speculate in slaves rather than in textile factories and iron works. They convinced themselves (with help from some sympathetic northerners) that the moral foundation of their economy lay in the fact that their slaves were well provided for in youth and old age. The white laboring poor in the North had no such provision. And so as Virginians tied their fortunes to the land, they failed to extricate themselves from a way of life that was limited in outlook and produced only resistance to economic development. Even Madison condoned this activity. Even Madison evidenced no entrepreneurship.30
Madison lodged trust in the political vision of many northerners; Jefferson never really trusted the northern states. When he spoke abstractly of the “people,” Jefferson thought of Virginians first, though he was always prepared to include those northerners who agreed with him in the means of constructing his imagined community that left the southern states to their own devices. For Jefferson, right thinking on the part of the people could be lost and then regained; the election of 1800 marked the people’s conscious desire to return to an earlier republican vision after letting their guard down and letting the monocrats hoodwink them.
Jefferson thought of politics as an ongoing cyclical process of revolutions and resistance to encroachments. As organic creatures, bodies politic were capable of self-destruction if destabilized by unnatural mixtures and nervous imbalance. In contrast, Madison talked about the “mixed character” of the federal government as “co-equal bodies politic,” a stabilizing element representative of a healthy interaction of forces. Madison emphasized good chemistry, and Jefferson emphasized the need to patrol social boundaries, keeping alien and combustible elements apart.
“A Coup de Grace”
In history there is enough dark emotion to cause us to question the moral makeup of our species. While the founders are still a pantheon of heroes for many Americans, today’s scholars increasingly disparage them for a lack of foresight and humanity. This degradation in the historical imagination is largely a result of their compromise position on slavery, a subject to which we have given a good many pages, with the idea that our treatme
nt of slavery should be thorough and systematic, but not exceed the amount of attention Madison and Jefferson gave to it relative to their other priorities as public men.
While they sought to remake their world, and make it freer, Madison and Jefferson grew up believing that authentic Americans were white men, most of them thrifty farmers. Even the white yeoman’s wife was reduced to a breeder, which reflected Madison’s and Jefferson’s common obsession with demography—they believed that the strength of the nation was tied to its ability to reproduce and expand westward.
Madison and Jefferson had a constituency that is not ours. They do not know us, and we know them only slightly. It goes without saying that they remained oblivious to the shape of the world to come. We admire them for focusing attention on the rights of conscience; but we would be wrong to associate them with today’s progressive agenda, just as Hamilton is wrongly credited for pointing the United States in the direction of the modern economy. Their psychic distance from us cannot be ignored.
The whole concept of original intent, therefore, makes no sense. It is a legal fiction that grossly oversimplifies Madison’s thinking. The truth is, his interpretation of the Constitution changed over the course of his lifetime, and original intent assumes that Madison’s views were permanently fixed in time. His earliest sense of what the Constitution should mean was expressed in his support for the Virginia Plan and the absolute negative, both of which were rejected. So which Madison do we claim was right? Madison at the beginning of the convention? Or Madison at the end? Or when he was writing his Federalist essays? In 1793, when Hamilton and he were engaged in combat in the newspapers as “Pacificus” and “Helvidius,” Madison deployed one of Hamilton’s Federalist essays against him. In the last stages of the Jay Treaty debate, Madison tried to say that original intent began with the ratifying conventions, and that meaning was not inherent in the Constitution itself but came instead through the exegesis of the states, beyond Philadelphia. Madison resorted to this tactic only because the so-called original meaning contained in the Constitution that he had signed did not support his position on the Jay Treaty eight years later. Thus, the only way to appreciate Madison’s constitutional thinking is to measure comprehensible changes in his views in response to specific political problems.