Madison and Jefferson
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72. Madison made this point clear in remarks in Congress on August 15 in defense of the Bill of Rights: “It was wished that some security should be given for those great and essential rights which they had been taught to believe were in danger. I concurred, in the convention of Virginia, with those gentlemen, so far as to agree to a declaration of rights which corresponded with my own judgment, and of the other alterations which I had the honor to bring forward before the present congress.” Madison also noted to Richard Peters, Speaker of the Pennsylvania House: “In many States Constn. was adopted under a tacit compact in favr … In Virga. It would have been certainly rejected, had no assurances been given by its advocates that such provisions would be pursued.” See “Amendments to the Constitution,” August 15, 1789; JM to Peters, August 19, 1789, PJM, 12:341–42, 347.
73. “Address of the President to Congress,” June 8, 1789, PJM, 12:59, 123; Stuart Leibiger, “James Madison and the Amendments to the Constitution, 1787–1789: ‘Parchment Barriers,’ ” Journal of Southern History 59 (August 1993): 460.
74. “Amendments to Constitution,” June 8, 1789, PJM, 12:58, 200–203; Kenneth R. Bowling, “ ‘A Tub to the Whale’: The Founding Fathers and the Adoption of the Federal Bill of Rights,” Journal of the Early Republic 8 (Fall 1988): 235–36; Leibiger, “Parchment Barriers,” 460–61.
75. “Amendments to the Constitution,” August 17, 1789, PJM, 12:58–59, 344.
76. Bowling, “ ‘Tub to the Whale,’ ” 223, 233, 236–37.
77. Ibid., 236, 239, 241–42, 244–45, 247; also see Scott D. Gerber, “Roger Sherman and the Bill of Rights,” Polity 28 (Summer 1996): 526.
78. JM to Pendleton, August 21 and September 14, 1789; to Randolph, August 21, 1789, PJM, 12:348, 402.
79. TJ to JM, August 28, 1789, RL, 1:630–31; Mason to TJ, January 10, 1791, PTJ, 18:484–85; Mason to Samuel Griffin, September 8, 1789, The Papers of George Mason, ed. Robert Allen Rutland (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1970), 3:1172. Edmund Randolph encouraged Madison to propose amendments, drawing a distinction between those “opposed on principle” and those driven by “virulence.” See Randolph to JM, March 27, 1789, PJM, 12:31. Pendleton, too, supported amendments at the ratifying convention, writing Madison that they would have “a good effect in quieting the minds of many well meaning Citizens.” As Madison explained to Richard Peters, he felt vindicated “as an honest man,” having lived up to “assurances” given to delegates at the ratifying convention—not any pledge to his constituents. See George Nicholas to JM, April 5, 1788; JM to Nicholas, April 8, 1788; JM to Edmund Randolph, April 10, 1788; JM to Peters, August 19, 1789; Pendleton to JM, September 2, 1789, PJM, 11:9, 12, 19, 347, 368; also see Leibiger, “Parchment Barriers,” 451, 467; Labunski, James Madison and Struggle for Bill of Rights, 114–15.
80. JMB, 1:732–43. Annette Gordon-Reed develops the argument for how Jefferson might have become intimate with a teenaged Sally Hemings in Paris. See Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello (New York, 2008), 264–89.
81. For Madison’s memorandum, see “Memorandum on an African Colony for Freed Slaves,” ca. October 20, 1789, in PJM, 12:437–38; William Thornton to Etienne Clavière, November 7, 1789, in C. M. Harris, ed., Papers of William Thornton (Charlottesville, Va., 1995), 1:xxxi–liii, 105–6; H. N. Sherwood, “Early Negro Deportation Projects,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 2 (March 1916): 502–3. Thornton’s proposal was more progressive than Jefferson’s resettlement plan. He imagined a thriving free black republic—he would not call it a colony—that boasted an advanced system of education and a sound commercial economy. He predicted that Americans, “who had so strenuously contended for LIBERTY, and who have declared it to be the natural right of MAN,” would be receptive to his ideals. See “Address to the Heart, on the Subject of Slavery,” published in the Herald [Newport, R.I.], March 1, 1787; and Thornton to John Coakley Lettsom, July 26, 1778, and June 15, 1790, in Harris, ed., Papers of William Thornton, 1:49–53, 77–79, 113–14; Sherwood, “Early Negro Deportation Projects,” 490–93; Wolf, Race and Slavery in the New Nation, 14, 102–3, 107.
82. “Memorandum on an African Colony,” PJM, 12:437–38. Both Jefferson and Madison, schooled in Scottish moral philosophy, assumed that all human beings had an innate desire for sociability. Consistent with this principle, if whites refused to socialize with blacks, emancipating southern slaves threatened social cohesion. Humane treatment did not alter hierarchy. See Joyce Chaplin, “Slavery and the Principle of Humanity: A Modern Idea in the Early Lower South,” Journal of Social History 24 (Winter 1990): 299–302.
83. “Memorandum on an African Colony”; “Instructions for the Montpelier Overseer,” ca. November 1790, PJM, 12:438, 13:303; Christopher Castiglia, “Pedagogical Discipline and the Creation of White Citizenship,” Early American Literature 33 (1998): 195, 197, 207. In 1773, two years after Madison left Princeton, two “Fanti-speaking” students (John Quamine and Bristol Yamma) were enrolled to study with John Witherspoon to prepare for being sent as missionaries to Africa. These young men were free blacks, sponsored by Reverend Samuel Hopkins, another early promoter of colonization. It is likely that Madison was aware of this bold experiment. See George E. Brooks, Jr., “The Providence African Society’s Sierra Leone Emigration Scheme, 1794–1795: Prologue to the African Colonization Movement,” International Journal of African Studies 7 (1974): 185–86; Sherwood, “Early Negro Deportation Projects,” 497–500.
84. “Memorandum on an African Colony,” PJM, 12:438; Notes on Virginia, Query XIV; Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, chap. 5. Madison meant that southern whites might eventually accept freed slaves as citizens. This desirable end would be achieved after news traveled across the ocean with proof that colonization worked and that blacks could lift themselves from a degraded state, adopting a republican character—slaves would not be remade in the eyes of slave owners until it was done first at a safe distance. In 1783, when Jefferson arranged his private library, he adapted the categories first used by Francis Bacon: memory, reason, and imagination. Of these faculties of the mind, he grouped memory with works of human and natural history (including medicine); philosophy with moral and mathematical concerns (including law); and imagination with literature and the arts. By placing memory and the human organism in the same category, he symbolically kept slavery apart from ethics and jurisprudence while associating blacks’ physical constitution—those attributes that commanded them to return to their original continent—with the politics of memory. The analogy to Jefferson’s library is not meant to be regarded as evidence of his racial science, so much as a curiosity in the context of his intellectual habits. See Charles A. Miller, Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation (Baltimore, 1988), 35–37, 73; James Gilreath and Douglas Wilson, eds., Thomas Jefferson’s Library (Washington, 1989).
85. William Howard Adams, Gouverneur Morris: An Independent Life (New Haven, Conn., 2003); Malone, 2:209–11, 400–401.
86. Henry S. Randall, Life of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1858), 1:551, 558.
87. JM to TJ, October 8, 1789; RL, 1:638; TJ to Washington, December 15, 1789, TJP-LC. In Jefferson’s reconstruction of the one sentence, certain unnamed people became a public “just indeed in their intentions,” and his grievance against those who had once called for an investigation into his conduct suddenly weighed less. His rhetorical pose now said that he was capable of perceiving those who censured him as individuals lacking in objective information rather than impelled by malevolence. But the thought of further criticism, regardless of underlying motive, made him nervous and reluctant to assume so visible an executive role.
88. TJ to JM, September 6, 1789, RL, 1:632–37. In usufruct land ownership, whoever had a claim to a property was able to reap the benefits of it—a modified form of possession. If the land was not used regularly, one could lose the usufruct. Herbert E. Sloan has come up with a cultural explanation for Jefferson’s nineteen-year cutoff for the span of one generation, seeing it in the context of a lifetime of number-crunching: Jefferson �
�hoarded numbers with unusual intensity,” Sloan writes, so as “to control the world around him.” Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York, 1995), chap. 2, quote at 58.
89. Adrienne Koch, Jefferson and Madison: The Great Collaboration (New York, 1950), chap. 4; Dumas Malone, Thomas Jefferson as Political Leader (Berkeley, Calif., 1963), 6.
90. JM to TJ, February 4, 1790, RL, 1:652–55.
91. “Conversation with George Beckwith,” PAH, 5:485.
92. Ibid., 483–85; Ketcham, 305.
CHAPTER SIX
Attachments and Resentments, 1790–1792
1. JM to TJ, October 8, 1789; TJ to JM, January 9, 1790, RL, 1:638, 650; TJ to Washington, December 15, 1789, TJP-LC; JM to Washington, January 4, 1790, PJM, 12:467; Malone, 2:249–55.
2. JM to Pendleton, April 4, 1790; to Short, April 6, 1790; Henry Lee to JM, March 13, 1790, PJM, 13:102–3, 138–41.
3. JM to Randolph, May 6, 1790; Rev. JM to JM, May 12, 1790, PJM, 13:189, 196.
4. PAH, 6:51ff.; Max M. Edling, “ ‘So Immense a Power in the Affairs of War’: Alexander Hamilton and the Restoration of Public Credit,” William and Mary Quarterly 64 (April 2007): 309–11.
5. Madison’s proposal would give current note holders the highest market value and reserve the difference between the market price and par value for the original holders. See Edling, “ ‘So Immense a Power,’ ” 289–90; Pennsylvania Gazette, March 24, 1790, reprinted in the New-Hampshire Spy [Portsmouth], April 10, 1790; Rush to JM, April 10, 1790, PJM, 13:146; Jacob E. Cooke, Tench Coxe and the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978), 145–48; Stuart Leibiger, Founding Friendship: George Washington, James Madison, and the Creation of the American Republic (Charlottesville, Va., 1999), 128–29; Ketcham, 314.
6. Edling, “ ‘So Immense a Power,’ ” 287, 292–96.
7. Carrington to JM, April 7, 1790; George Lee Turberville to JM, April 10, 1790, PJM, 13:142–45; Richard R. Beeman, The Old Dominion and the New Nation, 1788–1801 (Lexington, Ky., 1972), 74–77; Ketcham, 311–12. Henry was predicting the “prostration of agriculture at the feet of commerce,” along with the creation of a “large monied interest.”
8. “Notes for Speech in Congress” and “Assumption of State Debts,” PJM, 13:159–74.
9. Letter from the National Assembly of France, and TJ to Rev. William Smith, February 19, 1791, PTJ, 19:109, 112–13. For the complicated diplomatic dance over the mourning of Franklin, see “Death of Franklin,” PTJ, 19:78ff.
10. JM to Trist, May 27, 1790, PJM, 13:231; Henry S. Randall, Life of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1858), 1:612; Malone, 2:258–62, 267.
11. JM to Monroe, April 17 and June 1, 1790, PJM, 13:151, 233–34; John W. Kuehl, “Justice, Republican Energy, and the Search for the Middle Ground: James Madison and the Assumption of State Debts,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 103 (July 1995): 327.
12. “Jefferson’s Account of the Bargain on Assumption and Residence Bills” (1792?), PTJ, 17:204–8; Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization, 1789–1801 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1957), 5–7; Adrienne Koch, Jefferson and Madison (New York, 1950), 103–8. Jefferson’s letters to the likes of George Mason and James Monroe from mid- to late June convey optimism and a conciliatory spirit. This makes it highly probable that Madison, without prodding from Jefferson, had been doing the most to stall the program Hamilton wished to push through Congress.
13. We consider the best explanation to be that offered by Jacob E. Cooke, “The Compromise of 1790,” William and Mary Quarterly 27 (October 1970): 524–45; the scholarly debate was extended in Kenneth R. Bowling, “Dinner at Jefferson’s: A Note on Jacob E. Cooke’s ‘The Compromise of 1790,’ ” William and Mary Quarterly 28 (October 1971): 629–48. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick wrote: “Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton could not themselves impose a final resolution. But a fair guess, considering the circumstances, is that no settlement not acquiesced in by them was likely to occur.” Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism (New York, 1993), 156.
14. JM to Washington, August 24, 1788, PGW-C, 6:469–70. In July 1789, as Jefferson was watching the French Revolution unfold, Madison remained anxious about his northern colleagues’ ignorance of westerners’ sentiments. He wrote to Virginia ally George Nicholas of the many mistaken perceptions that “still lurk in the minds of those who view [the western country] at so great a distance and through the medium perhaps of local prejudices.” Madison was eager for Kentucky to be granted statehood, believing it would focus renewed attention on augmenting American power up and down the Mississippi. When remarking on the interests of the West, his real meaning seems to have been the interests of Virginia and the South. See JM to Nicholas, July 5, 1789, PJM, 12:279–81.
15. PJM, 12:369–82.
16. “Location of the Capital,” July 16, 1790, PJM, 13:264.
17. Pendleton to JM, July 21, 1790; JM to Monroe, July 26, 1790; to JM Sr., PJM, 13:282–85; Beeman, Old Dominion and New Nation, 78–81.
18. Ketcham, 316.
19. Hamilton to Washington, March 27, 1791, PAH, 8:218–23; Ketcham, 319–22.
20. On Madison’s appeal to the Constitutional Convention, see Benjamin B. Klubes, “The First Federal Congress and the First National Bank: A Case Study in Constitutional Interpretation,” Journal of the Early Republic 10 (Spring 1990): 28–31, 40–41; RL, 2:668. To Jefferson, the bank was a “convenient” instrument but not a “necessary” one. On Washington’s political purpose in asking for his cabinet members’ opinions, see Kenneth R. Bowling, “The Bank Bill, the Capital City, and President Washington,” Capitol Studies 1 (Spring 1972): 66–68.
21. JM to TJ, May 1, July 10, and August 8, 1791, RL, 2:687, 697–98, 708.
22. JM to TJ, October 24 and November 1, 1787, RL, 1:501–2. Madison’s famous definition of faction in Federalist 10 is: “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse or passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
23. Journal of William Maclay, United States Senator from Pennsylvania, 1789–1791, ed. Edgar S. Maclay (New York, 1890), entry of February 9, 1791, 387; Adams to Trumbull, April 1790, cited in Ketcham, 311.
24. Karl-Friedrich Walling, Republican Empire: Alexander Hamilton on War and Free Government (Lawrence, Kan., 1999), 134–37, 141–42; Leibiger, Founding Friendship, 124–25; Joanne B. Freeman, “The Art and Address of Ministerial Management: Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton,” in Kenneth R. Bowling and Donald R. Kennon, eds., Neither Separate Nor Equal: Congress in the 1790s (Athens, Ohio, 2000), 269–93.
25. Adams’s Autobiography, in The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston, 1865), 2:507–9.
26. As the historian Eric Foner has put it: “The early 1790s saw Paine at his best—bringing radical ideas to a new audience, submitting contemporary institutions to a withering critique, raising the demand for far-reaching change.” See Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York, 1976), 233.
27. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France and Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (Garden City, N.Y., 1973), 19–20, 101, 124–26, 139–40, 315, 370, 380, 384–85.
28. Adrienne Koch noted the similarity in Paine’s and Jefferson’s language, in Jefferson and Madison, 82–85.
29. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, and Paine, Rights of Man, 272–74, 277–78, 283–86, 294–96, 364, 383–84. The second volume of Paine’s work, published early in the following year, would be dedicated to the Marquis de Lafayette. Paine would send twelve copies of part 2 of The Rights of Man to Washington when it was published. See Washington to Paine, May 6, 1792, PGW-PS, 10:357–358n.
30. Discourses on Davila, in The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston, 1851), 6:254–62, 270–75, 284; letter to Sherman, 428; Peter Shaw, The Character of John Adams (Ch
apel Hill, N.C., 1976), 230–36.
31. TJ to Washington, May 8, 1791; to Adams, July 17, 1791; to Paine, July 29, 1791; PTJ, 20:291–92, 302, 308; Adams to TJ, July 29, 1791, PTJ, 20:305–7; TJ to JM, May 9, 1791; JM to TJ, May 12, 1791, RL, 2:689–91; Malone, 2:355–59; John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (Knoxville, Tenn., 1992), 311–12, 316. See also the extended Editorial Note, “Rights of Man: ‘The Contest of Burke and Paine … in America,’ ” in PTJ, 20:268ff.
32. “The Northern Journey of Jefferson and Madison,” PTJ, 20:436. The other Albany paper had nothing to say about the Madison-Jefferson visit, while unfriendly newspapers that picked up the story reprinted it with a different purpose: to make the point that Charles Fox symbolized opposition to the established government.
33. “The Northern Journey of Jefferson and Madison,” PTJ, 20:437–42; JMB, 2:819–25.
34. Ketcham, 323–26, quote at 325; Malone, 2:359–61.
35. This last remark is outright racism, not even credible as eighteenth-century logic. Banneker’s astronomical calculations were corroborated and his intellectuality verified by none other than David Rittenhouse of Philadelphia, a scientist whom Jefferson quite literally worshipped, and whom he advertised in Notes of Virginia as “second to no astronomer living.” See Banneker to TJ, August 19, 1791; TJ to Banneker, August 30, 1791; TJ to Condorcet, August 30, 1791, PTJ, 22:49–54, 97–99; Andrew Burstein, The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist (Charlottesville, Va., 1995), 180–81; John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (New York, 1977), 76–77.