Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  80. Register of Debates in Congress, June 20, 1836 (Washington, D.C.: Gales & Seaton, 1825–37), 1911–12.

  81. National Intelligencer, July 7, 1826; Daily National Intelligencer, July 1, 1836.

  82. Allgor, Perfect Union, 373–84.

  83. Brant, 6:530–31.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Thawing Out the Historical Imagination

  1. Van Buren to TJ, June 8, July 13, and September 2, 1824; TJ to Van Buren, June 29, 1824, TJP-LC. For a good synthesis of Van Buren’s courtship of the Old Republicans of the South, see Joseph Hobson Harrison, Jr., “Martin Van Buren and His Southern Supporters,” Journal of Southern History 22 (November 1956): 438–58.

  2. JM to Van Buren, September 20, 1826, March 13, 1827, December 11, 1830, and December 15, 1835, JMP-LC. On Van Buren’s effort to pursue the Madison and Jefferson line with regard to internal improvements, see The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick (Washington, 1920), 317–19. Repeatedly in the autobiography, Van Buren refers to the Jefferson and Madison administrations as seamless and philosophically alike. His Jefferson is fair and principled, and Madison “proverbial for his amiable temper.” See ibid., 123.

  3. Martin Van Buren, Inquiry into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States (New York, 1867), 1–3, 181–86, 267.

  4. In his Preface, Randall is effusive in expressing his gratitude to the Jefferson-Randolph family: “They welcomed our undertaking with a prompt and graceful expression of cordial appreciation … They furnished us their full recollections and opinions on every class of topics.” His other correspondents included Henry Clay, Edward Coles, and Joseph Carrington Cabell. Henry S. Randall, Life of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1858), 1:xi–xii. Epigraph is taken from ibid., 3:312. On Randall’s background and his desire to rescue Jefferson’s reputation, see Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York, 1960), 149–60.

  5. Ketcham, 615–16; Catherine Allgor, A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (New York, 2006), 402.

  6. Ralph L. Ketcham, ed., “An Unpublished Sketch of James Madison by James K. Paulding,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 67 (1959): 432–37.

  7. George Green Shackelford, Jefferson’s Adoptive Son: The Life of William Short, 1759–1848 (Lexington, Ky., 1993), 136. It must be said, however, that Short’s opinion of Madison was colored by events. Short held something of a personal grudge after Madison failed to shore up a diplomatic appointment initiated by Jefferson in 1808.

  8. In early America, “bilious complaints” connoted a “violent looseness” of the bowels. The most pertinent and widely popular eighteenth-century text containing descriptions, diagnoses, and treatments of ills is William Buchan, Domestic Medicine (London, 1785).

  9. Another example of an influential text conveying the power of language is Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783). Blair was a professor of rhetoric at the University of Edinburgh, and his book went through countless printings between the American Revolution and the American Civil War—a staple text in colleges. Attuned to the need for a thought-filled congressman to convey ideas effectively and affectingly, Madison asked Jefferson to send him a copy of Blair’s Lectures in 1784—it was one of the first favors his friend did for him. For a good dissection of Madison’s language as seen through his note-taking at the convention and his style of argument relative to Hamilton’s in The Federalist, see Louis C. Schaedler, “James Madison: Literary Craftsman,” William and Mary Quarterly 3 (October 1946): 515–33.

  10. Randall, Life of Thomas Jefferson, 1:vi; Peterson, Jefferson Image in American Mind, 314–17.

  11. Peter S. Onuf, “Making Sense of Jefferson,” in Onuf, The Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville, Va., 2007), 21.

  12. The popular author David McCullough undertook a joint study of Jefferson and Adams but opted to do Adams alone after he discovered that he did not particularly like Jefferson. His decision reminds one of the value in establishing a necessary distance between oneself and the historical subject. In American historiography after 1932, the third president was deftly redrawn as a Roosevelt Democrat. Hamilton, his nemesis, became a herald for big business conservatism. Their rivalry dominated the political narrative in most textbooks, until the all-too-obvious Adams-Jefferson contrast (stout and blunt versus slippery and detached) was thrust upon Americans in the 1990s. When Adams emerged from his long hibernation, founders chic became a popularity contest, mimicking our celebrity-conscious culture, in which voters decide on political candidates based on whether or not they “like” them. Yet Adams’s supposed self-deprecation and Jefferson’s supposed sneakiness tell us absolutely nothing about their political philosophies. See Peterson, Jefferson Image in American Mind, 347–79; Francis D. Cogliano, Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville, Va., 2006).

  13. TJ to Taylor, June 4, 1798, PTJ, 30:389. The P.S. of this letter reminded the Virginia Republican of Jefferson’s particular vulnerability: “It is hardly necessary to caution you to let nothing of mine get before the public. A single sentence got hold of by the Porcupines [i.e., by the likes of William Cobbett] will suffice to abuse & persecute me in their papers for months.”

  14. John Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington (New York, 2009), 231–33, 239.

  15. “To the Citizens Who Shall Be Convened This Day in the Fields in the City of New York,” April 22, 1796, PAH, 20:131–34.

  16. Margaret Bayard Smith, The First Forty Years of Washington Society, ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York, 1906), 299–300.

  17. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), 92–94, 306–18, quotes at 92, 306–7; Peter Dorsey, “To ‘Corroborate Our Own Claims’: Public Positioning and the Slavery Metaphor in Revolutionary America,” American Quarterly 55 (September 2003): 353–86.

  18. Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1774–1804 (Charlottesville, Va., 2009), chap. 7, esp. 242–43, 253–56.

  19. Lafayette to TJ, July 20, 1820, and June 1, 1822, in The Letters of Lafayette and Jefferson, ed. Gilbert Chinard (Baltimore, Md., 1929), 398–99, 408–9.

  20. Phillip D. Morgan, “Interracial Sex in the Chesapeake and the British Atlantic World,” in Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (Charlottesville, Va., 1999), 52–84.

  21. See John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore, 2003), 253–54, 260–63. In the early 1780s, while Jefferson was writing Notes on Virginia, gradual emancipation programs were in place in Connecticut and Rhode Island, but in those two states the cruel and cynical were still selling indentured black children into slavery in the Carolinas.

  22. Ibid., 180–81; Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York, 2009), 231–32; Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), 210–11.

  23. “The Slaves,” in New-York Mirror, and Ladies’ Literary Gazette, February 19, 1825; Douglas R. Egerton, “ ‘Its Origin Is Not a Little Curious’: A New Look at the American Colonization Society,” Journal of the Early Republic 5 (Winter 1985): 463–80, quote at 469. The standard work on the ACS is P. J. Staudenraus, The American Colonization Movement, 1816–1865 (New York, 1961). Recently two compelling reexaminations have been published: Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville, Fla., 2005); and with an emphasis on Virginia, Marie Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007).

  24. Shackelford, Jefferson’s Adoptive Son, 176–77. Perhaps it was a lack of imagination that explains Madison’s and Jefferson’s failure to think that Virginia and the South could free all slaves and hire as wage laborers as many as were willing to remain. To do so, after all, was not to promote a
completely integrated society. Legal restrictions would have remained in place to assuage the fears of the most virulent racists. As it was, free blacks did not have ready access to arms. Blacks would have remained a permanent underclass—the very “adjustment” white America made after Reconstruction. But even that was not possible for Madison and Jefferson, who opted instead for colonization of the freed slave. From 1800 on, meanwhile, more and more state legislation was designed to disadvantage, if not punish, free people of color.

  25. TJ to JM, April 4, 1800; JM to TJ, April 20, 1800, RL, 2:1132–33; Edmund Berkeley, Jr., “Prophet without Honor: Christopher McPherson, Free Person of Color,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 77 (April 1969): 184–85.

  26. Drew R. McCoy, The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (New York, 1989), 237–38; the author points out Madison’s “inadvertent contempt” toward free blacks, dating to the later period of his life, in ibid., 285. See also John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (New York, 1977), 264ff.

  27. Egerton, Death or Liberty, 247.

  28. Clarence E. Walker, Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (Charlottesville, Va., 2009), quote at 60; JM to Coles, September 3, 1819, JMP-LC.

  29. McCoy, Last of the Fathers, 239; TJ to Rush, September 23, 1800, PTJ, 32:166–68. In the letter, Jefferson did not capitalize “god.” See generally Charles B. Sanford, The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville, Va., 1984).

  30. See in particular Susan Dunn, Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia (New York, 2007), 123–28.

  31. JM to Smith, September 21, 1830, JMP-LC. Madison had crossed out “sophistry” and replaced it with “Heretic.”

  Bibliography

  Newspapers and Magazines Consulted (Originals, Microfilm, or Online)

  Alexandria Advertiser; Alexandria Gazette; American Citizen (New York); American Mercury (Hartford, Conn.); American Minerva (New York); Baltimore Patriot; Baltimore Telegraph; The Bee (Stonington, Conn.); Boston Daily Advertiser; Boston Gazette; Boston Spectator; Carlisle Gazette (Pa.); Carolina Gazette (Charleston, S.C.); Centinel of Freedom (Newark, N.J.); City Gazette (Charleston, S.C.); Columbian Herald (Charleston, S.C.); Columbian Minerva (Dedham, Mass.); Columbian Patriot (Middlebury, Vt.); Delaware Gazette; Enquirer (Richmond); Federal Galaxy (Brattleboro, Vt.); Federal Gazette (Philadelphia); Federal Republican (Baltimore and Georgetown, D.C.); Federal Republican (New Bern, N.C.); Freeman’s Journal (Portsmouth, N.H.); Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia); General Advertiser (Philadelphia); Herald of Virginia (Fincastle); Hornet (Fredericktown, Md.); Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia); Jersey Chronicle (Mt. Pleasant); Loudon’s Register (New York); Massachusetts Spy (Worcester); Mirrour (Concord, N.H.); Morning Chronicle (New York); Nantucket Gazette; National Aegis (Worcester, Mass.); National Gazette (Philadelphia); National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.); Newburyport Herald (Mass.); New-England Palladium; New-Hampshire Gazette; New-Hampshire Sentinel (Keene); New-Hampshire Spy (Portsmouth); New-Jersey Chronicle (Mt. Pleasant); New-Jersey Journal (Elizabethtown); New-Jersey Telescope (Newark); Newport Mercury (R.I.); New-York Evening Post; New-York Gazette; New-York Herald; New-York Journal; Norfolk Gazette (Va.); North American (Baltimore); Oracle of Dauphin and Harrisburgh Advertiser (Pa.); Pennsylvania Gazette; Pennsylvania Mercury; Pennsylvania Packet; Philadelphia Gazette; Political Gazette (Newburyport, Mass); Political Intelligencer (New Brunswick, N.J.); Port Folio; Portland Advertiser; Republican Advocate (Fredericktown, Md.); Republican Farmer (Bridgeport, Conn.); The Republican or, Anti-Democrat (Baltimore); Republican Star (Easton, Md.); Rhode Island Republican; Salem Gazette (Mass.); South-Carolina State-Gazette; Stewart Kentucky Herald (Lexington); Trenton Federalist; United States Chronicle (Providence); Virginia Argus (Richmond); Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg); Virginia Journal (Alexandria); Washington Federalist; Weekly Wanderer (Randolph, Vt.); Western Star (Stockbridge, Mass.).

  Pamphlets and Other Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Sources

  Adams, John Quincy. An Inaugural Oration Delivered at the Author’s Installation as Boylston Professor of Rhetorick and Oratory, at Harvard University. Boston: Munroe & Francis, 1806.

  [Anon.] An Address to the Independent Citizens of Massachusetts, on the Subject of the Approaching Election, Exhibiting a View of the Leading Measures of the Jefferson and Madison Administrations. Worcester, Mass.: Isaiah Thomas, 1810.

  [Anon.] The Death of Washington; with Some Remarks on Jeffersonian and Madisonian Policy. Broadside, place and publisher unknown, ca. 1809.

  [Beckley, John]. Address to the People of the United States with an Epitome and Vindication of the Public Life and Character of Thomas Jefferson. Richmond, Va.: Meriwether Jones, 1800.

  Bishop, Abraham. Connecticut Republicanism. An Oration on the Extent and Power of Political Delusion. Albany, N.Y.: John Barber, 1801.

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  [Cobbett, William, as “Peter Porcupine”]. A Little Plain English, Addressed to the People of the United States on the Treaty Negotiated with His Britannic Majesty. Philadelphia: Thomas Bradford, 1795.

  ———. A New Year’s Gift to the Democrats; or, Observations on a Pamphlet, Entitled, “A Vindication of Mr. Randolph’s Resignation.” Philadelphia: William Cobbett, 1796.

  Cragg, Saunders. George Clinton Next President, and Our Republican Institutions Rescued from Destruction. New York: Henry C. Southwick, 1808.

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  [Dallas, Alexander James]. An Exposition of the Causes and Character of the Late War with Great Britain. Philadelphia: Thomas S. Manning, 1815.

  ———. Features of Mr. Jay’s Treaty. Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1795.

  ———. Letters from Franklin; on the Conduct of the Executive and the Treaty Negotiated by the Chief Justice of the United States with the Court of Great Britain. Philadelphia: E. Oswald, 1795.

  Davis, John. Travels of Four Years and a Half in the United States of America; During 1798, 1799, 1801, and 1802. London: R. Edwards, 1803.

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  [Dennie, Joseph, as “A Layman”]. The Claims of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency, Examined at the Bar of Christianity. Philadelphia: Asbury Dickins, 1800.

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  Godwin, William. Enquiry concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Bioren & Madan, 1796.

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  [Lowell, John]. Perpetual War, the Policy of Mr. Madison. Boston: Chester Stebbins, 1812.

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90 (1789).

  [Randolph, Edmund]. Germanicus (1794), Early American Imprints (Evans), no. 27597.

  ———. A Vindication of Mr. Randolph’s Resignation. Philadelphia: Samuel H. Smith, 1795.

  Ray, William. Horrors of Slavery; or, the American Tars in Tripoli, Edited by Hester Blum. Troy, New York, 1808; rept., New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008.

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  Tompkins, Daniel D. Free Trade and Sailor’s Rights! An Address to the Independent Electors of the State of New York. Albany, N.Y.: Office of the Argus, 1813.

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  Wyche, William. An Examination of the Examiners Examined, Being a Defence of Christianity, Opposed to the Age of Reason. New-York: Wayland & David, 1795.

  ———. Party Spirit: An Oration. New-York: T & J Swords, 1794.

  Published Correspondence and State Papers

  The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams. Edited by Lester J. Cappon. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1987 (1959).

  Annals of Congress. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1857.

  [Coles, Edward]. “Letters of Edward Coles.” The William and Mary Quarterly 7 (July 1927): 158–73.

  The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution. Edited by Merrill Jensen, John P. Kaminski, et al. 22 vols. to date. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976–.

  The Federalist. Edited by Jacob E. Cooke. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961.