Madison tended to share Jefferson’s foreboding fears of consolidation. Like Jefferson, he was trapped by the unattractive implications of the slavery question; he also opposed the restrictions on slavery imposed by the Missouri Compromise and sought relief in the illusion of diffusion, as well as the equally illusory belief that gradual emancipation was somehow still feasible. Moreover, one of his last acts as president was to veto the bill for internal improvements on the ground that it granted the federal government unconstitutional powers. In all these crucial ways he and Jefferson agreed, making it possible for Madison to commiserate in good conscience with his aging mentor and his tortured thoughts after 1820.81
One area, however, where Madison preferred to maintain a discreet silence was Jefferson’s familiar refrain about what had been intended at the Constitutional Convention. “Can it be believed,” Jefferson asked rhetorically, “that under the jealousies prevailing against the General Government, at the adoption of the Constitution, the States meant to surrender the authority of preserving order, of enforcing moral duties and restraining vice, within their own territory?” Jefferson’s long-standing formula was straightforward: “I believe the States can best govern our home concerns and the General Government our foreign ones.” Or, as he put it in his most graphic formulation, “the federal is, in truth, our foreign government… .” Madison preferred to answer such assertions with elliptical statements. “The Gordion Knot of the Constitution,” he observed, “seems to lie in the problem of collision between the federal and State powers… .” While Madison himself wanted to blur both the sovereignty question and the extent of his disagreement with Jefferson, his wife, Dolley, in a note appended to her husband’s papers soon after his death, spoke more candidly: “Thomas Jefferson was not in America pending the framing of the Constitution, whose information in all that occurred in the Convention, and of the motives and intents of the framers, was derived from Mr. Madison, whose opinions guided him in the construction of that instrument, was looked up to many as its father and almost unanimously as its only true repositor.” When it came to constitutional questions, in short, Jefferson often did not know what he was talking about.82
The disagreement came to a head, as it logically and legally was almost obliged to do, over Jefferson’s colorful denunciations of the Supreme Court. The ultimate symbol of consolidation for Jefferson was the Marshall Court, sitting atop the federal government like a Federalist sanctuary, with Marshall dispensing his judicial verdicts like some malignant Buddha. “The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary,” Jefferson wrote in 1821. “That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is engulphing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them.” His most frequent image was of the Supreme Court as “the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated republic.” Most frustrating of all was Marshall himself, who seemed to possess magical powers of influence over his fellow justices. “An opinion is huddled up in conclave,” Jefferson noted in disgust, “delivered as if unanimous, and with the silent acquiescence of lazy or timid associates, by a crafty chief judge, who sophisticates the law to his mind, by the turn of his own reasoning.” At the very least, Jefferson urged, Marshall’s quiet despotism should be challenged by requiring all Supreme Court justices to submit separate “seriatim opinions,” so that dissent within the Court could be exposed and the illusion of godlike unanimity—Marshall’s preferred effect—could be destroyed.83
Madison tended to agree with Jefferson about Marshall’s formidable influence and the need for seriatim opinions by all the justices on the court. As long as the chief justice remained in place, one could expect no limits on the encroachments of the federal government when it came either to the slavery question in the western territories or to the presumption of federal control over internal improvements. But Jefferson went much further, denying altogether the power of the Supreme Court to decide on questions of constitutionality. “The ultimate arbiter,” he insisted, “is the people of the Union, assembled by their deputies in convention, at the call of Congress, or of two thirds of the States.” In other words, Jefferson denied the principle of judicial review and argued that the provisions made for amending the Constitution were the only proper procedures for deciding all questions of constitutionality.84
Madison, ever the diplomat with his lifelong colleague and friend, tried to avoid an open break by first suggesting that Jefferson’s preferred modus operandi was rather cumbersome, then concurring that Marshall’s decisions were indeed enough to test one’s patience. Then, however, came the devastating clincher: “But the abuse of a trust does not disprove its existence.” Madison accepted, and had all along accepted, the principle of judicial review. If there was the spirit of ’76, which Jefferson could plausibly claim to know firsthand, there was also the spirit of ’87, which Madison could claim with equivalent plausibility to know with comparable intimacy. The clear intention of the framers of the Constitution, Madison told his friend, was to make the Supreme Court the ultimate arbiter of federal versus state jurisdiction, the final judge, as Madison put it, of any “trial of strength between the Posse headed by the Marshal and the Posse headed by the Sheriff.”85
It was a rather astounding fact that the two Virginians had worked together so closely, so harmoniously for so many years and this elemental difference of opinion had never surfaced before. Despite Madison’s gentle and, as always, deferential tone toward his old friend, Jefferson could not have missed the point, for it came up again little more than a year later in another context. Jefferson had prepared a draft proposal entitled “The Solemn Declaration and Protest of the Commonwealth of Virginia” in which he attempted to carve out a position that would permit his home state to oppose federal legislation for internal improvements. He identified control over its domestic affairs as one of “the rights retained by the states, rights which never have been yielded, and which this state will never voluntarily yield… .” Then, after disavowing any desire to threaten the Union or risk any “immediate rupture,” declaring “such a rupture as among the greatest calamities which could befall them,” he threatened precisely the action that he had disavowed: Destroying the Union would produce a calamity, to be sure, “but not the greatest” calamity; there was “yet one greater, submission to a government of unlimited powers.” He sent the draft proposal to Madison with a note, saying that he “would not hazard so important a measure against your opinion, nor even without its support.”86
Madison wrote back within the week. “You asked an early answer,” he observed, “and I have hurried one, at the risk of crudeness in some of its views of the subject.” The essence of the lengthy answer was that Jefferson’s proposed draft was “an anomaly without any operative character.” Congress had passed the act funding internal improvements by a decisive majority. The only ground on which the act could be overturned was for the Supreme Court to find it unconstitutional, a course that was unlikely in the extreme given Marshall’s predilections and, irony of ironies, a course that Jefferson considered illegal anyway. Whatever one thought about internal improvements as a stalking-horse for the evils of consolidation, Virginia had to obey the law. To suggest otherwise was to raise the specter that states need not abide by laws they found objectionable. This was a recipe for civil war and eventual anarchy, precisely the danger the Constitution was designed to avoid and, Madison urged ever so discreetly, hardly the course Jefferson wished associated with his name. Jefferson almost always listened when Madison offered constitutional advice. “I have read the last with entire approbation and adoption of its views,” he reported back to Madison, and “have therefore suppressed my paper… .” A few years later, when Madison was defending Jefferson’s legacy against the claims of extreme states’ righters during the Nullification Crisis, Jefferson’s decision to withdraw his proposal made Madison’s task
much easier, and the benign duplicity of his defense more justifiable.87
Nevertheless, this last exchange and eventual collaboration with Madison are extremely revealing, and for reasons that extend far beyond the matter of Jefferson’s vulnerability to, or rescue from, emergent southern secessionists. Adams had been telling Jefferson for several years that the Jeffersonian version of what the American Revolution actually meant was both idiosyncratic and irresponsible. Now Madison was telling him that he had failed to grasp the central achievement of the constitutional settlement of 1787–88, which was to grant the federal government sufficient sovereignty to assure a national system of laws that all states and all individuals were obliged to obey. Both Adams and Madison, in their different ways, were informing Jefferson that the outstanding accomplishment of the revolutionary generation had been the realistic recognition of the need for limits as well as liberation, that the American republic had endured because its creators made sensible compromises with political power, that the genius of the American Revolution resided in its capacity to harness, indeed to consolidate, the energies released by the movement for independence.
But Jefferson, it turned out, had not seen it that way at all. He regarded himself as the untamed essence of the original revolutionary impulse, uncontaminated by any implicit understandings of 1776 (here he parted with Adams) or any explicit compromises with political power in 1787–88 (here he parted with Madison). Indeed what his two old friends regarded as realistic limitations designed to assure the stability of the republican experiment, he believed betrayals of the true meaning of the American Revolution, which was not to harness individual energies but to release them. Even such intimate collaborators as Adams and Madison might consider his vision alluringly irresponsible, the kind of dangerously romantic aversion to established authority that one needed to get over. But Jefferson’s statements during his last years of life, far from being aberrant ramblings, represented a consistent rededication to his visionary principles. All compromises with political power were pacts with the devil. All efforts at political consolidation were treasonable acts.
In that sense, at least, Madison was right to insist that his old mentor would have disavowed any claims on his legacy by southern states’ righters. His abiding legacy was a profound suspicion of governmental power of any sort and a political rhetoric that depicted any relationship between the people and their government as problematic and contingent. The only unkind observation about Madison that Jefferson ever made, at least the only one that found its way into the historical record, came on his deathbed, in the final hours when he was passing in and out of consciousness: “But ah!” he blurted out. “He could never in his life stand up against strenuous opposition.” While not fully fair to his most loyal friend, the remark captured Jefferson’s derogatory sense of all political accommodation as a betrayal of principle. He remained a rebel to the very end.88
EDUCATIONAL DREAMS
THE HAPPIEST MOMENTS in those increasingly unhappy last years were unquestionably private occasions: the hours in his garden; the afternoons on horseback; the early-evening romps with his grandchildren on the back lawns of Monticello. The one bright spot amid the deepening sense of gloom about public affairs was provided by the project taking shape a few miles away in Charlottesville, barely visible on a clear day from his mountaintop, which Jefferson called his “academic village.” Now known, of course, as the University of Virginia and recognized at the bicentennial celebrations of 1976 by the American Institute of Architects as “the proudest achievement of American architecture in the past 200 years,” it became Jefferson’s major retirement project in 1817.89
In that year he wrote a semiscolding note to Madison, who was still trying to disengage himself from the presidency, for missing the first meeting of the committee charged with planning what was then being called Central College: “A detention at Washington I presume prevented your attendance… . Circumstances which will be explained to you make us believe that a full meeting of all visitors, on the first occasion at least, will decide a great object in the State system of general education; and I have accordingly so pressed the subject on Colo. Monroe [the incumbent president replacing Madison] as I think will ensure his attendance, and I hope we shall not fail in yours.” In case Madison had missed the point, Jefferson reiterated his annoyance at Madison’s absence and his expectation that the next session would be “a full meeting of all… .” The episode illustrates Jefferson’s total immersion in his new educational and architectural venture; it never occurred to him that the outgoing and incoming presidents of the United States might have more important things to do.90
He threw himself into the project with the same youthful enthusiasm he had earlier given to the renovations of Monticello. Indeed one can understand the architectural and construction challenges posed by the University of Virginia as convenient conduits for the same restless energies previously expended on his mansion on the mountain, which was now just about finished; it was the perfect building project to keep him busy. But it was also much more, since it involved cajoling the Virginia legislature for money, selecting a faculty, building a library, shaping a curriculum, in effect creating a model American university in his own image and likeness. Once Madison began attending the meetings of the Board of Visitors, he immediately recognized that the enterprise was intended to serve as a projection of Jefferson’s personality. All members of the board understood they were appointed to follow Jefferson’s lead, and all displayed “unaffected deference… for his judgment and experience.” They were merely accomplices as he attempted, for what was obviously the last time, to institutionalize his dreams.91
His educational dreams went way back. First as governor of Virginia and then in his Notes on Virginia he had proposed a statewide system of public education designed to raise the Old Dominion out of its scandalously inadequate condition and place it on a par with the New England states. As president he had taken on George Washington’s favorite scheme for a national university, presumably located in the nation’s capital. But nothing came of the idea, and the academy established in New York with his blessing became an engineering school for army officers at West Point, not quite what he had in mind. Soon after his retirement from the presidency his broodings assumed the more tangible form of a master plan for Virginia. Each county would be divided into a series of local “hundreds” or “wards” modeled on the New England townships. Each ward would support a primary or elementary school funded out of public taxes, giving Virginia about twelve hundred local schools to teach basic literacy. Then each county would contain an academy or secondary school where the best graduates of the ward schools could learn their Latin and Greek and the rudiments of science, the poorer students at public expense. The capstone of the plan was a state university where the best graduates of the county academies would receive the best education available in America, again the poorest of the best on tax-supported scholarships.92
The scheme was pure Jefferson: magisterial in conception, admirable in intention, unworkable in practice. The Virginia legislature refused to provide the funds necessary for the comprehensive plan but did appoint a commission to meet at Rockfish Gap in 1818 and make recommendations for the site of a state university. Jefferson had himself and Madison appointed to the commission, dominated the deliberations and personally wrote the Rockfish Gap Report that advocated the creation of a state university in Charlottesville. Madison lent an editorial hand in his familiar way, suggesting that Jefferson’s use of the term “monastic” to describe the preferred collegiate atmosphere, while graphic, “may not give umbrage,” and that “the idea of seeking professors abroad may excite prejudices with some… .” Jefferson expressed his own apprehension that Virginia was deciding to place a capstone on an educational foundation that did not exist, but his enthusiasm for the project overwhelmed his reservations. He relished the prospect of reviving the Jefferson-Madison collaboration one final time, in yet another campaign to lead reluctant citizens t
oward truths that lay just beyond their vision. On the state commission, for example, Jefferson explained to Madison that “there is a floating body of doubtful and wavering men,” so in his written report “I have therefore thrown in some leading ideas on the benefits of education… in the hope these might catch on some crotchets in their mind, and bring them over to us.” It was like the old days.93
Several old and familiar Jeffersonian patterns also presented themselves, like characters in a play reappearing for a final encore. There was the meticulous master of detail, operating with a grand but clear vision to guide him, yet never quite able to perform successfully in that middle region where detail and vision intersect to create cost overruns. Jefferson surveyed the site for the Charlottesville campus himself, even personally laid out the stakes. For the Rotunda, which was to be the architectural centerpiece, he selected the Pantheon of Rome as his model and designed it to serve as both the library and a planetarium, with movable planets and stars on the interior of the dome manipulated by an ingenious and invisible set of pulleys and gadgets. (Control should never be visible.) He worked four hours each day for several months to assemble the catalog for the library of 6,860 volumes, which he estimated would cost $24,076. The false sense of mastery conveyed by such precise numbers kept being undermined by financial realities that always eroded Jefferson’s most careful calculations. In 1820 the Virginia legislature, believing it was acting responsibly to meet the total costs, authorized the Board of Visitors to borrow $60,000. But the Rotunda proved more expensive than Jefferson had anticipated, and he revised the estimate upward—again the misleading precision—to $162,364. The following year, facing heavy criticism from the legislature for the Rotunda’s cost, he predicted that $195,000 would completely cover all expenses. It did not, of course, but by then the pavilions were going up, the undeniable grandeur of Jefferson’s architectural vision was becoming visible and the momentum of the enterprise had passed the point where anyone but a foolish spendthrift would demand a halt.94
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