by Lynne Cheney
At age sixty-six, he could now turn his thoughts to Montpelier and practice what he had long preached: a scientific form of agriculture, one that looked at what had succeeded and what had failed to determine future decisions. Such an approach had worked for him in politics, and he believed it would work for him at Montpelier.
Madison happily accepted the presidency of the Agricultural Society of Albemarle and in an address to its members in 1818 put caring for the land in the larger perspective of man’s place in nature. “The human part of the creation” had a clear responsibility to preserve nature’s balance, to protect “that symmetry in the face of nature, which derives new beauty from every insight that can be gained into it.” To that end he recommended principles heretofore “too generally neglected.” Land should not be impoverished by cultivation as had so often happened in Virginia, where tobacco, known to exhaust the soil, was planted year after year. Horizontal rather than vertical plowing should be employed to keep soil from being carried off in the rain. Manures and other fertilizers should be used to enrich the soil, and irrigation applied. Madison made a special plea for preserving trees, which since the country’s beginnings had been cleared for houses and farms: “Prudence will no longer delay to economize what remains of woodland; to foster the second growths where taking place in convenient spots; and to commence, when necessary, plantations of the trees recommended by their utility and quickness of growth.”2
Madison had long—and often futilely—recommended such measures to his father and the overseers at Montpelier, and he was surely gratified to be able to implement them in his retirement. But they would not be enough to overcome drought, early frosts, or the Hessian fly, and soon the chinch bug was also ravaging his crops. “It attacks the Indian corn as well as wheat and the other small grains,” he wrote, “hiding itself under the folds of the plants and feeding on the stems.” Nor could he do anything about grain prices, which, with the end of the Napoleonic Wars, had begun a steep decline. “Without good prices and good crops, the people in some quarters of the Union cannot well be relieved from their pecuniary distresses,” he told Richard Rush.3
He heard from his old friend Francis Corbin, who was much saddened by Virginia’s situation and its prospects. At the root of the problem, as Corbin saw it, was that “slavery and farming” were “incompatible.” The great plantations of Virginia supported communities of slaves, the young and the old as well as the laboring force, and these costs held steady even when crops failed and prices fell. “Our non-effectives consume all our effectives make,” is how Corbin put it. “The profits of my estate will not do more this year than pay the expenses of it,” he wrote. “I suppose yours will hardly do more.”4
Corbin’s supposition was almost certainly correct. The Madisons might not have yet felt the pinch that other Virginia farmers and planters were experiencing, because during his eight years in the White House he had earned a salary considered quite handsome at the time—twenty-five thousand dollars a year—and savings from it might have provided a cushion. The money would not last forever, though, which meant land would have to be sold, but given the current economy where would one find buyers? It was not Madison’s way to despair, but he admitted to Corbin that “the times are hard indeed, the more so as an early change is so little within the reach of any fair calculation.”5
Madison had concerns for his nation as well as his state, particularly after the Missouri Compromise divided the nation in two: north of parallel 36°30’, with the exception of Missouri, slavery would be prohibited; south of that line it would be permitted. Setting section against section, though it might have provided a way out of the impasse over admitting Missouri to the Union, promised ever-escalating conflict. “A fire bell in the night,” Jefferson called the compromise, “the knell of the Union.”6
The stinging words hurled by the North at the South in the Missouri debate prompted Madison to take up a literary form that he had been familiar with since he had started reading the Spectator but that he had not turned his hand to before. He wrote an allegory, featuring Jonathan Bull, who represented the North, and Mary Bull, representing the South. The Bulls owned two large and neighboring estates and were happily married until a dispute arose over who could and who could not settle new farms on their vast tracts of land. Jonathan, intent on prohibiting Mary’s people from removing “with their property to new farms,” became fixated on a black stain on Mary’s arm and began to taunt her for it, though he had known it was there before their marriage. He demanded that she get rid of the stain, even if that meant cutting off her arm. Mary was stunned and, although angry at first, resolved to defend herself “with the calmness and good feelings, which become the relation of wife and husband.” He had once had black spots on his person, she reminded Jonathan:
You ought surely when you have so slowly and imperfectly relieved yourself from the mortifying stain, although the task was comparatively so easy, to have some forbearance and sympathy with me who have a task so much more difficult to perform. Instead of that you abuse me as if I had brought the misfortune on myself and could remove it at will, or as if you had pointed out a ready way to do it and I had slighted your advice. Yet so far is this from being the case that you know as well as I do that I am not to be blamed for the origin of the sad mishap; that I am as anxious as you can be to get rid of it; that you are as unable as I am to find out a safe and feasible plan for the purpose; and moreover that I have done everything I could in the meantime to mitigate an evil that cannot as yet be removed.
As for tearing off her arm, she said, “I remind you of what you cannot be ignorant, that the most skillful surgeons have given their opinions that if so cruel an operation were to be tried, it could hardly fail to be followed by a mortification or a bleeding to death.”7 Madison used allegory to say what many southerners believed: that slavery was a great evil, which the current generation had not caused and saw no way of ending quickly without destroying the South.
Madison did hold out hope that slavery could be ended gradually. As he explained to Robert J. Evans, a Quaker who advocated gradual emancipation, masters would have to be compensated, and “to be consistent with existing and probably unalterable prejudices in the U.S., the freed blacks ought to be permanently removed beyond the region occupied by or allotted to a white population.” After leaving the presidency, Madison had become a founding member of the American Colonization Society, an organization that settled on Liberia as the destination for manumitted slaves. The ACS had many luminaries in its ranks—including Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Francis Scott Key, and John Marshall. It was nonetheless controversial, not so much because, as we might think today, it advocated expatriating former slaves, but because it was regarded as an antislavery organization.8
• • •
DURING HIS retirement years, Madison observed, he had less leisure than he had experienced as a public man. His correspondence consumed much time, in part because he graciously responded to requests such as one sent to him by Jacob Engelbrecht of Fredericktown, Maryland. Engelbrecht wanted a letter that he might display after Madison’s death and even directed the former president to leave proper margins for framing. Madison answered that he wanted to be sure the letter was worthy of the purpose Engelbrecht intended, and to that end he copied out and enclosed a lovely poem that naturalist John Bartram had composed for Benjamin Franklin, a Horatian ode, filled with American images of mountains, plains, and mighty waters.9
Even a pamphlet elicited a thoughtful reply. When Frederick Beasley, provost of the University of Pennsylvania, sent him an a priori proof of “the being and attributes of God,” Madison responded by noting that “the belief in a God all powerful, wise, and good is so essential to the moral order of the world and to the happiness of man that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources.” But, he told Beasley, coming as close as he ever would to describing his own religious disposition, he thought that for most people the most convincing argument came not from
an “abstract train of ideas” but from the world around: “Reasoning from the effect to the cause, ‘from nature to nature’s God,’ will be of the more universal and more persuasive application.” Madison recommended a work he had read by Samuel Clarke some fifty years before, perhaps remembering that Clarke, although constructing an a priori argument, also noted that the existence of an intelligent being “appears abundantly from the excellent variety, order, beauty, and wonderful contrivance and fitness of all things in the world.”10
Madison often responded at length to requests for his commentary on constitutional matters. When Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in McCulloch v. Maryland that the necessary and proper clause of the Constitution allowed Congress to enact legislation merely “appropriate” to carry out its constitutional mandates, Madison offered his critique to Virginia Appeals Court judge Spencer Roane, writing, “What is of most importance is the high sanction given to a latitude in expounding the Constitution which seems to break down the landmarks intended by a specification of the powers of Congress.” He added that “few if any of the friends of the Constitution” who were present at its birth anticipated “that a rule of construction would be introduced as broad and as pliant as what has occurred.” Moreover, he wrote, if such a rule had been set forth in the state conventions, it was hard to believe that the Constitution would have been ratified. When the Speaker of the House, Andrew Stevenson, asked him to expound on “the origin and innocence of the phrase ‘common defense and general welfare,’” Madison set out a history of the phrase in the Articles of Confederation, the Constitutional Convention, and the ratifying conventions to show that the words were regarded “merely as general terms, explained and limited by the subjoined specifications.”11
• • •
DESPITE POOR CROPS and poor prices, the Madisons entertained often and fulsomely. Hospitality was bred in the bone, a Virginia tradition that had to be honored even if it meant going into debt to do so. Twenty at the table was not unusual, and the food was abundant: “good soups, flesh, fish, and vegetables, well cooked—dessert and excellent wines of various kinds,” as one visitor described it. Some of those the Madisons entertained had been invited, but others, including those simply curious to meet the former president, were also welcomed.12
One of the early visitors to Montpelier, James K. Paulding, described the personal attention Madison paid him during a visit that lasted “some weeks.” After breakfast, they would converse on the portico: “He spoke without reserve … sometimes on literary and philosophical subjects and not infrequently—for he was a capital story teller—he would relate anecdotes highly amusing as well as interesting. He was a man of wit, relished wit in others, and his small, bright blue eyes would twinkle most wickedly when lighted up by some whimsical conception.” Mid-morning there would be a tour on horseback to different parts of the five-thousand-acre estate, with Madison nimbly mounting his horse (as he would be able to for many years to come), talking as he rode, and dexterously opening gates “with a crooked stick without dismounting.” The conversation was “sometimes didactic, sometimes scientific, and at others diverging to lighter topics.” As Madison gave a behind-the-scenes view of momentous happenings, Paulding learned, he later wrote, “that many great events arise from little causes and that as relates to the real motives and moving causes of public measures, history knows about as much of the past as she does of the future.”13
Guests arriving at Montpelier were shown into the red drawing room, where they found an abundance of paintings and statuary. The portraits that Gilbert Stuart had done of the president and Mrs. Madison were there, as well as Stuart’s portrait of Jefferson and a copy he had made of his original Washington. The room had many large paintings, including one four feet high and seven feet long to the right of the fireplace. It showed Pan admiring a scantily clad nymph and was likely among the artworks that Payne Todd brought home from Europe. Busts were everywhere. One could contemplate Homer and Socrates or turn to more recent history and admire Franklin and Lafayette. In front of one of the room’s floor-to-ceiling mirrors was a fine bronze figure of Napoleon at Elba, and the mantelpiece featured a bronze of Louis XVIII, who had been restored to the throne of France after Napoleon’s defeat in 1814. When the top of the French king’s statue was lifted off, visitors found a tiny figure of the former emperor inside.14
One of the drawing room’s finest features was that it opened to a portico and lawn in back of the house. Beyond the lawn were woods and mountains, which the drawing room’s large mirrors reflected. In summer, when the doors to the portico were opened, the sweet scent of the jasmine and roses that twined around the portico’s pillars drifted into the room, adding, in the words of one visitor, “an air of indescribable charm to the whole scene, like a bit of fairyland in this prosaic world.”15
Guests reported dining at about 4:00 p.m. and, after lingering over excellent wines, adjourning with the Madisons to the portico, where they could view the Blue Ridge Mountains and admire the classical temple that Madison had built to disguise the icehouse. There was also a telescope on the portico with which guests could amuse themselves by bringing distant fields into view and espying visitors as they wound their way up the road to Montpelier. One day, challenging a young guest to a footrace, Mrs. Madison told of another entertainment that the portico provided. “Madison and I often run races here when the weather does not allow us to walk,” she said.16
• • •
MADISON SPENT untold hours writing and talking to Jefferson about the creation of the University of Virginia, a project in which Jefferson had involved Madison even before he had settled back into Montpelier. Madison’s work on behalf of the university was more than dutiful service to a friend. As he explained to a correspondent in Kentucky, knowledge was essential to a free people: “A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” By establishing institutions of learning, the United States showed the world that free governments “are as favorable to the intellectual and moral improvement of man as they are conformable to his individual and social rights.” This thought led him to one of the most charming images in all of his writings. “What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable,” he asked, “than that of liberty and learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support?”17
The great walls of the university’s Rotunda, designed by Jefferson after the Pantheon in Rome, began to rise, and when the thrilling news came that Lafayette was to visit the United States, Jefferson invited him to dine in the magnificent building. In the early afternoon of November 4, 1824, the sixty-seven-year-old Lafayette arrived at Monticello, where he and the eighty-one-year-old Jefferson, who had been ill, had a tearful reunion. Madison, a spry seventy-three, joined them at sunset. “My old friend embraced me with great warmth,” he reported to Mrs. Madison. “He is in fine health and spirits but so much increased in bulk and changed in aspect that I should not have known him.”18
The next day the three men traveled from Monticello to the university in what a French visitor called an “elegant calash.” Cavalry accompanied them, and a large crowd followed. Lafayette and the two presidents walked up the lawn to the Rotunda amid much waving of handkerchiefs, and although the building was not quite complete, four hundred people were seated for dinner on the top floor beneath the dome. As a French visitor described the scene, “The sight of the nation’s guest seated at the patriotic banquet between Jefferson and Madison, excited in those present an enthusiasm which expressed itself in enlivening sallies of wit and humor. Mr. Madison … was especially remarkable for the originality of his expressions and the delicacy of his allusions.” From Monticello, Lafayette went to Montpelier, where one of the French guests observed that Madison’s “well preserved frame contained a youthful soul full of se
nsibility, which he did not hesitate to show when he expressed to General Lafayette the pleasure he felt at having him in his house.” Mrs. Madison was praised for “the graces of her mind” and the way that “the amenity of her character” exalted “the excellence of that frank hospitality with which strangers are received at Montpelier.”19
The university opened in March 1825. Jefferson, who had declared that it would “be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind,” shied away from prescribing “the principles which are to be taught”—except in the case of the law school. There he believed that the board of visitors ought to require certain texts: the Declaration of Independence, The Federalist, and the resolutions of Virginia against the Alien and Sedition Laws. Madison, seeing subtleties where his friend did not, argued that if books and documents were to be required, the list should be lengthened to include George Washington’s inaugural speech and Farewell Address. He also made the case that dictating the way these texts should be taught, which Jefferson clearly intended, would excite controversy and ultimately prove unworkable. “The most effectual safeguard against heretical intrusions into the school of politics,” Madison wrote, “will be an able and orthodox professor.”20 While he was ahead of Jefferson in his notion of academic freedom, that principle did not in his mind require the trustees of the university to blind themselves to the views of candidates for the law professor’s post—a feat that would have been impossible in any case.
