The Great Divide

by Thomas Fleming

  The man who lived dangerously was about to take the riskiest gamble of his drama-filled life.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Man Who Loved to Legislate—But Hated to Govern

  JAMES MADISON’S FRIENDSHIP WITH George Washington never achieved the intimacy of the congressman’s relationship with Thomas Jefferson. The twenty-eight-year-old Madison had already served a year as councillor to Governor Patrick Henry when the thirty-six-year-old Jefferson was elected to succeed the famous orator in June 1779. Madison was undoubtedly aware of Jefferson’s role in drafting the Declaration of Independence and other noteworthy revolutionary documents, such as his defiant 1774 essay, A Summary View of the Rights of America.

  In 1777–78, Jefferson had been chairman of a committee in Virginia’s legislature that submitted a staggering 126 bills aimed at eliminating “every trace…of ancient or future aristocracy.” One wonders how he thought that the delegates, absorbed in the challenge of fighting a war for survival, could be expected to overhaul the structure of their government at the same time. It was a glimpse of a streak of unrealism in Jefferson’s personality—an inclination to put words—especially his own words—ahead of practical considerations.

  One bill, abolishing the Anglican faith as an established church, engulfed the legislature in angry debate for weeks, without reaching a decision. Another, calling for universal education, was much too expensive for the cash-strapped state to undertake. Only the law abolishing “entail”—making the eldest son the sole inheritor of a father’s wealth—won swift passage. The lawmakers failed to act on almost all of Jefferson’s other proposals. But the magnitude of the effort made it clear that he saw himself as a man ready to break new ground in the art and science of government.

  In 1776, Jefferson had been placed on a five-man committee of the Continental Congress that was charged with producing a Declaration of Independence as soon as possible. A huge British fleet and army was heading for New York and the embryo American nation badly needed a rallying cry. The committee chose Jefferson to write the draft because he was a Virginian—the same reason Congress had chosen George Washington to lead the Continental Army. It was vital to give leadership tasks to the largest state in the rebellious confederation lest the brewing revolution seem like a New England uproar that could be dismissed as all too typical of the argumentative ex-Puritans.

  Jefferson worked extremely hard on his appointed task. In 1943, a fragment of one of his early drafts was found in his papers. No less than 43 of the 156 words were additions or substitutions for words and phrases he had deleted. The opening paragraphs throb with a deeper, richer emotion than any other public document Jefferson ever wrote. Best among these sentences was one he never had to change: “We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

  Jefferson’s fellow committee members, who included John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, made several word changes in his draft. But their editing was mild compared to the going-over that Congress gave the document. They threw out whole paragraphs and totally revised the ending. Jefferson was outraged—a little known fact that one distinguished historian has wryly mocked. Drafters of documents were not expected to take such a personal interest in their hastily prepared words.

  “This was no hack editing job,” the same historian acidly added. “The delegates who labored over the draft…had a splendid ear for language.” Along with a vastly improved ending, the editors twice added the word “God”—a player in the drama that Jefferson seemed inclined to ignore, if not dismiss. Rather than accept the judgment of his editor-peers, Jefferson laboriously made copies of his original draft and sent them to several friends as proof that his version was far superior. He, of course, got sympathetic replies. Most later readers have concluded that Congress’s version was both more powerful—and more eloquent.1

  All in all, the lanky (6’ 2”) Virginian from Albermarle County, who lived in a spectacular mansion on the summit of a mountain, probably had an intimidating aura of superiority for slight James Madison. At this point in his life, his public accomplishments had not extended beyond his readiness to serve when summoned. As the oldest son of James Madison, Sr., proprietor of Montpelier, and the most prominent landowner in Orange County, Madison had been elected to the Virginia legislature in 1776. But he was much too self-effacing to make an impression on Jefferson or anyone else at that time.

  The long hours the two men spent together as governor and councillor, discussing with the other seven councillors the problems and perils of wartime Virginia, soon created an intimacy that deepened steadily throughout the next six months. Jefferson soon regarded Madison as his most valuable advisor. As Jefferson put it in later years, he learned to rely on “the rich resources of his luminous and discriminating mind and of his extensive information.”2

  The diffident Madison’s thinking on government was probably stimulated by the limitations of Virginia’s constitution. In their fear of executive tyranny, the Old Dominion’s framers had given the governor a minimum of executive power. Madison told one friend the office really consisted of “eight governors and a councillor.” Even then, the legislature retained 98 percent of the power. It is interesting and perhaps significant that Thomas Jefferson’s 126 proposed new laws made no effort to change this aspect of Virginia’s government. He apparently shared the framers’ fear of executive tyranny.

  At the close of 1779, the Virginia House of Delegates elected Madison to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and he began a correspondence with Thomas Jefferson that would eventually number 1,250 letters over the next forty years. Madison was soon signing many of his letters “your friend,” an expression that Jefferson quickly reciprocated. In one of his first letters, the new congressman told the governor “our public situation…continues equally perplexed and alarming.” It was the first of a series of grim truths about the struggle for independence that intensified Jefferson’s already mounting anxiety about Virginia’s and the nation’s survival.3

  Six days after Governor Jefferson took office in 1779, he had written to his friend William Fleming (no relation to the author), who was a Virginia delegate in Congress. The new governor asked if there was any truth to the rumor that the British were willing to make peace but Congress was dragging its collective feet on a negotiation. “It would surely be better to carry on a war ten years hence,” Jefferson wrote, “than to continue the present [one] an unnecessary moment.”4

  If the British had gotten their hands on that letter, their propagandists would have had a field day chortling about how the drafter of the Declaration of Independence wanted to drop out of the war. The letter again suggests a surprising strain of impracticality in Jefferson’s political judgment. No nation can “drop out” of a war and resume it ten years later.

  The impulsive words were triggered by Governor Jefferson’s discovery of Virginia’s daunting problems. Inflation was making the paper money printed by the Continental Congress a bitter joke. The same thing was happening to paper dollars printed by Virginia. Governor Jefferson had no authority to curtail this debilitating flood, which was destroying patriot morale everywhere.

  The governor had even less control over defending Virginia from attack. The state’s weak militia law enabled men to avoid service for the most trivial excuses, and Jefferson, a stickler about exact obedience to the will of the legislature, was loath to stretch the government’s authority, even in a looming crisis. In the spring of 1779, a British fleet had dropped anchor in Chesapeake Bay and sent ashore two thousand men. They captured a supposedly strong seacoast fort, burned the town of Suffolk, and cut a swath of fiery destruction across several dozen square miles of Virginia’s Tidewater district, without losing a man.

  This foray was the first glimpse of a change in British strategy. After four frustrating years of trying to subdue the Revolution in the North, George III
’s generals had decided to make the southern states their main target. Governor Jefferson could only watch helplessly while other British troops surged from Florida to conquer Georgia with dismaying ease. Next a redcoated army and fleet descended from New York to besiege Charleston, South Carolina, trapping a five thousand-man American army inside the city.

  Congress did nothing but wring its collective hands. Madison reported a vague hope that the defenders could hold out until a French fleet forced the British to retreat. Jefferson wrote urgent letters to General Washington, asking him for help. But Washington, facing a British army in New York that outnumbered his Continentals, 3-1, could do nothing for him.

  Other Madison letters from Congress reinforced the harsh limitations that General Washington confronted. The public treasury was empty and the private credit of men trying to buy food for the army was equally exhausted. More and more, the leadership of the war was in Washington’s hands. He even began publishing a newspaper to refute the propaganda pouring from British headquarters in New York. As Madison told Governor Jefferson in one of his gloomiest letters, Congress’s role had undergone “a total change” since 1776. In those glorious days, the solons printed paper money by the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The cash gave them the power to issue orders to the states. Now, with the money depreciated to wastepaper, Madison wrote that Congress was “as…dependent on the states as the King of England on the Parliament.”

  Worse, the states exhibited little or no inclination to respond to Congress’s pleas to send food and fresh men to the Continental Army. Madison feared they were approaching a moment when “every thing must inevitably go wrong or come to a total stop.”5

  While Madison and a few others tried to rouse the floundering Congress, Charleston’s five thousand defenders surrendered on May 12, 1780. The British army promptly invaded the rest of prostrate South Carolina. The Charleston captives included most of Virginia’s Continental regiments. A few weeks later, British cavalry destroyed another Virginia regiment that had been fleeing the doomed city. On August 16, 1780, at Camden, South Carolina, bayonet-wielding redcoats routed an army sent south under the command of Congress’s favorite general, Horatio Gates. Their ranks included seven hundred Virginia militia that Governor Jefferson had mustered with not a little difficulty. General Gates fled the battlefield and did not stop galloping rearward for 160 miles. His reputation never recovered.

  Jefferson’s reputation also suffered a dent with some Virginians, who thought he should have accompanied the militia to the battlefield and rallied them with words as stirring as those he wrote in the Declaration of Independence. Joseph Jones, the senior member of Virginia’s congressional delegation, went so far as to hope Jefferson would lead these men in the battle. Under Virginia’s constitution, the governor was the commander in chief of the militia. The idea had not even occurred to Governor Jefferson. He had no pretensions to expertise—and not much interest—in military matters.6

  In June of 1780, at the end of his first year as governor, Jefferson tried to resign. Shocked letters from close friends warned him that his reputation would never recover if he abandoned the leadership of the state in the midst of a crisis. It is a first glimpse of Jefferson’s reluctance to wield executive power—and his puzzling lack of enthusiasm for playing the role of an effective leader. Wearily, with no uplifting words about patriotism and duty, Jefferson agreed to serve another year.

  If Congressman Madison heard about his friend’s attempted resignation, he did not mention it in his letters. Madison had more distressing news to report—“the sudden defection of Major General Benedict Arnold and his flight to the enemy.” Madison told how Arnold had almost succeeded in surrendering the Hudson River fortress of West Point to the British, trapping General Washington, the French ambassador, and the Marquis de Lafayette in the snare.7

  Three months later, an agitated messenger galloped into Richmond to warn Governor Jefferson that another enemy fleet and army were in the Chesapeake. The commander was newly minted British Brigadier Benedict Arnold, and he soon headed up the James River with fifteen hundred men. Governor Jefferson had refused to believe the warning and had waited two days to summon the militia in the three counties around Richmond. A paltry two hundred men turned out. Meanwhile, the Governor had to get his terrified wife and three daughters out of the menaced capital to a nearby plantation. Martha Jefferson had given birth to a baby girl only two months earlier and was still far from well.

  Riding back to Richmond along the opposite side of the James River, Jefferson arrived to find Arnold burning tobacco warehouses and other property in the capital. A redcoated detachment marched up the river to Westham, where they destroyed the foundry and shops that made Virginia’s muskets. With scarcely a hostile shot fired at him, Brigadier Arnold returned to the coast and set up a permanent base at Portsmouth, where he was soon reinforced by another two thousand men.

  Although Virginia had at least fifty thousand men on her militia rolls, Governor Jefferson could not raise enough soldiers to dislodge the British, who repeatedly ravaged the countryside, burning shipyards, ships, and huge quantities of tobacco. In the midst of this public ordeal came a wrenching personal loss—five-month-old Lucy Elizabeth Jefferson died in Richmond, leaving her mother prostrate with grief.

  Two weeks later, Brigadier Arnold came up the James River again, once more forcing Governor Jefferson to flee into the countryside with his family. The climax to this ordeal was the invasion of Virginia by Charles, General Lord Cornwallis, the British commander in the Carolinas. He had decided that the rest of the South would not be pacified until Virginia was knocked out of the war. Combined with the garrison in Portsmouth, he had eighty-two hundred men.

  Governor Jefferson, his councillors, and the legislature fled west to Charlottesville. Cornwallis rumbled through the countryside, burning and looting at will. The state’s morale sank to the vanishing point. One of Jefferson’s closest friends, John Page, wailed: “I am ashamed and ever shall be to call myself a Virginian.”8

  At this political nadir, Jefferson informed the legislature that June 2, 1781, would mark the end of his second year as governor, and he did not intend to serve another term. The state’s desperate situation made his decision even more incredible to people who had witnessed George Washington’s refusal to quit after shattering defeats in 1776 and 1777, capped by the ordeal at Valley Forge. It was even more unnerving evidence that Jefferson seemed to place little or no value on his role as the revolutionary leader of Virginia.

  Some months earlier, on March 23, 1781, the Governor had told James Madison in a personal letter that he intended to step down. But he seems never to have revealed his intentions to anyone else. Madison had replied, on April 3, that he could not “forbear lamenting that the state in its present crisis is to lose the benefit of your administration.” But he was sure that Jefferson had “weighed well the reasons” for the decision, and Madison would lament it henceforth “in silence.” This was an extremely polite way of saying Jefferson was making a mistake—and an almost pathetic glimpse of Madison’s deference to his friend.9

  The Governor’s political timing could not have been worse. Early on June 4, two days after his resignation, an agitated horseman came pounding up the steep road to Monticello’s summit, shouting: “Tarleton is coming!” Redhaired Colonel Banastre Tarleton was the most feared cavalry leader in the British army. In a bid to demolish the last shreds of Virginia’s resistance, General Cornwallis had sent Tarleton and 250 of his green-coated horsemen on a hundred-mile dash west to scatter the legislature and capture Governor Jefferson. They had thudded through the Virginia countryside without a shot fired at them—more evidence of the almost total collapse of Virginia’s will to resist the royal invaders.

  The ex-governor’s only option was another flight with his terrified wife, Martha, and their two daughters, to a nearby plantation. Returning to Monticello to order silver and other valuables hidden, Jefferson had the unpleasant experience of lookin
g down on the main street of Charlottesville through his spyglass and seeing Tarleton’s horsemen riding down fleeing members of the legislature. The beat of hooves on Monticello’s winding road warned him that a detachment of dragoons was heading his way, making it wise for him to retire from the vicinity as rapidly as possible.

  In July, a rump group of legislators assembled at Staunton, Virginia, on the other side of the Blue Ridge Mountains, to affirm that the demoralized state still had a government. They elected a new governor and, at the suggestion of one member, resolved that an inquiry be made “into the conduct of the Executive of this state for the past twelve months.” The man behind this nasty proposal was Patrick Henry. He was disgusted with Governor Jefferson’s performance and had decided it was time to get rid of him as one of Virginia’s leaders.

  Nothing in Thomas Jefferson’s political career would ever wound him so deeply. He did not write a letter to James Madison for the next five months, nor did Madison write to him. They did not even exchange comments on the extraordinary transformation of the war. In mid-September 1781, General Washington and America’s French allies marched to Virginia to cooperate with the French West Indies fleet and trap General Lord Cornwallis and his army in the port of Yorktown. After a bombardment that lasted little more than a week, the British surrendered, rescuing Virginia and the rest of the crumbling American confederacy from imminent collapse.