The convention also chose twenty-three-year-old Edmund Randolph as the state’s attorney general. It was another symbolic, if ironic, choice, as his father, now removed to England, held the very same post under the royal governor. In the Virginia manner, young Randolph was expected to carry on traditions. He would soon be elected to the board of governors of the College of William and Mary and supervise an investigation into the activities of three faculty members accused of harboring Loyalist sympathies. He soon became as regular a correspondent of Madison’s and Jefferson’s as Pendleton was, and their ally for the next twenty years.17
Governor Henry began his term bedridden with malarial fever and unable to take charge of state affairs. One of his colleagues thought that he had, in fact, died during his first week in office. There was, at least, some good news in the neighborhood: the hated Dunmore had fled and no longer posed a real threat. But to the north General Washington’s disastrous defeat in the Battle of Long Island delivered New York City into British hands, launching a season of worry and restlessness.
In mid-December Brigadier General Adam Stephen, a fifty-five-year-old Scottish-born Virginian, wrote to Jefferson from the Continental Army’s camp on the Delaware River. He was not sanguine. “The Enemy like locusts Sweep the Jerseys,” he grumbled, as he reported on the cruelty inflicted on innocents. “They to the disgrace of a Civilisd Nation Ravish the fair Sex, from the Age of Ten to Seventy.” Secret Tories were selling out American interests with apparent impunity; a prominent American general, Charles Lee, was just taken prisoner. General Stephen knew George Washington well, having fought by his side in the French and Indian War, but his confidence in Washington at this point was limited. “The Enemy have made greater progress than they themselves expected,” he told Jefferson.
A few days would change conditions on the ground and lift Washington’s prospects. Indeed, by the time Jefferson read Adam Stephen’s letter, the commander of American forces had crossed the Delaware and redeemed himself with surprise attacks on British and Hessian troops at Trenton and Princeton. As hopeful and timely as this news was, Washington made it clear to Congress and his home state alike that his army was in desperate need of supplies. Negligence, incompetence, and bickering among officers over rank made his job doubly trying. He would have no complaint from a new recruit who had sailed from France on a vessel called La Victoire and who would put himself, his men, and his money at Washington’s disposal. The idealistic, nineteen-year-old Marquis de Lafayette was hungry for battle. Washington made the teenager a major general and put him in charge of a division of Virginia militia. He would have no regrets for having done so.18
Congress had issued a request to the states for troops. After an initial surge, it was clear by mid-1777 that enlistments had plummeted. Two years into the war, recruiters, including the twenty-year-old Captain James Monroe, admitted that they would have to turn to unethical means of conscription if they were to meet quotas. Madison’s younger brother Ambrose was an officer who had first joined the Revolution as a member of the Culpeper Minutemen. While Ambrose remained in the war, James Madison, Sr., raised troops and supplies in Orange.19
War exposed the fragility of the Union. Sectional divisions temporarily suppressed in Congress reemerged in the ranks of the military. Though Washington, a Virginian, had been named commander of the Continental Army in 1775, it did not take New Englanders long to hear that he had rudely smeared their officers for exhibiting the same “unaccountable stupidity” as their lower-class privates. In the autumn of 1776 John Adams, never known for humility himself, mocked the arrogant Virginians for believing that everyone from their state acted heroically; he had heard that they were calling the troops of the North “poltroons”—gutless. Mutual distrust and jealousy lingered, surfacing at crucial moments in the war.20
Communication of war news was often sketchy and unreliable. In the midst of this uncertainty, George Mason proposed “for the Preservation of the State, that the usual forms of government shou’d be suspended” and “additional powers be given to the Governour and Council.” He wanted Patrick Henry to be granted the power to exercise the legislative as well as executive functions of the state, to be a dictator “during the present imminent Danger of America & the Ruin & Misery which threatens the good People of this Common-Wealth.” The general anxiety over America’s military prospects was making cautious men amenable to extraordinary quick fixes. Even so, the idea of a Henry dictatorship quickly fizzled. It is not clear whether Henry himself was complicit in the proposal; he likely was not, though Jefferson later insisted that the first American-born governor of Virginia had in fact solicited unwarranted powers.
In May 1777, in a letter from Williamsburg, Jefferson elaborated on his concerns to his former congressional ally John Adams, who was still in Philadelphia. While all was quiet where Adams was, the people of Virginia were becoming, said Jefferson, “lethargick and insensible of the state they are in.” The phrase “lethargick and insensible” belonged to that unmistakable eighteenth-century vocabulary that bridged medicine and politics. Jefferson meant that by being dulled to reason, Virginians were no longer able to perceive their own best interests. He wanted more done to secure the Union without compromising its republican character and without investing power in any one individual. Soon afterward Patrick Henry was reelected without opposition to another one-year term. Jefferson had no comment—at least none that was recorded.21
Madison was unable to contribute to state-level politics during this period, because in April 1777 he lost reelection to the House of Delegates. As he and his allies subsequently explained, the candidate had not made himself personally available to his Orange neighbors or treated the voters to free food and drink, as his opponent had done. While gentlemen often derided the practice, “treating” had roots deep in colonial life and was by no means confined to the South. In Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia, for instance, assembly candidates campaigned openly and sometimes took out newspaper ads. When Franklin himself lost in a 1764 reelection bid, one of his devotees quipped that he had “died like a philosopher,” or, lost without cheapening his principles. There is nothing to suggest that Madison “died” any less a “philosopher” in the spring of 1777.22
He was gone from Williamsburg but not forgotten. The Princeton-educated delegate from Orange had made enough of a mark on the minds of his colleagues that after some months away (presumably at home with his parents), he was called back by a clear majority of the legislature and made a member of the select Council of Advisors to Governor Henry. Given that the new state constitution prevented the governor from acting without the cooperation of his eight advisers, Madison described the situation not as it literally was, a governor and eight councilors, but as “eight governors and a councilor.” He would be working closely with the lieutenant governor—the leader of the council—who in this case was John Page, Jefferson’s committed friend. If Madison and Jefferson were drawing closer, it was still by indirect means. Jefferson was in Williamsburg when Madison arrived, but once again they appear not to have interacted.23
In updating Virginia’s legal code, Jefferson collaborated with three elders. One was George Mason, once hesitant to remain in politics, now suddenly ubiquitous; the second was Pendleton; and the third, his college law professor, George Wythe, whom Jefferson called “one of the greatest men of the age.” The bills they drafted to cover immediate needs included a wartime measure to indemnify the governor and his Council of Advisors from any decision to forcibly remove from areas where they could easily communicate with the enemy “persons whose affections to the American Cause were suspected.” A “Bill concerning Inoculation for Smallpox” was designed to encourage and regulate vaccination, ordering those who had been inoculated (i.e., mildly infected) to stay out of the public until their “distemper” passed. Anyone intentionally spreading smallpox would be punished with a stiff fine or a prison term. Another bill Jefferson was integrally involved in established a land office. This gave the
state the right to determine settlement patterns in “unappropriated” lands, the idea being to promote population growth and ensure settlers’ loyalty while adding revenue.24
As Madison and Jefferson focused on the future of Virginia, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia began debate on the Articles of Confederation, a blueprint for national government. Though the states had united, the closest thing to a common government was the Continental Congress—with its constantly rotating personnel, hardly a central government.
The thirteen articles presented in 1777 declared a “firm league of friendship” and a “perpetual union,” yet the Union remained, for all intents and purposes, a collection of independent republics. Congress under the Articles of Confederation would control coinage but would not have the right to levy taxes or regulate overseas trade; its central government lacked executive and judicial branches. Regardless of size or population, the states were to have equal power—one state, one vote. That equality was not to be altered whether a state sent as few as two or as many as seven delegates to Congress; and a two-thirds majority of the states was needed to pass legislation.
Only Virginia was prepared to sign the Articles right away. Several of the states without claims to western territory wanted states like Virginia, whose claims extended all the way to the Mississippi, to cede their questionable lands to the general government. The most resistant was neighboring Maryland. Given Virginians’ pride in size, debates over land were destined to delay ratification of the Articles of Confederation for four more years.25
“Every Nerve Should Be Strained”
Reverend Madison resumed his professorial duties at the College of William and Mary. He resumed, as well, communication with his patron Jefferson. Unfortunately, their extant letters mainly show a shared concern with astronomical observations, but they were surely comparing ideas about education too. In the spring of 1777 the elder of Williamsburg’s two James Madisons became president of the college. His agreeable cousin, as a member of the governor’s Council of Advisors, came to board with him the following January; and in appreciation for his kinsman’s hospitality, James Madison, Jr., asked his father to send from the country “dried fruits &tc which Mr. Madison [the college president] is very fond of.” It was the least he could do, he said, to compensate for the “culinary favours” he daily received.
Although the identically named cousins disagreed on the thorny issue of disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Virginia, their friendship unquestionably deepened in these years. Meanwhile Jefferson took steps to convince the state government to provide public support to the college—his alma mater—by enlarging its faculty and adding “useful sciences” to the curriculum. He did not succeed, but knowing what Jefferson was up to, Reverend Madison did his utmost to preserve the integrity of the college that he had rescued from Tory hands.26
A short walk from the college, Governor Henry adapted to the routine of government. The man whom Jefferson considered an ill-educated opportunist had but little opportunity to improvise or even to sound eloquent. Virginia may not have been under direct attack, but these were nonetheless the darkest years of the war. Financial concerns were overwhelming. Hard money was hard to find across America, except among the British forces; as a result Pennsylvania farmers succumbed to temptation, feeding the enemy. Philadelphia fell to the British in the autumn of 1777, prompting Congress to move for a time to York, Pennsylvania. As the enemy enjoyed Philadelphia’s relative comfort, Washington’s men faced a severe winter and endured privation at Valley Forge.
Madison was one of four councilors who signed on to an official communication from the Executive Council, advising the governor to ship “good rum,” wine, sugar, and other food stores to “the exhausted part of America” where Washington’s army was situated. That was about all Virginia could to do. The state did not, at this or any other time, draft the numbers of troops Washington requested.27
In the spring of 1778 news from abroad improved America’s prospects. Veteran diplomat Benjamin Franklin had succeeded in securing French recognition of American independence. The two nations signed a treaty of amity and commerce, and French military aid would shortly follow. At this expectant moment James Madison was returned to the House of Delegates, voted back in by the same men of Orange County who had turned him out the year before. But ineligible to serve simultaneously on the Governor’s Council and in the legislature, he opted for the former and remained dutifully at Henry’s side another year.28
Eight years apart in age, Madison and Jefferson lived very different lives at this time. One was single, the other married with one daughter and a second on the way. Madison went where he was wanted; Jefferson wrestled with his own ambition and stubbornly pressed on. Since the fall of 1776 he more or less commuted between Monticello and Williamsburg. His wife, Patty, did not stay long in the capital, returning to Albemarle for her two pregnancies in 1777 and 1778. The first produced a son who lived but a few weeks, the only son Jefferson had with his wife. Then in August 1778 Mary (Maria) was born. She and her older sister Patsy would be the only two of the Jeffersons’ six children to reach adulthood.
Though there was a war on, it was centered elsewhere, so the squire of Monticello kept to his dreams as a builder. He devoted himself to the enlargement of his mountaintop plantation, producing tens of thousands of bricks and planting fruit trees—an enterprise he had begun almost a decade before. In 1769, when his building plans were just ripening, he had called his home “The Hermitage.” Soon afterward, the idiosyncratic Italianesque name “Monticello” came to him. Thinking broadly, he sketched out the design for attractive two- and five-room cottages for his white workforce and for the select slave families he wished to settle on Mulberry Row, just below the stylish house where he resided. By the time he actually got around to building along Mulberry Row, however, the slave cabins were humbler than what he had first imagined.
In 1778 Jefferson owned a total of 13,700 acres in six Virginia counties. The Monticello property amounted to 1,000 acres, and he held another 3,225 acres in several sites around Albemarle. From his father-in-law he inherited 7,661 acres in Bedford County, two days’ ride south; there he would eventually build the octagonal Poplar Forest house, where as an ex-president he would escape when Monticello was overrun with adoring pilgrims and curious strangers. For now, though, Jefferson was a man of business trained in the law, a wheat and tobacco farmer, a gentleman architect, and a man of taste. His stature as a lawgiver was constantly growing.29
In 1778 Virginia’s political leaders were prepared to believe that the alliance with France would result in British recognition of their “independency.” Richard Henry Lee wrote to Jefferson from Congress that May: “Our enemies are sore pressed.” But at the same time, Lee was desperate for the Virginia Assembly to raise more troops and urged: “For God’s sake, for the love of our Country, my dear friend, let more vigorous measures be quickly adopted for re-enforcing the Army.” Members of the Assembly tried, but they continued to have only limited success in recruitment.
Always a numbers man, Jefferson maintained a tally of enemy killed, wounded, and taken prisoner in the first two years of fighting. He estimated that the American side had lost half as many as the British. He was a member of the legislative committee that raised a new battalion to defend Virginia’s port cities. Each man who enlisted was to be paid ten dollars and bear no obligation to fight outside the state.
Jefferson kept coming up with ideas. He proposed conscription of a cavalry regiment in place of more foot soldiers. To continue previously unsuccessful methods of finding volunteers assured more failure. Besides, he figured he knew the sort of man who would serve in the cavalry. As he wrote to Lee, this “new fund” of recruits would be “those whose indolence or education, has unfitted them for foot-service.” Just as he thought he had found the source of a “weak and sickly” adoration of monarchy and aristocracy in impaired nerves, he now felt that “indolence” among young men denoted a preference for o
ne form of military service over another. It was his habit to identify fundamental defects of character and intricate moral explanations for human behavior, a prejudice and a conceit he would never outgrow.
He had a sense of purpose beyond the political, of course. At thirty-five, he saw himself as unfulfilled unless he could devote his mind to philosophical musings and scientific observation. Associating the study of Virginia’s climate with its people’s prospects for happiness, he addressed the Italian Giovanni Fabbroni, the friend of a friend, and suggested that they share temperature measurements—he already compared weather conditions in Williamsburg and Monticello with Reverend Madison, John Page, and others. “Tho’ much of my time is employed in the councils of America,” Jefferson wrote Fabbroni, “I have yet a little leisure to indulge my fondness for philosophical studies.” At the heart of this particular communication was an appeal to Fabbroni to convince Italian musicians and singers to come to America, where, Jefferson promised, they would always find useful employment. Music was, he pronounced, “the favorite passion of my soul, and fortune has cast my lot in a country where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism.” He reached for cultural expression in the interest of improvement.30
Jefferson’s close friend Philip (Filippo) Mazzei, who had put him in touch with fellow Florentine Fabbroni, had lived literally around the corner from Monticello since 1773. Mazzei had been passing through central Virginia looking for a place to settle and experiment with viticulture. Jefferson, whose love of wine would later become legend, convinced him that he should purchase the nearby property; he boarded Mazzei at Monticello until his house was ready for occupancy. In this way, by the outbreak of the Revolution, Jefferson learned to speak the Tuscan strain of Italian and helped to mold his neighbor into an American patriot. They would exchange plants and seeds for years to come.31
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