Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  Through his personal connection with the enterprising Italian, Jefferson came up with an idea of political cunning and advanced it to John Hancock in Congress. Mazzei was interested in soliciting financial support for America’s cause in Europe, and Jefferson thought it possible for the commercial Italians, with “immense sums” in London banks, to create financial chaos for Britain by demanding a return of their money all at once. It may have been unrealistic—a magical solution to a complex problem—but Jefferson could not resist speculating on a covert Italian operation. He imagined money flowing across the Atlantic and money drying up in London. “We might do something clever with them,” he wrote Hancock of the Italians, “supplying our wants, and perhaps rendering our Enemies bankrupt.”32

  In the first months of 1779, as Governor Henry neared the end of his third one-year term and was constitutionally ineligible for a fourth, he married into the socially prominent Dandridge family. His bride brought twelve slaves to their marriage: Henry now owned forty-two slaves, approximately half as many as Jefferson. The new husband improved his lot by purchasing a ten-thousand-acre plantation in a county that bore his name, near the Virginia–North Carolina border. Henry County had come into being in the first year of his governorship.33

  Despite a widening war, Virginia was still not directly threatened. Some were quite positive about the future. Alert to the fact that Great Britain was unlikely to receive practical encouragement from the other European powers, Richard Henry Lee repeated his aggressive optimism in a letter to Jefferson: “With our present prospects every nerve should be strained to make the Army strong. By being prepared we shall have a moral certainty of defeating the designs of our enemies the next campaign, which will in my opinion put a glorious period to the war.” Even in anticipating the enemy’s southern campaign, Lee maintained his confidence: “If we can baffle the Southern invasion … they will be compelled by inevitable necessity to be content with the loss of thirteen flourishing states.” Jefferson’s old friend Will Fleming, from the same vantage point in Philadelphia, was less sanguine than Lee: “I am apprehensive the enemy will commit great ravages before an effectual check can be given to their progress,” he wrote. Morale would be hard to sustain with the invaders’ numbers holding steady.34

  National unity was by no means assured. Fleming said it as well as any better-known patriot of the Revolutionary era: “I have heard much, but seen very little of patriotism and public virtue: If there is any remains of it in America, this is the season for calling it forth, and for its utmost exertions.”35 Evincing his primary concern for Virginia’s political foundation, Jefferson continued to advance ideas on the revisal of laws to Mason, Wythe, and Pendleton. Madison would much later observe that, after the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson’s work on the revisal was “the most severe” of his labors as a statesman. Mason, suffering from gout and barely able to stand for five minutes at a time, recognized how invaluable Jefferson was. This was why his legislative colleagues were pleased to make Thomas Jefferson governor. As the Albemarle representative left the House of Delegates to take on executive responsibilities, Mason realized that it would be left to him to pick up the slack, despite his aches and pains.36

  Madison remained in Williamsburg as a member of the Governor’s Council. His proximity to power had made him one of Virginia’s leading men. As yet neither Madison nor Jefferson could have predicted that their intimacy, which we can date to this moment, would have long-lasting implications. Indeed, Virginia as a whole was unprepared for all that was to come during the administration of Governor Jefferson—when the acrimony accompanying an invasion gave rise to new friendships and gave evidence of incompetence to Jefferson’s sworn enemies.

  “Quixotism”

  During the final six months of 1779 Madison and Jefferson grew to respect each other and work in partnership. One might say that the constitutional requirement that Virginia’s governor act in concert with the members of his Council of Advisors was the impetus behind a historic collaboration.

  Jefferson rarely plunged ahead in politics, or accepted any new public role, without deliberating at length. Though he would spend upward of forty years in colonial, Revolutionary, and federal government, he had a habit of protesting his public service and periodically announcing to friends his intention to retire to family life. Edward Rutledge of South Carolina had no doubt heard such reluctance to serve from Jefferson’s lips while they were in Philadelphia; in a letter of February 1779 he made light of the Virginian’s resolve to remove to Monticello permanently and devote himself to study: “When you have condescended to come down from above and interest yourself in Human Affairs …,” he prefaced an appeal to Jefferson on a matter of political import.37

  Jefferson had first intimated to Pendleton in the summer of 1776 that he craved the quiet of private life. As Pendleton had done then, he did once again in May 1779, urging Jefferson not to quit politics. In 1777 Pendleton had suffered a debilitating fall from his horse, broke his hip, and for the remainder of his life was forced to walk with crutches. Though most would have retired after such a calamity, he stayed active in state government. Jefferson, in his prime, had no such excuse, and two weeks before his election as governor, he heard from Virginia’s senior statesman, then resting at his Caroline County plantation of Edmundsbury: “You are too young to Ask that happy quietus from the Public, and should at least postpone it ’til you have taught the rising Generation, the forms as well as the Substantial principles of legislation.” To which Pendleton added, “A Correspondence with you will give me much pleasure.”38

  Jefferson assumed the governorship at the beginning of June 1779. It was painfully ironic to him that he should have become governor by defeating his dear friend John Page. The candidates’ “respective friends” had made them competitors in a close contest neither had invited. “It was their competition, not ours,” Jefferson wrote sensitively, reflecting on a friendship that extended to the two men’s wives.39

  He now resided in the governor’s palace, where Lord Dunmore had lived in splendor a few short, tumultuous years earlier. Patty and their two little girls were away at her relatives’ and would not arrive in Williamsburg for many weeks, while the new state executive reconciled himself to his situation by attaching himself to three of the members of his Council of Advisors: Page, Madison, and another boyhood friend and Albemarle neighbor, John Walker. Most of the papers relating to Jefferson’s formal meetings with his councilors are missing, making it difficult to detail the moment when Madison’s advice first appealed to him. All we have to judge from are the words Madison recorded in a letter four years after Jefferson’s death, in which he said of 1779 that “a friendship was formed, which was for life, and which was never interrupted in the slightest degree for a single moment.”40

  Some of Jefferson’s legislative initiatives came before the Assembly in his first year as governor. Clearly unfazed by their differences over church establishment, Pendleton wrote to him: “I am impatient to se [sic] what you call your Quixotism for the diffusion of knowledge.” This was when Bill no. 79, on education policy, was presented for debate. Its opening paragraph stated that the best way to prevent tyranny was to “illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large.” Jefferson’s plan would have had the Assembly choose three “honest and able” men each year to serve in each county as aldermen, charged with establishing schools; the aldermen in turn would name an “overseer” to appoint and evaluate teachers. All children, boys and girls, were to be entitled to three years of free elementary education, and to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, as well as Greek, Roman, English, and American history. Poor but promising boys would go on to free grammar school, studying Latin and Greek languages, geography, and higher math.

  The “quixotic” aspect of Jefferson’s proposal was its assertion that impoverished circumstances should not be a barrier to social advancement. It was axiomatic for him that native talent should be rewarded and the republic’s
leaders drawn from a wide pool. Assemblyman Jefferson was wholeheartedly invested in Bill no. 79, but Governor Jefferson seems to have recognized that, in the midst of a costly war, his liberal plan stood little chance of being funded by the state.

  Bill no. 80, which directly followed, detailed the nearly hundred-year history of the College of William and Mary and proposed legislation that would expand the number of professorships and guarantee the state’s financial commitment to an institution that educated “the future guardians of the rights and liberties of their country.” Its Revolutionary language proved to be window dressing, and Bill no. 80, like Bill no. 79, had fantasy written all over it. It soon became clear that Jefferson’s painstaking labor on the laws of Virginia had been done prematurely. It would fall to Madison to reintroduce Jefferson’s agenda to the Virginia Assembly after the war, when Jefferson himself was abroad and unable to exert any direct influence.41

  “Retaliation Becomes an Act of Benevolence”

  Naturally the war was of paramount importance to all of the nation’s governors. But because of the extent of Virginia’s land claims, the matter of British and Indian positions in remote areas of the West consumed Jefferson’s time as soon as he entered office. In mid-1776 he had prepared a series of recommendations for Pendleton, which he humbly called “undigested stuff,” advocating the sale of western lands to people who had little to invest and everything to lose. This plan made more sense to Jefferson than permitting vast tracts of land to be gobbled up by the very rich.42

  Now in 1779 his chief contact in the distant reaches of the known West was the Virginian with the greatest experience there, Albemarle’s George Rogers Clark. (Clark’s much younger brother William would later team with Meriwether Lewis, the scion of another Albemarle family, to explore the trans-Mississippi during Jefferson’s presidency.) Clark, a redhead like Jefferson and a year younger than Madison, was well known to both future presidents. He had on many occasions visited the Jefferson property. In his teens, he had studied at the school of Scotsman Donald Robertson, where Madison boarded prior to attending Princeton. Though records are scant, Madison and Clark must have overlapped at Robertson’s.43

  Clark was not a scholar but a surveyor and frontier fighter, an “adventurer” who captured the Virginian imagination. Like the similarly formed George Washington, he identified with the cause of land speculators before going on to distinguish himself in war. At the time of the massacre of Chief Logan’s family in 1774, he was traveling along the Ohio River with the Indian’s antagonist, Michael Cresap. Surveying the Kentucky River on behalf of the Ohio Company in 1775, Clark wrote home that he intended to settle near Frankfort, “ingrossing all ye Land I possibly Can.” He urged his father to join him.

  Whether by accident or by habit, George Rogers Clark ended up in the middle of multiple conflicts: Dunmore’s war with the Indians and then disagreements among the land companies of several states. When the backcountry became a theater in the war with Great Britain, Clark became a principal player. Learning of Jefferson’s Declaration, the Virginia constitution, and Patrick Henry’s governorship, he returned to Virginia, met with Henry, and secured the legislature’s agreement to furnish his frontier forces with five hundred pounds of gunpowder. Clark sent agents to collect intelligence around the Kaskaskia River in Illinois county and, in the second half of 1777, visited Williamsburg again, where Jefferson, as a proponent of western settlement, attended to his needs. From the beginning, Madison, Jefferson, and Henry all pushed for a strong presence along the Mississippi, which they aimed to keep out of foreign hands.

  Promoted to colonel, Clark embarked on a momentous expedition, hoping to secure for Virginia and the new United States a string of outposts under British control, including some along the Mississippi. A few in Virginia—Patrick Henry, George Mason, George Wythe, and Jefferson—knew the full character of the secret mission; the rest of the Assembly was informed only of Clark’s role in defending Virginia’s claim to Kentucky. In 1778 Mason, Wythe, and Jefferson signed a letter to Colonel Clark, authorizing him to make war on any Indian tribes responsible for massacres. The British were enlisting Indians to fight for them, and Jefferson, before his governorship began, called for their expulsion to areas beyond the Mississippi—“the invariable consequence of their beginning a war,” he wrote. This may sound extreme, but it was not an unpopular policy. As long as he was judicious and did not interfere with the claims of friendly Indians, Clark was able to guarantee his men that they would receive, in addition to their pay, three hundred acres each.44

  Knowing Clark was aiming to remove British power from the Mississippi, Jefferson spearheaded bills through the Virginia Assembly designed to invite settlement. He wanted Virginia to stand behind cheap, easily obtainable land and small-scale agriculture. Then, along with George Mason, he helped to keep a dialogue going with states that continued to look askance at Virginia’s growth. This strengthened Virginia’s position: once the Loyal and other land companies embraced, in principle, state sovereignty over all private claims, their sister states would show a spirit of compromise by confirming a substantial portion of the companies’ claims.45

  George Rogers Clark took the offensive. From June 1778 he had led his forces into what the Virginia Assembly was calling “Illinois County,” capturing the French town of Kaskaskia, below St. Louis. When residents were apprised that the king of France had joined America’s cause, the local French militia accepted Clark’s offer of American citizenship. This helped him secure the peaceful surrender of nearby Cahokia and later the strategic post at Vincennes, on the Wabash River, at the modern boundary of Illinois and Indiana. As word of mouth spread, a number of Indian tribes got wind that the Virginians were expecting reinforcements—a deception on the part of Clark, because none were coming—and they too abandoned their British allies. It seemed possible that the British position in Detroit would become vulnerable. Over several months Clark persistently harassed the enemy. His relatively small army was stretched thin, though, allowing the British to retake Vincennes. But then, Clark pulled off a daring and unlikely raid, taking advantage of an unexpected thaw in the middle of February 1779, returning across muddy prairie to Vincennes and capturing the infamous lieutenant governor of Detroit, Henry Hamilton.

  Hamilton was known as the “scalp-buyer,” or “Hair-Buyer General,” owing to his rumored order of indiscriminate Indian attacks on Americans, including women and children. Hamilton regularly reported back to British headquarters in Quebec the numbers of prisoners taken and the number of scalps received—the latter figure was always much larger. After he was taken prisoner, the explanation Hamilton gave Clark was a familiar one: that he was merely carrying out orders from his superiors. Clark, in turn, allowed those of his men whose relatives had been slain to butcher a number of Hamilton’s Indians taken at Vincennes. There was little gentlemanly honor on display and no parole given; when, in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson referred to savagery and the “known rule of warfare” on the frontier, this was what he meant.

  Patrick Henry had been governor when Clark’s expedition was first authorized. By the time Hamilton and his officers were led back to Williamsburg, it was June 1779, and they became prisoners of the new governor. A rather different scenario had presented itself when British and Hessian officers were taken prisoner after General John Burgoyne’s large army surrendered at Saratoga, New York. All were well treated during their seven-hundred-mile march south to an honorable captivity in Albemarle County, Virginia. Major General von Riedesel and his wife rented Philip Mazzei’s estate next to Monticello and received hospitality from the governor and his family.

  Such was the contrast between rule-bound European-style combat and the chaos Colonel Clark knew. As one who adhered to principles of reprisal and retribution, Jefferson, who talked music with the German officers, refused to show any consideration toward the scalp-buyer. His Council of Advisors agreed that Henry Hamilton and his officers deserved to be kept in irons and confi
ned to the public jail. Thus the symbol of British barbarity remained in an unsanitary ten-foot cell for nearly all of Jefferson’s two years as governor. Jefferson resisted all pleas for compassion. Just as he had previously listed the evidence that King George III had, without cause, behaved cruelly toward the American people, Jefferson now defended his position with respect to the scalp-buyer by invoking known examples of mistreatment of American prisoners.

  There was always the other side. Major General William Phillips was Burgoyne’s second in command at Saratoga and one of the captured British officers whom Jefferson treated with respect during his confinement in Albemarle. Phillips invoked the rules of war to appeal on the basis of civilized compassion and reciprocity, asking Jefferson to show clemency toward the prisoner from Detroit. The reply officially came from Jefferson, Madison, and the Council of Advisors, but the style and cadence smacks of Jefferson—certainly the moralizing does: “We think ourselves justified in Governor Hamilton’s strict confinement on the general principle of National retaliation,” it read. “When a uniform exercise of kindness to prisoners on our part has been returned by as uniform severity on the part of our enemies, you must excuse me for saying it is high time … to teach respect to the dictates of humanity; in such a case, retaliation becomes an act of benevolence.” Paraphrasing the passage on Indian treachery in the Declaration of Independence, the letter tacked on these words: “The known rule of warfare with the Indian Savages is an indiscriminate butchery of men women and children.” In hiring wild assassins, Hamilton was as guilty of murder as he would be if he had committed the acts with his own hand.46

  “A Bustling Time”

  The third week of July, just as the letter to Major General Phillips was sent, Madison left Williamsburg and returned home to Orange. He wished to escape the malarial conditions that the low-lying capital was known for in the middle months of the year. There are indications in fragments of his surviving correspondence that Madison was ill for at least a part of the time when he served as a member of Governor Jefferson’s council. He seems to have been close by in June, when Jefferson was new at his job and Henry Hamilton was on the agenda, and he was there again in November-December, as rampant inflation played havoc with the state’s economy.