Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  The convergence of two fundamental ideas—negotiated boundaries and federal power—occurred to Madison before it did other Virginians. Did he envision, even remotely, where the road would lead in six years? As the historian Peter Onuf has put it quintessentially, “Jurisdictional confusion created a mandate for a stronger central government.” And that is precisely where Madison stood. Once the Articles of Confederation were ratified, he immediately perceived the need for an amendment calculated to “cement & invigorate the federal Union” by asserting what he described to Jefferson as “the coercive power of Congress over the States.” Jefferson did not respond to Madison’s centralizing proposal for months, suggesting that in 1781 he may have been reluctant to engage fully with Madison’s philosophy of government.76

  The Revolution had profoundly affected the ways in which the former colonies related to one another. Independence required not just mutual military dependence but a moderation of the power differential among the states. The United States had only the shell of a government, because the collective states had not forged a sustainable political community. As Pendleton revealed when he gave credit to the rumor that Pennsylvania was withholding troops because it hoped to see Virginia weakened, trust was wanting.

  “The Honorable Acquittal of Mr. Jefferson”

  In October 1781 the Franco-American alliance culminated in a combined siege by land and sea, and the surrender of more than seven thousand of the enemy. With a feint toward the British position in Manhattan, Washington had marched south to Virginia, joining Lafayette, as the French navy sailed up the Chesapeake and put the squeeze on Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown. Though Washington would have preferred that Lafayette capture and execute the traitor Benedict Arnold, he was satisfied to get his hands on Cornwallis. After expressing confidence that the collapse of Virginia would effectively end the American rebellion, the British earl found his forces pinned down. On October 17 he capitulated so as to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. Virginia was saved, though not by Virginians. Out of a force of fifteen thousand that mustered to fight at Yorktown, only fifteen hundred or so were from the Old Dominion. As it was, the British would hold on to New York and Charleston for two more years, until a formal peace treaty was signed.

  The defeat of Cornwallis changed the domestic conversation only to the extent that His Majesty’s armed forces were no longer a threat to the sovereign states. Two issues, western land cessions and economic recovery, kept Congress hard at work. But persistent uneasiness in the political process does not take away from the meaning of Yorktown. As Dr. David Ramsay, the Revolution-era historian, wrote of this extraordinary moment: “The people throughout the United States displayed a social triumph and exultation, which no private prosperity is ever able to fully inspire.” While Jefferson licked his political wounds at Monticello, Madison joined the Philadelphia celebrations.77

  Shortly after Jefferson became governor in 1779, Edmund Randolph had visited Washington’s headquarters as Virginia’s attorney general. From there he reported back dutifully to Jefferson on the progress of the war. But now, laboring in Congress beside Madison in the fall of 1781, Randolph struck a very different tone. “I was much distressed,” he wrote ex-Governor Jefferson, “to find your irrevocable purpose of sequestering yourself from public life.” With a combination of flattery and frustration unlike anything Madison would have written, Randolph berated Jefferson: “If you can justify the resolution to yourself I am confident that you cannot to the world.”

  In his letters, Madison held back when it came to personal matters. In November 1781, before the Virginia Assembly dealt officially with the inquiry into Jefferson’s conduct in office, he wrote to Jefferson on the western question as though nothing had changed since May. He signed off: “With great respect and sincere regard.” The following month, after Pendleton relayed news that the embarrassed ex-governor had escaped censure in the Assembly, Madison was clearly delighted. “It gives me great pleasure to hear of the honorable acquittal of Mr. Jefferson,” he told Pendleton. “I know his abilities, & think I know his fidelity & zeal for his Country so well, that I am persuaded [the acquittal] was a just one.” Madison’s exoneration of Jefferson reads as heartfelt, yet we cannot overlook his choice of words: by his own testament, he had to be “persuaded” that Jefferson’s actions were justifiable.78

  During the first two years of the Madison-Jefferson correspondence, most letters concluded with some version of the conventional, “I am, dear sir, your obedient servant.” That of May 5, 1781, was the first in which Madison placed “yr. sincere friend” above his signature. This was a few weeks before Jefferson’s near-capture at the hands of Tarleton’s dragoons. In the months following, an odd, indefinite silence disturbed the progress of the relationship. A half-year went by before all appeared well again. Whatever Madison was to Jefferson or Jefferson to him at the end of 1781, the next few years would see their collaborative purposes enlarge and their trust deepen.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Partners Apart

  1782–1786

  I thank you much for your attention to my literary wants.

  —MADISON TO JEFFERSON, IN PARIS, APRIL 27, 1785

  They yesterday finished printing my notes … I beg you to peruse it carefully because I ask your advice on it and ask nobody else’s.

  —JEFFERSON TO MADISON, ON THE PENDING PUBLICATION OF NOTES ON VIRGINIA, MAY 11, 1785

  AS THE YEAR 1782 BEGAN, JEFFERSON HAD NO INTENTION OF REENTERING politics. Madison, well adjusted to the legislative routine in Philadelphia, did not know how hurt and angry Jefferson was upon his return to Monticello. On January 15 he wrote to Jefferson for the first time since the Virginia Assembly proffered its outwardly conciliatory grant of absolution to its former governor.

  Madison had no illusions about the nature of politics. From this moment on he would never again confine himself to polite language in his private correspondence with Jefferson. He called the Assembly’s inquest an “attack,” without acknowledging that he had required “persuasion” to re-embrace Jefferson. “The result of the attack on your administration was so fully anticipated,” wrote Madison, “that it made little impression on me.” These words would have been solace enough, but he wanted to say more. Virginia had retracted the insult by electing Jefferson to Congress; Jefferson had declined the honor. If Jefferson had agreed, Madison now told him, “it would have afforded me both unexpected and singular satisfaction.” He needed a strong ally to bolster his efforts, and no one would have been a more resolute defender of greater Virginia than Jefferson.

  His purpose in writing Jefferson at this time, however, was not to ruminate on the personal dimension of political life but to move ahead. Madison was uncertain that the delegation as constituted would be able to protect Virginia’s distant territory from the “machinations” of “interested individuals.” The other states were ganging up on Virginia. Even John Witherspoon, Princeton’s president, whom Madison looked up to, was now his adversary in Congress, representing the small, landless state of New Jersey and supporting the claims of private land speculators against the arguments of Virginia. Madison charged that Virginia was being “persecuted” by its sister states, and he meant it literally.

  If Jefferson refused to join Congress, then Madison at least wanted him to use his research skills to fortify the state’s position on the land cession issue. Convinced that he had proof of a conspiracy against their state beyond what the Assembly in Richmond could help to offset, Madison explained why he needed Jefferson. Everyone else thought Virginia too big for its britches; they had no second thoughts about cutting Virginia down to size: “We have no hope at present of being enabled from any other sources than the voluntary aids of individuals to contradict even verbally the misrepresentations and calumnies which are daily leveled against the claims of Va.” In the present environment, “calumnies” could stick.

  As his trusted friend Edmund Randolph prepared to leave Congress after only eight months (Joseph Jones would be gone
as well), Madison felt that the hopes of Virginia rested on his shoulders alone. He had in his possession a collection of papers and judgments from both George Mason and Edmund Pendleton, that he called “valuable”; but Jefferson was the one best equipped to assist him in winning back the respect for Virginia that he believed was practically depleted as the war neared its end. There is a tone of desperation in his January 15 letter, bidding Jefferson “spare as much time as would survey the whole subject, beginning with the original [1609] charter.” He was asking for a lot: a multifaceted argument that drew on nearly two centuries of written history.1

  Jefferson was an ardent collector not just of books—he possessed a trove of state historical manuscripts. Finally responding to Madison’s January letter in late March, he acknowledged the importance of the issue Madison presented but explained that the materials he needed had been taken across the Blue Ridge Mountains to Augusta County for safekeeping when the British raided Charlottesville. He would be unable to begin addressing the legal aspects of the case until his papers were returned to him. This was not a rejection, as Madison well understood. In fact, James’s brother William Madison was coming to Jefferson’s neighborhood to study law; now that he was “retired from public business,” Jefferson explained, he would have leisure to mentor William, as he had done with James Monroe and William Short.

  Madison had no choice but to be patient. With guarded optimism he wrote to Edmund Randolph on May 1 that he expected Jefferson to “lend his succor in defending the title of Virginia … I have exhorted him not to drop his purpose.” Randolph, considerably less patient with what he characterized as an “unpardonable rage for retirement,” replied promptly: “Mr. Jefferson must undertake the guidance of the work; or, I fear, the deviation will be great from the path of argument, which ought to be trodden on this occasion.” Randolph was clearly less sympathetic toward Jefferson, thinking him selfish for staying at home when Virginia needed him. But it was Madison who struggled most with the urgency of the situation. Despite his own good instincts and insights, he was unable to come up with another candidate—a distinguished enough mind and pen—for the job at hand. The combination of scholarship and persuasive power that Jefferson possessed was second to none in the state of Virginia.2

  “Weaning Him from Those Attachments”

  Two months after taking a lead part in the surrender ceremony at Yorktown, the Marquis de Lafayette, who would name his next daughter Virginie, returned home to France. He was not the only marquis with whom Jefferson had been communicating: there was the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois and the Marquis de Chastellux. The first, a chargé d’affaires in Philadelphia, had earlier passed to Monroe’s uncle, Congressman Jones, a somewhat generic list of queries about Virginia, the answers to which were to be conveyed back to the French government. The queries ended up in Governor Jefferson’s hands. While Marbois expected a dry, factual account, Jefferson’s resulting product would be an encyclopedic work of natural history and politics titled Notes on the State of Virginia. The other marquis, Chastellux, like Lafayette, had had a role in the victory at Yorktown and was in the process of touring North America when he visited Jefferson at Monticello on April 13, 1782, his host’s thirty-ninth birthday. Thirty-three-year-old Patty Jefferson was expecting another child and was in the eighth month of her pregnancy.

  In his Travels in North America, published in 1786, Chastellux described Jefferson as Madison was also often described on first encounter: “grave and even cold.” But after two hours touring the house and property and conversing philosophically, the Frenchman felt “as if we had spent our whole lives together.” He complimented Jefferson on his study of the fine arts in conceiving Monticello, and he wrote preciously that “no object has escaped Mr. Jefferson; and it seems indeed as though, ever since his youth, he had placed his mind, like his house, on a lofty height, whence he might contemplate the whole universe.”3

  That is, more or less, what Jefferson had in mind. Whereas Madison could easily don the armor he needed in the political trenches, Jefferson aimed for greater privacy, for a life spent reading, philosophizing, and improving the productivity of his farms, with perhaps occasional forays into the political field. The investigation into his conduct as governor had so shaken and so disturbed him that six months after his exoneration he rationalized his withdrawal from public life in an emotive letter to James Monroe that was clearly meant to be shared with political colleagues. “Before I ventured to declare to my countrymen my determination to retire,” Jefferson said, “I examined well my heart to know whether it were thoroughly cured of every principle of political ambition, whether no lurking particle remained which might leave me uneasy when reduced within the limits of mere private life.” In one of the most vibrant passages of any in his writings since the Declaration of Independence, he described his trauma: “I had been suspected and suspended in the eyes of the world … I stood arraigned for treasons of the heart and not mere weaknesses of the head. And I felt that these injuries, for such they have been since acknowledged, had inflicted a wound on my spirit which will only be cured by the all-healing grave.”

  Monroe knew that his mentor held on to his resentments, though he would have read “treasons” and the “wound” that only death could heal as examples of Jefferson’s literary hyperbole. As a new member of the House of Delegates, Monroe was undoubtedly disappointed by Jefferson’s retreat from the public; but Madison, still in Philadelphia, had not seen Jefferson in more than two years and had to have been perturbed when he heard that Jefferson had declined election not just to Congress but to the Virginia Assembly as well. He told Edmund Randolph bluntly: “Great as my partiality is to Mr. Jefferson, the mode in which he seems determined to revenge the wrong received from his Country, does not appear to me to be dictated either by philosophy or patriotism.” He thought Jefferson should recognize that the Assembly had relented and stop fixating on the injustices some of its members had earlier committed.4

  Lucy Elizabeth Jefferson was born on May 8, 1782, an hour after midnight. But after childbirth Patty, who had never been robust, failed to regain her strength. After languishing four months, she died in their bed on September 6, 1782. Her husband buried her in the shady grove down the sloping walk that led from the classically inspired house. After ten and a half years of marriage, she was “torn from him by death”—this is what Jefferson ordered carved on her tombstone. The epitaph, borrowed from the Iliad, was inscribed in Greek, a language Jefferson celebrated for its purity: “Nay if even in the house of Hades the dead forget their dead, yet will I even there be mindful of my dear comrade.”

  What is striking about this passage is that it does not place the survivor, Jefferson, among the living, but has him anticipating his own end and vowing that he will even then remember his Patty. The words of Achilles certainly suggest that the Jeffersons enjoyed an intense closeness. In the memoir of his active years written late in retirement, Jefferson referred to their years together as “unchequered happiness.”

  Reflecting on her mother’s death in later years, Jefferson’s eldest daughter, Patsy, recalled her father’s depressed state. About to turn ten, she saw her father faint during her mother’s last moments, then watched him walk about inconsolably for days thereafter. Witness to “the violence of his emotion,” as she put it, Patsy could not bear to describe the scene beyond that—even after her father’s death forty-odd years later.5

  On the day Patty Jefferson died, Congress agreed to a conciliatory proposal made by John Witherspoon. In the case of state cessions of western lands, Congress would not reverse any state’s decision on the legitimacy of private claims without that state’s concurrence. While this was only a step in the right direction, it gave Virginia the flexibility its defenders wanted and removed most of Madison’s fears of persecution. How the wary Virginia Assembly would act remained in doubt, but the lead Virginia congressman was relieved.6

  A few days later Randolph heard of the tragedy at Monticello and wrote to Madison
from Richmond: “Mrs. Jefferson has at last shaken off her tormenting pains by yielding to them, and has left our friend inconsolable.” The phrasing indicates that Jefferson’s associates all anticipated Patty’s death but not her husband’s reaction. “I ever thought him to rank domestic happiness in the first class of the chief good,” Randolph adjudged. “But I scarcely supposed, that his grief would be so violent, as to justify the circulating report, of his swooning away, whenever he sees his children.”7 Madison’s reply to Randolph shows how he gauged Jefferson’s emotional constitution at this time: “I conceive very readily the affliction & anguish which our friend at Monticello must experience at his irreparable loss,” he wrote. “But his philosophical temper renders the circulating rumor which you mention altogether incredible.” Madison may have miscalibrated Jefferson’s philosophical temper when it came to the manifestation of grief, but he was right in surmising that the loss of Mrs. Jefferson presented a silver lining. “Perhaps,” he suggested somewhat indelicately to Randolph, “this domestic catastrophe may prove in its operation beneficial to his country by weaning him from those attachments which deprived it of his service.”

  While Madison lobbied Congress to send Jefferson, a southerner, to France, to augment the peace-negotiating team of northerners Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, he bade Randolph to make the overture to Jefferson “as soon as his sensibility will bear a subject of such a nature.” The third negotiator in France, John Jay of New York, wished to be relieved of his duty, and so the timing seemed right. “Let me know,” Madison pressed, “whether or not his aversion is still insuperable?” The question mark and the word insuperable tell us that despite his eagerness to employ Jefferson, Madison was well aware of the ultimate contradiction in his character: a desire to retreat from contentious society, an abiding preference for privacy and quiet, joined somehow to a strong political will.8