Madison’s maneuver went far beyond electioneering, though. He recognized that the legitimacy of the Constitution rested on the central government’s responsiveness to the ratifying conventions. The Constitution was approved in Virginia because of the implicit quid pro quo that amendments would be introduced soon after. If he had tried to sidestep the issue, Madison would have alienated a large and influential contingent of principled moderates. To ignore their verbal contract would have made most antifederalists permanent enemies of the federal government.72
Madison saw to it that Washington’s inaugural address included a statement sympathetic to amendments. Through the mouthpiece of the first president, he urged Congress to show “a reverence for the characteristic rights of freemen.” Prudently, he announced his plan for amendments very early in the First Congress. Timing was critical, because on the very next day a fellow Virginian, Congressman Theodorick Bland, proposed calling a second constitutional convention.73
In composing his list of amendments, Madison carefully weighed more than two hundred amendments proposed at the various ratifying conventions. But he did more than synthesize when he presented eight amendments to Congress on June 8, 1789. Two were of his own invention: equal rights of conscience along with freedom of the press and trial by jury, and protection of property from state seizure. The rest of the amendments Madison proposed were drawn from the states’ ratifying conventions. These included prohibitions against excessive bail, double jeopardy, and unreasonable searches and seizures; guarantees of due process of law, a speedy trial, right of assembly and petition, and the right to bear arms (a well-regulated militia). Finally, limits were placed on the size of congressional districts. Any powers not delegated by the Constitution were to be reserved to the states.74
Madison wanted these amendments woven into the body of the Constitution in the various places where each appeared to fit, rather than adding them as a codicil at the end of the document. The “most valuable amendment on the whole list,” he contended, was one he drafted himself to protect from state exploitation the equal rights of conscience, freedom of press, and trial by jury. This was Madison’s last attempt to safeguard the rights of the minority against a dangerous popular majority within individual states.75
As it turned out, there was little support in Congress for Madison’s proposals. Federalists chastised him publicly as well as privately, claiming, as one Pennsylvanian wrote, that he was “so far frightened with the antifederalism of his own state” that he had thrown a “tub to the whale.” More than one congressman approved this popular allusion to Jonathan Swift’s satirical tale, in which sailors distracted a whale with a barrel, keeping the beast from destroying the ship. Madison, they said, had offered amendments in order to silence opposition, dispensing imaginary pills to cure antifederalists of their fear of the Constitution. Others dismissed his “water gruel” amendments as useless and unnecessary. Virginia antifederalists had little faith in Madison, believing he had turned a blind eye to other, more substantive amendments designed to curb federal power.76
It would be an uphill battle. His eight proposed amendments first went to a select committee of the House. During the second week of August, they were fiercely debated on the House floor, revised, and redrafted as seventeen amendments. Madison’s old nemesis Roger Sherman, now a Connecticut congressman, insisted that the amendments, when passed, be added at the end of the Constitution. The majority agreed, and Madison deferred to his colleagues. The Senate made twenty-six changes to the House version and reduced the number of amendments from seventeen to twelve, ten of which were finally ratified by the states.77
The first ten amendments to the Constitution did not come about simply. Instead, they define the legislative process colloquially referred to in more recent times as “making sausage.” Madison never looked kindly on butchering and was not at all pleased by the Senate’s alterations. He winced at the loss of what he considered his “most salutary articles,” in particular the one that dictated against state interference. But he was glad when the whole ordeal ended, writing to the two Edmunds, Randolph and Pendleton, that the work had been “exceedingly wearisome”; he had had to endure “dilatory artifices” and a “diversity of opinions & fancies.”78
Madison backed the Bill of Rights to fulfill promises he had made—not only to his constituents but also to his closest friends and political allies. Like George Mason, Thomas Jefferson was a hard man to please. When he saw Madison’s list of amendments, he gave it only a tepid endorsement. “I like it as far as it goes,” he wrote, “but I should have been for going further.”79
The U.S. minister to France was only one of many Virginians Madison had to consider. New Englander Fisher Ames only slightly overstated the situation when he wrote that Madison was afraid of losing his popularity among Virginia state politicians. Madison depended greatly on the Virginia circle. He listened to their complaints and remembered his promises to them. When he stood before Congress, he never forgot that he was a Virginian first.
“By Degrees”
As autumn arrived and the first session of the First Congress ended, Jefferson packed his trunks and prepared to sail for America, accompanied by his two daughters and the two Hemingses. Patsy and Polly had been taking regular guitar lessons; James had been trained in French cooking. Little is known about Sally’s life in France other than the plausible assertion by one of her sons, eight decades hence, that she first became pregnant by Jefferson there. We do know that her master did a good bit of shopping before leaving Paris: books and political pamphlets, mathematical instruments, linen, a “macaroni machine” (courtesy of his secretary, William Short, who had recently traveled as far as Naples), and an assortment of clothing for Sally. We know nothing more about the pairing of a forty-six-year-old man and his sixteen-year-old servant.80
Madison remained in Philadelphia, thinking Jefferson would be sailing there and they would make the trip back to Virginia together. While waiting, he spent considerable time with Dr. William Thornton, a fellow boarder at the House-Trist residence. He had known Thornton for two years, and was impressed with his wide-ranging knowledge and intense passion for reform. The Edinburgh-trained physician was a man of many parts: a painter, a poet, a naturalist, and an early promoter of steamboat technology. He would author a treatise on language and design the U.S. Capitol.
Born in the British West Indies, Thornton came from a family that owned a large plantation. He arrived in America in 1786, with a grand scheme to liberate his slaves and lead an expedition of free blacks to Sierra Leone. Raised a Quaker and influenced by British abolitionists, he was not long in America before embarking on a tour of New York and New England, making speeches and looking for recruits and backers for his plan. The year he became acquainted with Madison, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
They may have conversed about slavery at the time of the Constitutional Convention, but it was in 1789 that Thornton persuaded Madison to write a memorandum on the viability of colonization. Thornton forwarded it to the president of the recently established French abolition society, Les Amis des Noirs, a group influenced by the Quakers and a group Jefferson had refused to join, despite an invitation from Lafayette.81
Madison wrote the unsigned and unpublished memorandum while Jefferson was at sea. In it he calculated that there were “not less than 600,000 unhappy negroes” in the South. But he was wary of any emancipation plan undertaken too soon or before appropriate measures were applied; he cited the “ill effects suffered from freedmen who retain the vices and habits of slaves.” Neither the general happiness of society nor the happiness of individual slaves was served, Madison wrote, by “humane masters” who unconditionally freed their slaves. He held that differences caused by color were “permanent and insuperable” (just as Jefferson did) and that an integrated society would be virtually impossible in the South.
To the extent that free blacks found themselves trapped in the status of permanent aliens, Madison conside
red colonization along the west coast of Africa or “some other foreign situation” to be the only practical solution. He presumed that removal to America’s “interior wilderness,” the area beyond white settlement, would expose former slaves to Indian raids. He figured that Indians would resent the blacks’ presence and develop their own “peculiar antipathy” toward them.82
Madison is rarely examined under the sharp lens that history has focused on Jefferson. In spite of his ruminations in Federalist 54, where the “mixed character” designation made enslavement appear to be a temporary condition, he held on to many of the prejudices that limited Jefferson’s imagination and that persisted across the South. Whether he did so consciously or unconsciously, the pressure against real social change must have been powerful. All we have to do is to think of James Madison, Sr., the foremost planter in the county. James, Jr., grew up accepting his father’s traditional role in county politics and his supervisory control over extensive lands. The eldest son knew what it would mean if he were to exercise his intellectual freedom in such a way that it threatened his own family, for the sake of bringing justice to African Americans. He had just been through the Virginia Ratifying Convention, listening to the likes of Henry and Mason raising fears of northerners taxing slavery out of existence. Bowing to prejudice afforded psychological protection.
That said, Madison’s view diverged from Jefferson’s in significant ways. Whereas Jefferson completely closed off the possibility of whites and blacks peacefully occupying the same continent, Madison gauged that it was unlikely at present but not impossible over the long run. A settlement of free blacks on the African coast could serve as a worthy “experiment” that would “induce” the master to see his human property in a new light.
In his 1789 memorandum, Madison allowed for the possibility that both masters and slaves were capable of achieving internal control over their less admirable passions. He thought of slaves more as wayward (but still educable) pupils, servants in need of regular guidance. In a rare Madison text from this period, handwritten instructions to the overseer at Montpelier in 1790, he delivers a message of gentle discipline, requesting that the man “treat the Negroes with all the humanity & kindness consistent with their necessary subordination and work.” For “necessary subordination” to demand a reciprocal “humanity & kindness” neatly places Madison in his century.83
During their years living in Philadelphia, Madison and Jefferson routinely encountered free blacks as productive members of society. But Jefferson refused to abandon his theory that at some future point “convulsions” would end in the “extermination of one or the other race.” Madison alone foresaw that “by degrees, both the humanity and policy of the Government” could “forward the abolition of slavery in America.” Both were dealing in eventualities, not immediate prospects.84
Jefferson’s republican political philosophy featured a union based on affectionate relations, one he saw in terms of an emotional inheritance. Madison’s union occurred as a result of setting in motion safely counteracting, or neutralizing, forces—positive and negative energy. Consequently Jefferson identified history’s beneficent tendencies as well as its destructive power, which influenced his views on race. Madison’s view of history as a more fluid process (and a source of vitality) allowed him to anticipate the tempering effect of time and experience. In racial terms, Madison was less puzzled than Jefferson, or at least less troubled, by evidence of blacks’ successful acculturation. The impact of historic memory was deeper for Jefferson than it was for Madison.
“Just Indeed in Their Intentions”
Before his departure from France, Jefferson tried to talk to William Short about the future. He liked writing the script of his friends’ lives and wanted Short to think about returning to Virginia sooner rather than later. Jefferson had concluded that his bachelor secretary needed to run for political office back home or Virginia would forget that he was once a prodigy.
As proficient as Short was in his public duties, he was rebellious in other matters. He remained stuck on France and would not leave his duchess, though the likelihood of their ever marrying was slim. He imagined that Jefferson could put in a good word and see him elevated to the ministerial level. That was Short’s counterproposal.
Without marriage thoughts of his own, Jefferson was still ruminating on the partie carrée proposal—the foursome of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Short—living and thriving in the same neighborhood. That vision of the future still roused him in 1789, five full years after he had sailed to Europe. He figured that another of his intimates, the Harvard-educated painter John Trumbull, would perform Short’s secretarial duties while Short forged an American career.
Aware that President Washington could not be pressed too hard, Jefferson did not insist that Short succeed him in Paris. Short (and some of the French too) actually assumed that Madison would be Washington’s choice. But it was the experienced, one-legged Gouverneur Morris of New York, a standout at the Constitutional Convention, who was to perform in that role. Short was named minister to The Hague.
Gouverneur Morris was one of the republic’s great characters, a man of culture possessing a keen sense of humor. He was also touchy, impatient, and unapologetic. Trained at King’s College (Columbia) before the Revolution, he had, along with his friends Robert Livingston and John Jay, contributed significantly to New York’s wartime constitution. Washington was impressed by Morris’s eloquence and unfazed by his lack of delicacy as a diplomat. If the president’s choice as minister to France was insensitive and in the main unfriendly to the aims of the French in the 1790s, it would do his career no harm.85
After a harrowing end to an otherwise smooth transatlantic crossing, in which strong headwinds nearly toppled his ship, Jefferson docked in Norfolk and returned home by way of Richmond. He had a great deal on his mind. Besides having to reacquaint himself with the productivity of his farms, his elder daughter, Patsy, seventeen, was to be married shortly to a Randolph she had known when young and who had visited Paris while they were there.86
Madison and Jefferson were reunited at Monticello just after Christmas 1789. After five years apart, Jefferson had to have noticed that Madison’s hair was thinning. His own was still red and plentiful. What they dined on cannot be established, but we must assume it was capped off by French wine. Enjoying once more the splendid view from his mountaintop (“How sublime to look down into the workhouse of nature,” he had written Maria Cosway), Jefferson mulled over President Washington’s recent offer that he come to New York and take up the duties of secretary of state. In the days he spent with Madison at Monticello, comparing notes on politics at home and politics abroad, Jefferson must have absorbed a lot of information concerning the operations of Congress and the executive. Madison’s chief concern at this time was to convince his friend, as Pendleton had once urged back in 1776, not to “retire so early in life from the memory of man.”
Because of the obvious difficulty in getting mail to him while he traveled, it was not until Christmastime that Jefferson saw Madison’s appeal that he enter the president’s cabinet. The congressman had written at Washington’s behest on October 8, 1789, the very day that Jefferson set sail from the French port of Le Havre: “It is of infinite importance that you should not disappoint the public wish on this subject,” he said. By “public,” Madison meant that he had sounded out those whose votes in the national legislature he most counted on. “The Southern and Western Country have it particularly at heart,” he assured Jefferson, adding: “To every other part of the Union it will be sincerely acceptable.” He had brought Jefferson out of retirement after his wife’s death in 1782, and he was attempting to do so once again.
Shortly before he and Madison met up at Monticello, Jefferson had received word directly from the president that his services were desired. Replying in a tone of respect, he showed that he was of two minds. By accepting the position, Jefferson wrote Washington, “I should enter on it with gloomy forebodings from the critic
isms and censures of a public just indeed in their intentions but sometimes misinformed and misled.” His explanation revealed that he was still reflecting on his traumatic time as governor. In fact, in his first draft Jefferson left out the phrase “just indeed in their intentions”; only after rereading did he decide to retreat from his self-pitying language. His first thought, in any case, was to expose his fear of criticism and admit that he still felt a nagging hostility toward former critics.87
Jefferson would likely have acquiesced to the president’s call even without Madison’s argument. He appears to have resigned himself to his fate by New Year’s Day 1790, just after Madison’s visit was concluded. Jefferson could not have sounded very excited, because Madison wrote to Washington from Georgetown shortly thereafter, saying that he was “sorry to find him so little biased in favor of” the secretaryship. Apparently Jefferson took to heart the concept of “public servant” when he said he would allow the president to decide “what is to be done with me.”
“In Usufruct”
Though Madison and Jefferson had drawn especially close in 1783–84 and shared confidences at length from 1785 to 1789, we know that their philosophical differences were not insignificant, but also not deep or disruptive. After meeting at Monticello in December 1789, they were still conversing about unfinished business two months later. As much as they might differ, they would not sacrifice their alliance for anything.
After the outbreak of the French Revolution in July 1789, Jefferson had written a letter to Madison that he did not send but eventually handed to him in Virginia. In it he hazarded a new and experimental view, rooted in the principle that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” He argued that contracted debts should be dissolved at the end of each generation, which he defined as nineteen years. According to Jefferson’s logic, any public or private debt should be paid in full with moderate interest before nineteen years had expired. Contracts would then be renegotiated and laws and constitutions revised.
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