Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  Electoral votes divided, for the most part, along sectional lines. Pennsylvania went Republican; New York, New Jersey, and New England went Federalist; and Maryland was split. Adams received 71 electoral votes to Jefferson’s 68. The South Carolina Federalist Thomas Pinckney came in third, Burr a distant fourth. Because the framers had not anticipated strict party competition, the Constitution did not as yet provide for tickets and running mates. As the second highest vote-getter, Jefferson was awarded the vice presidency.

  “The event [i.e., result] of the election has never been a matter of doubt in my mind,” Jefferson wrote to Madison on New Year’s Day 1797. “Indeed the vote comes much nearer an equality than I had expected.” Though he said he could not decide whether the vice presidency, a largely powerless office, was in the least attractive to him, he accepted his role: “The General of to-day should be a soldier tomorrow if necessary.” Acknowledging that he was Adams’s “junior” in age and experience, Jefferson submitted to fate. He was hopeful, he said, that the incoming president would relinquish his pro-England bias and govern as a republican.

  In accounting for his willingness to serve with Adams, Jefferson added something else: “He is perhaps the only barrier against Hamilton’s getting in.” Jefferson was apparently thinking ahead to 1800, suggesting to Madison that if the relatively moderate Adams failed, Hamilton would be pulling the strings of a Pinckney; or perhaps he meant that Hamilton himself stood a chance of being elected president, because, after Adams and Hamilton, the Federalists’ choices were all lesser men.

  Jefferson enclosed the draft of a congratulatory letter to President-elect Adams so that Madison could comment before it was sent. Its tone was genteel, its conventional rejection of political ambition a rhetorical but still meaningful peace offering. “In the retired canton where I am,” wrote Jefferson, “I learn little of what is passing: pamphlets I see never; papers but a few; and the fewer the happier.” With an ironic metaphor suited to an age of risky travel, he continued: “I leave to others the sublime delights of riding in the storm.” Rationalizing his preference for the less taxing second position, he wanted Adams to know that he would rather have as his neighbors “fellow laborers of the earth” than the “spies and sycophants” who surrounded whichever man possessed real power. He did not envy Adams his job, and while he expected no one would believe him, he said he had no wish to be president.28

  Madison, in Philadelphia, read the letter and without hesitation instructed Jefferson not to send it. As Jefferson had entrusted the draft to his most dependable friend, Madison in turn did what he thought a friend should do. “In exercising this trust,” he said, “I have felt no small anxiety.” He told Jefferson that it was unnecessary to express conciliatory views directly to Adams—others could be relied on to let Adams know that, as runner-up, he harbored no jealous feelings. Eventually, Madison himself took on this duty, making a point of leaking the letter by way of the harmony-seeking Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, an intimate of both Adams and Jefferson. Rush did as Madison expected he would, transmitting to Adams a detailed summary of the contents of the unsent letter.

  Madison’s second critique of Jefferson’s offering to Adams was its “general air,” which sounded labored to him. He believed that Jefferson was protesting too much his dislike of politics and lack of ambition. Given Adams’s “ticklish” temper, one could not at all predict how the new president would read Jefferson’s intent. Madison put forward, all together, six arguments against sending the letter. The last and most direct of his arguments was the “probability that Mr. A’s course of administration may force an opposition to it from the Republican quarter.” Though he said he appreciated the desire to give the president-elect “a fair start to his Executive career,” Madison returned Jefferson’s draft knowing full well that Jefferson would follow his recommendation. Their relationship was entering a new phase. To use modern parlance, Madison had become Jefferson’s “handler,” sensitive to the missteps his enthusiastic friend was prone to and eager to help him avoid embarrassment. As such, Congressman Madison may be described as the first presidential campaign consultant.29

  Even without the written note of congratulation that Jefferson had wanted to send, the new president and vice president started out the year at ease with each other. On March 4, 1797, in an otherwise-opaque inaugural address, Adams pledged his devotion to republican government. He castigated all the evils known to political man: “the spirit of party, the spirit of intrigue, the profligacy of corruption, and the pestilence of foreign influence, which is the angel of destruction to elective governments.” It was an effort to appease.

  Adams wanted to include Jefferson in his administration in a visible way, but Jefferson backed off. He was candid with Madison as to why: he refused to “descend daily into the arena like a gladiator to suffer martyrdom,” as he had been obliged to do in Washington’s cabinet. As far as Vice President Jefferson was concerned, his sole duty would be the constitutional one of presiding over the Senate.30

  “This Lying Wretch of a Bache”

  The spirit of party was not to recede. Broadly considered, neither side wished that any level of comfort should exist between the two leading members of the executive branch, whose principles were so incompatible. In fact, what the president and vice president had most in common at this juncture was their aversion to one man, Alexander Hamilton. In the letter he composed but never sent, Jefferson assumed that Adams would appreciate his characterization of Hamilton as “your arch-friend from New York.”

  Philadelphia was a pressure cooker. On the same day that he took the oath of office as vice president, Jefferson paid Benjamin Franklin Bache for a year’s subscription to his ultra-Republican newspaper. He stayed in the city only nine days, returning to Monticello for nearly two months. On arriving back in Philadelphia in May, ever righteous in denying his own contribution to conflict, Jefferson wrote to Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a friend to both Adams and himself: “I consider as a certainty that nothing will be left untried to alienate him from me. These machinations will proceed from the Hamiltonians by whom he is surrounded, and who are only a little less hostile to him than to me.”31

  President Adams did not need to confer with his vice president to come to the same conclusion. Early on he was certain that Hamilton would stop at nothing to sink his chances for a second term. As his term proceeded, his cabinet repeatedly heard him blast Hamilton for his treachery; the cabinet, which Adams had inherited from Washington, kept no secrets from Hamilton. It took far too long for Adams to realize that cabinet selection was his prerogative and not his esteemed predecessor’s.

  Years later, after Hamilton’s death, the battered New England patriot would pour out his heart in an autobiography that one historian has aptly called less a literary text than “an open wound.” Hamilton was “infamous,” Adams railed, a being caught up “in a delirium of Ambition,” who yet “hated every man young or old who Stood in his Way.” Hamilton, Adams insisted, was far less courageous than he was given credit for—the very same critique Jefferson had leveled when he wrote Madison that Hamilton was “timid on horseback” and easily taken sick.32

  Combustible elements combined to defeat the hope of a presidential honeymoon. As Adams was trying to constitute an embassy to France to include at least one moderate who was not an extension of Hamilton (it would turn out to be Elbridge Gerry), he was being told that Jefferson did not want him to succeed in his efforts toward peace. Adding fuel to the fire was the Aurora, Bache’s newspaper, which gave the new president almost no time at all before printing inflammatory stories. William Cobbett, in his rival Federalist paper, Porcupine’s Gazette, fought fire with fire: “The most infamous of the Jacobins is BACHE,” he pronounced, “Distributor General of the principles of Insurrection, Anarchy and Confusion.” Franklin’s grandson was cartooned as a “haggard-looking hireling of France.”

  At the center of the firestorm, Abigail Adams wa
s taking the insults to her husband worse than the president himself did. She saw the Republicans collectively as agents of the French and believed that “this lying wretch of a Bache,” as she called the editor, was only the most easily detectable member of a devious band trying to force the president’s resignation. “And then they will Reign triumphant,” she railed, “headed by the Man of the People.” She meant, of course, Thomas Jefferson, whom she had once adored. The confidences they had shared as Americans abroad in the 1780s were memories of a bygone era. Madison’s prediction had come true. Both Adamses assumed that Jefferson burned with the same ambition that his Republican minions harbored for him. Mrs. Adams saw Bache’s work not simply as libelous and the atmosphere as lawless; she predicted that if his newspaper was not suppressed, the United States would succumb to civil war.

  Cobbett’s newspaper was widely read. The first lady remarked with pleasure that “his shafts are always tipt with wit.” But Cobbett, clever as he was, had no substantive connection to Hamilton or any other leading Federalist. He was unable to coordinate his writing with those in Congress who might otherwise have helped to offset the shock value of Bache’s fear-inspiring pronouncements.33

  The Fifth Congress of the United States convened in the spring of 1797, the first, since government under the Constitution began in 1789, to open without James Madison as a member. Home at Montpelier with Dolley, Madison had ended his long congressional career feeling that the Hamiltonians had succeeded in compromising republican principles. The struggle would have to continue without him. Federalists, glad to see Madison replaced by others, quickly began referring to the opposition as “Gallatin & Co.”

  Madison and Jefferson would remain Republican lightning rods. This time, though, Madison was out of government, and Jefferson back in. Like Jefferson in 1794, Madison wanted so badly to stay out that he wrote to his father urging him not to listen to any entreaties from Jefferson. The courier for Madison’s letter was none other than Jefferson, who was heading south a few weeks sooner. Although they dined together at House clerk John Beckley’s home the day it was penned, we can safely assume that Madison did not allow Jefferson to peek at the letter. Madison had wanted his father to know that he had decided not to stand for election to the Virginia House of Delegates. “If Mr. Jefferson should call & say any thing to counteract my determination,” he averred, “I hope it will be regarded as merely expressive of his own wishes on the subject, & that it will not be allowed to have the least effect.”34

  After they visited some of Dolley’s Virginia relatives, the Madisons came to live with his parents, who had arrived at their fiftieth year of marriage. James, Jr., in his mid-forties, would father no children, though he and Dolley had been trying; but he remained surrounded by family and helped to raise Dolley’s son Payne. There was his thirty-five-year-old brother William; his two sisters and their children; and his late brother Ambrose’s daughter Nelly, named for her paternal grandmother (reputedly Madison’s favorite among his younger kin). All lived in the vicinity of Orange. As he established a new domestic routine, Madison implemented a system of crop rotation—wheat, corn, peas, and clover—recommended by Jefferson. He solicited architectural designs from his accomplished friend, bought nails from the Monticello manufactory, and scheduled work on an addition to the Montpelier mansion.35

  Meanwhile, as president of the Senate, fifty-four-year-old Vice President Jefferson swore in eight new members of that body and delivered a formal address in which he apologized in advance for any procedural error he might commit. He had been so long away from legislative functions that he was rusty. Adams, of course, had lately served in the position he now took up, and Jefferson seized this formal opportunity to praise his old friend the president as “the eminent character … whose talents and integrity have been known and revered by me thro’ a long course of years.”36

  Their shared sense of honor stood no chance of auguring a time of reconciliation. Not just the partisan press at home but also liberals abroad demeaned Adams. From France, Tom Paine wrote to advise Jefferson that America’s reputation was deflated, and there was little hope of improvement under an Adams regime. “You can have but little conception,” Paine testified, “how low the character of the American Government is sunk in Europe.” Where it was not despised for its impotence, he said, it was being written off for its ignorance of how to conduct meaningful diplomacy: “England laughs at her imbecility, and France is enraged by her ingratitude, and Sly treachery.”37

  Politics inside the United States was still conditioned by manifestations of unfriendliness emanating from the Old World. There were clear signs of troubles yet to come in U.S. relations with an exasperated French government, which had begun to threaten American shipping. There was some talk of war. Britain remained surly and unbending, which hardly bothered the ruling Federalists but made Republican heads spin. As the Federalists stepped up their philippics against “foreign influences,” Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were to gather on a number of occasions between 1797 and 1799, meeting at one or another’s home in Albemarle or Orange to assess developments. With impending crises at home and abroad, they tried to figure out what the Republicans could do as a minority party.

  “La catin Angleterre”

  One hazard of possessing a gift for powerful figures of speech is the tendency to go too far and later feel regret. Jefferson had that tendency and on occasion felt that regret. It is what tempts historians to probe his mind and uncover his prejudices. In March 1796, for example, in a letter to political ally William Branch Giles on a subject of no particular consequence to his reputation, Jefferson speculated on the difficulties associated with the protection of American sailors against impressment by the Royal Navy. One would not expect a champion of tradesmen to express open disdain for the merchant seaman, but here is Jefferson objecting to a plan under review to issue them certificates of citizenship: “But these certificates will be lost in a thousand ways. A sailor will neglect to take his certificate. He is wet twenty times in a voyage. If he goes ashore without it, he is impressed, if with it, he gets drunk, it is lost, stolen from him, taken from him, and then the want of it gives an authority to impress which does not exist now.” Rather than entrust American sailors with paper, the cynical Jefferson would have the men “parade” on deck, while three foreign officers boarded the U.S. vessel to hunt for any non-Americans who might be concealed below.38

  As patronizing and demeaning as this sort of statement may appear now, it would never come back to haunt him. On the other hand, one portion of a single paragraph in a letter he wrote a few weeks later to Philip Mazzei would carry tremendous weight from the moment of its inconvenient publication until the end of his days. Mazzei was the chatty Italian who had resided near Monticello before the Revolution and who, though long since back in Tuscany, still had unfinished business in Virginia. Together Madison and Jefferson were handling Mazzei’s finances, which explains why Jefferson was writing. He was retired from politics in April 1796, when he wrote the letter; but when Mazzei allowed its publication in a Paris newspaper in January 1797, Jefferson was about to reenter the executive. His letter was translated from French back into English, imperfectly but not inaccurately, and published in early May in Noah Webster’s American Minerva, a successful New York newspaper. Webster was a confirmed Federalist.

  It was nothing Jefferson had not said before: “In place of that noble love of liberty and republican government which carried us triumphantly thro’ the war, an Anglican, monarchical and aristocratical party has sprung up …, all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty.” But this time, in suggesting that some who had fought for a republic had now conceded to a corrupt British-style regime, he drew inferences. Readers of the Minerva took Jefferson’s plural to be singular, when he said: “It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads sh
orn by the harlot England.” The French had printed “la chevelure a été coupée par la catin Angleterre”; retranslated, it read, less beautifully: “whose hair had been cut off by the whore England.”39 There could be only one man Jefferson was referring to: George Washington. As Samson, he had wrestled the British lion and crushed enemy armies; as wise Solomon, he built a temple to republican values. Jefferson might protest the translation, but the ex-president certainly thought Jefferson’s reference was to him; the benefit of the doubt he had granted Jefferson after their most recent exchange quickly dissolved into anger. He never said anything publicly, but others intervened to make certain that Washington stayed irate.40

  Jefferson was torn. He wanted to own up to his authorship of the letter and control its meaning so as to minimize damage. As he put it to Madison, “The general substance” was his, but in one place or another “very materially falsified.” He was splitting (Samson’s) hairs, of course, and realized that “nine tenths of the people of the U.S.” would recoil at anything he might publish in an attempt to rationalize his stated opinion of the retired president. “Think for me,” he implored Madison, “and advise me what to do, and confer with Colo[nel] Monroe on the subject.”

  Madison responded promptly. Eager to manage his friend’s career before the Federalists had their chance to end it, he undertook damage control. He confirmed what Jefferson knew, that any hint of a confession would be exploited, and advised silence. In that Monroe had already suggested to Jefferson that he go public, Jefferson was less likely to follow Monroe’s advice unless Madison independently concurred.

  While this was going on, Gallatin of Pennsylvania, the most prominent Republican in Congress, rose to defend what he interpreted as Jefferson’s spirited opposition to an ill-conceived foreign policy. He protested the stigmatization of being labeled “Jacobin” simply for perceiving the world differently than the party in power. His Federalist colleagues did not allow Gallatin’s remarks to stand unanswered, broadly hinting that Jefferson’s language was at least indecent and maybe conspiratorial. In the political climate of Washington’s retirement years, one did not overcome an insult to the supreme founding father. As for President Adams, the Mazzei letter confirmed his larger feeling that the Republicans had lost all sense of national fidelity in their blind devotion to France.41