Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  As Congress weighed the acquisition of Louisiana that month, the country learned of two deaths of national significance. On October 3 the eighty-one-year-old Revolutionary patriot Samuel Adams “paid the last tribute to nature,” as the newspapers were wont to phrase it; and on the twenty-third, when eighty-two-year-old Edmund Pendleton followed him, it was broadcast that “another star has fallen from the splendid constellation of virtue and talents which guided the people of the United States in their struggle for independence.” The House of Representatives instructed each of its members to wear a “badge of mourning” for thirty days, to show their veneration for both men. Some in the U.S. Senate balked at the suggestion, leading the Aurora to shudder that such an abhorrent act was “almost too malignant even for federalists.” As the nation’s boundaries expanded, the battle over the Revolution’s meaning went on.12

  The bill Jefferson signed on October 31 was a temporary measure. It allowed Madison to notify William C. C. Claiborne that he had been appointed the territorial governor of Louisiana; but the government itself was without form or substance. Claiborne, a less-than-poised twenty-eight-year-old former congressman from Tennessee, had been serving as governor of Mississippi Territory since 1801. Moving over to New Orleans, he was accompanied by five hundred troops, in case the Spanish attempted to resist the transfer of power. The show of force was meant as well to awe Indians of the region and curb potentially rebellious slaves.

  Claiborne found the Crescent City prosperous and bent on improvement, its buildings “elegant.” But he also found the displaced French to be of a “disorderly disposition”; those among them whom he called “warm imprudent young men” seemed spiteful toward Americans. If the French had to be watched, so did “adventurers … from several different nations—of various characters, and among them many vagabonds.” The young governor-in-waiting was unsure how far he should go to demonstrate his authority. Illustrative of the problems he had to confront, Claiborne did not speak French.

  In early December 1803, at long last, the Spanish in New Orleans staged an official retrocession to France, though at that time no French military presence was in the area. Cannon fire sparked the event, and the celebrants toasted both Bonaparte and Jefferson. Then, on December 20, the Louisiana Territory was formally conveyed from France to the United States, and its Virginia-born, Tennessee-bred governor addressed the people of New Orleans: “The American people receive you as brothers; and will hasten to extend to you a participation in those inestimable rights which have formed the basis of their own unexampled prosperity.” In the middle of January, when word of the peaceful transfer finally reached Washington, members of Congress hosted a festive dinner for the president and his cabinet; a ball in Georgetown brought out close to five hundred gentlemen and ladies.13

  In framing a government, Jefferson turned yet again to Senator Breckinridge, insisting this time that anything he told him was to be kept in the strictest confidence. “Never let any person know that I have put pen to paper on this subject,” he wrote, and enclosed his draft of the bill he wanted. Breckinridge, who conveniently chaired the committee on Louisiana, followed instructions, returned the original letter to the wary chief executive, and made few changes in the blueprint for a new political order in this most extensive territory.

  It was a good thing for Jefferson that he concealed his authorship. Debate on the Louisiana Ordinance of 1804 began in the Senate in early January and was immediately controversial. It pleased few members of Congress from either party. It was, in fact, a rather “unJeffersonian” creation: autocratic and oligarchic. The governor was appointed, not elected, and the thirteen councilors whom Jefferson designated were drawn from the ranks of “notables.” In effect, President Jefferson was reinventing the British colonial model.

  In keeping with that model, ordinary citizens had no voice in government. The outspoken Matthew Lyon, formerly of Vermont, sat in Congress these days as a Republican representative from Kentucky. He could not restrain himself from griping that the Louisianans were being reduced to “probationary slavery.” For all intents and purposes, in crafting America’s first colony, Jefferson was giving its residents fewer rights than the rebellious patriots of 1776 owned.14

  Those in Congress who defended the undemocratic ordinance rationalized that the people were not ready for self-government. In a display of nativism, men in Washington pronounced that New Orleanians were different from citizens of the United States, their character marred by too much exposure to colonial Spanish (and before that French) rulers. They were prone to unrest; they had to be weaned off bad habits. Native Louisianans sought audiences with President Jefferson in order to convince the administration that their cultural forms were consistent with the American understanding of free republican government. He politely heard their pleas but was unmoved.15

  Jefferson continued to be guided by the metaphor of the guardian and his ward. He told DeWitt Clinton of New York of his reluctance to experiment with democracy in Louisiana. “Our new fellow citizens as of yet are incapable of self government as children,” he stated, disagreeing with those in Congress who refused to “suspend its principles for a single moment.” Jefferson was saying that as children, or wards of the government, these dependents were to be regarded as aliens to republican values, who therefore could not act in their own best interest. This logic was oddly reminiscent of the hated Alien Acts of 1798, which had extended the naturalization period for aliens.16

  “Another St. Domingo”

  The political taint would wear off once Virginians, and others like them, migrated into the Louisiana Territory and replicated “American” forms. In the “empire for liberty” that Jefferson envisioned, vast open spaces invited new opportunity for a decent and deserving people who were meant to spread west and republicanize. Cultural dominance was built into that grand vision. It was impossible not to look to the future, as Jefferson mused to James Monroe in 1801, “when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond our limits, and over the whole northern, if not southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms by similar laws.” They would, of necessity, comprise a homogeneous population.17

  The only thing that threatened demographic conquest was, said Jefferson, racial “mixture”—which could only “blot” the pristine “surface” of his hoped-for American sphere of influence. And so he rejected the notion, held by some would-be emancipators, that parts of the trans-Mississippi West could be colonized by free blacks. He was thinking of the interests of a growing planter class poised to spread across newly acquired territories, and of the white yeomanry who aspired to slave ownership.

  But the theory of the yeoman republic of the West had a basic flaw. It would never be racially pure, due to the white landowner’s ambitions. Booming fields of cotton and sugarcane had already made the slave system nonnegotiable in the Southwest. In Claiborne’s relatively brief time as governor of Mississippi Territory, he had learned how profitable it was to own and sell slaves, reporting to Madison in early 1802 that the “culture of cotton is so lucrative, and personal labor so valuable, that common Negro Fellows will generally command five hundred dollars a head.” Arriving in New Orleans, he discovered that similar sentiments existed among the planters of Louisiana. The domestic slave trade would have to be protected.18

  In his confidential letter to Breckinridge, Jefferson made clear that he thought domestic slaves would satisfy the demand created when the supply of slaves from overseas dried up. White Virginians would reap the greatest benefits from this approach, because at least 45 percent of all slaves lived in the Old Dominion, where domestic slave traders carried on a brisk business. Virginians had long opposed the foreign slave trade, which kept the price of slaves from rising, and Madison had pushed hard at the Constitutional Convention to curtail imports of Africans. As early as 1784, he anticipated that westward movement would change the demographics of slavery. Tobacco cultivation, so destructive to the soil of Virginia, would f
ind a more receptive environment to the west, as Virginia, in Madison’s words, was “disburdened of the slaves who will follow the culture of that plant.” As slaves were moved to new tobacco fields, many more would go where cotton and sugar grew.

  Virginians struggled with their mounting debts, increasingly selling off their “surplus” slaves. The buyers believed domestic slaves to be safer—that is, less likely to rebel—than slaves brought from the West Indies. As the mayor of New Orleans concluded in early 1804, “domesticated” slaves drawn off the eastern states would ensure his city’s security; he was prepared to welcome “a race of servants already acquainted with our habits and attached to our country.”19

  The Louisiana Ordinance triggered a fractious debate on slavery in the U.S. Senate. Few were fooled by the suggestion that shutting down the foreign slave trade would benefit the nation. William Plumer got straight to the point: “It is obvious that the zeal displayed by the Senate from the Slave States, to prohibit the foreign importation of Slaves into Louisiana, proceeds from the motive to raise the price of their own slaves in the market—& to encrease the means of disposing of those who are most turbulent & dangerous to them.” James Jackson of Georgia summarized the national dilemma: “You cannot prevent slavery—neither laws moral or human can do it. Men will be governed by their interest, not the law.” Regardless of what laws Congress passed, unless the government enforced them with overwhelming military force, Louisianans would buy as many slaves as they wanted, from Virginia or from abroad.

  Defending Jefferson’s position, Breckinridge raised the specter of slaves in the South producing “another St. Domingo,” and Republican John Smith of Ohio backed him up, imagining what would happen if foreign slaves overran Louisiana. If the “negroes were scattered more equally” throughout the states and territories, he said, everyone would feel better. Samuel White of Delaware chimed in, reminding his colleagues of Gabriel’s Rebellion in Virginia. Breckinridge had no problem supplying the real rationale for the proposed redistribution of slaves: it was to “disperse and weaken the race—and free the southern states from a part of its black population, and of its danger.” Anything less and Congress would be prohibiting “men of wealth from the southern states” from settling in the territories. This was the idea of “diffusion,” lessening the evil of slavery by siphoning off the increasing population of slaves from the Atlantic states. As the Upper South became whiter, the pressure of simmering racial hatreds that Jefferson had referred to in Notes on Virginia would find a release. Simply put, the West was to serve as a safety valve for the South. Given this understanding, the impulse to “disperse and weaken the race,” as obnoxious as it is to us, could be spoken of openly. At the start of the nineteenth century, the “dispersal” or “diffusion” of blacks framed a convincing logic for many white Americans who considered themselves enlightened.20

  Defending the manner in which the president had acquired Louisiana, Breckinridge relied on the line of reasoning presented by Madison in Federalist 10. The senator dismissed the “old and hackneyed doctrine” that “a Republic ought not to be too extensive.” Madison’s premise was that factions ought to be diffused across space to make it more difficult for demagogic leaders to manipulate the passions of the people; small, crowded republics were more vulnerable to disruptive factions. Owing in large part to events in St. Domingue, Madison’s theory had become racialized. On a small, crowded island, violent passions had been unleashed.

  As top national executives, Madison and Jefferson were in positions of power and might have looked for an innovative approach to the moral menace of slavery. But in complicated times, politicians do not typically reach for the hardest, longest-insoluble problem to confront. Instead, they act in their own best interest—their immediate interest—and serve their closest constituency. They rationalize doing little by acknowledging the uncertainties that remain. To Monroe, in 1801, Jefferson could write that the West Indies were provided by nature as a “probable & practical retreat” for America’s free blacks, offering “climates congenial with their natural constitution.” The sea was a better racial barrier, a better means of quarantine, than the trans-Mississippi West. In the 1810s Jefferson would react to the problem of slavery in familiar language when he remarked to another Virginian: “Where the disease is most deeply seated, there it will be slowest in eradication.” The “curative process” required, he said, “time, patience, and perseverance.” This was how he rationalized. Neither he nor Madison nor their peers, meditating often on what loomed, persevered to posterity’s satisfaction.21

  In acquiring Louisiana, the United States did not fully understand the uniqueness of the place it had sought for years and finally won through diplomacy. Louisianans would be hard-pressed to convince the federal government that free men of color, who had previously served in the local militia, should continue in that function. Congress promptly barred free blacks from serving on juries. “With respect to the importation of Slaves from Africa,” Claiborne informed Madison in March 1804, “the people generally appear to feel a lively interest, and the prevailing opinion expressed here is, that a prohibition would tend greatly to the injury of the Province.” The governor was following his southern instincts in keeping the peace by interfering little. Some months passed before he was able to assure Madison that “calm” prevailed in the region: “I do believe,” he wrote, “if the natives of the United States should not excite discontents, the Louisianans will become well pleased with the temporary Government which Congress has prescribed.” And that is where things stood, for a while anyway.22

  “The Etiquette Story”

  One need only peruse the published letters of Madison and Jefferson at any point in the first decade of the nineteenth century to see that foreign diplomacy never ceased to be of great concern to them. Amid the extraordinary transition from a Federalist to a Republican order, the new style of governance in Washington produced all kinds of problems. Small gestures could be interpreted as major slights. The offended parties were the usual contending parties, the envoys from England, France, and Spain.

  As Anglo-French war renewed in mid-1803, the rights of neutral shipping came to the fore, as did the British practice of impressment. Neither Madison nor Jefferson was inclined to do the Royal Navy any favor by handing over deserters. Resentment built as the British defended their right to board American ships virtually anywhere in search of British subjects, who could then be hauled away and impressed into service. Americans naturalized as citizens after 1783, when the War for Independence ended, were deemed fair game.

  Madison was stubborn in his view on neutrality, but he was disinclined to respond at length to the first rumblings of impressment. Perhaps he did not want to get into a shouting match, but even so, his initial note to the British chargé d’affaires Edward Thornton proved fiery enough to anger Thornton, who had previously informed London that he considered Gallatin, not Madison, the heavyweight in the cabinet. Now he scoffed at what he described as Madison’s “bitterness of tone and of insinuation.”

  The Briton was aware that Madison had taken it upon himself to address the diplomatic note without conferring with the president, and he convinced himself that Jefferson would not have approved such language. But Thornton did not perceive the nature of Madison’s and Jefferson’s relationship. If forced to take charge, Jefferson would have stated U.S. opposition to British policy in complete detail and with no more reticence than Madison, feeling it was necessary to do so before anything took place on the high seas that threatened to spiral out of control.

  At times the president preferred to guard his opinions. In this case, Madison was present to commit them to paper at his behest and run interference with a foreign representative. Jefferson rarely made a policy decision without soliciting Madison’s counsel, and Madison would not pledge the United States to a position that he did not already know Jefferson approved. As a result of misperception, Thornton was made decidedly uncomfortable by Madison, while remaining remarkably
unperturbed by Jefferson’s policies. Thornton felt the same way about the president’s unpretentious dress and bearing. He and his wife had visited Monticello, and if its unfinished condition (which Jefferson seemed perfectly at ease in) made their stay imperfect, they had grown to understand that whether at home or inside the President’s House, their host did not entertain in the ostentatious manner to which most European diplomats were accustomed, and to which George Washington had adhered.23

  Edward Thornton did not have a full opportunity to judge President Jefferson’s policy toward neutrality and impressment, because his successor arrived in early 1804. Although envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary Anthony Merry was not of especially high rank, he had previously been in the diplomatic service in Spain. He came with expectations of grand treatment, as did his wife, Elizabeth, who reportedly sailed to America with servants and baggage overflowing.

  Jefferson detested high court culture and felt no need for ceremony. The Merrys were taken aback by the lack of formality at the President’s House, as when Jefferson greeted them in bedroom slippers. Learning that this was not an insult but the way he had appeared before a Danish minister as well, the Merrys still found ways to complain in letters home. It irked them (as it had the Spanish minister) that President Jefferson paid no mind to seating arrangements at his dinner table. Merry had assumed he was the guest of honor, only to find that the French minister had been invited to the same gathering, in spite of the fact that their two nations were at war. Hannah Gallatin had to give up her place at the table to Mrs. Merry, to help the Englishwoman overcome her discomfort.