Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  He received a visit in May 1836 from Charles Jared Ingersoll of Philadelphia, a War of 1812–era congressman whose father had served alongside Madison in the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War. After a bumpy ride from the Orange Court House, Ingersoll described the surrounding countryside: “The woods were in foliage, the white-thorn and red-bud trees in greater number than I had ever seen them, giving a pleasant coloring to what was otherwise a wild, poor, and uninteresting region. Nearer Mr. Madison’s, the country is more improved, and the mountain scenery is very agreeable.” On the property itself, Ingersoll found “signs of ornamental agriculture,” but the brick mansion was “decayed and in need of considerable repairs.” Inside were French carpets and tall mirrors, and a table “handsomely provided” with an impressive array of foods and wines.

  As the two men spoke of current affairs, Madison made it a point to bemoan the fate of the slave economy. He was somewhat less sanguine than he had been when the Englishwoman Harriet Martineau recently visited. To Ingersoll, he predicted “troubles and explosions,” and while willing to discourse on any and all political subjects, Madison left his guest feeling that the nullification controversy had sent a shock through his system. But there was one subject about which he felt no indecision. “You perceive directly that Mr. Jefferson is the god of his idolatry,” Ingersoll wrote. Madison kept several Jefferson portraits on the wall, and while he referred to his friend the fifth president simply as “Monroe,” he never mentioned his predecessor except as “Mr. Jefferson.” When pressed on past actors, Madison refused to speak ill even of Hamilton. In a tribute subsequently published in a Washington, D.C., newspaper, the Philadelphian concluded of Madison: “A purer, brighter, juster spirit never existed.”78

  During Ingersoll’s visit, Madison’s rapidly deteriorating health concerned Dolley. He was unable, she wrote, “even to exert his thoughts without oppressive fatigue.” Breathing was becoming more difficult. By the time Jefferson’s physician, Dr. Dunglison, was called to Montpelier, there was nothing to be done.

  The last obligation Madison accepted was to review the biography of Jefferson by Professor George Tucker, while in manuscript. Learning that it was being dedicated to him, he penned a note of gratitude to the author on June 27, 1836. “Apart from the value put on such a mark of respect from you in a dedication of your Life of Mr. Jefferson to me, I could only be governed in accepting it by my confidence in your capacity to do justice to a character so interesting to his country and to the world; and I may be permitted to add with whose principles of liberty and political career mine have been so extensively congenial.” Tucker advised him that the proof sheets were with the printer in Philadelphia, and Madison could expect to receive his copy “as soon as it can be bound.”79

  It may have been Madison’s wish to expire on Independence Day, as the second, third, and fifth presidents had all done, ten and five years earlier. But that did not occur. On Tuesday, June 28, at breakfast, and attended by a niece, the fourth president spoke a few words to reassure her that he was feeling fine, then slumped over and quietly left the world. It was, officially, the end of the Virginia Dynasty of presidents.

  In the U.S. Senate, on the thirtieth, Virginian William Cabell Rives, a protégé of Madison’s and Jefferson’s alike, could not resist invoking the providential deaths of Adams, Jefferson, and Monroe. Referring to Madison’s “trembling and unsteady signature” at the end of the letter he held in his hand, dated just the week before, Rives expressed his personal sorrow, adding: “Still I trusted that his light might hold out to the 4th of July, that he might be restored on that glorious anniversary to an immortal companionship with those great men and patriots. But it has been ordered otherwise.”80

  The National Intelligencer declared: “JAMES MADISON is no more!” It celebrated Madison’s genius, as “the last of the great lights of the Revolution, the brightest of those great minds,” and gave him the serene end he deserved: “He expired without a struggle, free from pain, free from regret, and from cause of reproach.” The same newspaper had proclaimed ten years before: “THOMAS JEFFERSON is no more!” The metaphors of light were equally resplendent then: “His weary sun hath made a golden set, leaving a bright tract of undying fame to mark his path to a glorious immortality.” At moments such as these, the press routinely called upon all Americans to count themselves as constituents of a sentimentally united nation.81

  Dolley Madison received only $30,000 rather than the $100,000 her husband had calculated on for his papers—which included the much-awaited notes that Madison took at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Though she was not saddled with the degree of debt and hardship that Jefferson’s family immediately faced upon his death, she did struggle considerably. After enjoying forty-two years of marriage, and left with a compulsive spender for a son, the sixty-eight-year-old Mrs. Madison kept her Washington connections alive and bore up under the strain.

  She honored her husband’s wish not to break up slave families when potential buyers approached with offers to relieve her of her financial burden. Jefferson’s heirs had been obliged to sell their nearly two hundred slaves in 1827; the families of all concerned suffered deep heartache at the inhumanity of the spectacle. Mrs. Madison, despite mortgage assistance from the New York millionaire John Jacob Astor, lost Montpelier in 1844. When she died at eighty-one, in 1849, she was returned there and buried beside her husband and his parents in the small cemetery on the property.82

  At midcentury, as the crisis of the Union worsened, Madison’s second-term attorney general, Richard Rush, publicly revealed a previously unknown text, a single page, that Madison had composed a year or so before his death. Dolley had sent it to Edward Coles, who in turn had passed it on to Rush. It bore the title “Advice to My Country,” and it contained a poignant personal message:

  As this advice, if it ever see the light will not do it till I am no more it may be considered as issuing from the tomb, where truth alone can be respected, and the happiness of man alone consulted.

  The advice nearest to my heart and deepest in my convictions is that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated. Let the open enemy to it be regarded as a Pandora with her box opened; and the disguised one, as the Serpent creeping with his deadly wiles into Paradise.83

  This was a very different parable from “Jonathan Bull and Mary Bull,” the bizarre tale of North versus South (and the nasty black stain) that he had earlier written. This was no allegory with a happy ending; it was, rather, a sharp admonition from a guarded man, sober and fearful, who had seen too much to be resting easy as he read the newspapers. The aged Madison invoked Pandora’s box to warn that talk of disunion, taken one short step further, would bring on an unstoppable train of events. The Serpent in Paradise was a stern reminder that those who severed the Union would be subject to everlasting shame and scorn.

  He had finished fighting battles. He could do no more than to wish his nation the self-possession and self-control it needed to recalibrate political and constitutional balance as it moved ahead.

  LEGACY

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Thawing Out the Historical Imagination

  Jefferson and Madison … recognized and adhered to the political party that elected them; and they left it united and powerful when, at the close of public life, they carried into their retirement, and always enjoyed, the respect, esteem, and confidence of all their countrymen.

  —MARTIN VAN BUREN, INQUIRY INTO THE ORIGIN AND COURSE OF POLITICAL PARTIES

  Calm authority sat in Jefferson’s eye, and lurked in the firm intonations of his voice … Madison, in public, appeared to a stranger like a polished and contemplative professional man or student, who was taking a look out on the busy world.

  —HENRY S. RANDALL, JEFFERSON BIOGRAPHER, 1858, REPEATING THE OBSERVATIONS OF THOSE STILL LIVING WHO WERE THE PRESIDENTS’ INTIMATES

  IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY MADISON AND JEFFERSON WERE often spoken of in a single breath. Most regarded their admin
istrations—wrongly—as an unbroken chain. Their penchants and policies while in office were lumped together, but their personalities were as readily differentiated: Madison was said to be naturally noble, Jefferson classically creative; Madison cool, Jefferson cordial. But none of the many descriptions of Madison and Jefferson by their contemporaries would strike the modern reader as detailed and unbiased. Indeed, despite all that has been written over the past two hundred years, the two Virginians descend to us as men with secrets, contradictory attitudes, and unknowable thoughts.

  It is that conclusion which we have been strenuously writing against in these pages. Our twofold object has been to get inside the all-important political culture of the Revolutionary generation and to resist, as much as possible, favoring one actor over another. If Americans’ historical understanding is to benefit, we must find a way to engage in a legitimate amount of speculation while stopping short of making the glib assertions and assumptions that always seem to attach to the founders.

  “Moved As They Were by a Common Impulse”

  Martin Van Buren was a U.S. senator from New York when he visited Virginia and conferred with Jefferson at Monticello. Though he had supported DeWitt Clinton over Madison in the election of 1812 and felt lukewarm toward President Monroe, he had, by 1820, perceived Virginia as the linchpin of his own national political ambition. In 1824 Van Buren invited Jefferson to refute charges recently made by the still vocal, still tactless New England Federalist Timothy Pickering, to the effect that Jefferson was covetous of power and a deliberate seducer of the unwitting public.

  Pickering and Jefferson were civil with each other in person, though two more bitterly opposed in political sentiments could hardly be found. “He arraigns me on two grounds: my actions and my motives,” Jefferson wrote back to Van Buren. “The very actions, however, which he arraigns, have been such as the great majority of citizens have approved.” All together Jefferson’s letter ran eleven pages, typical of the lengths to which he went when it was a matter of defending his historical reputation. Once he had cited page numbers and passages he objected to, and systematically tore apart Pickering’s “diatribe,” he left Van Buren the quintessential Jeffersonian statement as to his regard for historical vindication and his means of attaining it:

  Altho’ I decline all newspaper controversy, yet, when falsehoods have been advanced, within the knoledge of no one so much as myself, I have sometimes deposited a contradiction in the hands of a friend, which if worth preservation, may, when I am no more, nor [are] those whom it might offend, throw light on history, and recall that into the path of truth, and, if of no other value, the present communication may amuse you with anecdotes not known to every one.

  This broad hint-prescription-decree comprises a single tortuous sentence. Jefferson might have restrained himself here, and he might have compressed the eleven pages into three or four, had not his purpose been so far-reaching. His “contradiction” of Pickering’s testimony was thus left to Van Buren to release at the moment when it could have the greatest effect on posterity.1

  Although not a Virginian, Van Buren was, as it turned out, the right man for the job. After Jefferson’s death, the New York Democrat and future president increasingly looked up to Madison as a constitutional authority, whether on matters of federal support of roads and canals or on federal-state relations generally. As Jackson’s first-term secretary of state, he volunteered himself as a forwarder of Madison’s letters to Europe; and as vice president during Jackson’s second term, he sent Madison presidential messages in published form as well as political pamphlets of various kinds, inviting the founder to comment.2

  It was toward the end of his own life, as the Civil War approached, that Van Buren composed the texts that became his own historical search for vindication. His Inquiry into the Origin and Course of Political Parties traced his political lineage to the third and fourth presidents. Its first chapter opens with the lines: “There has been no period in our history, since the establishment of our Independence, to which the sincere friend of free institutions can turn with more unalloyed satisfaction, than to that embraced by the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, moved as they were by a common impulse.” Van Buren was unsparing in his characterization of Alexander Hamilton’s disgust for democracy. He pointed, as Jefferson would have him do, to Patrick Henry’s foolish (or greedy) attraction to Hamilton’s system. And he deployed Jefferson’s response to Pickering in the most persuasive way he knew how.

  In his narrative of the rise of the Republican Party in the 1790s, Van Buren chose to depict Jefferson as the “head” and Madison as the “laboring oar.” The party, he wrote, was “warmed into action by Jefferson’s more fervent though not more deeply seated patriotism.” Madison was “simple, practical, and direct,” and his report on the Alien and Sedition Acts “the flag under which the Republicans conquered.” The eighth president thus made the pair into righteous pugilists, delivering a one-two punch to the political sect that stood in the way of progress.3

  Henry S. Randall was too young to have met either Madison or Jefferson. Raised in a Hamilton-worshipping community in New York, he grew into a Van Buren Democrat, but one who resisted the antislavery turn Van Buren took in 1848. Regarding northerners’ distaste for southern culture as a “disease,” he was the first in a series of sympathizing biographers who told the story of the early republic as Madison and Jefferson preferred it to be understood—if, that is, Madison did not mind his friend receiving the lion’s share of attention. As he researched his three-volume history, Randall remained in close touch with Jefferson’s grandchildren, and as his epigraph to this chapter suggests, he sculpted the third and fourth presidents as though they were posing for national monuments.4

  No Madison study ever really caught on during the formative period of patriotic biography. Madison had no children with Dolley who might have functioned as Jefferson’s daughter, grandson, and granddaughters did. John Payne Todd, Dolley’s son from her first marriage, turned out to be a great disappointment in all respects. A tag-along member of the diplomatic staff that sailed to Europe to negotiate the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812, he often disappeared from the entourage and over the years became increasingly self-destructive. Madison himself spent thousands of dollars paying off his stepson’s gambling debts. After Madison’s death, Todd auctioned off thousands of his stepfather’s letters to cash in.5

  While Jefferson may have ultimately triumphed among biographers, Madison was the clear favorite of James Kirke Paulding. Writing in the 1840s, he acknowledged Jefferson’s primacy as “the Great Apostle of Democracy” but at the same time expressed his reservations about the third president’s occasionally immoderate prescriptions. He saw no genius in Jefferson’s management of policy in the lead-up to the War of 1812, and he did not acknowledge Madison’s share in responsibility for it. Writing of the “twinkle” in Madison’s “small bright blue eyes,” he made it abundantly clear how much he preferred the fourth president’s well-composed views of democracy. “His mind was more consummate and his faculties more nicely balanced than those of his predecessor,” Paulding wrote.6

  Recall the bookseller quoted in the preface to this book, who observed in 1824 that Jefferson possessed “more imagination and passion,” while Madison was the “more natural, candid and profound.” To these remarks, Samuel Whitcomb appended one other: that Madison, in spite of his “excellences,” had “a quizzical, careless, almost waggish bluntness of looks and expression.”

  We have, then, the perspectives of the writer Paulding and the bookseller Whitcomb to describe the artificial competition between Madison and Jefferson. Paulding added his observation of the “twinkle,” the spark, to the “waggish” or mischievous quality that Whitcomb saw in Madison. Perhaps it only grew on Madison in later years, but there was definitely a flash, a flicker, an irreverence that radiated from him, which history ignores. For whatever reason, modern scholars have made Madison not only full of thought, which he was, bu
t a stone-faced politician, which he was not; and they have, with comparable ease, rendered Jefferson as the Federalists so often branded him, a confused idealist.

  These are one-dimensional judgments. Before he was an idealist, Jefferson was a student of the physical world. He was always picking up his pen to record a thought, a design, an expenditure; he was always buying guides, collecting seeds, and describing nature. Whether the subject was farming or politics, he conducted experiments to satisfy his curiosity, always hoping to discover principles or verify hypotheses. And though his theories might at times have been flawed, he was critical of unscientific approaches to knowledge—views that were, as he saw it, counter to nature. Madison understood this about his friend, though his own inclinations were somewhat different. Madison was wary of excesses in experimentation and was more willing to compromise. He disliked inefficiency in any system. And he was intolerant of those in the political world whom he saw as uninspired or driven by narrow interests.

  With impressive variety in his routine, Jefferson yearned to extend knowledge. However, his need for rules and method also led him to impose an often arbitrary order on the world, inadvertently setting limits to knowledge. He chased consonance and fled dissonance. Though the language of harmony and affection supported his ambitious lifetime project, he was neither the anarchist that the angriest Federalists imagined him to be nor the bright-eyed New Deal liberal that the generation that consecrated his Tidal Basin memorial in Washington, D.C., proclaimed him. He was an introvert with a stubborn streak and a clear compulsion to have himself proven correct in the unfolding story of American politics. He had Madison, Van Buren, and grandson Jefferson Randolph, among others, to help him do the job. But the deterioration of historical memory deprives us of detail and context and makes a truthful translation from one generation to the next unlikely. When historians take shortcuts, they de-emphasize one trait by emphasizing another. Much interpretive power is forfeited as time presses on.