Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  66. Jefferson did not believe that the capture of Toussaint would end the conflict. “Some other black leader will arise, and a war of extermination ensue,” he wrote, “for no second capitulation will be trusted by the blacks.” John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (Charlottesville, Va., 1991), 138–39; TJ to Robert Livingston, April 18, 1802, PTJ-LC.

  67. Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half in the United States of America, 366–67.

  68. Linda K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970), chap. 2, quote at 324; Garry Wills, “Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power (Boston, 2003).

  69. Massachusetts Spy, April 28, 1802, originating in the Courant.

  70. Charleston Daily Advertiser, April 14, 1802; also, The Republican or, Anti-Democrat, May 10, 1802.

  71. Weekly Wanderer (Randolph, Vt.), April 17, 1802; also Pittsfield Sun.

  72. TJ to Livingston, April 18, 1802, TJP-LC; JM to Livingston, May 1, 1802; to Pinckney, May 11, 1802, PJM-SS, 3:174–78, 215–16; Malone, 4:286–91.

  73. Laurent DuBois, “The Haitian Revolution and the Sale of Louisiana,” in Kastor and Weil, eds., Empires of the Imagination, 93–116.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Embryo of a Great Empire, 1803–1804

  1. Donald Jackson, Thomas Jefferson and the Stony Mountains: Exploring the West from Monticello (Urbana, Ill., 1981), esp. chap. 7; James P. Ronda, “ ‘A Knowledge of Different Parts’: The Shaping of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 41 (Autumn 1991): 4–19; Ronda, “Dreams and Discoveries: Exploring the American West, 1760–1815,” William and Mary Quarterly 46 (January 1989): 145–62; William E. Foley, “Lewis and Clark’s American Travels: The View from Britain,” Western Historical Quarterly 34 (Autumn 2003): 301–24.

  2. Charles A. Miller, Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation (Baltimore, 1988), 238–43.

  3. TJ to Lewis, January 13, 1804, TJP-LC; Jackson, Thomas Jefferson and Stony Mountains, 128–29. Jefferson was interested not only in the Northwest but in the Southwest too. That expedition, tackling the Red River and testing Spanish power, did not fare as well. See Dan Flores, “Jefferson’s Grand Expedition and the Mystery of the Red River,” in Patrick G. Williams, S. Charles Bolton, and Jeannie M. Whayne, A Whole Country in Commotion: The Louisiana Purchase and the American Southwest (Fayetteville, Ark., 2005), 21–39.

  4. Harold Hellenbrand, “Not ‘To Destroy But to Fulfil’: Jefferson, Indians, and Republican Dispensation,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 18 (Autumn 1985): 539, 542; Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1973), esp. 89–91, 245–48; Eve Kornfeld, “Encountering the Other: American Intellectuals and Indians in the 1790s,” William and Mary Quarterly 52 (April 1995): 287–314; Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 215–17, 225–27; Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 276–80. Brian Steele has recently addressed Jefferson’s sense that Indian culture remained inferior if it “forced” women to labor in the fields; once Indian women were removed from hard labor, they could “literally reproduce the nation,” by equaling the fertility rates of white women. See Steele, “Thomas Jefferson’s Gender Frontier,” Journal of American History 95 (June 2008): 19–24. On Jefferson’s ease in sacrificing Indian lands and cultures to whites’ manifest destiny, see Robert J. Miller, Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, and Manifest Destiny (Westport, Conn., 2006), chap. 4. On the banishment of Indians from the narrative of American character, see Steven Conn, History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 2004).

  5. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (New York, 1969), 348–53; Miller, Jefferson and Nature, 205–6; Ketcham, 417–20. The observation that Jefferson conceived of an empire without a metropolis comes from Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville, Va., 2000), 45. Jefferson’s physiocratic thinking was consistent with his neurologically based theory of partisan differences. It was axiomatic for him that Republicans were naturally of “sound minds and bodies.” In 1802 he classified those he identified with as “the healthy, firm and virtuous feeling confidence in their physical and moral resources.” Federalists, by contrast, were “timid,” constitutionally predisposed to yield to strong, subversive leaders or welcome a return to monarchy. It could well be that in Jefferson’s mind, Federalists’ lesser identification with agricultural enterprise related to how their neurological health suffered due to their contentment with the status quo. Though a tireless, wide-ranging reader, Jefferson needed fixed models to back up what he might have put more simply, in purely political terms: Federalists resisted mass movement west because they feared a loss of control, the breakdown of class barriers, and the imagined results of democratic uplift. See Andrew Burstein, Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello (New York, 2005), esp. 201–2; TJ to William Branch Giles, undated, but sometime after October 15, 1795, PTJ, 28:423–27; TJ to Joel Barlow, May 3, 1802, TJP-LC.

  6. Jerry W. Knudson, Jefferson and the Press: Crucible of Liberty (Columbia, S.C., 2006), 102–4.

  7. Madison’s thinking here relates, as well, to checks and balances in the federal system put in place in order to diffuse destabilizing concentrations of power.

  8. TJ to Breckinridge, August 12, 1803, TJP-LC.

  9. TJ to Breckinridge, August 18, 1803; TJ to Wilson Cary Nicholas, September 7, 1803, TJP-LC. In his letter to Nicholas, Jefferson referred to an “unusual kind of letter” from the French minister to Madison, admitting that he would “acquiesce with satisfaction” if Congress ignored the need for an amendment. The phrase “safe & precise” also comes from the letter to Nicholas. Also see Ketcham, 421.

  10. Henry Adams, Life of Albert Gallatin (Philadelphia, 1879), 320–22.

  11. William Plumer of New Hampshire pointedly observed that only the Senate rules requiring a treaty to be read three times, and once a day, had prevented the treaty’s passage on the first day. According to Plumer, the president was handed his “vast wilderness world” without having to face any opposition. See William Plumer’s Memorandum of Proceedings in the United States Senate, 1803–1807, ed. Everett Somerville Brown (New York, 1923), 13–14; also RL, 2:1290–91; James E. Scanlon, “A Sudden Conceit: Jefferson and the Louisiana Government Bill of 1804,” Louisiana History 9 (Spring 1968): 141.

  12. Aurora General Advertiser, November 7, 1803; American Citizen, November 7, 1803; Republican Star [Easton, Md.], November 8 and November 15, 1803; Alexandria Daily Advertiser, January 9, 1804.

  13. Aurora General Advertiser, January 6, 9, and 19, 1804; Republican Advocate [Fredericktown, Md.], February 10, 1804; “The Governor’s Address to the Citizens of Louisiana,” (New Orleans, December 1803); Brant, 4:159.

  14. TJ to Breckinridge, November 12, 1803. Congressman George Washington Campbell of Tennessee also claimed that the new government would put residents “under the lash of despotism,” reduced to “chattel.” See Annals of Congress, 8th Cong., 1st sess., 1060, 1064–65; and Scanlon, “Sudden Conceit,” 142, 144, 149.

  15. Peter J. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven, Conn., 2004), 36–41, 55–66.

  16. TJ to Clinton, December 2, 1803, TJP-LC.

  17. TJ to Monroe, November 24, 1801, TJP-LC.

  18. Claiborne to JM, January 23, 1802, JMP-SS, 2:416; Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 45–51; Lacy Ford, “Reconfiguring the Old South: ‘Solving’ the Problem of Slavery, 1787–1838,” Journal of American History 95 (June 2008): 103–4.

  19. TJ to Breckinridge, November 12, 1803; JM to TJ, August 20, 1784, [draft portion of letter,] PJM, 8:108; Steven D
eyle, “’The Irony of Liberty: Origins of the Domestic Slave Trade,” Journal of the Early Republic 12 (Spring 1982): 43–44, 60–61; Lewis Kerr to Isaac Briggs, March 24, 1804, cited in Ford, “Reconfiguring the Old South,” 105–6.

  20. Everett S. Brown, “The Senate Debate on the Breckenridge Bill for the Government of Louisiana, 1804,” American Historical Review 22 (January 1917): 345–47, 350, 353–54. In 1798 John Nicholas and William B. Giles, both Virginians, had appealed similarly when the subject was allowing slavery in Mississippi Territory. At the time Congressman George Thatcher of Massachusetts, who had proposed keeping the restriction on slavery from the Northwest Ordinance in the Mississippi Territory bill, reacted to the diffusion argument: “The gentleman from Virginia … contended that certain States were overflowing with slaves, and if not colonized by opening this wide tract of country to them, they would not be able to keep or manage them … The gentleman wished to take the blacks away from places where they are huddle up together, and spread them over this territory; they wished to get rid of them, and to plague others with them.” Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., 1308–11; Rothman, Slave Country, 24–26.

  21. Annals of Congress, 8th Cong., 1st sess., 60. Tench Coxe had advocated diffusion to Madison in 1801, calling for tight restrictions on the foreign slave trade and a stronger militia to avoid the dangers previewed in the Caribbean; see Coxe to JM, December 12, 1801, PJM-SS, 2:307–8; TJ to Monroe, November 24, 1801, PTJ, 35:718–21; TJ to David Barrow, May 1, 1815, TJP-LC.

  22. Joseph T. Hatfield, William Claiborne: Jeffersonian Centurion in the American Southwest (Lafayette, La., 1976); Kastor, Nation’s Crucible, 36–41, 55–66; Claiborne to JM, December 27, 1803, January 31, February 4, March 1, and May 12, 1804, PJM-SS, 6:231, 416, 428–29, 525; 7:210.

  23. Brant, 4:56–57, 160–70; Malone, 4:93–94, 376–77. As to Madison’s reluctance to commit an opinion without first knowing Jefferson approved, see JM to TJ, April 24, 1804, RL, 2:1323, in an instance involving Governor Claiborne of Louisiana and Secretary Gallatin and the establishment of a state bank. Madison distinguished between private letters expressing “sentiments” and official letters expressing the government’s position. It is also an example of the seamless communication of Madison, Gallatin, and the president.

  24. Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics (Charlottesville, Va., 2000), 34–47; Malone, 4:377–83; JM to Monroe, February 16, 1804, PJM-SS, 6:484–86. The French minister separately confirmed Madison’s and Jefferson’s assessment of the negative impact Mrs. Merry’s resentments had on other Washington diplomat families.

  25. Burr to Theodosia Burr, October 16, 1803, and January 17, 1804, in Correspondence of Aaron Burr and His Daughter Theodosia, ed. Mark Van Doren (New York, 1929), 129, 147–48; Catherine Allgor, A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (New York, 2006). Allgor’s portrait of Dolley Madison is very insightful, though her penchant to diminish James in order to lift Dolley to preeminence amounts to caricature; Monroe to JM, July 1, 1804, PJM-SS, 7:404.

  26. JM to Robert Livingston, January 31, 1804, PJM-SS, 6:411–12; Albany Gazette, December 19, 1805, reporting a decree from the French general governing Haiti, which stated that all American vessels bringing supplies to the “revolted Negroes” would face “seizure and condemnation.”

  27. Robert A. Rutland, who calls Secretary of State Madison Jefferson’s “assistant chief executive,” has pointed out the difficulty of knowing precisely what Madison and Jefferson discussed in private from 1801 to 1809; he cites Jefferson’s letter at the end of his presidency, in which he reminded Madison: “A short conference saves a long letter.” See Rutland, James Madison: The Founding Father (New York, 1987), 169–70. See TJ to JM, August 7 and August 18, 1804, RL, 2:1332–33, 1337–38, for pertinent examples (among many) of the transatlantic correspondence they shared and the opinions they hazarded to each other. They were open about their complaints against Livingston, whose letters to the State Department were deficient, in Madison’s judgment, and whose “quarrelsome disposition” irritated Jefferson. See also JM to TJ, August 4 and August 18, 1804, and TJ to JM, August 18, 1804, ibid., 1331, 1338.

  28. James R. Sofka, “The Jeffersonian Idea of National Security: Commerce, the Atlantic Balance of Power, and the Barbary War, 1786–1805,” Diplomatic History 21 (Fall 1997): 519, 526.

  29. TJ to JM, August 28, 1801, RL, 2:1193–94; Samuel Smith to Captain Richard Dale, May 20, 1801, in Naval Documents Relating to the United States Wars with the Barbary Powers (Washington, D.C., 1939), 1:467; Frank Lambert, The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World (New York, 2005), 124–25, 133; “Editorial Note: Dispatching a Naval Squadron to the Mediterranean 20–21 May 1801,” JMP-SS, 1:198–99.

  30. David A. Carson, “Jefferson, Congress, and the Question of Leadership in the Tripolitan War,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 94 (October 1986): 410, 412, 415, 417–18; “Jefferson’s Cabinet Notes, May 15, 1801,” TJP-LC; Lambert, Barbary Wars, 126; Sofka, “Jeffersonian Idea of National Security,” 538.

  31. Humphreys to JM, April 24, 1801, JMP-SS, 1:92; “Jefferson’s Cabinet Notes, May 15, 1801”; Gallatin to TJ, September 12, 1805, TJP-LC.

  32. Decatur received a promotion and was commended by the secretary of the navy for his “gallant conduct” in a “brilliant enterprise.” The president ceremonially awarded him a sword. See Michael Kitzen, “Money Bags or Cannon Balls: The Origins of the Tripolitan War,” Journal of the Early Republic 16 (Winter 1996): 601–24; Robert J. Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States in the Muslim World, 1776–1815 (New York, 1995); Gardner W. Allen, Our Navy and the Barbary Corsairs (Boston, 1905), 173–77; Lambert, Barbary Wars, 128–30, 142–44.

  33. Humphreys to JM, April 24, 1801, James Leander Cathcart to JM, July 2, 1801, JM to Lear, July 14, 1803, JMP-SS, 1:92, 370–71; 5:178; G. A. Starr, “Escape from Barbary: A Seventeenth-Century Genre,” Huntington Library Quarterly 21 (November 1965): 35–52. Franklin was not alone in criticizing southern slavery with his comparison to the Islamic practice. Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797) was the most popular American work on the Barbary captives, and he too emphasized that American slavery was no better, and perhaps worse, than the Algerine practice. See Thomas S. Kidd, “ ‘Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet than the Devil?’ Early American Uses of Islam,” Church History 72 (December 2003): 766, 788. A former U.S. captive, William Ray, also published a memoir in 1808, in which he ridiculed the abuse of American sailors by their officers and compared them to African-American slaves; see William Ray, Horrors of Slavery; or, the American Tars in Tripoli, ed. Hester Blum (Troy, N.Y., 1808; rpt., New Brunswick, N.J., 2008), xix–xx; Lambert, Barbary Wars, 40, 110, 118, 120, 161; Sofka, “Jeffersonian Idea of National Security,” 542. This was not the only kind of representation Americans had access to; a 144-page history of Barbary described a “tawny”-colored people both “superstitious and cruel.” Its author led up to his explanation of current events with an account of the prophet Muhammad who, according to the Koran, urged his followers to fight to the death and fear nothing in so doing. The people of North Africa still, it was said, believed in evil spirits and in a destiny ordained by God; they acknowledged no law but “force and convenience.” See Stephen Cleveland Blyth, History of the War between the United States and Tripoli and Other Barbary Powers (Salem, Mass., 1806), quotes at 4, 40, 127–28.

  34. Jefferson’s reference to St. Domingue as the “American Algiers” is in TJ to JM, February 5, 1799; his reference to the Spanish provincial governors as “pigmy kings” in TJ to JM, August 30, 1802, RL, 2:1093, 1242. He used similar language some years earlier in a letter to James Monroe, in complaining that the federal government was making an unlawful attempt to transfer power from the House of Representatives to the president, the Senate, or “any other Indian, Algerine or other chief.” TJ to Monroe, March 21, 1796, PTJ, 29:41–42. Jefferson also expressed his willingness to use force against Spain, suggesting an attack on
a Spanish garrison in 1792, and again while he was president. See Sofka, “Jeffersonian Idea of National Security,” 528; and TJ to JM, October 23, 1805, wherein he claimed that if Spain interfered with the status quo, “we shall repel force by force.” RL, 3:1395. Also see TJ to JM, September 14, 1803, RL, 2:1285–86.

  35. JM to Levi Lincoln, July 25, 1801, Humphreys to JM, April 24, 1801, PJM-SS, 1:92, 476; TJ to Cooper, February 18, 1806, TJP-LC; Cooper was a staunch Jeffersonian found guilty of libeling President Adams in 1800 and was briefly imprisoned under the Sedition Act. On Jefferson’s idea of informal leagues of nations, see Sofka, “Jeffersonian Idea of National Security,” 534, 539.

  36. William van Alstyne and John Marshall, “A Critical Guide to Marbury v. Madison,” Duke Law Journal (February 1969): 3–8.

  37. TJ to William B. Giles, March 23, 1801, PTJ, 33:413–14; TJ to JM, August 13, 1801, RL, 3:1186; William Marbury to JM, December 16, 1801, PJM-SS, 2:319–20. If Madison disagreed with the posture Jefferson took, there is no evidence of it. It is Bruce Ackerman who has suggested that Jefferson “muzzled” Madison; see Ackerman, The Failure of the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidency Democracy (New York, 2005), 191.

  38. TJ to John Dickinson, December 19, 1801, PTJ, 36:165–66. Newspapers friendly to the administration saw Marshall’s determination as a pathetic ploy to irritate the executive: “The Tories talk of dragging the President before the court, and impeaching him, and a wonderful deal of similar nothingness. But it is easy to see this is all fume, which can excite no more than a ludicrous irritation.” See reprint from the Aurora, December 22, 1801, in Centinel of Freedom [Newark, N.J.], December 29, 1801. Other Republican papers reported “dark and mysterious appointments” as a desperate act by President Adams. See American Citizen, January 4, 1802; and Aurora, December 30, 1801.

  39. Van Alstyne and Marshall, “Critical Guide to Marbury v. Madison,” 4–5. According to Carl Prince, Jefferson was able to remove 18 of 30 Federalist judges, out of a total of 32 individuals appointed. He also replaced 13 of 21 district attorneys (11 of them Federalists) and 18 of 29 U.S. marshals. Of 316 offices, he forced out at least 146 incumbents (46 percent), at least 118 (37 percent) of whom were Federalists. Carl Prince, “The Passing of the Aristocracy: Jefferson’s Removals of the Federalists, 1801–1805,” Journal of American History 57 (1970): 565–68.