American Sphinx (17 page)

MADISONIAN ADVICE

B
Y THE MID-POINT
of his time in France, then, Paris had come to mean many things to Jefferson: It was the diplomatic capital of Europe in which the political and commercial stature of the new American nation he represented remained marginal at best; the epitome of the Old World’s civilized seductions, as well as its urban corruptions; and the perfect place to fall in love. Paris also proved to be the ideal perch from which to observe two of the most significant political events in Western history. From afar it afforded Jefferson a conveniently detached perspective on the debate surrounding the creation and ratification of the new Constitution of the United States, a debate in which the combination of his distance and the quality of his chief source—James Madison—allowed him to accommodate himself to political ideas that violated his deepest ideological instincts. From close up it provided him with the unique opportunity to witness the coming of the French Revolution and, in the crucible of conversations with several of its staunchest supporters and ultimate victims, to work out the full implications of his truly radical vision of politics. As both a bird’s-eye observer of American developments and a ringside witness of French convulsions, in short, he fashioned what were to become enduringly Jeffersonian convictions about mankind’s tenuous relationship with government.

His ongoing correspondence with Madison and Monroe had kept him abreast of the growing dissatisfaction with the inherent weakness of the federal Congress in Philadelphia. “The politics of Europe render it indispensably necessary that with respect to every thing external we be one nation only, firmly held together,” he informed Madison, adding, “Interior government is what each state should keep to himself.” He wanted it known back home in Virginia and in Philadelphia that he favored reform of the Articles of Confederation to enlarge federal jurisdiction over foreign trade and foreign policy but preferred leaving control over all domestic concerns, including taxation, to the particular states. “To make us one nation as to foreign concerns, and keep us distinct in Domestic ones,” he wrote to Madison, “gives the outline of the proper division of powers between the general and particular governments.”
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By 1786 Madison was already contemplating much more drastic changes in the structure of the federal government. Jefferson had inadvertently contributed to such thoughts by sending over two trunks of books, including the collected works of David Hume, which Madison then proceeded to study in preparation for the Constitutional Convention. (The historian Douglass Adair has called Madison’s intensive reading of Hume perhaps the most productive and consequential act of scholarship in American history.) But Madison did not initially share his more critical assessment of the American government with Jefferson. The established pattern of their political alliance was for Madison or Monroe to provide the information about congressional debates and for Jefferson then to dictate the directions to be taken. For example, when Monroe reported a congressional proposal to move the national capital from Philadelphia to New York, Jefferson told him to join with Madison to block the move since the interest of Virginia demanded a location on the Potomac. “It is evident that when a sufficient number of the Western states come in,” he apprised Monroe, “they will move it to George town. In the meantime it is our interest that it should remain where it is, and give no new pretensions to any other place.” Given the deference that Madison customarily displayed toward Jefferson’s commands, it is not surprising that Jefferson remained unaware of the root-and-branch reforms Madison believed essential until after the Constitutional Convention had completed its work. In this one all-important instance their roles were reversed; Madison was in the lead.
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Meanwhile Jefferson was receiving reports from other quarters about an insurrection in western Massachusetts led by a veteran of the American Revolution named Daniel Shays to protest new taxes imposed by Boston. In the grand scheme of things Shays’s Rebellion was a tempest in a teapot, but prominent figures throughout the country interpreted it as a harbinger of incipient anarchy and a clarion call for a more vigorous and fully empowered federal government: “In short, my Dr. Sir,” John Jay wrote from Philadelphia, “we are in a very unpleasant Situation. Changes are Necessary, but what they Ought to be, what they will be, and how and when to be produced, are arduous questions.” From London Abigail Adams summoned up the scene of a looming apocalypse. “Ignorant, wrestless desperadoes, without conscience or principles,” she informed Jefferson, “have led a deluded multitude to follow their standard, under pretence of grievances which have no existence but in their own immaginations.”
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In retrospect it is clear that both the Shaysites’ fear of tyranny and the corresponding fear of observers like Jay and Abigail Adams that America was on the verge of social disintegration were mutually reinforcing overreactions of near-paranoid proportions. Jefferson’s response to the entire display was especially revealing both for its clearsighted and even serene endorsement of popular resistance to government in almost any form and for its eventually famous phrasing: “I hope they pardoned them [i.e., the Shaysites],” he told Abigail. “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. . . . I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.” He had first proposed a similar formulation of the problem two months earlier in a letter to Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale. “If the happiness of the mass of the people can be secured at the expense of a little tempest now and then,” he had written Stiles, “or even of a little blood, it will be a precious purchase.” A month later he had written Madison in language almost identical to his message to Abigail. His boldest formulation came more months later, in November 1787, when he told William Stephens Smith that Shays’s Rebellion was actually a symptom of America’s political health: “What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?” he observed. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Moreover, those alleged statesmen who wished to use Shays’s Rebellion as an occasion to justify more coercive political institutions, he warned, “are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order.”
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These were extremely radical statements, which, taken literally—or, for that matter, taken at all seriously—placed Jefferson far to the left of any responsible political leader of the revolutionary generation. For his remarks suggested that his deepest allegiances were not to the preservation of political stability but to its direct opposite. Given the radical and even anarchistic consequences of the ideas he seemed to be advocating in response to the Shays scare, one is tempted to put them down as hyperbolic occasions, or perhaps as momentary excesses prompted by his genuine aversion to the overreaction of those condemning the Shays insurrection, an aversion rendered more plausible and comfortable by his distant and safe location in Paris.

But there is reason to believe that Jefferson meant what he said, indeed that his entire way of thinking about government was different from that of any other prominent American leader of the time. In January 1787, while Madison was studying the classic texts of Hume and Montesquieu in preparation for the Constitutional Convention later that spring, Jefferson wrote him to share his own thoughts on the appropriate political models for American society. While Madison was grappling with questions about political architecture—how to configure federal and state power; how to design institutions so as to balance interest groups without replicating the gridlock of the current government under the Articles of Confederation—Jefferson was thinking much more grandly, about the very ground on which any and all political structures must be constructed. While Madison was struggling with arrangements of authority in three branches of the government, Jefferson was identifying three kinds of society in which human beings might arrange themselves.

There was European society, with governments that ruled by force, usually monarchical in form, what Jefferson described as “a government of wolves over sheep.” Then there was American and, to a slightly lesser extent, English society, with governments responsive to the populace as a whole, where “the mass of mankind enjoys a precious degree of liberty & happiness.” Finally there was Indian society, which managed itself without any formal government at all by remaining small and assuring the internalization of common values among all members. If forced to choose, Jefferson preferred the Indian solution, while admitting that it was “inconsistent with any degree of population.” He reiterated the point in a letter to Edward Carrington, a conservative Virginian planter and politician. “I am convinced,” he explained, “that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government enjoy in their gen’l mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under European governments.”
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The Jeffersonian ideal, in short, was not a specific version of balanced republican government. It was a world in which individual citizens had internalized their social responsibilities so thoroughly that the political architecture Madison was designing was superfluous. Though prepared to acknowledge the need to make necessary compromises with his ideal for practical reasons—the size of the American population and the vastness of its territory obviously demanded some delegation of authority beyond the sovereign self—he did so grudgingly. And the elaborate reasoning about constitutional structure that so captivated political thinkers like Madison and the other delegates at the Constitutional Convention never animated the best energies of his mind, which drew its inspiration from a utopian vision of the liberated individual resisting all external coercion and regarding all forms of explicit government power as a necessary evil.

All this helps explain his initially hostile reaction to the news leaking out of Philadelphia about the shape of the new American Constitution in the summer of 1787. Madison had tried to prepare him for what was coming, suggesting that America needed an energetic federal government “with a negative
in all cases whatsoever
over the local legislatures.” But Jefferson resisted the suggestion and questioned the decision to make wholesale changes in the current, albeit inadequate, national government: “The negative proposal . . . on all acts of the several [i.e., state] legislatures is now for the first time suggested to my mind,” he told Madison. “Prima facie I do not like it. It fails in an essential character [by proposing] to mend a small hole by covering the whole garment.” He expressed the same apprehension to Adams, claiming that “the good of the new constitution might have been couched in three or four articles to be added to the good, old, and venerable fabrick, which should have been preserved even as a religious relique.” Edward Carrington also tried to prepare him for a fundamentally new kind of federal government, not just a minor revision of the Articles of Confederation. “The Ideas here suggested,” Carrington wrote in June, “are far removed from those which prevailed when you was amongst us, and as they have arisen with the most able, from an actual view of events, it is probable you may not be prepared to expect them.” Jefferson’s location in Paris rather than Philadelphia proved a major advantage, by providing time to adjust to political ideas that ran counter to his own and that he would in all likelihood have opposed if present.
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He concealed his worries about what was brewing in Philadelphia from all his European correspondents, preferring to play his customary role as America’s champion. “Our Federal convention is likely to sit till October,” he wrote a French friend, “and we may be assured their propositions will be wise, as a more able assembly never sat in America. Happy for us, that when we find our constitutions defective and unsufficient to secure the happiness of our people, we can assemble with all the coolness of philosophers and set it to rights, while every other nation on earth must have recourse to arms. . . .” Meanwhile Madison apologized for his inability to provide a detailed account of the ongoing deliberations. “I am still under the mortification of being restrained from disclosing any part of their proceedings,” he wrote in July. “As soon as I am at liberty I will endeavor to make amends for my silence and . . . give you pretty full gratification. I have taken lengthy notes of every thing that has yet passed. . . .”
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Madison was as good as his word. His letter of October 24, 1787, provided Jefferson with a lengthy report on the wide-ranging deliberations at the Constitutional Convention and a truly remarkable appraisal of the constitutional issues at stake. He described how the delegates had tried “to draw a line of demarkation which would give to the General Government every power requisite for general purposes, and leave to the States every power which might be most beneficially administered by them.” This formulation blurred the relative powers of federal versus state authority, but in terms that clearly extended federal jurisdiction over domestic policy in ways that Jefferson staunchly opposed. Madison then went on to analyze the intricate and purposefully ambiguous layering of jurisdiction by the different branches of government and the different versions of representation. “Those who contend for a Simple Democracy, or a pure republic, actuated by a sense of the majority, and operating within narrow limits,” he observed, “assume or suppose a case which is altogether fictitious.” What Madison was terming “fictitious” was in fact the essence of Jefferson’s thinking about government. Jefferson acknowledged as much in his response to Madison. “I own I am not a friend to a very energetic government,” he confessed. “It is always oppressive. . . . After all, it is my principle that the will of the Majority should always prevail.” Madison did not write back to explain that, at least as he saw it, the Constitution had been designed to subvert mere majority rule on the assumption that the chief threat to individual liberty in America was likely to come from that direction. Jefferson would have found such an argument unintelligible, since he found it impossible to regard popular majorities as dangerous or to think about the powers of government in positive ways. Madison’s entire emphasis on social balance was at odds with Jefferson’s commitment to personal liberation.
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