Joseph J. Ellis (10 page)

A
S MIGHT BE
expected, the answer the various participants gave to such an overarching question depended a great deal on the ground on which they were standing. And this, in turn, meant that Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison arrived at the dinner with different agendas, different experiences, and different stories to tell. Within this formidable trio, it makes most sense to start with Madison.

He was the most centrally situated, having led the debate over both assumption and the residence question in the House. He also enjoyed the reputation as both a preeminent nationalist and favored son of Virginia and had already become famous at the tender age of thirty-nine as the shrewdest and most politically savvy veteran of the tumultuous constitutional battles of the 1780s. Indeed, in 1790 Madison had just completed what turned out to be the most creative phase of his entire career as an American statesman, which several historians would subsequently describe as the most creative contribution to political science in all of American history.
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Distressed by the political disarray in the state governments in the 1780s and the congenital weakness of the Articles of Confederation, Madison had helped mobilize the movement for the Constitutional Convention. His arguments for a fortified national government became the centerpiece around which all the compromises and revisions of the eventual document congealed, giving him the honorary title of “Father of the Constitution.” He had then joined forces with Hamilton (with a modest assist from John Jay) to write
The Federalist Papers
, which was instantly recognized as an American classic, most especially in its ingenious insistence that republican government would prove more stable when extended over a large landmass and diverse population. In the Virginia ratifying convention he had outmaneuvered the apparently unbeatable opposition led by Patrick Henry,
prompting John Marshall, his fellow Virginian Federalist, to observe that Henry might be the all-time oratorical champion in his capacity to persuade; but that Madison was his superior in his capacity to convince. Then, to top it off, he had drafted and ushered the Bill of Rights through the First Congress. In 1790, in short, Madison was at the peak of his powers and, after George Washington and Benjamin Franklin (who died that year), was generally regarded as the most influential political leader in the new nation.
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He did not look the part. At five feet six and less than 140 pounds “little Jemmy Madison” had the frail and discernibly fragile appearance of a career librarian or schoolmaster, forever lingering on the edge of some fatal ailment, overmatched by the daily demands of ordinary life. When he left his father’s modest-sized plantation at Montpelier in Virginia to attend Princeton in 1769—Aaron Burr was a classmate—the youthful Madison had confessed to intimations of imminent mortality, somewhat morbidly predicting his early death. (As it turned out, he survived longer than all the leaders of the revolutionary generation, observing near the end, “Having outlived so many of my contemporaries, I ought not to forget that I may be thought to have outlived myself.”) Not only did he look like the epitome of insignificance—diminutive, colorless, sickly—he was also paralyzingly shy, the kind of guest at a party who instinctively searched out the corners of the room.
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Appearances, in Madison’s case, were not just massively deceptive; they actually helped to produce his prowess. Amid the flamboyant orators of the Virginia dynasty, he was practically invisible and wholly unthreatening, but therefore the acknowledged master of the inoffensive argument that just happened, time after time, to prove decisive. He seemed to lack a personal agenda because he seemed to lack a personality, yet when the votes were counted, his side almost always won. His diffidence in debate was disarming in several ways: He was so obviously gentle and so eager to give credit to others, especially his opponents, that it was impossible to unleash one’s full fury against him without seeming a belligerent fool; he was so reserved that he conveyed the off-putting impression of someone with an infinite reservoir of additional information, all hidden away, the speaker not wishing to burden you with excessively conspicuous erudition; but, if you gave permission, fully prepared to go on for several more hours; or until
your side voluntarily surrendered. His physical deficiencies meant that a Madisonian argument lacked all the usual emotional affectations and struck with the force of pure, unencumbered thought. Or as one observer put it later, “Never have I seen
so much mind in so little matter.”
His style, in effect, was not to have one.
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It is customary to think of Madison as Jefferson’s loyal lieutenant, the junior member of what has been called “the great collaboration.” Certainly in later years, when Madison served as Jefferson’s political point man in the party wars of the 1790s, then as his secretary of state, then his successor as president, there is much to be said for his characterization. The later pattern was for Jefferson to provide the sweeping vision while Madison managed the messier particulars. (If God was in the details, so the saying went, Madison was usually there to greet Him upon arrival.) Even then, however, Madison’s habitual shyness and his willingness to remain within Jefferson’s shadow probably concealed the extent of his independent influence on the partnership. The fairest assessment is that the collaboration worked so well because questions of primacy never occurred to Madison. Or, as John Quincy Adams described the seamless character of the partnership, it was “a phenomenon, like the invisible and mysterious movements of the magnet in the physical world.”
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However, in 1790, if one wished to talk about “the great collaboration,” the presumption would have been that one was referring to Madison and Hamilton. After all, while Jefferson was serving as America’s minister in Paris from 1784 to 1789, the team of Madison and Hamilton had led the fight for a vastly expanded national government with sovereign power over the states. Their collaboration as “Publius” in
The Federalist Papers
was every bit as seamless as the subsequent alliance between the two Virginians. When Hamilton began to draft his
Report on the Public Credit
in September of 1789, Madison was one of the first persons he consulted for advice. At that very time, Jefferson was writing Madison from France with expressions of great doubt about the powers granted the federal government over domestic affairs, powers that Madison had championed more effectively than anyone else at the Constitutional Convention.
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Jefferson had also shared with Madison his intriguingly utopian suggestion that each generation was sovereign, so that the laws made for one generation should expire after about twenty years. Madison
had responded in his gentle, unassuming, but logically devastating fashion to suggest that, yes, this was a fascinating notion, but if taken seriously, it was a recipe for anarchy and ran directly counter to the whole thrust of his own political effort to establish a stable constitutional settlement that compelled the trust and abiding veneration of present and future generations of Americans. Knowing as we do that Madison would soon become one of the most ardent and potent Jeffersonians of all time, it is all the more instructive to note that, prior to 1790, they had drifted to different sides of the constitutional divide.
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During the six months prior to the dinner at Jefferson’s quarters, Madison went through a conversion process, or perhaps a reconversion, from the religion of nationalism to the old revolutionary faith of Virginia. It is tempting to explain the switch in exclusively personal terms: Jefferson returned from France, recalled his old colleague to the colors of the true cause, and together they marched forward into history. Except that it was not that simple. Madison possessed the subtlest and most intellectually sophisticated understanding of the choices facing the new American republic of any member of the revolutionary generation. No crude explanation of the decisions he made can do justice to the multiple loyalties he felt, or the almost Jamesian way he thought about and ultimately resolved them.
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If we give chronology the decent respect it is due, it is clear that Madison’s thinking began to change before Jefferson returned to the scene. The precipitant was Hamilton’s
Report on the Public Credit
, forwarded to Congress in January of 1790. (Jefferson did not arrive in New York until March.) The fiscal goals Hamilton proposed were synonymous with the national vision Madison had advocated at the Constitutional Convention and in
The Federalist Papers
. The total debt of the United States, according to Hamilton’s calculations, had reached the daunting (at least then) size of $77.1 million. Of this total, $11.7 million was owed to foreign governments; $40.4 million was domestic debt, most of which dated from the American Revolution; and $25 million was state debt, also largely a legacy of the war. What began to trouble Madison, then terrify him, was not Hamilton’s goal—the recovery of public credit—but the way he proposed to reach it.
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The first symptom of the trouble appeared when Madison studied Hamilton’s proposal for the funding of the domestic debt. On the one hand, Hamilton’s recommendation looked straightforward: All citizens
who owned government securities should be reimbursed at par—that is, the full value of the government’s original promise. But many original holders of the securities, mainly veterans of the American Revolution who had received them as pay for their service in the war, had then sold them at a fraction of their original value to speculators. What’s more, the release of Hamilton’s plan produced a purchasing frenzy, as bankers and investors aware of the funding proposal bought up the securities in expectation of a tidy profit. Madison observed the buying frenzy and complained that unscrupulous speculators “are still exploring the interior & distant parts of the Union in order to take advantage of the holders.” The picture that began to congeal in his mind was the essence of injustice: battle-worn veterans of the war for independence being cheated out of their just rewards by mere moneymen. Benjamin Rush, the prominent Philadelphia physician and permanently incandescent revolutionary, urged Madison to stop this betrayal of the spirit of ’76: “Never have I heard more rage expressed against the Oppressors of our Country during the late War,” Rush fumed, “than I daily hear against the men who … are to reap all the benefits of the revolution, at the expense of the greatest part of the Virtue & property that purchased it.”
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Hamilton was both surprised and mystified when Madison came out against his funding scheme. On February 11, Madison delivered a long speech in the House, denouncing the Hamilton proposal as a repudiation of the American Revolution and recommending his own plan for payment, which he called “discrimination.” It was a vintage Madisonian performance: utterly reasonable, flawlessly logical, disarmingly temperate. The original holders of the securities had justice on their side, he noted, and justice must be honored. The current holders had the obligations of contracts on their side, and such obligations must be observed. The options then revealed themselves with lawyerlike precision: “one of three things must be done; either pay both, reject wholly one or the other, or make a composition between them on some principle of equity.” (In the twentieth century students of this mode of reasoning within policy-making circles called it “the Goldilocks principle” and later “triangulation.”) Madison, of course, favored the third option. But the House voted 36 to 13 against his motion. It was his first major legislative defeat after a long string of triumphs.
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It was not just that Madison hated to lose. (Unlike Jefferson, he could be genuinely gracious in defeat.) It was instead that an ominous picture was congealing in his mind of patriot soldiers being fleeced by an army of speculators whose only loyalty was to their own profit margins. Or perhaps it was a slightly different picture, this one of the nascent national government, which he had visualized as an exalted arena where only the ablest and most intellectually talented officials would congregate, the finest fruits plucked from the more motley state governments, now replaced by an obnoxious collection of financiers and money changers, the kind of social parasites whom Jesus had symbolically driven from the temple. The promise of the American Revolution, at least as Madison understood it, was falling into enemy hands.

The debate over assumption, which followed on the heels of the vote on funding, only intensified the sense of betrayal and made matters worse. Again, on the face of it, Hamilton’s proposal looked seductively simple. The federal government would take on—which is to say, assume—all the accumulated debts of the states, most of which had their origins during the war. Instead of thirteen separate ledgers, there would be but one, thereby permitting the fiscal policy of the new nation to proceed with a coherent sense of its financial obligations and the revenues required to discharge them. On February 24 Madison rose from his seat in the House to suggest that the matter was a good deal more complicated than it might appear at first glance, and that this apparently sensible proposal called “assumption” struck him as an alarmingly sinister idea.

If you read Madison’s speeches against assumption in the House during the spring of 1790, you get the impression that his core objections were economic. Most of the southern states, Virginia among them, had paid off the bulk of their wartime debts. The assumption proposal therefore did them an injustice, by “compelling them, after having done their duty, to contribute to those states who have not equally done their duty.” A subsidiary theme, also economic in character but implying grander suspicions, called for what he termed “settlement” to precede assumption. As Madison expressed it, “I really think it right and proper that we should be possessed of the ways and means by which we should be most likely to encounter the debt before we undertake to assume it.” In other words, there needed to be an official estimate of the specific amount each state would have “assumed” and
then be obliged to pay in federal taxes
before
the vote on assumption occurred. According to his own rough calculations, Virginia would transfer about $3 million of debt to the federal government, then be charged about $5 million in new taxes. Like the failure to compensate the original holders of government securities, this was unfair.
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