Madison and Jefferson (106 page)

Benjamin Franklin’s famed autobiography was also left incomplete, though probably not by its author’s design. So did Jefferson and Madison discuss what each was doing independently to speak to future generations? There must have been moments when they did, though we have no clear record.

Madison and Jefferson actively reviewed the names of prospective faculty for the university. Both men considered it essential that the professors should be amenable to their political as well as pedagogical perspectives. This was especially true in the case of the law faculty. “The most effectual safeguard against heretical intrusions into the School of Politics,” wrote Madison, “will be an Able and Orthodox Professor, whose course of instruction will be an example to his successors.”

The ex-presidents took special interest in the law and government texts they would assign to the first crop of students. In conceiving a curriculum, Madison displayed his fear of declension from republican traditions. He wrote that John Locke and Algernon Sydney, a seventeenth-century critic of the British monarchy (whose name Spencer Roane had adopted in his newspaper essays), were “admirably calculated to impress on young minds the rights of Nations to establish their Governments, and to inspire a love of free ones.” But he also noted that these same thinkers “afford no aid in guarding our Republican charters against constructive violations.” And “tho’ rich in fundamental principles,” the Declaration of Independence, he said, “falls nearly under like observation.” Thinking of Jacob Gideon’s recent republication of
The Federalist
, he commented that as a text for law students, it “may fairly enough be regarded as the most authentic exposition of the text of the federal Constitution … Yet it did not foresee all the misconstructions which have occurred; nor prevent some that it did foresee.” It seems Madison was still wishing to refine, as well as redefine, the work.
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As Madison contemplated the meaning of
The Federalist
for a new generation, Jefferson had to fight revisionism in order to reclaim the Declaration of Independence. In 1823 the hostile and unrepentant Timothy Pickering delivered a provocative Fourth of July address, announcing that the Declaration was as much Adams’s as Jefferson’s and a rather undistinguished piece of work besides. Jefferson, despite his declared ignorance of what was in the newspapers, assured Madison that he retained his original drafts—self-evident historical truth—and “written notes, taken by myself at the moment and on the spot.” He dredged up every past criticism that came to mind, not just Pickering’s. “Richard Henry Lee charged it as copied from Locke’s treatise on government,” he recalled. “Whether I gathered my ideas from reading or reflection I do not know. I know only that I turned to neither book or pamphlet while writing it.” Madison, obligingly, replied:
“Nothing can be more absurd than the cavil that the Declaration contains known and not new truths. The object was to assert not to discover truths, and to make them the basis of the Revolutionary Act. The merit of the Draught could consist only in a lucid communication of human rights … in a style and tone appropriate to the great occasion.” Jefferson could not have said it better.
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Although Madison held firm in the conviction that his notes from the Constitutional Convention should remain unpublished until after his death, both he and Jefferson retained personal measures of political orthodoxy. Jefferson’s was to ensure that his story of the Declaration remained the standard; and Madison’s was to privilege
The Federalist
in sanctifying his plan of government. The primary texts at the University of Virginia were to be, then: “1. The Declaration of Independence, as the fundamental act of Union of these States.” “2. the book known by the title of the ‘Federalist,’ being an authority to which appeal is habitually made by all … as evidence of the general opinion of those who framed and those who accepted the Constitution of the U. States on questions as to its genuine meaning.” “3. the Resolutions of the General Assembly of Virg
^a
in 1799, on the subject of the Alien and Sedition laws …” “4. The Inaugural Speech and Farewell Address of President Washington, as conveying political lessons of peculiar value.” These texts would enshrine the spirit of 1776, Madison’s moment as a nation builder, and Jefferson’s self-proclaimed Revolution of 1800, all the while reclaiming the republican heart and mind of George Washington, a man whose farewell address actually reflected Hamilton’s critique and who died rejecting the common vision of Madison and Jefferson.
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While Jefferson concurred with Madison’s selections, this did not mean that their perspectives on a party-free, or post-party, America were identical. In an 1822 letter to Gallatin that was more panic-stricken than politically perceptive, Jefferson saw a clandestine resurgence of the Federalist threat, which had been thought defunct: “You are told indeed that there are no longer parties among us …, [that] the lion and the lamb lie down together in peace. Do not believe a word of it. The same parties exist now as ever did.” No one would get a single vote running as a Federalist after 1820; but Jefferson still insisted that those who had once been avowed monarchists were settling now for “consolidated government”—an overbearing federal presence, undermining states’ rights. In Congress, he asserted, “you see many, calling themselves Republicans, and preaching the rankest doctrines of the old Federalists.” It was more than the punishing presence of
the Marshall Court that he feared. For Jefferson, the battle was far from over.
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In the autumn of 1823 Jefferson saluted a foreign friend. “We have gone through too many trying scenes together, to forget the sympathies and affections they nourished,” he addressed the Marquis de Lafayette, before going on to describe the latter-day “agitation” in American political life. “The Hartford Convention, the victory of [New] Orleans, the peace of Ghent, prostrated the name of federalism,” he declared. “Its votaries abandoned it through shame and mortification; and now call themselves republicans. But the name alone is changed, the principles are the same.” The morbid tone resembled that of his warning to Gallatin, but this time Jefferson found a universal truth: “The parties of Whig and Tory, are those of nature. They exist in all countries, whether called by these names or by those of Aristocrats and Democrats, Coté Droite et Coté Gauche, Ultras and Radicals, Servile and Liberals. The sickly, weakly, timid man, fears the people, and is a Tory by nature. The healthy, strong and bold, cherishes them, and is formed a Whig by nature.”

Back to the particulars of American politics, he called up the Missouri question yet again, insisting that it had been raised as a “false front” by those who pretended to care about ending slavery but who actually intended to produce “a geographical division of parties, which might insure them the next President.” Predisposed, as he had been in the 1790s, to mourn the opposition’s ability to dupe a part of the public, he charged: “The people of the North went blindfold into the snare.” At the end of the 1790s, in Jefferson’s political lexicon, the people had “recovered their sight”; after Missouri they gradually saw through “the trick of hypocrisy.” He was apparently accepting that his correspondent Senator John Holmes of Maine represented a broader awakening. “The line of division now is the preservation of the State rights, as reserved in the Constitution, or by strained constructions of that instrument, to merge all into a consolidated government. The Tories are for strengthening the Executive and General Government.” With consolidation in place, Jefferson warned, there was only one direction the United States could head in: it “must immediately generate monarchy.”
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At the end of the 1790s Madison might have regarded monarchy as a distant possibility for Federalist America, if trends were not reversed; he might have thought
Tories
a still-relevant term. But in the 1820s such thoughts were extreme, and Jefferson’s imagery unconvincing. Their divergence
as retired presidents is evident in the letter Madison wrote to Lafayette as the Missouri debate was still simmering late in 1820. Allowing that he was keenly aware of Lafayette’s strong abolitionist sentiments, we can see, even so, Madison’s acceptance that the issue was neither simple nor stark. Missouri was, he wrote, “a subject which ruffles the surface of public affairs”—not a subject tearing apart the nation’s viscera. “A Govt like ours has so many safety valves giving vent to overheated passions that it carries within itself a relief ag[ain]st the infirmities from which the best of human Institutions can not be exempt.” The republic in the 1820s was, for Madison, a system prone to internal convulsion, but a self-healing system nonetheless.

He coolly reported to Lafayette that the question of Missouri centered upon “whether a toleration or prohibition of slavery Westward of the Mississippi would extend its evils.” He had no easy answer: “The humane part of the argument against the prohibition turns on the position that … a diffusion of those in the Country tends at once to meliorate their actual condition, and to facilitate their eventual emancipation.” That was Madison’s conviction as well. Like Jefferson, he did not want to see the black population grow for any reason. He figured that national debate would continue until the fate of free blacks was resolved. Missouri’s constitution excluded free blacks from the state, which was not unusual. Surveying the Union, Madison told Lafayette: “The Constitutions & laws of the different States are much at variance in the civic character given to free people of colour; those of most of the States, not excepting such as have abolished slavery, imposing various disqualifications which degrade them from the rank & rights of white persons. All these perplexities develope more & more the dreadful fruitfulness of the original sin of the African trade.” He was saying that ambiguities in the laws made America’s race problem more complex than a good-hearted republican would prefer to imagine. He may have come down on Jefferson’s side of the argument, but it was not a “fire bell in the night” to him. The Missouri question did not destroy Madison’s calm. To judge by his epistolary persona, he remained solemn, unexcitable, and unafraid.
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The election of 1824 was one of the most thrilling and contentious in the annals of U.S. history. Campaigning began even before Monroe embarked
on a second term, when newspapers decided to speculate on the future prospects of a new breed of politician. Change was eagerly anticipated.

For one of the few times in the quadrennial election cycle, party identities were indistinct and there were more than two viable candidates in the running. John Quincy Adams had New England locked up, but not much else; Henry Clay of Kentucky, Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, and William Crawford of Georgia vied for the South and West. Three of the four had been overseas envoys during the Madison administration; the fourth was the most conspicuous military hero since George Washington and had recently entered the U.S. Senate for the purpose of announcing his availability.

Jefferson hoped for Crawford, who seemed most likely to protect Virginia’s interests—and in fact, the Georgian would go on to win Virginia’s electoral votes. And while he said nothing for public consumption, Jefferson’s feelings about Andrew Jackson were shaped by his knowledge of the general’s ungovernable temper and lack of intellectual curiosity. The rough and ready Tennessean was an admirer of Napoleon and known in some circles as “
Napoleon des bois,
” or “Napoleon of the woods.” Jefferson despised the French emperor and held nothing back when he labeled the Corsican a “scoundrel.” Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, who visited Monticello prior to the election of 1824, heard Jefferson express his distaste for Jackson. Webster quoted him as having called the general a “dangerous” man.

Jefferson did not live long enough to see Jackson inaugurated, so it is difficult to say whether he would have been more gracious in evaluating the energetic and imposing seventh president. Jefferson’s unofficial private secretary, Nicholas Trist, who married one of Jefferson’s granddaughters, served as a State Department clerk in the John Quincy Adams administration before becoming a trusted Jackson aide. Madison, who lived until the end of the Tennessean’s second term, did nothing to steal his thunder and earned the respect of the hard-edged old general as the years went by. It was indeed a time of flux in American politics.
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Madison and Crawford got on well, and in April 1824, when the candidate asked the ex-president to help him refute charges of improper ambition—solicitation of office—dating to Madison’s second term, Madison responded promptly and positively. Madison was not as close to Clay, but they communicated unceremoniously. When in the midst of the 1824 campaign, Clay shared with Madison his argument in favor of a protective tariff, Madison explained collegially, candidly, and at length why he could not support the plan. Though Jefferson had always been more at ease with the elder Adams
than Madison had been, Madison was decidedly more comfortable with John Quincy than Jefferson was. Monroe was not only pleased with the performance of the younger Adams, his secretary of state, but was personally fond of him too; and he had rather mixed feelings about Crawford, his secretary of the treasury, whom he came close to firing. Monroe strained to do all he could not to play favorites in his second term.
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Jefferson thought he was sorting out a mess when, in advance of the election, he viewed the competition to succeed Monroe and predicted that it would come down to two candidates: “a Northern & Southern one, as usual.”
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No one at the time could have predicted the course of this extraordinary political contest—whose result was as unplanned as the awkward tie between Jefferson and Burr in 1800.

Variables were present that Republicans in the past had not encountered. The nominating caucus no longer meant what it had. Ohio had more electoral votes than any southern state except Virginia. Crawford, the Virginians’ favorite, suffered a stroke in 1823 yet remained on the ballot. And in eighteen of twenty-four states, popular votes were translated into electoral votes for the first time. But when all ballots were cast, none of the four leading candidates had received enough to win the presidency outright, though Jackson led all competitors by a clear margin in both popular and electoral votes. According to the Constitution, the House of Representatives would have to determine Monroe’s successor.