Madison and Jefferson (109 page)

In retirement, Jefferson had articulated his concerns rather differently from Madison. Most notable was his extraordinary fear of consolidated government. One of the last letters in Jefferson Randolph’s collection, dated December 26, 1825, is addressed to William Branch Giles. Here, Jefferson expresses his fear for the “plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry” subject to the rule of a monied aristocracy; he wants the federal “usurpation” of states’ rights to be denounced “in the most peremptory terms.”

Madison, of course, refrained from such language. He clarified the difference in their styles most instructively in a letter of 1832 to Nicholas Trist. One had to be careful, he said, not to read too much into Jeffersonian hyperbole, especially when it came to his fearful prognoses of sectional discord. “As in others of great genius,” he explained, Jefferson had the habit “of expressing in strong and round terms, impressions of the moment.”
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Probably the most crucial rescuing of Jefferson’s reputation that Madison undertook during Andrew Jackson’s two terms as president was his insistence in 1831 that Jefferson would have had nothing to do with South Carolina’s nullifiers. The issue that grew into the nullification crisis had materialized three years before, when William Branch Giles and Thomas Ritchie combined in an effort to divide the third and fourth presidents. These staunch defenders of what Madison not too many years before had praised as the “Virginia Creed” now claimed Jefferson for themselves and hoped to wrest his legacy from Madison, if Madison should refuse to side with them in a highly explosive debate on tariffs.

Giles was Virginia’s governor from 1827 to 1830, while Ritchie remained at the helm of the
Richmond Enquirer.
Congress had passed a protective tariff, a patchwork of high and low duties on a range of goods and manufactures—wool, woolens, iron, hemp, and molasses—which no one entirely understood and many in the South feared would impoverish their section and enrich New England, the Middle States, and the West. Earlier in the decade Madison had politely but firmly disagreed with Henry Clay’s aggressive approach to tariff policy, but Clay was not involved in the present mess. Weighing in on the constitutional principle, Madison felt strongly that there was already ample precedent in favor of congressional justification in using tariffs to regulate commerce when these were shown to be in the
national
interest.

The problem for Madison arose only because Giles was armed with a letter Jefferson had written to him that construed tariffs as unconstitutional. Madison agreed (privately) that Jefferson had used “unguarded” language in a “hasty” letter, but he refused to give Jefferson over to the Richmond Junto. He felt it was incumbent on the political world to appreciate Jefferson’s ideas in toto and not to dwell on one ill-formed, overinterpreted statement made in 1825. Jefferson’s view on the tariff, Madison assured, was framed in terms of his warnings against abuses of power more generally. And so just as Jefferson had enlisted his protégé Joseph Cabell to sell the University of Virginia to the state legislature, Madison now turned to the same gentleman to publicize his thoughts and counter the voice of Governor Giles, who was by now imagining, without the slightest dread, the eventual breakup of the Union into regional confederacies.
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The matter of the tariff lingered, indeed festered. Flags on ships in Charleston harbor were lowered to half-mast to protest this “Tariff of Abominations.” Looking to the past for sustenance, and reading the Madison of 1798 creatively, a prominent faction in South Carolina proceeded to
relate the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions to their larger complaint against the federal government. With Jackson’s South Carolinian vice president, John C. Calhoun, fast losing influence to Secretary of State Van Buren, the movement gathered steam. But as Madison would insist, there was a marked difference between the philosophies of 1798 and 1831. The first theorized that a majority of state legislatures might nullify a generally despised act of Congress; the second supposed that the principle of state sovereignty allowed a single state to withdraw from the Union if it could not find a majority of states to agree with its rejection of an act of Congress. He called the South Carolinian construction “preposterous” and a misreading of Jefferson’s thinking.

The nullifiers mined the
Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies
for added support from Jefferson. Some of their faith turned him into a prophet, designating him as the “high priest” of the South Carolina doctrine. It was at a Jefferson’s birthday celebration in Washington that President Jackson famously toasted “Our Union: It must be preserved,” and Vice President Calhoun, recently reborn as a nullifier, came back with “The Union: Next to our liberties the most dear.” Nothing so plainly symbolized the fissure. As the nationalist Jackson confronted the hardened resisters from his native state, Madison—and Ritchie—became aware that Jefferson’s long-unattended-to, unpublished draft of the Kentucky Resolutions in fact contained the word
nullification.

Madison’s job now became to broadcast his intimate knowledge of Jefferson’s true intentions in 1798, when he committed to paper the language the nullifiers were now seizing upon. Nothing could be further from the truth, Madison cried out, than a Jefferson embracing the notion that nullification extended to the right to secede from the Union: “No man’s creed was more opposed to such an inversion of the Repub[lican] order of things.” But when South Carolina resorted to nullification of the tariff in 1832, a nullification proponent contrived a whimsical dialogue between Jefferson and Jackson, in which the former rejects the latter’s principle of majority rule: “Why the Federalists, with Tim Pickering at their head, never published a more offensive libel against me and my principles.”

Congress passed a compromise tariff in 1833, mollifying South Carolina enough that the legislature agreed to withdraw its nullification ordinance. But the bad taste did not disappear. Madison’s outspokenness enabled the likes of U.S. senator John Tyler—the next president to hail from Virginia—to condemn the last of the founders as a consolidationist. Tyler said that Madison had forsaken Virginia and that his authority could no
longer be relied upon. It seems that he had created more problems for himself by “Madisonizing” Jefferson, who at the time of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions had thought more about the right of a state to secede from the Union than Madison was willing to admit. He hated the nullifiers and wanted Jefferson to hate them too.
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In the midst of this sectional impasse, Virginia revisited its state constitution, and Madison willingly served as the delegate from Orange. Chief Justice John Marshall, Senator John Tyler, Congressman John Randolph, and Governor Giles were also delegates. Oddly enough, among these names, it was Marshall the Federalist whose constitutional views Madison felt closest to. Even before this time Madison had told a northern visitor to Montpelier that the chief justice no longer reflected those heavily partisan impressions he had recorded in the fifth volume of his
Life of Washington
, which had driven Jefferson to actively solicit a Republican counterhistory.
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Although his health was beginning to deteriorate, former president Monroe was in attendance at the state convention. Serving on the Board of Visitors for the university since his retirement in 1825, Monroe was accustomed to seeing Madison at their periodic meetings. Madison was, not surprisingly, the only one of the ninety-six members of the 1829 convention to have taken part in the Virginia Convention of 1776, which had adopted the current state constitution.

Ongoing tension between eastern and western Virginia interests had triggered the new convention. Representation in the state legislature was unequal, and the westerners had become increasingly agitated. The decisive factor in their understanding of power was the counting of slaves in determining the composition of the state legislature. There were nine times as many slaves east of the Blue Ridge as west. Thus, the western Virginians reprised, on the state level, the role of the northern states as to representation in the national legislature.

Madison called the convention to order on October 5, 1829, promptly nominating Monroe as presiding officer, a largely ceremonial job. The motion was agreed to, and Madison and Marshall conducted Monroe to the chair. A lively debate got under way, which grew more heated as the weeks passed. Despite his advanced age, Madison took part in every meeting. On the key issue he favored compromise, modestly reducing the eastern majority in the House of Delegates, while retaining the existing measure of representation in the Senate. He spoke at length only once, on December 2. As he rose, the convention recorder noted, “the [other] members rushed
from their seats and crowded around him.” He appears to have been neither surprised nor even bothered by John Randolph’s rambling of that day, in which the obstructionist congressman took direct aim at the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, mocking his populist language in
Notes on Virginia.
“We all know he was confident in his theories,” Randolph said of Jefferson, “but I am a practical man and have no confidence
a priori
in the theories of Mr. Jefferson, or of any other man under the sun.”

Madison ignored the inconsequential and chose to focus instead on slavery, “that peculiar feature in our community, which calls for a peculiar division in the basis of our Government.” It was crucial to their character that Virginians, he said, in apportioning power in the legislature by assigning a value to slaves for the purpose of representation, should not ignore the slaves themselves. They should be seen in the light of their humanity, he commanded, and not simply as property, so that whatever determination was made as to representation, the quality of life for African Americans would be improved. “The mere circumstance of complexion cannot deprive them of the character of men,” he said meaningfully. In 1801, at the time of the death of Madison’s father and nearly at the height of his slave owning, Montpelier’s unfree taxable population stood at 108; at the time of the 1829 convention it was 61—a result of financial setbacks and not manumissions. “We must agree on some common ground, all sides relaxing in their opinions,” he urged.

Madison’s refrain made sense. Compromise had brought about the federal Union; compromise should prevail in Richmond as well. He concluded his address to the delegates with a bid for calm: “I have now more than a hope—a consoling confidence, that we shall at last find, that our labors have not been in vain.” His voice was low, and many of his hearers could not make it out; still, none could have been confused by his message. Virginians needed to overcome their passion and provincialism. This was the sentiment on which he chose to end his career as a statesman.
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Monroe’s health had been steadily deteriorating since Richmond—he had had to step down from the chair before the close of the convention. In September 1830 he lost his wife of forty-four years and subsequently moved in with their daughter and son-in-law in New York. In April 1831 he wrote to Madison, stating that he would be unable to attend any more meetings of
the Board of Visitors, and tendering his resignation. In reply, Madison told him: “The effect of this, in closing the prospect of our ever meeting again afflicts me deeply, certainly not less so than it can you.” Of his own condition, Madison claimed “comfortable health” for the moment, but he reminded his old friend that he had already lived “a decad beyond the canonical three score & ten, an Epoch which you have but just passed.” Despite the inauspicious tone of Monroe’s letter, Madison held out a hope that the commencement of spring would restore his strength and he might yet undertake a journey south. His own “stiffening fingers” were making for a smaller handwriting, and he noted that “my feet take shorter steps.” But he seemed reluctant to accept that Monroe, seven years his junior, was dying. On July 4, 1831, five years to the day after Jefferson and Adams died, James Monroe’s life ended in New York.
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Even as Madison was reading Monroe’s last letter, James K. Paulding, archetype of the Knickerbocker school of writers and once Madison’s close companion, was feeling him out on the subject of a “life and letters” biography. Born during the Revolution, Paulding appears never to have seen Jefferson in the flesh. He wrote Madison now, asking for unique anecdotal materials on the primary founders and especially himself.

He received a surprisingly tepid reply, similar to what Madison had earlier written to Henry Lee IV. He was not interested in conveying his life according to the self-revelatory model of Benjamin Franklin. He admitted to “awkwardness” about the prospect of preparing a personal sketch, even for his friend Paulding: “My life has been so much of a public one that any review of it must mainly consist of the agency which was my lot in public transactions … Any publicity of which selections from this miscellany may be thought worthy, should await a posthumous date.” Asked about Franklin, Madison said he had nothing to add to what was already known. Regarding John Adams, he said simply that they did not meet until 1789, adding, with intentional vagueness, that he knew nothing of his private character, “which was not visible to all.” “Of Mr. Hamilton,” Madison wrote with greater honesty, “I ought perhaps to speak with some restraint though my feelings assure me that no recollections of political collisions could controul the justice due to his memory.”

Most surprising, though, were his remarks about Jefferson, which were not just undramatic but entirely commonplace. He directed Paulding to “the obituary Eulogiums” that “multiplied” the meaning of his life after the epochal coincidence of his and Adams’s deaths on the fiftieth Fourth of July. Wrote Madison: