Madison and Jefferson (12 page)

He was an advocate of voluntary manumissions as long as the process helped decrease the slave population. His larger agenda, consistent with the majority view in slave-owning America, was to whiten the population. Free blacks would be compelled to leave the state, as would white women who bore the children of black men. Racial homogeneity was thought essential to the integrity of society.

Jefferson routinely theorized about generational change. He was concerned with memories of mistreatment, the long oppression and resentment that could not be erased. In
Notes on Virginia
, he would contend that each slave inherited the “entail” of “his own miserable condition” from those who preceded. Once again, the dead hand of past generations was reaching into the future, corrupting and disfiguring society by creating factions permanently at war with one another.

Enlightenment doctrine held that slavery destroyed the natural inclination of human beings to become one people and one nation. It was an inherited
disease, a social contagion. But abolition was an unreliable cure. Only by exiling free blacks from Virginia, only by establishing a racial quarantine, could Jefferson feel certain that his state would be safe from future degeneration.

In his grand plan, education would suture the separate wounds inflicted by slavery and aristocracy. That way a morally tarnished, property-based master class could evolve into one based on liberal principles and intellectual merit. Of the 126 bills that Jefferson proposed in Williamsburg, Bill no. 79, for “the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” may be said to have crowned his reforms. Bill no. 79 provided for the establishment of primary schools for all free children, grammar schools for the more capable among them, and college for those most gifted, “whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue.”

He wanted good guardians appointed to ensure that physical structures were built and that the tuition of the truly talented would be subsidized by the state. This way education would not be the exclusive province of the wealthy, those whom Jefferson had in mind when he alluded to the “weak and wicked” in Virginia. He found it convenient to see men with aristocratic pretensions as damaged goods in republican society, and to label these effete types as demoralized—literally deprived of morals. He believed that moral laxity had a medical origin, a deficiency in the operation of nerve fibers.

Sensibility, the natural human susceptibility to nervous feeling, would, if properly exploited, engage positive passions, and animate and improve society. If the “weak and sickly” adoration of monarchy and aristocracy (the insensate surrender of power to an artificial elite) was an infirmity, then its temperamental opposite, “firm and bold” compassion (a well-adjusted sensibility), attached to the healthy republican. In later years Jefferson would apply the same theory of political anatomy to Federalists, the privileged class of men he opposed on the national scene. Fitness to rule was visceral.
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He was convinced that individual self-cultivation went hand in hand with the new nation’s bright and deserving prospects. The law was one tool for him, the infectious vocabulary of heart-enriched sensibility another. He believed that the culture war between active patriots and scornful, idle Tories would determine the personality of the future American.

The same imperative that directed Jefferson’s education program informed his court reform bill. Those with a hardy physical constitution, with sound and prudent judgment, were the ones fit for guardianship in
a Jeffersonian republic. The social engineer believed that only “men of science”—men of knowledge and discernment—should practice law in the highest court of the state, the General Court of Virginia. He wanted to weed out the poorly trained lawyers from the county courts, whom he coldly dismissed as “insects.” Jefferson’s programs were not democratic, as we understand the term; in all respects, he had in mind to create a cognitive elite, an all-male intellectual guardian class to fill the ranks in the courts and in government. They would be the architects of future reform.
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Religious freedom was another prominent part of Jefferson’s reform agenda, though his bitterest battles on this front were to come later. In the fall of 1776 both he and Madison sat on the Committee of Religion, two of its seventeen members meant to consider “all matters and things relating to religion and morality.” Old English laws remained on the books: a prison term was still technically possible for one who denied the Trinity and the divine authority of the Scriptures. But when Jefferson proposed getting rid of what he called “spiritual tyranny,” once more Pendleton argued against him. Even with Madison and the influential George Mason on his side, the younger liberals could not muster the votes to defeat Pendleton: “cool, smooth, and persuasive,” Jefferson categorized the Pendleton of this debate. The Madison-Jefferson side won but a single concession: an agreement that dissenting sects—Quakers, Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians—were to be exempt in future from paying taxes in support of the established church. Madison and Jefferson believed that no person of
any
sect should be obliged to support a religious establishment. But the separation of church and state would have to wait, as would many of the 126 bills that the manic reformer Jefferson drafted during the war years in his mission to remake Virginia.
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When they met in Williamsburg that fall, Madison and Jefferson did not become close. But they did associate. By November, Jefferson the bibliophile had purchased books on Madison’s behalf. As yet the future allies were probably attuned to their common social connections more than they knew in any depth what positions they held in common. The open-minded Reverend Madison was the most obvious example of the friends they shared, though as members of the Virginia gentry, they would have had numerous human connections of varying importance. For instance, the Italian
musician and dancing master who gave violin lessons to Jefferson in the late 1760s also gave dancing lessons to a teenage Madison.
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Patrick Henry, governor since July 6, responded to his election by the Virginia Convention with words of hesitancy and caution: “When I reflect that the tyranny of the British king and parliament has kindled a formidable war, now raging throughout this wide-extended continent …, in order to preserve this commonwealth from anarchy and its attendant ruin … I feel my mind filled with anxiety and uneasiness.” Given his well-known activism, the choice of Henry was symbolic of the break with England.
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The convention also chose twenty-three-year-old Edmund Randolph as the state’s attorney general. It was another symbolic, if ironic, choice, as his father, now removed to England, held the very same post under the royal governor. In the Virginia manner, young Randolph was expected to carry on traditions. He would soon be elected to the board of governors of the College of William and Mary and supervise an investigation into the activities of three faculty members accused of harboring Loyalist sympathies. He soon became as regular a correspondent of Madison’s and Jefferson’s as Pendleton was, and their ally for the next twenty years.
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Governor Henry began his term bedridden with malarial fever and unable to take charge of state affairs. One of his colleagues thought that he had, in fact, died during his first week in office. There was, at least, some good news in the neighborhood: the hated Dunmore had fled and no longer posed a real threat. But to the north General Washington’s disastrous defeat in the Battle of Long Island delivered New York City into British hands, launching a season of worry and restlessness.

In mid-December Brigadier General Adam Stephen, a fifty-five-year-old Scottish-born Virginian, wrote to Jefferson from the Continental Army’s camp on the Delaware River. He was not sanguine. “The Enemy like locusts Sweep the Jerseys,” he grumbled, as he reported on the cruelty inflicted on innocents. “They to the disgrace of a Civilisd Nation Ravish the fair Sex, from the Age of Ten to Seventy.” Secret Tories were selling out American interests with apparent impunity; a prominent American general, Charles Lee, was just taken prisoner. General Stephen knew George Washington well, having fought by his side in the French and Indian War, but his confidence in Washington at this point was limited. “The Enemy have made greater progress than they themselves expected,” he told Jefferson.

A few days would change conditions on the ground and lift Washington’s prospects. Indeed, by the time Jefferson read Adam Stephen’s letter, the commander of American forces had crossed the Delaware and redeemed
himself with surprise attacks on British and Hessian troops at Trenton and Princeton. As hopeful and timely as this news was, Washington made it clear to Congress and his home state alike that his army was in desperate need of supplies. Negligence, incompetence, and bickering among officers over rank made his job doubly trying. He would have no complaint from a new recruit who had sailed from France on a vessel called
La Victoire
and who would put himself, his men, and his money at Washington’s disposal. The idealistic, nineteen-year-old Marquis de Lafayette was hungry for battle. Washington made the teenager a major general and put him in charge of a division of Virginia militia. He would have no regrets for having done so.
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Congress had issued a request to the states for troops. After an initial surge, it was clear by mid-1777 that enlistments had plummeted. Two years into the war, recruiters, including the twenty-year-old Captain James Monroe, admitted that they would have to turn to unethical means of conscription if they were to meet quotas. Madison’s younger brother Ambrose was an officer who had first joined the Revolution as a member of the Culpeper Minutemen. While Ambrose remained in the war, James Madison, Sr., raised troops and supplies in Orange.
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War exposed the fragility of the Union. Sectional divisions temporarily suppressed in Congress reemerged in the ranks of the military. Though Washington, a Virginian, had been named commander of the Continental Army in 1775, it did not take New Englanders long to hear that he had rudely smeared their officers for exhibiting the same “unaccountable stupidity” as their lower-class privates. In the autumn of 1776 John Adams, never known for humility himself, mocked the arrogant Virginians for believing that everyone from their state acted heroically; he had heard that they were calling the troops of the North “poltroons”—gutless. Mutual distrust and jealousy lingered, surfacing at crucial moments in the war.
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Communication of war news was often sketchy and unreliable. In the midst of this uncertainty, George Mason proposed “for the Preservation of the State, that the usual forms of government shou’d be suspended” and “additional powers be given to the Governour and Council.” He wanted Patrick Henry to be granted the power to exercise the legislative as well as executive functions of the state, to be a dictator “during the present imminent Danger of America & the Ruin & Misery which threatens the good People of this Common-Wealth.” The general anxiety over America’s military prospects was making cautious men amenable to extraordinary quick
fixes. Even so, the idea of a Henry dictatorship quickly fizzled. It is not clear whether Henry himself was complicit in the proposal; he likely was not, though Jefferson later insisted that the first American-born governor of Virginia had in fact solicited unwarranted powers.

In May 1777, in a letter from Williamsburg, Jefferson elaborated on his concerns to his former congressional ally John Adams, who was still in Philadelphia. While all was quiet where Adams was, the people of Virginia were becoming, said Jefferson, “lethargick and insensible of the state they are in.” The phrase “lethargick and insensible” belonged to that unmistakable eighteenth-century vocabulary that bridged medicine and politics. Jefferson meant that by being dulled to reason, Virginians were no longer able to perceive their own best interests. He wanted more done to secure the Union without compromising its republican character and without investing power in any one individual. Soon afterward Patrick Henry was reelected without opposition to another one-year term. Jefferson had no comment—at least none that was recorded.
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Madison was unable to contribute to state-level politics during this period, because in April 1777 he lost reelection to the House of Delegates. As he and his allies subsequently explained, the candidate had not made himself personally available to his Orange neighbors or treated the voters to free food and drink, as his opponent had done. While gentlemen often derided the practice, “treating” had roots deep in colonial life and was by no means confined to the South. In Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia, for instance, assembly candidates campaigned openly and sometimes took out newspaper ads. When Franklin himself lost in a 1764 reelection bid, one of his devotees quipped that he had “died like a philosopher,” or, lost without cheapening his principles. There is nothing to suggest that Madison “died” any less a “philosopher” in the spring of 1777.
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He was gone from Williamsburg but not forgotten. The Princeton-educated delegate from Orange had made enough of a mark on the minds of his colleagues that after some months away (presumably at home with his parents), he was called back by a clear majority of the legislature and made a member of the select Council of Advisors to Governor Henry. Given that the new state constitution prevented the governor from acting without the cooperation of his eight advisers, Madison described the situation not as it literally was, a governor and eight councilors, but as “eight governors and a councilor.” He would be working closely with the lieutenant governor—the leader of the council—who in this case was John Page, Jefferson’s
committed friend. If Madison and Jefferson were drawing closer, it was still by indirect means. Jefferson was in Williamsburg when Madison arrived, but once again they appear not to have interacted.
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