Madison and Jefferson (13 page)

In updating Virginia’s legal code, Jefferson collaborated with three elders. One was George Mason, once hesitant to remain in politics, now suddenly ubiquitous; the second was Pendleton; and the third, his college law professor, George Wythe, whom Jefferson called “one of the greatest men of the age.” The bills they drafted to cover immediate needs included a wartime measure to indemnify the governor and his Council of Advisors from any decision to forcibly remove from areas where they could easily communicate with the enemy “persons whose affections to the American Cause were suspected.” A “Bill concerning Inoculation for Smallpox” was designed to encourage and regulate vaccination, ordering those who had been inoculated (i.e., mildly infected) to stay out of the public until their “distemper” passed. Anyone intentionally spreading smallpox would be punished with a stiff fine or a prison term. Another bill Jefferson was integrally involved in established a land office. This gave the state the right to determine settlement patterns in “unappropriated” lands, the idea being to promote population growth and ensure settlers’ loyalty while adding revenue.
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As Madison and Jefferson focused on the future of Virginia, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia began debate on the Articles of Confederation, a blueprint for national government. Though the states had united, the closest thing to a common government was the Continental Congress—with its constantly rotating personnel, hardly a central government.

The thirteen articles presented in 1777 declared a “firm league of friendship” and a “perpetual union,” yet the Union remained, for all intents and purposes, a collection of independent republics. Congress under the Articles of Confederation would control coinage but would not have the right to levy taxes or regulate overseas trade; its central government lacked executive and judicial branches. Regardless of size or population, the states were to have equal power—one state, one vote. That equality was not to be altered whether a state sent as few as two or as many as seven delegates to Congress; and a two-thirds majority of the states was needed to pass legislation.

Only Virginia was prepared to sign the Articles right away. Several of the states without claims to western territory wanted states like Virginia, whose claims extended all the way to the Mississippi, to cede their questionable lands to the general government. The most resistant was neighboring Maryland.
Given Virginians’ pride in size, debates over land were destined to delay ratification of the Articles of Confederation for four more years.
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Reverend Madison resumed his professorial duties at the College of William and Mary. He resumed, as well, communication with his patron Jefferson. Unfortunately, their extant letters mainly show a shared concern with astronomical observations, but they were surely comparing ideas about education too. In the spring of 1777 the elder of Williamsburg’s two James Madisons became president of the college. His agreeable cousin, as a member of the governor’s Council of Advisors, came to board with him the following January; and in appreciation for his kinsman’s hospitality, James Madison, Jr., asked his father to send from the country “dried fruits &tc which Mr. Madison [the college president] is very fond of.” It was the least he could do, he said, to compensate for the “culinary favours” he daily received.

Although the identically named cousins disagreed on the thorny issue of disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Virginia, their friendship unquestionably deepened in these years. Meanwhile Jefferson took steps to convince the state government to provide public support to the college—his alma mater—by enlarging its faculty and adding “useful sciences” to the curriculum. He did not succeed, but knowing what Jefferson was up to, Reverend Madison did his utmost to preserve the integrity of the college that he had rescued from Tory hands.
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A short walk from the college, Governor Henry adapted to the routine of government. The man whom Jefferson considered an ill-educated opportunist had but little opportunity to improvise or even to sound eloquent. Virginia may not have been under direct attack, but these were nonetheless the darkest years of the war. Financial concerns were overwhelming. Hard money was hard to find across America, except among the British forces; as a result Pennsylvania farmers succumbed to temptation, feeding the enemy. Philadelphia fell to the British in the autumn of 1777, prompting Congress to move for a time to York, Pennsylvania. As the enemy enjoyed Philadelphia’s relative comfort, Washington’s men faced a severe winter and endured privation at Valley Forge.

Madison was one of four councilors who signed on to an official communication from the Executive Council, advising the governor to ship
“good rum,” wine, sugar, and other food stores to “the exhausted part of America” where Washington’s army was situated. That was about all Virginia could to do. The state did not, at this or any other time, draft the numbers of troops Washington requested.
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In the spring of 1778 news from abroad improved America’s prospects. Veteran diplomat Benjamin Franklin had succeeded in securing French recognition of American independence. The two nations signed a treaty of amity and commerce, and French military aid would shortly follow. At this expectant moment James Madison was returned to the House of Delegates, voted back in by the same men of Orange County who had turned him out the year before. But ineligible to serve simultaneously on the Governor’s Council and in the legislature, he opted for the former and remained dutifully at Henry’s side another year.
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Eight years apart in age, Madison and Jefferson lived very different lives at this time. One was single, the other married with one daughter and a second on the way. Madison went where he was wanted; Jefferson wrestled with his own ambition and stubbornly pressed on. Since the fall of 1776 he more or less commuted between Monticello and Williamsburg. His wife, Patty, did not stay long in the capital, returning to Albemarle for her two pregnancies in 1777 and 1778. The first produced a son who lived but a few weeks, the only son Jefferson had with his wife. Then in August 1778 Mary (Maria) was born. She and her older sister Patsy would be the only two of the Jeffersons’ six children to reach adulthood.

Though there was a war on, it was centered elsewhere, so the squire of Monticello kept to his dreams as a builder. He devoted himself to the enlargement of his mountaintop plantation, producing tens of thousands of bricks and planting fruit trees—an enterprise he had begun almost a decade before. In 1769, when his building plans were just ripening, he had called his home “The Hermitage.” Soon afterward, the idiosyncratic Italianesque name “Monticello” came to him. Thinking broadly, he sketched out the design for attractive two- and five-room cottages for his white workforce and for the select slave families he wished to settle on Mulberry Row, just below the stylish house where he resided. By the time he actually got around to building along Mulberry Row, however, the slave cabins were humbler than what he had first imagined.

In 1778 Jefferson owned a total of 13,700 acres in six Virginia counties. The Monticello property amounted to 1,000 acres, and he held another 3,225 acres in several sites around Albemarle. From his father-in-law he inherited 7,661 acres in Bedford County, two days’ ride south; there he
would eventually build the octagonal Poplar Forest house, where as an ex-president he would escape when Monticello was overrun with adoring pilgrims and curious strangers. For now, though, Jefferson was a man of business trained in the law, a wheat and tobacco farmer, a gentleman architect, and a man of taste. His stature as a lawgiver was constantly growing.
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In 1778 Virginia’s political leaders were prepared to believe that the alliance with France would result in British recognition of their “independency.” Richard Henry Lee wrote to Jefferson from Congress that May: “Our enemies are sore pressed.” But at the same time, Lee was desperate for the Virginia Assembly to raise more troops and urged: “For God’s sake, for the love of our Country, my dear friend, let more vigorous measures be quickly adopted for re-enforcing the Army.” Members of the Assembly tried, but they continued to have only limited success in recruitment.

Always a numbers man, Jefferson maintained a tally of enemy killed, wounded, and taken prisoner in the first two years of fighting. He estimated that the American side had lost half as many as the British. He was a member of the legislative committee that raised a new battalion to defend Virginia’s port cities. Each man who enlisted was to be paid ten dollars and bear no obligation to fight outside the state.

Jefferson kept coming up with ideas. He proposed conscription of a cavalry regiment in place of more foot soldiers. To continue previously unsuccessful methods of finding volunteers assured more failure. Besides, he figured he knew the sort of man who would serve in the cavalry. As he wrote to Lee, this “new fund” of recruits would be “those whose indolence or education, has unfitted them for foot-service.” Just as he thought he had found the source of a “weak and sickly” adoration of monarchy and aristocracy in impaired nerves, he now felt that “indolence” among young men denoted a preference for one form of military service over another. It was his habit to identify fundamental defects of character and intricate moral explanations for human behavior, a prejudice and a conceit he would never outgrow.

He had a sense of purpose beyond the political, of course. At thirty-five, he saw himself as unfulfilled unless he could devote his mind to philosophical musings and scientific observation. Associating the study of Virginia’s climate with its people’s prospects for happiness, he addressed the Italian Giovanni Fabbroni, the friend of a friend, and suggested that they share temperature measurements—he already compared weather conditions in Williamsburg and Monticello with Reverend Madison, John Page, and others. “Tho’ much of my time is employed in the councils of America,”
Jefferson wrote Fabbroni, “I have yet a little leisure to indulge my fondness for philosophical studies.” At the heart of this particular communication was an appeal to Fabbroni to convince Italian musicians and singers to come to America, where, Jefferson promised, they would always find useful employment. Music was, he pronounced, “the favorite passion of my soul, and fortune has cast my lot in a country where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism.” He reached for cultural expression in the interest of improvement.
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Jefferson’s close friend Philip (Filippo) Mazzei, who had put him in touch with fellow Florentine Fabbroni, had lived literally around the corner from Monticello since 1773. Mazzei had been passing through central Virginia looking for a place to settle and experiment with viticulture. Jefferson, whose love of wine would later become legend, convinced him that he should purchase the nearby property; he boarded Mazzei at Monticello until his house was ready for occupancy. In this way, by the outbreak of the Revolution, Jefferson learned to speak the Tuscan strain of Italian and helped to mold his neighbor into an American patriot. They would exchange plants and seeds for years to come.
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Through his personal connection with the enterprising Italian, Jefferson came up with an idea of political cunning and advanced it to John Hancock in Congress. Mazzei was interested in soliciting financial support for America’s cause in Europe, and Jefferson thought it possible for the commercial Italians, with “immense sums” in London banks, to create financial chaos for Britain by demanding a return of their money all at once. It may have been unrealistic—a magical solution to a complex problem—but Jefferson could not resist speculating on a covert Italian operation. He imagined money flowing across the Atlantic and money drying up in London. “We might do something clever with them,” he wrote Hancock of the Italians, “supplying our wants, and perhaps rendering our Enemies bankrupt.”
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In the first months of 1779, as Governor Henry neared the end of his third one-year term and was constitutionally ineligible for a fourth, he married into the socially prominent Dandridge family. His bride brought twelve slaves to their marriage: Henry now owned forty-two slaves, approximately half as many as Jefferson. The new husband improved his lot by purchasing a ten-thousand-acre plantation in a county that bore his name, near the Virginia–North Carolina border. Henry County had come into being in the first year of his governorship.
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Despite a widening war, Virginia was still not directly threatened. Some were quite positive about the future. Alert to the fact that Great Britain was unlikely to receive practical encouragement from the other European powers, Richard Henry Lee repeated his aggressive optimism in a letter to Jefferson: “With our present prospects every nerve should be strained to make the Army strong. By being prepared we shall have a moral certainty of defeating the designs of our enemies the next campaign, which will in my opinion put a glorious period to the war.” Even in anticipating the enemy’s southern campaign, Lee maintained his confidence: “If we can baffle the Southern invasion … they will be compelled by inevitable necessity to be content with the loss of thirteen flourishing states.” Jefferson’s old friend Will Fleming, from the same vantage point in Philadelphia, was less sanguine than Lee: “I am apprehensive the enemy will commit great ravages before an effectual check can be given to their progress,” he wrote. Morale would be hard to sustain with the invaders’ numbers holding steady.
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National unity was by no means assured. Fleming said it as well as any better-known patriot of the Revolutionary era: “I have heard much, but seen very little of patriotism and public virtue: If there is any remains of it in America, this is the season for calling it forth, and for its utmost exertions.”
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Evincing his primary concern for Virginia’s political foundation, Jefferson continued to advance ideas on the revisal of laws to Mason, Wythe, and Pendleton. Madison would much later observe that, after the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson’s work on the revisal was “the most severe” of his labors as a statesman. Mason, suffering from gout and barely able to stand for five minutes at a time, recognized how invaluable Jefferson was. This was why his legislative colleagues were pleased to make Thomas Jefferson governor. As the Albemarle representative left the House of Delegates to take on executive responsibilities, Mason realized that it would be left to him to pick up the slack, despite his aches and pains.
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