Madison and Jefferson (20 page)

A liberal feature in Jefferson’s draft was the extension of voting privileges to “all free male citizens of full age and sane mind” after only one year’s residence in the state. But he did not believe the governor should be popularly elected; rather, he should be chosen by the elected members of the two houses. Jefferson did not want the legislature to have any opportunity to reverse his main agenda. It could not, for example, “abridge the civil rights of any person on account of his religious belief” or compel anyone to contribute to a church; it could not “ordain death for any crime but treason or murder”; it could not “prescribe torture.” The slavery provision is especially noteworthy: it made gradual emancipation a top priority. He would constrain the General Assembly from introducing any more slaves
to Virginia; and he would not permit it to authorize “the continuance of slavery beyond the generation which shall be living on the 31st Day of December 1800.” All persons born beginning January 1, 1801 would be, without exception, free. In this way the proposal marks Jefferson as an early abolitionist, though he did not elaborate on where freed slaves would be permitted to reside, and he certainly did not advocate a Virginia with self-sustaining black communities.

The proposed state constitution was a liberal document, concerned with fair and impartial government. Believing a better power-sharing arrangement could be achieved than that which the 1776 constitution provided for, Jefferson (even before Madison) put forward what amounts to a system of checks and balances. He was full of hope.
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Madison, still in Philadelphia, was greatly pleased that Jefferson had decided to reenlist in Congress. One way or another they would be crossing paths soon. In the interim, though, he suffered a personal setback when Kitty Floyd called off their engagement. At the behest of Kitty’s father, the renowned portrait artist Charles Willson Peale had composed miniatures of Madison and his intended bride, which the couple ritually exchanged and now had to return to each other. Madison conveyed his disappointment to Jefferson by letter. He had not “calculated” on being jilted, he said—the word
calculated
itself a calculated means of avoiding emotional expression. It was, rather, “one of those incidents to which such affairs are liable.” Any other description would have to await their next meeting. Madison expected he would visit Monticello in the coming weeks.
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Instead, Jefferson made his way to Philadelphia. He took a roundabout route of nearly two weeks through the Shenandoah Valley so that he could inspect caves and other natural formations that he would detail in
Notes on Virginia.
He was accompanied on his journey by his daughter Patsy and two servants, brothers Bob and James Hemings. Bob, now twenty-one, had been fourteen in 1776, when he traveled to Philadelphia as Jefferson’s personal attendant; James, eighteen, served the master in that capacity now, while his older brother began his training as a barber. Both were the biological children of the late John Wayles, who was the late Patty Jefferson’s father. These two slaves had come to Jefferson as part of an inheritance.
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It turned out that Jefferson did not stay long in Philadelphia, because Congress was on the move. The Revolution may have ended in triumph, but the unpaid soldiery had some sticky issues to resolve with their representatives. An irritated bunch of veterans had poured into Philadelphia in June 1783 to make their grievances known to the assembled Congress,
causing the delegates to remove to the modest town of Princeton. There they reconvened temporarily.
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Though his seat in Congress would be fixed elsewhere, Jefferson settled his motherless, eleven-year-old daughter in the City of Brotherly Love. During her father’s absence, Patsy would be exposed to the best of Philadelphia society, including the children of astronomer David Rittenhouse, a man whom Jefferson ranked among the world’s geniuses. He gave his daughter money for music lessons and arranged for her to study drawing with Pierre du Simitière, the Swiss designer of the American and Virginian great seals, who proved impatient with children and would find her wanting in talent.

Having done what he could for Patsy, he rode on to Princeton. He learned there that Congress was doing little and would reconvene in Annapolis a bit later on. So he returned to Philadelphia, spending two weeks there with Madison, buying and discussing books, synthesizing Madison’s experience over the past three years, and agreeing on an agenda so that Jefferson could further what Madison had begun. Then the two rode to Annapolis together, where Jefferson was finally able to join the roaming Congress.
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Ex-Congressman Madison had no reason to remain in Annapolis. He left Jefferson after a short stay and stopped briefly in northern Virginia to talk politics with George Mason at his estate, Gunston Hall. He informed Jefferson that Mason was amenable to a state convention to consider Jefferson’s proposed constitution, though the touchy politician was perhaps less committed than either Madison or Jefferson to solidifying the national union. After he left Mason, Madison rode on to Montpelier. It was now December 1783 and the first time he had been at home with his family since departing for Philadelphia at the beginning of 1780. Easing Jefferson’s loss of good company, James Monroe had moved from his position on the Governor’s Council in Richmond to a seat in Congress at Annapolis, where they lodged together.

Not to be long diverted from his favorite subjects, Madison spent the snowy months studying constitutions and laws of nations. As things stood, no one was more familiar with the federal system under the Articles of Confederation, and Jefferson often sought his counsel by letter. Noting the absence of many of the states’ delegates and expressing frustration over the slow pace of deliberations, he queried Madison about the extent of congressional influence: “Did not you once suppose in conversation with me that Congress had no authority to decide any cases between two differing states, except those of disputed territory? I think you did.”

Madison responded with a dissertation upon government. He gave an interpretation
of Benjamin Franklin’s 1775 “Sketch of Articles of Confederation,” looked closely at the role of Congress in treaty making, and weighed precedents in determining where a simple majority of states and where a two-thirds majority was required to enact law. He dwelled at length on the uncertain posture of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania when it came to any prospective cession of western territory to the federal government. “As all the
soil
of value has been granted out to individuals,” he argued, “a cession of the
jurisdiction
to Congress can be proper only where the Country is vacant of settlers.” He knew Jefferson would have to deal with this issue at length, and he harbored doubts as to Virginians’ understanding of the true complexity of the matter of land cessions. Madison and Jefferson appreciated—but did their fellow Virginians?—the degree of compromise with neighboring states that was yet required to cement the Union.
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The Madison-Jefferson alliance was thriving. At the end of increasingly long letters, Jefferson expressed warmth and devotion directly. He invited Madison to ride over to Monticello in his absence and make use of its library, and at one point he ramped up his appeal for steadier companionship. While certainly appreciative of such sentiments, Madison remained tentative at best. In mid-March 1784, explaining that snowy conditions prevented him from accessing Monticello, he addressed Jefferson’s larger object of bringing them permanently closer: “I know not my dear Sir what to reply to the affectionate invitation … I feel the attractions of the particular situation you point out to me; I can not altogether renounce the prospect; still less can I as yet embrace it.”

The “particular situation” he projected was for Madison to move from the family plantation, where his still-healthy father managed everything well. “Monroe is buying land almost adjoining me,” Jefferson taunted him. “Short will do the same. What would I not give [if] you could fall into the circle. With such a society I could once more venture home and lay myself up for the residue of life, quitting all it’s contentions … Think of it. To render it practicable only requires you to think it so.”

Madison was not always stirred by Jefferson’s wistful themes, but on this occasion he was responsive. They were both without wives, Jefferson hinting that he could “once more venture home” only when Monticello no longer wore the pallor of irreparable loss. A Dutch observer at Congress who spent time with Jefferson in Annapolis presumably heard him refer to his bereavement and recorded these comments: “Retired from fashionable society, he concerned himself only with the affairs of public interest, his sole diversion being offered by belles lettres … His mind, accustomed to
the unalloyed pleasure of a lovable wife, was impervious[,] since her loss[,] to the feeble attractions of common society, and that his soul, fed on noble thoughts, was revolted by idle chatter.” Allowing for overstatement in the service of literature, G. K. van Hogendorp was apparently able to glimpse the intellectual passion Thomas Jefferson exuded as well as the tautness that brought on his fierce tension headaches and disrupted his famously unruffled bearing.

“To render it practicable only requires you to think it so”: Jefferson’s notion that Madison would be well served by erecting an estate independent of Montpelier obliged Madison to at least ponder the possibility. “Life is no value but as it brings us gratifications,” Jefferson orchestrated. “Among the most valuable of these is rational society. It informs the mind, sweetens the temper, chears our spirits, and promotes health.” He prodded with Epicurean accents—Epicurus was Jefferson’s constant guide to the ideal life. And then he coaxed: “There is a little farm of 140 a[cre]s, and within two miles, all of good land … It is on the road to Orange.” “Think of it,” he pressed a second time, “and Adieu.”
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In April 1784 Madison was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates. As his accomplishments in Congress were widely known, no one in Virginia doubted that his presence would make a great difference in all matters of state policy. He was a “general” in the eyes of Edmund Randolph, who wrote Jefferson with complete assurance that “our friend of Orange will step earlier into the heat of battle, than his modesty would otherwise permit.” Jefferson, for his part, had written to his teenage nephew Peter Carr that he should look up Madison from time to time; while absent in Congress, he wanted a means to confirm that the lad’s education was proceeding as it should. “His judgment is so sound and his heart so good,” Jefferson urged Peter. “I wish you to respect every advice he would be so kind to give you, equally as if it came from me.” For starters, Madison was conveying a copy of Homer for him to read. And though Madison had traded Philadelphia for Richmond, Jefferson, as his promoter, was making the case that he should be accorded membership in the American Philosophical Society.
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As a member of the Confederation Congress from Virginia, Jefferson was front and center when George Washington came to Annapolis and on December
23, 1783, formally resigned his commission as commander in chief of the Continental Army. It was a more than symbolic rejection of military dictatorship before civilian authority; it was a pointed, if rhetorical, corrective to an incipient spirit of defiance that had sprung up among some of his officers. The Newburgh Conspiracy, so called, had been a drama staged for a slow-moving Congress during the spring of 1783, a devious ploy by some, including Alexander Hamilton, to fund the nation’s debt and strengthen the federal structure. Its purpose was to change the direction of the country.
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Washington had acquitted himself well in the Newburgh episode, using the power of his personality to calm a discontented but ultimately loyal officer corps, and he continued to display dignity and self-possession. In November 1783 Jefferson met him for the first time in seven years and remarked to Virginia’s present governor, Benjamin Harrison, that Washington looked healthier than before, despite the many trials he had endured. Jefferson was present at the spectacle in December, when the imposing, six-foot-three-inch Washington resigned his commission and brought his listeners, “especially the fair ones,” to tears. Announcing his decision to “retire from the theatre of action” and return to a simpler private life, Washington spoke in a weak and wavering voice, his unexpected humanity electrifying those in attendance. Wise though intellectually unexceptional, eager for respect and admiration, and susceptible to sycophancy, George Washington had learned political savvy over the course of the war. Now fifty-one, he was secure as the preeminent symbol of the American Revolution.
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During his months in Congress, Jefferson was involved in the official approval of the Treaty of Paris, which affirmed American independence. That seemingly customary legislative function was complicated by the lack of signatures from some state delegations, prompting Jefferson to consult with Madison on the constitutional questions involved. It was a symptom of the country’s lack of cohesion that nine states could not be corralled long enough to attain official recognition of the union of states that had been declared on July 4, 1776.

A certain amount of discussion in Congress dealt with housekeeping issues—anything could become political—so that Jefferson found himself taking part in conversations about where Congress should meet next. While every section of the Union had a favorite site convenient to its own delegation, the choice was narrowed down to an as-yet-unnamed town on the Delaware or one on the Potomac. Trenton, New Jersey, finally won out. Seeing how fractured Congress was, Jefferson could only think of America’s
domestic ills, its “politics and poverty,” when he wrote to the America-loving Marquis de Chastellux, who had recently returned to France.
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