Madison and Jefferson (25 page)

Madison was just as explicit about the states and their disparate aims when he addressed Monroe on the subject of a hoped-for, but as yet amorphous, “Continental Convention.” “I am far from entertaining sanguine expectations from it,” he remarked doubtfully. “Yet on the whole I cannot disapprove of the experiment.” A few days later he wrote again to Monroe: “I am not in general an advocate for temporizing or partial remedies. But a rigor in this respect, if pushed too far may hazard every thing.”

He wondered whether the means existed to point the states toward consensus. What prudent strategy could Virginians pursue that would not be rejected by their distrustful sister states? The language he used at this moment was a type that Madison rarely resorted to, as nervous and angst-ridden as when he told Jefferson in 1782 that Virginia was being “persecuted” by the rest of the states on the land cession issue. “If the present paroxysm of our affairs be totally neglected,” he warned Monroe, “our case may become desperate.” Crucial change lay on the horizon: “If any thing comes of the Convention it will probably be of a permanent not a temporary nature, which I think will be a great point.” A “great point” did not mean a positive outcome, but a major watershed that would either help or humble Virginia.

After the Civil War, scholars began to refer to the immediate post-Revolutionary years as “the critical period” in American history. One reason is that many of Madison’s cohort shared his concerns about the
destabilizing factors facing them: money matters within and among the states and their tenuous commitment to nationhood. Madison’s general pessimism was offset only by his belief that “the trouble & uncertainty” of having to proceed in small steps would make the delegates of the various states psychologically disposed to negotiating a coherent, systematic treatment for the many palpable defects in the existing Confederation. This marks the first moment when we can identify Madison’s dynamic commitment to what, in the end, became the Constitutional Convention.
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Finance was always at or near the head of the list of concerns. Some Americans owing British creditors rationalized that depredations during the war negated their prewar debts, but both Madison and Jefferson were among those who acknowledged the rights of the creditor and wanted Anglo-American commercial relations to get back on track. Interest that accrued on Americans’ debt during the war was a hazier ethical question. The British expected the interest to be paid. All knew that America needed to trade.

Domestic debt was hardly a simple matter either. The states were ineffective in their attempts to pressure debtors or even to collect taxes. Part of the problem was the decline in output among small-scale farmers who had been away from home serving in the army. Another problem was the declining value of paper money. In Virginia, the gentry accepted the higher taxes the Assembly demanded of them, agreeing in principle that their relative power in state politics should be matched by a higher tax rate. This alleviated, to a certain degree, the burden on those with fewer advantages. But it did not end complaints or bring real stability.

“No supplies have gone to the federal treasury,” Madison lamented. “Our internal embarrassments torment us exceedingly.” He would feel this torment in spades as Patrick Henry tried to push through the Virginia Assembly a new issuance of paper money, which Madison was sure would “rather feed than cure the spirit of extravagance.”
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Experiments in paper money would fail everywhere: it was “morally certain,” as he put it to Jefferson. And Virginia was only a small part of the problem. The sovereign states, taken together, were not contributing enough to the Union. The general government was fiscally unsound.

International repercussions were real and immediate. When Jefferson wrote to Madison from London that the British “sufficiently value our commerce; but they are quite persuaded that they shall enjoy it on their own terms,” both understood that America’s standing among the nations of Europe would be seriously hurt if discordant notes at home ruined the
chance to build a sustainable union. Somewhat later, after negotiating alongside John Adams in Holland on behalf of the U.S. Treasury, Jefferson would remind George Washington of the danger of losing credit in Europe: “Were we without credit we might be crushed by a nation of much inferior resources but possessing higher credit … It remains that we cultivate our credit with the utmost attention.”
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The foreign policy issues that preoccupied Madison were invariably ones with sectional ramifications. John Jay, in his role as secretary for foreign affairs of the Confederation Congress, was engaged in negotiations with Spain’s envoy, Diego de Gardoqui, concerning the boundary between U.S. and Spanish possessions in the Southwest. The specific point of argument rested upon whether U.S. commercial traffic was to be permitted along the Mississippi River. On other commercial subjects, Gardoqui extended rights that the United States desired, but he held firm that the Confederation should agree to a twenty-five-year waiting period before navigation rights on the Mississippi were granted.

Jay and the New England interests were content with such an arrangement, believing the Southwest of little value in the short run—plenty of upstate New York land remained to be settled. Madison and the Virginians were outraged. To them, the Mississippi symbolized a future of agricultural wealth and a replication of the South’s economy on contiguous lands. Madison had vehemently opposed Vermont’s admission to the Union back in 1781, so as not to add another northern vote in Congress. Now, in the spring of 1786, Virginians could read the Jay-Gardoqui recommendation as proof that the Northeast wished to dominate the Union. Terming the negotiations “a ticklish situation,” Madison proposed that Congress transfer responsibility from Jay to Jefferson, sending the Paris-based minister directly to Madrid. Meanwhile Monroe told Patrick Henry that men of Massachusetts were openly speaking of a separate northern confederacy if Virginia and the South continued to resist them.
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Madison gave Jefferson a lengthy report. As he digested the news, Jefferson painted an equally bleak scenario: the western settlers would recognize that they had been sold out by the United States. Prone to feelings of vengeance, they would then launch an attack on the militarily underprepared Spanish, to “rescue the navigation of the Missisipi River out of Spanish hands, and to add New Orleans to their own territory.” In the process they would cease to identify with the eastern states and would move to establish a separate confederation. If the United States helped westerners in
their war with Spain, they might rethink; but there would be no certainty of reunion once the ball started rolling.
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All this was happening as Madison readied himself for the special convention held in Annapolis in September 1786. Eight states sent delegates to consider the intertwined issues of commercial policy and regionalism. It was clear that without larger common purposes, without a sense of justice transcending sectional interests, the Union was doomed to fail. Unable to proceed very far in their deliberations, the delegates who met in Annapolis resolved that a more thoroughgoing convention would have to be organized. They announced that it would take place in Philadelphia in May 1787.

During the summer and autumn of 1786, five years after the death of his wife, Jefferson entered into an intense, if short-lived, relationship with the London-based Anglo-Italian artist Maria Hadfield Cosway. She was sixteen years younger than he, charming by all accounts, and in a loveless marriage with a successful painter, the miniaturist Richard Cosway, who is often depicted as sexually ambiguous and outlandish in his tastes.

The complete character of Jefferson’s relationship with Mrs. Cosway cannot be known. But the tenor of the correspondence, and the fact that the more passionate of their letters were intentionally excluded from the posthumous multivolume collection of Jefferson’s writings edited by his grandson, suggest a romantic relationship. They picnicked as a couple, attended museums and plays, and observed the city’s architecture when Richard Cosway was elsewhere engaged.

Jefferson was acutely aware that in France the meaning of marriage was not quite the same as in America. Members of the nobility with whom he interacted married for social and economic reasons. Husbands and wives had sexual partners other than their spouses. The prim, more rigid Adamses flatly disapproved. In letters to fellow Virginians, Jefferson, at least rhetorically, also rejected this aspect of the French way of life and love. Marriage always had to have a moral component, he insisted.

How sincere was his protest against “a passion for whores” when he discussed the prospect of a young American seeing Europe and facing its temptations? Years later his correspondence shows him condoning French
license—for the French, at least. It was fine for them to distort what nature intended, but Americans could not live that way. So it became something of a mantra for Jefferson to use the French example as a contrast when he wished to paint American manners as pure.

He complained reflexively of “female intrigue,” because he subscribed to the medical Enlightenment no less than to the liberal political Enlightenment. The prevailing literature categorized the female constitution in sexual language, as prone to powerful urges and needing her natural curiosity gratified. Men, for their part, required an outlet; they could not abstain from sex without forfeiting their mental and physical health.

On this foundation, eighteenth-century philosophic medicine had fashioned an elite culture that did not view sex as sinful, in the way the later Victorians would. A man of breeding, especially a widower like Jefferson, could rationalize his engagement in discreet sexual activity with an available, attractive young woman of any social station. In the world he knew, the educated and privileged made their own rules; they escaped the kind of censure that the courts imposed on those, male and female, who were presumed vulgar and bad and whose individual efforts to resist laws concerning adultery or interracial sex received little sympathy.
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In one of his many letters to Maria Cosway, Jefferson complained about the prurient eyes that he feared would waylay any of their letters that were committed to the public post. A diplomat had to shield himself from possible blackmail. As the lover of a married duchess, William Short was no prude; constantly at Jefferson’s beck and call, completely trusted by him, Short had to have been privy to whatever was happening in the relationship. Imploring Jefferson to visit her in London, Mrs. Cosway flirtatiously brought up Short’s amorous tendencies, informing Jefferson that “the beauty he lost his heart by,” the duchess Rosalie, “is here keeling [i.e., killing] every body with her beweching Eyes.” Jefferson wrote to Maria that he wished he could fly to her side: “I am always thinking of you. If I cannot be with you in reality, I will in imagination.” As the Jefferson-Cosway correspondence proceeded, there was usually a hint of romance, or else of disappointed yearnings.
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At no time did Jefferson commit to paper the name “Maria Cosway,” even to note her existence, when he wrote to his intimates Madison and Monroe. Only the cautious couriers of their private letters knew anything.

THE FEDERAL SYSTEM SET FORTH IN THE ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION
was unproductive. The United States of America was not being governed effectively. Frustration had been slowly building, and financial hardship made it difficult to sustain either the confidence expressed in print or the thanksgiving expressed in sermons of 1783, when the war ended. Nor did the wanderings of Congress encourage great confidence.

As George Washington surveyed the postwar world, bidding farewell to Lafayette at the end of 1784, he wrote to General Henry Knox, the Boston-born artillery specialist who had spent much of the Revolution by Washington’s side: “Would to God our own countrymen, who are entrusted with the management of the political machine, could view things by that large
and extensive scale upon which it is measured by foreigners, and by the statesmen of Europe, who see what we might be, and predict what we will come to.” It was not an optimistic appraisal of the American spirit.

Others expressed the same sentiment. Looking ahead to the Constitutional Convention, Madison wrote to Jefferson in March 1787: “What may be the result of this political experiment cannot be foreseen.” Contrasting Washington and himself with those who feared a too-powerful federal system, Madison saw a certain inevitability facing the states: “The difficulties which present themselves are on one side almost sufficient to dismay the most sanguine, whilst on the other side the most timid are compelled to encounter them by the mortal diseases of the existing constitution.”

Real change would have to come. Knox refused to hedge his bet when he told Washington that the Articles of Confederation would have to be altered “by wisdom and agreement, or by force.” Here was one of General Washington’s most trusted, noting the reluctance of some states to send delegates to a national convention of any kind; he found himself recommending that Washington assume the presidency of the convention, so as to lend it greater legitimacy.
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