Madison and Jefferson (43 page)

In fact, Jefferson thought that one almanac and one well-written letter constituted but little proof of the qualities of mind attaching to a whole race of men. His reservations became clearer in his comments to others, wherein his first line of defense was to rationalize that Banneker’s ancestry contained European blood. Or perhaps a white associate had helped him. Or perhaps the taste of trigonometry he offered was the extent of his natural gift. Justifying his doubts in later years, after Banneker was dead, Jefferson recalled that his impression of the mathematician was “a mind of very common stature,” and he went so far as to claim that there was a “childish and trivial” quality to Banneker’s writing.
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In that Jefferson’s history shows a constant suspicion about the African’s mental powers and a fixed disregard for any evidence offered to
him, the letter to Condorcet appears to have been a momentary detour. Madison’s greater curiosity and openness with regard to the black farmer in upstate New York attests to the suppleness of his thought; yet it would be wrong to see him as an integrationist either. He might have been entirely comfortable living in the North, but he never strayed far from Jefferson’s call for the recolonization of blacks beyond America’s borders.

In early 1791, as the contradiction between the Madison-Jefferson and Hamiltonian visions for America became impossible to resolve through cordial means, Madison encouraged his college roommate Philip Freneau to open a newspaper that would talk back to the administration. John Fenno’s
Gazette of the United States
was staunchly defending whatever Hamilton proposed. Fenno was of modest means, an entrepreneur who identified with the interests of the ruling circle and saw profits flowing from being its mouthpiece. He had, as yet, no competitor in the marketplace of ideas.

Freneau was just scraping by when Madison and Jefferson agreed to assist him in signing up subscribers. They also guaranteed that any losses would be covered. Though a Princetonian with literary gifts, Freneau did not come from wealth. The son of a New York merchant, he had been the captain of a privateer during the Revolution and was captured by the British. Confined to a noxious prison ship in the Hudson River, he made a daring escape. Even more important to his patrons than his Revolutionary heroism, Freneau was a time-tested republican, an intellectual who despised banks and speculators and had published articles on the subject. Madison fully trusted him, which was why Jefferson did as well. Another of the Princeton legion, General Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, eagerly signed on to the project.
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Financing problems delayed publication for some months. Naysayers, Madison wrote, “practiced some artifice” in their attempt to scare off the would-be editor. But in the end Freneau, like Jefferson before him, found Madison’s call to service overpowering. Freneau accepted a low-paying position in the State Department as a translator—incontrovertible proof of how closely Madison and Jefferson were cooperating at this moment. The noncoincidence would be exploited by an outraged Hamilton, who naturally read intrigue into the Freneau appointment. Jefferson maintained just enough distance that he could deny any unseemly involvement, while
Madison agreed to stay abreast of all financial details of the prospective opinion journal. He even enlisted his father to round up subscribers in central Virginia.
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The
National Gazette
published its first issue in Philadelphia on October 31, 1791. Three weeks later Madison anonymously authored the first of eighteen essays for his friend’s paper. It was titled “Population and Emigration.” Essentially nonpartisan, it revisited Benjamin Franklin’s observations on the safety-valve effect of westward expansion. Madison described migration from the Old World to the New as a natural process that stood to benefit both the United States and Europe. Creating a healthier, happier Euro-American population would add eager new consumers of European goods while ridding Europe of its laboring poor. According to Madison’s theory, immigrants would continue to desire what Europe produced, even as they became American in their pursuit of economic uplift. While it appeared politically innocuous, the essay established a template, a guide for further argument.
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As a political journalist, Madison was to offer step-by-step instruction in republicanism—how to talk back, how to push back against Hamilton’s British-style plan of government. Given Hamilton’s consolidation of power in the executive branch, normal checks and balances embodied in the federal system were no longer adequate, and quiet tactics were outmoded. Madison’s unceasing work in Congress had failed to stop an agenda overtly aimed at Anglicizing the new republic; so he would now tap the best minds in the country to help him salvage the constitutional framework. His answer to Hamilton was simple and straightforward: “public opinion.”

Madison did not employ the term in the way we understand it today, as raw poll data. By public opinion, he meant
educated
opinion, the output of influential critics. His earlier conception of the federal republic, the carefully drawn, thoroughly unpopular Virginia Plan, had hoped to empower an educated class of people’s representatives to filter and refine the collective opinion of “the people.” Now, disappointed in the overall output of the people’s elected representatives, he turned to what he called “the class of literati,” enlightened opinion makers, cultivators of ideas and manners, who he hoped would use the press to educate.
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There were few self-imposed limitations in what he wrote. In the notes he took as he conceived the
National Gazette
essays—ideas that he thought twice about and abandoned—Madison showed that he wanted to blast slavery for perpetuating aristocracy in the state governments of the South. He could not have done this in Congress without losing his southern allies,
but in the “public opinion” format he thought, for a moment at least, that he would speak truth to power. In the end, he realized he could not risk what would happen if his anonymity were compromised—alienating the southerners whose opinions he and Jefferson wished to mobilize against Hamilton’s policies.
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On December 5, 1791, two weeks after “Population and Emigration,” Madison contributed his second essay, “Consolidation.” It extended his theory of public opinion by focusing on the role it played in securing the republic. “Consolidation” regarded Hamilton’s capture of executive energy as an incipient move in the direction of monarchy, which stood to dissolve the states and consolidate (or concentrate) wealth and power at the center. Congress would lose its effectiveness; the people’s voice would go silent. Citing values of “reason, benevolence, and brotherly affection,” Madison drew upon the vocabulary of political sympathy (ordinarily Jefferson’s specialty), calling on the “great body of the people” to transcend their state identities, sympathize, and act in concert. When the federal government overstepped its authority, the collective people had to become a truer union than the established structure and “
consolidate
their defense of the public liberty.” Madison’s sense of collectivity described a people enlightened by public opinion; Jefferson’s described a people actuated by their native intelligence. Rethinking his definition of “the people,” Madison found himself philosophically closer to Jefferson and increasingly remote from Hamilton.
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He enlarged on the same question two weeks later as he opened a new
National Gazette
editorial with an axiom: “Public opinion sets bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign in every free one.” There were instances, he explained, when government must obey public opinion and instances when public opinion would be influenced by government. In the coming years, his and Jefferson’s detractors would obsess on the first instance and challenge their belief in the second.

This essay is significant, because it was a departure from Madison’s argument in
Federalist
10, wherein he had relied on the widening contours of the republic to prevent the abuses caused by factional majorities. In 1787 he had thought that geography held the key to preventing demagogic appeals from spreading. Now he believed something different: that circulation of public opinion over that broad expanse—the addition of critical voices—was the essential balancing element in political society. He endorsed “a general intercourse of sentiments, as good roads, domestic commerce, a free press, and particularly a
circulation of newspapers through the
entire body of the people
.” In Congress, he argued for lowering the postage on newspapers.
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After justifying the power of public opinion, Madison gave his attention to all things British in Hamilton’s policies. In the essay “Universal Peace,” he contested the practice of perpetual debt to facilitate wars. “Each generation should be made to bear the burdens of its own wars, instead of leaving the expense for other generations,” he wrote. He thought there was something sinister about Hamilton’s ploy to keep taxes low and indirect while allowing the government to mobilize large sums for war or other empire-building activities. It was not the prize—western land—that Madison objected to, of course, but the necessary by-product of funding a great military machine: the all-powerful central government, mirror image of Great Britain.
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On December 5, 1791, the day Madison published “Consolidation,” Hamilton gave him further cause for grievance with the release of his long-researched
Report on Manufactures.
Confirming Madison’s worst suspicions, the treasury secretary laid out a complex plan to enlist the federal government in promoting new industries. Madison’s objection was to financial inducements from the government. The practice, as he understood it, would create an entrenched cadre of moneyed patrons or, in modern parlance, lobbyists. Earlier in the year, as an experiment, Hamilton had backed a state-chartered cotton textile firm in Paterson, New Jersey, which was capitalized at $1 million and incorporated shortly before the
Report on Manufactures
was announced. So the report was more than theoretical.
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For Madison, the evidence was clear. Each of Hamilton’s programs sucked the United States deeper into the British orbit of foreign investment and capital. The republic would soon become a miniature version of its once and future enemy. Hamilton was extending the government’s powers beyond what the Constitution allowed, interpreting the preamble’s call to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty” as a blank check. Madison wrote Henry Lee, who was about to become Virginia’s governor, that any executive seizure of power could be justified based on Hamilton’s unrestrained reading of the republic’s charter. He concluded ruefully: “The parchment had better be thrown into the fire at once.” Lee’s response was even more cynical. He charged that Hamilton was trying to create a new species of American, a more docile race. Instead of the “stout muscular ploughman full of health … with eight or ten blooming children,” the secretary seemed to prefer “squat bloated fellows all belly & no legs who … manufacture a little.”
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As a member of the president’s cabinet, Jefferson was in a difficult position. He could not oppose Hamilton’s report directly. Washington had made it clear that the development of a manufacturing economy was a high priority of his presidency; he asked the secretary of state to cooperate with particular inventors and artisans who were bringing British technology to America.

The most aggressive promoter of manufactures in the government was Tench Coxe, Hamilton’s associate at Treasury, with whom Jefferson was friendly. This made the process bearable. So while Jefferson carried out the president’s orders, Coxe ran interference between Jefferson and Hamilton, taking the lead in organizing the Paterson corporation (called the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures). Jefferson, who exhibited an intellectual interest in all technological innovation, accompanied President Washington, the first lady, and Secretary Hamilton and his wife to visit the “cotton manufactory,” or machine shop, in Philadelphia, where the new and improved double looms for Paterson were being constructed. He did not do so as a concession to Hamilton—it was a command performance at the behest of the president of the United States.
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Jefferson knew full well that Washington was the force behind manufactures, which meant that Madison knew it too. Yet Madison had no qualms about attacking the
Report on Manufactures
in several of his later
Gazette
essays. In one notable instance, he returned to the cause of agrarianism, a subject generally associated with Jefferson. Praising the health, virtue, intelligence, and competence of the husbandman, Madison drew a contrast between the contentment of the self-employed and the pitiful condition of the exploited sailor—his symbol of the pervasive inequality within Britain’s maritime economy. “His mind, like his body, is imprisoned in the bark that transports him,” Madison wrote of the sailor, echoing Jefferson’s theory as he equated social well-being with freedom of movement and the creative exercise of human faculties.

More hard-hitting essays followed. In “Fashion,” Madison described the capricious character of manufacturing in merry old England. He recounted the plight of twenty thousand buckle factory workers who suddenly found themselves on the streets in 1786, owing to the fickleness of fashion. This highly specialized kind of production was exactly what Hamilton wished to encourage, but for Madison it represented the “lowest point of servility.” In his avid embrace of the rurally based economy and the healthy physical environment that promoted contentment among the masses, Madison continued speaking in Jefferson’s voice. Jefferson, meanwhile,
was either under an official charge to remain silent on this issue or was uncharacteristically detached from it.
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