Madison and Jefferson (64 page)

Wading into the brawl in which his political offspring were engaged, an honored elder urged reason and forbearance. In his
Address of the Honorable Edmund Pendleton of Virginia to the American Citizens, on the State of Our Country
, published in Federalist Boston, the old Revolutionary pointed out how futile it was for the United States to engage in provocation with France when France was sending signals that its demand was for nothing more than “placing our commerce with Britain and France on the same footing.” He dismissed the notion that there was somehow a “French party” in America, and he explained that no Republican wanted any connection with France more “intimate” than the quality of the relationship America enjoyed under the 1778 treaty through which the French proved themselves willing to fight for American independence. Pendleton defended Jefferson, not by name but as “the gentleman who is honoured by being placed at the head of this supposed party,” and pleaded with a divided people to take a breath and look for peaceful, constitutional remedies for the nation’s domestic ailments. As he had been in 1775, Pendleton attempted to be in 1799: the cooler head that he hoped would prevail. What he did not say in his address was that Jefferson had explicitly asked him to write something that would have the effect of “exposing the dupery being practised” on the American people by a cynical government. “Nobody in America can do it so well as yourself,” Jefferson had coaxed.
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The year 1799 saw a continuation of confrontational politics. In January and February Madison decided to go after the malefactors. Twice he wrote surreptitiously for the
Aurora
, using the signatures “Enemy to Foreign Influence” and “A Citizen of the United States.” In the first, he used an uninhibited metaphor—“the most jealous lover never guarded an inconstant mistress with a more watchful eye”—to complain about Britain’s “rigid and compulsive monopoly” over transatlantic trade, dating to the colonial period. “But the most powerful, perhaps, of all her motives,” Madison charged, “is her
hatred and fear
of the
republican example
of our governments.” He updated the old imagery of Tory perversion, warning that trade and profit had been concentrated in the hands of merchants who were bound to British capital and credit: “Thus it is,” he wrote spectacularly, “that our country is penetrated to its remotest corners with a foreign poison vitiating the American sentiment, recolonizing the American character.” This piece of polemic may be the most eloquent single line Madison ever wrote. He did not take, and has never received, credit for it.

In the second of his
Aurora
essays, Madison tried to reason his way through the generally distasteful course of the French Revolution. Demonstrating his caustic wit, he explained that it was not unusual for governments in the process of consolidating power to cultivate fear among the populace, mixing real threats with “jealousies, discontents, and murmurs.” Subversion of public opinion was, he wrote sharply, a tactic to which the United States was no more immune than the French Republic.
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Jefferson saw and approved the essays before they were printed, and he visited Madison in early March as he traveled south from Philadelphia. In the early years of the republic, Congress might be out of session for entire seasons, and in 1799 Vice President Jefferson remained at home from March until mid-December.
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After his late-winter stopover in Orange, there is a mystifying six-month gap in the Madison-Jefferson correspondence, due perhaps to both men’s apprehensions about the security of their communications. It is likely that messages were conveyed through private messengers and not retained.

In April 1799, a month into this epistolary drought, John Taylor and others expressed to Madison their concern about Patrick Henry’s return to politics. They convinced Madison to serve once again in the House of Delegates as a foil to the seductive orator, who rarely did as expected and who now supported the repressive Alien and Sedition Acts. But the drama never played out. On June 6, before the state legislature had even met, Henry died.
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In August, from Monticello, Jefferson reopened his correspondence with Madison. Dolley was in Jefferson’s neighborhood at the time and could, without harassment, carry home a letter containing dangerous sentiments. The letter of August 23 was arguably the most radical that Jefferson ever wrote to Madison or to anyone else. It envisioned conditions under which he would be willing to sanction the dissolution of the Union. In Jefferson’s estimation, the resolutions he and Madison had authored for the states to consider were good, but not good enough. Kentucky and Virginia had not sparked the kind of outcry he had hoped for; he wanted now to reexamine what might be done in a worse instance, if the states too easily acquiesced after the federal government clamped down on them, “disregarding the limitations of the federal compact.”

His prescription was dire. He seemed to strain to get the words out, and when he did, he could not find an effortless way to finish the opinion. Express in “affectionate and conciliatory language,” he proposed, “our warm attachment to union with our sister-states …, that we are willing to sacrifice
to this every thing except those rights of self government the securing of which was the object of that compact: that not at all disposed to make every measure of error or wrong a cause of scission, we are willing to view with indulgence and [to] wait with patience till those passions and delusions shall have passed over which the federal government have artfully and successfully excited to cover it’s own abuses and to conceal it’s designs.” Jefferson was writing a new, less beautiful declaration of independence—or declaration of divorce. “But determined,” he plodded on, “were we to be disappointed in this, to sever ourselves from that union we so much value, rather than give up the rights of self government which we have reserved, and in which alone we see liberty, safety and happiness.” And then he added bizarrely: “These things I sketch hastily.”
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Madison did not go to his desk and compose a systematic reply. He rode to Monticello instead, where they conferred face-to-face. Jefferson rethought what he had written and agreed with Madison that disuniting was a faulty prescription for present—or future—political ills. It was a rare instance of Jefferson’s reversing himself. But as he explained to Wilson Cary Nicholas of Albemarle County, his close ally in the state legislature, Madison had not needed to argue to convince him. He realized on his own that he had momentarily gone astray.

As the year wore on, Madison and Jefferson did not even have the luxury of paying visits to each other at will. The reason was not just the insecurity of the postal service, where seals and handwriting were recognized, and letters were purloined and their contents fed to unprincipled newspaper editors. This time Monroe took the initiative, cautioning Jefferson and Madison to avoid being seen together. In a place with few country roads and little anonymity, it was hard to hide comings and goings. It would not take much for them to stand accused of brewing conspiracies. Jefferson agreed with Monroe’s logic.
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Madison, Jefferson, and Monroe were more a triumvirate now than they had been at any time past. The Monroes were spending more and more time on the Albemarle property.
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In a heavily Republican House of Delegates, late in 1799, Madison proposed Monroe for the governorship of Virginia. His activities in France earlier in the decade had annoyed Washington while greatly pleasing most of the rest of Virginia. As a result, Monroe won the governor’s job by a significant margin over the Federalist candidate. The Virginians were on the move again. Stymied by Federalist gains in the last few years, they were buoyed now by confusion in the Federalist ranks, after President Adams rebelled against his cabinet and
restored balance in foreign affairs. Virginia was eager to reclaim its accustomed rank among the states.

The new century drew near. And as it did, the Revolutionary generation bade farewell to two senior Virginians. Six months after the loss of the daring, erratic Patrick Henry, George Washington died at Mount Vernon on December 14, 1799, at the age of sixty-seven. Had he lived a few more months, he would have had his immediate successor as a neighbor, when the Adamses moved from Philadelphia to the new Federal City on the Potomac.

Before he died, Washington was able to resume a correspondence with the youngest general in his Continental Army. Despite his long confinement, Lafayette had emerged from prison with as dynamic a commitment to American-style liberty as he possessed before his ordeal began. He loved the Americans and vowed to return to the United States for a long visit. Washington discouraged him from coming, citing the “present political agitation,” but Lafayette, as stubborn as he was affectionate, still planned to sail, saying that he wished to enjoy moments of seclusion at Mount Vernon with his treasured friend. In truth, Washington feared that Lafayette was too close in sentiments to the Republicans, or could be manipulated by them. Lafayette did not accept “no” easily. “I long to be in America,” he cooed.

No one else addressed Washington with the fervor of Lafayette. “I know you long to fold me to your paternal heart,” he pressed. In the last letter of his that Washington would ever read, Lafayette acknowledged his ambition to play a role in negotiating an improvement in Franco-American relations. To an American diplomat at The Hague, he suggested that the unique understanding he shared with lead participants in the American Revolution might be enough to bring peace to the warring factions, Federalist and Republican.
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It was the height of nerve and perhaps the best example of Lafayette’s “canine” appetite for fame that Jefferson had long before described in a letter to Madison. Still, the Frenchman had a sincere and irreducible commitment to the United States. Only the death of George Washington could stop him from sailing. As a result, he would not cross the ocean again for another quarter-century, at which time he who was once the youngest
American general would be within a year of the age Washington was when laid to rest.

Lafayette’s only open criticism of America concerned the sin of slavery. In the mid-1780s he had urged the land-rich Washington to resettle slaves as tenants on his property in the West—an experiment other planters could imitate. But the suggestion fell on deaf ears. At the time Washington claimed that his financial future remained in some doubt, and he saw slave ownership as an “imperious necessity” for him.

Washington, credited in history for having resolved to free his slaves after his death, could do so because he had no sons or daughters of his own and had earned an income from lands he leased out over the years, lands he had surveyed or received as bounties for his military service. The ambivalent emancipator made it clear that Mount Vernon would retain its slaves while his widow Martha lived. He claimed to have done all he could to provide an “easy and comfortable” way of life to those whose “ignorance” prohibited the adoption of any more liberal policy. He did nothing as president to draw the public’s attention to the politics or morals of race enslavement.
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Other matters took precedence. It is tempting in the twenty-first century to collapse time, reduce the distant past to an easy logic, and assign the greatest share of blame for slavery to certain well-known names or to censure the entire Revolutionary generation for failing to live up to its grand ideals. But doing so risks imputing to them a sense of priority and a vision of collective action that matches our own cherished cultural views. While it is true that Quakers and Methodists agitated for an end to slavery, widespread prejudices such as those George Washington unhesitatingly voiced always stood in the way. We may never really know what conscience dictated to historical actors, but a wise beginning for the modern questioner would be to assess everyday fears and political pressures and to analyze, in this context, how they rationalized their behavior.

Nor was Washington’s passing an occasion on which to reexamine the slavery issue. It was, however, a time when many chose to recall the Revolution appreciatively. As one would expect, the second half of December 1799 and the first part of the year 1800 produced an outpouring of ceremony and tribute, the most memorable of which was the succinct phrasing of Henry Lee: “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Less well known is the more hyperbolic language contained in General Lee’s address: “When our monuments shall be done away; when nations now existing shall be no more; when even our young and far-
spreading empire shall have perished, still will our Washington’s glory unfaded shine, and die not.” Other eulogists went even further to paint the first president as an instrument of God’s providence. As hard as it is to imagine in light of Washington’s posthumous reputation, there was backlash in select places too. At the College of William and Mary, Bishop James Madison—the reverend had been named bishop in 1790—authorized black armbands to be worn, but a number of students refused.
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In the Virginia House of Delegates, Madison rose to report the tragic news: “Death has robbed our country of its most distinguished ornament, and the world one of its greatest benefactors.” As he had done in Congress on the death of Benjamin Franklin in 1790, in Richmond now he introduced a motion calling on the members of the legislature to wear badges of mourning for the length of the current session.

On the day before Washington’s death, in curious contrast, a similar resolution honoring the “eloquence and superior talents” of Patrick Henry was put forward. It was rejected. Fifteen years earlier, when Henry was frustrating reform in the Assembly, Jefferson had said in a letter to Madison: “What we have to do I think is devoutly to pray for his death.” Perhaps Henry’s
political
death was all he meant. Now Henry was in all ways dead, and a new era had arrived in Virginia politics in which the party of George Washington was a dwindling minority.
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