Madison and Jefferson (78 page)

Hamilton had recognized how the United States was to walk a fine line in diplomacy: “If there be a foreign power which sees with envy or ill will our growing prosperity, that power must discern that our infancy is the time for clipping our wings.” Navigating well what was—and not even
Hamilton could have denied it—a dangerous situation, the Jefferson administration had adhered to the tried-and-true foreign policy of George Washington and kept America at peace. Yet the domestic opposition was brazenly, jealously contending that the president and his secretary of state deserved no credit for what had occurred through pure happenstance.

According to Taylor, the Jefferson administration had taken treaty-making authority out of the hands of a single executive and made it republican through the combined efforts of a trusted group of diplomatic strategists. It was, he wrote, “a new political era” in America. Grumbling Federalists exhibited, he said, “a temerity unprecedented” in their knee-jerk criticism of the improvements made since 1800. They could not acknowledge the truth about Republican rule: it was not imperious but collaborative. This was, at any rate, the shiny surface John Taylor held up to his readers’ view.
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In the election of 1804 Jefferson and his running mate, George Clinton, won handily, defeating the ticket of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina and Rufus King of New York. Even New England went Republican, save for the dissenting state of Connecticut. The electoral vote (162 to 14) showed just how low Federalist fortunes had sunk. The party’s leaders had predicted four years earlier that a President Thomas Jefferson, hopeless visionary that he was, would tear apart the religious fabric of the country and Frenchify American political culture. He had turned out to be far more down-to-earth than his enemies billed him. In response, the most embittered of the Federalists, at a loss to do anything productive, entered into conversation about a New England secession movement.

John Taylor’s pamphlet was a first-rate defense of political doctrine. Unfortunately for Madison and Jefferson, it did not anticipate where things were already heading.

AS THE YEAR 1805 BEGAN, A POLITICAL POET DELIVERED THE
doggerel to which newspaper readers had grown accustomed at New Year’s time. On a fairly regular basis, cartoonish verse made hay with men and events. None of it was any good. Heady rhymes unevenly philosophized the nature of man and led inexorably to grandiose statements about the American republic.

This one, penned by an avowed Republican, bemoaned the failure of France to live up to expectations after “bright freedom’s early dawn” in 1789. The unnamed poet laughed off the revolution in St. Domingue as a pitiful attempt of unlettered blacks to imitate a mature government. Proceeding from the insensitive to the bombastic, he asserted America’s virtues by contrasting rustic pleasure with effete arrogance:

And how had America already come to supplant Europe? Why, owing to the talent at the top of the Republican Party. In a quick cadence, the poet went down the list:

There was no complexity to the effort. The long poem recounted the ways in which impertinent Federalists regularly berated the Republican president for his unpretentious manner, his unpowdered hair, and his simple corduroy pantaloons. They had “stamp[ed] him Infidel,” and persisted in disseminating “old threadbare tales” of his sexual past, without offering proof. They had gone so far as to issue the absurd claim that he “fell in love, too, with a negro!”

Federalists had resorted to these blundering attacks on the president only because Jefferson had turned his back on the “courtly pomp” that noble, dignified Federalism sorely missed. For the ousted party, according to the Republican playbook, Jefferson’s biggest crime was his naturalness—his reputed comfort with commonness, his mass appeal.
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It is hard to perceive either Jefferson or Madison as men with a common touch. Their social identities as members of a cognitive elite made them no closer to common farmers than a neighborly, condescending smile demanded of them. Yet as often happens in politics at moments of change, style can trump every other consideration. The truth is that although they
were power brokers, the Virginia Dynasty of presidents—Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—had no impact on the composition of the Virginia delegation in Congress. Fully 60 percent of the state’s congressmen during their three successive presidencies were men whose close relatives had previously served in the House or Senate. But that did not stop the discredited party from making Jefferson out as a man who pandered to the democracy.
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Madison did not arouse the same degree of resentment. And it was not only because Jefferson held the chief executive position. Madison was just not scandal-prone; nor did he reveal in his correspondence a sentiment that could be turned against him. Jefferson’s gestures got him into trouble. His humane vocabulary struck some as less than sincere. Whether or not he intentionally did so, he appeared to court popularity, an indicator of cunning of which Madison could not be accused.

Of course, the Republican takeover of the executive linked the names of Madison and Jefferson in the partisan press as never before. As friends, their interdependence was fortified by regular social contact, and given Jefferson’s widower status, the convivial Dolley Madison occasionally took up duties as hostess at official gatherings in the President’s House. Jefferson’s surviving daughter Patsy spent the majority of her time in central Virginia.

Jefferson almost never missed a stopover at Montpelier when he rode to and from Washington City, and the Madisons typically visited Monticello every summer. In September 1804, a slow time in national politics with Jefferson’s reelection widely assumed, the Madisons came to stay with him. House servant Sally Hemings was pregnant. The following January she gave birth to a son, who was given the name James Madison Hemings. Though he bore his mother’s surname, he was, almost unquestionably, the master’s son, and it seems inconceivable that by this time the Madisons did not know. It was Mrs. Madison who suggested the name, as Madison Hemings informed a reporter late in life.

Precisely one year later, in January 1806, Patsy gave birth to a son at the President’s House, Jefferson’s eighth grandchild and second grandson (the first since 1792). That child too was named after James Madison. His father, Thomas Mann Randolph, was a high-strung congressman and future Virginia governor, far less talented than the man under whose roof he was sleeping or the man whose name his son had borrowed. Randolph’s temperament often gave his father-in-law cause for concern, and during this otherwise tranquil interlude he came close to fighting a duel with another whose name he shared, the routinely abusive Congressman John Randolph.
Complex circumstances, personal as well as political, must have given President Jefferson fresh reasons to appreciate the steadfastness and trustworthiness of James Madison.
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Jefferson’s second inaugural address appears on the surface as workmanlike as the first was vivid and dramatic. He showed his draft to Madison, who suggested alterations to two sections: the free exercise of religion and Indian policy. This time the rich Jeffersonian phrasings most likely to invite satirical responses were removed, quite likely by Jefferson himself.

If there was a single boast in the message, it was the rhetorical claim: “What farmer, what mechanic, what laborer, ever sees a tax-gatherer of the United States?” Translation: The Jefferson-Madison-Gallatin partnership was a hands-off central government, which suited a quiet, industrious people. State and national governments could coexist peacefully. This was what it meant to live as a republican.

Jefferson wrote out several drafts of the second inaugural, just as he had done with the first inaugural, and with the Declaration of Independence before that. Because he retained these pages, it is possible to probe his thinking—which is especially useful in identifying his initial tendency to emotional expression, which he then repressed, or at least compressed, in the final (published) text.

His “Notes on a Draught for a second inaugural Address” appears to be the earliest outline. It clarifies Jefferson’s assumption that the first inaugural address was “an exposition of the principles on which I thought it my duty to administer the government.” The second, he noted, should “naturally” be a rectification of accounts, “a statement of facts, showing that I have conformed to those principles. The former was
promise:
this is
performance
.” Here was Jefferson recurring to his experience as a lawyer, seeing his first inaugural in terms of a contract or a formal vow—an oral promise made in public and fulfilled.

Jefferson conceived of inaugural addresses as a ritual practice. They were different from his policy messages to Congress. He reminded himself (or Madison and other cabinet members, if he intended them to see the “Notes on a Draught”) that details were not called for. In listing the chief subjects he would be addressing, he privileged foreign affairs, followed by domestic affairs, taxes, national debt reduction, Louisiana, religious freedom, Indians,
and the press. For the section on Indians, he called on citizens to show the tribes humanity, so as to ensure their continued “good opinion” of white America. This is a hard pill for the modern reader to swallow, though it once reflected a standard of “philanthropy” toward Indians.

Jefferson saved the best for last: the press. The subject of newspaper opinion was absent from his first outline, but he devoted a good bit of time to crafting this section in a subsequent draft that contains the most cross-outs and insertions. “During this course of administration,” he began the fitful paragraph, “the artillery of the press has been levelled agt [against] myself personally agt my executive associates, & the members of the legislature.” Then, upon rereading, he eliminated the “myself personally” while still underscoring the nefarious character of the Federalist press.

The uncensored “Draught” read:

After thoughtful editing, it became:

It was a larger “us” who were being mistreated, and free institutions suffered for it. Luckily, he wrote, “wholesome punishments” were available to the state governments for prosecuting those guilty of “falsehood and defamation.” But (and here he tried to sound magnanimous as he issued a veiled threat) “public duties more urgent press on the time of public servants, and the offenders have therefore been left to find their punishment in the public indignation.” It was his way of saying that he was attentive to published slurs.

His larger message to the nation was really self-congratulatory, because
it claimed that his political opposition was ever-diminishing. As a republican, it was mandatory that he should congratulate the citizenry at large instead: “Contemplating the union of sentiment now manifested so generally as auguring harmony and happiness to our future course, I offer to our country sincere congratulations.” The “harmony and affection” of his first inaugural had become “harmony and happiness” here, as he celebrated a return to the course set forth in 1776, when the states had been genuinely, and not just rhetorically, united.

The text that the president actually read from on March 4, 1805, was, for convenience, a single long page, written in a shorthand that Jefferson had developed. There were indicators of where to pause—the word closest to the right margin was the final word in the sentence, with two slash marks placed after the period. In this, his speaking copy, Jefferson drew subject headings such as “Press” in clear boldface characters. Although he is universally depicted as a soft-spoken individual whose public addresses were difficult to hear, Jefferson’s intense, controlling method of preparing the speaking text shows that he cared enough about its reception to see that those in earshot were not disappointed.

As he delivered his inaugural message, he took a bow in the direction of Madison’s initially ignored and now much-heralded
Federalist
10. (Jefferson did not explicitly acknowledge the source.) Given the enormity of the Louisiana Purchase, it seemed to him useful to assure the public that expansion west was in the interest of all Americans. “Who can limit the extent to which the federative principle may operate effectively?” he posed. “The larger our association, the less it will be shaken by local passions; and in any view, is it not better that the opposite bank of the Mississippi should be settled by our own brethren and children, than by strangers of another family?” But of course, Jefferson did not mention the slaves being sold west, as he did not consider them part of the national family. His words highlight the tone of a young government still very anxious about European designs on portions of the continent.
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