Madison and Jefferson Read online

  Also by Andrew Burstein

  The Original Knickerbocker:

  The Life of Washington Irving

  Jefferson’s Secrets:

  Death and Desire at Monticello

  The Passions of Andrew Jackson

  Letters from the Head and Heart:

  Writings of Thomas Jefferson

  America’s Jubilee: How in 1826 a Generation

  Remembered Fifty Years of Independence

  Sentimental Democracy:

  The Evolution of America’s Romantic Self-Image

  The Inner Jefferson:

  Portrait of a Grieving Optimist

  Also by Nancy Isenberg

  Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr

  Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America

  Co-edited by Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein

  Mortal Remains: Death in Early America

  Copyright © 2010 by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg

  Map copyright © 2010 by Daniel R. Lynch

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Burstein, Andrew.

  Madison and Jefferson / Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60410-5

  1. Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826—Friends and associates. 2. Madison, James, 1751–1836—Friends and associates. 3. United States—Politics and government—1789–1815. 4. United States—Politics and government—1775–1783. 5. United States—Politics and government—1783–1865. 6. Founding Fathers of the United States—Biography. 7. Presidents—United States—Biography. I. Isenberg, Nancy. II. Title. III. Title: Madison and Jefferson.

  E332.2.B864 2010 973.4′6092—dc22 2010005884

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  To Jeannie. To David.

  And to all who appreciate the true complexity of the past.

  There is very little difference in that superstition which leads us to believe in what the world calls “great men” and in that which leads us to believe in witches and conjurors.

  —DR. BENJAMIN RUSH TO JOHN ADAMS, 1808

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by this Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Chronology

  Map

  A TIME OF BLOOD AND FORTUNE

  Chapter 1. The Virginians, 1774–1776

  Chapter 2. On the Defensive, 1776–1781

  Chapter 3. Partners Apart, 1782–1786

  Chapter 4. The Division of Power, 1787

  Chapter 5. The Addition of Rights, 1788–1789

  THE PATHOLOGICAL DECADE AND BEYOND

  Chapter 6. Attachments and Resentments, 1790–1792

  Chapter 7. Party Spirit, 1793

  Photo Inserts

  Chapter 8. The Effects of Whiskey on Reputation, 1794–1795

  Chapter 9. Danger, Real or Pretended, 1796–1799

  Chapter 10. Inhaling Republicanism, 1800–1802

  SIGNS OF A RESTLESS FUTURE

  Chapter 11. The Embryo of a Great Empire, 1803–1804

  Chapter 12. Years of Schism, Days of Dread, 1805–1808

  Chapter 13. Road to War, 1809–1812

  Chapter 14. Road Out of War, 1813–1816

  Chapter 15. Madison Lives to Tell the Tale, 1817–1836

  LEGACY

  Chapter 16. Thawing Out the Historical Imagination

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Preface

  THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743–1826) AND JAMES MADISON (1751–1836) were country gentlemen who practiced hardball politics in a time of intolerance. As agents of the American Enlightenment, they took premeditated action to overturn ingrained ideas they saw as insidious and unrepublican. As keen political operatives, they fought to humble some equally determined individuals whom they considered misguided or simply threatening. Like all politicians, Madison and Jefferson walked a fine line in condemning corruption while exercising power. They risked their personal prestige because they saw imminent danger. They were watchful. They were guarded. Their times did not allow for complacency.

  We need a better understanding than we currently possess of the strong-willed politicians who helped mold the United States. Our modern leaders quote the founders in magnificent tones, hoping to obtain insights into their minds. But they know them mainly as indefatigable characters in an oft-told and problematic story—they tend to see the founders as they were on their best days. The discipline of history exists to reexamine time-honored treatments of people and events, and to separate myth from reality. Historians are concerned, above all, with accuracy in interpretation. As researchers, they are expected to navigate competing explanations and sort out ideological biases. That is how this book came about.

  Previous biographers are not in all ways to blame for common effusions and misconceptions. Present beliefs about the early years of the American republic derive to a considerable extent from falsehoods the participants themselves planted, their filial offspring nurtured, and commemorative ritual compounded. Each generation gets to weigh in anew.

  One might expect this book to be titled Jefferson and Madison rather than Madison and Jefferson. Its closest relative, Jefferson and Madison: The Great Collaboration (1950), by Adrienne Koch, remains a serviceable piece of scholarship. The ever-quotable author of the Declaration of Independence took precedence in Koch’s title for the same reason that a beautiful monument was erected to his memory in the Tidal Basin of Washington, D.C., in 1943. Madison, the dry, distant “Father of the Constitution,” generated little posthumous sentiment.

  Textbooks highlight the “Age of Jefferson.” Madison’s high point as a public figure is generally associated with the one banner year of 1787, when the Constitutional Convention met; his low point was an unheroic flight from the President’s House during the British invasion of 1814. His manner and moods remain obscure, his long congressional career understudied. What could be a better invitation to learn more?

  Our title is not meant to be cute or ironic. It is not to degrade Jefferson as a force in politics—not one iota—but rather to suggest that it is time to reevaluate their relationship and their distinct individual contributions. Popular historians have done precious little with Madison. And while political scientists have boiled him down to his noteworthy contributions to The Federalist Papers, the historians who place him within the larger context of party formation have presented Madison as a man unaffected by an emotional life, a man eclipsed by the more magnetic, more affecting Jefferson.

  People have long been tempted to compare the third and fourth presidents. In 1824 an itinerant bookseller called on the Virginia neighbors. Jefferson was a man of “more imagination and passion,” he said; Madison, “more natural, candid and profound.” What exactly does this distinction mean? Did Madison lack imagination and passion? Was Jefferson less profound? The bookseller had spent too little time with his potential customers to know them at all well, and he was speaking in relative terms anyway.1

  As a persuasive stylist, Jefferson described the idea of America in ways that students of history have long admired. Investing his words with lyrical power, he indulged often in a sentimental idiom. So yes, he possessed imagination and passion. Madison had a literary faculty too, and a rich wit. But he succeeded foremost as a deliberative, direct, and u
sually (though not always) tactful legislator. Stepping before the public, he was not concerned with style in the way Jefferson was. Madison preferred to supply information that enlivened an intellectual atmosphere. So yes, he was both candid and profound.

  Even though Madison was unsentimental, he was every bit as intense as his more inspirational friend. Those who write about the American founding are dead wrong when they make Madison stiff and stilted. And some historians have rendered Jefferson so placid and elegant as to deprive him of spontaneous moments. Men and women who observed them at their most relaxed, in close quarters, remarked that Madison’s facility for conversational humor sometimes led him to make Jefferson the butt of a joke, and Jefferson to laugh so well that he nearly cried. The chapter headings alone instruct the reader that ours is a book about the ruthlessness of politics, aimed at demonstrating what is missing from the genre of Revolutionary heroics. Yet we do not lose sight of the power of personality, without which the annals of time would be cold, linear histories featuring absurdly rational actors.

  The founders did not resist when the national creation story was brilliantly painted and sculpted in marble and their personal exploits made into something nobler than they were. We should not expect them to have done otherwise. The truth, however, is that Madison, Jefferson, and their peers loathed as well as they loved. As they chased self-serving objectives, they got bogged down in banking arrangements and caught up in obstacles associated with seductive land deals. To a far greater extent than most realize, their public lives were conditioned by matters of personal health and vital impulses not usually part of the historical record. The giants of politics past immersed themselves in mundane matters that, taken together, measured social status. They juggled responsibilities and were dismayed by unexpected outcomes in many areas of their lives.

  To celebrate blindly those who were long ago given poetic protection as “founding fathers,” and who remain in the national spotlight today as our protectors, invites massive self-deception. In this book we do not denigrate, but historicize, the patriotic impulse. We do all we can to reconstitute the gritty world in which Madison and Jefferson operated. We guide the reader through nuances in eighteenth-century American English—a foreign language in many respects—to help make better historical sense of the emotional range within individual experience. Compared to our own time, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were primal and suggestible when it came to people’s expectations from life. Yet they were decidedly flamboyant times too, with more ill feeling than studied consensus. This alien culture, which eventually became ours, is more interesting when we strip away the loving haze.

  Let us set aside for a moment America’s early heroes and speak about the materials of history. It was not a comprehensive mind that brought forth the republic’s critical texts. It was, to a large degree, the “tribal” identities of men like Madison and Jefferson, who were Virginians first and keenly aware of the clannish objections that one part of the continent had to the positions and attitudes of another. Though we associate their rich organizing talents with their commanding national legacies, they did nothing without first asking, How will this play in Virginia?

  If this book has one overriding purpose, it is to bring back overlooked elements in a panicky political culture that dangerously provoked as often as it positively motivated Madison and Jefferson and those who fell into their circle. What reassurance Madison and Jefferson obtained, as they fought for what they believed in, derived in a very real way from the trust they eventually came to lodge in each other. Their partnership was one of the few constants either of them knew over his long political life. Yet it is wrong to suppose that they thought alike, as we will show at length.

  They were insatiable readers. They both read extensively in the law. But they were not powerful courtroom pleaders of the sort that swayed juries with oratorical flourishes. That was their close acquaintance and formidable opponent Patrick Henry. Madison never argued a case in court, and Jefferson defended his clients’ interests with minimum verbiage. They were concerned with the law in bookish ways; it helped them think of how to improve civil society. This may sound uninviting at first, but their common immersion in dry treatises sheds light on their popular political agendas and cannot be divorced from a history of their long collaboration. If we are to be thorough, we must recover the unromantic elements that produced moments of real excitement.

  For a six-foot-two-and-a-half-inch-tall man, Jefferson was not particularly imposing. His eyes were small, his skin tone fair. A delicate pallor shed about him. In later years his grandson remarked on how the sun caused his face to peel. His manner was almost retiring. Though his voice did not carry, he paid attention to acoustic power in all he wrote. He claimed he did not wish to draw attention to himself. He obviously failed in this.

  Madison is a bit harder to sum up. Known principally as a political thinker, he was surprisingly multifaceted, and as a political actor contentious without being divisive. Even so, he was always thought of as “Little Madison” and, to his worst detractors when he was president, “Little Jemmy.” The consensus is that he stood about five foot four; his private secretary insisted, years after his death, that he was five foot six. His voice was never described as impressive nor his style as flashy, yet he was frequently (perhaps out of politeness?) praised for his able oratory. He might have been the sort to get lost in a crowd, but he weighed in on every public issue that mattered to Americans for more than half a century. And no one ignored what he had to say.

  Both men were excellent dinner-table companions, affable and unhurried. This was the one social function they were bred for and excelled at. The greatest difference between them lay in their approaches to political disputation: Madison thrived in politicized settings of which Jefferson despaired. As the more easily irritated, Jefferson held a deep-seated desire to impose his will and crush his political enemies. Madison’s opinions were well defined and forcefully drawn, and he could certainly exhibit cold-heartedness; but he did not carry around the same degree of spite or the same need for historical vindication.

  Neither Madison nor Jefferson was truly a “man of the people,” in spite of their press. Jefferson, shy by nature, idealized yeoman farmers more than he identified with their grubby lives; the physically unimposing Madison closely observed people and manners, though he was not warm or hearty with strangers. In political councils, he was prepared for anything; no one who has served in Congress can claim to have shown greater determination to shape policy than James Madison. We know more about Jefferson’s doggedness, but Madison was no less assertive.

  They grew up on plantations in the Virginia countryside as privileged eldest sons. Their country seats, Madison’s Montpelier in Orange County and Jefferson’s Monticello, to the southwest, in Albemarle County, are about twenty-five miles apart. The world they shared was that of the Piedmont gentry. Jefferson enjoyed his book-lined, mountaintop retreat, which he started building in his twenties and which, for most of his adult life, was a domeless, and simpler, version of what exists today. Jefferson was only fourteen when he came into his patrimony upon the death of his pioneering father; his mother died in 1776.

  Except for when he traveled, or sat in legislative bodies in Virginia and Philadelphia, Madison lived with his parents at the mansion built in 1731, twenty years before he was born. Until his death in 1801, Madison’s father subsidized his son’s education and political career. It is important to point out that although James Madison, Jr., was the eldest son, his political inclination led him to cede day-to-day management of the family estate to his brother Ambrose, four years younger; the politician became squire of Montpelier as a result of Ambrose’s unexpected death in 1793. And it is rarely noted that Eleanor (Nelly) Conway Madison, Madison’s mother, was born the same year as George Washington and lived ninety-seven years, until 1829, twelve years after her famous son had retired from the presidency. She bore ten children, only three of whom survived her.

  Reare
d for leadership, Madison and Jefferson made connections with similarly inspired scholars at home and abroad. Jefferson remained in Virginia for higher education, but Madison went north to Princeton, where he became comfortable in the culture of the middle colonies. Jefferson escaped Virginia’s provincialism by going to France; Madison did not travel abroad but spent many years in Philadelphia and even sought to buy land in New York State.

  Theirs was a time when print culture was dominant, when ostensibly personal letters were widely reprinted for the “news” they contained, when weeks and even months passed before information could be acted upon. Political gossip traveled across a rutted, bumpy, and often muddy landscape, or aboard unsteady sailing ships; interior communities struggled to keep pace with the more active and concentrated populations of America’s commercial ports. Life revolved around slow, arduous, meaningful communications.

  The real story of Madison and Jefferson and their political ascendancy comes alive in this rich cultural terrain. Jefferson, the elder of the pair, took the first step, producing two Revolutionary texts: A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774) and, of course, the Declaration of Independence (1776). Combined, these writings addressed the nature of society and the psychological poverty of British colonialism. He put his political imagination to the test, arriving at a lively and quotable manner of presentation as he made the embrace of liberty a daring proposition. Less well known is his pique: severe and judgmental in private communications, Jefferson spoke his mind to his friends but refused to debate his adversaries in public.

  Madison’s career in national politics effectively began in 1780. From that year forward, he was known among his peers for a bold legislative agenda. In the 1790s he contributed incisive political pieces to the newspapers—often prompted by Jefferson. Jefferson appeared withdrawn, but allies inside Virginia and beyond its borders rarely misunderstood his and Madison’s policy preferences.