Madison and Jefferson (105 page)

“The marriage of J. & M. was not a barren one,” he continues puckishly. “Every year or two added a new member to the family,” each of whom received “a good farm, to be put under the authority of the child on its attaining the age of manhood.” As the “estates” were separately controlled by Jonathan and Mary, “tenants” issued forth from one or the other’s original terrain. Competition ensued.

Clumsily, Madison assigned an unfortunate trait to Mary, a “stain” from “a certain African dye” that had disfigured her left arm in childhood. The arm was “perfectly black” and consequently weaker than the other arm. Jonathan had been well aware at the time when the dye, this “noxious cargo,” had entered the river running through Mary’s estate; but she possessed a “comely form” otherwise, and so he had not allowed the one imperfection to dissuade him from marrying her.

There came a time, however, when all he could think about was the “black arm” of his bride. He taunted her unmercifully, reminding her of his “long forbearance,” and demanded that she “tear off the skin from the flesh or cut off the limb.” In Madison’s blunt reconstruction of the debate among the members of Congress, he insisted that the North’s sense of moral superiority was as arrogant as it was unjust. “White as I am all over,” Jonathan declares, “I can no longer consort with one marked with such a deformity as the blot on your person.” He is the aggressor, of course: “Mary was so stunned by the language she heard that it was some time before she could speak at all.”

Madison’s refusal to acknowledge the North’s right to speak out against southern slavery is matched by his feminization of the South, vulnerable if not wholly innocent and routinely subjected to unwarranted pressure. In his awkward script, it is the North that is unfeeling (as “our British brethren” were in the Declaration of Independence); it is the North that contemplates divorce; and the North that demands of its erstwhile partner
nothing short of a voluntary dismemberment—sectional suicide—if the marriage is to be saved.

Mary alone appreciates the “good feelings” that are meant to characterize relations between husband and wife. Her “generous & placable” temper was being tested, her “proud sensibility” to “unjust & degrading treatment” an utterly reasonable response. She is calm as she tries to talk sense to Jonathan, whom she continues to refer to respectfully as “my worthy partner.” Don’t forget our original “deed of settlement,” she reminds him, that which constituted “our Union.” She bade him remember that at the time of their joining together, “you yourself was not entirely free of a like stain on your own”—and here Madison could not decide whether to use the word “person” or “color.” On their wedding day, Jonathan had had “spots & specks” as black as Mary’s.

The next of Madison’s transparent metaphors drew upon the still highly uncertain practice of medicine. “If so cruel an operation were to be tried,” as attempting all at once to remove the black from Mary’s arm, no one could say what might happen. Jonathan was asked to reflect on what “the most skilled surgeons” were predicting: that the result would probably be fatal—“a mortification or bleeding to death.” And if the experts were wrong and surgery did not in fact result in death, Mary would still be left “mangled or mutilated.” Would you like me better in such a condition? she asks her husband.

Next, she asks him a rhetorical question: Would divorce make your estates stronger than they are as one half of our union? She did not deny that his protective arm made her stronger; she readily admitted that his “aid & counsel” made her a better household manager. Jonathan should, for his part, admit that her “purse” was valuable to him in the event of future “litigious” actions by “Old Bull” or anyone else.

Madison’s parable lacked a rousing conclusion, and the compromise worked out over Missouri statehood proved to be nothing more than a holding action. As every student of history knows, the estrangement of North and South resulted four decades later in the unimaginably bloody Civil War. Not until 1835, the year before he died, did Madison finally permit the
Southern Literary Messenger
to publish “Jonathan and Mary Bull.”
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The reactions of Madison and Jefferson to the crisis of union were dissimilar. The two shared a “foreboding” about the future, as the historian Peter Onuf has written, but whereas Madison remained privately cynical, Jefferson was jumpy. He had slipped into the radical Old Republican camp of John Taylor of Caroline and Virginia Appeals Court judge Spencer
Roane. At the height of the Missouri debate, the latter cautioned President Monroe that Virginians were already surrounded by blacks and refused to be “dammed up in a land of slaves.” Jefferson was, in Onuf’s words, “self-dramatizing” and “dangerously doctrinaire,” as he pursued a “solipsistic fantasy of death and destruction.” He supposed that the republic founded on common consent and common lineage was now held together by mere threads. Acknowledging that the Missouri question had aroused him from political slumber, he wrote nervously to his onetime protégé William Short, who now lived in Philadelphia: “The old schism of federal & republican, threatened nothing because it existed in every state.” Partisanship along sectional lines spelled a far greater danger, and Jefferson knew it.
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After 1821 the sound of the “fire bell” was more muffled, and while Jefferson’s alarmed sense of an overreaching federal power did not quiet much, he was able to reinvest his heart in the university and in watching his grandchildren (and even great-grandchildren) grow. He turned his financial affairs over to his eldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph. Though in earlier years “Jeff” had proved less studious than his grandfather had hoped, he resourcefully negotiated with bankers and worked tirelessly to manage the former president’s mounting debts.

The slave economy did not offer Jefferson any comfort in his retirement. Madison too encountered significant problems of economy as he aged. Whereas Jefferson had his large family to think about, Madison, like Washington before him, had no children to whom he would will his land. Just as Washington had freed his slaves, effective upon the death of his widow, Madison anticipated that he would be able to do the same. But even he would find such a plan impossible to carry out, as the Virginia economy continued to experience decline.
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During the Monroe years, politicized Virginians could not help but notice Judge Spencer Roane. Residing in John Marshall’s hometown of Richmond, he had become the southern states’ rights answer to the chief justice. It was Roane who had the loudest voice among the alliance known as the Richmond Junto, speaking through Thomas Ritchie’s
Enquirer.
Even the
National Intelligencer
had come to support Marshall’s rulings, causing Roane to perceive the nationalizing trend in dire terms. His opinion pieces grew more and more acerbic; his appeals always sounded ominous.
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During the middle months of 1821, at his wit’s end, Judge Roane tried to convince Madison to take a public position against the Marshall Court. Two Marshall decisions in particular alarmed him so much that he solicited the man whom, he said, Virginians regarded as the greatest living constitutional thinker, to come out of retirement. “They see in your pen,” he coaxed, “the only certain antidote” to Marshall. The case of
McCulloch v. Maryland
(1819) privileged the national bank by refusing to allow the states to tax any of its branches that operated within their borders. The case of
Cohens v. Virginia
(1821) asserted the right of a lottery firm set up by Congress to practice in contravention of Virginia law, thus thoroughly demeaning states’ rights theory. Both decisions expanded federal power and undermined the strict construction of the Constitution that Madison and Jefferson had favored.
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Before he decided to address Madison, Roane had published several newspaper essays under the pseudonym of “Algernon Sydney,” in which he called
Cohens v. Virginia
a “most monstrous” decision. He hearkened back to what he termed “the glorious revolution of 1799,” the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which had affirmed the state legislatures’ right to overturn unpalatable acts of Congress. The judge was hoping that Madison might reenlist in the same cause now. But it had been twenty years, and Madison now considered the situation of the states far from dismal. Writing out of respect to Roane, he agreed that “the Gordian Knot of the Constitution seems to lie in the collision between the federal and State powers.” But going into great detail to explain his current perspective, he seemed entirely comfortable with a nationalist agenda: Marshall’s lack of tact was unfortunate but not unconstitutional. “It is to be regretted,” he said, “that the Court is so much in the practice of mingling with their judgments pronounced comments and reasonings of a scope beyond them; and that there is often apparent disposition to amplify the authorities of the Union at the expense of the States … The constitutional boundary between them should be impartially maintained.” He did not give Roane any further support.
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It is ironic that at this moment Jefferson was closer to Judge Roane in his thinking than to Madison, given how quickly Roane came to the defense of the memory of his late father-in-law, Patrick Henry. But Roane and Jefferson shared a strong personal antipathy toward Chief Justice Marshall. And they were deeply concerned that strengthening the federal government through judicial decisions made more intrusive constitutional revision in the future—such as the abolition of slavery—likely. “The great object
of my fear,” Jefferson wrote Roane in March 1821, “is the federal judiciary. That body, like Gravity, ever acting with noiseless foot, & unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is ingulphing [
sic
] insidiously the special governments [i.e., the states] into the jaws of that which feeds them.” Like Henry’s son-in-law Roane, and like Pendleton’s nephew John Taylor, Jefferson took sustenance in the “recall to first principles” and hoped their combined call would be “heard & obeyed” by Virginia. “Let the eye of vigilance never be closed,” he intoned.

From this impassioned charge, Jefferson went on to divulge to Roane what he could not block out of his mind. “Last and most portentous of all is the Missouri question. It is smeared over for the present: but it’s geographical demarcation is indelible. What is to become I see not; and leave to those who will live to see it.” Having emptied his gut of its fears, he had finally landed in a sentimental place. “The University will give employment to my remaining years,” he breathed, “and quite enough for my senile faculties. It is the last act of usefulness I can render, and could I see it open I would not ask an hour more of life. To you I hope many will still be given.” But Roane, nineteen years Jefferson’s junior, died in 1822.
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Curiously, as all of this was occurring, Jefferson was moved to undertake what is now referred to as his autobiography. He did not mean to advertise it either as a concrete whole or as a self-exposition, as modern memoirists do. De-emphasizing its public value, he opened with a disclaimer: “At the age of 77. I begin to make some memoranda and state some dates & facts concerning myself for my own more ready reference & for the inform[atio]n of my family.” Doubtless, his extended “memoranda” were meant to be available to friendly historians, as an authoritative record to form a part of a larger work on founding-era politics.
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After the disclaimer, he detailed the Jefferson family’s Welsh ancestry and his mother’s Randolph lineage to England and Scotland. He outlined his father’s role in Virginia settlement and his own formal education; his awareness, as a young attorney, of the issues that led to the Revolution; and his interactions with the key figures, older than himself. Jefferson’s anatomical dissection of his time in the Continental Congress is perhaps the most self-indulgent portion of the “memoranda,” though his assignment and writing of the Declaration of Independence is cast in the humblest of language: “The committee for drawing the declaration of Independence desired me to do it. It was accordingly done.” The superlatives employed in Jefferson’s ostensible autobiography are reserved for his introduction of James Madison into the narrative:

This is the tenderest tribute Jefferson ever wrote about anyone.

After six months on the project, Jefferson gave up—or felt he had done enough to advance his perspective on the history of the Revolution. He completed the work with an extensive accounting of his five years in Europe, finally putting down his pen after noting his arrival in New York in the spring of 1790. Presumably he meant for the already collated
Anas
to serve as a companion to the memoranda, a primary source of importance in exposing the delicate history of his conflict with Hamilton in Washington’s cabinet. As to his two terms as chief executive, Jefferson must have expected his biographer to find materials in the vast correspondence that his grandson would eventually publish, beyond what lay in public archives.
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