Madison and Jefferson (111 page)

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY MADISON AND JEFFERSON WERE
often spoken of in a single breath. Most regarded their administrations—wrongly—as an unbroken chain. Their penchants and policies while in office were lumped together, but their personalities were as readily differentiated: Madison was said to be naturally noble, Jefferson classically creative; Madison cool, Jefferson cordial. But none of the many descriptions of Madison and Jefferson by their contemporaries would strike the modern reader as detailed and unbiased. Indeed, despite all that has been written over the past two hundred years, the two Virginians descend to us as men with secrets, contradictory attitudes, and unknowable thoughts.

It is that conclusion which we have been strenuously writing against in these pages. Our twofold object has been to get inside the all-important political culture of the Revolutionary generation and to resist, as much as possible, favoring one actor over another. If Americans’ historical understanding is to benefit, we must find a way to engage in a legitimate amount of speculation while stopping short of making the glib assertions and assumptions that always seem to attach to the founders.

Martin Van Buren was a U.S. senator from New York when he visited Virginia and conferred with Jefferson at Monticello. Though he had supported DeWitt Clinton over Madison in the election of 1812 and felt lukewarm toward President Monroe, he had, by 1820, perceived Virginia as the linchpin of his own national political ambition. In 1824 Van Buren invited Jefferson to refute charges recently made by the still vocal, still tactless New England Federalist Timothy Pickering, to the effect that Jefferson was covetous of power and a deliberate seducer of the unwitting public.

Pickering and Jefferson were civil with each other in person, though two more bitterly opposed in political sentiments could hardly be found. “He arraigns me on two grounds: my actions and my motives,” Jefferson wrote back to Van Buren. “The very actions, however, which he arraigns, have been such as the great majority of citizens have approved.” All together Jefferson’s letter ran eleven pages, typical of the lengths to which he went when it was a matter of defending his historical reputation. Once he had cited page numbers and passages he objected to, and systematically tore apart Pickering’s “diatribe,” he left Van Buren the quintessential Jeffersonian statement as to his regard for historical vindication and his means of attaining it:

This broad hint-prescription-decree comprises a single tortuous sentence. Jefferson might have restrained himself here, and he might have compressed the eleven pages into three or four, had not his purpose been so far-reaching. His “contradiction” of Pickering’s testimony was thus left to Van Buren to release at the moment when it could have the greatest effect on posterity.
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Although not a Virginian, Van Buren was, as it turned out, the right man for the job. After Jefferson’s death, the New York Democrat and future president increasingly looked up to Madison as a constitutional authority, whether on matters of federal support of roads and canals or on federal-state relations generally. As Jackson’s first-term secretary of state, he volunteered himself as a forwarder of Madison’s letters to Europe; and as vice president during Jackson’s second term, he sent Madison presidential messages in published form as well as political pamphlets of various kinds, inviting the founder to comment.
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It was toward the end of his own life, as the Civil War approached, that Van Buren composed the texts that became his own historical search for vindication. His
Inquiry into the Origin and Course of Political Parties
traced his political lineage to the third and fourth presidents. Its first chapter opens with the lines: “There has been no period in our history, since the establishment of our Independence, to which the sincere friend of free institutions can turn with more unalloyed satisfaction, than to that embraced by the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, moved as they were by a common impulse.” Van Buren was unsparing in his characterization of Alexander Hamilton’s disgust for democracy. He pointed, as Jefferson would have him do, to Patrick Henry’s foolish (or greedy) attraction to Hamilton’s system. And he deployed Jefferson’s response to Pickering in the most persuasive way he knew how.

In his narrative of the rise of the Republican Party in the 1790s, Van Buren chose to depict Jefferson as the “head” and Madison as the “laboring oar.” The party, he wrote, was “warmed into action by Jefferson’s more fervent though not more deeply seated patriotism.” Madison was “simple, practical, and direct,” and his report on the Alien and Sedition Acts “the flag under which the Republicans conquered.” The eighth president thus made the pair into righteous pugilists, delivering a one-two punch to the political sect that stood in the way of progress.
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Henry S. Randall was too young to have met either Madison or Jefferson. Raised in a Hamilton-worshipping community in New York, he grew into a Van Buren Democrat, but one who resisted the antislavery turn Van
Buren took in 1848. Regarding northerners’ distaste for southern culture as a “disease,” he was the first in a series of sympathizing biographers who told the story of the early republic as Madison and Jefferson preferred it to be understood—if, that is, Madison did not mind his friend receiving the lion’s share of attention. As he researched his three-volume history, Randall remained in close touch with Jefferson’s grandchildren, and as his epigraph to this chapter suggests, he sculpted the third and fourth presidents as though they were posing for national monuments.
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No Madison study ever really caught on during the formative period of patriotic biography. Madison had no children with Dolley who might have functioned as Jefferson’s daughter, grandson, and granddaughters did. John Payne Todd, Dolley’s son from her first marriage, turned out to be a great disappointment in all respects. A tag-along member of the diplomatic staff that sailed to Europe to negotiate the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812, he often disappeared from the entourage and over the years became increasingly self-destructive. Madison himself spent thousands of dollars paying off his stepson’s gambling debts. After Madison’s death, Todd auctioned off thousands of his stepfather’s letters to cash in.
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While Jefferson may have ultimately triumphed among biographers, Madison was the clear favorite of James Kirke Paulding. Writing in the 1840s, he acknowledged Jefferson’s primacy as “the Great Apostle of Democracy” but at the same time expressed his reservations about the third president’s occasionally immoderate prescriptions. He saw no genius in Jefferson’s management of policy in the lead-up to the War of 1812, and he did not acknowledge Madison’s share in responsibility for it. Writing of the “twinkle” in Madison’s “small bright blue eyes,” he made it abundantly clear how much he preferred the fourth president’s well-composed views of democracy. “His mind was more consummate and his faculties more nicely balanced than those of his predecessor,” Paulding wrote.
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Recall the bookseller quoted in the preface to this book, who observed in 1824 that Jefferson possessed “more imagination and passion,” while Madison was the “more natural, candid and profound.” To these remarks, Samuel Whitcomb appended one other: that Madison, in spite of his “excellences,” had “a quizzical, careless, almost waggish bluntness of looks and expression.”

We have, then, the perspectives of the writer Paulding and the bookseller Whitcomb to describe the artificial competition between Madison and Jefferson. Paulding added his observation of the “twinkle,” the spark,
to the “waggish” or mischievous quality that Whitcomb saw in Madison. Perhaps it only grew on Madison in later years, but there was definitely a flash, a flicker, an irreverence that radiated from him, which history ignores. For whatever reason, modern scholars have made Madison not only full of thought, which he was, but a stone-faced politician, which he was not; and they have, with comparable ease, rendered Jefferson as the Federalists so often branded him, a confused idealist.

These are one-dimensional judgments. Before he was an idealist, Jefferson was a student of the physical world. He was always picking up his pen to record a thought, a design, an expenditure; he was always buying guides, collecting seeds, and describing nature. Whether the subject was farming or politics, he conducted experiments to satisfy his curiosity, always hoping to discover principles or verify hypotheses. And though his theories might at times have been flawed, he was critical of unscientific approaches to knowledge—views that were, as he saw it, counter to nature. Madison understood this about his friend, though his own inclinations were somewhat different. Madison was wary of excesses in experimentation and was more willing to compromise. He disliked inefficiency in any system. And he was intolerant of those in the political world whom he saw as uninspired or driven by narrow interests.

With impressive variety in his routine, Jefferson yearned to extend knowledge. However, his need for rules and method also led him to impose an often arbitrary order on the world, inadvertently setting limits to knowledge. He chased consonance and fled dissonance. Though the language of harmony and affection supported his ambitious lifetime project, he was neither the anarchist that the angriest Federalists imagined him to be nor the bright-eyed New Deal liberal that the generation that consecrated his Tidal Basin memorial in Washington, D.C., proclaimed him. He was an introvert with a stubborn streak and a clear compulsion to have himself proven correct in the unfolding story of American politics. He had Madison, Van Buren, and grandson Jefferson Randolph, among others, to help him do the job. But the deterioration of historical memory deprives us of detail and context and makes a truthful translation from one generation to the next unlikely. When historians take shortcuts, they de-emphasize one trait by emphasizing another. Much interpretive power is forfeited as time presses on.

Biography is a tricky thing. Privileging one source over another inevitably alters conclusions. The particular problems among biographers of Madison and Jefferson are those caused by too much license being taken
with too little information. As Benjamin Rush said so incisively in 1808, believing in the “great man” theory of history makes as much sense as believing in “witches and conjurors.” The celebratory biographer exists because nostalgia adheres to every generation.

There is rarely a single moment in historical research, a smoking gun, that immediately and irreparably changes our knowledge of the past. The Madison-Jefferson relationship is too complex to be understood in that way. No one vignette encapsulates all the political twists and turns as two Virginians—two from the rural central counties of Virginia—sought to influence the domestic balance of power. For most of their careers, Madison and Jefferson were intent on rescuing the people of the United States of America from oppressive government. But they were not heroic. In the prime of their lives they acted out of an attachment to Virginia as much as a desire to defend the Union.

It was Jefferson’s particular habit to personify his political enemies, to give them a physical form through corporeal metaphors. For him, the “monocrat” Federalist’s ailment had its own unique pathology: it was a feminine disorder, embodied in a “timid” nervous constitution and a parasitic desire to worship the strong. These pseudo-aristocrats were backward in their thinking and out of step with the times, both dysfunctional and doomed. Like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, Jefferson’s effete monocrat was a monstrous re-creation, at once a poison introduced into a natural environment and an unnatural entity unable to progress, unable to adapt. “Doctor” Jefferson aimed to create new, healthy cells so that the body would heal completely once the diseased and anachronistic minority died off naturally. Or in the case of African Americans, unloved offspring of the institution of slavery, he preferred to purge the body of them, to expel them altogether, and to replace them by transfusion—new blood in the form of white European peasants or laborers.

Madison did not ignore personal flaws, such as Patrick Henry’s demagoguery and John Adams’s vanity. But he was less likely to blame policies on inherent defects or psychological failings. He focused instead on social forces, errors in reason, and balances of power that demanded structural solutions. He would reorganize the political dynamics of the national environment
through reeducation. This was how, early in his congressional career, he could envision a homeland for former slaves in Sierra Leone or Liberia; for him, a concerted experiment in recolonization and economic uplift stood a better chance of changing white racist attitudes than any other solution he could imagine. Later, growing from his conviction during the Constitutional Convention that the absolute negative made the most sense for an immature political society, he embraced a paternalistic model for the American republic: the invisible hand of educated public opinion. He was perfectly willing to confront enemies who violated the law of nations or constitutional principles—these were Madison’s sacred rules—but he lacked Jefferson’s need for visceral release in the process.