Madison and Jefferson (115 page)

Does the evasiveness, the ambivalence, of a Jefferson or a Madison make them loathsome? Or simply weak? Their political generation, like every generation, worked around ethical issues when clarity was not immediately forthcoming. Slavery may be the most striking example, but it is only one of many examples of Madison’s and Jefferson’s indecision—because theirs, as ours, was a wait-and-see, reactive political world. Public men did not necessarily take collective public action at the first sign of trouble or the first recognition that a moral dilemma existed. That is not an explanation for the persistence of slavery, but it is the way of American politics. Our expectations from past historical actors are ultimately irrelevant, and our final judgment on them brings us satisfaction only insofar as it reflects on how we wish to change the world
we
inhabit for the better.

No one denies that white Americans have been responsible for the telling of U.S. history for most of the past 250 years, and they have shaped the story of national origins in ways that protected (when they did not justify outright) white jurisdiction over that past. In a recent investigation of what he refers to as “the absence of black people in the master narrative,” the historian Clarence Walker neatly synthesizes the problem of ownership when he cites the words of a white southern editor in 1902, in disavowing African Americans: “The Negro is an accident—an unwilling, a blameless, but an unwholesome, unwelcome, helpless, unassimilable element in our civilization.” These words are emblematic of an anxious, needy strain prevalent among racists and nativists of the twentieth century, and one that echoes as well the attitude Jefferson came to symbolize. When his former presidential secretary freed his slaves and moved with them from Virginia to Illinois in 1819, Madison was up front about the long-term implications of white prejudice. “I wish your philanthropy could compleat its object,” he told Edward Coles, “by changing their colour as well as their legal condition.”
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Despite their common inability to address issues of race in a truly enlightened way, Madison and Jefferson subscribed to the Enlightenment in ethereal form: its adoration of science and philosophy and its treatment of religious dogma as hopeless fallacy; its focus on grand nature and human nature; its teaching that we should privilege rational understanding over passionate conviction.

The Paris Jefferson inhabited in the 1780s was a congenial city, the modern Athens, a place of soaring aesthetics and cultivation of the broadest kind. He brought it home to Madison through the books he sent, which Madison hungrily consumed.
Belles lettres
and scholarly treatises were
equally the ornaments of their private libraries. Books inspired the two Virginians to do practical things as well as to philosophize: aside from constitutional considerations, for instance, making scientific farming an essential course of study helped them draw up economic plans and regard the prospects of rural America. As collectors of the latest research, they maintained a constant correspondence with other readers and thinkers, bringing the wider republic of letters closer while saving them from boredom.

At its root the Enlightenment ideal was just that: an intellectual’s ideal, a visionary program combining individual awareness with the impulse to engineer social improvement. Politics, on the other hand, was a cumbersome process involving methods of organization that philosophy did not easily address. As they sought to implement a better system of governance than what they had inherited, Madison and Jefferson understood that man’s failings lay in his ignorance—and ignorance, they knew, was no less a function of democracy than it was of monarchy. That is why their cause began with an appeal to those whose educational opportunities resembled their own, whose experience within book culture made them receptive to new ways of thinking.

Their affinity for books also fed a strong sense of justice and injustice. Madison and Jefferson adopted an enlightened approach to freedom of conscience, as they spoke out against religious bigotry. This was how their relationship began. They rejected the notion that anyone knew the right way to be a Christian. As an ex-president, Madison was prouder of his forward role in support of freedom of religion, which ended the colonial-era persecution of religious dissenters, than he was of any other accomplishment. Jefferson’s self-composed epitaph pronounced him “Author of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom.” His words of 1800 to Benjamin Rush wrap around the interior of his domed monument in Washington, D.C.: “I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
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What held true for clerical imitators and imposters held true for kingly inheritance too. No English monarch or aristocratic body had ever welcomed progress. On the strength of this simple formulation, Madison and Jefferson advocated a republican government that kept power out of the hands of the undeserving and transferred it to new guardians of the public trust. Republican government extended happiness by minimizing taxes and maximizing individual freedom. This is their legacy. But in doing almost nothing to advance the cause of liberty for those enslaved, Madison and Jefferson also knowingly acquiesced to an American tyranny.

It is hard for most to think of Madison and Jefferson and admit that they were Virginians first, Americans second. But this fact seems beyond dispute. Virginians felt they had to act to protect the interests of the Old Dominion, or else, before long, they would become marginalized by a northern-dominated economy. Virginians who thought in terms of the profit to be reaped in land were often reluctant to invest in manufacturing enterprises. The real tragedy is that they chose to speculate in slaves rather than in textile factories and iron works. They convinced themselves (with help from some sympathetic northerners) that the moral foundation of their economy lay in the fact that their slaves were well provided for in youth and old age. The white laboring poor in the North had no such provision. And so as Virginians tied their fortunes to the land, they failed to extricate themselves from a way of life that was limited in outlook and produced only resistance to economic development. Even Madison condoned this activity. Even Madison evidenced no entrepreneurship.
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Madison lodged trust in the political vision of many northerners; Jefferson never really trusted the northern states. When he spoke abstractly of the “people,” Jefferson thought of Virginians first, though he was always prepared to include those northerners who agreed with him in the means of constructing his imagined community that left the southern states to their own devices. For Jefferson, right thinking on the part of the people could be lost and then regained; the election of 1800 marked the people’s conscious desire to return to an earlier republican vision after letting their guard down and letting the monocrats hoodwink them.

Jefferson thought of politics as an ongoing cyclical process of revolutions and resistance to encroachments. As organic creatures, bodies politic were capable of self-destruction if destabilized by unnatural mixtures and nervous imbalance. In contrast, Madison talked about the “mixed character” of the federal government as “co-equal bodies politic,” a stabilizing element representative of a healthy interaction of forces. Madison emphasized good chemistry, and Jefferson emphasized the need to patrol social boundaries, keeping alien and combustible elements apart.

In history there is enough dark emotion to cause us to question the moral makeup of our species. While the founders are still a pantheon of heroes for many Americans, today’s scholars increasingly disparage them for a
lack
of foresight and humanity. This degradation in the historical imagination is largely a result of their compromise position on slavery, a subject to which we have given a good many pages, with the idea that our treatment of slavery should be thorough and systematic, but not exceed the amount of attention Madison and Jefferson gave to it relative to their other priorities as public men.

While they sought to remake their world, and make it freer, Madison and Jefferson grew up believing that authentic Americans were white men, most of them thrifty farmers. Even the white yeoman’s wife was reduced to a breeder, which reflected
Madison’s and Jefferson’s common obsession with demography—they believed that the strength of the nation was tied to its ability to reproduce and expand westward.

Madison and Jefferson had a constituency that is not ours. They do not know us, and we know them only slightly. It goes without saying that they remained oblivious to the shape of the world to come. We admire them for focusing attention on the rights of conscience; but we would be wrong to associate them with today’s progressive agenda, just as Hamilton is wrongly credited for pointing the United States in the direction of the modern economy. Their psychic distance from us cannot be ignored.

The whole concept of original intent, therefore, makes no sense. It is a legal fiction that grossly oversimplifies Madison’s thinking. The truth is, his interpretation of the Constitution changed over the course of his lifetime, and original intent assumes that Madison’s views were permanently fixed in time. His earliest sense of what the Constitution should mean was expressed in his support for the Virginia Plan and the absolute negative, both of which were rejected. So which Madison do we claim was right? Madison at the beginning of the convention? Or Madison at the end? Or when he was writing his
Federalist
essays? In 1793, when Hamilton and he were engaged in combat in the newspapers as “Pacificus” and “Helvidius,” Madison deployed one of Hamilton’s
Federalist
essays against him. In the last stages of the Jay Treaty debate, Madison tried to say that original intent began with the ratifying conventions, and that meaning was not inherent in the Constitution itself but came instead through the exegesis of the states, beyond Philadelphia. Madison resorted to this tactic only because the so-called original meaning contained in the Constitution that he had signed did not support his position on the Jay Treaty eight years later. Thus, the only way to appreciate Madison’s constitutional thinking is to measure comprehensible changes in his views in response to specific political problems.

Madison’s and Jefferson’s concerns had an immediacy that was far more central to the contests of their lives than to any thoughts of legacy. The demons they faced were the forces they considered hostile to republicanism or that threatened to compromise American independence as they conceived it. This begins to explain their do-or-die contest with the High Federalists and the hysterical labeling that accompanied it. It also explains their eagerness to bulldoze over traditional Indian lands and lawfully Spanish lands, which they did to prevent the mere possibility of future British or French expansionism.

England’s bullying on the high seas challenged a sense of national honor. Fear of perpetual vassalage was a humiliating thought as well as an effective legal limitation on national sovereignty. It led Jefferson to embark on the Tripolitan War, and it led Madison to envision the conquest of Canada. They and their associates adopted an inflated rhetoric meant to overcome concerns about the vulnerability of the Union; and they justified acts of aggression in order to prove their manhood on an international stage. In their retirement years, Madison and Jefferson were able to witness the fundamental collapse of the world system they abhorred. The iniquitous routine of impressment eventually ended; and the prejudicial navigation laws that had for decades caused Anglo-American relations to alternate between wary and unfriendly finally moderated.

Despite Virginia’s monopolization of the executive branch of government from 1801 to 1825, southerners remained transfixed on the economic engine of the North. They saw themselves losing ground. In this environment, with all their nationalistic pronouncements, Madison and Jefferson did not simply transfer allegiance to the nation on the basis of abstract republican theory. Jefferson’s retreat to the theory of nullification in 1798 is only the most obvious example, showing the extent of his preoccupation with protecting Virginia rather than protecting his earlier vision of union. Virginia was on Madison’s mind when he battled to situate the national capital on the Potomac—he wanted Virginia’s river to be America’s Amazon, its primary economic artery.

Politics always trumped abstract ideas for Madison.
The Federalist Papers
belonged to a very small fraction of his career, and yet they constitute at least 50 percent of modern scholars’ efforts to describe his mind. What he wrote as “Publius” was simply meant as propaganda for passage of the new Constitution and certainly did not represent the pure distillation of his thought—there was nothing timeless about it. The political wisdom he demonstrated as a partisan writer after 1790 was far greater, and should be
more valuable to us today, than his studies of government in 1787–88. If the writings of those few years made him a better politician, it was because he discovered which of his ideas worked and which did not. And just as important, he discovered which of Jefferson’s most cherished ideas had to be countered. He was a problem solver.

Jefferson took more chances. He often believed he could actualize what he read in books. At times he was impulse-driven and highly inventive; in other ways he refused to unglue himself from outmoded thinking. He was hardheaded, and Madison was one of a very few who could move him to question basic assumptions. Yet he was also a superb manager of personnel; he was a doer, not just a thinker.

Jefferson’s words have malleable meaning. They have provided much fodder for students in disciplines such as botany and architecture, in addition to history and politics. As an indebted slave owner recording his day-to-day accounts in portable notebooks, he was weighed down by an anxious regard for the meaning of human happiness that was anything but abstract. At times he got lost rhapsodizing the healthful life amid the gently sloping landscape and red clay soil of Virginia’s Piedmont. And then there was his final experiment—a university.