Madison and Jefferson (16 page)

Although the course of the war was in doubt, Madison’s ambition was being satisfied. He expressed no inclination to learn at the feet of his father how to manage the plantation economy. At twenty-nine, Madison appears to have been the youngest member of Congress. A Delaware delegate wrote dismissively in his private journal that the slight Virginian “possesses all the self conceit that is common to youth and inexperience.” The harshness of the comment may represent an impulsive first impression, the diarist’s own defective ego, or the ever-present jealousies that afflicted the politicians of Revolutionary America; but it also suggests that Madison, so often called shy by his biographers, was not a silent member of the national body for long.
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Affairs of state looked increasingly bleak, especially the nation’s finances. The “13 separate popular bodies” did not function well together, Madison wrote, and it looked like Congress would only see more “uncertainty & delay” and respond with “dilatory & undigested expedients.” The enemy remained well provisioned and was on the move. Madison advised his regular correspondents back in Virginia, Edmund Pendleton and Joseph Jones (who had left Congress after only a short stay), that British warships had sailed from New York. Their destination was unknown.

It was clear that Virginia should prepare for an invasion by sea. At the end of October 1780, Madison informed Pendleton that their common fear was well founded. It was Virginia, indeed, that the invaders had selected as their target. “I am sensible of the great difficulties you will have to contend with” was all he could say. He tried to take comfort in the expectation that the state legislature would “arm” the governor and his council with sufficient authority to “call forth the military resources of the Country.” Showing the confusion that really governed, Joseph Jones wrote to Madison from Richmond that he was waiting for confirmation of “flattering accounts from the South” that Cornwallis and his entire army had been captured. His nephew Monroe, now a colonel in the Virginia militia, was, Jones noted, a part of the most recently organized detachment of light infantry. But Jones shied from predicting what was to happen next, acknowledging
“imperfections” in intelligence reports. Pendleton was more prone to believing good news and told Madison that “loose Accounts” of three thousand British surrendering struck him as “not improbable.”

The true picture was not what anyone wanted to hear. The British high command had assessed Virginia’s vulnerability. Pendleton realized that the House of Delegates lacked a quorum and would not meet until three weeks after originally scheduled. Virginia’s government was on vacation at the worst possible time. Several leading legislators, plus Governor Jefferson, all intended to resign. “It is a little cowardly to quit our Posts in a bustling time,” Pendleton contended. He meant Jefferson and others as well. But he certainly meant Jefferson.
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From the moment British warships were sighted off the coast in October 1780, Jefferson understood that many of the troops he intended to send south to join Gates and engage with Cornwallis in the Carolinas would now have to remain in Virginia. An invasion force of 2,200 men under Major General Alexander Leslie came ashore at Portsmouth and Newport News. The British boasted a mighty cavalry; the Virginia militia was short of weapons. Slaves, hearing of the landings, ran off to join the British. Yet Leslie stopped short, when he might have pushed inland with devastating effect.

Through the mails, Madison and Joseph Jones ran through the options available to slave owners. Jones was interested in a scheme that would raise white recruits by instituting a kind of property tax: “those wealthy in Negroes” would have to part with one, who would be transferred, as property, to a white soldier as a bounty for enlistment. Madison reacted against the idea of a “Negro bounty,” suggesting instead that loyal slaves could earn their freedom by enlisting in the fight against the British. Agreeing with Jones that troops were needed quickly, he argued: “Would it not be as well to liberate and make soldiers at once of the blacks themselves as to make them instruments for enlisting white Soldiers? It wd. certainly be more consonant to the principles of liberty which ought never to be lost sight of.” Madison tried to frame his proposal logically. Slave recruits would promptly identify with their free comrades, he surmised, “experience having shown that a freeman immediately loses all attachment & sympathy with his former fellow slaves.” Though Madison’s emphasis lay with practical
measures and the psychology of war, he did take the moral high ground, showing that he had no fear in the arming of slaves. He wanted to beat the British at their own game.

Jones figured that Madison’s idea of organizing black regiments stood little chance of helping the American cause and might just inspire the British to redouble their own efforts to coax southern slaves into serving the Crown. This, he said, would “bring on the Southern States probably inevitable ruin.” Gradual emancipation was “a great and desireable object,” Jones went on. But it would be a shame to lose a critical source of labor, all the while risking a “sudden revolution” if Madison’s well-meaning experiment were tried.
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In November 1780 the unsuccessful General Gates was replaced by a greater general, the Rhode Islander Nathanael Greene, who adopted aggressive tactics in the Carolinas and forced Cornwallis to rethink. But before General Greene could have much effect, the despised Benedict Arnold came ashore near Jamestown just after New Year’s Day 1781, marching on Richmond with fifteen hundred men and taking the capital without opposition. Jefferson could not have done much at this moment, though he can be faulted for not mobilizing the militia in time. Sending shock waves through the region, the faithless Arnold quickly left Richmond and returned to the coast. The capital of Virginia was so new, it had no significant public construction worth destroying.

In the midst of upheaval, there was at least one bright spot. At the time of the invasion, George Rogers Clark happened to be in Richmond to meet with Jefferson, and he dealt a punishing blow to one British contingent before being forced to get out of the way of Arnold’s superior numbers. A few days later, at the Battle of Cowpens, in South Carolina, Virginian Daniel Morgan orchestrated a resounding defeat of Tarleton’s cavalry, claiming more than one hundred British lives while taking more than seven hundred prisoners. It was the first impediment Tarleton’s raiders had faced.
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Cornwallis ranged over inhospitable country in North Carolina, far from his supply base, chasing after General Greene. In mid-April 1781 he announced that he was “quite tired of marching about the country in quest of adventures” and brought his troops to Yorktown, on Virginia’s coast, from where, he predicted, “a successful battle may give us America.” The combination of impatience and overconfidence in a general tends to yield quotable lines such as these—in several months Cornwallis’s words would come back to haunt him.

Washington dispatched the youngest of his generals, the Marquis de
Lafayette, to Maryland and Virginia. Jefferson notified the French volunteer that Virginians were as yet unprepared for a larger-scale war, blaming four years of a deceptive calm, while fighting raged hundreds of miles north and hundreds of miles south. Virginians had not acquired, he said, the “habits” of those who lived in the face of danger.

Jefferson himself continued to feel ill equipped to direct a war, and he wrote to Madison in March 1781 of his resolve to step down when his term expired at the beginning of June. Madison’s wooden and protracted reply is revealing in its lack of assertiveness: “Notwithstanding the personal advantages which you have a right to expect from an emancipation from your present labours, … I cannot forbear lamenting that the State is in the present crisis to lose the benefit of your administration. But as you seem to have made up your final determination in the matter and have I doubt not weighed well the reasons on which it is grounded I shall lament it in silence.” At this early stage in their association, Madison seems to have known that he could not change Jefferson’s mind, and so he politely gave the governor the benefit of all doubts.
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As spring arrived, Arnold’s forces were on the move again. Jefferson estimated the enemy at over four thousand strong, poised to come back in his direction from the Norfolk-Portsmouth area. Meanwhile the militia was short of lead. With mordant wit and understatement, Jefferson wrote to the Virginia delegation in Philadelphia of Arnold’s intent: “Should this Army from Portsmouth come forth and become active (as we have no reason to believe they came here to Sleep) our Affairs will assume a very disagreeable Aspect.” The loss of Chesapeake Bay as a commercial outlet was damaging to public and private shipping. The currency crisis had not relaxed either.
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As Arnold pushed inland, Jefferson relocated the state government from Richmond to Charlottesville, in the shadow of Monticello. The Governor’s Council was absent from the scene, and he was left to his own devices. He is supposed to have met at this time with Lafayette, who was awaiting reinforcements from Pennsylvania. Acknowledging his impotence, Jefferson regretted that Virginia could not contribute a sufficient number of men to make active resistance possible. “I sincerely and anxiously wish you may be enabled to prevent Lord Cornwallis from engaging you till you shall be sufficiently reinforced and be able to engage him on your own terms,” he told Lafayette. The foreigner who had fallen in love with America extemporized well, harassing the British and preventing them from penetrating deeper into Virginia and pushing north.

On May 28, 1781, a powerless Governor Jefferson appealed to Washington to lead the bulk of his army to Virginia. The reappearance of their long-absent native son would, he said, “restore full confidence of salvation.” To this he added with extreme pathos: “A few days will bring to me that period of relief which the Constitution has prepared for those oppressed with the labours of my office.” Two weeks later, when Jefferson was no longer governor, Richard Henry Lee would propose in no uncertain terms that Washington return to his state as a military dictator. Now a militia colonel who had seen some action himself, Lee appealed to Madison and the rest of the state’s delegation to lean on Washington: “Let Congress send him immediately to Virginia, and as the head of the Foederal Union let them possess the General with Dictatorial power until the General Assembly can be convened.” He expected Washington to retain this singular power for up to ten months and insisted that precedent for such action could be found in ancient as well as modern history. “There is no time to be lost,” Lee urged, “for the enemy are pushing their present advantages with infinite diligence and art.”
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Jefferson and the Virginia assemblymen with him in Charlottesville knew that the enemy was closing in. Pendleton had mistakenly conveyed intelligence to Madison that Tarleton had been killed in North Carolina, his legion “wholly cut to pieces.” But on Sunday, June 3, 1781, one day after Jefferson’s second term as governor came to an end without a successor having been chosen, an alarm was sounded. Captain Jack Jouett of the Virginia militia overheard the plans of several horsemen in Tarleton’s regiment. Familiar with local roads, he raced to Monticello in the predawn to alert Jefferson, then rode on to warn the exposed legislators in Charlottesville. After sending his family to safety, Jefferson remained on his little mountain long enough to gather up papers he did not want the enemy to capture. He then made a dash to nearby Carter’s Mountain, where he saw through his telescope that Charlottesville was crawling with British.

Tarleton’s men took seven state legislators prisoner in town. Those British soldiers who reached Monticello threatened the lives of Jefferson’s house servants as they stood guard over their master’s valuables. Fortunately for the now ex-governor, Tarleton gave orders to leave the estate intact. Cornwallis, who occupied Jefferson’s Goochland County property, Elk Hill, behaved less magnanimously, plundering at will. When he departed, nineteen of Jefferson’s slaves went with him. Four Monticello slaves took advantage of the invasion and ran away as well. Upward of eighty thousand slaves left their owners during the war years.
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Jefferson recorded an innocuous entry for June 4 in his account book: “British horse came to Monticello.” Rumors flew, and “intelligence” reached Philadelphia that exaggerated the impact of the assault on Charlottesville. Many read that Jefferson had been captured. We do not know whether or for how long Madison might have bought into this rumor, only that a month after the event he communicated with Philip Mazzei in Europe and noted that Jefferson had had a “very narrow escape.” He would not escape his critics, however, as stories of his management of the crisis began circulating.

Jefferson’s movements are actually easy to chart. After his brief reprieve on Carter’s Mountain, he rode on and met up with Patty, their daughters, and twenty-two-year-old William Short. Short was one of Jefferson’s select law students, a protégé like James Monroe. This handsome, honor-bound young man would be at Jefferson’s side a great deal more than either Madison or Monroe during the 1780s, and at this fretful moment the family must have seen him as a godsend.

The Jefferson party traveled south together for two days, arriving at their Bedford County plantation, Poplar Forest, where the pursued politician cooled his heels. A fall from his horse kept Jefferson in Bedford longer than he might otherwise have planned to stay. The state legislature, which had assembled on the western side of the Blue Ridge, in Staunton, could not help but notice his absence.
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Jefferson felt he had performed his patriotic duty for two years as governor, and he wanted nothing more to do with management of the war. But before long he was compelled to answer for his conduct. On June 12 Thomas Nelson, Jr., an old friend of Jefferson’s and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, took over as governor; Assemblyman George Nicholas, a young representative with interests in Patrick Henry’s Hanover County as well as Jefferson’s Albemarle, moved that an inquiry be made into Jefferson’s actions. The clear imputation was that Jefferson had failed to do his duty in arranging for a proper defense of Richmond at the time of Arnold’s invasion. Everything had gone downhill from there.