Madison and Jefferson (2 page)

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.

Reared 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.

In constitutional matters, Jefferson opposed a strong executive; yet he became one. He served in executive positions for most of his political
career: as Virginia governor, as George Washington’s secretary of state, as John Adams’s vice president, and as a two-term president. He was in the Continental Congress and Confederation Congress for relatively short periods and, though respected for his mind, voiced few opinions while there. At the Constitutional Convention, Madison worked to establish a strong executive, yet he was a relatively cautious president (though not a weak one, as some have said) who watched as a more aggressive Congress extended its influence. He was a legislator for longer than he was an executive, a leader both in Virginia and in national bodies.

From the above, the story of Madison and Jefferson would appear to be as much about unintended consequences as about straightforward political ambition. As is often true in American politics, not everything is what it seems.

We have written this book to establish what sustained a fifty-year-long personal bond that guided the course of American history. It turns out that beyond the relatively superficial differences outlined above, the Madison-Jefferson relationship was not always as smooth and effortless as history (and the actors themselves) want us to believe. Remarkably, after the Constitutional Convention, Jefferson sought to undermine the ratification process—to Madison’s severe embarrassment.

We have to question familiar assumptions if we are to achieve greater clarity in our appreciation of the past. Sometimes we find that what history calls triumphs were, in fact, less than billed. Madison was not particularly successful at the Constitutional Convention, certainly not in the way Americans have been taught and certainly not enough to warrant the title “Father of the Constitution.” Nor did
The Federalist Papers
that he collaborated on with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay carry the weight at the state ratifying conventions that our collective memory imagines. Their real value applies to a later time. Jefferson’s pseudo-scientific racism, iconoclastic statements about religious practices in America, and other philosophical musings were criticized as part of a larger political game—scare tactics, partisan politics—and did not always mean that the driving moral concerns of his critics were joined to practical solutions.

During much of his public career, Jefferson was steeped in bitter and lasting controversies created by his sometimes careless pen. As the less closely studied of the two, Madison has been grossly oversimplified as a brainy man whose vivacious wife ran his social schedule. Perhaps the most
astonishing of ignored facts is Madison’s orchestration of Jefferson’s career. Jefferson might otherwise have retired from public service after the Revolution, in 1782, and again in 1789, after his five years as a diplomat in France. Madison was the driving force behind Jefferson’s reemergence in 1796, when Jefferson was urging Madison, then at the height of his congressional career, to seek the presidency. Rejecting the idea, Madison lured Jefferson away from the quiet of his mountaintop, where he was experimenting with new farming measures, and set him up to battle John Adams. Madison, in short, was Jefferson’s campaign manager, long before the term was coined.

It has become customary to refer to Madison as Jefferson’s “faithful lieutenant,” and at times he certainly was that. But we should remember that the lieutenancy was constructed in the early years of the republic by a politically charged press. Madison was Jefferson’s secretary of state and successor; to those of their contemporaries who sought a simple calculus, the dutiful lieutenant sounded right—a convenient shorthand—whether or not it properly described their association. Most of what they said to each other remained between themselves, though we have deduced that Madison periodically exercised veto power over Jefferson’s policy decisions.

It has been too easy for history to tag Madison as “modest.” This was the very word Jefferson used to explain why Madison did not come to the fore in debate during his first three years on the political stage in Virginia, 1776–79, before he and Jefferson became close. To extrapolate from this statement and define Madison’s character as modest is dangerous: “modesty” retrospectively helped to explain, for example, why he was a bachelor until he was past forty. By the same token, contemporaries who identified with the Democratic-Republican Party associated Jefferson’s soft, almost feminine voice with his much vaunted harmony-seeking political style—a dubious designation, to say the least.

All historians are answerable for their shortcomings. Even the best resort to synecdoche: they seize on one attribute of an individual’s behavior and enlarge it to explain, in the broadest terms, his or her impulses. In the interest of a flowing narrative, much conscientious history is sacrificed. It happens often. The more intensively one researches, the hardier a book’s organizing themes are, and the easier it is to become attached to the book’s trajectory. For this reason, the research process is both a gold mine and a land mine. Contentment is the researcher’s enemy. All of us know what the stakes are when we attempt to overturn received wisdom. We know that readers will judge how scrupulous we have been.

Of the coauthors, Andrew Burstein has previously concentrated on Jefferson as a citizen of the republic of letters, a political writer, and an ex-president contemplating his own mortality. Nancy Isenberg has tackled Jefferson’s political instincts insofar as they explain the troubled relationship he had as president with his controversial first-term vice president, Aaron Burr. In refocusing on the founding era, our purpose is not to privilege Madison but merely to restore balance where the historical record is skewed.

Perhaps the bookseller was on to something when he called Madison “more profound,” though genius, especially political genius, cannot be defined in rational terms. If Jefferson occasionally used language as camouflage, he charged his words with feeling. That is why his popular appeal is unmatched by any in his time. Madison was appreciated for his candor, but candor usually comes in second place behind imagination in the business of constructing a national memory.

This is a history of two men operating in a world whose cultural and intellectual boundaries Americans are still trying to draw accurately. In that world, the pursuit of happiness was a matter of grave uncertainty. Although it is hard to find agreement among scholars, all are likely to grant that together Madison and Jefferson introduced a mode of persuasion that changed political discourse and moved the country in directions it probably would not otherwise have gone. If history must be a story, then that is the story we tell in this book.