Madison and Jefferson (24 page)

He applied the rigorous eighteenth-century perspective on the aesthetics of power, an understanding of which brings us a step closer to the psyches of eighteenth-century elite men and women. As the ornamental gardens of English manors showed (on an even larger scale than Jefferson’s Monticello), social authority accrued from the collection of seeds and grafts, and from the cultivation of rare and beautiful plants. The Euro-American aesthete tamed nature by knowing what to expect of it. Nature, as spectacle, was convertible into personal, but also public, power. That was what Jefferson was reaching for in his
Notes.
He thought of himself as the assembler of a catalog of knowledge. He quietly boasted America’s healthful surroundings and listed the relative sizes and weights of the animals of
the Old and New worlds, in order to contest the assumption made by Europe’s greatest authority, the Count de Buffon, that animals common to both continents were smaller in America.
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In this same vein, Jefferson defended the Native American against Buffon’s claim that the Indian, though not shorter in stature, was “feeble,” with “small organs of generation … and no ardor whatever for his female.” Jefferson wrote at length of the affectionate character, admirable capacity for friendship, and healthy passions of the American Indian. And he famously retold the story of Chief Logan, who on the eve of the Revolution justified his act of vengeance against the whites for murdering his family. The speech of Logan, directed to Lord Dunmore, was, Jefferson asserted, an example of eloquence not excelled by the classical oratory of Demosthenes and Cicero.

History has not forgiven Thomas Jefferson for his comparative treatment of Indians and African Americans in the
Notes.
Indians, he stated, were ignorant because of their lack of exposure to the word of letters; the climate of America did not hold them back, as Buffon and others had insisted. On the other hand, Jefferson construed that blacks were of diminished capacity, a “blot” on America, whose numbers were growing only because they were well cared for: “Under the mild treatment our slaves experience, and their wholesome, though coarse, food, this blot on our country increases as fast, or faster, than the whites.” While he acknowledged that slavery was a “great political and moral evil,” he could not acknowledge blacks’ potential in any meaningful way.

For Jefferson, white faces varied in appealing ways. Was their natural expressivenesss, he posed, not “preferable to that eternal monotony which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?” The delicacy of description—this “immoveable veil” of the “other” race—made use of the vocabulary of sensibility through the imagery of light versus darkness, in order to suggest the alien character of the African without making Jefferson sound entirely devoid of compassion.

Claiming that the African was outwardly unappealing, he added “scientific” observations revealing of essential deficiencies. He felt that blacks’ inelegance and lack of reasoning ability were natural traits rather than the result of their oppression; this made them incapable of genuine love, which Jefferson defined, in the spirit of his times, as “a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation.” Accepting that blacks equaled whites in memory, or “recollection,” he still did not consider them to be as educable as Indians. “Their griefs are transient,” he insisted; “in imagination they are
dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” In this way, he placed in opposition the African’s depressing dreariness and the Indian’s cleverness, artistry, and imaginative speechmaking.

For Jefferson, the African lacked a poetic consciousness. If his lovemaking was a matter of ardent impulse only, and enlightened emotions no part of his makeup, then banal communication was all the African could ever know. Wrote Jefferson, with an appalling provincialism: “Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration.” He concluded that, when freed, all slaves must be returned to Africa or recolonized elsewhere, “beyond the reach of mixture,” where, he assumed, they could be coaxed into remaining allies of the United States—albeit distant allies.

Jefferson’s was a peculiar calculus of race, reflecting a unique combination of “enlightened” science and “enlightened” sensibility. How he constructed his argument was unusual—his racism was not. Even Madison did not think to rein in Jefferson when he floated preliminary ideas about racial difference that were bound to stir up political passions later. In fact, at this moment, Jefferson was more intent on speaking his mind about religion and power than about race and power. He expected to anger conservative forces by insisting on the rights of conscience in his merciless appraisal of state-sponsored religion. As for race, he did not fear northern mockery of his assumptions any more than he feared an angry African-American reaction to his language; but he anticipated that he would be alienating many in the South for bringing up emancipation at all. In the 1780s few northern whites would have taken offense at what Jefferson imagined as scientifically based conclusions. But he knew that his fellow southerners would react harshly to his recognition of the “ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained,” unenumerated but undeniable wounds that Jefferson deemed likely to “produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” In his later section on the manners of the American people, he returned to the issue and unabashedly stated that the institution of slavery had so poisoned America that it stood as “unremitting despotism” at odds with republicanism. White children, “nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny,” learned by “odious” example to ignore the humanity of the slave. Indeed, he pondered in this regard, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”
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John Adams notably called Jefferson’s observations on slavery “gems,” without discriminating between those that appealed for eventual emancipation
and those that belittled the natural capacities of African Americans. Adams himself, in defending the British troops accused of murder in the 1770 Boston Massacre, had focused on the part-black, part-Indian provocateur Crispus Attucks, one of the dead, “whose very looks,” Adams claimed, “was enough to terrify any person.” To make his case, he said that the others who faced down the redcoats included “saucy boys, negroes and molottoes.” New Englanders had little sympathy for the disadvantaged African American, felt science had yet to clarify the nature of racial difference, and exhibited no particular discomfort with most racial stereotypes.
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By modern standards, or even mid-nineteenth-century standards, Madison and Jefferson did not do nearly enough to relieve suffering and extend rights—certainly not if we compare their dynamic efforts as critics of organized religion, a cause they prioritized. Jefferson could easily have downplayed the problem of race in his native state, but instead he addressed it head-on. He ventured his opinions as one of a distinct community. It would be some time before a significant number of his fellow citizens found his opinions troubling.

In debating with himself and relying on Madison’s counsel, Jefferson probably would have preferred to leave his name off the title page of his
Notes.
Even if he had, and removed first-person references in the text, certain passages would instantly have given away the book’s authorship. Yet in his approach to the work, Jefferson was trying to signal that he was interested in promoting himself as a thinker only. Like any author, he wanted a certain amount of exposure, but he was not concerned with financial profit—only with reaffirming his status as a Virginia gentleman whose mind was comprehensive and whose purpose was to be useful to society.
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At the end of the year 1785, Madison wondered whether significant agreement among the states was still possible. The wartime consensus had receded, and the voices of his strongest allies were hushed. George Mason wrote from Gunston Hall that he was suffering “Fits of the Convulsive Cholic.” George Washington was supportive of Madison’s efforts in the Virginia Assembly but impatient with the provincialism prevailing in that body: “We are either a United people or we are not,” he fulminated. “If the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation … If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending it.” The subject at hand was
commercial policy. Madison too feared for the health of the confederacy, given the “caprice, jealousy, and diversity of opinions” that abounded, plus Virginia’s “illiberal animosities … towards the Northern States.” He was uncertain what to expect from other states, but did not hesitate in condemning Virginia’s immobility either.
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Also at the end of 1785, the District of Kentucky announced its aim to separate peacefully from its parent Virginia. It would become the first state west of the Appalachian Mountains. Its leaders determined to set up a number of constituent counties, including one called Fayette, after the marquis, where the town of Lexington lies; one called Madison, where Daniel Boone built his fort in 1775; and one called Jefferson, in which Louisville, the town founded in 1778 by George Rogers Clark, is situated. These names and associations, all precious to Virginia, were now to be associated with a new sovereign state. But much work remained to be done to advance the union of the states.
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“Everything is quiet in Europe,” Jefferson wrote Madison early in 1786. It would be an entirely different picture three years later, of course, when he would be witness to the noisy beginnings of an increasingly bloody and turbulent revolution in France. He was becoming progressively more comfortable in Paris, though he was unimpressed with King Louis XVI and the ceremonies he attended at Versailles. Among the many social opportunities he enjoyed, none surpassed his visits to the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, the intellectually gifted humanitarian whose neighbors and tenants alike appreciated his reformist ways; nor did the duke seem to be concerned by the attentions that Jefferson’s secretary, William Short, paid to his second wife, the blue-eyed Rosalie. The duke was fifty-four and she twenty-four, theirs an expedient, rather than romantic,
mariage de convenance.
Short, at twenty-seven, was beloved. Everyone seemed happy.
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As spring neared, Jefferson traveled to London, where he rejoined John and Abigail Adams. He was presented to, and disdainfully treated by, the same King George III whose tyrannical ways he had censured so unsparingly in the Declaration of Independence ten years earlier. If Adams-Jefferson diplomacy had no appreciable effect on the British, whose anti-Americanism flowed liberally from the royal court, Jefferson profited from his weeks in England in other ways. He became quite chummy with Mrs. Adams, visited exquisite gardens that he never forgot, and attended a series of plays and operas. His account books show that he did a fair amount of shopping.

Later, Jefferson gave Madison a blunt (encoded) reappraisal of the man
he called “my friend Mr. Adams.” For reasons that seem a bit disingenuous, he reminded Madison that he had been blind to Adams’s shortcomings before Madison and Edmund Randolph jointly persuaded him of the New Englander’s vanity. As a consequence, the self-appointed investigator Jefferson had felt it incumbent to look more closely at a man he continued to call “disinterested,” “profound,” and “amiable.” Time, he now told Madison, had confirmed Adams to be “vain, irritable, and a bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men.” He was a good judge of most things, reported Jefferson, but a bad judge “where knowledge of the world is necessary.” This stinging evaluation suggests that he had sized up Adams as a man who sifted through learned treatises with deftness and decision but had no patience with, or was oblivious to, anything that required an understanding of personality or culture. In other words, he was likable but thick. In the same paragraph, Jefferson outlined the idiosyncrasies of other “public characters” Madison might want to know about, and he updated his opinion on the zealous and “efficacious” Marquis de Lafayette: “His foible is a canine appetite for popularity and fame. But he will get above this.”
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While Jefferson was accepting the Adamses’ hospitality, Madison and Monroe were growing closer too, though there was one piece of crucial intelligence Monroe chose to hide until the last minute: in February 1786 he married a New York merchant’s daughter, Elizabeth Kortright, but he only intimated the event to Madison a few days before he tied the knot, saying nothing more than “I will present you to a young lady who will be adopted a citizen of Virga.”

Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, fellow Princetonian, Revolutionary general, and new member of Congress, reopened a correspondence with Madison by frivolously labeling Monroe a “Benedict,” by which he meant the traitor Arnold. The quip from Lee was a reference to the newly wedded legislator’s betrayal of the fraternity of single men. Monroe was six years Madison’s and five years Lee’s junior and was therefore, by his comic calculation, acting out of turn. Madison read of Monroe’s nuptial in the newspaper and duly congratulated his friend on his “inauguration into the mysteries of Wedlock.” William Grayson, another of Virginia’s representatives in Congress and an old friend of Washington’s, supplied Madison with a longer list of congressmen who had recently married, describing the trend coarsely as “a conjunction copulative.” He prodded Madison: “I heartily wish you were here: as I have a great desire to see you figure in the character of a married man.”
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As Jefferson roamed the streets of London, Madison wrote from Orange, telling his unofficial overseas agent how much he appreciated his many book purchases—“the literary cargo for which I am so much indebted to your friendship.” In the same letter, he informed Jefferson about an upcoming convention of the states in Annapolis, designed as a “remedial experiment” to put the shaky national economy on surer footing. He anticipated that the addition of western states to the Confederation would make unanimity even less likely than it already was, reducing the amount of legislation that would pass Congress. Westerners, Madison said, possessed “sentiments and interests” that were not “congenial” with those of the Atlantic states. “I almost despair of success,” he sighed. He conveyed the same apprehension to Lafayette, unsure whether the branches of the Mississippi would spawn “so many distinct Societies, or only an expansion of the same Society.” So as Madison pondered the future in 1786, he imagined that state jealousies would only get worse as the West developed. Virginia’s land cessions had eliminated one thorny problem and created another.
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