Madison and Jefferson (42 page)

Paine rejected his adversary’s association of the French Revolution with fanatics bent on tearing society apart. Burke was ignorant of what was truly
happening in France: cleansing a nation of autocratic government. Even if Louis XVI, whose reign seemed mild, was not an evil man, he symbolized “hereditary despotism”—nothing prevented worse rulers from arising in the future. Echoing Jefferson’s thinking about generational tyranny, Paine wrote: “Every age and generation must be free to act for itself
in all cases
 … The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.”
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He pitied the British subjects of the “feeble and crazy” George III for their learned passivity. And echoing Madison’s criticism of Hamilton’s strategic plan, he attacked the funding system in Britain for accruing a large debt in order to pay for wars, increase taxes, and cultivate “a monied interest of the Nation” in support of state-sponsored aggression. It was almost word for word the danger to the republic that Madison (and, in due course, Jefferson) saw in Hamilton’s assumption plan. “It is power, and not principles, that Mr. Burke venerates,” taunted Paine, as he questioned his opponent’s moral sensibility.

The suspicions of Burke and Paine would be reproduced in the United States. In both the Old and New worlds, the politics of the 1790s were beset by premonitions of civilization’s collapse. According to Paine’s diagnosis, those who could still feel had no problem perceiving the justice of popular resentment. The Revolution in France, like the Revolution in America, was a “renovation of the natural order of things …, combining moral with political happiness.” He dedicated the first volume of
The Rights of Man
to George Washington and shipped him fifty copies. Washington may not have extolled the British political model as Burke did, but he certainly shared neither the radical intellectualism nor the moral imagination of the campaigning Tom Paine.
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The life of Paine’s friend Jefferson was about to change. Giving little thought to a brief cover letter that he wrote to a man he had never met, he passed on an early copy of the first (British) edition of
The Rights of Man
, which Madison had loaned to him. Jefferson had merely followed Madison’s instructions. Or so he thought. Unbeknownst to him, the recipient of the book was the brother of the man who intended to publish it in America, a man who clearly saw publicity value in using Jefferson’s words as a prefatory recommendation for the book. “I am extremely pleased,” Jefferson had casually penned, “that something is at length to be publickly said against the political heresies which have sprung up among us.” He was disturbed by the rise of pro-British feelings among those in government whom he would soon be referring to as “Anglomen.”

When the American edition came out, Jefferson acknowledged, to Washington as well as to Madison, the accuracy of the quote. It was, he explained, a dissent from the unrepublican notions of John Adams, who appeared to have renounced his Revolutionary principles in favor of a government steeped in privilege. The vice president had just published
Discourses on Davila
, a labored work on appetites and ambition in which he expressed his reservations about popular government. His ultimate reasoning may have elicited questions, but it was hard for an honest politician to object to his realism. “National passions and habits are unwieldy, unmanageable, and formidable things,” Adams wrote. No other member of the Washington administration was as yet prepared to acknowledge, as Adams was, that where competition among political parties existed, “the nation becomes divided into two nations, each of which is, in fact, a moral person, as much as any community can be so, and are soon bitterly enraged against each other.”

Jefferson regarded as political heresy Adams’s solution to the foibles of human nature. In any society, Adams wrote, famous figures attracted a following, such that it was irresistible for people to want to emulate them. Conferring rank and distinction restricted an otherwise out-of-control ambition among men, just as democratic impulses produced a “sordid scramble for money.” Rank and distinction preserved stability so that good things got done. By seeking to abolish social distinctions, the Revolution in France was attempting the impossible, because wealth, honor, and beauty never went out of fashion. Without some kind of paternalistic intervention, new rivalries always formed. For Adams, inequality was natural and should be preserved. The U.S. government should bestow titles upon the “natural aristocracy” of America. He wanted state conventions called for the purpose of appointing hereditary U.S. senators.

Adams did not consider himself unrepublican, but his definition of a republic was rather unusual: “a government whose sovereignty is vested in more than one person.” On this basis, Britain’s government was a “monarchical republic,” and as he phrased it in a letter to Roger Sherman, the United States would remain a republic whether power was invested “in two persons, or in three millions.” Republics, according to Adams, were no less productive of inequality than despotisms, only less cruel. The policies and institutions he favored would defeat socially disruptive impulses but also retain a class hierarchy.
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John Adams, then, was the individual Jefferson was thinking of when he wrote of “political heresies”—and he meant nothing more than that. To Madison: “I tell [Adams] freely that he is a heretic, but certainly never
meant to step into a public newspaper with that in my mouth.” Addressing President Washington, the secretary of state was less piquant and more circumspect. It was, he said, “the indiscretion of a printer” that had unfortunately resulted in his sentiments spilling out onto the page. Adams and he differed “as friends should do.” He hoped it would end there.

Something like this did not disappear overnight, however, and a flurry of newspaper commentary ensued. One series of articles, signed “Publicola,” took Jefferson to task for sponsoring Paine’s obnoxious ideas and labeled Jefferson the real political heretic. The aggressive style of “Publicola” resembled that of John Adams. Jefferson did not weigh in; nor did he immediately contact Adams. Writing supportively to Paine after the initial storm over
Rights of Man
had subsided, he reported optimistically that the author’s friends were winning the battle for public opinion over the friends of “Publicola.” He did not identify by name those who constituted the opposing side, referring instead to a “sect …, high in names but small in number.”

Madison’s response to the incident showed that he and Jefferson were on the same wavelength. Seeing the preface to the American edition of Paine’s work and the quote from Jefferson, he correctly put together all the circumstances that had produced an unsolicited controversy. Writing Jefferson, he could not resist adding his own strong critique of the “antirepublican discourses” that he regarded as an endorsement of the royal court. Madison viewed Adams’s ideas as irrelevant, if not ridiculous, and was confident that the vice president was incapable of convincing public men of anything at this point. It was Hamilton’s pro-British attitude that struck Madison as most unsound and no less ridiculous. Yet Hamilton was succeeding in convincing public men of the justness of his policies. And Madison had run out of patience.

Two more months passed before Jefferson sought to clear the air with Adams, dexterously explaining the motive behind his letter: “to write from a conviction that truth, between candid minds, can never do harm.” His notorious quote to the printer had been a throwaway line, he reiterated, never meant to see the light of day. Adams, as ingenious as he was spontaneous, replied to Jefferson with an affectation of surprise, claiming that they had never really discussed their respective views on government. He was telling Jefferson that it was dangerous to assume too much about another person’s beliefs. And indeed, Jefferson may not have known that the vice president, for all intents and purposes excluded from major policy discussions, cared little for Hamilton’s economic proposals, which he saw as a
“swindle” of ordinary Americans that only gave license to a “mercenary spirit of commerce.” Nor did Adams approve in the least the closer ties Hamilton wanted with England.

No doubt Jefferson made it a point to show Madison this letter, in which Adams denied that he was “Publicola.” It was, in fact, his twenty-five-year-old son John Quincy, as yet unnamed, who had embarked on his column without his father’s immediate knowledge. Jefferson, more ready than Madison to maintain a courteous conversation with the vice president, reaped what he had sown, as Adams, after lecturing, gave him warm assurances: “The friendship which has Subsisted for fifteen years between Us, without the Smallest Interruption, and untill this occasion without the Slightest Suspicion, ever has been and Still is, very dear to my heart.”
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Much of the
Rights of Man
controversy had taken place while Madison and Jefferson were traveling. In 1784 Madison had visited upstate New York with Lafayette, but Jefferson was as yet unfamiliar with the region. In May 1791, after conversations in lower Manhattan with Madison’s college friend and roommate Philip Freneau, a poet, and U.S. senator Aaron Burr, who had recently bested Hamilton’s father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, in a tense election, the two Virginians sailed up the Hudson. In the state capital of Albany, on a day when the temperature reached ninety-four, one of the city’s newspapers announced that it was “honored with the presence of Mr. Jefferson, Secretary of State, accompanied by the
Charles Fox
of America, the celebrated Madison.” Fox was a Whig leader in the British Parliament who had vocally supported the American Revolution and who now, no less controversially, welcomed the French Revolution.
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Their trip was billed as a nature expedition, and the travelers’ journals suggest that it truly was, though it would be absurd to think that political strategizing had not occurred to them as they took in their surroundings and met with prominent citizens. Beyond rumors that flowed through the pen of a Hamilton intimate, there is no evidence of machinations, no meeting to establish an alliance with Governor George Clinton of New York, who eventually would serve as vice president under both Virginians. But there is, ironically, a record of a cordial get-together with the defeated Senator Schuyler.
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Madison and Jefferson traveled as far north as Lake Champlain, visiting
Fort Ticonderoga and the Revolutionary battlefield of Saratoga. They paddled a canoe and went fishing on Lake George. They took in Bennington, Vermont, site of another battle of the Revolution, and traversed western Massachusetts and the Connecticut Valley. They then sailed forty miles across Long Island Sound to pay a visit to William Floyd, the former New York congressman whose daughter Madison had unsuccessfully courted. Madison biographer Ralph Ketcham has sardonically, yet aptly, described this crossing as “probably the longest sea voyage of his life.” Altogether Madison and Jefferson traveled nearly one thousand miles before they ferried from bucolic Brooklyn and ended up again in busy Manhattan.
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At every stage of their journey, the two paid close attention to the regional economy. Madison’s notes make reference to a thriving free black farmer who employed white laborers, “and by his industry and good management” operated an efficient farm. The congressman was impressed by the man’s native intelligence as well as his accounting skills. Jefferson’s notes were dominated by scientific measurements and rigorous observations on trees and fruits, so we have no way to know whether the farmer made an impression on him.

But there are other indications of Jefferson’s fairly static thinking about race. Shortly after he and Madison returned to Philadelphia, he had an exchange of letters with the Baltimore-area mathematician Benjamin Banneker, a sixty-nine-year-old free black. Jefferson’s one-page reply to Banneker stands alongside
Notes on Virginia
as our best evidence of his perplexity with regard to African Americans’ intellectual attainments.

The mathematician’s prose is wrapped in the gallantry that eighteenth-century epistolary culture favored. His uninvited communication implored Jefferson to recognize an essential equality among all peoples: “I suppose it is a truth too well attested to you, to need a proof here, that we are a race of beings, who have long labored under the abuse and censure of the world; that we have long been looked upon with an eye of contempt; and that we have long been considered rather as brutish than human, and scarcely capable of mental endowments.” He presumed that Jefferson was better than most whites, “a man far less inflexible in sentiments of this nature, than many others; that you are measurably friendly, and well disposed towards us; and that you are willing and ready to lend your aid and assistance to our relief, from those many distresses, and numerous calamities, to which we are reduced.” Quoting back the self-evident truths contained in the text of the Declaration of Independence, Banneker counted on Jefferson
to call publicly for an end to the “inhuman captivity, to which too many of my brethren are doomed.”

The largely self-taught Marylander, having illustrated his literacy and refinement, enclosed a copy of the almanac he had published. It revealed complex mathematical calculations and indicated his skill in the science of astronomy, a favorite pastime of Jefferson’s since his days as a student. In his reply, the secretary of state appears magnanimous, commending Banneker on the quality of his work: “No body wishes more than I do, to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men; and that the appearance of the want of them, is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America.”

On the same day that he sent his compliments to Banneker, Jefferson wrote to the fervently pro-American French philosopher Condorcet, his good friend and one of the great optimists about human nature. The statement was framed as if it were announcing a scientific discovery: “I am happy to be able to inform you that we have now in the United States a negro, the son of a black man born in Africa, and a black woman born in the United States, who is a very respectable Mathematician.” Repeating the language he had used in his
Notes on Virginia
, he expressed hope that science would eventually reveal that “the want of talents observed in [blacks] is merely the effect of their degraded condition, and not proceeding from any difference in the structure of the parts on which intellect depends.” This may have qualified as liberal sentiment in the eighteenth century, but it showed too that Jefferson was separating science (or philosophy of the mind) from the politics of emancipation.