Madison and Jefferson (57 page)

Hamilton called the wartime seduction of slaves “infamous” behavior, “an indelible stain” in the annals of the British Empire. But it would have been “still more infamous” if, after defeat, the British had returned the runaways to their masters. Within the law of nations, he wrote, restoration of
property was one thing, and “the surrender of persons
to slavery
” quite another. Citing Emerich de Vattel, the eighteenth century’s foremost expert in international law, Hamilton maintained that to keep slaves was to maintain a state of war with them—this interpretation more or less coincided with Jefferson’s theory of African Americans as a captive nation. Hamilton raised but did not resolve the question, “Is there any thing which exempts negroes more than other articles of personal property from capture & confiscation as booty?” In the end, he gave Washington some law to chew on, without recommending a clear course of action.
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In December 1794 Jefferson freed Robert Hemings, age thirty-two, who as a teenager had accompanied him to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Bob was the first slave Jefferson formally, if reluctantly, emancipated. Just over nine months after Bob’s emancipation, in October 1795, his younger sister Sally delivered a daughter at Monticello. It was the first of her children whose birth Jefferson recorded in one of his domestic account books. Sally and her infant, despite their slave status, were tended to full-time by a nine-year-old slave girl, possible evidence of special treatment ordered by Jefferson. Over the next thirteen years the biracial Sally Hemings, described by one who knew her as “mighty near white,” would bear five more Jefferson children. And all who survived to adulthood would be freed.
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Though he did not have the responsibilities placed upon him that Jefferson did when he came into his patrimony, James Madison, Jr., was now a husband with concerns beyond public service. He contemplated farming experiments to be tried at Montpelier when he left Congress for good, and his wife Dolley, despite her antislavery Quaker education, recognized that she was in no position to question the labor arrangements in Orange, Virginia. There she made a home for herself and her fatherless son and accepted the reality of slavery.

If anyone could have made inroads at this time, it was Dolley’s husband. Back in 1785, at the height of his interest in acquiring land in New York’s Mohawk region, he said he wished “to depend as little as possible on the labor of slaves.” Although Madison did not often discuss his private misgivings about slavery, he set down in a private journal a year or so before he and Dolley met: “In proportion as slavery prevails in a State, the Government, however democratic in name, must be Aristocratic in fact.” Refusing to shrink from the implications of his words, he acknowledged directly that the northern states were more democratic than the southern. While many of the thoughts in this particular notebook found their way into his
newspaper pieces, the slavery passages did not. Madison obviously felt it would have been imprudent for him to introduce a subject on which Virginians were so vulnerable. Political society was already in great flux. He would not consciously spark new unrest.
⁵⁰

Madison was thinking of the word
democratic
in its classical sense and not as a partisan slur used by northern Federalists in the mid-1790s. As election year 1796 approached, the “democratic” North of his theorizing had its share of democracy-hating, Republican-baiting men. Made defensive by those who tarred them as aristocrats, the Federalists conventionally declared themselves to be people of good sense; they assumed the collective mantle of a deserving leadership corps, a steadying influence in government. Anxious about the visibility and rising popularity of men of “indecent” ambition, the Federalists tried to shout them down; they claimed that the “Mads” did not even care if their actions served to break down the structure of government. A representative newspaper stated that protest over the Jay Treaty proved that “Jefferson, Madison, and Burr, itching for high offices in our government, will leave untried no probable means of accomplishing their views.” In linking the cagey Virginians with one cagey New Yorker, Federalists assumed that the Democratic-Republican Party had devised a North-South plot.

This was much overstated; it was a tentative alliance. Just a half year earlier Jefferson had identified the “Southern interest” as the segment of the political population that he was principally concerned about. If the “Southern interest,” he told Madison, had “any chance of prevailing,” the executive could not be allowed to fall into northern Federalist hands. The Federalists saw a marriage in the works that Jefferson, at least, was shying away from.
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It would be wrong to read too much into Jefferson’s choice of words, but it would be just as unwise to ignore it. His supposedly undeviating plan of retirement contained many holes and detours. As he contemplated how to respond to a German historian and geographer who was undertaking a multivolume work on the North American continent, Jefferson rejoined the conflict. Christoph Daniel Ebeling had written to the author of
Notes on Virginia
asking for information. Made aware that two northern Federalists who had toured the South were supplying the German professor with material from their travels, Jefferson instinctively disputed their findings by declaring that one cannot know a region just by staying at inns along the road and communing with “idle, drunken individuals who pass their time lounging in taverns.” Without even knowing whether the professor’s correspondents
had characterized the southern political economy in critical terms, Jefferson warned against what it would mean “to generalise a whole nation from these specimens.” But then he did some general cataloging of his own, presenting a conspiratorial picture of the essential division between republican and antirepublican in the United States. As before, he identified the misdirected people (“old tories,” “timid whigs,” and “American merchants trading on British capital”) who worshipped the British model; he claimed they were “hoping monarchy might be the remedy if a state of complete anarchy could be brought on.” In contrast, true republicans could be defined as “the entire body of landholders” and “the body of labourers, not being landholders, whether in husbandry or the arts.” This would seem to exclude only Americans of an urban and speculating character. Jefferson was designating the Federalist as substantially a northern creature, who up to this point had monopolized the power in government and who would ultimately be upended by a republican electorate.

Taken together, Jefferson’s confidential evocation of the “Southern interest” in the letter to Madison, and his notes for the German historian, suggest that he envisioned a solid South that would combine in the political furnace with landed yeomen of the North, South, and West to forge an electable consensus. From their no-less-heated perspective, the Federalists saw a Frenchified America waiting in the wings. Having witnessed the birth and expansion of democratic societies, a rebellion among taxpayers in the backcountry, and agitation against a commercial treaty with England, they were now concerned with the prospect of the Republicans gaining adherents in Pennsylvania, New York, and interior parts of New England. They saw their opposition as moblike.
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Angry as he was over Hamilton’s orchestrated takeover, Jefferson was genuinely repelled by politics and reluctant to reenter the lists. Madison was able to wear down his resistance only because he knew that his semiretired friend saw the situation as desperate. We are left with the question of why Madison did not pick up on Jefferson’s suggestion that
he
seek the presidency. Given Madison’s personality, it is possible that he regarded himself not as a singular administrator but as a floor manager. He would not envision otherwise until he had labored by a president’s side for eight years.

IN THE SPRING OF 1796 JAMES MADISON LED THE FINAL FIGHT IN
the House of Representatives to stop the Jay Treaty. He argued that while the Senate alone ratified treaties, the House, due to its role in appropriating public funds, had a right to review this or any treaty before its implementation. It was a novel approach, and although a majority in Congress sided with him, some Republicans, even at this late date, chose not to humiliate Washington, who claimed executive privilege and contested their right to inspect his instructions to Jay or any notes or correspondence relating to treaty negotiations.
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Madison sent Jefferson a copy of Washington’s challenge to Congress. The president’s “absolute refusal” to show his hand was, he charged, “as unexpected as the tone and tenor of the message [was] improper and indelicate.”
Madison felt cheated. He saw the hand of Hamilton in the president’s gambit, but he believed Republicans in Congress would muster “sufficient firmness” to face down the threat, without having to stage a direct confrontation with Washington. But whatever subtlety Madison might choose to employ, Benjamin Franklin Bache had his own strategy: to inflame the public further, he decided to publish the debates over the treaty.
²

Washington’s challenge should not have surprised Madison, who was, after all, stretching the meaning of the Constitution. Hamilton had assured the president that the House was to be excluded from the treaty process on the basis of the one precedent Madison ought to have understood and yielded to: the original meaning of the Constitution as established by the debates at the Constitutional Convention. While Madison’s allies begged him to draw on his detailed notes from the convention, he had to realize that it would have been a lost cause to do so. Instead, he invoked the ratifying conventions, and especially Virginia’s. These conventions, he now held, were responsible for breathing life into the Constitution. They had called forth the “voice of the people” and had transformed a “dead letter” into a living document. Therefore one could obtain a properly nuanced interpretation of the Constitution only by reckoning how the states understood it. Refusing, in his words, to treat the Constitutional Convention as an “oracular guide,” Madison creatively countered the Washington-Hamilton line by insisting that the Constitution had acquired “validity” only through its reception in the popularly elected ratifying conventions. He was improvising, of course, because at this moment his political agenda took precedence over constitutional correctness.
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Madison was wrong to substitute the ratifying conventions for the authority of the federal Constitution, and he was wrong as well about the firmness of the Republicans in the House. He pressed his colleagues to refuse appropriations and force renegotiation of the treaty, just as he told Jefferson he would do; but two unexpected absences and “a few wrongheads,” as he put it, finally sank his hopes. He gave Jefferson news of “defections among our friends,” which he said was owing to an unfounded fear of war with England.
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After a close vote, resistance to the Jay Treaty died. And once again it was Hamilton who worked hardest to keep the Federalist position in public view. Writing as “New Yorker,” he prepared a broadside that raised the fear of what would happen if the treaty were not implemented: “The C
ONSTITUTION
and
PEACE
are in one scale—the overthrow of the C
ONSTITUTION
and
war
in the other. Which do you prefer?” Lest there be any doubt who represented the domestic problem, he ended his piece with an unabashed attack on the Madisonians: “Do not second the ambition of a V
IRGINIAN FACTION
, constantly endeavoring to govern the United States.”
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In the early months of 1796, Madison thought he had rallied his forces effectively but found that he could not arrest their inclination to accommodate Washington. As a result, he grew deeply disillusioned. “Alas! Poor Madison!” one Federalist proclaimed. “He seems to have dwindled into nothing.” The Federalists had won the battle, without a very sophisticated argument. The Republicans looked weak.
⁶

Madison led the Republicans in Congress, but he did not control them. Sometimes they reacted too impulsively for his taste, as Edward Livingston of New York and William Branch Giles of Virginia had recently. But Madison adapted, as he always did, and resumed an active role in debate. These days, Albert Gallatin was his most trusted ally. Jefferson was not there, but he reinforced Madison’s instincts by telling him that if Gallatin would only look into the chaotic state of the nation’s finances and make better sense of them, “he will merit immortal honor.” Quick to launch into a republican refrain, Jefferson reduced his thought to a straightforward maxim: “The accounts of the U.S. ought to be, and may be, made, as simple as those of a common farmer.” When it came to fiscal health, he demanded transparency, literally wanting the government’s records so basic that the average cultivator understood them. This, he believed, would weaken the grip of the commercial class on the national government.

Jefferson’s hostility toward the central government had had time to incubate over the past two years of a midcareer retirement to Monticello. Hoping to see the national budget shrink—to see less government—he chided Madison for supporting a post road bill. “Boundless patronage” would result, he feared, in “jobbing to members of Congress.” No good could emerge from a “bottomless abyss of public money.” It pleased him that Virginia’s roads were administered by each county. “The roads of America are the best in the world,” he cooed, “except for those of France and England.” It was an admission that America had far to go, but the devotee of yeoman decency saw no reason to hurry things along.