Madison and Jefferson (17 page)

In July, once the damage was already done to Jefferson’s reputation, Nicholas wrote to the accused that he had not intended personal insult. By autumn Nicholas would admit that he had overreacted. And at year’s end both houses of the Assembly voted unanimously to commend Jefferson for his service as governor, wording the resolution so as to praise him for his “ability, rectitude, and integrity.”
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Nevertheless, people believed what they wanted, and over the years the story would enlarge: Was it ineptness that
Jefferson had displayed? Was it cowardice? Did he precipitously flee from Arnold, instead of remaining at his post and directing the militia? Did he do something weak in running from Tarleton’s men as they approached Monticello? The rap on Jefferson was that he cared too much for his own safety and too little for that of others.
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In this time of panic, someone besides the enemy had to be blamed for what befell Virginia, thus Jefferson was made the scapegoat. But no one person was at fault for the thinning of the ranks. Over the course of the war, neither Jefferson nor any of Virginia’s legislative leaders did anything to substantially change men’s attitudes about military service. Washington had stated unabashedly that the “lower class of people” should serve as Continentals; he did not realize that these tended to be the men with the least resolve. Few cared to fight outside their state, and the Virginians who were drafted into the Continental Army became disaffected quickly. They demanded and received higher bounties than Virginia militiamen, but despite receiving incentives for their service, many still ended up deserting. Resistance to conscription exposed tensions between the ruling gentry and nonslaveholding whites who felt they bore the greater burden in keeping the Revolution on track. The fault lines grew wider as the war progressed. Not inconsequentially, and without the intention of vindicating Jefferson, Pendleton told Madison on the eve of Tarleton’s entry into Charlottesville that the Pennsylvanians, instead of speeding their troops to Virginia, “were throwing out Insulting speeches that Virginia was too grand—let her be humbled by the Enemy, & such like.”
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The fact remains that protesting the burdens of his office and lacking real military knowledge, Jefferson lost stature by acquiescing to a second term. If he had been more aggressive in raising and deploying militia the story of his wartime governorship might have been different. Nor can we say whether his predecessor would have done any better. Patrick Henry was back with the legislature in Staunton, known to have encouraged, if not goaded, Assemblyman George Nicholas to go after Jefferson.

No matter what grudging respect for the Revolutionary orator Jefferson might have retained up to this point, he unmistakably regarded Henry as his chief antagonist now. Writing to the sympathetic Isaac Zane, whose iron manufactory was much in demand during the war, he held Henry accountable for the investigation into his conduct. The “trifling,” pitiable Nicholas, Jefferson said, was “below contempt,” “the tool worked by another hand.” Then, if the artisanal metaphor were not transparent enough, he left solid ground for his next, comparing the unnamed Henry to a
whale, “discoverable enough by the turbulence of the water under which he moved.”
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Finding “neither accuser nor accusation” when he arrived in Richmond to defend himself that fall, Jefferson stayed on for two weeks and turned his attention to science and study. He ran into the trailblazing Daniel Boone and gave him a letter for George Rogers Clark, then in Louisville, Kentucky. Jefferson requested of Clark “teeth of the great animal whose remains are found on the Ohio.” He was in the process of writing
Notes on Virginia
and was eager to collect mammoth bones and other specimens from the West; his fellows in the American Philosophical Society awaited his findings.
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The future of the West was not merely a matter of science and exploration, of course. When the Assembly met in Staunton after Jefferson stepped down from the governorship, the state’s attorney general, Edmund Randolph, was newly elected to Congress. He joined Madison in Philadelphia in July, and the two bonded quickly. They lived together at the House-Trist establishment and, by day, weighed the touchy matter of Virginia’s western land cessions, a matter of unending concern to the planter class.

Poorly defined boundaries in vaguely worded royal charters had resulted in claims by Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York to some of the same territory. After more than a century and a half of jealously guarding its legal authority to land adjacent to the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes, Virginia now agreed in principle to give over to the United States the portion of its territory that encompasses modern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Maryland, possessing no territory beyond its current borders, most resented neighboring Virginia’s long reach. The Virginians had to satisfy Maryland if that state was to agree to the Articles of Confederation and define the wartime union as a constitutional authority and not merely a league of states.

Virginia’s offer of a land cession was framed in terms of a common fund to be administered by Congress. It would not allow its western land to be divided among existing states, expecting instead that new states would be formed from it. This had been Virginia’s position since 1780, when George Mason proposed using western land for the war effort—sales of public lands benefiting the national government.

From the perspective of Mason and others, the cession had to involve shared sacrifice. It had to void private land company acquisitions and questionable agreements with Indian tribes—all that continued to motivate the various non-Virginia claimants. Virginia would not permit private land companies to challenge its sovereignty in the West, nor should Congress even be able to consider these private claims. One such company, the Indiana, brought in a hired gun, the polemical Tom Paine, to argue against Virginia’s interest. The author of
Common Sense
had spoken to common purposes in 1776, but in this instance Paine’s prose served only to irritate the Virginians and increase their still-simmering suspicions about the motives of their sister states.

Virginia consented to an Ohio River boundary line, that is, to the westward extension of the Mason-Dixon Line, which officially divided Maryland and Pennsylvania. By this consent, Virginia gave away disputed portions of western Pennsylvania, at the same time stipulating that George Rogers Clark and his men receive from Congress the land bounties Virginia promised them. Crucially, Maryland dropped its objections to Virginia’s expansionism; with their long coastline, Marylanders were spooked by British maneuvers offshore in 1781, and were suddenly eager for friends. That is how the last holdout among the so-called landless states agreed to sign the Articles of Confederation. America had its first national constitution.
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But that agreement did not end the contest over western lands. The congressional debates of 1781 marked but one phase in a protracted struggle by the small states to convince Virginia to adjust its sights in order to make for a less lopsided Union. As various members of Congress pressed Virginia to give up more of its rights to the “Western Country,” Madison wrote to Jefferson that the proceedings “clearly speak the hostile machinations of some of the States against our territorial claims.” George Mason warned Jefferson as well, using highly dramatic language when he portrayed the move in Congress as a conspiracy: “factious, illegal, & dangerous Schemes now in Contemplation in Congress, for dismembering the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

At the time when Madison asked for guidance on land cessions, he and Jefferson had had no direct correspondence for several months. The congressman warned the ex-governor that the rise in discord threatened to bring an end to the Union just as soon as the war ended. While insisting that their state should reserve the right to withdraw its agreement to any cession at all, he asked Jefferson to convey to fellow Virginians “the necessity
of great temper and moderation.” Madison knew that any diplomacy he undertook would have to have full support in Richmond, and he still considered Jefferson’s influence strong there.
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Despite Madison’s historical reputation for reserve, he showed no reluctance to vocalize his strong pro-Virginia outlook in the face of skeptics. Along with his colleagues Edmund Randolph and Joseph Jones, the now thirty-year-old Madison had the presence of mind to strike a delicate balance between talking tough and urging patience. He saw a real possibility that the Confederation might dissolve right after it had begun, but he also thought it possible for Virginia to get what it wanted even as the central government gained new powers.
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The convergence of two fundamental ideas—negotiated boundaries and federal power—occurred to Madison before it did other Virginians. Did he envision, even remotely, where the road would lead in six years? As the historian Peter Onuf has put it quintessentially, “Jurisdictional confusion created a mandate for a stronger central government.” And that is precisely where Madison stood. Once the Articles of Confederation were ratified, he immediately perceived the need for an amendment calculated to “cement & invigorate the federal Union” by asserting what he described to Jefferson as “the coercive power of Congress over the States.” Jefferson did not respond to Madison’s centralizing proposal for months, suggesting that in 1781 he may have been reluctant to engage fully with Madison’s philosophy of government.
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The Revolution had profoundly affected the ways in which the former colonies related to one another. Independence required not just mutual military dependence but a moderation of the power differential among the states. The United States had only the shell of a government, because the collective states had not forged a sustainable political community. As Pendleton revealed when he gave credit to the rumor that Pennsylvania was withholding troops because it hoped to see Virginia weakened, trust was wanting.

In October 1781 the Franco-American alliance culminated in a combined siege by land and sea, and the surrender of more than seven thousand of the enemy. With a feint toward the British position in Manhattan, Washington had marched south to Virginia, joining Lafayette, as the French
navy sailed up the Chesapeake and put the squeeze on Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown. Though Washington would have preferred that Lafayette capture and execute the traitor Benedict Arnold, he was satisfied to get his hands on Cornwallis. After expressing confidence that the collapse of Virginia would effectively end the American rebellion, the British earl found his forces pinned down. On October 17 he capitulated so as to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. Virginia was saved, though not by Virginians. Out of a force of fifteen thousand that mustered to fight at Yorktown, only fifteen hundred or so were from the Old Dominion. As it was, the British would hold on to New York and Charleston for two more years, until a formal peace treaty was signed.

The defeat of Cornwallis changed the domestic conversation only to the extent that His Majesty’s armed forces were no longer a threat to the sovereign states. Two issues, western land cessions and economic recovery, kept Congress hard at work. But persistent uneasiness in the political process does not take away from the meaning of Yorktown. As Dr. David Ramsay, the Revolution-era historian, wrote of this extraordinary moment: “The people throughout the United States displayed a social triumph and exultation, which no private prosperity is ever able to fully inspire.” While Jefferson licked his political wounds at Monticello, Madison joined the Philadelphia celebrations.
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Shortly after Jefferson became governor in 1779, Edmund Randolph had visited Washington’s headquarters as Virginia’s attorney general. From there he reported back dutifully to Jefferson on the progress of the war. But now, laboring in Congress beside Madison in the fall of 1781, Randolph struck a very different tone. “I was much distressed,” he wrote ex-Governor Jefferson, “to find your irrevocable purpose of sequestering yourself from public life.” With a combination of flattery and frustration unlike anything Madison would have written, Randolph berated Jefferson: “If you can justify the resolution to yourself I am confident that you cannot to the world.”

In his letters, Madison held back when it came to personal matters. In November 1781, before the Virginia Assembly dealt officially with the inquiry into Jefferson’s conduct in office, he wrote to Jefferson on the western question as though nothing had changed since May. He signed off: “With great respect and sincere regard.” The following month, after Pendleton relayed news that the embarrassed ex-governor had escaped censure in the Assembly, Madison was clearly delighted. “It gives me great pleasure to hear of the honorable acquittal of Mr. Jefferson,” he told Pendleton. “I know his abilities, & think I know his fidelity & zeal for his
Country so well, that I am persuaded [the acquittal] was a just one.” Madison’s exoneration of Jefferson reads as heartfelt, yet we cannot overlook his choice of words: by his own testament, he had to be “persuaded” that Jefferson’s actions were justifiable.
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During the first two years of the Madison-Jefferson correspondence, most letters concluded with some version of the conventional, “I am, dear sir, your obedient servant.” That of May 5, 1781, was the first in which Madison placed “yr. sincere friend” above his signature. This was a few weeks before Jefferson’s near-capture at the hands of Tarleton’s dragoons. In the months following, an odd, indefinite silence disturbed the progress of the relationship. A half-year went by before all appeared well again. Whatever Madison was to Jefferson or Jefferson to him at the end of 1781, the next few years would see their collaborative purposes enlarge and their trust deepen.