Madison and Jefferson (38 page)

That said, Madison’s view diverged from Jefferson’s in significant ways. Whereas Jefferson completely closed off the possibility of whites and blacks peacefully occupying the same continent, Madison gauged that it was unlikely at present but not impossible over the long run. A settlement of free blacks on the African coast could serve as a worthy “experiment” that would “induce” the master to see his human property in a new light.

In his 1789 memorandum, Madison allowed for the possibility that both masters and slaves were capable of achieving internal control over their less admirable passions. He thought of slaves more as wayward (but still educable) pupils, servants in need of regular guidance. In a rare Madison text from this period, handwritten instructions to the overseer at Montpelier in 1790, he delivers a message of gentle discipline, requesting that the man “treat the Negroes with all the humanity & kindness consistent with their necessary subordination and work.” For “necessary subordination” to demand a reciprocal “humanity & kindness” neatly places Madison in his century.
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During their years living in Philadelphia, Madison and Jefferson routinely encountered free blacks as productive members of society. But Jefferson refused to abandon his theory that at some future point “convulsions” would end in the “extermination of one or the other race.” Madison alone foresaw that “by degrees, both the humanity and policy of the Government” could “forward the abolition of slavery in America.” Both were dealing in eventualities, not immediate prospects.
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Jefferson’s republican political philosophy featured a union based on affectionate relations, one he saw in terms of an emotional inheritance. Madison’s union occurred as a result of setting in motion safely counteracting, or neutralizing, forces—positive and negative energy. Consequently Jefferson identified history’s beneficent tendencies as well as its destructive power, which influenced his views on race. Madison’s view of history as a
more fluid process (and a source of vitality) allowed him to anticipate the tempering effect of time and experience. In racial terms, Madison was less puzzled than Jefferson, or at least less troubled, by evidence of blacks’ successful acculturation. The impact of historic memory was deeper for Jefferson than it was for Madison.

Before his departure from France, Jefferson tried to talk to William Short about the future. He liked writing the script of his friends’ lives and wanted Short to think about returning to Virginia sooner rather than later. Jefferson had concluded that his bachelor secretary needed to run for political office back home or Virginia would forget that he was once a prodigy.

As proficient as Short was in his public duties, he was rebellious in other matters. He remained stuck on France and would not leave his duchess, though the likelihood of their ever marrying was slim. He imagined that Jefferson could put in a good word and see him elevated to the ministerial level. That was Short’s counterproposal.

Without marriage thoughts of his own, Jefferson was still ruminating on the
partie carrée
proposal—the foursome of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Short—living and thriving in the same neighborhood. That vision of the future still roused him in 1789, five full years after he had sailed to Europe. He figured that another of his intimates, the Harvard-educated painter John Trumbull, would perform Short’s secretarial duties while Short forged an American career.

Aware that President Washington could not be pressed too hard, Jefferson did not insist that Short succeed him in Paris. Short (and some of the French too) actually assumed that Madison would be Washington’s choice. But it was the experienced, one-legged Gouverneur Morris of New York, a standout at the Constitutional Convention, who was to perform in that role. Short was named minister to The Hague.

Gouverneur Morris was one of the republic’s great characters, a man of culture possessing a keen sense of humor. He was also touchy, impatient, and unapologetic. Trained at King’s College (Columbia) before the Revolution, he had, along with his friends Robert Livingston and John Jay, contributed significantly to New York’s wartime constitution. Washington was impressed by Morris’s eloquence and unfazed by his lack of delicacy as a diplomat. If the president’s choice as minister to France was insensitive
and in the main unfriendly to the aims of the French in the 1790s, it would do his career no harm.
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After a harrowing end to an otherwise smooth transatlantic crossing, in which strong headwinds nearly toppled his ship, Jefferson docked in Norfolk and returned home by way of Richmond. He had a great deal on his mind. Besides having to reacquaint himself with the productivity of his farms, his elder daughter, Patsy, seventeen, was to be married shortly to a Randolph she had known when young and who had visited Paris while they were there.
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Madison and Jefferson were reunited at Monticello just after Christmas 1789. After five years apart, Jefferson had to have noticed that Madison’s hair was thinning. His own was still red and plentiful. What they dined on cannot be established, but we must assume it was capped off by French wine. Enjoying once more the splendid view from his mountaintop (“How sublime to look down into the workhouse of nature,” he had written Maria Cosway), Jefferson mulled over President Washington’s recent offer that he come to New York and take up the duties of secretary of state. In the days he spent with Madison at Monticello, comparing notes on politics at home and politics abroad, Jefferson must have absorbed a lot of information concerning the operations of Congress and the executive. Madison’s chief concern at this time was to convince his friend, as Pendleton had once urged back in 1776, not to “retire so early in life from the memory of man.”

Because of the obvious difficulty in getting mail to him while he traveled, it was not until Christmastime that Jefferson saw Madison’s appeal that he enter the president’s cabinet. The congressman had written at Washington’s behest on October 8, 1789, the very day that Jefferson set sail from the French port of Le Havre: “It is of infinite importance that you should not disappoint the public wish on this subject,” he said. By “public,” Madison meant that he had sounded out those whose votes in the national legislature he most counted on. “The Southern and Western Country have it particularly at heart,” he assured Jefferson, adding: “To every other part of the Union it will be sincerely acceptable.” He had brought Jefferson out of retirement after his wife’s death in 1782, and he was attempting to do so once again.

Shortly before he and Madison met up at Monticello, Jefferson had received word directly from the president that his services were desired. Replying in a tone of respect, he showed that he was of two minds. By accepting the position, Jefferson wrote Washington, “I should enter on it with gloomy forebodings from the criticisms and censures of a public just
indeed in their intentions but sometimes misinformed and misled.” His explanation revealed that he was still reflecting on his traumatic time as governor. In fact, in his first draft Jefferson left out the phrase “just indeed in their intentions”; only after rereading did he decide to retreat from his self-pitying language. His first thought, in any case, was to expose his fear of criticism and admit that he still felt a nagging hostility toward former critics.
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Jefferson would likely have acquiesced to the president’s call even without Madison’s argument. He appears to have resigned himself to his fate by New Year’s Day 1790, just after Madison’s visit was concluded. Jefferson could not have sounded very excited, because Madison wrote to Washington from Georgetown shortly thereafter, saying that he was “sorry to find him so little biased in favor of” the secretaryship. Apparently Jefferson took to heart the concept of “public servant” when he said he would allow the president to decide “what is to be done with me.”

Though Madison and Jefferson had drawn especially close in 1783–84 and shared confidences at length from 1785 to 1789, we know that their philosophical differences were not insignificant, but also not deep or disruptive. After meeting at Monticello in December 1789, they were still conversing about unfinished business two months later. As much as they might differ, they would not sacrifice their alliance for anything.

After the outbreak of the French Revolution in July 1789, Jefferson had written a letter to Madison that he did not send but eventually handed to him in Virginia. In it he hazarded a new and experimental view, rooted in the principle that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” He argued that contracted debts should be dissolved at the end of each generation, which he defined as nineteen years. According to Jefferson’s logic, any public or private debt should be paid in full with moderate interest before nineteen years had expired. Contracts would then be renegotiated and laws and constitutions revised.

To think in terms of generations suited Jefferson’s mind. Upon his return from Europe, he went back to the drawing board and scoped out a plan to tear up and rebuild Monticello, based on what he had seen in France. One might say that he was launching a generational restructuring of his home: architectural historians identify the pre-1790 house as the
“first” Monticello, managed jointly by Patty and him, and the post-1790 house as the “second” Monticello, doubled in size and more dignified in appearance.

More to the point, when Jefferson thought of the structure of a generation, he was thinking legalistically. The theory he embraced was an extension of his earlier attempts to reform the laws of Virginia by ridding society of entail and primogeniture. Entail had allowed the dead to control the destiny of future generations by circumscribing how land could be distributed; primogeniture in effect disinherited younger offspring by automatically bequeathing the main estate to the eldest son.

When he imagined being able to reshape society, Jefferson was, on some level, thinking as a lawyer. The concept of “usufruct,” originally part of Roman law, dictated that land, houses, slaves, and livestock (property not consumed by use) were to benefit the user only until his death. Each generation enjoyed the profits and advantages of a piece of property, but no person should be burdened by unfair debts or legal restrictions left over from the past. Jefferson believed that one generation could not be trusted to safeguard the interests of the next. As in 1776, when he undertook his revisal of the laws of Virginia, once again Jefferson was convinced of the need for moral constraints to be imposed by law—he continued to believe in social engineering.
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While he was largely thinking of usufruct metaphorically, Jefferson was making the case to Madison that the people deriving benefits from the federal Constitution had to be the
living
users of the text. The Constitution’s meaning could not be stagnant; its understood benefits had to be progressively redefined. “No society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law,” wrote Jefferson unambiguously. He meant, too, that
there was no original intent:
the founding generation could not make the Constitution into a property monopolized by its authors, eternally empowering themselves to control its value and its application.

Jefferson’s letter to Madison has been dissected by various historians for its intrinsic meaning and what it says about their opposing perspectives on the world. It is easy to jump to the conclusion that Jefferson was dreaming, or preparing to unleash social and political chaos, needing Madison to talk him out of it. But Jefferson was not prescribing policy so much as opening a conversation about an issue he and Madison both cared about: possible ways to fix limits on public debt so as to keep the people from having to face unending taxes. But he did, as well, consider his theory as a way to move in a new political direction—government flexibility on issues affecting
the happiness of future generations. Even Dumas Malone, Jefferson’s most prolific and adoring twentieth-century biographer, described his subject as a man who was married to his theories. “Few men in American public life,” Malone wrote, “have taken general principles more seriously; more often than he should, perhaps, he regarded these as universal truths.” Though he did not agree with his friend’s prescription, Madison surely understood why Jefferson was thinking in the manner he was.
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In his measured reply to Jefferson’s letter, Madison cautioned against too much mutability or volatility in government. Seeing monarchical Europe as moribund, Jefferson warmed to the notion that each generation had to shake things up, and that society would profit from the exercise. But Madison read past his curious proposition and saw what was dangerous and disruptive in it. As each generation prepared itself to redraft its constitutional charter, factions would inevitably form for the express purpose of manipulating the process. To undermine property law would destroy land values; to eliminate all debts would negate the social good that grew from the protection of contractual obligations.

As a realist, Madison disagreed strongly with the idea that the nation could, in effect, return to the state of nature every nineteen years, rebuilding governing institutions and sanctifying new laws with the active consent of the people. He thought Jefferson too enamored with the principle of majority rule, by which governments attained legitimacy only through the consent of their living subjects. Drawing on Locke and other social contract theorists, Madison defended the idea of civil society and the rule of law, whereby citizens voluntarily gave up some of their natural rights in exchange for civil protections.

As every constitution relied on, in Madison’s words, “tacit and implied consent,” he had to reject Jefferson’s contention that majority will superseded all other law. There was only one conclusion to draw: if it were to be implemented, Jefferson’s theory would require that every new member of society (every person who came of age) give his consent to every law. That was impractical, if not impossible.