The Republic of Letters:
The Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776-1826
Edited by James Morton Smith
Norton, three volumes, 2,128 pages, $150
Thomas Jefferson was 33 years old, James Madison 25, when they met at Williamsburg in the fall of 1776. Jefferson had just drafted the Declaration of Independence, while Madison was entering politics as a member of the Virginia Provincial Convention. Both were products of the elite planter families that had ruled Virginia for several generations. But it was their shared opinions and convictions that formed the true basis of a friendship that would last exactly half a century, until Jefferson’s death on the 50th anniversary of Independence left Madison to protect his friend’s reputation for another decade.
The record of Madison and Jefferson’s friendship has now been published in this splendid collection of their private correspondence. James Morton Smith, emeritus director of the Winterthur Museum, has surrounded the nearly 1,250 letters reprinted here with an editorial apparatus that should meet the needs of scholars and serious readers of American history alike. Smith presents the letters in a series of chapters and gives each an introduction that nicely summarizes the course of events in the greater world
and each man’s biography.
Theirs was very much a friendship of 18th Century gentlemen. If they called each other Thomas and James when they exchanged visits between their plantations, 30 miles apart, we would never know it from the tone of these letters. From start to finish they addressed each other as “Dear Sir” and signed their full names.
More than a reflection of a friendship, these letters are in many ways its foundation. The two men became better acquainted in 1779, when Madison was a member of Gov. Jefferson’s council. But over the next 20 years, their political careers usually kept them apart. Their closest personal collaboration came between 1790-1793, when Secretary of State Jefferson and Rep. Madison created the Democratic-Republican party to oppose the policies of Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. When Jefferson retired to Monticello, Madison took over the leadership of the party; when Jefferson returned to office as vice president to John Adams, the newlywed Madison retired to Montpelier.
As politicians, planters and philosophers-they probably were the two best read men in the country-the topics they discussed ranged widely. Politics, war and diplomacy we might expect, but we also find them discussing pecans, ewes, Jefferson’s nail factory, seeds of all kinds, books to be purchased in Europe (when Jefferson served as minister to France in the 1780s) and their mutual hopes for the University of Virginia.
Still, it is the record of their political concerns and ideas that gives this correspondence its power. On nearly all major questions of political principle and policy, they agreed deeply. This was true when they promoted the cause of religious liberty in the 1780s, when they took the plunge into opposition in the 1790s, and when they came to power in 1801, committing the nation to a difficult and ill-conceived foreign policy that led to the War of 1812. (Both men were rank Anglophobes, reluctant to turn their backs on France-America’s wartime ally-even after its revolution took a violent course they privately abhorred.)
Yet the letters also reveal the secret of this remarkable friendship. Their agreements were the product of two very different minds playing upon each other: one (Jefferson’s) quick to reach judgment, bold to express it and usually optimistic; the other quizzical, prone to drawing careful distinctions and more conservative. After Jefferson’s death, Madison observed that his friend had the habit, common “in men of great genius, of expressing in strong and round terms, the impressions of the moment.” On more than one occasion, Madison tempered Jefferson’s impulsive responses with patient reminders of all the pitfalls his friend had overlooked.
We see this intellectual tension most clearly in the best known exchanges that appear here: the letters surrounding the new Federal Constitution that was Madison’s great project and whose progress Jefferson observed, with some detachment, from France. Madison was at his most pessimistic in the mid-1780s. While Jefferson was emphasizing the contrast between a sunken French peasantry and the prosperity of American farmers, Madison worried that the American states might soon breed an impoverished underclass that would threaten basic rights of property. He must have wondered whether his friend had lost his senses when Jefferson dismissed Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts with the observation that “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, & as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”
After the Federal Convention adjourned in September 1787, Madison was no less upset to learn of Jefferson’s public support for the adoption of a Bill of Rights. Madison had good reason to think this measure was a ploy whose real purpose was to prevent the Constitution from taking effect. But his belief that bills of rights were only “parchment barriers”-nice to read, perhaps, but not worth owning-finally rested on a powerful critique of the character of popular government.
What good would a mere statement of rights do, Madison asked Jefferson in October 1788, if a majority of the people were bent on committing acts of injustice against some minority: religious dissenters or wealthy propertyholders or perhaps even slaves? And what would happen to those essential rights that might be left out of the proposed Bill or that might have to be weakly worded to be adopted?
Jefferson answered with some common sense of his own. “Half a loaf is better than no bread,” he wrote back in January 1789. “If we cannot secure all our rights, let us secure what we can.” And so, of course, Madison proceeded to do when he pushed the Bill of Rights through a reluctant Congress later that year.
That same play of mind recurs in other exchanges. Jefferson writes from France to ask, in broad philosophic and democratic terms, whether each generation should not have the right to write its own constitution. Madison reminds him of all the uncertainty and instability such a right would generate. So, too, in 1798, the two men collaborate to have the Virginia and Kentucky legislatures adopt resolutions condemning the Alien and Sedition Acts used by the dominant Federalist party to browbeat their opponents.
But when Jefferson, drafting the Kentucky resolutions, rashly suggests that states have a right to nullify federal acts, Madison reminds him that this will undermine the basic principle of union itself. And in the decade after Jefferson’s death, Madison is repeatedly forced to explain that neither of them had intended to legitimate the states’ rights heresies that were now flourishing in the South.
It is in their role as party leaders that historians tend to grade these two men most critically, and again “The Republic of Letters” helps us to understand why. First in opposition and then (after 1801) in power, Jefferson and Madison remained driven by a mistrust of Hamilton and a fear of Britain that often led them to miscalculate American interests. In their discussions of domestic politics and foreign policy, they were as ensnared by ideology and suspicion as were the Federalists who regarded Jefferson as a godless democrat and Madison as his well-meaning dupe.
Reading their letters for these later years, we see how the high hopes of the Revolution gave way to the partisan vitriol of the 1790s. And even after Jefferson and Madison could be confident that they had slain the Hamiltonian dragon, the foreign policy dilemmas they faced from 1801 to 1815 reminded them that their new republic was still a minor player in a world of greater powers.
When John Adams died a few hours after Jefferson on the 50th anniversary of independence, his last words were, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” Adams was wrong in the short run, but his words still ring true today. With all his contradictions-or perhaps because of them-we still care about Jefferson. Madison, too, has come to exert an influence that few then would have predicted, for his political writings have a power that none of his contemporaries could match.
Theirs was the most remarkable political friendship in American political history, and in preparing this excellent edition of their letters, James Morton Smith enables all of us to understand why.
