Madison and Jefferson Read Free

straightforward political ambition. As is often true in American politics, not everything is what it seems.
    We have written this book to establish what sustained a fifty-year-long personal bond that guided the course of American history. It turns out that beyond the relatively superficial differences outlined above, the Madison-Jefferson relationship was not always as smooth and effortless as history (and the actors themselves) want us to believe. Remarkably, after the Constitutional Convention, Jefferson sought to undermine the ratification process—to Madison’s severe embarrassment.
    We have to question familiar assumptions if we are to achieve greater clarity in our appreciation of the past. Sometimes we find that what history calls triumphs were, in fact, less than billed. Madison was not particularly successful at the Constitutional Convention, certainly not in the way Americans have been taught and certainly not enough to warrant the title “Father of the Constitution.” Nor did
The Federalist Papers
that he collaborated on with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay carry the weight at the state ratifying conventions that our collective memory imagines. Their real value applies to a later time. Jefferson’s pseudo-scientific racism, iconoclastic statements about religious practices in America, and other philosophical musings were criticized as part of a larger political game—scare tactics, partisan politics—and did not always mean that the driving moral concerns of his critics were joined to practical solutions.
    During much of his public career, Jefferson was steeped in bitter and lasting controversies created by his sometimes careless pen. As the less closely studied of the two, Madison has been grossly oversimplified as a brainy man whose vivacious wife ran his social schedule. Perhaps the mostastonishing of ignored facts is Madison’s orchestration of Jefferson’s career. Jefferson might otherwise have retired from public service after the Revolution, in 1782, and again in 1789, after his five years as a diplomat in France. Madison was the driving force behind Jefferson’s reemergence in 1796, when Jefferson was urging Madison, then at the height of his congressional career, to seek the presidency. Rejecting the idea, Madison lured Jefferson away from the quiet of his mountaintop, where he was experimenting with new farming measures, and set him up to battle John Adams. Madison, in short, was Jefferson’s campaign manager, long before the term was coined.
    It has become customary to refer to Madison as Jefferson’s “faithful lieutenant,” and at times he certainly was that. But we should remember that the lieutenancy was constructed in the early years of the republic by a politically charged press. Madison was Jefferson’s secretary of state and successor; to those of their contemporaries who sought a simple calculus, the dutiful lieutenant sounded right—a convenient shorthand—whether or not it properly described their association. Most of what they said to each other remained between themselves, though we have deduced that Madison periodically exercised veto power over Jefferson’s policy decisions.
    It has been too easy for history to tag Madison as “modest.” This was the very word Jefferson used to explain why Madison did not come to the fore in debate during his first three years on the political stage in Virginia, 1776–79, before he and Jefferson became close. To extrapolate from this statement and define Madison’s character as modest is dangerous: “modesty” retrospectively helped to explain, for example, why he was a bachelor until he was past forty. By the same token, contemporaries who identified with the Democratic-Republican Party associated Jefferson’s soft, almost feminine voice with his much vaunted harmony-seeking political style—a dubious designation, to say the least.
    All historians are answerable for their shortcomings. Even the best resort to synecdoche: they