Madison and Jefferson (130 page)

44.
Todd Estes,
The Jay Treaty Debate, Public Opinion, and the Evolution of Early American Political Culture
(Amherst, Mass., 2006), 94–103.

45.
Columbian Centinel
[Boston], January 17, 1795, apparently originating in Hartford, Conn.;
Weekly Register
[Norwich, Conn.], February 17, 1795.

46.
[Alexander James Dallas],
Letters of Franklin
(Philadelphia, 1795), esp. 7, 20, 27–29; [Dallas],
Features of Mr. Jay’s Treaty
(Philadelphia, 1795), 12, 25. The letters were serially published in the newspapers first. Advertisement in the
Aurora
announcing publication of the collected
Letters of Franklin
in pamphlet form, July 30, 1795.

47.
“Peter Porcupine,”
A Little Plain English, Addressed to the People of the United States, on the Treaty Negotiated with His Britannic Majesty
(Philadelphia, 1795), Preface, 6–9, 89, 101–2; Brant, 3:417.
A Little Plain English
was published one month after
Letters of Franklin
appeared as a pamphlet.

48.
PAH
, 18:415–18.

49.
JMB
, 2:923; Lucia Stanton,
Free Some Day: The African-American Families of Monticello
(Charlottesville, Va., 2000), 102–7, 118–19; Jack McLaughlin,
Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder
(New York, 1988), 114, 406–7; Annette Gordon-Reed,
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy
(Charlottesville, Va., 1997), 195; Gordon-Reed,
The Hemingses of Monticello
(New York, 2008), 497–501. Jefferson freed Robert Hemings after Bob made arrangements to remove to Richmond. In 1784, after seeing Jefferson off to Europe, he had been allowed to hire himself out. In this way he found a wife, Dolly, and during Jefferson’s years abroad they had a child. Dolly was owned by a physician, who agreed to advance Bob the sum he needed to purchase his freedom, in order that the family could live together. Jefferson complained that Bob had been “debauched” from him—a remark that seems utterly cruel and selfish. Bob explained to Patsy that he did not wish to cause his master unhappiness, but he could not help choosing his immediate family over the one he had come into deprived of choice.

50.
Drew R. McCoy,
The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy
(Cambridge, 1989), 233–36; Susan Dunn,
Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia
(New York, 2007), 40–41.

51.
Western Star
[Stockbridge, Mass.], December 15, 1795; James Roger Sharp, “Unraveling the Mystery of Jefferson’s Letter of April 27, 1795,”
Journal of the Early Republic
6 (Winter 1986): 411–18.

52.
Ebeling to TJ, July 30, 1795; “Notes on the Letter of Christoph Daniel Ebeling,” [after October 30, 1795],
PTJ
, 28:423–27, 506–10; Andrew Burstein,
Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello
(New York, 2005), 199–203.

1.
Todd Estes, “Shaping the Politics of Public Opinion: Federalists and the Jay Treaty Debate,”
Journal of the Early Republic
20 (Autumn 2000): 393–422; Estes,
The Jay Treaty Debate, Public Opinion, and the Evolution of Early American Political Culture
(Amherst, Mass., 2006); Jack N. Rakove,
James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic
(New York, 1990), 117–120; “Notes for Speech, Jay’s Treaty, 1796,”
JMP-LC.

2.
JM to TJ, April 4 and April 11, 1796,
RL
, 2:929, 931.

3.
Jefferson egged Madison on, writing with grand gestures and extreme language. He would preserve the power of treaty making as a method of securing peace only, he said, seeing “no harm” in “annihilating” it if it was nothing more than a means to forge
permanent links between England and the Anglomen in Congress. This language of noncompliance was a clear preview of an even more radical position: the language of nullification which would dramatically challenge the sanctity of the Union. By his use of the word
annihilating
Jefferson was declaring that one party might reject a federal treaty or federal law, bypassing constitutional guidelines altogether. He regarded such a maneuver as the only way to stop Hamilton. See TJ to JM, March 27, 1796; JM to TJ, April 4 and April 11, 1796,
RL
, 2:928–29, 931. Washington cited the journals of the Constitutional Convention, as Hamilton did in his “Camillus” essays, written in an effort to defeat Madison’s bill. For Madison’s reliance on the state constitutional conventions (Virginia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania), see “Note for Speech in Congress, March 23–April 2,” and “Jay’s Treaty,” April 6, 1796,
JMP
, 16:274, 276, 296; Ketcham, 361–62.

4.
JM to TJ, May 1, 1796,
RL
, 2:936.

5.
Writing under a pseudonym, Robert Livingston observed the previous September, in a widely circulated opinion, that all Americans with unbiased judgment disapproved of what they saw happening. Of the deepening divisions around the country over the Jay Treaty, he wrote: “The states in which there is
least
of party spirit, manifest
most
warmth and most unanimity in their opposition.” See Cato no. 8,
Philadelphia Gazette
, September 12, 1795. But this did not seem to matter in the end, as Hamilton’s perspective won the day. “To the Citizens Who Shall Be Convened This Day in the Fields in the City of New York,” April 22, 1796,
PAH
, 20:131–34.

6.
JM to TJ, May 9, 1796,
RL
, 2:937, 940. Historian Todd Estes explains that Washington had an “extraordinary sense of timing and use of delay.” He waited until anger had abated before publicly embracing the less than ideal treaty. Estes also believes that Madison recognized the uncertainty of his constitutional argument that the House, because of its role in appropriations, rightly deserved to be involved in monitoring the treaty. See Estes,
Jay Treaty Debate
, 154, 160–61.

7.
TJ to JM, March 6, 1796; JM to TJ, April 4, 1796,
RL
, 2:923–24, 929. The post road bill was defeated because some New England Federalists saw it as a ploy for using northern tax dollars to pay for improving southern roads. See “Post Road Survey,” February 5 and 11, and May 19, 1796,
PJM
, 16:213, 221–22, 363; Joseph H. Harrison, Jr., “
Sic Et Non:
Thomas Jefferson and Internal Improvement,”
Journal of the Early Republic
7 (Winter 1987): 340; on the poor state of southern roads, see Richard B. Kielbowicz, “The Press, Post Office, and the Flow of News in the Early Republic,”
Journal of the Early Republic
3 (Autumn 1983): 277.

8.
JM to Monroe, May 14, 1796,
PJM
, 16:358; Noble E. Cunningham, Jr.,
The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization, 1789–1801
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 80–85.

9.
As Madison had taken an instant dislike to Adams years earlier, Adams had a particular aversion to Gallatin, Madison’s chief lieutenant in Congress. He proclaimed that the congressman’s “Ignorance” had been exposed in a speech—the same speech that so enchanted Thomas Jefferson when he read it in Bache’s paper that he pronounced it worthy of being added to the
Federalist Papers
! Previewing a prejudice Adams would carry into his presidency, he added of Gallatin: “It is intolerable that a Forreigner, should act such a Part as he has done and yet go on.” John Adams to Abigail Adams, February 27 and April 28, 1796,
Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive
, Massachusetts
Historical Society (
http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams
); TJ to JM, March 27, 1796,
RL
, 2:927–28.

10.
TJ to Monroe, June 12, 1796,
PTJ
, 29:124; Nancy Isenberg,
Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr
(New York, 2007), 145–46. Already among Burr’s powerful friends in the state of Virginia were Governor Robert Brooke, Henry Tazewell, and John Taylor of Caroline—the latter two had served with him in the U.S. Senate.

11.
Madison exercised a commanding influence in Jefferson’s Albemarle, where admiring friends took charge of rallying freeholders; farther west the population was thin, and he had little influence. In other places where the Republicans held sway, he lacked personal connections and was unable to identify who the moderates were; as a result, some diehards took center stage and made the Republican cause vulnerable to charges of “jacobinical” radicalism. See Richard R. Beeman,
The Old Dominion and the New Nation, 1788–1801
(Lexington, Ky., 1972), 132–35, 143–66.

12.
Ibid., 161; Brant, 3:440.

13.
Jeffrey L. Pasley, “ ‘A Journeyman, Either in Law or Politics’: John Beckley and the Social Origins of Political Campaigning,”
Journal of the Early Republic
16 (Winter 1996): 531–69; Brant, 3:445.

14.
JM to Monroe, September 29, 1796,
PJM
, 16:404, and
JMP-LC.
The numerical code used breaks up certain words into syllables or even individual letters; “Jefferson,” for instance, which is designated 581 798 604 146, translates into “Je” “f” “fer” “son.”

15.
Adams to Abigail Adams, as quoted in
PJM
, 17:xix, and
RL
, 2:895.

16.
TJ to Washington, June 19, 1796,
PTJ
, 29:127–28.

17.
Washington to TJ, July 6, 1796,
PTJ
, 29:141–43.

18.
Madison consulted with District of Columbia Commissioner and Virginian Alexander White, in discussing possible strategies for gaining support in Congress. See Alexander White to JM, September 26 and December 2, 1796, and Madison’s two speeches on the National University, December 12 and December 26, 1796,
PJM
, 16:401–3, 421–22, 425–26, 436–38.

19.
Felix Gilbert,
To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy
(Princeton, N.J., 1961), 123–26. Gilbert’s treatment is sound, but Stuart Leibiger’s analysis of Washington’s attitude toward Madison is a good deal more persuasive. See Leibiger,
Founding Friendship: George Washington, James Madison, and the Creation of the American Republic
(Charlottesville, Va., 1999), 209–14.

20.
Gilbert,
To the Farewell Address
, 137–47.

21.
See esp. U.S. senator Henry Tazewell to JM, October 3, 1796,
PJM
, 16:406–7.

22.
Cunningham,
Jeffersonian Republicans
, 97–99.

23.
Gazette of the United States
, October 27, 1796.

24.
“Cassius, No. II,”
New Jersey Journal
[Elizabethtown], November 16, 1796. This particular piece went on to assert: “Men of narrow minds are delighted with the exercise of power … But great men accept offices as painful duties.” Crediting Jefferson with the courage of his convictions was a subtle means of counteracting the Hamiltonian definition of masculine authority. The writer praised Jefferson’s resistance to the “detestable influence” of a certain “insidious foreigner,” exaggerating the foreignness of the
Caribbean-born Hamilton, at the same time insisting that Jefferson’s deviation from Washington’s political line was not a disqualifier, because Washington was not the arbiter of the “eternal nature” of truth.

25.
Columbian Herald
[Charleston, S.C.], July 23, 1793;
Aurora General Advertiser
, July 7, 1795;
Jersey Chronicle
[Mt. Pleasant], July 18 and November 28, 1795, originating with the
Aurora.

26.
For a compelling discussion in this regard, see Susan Dunn, “Revolutionary Men of Letters and the Pursuit of Radical Change: The Views of Burke, Tocqueville, Adams, Madison, and Jefferson,”
William and Mary Quarterly
53 (October 1996): 729–54.

27.
Jones saw “Pelham’s” impulse as an urge to instigate “a separation from the Southern people.” Recall that Jefferson had only recently (to Madison) identified the Republicans as the party of the “Southern interest.” See
Connecticut Courant
, November 21 and December 12, 1796; James C. Welling,
Connecticut Federalism, or Aristocratic Politics in a Social Democracy
(New York, 1890), 10–16; James Roger Sharp,
American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis
(New Haven, Conn., 1995), 158–59; TJ to JM, April 27, 1795,
RL
, 2:877–78; Sharp, “Unveiling the Mystery of Jefferson’s Letter of April 27, 1795,”
Journal of the Early Republic
6 (1986): 411–18; Joseph Jones to JM, December 1796 or January 1797,
PJM
, 16:448–49.

28.
TJ to JM, January 1, 1797, with enclosure,
RL
, 2:952–55.

29.
JM to TJ, January 15, 1797,
RL
, 2:956–58.

30.
John Adams Inaugural Address, March 4, 1797, in James D. Richardson, comp.,
A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of Presidents of the United States
, 20 vols. (New York, 1897–1917), 1:218–22; TJ to JM, January 22, 1797,
RL
, 2:960.

31.
JMB
, 2:954–60; TJ to Gerry, May 13, 1797,
PTJ
, 29:361–64.

32.
Joseph J. Ellis,
Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams
(New York, 1993), 61–62.

33.
James Morton Smith,
Freedom’s Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Acts and American Civil Liberties
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1956), 189–91; Kurtz,
Presidency of John Adams
, 141; Abigail Adams to Mary Cranch, May 7, 1798, in Stewart Mitchell, ed., “New Letters of Abigail Adams,”
Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society
55 (April–October, 1945), 347; Karen List, “The Role of William Cobbett in Philadelphia Party Press, 1794–1799,”
Journalism Monographs
82 (1993): 1–23. James Roger Sharp also provides a good brief assessment of the Adams-Jefferson dynamic and the slow disintegration of the relationship as the embassy to France was being considered; see Sharp,
American Politics in Early Republic
(New Haven, Conn., 1995), 160–67.