Madison and Jefferson (34 page)

Madison was engaged in a virtual debate with his friend Jefferson,
though not a virulent one. Curiously he did not reveal his authorship of
The Federalist
to Jefferson until the summer of 1788, a considerable time after he began writing the essays, and a month
after
Virginia’s ratifying convention had ended. Edward Carrington, a Virginia delegate to Congress, had already let Jefferson in on the more or less open secret of “Publius’s” identity, forwarding him copies of
The Federalist.
But Madison appeared in no hurry to acknowledge his views to Jefferson at this crucial moment.
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Since quitting Philadelphia, Madison had been living in New York. He finally headed back to Virginia in March 1788. He was not looking forward to his state’s ratifying convention, telling Washington it would inevitably involve “very laborious and irksome discussions.” In order to secure a seat at the Richmond gathering, he felt compelled for the first time in his life to give a lengthy political speech to the voters of Orange on Election Day. He spoke in the open air, on a windy day, aiming to dispel some of what he described to Jefferson as “absurd and groundless prejudices” circulating in central Virginia. He was elected as a delegate by a comfortable margin.

In Richmond Madison found himself battling more than antifederalists Patrick Henry and George Mason. Just as an intense debate opened, he became seriously ill and missed several days of the convention. While recovering, he had to listen in silence; each time he tried to raise his voice, he was barely audible.
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Aware that the vote on the Constitution would be close in his native state, he identified three factions right away: those, like himself, who unconditionally supported the new plan of government; those who would approve if it accepted amendments; and Henry’s coalition, which sought to derail the proceedings. Madison placed Randolph and Mason in the middle group, unaware that the embittered Mason was moving closer to Henry’s position.
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Jefferson told one of his correspondents in December 1787 that he expected Madison to be the “main pillar” of defense at the ratifying convention, but he also questioned whether Madison would be able to “bear the weight.” He predicted that Virginia would reject the Constitution—and he would not be at all alarmed if that were the result. Madison would have been deeply troubled if he had known that Jefferson was devising a solution to the likely impasse that flew in the face of all that he hoped to accomplish.

Jefferson was not just expressing his disappointment with aspects of the Constitution; he was putting pressure on Madison directly. He submitted critical letters to a Maryland antifederalist and a Virginian, both of whom
were then in London. These individuals were meant to take charge of circulating the letters, while keeping Jefferson’s name out of the newspapers. To the Virginian, Alexander Donald, a tobacco broker whom Jefferson had known since youth, he was the more direct: “I wish with all my soul that the nine first [ratifying] Conventions may accept the new Constitution, because this will secure to us the good it contains, which I think great and important. But I equally wish that the four latest conventions, whichever they be, may refuse to accede to it till a declaration of rights be annexed.” He knew that Maryland and Virginia both might reject the Constitution, and he deliberately targeted them because that was where his influence was greatest. He hoped to prompt a supplementary second convention. This strategy placed Jefferson closer to the middle group of Madison’s three-way valuation: the group that sought amendments. But he was also unknowingly close to Henry in his comfort with a second convention.

Several months later, as Jefferson’s disruptive letter was making the rounds, one flustered Marylander wrote to Madison and asked incredulously: “Can this possibly be Jefferson?” At the Virginia Ratifying Convention, Patrick Henry invoked Jefferson’s name with perverse pleasure: “This illustrious citizen advised you to reject this government till it be amended.” He was claiming that the two of them occupied common ground, and it certainly looked that way. Henry’s words pained Madison, whose only recourse was to counter by saying that Jefferson’s position was being misconstrued. But Madison did not delude himself: Jefferson was secretly working against him.
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The Virginia Ratifying Convention lasted from June 2 to June 25, 1788. Both sides already knew how most of the delegates would vote, and few changed their opinions even after three weeks of grueling debate. A handful of undecideds kept the others in suspense, knowing their votes could decide the fate of the Constitution. As a Madison supporter put it, all was “suspended upon a single hair.” An increasingly skeptical Madison did not surrender his doubts until nearly the end of the convention.
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The gathering was a grand opera of strong personalities. By unanimous decision, Edmund Pendleton reprised his role of a dozen years earlier as convention president. His health was impaired and he stood on crutches, but he showed, in the words of moderate antifederalist James Monroe,
“as much zeal to carry [the convention], as if he had been a young man.” Henry, always entertaining, quickly grabbed the spotlight, sometimes speaking for hours at a time. But Pendleton’s influence was equal to that of Henry, given the length to which the competing sides went to gain his support. As president of the Virginia Convention in 1776, he had led the state to declare its independence from Great Britain. Now the grand old man was to preside over the adoption of a brand-new form of government.

Ordinarily a harmonizer, Governor Edmund Randolph found himself a man misunderstood. Though he had turned down the Constitution in Philadelphia, he changed his mind over the intervening months and was calling for ratification, agreeing with Madison that amendments could wait. His turnabout meant he had to fend off brutal swipes from the voluble Henry. At one point Henry went so far that the convention demanded he apologize for his rudeness.
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Henry assumed the role of master of ceremonies at the convention, dictating the order of debate in spite of the will of the majority of delegates. They wanted to discuss the Constitution clause by clause, but he somehow outmaneuvered them all, identifying topics of interest as he saw fit and spelling out every possible danger he believed to be lurking in the language of the document. Mason and Henry proved a formidable tag team. Their themes were these: the federal government threatened Virginia’s status as the most powerful state in the Union; the state’s economic welfare would be seriously jeopardized as the North gained in population and secured control in Congress; and slavery, the source of Virginia’s tremendous wealth, lay politically unprotected. Henry assured the delegates that Virginia could refuse to ratify and the other states would still welcome her back into the Union with open arms. But first she had to make her point and vote no. Monroe spoke relatively little, and any influence he had only underscored Henry’s importance.

Of the subjects taken up, slavery proved the most contentious. Mason repeated what he had said during the Constitutional Convention: that the new government failed to provide for “domestic safety” if there was no explicit protection for Virginians’ slave property. Henry called up the by-now-ingrained fear of slave insurrections—the direct result, he believed, of Virginia’s loss of authority over its own militia (because the president, as commander in chief, could conscript all militias). Congress, if it wished, could draft every slave into the military and liberate them at the end of their service. If troop quotas were determined by population, and Virginia had over 200,000 slaves, Congress might say: “Every black man must fight.”
For that matter, a northern-controlled Congress might tax slavery out of existence.
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Mason and Henry both ignored the fact that the Constitution protected slavery on the strength of the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, and the slave trade clause. Their rationale was that none of this mattered if the North should have its way. At length Madison rose to reject their conspiratorial view. He argued that the central government had no power to order emancipation, and that Congress would never “alienate the affections of five-thirteenths of the Union” by stripping southerners of their property. “Such an idea never entered into any American breast,” he said indignantly, “nor do I believe it ever will.” Madison was doing his best to make Henry and Mason sound like fear-mongers. Yet Mason struck a chord in his insistence that northerners could never understand slavery; and Henry roused the crowd with his refusal to trust “any man on earth” with his rights. Virginians were hearing that their sovereignty was in jeopardy.
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To Randolph and Madison, the antifederalists sounded arrogant, insular, and isolationist, their posturing unproductive, even foolish. Madison reminded the convention how “notoriously feeble” America was under the Articles of Confederation. Its deranged finances, its dubious reputation with foreign nations, and its troubled military defenses during the Revolution made a strong federal system absolutely essential. He reminded the delegates of General Washington’s incontrovertible statement at the end of the Revolution, when he publicly voiced his disapproval of the Confederation as he lay down his arms. It was most probably Madison’s tribute to Washington’s resolute character that prompted Henry, the very next day, to embarrass Madison by bringing up Jefferson’s criticism of the Constitution.
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Near the end of the convention, Henry launched into his longest discourse on slavery. The generally placid and greatly esteemed legal scholar George Wythe had had enough. Years before, Wythe had refused to certify Henry’s admission to the bar, doubting the young man’s academic credentials. Now, believing that Henry had nothing of relevance to add to the proceedings, he moved to cut off debate and vote for unconditional ratification.

Newspapers were reporting that the federalists would win by six or eight votes, and their prediction proved remarkably accurate. On June 25, after the convention rejected two lists of proposed amendments submitted by Henry, it voted and, by 89 to 79, Virginia became the tenth state to ratify. A special committee met to draft a list of constitutional amendments that it
wished to have incorporated in the future, and on the twenty-seventh, the Virginia Ratifying Convention adjourned.
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The federal moment had arrived, and the press came alive. Though still in its infancy as a channel for shock and awe, the American newspaper effectively covered the clash of well-known personalities. Throughout Virginia’s convention, readers followed the vigorous language of Patrick Henry and pored over the arguments of James Madison. One published letter explained that the Constitution had passed because of the latter’s intellectual reach, “notwithstanding Mr. Henry’s declamatory powers—they being vastly overpowered by the deep reasoning of our glorious little Madison.” Reason had outlasted passion. David had slain Goliath.
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Antifederalists saw a different contest, to be sure, praising Henry’s genius as well as his eloquence. To this loyal opposition, he was victorious even in defeat. When Henry railed against the “bloodsuckers” (tax collectors, excise men) trudging south to drag Virginians into federal court, he reached into the impressionable minds of debtors and small farmers. He showed large planters that they faced financial ruin if unsympathetic federal judges forced them to pay their British creditors. To Kentucky and frontier Virginia delegates, he sounded out a warning: when a northern-dominated Congress threw Virginia’s “Western brethren” into the “arms of Spain” and surrendered all access to the commercial lifeline of the Mississippi River, they would be left high and dry. A French observer remarked of Henry: “He was always attacked, but never conquered.” But he
was
conquered. He lost out to a Virginian who was not a delegate or even in Richmond at the time of the convention: George Washington, whose presence was felt, and whose support for the Constitution was well known. Monroe told Jefferson: “Be assured his influence carried this government.”
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A month after Virginia ratified, when Madison got around to writing Jefferson, he was in a better mood than he had been up to that point. Yet he remained fatigued, if not alarmed, by all it had taken to turn back the antifederalist challenge. He expressed relief that Mason and Henry “will give no countenance to popular violences,” but neither were they truly reconciled to the results. Informing Jefferson that Henry had brought up the contents of his letter to Alexander Donald as proof of Jefferson’s antifederalism, Madison explained that he had attested to the falsity of those attributions that he knew misrepresented Jefferson’s position. Beyond that, he said, he “took the liberty” to credit Jefferson for his opinions in support of the Constitution.

As their relationship allowed for candor, Madison criticized Jefferson for his recklessness—in language that was gentler than it might have been. He explained that Jefferson’s antifederalist tone was not only recognized by Henry but had spread through Maryland even earlier, “with a like view of impeding the ratification” in that state. The minister’s preference for amendments prior to ratification had revived the antifederalist cause in Maryland, but ratification did take place there, nonetheless, at the end of April. No harm done.
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Before he received Madison’s reprimand, Jefferson had already responded warmly to news that ratification had succeeded in nine states (including Maryland, but prior to Virginia). “I sincerely rejoice at the acceptance of our new constitution,” he wrote Madison. “It is a good canvas, on which some strokes only want retouching.” In Jefferson’s mind, some added strokes of the pen were needed both for Virginia’s sake and also to sustain America’s growing reputation for representative government among the liberal minds of Europe.

In fact, while Madison was dealing with Mason and Henry, Jefferson in Paris had been amicably debating the Constitution with Tom Paine and the Marquis de Lafayette. He had to deal with French displeasure at America’s inability to pay the interest on its loans at a time when the French government itself struggled with an acute financial crisis. Ordinary French people were the ones who suffered the most. The French problem was, for Jefferson, another lesson in what can go wrong when government is deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.
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