American Sphinx (47 page)

Finally, there is the much-quoted defense by Madison. Jefferson had asked his old disciple “to take care of me when dead,” a poignant request that the ever-loyal Madison did not fail to fulfill in the 1830s, when southern secessionists tried to claim Jefferson as their own. No one could challenge Madison’s claim that he knew Jefferson better than any man alive, and he expressed his clear conviction that “the charges against Mr. Jefferson,” meaning the claims on his patrimony by secessionists and resolute states’ righters, “can be duly refuted.” Madison observed that “allowances also ought to be made for a habit in Mr. Jefferson as in others of great genius of expressing in strong and round terms, impressions of the moment.” A few latter-day utterances, lifted out of context, ought not to be allowed to align Jefferson’s long legacy with the most reactionary elements in the South. Coming as it did from Jefferson’s closest confidant, who was also a Virginian with impeccable credentials as a defender of southern interests, Madison’s insistence that Jefferson not be taken literally as a supporter of secession was both plausible and compelling.
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Each of these efforts at extenuation and helpful explication is true enough, especially Madison’s warning that Jefferson’s most disarmingly extreme statements not be seized upon in isolation as fair samples of his final thoughts. But it is also true that efforts to dismiss his latter-day political pronouncements as aberrations will not do. Whatever impact his financial predicament had on his emotional stability, he found ways to shield himself from the full implication of his indebtedness until only a few months before his death, using the same denial mechanisms that had served him so well throughout his life. And the narrowly partisan character of his correspondents was not just some accident of fate; Jefferson chose to focus his exchanges on politics with spokesmen for a “Virginia-writ-large” version of America because they tended to share his sense of impending doom for an agrarian society and a way of life that was inextricably bound up with slavery. Even Madison’s persuasive defense—that Jefferson had an inherently rhetorical way with ideas that ought not always be taken literally—must be challenged, since the rhetorical power of Jefferson’s political utterances was a central feature of their appeal and the singularly most significant key to the endurance of his legacy. In sum, Jefferson’s final thoughts on the meaning of the American Revolution and what that meaning meant for the government of the emergent American nation
were
extreme, but not in the sense of being aberrant or wildly misrepresentative; they were intensifications and purifications of what he had been saying all along.

Perhaps alone among Jefferson’s contemporaries, Madison understood all this. (Adams kept trying to understand, but his classical assumptions about the need to discipline and balance political power prevented him from grasping the seminal source of Jefferson’s message.) Madison’s defense of Jefferson was in fact more than a bit disingenuous, since his own personal correspondence and conversations with his mentor during the last five years of Jefferson’s life gave him unique access to the final expression of Jeffersonian political wisdom, which was eminently vulnerable to capture by the southern secessionists. But Madison also understood better than anyone else that Jefferson was more a political visionary than a political thinker. In that ultimate sense his message defied capture by any single faction or interest group, including the ascendant southern secessionists; indeed it defied all traditional assumptions about what was possible in politics.

Madison tended to share Jefferson’s foreboding fears of consolidation. Like Jefferson, he was trapped by the unattractive implications of the slavery question; he also opposed the restrictions on slavery imposed by the Missouri Compromise and sought relief in the illusion of diffusion, as well as the equally illusory belief that gradual emancipation was somehow still feasible. Moreover, one of his last acts as president was to veto the bill for internal improvements on the ground that it granted the federal government unconstitutional powers. In all these crucial ways he and Jefferson agreed, making it possible for Madison to commiserate in good conscience with his aging mentor and his tortured thoughts after 1820.
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One area, however, where Madison preferred to maintain a discreet silence was Jefferson’s familiar refrain about what had been intended at the Constitutional Convention. “Can it be believed,” Jefferson asked rhetorically, “that under the jealousies prevailing against the General Government, at the adoption of the Constitution, the States meant to surrender the authority of preserving order, of enforcing moral duties and restraining vice, within their own territory?” Jefferson’s long-standing formula was straightforward: “I believe the States can best govern our home concerns and the General Government our foreign ones.” Or, as he put it in his most graphic formulation, “the federal is, in truth, our foreign government. . . .” Madison preferred to answer such assertions with elliptical statements. “The Gordion Knot of the Constitution,” he observed, “seems to lie in the problem of collision between the federal and State powers. . . .” While Madison himself wanted to blur both the sovereignty question and the extent of his disagreement with Jefferson, his wife, Dolley, in a note appended to her husband’s papers soon after his death, spoke more candidly: “Thomas Jefferson was not in America pending the framing of the Constitution, whose information in all that occurred in the Convention, and of the motives and intents of the framers, was derived from Mr. Madison, whose opinions guided him in the construction of that instrument, was looked up to many as its father and almost unanimously as its only true repositor.” When it came to constitutional questions, in short, Jefferson often did not know what he was talking about.
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The disagreement came to a head, as it logically and legally was almost obliged to do, over Jefferson’s colorful denunciations of the Supreme Court. The ultimate symbol of consolidation for Jefferson was the Marshall Court, sitting atop the federal government like a Federalist sanctuary, with Marshall dispensing his judicial verdicts like some malignant Buddha. “The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary,” Jefferson wrote in 1821. “That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is engulphing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them.” His most frequent image was of the Supreme Court as “the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated republic.” Most frustrating of all was Marshall himself, who seemed to possess magical powers of influence over his fellow justices. “An opinion is huddled up in conclave,” Jefferson noted in disgust, “delivered as if unanimous, and with the silent acquiescence of lazy or timid associates, by a crafty chief judge, who sophisticates the law to his mind, by the turn of his own reasoning.” At the very least, Jefferson urged, Marshall’s quiet despotism should be challenged by requiring all Supreme Court justices to submit separate “seriatim opinions,” so that dissent within the Court could be exposed and the illusion of godlike unanimity—Marshall’s preferred effect—could be destroyed.
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Madison tended to agree with Jefferson about Marshall’s formidable influence and the need for seriatim opinions by all the justices on the court. As long as the chief justice remained in place, one could expect no limits on the encroachments of the federal government when it came either to the slavery question in the western territories or to the presumption of federal control over internal improvements. But Jefferson went much further, denying altogether the power of the Supreme Court to decide on questions of constitutionality. “The ultimate arbiter,” he insisted, “is the people of the Union, assembled by their deputies in convention, at the call of Congress, or of two thirds of the States.” In other words, Jefferson denied the principle of judicial review and argued that the provisions made for amending the Constitution were the only proper procedures for deciding all questions of constitutionality.
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Madison, ever the diplomat with his lifelong colleague and friend, tried to avoid an open break by first suggesting that Jefferson’s preferred modus operandi was rather cumbersome, then concurring that Marshall’s decisions were indeed enough to test one’s patience. Then, however, came the devastating clincher: “But the abuse of a trust does not disprove its existence.” Madison accepted, and had all along accepted, the principle of judicial review. If there was the spirit of ’76, which Jefferson could plausibly claim to know firsthand, there was also the spirit of ’87, which Madison could claim with equivalent plausibility to know with comparable intimacy. The clear intention of the framers of the Constitution, Madison told his friend, was to make the Supreme Court the ultimate arbiter of federal versus state jurisdiction, the final judge, as Madison put it, of any “trial of strength between the Posse headed by the Marshal and the Posse headed by the Sheriff.”
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It was a rather astounding fact that the two Virginians had worked together so closely, so harmoniously for so many years and this elemental difference of opinion had never surfaced before. Despite Madison’s gentle and, as always, deferential tone toward his old friend, Jefferson could not have missed the point, for it came up again little more than a year later in another context. Jefferson had prepared a draft proposal entitled “The Solemn Declaration and Protest of the Commonwealth of Virginia” in which he attempted to carve out a position that would permit his home state to oppose federal legislation for internal improvements. He identified control over its domestic affairs as one of “the rights retained by the states, rights which never have been yielded, and which this state will never voluntarily yield. . . .” Then, after disavowing any desire to threaten the Union or risk any “immediate rupture,” declaring “such a rupture as among the greatest calamities which could befall them,” he threatened precisely the action that he had disavowed: Destroying the Union would produce a calamity, to be sure, “but not the greatest” calamity; there was “yet one greater, submission to a government of unlimited powers.” He sent the draft proposal to Madison with a note, saying that he “would not hazard so important a measure against your opinion, nor even without its support.”
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Madison wrote back within the week. “You asked an early answer,” he observed, “and I have hurried one, at the risk of crudeness in some of its views of the subject.” The essence of the lengthy answer was that Jefferson’s proposed draft was “an anomaly without any operative character.” Congress had passed the act funding internal improvements by a decisive majority. The only ground on which the act could be overturned was for the Supreme Court to find it unconstitutional, a course that was unlikely in the extreme given Marshall’s predilections and, irony of ironies, a course that Jefferson considered illegal anyway. Whatever one thought about internal improvements as a stalking-horse for the evils of consolidation, Virginia had to obey the law. To suggest otherwise was to raise the specter that states need not abide by laws they found objectionable. This was a recipe for civil war and eventual anarchy, precisely the danger the Constitution was designed to avoid and, Madison urged ever so discreetly, hardly the course Jefferson wished associated with his name. Jefferson almost always listened when Madison offered constitutional advice. “I have read the last with entire approbation and adoption of its views,” he reported back to Madison, and “have therefore suppressed my paper. . . .” A few years later, when Madison was defending Jefferson’s legacy against the claims of extreme states’ righters during the Nullification Crisis, Jefferson’s decision to withdraw his proposal made Madison’s task much easier, and the benign duplicity of his defense more justifiable.
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Nevertheless, this last exchange and eventual collaboration with Madison are extremely revealing, and for reasons that extend far beyond the matter of Jefferson’s vulnerability to, or rescue from, emergent southern secessionists. Adams had been telling Jefferson for several years that the Jeffersonian version of what the American Revolution actually meant was both idiosyncratic and irresponsible. Now Madison was telling him that he had failed to grasp the central achievement of the constitutional settlement of 1787–88, which was to grant the federal government sufficient sovereignty to assure a national system of laws that all states and all individuals were obliged to obey. Both Adams and Madison, in their different ways, were informing Jefferson that the outstanding accomplishment of the revolutionary generation had been the realistic recognition of the need for limits as well as liberation, that the American republic had endured because its creators made sensible compromises with political power, that the genius of the American Revolution resided in its capacity to harness, indeed to consolidate, the energies released by the movement for independence.

But Jefferson, it turned out, had not seen it that way at all. He regarded himself as the untamed essence of the original revolutionary impulse, uncontaminated by any implicit understandings of 1776 (here he parted with Adams) or any explicit compromises with political power in 1787–88 (here he parted with Madison). Indeed what his two old friends regarded as realistic limitations designed to assure the stability of the republican experiment, he believed betrayals of the true meaning of the American Revolution, which was not to harness individual energies but to release them. Even such intimate collaborators as Adams and Madison might consider his vision alluringly irresponsible, the kind of dangerously romantic aversion to established authority that one needed to get over. But Jefferson’s statements during his last years of life, far from being aberrant ramblings, represented a consistent rededication to his visionary principles. All compromises with political power were pacts with the devil. All efforts at political consolidation were treasonable acts.