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Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

Review: Was Madison More Radical Than Jefferson?Author(s): James OakesSource: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Winter, 1995), pp. 649-655Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of theEarly American RepublicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3124017

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W A S MADISON M O R E

RADICAL T H A N

JEFFERSON?

James Oakes

The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence Between Thomas Jeffer-

son andJames Madison 1776-1826. 3 vols. Edited by James MortonSmith. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. Pp. Xix, 2073. Illustra-tions. $150.00.)

At the close of his "Preface" and at the opening of his "Introduc-

tion," James Morton Smith quotes twice the late Julian Boyd's as-

sessment of the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and JamesMadison. It was, Boyd exclaimed, "the most extended, the most ele-

vated, the most significant exchange of letters between any two men

in the whole sweep of American History." Well-not quite. The

most "extended?" John Adams corresponded with Jefferson from

May 1777 through April 1826, beating out Madison by a few years.'Then again, where Lester Cappon found 380 letters between Adams

and Jefferson, Smith has reproduced in The Republic of Letters more

than three times that many exchanges between Madison and Jeffer-son. They fill 2,073 pages in three weighty volumes. If by "ex-

tended" Boyd meant voluminous, he may have been right. But are

they "the most elevated, the most significant" of all American let-

ters? Alas, Professor Boyd's enthusiasm surpassed his judgment. The

truth is that the Jefferson-Madison letters can be awfully dull. Most

of them are concerned with minute details of public policy. They are

undoubtedly of great value to students of, say, factional intrigue dur-

ing the Washington administration, diplomatic maneuvers during the

Jefferson and Madison presidencies, or the founding of the Universityof Virginia. But for readers in search of a compelling exchange of

ideas between two of the finest minds ever to grace American public

' TheAdams-JeffersonLetters,ed. LesterJ. Cappon (Chapel Hill, 1959).

JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC, 15 (Winter 1995) ? 1995 Society for Historiansof the Early AmericanRepublic



JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC

life,The

RepublicofLetters s

somethingof a

disappointment.None of this diminishes the editor's achievement. James Morton

Smith has devoted his retirement years to compiling and annotation

these hundreds of letters, and he has risen to the most exalted stan-

dards of his craft. Smith's written introductions comprise some 550

pages. He rightly points out that The Republic of Letters constitutes a

substantial "dual biography" of Jefferson and Madison, far more

comprehensive than Adrienne Koch's previously definitive study of

what she called the "Great Collaboration." To the letters themselves

Smith has attached thousands of footnotes, and at the end of the third

volume heprovides

afourteen-page bibliographical essay

and an in-

dex that stretches on for more than fifty pages. Given the snail's paceat which the Jefferson and Madison papers are crawling off the

presses, scholars can only be grateful for Smith's labor of love. If the

letters themselves do not make the most exhilarating reading, Smith's

impressive editorial apparatus more than compensates.Some critics have suggested that the correspondence is dull be-

cause Madison and Jefferson agreed on most things. They simply had

nothing to argue about. This reading flies in the face of the "progres-sive" orthodoxy that paints Jefferson as the radical egalitarian and

Madison asthe

archdefender of bourgeois stability. To be sure,Koch never accepted this interpretation, and Drew McCoy has made

an interesting case for elevating Madison over Jefferson. Further-

more, Jefferson himself has been subjected to some rough treatment

in recent years.2 Nevertheless the progressive orthodoxy has never

fully disappeared from the historiography. It permeated the work of

the late Merrill Jensen, and Gordon Wood's first book reinforced it.

More recently, Richard Matthews exuberantly revived this interpre-tation. Having made the case for Jefferson's radicalism, Matthews

has recently returned to the fray with an extended brief against Madi-

son.3

Drew R. McCoy, The Last of the Founders.James Madison and the Republican

Legacy (New York, 1989). A less-than-saintly Jefferson rears his head in many of the

essays in JeffersonianLegacies,ed. Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville, 1993).3 Richard K. Matthews, The Radical Politics of ThomasJefferson(Lawrence, KS,

1984); Richard K. Matthews, If Men WereAngels: James Madison and the HeartlessEm-

pire of Reason(Lawrence, KS, 1995).

650



WAS MADISON MORE RADICAL?

There is more thanenough

sustenance in TheRepublicof

Letters o

satisfy the hungriest neo-progressive. Here readers will find Jefferson

registering his misgivings about the new Constitution, wonderingwhether the delegates in Philadelphia have not overreacted to Shays's

Rebellion, suggesting that a little rebellion now and then might be a

healthy thing, that "legislators cannot invent too many devices for

subdividing property," and boldly declaring that "the earthbelongs n

usufruct o theliving." Here also is Madison, worrying about the stabil-

ity of the government and the security of property, defending the

Constitution, and pouring cold water all over Jefferson's idea about

rewritingthe fundamental law

every generation.In short, these let-

ters seem to reveal anew the stock figures of the progressive ortho-

doxy: Jefferson the radical and Madison the conservative.

But "radicalism" is never an easy concept to pin down. One per-son's progressive is someone else's reactionary. This alone is enoughto raise suspicions about terms like radical and reactionary, especiallywhen trying to characterize the political thought of two well-educated

Virginia planters who thought of themselves as political allies. Not

surprisingly, the evidence accumulated in The Republicof Letterscan be

mobilized in a manner that effectively destabilizes the standard pro-

gressive categories.What are readers to

make,for

example,of Madi-

son's letter sent to Paris in late 1788 commenting on Jefferson's

proposed revisions to the Virginia state constitution? Where Jeffer-son's plan provided for the indirect election of the Executive Gover-

nour and the Council of State, Madison suggested instead direct

election "by the people at large" (I, 558-59). Or consider the ex-

change begun in 1803 when Jefferson proposed a constitutional

amendment for organizing the Louisiana territory for the benefit of

"the White inhabitants." Madison altered the wording so as to vest

political power in "a majority of free males above twenty-one years,"but

Jefferson changedthe

wordingback,

explicitly restrictingcitizen-

ship to "white inhabitants" (II, 1269-71). Where Madison's proposal

expanded suffrage by eliminating all property qualifications, Jeffersonwould have introduced an unprecedented racial restriction on citizen-

ship.When these and other pieces of evidence are compiled and set out

systematically, a scholar inclined to mischief could construct a plausi-ble case for the complete inversion of the progressive orthodoxy. In

651




thistelling,

Madison becomes the radical andJefferson

the

reactionary. Parts of the argument would rest on the things Madison,unlike Jefferson, did not say. For example, Madison never arguedthat white prejudices against blacks were rooted in the innate inferior-

ity of Africans, and he never expressed any of Jefferson's revulsion at

the idea of sexual "amalgamation" of blacks and whites. The same

was true of gender distinctions. Jefferson's letters were dotted with

metaphors that always elevated masculinity over femininity. He com-

plained while in Paris that he was forced to pay "an almost womanlyattention to the details of the household, equally perplexing, disgust-

ing,and inconsistent with business." A short time later, still in Paris,

Jefferson praised the revolutionary government of France for having"ushered itself into the world as honest, masculine and dignified" (I,540, 629). Madison's letters are devoid of comparable metaphors.Nor did Madison echo Jefferson's various expressions of contempt for

urban "mobs" (III, 1583).Or consider the differences between Jefferson and Madison on the

subject of free expression. For all the homage Jefferson paid to the

unfettered exchange of ideas, he was notoriously anxious to clampdown on the press. Madison's draft of the Bill of Rights included an

unrestrictedright

to freedom ofexpression,

inpublic print

or inpri-vate conversation, but Jefferson substantially revised Madison's

wording. If Jefferson had had his way, a muddle of obscure qualifica-tions would have stripped the first amendment of its decisive clarity:"The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speakor to write or otherwiseto publish any thing but false facts affecting

injuriously the life, liberty, property, or reputation of others or affect-

ing the peace of the confederacy with foreign nations" (I, 623, 629-

30). Throughout his life, Jefferson repeatedly advocated legal res-

traints on the press, whereas Madison was something of a first

amendment absolutist. In his report on the Alien and Sedition Acts in

1799 Madison asked rhetorically whether the federal government had

any authority to restrain "the licentiousness of the press." His an-

swer was an emphatic no: "the federal government is destitute of all

such authority." In 1825 Madison had to quash Jefferson's attemptsto impose an ideological litmus test for the selection of the Universityof Virginia's first professor of law (III, 1923-5).

Much of historians' faith in progressive orthodoxy rests on the

unexamined premise that Jefferson's localism was intrinsically more

democratic than Madison's support for a stronger central

652




government.The

RepublicofLetters

exposesthe

fallacyof the localist

argument, in both theory and practice. For example, where Madison

wanted the Constitution to extend the Bill of Rights explicitly to all

the states-as the Fourteenth Amendment eventually did-Jeffersonwas prepared to grant states the power to restrict the limits of freedom

within their borders. Madison's letters brilliantly explained why pop-ular sovereignty and natural rights were more secure in large republ-ics rather than under local authority. Most impressively, Madison's

argument rested squarely on the principle of fundamental human

equality. This was already clear in 1785, when Madison published his

extraordinary"remonstrance" on freedom of

religion.The

Virginiastatute establishing an official church, Madison argued, violated the

premise that all humans held an "equal title to the free exercise of

Religion" (I, 376-78).

Forty years later, after Jefferson took up an extreme localist posi-tion in reaction to the Missouri Crisis, Madison twice invoked the

principle of equality against the supporters of states' rights. "A para-mount or even a definitive Authority in the individual states, would

soon make the Constitution and laws different in different States,"Madison argued, "and thusdestroy hatequalityand uniformityof rightsand

dutieswhichform

the essenceof

theCompact" (emphasis added).

To rein-

force his point, Madison forwarded a copy of a letter he had sent

earlier to Spencer Roane. If individual states had the kind of author-

ity Jefferson and Roane were claiming, Madison explained, the Con-

stitution would mean something different in every state and "the vital

principleof equality" would thereby "be deprivedof its virtue" (III, 1865,1868-89, 1874; emphasis added). Jefferson never really agreed. At

one point in his second inaugural address Jefferson gave glancing no-

tice to Madison's argument, yet not once in forty-five years of corre-

spondence did Jefferson attempt to refute his friend's logic. As a

result, Madisonemerges

from these letters asconsistently

lessracist,less sexist, more solidly devoted to free expression, and more resolute

in his commitment to the principle of fundamental human equality.Not even Madison's lifelong concern for the protection of "prop-

erty" justifies the conclusion that he held up the conservative end of

the great collaboration. For one thing, Madison defined "property"in unusually broad terms. Smith quotes from part of a major essay of

1792 in which Madison sharply distinguished a narrow definition of

property from his own, more expansive notion. He opened by

653




declaringthat "a man has a

propertyin his

opinionsand the free

communication of them." By the same reasoning, Madison believed

that man held "property" rights in his freedom to worship as he

pleased, in his "safety and liberty . . . [and] in the free use of his

faculties." In a word, he concluded, "as a man is said to have a rightto his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his

rights." This was consistent with Madison's lifelong fear that political"factions" threatened not only material possessions but religious free-

dom.

If Madison's defense of property was more complicated than the

progressive orthodoxyhas

allowed,the same was true of

Jefferson'sexhilarating pronouncements in favor of popular sovereignty. Jeffer-

son's tolerance for rebellion, for example, was notoriously color-

coded. He assumed a benevolent attitude toward white property own-

ers who violently objected to paying their taxes, but he was not nearlyso well disposed toward the slaves who rebelled against their masters

in San Domingue or toward the Native Americans who forcibly re-

sisted white encroachment.

Jefferson always positioned himself in opposition to the forces of

neo-feudalism, real or imagined. By consistently defining all of his

enemies as advocates ofmonarchy

andaristocracy, Jefferson

was able

to frame his arguments in rhetoric that was more radical in form than

in substance. Thus his soaring declaration that legislatures could not

think up too many ways to subdivide property came at the end of a

critique of feudal property relations in France. In practice, however,

Jefferson never proposed anything more radical than the abolition of

primogeniture and entail, which had virtually no effect on the maldis-

tribution of property in America. He certainly never proposed the

abolition of private property. Yet by repeatedly defining all of his pet

projects as bulwarks against feudal oppression and priestly supersti-

tion, andby dismissing

hisopponents-including antislavery

radi-

cals-as so many "monocrats," Jefferson draped his increasingly

reactionary politics in superficially radical garb.

Such, at least, is one interpretation open to a mischievous reader

of the Jefferson-Madison letters. But turning the progressive ortho-

doxy on its head only duplicates its fundamental mistake: labellingeither of these men as "radicals" obscures more than it reveals. For

example, Jefferson was hardly alone in positioning himself as the en-

emy of all things feudal. Liberals had been doing the same thing ever

654




sinceJohn

Locke devoted his entire First Treatise o ablistering

assault

on Rober Filmer's Patriarcha. "Feudalism may have lingered long in

Europe," Joyce Appleby writes, "but it lingered even longer in

American political discourse where it became the code word for

everything that differentiated Old World atavism from New World

innovation." Appleby has made a strong case for reading Jefferson as

a forward looking liberal-neither the proto-communist of the neo-

progressive imagination nor the reactionary hypocrite of some of his

recent critics.

Much the same can be said of his lifelong friend and partner.

AmongMadison's

contemporariesthere were men who were far

more obsessed than he with the security of property, and there were

others who were far more comfortable with majority rule. Madison

never defended democracy in the inspiring cadences summoned up by

Jefferson, yet it was Madison who devised a structure of governmentthat finally rescued democracy from its ancient associations with an-

archy and tyranny.In important ways, both Jefferson and Madison adhered to what

Isaac Kramnick calls "bourgeois radicalism." Both rejected prescrip-tive hierarchy. Both held that the sovereignty of the government re-

sided in thepeople.

On the other hand, both mencompromised

their

antislavery ideals for the sake of the Union, both advocated the colo-

nization of blacks outside the United States, and late in life both sup-

ported the "diffusion" of slaves into western territories. Finally, both

Jefferson and Madison were "federalists" who believed that libertywas protected by the division of power between state and national

governments. Both supported a constitutional amendment to allow

the federal government to sponsor railroads, turnpikes, and canals.

The difference was that by the 1820s Madison concluded that internal

improvements were so universally popular that the electorate had

changed the Constitution defacto, whereas Jefferson thought the

peo-ple had gone mad.

655

madison jefferson

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