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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
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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).
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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
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JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
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
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WAS MADISON MORE RADICAL?
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
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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
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WAS MADISON MORE RADICAL?
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