Madison and Jefferson

"Madison and Jefferson had a personal and political partnership that lasted fifty years. These two men loved each other, respected each other, and enjoyed each other’s company. It’s an enduring 50 year partnership, which no one had written a book about since 1950. It’s called Madison and Jefferson , rather than the other way around, because although Madison is generally thought of as Jefferson’s protégé, they were in all respects equals. You could say the Jefferson’s presidency was a co-presidency with Madison, his secretary of state. People think of Madison as the cerebral father of the Constitution, which is accurate, but he was also a power player in Congress, especially in the troubled 1790s, when he held political seniority. Madison was instrumental in forging the anti-Hamilton political interest in Congress that ultimately backed Jefferson. There was nothing Jefferson did not consult Madison on. The book identifies awkward truths that generations of patriotic mythmakers have avoided facing. It’s a story of country gentlemen practicing hardball politics. We think of democracy as something open and above board, but both Madison and Jefferson came to believe that political progress was best arranged in secret. Well, he had many lifelong friendships, and he knew how to use them to his advantage. He used his pen to mold opinion, to build alliances, and to forge plans sometimes in coded letters or in small conclaves. Then he and Madison presented pre-formed plans to Congress. Jefferson goaded his allies to enact his political will. In Democracy’s Muse , I write about how, from FDR to the present, every president and many members of Congress have quoted Jefferson to advance their own partisan agendas. His words were heroic. But he was someone who had inherited from his father and from his father-in-law a couple of hundred African Americans as property. That’s the world he was born into. “When I lecture, I use the term ‘timid abolitionist’” The question is: Why didn’t he do more to bring it to an end? He wrote about slavery as a sin, boldly, in the early 1780s. He wrote that slavery destroyed the virtue of white kids, who, growing up, had to learn the attitudes that embodied mastery. When I lecture, I use the term ‘timid abolitionist’ which is to say Jefferson wasn’t going to say anything more in public than what he wrote when he was young when he hoped that Virginia’s Legislature would find a way to eradicate slavery. He left the task of getting rid of this evil to the next generation. We focus on Jefferson as the man who should’ve done more. But Washington was president for eight years and he didn’t lift a finger to free African Americans in his lifetime. He did free his slaves in his will, but it wasn’t immediate. Those slaves were only freed after his widow, Martha, died. Nancy and I just wrote a book about John and John Quincy Adams called The Problem of Democracy . It does distinguish the Adams family from the Virginian founders. In New England, they didn’t grow up around slaves. A New Englander might’ve had a household slave or one person who helped in the field. None of the New England states held as slaves more than 1-2% of its population at any time. In Virginia that figure was around 40%. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Virginians’ economic well-being depended on slavery. Yet some in the state did work to find an end to slavery by compensating owners for their loss of property—a bill promoted by Jefferson’s grandson that nearly passed the Virginia legislature in 1832. Jefferson said that blacks and whites could never live together peacefully, because of understandable black resentments as well as white prejudices. This is what a majority of white early Americans probably believed. So, we would have to indict his entire generation and the entire leadership group for greed and a collective failure to cure their society of a species of injustice and immorality we find ugly and impossible to reconcile. Perhaps the Adamses were morally superior in this area of concern. But John Adams embraced Jefferson’s etiology in the 1780s when Jefferson wrote that recolonization of freed blacks to West Africa or the Caribbean would be the best way to remove slavery from American shores."