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Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson James Madison Letters Series. My name is Charlie Jett, and I'm coming to you from our studio in beautiful downtown Chicago. Two men, fifty years, nearly twelve hundred letters. One of them wrote the Declaration of Independence. The other gave the Constitution its working shape. Between them, across an ocean and a revolution, they argued a republic into being, not in speeches, not in monuments, but in letters sent one at a time before anyone knew how the story would end. You're not going to study that story. You're going to witness it while the ink is still wet and the ending is still unknown. Now a word before we start. This introductory episode runs a little longer than the rest, and that's on purpose. I want to set the stage to show you the whole shape of what's coming and how to listen once we're inside it. So bear with me through this one. Every episode after this is a single letter, just six to eight minutes, short enough to fit in a walk or a commute. Think of this as the map before the journey. Now for fifty years, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison wrote to each other the longest and most productive friendship in American history. They met in 1776, two Virginians in the state legislature. They kept writing until Jefferson died on the fourth of july eighteen twenty six. In between, they helped invent a country. That correspondence runs to nearly twelve hundred and fifty surviving letters. We can't read them all together, so I've chosen the ones that carry the essentials. Not the most famous letters, necessarily, and not a neat sampling from every year. I chose the letters where something turns, where an idea is born, where one man changes the other's mind, where the friendship is tested by power, by war, by slavery, by age, and by memory. Some are great public letters. Some begin with books or seeds or sugar, or a fever in the household. But every one of them earns its place the same way. It moves the story of the friendship of the republic, or of the contradiction at the heart of both. And here's the thing I want you to know going in. This is not a story about two men arguing. The Jefferson and Adams letters were a reconciliation between old rivals. This is something different. This is a story about two men building and trusting each other completely while they did it. So pull up a chair, imagine yourself at the elbow of two friends who are quite literally designing a republic on paper. And remember as we read that not one of these letters knew it was history. Each one was written as news. Now Thomas Jefferson was the elder by eight years, born in 1743, author of the Declaration of Independence, Minister to France, third President of the United States, and founder of the University of Virginia. He was the visionary, the one who reached out for the bold idea. James Madison, born in 1751, was the father of the Constitution and the father of the Bill of Rights, Jefferson's Secretary of State and the fourth President of the United States. He was the architect, the one who knew how to make an idea actually stand up. Put them together and you get something neither could be alone. Jefferson reaches for the beautiful, slightly impossible idea. Madison is the one who answers gently yes, but here's how the world will actually work. That exchange, repeated across fifty years, is the engine of this whole series. Now the last time I mapped the series, I laid it out by theme, but the more I lived with these letters, the more I saw that their real shape follows the men's own lives, where they were and what they were doing. So I've organized the series into four acts, tracing the friendship through the four great chapters of their public life. And the correspondence has a shape of all its own. It runs full at the beginning and full at the end, and it thins in the middle. Now there's a reason for that, and it tells you something about the friendship. So the acts aren't really even, and I haven't tried to make them even. The series follows the letters themselves Full when distance forced the friendship onto paper, spare when the two men governed side by side and can simply talk, and full again when old age put them back at their desks. The first act is the building of the Republic before either man held the presidency, and it's the richest stretch of all because they were apart and writing constantly. It opens with a book order. In 1784, Madison asks Jefferson, newly bound for Paris, to be his bookseller in Europe, and to send along the histories of every Confederacy that ever existed because he's already worried about our own. That's where the partnership begins, not with a grand declaration, but with an errand between friends. From there, this act carries the heart of the early story, the argument that produced the Bill of Rights. Jefferson writes the line that ought to be carved on every courthouse door. I quote, a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth. And here is what makes it a great story. Madison, the man who would write the Bill of Rights, first wrote back to say he wasn't sure it was a good idea. We'll watch Jefferson change his friend's mind one letter at a time. This first act also holds my favorite exchange in the whole correspondence, the most daring idea either man ever put on paper. And here I'm going to use a word that's not used very much. It's called usufruct. Usufruct means the legal right to use and enjoy someone else's property, including any income it produces, without owning the property itself. In 1789, Jefferson proposes that, and I quote, the earth belongs in usufruct to the living, that no generation has the right to bind the next, that every law and every debt ought to expire in nineteen years. It is revolutionary, it is gorgeous, and it's not quite workable. Madison's reply, granting the beauty and dismantling the practicality, may be the finest single letter either man ever wrote to the other. Hold on to that one. The earth belongs to the living, because the whole series comes back to it at the very end. Then the first act closes on a cliffhanger the country had never faced, the election of eighteen hundred, a tie, a deadlock thrown into the House of Representatives, thirty six ballots, and a real question of whether power would transfer peacefully at all. We'll read Jefferson living through it in real time, including the letter where he tells Madison he no longer dares to put a word of politics on paper because his mail is being opened and published against him. The second act is Jefferson's presidency. And here the letters grow quiet for the happiest of reasons. Madison is now Secretary of State at Jefferson's side in the same city. When you can walk down the hall, you don't write. So this is a shorter act, and it turns on the handoff, the letter Jefferson sends in eighteen oh nine, freshly retired at Monticello, to the new president, his protege and now his equal. It's where he dreams out loud of quote an empire for liberty, a continental republic stretching further than the world has ever seen. Keep that phrase in mind too, because it's going to collide later with something Jefferson would rather not look at. The third act is Madison's presidency and the War of eighteen twelve. Now the roles reverse. Jefferson is the one at home in the Virginia Hills, and Madison is the one carrying the weight. Jefferson writes as a counselor from retirement, warning against fighting two enemies at once, cheering the war's early days, and then at the war's darkest hour, doing something I find genuinely moving. In August of eighteen fourteen, the British burned Washington. One month later, Jefferson writes to console a president who has watched the Capitol fall, tells him even George Washington lost battles, that the blame isn't his, and then offers the nation his own library. 10,000 volumes to replace the one that burned. The bookseller of seventeen eighty four, thirty years on, giving the country his books. Madison signed the purchase into law. It became the seed of the Library of Congress we have today. And the fourth act is the long retirement. Two old men in neighboring counties founding the University of Virginia together as their last great project. It's also where the story turns its most honest. The Missouri crisis breaks over the country, and slavery moves to the center of everything. And here I have to tell you something the letters themselves taught me, and it surprised me. I expected to find these two men agonizing together over slavery and the Union. They did not. At the height of the crisis, what they mostly wrote each other about was a fever in their households. Jefferson's real anguish, the famous line about a firebell in the night, unquote, he sent to other men, not to Madison. To his closest friend, on the question that would one day break the country, he was almost silent. We're going to sit with that silence because it's the truest thing this act has to teach. These two men who wrote so beautifully about liberty owned human beings. They build a republic of liberty while living inside a republic of slavery. That contradiction sits at the center of the American founding and we will not look away from it. The series ends where it has to, with Jefferson dying, bankrupt, writing to his oldest friend to ask him to, and I quote, take care of me when dead. And here's the echo I promised you. The man who argued in seventeen eighty nine that the dead have no claim on the living, that no generation may bind the next, asks at the very end to be remembered. Madison wrote back and promised he would, and for ten more years until his own death he kept that promise. That's the bookend the whole series is built on. Everything in between is the story of what they built in the years they were given. So those are the letters I've chosen, the turning points, the echoes, the silences, and the small human favors. Together they let you see not just what Jefferson and Madison believed, but how the friendship actually worked. Now a series like this stands on the shoulders of the scholars who preserved the letters. For the Jefferson Adams correspondence, that scholar was Lester Capan. For Jefferson and Madison, the towering figure, the man to whom this entire series owes its deepest debt, is James Morton Smith. Smith did something that, astonishingly, no one had ever done in the better part of two centuries. He gathered the entire surviving correspondence between these two men, nearly twelve hundred and fifty letters, and published it. Complete for the very first time. The result is his magnificent three volume work, The Republic of Letters, the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison 1776 to 1826, brought out by WW Norton. Every letter annotated, every letter in chronological order. Each chapter opened by an essay that sets the scene, so that an ordinary reader, not just a professional historian, can follow the whole fifty year conversation. And listen to what Smith understood about why these letters matter so much. Neither Jefferson nor Madison kept a diary. Their innermost thoughts didn't go into a journal, they went straight into these letters, to each other. So the correspondence isn't a footnote to their lives, it is the record. Smith called these two the greatest philosopher statesmen of the American Enlightenment, and after three volumes in their company, it's hard to disagree. If anything in this series moves you to want these letters themselves, I can't recommend Smith's The Republic of Letters highly enough. It belongs on the shelf of anyone who loves this country's founding. Without his labor, a project like this simply would not be possible. For our part, every letter you'll hear in this series is also verified word for word against Founders Online, the National Archives digital edition of the Founders' Papers. And I want to be candid with you about what the verification actually caught. In building this series we checked every quotation against the original manuscript, and we found famous lines that had drifted from their true wording and famous lines that turned out to have been written by someone else entirely. That firebell in the night I mentioned? That was written to a man named John Holmes, not to Madison. So we'll only ever quote it as it what it was. And when I read you Jefferson's words to Madison, they are Jefferson's word to Madison, exactly as he wrote them. That matters to me, and I suspect it matters to you. So this is how this works. Each episode takes a single letter. I'll set the scene, where they were, what had just happened, what they were responding to. Then I'll read the letter itself in their own words. And then we'll sit with it for a few minutes and ask the questions that make old letters live. What did they assume? What did they fear? What did they take for granted that we no longer can? And what is missing? What did they fail to see? But I want to tell you how we'll do this because that's the whole point. I'm not going to stand at a distance and describe these letters the way a historian looks back on settled events. I'm going to put you in the room while the ink is still wet, I like that phrase. When the outcome is unknown and everything is still possible. When we open a letter, it is not yet history. It is news. Jefferson does not know Madison will disagree with him. Madison does not know he'll change his mind. The Republic might not hold. You'll hear each letter the way the writer meant it live, uncertain, and unfinished. And then once we've lived the moment together, we'll step back and ask what it meant. Because you and I have the one thing Jefferson and Madison never had. We know what happened next. That's the gift and the ache of it. We get to witness these two men decide the future while they still had to guess at it. So in every episode I'll drop you into the moment first and lift you out to understand it afterwards. That movement, living it, then weighing it, is how this series works. And keep an ear out for one small human thread running the whole way through. It starts with that book order in 1784, but it doesn't stop there. A few years on, Madison is buying maple sugar for Jefferson at a New York auction. Years after that, Jefferson is thanking Madison for a gift of squash seeds from Maine, in the same letter where he dreams of a continental empire. And at the end there are ten thousand books. Across fifty years, in letter after letter, these two enormous historical figures are also just two friends, doing each other favors the monumental and the domestic, always in the same breath. That's the texture of real friendship, and it's part of what makes these letters worth our time. So you don't need a history degree, you just need to be curious about how a republic gets made. And about how two extraordinary friends can build between them one letter at a time. So that's where we're headed. Four acts fifty years, the friendship that helped make America witnessed one letter at a time while the ending was still unknown. I look forward to sharing these important and wonderful exchanges with you and hope that they enhance your understanding and appreciation for what these remarkable men did in real time way back then. I'm Charlie Jett, and until next time, stay informed, stay engaged, and stay curious.