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Hello and welcome to the Jefferson Madison Letters. I'm Charlie Jett, coming to you from our studio in beautiful downtown Chicago. One letter at a time, we're following the fifty year friendship that helped build a republic. It's december twentieth, seventeen eighty seven. Jefferson is in Paris, and Madison's letters have been arriving all week, three of them in a rush, months of American news landing all at once. The great account of the convention we read last time, with its quiet mention of George Mason's fatal objection reached him just yesterday. He is answering it within twenty four hours. So this is a reply. Madison sent the Constitution across the ocean and asked, in effect, what do you think? Jefferson now answers. And the manner of his answer matters as much as the content. He doesn't lecture. He sets out a balance sheet. He writes what I like. Then he writes what I do not like. The way you talk to someone whose judgment you trust completely. Remember, Jefferson missed the whole convention. Madison built this document, Jefferson knows it and writes with real humility. I am telling you this, he says, merely as a matter of curiosity, for I know your own judgment has been formed. But buried in the what I do not like column is the thing this episode is all about, and it's the thing that will within two years become the first ten amendments, though Jefferson cannot know that as he writes. He has read Mason's objection, and unlike Madison, he thinks Mason is right. Here is the moment live Jefferson at his desk in Paris, weighing the new republic and not yet knowing his verdict will help reshape it. A note before I read I'll pass over the letters opening Thanks Business a missing parcel of rice. Though the very first thanks is worth hearing, he writes First and most for the ciphered paragraph respecting myself. The coded passage from our last episode acknowledged. Then I'll read the constitutional heart nearly whole. Every word is Jefferson's from the manuscript in Madison's papers at the Library of Congress. And catch the echo as he begins. Madison introduced his great account of the Convention as something to make up a letter, Jefferson now introduces his reply the same way, having quote little to fill a letter, he will quote make up the deficiency by adding a few words on the Constitution, a few words. Neither man ever announces the historic. They just write it. Jefferson starts genuously, a long list of what he admires. He writes I like much the general idea of framing a government which should go on of itself peaceably without needing continual recurrence to the state legislatures. I like the organization of the government into legislative, judiciary, and executive, and I'm captivated by the compromise of the opposite claims of the great and little states. Then the turn He writes I will now add what I do not like. First, the omission of a Bill of Rights providing clearly and without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land and not by the law of nations. Jefferson's heard the clever argument against a Bill of Rights, the one James Wilson made, that you don't need to list rights because the government only has the powers specifically given to it. Jefferson dismisses it as gratis dictum, a bare assertion given without proof. And then comes the sentence, and I quote Let me add that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse or rest on inference. Entitled to against every government on earth not a gift the state hands down, but something the people are owed and may demand. Read that twice, because it's the philosophical hinge of the whole Bill of Rights. And here is what the manuscript itself shows. The editors record that this sentence is interlined, squeezed in between two lines already written. The most famous sentence of the letter, the one carved in the country's memory, was an afterthought Jefferson went back and wedged onto the page. He wrote, Let me add, and then literally added, but he isn't finished disliking. He names a second flaw, and this one he underlines. The second feature I dislike and greatly dislike is the abandonment in every instance of the necessity of rotation in office, and most particularly in the case of the president. He is then an officer for life. Jefferson feared a president with no term limit would become, in effect, a king, and that foreign powers would meddle in his election with money and with arms. It would take a hundred and fifty years and the twenty second amendment to answer that worry. Then he states his creed in two of the most famous sentences he ever wrote. I quote I own I am not a friend to the very energetic government. It is always oppressive. And with that he circles back to where we were two episodes ago, Shay's Rebellion. He writes The late rebellion in Massachusetts has given more alarm than I think it should have done. Calculate that one rebellion in thirteen states in the course of eleven years is but one for each state in a century and a half. No country should be so long without one. After all, it is my principle that the will of the majority should always prevail. He closes on the thing he trusts most, not structure, not even rights on paper, but an educated people. He writes Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty. Well, what does Jefferson assume? He assumes that rights precede government. Look again at the key sentence a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, general or particular. That little phrase does enormous work. It means rights aren't created by the Constitution, they exist before it, and the people are simply owed their acknowledgement. This is the Declaration of Independence Thinking, rights as inherent, not granted, applied now to the machinery of the new government. Where Madison saw rights as protected by clever structure, Jefferson assumes they're prior to any structure at all, and that a just government's job is simply to admit them. But what does Jefferson fear? He fears concentrated permanent power in two forms. First, a government that can quietly take a right that was never written down. Second, and he greatly dislikes this one, a president who never leaves. Read the passage on reelection. Jefferson genuinely fears an American chief executive becoming a monarch in all but name, with European powers bankrolling his elections. He's writing from Paris watching real kings up close, and he can see the gravitational pull of unchecked office. It's worth noticing how prescient this was, and how it took a century and a half and a constitutional amendment to address it. So what do they take for granted that we no longer do? That the country's virtue depended upon staying agricultural. There's a striking line near the end. Our governments, and I quote, will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural, and will become corrupt, and again I quote, when they get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe. That is a whole worldview we've left behind, the Jeffersonian faith that liberty lives on the farm and dies in the city. We are now the urban nation he feared. Sitting with that line tells you how differently he imagined the country's future from the one we actually built. So what's missing? The slaves and the women and the unpropertied, the people not included in the people. Jefferson writes soaringly about what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, and he means it. But the circle of the people in seventeen eighty seven was narrow, and Jefferson himself held more than a hundred human beings in bondage at Monticello as he wrote these words about universal entitlement to liberty. The sentence is one of the noblest in the founding. The distance between its promise and the author's life is the contradiction this whole series keeps faith with. The Bill of Rights he's calling for would for generations protect some Americans and not others. That's not a reason to dismiss the sentence. It's a reason to keep reading toward the people it left out. Well Madison reported Mason's objection as one man's complaint. Jefferson just turned it into a principle. A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to. The idea is now loose in the correspondence, pressing on the one man with the power to act on it. But Madison isn't convinced yet. Next time he writes back and pushes against his friend hard. Now that's our fourth letter. Next time Madison answers and makes the case against a Bill of Rights, calling such guarantees mere parchment barriers. The father of the Bill of Rights arguing that he doesn't want one. Today's letter is verified against Founders Online, the National Archives edition of the Founders' Papers, Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, december twentieth, seventeen eighty seven, in the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, volume twelve. You can read every word of it for yourself. Well, thank you for joining us. I'm Charlie Jett, and until next time, stay informed, stay engaged, and stay curious.