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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 50-year friendship that helped build a republic. Today we provide Jefferson's answer to the boldest idea in the correspondence that has finally reached Madison's desk in New York, five months after it was written. Madison calls Jefferson's ideas a great one. And then, class by class, objection by objection, with all the gentleness of a friend and all the rigor of a builder, Madison takes it apart. It's February 4th, 1790 in New York, and James Madison, he turns 39 next month, is in the second session of the first Congress, still the working engine of a new government. And remember where we left the usufruct letter sealed in Paris, waiting for a ship, its author confessing he did not know by what occasion he would send it. Now we know the occasion. It was Jefferson himself. The letter crossed the ocean in his own baggage, rode home with him to Virginia, and was finally enclosed in a letter he wrote from Monticello on January 9th. Days ago it reached Madison at last, five months from ink to reader. And think about what has changed while he traveled. Jefferson is not in Paris anymore. He is home at Monticello, and on his doorstep waiting was President Washington's offer to make him the first Secretary of State. As Madison writes this reply, his friend has not yet said yes. Nobody knows whether the author of the boldest idea in the correspondence is about to become a private citizen or the new government's chief diplomat. And the timing of the letter's arrival is almost too apt. Jefferson's theory says no generation may bind the next with debt. It lands in New York in the very weeks the first Congress opens its great fight over the national debt. Secretary Hamilton's report on public credit is on the members' desks, and the question of who will pay for the revolution and on what terms and for how long is about to consume the session. Madison is not reading a philosophical exercise. He is reading it with the debt debate roaring toward him, and no one can yet say where that fight will land or what it will cost the men who wage it. So sit with him at his desk in New York, the much travelled letter finally opened beside the fresh sheet, the reply not a word old. A note before I read this is a long and very dense letter, Madison at his most systematic, and I'll summarize the connective argument between the passages I read in full. Every word quoted is Madison's from the letter Jefferson received verified against founders online. Madison begins with the arrival, and pay attention to the dates incited. He writes Your favor of the ninth of January, enclosing one of September last, did not get to hand till a few days ago. One of September last The delayed letter has landed, and Madison's first verdict on it is generous and genuine. He writes The idea which the latter evolves is a great one and suggests many interesting reflections to legislatures, particularly when contracting and providing for public debts. A great one. He means it, but listen to what comes next, the sentence that announces with perfect courtesy that a rebuttal is coming. He writes My first thoughts, though coinciding with many of yours, lead me to view the doctrine as not in all respects compatible with the course of human affairs. I will endeavor to sketch the grounds of my skepticism. The course of human affairs Theory is about to meet the world. And now Madison does something that tells you everything about how these two men argued. Before he answers Jefferson's case, he restates it in his own words fairly in its strongest form, and then confirms, and I quote, this I understand to be the outline of the argument. He will not fight a weakened version of his friend's idea. He builds the idea back up to full strength first, so that whatever survives his objection has actually been tested. Then he lays out his method, the whole rebuttal in three moves. He writes The Acts of a political society may be divided into three classes. First, the fundamental constitution of the government. Second, laws involving stipulations which render them irrevocable at the will of the legislature. And third, laws involving no such irrevocable quality. Constitutions binding commitments, ordinary laws. He will run Jefferson's principle through each, and watch where it breaks. First, Constitutions. Should they really expire every nineteen years? Madison answers with questions and each one lands like a hammer. He writes and I quote Would not a government so often revised become too mutable to retain those prejudices in its favor which antiquity inspires, and which are perhaps a salutatory aid to the most rational government in the most enlightened age? Would not such a periodical revision engender pernicious factions that might not otherwise come into existence? Would not, in fine, a government depending for its existence beyond a fixed date on some positive and authentic intervention of the society itself be too subject to the casualty and consequences of an actual interregnum. Three questions three wounds A constitution that dies on schedule invites faction at every deadline, gambles on chaos between governments, and most striking of all loses the reverence that only age can give it. Madison is saying something almost scandalous to the enlightenment mind, that even the most rational government needs the prejudice of antiquity on its side. People obey old things. Take away the oldness, and you take away part of the obedience. Second, the deaths, and here Madison turns Jefferson's own foundation against him. If the earth is the gift of nature to the living, he says, then the living hold title only to the earth in its natural state. But that is not the earth they actually receive. He writes, and I quote The improvements made by the dead form a charge against the living who take the benefit of them. This charge can no otherwise be satisfied than by executing the will of the dead accompanying the approvements. The dead, he says, do not just leave debts, they leave cleared fields, built roads, won wars, and a war for independence whose benefit, Madison says, descend through many generations. Some debts are incurred for the unborn. Such, perhaps, is the present debt of the United States. The generation that borrowed to win the revolution borrowed on behalf of every generation that would live free because of it. And then the two sentences that carry the whole rebuttal Madison at his most compressed he writes There seems then to be a foundation in the nature of things, in the relation which one generation bears to another, for the descent of obligations from one to another. Equity requires it. Mutual good is promoted by it. Equity requires it words directly against Jefferson's whole edifice. The generations are not strangers, Madison says, not foreign nations dealing at arm's length. They are bound together in a chain of benefits conferred and obligations honored. The only real rule is honest bookkeeping. He writes to see that the deaths against the latter do not exceed the advances made by the former. Then the third class, ordinary laws, and here Madison, the practical man, takes over. Let every law expire on schedule and what happens on expiration day. Property rights lapse. Contracts dissolve. Everything must be reenacted against the clock forever. And he continues and I quote all the rights depending on positive laws, that is most of the rights of property would become absolutely defunct, and the most violent struggles be generated between those interested in reviving and those interested in new modeling the former state of property. And who wins in that recurring scramble? Not everyone equally. The uncertainty, Madison writes, would give a disproportionate advantage to the more over the less sagacious and enterprising part of society. The sharp operators feast. Ordinary people lose. If that argument sounds familiar, it should. It is the same warning Madison had published a year and a half earlier in The Federalist. Unstable law is a subsidy to the clever few at the expense of everyone else. He is not improvising an objection to please himself. He is answering his friend with the settled conviction of his life's work. So what holds society together if not perpetual reconsent? Madison names it the quiet doctrine underneath every functioning government. He writes I find no relief from these consequences, but in the received doctrine that a tacit assent may be given to established constitutions and laws, and that this assent may be inferred where no positive dissent appears. Tacit Assent We consent by staying, by living under the law without rising against it. Take that away, Madison argues, and even majority rule collapses, because the majority's right to bind the minority does not result, I conceive, from the laws of nature, but from the compact founded on conveniency. Pull one thread of Jefferson's logic and the whole fabric of civil society comes loose, and then the close, and it may be the most touching thing in the letter. Having dismantled the doctrine for four pages, Madison refuses to bury it. He writes It would give me singular pleasure to see it first announced in the proceedings of the United States, and always kept in their view, in a salutatory curb on living generations from imposing unjust or necessary burdens on their successors. But this is a pleasure which I have little hope of enjoying. Madison wants the principle kept in view as a curb, a conscience, a warning, even though he has just proven it cannot be a law. And why such little hope? Because he writes with a weary honesty, it is so much easier to espy the little difficulties immediately incident to every great plan than to comprehend its general and remote benefits. The sublime truths of philosophy are not yet visible to the naked eye of an ordinary politician. Then he signs off the way he always does. He writes, I remain always and most effectively yours, and the greatest philosophical exchange of their fifty years is over, settled the way friends settle things, completely and without a single raised voice. So what does Madison assume? He assumes that a government has to work on a Tuesday morning. Every one of his objections comes from the same place. Institutions live in time among actual human beings, with rents due and crops in the ground and speculators watching the calendar. Where Jefferson reasons downward from a self-evident principle, Madison reasons outward from consequences. What would people do on the day the Constitution expired? He assumes that stability is not the enemy of liberty but its precondition, that reverence for law, even the prejudice that mere oldness inspires, is a load bearing wall, and that a beautiful principle which produces an ugly Tuesday is not, in the end, a principle of government. It is the mind of the builder, and never once stops honoring the mind of the philosopher it is correcting. So what does Madison fear? He fears that expiration date itself. Read his three questions again faction, interregnum, the loss of reverence, and beneath them his picture of the third class, property rights going absolutely defunct, violent struggles over the redivision of everything, and the sagacious and enterprising few feasting upon the uncertainty while everyone else loses ground. That last fear is the one he had already published in the Federalist, unstable law as a standing advantage to the clever over the ordinary. Madison fears the recurring crisis Jefferson's principle would build into the calendar. Not one revolution, but a scheduled one, every nineteen years forever. He had spent seventeen eighty seven designing a machine to break the violence of faction. He was not going to let his best friend wind faction into the clockwork. So what do they take for granted that we no longer do? That reverence for a constitution has to be grown and can be squandered. Madison's most striking claim is that even the most rational government needs the prejudice which antiquity inspires, that a constitution's authority is not automatic, but accumulates year by year, like soil. We live on the far side of that accumulation. Two centuries deep in constitutional veneration, we take the document's authority as a given, something the founding simply handed us. Madison in seventeen ninety is telling Jefferson it is the most fragile thing they possess. One year old, unproven, and entirely capable of being argued or amended into contempt. We know the reverence took root. He's writing at the moment when it might not, which is exactly why he refuses to schedule its death. So what's missing? Two silences, and they weigh the same. The first is inside the word property. When Madison warns that expiring laws would render the most rights of property absolutely defunct, the property law he is defending in Virginia in seventeen ninety, includes property in human beings. The stability he is protecting protected slavery too. The wills and inheritances, his improvements of the dead argument, honors past enslaved people from generation to generation as surely as they passed fields and roads. Neither man names it. The letter's finest reasoning stands on ground it never examines, and the series does not look away from that. The second silence is the machinery. Madison blesses the principle as a salutary curb, a conscience to be kept in view, but he gives no enforcement, no institution, no teeth. A curb that lives only in view is a hope, not a law. Every generation since has borrowed against the next and called it necessity. Madison won the argument. Whether anyone won the problem, we are still finding out. Well, in closing, look at what these two friends just did. One sent the other the boldest idea of his life and asked him to test it. The other tested it to its destruction, fairly, thoroughly, restating it at full strength before answering it, and then, having won, asked that the idea be kept in view forever as the conscience of the Republic. No victory lap, no wounded pride. The philosopher supplied the star, the builder supplied the ground, and the argument between them, what do the living owe the dead, and what may they charge the unborn, is still the argument under every budget, every debt ceiling, and every amendment. They had it first, and they had it as friends. Well that's our eighth letter, and it closes the movement we've called The Earth Belongs to the Living. The spark that crossed the ocean, the engine answered, and the two positions these friends staked out have framed the American argument about debt and obligation ever since. Next time the correspondence turns a corner. It is the summer of seventeen ninety one, and the letter opens with Madison running an errand for Jefferson, maple sugar of all things, before it pivots into something new in these pages Fury. Hamilton's financial system is up and running. The scramble for bank stock is on, and Madison calls it what he thinks it is, a mere scramble for so much public plunder. The friendship is about to become an opposition. Now today's letter is verified against Founders Online, the National Archives edition of the Founders' Papers, James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, February 4th, 1790, in the Papers of James Madison, Volume 13. You can read every word for yourself. Well I'm Charlie Jett, thanking you for joining us. And until next time, stay informed, stay engaged, and stay curious.