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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, a shopping errand and a declaration of war in the same envelope. Madison writes from New York with a price report on maple sugar and then turns to the frenzy down the street, where shares in Hamilton's new national bank are selling like a gold strike. He calls the whole business a mere scramble for so much public plunder, and buried in his fury is the question that will define the decade. Just who is going to govern the people of the United States? It is Sunday, july tenth, seventeen ninety-one, in New York City, and James Madison, forty years old, a congressman waiting out the summer recess, is writing to Philadelphia where Thomas Jefferson, forty eight years old, is Secretary of State. Seventeen months have passed since the letter we heard last time, and the whole landscape has shifted. The government has moved to Philadelphia. Jefferson has traded Paris for a seat in George Washington's cabinet, and inside that cabinet a rivalry is hardening, because across the table sits the Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. The past winter brought the fight. Hamilton proposed a national bank, a private corporation chartered by Congress, holding the public's money. Madison rose in the House in February and argued the Constitution grants no such power. Jefferson told President Washington the same thing in writing, and then lost. Washington signed the bank into law in February, and six days ago, on the fourth of July of all days, the bank opened its subscription books. The shares sold out within the hour. Now the paper is climbing daily. Fortunes are forming out of pure expectation, and the coffee houses of New York and Philadelphia sound like casinos. Madison is in New York because he never quite left. In May and June he and Jefferson made a month-long ramble up the Hudson and through New England, officially a naturalist's holiday, all botany and Hessian flies and lake trout. Unofficially, historians have wondered ever since what else the two leaders of an emerging opposition were cultivating along the way. Jefferson has gone home to his desk. Madison has stayed. And Jefferson's letter of july sixth is in front of him, with errands in it. Price the maple sugar newly advertised in New York, and get a letter and some money out to Prince, the nurseryman at Flushing. And there is one more piece of news on Madison's desk, and it is bad. Philip Frenau, the poet and editor he and Jefferson have been quietly recruiting to start an opposition newspaper in Philadelphia, has, it seemed, walked away from the whole project. Madison does not know why. He does not know whether there ever will be a paper. He does not know that the thing that he and Jefferson are building even has a name yet. He only knows what he sees at the coffee house, and he picks up his pen. So stand at his shoulder in New York, the July heat coming up off the streets, the buzz of the speculators drifting over from the coffee house. This letter is not history yet. It is Sunday's mail, and the man writing it has no idea he is founding anything. A note before I read this is an extract. Most of the letter with the smaller housekeeping summarized as we go. Every word quoted is Madison's verified against founders online. He begins, as he so often does, with an errand. Your favor of the sixth came to hand on Friday. I went yesterday to the person who advertised the maple sugar for the purpose of executing your commission on that subject. The Commission A future fourth president of the United States has spent his Saturday tracking down a sugar merchant, and listen to the report he brings back. This is a man who does his homework, even on groceries. He writes He tells me that the cargo is not yet arrived from Albany, but is every hour expected, that it will not be sold in parcels of less than fifteen or sixteen hundred pounds, and only at auction, but that the purchasers will, of course, deal it out in smaller quantities, that a part is grained and part not, and that the price of the former will probably be regulated by that of good Muscovado, which sells at about fifteen pounds New York. Grained sugar ungrained sugar five pounds New York currency, the hundred weight, priced against Muscovado, the raw brown cane sugar of the West Indies. Hold that comparison, we will come back to what it carries. He settles the rest of the household business. Jefferson's letter and money will reach Prince's nursery at Flushing one way or another, and then he adds the following The Maple Seed is not arrived. The birch bark has been in my hands some days and will be forwarded as you suggest. Maple Seed Birch Bark Souvenirs of the Spring Ramble Up the Hudson, the friendship at its most domestic. And then with no more transition than a paragraph break, the temperature of the letter changes completely. He writes The bank shares have risen as much as the market here as in Philadelphia. It seems admitted on all hands now that the plan of the institution gives a moral certainty of gain to the subscribers with scarce a physical possibility of loss. A moral certainty of gain scarce a physical possibility of loss. A machine that cannot lose, built by Congress, guaranteed by the public. And now the sentence this episode is named for. He writes The subscriptions are consequently a mere scramble for so much public plunder which will be engrossed by those already loaded with the spoils of individuals. Public plunder engrossed, swallowed whole by men already loaded with the spoils of individuals. The fortunes made by buying up the depreciated war debt from its original holders for a fraction of its face. This is fury. But watch what Madison does with fury. He reads it as evidence when he writes It pretty clearly appears also in what proportions the public debt lies in the country, what sort of hands hold it, and by whom the people of the United States are to be governed. There it is, the sentence under the sentence By whom are the people of the United States to be governed? Not a question about sugar or scrip or share prices. The frenzy has pulled back a curtain. The debt is concentrated, the hands holding it are few, and money like that does not stay out of politics, and the proof for Madison is already sitting in Congress. He writes Of all the shameful circumstances of this business, it is among the greatest to see the members of the legislature who were most active in pushing this job openly grasping its emoluments. The men who voted the bank into being are buying the stock openly, and then the crowning detail, one name dropped with surgical precision. He writes Skyler is to be put at the head of the directors if the weight of the New York subscribers can affect it. Philip Skyler, the United States Senator from New York, and the letter doesn't say it, because Jefferson doesn't need telling, Alexander Hamilton's father in law. Then Madison looks out the window and gives us the whole city in three sentences. He writes nothing new is talked of here. In fact, stock jobbing drowns every other subject. The coffee house is an eternal buzz with the gamblers. And now the bad news, the project that was supposed to be their answer to all of this. He writes I have just understood that Frenau is now here and has abandoned his Philadelphia project. From what cause I am wholly unable to divine, unless those who know his talents and hate his political principles should have practiced some artifice for the purpose. Frenau's Philadelphia project is the newspaper, the opposition paper Madison and Jefferson have been quietly arranging down to a day job for its editors in Jefferson's own State Department, and it has apparently just collapsed. Notice where Madison's mind goes first Artifist Sabotage by those who hate his political principles. Whether or not he's right, the instinct tells you that these letters have become dispatches from one side of a fight. He closes with his health. The summer fevers that stalk him have already cost him a planned trip through New England, and though he is free of fever at the moment, he is keeping to what he calls his defensive precautions. A borrowed pamphlet on weights and measures is on its way to Jefferson's desk. And then the sign off always and most affectionately yours James Madison junior. So what does Madison assume? He assumes that money is a map. Read the pivot sentence again. The frenzy shows what sort of hands hold the debt and by whom the people of the United States are to be governed. Madison assumes, without pausing to argue it, that ownership and power are in the same picture. Tell me who owns the paper, and I will tell you who will own the government. And he assumes his reader completely. There is no persuasion in this letter, no case being built, no evidence marshaled for a skeptic. Jefferson gets conclusions in shorthand, because after seven years of these letters, these two men share one set of eyes. But what does Madison fear? Not that the bank will fail, that it will succeed. He writes a moral certainty of gain, and that's not the language of a crash warning, it's the language of capture. What frightens Madison is a machine that cannot lose, welded into the very legislature that built it, congressmen who are openly grasping its emoluments, a senator moving for the directorship. This is the old eighteenth century meaning of corruption, not bribes in envelopes, but a government financially entangled with itself until no one can say where the public's interest ends and the shareholders begins. Madison fears that the election that matters most is being held at the subscription window, and the people of the United States are not invited. So what do they take for granted that we no longer do? That shame would do the work by itself. Madison calls the legislature's stock grabbing shameful, and that word is doing all the enforcement there is. No disclosure rules, no ethics committees, no divestment requirements, none of that exists yet. Both men take for granted that in a republic, a lawmaker profiting from his own law is self evidently disqualifying, that to name the thing is to punish it. We know because we have had two more centuries of this, that shame is not a mechanism. They are standing on the exact ground where the whole modern machinery of conflict of interest law would eventually be built, and they assume that the Republic can run on blushing. So what is missing? Three silences, each one loud. The first is a name Hamilton. His system is everywhere in this letter the bank, the debt, the jobbers, his own father in law, and the man himself appears nowhere. Madison attacks the machine and walks silently around its architect. The closest he comes is Skylar. The second missing word is party. Look at what this letter actually contains. Opposition intelligence, a recruited editor, coordinated fury between the two leaders of a movement. This is a political party being born on the page, written by two men who officially believe parties are a disease. They are building the thing they deplore, and they cannot yet say its name. We knew Frenau comes back. The National Gazette launches that fall, and it helps give the thing a name Republican. Madison tonight knows none of that. And the third silence sits inside the sugar. Maple sugar in 1791 is not just a grocery item, it is a cause. Reformers, Benjamin Rush among them, are promoting it as a homegrown replacement for West Indian cane, sugar made by free hands instead of enslaved ones. Jefferson has embraced that hope in his own letters. So this is a genuinely anti slavery errand, commissioned by a man who farms and gardens, and whose maple trees when they arrive will be worked by people he owns. Neither man remarks on it. The letter cannot see it. We have to. Well, in closing, hold the two halves of this letter side by side. In one paragraph, a friend prices maple sugar for another friend's table, sugar they hope free hands can make. In the next, he watches a machine of guaranteed profit bolt itself to the government they built. The errand and the alarm on one page, in one steady hand, because for these two men there was never a line between the life of a friendship and the life of the Republic. And the question Madison asks here, who in the end governs the people of the United States is the question the next ten years of these letters will fight over. Starting now, they are not just watching the government, they are organizing against part of it. Well, that's our ninth letter, and it opens the movement we're calling Building an Opposition. The partnership that began with a book order and survived the great argument over the rights of the living now turns to face the first hard domestic fight of the new government, and the friendship starts becoming a party. Next time the stakes rise again. It is the summer of seventeen ninety three, war has engulfed Europe, and Hamilton is in the newspapers under the pen name Pacificus, arguing for sweeping presidential power. Jefferson's answer will be to reach for the best weapon he has. He writes For God's sake, my dear sir, he will write to Madison, take up your pen and cut him to pieces in the face of the public. Well, today's letter is verified against Founders Online, the National Archives edition of the Founders' Papers, James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, july tenth, seventeen ninety-one, in the papers of Thomas Jefferson, volume twenty. You can read every word for yourself. Well I'm Charlie Jett, and until next time, stay informed, stay engaged, and stay curious.