The Jefferson Madison Letters
For fifty years, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison wrote to each other — across an ocean, across a revolution, across the whole experiment of building a republic. Theirs was the most consequential friendship in American history, and most of it survives on paper: nearly 1,250 letters, written between 1776 and Jefferson's death in 1826.
We can't read all 1,250 together. So I've chosen thirty — the ones that carry the essentials: the argument that produced the Bill of Rights, the exchange over whether the earth belongs to the living, the building of a political party, two presidencies, the Missouri crisis, and the founding of the University of Virginia.
This is not a series about two men arguing. It is a series about two men building. When they disagreed — over a bill of rights, over how far one generation may bind the next — they did it as allies who trusted each other completely. And we do not look away from the contradiction at the center of it: they built a republic of liberty while living inside a republic of slavery.
In each episode, host Charlie Jett reads a single letter, sets its scene, and asks what it still has to teach us. A history lesson, from the founders themselves — one letter at a time.
The Jefferson Madison Letters
11 Jefferson on the Jay Treaty, Curtius and Camillus, and the Colossus
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Writing from Monticello on September 21, 1795, at the height of the Jay Treaty storm, the retired Thomas Jefferson sends James Madison a dispatch from the pamphlet war. A box of Mathew Carey's treaty compendium has arrived from John Beckley, clerk of the House, for distribution among Virginia republicans; Jefferson forwards the essay signed “Curtius,” pronounces it “evidently written by Hamilton,” and reports a remarkable experiment — he gave copies “to honest sound hearted men of common understanding,” found “they were not able to parry the sophistry,” and stopped handing them out. From that test comes the most famous tribute in the correspondence: “Hamilton is really a colossus to the antirepublican party. Without numbers, he is an host within himself.” The letter argues the treaty is lawmaking “under color of a treaty” by a party that lost the House; diagnoses the strange public quiet — the merchants' desertion, Washington's “chiding” replies to Boston and Richmond, and “the quietism into which the people naturally fall”; and delivers the third “for god's sake take up your pen” plea of the decade — the one that would go unanswered in print. It closes with rheumatism, the family returning from the springs, and an invitation revealing that Jefferson has not yet met Dolley Madison. Modern scholarship adds the letter's great irony: “Curtius” was Noah Webster, and “the Features of the treaty” was Alexander Dallas — Jefferson misattributed both.
Key Themes.
• “Hamilton is really a colossus… an host within himself” — the enemy's measure taken honestly
• Jefferson's “experiment” on “honest sound hearted men” — propaganda focus-tested in 1795
• Poison, antidote, shock, revulsion, quietism — public opinion as body chemistry
• Lawmaking “under color of a treaty” — the constitutional case against the Jay Treaty
• “Government” struck for “constitution” — the charge escalating in Jefferson's own hand
• The third “take up your pen” — and the first one Madison does not answer in print
• Roman masks and the attribution game: Jefferson misattributes both Curtius (Noah Webster) and “Features” (Alexander Dallas)
• Boxes of books as ammunition — Beckley's distribution network and the machinery of an unnamed party
• “Mrs. Madison” — Dolley enters the correspondence, still a stranger to Monticello
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, the most famous marching order in the whole correspondence. It is the summer of 1793. Europe is at war and Hamilton, writing as Pacificus, is redefining presidential power in the newspapers, and he's unanswered. Jefferson, trapped inside the cabinet, reaches for the one weapon he trusts. For God's sake, my dear sir, take up your pen and cut him to pieces in the face of the public. And underneath the order, a second crisis, the French minister who may destroy the very cause Jefferson is trying to save. It is Sunday, july seventh, seventeen ninety three, and Thomas Jefferson, fifty years old, Secretary of State, writing from his rented summer house on the edge of Philadelphia, is two years past the maple sugar letter we heard last time, and the opposition it announced now has teeth. Frenal has come back. The National Gazette is publishing. The sides have names people actually use Republican, Federalist. Madison, forty two, is home at Montpelier for the congressional recess, which means everything in this fight has to ride the post to Orange, Virginia. And Jefferson wants out. He's been trying to resign since winter. Washington keeps talking him back. Jefferson means to be gone within months. He's a man serving out a sentence, in the middle of the worst foreign crisis the new government has ever faced. Because Europe has caught fire. In January, French guillotined its king. In February, France declared war on Britain. Every American question now runs through that war, and in April, President Washington issued a proclamation declaring the United States would stay out of it, a document so cautious it never once uses the word neutrality. But beneath the caution sits an enormous constitutional question. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. So who has the power to declare peace? On june twenty ninth, in Fenneau's Gazette of the United States, the first essay signed Pacificus appeared, defending the proclamation with an argument that goes much further. The conduct of foreign affairs is executive by nature. It belongs to the president, and the exceptions are to be read narrowly. Everyone in Philadelphia knows who Pacificus is. Two more essays have landed this very week july third, july sixth, and from the Republican side silence. Meanwhile, the Republicans' great ally has become their great liability. Citizen Jenet, the minister of revolutionary France, landed at Charleston in April to cheering crowds and has spent the spring commissioning privateers out of American ports as if the proclamation did not exist. This very weekend, the collision has a name, a captured British brig rearmed in Philadelphia as a French privateer, ready to sail in open defiance of the government, while the president is away at Mount Vernon. And Jenet has been talking loudly of appeals, from the President to Congress, from Congress to the people themselves. So Jefferson sits down on Sunday with Fenneau's newspapers on his desk and two audiences in his head, the friend he needs and the ally he fears. He does not know whether Madison will say yes. He does not know whether Hamilton's doctrine will stand unanswered and harden into precedent. He does not know whether the French minister will sink the Republican cause before autumn, or whether he himself can last in the cabinet until his release. He knows only that two essays are lying there unanswered, and that silence is beginning to sound like consent. So watch him fold the newspapers into the packet. Fennow's gazette, his enemy's essays mailed south by his own hand. The president is away, the harbor holds a ship that will not wait, and none of this is history yet. It is this week's crisis and it is not going well. Today we read the whole letter, every word Jefferson's verified against founders online. He begins with the anxiety every one of these letters carries, the mail itself. He writes I wrote to you on the thirtieth ultimo of last month, and shall be uneasy until I have heard you have received it. I have no letter from you this week. Uneasy till I have heard an opposition run entirely by post, every letter a small act of faith. Then the enclosures and a jab worth catching. The papers he is sending are Fennows, the administration paper, Hamilton's paper, which has just announced it must go daily or die. Jefferson writes You will perceive by the enclosed papers that they are to be discontinued in their present form and a daily paper published in their stead, if subscribers enough can be obtained. I fear they cannot, for nobody here scarcely has ever taken his paper. I fear they cannot. He fears no such thing. He is savoring it. But inside these failing papers is the thing that has brought him to the desk, and he writes You will see in these Colonel Hamilton's second and third Pacificus, nobody answers him, and his discipline will thereafter be taken for confessed. Taken for confessed. In Jefferson's world, an unanswered argument doesn't just linger, it wins. It becomes subtle doctrine by default. And so the sentence this series has been building towards since the bank letter is as follows For God's sake, my dear sir, take up your pen. Select the most striking heresies and cut him to pieces in the face of the public. There is nobody else who can and will enter the lists with him. Heresies The Lists The Language of religious war and single combat in one breath. And notice the two verbs nobody else who can and will. It is flattery, and it is true, and it is an assignment. Then without pausing for a reply, Jefferson turns to the other fire. He writes Never, in my opinion, were so calamitous an appointment made as that of the present minister of France here. Hot headed, all imagination, no judgment, passionate, disrespectful, and even indecent toward the president in his written as well as verbal communications, talking of appeals from him to Congress, from them to the people, urging the most unreasonable and groundless propositions, and in the most dictatorial style, etc, etc, etc That is citizen Janay, and remember who was writing this, not a Federalist enemy of France, the most pro French man in the cabinet, describing his own side's champion. Appeals from the President to the People, a foreign minister proposing to go over the head of George Washington. Jefferson can already see how this plays out when he writes If ever it should be necessary to lay his communications before Congress or the public, they will excite universal indignation. He renders my position immensely difficult. And then a passage of pure weary diplomacy, the Secretary of State as the manager of a temper. He writes He does me justice personally, and giving him time to vent himself and then cool, I am on a footing to advise him freely and he respects it. But he breaks out again on the very first occasion so as to show that he is incapable of correcting himself. And here the manuscript itself tells a story. The editors note that Jefferson first wrote will break out future tense, then struck it and wrote breaks out. Somewhere in the middle of the sentence the future collapsed into the present. Even his grammar has given up hoping Janet will improve. Then the close at its most revealing confession. Jefferson writes To complete our misfortune we have no channel of our own through which we can correct the irritating representations he may make. Adieu, my friend, yours affectionately. No channel of our own. The editors identify this as the American minister in Paris, Governor Morris, a Federalist the French government detests. Even the diplomatic pipeline belongs to the other side. And one last detail you cannot hear but should know. The letter is unsigned, no name at the bottom. A Secretary of State ordering a newspaper war against his own cabinet colleague does not put his signature on it. The males have eyes, and that caution will echo through this correspondence for years to come. So what does Jefferson assume? He assumes that the Constitution is settled in the newspapers. Nobody answers him and his doctrine will therefore be taken for confessed. Read that assumption closely. Not the courts will set it out, not Congress will push back. In Jefferson's world, constitutional meaning is decided in public argument, and an unanswered essay hardens into precedent by default. Silence is surrender. He also assumes Madison completely. There is nobody else who can and will. After nine years of these letters, he knows his man. But what does Jefferson fear? He has two fears braided together, and the second is the more interesting one. The first is the doctrine. Pacificus is arguing that foreign policy belongs to the president by nature, and that it stands confessed. The executive begins to swallow the war power the Constitution gave to Congress. But the second fear is his own ally. Read the proportions of this letter. Four lines on Hamilton, a full page on Genet. The Frenchman is handing Hamilton his best argument, proof, played out in Philadelphia Harbor, that sympathy for France means chaos and insult to Washington. Jefferson's deepest fear in july 1793 is not the enemy who argues well. It is the friend who behaves badly, the champion who discredits the cause. So what do they take for granted that we no longer do? That a cabinet officer could covertly direct the opposition to the administration he serves, and consider it honorable. Jefferson is Secretary of State. By day he executes the neutrality policy, by Sunday Post he commissions its doctrinal demolition. No resignation, no recusal, no sense of scandal. The norms that would make this unthinkable have not been invented, in part because this very fight will invent them. And they take for granted the reader at the end of it all, that the fate of the war power genuinely hangs on whether a congressman in Virginia writes essays, and that citizens will read seven installments of Pacificus and five of the reply, and then judge. An entire constitutional order resting on the assumption of a public that reads. We know how much weight that assumption would eventually have to bear. So what's missing? Three absences. The first is Jefferson's own pen. He writes There is nobody else who can and will enter the lists. The most gifted polemicist in America is the man holding this pen, and his office forbids what his policies demand. The letter orders a battle its author cannot join, and never once acknowledges the contradiction. The second absence is the alternative doctrine. Jefferson says cut him to pieces. He never says what should stand in the doctrine's place. Demolition is ordered. Construction is left entirely to Madison. We know from Madison's own reply later that month what that cost. He called the assignment, and I quote, the most grating one I ever experienced, unquote. But the five Helvidious essays got written, and the argument Pacificus made did not go into the books unanswered. And the third absence is Washington himself. The president appears in this letter as a single abbreviated letter, the P away at Mount Vernon while his two secretaries arm for a proxy war in the newspapers. The fiction that the administration speaks with one voice is nowhere in this letter, because by july seventeen ninety three it is already gone. One more thing we know from the balcony. Jenet's story ends in irony. Within weeks the cabinet, Jefferson included, will unanimously ask France to recall him. By the time the recall comes, the government that sent him has fallen to men who would send him to the guillotine, and it is Washington, the president he insulted, who lets him stay. He marries the governor of New York's daughter and lives out his day as an American farmer. The man who nearly wrecked the Republic's neutrality dies forty years later, a citizen of the Republic. Well in closing, strip this letter to its two confessions and you have the whole movement we are in. Nobody answers him. The belief that a republic is argued into being sentence by sentence, and that an unanswered claim becomes power. And we have no channel of our own. The admission that argument needs machinery, papers, subscribers, ministers, mails. Between these two sentences, an opposition stops being a sentiment and becomes an organization. And the order that made it happen was given the way everything happens between these two men, one friend asking another, for God's sake to write. Well, that's our tenth letter, the second of the movement we're calling Building an Opposition. Madison took up the pen, Helvidius, and answered Pacificus, and the argument over who commands the Republic's foreign policy, begun in a borrowed newspaper in the summer of 1793, has never really ended. Next time the pattern repeats and it sharpens. It is 1795. The Jay Treaty with Britain has set the country ablaze, and Jefferson, now retired to Monticello, takes his enemy's measure in the most backhanded tribute he ever wrote. Hamilton is really a colossus to the Anti Republican Party. Without numbers, he is a host within himself. And once again the same plea to the same friend, for God's sake, take up your pen. Today's letter is verified against Founders Online, the National Archives edition of the Founders' Papers Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, july seventh, seventeen ninety-three. In the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, volume twenty six. You can read every word for yourself. I'm Charlie Jett, and until next time, stay informed, stay engaged, and stay curious.