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
17 Jefferson on the Handoff and an Empire for Liberty
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Five weeks into retirement, Jefferson writes the new President in the glow of the Erskine agreement — Britain's apparent withdrawal of the Orders in Council — hailing it as “the triumph of our forbearing & yet persevering system” and promising it “will give us peace during your time.” He warns Madison against any commercial treaty with Britain (“They never made an equal commercial treaty with any nation”), buries the Jay Treaty as “a millstone round our necks,” and then sketches a hemispheric future: Cuba by consent, Canada by war, and “such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation” — bounded by one rule: “Nothing should ever be accepted which would require a navy to defend it.” The letter closes with thanks for squashes from Maine, planted that very day. Within weeks, London disavows Erskine; within three years, “peace during your time” gives way to the War of 1812. The mentor's handoff — generous, visionary, and wrong about nearly everything except the friendship — closes Act II.
Key Themes
• The Erskine false dawn: vindication claimed before the news could be trusted
• “Peace during your time” — the blessing history revoked
• Treaty trauma: Jay's ghost and the fear of being “whipped into” negotiation
• “Empire for liberty”: expansion without contradiction, and the ledger awaiting at Missouri (Ep 28)
• Counsel and deference: the mentor's new register, and squashes planted to day
Welcome! I'm Charlie Jett coming to you from my studio in beautiful downtown Chicago. This is the Jefferson Madison Letters Series, a history lesson from the Founders One Letter at a Time. 50 years of correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and every word you'll hear from them is verified against the original manuscripts at Founders Online, the Digital Archive of the National Archives. It is April 27, 1809. Thomas Jefferson is 66 years old and for the first time in decades a private man, home at Monticello for good, five weeks after watching James Madison sworn in as the fourth president of the United States. Madison, 57, inherits a hard estate. The embargo, their great experiment in peaceable coercion, has been gutted by Congress on the way out. New England is furious, and Britain's orders in council still strangle American trade. War is the question on every desk. And then, in mid-April, a break in the clouds. Britain's young minister in Washington, David Erskine, agrees to terms. The orders in Council will be withdrawn as to the United States in June. Madison proclaims that trade with Britain may resume. After years of humiliation, it looks like vindication. Economic pressure, patiently applied, has apparently bent the world's greatest naval power without a shot. The letters are flowing again. This is the gift of retirement. The neck of the hourglass is behind us, and for the next seventeen years the correspondence runs rich. But mark the moment's edge. The agreement everyone is celebrating rests on a young diplomat's promises, and the ministry in London has not yet spoken. No one on this side of the Atlantic, not the new president, not the old one, knows whether Erskine had the authority to promise what he had promised. Right now, in this letter, the news is simply good. So take the letter as Madison takes it. In the first spring of his presidency, when the news from Britain is for once good, and no one in America knows it's too good to be true. What follows is an extract, and I'll summarize the rest. Jefferson opens with congratulation and a claim of vindication. I sincerely congratulate you on the change it has produced in our situation. The British ministry has been driven from its Algerine System, not by any remaining morality in the people, but by their unsteadiness under severe trial. But whensoever it comes, I rejoice in it as the triumph of our forbearing and yet preserving system. An Algerine System Britain behaving like the Barbary pirates and driven from it, he says, by American patience. Then the blessing with a promise history will not keep. It will lighten your anxieties, take from Cabal its most fertile ground of war, will give us peace during your time, and by the complete extinguishment of our public debt, even upon us the noblest application of revenue that has ever been exhibited by any nation. Peace during your time. Hold that sentence. Next comes the warning. Britain is sending a minister to negotiate a treaty and Jefferson wants no part of it. They never made an equal commercial treaty with any nation, and we have no right to expect to be the first. And on the ghost of the Jay Treaty, that form will forever be a millstone round our necks, unless we now rid ourselves of it once and for all. Then the letter lifts off the Atlantic and becomes a map of the hemisphere. Napoleon, Jefferson reasons, might one day consent to Cuba joining the Union. That would be a price, and I would immediately erect a column on the southernmost limit of Cuba and inscribe on it a Neplus ultra, nothing further beyond. We should then have only to include the North in our Confederacy, and we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation. And I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self government. An empire for liberty Cuba to the south, Canada, of course in the First War, to the north, and one principle to govern it all. Nothing should ever be accepted which would require a navy to defend it. Then, having redrawn the map of the New World, the letter comes home to a garden. I thank you for the squashes from Maine. They shall be planted today. Planted today. The Empire can wait, the squashes cannot. He ends with I salute you with sincere and constant affection. So what does the author assume? He assumes the system worked. Our forbearing and yet persevering system has, he believes, broken Britain's will, vindicating the embargo years and everything they cost. He assumes expansion and liberty are one project Cuba by consent, Canada by war, and a constitution so well calculated for extensive empire and self government that growth only strengthens it, and he assumes his role is now counsel, not command. The letter advises, warns, and blesses. But from the first line it is Madison's presidency, Madison's anxiety, Madison's time. So what does the author fear? Treaties. The fear runs through the middle of the letter like a scar. Breton whipping us into a treaty as she did with J. The J form as a millstone round our necks, a domestic faction devoted to a foreign interest. He fears Napoleon's unreadability. His policy is so crooked that it eludes conjecture, is as close as Jefferson comes to admitting a limit on his own analysis. And he fears navies, or rather the empire that navies imply. His one law of expansion is a law of self restraint. So what do they take for granted that we no longer do? That acquiring neighboring lands and peoples is self evidently the spread of liberty. Empire for liberty carries, for Jefferson, no contradiction at all. The phrase sits in the letter without a flicker of irony. We know the ledger that phrase must eventually answer. The empire doubled at Louisiana is also the ground on which slavery expands, and when the bill comes due at Missouri in eighteen twenty, episode twenty eight, these two men will meet it mostly with silence. He also takes for granted that a republic can decline sea power on principle, that restraint is strategy. A century of American history will run the other way. So what's missing? The people of the Empire Cubans, Canadians, the enslaved of an expanding cotton kingdom. The map in this letter has acquisitions, not inhabitants. Missing too is any hedge on the good news, no if the ministry confirms, no caution about a young diplomat's authority. The vindication is total. We know it has weeks to live. London will disavow Erskine. The celebration will curdle, and peace during your time will fail in three years in a war that bears Madison's name. And missing, remarkably, is the envy. Five weeks out of the most powerful office in the Republic, Jefferson writes without one backward glance at power. What he wants back is not the presidency, it is the correspondence. And now at last he has it. Well in closing, the handoff is complete in a single page. Vindication claimed, warnings issued, a hemisphere sketched, squashes planted. Jefferson hands Madison a republic he believes is done with war, and a vision of empire he believes is identical to liberty. Neither belief survives Madison's presidency, but the friendship does. Well that's our episode and the close of Act II. These letters remind us that even the founders read their moment wrong sometimes. What they modeled was not perfect foresight, but steadiness when the news turned. So stay informed, stay engaged, and above all, stay curious. As with the others, today's letter is verified against Founders Online, the papers of James Madison, the Presidential Series. I'm Charlie Jett, and I thank you for listening.