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Welcome! I'm Charlie Jett coming to you from my studio in beautiful downtown Chicago. This is the Jefferson Madison Letters, a history lesson from the Founders One Letter at a Time. Fifty 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. Well it is august seventeenth, eighteen oh nine, and the good news has gone bad. Thomas Jefferson is sixty six, five months into retirement at Monticello. James Madison is fifty eight and back at Montpelier thirty miles north. Here is what has happened since our last letter. On the nineteenth of April, Madison proclaimed that trade with Britain would resume on the tenth of June on the strength of David Erskine's word that the orders in council would be withdrawn. American ships sailed. Then on the twenty second of july, the news lands. George Canning, the British Foreign Secretary, has repudiated his own minister. Erskine had no authority to promise what he promised. Canning's real instructions are published in the American newspapers, and their terms are humiliating. Erskine is recalled. His replacement is already named. Madison hurries back to Washington. On the ninth of August, he issues a second proclamation canceling the first and restoring non intercourse with Britain. In cabinet, his own Secretary of State argues alone that the president has no power to do it. The Richmond Inquirer, a Republican newspaper, says the same thing in print. Madison returns to Montpelier and writes Jefferson on the sixteenth. Isaiah Coles carries the letter thirty miles. Jefferson answers the next day. What nobody knows this afternoon is this whether the second proclamation will stand, whether Bonaparte will move, and whether the summer just passed was a diplomatic humiliation or the opening of a war. So set aside for a moment the war that you know is coming. In this room on this afternoon, the war is still a conditional clause, and the first thing on the page is a change in the travel plans. What follows is an extract, and I'll summarize the rest. The letter opens at home and the household is sick. Jefferson writes My journey to Bedford has been delayed by sickness among my laboring people. No new case having arisen for some time, I am in hopes it is at an end. His laboring people that is what he calls them. They are the enslaved men and women of Monticello, and in this sentence they appear as a delay. Hold that for a while. Then the warmth. He hopes Madison and Mrs. Madison will visit and an ancient promise from the Gallatons entitles him to hope for them too. Then the politics and the tone hardens. He writes I have never doubted the chicanery of the Anglomen or whatsoever measures you should take in consequence of the disavowal of Erskine. Jefferson defends both proclamations, and he finds in the wreckage a prophet. He writes Their dirty gain is richly remunerated to us by our placing them so shamefully in the wrong, and by the union it must produce among ourselves. He reasons through the legal case at length, the minister assured, the executive trusted, the event did not take place, so the consequence could not follow. And then in one clause an admission most men would have cut. He writes This view is derived from the former non intercourse law only, having never read the latter once. Now the sentence the episode is named for. Mark how it begins, not with a prophecy but with a condition. He writes Should Bonaparte have the wisdom to correct his injustice toward us, I consider war with England as inevitable. Our ships will go to France and its dependencies, and they will take them. This will be war on their part and leaves no alternative but reprisal. I have no doubt you will think it safe to act on this hypothesis and with energy. And having handed the president a hypothesis, he hands him a target, when he writes The moment that open war shall be apprehended from them, we should take possession of Baton Rouge. If we do not, they will, and New Orleans becomes irrecoverable and the western country blockaded during the war. Justifiable towards Spain, he adds, on the ground of title to West Florida, with reprisal extended to East Florida. Four months ago this man sketched an empire for liberty. Today he names the first fort. Then something unexpected. He defends the man who failed him. He writes I hope and doubt not that Erskine will justify himself. My confidence is founded in a belief of his integrity and in the unprincipled rascal of canning. And the verdict on the ministry delivered with one word doing all the work. He writes I consider the present as the most shameless ministry which ever disgraced England. Copenhagen will immortalize their infamy. Copenhagen The British fleet's bombardment of a neutral capital two years earlier to take the Danish Navy. Then he ends with I salute you with all possible affection. So what does Jefferson assume? He assumes that failure was worth it. Their dirty gain it's richly remunerated to us. The humiliation brought moral high ground abroad and unity at home, and on his ledger that is a fair trade. He assumes Erskine acted in good faith and Canning did not, which is a judgment about character made from four thousand miles away and made generously. He assumes West Florida is already American in principle, so taking Baton Rouge is recovery rather than conquest. And he assumes he will be listened to, when he wrote, I have no doubt you will think it safe to act on this hypothesis. That's not a suggestion. It's a man handing his successor a plan and expecting it to be adopted. So what does Jefferson fear? Not war, but being late to it. The fear in this letter is geographic and specific that Britain reaches Baton Rouge first, that New Orleans becomes irrecoverable, that the whole western country sits blockaded for the duration. Everything he built at Louisiana is a river mouth away from being cut off, and he can see it from Monticello. Underneath that a longer fear with no remedy in it, that all cordial conciliation with England is hopeless during the life of the present king. George III is seventy one. Jefferson is waiting for a man to die. So what does he take for granted that we no longer do? Two things, and they're not the same size. First the small one, that a former president advises the sitting one to seize a neighboring nation's fort in a private letter, with no sense that either the privacy or the seizure requires justification. There is no channel here, no record, no Congress. Two friends thirty miles apart decide where the army should go next. The second and the large one is in the first paragraph, and we have to say it plainly. Sickness among my laboring people. Something is moving through the enslaved community at Monticello, serious enough to stop a man's travel, and it enters this letter as a scheduling problem. They are not named. Their illness is measured by its effect on his calendar. And that same letter, eleven sentences later, is planning an empire. This series has now watched the ledger open three times the white inhabitants of the Louisiana Draft, the Empire for Liberty on the Handoff, and now the people whose sickness delays the trip. We are not going to pretend that these are separate letters. Well, what's missing is Congress. He raises the question himself whether the legislature might be called, and talks himself out of it in a single sentence. And the law, having never read the latter one. He has reasoned three paragraphs on the legality of a presidential proclamation on the basis of a statute he has not read, and says so to the president without apparent discomfort. Missing too is any acknowledgement of where the objection actually came from. Jefferson assigns the quibbling to Anglomen, and to men to whom gain is their god and their country nothing. We know it was also Madison's own Secretary of State, alone in the cabinet, and a Republican newspaper in Richmond. The most uncomfortable criticism was coming from inside the house, and the letter has no room for that. And one thing missing that neither man could have arranged. Copenhagen will immortalize their infamy. Jefferson writes that, and the ministry he is condemning has already chosen Erskine's replacement. His name is Francis James Jackson. In eighteen oh seven he carried the ultimatum to Denmark and watched the city burn. Americans will call him Copenhagen Jackson. He is on the water while this letter is being written, and Jefferson's sentence does not connect him to it. So in closing, a war predicted on a condition, a fort selected in advance, a rival diplomat defended out of simple fairness, and a household illness that never gets a name. Jefferson is at his most clear eyed and his most blind on the same page, which is the honest shape of a founder, and the reason we read the letters instead of the summaries. Well, that's our episode and the opening of Act three. These letters remind us that foresight and blindness are not opposites. They live in the same paragraph, in the same man, on the same afternoon. So stay informed, stay engaged, and above all, stay curious. Today's letter, like the others, is verified against Founders Online, the papers of James Madison, the Presidential Series. I'm Charlie Jett, and I thank you for listening.