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Welcome! I am Charlie Chett coming to you from a 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 may thirtieth, eighteen twelve. Thomas Jefferson is sixty nine and three years into retirement. James Madison is sixty one and in Washington, and in two days he will send Congress a war message, though almost no one outside his cabinet knows that yet. Three years have passed since our last letter. Erskine's replacement arrived and insulted the administration until Madison stopped receiving him. Napoleon dangled a promise that was probably a fraud, and the government took it at base value. Harrison fought at Tippicanoe. Last November a new Congress convened stocked with young men who want a war, Clay of Kentucky, Calhoun of South Carolina. In April, Congress passed a ninety day embargo, and everyone in the country reads it as a countdown. And a proposal is loose in Washington. If the grievance is neutral rights, the argument runs, then France has violated them too. So declare war on both or on neither. They call it the triangular war. Federalists press it. So do the Quids, John Randolph's dissident Republicans. Whether it is a principle or a trap depends on who is being asked. Madison has not asked Jefferson anything. Jefferson writes anyway, because a letter came from Utica, New York and it needs forwarding. What no one at this desk knows whether Congress will vote for war or against whom, or whether the votes are even there. So sit down at the desk at Monticello. Three letters are moving on the roads this week, and not one of them will arrive in time, but that is invisible from here. Here there is only the morning's mail and a bad idea that needs killing. What follows is an extract, I'll summarize the rest. It opens with an errand, and the errand is a man's career. Another communication is enclosed, and the letter of the applicant is the only information I have of his qualifications. The applicant is Samuel B. Malcolm of Utica, who wants a new federal judgeship in New York. Jefferson's assessment runs to two sentences. He writes I barely remember such a person as the Secretary of Mr Adams and Messenger to the Senate while I was of that body. It enlarges the sphere of choice by adding to it a strong Federalist. That is the whole recommendation. He barely remembers the man, and the one thing he can offer in his favor is that appointing him would widen the field. It is worth knowing what was folded inside, because Madison read it too. Malcolm's own letter had reached Monticello three days earlier, and it is the letter of a man who cannot stand what he is doing. The beggarly business of supplication for a department, which I now solicit, I am aware, is not calculated to conciliate your respect. To render it pure and perfectly independent, it should be a voluntary gift. But modern fashion has prostated so much of delicacy that a reluctant innovation of my own feelings must be made. He is ashamed to be asking. He names his limits with some pride The President, Jefferson, Adams, and the Governor of New York, those four and no others. And then in a postcript he plays the only card he holds. Apart from General Hamilton, no individual of the Skyler family has received perferment. Malcolm had married General Skyler's younger daughter. Hamilton had married Elizabeth Skyler in seventeen eighty. He is asking a favor on the strength of his dead brother in law's ghost. Hold all of that because we will come back to what was happening around it. Then with no transition whatever the war. The triangular war must be the idea of the Angloman and Malcontents, in other words, the Federalist and Quids. Yet it would reconcile neither. It would only change the type of abuse with the former and not cure the mental disease of the latter. Now watch what he does. What follows is one sentence, a single sentence that dismantles the proposal five separate ways. First the sailors. It would prevent our eastern capitalists and seamen from employment in privateering, taking away the only chance of conciliating them and keep them at home idle to swell the discontents. Second, the weapon. It would completely disarm us of the most powerful weapon we can employ against Great Britain by shutting down every port to our prices, and yet would not add a single vessel to their number. Third, the farmers. It would shut every market to our agricultural productions, and engender impatience and discontent with that class which in fact composes the nation. Fourth the peace. It would insulate us in general negotiations for peace, making all the parties our opposers. And fifth the killing blow, which is not strategic at all, but literary. And would exhibit a solicism, a breach of etiquette or accepted custom, worthy of Don Quixote, only that of a choice to fight two enemies at a time rather than to take them by succession. A solicism, a blunder in grammar, an offense against sense. He is just called a war plan bad writing. Then the motive named and buried. And the only motive for all this is a sublimated impartiality at which the world will laugh, and our own people will turn upon us en masse as soon as it is explained to them, as it will be by the very persons who are now laying that snare. The snare layers will spring their own trap, and then, having done all that, the sign off. These are the hasty views of one who rarely thinks on these subjects. Your own will be better, and I pray to them every success to you every felicity. One who rarely thinks on these subjects. Okay, so what does the author assume? He assumes that the war will be fought by merchants. Privateering is the most powerful weapon we can employ, not the Navy, which he spent eight years refusing to build. Private ships licensed to take enemy cargo for profit. He assumes New England can be bought back into the Union with prize money, which is a hard headed reading of men he does not like. He assumes the triangular war is not a proposal but a trap laid by people who intend to blame the administration for falling into it, and he assumes the farmers are the country, that class which in fact composes the nation. So what does he fear? Ridicule first, a sublimated impartiality at which the world will laugh. Then isolation. Fighting both empires makes every party at the peace table an opponent, and very indifferent about peace with us if they have it with the rest of the world. And underneath the fear that runs through the whole letter without being named New England. Every one of his five objections roots back to holding the country together long enough to fight. So what does he take for granted that we no longer do? That a nation's chief weapon is licensed piracy, privateering, private citizens commissioned to capture enemy merchant ships and keep a share is here the sober strategic centerpiece, not a footnote. It is discussed the way we would discuss an Air Force. And the phrase that has to be looked at squarely, that class which in fact composes the nation. He means the men who grow and sell agricultural produce. He is writing from a plantation where the people who actually raise the crop are owned, and they are not the class he means. The letters have shown us this ledger before, the white inhabitants of the Louisiana draught, my laboring people, delayed his journey three years ago, and here it appears not as an aside but inside the definition of the nation itself. So what is missing? The war. There is not one word in this letter about whether to fight, no impressment, no orders in council, no grievance of any kind. The question of war is settled, only the geometry is open. From a man who once wrote that a little rebellion is a good thing, that is a considerable distance travelled. And now the party cannot see. Everything in this letter is out of date. Malcolm had also written John Adams, and told Jefferson so in the enclosure. From Mr Adams you will probably soon hear. Adams wrote three letters on the twenty first of may, one to Malcolm, telling him there is neither sin, crime nor meanness in the desire to serve the public, and advising him to write to the president, to Jefferson, to J, to Governor Tompkins, one to Jefferson, which would not reach Monticello until the third of June, four days after this letter was sent, and one straight to Madison. That third letter is the one that matters, and it is not what you would expect. Adams gives the character reference three years in my family, ingenuous, faithful, industrious, and then steps back. There will be no doubt many applications from persons whose merits are wholly unknown to me, and in your decision I shall perfectly acquiesce. Adams forwarded the paper and declined to press. Which is exactly what Jefferson did three days later. That symmetry is the answer to the cold sentence. Jefferson knew a recommendation was coming. He had been told and he did not wait, but he did not need to because Adams was writing to Madison himself. And the letter of the applicant is the only information I have of his qualifications, is exactly almost lawyerly true. This is not a snub of Adams. It is two former presidents independently doing the same careful thing, forward the paper, state the limit of your knowledge, and leave the appointment to the man who has to make it. It would not have mattered. The judgeship was already gone. Madison had given it to William P. Van Ness on the twenty seventh of May, three days before this letter was written, and Van Ness was the man who had stood as Aaron Burr's second at Weehawken and helped him load. So Adams asks Jefferson to help Alexander's Hamilton's brother in law to get a seat that had already been handed to Burr's second, and the request arrives after the letter answering it has left. And Madison said so himself on the third of June, the same day Adams' letter finally reached Monticello. Writing back to Quincy, he returned Malcolm's letter as asked and gave the verdict in one line. Mr Malcolm was not in time to be taken into consideration along with others having the same object with him, not unqualified, not outweighed. Late. And Malcolm himself, he did not get the bench. He had closed his New York practice in eighteen oh six and gone upstate to manage his wife's land, work he found neither profitable nor congenial. He had told Adams the income from it was almost nothing. He had also told him that of his four children, three were dead of croup. The shame he wrote out for Jefferson he had already written out for Adams, in nearly the same words, compelled to become a reluctant follower in the beggarly practice of supplication. A month after this letter he was writing Madison again, asking a naval lieutenancy for a relative. He died at Stillwater, New York in eighteen fifteen, three years on at thirty nine. The one thing he ever brought himself to ask for had been given away before he finished asking for it. Hold that beside the rest of the page. Three weeks after Jefferson wrote, Congress declared war on Britain. Five days after that, Britain withdrew the orders in council and that caused it. The news was on a ship. This is a letter about a nation making irreversible decisions on information that is already expired, and the men in it cannot even keep a job application straight. Well, in closing, he killed the triangular war in one sentence and then apologized for thinking about it. That is the whole register of the retired man. Full force, then a bow. Your own will be better. And Madison, who never took the triangular bait, may well have thought so too. Well that's our episode. These letters remind us that the great decisions are made often in the dark, on stale mail, crossed letters, and the best judgment available on a Saturday. So stay informed, stay engaged, and above all, stay curious. As before, today's letter can be verified against Founders Online, the papers of James Madison, the Presidential Series. I'm Charlie Jett, and I thank you for listening.