SPEAKER_00 0:10

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 September 24th, 1814, and one month ago the President of the United States watched his capital burn. On the 24th of August, the American line broke at Bladensburg so quickly that men are already calling it a race. British troops walked into Washington that evening. They burned the President's house, the Treasury, the Navy Yard, and the Capitol. And inside the Capitol, the Library of Congress, some three thousand volumes, went up with it. Madison was in the field that day and slept that night across the river. Dolly Madison got out with what she could carry. The blame is coming down on him. He is sixty three, and this is the fourth year of a war his enemies call mister Madison's War. The banks outside New England have suspended specie payments. The treasury is nearly empty. And two weeks ago on Lake Champlain, a young officer named MacDonagh destroyed a British fleet and stopped an invasion coming down from Canada, though the details have not yet reached Virginia. At Monticello, Jefferson is seventy-one and has not written to Madison in a long time, out of what he calls discretion. Today he breaks the silence. Nobody yet knows how this war ends or whether the government can pay for another year of it. Here's the letter. Read this one as it arrives to a man who has been blamed for a burned city and has not yet been told it was not his doing. What follows is an extract, and I'll summarize the rest. He explains the silence first and then abandons it. He writes It is very long since I troubled you with a letter which has proceeded from discretion and not want of inclination, but in the late events at Washington I have felt so much for you that I cannot withhold the expression of my sympathies. Then the argument, and notice he does not offer comfort. He offers a distinction. He writes For although every reasonable man must be sensible that all you can do is to order, that execution must depend on others, and failures be imputable to them alone, yet I know that when such failures happen, they afflict even those who have done everything they could do to prevent them. You are not to blame, and I know that will not help. And then the sentence that does help, because it moves the whole thing out of Madison's chest and into history. He writes Had George Washington himself been now at the head of our affairs, the same event would probably have happened. He reaches for precedent. The deviats of Harmer and St. Clair on the Northwestern Frontier twenty three years earlier, which he calls a trifling war with one or two petty tribes of Indians in which two armies were cut off by not half their numbers. And then the witness's credential, he writes Everyone knew and I personally knew, because I was then of his counsel, that no blame was imputable to him, and that his officers alone were the cause of the disasters. They must now do the same justice. And then the good news from the lakes MacDonagh, of which, however, we have not the details, and the meaning he draws from it when he writes While our enemies cannot but feel shame for their barbarous achievements at Washington, they will be stung to the soul by these repeated victories over them on that element on which they wish the world to think them invincible. We have dissipated that error. They must now feel a conviction themselves that we can beat them gun for gun, ship to ship, and fleet to fleet. There is a passage on the banks and on his own scheme for treasury notes, which he has written out at length for Mr. Epps and others, then this which is the funniest self knowledge in the whole correspondence. He writes They are too long for your reading, but Colonel Monroe can, in a few sentences, state to you their outline. And then the last paragraph when he writes Learning by the papers the loss of the Library of Congress, I have sent my catalog to SH Smith to make their library committee the offer of my own collection, now of about nine or ten thousand volumes, which may be delivered to them instantly on evaluation by persons of their own naming and be paid for in any way and at any term they please. Persons of their own naming, anyway, any term they please. He sets no price and no schedule. He hands Congress the pen. Then the reason, he writes I have long been sensible that my library would be an interesting possession for the public, and the loss Congress has recently sustained, and the difficulty of replacing it, while our intercourse with Europe is so obstructed renders this proper moment for placing it at their service. The proper moment accept assurances of my constant and affectionate friendship and respect. So what does the author assume? That command and execution are different things, and that a republic must learn to tell them apart, or it will destroy every executive it has. That is the whole architecture of the first paragraph, and he builds it from the only material that could work on Madison, Washington. He assumes naval victory answers land defeat, not militarily, but in the mind. The British trade on being invincible at sea, so beating them at sea unmakes something larger than a fleet. And he assumes, without a flicker, that a private gentleman's books are properly a national possession. So what does he fear? He fears that his friend is taking it personally. Every move in the first half of this letter is aimed at one man's interior, the distinction, the precedent, the eyewitness credential, they must now do the same justice. He is not consoling a president. He is arguing a case on Madison's behalf that Madison cannot argue for himself. And a quieter fear in the last paragraph. The difficulty of replacing it while our intercourse with Europe is so obstructed. A blockaded republic books. The knowledge can burn faster than it can be reimported. That is why this is the proper moment, not because he is ready to part with them, but because the country cannot get them in any other way. So what does he take for granted that we no longer do? A trifling war with one or two petty tribes of Indians. That is St. Clair's defeat of november seventeen ninety one, in which more than half an American army was killed or wounded in a single morning. Still the worst defeat United States forces have ever suffered at the hands of native people. The Confederacy that inflicted it was not petty and the war was not trifling. Jefferson needs a precedent in which a great man was blameless and his officers failed, and to make it fit he shrinks the victors. He is diminishing the people who beat us in order to console the man who lost a city. Set it beside the rest of Act three and the pattern is unmistakable. Conquering Canada to stop Indian barbarities, Baton Rouge and the land granted in exchange for equivalent portions, and now petty tribes. It is the same ledger the letters have kept from the beginning in its other column. So what is missing? Dolly Madison, who was in the house, Fort McHenry, which had held ten days earlier and which is not in this letter, and a price. That last absence is worth standing in. He names no sum. He asks Congress to appoint its own valuers and to pay however and whenever it likes. Watch how far he carried that. He refused to name a figure even when asked. He engaged a Georgetown bookseller, Joseph Milligan, to count the volumes for Congress's committee rather than his own. He declined to take any payment until the books were delivered, and when his own final count came out two hundred and twenty volumes larger than what Congress had agreed to buy, he sent the extra books anyway and did not ask for the eleven hundred dollars they were worth. And now the other half because both are true. Thomas Jefferson was deeply in debt. Of the twenty three thousand nine hundred and fifty dollars Congress finally paid, ten thousand five hundred went to settle what he owed William Short, and four thousand eight hundred and seventy went to John Barnes of Georgetown, the same Mr Barnes whose bill of exchange in our last episode he was so careful to forward safely to General Kosyusko. This was a gift, and it was also a rescue. Nothing in the letter is dishonest. It is simply that a man can do the most generous thing of his life at the moment he most needs the money, and both facts survive. Here's some balcony arithmetic. He estimated nine or ten thousand volumes. The actual count was six thousand four hundred and eighty seven. Congress argued about it for three months, too big, too costly, too many foreign languages, some works of too philosophical a character, and some otherwise objectionable. They bought it anyway, and Madison signed the bill on the thirtieth of january eighteen fifteen. The nation's library was rebuilt out of one man's shelves. Here are two more things. On Christmas Eve of eighteen fifty one the capital burned again and took roughly two thirds of Jefferson's books with it. And within months of selling them he began buying again in a letter to John Adams, not to Madison. I cannot live without books. Thirty years and six months before this letter, from a house thirty miles from here, James Madison had ordered books on the Confederacies that had existed before, because the operations of our own must render all such lights of consequence, and Jefferson had written back, address yourself to me as your bookseller. That is where this series began, and it ends here, with the bookseller selling the country its library out of a burned capital's need. The thread is closed. Well in closing, Jefferson wrote to tell a beaten man that it was not his fault, and stayed to hand him a library. Act three began with the war predicted and ends with the shelves emptied to replace what the war destroyed. Whatever else these two built, they built it out of books, and when the country needed them, the books were there. Well that's our episode and the close of Act II. These letters remind us that a republic is rebuilt the same way it is built by people who show up with what they have. So stay informed, stay engaged, and above all, stay curious. And like the others, today's letter is verified by Founders Online, the Papers of James Madison, the Presidential Series. I'm Charlie Jett, and I thank you for listening.