#1540 The Jeffersonians in Power
2023-03-27 00:59:03
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Hello everyone, it's Clay Jenkinson in this week's podcast introduction to the Jefferson Hour. Just so glad you're aboard. I hope you like this little add-on section that we include in each week's program. I certainly do.
It gives me a chance to sort of debrief myself and to be a little bit more informal in the way that I talk about the Great Man himself. This week, it was Kevin Goodsman, the Jeffersonians. I liked his book a lot. It was interesting about the way in which these three great Virginians collaborated and became essentially three, four, five, six terms. Two for Jefferson, two for his principal protege, James Madison, and two for their protege, James Monroe.
Now, Madison was a little more pragmatic and conservative than Jefferson, and Monroe was quite a bit more left-leaning to use one of our terms than Jefferson. He was the truer small-R Republican. Madison was in fact, suspected amongst serious Republican ideologues as being too conservative, too much in Hamilton's camp, too likely to extend American power beyond what a small-R Republican vision of this country would be. And his nomination was opposed in 1808 by the radical Republicans they would have preferred Monroe.
Jefferson, of course, is the Dalai Lama of the whole thing. It's amazing that this radical man, and in my view, the most radical person who was ever the president of the United States. With the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, this radical man. Thomas Jefferson who wrote these really wild things about tearing up the Constitution once every 19 years. And the tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants. And you know, these really bizarre, really potent ideas that, in a sense, are so antithetical to the relatively conservative way we do business in the American system, almost a republic. It's amazing that he was able not only to become president. If people had really known the full panoply of his ideas, I doubt that would have happened. If people had known that he was a true unitarian and deist, it might have hurt him more than it did, but he was steadfastly silent and protective of his religious life.
But he becomes the third president, serves two terms, would have been reelected to a third term. In spite of all the chaos of the embargo acts, the rising tension between the United States and Britain, which would lead, in Madison's term, to the war of 1812.
But not only did Jefferson survive all that, and would have been reelected to a third and probably a fourth term had he not insisted on going back to Monticello. He then was able to name his successor. That doesn't happen very often. The other one that comes to mind is Theodore Roosevelt, naming William Howard Taft as his successor. And that turned out to be a disaster that broke the friendship once and for all. But Jefferson names James Madison his secretary of State. Obvious next choice.
And I asked Dr Gutzman, Would Madison have ever been the president of the United States if it weren't for Jefferson? and the answer was immediate No, of course not. Jefferson is the kingmaker, and Jefferson is the charismatic, and Jefferson is, among other things, the author of the Declaration of Independence.
So if you're the author of the Declaration of Independence, you have a magic in American life that nobody else is going to have. If you're George Washington, that's a different kind of magic. The Great Commander, the one who saved the country, the first president, the man who set the tone for the very structure and style of the presidency. But if you're Jefferson, you have a cachet that nobody else has, not even Madison. Madison creates the constitution, not alone, of course, but he was the father of the Virginia Plan. But he's not the same. The Declaration of Independence is one of the world's most important documents.
The Constitution is an important document, but the declaration is a world historical document and it has helped to liberate people all over, including in Vietnam, of all places. But almost every revolutionary movement since Jefferson's time returns to the preamble because it just doesn't get stated better than that ever. Nobody else could have done that, a lot of other people could have tried, but they wouldn't have written. Something we'd still be talking about in quite the same way this far. Afterwards, 250 years later. And if the big 250th anniversary celebration, if it's that of the United States, doesn't have the declaration of independence at its center. In spite of what we now think about Jefferson, that will be a colossal mistake.
And I believe we will probably, of course, make that mistake. But anyway, Jefferson gets two terms, turns down a third, names. His successor. Madison has a really rough presidency, his Cabinet is not particularly distinguished or loyal.
Then comes the war. Madison was sort of ideologically pure and in a perfect small R Republican, but the war goes badly. It's amazing that we survived it, It's amazing that we consider that we prevailed in the war. We sort of outlasted the British for a second time.
And after that, the British American relationship, although it has been tense at times, has never led to that sort of breakdown again. And then Monroe and Monroe had not had a very even or distinguished career. He had some bitterness, including, I think, some residual bitterness towards Jefferson himself. Felt competitive with Madison, probably felt ideologically superior to Madison. But they name him the next president and he gets his eight years, too.
And John Adams actually said that Monroe was more successful than all of them, even though both Jefferson and Adams knew that Monroe was not of equal intellectual stature or political acumen as Madison and Jefferson was. But nevertheless, he had a very successful presidency. And we still associate the term America, the era of good feeling to that period. Before the election of John Quincy Adams, and then, of course, the election of Andrew Jackson. I so enjoyed this conversation with Dr.
GUTZMAN And I hope you will enjoy it too. Thanks for supporting the Jefferson Hour. If you can support it in a bigger way, my goodness, please do. This is an interesting new growth time, you know, we're moving towards listening to America.
The first of those programs will start in May. I'll be doing a sort of an inaugural program at WHRV, our flagship station in the Lower Chesapeake. We're very excited about this. The brush is going to get broader, the lens is going to be wider, but we'll still be centered on Jefferson, of course.
And I should say that, you know, some people are saying, well. It would be a shame to lose Jefferson. And we're not going to lose Jefferson. I promise we're not going to lose Jefferson. Jefferson is the most amazing individual that I have ever had the chance to study. And that includes some giants like Theodore Roosevelt and J. Robert Oppenheimer and John Donne and William Shakespeare and John Wesley Powell and John Steinbeck and William L.
Shire, the author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I've had a really extraordinary freedom in my career to, if you could call it, a career to wander about in the world of ideas. But of the most compelling of all the figures is Thomas Jefferson, and you know, he's a very deeply flawed individual. We get it.
We get it, we get it. But he gave us our public architecture, and he gave us the Library of Congress. And he gave us the beginnings of systematic paleontology. And he gave us, above all, the greatest statement about human freedom and aspiration that the world has ever known. The 35 perhaps most important words in the English language.
So there will be no end to it. I'm a Jeffersonian deep into the core, I can't any longer get out from under it, nor do I wish to. So stay tuned, great things are going to happen and we want you to come along.
We want you to support us. We want you to send back your feedback and ideas and questions, and suggest themes for what we're doing. And if you can support us financially. This is a huge growth time for the Thomas Jefferson hour and we would be very much delighted if you could do that. So let's go to the show. Kevin Goodsman, The Jeffersonians.
Hello everyone and welcome to this special edition of the Thomas Jefferson Hour. I am delighted to have across from me Kevin Goodsman, the author of The Jeffersonians, the Visionary Presidencies of Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. So welcome Professor Goodsman.
Happy to be here.
This is not your first book in this area. I see you've also written a book, Thomas Jefferson, Revolutionary James Madison and The Making of America. And then I don't know what got into you. The politically incorrect guide to the Constitution, so, plus others.
That last one is actually a Jeffersonian account of American history. I start before the Revolution and apply Jefferson's way of thinking all the way to the present.
So tear up the Constitution every 19 years.
Something like that.
Interesting, I ordered this book a few months ago. I was delighted I enjoyed reading it very much. What possessed you to write about this broad 24 year period? The Virginia Dynasty?
In 2012, my book, James Madison and the Making of America, was published, and I had the historian Daniel Walker Howe write a cover blurb for it. And when he gave me the cover blurb, he told me he had liked the book very much. But he would like to see me devote more attention to Madison's presidency. Of course, Madison's presidency wasn't really a subject of the book, it was about Madison's constitutional career.
And that was mostly about his role in creating the Constitution and various matters before he became president. But I got to thinking about that and eventually I decided, Well, you can't really write about Madison's presidency without starting with Jefferson. I think, too, that Jefferson and Monroe all thought of it as one continuous administration. Basically, they were all acting on the principles that Jefferson laid out in his first inaugural address.
So I ended up with this idea and then I found that there was no other book on this subject. Which is very odd, given that Jefferson has always been a kind of favorite. Both of scholars in the book buying public. And there's been a recrudescence of interest in Madison since about 1988, with Drew McCoy's book Last of the Fathers among scholars and among the general book buying public. So I thought, Well, this is a good idea, and fortunately, my editor at St.
Martin's thought Well, yeah, it is a really good idea. And so here we are. Five years, five years work. It took me longer than any other book I've written.
And why is that five years? Why?
There's just enormous amount of material that you have to master, you have to know about the military history. I know the constitutional history and the political history pretty well, but I had to learn all about the military history of the war of 1812 and such. So there was a lot of background reading to do before I got to the actual writing part of it. It was a very enjoyable project all around.
The best thing about it, of course, is that the three of them are especially good writers. And then they had people like Albert Gallatin and John C. Calhoun and John Quincy Adams in their cabinets, all of whom were good writers. And Jefferson's half-crazy cousin, John Randolph of Roanoke, plays a prominent role through the whole period. And the thing to decide about him once you decide you want to have him feature in your book is which stories you're going to leave out? Because there are just endless stories about John Randolph that are amusing and interesting.
And after doing years of reading on this subject, I finally got around to the point where I thought, Okay, now I actually have to write the book. It was a big project.
That book is The Jeffersonians, the Visionary presidencies of Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. So let me just quickly start with John Randolph of Roanoke. I mean, coming into the Senate chamber with his hunting dogs. And what an extraordinary, odd, eccentric, in some ways crazy human being he was. Why did they put up with him?
He broke decorum in almost every possible way in the course of his life.
Well, I think the reason is that he was just brilliant. He just was a kind of a volcano of literary allusions and historical resonances and Jeffersonian principles. And, of course, in the first Congress of Jefferson's presidency, people knew Randolph was Jefferson's cousin. And he was the fellow. He was close friends with Albert Gallatin, too, so he was the fellow who was kind of the mouthpiece of the administration. And once he had been the leader on the floor for a while, he was not going happily to give that position up.
I think there wasn't really anybody who felt comfortable confronting him, that was the main thing. They're just all kinds of amusing, as I said, amusing stories about him, and he was a brilliant fellow, really smart guy.
He eventually breaks with Thomas Jefferson. He's now Jefferson's Jefferson. He's a more radical Jeffersonian Republican than Jefferson, who turns out to be something of a moderate. And first over the we don't want to go down this path. But the famous Yazoo lands controversy that.
Bedeviled Jefferson's administration, Of course, Randolph at an early point decided, well, the insufficient Jeffersonian-ness of Jefferson's administration was Madison's fault. He was a very vociferous opponent of Madison's advancement, and this meant working with James Monroe as an alternative to Madison. One story in the book about the night that. It became clear to Randolph that Monroe had decided he was going to come back into politics and he was going to side with the administration, the Madison administration.
And I tell the story in the book. That night in his diary, Randolph wrote The date Richmond James Monroe traitor.
So he, he thought, I guess, that if you were going to be in the administration, well, you're going to be hostile to him. And actually, of course, John Taylor of Caroline, another one of these fellows, not not as fiery minded as as Randolph, but somebody with similar principles, actually told his friend. Monroe Well, you know, once you become president, I'm going to be in opposition to you. That's just the way I am, you know? That was a that was a kind of disposition they had. Essentially, there was going to be difficulty in the government and they were going to highlight it.
These guys were real Jeffersonians, and Madison was more practical than they, although I would say for the most part, he was a Jeffersonian, too. But not of as pure a stripe as Randolph and Taylor.
Right? So then Randolph and the Quids decide they're going to promote Monroe to be the fourth president and not let Madison in. And then one of my very favorite of all of Jefferson's letters, you know it very well. It's the one he wrote to them, saying A circumstance of great pain. Appears to be somewhat, you know, it's so vague, but it works. He talks Monroe right off the ledge.
Monroe then gives up and lets Madison be the fourth president and takes his turn. And you just think of a what an elusive, graceful guy. Jefferson was that his power was such the tiniest hint to was enough to take care of this, but also how Jefferson could not deal with conflict. And so he, he could only write about it in this really circumspect way.
Right, right, that's exactly right. And of course, here he's totally unlike Randolph, who's absolutely the opposite of that.
Loves conflict.
Right, apparently.
You know, one of the perennial questions, and it gets a little ahead of your book. But, you know, Hamilton was bewildered when Jefferson came back from France in 1789 because Madison had worked with him. And they had largely shared a view of the national government of the United States and worked in tandem to to get the thing ratified and so on. But then suddenly Jefferson comes back and Madison veers. This is Hamilton thinking, veers way left and betrays the very things, the friendship and also the partnership that he had formed with Hamilton. What do you think happened there?
Well, I think, and this is a topic into which I delve in detail in my book about Madison and the Constitution. I think that Madison went to the Virginia Ratification Convention, a nationalist, as he had been in the Philadelphia Convention, and he participated in debates. And he knew what the federalists had promised people in the in the Virginia Ratification Convention. And I think through the rest of his career, he endeavored to treat the Constitution as meaning what the federalists had told the Virginia Ratification Convention it would mean. And, of course, Hamilton had a completely different experience. He went to Poughkeepsie to work in the Ratification Convention in New York, and he and John Jay basically laid out a national government.
I don't think it involved had to involve any dishonesty here, I think it's easily explained by the processes the two of them had gone through. Madison thought that the Constitution meant what the people had been told it meant in the ratification conventions, and his ratification convention was very closely divided. Monroe was actually an anti-federalist in the ratification convention in Virginia.
And so he ends up with a very limited government, kind of highly federal idea of the Constitution. And, of course, Jay and Hamilton are nationalists. Hamilton's understanding of what had happened between him and Madison, I don't think, was ever. I'm not aware that he was informed of the shape that debates had taken in Richmond. He, I think, ascribed different motives to Madison than I think were there. I think Madison actually was really committed to the idea of popular ratification.
And that meant, as Jefferson once put it, that the constitution had the meaning that people, I mean, its proponents, had laid before the people when it was pending for their ratification. This might make a good book, too. You could end up with different states agreeing to different constitutions if this happens in contract law or in relation to a treaty. We'd say there was a legal term. Is no meeting of the minds and there's no valid agreement. But that's not an argument that people have ever made in relation to the U.S.
Constitution I do think, though, certainly we can find extreme ideas of different explanations of the Constitution being offered in different states. I just want to say, since you mentioned.
Law You have a J.D. from Texas School of Law, a P.h.D. from none other than Mr. Jefferson's University UVA 1999 and a B.A. from the University of Texas 1985. I'm talking with Kevin Gutzman. Let me ask you an impossible, but also sort of simple question Would James Madison have been the president of the United States had it not been for Jefferson?
Oh, no.
No, Madison was a kind of backstage operator. He was not going to rally personal support the way Jefferson did, so he was definitely a kind of legacy of Jefferson's career. That's not to say that the relationship only went in one way.
Certainly, he was a bosom friend and the closest of advisors to Jefferson, but he didn't really have charisma, so no, I don't think he would.
Have been a little apple John of a man. Even Jefferson called him a hypochondriac, always sickly and always wanting to retire and never having the right stuff. Jefferson's a little condescending towards his friend Madison at times. It's probably true what Jefferson said.
Well, he was in his 20s the first time, I'm aware that. He wrote a letter to a friend of his from Princeton, who was back home in Philadelphia, and said he described some of his physical problems. And he said, You know, he figured he was going to have a short life and he would be saying that.
Until he was 85.
Exactly, we're going to take a short break. We're talking with Kevin Gutzman, the Jeffersonians, the visionary presidencies of Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, you're listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour.
We'll be back in just a minute.
I'm Clay Jenkinson and I'm talking today with Kevin Gutzman, the author of a number of books. Two on Jefferson now, one on Madison, and a couple of on the Constitution of the United States. This one is the Jeffersonians, the visionary presidencies of Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. I've always been fascinated by the Jefferson-Madison relationship, so these are our terms, but they're basically best friends, and yet they probably call each other Mr.
Madison and Mr. Jefferson There's a formality. With Jefferson, there's always a formality. They're collaborators.
In a certain sense, they're Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. That Jefferson is the visionary. He's prone to some pretty wild flights, some radical flights, and he had the good sense to run. Most of this by Mr. Madison, and if Madison thought it was silly or imprudent, he almost always was able to talk Jefferson off the ledge. So you must have really enjoyed trying to suss this out as you looked at these two extraordinary men.
Well, there actually is a good book on this subject by Lance Banning. He takes, I think, three examples of places in their correspondence where they had significant disagreement and shows what he said. And Madison later said that Mr. Jefferson's mind was one that tended to paint in broad colors. He would state a bold position.
Like many other men of genius, and the translation is, there are whoppers in.
Jefferson You just have to deal with it. He didn't hold back in case spur-of-the-moment statement might turn out to be a little bit too much. But I think the main example of this in the book, the main example of the influence of Madison on Jefferson in this period, is this experiment. They tried in substituting economic coercion for military force in international affairs.
That, I believe, was Madison's idea, he had that idea, at least as early as the early 80s. And of course, Jefferson said in his first inaugural address. People had the idea that America had a weak government. But he thought it was the strongest one in the world. Because it was the only one that could count, in case of emergency, on the people flying to the colors to defend it. And what this ended up meaning in practice was that they would try not having any military establishment at all. And, of course, the ultimate absurdity here was that in 1812, the U...s.
Congress declared war on Great Britain, which had the most powerful military establishment in the world. Without first making any kind of preparations, without building any ships or raising any manpower. Or even establishing a tax system that might support a war effort? And predictably, we know it was predictable because it was predicted. What this resulted in, among other things, was a foreign army marching into Washington, burning down the Capitol and the White House and all the other major government buildings. In fact, if you take a private tour of the White House today, you can still see smoke stains in the White House. So this was a terrible result. It's obviously the low point, not only of Madison's career, but of this entire period.
And it was, as I say, it was entirely predictable, it was completely irresponsible to be declaring war without making any preparation first.
And that's what the U.
S did in 1812, but before that, the embargo, the disastrous embargo. In the last years of the Jefferson administration, Jefferson had basically just walked away out of town. As he said in his first inaugural address, the people will rally to the cause because this is a republic. And they didn't.
They smuggled, and they protested, and they burned. Jefferson in effigy and from Jefferson's vision of what the Yeoman farmer citizen was.
Going to be? It was a complete disaster. Yes, absolutely. This is like a black stripe across the painting of the Jefferson, Madison, Monroe administrations. And again, as I say, I think that this is the brainchild of Madison. A large share of the blame has to go to Jefferson.
I guess it's the one major instance in which Jefferson had one of these completely overstated theoretical ideas, and Madison went ahead and implemented it. Well, I mean, it makes a certain.
Kind of sense that instead of wasting the blood of our youth, all the treasure at a new, fragile republic, we'll just withdraw from the world. We're Fortress America. They will all need us more than we need them, and if they don't, we'll make homespun clothing and our own furniture. And it makes a kind of sense. Because Jefferson's view was that peace is to be preferred to war, and that this might be the moral equivalent of war.
And this might be a breakthrough in.
The history of human Relations. Well, I'm not saying that they're to be faulted for making the experiment. The problem came when they decided that the next thing to do was to declare war again without making any preparations. Now, that's Madison, right? Jefferson had withdrawn.
So much that he had no role in that. And so this is why Theodore Roosevelt, by the way, despised both of them. Because they disarmed the nation, then they'd blunder their way into second war of national independence, we'd barely survive it. We'll call it a victory.
This is so dangerously naive that it endangered the very survival of the republic. And Roosevelt just thought, These guys, they're not real men, they don't have the right stuff.
Well, it endangered the survival of the Republic, not only in military sense, but in the sense that what came as a result of it was the great conquering general hero, which was exactly the kind of figure Jefferson most feared. That's what they got out of it.
The man on horseback from Tennessee.
But one way of understanding it is, who knows what would have happened if it hadn't been for Andrew Jackson? We had two competent generals in the war, Jackson and William Henry Harrison, and the rest of them were just. It's hard to exaggerate the incompetence, the terrible appointments Madison made to the military positions in his cabinet. For example, one fellow who would be drunk by noon every day, and the other guy who had been a surgeon in the army during the revolution. Somehow, that qualified him to be war secretary 30 years later.
You know, Jefferson is now retired at Monticello, he was kind of militantly retired. He's never going back to Washington. He's he's going to just be under his vine and his fig tree and putter in his garden and write some letters and so on.
But when the war of 1812 comes, he writes these absurd letters, saying If I were just a little younger, I'd be right there. We need to attack, we need to take Canada once and for all. You just think there's a kind of an unreality somewhere in the heart of Jefferson's consciousness that he could. Even at this age, he's not a warrior.
We get that we know his war record and that at this age, he thinks. If I were just a little younger, maybe I could go vindicate the American Revolution.
Actually, he also had the idea, as he put it, that the war would be a matter of just a couple of weeks marching, a couple of weeks marching. So apparently he thought Canada was just a big empty space and the U.S could just send whatever kind of an army it could hurriedly assemble. The conquest would be free. Hard to exaggerate the inappropriateness of these ideas and these.
Actions. Here's James Madison, a man of penetrating intellect, always the best prepared person in every room he ever went into. Not like Jefferson, distorted by some sort of an overarching idealism, he sees the world in pretty pragmatic terms. Brilliant administrator when he wants to be.
How could he bungle this so profoundly? Forget the preparedness issue once we're on, why couldn't Madison prosecute the war? With kind of the mastery we associate with his prep for the?
Constitutional Convention. That is a very interesting question. There are repeated incidents in the war in which it's obvious that he really hasn't given much thought to war making. So, for example, there's the famous episode of the Bladensburg races before the fighting started at Bladensburg in 1814. Madison took, among others, Secretary of War Monroe to the battlefield, and the American forces had already been disposed on the battlefield, and Madison encouraged the war secretary to go make suggestions to the commanding general on the scene. And all military historians agree that the slight suggestions that Monroe made were detrimental to the American army's performance.
That is, he had some of the soldiers redeployed so that they could not support the other line of American troops as they were being attacked from the front.
Madison insisted that Monroe do this, and all I can say is it seems that Madison didn't have an idea that there should be a professional officer corps. There should be people who knew what they were doing, making these decisions, he apparently thought that it was just an amateur sport.
I don't know how to justify it. As far as the appointments that Madison made go. I describe in the book a bit of correspondence that Madison had later in life with a younger generation. Lee, who wrote to him and asked various political questions. He said he was writing a book about the revolution and then in the period since. And he said, After a couple of letters back and forth, the young man said to Madison, You know, there's going to come a point in my account when I'm going to have to say something about your appointments. What can I say about them? They're so awful and Madison doesn't defend himself.
He doesn't say no, they weren't awful. He doesn't try to justify any of the choices. Other than to say, you know, there are various criteria that you have to bear in mind when you're making these appointments. One thing is we have to have geographic representation, which was actually pretty much insisted on in those days. Another thing is, people have to be wealthy and they have to be well connected. Because there weren't really significant salaries that went with these offices. And you had to have different parts of the Republican Coalition in different states represented in these high positions. And when he got through describing the various qualifications to the fellow, you could kind of think, well. Still, I don't think John Armstrong was a good choice for war secretary.
I mean, is this really what? He was actually probably competent, but he had also been the chief.
Conspirator at Newburgh during the Revolution Conspiracy, you know? So here's a essentially a.
Traitor? Yes, yes, and James Madison must have known that everybody knew that. In fact, John Quincy Adams I mentioned in the book, John Quincy Adams, wrote in his diary that this was the most shameful appointment that had ever been made in the federal government.
He could not believe that John Armstrong was in the cabinet. That leads to a question that I had, I was reading this.
Morning, in another book, about the moment when Dolly Madison is on the roof of the White House with her telescope, trying to see whether Jemmy is safe. And and trying to figure out when the redcoats are going to come. And then, of course, we all know. She saves the Gilbert Stewart painting of George Washington, which was huge eight feet by five. And it wasn't easy to get that sucker off the wall, it turns out. But. But then she's, she goes across the river to meet up with Madison. And they, they're all these notes, back and forth, a little bit of confusion. She gets to this, this tavern, and the people start browbeating her like your husband's.
A disaster. He screwed this thing up, he's allowed Washington to be sacked. You two are not good, and she's, she's taking this abuse. I never had heard that before.
But amazing. And he does, too, as he comes back into the into the federal city. And here's the White House burning, and the Capitol burning, the Treasury burning the point.
At which he decides he needs to break with Armstrong. He tells Armstrong, You know, everybody's blaming this on you. So maybe you should take a vacation. You need to go home to New York for a while. And at that point, apparently, once Armstrong had followed up on this and headed off toward New York. Madison, I think, fobbed off responsibility on him, but although he had, Armstrong had done things that made him culpable. Ultimately, the responsibility was, of course, in the President.
Of course, and he's out there as commander in chief, something he should not have attempted to do, be out advising troops. I think it's just fascinating that this the story of of the sacking of Washington, you know? Of course, it came up again a couple of years ago with our more recent, more minor sacking of the Capitol. But it's an amazing story. That, you know that we, we Americans tend to forget that early on in our national history, the British sacked our national capital and got away with it. Talk a little bit about Dolly Madison as America's first great first lady.
Oh boy, well, Dolly Madison was a kind of compliment to her husband. Her husband was the kind of fellow who, in a big group, would find two or three guys to stand in a corner with and talk to. And meanwhile, Mrs Madison would kind of flit around the room, saying that everybody was happy. And giving, you know, sharing punch with them and making sure that they knew that she had been there. There's a kind of feeling that her conviviality really kind of greased the skids for Madisonian politics.
People who met with the two of them in small groups said that James Madison was kind of a happy-go-lucky. A hail fellow. Well met, but apparently in a big group, he, he was not comfortable, so Mrs. Madison made up for that. And I tell stories about that in the book. About her role in, shall we say, decorating the White House, which when they moved into it was kind of a frame of a building. And famously, Mrs.
Adams In the couple of weeks she lived there had had run a clothesline across the East room, which is, you know, hard to fathom. But Mrs Madison had lots of family connections. As I recall, she was related by marriage or by blood, to five congressmen in one Supreme Court justice. And and so it seems that she and her sisters had all decided marrying politicians was a good thing to do. And this meant connections for James Madison, too. So she was, I guess, a kind of lieutenant in the political operation.
So she's tall, five, eight she wears.
These turbans and feathers, and she beautiful gowns, and she, by all accounts, she's vivacious and working the crowd and making everyone feel comfortable. And people may not know that, James.
Madison remains the smallest person who's ever been president. He was five, two, apparently about, yeah, something like that, and he apparently weighed about a hundred pounds. It's kind of hard to imagine. I think I was five feet tall and a hundred pounds when I was in the fifth grade. And Madison, Madison was that size. When he was president, well, he married up, let's say he married.
A woman who who became one of the great women of the of that era in American life. And really set the tone for first ladies. Because she was the first first lady who had a cause, she helped to support an orphanage, right? And that. So, this sets the tone for the first lady, who stays out of politics but does important, socially acceptable things in a private way while serving in that.
Office Well, the the thing about these three presidents is, of course. Jefferson was a widower. And then James Madison had this very vivacious wife, and then Mrs Monroe was sickly. So she didn't do much socializing at all. So Mrs Madison really was a break with anything that had come before. And people remembered this, uh, experience they had had with her for decades.
After, of course, she moved back to the Capitol. She does in those last five years of her life. She's she.
Loses everything, essentially because her no good son has gambled it all away and drunk it all away, and she can't stand up to him. She keeps bailing him out, selling plantations and enslaved people to support his habits. And she spends the last five years in some, in some, poverty, not destitution, in Washington, D.C. So we know we all have this picture of her, but who's the next first lady? I mean, you almost go to Mary Todd Lincoln.
They're, they're not colorful until much later, you know?
I understand that Mary Todd Lincoln was the first one who was called first Lady and that that was a term of derision in her case. So, uh, I don't know who was the first one after Mrs Madison, who was popular with the general public. I don't know who that would be. So Jefferson leaves on March 4th.
1909 Using his usual political theater, rides his horse to the inauguration. You know, it does all.
That says all the Jeffersonian things I did not know before I worked on this book, that Jefferson. The first draft of Jefferson's first inaugural address, included positive references to both of his predecessors. And apparently, when he awoke that morning and found out that the Adamses had left, he cut out the part about John Adams. So it just says something nice about George Washington. So this was a little bit vindictive, maybe. How do you know this?
Maybe John Adams should have, you know, stuck around for the day, but of course he should have. How do you know this? Uh, well, it's in the papers, it's in the, uh, the Jefferson Papers volume, he scratches out.
A reference? A nice reference to Adams, because Adams bolted at 4 a.
M. But of course, he, famously.
He says that he realizes that. Um, it's not going to fall to people who have been in this high office to have reputations as good when they leave as they have been when they arrived. And so then he said positive things about the two of them, but the final version doesn't include.
Anything about John Adams fascinating, really. When we come back, I want to ask you more about the shape of his administration. So let's take a quick break. I'm talking with Kevin Gootsman, the author of The Jeffersonians, The Visionary Presidencies of Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, and we will talk about James Monroe. Uh, you're listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour?
We'll be back in just a.
MINUTE Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour. I'm talking with Kevin Gootsman about his book on the three Virginians, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. The 24-year Virginia Dynasty, as it has been called. Madison, becomes the fourth president, and in a certain sense, we need to look on that as Jefferson's third term. You won't want to overemphasize that, but in a sense, it's more continuity than otherwise. And Jefferson is willing to retire in 1809 because he knows that his legacy is going to be well taken care of by his closest collaborator, Madison.
Madison winds up in this appalling war, which we, you know, barely survived and won. Mostly for the same reason that it's hard for an island to wage continual war against a continent. But it wasn't one of America's greatest moments. But he survives it and is re-elected, he gets through it. And he's not unpopular at the time of his retirement. He's not as popular as Jefferson, but he doesn't leave in shame.
So what are the greatest achievements of the Madison administration, would you say?
Ah, well, obviously. The continued retirement of the debt is the main thing they're interested in. And there are significant steps taken in regard to settlement of New Louisiana territory. There's change to the composition of the Supreme Court that moves it away from the entirely Hamiltonian posture it had been taking. Other than that, essentially, it's following the Jeffersonian program. I wouldn't say that it was markedly different. I again, I don't think you can really understand the Madison administration without starting with Jefferson.
So with Jefferson administration, so it really is more of the same in general, and that's what they expected it to be.
That's what Madison intended it to be. In some respects, Madison is, I think, the most underrated of the founding fathers. He certainly deserves a higher place than he's tended to get. And yet when we want to talk about how great he was, we talk about the Bill of Rights, the Constitutional Convention, his work on the Louisiana Purchase Treaty and so on. We seldom spend a lot of time on the Madison presidency.
It's just sort of best left alone. For most historians. Do you find it tedious trying to flog your way through that war? Well, the most interesting part.
Of the war is the naval aspect of it, in which there's some of the most famous acts of naval heroism in American history. And people in Britain were shocked by news of repeated victories of single American ships against single British ships. But of course, this wasn't going to change the general shape of the war, because the British had hundreds and hundreds of warships. And ultimately, the Americans found themselves cabined in essentially to their own ports. I guess one other major, I don't know whether you call it accomplishment, one other major legacy of the Madison administration is that. At war's end, there was an agreement between the United States and the British, more or less, to demilitarize the border between the United States and Canada, which remains demilitarized. Now. It is the longest undefended border ever anywhere, and it has been for 200 years, so this is very significant.
Actually, if you've traveled, you know, in Europe or elsewhere. I when when I was a child, my father was in the army, I lived in Central America. And, of course, at every border, you had to stop at the Adwana. And it's just not like that in the United, between the United States and Canada. So that's a significant development, too. Beyond those, I do think it's more of the Jefferson administration, it's more of one continuous administration, you know, of course.
Jefferson thought this was going to be the way World Without End right there, there just would forever be more of the same program. Because, as he said in his first inaugural address, he thought Americans generally agreed about political principles. And so they were all going to be reflected in the administration of his government, and he was right in the short term, and.
Colossally wrong in the long term, so the federalists basically disappear. Jefferson is overwhelmingly re-elected in 1804. He's popular even after the debacle of the embargo acts. And in my opinion, he abdicated the presidency about seven months before he actually left town, which was unfair to poor Madison. At the end of his life, Jefferson writes this magnificent letter to James Madison, the last that he ever wrote to Madison, and he says something like. We have the the gratification of knowing that. The administration which you and I brought to the world had more integrity and more real commitment to the happiness of humankind than any other government. That can be explored by historians.
We are the class act of governance. And so in a certain sense, I believe that, I mean, in a certain sense. Jefferson is kind of right about that. He thought the end of history? He's like Fukuyama, that it's over now, the Jeffersonians. That's the permanent paradigm of human liberty and limited government. And so I love that, because, first of all, it's a very beautiful letter to Madison and a great tribute to to Madison.
But it's also so wrong that Jefferson can live in this world where he thinks. I don't disagree with his basic assertion, although it's a whopper. What I disagree with is his belief that this is going to continue forever. That's what he.
Seemingly thought, actually. There's an amusing story that when the two of them were corresponding about establishing what would become the University of Virginia. They went back and forth about various things that needed to be taken care of. And then they got to the question, Well, what kinds of books need to be in the library? And we should maybe prescribe this book for chemistry? And Madison writes back and says, Well, now you think we should, we should let the chemistry teacher decide what books they would assign in chemistry class.
And Jefferson says, Well, yes, but when it comes to politics, you and I decide, right? So, so. He had this idea that we had reached the final stage, which, of course, is a very un-Jeffersonian idea. The general tenor of Jefferson's thought was, man will continue to accrue more and more knowledge and things will forever improve. When it came to politics, this is kind of an end state, you're right.
I do think that was his opinion.
Well, I think he believed that partisanship is inevitable, but it doesn't need to be the path, it doesn't need to be the sole way we go about this. And that we agree on more than we disagree on. And that America is an exceptional experiment, and that we probably are going to find more harmony than has existed before. There's a deep hopefulness in Jefferson's vision. And what Hamilton would say was, You have no idea how capitalism works. You know? You're going to be overwhelmed. Your agrarian Virgilian Horatian fantasy here is going to be overwhelmed with the power of money. And Jefferson, I didn't, don't even think, had that mental vocabulary.
Well, Monroe apparently thought this, too. He took no steps to ensure that there would be another Virginian to succeed him as president. But he seems to have thought there shouldn't be parties. One interesting thing this shows. It's very common among political scientists to assume that at this time, people were all going around spouting passages of the Federalists to each other. But even though Madison had written the essay in The Federalist about the idea that parties were inevitable, apparently Jefferson and Monroe did not think parties were inevitable. They thought there shouldn't be parties.
That was artificial, and Hamilton drummed that up, and the only reason that was possible was because, inexplicably, he had an in with General Washington. You're right, it's it's. Of course it proves to be ephemeral, but they didn't think it was ephemeral. Certainly, Jefferson didn't think it was ephemeral. And again, I don't think Monroe thought so either. I think that he thought there was going to be more of such administration. And we don't want it to be all Virginians, because that'll build up resentment and this could lead to negative political outcomes.
But why would principles change in the federal government? Monroe does not want the sixth.
President to be a Virginian, what does he want? Well, he'd like somebody of a similar mind, but.
He doesn't even want her to be parties. Of course, by the time you get through his re-election, he'll. There's only one vote against him in the Electoral College, and and that's from William Plummer, who's a fellow Republican. He just said he didn't think Monroe's personality was appropriate to the office. Monroe's idea was essentially that, as he said about Jefferson, we've reached kind of end state.
We now have made big advances over the ancients in political science, and there's really nothing.
Left to learn. So here we are. Conventional wisdom is that Jefferson is a visionary genius, Madison is a deep thinker and a master of politics and political theory, and Monroe is kind of a.
Lightweight. How fair is that? Well, I think Monroe is easily the most successful president of the three. This idea was kind of circulating in their own lifetimes. And somebody asked John C. Calhoun, who had been Monroe's war secretary and one of his two chief advisors in the cabinet, about this, and Calhoun's response was Well, it's true that Mr. Monroe was not brilliant.
On the other hand, he said, he had almost inerrant judgment. He would make the right decision. And of course, that's what you want in a president, you know, you want a president. Maybe he doesn't have a 150 IQ, but he's not going to start a war without raising taxes and raising an army. That's how I understand it.
It's certainly the case that Monroe did not have the very well-honed intellect that the other two did. Of course, we have to remember that. Part of the reason for that is that at age 18, he dropped out of William Mary to join the Continental Army with a lot of his classmates. So he had been an authentic war hero in the American Revolution, and he never got to go back and finish his schooling. But he apparently felt the deficit. And he chose John, Quincy, Adams and Calhoun to be his top advisors. And by all accounts, they gave him good advice and he made correct decisions.
He made good appointments to other positions, and, as I said, I think he was clearly the most successful president of the three.
So 1823 Monroe writes to former President Jefferson and says, I'm kind of formulating the thing about the Western Hemisphere, What do you think? And Jefferson weighs in, and John Quincy Adams takes it from there, and we get the Monroe doctrine. So to unpack that a little bit, that's in.
His sixth annual address, Of course. In those days. The annual address was a written message that would be sent by the President to Capitol Hill to be read by the clerks of each of the two houses. I think right. Monroe's notion is there had been a request or an offer feeler from the British government about the question whether the United States would join the British in making a proclamation that no more slave trading would be allowed in the Atlantic Ocean and on the coasts of North and South America. And so they went through cabinet meeting and the Cabinet members would speak in reverse order of seniority.
So Calhoun's position was well. This is a great idea, I'm sure we should do this. And when they came to Quincy Adams, Quincy Adams said, Well, okay, it could be a good idea. We, of course, like the principle of not having any more of the transatlantic slave trade, slave trade.
On the other hand, if we join the British in making this proclamation, we'll just be a kind of bark in the wake of the Great British worship. But if we just let them make their own proclamation and then make our own proclamation. A day is going to come when we are mighty enough to enforce this ourselves. And we'll be able to point back to this and say we've. We've told you all along, we won't allow this kind of thing here. The slave trade and interference by European powers in the Western Hemisphere, former colonies of Spain were the two main issues. And Monroe says in his sixth annual address that the United States will look with a hostile eye on any attempt by European powers to recolonize former Spanish colonies in the Western Hemisphere. British are going to be doing that too, but the United States is not going to be following the British in taking steps against that kind of activity on the part of European countries.
When, as Adams foresaw after World War II? Or maybe in the 1950s, when it finally was the case that the United States was militarily more powerful than the British? Here, the United States could say, well over a century ago, we told you we were not going to allow interference of European powers in in the Western hemisphere. This reflects the way that Jefferson Madison Monroe thought about these things, too. It was very early on in the history of the breakup of the Spanish empire that the United States were sympathetic. That the U.S government sent not ambassadorial personnel, but lower level diplomats to various provinces of the former Spanish empire, and so on, and more or less urged them to follow the American example. Some of them adopted written constitutions after the American example and made declarations of independence.
That sounded kind of like Spanish inflected or Portuguese inflected versions of Jefferson's handiwork. And this was, uh, it seemed a kind of Republican millennium to all these people.
I want to ask you a question about ideology. So Jefferson is more Jeffersonian when he's not the president, when he's the president. He surprises a lot of people by his moderation, his pragmatism, in some ways, he's even seen as a quasi-hamiltonian. And, of course, the Louisiana purchase is a test moment of all of that.
And that causes the the more hard-edged Republicans like John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke to really be a little disappointed with their great man than Madison. More disappointing still, during the first two of these presidencies, Monroe is the of the Republicans, and he, he still has the allegiance of that crowd. I think the ideological question I'm asking is, if you want to be an ideological purist, you never want to hold power, right? Because when they have to hold power, they have to make pragmatic decisions. Well, just as.
Taylor told Monroe You know, I've always been an ally of yours, but the minute you become the.
President, I'll, I'll be in opposition. They all learned, in a certain sense, the hard way, that these big pronouncements that they make, principally Jefferson, are hard to uphold. When you have to make day-to-day decisions about a very complex world where you're being preyed upon by the French and the British. And you've got problems out in the West, and people are often disappointed with Jefferson, less disappointed historians with Madison and Monroe, because they didn't they?
Didn't send the the idealism so high. I think the only significant Republican who thought there was a constitutional problem with Louisiana purchase was Jefferson.
Madison's response was, What are you kidding? It says, Deal with it. Article two of the Constitution, you can make a treaty with the advice and consent of the Senate. And since it doesn't say what kind of treaties, we have to assume that means all the common kinds of treaties, of course, nowadays. And then that would include treaties of alliance, treaties of peace, commercial treaties.
It would not include today, but it would have included in those days treaties to buy and sell territory, which were not uncommon in Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. So Madison thought, this is not really even an issue. I can't identify any other significant Republican who thought this was an issue than the president. The president thought this was a problem, and he never was persuaded it had been constitutional.
But his final conclusion is, well. There will occasionally be instances in which the chief executive has of because of fugitive events. Has to make a decision and just throw himself on the you know, will of the people. There are occasions when this will happen.
And it's not going to be okay if it's the other guys, but if it's us, then. We have built up enough trust and credibility that the people will understand why we're making this one-time.
Deviation. See, this is how John Quincy Adams understood this. At the time this happened, he remained a federalist. He actually went to Secretary Madison and asked him whether he would like John Quincy Adams to write a constitutional amendment empowering the federal government to do this, Madison told Adams. I don't think we need to do that.
In his diary, John Quincy Adams wrote All of the complaints that the Republicans had made against the behavior of the Federalists in the 1790s had been political. I think none of them were sincere when you went into the project, what?
Changed in your mind when you actually dug in for five years with these three people, as I said before.
I think Monroe was certainly the most successful of the three. I had a baseline idea of the war of 1812, but I just didn't realize how inept the executive leadership of the country was during the war of 1812. It was just so awful. I have to say that I think that, again, Monroe was the best president of them, Jefferson considerably less, less successful than Monroe, and Madison's presidency was a debacle.
It was how else could you describe it? Whatever else he did, a foreign army burned down the capital, so what can you say?
We'll have to leave it there for the moment. I've so enjoyed.
This conversation Come back and have more conversations on the Jefferson Hour about this extraordinary period in American history. I've been talking to Kevin Gutzman, the author of The Jeffersonians, the Visionary Presidencies of Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. We'll see you all next week for another important edition of the Thomas Jefferson Hour.
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