THE TRAIN OF EVENTS BEGAN WITH A HORRIBLE EVENT IN HIS FRIEND Jefferson’s life. In late September 1782, Madison learned that Jefferson’s long-suffering wife, Martha, had died. Jefferson, he knew, had loved Martha completely, and the prior year had already been convulsive for the couple. In flight from the British, Martha had given birth to a baby daughter, Lucy, but the infant died after four months, breaking her parents’ hearts. Just three months ago, Jefferson had retired from the governorship to Monticello to be a husband, father, farmer, and lawyer.
Randolph visited with Jefferson and wrote Madison with alarm that the man’s grief was “so violent” that he was “swooning away” whenever he saw his children.1 Madison had a difficult time envisioning his friend out of control. He responded coolly, as if Jefferson’s trauma was just another challenge to dissect and control. “I conceive very readily,” he wrote, “the affliction & anguish which our friend at Monticello must experience at his irreparable loss.” But Jefferson’s “philosophical temperament,” he confidently told Randolph, made the report of his swooning at the sight of the couple’s children “altogether incredible.”
Not only did Madison refuse to mirror Jefferson’s passion. He saw a political opportunity in his tragedy. He had already felt that Jefferson’s talent was being wasted on domestic life. He now asked Randolph to approach Jefferson to serve as a peace commissioner in Europe as “soon as his sensibility will bear a subject of such a nature.”2 Madison passed the idea to other legislators, and it spread quickly. In November, Congress unanimously supported reappointing Jefferson as minister plenipotentiary for negotiating peace. Congress openly discussed his domestic situation. Madison, taking notes, wrote that many hoped “the death of Mrs. J. had probably changed the sentiments of Mr. J with regard to public life.”3
Madison then heard what was, for him, another kind of death: the crushing news that the Virginia legislature had defeated the forced contribution once and for all.
RANDOLPH ADMITTED HE HAD WAITED TEN DAYS TO TELL MADISON THE news because it “was not a fit season.” “I commiserate your situation indeed!” he told Madison.4 The defeat took on a biblical cast in Virginia. Just after the New Year, Governor Harrison wrote to Madison that “the cloven footed monster” was roaming in Richmond—a beast, Harrison wrote (no poet, but trying) “cover’d with the thickest covering.” The forced contribution’s foes, through “silken words” and “high sounding patriotic speeches,” were tempting men to error and to sin—even those “who think they know and are on their guard against him.”5
The defiant states continued to sap the country’s strength. Madison was delighted when Jefferson agreed to return to public life in his reappointment. The peace negotiations with Great Britain were dragging on, the countries still technically at war. Madison returned to the nexus imperii he had proposed to Witherspoon: to bind the two countries through their mutual interest in money. He introduced a motion instructing the ministers plenipotentiary—John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and now Thomas Jefferson—to establish “direct Commerce” with the British empire.6 By tethering the United States and its parent through trade, he thought, the two countries would be forced to heal their war wounds through mutual interest. His motion passed unanimously.7
By January, Jefferson moved back into the boardinghouse run by Mary House, a popular Philadelphia house where Jefferson, Madison, and several other congressmen regularly stayed for long stretches at a time. The reunion with Madison, despite Jefferson’s bottomless pain, was joyful for both men. Fermenting ideas excitedly, they quickly landed on a project suitable to their personalities. The prior summer, Theodorick Bland—in a rare forward-looking move—had successfully motioned that Congress compile a “list of books to be imported for the use of the United States in Congress Assembled.” The committee charged with that mission again brought together Madison (as chairman) and John Witherspoon, as well as John Lowell from Massachusetts. But with Witherspoon and Lowell both leaving Congress, Madison had continued the work mostly on his own.8
With Jefferson in Philadelphia, he could attack with renewed force the project of building a world-class library for a reimagined nation. The list Madison and Jefferson worked up was sweeping in its ambition and strikingly particular in its scope. The books included many volumes that Madison studied with Robertson and Witherspoon, major works of intellectual history, moral philosophy (Francis Hutchinson), collections of laws (Hugo Grotius), and collections of treaties and of laws. It featured works on French international law and diplomatic history; books of general history, from Voltaire to Sir Walter Raleigh, geography, and maps; and Greek, Roman, Italian, German and Dutch, French, Russian, Spanish, Prussian, Swedish, and, of course, British history. It also held journals of travels to foreign lands, such as India; synoptic works on law (Blackstone); and books of articles about the American states and territories.
Most critically, they tilted their list toward political theory. For the perusal of the United States Congress, Madison put down Plato’s Republic; Aristotle’s A Treatise on Government; Sir Thomas More’s Utopia; Thomas Hobbes’s collected works, including Leviathan; John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government; Niccolò Machiavelli’s collected works, including The Prince; Montesquieu’s collected works; Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; and David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects.9
What was missing from the list was as notable as what it included. There was no Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose idealistic, passionate exposition of society’s “general will” and the individual necessity of enlightenment had captivated the French revolutionaries. There was no Cicero, whose Platonic assertions about statesmanship contained little imagination but stern admonitions about ethics in politics.
And there was no Shakespeare. The playwright was beginning to loom large in America’s political thought. John Adams, for instance, praised Shakespeare’s “knowledge of nature, of life and character,” employed Macbeth to attack England’s treatment of colonial Americans, and used Henry VIII to question unfair tax policy and Coriolanus to undermine internecine politics.10 On the afternoon of July 14, 1787, George Washington left the floor of the Constitutional Convention to watch a performance of The Tempest at Philadelphia’s Opera House—a play which many scholars have suggested could be about the plight of an iconic marooned colonial American.11 But Madison included no Shakespeare in the plan.
The list was a visionary but logical and even harsh armory of political ideas. But despite all of this intellectual preparation, Madison was about to succumb to the least intellectual experience of all.