Jefferson and the Virginians by Peter Onuf

Author:Peter Onuf [Onuf, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Revolutionary Period (1775-1800), North America
ISBN: 9780807170557
Google: 7AttDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2018-10-10T00:43:59+00:00

IV. GENERATIONS

Over the course of the campaign to draft and ratify the Constitution, Jefferson and Madison conceived of the character of the American people and their role in the expanding federal republic in contrasting ways. Overlooking the endemic factionalism that Madison feared would subvert state governments and destroy the union, Jefferson celebrated the spirit of the people. The coincidental “revolution in the public opinion” in France provided an optimistic framework for interpreting American developments that ratification of the Constitution ultimately vindicated. Madison and his allies were able to direct the current of public opinion in a progressive direction, thus overcoming “factious” opposition and widespread skepticism about their own good faith. Ratification logically led Madison to embrace Jefferson’s narrative of democratic constitutional change. When the American people, acting through their state conventions, ratified the Constitution, they became its true authors. The people had made the Constitution, and they could revise it to suit their changing needs.

Jefferson explored the broad implications of his democratic constitutionalism in an extraordinary letter to Madison from Paris in September 1789. Jefferson famously told Madison that the “earth belongs in usufruct to the living” and then went on to elaborate his conception of generational sovereignty.88 According to calculations he based on mortality tables, a new generation appeared roughly every nineteen years, and its coming of age should be marked by drafting a new constitution. This was not, of course, a description of demographic reality, but rather a provocative thought experiment designed to illuminate the fundamental principles of political society. Preoccupied with the practical business of organizing the new federal government, Madison had little inclination to indulge Jefferson’s theoretical fancies. The two men did spend some time together after Jefferson’s return from France in November, when Madison recruited his friend to serve in Washington’s cabinet as the first secretary of state. Evidently the generation theme did not come up in conversation.89 Madison only responded to Jefferson’s letter in February, politely but dismissively.90 It might be easy for Jefferson to theorize about writing a new constitution every nineteen years, but it was a prospect the “father” of the recently ratified federal constitution could not happily contemplate.

The exchange between Jefferson and Madison has inspired much excellent scholarship.91 Focusing on the immediate context, most writers understandably highlight the contrasting perspectives of the “philosophical legislator” and the practical politician. By most accounts, Madison makes the most sense. Jefferson’s call for a periodic return to first principles was a prescription for “anarchy” and “licentiousness,” exacerbating endemic factiousness and “subverting the very foundation of Civil Society.” Jefferson insisted on the right of each generation, “by the law of nature,” to determine its own destiny, freed from the past’s dead hand: “one generation is to another as one independant nation to another.”92 But generations only existed in Jefferson’s mind, not in the real world. Starting all over again “at the end of a given term” risked the “consequences of an interregnum,” Madison replied. In this period of no government, or state of nature, the “voice

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