Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Congressman James Madison, Republicans of Virginia, took a lengthy trip through northern climes together in the spring of 1791. Contemporaries surmised that the two of them had in mind to invigorate the Republican proto-party of which they were understood to be the leaders. Louis P. Masur’s exquisite little book A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, & the Forging of a Friendship shows that they did far more than that.
Masur refers to the Virginians’ northern sojourn as “a gambol through upstate New York and parts of New England” and what we would nowadays call an opportunity for them to recharge their batteries. Their ongoing conflict with Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist party had somewhat dampened their spirits, and a bit of sightseeing would perhaps reinvigorate these prominent political contestants—even if it is somewhat difficult to imagine James Madison in so light-hearted a mood as to be gamboling. Masur’s other description of the journey as an “excursion, maybe an adventure” is more apt. They did do some work along the way, the author avers, as their sightseeing at Revolutionary battlefields and meetings with local eminences perforce had political implications.
In his prologue, Masur shows that Jefferson, at least, had in mind traveling with a companion from an early age. For example, he asked John Page—a young friend and future Virginia governor—whether he had in mind to travel: “If you have,” Jefferson told him years before the Revolution, “I shall be glad of your company.” As Page would not join him, Jefferson had to wait until he was posted several years later to represent the Confederation Congress in Europe to take in the sights in much of England and France. Of rural France, he wrote, “I am now in the land of corn, wine, oil, and sunshine. What more can man ask of heaven?” He counseled a younger kinsman that traveling “makes men wiser, but less happy.” As he was likely to learn to value his homeland less if he traveled abroad, Jefferson opined that the younger man should just take in American sights: “There is no place where your pursuit of knowledge will be so little obstructed by foreign objects as in your own country, nor any wherein the virtues of the heart will be less exposed to be weakened.”
One suspects that spending time together was what the two rising statesmen enjoyed most about their voyage.
James Madison was loath to undertake significant travel. He first rejected an invitation from Jefferson to spend much of 1784 in France and then the following year turned down James Monroe’s invitation to accompany him to the Ohio territory. Monroe’s suggestions of Montreal and Quebec sojourns drew no more positive a response. In 1784, however, Madison did accompany the Marquis de Lafayette to New York and up the Hudson River (which he had visited before). He told Jefferson in the wake of this journey that he would like to see “the eastern states,” i.e., New England, on the first convenient occasion.
Masur provides a kind of précis of Jefferson’s life prior to the trip with Madison, capturing all of the main points in a slight space and giving a good impression of the older man’s personality along the way. A substantial deepening of the two men’s friendship followed the death of Jefferson’s wife, particularly as the two shared time together in Philadelphia between that lamentable event and Jefferson’s departure for diplomatic duty in France. In 1784, not for the last time, Jefferson tried to persuade Madison to establish an abode close to Monticello.
Their political relationship is also succinctly presented. Like most Federalists of the 1780s, Madison was aghast at Shays’ Rebellion; Jefferson, away in France, found something very un-French to admire in Berkshires Massachusetts men’s tax resistance. A similar impulse left Jefferson quite skeptical of the proposed United States Constitution, which his friend had played the lead role in writing. To placate Orange County Baptists, Jefferson, Governor Edmund Randolph, George Mason, and George Nicholas, Madison took up Jefferson’s dear cause of constitutional amendments. Masur’s account of these matters, familiar to students of the men and the period, is brief and clear. So too that of the Jefferson/Madison-led Republican Party’s opposition to Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s program.
Some of the material Masur includes is of interest to students of Jefferson, Madison, and the United States in this period, though not likely to people solely interested in the Northern Sojourn of 1791. For example, the story of the slave James Hemings’ service to Jefferson in Virginia and France, besides his eventual emancipation in America and ultimate suicide, has little to do with the events of 1791. So too the imbroglio over publication of Jefferson’s comment on a copy of Tom Paine’s “Rights of Man” that it would counteract certain “political heresies which have sprung up among us.” The “heresies” he had in mind had been endorsed by Vice President John Adams, whom Jefferson certainly did not intend to contradict in so direct a manner before the public—yet here it was. Masur seems to include these marginally relevant tales just because he finds them interesting. (The Paine tale ends with an observation that Timothy Pickering was due to have a distinguished career, which is one way to describe it.)
We are told after this that Madison and Jefferson fell into “the very party system that they dreaded,” and by the end of the same paragraph, Madison says that party disputation “could not be prevented,”—which anyone familiar with his famous Federalist #10 would find totally unsurprising. Jefferson stooped to secret partisan machinations and lied to President Washington about being involved, as the President surely must have known. That the two Republican chieftains dined with prominent administration critics before their departure to the north cannot have allayed anyone’s suspicions.
“No question,” Masur says, “politics was on everyone’s mind” as our heroes began their journey. “Jefferson and Madison’s tour through Federalist New England undoubtedly reinforced for them the necessity of taking a firm public stand against what they saw as the heresies of the day. Yet, in the end, politics was not their main purpose.” “Health, recreation, and curiosity,” said Madison, prompted their trip. What else might we expect him to have said?
From then on, each chapter of the book about the journey itself is titled to refer to one of the main matters of interest to Jefferson and Madison as they made their way. Jefferson famously was a man of encyclopedic interests, and Madison, too, could be prompted to take up matters of fascination. While we are prone to think of them now as among the premier politicians in the country’s history, both of them were first substantial farmers, of course, and one of the purposes of their journey was to investigate the problems posed to American agriculture by the Hessian fly.
Masur provides information about the new pest’s appearance in Europe, about Jefferson’s role in spurring the American Philosophical Society to investigate the Hessian fly, about the questions regarding the fly—when it first appeared, whether it grew from egg or worm, the type(s) of wheat it attacked, how it had been successfully fought—to ask people along their route. “Jefferson’s most extensive writing” on the trip, we learn, “was his notes on the Hessian fly.” “They are never in the grain or chaff,” he jotted, likely irked by the British government’s measures to exclude American wheat imports. Though an amateur scientist, Jefferson was a notable one. In his leisure time, he did significant mental work, and Madison was right along with him. Much of their recreation on the trip had practical application.
Masur also describes Jefferson’s relationships with one of his daughters and a slave, as shown on this trip. Rather than a single narrative account, the book presents a timeline with several points of interest along it, at which the author delves into related, sometimes distantly related, matters. The “forging of a friendship” in the book’s title does not exactly capture the book’s content. For example, there are sections on Jefferson’s relationship with his younger daughter and on the slave man he took with him to France, neither of which is related to the older man’s relationship with James Madison.
A substantial section on Madison and slavery, though interesting, is not much about the men’s friendship either. Like Jefferson, he thought seriously about slavery, and Masur considers his record in this regard. Like many other Upper South liberals of his day, Madison believed that the sole practicable solution to the slavery problem was to find someplace to which American slaves could be sent. While Masur’s account of this matter will hold the interested reader’s attention, it is not obviously related to the book’s supposed theme.
In sum, A Journey North ably tells the story, with substantial digressions, of the northern trip James Madison and Thomas Jefferson took in 1791. Perhaps the most memorable aspect of this well-written little book is the story of Jefferson’s leaving his walking stick to Madison “as a token of the cordial and affectionate friendship which for nearly now an [sic] half century, has united us in the same principles and pursuits of what we have deemed for the greatest good of our country.” Masur illustrates it with a photo of the stick, which Madison returned to Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson’s favorite grandchild, thus accounting for its presence at Monticello today. One suspects that spending time together was what the two rising statesmen enjoyed most about their voyage.