Christopher Benfey on Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's Excellent Adventure
| In the spring of 1791 Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, seeking, in Madison’s words, “health recreation & curiosity,” decided to go on an extended holiday together. As Christopher Benfey writes in the Review’s March 12 issue: They envisaged a monthlong ramble up the Hudson River and down the Connecticut, with stops at the major battlefields of Saratoga and Ticonderoga in upstate New York and a foray into the newly admitted state of Vermont. Jefferson was forty-eight, Madison eight years younger.… Neither traveler knew, in that spring of 1791, what form the federal government might eventually take. Neither knew that he would one day be president. Neither knew that this would be their final extended journey.
Unburdened by knowledge of the future, on their sojourn the Founding Friends nonetheless managed to encounter everywhere intimations of the nation’s future: “an invasive pest known as the Hessian fly, which had devastated the American wheat crop over the previous decade; an encounter with a free Black farmer in New York; the sugar maple tree of Vermont; and an interview with a few Indians on eastern Long Island.” Below, alongside Benfey’s essay, are five articles from our archives about Jefferson and Madison. In a thirty-three day ramble along the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers in 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison encountered many of the issues that would end up plaguing the United States. Americans have been trying to claim, or use, Thomas Jefferson in one way or another from the time of his death in 1826 up until this very moment. —August 19, 2017 “But France was also, by the end of the 1790s, a frightening illustration of the political costs of military power to a republican form of government. Madison’s and Jefferson’s arguments against federal power had been concerned, since the ratification of the Constitution, with ‘executive aggrandizement,’ of which, Madison wrote in 1793, ‘war is in fact the true nurse.’” —March 25, 2004 New Subscriber Benefit!Subscribers are now able to share unlocked versions of our articles with friends, family, and social media channels. When signed in to your account, look for this gift box icon in any of our articles. “Poor James Madison! Think of who he was and what he achieved. The major architect of the Constitution; the father of the Bill of Rights and one of the strongest proponents of the rights of conscience and religious liberty in American history; co-author of The Federalist, surely the most significant work of political theory in American history; the leader and most important member of the first House of Representatives in 1789; co-founder of the Democratic-Republican party in the 1790s; secretary of state in Jefferson’s administration; and the fourth president of the United States—all this, and still he does not have the popular standing of the other founding fathers, especially that of his closest friend, Thomas Jefferson.” —October 19, 1995 Thomas Jefferson and James Madison first met while serving in the Virginia state legislature in 1776, when Madison was twenty-six and Jefferson thirty-three, and within a few years began a correspondence and collaboration that ended only with Jefferson’s death on the fiftieth anniversary of his great Declaration, July 4, 1826. During that time they exchanged 1,250 letters that have been preserved, and here they are, in chronological order, from small enigmatic one-liners to lengthy discursive ruminations.
—March 2, 1995 “The third president, converted to a cult of Jesus while he was in the White House, spent the last years of his life reading himself to sleep over the Gospels.” —November 24, 1983 You are receiving this message because you signed up
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