No friendship in American history has been as consequential as that between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Their paths first crossed shortly after Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence; soon they became inseparable partners in building a new nation. Even after Jefferson’s passing in 1826, their partnership endured. In his last letter to Madison, Jefferson asked, “take care of me when dead.” Madison did so, arranging for the publication of notes that Jefferson had taken from the Confederation Congress’s debates about the Declaration of Independence alongside the notes Madison took at the Federal Convention in Philadelphia of 1787. These indispensable records were published after Madison’s death in a three-volume set then known as “the Madison Papers.” These at last gave Americans a first-hand account of the nation’s formative debates, from the point of view of these two founding friends.
Though Madison and Jefferson saw their legacies as inseparable, if not identical, Progressive-era historians would later tear them apart. Most notably, Charles Beard claimed that the Constitution represented a betrayal of the Declaration’s democratic principles. Though the particulars of his argument have been amply refuted, the sentiment it conveyed continues to have a powerful residual influence on scholarship about the founding era. Still, subsequent historians who have treated Jefferson and Madison as partners confirm the continuities of their political thought and legacies, rather than supporting Beard’s claim of discontinuities. Adrienne Koch reconciles the two in her classic work Jefferson and Madison: The Great Collaboration by raising Madison to Jefferson’s status as an American philosophe. She reached the “inescapable conclusion … that the political philosophy known simply as ‘Jeffersonian’ is actually an amalgam of ideas, which owes very much to James Madison.” Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, in Madison and Jefferson, sought by contrast “to separate myth from reality,” framing these men less as visionaries of a new form of democratic republicanism and more as practitioners of “hardball politics in a time of intolerance.” They also place Madison’s contributions on an “essential equality” with Jefferson’s, but by devaluing the principles and ideals that these men shared.
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