#1665 Jefferson and Madison on Vacation

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2025

⏱️ ? minutes

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Summary

Clay's conversation with historian Louis Masur about his new book A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, & the Forging of a Friendship. In 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison went on a monthlong tour of New England. They were weary from their struggles with Alexander Hamilton for the soul of America. They needed a vacation, but as exemplars of the Enlightenment, they wanted to do some "botanizing," as they put it. They were interested in studying the Hessian Fly, which was devastating New England wheat production and seemed to be heading south to Maryland and Virginia. They wanted, like most tourists, to see American Revolution battlefields. They had been friends for more than a dozen years, but this journey deepened their political partnership. The Federalists accused them of making the journey to stir up political opposition to the Hamiltonian fiscal program; however, they were mostly exploring a part of America about which they knew little.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, all, everyone, and welcome to the special edition of listening to America.
0:09.3	I'm Clay Jenkinson.
0:10.2	And across from me is Louis Meijure, the author of a new book on Thomas Jefferson, James Madison,
0:17.8	and the amazing 1791 journey they made up into the heart of New England. So welcome, sir.
0:23.9	Great to be with you, Clay. Thank you. So how did you come to write this book? Well, one of the
0:29.0	things that I work on, I'm an American cultural and political historian, and I like to look for moments,
0:35.2	vignettes, and sort of unpack them, explode them. My sort of approach to the
0:39.7	writing of history in the world and the grain of sand, I wrote a book about a year called 1831,
0:45.3	Year of Eclipse. I've written a book about a photograph, and at some point I came across
0:49.9	the fact that these two took this trip together, And it intrigued me and I began to research it
0:56.1	and look into it and decided there was a nice little story here to be told about these
1:01.9	these two amazing friends and founding fathers taking this six-week journey together up through
1:10.5	New York and Vermont and Connecticut,
1:13.5	Massachusetts, and back down through Long Island. It's an amazing little episode in the life of
1:19.0	Thomas Jefferson, particularly, but I want to set the scene. So this is the 1790s. Now the new government of the United States is in place.
1:29.9	George Washington is the president of the United States.
1:33.7	Jefferson has come back from France, where he spent five years.
1:36.9	He was, in fact, expecting to return to France.
1:39.9	And he discovers that he's been named Secretary of State.
1:42.7	So, of course, he accepts that, moves to New York City, starts in meets Colonel Hamilton,
1:48.3	who had been named Secretary of the Treasury.
1:51.3	He was also Washington's aide to camp during the war and one of the most brilliant revolutionaries,
	...

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