An imagined gathering
1802 · Monticello, Virginia
Jefferson entertains Madison and Hamilton as president, balancing the Louisiana question against the constitutional quarrels that divide them.
Jefferson has been president for a year and has moved into the house he designed on his mountain. He keeps a generous table and a strict rule of no precedence, so that the company sits wherever it likes and the talk is free.
Madison, his secretary of state, has been negotiating the purchase of Louisiana from France; Hamilton, out of office but not out of politics, has come as a guest and an adversary. They disagree about almost everything — the bank, the debt, the scope of federal power — but Jefferson wants to hear him, and the evening is courteous. They eat pickled oysters, a Brunswick stew, sweet potato pone, and pecan pie, and drink madeira punch as the candles burn down.
Host: Thomas Jefferson
James Madison — Secretary of state and Jefferson's closest political ally.
Alexander Hamilton — Out of office, but still the intellectual leader of the Federalists.
First course
a period dish
a period dish
Drink
a period dish
Thomas Jefferson
The 1803 deal that doubled the nation's territory, and the constitutional scruples Jefferson overcame to make it.
James Madison
Madison's argument that liberty is safest when the branches of government check one another, and that ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Alexander Hamilton
The eighty-five essays Hamilton, Madison, and Jay wrote to persuade New York to ratify the Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson's Statute for Religious Freedom, which disestablished the church and made belief a matter of private conscience.
This gathering is an editorial recreation grounded in the biographies of those present; it did not necessarily take place as described.