As though aware that their images might one day adorn our monuments and our money, the principal Founders assiduously cultivated their personal appearances. Intent on conferring awe on the new office of the presidency, George Washington rode in a cream-colored coach drawn by pairs of white horses. Benjamin Franklin, divining that the French would respond to a more homespun persona, ditched his wig for a coonskin cap.^* On his way to New York in the spring of 1791 to meet his fellow Virginian James Madison for a holiday together, Thomas Jefferson stopped in Princeton to visit a barber. “He expects not to live above a Dozen years,” Abigail Adams wrote cattily, “and he shall lose one of those in hair dressing.”

Madison was the exception to such ostentatious display. A spindly five foot four, sickly, and weighing a hundred pounds, he didn’t strike much of a figure beside the six-foot-two Jefferson, with his carefully coiffed hair—“not red,” Madison corrected a biographer after Jefferson’s death, “but between yellow & red.” And yet it was Madison, gifted with the subtlest political mind and the shrewdest powers of persuasion among the Founders, who patiently shepherded the Constitution, via coaxing and compromise, through adoption and ratification. Maybe Madison’s inconspicuousness was itself a pose. “He seemed to lack a personal agenda because he seemed to lack a personality,” the historian Joseph J. Ellis has written, “yet when the votes were counted, his side almost always won.”

The Virginians planned their trip, as Madison put it, as one of “Health recreation & curiosity.” 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. Appointed by Washington to be the first secretary of state, Jefferson had recently returned from his sojourn in France. He had served as the United States minister in Paris during the eventful years of 1784–1789, when he had a close-up view of the early stages of the French Revolution, and advised Lafayette on its course.

Jefferson was already established as the lyric poet of revolution, having framed the case against the tyrannical George III in the ringing clauses of the Declaration of Independence. Unlike Washington or his versatile aide-de-camp, Alexander Hamilton, neither Jefferson nor Madison, rich landowners and slaveholders responsible for extensive plantations, had seen military action in the war. Governor of Virginia when British troops advanced on Richmond in 1781, Jefferson was roundly condemned for fleeing the capital city. Offended by the investigation that eventually cleared him, he vowed never to accept public office again, a promise quickly broken amid the pressing needs of the new nation.

Less mellifluous a writer than Jefferson, Madison was a master of nuance and innuendo, reducing the conundrums of the proposed republic—how the states would interact with a federal government, how the branches of government would (or at least should) balance one another, how taxes would be handled—to clear, well-reasoned choices. He pushed for ratification of the Constitution with his brilliant contributions to the Federalist Papers. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” he wrote in the famous fifty-first letter. In the tenth, he argued, counterintuitively, that a republic of large expanse would trample less on the rights of minorities than a small one. “Extend the sphere,” he wrote, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.” Madison himself composed the Bill of Rights—ratification of which was underway at the time of his journey north with Jefferson—partly to mollify southerners who feared government meddling in their affairs, including their dependence on slave labor.

The virtuosic prose of the Revolutionary generation can seem oddly upbeat in tone, as though we were listening to a comic opera rather than a fateful turn in the history of the world. Madison’s blithe confidence in the restraining powers of elected representatives and an impartial Supreme Court (expressed in sentences that, with their artful oppositions, mirror the checks and balances of the governmental scheme he proposed) can seem naive in our own menacing times, when the whole elegantly conceived structure is suffering a stress test of previously unimagined proportions. For his part, Jefferson foresaw some of the potential dangers in the newly drafted Constitution, telling John Adams that there were “things in it which stagger all my dispositions.” He pressed hard for a bill of rights to protect individuals from government predation, and compared plans for a strong executive to “setting up a kite [a bird of prey] to keep the hen yard in order.” We now have an escalating sense of just how rapacious that bird can be.

In On Revolution (1963) Hannah Arendt ascribed the “air of lightheartedness” in the Founders’ prose to the relative absence of suffering—the grinding poverty that exploded in France in 1789 and again in 1871, and Russia in 1905—in their experience. “It is as though the American Revolution was achieved in a kind of ivory tower into which the fearful spectacle of human misery, the haunting voices of abject poverty, never penetrated,” she wrote. Never penetrated because half a million enslaved people were overlooked in their subtle debates. The “primordial crime upon which the fabric of American society rested,” as Arendt calls it, constitutes for us the glaring failure in the moral calculus of the Founders. Nonetheless, in Arendt’s view, later revolutionaries would have been wise to study the American model that, she believed, suggested alternatives to the authoritarianism that regularly followed the insurgencies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What Jefferson in particular understood, in Arendt’s view, was that the revolutionary spirit, bubbling up from local unrest and injustice, must be a permanent feature of a society aspiring to justice, not just a distant memory to be celebrated on the Fourth of July.

It was a view not widely shared even among Jefferson’s intimates. Madison was appalled by the tax revolt in western Massachusetts known as Shays’s Rebellion—when, during a series of confrontations in 1786–1787, a local militia fired on protesters—and believed a strong Constitution might help prevent such instability. Jefferson, from his perch in Paris, cheerfully countered that “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” “The tree of liberty,” he argued, reaching for a more pungent metaphor, “must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

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. Louis Masur is the first historian to give sustained attention to this transitional moment in these industrious men’s lives and in the nation they were helping to create.

There was “no friendship like theirs in American history,” Masur proclaims in his tightly conceived, deeply researched, and deftly written short book A Journey North. John Quincy Adams compared “the mutual influence of these two mighty minds” to “the invisible and mysterious movements of the magnet in the physical world.” If so, perhaps it was because opposites attract. Jefferson loved to travel and thought its only drawback came with its cessation, during the difficult adjustment to the provincial privations of home. Madison, unusually sensitive to discomforts on land and sea, disliked it. Their political tendencies also diverged. Madison believed that a strong chief executive was essential to a functioning republic. Jefferson thought it reeked of monarchy.

Masur has identified four phases of the journey anchored in four concerns shared by the two friends. While conceding that the travelers left “scant documentation,” he has mined original sources to fill out these points of interest: 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.

As they traveled through the young republic these two farmers were particularly attentive to crops, the price of land, and agricultural blights like the Hessian fly. “If there was a single purpose for the northern journey from Jefferson’s perspective,” Masur notes, “it was to conduct research on the fly.” He examined a specimen, “between the size of a gnat and a mosquito,” under a microscope, taking note of its “membraneous” wings and its penis. Since the fly, Mayetiola destructor, had first appeared in American fields during the Revolution, it was widely believed that Hessian soldiers, some 30,000 German mercenaries brought over to fight with the British, had smuggled the flies in their straw beds as a means of biological warfare. The threat, “as great a Curse as the British Army,” according to one observer, was particularly unnerving to Virginia planters like Jefferson, Madison, and Washington who had shifted their primary crop from soil-depleting though fly-immune tobacco (“a culture productive of infinite wretchedness,” according to Jefferson) to wheat.

A similar nexus of culture and agriculture motivated the travelers’ eagerness to learn something of the sugar maple once they had crossed into Vermont. Founded as a republic in which slavery was prohibited, Vermont had been admitted as the fourteenth state the previous February. Philadelphia Quakers had promoted maple sugar as a potential means, in the words of the influential physician (and signer of the Declaration of Independence) Benjamin Rush, “to lessen or destroy the consumption of West India sugar, and thus indirectly to destroy negro slavery.” The slave revolt in Saint-Domingue in August 1791 had intensified interest in an alternative sweetener. While sugar maples did not thrive in Virginia, Jefferson persisted in his efforts to establish a maple orchard at Monticello. Later, with the rise of lucrative slavery-based sugar production in Louisiana, Masur notes, “talk of domestic maple sugar production as a means to combat slavery vanished.”

Slavery was an uneasy subject for Jefferson and Madison, when they thought about it at all. Both men recognized the institution as evil, a “taint” on the young nation. Both believed it would eventually disappear. Both favored “colonization,” resettling Black people in Africa or some other “proper external receptacle,” as Madison awkwardly put it. Madison, who later served as president of the American Colonization Society, believed the races were essentially equal but that white prejudice, “which proceeding principally from the difference of color must be considered permanent and insuperable,” would never allow full acceptance and equality. Jefferson, by contrast, was a white supremacist, convinced that Black people were inferior to white people in intelligence and physical prowess. When the free Black naturalist and writer Benjamin Banneker sent Jefferson his almanac in 1791 Jefferson was impressed, calling him “a very respectable mathematician,” but by 1809, his racism kicking in, he suspected that Banneker must have gotten help from a local abolitionist.

Both Jefferson and Madison were heavily invested in slavery, financially and personally. Jefferson, we now know, had at least six children with Sally Hemings, an enslaved young woman at Monticello, naming one of them James Madison Hemings. Sally’s older brother James was Jefferson’s personal cook. He and Sally were also half-siblings of Jefferson’s wife, Martha, since they shared a white father. In Paris, Jefferson had James Hemings trained as a French chef; James is credited with bringing the recipes for macaroni and cheese and crème brûlée back to America. Jefferson assented to James’s request for emancipation in 1793 but huffily complained that “having been at great expence in having James Hemings taught the art of cookery” he wouldn’t get a return on his investment. Later, during his presidency, Jefferson directed a staffer to ask if James would cook at the White House. James asked for a personal invitation from the president, specifying work conditions and wages, which never came. James Hemings killed himself in 1801.

More open to Black talent than Jefferson, Madison, on the journey north, was greatly impressed with a free Black farmer and Revolutionary veteran he met in Fort George, noting in his journal that Prince Taylor (unnamed by Madison) was literate, “dextrous in his affairs,” and displayed “industry & good management” with his “6 white hirelings.” Masur has discovered that Taylor, who bought a 250-acre farm near Fort Ticonderoga in 1791, the year Madison wrote about him, was also an innkeeper and a founding member of the local Episcopal church.

In his discussion of slavery, Masur has a tendency to hammer his points home rather than let the reprehensible facts speak for themselves. He notes that Jefferson was accompanied for much of the trip by James Hemings, and it seems likely that Madison traveled with a slave as well. But once the journey was underway, Masur notes, “there is no mention of either” in the few letters and journal fragments the men left. The detail seems damning enough, but Masur can’t resist adding, “It is a resounding silence in the record, repeated over and over again in history: people who were present, but not considered.” Masur is similarly indignant that no lasting impression was apparently made on Madison by his encounter with the Black farmer. “Departing Fort George during that northern journey, Madison thought no further about Prince Taylor, a free Black who had fought in the Revolution, owned a productive farm, and enjoyed the fruits of his freedom.” But how does Masur know that Madison “thought no further” about Prince Taylor?

While he was dismissive of Black people forcibly removed from Africa, Jefferson was passionately interested in the “aboriginal” American Indians, writing letters home on birch bark as though he were one of them. Both Jefferson and Madison were eager to disprove the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon’s theory of “New World degeneracy,” the claim that animals on the North American continent were smaller and weaker than their European counterparts, and possessed “withered genitalia.” Madison once dissected a weasel, not neglecting the kidneys, spleen, and tongue (and presumably genitalia), and favorably compared the results to those adumbrated by Buffon.

Jefferson thought American Indians also disproved the “degeneracy” argument, noting their ability to endure torture “with a firmness almost unknown to religious enthusiasm.” He praised their admirable commitment to liberty, “having never submitted themselves to any laws, any coercive power, any shadow of government.” They enjoyed the kind of minimal government Jefferson himself would have preferred for the United States. He’d once excavated a burial mound to learn how Indians cared for their dead. Again Masur, from his superior perch in the twenty-first century, can’t resist finding fault. “In his pursuit of knowledge,” he writes, “little was sacred to Jefferson; he gave no thought to the site’s desecration.”

Jefferson was particularly intrigued by the diversity of Indian languages and believed that a close examination of vocabulary differences among the various tribes might give hints to their origins and migration patterns. To that end he encouraged travelers to compile lists of native equivalents of two hundred words he had chosen, from specific animals and plants to abstract concepts like God and the devil. In eastern Long Island, at the end of his journey with Madison, Jefferson was delighted to encounter three members of the Unkechaug people and immediately set to work on a vocabulary list, the only one that he himself compiled.

The many lists that Jefferson eventually collated, including copies of some of those completed at his request by Meriwether Lewis on his famous travels with William Clark, suffered an unfortunate fate. Returning to Virginia after his presidency, Jefferson placed the handwritten lists in a trunk. One of twenty-nine loaded on a ship, the trunk with the lists was stolen and ransacked, and the seemingly worthless papers thrown into the Delaware River; only a few scraps of them survived. Lewis’s original lists vanished after his suicide in 1809.

A Journey North is a brisk and pleasurable ramble for the reader, just as it was, evidently, for its pair of travelers. In the intensity of their engagement with particular trees and insects and innkeepers, they sometimes recall the Japanese poet Basho’s sharp-eyed travelogue, Narrow Road to the Deep North.Masur is right to remind us that the upbeat tone of their exchanges, that “air of lightheartedness” Arendt mentioned, often concealed darker realities. For today’s readers, the darkness has intensified. With the status of the Constitution again in doubt, Jefferson’s warnings about the potential rise of a predatory president seem prophetic, while Madison’s confidence in the Article I powers of an energized Congress gives little comfort.

On the last day of his journey with Madison, which covered 920 miles in thirty-three days and cemented a partnership that would last through both of their presidential terms, Jefferson stopped in Burlington, New Jersey—for a haircut.