Very Secretive Men

Sometimes it is the smallest tidbits about famous historical figures that are the most interesting. Of course these men with all their great deeds and noble undertakings were, in the end, human and thus susceptible to greed, jealousy, and paranoia. It is that paranoia that I want to touch on with my blog tonight...
So Madison and Jefferson, two Virginians, close friends, and Presidents of the United States corresponded with each other throughout their very long and close friendship. The letters talked about family matters, engagements, marriage, politics, Virginia (man did they love their state...their country), and politics. Perhaps it was the nature of letters during the period or perhaps it was because some of their subjects...if read by the wrong set of eyes, it would damage their reputations and because of some of their close associates, cause duels (just ask Alexander Hamilton how duels work out)...but these guys were extremely paranoid and secretive when it came to how they communicated.
For many years, since the time of the Revolution when they served as Virginia delegates, Congressmen in the Continental Congress, or Governor (Jefferson was the second Governor of Virginia, after Patrick Henry)...these guys corresponded in code, like a secret code...
When Jefferson arrived in Paris during the first half of the 1780s, he had 20 pages of encoded letters waiting for him (according to authors Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg).

I can understand the worry that prying eyes would use my own words against me... look at the age we live in, but I found it fascinating that these two very close friends would write these long and expansive letters to each other in a complicated code so they could ensure that only the other could read a letter.

Secret code buddies