Writing from New York on July 10, 1791, James Madison answers Jefferson's letter of July 6 with the second great errand of the correspondence — a meticulous price-and-supply report on maple sugar, part of Jefferson's hope that homegrown, free-labor sugar might one day displace the slave-grown cane of the West Indies — before pivoting into the first sustained political fury in these letters. Six days after the Bank of the United States opened its subscription books to a buying frenzy, Madison describes shares carrying “a moral certainty of gain” with “scarce a physical possibility of loss,” brands the subscriptions “a mere scramble for so much public plunder,” and reads the frenzy as a revelation of “what sort of hands hold” the public debt “and by whom the people of the U.S. are to be governed.” He records legislators openly grasping the emoluments of the bank they chartered, notes the push to place Senator Philip Schuyler — Hamilton's father-in-law — at the head of the directors, and reports, without yet understanding it, that Philip Freneau has abandoned the planned opposition newspaper in Philadelphia. Domestic errand and political alarm share a single page: this is the letter in which the friendship begins, unmistakably, to become an opposition.

Key Themes.

• The “books” thread continues: the bookseller favor of 1784 becomes the maple-sugar errand of 1791 — the domestic and the monumental on one page

• “A mere scramble for so much public plunder” — the bank-scrip frenzy as moral indictment

• “By whom the people of the U.S. are to be governed” — concentrated debt read as a map of political power

• Legislators “openly grasping its emoluments” — corruption as entanglement, policed only by shame

• Schuyler and the unnamed architect: Hamilton's system everywhere, Hamilton's name nowhere

• Freneau and the newspaper: a party being born that neither man will yet call a party

• The silence inside the sugar: a free-labor cause pursued, without comment, by slaveholders