This time Jefferson was aroused, although personally he had never had anything to do with Tammany in New York nor any of the Democratic societies in Philadelphia. He fairly exploded in a letter to James Madison: the denunciation of the Democratic societies was "one of the extraordinary acts of boldness of which we have seen so many from the faction of monocrats." How could one condemn the Democratic societies and let alone the Society of the Cincinnati, "a self-created one, carving out for itself hereditary distinctions, lowering over our Constitution eternally." It was an inexcusable aggression. With regard to the transactions against the excise law, he refused to take seriously the "meeting of Braddock field", and ridiculed the mobilizing of an army against men who were not thinking seriously of separating, "simply consulting about it."--"But to consult on a question does not amount to a determination of that question in the affirmative, still less to the acting _on such determination_," he advised. A fine legal distinction which Jefferson forgot at the time of the Burr conspiracy! But "the first and only cause of the whole trouble was the infernal excise law." The first error was "to admit it by the Constitution"; the second, to act on that admission; the third and last will be to "make it the instrument of dismembering the Union." In conclusion he advised Madison to stay at his post, "to take the front of the battle" for Jefferson's own security, and once again he reaffirmed that he would not give up his retirement for the empire of the universe.[320]