by Myron Magnet
At her first Wednesday night in May 1809, visitors oohed and aahed at her parlor’s “very latest Sheraton style” furniture, upholstered in the same sunflower-yellow silk as the curtains, which shimmered in the glow of the Argand lamps and superfine wax candles. Her pièce de résistance, the oval drawing room, ready for her New Year’s reception in 1810, sported red silk-velvet curtains framing the French windows that overlooked the newly landscaped grounds, all reflected in the sparkling mirrors opposite.
Like every other important visitor to the capital, Washington Irving went to one of the White House’s “genteel squeezes,” and pronounced the “blazing splendor” so dazzling that he thought he was in “fairy land.”113 Dolley aimed all the splendor at glorifying not herself but the nation and the people: everything that could be American made was, especially the furniture, some of which had such patriotic motifs as the U.S. seal carved or painted on it. And everywhere were evocations of republican Rome and democratic Greece. The furniture was Greek Revival because classical “Greece was free,” Latrobe explained; “in Greece every citizen felt himself a part of the republic.”114
Certainly the citizens who attended Dolley’s festivities—300 or so at a time, including often “a perfect rabble in beards and boots” rather than gentlemanly shoes—felt enlarged not diminished by being there, and the force of Dolley’s personality wove the spell. “She spared no pains to please all who might visit her, and all were pleased from the most exalted to the most humble,” wrote playwright George Watterston. “There was nothing about her that looked like condescension, or bordered on haughtiness: everything she did had the appearance of real kindness, and seemed to spring from a sincere desire to oblige and to gratify those who came to see her.” She never forgot a name, and like the deftest politicians, she often knew who people were before they’d been introduced.115 “You like yourself more when you are with her,” her niece explained.116
Dolley’s challenge was not just to bring Federalists and Republicans together, which she did with aplomb, but also to reconcile the various Republican factions, nastily sniping at each other now that the party held so overwhelming a majority. “By her deportment in her own house you cannot discover who [are] her husband’s friends or foes,” a congressman marveled. “Her guests have no right to complain of her partiality.”117 He was among many who noted what Anthony Morris called “the peculiar power she always possessd, of making & preserving friends, and of disarming Enemies.”118
If only her husband had the same knack. While she, in her resplendent gowns, plumed turbans, and republican pearls rather than diamonds highlighting the famous bosom, sat at the head of the dinner table, “as easy as if she had been born & educated at Versailles,” said Vice President Elbridge Gerry’s son, the president found a quieter place down in the middle, where he didn’t have to, well . . . preside.119 “The little Man looks sometimes, as if the cares of the nation and the toll of seeing so much company had almost exhausted him,” said one guest, echoing a common sentiment.120 Madison struck many visitors as “a schoolmaster dressed for a funeral,” and, “being so low in stature,” one remarked, “he was in danger of being confounded with the plebeian crowds and was pushed and jostled about like a common citizen.” To make sure everyone knew who he was, Dolley had the band play “Hail to the Chief” when he came into the room.121
EVEN THOSE WHO AGREE that that government is best which governs least might think that the Revolution of 1800 took a good idea way too far. As “real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form,” Jefferson boasted, his was arguably a counterrevolution, a rejection of the Madisonian Constitution’s energetic federal government and a return to something closer to the weaker Articles of Confederation regime.122 “When we consider that this government is charged with the external and mutual relations only of these states; that the states themselves have the principal care of our persons, our property, our reputation, constituting the great field of human concerns,” Jefferson told Congress in 1801, “we may well doubt whether our organization is not too complicated, too expensive; whether offices and officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily.”123 He set out to fix all that.
But even in its own terms, Jefferson’s revolution didn’t make sense. Yes, he cut and cut. He dumped all internal excise taxes and fired the tax collectors, slashing the Treasury’s head count by 40 percent. By 1810, even with the $15 million spent for the Louisiana Purchase, he and Madison had cut the federal debt to half the $80 million it totaled when they began.124 But they cut muscle, not just fat. They reduced foreign embassies to just three, in Britain, France, and Spain. Jefferson halved military spending, letting the army dwindle to 3,000 men and the navy to the handful of frigates George Washington had built to fight the Barbary pirates, which Jefferson proposed to supplement with a swarm of light, undergunned patrol boats for coastal defense.125 The federal government claimed responsibility for external relations, but it had trashed foreign policy’s essential diplomatic and military instruments.
That might be less reckless in a time of profound peace, but from 1792 until 1815—before Jefferson became president, in other words, and until midway through Madison’s second term in the White House—more or less continuous war between France and England and their allies and vassals convulsed the globe, with battles raging on land and sea not just across Europe but from the West Indies to Egypt to Moscow. True, an ocean appeared to protect America from Europe’s troubles; but French shippers—as well as those from Spain, which declared war against Britain in 1796—dared not run the British naval gauntlet by carrying goods between their West Indian islands and Europe, so American seafarers filled the vacuum. United States ship tonnage trebled from 1793 to 1807; American shippers—mostly New Englanders—became the world’s largest neutral carriers, and their profits skyrocketed. So the nation had something to protect, even though Jefferson considered the carrying trade mere unproductive “gambling,” unlike honest agriculture.126
A LEGAL FICTION made this golden age for U.S. seamen possible. American officials invoked the time-honored international-law precept that “free ships make free goods,” meaning that in wartime neutral ships had the right to carry any non–war-materiel cargo to belligerents. But Britain countered by dusting off a trade regulation from the Seven Years’ War—the Rule of 1756—and reinterpreting it to mean that U.S. ships couldn’t carry cargoes from French and Spanish West Indian ports to Europe.127 So U.S. shippers seized the fig leaf of the “broken voyage.” They carried cargo from the French or Spanish West Indies to the United States, unloaded it and paid the duty, reloaded it and got a tax rebate, and carried it on to Europe as American goods.
Britain tolerated this charade, both for eastward and westward trade, until the spring of 1805, when the war intensified. Then, without warning, the Royal Navy started seizing cargoes from American ships whose captains couldn’t prove that their loads really were bound for or coming from the United States. When Admiral Lord Nelson’s crushing victory over the French and Spanish navies at Trafalgar in the fall of 1805 gave Britain total mastery of the seas, American shipping faced even higher risk. Before 1805 ended, British confiscations had cost American carriers millions of dollars, their insurance premiums had quadrupled, and President Jefferson and Secretary Madison had a major crisis on their hands.128
Napoleon made their troubles worse. His million-man conscript army’s triumph at Austerlitz in December 1805 won him control of the European continent, which he used the next year to choke the British economy through decrees barring ships that traded with England from entering any European harbor. If a ship had landed anywhere in the British Empire, European port troops would seize it; if its cargo was British made or Empire grown, they would confiscate it. In this life-or-death world war, which ultimately cost Britain over £1 billion and 300,000 dead, London understandably retaliated with its own 1807 Orders in Council, which made any ship trading between Continental ports subject to British seizure and
required any ship trading with a single Continental port to stop in England for a license. Napoleon countered by ordering the capture of any ship that complied with the Orders in Council.129 American captains, caught between two implacable world powers, had nowhere to turn.
Nor was that all. In its desperate need for sailors, the Royal Navy not only “impressed” men—that is, drafted them—by kidnapping them off British streets and merchant ships, but it also stopped American ships and impressed seamen it claimed were British subjects, especially galling to America in that Britain didn’t recognize the right of Britons to become U.S. citizens. In June 1807, a few miles off Virginia’s Hampton Roads, the British warship Leopard ordered the American frigate Chesapeake to let a boarding party search for deserters and, being refused, raked the U.S. vessel with broadside after broadside, killing three and wounding eighteen Americans. Then a press gang from the Leopard kidnapped four sailors, claiming they were British deserters, though only one was. An outraged Madison directed U.S. ambassador James Monroe to demand release of the seamen, punishment of the Leopard’s officers, and a British promise of “an entire abolition of impressments” of Americans. Jefferson ordered all British ships out of U.S. harbors.130
And what retaliation did Madison propose to this multitude of provocations? With no military force to speak of, the only arrow he had in his quiver was a trade embargo, a weapon of the 1770s that he persisted in believing would work in the new century. But contrary to what he thought, Britain and France were much less dependent on U.S. trade than America was on European, especially British, trade; British foreign secretary George Canning rightly dismissed the embargo that Congress passed in December 1807, barring all U.S. vessels from foreign trade, as “an innocent municipal Regulation, which effects none but the United States themselves.”131 How right he was: during 1808, U.S. exports fell 80 percent and imports 60 percent.132
Soon enough, too, the bitterly unpopular embargo—along with the Jefferson administration’s viciously oppressive Enforcement Act of 1809, which responded to widespread smuggling and evasion by arming the government with search and seizure powers as unconstitutional as the Alien and Sedition Acts—came to feel more like a war against Americans than against Europeans. Echoing the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, Connecticut’s governor invoked the state’s duty “to interpose” to protect “the right and liberty of the people” against “the general government.”133 Before Congress voted to repeal the embargo, effective on Madison’s inauguration day in March 1809, New Englanders were even darkly muttering about secession.134
WHEN MADISON STOOD in the Capitol, pale and trembling in his embargo-chic suit of black Connecticut-made cloth, to deliver his First Inaugural Address on March 4, he inadvertently sounded what was to be his administration’s keynote when he mentioned, with conventional modesty, his “inadequacy to [the] high duties” he was assuming. He spoke more truly than he knew, sadly: for he proved an inadequate leader, with feckless subordinates who failed to meet the stern challenges his administration faced. And thanks to his and Jefferson’s ideology, he had inadequate tools to deal with those challenges, and he lacked the leadership skills to get Congress to strengthen or even to preserve those he had.135 Only the genius and daring of General Andrew Jackson and of some naval captains off Madison’s radar screen saved his presidency from failure and fortuitously gilded it with honor.
As the embargo expired, Congress renewed sanctions against Britain and France but opened trade with the rest of the world, so captains simply lied about their destinations and traded promiscuously. Bowing to reality, Congress reopened French and British trade but declared that if either combatant would drop its anti-U.S. rules, America would forbid trade with the other. A slapstick charade ensued, with both England and France promising to lift their bans but shying away once Madison had made policy changes that left him looking clueless. Whether commercial sanctions can ever substitute for force remains debatable; but one Republican congressman rightly complained that his party’s embargo policy “puts out one eye of your enemy, it is true, but it puts out both your own. It exhausts the purse, it exhausts the spirit, and paralyses the sword of the nation.”136
The Twelfth Congress, which convened in November 1811, was as solidly Republican as its five predecessors, but its many freshmen included a new breed of western Republican, young War Hawks who thought that Madison’s temporizing appeasement sullied “the honor of a nation,” as one congressman said. To “step one step further without showing that spirit of resentment becoming freemen,” another declared in trademark Republican terms, “would but acknowledge ourselves unworthy of self-government.”137 Choosing tough-minded newcomer Henry Clay as Speaker—who took such firm control that he stopped Old Republican John Randolph from bringing his dog into the House, a practice no one dared challenge before—the Congress broke with Old Republican orthodoxy, raising taxes and beefing up the army.
“The business is become more than ever puzzling,” a troubled Madison wrote Jefferson on May 25, 1812. “To go to war with Engd and not with France arms the federalists with new matter, and divides the Republicans. . . . To go to war agst both, presents a thousand difficulties.” On June 1, citing impressment, the Chesapeake, and the Orders in Council, Madison asked the Senate to declare war on Britain, which it did on June 18—though unknown to the president, Britain had already lifted the offending Orders.138 Federalists voted unanimously against what they called “Mr. Madison’s War,” which one Federalist pamphleteer, exaggerating Madison’s real enough Anglophobia, charged was “undertaken for French interests and in conformity with repeated French orders.”139
TO ADMINISTER the war and command the troops, Madison assembled a group of incompetents rarely matched in U.S. history. As part of the Revolution of 1800, Jefferson had raised party loyalty above merit in government appointments; Madison, with no control of his own party despite all his political experience, used appointments to appease Republican factions or barons, choosing each official with “an eye . . . to his political principles and connections,” he ruefully sighed, “and the quarter of the Union to which he belongs.”140 Even so, one party faction blocked his promotion of his first-rate, trusted Treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin, to secretary of state, so Madison elevated indolent navy secretary Robert Smith instead, to ingratiate Smith’s powerful senator brother. That breathtaking failure to lead—and “to resist encroachments” of the legislative on the executive department and so to maintain the crisp and clear separation of powers that Federalist 51 had urged—meant in effect the president would have to keep running the State Department himself. An inoffensive southerner replaced Smith as naval chief, and, for balance, a northern ex-congressman whose father-in-law was also a congressman took over the War Department, though beyond a medical degree he had no special wartime skills.141 Both secretaries, one senator grumbled, were “incapable of discharging the duties of their office.”142
Incompetence aside, John Randolph warned, the cabinet “presents a novel spectacle in the world, divided against itself, and the most deadly animosity raging between its principal members—what can come of it but confusion, mischief, and ruin?”143 War Hawk John C. Calhoun wrote more charitably but with no less foreboding, “our president tho a man of amiable manners and great talents, has not I fear those commanding talents which are necessary to controul those about him.”144
What instruments did Madison have to fight and finance the war? For his top generals, he named men cut from the same cloth as his cabinet, chosen by the same principles from the aging “survivors of the Revolutionary band.” Sneered John Adams, “Chaff, Froth, and Ignorance have been promoted,” and even twenty-six-year-old Colonel Winfield Scott worried that the old officers had “sunk into either sloth, ignorance, or habits of intemperate drinking.”145 And though the War Hawk Congress approved a larger army, it clung to Republican prejudice against an oceangoing navy, believing that once the war ended, “a permanent Naval Establishment” would “become a p
owerful engine in the hands of an ambitious Executive,” as one overwrought congressman grimly prophesied, and that it would require permanently higher taxes that would “bankrupt” the nation and “end in a revolution.”146 The previous, orthodoxly Republican Congress had refused to renew the charter of Hamilton’s bank when it expired in 1811, so Madison lost his best tool for borrowing money to pay for the war. By March 1813, Treasury secretary Gallatin warned Madison that the country had scarcely a month’s worth of funds. By November 1814, with no one willing to buy its bonds, the United States defaulted on its national debt.147
MADISON’S MILITARY STRATEGY was to launch lightning attacks on Canada and seize prime swaths of territory before an unready Britain could harden its positions there—an enterprise, Jefferson wrote him, sure to be “a mere matter of marching.”148 A demoralized London would have to back off as it lost a precious chunk of its empire, which Madison hoped to annex, just as he had condoned a recent freelance American seizure of Spanish West Florida.149 Though Madison bustled round the “departments of war and the navy, stimulating everything in a manner worthy of a little commander in chief, with his little round hat and huge cockade,” one official reported, the three-pronged Canadian invasion had a less jaunty result.150