James Madison: A Life Reconsidered

by Lynne Cheney

  As Henry, armed with his new authority, readied a general militia call, an astonishing event unfolded in New Jersey. George Washington led twenty-four hundred men back across the icy Delaware River, surprised Hessian mercenaries quartered at Trenton, and took nearly a thousand of them prisoner. His victories there and at Princeton in early January 1777 raised hopes once more, including, no doubt, those at the Madison home. News was slow to arrive in the Piedmont, but by the end of January, James Madison, home after the adjournment of the House of Delegates, would have heard of Washington’s thrilling feats and had reason to think it was a new season for the American cause.

  For Madison, however, the early years of the war had even more peaks and valleys than they did for his fellow countrymen. No sooner were there signs that the American effort might succeed than he suffered an ignominious political defeat. “Swilling the planters with bumbo,” as providing food and drink for voters was called, was a long-established practice among Virginia politicians. Madison’s great-uncle Thomas Chew had gained a measure of fame in 1741, when as a candidate for the House of Burgesses he brought a punch bowl into the courthouse itself. Believing that the spirit of the Revolution demanded a more sober approach, Madison chose not to treat freeholders as they arrived to vote, a decision that caused him to lose the election to Charles Porter, a barkeep who offered an ample supply of spirits.21

  Porter took Madison’s seat in the assembly, but delegates there remembered the impressive young man from Orange, and on November 15, 1777, they elected him to serve as one of the eight members of the Council of State, a body that had to concur with the governor’s decisions in order for him to act. Madison thus became, in the words of his biographer Irving Brant, “one-ninth of a governor.”22

  On Madison’s first day on the council, he saw the complexities of the war that America was waging. Although American forces under the command of General Horatio Gates had won a crucial victory at Saratoga, General Washington’s men were suffering. Together with Governor Henry council members took up a letter from a congressional committee, “representing the alarming accounts of the distresses of the American army” at Valley Forge. Washington had reported that unless provisions were sent, the army would “starve, dissolve, or disperse,” and the committee wanted Virginia’s help. Appalled at the incompetence of the Continental commissary, which should have been supplying the troops, Henry and the council nonetheless sent agents to track down cattle and hogs for Washington’s men. “It will indeed be unworthy [of] the character of a zealous American to entrench himself within the strict line of official duty,” Henry wrote.23

  Virginia, meanwhile, had begun to conduct diplomacy and war on its own. On his first day on the council, Madison voted approval of orders to Colonel David Rogers to recruit thirty men at double pay and proceed down the Mississippi, ascertaining British strength along the way. In New Orleans, Rogers was to acquire provisions and, if possible, obtain a loan from the Spanish governor of Louisiana, Bernardo de Gálvez. With the orders to Rogers, Henry enclosed a letter for Gálvez and an explanation that a missive formerly sent was so badly translated into French—the language of diplomacy—that “the meaning … was omitted.”24 Madison, with his competent French and, one assumes, great tact, likely helped Henry realize that his previous letter to the Spanish governor had been gibberish.

  Madison probably learned within a few days of beginning service on the council of another of Henry’s undertakings, this one aimed at protecting Virginia’s interest in its western lands, a vast stretch of territory northwest of the Ohio River, which the commonwealth claimed under its royal charters. Henry had agreed to a plan put forward by George Rogers Clark, a charismatic red-haired militia major, for Clark to undertake a campaign aimed at driving the British out of the western lands and subduing their Indian allies. During Madison’s time on the Council of State, Clark would accomplish one seemingly impossible feat after another, including capturing both the fort at Vincennes and the lieutenant governor of Detroit, Henry Hamilton. Eventually, Clark’s luck would turn, but not before his Virginia-sponsored foray earned him a place in the history books as “the conqueror of the Northwest.”25

  When the council and the governor decided to seek European financial support for the war, Thomas Jefferson, serving in the House of Delegates, suggested his neighbor, Philip Mazzei, as an agent, a cause that Madison took up. Mazzei, who had come to the Piedmont from Tuscany to introduce wine making to Virginia, was commissioned to seek a loan for 900,000 pounds in Europe. Genial and outgoing, Mazzei hoped for the best as he sailed but prepared for the worst. “I have put my papers with a four-pounds ball in a bag to be thrown overboard, if prudence should require it,” he told Madison. Mazzei’s ship was stopped by a British privateer before he had sailed through the Virginia Capes, and his papers with the four-pound ball went to the bottom of the Chesapeake. The ship was taken to New York, where Mazzei managed to talk the British into letting him sail for Europe. He made it to Paris, where Benjamin Franklin regarded him and other agents acting on behalf of individual states as pests. Franklin apologized to French officials for their behavior.26

  The failure of this venture into international finance might have been a lesson for both Madison and Jefferson about the hazards of states conducting foreign policy, and for at least the next five years it would have personal consequences as well. In an effort to collect the salary he believed owed to him for his work, the irrepressible Mazzei made the rounds of the powerful in Virginia. In 1784, Madison wrote to Jefferson to warn him that Mazzei was coming to see him. “I tremble at the idea,” replied Jefferson, who suffered from migraines. “He will be worse to me than a return of my double quotidian headache.”27

  In later years, Jefferson advanced the idea that Madison had prepared so many of Governor Henry’s papers, particularly his foreign correspondence, that he deserved to be recognized as his secretary. The notion is probably exaggerated, but Madison was so skilled at gathering and absorbing information, compiling what was most important from it, and writing quick and cogent responses that Henry, who had a reputation for not liking to take up either book or pen, no doubt found ways to take advantage of his skills. The governor probably relied on Councilor Madison to handle a great deal of routine paperwork and administrative detail, which might account for Madison’s sentiment in later years that the council was “a grave of useful talents.”28

  After Henry had served as governor for three years, the maximum allowed, the assembly elected Thomas Jefferson his successor. The tall, loose-limbed Virginian entered office at a time when British strategy had undergone a significant change. The victory of the United States at Saratoga had been a devastating blow to Great Britain, not least because it had persuaded the French to sign a treaty of alliance with the United States. Shaken by the course of the war in the North, the British had shifted focus to the South, which they saw as more vulnerable and where they believed Loyalist sympathies ran particularly strong. By the time Jefferson moved into the governor’s palace, the British had taken Savannah, were menacing Charleston, and had sent a flotilla into the Chesapeake, where their troops seized Portsmouth, burned Suffolk, and destroyed ships, armaments, and tobacco. As Jefferson tried to secure the commonwealth and deal with the myriad issues that war brought to his desk, he came to place high value on what he described as Madison’s “extensive information” and “the powers and polish of his pen.”29 He no doubt learned, too, that Councilor Madison had a deft political mind, one that instinctively saw contingencies and thought of ways to prepare for them.

  An issue that Jefferson and the council had to take up early concerned the treatment of the now-imprisoned lieutenant governor of Detroit, Henry Hamilton. Jefferson’s approach to those taken in combat had heretofore been very gentlemanly. He had befriended, even socialized with, captured Hessian and British officers that the Continental Congress had quartered near Monticello. But Hamilton was widely known as “the hair-buyer general” for reportedly encouraging Great Bri
tain’s Indian allies to murder and scalp Americans, and the governor and the council decided he deserved to be kept in shackles. Within weeks, General William Phillips, one of the British officers Jefferson had befriended in the Piedmont, protested Hamilton’s treatment, writing that since the lieutenant governor of Detroit had surrendered, he could not, according to the rules of war, be put in “close confinement.” To Jefferson, this seemed like nonsense, but someone—and it is easy to imagine Madison playing the part—suggested being absolutely sure that George Washington saw things similarly. The general, previously notified of the decision, had not objected, but if there was controversy, perhaps he would. With the council, Jefferson wrote a letter to Washington that took the form of seeking information. Did the general know of any rule prohibiting the confinement of those who agreed to surrender?30

  As it turned out, once controversy developed, Washington had second thoughts, writing that “this subject, on more mature consideration, appears to be involved in greater difficulty than I apprehended.” Hamilton could “be confined to a room” but not shackled, he wrote.31 The decision rankled Jefferson, but at least he was not in the embarrassing position of having been overruled. Thanks to the council letter, he was instead enlightened by a clarification he had sought.

  • • •

  THE FRIENDSHIP that began to form between Jefferson and Madison as they labored on the council was in some ways unlikely. Although only eight years Jefferson’s junior, Madison seemed much younger. He was single, leading a bachelor’s life, staying in rooms here and there when he was away from home. While he served on the Council of State, he stayed with his cousin, also named James Madison, an Anglican cleric and the president of the College of William and Mary. Councilor Madison’s room in the president’s house was better lodging than he would otherwise have had in Williamsburg, but his personal life still had a harum-scarum quality. Someone took his hat, his only hat, forcing him to stay indoors for two days until at last he managed to buy another “from a little Frenchman who sold snuff.” His horse either wandered off or was stolen, and he advertised for it in the Virginia Gazette of October 30, 1779, offering a hundred-dollar reward, which might have been too much, particularly if it was the horse his father had sent him the previous June. Madison had described that animal as being in “meager plight.”32

  Jefferson was a family man with a beautiful wife, Martha Wayles Skelton, who had brought him a great landed estate, albeit one encumbered by debt. The two had lost a daughter before she reached her second birthday and a son in infancy, but Patsy and Polly, much-adored little girls, survived. Prior to Jefferson’s moving into the governor’s mansion, he and his family lived for a time in Williamsburg’s loveliest home, the George Wythe house on Palace Green, where Wythe slaves as well as Jefferson slaves would have attended them. Well cared for as he was, Jefferson was unlikely to have his hat go missing, and he certainly never rode a horse in “meager plight.” His steeds were magnificent—and spotless. “When his saddle horse was led out,” wrote Henry Randall, who interviewed Jefferson family members, “if there was a spot on him that did not shine as faultlessly as a mirror, he rubbed it with a white pocket handkerchief, and if this was soiled, the groom was reprimanded.”33

  The men were alike in being reserved. Neither would have dreamed of keeping a diary full of the personal observations that John Adams recorded, but among friends both would offer frank, even barbed assessments of others. Madison also liked to poke fun at himself, which was not a habit of Jefferson’s. Madison amused close acquaintances with a fund of self-deprecating anecdotes, including the story of how he had managed to lose reelection to the House of Delegates “in consequence of his refusing to electioneer.” In years ahead, he’d also entertain friends by telling about his stolen hat. He particularly enjoyed describing the replacement, which was so small in the crown and broad in the brim that his friends found it an object of endless merriment.34

  Both men loved chess. Jefferson also loved music and poetry, but Madison, with no known musical penchant, had decided that life was too short and the demands of the real world too pressing for him to spend much time reading poems and plays. Jefferson was the more soaring thinker and would leave behind some of the most uplifting prose ever written. Madison’s genius showed itself in the dismantling of conventional wisdom and the creation of new concepts. Jefferson’s ideas sometimes became untethered from reality, but Madison drew him back to the solid earth—and often found himself inspired by the adventure. Thus, they complemented each other, or as historian Merrill Peterson described their relationship, “The account balanced.”35

  They both had disorders that sometimes disrupted their lives. Within months of the time that Madison experienced a sudden attack during military training, Jefferson was incapacitated for weeks with one of the migraines that plagued him. Neither man hesitated to describe the gastrointestinal ailments from which he and almost everyone else in the eighteenth century suffered. Jefferson described being taken ill with dysentery in his autobiography. Madison noted the progress of a bowel complaint in a letter to George Washington.36 But Jefferson did not talk much about his headaches, and Madison was even more circumspect about his sudden attacks, Jefferson likely being in the small circle of those in whom he confided.

  Each was probably the brightest person the other ever knew, and both were well schooled, giving them a vast fund of common learning on which to draw as they talked and planned. Both continued to study throughout life and considered books of mighty importance. Each was known to buy them when they became available whether he had ready cash or not, but Jefferson’s acquisitive instincts went beyond Madison’s, at times doing violation not only to his finances but to good manners. When Randolph the Tory decided to sail for England rather than support the American rebellion, Jefferson wrote him a heartfelt letter regretting his departure, commenting on the state of human affairs that made it necessary, and asking if he might be interested in selling some of his books.37

  One of the most important bonds between Madison and Jefferson was Virginia. They knew its seasons, from the redbuds of spring to the orange and gold leaves of sweet gum trees in the fall. They had internalized its pleasant manners and hospitality, and they knew its failings. Neither found much appeal in the gambling and fox hunting to which many a young Virginian devoted his time. The indolence that northerners found disconcerting in the South, particularly in the Tidewater, was no part of their daily existence. When the Virginia Convention adopted the proposal of a committee headed by George Mason to put the Latin words for “God bestowed upon us this leisure” on the seal of the commonwealth, Jefferson erupted. “For god’s sake,” he wrote, “what is the Deus nobis haec otia fecit?” During the time he was governor and Madison on the council, the words were replaced with Perseverando.38

  They both hated slavery, upon which Virginia’s culture and commerce were built. They understood the contradiction between the liberty they sought for mankind and the servitude they witnessed daily, yet at the end of long lives they would both die owning slaves.

  A traveler noted that Virginians were “haughty and jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and can scarcely bear the thought of being controlled by any superior power.” In none of the founders did this spirit burn more brightly than in Madison and Jefferson, and it might have formed their strongest bond, animating them not only to throw off British rule when it became oppressive but to build a new country in which religious freedom—which both saw as part and parcel of intellectual freedom—was assured. Madison’s zeal in this cause was likely heightened by the misery he knew as a young man when he realized that Christian orthodoxy insisted on a supernatural explanation for epilepsy. For Jefferson there is no event to pinpoint, “no certain way of knowing,” as his biographer Dumas Malone put it, “just when this apostle of freedom first swore eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”39 It may be telling that they were both men of the Piedmont, the upcountry, where life was m
ore rugged than in the Tidewater and individual pride in overcoming the challenges of isolation and distance more deeply embedded. Jefferson and Madison were from land not long removed from either the frontier or the frontiersman’s independent mind.

  Beginning June 1, 1779, Governor Jefferson and Councilor Madison met with other council members in daily sessions that began at ten each morning on the second floor of the capitol in Williamsburg. In mid-July, as the malarial season was about to begin, Madison left for Orange County, not to return until late October, then, on December 16, 1779, he left the council for good when the House of Delegates chose him to serve in the Continental Congress. Thus the two men worked together on the council only thirteen or fourteen weeks, but it was long enough, in Madison’s words, that “an intimacy took place.”40 After that, they were often apart, sometimes for years, but their mutual work continued. They encouraged, defended, and had a profound effect on each other—and on the nation they helped build.

  Chapter 4

  A ROPE OF SAND

  WHEN GEORGE WASHINGTON considered how poorly paid, ill-clothed, and ill-fed his army was, he knew exactly where to place the blame—on the Continental Congress. “The great and important concerns of the nation are horribly conducted,” he wrote to Benjamin Harrison, Speaker of the Virginia House. It was his “pious wish” that “each state … not only choose but absolutely compel their ablest men to attend Congress.”1