James Madison: A Life Reconsidered

by Lynne Cheney

  Washington no doubt had in mind luminaries such as Thomas Jefferson and George Mason, but Jefferson was governor of the commonwealth and his wife was often sick, while Mason worried about his motherless children. Philadelphia was many days’ travel away, and Congress never recessed, making it extraordinarily difficult for anyone who had a family or needed to earn a living. Madison’s friend Edmund Randolph would twice resign from the Continental Congress in order to practice law and support his wife and children.2

  Madison was thrilled to be asked to be part of the Virginia Assembly’s effort to improve its congressional representation. He did not forget to be modest, but his eagerness was apparent as he offered Speaker Harrison his “assurances that as far as fidelity and zeal can supply the place of abilities, the interests of my country shall be punctually promoted.”3 He had neither wife nor child to support. In fact, his father was willing to support him—albeit sometimes grudgingly. And he might also have had an idea that Congress, much smaller than the Virginia Assembly and with far fewer eminences, was a place where a bright young man who worked very hard could have a large impact.

  A winter of unprecedented harshness kept him from leaving for Philadelphia promptly, but he used the time to delve into a problem that lay behind many others bedeviling Congress and the American cause: money. The paper that Congress was issuing to pay for the war had become nearly worthless, and as snow fell on the hills of the Piedmont and rivers froze, Madison pored over books trying to understand the country’s troubled finances. Montesquieu and Hume maintained that the value of money decreased as its quantity increased, but Madison decided more was at work, namely, “the credit of the state issuing [the currency] and … the time of its redemption.” If the military prospects of the United States improved, he sensibly concluded, faith in the country’s future would help keep its currency afloat. So, too, would setting a time specific for redemption. Congress had not made such a commitment for several years.4

  But redeeming currency meant levying taxes, and as Madison traveled to Philadelphia in the company of Billey, one of the family slaves, he no doubt thought about this most basic problem: the Continental Congress had no power to raise money. It was financially dependent on the states, and they were reluctant to use their taxing authority. Unless something changed drastically, Continental currency would continue its decline, a situation made worse by the fact that wartime demand would also continue exerting upward pressure on prices. Sugar already cost ten times as much as at the beginning of the Revolution, and bacon twenty times.5

  Madison arrived in Philadelphia to find that Congress had grown so desperate about the country’s finances that members had decided to give up all authority over money matters. Going forward, the states were to redeem Continental currency and, as that was done, take over the issuance of new money. “An old system of finance” was “discarded as incompetent to our necessities,” Madison wrote to Jefferson, and “an untried and precarious one substituted.” There was the prospect of “a total stagnation … between the end of the former and the operation of the latter.” Meanwhile, a widening circle of difficulties was being created by the country’s financial woes: “Our army threatened with an immediate alternative of disbanding or living on free quarter; the public treasury empty, public credit exhausted; … Congress complaining of the extortion of the people, the people of the improvidence of Congress, and the army of both; our affairs requiring the most mature and systematic measures, and the urgency of occasions admitting only of temporizing expedients and those expedients generating new difficulties.” Like Washington before him—indeed, like much of the country by this time—Madison concluded that the Continental Congress, with its “defect of adequate statesmen,” was not likely to solve the nation’s problems. The mediocrity of its members meant that it was “more likely to fall into wrong measures and [be] of less weight to enforce right ones,” he wrote.6

  • • •

  THE YEAR AHEAD, the worst of the war, would complicate this assessment. Even the most enlightened delegate, Madison would find, could fall into wrong measures when he lacked adequate information, which members of the Continental Congress usually did. At the end of May 1780, Rivington’s Royal Gazette put out an extra edition describing the fall of Charleston to the British. Was this to be believed? Or did “the notorious character for lying of the author,” as Madison wrote to Jefferson, “leave some hope that it is fictitious”? As it became clear that Charleston had indeed capitulated and nearly the whole of the army in the South had surrendered, the obvious response, or so it seemed to Madison, was to send more troops. As part of a committee, he proposed that Major Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, a Virginian whom he had known at Princeton, “proceed immediately to South Carolina with the corps under his command,” a recommendation forwarded to General Washington on behalf of Congress. Within weeks, however, delegates heard from Washington of a battle in New Jersey that was too close to Philadelphia for comfort. They reversed themselves, endorsing Washington’s recommendation that Lee’s corps march north.7

  Madison came to see that the Continental Congress could be a conclave of statesmen and still not operate effectively. Not only had the power of the purse been handed over to the states, so, too, had authority for raising, provisioning, and paying the army. The states were “dilatory” in providing resources, Madison reported to John Page, with whom he had served on the Virginia Council of State. But there was nothing Congress could do. Its members could “neither enlist, pay, nor feed a single soldier,” as Madison described it.8

  All that was left was “to administer public affairs with prudence, vigor, and economy,” and even in that task the delegates’ labors were sometimes counterproductive. When Congress undertook a campaign to reform abuses in the procurement and transport of goods, Washington’s quartermaster and favorite general, Nathanael Greene, was soon in the crosshairs. The forceful, thin-skinned Greene hadn’t wanted to be quartermaster in the first place. In defiance of his Quaker father, he had read the works of great military leaders such as Julius Caesar and Frederick the Great growing up, and it was field command that he found satisfying. But Washington had prevailed upon him to take the quartermaster’s position and had kept him there by releasing him to take part in battle from time to time. Greene had little patience with congressional suggestions that some of the thousands of agents procuring supplies for him were corrupt. Indeed, he had little patience with the “talking gentlemen” of Congress, who, as he saw it, “tired themselves and everybody else with their long, labored speeching that is calculated more to display their own talents than promote the public interest.”9

  Because he worked on commission rather than salary, Greene had made a good deal of money supplying the army, which raised red flags in Congress, although its members had authorized the arrangement. Apparently on the theory that he who is abundantly compensated should be abundantly responsible, delegates began to discuss making Greene personally liable for improper expenditures by his subordinates whether they were fraudulent or merely imprudent. Hearing of this, Greene wrote an eleven-page letter detailing his objections to this “strange, new, and unexpected … doctrine.” The official resolution in response, written by Congressman Madison, affirmed the principle of Greene’s responsibility, adding the caveat that Congress, not wishing “to expose the faithful servants of the public to any unreasonable risks or losses,” would “determine on the circumstances as they arise and make such favorable allowances as justice may require.” When Greene resigned in fury, Congress threatened to strip him of his rank, at which point Washington entered the fray, backing Congress down on the matter of Greene’s commission but having to accept a new quartermaster, Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, a thin, austere man whom he did not trust.10

  The results were even worse when Congress concerned itself with one of Washington’s least favorite generals, Horatio Gates, widely regarded as the hero of the Battle of Saratoga. During the dark days of Valley Forge, Gates had been put forwa
rd by powerful allies as the man who should replace Washington. Although the effort had failed, Washington had not forgotten, and he was dismayed when Congress without notifying him appointed Gates to the southern command. Gates was full of confidence as he arrived in the South to head a newly raised army, but within weeks he made a disastrous decision to lead his men through unfriendly territory to Camden, South Carolina. There he encountered General Charles Cornwallis and his well-trained forces, and on August 16, 1780, they dealt the patriots the war’s bloodiest defeat. Gates’s army suffered more than two thousand casualties, and Congress, unusually chastened, gave Washington the power to choose Gates’s replacement. He put Nathanael Greene in charge.

  In the wake of the terrible defeat at Camden came the spectacular and horrifying news that Major General Benedict Arnold had turned traitor. A short, square-jawed man full of energy and ambition, he was one of America’s most renowned warriors. Many thought it was he who should be credited for the American victory at Saratoga. He had married a young and wealthy heiress, Peggy Shippen of Philadelphia, but was nonetheless deeply in debt. Convinced that his country did not sufficiently appreciate him, he agreed that in exchange for a handsome payment and a British commission he would surrender West Point. As Madison and other members of the Virginia delegation described Arnold’s actions to Governor Jefferson, he “shamefully, treacherously, and ignominiously deserted the important post at West Point, which garrison he commanded, after having concerted measures … for delivering it up to the enemy.” The plot to hand the fortress over to the British was foiled, but Arnold escaped to a British warship, and American morale suffered a heavy blow.11

  The discouraging course of the war and the frustrations of Congress helped drive many delegates home, but Madison had no intention of giving up. While others dropped in and out of their duties, he remained in Philadelphia, comfortable in Mary House’s lodgings at the corner of Market and Fifth and enjoying the friendship of Eliza Trist. Among the others boarding at Mrs. House’s was William Floyd of New York. While Madison’s recommendation seems to have persuaded Virginia delegates James Henry, Joseph Jones, and John Walker to join him at Mrs. House’s, Floyd might have brought New Yorkers Robert Livingston, John Morin Scott, and James Duane to their table. The last two congressmen were of special service to Mrs. House when she was sued in 1780 by Joseph Bulkley, a man with whom she seems to have had some past close relationship. Scott and Duane defended her, though not successfully enough to prevent a sheriff from seizing furnishings from the house. Shortly after this drama, Mrs. House’s establishment, like several other buildings in Philadelphia, was struck by lightning. Although hers was the worst damaged, the harm was less than it might have been because, the Pennsylvania Packet reported, a bell wire conducted the lightning through several rooms to the ground. “This incident affords an additional proof of the utility of the electrical rods invented by the ingenious Dr. Franklin,” the Packet opined.12

  These domestic crises no doubt reinforced the camaraderie growing out of the great common cause in which Mrs. House’s boarders were involved. One imagines the lodgers gathered around the parlor fire, discussing Great Britain’s southern campaign, Benedict Arnold’s treachery, and, occasionally, the lawsuit and lightning strikes.

  Living at Mrs. House’s was not cheap. Madison’s boarding bill for the first six months was more than twenty-one thousand dollars, an amount that underscored how inflationary the times were, particularly in Philadelphia. Madison’s fellow boarder William Floyd declared that “the devil was with all his emissaries let loose in this state to ruin our money.” Madison made loans to his congressional classmate Joseph Jones and also helped out Theodorick Bland, elected from Virginia in 1780 and often a thorn in Madison’s side. Tall, wavy-haired, and given to making florid speeches, Bland, who was married to the beautiful, utterly frivolous Martha Dangerfield Bland, complained that his money “evaporated like smoke,” leaving him “without the means of buying a dinner or … a bait of oats for my horses.” When Madison ran low on funds himself, he applied to his father, apparently with some success, but Edmund Randolph seems to have been a surer source of financial support, as was Haym Soloman, a moneylender on Front Street, who refused, despite Madison’s insistence, to charge him interest.13

  From Mrs. House’s establishment it was an easy walk to the statehouse, where the thirty or so members of Congress attended sessions on the second floor. The boardinghouse was also near the French legation on Chestnut Street, which had been recently and elegantly enlarged. The chevalier de la Luzerne, the French minister, hosted fine parties there, events particularly appreciated by Martha Bland. “Oh, my dear, such a swarm of French beaux, counts, viscounts, barons, and chevaliers,” she gushed to her sister-in-law. Mrs. Bland adored what she called the “dissipation” of Philadelphia and did not appreciate the lack of jollity displayed by the Virginia delegation. Madison, “a gloomy, stiff creature,” was particularly annoying. “They say [he] is clever in Congress, but out of it he has nothing engaging or even bearable in his manners—the most unsociable creature in existence.”14 One doubts that Madison would have been bothered by her assessment.

  • • •

  MADISON WAS WELL AWARE of the importance of staying close to the French. Even before the American victory at Saratoga had persuaded them to sign a treaty of alliance with the United States, they had provided essential aid, including money and arms. More was needed, however, if America was to win its war for independence, particularly naval power. American hopes had been raised when the chevalier de Ternay arrived in Newport in July 1780 with seven ships of the line and dozens of transports carrying thousands of French regulars under the command of the illustrious comte de Rochambeau, but summer passed, and both navy and army remained in Newport. For a time in September it seemed as though a large French fleet from the West Indies was off the coast, but Madison had to inform his fellow Virginia congressman Joseph Jones that the ships that had been spotted were actually British ships of the line and frigates.15

  After the great patriot loss at Camden, South Carolina, frustration with the French reached new levels in Virginia. Joseph Jones wanted to know if Luzerne had explained France’s failure to act. “I must confess I am at a loss how fully to satisfy the doubts of some and to silence the insinuations of others who ground their observations upon the transactions of the present year,” he wrote. Madison had by now mastered the art of being reassuring, on the one hand, without criticizing the source of the anxiety, on the other. He told Jones that those aware of the reason for French delay understood the consternation it was causing, but “as they give no intimations on the subject it is to be inferred they are unable to give any.”16

  Late October brought good news of a patriot victory at Kings Mountain, South Carolina, but it was followed shortly by word of a British invasion force in the Chesapeake. The British operated mostly around the mouth of the James River and left after a month, but their presence raised ever more urgently for Virginians the question of when France’s army and naval forces would engage. It was a measure of the high regard in which Madison was increasingly held that the distinguished Edmund Pendleton had asked to correspond with him, and when the older man expressed his mystification over French inaction, Madison sympathized—while at the same time praising the French. “The motions of our allies are no less mysterious here than they appear to you,” he wrote. “We have however experienced so many proofs of [French] wisdom and goodness towards us that we ought not on slight grounds to abate our faith in them. For my own part I have as yet great confidence in both.”17

  • • •

  MADISON REALIZED EARLY in his congressional career that while he should give due regard to what eminent Virginians had to say, he also needed to exercise his own judgment. When Arthur Lee, one of the most contentious men ever to be part of American public life, was recalled from his position as a commissioner in France, he launched an attack on Benjamin Franklin, who was serving as America’s minister plenipoten
tiary in Paris. The relentlessly ambitious Lee claimed in a letter to Congress that “Dr. Franklin is now much advanced in years, more devoted to pleasure than would become even a young man in his station, and neglectful of the public business.” Madison’s fellow Virginia delegate Theodorick Bland, the chairman of the committee to investigate Franklin, allied himself with Lee, unaware that he, too, had once been the object of a wicked assessment by a member of the Lee family. “Never intended for the department of military intelligence,” Light-Horse Harry Lee, Arthur’s brother, said of Bland.18

  As a young man Madison had made brash comments about Franklin’s trustworthiness, but he now became his defender, voting against a proposal to send an envoy to France to do what Franklin was supposedly failing to do. After the motion passed despite his opposition, Madison drafted instructions to the envoy that were tailored to support Franklin. In the end, Franklin saved himself from this particular attack by securing a much-needed loan of ten million livres from the French, but he and Madison had become firmly allied. When future assaults were made on the elderly Pennsylvanian, he would find the young Virginian at his side. For this and other transgressions, Madison drew the cantankerous Lee’s ire, but it was perhaps a measure of his political skill that he managed to avoid the worst of it. Lee wrote of Madison, “Without being a public knave himself, he has always been the supporter of public knaves”—which coming from Lee was practically praise.19

  At times Madison was bound by instructions from Virginia’s legislature, as in the matter of the navigation of the Mississippi. Upon entering the war against Great Britain, Spain had closed the lower part of the river to all but Spanish commerce. This was fine with the French, who hoped that letting Spain have its way would encourage greater Spanish involvement against Britain, but Virginia regarded free use of the Mississippi as crucial to its economy—particularly in the Kentucky part of the commonwealth, which was not yet a separate state. Thus the Virginia Assembly instructed its representatives in Congress to insist on open navigation of the Mississippi, which Madison most willingly did. Elected to chair a committee to explain Congress’s position to John Jay, a tall, solemn New Yorker who had recently been president of Congress and was now minister to Spain, Madison drafted a letter setting forth a vision of the “vast extent” of land west of the Alleghenies. “In a very few years, after peace shall take place, this country will certainly be overspread with inhabitants,” Madison wrote. He imagined them cultivating fertile soil, raising wheat, corn, beef, tobacco, hemp, and flax—and needing a way to carry on commerce. “The clear indications of nature and providence and the general good of mankind,” he wrote to Jay, required that these “citizens of the United States” have “free use of the river.”20