James Madison: A Life Reconsidered

by Lynne Cheney

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  MADISON’S FINAL BREAK with Hamilton came when he perceived that the secretary’s plans threatened to turn the limited government proposed by the Constitution into one with unlimited power. “This change,” he wrote to Harry Lee, “will take place in defiance of the … sense in which the instrument is known to have been proposed, advocated and ratified.” The question, as he saw it, was “whether the people of this country will submit to a constitution not established by themselves but imposed on them by their rulers… . It must unquestionably be the wish of all who are friendly to their rights that their situation should be understood by them and that they should have as fair an opportunity as possible of judging for themselves.”4 For the next year and a half Madison worked not only to enlighten the public but to put forward the idea that an awareness of what was wrong wasn’t enough. Oppositional thought had to be organized in order to put ideas into practice, which is what a party did. This was breakthrough thinking in a society where revolution was still a living memory. Americans had thrown off a king to become an independent people, and now, it was almost universally believed, citizens should work for unity and harmony, pulling together for the greater good. Partisanship was divisive, selfish, and even subversive, a threat to the order that had been won at such cost. No one had a kind word to say about parties until Madison concluded that the established order was itself undoing the Revolution and that the greater good required effective opposition.

  Madison conducted his campaign to enlighten the public in Philip Freneau’s National Gazette, the newspaper he had made possible. Writing anonymously, he set the stage by describing a vision of the country in which people worked the land, were nourished by its harvests, and encouraged in “health, virtue, intelligence, and competency.” Manufacturing and mechanical industry, he wrote, ought not to be “forced or fostered by public authority,” but rather viewed as regrettable “as long as occupations more friendly to human happiness lie vacant.” He offered up the story of Great Britain’s shoe buckle industry to illustrate the instability fostered by the manufacture of superfluities. Twenty thousand people had been thrown out of work when shoestrings and slippers came into fashion: “What a contrast is here to the independent situation and manly sentiments of American citizens, who live on their own soil or whose labor is necessary to its cultivation, or who were occupied in supplying wants … founded in solid utility.”5

  Hamilton, meanwhile, was heading rapidly in the opposite direction. In his Report on Manufactures for Congress, he recommended having the government pay cash bounties for factory start-ups. “Incitement and patronage” on the part of government would hurry the country along to a state in which labor could be constant rather than seasonal, as on a farm; indeed, people could work around the clock. This new and prosperous world would see “the employment of persons who would otherwise be idle (and in many cases a burden on the community).” It was a measure of the relentlessness of Hamilton’s vision that he found it “worthy of particular remark that, in general, women and children are rendered more useful and the latter more early useful by manufacturing establishments than they would otherwise be.” He helpfully pointed out that “of the number of persons employed in the cotton manufactories of Great Britain, it is computed that four-sevenths nearly are women and children, of whom the greatest proportion are children and many of them of a very tender age.”6

  Hamilton advanced an argument for the constitutionality of his proposal that Madison had contended with before—that the general welfare clause of article 1, section 8, permitted Congress a wide range of activities that were not specifically authorized. As Madison viewed it, the general welfare clause was simply a general expression of the enumerated powers that followed in section 8 of the Constitution, such as the powers to coin money and provide post offices. To interpret the clause as Hamilton did was to abolish the idea of limited government. “If Congress can apply money indefinitely to the general welfare and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare,” Madison said on the floor of the House, “they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may establish teachers in every state, county, and parish, and pay them out of the public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union, they may undertake the regulation of all roads, other than post roads. In short everything from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police would be thrown under the power of Congress.” Hamilton was driving the nation toward the Leviathan state that Thomas Hobbes had described, something never assented to in Philadelphia or the ratifying conventions. To a friend Madison wrote that if such an interpretation of the Constitution were to prevail, “the parchment had better be thrown into the fire at once.”7

  Madison’s opposition to the Report on Manufactures gained force from financial panic in 1792. Bank and government securities suddenly plummeted, and among those whose fortunes followed was former assistant Treasury secretary William Duer. Hamilton’s friend had borrowed vast amounts in all corners of the city to place large bets that securities would continue to rise. When they fell instead, he ended up in debtors’ prison, and hundreds to whom he owed money were ruined as well. “The prince of the tribe of speculators has just become a victim to his enterprises,” Madison wrote to Edmund Pendleton. “Every description and gradation of persons from the church to the stews are among the dupes of his dexterity and the partners of his distress.” Among the swindled was the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, another brainchild of Hamilton’s, which with private funds and a charter from William Paterson, now governor of New Jersey, intended to build factories and a factory town (named Paterson) along the banks of the Passaic River. Hamilton had picked Duer to head the society, and it soon became evident that he had looted the society’s funds.8 With government involvement in private industry suddenly having little appeal, Congress shelved Hamilton’s report.

  Madison’s National Gazette essays now became more pointed. In “The Union: Who Are Its Real Friends?,” Madison did not mention Hamilton’s name, but he noted that real friends were “not those who favor measures, which by pampering the spirit of speculation within and without the government, disgust the best friends of the Union.” Nor did real friends “promote unnecessary accumulations of the debt of the Union instead of the best means of discharging it as fast as possible.”9 Madison did not mention parties, but nevertheless took a crucial step in changing their image by putting Hamilton and his supporters on a level with those who opposed them. The public tended to view the Treasury secretary and his allies in Congress not as a faction but as the government. By setting their behavior against that of real friends of the Union—who dampened speculation and eschewed debt—Madison showed, though did not yet say, that the Hamiltonians weren’t above party, they were a party, one to which there was a vastly superior alternative.

  In another of his National Gazette essays, Madison used Jefferson’s notion that each generation should bear its own burdens in order to attack the idea of accumulating debt. A friend of his from the Virginia House of Delegates, John Mercer, now a representative from Maryland, subsequently took up the idea on the floor of the House: “The God of nature has given the earth to the living. That He will make our children and our children’s children as free as He made us is what no parent, I trust, will deny. Under the divine impression, the voice of United America has declared that we cannot deprive posterity of their natural rights, which, from generation to generation must continue the same as we came into the world with; we have a right to the fruits of our own industry—they to theirs.” Mercer had studied law with Jefferson, who might also have tutored him in the philosophy of his speech, but it was Madison who caught Hamilton’s attention by letting it be known that he favored Mercer’s sentiments.10 Madison’s attacks on his policies vastly irritated Hamilton, but this assault on his legacy was more than he could endure.

  Hamilton decided to “u
nbosom” himself. In a six-thousand-word letter full of furious underlinings to Edward Carrington of Virginia, he wrote that he would never have taken the post of secretary of the Treasury had he not expected to have “the firm support of Mr. Madison.” He had counted on it because the two of them had been in such agreement, but now instead of backing a strong central government, Madison was “disposed to narrow the federal authority.” Madison’s differences with him came from personal animosity, he believed. They had sprung “from a spirit of rivalship,” perhaps. Whatever the reason behind Madison’s opposition, Hamilton wrote, it had certainly caused him to change his mind about the man: “The opinion I once entertained of the candor and simplicity and fairness of Mr. Madison’s character has, I acknowledge, given way to a decided opinion that it is one of a peculiarly artificial and complicated kind.”

  Time and again, Madison, in cooperation with Jefferson, had opposed him, not only on fiscal issues but also on foreign policy, Hamilton went on. “They have a womanish attachment to France and a womanish resentment against Great Britain,” he wrote. But the best example of their opposition was the National Gazette. Jefferson and Madison had brought Freneau to Philadelphia, where he had been given a State Department position and started a newspaper. Hamilton’s concern wasn’t about the ethics of putting Freneau on the public payroll while he undertook other activities. It was not uncommon for even high officials to have second jobs, including ones that might take them away from the capital for extended periods. Rather, the issue was that Madison and Jefferson were behind “a paper devoted to the subversion of me and the measures in which I have had an agency.” An impartial man would also conclude, Hamilton wrote, “that it is a paper of a tendency generally unfriendly to the government of the United States.”11

  Hamilton’s grandiosity seems to leap off the page. The idea that opposition to him and his policies was subversive to the Republic smacks of the kingly l’état, c’est moi, but to be fair to the Treasury secretary, he was representing—in an extreme way, to be sure—the widely held view that party spirit was evil and quite naturally exempting himself from it. Madison agreed that parties could have evil effects, but the difference was that he didn’t regard himself as above the fray. “Parties are unavoidable,” he wrote in one of his National Gazette essays, and the task was to make “one party a check on the other.”12

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  WITH THE ELECTION of 1792 on the horizon, George Washington was contemplating retirement. He sent a note to Madison requesting him to call and confided his reasons: he felt unfit to make many of the judgments required of him, particularly those of a constitutional nature. “He found himself also in the decline of life, his health becoming sensibly more infirm and perhaps his faculties also.” Moreover, he was miserable in his job, in part because of the “spirit of party” that had arisen. Madison summoned all his tact. Instead of confronting the president’s assumption that party spirit was ever and always a threat, he tacitly acknowledged that unchecked it could be. The president ought to remain rather than retire, Madison argued, because by the end of another term the government would have “a tone and firmness” that would protect against any of the dangers that party represented, such as “disaffection” for the government among a few on one side and an ambition on the other for “mixed monarchy.” A few days after meeting with Washington, Madison agreed to suggest what the president might say in a farewell address, but he did so, he carefully noted, in a way that did not indicate even the slightest agreement to such a plan.13

  If Washington was aware of Madison’s involvement with the National Gazette, he betrayed no hint of it. Madison had never told him and might have felt some uneasiness about not doing so. A critique of Hamilton’s policies was inevitably a critique of the president who approved them, and after his meeting with Washington, in which the president had consulted him in such a personal way, Madison did not write for the National Gazette for more than five months. He would take up his pen again only after a severe escalation of the paper wars.

  Washington himself helped in that escalation. He held off on making up his mind about a second term until the fall and thereby inflamed the party spirit he so despised. As Hamilton thought about a contest for the presidency, he became ever more convinced that the attacks on him had been orchestrated by Jefferson to get rid of him as a rival. He inundated John Fenno, editor of the Gazette of the United States, with letters written under a variety of pseudonyms that attacked Jefferson by name and told the story of Freneau’s being recruited to come to Philadelphia, work in Jefferson’s State Department, and begin a newspaper. This made Freneau, Hamilton wrote, “the faithful and devoted servant of the head of a party.” When Freneau responded that the modest pay he received for translating had nothing to do with the views he expressed in the National Gazette, Hamilton snipped his words into a seeming admission of guilt, then asked this pointed question: How could Jefferson continue to serve in an administration that he was attacking?14

  Driving the knife in deeper, Hamilton cited the meddlesome letter that Jefferson had written prior to the Virginia ratifying convention, in which he had expressed the hope that nine states would ratify the Constitution but four hold out until amendments were agreed to. As Hamilton presented it, this meant that “Jefferson was in the origin opposed to the present Constitution.” Thus it made perfect sense that he should have established a paper to express views “virulently hostile both to the government and to its measures.”15 By conflating opposition to government measures with opposition to the Constitution, Hamilton was at once reflecting the widely held view that government was above party and calling Jefferson disloyal.

  Madison was at Montpelier when he learned of Hamilton’s attacks on Jefferson, and he immediately rode to Albemarle to confer with Jefferson and Monroe. Madison and Monroe took on the task of fighting back in Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser. They accused Hamilton (though not by name) of wanting to silence anyone who pointed out “the mischievous tendency of some of the measures of government.” They also published extracts of a number of letters that Jefferson had sent “to a particular friend” in order to show his support for the Constitution. Madison also defended Freneau, pointing out his Princeton friend’s education, his worthy character, and his suffering during the war, when he had been held in a British prison ship.16

  Freneau needed some boosting. Skilled polemicist though he was, the assault on his journalistic integrity pained him. Nearly a decade later he would still be denying that he had been Jefferson’s “pensioner” or “confidential agent.” In the months ahead, as if to show his independence, Freneau would launch harsher attacks than either Jefferson or Madison thought wise on the president himself. A cartoon in the National Gazette that showed a kingly Washington paying for his misdeeds on the guillotine would cause the president to bring a cabinet meeting to a full stop while he raged about “that rascal Freneau.”17

  While defending Jefferson and Freneau, Madison also continued his effort to shift public thinking about parties. In a National Gazette essay, he made their inevitability clear by placing them in historical context. They had been present when some argued for independence while others remained loyal to Britain. They had existed when some supported the Constitution and others opposed it. Now there was “a third division, which being natural to most political societies, is likely to be of some duration in ours.” Madison described one of the current parties as “more partial to the opulent than to the other classes of society; and having debauched themselves into a persuasion that mankind are incapable of governing themselves, it follows with them of course that government can be carried only by the pageantry of rank, the influence of money and emoluments, and the terror of military force.” The other party, clearly needed as a check, believed “in the doctrine that mankind are capable of governing themselves.” This second party, he wrote, was “the Republican party, as it may be termed.”18 It was a designation that would cause confusion for generations of students because Madison’s
Republican Party is unrelated to today’s, which came into being during the decade before the Civil War. The name was cleverly chosen, however, to indicate that Republicans adhered to the idea of the Republic as set forth in the Constitution. The opposing party, Madison suggested, should be known as Antirepublicans, but the Federalists, not surprisingly, preferred the name they’d had since the battle over the Constitution.

  The fledgling Republicans tried out their wings in 1792. Once it was evident that George Washington was a candidate for the presidency, all idea of a contest for the top office was abandoned, but Republicans thought they saw a ripe target in Vice President John Adams. He had not only made himself ludicrous with his emphasis on high-sounding titles but actually written a series of essays in which he had praised the idea of hereditary succession. In the search for an alternative to Adams, Madison’s name was mentioned—presumably by Republicans who failed to understand that Virginia’s electors could not vote for both him and George Washington. The early favorite, however, was longtime New York governor George Clinton. Not only was he firmly opposed to everything Alexander Hamilton stood for, but with his flyaway hair and bulbous nose he looked the populist part. But in October, Republicans from New York and Pennsylvania wrote to Madison and Monroe to tell them that Aaron Burr had mounted a campaign. Where did they stand now that there was a choice? They remained with Clinton, as did Republicans who caucused in Philadelphia. John Beckley, clerk of the House and a reliable source of party intelligence, wrote to Madison that the caucus had dropped “all thoughts of Mr. Burr.” Beckley, who had been in New York, also warned Madison about Hamilton. “It would be wise to be watchful; there is no inferior degree of sagacity in the combinations of this extraordinary man, with a comprehensive eye, a subtle and contriving mind, and a soul devoted to his object.”19