James Madison: A Life Reconsidered

by Lynne Cheney

  In an age when it was difficult even to get out the news that Adams had an opponent, Madison knew that a Clinton victory was unlikely. But the Republicans hoped to make a good enough showing to provide Adams with some useful enlightenment. “As the opposition to him is leveled entirely against his political principles and is made under very great disadvantages,” Madison wrote, “the extent of it, whether successful or not, will satisfy him that the people at large are not yet ripe for his system.”20 In the end Clinton received fifty electoral votes to John Adams’s seventy-seven, which was impressive. Washington remained as popular as ever. For the second and last time in American history, the vote of the Electoral College for a presidential candidate was unanimous.

  • • •

  AMONG HAMILTON’S FOES it was widely believed that he had used his office to enrich himself. John Beckley told Madison that he thought he had “a clue to something far beyond mere suspicion on this ground,” and at the end of 1792 a scandal seemed about to break.21 Three members of Congress received information that Hamilton had been providing money to James Reynolds, a shady character who had been jailed for fraud, and that the payments had to do with speculation. Since one of the members apprised of this was Senator James Monroe, it is likely that Jefferson and Madison were aware of the charges almost immediately—and were as stunned as Monroe when Hamilton confessed that yes, he had been paying Reynolds, but it had nothing to do with speculation. Rather, for more than a year, Hamilton, husband of the lovely Elizabeth Schuyler, who had recently borne him his fifth child, had been involved in an affair with Reynolds’s wife. He had been buying Reynolds’s silence.

  Hamilton’s affair was not the kind of thing that gentlemen brought up in public. Indeed, the members who confronted Hamilton apologized for “the trouble and embarrassment” they had caused him, and it would be five years before the matter reached the press. Thus, even though Madison, Jefferson, and Monroe were now confirmed in their belief that Hamilton was hardly the paragon of virtue he liked to claim, they were constrained from making that evident. When the new Congress convened, William Branch Giles of Virginia, who was Theodorick Bland’s successor, tried an attack along financial lines. A Princeton graduate with a sloping forehead and pugnacious manner, Giles proposed a series of resolutions intended, he said, “to obtain necessary information.” They suggested that Hamilton was playing fast and loose with Treasury funds, including putting money borrowed for one purpose to another use. Hamilton provided the information Giles requested—indeed, gave fulsome responses, indicating that if he had on occasion violated “the strict letter of the law,” it was for good reason and with presidential authority. And then, as if to drive his critics mad, he claimed that such administrative discretion was a necessary part of his office. Only “pusillanimous caution” would demand a “strict regularity.”22

  The Second Congress was near adjournment, and Madison, aware that the questions raised and Hamilton’s answers needed a lengthy discussion, wanted to wait until a new Congress met to continue the dispute. But Jefferson wanted resolutions of censure against Hamilton introduced immediately and went so far as to draft them himself. Giles was his willing handmaiden, and Madison’s role seems simply to have been in softening Jefferson’s language before Giles brought the resolutions to the floor.23

  The resolutions lost—and lost badly. Jefferson blamed the outcome on the number of “stockjobbers,” “bank directors,” and “holders of bank stock” in Congress and believed that the rejection would show the public “the desperate and abandoned dispositions with which their affairs were conducted.” But Madison viewed it as “very unfortunate” that the resolutions were offered.24 He was trying to build a party, and the last thing he needed was to force votes that drove members to the other side.

  Not long after the Second Congress ended, Madison set out for Virginia with James Monroe, who just four years before had been his rival for a seat in Congress. Madison’s move away from an emphasis on strong central government and his opposition to Hamilton had strained some relationships, including with the president, but he found himself more in harmony than he had been for years with Virginians who were suspicious of federal power. George Mason, before he died, had made a point of sending his respects to Madison and letting him know he was held in high regard. In a time that in many ways was disappointing, there was comfort to be found in being embraced at home.25

  There was also pleasure in being recognized for the role he had played in advancing liberty. After arriving in Orange, he received notice that the French National Assembly had made him an honorary citizen. Like Jefferson, Madison saw the French Revolution as a continuation of the work America had begun in “reclaiming the lost rights of mankind,” and in that spirit he accepted.26 But the French Revolution was devolving into something very different from an uprising against tyranny. Savage mobs had stormed the Tuileries and slaughtered hundreds of the king’s Swiss Guards. Lafayette, who had been at the center of events in the Revolution’s hopeful early days, had been forced to flee France, had been arrested, and would endure a cruel imprisonment. Rampaging crowds had broken into Paris prisons and killed indiscriminately, piling the corpses of political prisoners, clergymen, common criminals, and children into bloody heaps. The royal family had been placed under arrest, and just a few months before Madison accepted honorary French citizenship, the National Assembly had passed a death sentence on Louis XVI (or Louis Capet, as the revolutionaries insisted, refusing to acknowledge him as a monarch). The sentence was carried out by guillotine.

  From our perspective in the twenty-first century, we know that matters would only grow worse. The guillotine in Paris would soon be chopping off more than one head a minute. In outlying areas such as Pont-de-Cé and Avrillé thousands were shot. At Nantes, thousands were drowned in the Loire in what were called “republican baptisms.” But Madison did not know what lay ahead, and like many before and since who have watched the overthrow of tyrants with great hope, he convinced himself that the French Revolution would turn out for the best. Concern that failure of the Revolution would be seen as evidence that people could not govern themselves also influenced his thinking and made it easier in a time of uncertain communications, most filtered through a hostile British press, to dismiss reports of blood running in the streets of Paris. As for Louis XVI, Madison could not quite bring himself to say that he had gotten what he deserved, but instead reported that plain men had repeatedly expressed to him a statement that seemed fair: “If he was a traitor, he ought to be punished as well as another man.” Madison’s old college friend Hugh Brackenridge was less respectful. He headlined a piece he wrote for the National Gazette on the king’s demise “Louis Capet Lost His Caput.”27

  Madison’s hope in the French Revolution was widely shared—as became evident in the reception that Americans accorded to Edmond-Charles Genêt, or Citizen Genêt, as he was known in revolutionary France. Named minister to the United States, the thirty-year-old Genêt, a florid-faced, bright, and bustling redhead, arrived aboard the French frigate Embuscade in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 8, 1793. He was greeted by jubilant crowds and enthusiastic officials, who seemed not the least taken aback when he began to fit out privateers to sail in the French cause—and man them with Americans. He also began to recruit American citizens to invade Spanish possessions in the Southwest. As he made his way north, Genêt received one enthusiastic reception after another, all climaxed by a grand dinner in Philadelphia, where the company joined in singing “La Marseillaise” and took turns donning a bonnet rouge, the red cap symbolizing liberty. At Montpelier, Madison took heart when he heard of Genêt’s reception. He hoped it would “testify what I believe to be the real affections of the people,” he told Jefferson.28

  • • •

  ABOUT THE TIME that Genêt arrived in America, so did news that revolutionary France had declared war on Great Britain. President Washington issued a proclamation that the United States would “pursue a conduct friendly and impartial t
oward the belligerent powers,” a policy with which Madison generally agreed, but he fretted about the word “impartial.” It seemed “stronger than was necessary,” he wrote to Jefferson, and perhaps stronger than was proper, given the treaty that the United States had signed with France in 1778. It might have been worse, Jefferson explained. He had at least managed to keep the word “neutrality” out of the proclamation.29

  The president was soon under attack, particularly in the pages of the National Gazette. Someone, perhaps Freneau himself, writing under the pen name Veritas, accused Washington of “double-dealing” in the proclamation, effectively nullifying the United States’ treaty with France, although not saying so. Had the president consulted his fellow citizens, instead of relying on “the aristocratic few and their contemptible minions of speculators, Tories, and British emissaries,” he would have realized, wrote Veritas, that the people had no inclination to treat on equal terms those “who so lately deluged our country with the blood of thousands and the men who generously flew to her rescue and became her deliverers.” Madison wrote to Jefferson that the proclamation seemed “to violate the forms and spirit of the Constitution,” but he nonetheless regretted “the position into which the president has been thrown.” Jefferson began to think the attacks in the National Gazette were somehow a Federalist trick to further alienate Washington from Republicans and drive him into Federalist arms.30

  Hamilton, with perfect timing, weighed in to defend Washington in a series of energetic essays in John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States. Writing under the pseudonym Pacificus, he brought forward the word that Jefferson had avoided and labeled the president’s statement a “Proclamation of Neutrality”—a name that would stick. He insisted that the treaty of 1788 put the United States under no obligation to assist France in its war on Great Britain. Moreover, he wrote, the president had the perfect right under the Constitution to make that judgment, and those who disagreed were angling for war with the British.31

  A frantic Jefferson urged Madison to respond: “For god’s sake, my dear sir, take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public.” Jefferson was rattled in part because at the same time Hamilton was attacking the Republican, pro-French position in the pages of the Gazette of the United States, Genêt was undermining it by his conduct in Philadelphia. Warned by the president to cease fitting out privateers, Genêt had continued to do so right under the president’s nose, using the port of Philadelphia to arm a British vessel captured by the French. When told the vessel should not sail, he responded by threatening to go over the president’s head to Congress and, if necessary, to the people. Jefferson, who had once had high hopes for Genêt, wrote to Madison, “Never, in my opinion, was so calamitous an appointment made, as that of the present minister of France.” He described Genêt as “hotheaded, all imagination, no judgment, passionate, disrespectful, and even indecent towards the president.” So destructive was Genêt’s behavior to the relationship between France and the United States that Madison was tempted to think him an agent of the anti-French Hamiltonians.32 It was not the last time that he would find the French to be difficult allies.

  Madison was not eager to enter the fray. He was at Montpelier, far from the scene of the crisis, and deprived, as he put it, “of some material facts and many important lights.” He was no longer even sure what the president’s position was. He forced himself to take up the task but called it “the most grating one I ever experienced.” The pseudonym under which he wrote, Helvidius, for Helvidius Priscus, who had died resisting imperial rule, might have been an indication of his misery—as well as a biting comment on Washington’s administration. Madison’s task was complicated by the ground shifting under his feet. Even as he wrote, he learned that Jefferson was joining Hamilton and the rest of the president’s cabinet in demanding Genêt’s recall. As he was arguing the nuances of legislative versus executive power to make proclamations concerning war and peace (and favoring the legislative), he heard from Jefferson that the president’s proclamation was now so popular that “it would place the Republicans in a very unfavorable point of view with the people to be caviling about small points of propriety.” Madison threw up his hands. Citing social obligations and “the new posture of things,” he stopped writing.33

  • • •

  FALL WAS COMING ON, a reflective, melancholy time, and as Madison looked back, he saw a Second Congress that had begun badly and ended worse. Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures had been shelved, but that was the result of speculation and panic as much as a triumph of republican principles. His best effort had been the essays he had written to help enlighten public opinion. His pride in them would be apparent when in his old age he initialed them so there would be no question of authorship. He had written anonymously, but his role as opposition leader was widely acknowledged. The Republican Party was now often called Madison’s party.34

  Jefferson was retiring, and while it might be a relief not to have his friend constantly urging him to the barricades, he would miss his companionship in Philadelphia. When he returned for the Third Congress, Madison would also be without his familiar household. Mrs. House had died in June, and Mrs. Trist was closing up the boardinghouse. Madison might have begun to think that the time was growing near when he, like Jefferson, could enjoy more permanently the pleasures of rural life. After his brother Ambrose died on October 3, necessity began to enter into his thinking. Ambrose had helped James Madison Sr. run Montpelier, and someone needed to take up his responsibilities.

  But the pull of political life was strong, and he was making plans. He had worked with Jefferson on a report to be submitted to the Third Congress showing that Great Britain imposed more onerous duties on American products than any other nation and detailing the restrictions that it placed on American shipping. A recent British decree—called an Order in Council—authorizing the Royal Navy to stop and detain American vessels carrying grain to France would help him make his point that British policies should be resisted.35 Madison was convinced that the United States had the commercial power to change Great Britain’s ways, and he wanted to see the U.S. Congress use it.

  As fall advanced, it became unclear when Congress would meet again. Yellow fever had struck Philadelphia and was taking a devastating toll. There was a report of 150 buried on a Wednesday, which a few days later was revised upward to 200. Jefferson described the course of the disease: “It comes on with a pain in the head, sick stomach, then a little chill, fever, black vomiting and stools and death from the second to the eighth day.” So many succumbed that the ringing of church bells for the dead was forbidden. As many as twenty thousand fled, and even after spells of cool weather in early October the funerals continued.36

  In mid-October, Madison received what was now very rare: an inquiry from the president. Washington wanted to know if he had power under the Constitution to call for Congress to meet in another place. He did not, Madison replied, but a late October frost rendered the question moot. No one understood that the freezing weather brought an end to the fever by killing the mosquitoes transmitting it, but Philadelphians knew that the terrible plague was over.37

  The freeze did not come in time for John Todd, a young Quaker lawyer in Philadelphia. He had moved his wife, their toddler, and a newborn outside the city to lodgings on the west bank of the Schuylkill, where he hoped they would be safe, and then returned to Philadelphia to care for his parents. They died, and on October 14, 1793, Todd died, like his parents a victim of the fever. On the same day, the Todd baby, named William, died. Little John Payne Todd survived, and so did his twenty-five-year-old mother. Her name was Dolley.

  Chapter 11

  DOLLEY

  AS THE FEVER ABATED, Philadelphians whitewashed the walls of their homes, scrubbed the floors with vinegar, and burned gunpowder to cleanse the air. Finally, in mid-November 1793, the city was declared safe for the government to gather. Madison arrived, moved in with James Monroe on North Eighth Street
, and reentered the political fray, putting forward measures to place the same restrictions on British shipping that Great Britain applied to the United States. “The commerce of the United States is not at this day on that respectable footing to which from its nature and importance it is entitled,” he declared on the House floor. The evidence was there for all to see, and he proposed tariffs and tonnage fees to bring the British around.1

  Madison had tried before to institute commercial policies that he believed would change British behavior, and he had failed before. But now his proposals seemed to come at a particularly apt moment. Not only were the British treating grain as contraband; they had also brokered a truce between Portugal and Algiers that had resulted in freeing Algerine pirates to prey on American vessels in the Atlantic. Nevertheless, Madison ran into a firestorm of opposition from merchants and shipowners who did not want to offend their biggest customer. Hamilton, who as recently as Federalist 11 had been a proponent of using trade policy to influence other nations, was now fearful that Madison’s proposals, by leading to a decrease in trade, would bring a decrease in tariff revenues. He began passing talking points to Madison’s opponents, and both they and the Federalist press attacked him, alleging that his proposals would lead to war.