by Lynne Cheney
Some state legislatures, in responding to the 1798 resolutions, had gone so far as to embrace the Sedition Act. New Hampshire, for example, had opined that it was “constitutional and in the present critical situation of our country highly expedient.” Madison emphasized that it violated freedom of the press, an action explicitly forbidden by an amendment to the Constitution. Some were trying to construe that amendment to mean that while Congress could not prevent publication, it could pass laws punishing opinions once printed. Such a distinction made “a mockery” of press freedom, Madison wrote, which in a country where the government was elective had to be most strenuously defended. The Sedition Act would keep the people from knowing when public officials failed to discharge their trusts properly. It would keep them from being able to hold those officials accountable. And it would do so, Madison noted pointedly, in the upcoming presidential election. Those in power “will be covered by the ‘Sedition Act’ from animadversions exposing them to disrepute among the people,” while challengers “may be exposed to the contempt and hatred of the people.”35
Madison took the opportunity to put the Sedition Act in context, pointing out that it was part of a “design” in which the federal government accumulated power “by forced constructions of the constitutional charter.” This was a dangerous tendency, he observed. Interpreting the general welfare clause of article 1, section 8, of the Constitution to give the federal government sovereignty in “all cases whatsoever” would ultimately transform “the republican system of the United States into a monarchy,” and “whether it would be into a mixed or an absolute monarchy might depend on too many contingencies to admit of any certain foresight.”36
In Madison’s old age, the Report of 1800, like the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, would be used in the great battle over whether states could nullify federal laws and secede from the Union. As he wrote, however, he focused on fundamental rights and the preservation of a republic in which the people were sovereign. With the presidential election of 1800 growing ever closer, he was also surely aware that the report was a reminder to voters of the threat that Federalist government represented. Five thousand copies of the report were distributed throughout Virginia, and Jefferson, in Philadelphia, made sure that members of Congress had copies to take home with them.37
Madison spent some of his time in the House of Delegates on election mechanics. When Virginia had voted by district in 1796, Jefferson had received only twenty of the state’s twenty-one electoral votes. Since there was a difference between Jefferson and Adams of only three electoral votes nationwide in 1796, the single electoral vote in Virginia plus a single vote that had been cast for Adams in North Carolina could have made Jefferson president. In order to ensure all the Virginia electoral votes for Jefferson in 1800, Madison prepared a bill that would provide for a general ballot to be presented to voters. Since Republicans were thought to dominate, their ticket would win statewide, and the victorious electors, Republicans all, would vote for Jefferson. Madison reported that the “general ticket was so novel that a great number who wished it shrunk from the vote, and others apprehending that their constituents would be still more startled at it voted against it.” But it passed by five votes, and on January 21, 1800, ninety-three Republicans, including Madison, gathered in Richmond to put the electoral slate together. As John Beckley had done in Pennsylvania, the gathered Republicans made their slate as prestigious as possible. Edmund Pendleton was on it, as were George Wythe and James Madison. A central committee was established as well as committees in each county to make sure not a single electoral vote went astray. The gathering even agreed upon an election program for easing the public into acceptance of the new voting method: speakers in favor of it would appear in each district to laud not only the candidate for elector from that district but also the “prominent characters” from other districts who would finish out the ticket.38
Sometime before he left Richmond in January 1800, Madison encountered George Tucker, a young writer and law student, who left a memorable portrait of him:
He was then nearly fifty years of age, dressed in silk stockings and black breeches and wore powder according to the practice that still prevailed in full dress. The first [impression] made on me was that of sternness rather than of the mildness and suavity which I found afterward to characterize [him]. I saw him at the home of Mr. Monroe, then recently appointed governor of Virginia, on whom I called to deliver a letter of introduction, and I know not whether it was that they were engaged in some matter of grave conference which left its impression on his features when I saw him, or such was the ordinary effect first produced on a stranger, but I never perceived it afterwards.39
Madison had plenty to be looking grave about, but Tucker identified something others also observed: Madison gave nothing away to strangers, but once a person gained his trust, he became agreeableness itself.
• • •
MADISON WAS BACK at Montpelier when he learned that Napoleon had overthrown the French Republic, replacing the Directory with a consulate and installing himself as first consul. Madison knew that Federalists would use the event to point out the importance of ensuring order with alien and sedition laws and a large army. Too much liberty, they would argue, brought about chaos, which in turn led to monarchy. Madison hoped that the people would see that this was not the American situation and “ultimately rescue the republican principle.” “Such a demonstration,” he wrote to Jefferson, “will be the more precious as the late defection of France has left America the only theater on which true liberty can have a fair trial.”40
Jefferson, in Philadelphia, waited to write to Madison until he had someone whom he could trust completely to carry the letter. He found that courier in Hore Browse Trist, son of Eliza Trist, grown now and living in Charlottesville, as was his mother. He would carry messages between Madison and Jefferson several times during the year.
Jefferson’s letter contained a rundown on the upcoming presidential election. New York would provide an early sign of prospects, with legislative elections to be held in late April. The legislature appointed electors in that state, and if the Republicans gained control, New York’s electors, which in 1796 had gone to Adams, would go to Jefferson. New York City, which dominated the legislature, was the place to watch. A Republican victory there would almost certainly mean that Jefferson would take all of the state’s electoral votes in the fall.
The upcoming New York City election was not the only thing Madison had on his mind. The peace delegation to Paris seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth. It had been more than a year since President Adams had nominated William Vans Murray as minister to France and added Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth and Governor William Davie of North Carolina to the mission, but as the spring of 1800 approached, they still had not arrived in France. From Senator Stevens Thomson Mason of Virginia, Madison learned that Ellsworth and Davie had landed in Portugal and were proceeding from there to Paris by land. “Why they should have landed at so remote a place seems hard to be accounted for,” Mason wrote, “unless it is to be considered as a part of that system of procrastination which detained them in this country above eight month[s] after their appointment.”41
There was also the matter of dressing the columns of the portico at Montpelier. Madison asked the vice president to oblige him “by enquiring whether there be known in Philadelphia any composition for encrusting brick that will … stand the weather, and particularly what is thought of common plaster thickly painted with white lead overspread with sand.”42
Before Madison got an answer, he received momentous news from Virginia congressman John Dawson. “The Republic is safe,” Dawson exulted. “Our ticket has succeeded in the city of New York.” In a letter written a week later—and apparently sent through the mail—Jefferson said not a word about the victory, but he did advise on Madison’s columns. “In Lord Burlington’s edition of Palladio,” he wrote, “he tells us that most of the columns of those fine buildings erected by Palladio
are of brick covered with stucco and stand perfectly.” And he added “that three fourths of the houses in Paris are covered with plaster and never saw any decay in it.”43
Good news continued to come in. In Virginia the Republicans did well in legislative races, and in Philadelphia the Federalist caucus in Congress seemed to be tying itself in knots. Caucus members named John Adams and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney as their candidates but refused to give priority to Adams, a move some hoped would put Pinckney in the White House. The idea of Hamilton and others was that states in New England would support Pinckney as part of a ticket with Adams while South Carolina, his home state, would choose electors committed to him and Jefferson, thereby giving Pinckney the greatest number of electoral votes. Following the caucus, a furious John Adams fired his secretary of state, Timothy Pickering, and his secretary of war, James McHenry, both of whom he suspected—rightly—of being loyal to Hamilton rather than to him.44 Adams, who knew by now that the American envoys to France would be cordially received in Paris, also ordered the disbandment of the new army. There would be no military adventurism on Hamilton’s part on his watch.
The Republicans in Congress held their caucus, and the results were straightforward: Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for vice president. It was true that the darkly handsome Burr had irritated many of his fellow Republicans, including Thomas Jefferson, with his ill-concealed ambition, but he had earned a place on the ticket by crucial work he had done in New York to put that state in the Republican column.
• • •
MEANWHILE, IN RICHMOND the associate justice of the Supreme Court Samuel Chase, a high Federalist, was dealing his own party a severe setback. Someone had given him a booklet written by the scandalmonger James Callender that called President Adams a “hoary headed incendiary” and asserted that his “reign” was “one continued tempest of malignant passions.” Furious that these calumnies were going unpunished, Chase had seen to it that Callender, who was living in Virginia, was indicted under the Sedition Act—and was in the process of ensuring his conviction. Chase instructed the marshal at the Richmond trial to disqualify Republicans from being on the jury and refused to reject a juror who announced he had already made up his mind that Callender was guilty. He browbeat defense witnesses and interrupted defense counsel so often that they could not present a case. When the inevitable guilty verdict came in, Chase, seemingly determined to destroy whatever Federalist support was left in the Old Dominion, declared the verdict “pleasing to him, because it shewed that the laws of the United States could be enforced in Virginia, the principal object of this prosecution.” Madison took a certain pleasure in watching “the party which has done the mischief … so industriously cooperating in its own destruction.”45
Madison received a letter from Jefferson in mid-June inviting him and Mrs. Madison to Monticello so that the two men could discuss topics they could not take up in the mail. The Madisons arrived on Jefferson’s mountaintop during a lovely stretch of July weather and probably stayed in an octagonal room on the first floor that is known today as the Madison Room.46 Madison would visit Monticello again in August to discuss the upcoming election with Jefferson in person. Few letters passed between them, and those that did were less about politics than they were about nails. Should outsiders have read the interchange, they might have concluded the correspondence was between two carpenters.
• • •
IN OCTOBER, Federalists suffered another self-inflicted wound, this one courtesy of Alexander Hamilton. His disdain for President Adams had ripened into hatred after Adams had sent a peace mission to Paris, fired Hamiltonian cabinet members, and disbanded the army, and his plans to have Federalists elevate Pinckney over Adams in their voting were not going well. In frustration, Hamilton laid out the case against Adams in a pamphlet. He depicted a paranoid and suspicious man, subject to “eccentric tendencies” and “paroxysms of anger.” He detailed the personal affronts he had suffered, and after declaring Adams “unfit … for the office of chief magistrate,” he did a strange reversal and urged Federalists not to withhold a single vote from the president.47
Hamilton had intended to have his pamphlet privately distributed, but no sooner had it reached the printer than a copy was leaked to political operative John Beckley and passages soon appeared in the Aurora. Hamilton’s descriptions of Adams created a sensation, and the endorsement that followed on them made Hamilton appear at least as deranged as the man he was writing about. In Madison’s judgment, the pamphlet damaged Hamilton more than Adams, but the injury to the president was nonetheless significant. “The pamphlet of H,” Madison wrote to Jefferson, “which, though its recoil has perhaps more deeply wounded the author than the object it was discharged at, has contributed not a little to overthrow the latter, staggering as he before was in the public esteem.”48
In the end the election came down to South Carolina, and in late November, as Vice President Jefferson stopped at Montpelier on his way to Washington City, the new capital, Madison handed him a letter that must have buoyed them both. It was from Senator Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, whom Madison had known since the Constitutional Convention. The cousin of Thomas and General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Senator Pinckney was now referred to as Blackguard Charlie for having strayed from the Federalist fold. He had been working hard in the Republican cause and reported he was convinced that “we shall have a decided majority in our legislature.” That meant that Republican candidates for elector would prevail. There was still a possibility that some Republican electors would cast their second votes for General Pinckney, the favorite son, rather than Aaron Burr, and that those electoral votes added to Federalist electoral votes for Pinckney could elevate him above other candidates, but Republican Party discipline was strong and General Pinckney was a gentleman, refusing to back any candidate for elector who was not faithful to John Adams. On December 2, Senator Pinckney was able to report to Jefferson, “The election is just finished, and we have (thanks to heaven’s goodness) carried it.”49
In the months before the election, Madison had served as a liaison to vice presidential candidate Aaron Burr’s campaign. Still smarting from Burr’s having received only one electoral vote from Virginia in 1796, Burr’s forces wanted assurances that all the Virginia electors would vote for Burr as well as Jefferson. Madison provided them and was in turn assured that all of New York’s electors would vote for Jefferson as well as Burr. Burr’s agent also reported that in two or three states electors voting for Jefferson would not vote for Burr, thus assuring that Jefferson would come out first in the electoral count and be elected president.50
Madison had managed to overcome the extreme reluctance of Virginia elector George Wythe to keep his part of the bargain, but as December advanced, he began to worry that he had been dealt with falsely. No Jefferson electors in other states had thrown away their second vote to assure Jefferson precedence. Thus, Jefferson and Burr were tied with seventy-three electoral votes apiece.51
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THIS STUNNING RESULT meant that the contest for the presidency would be decided in the House of Representatives, where the Federalists had a majority of members but Republicans controlled more state delegations: eight to the Federalists’ six, with two states divided. Since voting would be by state, with each casting a single vote, the Republicans had an advantage, but they did not have the majority of nine votes (out of sixteen) necessary to put Jefferson into the presidency.
Federalists decided in a caucus to support Burr. This was not an endorsement of his character, as Speaker of the House Theodore Sedgwick made clear. In a letter to Hamilton, he wrote of Burr, “His ambition is of the worst kind. It is a mere love of power, regardless of fame but as its instrument. His selfishness excludes all social affections and his profligacy unrestrained by any moral sentiment and defying all decency.” But however unworthy Burr was, Federalists were willing to use him to keep Jefferson, whom they considered more unworthy, from becoming president. One scheme
was to keep blocking Jefferson until the term of the Adams administration expired so that on Inauguration Day 1801, the presidency and the vice presidency would be empty. Since Congress had the constitutional power to provide for succession in “the case of removal, death, resignation, or inability both of the president and vice president,” Federalists could then, with only “a stretch of the Constitution,” pass a bill naming a federal officer such as Secretary of State John Marshall to the vacancy.52
Jefferson reported this scheme to Madison, who responded that he could hardly believe it—and surely he did not want to, realizing that by persuading Wythe he had contributed to the electoral nightmare. He shot off a furious letter to Virginia Republican John Dawson that he clearly intended for distribution among Federalists. If the current House was unable to choose a president, the next House, which would be controlled by Republicans, would gain the right, he said. Jefferson and Burr should call that House into session early in order for the decision to be made, he wrote, adding that the attempt to elect Burr was degrading the country. Madison’s plan got Federalist attention but had a fatal flaw. It depended on Burr’s cooperation, and he was giving no hint that would be forthcoming. Jefferson, even more outraged than Madison, informed the Federalists that if they should “pass a law for putting the government into the hands of an officer, … the middle states would arm and that no such usurpation even for a single day should be submitted to.”53