James Madison: A Life Reconsidered

by Lynne Cheney

• • •

  MADISON HEARD FROM MONROE, who had been delegated to affirm U.S. claims to Florida. Spain would not act without French approval, Monroe had found, and the French foreign minister, Talleyrand, was contradicting the American position that West Florida was part of the territory purchased by the United States. Closer to home, there were also signs that Napoleon, who had declared himself emperor, was intent on a new and tougher approach. He had appointed a new French minister to the United States, General Louis-Marie Turreau, who arrived in America with a reputation for being cruel as a soldier and profligate in his private life. His beefy face inspired Senator Plumer to attribute “a ferocious disposition” to him, and his domestic life seemed to prove the point. Dolley Madison wrote to her sister that Turreau “whipped his wife and abused her before all his servants.” Senator Plumer recorded an incident in which Turreau’s wife hit him with an iron and he beat her with a cane. In a vain effort to cover the shouting and shrieking that ensued, the legation secretary opened a window and played frantically on his French horn.20

  Jefferson worried that the collapse of negotiations over who owned West Florida meant war, either with Spain or with its sponsor, France. The United States ought to seek a treaty of alliance with England, he wrote to Madison. He pressed the matter for a second time on August 7, 1805, then again in ten days with even greater urgency: “Should negotiations with England be advisable, they should not be postponed a day unnecessarily.” When Madison responded that U.S. “conduct towards Great Britain is delicate as it is important” and warned that an alliance with Britain would draw the United States into war against France, Jefferson protested that he had meant a provisional alliance, one that would go into effect only if the United States became engaged in a war with France or Spain. Madison continued to demur, pointing out that there was no advantage to England in such an agreement, and although Madison’s recalcitrance might have annoyed another man, Jefferson listened. When Mrs. Madison’s knee would still not permit her to return to Washington in early October and Madison had to miss a scheduled cabinet meeting, Jefferson assured him that no decision would be reached in his absence. The subject of seeking alliance with Britain was “too important and too difficult to be decided but on the fullest consideration,” he wrote, “in which your aid and counsel should be waited for.”21

  Madison turned to books, as he had so often done. Using volumes he had brought with him to Philadelphia as well as others he borrowed, he worked furiously on a treatise intended to show the illegality of British navigation policy. His target was the Rule of 1756, which forbade neutrals such as the United States to engage in shipping that was not open to them in peacetime, most importantly between the West Indies and Europe. The British had been allowing American ships to evade this rule by stopping in the United States with their cargoes and reexporting them from there, but in 1805 an Admiralty court ruled such “broken voyages” a violation. American vessels carrying goods between France and Spain and their Caribbean colonies were now subject to seizure, even if they off-loaded and reloaded their cargoes in an American port. While Madison waited with Dolley for her knee to heal, he produced a document of seventy thousand words demonstrating the lack of basis in international law for the Rule of 1756. When Jefferson saw the result, he declared the British rule “pulverized.”22

  The Royal Navy, unimpressed by Madison’s logic, stepped up ship seizures. Britain also continued to impress sailors from American merchant ships. As these actions doomed the possibility of a British alliance, President Jefferson’s thoughts turned again to France and Spain. Perhaps remembering 1803, when Napoleon, under war pressure, ceded Louisiana, Jefferson and his cabinet decided to try to resume negotiations about Louisiana’s boundaries, this time with money on the table. Since Spain was indebted to France, Napoleon might encourage Spain to accept an American offer for the Floridas—five million dollars, say—which it could then use to pay off its debts to France. But if the administration saw this new effort as based on what had worked in the case of Louisiana, John Randolph saw it as a repeat of the XYZ Affair, only this time the United States was volunteering to bribe the French. When he was shown a plan that proposed a partial payment of two million dollars, he peremptorily declared that he would not vote a single shilling for it.23

  • • •

  DOLLEY’S KNEE had healed sufficiently for Madison to leave Philadelphia for Washington toward the end of October, expecting that she would be able to follow soon. James had scarcely departed before Dolley began a letter to him. “A few hours only have passed since you left me my beloved,” she wrote, “and I find nothing can relieve the oppression of my mind but speaking to you in this only way.” His departure had stirred up her worries about him, but “three or four drops of laudanum” helped her calm down. She passed along Dr. Physick’s compliments (“He says he regards you more than any man he ever knew and nothing could please him so much as passing his life near you”) and closed her letter, “Adieu, my beloved, our hearts understand each other.”24

  In his letters, James tried to keep Dolley’s spirits up, pretending to flirt with her friend Betsy Pemberton, who was staying with her. He sent her letters from her mother and her son, John Payne Todd, now thirteen, whom they both called Payne, and signed one of his letters “with unalterable love.” She wrote to him, “To find you love me, have my child safe and that my mother is well seems to comprise all my happiness.”25

  He made considerable effort to secure a place for Payne at a Catholic school in Baltimore and asked his wife’s permission to let his niece Nelly and her husband, John Willis, transport furniture in a wagon the Madisons were sending back to Montpelier. He located a pair of earrings someone had sent her as a gift and reminded her to insure the buildings she was renting out in Philadelphia. For the most part their communications are from one equal to another, but there is a change in Dolley’s tone when she brings up politics. “I wish you would indulge me with some information respecting the war with Spain and disagreement with England,” she wrote. “I am extremely anxious to hear (as far as you may think proper) what is going forward in the cabinet.” Her way of assuring him that she had no intention of becoming an “active partisan” was to stress “her want of talents” and her “diffidence in expressing her opinions [on matters] always imperfectly understood by her sex.”26

  James did not reveal cabinet deliberations, but he paid respect to her inquiry by offering a prescient assessment: “If a general war takes place in Europe, Spain will probably be less disposed to insult us and England less sparing of her insults.” He also reminded her that “the power … of deciding questions of war and providing measures that will make or meet it lies with Congress and,” he added, “that is always our answer to newsmongers.” If his tone was a trifle condescending, it is easy to understand the need he felt to caution her. Despite her ailing knee, Dolley had an active social life in Philadelphia. Among her callers were the Spanish minister the marquis de Yrujo and the French minister General Turreau. Finally, in late November, Dolley’s knee had healed enough for her to travel. Accompanied by her sister Anna and Anna’s husband, Richard Cutts, she returned to Washington and the husband she called her darling, her dearest, and her best friend.27

  • • •

  AS THE YEAR 1805 was coming to an end, word arrived that Lord Nelson had utterly defeated the French and Spanish fleets off Cape Trafalgar on the southwest coast of Spain. Jefferson, determined to find good news in the report, reflected that Napoleon still dominated on land: “Our wish ought to be that he who has armies may not have the dominion of the sea and that he who has dominion of the sea may be one who has no armies. In this way we may be quiet, at home at least.” In his heart of hearts, Jefferson had to know this was wishful thinking. As long as Napoleon held sway on the Continent, the British were going to continue their crackdown on U.S. ships carrying goods to Europe, and that meant discontent at home. James Monroe reported from London that the seizure of American ships was not happening willy-nil
ly, but had become British policy. He also said that there was no indication of any desire on the part of the British government to end impressment. He speculated that these insults were at least in part a result of an opinion held by many “that the United States are by the nature of their government being popular incapable of any great, vigorous, or persevering exertion,” and he recommended that the United States defend its interests “in a decisive manner.”28

  Jefferson forwarded this letter to Congress without recommending any course of action, much less a decisive one, perhaps because he did not want to be accused of violating the separation of powers. Whatever his motive, he created a situation ripe for Randolph to launch an attack on Madison. When Representative Andrew Gregg of Pennsylvania put forward a bill forbidding the import of British goods, Randolph demanded to know if this was a secret project of the administration and particularly of one secretive high official: “Is this a measure of the cabinet? Not of an open declared cabinet, but of an invisible, inscrutable, unconstitutional cabinet without responsibility, unknown to the Constitution. I speak of backstairs influence.” Randolph claimed that when he had inquired about the opinion of the cabinet, he was told, “There is no longer any cabinet,” the meaning being that Madison was now so totally dominant that no one else mattered.29

  In a rant that extended for two days, Randolph attacked the president and the secretary of state, using invective that one observer called “the most severe that the English language can furnish.” Madison’s treatise on the illegality of British navigation policy was a particular target. Calling it “a tangled cobweb of contradictions,” Randolph read from it disdainfully, then tossed it to the floor. Observed Senator Plumer, “Mr. Randolph has passed the Rubicon. Neither the president or the secretary of state can after this be on terms with him.”30

  The multimillion-dollar plan to settle the matter of the Floridas with Spain, using France as an intermediary, was also on Randolph’s mind. The House had passed it over his objections, and the defeat rankled. Because the deliberations on the plan were secret, he had to be content with insulting them metaphorically, comparing them to patent medicine advertisements: “Here you have ‘the worm-destroying lozenges,’ there ‘Church’s cough drops,’ and to crown the whole, ‘Sloan’s vegetable specific’—an infallible remedy for all nervous disorders and vertigoes of brainsick politicians.” Brilliant and devious as Randolph was, one has to wonder if with the last comparison he was aiming at Madison, who earlier in the year had an accident that newspapers reported on for weeks. As Kentucky senator John Breckinridge described it to his wife, “Mr. Madison fell out of his door … and put his knee out of place.” There is no indication that the accident had anything to do with a nervous disorder, vertigo, or being “brainsick,” but Randolph, likely aware that Madison had been subject to sudden attacks, might have been hinting at the connection. In the same speech he referred to the “mercantile megrims,” or migraines, afflicting the nation, a phrase that probably called to mind for many on the floor the sick headaches that periodically incapacitated Jefferson.31

  Ironically, the administration also had difficulties with the measure that Congressman Gregg had introduced and that Randolph had used as a starting point for his fulminations. Cutting off British imports would mean a drastic decline of import duties to the Treasury and cause discontent among the merchant class. The president and his cabinet preferred a milder resolution offered by Congressman Joseph Nicholson of Maryland that listed specific goods that could no longer be imported from Great Britain. To Randolph, who had viewed the Gregg proposal as too strong, the Nicholson resolution was too weak, particularly since it wasn’t scheduled to take effect until November 1806. Randolph ridiculed it as “a milk and water bill, a dose of chicken broth to be taken nine months hence.”32

  In a humiliating defeat for Randolph, Nicholson’s resolution passed the House by 87 to 35, and the Non-importation Act based upon it enjoyed an even wider margin: 93 to 32. Randolph was one of the most eloquent speakers ever to rise in the House of Representatives. Senators regularly came to the House to hear his speeches. But he had pushed too hard and gone too far. As Senator Samuel Smith of Maryland described one of his performances, “He astonished all his hearers by the boldness of his animadversions on executive conduct, the elegance of his language, and the pointed and fine strokes of oratory. But he has left stings in the breasts of many that never can be extracted.” As Randolph’s tactics were becoming less and less effective, the president started reaching out to members of Congress, including a senator who had opposed the Non-importation Act and the Speaker, whom he invited to the president’s house for the evening. Jefferson also wrote to James Monroe in London. He knew that Randolph hoped that Monroe would challenge Madison for the presidency in 1808 and had already warned the minister to Britain that “some of your new friends are attacking your old ones out of friendship to you, but in a way to render you great injury.” The day after the Nicholson vote, on March 18, he emphasized how soundly Randolph had been defeated, writing to Monroe that he had “never seen a House of Representatives more solidly united in doing what they believe to be the best for the public interest. There can be no better proof than the fact that so eminent a leader should at once and almost unanimously be abandoned.” But neither of these letters reached Monroe, leaving him uninformed for months about Jefferson’s thinking on the political situation among Republicans.33

  Monroe did hear from John Beckley, who described Randolph’s downfall but also told Monroe that he should be the one to succeed Jefferson. Apparently in the market for a new patron, Beckley turned on his old one, criticizing Madison as “too timid and indecisive as a statesman.” Randolph wrote to describe an administration plot intended to embarrass Monroe and elevate Madison. Monroe responded cautiously, writing to Randolph that there were “older men whom I have long been accustomed to consider as having higher pretentions to the trust than myself.” He didn’t quite close the door, however, saying that there would be other opportunities to discuss the matter.34

  • • •

  IN THE AUTUMN of 1806, Jefferson received word that Meriwether Lewis and his party had arrived safely from their journey of exploration. The news brought him “unspeakable joy,” he wrote, probably all the more so since most of the reports he received that fall and winter were discouraging. Both he and Madison had heard from credible sources that the former vice president Aaron Burr, who had taken a seven-month, three-thousand-mile excursion in the West, was up to no good. The chief suspicion was that he was involved in a conspiracy to separate western states and territories from the Union and create a separate empire. One of those whom he had repeatedly consulted about his plans was General James Wilkinson, who, despite his reputation for fast dealing, commanded the U.S. Army and was governor of the Louisiana Territory. In October, after a rush of rumors linking Wilkinson with Burr, the general decided that the better part of valor was to betray the former vice president. He wrote to Jefferson about a plan to converge an army in New Orleans and from thence, with naval assistance, to invade Mexico. He did not identify Burr as the leader of this enterprise, and neither did the president, when on November 27, 1806, he proclaimed a conspiracy and urged authorities to bring to punishment those involved. But whether he was named or not, by now everyone knew that this was about Burr. Wrote Senator Plumer on November 28, “Reports have for some time circulated from one end of the United States to the other that Aaron Burr, late vice president, with others in the western states are preparing gun boats, provisions, money, men and so forth to make war upon the Spaniards in South America; that his intention is to establish a new empire in the western world and that he contemplates forming this empire from South America and the western states of North America.”35

  When John Randolph of Roanoke demanded more information, Jefferson sent a message to Congress that described the evidence for a Burr conspiracy as “a mixture of rumors, conjectures, and suspicions”; nevertheless, in an ill-considered statement, h
e also declared Burr’s guilt “beyond question.” Senator Plumer was not so sure. Much of the case against Burr was based on a ciphered letter that he had supposedly sent to Wilkinson and that the general had helpfully deciphered. Plumer thought the letter sounded more like Wilkinson than Burr, and in fact Wilkinson had altered it. He was on the payroll of the Spanish and by no means the honorable soldier and good citizen that Jefferson credited him with being. But Wilkinson’s treachery did not mean that Burr was without guilt. As early as 1804, Burr had approached British minister Anthony Merry with a request for the British to assist in a scheme to liberate the inhabitants of Louisiana from the United States. To accomplish this purpose, Merry reported to his government, Burr wanted a half-million-dollar loan and a British squadron. When the British failed to come through, Burr sent one of his associates, former senator Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, to sketch out for the Spanish minister, the marquis de Yrujo, a plan for a coup d’état. Jefferson would be seized, along with the vice president, public money would be taken from Washington banks, and ships from the naval yard would be used in a plan to liberate the West. Burr himself began an effort to draw discontented military officers into the conspiracy.36

  Captured in February 1807, Burr appeared in court in Richmond on April 1. Presiding was Chief Justice John Marshall, Jefferson’s longtime adversary. Marshall allowed a misdemeanor charge against Burr to go forward but refused to commit him on a charge of treason, saying that there was insufficient evidence. “The hand of malignity” could not “capriciously seize” and charge an individual, Marshall said, a comment that was widely assumed to be directed at the president. Jefferson, thoroughly enraged, assigned Madison to the task of gathering information for the trial. One of Madison’s contacts sent him a number of affidavits concerning Burr’s recruiting men and ordering arms and ammunition. Madison forwarded them to the lead prosecutor in the Burr case, George Hay. The president also asked Madison to arrange to get witnesses from distant places to the trial in Richmond and sent him a warrant for five thousand dollars to cover expenses.37