James Madison: A Life Reconsidered

by Lynne Cheney

  In June a grand jury that had assembled in Richmond handed down an indictment against Burr for treason. In August, the jury formed for his trial heard testimony centering on Blennerhassett Island in the Ohio River, where the prosecution alleged that Burr, by directing the assemblage of armed troops and boats, had levied war against the United States. The phrase “levying war” was one of the constitutional definitions of treason.

  Burr had left the island by the time the conspirators assembled, but the prosecution was confident in its approach because in a Supreme Court decision less than six months earlier, Chief Justice Marshall had written with regard to a case of treason that “all those who perform any part, however minute or however remote from the scene of action … are to be considered as traitors.” But after the prosecution had presented witnesses who told of the activities on Blennerhassett Island, the defense moved to have all further testimony declared irrelevant. Whatever further witnesses might reveal about Burr’s motives, intentions, and connections to the assemblage on the island, it wouldn’t show him actually levying war—because he wasn’t there when the forces came together, Burr’s lawyers argued. As for the Supreme Court’s recent statement that one did not have to be present to be a traitor, that should be regarded as obiter dictum, said the defense, something said merely in passing. The prosecution was startled, to say the least, at such a claim. A bright young attorney for the prosecution, William Wirt, responded, “A plain man would imagine that, when the Supreme Court had taken up and decided the case, its decision would form a precedent on the subject.”38

  Marshall sided with the defense, writing in a long and, some have thought, labored opinion that “no testimony relative to the conduct or declarations of the prisoner elsewhere and subsequent to the transaction on Blennerhassett’s Island can be admitted.” With more than a hundred prosecution witnesses waiting in the wings, including some, no doubt, whom Madison had helped bring to Richmond, Marshall sent the case to the jury, which returned the predictable verdict but seemed irritated at not having heard the full prosecution case. Declared the members, “We of the jury say that Aaron Burr is not proved to be guilty under this indictment by any evidence submitted to us. We therefore find him not guilty.”39

  Jefferson made no comment on the legal niceties of the trial, but the verdict was surely galling, as was the public pummeling the president had taken. Not only had Marshall subpoenaed him (Jefferson provided papers but did not appear), but Luther Martin, the erstwhile defender of Justice Samuel Chase, had taken him to task for declaring Burr guilty before his trial had even begun: “The president … has assumed to himself the knowledge of the Supreme Being himself and pretended to search the heart of my highly respected friend. He has proclaimed him a traitor in the face of that country which has rewarded him. He has let slip the dogs of war, the hellhounds of persecution, to hunt down my friend.” Showing a side of himself that had no corollary in his friend Madison’s personality, Jefferson suggested that Martin also be tried for treason.40

  • • •

  THE BURR TRIAL was not the only thing going wrong for the Jefferson administration. Not long after Jefferson and Madison had become truly alarmed at the former vice president’s activities, Madison had received a letter from John Armstrong, American minister to France, whom Jefferson had commissioned to reopen negotiations about the Floridas. Armstrong reported that efforts to get the French to help the United States persuade Spain in America’s favor had hit a wall. Napoleon had personally intervened, dressing down Talleyrand for even contemplating such an intervention.41

  Some three months later came bad news about negotiations that James Monroe and William Pinkney had conducted with the British. Jefferson and Madison had initially been hopeful about them, partly because England had a new foreign secretary, Charles James Fox, thought to be friendly to the United States. One of his first acts had been to recall Anthony Merry, the “diplomatic pettifogger,” as Madison referred to him, whose relationship with the president and the secretary of state had been so strained. But the rotund Fox would die after only seven months in office, and when the new British minister to the United States, young David Erskine, came hurrying to Madison with a copy of the treaty that Monroe and Pinkney had negotiated, Madison suspected that all was not well. His first question was, “What [has] been determined on the point of impressment?” When Erskine told him the treaty did not address the matter, Madison “expressed the greatest astonishment and disappointment,” Erskine wrote to his government. Madison was further dismayed when Erskine handed him a note supplementary to the treaty relating to a recent edict Napoleon had issued from Berlin. The emperor, having decided to use his control of Europe to impose a naval blockade on Britain, had decreed that British ships would no longer be received in continental ports, nor would any ship that had traded with Britain. The British wanted the United States to promise that it would defy the edict, which would inevitably have pushed it into war with France. Madison told Erskine that the note itself was sufficient to keep the treaty from being ratified.42

  Jefferson was ill, suffering from a migraine that would plague him for most of March. As Dolley Madison described the situation, “The president has a sick headache every day so that he is obliged to retire to a dark room at 9:00 in the morning.” Thus it might have been Madison who made the decision not to try to keep Congress, which was about to adjourn, in session to deal with the treaty. If he did so, it was in the knowledge that the president thought that no treaty would be better than one that did not address impressment. Late that night Jefferson, who got relief from his migraines when the sun went down, made clear to a group of senators bringing bills for him to sign that the treaty would never be submitted.43

  When Monroe, in London, learned of the treaty’s fate, he was shocked and angry. He believed that he had negotiated the best treaty possible and had fully expected the president to approve of it. Monroe’s disappointment was not likely to have been assuaged by Jefferson’s letter of March 21, 1807. Even though the president went to some effort to deny rumors in the Federalist press that the treaty was rejected in order to damage Monroe and advance Madison, he also emphasized how much he objected to the agreement Monroe had negotiated: “The British commissioners appear to have screwed every article as far as it would bear, to have taken everything and yielded nothing.” Nor would Monroe have responded well to the businesslike tone in which Madison wrote to him about “the particular difficulties” that had restrained the president “from closing the bargain with Great Britain.” The spring of 1807 saw a deteriorating relationship not only between the United States and Britain but also between James Monroe and the administration he represented, particularly as it was embodied by James Madison. In a letter that he wrote to the president but never sent, Monroe declared his disappointment with the months he had spent negotiating with the British. “At no period of my life,” he wrote, “was I ever subjected to more inquietude.”44

  • • •

  IN JUNE 1807, about the time of Aaron Burr’s indictment, word came of a disaster at sea. It involved the USS Chesapeake, one of the six frigates originally authorized in 1794. Although the Chesapeake was less gracefully shaped than its sister ships, it was nonetheless a beauty.45 A painting of the Chesapeake in the art collection of the U.S. Navy shows how it might have looked just before disaster struck, its sails full and the Stars and Stripes flying aft.

  On June 22, the Chesapeake passed Cape Henry, headed for the Mediterranean. Its commodore, James Barron, noticed the maneuverings of a British frigate, HMS Leopard, but made little of them until late afternoon, when there came a message from the Leopard requesting permission to send an officer on board. When he arrived, he demanded that the crew of the Chesapeake be mustered so that he could look for a British deserter. Commodore Barron refused. The Chesapeake was not a private merchant ship but an American ship of war. He could not submit it to being boarded and searched.46

  Barron ordered his men to prepare for battle, but before
they were ready, the Leopard fired a warning shot, then another, and then, as Henry Adams described it, “poured [its] whole broadside of solid shot and canister, at the distance of one hundred and fifty or two hundred feet, point-blank into the helpless American frigate.” After taking another broadside, the Chesapeake struck its colors. As the flag was being lowered, a third broadside came, and then the British boarded. They left with four sailors they claimed were deserters, three of whom, it would turn out, were American citizens. The Chesapeake, three of its crew dead and eighteen wounded, made its way back to Norfolk.47

  As news spread of the attack, so did the public’s indignation. The Chesapeake incident seemed to encapsulate all the insults that Britain had dealt the United States since the beginning of the European wars, and Republicans and Federalists alike shook their fists and demanded vengeance. “This country has never been in such a state of excitement since the Battle of Lexington,” Jefferson wrote, a comment that conjured up a time when the nation had been a colony. Britain seemed to be treating the United States as though the American Revolution had never occurred, and resentment of that attitude fueled American anger. Madison, normally the coolest member of the cabinet, caught the fever. In the draft he prepared for the proclamation to be issued by the president on July 2, he wrote of British “insults as gross as language could offer” and described British actions as “lawless and bloody.” In a turning of the usual tables, it was Jefferson who toned down Madison’s rhetoric in the proclamation as it finally appeared.48

  Meeting almost every day, the cabinet agreed on defensive measures, such as recalling warships from the Mediterranean, and approved Madison’s draft of a diplomatic dispatch to be sent to England aboard an aptly named schooner, the Revenge. The president decided to call Congress to meet on October 26, 1807, some three months hence, calculating that by that time there might be an answer to American demands for return of the Chesapeake seamen, reparations, and the ending of impressments. In an indication of the nature and pace of early-nineteenth-century diplomacy, the president then left for Monticello and Madison for Montpelier.49

  By the time they returned and Congress had gathered, there was still no response to the dispatch. The actions of Admiral George Berkeley, who commanded British ships assigned to North America, made it hard to be optimistic. After a trial in Halifax, he ordered one of the men seized from the Chesapeake, who had been judged to be British, summarily hanged.50

  The Revenge arrived in New York on December 12, and suddenly there was a rush of news, none of it good. The king had declared that the practice of impressment, even from warships, would be accelerated. In a decree issued from Milan, Napoleon had made clear that his determination to blockade Britain included seizing American ships, not only those that had entered British ports but also ships that allowed themselves to be searched by the British. There was also word of a new British edict intended to counter Napoleon’s Berlin Decree. The British Order in Council declared that ships found in commerce with France, its allies, or its colonies would be seized.51 If American ships went to England, in other words, France threatened them. If they went to almost any other destination, they risked seizure by England.

  The Non-importation Act that had been passed some twenty months previously was finally allowed to go into effect on December 14, 1807, but more was clearly needed. Jefferson recommended an embargo, which Congress quickly passed, and Madison explained the action in a series of unsigned editorials in the National Intelligencer. The embargo was a protective measure, he wrote, one that would keep American ships safe in harbor, and it would “have the collateral effect of making it the interest of all nations to change the system which has driven our commerce from the ocean.” It was an energetic measure, to be sure, but it would not lead to war, “being universal and therefore impartial.”52

  Madison acknowledged the economic disruption the embargo would cause and tried, not very successfully, to put it in the best possible light. Yes, there would be privation among the citizenry, he wrote, but that, in turn, would encourage “frugality” and hard work, the virtues of the yeoman farmer. It would spur “household manufactures which are particularly adapted to the present stage of our society.” And, yes, there would be “much inconvenience” produced in the mercantile world, but that, in turn, would “separate the wheat from the chaff,” the responsible merchants from the irresponsible, speculative ones. It is hard to imagine either citizens or merchants drawing much comfort from these arguments. More persuasive, perhaps, was the case he made that an embargo was a step short of war that could allow the United States to achieve its ends.53 That argument, part of Madison’s long-held belief that U.S. commercial power was sufficient to change the policies of other nations, would turn out to be wildly optimistic.

  • • •

  MEANWHILE, THE PRESIDENTIAL CONTEST of 1808 was under way, and it was almost certain to be won by the Republican nominee. For all the policy shifts and political attacks of the last seven years, Thomas Jefferson and his administration were still hugely popular. Jefferson had reduced taxes, he had paid down the public debt, and although war seemed constantly in the offing, he had kept the nation at peace. A senator from Vermont, who was dismayed by the clout that Jefferson’s popularity gave him, told Senator Plumer that “Mr. Jefferson’s influence in Congress was irresistible, that it was alarming, that if he should recommend to us to repeal the gospels of the evangelist, a majority of Congress would do it.”54

  Madison had another advantage, which was that the congressional caucus would decide the Republican candidate and Dolley Madison was enormously skilled at winning over members of Congress. She repeatedly invited them to the Madison home, where for several hours they could forget their personal misery. Most of them lived in boardinghouses on Capitol Hill, rooming and taking meals with other members. One senator compared it to living “like bears, brutalized and stupefied … from hearing nothing but politics from morning to night.” There were no clubs or theaters they could escape to, except for one establishment that specialized in ropedancers.55 How pleasant, then, was an evening on F Street with the secretary of state and his wife.

  One member described the edge that Dolley’s entertainments gave Madison over Vice President George Clinton, who, though long regarded as too feeble to run, was harboring presidential ambitions in his sixty-nine-year-old heart. Wrote Senator Samuel Mitchill to his wife, “The former gives dinners and makes generous displays to the members. The latter lives snug at his lodgings and keeps aloof from such captivating exhibitions. The secretary of state has a wife to aid his pretensions. The vice president has nothing of female succor on his side. And in these two respects Mr. M. is going greatly ahead of him.” When James Monroe began to be talked about as a Republican contestant, Madison managed to keep quiet, even as he was experiencing a cash strain from paying off the last of the bank loans that had helped finance Monroe’s diplomatic venture. But Dolley Madison found it hard to bite her tongue. About the time that James Madison was arranging to borrow money in order to pay rent on the F Street house, Dolley, so John Quincy Adams reported, “spoke very slightingly of Mr. Monroe.”56 One can hardly blame her. Monroe was supposed to be her husband’s friend, but it was looking very much as though he were, for the second time, being seduced into running against him. As she must have seen it, he had succumbed to Patrick Henry’s blandishments in 1788 and now was letting John Randolph of Roanoke lead him astray.

  Dolley paid for her visibility by often being the subject of ugly rumors. In the period before the 1804 election, both she and her husband had shown great shrewdness in dealing with one gossipy incident. A story passed around that a Federalist congressman had impugned Mrs. Madison’s morals and those of her sister Anna Cutts. Postmaster General Gideon Granger rushed to defend the Madison women, whereupon the congressman, Samuel Hunt of New Hampshire, challenged him to a duel. When Granger declined, thereby making himself look foolish, the Madisons did something quite unexpected. The secretary himself carried Mrs
. Madison’s compliments and a dinner invitation to Congressman Hunt, courtesies that made clear they did not believe he had gossiped about her—and further implied that there was nothing to gossip about.57

  But not all stories were easy to combat. At about the same time, James’s supposed friend Richard Peters had also weighed in on Dolley’s morals. In a letter to his fellow Federalist Timothy Pickering, who had talked about the sexual insatiability of democratic (that is, Republican) men, Peters wrote, “You should not have forgot to give precedence to the insatiability of democratic [that is, Republican] women. The leader of the ceremonious flock you mention carries with her, if not the thing itself, at least the appetites of the second of the four insatiable things mentioned in the thirtieth chapter of Proverbs, verse 16.”58 The second of the things never satisfied in Proverbs is “the barren womb.” Peters’s implication, which he, no doubt, thought wittily made, was that Dolley Madison was sexually insatiable because her husband had failed to impregnate her.

  As the election of 1808 approached, the rumors picked up again. Senator Mitchill wrote to his wife, “Your friend Mrs. Madison is shockingly and unfeelingly traduced in the Virginia papers.” One of those encouraging the rumors was John Randolph of Roanoke. Writing to Monroe about opposition that was supposedly building against Madison, he cited a list of the secretary’s shortcomings, adding at the end, “There is another consideration which I know not how to touch. You, my dear sir, cannot be ignorant, although of all mankind you, perhaps, have the least cause to know it, how deeply the respectability of any character may be impaired by an unfortunate matrimonial connection. I can pursue this subject no further. It is at once too delicate and too mortifying.” The rumors were probably particularly painful for Dolley Madison because she was going through a very difficult time. Her mother died in October 1807 while nursing her sister Mary, who had tuberculosis and had lost two of her three daughters the previous year. Then Mary died in early 1808, about the time that the stories about Dolley were, to use Richard Peters’s delicate words, running “on all fours.”59