James Madison: A Life Reconsidered

by Lynne Cheney

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  FAMILY, BEGINNING WITH DOLLEY, was a great source of happiness for Madison in his later years. Mrs. Madison, according to her niece Mary Estelle Elizabeth Cutts, was the former president’s “solace and comfort”: “He could not bear her to leave his presence, and she gratified him by being absent only when duty required. No matter how agreeably employed [she was], he was her first thought, and instinct seemed to tell her when she was wanted. If engaged in conversation, she would quickly rise and say ‘I must go to Madison.’ On his return from riding round the plantation she would meet him at the door with refreshment in her own hands.” One guest who observed them together noted that “they looked like Adam [and] Eve in their bower.”21

  Relatives from both sides of the family were among the frequent visitors to Montpelier. Madison particularly enjoyed the company of Nelly Madison Willis, the cheerful and good-hearted daughter of his late brother Ambrose. In the summer Dolley’s sister Anna Cutts and her children made long visits. Anna’s oldest son was a namesake, James Madison Cutts, and her youngest, Richard D. Cutts, was the apple of his uncle James’s eye. Madison sent young Richard a copy of the Spectator, telling him that he had read it as a boy and recommending it for the “lively sense of the duties, the virtues, and the proprieties of life” it imparted. There were strains between Madison’s brother William and other members of the family, particularly Frances Madison Rose, the youngest sister, arising from the settlement of James senior’s estate. William seemed perpetually angry, perhaps because of the awful circumstances of his life. Tuberculosis decimated his family. By the time of James Madison’s retirement, William had lost four children, and during James’s retirement he would lose five more and his wife. James seems to have looked beyond his brother’s bitterness to recognize the gifts of William’s son Robert, whose way he paid at Dickinson College. Robert’s wedding was celebrated at Montpelier.22

  Other family members were also a source of worry. After Anna’s husband, Richard Cutts, lost his inherited fortune during the War of 1812, he persuaded Madison to lend him $11,500 so that he could invest his way out of his financial troubles. Dolley Madison contributed another $4,000. But Cutts’s ventures failed, and he was forced to declare himself insolvent. A bank to which he owed money seized the home he had built for his family on the square north of the White House, and Madison signed notes for another $6,000 to buy it so that Anna Cutts and her children would not be displaced. This arrangement infuriated other creditors of Cutts’s (including architect William Thornton), who resented his living in fine style while he owed them money. It also led to Madison’s being named and having to hire lawyers to defend him in two suits brought against Cutts.23

  Payne Todd was angered by the initial loan to Cutts because, he wrote, the four thousand dollars his mother contributed was from his trust and he had not been consulted. It is hard to have confidence in many of Todd’s statements, but this one has the ring of truth about it. Dolley Madison had raised Anna and regarded her as her daughter as well as a sister. She would have gone to almost any length to prop up the Cutts family’s fortunes. Todd brooded over the Cutts loan, and although he already had a habit of disappearing for months at a time and running up bills that James Madison ended up being responsible for, Todd’s resentment over his mother’s spending a significant part of his patrimony might have made matters worse. In 1825, after one long period of not hearing from him, Madison wrote, “What shall I say to you? It is painful to utter reproaches; yet how can they be avoided?” Todd was not only beggaring him, he was bringing grief to Mrs. Madison, “the tenderest of mothers.” She was “wound up to the highest pitch by this addition to your long and mysterious absence,” Madison wrote, urging Todd to explain the reasons for it. “You owe it to yourself as well as to us to withhold them no longer.”24 Both Madisons were concerned that Todd had ended up in debtors’ prison, as indeed he had.

  Until 1825, Madison had managed to stay afloat with bank loans, but in April of that year, when he had tried to borrow six thousand dollars from the Bank of the United States, the bank’s president, Nicholas Biddle, turned him down, explaining that the bank was no longer lending money secured by real estate. Madison managed to get Payne out of prison and, in an effort to keep him from going back, assumed responsibility for a number of his debts. Short of funds himself, however, he had to seek delays and make excuses. In 1826 he wrote to a Philadelphia boardinghouse owner, “Inconsiderable as the amount may be thought, such have been the failures of my crops and the prices for them for a series of years and such the utter failures of payments when I am the creditor, and I may add, such the pecuniary distress and prospects here at present, that in undertaking unforeseen payments the time must be left to my own conveniency.” In 1827, when Philadelphia’s postmaster, Richard Bache, covered a three-hundred-dollar draft of Todd’s “to prevent his arrest and imprisonment,” Madison had to ask for time in repaying him. He simply didn’t have the money.25

  Madison found buyers for Montpelier lands as well as some adjacent and in 1827 gratefully received a loan of two thousand dollars from Edward Coles, the young Virginian who had been his private secretary while he was president. Since his time with Madison, Coles, who was just six years older than Payne Todd, had accomplished many things, including freeing ten slaves he had inherited from his father. He had taken them out of state, as Virginia law required, and settled them in Illinois, giving each family 160 acres of land. Subsequently elected governor of Illinois, Coles had tried but failed to change the infamous “black code” of Illinois, which placed restrictions on free blacks. He did manage to turn back a serious effort to make slavery legal in the state.26

  Coles had been fervently opposed to slavery since he was a young man and had not hesitated to let Madison know his views. When Madison continued as a slaveholder, Coles tried to understand how a good man could tolerate such a great moral wrong. He described Madison’s principles as “sound, pure, and conscientious”: “To give pain always gave him pain; and no man had a more instinctive repugnance to doing wrong to another than he had; yet from the force of early impressions, the influence of habit and association, and a certain train of reasoning which lulled in some degree his conscience, without convincing his judgment (for he never justified or approved of it), he continued to hold slaves.” Madison congratulated Coles for his success in pursuing “the true course” but cautioned him that white prejudice would keep those whom he had freed from full liberty. Over the years the people Coles had emancipated worked hard and did well, but along the way they were also duped and cheated, as well as deprived of their rights by the Illinois black code. Coles, convinced that all free blacks would find better lives in Africa, became an outspoken member of the American Colonization Society.27

  Madison had other young friends who wanted to leave Virginia. Nicholas Trist, grandson of Eliza, studied at West Point, read law, and tried unsuccessfully to make a career for himself as a planter in Louisiana. Trist returned home to marry his sweetheart, Virginia Jefferson Randolph, Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughter, but like many of his generation couldn’t find a way to make a living in the Old Dominion and spent most of his life outside it. His friend (and Thomas Jefferson’s grandson) Francis Eppes expressed the frustration of a younger generation of Virginians as financial depression continued. He wrote to Trist, “We will never witness better times here.”28

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  MADISON WAS NOT the only former president with financial woes. Jefferson’s troubles made the newspapers when he sought permission from the Virginia legislature to organize a lottery to sell Monticello property. After the stories appeared, Madison received a letter from his friend mentioning the “mortification” he was going through and explaining how it had happened: poor crops, low crop prices, plummeting property values, and former governor Wilson Cary Nicholas’s default on a twenty-thousand-dollar note that Jefferson had co-signed and for which he was now liable. That, Jefferson explained, was “the coup de grace.”29
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  Madison wrote back that he, too, was struggling: “Since my return to private life (and the case was worse during my absence in public) such have been the unkind seasons and the ravages of insects that I have made but one tolerable crop of tobacco and but one of wheat, the proceeds of both of which were greatly curtailed by mishaps in the sale of them. And having no resources but in the earth I cultivate, I have been living very much throughout on borrowed means.” Madison did not mention Payne Todd, though surely it must have occurred to him that Todd was a greater blight on Madison fortunes than Wilson Cary Nicholas was on those of Jefferson. Receipts that Madison saved from payments he made on Todd’s behalf would eventually total some twenty thousand dollars—about half, Madison would estimate, of the amount he had actually paid.30

  When Jefferson, nearly eighty-three, wrote the letter explaining his financial woes, he was weighed down not only by debt but by thoughts of dying, “as I soon must.” He told Madison that “the friendship which has subsisted between us now half a century and the harmony of our political principles and pursuits have been sources of constant happiness to me through that long period.” He took “great solace,” he wrote, in knowing that Madison would live on to vindicate their efforts: “If ever the earth has beheld a system of administration conducted with a single and steadfast eye to the general interest and happiness of those committed to it … , it is that to which our lives have been devoted. To myself you have been a pillar of support through life. Take care of me when dead, and be assured that I shall leave with you my last affections.”

  Madison wrote back, “You cannot look back to the long period of our private friendship and political harmony with more affecting recollections than I do. If they are a source of pleasure to you, what ought they not to be to me? We cannot be deprived of the happy consciousness of the pure devotion to the public good with which we discharged the trusts committed to us. And I indulge a confidence that sufficient evidence will find its way to another generation to ensure, after we are gone, whatever of justice may be withheld whilst we are here.” Madison could not bring himself to acknowledge that his friend would soon be “beyond the bourne of life,” as Jefferson expressed it, but Jefferson died on July 4, 1826—the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the same day that John Adams died. Jefferson’s physician, Robley Dunglison, brought Madison a gift that Jefferson had bequeathed him as a token of their long friendship, a walking stick of animal horn, mounted in gold.31 Madison accepted the staff—and the duty of taking care of his dead friend’s reputation.

  In the last months of his life, Jefferson had been particularly troubled by a message delivered to Congress by John Adams’s son John Quincy Adams, who had become president in 1825. In his first formal message, the sixth president had set forth plans for the federal government to undertake a wide range of internal improvements, from a canal connecting the Chesapeake Bay and the Ohio River to the continuation of the Cumberland Road. Jefferson had nothing against such projects, but he was extraordinarily concerned that the federal government would undertake them without constitutional authority. It was the same point that Madison had made on his last full day as president when he vetoed the improvements bill, but Jefferson’s reaction to Adams’s message, no doubt heightened by sickness and financial distress, was extreme. He composed the “Declaration and Protest,” which he planned to send to the Virginia legislature for its use. In it he returned to the ideas he had advanced in 1798: the Constitution was a compact that the states had entered into that granted certain powers to the federal government while retaining the rest; and when the federal government usurped state powers by “constructions, inferences, and indefinite deductions,” it was the right of the state to “protest” those usurpations “as null and void.”32

  As he had done for decades when he knew he had written something likely to inflame opinion, Jefferson sent the protest to Madison for review. With wisdom and patience, Madison discouraged him from sending it, and Jefferson listened, but he had already mailed a letter to the contentious William Branch Giles bemoaning “the rapid strides with which the federal branch of our government is advancing towards the usurpation of all the rights reserved to the states and the consolidation in itself of all powers, foreign and domestic.” Although Jefferson counseled patience in his letter to Giles, he also wrote that “when the sole alternatives left are the dissolution of our Union … or submission to a government without limitation of powers … there can be no hesitation.”33

  Jefferson had written at the letter’s beginning that it was “not intended for the public eye,” but after his death Giles, who had run for and won the governorship of Virginia by attacking government encroachments, released the letter. Giles argued that not only were roads and canals “unauthorized oppressions of the general government” but so were tariffs that protected eastern manufacturers at the expense of southern agricultural interests, and his release of the letter made it seem as though Jefferson endorsed Giles’s views on tariffs—and supported going so far as secession should the federal government become too domineering.34

  In fact, Jefferson, like Madison, was on record in favor of tariffs that protected American manufactures, and Madison, while privately admitting that Jefferson had been careless in his language, nonetheless thought it “monstrous” that a private communication would be used to make the former president “avow opinions in the most pointed opposition to those maintained by him in his more deliberate correspondence with others and acted on through his whole official life.” He took it as his mission to show the constitutionality of the Tariff of 1828 (known in the South as the Tariff of Abominations). The levying of tariffs was among the powers granted to Congress under the commerce clause, he wrote, and the practice had the weight of precedent behind it. For nearly forty years, tariffs had been sanctioned by every branch of federal and state government, and to overturn “so prolonged and universal a practice,” Madison wrote, would mean “an end of that stability in government and in laws, which is essential.”35

  Because the issue of the tariff had become so hotly disputed, Madison held off publication of his pronouncements until after the presidential election of 1828. In that year, Andrew Jackson defeated John Quincy Adams, and John C. Calhoun, who as Adams’s vice president had worked mightily to defeat him, was reelected and became Jackson’s number two. Brilliant and ambitious, Calhoun sensed the power of the tariff issue, particularly when it was understood as he chose to understand it, as part of a larger effort to destroy “the peculiar domestic institution of the southern states and the consequent direction which that and her soil and climate have given to her industry.” In seizing upon the tariff to defend the right of a state to declare a law unconstitutional and thus “null and void,” he positioned himself as a defender of the southern way of life, and he pointed to two other southerners as having provided him precedent, Jefferson in the Kentucky Resolutions and Madison in the Virginia Resolutions and the Report of 1800.36

  Thus Madison, who had tried to avoid the political storm, was drawn into the center of it. Far more was at stake now than a tariff. “Nullification,” in his words, “has the effect of putting powder under the Constitution and Union and a match in the hand of every party to blow them up at pleasure.” Madison did not say the words “civil war,” but the violence of his image suggests that he, so good at discerning the course of events, understood well that the doctrine of nullification opened the possibility of bloody conflict between the North and the South.37

  He argued that neither the Virginia Resolutions nor his report had ever contemplated a single state’s overturning a federal law. The idea that such a thing was possible rested on an erroneous idea of how the Constitution had been created. State governments hadn’t formed it but rather the people of each state, “acting in their highest sovereign capacity.” Such a compact “constituting the people” of the states as “one people for certain purposes … cannot be altered or annulled at the will of the states individually.”3
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  Madison’s opposition to nullification brought out the worst in its supporters. They accused the former president of being senile and inconsistent. Governor Giles wrote that “what Mr. Madison’s opinions at seventy-nine years of age may be,” he could not guess. He would “rely upon his opinions of fifty and the incontestable arguments which support them.”39

  Madison made light of the charge that he was in his dotage: “A man whose years have but reached the canonical three score and ten (and mine are much beyond the number) … should never forget that his arguments whatever they be will be answered by allusions to the date of his birth.” He took the accusations of inconsistency more seriously but found himself faced with a knotty problem when denying that he had contemplated anything like nullification in the days of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Jefferson had caused the words “null, void, and of no force or effect” to be inserted into the Virginia Resolutions after Madison had drafted them but before they were presented to the House of Delegates. Madison could not, while remaining faithful to his friend, point this out, nor could he take the credit that was likely his due for getting the words omitted. He was left with arguing that the fact they had been struck showed that Virginia was “precisely against the doctrine.”40 Madison’s silence on Jefferson’s role in the Virginia Resolutions was a gift to his friend, all the more generous because it robbed Madison of his own best defense.

  Madison never quit trying, but defending Jefferson against the nullifiers’ use of Jefferson’s words was a nearly impossible task. The thing to do, Madison advised Nicholas Trist, was to call attention to what Jefferson had said and done in earlier epochs of the Republic. He advised that “allowances also ought to be made for a habit in Mr. Jefferson, as in others of great genius, of expressing in strong and round terms impressions of the moment.”41 Madison, a man of steadier and more patient genius, had been doing exactly this for fifty years.