The new secretary of state became involved in a dangerous foreign-policy dispute at his very first cabinet meeting, May 15, 1801, just two weeks after he and Dolley had arrived and unpacked their bags. Under President Adams, America had paid $80,000 a year in tribute to the Barbary States in north Africa, headquartered in Tripoli, whose armed pirate ships patrolled the Mediterranean Sea and the Straits of Gibraltar. The money was to help the pasha of Tripoli restrain pirates in the area from attacking American shipping. The pasha told Jefferson that he was enraged that America had paid Algiers more than him and upped his fee to $225,000. Jefferson, furious at the shakedown, refused to pay and convened his cabinet to discuss the issue. He wanted to go to war with the pirates, but in such a way that the United States was not dragged into the Napoleonic Wars. He could, of course, have followed George Washington's example and declared war on the Barbary pirates in his role as commander in chief of American armed forces, but he decided that including his cabinet in the decisions was a better idea.
Jefferson's bold plan was to send a fleet of warships to the Mediterranean to protect any US merchant ships sailing those seas from the Barbary pirates. If attacked, the American ships would attack back and sink them. Madison agreed completely with Jefferson's policy; the United States could not be pushed around, and especially by a pasha whom the pair saw as a third-rate military gadfly. All in the cabinet agreed, and within weeks, a fleet of thirty warships set sail for the Mediterranean. By the beginning of summer, six frigates were sailing alongside American merchant ships past the Rock of Gibraltar and through the Mediterranean, past fleets of Barbary pirate ships that did not attack—for now.
Madison was careful in his work with the Barbary pirates. He saw them as not only an incendiary group that would engender deep passions in the United States but also a group that could cause the United States to overstep its policy boundaries in its treatment of them. He had warned Jefferson about heated foreign-policy issues in 1798: “the management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse, of all the trusts committed to a government, because they can be concealed or disclosed, or disclosed in such parts and at such times as will best suit particular views and because the body of the people are less capable of judging and are more under the influence of prejudices, on that branch of their affairs, than of any other. It is perhaps a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger real or pretended from abroad,” he said.20 The disputes with the Barbary States would grow and become even more heated over the next few years, though, bringing Jefferson and Madison to a critical decision about the pirates later.21
At the same time that Madison worried about Napoleon and the island of Santo Domingo, he went about the rather ordinary business of meeting different ministers, conferring with other cabinet members, and finishing the work of the State Department. He labored to build good relations with the powers in Europe, such as the always-testy Great Britain and France, and worked with African countries, plus Spain and Portugal, to keep American shipping prosperous.
Madison read the letters that poured in from all over the country. One day, he received an explosive letter from Virginia newspaper writer James Callender, who fumed in heated and insulting language that President Jefferson had refused to give him money to pay a fine that he had incurred during the Adams administration, when the federal government under Adams brought him to trial and had him jailed under the volatile, anti-press Alien and Sedition Acts. Jefferson had promised to pay his fine, but had not. Where was the money, Callender asked. Why had Jefferson abandoned him? He was angry. Madison read the letter, shrugged, and did nothing about it. Later, an angry Callender would become involved in one of the great scandals in American history, a scandal that would target Jefferson and question his morals.
Madison also worked with Jefferson and the cabinet to keep America out of foreign wars, did not sign treaties that might bring the nation into conflicts, and was eager to establish good relations with key countries. Jefferson and Madison, remembering Washington's noninvolved foreign policy, and its success, said they were determined, like him, to make certain that America never became an international bully or was dragged into foreign wars through overly friendly ties with some nations.
With its shores protected from foreign attack, and free of costly wars, the United States could move on to prosper at home. Madison and Jefferson sought favorable trade agreements, reasonable import taxes on foreign goods, and a brisk export-and-import trade with foreign merchants. Jefferson's new federal government, eager to give states and cities more power and to limit the power of the federal offices, flourished.
Madison could sit back, as he did later, and write of any nation (Spain, in this instance) “that she dreads…the growing power of this country and the direction of it against her possessions within its reach. Can she annihilate this power? No. Can she sensibly retard its growth? No.”22 He added that any country that tangled with America would bring on itself “prematurely the whole weight of the calamity which she fears.”
At the end of his first year in office, James Madison had built a strong and productive State Department, served his friend the president well as a political adviser, and, thanks to his wife, become one of the most sociable figures in all of Washington.
Life was good for the great little Madison.
The deplorable condition that Napoleon's army found itself in following the Yellow Fever epidemic in Santo Domingo led French military advisers to suggest a second army be sent to put down the slave revolt, but this new force had to be just as large as the first. A frustrated Napoleon, overwhelmed with affairs in Europe, declined. What was the loss of one island, anyway? He still owned just about all of the middle third of North America and was about to gain New Orleans from Spain, and perhaps Florida, too.1
James Madison and Thomas Jefferson worried about Napoleon. Madison had studied the history of French government over hundreds of years. Napoleon was aggressive and had proved that again and again in his wars in Europe and in the Caribbean. Madison did not want Napoleon on the American doorstep. It made no sense for Napoleon and France to retain that land; it hampered a substantial amount of good that America could do in that area; and it completely stifled American growth.
A substantial amount of American shipping went down the Ohio and Missouri Rivers to the Mississippi, and then down to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. France could bottle that up in New Orleans. Since the end of the revolution, tens of thousands of Americans had migrated into the Mississippi valley and saw that area as their new, permanent home. Many of them wanted to keep on moving west. They did not relish having the French there as their neighbors, either.
And Jefferson had never trusted the French emperor and tended to side with whoever was opposed to him. He wrote Ambassador Robert Livingston in 1802 that “we must marry ourselves to the British fleet & nation.”2 He told the ambassador that “it appears evident that an unfriendly spirit prevails in the most important individuals of the [French] government towards us.”
Jefferson had the American press on his side. Some Republican newspaper editors even urged Jefferson to declare war on France rather than have them sit in the Midwest.3
One editor asked readers why Napoleon wanted to hang onto Louisiana anyway. “Its cultivation will be carried on by slaves…felling all those trees and forests is hard work and [not suited to slaves],” he wrote, adding that the only real resource to be obtained in Louisiana was lumber. The thousands of slaves needed there would also drive up the price of slaves throughout the South.4
Many in America, like Jefferson and Madison, did not trust Napoleon. One American diplomat at The Hague reminded newspaper readers that Napoleon had kept eleven thousand French troops in Bavaria long after he had promised to withdraw them. His attack on Switzerland worried many, too. “The recent attack made by Bonaparte upon the liberties and independence of the Swiss cantons here naturally made a strange impression on the inhabitants
of this country,” the diplomat wrote.5
Napoleon did not trust the Americans, either. For years, his ministers, speaking for him, complained that Americans, public and private, had helped the rebels defeat the French in Haiti. French minister to the United States general Louis-Marie Turreau, wrote Madison in 1806, “but it was not enough for some citizens of the United States to convey munitions of every kind to the rebels of St. Domingo, to that race of African slaves, the…refuse of nature; it was moreover necessary to injure the success of the ignoble and criminal traffic by the use of force. The vessels destined to protect it [rebellion] are constructed, loaded, armed in all port of the union under the eyes of the American people and the federal government itself and that government does not forbid it.”6
President Jefferson, who intended to buy New Orleans with money secretly authorized by Congress, was careful, though, not to provoke a confrontation with the always-edgy Napoleon. “We are endeavoring [with Congress]…to obtain by friendly negotiations a reasonable redress of the injuries,” he wrote of one dispute with France.7
Madison was a pit bull in his determination to rein in French ambition in the Louisiana Territory. In 1802, he warned through the French ambassador that “France cannot long preserve Louisiana against the United States.” America would ally itself with Great Britain against any aggression by France in the Americas. Madison told the French ambassador, who relayed the message to Napoleon, that Americans were swarming into the Mississippi region. Already, in just fifteen years, the population of Kentucky alone had leaped from 60,000 to 250,000 settlers. More were on the way. Pioneers were traveling across the mountains to the Mississippi region from the east in lengthy parades. They came by wagon, by horseback, and on foot. There were single men, married couples, and families, large and small. They set up tiny villages and soon had churches, general stores, and newspapers. They were there to stay, and when they looked west, they did not want to see the French staring back at them. It was not a tiny trickle of people; it was a tidal wave. The new settlers included slaves, merchants, riverboat captains, sailors, farmers, and new waves of immigrants. The American government could not possibly rein in that horde, and they were restless people. They would create their own country in those territories, and France would not be able to handle them, Madison insisted. He wanted to annex New Orleans, but he also wanted to stop bloodshed in any uprising that the Americans who lived there already might start against Napoleon and any army the French emperor brought to the region.8
Besides, Madison felt just like his countrymen who lived there. He had been a champion of the Mississippi region as part of America all of his life. Nearly twenty long years earlier, he had written James Monroe that “the use of the Mississippi is given by nature to our western country, and no power on earth can take it from them. Whilst we assert our title to it therefore with a becoming firmness, let us not forget that we cannot ultimately be deprived of it and that for the present war is more than all things to be deprecated [for it].”9
Madison told Napoleon that France, concerning Louisiana, had “to be resigned to [America's] future power, to conciliate them and acquire the merit, useful in other respects, of acceding to that which the force of events will give them in spite of us.”10 That force of events, Madison knew, had helped to bring about the rapid population of the huge French territory in the plains west of the Mississippi by Americans. Who else would move there? How long would it take until hundreds of thousands of Americans began claiming land and building homes in the territory, regardless of what the French claimed?
Added to all of that was Florida. France had been trying to purchase Florida from Spain for a year. If France owned Florida, and its ports, it could increase its trade in the Caribbean and surround America west and south. Spain was in no hurry to sell Florida to France, however. It was not willing to sell the peninsula to the United States, either, despite repeated offers. For the next sixteen years, American politicians would argue that if the United States had the Louisiana Territory in the west, it had to have Florida in the South to be complete. One New York newspaper letter writer said that the only tract of land the United States received from Napoleon was New Orleans. He said the Americans needed to purchase Florida, too, and that “a few millions of dollars will be appropriated for another bargain.”11
Secretary of State Madison kept up his pressure on Napoleon throughout 1802 and 1803, and also bitterly condemned the Spanish for shutting the port of New Orleans for a period of time and halting the export of American goods that had been carried down the Mississippi by hundreds of boats. To Madison, there was no future with either Spain or France in charge of New Orleans.
The Secretary of State told the US ambassador to Spain Charles Pinckney that the Mississippi was “everything” to merchants who shipped their goods on it. “It is the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac and all the navigable rivers of the Atlantic States formed into one stream.”12 He let ambassador to France Robert Livingston know that he wanted to be tough with Napoleon. He asked him to warn France that Napoleon had to watch out not only for official American anger but also for anger by the large militia forces in the Mississippi region, which the US government could not control. “There are now…not less than 200,000 militia on the waters of the Mississippi, every man of whom would march at a moment's warning to remove obstructions from that outlet to the sea, every man of whom regards the free use of that river as a natural and indefeasible right and is conscious of the physical force that can at any time give effect to it. France [needs] to cure the frenzy which covers Louisiana.”
By the spring of 1803, opposition in America to French power in the Mississippi area had become fierce. The newspapers were filled with stories that the militias might take matters into their own hands. One congressman even demanded that. He rose in the House chamber and said that President Jefferson should raise an army of eighty thousand militiamen, paid for with a $5 million appropriation from Congress, and that they should, as soon as possible, march on New Orleans and seize the city.13
There were stories, too, repeated again and again, that the British Navy might sail to New Orleans and occupy it, an act that would start a war with France. In the middle of all this, Madison, at Jefferson's request, sent officials to Paris to purchase the city of New Orleans from France.
The negotiators, which included James Monroe, loaded down with lengthy and detailed instructions from Madison, were startled when French foreign minister Charles Talleyrand offered to sell them the entire Louisiana Territory, the whole one third of what is today the continental United States. The previous day, as they were preparing for the meeting, an angry Napoleon, disgusted with defeats in Santo Domingo, pressured from England, and squabbling with the United States, in particular with Madison, became fed up with Louisiana. At the same time, he knew that he needed money, and quickly, to fight a war that he foresaw breaking out with England. Talleyrand and his other ministers turned down the American offer for New Orleans and suggested it buy the entire territory. The Americans did not have high regard for Talleyrand; few did. The British duke of Argyll said he was “the most disgusting individual I ever saw. His complexion is that of a corpse considerably advanced in corruption.”14 They had to do so right away, the French insisted, or Napoleon, known for his flighty behavior, might withdraw the offer.
Monroe wrote Madison that he was not only stunned by the offer but also certain that Jefferson could buy the whole territory for very little money. In the end, the sale price was just $15 million, an average of just four cents an acre.
How could the United States buy the territory, though, and how? There was nothing in the Constitution that enabled the president to purchase land. Jefferson assumed that Congress could do so, but that would consume months of talks and committee meetings, and Napoleon might withdraw the offer. The president wanted to buy Louisiana by himself, but thought that he needed a constitutional amendment to do that, which would be a very time-consuming process. He sought the advice of Madison
, who wrote the Constitution. He agreed that an amendment was required. Others did not. Several people told them that this was the same thing as a treaty, and George Washington's assumption of foreign-policy and treaty-making powers gave Jefferson the right to buy Louisiana. It not only was perfectly legal but also would speed up the entire process and set a good precedent for future purchases and/or acquisitions of land for the United States.
John Quincy Adams, who studied the Louisiana Purchase, wrote that what Jefferson did was open the door to permit the United States to purchase territory “to the two polar circles and from the straits of Hudson to the Straits of Magellan.”15 He added, though, that he admired Jefferson for doing it. “The merit of its accomplishment must ever remain as the great and imperishable memorial of the administration of Jefferson.” Another critic, the loquacious John Randolph, bristled at the entire idea but admitted to others that the president had the power to buy the territory. “Foreign relations, every matter short of war and even the course of hostilities, depend upon him [the president],” wrote Randolph of executive power.16
Jefferson also believed that the Constitution was a flexible document, meant to be interpreted as the years went by. So he built upon Washington's “implied powers” of the Constitution to give himself the power to consummate the deal to buy the Louisiana Territory from France. The Constitution, he felt, was a document that had to change as the American people changed and circumstances changed, and it had to protect and preserve the rights of those people. That came later. Others insisted that the Constitution was a large house with many rooms, and designed for many additions. It was meant for the people it served, no matter when they lived, and was not a legal shrine for the ages, hopelessly stuck in time. When John Jay lobbied for passage of the Constitution at the New York State ratifying convention in 1788, he told opponents of it that it could always be changed, with amendments, when the people did not like it. He told the head of the opposition group that, as a mother would tell her children about food, “try it, you'll like it.” If they did not like it, Jay assured opponents, they could change it with amendments. It could be changed, too, by interpretation by the president and Congress. Now, Jefferson believed that he could change it, and he did. He loathed those who “look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the Ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched.”17
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