Madison was present on these occasions, as was Dolley. The secretary of state was not concerned enough to contradict the president’s routine, and he may not have detected the problem right away either. For her part, Mrs. Madison was not squeamish in the least, nor reared among the highborn. “She is still pretty,” Aaron Burr wrote to his daughter, “but oh, that unfortunate propensity to snuff-taking.” Jefferson, not one to police his letters to trusted friends, was reacting to Elizabeth Merry’s diamond-studded attire and overstated requirements from etiquette when he told Monroe, who remained abroad, that she was an alienating force in Washington. Burr, curiously, had an impression of Elizabeth Merry very different from Jefferson’s: “Much of grace and dignity, ease and sprightliness; full of intelligence … an amiable and interesting companion.”
To call this a crisis over etiquette misses Jefferson’s state of mind. He did not care to be subtle in demonstrating his contempt for a female who insisted on speaking her mind, calling Elizabeth Merry a “virago”—a shrewish woman. Though accustomed to female-orchestrated salons in Paris, Jefferson as president had little patience with a diplomat’s forceful wife attempting to insinuate herself into what he regarded as a strictly masculine political setting. Madison reported to Monroe, with similar dismissiveness, that the Merrys’ expectations amounted to a “display of diplomatic superstition, truly extraordinary in this age and country.” In his official role, taking no chances, he bade Monroe to assure the British government that there was no reason for the Merrys’ eccentricity to lead to any worsening of Anglo-American relations.24
Though Madison and Jefferson were in general agreement, the incident with the Merrys again suggests differences in the two Virginians’ personalities. Jefferson had the habit of looking to define people on the basis of preconceived categories; he dismissed those who annoyed him and denied his own agency in the process. Madison was less of an essentialist, with a less deterministic way of mulling over human foibles—or at least, less of a tendency to vent. As importantly, he appears to have had less of a need to have the last word.
The so-called Merry Affair echoed all the way to London, though fortunately its effect did not linger long. Monroe reported to Madison from the British capital after meeting with one of the Lords: “He knew nothing of the Etiquette story tho’ he is in the diplomacy of the country … I inferred from that circumstance that the government gave no eclat to the incident.” This was one Anglo-American diplomatic squabble that could be put to rest easily.25
The administration continued to cope with foreign policy standoffs, all of which landed on Madison’s desk. U.S. merchant ships were harassed by the British whenever they dared to conduct business with the French. New Yorkers became especially irate when British warships hovered not far off Manhattan Island, spying on a French frigate that was in port to take Jerome Bonaparte back to France. The French, for their part, took offense at America’s posture in the Caribbean, where armed merchant ships continued to convey supplies to the black forces in Haiti. Madison worked out an elaborate argument, trying to convince the French that by forbidding Haitians to trade freely with the United States, they would only be “embittering the minds of the inhabitants against France.” His logic had no immediate effect. And despite the Louisiana exchange, Spain and the United States remained at odds over the Florida boundary.26
Neutrality was a lot easier to proclaim than to maintain. Madison tried to preserve balance: keeping the peace and avoiding looking weak. He and Jefferson read each other’s mail when one was at Washington and the other at home, or one at Montpelier and the other at Monticello; and we can assume that they did so when they were laboring near at hand in Washington. But exertions toward making America’s positions matter in a Eurocentric world were onerous when the nature of diplomacy was slow and deliberate and every word took a month or more to cross the Atlantic.27
“River of Thieves”
Jefferson’s handling of the Tripolitan War has to be one of the most instructive episodes in early U.S. foreign policy. Often seen as a diversion, the administration’s conflict with the Barbary powers was actually central to Jefferson’s and Madison’s philosophy of statecraft. For both of them, the principle of neutrality was automatically coupled with an implied threat of commercial retaliation. But economic pressure could work only on nations such as France and England, where there was a considerable volume of trade; the same strategy was useless in dealing with smaller states that disrupted American commerce. Jefferson had concluded as early as the 1780s that in such situations brute force was the only option.28
The Barbary States of North Africa, which included Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco, had a long-established practice of attacking American ships in the Mediterranean. They demanded tribute—bribes to ward off assaults on American merchantmen—and when it seemed expedient, they took American sailors captive. Forced to do backbreaking slave labor, the prisoners were punished with the infamous bastinado, one hundred blows to the feet for even minor offenses. Angered when President Adams failed to pay tribute as expected, the bashaw of Tripoli (the word for “high official” comes from either Persian or Turkish) impulsively declared war on the United States just as Jefferson assumed office. Unwilling to continue the past policy of “tributes and humiliations,” Jefferson told Madison that only military force would stop “the eternal increase of demand from these pirates.”
After consulting with his cabinet, Jefferson decided to send a squadron to the Mediterranean. This initiated the Tripolitan War (1801–05), best described as a naval war of intimidation and harassment. The captain of the American squadron carried clear instructions: to fight any or all of the Barbary States if they should declare war; and to safeguard commerce and “chastise their insolence—by sinking, burning or destroying their ships” wherever they might be found. The navy’s goal was to establish a blockade of Tripoli and protect American vessels at the lowest possible cost.29
Jefferson may have had qualms over the constitutionality of the Louisiana Purchase, but he was little troubled by his unsanctioned use of military force in this instance. Did he possess the authority to go to war without first consulting Congress? Attorney General Levi Lincoln was the only member of his cabinet to urge caution. Both Gallatin and Madison eagerly endorsed an unmitigated show of force. Surprisingly, Congress put up little resistance to Jefferson’s naval war, granting him complete control over the Mediterranean operation in 1802. The following year Gallatin set up a special fund that the president could use at his discretion and without further congressional oversight. Jefferson never made a formal declaration of war and kept a tight rein over relations with the Barbary States until the day he left office.30
The war with Tripoli was not just about protecting American commerce; it was a statement to the world about American fortitude. In a letter to Secretary Madison, David Humphreys, U.S. consul in Spain, expressed his concurrence with a policy designed to “chastise that haughty but contemptible Power.” The military response would, he said, serve “not only as salutary example to the other piratical States, but it would produce an almost incalculable effect in elevating our national character in the estimation of all Europe.” He echoed what poets and political figures had been saying for two decades already: that “National Character and public opinion are far from being unimportant objects, and more particularly as they respect a rising People.” The “rising” United States still had a great deal to prove in Europe.
Madison shared these sentiments, advising Jefferson to display the flag and use force strategically, to help improve relations with England and France. He insisted that the administration broadcast the deployment of its navy so as to let every nation understand its purpose. Gallatin may have said it best when he claimed that the decisive use of force proved that the United States was “prepared, like the Great Powers, to repel every injury by the sword.” Madison, Jefferson, and Gallatin all wished to prove America’s virility.31
Between 1801 and 1804 the American sq
uadron in the Mediterranean showed off its nautical skill and military muscle. In its first engagement, the schooner Enterprise won a quick and decisive victory over a Tripolitan cruiser. Jefferson heralded the bravery of the crew. The enemy suffered heavy casualties without the loss of a single American life. This victory helped the president convince Congress to pass the 1802 authorization bill that gave him unrestricted control over Barbary policy.
American exploits continued to receive favorable press at home and abroad. When the American frigate Philadelphia ran aground near Tripoli in October 1803, defeat was turned into a spectacular success. The captain and crew had become captives, their ship taken over and used against other U.S. vessels. In February 1804 Captain Stephen Decatur of the Intrepid earned his nation’s gratitude by overtaking the Tripolitans, who held the Philadelphia, and then setting the ship ablaze. This even earned him accolades from the acclaimed English admiral Lord Nelson, who termed Decatur’s feat “the most bold and daring act of the age.” In case doubts remained as to America’s long-term resolve, Decatur’s commander, Edward Preble, launched a large-scale assault on Tripoli. The war officially ended in 1805, when a combined sea and land offensive brought the prostrate ruler to terms.32
The administration’s understanding of its distant enemy was filtered through predictable stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims. U.S. diplomats contemptuously dismissed the Barbary powers as a thuggish “handful of banditti” and their area of operations as a “river of thieves.” In Anglo-American lore, inhabitants of the Barbary States were rude barbarians and superstitious heathens who reversed history by enslaving Christians. But some observers used images of Islamic slavery to highlight the gap between American rhetoric and reality. In his last publication before death, Benjamin Franklin produced a scathing satire on this very subject, in which a fictitious North African Muslim defended slavery. Though his tale was set in 1687, Franklin was actually mocking the speech of a southern congressman.
Jefferson and Madison refused to comment on the moral implications of the enslavement of white Americans. They may even have understood that Muslim slavery was a more limited and, in some respects, less repressive regime from what was practiced in parts of the U.S. South. Those doing forced labor in the Barbary States were not of a particular race or religion; and manumission was not just possible but quite common. There were nearly three-quarters of a million slaves of African descent in the United States in 1803, and only a few hundred Americans held in bondage in North Africa.
The administration was equally careful not to turn the war into a holy crusade. Despite the fact that Pope Pius VI, learning of Tripoli’s surrender, had praised the Americans for doing more than any other nation to protect Christianity, neither Madison nor Jefferson saw any advantage in furthering religious prejudice. In appointing Tobias Lear (formerly assigned to St. Domingue) as the consul general in Algiers, Madison reminded him that “universal toleration in matters of religion” was official policy. That said, the secretary of state’s decision had less to do with a high-minded view of religion than with the practical benefit America gained over other Christian nations when it dealt in simple terms of power and interest with Islamic cultures.33
Confident that he was pursuing an able and intelligent policy, Jefferson was convinced that rogue states should be chastised like unruly children. He generalized about weak polities as illegitimate territories that could be manipulated. He called Haiti the “American Algiers” and wrote off Spain’s provincial governments in North America with similar contempt. For President Jefferson, though he probably would not have said so, a distinctive hierarchy of nations existed. At the top were the “Great Powers,” England and France, which extended their rule through war and conquest. Next he ranked the United States, a nation morally superior to the imperial powers and commercially strong but unwilling (as long as it adhered to its republican form) to become a full-fledged, tax-and-borrow, military behemoth. At the bottom of Jefferson’s hierarchy of states were the small and insignificant. For them, independence had minimal bearing on their historical destiny. Offering little to the world, these states remained potentially destabilizing and were to be ignored, subjected to persuasion, and when required dealt with by force. Jefferson’s system of nations fell neatly into a classic republican division of social classes: the corrupt, bloated, but still dangerous elite; the honest and morally upright middle ranks; and the primitive, if not hopeless and contemptible, lower class.34
In his thinking, the adoption of a more forward international posture would reinforce American liberty. By showing it had no reluctance to use military force where it saw advantages in doing so, the United States stood to free itself from subservience to British maritime policy. The British still ruled the high seas, but the United States had begun its climb toward greater respectability by controlling its destiny in one corner of the Mediterranean. For his part, Madison was convinced that America’s show of strength would help its relations with London and silence those Federalist critics who liked to paint Jefferson as a feeble president.
Refusing to go along with the status quo and pay tribute to the Barbary States, the administration had begun to reverse a trend. Jefferson had earlier considered the possibility that an informal league with Russia and Sweden could help curb the excesses of the Barbary States and shift the maritime balance of power in America’s favor. Consul David Humphreys voiced this very opinion when he told Madison that the United States could start a “new aera in the naval history of mankind.”
After signing a treaty with Tripoli in 1805, President Jefferson defended his actions to the English émigré Thomas Cooper, concluding that the nations of Europe needed to take a fresh look at the United States. They had mistakenly believed that America was “entirely Quaker in principles & will turn the left cheek when the right has been smitten.” This opinion, according to Jefferson, “must be corrected”; the Tripolitan War had provided a “just occasion” to undo the error in perception. Putting Tripoli in its place gave America an upper hand in diplomacy, not just in the Mediterranean but also on the Continent, where it counted most.35
“Repugnant to the Constitution”
A few other events that stigmatized the years of Jefferson’s presidency warrant consideration because they affected Jefferson’s and Madison’s respective—and joint—legacies. The Marbury court case, which came to a head in 1803, pitted the administration against the Federalist-dominated Supreme Court. James T. Callender’s newspaper columns prying into the president’s personal behavior unleashed a scandal that continues to resonate into the twenty-first century. And the Yazoo corruption controversy forced the administration to confront the American passion for speculation in frontier land. It also brought to the fore John Randolph of Roanoke, exemplar of Old South political eloquence, who went overnight from Republican stalwart to administration critic.
William Marbury is known to history not for a distinguished career but for a career interrupted. Named by John Adams as a justice of the peace for the District of Columbia on the eve of Jefferson’s inauguration, he never received his commission. He sought redress from the Supreme Court, hoping the justices would hear his case and force Secretary of State Madison to hand over his commission.
The question seems almost trifling: Was Marbury entitled to his job as promised? Was the lack of delivery of his commission a meaningful omission or a meaningless detail? Chief Justice John Marshall, who ruled on the case, was at the time of Marbury’s appointment President Adams’s secretary of state—it was he who had not completed the arrangement. Yet his successor in that office, Madison, was being held accountable for failing to follow up.36
It was Jefferson, and Jefferson alone, who had decided to withhold Marbury’s commission. Madison had still been in Virginia at the time and had not yet taken up the duties of his new office. The third president considered the second’s last-minute appointments “nullities” and felt no qualms, as he told Madison, in dismissing those persons “indecently appointed an
d not yet warm in their seat of office.” “Indecency” made an impression on Jefferson.
Though duly summoned in December 1801, Madison never appeared in court; Attorney General Levi Lincoln made his excuses. One must wonder whether, in urging his secretary of state to boycott the proceedings, Jefferson was afraid that Madison might take a moderate line and find some common constitutional ground with Marshall. Or perhaps he was simply so outraged by Marshall’s forward and presumptuous action in summoning Madison that he wanted to snub the Court. Either way, in this case Madison allowed himself to be muzzled by Jefferson.37
Soon enough the Republican press went on the attack, haranguing Marshall for his “ludicrous” attempt to “stigmatize” the executive. With two of three branches of government in Republican hands, Jefferson complained that the Federalists had “retired to the Judiciary as a strong hold,” from which “battery” the good works of a Republican administration were to be “beaten down & erased.” The president’s recurrence to a metaphor of warfare was no accident; he planned to subject the High Court to a long siege. It seemed Americans were not “all Republicans, all Federalists” after all.38
Jefferson’s initial gambit was the repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801, for which he relied on his allies in Congress. The Judiciary Act, passed during the lame duck session at the end of the Adams administration, increased the number of federal district court judges. At the same time the District of Columbia was formed, creating forty-two new judgeships, among which was the position that went to William Marbury. In Jefferson’s mind, these so-called midnight appointments constituted a flagrant form of court packing. It placed a “phalanx” of disruptive Federalists—again, his sense of political warfare—at the hub of his administration. In early 1802 Breckinridge of Kentucky took the lead in dismantling the bloated judiciary. Federalists became defensive. Accusations flew that Jefferson was threatening the independence of the courts.39
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