In March 1808, in advance of scheduled communications with U.S. ministers in London and Paris, Jefferson issued formal instructions to his secretary of state. On the subject of neutral rights, England and France were showing no signs of bending to U.S. demands, and the president wanted the two belligerent nations to understand his resolve. “Without assuming the air of menace,” he told Madison, “let them both percieve [sic] that if they do not withdraw their orders and decrees, there will arrive a time when our interests will render war preferable to a continuance of the embargo.” The language was meant to be absolute. “When that time arrives,” added Jefferson ominously, “if one has withdrawn and the other not, we must declare war against that other; if neither shall have withdrawn, we must take our choice of enemies between them.” If this pronouncement was Jefferson’s, and not jointly conceived, it effectively painted his successor into a corner. Jefferson had previewed this mind-set two months earlier, when he wrote on the embargo to John Taylor of Caroline: “Keeping at home our vessels, cargoes & seamen saves us the necessity of making their capture the cause of immediate war.” It was a puzzling, even perverse, way of looking at his options.46
Certainly the embargo was accomplishing less than the Jefferson administration imagined. The National Intelligencer insisted defensively that Virginia would experience the most “inconvenience” from the measure, but even this, the administration’s paper, went from consoling itself that “the temper of the nation remains unruffled” to acknowledging that news of the embargo “made no impression on the political circles in London.” The question was simple and fairly obvious: How long would Americans, no matter how incensed they were with Europeans’ might-makes-right posture on the high seas, remain willing to endure privations?47
Newspapers to the north, particularly those of the port cities, regularly expressed their concern that the embargo would be never-ending. The North American and Mercantile Daily Advertiser, a Baltimore paper, was one of these, reporting that the administration ignored sincere communications of friendship from London while permitting “breaches of the embargo law” by French privateers. British policy, it sought to explain, was “not meant as an injury or insult to America, but as a measure of self-defense for Great Britain.” The enemy to fear was Napoleon Bonaparte, who had overrun Spain and might well have designs on the United States.
How could the Republicans continue to overplay the threat of one power and underplay the threat of the other? A letter to the Salem (Massachusetts) Gazette from a presumably reliable source in Washington assured readers: “We shall have peace with Britain. War with France will follow … It is confidently said that Mr. Jefferson has declared his dread of the enormous and preponderating power of France!” Others accused the administration of deliberately playing into Napoleon’s hands, which led a New York paper sympathetic to Madison and Jefferson to grouse: “The old story of French influence is again resuscitated, in the vain hope of enlisting odium against the embargo and the administration.” The New-York Evening Post offered a pithy prediction from its Connecticut correspondent: “Jefferson’s Embargo is an excellent mother, for she brings forth federal children in abundance.”48
Boston’s Columbian Centinel insisted that embargoes solved nothing and only destabilized. “How are the Poor to be fed?” it asked, with Virginia in its sights and satire on the tongue: the North’s poor, after all, were not as lucky as southern slaves, whose masters would always make sure they had their hominy grits to eat. For the equally unforgiving Albany Gazette, the embargo was an intentional ploy meant to maintain Virginia dominance. “Where are our defences?” it asked nervously, as it described the vulnerability of Manhattan and interior portions of the state. “Behold the effects of an anticommercial spirit—behold the effects of a deadly and unnatural hostility to the State of New York.” An interstate rivalry came into sharper focus: “Yes yes, the growing wealth and strength of New York must be checked! The omnipotence of Virginia must be maintained.” In this instance, Jefferson escaped mention, but the presumptive fourth president, coarchitect of the embargo, did not: “Let Mr. Madison look to it; let his supporters pause—for his French predilections may lead to the ruin of our Independence.” Madison and Jefferson did little to disabuse northerners of their apprehensions, convinced as they were that all sections of the country were in fact making equal sacrifices.49
On the Fourth of July, in the last year of his presidency, Thomas Jefferson opened the doors of the President’s House to citizens of the young national capital. He was dressed in “a neat suit of homespun,” the National Intelligencer reported, “in conformity to the spirit of the times.” A cavalry paraded before the Madisons’ home, and Dolley emerged to give a patriotic address to those assembled. In Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina’s two largest towns, celebrants selflessly toasted the embargo. “Its injurious effects will be borne with patience by every real friend of his country,” ran the one. “Better it is to bear all its attendant evils than to lay prostrate our dear bought independence,” proclaimed the other.50
Despite such gestures as these, the spirit of the times was not at all what Madison and Jefferson had prepared for. Their misplaced confidence in commercial restrictions soon led them to turn to more draconian enforcement measures along the coasts and on the Canadian border. In August 1808, while at Montpelier, Madison urged that Jefferson waste no time in deploying every available gunboat to attend to “the suspicions situations along the New England Coast.” That section’s much-valued lumber and flour were being smuggled into Canada and from there to the West Indies. Madison wanted a show of force to suppress all who were, as he stressed, “in collusion with British smugglers.” It took a Newark, New Jersey, newspaper to direct attention to an increasingly conspicuous problem of perception: “In order to render our embargo an effectual instrument against Great Britain, it ought obviously to operate more strongly upon her than on ourselves.” The Newarker restated his point neatly: “Our weapon recoils.”51
There were small signs of hope. Senator John Quincy Adams went against the New England grain and would eventually be rewarded for his courage in a Madison administration. This new, unexpected ally was toasted in the unlikeliest of places, such as Charleston, South Carolina, for his refusal to conform to “the dictates of party spirit.” But as the sole Federalist to vote in favor of the embargo, he succeeded only in guaranteeing the loss of his Senate seat.
The other Massachusetts senator, former secretary of state Timothy Pickering, had been fired by Adams’s father. Pickering could plainly see that his party would not regain the presidency, and he hoped in vain that Monroe (now presumed cured of his partiality toward France) might stand a chance against Madison. Just as Federalists once thought they could influence Aaron Burr if they should connive to sneak him into the presidency past Jefferson, there was thought that Monroe could be shaken loose from his Republican connections.
One of Pickering’s steady correspondents was Chief Justice John Marshall, who presumably was not wearing his judicial robe when he predicted where things were heading. The embargo, he wrote Pickering, “will impel us to a war with the only power which protects any part of the civilized world from the despotism of that tyrant [Napoleon] with whom we shall then be arranged.” Pickering had made noises about disunion in 1804, and now, four years later, his compatriot Harrison Gray Otis, ex-congressman and current state legislator, wrote suggesting a convention of New Englanders—inviting select New Yorkers too—to find ways of fighting the embargo. Others may have had secession in mind, but that was not Otis’s purpose. He simply wanted northern Federalists to show nerve. Some in the Northeast were threatening to nullify the embargo law, using Jefferson’s theory of states’ rights against him.52
Cotton producers of the Carolinas and Georgia, stuck with an unsold crop and unpaid debts, saw their circumstances uniquely. Their trade was exclusively with England, while New England had access to a number of markets. They also believed that a restoration of normal trade would benefit northern
consumers more than it would southern producers. Placed in what they saw as the most unenviable position, cotton producers boasted their greater patriotism in putting up with trade restrictions. The Charleston papers in 1808 vowed that the Carolinians would hold on longer if the administration demanded.53
Resistance was not confined to the North, however. When the administration-friendly Richmond Enquirer finally admitted that “the inhabitants of the United States appear to differ from the government, with respect to the efficacy of the embargo,” it was all right to acknowledge publicly that it harmed neither Britain nor France. Softening the blow, the Enquirer reported at the same time that the Virginia House of Delegates had voted its “approbation” of President Jefferson’s policy, reminding citizens of their duty to rally round the measures of the government when the flag was insulted and commerce menaced by the “iniquitous edicts” of the European powers.54
“I See with Infinite Grief a Contest Arising”
Madison’s role in the embargo earned him a good many enemies, and not only in New England Federalist circles. As Morgan Lewis rightly construed, Republicans from Manhattan to Albany and beyond were cool to the plan of succession. The port of New York had eclipsed Philadelphia as a center of population, commerce, and finance. Its entrepreneurs were being held back, the city’s growth impeded. New Yorkers naturally resented the impotence of Vice President Clinton inside the Jefferson administration. Refusing to solicit Clinton’s advice as it plunged ahead with a destructive policy, the Virginia faction was showing that it did not care about anyone but themselves.
Activists who wished to end the stranglehold Virginia had on the rest of the country reminded voters that George Clinton had been a “friend and companion” to George Washington. By some unexplained logic, they maintained that this made him Washingtonian in his leadership skills, “as wise and discerning a statesman as he had been an expert and courageous soldier.” For a time even some Virginia Republicans recognized the legitimacy of New York’s grievance: U.S. senator William Branch Giles and Richmond newspaper editor Thomas Ritchie, both deeply respectful toward President Jefferson, at least entertained the idea that it was New York’s turn to supply a Republican president.
But then the Clintonians got nastier, portraying the secretary of state as a shady character. The worst of these stated: “No man ever injured the United States in an equal degree with James Madison … The awful crisis in our public affairs: impending war, internal broils, the defenceless state of our country, are all the dreadful consequences of a system organized by this man.” That dread had grown from unmet expectations. Clinton supporters had hoped, if they did not assume, that their champion’s elevation to the vice presidency in 1805 was meant to groom him for the presidency when Jefferson retired. For those who distrusted the Virginians, and for the Madisonians who distrusted the Clintonians, the Republican Party did not appear to be national in character.55
The Republican nominating caucus was held in Washington on January 23, 1808, two days after the Virginia Assembly nominated Madison for the presidency. The Virginia Argus defined caucus as a “voluntary association of individuals agreeing to abide by the will of the majority” and (a bit too confidently) “the only proper way” of uniting Republicans. Knowing the foreordained outcome of the caucus, supporters of Clinton in New York and John Randolph’s pro-Monroe crowd in Virginia both registered their objections to the staged event and refused to attend. By now Senator Giles and editor Ritchie were staunch Madisonians, no longer flirting with the idea of being fair to New York. The new Madisonian John Quincy Adams took part in the caucus as well, and while his mother looked askance, his father warmly approved his son’s independent streak and declared that he himself had “renounced” those who went, these days, by the name of Federalist.
Candidate Madison won 83 of 89 votes cast at the Republican caucus. George Clinton and James Monroe received 3 each. On the ballot for vice president, Clinton was awarded 79 of 88 votes. The administration wing of the party had spoken.
Rather than agree to run for four more years of subordination, Clinton expressed personal dissatisfaction with the process in a letter to the American Citizen, the New York City newspaper edited by James Cheetham. The paper had vocally supported the Jefferson administration in the past, but it decided to withdraw support from Jefferson’s handpicked successor. If Madison was elected, Cheetham said, “nothing short of a miracle can save the republican party from destruction.” And so he came out for a Clinton-Monroe ticket.
Not all New Yorkers took up Clinton’s cause—a sizable number stood behind Madison. By July these people were declaring that the two newspapers edited by Cheetham were “no longer to be considered by us as republican papers, and that they ought not to be any longer esteemed as organs of republican opinions.” Cheetham, undeterred, promulgated his reasoning as to why a vote for Madison, twelve years Clinton’s junior, was unsafe: “He is sickly, valetudinarian [obsessed with health issues], and subject to spasmodic affections [convulsive disturbances], considered by philosophers as one of the most powerful agents of our intellectual faculties.” Madison did, indeed, have a reputation for a weak physical constitution, but suggesting that his past medical history pointed to a deterioration of mental acuity was a stretch.56
The reality was that the aging George Clinton was a stand-in for his thirty-nine-year-old nephew DeWitt Clinton, mayor of New York for the past four years. It was he who pulled the strings. Four years later, in fact, DeWitt Clinton would nearly succeed in unseating President Madison. But at this moment, if he lacked national stature, the younger Clinton did not lack guile. Morgan Lewis thought he saw credible evidence of this when New York State’s presidential electors were about to be chosen. He warned Madison that DeWitt was changing the “game” so that Republicans—all of whom wanted a New Yorker on the ticket—could have their choice between his uncle George for president or, if a Virginian was at the top of the ticket, DeWitt himself as vice president.
Convinced that once he was elected, Madison would know how to handle “the federalists and British apologists” who gnawed at him, Lewis issued a warning of Shakespearean dimensions in case Madison still thought it possible to make an arrangement with DeWitt Clinton: “Those who approach and assail you under the disguise of friendship will be most to be dreaded. A vice president certainly has great opportunities for intrigue … Be assured I know his Character well. He is mischievous, intrigueing, impatient of a Superior, and attached to nothing in this world but himself.” Morgan Lewis was obsessed with the Clintons. But he would prove prescient.57
After the Republican caucus, John Randolph’s men circulated a carefully worded dissent: “We … protest against the nomination of James Madison, as we believe him to be unfit to fill the office of President in the present juncture of our affairs.” A number of Clintonians added their signatures to the document. William Duane, editor of the nationally influential Philadelphia paper Aurora, initially supported George Clinton; he now switched over to Madison’s side.58
The administration paper, the National Intelligencer, maintained a steady stream of articles lavishly praising Madison. “The page of history glows with the achievements of the hero who has fought,” it pronounced, “but its brightest effulgence beams around the individual who ranks as the founder of a fundamental system, which adjusts for ages the limits of power and its application to the varied and complicated wants of man.” According to the Intelligencer, Madison’s consistent performance guaranteed that he would “pursue the straight line of honest policy, without being led astray by the false lights of sinister ambition.”
The easiest way to promote Madison’s candidacy was to enlarge upon his painstaking work at the Constitutional Convention, which the Intelligencer did with its accustomed flamboyance: “Every eye was fixed on Madison … The task was Herculean; but it was performed with zeal and dignity.” In this rendering, his energetic mind was supported by “candor and moderation”; and in subduing passions, he symbolized
the “calmness and sobriety” that the emerging nation needed in 1787. The editor of the Intelligencer did not want to hear of Madison’s defeats in Philadelphia—all that mattered was the legend.59
Not since Monroe lost to Madison in the election for a House seat in 1789 had the two been so visibly pitted against each other. This time, of course, the presidency was at stake. Madison and Monroe were careful not to say anything publicly, and none of the newspapers promoting Madison criticized Monroe at any time. The Argus clarified: “Being sincerely convinced (as we have always been) of the exalted merit of Col. Monroe, we shall not attempt to detract from it in the least; but we wish to know in what respects he excels Mr. Madison? Does he possess greater natural talents? More learning?” This was a direct response to the friends of Monroe who were, according to the Argus, parsing words in their effort to find “an essential and radical distinction” between the two by elevating Monroe above Madison in terms of his “purity of principles” and “patriotism.” One who signed his contribution “An American of ’76” wrote that it was not Monroe but Monroe’s supporters who were inventing the division between them by accusing Madison of having subverted Monroe’s diplomatic mission, setting Monroe up for failure. Monroe, the writer assured, could not possibly have been complicit in any underhanded attack on Madison.60
There was a real possibility of confusion at the polls. The adoption of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804 now provided separate slates for president and vice president. Clintonians could vote for Clinton on the presidential slate and choose someone else for vice president, while the Madisonians were expected to vote for Clinton as their vice-presidential choice. Morgan Lewis’s dreaded scenario could arise if the Republicans were not careful.
Monroe himself remained torn. He wanted to be president, but he did not wish to create bad blood that might permanently deny him the office he aspired to. In a piece designed for the newspapers that he penned but ultimately did not send, he said he did not think of himself as a candidate for president but would serve if his fellow citizens went so far as to elect him. President Jefferson, with evident discomfort, wrote to him: “I see with infinite grief a contest arising between yourself and another, who have been very dear to each other, and equally so to me.” Insisting that he was maintaining perfect neutrality—it was to be a “sacred observance” for him, owing to their long association—Jefferson was nonetheless disturbed that “painful impressions” remained on Monroe’s mind that could tear apart critical friendships. He urged him not to believe the malicious messages that he knew Monroe was receiving from third parties, which did more than hint at the lame duck president’s partiality toward Madison. “I feel no passion, I take no part, I express no sentiment,” Jefferson wrote. He was being truthful only insofar as party regulars had already acted to secure the succession in the manner Jefferson preferred. His will was being enacted without his having to say or do more.
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