Jefferson and Monroe were kindred spirits. Both had lost a father at an early age, had raised daughters but no sons, and nurtured a healthy appetite for political revenge. Both had been tapped by President Washington to serve the nation (Jefferson in the cabinet and Monroe as an envoy); and both had lost Washington’s confidence owing, they believed, to the machinations of Hamilton. Monroe was, without exaggeration, Jefferson’s protégé, his career overseen by his mentor ever since 1780, when he read the law under then-Governor Jefferson’s watchful eye.
Jefferson used delicacy whenever he wrote to Monroe, a pose he rarely found necessary when he wrote to Madison. In the early months of 1808, Jefferson assured Monroe that Madison and he were equal in his esteem, “two principal pillars of my happiness.” But even with the exiting president’s effort to reunite them, Madison and Monroe refrained from interacting. When Madison visited Monticello that summer, he did not go the extra mile, literally, to see Monroe at home; nor did Jefferson extend Monroe an invitation to join them on the mountaintop. Bad feelings lingered.61
As the election neared, the language used by interested friends of the Republican competitors remained sharp. Some Federalists sought the role of spoiler by suggesting that Jefferson’s partiality for his secretary of state was a form of tampering with the election process. When Federalists in Richmond met to endorse Monroe, they took extreme positions, claiming that Madison was under French influence and Monroe under British. According to their extended logic, Madison had abandoned the principles of George Washington, whereas Monroe, conciliatory toward Federalists during his governorship (1799–1802), was long known for his honesty and could be counted on to act with restraint. As the Virginia Gazette reported: “We have no fears of his marking out the federalists as a political sect upon whom he shall have vengeance!!” In joining a brand of Federalist to a brand of Republican, the Monroe phenomenon constituted a fairly unique event in American history, a function of minority fears and prejudices on opposite sides of the political spectrum.62
With all parties acknowledging the near certainty of Republican victory at the polls, one Federalist adopted as his nom de plume “Richard Saunders,” the folksy alter ego of Benjamin Franklin in his long-running annual (1732–57), Poor Richard’s Almanack. Weighing in on Jefferson’s presidency, “Saunders” opened with feigned praise for the first inaugural and its call for unity: “I declare I would have given Thomas Jefferson the best calf on my farm for speaking such good words, had he come and asked for it. But talking is one thing, and acting another.”
For “Saunders,” James Monroe’s unappreciated exertions abroad constituted the only harmony seeking in Jefferson’s eight years. For all his sincerity and hard work, Monroe had been “blackguarded” by his supposed friends. At this point, “Saunders” surmised, the Jay Treaty had to look good, even to Republicans. As to the ill-conceived embargo, he pretended to be confused, mock-innocently addressing the Republicans: “The French want money, said Madison, and they must have it; John Randolph heard him say these very words … And now Bonaparte says we must go to war with England; and if Madison or Clinton or any of your leaders get to be president, to war we shall go.”63
As the year of embargo progressed, even Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, a moderate Republican who had initially favored the measure, was ready to throw up his hands. He wrote to a favorite correspondent, ex-president John Adams: “Could the absurdities in principle and conduct of our two great parties for the last 12 years be laid before the world in a candid and dispassionate manner, we should be ashamed to call ourselves MEN. The disputes of children about their nuts and gingerbread have less folly and wickedness in them.”64
Dr. Rush could only offer a diagnosis; he knew of no cure for America’s political ills, beyond suturing the rupture between two old Revolutionaries who were his friends. It was his desire to restore the friendship of Adams and Jefferson, an historic mission he would embark on once Jefferson left office and Madison inherited the problems of the presidency.
“What I Had Foreseen Has Taken Place”
The coolness that subsisted between Madison and Monroe cast a pall over the presidential transition. Though the Jefferson administration ended poorly, as a whole it did not resemble the picture of anarchy and atheism painted by the advocates of order and firmness eight years earlier. Until the embargo was instituted, opposition congressmen recognized the methodical and responsible approaches that the president and his cabinet took to issues of administration and economy. Though Federalists were removed from office for political reasons, no members of the despised “mobocracy” were elevated to federal office. Hot issues such as the Samuel Chase trial reminded Federalists that Jefferson had an obnoxious agenda and they needed to be wary of him. But in spite of core disagreements, Jefferson and Madison and Gallatin ultimately did little to upset the structure the Federalists had put in place.65
At a later period Madison was fond of telling one particular joke to demonstrate Jefferson’s disarming manner as president. A new congressman who had been led to expect a man of rigid opinions walked away from a meeting with him saying, “He is the most pliable great man I ever met with.” Owning that Jefferson was persuaded by his argument on a political subject, he boasted to his friends: “I verily believe I could change his mind on almost any point.” The joke, as Madison related it, was that the new congressman had in fact been converted to Jefferson’s side of the issue without even knowing it.66
Until the embargo went into effect, all sections of the Union had thriving economies. By the end of Jefferson’s two terms, weakened northern Federalists were left with much to protest. Southern Federalists were equally nervous and even less visible. The number of their party’s newspapers in the South had declined from sixteen in 1800 to twelve in 1808. In the same region during the same period, Republican papers grew in number from thirteen to twenty-three. Perhaps owing to the disastrous embargo policy, four new southern Federalist papers raised enough funds to go into business between January 1808 and January 1809. Still, the Republican Party was in the ascendant. Every southern state legislature remained in Republican hands. As the historian James Broussard sees it, “It would not be an exaggeration to say that without its vigorous partisan editors, the southern Federalist Party would scarcely have existed at all.”67
Once Monroe enthusiasts saw their chances shrink, the election of 1808 became anticlimactic. The character of Virginia’s congressional delegation remained Republican, of course, yet pockets of resistance remained. Both northern and southern districts of Virginia voted in Federalists in 1808, among them one Daniel Sheffey of Wytheville, in the southwest portion of the state. Sheffey began his career as a shoemaker’s apprentice (an atypical Federalist profile); he worked his way up by studying the classics and the law and entered Congress at age thirty-nine, in 1809. The invective-hurling John Randolph was known to refer to Sheffey as “the shoemaker” when they disagreed on the floor of the House.68
Randolph of Roanoke was not about to scale back on the fury of his speeches or the provocations in his letters; he would remain newsworthy for another quarter century. But the time of his being considered a leader, or even a legitimate critic in national affairs, was past, save for his usefulness to Federalists, who could count on his vote in opposition to war measures. Henceforth the defective philosopher would be portrayed in caricature: the obstructionist as entertainer.
Nationally, the Federalists ran Charles Cotesworth Pinckney again. He did little better against Madison than he had done four years before against the incumbent Jefferson. The South Carolinian was not even able to win his home state, and though George Clinton siphoned off 6 of New York’s 19 electoral votes, Madison still received 122 of the 169 electoral votes cast.
But how strong a president would he be? During the last week of December 1808, Albert Gallatin sized him up. “Mr. Madison is, as I always knew him, slow in taking his ground, but firm when the storm arises. What I had foreseen has taken place. A majority wil
l not adhere to the embargo much longer, and if war be not speedily determined on, submission will soon ensue.” It was not a sanguine picture.69
Madison and Jefferson had persisted with the embargo to the detriment of their political reputations. That measure was to be repealed by Congress, and there was little they could do about it. Jefferson had come into office a hero to his party, and he left it wounded but with honor intact; even “schism” had not reduced him. In Madison’s case, a paradox presented itself: rejection accompanied by electoral victory. He had much to prove.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Road to War
1809–1812
The pillars of Democracy begin to fall away;
But you’re no novice in the art of bolst’ring the decay;
Grease well their palms, you little rogue, as I have had to do;
They follow only for the loaves, James Madison, my Joe.
—AN “INTERCEPTED LETTER FROM TALL TOMMY TO LITTLE JEMMY,” FEDERALIST SATIRE IN THE ALEXANDRIA (VA.) GAZETTE, 1810
God bless you and send you a prosperous course through your difficulties.
—JEFFERSON TO MADISON, MARCH 26, 1812
THE MARCH 3, 1809, ISSUE OF THE NATIONAL INTELLIGENCER marked the transition in Republican administrations. “This day will form a bright aera on the page of history. Never will it be forgotten as long as liberty is dear to man, that it was on this day that THOMAS JEFFERSON retired from the supreme magistracy amidst the blessings and regrets of millions.” He had strengthened liberty, while creating an environment in which wealth had “outrun every calculation.” Had he chosen to serve a third term, the editor volunteered, Jefferson would have had no competition.
The following issue of the same paper came out on the sixth, two days after Madison became president. It related the events of inauguration day, from the “federal salutes” of navy guns to the cavalry troops that escorted the modest man’s carriage to Capitol Hill. The streets of Washington had been filled with inquisitive citizens. Some ten thousand people crowded around the Capitol, most of them unsuccessful in obtaining access to the ceremony. Jefferson made his entrance as inconspicuous as possible, opting to ride his own horse to the event. He hitched it to a post and moved inside, so that he was already at the front of the House chamber when Madison entered and approached.
The incoming president took his seat beside the outgoing one. Chief Justice John Marshall rose to perform the swearing in. Marshall had recently completed the fifth and final volume of his widely read biography of George Washington, in which he painted Thomas Jefferson as a man of ambition who had tried to erase his countrymen’s love of the national father. Madison’s name was scarcely mentioned in Marshall’s work.
After the chief justice administered the oath of office, “two rounds of minute guns were fired.” Thomas Ritchie, whose Richmond newspaper, the Enquirer, was the only paper Jefferson would admit to reading in his retirement years, sat beside a thirty-one-year-old Virginia-born Kentuckian, already a U.S. senator and soon to be Speaker of the House. America would hear often from Henry Clay during the ensuing four years. Some argue that he influenced the nation’s political direction in ways Madison could not.1
The time arrived for Madison to deliver his inaugural address. It was a colorless speech, in which he soberly recognized his inheritance: “The present situation of the world is indeed without a parallel, and that of our own country full of difficulties.” The first, more substantive section of his address dealt with world affairs. He wanted nothing to do with Europe’s “bloody and wasteful wars,” he said, and he would seek “peace and friendly intercourse with all nations.” He claimed that his nation was righteous in its demand for neutral rights: “It has been the true glory of the United States to cultivate peace by observing justice, and to entitle themselves to the respect of the nations at war by fulfilling their neutral obligations with the most scrupulous impartiality.” To which he appended the morally assertive line: “If there be candor in the world, the truth of these assertions will not be questioned.”2
He dwelled on this subject long enough to provide evidence of America’s continuing concern with the two belligerent powers. Turning to domestic affairs, he had only platitudes to utter, evocations of the small-government, liberty-loving philosophy associated with republicanism: seeing the Constitution as “the cement of the Union, as well in its limitations as in its authorities”; deferring to the states instead of lording over them; avoiding “the slightest interference with the right of conscience or the functions of religion, so wisely exempted from civil jurisdiction”; observing “economy in public expenditures”; and keeping “within the requisite limits” a standing army, that is, recognizing state militias as “the firmest bulwark of republics,” instrumental in the preservation of liberty. There was no indication of any alteration in the thinking that had governed the moderate Republicans before this.
As to the Indians of North America, Jefferson had left a memo regarding unresolved intrusions by whites on Cherokee and Chickasaw lands in Georgia. The third president’s thinking was that Indians should choose either incorporation into white society as individual farmers, or eventual banishment across the Mississippi, where a mobile, hunting society could be sustained for a period of time. The new chief executive, lacking, as the vast majority of his generation did, the impulse to accommodate alternative cultures on terms of political equality, vowed in his inaugural message to “carry on the benevolent plans which have been so meritoriously applied to the conversion of our aboriginal neighbors from the degradation and wretchedness of savage life to a participation of the improvements of which the human mind and manners are susceptible in a civilized state.”3
America’s priorities lay with Europe. The nation’s immediate future was thought to be most closely linked, economically and militarily, to Old World power relations. In such a political climate, dutiful attention was to be given, but little real sensitivity shown, to the needs of Indians and those with detectable African origins still in bondage in the South. An indulgent vocabulary of Christian charity coexisted with, but did little to counteract, common depictions of Indians and African Americans. This reading of race was manifest in visual, spoken, and written stereotypes destined to thrive in both North and South for many decades. In the minds of those who directed U.S. policy in Washington, Indian traditionalists were buried by material progress; blacks were adjudged by nature less attractive than whites and were assumed biologically distant as well. With such stereotypes ingrained, government policy in years to come was to center on Indian removal and black recolonization, accompanied by an upsurge in miscegenation fears. Laws that rendered mixed-race offspring as bastards, deprived of any inheritance, would outlast slavery itself. When freedom was defined exclusively as a white inheritance (though no one said so explicitly), Indians and blacks were seen not just as inferiors but also as social deviants who posed a credible danger to the wholesome vigor as well as necessary security of American expansionism.4
Congress had recently terminated the overseas slave trade in accordance with the twenty-year postponement written into the Constitution. But this did not do much to stimulate thinking that a political solution might be found over the short term. To the extent that the politics of race was on the minds of Virginians and others in 1809, it was the frightening example of the black republic in Haiti. With attention focused on the future of Spanish Florida and the unsettled Louisiana Purchase lands, some began asking whether the black population might be relocated from the Atlantic states onto lands still populated by Indians.
New territory meant more opportunities for speculating slave owners, but it also meant new problems. In the commercially attractive, soon-to-be state of Louisiana, for instance, sugar plantation owners anxiously viewed the end of slave imports from abroad. When the embargo was declared, officials were forewarned that Louisiana could become another Haiti, and so they attempted to cut off smuggling. Slaves were arriving in New Orleans in substantial numbers from Afri
ca, the Caribbean, and South Carolina. What would be considered the right balance between public safety and private profit? Edward Livingston, the prominent Republican congressman (and DeWitt Clinton’s predecessor as New York City mayor), had removed to New Orleans in the wake of a financial scandal, where he married an attractive young French widow, a refugee from Haiti, whose father had owned a sugar plantation there. A constitutional scholar as well as land developer, Livingston, as an adoptive southerner, challenged the prohibition on importation of slaves from Africa.5
Since Gabriel’s Rebellion in Virginia and the bloody course of events in Haiti, the possible growth and expansion of slavery appeared more unsettling than the possible relocation of Indians. That was why Madison found it easier, in the text of his inaugural address, to direct his attention to the relatively benign project of making Indians “white.” Indians were a mobile race, whereas slaves were bound to the land because their owners needed them to render it fruitful. Slavery remained a blight on the cultural landscape and an issue that was too huge to tackle head-on in the lead-up to the War of 1812.
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