Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  If Madison questioned the timing of so forward a move in East Florida and thus proceeded with caution, Jefferson weighed the situation differently. Based on his long-cultivated suspicion of British intentions—always good grounds for a land grab—he thought any Florida gamble worthwhile. Reading in stark terms the mind of the enemy, he wanted the government to provide for the security of its territory. “The militia of Georgia will do it in a fortnight,” Jefferson assured Eppes. We do not know for certain whether Madison’s initial appeal to George Mathews involved Jefferson’s input, but it is reasonable to conclude that Madison knew precisely where Jefferson stood when he stopped short of giving Mathews the green light. It was too soon for East Florida.44

  Once again it is the southern mind, its long-prevailing sense of opportunity, competition, and risk, that explains all governing motives in the Gulf area drama of 1810–11. Madison understood and supported the impulse to acquire new land and banish foreign influence; but he seems to have been sensitive to appearances and unwilling to rile Britain, France, or Spain without sufficient cause. Jefferson’s motives typically involved fears of encroachment, which in this case was the fear that his nation’s freedom of movement was to be somehow restricted by Great Britain. Madison did not see quite the same threat. Yet in the end he came away with West Florida, using a convenient legal interpretation of the Louisiana Purchase to justify an extralegal filibuster. This was political canniness, if not political genius.45

  Militancy made sense to a certain breed of American—generally, though not exclusively, southern Republicans. They were motivated by the desire for land on which to cultivate cotton and other cash crops; they were motivated by the desire to sell surplus slaves in the West. In 1802, while trying to squeeze Napoleon to give up New Orleans, then–Secretary of State Madison had capitalized on the same phenomenon when he advised U.S. minister to France Robert Livingston to drop hints that disgruntled Americans might provoke incursions of their own into Louisiana. James Monroe was another who long favored strong action with respect to Spain. They all had a convenient rationale: men like George Mathews were everywhere. Government officials wanted it understood that forces operating in and around the Gulf were too large and too random for them to control. General Andrew Jackson would be next, and the most successful of all, finally securing East Florida and becoming its first territorial governor in the years immediately after Madison left the presidency to Monroe.

  “Silence the Growlings”

  Among the younger generation of Virginians who were increasingly involved in Madisonian-Jeffersonian politics, Congressman John Wayles Eppes is one of the least remembered. In the lead-up to the War of 1812, however, he was a valuable liaison between the executive and legislative branches of government, no mere mouthpiece of the administration.

  From the moment of Madison’s accession to the presidency, Eppes took an interest in both military and civilian appointments as they related to Louisiana and U.S. relations with Spain. Early in 1810 he alerted Madison to information reaching him from army circles that rates of desertion were high among U.S. troops in New Orleans, and that General Wilkinson was responsible for the deaths of many of those in his command by exposing them to unsanitary conditions and stationing troops in swampy areas. Eppes advised Madison that the shady general, an alleged pensioner of Spain, had by this time “lost completely the confidence of nine tenths of all persons with whom I am acquainted.” Wilkinson would be brought up on charges and, in spite of the efforts of those like Eppes, somehow survive long enough to embarrass himself anew as a wartime commander.

  Eppes was one of the Jefferson intimates invited to comment on the batture case. In addition, he kept his former father-in-law up to date on partisan debates in Congress over West Florida annexation. Expressing himself with no less reserve when he spoke to the sitting president, Eppes urged Madison in early 1811 to wait for evidence of French cooperation before strengthening the terms of nonintercourse with England. His established position in Congress underscored the slow but steady shift in policy formulation from the Revolutionary generation to its successor: men born in the early 1770s, bearing no memory of life as colonial subjects, were grabbing national headlines.46

  With Jefferson in retirement, Madison in Washington, and the Federalists diminished in number but not in noise-making, the third and fourth presidents knew that history was chronicling their career achievements and shortcomings and would continue to do so whether or not they weighed in. As a compiler of notes and an inveterate record-keeper, Jefferson is known for his many vocations: He accumulated thousands of books in several languages; he studied and savored wines; he carefully annotated his correspondence, made architectural drawings, undertook encyclopedic studies of flora and fauna, and pursued Indian vocabularies. He recorded all expenditures made for his farms when he stayed at home, and he kept track of expenses large and small on the road, when he traveled near and far, down to the cost of a shave and the tips he gave to Madison’s servants when he visited Montpelier. But he also, and with extreme care, put his political house in order between 1809 and his death seventeen years later. His purpose in the reorganization and recalibration of the past was collective as much as it was personal: he wished to ensure that America’s founding era was painted with a Republican rather than a Federalist brush.

  For years already Jefferson had been appealing to the poet Joel Barlow to write an authoritative political history. Though Connecticut-born and Yale-educated, Barlow was of a modest genealogy and a Republican in temperament. He had lived long in France before returning to the United States in 1802. “Mr. Madison and myself have cut out a piece of work for you,” then-President Jefferson had appealed. “We are rich ourselves in materials, and can open all the public archives to you.” He insisted that Barlow move to Washington, “because a great deal of knoledge of things is not on paper, but only within ourselves for verbal communication.” It is hard to know for sure whether the sly and seductive tone we automatically read into Jefferson’s language bore an equally conspiratorial flavor for Barlow as he read the letter. The poet kept Jefferson on hold, and when he was about to embark on a diplomatic mission for Madison in 1811, Jefferson appealed to him one last time: “What is to become of our Post-revolutionary history?” Joel Barlow died in 1812, while on that mission. And the history Jefferson wanted written would not appear in his lifetime.47

  Because of Madison’s more guarded manner, far less is known of his predilections in this regard, though we have Jefferson’s testimony that the two of them were equally involved in the solicitation of Barlow. For some reason President Madison was poring through his papers at Montpelier during the summer of 1810 and was upset not to find among them “a delineation of Hamilton’s plan of a Constitution,” in Hamilton’s own hand, dating to the time of the Constitutional Convention. In 1791 he had asked Jefferson to make copies of his notes from the convention, for safekeeping, and in 1810 bade Jefferson to help him look for the missing Hamilton document. Jefferson in turn asked his son-in-law Eppes, who as an eighteen-year-old had written out the copies; he amazingly recalled the pin that fastened these particular pages. Writing Madison directly, the now-thirty-seven-year-old congressman Eppes detailed the procedure by which he undertook the “entirely confidential” trust of making the copies. All these years later he was able to assure Madison that he had returned the Hamilton piece with the rest of the papers, and indeed Madison took another look and found what he sought.48

  Whatever it was in the historical record that concerned Madison at that moment, his history could not be completely written before relations with England and France were resolved. And for now he was strapped to a secretary of state who was sapping the strength of the executive. Robert Smith demonstrated loyalty only to his senator-brother, Samuel, who had grown increasingly resentful toward Gallatin, the only cabinet member to whom Madison accorded real power. Gallatin knew infinitely more about international affairs than his rival Smith did, but he was convinced that the Smiths
were conspiring to make Robert president in 1812. Jealousy was clearly a factor in the Smith-Gallatin rift. Even their wives quarreled. After one extremely bitter social encounter, Smith said he would have shot Gallatin if given the chance. Dolley Madison sought to calm matters between the Smiths and Gallatins, but to no avail.49

  During the spring of 1811, when the administration could little afford it, its family squabble reached the breaking point. Smith revealed information about U.S. distrust of the French to a British representative, implying that the British had cause to question the president’s candor. Madison confronted Smith, denouncing him both for undermining Gallatin and for making the president’s job difficult by operating behind his back. Smith denied that he had any bad intent.

  Technically, it was Gallatin who offered his resignation. But he may have done it as a ruse, in consultation with the president, to bring matters to a head and yield the result Madison wanted. Gallatin could not be spared, of course, and Smith was dismissed. Madison offered him, as a consolation prize, the St. Petersburg ministry, currently occupied by John Quincy Adams, who disliked Russia intensely. After initially expressing interest, Smith thought twice before rejecting what he termed an “insidious” offer. Next, he set out to repudiate Madison before the public, vowing to his brother that he would “overthrow” the president. The forty-page pamphlet he published in July 1811 was aimed at personal vindication, but it went so far as to label the president “unmanly” for conducting a weak foreign policy. Madison prepared to defend himself, drafting a memorandum on Smith’s activities in case public opinion turned against him or he was forced to answer charges before Congress. He told Jefferson that much of what Smith wrote could be answered only by “disclosures” from himself, which the duties and decorum of his office precluded. He could only hope, he said, that others would see to it that the “whole turpitude” of Smith’s conduct was exposed.50

  How unmanly Madison was by the standard of the day is best measured in political terms, because that was what his opponents really meant by their insults. Madison was slender and never hearty, of course. The prolific Washington Irving, not yet thirty when he met the president, was already a popular satirist, but his world-famous short stories were yet to be conceived. Introduced around Dolley’s drawing room, “hand in glove with half the people in the assemblage,” he pronounced upon the president: “Poor Jemmy! he is but a withered little apple-John.” Shriveled up perhaps, but Madison was a fan of Irving’s and approved his spicy attitude. Literature, he knew, could not exist without quirks and humorous distortions.51

  Political emasculation was another matter entirely. Madison’s critics took aim at those they referred to as “submission men,” whose cowardly subservience left the country without a manly defense or its national honor. The so-called invisibles or malcontents who rallied round the Smiths demanded some form of military retaliation against Great Britain in place of passive economic coercion. Surprisingly, Madison’s old Virginia friend Wilson Cary Nicholas abandoned him in protest against the administration’s relatively modest commercial warfare policies. As Nicholas put it, “Every expedient short of war was submission.”52

  To Madison’s dismay, Philadelphia Aurora editor William Duane, a longtime ally, became an angry opponent after 1809. Taking the side of the Smiths against Gallatin, he roundly criticized Madison. So despite a tormented history with printers and editors, Jefferson decided that this was one time when it made sense for him to get directly involved. He enjoyed a good rapport with Duane and felt he might persuade the editor to return to the fold.

  In March 1811, only days before his first appeal to Duane, Jefferson received a letter from Jack Eppes that may have convinced him to pursue the course he ultimately took with Duane. “The rancor of party was revived with all its bitterness during the last Session of Congress,” Eppes wrote. “I consider the scenes of 1798 & 1799 again approaching.” No one else had presented such imagery to Jefferson—summoning back the “reign of witches”—and it had to have affected him in some way. Concerned about the election of 1812, Eppes laid out the risks and the possibilities: “Our principles are staked on the support of Mr. Madison—A change in our foreign relations would enable him to ride triumphant, put down his opponents in Congress & silence the growlings of those who ought to possess his entire confidence.”53

  Jefferson knew that Madison could not afford to lose the state of Pennsylvania, where “growlings” were coming from the presses of the Aurora. Writing on March 28, he asked Duane to reconsider, and to indulge differences in political outlook that Jefferson considered relatively minor. “I believe Mr. Gallatin to be of as pure integrity … as [the] most affectionate native citizen,” he testified. During his eight years as president he had come to know the character of his treasury secretary “more thoroughly perhaps than any other man living”; and, he amplified, “I have ascribed the erroneous estimate you have formed of it, to the want of that intimate knoledge [sic] of him which I possessed.”

  Jefferson’s exhortation to Duane continued for pages, emphasizing the need for Republicans to recover their common purpose. “If we do not act in phalanx,” he wrote, “I will not say our party, the term is false and degrading, but our nation will be undone.” Alluding to the ambiguities that had resulted in schism, he added with conviction, if with a less than fully honest recollection: “I have ever refused to know any subdivisions among [the Republicans].”54

  Jefferson sent Madison a copy of his letter. “I shall make one effort more to reclaim him from the dominion of his passions,” he said of Duane after several weeks had gone by. And when he did, he tried both stick and carrot, informing the editor that Virginians had lost both sympathy and respect for the Aurora. Jefferson appealed first to conscience, and then to a sense of honor, before suggesting to Duane that the mind can be led, “step by step, unintended & unpercieved by itself,” to self-destructive acts. “The example of John Randolph, now the outcast of the world, is a caution to all honest & prudent men,” he pressured, adding a personal touch before he closed: “It would afflict me sincerely to see you … become auxiliary to the enemies of our government.” This was a letter written with extreme care, but not without a tone of finality. Duane would recognize it as an ultimatum. After waiting another month for the answer that never came, Jefferson told Madison: “It probably closes our correspondence as I have not heard a word from him on the subject.” In the interim Jefferson redoubled his effort to see that Thomas Ritchie of the Richmond Enquirer was “correct as to the administration generally.” It was essential to shore up Virginia Republicanism before any other advantage could be sought.55

  Madison had been far less sanguine all along. While he credited Duane as “a sincere friend of liberty,” he did not regard him as “rational or friendly” when it came to the team of Madison and Gallatin. Nor did Madison expect the editor ever to be anything but a slave to his passions. “He gives proofs of a want of candor, as well as of temperance,” the fourth president unloaded to the third. In the end Jefferson had to agree. When May rolled around, he told an ally, attorney (and future attorney general) William Wirt: “It is possible Duane may be reclaimed as to Mr. Madison, but as to Gallatin I despair of it.” In the same letter he echoed Madison’s belief as to Duane: “His passions are stronger than his prudence, and his personal as well as general antipathies, render him very intolerant.” The Smiths and William Duane had succeeded in producing a schism in Madison’s first term to equal that which Jefferson had endured in his second. And the partisan newspaper, an American institution that Madison and Jefferson could not say they were entirely innocent of promoting, had become the channel through which President Madison—whose circle of friends was now much constricted—had to fight for his political life.56

  Robert Smith’s long-overdue departure from State made it possible for Madison to redefine administration foreign policy. He did so by repairing, once and for all, the personal breach his predecessor had cared about most. Madison wrote Jefferson laco
nically: “You will have inferred the change which is taking place in the Department of State. Col. Monroe agrees to succeed Mr. Smith.” Jefferson was able to read into those two sentences everything Madison intended him to know. His reply was elaborate: “I do sincerely rejoice that Monroe is added to your councils. He will need only to perceive that you are without reserve towards him, to meet it with the cordiality of earlier times. He will feel himself to be again at home in our bosoms, and happy in a separation from those who led him astray.” There is an indication that before Madison made this appointment, he had asked Jefferson whether he would like to serve as secretary of state, in which case Monroe would have been placed at the head of the War Department.

  Why would Madison have wanted Jefferson back at the State Department? Was it not obvious to him that if Jefferson rejoined the government, “Little Jemmy Madison’s” image problem would only have deepened? Or perhaps Madison’s ego was not so sensitive that he would be concerned about that. Surely his enemies would have termed the appointment an admission by Madison of his own incompetence. On the other hand, Madison’s motivation is fairly obvious: after all the problems caused by the Smiths, he wanted a reliable Virginian, someone he completely trusted, in key posts. Jefferson had to have thought Monroe the perfect candidate and was not being merely rhetorical when he said he was tired of the daily routine of government and unwilling to subject himself to further mutilation in the press. Refusing to reenter the maelstrom, Jefferson noted of Monroe’s new situation: “I learn that John Randolph is now open-mouthed against him.”57