Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  Not content to wait for events to take their course, he upped the ante in March when he made a Jefferson-like move, declaring the existence of a disunionist plot, hatched by New England Federalists with British connivance. An Irishman named John Henry, who had lived in America for some years before migrating to Montreal, had been hired in 1808 by the governor of Lower Canada to discover whether disgruntled Yankees, angered by the embargo, might be interested in secession. When he could not get the kind of money he felt he deserved for his services, Henry decided to sell his correspondence to the United States. Somehow he convinced the Madison administration to pay him the incredible sum of $50,000, which reportedly drained the entire fund set aside for secret services.

  Madison wrote to Jefferson that the documents obtained gave “formal proof, of the cooperation between the Eastern Junto [of Federalists] and the British Cabinet.” He sent the packet of materials to Congress, but John Henry’s papers turned out to contain no smoking gun, no names of Federalists willing to betray the Union. Madison turned next to New Jersey Federalist Jonathan Dayton, an old friend of Aaron Burr’s, convinced that Dayton was just disaffected enough from his party to reveal the names of secessionists. But Dayton had nothing to say, and Madison lost ground. The Federalists accused the administration of using the Henry incident as an “electioneering trick” to drum up Republican support in New England.

  And perhaps it was. Monroe described these events to the French minister as “a last means of exciting the nation and Congress” to get on with the inevitable. The president hoped that by hinting at treason he would silence New England; and he probably expected, too, that news of the intrigue with Henry would force London’s ministers to act with dispatch in resolving its dispute with the Madison administration. But once Henry broadcast how much he was paid, Madison suddenly looked foolish, if not crooked. Combined with the abortive attempt of George Mathews to wrest East Florida from the British-allied Spanish (called off by Madison), the president’s position was suddenly dubious, even in the South.76

  Then again, Madison may have thought he had a very good reason to play up the Henry affair. A threat of disunion—an espionage caper originating in Canada, where many Loyalists had lived since the Revolution—would be quite enough to justify a northern invasion. This, plus British-inspired Indian attacks in the West, and Canada would no longer be a passive country. With a firm push north, the border would dissolve.

  On June 1, 1812, Madison came forward with a definitive list of unredressed grievances against Great Britain. These included impressment, the Orders in Council, and incitement of Indians in the Northwest. The House Foreign Affairs Committee met and agreed that London’s hypocrisies could no longer be tolerated. The long period of anxious anticipation ended, as both houses of Congress voted for war. The tally was 79 to 49 in the House, 19 to 13 in the Senate (coming on June 17, and only after extended debate).

  Madison sent Jefferson a copy of the war declaration. Without hesitation, Jefferson conveyed his overall strategy for success. “To continue the war popular two things are necessary mainly: 1. to stop Indian barbarities. The conquest of Canada will do this. 2. to furnish markets for our produce.” As to the first, he did not have to elaborate, because Madison and he were equally eager to see if, in fact, the Canadians could be prodded to rise up against the empire. But on the matter of maintaining markets for U.S. production, Jefferson went into greater detail. It did not concern him whether U.S. carriers, neutral vessels, or even enemy ships under neutral flags were under sail, just so long as America’s commerce remained healthy. The one “mortifying” possibility, which he knew would cause farmers to turn against the war, was for their surplus wheat, meant for export, to rot in their barns.77

  It was hard to fight a war when the excitement was short-lived. Few Americans were willing to make significant sacrifices over maritime rights alone. Embargo had made that clear. And if one region of the country suffered a disproportionate burden, the war effort would certainly suffer. Madison and Jefferson both knew this. John Marshall exposed underlying tensions when he wrote in early 1812: “There would be a great majority for war if it could certainly be carried on without money.” Bellicose words cost Virginians nothing, a Norfolk newspaper observed, but many cared more for their pocketbooks than for “the liberty of which they so much boast.”

  Jefferson’s strategy was to keep the South and West happy. He was willing to concede that the Northeast was a lost cause. Madison saw things differently, by necessity. Regulars and volunteers from New England would be needed for the Canadian invasion, and he prayed that “the zeal of the S. & W. could be imparted to that region.” He assessed the situation in a letter to a friend in Massachusetts: the war would be “short and successful,” he said guardedly, if the enemy could be convinced that it was fighting “the whole and not a part of the nation.”78

  The underlying theme in Madison’s war message to Congress was that England’s refusal to treat the United States as an independent nation challenged the nation to demonstrate its honor and self-worth. Seeing America as a rival, kidnapping its sailor-citizens, inciting “Savages” to attack women and children, stealing “the products of our soil and industry,” Great Britain would bully and intimidate for as long as the United States allowed the “spectacle of insults and indignities” to continue. As an individual, Madison, of course, had never even come close to engaging in a duel. But he understood the emotive force of this language. War Hawks in Congress had beaten their drums with such overwrought phrases as “the honor of a nation is its life” and to “abandon it is to commit political suicide.” They had compared America to a young man, kicked and cuffed, or robbed and stabbed, whose one recourse was to respond with force. Americans as a group had endured “mental debasement,” a prolonged state of humiliation. “To step one step further without showing that spirit of resentment becoming freemen,” as one congressman contended, “would but acknowledge ourselves unworthy of self-government.” The president and Congress had transformed the war into a coming-of-age story, a metaphorical battle for manly vindication.79

  Reading much about neutral rights, Federalists had no idea that Jefferson was writing to Madison about improvements to the farm-based economy if the war should go as well as he expected. The voice of antiwar New England put forward a different logic: Madison was using “dark, ambiguous, and unintelligible” language to fabricate a threat of invasion where there was none. How could a “Quixotic expedition” into Canada, a foreign country, by American fighters, be called self-defense, or “proof that America was in danger”? Madison was susceptible to the same charge he had leveled at John Adams in 1798, when criticizing “hot-headed proceedings” in advance of the Quasi-War with France.

  The Federalists experienced a different reality. In 1812 they believed that Britain was willing to modify its stand on impressment. The great stumbling block, the Orders in Council, was finally being repealed. This being the case, the “rights” the president was poised to go to war over were “barren and useless” rationalizations, not real rights. The rejected Monroe-Pinkney Treaty could have achieved a reasonable settlement of Anglo-American conflict in 1807—Monroe had certainly thought so. He was cognizant of the unpreparedness of the U.S. military and sensitive to the vulnerability of U.S. coastal cities. Monroe, now a key member of Madison’s cabinet, had to know that the War of 1812 was pure folly.

  But the problem went deeper. Madison was calling state militias into service, a move the Federalists judged to be unconstitutional under existing circumstances. They urged the states to resist the president’s instructions. Several New England governors did just that, refusing to hand over their militia to federal control—especially for a far-flung campaign into Canada. State sovereignty, the old Republican calling card, was now the Federalist mantra. As unlikely as it seemed, given his past behavior, Madison was, to his northern opponents, the architect of a “consolidation” of the military power of the country.80

  Southern Federalists s
aw the irrationality of the president’s course with the same clarity. Waging war meant increasing the national debt that Gallatin was working so hard to retire. It also meant raising taxes on commerce, and Republicans were supposed to be staunchly opposed to taxes. The War Hawks seemed oddly unconcerned about these things. From Virginia to Georgia, Federalist newspapers pointed out that the president’s policy was upside down: Anglo-American trade was nearly ten times the volume of Franco-American trade, and worth protecting. U.S. interests would be served in allowing England to concentrate fully on defeating Napoleon, the real tyrant and only real threat in the long run.

  For Federalists, north and south, then, the Republican majority was temporarily out of its senses and trapped in an uncompromising position. Former North Carolina governor William Richardson Davie, a Revolutionary War hero, saw an opportunity in the midst of upheaval. “We must touch an extreme point of public wretchedness,” he wrote, “before the people could be set right.” If enough Americans were killed in the war, the Federalists would be voted back into power. This is where politics stood.81

  From the start, Vice President George Clinton had played no role whatsoever in the Madison administration. When Jefferson wrote of his own impairments to Benjamin Rush, he ventured into the subject of human nature and the aging mind, and while on the subject he offered a medical opinion of Clinton, his own former vice president: “Our old revolutionary friend, Clinton, for example, who was a hero, but never a man of mind … tells eternally the stories of his younger days, to prove his memory. As if memory and reason were the same faculty, nothing betrays imbecility so much as the being insensible of it.” George Clinton’s value to Madison, as to Jefferson, was his “imbecility.”82

  His nephew, New York mayor DeWitt Clinton, was quite a different story. A patron of the arts, surly, boastful, yet widely respected for his intellect, this Clinton was a crafty politician. In 1812, at the age of forty-three, he believed his time had come. Though a Republican, he thought he could defeat Madison by forging a coalition with New England Federalism and launched his campaign when Madison opted for war.

  It did not take long for word to spread. New Englander Henry Dearborn, who had been Jefferson’s secretary of war, informed the ex-president in March that the “Clinton party” was stopping at nothing to defeat Madison. Then in April 1812 George Clinton died, still holding office, and more than symbolically passed the torch to the next generation. In what might be considered bad taste, the Madisons hosted a party at the President’s House just two days after the vice president’s funeral.

  DeWitt Clinton’s core constituency was the Republicans (and not only New Yorkers) in Congress who opposed going to war with England. They would orchestrate his candidacy just as they had tried four years earlier to substitute his uncle for Madison at the top of the Republican ticket. “If a man of the Washington school cannot be brought forward with any success, take DeWitt Clinton,” the Trenton Federalist urged in August. “Take any sensible and honest American, not a Virginian of the present ruling party, and we shall do better.”

  Federalists had tried a similar kind of rationalization in backing “honest” Monroe over the supposedly less reasonable Madison in 1808. It had not worked. But this time New Jersey Federalists succeeded in the same way that Aaron Burr had in 1800, taking their activism to the elections for seats in the state legislature, where presidential electors were chosen. Clinton forces not only positioned themselves to deliver the state to their candidate; they also gerrymandered New Jersey so as to deprive the state of a Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Madison acknowledged to Jefferson that he understood the contest with DeWitt Clinton as a referendum on the war. He called this “the Experimentum crusis,” or critical experiment, upon which the fate of his administration would hinge. Clinton proved a formidable opponent. Although in the general election he did not pick up any states south of New Jersey, he did win in seven.83

  The gerrymandering phenomenon may not have been the invention of Elbridge Gerry, precisely, but it was he whose name became most closely associated with the maneuver. The same Elbridge Gerry was now to provide the North-South balance traditionally sought in the executive, when he agreed to serve as Madison’s second-term vice president. As old John Adams wrote to Madison in May 1812, Gerry remained “one of the firmest pillars of that system which alone can save this Country from disgrace and ruin.” Recently defeated as he sought reelection as his state’s governor, Gerry was sixty-eight years old and unmistakably meant to serve as an unambitious caretaker vice president under an embattled president who wished to be on hand to see the war through.84

  “This Most Disgraceful Event May Produce Good”

  The lack of self-censorship in the Madison-Jefferson correspondence is more apparent at this juncture than at almost any other time. Jefferson repeatedly and optimistically urged war. Madison was less cheerful about the subject but was unrestrained in expressing anxiety about all he had unleashed.

  Among his uppermost concerns was New England’s all-too-obvious resistance, which led Madison to fear that not many men would volunteer for the military. Before there were even battles to report on, he wrote Jefferson that “seditious opposition” in Massachusetts and Connecticut, with “intrigues elsewhere insidiously cooperating with it,” had “so clogged the wheels of the war that I fear the campaign will not accomplish the object of it.” With loose language, Jefferson called for different measures in different parts of the country: “A barrel of tar to each state South of the Potomac will keep all in order,” he ventured in August. “To the North they will give you more trouble. You may have to apply the rougher drastics of … hemp and confiscation”—by which he meant the hangman’s noose and the confiscation of property. This marvelous example of Jefferson’s gallows humor is a clear sign of the unguarded style he brought to his communications with Madison. His untied tongue was meant to encourage firmness, rather than literally to prescribe retaliation. He knew he could speak maliciously because he knew that Madison, and not he, was now in charge of strategy. Meanwhile the antiwar activist John Randolph found himself the target of physical threats; one of Madison’s Virginia correspondents wrote unsympathetically that Randolph should be struck down, if not by “the vengeance of heaven” then by the “the hand of his country.”85

  A series of riots broke out in Baltimore between June and August after a pro-war mob destroyed the print shop of a Federalist newspaper, the Federal Republican. The Virginian Henry (“Light-Horse Harry”) Lee was the editor’s friend and happened to be at the scene. The noted general and memorable eulogist of George Washington had recently emerged from prison, where he had been incarcerated for debt after poorly juggling his land investments. As his world was crumbling, Lee had asked his old friend Madison to assign him to a consular post in the Caribbean, so that he could keep the law from his door. Madison did nothing. While the used-up general sat in prison and paid off his debt to society, his hatred for Jefferson and the embargo caused him to seethe. It was Jefferson’s fate to be the focus of prying eyes and negative attention, and Madison’s better fortune to escape the harshest criticism.

  Henry Lee appeared in bellicose Baltimore in the summer of 1812, for the ostensible purpose of selling his memoir of the Revolution, which he had written in prison and which revisited the charge that Governor Jefferson had failed Virginia. As a guest in the house of Alexander Contee Hanson, the Federal Republican’s editor, Lee sought to restrain those present from provoking the rock-throwing miscreants who clamored outside. But as the mix of boys, middle-class men, immigrant laborers, and others invaded the house, Lee defied them and was badly beaten on the head and face as a result of his courageous stand. When the militia was called out, its members decided they would not risk themselves to protect Federalists; so they stood by the pro-war mob and evinced little sympathy for the victims—or the free press. With such activity occurring, Secretary of State Monroe warned Madison that a sedition law of some kind might be needed to avert
an escalation of violence. Madison was unmoved. He would not repeat the missteps of President John Adams by sacrificing civil liberties, even in a time of war.86

  Two months after Congress had declared that war, the president still had no inkling of the enemy’s reaction. “We have had no information from England since the war was known there, or even, seriously suspected, by the public,” he wrote. As a result, he was having a hard time justifying any offensive. In fact, Lieutenant General Sir George Prevost, the man in charge of Canada’s defense, learned in May that no troops would be sent from England for the foreseeable future. Henry Dearborn, who had developed the basic three-prong strategy—committing forces to the theaters of Detroit, Niagara, and Montreal—was put in charge of the planned assault on Montreal from northern New York State. He received and accepted a proposal from Prevost to cease hostilities. Madison rejected it and ordered Dearborn to prepare a northern invasion as soon as possible. He wanted Canada.87

  Committed to the cause, former president Jefferson had no choice but to sit on the sidelines. He read, more than he wrote, on the subject. Enlistee Isaac Coles updated him from Buffalo, complaining that he and his fellow soldiers were getting mixed messages: either they were to hunker down in the woods without adequate supplies or launch an invasion of Canada. Coles was less than sanguine. “In truth,” he wrote, “the regulars here … are without discipline & could by no means meet an equal number of British troops—You can form no conception of the irregularity and disorder that exist in every branch of the service—every one prates & no one acts.”