Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  Madison was growing more daring. When he called for an enlarged navy and praised the crews of the victorious American ships for their gallant reprisals, he defended the war as one of “manly resistance” to British tyranny. The United States would remain “colonists and vassals,” he said, as long as the nation submitted to British domination of the high seas—“that element which covers three-fourths of the globe.” He had begun to confront one of the unsound premises of Jefferson’s administration: that the United States did not need a navy of significance. The Royal Navy, with some thousand warships, completely outclassed the U.S. fleet, with barely five seaworthy frigates. A naval presence large enough to stand up to an aggressor had to become part of the American arsenal, not merely to carry on war but to prevent it. As Gallatin admitted to his brother-in-law at this time, the growth of the navy would be an essential ingredient in America’s autonomy after the war. “Taught by experience,” he wrote, the government would be channeling public resources into the navy so that “within five years” it would be in a “commanding position” in its Atlantic neighborhood.9

  During the American Revolution, Madison had recognized the need for a strong navy. His assessment of the conditions the nation faced in 1813 marked a revival of that earlier commitment. In fact, war caused Madison to change his opinion about several articles of the Jeffersonian faith: no direct taxes, no national bank, and a reliance on gunboats. When he appointed Jones secretary, Madison selected a man who despised gunboats. Of the one hundred coast-hugging gunboats on the water in 1813, Jones took more than half out of commission, asking Congress to grant the president permission to sell boats not in use. They were “sluggish in their movements,” he said, and were no match for warships. Scattered about the country, the gunboats were mere “receptacles of idleness and objects of waste and extravagance without utility.” Jones did not mince words.

  Madison backed him fully. When Jefferson wrote in May, pleading for “the humble, the ridiculed, but the formidable gunboat” to defend the Chesapeake, going so far as to send Madison a detailed map of how they might be positioned, he did not receive the reply he expected. Softening the blow, Madison told him a little white lie, that “the present Secretary of the Navy is not unfriendly to gunboats.” He then repeated Jones’s critique almost verbatim: gunboats were “too slow in sailing, and too heavy for rowing, they are limited in their use to particular situations, and rarely for other than defensive co-operations.” While Federalists mocked the country’s “formidable armada of gunboats,” Madison decided to quietly phase them out of existence. In 1815 he secured congressional approval to sell all that remained.10

  “Repent Even at the Eleventh Hour”

  By the early spring of 1813, Madison’s two newest cabinet members had brought energy and order to their troubled departments. Jones took the first step in constituting a naval bureaucracy by overseeing shipbuilding at the Washington Navy Yard and acting to eliminate sources of friction over rank—navy captains had hitherto been subordinate to army commanders. Armstrong was just as busy reorganizing the War Department. Less than half of the regular forces were under arms at the time he took over. An army needed a supply system to operate effectively as it advanced, and so he named quartermasters for each military district to arrange for the purchase of food, clothing, arms, and ammunition.

  But Madison’s cabinet was no more united than it had been. Just as Monroe exhibited jealousy and suspicion of Armstrong, Gallatin watched nervously as Armstrong used the power of appointment to build up a personal base, giving important posts to Gallatin’s foes in Pennsylvania. This included editor William Duane of the Aurora. And as his personal secretary, Armstrong named Robert Smith’s nephew. Gallatin was regretting his earlier endorsement of the wily New Yorker.11

  But a more serious crisis confronted Gallatin. Five days into March he informed the president: “We have hardly enough money to last till the end of the month.” Any future military operations would be threatened, he warned, if the government could not find funds soon. Republicans in Congress had made the problem worse by mulishly rejecting, in their last session, his proposal for direct taxes. This left Gallatin with little choice but to cultivate private investors. His main prospects were the German-born New York merchant John Jacob Astor and the Philadelphia banker Stephen Girard—ironically, the kind of speculators Madison had dismissed in the 1790s as depraved “gamblers” and Hamiltonian tools. Astor offered little encouragement. He explained that most financiers were skeptical of the way the administration was handling the war and proposed a radical, entirely unrepublican solution: the administration should charter another bank of the United States, and borrow from the bank to finance the war.12

  The bank would have to wait, as the nation learned of Napoleon’s crushing defeat in Russia. Republican newspapers assessed the implications of the shocking news. Some claimed that the reports had been exaggerated in the British press; others anticipated a likely increase in British operations against the United States, as military operations against France were scaled back. As one New York editor concluded: “Every defeat sustained by Bonaparte in Europe is a victory gained not by Russia, by Spain, but by our own enemy England.”

  An unusual proposal came from Alexander I of Russia. The tsar offered to mediate the conflict between Great Britain and the United States. Madison wasted little time before accepting the offer and appointed his ever-controversial, French-speaking right-hand man to the diplomatic mission. Albert Gallatin would join John Quincy Adams, already in Europe, and they would end impressment and bring the war to an honorable end. At least that was the plan.

  Madison’s choice made strategic sense. Gallatin was more than a diplomat—he was the president’s most trusted adviser. Astor and his friends would take heart. Having Treasury Secretary Gallatin on the commission said to these tightfisted financiers that the government was serious about the mission. Indeed, the sudden prospect of peace convinced the wary investors to agree to $10.5 million in urgently needed loans, most of which was promptly allocated to the War Department.13

  Old resentments toward Gallatin quickly resurfaced. This time a group of malcontents headed by Virginia Republican William Branch Giles, taking their cue from New York Federalist Rufus King, questioned whether the president had the authority to appoint one man to two such important positions. Madison assumed he did, and on June 3, 1813, one month after Gallatin and fellow negotiator Federalist James Bayard of Delaware set sail for St. Petersburg, the president notified Congress that Secretary of the Navy Jones would serve as acting treasury secretary during Gallatin’s absence.

  Madison, overworked, took ill at this time. Rumors that he was dying spread across Washington. At the end of June, on the fifteenth consecutive day of a “remittent” bilious fever, Madison remained under the simultaneous care of three physicians. Dolley was constantly by her husband’s bedside. Monroe gave Jefferson a blow-by-blow account of the president’s condition; the National Intelligencer issued daily bulletins. One cold-blooded critic, who signed his name “Virginius,” diagnosed Madison’s disease as one caused by a mass of “parasites, sycophants, and flatterers”; he hoped that as Madison faced his maker he would see the error of his ways and “repent even at the eleventh hour.” If he should escape death, the president would then return to the world of the living ready to end the war.

  Next, Vice President Elbridge Gerry fell ill, and Monroe conjured a darker plot. He believed that the Senate wished to elevate the unfulfilled Giles first to president pro tem of the Senate and then to the presidency, along the line of succession established in the Constitution. Monroe pictured Giles, Madison’s most virulent enemy at this moment, maneuvering to sink his own chances of winning the presidency in 1816. It was an extreme scenario, but Monroe’s lurid imagination was engaged, as rancor coming from the Senate remained intense.

  Even as he fully recovered in July, Madison did little to alleviate the schismatic situation. He agreed to informally discuss the Gallatin appointment
with members of the Senate committee who were then considering how to respond to it. But in explaining his position to them in writing in advance of the meeting, Madison ultimately left no room for argument. He insisted that the Senate might advise, but could not dictate, to the president. The committee, as a body, marched over to the executive mansion prepared for a showdown. They presented their resolutions, and Madison rejected them. A prolonged silence ensued. The president’s stubbornness fed their anger, and enemies old and new, offended by his brusque treatment, mustered enough support to defeat Gallatin’s diplomatic appointment by one vote.14

  The spring and summer of 1813 were precarious months in the war effort. While Armstrong attempted to bring order and system to land-based forces, Britain stepped up efforts to blockade U.S. ports, from New York to the Chesapeake, Charleston, Savannah, the Mississippi, and anywhere American privateers set sail. By late spring, British raids along the Maryland and Virginia shores were being met with little opposition.15

  Whether or not owing to Napoleon’s setbacks, the British had become more aggressive. Former British foreign secretary Lord Wellesley provoked members of Parliament by asking: “What have we done? Nothing—nothing to intimidate—nothing to punish.” Americans had to suffer, or the war would drag on. Jefferson recognized that Virginia and Maryland would become prime targets for the enemy. Random raids of towns along the Chesapeake would have their desired effect on the middle states—“the most zealous supporters of the war,” as he reminded Madison. The Virginia militia ably defended Norfolk, but Hampton was not so lucky. Reports of British outrages circulated: rape and murder as well as plunder.

  Men of Virginia were called to arms to rise in defense of American womanhood. The House of Representatives issued a report on “British Barbarities,” highlighting the “shrieks of innocent victims of infernal lust at Hampton.” Some six hundred Virginia slaves fled to the British, reawakening Virginians’ fears from the days of Lord Dunmore. As British ships appeared at the mouth of the Potomac in July 1813, clashing cabinet members Monroe and Armstrong rushed out to meet the danger, with their companies of volunteers and regulars respectively. Hearing this, Secretary of the Navy Jones observed with more than a hint of sarcasm that the two were really “running for the Presidential purse.”16

  Although Republicans were opposed, on principle, to raising taxes, British raids so close to Washington may have prompted Congress to accept what Gallatin had earlier called “necessary evils.” Congressman Charles Jared Ingersoll disputed his fellow Pennsylvanian’s choice of words but not his policy. There was nothing evil about taxes, even direct taxes, he argued before the House: “War cannot be waged without finances.” He saw a silver lining in the cloud of battle, if the United States emerged from the fight with “a good system of permanent internal revenue.”

  Few would agree openly with Ingersoll. The Republicans seemed hopelessly divided. So when they rallied to pass revenue bills, they caught the Federalists off guard. With lobbying help from Acting Treasury Secretary Jones, the Pennsylvanians were able to nudge the legislation through, though the taxes imposed would not go into effect until 1814. Madison strongly endorsed the tax increase, taking a decisive step away from Jefferson’s minimalist approach to federal government.17

  One bright spot for Madison and Jefferson was the victory of Jefferson’s son-in-law, the since-remarried John Wayles Eppes, who bested John Randolph of Roanoke in a House contest that bore symbolic weight for the administration. The isolationist Randolph had campaigned vigorously. In spite of his soaring rhetoric and captivating storytelling, the establishment triumphed over the carnival act. Congressman Eppes served as chair of the powerful Ways and Means Committee.

  Eppes had his doubts about the Gallatin-Jones tax package. He felt that the constitutional rule of using population to apportion direct taxes (from which the insidious three-fifths clause was derived) was flawed. His Virginia instincts kicked in, as he alluded to disparities between old and new, and agricultural and commercial, states. He wrote to Jefferson that he saw no just reason why “a given population in an uncultivated Forrest” should pay the same tax on personal property as an advanced manufacturing and commercial center, or a more productive agricultural community. Why, he posed, should the state of Ohio, “just arriving into political existence,” pay the same tax as the state of New Jersey? Only indirect taxation (customs fees, for example) ensured that the system of taxation would not oppress the people. But even with his strong reservations, Eppes had to acknowledge that direct taxation was “unquestionably the best” means to balance the budget. So he decided to remain silent during the House debate and to vote for most of the revenue bills. It was by no means easy to navigate between the old Jeffersonian philosophy of limited taxes and Madison’s pragmatic new approach to prosecution of the war.18

  Eppes was torn, but his father-in-law was plainly disgusted. In a long letter of June 1813, Jefferson gave vent to his mounting concerns about government finances. He feared, he wrote frantically to Eppes, “debt, bankruptcy—and Revolution.” To explain the problem, he repeated his 1789 theory that “the earth belongs to the living,” restating that the debts of one generation must never burden the next. Funding war through debt, like a dependency on paper money, was, he insisted, a discredited way of thinking, in “slavish imitation” of Great Britain. He believed that the United States had already grown too fond of banks—state banks were generating an uncontrollable inflation. The charter of the first national bank had expired in 1811, and Jefferson did not think that chartering another national bank was the solution to anything.

  He proposed alternatives, willing to do virtually anything at this point to minimize the power of banks and bankers. First, the government had to stop borrowing money from “self-created money lenders,” and here he had the likes of John Astor and Stephen Girard in mind. With any loan, he said, Congress should pass an accompanying tax (he did not specify what kind), guaranteeing that the loan was redeemed within a reasonable amount of time. Then instead of piling up debts, the government would issue short-term Treasury notes to further help cover the expenses of war. He believed that such a program would obviate the need for banks and keep the federal budget balanced.

  Jefferson did not seem at all alarmed that he would be granting Congress the power to control the circulation of money—at least during times of war. He imagined that the states south and west of New England would all be willing to rescind state bank charters and redirect their hard coin, or specie, to the coffers of the federal government. When Washington controlled most of the specie, it could offer Treasury notes at good rates, eventually forcing even the holdout states to join in, putting many state banks out of business. Every generation had a natural right to be free from its parents’ debts, Jefferson reasoned, but “no one had a natural right to the trade of the money lender.” Increasing the power of the federal government by giving it complete control over the money supply, he was willing to adopt an essentially Hamiltonian structure, solely in order to rid the nation of avaricious bankers and their unhealthy profits. As he envisioned it, his plan would provide a healthy cleansing of the economy, while preserving the United States as a more moral, and essentially agricultural, nation.

  As before, Jefferson was preoccupied with patrolling boundaries. In A Summary View in 1774 he had defined America’s distinct corporeal identity: a country created on its people’s own blood-drenched soil, a country enriched by the sacrifices of generations past. It was what endowed this people with inalienable rights. Then in contemplating the federal Constitution in 1789, he had sought to “guard the people against the federal government” by supplying a “parchment barrier” in the form of a bill of rights. Turning his attention to the states in 1798, he had claimed in the Kentucky Resolutions that each state’s corporate identity was unassailable and that, in the name of self-defense, any state could reject invasive federal laws.

  Now in 1813, as he worried about the federal debt, he set out to protect future gener
ations, each of which, in his words, constituted “a distinct nation.” One generation could no more bind its successor than it could pass laws for the inhabitants of a foreign country. When a generation ended, so did its sovereign debts. In Jefferson’s thinking, the boundary between generations was a natural chasm; it could not be crossed any more than the dead could return to the living over the river Styx.

  As much as it made him secure in purging an evil, Jefferson’s plan was not at all democratic and stood in marked contrast to the democratic theory he was and is widely known for. In his own state of Virginia, many of the existing state banks were established to extend credit to those beyond the governing class. Jefferson’s view of lending perversely assumed that only individuals with money should be able to borrow. By this logic, he would restrict yeomen farmers from the purchase of land and equipment, or any sort of self-betterment; or, crucially, from picking up stakes and relocating west. Extending the privilege of borrowing money only encourages social mobility.

  Jefferson had taken the time to write a long and polished disquisition, which he expected Jack Eppes to circulate among Republicans in Congress. “Use them or not as they appear to merit,” he said, a standard way of telling someone to spread the word. Jefferson needed congressmen in his corner before he would broach the subject with Madison. He would be sadly disappointed. Though Eppes did push the Treasury notes strategy and did oppose the charter of a new national bank, he gained few converts in Congress. Of the prominent Virginians in Washington, only Monroe seriously considered the ex-president’s approach. It would be another year before Jefferson decided to write to Madison on these subjects, when he knew that the administration had every intention of backing a new national bank.19

  “Such Gossiping Trash”

  Madison did a most un-Republican thing when he raised taxes in order to conduct an aggressive war. Banking on an invasion of Canada to improve U.S. prospects, he simultaneously hoped that diplomacy, assisted by Tsar Alexander, would bring an end to impressment and obtain peace with honor. During the first half of 1813, the British buildup on the northeastern shore of Lake Ontario and along the St. Lawrence River was matched by an American buildup at Sackets Harbor, in New York State, on the eastern shore of the lake, some forty miles south of the St. Lawrence.