Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  In the West the Shawnee leader Tecumseh proved as courageous as he was impatient with the tentative British commander with whom he was meant to coordinate operations. On the American side, William Henry Harrison seemed to be wasting money as he wasted time; the Virginia Argus thought of this native son as an inept watchmaker, “always winding up, but … never striking.” East and west, British and American forces alike exhibited their share of disorderly conduct, on and off the battlefield. In July 1813 Secretary of War Armstrong removed an increasingly despondent General Henry Dearborn (“Granny Dearborn,” to the Federalists) from his command.20

  During the second half of the year, the United States gradually achieved naval supremacy on Lake Ontario, though the balance of power there kept shifting. On Lake Erie America’s newest naval hero, Oliver Hazard Perry, redefined coolness under fire as he braved some of the heaviest fire of the war and destroyed the best of the British fleet. As he reduced their profile, the British thought it prudent to abandon Detroit. This opened the door for William Henry Harrison. Boosted by Kentucky riflemen, he crossed into Canada in pursuit of the enemy; and at the Battle of the Thames in October, Tecumseh, the eloquent spokesman for pan-Indian alliance and most formidable of warriors, was killed. Montreal and Quebec remained too heavily defended to pose a real opportunity, even for a resilient American force.

  General James Wilkinson, who tainted everything he touched, replaced Dearborn. In the spring of 1813 he was called from New Orleans to New York State and took charge at Sackets Harbor. The army assembled there was weakened by a health crisis caused by the consumption of food polluted by water that flowed through the soldiers’ latrines. But it was not long before Wilkinson was claiming that he was primed to take the war to the enemy.

  His survival as an active general, despite years of harassing civilian leaders and tormenting troops, is a remarkable story. Useful to Jefferson when he gave dubious substance to the rumors of Aaron Burr’s treasonous intent, Wilkinson found himself the subject of serious inquiry, and then a court-martial, in 1811. An investigation launched by President Madison himself found irregularities in the general’s behavior with respect to Burr and, ultimately of greater importance, in playing both sides in his dealings with Spanish authorities. But the evidence fell short of what was required to convict, and he retained his position in Louisiana, where he was universally despised. Armstrong’s decision to reassign Wilkinson to the Canadian front was done to take him out of harm’s way, politically speaking.

  From Sackets Harbor, then, Wilkinson menacingly moved his force of seven thousand up the St. Lawrence in October and early November 1813, aiming for Montreal. Taking ill, the portly general self-medicated with the opiate laudanum, which slowed his thinking and slowed the advance. His senior officers favored continuing engagements along the river, but Wilkinson proved less bold than his rhetoric and returned to winter quarters. With all his ribbons, he revealed himself a rather indecisive soldier. Like Secretary of War Armstrong, he had never commanded an army in battle and left it up to a heartier breed to engage directly.21

  These were the kinds of men who directed Mr. Madison’s ground war. Slowly, as significantly higher bounties led more and more men to enlist, better soldiers rose in the ranks and replaced Wilkinson, Dearborn, and their like. In the West, the British-Indian alliance had weakened. Any northern push would now have to come from that direction.

  Meanwhile, as he surveyed the failed Canadian campaigns, Armstrong became convinced that conscription was needed to produce a superior force. He published an editorial in a New York newspaper, calling for a regular army of 55,000 men, because the voluntary regular army and state militias had proven unreliable. Monroe, now sensitive to the political cost of such a move, persistently warned Madison against listening to his secretary of war—Monroe was convinced that militia units would fight as well as regular army. Madison ignored these warnings and allowed Armstrong to make his case to Congress. On December 7, 1813, Madison gave an address to the national legislature, in which he endorsed conscription. He was ready for drastic measures, even if it meant raising the specter of a standing army, so long anathema to republicanism.

  The collapse of the northern campaign made Monroe angry again. He demanded Armstrong’s removal. In fact, during Armstrong’s absence at the front, Monroe ordered all correspondence dealing with the 1813 campaign transferred to the State Department. His method for collecting evidence against Armstrong struck Madison as unsavory—in fact, the chief clerk at the War Department later recalled that he had never seen Madison “more in a passion.” The president was not likely to listen to a new round of Monroe’s complaints. Though wary of Armstrong, he was willing to give him another chance, believing that every move in the direction of Canada strengthened America’s hand in negotiations with England.

  With Armstrong and Monroe jockeying for power and Gallatin overseas, Madison put greater trust in the loyal, enterprising, but less personally ambitious William Jones. When Gallatin’s appointment as a peace negotiator was officially approved in Congress, Jones finally stepped down as treasury secretary, leaving that key administration position open. Madison tried to enlist the Pennsylvanian Alexander James Dallas, an outspoken Republican since the mid-1790s, who was a close friend of Jones’s. But Dallas despised Armstrong and refused to serve in the cabinet with him. The president then settled on Senator George Washington Campbell of Tennessee, a man with little skill in the area of finance. His appointment was largely cosmetic, as it relieved Jones of the bureaucratic burdens of running two departments, though the president still came to him for economic advice.22

  In the latest round of cabinet shuffling, Madison got rid of Postmaster General Gideon Granger, a DeWitt Clinton ally, after Granger attempted to use his patronage power to humiliate his boss. Instead of ratifying Madison’s choice for postmaster of Philadelphia, he had named one of Gallatin’s archenemies. Granger’s petty maneuver was, in Dolley Madison’s words, an “insult to us all.” Seeing what might occur next, Madison warned Jefferson to be wary of any “artful” letter he might receive from the outgoing official. Incredibly, Granger thought he could blackmail Jefferson into defending him. He directly threatened to publicize allegations about the sexual diversions of both the first lady and her sister. And he even insinuated that he might have to remind the public of Jefferson’s attempted seduction of his neighbor’s wife, a charge dating to the late 1760s, first leveled by James Callender, which Jefferson had owned up to.

  Jefferson did not take Granger’s threats lightly. He replied to the unwelcome letter with a stern warning: If he dared to circulate “such gossiping trash,” Granger would quickly find himself ostracized by the Republican Party. With Granger out of the way, Madison appointed Ohio governor Return J. Meigs as postmaster general. It did not go unnoticed that after the death of Dolley Madison’s sister, the husband she left behind, John G. Jackson, congressman from Virginia, had recently married Meigs’s daughter.23

  “Inertia”

  As president, Madison was not pressed by his fellow Virginians, or even by prominent northerners, to devise a remedy for slavery—except in private by his personal secretary Edward Coles. Madison did, however, witness during his second term the beginnings of what would become the South’s antebellum defense of slavery as a creditable institution. The man responsible was the quintessential Old Republican, Edmund Pendleton’s nephew and Madison’s longtime acquaintance, former U.S. senator John Taylor of Caroline.

  In 1813 Taylor published the influential Arator (Latin for “cultivator”), a guide to healthy agricultural practices that was equally a defense of Virginia tradition. In the essays, Taylor showed no sympathy for African Americans. Claiming a realist perspective, he dismissed the arguments of humanitarians and insisted that slavery was an evil that could never be “wholly cured”; “to whine over it is cowardly,” he insisted, “to aggravate it, criminal.” The realist’s solution was to perfect slave owning and contain its violent potential. For this, Taylor
drew a transparent analogy: “The history of parties in its utmost malignity is but a feint [sic] mirror for reflecting the consequences of a white and black party.” He played upon memories of the worst of the French Revolution, referencing the poorest and most shabbily dressed of the Jacobins: “For where will the rights of black sansculottes stop?” It was critical that slaves remained docile and disciplined, because slavery remained the only means to wealth in the South, and Taylor could see no better option than to maximize the efficiency of farms.24

  Taylor was convinced that free blacks were “an unproductive class” and, lacking full political rights, turned easily to vice. Their “mingling” with enslaved brethren “mutually excit[ed] each other to rebellion.” The visibility of free blacks damaged the planter’s efforts to keep his slaves happy and productive. The national government, he said, as a composite of North and South, was collectively ignorant of agricultural science and incapable of acting in the interest of the cultivator.

  Taylor joined two themes: exhaustion of the soil of Virginia and big government’s taking the side of the moneyed interest over that of the endangered cultivator. Entranced with the banking community, government only added to the southern farmer’s woes by victimizing him for owning slaves, while at the same time consigning his agriculture to “contempt and misery.” Outside the United States, according to Taylor, the agricultural interest was “a slave”; “here she is only a dupe …, deluded by flattery and craft.” If nothing were done to reverse the trend, in the end the South’s entire wealth would be squandered.25

  He had thrown down the gauntlet. Either Washington must protect the true, tangible wealth of the nation, or it would wreak economic havoc and increase the potential for widespread racial violence. Taylor insisted that the republican form of government was entirely compatible with the institution of slavery. “Slavery was carried farther among the Greeks and Romans than among ourselves,” he argued, “and yet these two nations produced more great and good citizens, than, probably, all the rest of the world.” Accordingly, Taylor rejected Jefferson’s warning in Notes on Virginia that slavery corrupted the manners of whites. Even Madison, despite an inclination to find comfort in the demonstrated abilities of free blacks in the North, would return before long to the familiar stereotype, praising the benevolent Virginia master and saying that emancipation was not likely to remedy the slave’s “natural and habitual repugnance to labour.”

  President Madison did not entirely escape condemnation for his support of slavery. His papers reveal that at least one representative abolitionist was irate enough to write to him directly and expose the hypocrisy in his complaining about Britain’s “pressing and enslaving a few thousand of your seamen,” while “you southern Nabobs, to glut your avrise [sic] for sorded [sic] gain, make no scruple of enslaving millions of the sons and daughters of Africa, & their descendants.”26

  While demeaning descriptions of the character of a slave fed the many rationalizations for the institution’s persistence, most everyone in the South agreed that a concentration of slaves in any one place increased the possibility of social unrest. The colonization/removal option, whether arising out of ostensibly humane concern for the enslaved or selfish motives on the part of whites, remained alive from the Revolution through the deaths of Jefferson and Madison.

  Jefferson’s clearest reflection during these years on the problems associated with slavery and emancipation appears in two exchanges: one with the businessman John Lynch, founder of Lynchburg, in 1811; and another, the more famous, with Edward Coles, in 1814.

  Late in 1810, a Philadelphia Quaker had been in the area of Jefferson’s Poplar Forest retreat and had hoped to find Jefferson on his property. Failing this, she conveyed her ideas to Lynch, “with a request that I would Lay the matter before thee.” Anne Mifflin, like Lynch, wished that Virginians would coordinate with existing British efforts to colonize African Americans on the West Coast of Africa. During Jefferson’s presidency, she had written to a member of Congress, asking that the plan be presented to Jefferson and had heard nothing since.

  Replying to Lynch, Jefferson explained what he had sought to do as president. His views concerning “the people of color of these states” had never really changed, he said. He had long favored “gradually drawing off this part of our population” and “transplanting them among the inhabitants of Africa.” In 1801 Virginia’s legislature, through the office of then-Governor Monroe, had requested presidential action, and Jefferson in turn recommended following the plan of the private English company that was colonizing former American slaves in Sierra Leone; or if that was logistically infeasible, to look to “some of the Portuguese possessions in South America.” Monroe raised the possibility of colonization closer to home—west of the Mississippi—which Jefferson rejected outright. He wrote to the U.S. minister in London, who informed him that the Sierra Leone enterprise was opposed to including any more African Americans in their colony, owing to their reputation for disruptiveness. The colony was by then in financial straits, what Jefferson called “a languishing condition.” His effort, as president, to interest the Portuguese “proved also abortive.” He was now a private individual, unable to perform officially, though he believed that the commercial prospects were equal to the humanitarian value in setting up an African colony. “But for this the national mind is not yet prepared,” he concluded. He spoke in favor of “the experiment,” but urged prudence and caution.27

  The more famous exchange of this period was Jefferson’s with his wealthy young neighbor Edward Coles. Born in Albemarle when Jefferson was serving as the U.S. minister to France, Coles grew up identifying with the first families of Virginia and, like Jefferson, attended the College of William and Mary. This privileged young Virginian, as secretary to President Madison, felt comfortable sending Jefferson a pressing appeal to help him bring an end to slavery in their home state. Coles planned to emancipate his slaves, bring them to Illinois, and give them land—it would be 160 acres each when he succeeded in realizing his plan a decade later.

  Telling Jefferson in his letter of July 31, 1814, that he had had such an enterprise in mind ever since he was old enough to grasp the meaning of the “rights of man,” Coles admitted he was uncertain as to the reception of his ideas. But he could not contain himself in seeking aid from his famous neighbor. “The fear of appearing presumptuous” would have deterred him, he wrote, “had I not the highest opinion of your goodness & liberality … My object is to entreat & beseech you to exert your knowledge & influence.” Do not refuse out of a fear of failure, he ventured.28

  Jefferson understood the passion that went into Coles’s composition and wrote feelingly in reply three weeks later: “The love of justice & the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain.” He owned that his passages on slavery in Notes on Virginia remained the best synthesis of his beliefs, as he recounted for Coles his own early activism: as a colonial legislator he had appealed to a senior statesman, Colonel Richard Bland, to seek “certain moderate extensions of the protection of the laws to these people.” Bland followed through, embracing Jefferson’s idea in a public forum, only to be “denounced as an enemy of his country, & treated with the grossest indecorum.” Whether or not Jefferson was suggesting a direct parallel, he was insisting that his time to make waves was past. His preferred analogy was to Virgil, the epic poet of Rome, whose Aeneid related the fall of Troy. Were he to enter the lists with Coles, Jefferson would be King Priam, long past his fighting days when he ridiculously strapped on a set of useless armor and attempted to save the city. The ex-president claimed he was too old to accomplish anything significant. “This enterprise is for the young,” he told Coles, adding: “It shall have all my prayers.”

  Coles allowed three weeks to pass before he addressed Jefferson once again. He refused to let him off the hook. “Your prayers I trust will not only be heard with indulgences in Heaven,” he said, “
but with influence on earth. But I cannot agree with you that they are the only weapons of one of your age, nor that the difficult work of cleansing the escutchion [sic] of Virginia of the foul stain of slavery can be best done by the young.” The old must combine with the young, he coached, because the old had achieved a high social station and still held the power to change course—providing that the will remained healthy. Joining together, old and young could combat the unfortunate human tendencies of “apathy,” “habit,” and “inertia.”

  Coles explained again his reasons for turning to Jefferson, whom he termed “the first of our aged worthies.” He did not invoke Madison in these letters, but Coles must have presumed—or been told directly—that the war president was in no position to tackle so contentious an issue at this moment. He seemed undeterred, though, by Jefferson’s alert rationalizations, and with an utter lack of inhibition, he reminded the ex-president that Benjamin Franklin, at a greatly advanced age, had spoken out against slavery and had the degree of influence over Pennsylvanians that Coles hoped Jefferson might have over their fellow Virginians.29

  Jefferson was not inclined in the least to accommodate Coles. In the letters of his retirement years, he wrote so often of his “love of tranquility” that the phrase became automatic. During the presidencies of Madison and Monroe, he commented at will on national and international affairs, expecting his successors as president to treat all such letters as confidential. To others, he routinely protested his desire to spend his final years away from the public eye, as a farmer, a gardener, and a family man. When the subject was slavery and race, he would listen to those whose fertile thoughts of dramatic possibilities would one day improve America. It was an extension of his theory of generational distinctiveness: the successors would shape a different destiny for themselves, based on the will of a new majority unencumbered by the yoke of the past.