Madison and Jefferson had been out of contact during the months when Chesapeake communities were feeling the might of the British forces. On September 24 Jefferson reopened communications. “It is very long since I troubled you with a letter,” he noted. The decision not to write had been based on “discretion, and not want of inclination.” He knew that Madison had more than enough concerns, but he was too moved to let any more time pass: “In the late events at Washington I have felt so much for you that I cannot withhold the expression of my sympathies.” He absolved Madison of responsibility for the burning of the federal city, assuming he had done all he could and relied on others to execute his orders.
Jefferson understood that words would be little solace. “I know,” he said, “that when such failures happen they afflict even those who have done everything they could to prevent them.” As a proud man who, as governor, fled to the hinterlands when Benedict Arnold ravaged Virginia, he added meaningfully: “Had General Washington himself been now at the head of our affairs, the same event would probably have happened.” It seems unlikely that Madison would have thought to compare his predicament to anything Washington had faced in the Revolution; but he must have been comforted, at least a little, by Jefferson’s proposition that some military setbacks were unavoidable. Never one to admit defeat easily, Jefferson predicted that the naval war on the Canadian frontier would continue to give the British pause. “While our enemies cannot but feel shame for their barbarous atchievements at Washington,” he assured, “they will be stung to the soul by these repeated victories over them on that element on which they wish the world to think them invincible … We can beat them gun to gun, ship to ship, and fleet to fleet.”
Time had come for Madison and Jefferson to address their differences on wartime finance, which Jefferson had remarked upon without detailing. The National Bank begun by Hamilton had not had its twenty-year charter renewed. Jefferson had opposed it in 1791, and nothing for him had changed. He wished to find a means of paying for the war other than the issuance of state bank notes (in the absence of a national bank). Paper money always made him uneasy, and state banks had recently stopped specie payments. But for Madison, times had changed, and he was no longer opposed to the bank, as he had been in 1791. For the United States to conduct its war, it would have to borrow. Rather than write bluntly to Jefferson, he communicated only in general terms: “To a certain extent, paper, in some form or another, will, as a circulating medium, answer the purpose your plan contemplates.”
When financing of the war was debated in Congress in 1814, Dolley’s former brother-in-law James G. Jackson proposed a new national bank, and Jefferson’s son-in-law Eppes opposed it. Through their proxies, then, the bank was a point of contention for the third and fourth presidents. When Madison dismissed his plan to privilege Treasury notes over all other sources of funding for the war, Jefferson was stunned. But Madison explained that relying on Treasury notes would only replicate the unhappy situation during the Revolution, when currency issued by the Continental Congress rapidly depreciated in value. He even told Jefferson that he felt the national bank of Great Britain was the best model to follow! Perhaps there was no time when Madison and Jefferson’s economic thinking was farther apart than this.45
Meanwhile, in the latter months of 1814, Monroe was far more interested in being secretary of war than secretary of state. If he had his druthers, he would ride at the head of the nation’s ground forces. He preferred this role to the presidency itself and had decided to disavow any interest in 1816 if he could just take over the army. But Madison had other ideas. He believed that under present circumstances, northerners would react with unprecedented hostility to a Virginian as secretary of war. Monroe had to work hard to convince Madison otherwise; he succeeded, and the Senate promptly confirmed Monroe as secretary of war, without his having to disqualify himself from the presidential race.
Looking for a successor to Monroe at the State Department, Madison considered the diplomatic choice of Rufus King, the Federalist U.S. senator from New York. But then he approached another New Yorker, Governor Daniel Tompkins, who had taken on the Clinton coalition in 1812 and 1813, and had retained office in spite of his association with Mr. Madison’s unpopular war. But Tompkins did not feel like picking up and moving his family to the burned-out national capital. When he rejected the president’s offer, Monroe again took to wearing two hats: secretary of war and acting secretary of state.46
“That Little Man in the Palace”
The autumn of 1814 was stressful. Madison hoped for a negotiated peace, but the reports from Gallatin in Europe, even before the burning of Washington, were decidedly pessimistic: “Great Britain wants war in order to cripple us: she wants aggrandizement at our expense.”47
The president found a new secretary of the navy in Benjamin Crowninshield, a native of Salem, Massachusetts, the very nucleus of New England Federalism, and this took a bit of the heat off the power-wielding Virginians. But the British spirit had risen since Napoleon’s defeat, and it seemed that nothing less than America’s submission would satisfy the government in London. Adding to the president’s burdens, Elbridge Gerry died in late November while on his way to Capitol Hill. Edward Coles informed Madison that death came quickly, “after a few moments illness, with a kind of paralytic fit.” With Gerry’s passing, the vice presidency would remain vacant for the remainder of Madison’s second term.48
The party out of power had its own ideas at this mouthwatering moment. With the destruction of Washington and the loss of Gerry, some Federalist senators tried a coup of sorts, pressuring for Rufus King to be made president pro tem and for Madison to resign the presidency. Their power grab was transparent and led nowhere fast. It revealed only that the party of Washington and Hamilton was clinging to life.49
There were no moderate Federalists anymore and had not been for some time. Those such as Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse of Harvard, who refused to toe the party line, were ostracized. “Until the memorable affair of the Chesapeake,” Waterhouse wrote to Jefferson, “I was considered as a moderate federalist”; but since defecting to the Republicans, “a secret and not an open persecution has followed me.” His medical research came under attack, and he soon realized that New England’s Federalists would stop at nothing: “When I expressed my disgust at the attempt to prostitute truth & science to the purposes of party, they discovered I was not a fit instrument for their purposes, & a species of warfare ensued.” After giving details of the whisper campaign against him, Waterhouse apprised Jefferson that the youth of the region were being militarized, but not to fight the British. He thought arch-Federalist Timothy Pickering was behind it, and that Pickering was in league with the Clintonians. He urged Jefferson to give President Madison a true account of these occurrences.50
Wilson Cary Nicholas had been critical of Madison’s deliberative foreign policy at the outset of his presidency but returned to the fold once the war was launched. In 1809 he was a “malcontent,” like the Smith brothers, to whose sister Nicholas was married; in 1814, however, their daughter was being courted by Jefferson’s eldest grandson, as Nicholas was elected governor of Virginia. The new state executive wrote fearfully to Madison that the “discontented and factious of the eastern States” concerned him as much as the British military did. While he had no concrete information from New England beyond the public papers, he had read enough to raise suspicions, and like Dr. Waterhouse, he assumed clandestine goings on. “It is the characteristic of treason to be secret,” Nicholas forewarned: “I love the union and have a strong attachment to the eastern people. It was not until very recently that I could be brought to distrust them to the extent I now do … I do not believe national antipathy was ever stronger in an Englishman towards a Frenchman than which is felt by them towards us.” It was probably true that the Federalist leaders’ feelings of resentment toward Virginia had never been greater.
Nicholas, a staunch Madison-Jefferson ally in the decade 1798–1808, could not have foun
d a more receptive audience than the man who was president in 1814. As Gerry was laid to rest in the Congressional Cemetery, Madison vented: “You are not mistaken in viewing the conduct of the Eastern States as the source of our great difficulties in carrying on the war.” Just as Federalists had, until lately, accused him of playing into the hands of Napoleon, he saw a coalition of High Federalists and their anti-Republican “priests,” as he still called the New England clergy, looking for a British victory to enable a complete separation from Virginian rule. Their delusion, Madison told Nicholas, was “scarcely exceeded by that recorded in the period of witchcraft.” He depended, he said, on the “vigorous support of the well-disposed States,” more now than ever before, and he pleaded for “zealous exertions” from Virginia.51
The bitterest Federalists referred disparagingly to the president as “that little man in the Palace” and felt an obligation to make his life a living hell as the war trudged wearily on. They believed it an act of virtue to trade with the enemy. Upon the downfall of Bonaparte, Boston threw a massive public celebration.
The war forged a strange alliance and fruitful correspondence between the opinionated John Randolph and former Massachusetts congressman Josiah Quincy, who bore the distinction of having proposed Jefferson’s impeachment during the third president’s final months in office. When Massachusetts state senator and future U.S. senator Harrison Gray Otis, a prime mover in the DeWitt Clinton coalition of 1812, voiced a states’ rights argument in 1813, Randolph laughed his way through a letter to Quincy. Resisting “Federal usurpation” in 1798–99, Randolph had been with the Virginians in supporting the same concept these New Englanders now embraced. “I rejoice,” he told Quincy. “Pray give me some light on the subject of your proceedings. It was always my opinion that Union was the means of securing the safety, liberty, and welfare of the confederacy, and not in itself an end to which these should be sacrificed.”52
The proceedings to which Randolph alluded were Otis’s call to organize a convention, which opened in Hartford on December 15, 1814. The Hartford Convention is infamous in American history for the loud whispers of secession that emanated from it. It was conceived as a meeting in which the northern Federalist minority could air its collective grievances and consider options in dealing with what was, for them, an unresponsive central government. It did not advocate outright violence, though one delegate recklessly recommended a return to the original thirteen states, leaving the West (and the territories formed out of the Louisiana Purchase) to their own devices. The Federalist press was responsible for airing the most extremist ideas that attached to the Hartford Convention.
What the meeting did do, significantly, was to propose a new constitutional convention to reconsider the justice of that representation arrangement that gave the slaveholding South a distinct advantage in the House of Representatives. Another agenda item certain to harden Madison’s resolution to silence New England’s bold resisters was the convention’s call to limit the chief executive to a single term and to deny any state the right to provide two presidents in direct succession—in other words, no Virginia Dynasty. Monroe was concerned enough that he began to prepare a military response in the event that a secession plan actually went into effect.53
If slightly less incendiary than history imagines, the Hartford Convention gave substance to the fears expressed by Governor Nicholas, President Madison, and many other Republicans. In the end, though, its timing could not have been worse for the Federalists, given the news that started to circulate across the United States shortly after the final gavel fell. Peace was at hand, and Federalism would be unable to survive it.
“The Republic Is Safe”
Along the southern frontier, a showdown was about to occur. Major General Andrew Jackson had removed the British from Pensacola in November 1814, where they had been guests of the ruling Spanish government. He had not waited for orders from Washington. (Indeed, Secretary of War Monroe had cautioned against irritating Madrid, fearing it might more overtly join in the war.) But historians generally agree that Monroe anticipated Jackson’s actions and saw no real urgency to interfere. Any letter of caution to him was merely pro forma.
As the tall, gaunt Tennessean headed for the ethnically mixed, incompetently policed city of New Orleans, he well knew its history of petty crime and the potential for violence. But he was prepared to use anyone he could find who was willing to fight the British. Worn down by dysentery, Jackson arrived there on December 1. Despite unpropitious circumstances, he rallied his forces and two weeks later declared martial law. While on the lookout for spies and traitors, he sought advice from an old ally, Edward Livingston, the adoptive Louisianan who had been Jackson’s New York Republican colleague in the House of Representatives seventeen years earlier. He made Livingston his speechwriter and a colonel.
A man for desperate times, Jackson went so far as to release prisoners from jail if they agreed to join the militia. He enlisted friendly Indians and African Americans in his army. Slaves did the hardest work, digging trenches and raising fortifications. With Livingston’s negotiating assistance, he bargained with the pirate Jean Lafitte, who had fought Governor Claiborne of late, but whose artillery would prove instrumental against the British invaders. When he took charge, Jackson sidelined Claiborne, adding to the list of public officials whose resentment he earned through his impetuousness. All that Jackson was concerned with at this moment was giving America’s overconfident enemy a rude welcome to the Crescent City. His lines extended a mile and a half, from forest to swamp, and five miles southeast. Because of the many approaches, and the rivers, creeks, and bayous, it was hard to know precisely where the British would attack. In Washington, Madison waited nervously for updates.54
Britain’s invasion force was composed of veterans of the Chesapeake offensive, veterans of the war with Napoleon, and African-born soldiers belonging to two West Indies regiments. London was so sure of victory that it sent along civilian officials meant to make the arrangements for a new colonial government. Here Jefferson’s admonitions as to the true extent of British ambitions proved justified. Since the defeat of Napoleon, the War of 1812 had become, for London’s ministers, a war of territorial capture and subjugation. Andrew Jackson put a stop to that, though the result would have been the same if he had not, as the peace treaty signed at Ghent, in Belgium, on Christmas Eve denied the British the city of New Orleans.
The Battle of New Orleans, the stuff of legend, is a rare historic event so spectacular that it could not be ruined even by generations of overeager storytellers. Disciplined British columns advanced through a dense early morning fog in the direction of the American lines, as artillery exploded in several directions. From their defensive positions, Jackson’s motley frontiersmen, inadequately trained, mowed down the brave British. The commanding general, Sir Edward Pakenham, was among the dead, and along with him a number of colonels, majors, and captains. American losses were in the tens, whereas British losses stood in the hundreds.
The entire battle lasted under two hours. As a result of what appeared to most a providential victory, Andrew Jackson earned a lifetime of celebrity and political capital that his future enemies could not discount. Caught up in the moment, even the anti-administration New-York Evening Post saw fit to praise his “unstudied simplicity and modesty.” Former National Gazette editor and now aging national poet Philip Freneau wrote to tell his friend the president that he was applying all his “poetical energy” to the production of epic verse on “the grand subject of the Repulse of the British army at New Orleans.”55
General Jackson complicated things, however, by refusing to lift martial law after news reached him that the war was over. Assuming dictatorial power, he imagined mutinies brewing around him and justified himself to Governor Claiborne: “This Sir is not a time for Complaint, or equivocation.” Jackson and Claiborne were both Tennesseans and veterans of affairs of honor, but Claiborne saw no excuse for the general’s pugnacity. Jackson clamped down on militiam
en for neglect of their duties and desertion. He jailed resident aliens based on only weak suspicions and ordered the arrest of a prominent state legislator who had openly criticized his repressive methods. Then he arrested the federal judge who challenged that action, banishing him for “exciting mutiny.” The judge in question turned the tables on Jackson, citing him for contempt, and Jackson was eventually obliged to pay a substantial fine. A letter from Claiborne reached President Madison, characterizing Jackson’s imperious manner; and while sympathetic to the general’s apprehensions, Madison could not understand the lengths to which he went. Through the War Department, he expressed his disquiet and requested of Jackson that he show more discretion in his treatment of the people of Louisiana. Fortunately for all concerned, the glory of victory drowned out these untoward memories; they only resurfaced years later when Jackson pursued the presidency.56
After the dust had settled, Jefferson wrote Madison a letter of congratulation. The glorious end of the war reaffirmed, in his mind, the country’s ability to take up arms against a perceived threat to its continental destiny. “The affair of New Orleans was fraught with useful lessons to ourselves, our enemies, and our friends,” he said. “It will show [Europe] that we mean to take no part in their wars, and count no odds when engaged in our own.” Years before, in Paris, he had rhapsodized to Maria Cosway that America took on the world’s fiercest army in its Revolution because of heart, not logic. Whether or not this second war for national independence was prudently undertaken, Jefferson rightly concluded that it fed an ever-widening sense of popular entitlement to still uncharted land and winding riverways. And the high seas would be safer too. Though the matter of impressment was unresolved, the Royal Navy no longer needed to impress American sailors into service, because Britain was at peace for the first time in more than twenty years.57
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