Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  He proceeded to catalog it all—6,487 volumes. The Federalists in Congress, to a man, voted vindictively to reject Jefferson’s library. One even called the books “infidel” in nature. By a partisan vote, then, the measure passed, and Thomas Jefferson allowed his books to be packed and shipped to Washington in the nine-foot-high pine cases in which they had been displayed in his private study. The new Library of Congress now contained twice as many books as it did before the war.72

  Jefferson had badly needed the funds from the sale of his library in order to pay back outstanding loans. At the same time he continued to oppose rechartering of the national bank. He was wary of the wild issuance of credit and unreliable circulating paper. Monroe was a cautious ally, but both Madison and Treasury Secretary Dallas had come around to the idea of a second national bank as a check on inflation—the direct opposite interpretation to Jefferson’s.

  Madison vetoed the bank recharter bill in its first incarnation in 1814, not on constitutional grounds, but because he felt it did not adequately invest the bank with the power to preserve a uniform (national) currency. Ten months later, in his annual message, he urged Congress to draft a new bill in which he ignored the rationale that the bank was primarily needed to borrow money (the argument in 1791) or collect taxes (the argument in 1814). And he gave a slight nod in Jefferson’s direction by claiming that whether the means was through Treasury notes or a national bank, the goal in either case was to establish a uniform currency. Madison would recharter the bank, but not on Hamiltonian terms.

  Congress voted in favor of recharter in April 1816, but the Bank of the United States proved to be a mixed blessing. At first a great boon to the postwar economy, rapid expansion would prove catastrophic by 1819, when prices fell, credit tightened, and the bank called in its loans. Overborrowed Americans, north, south, and west, were ruined. Smarter banking practices were then put in place, and the 1820s saw healthier growth and expansion.

  But for the moment President Madison was convinced that the bank he had once thought unconstitutional was constitutional after all—and a good way for the United States to restore pubic credit abroad in peacetime. The president was at Montpelier, during what had become the government’s traditional summer/early autumn recess, when Monroe informed Jefferson that little could be done to change minds about the bank. Any subsequent discussion the third and fourth presidents had on the bank question was verbal and remains lost to history. It was a unique state of affairs when Jefferson’s position on the bank was adopted by southern Federalists, who voted against recharter in 1816 and made noises about limiting its powers in the months preceding the Panic of 1819.73

  In 1815–16, for the first time in his long-embattled presidency, James Madison had a cabinet with which he felt comfortable. Madison and Monroe forgot the past disturbances in their relationship. Alexander Dallas was the new Gallatin, reliably reporting from Washington in the months when the president relaxed on his plantation. Senator William Harris Crawford of Georgia, a rising star, filled the opening at War, as Monroe reembraced the State Department. John Quincy Adams was the new minister to Great Britain, and Gallatin minister to France.

  An interesting transition was under way. Federalists were muting their Federalism and recommending party “amalgamation,” under the banner of nationalism, as the way forward. The more vigorous government symbolized by Madison’s acceptance of the bank led many to perceive a mitigation of the Republican ideology. New Hampshire governor William Plumer, a Monroe supporter, had been a Federalist senator during Jefferson’s presidency. He now believed that both the Federalist and Republican parties had “expired” with the end of the war, each having “absorbed into itself much of what was best in the policy of its opponents.”74

  In spite of the remaining fire-eaters on both sides of the political divide, a consensus appeared to be slowly forming. It delivered no appreciable power to a Federalist, however, unless he explicitly abandoned his original creed first. And while that consensus began to take shape in Madison’s shadow, it would emerge as a Monrovian, not Madisonian, persuasion. Still, Henry Adams recognized what happened when he later wrote of Madison’s good fortune: “Few Presidents ever quitted office under circumstances so agreeable.” The restoration of the financial system was, to this Adams, the most noteworthy element in a new calculus. “In a single day, almost a single instant,” he declared, “the public turned from interests and passions that had supplied its thought for a generation.” As the war’s outcome provided the catharsis citizens needed, Madison’s sense of urgency vanished, allowing him to reason through the science of constitutional government and preview his future “job” as elder statesman.75

  The decline of Federalism allowed for a brief respite from the politics of “faction.” As he neared his sixty-fifth birthday, Madison presided over a slowly strengthening nation. Public servants became professionals, and Congress, for the first time, voted its members a regular salary, replacing the negligible per diem meant to offset expenses. This had the added bonus of enabling more members of Congress to bring their wives and children to Washington, D.C., helping to make it more livable.76

  Although James Monroe was destined to be the last U.S. president to have participated directly in the American Revolution, the inclusiveness newly possible in political life gave indications that a generation less encumbered by Republican-Federalist wrangling was coming into its own. In that sense, Virginia-born William Crawford might have been a more representative choice to succeed Madison. He had worked his way up in the ranks from farmer to schoolteacher to lawyer, then from Georgia state legislator to U.S. senator during the middle years of Jefferson’s presidency. Madison respected his talents enough to send him to France as U.S. minister during the trying years of the War of 1812, before naming him to the cabinet.

  But there were other considerations. Those who wielded power in the federal government were leaving little to chance. The wheels had been set in motion some time back, and Madison clearly wanted Monroe’s ambition to be fulfilled. Thus, in early April 1816, the Republican caucus nominated James Monroe for president. “The service of his country has taken up a large share of Mr. Monroe’s active and well spent life,” the National Intelligencer recorded, as it showed Crawford of Georgia surprisingly close behind in votes.77

  Lest one believe that all political wrangling was past, the Virginia Argus found it necessary to rebuke as “false and malevolent calumny” a story in the Boston Gazette claiming that Crawford’s supporters in Congress had resolved to cast their lot with the Federalists. Governor Daniel D. Tompkins of New York, meanwhile, agreed to be Monroe’s vice-presidential running mate, reaffirming the Virginia–New York chain of command. And Crawford settled in as secretary of the treasury, always a prominent post in the early republic. He would hold on to it for the duration of Monroe’s two-term administration.78

  As James Madison planned a peaceful final year in office and a smooth transition, he continued to come under attack from certain enclaves in New England where the past hung on. If Jefferson could boast a cabinet with little turmoil and little turnover for eight years, Madison had seen a long succession of short-lived cabinet officers and unsuitable field generals. The Massachusetts Spy took joy in trying to list them all—dredging up the Robert Smith imbroglio and the names of military mediocrities such as Dearborn, Hull, and Wilkinson. It was all meant to show that Madison was a poor judge of character.

  Unanimity was not then, or ever, an American trait. Even among Monroe’s supporters, there were those who estimated him according to his less commendable traits: hypersensitivity, hastiness, a lackluster intellect. Typical of the shrill voices that continued to personalize politics, the Alexandria Gazette maintained a constant drone from the south side of the Potomac. “As to Mr. Monroe, there is little we know that should entitle him to the high distinction he covets,” read a representative article, “unless it is playing the fawning parasite.” In 1808, the Gazette reminded readers, the parasitic Monroe was “i
n disgrace with the old man of the mountain”—Jefferson the puppeteer. Making fun of politicians still sold papers.79

  According to the anti-administration Nantucket Gazette, while the National Intelligencer “prattled about the purity of election,” pressure had been applied to the electors of at least two states in order to push Monroe past Crawford. Under the Republicans, the Constitution was ignored, and free suffrage was a myth: “These men carry all their elections by corruption.” Federalist holdouts took the position that there was hypocrisy galore among the Republicans, whether pro-Madison in 1808 or pro-Monroe in 1816. But that was all the discredited party could do now; its editorializers shook their heads at unmannerly democrats and charged that “Peter Porcupine” and Joseph Dennie had been right all along: the party of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe encouraged profligacy in America.80

  The prevailing spirit among Republicans comes alive in the Fourth of July 1816 oration given in Windsor, Vermont, by a War of 1812 army officer named Selleck Osborn. As a Jeffersonian newspaper editor in Federalist Connecticut, Osborn had spent much of the year 1806 in jail for his supposedly libelous writings. He was a marvelous satirist who poked fun at the disgruntled Federalists who mechanically labeled Republicans as infidels and libertines. Osborn described his home state as “a country conquered by lawyers” and did not shy from exposing a justice of the peace who dispensed injustice. For speaking the truth he had to be punished most cruelly. It was not enough to lock him up—Osborn was given a mentally disturbed cellmate who had raped and murdered.81

  The Republican editor was much restored by 1816 and living in the free state of Vermont. That year he delivered a Fourth of July oration lacking none of the pizzazz that had earlier gotten him into trouble. Painting the Federalist residue as men of gloom and doom, he berated their “idle talk” about the taxes of 1816 by asking them to remember the taxes of 1799, when their party had been in charge. They could speak at length about the faults of democracy but made no acknowledgment of democracy’s merits. “We shall hear many dismal prophecies,” he said pertly, “but nothing about the falsehood of all their preceding ones.” The one line summed up his critique of an effete ideology.

  He did not profess that the Republicans were perfect. “The sun itself is not without spots,” he assured. But in praising the Virginia presidents for their efforts to see that independence stood “deeply rooted where it was planted forty years ago,” Osborn drew an unusual comparison between the wars waged by two chief executives: “In a second struggle for independence, we have, some of us, been prone to lay our misfortunes at the door of our best and ablest friends—The same spirit that would have consigned a Washington to oblivion and disgrace …, would have deposed and sent a Madison to Elba [Napoleon’s place of exile], and placed in his station, it is difficult to say whom, but certainly not a better man.” The comparison was meant to level the playing field of history: Madison had his detractors, and so did Washington.82

  On that same Fourth of July, the Madisons threw what Dolley described as a “profuse and handsome” picnic dinner on the shady lawn of Montpelier. Ninety of their country neighbors attended. Jefferson was not present, being then at his Poplar Forest retreat, more than one hundred miles away. Returning to Albemarle, he paid the Madisons a visit at Montpelier in mid-August.83

  Little could be done to stop one more Virginia Republican triumph. In the last year of his presidency, Madison spent June through early October in Virginia, his longest absence from the capital since 1800. It was a sign of his impending retirement and also a recognition that he was likely to spend the rest of his term without having to face any sudden crises. Entering the presidency at a time of acute anxiety, he exited it amid a growing sense of possibility. Meanwhile, to no one’s surprise, Monroe soundly defeated his Federalist rival, New York senator Rufus King, failing to win only the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware. Perhaps the oddly indifferent Federalist nominee said it best, as he explained why his loss was foreordained. Monroe, King observed, “had the zealous support of nobody, and he was exempt from the hostility of Everybody.”84

  “Internal Improvements”

  Before Madison took his leave, the overall atmosphere of experiment and renewal brought the constitutional issue of “internal improvements” (highway and canal building) front and center for the first time since 1808. Back then, with Jefferson’s blessing, and in a desire to secure the Union, Treasury Secretary Gallatin had prepared an elaborate report for Congress with a series of recommendations detailing the practical means and probable expense involved in linking North, South, and West. With the retirement of the national debt there would be fewer barriers to public works projects; and with its responsibility for appropriations, Congress could enact legislation without stepping on the rights of the states whose land and navigable waterways were involved in the prospective projects.

  Like Jefferson, Madison favored internal improvements in principle. All understood that good roads contributed to an increase in land values. Local authorities had traditionally built and maintained roads through taxes, but work usually stopped at the county line. Internal improvement, as a unifying national program, was something different, and the problem that concerned both the third and fourth presidents was whether a constitutional amendment was necessary to enable the federal government to undertake large projects. But whereas Madison embraced a federal responsibility for road building in service to national security and mail delivery, Jefferson was less committed to the principle; both were skeptical about internal improvements for strictly commercial ends.

  As Madison completed his second term, the age of the canal and steamboat was getting under way. The expansive energy that these innovations were to provide to a generation of settlers, and to towns all along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, was entirely unprecedented. DeWitt Clinton, Madison’s opponent in the last presidential election, was, after many years of brash maneuvering, finally to achieve greatness as the lead proponent of the Erie Canal. When the federal government refused to offer support, he established a canal commission composed equally of Federalists and Clintonians. At the end of 1815 he began appealing for funds from within the Empire State.

  Monroe’s running mate from New York, Governor Tompkins, was less than wholly enthusiastic about the project. Jefferson, on the other hand, looked over the plans Clinton had sent him and replied with zest: “The conception is bold and great, and the accomplishment will be equally useful.” Always eager for proofs of America’s superiority to the Old World, he added: “The works of Europe in that line shrink into insignificance in comparison.” For Jefferson, in so many ways a Virginia apologist, progress was, on certain occasions, a matter of national pride.

  The New York canal commissioners went ahead with a memorial to Congress in December 1816, offering an attractive cost-benefit analysis. But their final gambit yielded nothing, because the outgoing president made the matter moot. Just one day before Monroe’s inauguration, Madison vetoed the Bonus Bill championed by Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, which would have taken the first steps toward defining a permanent federal role in this crucial arena of national development and national prosperity. Meanwhile the Erie Canal, as an entirely state-sponsored enterprise, went on to make a profit even before completion, spurring Ohio and other states to imitate it, while making the federal government appear inept in the realm of internal improvements.

  Madison shocked his allies in Congress when he issued the veto.85 It was he, after all, who had urged Congress to take up the issue in his final annual message on December 3, 1816. And it was only after considerable wrangling that the House and Senate were able to come up with an agreement on the internal improvements dilemma. During those weeks of debate, the president reached the conclusion that the Bonus Bill was unconstitutional, that it undercut, in his words, the “definite partition” between the “General and State Governments.” It appeared to him too incoherent, too nonspecific, to accomplish its noble goal. It might feed dishonest dea
lings between national legislators and interested state officials looking for advantages.

  Jefferson, and later Gallatin, agreed with Madison’s second reading of the Bonus Bill. The most respected analyst of the subject, historian John L. Larson, offers a somewhat cynical interpretation of what went on in President Madison’s mind: he had come to distrust the founders’ successors. Writes Larson, “Madison watched young men with no roots in the founding take up the game of constitutional construction … Madison hoped to bind the rising generation with the authority of the Union’s creators.” If true, it might have reflected his fear of the future, but it also shows a lack of introspection on Madison’s part—for he had broken with his own past views more than once.86

  Another executive decision that Madison reached at the end of his tenure in office spoke to his interest in the authority of the Union’s creators, this one far less complicated. He directed the patriotic John Trumbull to paint four large murals for the Rotunda of the rebuilt Capitol building, taking as their subject what Madison viewed as the most memorable events of the Revolution: the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the resignation of George Washington from the Continental Army, the surrender of General John Burgoyne after the Battle of Saratoga, and the surrender of General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown. They would be life-size representations of dynamic proceedings, each one twelve by eighteen feet.

  Jefferson had played an unconscious role in Madison’s executive decision. Trumbull had conceived his iconic Declaration of Independence and Surrender at Yorktown in 1786–87, while a guest at Jefferson’s home in Paris. The Resignation of General Washington was of particular significance to Jefferson: as a member of the Confederation Congress, he had been present at the ceremony in Annapolis, in December 1783, bearing witness as the victorious general, speaking in slow, hushed tones, resigned his military commission and acknowledged civilian authority over the United States. “Having now finished the work assigned to me, I retire from the great theatre of action,” Washington had recited at that time. And now Madison was to do the same.87