The problem for Madison arose only because Giles was armed with a letter Jefferson had written to him that construed tariffs as unconstitutional. Madison agreed (privately) that Jefferson had used “unguarded” language in a “hasty” letter, but he refused to give Jefferson over to the Richmond Junto. He felt it was incumbent on the political world to appreciate Jefferson’s ideas in toto and not to dwell on one ill-formed, overinterpreted statement made in 1825. Jefferson’s view on the tariff, Madison assured, was framed in terms of his warnings against abuses of power more generally. And so just as Jefferson had enlisted his protégé Joseph Cabell to sell the University of Virginia to the state legislature, Madison now turned to the same gentleman to publicize his thoughts and counter the voice of Governor Giles, who was by now imagining, without the slightest dread, the eventual breakup of the Union into regional confederacies.66
The matter of the tariff lingered, indeed festered. Flags on ships in Charleston harbor were lowered to half-mast to protest this “Tariff of Abominations.” Looking to the past for sustenance, and reading the Madison of 1798 creatively, a prominent faction in South Carolina proceeded to relate the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions to their larger complaint against the federal government. With Jackson’s South Carolinian vice president, John C. Calhoun, fast losing influence to Secretary of State Van Buren, the movement gathered steam. But as Madison would insist, there was a marked difference between the philosophies of 1798 and 1831. The first theorized that a majority of state legislatures might nullify a generally despised act of Congress; the second supposed that the principle of state sovereignty allowed a single state to withdraw from the Union if it could not find a majority of states to agree with its rejection of an act of Congress. He called the South Carolinian construction “preposterous” and a misreading of Jefferson’s thinking.
The nullifiers mined the Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies for added support from Jefferson. Some of their faith turned him into a prophet, designating him as the “high priest” of the South Carolina doctrine. It was at a Jefferson’s birthday celebration in Washington that President Jackson famously toasted “Our Union: It must be preserved,” and Vice President Calhoun, recently reborn as a nullifier, came back with “The Union: Next to our liberties the most dear.” Nothing so plainly symbolized the fissure. As the nationalist Jackson confronted the hardened resisters from his native state, Madison—and Ritchie—became aware that Jefferson’s long-unattended-to, unpublished draft of the Kentucky Resolutions in fact contained the word nullification.
Madison’s job now became to broadcast his intimate knowledge of Jefferson’s true intentions in 1798, when he committed to paper the language the nullifiers were now seizing upon. Nothing could be further from the truth, Madison cried out, than a Jefferson embracing the notion that nullification extended to the right to secede from the Union: “No man’s creed was more opposed to such an inversion of the Repub[lican] order of things.” But when South Carolina resorted to nullification of the tariff in 1832, a nullification proponent contrived a whimsical dialogue between Jefferson and Jackson, in which the former rejects the latter’s principle of majority rule: “Why the Federalists, with Tim Pickering at their head, never published a more offensive libel against me and my principles.”
Congress passed a compromise tariff in 1833, mollifying South Carolina enough that the legislature agreed to withdraw its nullification ordinance. But the bad taste did not disappear. Madison’s outspokenness enabled the likes of U.S. senator John Tyler—the next president to hail from Virginia—to condemn the last of the founders as a consolidationist. Tyler said that Madison had forsaken Virginia and that his authority could no longer be relied upon. It seems that he had created more problems for himself by “Madisonizing” Jefferson, who at the time of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions had thought more about the right of a state to secede from the Union than Madison was willing to admit. He hated the nullifiers and wanted Jefferson to hate them too.67
In the midst of this sectional impasse, Virginia revisited its state constitution, and Madison willingly served as the delegate from Orange. Chief Justice John Marshall, Senator John Tyler, Congressman John Randolph, and Governor Giles were also delegates. Oddly enough, among these names, it was Marshall the Federalist whose constitutional views Madison felt closest to. Even before this time Madison had told a northern visitor to Montpelier that the chief justice no longer reflected those heavily partisan impressions he had recorded in the fifth volume of his Life of Washington, which had driven Jefferson to actively solicit a Republican counterhistory.68
Although his health was beginning to deteriorate, former president Monroe was in attendance at the state convention. Serving on the Board of Visitors for the university since his retirement in 1825, Monroe was accustomed to seeing Madison at their periodic meetings. Madison was, not surprisingly, the only one of the ninety-six members of the 1829 convention to have taken part in the Virginia Convention of 1776, which had adopted the current state constitution.
Ongoing tension between eastern and western Virginia interests had triggered the new convention. Representation in the state legislature was unequal, and the westerners had become increasingly agitated. The decisive factor in their understanding of power was the counting of slaves in determining the composition of the state legislature. There were nine times as many slaves east of the Blue Ridge as west. Thus, the western Virginians reprised, on the state level, the role of the northern states as to representation in the national legislature.
Madison called the convention to order on October 5, 1829, promptly nominating Monroe as presiding officer, a largely ceremonial job. The motion was agreed to, and Madison and Marshall conducted Monroe to the chair. A lively debate got under way, which grew more heated as the weeks passed. Despite his advanced age, Madison took part in every meeting. On the key issue he favored compromise, modestly reducing the eastern majority in the House of Delegates, while retaining the existing measure of representation in the Senate. He spoke at length only once, on December 2. As he rose, the convention recorder noted, “the [other] members rushed from their seats and crowded around him.” He appears to have been neither surprised nor even bothered by John Randolph’s rambling of that day, in which the obstructionist congressman took direct aim at the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, mocking his populist language in Notes on Virginia. “We all know he was confident in his theories,” Randolph said of Jefferson, “but I am a practical man and have no confidence a priori in the theories of Mr. Jefferson, or of any other man under the sun.”
Madison ignored the inconsequential and chose to focus instead on slavery, “that peculiar feature in our community, which calls for a peculiar division in the basis of our Government.” It was crucial to their character that Virginians, he said, in apportioning power in the legislature by assigning a value to slaves for the purpose of representation, should not ignore the slaves themselves. They should be seen in the light of their humanity, he commanded, and not simply as property, so that whatever determination was made as to representation, the quality of life for African Americans would be improved. “The mere circumstance of complexion cannot deprive them of the character of men,” he said meaningfully. In 1801, at the time of the death of Madison’s father and nearly at the height of his slave owning, Montpelier’s unfree taxable population stood at 108; at the time of the 1829 convention it was 61—a result of financial setbacks and not manumissions. “We must agree on some common ground, all sides relaxing in their opinions,” he urged.
Madison’s refrain made sense. Compromise had brought about the federal Union; compromise should prevail in Richmond as well. He concluded his address to the delegates with a bid for calm: “I have now more than a hope—a consoling confidence, that we shall at last find, that our labors have not been in vain.” His voice was low, and many of his hearers could not make it out; still, none could have been confused by his message. Virginians needed to overcome their passion and provincialism. This was
the sentiment on which he chose to end his career as a statesman.69
“Pandora with Her Box Opened”
Monroe’s health had been steadily deteriorating since Richmond—he had had to step down from the chair before the close of the convention. In September 1830 he lost his wife of forty-four years and subsequently moved in with their daughter and son-in-law in New York. In April 1831 he wrote to Madison, stating that he would be unable to attend any more meetings of the Board of Visitors, and tendering his resignation. In reply, Madison told him: “The effect of this, in closing the prospect of our ever meeting again afflicts me deeply, certainly not less so than it can you.” Of his own condition, Madison claimed “comfortable health” for the moment, but he reminded his old friend that he had already lived “a decad beyond the canonical three score & ten, an Epoch which you have but just passed.” Despite the inauspicious tone of Monroe’s letter, Madison held out a hope that the commencement of spring would restore his strength and he might yet undertake a journey south. His own “stiffening fingers” were making for a smaller handwriting, and he noted that “my feet take shorter steps.” But he seemed reluctant to accept that Monroe, seven years his junior, was dying. On July 4, 1831, five years to the day after Jefferson and Adams died, James Monroe’s life ended in New York.70
Even as Madison was reading Monroe’s last letter, James K. Paulding, archetype of the Knickerbocker school of writers and once Madison’s close companion, was feeling him out on the subject of a “life and letters” biography. Born during the Revolution, Paulding appears never to have seen Jefferson in the flesh. He wrote Madison now, asking for unique anecdotal materials on the primary founders and especially himself.
He received a surprisingly tepid reply, similar to what Madison had earlier written to Henry Lee IV. He was not interested in conveying his life according to the self-revelatory model of Benjamin Franklin. He admitted to “awkwardness” about the prospect of preparing a personal sketch, even for his friend Paulding: “My life has been so much of a public one that any review of it must mainly consist of the agency which was my lot in public transactions … Any publicity of which selections from this miscellany may be thought worthy, should await a posthumous date.” Asked about Franklin, Madison said he had nothing to add to what was already known. Regarding John Adams, he said simply that they did not meet until 1789, adding, with intentional vagueness, that he knew nothing of his private character, “which was not visible to all.” “Of Mr. Hamilton,” Madison wrote with greater honesty, “I ought perhaps to speak with some restraint though my feelings assure me that no recollections of political collisions could controul the justice due to his memory.”
Most surprising, though, were his remarks about Jefferson, which were not just undramatic but entirely commonplace. He directed Paulding to “the obituary Eulogiums” that “multiplied” the meaning of his life after the epochal coincidence of his and Adams’s deaths on the fiftieth Fourth of July. Wrote Madison:
It may on the whole be truly said of him, that he was greatly eminent for the comprehensiveness & fertility of his genius for the vast extent & rich variety of his acquirements, and particularly distinguished for the impress left on every subject which he touched. Nor was he less distinguished for an early & uniform devotion to the cause of liberty … In the social & domestic spheres he was a model of all the virtues & manners which most adorn them.
At the end of his deficient statement, he wrote: “I am sorry Sir that I could not make a better contribution to your fund of biographical matter.”71
It surely would have pleased those living if Madison had had something more precious to convey about his and Jefferson’s long partnership. Though uninhibited and at times ribald among friends, his reserve when it came to publication marked him as a cautious actor. When Paulding read too much into his letter, believing there was more to come and that it would be a substantive history of the Revolution and the constitutional era, Madison wrote back: “I did not mean I had in view a History of any sort, public or personal, but only a preservation of materials of which I happened to be a Recorder, or to be found in my voluminous correspondence.”72
In 1832 and 1833 Madison was called upon to offer judgments on nullification, slavery, and other weighty matters. Along with John Marshall, who was concurrently chief justice and president of the American Colonization Society, Madison defended the society’s project of relocating American blacks to West Africa. He saw this imperfect option as the best alternative to the “convulsions” that he believed inevitable if simple, across-the-board emancipation were to take place. He recognized as a central problem “the consent of the individuals to be removed,” for which he could offer no possible resolution; but he held out hopes of seeing “gifts & legacies from the opulent, the philanthropic, and the conscientious.” He counted on the state legislatures to provide funds, and he saw that, even with such funding, West Africa was too distant a destination for easy coordination to be undertaken in the United States. Madison’s “auxiliary” plan would involve colonization on those Caribbean islands “where the colored population is already dominant.” When Marshall stepped down in 1833, Madison accepted his turn as president of the American Colonization Society. And in October 1834, to balance his accounts, Madison sold sixteen of his slaves to a relative.73
When the English writer and abolitionist Harriet Martineau visited Montpelier in February 1835, she found the last of the Revolutionary patriarchs amiable and attentive, though he complained of deafness in one ear. “He talked more on the subject of slavery than any other,” Martineau noted. But Madison did not retreat from colonization. He pointed out “how the free states discourage the settlement of blacks; how Canada disagrees with them; how Hayti shuts them out; so that Africa is their only refuge.” To Madison’s remarks, Martineau added her own commentary: “He did not assign any reason why they should not remain where they are when freed.” He also confessed to her that his own slaves were relieved to learn that they were not to be colonized in West Africa, which they much feared.
These contradictions bothered Martineau. Madison might rationalize that conditions had improved for the slaves of Virginia, but such wishful thinking did nothing to comfort the abolitionist, and she ultimately found a tragic depth to his feelings about slavery. She added pathos to the scene she witnessed at Montpelier by describing how “his little person [was] wrapped in a black silk gown,” propped up by a pillow, as his wife read to him.74
That summer Madison described his mixed feelings about the state of the nation to another elderly Virginian. He foresaw disunion as a real possibility, but at the same time he refused to surrender his hope for “a more tranquil and harmonious course of our public affairs.” He evidently had his own infirmities on his mind as he theorized about sectional politics: “A sickly countenance is not inconsistent with a self-healing capacity of a Constitution such as I hope ours is; and still less with medical resources in the hands of a people such as I hope ours will prove to be.” To those who inquired after his well-being in the summer and fall of 1835—President Jackson, John Quincy Adams’s son Charles Francis, and others—Madison offered the same refrain: his health was “broken by chronic complaints,” mainly rheumatic joints. Warm weather offered some reprieve, but by November 1835 he was unable even to walk across his bedroom.75
In July 1835 Chief Justice Marshall died. Lafayette had passed away the year before. Randolph of Roanoke had met his fate in 1833, telling his doctor at the end: “I have been an idiosyncrasy all my life.”76 There was really no one of the Revolutionary generation left, save for Madison and Aaron Burr, who was in New York and destined to outlive the Virginian by only two and a half months. Like Madison, the political exile, once prosecuted for treason, and who for two decades had maintained a steady, if understated, law practice, accepted the energetic, if intellectually deficient, Andrew Jackson as president. But unlike Madison, Burr was not called upon for his expert opinion anymore. History had cast its vote against him.
In the years since Jefferson’s death, Madison had given regular attention to their combined legacy as well as their individual legacies. Like Jefferson, he made certain to prepare his papers for posterity. Conscious of a duty to history, he had shared letters from the era of the founding with Jared Sparks, a Harvard graduate born in the year George Washington became president, who in the 1830s reigned as the most prolific chronicler of the founders. He welcomed to Montpelier the historian George Bancroft, who would go on to produce a massive history of the United States.
He was doing all he could to stay involved. Dolley kept watch and doted. In his last will, prepared in April 1835—expecting that his collected papers would fetch a good price for his widow—Madison felt secure in bequeathing substantial sums to the American Colonization Society, the University of Virginia, and his alma mater, Princeton.
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