American Experiment (44 page)

But there was some ill feeling too. Bellicose Americans still wanted to attack Canada, especially after General Jackson had shown what could be done on the Mississippi. Some Federalists argued that the war should not have been fought in the first place. Many Canadians felt deserted by the English. And many Britishers felt sold out by their government; their sentiments found a voice in the
Times
of London, which saw the British as retiring from the combat with “the stripes yet bleeding on our backs,” and lamented that the treaty “betrays a deadness to the feelings of honour.”

Like all wars, that of 1812-15 extinguished some problems and heated up others. One of the latter was the border with Canada, which remained to be negotiated with London. The Great Lakes, where costly naval battles had been fought, were the critical area. For years American leaders—notably John Adams in Paris and John Jay in London—had dreamed of a permanent disarmament of the Lakes. Now the opportunity had come. The House of Representatives led the way, though partly out of reasons of economy, by authorizing the President to have the fresh-water navy laid up or sold, after first preserving their “armament, tackle, and furniture.” Would Britain follow suit? John Quincy Adams, now minister in London, sent word that the Cabinet was determined not only to maintain but to increase their naval power on the Lakes. Monroe instructed him to propose a mutual limitation of armed vessels.

With negotiations well under way, Madison could turn to pressing domestic problems. At war’s end, he had only two more years to serve. His annual message to Congress in December 1815 was the first he was able to devote mainly to domestic issues. It was a paradoxical occasion. Congress was ignominiously meeting in the Patent Office, the only major federal building spared by the British, but its leadership had never been more lustrous: Calhoun, Webster, Pickering, Clay. The Kentuckian had been re-elected to the Speakership the first day he returned to the House after his year and a half abroad as a peace commissioner. The secondary leadership was hardly less impressive: Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, William Lowndes of South Carolina, Samuel D. Ingham of Pennsylvania, all Republicans, and a small band of articulate Federalists. But most remarkable was Madison’s message.

It started out by claiming victory—not over the British, but over Algiers, where Captain Stephen Decatur had recently exacted a peace agreement from the Dey after a brilliant attack and had gone on to gain similar guarantees from Tunis and Tripoli. If this pleased the members of Congress, the mood swiftly changed as the President came to his proposals. He called for expanded defense, “both fixed and floating,” and for more skilled and disciplined state militias. He asked for tariff protection for young manufacturing establishments. He talked about the need for the “General Government” to build roads and canals, and to make rivers more navigable, provided that such steps were—or could be made—constitutional. And he said, in words that were as startling in substance as mild in form, “If the operation of the State banks cannot produce this result”—a uniform national currency—“the probable operation of a national bank will merit consideration.”

Stepped-up defense in peacetime? Tariffs? Internal improvements? A national bank? What heretical doctrine was this? And from the pen of James Madison, second only to Jefferson among Republican founding fathers? Then and later the “old Republicans” brought out their sacred texts. “The evil of the times is a spirit engendered in this republic, fatal to Republican principles; fatal to Republican virtue;”, cried John Randolph, “a spirit to live by any means but those of honest industry; a spirit of profusion;…a spirit of expediency not only in public but in private life.…There are very few who dare to speak truth to this mammoth. The banks are so linked together with the business of the world that there are very few men exempt from their influence.”

Only a few congressmen realized that they were witnessing a profound shift in the Republican party—a shift that would alter the nation’s politics for decades to come. In its many rooms, the mansion of Republicanism had always had a place for activist, mercantilist policies of government support for economic development. Gallatin, in a series of masterly reports in the last year of Jefferson’s presidency, had called for a national transportation and communications network as part of a ten-year plan that, William Appleman Williams has commented, “made Hamilton appear a fumbling amateur.” Then had come war, always the forcing house of economic change. The federal government had become deeply involved in raising and spending money, promoting industry such as iron foundries and ship manufacture.

Younger, more entrepreneurial Republicans like Henry Clay shucked off the old Republican bias against federal economic action. Madison himself, under the pressure of war, shifted his ground. “Altho’ I approve the policy of leaving to the sagacity of individuals, and to the impulse of private
interest, the application of industry & capital,” he wrote a correspondent a few months after leaving the White House, “I am equally persuaded, that in this as in other cases, there are exceptions to the general rule, which do not impair the principle of it. Among these exceptions, is the policy of encouraging domestic manufacturers, within certain limits, and in reference to certain articles.”

Out of the old Republican party a new political force was arising, more nationalist, more entrepreneurial, more interventionist than the old. Politicians were switching sides. Madison, who had vetoed a bank bill in January 1815, signed, hardly fifteen months later, a measure creating the Second Bank of the United States, capitalized with the huge sum of $35 million. Calhoun had introduced the bill; Clay, who five years before had argued that such a bill was unconstitutional, left the Speaker’s chair to explain why he had changed his mind; and Federalists, advocates of the first United States bank only two decades before, largely voted against it. So many “old” Republicans joined Federalists against the bill as almost to defeat the measure in the House. The bank began operating at the start of 1817.

More was involved in all this than economic and political change. The very spirit and character of the nation seemed altered after the war. In part this was a matter of self-satisfaction and celebration. “I can indulge the proud reflection that the American people have reached in safety and success their fortieth year as an independent nation,” Madison said in his last message to Congress, in December 1816; “that for nearly an entire generation they have had experience of their present Constitution,” and “have found it to bear the trials of adverse as well as prosperous circumstances; to contain in its combination of the federate and elective principles a reconcilement of public strength with individual liberty, of national power for the defense of national rights with a security against wars of injustice.…”

The “reconcilement of public strength” and “individual liberty”—this was the essence of the political achievement. But the spirit of 1816 and 1817 went beyond this. It was a feeling of self-confidence, of having won—or so it was thought—America’s “second war of independence.” It was the boast that America now had established herself in the family of nations as a power that must be respected. It was the notion that at last Americans had achieved a sense of self-identity, of spirit, of earned esteem and hence of self-esteem. “A great object of the war has been attained in the firm establishment of the national character,” Clay told officials of the city of Washington on returning from Europe in September 1815.

Few Americans embodied this spirit more visibly than James Monroe,
the heir apparent to the presidency. “The experiment” of war, he said, “was made under circumstances the most unfavorable to the United States, and the most favorable to the very powerful nation with whom we were engaged. The demonstration is satisfactory that our Union has gained strength, our troops honor, and the nation character, by the contest.” Now in his late fifties, Monroe, with his big strapping frame, erect bearing, and plain, deep-lined face, looked more like a leader of the Virginia gentry than of the “Virginia dynasty.” Less reflective, philosophical, or profound than his mentors Jefferson and Madison, he was known as a man of common sense, good judgment, and courage. He was deeply experienced, as Revolutionary officer, Continental Congressman, United States senator, diplomat, governor of Virginia, and Secretary of State doubling as Secretary of War during the final critical months of the war. Monroe’s thinking had changed considerably since the days when he opposed the Constitution because it vested too much power in the chief executive. Now he looked forward to being a strong President of a strong nation.

Not all supported this ambition. Even in Virginia, the foundation of Monroe’s support, “old Republicans” were hostile to his candidacy. Once again the party’s nomination would be decided by “King Caucus,” the traditional meeting of Republican members of Congress, but here Monroe faced formidable opposition in Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford. In turn senator from Georgia, Minister to France, and Secretary of War, before taking over Treasury, Crawford was almost as experienced as Monroe; even more, the tall, ruddy-faced Georgian was the kind of orator, superb storyteller, and genial handshaker that endeared a leader to politicians in both houses. He also benefited from a widespread feeling that it was time to curb the Virginia dynasty and Virginia influence. This feeling was strongest in the Empire State, which had provided the nation with neither President nor emperor, but New Yorkers were divided between supporters of the politico and reformer De Witt Clinton and of the rising young state politician Martin Van Buren.

The machinations of 1816 are still not wholly clear, but it probably was the Crawfordites who posted an anonymous notice calling Republican senators and representatives to a nominating session. Monroe’s supporters boycotted this rump caucus, which attracted so embarrassingly few members that it could only summon a second caucus. At this point Crawford seems to have experienced a failure of nerve. It was not easy to take on the senior member of the Cabinet; moreover, at the age of forty-four, the Georgian felt he could wait a presidential term or two and run again in 1824 at the latest. At the second caucus Monroe beat him by the unimpressive margin of 65 to 54.

The Federalist party was so weak in 1816 that Monroe’s nomination was tantamount to election. The party of Washington and Hamilton chose the veteran New York politician Rufus King, and then failed to unite its thin support even behind him. Monroe vanquished him in the electoral college, 183-34, with the shrunken Federalists monotonously clinging to their majorities in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware. The Virginia dynasty stood fast.

“The American people,” President James Monroe said in his Inaugural Address, “…constitute one great family with a common interest.” The government had been in the hands of the People. The People had built and sustained the Union. Only when “the People become ignorant and corrupt” did they become the “willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin.” Hence: “Let us, by all wise and constitutional measures, promote intelligence among the People, as the best means of preserving our liberties.”

To many, this paean to the People was so much Republican oratory. But Monroe was not just indulging in cant. He had a plan based on a hypothesis that, as he wrote Andrew Jackson, “the existence of parties is not necessary to free government.…” His plan was no less than to rid the nation of party rivalry. Inheriting Jefferson’s theoretical dislike (though actual utilization) of party, Monroe would go far beyond him. Whereas Jefferson proposed to win over moderate Federalists, isolate “monarchical” types, and build a new party, Monroe proposed to offer the Federalists the chance to “get back in the great family of the union,” thus to broaden the Republican ranks, and then to govern on behalf of the whole People, the American Family, the national consensus.

“The nation has become tired of the follies of faction,” Nicholas Biddle said after the election.

To raise his administration above party rivalry, to speak for the American family, to act on the national consensus, Monroe resolved on a glittering ministry, a Cabinet of all the talents, a leadership from all the sections. From the East, for Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams. From the West, for Secretary of War, Henry Clay. From the South, for Secretary of the Treasury, William H. Crawford. But not all the leaders were willing to crowd into the new President’s tent. In particular Henry Clay, sorely disappointed that he had not been proffered State, declined War. Unable to find for this post another Westerner of sufficient stature or caliber, Monroe appointed the brilliant young Southerner John Calhoun, who was rising to an eminence that would rival Clay’s. All these men were Republicans.
Where were the Federalists in this non-party administration? Monroe said he wanted to give the opposition a chance for reconciliation but he appointed few Federalists, mainly out of fear of alienating Republicans. Federalists did not protest unduly. They could forgo Republican
patronage
, they calculated, as long as Monroe seemed to embrace Federalist
policies.

If Americans were now to be one family with the President as their father, a grand tour seemed a fine way to demonstrate popular support for the new leader. Three months after his inauguration, Monroe, accompanied by a small party, set off for New England. He was greeted by friendly crowds and subjected to parades, reviews, and tours all the way up the eastern seaboard, but enthusiasm rose to a pitch in Boston. Was the old city making up for its long coolness to Virginia dynasts? Forty thousand persons, it was estimated, lined the streets and filled every window as the presidential party moved through the streets to Boston Common. Over the next few days Monroe inspected defenses, greeted delegations, reviewed troops, toured the Watertown arsenal and a Waltham cotton factory, heard Edward Channing orate in Faneuil Hall and William Ellery Channing preach a Unitarian sermon, visited Bunker Hill and “Old Ironsides,” and drove to Harvard, where he received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree amid much pomp and circumstance. Just as he hoped, Federalists—including even his old foe Timothy Pickering—greeted him warmly. Indeed, the main political problem was the unseemly jockeying between Republican and Federalist leaders to honor the President; even this kind of party rivalry disturbed the grand harmonizer.