James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (10 page)

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MADISON WAS WELL AWARE
of the importance of staying close to the French. Even before the American victory at Saratoga had persuaded them to sign a treaty of alliance with the United States, they had provided essential aid, including money and arms. More was needed, however, if America was to win its war for independence, particularly naval power. American hopes had been raised when the chevalier de Ternay arrived in Newport in July 1780 with seven ships of the line and dozens of transports carrying thousands of French regulars under the command of the illustrious comte de Rochambeau, but summer passed, and both navy and army remained in Newport. For a time in September it seemed as though a large French fleet from the West Indies was off the coast, but Madison had to inform his fellow Virginia congressman Joseph Jones that the ships that had been spotted were actually British ships of the line and frigates.
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After the great patriot loss at Camden, South Carolina, frustration with the French reached new levels in Virginia. Joseph Jones wanted to know if Luzerne had explained France’s failure to act. “I must confess I am at a loss how fully to satisfy the doubts of some and to silence the insinuations of others who ground their observations upon the transactions of the present year,” he wrote. Madison had by now mastered the art of being reassuring, on the one hand, without criticizing the source of the anxiety, on the other. He told Jones that those aware of the reason for French delay understood the consternation it was causing, but “as they give no intimations on the subject it is to be inferred they are unable to give any.”
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Late October brought good news of a patriot victory at Kings Mountain, South Carolina, but it was followed shortly by word of a British invasion force in the Chesapeake. The British operated mostly around the mouth of the James River and left after a month, but their presence raised ever more urgently for Virginians the question of when France’s army and naval forces would engage. It was a measure of the high regard in which Madison was increasingly held that the distinguished Edmund Pendleton had asked to correspond with him, and when the older man
expressed his mystification over French inaction, Madison sympathized—while at the same time praising the French. “The motions of our allies are no less mysterious here than they appear to you,” he wrote. “We have however experienced so many proofs of [French] wisdom and goodness towards us that we ought not on slight grounds to abate our faith in them. For my own part I have as yet great confidence in both.”
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MADISON REALIZED EARLY
in his congressional career that while he should give due regard to what eminent Virginians had to say, he also needed to exercise his own judgment. When Arthur Lee, one of the most contentious men ever to be part of American public life, was recalled from his position as a commissioner in France, he launched an attack on Benjamin Franklin, who was serving as America’s minister plenipotentiary in Paris. The relentlessly ambitious Lee claimed in a letter to Congress that “Dr. Franklin is now much advanced in years, more devoted to pleasure than would become even a young man in his station, and neglectful of the public business.” Madison’s fellow Virginia delegate Theodorick Bland, the chairman of the committee to investigate Franklin, allied himself with Lee, unaware that he, too, had once been the object of a wicked assessment by a member of the Lee family. “Never intended for the department of military intelligence,” Light-Horse Harry Lee, Arthur’s brother, said of Bland.
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As a young man Madison had made brash comments about Franklin’s trustworthiness, but he now became his defender, voting against a proposal to send an envoy to France to do what Franklin was supposedly failing to do. After the motion passed despite his opposition, Madison drafted instructions to the envoy that were tailored to support Franklin. In the end, Franklin saved himself from this particular attack by securing a much-needed loan of ten million livres from the French, but he and Madison had become firmly allied. When future assaults were made on the elderly Pennsylvanian, he would find the young Virginian at his side. For this and other transgressions, Madison drew the cantankerous Lee’s ire, but it was perhaps a measure of his political skill that
he managed to avoid the worst of it. Lee wrote of Madison, “Without being a public knave himself, he has always been the supporter of public knaves”—which coming from Lee was practically praise.
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At times Madison was bound by instructions from Virginia’s legislature, as in the matter of the navigation of the Mississippi. Upon entering the war against Great Britain, Spain had closed the lower part of the river to all but Spanish commerce. This was fine with the French, who hoped that letting Spain have its way would encourage greater Spanish involvement against Britain, but Virginia regarded free use of the Mississippi as crucial to its economy—particularly in the Kentucky part of the commonwealth, which was not yet a separate state. Thus the Virginia Assembly instructed its representatives in Congress to insist on open navigation of the Mississippi, which Madison most willingly did. Elected to chair a committee to explain Congress’s position to John Jay, a tall, solemn New Yorker who had recently been president of Congress and was now minister to Spain, Madison drafted a letter setting forth a vision of the “vast extent” of land west of the Alleghenies. “In a very few years, after peace shall take place, this country will certainly be overspread with inhabitants,” Madison wrote. He imagined them cultivating fertile soil, raising wheat, corn, beef, tobacco, hemp, and flax—and needing a way to carry on commerce. “The clear indications of nature and providence and the general good of mankind,” he wrote to Jay, required that these “citizens of the United States” have “free use of the river.”
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But rumors of peace began to undercut his position. Neutral powers were said to be supporting a plan that would settle the North American conflict by giving contending parties possession of lands they currently occupied. With crucial parts of Georgia and South Carolina under military occupation, delegates from those states were desperate to do anything that might pull Spain into an alliance and push the British out of their territory before such a settlement occurred—including giving up free use of the Mississippi. Madison argued that free navigation was too important to concede “as long as there is a possibility of retaining it” and contended that Spain was trying “to alarm us into concessions.”
But Theodorick Bland decided it was time for the Virginia Assembly to reconsider its instructions to congressional delegates and took the unusual step of writing a personal letter to Governor Jefferson. With many protestations about the “sense of . . . duty” that impelled him to go behind the backs of the rest of the delegation and communicate with the governor directly, Bland argued that free navigation should not stand in the way of “overtures” from Spain that might “relieve our present necessities” and “promise us peace and a firm establishment of our independence.”
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Bland’s view became very convincing to Virginians when, in December 1780, the British sailed into the Chesapeake again, this time with the newly minted British brigadier general Benedict Arnold heading the fleet. Fearful of going the way of Georgia and South Carolina, the Virginia legislature instructed the state’s representatives in the Continental Congress to give up free navigation of the Mississippi if that was the price of a Spanish alliance.

The change in Virginia’s instructions tilted the balance in Congress, and Madison found himself having to write a letter to Jay altering his orders. The experience was likely a bitter one, since Madison was convinced that cession was a mistake. Jay agreed, believing as Madison did that while Spain wanted America to give over navigation rights, it had no real intention of entering into an alliance. Jay included the concession in a series of offers that he thought Spain would be unlikely to embrace—a judgment that proved correct.
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WITH ARNOLD
and his fleet at the mouth of the James River, Virginia’s assembly fled Richmond, which its members had made the commonwealth’s capital some twenty months previously, but just before leaving, they took a crucial vote and agreed to cede the western lands, the territory northwest of the Ohio River that Virginia had long claimed under its royal charter. Other states viewed the lands as belonging to the country as a whole, and Madison agreed that they were properly national—but only if they were used to create free and independent
states. It galled him to think of them going to satisfy what he called the “avidity of land mongers,” speculators who swarmed Congress, pressing dubious claims. He was furious when he realized that Theodorick Bland and another Virginia delegate, John Walker, were acting on behalf of these interests. He believed the two men were naive rather than corrupt, but he was still so angry that he vowed to make them personally explain the whole matter to the Virginia Assembly. Upon “cooler reflection,” however, he decided that the proper course was to get the assembly to put protections against speculators in place—which he did.
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Virginia’s offer to cede the western lands opened the way for the Articles of Confederation, sent to the states in 1777, finally to go into effect. They created a loose confederacy of the states, with a congress at the center. There was no executive branch, no national judiciary, and each state, no matter its size, had a single vote. Unanimous ratification of the articles was required, and Maryland had refused to sign until there was a Virginia cession. It would be another three years before agreement between Virginia and the United States was complete, but the resolution from the Virginia Assembly was enough for Maryland, and its delegates notified Congress on February 12, 1781, that they had authority to sign the articles.
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THE CRISES MADISON
dealt with during his first year in Congress did not come in neat sequential order. A starving army, French delays, Arnold’s betrayal, Jay’s instructions, the western lands—all came rushing at him at a time when the larger cause of which they were part was doubtful. Underscoring the perilous state of the war was a mutiny in the Pennsylvania line that started on New Year’s Day 1781. Enlisted men encamped near winter quarters in Morristown, New Jersey, seized weapons, fired on officers, and set off for Philadelphia to demand redress. “The grievances complained of,” Madison wrote to Governor Jefferson, “were principally a detention of many in service beyond the term of enlistment and the sufferings of all from a deficient supply of clothing and subsistence and long arrearage of pay.” The president of
Pennsylvania met with the mutineers and agreed to discharge those who had served more than three years—which amounted to more than thirteen hundred men.
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Civilian authorities had averted a crisis but set a dangerous precedent. How long before other American soldiers took up arms against their officers?

Meanwhile, Madison learned that Arnold and his men had sailed up the James River and invaded Richmond, burning and pillaging there and in the surrounding countryside. They destroyed records, warehouses, and mills, all the while meeting little resistance. After Arnold had sailed back downriver, Madison wrote to Pendleton, “I am glad to hear that Arnold has been at last fired at.”
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There was good news from South Carolina, where Virginia general Daniel Morgan and his men celebrated a stunning victory over the legendary Banastre Tarleton at Cowpens, but at nearly the same time word came of a mutiny among New Jersey troops. Not long after, Nathanael Greene and his army began a retreat across the Carolinas, seeking the safety of Virginia. General Cornwallis was at their heels.

As these events piled up, Madison seems to have suffered one or more of his sudden attacks. Between January 13 and 31, he is not mentioned in the congressional journal, and there is a similar absence between February 6 and 12. In March he received a letter from his cousin the Reverend James Madison. “I have heard of a severe attack,” the future bishop wrote. He knew Congressman Madison very well and seemed aware that he had once suffered an attack after studying too hard and exercising too little. “How do you relish your business?” he inquired. “Does it interfere with riding and so on?”
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As though a conversation were going on among a group close to Madison, Edmund Pendleton wrote to him concerned about the effect of wartime pressures on his “crazy constitution,” and James Madison Sr., with whom Pendleton had been visiting, requested that his son get him a copy of William Cullen’s
First Lines of the Practice of Physic
. Cullen, who had until recently been president of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh, was a man whose opinions were so valued that
First Lines
was one of the few titles smuggled into the United States
during the war with Great Britain.
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Volume 1 of Cullen’s work, edited by Dr. Benjamin Rush, was published in Philadelphia in 1781, and it was probably a copy of this edition that Madison sent to his father.

Volume 2 of
First Lines,
also edited by Rush, was published in Philadelphia in 1783, while Madison was still living there. Madison makes no mention of the second volume in his letters, but since it took up “nervous diseases,” it would hardly be surprising if he read it. Cullen wrote that epilepsy was caused by a “debility” arising from “original conformation”—a description very close to the “constitutional liability” to which Madison attributed his attacks. Cullen’s description of “
aura eleptica
” would have interested Madison, whose attacks seem to have involved a feeling in his chest. Cullen described “a sensation of something moving in some part of the limbs or trunk of the body and from thence creeping upwards to the head.” But most significant was Cullen’s description of “particular convulsions which are to be distinguished from epilepsy by their being more partial . . . and are not attended with a loss of sense.” Here was authority for Madison’s describing his attacks as “somewhat resembling epilepsy.”
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