James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (11 page)

Cullen mentioned iron, copper, flowers of zinc, mercury, and arsenic as being used to treat epilepsy arising from a “debility” but clearly preferred “a considerable change of climate, diet, and other circumstances in the manner of life.” Many sensible thinkers made this recommendation, but in the middle of war taking a leave was no easy matter. Indeed, Theodorick Bland had taken advantage of Madison’s absence from Congress in February. Both he and Madison had been working to secure French naval aid for Virginia, but on February 9, 1781, with Madison apparently unwell at Mrs. House’s, Bland informed Governor Thomas Jefferson that “my personal application, singly, has been unremitted . . . to have a line of battleship and one or two frigates sent into our bay.” He wrote that he had lately “redoubled these applications and enforced them with the strongest arguments I could address,” and “the Minister of France has communicated to me and charged me with secrecy to every soul but your excellency” that the French were sending “one or two ships of the line and two frigates into our bay.”
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As it turned out, claiming credit for getting the French to undertake this particular military action was a bad idea. Washington was furious. He had been working to get not a squadron but the entire French fleet to sail, and he pointed out to Virginia delegate Joseph Jones that because he was circumvented, the moment was lost for sending the commonwealth the full succor it needed. Madison put a copy of the letter from Washington to Jones in his own files, as if to point future historians to Bland’s machinations.
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The attack that Madison might have suffered in the early months of 1781 did not keep him from vigorously advancing the cause of a stronger Congress. The church bells celebrating the March 1, 1781, ratification of the Articles of Confederation had scarcely ceased to peal when he began to argue that under the new framework a majority of states present and voting should prevail on ordinary matters. If, as some delegates wanted, the votes of seven states (a majority of the thirteen) were required to pass every measure, the result would be that when only seven states were present, one could prevent action desired by six; if eight states were present, two could block action; and so on. Madison saw this as a recipe for weakness, which indeed it was, but in a time when Americans were fighting a revolution to throw off an oppressive government, most states wanted Congress to be weak. The rule that Madison argued for was defeated.

Thomas Rodney of Delaware was one of the delegates on the other side. A new arrival in Congress, he took an instant dislike to Madison, describing him as having “some little reading in the law,” being “just from the college,” and possessing “all the self-conceit that is common to youth and inexperience in like cases—but . . . unattended with that gracefulness and ease which sometimes makes even the impertinence of youth and inexperience agreeable or at least not offensive.” Rodney was a thoroughgoing eccentric who claimed to have personal visits from archangels, but odd though he was, his comment about the thirty-year-old Madison being fresh from college is revealing.
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A miniature painted by Charles Willson Peale about this time shows how Rodney might have made this mistake. The overall impression is of slender
youth—except for Madison’s eyes, which seem to be making a very sharp assessment.

Rodney might have been reacting to Madison’s undisguised disapproval of Delaware’s recent actions. That state refused to go along with an embargo on the export of foodstuffs that was intended to ensure there were adequate provisions for the army. As Madison described it to Jefferson, “Delaware absolutely declined coming into the measure and not only defeated the general object of it, but enriched herself at the expense of those who did their duty.” Madison proposed an amendment to the Articles of Confederation authorizing Congress “to employ the force of the United States as well by sea as by land” to force recalcitrant states to fulfill their federal obligations.
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Madison had no better luck with this amendment than with his effort to obtain what he believed to be a practical definition of a majority, and while he labored in futility, news of the war seemed increasingly grim. General Nathanael Greene performed brilliantly, escaping into Virginia, obtaining reinforcements, and turning back into North Carolina. He destroyed a quarter of Cornwallis's army at Guilford Courthouse before withdrawing from the field in order to save his own army for future combat. Left with fewer than fifteen hundred men, Cornwallis decided to cross into Virginia, where he united with British forces now under the command of Major General William Phillips, Jefferson’s erstwhile friend, whose second-in-command was British brigadier general Benedict Arnold. Washington had sent the marquis de Lafayette with a small force to aid Virginia, but they were well outnumbered by the combined British forces and could do little to stop their rampages. In June, Cornwallis sent an expedition under Banastre Tarleton to Charlottesville, to which the Virginia legislature had retreated from Richmond. The raiders took a number of assemblymen prisoner and nearly captured Thomas Jefferson, who fled Monticello just as British dragoons were approaching.
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Madison pinned his hope for relief for Virginia on the French joining General Washington in a siege of New York, a move that, he believed, “will certainly oblige the enemy to withdraw their force from the southern states.” In August, however, it became clear that French might was
going to be brought to bear on the British in Virginia itself. A huge fleet under the command of Admiral de Grasse was sailing for the Chesapeake from the West Indies and would be met there by the French fleet from Newport. Meanwhile, the American and French armies were on the march to Virginia. Madison watched them pass through Philadelphia, the Americans first, lean and ragged, followed by the French, polished, shining, and exact in their maneuvers. “Nothing can exceed the appearance of this specimen which our ally has sent us of his army,” Madison wrote.
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French forces at sea and American and French forces on land came together in near-perfect conjunction, trapping General Cornwallis on the Virginia peninsula at Yorktown and forcing him to surrender his entire garrison of some seven thousand British soldiers. When the news reached Philadelphia on the early morning of October 24, there was an outpouring of joy. Citizens thronged into the streets, and that night the city was aglow as Philadelphians lit candles in their windows. An elated Madison wrote to Edmund Pendleton, “If these severe doses of ill fortune do not cool the frenzy and relax the pride of Britain, it would seem as if heaven had in reality abandoned her to her folly and her fate.”
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A FORMAL PEACE TREATY
was nearly two years away, but it was time, Madison believed, for the United States to face up to its enormous debts. Money was owed not only to foreign creditors but to domestic ones, including the men who had fought the war, and there was great unwillingness on the part of several states to provide Congress with the means to settle those debts. Virginia was one of those states, but Madison took the lead nonetheless in trying to establish a funding stream that would allow the nation to meet its obligations, and he gained a valuable ally when twenty-seven-year-old Alexander Hamilton rode into Philadelphia in November 1782.

A seasoned veteran, despite his young age, Hamilton had crossed the Delaware with George Washington, fought at Trenton and Princeton, and served as the commander in chief’s aide-de-camp for more than
four years. At the climax of the Revolutionary War, he received what he had long coveted, a battlefield command, and he led his men with great bravery at Yorktown. Like Madison, he was small of stature, or “not tall,” as one observer described him, but he was the Virginian’s opposite in many other ways.
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Far from being of respectable lineage, he was the child of an illegitimate union. Rather than having roots stretching far back in America, he had spent his childhood in the British West Indies. Instead of being circumspect, Hamilton was high-strung and impatient, a risk taker, who charmed with cosmopolitan ease. But he and Madison shared brilliance and determination, and it seemed obvious to both that Congress needed a source of revenue to pay the nation’s debts.

Underscoring the danger of empty federal coffers was a petition carried to Congress by Major General Alexander McDougall of New York reporting the “great distress” under which the officers and soldiers of the army, long unpaid, were laboring. “We complain that shadows have been offered to us while the substance has been gleaned by others,” the memorial asserted, continuing, “We have borne all that men can bear—our property is expended—our private resources are at an end—and our friends are wearied out and disgusted with our incessant applications. We therefore most seriously and earnestly beg that a supply of money may be forwarded to the army as soon as possible. The uneasiness of the soldiers for want of pay is great and dangerous. Any further experiments on their patience may have fatal effects.” Madison was deeply sympathetic to the officers’ cause, but when he met with them as part of a committee, he kept his counsel. “What can a Virginia delegate say to them,” he wrote to his friend Edmund Randolph, when his “constituents declare that they are unable to make the necessary contributions and unwilling to establish funds for obtaining them elsewhere?”
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Madison and Hamilton both offered motions declaring the need for Congress to collect funds to meet the nation’s obligations. Madison’s proposal brought the contentious Arthur Lee, now one of Virginia’s delegates, to his feet. He declared Madison’s motion to be “repugnant to the Articles of Confederation; and by placing the purse in the same hands with the sword was subversive of the fundamental principles of
liberty.” Moreover, said Lee, the states were averse to a plan of general revenue, and—in case Madison had forgotten—Lee noted that Virginia, in particular, was opposed.
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Hamilton entered the debate and managed to inflame it. Since the federal government lacked energy for “pervading and uniting the states,” he declared, federal revenue agents should be sent into the states to supply it. Madison tried to appeal to the delegates’ better selves. “The idea of erecting our national independence on the ruins of public faith and national honor must be horrid to every mind which retained either honesty or pride,” he said. He reminded his colleagues that the debate in which they were engaged had been precipitated by “a very solemn appeal from the army to the justice and gratitude of their country,” and he asked, “Is not this request a reasonable one?” He also noted that “the patience of the army has been equal to their bravery, but that patience must have its limits, and the result of despair cannot be foreseen nor ought it to be risked.” In addition, he responded to Arthur Lee by setting forth what he believed it meant to represent a constituency: “Although the delegates who compose Congress more immediately represented and were amenable to the states from which they respectively come, yet in another view they owed a fidelity to the collective interests of the whole.” Even in the face of express instructions from his state, Madison said, a delegate would find occasions on which clear conviction should lead him to “hazard personal consequences” and ignore the instructions from home. This was such a time.
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Madison’s speech resulted in a positive vote on the principle of general revenue, but opposing forces tried to walk the decision back. Arthur Lee took the floor proclaiming that he would “rather see Congress a rope of sand than a rod of iron,” but his fiery rhetoric had little effect. A committee that included Madison and Hamilton was directed to come up with a plan for general funds.
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The program they devised, an impost amendment to the Articles of Confederation, had a 5 percent import tax at its heart, as well as a long-term requisition of $1.5 million a year.

The articles required that each state’s share of a requisition be determined by the value of each state’s land, a plan that was widely recognized
as unworkable since states did not trust one another to determine their own real estate values. In private notes, Madison proposed that instead of “apportioning pecuniary burdens according to the value of land,” population be substituted. Because much of the wealth of the South came from slave labor, he further proposed including slaves in the count, “reckoning two slaves as equal to one free man.” This became a committee report recommending that the financial burden be apportioned according to each state’s “number of white inhabitants” and “one half of the number of all other inhabitants.” A debate followed, with several northerners recommending that three-fourths of slaves be counted rather than one-half, which would mean southern states paying more in taxes. Madison did the math and came up with a figure that split the difference—three-fifths—which was accepted.
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LIKE OTHER FOUNDERS,
Madison understood that slavery was a moral issue. When the Virginia Assembly had proposed encouraging enlistments by granting each enlistee a slave, he had objected, “Would it not be as well to liberate and make soldiers at once of the blacks themselves as to make them instruments for enlisting white soldiers? It would certainly be more consonant to the principles of liberty which ought never to be lost sight of in a contest for liberty.” When he became convinced that Billey, the enslaved man who had traveled to Philadelphia with him, had become “too thoroughly tainted” by having lived among free blacks to return to Montpelier, he made arrangements that freed him after a time, perhaps after a period of indentured servitude. “I do not expect to get near the worth of him,” Madison wrote to his parsimonious father, “but cannot think of punishing him by transportation merely for coveting that liberty for which we have paid the price of so much blood and have proclaimed so often to be the right and worthy the pursuit of every human being.”
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