James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (44 page)

The “want of energy” charge also received a strong check after Federalist senator Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts accused the administration of catering to the French and trying to provoke war with the British. In answer, Jefferson released some 100,000 words of diplomatic correspondence, much of it in Madison’s hand. Over several days it was read aloud in the House and Senate. Newspapers of both parties published the documents, and not even a hostile editor could find evidence of the bias that Pickering alleged. The documents showed how hard Madison had worked as secretary of state—and how well. An early Madison biographer, George Tucker, thought that it was by the labors
of his pen that Madison’s “merits were most conspicuous and that he most recommended himself to the nation.” The diplomatic correspondence, wrote Tucker, “always showed a masterly acquaintance with the subject never expressed in harsh or uncourteous manner and exhibited in a form to carry conviction to every unprejudiced mind.” Tucker added an observation that will ring true with anyone acquainted with Madison’s State Department writings. It would be impossible, he wrote, to identify any part of them “in which he has omitted anything it was material to say.”
⁶²

Samuel Harrison Smith, the editor of the
National Intelligencer,
noted Madison’s “irreproachable morals.”
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This was a point often made by Madison advocates but usually without much elaboration. To be too specific or go on too long might have invited unwelcome comparisons with President Jefferson.

•   •   •

GEORGE CLINTON,
planning to run for president, had been chosen as the vice presidential candidate by the Republican caucus. When he received word of his vice presidential nomination, he decided to hedge his bets. Protesting loudly that no one had told him his name would be put forward, he claimed that he had certainly not approved it, but he didn’t withdraw, thus managing the neat—and never repeated—trick of running for vice president on a ticket with a man whom he was running against for president. Clinton was showing his years. As Senator Plumer described him, “He is old, feeble, and altogether incapable of the duty of presiding in the Senate. He has no mind—no intellect—no memory. He forgets the question—mistakes it—and not infrequently declares a vote before it’s taken—and often forgets to do it after it is taken.” Perhaps because of Clinton’s feebleness, his advocates tried at least once to make Madison’s health an issue. They might also have been inspired by Madison’s being ill for weeks earlier in the year. For a time he had been too sick to meet with a British emissary, too sick even to write a note. A Clinton advocate, whose work appeared in the Troy, New York,
Farmers’ Register,
noted that Madison was “a little younger than George
Clinton—but unfortunately for his country, he is sickly, valetudinarian, and subject to spasmodic affections, which operate unfavorably on his nervous fluid, considered by philosophers as one of the most powerful agents of our intellectual faculties.” The phrase “spasmodic affections” was a clever choice, calling to the nineteenth-century reader’s mind not only epilepsy, with its dreaded associations, but hysteria, which, being regarded as a womanly affliction, suggested that Madison was not only weak but effeminate.
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Clinton’s advocates do not seem to have followed up on this line of attack, and one has to wonder why. Perhaps they worried it would underscore Clinton’s own bad health. Perhaps illness was so ever present in the nation’s beginnings that it was hard to make it into a political liability. Officeholders, just like those they represented, were expected to get sick. The great Washington, after all, had nearly died of pneumonia during his first term in office. John Adams was known to collapse and once lay in a coma for five days. Jefferson’s headaches could put him out of commission for weeks. Sickness was also the shadow of death, and few were the families that had not lost a spouse or child. Martha Washington had been a widow when she married George Washington, and her children, who became his beloved stepchildren, Patsy and Jack, both died before he took office. Adams had lost a little girl, Susanna, of whom he could barely speak. Jefferson had lost his wife, three daughters, and a son by the time he assumed office, and his adult daughter, Maria, died during his first term. In an era when everyone had death as a constant and tragic companion, even the most zealous politician might have had qualms about using illness as a political weapon.

•   •   •

THE MOST
substantive issue of the campaign was the embargo, which had a serious economic impact at home, driving exports, which had been $108 million in 1807, down to $22 million in 1808. Believing they finally had an issue, the Federalists, who had been nearly moribund, became animated, once more nominating Charles Cotesworth Pinckney as their presidential candidate and launching an anti-embargo campaign
that eventually had a mascot: a snapping turtle named Ograbme (“embargo” spelled backward), shown in one cartoon taking a chunk out of a merchant’s backside. The Federalist press never tired of attacking, and Madison grew bitter about the criticism, which he viewed as undercutting the effectiveness of the embargo by making it seem likely the United States wouldn’t stick to it. He wrote to Jefferson that only “some striking proof of the success of the embargo can arrest the successful perversion of it by its enemies, or rather the enemies of their country.”
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There would be no striking proof. Napoleon ridiculed the embargo by offering to help the United States enforce it. He would capture any American ship on the high seas, he said, on the grounds that it must be there illegally. As for the British, occasional news articles indicated that the embargo was causing pain, but they were cold comfort to citizens in the northeast part of the United States, where both financial losses and unemployment were mounting rapidly. Gallatin had warned Jefferson that “governmental prohibitions do always more mischief than had been calculated; and it is not without much hesitation that a statesman should hazard to regulate the concerns of individuals as if he could do it better than themselves.”
⁶⁶
Neither the president nor the secretary of state, both committed to restraining government, heeded this advice, perhaps because they could not allow themselves to. As they perceived it, the only alternatives to economic sanctions were even greater threats to the Republic: a return to being under the British thumb—or war.

•   •   •

MADISON WON HANDILY
in 1808, receiving 122 electoral votes to Pinckney’s 47 and Clinton’s 6. Monroe received no votes at all. The embargo had taken a toll—Madison had lost most of New England—but he prevailed in other parts of the country to chalk up a substantial victory.

There was little time to savor it. To Madison’s heavy official correspondence were now added pleas from job seekers, but perhaps that made thoughtful notes of congratulation all the more appreciated. “Blackguard” Charles Pinckney, the Republican in the Pinckney family,
wrote, “I . . . congratulate you on your election to the most honorable station in your country’s gift.” Madison also heard from his cousin the Reverend James Madison, who had become a bishop of the Episcopal Church in 1790. “You will indeed, I fear, have a stormy time to encounter,” the clergyman wrote, “but that is the season in which the pilot discovers his superior skill.”
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The embargo, which New Englanders continued to violate, was the most pressing problem, particularly when President Jefferson decided after Election Day to let matters drift until his successor was inaugurated. He said that he wanted “to leave to those who are to act on them the decisions they prefer.” With Madison’s blessing, Gallatin wrote to the president, urging him to decide between “enforcing the embargo or war . . . so that we may point out a decisive course either way to our friends.” Jefferson decided on enforcement, signing a bill on January 9, 1809, that would become known as the Force Bill by those who despised its strict measures.
⁶⁸

There was concern that New Englanders might themselves resort to force, so furious were they about the new law. The Massachusetts legislature resolved that enforcing the embargo should be a state crime. Connecticut’s governor refused to assign militia officers to assist in enforcement, and its legislature, echoing the language of the Virginia Resolutions of 1798, declared it to be the duty of states “to interpose their protecting shield between the rights and liberties of the people and the assumed power of the general government.” In petitions and memorials, irate citizens poured out their anger and offered more than a few threats to secede. “I felt the foundations of the government shaken under my feet by the New England townships,” Jefferson later recalled.
⁶⁹

And so did Congress. As New England Republicans reacted to their constituents’ rage, party discipline began to crumble—and then collapsed. By early February, President-elect Madison, apparently deciding that he could no longer stand aside, began to work with Virginia congressman Wilson Cary Nicholas on a plan that would allow the United States to maintain at least some commercial pressure on France and Great Britain. The plan he recommended was to lift the embargo except
for those two countries and further provide that should either of them withdraw its hostile edicts, the president had authority to open trade with that country.
⁷⁰

Congress passed such legislation, calling it the Non-intercourse Act, and Jefferson signed it on March 1, 1809. Three days later, with his party splintered, the nation divided, and both of the world’s great powers threatening, James Madison was sworn in as the fourth president of the United States.

JAMES MADISON TOOK THE OATH
of office in the new chamber of the House of Representatives, a large, gracefully shaped room with fluted columns, crimson curtains, and a painted ceiling. He was pale and trembling with emotion as he contemplated the great honor and vast responsibility that were about to be his, and when he delivered his inaugural address, he could not at first be heard. But his voice strengthened as he spoke about peace, which, he said, had “been the true glory of the United States to cultivate.” Following the path of right and justice had not protected the United States from “belligerent powers,” which “in their rage against each other” had issued the “arbitrary edicts” responsible for the nation’s present troubles, and the new president said he could not predict how long the country would be caught up in this conflict. He could be sure, however, of the principles he would follow in leading the nation through difficult times. He would always prefer peaceful accommodations to war, he would support the Constitution, and he would be strengthened in these tasks by “the well-tried intelligence and virtue of my fellow citizens.” In them he would place his confidence, “next to that which we have all been encouraged to feel in
the guardianship and guidance of that Almighty Being whose power regulates the destiny of nations.”
¹

After passing by troops in review, Madison rode back to F Street in a coach and four. Jefferson had still not moved out of the president’s house, and the Madisons invited guests into the home they had lived in for more than six years, receiving their company just outside the drawing room. Margaret Bayard Smith, wife of the publisher of the
National Intelligencer,
observed that Mrs. Madison “looked extremely beautiful . . . dressed in a plain cambric dress with a very long train, plain round the neck without any handkerchief [covering her bosom], and beautiful bonnet of purple velvet and white satin, with white plumes.” So striking was Mrs. Madison’s outfit, the latest in French fashion, that Mrs. Smith seems not to have noticed the president’s suit, which was not only made in the United States but cut from cloth woven from the wool of American-raised merino sheep.
²

A ball was held that evening at Long’s Hotel on Capitol Hill. Thomas Jefferson, a former president now, was among the first to arrive. Relaxed, even ebullient with the weight of office lifted from his shoulders, he jokingly noted that he was unprepared for the social life of the new administration. “You must tell me how to behave,” he said to a friend, “for it is more than forty years since I have been to a ball.”
³

After the diplomatic corps had arrived, the musicians struck up “Madison’s March,” and the president and Mrs. Madison entered the ballroom. She looked gorgeous, wearing a light buff-colored velvet dress and matching turban decorated with two superb bird-of-paradise plumes. Margaret Bayard Smith reported this and also observed the absolute propriety of her behavior. Asked to take the floor for the first dance, Mrs. Madison declined, saying she did not dance. Asked to choose someone else for the honor, she declined again, lest her choice looked like “partiality.” Having recounted this story of Mrs. Madison’s “unassuming dignity, sweetness, grace,” Mrs. Smith, in a letter to her daughter, asked a curious question: “Ah, why does she not in all things act with the same propriety?” Mrs. Smith was one of Mrs. Madison’s most ardent admirers, and one can only guess at what was bothering
her. Perhaps the low-cut dresses, perhaps Mrs. Madison’s taking snuff, a habit she had been unable to break, or perhaps it was that Mrs. Madison was open and uninhibited with men as well as women. Not long before her husband became president, Mrs. Madison had kissed an old bachelor full on the lips to prove she was not a prude.
⁴

By most, Dolley was admired uncritically. “She loved life and people and her world loved her,” an early biographer wrote. At the inaugural ball, guests crowded toward her, “those behind pressing on those before and peeping over their shoulders to have a peep of her,” Mrs. Smith reported. The president managed to escape the crush by standing on a bench with Mrs. Smith. When the managers of the ball came to ask him to stay for supper, he agreed, but as soon as they were out of earshot, he turned to Mrs. Smith and said, “But I would much rather be in bed.”
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One can hardly blame him. The ballroom was not only crowded but hot. The upper windows had to be broken out for ventilation. Moreover, from his bench, Madison could survey the hall and see the characters who were already making his political life difficult. Representative John Randolph of Roanoke was there, less powerful than he had once been, but with a tongue sharp as ever. George Clinton was in attendance, not only Madison’s vice president but his recent rival for the presidency and thereby thoroughly untrustworthy. Secretary of the Navy Robert Smith was at the ball and probably quite a cheerful presence. He would soon become secretary of state, though that was not how Madison had wanted it. His plan had been to elevate Albert Gallatin to that office, but William Branch Giles of Virginia, now a senator and apparently miffed that he hadn’t been offered the position, had formed an alliance with Senator Samuel Smith of Maryland, Secretary Robert Smith’s brother. The two had enough votes to sink Gallatin’s nomination and to make life very unpleasant should Robert Smith be kicked out of the cabinet. Madison knew he needed the wise and straight-talking Gallatin, and his first thought had been to get Senator Smith behind Gallatin’s nomination by putting Robert Smith in at Treasury. But Gallatin knew that Smith, whose joviality was his greatest asset, wasn’t up to the Treasury job. Realizing that he was going to end up doing all the work of Treasury
in addition to the work of the State Department, Gallatin refused to go along. He would stay at Treasury, and Smith was moving to State—which meant that Madison was going to be doing not only the work of the presidency but the work of the secretary of state.
⁶
Small wonder that he wanted to go home and go to bed.

In his first weeks in office, Madison used the foreign policy weapon that Congress had provided him to try to deal with hostile edicts and actions from both England and France. He wrote instructions, which Secretary Smith signed, to American ministers in those countries, not only emphasizing the willingness of the United States to begin trade with whichever government withdrew its hostile orders, but also stating the likelihood of Congress’s authorizing “acts of hostility” against the other country unless it too should respect American rights. Hardly was the ink dry on the instructions when David Erskine, Great Britain’s minister to the United States, came forward with an amazing offer: the king would withdraw the vexatious Orders in Council in exchange for repeal of the Non-intercourse Act as it pertained to Great Britain. At Erskine’s suggestion, Madison agreed on June 10, 1809, as the day that the Orders in Council would be vacated and U.S. trade with Britain resumed, and on April 19, Madison issued a statement to the nation to that effect: “Whereas the honorable David Montague Erskine, His Britannic Majesty’s Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary, has by the order and in the name of his sovereign declared to this government that the British orders in council of January and November 1807 will have been withdrawn as respects the United States on the 10th day of June next, now therefore I, James Madison, president of the United States, do hereby proclaim that . . . after [that] day the trade of the United States with Great Britain . . . may be renewed.”
⁷

The satisfaction that this proclamation gave Madison must have been immense. It was ratification of his long-held belief that commercial sanctions worked, that the American republic did not have to go to war with Great Britain in order to assert its rights as an independent nation. The
National Intelligencer
put out an extra edition to announce “the
happy result” of negotiations, and as news of the agreement spread, Madison had the heady experience of being the object of almost universal praise. Even a normally hostile newspaper like the
Philadelphia Gazette
had good words for him: “Never statesman did an act more popular or more conducive to the true and permanent interest of his country.” John Randolph of Roanoke congratulated him, offering a resolution in Congress approving “the promptitude and frankness” with which he had acted.
⁸

The happy mood of the country likely pervaded the president’s house, where Mrs. Madison, working with the architect Benjamin Latrobe, was renovating and decorating. Operating with an appropriation from Congress of twenty-six thousand dollars, they were turning Jefferson’s office into the State Dining Room, which it remains today. The smaller room next to it, today’s Red Room, was being made into Mrs. Madison’s parlor. Yards and yards of sunflower-yellow satin were being cut to cover sofas and chairs and to festoon the windows and make cornices. Mrs. Madison wanted music in her parlor, and so Latrobe went shopping for a pianoforte and a guitar. He had trouble finding fabric for the draperies for the oval room next to the parlor, which was to serve as the drawing room, but by late March he had found enough crimson velvet not only for the windows but for chair cushions. This room, known as the Blue Room today, was regally decked out, with cream-colored walls setting off the crimson velvet. A new fireplace mantel was installed, and above it was hung a large looking glass, one of several Latrobe purchased. They all sparkled brilliantly in candlelight, but the mirror over the mantel in the drawing room was especially festive, with gilded balls trimming a cloth valance over the top.
⁹

As spring approached, the Madisons were ready to entertain, and Mrs. Madison began her “Wednesday drawing rooms,” events that anyone acquainted with the Madisons—or anyone recommended by someone who was—could attend. In summer the windows might be thrown open in the elegant rooms; in winter large blazes were set in the fireplaces. A military band played as guests promenaded, the men dressed in dark coats and breeches, the women in elegant dresses that followed
French fashion. Mrs. Madison’s outfits seemed to grow increasingly fanciful. At one of the Wednesday drawing rooms, a guest reported, she wore “a robe of pink satin trimmed elaborately with ermine, a white velvet and satin turban with nodding ostrich plumes and a crescent in front, gold chains and clasps around the waist and wrists.” After guests had greeted the president and his wife, they moved to the dining room, where the table was piled high, mostly with sweets, including Mrs. Madison’s favorite, ice cream inside a baked pastry shell. Coffee and wine were passed, and for the guest who wanted something stronger, there was a bracing whiskey punch.
¹⁰

A European visitor to the first levee, held on May 31, was impressed by Mrs. Madison, describing her as “plump, tall, well-looking, and very pleasant and affable,” but the president, he wrote in his diary, “is a very small, thin, pale-visaged man of rather a sour, reserved, and forbidding countenance.”
¹¹
Smiling at strangers still wasn’t in Madison’s social repertoire—as it was never in George Washington’s—even when things seemed to be going very well. In little more than a week, the United States would resume trade with Britain, and that, in turn, might bring the French around.

But on June 10, with hundreds of American ships having already departed from port, Madison received word of new British Orders in Council. These had been issued before the British government would have received news of the Erskine agreement, but it was odd that there should be fresh edicts in light of the terms that Erskine had offered. Erskine, a genial young man with an American wife and genuinely friendly feelings toward the United States, gave many reassurances. Madison wrote to Jefferson that he expected the British government to “fulfill what its minister has stipulated.” Still, he said, he was prepared for the possibility that the British would be “trickish.”
¹²

Dolley’s sister Anna, her husband, Congressman Richard Cutts, and their three small boys had moved into the White House, and they accompanied the Madisons when they set out for Montpelier in mid-July. Although construction would soon begin on the first of two wings to be added to the Piedmont house, James Dinsmore, the Irish joiner in
charge of construction, would have moved bricks and lumber out of sight before the president’s party drove up the road to the mansion. Remodeling had already started inside, but Dinsmore had made sure that the house would be usable during the Madisons’ summer stay.
¹³

Samuel Smith, the editor of the
National Intelligencer,
and his wife, Margaret, arrived at Montpelier in early August. The president greeted them at the door, as “plain, friendly, communicative, and unceremonious as any Virginia planter could be,” said Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Madison, “kindness personified,” wrote Mrs. Smith, asked her why she hadn’t brought her little girls. To Mrs. Smith’s answer that she didn’t want to inconvenience friends, Mrs. Madison said with a laugh, “I should not have known they were here among all the rest, for at this moment we have only three and twenty in the house.” Mrs. Madison led Mrs. Smith to her bedroom, where she helped her loosen her riding habit and take off her bonnet. She then joined her in lying on the bed, where the two of them were served wine, punch, and pineapple. Mrs. Smith was overwhelmed by Mrs. Madison’s “simplicity, frankness, warmth, and friendliness.” The Madisons’ life, she noted, “was characterized by that abundance, that hospitality, and that freedom we are taught to look for on a Virginian plantation.”
¹⁴

This summer idyll was interrupted by news that the British had indeed been “trickish.” They had repudiated the agreement Madison had negotiated with David Erskine and recalled Erskine, in disgrace, to London for having violated his instructions. That amiable young man had presented certain conditions set forth in his instructions not as requirements, as the British Foreign Office had told him to do, but rather as negotiating points. He had been overeager, to be sure, but some of the conditions must have struck him as too harsh to be anything other than points to be negotiated away. One, for example, was that the Royal Navy be at liberty to capture American vessels that were trading with France and its allies in violation of American law. What nation would let another enforce its laws? Erskine had let the matter drop, but foreign secretary George Canning was now releasing dispatches demonstrating that he had instructed Erskine to make this obvious
violation of American sovereignty mandatory. Madison, upon learning of all this, observed that Canning had been as determined to prevent a good outcome to the negotiations as Erskine had been to bring one about.
¹⁵