James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (9 page)

After Henry had served as governor for three years, the maximum allowed, the assembly elected Thomas Jefferson his successor. The tall, loose-limbed Virginian entered office at a time when British strategy had undergone a significant change. The victory of the United States at Saratoga had been a devastating blow to Great Britain, not least because it had persuaded the French to sign a treaty of alliance with the United States. Shaken by the course of the war in the North, the British had shifted focus to the South, which they saw as more vulnerable and where they believed Loyalist sympathies ran particularly strong. By the time Jefferson moved into the governor’s palace, the British had taken Savannah, were menacing Charleston, and had sent a flotilla into the Chesapeake, where their troops seized Portsmouth, burned Suffolk, and destroyed ships, armaments, and tobacco. As Jefferson tried to secure the commonwealth and deal with the myriad issues that war brought to his desk, he came to place high value on what he described as Madison’s “extensive information” and “the powers and polish of his pen.”
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He no doubt learned, too, that Councilor Madison had a deft political mind, one that instinctively saw contingencies and thought of ways to prepare for them.

An issue that Jefferson and the council had to take up early concerned the treatment of the now-imprisoned lieutenant governor of Detroit, Henry Hamilton. Jefferson’s approach to those taken in combat had heretofore been very gentlemanly. He had befriended, even socialized with, captured Hessian and British officers that the Continental Congress had quartered near Monticello. But Hamilton was widely known as “the hair-buyer general” for reportedly encouraging Great Britain’s Indian allies to murder and scalp Americans, and the governor and the council decided he deserved to be kept in shackles. Within
weeks, General William Phillips, one of the British officers Jefferson had befriended in the Piedmont, protested Hamilton’s treatment, writing that since the lieutenant governor of Detroit had surrendered, he could not, according to the rules of war, be put in “close confinement.” To Jefferson, this seemed like nonsense, but someone—and it is easy to imagine Madison playing the part—suggested being absolutely sure that George Washington saw things similarly. The general, previously notified of the decision, had not objected, but if there was controversy, perhaps he would. With the council, Jefferson wrote a letter to Washington that took the form of seeking information. Did the general know of any rule prohibiting the confinement of those who agreed to surrender?
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As it turned out, once controversy developed, Washington had second thoughts, writing that “this subject, on more mature consideration, appears to be involved in greater difficulty than I apprehended.” Hamilton could “be confined to a room” but not shackled, he wrote.
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The decision rankled Jefferson, but at least he was not in the embarrassing position of having been overruled. Thanks to the council letter, he was instead enlightened by a clarification he had sought.

•   •   •

THE FRIENDSHIP
that began to form between Jefferson and Madison as they labored on the council was in some ways unlikely. Although only eight years Jefferson’s junior, Madison seemed much younger. He was single, leading a bachelor’s life, staying in rooms here and there when he was away from home. While he served on the Council of State, he stayed with his cousin, also named James Madison, an Anglican cleric and the president of the College of William and Mary. Councilor Madison’s room in the president’s house was better lodging than he would otherwise have had in Williamsburg, but his personal life still had a harum-scarum quality. Someone took his hat, his only hat, forcing him to stay indoors for two days until at last he managed to buy another “from a little Frenchman who sold snuff.” His horse either wandered off or was stolen, and he advertised for it in the
Virginia Gazette
of October 30, 1779, offering a hundred-dollar reward, which might have been too
much, particularly if it was the horse his father had sent him the previous June. Madison had described that animal as being in “meager plight.”
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Jefferson was a family man with a beautiful wife, Martha Wayles Skelton, who had brought him a great landed estate, albeit one encumbered by debt. The two had lost a daughter before she reached her second birthday and a son in infancy, but Patsy and Polly, much-adored little girls, survived. Prior to Jefferson’s moving into the governor’s mansion, he and his family lived for a time in Williamsburg’s loveliest home, the George Wythe house on Palace Green, where Wythe slaves as well as Jefferson slaves would have attended them. Well cared for as he was, Jefferson was unlikely to have his hat go missing, and he certainly never rode a horse in “meager plight.” His steeds were magnificent—and spotless. “When his saddle horse was led out,” wrote Henry Randall, who interviewed Jefferson family members, “if there was a spot on him that did not shine as faultlessly as a mirror, he rubbed it with a white pocket handkerchief, and if this was soiled, the groom was reprimanded.”
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The men were alike in being reserved. Neither would have dreamed of keeping a diary full of the personal observations that John Adams recorded, but among friends both would offer frank, even barbed assessments of others. Madison also liked to poke fun at himself, which was not a habit of Jefferson’s. Madison amused close acquaintances with a fund of self-deprecating anecdotes, including the story of how he had managed to lose reelection to the House of Delegates “in consequence of his refusing to electioneer.” In years ahead, he’d also entertain friends by telling about his stolen hat. He particularly enjoyed describing the replacement, which was so small in the crown and broad in the brim that his friends found it an object of endless merriment.
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Both men loved chess. Jefferson also loved music and poetry, but Madison, with no known musical penchant, had decided that life was too short and the demands of the real world too pressing for him to spend much time reading poems and plays. Jefferson was the more soaring thinker and would leave behind some of the most uplifting prose ever written. Madison’s genius showed itself in the dismantling of
conventional wisdom and the creation of new concepts. Jefferson’s ideas sometimes became untethered from reality, but Madison drew him back to the solid earth—and often found himself inspired by the adventure. Thus, they complemented each other, or as historian Merrill Peterson described their relationship, “The account balanced.”
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They both had disorders that sometimes disrupted their lives. Within months of the time that Madison experienced a sudden attack during military training, Jefferson was incapacitated for weeks with one of the migraines that plagued him. Neither man hesitated to describe the gastrointestinal ailments from which he and almost everyone else in the eighteenth century suffered. Jefferson described being taken ill with dysentery in his autobiography. Madison noted the progress of a bowel complaint in a letter to George Washington.
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But Jefferson did not talk much about his headaches, and Madison was even more circumspect about his sudden attacks, Jefferson likely being in the small circle of those in whom he confided.

Each was probably the brightest person the other ever knew, and both were well schooled, giving them a vast fund of common learning on which to draw as they talked and planned. Both continued to study throughout life and considered books of mighty importance. Each was known to buy them when they became available whether he had ready cash or not, but Jefferson’s acquisitive instincts went beyond Madison’s, at times doing violation not only to his finances but to good manners. When Randolph the Tory decided to sail for England rather than support the American rebellion, Jefferson wrote him a heartfelt letter regretting his departure, commenting on the state of human affairs that made it necessary, and asking if he might be interested in selling some of his books.
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One of the most important bonds between Madison and Jefferson was Virginia. They knew its seasons, from the redbuds of spring to the orange and gold leaves of sweet gum trees in the fall. They had internalized its pleasant manners and hospitality, and they knew its failings. Neither found much appeal in the gambling and fox hunting to which many a young Virginian devoted his time. The indolence that northerners
found disconcerting in the South, particularly in the Tidewater, was no part of their daily existence. When the Virginia Convention adopted the proposal of a committee headed by George Mason to put the Latin words for “God bestowed upon us this leisure” on the seal of the commonwealth, Jefferson erupted. “For god’s sake,” he wrote, “what is the
Deus nobis haec otia fecit
?” During the time he was governor and Madison on the council, the words were replaced with
Perseverando
.
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They both hated slavery, upon which Virginia’s culture and commerce were built. They understood the contradiction between the liberty they sought for mankind and the servitude they witnessed daily, yet at the end of long lives they would both die owning slaves.

A traveler noted that Virginians were “haughty and jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and can scarcely bear the thought of being controlled by any superior power.” In none of the founders did this spirit burn more brightly than in Madison and Jefferson, and it might have formed their strongest bond, animating them not only to throw off British rule when it became oppressive but to build a new country in which religious freedom—which both saw as part and parcel of intellectual freedom—was assured. Madison’s zeal in this cause was likely heightened by the misery he knew as a young man when he realized that Christian orthodoxy insisted on a supernatural explanation for epilepsy. For Jefferson there is no event to pinpoint, “no certain way of knowing,” as his biographer Dumas Malone put it, “just when this apostle of freedom first swore eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
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It may be telling that they were both men of the Piedmont, the upcountry, where life was more rugged than in the Tidewater and individual pride in overcoming the challenges of isolation and distance more deeply embedded. Jefferson and Madison were from land not long removed from either the frontier or the frontiersman’s independent mind.

Beginning June 1, 1779, Governor Jefferson and Councilor Madison met with other council members in daily sessions that began at ten each morning on the second floor of the capitol in Williamsburg. In mid-July, as the malarial season was about to begin, Madison left for Orange
County, not to return until late October, then, on December 16, 1779, he left the council for good when the House of Delegates chose him to serve in the Continental Congress. Thus the two men worked together on the council only thirteen or fourteen weeks, but it was long enough, in Madison’s words, that “an intimacy took place.”
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After that, they were often apart, sometimes for years, but their mutual work continued. They encouraged, defended, and had a profound effect on each other—and on the nation they helped
build.

WHEN GEORGE WASHINGTON
considered how poorly paid, ill-clothed, and ill-fed his army was, he knew exactly where to place the blame—on the Continental Congress. “The great and important concerns of the nation are horribly conducted,” he wrote to Benjamin Harrison, Speaker of the Virginia House. It was his “pious wish” that “each state . . . not only choose but absolutely compel their ablest men to attend Congress.”
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Washington no doubt had in mind luminaries such as Thomas Jefferson and George Mason, but Jefferson was governor of the commonwealth and his wife was often sick, while Mason worried about his motherless children. Philadelphia was many days’ travel away, and Congress never recessed, making it extraordinarily difficult for anyone who had a family or needed to earn a living. Madison’s friend Edmund Randolph would twice resign from the Continental Congress in order to practice law and support his wife and children.
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Madison was thrilled to be asked to be part of the Virginia Assembly’s effort to improve its congressional representation. He did not forget to be modest, but his eagerness was apparent as he offered Speaker
Harrison his “assurances that as far as fidelity and zeal can supply the place of abilities, the interests of my country shall be punctually promoted.”
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He had neither wife nor child to support. In fact, his father was willing to support him—albeit sometimes grudgingly. And he might also have had an idea that Congress, much smaller than the Virginia Assembly and with far fewer eminences, was a place where a bright young man who worked very hard could have a large impact.

A winter of unprecedented harshness kept him from leaving for Philadelphia promptly, but he used the time to delve into a problem that lay behind many others bedeviling Congress and the American cause: money. The paper that Congress was issuing to pay for the war had become nearly worthless, and as snow fell on the hills of the Piedmont and rivers froze, Madison pored over books trying to understand the country’s troubled finances. Montesquieu and Hume maintained that the value of money decreased as its quantity increased, but Madison decided more was at work, namely, “the credit of the state issuing [the currency] and . . . the time of its redemption.” If the military prospects of the United States improved, he sensibly concluded, faith in the country’s future would help keep its currency afloat. So, too, would setting a time specific for redemption. Congress had not made such a commitment for several years.
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But redeeming currency meant levying taxes, and as Madison traveled to Philadelphia in the company of Billey, one of the family slaves, he no doubt thought about this most basic problem: the Continental Congress had no power to raise money. It was financially dependent on the states, and they were reluctant to use their taxing authority. Unless something changed drastically, Continental currency would continue its decline, a situation made worse by the fact that wartime demand would also continue exerting upward pressure on prices. Sugar already cost ten times as much as at the beginning of the Revolution, and bacon twenty times.
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Madison arrived in Philadelphia to find that Congress had grown so desperate about the country’s finances that members had decided to give up all authority over money matters. Going forward, the states were
to redeem Continental currency and, as that was done, take over the issuance of new money. “An old system of finance” was “discarded as incompetent to our necessities,” Madison wrote to Jefferson, and “an untried and precarious one substituted.” There was the prospect of “a total stagnation . . . between the end of the former and the operation of the latter.” Meanwhile, a widening circle of difficulties was being created by the country’s financial woes: “Our army threatened with an immediate alternative of disbanding or living on free quarter; the public treasury empty, public credit exhausted; . . . Congress complaining of the extortion of the people, the people of the improvidence of Congress, and the army of both; our affairs requiring the most mature and systematic measures, and the urgency of occasions admitting only of temporizing expedients and those expedients generating new difficulties.” Like Washington before him—indeed, like much of the country by this time—Madison concluded that the Continental Congress, with its “defect of adequate statesmen,” was not likely to solve the nation’s problems. The mediocrity of its members meant that it was “more likely to fall into wrong measures and [be] of less weight to enforce right ones,” he wrote.
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THE YEAR AHEAD,
the worst of the war, would complicate this assessment. Even the most enlightened delegate, Madison would find, could fall into wrong measures when he lacked adequate information, which members of the Continental Congress usually did. At the end of May 1780, Rivington’s
Royal Gazette
put out an extra edition describing the fall of Charleston to the British. Was this to be believed? Or did “the notorious character for lying of the author,” as Madison wrote to Jefferson, “leave some hope that it is fictitious”? As it became clear that Charleston had indeed capitulated and nearly the whole of the army in the South had surrendered, the obvious response, or so it seemed to Madison, was to send more troops. As part of a committee, he proposed that Major Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, a Virginian whom he had known at Princeton, “proceed immediately to South Carolina with the
corps under his command,” a recommendation forwarded to General Washington on behalf of Congress. Within weeks, however, delegates heard from Washington of a battle in New Jersey that was too close to Philadelphia for comfort. They reversed themselves, endorsing Washington’s recommendation that Lee’s corps march north.
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Madison came to see that the Continental Congress could be a conclave of statesmen and still not operate effectively. Not only had the power of the purse been handed over to the states, so, too, had authority for raising, provisioning, and paying the army. The states were “dilatory” in providing resources, Madison reported to John Page, with whom he had served on the Virginia Council of State. But there was nothing Congress could do. Its members could “neither enlist, pay, nor feed a single soldier,” as Madison described it.
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All that was left was “to administer public affairs with prudence, vigor, and economy,” and even in that task the delegates’ labors were sometimes counterproductive. When Congress undertook a campaign to reform abuses in the procurement and transport of goods, Washington’s quartermaster and favorite general, Nathanael Greene, was soon in the crosshairs. The forceful, thin-skinned Greene hadn’t wanted to be quartermaster in the first place. In defiance of his Quaker father, he had read the works of great military leaders such as Julius Caesar and Frederick the Great growing up, and it was field command that he found satisfying. But Washington had prevailed upon him to take the quartermaster’s position and had kept him there by releasing him to take part in battle from time to time. Greene had little patience with congressional suggestions that some of the thousands of agents procuring supplies for him were corrupt. Indeed, he had little patience with the “talking gentlemen” of Congress, who, as he saw it, “tired themselves and everybody else with their long, labored speeching that is calculated more to display their own talents than promote the public interest.”
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Because he worked on commission rather than salary, Greene had made a good deal of money supplying the army, which raised red flags in Congress, although its members had authorized the arrangement. Apparently on the theory that he who is abundantly compensated
should be abundantly responsible, delegates began to discuss making Greene personally liable for improper expenditures by his subordinates whether they were fraudulent or merely imprudent. Hearing of this, Greene wrote an eleven-page letter detailing his objections to this “strange, new, and unexpected . . . doctrine.” The official resolution in response, written by Congressman Madison, affirmed the principle of Greene’s responsibility, adding the caveat that Congress, not wishing “to expose the faithful servants of the public to any unreasonable risks or losses,” would “determine on the circumstances as they arise and make such favorable allowances as justice may require.” When Greene resigned in fury, Congress threatened to strip him of his rank, at which point Washington entered the fray, backing Congress down on the matter of Greene’s commission but having to accept a new quartermaster, Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, a thin, austere man whom he did not trust.
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The results were even worse when Congress concerned itself with one of Washington’s least favorite generals, Horatio Gates, widely regarded as the hero of the Battle of Saratoga. During the dark days of Valley Forge, Gates had been put forward by powerful allies as the man who should replace Washington. Although the effort had failed, Washington had not forgotten, and he was dismayed when Congress without notifying him appointed Gates to the southern command. Gates was full of confidence as he arrived in the South to head a newly raised army, but within weeks he made a disastrous decision to lead his men through unfriendly territory to Camden, South Carolina. There he encountered General Charles Cornwallis and his well-trained forces, and on August 16, 1780, they dealt the patriots the war’s bloodiest defeat. Gates’s army suffered more than two thousand casualties, and Congress, unusually chastened, gave Washington the power to choose Gates’s replacement. He put Nathanael Greene in charge.

In the wake of the terrible defeat at Camden came the spectacular and horrifying news that Major General Benedict Arnold had turned traitor. A short, square-jawed man full of energy and ambition, he was one of America’s most renowned warriors. Many thought it was he who
should be credited for the American victory at Saratoga. He had married a young and wealthy heiress, Peggy Shippen of Philadelphia, but was nonetheless deeply in debt. Convinced that his country did not sufficiently appreciate him, he agreed that in exchange for a handsome payment and a British commission he would surrender West Point. As Madison and other members of the Virginia delegation described Arnold’s actions to Governor Jefferson, he “shamefully, treacherously, and ignominiously deserted the important post at West Point, which garrison he commanded, after having concerted measures . . . for delivering it up to the enemy.” The plot to hand the fortress over to the British was foiled, but Arnold escaped to a British warship, and American morale suffered a heavy blow.
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The discouraging course of the war and the frustrations of Congress helped drive many delegates home, but Madison had no intention of giving up. While others dropped in and out of their duties, he remained in Philadelphia, comfortable in Mary House’s lodgings at the corner of Market and Fifth and enjoying the friendship of Eliza Trist. Among the others boarding at Mrs. House’s was William Floyd of New York. While Madison’s recommendation seems to have persuaded Virginia delegates James Henry, Joseph Jones, and John Walker to join him at Mrs. House’s, Floyd might have brought New Yorkers Robert Livingston, John Morin Scott, and James Duane to their table. The last two congressmen were of special service to Mrs. House when she was sued in 1780 by Joseph Bulkley, a man with whom she seems to have had some past close relationship. Scott and Duane defended her, though not successfully enough to prevent a sheriff from seizing furnishings from the house. Shortly after this drama, Mrs. House’s establishment, like several other buildings in Philadelphia, was struck by lightning. Although hers was the worst damaged, the harm was less than it might have been because, the
Pennsylvania Packet
reported, a bell wire conducted the lightning through several rooms to the ground. “This incident affords an additional proof of the utility of the electrical rods invented by the ingenious Dr. Franklin,” the
Packet
opined.
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These domestic crises no doubt reinforced the camaraderie growing
out of the great common cause in which Mrs. House’s boarders were involved. One imagines the lodgers gathered around the parlor fire, discussing Great Britain’s southern campaign, Benedict Arnold’s treachery, and, occasionally, the lawsuit and lightning strikes.

Living at Mrs. House’s was not cheap. Madison’s boarding bill for the first six months was more than twenty-one thousand dollars, an amount that underscored how inflationary the times were, particularly in Philadelphia. Madison’s fellow boarder William Floyd declared that “the devil was with all his emissaries let loose in this state to ruin our money.” Madison made loans to his congressional classmate Joseph Jones and also helped out Theodorick Bland, elected from Virginia in 1780 and often a thorn in Madison’s side. Tall, wavy-haired, and given to making florid speeches, Bland, who was married to the beautiful, utterly frivolous Martha Dangerfield Bland, complained that his money “evaporated like smoke,” leaving him “without the means of buying a dinner or . . . a bait of oats for my horses.” When Madison ran low on funds himself, he applied to his father, apparently with some success, but Edmund Randolph seems to have been a surer source of financial support, as was Haym Soloman, a moneylender on Front Street, who refused, despite Madison’s insistence, to charge him interest.
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From Mrs. House’s establishment it was an easy walk to the statehouse, where the thirty or so members of Congress attended sessions on the second floor. The boardinghouse was also near the French legation on Chestnut Street, which had been recently and elegantly enlarged. The chevalier de la Luzerne, the French minister, hosted fine parties there, events particularly appreciated by Martha Bland. “Oh, my dear, such a swarm of French beaux, counts, viscounts, barons, and chevaliers,” she gushed to her sister-in-law. Mrs. Bland adored what she called the “dissipation” of Philadelphia and did not appreciate the lack of jollity displayed by the Virginia delegation. Madison, “a gloomy, stiff creature,” was particularly annoying. “They say [he] is clever in Congress, but out of it he has nothing engaging or even bearable in his manners—the most unsociable creature in existence.”
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One doubts that Madison would have been bothered by her assessment.