James Madison

Father of the Constitution

By Alfred Steinberg

Grade Level and Copyright 

Grade Level is 11.7 using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test with six sample chapters.

First edition published by G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1965.

Electronic edition published by Ebooks for Students, Ltd., 2023.

© 1965 by Alfred Steinberg. All rights reserved. Free distribution to students with the permission of  the estate of Alfred Steinberg.

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The Author

Alfred Steinberg contributed many articles on the national scene to Reader’s Digest, the Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s, Colliers, American Heritage, and many other magazines and newspapers. James Madison will be the eighth book he has written in the Putnam Lives to Remember Series.

His other books include The First Ten; The Founding Presidents And Their Administrations, The Man from Missouri: The Life and Times of Harry S Truman, The Kennedy Brothers, Mrs. R: The Life Of Eleanor Roosevelt, Sam Johnson's Boy; a Close-Up of the President From Texas, and several more titles about American politics.

For my friend, Francis Coleman Rosenberger Virginia Student and Scholar

1

MAKER OF THE FUTURE

IN MAY, 1787, a short slight man named James Madison took the front row, center seat in a small room in the Pennsylvania State House. This was the same room where the Declaration of Independence had been produced eleven years earlier; and those who were now present with Madison hoped somehow to write as important a document as was written on that earlier occasion. Directly facing him was his friend and fellow Virginian, General George Washington, the elected presiding officer, whose presence lent national authority to the gathering. Seated about Madison were a few dozen men from the twelve states that had answered the call to write a constitution for a new government.

That summer Philadelphia’s heat and high humidity made the city like a steaming African jungle. Yet during the four months that these men labored, they were most times unaware of the unseasonable weather. Day after day they argued, haggled, formed committees, and subjected each other’s views to the practical politician’s mental scalpel. Most wanted a strong central government that would unify, yet exercise authority over the separate states. Others wanted to protect the powers of the jealous states and to evolve a weak central structure.

When the Constitutional Convention completed its work on September 17, the 5,000-word document was a long string of compromises. The result was that a majority of the delegates were in doubt as to the success of their endeavor. But on one point there was almost complete agreement. Thirty-six-year-old James Madison had played a leading role in the determination of the American Constitution. Through his zeal, wisdom, and knowledge of government he emerged as the “Father of the Constitution.” In his quiet, yet persuasive manner, he dominated the proceedings. As a delegate from Georgia so aptly stated: “Mr. Madison is a character who has long been in public life; and what is very remarkable every person seems to acknowledge his greatness. He blends together the profound politician with the scholar. In the management of every great question he evidently took the lead in the Convention.”

Physically, Madison was usually the smallest man in any political gathering, but this factor faded away when a contest of minds or principles developed. Opponents would attack him solely on the basis of his size, only to find that this mean approach splashed back on themselves the very mud they had thrown. On one occasion, Napoleon Bonaparte, not tall himself, sneeringly addressed William Crawford, the American Minister to France, about Madison. “Is your Mr. Madison tall?” he asked, and smiled wryly.

“Not at all,” Crawford replied. “President Madison is on the contrary, quite small. Not taller than that.”

He stretched out an arm, and the flat of his palm rested two inches above the French ruler’s head.

Napoleon’s face turned brick-red, and he stumbled away.

Several historians who have delved into Madison’s life have not been content with his importance as a Virginia legislator, member of the Continental Congress, fashioner of the Constitution, leader of the House of Representatives, Secretary of State, and President of the United States. Some have found it necessary to cloak him with false prestige by tying him to unrelated earlier Madisons.

Most popular has been the effort to connect him with a brave Indian-fighter named Captain Isaac Madyson, who served Captain John Smith in the founding of the Jamestown Colony of Virginia in 1607. Unfortunately, Captain Madyson did not have any male descendants. The truth is that the first American ancestor of James Madison was a ship’s carpenter named John Maddison who sailed from England in the 1650’s. This great-great-grandfather of the future statesman settled on 600 acres in Gloucester County, Virginia, on the shore of the Mattaponi River near the coast.

Hard work brought him prosperity, and his holdings were further enlarged by his son, also named John Maddison, the sheriff and justice of the peace of King and Queen County to the west. Sheriff Maddison’s eldest son, Ambrose, dropped the second d in the family name and acquired the 5,000-acre Montpelier estate in Orange County, east of the Blue Ridge Mountains and close to the swift Rapidan River. Ambrose, who was James Madison’s grandfather, married Frances Taylor, whose brother was the grandfather of Zachary Taylor, hero of the Mexican War in 1846. Thus James Madison, the fourth President, and Zachary Taylor, the twelfth, were second cousins.

When Ambrose Madison died in 1732, he left a young widow and three children living on the edge of the raw Virginia frontier. These were hard years for her: struggling to stave off bankruptcy; clearing land; planting crops; guarding against Indian attacks, and coping with shrewd London brokers. However, in time she could depend on her steady eldest son, James, who did not go off to William and Mary College as his friends did, but stayed at home to help her.

Frances Madison sent her tobacco to Conway s warehouse below Fredericksburg on the Rappahannock, and it was James who handled deliveries. Here in 1740, he met Nelly Conway, a child of eight, compared with his seventeen years. The youth saw her again each year when he brought the Madison tobacco. Finally, in 1749 when Nelly was seventeen, he proposed to her, and they were married.

When Nelly was nineteen, she was expecting her first child. The young mistress of Montpelier yearned for her mother and was soon on the road east to Fredericksburg and then south to Port Conway. A short time later a notation appeared in the family Bible: “James Madison, Jr. was born on Tuesday night at 12 o’clock being the last of the 5th and the beginning of the 6th day of March, 1751.” This notation was afterward amended, for 1751 was the year the British Parliament dropped the old style Julian calendar and adopted the new style Gregorian calendar. The infant’s birthday, therefore, had to be changed to March 16.

Decades later when James Madison won renown, family members suffered embarrassment over his mother’s name, for Nelly was a name commonly given to female slaves and horses. In snobbish disdain for the truth, they insisted that her name was Eleanor Rose. Even Madison’s assertion in 1835 that he was “the son of Nelly Conway” did not end the foolish claim.

2

MONTPELIER YOUTH

THE Montpelier estate to which Nelly Madison returned with her infant son was far from the gracious setting it later became. The plain wooden house was small and windowless, and it stood at the point of a valley forest. Close by were barns, sheds, and tiny cabins for the slaves, as well as the family cemetery, and piles of lumber choppings that gave evidence of the constant effort to clear the land for crops.

Montpelier was in reality a large rough farm, but like other Virginians, James Madison, Sr., preferred the term “plantation.” To distinguish themselves further from northern farmers, men in his position called themselves “planters” and wrote the word “gentleman” after their names.

At this period in Virginia’s history, three distinct societies flourished. There was the aristocratic Tidewater gentry of the east, who were masters of large plantations near the mouths of the Potomac, Rappahannock, York, and James Rivers. They dressed in satin coats, velvet breeches, and long silk stockings and lived like English barons. A hundred miles to the west on the Piedmont where Montpelier was situated, clothing was rougher, manners were less elegant, and the well-to-do joined in physical tasks. Across the mountains in the Shenandoah Valley was the frontier; the deerskin shirt, coonskin cap, homespun dress, the log cabin, and ever-present musket placed this still primitive society a generation behind the Piedmont community, and two behind the Tidewater group.

One of little James’s first memories of the Piedmont was the sight of wild animals that made their home at Montpelier. Another was the memory of the look of stark terror in the eyes of his father and his Beale, Chew, Taylor, and Catlett relatives one July day in 1755. Not until years later did he learn the reason. The British had begun their war that year to drive the French from North America. In July, word had come to the assembled relatives at Montpelier of the slaying of General Edward Braddock and the routing of his expedition against Duquesne by French and Indian forces in the Monongahela River forests. They realized that the Piedmont and the Frontier were now open prey to Indian attacks, and tension became their way of life until 1763 when the French admitted defeat and stopped promoting Indian attacks on the British colonists.

This fear of Indians permanently scarred James, with prejudice against them, and was the opposite of his attitude of sympathy for Negro slaves. His father owned fifty Negroes, and though Madison’s relatives were plentiful in the area, his chief companions were the children of his father’s slaves. The give-and-take of their childhood games made it impossible for him to assume the role of an all-wise and strict “master” when he reached manhood. These early friendships also led him to become an outspoken opponent of the institution of slavery in later life.

From the start the person who most impressed Jamie, as he was called in the neighborhood, was his father. The elder Madison was given more to action than cultural pursuits, but his character was so stalwart that residents of the area looked to him for leadership. At the Episcopal Brick Church, seven miles away near Orange Courthouse, Madison senior served as vestryman. Because the Episcopal, or Anglican, Church was then the only officially approved church in the colony, it functioned as part of the government. Consequently, a vestryman’s duties included doling out public money to the poor, arresting those caught riding on the Sabbath, and preventing other religious sects from preaching or holding services. He also served as local justice of the peace, although he refused this appointment for three years after it was made. For justification he could point to his enormous effort in constructing a suitable brick mansion with white porch pillars to replace the wooden house built in 1730. In addition, there were the demands of a growing family, one that eventually contained twelve children.

Despite the doting care he got from his parents and grandmother, little Jamie was so wan and frail as a child that the family was concerned that its heir would not live to reach manhood. But if he had a weak body, he more than compensated for it with his brilliant mind. Just past babyhood he learned to read and was soon poring over the small array of books his father imported from London as part payment for delivered crops. However, it was not until after the death of his grandmother, who was his first teacher, that his father decided to give him some formal education.

Two of Jamie’s cousins were attending the private school run by Donald Robertson in King and Queen County, three counties to the east; and shortly after Jamie’s eleventh birthday in 1762, he was sent by carriage to join them.

Robertson turned out to be a thorough scholar, well educated at Edinburgh University in Scotland, and an enthusiastic teacher. He did not have many pupils, but those he had were an interesting lot. Besides Madison, one student was John Tyler, later Speaker of the Virginia Assembly and father of President John Tyler. Another was George Rogers Clark, who won the Northwest for America in the Revolutionary War. Still another was John Taylor of Caroline, Virginia; he later became the agriculturist-philosopher of the Jeffersonian political party. To each, Robertson gave of himself freely, for he charged the ridiculously low fee of twenty dollars a year.

Robertson was immediately taken with the pale new arrival. For he quickly discovered that behind the expressive light blue eyes was an extraordinary mind that thirsted for knowledge. He soon had the lad hopping at a swift pace through a rigorous regime of Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, algebra, geometry, geography, literature, and philosophy. “All that I have in life I owe largely to that man,” Madison acknowledged years afterward.

Robertson saw that the boy had a remarkable, original mind that went far beyond the capacity for storing memorized facts. It was a mind that could successfully challenge the dogma of accepted scholars, and intelligence that could conceive plausible relationships between seemingly unrelated matters. However, it lacked discipline, and Robertson subjected Jamie to all that was then available in the field of logic. “Logic or Dialectick is the art of reasoning,” Jamie carefully scrawled in a school notebook. Logic meant using the mind “in discovering truth and error,” he also noted.

The depth of the lad entering his teens is readily available from his notes on readings in philosophy. For instance, on one page he wrote: “Mr. Locke and other philosophers have made a curious observation upon the essential and accidental properties of a matter, which they call primary and secondary qualities. They say that the primary qualities, such as extension, solidity, figure, are real and inherent in the substance independent of our ideas; but that the secondary or sensible qualities, such as color, smell, heat and the like: are not really in the objects, but only in our conception.”

Madison had devoured all of Robertson’s philosophic library, and was already proving an academic match for his teacher when his father requested him to return home in 1767. The twenty dollar annual payment was unnecessary, said his father, because the young Reverend Thomas Martin, the new parish minister at the Episcopal Brick Church, had moved into Montpelier and was tutoring Jamie’s younger brothers. There was no reason why Martin could not include Jamie, too, said Madison, Sr.

The leave-taking between Jamie and Robertson was sad. But upon returning to Montpelier, the sixteen-year-old youth found Martin to be an equally challenging teacher. Moreover, Martin added a new subject for James’s consideration. The young minister was the first person to open James’s eyes to the political relationship between England and the colonies. In 1765, Parliament had decided that the colonists would have to pay their share of the cost of empire. First came the Stamp Act of that year and then the Townshend Acts of 1767. James agreed with Martin that the imposition of these taxes by Parliament was illegal because they were assessed without the approval of the colonists. Tutor and student probably spent as much time discussing the growing troubles with England as they did with mathematics and geography.

Still another benefit from his relationship with Martin came in 1769. The time had come for the youth to go to college. Madison senior had heard that many of the boys who went to William and Mary College at the capital in Williamsburg spent their time gambling and drinking. Furthermore, a boy as frail as Jamie was in danger of succumbing to “the bilious fever” at Williamsburg, which lay in a swampy peninsula.

Martin’s brother, Alexander Martin, later a governor of North Carolina, came to Montpelier for a visit at the time the elder Madison was pondering over the problem of a college for his son. The two brothers heartily recommended the college they had attended even though the institution was less than a quarter-century old. This was the College of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton), and they rated it as high in scholarship as any college in the colonies.

The elder Madison had two questions to consider: Would his son survive a three-hundred-mile trip? Would a Presbyterian school taint him?

A short time later in the summer of 1769, James, chaperoned by Sawney, one of the Madison slaves, and the Martin brothers were on the road traveling northeast to New Jersey.

3

PRINCETON YEARS

AN IMMEDIATE problem faced James Madison when the Martin brothers left him in the tiny village of Princeton in July, 1769. The Martins had failed to recall that the school term began in May and would not be over until the end of September; the next term would not commence until November. Should he plunge into the term already half-over or should he waste time until November?

He would take his chances. “I entered college immediately,” he wrote to the Reverend Martin early in August.

Then, before he had time to adjust to college life, came the exams—rigorous tests in a half-dozen subjects. Dr. John Witherspoon, the serious college president, called him in afterward. Witherspoon always wore his black cap and gown over his preacher’s garb and insisted that the students also wear the academic cap and gown at school. Madison’s discomfort, caused by doubts about the examinations and the awkward garb, vanished when Witherspoon began to talk. He had done so well in his tests, Witherspoon told him in his strong Scottish accent, that he would be enrolled as a sophomore when the next term began.

Princeton changed Madison from a shy, withdrawn youth to a self-confident, out-going young man. The college was indeed a small institution and it required little socializing to meet the entire student body of one hundred boys. Princeton’s entire business centered in Nassau Hall, with the basement of the building given over to a school for younger boys and the upper floors to the college. Day and night the upstairs floors resounded with the voices of students discussing school subjects, stretching their minds in academic arguments or planning practical jokes on the faculty, which consisted of Dr. Witherspoon and three tutors. At the top of Nassau Hall, the students lived three to each small bedroom. Sometimes in the black of night while Madison and his friends argued strenuously, Dr. Witherspoon sleepily appeared in the corridor. “To bed, lads, to bed!” he would call out in his Scottish burr. Silence immediately followed. But when his shuffling footsteps had faded, discussion resumed.

When some students founded the American Whig Society in 1769, Madison was a prime mover. This was a debating society and “Jemmy,” as fellow-Whigs called him, kept its activities moving at a feverish pitch. In 1770, when a religious revival swept the village and Nassau Hall, the more religious students formed the Cliosophic Society. Madison quickly challenged them to engage in a debating and literary war, and when the Clios accepted an unending battle began.

Considering the talent among the Whigs, the contest was unequal. Besides Madison, the Whigs numbered Philip Freneau, later known as the “Poet of the American Revolution;” Hugh Henry Brackenridge, an important early American poet, political satirist and Pennsylvania Supreme Court judge; Samuel Stanhope Smith, later president of Princeton; John Henry, who became a U. S. Senator and governor of Maryland; William Bradford, President Washington’s Attorney General; John Beatty, member of the U. S. House of Representatives; and Caleb Wallace, Chief Justice of the Kentucky Supreme Court. Another student who was a fairly inactive Whig was Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, later a Revolutionary War general, Congressman and father of Robert E. Lee.

Madison was known to his brother-Whigs as a man who could arouse the “Tories,” as they called the Clios, to wild fury. However, he had to do this indirectly, for he was afraid to speak in public. His poems lashing the Clios were read to cheering students in the parish hall by his friends, Freneau and Brackenridge. His chief target was Samuel Spring, poet laureate of the Clios and later a chaplain in the Revolutionary army. But Sam Spring, after smarting under poetic attack, would reply in kind and thus keep the battle going. Four other Clios, who later became sedate Presbyterian ministers, found themselves labeled by Madison as “sons of screech owls, monkeys and baboons.” One renegade Whig named Aaron Burr joined the Clios, but there is no evidence that he ever attacked Madison. Young Burr was the son of Aaron Burr, Sr., the late president of Princeton, and the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, famous New England preacher.

Although Madison devoted a great deal of time and effort to the Whigs, he made certain it did not interfere with his studies. Upon completion of his first full year at Princeton in 1770, he was already a third-year student. Not satisfied even with such progress, he petitioned Dr. Witherspoon for permission to combine his third and fourth years of study into a single year. Witherspoon might easily have rejected his plea to complete the four-year course in two years. But Madison’s eagerness and his already apparent ability persuaded Witherspoon to grant the request.

During this hard academic year, Madison took his chief course-work directly from the president, who introduced him to a life-long interest in international law and theory of government. Witherspoon also taught him moral philosophy and public speaking, though Madison floundered in the latter course. Years later when he forced himself to speak in public, he recalled the frequent warnings of his professor.

“Lads,” Witherspoon would pound a fist into a palm and insist, “if it should fall to the lot of any of ye, as it may be, to appear upon the theater of public life, let me impress upon your minds two rules in oratory that are never to be departed from upon any occasion whatever—Ne’er do ye speak unless ye ha’ something to say, and when ye are done, be sure to leave off.”

Dr. Witherspoon was a hard master, and the program he laid out for Madison proved taxing. Yet Madison did not seem to be under any strain, for he not only met all student requirements but also continued his Whig activities. Furthermore, he was engaged in a heavy program of outside reading, which included all the books Witherspoon had specifically ordered the students not to read, such as the writings of Voltaire.

There was still another activity that engaged some of Madison’s time. This was politics, a subject first brought to his attention by the Reverend Martin and now expanded by Dr. Witherspoon. Although the president had come to New Jersey from the British Isles as recently as 1768, he was soon involved in the struggle of the colonies against the mother country’s tax policies. He first took a public stand in October, 1769, when he invited Madison and the other students to watch the awarding of an honorary degree to John Hancock of Boston. Hancock was already a leader in the fight to defy the British.

Witherspoon’s views against the Townshend Act taxes became those of both the Whigs and Clios, uniting them for the first time since their founding. Soon the various sections of the colonies from which the students came, were receiving letters from the college boys that were undoubt’edly the echoes of what they had heard from Witherspoon. In mid-1770, shortly after the Boston Massacre, New York merchants who had promised not to import British goods broke their promise. Madison’s letter to his father told about “the base conduct of the merchants in New York in breaking through their spirited resolutions not to import.” He mentioned that the merchants of New York had written to Philadelphia merchants recommending that they too ignore their promise not to import. A copy of the letter, wrote Madison, “was lately burnt by the students of this place in the college yard, all of them appearing in their black gowns and the bell tolling.” What he did not tell his father was that the students had hired a hangman to strike a match to the letter and start the backyard bonfire.

In September, 1771, Madison’s graduating class held its exercises. He had written his father earlier that “the greatest scholar” was supposed to deliver the head oration, while the leading orator would deliver the farewell for the class, or the valedictory. Madison was “the greatest scholar” in that twelve-man senior class, yet he took no part whatsoever in the graduation ceremonies. He had far to go before he dared to stand up before others and speak, a serious drawback to achieving his secret ambition of leadership.

4

BEGINNING AT POLITICS

AFTER the graduation, Madison did not pack up his bags and quit Nassau Hall. Now that the pressure of his studies was off, the strain on his health began to show. A year spent with only four hours of sleep a night revealed itself in the exhaustion that settled over him.

Although some biographers credit Madison with remaining an extra year at Princeton to do graduate work leading to the ministry, this was far from the actual case. A note dictated later by Madison explained that he severely injured his health and was rendered unfit to return home, and he therefore spent the ensuing winter in Princeton employed in miscellaneous studies.

In the winter of 1771-72, he studied Hebrew and ethics with Dr. Witherspoon. But in the spring, a general feebleness overtook him and he gave up his studies to return to Virginia.

However, not even the warm family welcome and care improved his health. Furthermore, he now fell into a state of deep depression and concluded that at twenty-one his life was almost over. In a letter to his classmate, William Bradford, in Philadelphia, he wrote: “As to myself, I am too dull and infirm now to look out for any extraordinary things in this world. I think my sensations for many months past have intimated to me not to expect a long or healthy life, and therefore have little spirit and alacrity to set about anything that is difficult in acquiring and useless in possessing after one has exchanged time for eternity.”

During the course of 1772, he continued to read, but with declining interest. For a while he tutored his younger brothers and sisters, but he lacked the necessary teaching spark. Then brooding over his physical inadequacies, he developed chest pains and what appeared to be the advanced stage of a fatal disorder. For hours at a time, following strange seizures, his body was as rigid as a corpse. Doctors came to the house and dolefully announced that he had a violent form of epilepsy. Fortunately, they did not drain blood from him, as was the custom at the time for almost any ailment. For if they had, chances are he would not have survived the ordeal.

While the elder Madisons wrung their hands at the sorry condition of their eldest son, outside situations were shaping up that would deliver him from his seizures and stupor. In 1773, Virginia law prosecuted all religious organizations except the colony-supported Episcopal Church. The law required all children to be baptized as Episcopalians. All freeholders were assessed for support of the Anglican (Episcopal) Church whether they were members or not. Any person inviting a Quaker into the colony was guilty of a crime, and all who upheld a religious doctrine rejected by the Bishop of Virginia could be burned at the stake for heresy.

Madison was lost in self-pity when word reached Montpelier that some Baptists had been arrested in nearby Culpeper County for preaching. The injustice roused him from his apathy, and a rising fury came over him. He immediately launched a letter-writing campaign to Culpeper authorities, demanding the release of the Baptists. He also went in person to argue in their behalf, despite the fact that he was making himself liable to the religious laws of the colony. In the heat of his effort, he wrote to William Bradford: “There are at this moment in the adjacent county not less than five or six well-meaning men in close jail for publishing their religious sentiments which in the main are very orthodox. I have squabbled and scolded, abused and ridiculed so long about it to little purpose, that I am without common patience. So I must beg you to pity me, and pray for liberty of conscience. . . . Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind, and unfits it for every noble enterprise.”

Although he could not win release for the Baptists, his fight restored him to the world of reality. He undertook exercises to strengthen his body, as ordered by his doctor, and spent hours each day either on long walks or in the saddle. He also began an annual trek to Berkeley Springs, in western Virginia, where, his doctor believed, the chemical baths would relieve his seizures. His affliction disappeared, for whatever reason, and its disappearance was heralded by his renewed interest in life.

By the end of 1773, he was engaged in “a course of reading,” he said, “to qualify himself for, but with no fixed determination, to practice at the Bar.” Then early the next year, his energy restored, he set out for the North on a trip that would take him to Philadelphia, New York City and up the Hudson River to Albany.

Now came a revived interest in politics. His trip took place shortly after the Boston Tea Party occurred, and all along his route he heard the public denouncing “taxation without representation.” He learned that Parliament had retaliated angrily to the radicals dumping of a cargo of English tea with the Intolerable Acts of 1774. Boston harbor had been closed; many of the self-governing rights of the Massachusetts colony were abolished; and General Thomas Gage, leading a large army of Redcoats, had become governor of the colony.

Upon his return home in mid-1774, Madison swelled with pride to learn that the Virginia Assembly had reacted to the Intolerable Acts by declaring June 1 a statewide day of “fasting, humiliation and prayer.” And when Lord Dunmore, the royal governor, dissolved the assembly because of its declaration, members boldly reconvened at the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg. From here, through the Virginia Committee of Correspondence, the tavern assembly sent out a call to the other colonies for a Continental Congress “to deliberate on those general measures which the united interests of America may from Time to Time require.”

Madison learned from his friend, William Bradford, that the First Continental Congress had met in secret sessions in Philadelphia during September and October. He was disappointed when he heard that the Congress had sent a pleading petition to King George III, calling him “Most Gracious Sovereign” and begging him to dismiss “designing and dangerous men.” So far as Madison was concerned, he noted to Bradford, “delay on our part emboldens our adversaries and improves their schemes.” If necessary, the colonies must consider physical resistence.

One of the decisions of the Continental Congress was to call for a Second Continental Congress in May, 1775, if the Intolerable Acts were not repealed. Another agreement was to establish a Continental Association to enforce a boycott against importation of British goods. Every city, county, and town throughout the colonies received a request to form a committee of safety to serve as the local enforcement agency for the Continental Association.

Animosity toward Parliament ran high in Orange County, and almost every freeholder turned out in December, 1774, to vote for their committee. As the county’s leading citizen, James Madison, Sr., easily won the chairman’s seat. Then, to add further honor to the master of Montpelier, voters also named his twenty-three-year-old son and namesake to the committee. Thus began the political career that would span forty-two years.

5

FROM COUNTY TO STATE

WHEN the Madisons, senior and junior, became members of the Orange County committee to enforce the boycott, they gave revolutionary evidence that they no longer recognized the authority of the royal colonial government.

This attitude was growing quite common throughout the colony by late 1774 to the great concern of the royal governor. In a letter to his government back in London, Lord Dunmore wailed about this new political authority to be found in Orange County and elsewhere. “A Committee has been chosen in every county,” he wrote, “which Committee assumes an authority to inspect the books, invoices, and all other secrets of the trade and correspondence of merchants; to watch the conduct of every inhabitant, without distinction, and to send for all such as come under their suspicion; to interrogate them; and to stigmatize such as they find transgressing what they are now hardy enough to call the laws of the Congress.”

But the control over imports from England was only one part of the activities of the committees, Lord Dunmore added. They “have set themselves up superior to all other authority.” The Madisons and the rest of the Orange County committee, for example, bore out his complaint, for they soon constituted the only law in the county. The committee tried one man for gambling, on the assumption that control over business morality regarding the boycott also extended to private morality. In another case, the committee seized pro-British pamphlets owned by a minister and ordered them “publicly burnt as a testimony of the Committee’s detestation and abhorrence of the writers and their principles.”

The royal governor also complained that “every county is now arming a company of men, whom they call an independent company, for the avowed purpose of protecting their committees.” No doubt, this was the most serious form of disrespect for the legal colonial government, for it meant private armies in every county directly opposed to that government.

The Piedmont and Frontier counties were especially active in organizing and training companies of militia. In Orange County, as head of the committee, Madison, Sr. took command of the militia and assumed the rank of colonel. A martial atmosphere began to take hold as the young men started drilling, shooting, and learning military maneuvers. Twenty-one-year-old Francis Madison, the colonel’s second son, and nineteen-year-old Ambrose Madison, his third son, made a good showing for Montpelier by enlisting.

At first James Madison, Jr. gave all his time to the Orange County committee, attending meetings, questioning witnesses, and writing committee opinions and decisions.

But this seemed so indirect a contribution to the cause of the Virginia colony against the royal government that he resolutely joined the Orange County militia at the beginning of 1775. Now he began drilling and taking part in rifle practice. “The strength of this colony will lie chiefly in the riflemen of the upland counties,” he boasted. “Indeed I believe we have men that would very often hit a mark at 250 yards.” He lay claim to the hope that he might soon become expert at hitting a target one-hundred-yards distant.

Early in 1775, Parliament retaliated to the First Continental Congress of the previous September by issuing several new and severe regulations. In Virginia the counties sent delegates to the extra-legal Virginia Convention being held in Richmond to avoid the governor’s regulars in Williamsburg. Madison and all of Virginia thrilled to learn of Patrick Henry’s fiery speech of March 23, when he shouted defiantly: “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

On Henry’s motion, the Convention now ordered each county on a war footing, despite a widespread shortage of ammunition and equipment. The Convention also requested the same seven delegates to take part in the Philadelphia meetings of the Second Continental Congress in May.

Had Lord Dunmore been a military man and if he had been able to count on a loyal army, the first strong retaliatory action against a rebellious colony might have occurred in Virginia. Instead, the crisis shifted to Massachusetts, where General Thomas Gage, governor and former comrade of George Washington on the ill-fated Braddock expedition of 1755, was in control. Informed that rebels were storing arms at Concord, Gage sent eight hundred men on an eighteen-mile night march to that town to seize the stores and capture John Hancock and Samuel Adams in nearby Lexington. At dawn on April 19, 1775, seventy “minutemen” faced the British on Lexington Common and suffered eight killed and ten wounded in the encounter. The British then marched on to Concord where a skirmish took place on Concord Bridge. Here “the shot heard round the world,” was fired and the Revolutionary War was on in earnest in Massachusetts.

On the day following the Concord fighting, though without knowledge of it, Lord Dunmore decided to take action in Virginia. The colony’s ammunition was stored in a little brick hexagon-shaped building called the Powder Horn in the center of Williamsburg. On April 20, Dunmore ordered the gunpowder removed from the Horn and transferred to a British man-of-war lying in the James River. It was his fear that the colonists would seize it if he left it in the Horn.

Virginia militiamen rose up in anger at his action, and six hundred men assembled at Fredericksburg to follow Patrick Henry into Williamsburg. Dunmore realized he could not defeat the determined colonists, and in alarm sent about $1,500 to Henry to pay for the confiscated powder. Henry was for pushing on and joining the battle. But Peyton Randolph, President of the First Continental Congress and head of the Virginia Convention, ordered him back, insisting that violence “may produce effects which God only knows the effects of.”

While Patrick Henry was on his way to Williamsburg, companies of militia set out from other counties. A soldier in the Albemarle County company later reported: “About ten o’clock the next morning, as we were crossing the boundary into Orange County, we met two young men sent from that county’s company for the purpose of bringing the two companies together. They were the two Madison brothers (James and Francis).” Along the way, the two companies met Patrick Henry and his Hanover County militia returning from the powder incident. There was nothing to do now except turn around and head for home. Madison later sent Henry the following message in behalf of the Orange County Committee: “We, the committee for the county of Orange, having been fully informed of your reasonable and spirited proceedings in procuring a compensation for the powder fraudulently taken from the country magazine by command of Lord Dunmore . . . entreat you to accept their cordial thanks. We take this opportunity also to give it as our opinion that the blow struck in the Massachusetts government is a hostile attack on this and every other colony, and a sufficient warrant to use violence and reprisal in all cases in which it may be for our security and welfare.”

Madison’s military experiences worried his parents because of his delicate health. Madison realized, too, that if he had gone into Williamsburg for an actual battle late in April, he probably would have expired on the scene from sheer exhaustion. So, as the elder Madison put it, “the feebleness of his health which he had experienced in training restrained him” from remaining in military service. He had made a full effort to do his duty and had no need to carry a guilty conscience into the future.

Yet, even though he lacked the stamina for hard physical exertion, his body possessed a special kind of physical power. Shortly after the incident of the Horn, typhoid fever swept the Piedmont and Frontier. Entire families were wiped out, and many new cemeteries had to be dug. “Since I wrote last,” Madison informed William Bradford in mid-June of 1775, “a Dysentery hath made an iruption [sic] in my father’s family. It has carried off a little sister about seven (Elizabeth) and a brother about 4 years of age (Reuben). It is still among us but principally among the blacks. I have escaped hitherto.” A month later when a fresh outbreak carried off another sweeping total of local citizens, Madison wrote again, “The Dysentery has been again in our family and is now among the slaves. I have hitherto escaped and hope it has no commission to attack me.”

The general sadness and fright caused by the typhoid epidemic naturally had an immediate, tempering effect on the problems relating to England. If Lord Dunmore had remained quiet in the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg, the afflicted sections of Virginia would have been too busy burying the dead to take further action against him.

However, Dunmore lived under an overbearing fear that he would be assassinated. A wild-looking band of young horsemen from Piedmont had come riding into Williamsburg. Up and down Duke of Gloucester Street they rode, letting out fierce yells; and Dunmore saw that they carried tomahawks and scalping knives.

On June 5, 1775, he decided the situation was too dangerous and he fled the Governor’s Palace for the safety of a British frigate lying off Yorktown. Then to prove he had not acted in fear, he began a bombardment of helpless coastal towns. Virginia minutemen thirsted for revenge, and they had their reward on December 9, 1775, when they routed the British army below Norfolk. This action brought to an end the Royal Colonial Government.

By leaving the Palace, Lord Dunmore had signified that he no longer exercised control over Virginia. For this reason, when the Virginia Convention met in August, 1775, the colonist-delegates realized that the time had come to establish a statewide government free of British authority.

Word went out, therefore, to each county to elect two delegates to meet with other county delegates in May of the following year on vital business.

Rumor had it that the May, 1776, Convention at Williamsburg would consider a declaration of independence and prepare a constitution for a state government. This would be the most important assemblage to date in Virginia’s history, and each county looked to its leaders to represent it.

In Orange County, James Madison, Sr. could have become a delegate by acclamation. But he preferred to remain at Montpelier. Nevertheless, to show their respect for him, freeholders elected his untiring son James, the twenty-five-year-old member of the Orange County committee on the boycott.

James realized that the voters had, in effect, elevated his father from county to state politics when they voted for the son. This made him all the more anxious to prove they had chosen a worthy substitute.

6

STATE POLITICIAN

WILLIAMSBURG was alive with anticipation when Madison rode into the capital in May, 1776. Word had come from Massachusetts of General Washington’s spectacular success against General Gage and his replacement, General Sir William Howe. After Washington had seized Dorchester Heights, laying Boston open to bombardment, Howe and his army of Redcoats fled the city on March 17 for Halifax, Canada. Washington had then taken his army to New York to await Howe’s return—if he dared come. The war seemed to have ended before it really began.

Up and down mile-long Duke of Gloucester Street that ran from the capitol to William and Mary College, carriages drawn by six horses arrived that May for the Virginia Convention. The college was empty when Madison reached Williamsburg. Pro-royalist professors and students had slipped out of town to avoid anti-Tory outbreaks, while the revolutionary elements in the faculty and student body were drilling and practicing on the rifle range. Visitors flocked about the brick Powder Horn in Market Square to stare at the scene of the opening of Virginia’s revolution in April, 1775. Madison also came to look, and then went to the Raleigh Tavern where local citizens and politicians drank endless toasts to the cause of independence.

When the Convention came to order on May 6, there seemed little likelihood that the shy, small delegate from Orange County would make an impression on this outstanding gathering. First, he was the shortest delegate present. Second, he was both unknown and inexperienced. “Madison was probably the only very small man in the Convention of 1776,” noted one observer. Strictly by happenstance, almost every delegate stood taller than six feet. Madison obviously felt this handicap, for he wore a high hat that was like an inverted ice cream cone, to add inches to his limited stature.

Nine days after the Convention began, a resolution passed instructing Virginia’s delegates to the Continental Congress “to propose to that respectable body to declare the United Colonies free and independent States.” Along with his one hundred and eleven colleagues, Madison had made the call for independence unanimous. Afterward, he joined in the emotional gathering outside the capitol building to witness the hauling down of the British flag and the running up of the Continental Union flag in its place.

The important committee at the Convention was the Committee on the Declaration of Rights and Proposals for a New Government. Madison yearned for membership, but instead Chairman Edmund Pendleton put him along with more than half the other delegates on the Committee on Privileges and Elections to determine if delegates had been properly elected.

On the floor, Madison was silent. Yet in private conversation he quickly impressed delegate after delegate with his massive reasoning powers. More and more delegates began to mouth opinions they had first heard from him. Those who could not remember his name found a ready way of describing him, for he dressed invariably in black. He was “of rather a tawny complexion, bespeaking a sedentary and studious man,” said one man. “I never knew him to wear any other color than black; his coat being cut in what is termed dress-fashion; his breeches short with buckles at the knee, black silk stockings, and shoes with strings. He wore powder on his hair, which was dressed full over the ears, tied behind.”

Day by day Madison’s reputation grew. Finally on May 16 came his reward when Convention leaders suddenly gave him a seat on the coveted committee. He now found himself sitting at the same conference table with Patrick Henry —“a pillar of fire, inflamed and followed by the Convention.” If this were not enough to fill him with awe, there was George Mason, the irascible friend of General Washington and promoter of civil liberties, seated at the table.

The committee’s immediate task was to prepare a Virginia Bill of Rights. Madison was disturbed by the competition between Henry and Mason to take command rather than work together. In Mason’s words: “The committee appointed to prepare a plan is overcharged with useless members.” Henry’s cold comment was, “I cannot count upon one coadjutor of talent equal to the task.”

Despite Henry’s challenge, Mason evenutally took charge and was responsible for fourteen of the committee’s sixteen provisions in the Bill of Rights. Among the guarantees were those assuring freedom of the press, right to a fair trial, and the abolition of hereditary offices. Later Mason’s draft was sent to Philadelphia where Thomas Jefferson used it in writing the Declaration of Independence for the Continental Congress. Where Mason had written that men had “certain inherent natural rights” such as “the enjoyment of life and liberty,” Jefferson’s Declaration said that men were “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Two chief floor fights developed over Mason’s Bill of Rights. First came a strenuous objection to his opening line “That all men are born equally free and independent.” Days were spent arguing over the single word “born” and finally it was replaced with “by nature.”

The second argument developed over the article pertaining to religious freedom. This was Madison’s draft and provided a sweeping indictment of a church-state combination. Madison’s handiwork declared that the free exercise of religion was a matter of right and not a matter of tolerance by the Virginia Anglican Church. Furthermore, no religious organization should be permitted state support or other special privileges over other religions.

Unfortunately, Madison would not speak in behalf of his draft, and his proposal to disestablish the Anglican Church was thus doomed to failure by silence. While he squirmed in his seat, trying to gather courage to rise, a weaker version retaining the church-state relationship was presented by Edmund Pendleton and inserted in place of his draft article.

When the Convention approved the Bill of Rights with the Pendleton article on religious freedom on June 12, Madison’s committee then turned to the task of writing a state constitution. Again George Mason took command, and Madison later insisted with undue modesty, “Being young and inexperienced I had, of course, but little agency in  those proceedings.” Nevertheless, he engaged in a full committee discussion of its provisions and strongly opposed some of Mason’s proposals, even though he knew his effort was futile.

Madison’s chief objection to the Constitution was that it gave political control to the aristocratic Tidewater planters. They were to hold almost a majority of seats in the lower House of Delegates and far more than a majority in the upper house. One objection was that the governor was made little more than a figurehead under the control of an eight-man council elected by the assembly.

Madison also believed that the Constitution had been illegally enacted. Voters had not specifically been told they were selecting delegates to write a constitution, he insisted. In addition, he questioned the document’s validity because the Convention passed it on June 29, a week before the Continental Congress declared the independence of the United States on July 4, 1776.

Just as illegal, he added, was the provision in the State Constitution authorizing the Convention to sit later in the year as the first Virginia legislature. Yet even though he argued that the Convention members had no authority to function as a law-making body, when the Convention reconvened as the House of Delegates in October, 1776, he hurried to Williamsburg as a member.

By now the continental military situation had turned grim. The initial joy when Washington captured Boston earlier in the year had long since evaporated. For in August, Sir William Howe had slipped down by sea from Halifax with 34,000 men and effected a landing on Staten Island. Washington’s smaller army, was poorly trained and ill-provisioned; they had been forced to retreat from Brookyln and Manhattan, first up the Hudson to Peekskill, then across New Jersey and into Pennsylvania. Word reached Williamsburg that Washington’s Continental Army was now a ragtag force of 3000 exhausted men.

Nevertheless, optimism prevailed at the Virginia Assembly that Washington would prove the final victor, and members quickly set to work to write the state’s first laws. Patrick Henry, who had dominated the Convention, was now governor; legislative leadership fell on the shoulders of a lanky, sandy-haired, thirty-three-year-old Piedmont planter named Thomas Jefferson, fresh from his triumph in writing the Declaration of Independence.

Although Madison lived only thirty miles north of Jefferson’s Monticello, the two had not met before. In time no two men in American politics would enjoy a closer, more enduring friendship; yet it began very slowly. Madison said that although the two met in 1776, “I did not [really] become acquainted with Mr. Jefferson until 1779.” Jefferson acknowledged that friendship did not develop for three years and attributed it to Madison’s “extreme modesty.”

Jefferson’s legislative leadership quickly impressed Madison. Of the 126 bills proposed during that session, Jefferson drew up more than half and led the floor fight on most. He centered his efforts on ending the aristocratic tendency of Virginia’s political and economic practices and found Madison a willing ally.

It was on the subject of freedom of religion that Madison and Jefferson worked closely in the 1776 session. Madison’s handiwork in preparing the religious article in the Constitution had provided an opening wedge in the fight to disestablish the Anglican Church. Now came statewide demands that the Constitution’s pious words be implemented, and other churches accorded equal treatment. Madison and Jefferson in the Committee on Religion favored this, but they failed to reckon with the power of Edmund Pendleton, speaker of the House of Delegates. In the end a compromise was worked out. The Anglican Church would remain the church of Virginia. But, said Jefferson, “the Act of 1776 exempted dissenters from making contributions to the Church, and left the Church clergy to be supported by voluntary contributions of their own sect.”

When the session ended, Madison felt like an old legislative hand, even though he had not spoken a word on the floor of the small assembly room in the capitol. On his return home, he found that the freeholders of Orange County, or those who owned enough land to entitle them to vote, were pleased with his record.

He therefore assumed he would easily win the coming election in April, 1777. However, he was in for a rude shock. Custom decreed that political candidates provide free liquor to voters. Even in Pennsylvania, as Madison’s college friend, Hugh Brackenridge, described in a novel, no man could hope to win an election without whiskey. He had one candidate appear before the crowd with a single jug and a second with two kegs. Said the latter to the eager crowd, “Frinds, I’m a good dimicrat, and hates the Brattish. An ye all know that my mammy was kilt o’ the Ingens. Now all ye that’s in my favor, come forit an’ drenk.”

Poor Madison could not see what free whiskey had to do with winning an election, and he refused to supply any. As he sadly explained his defeat: “It was found that the old habits were too deeply rooted to be suddenly reformed. Particular circumstances [Madison Senior’s influence] obtained for me success in the first election at which I was a candidate. At the next I was outvoted by two candidates, neither of whom having superior pretensions, and particularly deficient in them; but both of them availing themselves of all the means of influence familiar to the people.” 

Afterward, Madison’s friends petitioned the House of Delegates to deny a seat to Charles Porter who had defeated Madison. Their charge was that Porter had used “bribery and corruption.” This brought only smiles to the faces of members of the Elections Committee, for they realized that free whiskey had also elected them. When they threw the petition out, Madison’s meteoric rise in Virginia politics came to an abrupt end.

7

FROM STATE TO NATION

MADISON, rejection by the voters hurt him deeply, but he did not brood as he might have done a few years earlier. Nor did he remain idle. He had much reading to do, in fact, enough to occupy his hours until the end of his life. In addition, as the future heir of Montpelier he began to engross himself in its many activities.

In 1776, new county courts were established to replace the county committees. Shortly after Madison’s defeat the Orange County Court appointed him a local justice of the peace. However, he did not accept this position because his father planned to be away from home, and he wanted to take this opportunity to manage the affairs of the estate. He was soon to find that his gentle nature made it impossible for him to be stern or dictatorial toward the family slaves. When one fell ill, he treated him as a doctor would a patient. “I had his arm kept moist by the usual poultices, which has answered every purpose,” he wrote his father. The slaves in turn were somewhat mystified by his mildness and concern for their welfare. None ever called him “Mr. Madison,” even when he was President. In face to face encounters, they addressed him simply as “Master Jemmy,” as though he were still the boy of the house and not the proprietor.

Not for long did he hear himself called. Master Jemmy. For in November, 1777, after only a single planting season at home, he received surprising news from Williamsburg. Under the new Constitution, the Assembly had to select the first eight-man Council of State, or Executive Council, to advise and work with the governor. Several members of the House of Delegates had campaigned for appointment to the Council. Yet members had selected Madison as one of the eight, even though he had not pressured for the appointment.

The truth was that Madison had, of course, opposed the formation of the executive branch as laid out in the new Constitution. He had favored a strong executive, but instead the Constitution fashioned an office of the governor which would be in effect a pawn of the legislative branch. Not only did he lack a veto, but he was elected by the legislature and subject to the control of the Council of State.

One of Madison’s characteristics was that he always made an effort to improve poor circumstances. In this instance, the unwieldy executive arrangement had to be made to work because of the desperate war situation then prevailing. After George Washington’s army had been chased from New York down into Pennsylvania in December, 1776, Washington had gambled everything on a daring Christmas Eve crossing of the Delaware River and an attack on Hessian soldiers at Trenton, New Jersey; then another swift victory at Princeton. But in July, 1777, General Howe sent an amphibious force of 15,000 men to land below Washington’s army and attempt to trap him. There was a fight along Brandywine Creek in September, and the inferior Continental forces retreated. Then what was almost an American disaster occurred early in October at Germantown, Pennsylvania, where 1,500 Continental casualties resulted.

When Madison joined the Council of State on January 14, 1778, Washington’s army was suffering the miseries of a cruel winter at Valley Forge without clothing, food, or supplies. Fewer than twenty-miles-distant, General Howe was enjoying the warmth, plenitude, and charm of Philadelphia.

That first day Madison sat at the long egg-shaped table in the Council chamber, Washington’s misfortunes were a chief item of business. Here was a plea from the General sent to Governor Patrick Henry through the Continental Congress. “Unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place,” wrote Washington, “this army must inevitably starve, dissolve, or disperse.”

What was occurring close to Valley Forge was a national disgrace. It was common knowledge that farmers in the area refused to sell food to the Continental army because they would be paid in almost worthless Continental money. Rather than do this, they transported their products in large amounts to Philadelphia where the British Army paid high prices in gold. Congress had authorized Washington to raid the farms and seize supplies but he could not bring himself to take this extreme step despite his need.

After a Council meeting, Governor Henry wrote to the Continental Congress, “Let it suffice to say that this country abounds with the provisions for which the army is said to be almost starving, particularly that part of it nearest the camp.” Nevertheless, Madison and his fellow Council officers determined that Virginia should ease Washington’s lot despite the selfishness of Pennsylvania farmers. With this in mind they advised Henry to appoint purchasing agents to buy food for Washington’s army and deliver it to him. Then they added they had learned that Washington lacked supplies personally “which custom and the great fatigues to which he is constantly exposed must make necessary to the preservation of his health.” So they also advised the governor to send him “a stock of good rum, wine, sugar, and such other articles to be charged either to the continent or to be considered as a present from this state.”

As a member of the executive council, Madison was also involved in the difficult problem of providing Washington with soldiers. At first, Virginia relied on native patriotism to inspire her young men to volunteer for the Continental Army. But in 1777 the volunteer system was found inadequate. That year the Continental Congress assigned the states the task of raising eighty-eight battalions, each to consist of a headquarters and two companies, and each company to be made up of two platoons.

The assigned Virginia quota was for fifteen battalions. But considering the large number of the state’s citizens who had previously marched north to serve, this assessment was a strain on the remaining manpower. Even the promise of free land and cash failed to produce the required results, so that the legislature was forced to pass a draft law. All single men over eighteen were thrown into a pool of future draftees, subject to being called into service by county draft boards. However, those with money could buy substitutes to march off in their stead.

Not many weeks passed under the draft system when draft riots broke out in various counties. Too many tales had been spread about the hardships of army life—lack of pay, food and even shoes. There was also resentment against well-to-do young men “permitted to buy their way out of service. Regardless of the truth of these grievances, Madison refused to forget the bigger issue involved. This was to keep Washington’s army in the field against the British until victory finally came. Therefore, he led the fight in the executive council to prosecute rioters and draft-evaders to the “utmost rigor of the law.” Even when his own father wanted to retire from his draft duties because of trouble in Orange County, Madison quickly wrote him, warning: “A resignation at this juncture is here supposed to have a very friendly aspect on the execution of the draught and consequently to betray at least a want of patriotism and perseverance.” Madison, Sr. remained on, though the draft quota for Orange County was cut to a negligible figure in order to ward off trouble in the county.

If the problem of the governor and the Council of State was how to find sufficient Virginians for army duty, an opposite problem had arisen among non-Virginians. American commissioners in France had recruited a large number of young Frenchmen to fight the British in North America. The enthusiasm of those who arrived in Virginia and in other places was based on the fact that in Paris an untold number had been promised the rank of general, and those less fortunate had been promised half-pay for life.

The problem in Virginia that the Council of State and the governor faced was how to convince the young Frenchmen that there had been a mistake in most cases. The subject grew more acute in March, 1778, when word came that Benjamin Franklin and the other two American commissioners in Paris had signed two treaties with the royal French government—a treaty of friendship and commerce, and more important, a treaty of alliance. France was now an ally by signature, and greater diplomacy was required to handle individual cases of young Frenchmen who demanded to be named as generals.

As it later turned out, the French Treaty of Alliance was the turning point of the war, for France pledged to conduct war against England until the British recognized American independence. Madison sensed the importance of this pact, for he detained the express carriage between Williamsburg and Washington’s headquarters at Valley Forge while he wrote the first letter carrying the news. “The French court,” he wrote happily, “had actually recognized Dr. Franklin as Ambassador for the Independent States of America and the Doctor had formed an alliance for thirty years.”

When Madison became a councilor, he was thrust into daily association with Governor Patrick Henry, one of his early heroes. However, his sense of awe toward the early patriot faded when they differed on principles and tactics. The time came when Henry scoffed at him as a bookworm, while Madison considered Henry too eager to claim credit for the work of others. In April, 1778, only a few months after he joined the Council of State, Madison was pleased when Orange County voters elected him to the House of Delegates without being plied with liquor. Not only would this take him away from close meetings with the governor but his return to the House would bring him back into lawmaking, which he preferred to executing laws. However, the House Committee on Privileges and Elections shattered his dream by nullifying the election. In a report that referred to him as “James Madison jun. Esq.” the committee declared that “being at the time of election a member of the Council of State, he was incapable of being elected a member of this House.”

One vital disagreement between Henry and Madison was their view of the relationship between Virginia and the United States. This was a controversy that would reach its climax when the Federal Constitution was written in 1787. Simply stated, Henry’s view was that he was a Virginian; Madison’s, that he was an American.

It is strange that on Madison’s first day as a councilor, the Executive Council was called on to approve Governor Henry’s proposal to extend the Virginia “empire.” The colonial charter gave to Virginia land all the way to the South Seas, and Henry intended that the free state of Virginia would hold such territory against all claimants. In agreeing with Henry’s letter to the Spanish Governor of Louisiana that first day, Madison gave Henry the false impression that he, too, considered Virginia an independent political organization. For the letter asked the Spanish governor for a loan to Virginia and said that in payment, the governor would receive “the thanks of this free and independent country and the friendship of its warlike inhabitants.” Madison also agreed that day to Henry’s writing a letter to a Virginia colonel instructing him to secure a trading post for the State at New Orleans. However, later when he began to consider what Henry’s true goal was, he found himself more and more in opposition to the governor. This view was reinforced when Governor Henry dispatched George Rogers Clark to attack the British in Illinois along the Mississippi in the name of Virginia instead of the Continental Congress.

Each day when Madison finished his work at the council chamber he found relaxation and a home at the other end of Duke of Gloucester street. Here his boon companion was a young minister two years older than he and with the same name. This James Madison was his cousin, the son of his grandfather’s brother, and as much a scholar as his namesake. James Madison the minister had graduated from William and Mary in 1771, won admittance to the bar in 1773, but instead of practicing law he had become professor of natural philosophy and mathematics at William and Mary. Then in 1775 he had gone to England for a year to study for the ministry, and returned late in 1776 despite the war to resume his teaching post as a clergyman.

The two Madisons did not permit their professions or beliefs to interfere with their relationship. In fact, they lived together peacefully even though one favored disestablishing the Anglican Church and the other wanted the church-state tie to remain. While the political Madison was busy as a legislator, Clergyman Madison was noisily attempting to rid William and Mary of its pro-English president, the Reverend John Camm. His success at this endeavor was obvious by the time his cousin James returned to Williamsburg in January, 1778, as a member of the Council of State. For not only had President Camm been ousted but the new president of William and Mary College was the Reverend James Madison.

Madison added to his companions in mid-1779 when Governor Henry’s three-year term expired and Thomas Jefferson succeeded him. Their acquaintance in the 1776 state legislature ripened immediately into full friendship on daily association. Madison referred to Jefferson as a “walking library,” while Jefferson called Madison’s mind “luminous and discriminating.”

They were not long together, however, for a crisis had arisen in the Continental Congress. In its early meetings, the cream of Virginia’s brainpower had served as delegates. But by 1779 when the country was sorely beset with financial, foreign, and military problems, the caliber of the Virginia delegation had sadly declined.

General Washington, who had weathered the trials of Valley Forge, had chased the British Army from Philadelphia to New York in June, 1778. Had he not had a traitorous general in his midst he might have emerged with a major victory against the British at Monmouth on June 28. Nevertheless, Monmouth proved to be the last major battle in the North, for the British moved into New York, entrenched themselves there against attack and gave no indication of wanting to engage Washington’s forces stationed along the Hudson.

Washington was appalled that his home state was doing so little to help settle the problems of the national cause, and in an angry mood he wrote to Benjamin Harrison, Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates. (Harrison would become known to later historians as the father of one President, William Henry Harrison—1840, and the greatgrandfather of another, Benjamin Harrison—1888.) “The public believes that the states are badly represented,” Washington informed Harrison. “Most earnestly,” he pleaded, “send your ablest and best men to Congress; these characters must not slumber or sleep at home in such times of pressing danger; they must not content themselves in the enjoyment of places of honor or profit in their own country, while the common interests of America are mouldering and sinking into irretrievable (if a remedy is not soon applied) ruin.”

Speaker Harrison set to work throughout 1779 to raise the level of the Virginia delegation. His success in one instance was noted by a letter he received on December 16. “Sir, Being notified that the General Assembly have honored me with a delegation to serve this commonwealth in general Congress,” it began, “I beg the favor of you, sir to communicate to them my acceptance thereof, and my assurances that as far as fidelity and reason can supply the place of abilities, the interests of my country shall be punctually promoted. Your most obedient servant, James Madison, Jun.”

8

THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS

IT TOOK Madison two weeks in March, 1780, to travel from Montpelier to Philadelphia, a distance of about two hundred miles. The muddy, rutted roads, made almost impassable in spots by torrential rains, forced him to stop at so many towns that he gained insight into the types of people involved in the war of independence. There were no loyalists in view in the Middle Atlantic states, but it was commonly estimated that at least a third of the population favored a continuation of loyalty to King George III. Another third revealed no interest in the war, except to complain about rising prices or the lack of luxury items normally imported from England. It was the final third, a distinct minority possessing energy and purpose, who carried the Revolution along. These were individuals of strong passions, often fighting among themselves when things went wrong, but united in their goal and in their opposition to those who did not profess their belief in independence. As one loyalist described the violence and terror practiced on followers of the British Crown by the minority of revolutionists:

“Loyalists were tarred and feathered and carried on rails, gagged and bound for days at a time; stoned, fastened in a room with a fire and the chimney stopped on top; advertised as public enemies; they had bullets shot into their bedrooms, their horses poisoned or mutilated; their houses and ships burned, and when carted about for the mob to stare at and abuse, they were compelled to pay something at every town.”

The Philadelphia which Madison now entered with his servant Billey was the largest city in the thirteen states and the one most given to political hysteria. Back in 1777 before Washington relinquished the city to the British Army, he disdainfully referred to its citizenry as “to a man disaffected.” However, a year later when he emerged from Valley Forge and reoccupied the city after the British deserted it for New York, the once notorious hotbed of loyalists had gradually changed political colors. By 1780, mobs threatened Quakers because they would not bear arms. Various political groups fought each other with clubs in the narrow lanes and broad streets. Now and then there was gunfire, and occasionally soldiers came from distant fields and threatened to mutiny.

This charged atmosphere was apparent to Madison as he rode through the streets to the popular boarding-house run by Mrs. Mary House and her charming daughter, Mrs. Eliza Trist. Down the street was the State House where the Continental Congress met, and when he took his place there on March 20, 1780, the debates, committee reports, and the journals of past proceedings made him equally aware of the desperate national situation. In a letter to Governor Jefferson shortly after he began his congressional duty, he cried out:

“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; a total stagnation in prospect.”

To the leaders of the Continental Congress, the arrival of this new delegate from Virginia hardly seemed a momentous occasion. Just past twenty-nine, he was the youngest member and entirely without experience on the national level. His unwillingness to participate in debate, his slight figure and gentle modesty, made him appear as just another of the recent low-quality Virginia delegates. One member, who mistook him for a college lad, wrote in his diary: “I take notice of a Mr. Madison of Virginia, who with some little reading in the law is just from the College; and possesses all the self-conceit that is common to youth and inexperience.”

Madison’s quietness and youth led to his immediate assignment on the graveyard committee—the Board of Admiralty. The function of the board was to oversee the American Navy, which consisted then of fewer than a half-dozen frigates. Madison’s frustration at this meaningless task soon reached a peak because of the inability of the American forces to take action against the mass transportation of British troops by water.

After the battle of Monmouth in June, 1778, war in the North leveled off, and a stalemate developed. The British shifted the fighting to the South, capturing Savannah and Atlanta with the aid of Georgia loyalists. Another force under Sir Henry Clinton and Lord Charles Cornwallis slipped out of New York Harbor and successfully laid siege to Charleston, South Carolina, where 5,000 American soldiers surrendered. News of this catastrophe came to Madison’s committee directly from Washington’s headquarters. For want of several vessels to challenge the British transport fleet, the English were now in a position to capture the entire South.

Word now came to Congress of grave military danger stemming from General Cornwallis’ forces. As a former navy committee member, Madison won a place on the three-man committee to recommend something to thwart the British. General Horatio Gates, a fellow Virginian and Washington’s serious rival to head the Continental Army, had so far provided the best news of the war when he accepted the surrender of British General John Burgoyne and his 5000 men at Saratoga, New York, in October, 1777. More than any other event, this had led the French to become an active American ally in February, 1778.

Madison’s committee now recommended that General Gates command the Continental Army of the South and be free entirely of any supervision by Washington. This was a major blunder, for on August 16, 1780, news came of a disaster to Gates’s army at Camden, South Carolina. Worst of all, the general had deserted his men in the midst of the battle.

This presumptuous action by the committee in naming Gates and making him a free agent was an important lesson for Madison. He now agreed that Washington should select his own Southern commander and regulate his work. Yet when Washington named General Nathanael Greene to succeed Gates, Madison had himself named to a committee to keep in close touch with Greene. Several congressmen, friendly to Gates, tried to prevent his court-martial. But as Gates complained to Governor Jefferson, “To my astonishment, this motion was prevented from being carried out by a Mr. Madison of this state, a gentleman I do not know, and who, I am satisfied, does not know me.”

There was hardly an activity of the Continental Congress in which Madison did not play a major role. In October, 1780, for example, he made vital foreign policy. Spain had entered the war in 1779 with the intention of using the struggle between England and the colonies to enlarge her own landholdings in North America. She already owned both banks of the lower Mississippi River as well as the west bank in the North. Now, she suddenly barred America and her ally from using the lower Mississippi and announced her plan to acquire former British territory between the Alleghenies and the river.

Madison was outraged at her greedy ambition, for the land over the mountains was the natural area for American expansion. Yet he could not get his fellow delegates to agree to a strong protest. An opportunity to promote his own views came in August, 1780 when John Jay, American minister to Madrid, asked Congress for instructions on dealing with Spain. Madison eagerly sought and won a place on the four-man committee to write Jay’s instructions. When two quit the committee and the third proved to be without opinions, by default Madison found himself in charge of Spanish policy.

Even though he could not bring himself to rise and speak in favor of his instructions for Jay, Congress nevertheless approved them on October 17. Jay was ordered to insist that the territory west of the Allegheny Mountains had been part of the British Empire and that sovereignty passed to the United States as a result of the war. Spain was to be told that her right-of-conquest theory was not acceptable. For if carried to an extreme, wrote Madison, Spain could help chase the British Army from New York City and then claim the metropolis as her own. As for her action barring Americans from navigation of the Mississippi, Madison declared, international custom gave the people in an up-river region the right to use the lower river to move goods out to sea.

Another role Madison played was to help the Continental Congress to operate under a constitution.

In June 1776, the Continental Congress had established a committee to write a document regarding political rules. A month later, largely through the writing efforts of Pennsylvania delegate, John Dickinson, the plan of union known as the Articles of Confederation was submitted to the Congress for a vote. Not until November 15, 1777, did Congress approve the Articles. But even then it could not go into effect because it required the ratification of all thirteen state legislatures.

The country was divided between eight states that had land claims beyond the mountains and five states that did not. Those who did not hold legal claims now made ratification of the Articles dependent on the establishment of the principle that the West belonged to the central government and not to the individual states. Virginia’s claims were the most extensive, including what later became Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota. To the demands of the “have-not” states, Virginia’s Benjamin Harrison retorted savagely that there would be no Articles of Confederation because Virginia would never cede her property. “Virginia owns to the South Sea!” he screamed. “No state will pare away the colony of Virginia.”

When Madison came to Congress in the spring of 1780, the Articles of Confederation were still unratified. However, only Maryland remained as a stumbling block because all other twelve states had agreed to the Confederation. Madison made himself quickly aware of the reason why Maryland alone held out. Influential citizens of that state had helped form land-speculating companies and had purchased millions of acres of Western lands from Indian tribes. What the speculators wanted was to have the claimant states cede their Western land rights to the Central Government, and they wanted the areas which their land companies claimed to be awarded them by Congress.

The Virginia Assembly had sent Madison and his fellow delegates its land policy stand, which Madison presented to Congress in April, 1780. In a strong protest, the Assembly declared that Congress lacked authority to hand out Western lands to the speculating companies. A single land company, the Assembly pointed out, claimed the entire area of West Virginia.

However, while this stubborn stand of Virginia was being discussed, Madison quietly joined with New York delegates to find a suitable compromise. What resulted was a Virginia program to cede, under certain conditions, all her claimed territory northwest of the Ohio River to the United States. These conditions were that Congress declare all land company purchases from Indians to be null and void, guarantee the Kentucky area claim of Virginia south of the Ohio, and promise to make states of the Northwest Territory. In January, 1781, when the Virginia Assembly agreed to cede, the next move was up to Maryland. On March 1, after concluding that the Virginia cession would make a good starting point for validating land company claims, Maryland finally approved the Articles of Confederation.

The land issue also brought Madison into the debating forum for the first time in his political career. Afraid to speak in public as a college student or as a member of the Virginia Assembly, he timidly rose on the Congressional floor and began to speak on the subject of Vermont. At the time, both New York and New Hampshire claimed the Green Mountain lands, despite the opposition to both by the inhabitants. Madison was particularly irked by the policy of New York in selling land already settled by Vermonters to New York land speculators. Madison did not advocate statehood for Vermont, for this would have jeopardized his own state’s right to determine the future of Kentucky. Instead he proposed that Vermonters be assured their property would not fall prey to the New York speculators. However, his motion gained only a tie vote and nothing came of the proposal.

Madison remained in the Continental Congress until the close of 1783. Before he left he was already acclaimed as a national leader, and had he been less modest he would easily have been elected President of the Continental Congress. French Minister Chevalier de La Luzerne said of him afterward: “James Madison, Junior—of a sound and just mind. A man of learning, who desires to do good works, but is not possessed with too much ambition. He is considered the man with the soundest judgment in the Congress and talks with such fairness that he generally wins the approval of his colleagues.’’

A major test for the rising statesman came in December, 1780, when his old teacher, Dr. John Witherspoon, president of Princeton, took his place at the New Jersey table of delegates. Dr. Witherspoon, never without his black cap and gown even when he signed the Declaration of Independence, had served in the Continental Congress from June, 1776, until December, 1779, when he took a year’s leave. He had served on more than a hundred committees, including the two most important standing committees which dealt with foreign affairs and the conduct of the war. He was forever demanding that delegates use common sense in settling problems instead of relying on previous decisions or customary usage. Madison called his personality both strong and kind at the same time. But he was an unrelenting Puritan and his solemn nature showed through, as for instance, when he wrote a pamphlet against the theater. The good doctor believed that the drama agitated emotions and hence was evil.

There is little question that Dr. Witherspoon expected his former student to bow to his will and absorb his opinions as he had only nine years earlier. But Madison was now an independent personality, and after a warm reunion, he treated Dr. Witherspoon as he would any other delegate. Where they agreed on an issue they made strong teammates. Where they disagreed they were unrelenting opponents.

For example, Witherspoon refused to accept the Virginia cession of Western lands of January, 1781. Nor would he agree with Madison’s argument that Virginia had a right to insist that its conditions be met by the United States. Witherspoon’s blunt position was that Virginia never had any land to give to the common cause; that the country as a whole acquired it from the British Crown by war. This position shocked Madison for it put his former professor on the side of the land speculators, and he could not believe that Witherspoon was not aware of this. However, Witherspoon had a larger following among the delegates than Madison at the time. So the Continental Congress rejected the earlier cession of land by Virginia, to the astonishment of Madison. Finally in December, 1783, the Virginia Assembly agreed to a revised cession without its former list of restrictions, and Congress finally accepted this the following March.

Madison and Witherspoon also clashed on occasion over foreign affairs, especially on matters pertaining to the mission to France. Congress had early dispatched Benjamin Franklin, Dr. Arthur Lee of Virginia and Silas Deane of Connecticut as Commissioners, or Ministers, to the Court of King Louis XVI. Lee and Deane were soon not on speaking terms and both revealed open animosity toward the venerable Dr. Franklin. Word of the continuous squabble reached Congress, and Deane was recalled to answer charges of corruption leveled against him by Lee. John Adams then went to France to replace Deane and he immediately sent back reports against both Lee and Franklin. Finally Congress acted on one of Adams’s recommendations and made Franklin the sole Minister to France. Lee was then asked to return to answer charges that Deane was making against him.

It fell to Madison to serve as chairman of the committee to judge Arthur Lee. Madison’s report did not attack either Deane or Franklin, although he declared that Lee’s recall “was not intended to fix any kind of censure on his character or conduct abroad.’’ However, Congress would not even accept this simple statement, but eradicated every favorable adjective from the report before approving it.

This enraged Lee who cannonaded various delegates with a barrage of name-calling. One delegate was “Swivel-Eye,” another, “Fiddlehead.” As for Madison, Lee later said: “It is his political conduct which I condemn; that without being a political knave himself he has always been the supporter of public knaves.”

Lee’s worst remarks were reserved for Benjamin Franklin, and at great length he painted a picture of a “dishonest and incapable” man. These rantings were so wild that Congress established a committee to investigate Franklin and thus settle, if possible, the long-floating rumors launched by Lee and Deane against him.

Madison was not named a member of this committee, but Dr. Witherspoon was, and it soon became obvious to the Virginian that his old college head was an anti-Franklin man. Not even the fact that Franklin had arranged for the wartime release of his son from the Tower of London softened Witherspoon’s attitude toward him. This was evident soon afterward when the committee produced a report condemning Franklin and demanding his recall.

However, Madison used parliamentary maneuvers to prevent a vote on the report, for he had heard that Lee’s chief charge was false. Lee had said that at a time when the Continental army was desperate for supplies, Franklin had prevented the frigate Alliance from leaving France on schedule for its Atlantic crossing. Even after the delay, said Lee, Franklin had seen to it that a major portion of the clothing and military supplies it carried were removed.

Madison’s maneuvering against the committee report continued until February, 1781, when Commodore John Paul Jones arrived in Philadelphia. The story Jones now told made Madison’s delaying tactics worthwhile. Lee had come aboard the Alliance as a passenger and had encouraged the crew to mutiny against Jones. Then Lee had replaced Jones with Captain Landais, whom Franklin had earlier court-martialed for not coming to the aid of Jones’s vessel, the Bon Homme Richard, in its celebrated battle with the British man-of-war, Serapis. With all this evidence made public, the case against Franklin collapsed and Madison’s stock rose.

One area where Madison and Witherspoon were in complete agreement was in the need for supplying General Washington with what he needed to fight the British. For hours on end Witherspoon could talk of details that would improve both the supply of soldiers and equipment for Washington’s army. This ability to speak tirelessly was a matter of constant wonder to Madison with his own weak voice. It was also a source of amazement to others. John Adams, who went to church one Sunday in August and listened to Dr. Witherspoon’s sermon, wrote in his diary that he had “heard Dr. Witherspoon all day."

Both Madison and Witherspoon sought in vain to solve Washington’s supply problem. “Scarcely a week, and sometimes scarcely a day, but brings us a most lamentable picture from headquarters,” Madison noted. The lack of adequate supplies gave Washington an unhealthy army with depressed morale. Washington’s Continental force, wrote Madison, “is weak in numbers beyond all suspicion and under as great apprehension from famine as from the enemy.”

At that time the army totaled only 10,000 malnourished men who were supposedly being fed, clothed and shrined by 9000 civilian purchasing agents. In order to save money on salaries, Congress had hired contractors and paid them a percentage commission on their purchases for the army. Not only was the “agent army” approaching the size of the fighting army but the portion of the supplies that they kept as commission seemed to grow and grow, while the amount sent to Washington steadily diminished. No solution to this wretched situation was possible so long as the commissioned agents controlled supplies.

Unlike Madison, Witherspoon was personally touched by the war. The British had cannonaded Princeton badly in various campaigns. Much worse, one of his sons died at the Brandywine Creek battle in 1777. Madison’s relationship to the war had ended in 1775 when he rode horseback to meet Patrick Henry returning from his encounter with Royal Governor Dunmore over gunpowder.

Now late in 1780 the war became personal to Madison when he heard that the traitor Benedict Arnold had invaded Virginia. Madison knew that Washington had dispatched his young protege, the Marquis de Lafayette, with a thousand Continental regulars to Virginia. But this small force would not be able to withstand a major offensive. This was why Washington sent word to Governor Jefferson to enlarge and prepare the Virginia militia to battle Arnold, and possibly Lord Cornwallis who was now moving north from South Carolina.

Unfortunately, Governor Jefferson paid little heed to Washington’s warning about preparing the Virginia militia. Nor did the Virginia Assembly seem in any hurry to meet and discuss the situation. With knowledge of what was in the offing, Madison wrote angrily that this was “unfortunate and inexcusable.” Then when the Assembly considered enticing more men into the militia by offering them slaves as bounty, Madison besieged Virginia politicians with his own proposal. “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?” he wrote. “It would certainly be more consonant to the principles of liberty, which ought never to be lost sight of in a contest for liberty.”

In January, 1781, Madison heard that Benedict Arnold’s armada of thirty-one ships had sailed into the Virginia Capes, Chesapeake Bay and up the James River. On January 5, Arnold burned the new capital at Richmond, and the legislature and Governor Jefferson fled the city for Charlottesville near Jefferson’s home at Monticello.

Washington had ordered the Pennsylvania line under General “Mad Anthony” Wayne to march to Virginia and reinforce Lafayette’s small force against the expected general British invasion. General Greene, the Southern commander of the Continental Army, looked forward to this relief, for he was then drawing General Cornwallis away from his South Carolina stronghold into North Carolina where the British supply lines were overextended.

But now Madison wrote him as a member of the “Greene” Committee of Congress that the Pennsylvania line had mutinied, and was not marching south. There were good reasons, he wrote and sympathetically described the soldiers’ plight. Most of the men were almost naked, without ammunition, or adequate food; they had served for months without pay; many were forcibly kept in the army beyond their terms of enlistment. Those who had asked officers to tell them the exact terms of their enlistment were either shot, imprisoned, or beaten. Finally in January, 1781, the men seized Wayne and sent a group of regulars to Philadelphia to complain to Congress. Congress eventually scraped together sufficient money to settle their back pay, but even then, they would not budge from their barracks at York, Pennsylvania, because of a supply shortage.

In April, Madison heard that Cornwallis had finally invaded Virginia with his well-fed army of Redcoats, and laughingly announced, “That boy Lafayette cannot escape me.” Madison immediately offered a resolution to move General Wayne’s army south. “General Wayne is hereby authorized and directed, in case the supplies, provisions and forage necessary for the immediate march of the detachment under his command to the southern department cannot be otherwise obtained, to impress the same,” read Madison’s motion. In other words, with the situation so desperate, let Wayne’s army seize the supplies they needed along the way.

Congress barely approved Madison’s motion, but when word reached Wayne, his army struck out almost running toward Virginia. His joining with Lafayette’s forces not far from Montpelier in an action against Cornwallis turned the British General back from the western part of Virginia, and led to his eventual defeat at Yorktown below Williamsburg.

But if Madison’s motion set the scene for the war’s final fighting, it came too late to help his friend, Governor Jefferson. Cornwallis hoped to break the morale of Virginians by capturing Jefferson and the assembly at Charlottesville. Jefferson learned only at the last possible moment that the British were advancing on Monticello on June 4, 1781. The only pleasing note of this raid to Madison was that his friend managed to ride down one side of the mountain as the British galloped up the other side. The assembly then met at Staunton on June 12, elected a new governor and ordered an investigation of Jefferson’s conduct. Although Jefferson was exonerated of the charge of failing to prepare for the British invasion, his letters to Madison and others grew extremely gloomy, and he felt himself disgraced.

In July, Madison wrote to a friend that Lafayette and Wayne “advanced rapidly on Cornwallis, who retreated to Richmond and thence precipitately to Williamsburg, where he lay on the 27th ultimo.” Cornwallis had moved into Yorktown and began to fortify this town on the Chesapeake Bay peninsula, expecting the protection of the British Navy at his back. By August, Madison and his committee on the southern campaigns sensed that a climax was nearing. Greene had turned his attention to liberating South Carolina and Georgia and was, therefore, not avaliable during this crucial period.

But by the end of the month, Madison’s committee was writing General Greene that Washington’s request for French naval aid in the Chesapeake was being met. In addition, on September 2, Washington’s bedraggled Continentals plus a 5,000-man French Army in resplendent uniforms and under the command of General Jean Baptiste Rochambeau came marching through Philadelphia on their way to joining Lafayette. Madison was standing before the State House with other delegates when the troops marched past, saluting Congress and raising a dust “like a smothering snow-storm.”

A few days later, word reached Madison’s committee that the French fleet under Admiral Count de Grasse had inflicted a stunning defeat on the British Navy under Admiral Thomas Graves. Thus, English ships were prevented from coming to the aid of Cornwallis. Washington and Lafayette converged on Yorktown and surrounded the British forces on the land escape routes.

On October 24, a courier brought word to Congress that seven days earlier Cornwallis had surrendered his army of 7,000 men. Congress ordered artillery fired in celebration in the harbor. There were joyous marches in the streets and a mass prayer of thanks in the city’s churches. Congress turned over to Madison, its hardest-working member, the task of writing eulogies to all the major and minor figures involved in the decisive victory.

9

TROUBLES OF INDEPENDENCE

THE RUSHING PACE, bitter debates and continual state of emergency in the Continental Congress did not end with the victory at Yorktown. Confusion was everywhere— a mutinous attitude among the soldiers, a lack of acceptable money for transacting business, jealousies among the states and a gnawing concern within the Congress about its lack of authority to direct the nation.

The Articles of Confederation had finally been ratified in March, 1781, after almost five years of delay. There were thirteen separate articles in the written constitution, seemingly a good luck omen exactly totaling the number of states. But to Madison, an advocate of a strong national government, the Articles of Confederation were only a level above having no central government at all.

The Articles stated that “each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence.” The states were joined together, said the constitution, merely in a “league of friendship,” a confederation of equal states meeting as a council to consider problems of mutual interest. To emphasize that the states had not given up any of their independence, Congressional delegates were creatures of their states, selected, paid and recalled by them at the pleasure of state legislatures. Should a delegate vote in a manner that displeased the leaders of his state’s assembly, he knew he would soon receive a letter returning him to private life.

Under the Articles of Confederation' the theory that each state was the equal of any other was put into practice by giving the smallest state the same single vote held by the largest. Amending the Articles also attested to the basic power of a state, for revision required the approval of all thirteen state legislatures. Not even a majority of states was sufficient in passing laws within the Continental Congress. The Articles required the vote of nine state delegations to approve a bill.

Nor were these all the safeguards to make certain that each state would retain its independence. One thorough reading of the Articles made it plain to Madison that the so-called central government lacked any force to make its decisions respected by the states. True, he said, Congress was granted power to make treaties with foreign countries, but Congress lacked authority to make a state abide by the provisions of a treaty. Congress was also empowered to settle a dispute between two states. Yet each state could ignore the decision because Congress was not granted any means to enforce its will.

Within a few days after the Articles of Confederation went into effect, Madison immediately launched a drive to strengthen the national government. With the aid of Dr. Witherspoon, he made a strong fight to amend the rule requiring the approval of nine state delegations on a piece of legislation. His proposal was to change the requirement to a simple majority decision.

In the long debate that followed, tempers rose and a leading defender of states’ rights denounced Madison and Witherspoon as “men who would be tyrants if they could get the power.” The truth was just the opposite, for as Madison pointed out, a single small state could dominate legislation. Experience showed that usually only nine state delegations were present in the State House hall. This meant that if only one delegation opposed a bill, and eight delegations favored it, the bill would fail.

Madison lost on this issue, but he was not a man who let defeat sour his outlook and purpose. He now had himself appointed to a three-man committee “to prepare a plan to invest Congress with full powers to force the states to accept all acts or resolutions passed agreeable to the Articles of Confederation.”

The Articles declared that every power not expressly delegated to the United States was retained by each state. In his committee report, Madison promoted the idea of implied powers. These would be powers necessary to carry out the enumerated powers. For instance, if Congress had authority to regulate mail, it must be implied that Congress could establish post offices, even though this power was not specifically listed in the Articles.

Madison now put forward his theory of implied powers as a means of remedying the problems facing the Congress. The Articles of Confederation required the states to accept in good-will the decisions of Congress dealing with enumerated powers, Madison claimed. Then it must be implied that Congress had authority “to employ the force of the United States” when the states ignored those decisions. In other words, if a state refused to obey an act of Congress that met the legal requirements of the Articles, then Congress was within its authority to use the army and navy to enforce its decision.

Madison’s report created a great deal of soul-searching by delegates in the general debate that followed. Those who opposed the implied-powers doctrine spoke angrily about Madison’s proposal to allow Congress to use the national military establishment to enforce its decisions. This was the very reason Massachusetts had begun warring with England seven years earlier, they cried. Many delegates feared bringing Madison’s proposal to a vote because of possible reprisal from their home legislatures. So they took a convenient path by handing his report over to a larger committee where it was put on a shelf to gather dust.

All the while Madison worked to strengthen the weak Confederation, he was also busy helping to establish a regular machinery of government administration. The Articles did not provide for an independent executive or judiciary. Before the Articles of Confederation were ratified, Congress appointed members to serve on standing committees to conduct executive business. Under the Confederation, many states’ rights advocates wanted this system continued. However, nationalists like Madison and James Duane of New York held the upper hand temporarily and won approval for a drastic change. It was their insistence that Congress establish various departments, each to be managed by an individual who would be outside the Congress.

First came the Department of Foreign Affairs, which Congress created early in 1781. Then came Departments of War and Finance. Several members proposed that Madison become the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, but he declined to permit his name to be placed in nomination. However, when Robert R. Livingston of New York and Arthur Lee of Virginia became contenders for that post, Madison played the role of king-maker. His troubles with Lee over Benjamin Franklin and Lee’s pronounced anti-French attitude convinced Madison he was not the man for the job. Dr. James McClurg of Virginia was induced to join the race, thus splitting Lee’s vote and eventually leading to the selection of Livingston.

Madison believed that the Confederation’s weakest link was its lack of authority to provide itself with its own independent income. Its originators, dominated as they were by a desire to create a dependent national government, had purposely failed to grant Congress the power to levy or collect taxes. Instead, the Confederation had to call on the states for financial assistance to meet its obligations. Each year Congress was to determine its expenses and then divide the total so that each state would pay a share equal to the proportion its land value was compared with the total land value of the thirteen states. If Congress needed $5,000,000 and Virginia’s land value was thirty percent of the total land value, Virginia was then expected to pay $1,500,000 as its share.

The trouble with this system was that land values were anybody’s guess. But much worse, when assessments were made, the states seldom paid because they knew Congress was powerless to enforce its requests. For example, Congress asked the states for $8,000,000 in 1782 and for $2,000,000 more in 1783. During both years only $1,500,000 flowed into the office of Robert Morris, the Secretary of Finance. “The fault is in the states,” the enraged Morris wrote to each governor. “They have been deaf to the calls of Congress, to the clamors of public creditors, to the just demands of a suffering army.”

Madison proposed that in order to avoid the amendment process which required unanimous approval, states place duties on imported goods. This would meet with the demands of the jealous states that they alone held the power to tax. However, the taxes would be collected by agents for the central government. Other nationalist delegates found Madison’s scheme too complex. Instead, they pushed through Congress the Impost of 1781, giving Congress authority to levy a five-percent tax on goods imported into the country.

This legislation would have amended the Articles of Confederation, and thus it required the approval of all thirteen states. It is surprising that twelve states agreed, but Rhode Island’s legislature doomed the impost by rejecting it in December, 1782. “This perverse sister,” Madison snapped at Rhode Island for failing to give the power to tax to the confederation.

With the defeat of the Impost of 1781, Madison took the lead on another financial plan. In a strong statement shortly after Rhode Island’s negative action, he said frankly: “Congress cannot abandon the plan as long as there is a spark of hope. Nay, other plans on a like principle must be added. Justice, gratitude, our reputation abroad and our tranquility at home require provisions. If there are no revenue laws which operate at the same time through all the states and are exempt from the control of each—the mutual jealousies which begin already to appear among them will assuredly defraud both our foreign and domestic creditors.”

This time Madison had the help of the brilliant, twenty-five-year-old Alexander Hamilton, delegate from New York and former aide to General Washington. The plan Madison now brought forward would not require an amendment and the approval of every state. He proposed that instead of making a permanent change in the constitution Congress be given a twenty-five-year grant of power to lay specific import duties on a variety of items and a five-percent duty upon all other goods. In addition, each of the states would be assessed a total of $1,500,000 annually to help meet confederation expenses. But instead of retaining the provision that state assessments were based on land values, Madison proposed a change to a population basis, with a reduction in the population count for persons “bound to servitude for life.”

Arthur Lee was Madison’s chief opponent on this new plan. According to Lee, Madison was attempting to fashion Congress into “a rod of iron” when it was preferable to retain it as “a rope of sand.” A major fight in the month-long debate came over the shift in state payments to a population basis. How to count the 600,000 slaves in the total population of 3,000,000?

Southern delegates wanted few slaves counted because this would cut the assessment. Northern delegates, especially New Englanders who condemned slavery, wanted the Negroes included. Northerners argued that the South worked its slaves hard and, therefore, three-fourths of them should be included in the population count. Southerners answered with the charge that Northern white children were put to factory work at an earlier age than slave children were put into the cotton and tobacco fields. In the end Madison produced a compromise that won approval: the slaves would be counted as three-fifths of their total. This was the provision that was also inserted in the Constitution of 1787.

Congress finally accepted the finance measure on April 18, 1783, after making numerous minor changes. Then Madison wrote an eloquent appeal to the states for their approval of the plan. But despite all the work he had put into it, after three years only two states agreed to all the proposals, seven states to parts of the plan and four ignored it.

Unable to acquire its own powers of taxation, Congress was to a large extent dependent on France for loans and outright gifts. At the beginning of the war, Congress had made use of still another means to pay its bills. It had simply printed paper money that was not backed by gold or silver. However, since holders could not go to a bank and exchange the paper for precious metal, it declined rapidly in value from the amount printed on its surface. This was also happening in the states, where printing presses worked nonstop to print un-backed paper money on order from state legislatures. When merchants refused to accept the state paper money in payment of debt, several legislatures passed laws compelling acceptance of its script money. However despite harsh penalties, most creditors ignored the law.

After five years, in which it had printed $200,000,000 in unsecured paper money, Congress decided to halt further printing. An indication of the extent of the depreciation in value of the paper money is apparent from the charges Madison had to pay in 1781. His bill at Mrs. House’s boardinghouse came to $3,500 a month. He also paid a stable owner $1,000 a month to tend to his horse and monthly visits to his barber set him back $200. People who went to the butcher shop for a leg of lamb had to bring a sack of paper money. The burden of carrying about so much paper money finally led Congress to decree that holders of Continental paper money could turn in forty dollars worth and get one dollar in new paper money. In other words, the new dollar was to be accepted as equal to forty dollars of the old paper. To further encourage this exchange, Congress promised to redeem the new paper in six years with metal coins.

When the exchange rate of forty to one became effective, Congress thus neatly cut its paper money debt from two hundred million to five million dollars. But its action did not end the inflation, for prices continued to skyrocket.

Although Madison opposed inflation, or the dwindling in value of money, he considered the decision of Congress to stop printing more paper money a terrible blunder. No matter how much the Continental dollar dropped in value, he insisted, the mere printing of more paper money would have given the Confederation some financial independence. By halting any further printing, Congress was in truth surrendering power and making itself dependent on the states.

Madison expressed this view in a letter to Jefferson. “They had the whole wealth and resources of the continent within their command, and could go oil with their affairs independently and as they pleased,” he wrote. But when the delegates prohibited further printing of Continental paper money, he added, this authority was “entirely given up, and they are now as dependent on the states as the King of England is on the Parliament.”

Madison’s concentration on financial problems was not entirely impersonal. Several delegates found they could not meet their bills and accepted money from the French Minister. He was pleased to put them on Louis XVI’s payroll where they developed a new indebtedness to the French cause and voted in Congress as he ordered. Madison would not be bribed, even though Virginia did not pay his salary for three years. On occasion his father sent him money, but this was so infrequent that he would have starved were it not for the kindness of Haym Salomon, a purchasing agent for the Continental Army. “I have for some time past been a pensioner on the favor of Haym Salomon,” he wrote in mid-1782. “The kindness of our little friend in Front Street, near the coffee-house, is a fund that will preserve me from extremities. But I never resort to it without great mortification, as he obstinately rejects all recompense.”

However, Madison would have been the first to admit that his personal financial distress was minor compared with that suffered by the hungry and unpaid soldiers of the Continental line. Although the real fighting ended at York-town in October, 1781, the formal treaty of peace was not signed until September, 1783. Because of the uncertainty during that period whether large-scale fighting might be resumed, Washington preferred to hold the army together. After Yorktown, he came to Philadelphia where he remained fifteen weeks to discuss military problems with Congress. It was during this time that he and Madison became warm friends.

With the British still retaining New York, much of Washington’s army by necessity was at Newburgh on the Hudson to watch the British. Word came to Madison and other delegates during 1782 that the American soldiers were in a sour mood. The army threatened to stay at Newburgh until the question of its pay was settled. There was talk that Congress was a bigger enemy than the British because it failed to provide for the soldiers and did not act on its promise to guarantee officers half-pay for life.

In May, 1782, certain officers told Washington they would back him as king of the United States. “You could not have found a person to whom your schemes are more disagreeable,” he warned them severely.

In December, the officers of Newburgh drew up a sharp statement and sent it to Congress. The statement was a veiled threat to take control of the government unless their demands were met.

Three officers appeared in Philadelphia in January, 1783, as representatives for the angry soldiers and Congress put Madison on a committee to deal with them. “What can a Virginia delegate say to them,” Madison reported, “whose constituents declare they are unable to make the necessary contributions?” Nevertheless, he eased the tense moment by getting Secretary of Finance Robert Morris to agree to apply part of the French loans to back pay for the army. As for the half-pay-for-life promise to officers, Madison believed the promise to be binding on Congress. In a frank talk with the officers, he and Alexander Hamilton won their approval for substituting full pay for five years instead of half-pay for life.

When Congress did not put these promises into law, the officers at Newburgh again began talking of rebellion. Washington came into possession of anonymous circulars telling the men not to disband until they were paid and ordering a meeting of officers for the following day. Washington immediately issued general orders calling for his own meeting with officers, and he came prepared to ward off future trouble. Slowly he put on his spectacles while reading a statement to the officers, and he threw in the following remark: “Gentlemen, you must pardon me. I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind.” When he finished his appeal to the army not to take justice in its hands, his plea “drew tears from many of the officers.” After he left the room, the officers adopted resolutions expressing loyalty and faith in Congress.

Washington had promised the army that he would personally deal with Congress to give them justice. He sent several letters, pleading that Congress not discuss the soldiers like a “Sett of Beggars.” Madison’s financial plan of April, 1783, was designed to raise the necessary money, but it was destined to failure because of inaction by the states. However, Congress voted to pay officers their full salaries for five years, as Madison had earlier proposed. Then in May, Congress instructed Secretary of Finance Morris to scrape together three months’ pay for the soldiers. A month later most of the officers and men walked out of the Newburgh camp and headed for home, thus bringing the Continental Army to an end. Madison had been arguing in Congress at the time that the confederation required a standing army that would be independent of the states. The evaporation of Washington’s army put an end to his proposal.

Small units of the army, however, were still encamped, and one was to embarrass Congress. In June, 1783, eighty soldiers of the Pennsylvania line marched to Philadelphia from their Lancaster camp and surrounded the State House while Congress was meeting. They came to demand better treatment at camp and back pay. Madison, who was inside the building, reported that “the soldiers remained in their position, without offering any violence, individuals only occasionally uttering offensive words and wantonly pointed their muskets to the windows of the hall of Congress.”

But many delegates grew frightened as the day wore on, and as Madison recorded, “it was observed that spirituous drink from the tippling-houses adjoining,” began to be liberally served out to the soldiers.” Madison and Hamilton sent out a request that the Pennsylvania state government protect Congress if disorder grew. But such assistance did not come. In the meantime, the soldiers’ threats grew more violent and included “the seizure of the members of Congress from whom they imagined an indemnity” might be collected. During the night Congress fled to Princeton where Dr. Witherspoon put up the delegates in the college buildings. Major John Armstrong, instigator of the mutineers and later Madison’s Secretary of War, wrote in glee to General Horatio Gates, hero of Saratoga and coward of Camden, that the Congress “with all their solemnity and emptiness have removed to Princeton, and left a state where their wisdom has long been questioned, their virtue suspected and their dignity a jest.”

Congress did not return to Phildelphia after this episode until 1787. The delegates remained at Princeton until November, 1783; reconvened in Annapolis, Maryland until June, 1784 in Trenton, New Jersey until the end of 1784, and then in New York City where the Confederation ended on March 2, 1789.

The Articles of Confederation limited the term of a delegate to three years in any six years. Madison’s term ended in March, 1784, but he quit in October, 1783, even though he would have relished putting a more nationalistic tone into the proceedings of Congress. Personal disappointment had overcome him and he did not mind returning to Montpelier. His sadness was the direct result of his first romance.

In the spring of 1780, when he first moved into Mrs. House’s boarding-house he had made the acquaintance of William Floyd, a delegate from New York, and his family. Floyd’s youngest child was Catherine, or Kitty, as she was called. Kitty was thirteen and Madison talked to her as a man of twenty-nine would to a girl of that age. He had never been an easy conversationalist with the opposite sex, but as time passed he found he was relaxed in Kitty’s company.

In early 1782, the Floyds went home to New York. That November when they returned, Madison was aware that Kitty at fifteen had become a beautiful young lady and he fell in love with her. At the end of the year, Jefferson came to Philadelphia and moved into Mrs. House’s place. His wife had died shortly before and he was making plans to go to Europe as a member of the five-man peace commission. In his own sadness, Jefferson was pleased with the romance between Madison and Kitty.

When Jefferson’s commission became unnecessary, he returned to Virginia and wrote Madison a letter of congratulations in April, 1783. He admitted that he had tried to play the role of matchmaker—“I often made it the subject of conversation with her and was able to convince myself that she possessed every sentiment in your favor which you could wish. I wished it to be so as it would give me a neighbor whose worth I rate high, and as I know it will render you happier than you can possibly be in a single state.”

Not long after this Madison confirmed to Jefferson his engagement and coming marriage set after the adjournment of Congress in November. When the Virginia Assembly informed him that he should remain a delegate until March, 1784, Madison rejected this with the comment that it “does not coincide with the plans which I have in view after November next.”

Madison had just pushed his financial plan through Congress and feeling overjoyed at his general success, he accompanied the Floyd family as far as Brunswick, New Jersey, on their return to New York in April, 1783. He and Kitty said good-by until their wedding and he returned to Philadelphia to try to solve the problems of the unpaid soldiers.

In August a letter came from Kitty that was sealed with a blotch of rye dough. Madison pulled the note open to read the sad words that Kitty loved another and was calling off the marriage. “I sincerely lament the misadventure which has happened,” Jefferson wrote him. “Firmness of mind and unremitting occupations will not long leave you in pain. No event has been more contrary to my expectations.”

So ended Madison’s first romance and his remarkable four years as a national legislator.

10

PATH TOWARD CLOSER UNION

ON MADISON’S return home to Montpelier late in 1783, his parents and neighbors treated the thirty-two-year-old national political figure as an elder statesman. Those who had known him as a boy came to dinner and stayed the night in the cold, damp mansion. Yes, he knew General Washington—in fact, quite well. How weak was the Congress that had to flee a few dozen drunken soldiers? Why should Virginia give up her vast Western claims to the Confederation Government that was knocked from pillar to post, going first to Princeton and now temporarily housed in the State House at Annapolis?

The questions grew tiresome and his answers embarrassing to him. Finally the early snows, extraordinarily heavy for the Piedmont, blocked the roads and paths and he was free of the visitors.

Soon he was back to his first loves: reading, studying, writing and solitary thinking, all of which required privacy. He resumed the study of law, delved into the new field of economics and became interested in biology, botany and science.

His friend Jefferson was once more a member of the Congress at Annapolis, busy on almost every committee and taking a major hand in drafting the thirty-one state papers of that session. One piece of his legislation was the Ordinance of 1784 that set the pattern for the more famous Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Both were essentially based on Madison’s earlier proposal regarding the future of the Northwest Territory. Another of Jefferson’s bills was to adopt the dollar as the money unit and the decimal breakdown for coins.

As busy as he was, Jefferson found time to make scientific experiments and he and Madison carried on an extensive correspondence about their findings. Both were rank amateurs who took their scientific endeavors seriously, perhaps too seriously. One effort by Madison was to calculate whether the North and South Poles were closer to the earth’s center than points on the Equator. His mathematical calculation was that the Poles were about 50 miles closer. He and Jefferson also exchanged letters on whether the cooler earth surface was cooling the boiling central mass or whether the hot center was heating the surface.

The two were also amateur meteorologists and maintained daily records on wind velocity, temperature and cloud formations. In addition, they were highly curious about American animals, the result no doubt of reading the Count de Buffon’s fifty-six volumes on European species. This led Madison outdoors which was beneficial to his health, and he went on a search for weasels, moles, woodchucks and oppossum. Jefferson was from time to time informed of his findings, which were for the most part measurements that could be compared with the European cousins.

Madison also confessed to Jefferson his “little itch to gain a smattering of “Chymistry,” and asked him to send along a good chemistry book and the necessary apparatus for the lab. Obviously the field of optics was not among his scientific areas, for he wrote Jefferson a letter requesting him to buy glasses for his mother, “a pair for the age of fifty-five or thereabouts.” Jefferson in turn did not consider this method of selecting proper glasses to be incorrect because he sent Madison two pair for a woman of fifty-five.

Although a reader of Madison’s correspondence with Jefferson at this time would have gained the impression that two scientists were exchanging their findings, this was not the actual case. To Jefferson, it was merely recreation after a hard stint at political matters. To Madison, scientific experiments took his mind off Kitty Floyd and the vexing problems of the Confederation. By the spring of 1784, he was asking Jefferson to buy him books exploring past European confederations—“the Dutch, the German and the Helvetic.” Such requests for political books followed Jefferson to Paris that summer, where he was first assigned to negotiate treaties of commerce with France, England, and Prussia; and then to succeed Benjamin Franklin as Minister to France. One of Madison’s requests was for a thirty-seven-volume French encyclopedia; another, for a thirteen-volume history of the humanities; still others were for histories of various countries, from ancient times to that period, foreign dictionaries and books on economics. Madison sent Jefferson a few hundred dollars to pay for the trunkloads of books sent him. In return, he complied with numerous requests from Jefferson for more than a hundred living trees of a dozen American varieties—oak, maple, apple and others; stuffed animals, and dictionaries of various Indian tribal languages.

Madison was in the midst of his studies on why other confederations had failed when the freeholders of Orange County voted him back into the Virginia House of Delegates in April, 1784. He did not hesitate to accept, even though it was a political step backward. His reason was simple: In the Congress he had worked strenuously to push legislation through to enactment, but later the states had failed to do their part to put them into effect. As a member of the Virginia Assembly, he would have the opportunity to put enabling state legislation into the statute books and thus strengthen the Confederation. He might also push “new grants of power to Congress” so that the central government would be able to take independent action without waiting for approval from each state’s legislature. If he could do this, and others in neighboring states did so, too, the effect, he said, would be “a rescue of the Union from an impending catastrophe.”

When Madison entered the House of Delegates in May, he brought with him the prestige of a strong four years of service as a legislator in the Confederation. There were already three political factions maneuvering for power, but he immediately took the leadership of a fourth group. The strongest leader was Patrick Henry whose voice commanded an excited following to do his bidding. Another was Richard Henry Lee, a states’ rights leader and the brother of Madison’s Congressional opponent, Arthur Lee. The third was the Speaker of the House, John Tyler, father of the future President. All three faction leaders commanded the respect of older members of the Assembly. But a new group had come into being, and these were young men who had served as soldiers in the Continental line. They were loud, boisterous, energetic and impatient. One of their number was young John Marshall, a distant neighbor of the Madison clan, cousin to Thomas Jefferson and a veteran of Valley Forge. Marshall and the veterans seized upon Madison as their leader, which prompted Edmund Randolph, the state’s attorney general to write Jefferson: “Our friend of Orange will step earlier into the heat of battle, than his modesty would otherwise permit. For he is already resorted to, as a general.”

One of Madison’s early efforts to strengthen the Confederation was to attempt to get his state to live up to her financial commitments. He was quite optimistic when he had little difficulty pushing through a resolution authorizing the Continental Congress to use force if necessary to collect money due the Confederation. He also had no trouble winning approval for his change in the Articles of Confederation, the amendment assessing annual money payments from the states according to population and not land values.

However, his optimism faded when he made motion to have Virginia pay during 1784 its delinquent Confederation assessment of 1781. Patrick Henry, who had not opposed the earlier legislation to aid the Confederation, now leaped to his feet with a motion to postpone all tax collections until 1785. In a voice that sounded to the rafters, Henry appealed to the selfish interests of individual members, and the majority that had supported Madison now disappeared. Madison wrote bitterly to his father “We shall make a strange figure. After our declarations with regard to Congress and the Continental debt, we wholly omit the means of fulfilling them.”

Madison and Henry were soon at each other’s throats on another point involving the prestige of the Confederation Government. The treaty of peace with England contained the provision that pre-war debts owed to British citizens were to be paid. Since Congress could not enforce this because it lacked power, it could only urge the states to live up to the treaty. When Madison with the help of John Marshall proposed that Virginia order her citizens to comply with the treaty’s debt-payment section, Henry and John Tyler took the opposite stand.

Henry had the popular position, for Virginians were generally heavily in debt to British brokers and merchants. As war victors, they claimed the right to write off those debts, which many believed would ruin them if payment were required. The clever Henry agreed with Madison that Congress held authority to make treaties. But how could Virginia comply when the British had carried off 30,000 Virginia slaves during the war? What Congress must do, said Henry, was to get Britain to return the slaves before Virginia would enforce the collection of British debts.

With ease he defeated Madison on treaty compliance. Afterward when Henry was asked his opinion of his opponent, he said, “I detest as a statesman, the projects of theorists and bookworms.”

Since 1781, when Benedict Arnold burned Richmond, the state capital was slowly in process of rebuilding. There was still a severe housing shortage and members of the Assembly crowded into the two large rooms of Formicola’s Tavern where they ate, drank, and slept dormitory-style. Here the talk was of horse-racing, runaway slaves, and politics; and here the various political factions worked hard to pick up additional support.

Madison was noted at Formicola’s for his wit as well as for his earnestness. He was also known for the wide range of subjects in which he took a keen interest.

One subject to which he devoted much time was finding a means to increase Virginia’s trade. Virginia had no large ports, with the result that foreign commerce came to Philadelphia or Baltimore and then was generally trans-shipped.

Madison proposed that Virginia build up “a Philadelphia or a Baltimore among ourselves.” Thus might Virginia serve as a center of foreign trade, acquire foreign currency and enrich her citizens. The growth of a large port-city or two would also serve to head off future stagnation of the coastal area. With this in mind, he proposed establishing large ports at Norfolk and Alexandria, and limiting the state’s foreign trade solely to them. But his opposition managed to thwart his purpose while pretending to favor it by adding three other towns to the list of ports.

In general, Madison found himself on the losing side, but his enthusiasm never faltered. If his opposition could make use of wily political tactics, so could he. For instance, Patrick Henry reopened the religious issue by proposing an assessment on all citizens for the support of religion. Madison had worked hard during his first term of the state legislature back in 1776 to abolish the then-existing law forcing compulsory contributions to the Episcopal Church. Now he saw his work threatened by Henry’s proposed religious tax.

In the fall of 1784 came the sharp debate between Henry and Madison. In his best orator’s voice, Henry thundered and roared as he described how other civilizations fell because their people forgot their religious teachings. Virginia was rapidly sinking into moral decay, he shouted, and would fail entirely unless the tax on religion passed.

Madison replied in his thin little voice by calling Henry’s recital about past history an entirely false and misleading tale. Further, he went on, the religious tax violated the Virginia Declaration of Rights, would force many citizens to leave the State, and would corrupt religious leaders who would depend on the government for funds. Although logic was on his side, eloquence was not, and Henry won the applause of listeners.

The reaction of the House of Delegates was to vote approval of Henry’s general proposal and to name him chairman of a committee to write the specific bill. All seemed lost when Jefferson wrote Madison: “What we have to do, I think, is devotedly to pray for his death.” But Madison knew of a less morbid approach. No man had greater vanity than Patrick Henry. As a member of the House of Delegates, he was a leader but he was still only a Delegate.

Governor Benjamin Harrison’s term was at an end, and a vacancy occurred in this powerless office. Madison now proposed Henry for the post. As a former governor, Henry knew how weak the job was, but still it was Virginia’s highest office. Would he reach for the bait and thus remove himself from leading the fight for the support of the religion tax? Madison’s scheme worked and Henry accepted the governorship. In glee, Madison wrote about the Henry bill: “Its friends are much disheartened at the loss of Mr. Henry. Its fate is, I think, very uncertain.”

The contest over the proposed legislation remained long and drawn out. But in the end Madison won. And, having come this far, he now determined to use the momentum to gain complete separation of church and state. Thomas Jefferson had written “An Act For Establishing Religious Freedom In Virginia” in 1779. At the time it did not pass, despite Jefferson’s great prestige in the Assembly. Among its provisions was one allowing non-Episcopalians to hold government jobs; and another making it legal to subscribe to other religious organizations. Madison now quickly rushed the old Jefferson bill through the legislature and thus completed the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Virginia. Church and state were henceforth separated in Virginia.

It was during this period when he was pitting himself against Patrick Henry that Madison felt a strong urge for personal independence. In 1784, although acknowledged a statesman in Virginia and in the rest of the Confederation, he was nevertheless entirely dependent on his father’s generosity for his clothes, food, books and bed. To Madison, politics was not a profession from which a man could support himself by drawing a salary. Politics was a duty, and other means must be found to bear the expenses of serving one’s community, state or nation.

To give himself a profession that might make him financially independent, Madison began putting in spare time from his legislative duties studying law in the Richmond office of Attorney General Edmund Randolph. As he stated his purpose to Randolph, then the leader of the Richmond bar: “My wish is if possible to provide a decent and independent subsistence. Another of my wishes is to depend as little as possible on the labor of slaves.” However, he did not proceed far enough in his studies to take the bar examination. Yet, this did not prevent Randolph from besieging him with requests for explanations and interpretations of legal matters.

Western land speculation had aroused the financial appetite of many of Virginia’s leading citizens. Paper profits were enormous and competition was keen for the better sections. This was the next avenue Madison explored in his search for financial independence.

In the late summer of 1784, Madison went to Philadelphia to handle some Montpelier business transactions for his father. By chance he came upon General Lafayette in Baltimore. The Marquis had just concluded a visit with General Washington at Mount Vernon and was on his way to upstate New York for a treaty meeting with the Six Nations Indian Tribes. Madison eagerly accepted Lafayette’s invitation to come along, and they were soon traveling over the horse paths to Philadelphia and then New York. Here they transferred to a sailboat for the trip up the Hudson to Albany, where they transferred to horses and followed the Mohawk River. Westward they rode through rich forestland, sparse settlements, and Indian villages until they reached their destination at Fort Schuyler, the present site of Rome, New York.

There were many adventures along the Mohawk and when Madison returned to Richmond, he conceived the notion that Mohawk land might become his financial salvation. A two-day visit with Washington at Mount Vernon gave him the courage during their political talk to ask gingerly what the general thought of the Mohawk Valley for speculative purposes. Washington was then a joint speculator with Governor George Clinton of New York in a substantial Mohawk venture and he praised that area highly.

Madison believed that it would be best to have a partner in this business in which he lacked experience, and he had just the person in mind. Judge Joseph Jones, a close friend of General Washington, had served with Madison in the Continental Congress and the Virginia Assembly. Madison knew Jones well; in fact, they had shared the same bed in a tiny room at Princeton when the Congress fled from the drunken soldiers of the Pennsylvania line. Judge Jones was the uncle and guardian of a tall, thin young man named James Monroe, and it was Monroe with whom Madison wanted to form a land-speculating partnership.

Monroe was seven years younger than Madison, highly ambitious for a political career and eager to make the “right” connections. After serving in the Continental line, he returned to Virginia in the spring of 1779 armed with a letter of enthusiastic recommendation that he had brashly prevailed upon General Washington to write in his behalf. Washington wrote: “It would give me particular pleasure; as the esteem I have for him, and a regard for his merit, conspire to make me earnestly wish to see him provided for in some handsome way.” Monroe was then twenty-one. Jefferson was governor of Virginia that year, and Judge Jones beseeched him to take on his nephew as his law clerk and law student at a time when Jefferson was deeply involved in political activities. Monroe also bought some land at Charlottesville near Jefferson’s estate at Monticello and was planning to build a home there so he could be in close association with Jefferson. It was Jefferson who introduced Monroe to Madison, and the younger man attached himself to the heir of Montpelier with almost as much enthusiasm as he did to Jefferson.

At the time Madison was interested in land speculation, Monroe, after a meteoric career as a member of the Virginia Assembly and the Governor’s Executive Council, was a member of the Continental Congress. He had recently returned from a trip to the Mississippi and was offering the opinion that the prairie lands of Illinois and Indiana were sterile because no trees grew there. Madison’s query about going into partnership in the Mohawk Valley of New York caught Monroe at a good time, for in comparison with the Midwest, the Mohawk Valley was to him a Garden of Eden.

Monroe soon made arrangements for them to begin with a thousand-acre purchase. But at settlement time, Madison admitted he was without money to pay the $700 in Spanish coins that the owner demanded. Monroe was also without money, but managed to scrape half that amount together through loans and promised to pay off the rest within a year.

The partners seemed not to have been embarrassed by their own optimistic talk about becoming great landholders like Robert Morris or the Maryland Carrolls who possessed millions of acres. In fact, the first glow of owning some land prompted Madison to write to Jefferson in Paris with a request that he join their venture by acquiring a $20,000 loan for them. Jefferson replied promptly that French lenders were not interested in American land when profits were so high at home.

The upshot of the land venture was that the two partners could not pay off the remaining $350 for their parcel when it fell due. Only after three years when the seller made a move to reclaim it by default did Madison complete the deal by paying the balance plus an interest charge greater than the balance. The venture proved to be Madison’s last effort at financial independence. Until 1801, on his fiftieth birthday, he would remain a dependent son.

Yet it was fortunate for the nation, if not for Madison, that his business ventures were not successful to a degree where he would have concentrated on personal finance instead of the public interest. For his destiny was the public service with leadership at its most vital turning point.

11

END OF THE CONFEDERATION

IT WOULD have seemed preposterous to his fellow students at Princeton that their slight, shy classmate would one day bring down the curtain on one national government and raise it on another. But this is precisely what Madison did. All of it came through small steps, some seemingly unrelated to any grand design.

There were those who considered the Congress of the Confederation a successful venture. When it was fighting for its existence, these individuals pointed proudly to its achievements: It completed the war and concluded a peace treaty with terms exceeding fondest hopes; it acquired the lands of the West from the states with claims there; enacted the Northwest Ordinance which barred slavery in the territory north and west of the Ohio River; and established a system of expansion through the creation of new states.

Madison would have been among the first to praise these achievements, but when measured against the needs of the country, they were not enough. From his experiences in both the Congress and the Virginia legislature, Madison carefully analyzed the Confederation in a written study entitled, “Vices of the Political System of the United States.” Among the vices he listed were: “failure of the states to comply with constitutional requisitions; encroachment by the states on the federal authority; violations of the law of nations and of treaties; trespasses of the states on the rights of one another; want of concert in matters where common interest requires it; want of sanction to the laws, and of coercion in the government of the confederacy; multiplicity of laws in the several states; mutability (frequent changes) of the laws of the states; injustices of the laws of the states.”

Madison had personally attacked many of these vices, but his success was limited. His effort to give Congress power to impose taxes had made little headway among the independent and jealous states. Nor had his hard labors induced Virginia to pay her annual Confederation assessments or to live up to the peace treaty provision calling for payment of prewar debts to British creditors.

In one area he had met with much success, and this was on the item of “Injustices of the laws of the states.” The separation of church and state in Virginia was a noteworthy gain, even though he had to pay the price of elevating Patrick Henry into the governor’s chair. Madison also made a contribution in this area with his herculean effort to bring Virginia’s laws up-to-date and eliminate the medieval practices that had been brought over from England.

Back in 1776, Thomas Jefferson, George Wythe and Edmund Pendleton began a three-year stint to modernize the courts, the criminal and civil legal codes and to eliminate various social injustices in order to prepare Virginia for the postwar world. But not even the immense prestige of these three gentlemen was able to win passage for their codification in 1779.

Now five years later in 1784, Madison determined that it was nonsense for the state to limp along with a court system adequate perhaps for a town in the Dark Ages and with a criminal code that inflicted the brutal death penalty for housebreaking or counterfeiting. However, he found an unwillingness to pass the codification in a piece until each section was individually approved. With hundreds of items, the enormity of the task would have made another man quit. But Madison plowed ahead, battling Patrick Henry’s lieutenants all along the way. Finally in 1786, realizing that Governor Henry’s term would soon end, and that he would mutilate the entire codification if he returned to the legislature, Madison decided to settle for what had already passed in tentative form. Quickly he assembled the approved sections into a single bill and rushed it through the Assembly. He believed he was without an alternative, although this meant dropping Jefferson’s section for a free public school system and the restriction of capital punishment to treason and murder.

Jefferson later acknowledged Madison’s work on the revision of the code with the comment: “When by the unwearied exertions of Mr. Madison, in opposition to the endless quibbles, chicaneries, vexations and delays of lawyers and demi-lawyers; most of the bills were passed by the legislature with little alteration.”

It was the problem of how to regulate the commerce of the United States that was to provide a major incentive to end the Confederation. Although Madison recognized this as a serious concern, he would not have guessed at the time that it would provide a vehicle for a new government.

With the coming of peace, several of the states were engaged in bitter trade wars with each other. For instance, Connecticut laid import duties on goods coming from Massachusetts, and New York City subjected New Jersey imports to the same treatment. Said Madison: “Some of the states having no convenient ports for foreign commerce were subjected to taxes by their neighbors through whose ports their commerce carried.” All such activities were leading to argument and retaliation and pained Madison to such an extent that he wrote to Monroe in Congress: “Experience has confirmed what reason foresaw, that trade can never be regulated effectively by the states acting in their separate capacities. They can no more exercise the power separately than they could separately carry on war, or separately form treaties of alliance or commerce.”

A problem also existed in foreign trade. With the United States almost entirely an agricultural economy, large farm surpluses accumulated annually and had to be sold abroad. In 1783, the British government exercised her rights by restricting trade between the United States and the British West Indies to British vessels. New England shipowners were incensed at this order, for they had found that run extremely profitable. Congress came to their aid in 1784 by recommending that the states give Congress power for fifteen years to prohibit all trade except in American ships or by ships of foreign countries with no discriminatory laws. Madison quickly pushed this legislation through the Virginia legislature. But when only one other state joined Virginia, this amendment suffered the fate of every other amendment to the Articles of Confederation. To Madison, this was further proof that the inability to amend the Confederation’s constitution doomed its existence in a changing world. However, unknown to him and to others, American business ingenuity overcame this lack of retaliatory power. New England shippers turned to smuggling and maintained their West Indian trade.

With the existence of chaotic state regulation of out-of-state and foreign commerce and the helplessness of Congress, Madison sought a means to change this situation. The Articles of Confederation did not permit alliances or compacts between states without the expressed approval of Congress. Madison now turned to this illegal method for his solution.

He found his opportunity in the consideration of navigation on the Potomac, a river running between Virginia and Maryland. Washington had frequently spoken to Madison about developing a water-highway system between the West and the Eastern seaboard. Besides Madison, Washington had also interested Jefferson who agreed that if the Potomac were made navigable to the mountains and a canal built connecting the river to the Ohio River, Virginia would gain almost all “the Western and Indian trade.”

It was Washington’s hope that the government of Virginia would undertake the development of the Potomac, but the legislature would not pass such legislation. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1784, Madison pushed a bill through the Assembly to appoint members of a commission to meet with Maryland commissioners and formulate a compact on navigation of the Potomac. The following January, Madison also won approval of a charter for the Potomac Navigation Company, a joint Maryland-Virginia private firm, to develop the Potomac.

Events now moved relentlessly. In March, 1785, the Maryland and Virginia Potomac commissioners held a conference at Mount Vernon. Madison was a commissioner but Governor Henry “forgot” to notify him of the conference. Despite his omission, Madison headed the legislative committee to win agreement for the compact that resulted. The agreement pleased him, for both states agreed that their citizens would enjoy free use of harbors, pay no port duties on imports from each other. Other provisions regulated fishing, established trial procedures for piracy and similar crimes and authorized joint-lighthouse construction.

When the report of the Mount Vernon Conference reached the Maryland legislature in December, 1785, a majority of members not only accepted it but also added a new proposal. Why not broaden the compact and invite neighboring Delaware and Pennsylvania to join in establishing a four-state commercial policy? Word of this reached Madison before Virginia had acted on the report of its commissioners. An exciting idea now gripped him. Why not invite all the states to send commissioners to a convention instead of merely four? The excuse for the meeting could be to consider common ground on commerce in light of Congress’s weakness. But perhaps, he told Washington hopefully, the commissioners might dare go beyond this purpose and consider all problems besetting the Confederation.

Only recently had Madison delivered a long hard-hitting speech for a strong central government with power to force states to obey the national will. If he now introduced a call for a convention of the states, the Patrick Henry opposition would react with suspicion as to his real purpose. Therefore, he decided upon a political ruse.

On the closing day of the session, on January 21, 1786, the rumor spread that Madison would force a vote on a bill to grant Congress power over commerce. Instead, Madison went to John Tyler and prevailed upon him to introduce his resolution calling upon the other states to meet with Virginia on matters pertaining to their commerce with one another. Madison chose Tyler because the former Speaker favored such a resolution, and because he was not an object of “antifederal feeling” as Madison was. When the Tyler resolution was made, Madison’s opposition was so relieved that it consented quickly. The Assembly also agreed, said Madison happily, to keep Congress in the dark by “a vote against a communication of the Compact to Congress.”

Madison made certain he was one of the Virginia delegates. He also set the place for the convention, choosing Annapolis, Maryland, and the time, the first Monday in September, 1786. Then agonizing weeks followed while he waited for word from the other states. It came slowly, for communications were poor and some of the legislatures were concerned that the Annapolis Convention was unconstitutional.

In the end, nine states voted to send delegates, and Madison hurried to Annapolis to be on the scene weeks before the convening date. Delegates began trickling in at the start of September. Outspoken men, like Rufus King of New York, spoke to Madison about turning the Convention into more than a meeting to conclude a trade agreement, but he pretended not to be interested. “He does not propose any other plan than that of investing Congress with full powers for the regulation of commerce foreign and domestic,” King complained bitterly about Madison.

The truth was that Madison soon became pessimistic about achieving even this, for only five states were represented on the opening day of the conference. Days went by without other state delegations making their appearance, and finally after three weeks the small group of only twelve delegates adjourned. But there was something important that did come out of this convention. The small group spoke freely to each other on their political concerns for the nation and their states. At Madison’s urging, a committee was appointed to write a report of the conference, and Madison brought Alexander Hamilton into the task as author.

Madison now concluded that there should be a second convention to create a strong federal government. But when Hamilton wrote this into his report, Madison insisted he change this for fear it would induce several states not to participate.

Instead, the final report was a softened appeal to the legislatures of every state to appoint commissioners to meet at Philadelphia on the second Monday of May, 1787. The defects of the Confederation were outlined, yet Madison and Hamilton avoided making a rousing call for a major overhaul. The states were merely asked to send commissioners to “render the constitution of the federal government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.”

There would be only one further step now to the “Second American Revolution.” This would be the great Convention at Philadelphia the following spring and summer.

Following the Annapolis Convention, Madison had six months to prepare for the vital Philadelphia assemblage. There were letters to write and visits to make; arguments to refute and doubters to be won over.

His cause was helped immensely by the financial unrest that had developed in the thirteen states. Debtors could not pay their bills, yet this seemed only to increase the demands of creditors for payment. The resulting public disorders frightened many people, and even Madison, who was not easily frightened, thought they might end in “an appeal to the sword.”

By 1783, the Continental currency and state paper money, lacking any backing in precious metals, were no longer in circulation. However, a great deal of gold and silver had come into the country during the war on British and French ships to be used to defray their military expenses. Once the war ended, Americans used these gold and silver coins to pay for enormous imports of foreign goods. Added to the excellent business and farming conditions that existed at the time, booming prosperity resulted, with huge profits, skyrocketing prices and high wages.

Then suddenly in 1785 the economy collapsed. So much foreign production of furniture, clothing, wines, etc., had entered the United States and were quickly purchased here, that all the gold and silver coins had been shipped out by then in payment. The general disorder was labeled the “Panic of 1785” with its widespread bankruptcies, unemployment and the sharp decline in farm prices. A man who had bought a farm in 1784 for $1,000 now found his farm valued at only $200, but he was nevertheless required by law to pay off his $1,000 mortgage.

Paper money political parties now developed in almost every state. Their leaders realized from wartime experiences with unbacked paper money that a bill stamped $1000 would soon not be accepted by a seller of goods as representing a value above $100. However, they hoped to win political power and then pass laws requiring a seller to accept the face value of the paper money regardless of how cheaply it had been acquired by the buyer. In this way, the man with the $1,000 farm worth $200 would sell $100 of wheat in exchange for a $1,000 paper certificate. He would then legally force the person or bank holding his mortgage to accept the paper certificate as full payment for his farm.

In Virginia, Patrick Henry led the paper-money party with Madison taking leadership of the opposition. Seven states had already voted paper-money parties into office in 1786, and Virginia seemed destined to join the pack. The issue came to a head in November, 1786, with both sides clashing in debate. The Montpelier estate was short of money and some creditors were hounding for payment, but to Madison the principle at issue was always more important than his personal situation. He argued that unsecured state-issued paper money was in violation of the state and Confederation constitutions and pointed to its effect on morals and commerce. When he concluded, the House of Delegates cast an eighty-five to seventeen vote against the issuance of unbacked currency.

The greatest disorders came in Massachusetts where Shays’s Rebellion broke out late in 1786. Massachusetts farmers were heavily taxed, besides paying as much as forty-percent interest on their mortgages. During the war, the state had permitted them to postpone paying their debts. But now payment was demanded and coupled with all their other financial burdens, western Massachusetts farmers revolted under the leadership of Daniel Shays, a Revolutionary officer. These debtors demanded the issuance of paper money to relieve their situation and they also insisted that “stay” laws be enacted, halting the collection of debts through the courts.

When their demands were not met, they mobbed the court house where farmers were being tried in debt cases. Civil war appeared to be near when Shays’s men laid seige to the U. S. arsenal at Springfield and made plans to move against eastern cities in the state. Congress was helpless to send an army to safeguard the arsenal, adding to the general contempt in which it was held. Finally Governor James Bowdoin sent 4,000 soldiers under General Benjamin Lincoln to fight Shays’s army. Lincoln, who had surrendered 5,000 American soldiers to the British at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1780 without a battle, had little trouble subduing the ragtag force of penniless farmers.

Madison did not know the background of Shays’s Rebellion. If he had, no doubt his sympathy would have been with the farmers. But what news he did receive made it appear that a mob was out to destroy the established government. This was the opinion formed also by Washington and many other political leaders.

There came a sudden spurt of interest now in the proposed Philadelphia Convention as a way, perhaps, to prevent other rebellions from breaking out. Virginia, New Jersey and Pennsylvania took action in favor of the conference, and all other states except New Hampshire and Rhode Island accepted the bid. New Hampshire promised to send a delegation later, but Rhode Island professed to find no good reason for calling the Convention. “Nothing can exceed the wickedness and folly which continue to reign in Rhode Island,” Madison said, disappointed.

The acceptance by Virginia of the forthcoming Philadelphia Convention led Madison to push immediately for his slate of attending delegates. The names on his list were George Washington, former Governor Patrick Henry, Governor Edmund Randolph, John Blair, George Mason, George Wythe and his own. He realized that it was vital for George Washington to attend the Convention, for as the most popular person in the country, his presence would give the gathering prestige. Patrick Henry’s presence might make that gentleman less prone to attack the results afterward.

With the acceptance of his slate, Madison now quit the Assembly to become once more a member of Congress. On his trip to New York early in January, 1787, it was apparent to Madison that the “Panic of 1785” had ended. Crops were once more getting high prices, labor shortages were reappearing, a large export trade was developing, and many towns were booming with new housing and road construction programs. Even the glaring weaknesses of the Confederation could not harm the American economy for long.

When he took his seat in the Congress, he was aware of the general sullenness and anger at the forthcoming Convention. For many members saw it for its true purpose—to kill the Confederation and scatter its ashes. The Convention could not be stopped, but members of the Congress sought a way to maintain their pride. Their answer was to pass a measure calling for a convention of the states to meet at the same time and place as the one called for by the Annapolis Convention. This Congressionally-called convention was to meet for the “sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation,” and to report changes for the “preservation of the Union.” At first, Madison viewed this as a rival convention. But then he realized there would be only the convention he had worked for and Congress was merely trying to save face by claiming credit for it.

Madison had not come to Congress in February, 1787, solely for the hollow honor involved. During the preceding year, seven Northern states had voted to authorize the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, John Jay, to negotiate a treaty of commerce with Spanish Minister Gardoqui. Jay was authorized to agree to a closing of the Mississippi to Americans for twenty-five years in return for the commercial pact. It was Madison who years before had written the diplomatic instructions from Congress to Jay, then Minister to Spain, to insist on free navigation of the Mississippi. Now he had returned to Congress to fight for the early policy and “to bring about, if possible,” he said with determination, “the canceling of Mr. Jay’s project for shutting the Mississippi.”

Besides his firm belief in the American right to use the Mississippi, Madison had another reason for his stand. Discontent in Kentucky and Tennessee was so widespread that there were rumors that these sections, so dependent on the Mississippi to carry their products to the sea, would separate from the Union. “Figure the effect of such a stipulation (the Jay proposal) on the Western people,” he wrote Jefferson. They felt betrayed by Northern interests desiring to sell fish to Spain and willing to cede the Mississippi in order to do so, said Madison. Betrayed by fishermen, on the Eastern Seaboard why shouldn’t the Westerners “consider themselves absolved from every Federal tie?”

In April, Madison brought the question to the floor by first requesting Jay to tell members whether he was proceeding with a Spanish treaty on the basis of his instructions. Jay said he had already agreed with Gardoqui to close the Mississippi to Americans for twenty-five years. Madison then argued that ratification of the treaty by seven states was insufficient, that nine states were necessary. When the Congress upheld him, Jay’s proposal died and Madison’s short mission to the national legislature was a success. On May 2, 1787, he looked about him at the ebbing scene of the Confederation Government, and he wrote in his journal, “I left New York for the convention to be held in Philadelphia.”

12

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION

WHEN Madison journeyed to Philadelphia, he was embarking on the major work of his life. Having been the driving force to bring the Convention into existence, he was also the American most knowledgeable about the problems facing the country and their possible solution.

He had done his homework with customary thoroughness. There was his deep study of preceding confederations dating back to ancient times and his remarkable written analysis of each. How were they organized? What were their benefits, their faults? Why did they fail? In his neat handwriting, he answered such questions regarding the Confederations of Lycia, Amphictyon, Achaia, as well as the Helvetian, Belgian and German Confederations. The theme running through each history was that failure came because the central, binding authority had no power to enforce decisions over equal and independent members.

There was also his thorough study of the American Confederation, analyzing its weaknesses and problems. Now he had gone one step further. If the basic conception of a confederation doomed it to eventual failure, what should replace it? There was no point in proposing that a stitch be taken here and there where the seams were obviously tearing, for the entire fabric was bound to disintegrate sooner or later. What was needed was an entirely new garment—a new type of government that retained only the republican form. This is what Madison had already carefully thought out in detail, but he wisely refrained from making his proposals public until the proper time.

There were too many things that might go wrong, and Madison had his hands full even before the Convention was scheduled to get under way. His chief immediate concern had been to get George Washington to come, for the general was the most popular and highly regarded American. But Washington showed signs of modesty, even though he considered the Convention vital. Then there were questions regarding his health, for all during the war Washington had averaged only four or five hours of sleep a night. He begged off with—“A rheumatic complaint in my shoulder. At times I am hardly able to raise my hand to my head.” But in the end, after oft-repeated urging that his influence was necessary for the success of the Convention, he sent his acceptance to “My particular friend Mr. Madison”; and on May 9, 1787, he set out by carriage from Mount Vernon for Philadelphia.

Madison was not happy to learn that Patrick Henry had refused to attend. Henry had angrily snapped that he “smelt a rat,” and that the true purpose of the Convention had not been publicized. He passed stories about that Madison intended to overhaul the government completely and thus weaken the states. Hadn’t Madison and his fellow schemers seen to it that a quorum failed to appear at the Annapolis Convention so that they had a pretext to adjourn and call for a second convention? Everyone knew that the Annapolis Convention, said Henry, was restricted to consider an interstate commercial agreement, while the Philadelphia Convention could take up any question pertaining to the Confederation.

Patrick Henry’s absence caused Madison some concern; for he had prepared a checklist of the major difficulties he faced, and Henry’s name drew a big question mark after Item Three. His checklist was as follows: (1) to get the Convention to agree to his proposed plan; (2) to win the approval of Congress; and (3) to obtain the sanction of the states to the new government. “The nearer the crisis approached,’’ he said, “the more I tremble for the issue. The difficulties which present themselves are almost sufficient to dismay the most sanguine.”

Fortunately, Madison’s approach was to handle each problem as it presented itself and not to be overwhelmed by problems that were far into the future.

Madison was the first delegate to reach Philadelphia, and he checked into Mrs. House’s boarding-house long before the May 14 opening date. He had time to meet the venerable Dr. Benjamin Franklin, the eighty-one-year-old Pennsylvania delegate to the Convention. There was no talk about Madison’s work in staving off Arthur Lee’s demand to Congress to recall Franklin from Paris. Franklin was feeble now and his voice was so small that he could hardly be heard. But his mind was still clear and he, too, favored a major political overhaul.

Then on May 13, a day before the Convention was to begin, George Washington arrived at Mrs. House’s place, having been treated to gun salutes and the rousing cheers from an excited crowd en route. He intended to stay with Madison, whom he called his close friend now, even though Madison was nineteen years his junior. But Robert Morris came to Mrs. House’s place and whisked him off to his own house.

The May 14 opening of the Convention was a failure, for only delegates from Virginia and Pennsylvania presented themselves in the meeting room on the second floor of the State House. There could be no organizing quorum until a majority of the delegations (seven) made their appearance. It was not until May 25, eleven days after the scheduled opening, that this number was first counted.

While some of the early-arriving delegates would have preferred social entertainment until a quorum appeared, Madison made it a work period. Beginning on May 17, the Virginia delegates began holding daily sessions that lasted two and three hours. Here Madison took to expounding the position he had confided to Washington—“Temporizing applications will dishonor the councils that propose them. Radical attempts, although unsuccessful, will at least justify the authors of them.”

Madison’s thesis at these Virginia delegation meetings was that a patchwork job on the Articles of Confederation was not good enough. In fact, the concept of a confederation must be discarded. In its place, he proposed a new national government, which would have the following features:

1.    A legislature of two houses with different terms of office.

(The Confederation had a single-house Congress.)

2.    A change in the principle of state representation in the legislature so that the large states would have fairer influence. (the Confederation gave each state a single vote.)

3.    A national executive, who, unlike the President of the Congress, would not be a member of Congress.

4.    A judiciary department independent of the legislature and the national executive that would maintain “national supremacy.”

5.    A relationship between the national government and the states which would provide “a due supremacy of the national authority” and “subordinately useful local authorities.” The national government would be armed “with positive and complete authority in all cases which require uniformity,” such as the regulation of trade, the right to tax and to coin and borrow money.

6.    The supremacy of the national government would also be noted by its authority to disapprove “legislative acts of the states in all cases whatsoever.”

7.    It would also have an expressed right to force obedience to national laws.

8.    The national government would “expressly guarantee the tranquillity of the states against internal as well as external dangers.”

9.    A new constitution should be acted upon with ratification “obtained from the people and not from the ordinary authority of the Legislatures.”

On May 25, when twenty-nine delegates from seven states finally appeared, the Convention was at last ready to begin its work. A total of seventy-four delegates was actually appointed, but only fifty-five eventually came to Philadelphia and the average daily attendance was seldom higher than thirty. With the count of the quorum completed, Washington was unanimously elected as presiding officer. As he took his place in the high-backed chair on the raised platform facing the delegates, one delegate moved into the seat directly in front of him.

This was Madison, thirty-six years old now and prepared for the most exhausting mental activity of his life. In appearance he was called “handsome in blue and buff costume carefully contrived to make up in impressiveness, what he lacked in height.” He had begun to lose his hair and it was “combed forward to hide his premature baldness.” The central seat Madison took in the hall was “in pursuance of the task I had assumed ... In this favorable position for hearing all that passed, I noted (on paper) what was read from the chair or spoken by the members.” In other words, besides taking a major role in the determinations of the Convention, Madison also planned to keep a complete record of proceedings.

Jefferson later referred to the delegates to this Convention as “an assembly of demigods.” This was, of course, an extreme exaggeration. The truth was that they were political leaders in their states and three-fourths had also served in Congress. About half were lawyers and the rest were planters, merchants and doctors. In age, they ranged from Franklin who was past eighty, to six men who were under thirty-one. One man, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, deliberately cut four years from his age in order to claim honors as the youngest delegate. Some historians later called members a selfish group, primarily interested in writing a constitution that would safeguard their own property from the likes of “Shays’s rebellious mobs” and from paper-money parties in the states. As part of their “evidence,” they pointed to the fact that no workers or farmers served as delegates. A fairer judgment would be to say that these were earnest and patriotic men, who may have held the prejudices of their geographic sections and their economic class but were deeply concerned with their country’s future. Some saw a future in a strong centralized government; others opposed this strenuously.

The first phase of the Convention lasted from May 25 to May 29. During this period delegates adopted rules of procedure. These included Madison’s proposal that only a simple majority was necessary to approve a resolution, instead of the rule of nine affirmative votes that had made the Continental Congress almost helpless. Madison also won approval for closed and secret sessions. He believed the time was so crucial that open debates reported by the press would keep members from speaking freely. The Convention also approved the heaping of loose dirt on the streets outside the hall in order to drown out the noises of passing carriages and wagons.

The second phase of the convention (from May 29 to June 19) began with a bombshell on the twenty-ninth. Madison had insisted on the daily meetings of the Virginia delegation, because he believed it was necessary to present a working plan to the Convention instead of bumbling ahead in chaos in the meeting hall. Members of his delegation had largely accepted his views on what should be done, although he watered down some details to keep Governor Edmund Randolph in line. The final conclusions were embodied in a preamble-resolve and a series of fourteen other resolutions which Randolph, as nominal head of the delegation, introduced as the Virginia Plan.

There was no uproar when Randolph began with a preamble-resolve that “the Articles of Confederation ought to be so corrected and enlarged as to accomplish the objectives proposed by their institution.” But mumbled objections pierced the air as he went on, reciting resolutions that were at complete odds with this preamble. For what came now were Madison’s ideas for a radical change of government:—Each state would have representation in the proposed two-house legislature according to its population, thus demolishing state equality. Separate and equal executive and judicial branches would take powers away from Congress where all three were formerly united. Then a national government with authority to make it supreme over subordinate state authority would complete the demolition of the Confederation.

Most members were stunned by the force and objectives of the Virginia Plan. On May 30, the Convention resolved itself into a committee composed of all delegates (committee of the whole) to discuss the plan line by line. When one delegate pointed to the conflict between the preamble-resolve and the following long list of resolutions, Madison quickly withdrew the preamble and reinserted three other resolutions in its place that called for a strong national government.

Day after day, Madison explained his Virginia Plan. As members began hearing a repetition of its points, their initial alarm faded, and at the end of two weeks a majority seemed to be in favor of the Plan. This alarmed the delegates from the small states who saw their states overwhelmed by the large states if population became the basis of representation in Congress. Finally on June 15, New Jersey delegate William Paterson gained the floor and proposed the New Jersey Plan of the small states.

The Convention could not go beyond offering amendments to the Articles of Confederation, Paterson orated. “The people are not ripe for any other,” he added. “Give the large states an influence in proportion to their magnitude, and what will be the consequence? Their ambition will be proportionately increased, and the small states will have everything to fear.”

Paterson’s New Jersey Plan, which was a hasty afterthought to the growing popularity of the Virginia Plan, proposed that Madison’s resolutions be thrown aside. In place of the Virginia Plan would be the substitute calling only for a revision of the Articles of Confederation. Congress should be given power to levy taxes and regulate commerce, but representation in Congress must remain as before, with all states being represented equally regardless of population.

There were other plans, including that of Alexander Hamilton to form a government similar in many respects to the British system. Among Hamilton’s proposals was one to elect one body of the legislature for life. Hamilton’s plan received no notice by the delegates when the committee of the whole met on June 19 to make its final vote on all proposals. With the large states in the majority, Madison’s Virginia Plan, with numerous revisions, swept to victory. Lost forever was the hope of the small states that the Convention would limit itself to revising the Articles of Confederation.

Now came the third phase of the conference, which lasted from June 19 to July 26 and resulted in the “Great Compromise” of the Convention. Agreement in the committee of the whole was not final, and after the vote of June 19 was completed, the same members sitting in their places were no longer members of the committee. Instead the committee was now gone and the men were once more delegates to the Convention to consider the report of the committee.

The debate to this point had not been especially bitter. But now tempers rose in the broiling summer’s heat, as the small states revealed an unyielding attitude toward the idea of representation by population. Madison, James Wilson of Pennsylvania and Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania led the argument for the nationalists and the big states, while William Paterson of New Jersey, John Dickinson of Pennsylvania (who had drafted the Articles of Confederation), Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts and Roger Sherman of Connecticut formed the opposition leaders. At the end of June with no end in sight to the debate, Washington said:

“I almost despair of seeing a favorable issue to the proceedings of the Convention, and do therefore repent having had any agency in the business. The men who oppose a strong and energetic government are, in my opinion, narrowminded politicians, or are under the influence of local views.”

Gradually, the New Jersey Plan sponsors had come to the acceptance of a two-house Congress to replace the single chamber of the Confederation. They were even willing to permit representation according to population in the lower house if there were equal state representation in the Senate. On June 29 came the vote on representation in the proposed House of Representatives and the large states had their way here. On July 2, the vote was scheduled on representation in the Senate, and here again the Madison forces expected to win. However, one delegate overslept and another galloped out of town to fight a duel.

On the basis of such minor events, the vote was a tie and the groundwork was thus laid for a major decision. With the Convention balancing on dead center, something drastic had to be done to prevent a total collapse. The move now came from General Charles Cotesworthy Pinckney of South Carolina, cousin of his fellow delegate Charles Pinckney of the same state. The general called for a committee composed of one member from each state, and this the Convention eagerly acted upon, making certain that strong nationalists, such as Madison and Wilson were omitted.

It was a foregone conclusion now that the small states had won part of their battle. This became evident on July 5 when the committee reported a compromise proposed by committee member Benjamin Franklin. Its chief features were the small-state desire for equal state representation in the Senate and House representation by population, plus a provision requiring all money bills to originate in the House. This last feature was a concession to the large states, for it was assumed they would dominate the House of Representatives. The committee report also proposed that three-fifths of the slaves be counted in reaching a population total for purposes of representation and taxation. This was not a compromise but merely a continuation of Madison’s proposal in his 1783 revenue bill in the Confederation Congress.

An eleven-day debate followed the introduction of the “Great Compromise.” Madison led the fight to the bitter end against equal representation in the Senate and the money-bill restriction. But on July 16, he grudgingly admitted defeat when the Convention adopted the Great Compromise with a vote of five state delegations to four.

The climax of this third phase of the Convention was certainly this compromise. In reality, it proved to be the climax of the entire Convention, for once it was adopted the small states relaxed and revealed far less opposition to the idea of a strong central government.

The third phase continued for ten days following the Great Compromise, for there were still many parts of the report of the committee of the whole to consider. Chief among the remaining questions was how much authority the national Congress should have. Madison’s earlier resolution was to the effect that Congress should “legislate in all cases to which the separate states are incompetent; or in which the harmony of the United States may be interrupted by the exercise of individual (state) legislation.”

To the question whether the powers of Congress should be spelled out with enumerated or specific listing, the small states now came out for the broadest possible general grant of power. This desire on their part to weaken state governments surprised Madison, for this is what a general grant of power to Congress meant. Afterward, he admitted that once the small states had achieved equality in the Senate they “exceeded all others in zeal for granting powers to the general government.”

It was not until July 26 that the Convention completed its exploration into the report of the committee of the whole. Debates covered a host of subjects besides Congressional power, such as how to select a national executive and judges, how long they should serve and what their duties would be. Rumors spread in the press that the delegates were bellowing at each other, and that they kept moving their conference room from the second floor to the first floor and back again. They did move their conference room and their sessions were frequently stormy. But to quiet the rumors of dissension, delegates got local papers to print an item that the Convention was proceeding so smoothly that “it has been proposed to call the room in which they assemble Unanimity Hall.”

On July 26, the Convention had for the time being agreed on the general principles of the contemplated government. It was necessary now to draft a preliminary constitution that would assemble all the agreed-upon principles into a single document. Madison was not elected as a member of the five-man drafting committee (committee of detail), but he was not concerned with its handiwork, for men who thought as he did held the majority.

The ten-day Convention recess from July 26 to August 6 represented the fourth phase of the Convention. During this time the committee of detail worked day and night to prepare its draft. It took as its outline the accepted Virginia Plan resolutions approved in the committee of the whole, and the further principles accepted by the Convention in the debate that followed. For details to fill in this outline, the committee lifted what was appropriate from the Articles of Confederation and state constitutions. For instance, on the subject of Congressional powers all those listed in the Articles of Confederation were put bodily into the draft-constitution. Then to this list were added power of taxation, regulation of commerce, establishment of a uniform rule of naturalization and, authority to call out the militia “to execute the laws of the Union, enforce treaties, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions.” There was also inserted at the end of the enumerated powers the following power for Congress: “And to make all laws that shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers.”

On the question of giving Congress power to regulate commerce, Southern members of the committee demanded that regulation require a two-thirds vote. At the same time, Northern members wanted to bar the importation of slaves. The committee finally reached a compromise requiring only a simple majority vote for laws relating to commerce, and prohibiting Congress from interfering with the importation of slaves before 1808, taxing exports or giving preference to “the Ports of one State over those of another” in any law.

Phase five of the Convention began on August 6 when the committee on detail submitted its draft. Then for more than a month, or until September 8, the Convention went over the document word by word. This was one of Philadelphia’s hottest summers, but the delegates persisted daily at their task from five to six hours. Madison was not away from his seat “more than a casual fraction of an hour in any day,” for he had much to protect from the onslaught of other delegates and much to alter in the printed draft.

He succeeded in expunging from the draft a provision to establish property qualifications for national officeholders; fought in vain to remove any requirements that foreign-born citizens be naturalized for a certain period of time before becoming eligible for office; won a clause that limited the total number of members in the House of Representatives; changed a vital word in the list of Congressional powers so that Congress had power to “declare” war and not “make” war; battled unsuccessfully against the clause forbidding Congress to interfere with the slave trade until 1808; and lost by a single vote in his effort to give Congress power to hold state laws void.

The committee of detail’s August 6 draft-constitution contained various sections which members considered incomplete. Toward the end of August the Convention established the Committee of eleven to examine and settle these postponed sections and Madison played a key role on this new committee. One of the subjects he helped handle was that of the Presidency, a newly conceived office that baffled delegates in determining selection, term of office and duties.

The draft of August 6 followed a previous Convention vote for an executive appointed by Congress for a seven-year term and ineligible for re-election. The Committee of eleven handed the Convention its report on September 4 that radically changed this approach. The President would serve a four-year term and be eligible for re-election. He would be elected by electors chosen in each state by a method decided upon by the state legislature. The number of Presidential electors for each state would equal its total of Senators and Representatives. If no candidate obtained a majority of the electoral votes, the Senate would select the President from among the top five candidates. The previous grant of power to the Senate “to make treaties and appoint ambassadors and judges of the Supreme Court” was now transferred to the President with the check of senatorial approval. Other new details surrounding the construction of the Office of the Presidency pointed to a key factor in the mind of Madison and its other sculptors. They carved the office with George Washington as their model and first President.

By September 8, exhaustion had overtaken most delegates. This was evident from the many demands for minute changes in wording of the various agreements. On that day, to head off endless changes, the Convention appointed a committee on style and entered into the sixth and final phase of the Convention. Madison was a member of this five-man committee “to revise the stile [jfc] of and arrange the articles which had been agreed to by the House.” With a reputation for smooth writing, Delegate Gouverneur Morris, marked by a wooden leg and a useless right arm, took the paragraphs handed him by his committee members and deftly composed the 5000-word document we now know essentially as the Constitution of the United States.

Madison believed his own work was done and did little quibbling on Morris’s wording. However, there was one matter he found that had not been fully handled before and he now prepared it for insertion in the Morris document. This was the method for amending the Constitution. The Articles of Confederation had been impossible to amend because of the requirement that all thirteen states had to sanction changes. Jefferson had said that under governments so difficult to change as the Confederation a revolution was necessary every two or three decades “to clear away accumulated injustices.” The amendment process Madison now added to the new Constitution made change possible with the approval of two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the state legislatures.

The committee on style reported on September 12. On the following day the report was printed. Then came two days of close examination with small last-minute changes, and on Saturday, September 15, the immense task was completed.

The final ceremony came on Monday, the seventeenth. George Washington had first honor to sign the Constitution. A total of thirty-nine delegates representing twelve states now affixed their signatures. Of the two signers for Virginia, one was James Madison, Jr., “Master-builder of the Constitution.”

13

RATIFYING THE CONSTITUTION

MADISON was physically spent after his intensive work at the Philadelphia Convention. He had taken off only a few days for resting and reading when he received an urgent note from New York, requesting him to come immediately to the meetings of the Continental Congress.

Madison was still a member of the Virginia delegation to Congress, and he rushed quickly to the scene by carriage. The trouble was apparent as soon as he took his place. Richard Henry Lee of the Virginia delegation was leading a group of delegates in a fight to reject the Constitution. Upon the completion of the Constitutional Convention, the Constitution had been sent to Congress because it was the legal central government. However, the leaders of the Convention, fearful that jealous members of Congress might cast a disapproving vote, sent a second document along with the Constitution. This latter document carefully omitted a request that Congress approve the Constitution. Instead, it requested Congress merely to act as a mailman and send copies of the Constitution to the States to be “submitted to a convention of delegates chosen in each state by the people thereof.”

Lee’s position was that the accompanying document was an insult to Congress. In the first place, he charged, the nature of the new Constitution was such that if Congress did not prevent it, a new government might be established with only nine states. For if nine states joined the government, while the other four did not, then instead of thirteen states there would be only nine United States. Second, he said, Congress should change the Constitution in several respects before sending the document to the states.

Madison served as the chief defender of the Constitution. He was unwilling to foresee the possibility that only nine states might join the new Union. As for making changes in the Constitution, this was bound to cause enormous trouble, he said. Some state conventions were certain to vote on the original Constitution, others on the Constitution as altered by Congress. The result would be confusion.

The debate was loud and raged for a few days. But Madison’s view prevailed to such an extent when the vote came, that the majority of all eleven state delegations approved sending the Constitution to the states without changes.

This was the second hurdle of the battle Madison had pessimistically outlined before the Philadelphia Convention. One final obstacle remained, and this was the struggle within each state over ratification.

Already the opposition was gaining strength. Washington fervently believed in the need for the Constitution. But always the straightforward man, he was quoted as saying only two days after returning to Mount Vernon: “I wish the Constitution which is offered had been made more perfect.” With faint praise he had added, “But I sincerely believe it is the best that could be obtained at this time.”

This sort of comment did the ratification forces little good at the outset, for Washington was the most respected American of that period. But there were other serious troubles on the propaganda line. In October, 1787, Hamilton visited Madison and revealed great concern over the spreading array of newspapers and pamphlets against the Constitution. The chief propaganda source was the same troublesome Richard Henry Lee, who, with his Letters from the Federal Farmer, was creating strong doubts in many areas regarding the need for the new Constitution.

In a calm, unhurried manner, Lee argued that there was no reason for haste in acting on the proposed Constitution. He chided the emergency state of mind of the Constitution-makers with—“It is natural for men, who wish to hasten the adoption of a measure, to tell us, now is the crisis—now is the critical moment which must be seized, or all will be lost; and to shut the door against free enquiry, whenever conscious the thing presented has defects in it; which time and investigation will probably discover.” Economic conditions were getting better daily, said Lee, and things were bound to improve even more, despite some shortcomings in the Articles of Confederation. But why cast aside the Confederacy for an undemocratic form of government, with a central government authorized to interfere with the commerce of the states? he asked. “Every man of reflection must see,” he concluded, “that in the changes now proposed is a transfer of power from the many to the few.” He regretted the fact that the “non-attendence of eight or nine men, who were appointed members of the Convention” had resulted in a “strong tendency to aristocracy now discernable in every part of the plan.” He failed to mention that he had been named as a Virginia delegate to the Convention but had refused to attend.

Hamilton proposed that Madison join him and John Jay in a large-scale effort to offset Lee and other propagandists opposed to the Constitution. Weary as he was, Madison agreed and a grand design was laid out to publish articles in Northern and Southern newspapers to promote the Constitution. All three agreed to use the pen name of “Publius” but to write independently of the other two. “Though carried on in concert,” Madison later said, “the writers are not mutually answerable for all the ideas of each other, there seldom being time for even a perusal of the pieces by any but the writer before they were wanted at the press; and sometimes hardly by the writer himself.”

In this frenzy of meeting deadlines, within a six-month period “Publius” turned out eighty-five essays. Jay fell ill in November, 1787, less than a month after the venture began and, said Madison, “The execution was thrown mostly on the other two.” Hamilton saw to their initial publication in New York where Governor George Clinton was leading the fight against ratifying the Constitution; while Madison soon had his transmission line formed directly to George Washington for printing at Richmond. The total lot of essays was printed in book form in 1788 as The Federalist and became the Bible of those promoting the Constitution. Despite the haste in which the essays were written, one legal historian declared: “For design, strength, clearness and simplicity, The Federalist has no parallel among the writings of men, not even excepting or overlooking those of Montesquieu or Aristotle.”

The essays followed a definite plan. In the first essay in The Federalist Hamilton told readers to expect future articles on the value of the Union; the confessed failure of the Articles of Confederation; the need for a unified government instead of widespread sovereignty among thirteen sovereign states, and the possibilities for the growth of republican principles under the new Constitution.

For more than a century afterward there was dispute as to the authorship of individual essays. It has now been established that Hamilton wrote fifty-one, Madison twenty-nine and Jay five. Upon the printing of No. 1 by Hamilton in the New York Independent Gazetteer, Jay followed with the next four, explaining how foreign troubles and interstate jealousies required a national overseer to safeguard the Union. Hamilton then wrote the next five articles, making the points that a national government need not be despotic or dictatorial; that a continuation of a Confederacy of independent rival states was more likely to lead to wars and a split into smaller confederacies.

Madison’s first “Publius” was The Federalist No. 10 of November 23. To students of government, this single essay is considered the most important of the entire eighty-five. Here in a remarkable few pages, he compressed the history and theory of political parties and governments run by political parties. In Madison’s view, “The most common and durable source of factions [political parties] has been the various and unequal distribution of property.” In general, he said, “Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.” The rich and the poor have “different sentiments and views.” Even among the property class, he went on, there is "a landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests” which “divide them into different classes.”

A political party, said Madison, consists of “a number of citizens who are united by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens. If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote.” But what was there to do when a political party holds a majority and measures are decided “not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an overbearing majority?” The Confederacy could not prevent any single economic force from gaining the upper hand and acting primarily with “neither moral nor religious motives” to exploit its economic rivals. The task of government, Madison said, was to hold all these rivals in check and maintain a balance among the economic groups. This, he declared, could best be done under the proposed Constitution.

The essays on the value of the Union under the new Constitution continued through No. 14. Then began the hardhitting articles of the failures of the Confederacy, which ran through No. 22. After this, Hamilton and Madison decided to divide the subject matter into topics in which each was most familiar. Hamilton did all the essays through No. 36 now, essays dealing almost entirely with financial and military subjects with the theme that only the energy and drive provided in the proposed Constitution could handle these matters properly. Madison then contributed from No. 37 to No. 59 to show the faithfulness of the Constitution to the principles of republican government. A republican government he defined as one “which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for a limited period, or during good behavior.” In this series Madison also examined the proposed powers for the Legislative and Executive branches with a detailed explanation of the checks and balances on the independence of each. Madison also wrote No. 62 and 63 and then turned over the remaining twenty-two to Hamilton to write.

Even though Rhode Island rejected the Constitution, there was good news from other states. The Delaware State Convention unanimously ratified the Constitution on December 7, 1787. Pennsylvania was second on December 12; then came New Jersey on the eighteenth, followed by Georgia on January 2, 1788, and Connecticut on the ninth. These were five of the required nine states, but Madison was aware that outside of Pennsylvania the other four states were small. Unless Massachusetts, New York and his native state acted favorably, the ratification fight would be meaningless.

Madison first heard about the Massachusetts fight with dread. A massive 355-delegate Convention met in January and word was that a majority opposed ratification. Governor John Hancock would not announce his position, while another influential delegate, Samuel Adams, coldly remarked, “I stumble at the threshold. I meet with a national government, instead of federal union of sovereign states.” But Hancock became a Federalist when those favoring ratification hinted to him that Washington would not run for President because Virginia would reject the Constitution. Hancock, they whispered, would then become the first President for certain. As for Sam Adams, he dropped the role of the Antifederalist when Paul Revere and other influential Bostonians told him that ratification would help business. The Convention then approved the Constitution with minor amendments.

Madison had no intention of taking part directly in the Virginia Convention. But word came from George Washington that the opposition was strongly led by Patrick Henry, who believed he had sufficient votes to control the Convention. ‘‘Many have asked me with anxious solicitude,” wrote Washington, ‘‘if you did not mean to get into the convention; conceiving it of indispensable necessity.”

Madison came home in March, stopping first to visit with Washington. It was the day before the election when he reached Montpelier. The county was to send two delegates to the Convention and general opinion was that a majority of freeholders opposed the Constitution. However, Madison’s personal popularity and the fact that his father stationed himself at the county’s sole polling place and made speeches to the voters won election for Madison and another Federalist.

The Convention was to begin on June 2, 1788, and Madison faced a major task during the few months after his selection as delegate in preparing his forces and strategy. His opposition was formidable, considering that Patrick Henry, the leading orator of his time, plus two former Speakers of the House of Delegates, Benjamin Harrison and in addition to John Tyler, Judge Joseph Jones and his protege-nephew, James Monroe, and George Mason, father of Virginia’s Constitution and Bill of Rights, would be on hand to fight against ratification. Mason and Governor Randolph had refused to sign the Constitution at Philadelphia because the document contained no bill of rights. Madison considered this refusal unjustified, for he also favored a bill of rights and proposed that these freedoms be written into the Constitution after ratification as Amendments. Mason had not brought up the subject at Philadelphia until the final hours of the Convention when the delegates were exhausted and ready to leave.

If Governor Randolph came to the Virginia Convention as an Antifederalist, it would be a severe blow to those who favored ratification. For this reason, Madison and Washington now deluged him with friendly letters in an effort to have him change sides. In the end, their play on his vanity, that he would be only a second-string player on Henry’s team of wild shouters, brought his fortunate shift to Madison’s bench. In addition, Madison collected on his side Edmund Pendleton, the aged Madison family lawyer and patriot, George Wythe, brilliant law professor and signer of the Declaration of Independence, lawyer John Marshall, Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, and James Innes, who, at about seven feet in height, was the tallest delegate.

If Patrick Henry expected Madison to play the part of the “bookworm,” he was due for a surprise. When the Convention opened, Henry was leisurely greeting his followers. Suddenly two important votes came at Madison’s quick demand. One was to elect the Convention’s president, the second, to choose the chairman of the Committee of the whole, where the Constitution would be discussed section by section. Having come primed for action, Madison’s organized vote led immediately to the selection of Pendleton as president and Wythe as chairman of the vital committee.

But this was just the opening victory, for the debate went on for three weeks. A total of one hundred and seventy delegates took part in the bitter contest and Richmond was crowded with visitors from every corner of the state, curious to view in one gathering the cream of Virginia’s politicians, excluding George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

An unofficial tally convinced Madison that a majority of the delegates opposed ratification at the outset. This revealed itself in the wild cheers that greeted Patrick Henry’s fiery opening remarks. “What right had the members of the Convention to say, ‘We, the people,’ instead of ‘We, the states?’ ” Henry demanded. “We, the people” showed a plot to establish a great centralized government and wipe out the superior Confederation of the equal states, he charged.

Madison selected Governor Randolph, the late convert to Federalism, to make the first reply to Henry. The Convention Hall immediately turned into a bedlam, for the Antifederalists had not known of Randolph’s conversion. Randolph was an excellent speaker and his remarks hurt Henry. Afterward, the little delegate from Orange County rose and took from his tall hat the first few pages of a long manuscript that he would refer to during the long weeks of debate. Then came the Federalists Pendleton and “Light-Horse Harry” Lee to add further emphasis to the explanations of Randolph and Madison that “We, the people” was the source of the government and not “We, the states.”

Patrick Henry returned in his red wig for an all-day denunciation of the Madison forces. He rambled into many areas of argument and threatened to bring about the secession of southern Virginia if the Convention approved the Constitution. “It is said eight states have adopted this plan,” he thundered. “I declare that if twelve and a half states had adopted it, I would with manly firmness and inspite of an erring world reject it.” In almost a screaming tone, he attacked the proposed powers of taxation and commercial regulation grouped to the central government and called the President a monarch. The shorthand recorder was so overwhelmed by the unparalleled magnificence of the orator that he failed to take down more than a small portion of his speech.

Both sides concluded after a few days that ratification or rejection depended on the thirteen homespun-dressed frontiersmen from the Kentucky section of Virginia. On this basis, Henry now emphasized that the Constitution would not operate in the best interest of the West. The Eastern states would dominate the Senate, where treaties would be approved, he said flatly. So, let’s look at the East and North, he added. Under the Confederacy, seven Northern states had been willing to sign away by treaty the rights of Americans to navigate the Mississippi. Only when six Southern states opposed this treaty, Henry claimed, was such action stopped.

Henry called on young Monroe to bear out his argument,and it was apparent at once to Madison that Monroe had been selected because he appealed chiefly to former Revolutionary War soldiers. So when Monroe finished his support of Henry, Madison called on Monroe’s best friend, John Marshall, another war veteran, to demolish him. Delegates agreed when Marshall finished that he had won the debate by a large margin.

The debate moved on like a covered wagon heading west. Point by point the Constitution was attacked and defended. There were arguments on paper money, standing armies, repaying British debts, the fear of national force to carry out national policy within the state, the protection of individual freedom and property rights. When his lieutenants failed to make their positions clear, Madison was at hand, even though he had fallen ill, to make the necessary further emphasis. From the second week in June, these many efforts by Madison to gain the floor did not include seventeen long debates with Henry. It was difficult to make headway against Patrick Henry, Madison admitted, because Henry was forever “putting words into our mouths which we never uttered.” Madison relied on reason, Henry on emotion, and there was no way of knowing which was more effective. Henry stamped and yelled, the veins standing out on his neck. As for Madison, said an observer, “He always rose to speak as if with a view of expressing some thought that had casually occurred to him, with his hat in his hand and with his notes in his hat; and the warmest excitement of debate was visible in him only by a more or less rapid and forward seesaw motion of his body.”

Neither man would give ground on any point. When Madison said, for instance, that George Washington favored ratification, Henry hit back with Madison’s friend, Thomas Jefferson, minister to France. Jefferson had written a letter calling for the addition of a bill of rights in the Constitution, but favoring ratification. In his letter Jefferson wrote that he wished “that the nine first conventions may accept the new Constitution, to secure to us the good it contains; but I equally wish that the four latest, whichever they may be, may refuse to accede to it till a declaration of rights be annexed.” Since New Hampshire was in process of becoming the ninth state to ratify, said Henry, surely Mr. Madison would want the Convention to follow the view of his brilliant friend, Mr. Jefferson, and be one of the four rejecting states.

The climax of the verbal struggle was the battle over the proposed national court system. “The purse is gone; the sword is gone and now justice,” Henry lamented. As he reached the high point in his attack on the Federal Judiciary, there came a sudden clap of thunder and bright flashes of racing lightning. Madison had called on Marshall to handle this argument with Henry, and when Marshall finished, Madison wrote Hamilton happily that Henry made “less impression than was feared.”

The critical situation at the Convention throughout the various debates had remained the task to swing the majority of the Kentucky delegation to accept the Constitution. Henry had worked relentlessly on the fear of these thirteen frontiersmen that the East and North would work against the West’s interests. Now at an opportune moment, Madison decided the time had come to demolish Henry. Even though members of the Confederation Congress were sworn to secrecy on their debates, Madison considered it vital to violate this rule in the present emergency. Henry was in error, he said, and some of the men who backed Henry were aware he was wrong in his claim that the East and North had agreed to close the Mississippi to Americans. Madison said he had been present in Congress when the Jay-Gardoqui Treaty to trade away navigation rights on the Mississippi for twenty-five years in exchange for a commercial agreement with Spain was discussed. Rather than a solid line of Northern states favoring the Jay proposal, Madison declared, Pennsylvania and New Jersey had stood alongside the five Southern states in opposing it.

In anger, Henry shouted that he had not been “scuffling for Kentucky votes.” But Madison had made his point, and a majority of the frontier representatives were now for ratification.

The final vote came on June 25. Attorney General James Innes rose to his great height and closed the Federalist case by chiding Henry’s forces to act like Americans and not like Virginians, as they had during the late war. Henry and George Mason made a last-minute effort to tack a proposed bill of rights and other amendments onto the Constitution. But Madison, who knew that the document must be ratified in identical form in every state, successfully fought them off. Instead he won agreement on his motion to recommend the proposed bill of rights to the consideration of the Congress established under the Constitution. The clerk now began a reading of the roll, and when the call was completed, Madison beamed over the gratifying 89-79 victory for ratification.

In August, a touching reward came to Madison from Nassau Hall. A letter from Dr. John Witherspoon notified him that Princeton had awarded him an honorary degree as a Doctor of Laws. His old professor and fellow delegate in the Continental Congress wrote that all at Princeton were proud “of one of their own sons who has done so much honor by his public conduct.”

But there was news from New York of an even greater reward. New Hampshire had ratified the Constitution on June 21, four days before Virginia, thus putting the new government into effect as the ninth ratifying state. However, Madison knew that the approval of New York and Virginia were essential to the new Union because of their size and population. Once his own state ratified the Constitution, New York became his major concern. Here Hamilton was attempting the same role Madison had played in Virginia, although he began with two-thirds of the delegates opposed to ratification. Yet in July, after enormous labors, Hamilton won by a three-vote margin; the new government could now safely begin.

14

NATIONAL POLITICIAN

ONCE the Constitution won legal ratification, Madison might have taken a long and deserved rest. However, he saw roadblocks going up at many points to thwart the will of the people.

For instance, the Confederation Congress remained reluctant to sign its own death certificate. In August, Madison traveled to New York to check into the delay, and a month passed before he could induce Congress to take the required action. There had been a fight over the selection of the first temporary capital. Madison had suggested Baltimore, but when this carried, he saw that Northern members were angry. So to make them more agreeable, he got five Southern states to change their vote to New York City instead.

Congress was also in no hurry to set a time for the new government to begin. Finally, delegates agreed that Presidential electors should be chosen in the various states on the first Wednesday in January, 1789; that they should meet and cast their ballots on the first Wednesday in February; and that the newly-elected Congress should convene on the first Wednesday in March. Because this first Wednesday in March, 1789, was March 4, that became the day all new Presidents were to be inaugurated until the Twentieth Amendment adopted in 1933 made January 20 the date for inauguration of the President.

When word came to Virginia that the machinery was in order to begin the new government, Patrick Henry decided to seek revenge on Madison. Washington, who was sure of his own unanimous selection by electors for President, wanted Madison in the United States Senate. Madison was in New York when Henry took the floor in the Virginia Assembly and savagely denounced him. As a friend reported: “Mr. Henry exclaimed against your political character, and pronounced you unworthy of the confidence of the people in the station of Senator. That your election would terminate in producing rivulets of blood throughout the land.”

In dismay, Washington reported to Madison that Henry’s power in the Assembly was so great that “he has only to say let this be law, and it is law.” Henry bore out this observation by winning the election for Richard Henry Lee and William Grayson as Virginia’s first pair of Senators. Both Lee and Grayson were strong opponents of the new Constitution. Madison, its champion, ran a poor third to both in the legislature’s vote.

At this point, Madison planned to run for a House seat, but again Henry decided to thwart him. The state legislature was to form congressional districts, each of which would elect one man to the House of Representatives. Henry knew of Madison’s popularity in Orange County, so he fashioned a District that included an overwhelming number of Antifederalist counties in addition to Orange County. Once having won approval for this anti-Madison Congressional District, Henry then selected James Monroe as his opponent.

By the time Madison returned from New York, Henry had spread rumors throughout the district that Madison opposed the addition of a bill of rights as amendments to the Constitution. Henry also told Baptist leaders that Madison was no longer a champion of religious liberty. The election was to take place on February 2, 1789, and Madison had only a month to overcome his many handicaps.

At first he thought he would not campaign, that the voters would realize the falseness of Henry’s remarks. But he soon changed his mind when he saw that the Baptist leaders were denouncing him. Quickly he sent friends to straighten out the situation among the Baptists. Then he induced Monroe to travel with him throughout the District to discuss their views on the Constitution with voters. At one church-meeting place, Madison recalled, “Services were performed and then they had music with two fiddles. When it was all over we addressed these people and kept them standing in the snow listening to the discussion of constitutional subjects. They stood it out very patiently-seemed to consider it a sort of fight in which they were required to be spectators.” That night Madison’s nose was frostbitten and left a permanent scar.

These debates made the difference. Voters could compare Madison’s knowledge and wit with Monroe’s dull manner of speaking and lack of maturity. When the vote was tallied, Madison was ahead by three hundred.

Ever since the Annapolis Convention of September, 1786, Madison had been constantly on the move. But any yearning for a needed rest had to be stilled with his election to the House of Representatives. For he felt it his duty now to help the new government off to a good start so that it would succeed.

He went first to Mount Vernon for long talks with Washington on plans and programs for the initial session of Congress, slated to begin in a few weeks. Then he hurried to New York to be present for the opening meeting on March 4. That day came and went with only a handful of Congressmen present, and he felt disgust with absent colleagues when the month disappeared without the arrival of the necessary majority quorum.

It was not until April 6 that a working majority finally straggled into the Senate; five days after the House had its first quorum. Now the Senate could count the electoral vote and make official the widespread rumor that Washington was unanimously elected. When word reached the House that Washington had sixty-nine electoral votes and John Adams thirty-four, the second highest number of votes, the House resolved that “Mr. Madison do communicate the said message” to Washington and Adams that they were President and Vice-President respectively.

From the very first day, Madison functioned as the leader of the House. One historian counted the number of times he held the floor on business during that first five-month session and found the total was one hundred and twenty-four. His first bill, and also the House’s first bill, was a tariff measure, laying import duties on a variety of goods and material. To Madison, this act signified a basic difference between the Confederation’s helplessness and the new government’s strength. He told the House that “by the establishment of a more effective government” and “having recovered from the state of imbecility” under the Confederation, the House, “in its first act,” should “revive those principles of honor and honesty that have too long lain dormant.” A northern Congressman who watched him take charge of the bill to establish an independent income for the National Government said, “He is our first man . . . his language is very pure, perspicuous and to the point.”

Washington arrived in New York amidst much pomp and ceremony. Few realized he had borrowed about $3,000 in order to pay his debts and cover the expenses of his trip to New York. Nor was it known that on April 30, 1789, when he took his oath and then nervously began reading his inaugural address to Congress, that he was reading a speech written by Madison. Afterward, the House requested Madison to prepare a reply to the inaugural address. Then to complete the writing chores, Washington asked Madison to write his reply to the House reply.

The Constitution had made no direct reference regarding the establishment of governmental agencies, although one section said the President could require the opinion of the chief officer in each department. Washington was continuing the small agencies of the Confederacy, but it was obvious to Madison that new departments should be firmly established by law. Finally on May 19, after consultation with Washington, he introduced legislation to establish a Department of Foreign Affairs (later changed to the Department of State), and the Treasury and War Departments.

There was no argument with Madison’s proposal to have the President appoint a Secretary as principal officer in each department, and the Senate to confirm or reject each Secretary. However, a squabble did develop over the point whether the President could fire a Secretary without Senate approval. Those who favored giving this power to the Senate pointed out that Article No. 77 of The Federalist said that Senate approval “would be necessary to displace as well as appoint.”

This was an essay Hamilton had written, and Madison took the opposite side in the House debate. The President, he insisted, had sole authority to remove because that power was an executive and not a legislative function. What if a President could not remove a Secretary, he asked, and the Secretary stole a large sum of money from the Treasury? Because the President is responsible for the Executive branch, Madison concluded, he would now find himself liable to impeachment.

For a time it appeared that the House would pass the bill to establish the Department of Foreign Affairs, which contained a clause that the Secretary was liable “to be removable by the President.” Madison said that this clause made it appear that Congress controlled removals, but was letting the President have the authority in this single instance. By a vote of twenty-nine, to twenty-two, he succeeded in having the House change this section to read that “whenever said principal officer shall be removed by the President,” the chief clerk should perform his duties. This language change, casual as it reads, gave the President sole power of removal except by impeachment proceedings.

As he had solemnly promised the Virginia Ratifying Convention, Madison took the lead in amending the Constitution by adding a bill of rights. Many state conventions had submitted long lists of proposed amendments, besides the forty Virginia had sent. Madison carefully scrutinized each, weeded out duplicates, studied newspapers and public records and then composed his own list. From a total of more than a hundred proposed by the state conventions and from other sources, he emerged with fewer than twenty. Besides duplicates, many of the proposals were already in different parts of the Constitution, such as the guaranteeing of a jury trial, the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus (or the right of a prisoner to be brought before a judge to determine whether he is being legally held; and the prohibition of ex post facto laws (or laws that make a person liable to punishment for an action which was not criminal at the time it was performed.

When he introduced his proposed amendments, Madison was shocked to discover that most members were indifferent to enacting a bill of rights. One congressman went so far as to accuse him of the motive to seek “some publicity” in urging action. However, he persisted, and finally after a few months went by, he forced floor action on his proposals.

First came his amendment to prevent the Federal Government from interfering with religious freedom. This same amendment, later known as the First Amendment, also guaranteed freedom of speech and press and the right to petition the government “for a redress of grievances.” Others provided against “unreasonable searches and seizures” of “persons, houses, papers and effects”; the right to “a speedy and public trial . . . and to have the assistance of counsel”; the right not to “be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor to be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This last, later became part of the Fifth Amendment.

One of Madison’s proposed amendments (which became the Tenth Amendment) said that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states,” were to be reserved to the states. States’ rights Congressmen immediately voiced objection to the wording and insisted that “expressly” be added before the word “delegated.” Madison saw through their scheme, for this same expression, “expressly delegated” had prevented the Confederation Congress from going beyond the powers specifically enumerated in the Articles of Confederation. The new government would be cruelly restricted if it lacked authority to use implied powers, or powers necessary to carry out the enumerated powers.

Madison staved off the opposition on this important amendment and his lot of seventeen passed the House and went to the Senate. The Senate then rejected two of his amendments, combined others and sent twelve back to the House for final action. When the House approved them, they were sent to the States where legislatures consented to ten (The two rejected amendments dealt with the pay of Congressmen and the number of members in the House.) It is these first ten Amendments that form another Madison legacy to his country.

Besides his work establishing the “Bill of Rights,” the Executive departments and the first national revenue, Madison was called on frequently by Washington for advice on matters that involved Presidential policy. That this was a violation of the so-called doctrine of separation of powers between the Executive and legislative branches did not disturb either man. When Washington wanted a message for Congress, it was Madison to whom he turned for assistance in writing. Several times he asked Madison whether certain moves would violate the Constitution, and he acted on the basis of the replies. Once Washington had Madison prepare a veto message for him on a piece of legislation that had passed Congress. Washington also made constant use of the Virginia legislator in selecting government officials. It was Madison who suggested that Thomas Jefferson be brought back from his French ministerial post and made Secretary of State. Madison was also instrumental in keeping Charles Lee off the Supreme Court. On one occasion, after a siege of appointment requests to Madison, Washington wrote him: “I am very troublesome, but you must excuse me. Ascribe it to friendship and confidence, and you will do justice to my motives.”

Washington had appointed Alexander Hamilton, indeed a financial genius, as his Secretary of the Treasury. Madison’s association with the New Yorker had, of course, been warm and close, and there was every reason to believe that their relationship would continue to be cordial.

Toward the close of 1789, Hamilton asked his friend for suggestions on increasing the Federal revenues in order to pay the national debt of $54,000,000 inherited from the Confederation. Madison, in his reply, proposed a tax on whiskey production, duties on imported liquor, a Federal land tax and a stamp tax on Federal Government legal documents. Hamilton incorporated these in a report he submitted to Congress in January, 1790. However, his “Report on the Public Credit” went far beyond these proposals and began trouble between the two friends that eventually erupted into fierce antagonism.

Hamilton’s report also proposed that the Federal Government assume the $21,500,000 of unpaid debts incurred by the states during the Revolutionary War. This would be in addition to the $14,000,000 in foreign debts and the redemption at original value of the now almost worthless $42,000,000 in Continental paper money still outstanding and the certificates given soldiers and contractors that promised future payment. He proposed further that all holders turn them in and get in exchange new Treasury certificates equal to the original face value of the old. These new certificates would be redeemed after a period of years and would bear interest payments of six percent to holders.

Alexander Hamilton claimed that Federal “assumption” of state debts would establish federal supremacy in financial affairs. He also said that the purchase of the Continental paper money and certificates at par value would force the rich people, who had speculated in them, to support the new government in order to get their interest and final high payment.

Madison’s view was that this was a base scheme. The soldiers who had been paid with certificates had long ago been forced to sell them at a fraction of face value in order to get food for their families. Why enrich speculators who bought them at five percent of face value with a payment of one hundred percent? Madison wondered. The fair solution was to pay the original holders who had sold their securities at the highest actual market price that existed in the past for their type of certificate; then give the current holders the difference between that price and the face value. As for “assumption” of state debts, Madison found this obnoxious, for it would create a situation whereby Virginia, which had discharged most of her war debt, would be paying Federal taxes in behalf of states that had not.

As the leader of the House of Representatives, Madison prevented Hamilton’s plan from passing. Nevertheless, he could not win acceptance for his own proposal. In the meantime, speculators were roaming through the back-woods areas in the various states, buying up defaulted state-issued paper money and certificates for a fraction of original value.

Then in June, Jefferson arrived in New York to take on his duties as Secretary of State. Said Jefferson: “As I was going to the President’s one day, I met him [Hamilton] in the street. He walked me backwards and forwards before the President’s door for half an hour.” Hamilton cried that his assumption bill was vital and appealed to Jefferson for aid. Jefferson invited him to dinner the following evening and had Madison attend the meeting. Although Madison insisted he would still oppose assumption, Jefferson agreed to get two Virginia Congressmen, Alexander White and Richard Bland Lee, to support assumption and thus give Hamilton his majority. In exchange, Hamilton agreed to add Northern support to a bill to establish the permanent national capital on the banks of the Potomac River after a ten-year stay (1790-1800) in Philadelphia. Both bills passed.

Madison later wrote off the deal as “an unavoidable evil.” He agreed that without some features of Hamilton’s financial plan being enacted into law, the continuation of the National Government was endangered. However, Jefferson later claimed ignorance, charging that Hamilton had sprung the plan on him and he had no time to examine its merits.

Madison had no trouble winning re-election in 1790. When he traveled to Philadelphia for the Second Congress, he found himself again the leading opponent to the plans of Hamilton. This time Hamilton proposed that Congress charter a Bank of the United States. The Bank would be privately owned and managed, though the Government would buy some of its stock. The Bank, with branches throughout the country, would have authority to issue paper money, but this paper would be backed by gold and silver reserves held in the bank vaults and would be redeemable upon demand by holders. Thus the economy would have a sound currency for the first time. In addition the Bank would help the government obtain loans, transfer government funds from one section of the country to another as needed and would help collect Federal taxes. The Bank would also make loans to individuals and businesses.

Hamilton assumed that Madison, as a champion of a strong central government in the past, would now support the chartering of a national bank. But this was not the case. Madison viewed the Bank as a scheme to enrich already wealthy Americans and to bring about an unhealthy concentration of wealth. Where he had previously taken up the fight to enlarge national powers beyond those enumerated in the Constitution, he now demanded that the National Government be restricted to the specifically enumerated powers. The Bank, he declared in an all-day speech, was unconstitutional because nowhere in the Constitution was Congress authorized to undertake this activity.

On the issue of the Bank, Washington asked his Cabinet for opinions on its constitutionality after Congress approved the charter. Jefferson and Attorney General Edmund Randolph opposed his signing the bill, while Hamilton urged it. Washington then asked Madison to draft a veto message for Congress to be submitted before the President’s ten-day limit in holding a bill expired. Then just as his time limit was to end, Washington discarded the veto and signed the bill. This action signified that he was drawing closer to Hamilton and receding from Madison.

In May, 1791, Madison and Jefferson set out on a tour of New York and New England. None of their letters during their absence from Philadelphia mentioned politics. In fact, the two men later referred to their trip as a “botanical excursion.” The interest of the two men in plant experimentation no doubt made their trip interesting. Jefferson could talk about the many crop breedings he was undertaking at Monticello, and Madison could tell him about the South Sea rice sent him by a Captain William Bligh, who sailed the British armed transport, Bounty. Yet the two men must have talked politics as they traveled, for their return signified the true beginning of political parties under the mantle of the Constitution.

Jefferson took the lead away from Madison in their opposition to Hamilton’s policies. Those who supported him later came to be known as Democratic-Republicans, or Republicans, while the backers of Hamilton were known as Federalists. Hamilton had his own Federalist newspaper, the Gazette of the United States, edited by John Fenno, to whom Hamilton awarded public printing contracts to boost his income. At Madison’s suggestion, Jefferson employed Philip Freneau, Madison’s Princeton friend, as a State Department translator. This gave Freneau a small extra stipend of $250 a year while he edited the National Gazette, Jefferson’s Republican newspaper. Fenno and Freneau carried on fierce attacks against each other’s political leaders and party.

Hamilton well understood that Jefferson’s philosophy called for a weak central government, a farming society, and opposition to the British Government. That Madison would now subscribe to this same position not only befuddled Hamilton but made him furious. In a 6,000-word letter in 1792 to one of Madison’s Virginia friends, Hamilton attacked Madison with venom. He was especially bitter at the charges in Freneau’s publication that he was an enemy to individual freedoms and favored a monarchy. These charges he attributed to Madison. He also said he found it peculiar that Madison could be for states’ rights when only a short time ago “a primary article in his creed was that the real danger in our system was the subversity of the national authority by the state governments.”

The fighting between Jefferson and Hamilton became known to Washington when in March, 1792, he began the practice of meeting with his Secretaries. Madison coined the term "Cabinet” for these meetings. At these Cabinet sessions, the two men were like gamecocks in the pit with charges and countercharges against each other. Washington attempted to bring friendship between the two by pleading to each to consider the public good.

When their fighting continued, Washington finally wrote to Madison that he planned to retire after a single term as President. Would Madison write a Farewell Address for him? he asked, “expressing in plain and modest terms that having been honored with the Presidential Chair, and to the best of my abilities contributed to the Organization and Administration of the government . . . retirement . . . will be most pleasing to me.”

Madison wrote the “Farewell Address,” but it was not used until four years later. For Madison joined Jefferson and Hamilton in pleading with Washington to accept a second term as the only man in public life who could unify the nation.

Washington’s second term proved a stormy period, despite the economic prosperity of the nation. In July, 1789, the French Revolution had begun with the storming of the Bastille. Almost all Americans rejoiced in the struggle against tyranny. But by the beginning of Washington’s second term, in March, 1793, Hamilton’s Federalists had taken a strong anti-revolutionary position. In contrast, the Republicans maintained their unswerving enthusiasm.

Washington faced his first major foreign crisis that year. In January, the French revolutionists beheaded King Louis XVI, the king who had aided the United States during its war against England. Then in February France went to war with England, while the French at home were under the violent Reign of Terror.

The French Government was sending a new minister to the United States. On hearing this, Washington was faced with concern. If he received the French minister, it would mean that he recognized the revolutionary government. And if he recognized the new government, would the United States remain bound by the French Treaty of Alliance of 1778? One provision of that treaty called for the U. S. to defend the French West Indies against all attacks.

On April 22, 1793, Washington threw the French treaty overboard by issuing a neutrality proclamation, calling on Americans not to take sides in the European war. He also announced the Government’s policy to be “a conduct friendly and impartial towards the belligerent powers.”

Madison considered the neutrality proclamation a violation of the French treaty. Jefferson went further and attacked Hamilton in Cabinet meetings for favoring it. When Hamilton wrote articles backing the proclamation in Fenno’s paper under the pseudonym of “Pacificus,” Jefferson wrote Madison: “For God’s sake, my dear sir, take up your pen, select the most striking heresies and cut him to pieces in the face of the public. There is nobody else who can.” Madison did not want to undertake such a task, but he finally agreed and under the name of “Helvidius,” he wrote five articles in reply.

In the meantime, Edmund Genet, the young French minister, arrived at Charleston, South Carolina, and proceeded slowly to Philadelphia. Everywhere the Republicans dined and wined him and he outfitted privateers to fight against British man-o’-wars, in violation of the neutrality proclamation. Once he reached Philadelphia, Washington received him, although coldly, yet his welcome meant that the French revolutionary government had been accepted by the American Government. Madison, who was pleased with recognition, soon grew angry with Genet’s continuing misconduct. Finally, even Jefferson, who had acted as Genet’s sponsor, now suggested to the President that the Frenchman be ousted from the country.

In July, 1793, when the arguments between Jefferson and Hamilton could not be lessened by Washington’s pleas, Jefferson resigned. Washington paid a call on Jefferson to ask him to reconsider. When Jefferson would not Washington turned to the problem of choosing his successor. “He said Mr. Madison would be his first choice,” Jefferson later commented, “but he had always expressed to him such a decision against public office that he could not expect he would undertake it.” When Madison rejected the offer, Washington named Edmund Randolph to the State Department and replaced Randolph as Attorney General with William Bradford, Madison’s classmate at Princeton.

In the spring of 1794, Washington decided that the time had come to get England to behave properly toward the United States. England still held posts on American territory. She was also seizing American vessels engaged in trade with the French West Indies, impressing seamen off American vessels and forcing them into service in the royal navy.

Washington selected Chief Justice John Jay as his envoy to London to write a second treaty with the British. At the same time he had a vacancy in France, where the French had ousted American Minister Gouverneur Morris in retaliation for the Genet recall. Madison headed a committee that called on Washington with the request that he name Aaron Burr to replace Morris. However, Washington would not hear of Burr and offered the post to Madison. Madison could not tell the President why he would not accept. But he offered a second candidate, James Monroe, and Washington agreed to this.

The cause of Madison’s inability to accept the diplomatic post was a young widow named Dolley Payne Todd. Born in North Carolina of Quaker parents in 1768, Dolley was raised in a house her father bought from the husband of her mother’s aunt, Mrs. Patrick Henry. After the elder Payne freed his slaves in 1783, he had to sell his plantation because he lacked a labor force. That year he moved to Philadelphia where he made and sold starch. In 1789, the year the new government hopefully began, John Payne’s business went under. First the Quakers expelled him because he could not pay his debts. Then he retired to a room where his body and mind wasted away until death relieved him. While he was still alive, Mrs. Payne opened a boarding-house to support her family of eight children. Dolley, her oldest daughter, left her in January, 1790, when she married John Todd, a young Quaker. Then in 1793, another daughter, fifteen-year-old Lucy, married George Steptoe Washington, the President’s nephew and ward.

That summer a yellow fever epidemic raged in the Philadelphia area, killing 4,000 persons. John Todd wisely saw to it that Dolley, their two-year-old son, John Payne Todd, and their new baby were outside the troubled area. Nevertheless, he stayed in Philadelphia where he helped nurse the sick and bury the dead. Finally on October 24, the fever seized him, too. With the sobbing cry, “I must see her once more,” he hurried to Dolley, only to die within a few hours.

Then Dolley fell gravely ill, and her baby son died. The epidemic lifted and the young widow moved back to Philadelphia with her remaining child.

Her nature was so warm and gay that she was constantly surrounded by friends. Nor did she lack for suitors. Many proposed to the young woman but she accepted none. There was talk that Senator Aaron Burr, whose wife was dying of cancer, had asked Dolley to marry him when he became a widower. A will that she wrote at this time named Burr as guardian of her son.

Madison was forty-three now and considered a confirmed bachelor. He lived only a few blocks from Dolley and knew of her charm. However, he could not approach her directly to make her acquaintance. A note from Dolley to her best friend early in 1794 reveals the method he used. Wrote Dolley: “Aaron Burr says that the great little Madison has asked to be brought to see me this evening.”

Madison was quickly in love with her and their courtship was swift. On September 15, 1794, they were married and Dolley wrote to a friend: “In the course of this day I give my hand to the man of all others I most admire.” Shortly afterward, the Quakers expelled Dolley for her marriage to a non-Quaker.

15

PARTY POLITICIAN

MADISON’S relations with President Washington cooled noticeably during 1794, though the two men remained on speaking terms. Madison never altered his opinion of Washington as a great man, but he believed now that the President was permitting Hamilton to steer him into undemocratic channels.

For instance, in 1794, the Whiskey Rebellion had broken out in western Pennsylvania. Farmers there, faced with poor roads to carry their corn and rye, had for years converted their grain to whiskey, which was easily transported. However, the National Government’s excise tax on distilled liquor was affecting their pocketbooks and they believed they were being unfairly treated with this special tax. As a result, they finally rebelled in 1794 and drove federal treasury agents from the area.

In Madison’s opinion, Hamilton had quickly convinced Washington that the rebellion was the work of the Democratic Societies, the Republican clubs that had sprung up throughout the country to support France in her war against England. He felt certain of this when Washington labeled the rebellion “the first formidable fruit’’ of the Democratic Societies and declared that unless it ended “we may bid adieu to all government in this country, except mob and club government.”

Madison did not side with the rebels. But he was outraged when Washington and Hamilton sent a militia of 15,000 men from four states against the'disgruntled farmers. Even before the state militias appeared, the farmers gave up their struggle. Yet Hamilton had sought scapegoats, arresting several leaders, two of whom were later convicted of treason. Two other men who narrowly avoided Hamilton’s detention on charge of treason were Albert Gallatin and Hugh Brackenridge, Madison’s fellow poet at Princeton. Later Hamilton tried to get House Federalists to pass a resolution condemning the Democratic Societies, in an effort to destroy the Republicans. However, Madison prevented its passage, pointing out that “the censorial power is in the people over the government, and not in the government over the people.”

Another major antagonism toward Washington’s policies occurred when the Jay Treaty with England was made public. Jay had signed a treaty that completely ignored his instructions from Washington. No mention was made of impressment of sailors or rights of neutral nations on the high seas. Instead Jay had agreed to give the British free navigation on the Mississippi, special treatment for her exports to the United States and to accept a restriction on American trade with the British West Indies to ships under seventy tons and a promise not to export cocoa, sugar, coffee, cotton or molasses.

The truth was that Washington was stunned by these wretched terms. Yet after holding the treaty for three months, he concluded that it could serve as a beginning to other agreements and he reluctantly submitted it to the Senate on this basis. Here after a sharp debate, approval came by a narrow margin in June, 1795, after the sections limiting the size of American vessels and the ban on exports were struck out.

When news of the treaty reached the public, the national fury was enormous against Jay and Hamilton. Even Washington complained that the Republican press was comparing him to “a common pickpocket.” When Washington signed the treaty in August, there did not appear to be any way to prevent it from going into effect. However, Madison’s fertile brain conceived of a plan in this direction.

The treaty required an appropriation of money from Congress. Early in 1796, Washington made this request of the House to appropriate the necessary sum to meet the treaty obligations. Madison’s plan now became known. He acknowledged that the President and the Senate shared the treaty-making power under the Constitution. However, the House shared the legislative power with the Senate. Therefore, he concluded, when a treaty required further legislation, it was the right and duty of the House to examine the treaty in detail and to pass judgment on whether it was for the public good.

All this produced a fight between the House Republicans and Washington. First the House requested Washington to send over the papers involved in negotiating the Jay Treaty. Washington’s reply was that he would not unless the House planned his impeachment. Then the House by a vote of 57-35 affirmed its right and duty as a legislative body to look into treaties which required an appropriation. On the advice of Hamilton, who had retired from the Cabinet in February, 1795, Washington bluntly told the House that it had neither a moral or legal right to prevent carrying out a treaty.

At this point, Madison counted his support and happily noted that he had a margin of twenty votes on this issue. However, lobbyists now descended on Philadelphia, and he saw his support melt. The final vote for the appropriation without examining the treaty was fifty-one to forty-eight in Washington’s favor. Madison now disgustedly wrote Jefferson that the defection of the House Republicans brought this defeat and not the strength or malice of Federalists.

In September, 1796, Washington published his “Farewell Address,” much of it still the version written for him by Madison in 1792. Hamilton had made some additions and Washington had done the final editing. The Address, besides being a basic political document, counseling against political parties and entangling foreign alliances, signified the retirement of Washington. Jefferson had been pushing Madison to run for President, while Madison was urging Jefferson on the Republicans. The final count of the electoral ballots put John Adams into the Presidency with seventy-one votes and Jefferson into the Vice-Presidency only three votes behind him.

Madison had made up his mind to retire from politics on March 4, 1797, and he refused to run for re-election. Nor would he accept the offer from leaders of the Virginia Assembly to elect him governor by a unanimous vote.

He and Dolley and little Payne Todd, her son, were at home with the Madison elders at Montpelier when the major crisis of the Adams Administration arose. Washington had recalled Monroe for being too friendly with the French revolutionary government, but the French had refused to receive General C. C. Pinckney, named to succeed Monroe. Adams had considered sending Jefferson and Madison to France to straighten out the diplomatic troubles. However, when neither man would accept, Adams finally sent John Marshall and Elbridge Gerry to form a trio with Pinckney to settle the French problem.

It was in the spring of 1798 that French relations entered into domestic American politics. After Adams informed Congress that the mission had failed, he said that three agents of French Foreign Minister Talleyrand, whom he designated as X, Y and Z, had demanded a bribe of $250,000 to begin negotiations.

The public disclosure of the XYZ Affair produced a national wave of anti-French feeling. By the middle of that year, Congress passed a score of measures to improve the nation’s defenses and begin an undeclared war with France on the seas. However, the Federalists in charge of Congress would not stop with military legislation. They turned instead on the former pro-French Republican party and undertook to destroy or maim it.

Two bills called the Alien Act and the Enemy Alien Act, were directed at the foreign-born supporters of the Republican party. They gave the President the right to imprison and deport aliens he considered dangerous to the nation. A third bill, called the Sedition Act, was a serious violation of the Bill of Rights.

When Madison read the provisions of the Sedition Act, he believed action was necessary to save civil rights. For the act authorized fines and imprisonment for those who wrote or spoke about the President or Congress in a manner that would “bring them . . . into contempt or disrepute.” To Madison, this was a bald attempt by the Federalists to silence their opposition. But what was there to do?

Madison met with Jefferson that July and from their pens came two documents later known as the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions. Madison drew up the Virginia set of resolutions, which the Virginia Assembly passed; while Jefferson had his resolutions introduced in the Kentucky legislature after revisions by John Breckinridge. As Vice-President, Jefferson did not consider it proper to stand revealed as the author.

The Virginia and Kentucky resolutions denounced the Alien and Sedition Acts. But they went much further than this. Madison, who believed at the time of the writing of the Constitution, that national political power was derived from the people, now wrote that the Union had been formed by a compact of the several states. The states joined by this compact had established a national government, he said, and had delegated certain powers to it. “In the case of a deliberate, palpable and dangerous exercise of powers not granted by the said compact,” Madison concluded, “the States have the right and are duty-bound to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil.” Madison then called on other states to join Virginia in declaring the Alien and Sedition Acts “unconstitutional.”

This doctrine, proposing that the states had the authority to nullify an act of Congress, met with condemnation by every state legislature to which a copy of the resolutions was sent. It is of interest that only Vermont, however, challenged the concept of a compact of the states, with the assertion that “the people of the United States formed the Federal Constitution and not the states, or their legislatures.” It is also of interest that decades later Southern nullifiers used the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions as their authority to oppose national legislation.

The excesses practiced by Federalist judges against Republicans under the Sedition Act swung a large share of American voters behind Jefferson in the 1800 Presidential contest. At the same time, President Adams had antagonized many Federalist leaders by successfully seeking and obtaining a peace with honor from Napoleon Bonaparte, now ruler of France. The combination of the two events promoted the Republicans into office for the first time, with Jefferson and Aaron Burr both receiving seventy-three electoral votes.

Madison had returned to the Virginia Assembly in 1799, to combat Patrick Henry, who wanted to make full use of the Sedition Act against Republicans who dared criticize the Federalists. Jefferson was at Washington, the new capital, in February, 1801, when the Federalist House went through thirty-six ballots before selecting Jefferson as President, and Burr as Vice-President. As soon as Jefferson learned the results, he asked Madison to come to Washington before the March 4 inauguration as his proposed Secretary of State. However, Madison could not leave Montpelier immediately, though he accepted Jefferson’s offer of the Cabinet position. The elder Madison, now almost eighty, had fallen gravely ill. He died on February 27, 1801, and the new master of Montpelier, now fifty-one, did not reach the capital until May 1.

In Washington, the Madisons moved to a narrow, three-story house on F. Street and Thirteenth, after a short stay two blocks away with President Jefferson in the White House, or the “Palace,” as the Executive Mansion was commonly called. The first State Department office was eight blocks from his home at Pennsylvania Avenue and Twenty-Second street, in a structure known as the “Six Buildings.”

When Madison assumed his duties, he found a total staff of seven clerks. Overseas, American consuls were only part-time officials, for they were also private merchants. This general lack of full-time help meant that Madison had to put in an enormous amount of time on minor details, for one promise of the Jeffersonians was to cut government activities and the number of government employees. Republicans later changed their minds and wanted the number of employees greatly increased with the jobs going to loyal party members. When Madison refused either to increase jobs or hire Federal employees, he found himself the object of bitter complaints to Jefferson.

As Jefferson was a widower, Dolley Madison shared honors with his two daughters, Martha and Maria, as his Palace hostess. Jefferson had a complete disdain for dressing neatly and often received guests in old worn clothes and shoes run down at the heels. He also ignored the rules of etiquette for official entertainment and employed what he called pell-mell protocol. On one occasion, British minister Anthony Merry and his wife came to an official dinner and expected to be led into dinner and seated at the table according to their rank. Instead, Jefferson took Dolley Madison’s arm and led her into the dining room. Then when Merry was seating himself at the table, a Congressman pushed him away and sat down. Merry afterward sent a stiff report to his own government, and this led to a great waste of Madison’s time in the diplomatic exchange that followed.

But there were far more important diplomatic concerns that Madison dealt with during Jefferson’s two terms. For her aid during the French and Indian War, France had ceded Louisiana to Spain in 1763. Then as one of the losers, Spain ceded Florida to England. But the peace treaty of 1783, after the Revolutionary War, returned Florida to Spain, a Florida broken into two parts at the Apalachicola River into East and West Florida.

Shortly after Jefferson took office, word came that Spain had signed a treaty with France, ceding Louisiana back to France in exchange for a small kingdom carved out of Italy. Madison and Jefferson agreed that this would be a catastrophe, for unlike weak Spain, Napoleon would establish a military empire in Louisiana that would cause trouble for the United States. The return of Louisiana to France would mean a vital change in American foreign policy. “The day that France takes possession of New Orleans,” said Jefferson, “we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.”

In 1802, while Madison kept watch to learn if France was preparing to occupy Louisiana, Spain barred Americans from using the port of New Orleans as their transfer point for goods going down the Mississippi. This heightened the crisis and produced action on the part of the Administration. While Madison conducted diplomatic exchanges with Spain to rescind the New Orleans order, James Monroe was sent in January, 1803, to join Robert R. Livingston, American minister to France. The two envoys were to buy the city of New Orleans and the two Floridas from France. Jefferson assumed that Napoleon had also gained the Floridas along with Louisiana.

Before Monroe arrived, Napoleon offered to sell all of Louisiana to the United States. He had made peace with England in March, 1802, but now a year later, fighting was to break out again. England with her control of the seas would easily capture Louisiana, Napoleon reasoned, so why not sell it and get money to buy war supplies?

With the slowness of communications at that time, the two diplomats could not request instructions from Washington. While Madison and Jefferson waited anxiously for word about New Orleans and the Floridas, in June came momentous news of a different nature. For $15,000,000, Monroe and Livingston had bought the entire Louisiana Territory, thus more than doubling the land area of the United States. This did not include the two Floridas, still the property of Spain.

The Louisiana Purchase made certain Jefferson’s re-election to a second term. But it was not long before a new foreign crisis arose. Both England and France passed stringent rulings to prevent each other from getting supplies from neutral countries. British Orders-in-Council required all ships bound for Europe to stop first at an English port and buy a license. French Decrees declared that any ship bound to or from England or a British colony was subject to capture or sinking. American foreign commerce, so vital to the health of the economy, fell prey to the two warring nations of Europe.

British frigates took to sitting outside American harbors, where they calmly captured vessels making their way in or out of the ports. The British were also halting American ships to seize, or impress, sailors whom they charged were British subjects. Protests by Madison that these sailors were naturalized Americans led to the British countercharge that citizenship was determined solely by place of birth and was unchangeable. Madison and Jefferson suffered further failure when they dispatched Monroe to London to seek a treaty ending impressment and violations of the shipping rights of neutral nations. Monroe’s treaty had to be torn up because he failed to settle either issue.

Americans grew furious in June, 1807, when the British cruiser Leopard fired on the U. S. Navy frigate Chesapeake, as it was leaving Hampton Roads, Virginia. When the American commander refused to submit to a search, a bombardment killed some of his sailors. Then a British search party climbed aboard and carried off three American sailors.

There was now a loud demand for war with England. But Jefferson’s military policy had been to reduce American forces to a minimum. As a result Madison proposed what he considered the only plausible substitute for war. This was an embargo on foreign commerce, or a self-imposed blockade. Jefferson called it “peaceable coercion,” and sent Congress a request for an Embargo Act to bar all American ships from sailing to foreign ports. Jefferson believed that with England and France dependent on the United States for materials, the abolition of trade would bring both countries to their senses and lead to free neutral trade.

At first, the Republicans supported the Administration’s Embargo Act. But in 1808 shippers preferred to take the chance of being caught as violators rather than face financial ruin with vessels rotting in port. In New England there was talk of using the philosophy of the Madison-Jefferson, Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798 against the Embargo Act. Thus the states would declare the Embargo Act null and void.

At the beginning of 1809, the Republican party revolted against Jefferson’s leadership. He developed violent headaches and turned over the management of the government to Madison and Albert Gallatin, his Secretary of the Treasury. Republicans in Congress demanded that the Embargo Act be ended, and Madison found himself forced to agree by the preponderance of their numbers. Finally on March 1, Jefferson signed a new law, which repealed the Embargo and substituted for it an Act of Non-Intercourse with France and England. American ships could once more leave port, though they could not travel to England or France, nor could foreign armed vessels enter American waters.

This was only a temporary compromise, for it was obvious to all that the issue was merely being pushed forward onto the next Administration. And the next Administration was, of course, that of James Madison.

16

ROAD TO WAR

In DECEMBER, 1804, after Jefferson was assured of a second term, he wrote to a friend that he would not accept a third term. “The danger is that the indulgence of the people will keep a man in the chair after he becomes a dotard,’’ said Jefferson. “Re-election through life shall become habitual, and election for life follow that.” He hoped that eventually the Constitution would be amended to limit a President to eight years.

With his own eighth year approaching in 1808, Jefferson’s choice for his successor was his close friend of a quarter-century, his Secretary of State, James Madison. However, there were others who were bitten by the Presidential bug. One was Jefferson’s Vice-President, sixty-eight-year-old George Clinton, former governor of New York and a powerful Republican leader there. Another would-be Republican candidate was fifty-year-old James Monroe.

Two years earlier, in 1806, Monroe had said he would sooner be a constable” than oppose James Madison. But that year he wrote a treaty with England that President Jefferson refused to forward to the Senate for ratification because Monroe had failed to insist on the President’s minimum demands. By the time the shame-faced Monroe returned home from London in December, 1807, he was the recipient of several letters from Representative John Randolph of Virginia. Randolph had served as Jefferson’s leader in the House, but he had developed the vicious practice of denouncing the Administration, and especially Madison, without just cause. Finally Jefferson discarded him. Randolph then attached himself to Monroe and promoted him for President in a brisk exchange of correspondence. As a result, when Monroe came ashore he believed first that Jefferson disliked him, and second that he stood a good chance of defeating Madison.

The first contest between the two came on January 22, 1808, when each sought favorite-son status from the Virginia General Assembly. Here Madison won out easily by a vote of 136 to 57. The second contest came the following night in Washington when Republican members of Congress met in caucus to nominate their candidates for high office. Randolph’s sixteen-member group refused to attend, and Madison won the Presidential nomination with eighty-three votes to three each for Clinton and Monroe. Clinton then won the Vice-Presidential nomination over former Senator John Langdon by seventy-nine to five. Later the Federalists selected C. C. Pinckney and Rufus King, their same weak ticket of 1804.

It was a most unpleasant campaign, even though none of the candidates made a single campaign speech. Political etiquette of the times demanded silence from candidates. This did not mean, however, that candidates would refrain from influencing key politicians throughout the states. Nor did it mean that supporters of the runners and their newspapers would be silent. In fact, the open remarks of the candidates would no doubt have raised the level of this campaign.

Clinton, who accepted the Republican caucus’s nomination for the Vice-Presidency, was at the same time prompting his supporters to denounce the caucus as “corrupt.” In this way, he could be an opponent of Madison for President and show no embarrassment when the Clinton-backing newspapers denounced Madison as “sickly, subject to spasmodic affections, which operate unfavorably on his nervous fluid.” The Clintonians also called him a puppet of Napoleon and someone who would continue the “present visionary, corrupt management of our national affairs.” The Federalists approved of the Clinton charges against Madison and added the thought that Madison was “a disciple of Confucius.” All the while the Randolph forces for Monroe were belaboring Madison for having no energy or talent and for being at heart a Federalist.

The name-calling campaign continued without letup until February 8, 1809, when Congress finally counted the electoral votes. For President, Madison garnered one hundred twenty-two votes to forty-seven for Pinckney and six for Clinton. Monroe had none. For Vice-President, Clinton had 113 and Rufus King, 47.

On March 4, 1809, Jefferson accompanied Madison to the Capitol to witness his successor taking the oath of office, and then he stayed to hear Madison deliver his inaugural address in the House chamber. One witness said that Madison was “extremely pale and trembled excessively when he first began to speak, but soon gained confidence and spoke audibly.” Jefferson had not begun his packing and was to remain in the White House until March 11, so the Madisons held their Presidential reception in their narrow house afterward.

Then that evening the inaugural ball took place at Long’s hotel. Here an eyewitness said that Dolley Madison “looked a queen. She had on a pale buff-colored velvet, made plain, with a very long train and beautiful pearl necklace, earrings and bracelets. Her headdress was a turban of the same colored velvet and white satin (from Paris) with two superb plumes, bird-of-paradise feathers. It would be absolutely impossible for anyone to behave with more perfect propriety than she did. Unassuming dignity, sweetness, grace. Mr. Madison, on the contrary, seemed spiritless and exhausted. While he was standing by me, I said, ‘I wish with all my heart I had a little bit of seat to offer you.’ ‘I wish so too,’ said he, with a most woebegone face, and looking as if he could hardly stand. The managers came up to ask him to stay to supper, he assented, and turning to me, ‘but I would much rather be in bed,’ he said.” The enormous crowd that pressed close to catch a glimpse of Dolley and of her husband made it necessary to smash the windows to let the Presidential couple breathe.

The pomp of the inauguration ceremonies were in sharp contrast to the simplicity of Jefferson’s inaugurations and portended a return to the rich formalities of the Washington and Adams era. Instead of his predecessor’s total disregard of the rules of protocol, the Madisons reinstated political and diplomatic etiquette. Mrs. Madison also revived the custom begun by Mrs. Washington, to hold a weekly levee, or reception, to which the more select citizens of the capital could come and rub shoulders with the President.

The bitterness of the Presidential campaign and the national denunciation of the harshly restrictive embargo program of Jefferson did not augur well for Madison. Serious trouble began even before his inauguration when he selected his Cabinet. Madison’s choice for Secretary of State was Albert Gallatin, who had served so brilliantly as Jefferson’s Secretary of the Treasury. Gallatin, born into an aristocratic Swiss family, came to the United States at an early age, took part in the Revolution, taught at Harvard, and then went into business and politics in Pennsylvania. He had served in the state legislature, the U. S. Senate and the House of Representatives before his eight years directing the country’s finances as Jefferson’s Treasury Secretary.

However, before Madison could formally announce his selection of Gallatin, protests from Gallatin’s enemies began pouring into his mailbox. The senders included key Senators who held a great deal of power in the upper chamber. One was Senator William B. Giles of Virginia, who was urging himself on Madison after serving as one of his Presidential campaign managers. In one letter Giles supplied nine reasons why Gallatin should be denied the State Department. These boiled down chiefly to two strange arguments: first, that Jefferson was fond of Gallatin; and second, that the American people distrusted Gallatin. He also included a threat that “nothing could be more unfortunate for you during your whole administration than the transfer of the opinion in relation to Mr. Jefferson to yourself, that favoritisms should be ingredients in the inducements to office. The nomination of Mr. Gallatin will have a greater tendency towards producing this impression than any other act you could decree.”

Another Gallatin hater was Senator Samuel Smith of Maryland, whose brother Robert had served as Jefferson’s incompetent Secretary of the Navy. The Smiths were in the shipping business and considered Gallatin’s Treasury policies damaging to their economic well-being. Senator Smith let it be known that Madison could expect serious trouble in the Senate on his program unless he retained Robert Smith in his Cabinet. Madison saw an opportunity at this point to do a little trading with the Smiths, to win their support for Gallatin’s transfer to the State Department. What he now proposed was that Robert Smith become Secretary of the Treasury. However, when Robert Smith went to the Treasury to examine his duties, Gallatin reported back to Madison that he had not the slightest ability to comprehend tax matters, government loans, sinking funds or interest rates.

Gallatin’s conclusions reached Madison at about the time he also received the results of a Senate survey on Gallatin’s chances for confirmation. This survey was undertaken by Wilson Cary Nicholas, a Representative from Virginia, Jefferson’s floor leader in the House and a brother-in-law of the Smith brothers. Nicholas’ report was pessimistic so far as Gallatin was concerned, so that Madison now perceived that if he nominated Gallatin the Senate might reject him. This would put Madison and the Senate on terms of animosity from the beginning, a predicament Madison knew would spell trouble henceforth. Rather than fight and be demolished at the outset of his Presidential term, Madison went to the other extreme. Gallatin was to be retained as Secretary of the Treasury, a continuation of his job under Jefferson and thus unnecessary of renewed Senate confirmation. As for the Secretary of State, Madison chose Robert Smith and hoped he could somehow in the future win Senator Smith’s support for his Administration.

Outside of Gallatin, Madison began his Administration with a poor lot of Cabinet Secretaries. Dr. William Eustis, a highly regarded physician, but a man lacking entirely in ability to run a government agency, became Secretary of War. Former-Governor of South Carolina, Paul Hamilton, who unknown to Madison, was sinking deeper and deeper into alcoholism, became Secretary of the Navy. The Postmaster General was Gideon Granger, a carry-over from the last Administration, who was involved in a Georgia land scandal and who spread malicious and false tales about Jefferson and Madison. Attorney General Caesar Rodney, also a carry-over, insisted on remaining at Wilmington, Delaware, to continue his private law practice, and coming to Washington only when his presence was absolutely essential.

If it were not enough that he and Gallatin would have to manage the affairs of government almost without help, Madison faced the enormous problems pushed on him by the departing Jefferson. This perhaps explains an early description of him as “a very small, thin, pale-visaged man of rather a sour, reserved and forbidding countenance.”

It was difficult for England or France to take America seriously because Jefferson had reduced the limited army he inherited to small detachments scattered at distant forts and poorly supplied. As for a U. S. Navy, Jefferson had chosen not to rely on regular frigates but on small gunboats, which were in reality sailboats, manned by a crew of two or three men with a single gun mounted at the stern.

When Madison became President, he realized that Jefferson’s bias against a substantial standing military force was a severe handicap in future negotiations. Nor did he believe now in the Jeffersonian commercial warfare philosophy, which stated: ‘‘Our commerce is so valuable to them [England and France] that they will be glad to purchase it when the only price we ask is to do us justice.”

The status of American relations with the two European belligerents in March, 1809, was that of mutual commercial hostility. Napoleon’s decrees not only barred American ships from the continent if they obtained British licenses but permitted seizing, burning, and plundering. In a short period in 1808, after his Bayonne decree labeled all American ships as enemy English vessels, Napoleon seized $10,000,000 worth of American vessels and pocketed their sales proceeds. As for the British, they still operated under the hated Order-in-Council of November 11, 1807, which closed European ports under French control to neutral trade unless each ship stopped at an English port for a license. The United States, as the third member of this unhappy triangle, had cast aside the Embargo, which forbade American ships to sail abroad, and had adopted a Non-Intercourse Act. This excluded all French and British ships and imports from the United States, but permitted American ships to engage in commerce elsewhere. The Non-Intercourse Act also gave Madison authority to reinstate trade with England or France, if either would eliminate its orders or decrees.

France with its weak navy did not constitute the problem on the high seas that England did. So even while he served as Jefferson’s Secretary of State, Madison began meetings with British Minister David Erskine in hope of convincing the British to drop their Orders-in-Council. Only one month after he was in office, Madison astounded the nation by issuing a proclamation announcing the withdrawal of the British Orders-in-Council on June 10, and permitting Americans to trade once more with England. Newspapers also carried a confirming note from Erskine. All honor now seemed to reflect on the wisdom of Jefferson’s Embargo Act for this change of heart. As the semi-official Republican newspaper, the National Intelligencer, graciously stated: “It may be boldly alleged that the revocation of the British orders is attributable to the embargo.”

An enormous amount of trade between England and the United States immediately burst forth, and Madison received national acclaim. But the trade bubble burst in August, 1809, when word arrived that British Foreign Secretary George Canning announced that Erskine had exceeded his instructions. Erskine had been told not to make any concession until the United States agreed to bar French warships from American ports. This, Erskine had failed to do, so the Orders-in-Council were still in force. In dejection, Madison had no other course than to reinstate the Nonintercourse Act against England.

He left that summer for Montpelier filled with gloom at his lack of success. Nevertheless, he played the role of welcoming host with Dolley, managing to put up as many as twenty guests overnight. Erskine had been recalled home to London in disgrace and the new minister, Francis James “Copenhagen” Jackson, had arrived at the Capitol in Madison’s absence. But Madison had no intention of returning to Washington to meet Jackson, for he knew of his poor reputation: Jackson had won his nickname while serving as special envoy to Denmark in 1807. After receiving a refusal to his order to the Danish Government to join England in her war with France, Jackson decreed the destruction of Copenhagen by British bombardment. This cruel act resulted in the death of hundreds of women and children and won for him the nickname of “Copenhagen.”

In the month of September, Jackson spent his time reading the Erskine correspondence. He came to the conclusion that Madison had insulted the British government, and like a puppy that did not obey its master, the United States must be taught to respect Great Britain. Jackson’s belief that the United States was belligerent toward his government was increased in October when Madison finally received him. For Madison told him that he would be willing to receive British proposals to improve the situation. In his report to his home government, Jackson said it was up to the United States to make the proposals and referred to Madison as a “rather mean-looking little man.” He said that Dolley, whom he met later, “must have been a comely person when she served out the liquor at the bar of her father’s tavern.”

Madison and Gallatin perceived that Jackson had come looking for trouble. First they told him he should deal with Secretary of State Robert Smith. But when he told Smith that he had come only to get American overtures, Madison instructed Smith to tell him that further discussions must be only “in written form.” To this Jackson objected strenuously as “there does not exist in the annals of diplomacy a precedent for such.”

However, he agreed to written discussions in the end, though he did not know that Madison wrote all the American letters and let Smith sign them. At first Jackson was disturbed by the fact that Smith’s letters were too astute for a man who was so foolish in person. But as the correspondence lengthened, Jackson had no time to think of this, for he had all he could do to fashion half-plausible replies to Madison’s attack on British policy and the recall of Erskine.

At one point Jackson’s temper got the better of him and he wrote that the American Government had known about Canning’s conditions to Erskine before making a settlement. He went on to say that the Americans had schemed with Erskine to drop those conditions. “Such insinuations,” Madison replied, “are inadmissable in the intercourse of a foreign minister with a government that understands what it owes itself.”

This mild reply to his remark that Madison was a conniving liar made Jackson bolder and he now wrote to Smith, “You will find that in my correspondence with you, I have carefully avoided drawing conclusions . . . where I was unable to substantiate a fact.”

This was the end. With Smith’s signature, Madison wrote him: “Sir, finding that you have used a language which cannot be understood but as reiterating and even aggravating the same gross insinuation, it only remains, in order to preclude opportunities which are thus abused, to inform you that no further communications will be received from you.” So Jackson was ordered to leave the country.

In November, 1809, when Congress met, relations with England were at a new low. Madison sent a message explaining England’s refusal to honor the agreement made by Erskine. Only a single paragraph was devoted to continued French outrages on American commerce. Madison then said he was leaving all problems to “the wisdom of the National Legislature.”

First Congress wasted all of December debating a resolution offered by Senator Ciles, condemning “Copenhagen” Jackson’s conduct as “indecorous, insolent, affronting, insidious, false, outrageous and premeditated.” Giles unimportant resolution finally passed the Senate, but in the House the Federalist members looked upon it as an undeclared war against England. Finally to get it out of the way and proceed to more important business, the House leadership held a nineteen-hour session on January 3, 1810, and brought approval at six in the morning.

In the summer of 1809, Gallatin had expressed his desire to quit the Cabinet unless military spending was cut. Jefferson, to whom he wrote, convinced him to remain. Now in December, Gallatin submitted a financial report to Congress that revealed that as a result of the Nonintercourse Act the Government’s revenues were smaller than its expenditures. As a solution for this situation, he now proposed a slash of fifty percent in military spending, or a $3,000,000 cut. But Congress expressed confusion when President Madison pointed out the following month that the possibility for war had heightened. Therefore, he said, he was recommending the establishment of a volunteer force of 20,000 soldiers and Congressional consideration of the question, “How far further provision may be expedient for putting into actual service, if necessary, any part of the naval armament not now employed?”

Congress was bewildered by the opposite advice it got from Gallatin and Madison. Senators Giles and Smith pushed a measure through the Senate to fit out the five decommissioned frigates in the navy yards. However, the House considered this a war bill and would not pass it. Then the bill to increase the Army failed in the Senate.

With Congress unwilling to prepare the nation’s defenses, Gallatin then asked the legislature to save the nation’s finances. This request came in the form of a bill known as Macon No. 1, in honor of Representative Nathaniel Macon, former Speaker of the House, who introduced it for Gallatin.

Macon No. 1 proposed to repeal the Nonintercourse Act but still continue to bar British and French vessels from American harbors. Its singular difference was that British and French goods could be imported, if they came in American ships. It was Gallatin’s hope that the increase in imports would yield tariff receipts high enough to cover his deficit. However, Senator Smith, who hated him, opposed the bill and prevented it from passing.

If it were not enough that Congress refused to accept Madison’s recommendations to increase the defense forces, efforts were now made to weaken the feeble forces that existed. Representative John Randolph, who had denounced Madison in the Presidential campaign, now denounced Senator Giles, the Army, the Smith brothers and the Navy. With the help of Macon, Randolph won a House resolution for drastic cuts in the Army and Navy. With the resolution passing by a two-to-one margin, Randolph now proceeded to write a bill that would almost completely eliminate any American military force. Among its provisions were those to cut the Army to three regiments, the Marines to two companies and the Navy to three frigates,with all but three navy yards dismantled and all of Jefferson’s gunboats sold. Fortunately, the House came to its senses and voted down his proposals.

In April, 1810, Congress could point to no positive action on the various aspects of the national crisis. With the Nonintercourse Act about to expire, some action was necessary to combat British and French misdeeds against American neutrality. Congress now considered Macon No. 2, opposed both by Macon and President Madison. For what this bill proposed was to open world-wide commerce with no restrictions whatsoever on the two European culprits. The only qualification was that if either England or France repealed its decrees or orders against the United States before March 3, 1811 the President was authorized to announce that fact. Then if the other belligerent failed to end its restrictions within three months, the President was to cut off all trade with that nation.

The cynical and clever Napoleon saw his opportunity when Congress approved Macon No. 2 in the last hours of the session. “I am authorized to declare to you, Sir,” Napoleon had the Due de Cadore, his minister of Foreign Affairs, write to American minister John Armstrong, “that the Decrees of Berlin and Milan are revoked, and that after November 1 they shall cease to have effect. It being understood that in consequence of this declaration, the English are to revoke their Orders-in-Council and renounce the new principles of blockade which they have wished to establish; or that the United States, conformably to the Act you have just communicated [the Macon Act] cause,their rights to be respected by the English.”

Madison had no respect for Napoleon’s word, for he had long known of the French dictator’s treachery. However, he considered the Emperor’s declaration, even if untrue, an excellent opportunity to force England to drop her Orders-in-Council. Therefore, on November 2, 1810, he announced: “It has been officially made known to this government that the said edicts of France have been so revoked as that they ceased, on the first day of the present month, to violate the neutral commerce of the United States.”

England had until February 2, 1811, to rescind her orders, and Madison waited hopefully to learn this good news. While he waited, he received information that the French were still seizing American ships. But he chose to take no action because of his larger objective to win respect from England. However, the country at large could not be told of his plan. So the people saw an England that acted in a warlike manner, unlike a supposedly friendly France.

The people also saw a Congress that would not prepare the country to meet a possible head-on collision with England. As a result, in the elections that year almost half the members of Congress failed to win re-election to the next, or Twelfth Congress.

Unfortunately, the will of the people for positive action could not so easily be realized. For although the elections took place in late 1810, the newly elected members would not meet until a year had passed. In the meantime the defeated and discredited Congress would hold another session from December until the following March, 1811.

When this unrepresentative last session of the Eleventh Congress met, Madison had news to report. First he explained his proclamation dealing with Napoleon’s promise to rescind his trade decrees. Then he made public a second proclamation bringing the people of West Florida “into the bosom of the American family.” He failed to mention that he had sent agents into the area between the Mississippi and Perdido Rivers on the Gulf of Mexico to stir up the 100,000 Americans living there to throw off their Spanish yoke and request incorporation into the Union. Madison now sent Congress a secret message requesting authority to take temporary possession of East Florida before the British did. This was the Spanish province extending from approximately Pensacola in the west on the Gulf to the St. Marys River flowing into the Atlantic on the Georgia border. Congress gave him quick authorization.

But beyond this, Congress lapsed generally into indifference. To his request again for an increase in the Army, Congresss voted to cut the appropriation of the land forces. Nor would the legislature act on his request for a national university.

The most crushing defeat came on the request by Treasury Secretary Gallatin to recharter the national Bank of the United States, scheduled to go out of existence on March 4, 1811. Madison had originally opposed the Bank in 1791 on Constitutional grounds, but he now regarded this institution with its many branches as of great value in stabilizing credit and the value of the currency. Nevertheless, he did not believe he should promote the Bank actively with members of Congress. There is little question that his voice would have been decisive on this issue. But without it, Smith and Giles denounced the Bank for two weeks in debate and managed a seventeen to seventeen tie vote in the Senate. Vice-President Clinton now had his opportunity to show his low regard for the Administration, and he revealed it with a negative vote that killed the Bank. Then to heap further abuse on Gallatin, his enemies in Congress would not approve his proposal to meet the Government’s deficit with increased duties on imports. Only when the dying Congress prepared to leave Washington did it return to affirmative action, and this was to reinstate the Nonintercourse Act of 1809 against England.

Madison’s lack of success always showed on his face, and his disappointment with the Eleventh Congress was extensive. Washington Irving, who saw him and Dolley during this session, wrote: “Mrs. Madison is a fine, portly, buxom dame, who has a smile and a pleasant word for everybody. But as to Jemmy Madison—ah! poor Jemmy!—he is but a withered little Apple-John.”

In March, 1811, after Congress adjourned, Gallatin came to the conclusion that he was harming Madison’s Administration by remaining in office. With his defeat by Smith and Giles on the Bank bill in mind, he wrote Madison: “I clearly perceive that my continuing a member of the present Administration is no longer of any public utility, invigorates the opposition against yourself, and must necessarily be attended with an increased loss of reputation by myself. Under these impressions, not without reluctance, and after hesitating too long in the hopes of a favorable change, I beg leave to tender you my resignation.”

Madison reacted immediately by refusing to accept the resignation of the man who had devoted the last decade to helping him and Jefferson. Instead he determined on another change. Robert Smith, who was a daily reminder that he was entertaining a member of his opposition within his own official family, would be ousted from office.

In a personal meeting with his Secretary of State, Madison told Smith about his many incompetent activities, his laziness in putting off necessary tasks, his “crude and inadequate” drafts of letters and reports that Madison had to rewrite. Madison went on to say that “whatever talents he might possess, he did not, as he must have found by experience, possess those adapted to his station.” Further, he pointed out, Smith had talked to outsiders about confidential Cabinet matters and diplomatic correspondence. In summation, he called Smith disloyal for talking against measures he had accepted in Cabinet meetings and for making nasty personal remarks against the President and other members of his Administration. Smith could accept the post of minister to Russia, but he would have to leave the State Department. After some hesitation, Robert Smith rejected the diplomatic post and now joined with his brother to destroy Madison.

As Smith’s successor, Madison chose James Monroe, then the governor of Virginia. Monroe’s campaign against him in 1808 had hurt Madison, but Jefferson had made it his personal business to reunite the two in friendship. His success at this endeavor was revealed by the notation in the diary of Madison’s enemy, Representative John Randolph, who had urged Monroe into the Presidential competition. Randolph, on hearing that the two were once more friends, wrote in his diary, “Monroe, Traitor . . . Judas.’’

However, before Monroe would accept the chief Cabinet post, he had something he wanted to make clear. It was his belief that Madison’s foreign policy was pro-French. Monroe believed in a reconciliation with England. Would he be prevented from attempting this goal as a member of the Cabinet? Madison assured him that he would welcome “a cordial accomodation” with England as well as France. On that basis, Monroe accepted the offer.

To replace “Copenhagen” Jackson, the British were sending Augustus J. Foster as minister to Washington. While Foster was on his way, British frigates arrogantly blocked New York harbor to search all American ships and impress sailors whom they labeled as deserters from the British Navy. The sense of outrage of the American public was enormous at this activity, and although Madison was aware of the risks involved he gave permission to Commodore John Rodgers to lead a squadron of frigates to patrol the coast.

On May 16, 1811, Rodgers on the President was fifty miles off Cape Henry when he sighted a British man-o’-war. A chase followed and then an exchange of fire resulted in thirty-two British casualties aboard the Little Belt. The news of the encounter electrified the nation accustomed to bowing its head first to the French, then to the British year after year. It mattered not that the Little Belt was much smaller than Rodgers’s ship. What counted was that for the first time in the trade war, the United States had dared challenge the mightiest sea power.

The spirit of the growing challenge to England was in the air when the Twelfth Congress met in November, 1811, a year after its election. The House had seventy new members and its initial act was to choose Henry Clay of Kentucky as Speaker. Clay had already served a short time in the Senate, but he was new to the House and the selection of a new member as Speaker was unprecedented.

Madison sent the House his Message on November 5, and after he told of the many British misdeeds, he wrote: “With this evidence of hostile inflexibility in trampling on rights which no independent nation can relinquish, Congress will feel the duty of putting the United States into an armor and an attitude demanded by the crisis; and corresponding with the national spirit and expectations.”

Madison also charged France with acting in an unfriendly manner even though announcing the repeal of her decrees. But to the lot of new Congressmen, France’s crimes did not match those of England. The British were on the frontier in Canada and in the West, where settlers claimed they were inciting the Indians against Americans. England was also impressing American sailors, while France was only burning and capturing American ships in European waters. When Madison now called for laws to increase the Army and Navy, military production and a national stockpile, the general conclusion was that he wanted to prepare for a final showdown with England.

In the past, House Speakers were men who helped schedule the legislative workload and settled working problems of members without regard to party. But thirty-four-year-old Speaker Clay established himself as the boss of the 140 members. An aggressive man, ambitious and clever, he knew how to manipulate people and win his way. Disregarding the previous practice of selecting committee members and chairmen on the basis of length of service, Clay appointed only those members to important committees who agreed with his views and would accept his leadership.

The group who met this standard was known as the “War Hawks,’’ or those no longer willing to rely solely on embargoes or other trade restrictions to bring a change in England’s attitude. The night before the session began, Clay had held a secret caucus and the War Hawks agreed that Jefferson’s policy of peaceable coercion must be abandoned. For chairman of the vital Foreign Affairs Committee, Clay appointed Peter B. Porter of New York, a Niagara trader who was once a supporter of the Burr Conspiracy of 1805-1807 to dismember the West and capture the Southwest and Mexico. On Porter’s committee, Clay assigned young John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, a brilliant thinker and speaker, and Felix Grundy of Tennessee, who resigned a judgeship to run for Congress and vote for war. As chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs, Clay named David R. Williams of South Carolina, who spoke and strutted like a Shakespearean actor and possessed a violent temper. The Naval Affairs chairman was Langdon Cheves, also of South Carolina, a massive young man who managed to look dignified and possessed superb debating skills. All of these men and others who made up their group could not wait to have England feel the lash of American military power.

Porter’s committee made its report on November 29, 1811, and declared that Congress had the sacred duty to “call forth the patriotism and resources of the country.’’ Shortly afterward, Dolley Madison wrote to her sister, “I believe there will be war. Mr. Madison sees no end to the perplexities without it, and they seem to be going on with the preparations.”

The committee was said to have called Secretary of State Monroe into consultation on three different occasions and there was talk that its chief recommendations were worked out in advance with Madison. After reciting the many wrongs committed on American commerce, Porter closed with six resolutions to prepare the country for war. The chief proposals would add ten regiments to the Army, permit the President to call for 50,000 volunteers, put the Navy on a war basis and arm merchant ships.

Monroe, who had joined the Cabinet with the intention of effecting friendly relations with England, found himself drifting rapidly into an anti-British attitude. Monroe was known as the champion of the frontier, and British Minister Foster’s protest against “American aggressions” in the disputed Floridas angered him. So did Foster’s threat of “further measures of retaliation for the Nonimportation Act” against the United States unless Madison announced the falsity of Napoleon’s assertion that his blockade decrees had ended. After communicating Foster’s remarks to Madison, Monroe joined the young War Hawks at their boarding house, which was called “The War Mess,” and promised that if England did not rescind her orders by May, 1812, there would be war.

Fuel was heaped on the war fire at the same time the Porter committee report was made public with news from west central Indiana Territory. Governor William Henry Harrison, son of Madison’s political contemporary, Benjamin Harrison, had defeated the Shawnee Confederacy at Tippecanoe Creek on November 7, 1811. The true story was that Harrison had signed the Indian land-ceding Treaty of Fort Wayne in September, 1809, with five Indian tribes and took title to 3,000,000 acres in the Wabash Valley that did not belong to them. At Madison’s order, Secretary of War Eustis wrote Harrison in November, 1810, not to occupy the treaty lands, whose title was disputed by the great Indian chief Tecumseh and his brother, The Prophet. It was in the absence of Tecumseh, who had gone south to discuss a union of all tribes from Canada to Florida, that Harrison struck across Shawnee land with an army and made camp close to The Prophet’s town. Three Indian messengers came to ask for peace, and when Harrison would not agree to this overture, he said, “the most depraved wretches, upon earth’’ attacked his camp at Tippecanoe Creek. His victory at a cost of 188 American soldiers was to propel him into the White House in 1840. But in November, 1811, Tippecanoe was offered as proof that the British were behind the Indian threats to Western settlers.

In the debates that followed on the Porter report and recommendations, there was a noticeable change from the attitude that war might be necessary because of British activities. Now there was greedy talk that the United States had an opportunity to gain a vast addition of land. As Congressman Grundy put it: “This war, if carried on successfully, will have its advantages. We shall drive the British from our continent. I am willing to receive the Canadians as adopted brethren. I feel anxious not only to add the Floridas to the South, but the Canadas to the North of this Empire.”

This view was echoed so repeatedly by the War Hawks that John Randolph who opposed war, taunted them: “Canada seems tempting in their sight. Agrarian cupidity, not maritime right, urges the war. Ever since the report of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, we have heard but one word—like the whippoorwill, but one eternal, monotonous tone —Canada, Canada, Canada!”

In the Senate, William Giles was chairman of the select committee handling foreign affairs, military and naval matters, while Madison’s other chief foe, Senator Samuel Smith, handled commercial problems. To Giles now came the Madison and Porter proposal for bringing the old Army regiments to full strength by adding 6,000 men, creating new regiments for 10,000 more and calling for 50,000 temporary volunteers. To Madison’s surprise, Giles proposed 25,000 regulars for the new regiments instead of 10,000. Asked for his reason, he replied that the smaller figure showed the decision of the Administration to abandon New Orleans.

The Giles proposal passed Congress, but now the old Republican concern with standing military forces as an antidemocratic body returned. This revealed itself when Langdon Cheves, chairman of the House Naval Committee, asked for $7,500,000 to build a new Navy. This sum would have added ten new double-deck frigates to the five in operation plus five others in disrepair that would be made war-ready. The Cheves proposal was his interpretation of Madison’s request for a Navy “as may be required for the services to which it may be best adapted.”

But his bill failed to pass, giving the country the prospect of fighting the greatest sea power while having virtually no navy of her own. Nor was this all. To meet expected war costs, which he estimated at $50,000,000, Gallatin proposed a new tax program. However, Congress would not permit this, telling him instead to borrow $11,000,000. As a result the work of Congress went in two opposing directions: first, to bring war closer; second, to fail to provide the necessary means to fight that war.

In the spring of 1812, it appeared that the war spirit was waning. It rose sharply again, but this time against France, when word came that a French squadron had stopped two American ships in mid-Atlantic and burned them. In anger, Monroe conveyed to the French minister a message from Madison: “You know what warlike measures have been taken for three months past. Within a week we were going to propose the embargo, and the declaration of war was the immediate consequence of it ... It is at such a moment that your frigates come and burn our ships, destroy our work, and put the Administration in the falsest and most terrible position in which a government can find itself.”

Monroe’s conversion to a position calling for war against England showed itself also at this time when a French adventurer offered to sell him “secret papers” belonging to a John Henry, supposedly a spy for the Governor-General of Canada. Crillon, the Frenchman, actually an agent of Napoleon’s secret police, offered to sell Henry’s documents for $125,000. Crillon also met Madison, and the President, who was a most thorough reader, agreed to pay $50,000 without examining the purported Henry accusations.

On March 9, Madison sent the Henry papers to Congress and said they revealed treasonable correspondence between a number of New England Federalists and the British Government. The papers would prove, he said, that the Federalists had plans for “forming the eastern part” of the United States “into a political connection with Great Britain.” However, a reading of the papers revealed no positive evidence of such a plot. Then when a Senate resolution called on Madison to state the names of the plotters, he was embarrassed to admit that all the names in the documents had been erased. One would have thought that Congress would now assail the President for wasting money on documents of no value. But instead, Congress proclaimed Henry’s “evidence” the crowning insult yet to come from the British.

On March 15, Speaker Clay asked Madison to “recommend an embargo to last say 30 days, by a confidential message. That a termination of the embargo be followed by war.” Clay pointed out that the American sloop-of-war Hornet would arrive about that time with the first official news from the new British Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh. Clay wrote, “The Hornet will have returned with good or bad news and of course the question of war may then be fairly decided,” depending on whether or not Castlereagh removed the hated Orders-in-Council.

Madison’s reply was to send Monroe to the Capitol on March 31 to tell a House committee “that without an accomodation with Great Britain, Congress ought to declare war before adjourning.” Monroe pointed out that Congress had not prepared the nation’s defenses sufficiently to declare war immediately. On the following day, Madison sent Congress a secret message recommending a sixty-day embargo on all ships then in port. The War Hawks were aware that his purpose was to tie up American ships in port and to permit time to those outside the country to return so their safety would not be jeopardized by a declaration of war. When the embargo passed Congress, the concerned British minister asked Madison if it was a war measure. “Oh, no, embargo is not war,” Madison replied. “But the United States would be amply justified in going to war with Great Britain, for Great Britain is actually waging war upon us.” For proof he mentioned the recent British seizure of eighteen American vessels.

On April 10, Congress authorized Madison to call up 100,000 militia in the states, and two weeks later it established a Quartermaster’s Department in the Army. Then it recessed, leaving poor Gallatin with the task of raising funds to equip the Army.

Ordinarily, Congressional Republicans met early in election years in secret caucus to nominate candidates for President and Vice-President. When April passed in 1812 without the caucus, rumors spread that Henry Clay told Madison that he must recommend a declaration of war if he desired renomination. This so-called meeting never occurred because Clay was aware that Madison had secretly requested a declaration of war before Congress adjourned.

However, another meeting did take place between Madison and the War Hawks, and this on May 13. According to Joseph Gale, editor of the semi-official National Intelligencer, Madison told Clay he hesitated to ask openly for a war declaration “not from any backwardness on his part’’ but because he doubted if the House would vote to sustain him. Clay promptly told him “of the readiness of a majority of Congress to vote the war if recommended.’’

When the Republican caucus finally met on May 18, Madison was assured of his renomination. George Clinton, his Vice-President and 1808 opponent, had died the previous month. Madison’s other 1808 opponent, James Monroe, now believed he was destined to succeed Madison in 1816, and of course did not rock the boat. However, Clinton’s nephew, DeWitt Clinton, as bitterly anti-Madison as his late uncle, offered himself as a candidate. But the caucus selected Madison unanimously and named Elbridge Gerry, former governor of Massachusetts, as his running mate, in order to attract New England votes. Clinton would not give up and later ran on the Federalist ticket as a Republican with Jared Ingersoll of Pennsylvania.

The day after Madison’s renomination came decisive news. The Hornet arrived that day with word about Lord Castlereagh’s American policy. The British leader agreed that since the French decrees were still in force, England would not eliminate her orders.

On June 1, Congress met in secret session to hear a reading of a message from Madison. This was a long recital of grievances against the British. He protested against the impressment of American sailors on the seas, to be “dragged on board ships of war of a foreign nation ... to risk their lives in the battles of their oppressors.’’ He talked about British cruisers that “hover over and harass our entering and departing commerce”; the “pretended blockade” under which “our commerce has been plundered in every sea”; and blamed the British for “the warfare just renewed by the savages on one of our extensive frontiers.” Whether the country should go to war or not, he concluded, “is a solemn question which the Constitution wisely confides to the legislative branch.”

Two days later Calhoun introduced a war resolution in the House. “To go to war without money, without men, without a Navy!” John Randolph yelled. “Go to war when we have not the courage, while your lips utter war, to lay taxes!”

To this Calhoun replied, “So far from being unprepared, sir, I believe that in four weeks from the time that a declaration of war is heard on our frontiers, the whole of Upper and a part of Lower Canada will be in our hands.”

Speaker Clay demanded obedience of House members, and on June 4 by a vote of seventy-nine to forty-nine, the House approved the war declaration. On June 17, the Senate followed by the much closer vote of nineteen to thirteen. When Madison signed the declaration the following day the second war with England had begun.

The unfortunate aspect of this action was that the day before Madison wrote his signature on the declaration of war, Lord Castlereagh removed the chief cause by suspending the Orders-in-Council. By the time crawling sailboats brought the news, fighting had started.

17

THE WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH

WHEN the War of 1812 began, President Madison signified this event by visiting the military headquarters of his government. One observer portrayed him as “visiting in person—a thing never known before—all the offices of the Departments of War and Navy, stimulating everything in a manner worthy of a little commander-in-chief, with his little round hat and huge cockade.”

The American war cause needed more than a visit, as Madison well knew. He realized, as he later said, that the country was woefully unprepared and divided, but he hoped that in throwing “forward the flag of the country, the people would press onward and defend it.”

His total Army had only a few thousand men at the outset. Fewer than twenty warships comprised the Navy and his treasury teetered on bankruptcy. He had been forced to make a vital decision regarding military commands—whether to appoint as top officers some old and rusty Revolutionary War men or young but inexperienced persons. He mistakenly selected the old warriors and thereby robbed himself of enthusiastic, energetic leaders. The top officers, Major Generals Henry Dearborn and Thomas Pinckney, were in their sixties. Brigadier General William Hull, governor of the Michigan Territory, was palsied. Only one of the eight appointed generals was a professional soldier, and he was, Brigadier General James Wilkinson, a secret agent of Spain and a former Burr conspirator.

Madison also knew that the country was badly divided on the need for war. DeWitt Clinton, running that year against him for President, called him a tool of Napoleon. The Randolph “Quids,” as the small force of John Randolph was called, derided the necessity of the war. But worst of all were the New England Federalists who talked disunity and separation from the Union. Shortly after the war declaration, more than thirty Federalist Congressmen distributed “An Address of the Minority to their Constituents,” detailing their opposition to the Administration. When Madison ordered the Federalist governors of Connecticut and Massachusetts to call out their state militias for service outside their states, they flatly refused to obey him. To his demand that the Constitution authorized him to do so to “repel invasions,” they replied that they alone would judge when this situation existed.

Because of the lack of national unity and preparedness, at the same time that the war began, Madison launched diplomatic efforts to end it. However, he wanted to end it on his own terms. The American charge d’affaires in London, Jonathan Russell, received a request from Madison to tell the British Government that if an armistice did not soon take place, he would find it “difficult to relinquish territory which had been conquered.” Troubled as they were with Napoleon in Europe, a Napoleon who seemed to have timed his invasion of Russia to coincide with the American declaration of war, British officials were most anxious to negotiate an armistice at that moment.

It was Madison’s idea that if his Army gained a quick victory, the British would be more agreeable to his terms of settlement of outstanding issues. A victory, to be impressive, would have to come in the north, with a spectacular invasion of Canada. At the thousand-mile-long water boundary along the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence, the British had mustered only 7,000 regulars. However, British ships dominated the Great Lakes, though this dominance was vulnerable at three key points. These were Detroit at the western edge of Lake Erie; Niagara Falls, athwart movement between eastern Lake Erie and Lake Ontario; and Montreal on the St. Lawrence.

Canada was then in two zones, Lower Canada and Upper Canada. Lower Canada which lay in the East was also Quebec Province, and here the British regulars numbered about 5,000. Further west was the long stretch of Upper Canada, or Ontario Province, with only 2,000 regulars and a mere 600 Canadian militiamen stationed between Detroit and Montreal. Many of the militiamen were known to be American sympathizers.

After considering what intelligence reports were available, Madison saw that General Hull, striking from Detroit south and then east into Upper Canada, might easily achieve the quick victory he needed for his armistice negotiations. To help Hull, Madison proposed a simultaneous diversionary move by General Dearborn. The old general was to lead his army from Albany, crash through at Niagara and push toward Montreal, thus drawing British fire from Hull.

Unfortunately, this sound plan never went into effect. Hull moved his army eighteen miles south of Detroit to strike at British Fort Malden, where General Isaac Brock was complaining that the Canadian militia would not fight Americans. Had Dearborn now struck at the other end of Lake Erie, Brock would have been forced to abandon Malden and fall back. But the Governor-General of Canada had sent Dearborn a message requesting armistice talks, and Dearborn’s army lay immobilized while he conducted negotiations.

Near the end of August, 1812, Madison was on the road to Montpelier when a horseman stopped his carriage. He brought news of calamitous disaster. Hull had returned with his entire army from the Fort Malden area to Fort Detroit. Then Brock had come with 700 men to demand the surrender of Hull and his 2,500 men. “No one anticipated the surrender until he saw the white flag displayed,” said an American colonel, shocked when Hull agreed on August 16 to surrender without firing a shot. Hull was reportedly sitting on the ground in his tent and shaking like a leaf at the time. Brock’s statement on the surrender to his superior said: “Your Excellency will be astonished.”

Both participants now decided to break off the armistice negotiations. To the British, the easy victory over Hull portended even more important victories and territorial gains elsewhere. Monroe best expressed the administration’s feelings on the subject when he said: “When our honor shall be avenged, when our generals shall occupy the best part of your Canada, then I shall be disposed to listen, and to treat of peace.” Monroe, who since his Revolutionary War experiences, wanted to be a great military leader, asked and received reluctant permission from Madison to lead Kentucky and Ohio forces to recapture Detroit. Fortunately for Monroe because his ability did not match his ambition, the governor of Kentucky named the experienced Indian fighter, William Henry Harrison, as Major General over Kentucky’s troops.

During the rest of 1812 there were further land setbacks. In October an American force under Stephen Van Rensselaer crossed the Niagara and then was driven back. The next month saw General Dearborn, suffering severely from rheumatism, lead his army to the Canadian border. There his militiamen stubbornly refused to cross the border and he was forced to return to Plattsburg, New York.

Both these failures plus Hull’s miserable surrender played important propaganda roles in the bitterly contested Presidential election that fall. DeWitt Clinton’s capable campaign manager, a young politician named Martin Van Buren, promoted the idea that Madison was personally responsible. The Federalists, who were combining with Northern Republicans against Madison, went even further. Shortly after the disaster at Detroit, the general’s nephew, Captain Isaac Hull, electrified the nation when he led the frigate, the Constitution, in its sensational capture of the British Guerriere off Bermuda. For this victory, Hull’s ship was nicknamed “Old Ironsides.” Then the tiny American Navy achieved other refreshing victories. The Wasp captured the 22-gun Frolic and the United States under the command of Captain Stephen Decatur brought home the largest and newest British frigate, the Macedonian, captured off the Canary Islands.

The Federalists argued during the campaign that the miraculous naval victories were their handiwork because they had continually appealed for Navy appropriations, while the Republicans voted them down each time. This sort of illogic extended also to Clinton’s promises to stand for peace with England in the East and to favor war to curry Western voters. Not until December 3, 1812, when the total electoral count was in, did Madison know he was reelected. Clinton took every state on the coast from New Hampshire to almost half of Maryland’s electoral districts and he gained all of the Middle Atlantic States except Pennsylvania. But that state plus Vermont, the solid South and the border states on the frontier enabled Madison to win by 128 to 89 electoral votes.

With the election out of the way, Madison now prepared to rid himself of dead weight. A great public clamor had risen against Secretary of War Eustis, the burly doctor, after the loss at Detroit. One Senate critic charged that he consumed “his time in reading advertisements of petty retailing merchants to find where he may purchase one hundred shoes or two hundred hats.” Madison accepted his resignation in December, 1812, and then turned his attention to Secretary of the Navy Hamilton, who was unfortunately becoming incapable of spending more than a few hours each day at his job. Madison finally told him that Congress would not provide funds for the Navy so long as he was Secretary. Hamilton then resigned effective December 31.

To replace Hamilton, Madison installed William Jones, who was in the shipping business and had served in the Navy during the Revolution. Jones proved to be an excellent Secretary of the Navy, and with energy began to build fleets of ships of the line. As for a new Secretary of War, Madison offered the post to Monroe, who took it on a temporary basis with the erroneous belief that he was also to be appointed lieutenant general in charge of all the armies in the field.

Monroe declined a permanent appointment to the War Department at the beginning of 1813 because he considered it harmful to his prospects for the Presidency in 1816. Madison then offered the post to General Dearborn and to Senator William Crawford of Georgia, both of whom declined.

At this point, Madison turned to John Armstrong of New York, former American minister to France, even though he knew of Armstrong’s role in fomenting officer rebellions against the Continental Congress in 1783. The unpopularity of the appointment was soon evident in the Cabinet where Gallatin referred to Armstrong as “a devil,” and Monroe warned Madison that Armstrong had delusions of becoming an American Napoleon. Monroe’s opposition stemmed from the fact that Armstrong was then considered his chief opponent for the Republican nomination in 1816. Congressional opposition to Armstrong was also strong, for he barely won Senate approval of his nomination.

Despite the fact that Armstrong and Monroe were at each other’s throat almost constantly after both were in the Cabinet, Armstrong brought far-reaching changes in the military organization. He fired many of the old Revolutionary War generals and brought in new men. He also organized a general staff for the first time, to plan and organize for the entire Army, instead of permitting each general to be his own boss. But he was also a man who asked Senate friends to oppose the plans of Monroe and Gallatin and he retired military officers when he believed they were growing popular.

Shortly after Madison’s second inauguration on March 4, 1813, Czar Alexander I of Russia sent him word that he would like to mediate the war between the United States and England. Alexander was now fresh from his triumph over Napoleon, whose armies had perished after reaching frozen Moscow. Madison could see only good in this proposal for the British had installed a tight blockade on the Atlantic seaboard, the Treasury’s position was daily more desperate, and New England Federalists were stepping up their opposition to the war.

Madison agreed with Monroe that two additional envoys should join American minister John Quincy Adams at St. Petersburg to meet with British representatives under the Czar’s middle position at the table. On hearing the news Gallatin requested Madison to name him as one of the peace envoys. Gallatin, who had done such magnificent work reorganizing government agencies for war, advising Madison on diplomatic matters, and in acquiring even a small part of the authorized government wartime loans, was tired of daily political battles and emergencies. Although he was reluctant to lose Gallatin’s services even for a short time, Madison agreed that his skills would add to the possibility of a just peace.

Gallatin and Federalist Senator James A. Bayard were already on their way to Russia in May, 1813, before the Senate considered their nominations. Gallatin had left behind him a long list of tax proposals, and when Madison asked Congress for authority to assess internal taxes, the response from the Smith and Giles faction was “Where has the Secretary of the Treasury gone?” Some Republican papers even charged that Gallatin had fled.

Trouble soon rose when Senators charged that Gallatin could not hold his Treasury and diplomatic posts at the same time. To Madison’s quick reply that Secretary of the Navy Jones was handling Gallatin’s Treasury duties until his return, the cry came that this was illegal. Then in June the Senate confirmed this by voting twenty to fourteen that the two jobs could not be “united in the same person.” Conveniently forgotten was that President Washington had sent Chief Justice John Jay to England in 1794 to design a treaty.

Nor was this the only slap at Gallatin. On July 19, the Senate rejected his nomination as an envoy by eighteen to seventeen, while confirming Bayard and Adams. There was evidence that Secretary of War Armstrong had helped line up votes against Gallatin. This left Gallatin as Secretary of the Treasury, but since he was already in Moscow, he suffered great humiliation. In a note to Madison, he said he would remain in Europe. The Senate then resolved to declare his Treasury post vacated and Madison appointed incompetent George W. Campbell, a Tennessee Senator, to replace him in February, 1814. Shortly afterward the Senate agreed to confirm Gallatin as a peace commissioner. So the result was that the Smith brothers finally achieved revenge for Madison’s firing of Secretary of State John Smith in 1811.

In early 1813, the American Army suffered further land disasters in the Detroit area. But in April, General Dearborn led a raid around Lake Ontario to York (Toronto), the capital of Upper Canada. Here his soldiers terrorized the 700 Canadians and looted and burned the Houses of Parliament and many other public buildings. This wanton destruction later became the English excuse for an attack on the U.S. Capital, Washington.

Worn out from his sleepless efforts, Madison fell seriously ill in June, 1813, and doctors despaired for his life as he was wracked with high fever. After sitting five weeks at his bedside, Dolley wrote to Mrs. Gallatin at the end of July: “I watch over him as I would an infant, so precarious is his convalescence.” Then when his fever abated, she said, “But now that I see he will get well, I feel as if I should die myself from fatigue.” While he lay in bed, a British squadron came up the Chesapeake. Dolley wrote: “All the city and Georgetown have expected a visit from the enemy.” A rumor spread that fifty British commandoes were to seize Madison and carry him off. But the British fleet did not attack.

With Armstrong’s efforts to create a new and energetic Army still in the planning stage, victory on water seemed the best course for the United States in 1813. With the Atlantic Ocean blockaded, the Great Lakes offered the prime target. But early optimism gave way to pessimism in this area. Sent in May to attack supply ships in the St. Lawrence, Captain James Lawrence’s frigate Chesapeake was captured by the Shannon. To a small extent the defeat was offset by Lawrence’s dying shout, “Don’t give up the ship!” For this rapidly became an American battle cry.

Madison had insisted upon decisive action on the Great Lakes, and he waited impatiently in late summer for word that the preparations of Captain Oliver Hazard Perry were not as useless, as so many of the Army maneuvers, that did not lead to action. Late in September, Madison received the message he had been yearning to hear: On the tenth, Perry’s naval force, brought the surrender of “the British squadron, consisting of two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop.” Perry thus gained control of Lake Erie and Americans loudly echoed his cry, “We have met the enemy and they are ours!”

Nor was this all the news to cheer Madison. The British commander on the western front in the Detroit area now found that Perry’s mastery of Lake Erie cut his communications and supply lines. As a result, he retreated, only to be chased by William Henry Harrison’s army. On October 5, the two armies clashed in the battle of the Thames, a river eighteen miles east of Detroit. Harrison’s victory was onesided for almost all the British regulars were slain or captured. Besides clearing the Detroit frontier, this victory destroyed the power of the Northwest Indians, allies of the British; for their leader, Tecumseh, died in the battle.

If 1813 had its periods of joy to Madison, 1814 was a year of personal humiliation for him. The new year brought word from Lord Castlereagh that although the British had refused the Czar’s offer to mediate, Castlereagh was willing to negotiate a peace directly with Madison’s envoys. Madison quickly accepted and named Jonathan Russell, minister to Sweden, and Speaker Henry Clay to join Gallatin, Adams and Bayard at this task.

Madison realized that the fighting would go on until the peace was set, and England would try to gain much of the United States’s territory in order to force her terms on him. At the same time, Madison determined to take possession of as much outside territory as he could in order to gain bargaining advantage for the United States. However, all advantage lay with the British. For in addition to Madison’s growing domestic troubles that hamstrung bold action, the off setting force of Britain’s European enemy suddenly vanished with the news that Napoleon had been decisively defeated at Leipzig on October 18, 1813. The British could now transfer battle-hardened regulars to North America to chasten the former colonies.

At the beginning of 1814, the British campaign plans became apparent to Madison. These would be combined in a planned invasion from several fronts. Just as the Americans had so long considered a Canadian invasion through the portal of Niagara, the British would now descend through that gateway. They would also come south along Lake Champlain where success would split the United States in two parts, separating New England from the rest of the country. A third prong would come through the Gulf of Mexico to take New Orleans.

There was also a fourth prong. In the summer Admirals Sir George Cockburn and Alexander Cochrane entered the Chesapeake with several thousand Redcoats. Residents of Washington grew terrified with concern that they meant to capture the capital. Washington was hill-encircled and an easy target for an enemy unless thousands of trained defenders were stationed strategically to blunt their drive.

It was Armstrong’s view that the British would not invade Washington but would go instead to Baltimore forty miles to the north. However, Madison did not believe he could rely entirely on this opinion, and early in July he named Brigadier General William Winder to prepare for the defense of the capital. This appointment was especially poor for Winder was a Baltimore lawyer who knew little military strategy. Moreover, he had just returned from a Canadian war prison where he had been held since his capture in June, 1813. Lacking both skill and experience, Winder also faced a shortage of ammunition, trained soldiers and capable officers. Even understanding all this, Armstrong refused to change his mind and aid in Washington s defense. So far as he was concerned it was still all folly, Madison’s folly, for the British would never head for Washington.

The mayor of Washington put out a call to all able-bodied men to help dig earthworks and Dolley Madison soon saw a tent city spring up on Meridian Hill not far from the Executive Mansion. In the meantime General Winder was busy in activities that meant only disaster if the British struck. While generals normally remained at their headquarters planning and organizing future moves, Winder spent six weeks on personal scouting missions and left his work undone. The British ships, some fifty in number, were in Chesapeake Bay and Winder believed one day they would land at one spot, and on another day at another spot, perhaps turning into this river or that, or perhaps just sailing off.

Monroe wrote: “Calling on the President on the morning of the 18th of August, he informed me that the enemy had entered the Patuxent in considerable force, and were landing at Benedict. I remarked that this city [Washington] was their object. He concurred in the opinion.”

Monroe now saw an opportunity to show his military abilities and with Madison’s approval became a rival scout to Winder. On the morning of the 19th, he was at Benedict, where he counted “23 sq: rigged vessels.’’ The next day he lost the advancing British Army, for while he waited off one road to scout the advance, the Army rushed down another road to Nottingham, Maryland, and from there to Marlboro. But bewildered Winder was watching the British on the 22nd as they marched to Marlboro. It was obvious to his junior officers that the march would continue to the town of Bladensburg and from there into Washington unless a unified defense were quickly made. However, Winder could not see this and ordered his small army to scatter to all the roads and trails leading into the capital.

While the general was acting in this peculiar fashion, the citizens of Washington paid for the erection of fortifications at Bladensburg. On the night of the 22nd, the British made camp eight miles south of the village in their northern march. The next day Madison was astonished to receive a message from Winder, who begged for “assistance of counsel from yourself and the Government.” At this point Madison finally realized his blunder in naming Winder.

On the morning of the 24th, Madison received word that the British were advancing on Bladensburg. Overwrought by concern, he agreed with Monroe’s request to rush to the scene and help save American honor. An hour later Monroe reached the Maryland militia forces under the command of General Tobias Stansbury, deployed on elevated ground commanding “the pass into Bladensburg and the bridge south-westerly of the town.” Unknown to the general, Monroe quickly ordered the Fifth Regiment of Baltimore volunteers, who had been concealed in rear orchards as a reserve force, to advance into the open. For this he was later to be called an “amateur, blundering tactician” by Armstrong, who also blamed part of the resulting disaster on Monroe’s action.

With only six hundred men in Stansbury’s command, there was little likelihood that the larger British force could be contained. Then through the dust the first unit of Washington’s 2,700 soldiers came into view, and riding on horseback with them were President Madison and his Cabinet! The President and his top officials did not halt but rode toward the bridge. Only the stern warning of a volunteer prevented them from crossing into the British sector.

Soon afterward the British began their advance on the bridge. Monroe reported that rockets fell “near the President,” and Attorney General Richard Rush said that their rockets flew over us as we sat on our horses.” The first wave of Britishers were surprised by the ease with which they swept past the Americans on the other bank, and just before they engaged in heavy fighting against Commodore Joshua Barney’s few hundred bluejackets, Madison and Rush decided to return to the city. Winder had given the order to retreat, said Madison, and “it became manifest that the battle was lost.” More than 2000 men were thus prevented by Winder from firing a shot, and shortly after Madison left, they formed a chaotic mob surging into Washington. Barney’s sailors, many of whom were Negroes, bought a half hour of time for the President and the mob by their refusal to quit on Winder’s orders.

Dolley Madison had remained at the Executive Mansion, certain that her husband would return for three P.M. dinner with news of a victory. She said she was “calmly listening to the roar of cannon, and watching the rockets in the air, when she perceived our troops rushing into the city with the haste and dismay of a routed force.” To her sister, she wrote, “Our kind friend, Mr. Carroll, has come to hasten my departure, and is in a very bad humor with me because I insist on waiting until the large picture of General Washington is secured, and it requires to be unscrewed from the wall.” She finally had to break the picture frame to extricate the Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington; and she added to her letter: “And now, dear sister, I must leave this house, or the retreating army will make me a prisoner in it, by filling up the road I am directed to take.”

The Bladensburg fighting had ended at four P. M., and shortly after that Madison rushed into the Executive Mansion only to find Dolley gone and dinner for a large gathering in preparation in the kitchen. He sent word to Secretary of the Navy Jones, who, he knew, was with Dolley and his own family in Georgetown, to rendezvous with him at Foxall’s cannon foundry alongside the Potomac. But when the Joneses and Dolley reached Foxall's place, Madison had already taken the ferry across the river to Virginia. He had found the road to Foxall’s crowded with fleeing refugees and had been unable to get through.

In the evening as he rode first to a Falls Church tavern and then to a night’s rest at the home of Reverend John Maffitt near Chain Bridge, he looked back with sinking heart at the lighted skies above Washington. At eight P. M. British patrols were already roaming Washington streets, and that night and the next day, August 25, the President’s house, the Capitol, arsenal, navy yard, many private homes and the long bridge across the Potomac to Virginia were set afire. Admiral Cockburn ruefully reported he would have burned the entire town, but “the victors were too weary.”

The following three days were a nightmare for Madison. Dolley had spent the night with her friend, Mrs. Richard Love, at Rokeby, Virginia. Here the old cook refused to serve her coffee because, “Mr. Madison and Mr. Armstrong done sold the country to the British.” In the morning, Madison had gone looking for her and when he could not find Dolley, he rode toward the Great Falls of the Potomac. A hurricane suddenly enveloped the area and he hurriedly took refuge in an old house. Afterward, he found Dolley at Wiley’s Tavern near the Great Falls, sixteen miles from the capital.

At midnight, a report reached him that the British were coming, and he crossed the river by ferry and went on to Brookville, Maryland where he spent the night of August 26. Only then did he learn that the British Army had left Washington and was headed for Baltimore. The hurricane had put out the fires in the capital and had saved the city from complete ruin. Then some of the local citizens spread the false rumor that a large American army was rushing for Washington, and the British abruptly took their leave.

Madison returned to Washington on August 27 to find himself reviled by the Federalist press. He was called a “serpent” and “coward,” who hid in “midnight hovels.” The lie spread that an angry militiaman’s wife chased Dolley out of Mrs. Love’s house. It was difficult for Madison to pull the strings of his life together now after four days in the saddle and the jeering of the opposition press. But the job had to be done—and quickly—because the war had to be brought to a successful conclusion.

The Madisons could not return to the Executive Mansion because it was now a charred ruin. Instead, they moved first to the little house on F Street they had occupied in 1801, then to the Octagon House, two blocks from the Mansion, and then to the House of the Seven Buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue and 19th street. Congress moved into the Post and Patent Office Building, the only public building to escape destruction.

One of Madison’s first moves was to fire Armstrong. Not only had he failed to prepare Washington’s defense but he had so antagonized the troops and officers that they declared they would not serve under him. Madison named Monroe to take over the War Department while retaining his post as Secretary of State. Monroe hesitated taking on this job, but he finally accepted with the knowledge that a chief rival for Madison’s successor was now destroyed. Madison also replaced incompetent Secretary of the Treasury Campbell with Alexander Dallas. The country also had a new Postmaster General, for Madison had fired Gideon Granger who had appointed an Administration opponent as Philadelphia postmaster.

Madison called Congress into special session in September, 1814, and the young War Hawks had an opportunity to see first-hand the folly of bringing war, yet not be willing to pay for it. But if Washington symbolized failure, there was cheering news on other fronts. On September 11, fifty British ships entered the Patapsco River near Baltimore for a naval attack on Fort McHenry. At the same time General Robert Ross, whose army took Washington, was preparing a land assault on Baltimore. At dawn on September 13, the British warships began their attack. However, a twenty-five hour naval bombardment with mortars and rockets did not bring out a white flag from the Fort; and on land General Ross was killed. Senator Sam Smith, now Major General Smith of the Maryland militia, turned out to be the guiding force in Baltimore’s defense.

Even more breath-taking news came from the Canadian zone. The British that summer had begun their long-feared invasion on the Lake Champlain route to cut the United States in two. But on September 11 came the decisive action of the entire war. That day a U. S. naval force under Commodore Thomas Macdonough won a major victory over a larger British force in the battle of Plattsburg Bay on the western side of Lake Champlain. A British Army of 9,000 had been advancing on Plattsburg. But the lake defeat jeopardized its communications and the soldiers ran back almost in a rout to Canada.

Commodore Macdonough’s victory played a key part in the peace negotiations that had been going on between the five American and three British envoys at Ghent, Belgium, since August. With a belief that the British Army and Navy would soon control a large part of the United States, the three envoys gave the Americans British peace terms for Madison’s acceptance. First, the British insisted on the establishment of a neutral, buffer-Indian territory in the North and Northwest not under control of the United States Government. This area would comprise Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. Second, the British wanted Americans to withdraw from the Great Lakes; cede a large part of Maine, grant British rights of navigation on the Mississippi and give up New England fishing rights in Canadian waters.

Madison would not hear of such arrogance. His envoys were to seek an end to impressments and a guarantee of neutral rights. But at Ghent, his five envoys began squabbling among themselves as to what part of the British demands might be acceptable.

At the time, the British were counting on military moves against the Americans to frighten Madison’s envoys into accepting these terms. However, Macdonough’s victory at Plattsburg changed this plan. When Prime Minister Liverpool asked the Duke of Wellington, fresh from his overwhelming of Napoleon, to take command of British forces in Canada, the Duke refused. He said that the British were incapable of taking any vulnerable “point of importance” except New Orleans. He advised a peace whose terms did not include any addition of territory, and a few days later Lord Liverpool decided not to continue the war.

Now came new British proposals that did not include any claim to the Northwest Territory, possession of the Great Lakes, Mississippi navigation rights or the barring of American fishermen from Canadian waters. At the same time the British would not consider any inclusion of sections barring impressment or establishment of neutral rights in wartime. When the American envoys led by Gallatin signed the treaty on December 24, 1814, they knew they were not settling any American grievance or meeting any territorial hope of the War Hawks. They were merely signing peace into law, but this was quite enough for both sides.

Before the diplomatic coach-and-four sped down Pennsylvania on a February afternoon in 1815 on its way to Octagon House with the Treaty of Ghent for President Madison, two related events were occurring. In New England the previous October, the Massachusetts legislature had issued a call to surrounding states to send delegates to a convention of grievances against Madison. Then in response, five states sent twenty-six delegates to Hartford, Connecticut, in December. Here the delegates talked about disunion and praised the British. A visitor to the Octagon House reported that he “called on the President. He looks miserably shattered and woebegone. His mind is full of the New England sedition.”

However, the Hartford Convention’s agreed-upon resolutions failed to live up to talk about separating from the Union. Its members requested a Constitutional Amendment requiring a two-thirds Congressional vote for a war declaration and the admission of new states; limiting the President’s period in office to one term; barring of two Presidents in a row from the same state; and banning foreign-born Americans from holding government jobs.

While the Hartford Convention was reaching its conclusions and demands, at the other end of the nation another event was transpiring that also troubled Madison. Ever the careful planner, Prime Minister Liverpool was attempting to insure himself against any mishap. He had sent 15,000 hardened veterans from Ireland to Jamaica early in September. Led by Wellington’s brother-in-law, Sir Edward Pakenham, they were to take New Orleans. Then if Madison refused to sign the peace treaty, Pakenham was to get into the Chesapeake or Delaware Rivers. Should even this fail to bring Madison to his knees, said Lord Liverpool, “We must immediately propose to make a separate peace with them [the New England states], and we have good reason to believe that they would.”

The American general in the South who had revealed a remarkable ability to lead troops was Major General of Militia Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. The hero of the Battle of Horseshoe Bend against the marauding Creek Indians operated under his written philosophy of “An eye for an eye, a toothe for a toothe, and scalp for scalp.” When news of Pakenham’s venture reached the capital, Madison sent Jackson word through Monroe to defend New Orleans.

At first Jackson would not go because he was intent on capturing Pensacola, Florida. Then late in November, 1814, as Pakenham’s army left Jamaica for New Orleans, Jackson sent word to Washington that he would be in New Orleans in twelve days “if his health permitted.” By a piece of good fortune that was invariably his lot, even traveling slowly, Jackson managed to reach New Orleans ahead of the British. Pakenham’s large squadron easily captured the small American flotilla defending the approach to New Orleans, and had he pushed ahead rapidly under clear skies, he might have entered the city in triumph.

However, a fog set in and Jackson was able to check the advance enemy column. Once this was accomplished, he calmly led his men to a strategic area that lay between a heavy swamp and a river. Here his soldiers spent a day erecting a breastwork behind a curving canal. Pakenham came upon this scene and decided to retire for a while to reconsider strategy. A week later on January 8, 1815, his army came rushing forward in a frontal assault. Jackson’s frontiersmen were ready now and with withering precision slaughtered the on-rushing soldiers, including Pakenham. The British lost 2,117 men and the Americans, thirteen, in the savage half-hour dawn battle.

The “ambassadors” from the Hartford Convention were on their way to Washington to warn Madison to accept their recommendations or face the end of the Union. Along the route they were struck a blow when they learned of Jackson’s victory at New Orleans. Then in Washington they learned of the news from Ghent. The Federalists from New England were now the laughingstock of the country.

Madison, who a short time before had been jeered at for the burning of Washington, now found himself the hero of the hour. In fact, during the rest of his term, he was treated as a popular and greatly admired President. The war had produced an American character for the first time, and people considered themselves now as Americans rather than Virginians or New Yorkers. As one stated it: “The war has renewed and reinstated the national feelings and character which the Revolution had given, and which were daily lessening. The people . . . feel and act more as a nation.” And Madison symbolized the national authority.

Even though the Treasury had announced on November 9, 1814, that the Government could not pay its bills, this bankrupt condition did not last long once peace came. The war had stimulated American manufacturing, and in the growing economy devoted to peaceful production, taxes supplied needed revenues. Furthermore, European countries were now eager to invest in government bonds.

Jefferson was not happy with Madison’s legislative program in his last two years in office. For Jefferson considered legislation in terms of his philosophic principles that he had reached at an earlier time, while Madison was concerned with the facts of life currently. Madison now favored a Second Bank of the United States, even though he and Jefferson labeled it unconstitutional in 1791. Madison requested and won Congressional approval of a standing Army and Navy, so that the National Government would not ever again be dependent on the states and their militias. In these actions, Madison was once again the man whose strong desire to hold the Union together had led him to promote the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the ratification of its work. Only in his final legislative action did Madison reveal the Jeffersonian influence. This was his veto of a bill to permit the national government to build canals and roads.

On March 4, 1817, when James Monroe, tall and thin, succeeded Madison as President, there were cheers from the crowd at the inauguration for the outgoing Chief Executive and Dolley Madison. Even the Federalist press now had kind words for the man it had vilified for almost a decade. Kindest of all was the message from John Adams that regardless of “a thousand faults and blunders, his Administration has acquired more glory and established more Union than all three predecessors, Washington, Adams and Jefferson.”

18

VIRGINIA PATRIARCH

MADISON was sixty-six when he and Dolley arrived home from Washington. He looked so worn as he crossed the threshold that there seemed little likelihood that he would long survive. Yet he lived to the age of 85 and maintained an active life almost to the end.

Dressed invariably in black clothes, with silver knee- and shoe-buckles, and with his white hair powdered and queued, he was either outdoors overseeing Montpelier’s activities, or in the quiet of the library reading and writing, or entertaining a steady stream of guests.

On occasion, he and Dolley visited with Jefferson at Monticello, and the conversation usually abounded in complex philosophic topics. Then there were the continual pleas from President Monroe for his opinion on almost every subject facing Monroe. What did Madison think of the proposed Missouri Compromise of 1820, to divide the West into slave and non-slave territories and states? What were Madison’s long ago written thoughts on barring European powers from acquiring new colonies in the Americas?

One of the subjects that absorbed Madison’s attention for a long period was the establishment of the University of Virginia. This was the fondest desire of Jefferson, and the two worked closely to bring it about. The burden of this effort shifted to Madison in 1819 when Jefferson was ruined financially. He had signed a $20,000 note for a friend and when payment came due, his friend lacked the funds and Jefferson became liable. Madison felt the shame of not being able to help Jefferson in his hour of trouble. This mortification deepened when Jefferson appealed to the Virginia Assembly for permission to run a public lottery with prizes consisting of most of his land at Monticello.

After a public protest and the collection of voluntary contributions temporarily saved Monticello, Jefferson returned to his work with Madison. But Madison now saw that his friend was growing feeble. In 1824, when Lafayette paid a visit to Jefferson and Madison, huge crowds gathered at Monticello for a glance of reverence at the great men of the Revolution. Jefferson was barely able to totter across the lawn to shake Lafayette’s hand.

The University opened in the spring of 1825 with Jefferson as rector and Madison and Monroe as members of the Board of Visitors. Scholars were hired and came from leading colleges in Europe and the United States to set the school off on the high plane demanded by all three former Presidents. But with the university in existence only a few months, the students rioted, caning some professors and breaking equipment as a prank. The founders of the school met with the student body shortly afterward. Yet hardly had Jefferson risen to protest the ill-conduct when he slumped into his seat overcome with anguish. However, the scene had a serious effect on the students, for they settled down to their studies without further troubles.

It was on July 4, 1826, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, that Jefferson and John Adams died. Madison’s friendship with Jefferson, dating back to that early period, was now at an end, and it was apparent from his letters after the sad event that Madison missed him a great deal.

He was seventy-five that March, but after a lifetime of hard work he would not permit himself the luxury of old-age idleness. He succeeded Jefferson as rector of the university and held this position for eight years. Then in 1829 he served as a delegate to the Virginia Convention to revise the State's constitution. Even though the other delegates considered him the leader, in characteristic fashion he quickly nominated Monroe as presiding officer. Approving shouts and applause rang out in the meeting hall at the sight of Madison and Chief Justice John Marshall escorting Monroe to the chair of honor.

Monroe was then in poor health and in a condition of near bankruptcy despite an earlier grant of $30,000 from Congress. He was forced to sell his home, and in 1830, Madison bade him good-by as Monroe left for New York where his son-in-law offered him a room. Then in mid-1831 came the sad word that Monroe was dead, having passed away like Jefferson and Adams on the Fourth of July.

Madison was not to spend his last years in peace. Dolley’s son, Payne Todd, doted upon by his stepfather and mother, grew into a ne’er-do-well. His mother’s continual effort to give him whatever he demanded and the attention lavished upon him because of his famous relative made him contemptuous of those currying his favor. As a result, by the time he reached manhood he had little inclination to work for a livelihood. Letters poured into Montpelier demanding payment for Todd’s gambling debts.

Madison did not tell Dolley about these demands, but sent off the necessary sums to keep his stepson out of trouble. However, there came the time when he could no longer pay the gambling debts, and he had to endure deep humiliation when the Bank of the United States refused to lend him $6,000. Quietly, he sold some of his 5,000 acres at prices far below cost just to settle Payne Todd’s debts, and as time went on he sold more and more land. One day near the close of his life, he put vouchers totalling $20,000 into an envelope to be given Dolley after he was gone “as an evidence of the sacrifice he had made to insure her tranquillity by concealing the ruinous extravagance of her son.”

Another bar to Madison’s peace arose after the Tariff of 1828 became law. The South, which did little manufacturing, was now forced to pay higher prices for goods brought into that area. Vice-President John C. Calhoun declared that the Southern states had the authority to set aside the Tariff Act by labeling it unconstitutional. Madison found himself in the middle of the growing controversy, for Calhoun and others cited his Virginia Resolutions of 1798 against the Alien and Sedition Acts as the basis of their doctrine for nullification.

It was a crucial period for Madison and the country, for Southern leaders hoped to use him as their spiritual leader for states’ rights and secession. However, Madison would not accept their mantle and found himself the victim of their angry outrage. Contrary to the conclusions drawn by the nullifiers, said Madison, the Virginia Resolutions were not a call for action by the states to declare the Alien and Sedition Acts null and void. Instead, he declared, they were meant solely to bring the cooperation of the states to seek their repeal by Congress or through an amendment to the Constitution.

By the end of 1833, he had slipped into general feebleness, though his mind remained alert until the end. He had to give up his position as rector at the university, but he continued the most important activity of his declining years —the preparation of his careful notes on the Constitutional Convention of 1787 for eventual publication. After his death Congress bought them from Dolley Madison for $30,000 and they were published in three volumes in 1843. Dolley was not to retain this money, for her son got his hands on it, and it soon disappeared. Nevertheless, Madison’s notes fulfilled an enormous purpose, because once they were published they became the Bible of the Supreme Court in its opinions on constitutional issues.

On his eighty-fifth birthday in March, 1836, his fingers were so rigid that he could no longer grasp a pen. Dolley was unable to hide her grief in his presence and he begged her “to be composed if not cheerful.” He dictated his letters now to Dolley, and one of the last expressed the hope that the Federal Government would buy freedom for the Negro slaves. It was his belief that the Abolition Societies that were springing up served only to harden Southern determination to maintain that evil institution.

Despite his age, states’ rights advocates continued to attack him, charging that his late opinions were not consistent with earlier ones. On the morning of June 28, 1836, he was unable to swallow food. Asked what was the matter, he replied, “Nothing more than a change of mind, my dear.” A moment later he was dead.

There would be wars, depressions and internal disorders in the decades ahead that would temporarily jar the unity of the American people. But in each crisis, the enduring fabric of a unity based on the Constitution of the United States and its added Bill of Rights would hold them together. These are the legacies of James Madison, who would not give up his fight to establish a United States of America in fact as well as in name.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Henry, History of the United States, 9 volumes, 1891- 1898.

Life of Albert Gallatin, 1879.

Adams, John Quincy, Lives of James Madison and James Monroe, 1850.

Writings, edited by W. G. Ford, volumes 3-6, 1913-1916. 

Anderson, D. R., William Branch Giles, 1915.

Beard, Charles, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, 1919.

Brant, Irving, James Madison, 6 volumes, 1941-1961.

Cresson, W. P., James Monroe, 1946.

Dodd, W. E., Life and Times of Nathaniel Macon, 1903. 

Farrand, Max, Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 3 volumes, 1911.

Ford, Paul L., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10 volumes, 1892- 1899.

Gay, Sidney H., James Madison, 1899.

Hamilton, S. M., Writings of James Monroe, 7 volumes, 1898-1903.

Henry, William Wirt, Patrick Henry, 3 volumes, 1891.

Hunt, Gaillard, Life of James Madison, 1902.  Writings of James Madison, 9 volumes, 1900-1910.

Hutchinson, W. T. and Rachal, W. R., The Papers of James Madison, 2 volumes, 196S.

Jennings, Paul, A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison, 1865.

Koch, Adrienne, Jefferson and Madison, 1950.

Madison, Dolley, Memoirs and Letters, edited by Lucia B. Cutts, 1886.

Madison, James, The Federalist, (with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay), 1864.

Letters and other Writings, published by order of Congress, 1865.

Papers of James Madison, 3 volumes, 1840.

Randall, Henry S., The Life of Thomas Jefferson, 3 volumes 1858.

Rives, William Cabell, History of the Life and Times of James Madison, 3 volumes, 1859-1862.

Smith, Mary Bayard, The First Forty Years of Washington Society, 1906.

Stoddard, William O., James Madison, 1887.

INDEX

Adams, John

Adams, Samuel 

American Revolution  

American Whig Society

Annapolis Convention

Armstrong, John

Army, U.S., see Military forces 

Arnold, Benedict

Bank of United States

Bayard, James A.

Bill of rights

Brackenridge, Hugh Henry

Braddock, Gen. Edward

Bradford, William

Breckinridge, John

Burr, Aaron

Calhoun, John C.

Campbell, George W.

Canada

Castlereagh, Lord

Clay, Henry

Clinton, DeWitt

Clinton, George

Cliosophic Society

Commerce, regulation of

Concord, battle of

Confederation, Articles of

Confederation Congress

Congress  

Connecticut 

Constitution

Constitutional Convention

Continental Army

Continental Congress

Cornwallis, Lord Charles

Courts

Crawford, William

Dallas, Alexander

Deane, Silas

Dearborn, Maj. Gen. Henry

Declaration of Independence

Delaware

Democratic Societies

Dickinson, John

Duane, James

Dunmore, Lord

England, see American Revolution;

War of 1812 

Erskine, David

Eustis, William

Federalists

Federalist, The

Fenno, John

Finances, national

Floyd, Catherine (Kitty)

Foreign trade

Foster, Augustus J.

France

Franklin, Benjamin

Freneau, Philip

Gage, Gen. Thomas

 Gallatin, Albert

Gates, Gen. Horatio

Genet, Edmund

Georgia

Gerry, Elbridge 

Ghent, Treaty

Giles, William B.

Government, organization of

Granger, Gideon 

Grayson, William,  

Great Britain, see American Revolution; War of 1812 

“Great Compromise''

Great Lakes campaigns

Greene, Gen. Nathanael

Grundy, Felix

Hamilton, Alexander 

Hamilton, Paul

Hancock, John

Harrison, Benjamin

Harrison, William Henry

Hartford Convention

Henry, John

Henry, Patrick

Howe, Sir William

Hull, Brig. Gen. William

Indians

Ingersoll, Jard 

Innes, James

Intolerable Acts

Jackson, Andrew

Jackson, Francis James “Copenhagen''  

Jay, John

Jay-Gardoqui Treaty

Jefferson, Thomas

Jones, John Paul  

Jones, Joseph

Jones, William

Kentucky

King, Rufus

Lafayette, Marquis de

Lawrence, Capt. James  

Lee, Arthur

Lee, Henry (“Light-Horse Harry”)

Lee, Richard Henry

Lexington, battle of

Liverpool, Prime Minister

Livingston, Robert R.

Louisiana Purchase

Macdonough, Commodore Thomas

Macon, Nathaniel

Madison, Dolley Payne Todd

Madison, James

ancestry and relatives

appearance

inauguration

military experience

student

Madison, James, Sr.

Madison, Rev. James

Marshall, John

Martin, Alexander

Martin, Rev. Thomas

Maryland

Mason, George

Massachusetts

Merry, Anthony

Napoleon

Navy, U.S., see Military forces New Hampshire

New Jersey

New Orleans, battle of 

New York City

New York State

Nonintercourse Act

Orders-in-Council

Pakenham, Sir Edward

Paterson, William

Pendleton, Edmund

Pennsylvania

Perry, Capt. Oliver Hazard

Philadelphia

Philadelphia Convention

Pinckney, Charles

Pinckney, Gen. Charles C.

Pinckney, Maj. Gen. Thomas 

Porter, Peter B„ Committee

Powder Horn

Princeton

Randolph, Edmund

Randolph, John

Religion, freedom of

Republicans

Rhode Island

Robertson, Donald

Rodgers, Commodore John

Rodney, Caesar 

Rush, Richard

Russell, Jonathan

Russia

Salomon, Haym, 

Sedition Act

Shays's Rebellion

Slavery

Smith, Robert

Smith, Samuel

South Carolina

Spain

Spring, Sam

Stanbury, Gen. Tobias

States’ rights

Taylor, Zachary

Tennessee

Tippecanoe

Todd, Dolley Payne, see Madison, Dolley Payne Todd 

Townshend Act  

Tyler, John

University of Virginia

Van Buren, Martin

Vermont

Virginia

Virginia Convention

War of 1812

War Hawks

Washington, D.C.

Washington, George

Wayne, Gen. “Mad Anthony

Western territories

Whiskey Rebellion

Wilson, James

Winder, Brig. Gen. William

Witherspoon, John

Wythe, George

XYZ Affair