James and Dolley Madison (50 page)

Madison knew what the arguments in favor of slavery were, and they were repeated to him all of his life by friends and relatives. They were succinctly stated by a man who adopted the pseudonym Eliobo in a continuing series of letters depicting the pros and cons of slavery in the
New Jersey Journal
newspaper in the winter of 1780–1781. Madison, in Congress in Philadelphia at that time, read every newspaper he could find and must have perused this one.

Eliobo's arguments for slavery were (1) owners provide for slaves' basic needs in life, such as food and shelter; (2) blacks were lazy and could not function in society; (3) slaves were happy; (4) freed blacks will rape white women; (5) freed slaves will obtain firearms and get what they want by force; and (6) freed slaves would join forces with American Indians and attack white villages. In some form, all slaveholders agreed with the arguments of the letter. Those against the arguments, such as Madison, knew that many of their neighbors embraced them.

Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina had told friends that many opposed the Bill of Rights to Madison's Constitution because such legislation usually said that “all men are by nature born free” yet “a large part of our property consists in men who are actually born slaves.”
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Many of Madison's friends were members of antislavery societies. Tench Coxe, one of his friends from the revolution, belonged to the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and kept him abreast of their work. He even told Madison at one point that the group had been trying to get Benjamin Franklin to introduce an antislavery measure at the Constitutional Convention, but that did not happen.

Many Virginians considered slavery a curse on their state. When Kentucky separated from Virginia and its officials met to discuss their new constitution, David Rice, who had moved there from Virginia, told them that “holding men in slavery is the national vice of Virginia.”
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When Madison was president, several leaders of large abolitionist organizations met with him in an effort to engage his official support of their antislavery crusade. In the winter of 1813, as he was consumed in work over the war with England, he met with a representative of the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society. Afterward, they released a statement that blasted slave owners. “That notwithstanding the laws which Congress have enacted inhibiting the slave trade, as well as for the punishment of citizens who may be concerned in the
infraction of them, the inhuman, and unjust commerce in African subjects, continues in defiance of those laws and in violation of every honorable and benevolent principal to be pursued by some American merchants.” The document went on to state that its members had proof that seventy thousand men and women were kidnapped from Africa in 1810 and illegally taken to the United States as slaves. They were transported and delivered, the abolitionists charged, because foreign governments and the US government did nothing to stop the slave trade. Officials just looked the other way. They begged Madison to step in and curb it. He did not.
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Many antislavery leaders argued that if legislators would not end slavery, God would punish the entire country. One said that slavery was “a solemn mockery” and “insult to God” and that “the national sanction and encouragement [of slavery] ought to be considered as justly exposing us to the displeasure and vengeance of Him, who is equally Lord of all.”
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The editor of the
Connecticut Courant
newspaper howled that “the existence of slavery may be viewed as one forcible cause of a final separation of the United States” and called slavery “extreme wickedness.”
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Yet, at the same time, columns ran in newspapers, both in the North and in the South, stating that a study of slavery in ancient Rome and Greece showed that bondage did not make those nations weaker; it made them stronger. Southern congressmen extolled it in their speeches and, if they didn't directly applaud it, warned others that southerners believed in it. “I will tell the truth,” said one southern lawmaker. “A large majority of the people in the southern states do not consider slavery as even an evil.”
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When confronted directly with slavery, Madison often retreated from his position of a slave owner to that of a libertarian, or so he thought. When he went home to Virginia at the end of a term in the Continental Congress, in 1783, he sold his slave Billy, who had lived with him for several years. Under Pennsylvania law, Billy would then be free after seven years. Madison wrote his father that Billy had become “too thoroughly tainted to be a fit companion for fellow slaves in Virga.,” and that he was “covering that liberty for which we have paid the price of so much blood, and had proclaimed so often to be right & worthy the pursuit, of every human being.”
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He pushed his “back to Africa” theory from his early twenties until his death. None of his slaves wanted to go to Africa, though. They were Americans and wanted to remain here. British writer Harriet Martineau was surprised when Madison told her that the slaves were opposed to going to Africa. “He accounted for his selling his slaves by mentioning their horror of going to Liberia, a horror which he admitted to be prevalent among the blacks,” she wrote.
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Those slaves who remained with him all of his life, such as Paul Jennings, liked him. Jennings wrote that he was close to Madison and never saw the president lose his temper toward any slave on the plantation or in the White House. But many of Madison's slaves, whom he thought loved him and his wife, were very happy to leave him when sold to someone else. He noted that in letters to friends. He sold several to a county neighbor to pay a debt in 1819. “I am persuaded [he] will do better by them than I can, and to whom they gladly consent to be transferred,” he wrote Edward Coles.
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Madison's views on slavery were never seriously challenged. Life rolled on in both slave states and free states, speeches were made and speeches were ignored, tobacco sold and profits appreciated. Then, in 1820, came the storm over the Missouri Compromise. Following heated debates, as a solution to the entry of more states into the Union and as a way to quell a brewing social and political storm, Congress decided to admit Missouri as a slave state and, to balance the number of free and slave states, to admit Maine, which had broken free of Massachusetts, as a free state.

Madison agreed with those who wanted Missouri admitted as a slave state, but for an odd reason. He told friends that Missouri would not be invaded by a large number of slaveholders with hundreds of slaves, but probably by hundreds of families each with just a few slaves. Those slaves, he believed, would have better lives until the day, up ahead, when slavery was ended in the country. He stuck to his views against a tidal wave of antislavery invective against the Missouri Compromise by hordes of northerners who were growing increasingly unhappy about the power of slavery in the growth of America.
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The arguments over the Missouri Compromise showed, too, that Virginia's slaveholders and political leaders, such as Madison, were not really in favor of eliminating slavery after all; they just wanted to delay it, hoping the antislavery movement would die. It would not.

Madison was always afraid, like many, of what Jefferson said in a wonderful metaphor about slavery: holding the wolf by the ears and being afraid to let him go.

Madison had written the marquis de Lafayette in 1820, five years before his arrival in America for a much-heralded tour, of the “dreadful fruitfulness of the original sin of the African trade” and fended off attacks by Lafayette when he toured Montpelier later. Madison continually told Lafayette that he wanted to free his slaves, but he kept turning his back on all opportunities to do so. Fanny Wright, Lafayette's feminist companion on his 1825 tour, later wrote Madison and said she wanted to set up a farming collective made up of freed slaves. The bondsmen and bondswomen would work for a certain amount of
time to pay off the price of their freedom and, at the same time, be taught how to read and write and run a farm. After a certain point in time, they would be freed and given farmland. She was very confident the collective would work. Madison sneered at her. He told her discipline could not be maintained on such a farm and that “the prospect of emancipation at a future day will sufficiently overcome the natural and habitual repugnance to labor.”
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Madison's alternative idea, hatched in 1819, was to institute a gradual system of emancipation so that plantations would not be left workerless when manumission was accomplished. He was not certain how to do it, but he told friends it was the best plan. Part of it was to get the federal and state governments to sell off millions of acres of public property and use the revenue to pay slaveholders for their slaves and to grant slaves their freedom. The slaveholders, with all that money, could then begin a new system of paid-labor farming and hire back tens of thousands of black and white paid laborers.

He estimated that all of the money needed to free the slaves, some $600 million, could be raised with the sale of 200 million acres, or just one third of total public lands, at a very reasonable $3 per acre. It seemed like a good solution for everybody. “And to what object so good, so great, so glorious could that peculiar fund of wealth be appropriated?” he asked.
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The president never seemed to think through his abolition plans. He insisted on gradual emancipation for blacks, who insisted with equal fervor on immediate freedom. He was convinced that his plan would work because the need for slaves had declined since farming, in general, had declined. He never injected the cotton industry, starting to boom in the late 1820s, into this equation; planters needed more, not fewer, slaves.

One thing he did do, though, and constantly bragged about, was to buy and sell slaves with contracts that called for their emancipation after a few years, usually five or seven. These agreements enabled him to free slaves on a delayed basis. In 1804, Madison purchased a slave named David for $400. “It being understood,” his wife wrote, “that at the expiration of five years he is to become free & that in the meantime Mr. M. is to be his owner.” Dolley did the same. In 1810, Francis Scott Key worked out an arrangement in which Dolley would loan her black freedman servant Joe $200 with which he could use as an advance to purchase the freedom of his wife from Key. The husband and wife would then work for a certain number of years as paid workers and pay off the rest of the price of the wife. Dolley agreed. The Madisons based these contract ideas on established British slavery views from earlier times, that slaves could be considered like indentured servants and bonded for a specific period of time. This way, in a few years, Madison could actually “free” his slaves, or so he argued.

To their credit, the Madisons also tried to hire freed blacks when they could, rather than buy more slaves. In 1808, friend John Tayloe found two coachmen in Richmond, both freed blacks, for the Madisons. One was hired. Three other freed blacks were hired to work in the gardens of Montpelier.
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Madison was named the president of the American Colonization Society in 1833, a few years before his death and, even though ill during most of his term as leader of the group, he helped them gain publicity and raise money. He lobbied for the group, via letters, with Congress. Visitors told him that his plan to have all northerners pay half the cost of transportation to Africa would never work. They didn't own slaves; why should they be burdened by the cost? He waved them all off. Since northern merchant ships had brought the slaves to America, northerners were responsible for paying the cost of sending them back, he insisted, completely blind to reality. The slaves had to go to Africa, he argued. They could not remain in America because they would be unable to intermingle with the whites, despite the fact that tens of thousands of them freed after the revolution in the north had done just that, and successfully, even though it was painful.

Madison paid no attention to charges that the colonization movement had made little progress under his presidency and during his membership. The slave movement in America was now huge and slavers threatened to take their bondsmen and bondswomen into the new territories and, in time, get those territories made into slave states. After all, over the last several decades, the thirteen original colonies had added eleven more states, with more states in the Louisiana Territory probable within the next ten or twenty years. There would soon be one million slaves in America and the “peculiar institution” was a hot issue in each state, yet all Madison worried about was putting a few hundred slaves on ships to send back to Africa.

He ignored any and all other solutions for the freedom of the slaves. One of the best sent to him was from his own former secretary, Edward Coles. The visionary Coles moved from Virginia to Illinois, a free territory, so that he could free his slaves and start his own life all over again in a state not crippled by slavery. Coles freed his slaves on the way to Illinois, gave them farmland, and showed them how to live on it as free men and how to cultivate it. He remained with them for several months, providing instructions so that they could make it on their own as freemen farmers. It worked.

Madison congratulated Coles, writing him, though, that his plan only succeeded because of his help. He said that “with the habits of the slave, and without the instruction, the property, or the employments of a freeman, the manumitted blacks, instead of deriving advantage from the partial benevolence of their masters, furnish arguments against the general efforts in their behalf.”
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Coles had acted swiftly and successfully; Madison never did. He continued to complain about slavery and yet continued to do nothing to end it.

As the slavery issue grew in intensity through the 1830s, politicians in South Carolina began to suggest that their state, and perhaps other southern states, leave the Union and form their own government in order to protect slavery. This alarmed Madison. He did not believe the pro- and antislavery clashes could actually split the government of the country he had personally designed at the Constitutional Convention. He wrote Henry Clay, “What madness in the South to look for greater safety in disunion. It would be worse than jumping out of the frying pan into the fire; it would be jumping into the fire for fear of the frying pan.”
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