James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (27 page)

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SLAVERY CAST
a great shadow over this agrarian vision, and there was a sharp reminder of it when antislavery petitions interrupted the congressional debate on the nation’s finances. On February 11, 1790, two groups of Quakers petitioned for “a sincere and impartial inquiry” into whether Congress should in the name of “justice and mercy” abolish the slave trade. On the next day, February 12, came another petition, this one from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. It earnestly entreated Congress to give “serious attention to the subject of slavery . . . promote mercy and justice,” and “step to the very verge of the power vested in you for discouraging every species of traffic in the persons of our fellow men.” Benjamin Franklin, in one of his last acts, had signed the society’s petition.
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Madison wanted to treat the petitions in a regular manner, sending them to a committee that would report on the powers of Congress under the Constitution. Perhaps there were ways that Congress could regulate the slave trade and “countenance” its abolition, he suggested. But South Carolinian Aedanus Burke declared that merely sending the petitions to committee “would sound an alarm and blow the trumpet of sedition in the southern states.”
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Madison won out, with almost all of Virginia’s delegates joining with the North to commit the petitions, but the report that came from committee a few weeks later caused more contention. The Georgia and South Carolina delegations believed the report went beyond the agreement reached at the Constitutional Convention by implying that when Congress gained power to act on the slave trade eighteen years hence, that body would also then have power over domestic slavery. This was an interpretation that those opposing the Constitution had advanced in the South. Reassurances had been offered to obtain ratification support, but now it looked as though they had meant nothing, and the men of Georgia and South Carolina were in a fury. They delivered what had never before been presented in a great national forum: a defense of slavery itself. It was not a necessary evil, they said, but a humane institution, one sanctioned by history and the Bible. James Jackson of Georgia, a hot-tempered war veteran with a cleft in his chin, argued “the situation of slaves here” to be “immensely preferable” to their lot in Africa and
predicted race war would follow on the freeing of slaves. William Loughton Smith of South Carolina, wealthy and European educated, read extracts from Jefferson’s
Notes on the State of Virginia,
which maintained the inherent inferiority of the black race. A disgusted Madison called the debates “shamefully indecent.”
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Not content with defending slavery, Georgians and North Carolinians attacked the petitioners. Jackson said that Franklin would never have signed such a document “unless his age had weakened his faculties.” Burke likened the Quakers watching from a gallery to “Satan sitting like a cormorant.” Madison wrote to Benjamin Rush, “The gentlemen from South Carolina and Georgia are intemperate beyond all example and even all decorum.”
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John Pemberton, one of the Quakers observing the debate, was shocked at the “abuse and malevolence” of Burke and his colleagues. On the other hand, Pemberton noted, “Madison from Virginia spoke well on our cause.” A member of a wealthy Philadelphia family, Pemberton was intent on shutting down the slave trade worldwide, and to that end he wanted to keep Americans from participating in the trade between Africa and other countries. Madison helped him toward that goal by ensuring that in the report finally put forward, Congress declared its authority “to restrain the citizens of the United States from carrying on the African trade.” The report also declared in Madison’s words that Congress could regulate “for the humane treatment during their passage of slaves imported by the said citizens into the states admitting such importation.” William Loughton Smith objected—unsuccessfully—to specifying humane treatment on the grounds that doing so could end the slave trade. John Pemberton wrote to his brother, “Some of their hearts seem hard.”
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Madison also quieted the explosive debate in Congress by making the final report reflect what he—and most congressmen—believed the Constitution had established: Congress had no authority over the emancipation or treatment of slaves, “it remaining with the several states alone,” in Madison’s words, “to provide any regulations therein which humanity and true policy may require.” The report passed, establishing what has been called the “federal consensus.” In the years ahead, this
decision would be cited repeatedly by those who maintained that slavery was a matter exclusively under the jurisdiction of the states.
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One of Madison’s motives in quieting the debate over congressional jurisdiction, it has been suggested, was that the discussion exposed the contradiction in his own position: that slavery was wrong—“the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man,” he had called it—but that an immediate end to it was impossible. Indeed, there was one point in the debate that must have made Madison inwardly cringe, and that was when William Loughton Smith addressed what he called “fanciful schemes” that would relocate former slaves to “a remote country.” Privately, Madison advocated exactly that, and Smith struck at one of the major vulnerabilities of such colonization plans. “How could [former slaves] be called freemen if they were against their consent to be expelled?” Smith asked.
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But for all his legislative skills, Madison could not have accomplished the federal consensus without the backing of northern congressmen. His colleagues from Georgia and South Carolina opposed him at every step, but he had the crucial, albeit often tacit, support of the men of New England and the middle Atlantic states. Quaker John Pemberton noted that congressmen “who heretofore had professed highly respecting freedom and being united with us” left the House rather than speaking up in debate, and he believed he knew the reason. Congress was a body where the philosophy of “scratch me and I will scratch thee” prevailed, he wrote, and “the funding system is so much their darling” that northerners were willing to keep silent in order to gain southern support. It was an astute observation. The delegates from Massachusetts, for example, were exquisitely aware that on upcoming votes concerning the assumption of state debts by the United States, South Carolina would be their most reliable ally. But something else was also at work: a belief that while the new nation was getting started, it made no sense to discuss an issue more divisive than any other. Congressman Theodore Sedgwick, who had pressed the lawsuit that made slavery illegal in Massachusetts, called the consideration of the Quaker petitions “a very foolish thing and very indifferently managed.” Vice President John Adams,
who considered slavery a “foul contagion in the human character,” presented the slavery memorials to the Senate “rather with a sneer,” according to William Maclay, and in private correspondence referred to “the silly petition of Franklin and his Quakers.” Wrote Fisher Ames, “I am ashamed that we have spent so many days in a kind of forensic dispute—a matter of moonshine.”
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A month later, when news of Benjamin Franklin’s death reached New York, Madison had the sad task of memorializing him and moving that House members wear “the customary badge of mourning for one month.” The motion carried, but in the Senate a similar motion had to be withdrawn. The South Carolina senators hated Franklin, and other members of the Senate, wanting South Carolina’s votes on financial matters, were unwilling to wear crepe lest the South Carolinians be offended. Madison no doubt found the incivility reprehensible, but he would also have been aware of the pleasure his old friend Franklin would have taken from stirring up such trouble. One of Franklin’s last acts had been to lampoon James Jackson of Georgia, noting in a newspaper article the wondrous similarity of Jackson’s speech justifying African slavery to a speech given by one Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, a fictional Algerian pirate who was intent on justifying the enslavement of Christians.
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ALEXANDER HAMILTON’S PLAN
to restore the nation’s credit included having the federal government assume the debts that states owed for wartime expenditures, a proposition that was pleasing to Massachusetts and South Carolina, which carried large debts, but displeasing to states such as Virginia and North Carolina, which had paid off large portions of their wartime obligations. Theoretically, no state would lose from assumption because a settlement of accounts was under way, and if a state’s wartime expenditures turned out to be greater than the debt assumed by the government, that state would be owed the difference. But Virginians worried that a final settlement could take a long time to happen, or might in fact never happen, in which case the Old Dominion would end up paying for liabilities incurred by other states. Moreover,
to Virginians, Hamilton’s attitude toward debt itself seemed cavalier. He said that after state liabilities were rolled up with national ones, the federal government would pay down the consolidated debt, but it was hard to trust him on this point since he also called the debt a “national blessing.” By that he meant that once Congress had the ability to collect taxes and pay the interest on the debt, it would become a vehicle for restoring the nation’s credit. Madison agreed that the nation’s financial house had to be put in order and was willing to take necessary steps to that end, but he wanted to be clear, he told Harry Lee, “that a public debt is a public curse.”
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Pro-assumption forces managed a victory on March 9 by pulling out all the stops, even having two pro-assumptionist congressmen carried to the floor. One was Daniel Huger of South Carolina, who was lame. The other was Theodorick Bland of Virginia, who was too ill to walk. Before summer Madison would be writing to Virginia of his death.
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But on April 12, after three North Carolinians had taken their seats, assumption was defeated 31 to 29. Senator Maclay, who had been watching the debate, noted the reaction of the Massachusetts men, who could feel their state’s creditors breathing down their necks. Sedgwick left the chamber and, when he returned, appeared to have been weeping. Fisher Ames “sat torpid, as if his faculties had been benumbed.” Soon, Madison wrote to Monroe, the pro-assumptionists were speaking “a strange language on the subject,” intimating “danger to the Union from a refusal to assume.” Full of his victory, Madison bragged, “We shall risk their prophetic menaces.” It cannot have been long, however, before he realized that he needed to take them seriously. They were under increasing pressure to pay their debts, but the Constitution forbade the usual means, such as issuing paper money. States could levy taxes, but the memory of Shays’s Rebellion took that off the table. For the deeply indebted states, walking away from the prohibitions imposed by the Constitution—and thus walking away from the Union—had its attractions. Meanwhile, there was also talk coming from the South of breaking off from the newly formed Union. Madison’s friend Harry Lee, concerned that the central government was establishing “a system calculated only
for commercial society,” was beginning to think that only in “disunion” would Virginia find relief.
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Madison was sick for a few days at the end of April and probably worried through the course of the flu that laid him low about the stability of the nation. Then President Washington became dangerously ill with what Madison reported to be “a peripneumony united probably with the influenza,” and concern about the future of the country seized nearly everyone. Abigail Adams expressed the dread many felt when she wrote to her sister, “It appears to me that the union of the states and consequently the permanency of the government depend under providence upon [Washington’s] life.”
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The president began to recover in mid-May, but his illness underscored the fragility of the new-modeled nation, no doubt especially for Madison, who would, until the end of his days, see the Republic as tentative and provisional—an experiment, the result of which was not known.

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THE QUESTION
of where to locate the nation’s capital was still riling Congress in the spring of 1790, and it soon became caught up in the dispute over assumption. As Thomas Jefferson recorded it, one June day, about eight weeks after he arrived in New York, he ran into Hamilton in front of the president’s house. The Treasury secretary looked as if he had been sleeping in his clothes—if he had been sleeping at all. “Somber, haggard, and dejected beyond description,” as Jefferson described him, Hamilton lamented that his entire financial program was at risk. He bemoaned the fact that the dispute over assumption had put the Union in danger. Jefferson was sufficiently struck by the distraught Treasury secretary that he agreed to host a dinner at his new quarters in Maiden Lane to find “some temperament for the present fever.” The main guests were Madison and Hamilton, and as Jefferson reported on the results of the evening:

It ended in Mr. Madison’s acquiescence in a proposition that the question [of assumption] should be again brought before the House
by way of amendment from the Senate, that though he would not vote for it, nor entirely withdraw his opposition, yet he should not be strenuous, but leave it to its fate. It was observed, I forget by which of them, that as the pill would be a bitter one to the southern states, something should be done to soothe them; that the removal of the seat of government to the Potomac was a just measure and would probably be a popular one with them and would be a proper one to follow the assumption.

As good storytellers often do, Jefferson oversimplified his narrative, ignoring the feverish dealing that had been going on behind the scenes for months. He was not the first person Hamilton had waylaid. The Treasury secretary had approached Senator Robert Morris on the Battery and offered Pennsylvania the permanent capital in exchange for votes on assumption. When Morris, wanting a bird in the hand, insisted on Philadelphia as the temporary capital, Hamilton had dropped out of that bargaining. There was also likely a negotiation at the dinner that Jefferson didn’t describe: some consideration for Virginia in the assumption measure, such as an increase in the amount of its debt to be assumed.
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As events would show, Madison might also have insisted that the residence question be settled before he delivered the votes needed on assumption.