James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (33 page)

The House passed the resolution demanding that the president turn over papers. Washington, with encouragement from Hamilton, refused and threw the entire weight of his reputation behind the rejection, saying in his message that the only constitutional reason for the House to request the documents was if members intended to impeach him. Both the substance and the combative tone of the president’s response came as a surprise to Madison but did not slow his response. In a caucus of Republican members—the first on record—Madison called for a stand
on the principle that if a treaty required enabling legislation from Congress, “it is the constitutional right and duty of the House of Representatives, in all such cases, to deliberate on the expediency or inexpediency of carrying such a treaty into effect.”
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He won his point, 57 to 35.

Madison turned from his victory on the prerogatives of the House to the Jay Treaty itself, taking the floor on April 15 to note the treaty’s “want of real reciprocity.” The British gained commercial advantage from Jay’s negotiation, but the United States did not. He also took up the idea that war would follow if the treaty were not put into effect. Such a notion, advanced by treaty advocates, was “too visionary and incredible to be admitted into the question,” he said. There was no cause of war in a sovereign nation’s declining a treaty that was not in its self-interest, nor was Great Britain, “with all the dangers and embarrassments which are thickening upon her,” likely to seek war.
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Meanwhile, another treaty was complicating Madison’s life. President Washington had sent the U.S. minister to Britain, Thomas Pinckney, to Spain as an envoy, and he had negotiated an agreement that guaranteed the United States navigation of the Mississippi. Knowing how dear this goal was to western hearts, Madison’s opponents in the House had tried to combine appropriations for several treaties, including Pinckney’s and Jay’s, into a single resolution, thus forcing members who wanted any of the treaties to vote for all. Madison fended off that effort but was soon facing a similar move in the Senate.

“Vast exertions are on foot” not only within the House but outside it, Madison told Monroe, to get a positive vote on funds for the treaty. Commercial interests were organizing mass meetings and petition drives. “The banks, the British merchants, [and] insurance companies,” Madison wrote, were “sounding the tocsin of foreign war and domestic convulsions.” Opponents were also building support for the treaty in unexpected places, including Pennsylvania. Madison’s Princeton friend Hugh Brackenridge, now a judge in Pittsburgh, had become seized with the idea that without the Jay Treaty, which required the British to leave their western posts, the Pinckney Treaty opening up the Mississippi would be ineffective. Through a petition campaign and newspaper
editorials based on this message, he whipped up western support.
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Toward the end of April, Madison watched with dismay as a bright young Philadelphia congressman presented pro-treaty petitions to the House. Albert Gallatin, born in Switzerland, had been firm in his defense of the right of the House to ask Washington for Jay documents, but like other Republicans he was under pressure from his constituents. Madison told Jefferson that the Republican strength that the Jay Treaty had helped create was dissipating fast. “The majority has melted by changes and absence to eight or nine votes,” he wrote. Three days later, Gallatin rose on the floor of the House to announce he would vote to fund the treaty. Two days after that, Edward Livingston, who had submitted the resolution demanding treaty papers, indicated that he, too, would be voting in support.
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Then a gaunt Fisher Ames rose to speak. Directly addressing families on the frontier, he predicted that they would be slaughtered by Indians unless the British left the western garrisons, as the Jay Treaty provided, and American troops moved in: “Your cruel dangers, your more cruel apprehensions are soon to be renewed; the wounds yet unhealed are to be torn open again; in the daytime your path through the woods will be ambushed; the darkness of midnight will glitter with the blaze of your dwellings. You are a father—the blood of your sons shall fatten your cornfield; you are a mother—the war whoop shall wake the sleep of the cradle.” As Ames pictured it, Congress stood with “one hand . . . held up to reject this treaty,” while “the other grasps a tomahawk.”
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Ames’s fearmongering would have been less effective had not he and everyone else thought he was dying. A debilitating illness had taken hold of him, and he used it for all it was worth. If the treaty were not ratified, he said at the end of his speech, “Even I, slender and almost broken as my hold upon life is, may outlive the government and Constitution of my country.” John Adams reported to Abigail that Ames’s speech left “not a dry eye” in the House, and it seems to have been particularly effective with Pennsylvania congressmen.
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Already worried that the treaty’s defeat would inhibit opening of the Mississippi, they were now being told that voting against the treaty would make them
complicit in their constituents’ brutal deaths.

The portly, round-faced Frederick Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania chaired the committee of the whole when the House voted on appropriating funds for the treaty. He usually voted with the Republicans, who had elevated him to the speakership in the Third Congress, but when the vote on the Jay Treaty tied 49 to 49 in the committee of the whole, Muhlenberg joined the Federalists, saying that he did so in order that the treaty “go to the House and there be modified.” When it came before the House unmodified, however, he voted for it again. Another Pennsylvania congressman was conveniently absent. William Findley, a weathered farmer and usually dependable Republican, later claimed that he had been mailing a trunk at the time of the vote. Muhlenberg’s switch and Findley’s absence converted what would have been a tie to a victory for pro-treaty forces.
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Fifty-one members voted to fund the treaty, and forty-eight opposed.

Muhlenberg might not have read his constituents as well as he thought he had. He would never be elected to Congress again—and that wasn’t the worst of his troubles. His stand so enraged his Republican brother-in-law that a few days afterward, he stabbed Muhlenberg, nearly killing him. Findley’s disappearing tactic, on the other hand, worked. There was some caustic commentary at his expense; the
Pittsburgh Gazette
wished that the trunk had been Findley’s coffin. But he would have such a long career in Congress that he would become known as “the venerable Findley” for his length of service.
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•   •   •

THE RATIFICATION
and implementation of the Jay Treaty, the most controversial in the nation’s history, have been praised by many, who argue as the Federalists did that although it was unpalatable, it was necessary for peace. But there is reason to doubt that war with Britain would have followed on the heels of the treaty’s failure. Madison made a crucial point in his April 15 speech when he noted that it would be “madness” for the British, in the middle of war with France, to take on the United States as well. It had its navy fully employed in the fight
against the French. It needed the resources gained from trade with the United States, its biggest customer, to underwrite that navy and subsidize allies on the Continent. Matters were soon to grow even worse as a twenty-six-year-old general named Napoleon Bonaparte began to roll up one military triumph after another. Meanwhile, Britain had domestic troubles. A series of bad harvests had spiked the price of wheat and threatened mass starvation. Bread riots had already broken out across England.
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The argument that the treaty was necessary for peace is a weak one, made weaker still by the indisputable fact that it would soon lead the United States into an undeclared war with France.

Madison took the treaty loss hard, telling Jefferson that “the progress of this business throughout has to me been the most worrying and vexatious that I ever encountered, and the more so as the causes lay in the unsteadiness, the follies, the perverseness, and the defections among our friends more than in the strength or dexterity or malice of our opponents.” The Republican cause was now “in a very crippled condition,” he wrote, citing elections in New York and Massachusetts, “where the prospects were favorable, [but] have taken a wrong turn under the impressions of the moment.”
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Republican strength mattered for many reasons, including the presidential election of 1796, which Madison and Jefferson had been discussing since before debate on the Jay Treaty had begun.

Jefferson had broached the topic by hinting in the spring of 1795 that he wanted Madison to be Washington’s successor, a suggestion that prompted a strong response. “Reasons of
every
kind,” Madison wrote, “and some of them of the most
insuperable
as well as
obvious
kind, shut my mind against the admission of any idea such as you seem to glance at.” Madison might have been thinking of his need to spend more time at Montpelier, but his emphasis on the reasons being “insuperable” suggests that he might also have had his sudden attacks in mind. To anyone who knew about them, as Jefferson surely did, they were an “obvious” impediment.
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It was clear to Madison that for all Jefferson’s talk about how much he loved retirement—he had said he would not trade it “for the empire
of the universe”—he was the one who should carry the Republican standard. “You ought to be preparing yourself . . . to hear truths, which no inflexibility will be able to withstand,” he wrote. Madison likely delivered these truths during visits to Monticello in the summer and fall of 1795, but Jefferson continued to resist. Early in 1796, Madison wrote to Monroe that Republicans, realizing that Jefferson was their only hope for success, were pushing his candidacy forward. There was no formal process for choosing a nominee at this early stage of party politics. Party leaders, with Madison first among them, simply reached a consensus, and they had decided Jefferson was their man. Madison was concerned, however, that Jefferson might “mar the project and ensure the adverse election by a peremptory and
public
protest.”
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A presidential candidate in the early republic did not have to say yes, but he could derail his candidacy by saying no.

Even after Washington published his Farewell Address in September 1796 and the campaign took off in earnest, Jefferson remained ensconced at Monticello, experimenting with “a threshing machine made on the Scotch model” and trying to get new walls up at the main house, where he had demolished the upper story, before winter set in. Madison was now avoiding him, explaining to Monroe that he “thought it best to present him no opportunity of protesting to his friend against being embarked in the contest.” For vice president, there was some Republican support for Aaron Burr, but there were also recommendations that Republican electors cast one vote for Jefferson and the other for anyone except the top Federalist candidates. In the end Burr would gain just a single electoral vote from Jefferson’s supporters in Virginia, an outcome the New Yorker would not soon forget.
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Vice President John Adams was the candidate Federalists were coalescing behind, and Thomas Pinckney, who had successfully negotiated the popular treaty with Spain, had strong support for the second slot—though Pinckney, in a ship crossing the Atlantic on his way back to America, had no idea he was being pushed forward. Alexander Hamilton, not a fan of John Adams’s, was even advancing Pinckney for the top position.
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With parties still in their formative stages, it was next to
impossible to reach nationwide agreement on a ticket, and since electors, according to the Constitution, cast two votes of equal weight, it was impossible to be certain exactly who would end up where when the votes were counted.

Political operative John Beckley brought what seems a decidedly modern spirit to a campaign in which candidates didn’t acknowledge they were running—or sometimes even know it. Beckley, who had come to America as an indentured servant and with Madison’s backing become the clerk of the House of Representatives in the First Congress, had an aptitude for politics—and no embarrassment about deploying it. He organized Pennsylvania, a state in which Federalists were strong, to achieve a victory for Jefferson in 1796. His first bit of shrewdness was to encourage a slate of Republican electors with high name identification, men such as former senator William Maclay. Then he kept the list of electors under close hold until after the Federalists had made known their much less distinguished slate. Beckley accurately assessed the areas of Republican strength in Pennsylvania and gave them extra attention, making sure, for example, that handbills were sent across the Alleghenies into areas supportive of Jefferson. As the election approached, he dispatched teams throughout the state to distribute thousands of ballots containing names of Republican electors. Since voters could not submit printed ballots on Election Day, Beckley, his agents, and activists across Pennsylvania handwrote thousands of them. Anyone who didn’t want to write out the slate himself—or perhaps couldn’t write—could submit the ballot at voting time.
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So clever was Beckley that historians generally agree that he was responsible for a diplomatic note published in the
Aurora
shortly before Election Day. In it the French minister set out his country’s decidedly hostile attitude toward the United States. As Republican operatives were happy to point out, this was the result of the Jay Treaty, and if it led to war, Federalists were to blame. Madison was not pleased with the note’s publication. He thought it would drive a further wedge between the United States and France. But the threat of war might well have influenced Quakers to vote Republican and thus been
responsible for the narrow victory Jefferson eked out in Pennsylvania. Because the state’s overconfident Federalists had voted a winner-take-all system, Jefferson’s slim margin nevertheless gave him all but one of the state’s cache of electoral votes.
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In the end it wouldn’t be quite enough. When electoral votes were finally counted, Adams would have seventy-one to Jefferson’s sixty-eight. But the fact that Jefferson had fallen just three votes short sent a strong signal. Despite the Federalist win on the Jay Treaty and what was likely to be a Federalist Congress, the Republicans had demonstrated they were far more than a passing phenomenon.