James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (34 page)

Results were trickling in when Madison arrived back in Philadelphia with Mrs. Madison and his twenty-two-year-old sister, Frances Madison, on November 22. By the time the second session of the Fourth Congress convened on December 5, the outcome was still uncertain, but Madison felt obliged to send a warning to Jefferson: “You
must
reconcile yourself to the secondary as well as the primary station.”
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As it became clear that Jefferson would indeed be John Adams’s vice president, Jefferson wrote Adams a letter. Such a communication was not a bad idea, particularly since the election had made the candidate of the party opposed to Adams his vice president, but the letter dramatically claimed that Jefferson had never wanted to be president: “I leave to others the sublime delights of riding in the storm, better pleased with sound sleep and a warm berth below.” It seemed at once haughty and harsh, referring to Hamilton a little too cleverly as Adams’s “archfriend.” Jefferson might have had an inkling that the letter wasn’t quite right, because he sent it by way of Madison and asked his friend to review it. Madison did and tactfully suggested that Jefferson consider whether the letter might not change his relationship with Adams, which was cordial, for the worse, particularly since Adams was of a “ticklish” temper. The letter went unsent.
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Madison had announced his retirement from Congress. He was “wearied with public life,” he would later write, “and longed for a return to a state in which he could indulge his relish for the intellectual pleasures of the closet and the pursuits of rural life.” He also noted that his farm,
as he liked to call Montpelier, was “the only resource of his future support.” William Wirt, a Virginia lawyer, would later write that Madison’s health, “in a visible and alarming decline,” was another reason for his retirement. Wirt explained that “his constitution had received a serious shock,” so he might have experienced another sudden attack of some severity.
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Madison and his family were still in Philadelphia when Jefferson arrived to be sworn in, and the vice president elect stayed with them overnight before moving to a hotel. It was spring before the Madisons had packed up their furniture, including purchases that Monroe had made for them in Paris, and were ready to leave the city. They took a roundabout way to their Virginia home, traveling through Harpers Ferry and visiting relatives along the way, and it was the end of April when they neared Montpelier.
⁵⁵
In the woods along the road, dogwoods were flowering, and sweet spire blossomed where the ground was damp.

As they approached the house, Madison might have noticed pale yellow flowers on the buckeye tree that had been planted in the southwest corner of the yard some seven years before. Who could have imagined all that would happen in the meantime, Hamilton’s ascendancy and the threat his policies posed, the Jay Treaty, which had completed Madison’s break with President Washington? He would never visit Mount Vernon again. Seven years earlier, he had just begun to suspect that the threat to the Republic would come not from the states, as he had originally thought, but from a too strong central government. Now he was certain of it—and alarmed that opposition to government policies, which he viewed as utterly necessary, was taken as subversive. Even in his Farewell Address, Washington had continued to advance that notion.

Madison’s personal life had also undergone remarkable change. Seven years earlier he had been a bachelor, and who would have supposed that those days would end with the lovely woman in the carriage beside him?

•   •   •

JOHN ADAMS
took note of Madison’s retirement. “It is marvelous how political plants grow in the shade,” he wrote to Abigail.
⁵⁶
Madison had no formal plans to reenter politics himself, but he was certainly ambitious for his friend Jefferson, and should he achieve the presidency, it was as certain as day following night that he would call on Madison to assist him. In the event that happened, Madison would, as Adams observed, benefit from time spent out of the
glare.

ABOUT THE TIME THAT JOHN ADAMS
was sworn in as president, William Martin, captain of the
Cincinnatus,
a ship out of Baltimore, was being tortured with thumbscrews. The officers of the French brig that had captured Martin’s ship wanted him to say that his cargo was English property and therefore liable to French seizure. Martin resisted and got away with his cargo intact when more attractive prey, a British ship, sailed by, but his story and others in a similar vein made it clear that the French, furious about the Jay Treaty, had reached a determination: if British ships were no longer going to give neutral vessels a pass, neither would they.
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The French also broke off diplomatic relations, and one of the people Adams asked to be part of a negotiating team to go to Paris and repair them was James Madison. The former congressman refused, probably in part because of his aversion to deep water, but he might have also found the experience of his neighbor James Monroe instructive. As minister to France, Monroe, rather than following the Washington administration’s policy and defending the Jay Treaty, had urged that it be renegotiated. Diplomats weren’t supposed to give free rein to their own
opinions but to represent those who appointed them, which in the case of the Adams administration Madison had no desire to do. Better to continue the path he was on, gradually becoming the patriarch of Montpelier and paying serious attention to farming. The war in Europe had sent grain prices skyrocketing, and by carefully cultivating his wheat fields, Madison hoped to put the estate’s finances on a firmer footing.
²

He also wanted to enlarge the house at Montpelier so that it suited two families, and he came up with an ingenious and lovely plan for building a thirty-foot addition on the north and shifting the axis of the house in that direction. A two-story Tuscan portico across the front of the extended house unified the whole, although the house was in fact a duplex now, with separate spaces for the older Madisons on one side and for James, Dolley, and their family on the other. In later years, a central doorway with fanlight and sidelights would be added, and the illusion of a single, gracious dwelling would be complete.
³

Madison was his own architect, and while he probably relied on books in his library, including one showing Palladio’s designs, he was not a stickler for rules. His portico combined Tuscan columns with an Ionic entablature, and his practicality showed itself when it came to the fanlight over the front door. It was originally designed as a semicircle, probably to harmonize with a semicircular window intended for the portico, but when Madison learned that the first-floor ceiling would have to be raised to accommodate the fanlight, he decided instead on a semi-oval window that would fit the existing structure.
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Madison was also his own general contractor, ordering materials, hiring workmen, and supervising construction. On Christmas Day 1797, he wrote to Jefferson to place an order with the nailery at Monticello for nearly 150,000 nails. Madison also asked the vice president to purchase window glass, brass locks, and brass hinges for him. Jefferson not only tended to his friend’s request but also advised him on a better hinge for his doors.
⁵

The Madisons visited friends in the neighborhood and traveled farther afield to see relatives. After their furniture from Philadelphia arrived, they acquired a few more things from Monroe, who had brought
extra goods back from Paris. An eighteen-foot tablecloth was one of the items purchased, which suggests that the Madisons were entertaining despite renovations under way. Dolley, unconstrained now by Quaker demands for simplicity, no doubt carried out her duties as hostess dressed as fashionably as was possible far from a city. One of her letters hints at the difficulty. She had asked her friend Eliza Collins Lee to buy and send her hose, but unfortunately the ones that arrived were too small. “The hose will not fit even my darling little husband,” Dolley wrote.
⁶

Missing from this new life were offspring. “Madison still childless,” wrote Aaron Burr to James Monroe, “and I fear like to continue so.” Why James and Dolley had no children will never be known, and although he no doubt regretted not being a father, it might also have been a relief, given the widespread belief that epilepsy was hereditary. A highly influential treatise that Madison could have easily found in Jefferson’s library went so far as to declare it a duty for those with epilepsy to remain celibate. In any case, the Madisons’ childlessness did not equate with loneliness. James and Dolley were surrounded by young people: her son, Payne, and her sister Anna; his youngest sister, Fannie; and dozens of nieces and nephews.
⁷

Since his arrival back home coincided with his father’s failing health, Madison’s new role seemed to satisfy them both, though one wonders how the frugal James senior regarded the great expansion of the family home. And James junior must surely have been conscious of how far he had come from the aspiration of his younger years “to depend as little as possible on the labor of slaves.” There were a hundred human beings enslaved at Montpelier, some of whose names we know from Madison’s letters. When he had learned that Billey Gardner, whom he had helped become a free man, had died in an accident at sea, Madison had asked his father to “let old Anthony and Betty know that their son Billey is no more.” When his parents traveled to take healing waters, Madison kept them apprised of the whereabouts and health of Jacob, Sam, Simon, Ralph, and Joseph. The house slaves at Montpelier were an ever-present part of the Madisons’ lives, serving them meals, helping them dress, and
taking care of the multitude of tasks that made the household function. The quarters in which the domestic slaves lived were very close to the house. Smoke from the fires and the smells of cooking would have drifted into Madison’s library while he read. He would have heard the sounds of slave children playing.
⁸

•   •   •

MADISON FOUND HIMSELF
a counselor of sorts to James Monroe. Still shaken by his recall, Monroe, back in Albemarle now, sought Madison’s advice about preventing new blows to his reputation. Monroe’s first worry had to do with the payments that Alexander Hamilton had made to James Reynolds some five years before. They had become public, thanks to a brilliant, twisted, and starving immigrant from Scotland, James Callender, who was on his way to becoming the greatest scandalmonger in American history. Sarcastically dismissing the idea that the payments had been made to keep Reynolds quiet about the affair that Hamilton was having with his wife, Callender insinuated that Hamilton had been using Reynolds to purchase speculative certificates for him. The charge drove Hamilton into a frenzy. He blamed Monroe for leaking information to Callender, and the two nearly came to a duel. Hamilton even published a pamphlet aimed at proving definitively that he was an adulterer, not a speculator, and it was an angry exchange of letters reproduced in that pamphlet that had Monroe concerned. He asked Madison, was he obliged to pursue Hamilton further? Madison assured him that he was not, perhaps smiling to himself as he did so, realizing that the sensational details that Hamilton had revealed about his affair with Mrs. Reynolds made it highly unlikely that anyone was going to focus on Monroe.
⁹

Several months later, when Monroe became concerned about insults that President Adams was directing his way, Madison again urged caution, noting that “the present paroxysm may pass off with as great a rapidity as it has been brought on.” When the younger man became agitated over Adams’s military buildup and the taxes he was proposing to pay for it, Madison sounded like a soothsayer on a mountaintop,
responding that it was all part of a steady movement away from revolutionary principles that would soon reverse itself. “The tide of evil is nearly at its flood,” he wrote, and “will ebb back to the true mark which it has overpassed.”
¹⁰

Madison seems to have managed a psychological separation from events in the world below, but it soon came to an end. President Adams reported that his diplomatic attempt to reach out to the French had failed and, when Congress demanded to know the details, sent it dispatches showing that three agents of the French foreign minister, dubbed X, Y, and Z, had demanded a bribe and a loan for the French war effort before the government would even receive the diplomats. Madison, hearing of the news at Montpelier, was amazed, though not about the French foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, being corrupt—that was widely acknowledged. But Talleyrand had spent time in America, understood how hard it was to keep secrets in the United States, and should have known better than to think his attempt to secure a bribe would work. “Its unparalleled stupidity is what fills one with astonishment,” Madison wrote.
¹¹

As citizens pictured America’s upright and honest envoys being pestered by decadent Frenchmen with their hands out, the XYZ Affair, as it became known, led to a great surge of patriotism. President Adams was lionized. The newspapers were full of addresses declaring affection for him and expressing confidence in his wisdom. At Jim Cameron’s Philadelphia tavern, he was toasted repeatedly as the crowd “roared like a hundred bulls.” More than a thousand supportive young men wearing black cockades (ribbons pinched to look like flowers) marched to his house, two by two, to pay respects.
¹²

The anti-French rallying cry became “Millions for defense, but not a cent for tribute,” and Republican congressmen who would once have been hesitant enthusiastically joined the Federalists in expanding the army and the navy. Congress declared all treaties with France null and void and authorized the president to order his commanders to seize armed French vessels anywhere on the high seas.
¹³
The nation was at war—although war had not been declared.

•   •   •

CONGRESS ALSO PASSED
and the president signed measures to deal with what many considered the enemy within. The first target was immigrants, who, as Federalists saw it, were likely to have foreign allegiances. They were a political nuisance besides, since they tended to align themselves with Republicans. One piece of legislation gave the president power to expel aliens of any nation during either peace or war simply on the grounds that he suspected them of being dangerous. Madison, writing to Jefferson, declared the bill “a monster that must forever disgrace its parents.”
¹⁴

A sedition bill that would throttle the Republican press was clearly on the way, but in the case of Benjamin Franklin Bache, the twenty-eight-year-old grandson of Benjamin Franklin and publisher of the
Aurora,
the administration could not bring itself to wait. On June 26, 1798, even as a sedition bill was being introduced into the Senate, Bache was arrested under common law for “libeling the president and the executive government in a manner tending to excite sedition and opposition to the laws.” It was also on that day that Vice President Jefferson requested leave from the Senate for the rest of the term and left the city. He probably did not know but likely suspected the efforts the administration was making to unearth information about him and worried that he, too, would be arrested.
¹⁵

On his way to Monticello, Jefferson stopped to see Madison at Montpelier, and as candles were lit, the two men could hear the sound of evening thunder.
¹⁶
The distant rumblings provided a fittingly ominous background for their discussion of how to confront the dangers to liberty that the nation faced.

Both Madison and Jefferson had been counseling a watchful waiting, Madison on the grounds that the Federalists’ oppressive acts would awaken the citizenry. Jefferson had believed that with patience “we shall see the reign of witches pass over.” But now something had to be done. There were many reasons to have formed a union of states under the Constitution, but none higher than the liberty to think and speak freely, which was now in jeopardy. As the two men explored remedies, they
realized that there was no recourse to be had in Congress, where the legislation they so abhorred was in favor. Nor did they see the courts as an option. They were also controlled by the Federalists, as had been demonstrated the previous year, when Richmond jurors had charged Virginia congressman Samuel J. Cabell for daring to criticize the Adams administration in circular letters to his constituents.
¹⁷
Madison and Jefferson finally concurred in a plan to persuade state legislatures to oppose the Alien and Sedition Acts, and they agreed that they would act secretly, not writing under their own names, but working through others.

•   •   •

BY MID-JULY
a sedition bill was passed and signed into law by President Adams, making it illegal to write, print, utter, or publish “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States or either house of the Congress of the United States or the president of the United States with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said president, or to bring them or either of them . . . the hatred of the good people of the United States.”
¹⁸
Anyone reading the law would have been hard put to miss the fact that one prominent federal officer was not on the list of the protected: John Adams’s chief political rival, the vice president of the United States. It was a clear sign of the political intent of the bill, though Federalists, still operating out of an older way of thinking, no doubt saw the omission of the vice president as insuring against Jefferson’s traitorously attacking the government.

Violators of the Sedition Act were soon being thrown in jail. One was Vermont congressman Matthew Lyon, who had the temerity to accuse the Adams administration of overlooking the people’s welfare “in a continual grasp for power, in an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice.” Editors and journalists with Republican leanings were indicted, including William Duane, who had succeeded Bache at the
Aurora;
Thomas Cooper of the
Gazette
in Northumberland, Pennsylvania; and Thomas Adams of Boston’s
Independent Chronicle
.
David Brown, an impoverished, semiliterate man who wandered the Massachusetts countryside preaching Republican doctrine, was tried and convicted. The Federalist Fisher Ames viewed him as one of the “runners” sent “to blow the trumpet of sedition” and was particularly perturbed that he had inspired Dedham citizens to set up a liberty pole, an “insult on the law,” Ames deemed it. New Jersey’s Luther Baldwin was also caught up in the frenzy, fined, and jailed after he informed a barkeep that he did not care if cannon fire hit John Adams in the arse.
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