James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (8 page)

Jefferson had proposed that Virginia’s constitution be ratified by the people “assembled in their respective counties.” This suggestion was also ignored, but Madison saw its inherent correctness. This was a further way to distinguish a fundamental document from a legislative act and thereby shelter it from constant change. In later years, when Madison drafted a constitution for the nation, he would provide for “an
assembly or assemblies of representatives . . . expressly chosen by the people, to consider and decide thereon.”
¹⁶

On June 29, 1776, delegates in Williamsburg adopted the constitution over which they had long labored, and as if to prove the point that they were a legislative body rather than an assembly for creating paramount law, they rolled themselves over into the lower house of Virginia’s legislative branch, scheduled to meet in the fall. The constitution also created a governorship, one weak enough so that there was no danger of the incumbent disregarding the legislature, as royal governors had sometimes done, and the delegates elected Patrick Henry to the post.

As the convention in Williamsburg neared adjournment, members of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia approved the proposal that the Virginia Convention had instructed its representatives to offer. On July 2, 1776, they affirmed “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”

On July 4, the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence, giving universal justification to America’s course in Jefferson’s soaring prose: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.”

•   •   •

MADISON HAD READ
enough history to know that he was at the center of epoch-shaping events, and he had reason to be optimistic about the outcome. While he knew from listening to Edmund Randolph of the many difficulties that General Washington and his army faced, he likely balanced these in his mind against the long string of punishing blows that
troops engaged in the American cause had so far delivered: The militiamen of Massachusetts had killed and wounded hundreds of the redcoats who had tried to seize arms at Concord; Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys had captured Fort Ticonderoga; the defenders of Breed’s Hill had inflicted punishing casualties on the British. Virginia troops had dealt a devastating blow to Lord Dunmore at the Battle of Great Bridge, near Norfolk, and General George Washington and his army had forced the British from Boston.

Within months, however, the news turned ominous. The British had landed tens of thousands of troops on Long Island and in late August routed the American army, forcing Washington to evacuate across the East River to Manhattan. The British followed, and Washington retreated north to Harlem Heights, abandoning New York City. In October, as Madison traveled the route from Orange County to Williamsburg to serve in the newly formed House of Delegates, Virginians learned from the
Virginia
Gazette
that much of New York had burned.
¹⁷

But even the deep concerns of war did not bring a cessation of politics, and Madison found the assembly caught up in a controversy that he had helped create. Pursuing the religious amendment to the Virginia Declaration of Rights to its logical conclusion, petitioners flooded the House of Delegates with calls for ending state support of the Anglican Church. One group, quoting the amendment for which Madison had been responsible, demanded in the pages of the
Virginia Gazette
“that all religious denominations within this dominion be forthwith put in the full possession of equal liberty, without preference or preeminence, which, while it may favor one, can hurt another, and that no religious sect whatever be established in this commonwealth.” A group from Prince Edward County wrote that they viewed the religious amendment to the Declaration of Rights “as the rising sun of religious liberty to relieve them from a long night of ecclesiastical bondage” and urged that “without delay, all church establishments might be pulled down and every tax upon conscience and private judgment abolished.” The fact that one of Madison’s friends from Princeton, Samuel Stanhope Smith, was a Presbyterian leader in Prince Edward County and that Madison
had been in recent communication with him suggests that Madison might not have been entirely surprised at the outpouring of response to the amendment he had helped create.
¹⁸

There were zealous Anglicans in the assembly, but delegates such as Madison who wanted to end state sponsorship of the church had gained a powerful leader for their cause. Thomas Jefferson had retired from his seat in the Continental Congress in the late summer of 1776 in order to serve in the Virginia legislature, his aim being to reform “many very vicious points” of legislation that had grown up under British rule, among them the Anglican dominance that he called “spiritual tyranny.” Madison and Jefferson, whose Piedmont homes were only thirty miles apart, had not met before, and because of what Madison described as “the disparities between us,” they would not yet become fast friends. Eight years older than Madison and a man of national reputation, Jefferson was not a newcomer, expected to watch and learn, but a seasoned politician. He was a force in committee meetings, waging what he called “desperate contests” against the established church. Edmund Pendleton was a particularly adept foe, “the ablest man in debate I have ever met,” Jefferson wrote, describing him as “never vanquished”: “You never knew when you were clear of him but were harassed by his perseverance until the patience was worn down of all who had less of it than himself.”
¹⁹
While Jefferson and his allies managed to do away with laws punishing heresy and requiring church attendance, permanently ending state support for religion was, for the moment, beyond their reach. But Jefferson and Madison, no less than Pendleton, knew the meaning of perseverance, and year after year, as friendship between them grew, they held on to this cause, supporting each other, spelling each other, and eventually succeeding.

As the House of Delegates neared adjournment, news of the war caused alarm akin to panic. The British had driven George Washington and his ragtag army out of New York and pursued them across New Jersey. According to the
Virginia Gazette,
thousands of British troops had followed the Americans into Pennsylvania, an account that turned out to be false, but the newspaper’s report that the Continental
Congress had fled from Philadelphia was accurate. Fearing that Virginia would be attacked, the assembly decided on December 21, 1776, to grant Patrick Henry and his council extraordinary powers.
²⁰
A severely constrained executive was one thing in theory but quite another with the enemy at the door.

As Henry, armed with his new authority, readied a general militia call, an astonishing event unfolded in New Jersey. George Washington led twenty-four hundred men back across the icy Delaware River, surprised Hessian mercenaries quartered at Trenton, and took nearly a thousand of them prisoner. His victories there and at Princeton in early January 1777 raised hopes once more, including, no doubt, those at the Madison home. News was slow to arrive in the Piedmont, but by the end of January, James Madison, home after the adjournment of the House of Delegates, would have heard of Washington’s thrilling feats and had reason to think it was a new season for the American cause.

For Madison, however, the early years of the war had even more peaks and valleys than they did for his fellow countrymen. No sooner were there signs that the American effort might succeed than he suffered an ignominious political defeat. “Swilling the planters with bumbo,” as providing food and drink for voters was called, was a long-established practice among Virginia politicians. Madison’s great-uncle Thomas Chew had gained a measure of fame in 1741, when as a candidate for the House of Burgesses he brought a punch bowl into the courthouse itself. Believing that the spirit of the Revolution demanded a more sober approach, Madison chose not to treat freeholders as they arrived to vote, a decision that caused him to lose the election to Charles Porter, a barkeep who offered an ample supply of spirits.
²¹

Porter took Madison’s seat in the assembly, but delegates there remembered the impressive young man from Orange, and on November 15, 1777, they elected him to serve as one of the eight members of the Council of State, a body that had to concur with the governor’s decisions in order for him to act. Madison thus became, in the words of his biographer Irving Brant, “one-ninth of a governor.”
²²

On Madison’s first day on the council, he saw the complexities of the
war that America was waging. Although American forces under the command of General Horatio Gates had won a crucial victory at Saratoga, General Washington’s men were suffering. Together with Governor Henry council members took up a letter from a congressional committee, “representing the alarming accounts of the distresses of the American army” at Valley Forge. Washington had reported that unless provisions were sent, the army would “
starve,
dissolve,
or
disperse,
” and the committee wanted Virginia’s help. Appalled at the incompetence of the Continental commissary, which should have been supplying the troops, Henry and the council nonetheless sent agents to track down cattle and hogs for Washington’s men. “It will indeed be unworthy [of] the character of a zealous American to entrench himself within the strict line of official duty,” Henry wrote.
²³

Virginia, meanwhile, had begun to conduct diplomacy and war on its own. On his first day on the council, Madison voted approval of orders to Colonel David Rogers to recruit thirty men at double pay and proceed down the Mississippi, ascertaining British strength along the way. In New Orleans, Rogers was to acquire provisions and, if possible, obtain a loan from the Spanish governor of Louisiana, Bernardo de Gálvez. With the orders to Rogers, Henry enclosed a letter for Gálvez and an explanation that a missive formerly sent was so badly translated into French—the language of diplomacy—that “the meaning . . . was omitted.”
²⁴
Madison, with his competent French and, one assumes, great tact, likely helped Henry realize that his previous letter to the Spanish governor had been gibberish.

Madison probably learned within a few days of beginning service on the council of another of Henry’s undertakings, this one aimed at protecting Virginia’s interest in its western lands, a vast stretch of territory northwest of the Ohio River, which the commonwealth claimed under its royal charters. Henry had agreed to a plan put forward by George Rogers Clark, a charismatic red-haired militia major, for Clark to undertake a campaign aimed at driving the British out of the western lands and subduing their Indian allies. During Madison’s time on the Council of State, Clark would accomplish one seemingly impossible feat after
another, including capturing both the fort at Vincennes and the lieutenant governor of Detroit, Henry Hamilton. Eventually, Clark’s luck would turn, but not before his Virginia-sponsored foray earned him a place in the history books as “the conqueror of the Northwest.”
²⁵

When the council and the governor decided to seek European financial support for the war, Thomas Jefferson, serving in the House of Delegates, suggested his neighbor, Philip Mazzei, as an agent, a cause that Madison took up. Mazzei, who had come to the Piedmont from Tuscany to introduce wine making to Virginia, was commissioned to seek a loan for 900,000 pounds in Europe. Genial and outgoing, Mazzei hoped for the best as he sailed but prepared for the worst. “I have put my papers with a four-pounds ball in a bag to be thrown overboard, if prudence should require it,” he told Madison. Mazzei’s ship was stopped by a British privateer before he had sailed through the Virginia Capes, and his papers with the four-pound ball went to the bottom of the Chesapeake. The ship was taken to New York, where Mazzei managed to talk the British into letting him sail for Europe. He made it to Paris, where Benjamin Franklin regarded him and other agents acting on behalf of individual states as pests. Franklin apologized to French officials for their behavior.
²⁶

The failure of this venture into international finance might have been a lesson for both Madison and Jefferson about the hazards of states conducting foreign policy, and for at least the next five years it would have personal consequences as well. In an effort to collect the salary he believed owed to him for his work, the irrepressible Mazzei made the rounds of the powerful in Virginia. In 1784, Madison wrote to Jefferson to warn him that Mazzei was coming to see him. “I tremble at the idea,” replied Jefferson, who suffered from migraines. “He will be worse to me than a return of my double quotidian headache.”
²⁷

In later years, Jefferson advanced the idea that Madison had prepared so many of Governor Henry’s papers, particularly his foreign correspondence, that he deserved to be recognized as his secretary. The notion is probably exaggerated, but Madison was so skilled at gathering and absorbing information, compiling what was most important from it, and
writing quick and cogent responses that Henry, who had a reputation for not liking to take up either book or pen, no doubt found ways to take advantage of his skills. The governor probably relied on Councilor Madison to handle a great deal of routine paperwork and administrative detail, which might account for Madison’s sentiment in later years that the council was “a grave of useful talents.”
²⁸