Madison and Jefferson (101 page)

The War Hawks may have plotted their crusade as yet another land grab, justifying military aggression in the name of national honor. But the war quickly devolved into a family soap opera, in which the estranged parent and bratty child lost the ability to negotiate peaceably. They issued warnings. They pressured. They crowed. Theirs was a war that revisited family secrets and opened up old family wounds. The English torched the nation’s capital mainly to humiliate the president—and perhaps more than one president. For in reducing Washington the city, they were symbolically reducing Washington the general who had reduced Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown. Madison was made to appear a befuddled executive, unable to defend his hearth and home. In a fitting way, his escape from Rear Admiral Cockburn was a rerun of Jefferson’s flight from Monticello, as the cowardly governor of Virginia.

Madison lacked swagger, let alone a military reputation. He did not know how to rally the public or mobilize enough regulars. That is why he needed so badly to win over New England. Though he never took a hard line against governors who refused to send their militias to the front, neither did he give them any leeway to work out an honorable compromise with the government. New Englanders backed the U.S. Navy, but that was as far as they went. With his mishandling of the so-called John Henry plot, Madison alienated many New Englanders before the war had even begun, trying to make them appear as traitors. Playing the “sectional card” backfired.
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For the war to have succeeded, Madison needed more than propaganda. He needed a just cause, such as an attack on the United States. The impressment issue lacked the symbolic resonance to rally support for a prolonged war. Secretary of the Navy William Jones seems to have come up with a more likely scenario: if U.S. ships had refused to allow the British to search their crews and impress their sailors, forcing both sides to resort to
arms, then the war might have risen to a higher moral station in the public’s imagination. A series of “
Chesapeake
Affairs” might have made the conflict more of a national crisis.
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Another problem was that the United States was fighting two wars. One was initiated by westerners in a scheme to subdue the Indians. It was a frontier war, really nothing more than a filibuster to obtain desired land still lodged in hostile hands. The western theater had little to do with actual grievances against the British. The British were blamed for encouraging Indian atrocities during the war, but that did not move many residents along the East Coast. The other war, the one Madison cared about most deeply, stemmed from a diplomatic conflict with Great Britain over control of the high seas, which mattered more in the older, more politically savvy parts of the republic. Attempting to forge two different national threats into one grand narrative, the Madison administration convinced too few that there was a coherent logic behind the War of 1812.
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Another problem for Madison was that he was no Jefferson when it came to writing emotional texts. As a
litterateur
, he had no finesse. The War Hawks, with their overblown rhetoric, had greater influence over the narrative of war, but their rhetoric was out of touch with the actual military or fiscal strength of the government. The proud declaration of war may have secured Madison’s reelection, but a meaningful victory remained beyond his grasp. In the end, he failed to secure free trade or the acknowledgment of sovereignty on the high seas. Impressment ended when England and France stopped going to war, not because of anything Madison did.

Did he oversee a losing war? It is closer to the truth to say that Madison shook off a near defeat and ultimately survived the war. He disciplined his unruly cabinet. He gradually dislodged the congressional malcontents. He moved the federal government toward fiscal stability by turning away from the Virginia model and being more receptive to his Pennsylvanian advisers. Forced to learn lessons the hard way, he emerged intact. One thing can be said about James Madison: He was a political survivor.

Pennsylvania senator Jonathan Roberts may have captured Madison’s survival instincts best when he described a series of 1814 visits. Though they met two or three times a week that year, and Roberts typically brought “gloomy forebodings” to the president’s desk, he observed nonetheless: “I found him cheerful, he look’d through the pass’d [
sic
for past], and passing events; as ever became a great man.” Was greatness simply a refusal to cave in to pressure in the midst of war? Or was it something more: an ability to see the bigger picture? The pettiness of personal rivalries that plagued his
administration would have overwhelmed a less supple mind. Suffice it to say that if the war failed in its projected goals, that failure did not completely tarnish Madison’s reputation.
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It was a time to rebuild. Jefferson had volunteered to replenish all that was lost when the Library of Congress burned, by selling his Monticello library if the members of Congress were so inclined. For decades he had scoured Europe and America for titles and collections on subjects ranging from architecture to zoology. Some dated back to the seventeenth century. He possessed accounts of voyages encompassing every corner of the globe; atlases and travelogues in English, French, Spanish, and Italian; an array of dictionaries and encyclopedias; ecclesiastical histories in Latin; dozens of volumes on British history and an equal number on classical antiquity; and studies of jurisprudence, moral philosophy, gardening, mathematics, surgical manuals, literary criticism, and epic poetry.

He proceeded to catalog it all—6,487 volumes. The Federalists in Congress, to a man, voted vindictively to reject Jefferson’s library. One even called the books “infidel” in nature. By a partisan vote, then, the measure passed, and Thomas Jefferson allowed his books to be packed and shipped to Washington in the nine-foot-high pine cases in which they had been displayed in his private study. The new Library of Congress now contained twice as many books as it did before the war.
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Jefferson had badly needed the funds from the sale of his library in order to pay back outstanding loans. At the same time he continued to oppose rechartering of the national bank. He was wary of the wild issuance of credit and unreliable circulating paper. Monroe was a cautious ally, but both Madison and Treasury Secretary Dallas had come around to the idea of a second national bank as a check on inflation—the direct opposite interpretation to Jefferson’s.

Madison vetoed the bank recharter bill in its first incarnation in 1814, not on constitutional grounds, but because he felt it did not adequately invest the bank with the power to preserve a uniform (national) currency. Ten months later, in his annual message, he urged Congress to draft a new bill in which he ignored the rationale that the bank was primarily needed to borrow money (the argument in 1791) or collect taxes (the argument in 1814). And he gave a slight nod in Jefferson’s direction by claiming that
whether the means was through Treasury notes or a national bank, the goal in either case was to establish a uniform currency. Madison would recharter the bank, but not on Hamiltonian terms.

Congress voted in favor of recharter in April 1816, but the Bank of the United States proved to be a mixed blessing. At first a great boon to the postwar economy, rapid expansion would prove catastrophic by 1819, when prices fell, credit tightened, and the bank called in its loans. Overborrowed Americans, north, south, and west, were ruined. Smarter banking practices were then put in place, and the 1820s saw healthier growth and expansion.

But for the moment President Madison was convinced that the bank he had once thought unconstitutional was constitutional after all—and a good way for the United States to restore pubic credit abroad in peacetime. The president was at Montpelier, during what had become the government’s traditional summer/early autumn recess, when Monroe informed Jefferson that little could be done to change minds about the bank. Any subsequent discussion the third and fourth presidents had on the bank question was verbal and remains lost to history. It was a unique state of affairs when Jefferson’s position on the bank was adopted by southern Federalists, who voted against recharter in 1816 and made noises about limiting its powers in the months preceding the Panic of 1819.
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In 1815–16, for the first time in his long-embattled presidency, James Madison had a cabinet with which he felt comfortable. Madison and Monroe forgot the past disturbances in their relationship. Alexander Dallas was the new Gallatin, reliably reporting from Washington in the months when the president relaxed on his plantation. Senator William Harris Crawford of Georgia, a rising star, filled the opening at War, as Monroe reembraced the State Department. John Quincy Adams was the new minister to Great Britain, and Gallatin minister to France.

An interesting transition was under way. Federalists were muting their Federalism and recommending party “amalgamation,” under the banner of nationalism, as the way forward. The more vigorous government symbolized by Madison’s acceptance of the bank led many to perceive a mitigation of the Republican ideology. New Hampshire governor William Plumer, a Monroe supporter, had been a Federalist senator during Jefferson’s presidency. He now believed that both the Federalist and Republican parties had “expired” with the end of the war, each having “absorbed into itself much of what was best in the policy of its opponents.”
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In spite of the remaining fire-eaters on both sides of the political divide,
a consensus appeared to be slowly forming. It delivered no appreciable power to a Federalist, however, unless he explicitly abandoned his original creed first. And while that consensus began to take shape in Madison’s shadow, it would emerge as a Monrovian, not Madisonian, persuasion. Still, Henry Adams recognized what happened when he later wrote of Madison’s good fortune: “Few Presidents ever quitted office under circumstances so agreeable.” The restoration of the financial system was, to this Adams, the most noteworthy element in a new calculus. “In a single day, almost a single instant,” he declared, “the public turned from interests and passions that had supplied its thought for a generation.” As the war’s outcome provided the catharsis citizens needed, Madison’s sense of urgency vanished, allowing him to reason through the science of constitutional government and preview his future “job” as elder statesman.
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The decline of Federalism allowed for a brief respite from the politics of “faction.” As he neared his sixty-fifth birthday, Madison presided over a slowly strengthening nation. Public servants became professionals, and Congress, for the first time, voted its members a regular salary, replacing the negligible per diem meant to offset expenses. This had the added bonus of enabling more members of Congress to bring their wives and children to Washington, D.C., helping to make it more livable.
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Although James Monroe was destined to be the last U.S. president to have participated directly in the American Revolution, the inclusiveness newly possible in political life gave indications that a generation less encumbered by Republican-Federalist wrangling was coming into its own. In that sense, Virginia-born William Crawford might have been a more representative choice to succeed Madison. He had worked his way up in the ranks from farmer to schoolteacher to lawyer, then from Georgia state legislator to U.S. senator during the middle years of Jefferson’s presidency. Madison respected his talents enough to send him to France as U.S. minister during the trying years of the War of 1812, before naming him to the cabinet.

But there were other considerations. Those who wielded power in the federal government were leaving little to chance. The wheels had been set in motion some time back, and Madison clearly wanted Monroe’s ambition to be fulfilled. Thus, in early April 1816, the Republican caucus nominated James Monroe for president. “The service of his country has taken up a large share of Mr. Monroe’s active and well spent life,” the
National Intelligencer
recorded, as it showed Crawford of Georgia surprisingly close behind in votes.
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Lest one believe that all political wrangling was past, the
Virginia Argus
found it necessary to rebuke as “false and malevolent calumny” a story in the
Boston Gazette
claiming that Crawford’s supporters in Congress had resolved to cast their lot with the Federalists. Governor Daniel D. Tompkins of New York, meanwhile, agreed to be Monroe’s vice-presidential running mate, reaffirming the Virginia–New York chain of command. And Crawford settled in as secretary of the treasury, always a prominent post in the early republic. He would hold on to it for the duration of Monroe’s two-term administration.
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As James Madison planned a peaceful final year in office and a smooth transition, he continued to come under attack from certain enclaves in New England where the past hung on. If Jefferson could boast a cabinet with little turmoil and little turnover for eight years, Madison had seen a long succession of short-lived cabinet officers and unsuitable field generals. The
Massachusetts Spy
took joy in trying to list them all—dredging up the Robert Smith imbroglio and the names of military mediocrities such as Dearborn, Hull, and Wilkinson. It was all meant to show that Madison was a poor judge of character.

Unanimity was not then, or ever, an American trait. Even among Monroe’s supporters, there were those who estimated him according to his less commendable traits: hypersensitivity, hastiness, a lackluster intellect. Typical of the shrill voices that continued to personalize politics, the
Alexandria Gazette
maintained a constant drone from the south side of the Potomac. “As to Mr. Monroe, there is little we know that should entitle him to the high distinction he covets,” read a representative article, “unless it is playing the fawning parasite.” In 1808, the
Gazette
reminded readers, the parasitic Monroe was “in disgrace with the old man of the mountain”—Jefferson the puppeteer. Making fun of politicians still sold papers.
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