Madison and Jefferson (110 page)

At the end of his deficient statement, he wrote: “I am sorry Sir that I could not make a better contribution to your fund of biographical matter.”
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It surely would have pleased those living if Madison had had something more precious to convey about his and Jefferson’s long partnership. Though uninhibited and at times ribald among friends, his reserve when it came to publication marked him as a cautious actor. When Paulding read too much into his letter, believing there was more to come and that it would be a substantive history of the Revolution and the constitutional era, Madison wrote back: “I did not mean I had in view a
History
of any sort, public or personal, but only a preservation of materials of which I happened to be a Recorder, or to be found in my voluminous correspondence.”
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In 1832 and 1833 Madison was called upon to offer judgments on nullification, slavery, and other weighty matters. Along with John Marshall, who was concurrently chief justice and president of the American Colonization Society, Madison defended the society’s project of relocating American blacks to West Africa. He saw this imperfect option as the best alternative to the “convulsions” that he believed inevitable if simple, across-the-board emancipation were to take place. He recognized as a central problem “the consent of the individuals to be removed,” for which he could offer no possible resolution; but he held out hopes of seeing “gifts & legacies from the opulent, the philanthropic, and the conscientious.” He counted on the state legislatures to provide funds, and he saw that, even with such funding, West Africa was too distant a destination for easy coordination to be undertaken in the United States. Madison’s “auxiliary” plan would involve colonization on those Caribbean islands “where the colored population is already dominant.” When Marshall stepped down in 1833, Madison accepted his turn as president of the American Colonization Society. And in October 1834, to balance his accounts, Madison
sold
sixteen of his slaves to a relative.
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When the English writer and abolitionist Harriet Martineau visited Montpelier in February 1835, she found the last of the Revolutionary patriarchs amiable and attentive, though he complained of deafness in one ear. “He talked more on the subject of slavery than any other,” Martineau noted. But Madison did not retreat from colonization. He pointed out “how the free states discourage the settlement of blacks; how Canada disagrees with them; how Hayti shuts them out; so that Africa is their only refuge.” To Madison’s remarks, Martineau added her own commentary: “He did not assign any reason why they should not remain where they are when freed.” He also confessed to her that his own slaves were relieved to learn that they were not to be colonized in West Africa, which they much feared.

These contradictions bothered Martineau. Madison might rationalize that conditions had improved for the slaves of Virginia, but such wishful thinking did nothing to comfort the abolitionist, and she ultimately found a tragic depth to his feelings about slavery. She added pathos to the scene she witnessed at Montpelier by describing how “his little person [was] wrapped in a black silk gown,” propped up by a pillow, as his wife read to him.
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That summer Madison described his mixed feelings about the state of the nation to another elderly Virginian. He foresaw disunion as a real possibility, but at the same time he refused to surrender his hope for “a more tranquil and harmonious course of our public affairs.” He evidently had his own infirmities on his mind as he theorized about sectional politics: “A sickly countenance is not inconsistent with a self-healing capacity of a Constitution such as I hope ours is; and still less with medical resources in the hands of a people such as I hope ours will prove to be.” To those who inquired after his well-being in the summer and fall of 1835—President Jackson, John Quincy Adams’s son Charles Francis, and others—Madison offered the same refrain: his health was “broken by chronic complaints,” mainly rheumatic joints. Warm weather offered some reprieve, but by November 1835 he was unable even to walk across his bedroom.
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In July 1835 Chief Justice Marshall died. Lafayette had passed away the year before. Randolph of Roanoke had met his fate in 1833, telling his doctor at the end: “I have been an idiosyncrasy all my life.”
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There was really no one of the Revolutionary generation left, save for Madison and Aaron Burr, who was in New York and destined to outlive the Virginian by only two and a half months. Like Madison, the political exile, once prosecuted for treason, and who for two decades had maintained a steady, if understated, law
practice, accepted the energetic, if intellectually deficient, Andrew Jackson as president. But unlike Madison, Burr was not called upon for his expert opinion anymore. History had cast its vote against him.

At Christmastime 1835 Madison was still answering his correspondence. He responded to a report from Secretary of the Treasury Levi Woodbury: “The exuberant prosperity of our Country is a happy illustration of the beneficent operation of its political Institutions.” After New Year’s he received a policy update from Vice President Van Buren, and information on the planning of the Washington Monument from William Cranch, a longtime federal district judge related to Abigail Adams. A professor sent him his “Geological Reconnaissance of the State of Virginia,” and many others wrote for his views on constitutional matters. Madison’s eyes had weakened, and it became difficult for him to read for any length of time. At eighty-five, he had been worn down by successive winters of rheumatic pain. Yet he faithfully answered his mail, sometimes through dictation, other times in his own hand.
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In the years since Jefferson’s death, Madison had given regular attention to their combined legacy as well as their individual legacies. Like Jefferson, he made certain to prepare his papers for posterity. Conscious of a duty to history, he had shared letters from the era of the founding with Jared Sparks, a Harvard graduate born in the year George Washington became president, who in the 1830s reigned as the most prolific chronicler of the founders. He welcomed to Montpelier the historian George Bancroft, who would go on to produce a massive history of the United States.

He was doing all he could to stay involved. Dolley kept watch and doted. In his last will, prepared in April 1835—expecting that his collected papers would fetch a good price for his widow—Madison felt secure in bequeathing substantial sums to the American Colonization Society, the University of Virginia, and his alma mater, Princeton.

He received a visit in May 1836 from Charles Jared Ingersoll of Philadelphia, a War of 1812–era congressman whose father had served alongside Madison in the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War. After a bumpy ride from the Orange Court House, Ingersoll described the surrounding countryside: “The woods were in foliage, the white-thorn and red-bud trees in greater number than I had ever seen them, giving a pleasant coloring to what was otherwise a wild, poor, and uninteresting region. Nearer Mr. Madison’s, the country is more improved, and the mountain scenery is very agreeable.” On the property itself, Ingersoll found “signs of ornamental agriculture,” but the brick mansion was “decayed and in need
of considerable repairs.” Inside were French carpets and tall mirrors, and a table “handsomely provided” with an impressive array of foods and wines.

As the two men spoke of current affairs, Madison made it a point to bemoan the fate of the slave economy. He was somewhat less sanguine than he had been when the Englishwoman Harriet Martineau recently visited. To Ingersoll, he predicted “troubles and explosions,” and while willing to discourse on any and all political subjects, Madison left his guest feeling that the nullification controversy had sent a shock through his system. But there was one subject about which he felt no indecision. “You perceive directly that Mr. Jefferson is the god of his idolatry,” Ingersoll wrote. Madison kept several Jefferson portraits on the wall, and while he referred to his friend the fifth president simply as “Monroe,” he never mentioned his predecessor except as “
Mr.
Jefferson.” When pressed on past actors, Madison refused to speak ill even of Hamilton. In a tribute subsequently published in a Washington, D.C., newspaper, the Philadelphian concluded of Madison: “A purer, brighter, juster spirit never existed.”
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During Ingersoll’s visit, Madison’s rapidly deteriorating health concerned Dolley. He was unable, she wrote, “even to exert his thoughts without oppressive fatigue.” Breathing was becoming more difficult. By the time Jefferson’s physician, Dr. Dunglison, was called to Montpelier, there was nothing to be done.

The last obligation Madison accepted was to review the biography of Jefferson by Professor George Tucker, while in manuscript. Learning that it was being dedicated to him, he penned a note of gratitude to the author on June 27, 1836. “Apart from the value put on such a mark of respect from you in a dedication of your Life of Mr. Jefferson to me, I could only be governed in accepting it by my confidence in your capacity to do justice to a character so interesting to his country and to the world; and I may be permitted to add with whose principles of liberty and political career mine have been so extensively congenial.” Tucker advised him that the proof sheets were with the printer in Philadelphia, and Madison could expect to receive his copy “as soon as it can be bound.”
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It may have been Madison’s wish to expire on Independence Day, as the second, third, and fifth presidents had all done, ten and five years earlier. But that did not occur. On Tuesday, June 28, at breakfast, and attended by a niece, the fourth president spoke a few words to reassure her that he was feeling fine, then slumped over and quietly left the world. It was, officially, the end of the Virginia Dynasty of presidents.

In the U.S. Senate, on the thirtieth, Virginian William Cabell Rives, a protégé
of Madison’s and Jefferson’s alike, could not resist invoking the providential deaths of Adams, Jefferson, and Monroe. Referring to Madison’s “trembling and unsteady signature” at the end of the letter he held in his hand, dated just the week before, Rives expressed his personal sorrow, adding: “Still I trusted that his light might hold out to the 4th of July, that he might be restored on that glorious anniversary to an immortal companionship with those great men and patriots. But it has been ordered otherwise.”
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The
National Intelligencer
declared: “
JAMES MADISON
is no more!” It celebrated Madison’s genius, as “the last of the great lights of the Revolution, the brightest of those great minds,” and gave him the serene end he deserved: “He expired without a struggle, free from pain, free from regret, and from cause of reproach.” The same newspaper had proclaimed ten years before: “
THOMAS JEFFERSON
is no more!” The metaphors of light were equally resplendent then: “His weary sun hath made a golden set, leaving a bright tract of undying fame to mark his path to a glorious immortality.” At moments such as these, the press routinely called upon all Americans to count themselves as constituents of a sentimentally united nation.
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Dolley Madison received only $30,000 rather than the $100,000 her husband had calculated on for his papers—which included the much-awaited notes that Madison took at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Though she was not saddled with the degree of debt and hardship that Jefferson’s family immediately faced upon his death, she did struggle considerably. After enjoying forty-two years of marriage, and left with a compulsive spender for a son, the sixty-eight-year-old Mrs. Madison kept her Washington connections alive and bore up under the strain.

She honored her husband’s wish not to break up slave families when potential buyers approached with offers to relieve her of her financial burden. Jefferson’s heirs had been obliged to sell their nearly two hundred slaves in 1827; the families of all concerned suffered deep heartache at the inhumanity of the spectacle. Mrs. Madison, despite mortgage assistance from the New York millionaire John Jacob Astor, lost Montpelier in 1844. When she died at eighty-one, in 1849, she was returned there and buried beside her husband and his parents in the small cemetery on the property.
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At midcentury, as the crisis of the Union worsened, Madison’s second-term attorney general, Richard Rush, publicly revealed a previously unknown text, a single page, that Madison had composed a year or so before his death. Dolley had sent it to Edward Coles, who in turn had passed it on to Rush. It bore the title “Advice to My Country,” and it contained a poignant personal message:

This was a very different parable from “Jonathan Bull and Mary Bull,” the bizarre tale of North versus South (and the nasty black stain) that he had earlier written. This was no allegory with a happy ending; it was, rather, a sharp admonition from a guarded man, sober and fearful, who had seen too much to be resting easy as he read the newspapers. The aged Madison invoked Pandora’s box to warn that talk of disunion, taken one short step further, would bring on an unstoppable train of events. The Serpent in Paradise was a stern reminder that those who severed the Union would be subject to everlasting shame and scorn.

He had finished fighting battles. He could do no more than to wish his nation the self-possession and self-control it needed to recalibrate political and constitutional balance as it moved ahead.