Madison and Jefferson (70 page)

The U.S. minister in London, Federalist holdover Rufus King, wrote Madison in early October that with peace, St. Domingue and other Caribbean islands would engage Napoleon’s attention and result in Louisiana becoming even more a place of exiles. To make matters worse, Madison was deeply troubled by the French government’s behavior in refusing to confirm the retrocession of Louisiana from Spain to France. King called it “extraordinary” that London had remained silent on Louisiana during peace negotiations with its old and inveterate enemy. Rumors held that Britain was supplying ships for the French campaign against Toussaint. This was too much to take. The administration did not want to adopt a passive, wait-and-see posture. Jefferson tried saber rattling, but his threat to ally with England could not have given Napoleon any pause, since England and France could no longer be played off against each other. The administration needed a new approach to disturbances in its southern neighborhood.
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If French occupation of Louisiana was inevitable, as Madison felt it was, then the United States might buy western Florida from France, in order to preserve at least one avenue for getting agricultural produce down the Mississippi and out to sea. Jefferson slowly became convinced that the situation in St. Domingue might actually help America’s cause. Napoleon
announced that a force was being assembled, led by his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc. Hearing this, Jefferson told Pichon that French forces would fail miserably if they tried to reinstitute slavery on the island. In the early months of 1802 they did, in fact, become bogged down, at which point the administration saw its opportunity to put pressure on.
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The policy that emerged had teeth: it declared neutrality while defiantly refusing to restrict American shippers from freely trading with the island. The French government demanded an end to this trade, and the administration refused to comply. At the same time, when Pichon begged for loans from the United States to assist the French forces, Madison coolly rejected his proposal.

Though General Leclerc was promised American food and supplies, he soon found himself in an impossible situation on St. Domingue. Without U.S. assistance, he could neither feed his own massive army nor curtail the flow of U.S. contraband to Toussaint’s army. By May 1802, Leclerc had confiscated American cargo, thrown two captains in the brig, ejected Tobias Lear from the island, and lodged complaints against the United States for intentionally assisting the rebels. American public opinion quickly turned against the high-handed French commander. Madison and Jefferson kept their passive-aggressive trade warfare going. Their silence encouraged more U.S. trade. In fact, rather than starve Toussaint, as Jefferson had originally pledged, U.S. obstruction of Leclerc reduced the French forces to near starvation.
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The administration’s failure to maintain a consistent, coherent policy suggests either that Jefferson and Madison did not precisely mirror each other’s understanding or else they had devised a very shrewd diplomatic strategy. Jefferson confronted Napoleon, while protesting (for effect) that any break with France would pain him. Such were his words to Robert Livingston, his minister to France, in a long letter of April 1802. Anticipating the end of Franco-American amity, the president adopted a plaintive tone: “It compleatly reverses all the political relations of the U.S. and will form a new epoch in our political course. Of all nations of any consideration France is the one which hitherto has offered the fewest points on which we could have any conflict of right, and the most points of a communion of interests.”

As we have seen many times already, Jefferson used letter writing as a means to convey sentimental attachments or, as in this instance, his professed shock in having to face up to a major disappointment. Perhaps it is going too far to say that he enjoyed the semantics of bold reprisals; but at
virtually no time were the theatrics of his shifting moods meant to lead to the use of military force. Madison preferred a subtler approach to foreign policy making, finding ways to manipulate neutrality—here it was to undermine General Leclerc. To a greater extent than Jefferson, he believed in economic retaliation as America’s only good weapon against hostile imperial powers.
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Jefferson and Madison were equally worried about the appearance of a large French army in their neighborhood. It fell to Rufus King to encapsulate brilliantly the predicament of their lifetime, when he quoted for Madison the Enlightenment-era political philosopher Baron de Montesquieu: “It is happy for trading Powers, that God has permitted Turks and Spaniards to be in the world since of all nations they are most proper to possess a great Empire with insignificance.” Replacing the weak Spanish presence with the French was a dangerous prospect. From Tobias Lear, Madison learned that the French army in St. Domingue was filled with “anti-republican venom” and was committed to forcing monarchy on those whom it conquered. This was what Louisiana appeared to be facing as well. Madison avowed to Robert Livingston that a contingent threat existed to America’s security: any French colony in Louisiana would become a haven for runaway slaves, who had already been taught “to regard the French as the patrons of their cause.”
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Race-baiting messages from national political figures of all stripes streamed in. Philadelphian Tench Coxe, a former Hamilton associate now in the Republican camp, laid out the worst-case scenario for Madison when he predicted that Bonaparte would send “a large detachment of republican blacks” from St. Domingue to Louisiana. This, he said, would lead to the “sudden emancipation” of the blacks there, and Madison could count on their becoming “warlike.” To Coxe, St. Domingue could no longer be considered an isolated island, safely removed from American shores. As ideas of emancipation and racial equality were carried to New Orleans, the vibrant, growing port would keep up its “extensive constant intimate connexion with the great Negro state,” to the detriment of the entire U.S. South.
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The situation in St. Domingue also pained the humanitarian Benjamin Rush, who wrote to his friend Jefferson: “Does our globe, like a diseased body, stand in need of a perpetual issue of blood? I tremble for the consequences everywhere and particularly in our own country. Can nothing be done by concession and partial emancipation to avert the storm from the
southern states?” It is hard to overstate the apprehension Jefferson, Madison, and their political friends all seemed to share.
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At least rhetorically, the idea of emancipation was hard for liberal Republicans to declaim against. As long as it did not produce violence inside the United States, the anticolonial objective of the blacks on St. Domingue was easy to appreciate. But as more reports circulated, rumors spread far and wide. In 1800 the Richmond-based conspiracy known as Gabriel’s Rebellion, though stopped in its tracks, shook Virginia to its core. Gabriel was well built, literate, and a skilled blacksmith who, like many slaves, was able to move freely about the state. His men had contemplated taking Governor Monroe hostage as a means of securing their freedom and advancing the cause of emancipation more generally. To make matters worse, some white Frenchmen were thought to be associated with Gabriel. After the conspirators were hanged, new legislation required every manumitted slave to leave the state within one year.
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Dr. Rush was known for his warm attachments. He knew firsthand that churchgoing free black families were at least as stable as working-class white families. But whites’ fears of their black neighbors were rising even in Philadelphia, where abolition had a consistent following. After years of mutual accommodation, the combination of events on St. Domingue and the influx of less-skilled, southern-born ex-slaves had produced a tense environment in the city. It would find expression in militant demonstrations and counterdemonstrations in the streets, warnings about sex across the color line, and an increase of forthright sermons in black churches on captivity in Egypt and the eventual deliverance of the people of Israel.
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Proslavery arguments took root in Virginia as never before, assisted by such campaigning writers as Edmund Pendleton’s nephew John Taylor of Caroline. Mainstay Republicans such as Taylor mingled racial fears with economic logic, and Madison and Jefferson were not the sort to risk alienating the majority in the South—even though other Virginians believed gradual emancipation would be a prudent policy and would have responded positively to encouragement from the president and secretary of state.

No matter what his thoughts were on black republics, Jefferson never seriously entertained emancipation as a policy option. He took comfort in his prediction that Bonaparte’s plan to reestablish slavery in St. Domingue would lead to his army’s ultimate demise. In this, he was at least partially correct. Violent resistance to reenslavement mired French forces in a prolonged
and very bloody conflict. Not even the capture of Toussaint in May 1802, and his removal to France, slowed the resistance. Only when tropical disease thoroughly decimated his troops did Napoleon realize the island campaign was headed for defeat. Among the dead was General Leclerc.
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Jefferson’s growing complacency in the period after Leclerc’s death is captured in the observations of an Englishman. John Davis, who spent the years 1798 to 1802 touring the United States, north and south, relished his time in Virginia and heralded its culture of hospitality. “I never saw slavery wear so contented an aspect,” he observed after visiting a plantation. “The work of the slaves was light, and punishment never inflicted.” With Jefferson’s concurrence, the author dedicated his book to him.
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Virginia was at the helm—that much was clear. During Jefferson’s first term, northern Federalists kept up a steady stream of criticism. They reflected uneasily upon the surrender to southern sensibilities that took place at the Constitutional Convention. Their acceptance of the three-fifths compromise had tilted the scales in favor of southern interests, and it was not clear that political balance would ever be restored.

Prejudices hardened, and not merely because of the impact of flame-throwers such as Joseph Dennie. “In the conception of a Virginian it is merely the object of
Liberty
to secure independence to Planters,” wrote Connecticut’s Oliver Wolcott, Jr., Hamilton’s successor as treasury secretary, now out of a job. The old refrain was repeated in more than one anti-administration newspaper: if human property counted toward representation, then why shouldn’t New England horses, hogs, and oxen? Jefferson was the most obvious beneficiary and most visible practitioner of a grotesque and hypocritical system.
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In the war of words, the president was ably defended by the administration’s main organ, the
National Intelligencer
. But Madison fared better in the press, in general. The otherwise unfriendly
Connecticut Courant
and
Massachusetts Spy
noted at the end of Jefferson’s first year in office that “the conduct of Mr. Madison and Mr. Gallatin towards the clerks in their departments, is admitted to have been fair and impartial.” But they were as sure to append that the Republicans never acknowledged the same about former secretary of state Timothy Pickering, who retained clerks that had worked under his predecessors, Jefferson and Edmund Randolph. If his
two top advisers were comparatively fair-minded, reported the newspapers, Jefferson himself was intolerant and mean-spirited, as his affronts toward Washington and Adams proved.
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After a visit to the President’s House in 1802, a southern traveler published his observations on the chief officers of the government, stressing Jefferson’s artificiality and Madison’s relative openness, Gallatin’s compulsive work habits and Dearborn’s nepotistic hiring practices. Starting with Jefferson, he followed every detail: “Mr. Jefferson is most affectedly plain in his dress; the morning I waited on him, he wore cut shoes as slippers, and very coarse brown stockings.” According to the traveler, Meriwether Lewis, Jefferson’s “awkward and stiff” secretary, was on hand to interpret the president’s outfit, stating that the stockings were not imported fineries, but the product of a Germantown, Pennsylvania, factory.

Jefferson’s commitment to democratic self-deprivation was undeniable: “The president rides out every day, unattended by any servant … I saw him at the Capitol … He hitched his horse amongst twenty others, at the row of pegs which are placed before the Capitol door in the manner you have seen at country taverns.” His right and left hands were a study in contrast:

These descriptions may not be the real Madison and Jefferson, but they reveal a general impression of Madison’s independence from Jefferson, as the idea lodged in the minds of those who encountered them briefly or imagined their perspectives and governing styles from a distance. Madison was not necessarily seen as complicit in the actions Jefferson took that annoyed the opposition.

A friendly northerner’s portrait was printed in newspapers of western
Massachusetts and Vermont around the same time, under the heading “Biography of Mr. Madison.” It plainly shows that, at least in some places, the secretary of state was not regarded as subordinate to Jefferson—in fact, he was just as instrumental in the triumph of republicanism as Jefferson. Because of Madison’s leadership on contentious issues, the short biography states, this “bosom friend” of the president was subject to “federal abuse,” all of it undeserved. He gave evidence of “conciliatory manners, examplary [
sic
] morals, unimpeachable integrity, a luminous understanding, indefatigable industry, and long experience.” There was nothing artificial and everything honorable about him. One could not hope for better press.