Madison and Jefferson (80 page)

Republican defections began to add up. In the troubled years preceding the election of 1800, no one had been more loyal to Madison and Jefferson than the clerk of the House of Representatives, John Beckley; he did not oppose the administration as Randolph did but nonetheless wrote to James Monroe in July 1806: “Madison, is deemed by many, too timid and indecisive a statesman, and too liable to a conduct of forbearance to the Federal party, which may endanger our harmony and political safety.” At the other end of the political spectrum, Federalists seemed to enjoy speculating on rumors that Jefferson’s putative successor was dismayed and overwhelmed by internal Republican politics and ready to bow out.
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The Franco-American relationship may have soured considerably with the rise of Bonaparte, but a sense of debt to the Marquis de Lafayette remained constant. In fact, Jefferson was reported to have had Lafayette in mind as his foremost choice to serve as the first U.S. governor of the Louisiana Territory. Lafayette maintained a fairly regular correspondence with both Madison and Jefferson; they learned from him that while he held on to the family’s magnificent estate, La Grange, he had otherwise been broken by the destructive force of the French Revolution. During the years of imprisonment, his considerable fortune had vanished. In 1803, as a bounty for having served as a U.S. major general, Congress voted to award him a tract of land (without stipulating where) that was approximately equal to all
that Jefferson—and more than Madison—possessed. Such a quantity of land was available only north of the Ohio River or in Louisiana. In 1805 the matter was resolved when Madison and Jefferson, acting as Lafayette’s agents, arranged a purchase close to the city of New Orleans. A few years later these lands were valued at $200,000, the very sum Lafayette had taken from his once-limitless store of capital to fund the American Revolution.
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The unprecedented addition of territory may have encouraged disputation within Congress, but it made little impression abroad. With the spectacular victory of Admiral Lord Nelson over a combined French and Spanish force off the coast of Spain, England was able to restore its dominance on the high seas. And in December Napoleon’s success at Austerlitz gave France control of the European continent. As these two military giants continued to fight for global hegemony, foreign policy again took center stage in Washington. Though the administration wished otherwise, the inclinations of neutral nations mattered little to England and France. Jefferson’s theory that a muscular Barbary policy would counteract the denigration of America’s capacity was yet to be proven.

Madison responded to the changing scene by retreating to his library, where he prepared a 204-page pamphlet protesting the British disregard for neutral nations. Attacking London’s justifications for the capture of neutral vessels in times of war, he asserted that the policy had no basis in international law but was “
a mere superiority of force
.” Several members of Congress waded through the overwritten treatise, few of whom found anything quotable or politically useful in it. John Randolph resorted to his usual antics, throwing the document on the floor as he scoffed at “a shilling pamphlet hurled against eight hundred ships.”

In his annual message that December, Jefferson called for a better organized militia, ready for any “sudden emergency.” He asked Congress for gunboats to meet the dangers posed by the European belligerents. “We should have a competent number of gunboats,” he said, “and the number, to be competent, must be considerable.” As a purely defensive measure, the small, maneuverable boats were meant to patrol the nation’s coastline and northern border lakes.

To suit his vision of a volunteer republican army, Jefferson hoped that the naval militia would be manned by local militia regulars. He knew that the gunboats were inadequate by themselves, so he asked Congress to fund the construction of more substantial warships, a policy backed by his usually tightfisted treasury secretary. Republican legislators flatly rejected the idea. The president and his secretary of state were ready to expand the peacetime
navy, but their southern allies were refusing to follow their lead. This refusal would have dire consequences.
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The party of Madison and Jefferson was so strong in the South that by the congressional campaign season of 1806, there was only one incumbent Federalist below the Potomac. In all but four of the South’s forty-six congressional districts, no Federalist even made the effort to run for a seat.
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In Massachusetts, Senator John Quincy Adams found himself agreeing with the administration’s foreign policy. But rather than herald an era of muted partisanship, the younger Adams’s turnabout served only to isolate him.

No sooner had the Republicans proven that they could best the Federalists nearly everywhere than they began battling among themselves. It went beyond John Randolph. The word
schism
appeared more frequently in the nation’s newspapers. The
Republican Spy
, in Northampton, Massachusetts, tried to deny the trend, complaining in September 1805 that the Federalists were the real troublemakers, their papers “full of hopes and wishes about ‘the third party’ in New York and Pennsylvania … They hope that Col. Burr will create a schism in Louisiana and the western states.” Anything that might “perplex the administration” would suit the unseated party just fine, warned the
Spy
. The Burrite newspaper in Manhattan hoped to deflate at least some of the rumors about their champion, assuring New Yorkers the following spring that the dismissed vice president was back in the Republican fold. “The friends of freedom who lamented a schism … will rejoice,” reported the
Morning Chronicle
.
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The “schism” turned out to be more real than the optimists thought. As the party in power, the Republicans could no longer define themselves as outsiders. With their archenemy Hamilton gone, they took chances, exercising free speech in rowdy ways while showing less of an inclination to maintain party solidarity. The
Republican Watch-Tower
, a New York newspaper, urged that “passion should yield to justice and calm reflection” if society was to uphold “the cause of
civil liberty
, of
social happiness
, of our
country
, and of
man
.” Casting the issue in these cosmic terms, the paper admitted that “an extensive schism has long existed among us,” while agreeing with the
Republican Spy
that it had been “artfully fomented by our antagonists.” Regardless of its cause, the
Watch-Tower
warned, the internecine feud was being conducted “with too much heat and animosity.”

The spirit of party had turned in on itself. Republicans were called upon to “sacrifice resentments upon the altar of your country’s welfare.” But the resentments were too real for noble appeals to reverse what was happening. A year after Randolph’s break with the administration, the language of
schism persisted. The
Tickler
, in Philadelphia, printed a column titled “The New Split,” noting that “much interest has been excited by a new schism among the democratic republican party.” No one was tickled.
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We must recognize where this was coming from. An intensification of state politics not only reflected but also in some ways preceded activity at the national level. In the case of Pennsylvania, Jefferson had told Gallatin as early as March 1803 that “a schism was taking place … between moderates and high flyers.” Clearly, there was more than one understanding of how the Democratic-Republican vision was to be realized in practice. Pennsylvania had a “Chase trial” all its own in the impeachment of Judge Alexander Addison, who had been overzealous in his enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Acts. In the Keystone State, the name
Quid
was assigned to those who sought to restrain radical democrats from undermining a structure that already supported prosperity for the many. As respectable merchants and manufacturers, political liberals who extolled “the blessings of republican government,” the Quids feared turbulence coming from public figures who were pushing for too much too fast. For their part, the radicals complained that political offices were still occupied by an exclusive corps of elite names and should be opened up to more ordinary citizens. In 1805 the radical Society of the Friends of the People claimed it represented the undervalued majority against aristocratic tendencies. Although the pro-administration governor Thomas McKean defeated the radicals’ candidate and was reelected, the vote was extremely close.

Ironically, McKean could not have won without the votes of Federalists. He was an old warhorse, a signer of the Declaration of Independence well known to Madison and Jefferson and respected by them. Both had served with him in Congress—in fact, in 1781 McKean was president of Congress. In the 1790s he reigned as chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and in 1801 he was as eager as any to remove Federalists from office. But as soon as William Duane, editor of the newspaper
Aurora
since 1798, turned against McKean for being too moderate, he was pursued relentlessly. After his reelection as governor in 1805, the defeated radicals, bolstered by Duane, went about examining the grounds on which they could possibly impeach the now seventy-year-old executive. Duane would keep the movement alive through 1807.
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Benjamin Rush put it tartly in a letter to John Adams during the acrimonious gubernatorial campaign of 1805: “We have four distinct parties in Pennsylvania: 1. old tories, 2. honest Federalists, 3. violent Democrats, 4. moderate Republicans.” Later, as McKean’s three-year term wound down,
Rush agreed with the governor’s classification of the diverse population of their state (now divided merely in two): “one part of them ‘Traitors, tories, apostate whigs, and British agents,’ and the other ‘Fools, Geese, and Clodhoppers.’ ” Stripped of its hopeful-sounding vocabulary, this was the naked state of politics in what has been designated Jeffersonian America.

For the Madisonian perspective in the midst of schism, we turn again to Dr. Rush, who informed Adams that the secretary of state was in a generous frame of mind. When James and Dolley visited Philadelphia in August 1805, the former spoke of the second president in unusually sympathetic terms. “He dwelt largely upon”—and here Rush quoted word for word—“your ‘genius and integrity,’ and acquitted you of ever having had the least unfriendly designs in your administration upon the present forms of our American governments.” Apparently, ex-President Adams, now that he was removed from the political game, could be seen as something less monstrous than a monarchist.
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The Federalists who were still actively engaged in battling the administration had long considered those they dismissively called “democrats” as a species prone to emotionalism. They had been anticipating “schism” since the Jefferson-Burr electoral tie and followed the competition between Burrites and Clintonians in New York with great glee. It was not just the case in the North, where anti-Virginia sentiment ran strong. South Carolina Federalists noted the quarrels between Burrites and Clintonians as they were developing, and they interpolated from this intelligence that there were quarrels among “partizans of the Cabinet.” More than one paper deduced “a schism in the party at large and division has got among them.”

This “storm of democratic madness … often predicted” was now widely recognized. As John Randolph’s attacks on the administration added to intraparty feuds in Pennsylvania and New York, the Federalists’ anxious prophecy had come true. In March 1806 the
Aurora
’s editor Duane wrote Jefferson that rumors were circulating to the effect that the president had gone soft, and that among the members of the cabinet only Madison still had any confidence as to the direction in which the administration was heading. But in reading the letters that Madison and Jefferson were writing on political subjects during this period, one cannot find even a glimmer of concern beyond the ordinary.
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The administration was hopeful that Monroe’s diplomatic efforts in London would bear fruit. And in Louisiana, General James Wilkinson was being instructed to take care to avoid hostilities with neighboring Spanish forces. The president officially informed Madison that there was a “great probability of an amicable and early settlement of our differences with Spain,” and that the boundary between U.S. and Spanish spheres of influence in the Southwest was to be negotiated. Jefferson was cautiously optimistic, and Madison guarded, writing to one general that it was “premature to draw any positive conclusions.”
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Hopes vanished in the waning weeks of 1806, when the best-laid plans for peace and growth dissolved, and Jefferson’s second term set a course for catastrophe. Madison and Jefferson found their lives increasingly complicated, once former Vice President Burr and the powerful General Wilkinson presented the administration with two possible scenarios, both drastic. One or the other was lying about a plan to circumvent federal policy and use military means to acquire land across the Spanish frontier. The scandal that ensued preoccupied Jefferson for many months, at a time when the secretary of state could not be sure of the trajectory of ongoing U.S. talks in London and Madrid.

But before the so-called Burr Conspiracy could be resolved, an incident of British impressment off the coast of Virginia resulted in three deaths and sparked a contest of national honor that tied up the administration for the balance of Jefferson’s presidency. London’s unsatisfactory response would raise the specter of a second Anglo-American war and prompt Jefferson to step up his plan to act out a continental vision. During the summer of 1807 he confided in Madison the following thought: