Madison and Jefferson (89 page)

That summer the battles involving personalities and politics enlarged. Madison was in regular touch with the Department of State over fallout from the bitter dispute that had earlier occurred between Skipwith and Armstrong in Paris. In mid-August Jefferson was at Montpelier, and just after he departed, the
National Intelligencer
reprinted a proposed constitution for West Florida, put together by area settlers. (Skipwith may or may not have been directly associated with this document.) Reading intelligence communicated to him by Harry Toulmin, a superior court judge in the Mississippi Territory, Madison expressed concern about the region’s volatility and sent Toulmin’s letter to the State Department, saying it was of pressing interest. This prompted further discussion about the means to suppress filibustering enterprises against the Spanish.

By mid-September ideas gave way to what is today referred to as actionable intelligence. Madison learned of the burning hunger for revolution among Americans in West Florida. He knew (or assumed) that something was to be staged in the hope that the United States would respond with military aid. But the anxious West Florida plotters also acknowledged that significant numbers in the region leaned toward Great Britain, and still others were not prepared to forswear allegiance to the Spanish Crown. In mid-September, before returning to Washington, Madison visited Monticello. Claiborne had not yet left the East Coast. Madison sent word to the acting governor of the territory to keep a “wakeful eye” on Baton Rouge, but nothing more.
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To bring down Spanish colonial rule, a band of American rebels attacked the garrison at Baton Rouge, on the banks of the Mississippi, and forced the Spanish out. Militia loyal to the Spanish were stripped of their weapons and placed under house arrest. On October 27, in convention, the rebels approved a constitution. Three weeks later Fulwar Skipwith was
elected governor. His talents were well enough known even before the rebellion that he had been put forward for a judgeship on the highest court of the territory. At that time the Spanish governor rejected his nomination on the grounds that he had been a resident for too short a time and, no less meaningfully, that Skipwith had never declared his loyalty to Spain. Soon afterward the former U.S. consul in Paris was helping to declare West Florida independent.

The declaration he issued was based on natural rights doctrine, stating that because Spain was in political turmoil, responsibility for West Florida’s protection was returned to its people. It was not quite as convincing as Jefferson’s grand appeal to the “candid world” in 1776, but Skipwith knew how to dress a text in colorful garb: “Having been abandoned by a sovereign, whose system and principles of colonization grew up in the past ages of bigotry and persecution; our rights of self-government will not be contested.” So he told the assembled legislators of the new republic in his inaugural address.
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Madison had to appear to honor America’s proclaimed neutrality. He pretended to distance himself from what was happening in Baton Rouge, until the smoke had cleared. As soon as he could, though, he issued a presidential proclamation asserting that the United States already had title to this territory on the strength of the Louisiana Purchase. He made this announcement on October 27, by coincidence the same day that a convention in West Florida adopted a constitution. In his decree, Madison stated that the land from the River Perdido (situated between Pensacola and Mobile) to the Mississippi was a part of the purchase. The United States had not taken possession of it before but would now. It was, he said, “a satisfactory adjustment, too long delayed” and “suspended by events.”

Madison’s claim was debatable. In fact Spain did not agree, and would not agree, to America’s interpretation of the Louisiana Purchase until James Monroe was president. Annexation took place because England and France were otherwise engaged—in 1810 West Florida was a meaningless distraction from the war in Europe. Still, in the mind of Madison no less than Jefferson, the entire Gulf Coast remained potentially an operational base for hostile Europeans. He had acted accordingly.
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The West Florida Republic elected its governor and legislature in late November. The next month, back in the region, Governor Claiborne presented Madison’s proclamation to Fulwar Skipwith. At first Skipwith balked. But Claiborne talked sense into his fellow Virginian, and the West Florida Republic breathed its last. In later years Skipwith told the story differently,
asserting that he had always looked favorably upon the president’s policy of immediate annexation of the territory. The precise truth—what went on behind the scenes—cannot be known.

Madison floated the idea that East Florida might also be wrested from Spain during his presidency, though preferably through negotiation. Just after West Florida’s annexation, he gave Georgia’s seventy-one-year-old former governor, George Mathews, the leeway to negotiate with the Spanish for East Florida. In the spirit of the times, Mathews, in spite of his advanced age, interpreted his instructions as permission to lead an army south and to take the land by force if necessary.

Of Irish extraction, Virginia born and Georgia bred, General George Mathews was thoroughly familiar with the Georgia-Florida border, East and West Florida. He had fought the Shawnees in 1774, was wounded on a Revolutionary battlefield, and languished on a British prison ship for two years before witnessing the Yorktown surrender ceremony. Though tarred by his association with the Yazoo fraud, he continued to have friends in high places. Madison had served with Mathews in the First Congress. At a meeting in the President’s House in early 1811, Mathews outlined the dangers emanating from a pro-British faction in East Florida, and Madison listened.

From that point on, as Madison kept his ear to the ground, Mathews remained ready and eager. At the first opportunity he tried to engineer a rebellion in St. Augustine and install a friendly government. But the candidates Mathews had in mind were wary of him and revealed his plot to Spanish authorities. Whether the plot was officially sanctioned or a self-supporting filibuster did not matter to old George Mathews. He wanted to move in and to turn over East Florida to the United States. The Spanish consul, Juan de Onís, caught wind of what was happening and strongly protested. He wanted to know whether Mathews represented the Madison administration.
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“I go to St. Augustine,” Mathews declared, just as the administration realized it had to disavow his activities. “From there our victorious men move on Mobile and Pensacola. But we will not stop. On to Venezuela, to rout the autocratic Spaniards and plant the flag of freedom over all of South America.” It was the wrong time to rely on intimidation as a regular form of policy, and Madison knew it.
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In the case of the West Florida Republic, Madison had felt less encumbered. Baton Rouge was only nominally Spanish. In that sense, he had a good understanding of what Burr’s alleged conspiracy had really been
about—like Skipwith’s ploy, it was concerned with growth opportunities in southeastern Louisiana and the volatility of Spanish lands generally. In authorizing Governor Claiborne to intercede in Baton Rouge, Madison was generally wary of what could happen when land-hungry frontier types joined their fortunes to a fearless expansionist. He wanted to take no chances that what Burr was
thought
to have been plotting might occur again under Skipwith’s auspices and spin out of control. In truth, then, Madison was doing in West Florida just what Burr had wanted: permitting a filibuster to open the door to territorial annexation.

Madison committed the United States to the filibuster and gave Skipwith an honorable way out. He could do this because both Claiborne and Skipwith were Virginians—politically nonthreatening ones, at that. Burr, of course, was a New Yorker and a latent threat to Jefferson’s vision of a Virginia Dynasty. Had the battle-hardened Colonel Burr, a company commander during the Revolution, taken Mexico, his political fortunes in the United States might well have revived. Jefferson, as president, had acted out of fear and distrust, doing all he could to scare off any who might otherwise have glorified Burr. Charging Burr with treason and putting him on trial—a political show trial—backfired on him; Marshall had seen to that. In 1810 Madison was at the helm, less impulsive than his predecessor had been three years before. The result was the disempowerment of Fulwar Skipwith and his fellows and the successful incorporation of a piece of Spanish territory.

As for Jefferson, whose retirement was meant to take him out of politics, Baton Rouge appeared to be a clear harbinger of things to come. He advocated a forward policy when he wrote to his former son-in-law John Wayles Eppes, the cousin and husband of his late daughter Maria, and a member of Congress since 1803. Just as Mathews was meeting with Madison in Washington, and aware that Eppes was to be in charge of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Jefferson urged action: “I wish you would authorise the President to take possession of East Florida immediately.” He was convinced that as soon as England learned that Baton Rouge was taken, it would move on Florida—from St. Augustine on the Atlantic west to Pensacola—and do it “pretendedly for Spain.”

If Madison questioned the timing of so forward a move in East Florida and thus proceeded with caution, Jefferson weighed the situation differently. Based on his long-cultivated suspicion of British intentions—always good grounds for a land grab—he thought any Florida gamble worthwhile. Reading in stark terms the mind of the enemy, he wanted the government
to provide for the security of its territory. “The militia of Georgia will do it in a fortnight,” Jefferson assured Eppes. We do not know for certain whether Madison’s initial appeal to George Mathews involved Jefferson’s input, but it is reasonable to conclude that Madison knew precisely where Jefferson stood when he stopped short of giving Mathews the green light. It was too soon for East Florida.
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Once again it is the southern mind, its long-prevailing sense of opportunity, competition, and risk, that explains all governing motives in the Gulf area drama of 1810–11. Madison understood and supported the impulse to acquire new land and banish foreign influence; but he seems to have been sensitive to appearances and unwilling to rile Britain, France, or Spain without sufficient cause. Jefferson’s motives typically involved fears of encroachment, which in this case was the fear that his nation’s freedom of movement was to be somehow restricted by Great Britain. Madison did not see quite the same threat. Yet in the end he came away with West Florida, using a convenient
legal
interpretation of the Louisiana Purchase to justify an
extralegal
filibuster. This was political canniness, if not political genius.
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Militancy made sense to a certain breed of American—generally, though not exclusively, southern Republicans. They were motivated by the desire for land on which to cultivate cotton and other cash crops; they were motivated by the desire to sell surplus slaves in the West. In 1802, while trying to squeeze Napoleon to give up New Orleans, then–Secretary of State Madison had capitalized on the same phenomenon when he advised U.S. minister to France Robert Livingston to drop hints that disgruntled Americans might provoke incursions of their own into Louisiana. James Monroe was another who long favored strong action with respect to Spain. They all had a convenient rationale: men like George Mathews were everywhere. Government officials wanted it understood that forces operating in and around the Gulf were too large and too random for them to control. General Andrew Jackson would be next, and the most successful of all, finally securing East Florida and becoming its first territorial governor in the years immediately after Madison left the presidency to Monroe.

Among the younger generation of Virginians who were increasingly involved in Madisonian-Jeffersonian politics, Congressman John Wayles
Eppes is one of the least remembered. In the lead-up to the War of 1812, however, he was a valuable liaison between the executive and legislative branches of government, no mere mouthpiece of the administration.

From the moment of Madison’s accession to the presidency, Eppes took an interest in both military and civilian appointments as they related to Louisiana and U.S. relations with Spain. Early in 1810 he alerted Madison to information reaching him from army circles that rates of desertion were high among U.S. troops in New Orleans, and that General Wilkinson was responsible for the deaths of many of those in his command by exposing them to unsanitary conditions and stationing troops in swampy areas. Eppes advised Madison that the shady general, an alleged pensioner of Spain, had by this time “lost completely the confidence of nine tenths of all persons with whom I am acquainted.” Wilkinson would be brought up on charges and, in spite of the efforts of those like Eppes, somehow survive long enough to embarrass himself anew as a wartime commander.

Eppes was one of the Jefferson intimates invited to comment on the batture case. In addition, he kept his former father-in-law up to date on partisan debates in Congress over West Florida annexation. Expressing himself with no less reserve when he spoke to the sitting president, Eppes urged Madison in early 1811 to wait for evidence of French cooperation before strengthening the terms of nonintercourse with England. His established position in Congress underscored the slow but steady shift in policy formulation from the Revolutionary generation to its successor: men born in the early 1770s, bearing no memory of life as colonial subjects, were grabbing national headlines.
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With Jefferson in retirement, Madison in Washington, and the Federalists diminished in number but not in noise-making, the third and fourth presidents knew that history was chronicling their career achievements and shortcomings and would continue to do so whether or not they weighed in. As a compiler of notes and an inveterate record-keeper, Jefferson is known for his many vocations: He accumulated thousands of books in several languages; he studied and savored wines; he carefully annotated his correspondence, made architectural drawings, undertook encyclopedic studies of flora and fauna, and pursued Indian vocabularies. He recorded all expenditures made for his farms when he stayed at home, and he kept track of expenses large and small on the road, when he traveled near and far, down to the cost of a shave and the tips he gave to Madison’s servants when he visited Montpelier. But he also, and with extreme care, put his political house in order between 1809 and his death seventeen years later. His
purpose in the reorganization and recalibration of the past was collective as much as it was personal: he wished to ensure that America’s founding era was painted with a Republican rather than a Federalist brush.