The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

by Myron Magnet

  To the west, stroke-impaired General William Hull, fifty-nine, set out to invade Canada from Fort Detroit, but his detachment of Ohio militiamen refused to follow, saying that they couldn’t leave U.S. territory. Hull returned to Fort Detroit and misguidedly sent orders to evacuate Fort Dearborn in Chicago, surrounded by hostile Indians. On August 15, 1812, the fort’s sixty-five soldiers marched out: the Indians massacred them, beheading one officer and eating his dripping heart. British general Isaac Brock besieged Hull’s own Fort Detroit and plied him with disinformation about the murderous intentions of the redcoats’ supposedly huge detachment of Indian allies. “My God!” the petrified Hull cried. “What shall I do with these women and children”—including his own family? With no warning to any subordinate, he surrendered the fort without a shot on August 16. “Even the women were indignant at so shameful a degradation of the American character,” one observer recorded, and an equally indignant court-martial sentenced him to death for cowardice and dereliction of duty, though Madison spared his life. Brock claimed the Michigan territory for the British Crown.151

  Commanding the middle prong, at Niagara, was “the last of the patroons,” General Stephen Van Rensselaer, who at forty-nine had not a shred of battlefield experience. His first effort to cross the river into Canada miscarried, as a traitor stole all his oars. Two days later, he managed to send 600 men across, who, under the command of Winfield Scott, killed the fast-moving General Brock but got pinned down. When Van Rensselaer ordered his New York militia to Scott’s aid, they too refused to leave U.S. soil. Scott had to surrender with his army.152

  Jefferson’s ex–secretary of war, General Henry Dearborn—fat, sixty-one, and nicknamed “Granny”—commanded the eastern prong, charged with taking Montreal. He wouldn’t move. When the War Department peremptorily ordered action, he lumbered from Albany to Plattsburgh and sent troops into Canada, where, after skirmishing with the enemy, they then shot at one another in the dark. As usual, the militia wouldn’t follow the regulars onto foreign soil, and Granny retreated with his 7,000 or so men. The whole Canadian fiasco, even a Republican paper judged, added up to nothing but “disaster, defeat, disgrace, and ruin and death.”153

  Against that black backdrop, the navy’s brilliant successes shone the more luminously, especially given the cloud of Republican disdain that had hung over that service. In August 1812, the frigate Constitution, with craven General Hull’s brave nephew Isaac Hull in command, forced HMS Guerrière to strike her colors after a heart-stopping mid-Atlantic chase and heaven-resounding battle that crippled and dismasted the British vessel and caused one American sailor to cry of his own ship, “Her sides are made of iron,” when cannonballs bounced off her, instantly winning her the nickname “Old Ironsides.” An aghast London Times spluttered that “never before in the history of the world did an English frigate strike to an American.” Madison, discarding ideology for the lessons of experience he had formerly valued so highly, sent out his little navy to patrol the high seas in late 1812, where it won renown in victory after victory against a Britannia that had hitherto ruled the waves.

  Stephen Decatur, for instance, who at twenty-five had become the youngest captain in U.S. naval history during Jefferson’s 1804 campaign against the Barbary pirates, when he had daringly sneaked into Tripoli Harbor and burned a U.S. frigate grounded there to keep her out of piratical hands, now won further fame when his United States astonishingly brought the defeated frigate HMS Macedonian into Newport Harbor as a prize after another mid-ocean duel. More important, since control of the Great Lakes was the strategic key to the Canadian front, was twenty-seven-year-old Oliver Hazard Perry’s destruction of the British fleet on Lake Erie in late 1813, in a battle so ferocious he had to switch to a new ship when the British shot his first one out from under him. Another group of American seamen, the sailors who manned the 500 U.S. privateers, proved equally lethal, capturing 1,300 British merchantmen before the war ended.154

  IN A FURTHER BOW to experience, Madison fired his war and navy secretaries at the start of 1813, and Congress, also educable, voted new ships, more soldiers with better pay, and higher taxes to pay the bills—effective the next year, when it turned out to be too late. But Britain learned faster and by the end of 1813 had clamped a blockade on America’s entire East Coast, bottling up the U.S. Navy and choking off trade.

  When Napoleon’s abdication in April 1814 freed seasoned British troops to turn their full force on America, the outlook darkened ominously. Though a brilliant U.S. naval victory on Lake Champlain stymied the British invasion of New York in September, British troops and ships sailed into Chesapeake Bay and looted, burned, and raped their way toward Washington. Madison ordered his new war secretary, John Armstrong, to strengthen the capital’s defenses, but the pigheaded Armstrong—no improvement on his predecessor, as Madison by then knew from a long train of insubordination and duplicity that a competent leader would have punished with dismissal—disobeyed, convinced that the enemy had targeted Baltimore, even though on August 19 British admiral Sir George Cockburn had sent a message declaring that he’d dine in Washington in two days, take Dolley Madison captive, and display her in triumph in the streets of London.155

  On August 24, 1814, the British attacked U.S. troops at Bladensburg, Maryland, the overland approach to Washington, fifteen miles away. Pluckily, Madison, in his little round hat, had spent most of six days in the saddle despite his sixty-three years, stimulating his officers there with all his heart. To no avail: the troops fled in such ignominious disarray that the “battle” became known as the Bladensburg Races. As plucky as her husband, Dolley Madison told her cousin that she did not “tremble” but felt “affronted” when Admiral Cockburn entered the Chesapeake and “sen[t] me notis that he would make his bow at my Drawing room soon.” After all, she said, “I have allways been an advocate for fighting when assailed, tho a Quaker,” and she had her “old Tunesian Sabre within my reach.”156

  In a famous letter to her sister Lucy, written the night of August 23, added to twice the next day, and clearly edited and copied after the fact, since it is mostly free of Dolley’s endearingly haphazard spelling, Dolley tells of staying in the White House until the last possible moment, “with no fear but for [Madison] and the success of our army,” packing up cabinet papers and valuables, and “ready at a moment’s warning to enter my carriage and leave the city.” The 200 men guarding the White House had melted away; panicked Washingtonians were angry with Madison for bringing war to their doorsteps; her French butler, hired from the Merrys on their departure, remained unconvinced that it would be bad form to booby-trap the White House with gunpowder to blow up the British if they entered.

  Dawn of the twenty-fourth found her “turning my spyglass in every direction, . . . hoping to discern the approach of my dear husband.” By three o’clock she could hear the cannon from Bladensburg. A friend who had come to help her escape waited impatiently as she tried to get the huge, full-length portrait of Washington unscrewed from the wall. It was taking too long. “I have ordered the frame to be broken, and the canvass taken out it is done, and the precious portrait placed in the hands of two gentlemen from New York for safe keeping”—one of the few relics of the original White House on view there today. “And now, dear sister, I must leave this house” or be trapped in Washington. “Where I shall be tomorrow, I cannot tell!!”157

  A couple of days late but true to his word, Admiral Cockburn marched into the city a few hours after Dolley left her house for the last time. At the Capitol, British troops piled up all the furniture and set it alight, melting the building’s glass and incinerating the Library of Congress. At the White House, finding the table set for a dinner party of forty that Dolley had planned, with the meat still warm, Cockburn and his officers sat down to eat the “elegant and substantial repast,” toasting “Jemmy’s health” in his own good wine, and carrying away Dolley’s cushion, so Cockburn could “warmly recall Mrs. Madison’s seat,” along with one of Madison’s h
ats and his wife’s portrait, to “keep Dolley safe and exhibit her in London,” the admiral joked. Then fifty men with buckets of burning coals set the building afire from end to end; the “city was light and the heavens redden’d with the blaze,” a witness reported.

  The redcoats fired the nearby Treasury, at the same moment that the commander of the navy yard ordered his ships and stores torched to keep them out of enemy hands. Dolley could see the blaze from her refuge ten miles away. The next day, when the British accidentally exploded 130 barrels of gunpowder at an American arsenal, the whole city would have burned to the ground but for a providential thunderstorm with freak, hurricane-force winds that turned the sky black as night and extinguished the flames.158

  The Burning of Washington pub. by G. Thompson, 1814

  Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library

  IN AUGUST 1814, peace talks began in Ghent. Britain demanded control of the Great Lakes, an Indian buffer zone shielding Canada, a chunk of Maine, and access to the Mississippi. The no-nonsense American commission, led by Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams, refused. But when British troops moved on from Washington and failed to take Fort McHenry in Baltimore, an American success that Francis Scott Key immortalized in “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and when the Duke of Wellington opined that the conquest of America would be difficult—and impossible without control of the Great Lakes—London’s negotiators softened their harsh terms and agreed to a peace that restored the status quo antebellum. After all, while Americans viewed the War of 1812 as an urgent matter of national honor, reasserting that they were no longer colonial vassals of the British Empire, for Britain it was merely an annoyance, and half the British public didn’t even know their country was at war with the United States.159

  The commissioners signed the treaty on Christmas Eve 1814. News of the peace had not reached Wellington’s brother-in-law, General Edward Pakenham, however, who had marshaled a 10,000-man army in Jamaica and sailed it to the Louisiana coast to storm New Orleans and pour into the Mississippi Valley. Nor had U.S. general Andrew Jackson heard of the treaty. After wresting Alabama from the Creek Indians, he now methodically prepared to wreak equal violence upon the British invaders of New Orleans. With pirate chief Jean Lafitte as his unorthodox aide-de-camp, Jackson built defensive earthworks stretching from the Mississippi at the western end to an impassable swamp at the eastern, and he prepared his 4,700 soldiers and artillerymen to meet 5,300 boxed-in British head-on. The unrelenting, close-range cannon, rifle, and musket fire on January 8, 1815, was “the most murderous I ever beheld,” a battle-tested British veteran marveled. The numbers bear him out: 700 Britons killed (including Pakenham), 1,400 wounded, and 500 captured—compared with 7 dead and 6 wounded Americans.160

  The burning of Washington had at last solidified U.S. public opinion in favor of the war; when the news of Jackson’s victory reached Washington on February 4, topping even the U.S. Navy’s dazzling feats, the celebratory crowds in the torch-lit streets felt the war effort was worth its heavy cost. To crown all, when the peace terms reached Madison on February 13, their mildness amazed him. With their honor vindicated, and the question of impressment made moot by the ending of the European war, Americans believed they had won a famous victory, even though Britain had conceded nothing. They felt all the more victorious when the next month the U.S. Navy crushed the Barbary pirates for good, freeing all their captives.161 Madison was the man of the hour, and what one journalist dubbed the “era of good feelings” dawned.

  In truth, however, America had had a close call, and Madison digested its lessons. In April 1816, he approved a new bank, a small standing army and permanent navy, and taxes and tariffs to maintain them.162 He had learned, as all his reading of history should already have taught him, that because men are not angels, a nation needs a military establishment to defend against the passions and interests that drive other countries to trample its rights. He had learned, too, that the bank was necessary, not merely convenient.

  And that lesson made his understanding of constitutional interpretation more nuanced. “There is certainly a reasonable medium between expounding the Constitution with the strictness of a penal law, or other ordinary statute, and expounding it with a laxity which may vary its essential character,” he wrote in 1819, two years after he retired. One should neither “squeeze it to death” nor “stretch it to death,” he pronounced late in life. Reasonable men will have legitimate disagreements about the means necessary to wield the government’s limited and enumerated powers. All that is beyond dispute is that the means may not outstrip the ends, “which is in effect to convert a limited into an unlimited Govt.”163

  Historians like to play the game of “counterfactual history”: What would have happened had Lincoln let the South secede or if Lee had won at Gettysburg? What if Britain had stayed out of World War I, if Hitler had invaded Britain, or if Russia had had no Gorbachev? So it’s hard to resist the question: What if Madison and Jefferson had acknowledged the value of America’s shipping trade, had recognized the skill of U.S. seamen, had built up a navy equal to U.S. maritime genius, and had sent it to protect seaborne commerce? What if they had valued finance and central banking? Would America have had to fight the War of 1812? And suppose Madison had decided that America’s commercial interest lay with Britain, long its main trading partner, not France, for which he and Jefferson had, Hamilton once charged, a “womanish weakness”: Would he have helped defeat Napoleon and joined Britain in the commercial mastery of the world?164 The point of such questions is only to show that nothing is foreordained. Events unfold because people make choices, show courage (or not), have talents, have luck, have certain beliefs, not because of impersonal, ineluctable forces. The leader makes the time as much as the time makes the leader. Thinking about how things might have turned out better, Madison would say, is how we learn from the experience of history.

  WHEN THE MADISONS left Washington for retirement at Montpelier on April 6, 1817, the ex-president seemed like “a School Boy on a long vacation,” a fellow passenger on their steamboat recalled: “as playful as a child, talking and jesting with everybody on board.” He was happy with his “release from incessant labors, corroding anxieties, active enemies, and interested friends,” as Jefferson described how he must feel.165 Healthy and fit at sixty-six, he threw himself enthusiastically into managing his plantation. He and Dolley, surrounded by relatives, entertained crowds of visitors in the warm months, with ninety to dinner one Fourth of July. They walked up and down their portico when it rained, arranged and edited Madison’s papers for publication, and “looked,” one visitor said, “like Adam and Eve in their Bower.”166

  Madison fell at once into his comfortable role as Jefferson’s second in command on the board of the University of Virginia, of which Jefferson, as founder and rector, was, said Madison, “the great projector and mainspring.”167 When the third president told the fourth how pleased he was to think that Madison would also succeed him as rector, it was something more than modesty that made Madison say that doing so—as he faithfully did—“would be the pretension of a mere worshipper [replacing] the Tutelary Genius of the Sanctuary.”168 Aside from a three-month sojourn in Richmond for the 1829 Virginia Constitutional Convention, the Madisons, increasingly dependent on each other, never left Montpelier beyond short trips to Charlottesville for Board of Visitors business and twice-yearly weeklong visits to Monticello—where one can’t help wondering which of the old couple slept against the wall in the cozy but inconvenient alcove bed in what was always called “Mr. Madison’s room.”

  When the Madisons returned to Virginia from Washington, war-inflated grain prices were falling. Like so many of his neighbors, Madison tried to diversify, raising sheep and growing corn and even tobacco again, difficult on the worn-out Piedmont clay. Bad weather throughout the 1820s shrank harvests; Virginians sold depreciating land cheap, sold slaves, and moved to greener pastures as their way of life died out. “They whose fathers rode in coaches and dr
ank the choicest wines now ride on saddlebags, and drink grog, when they can get it,” mourned John Randolph.169

  The agricultural depression hit Jefferson especially hard, not only because high living had already swamped him with debt but also because, as the Virginia gentlemanly code demanded, he had co-signed loans for a friend who defaulted, leaving him liable for more than he could pay. In his last letter to Madison, he confided that he was trying to get permission for a lottery to sell off his lands, keeping just the Monticello house and a modest farm. Otherwise, he would lose the estate and perhaps “have not even a log hut to put my head into” or even “ground for burial.” And, with a premonition of death, he said farewell: “The friendship which has subsisted between us, now half a century, and the harmony of our political principles and pursuits, have been constant sources of happiness to me,” he told Madison. “To myself you have been a pillar of support through life. Take care of me when dead, and be assured that I shall leave with you my last affections.”170

  Madison replied, “You cannot look back to the long period of our private friendship & political harmony, with more affecting recollections than I do. If they are a source of pleasure to you, what ought they not to be to me?” Perhaps gently telling Jefferson that he wished he could help him financially but couldn’t, he remarked that for more than a decade, “such have been the unkind seasons, & the ravages of insects, that I have made but one tolerable crop of Tobacco, and but one of Wheat; the proceeds of both of which were greatly curtailed by mishaps in the sale of them. And having no resources but in the earth I cultivate, I have been living very much throughout on borrowed means.”171