James Madison: A Life Reconsidered

by Lynne Cheney

  Madison was at Mrs. House’s Philadelphia boardinghouse putting into code a letter to Jefferson explaining the efforts he was making to enlist Lafayette’s assistance when Lafayette walked into his room. Madison was thus obliged, so he explained to Jefferson, “in order to avoid reserve to let him know that I was writing to you. I said nothing of the subject, but he will probably infer from our conversation that the Mississippi is most in my thoughts.” Particularly at Mrs. House’s, it could not have been otherwise. Eliza Trist, Mrs. House’s daughter, who was on her way down the Mississippi River to be with her husband, would soon learn of his death, and then what would she do? “When and how she will be able to get back since the Spaniards have shut all their ports against the U.S. is uncertain and gives much anxiety to her friends,” Madison wrote to Jefferson.35

  Madison and Lafayette traveled to New York, where the marquis received “a continuation of those marks of cordial esteem and affection” that Madison had observed since the two had first joined forces in Baltimore. From the city they set off in a barge up the Hudson to Albany, a journey that took them past lovely country homes and the commanding sites where Forts Washington and Lee and Stony Point had once stood. Their barge wound through highlands that curved and narrowed at West Point, where during the Revolution a great chain had been stretched across the Hudson to prevent British ships from sailing farther north. Slowed for six days by heavy wind and rain, the party finally sailed past family seats of the Rensselaers and Schuylers, over dangerous sandbars, and into Albany on September 22.36 As they were making arrangements for traveling overland to Fort Stanwix, François de Barbé-Marbois, the witty French chargé d’affaires whom Madison knew well from Philadelphia, arrived at the dock, and soon he had joined their party.

  After stopping at a Shaker community and observing the sect’s “convulsive dances,” the party rode on to Fort Stanwix, a journey of several days. “Mr. Madison directed the march,” Barbé-Marbois reported, “and I was cook for the troop.” It was often cold and rainy, but Lafayette seemed impervious to the weather, protected as he was by “a cloak of gummed taffeta, which had been sent him from France, wrapped up in newspapers. The papers had stuck to the gum, and there had not been time to get them off, so that the curious could read on his chest or his back the Journal de Paris, the Courier de l’Europe, or news from other places.”37

  At Fort Stanwix, Lafayette made a speech to the assembled Iroquois that was enthusiastically received. Lafayette so commanded the stage at Fort Stanwix that the official commissioners to the event were miffed, a fact that Lafayette understood, Madison wrote, using code, but he “consoled himself with the service which he thought the Indian speeches … had rendered to the United States.” Madison also thought that Lafayette was looking forward to reading about his performance. “It will form a bright column in the gazettes of Europe,” Madison wrote, continuing to use code, hinting that Lafayette would make sure of that. “He will be impatient for its appearance there without seeing any mode in which it can happen, of course.” As it turned out, Madison underestimated Lafayette, who managed to get copies of his remarks in American papers even before the commissioners had officially reported the treaty signing to Congress.

  Lafayette was often praised for his modesty, but Madison thought that a bit off the mark. Continuing in code, he described the young Frenchman as combining “great natural frankness of temper” with “very considerable talents” and “a strong thirst of praise and popularity… . In a word, I take him to be as amiable a man as his vanity will admit.” But Lafayette was a steadfast ally. He took on the task of encouraging the French to support America’s right to freely navigate the Mississippi. “I am every day pestering government with my prophetics respecting the Mississippi,” he wrote from Paris in March 1785. And he took up this cause, so dear to Madison, despite George Washington’s being cool to it. He wanted to see the Potomac become the commercial route into the interior. One of Lafayette’s tactics was to take advantage of the well-known penchant of Spanish officials to read other people’s mail. “I have written letters by post to Madrid and Cadiz to be intercepted and read,” he told Madison. It was impossible not to be charmed by such an openhearted soul. Madison’s assessment of Lafayette grew noticeably softer: “His disposition is naturally warm and affectionate and his attachment to the United States unquestionable.”38

  • • •

  MADISON’S THOUSAND-MILE journey from Montpelier to Philadelphia to New York, then through the Mohawk valley and back, makes the point that when he wasn’t ill, he was vigorous. The stereotype of him as forever weak and frail does not stand up well to the trips he took, including the relatively routine ones between Montpelier and Philadelphia—or Montpelier and Washington, after the capital was moved. They were always over roads that would not be thought to deserve the name today and seemed often to occur in downpours. Once Madison was forced to dismantle his carriage, make three trips with it “in something like a boat” over a swollen pond, and swim his horses across to get home.39

  Madison’s predisposition to sudden attacks did lead him to take certain precautions, such as avoiding “deep waters,” as one manual advised patients with epilepsy. Madison refused several opportunities for government service in Europe and in 1785 declined an invitation from Jefferson to visit Paris. “I have some reason … to suspect that crossing the sea would be unfriendly to a singular disease of my constitution,” he wrote.40

  An ocean voyage was an entirely different matter from a trip over a pond or up the Hudson. A journey of many weeks increased many times the odds he would suffer a sudden attack, fall overboard, and drown. Jefferson also invited Madison to move closer to Monticello. He had persuaded James Monroe to do so, he reported, as well as William Short, who was in Paris with him, serving as his secretary. “Would you but make it a ‘partie quarrée,’” Jefferson wrote, “I should believe that life had still some happiness in store for me. Agreeable society is the first essential in constituting the happiness and, of course, the value of our existence.”41

  Ever so politely, Madison put Jefferson off. “Your invitation has the strongest bias of my mind on its side,” he wrote, “but my situation is as yet too dependent on circumstances to permit my embracing it absolutely.” Much as he valued his friendship with Jefferson, Madison might well have perceived that a little distance was healthy, and even if he had wanted to be part of the philosophical neighborhood that Jefferson proposed, he had no way to do it. At thirty-four he was still relying on his father and the enterprise at Montpelier for a living.42 He could hardly expect his family to finance his setting up a household somewhere else.

  Jefferson’s proposal underscored for Madison a situation he wanted to change. “My wish,” he wrote to his friend Edmund Randolph in the summer of 1785, “is if possible to provide a decent and independent subsistence.” He wanted to be on his own—and he wanted a life, he told Randolph, that would “depend as little as possible on the labor of slaves.” Recognizing the contradiction involved in working to advance the cause of freedom while relying on income produced by slave labor, he was looking for a way out, and he had some ideas in mind, “several projects from which advantage seemed attainable. I have in concert with a friend here, one at present on the anvil which we think cannot fail to yield a decent reward for our trouble.”43

  The deal “on the anvil” probably had to do with buying land, then selling it at a profit. One area that he thought particularly ripe for speculation was the Mohawk valley, which he remembered as a place of rich soil near navigable water. His enthusiasm only grew after he discussed the valley with George Washington, an experienced land speculator, who intimated “that if he had money to spare and was disposed to deal in land, this [was] the very spot which his fancy had selected out of all the U.S.”44

  Madison found a willing partner in James Monroe, twenty-eight, a newlywed and now serving in Congress. Although Monroe, like Madison, was part of Jefferson’s circle, he was less given to intellectual pursui
ts than the other two men. Over his life, he would amass a substantial library, but his letters give almost no indication that he took pleasure in it. One contemporary observed of Monroe that “nature has given him a mind neither rapid nor rich” but that he made up for it through “a habit of application which no difficulties can shake, no labors can tire.” Washington admired the bravery with which Monroe, as an awkward and rawboned teenager, had fought in the Revolution. Jefferson admired Monroe’s honest character and had recommended him to Madison. “The scrupulousness of his honor will make you safe in the most confidential communications,” Jefferson had written. “A better man [there] cannot be.”45

  Together, Madison and Monroe bought nine hundred acres of Mohawk land for $1,350 and wanted to purchase more, but neither had the cash. It was a measure of Madison’s eagerness to invest further that he wrote to Jefferson describing the land and the bargain it represented in glowing terms and suggesting that Jefferson borrow the money in France for them to make a larger purchase. Jefferson explained that the French government borrowed more money than was lent in France, regularly and reliably paying attractive interest and making it unlikely that a foreign borrower would succeed. After buying out Monroe’s interest in the nine hundred acres, Madison sold the land in 1796, ten years after he had purchased it, for $5,250, leaving him a profit but hardly providing an independent subsistence.46

  Madison would never accumulate the resources to live independently. If he had devoted full and extended attention to the endeavor, perhaps he could have done so, but 1786, the year of his investment efforts, was also a time of national crises, and he increasingly turned his mind toward them. His absorption in politics, which would continue for decades to come, was fateful for the nation—and it would leave him linked forever to Montpelier and the enslaved people who lived there.

  One of the first crises came in April, when New York State refused to accept the impost in the form in which Congress proposed it. Twelve states had approved the measure about which Madison had written so eloquently three years before, but New York’s obstinacy effectively ended hope for the national government as it existed under the Articles of Confederation being able to raise revenue.47

  By late summer, “the general rage for paper money” headed Madison’s concerns. With Congress having no authority to prohibit states from printing money, various state legislatures were producing it willy-nilly. Rather than accept it, farmers were withholding their crops from market and shopkeepers were shutting their doors. Paper money was also producing “warfare and retaliation among the states,” Madison wrote, as were the taxes that states with “convenient ports for foreign commerce” were levying on neighboring states that had no such ports. New Jersey, located between Philadelphia and New York, was being taxed from two sides, like “a cask tapped at both ends,” as Madison described it. North Carolina, situated between Virginia and South Carolina, was “a patient bleeding at both arms.”48 And Congress had no ability to do anything about it.

  The Union’s increasingly dire straits gave special meaning to the study project Madison had embarked upon. In the library at Montpelier, he took notes on the books that Jefferson had sent him in a “literary cargo,” noting the strengths and weaknesses of ancient confederacies such as the Amphictyonic Council and the Achaean League and more modern ones such as the Belgic Confederacy. His reading revealed that lack of strength at the center made confederacies unable to act as a whole and predisposed them to falling apart.49 This history confirmed what his experience had shown him: if the United States was going to survive as a union, a strong central government was required.

  But he did not see clearly the vehicle for establishing such a government. His efforts to strengthen Congress had largely come to naught. He had doubts about states gathering in small groups to work out issues that were troubling them, thinking that was likely to excite “pernicious jealousies.”50 This may explain his failure to take offense when Governor Patrick Henry neglected to notify him of the time and place at which Virginia and Maryland commissioners were to gather to discuss commerce on the Potomac River. Madison had been appointed one of the representatives, but by the time he learned of the details, the meeting had already occurred.

  He did not miss the follow-on, however, a gathering in Annapolis to which Virginia invited all the other states “to take into consideration the trade of the United States.” Madison’s reputation by now was such that at least one of his contemporaries saw the Annapolis Convention as his handiwork, but he was, in fact, not at all sure that it would succeed. He described it to James Monroe as an effort that “will probably miscarry,” though it was “better than nothing,” he allowed, and “may possibly lead to better consequences than at first occur.” On the chance that something would come of it, he arrived early for the convention, taking up lodging on September 4, 1786, at Mann’s Tavern, an elegant hostelry at Church and Conduit streets that had formerly been the grand home of a Tory, Lloyd Dulany. The next evening he had dinner there, complete with wine, probably in the company of two other delegates.51

  Eventually, nine more delegates attended, but only five states were represented, which meant that the convention was, formally speaking, a failure. There might have been plans for meetings in the Senate chamber of the Maryland State House, just up the hill from Mann’s, but with only a dozen attendees it was more suitable to gather in a room at the tavern.52 There and at other Annapolis taverns and coffeehouses, the delegates, no doubt with Madison nudging them along, began to discuss the need for more than commercial agreements if the young country was to save itself.

  Alexander Hamilton, attending from New York, was also doing a fair amount of nudging. He had been critical of the Articles of Confederation since before the end of the war, finding them “neither fit for war nor peace.” In 1780, far in advance of anyone else, he had recommended a convention to remedy the articles. His time come round at last, he wrote a proposal to Congress and the states that was dire in its description of problems and dramatic in setting forth the need for change. So passionately did Hamilton make his argument that Edmund Randolph balked. Hamilton resisted changing the tone of his proposal until Madison took him aside: “You had better yield to this man, for otherwise all Virginia will be against you.” Hamilton listened, toning down his words so that the proposal calmly and respectfully suggested “the appointment of commissioners to meet at Philadelphia on the second Monday in May next, to take into consideration the situation of the United States [and] to devise such further provisions as shall appear to them necessary to render the constitution of the federal government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.”53

  • • •

  NOW MADISON SEEMED to be everywhere and all at once. Not long after departing Annapolis, he was in Richmond, penning the legislation that would throw Virginia’s weight behind the proposed convention. “The crisis is arrived,” he wrote, “at which the good people of America are to decide the solemn question, whether they will by wise and magnanimous efforts reap the just fruits of that independence which they have so gloriously acquired” or whether “they will renounce the auspicious blessings prepared for them by the revolution.” Virginia’s path was clear. It would work to make the United States “as happy in peace as they have been glorious in war” by appointing commissioners “to meet such deputies as may be appointed and authorized by other states to assemble in convention at Philadelphia.”54

  Even before the bill passed the House of Delegates, Madison was trying to persuade George Washington to attend. Virginia’s endorsement would come in “very solemn dress,” he wrote to the general, and it would carry “all the weight which could be derived from a single state. This idea will also be pursued in the selection of characters to represent Virginia in the federal convention. You will infer our earnestness on this point from the liberty which will be used of placing your name at the head of them. How far this liberty may correspond with the ideas by which you ought to be governed will be best decided where it must
ultimately be decided. In every event it will assist powerfully in marking the zeal of our legislature and its opinion of the magnitude of the occasion.” Washington could not have been terribly surprised by the nomination. In a recent letter to Madison, he had lamented America’s decline. “No morn ever dawned more favorable than ours did—and no day was ever more clouded than the present!” he wrote. He was particularly troubled by a report from Massachusetts of the tax revolt that would become known as Shays’s Rebellion. Farmers who could not pay what they owed were taking up pitchforks and marching on county courthouses to protest seizure of their land. The country appeared “fast verging to anarchy and confusion,” Washington wrote to Madison. “What stronger evidence can be given of the want of energy in our governments than these disorders?” he asked. “Will not the wise and good strive hard to avert this evil?”55

  No one in the country was regarded as wiser or more virtuous than Washington, as he himself well knew. He seemed to be inviting a nomination to serve at the Philadelphia convention, but when Madison presented it to him, he demurred, explaining that the convention was to meet in Philadelphia at about the same time as the Society of the Cincinnati, whose invitation he had already declined. Washington was president of the society, an organization of officers who had served in the Revolution, and he had at first been pleased to lead the group, but because membership in it passed down to oldest sons, the organization was soon perceived as planting the seeds of a hereditary aristocracy. The Massachusetts legislature denounced it. Pamphleteers railed against it. And Washington, ever careful of his reputation, had decided to put some distance between himself and the Cincinnati by sending regrets for their Philadelphia meeting. This meant, he wrote to Madison, “that I could not appear at the same time and place on any other occasion.”56