James Madison: A Life Reconsidered
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Provocations on the part of Britain soon muted that charge. News came of a speech by Lord Dorchester, the governor-general of Canada, confirming suspicions that the British were urging Indian attacks on Americans in the Northwest, where Great Britain still had not left military garrisons that it had agreed to give up in the peace treaty of 1783. The British also issued an even harsher Order in Council, one that put at risk not just foodstuffs but any cargo—and the vessels carrying it—to or from the French West Indies. Then, bringing the crisis to a head, the British began seizing American ships. Soon they had captured some 250 vessels in the West Indies and declared most of them prizes of war. They stripped crew members of papers and possessions, including the clothes they were wearing, and threw the naked seamen into rusting prison hulks.2
Retaliatory trade policies suddenly seemed beside the point, and leading Federalists began advocating a military buildup. In response to the threat posed by the Algerine corsairs, Congress passed and the president signed a bill authorizing the construction of six American warships. Madison voted against the measure, arguing that the ships could not be ready in time to deal with the crisis. Moreover, he said, since the Algerine pirates “were known to be in the habit of selling a peace,” the United States might find it could “be purchased for less money than the armament would cost.”3 In fact, the nation would bribe the Algerines—but also build the six frigates, a project for which Madison would one day be very grateful.
Federalist Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts followed up by proposing fifteen regiments of a thousand men each and authority for the president to declare an embargo. Madison regarded armies, like navies, as potentially ruinous expenses. He also worried that a standing army would dangerously enhance governmental power. The Republic would be better off if the United States worked its will on the world through trade restrictions rather than military establishments, he believed. The embargo thus struck him as a wise move, and although New England members at first resisted, on March 25 the House unanimously passed a bill halting trade between America and all other countries for thirty days.4
Members clamored to do more, and partly in hopes of blocking further anti-British measures, President Washington, spurred on by Hamilton, decided to send an envoy to London. His choice, to Madison’s way of thinking, was not the worst he could have made. That would have been Hamilton himself. But Washington’s pick was nearly as bad: the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay. As Madison saw it, the tall, thin New Yorker simply wasn’t a dependable protector of America’s interests. It was he who had proposed that the United States forgo navigation on the Mississippi for thirty years in exchange for a trade deal with Spain. Moreover, Jay was decidedly pro-British and anti-French in his thinking, a bias that Madison attributed in part to anti-Catholicism.5
• • •
IN THE HIGH COUNCILS of the executive branch, there was now no strong voice representing the Republican view, a situation that Madison could have remedied. President Washington had brought up the subject of his replacing Jefferson as secretary of state, but Madison had seen Jefferson’s frustration in a cabinet in which he was an outsider and wanted no part of it. Edmund Randolph had replaced Jefferson, and although ostensibly Republican, he vacillated so often that Jefferson called him a chameleon, “having no color of his own and reflecting that nearest him.” William Bradford, who had been Madison’s friend at Princeton, had become attorney general when Randolph moved up, but he and Madison were no longer close, and Bradford was a committed Federalist. The president was increasingly under the Federalist spell, as Madison saw it, and that, combined with his enormous popularity, was “an overmatch for all the efforts Republicanism can make.” Allegiances were shifting in Congress so that the party of republican sentiment in the Senate was “completely wrecked,” he told Jefferson, and the House was headed in the same direction.6
• • •
IN THE MIDST of what was not a good time for him politically, Madison experienced a most happy turn in his personal life. Out walking one spring day, he caught sight of the recently widowed Dolley Payne Todd. Nearly five feet eight inches tall and of shapely figure, she turned many a head. Her friends teased her about the men who lingered in the streets for a glimpse of her. “Really, Dolley,” they would say, “thou must hide thy face.”7
She had black hair, blue eyes, and a startlingly fair complexion that she had learned as a child growing up in Virginia to shelter from the sun. When she was fifteen, her Quaker father, John Payne, decided as a matter of conscience to free his slaves, and he moved his family to Philadelphia, where they joined the Northern District Meeting. Many years later, female Friends remembered that young Dolley was “inclined … for the gaieties of this world” and often gave offense with the way she wore her caps, “the cut of her gowns, and the shape of her shoes.” One Quaker matron recalled that during an effort to convince her of the seriousness of life, the young girl “at first smiled and afterwards fell fast asleep.”8
John Payne tried to support his family by manufacturing laundry starch, but the business went under, and overwhelmed by failure, he took to his bed. Dolley Payne, age twenty-one, fulfilled her dying father’s wish by becoming the wife of a promising young Quaker lawyer, twenty-seven-year-old John Todd, who had been kind to John Payne through his trials. The newlyweds, together with Dolley’s sister Anna, moved into an imposing brick house at Fourth and Walnut streets. Dolley’s mother, Mary, began to take in boarders, one of whom was Aaron Burr.9
Madison had known Burr since they had both been students at Princeton, so it was natural for the congressman to turn to him when he wanted an introduction to the lovely widow Todd. “Thou must come to me,” Dolley wrote to a friend. “Aaron Burr says that the great little Madison has asked him to bring him to see me this evening.” Dolley wore mulberry satin and yellow glass beads to greet James in her parlor, and he was thoroughly smitten. Soon he was letting Dolley know how he felt through her friend Catharine Coles. “Now for Madison,” wrote Catharine to Dolley on the first day of June 1794: “He told me I might say what I pleased to you about him. To begin, he thinks so much of you in the day that he has lost his tongue; at night he dreams of you and starts in his sleep a calling on you to relieve his flame, for he burns to such an excess that he will be shortly consumed and he hopes that your heart will be callous to every other swain but himself.” Lest Dolley think this breathless prose didn’t sound like Madison, Catharine assured her, “He has consented to everything that I have wrote about him with sparkling eyes.” She also noted that James Monroe had been appointed minister to France and that Madison had taken over his house. “Do you like it?” she inquired.10
Madison was not Dolley’s only suitor. Another, Philadelphia lawyer William Wilkins, pursued her with such intensity that he felt obliged to apologize for the “violence of attachment which made me appear so unamiable in thy eyes.”11 That was not Madison’s style—except when Catharine Coles served as his amanuensis—and he had many other marks in his favor. A great man who would possibly be greater, he had achieved a level of fame and respect matched by few in the nation. He would be a powerful protector, which a struggle to extract her rightful inheritance from John Todd’s estate likely convinced Dolley she needed, and he would treat her with kindness and thoughtfulness. Dolley, like many a woman before and since, might have found that the most essential point.
They discussed finances and agreed to settle Dolley’s real property “with a considerable addition of money” upon two-year-old John Payne Todd.12 Dolley was aware that she would be expelled from meeting for marrying out of the Quaker faith, and they might have discussed that as well. It is entirely possible that Dolley, who felt hemmed in by Quaker strictures, looked forward to the event with relief.
By mid-August, Dolley had written James an affectionate letter accepting his offer of marriage. “I cannot express but hope you will conceive the joy it gave me,” he wrote back. The wedding took place in the parlor of the stone house at Harewoo
d, the estate in Virginia where Dolley’s sister Lucy and her husband, George Steptoe Washington, the nephew of the president, lived. There is no record of Dolley’s dress, but we know that James’s shirt was trimmed with a Flemish lace that the exuberant young women who attended Dolley cut up for souvenirs.13
On the morning of her wedding, Dolley wrote a letter to her friend Eliza Collins Lee describing her husband-to-be as “the man whom of all others I most admire.” She wrote that “in this union, I have everything that is soothing and grateful in prospect—and my little Payne will have a generous and tender protector.” She signed the letter “Dolley Payne Todd,” but that evening, after the wedding, she signed it again, this time “Dolley Madison,” and she added, “Alass! Alass!” The marriage would endure until Madison’s death forty-two years later and be a happy one, but at that moment Dolley was distressed. Did the age difference suddenly hit home with her? James was seventeen years her senior and, as she was surely aware by this time, given to “sudden attacks, somewhat resembling epilepsy.”14 Perhaps she was simply responding to all she had been through in the last ten months—losing a husband and a baby and marrying again.
She was not a woman to be dispirited for long, and one imagines her smiling happily as she set out with James on their honeymoon, accompanied by Anna, her fourteen-year-old sister, whom she regarded as a daughter.15 Anna would live with James and Dolley until she married, providing company in which both Madisons delighted.
• • •
WHILE MADISON was traveling in northern Virginia with his new family, George Washington, spurred on by Hamilton, sent thirteen thousand militia into western Pennsylvania, where citizens were in open rebellion over the excise tax on domestic spirits that the First Congress had passed. Nearly every farm had a still, and the whiskey produced wasn’t just for local consumption; it was transported for sale. Angry farmers tarred and feathered tax collectors and burned down the house of one. Some six thousand rebels gathered in an armed show of strength in a field a few miles outside Pittsburgh.16
In the face of the overpowering force with which the president responded, the Whiskey Rebellion, as it came to be called, quickly dissipated, but its effects lingered. For one thing, it made Hamilton an ever more menacing figure in Republican eyes. He had been in effective charge of the army in western Pennsylvania, the man on horseback using force to govern men. The Whiskey Rebellion also increased Washington’s suspicions of several dozen political societies that had formed across the country. They called themselves “democratic,” a word that had come to be interchangeable with “republican,” and they quickly adopted the agenda of the emerging Republican Party. Federalists regarded them as a threat, and Washington blamed them for the Whiskey Rebellion. Sitting in the audience in Congress Hall for the first presidential address since his marriage, Madison heard Washington denounce “associations of men” for threatening lawful agents of the government. “Certain self-created societies,” said the president, had incited riots and violence until the government had been forced to act.17
Madison was shocked. Although one of the democratic societies had named its branch after him, both he and Jefferson steered clear of the clubs, whose members did not make a practice of tact or subtlety. But their right to meet and make pronouncements seemed nonetheless clear. In a letter to Jefferson, Madison called Washington’s condemnation an “attack on the most sacred principle of our Constitution and of republicanism,” and to Monroe, now in Paris, he wrote that Washington’s “denunciation of the ‘self-created societies’ … was perhaps the greatest error of his political life.”18
Still, Madison’s instinct was to let the matter pass, and the House of Representatives’ reply to the president did not at first mention it, but Thomas FitzSimons of Pennsylvania insisted on the floor of the House that the reply condemn “the self-created societies … which by deceiving and inflaming the ignorant and the weak may naturally be supposed to have stimulated and urged the insurrection.” In the ensuing debate Madison declared that “opinions are not the objects of legislation,” and he worried aloud, “How far will this go? It may extend to the liberty of speech and of the press.” Finally, a compromise was reached in which members expressed concern that “any misrepresentations whatever of the government and its proceedings, either by individuals or combinations of men, should have been made and so far credited as to foment the flagrant outrage which has been committed on the laws.” Madison wrote to Jefferson that Republicans considered the compromise language something of a victory while Federalists claimed “a final triumph on their side,” because Washington in his response made veiled reference to the democratic societies, urging that every effort be made “to discountenance what has contributed to foment” the rebellion.19
As Madison saw it, an assault on fundamental rights had been undertaken for political reasons. He wrote to Jefferson, “The insurrection was universally and deservedly odious. The democratic societies were presented as in league with it. The Republican part of Congress were to be drawn into an ostensible patronage of those societies and into an ostensible opposition to the president.” He worried—rightly, as it would turn out—that this deeply troubling tendency would become ever more threatening to what he regarded as first principles of the Republic.20
• • •
JEFFERSON, HEARING RUMORS that Madison would not be a candidate for Congress again, urged him to stay in office. “Hold on then, my dear friend,” he wrote, reporting that people with whom he talked had no “greater affliction than the fear of your retirement; but this must not be, unless to a more splendid and a more efficacious post.” Madison’s newly married state might have caused some to think that he would be settling into home life at Montpelier, and, as Madison told his father, there were “perhaps … many considerations to do so,” among them James senior’s need for assistance in the wake of Ambrose’s death. But Madison had unfinished business in Philadelphia, including the treaty that John Jay had been sent to negotiate with Great Britain. Madison was hearing that it had been concluded on grounds disadvantageous to the United States. “I suspect that Jay has been betrayed by his anxiety to couple us with England and to avoid returning with his finger in his mouth,” he wrote to Jefferson. Dolley Madison might also have subtly encouraged him to serve another term. Their marriage meant that she and Anna, fifteen now, were included in all the festivities of the social season, including the splendid ball held by the City Dancing Assembly to celebrate Washington’s birthday.21 If James served until 1797, they could enjoy two more winters of the social whirl.
Madison asked his father to contradict the rumors of his retirement and began advising him by letter about crops and caretakers, a task that became easier once the mail route was extended to Orange Court House. It wasn’t a perfect solution. James senior was not always prompt about answering mail and seemed to ignore his son’s suggestions for a rotation of red clover in the fields, but the makeshift arrangement, Madison decided, would get him through another congressional term.22
• • •
WITH THE EUROPEAN WAR expected to result in an influx of immigrants to the United States, the short session of the Third Congress passed a naturalization bill that extended the time of residence required from two years to five and mandated three years’ notice of intent to become a citizen. Madison supported the extension but objected to efforts to make the waiting period longer. He also supported a proposal from his colleague William Branch Giles that anyone wishing to become a citizen must renounce noble titles and took a certain pleasure in watching the Federalists, who had tried to devise such titles for Washington, squirm. But when Samuel Dexter of Massachusetts declared that “priestcraft had done more mischief than aristocracy” and mocked Catholicism, Madison was all business. He would have Catholics derided no more than he would have Baptists scorned. He said that he did not “approve the ridicule attempted to be thrown out on the Roman Catholics,” and added that there was nothing in Catholicism “inconsistent with the purest republ
icanism.”23
• • •
THE TREATY that John Jay had negotiated did not arrive in Philadelphia until early March, and it was immediately cloaked in “impenetrable secrecy,” as Madison described it. Details had still not been made public in April, when Madison left Philadelphia with his wife, his sister-in-law Anna, and his stepson, Payne, to spend the interval between the Third and the Fourth Congresses in the Piedmont. The secrecy continued through May and into June, when a special Senate session began debating the treaty in secret. Shortly thereafter, Madison, at Montpelier, began to receive a leaked copy of the treaty, page by page. “Convinced that this—as they term it—most important secret is much safer with you than in the hands of many to whom it is confided,” South Carolina senator Pierce Butler wrote, “I shall by every post send you a sheet of it.”24
The treaty was worse than Madison had expected. The United States gained certain items: a British commitment to withdraw from posts in the territory northwest of the Ohio River, which was supposed to have happened earlier; the creation of commissions to which Americans could appeal for losses they had suffered at the hands of the Royal Navy; and the opening of some trade to the West Indies, though on terms so harsh the Senate would reject this provision. But there was no mention of impressment, the increasingly troublesome British practice of forcing seamen who were deemed British but were often American, into British service. And there was abandonment of the U.S. principle that the cargo of neutral vessels should not be subject to search and seizure by warring nations. Perhaps worst of all, the treaty barred the United States for ten years from imposing the kinds of restrictions on British trade that Madison had repeatedly proposed. Jay had guaranteed the British that no matter the circumstances they would pay no higher duties than any other nation, thus, in Madison’s view, making any effective retaliation short of war impossible. The treaty was, Madison wrote, “so full of shameful concessions, of mock reciprocities, and of party artifices that no other circumstances than the peculiar ones which mark our present political situation could screen it from universal execration.”25