by Lynne Cheney
Even after Washington published his Farewell Address in September 1796 and the campaign took off in earnest, Jefferson remained ensconced at Monticello, experimenting with “a threshing machine made on the Scotch model” and trying to get new walls up at the main house, where he had demolished the upper story, before winter set in. Madison was now avoiding him, explaining to Monroe that he “thought it best to present him no opportunity of protesting to his friend against being embarked in the contest.” For vice president, there was some Republican support for Aaron Burr, but there were also recommendations that Republican electors cast one vote for Jefferson and the other for anyone except the top Federalist candidates. In the end Burr would gain just a single electoral vote from Jefferson’s supporters in Virginia, an outcome the New Yorker would not soon forget.48
Vice President John Adams was the candidate Federalists were coalescing behind, and Thomas Pinckney, who had successfully negotiated the popular treaty with Spain, had strong support for the second slot—though Pinckney, in a ship crossing the Atlantic on his way back to America, had no idea he was being pushed forward. Alexander Hamilton, not a fan of John Adams’s, was even advancing Pinckney for the top position.49 With parties still in their formative stages, it was next to impossible to reach nationwide agreement on a ticket, and since electors, according to the Constitution, cast two votes of equal weight, it was impossible to be certain exactly who would end up where when the votes were counted.
Political operative John Beckley brought what seems a decidedly modern spirit to a campaign in which candidates didn’t acknowledge they were running—or sometimes even know it. Beckley, who had come to America as an indentured servant and with Madison’s backing become the clerk of the House of Representatives in the First Congress, had an aptitude for politics—and no embarrassment about deploying it. He organized Pennsylvania, a state in which Federalists were strong, to achieve a victory for Jefferson in 1796. His first bit of shrewdness was to encourage a slate of Republican electors with high name identification, men such as former senator William Maclay. Then he kept the list of electors under close hold until after the Federalists had made known their much less distinguished slate. Beckley accurately assessed the areas of Republican strength in Pennsylvania and gave them extra attention, making sure, for example, that handbills were sent across the Alleghenies into areas supportive of Jefferson. As the election approached, he dispatched teams throughout the state to distribute thousands of ballots containing names of Republican electors. Since voters could not submit printed ballots on Election Day, Beckley, his agents, and activists across Pennsylvania handwrote thousands of them. Anyone who didn’t want to write out the slate himself—or perhaps couldn’t write—could submit the ballot at voting time.50
So clever was Beckley that historians generally agree that he was responsible for a diplomatic note published in the Aurora shortly before Election Day. In it the French minister set out his country’s decidedly hostile attitude toward the United States. As Republican operatives were happy to point out, this was the result of the Jay Treaty, and if it led to war, Federalists were to blame. Madison was not pleased with the note’s publication. He thought it would drive a further wedge between the United States and France. But the threat of war might well have influenced Quakers to vote Republican and thus been responsible for the narrow victory Jefferson eked out in Pennsylvania. Because the state’s overconfident Federalists had voted a winner-take-all system, Jefferson’s slim margin nevertheless gave him all but one of the state’s cache of electoral votes.51 In the end it wouldn’t be quite enough. When electoral votes were finally counted, Adams would have seventy-one to Jefferson’s sixty-eight. But the fact that Jefferson had fallen just three votes short sent a strong signal. Despite the Federalist win on the Jay Treaty and what was likely to be a Federalist Congress, the Republicans had demonstrated they were far more than a passing phenomenon.
Results were trickling in when Madison arrived back in Philadelphia with Mrs. Madison and his twenty-two-year-old sister, Frances Madison, on November 22. By the time the second session of the Fourth Congress convened on December 5, the outcome was still uncertain, but Madison felt obliged to send a warning to Jefferson: “You must reconcile yourself to the secondary as well as the primary station.”52
As it became clear that Jefferson would indeed be John Adams’s vice president, Jefferson wrote Adams a letter. Such a communication was not a bad idea, particularly since the election had made the candidate of the party opposed to Adams his vice president, but the letter dramatically claimed that Jefferson had never wanted to be president: “I leave to others the sublime delights of riding in the storm, better pleased with sound sleep and a warm berth below.” It seemed at once haughty and harsh, referring to Hamilton a little too cleverly as Adams’s “archfriend.” Jefferson might have had an inkling that the letter wasn’t quite right, because he sent it by way of Madison and asked his friend to review it. Madison did and tactfully suggested that Jefferson consider whether the letter might not change his relationship with Adams, which was cordial, for the worse, particularly since Adams was of a “ticklish” temper. The letter went unsent.53
Madison had announced his retirement from Congress. He was “wearied with public life,” he would later write, “and longed for a return to a state in which he could indulge his relish for the intellectual pleasures of the closet and the pursuits of rural life.” He also noted that his farm, as he liked to call Montpelier, was “the only resource of his future support.” William Wirt, a Virginia lawyer, would later write that Madison’s health, “in a visible and alarming decline,” was another reason for his retirement. Wirt explained that “his constitution had received a serious shock,” so he might have experienced another sudden attack of some severity.54
Madison and his family were still in Philadelphia when Jefferson arrived to be sworn in, and the vice president elect stayed with them overnight before moving to a hotel. It was spring before the Madisons had packed up their furniture, including purchases that Monroe had made for them in Paris, and were ready to leave the city. They took a roundabout way to their Virginia home, traveling through Harpers Ferry and visiting relatives along the way, and it was the end of April when they neared Montpelier.55 In the woods along the road, dogwoods were flowering, and sweet spire blossomed where the ground was damp.
As they approached the house, Madison might have noticed pale yellow flowers on the buckeye tree that had been planted in the southwest corner of the yard some seven years before. Who could have imagined all that would happen in the meantime, Hamilton’s ascendancy and the threat his policies posed, the Jay Treaty, which had completed Madison’s break with President Washington? He would never visit Mount Vernon again. Seven years earlier, he had just begun to suspect that the threat to the Republic would come not from the states, as he had originally thought, but from a too strong central government. Now he was certain of it—and alarmed that opposition to government policies, which he viewed as utterly necessary, was taken as subversive. Even in his Farewell Address, Washington had continued to advance that notion.
Madison’s personal life had also undergone remarkable change. Seven years earlier he had been a bachelor, and who would have supposed that those days would end with the lovely woman in the carriage beside him?
• • •
JOHN ADAMS took note of Madison’s retirement. “It is marvelous how political plants grow in the shade,” he wrote to Abigail.56 Madison had no formal plans to reenter politics himself, but he was certainly ambitious for his friend Jefferson, and should he achieve the presidency, it was as certain as day following night that he would call on Madison to assist him. In the event that happened, Madison would, as Adams observed, benefit from time spent out of the glare.
Chapter 12
REIGN OF WITCHES
ABOUT THE TIME THAT JOHN ADAMS was sworn in as president, William Martin, captain of the Cincinnatus, a ship out of Baltimore, was being tortured with thumbs
crews. The officers of the French brig that had captured Martin’s ship wanted him to say that his cargo was English property and therefore liable to French seizure. Martin resisted and got away with his cargo intact when more attractive prey, a British ship, sailed by, but his story and others in a similar vein made it clear that the French, furious about the Jay Treaty, had reached a determination: if British ships were no longer going to give neutral vessels a pass, neither would they.1
The French also broke off diplomatic relations, and one of the people Adams asked to be part of a negotiating team to go to Paris and repair them was James Madison. The former congressman refused, probably in part because of his aversion to deep water, but he might have also found the experience of his neighbor James Monroe instructive. As minister to France, Monroe, rather than following the Washington administration’s policy and defending the Jay Treaty, had urged that it be renegotiated. Diplomats weren’t supposed to give free rein to their own opinions but to represent those who appointed them, which in the case of the Adams administration Madison had no desire to do. Better to continue the path he was on, gradually becoming the patriarch of Montpelier and paying serious attention to farming. The war in Europe had sent grain prices skyrocketing, and by carefully cultivating his wheat fields, Madison hoped to put the estate’s finances on a firmer footing.2
He also wanted to enlarge the house at Montpelier so that it suited two families, and he came up with an ingenious and lovely plan for building a thirty-foot addition on the north and shifting the axis of the house in that direction. A two-story Tuscan portico across the front of the extended house unified the whole, although the house was in fact a duplex now, with separate spaces for the older Madisons on one side and for James, Dolley, and their family on the other. In later years, a central doorway with fanlight and sidelights would be added, and the illusion of a single, gracious dwelling would be complete.3
Madison was his own architect, and while he probably relied on books in his library, including one showing Palladio’s designs, he was not a stickler for rules. His portico combined Tuscan columns with an Ionic entablature, and his practicality showed itself when it came to the fanlight over the front door. It was originally designed as a semicircle, probably to harmonize with a semicircular window intended for the portico, but when Madison learned that the first-floor ceiling would have to be raised to accommodate the fanlight, he decided instead on a semi-oval window that would fit the existing structure.4
Madison was also his own general contractor, ordering materials, hiring workmen, and supervising construction. On Christmas Day 1797, he wrote to Jefferson to place an order with the nailery at Monticello for nearly 150,000 nails. Madison also asked the vice president to purchase window glass, brass locks, and brass hinges for him. Jefferson not only tended to his friend’s request but also advised him on a better hinge for his doors.5
The Madisons visited friends in the neighborhood and traveled farther afield to see relatives. After their furniture from Philadelphia arrived, they acquired a few more things from Monroe, who had brought extra goods back from Paris. An eighteen-foot tablecloth was one of the items purchased, which suggests that the Madisons were entertaining despite renovations under way. Dolley, unconstrained now by Quaker demands for simplicity, no doubt carried out her duties as hostess dressed as fashionably as was possible far from a city. One of her letters hints at the difficulty. She had asked her friend Eliza Collins Lee to buy and send her hose, but unfortunately the ones that arrived were too small. “The hose will not fit even my darling little husband,” Dolley wrote.6
Missing from this new life were offspring. “Madison still childless,” wrote Aaron Burr to James Monroe, “and I fear like to continue so.” Why James and Dolley had no children will never be known, and although he no doubt regretted not being a father, it might also have been a relief, given the widespread belief that epilepsy was hereditary. A highly influential treatise that Madison could have easily found in Jefferson’s library went so far as to declare it a duty for those with epilepsy to remain celibate. In any case, the Madisons’ childlessness did not equate with loneliness. James and Dolley were surrounded by young people: her son, Payne, and her sister Anna; his youngest sister, Fannie; and dozens of nieces and nephews.7
Since his arrival back home coincided with his father’s failing health, Madison’s new role seemed to satisfy them both, though one wonders how the frugal James senior regarded the great expansion of the family home. And James junior must surely have been conscious of how far he had come from the aspiration of his younger years “to depend as little as possible on the labor of slaves.” There were a hundred human beings enslaved at Montpelier, some of whose names we know from Madison’s letters. When he had learned that Billey Gardner, whom he had helped become a free man, had died in an accident at sea, Madison had asked his father to “let old Anthony and Betty know that their son Billey is no more.” When his parents traveled to take healing waters, Madison kept them apprised of the whereabouts and health of Jacob, Sam, Simon, Ralph, and Joseph. The house slaves at Montpelier were an ever-present part of the Madisons’ lives, serving them meals, helping them dress, and taking care of the multitude of tasks that made the household function. The quarters in which the domestic slaves lived were very close to the house. Smoke from the fires and the smells of cooking would have drifted into Madison’s library while he read. He would have heard the sounds of slave children playing.8
• • •
MADISON FOUND HIMSELF a counselor of sorts to James Monroe. Still shaken by his recall, Monroe, back in Albemarle now, sought Madison’s advice about preventing new blows to his reputation. Monroe’s first worry had to do with the payments that Alexander Hamilton had made to James Reynolds some five years before. They had become public, thanks to a brilliant, twisted, and starving immigrant from Scotland, James Callender, who was on his way to becoming the greatest scandalmonger in American history. Sarcastically dismissing the idea that the payments had been made to keep Reynolds quiet about the affair that Hamilton was having with his wife, Callender insinuated that Hamilton had been using Reynolds to purchase speculative certificates for him. The charge drove Hamilton into a frenzy. He blamed Monroe for leaking information to Callender, and the two nearly came to a duel. Hamilton even published a pamphlet aimed at proving definitively that he was an adulterer, not a speculator, and it was an angry exchange of letters reproduced in that pamphlet that had Monroe concerned. He asked Madison, was he obliged to pursue Hamilton further? Madison assured him that he was not, perhaps smiling to himself as he did so, realizing that the sensational details that Hamilton had revealed about his affair with Mrs. Reynolds made it highly unlikely that anyone was going to focus on Monroe.9
Several months later, when Monroe became concerned about insults that President Adams was directing his way, Madison again urged caution, noting that “the present paroxysm may pass off with as great a rapidity as it has been brought on.” When the younger man became agitated over Adams’s military buildup and the taxes he was proposing to pay for it, Madison sounded like a soothsayer on a mountaintop, responding that it was all part of a steady movement away from revolutionary principles that would soon reverse itself. “The tide of evil is nearly at its flood,” he wrote, and “will ebb back to the true mark which it has overpassed.”10
Madison seems to have managed a psychological separation from events in the world below, but it soon came to an end. President Adams reported that his diplomatic attempt to reach out to the French had failed and, when Congress demanded to know the details, sent it dispatches showing that three agents of the French foreign minister, dubbed X, Y, and Z, had demanded a bribe and a loan for the French war effort before the government would even receive the diplomats. Madison, hearing of the news at Montpelier, was amazed, though not about the French foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, being corrupt—that was widely acknowledged. But Talleyrand had spent time in America, understood how hard it was to k
eep secrets in the United States, and should have known better than to think his attempt to secure a bribe would work. “Its unparalleled stupidity is what fills one with astonishment,” Madison wrote.11
As citizens pictured America’s upright and honest envoys being pestered by decadent Frenchmen with their hands out, the XYZ Affair, as it became known, led to a great surge of patriotism. President Adams was lionized. The newspapers were full of addresses declaring affection for him and expressing confidence in his wisdom. At Jim Cameron’s Philadelphia tavern, he was toasted repeatedly as the crowd “roared like a hundred bulls.” More than a thousand supportive young men wearing black cockades (ribbons pinched to look like flowers) marched to his house, two by two, to pay respects.12
The anti-French rallying cry became “Millions for defense, but not a cent for tribute,” and Republican congressmen who would once have been hesitant enthusiastically joined the Federalists in expanding the army and the navy. Congress declared all treaties with France null and void and authorized the president to order his commanders to seize armed French vessels anywhere on the high seas.13 The nation was at war—although war had not been declared.
• • •
CONGRESS ALSO PASSED and the president signed measures to deal with what many considered the enemy within. The first target was immigrants, who, as Federalists saw it, were likely to have foreign allegiances. They were a political nuisance besides, since they tended to align themselves with Republicans. One piece of legislation gave the president power to expel aliens of any nation during either peace or war simply on the grounds that he suspected them of being dangerous. Madison, writing to Jefferson, declared the bill “a monster that must forever disgrace its parents.”14
