James Madison: A Life Reconsidered
Page 40
The satisfaction that this proclamation gave Madison must have been immense. It was ratification of his long-held belief that commercial sanctions worked, that the American republic did not have to go to war with Great Britain in order to assert its rights as an independent nation. The National Intelligencer put out an extra edition to announce “the happy result” of negotiations, and as news of the agreement spread, Madison had the heady experience of being the object of almost universal praise. Even a normally hostile newspaper like the Philadelphia Gazette had good words for him: “Never statesman did an act more popular or more conducive to the true and permanent interest of his country.” John Randolph of Roanoke congratulated him, offering a resolution in Congress approving “the promptitude and frankness” with which he had acted.8
The happy mood of the country likely pervaded the president’s house, where Mrs. Madison, working with the architect Benjamin Latrobe, was renovating and decorating. Operating with an appropriation from Congress of twenty-six thousand dollars, they were turning Jefferson’s office into the State Dining Room, which it remains today. The smaller room next to it, today’s Red Room, was being made into Mrs. Madison’s parlor. Yards and yards of sunflower-yellow satin were being cut to cover sofas and chairs and to festoon the windows and make cornices. Mrs. Madison wanted music in her parlor, and so Latrobe went shopping for a pianoforte and a guitar. He had trouble finding fabric for the draperies for the oval room next to the parlor, which was to serve as the drawing room, but by late March he had found enough crimson velvet not only for the windows but for chair cushions. This room, known as the Blue Room today, was regally decked out, with cream-colored walls setting off the crimson velvet. A new fireplace mantel was installed, and above it was hung a large looking glass, one of several Latrobe purchased. They all sparkled brilliantly in candlelight, but the mirror over the mantel in the drawing room was especially festive, with gilded balls trimming a cloth valance over the top.9
As spring approached, the Madisons were ready to entertain, and Mrs. Madison began her “Wednesday drawing rooms,” events that anyone acquainted with the Madisons—or anyone recommended by someone who was—could attend. In summer the windows might be thrown open in the elegant rooms; in winter large blazes were set in the fireplaces. A military band played as guests promenaded, the men dressed in dark coats and breeches, the women in elegant dresses that followed French fashion. Mrs. Madison’s outfits seemed to grow increasingly fanciful. At one of the Wednesday drawing rooms, a guest reported, she wore “a robe of pink satin trimmed elaborately with ermine, a white velvet and satin turban with nodding ostrich plumes and a crescent in front, gold chains and clasps around the waist and wrists.” After guests had greeted the president and his wife, they moved to the dining room, where the table was piled high, mostly with sweets, including Mrs. Madison’s favorite, ice cream inside a baked pastry shell. Coffee and wine were passed, and for the guest who wanted something stronger, there was a bracing whiskey punch.10
A European visitor to the first levee, held on May 31, was impressed by Mrs. Madison, describing her as “plump, tall, well-looking, and very pleasant and affable,” but the president, he wrote in his diary, “is a very small, thin, pale-visaged man of rather a sour, reserved, and forbidding countenance.”11 Smiling at strangers still wasn’t in Madison’s social repertoire—as it was never in George Washington’s—even when things seemed to be going very well. In little more than a week, the United States would resume trade with Britain, and that, in turn, might bring the French around.
But on June 10, with hundreds of American ships having already departed from port, Madison received word of new British Orders in Council. These had been issued before the British government would have received news of the Erskine agreement, but it was odd that there should be fresh edicts in light of the terms that Erskine had offered. Erskine, a genial young man with an American wife and genuinely friendly feelings toward the United States, gave many reassurances. Madison wrote to Jefferson that he expected the British government to “fulfill what its minister has stipulated.” Still, he said, he was prepared for the possibility that the British would be “trickish.”12
Dolley’s sister Anna, her husband, Congressman Richard Cutts, and their three small boys had moved into the White House, and they accompanied the Madisons when they set out for Montpelier in mid-July. Although construction would soon begin on the first of two wings to be added to the Piedmont house, James Dinsmore, the Irish joiner in charge of construction, would have moved bricks and lumber out of sight before the president’s party drove up the road to the mansion. Remodeling had already started inside, but Dinsmore had made sure that the house would be usable during the Madisons’ summer stay.13
Samuel Smith, the editor of the National Intelligencer, and his wife, Margaret, arrived at Montpelier in early August. The president greeted them at the door, as “plain, friendly, communicative, and unceremonious as any Virginia planter could be,” said Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Madison, “kindness personified,” wrote Mrs. Smith, asked her why she hadn’t brought her little girls. To Mrs. Smith’s answer that she didn’t want to inconvenience friends, Mrs. Madison said with a laugh, “I should not have known they were here among all the rest, for at this moment we have only three and twenty in the house.” Mrs. Madison led Mrs. Smith to her bedroom, where she helped her loosen her riding habit and take off her bonnet. She then joined her in lying on the bed, where the two of them were served wine, punch, and pineapple. Mrs. Smith was overwhelmed by Mrs. Madison’s “simplicity, frankness, warmth, and friendliness.” The Madisons’ life, she noted, “was characterized by that abundance, that hospitality, and that freedom we are taught to look for on a Virginian plantation.”14
This summer idyll was interrupted by news that the British had indeed been “trickish.” They had repudiated the agreement Madison had negotiated with David Erskine and recalled Erskine, in disgrace, to London for having violated his instructions. That amiable young man had presented certain conditions set forth in his instructions not as requirements, as the British Foreign Office had told him to do, but rather as negotiating points. He had been overeager, to be sure, but some of the conditions must have struck him as too harsh to be anything other than points to be negotiated away. One, for example, was that the Royal Navy be at liberty to capture American vessels that were trading with France and its allies in violation of American law. What nation would let another enforce its laws? Erskine had let the matter drop, but foreign secretary George Canning was now releasing dispatches demonstrating that he had instructed Erskine to make this obvious violation of American sovereignty mandatory. Madison, upon learning of all this, observed that Canning had been as determined to prevent a good outcome to the negotiations as Erskine had been to bring one about.15
Madison made the trip to Washington City in two and a half days and, after arriving, quickly settled a cabinet dispute. Secretary of State Smith was arguing that since Madison had received authority from Congress to lift nonintercourse with Britain, he needed congressional authority to reinstate it, but Congress was not in session, and Madison could hardly leave matters as they were. He did what the moment demanded, signing a new proclamation suspending trade with Great Britain. With matters back to where they had been when he entered office, he returned to Montpelier.16
• • •
BACK IN WASHINGTON in the fall, Madison found a new British minister in place, Francis James Jackson, whom the British Foreign Office clearly believed would present a stout defense of British policy. Jackson was notorious for having been chosen in 1807 to deliver an ultimatum to the court of Denmark: either surrender the Danish fleet to the British or see Copenhagen destroyed. The prince regent had refused, and shelling began that ultimately killed some two thousand civilians. Caesar Rodney, Madison’s attorney general, recommended that the president not receive a minister whose conduct had made him “personally obnoxious to our country,” but after learning of Napoleon’s decisive defeat of the Austr
ian army at Wagram, Madison no doubt thought it was worth giving Jackson a chance.17 Perhaps Napoleon’s dramatic success would render the British willing to reach a real accommodation with the United States.
The thirty-eight-year-old Jackson, a round-faced man whose sideburns verged on muttonchops, found much to admire about the new capital to which he had been assigned. “I am surprised no one should before have mentioned the great beauty of the neighborhood,” he wrote. He shot partridge near the Capitol and took long rides with his wife, Elizabeth, a Prussian baroness. But he could barely conceal his contempt for the president and his wife. He described Madison as not only “plain” but also “mean-looking,” by which he probably meant lacking in dignity and importance. As for Mrs. Madison, she was, he said, “fat and forty, but not fair.” He also passed along to his mother back in England Federalist gossip that the president’s wife had once been a comely barmaid.18
Madison quickly discerned that Jackson’s only purpose in the United States was to try to intimidate the government, but he also perceived the usefulness to be found in such an attitude. At his instructions, all official communications between the secretary of state, Robert Smith, and Jackson were to be in writing. This served a twofold purpose: first, putting Madison, who wrote all of Smith’s significant correspondence, in charge of negotiating with Jackson, and second, creating a record. Jackson fell into the trap right away, sending a letter to Smith in which he insinuated that the Americans had connived with Erskine, that the president himself had fully understood that the conditions set forth by the British were mandatory but chose to act as if they were not.19
On the surface Madison was all graciousness, hosting the Jacksons at a dinner party. “I do not know that I had ever more civility and attention shown me,” Jackson wrote. Madison even took Mrs. Jackson into dinner, thus settling what Jackson called the “foolish question of precedence” that had arisen when Anthony Merry was the British minister in Washington. Meanwhile, however, Madison was also demanding in a letter sent over Smith’s name “a formal and satisfactory explanation” for why the British government had disavowed an agreement made “by its acknowledged and competent agent.” The letter brushed lightly past the accusation of connivance, expressing surprise at “the stress you have laid on what you have been pleased to state as the substitution of the terms finally agreed on for the terms first proposed.” Some of the terms were “palpably inadmissible,” the letter noted. Did the British government really expect that the United States would give over the enforcement of its laws? When Erskine, the acknowledged agent of the king, saw that these proposals would not be successful, Madison-writing-as-Smith explained, he did what negotiators do and went instead with the reasonable terms.20
Jackson foolishly responded by repeating his charge that the Americans had ratified the agreement in bad conscience, which brought a response from Madison, again writing as Smith, that “such insinuations are inadmissible.” When Jackson stood by the accusation, he received a letter signed by Secretary Smith informing him “that no further communications will be received from you.”21
Within a week, Jackson read an account in the National Intelligencer of his correspondence with the secretary of state. It portrayed the American government, in the face of repeated insults by the British, acting in a fashion both strong and reasonable. Jackson realized what had happened. The Americans had told the “story in their own way and at the time they [thought] best,” and he was indignant about it. He wrote to his brother that he had come “prepared to treat with a regular government and have had to do with a mob and mob leaders.” He demanded his passport and prepared to leave Washington. Just as he was departing, the Intelligencer struck again, editorializing that he was the “fit tool of a treacherous and abandoned government” and suggesting that a man of his ilk could succeed at diplomacy only when accompanied, as he had been in Copenhagen, by dozens of frigates and ships of the line, as well as thirty thousand troops.22
Jackson found some sympathy as he traveled north to New York and Massachusetts. In Boston, he was honored by a banquet at which Senator Timothy Pickering, the most extreme of the Federalist leaders, raised his glass to “the world’s last hope—Britain’s fast-anchored isle.” But Jackson’s reputation made him a difficult man to defend. Moreover, because the Federalists had been enthusiastic about the deal with Erskine, they looked foolish when they tried to reverse course and blame the administration for duping him. Madison had turned what could have been a political disaster into a benefit. Observed Representative Ezekiel Bacon, a New England Republican, “I think that James Madison’s administration is now as strongly entrenched in the public confidence as Thomas Jefferson’s ever was at its fullest tide, and I do think that it will be quite as likely not to ebb as much as that did towards its close.”23
Just two days after Bacon’s positive assessment, Isaac Coles, Mrs. Madison’s cousin and the president’s secretary, caused a scandal by slapping Maryland congressman Roger Nelson in the face. Coles apologized to the House of Representatives, saying that he was “the last who would willfully manifest a deficiency of that reverence which is due to the representatives of my country,” and managed to get off with a reprimand for breaching House privileges, but he felt obliged to resign from his job and was replaced by his brother Edward.24
Coles’s assault on Representative Nelson, who was not only a member of the president’s party but a seemingly sensible fellow, was a personal matter. Coles thought Nelson had slandered him. But a more serious incident five days later had politics behind it. Virginia congressman John G. Jackson, Mrs. Madison’s fiery brother-in-law (the widower of her sister Mary), suffered a serious hip wound in a duel with a North Carolina congressman who had insulted Jefferson and Madison. Jackson, one of the president’s firmest allies, returned to the House the following spring but after an “unfortunate fall,” perhaps caused by the unsteady gait with which the gunshot wound left him, finally had to resign.25
Congress seemed disjointed, veering this way and that in an effort to find an alternative to either submission or war. In his message of January 3, 1810, Madison tried to provide direction, recommending that Congress reauthorize a statute that would allow him to raise 100,000 militiamen, provide for a standby volunteer force of 20,000, and fill out the regular army, which had been enlarged in the wake of the Chesapeake crisis. He also directed congressional attention to the navy, where, according to Secretary of the Navy Paul Hamilton, decommissioned frigates needed to be repaired and the cost would be $775,000. In addition, Madison noted “the solid state of the public credit,” indicating that a loan to finance these measures was appropriate.26
John Randolph of Roanoke, who had been ill, returned to Congress in time to object. “Is there a man who hears me who feels one atom of additional security to his person or property from the army of the United States?” Randolph asked on the floor of the House. “Has it ever been employed to protect the rights of person and property? Has it ever been employed but in violation of personal rights and property—in the violation of the writ of habeas corpus and as a new modern instrument of ejectment?”
Randolph proposed “that the military and naval establishments ought to be reduced”—a proposition that was, as it turned out, not the most extreme to be offered. Other congressmen called for doing away with the army and navy entirely.27
Representative Roger Nelson of Maryland, several months earlier the recipient of Isaac Coles’s slap, pointed out how inane these proposals were in light of previous steps Congress had taken: “It is a perfect child’s game. At one session we pass a law for raising an army and go to expense. In another year, instead of raising money to pay the expense by the means in our power, we are to disband the army we have been at so much pains to raise. We shall well deserve the name of children instead of men if we pursue a policy of this kind.” On April 17, the House approved general proposals to reduce both the army and the navy, but when members began to discuss where to cut, consensus vanished, and Con
gress, proceeding in what Madison called its “unhinged state,” failed to resolve the issue.28
Members did pass a new trade measure, a mirror of the one expiring. Macon’s Bill Number 2, as it was known, lifted all trade restrictions but gave the president power to reimpose them on France should Britain withdraw its Orders in Council, or on Britain should Napoleon back off his edicts. It was widely regarded as an embarrassingly weak measure, a virtual surrender to both nations, but Madison saw possibilities in it. The French would have little interest in maintaining a situation in which all trade restrictions were lifted because it gave a clear advantage to the British, who dominated ocean commerce and thus benefited most when it was freed up. France might, therefore, by backing off, use the act “to turn the tables on Great Britain by compelling her either to revoke her orders or to lose the commerce of this country,” Madison wrote to William Pinkney, U.S. minister to Great Britain.29