James Madison: A Life Reconsidered

by Lynne Cheney

  A contingent of Kentucky volunteers had marched with Harrison, and Felix Grundy knew some of the fallen. The Indians were not solely responsible for the murders, he said. The British had supported them, incited them. “War is not to commence by sea or land,” he thundered on the floor of the House, “it is already begun; and some of the richest blood of our country has already been shed.” Grundy maintained that the United States should “drive the British from our continent” and thus keep them from inciting “the ruthless savage to tomahawk our women and children.” Like Peter Porter of New York, he saw Canada as more than a bargaining chip; it would make a fine addition to the United States. “I am willing to receive the Canadians as adopted brethren,” Grundy said.50

  • • •

  UPON ASSUMING the speakership, Henry Clay had been determined to bring order to the House, and that meant getting John Randolph of Roanoke under control. So volatile was Randolph that no one had previously dared to deal with the hunting dogs he habitually brought onto the House floor, but early on, when he showed up with one of his pointers, Clay ordered the dog out and Randolph acceded. This did not, however, signal any diminution in the ferocity with which he went after opponents. Randolph demanded proof that the British had incited the Indians at Tippecanoe and accused his fellow Republicans of pushing a “war of conquest and dominion.” One theme was repeated throughout their remarks, he said, “one eternal monotonous tone—Canada! Canada! Canada!”51

  Randolph’s eloquence had lost its power to persuade, but it nevertheless took more than two weeks for the House to approve measures to strengthen the military. In the Senate, William Branch Giles complicated matters by giving the president more men than he wanted: instead of enlarging the army by ten thousand for three years, he pushed through a proposal calling for twenty-five thousand for five years. That number would require a large tax levy and was a number impossible to raise in any case, given the length of enlistment, but the House went along with those numbers in January. The Senate also played havoc with the volunteer force by putting the states in charge of it. An exasperated Madison observed that while there was support for war, Congress seemed intent on making it as hard as possible to wage. He wrote to Jefferson, “With a view to enable the executive to step at once into Canada, they have provided … for a regular force requiring twelve [months] to raise it and … a volunteer force on terms not likely to raise it at all for that object.” Responded Jefferson, “That a body containing one hundred lawyers in it should direct the measures of a war is, I fear, impossible.”52

  Langdon Cheves, whom Clay had made chairman of the Naval Committee, brought forth a proposal to build ten new frigates, but it was voted down at the end of January. The House did give its support to measures that allowed merchant vessels to arm and capture enemy ships as prizes. Peter Porter called this use of privateers “war … by individual enterprise,” and it would be enormously successful.53

  It took until early March, but Congress also took steps to pay for the war, passing a series of tax resolutions. Even though they were made contingent on the event of war, Madison was grateful that the members of Congress “have got down the dose of taxes,” as he described it to Jefferson. “It is the strongest proof they could give that they do not mean to flinch from the contest to which the mad conduct of Great Britain drives them.”54

  Intent on maintaining the momentum toward war, the president sent documents to Congress that James Monroe had acquired from a handsome Irish immigrant named John Henry. The governor-general of Canada, Sir James Craig, had dispatched Henry to Boston as a secret agent during the unpopular embargo of the Jefferson administration, and the documents sent to Congress included Craig’s instructions to Henry to determine the sentiment among New Englanders for separating from the Union rather than suffering “a continuance of the difficulties and distress to which they are now subject” and to identify individuals interested in such an effort. U.S. officials had long suspected Great Britain of making efforts to sever New England from the rest of the nation, but here was proof. “Who would now assert that Great Britain was friendly disposed towards us,” Richard Johnson of Kentucky demanded to know, or “that she was fighting our battles or the battles of freedom, [or] that she stood between us and universal domination.” Like other war hawks, Johnson drew a connection between British attempts to subvert Bostonians and their efforts to incite Indians along the frontier. The Henry letters, he said, accounted “for the news we are daily receiving of the hostile intentions of the savages upon our borders.”55

  Federalists energetically objected that the administration was trying to smear them. In the letters, Henry had written about New Englanders “of talents and property who now prefer … open resistance and a final separation to an alliance with France and a war with England.” But who exactly were these citizens? Federalists demanded, pointing out that Henry had named no names. They also denounced the administration for paying an exorbitant amount—fifty thousand dollars—for the papers. Soon it was revealed that the comte de Crillon, who had introduced Henry to official Washington, had credentials that were entirely bogus, and the administration suffered further embarrassment when it became public that the United States had sent an American agent, George Mathews, into East Florida (Florida today). Mathews had been sent in case citizens there decided to break from Spain as they had in West Florida, but, apparently impatient, he had decided to hurry things along by organizing a rebellion. Mathews had far exceeded his brief, but his actions nevertheless made the Madison administration look guilty of worse violations of another nation’s sovereignty than the British were in the Henry affair. Henry’s letters should have served as a warning about New England discontent and British willingness to take advantage of it, but events that had nothing to do with the substance of the letters largely obscured those messages.56

  The administration suffered an undeniable setback when a squadron of French warships captured and burned two American merchant ships carrying flour to Spain. The incident provided the British opportunity to demand evidence that Napoleon had lifted the decrees of Berlin and Milan and provided an opening for domestic opponents of war. The administration took a step back. Monroe and Clay had previously agreed that Congress would vote a thirty-day embargo that would be followed by war. Such a move would allow American ships to seek safe harbor and serve as a notice to the nation and the world that war was on the horizon. Now it seemed prudent to lengthen the embargo to sixty days. Some of Madison’s opponents believed this request represented wavering on the president’s part, but in an April 3, 1812, letter to Jefferson the president seemed to be on his steady course. The British “prefer war with us to a repeal of their orders in council,” he wrote. “We have nothing left, therefore, but to make ready for it.”57

  On April 20, Vice President George Clinton, long in poor health, died, setting off a scramble for a successor. The Republican caucus chose Elbridge Gerry, who as governor of Massachusetts had signed into law a bill reshaping the state’s election districts to give Republicans an advantage. One of the reconfigured districts looked distinctly like a salamander, giving rise to the term “gerrymander,” still recalled today when politicians redraw district lines to give their party an edge. Gerry’s fierce opposition to antiwar Federalists made him an attractive vice presidential choice—as did his age. He was sixty-seven, and Madison might well have pushed for his choice as a way of preserving the presidency for his erstwhile rival Secretary of State James Monroe.58 It is a measure of Madison’s ability to rise above personal animosity that by this time he was almost surely thinking of Monroe, who had twice challenged him for office, as his successor.

  At about the same time as the Republican caucus, the House sent out an official call for its members to be present by June 1, 1812, and as representatives were gathering, Madison met with Clay and his war hawks. As Madison’s foes liked to tell it, the Speaker used the occasion to stiffen the president’s spine, but there is no indication that the president lacked fervor fo
r confronting Britain. His only hesitation had to do with readiness for war. Congress had already passed legislation allowing the president to enlist fifteen thousand men for eighteen months of service and would soon agree to measures that would bring numbers of regular forces more in line with his thinking, but troops had to be organized for war, and Congress had indefinitely postponed action on his request for two assistant secretaries of war to assist the secretary, William Eustis. In the end, the president concluded that the country was as ready as it was ever likely to be—until war was upon it. “It was certain,” he would write, “that effective preparations would not take place whilst the question of war was undecided.”59

  He had also concluded that opposition to war was not going to go away, particularly while opponents felt they might force a change in course. And so the president decided, as he would say many years later, “to throw forward the flag of the country, sure that the people would press onward and defend it.” This was thinking not that different from the war hawks’. Felix Grundy had declared on the floor of the House, “Whenever war is declared, the people will put forth their strength to support their rights.”60

  Clay almost certainly told the president in their meeting that he had a sufficient number of votes, and the two men undoubtedly discussed how to take the nation to war under the Constitution. Doing something that had never been done, they apparently agreed on the steps that followed. On June 1 the president sent a message to Congress setting forth British offenses, from impressment to Orders in Council to inflaming tribes along the frontier. These acts, declared the president, were “hostile to the United States as an independent and neutral nation,” and he recommended that Congress take up the “solemn question” of whether the country should “continue passive under these progressive usurpations” or take up “defense of their national rights.”61

  On June 4 the House voted a declaration of war, and two weeks later the Senate followed. Madison signed the measure, and on July 18, 1812, the nation was at war.

  Chapter 16

  A FRIEND OF TRUE LIBERTY

  THEIR “VOLUNTARY AND HEARTY COOPERATION” was not to be expected, the citizens of Charlemont, Massachusetts, told the president. They could not, they wrote, support a war that put the United States on the same side as Napoleon, “who holds beneath his iron sway the distressed nations of continental Europe.” The citizens of Lyman, Maine, put it more dramatically: “We should prefer the lot … of Daniel in the lions’ den rather than fall a sacrifice to that despot.”1

  Napoleon wasn’t the only reason that New England Federalists opposed the war. They had suffered four years of maritime restrictions at the hands of a national government controlled by the Republicans, and war with Britain would continue the disastrous decline they had witnessed in shipbuilding and commerce. It would also pit them against a nation that they looked fondly upon. David Osgood, pastor of the church at Medford, Massachusetts, described Great Britain as “a nation of more religion, virtue, good faith, generosity, and beneficence than any that now is or ever has been upon the face of the earth,” while the French, in Pastor Osgood’s words, were “a race of demons.”2 Federalist New England remembered the mob violence of the French Revolution and worried that Madison and his fellow Republicans, with all their emphasis on government by the people, were taking the United States down the same path.

  In July 1812 a riot in Baltimore underscored their concerns. At the center of it was a Federalist newspaper editor, Alexander Hanson, and Madison’s old friend from Princeton Harry Lee, who had been through difficult times since leaving public office. The father of ten children, including Robert E. Lee, who would command the Army of Northern Virginia in the Civil War, Harry Lee had tried to make his fortune in land speculation but managed instead to ruin his reputation as an honest man and spend a year in debtors’ prison. It is hard to be sure what brought him together with Alexander Hanson, but both of them opposed the war and hated mobs. Lee had even supported the Alien and Sedition Acts because he saw them as a way of preventing those ambitious for power from fomenting the masses.3

  Hanson had attacked the declaration of war in his Baltimore newspaper, the Federal Republican, claiming it to be the result “of undisguised foreign influence.” After a dissenting mob tore down his office on Gay Street, Hanson moved to a brick house on Charles Street, and on July 27 he and a number of Federalist colleagues defiantly issued a paper from there. Harry Lee and another veteran of the Revolution, James Lingan, were on hand to provide security, which everyone suspected would be needed. Not only was Baltimore a Republican hotbed, but its nickname was “mob town,” and that evening a crowd gathered and began to pelt the house with rocks. The group inside the house fired their weapons, aiming over the heads of the crowd but inciting them nonetheless. The attackers broke into the house; several of them were wounded and one was killed, provoking further fury from the mob. Lee convinced his colleagues that protective custody was their best option, but the next night a crowd overran the jail in which the men were being held, killed James Lingan, and seriously wounded several others, including Harry Lee, who would never fully recover. He would wander through the West Indies, trying to restore his health, and die on Cumberland Island, Georgia, at age sixty-two.4

  Federalists could see the Reign of Terror approaching, and they began, in Samuel Eliot Morison’s words, “to look on the national administration as a far more dangerous enemy than the nation against which war had been declared.” Some Federalists went so far as to accuse Madison of having set the mobs on the Federal Republican, a charge that must have been particularly galling to a man who had spent his adult life defending free expression. An early investigation indicating the falsity of the charge cheered the president by lifting the cloud of reproach from those whom he called “the friends of true liberty.” He modestly refrained from including himself among the “friends,” but in the war against Great Britain he would show himself to be their steady leader.5

  • • •

  THE AMERICAN PLAN was to begin by attacking the British at their point of greatest vulnerability—Canada, which was thinly settled and, given the extent of its border with the United States, lightly defended. Brigadier General William Hull, who had served with distinction in the Revolution, moved an army of two thousand from Ohio to Fort Detroit and from there crossed into the British territory of Upper Canada (southern Ontario today). After learning of the fall of a small American post on Mackinac Island, however, Hull became exceedingly fearful of being overrun by Indians and ordered a withdrawal to Detroit. Once there, terrified now about what Indian allies of the British would do in a battle for the fort, he surrendered his army without a shot being fired.6

  A court-martial would find Hull guilty of cowardice, but two subsequent battles in the West made clear that U.S. forces had reason to fear Britain’s Indian allies. Responding to Hull’s orders to evacuate Fort Dearborn on the Chicago River, Captain Nathan Heald arranged to turn it over to the Potawatomi. When he marched his party of fewer than a hundred out of the fort, it was set upon by the Indians, and most of the Americans were killed. The Indians beheaded one of the officers, cut out his heart, and ate it. After a battle at the Raisin River in Michigan Territory, dozens of Kentucky volunteers who had been taken prisoner were tomahawked and burned alive. “Remember the Raisin” became a powerful cry for rallying war spirit along the frontier.7

  Stephen Van Rensselaer, a militia major general, opened a second front along the Canadian frontier by ordering troops across the Niagara River, where they captured Queenston Heights, but when Rensselaer ordered militia to reinforce the position, they refused to leave American territory. The result was the subsequent loss of the heights and the killing, wounding, and capture of more than a thousand Americans, including Lieutenant Colonel Winfield Scott, who would one day become commanding general of the U.S. Army.8

  Meanwhile, to the northeast, Major General Henry Dearborn was supposed to push forward on a third front by attacking Montreal, but afte
r the Federalist governors of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island refused to send their allotments of militia, he wouldn’t leave Boston, despite repeated orders from the secretary of war that he raise what volunteers he could and move on to northern New York, where he would find troops awaiting him. Dearborn saw it as his duty to protest the Federalist governors’ refusals to send militia and was thoroughly alarmed by the vitriolic tone of war opponents. Convinced that Massachusetts was about to see a “Tory revolt,” he became caught up in the efforts of Massachusetts Republicans to counter it, and autumn was well advanced before he began his move toward the Canadian border.9

  President Madison was also concerned about Federalist opposition in New England. “The seditious opposition in Massachusetts and Connecticut with the intrigues elsewhere insidiously cooperating with it have so clogged the wheels of the war that I fear the campaign will not accomplish the object of it,” he wrote to Jefferson. But he didn’t see any advantage in confronting opponents head-on, as Dearborn seemed determined to do, nor, even though he called their opposition “seditious,” did he have any intention of trying to suppress them, which was Jefferson’s inclination. “Hemp and confiscation” would take care of them, the former president said, joking, probably, about hanging northern dissenters and taking their property, but Justice Joseph Story, whom Madison had appointed to the Supreme Court, quite seriously advocated “an internal police or organization” as “necessary to protect the government.” He urged Attorney General William Pinkney to seek a congressional remedy to counter “the violence of party spirit in some of the New England states,” and Pinkney passed the advice along to Madison. Philadelphia publisher Mathew Carey also urged the president to seek a law that would make “any attempt to dissolve the Union a high crime and misdemeanor.” But these ideas were utterly incompatible with the defense of free speech that the president had been offering since he was a young man. He thanked Carey for his concern but turned away his proposal with the soothing hope “that the wicked project of destroying the Union of the states is defeating itself.”10