James Madison: A Life Reconsidered

by Lynne Cheney

  As part of his battle against the idea that a state could nullify a federal law, Madison publicly affirmed the constitutional authority of the federal judiciary to do so. It was impossible to conceive, he wrote in a letter to the North American Review, that there could be “a supremacy in a law of the land,” as provided for in article 6 of the Constitution, “without a supremacy in the exposition and execution of the law.” He was also clear, however, that the power of the Supreme Court had “not always been rightly exercised.” He and John Marshall had by now become personally reconciled. Regarded as great sages, they had both been called upon for their wisdom when Virginia rewrote its constitution in 1829, and during the months of the convention they were often seen walking together on Shockoe Hill, the site of the Virginia capitol. But Madison had not reconciled himself to Marshall’s latitudinarian constructions of the Constitution, nor to the idea that the federal judiciary’s was the only opinion that counted. There were “proper measures” that citizens and state legislatures could take—as Virginia had in 1798—that could bring about a change in public opinion sufficient to alter judicial opinion.42 The Supreme Court might have the last word—but not for all time.

  Madison did not cease his struggles against nullification even as he entered his ninth decade. He continued to send expository letters to Nicholas Trist, now an aide to Andrew Jackson, that Trist turned into newspaper essays opposing nullification. It was also to Trist that Madison lamented as South Carolina rushed headlong toward enacting a nullification ordinance: “The idea that a constitution which has been so fruitful of blessings and a union admitted to be the only guardian of the peace, liberty, and happiness of the people of the states comprising it should be broken up and scattered to the winds without greater than any existing causes is more painful than words can express.”43

  Henry Clay devised a compromise tariff that calmed both nullifiers and President Jackson, who was intent on forcing compliance with federal law. Madison congratulated Clay for the “anodyne” he had provided for “the feverish excitement under which the public mind was laboring,” and he optimistically predicted that the South’s surplus of agricultural workers, both free and slave, would be partly absorbed into manufacturing in the North and that the South would increasingly turn to the North for manufactured goods. He even predicted that his beloved Virginia “must soon become manufacturing as well as agriculture,” and if he was troubled by this dimming of the agrarian vision, he did not say so. At stake was something much greater—healing the potentially calamitous rift between the North and the South. His hope was that the intermixing of manufacturing with agriculture would alleviate the sharp divide and provide “a new cement of the Union.”44

  Still, he was worried by “the torch of discord” that had been lit by the nullification crisis, “by the insidious exhibitions of a permanent incompatibility and even hostility of interests between the South and the North, and by the contagious zeal in vindicating and varnishing the doctrines of nullification and secession, the tendency of all of which, whatever be the intention, is to create a disgust with the Union and then to open the way out of it.” He wrote a statement to be released only after his death:

  As this advice, if it ever see the light, will not do so till I am no more, it may be considered as issuing from the tomb, where truth alone can be respected and the happiness of man alone consulted. It will be entitled therefore to whatever weight can be derived from good intentions and from the experience of one who has served his country in various stations through a period of forty years, who espoused in his youth and adhered through his life to the cause of its liberty and who has borne a part in most of the great transactions which will constitute epochs of its destiny. The advice nearest my heart and deepest in my convictions is that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated. Let the open enemy to it be regarded as a Pandora with her box opened and the disguised one, as the serpent creeping with his deadly wiles into Paradise.45

  He wanted his fellow citizens to contemplate the awful consequences of dissolving the Union, and a posthumous statement was the most powerful way he could think of to encourage that.

  • • •

  MADISON SPENT long hours at Montpelier collecting and editing his papers. He wrote to friends and their descendants to retrieve copies of letters he had written, separated official correspondence from private, and, to the everlasting regret of Madison scholars, destroyed or gave away documents that he considered personal. Mrs. Madison often worked with him, and both he and she struck out lines in letters that they thought might be hurtful. When Madison came across a letter he had written to Jefferson some fifty years before, he changed the description of Lafayette it contained from “I take him to be as amiable a man as his vanity will admit” to “I take him to be as amiable a man as can be imagined.” The description had originally been in code, but Jefferson’s decipherment of it was plain for all to see. Thus in order to change the passage, Madison had to imitate Jefferson’s writing, which he did. Madison clearly thought that after a half century of friendship and all that Lafayette had endured, he deserved better.46

  Scholar that he was, working on his notes of the Constitutional Convention must have brought him particular gratification. They were a gift for posterity, contributing, in his words, to “the history of a constitution on which would be staked the happiness of a people great even in its infancy and possibly the cause of liberty throughout the world.” He also hoped that the sale of his papers would prove a financial benefit to family members and institutions that he valued. He no doubt particularly hoped to protect Mrs. Madison from the poverty that was beginning to encroach on Montpelier. A visitor noted that Madison’s well-designed house was “decayed and in need of considerable repairs, which, at a trifling expense would make a great difference in favor in the first impression of his residence.”47

  Although Madison sold off land, he did not want to sell slaves, which meant that there were fewer and fewer resources to support an enslaved workforce that continued to grow. Finally, in 1834, he sold sixteen slaves to William Taylor, a relative in Louisiana. He told Edward Coles that the slaves had consented “to be transferred,” and although slaves were generally—and rightfully—terrified of being sent to the sugar and cane fields of the Deep South, there is contemporary testimony to slaves as well as slaveholders wanting to leave an increasingly impoverished Virginia. It would have been obvious to those who were enslaved at Montpelier, as it was to its master, that the farmland that remained could not produce enough to feed and clothe all those who lived there.48

  Madison had intended for the sale to take care of his most urgent debts, but one of the first creditors he paid was Edward Coles, who does not seem to have been pressing for payment. But Coles had become agitated by what he called the “revolting heresies” of Andrew Jackson and peremptorily demanded that the eighty-three-year-old Madison step forth and condemn the president. Madison answered that given “the debilitating effects of age and disease,” he had “withdrawn from party agitations,” which is what he believed the quarrels surrounding Jackson were about. He no doubt also had in mind Jackson’s firm opposition to nullification. The president had been on the right side of that controversy. Coles responded furiously that Jackson was violating the Constitution and again demanded that Madison speak out. Coles was not the first person to think that being a creditor entitled him to more than money, but Madison, apparently finding his attitude intolerable, used proceeds from the slave sale to pay Coles. He also wrote him a stern letter that had apparent effect: Coles, though still not lacking in self-righteousness, henceforward was respectful.49

  • • •

  MADISON’S MOTHER died in 1829 at the age of ninety-eight, and he was also losing younger people whom he loved: Robert Madison, the nephew in whom he had placed such hopes, died in 1828. Anna Cutts, whom he had helped Dolley raise and seen through many troubles, died in 1832. As happens to those who attain great age, compatriots passed from his life, including Jam
es Monroe, who, having fallen into financial ruin, had been forced to sell his Albemarle property. Plagued by ill health, Monroe went to live with his daughter in New York City, and it was from there that he wrote to Madison, “I deeply regret that there is no prospect of our ever meeting again.” Madison responded, “Closing the prospect of our ever meeting again afflicts me deeply… . The pain I feel at the idea, associated as it is with a recollection of the long, close, and uninterrupted friendship which united us, amounts to a pang which I cannot well express.”50 Monroe died a few months later—on July 4, 1831.

  In a letter to historian Jared Sparks, Madison observed that since the death of Georgia’s William Few, he was “the only living signer of the Constitution of the United States,” and he joked, “Having outlived so many of my contemporaries, I ought not to forget that I may be thought to have outlived myself.” In his last years, he suffered from what he called “the crippling effects of a tedious rheumatism” that made it very difficult for him to write and caused him to spend much of his time on a couch. When friends came to visit him, he excused his reclining posture by saying that “he could converse better lying.”51 Despite age, illness, and financial stress, signs of good humor remained.

  His life became ever more narrowly circumscribed, until he was living in a single room where he had a bed and a chair, next to the Montpelier dining room, but even then visitors noted the vigor and relish of his spirit. They often gave Dolley credit for the loving care she provided him, and it was well deserved. During one eight-month period when he was ill, she did not venture farther than the black picket fence surrounding their Montpelier home. One particularly astute guest, English writer and feminist Harriet Martineau, noted how much Madison owed to his wife’s “intellectual companionship.” Martineau, who arrived to visit the Madisons on “a sweet day of early spring” in 1835, found Mrs. Madison “a strong-minded woman, fully capable of entering into her husband’s occupations and cares.” Dolley had been with the man whom she called her best beloved through presidential elections, war, and the burning of Washington, and during his long retirement she helped him edit his papers. One doubts that she any longer prefaced political questions as she once had by stressing her “want of talents.”52

  The Madisons had specifically invited Martineau, who was touring the United States, to visit Montpelier, perhaps because they had heard that she admired the former president’s political philosophy, but the fact that she was an abolitionist probably played an important part. Madison did not want to die without making clear that he, too, abhorred slavery, that it was guilty of every evil with which it had ever been charged.

  Perhaps it was the recent effort of working on his will that made him feel a need to explain himself. Certainly the task was a harsh reminder of the realities of trying to disentangle himself from an institution he despised. Friends were encouraging him to free his slaves in his will, but to do so immediately upon his death would leave Dolley Madison with an indebted estate and no way to run it. To free them upon her death would leave her in the same situation in which George Washington’s will left his wife. Martha Washington became so afraid of being killed that she freed his slaves a year after his death. But she had 153 slaves of her own remaining, “dower slaves” they were called, with which to manage Mount Vernon.53 There were no “dower slaves” at Montpelier.

  And even if there were a way for Dolley to manage with the slaves at Montpelier freed, where were they to go? As Madison explained to Martineau, “The free states discourage the settlement of blacks; … Canada disagrees with them; … Haiti shuts them out.” He told her that “Africa is their only refuge.” The American Colonization Society, of which he had become president, was, he said, the only thing that kept him from utter despair about ending slavery.54

  Martineau was deeply skeptical of the colonization scheme, and Madison admitted the difficulties, primary among them being that enslaved people did not want to go to Liberia. But it was all he had found to cling to and he held on hard, deluding himself, but refusing to die without some hope that the “dreadful calamity” of slavery would end.55

  Slavery was the subject Madison talked most to Martineau about, but their conversation ranged widely, from the death of British scholar Thomas Malthus to the size of Roman farms. Observing Madison’s keenness for conversation and the remarkable vigor of his mind, Martineau asked herself what uplifted him as he faced the yawning grave, and she concluded that it was his “inexhaustible faith; faith that a well-founded commonwealth may … be immortal; not only because the people, its constituency, never dies; but because the principles of justice in which such a commonwealth originates never die out of the people’s heart and mind.” He had used his remarkable gifts in one of the most important ways a man could, by playing a key role—the key role, one might say—in creating a framework for laws and establishing institutions that would secure liberty and happiness for generations to come. “This political religion resembles personal piety,” Martineau observed, “in its effect of sustaining the spirit through difficulty and change, and leaving no cause for repentance, or even solicitude, when, at the close of life, all things reveal their values to the meditative sage.”56

  • • •

  ON THE MORNING OF June 28, 1836, Madison died at home, in his room. An enslaved woman named Sukey had brought his breakfast, but he had trouble swallowing. “What is the matter, Uncle James?” asked his favorite niece, Nelly Willis. “Nothing more than a change of mind, my dear,” he answered. Paul Jennings, born a slave at Montpelier and now Madison’s manservant, described what happened next: “His head instantly dropped, and he ceased breathing as quietly as the snuff of a candle goes out.”57

  He was buried in the family graveyard, where his grandfather Ambrose and his grandmother Frances lay and near where he had buried his mother and father. Modest to the end, he had not, as his friend Jefferson had, designed a tombstone, and for twenty years his grave remained unmarked.

  EPILOGUE

  MADISON LEFT MOST of his worldly goods to his wife, including the slaves at Montpelier. Friends clung to the idea that there was a secret codicil instructing Mrs. Madison to free them upon her death, but if Madison left such instructions, they have never been found. His will simply asked that Dolley Madison sell slaves only with their consent or if they misbehaved, a request that for several years she largely managed to fulfill.1

  In the expectation that the sale of his papers would bring $100,000, Madison left bequests amounting to $5,500 to institutions such as the American Colonization Society, the University of Virginia, and Princeton. In addition to individual bequests of land and cash amounting to $7,000 to specified relatives, he made a general bequest of $9,000 to be divided among his nieces and nephews, or, if they should be deceased, their heirs. But when Congress purchased the first three volumes of his writings in 1837, it was for just $30,000. Even as Mrs. Madison was distributing funds according to his will, creditors were almost certainly dunning her for payment of debts incurred before his death, and meanwhile Payne Todd continued his wastrel ways. A friend, noting that Todd’s friends were “blacklegs and gamblers,” worried that “this money will in all likelihood be lost to Mrs. Madison if he has any power over it.”2

  In October 1837, Dolley returned to Washington for a long stay, occupying the house on Lafayette Square where her sister had once lived. Warm and gracious as ever, she soon found her days filled with visiting and her evenings with elegant events. At one dinner to which she was invited, twenty courses were served, each accompanied by wine. But even as she attended such festivities, she was falling into a genteel but very real poverty. No longer able to buy new clothes, she wore outfits she had had for years. Among her favorites was an old black velvet dress that she paired with a worn white satin turban.3

  Back at Montpelier in the summer of 1839, Dolley found herself a caregiver again. Her sister Lucy, who had suffered a stroke, moved in, and Dolley became her devoted nurse. Dolley’s son, Payne, constructed an eccentric ho
me near Montpelier that he called Toddsberth, and that project ended as badly as the rest of his ventures, with the main structure burning to the ground in the spring of 1841. The economy persisted on its downward path, and Virginia continued its long agricultural decline. Making matters worse, the overseer neglected the fields, and Dolley lost an entire season’s crop. In her early seventies now, she was often not well. A recurrent and painful eye inflammation made it difficult for her to write.4

  She was also under pressure from William Madison, who still harbored resentment over the settlement of James senior’s will. Determined to get his due, he sued Dolley for two thousand dollars that he claimed was owed him from his work on that will. When he died in 1843, his son continued the suit, and when the court ruled in his favor, Montpelier slaves were seized to pay off the debt. By countersuing, Dolley managed to stay the sale of the slaves, and she transferred ownership of some forty of them to Payne Todd.5

  It was impossible to keep Montpelier any longer, and after a long negotiation she sold it and the rest of the estate’s slaves to merchant Henry Moncure. She wrote to him, “No one, I think, can appreciate my feeling of grief and dismay at the necessity of transferring to another a beloved home.”6

  Living on Lafayette Square in Washington again, Dolley received more invitations than she could possibly accept and was even given her own seat on the floor of the House of Representatives. But the sale of Montpelier had not alleviated her financial distress. A journal she kept in 1845 and 1846 shows her dependent on a seventy-dollar loan on which she paid thirty-five cents a month in interest. In 1847, she wrote to her son, “I have borrowed as you must know to live since and before we parted last, but now I am at a stand until supplies come from you.”7 Recognizing that Payne was a financial threat to his mother rather than a resource for her, Congress, in purchasing an additional four volumes of James’s papers in 1848, paid Dolley Madison five thousand dollars outright but put the remaining twenty thousand dollars of the purchase price in a trust from which she could draw the interest.