The Burning of the White House

by Jane Hampton Cook

  Repealing the Embargo Act shortly before Madison took office, Congress replaced it with the Non-Intercourse Act, which allowed trade with other countries, but continued prohibiting trade with England and France.

  The Embargo and Non-Intercourse Acts were precursors of the war, as Dolley astutely knew. “Before this, you know of our embargo—to be followed by war! Yes—that terrible event is at hand, and yet England wants faith!” she’d written to a friend in France before the 1812 war declaration. The possibility had weighed on Dolley so much that she had written her sister, Anna Cutts, to prepare her Quaker heart for it, telling her, “I believe there will be a war as M[adison] sees no end to our perplexities without it—they are going on with the preparations to [g]reat extent.”

  Washington Irving knew what he had to do after he heard the most recent news about the USS Chesapeake in 1813. The battle gave him what he had been looking for, a compelling, resonate story for publishing in his Analectic Magazine.

  Irving interviewed crewmembers from the Chesapeake and discovered the story of James Lawrence, the hero whom Madison had mentioned in his recent message to Congress.

  After defeating the Peacock while leading the Hornet, Lawrence was promoted to captain and became commander of the famed USS Chesapeake. Sailing from Boston on June 1, 1813, Lawrence put the Chesapeake out to sea. Around 4:00 p.m. the British captain of the HMS Shannon spotted the Chesapeake. The vessels maneuvered until within pistol shot of each other. The Shannon fired and then both ships continued with broadside attacks.

  Though a musket ball pierced Lawrence’s leg, he continued to give orders. Three men were shot from the helm, each one taking over as the other was killed. Soon an anchor from the Chesapeake became stuck in the after port or behind the middle on the left side of the Shannon, prohibiting it from continuing to fire. The positioning, however, allowed the Shannon to continue to aim at the Chesapeake. Soon Captain Lawrence received a musket ball to his intestines. The wound was fatal.

  “The brave Lawrence saw the overwhelming danger; his last words as he borne bleeding from the deck, were, ‘don’t surrender the ship,’” Irving wrote in his biography of Lawrence for the Analectic. The words became the immortal cry of “don’t give up the ship.”

  Though one of Lawrence’s men eventually had to surrender, a British sailor struck him in the head and killed him immediately afterward. The Chesapeake’s colors, however, were never struck or removed by the Americans, the universal sign of surrender. Instead the British sailors who boarded the ship removed the U.S. flag from its mast.

  Irving’s portrayal was as poetic as it was inspiring. “He [Lawrence] passed from the public eye like a star, just beaming on it for a moment, and falling in the midst of its brightness,” Irving wrote.

  Publishing articles about naval heroes had given Irving a new purpose. Because he could only base his stories on interviews with a handful of witnesses, he knew his accounts were journalistic, a first draft of history. He saw the opportunity to promote a spirit of patriotism. Irving hoped these hasty and imperfect sketches would “not merely to render a small tribute of gratitude to these intrepid champions of his country’s honor . . . but to assist in promoting a higher tone of national feeling.”

  The war had turned Washington Irving from satire toward salutes, from comedy to biography. He never wrote the lampoon he had planned to pen after his visits to Washington City in 1811 and 1812. He never wrote a satire about the white house of the buxom dame married to the president.

  Who would be the subject of his next biography? He didn’t yet know but waited with great anticipation.

  After receiving Madison’s answers about who was in charge of the treasury in Gallatin’s absence, a furious King gave a speech to the Senate. He spoke with typical lawyerly logic combined with plainspoken pragmatism.

  “Except in the case of inferior officers, Congress cannot by law authorize the President alone to make appointments. The question is a plain one—Can the secretary of the treasury be considered as [one of] the inferior officers?”

  As a cabinet-level appointment, the Treasury secretary is one of the highest executive positions in the U.S. government. “We think not because the Constitution demonstrates him a principal officer, in whom may be vested the power of appointing the inferior officers of his own department. Indeed we hardly know where to look for superior officers, if the heads of the departments are to be considered as inferior ones.”

  As if fencing with a skilled opponent, King took a polite stab at those senators wanting to relinquish their appointment power. He noted the “increasing disposition in Congress to dispense with the consent of the Senate in the appointments of officers—a practice which unconstitutionally enlarges the power of the executive.”

  King had developed his debating skills over time after becoming an attorney, a profession that made his father proud and gave him an excuse not to serve during most of the Revolution. Born in Scarboro, Massachusetts, in 1755, King was a student at Harvard College when the British invaded Lexington and Concord. His father, Richard King, had been a successful landowner, merchant, and lumberman. Richard was also an ardent loyalist, someone who supported the British crown.

  Knowing his father’s loyalties and expectations, Rufus graduated from Harvard in 1777 and started his legal career with a successful Boston attorney instead of volunteering for military service. He couldn’t avoid the war entirely. Despite his father’s loyalty to the crown, Rufus decided to show his support for the patriots by joining a militia. He was part of the unsuccessful campaign to free Newport, Rhode Island, from British control.

  Like Madison, Rufus King proved unsuited for military service, and he returned to his law practice within a year. He became one of New York’s most successful attorneys. He was skilled in investigating a case or situation, documenting his conversations, and then asking questions to erode his opponent’s argument.

  Tapping his best talents, he took to the floor the first week of June 1813 to give his speech against Gallatin. What laws allowed the president to designate a temporary replacement at the treasury department without consent of the Senate?

  “In the instance of Mr. Gallatin, does a case exist in which the president alone has power to appoint a person to discharge his duties?” The law was clear. The president had complete power of appointment when death or sickness caused the absence of a cabinet officer. “The cases described in the laws, in which the president has the sole power of appointment, are the death, absence from the seat of government, or sickness of the secretary of the treasury.”

  Mr. Gallatin was obviously not dead or seriously ill. “But is his appointment as an envoy to Russia, admitting its validity, and his consequent absence from the U.S., such an absence from the seat of government as the laws provide for?”

  King thought not. The honorable senator from New York believed the law, and common sense, defined absence from the seat of government as an occasional, temporary measure, not another appointment. “His estate and private affairs at home may demand his attention, and other urgent duties may oblige him for a short time to be absent from the seat of government.”

  Absences because of circumstantial or private responsibilities were one thing. This was different. “Not an absence created by the President himself, nor one proceeding from the acceptance of another office, the duties whereof are incompatible with those of the secretary of the treasury.”

  King then put a little zing in his game: “If such be the construction, and especially if the substitute appointed by the president is to continue indefinitely, the heads of departments may all be converted into ambassadors, and the business of the nation conducted by undertakers or job men.”

  Such sarcasm showed King’s fury. The mighty little Madison had blown it. Gallatin’s appointment as a diplomat was invalid as long as he held the position of Treasury secretary, at least in the eyes of King. He would soon learn whether his arguments were strong enough to convince others to vote against Gallatin and r
uin Madison’s peace commission.

  From Philadelphia, Edward Coles responded to Dolley’s request for him to remain as the president’s secretary. He appreciated “the kind and affectionate assurances of the regard which you and Mr. Madison entertain for me, and of your wish that I should return and continue longer with you.”

  Though his health had improved, he was not yet strong enough to return to Washington. “I hope however it will not be very long before I shall have it in my power to be with you, and to attend to those duties which I fear will plague and embarrass Mr. M. in consequence of my absence.”

  He then gave his cousin an update on gossip. Mutual friends, Mr. and Mrs. Waddell, had recently moved to the country. Mrs. Waddell had bluntly asked Edward if she’d done something to offend Mrs. Madison.

  “She was certain from your conduct that you were either offended, or had changed your former friendly opinion of her.” Mrs. Elizabeth Pemberton Waddell complained that for years she’d carried on a correspondence with Dolley but that recently “she had written you four letters, two of which were on subjects interesting to her and required particular answers, neither of which you had noticed.”

  Edward then gave Dolley his blunt assessment of the woman’s attitude. “I assure you the lady appears to be quite in a fit with you.”

  What to do? He sensed that this woman had no idea of the social responsibilities that pressed on Dolley as mistress of the President’s House. Mrs. Waddell was simply being selfish. He tried to explain that as wife of the president, Dolley received numerous letters and could not possibly respond to them all. This only revealed that the woman’s true feeling was jealousy. “When I attempted to apologize by reminding her of your incessant occupation, she said, you could find time enough to write to Miss Morris [Phoebe, who was the woman’s niece] nearly every week who was a mere child.”

  The incident wasn’t unique. Mrs. Waddell wasn’t the only female seeking to boost her social status by claiming Mrs. Madison as a friend and correspondent. Many desired Dolley’s attention.

  “I have been so much mortified at not receiving one line from my dear Mrs. Madison, that under any other circumstances I should not presume to write again,” Clara Baldwin Kennedy Bomford had written Dolley in February 1813.

  She had good reason to try writing Dolley again. Her brother-in-law, Mr. Barlow, had been the U.S. minister to France after General Armstrong. Barlow had died while on a mission to Poland. Beyond the personal tragedy, Barlow’s death had set back Madison’s latest attempts to improve the U.S. relationship with Napoleon’s France.

  What women like Mrs. Waddell and Mrs. Bomford failed to understand is that family came first with Dolley. Phoebe was a daughter to her. She may have secretly hoped that a romance would develop with Phoebe and Payne. She would do anything for James, and give up anything for him—friends and correspondents included. She simply no longer had time to respond to every letter, no matter how many feelings she hurt in the process.

  “Of all the situations Mr. Madison ever occupied, there was no one he was as fond of talking about, as the convention of 1787, which made the Constitution of the U.S. and of the one in 1788 which ratified it in Virginia. Of the acts and doings of these two bodies, he was as fond of talking, as some men are with their old schoolmates of their collegiate lives,” Edward Coles reflected on James Madison.

  Coles had heard the stories that the president told. Years earlier, in the summer of 1786, Madison had read numerous books on government. Sent by Thomas Jefferson, who was in Paris, he had pored through a thirteen-volume set on political history by Fortuné Barthelemy de Felice and an eleven-volume set of the history of humanity by Abbé Millot. Also reading Plutarch, Demosthenes, and Polybius, he studied ancient republics and what led to the fall of Greece and Rome, among other realms.

  Absorbing this vast information about establishing and managing governments, he considered what worked and what didn’t. He learned that weak federal governments made it easier for foreign entities to intrigue with forces within and overthrow empires. Then he wrote a paper called Of Ancient and Modern Confederacies, which included a section on the vices of the Articles of Confederation, the law governing the United States at the time. He also created a forty-page pocket-sized sheet of notes to carry with him as a resource for informal and formal debates.

  In doing so he diagnosed the problems with America’s government under the Articles. This affiliation of the states purposefully created a weak national government. Each state acted like an independent country more than a state within a nation. They had different currencies and standards of trade with each other and foreign countries. Not only that, all national authority—executive, legislative, and judicial—was held by one single body, Congress. This alone made it weak, in Madison’s view.

  Fearful that the current system was failing, Madison lobbied George Washington to meet for a convention in the summer of 1787. Publicly, the purpose was to consider revising the Articles of Confederation. Privately, Madison had another idea in mind. Revision wouldn’t work. Replacing it just might. He used his in-depth study of governments to craft a new plan, which became known as the Virginia Plan.

  “Having been lately led to revolve the subject which is to undergo the discussion of the convention, and formed in my mind some outlines of a new system, I take the liberty of submitting them without apology, to your eye,” Madison wrote to Washington in the spring of 1787 as he submitted his ideas.

  Because the Articles were “irreconcilable,” Madison preferred to start over with a new constitution. “I have sought for some middle ground, which may at once support a due supremacy of the national authority, and not exclude the local authorities wherever they can be subordinately useful.”

  The heart of the new constitution would be a division of power in several ways. Authority would be divided between federal and state governments, with an eye for strengthening the federal side to provide a common currency, make all trade agreements with foreign nations, regulate trade between the states, and provide a tax system. He also believed the states needed a “disinterested,” or impartial, federal government to serve as an umpire when conflicts arose between them.

  The federal government would further divide its powers into three branches: the legislative, executive, and judicial. Not only that, but the power of the legislative would also be divided even further, into two houses. These branches would have the power to check one another and hold each other accountable in different ways.

  “I would propose as the groundwork that a change be made in the principle of representation,” Madison explained to Washington. Representation would replace royalty. We the people would replace long live the king.

  Impressed with the thirty-six-year-old Madison and his thorough and well-reasoned plan, George Washington agreed to attend the convention in Philadelphia. He was elected president of this deliberative body, which later became known as the Constitutional Convention. Fifty-five men participated in the convention. Though many rotated in and out during the deliberations, about thirty attended on most days.

  Because he had so thoroughly studied ancient governments and dissected their defects with the skill of a surgeon, Madison emerged as one of the most effective and important members of the Constitutional Convention. He had at his disposal historical evidence to refute arguments made by convention members opposed to entrusting a federal government with more power. Though a reserved man with an introverted nature, Madison used his skills of persuasion both on the floor of the convention and in small groups. He talked to men in relaxed settings about their concerns. They shared coffee or ale at the place where he boarded or other taverns in Philadelphia. Unlike some men, he knew how to disagree without being disagreeable. His quiet, reasoned, logical, and well-researched answers often overcame the loud, inflammatory rhetoric of more impassioned souls.

  Madison didn’t get everything he wanted, but that wasn’t the point. The purpose was to create a stronger national government through compromise.
The Virginia Plan morphed and changed, but its core of three branches and two legislative bodies remained intact. The result of their deliberations was the U.S. Constitution, approved by the convention on September 17, 1787.

  Traveling to New York, Madison mapped a public relations effort with men such as Alexander Hamilton and Rufus King to motivate at least nine of the thirteen states to ratify the Constitution through special state conventions. His twenty-nine essays, along with those from Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, became known as the Federalist Papers, a total of eighty-five essays. Once again he used his research and reasoning to help reluctant Americans overcome their apprehensions about forming a more perfect union through the U.S. Constitution.

  The Federalist Papers influenced many and created a foundational work of American political theory. The campaign worked. After the states adopted the U.S. Constitution, Madison emerged as a member of the new Congress from Virginia while George Washington became the first president in 1789.

  Because Madison was a central figure in the greatest accomplishment of the century, men would later call him the Father of the Constitution, a title he rejected.

  “You give me a credit to which I have no claim in calling me ‘The writer of the Constitution of the U.S.’ This was not, like the fabled Goddess of Wisdom, the offspring of a single brain. It ought to be regarded as the work of many heads and many hands.”

  Now, here he was in 1813, on the receiving end of the checks and balance system that he was most responsible for creating. Here he was leading the country under the Constitution in an unpopular war that had no end in sight. Peace, while vigorously prosecuting the war, was his best strategy. Why couldn’t others see it his way and cooperate with him on the peace nominees and funding the war? Why couldn’t Rufus King revive the cordiality they had experienced when lobbying the country to accept the Constitution? Humanity’s minds and affections changed far more easily than the laws they created.