James and Dolley Madison

by Bruce Chadwick

  Monroe's chagrin was triggered by the actions of President Adams, whom Madison intensely disliked. Madison had disagreed with some of Washington's policies but admired him enormously. Madison despised Adams, though. In comparing the two presidents, he wrote that “the one cool, considerate and cautious, the other headling and kindled into flame by every spark that light on his passion: the one scrutinizing into the public opinion, and ready to follow where he could not lead it, the other insulting it by the most adverse sentiments and pursuits. Washington, a hero in the field, yet overweighing every danger in the cabinet—Adams of the smallest disturbance of the ancient discipline, order and tranquility of despotism.”24

  To Monroe, Madison wrote of Adams and his friends, “let us hope, however, that the tide of evil is nearly at its flood and that it will ebb back to the true mark, which it has overpassed.”25 Similarly, Madison wrote Jefferson in 1798 that he agreed with Benjamin Franklin's assessment of Adams as being “always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes wholly out of his senses,” and he added that Adams's speeches were “the old song” and that the Senate's answer to his policies “was cooked in the same shop with the speech.”26

  He had an equally low opinion of the followers of the second president. Madison wrote of them that “it is a pity that the non-attendance of the Adamsites is not presented to the public in such a manner [newspaper stories], with their names, to satisfy the real friends of Washington, as well as the people, generally, of the true principles and view of those who have been loudest in their hypocritical professions of attachments to him.”27

  In April 1798, as the snows around Montpelier melted, he wrote, “the President's message is only a further development to the public of the violent passions and heretical politics which have been long privately known to govern him.”28 Madison took Adams to task for everything. When Adams expressed ill feelings toward the brand-new capital at Washington, DC, Madison whipped him for that, too. “The discovery of Mr. A's dislike to the city of Washington will cause strong emotions,” he said, and he added that the “magnificence of the President's house belongs to a man of very different principles from those of Mr. A.”29 Later, after reading a statement by Adams reprinted in a newspaper, he said that “his language…is the most degrading and abominable that could fall from the lips of the first magistrate of an independent people.”30

  His criticisms paled compared to his friend Jefferson's view of Adams. Jefferson called all of Adams's speeches “a national affront” and “follies.”31

  Madison slowly became consumed with Adams's misdeeds, as he saw them. He opposed any involvement in a war with France, was annoyed at the XYZ Affair (in which French ministers reportedly tried to bribe US officials to obtain a generous policy decision), and did not think that any of Adams's appointments were credible. His ire, and Jefferson's anger, with Adams and his Federalist cadre came to a head over the Alien and Sedition Acts, one of the most controversial pieces of federal legislation in American history.

  For several years, beginning with President George Washington, Federalists had bristled under the lash of critical newspaper editors who worked for Republican-controlled newspapers. They went well beyond freedom of the press, Federalists claimed. Some were severe in their demands that the critics be silenced. The editor of Gazette of the United States wrote that one critic was “this scum of party filth and beggarly corruption, worked into a form somewhat like a man” and added that he “was entitled to the benefit of the gallows.”32 US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase agreed, saying that “a licentious press is the bane of freedom and the peril of society.”33

  They might have been offended by criticism, Republicans had argued, but the criticism was never treasonous or libelous. James Callender, for example, had called President Adams a “hoary headed incendiary” and wrote that “the reign of Mr. Adams has to be one of continued tempest of malignant passions…the grand object of his administration has been to exasperate the rage of contending parties to calumniate and destroy every man who differs from his opinions.”34

  Under the terms of the Sedition Act, anyone who criticized Presidents Adams or his administration could be imprisoned. The Federalists began to jail people quickly, too, sending several newspaper editors to prison and shutting down their papers. One newspaper editor was even sentenced to death for opposing the president (this sentence was overturned on appeal).

  The Philadelphia Aurora printed long articles on the arrest of its editor, William Duane, with eyewitness accounts of people who saw Duane arrested, beaten, and bruised, while all the time yelling that he was being “murdered.”35

  The bills brought about a lengthy correspondence among Madison, Jefferson, and others that lasted for months. Madison saw a bright side to the bills, too, and that was the political repercussions they were sure to bring. He wrote Monroe, “the party which has done the mischief [Federalists] is so industriously co-operating in its own destruction.”36

  Newspapers throughout Virginia and the South were filled with stories about the acts. Madison was so angry about the two bills that he listened to friends who told him the best way to fight them was to figure out a way for the state legislators, under states’ rights powers, to overturn them within state boundaries. To do that, they told Madison, he needed to get elected to the Virginia state legislature and work with other Republicans in Richmond to write bills to overturn the Alien and Sedition Acts.

  Madison had not wanted to return to politics. He had been retired for only two years, and his home and farms still needed his attention. He and his wife, Dolley, were in the middle of constructing a happy social life for themselves. Yet he could not remain home as Adams and his cohorts circumvented the Constitution he wrote to blunt all criticism of their behavior. What was a free country without freedom of speech and freedom of the press? Adams and his aides were trampling on the Bill of Rights Madison had shepherded through Congress.

  His return to politics was unusual. Ordinarily, the man running for office traveled to a few dinners and rallies to give speeches, alone, without his wife. Politics was in the male dominion in America in the waning years of the eighteenth century. Madison was different, though. He brought Dolley to his dinners and rallies. She did not sit in the rear of the audience, either. She sat in the front row on the platform, right next to her husband, and applauded madly when he made his campaign speeches. Soon, other wives joined their husbands on the campaign trail, and the look of the political world in America changed forever.37

  He and Jefferson hatched a secret plan to blunt the federal acts. They would each write legislative bills for different states, Kentucky and Virginia, which called upon those state legislatures to overturn the federal acts. Jefferson was vice president and could not publicly do that, so he did so in secret, winning support from Kentuckians to carry on the fight for him. Madison did the same thing in the Virginia legislature, but publicly.

  In Richmond, full of indignation for Adams and defensive about the Constitution and Bill of Rights he had authored, Madison took the floor of the legislature and, voice louder and more persuasive than usual, battered Adams over the Alien and Sedition Acts. He argued that the First Amendment guarantee of press freedom absolutely forbid federal-government infringements upon rights in any way, shape, or form. It would be “a mockery to say that no laws should be passed preventing publications from being made, but that laws might be passed for punishing them in case they should be made,” and he added, “to the press alone chequered as it is…the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.”38

  The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions were not duplicated in any other state legislature. Madison and Jefferson, and their Republican friends, tried to gain support in other state legislatures, making herculean efforts to do so, but failed. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, passed in 1799, had little consequence. They were no longer effective when Adams's term ended.

  The battle over t
he Alien and Sedition Acts wound down right around the time the 1800 presidential election arrived. Thomas Jefferson, an exasperated vice president, decided to run for president against Adams. He was strongly supported in his bid by Madison, who joined one of the Virginia committees connected to the election to make certain that his friend received all of the electoral votes in his state, the largest state in the Union. The election campaign that followed drew Madison back into politics, with his wife's blessing.

  Madison had other reasons to return to government, especially since the new federal capital was now located nearby on the Potomac River. His wife, Dolley, a social butterfly, had nowhere to fly in isolated northwest Virginia, especially in the winters when cold and snow set in. Madison's dream of living out his days as a successful lord of the plantation manor had not worked out that well, either. Running a plantation was hard work. He wrote in the spring of 1798, “It has now become certain that not half crops of wheat can be made, many will not get back more than their seed, and some not even that. We have lately had a severe spell of n.e. rain which in this neighborhood swept off at least 15 per cent of the [harvest] and from accounts in different directions it appears to have been equally fatal. We are at present in the midst of a cold n.w. spell, which menaces the fruit. The tops of the Blue Ridge mountains are tinged with snow and the thermostat this morning was at 31 degrees. It does not appear, however that the mischief is yet done. The coming night, if no sudden change takes place, must I think, be fatal.”39

  And on top of all of that, the man who was renting his house in Philadelphia, Stephen Moylan, told him that not only could he not pay his rent for a while, but that the house was in need of substantial, and costly, repairs.40

  James Madison had put up with so much trouble from bad weather, irate workers, unhappy slaves, deteriorating homes, and nonpaying boarders that a job as secretary of state, where he had to worry only about wars with nations, must have looked very appealing.

  When he was young, James Madison did not want to follow in his father's footsteps and become a planter at Montpelier. Running a large plantation farm, keeping books, and sweating in the heat and shivering in the always surprisingly cold Virginia winters were not for him. Shopping at the dreary, little, local general stores and supervising slaves had no appeal. What did appeal to the teenage James Madison were books, volumes of every size and kind—thick ones and thin ones, old ones and new ones. Madison dove into the pages of every book he could find, following the staid debates on governments throughout history in one book, and, in the next, the heroic exploits of the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome. He was just as fond of the warrior Achilles as he was of the writer Aeschylus.

  The young Madison did not know exactly what he wanted to do in the world, but it was not farming. His father understood. James Madison Sr. had sent his son to study with a noted tutor, Donald Robertson, an instructor at the Innes plantation in King and Queen County, Virginia, for five years. There, he studied with the children of other wealthy and influential Virginia planters. He learned geography, languages, history, and mathematics. He came back to Montpelier at the age of sixteen to study more advanced work with another tutor, Reverend Thomas Martin. Then he was ready for college. Almost all of the college-aged young men of Virginia whose families had money attended the state's finest school, the College of William and Mary, but Madison resisted because of the oppressively hot climate in Williamsburg, which he was certain would ruin his always-precarious health. Instead, he traveled to Princeton, New Jersey, to enroll at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University). There, the slight, thin Madison, who rarely smiled, plunged into college work amid the tree-lined streets of the pretty campus. He jammed three years of academic study into just two, reading day and night, and then stayed at the college for another year to read more. He studied many of the governments of European countries, their history and structure, as well as those of Russia and Asia. His studies took him all the way back to the Roman Empire and the city-states of ancient Greece. This fascination with government would engage him all of his life.

  In 1772, he returned to a Virginia that had been torn apart by political disputes between the British Parliament and the colonies. Virginia had been in crisis since 1765, when the British government imposed the Stamp Act on America, forcing the colonists to pay a tax on any printed material. The tax was imposed because Britain had decided that the enormous cost of the Seven Years’ War, concluded in 1763 with British victory over the French and their Indian allies, had to be paid by the Americans. British citizens were already paying heavy taxes and should not be charged even more fees, Parliament leaders believed and, besides, that war had been fought to protect the colonies on the eastern seaboard. So, naturally, they had to pay for it. The colonists disagreed, and loudly. The British fought that war, colonial political leaders and newspaper editors argued, to solidify and expand its empire in North America. Victory had given Britain nearly half the continent. The British would reap the profits from the war, so Americans believed that the British should shoulder the cost of it. Colonial representatives from nine colonies met at a special Stamp Act Congress in New York and drew up a formal statement of protest. Colonial leaders agreed to “nonimportation agreements,” a boycott of British goods. Women made homespun clothing to replace the expensive dresses they had been purchasing from fancy London shops as another protest. Men of all ages who had merely watched politics unfold in their cities now jumped into the political wars, angrily siding against the Crown. The Sons of Liberty and Daughters of Liberty, which would become powerful revolutionary groups a few years later, were formed as protest organizations. Newspaper editors, taxed on their newspapers, railed about it, some even predicting that it would end freedom of the press in America. There were parades and public rallies against it. Raucous protests, which included physical attacks on tax collectors, took place in many villages and cities. British merchants complained bitterly to Parliament that their shipping, half of which went to America, and sales had been crippled by the protests. These much-publicized efforts finally forced that tax to be overturned a year later, but the British Crown came back with more taxes.

  Nobody understood more than Madison that the taxes came to a set of colonies that had developed into their own country over the past 150 years. Americans had become one of the world's most important trading partners. American court systems, modeled after the British tribunals but with changes, were efficient; crime was low; and business was good. The colonies had become a country within the British Empire.1 There was one more, deep, wrinkle to that portrait—virtue. During the last half century, Parliament and other British governing agencies had been crippled with very public corruption scandals. The British government, Americans believed, was no longer virtuous. Lobbying for liberty grew everywhere in James Madison's Virginia in the 1760s and 1770s. Nowhere was it better expressed than in a soaring speech by Virginian Patrick Henry. Henry would go on to be a six-time governor of Virginia and ardent political foe of Madison. He told the House of Burgesses, the Virginia state legislature, that the taxes would “destroy American freedom.” In soaring language, hands and arms flying about him, he shouted, “If this be treason, make the most of it.” (Madison's friend Jefferson, in the hall that day, said Henry showed “torrents of eloquence.”)2

  Madison felt like Washington, whom he would meet later, that the colonies had suffered much. Later, Washington wrote, “We had borne much; we had long and ardently sought for reconciliation upon honourable terms, that it has been denied us, that all our attempts after peace had proved abortive, and had been grossly misrepresented, that we had done everything which could be expected from the best of subjects, that the spirit of freedom beat too high in us to submit to slavery and that if nothing else could satisfy a tyrant and his diabolical ministry, we are determined to shake off all connections with a state so unjust and unnatural.”3

  There in Williamsburg, legislators developed the Committees of Public Safety. These were secretive citiz
en groups designed to gather information about Crown activities and share it with committees throughout the colony and in other colonies. Each colony had several committees.

  Madison, aged twenty-three, joined the Orange County Committee of Public Safety. It was his first official political position. He was then elected as a county delegate to the state convention in Williamsburg and a year later, in 1776, was elected to the state assembly, the House of Burgesses. There, in its somber chambers in an elegant brick building, he met and became a close friend of Thomas Jefferson, one of the most brilliant men in America. Madison had witnessed fierce persecution of Baptist ministers in Virginia and in the legislature worked on measures to guarantee religious freedom. In just the three years that he served as a delegate to the House of Burgesses, Madison had been deeply immersed in the anti-Crown politics of Virginia and America, befriended the leaders of the various tax disputes, served on anti-Crown committees, and written anti-Parliament letters. The Virginia state legislature sent him to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1780 as a state delegate when he was twenty-nine. He was an easily recognizable figure in Philadelphia because he almost always dressed completely in black and, wherever he went, he carried armfuls of thick books. His small room in Philadelphia was crammed full of books.

  In Congress, he visited the army camp, dined with Washington on several occasions, and met with Washington whenever the general visited Congress to deliver reports on the progress of the war. In Philadelphia, Madison debated and befriended just about all of the delegates, who represented colonies he had never even visited. He got bills passed in several areas and even convinced Virginia to give up part of its lands to form a brand-new geographical region, the Northwest Territories, governed by Congress.

  Few people in America had been so exposed to American political thought, and action, as the radical Madison. Few had interacted with so many political figures from so many colonies. Few had met and spent time with so many generals and officers of the Continental Army. Few Americans, ever, had been so exposed to every nuance of colonial politics or understood the politics of England, both on the battlefield and in philosophical debates. James Madison was, as Edmund Randolph said, “a child of the Revolution.”4