At home, the new secretary of state luxuriated in the victory while at the same time applauding the rapid growth of Washington, DC, and the safety of the city in which he and his wife lived. One of the reasons why people flocked there was the lack of crime. Despite its muddy streets, swampy backyards, and oppressive summer heat, it was a good place to work, live, and bring up children. Nobody was afraid to walk the torch-lit streets of the city after dark. The reason for that was the newness of the town, which just a few years ago had been a forest on the Potomac's banks. The criminal element had not yet had time to settle in. It gave all Washingtonians, especially the social-minded Madisons, the opportunity to create new lives for themselves, unencumbered by street crime, gambling dens, taverns, or brothels. Washington was not a city infected by sin, such as New York or Baltimore. For the time being, it was relatively pure.
People who lived there and worked there appreciated that innocence, that newness, because in the years 1800 to 1816, the Madisons’ time in Washington, nearby cities had turned into colonial-era Sodoms and Gomorrahs with their murders and robberies. A perfect example was Richmond, Virginia, just ninety miles away, visited often by the Madisons and Jefferson. Richmond, on the banks of the James River, was, like Washington, exploding in size. It had become the capital city of Virginia in 1779 and had grown rapidly ever since, thanks to sea trade and the surrounding tobacco empire, doubling its population every ten years. In 1810, just after Madison became president, it had ten thousand residents. By then it had become a hotbed of crime. There were so many felonies that as early as 1782, local officials had petitioned the federal government for help in fighting crime. The officials cited the “nocturnal depredations and robberies which have been lately so much practiced among us.”17
Richmond had been invaded by houses of ill repute, taverns, and gambling casinos, all legal at the time, and their operators preyed on local residents. There were several dozen houses of prostitution, where pretty, young women seduced men for money. The brazen prostitutes not only strolled on sidewalks to solicit business but also walked through the town's theaters, too. They plied their trade at local dance halls and casinos and convinced men to spend their winnings on them. The neighborhood that housed the whorehouses of Richmond, just off the main street in town, which ran along the James River at the bottoms of the city's hills, was nicknamed “Pink Alley,” and there was so much crime there that a Richmond newspaper said of the area later that it was “so notorious in the police annals of Richmond as are the Five Points in the city of New York.”18
Richmond was home to more than one hundred taverns. There was so much drinking in the city that someone even opened up a local brewery to meet the overflow needs of bar patrons. It was not uncommon for men of that era to drink seven or eight beers a night. It was neither prostitution nor drinking but gambling that led to the downfall of many in Richmond, though. There were more than one hundred storefront-style casinos in town and elegant casinos in the large hotels on Main Street. Cardsharps from around America invaded the casinos to take advantage of amateur gamblers and made a fortune off of them. The city also sported “lottery parlors” where residents could purchase tickets for the hundreds of lotteries in Virginia (New York City had two hundred lottery parlors by 1820), many of which were advertised in the local newspapers. Gambling was frowned upon by civic leaders and church officials, who successfully lobbied to get numerous bills forbidding it passed in the state legislature; they were all ignored. Constables refused to shut down casinos where inside they found military officers, wealthy merchants, ministers, and public officials playing cards and rolling dice.
The drinking, gambling, and prostitution in Richmond brought on a crime wave, spearheaded by robbers who beat up and killed their victims on the dark streets of the city. From 1802 to 1806, among Madison's first years as secretary of state, the number of crimes in the streets of Richmond quadrupled to nine hundred felonies a year, and it was estimated that 11.3 percent of the city's residents were victims of a crime each year. The newspapers wrote that three crimes were committed in town each day and a violent crime every other day. The crimes in Richmond reflected the crimes in all other American cities; critics said America was creating a “criminal class.” In Pittsburgh, a newspaper editor even wrote that “we have in the very midst of us a population of the most abandoned kind.”19
There was so much crime in Richmond that the city not only had to build a large city jail in 1800 but in addition constructed a large state prison, too. If you add up all the murders, robberies, and other crimes and divide that into the overall population of Richmond, in 1809, the crime rate in the year Madison became president was just as high it would be in the early years of the twenty-first century. Crime was rampant; it scared everybody.20 One exasperated visitor to Richmond in that era threw up his hands and said “O! The wickedness and abomination of the little city.”21
The story of crime in Richmond was little different than similar stories of crime in other urban areas, but crime had not yet reached the brand-new town of Washington, DC. Its taverns had just opened, its racecourse so far had a relatively short season, and gambling casinos had not yet arrived as a force. They would, as they did everywhere, but Washingtonians had time to create a workable and safe, pleasant society without looking over their shoulders for criminals. It gave the residents of Washington time to flourish properly—and they did.
And so did James and Dolley Madison.
The British government had plunged into a war with Napoleon and France and decided that no neutral nation could help supply France, its mortal enemy, with guns, ammunition and supplies, especially the United States. It ordered all France-bound ships from America to stop off at British ports first for inspection before continuing on to seaports on the French coast. The British did this under a little-used 1756 order passed by Parliament that permitted the search and seizure of any ship thought to be supplying an enemy. In a lengthy two-hundred-page memo, Madison decried the searches and seizures and, in what many believed to be irrefutable research and logic, brilliantly put together a pamphlet that proved the 1756 British orders illegal under international law. The British, of course, ignored him. In his 1805 inaugural address, Jefferson feared a war with England. He asked for increased fortifications at US seaports, more gunboats, the restoration of existing gunboats, a larger army, and the construction of more warships.1 By 1807, Madison, within the administration, was calling for tough military action to stop the search and seizure of American ships and impressment of American sailors. He knew, though, and Jefferson knew, that the United States had a tiny navy, a small army, and little funds for military activity and could not engage the mighty British Empire in a war. In fact, a congressmen reported in 1810 that of the alleged nearly two thousand troops in New Orleans, just 950 were left—the rest had died, had deserted, or were too sick to fight. Madison learned from Naval Secretary Paul Hamilton that the navy was in no condition to fight anybody because Congress kept cutting its budget and forbid not only the building of new ships but also the repairing of old ones (the 1810 budget of $450,000 for ship repairs was cut down to $150,000).2
Constant US entreaties on seizures of American seamen and the stopping of ocean-going ships by the British fell on deaf ears. American officials were furious. If a war could not be fought, then what to do?
The answer was an embargo.
James Madison had embraced nonmilitary protests, especially trade embargoes, as successful means of retaliation against nations as far back as his college days. A scholar of military and monetary policies covering two thousand years, he told friends that the government could do more harm to opposing governments by restricting trade than it could with the firing of a thousand cannon. Hit them in the pocketbook.
He had been a firm supporter of the nonimportation acts of the colonies against England prior to the revolution, embargoes that did not last because the colonists realized they needed—and wanted—British goods. Madison was certain that if the coloni
sts had stuck to their good intentions on the embargo, they would have prevailed. The colonists never did, though, so there was no supreme test.
Madison continually insisted that an embargo would hurt England, and hurt her badly. It would put tens of thousands of shipping business laborers out of work, kill the profitable business that Great Britain did with America, and, as icing on the economic cake, curb the economy of British islands in the Caribbean, which Madison claimed desperately needed American goods because so many essential goods there were imported.
The test he had hoped for in the 1760s would come in 1808. He convinced Congress to support an embargo on goods sold to England, confident that the economic wallop of the embargo would force Britain to leave American shipping and sailors alone. At first, most supported the embargo. Tens of thousands of people all over the country attended meetings to pass resolutions for it. In New York, Mechanics Hall was jammed with an overcapacity crowd of seven hundred people. Hundreds of additional attendees were packed into the lobby of the building and filled the staircases. Hundreds more shut down the city street in front of the building as they formed a large crowd to discuss the embargo.3
There was support in other places, too. Several Federalist newspapers even supported it. The Washington Federalist, used to criticizing Jefferson and Madison, backed them on the embargo and even ran a mathematically arranged formula, with tonnage charts, to show that Britain needed American goods far more than America needed British goods. The Maryland state legislature voted to support it and said that it was “a measure strongly characteristic of the judgment and wisdom of our national councils.”4
Abroad, Ambassador Pinckney wrote to Madison from London that the early embargo was having its effects on England, where people realized they needed to import goods that could only be found in America, such as cotton and machines. The British press worried about the embargo, and so did some members of Parliament. He told Madison that the embargo was a great idea and that it would soon bring England to its knees.
Fueled by Pinckney's letter and Jefferson's support, Madison became even bolder. He told Congress that England had to stop its shipping policies immediately and that anyone who did not support the embargo, such as merchants in New England, were unpatriotic. He wrote several colleagues that the embargo would also prevent war.5
Gallatin, Madison's close friend, had his doubts, though: “Governmental prohibitions do always more mischief than had been calculated and it is not without much hesitation that a statesman should hazard to regulate the concerns of individuals as if he could do it better than themselves…as to the hope that it may…induce England to treat us better. I think it entirely groundless.”6
Madison received a letter from friend Wilson Nicholas that contained warnings about the plan, too. “If the embargo could be executed and the people submit to it, I have no doubt it is our wisest course; but if the complete execution of it and the support of the people cannot be counted upon, it will neither answer our purpose nor will it be practicable to retain it,” he said.7
Madison, the political theorist and “Big Knife” dealmaker, overlooked the most obvious problem of the embargo. Americans still wanted to buy British goods and sell them goods of their own. They saw the embargo as entirely separate from political and military foreign policy. Worse, many, especially those in New England with Federalist ties and connections to the shipping industry, a huge business there, saw it as illegal pressure by the federal government on their ability to maintain their livelihoods. The Republicans were supposed to defend states’ rights, and the rights of the people to earn a living, yet with the embargo, the federal government was doing just the opposite. Not only that, but the federal government, mostly Republicans, was doing it to New England, where most residents were Federalists. It was political, they argued, and it was wrong.
An outraged poet William Cullen Bryant, just thirteen years old at the time, savaged Thomas Jefferson in a poem on the embargo that ripped the president's recently revealed (alleged) relationship with slave girl Sally Hemings and called for his resignation.
And thou, the scorn of every patriot's name,
Thy country's ruin and thy country's shame!
Go, wretch! Resign the Presidential chair.
Disclose thy secret measures, foul or fair…
Go scan, philosophist, thy [Sally's] charms,
And sink supinely in her sable arms.
But quit to abler hands, the helm of state.
Nor image ruin on thy country's fate!8
Others wrote songs about the embargo. One popular New England ditty went as follows:
Our ships all in motion once whitened the ocean;
They sailed and returned with a cargo.
Now doomed to decay they are fallen a prey
To Jefferson, worms and EMBARGO.9
To thwart the embargo, people began to smuggle British goods into the United States. The Canadian border was a sieve to trade; hundreds of small-time entrepreneurs smuggled goods over the border to Boston and other New England communities. Congressmen warned Jefferson that the only way to make the embargo work was for the federal government to become very aggressive in prosecuting people it suspected of violating it. In addition to all of that, Madison had underestimated the need of America to sell its exports. The business was bigger than he thought. He also pushed his plan through Congress and into law too quickly. The embargo permitted “special permissions” to be granted to some shipping companies. This meant that instead of no ships sailing to Europe in 1808, more than six hundred did. Imports were viewed the same way. Dispensations for certain European goods were allowed and others were brought in with them, finding a quick market. During 1808, for example, European shipping business at the port of Philadelphia did not drop by 100 percent, as Madison predicted, but by only 25 percent. In the Caribbean, Napoleon, busy with his wars, simply ignored the embargo. British islands seemed to shrug it off and continued with their daily lives. In England, merchants had huge surpluses of cotton and other goods bought from America before the embargo went into law, so they did not suffer. The Spanish markets in South America opened their doors to British merchants, too, and the increase in business to South America made up for the loss of business in the United States. The embargo was a failure with other nations, too. The more Madison insisted that others understand it, the more they did not and saw it as a desperate measure by a country unwilling or unable to find other means to reach its diplomatic goals. And, no matter how often the secretary of state said that it was a practical tool, everybody saw it was a cold, political gamble and nothing less. Madison would not let it go; everybody overseas blamed its failure on him.
Another complaint raised in the United States was that the government had led the people to believe that it was a short, temporary measure, but, in fact, it had seemed to become permanent. “They will now have to acknowledge that the predictions of the Federalists were too true. The federal editors declared long ago that the embargo was intended to be permanent…if Madison succeeded to the Presidency, it would continue during his reign. It is now found from experience to be a useless measure,” wrote an editor at the Washington Federalist.10
One man wrote that by the end of 1808 everybody knew “the ravages that the embargo is making throughout the whole country” and said that it was not just shippers and merchants who were suffering, but farmers, too.11 Newspapers from Maine to Georgia ran long lists of the profits from pre-embargo days to embargo days, noting the catastrophic declines in them. The Federalists framed the issue as one of submission, claiming that the United States turned to the embargo because England and France forced the country to back down when they demanded checks of American shipping. They were, the federalists charged, moving away from the nation's long-cherished revolutionary principals and scraping their knees to England and France.12
Congressman Matthew Lyons said that the embargo “cannot fairly be said to possess a single republican feature—it may be compared to an apoplexy; it
stops the circulation of the blood in the commercial system and extends its baneful influence to the agricultural body; repeated fits will produce convulsions and death in the political as well as in the physical world. It is a weapon which never fails to wound those who use it.”13
And many said that the embargo was the wrong weapon to use. If Jefferson and Madison wanted weapons, they argued, they should have obtained real ones. “To permit our merchants to arm, under proper restrictions, and to equip, man and send out our public ships to defend those maritime rights which are clear and indisputable is not war, nor will it necessarily involve us in war. Every nation on earth would respect us for defending our natural rights,” argued Connecticut senator James Hillhouse.14
And in the middle of all this, Madison's wife became very sick. She had fainted at a reception at Montpelier and was put to bed. It was another bout of inflammatory rheumatism, which she had suffered before, but this was the worst. “Never had I more extreme sickness & pain. Dr. Willis bled me & gave me medicine. Nelly and Mother M nursed & waited on me with great attention and kindness. No language can give you an idea of the poignancy of my misery. I was never before in such a situation,” she wrote her sister.15 It was one of many encounters with rheumatism and other ailments that plagued Dolley all of her life. She had complained of weak and sore eyes since her twenties. Her knee, taken care of in 1805 by Dr. Physick, never fully recovered. From time to time, she felt parts of her face go numb, often in stressful situations. She also had great fears of the epidemics that spread throughout the country. She wrote alarmingly of a cholera epidemic that just missed relatives in Kentucky. In 1805, she wrote with great fear of yet another Yellow Fever epidemic. “I enquire every day & they tell me there is not a single case. Mr. M goes out a great deal & does not tell me he hears of it…I am often in miserable fears for his health.”
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