James and Dolley Madison

by Bruce Chadwick

  The British fleet finally reached New Orleans. They attacked on December 28 with a 6,000-man army, but were beaten back. On January 1, 1815, they began an artillery barrage of the American position but were driven back again by American cannonading that destroyed a dozen of their guns. Then, on January 8, just after dawn, the British began their main assault. In true British tradition, they began to march slowly through the bayou, long red lines of men sloshing their way through the waist-high reeds and grass in the swamp. Their army endured a long series of miscues that morning. Needed long, wooden ladders had been left behind; maps were found unworthy; a dam the Redcoats built to help them transport wagons collapsed. Their leaders knew nothing of the territory they had to move through. Their one advantage was the weather. An early-morning fog covered their movements as they slowly advanced. Then, suddenly, around 8 a.m., the fog lifted. The British army was within range, the Americans had coordinates from the pirates, and Jackson's cannon exploded, cutting them down. The pirates, black freedmen, and townspeople opened up with their muskets, firing at will as quickly as they could reload. Thick clouds of smoke rose from all of the discharges of muskets, pistols, and cannon. British troops, so used to fighting on sunlit, flat, open meadows, bumbled and stumbled through the thick terrain and were confused. The barrage from the American line, with soldiers encouraged by Jackson riding his horse back and forth and shouting orders, was thunderous and nonstop. When one part of the line of cannon ended its fire, a second part of the line opened up. It was an incredibly professional performance by a mostly amateur army. The carnage was terrible. One seasoned British soldier, a veteran of the European wars, said the Americans unleashed on them “the most murderous [fire he] ever beheld.”17

  The British had over seven hundred killed and a total of two thousand dead, wounded, and missing—a full one third of their army. It was one of the biggest and most embarrassing defeats in British history. The Redcoats were wiped out quickly and lost most of their top generals and officers, leaving the infantry all alone without leadership and direction. The cannon fire increased. The Redcoats fled at 8:30 a.m. and were fired upon until they were out of range. Jackson had not only defended and saved New Orleans but also scored a great historic triumph over the British, last seen running for their lives through the swamp in a shameful retreat. “[Fire] from our guns and our musquetry opened on them with such irresistible effect…leaving the ground strewn with dead and dying…a spectacle of carnage,” wrote New Orleans postmaster Thomas Johnson, who was there, in a letter to Dolley. And, Johnson added, “the British have evacuated the country. The city is in a ferment of delight. The country is saved, the enemy vanquished…general joy.”18

  It was a victory that was lauded from one end of the United States to the other, whose importance resonated throughout the world, and, later, resonated throughout history via newspapers articles, poems, books, movies, plays, and television shows.

  Prior to the battle of New Orleans, ministers of Great Britain and the United States were locked in talks to end the war. The Americans had had enough of a war they only entered into in order to end British impressment of sailors and searches of ships. England, finished with its wars against the now-exiled Napoleon, did not want to continue the struggle, especially since witnessing the resiliency of Madison and his government after the burning of Washington. President Madison had made it clear, in quickly reorganizing his government and making plans to rebuild the capital, that he was tougher than people believed. Under Madison, the Americans would never quit, and the British would never win. The ministers finally reached a peace agreement.

  Madison, friends said, looked anxious and worried. Dolley, though, a friend wrote, held up the public-relations front at the Octagon House quite well. A friend wrote that “Mrs. Madison [was] as blooming as a country lass.”19

  A copy of the peace treaty arrived and was taken by courier to Washington on February 14, 1815, and crowds gathered as the rider carrying the finalized treaty made his way to the president's office at Octagon House. Hundreds of people waited outside. Acting out of sheer instinct, Dolley flung open the doors to her home and invited all in as her husband and the cabinet went over the treaty line by line in their makeshift cabinet room. Congressmen and senators arrived soon after the initial crowd was let into the home, followed by members of the Supreme Court and various government offices and newspaper people. As the hours went by, the crowd grew. Drinks flowed, music was played, and Dolley moved throughout the party like a professional organizer, like the Dolley of her White House days, talking to everyone and helping all to get ready to celebrate the new treaty.

  The treaty did not cede to the United States any part of Canada, award reparations for the burned capital, or provide monetary awards of any kind. The 1756 British Orders of Council, a thorny issue for years, had been abandoned when the war began and was no longer an issue. The document did not end impressment, although the ministers, and Madison, agreed that it had to end since the Napoleonic Wars were now finished. What Madison was left with, really, was a draw, but he, his wife, and others, did not see it that way. They saw it as a huge public-relations victory. Guests at the party waited and waited, and then Dolley's cousin Sarah “Sally” Coles, who had been standing outside the cabinet-room door all night, walked into the main ballroom, a smile spreading on her face, and, all eyes on her, shouted “Peace! Peace!” Servant/slave Paul Jennings picked up a violin and struck up “The President's March,” more drinks were brought around, and everyone who had crammed into the home cheered lustily.20

  Dolley was elated. “The most conspicuous person in the room…was Mrs. Madison herself, then in the meridian of life and queenly beauty. No one could doubt who beheld the radiance of joy which lighted up her countenance and diffused its beam all around that all uncertainly was at an end and the government of the country had in very truth passed from gloom to glory. With a grace all her own, to her visitors she reciprocated heartfelt congratulations upon the glorious and happy change in the aspects or public affairs,” wrote one man who was there.21

  The president and his cabinet then appeared at the party, dignified and somber. Paul Jennings, who had been with them in the cabinet room earlier, wrote, though, that “Mr. Madison and all his cabinet were as pleased as any, but did not show their joy in this manner.”22

  The entire country celebrated along with the Madisons and their friends in Washington. Americans combined Jackson's victory at New Orleans with news of the peace treaty into a huge psychological and public-relations victory. The United States had defeated the British Navy several times on the Great Lakes and in the Atlantic, crushed its army at New Orleans, held up against a ferocious naval bombardment at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, and survived the attack on Washington. Its men, shaky at first, had become veteran soldiers and won the war. The president, learning military skills as he went along, had become a hands-on commander in chief, a tough leader.

  Everyone remembered, too, that throughout the conflict Madison had remained firm and was never shaken by any of the many defeats in the war or the tide of public opinion against him, even the betrayal of friends such as William Thornton. He was a rock. Pennsylvania senator Jonathan Roberts visited him the night before the peace treaty arrived, at a time when everyone was certain the war was over, and found him alone in the Octagon House. Madison greeted him warmly. “The self-command, and greatness of mind, I witnessed on this occasion was in entire accordance with what I have before stated of the President, when to me things looked so dark,” he said.23

  In a few weeks, it became apparent, too, that the impressment of American sailors at sea had stopped. Madison told everyone, again and again, that America had gone to war to stop impressment. That impressment had ended. America, therefore, achieved its single goal in the war. It had won.

  All of this had its effect on Congress. The legislature took an early vote on whether or not to move the government to Philadelphia. It lost. Congressmen voted 79 to 37 to keep the capital in Washingto
n. They would vote again, and the final vote margin would be nine votes. In the end, it was decided to resurrect the White House and the Capitol and keep the national government in Washington. The Senate soon appropriated large funds to rebuild all of the structures that had been burned in the city. By the end of 1816, some of the Capitol had been rebuilt (it would be reoccupied in 1819), along with all of the Treasury and War offices and the Navy Yard. In September 1817, the White House was finished and President Monroe and his wife moved in.

  As construction began on government buildings, Thomas Jefferson sold most of the books in his huge collection at Monticello to Congress to restart the Library of Congress. President Madison created the post of Librarian of Congress and appointed writer George Watterston the first librarian. In 1816, a group of men headed up by John Quincy Adams founded the Columbian Institute to promote the arts and sciences in the town. In 1816, more single-family homes were built in Washington than in the previous five years. Two new, large churches opened their doors, and dozens of shops opened on Pennsylvania Avenue. The population of the city grew and would double within the next few years.24

  There was prosperity across the nation. The New England shipping business profits bounced back immediately as their vessels sailed the seas unimpeded by searches by the English and French. The industry's jailed sailors were released and sent home. The price of tobacco nearly tripled, and the price of cotton quadrupled. The total amount of exports from the United States jumped from $45 million in 1815 to over $68 million in 1817 and climbed higher the next year. In the two years after the war, unemployment dropped and so did the national debt. The total cost of running the federal government dropped to just $22 million a year.

  Public opinion on Madison soared. He had gone from being the derided “little man in the palace” to a national hero. America had won the war, had disgraced the British at New Orleans, and once again enjoyed freedom of the seas. England would never war on the United States again. The New England secession movement died, business was better, farming was more prosperous, and Americans were happy. “Their first war with England made them independent; their second made them formidable,” wrote an editor of the London Times about the United States.25

  The Madisons, James and Dolley, were the two most popular people in the country during the president's last two years in office.

  There was one more piece of business, the ever-annoying Barbary pirates off the coast of North Africa. Madison had helped Jefferson defeat the pirates of the Barbary States in 1805, but during the War of 1812, the bandits were back on the high seas in the Mediterranean, stopping US merchant ships and once again seizing American sailors. Madison paid little attention to the renewed war because he had to defeat the British. That war was finished. Now it was off to Tripoli to tangle with the Mediterranean pirates once more. The president sent two squadrons of warships, one under Commodore William Bainbridge in Boston and one under Commodore Stephen Decatur, a hero in both the first Barbary War and the War of 1812. Decatur's fleet was composed of the frigate USS Guerriere, with forty-four guns; the Constellation, with thirty-six guns; and the Macedonia, with thirty-eight guns; plus six sloops with between twelve and sixteen guns each. They encountered the pirate fleet near Gibraltar and captured two of its largest vessels. Decatur then sailed on to Algiers and threatened to attack it. The dey agreed to negotiations. Decatur returned the two ships he had captured to the dey and the dey, surprised and fearful of the large and powerful American fleet, completely capitulated. He vowed never to harass American shipping again and to release all captured US sailors plus several dozen Europeans who had been taken. The dey agreed to pay $10,000 in reparations, never to demand tribute again, and never to harass American shipping. He agreed to pretty much the same deal with British negotiators six months later. The second, and final, Barbary War was over in triumph for America, and Madison.

  The world saw Madison's actions as swift and decisive, the work of the leader of a world power. The old tentativeness of America in its relationship with the Barbary States under both Jefferson and Madison was gone. There was no more threatening or diplomatic sword rattling. President Madison made up his mind to end the war and subdue the pirates and did so. He showed a fierce determination that he had never shown in his life. He was a new man.26

  His view of government had changed dramatically. He was no longer firmly in the corner of the states’ rights champions who feared a big and powerful federal government. Now, as his presidency wound down, James Madison had become an extraordinarily powerful and confident national leader. He had no trouble getting Congress to establish a national bank to back up American money in times of trouble. In his budget messages and State of the Union addresses, he moved further and further toward a powerful presidency, certain that the national government could do things that states could not. Only the national government could have fought the War of 1812, and only the national government had the money for national transportation, education, defense, and banking. He needed more taxes and more spending and pressed Congress for authorization on those issues. He had found that a special tax just to fight the war had worked, and it would work for presidents for hundreds of years to come.

  Madison was applauded by all. Jefferson wrote him just after the war ended to tell him that he had not only transformed the American character but also shown all of Europe, and all of the world, that the American country and people had changed forever. Historian Henry Adams, whose nine-volume work on the War of 1812 is still considered the premier account of the conflict, wrote that “in 1815, for the first time, Americans ceased to debate the path they were to follow. Not only was the unity of the nation established, but its probable divergence from older societies was also well defined…. The American, in his political character, was a new variety of man.”27

  Everything had changed in America during Madison's two terms and his eight years as the secretary of state. The nation's population boomed. The total number of people living in America in 1817, when Madison retired, was about four times as great as when he wrote the Constitution. The three western states of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee had developed rapidly, and the 1820 census would show their growth from 370,000 in 1800 to 1.7 million in 1820. The country's churches had flourished and were now found all over the land, and not just in the large cities. When the revolution ended, there were forty-four newspapers in America; in the 1820s, there were more than five hundred. The one-party system that began with George Washington had folded, and there were two strong parties. Then the Federalists died and were to be replaced by the Whigs. Men's and women's fashions had changed, again and again, during his eight years in Washington and would change yet again in his retirement.

  James Madison had had, in the twilight of his presidency, established a happy balance between a powerful federal government over a collection of vibrant state governments. He had moved a long way from the Madison of the mid-1790s, and so had the nation.

  The president was “the great little Madison” at last.

  As the steamship carrying the Madisons out of the nation's capital slowly slipped its moorings and began to churn along the wide Potomac, the former First Couple passed a scene they had never anticipated when they arrived in Washington sixteen long years before. Then, the brand-new capital was less than a year old. There were just three thousand or so residents and a few large, mostly uncompleted, government buildings. The center of the city was covered with wide, vacant, uneven, dirt-filled lots; rolling meadows; and soggy wetlands. Some of the streets, such as Pennsylvania Avenue, stopped somewhere out in a wet swamp. There were a few parties at the homes of the comfortably well off, some taverns, a boardinghouse or two, and long horseback or carriage rides to Georgetown and Alexandria over the Potomac.

  Upon arriving at the new capital, President Jefferson had written Madison, “we shall have an agreeable society here, and not too much of it.” He was right then but wrong now. In the spring of 1817, as the Madisons stood at the rail of the ship and waved
good-bye to friends, Washington was a very different place.1

  Several dozen large, finished government buildings anchored both the business and residential centers of town. The Capitol and White House, burned in the war, were under reconstruction and were nearly finished. Dozens of noisy taverns filled with residents and visitors dotted the terrain. The population of the town had tripled, to nearly ten thousand people, and the city, without a newspaper in the summer of 1800, now had four. The populations of Georgetown and Alexandria had also tripled in those seventeen years.

  The size of the city was much larger and far more diverse. Thousands of people moved to town to take the increasing number of federal jobs and jobs with companies that did business with the government. Independent stores and factories hired many more workers. There were now more than a dozen busy boardinghouses and several elegant, spacious hotels lining the streets. The city's social life had exploded, with theaters and music halls now open full-time and regular troupes of entertainers performing in them. Bookstores attracted hundreds of people, several schools had been built, and national science and philosophical centers had been established.

  Margaret Bayard Smith, looking back on her years at the capital, which were the same years as the Madisons’, wrote:

  When I first came to the city [1800], I found myself almost as much a stranger as I did twelve years ago, and when I recalled to mind the society which had so often circled round our fireside and beheld them scattered over the world, separated by the waves of the Atlantic, some by the ocean of eternity, sadness and sorrow mingled with the pleasures of recollection. Washington [now] possesses a peculiar interest and to an active, reflective and ambitious mind has more attractions than any other place in America. This interest is daily increasing and with the importance and expansion of our nation, this is the theater on which its most interesting ideas are discussed, by its ablest sons, in which the greatest characters are called to act. It is, every year, more and more the resort of strangers from every part of the union, and all foreigners of distinction who visit these states and visit this city.