The Great Divide

by Thomas Fleming

  When Congress did not respond to these pronouncements, the President created on his own authority the office of Permanent Superintendent of the Military Academy—a major step toward an organized and functioning school for the soldiers who would lead Americans in future wars.

  In 1816, the last year of Madison’s term, the new leadership-oriented President persuaded Congress to think nationally in ways that would have pleased George Washington. Congress chartered a second Bank of the United States and revived Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures—the last step in his program to create a great commercial republic. In line with this innovation, Madison persuaded the legislators to sponsor the nation’s first protective tariff to guard new American industries against foreign [mostly British] competition.

  Supporting these revivals of President Washington’s policies was Chief Justice John Marshall, who rejected the state of Maryland’s attempt to challenge the new Bank of the United States. In McCulloch vs Maryland, Marshall struck down Jefferson’s notion that the Constitution was a compact between the states. Instead, he insisted “the government of the Union…is emphatically and truly a government of the people.” While the federal government was “limited in its powers,” the Constitution gave it the “discretion” to use the means required to apply these powers “in the manner most beneficial to the people.”

  Thomas Jefferson was horrified by President Madison’s embrace of the Bank of the United States. Writing to his son-in-law, Congressman John Eppes, the ex-president saw America heading for a future of “debt, bankruptcy and revolution.” Exhuming his dictum, “The Earth Belongs to the Living,” he called Madison’s policy a “slavish” imitation of Great Britain. There was no need for a Bank of the United States to loan the government money. Treasury notes could pay for a war just as easily as borrowing from an unconstitutional monster like the BUS.

  When Jefferson broached this idea to Madison, the President stunned his former mentor by dismissing his plan and his reasoning. Madison pointed out that printing Treasury notes was not terribly different from the 1776 Continental Congress’s printing millions of dollars of paper money, which ended up with the government bankrupt and the dollars “not worth a continental.” Even more appalling [to Jefferson], Madison declared the new Bank of the United States should be modeled on the Bank of England.19

  Over the next several years, Jefferson grew more and more enraged by John Marshall’s judicial decisions, which consistently stressed federal power and made the Supreme Court the ultimate arbiter. In 1823, Jefferson reverted to the cry of the long defunct anti-federalists—the Constitution was a plot to “consolidate” the states out of existence. He wrote a letter full of violent denunciations to William Branch Giles, who had become governor of Virginia. Instead of the Supreme Court, Jefferson proposed a plan to resolve clashes between the states and the federal government by letting the people decide disputes at state conventions.

  When Jefferson showed the letter to James Madison, he again earnestly but firmly disagreed with his lifelong friend. Madison argued with almost irresistible force for judicial review and the supremacy of the Supreme Court. He pointed out that calling conventions every time the states and the federal government disagreed would soon destabilize the politics of the nation. Jefferson retreated into silence.

  If we include the vigorous leadership President Madison gave Congress in his final year in office and his embrace of the Bank of the United States, a protective tariff and internal taxes, it is no exaggeration to say that experience, that best of all teachers, had forced James Madison to rethink his long devotion to President Thomas Jefferson and reconsider his once angry opposition to President George Washington.

  Madison was much too polite—and too fond of Jefferson as a friend—to put his transformation into blunt words before Jefferson’s death in 1826. The two men worked closely together on a praiseworthy retirement project—the founding of the University of Virginia. Even here there were glimpses of disagreement. As the university neared opening, they discussed the texts that should be listed as required reading for the law school, a branch of education in which, Jefferson declared, “we are the best judges.” He recommended the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist, and the 1798 and 1800 Virginia Resolutions as well as English sources, such as John Locke and Algernon Sidney.

  Madison politely (as always) but firmly objected. He argued that none of these texts, though rich in fundamentals, should be recommended as biblical-like repositories of The Truth. He particularly dismissed the Virginia Resolutions as much too partisan. Instead, Madison suggested merely calling the list the “best guides” to the principles of American government, giving the next generation the freedom to construct their own beliefs. Then, without any hint of apology or pleading, Madison suggested adding George Washington’s Farewell Address.

  Two years after Jefferson’s death in 1826, Andrew Jackson revived and even enlarged George Washington’s tradition of the strong president—and James Madison made his political transformation explicit. In 1832, a clash between Vice President John Calhoun and his followers in South Carolina about a state’s right to protest a protective tariff escalated into a constitutional crisis. Calhoun espoused the Jeffersonian doctrine that the national charter was a compact between sovereign states, which meant a state could “nullify” a federal law that it found hostile to its interests. From there it was only a step to the claim that a state had the right to secede from the Union in order to protect its citizens’ rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Among Calhoun’s most vociferous supporters was William Branch Giles of Virginia.

  President Jackson was not a constitutional scholar, but his private secretary was a young man named Nicholas P. Trist, who had married one of Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughters. Trist’s grandmother, Elizabeth Trist, had run the boardinghouse at which Madison and Jefferson had stayed during their congressional years in Philadelphia. This personal link enabled Trist to bring the eighty-one-year-old ex-president into the dispute, with remarkable results.

  Madison published a vigorous rebuttal of the nullifiers’ claims. He insisted that the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were merely statements of opinion, with no claim to being legal principles. He was especially fierce on Calhoun’s embrace of Jefferson’s proposal to settle disputes between the states and the federal government by calling state conventions. The ex-president cited his essay in The Federalist, which argued that the Supreme Court was the best and only way to settle such differences.

  Chief Justice John Marshall had been following this contest with close attention. He informed the world that Madison’s demolition of Calhoun gave him “peculiar pleasure.” Madison was also repudiating Thomas Jefferson but Marshall diplomatically omitted his name. The fourth president, the Chief Justice said, “was himself again, [avowing] the opinions of his best days.”20

  Calhoun, Giles, and their backers in other southern states dismissed Madison as an old codger with a fading memory of what he really thought and meant in 1798. They had “incontestable” proof that Thomas Jefferson believed in the doctrine of nullification. He had written it into his Kentucky Resolutions. To Madison’s dismay, he discovered in his papers a draft of Jefferson’s resolutions, with the dreaded word in the Master of Monticello’s own hand.

  Although he was ravaged by the infirmities of old age, with his wife Dolley’s help, Madison hurled himself into the argument. He insisted that Jefferson did not mean nullification as Calhoun was using it, to justify a single state’s defiance of the government. Madison stressed with almost visible desperation his friend’s lifelong commitment to majority rule. More important, in his letters to Nicholas Trist, intended for President Jackson, Madison reiterated that the federal union was indissoluble, perpetual—and crucial to the future happiness of nation.

  When the South Carolinians summoned a convention that declared the latest federal tariff was null and void, and proclaimed their readiness to defend their stand
with gunfire, President Andrew Jackson had ready a Madisonian reply that was tailored to the Tennesseean’s convictions and temperament. “The Constitution of the United States…forms a government, not a league…It is a government in which all the people are represented, and which operates on the people individually, not upon the states.” That meant the United States “was a nation,” and secession would destroy it. “Do not be deceived by names,” Jackson warned. “Disunion by armed force is treason.”

  For a few days South Carolina blustered defiance. But when President Jackson obtained from Congress the right to summon an army, and grimly promised to invade the state at the head of ninety thousand men, the hotheads in Charleston collapsed. It was a replay of George Washington’s destruction of the Whiskey Rebellion. In Montpelier, James Madison applauded. He wrote a letter of congratulation to ex-War Hawk Henry Clay, who had persuaded Congress to pass a more moderate tariff bill that made South Carolina’s capitulation less humiliating.

  For the rest of his life, fears for the future of the Union disturbed ex-President Madison’s sleep. “What madness for the South,” he sighed, when reports convinced him that many southerners were still talking nullification and secession. Looking for greater safety in disunion, he said, would be “jumping into the fire for fear of the frying pan.” Madison worried that the next crisis would involve “the Negro, or slavery question.” President Andrew Jackson voiced the same fear. As Madison brooded on this possibility, he decided to leave a message to his fellow Americans.

  Madison called it “Advice To My Country.” It began with a paragraph describing it as “issuing from the tomb”—it would not be published until after his death (in 1836). But it was “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 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 conviction 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 a Serpent creeping with his deadly wiles into Paradise.21

  Those words marked the final transformation of James Madison. He had abandoned the divisive ideology that emanated from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and returned to the sunny piazza of Mount Vernon as a partner of that realistic visionary, George Washington. It is a journey that every man and woman in America can and should take—now and in the future.

  Epilogue

  BY THE TIME JAMES Madison wrote those resounding farewell words, no one realized that he was repudiating Thomas Jefferson and affirming George Washington. Madison avoided a specific reference to either man—ironic proof that he was still emotionally trapped between them. To explain himself would have required a veritable treatise on their differences, which would have been extremely painful for Madison to write. He would have had to face not only their clashing views on the importance of the Union. At least as significant was their disagreement over the powers of the presidency and the role of Congress in governing the nation. Washington’s views had been obliterated from the public mind. The man responsible for this historical erasure was Thomas Jefferson.

  Throughout Jefferson’s presidency, and in the two decades of his life after he returned to Monticello, he waged a persistent campaign to portray Washington as a symbol of American nationhood with virtually no content to the image but his role as a noble, nonpartisan father of the country. As Jefferson put it in his first inaugural address, Washington was “our first and greatest revolutionary character” whose “preeminent services entitle him to the first place in his country’s love.” There is not a hint in these words of the decisive president who smashed the secessionists of the Whiskey Rebellion, deflated the so-called Democratic Societies and their adoration of France, and persuaded Americans to accept the less-than-perfect John Jay treaty with England as a price worth paying for peace—all feats that Thomas Jefferson had dismissed with sneers and loathing.

  By 1813, Jefferson had begun to rewrite the history of Washington’s administration. “General Washington did not harbor one Principle of Federalism,” he insisted.” Note the use of “General” instead of “President.” When Chief Justice John Marshall published his biography of Washington, making it very clear that President Washington was not only a Federalist, he abhorred Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans for their mindless worship of France, their readiness to ignore the Consitution and discuss—and even plan—to fracture the Union, Jefferson dismissed the book as a tissue of lies put together for “electioneering purposes.” In his heart, Jefferson maintained, Washington was a “small r” republican, which meant he could never have agreed with the monarchists and Anglomen who peopled the Federalist party.1

  Standing the truth on its head in this way, Jefferson succeeded in making the Federalists guilty of twisting Washington’s reputation into a parody of the real president. They had “gone some distance toward sinking his character by hanging theirs on it, and by representing as the enemy of republicans him, who of all men, is best entitled to the appellation of the father of that republic which they were endeavoring to subvert.” There was, Jefferson admitted, opposition “to the course of [Washington’s] administration,” but that simply was an effort “to preserve Congress pure and independent of the Executive,” to restrain the administration to republican forms and principles, and not permit the Constitution “to be warped in practice into all the principles and pollutions of their favorite English model.” The Republicans, “devoted to the present Constitution,” had never threatened the national charter, as Chief Justice Marshall claimed. They merely resisted “Anglomany & Monarchy.”2

  By blending Washington into this imaginary history, Jefferson made it difficult and finally impossible for average Americans to remember their clashing visions of the federal government. These differences have persisted throughout the nation’s history. We have seen how close Jefferson’s political heirs in the Democratic Party came to fracturing the Union in the 1830s by embracing his view that the federal government was a compact between the states, which could be dissolved by a majority vote of any state. Coupled with this contention was his idea that a state could nullify an act of Congress if they thought it impinged on their rights. When these ideas collided with New England’s abolitionist crusade against slavery, the bloodbath of the Civil War became inevitable. More and more, it looked like Washington’s vision of the central importance of the federal Union was heading for history’s dumpster.

  It slowly became apparent that millions of Americans had absorbed a profound respect—even a love—of the Union. Washington’s Farewell Address played a large part in this sentiment. Not a few historians believe that the Union was the primary emotion—not hatred of slavery—that galvanized the nation to resist the South’s secession.3 At least as important was the election of Abraham Lincoln, a man who was a believer in the implied powers of the presidency, thanks to his long apprenticeship in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Whig Party, who considered themselves the heirs of the Federalists. He had no hesitation about wielding unprecedented authority as commander-in-chief. He suspended habeas corpus and other rights, issued the Emancipation Proclamation and a stream of executive orders that bypassed Congress in the name of urgency. One might call him the unJefferson President. Without his extraordinary, often almost extra-legal leadership, the Union would not have survived its four-year ordeal.

  When an assassin’s bullet ended Lincoln’s presidency, another divide in the conflict between Jefferson and Washington came to the fore. Angry members of Congress invoked Jefferson’s view of the national legislature as the nation’s true ruler. Thaddeus Stevens, the leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, sounded the battle cry: “Though the President is Commander-in-chief, Congress is his commander, and God willing, he shall obey…He and his minions shall learn that this is not a governmen
t of Kings and Satraps but a Government of the people, and that Congress is the people.”4 Stevens and his Senate ally, Ben Wade of Ohio, set up the Joint Committee of Fifteen, composed of six senators and nine congressmen, a body that operated like a British cabinet, making regular reports to Congress and drafting legislation. They rammed through a series of punitive laws that were a cruel parody of Lincoln’s hopes of reconciliation and made Reconstruction a hated word in the South.5

  The Joint Committee also drafted legislation aimed at drastically reducing the powers of the president. Early in 1867, they passed laws that kept Congress in continuous session if it so inclined, and added the power to call itself into special session, a privilege hitherto reserved to the chief executive. They struck at his role as commander in chief by ordering President Andrew Johnson to issue all military orders through General Ulysses S. Grant, and forbidding Johnson to remove Grant or transfer him to another post without the Senate’s consent. To cripple the president’s patronage powers, they passed a Tenure of Office Act, which made it a “high misdemeanor” for him to fire any federal official without their approval.

  When Johnson challenged this latter law by dismissing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Congress impeached him. Most of the charges dealt with the Tenure of Office Act, but the President’s accusers threw in a final article that revealed the real nature of the clash: he was guilty of “defaming Congress.” Fortunately for the future of the country, some Republican senators began to have second thoughts about what their party was doing. “Once set the example,” said Lincoln disciple Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, “and no future president will be safe who happens to differ with a majority of the House and two-thirds of the Senate on any measure deemed by them important.” This was an almost exact description of the kind of government President Jefferson tried to achieve in the impeachment of Judge Samuel Chase.6