Madison and Jefferson

by Nancy Isenberg;Andrew Burstein

  As spring proceeded, Madison was still assembling his cabinet. He did not have the luxury Jefferson previously had in selecting men he trusted. First and foremost he wanted to make his closest adviser, Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, his secretary of state. A small but influential faction led by Maryland senator Samuel Smith and Virginia’s William Branch Giles—both experienced wheeler-dealers—would not hear of it. They had previously defended Gallatin against Federalist slurs regarding his un-American character, but things were different now. According to a nineteenth-century Smith descendant, the objection to Gallatin’s assumption of the secretaryship of state was once again his foreign birth—which, for some unexplained reason, seemed less of an issue if he were to remain in charge of America’s financial well-being.

  It was probably not that simple and more about political jockeying. For his part, Giles wanted the appointment for himself. He had been a useful auxiliary in Congress for several years and tried to take credit for smoothing Madison’s way to the presidency. But if John Randolph can ever be regarded as a reliable source of information, it may have been that Giles was not quite as competent as he thought he was. At least Smith “can spell,” wrote Randolph, and thus “he ought to be preferred to Giles.” (Giles had earlier flirted with Randolph’s Quiddism, distancing himself when it came time to throw his support to Madison over Monroe.)

  Madison did not wish to provoke Senator Smith or to alienate Giles. Smith’s brother was Jefferson’s secretary of the navy, Robert Smith, yet another Princeton graduate. He definitely lacked the will to perform administrative duties with Gallatinian energy. Jefferson had found his secretary of the navy to be a pleasant but not particularly dynamic cabinet officer, and Madison probably shared his opinion. As early as inauguration day former senator Wilson Cary Nicholas, now a congressman and one of Madison’s and Jefferson’s most trusted Virginia colleagues, had alerted Madison to the existence of an anti-Gallatin wing in the Republican Party; yet it was Gallatin himself who forced Madison’s hand and sanctioned the appointment of Robert Smith to State. The loyal Gallatin opted to remain at Treasury rather than stir up more dissension in the Republican ranks.

  It was left up to Jefferson to make nice with the Smiths. He wrote to Robert after his appointment, saying that he was able to “look back with peculiar satisfaction on the harmony & cordial good will which, to ourselves & our brethren of the Cabinet so much sweetened our toils.” The irony of this sentiment would become evident in little more than a year, as conflict between Smith and Gallatin escalated. Hoping to avoid problems, Madison had opted to placate; he had already seen too much of confrontation, schism, and faction.

  It bought him time, but not much. His politically drawn cabinet choices, beginning with Robert Smith, were to prove ruinous to the president in his first term. And it made Madison’s life no easier when it became apparent that nothing he did allowed him to escape Jefferson’s shadow—many, even his political admirers, assumed that the retired president was still calling the shots.

  Madison was, to many, the sickly heir apparent, a pale copy of the controversial but inspirational former president. Margaret Bayard Smith even suggested that the new president was more like a child than an equal of Jefferson’s. “Father never loved son more than he loves Mr. Madison,” she recorded, imagining paternal pride on Jefferson’s face. Lacking the party-building skills of Jefferson, Madison would find it difficult to claim the initiative.22

  The most decisive difference between the two presidents lay in their approaches to party leadership. Jefferson cajoled his Republican allies into doing what he wanted, sharing secrets and demanding loyalty. Madison did not have this ability. To put it indelicately, only Jefferson knew how to seduce. He courted the faithful and sought out the young, the suggestible. His skill as a letter writer enabled him to convince his associates that their ideas and services were important. He knew how to soothe wounded egos—a political skill not sufficiently appreciated.

  Madison had been successful in drawing close to elder statesmen such as Edmund Pendleton and George Washington because he could get things done for them. He held others to the same standard. Jefferson had the personal touch, Madison much less so. While Madison scripted Jefferson’s political ascendancy in the 1780s and 1790s, it was Jefferson, not Madison, who conceived and built the Virginia Dynasty of presidents. Another way to interpret Margaret Bayard Smith’s bubbly comment—“Father never loved son more”—is to imagine Madison inheriting his office in the sense that a prince succeeds the king. As all familiar with that story know, the younger man never quite measures up to the patriarch.

  Coming into office, Madison was not the head of the party in the same way he had been in Congress in the 1790s. Deferring to others when he did not appoint Gallatin to the State Department, he did little to incline the members of Congress to do his bidding. It was a fainthearted approach and tactically unwise. Nor did he reach out to the compromise candidate, Robert Smith, as Jefferson did. It is hard to imagine Jefferson allowing Congress to derail him; it is harder still to imagine Jefferson failing to welcome a new cabinet member and soliciting his loyalty, which Madison evidently did not adequately do. When it fell to Jefferson to write to Smith, he attempted to conciliate, to reach out to him on an emotional level.

  We know that Jefferson was often irked by the hostile attacks—“the floating lies”—that drew near him, just as we know that Madison was largely able to shun all of that species of torment. But Jefferson conveyed affectionate thoughts to the members of his party; in so doing, he succeeded in convincing them that he should be looked up to as the party’s leader. Ironically, Madison was closer to the Adams model, a president who was most popular when America was on the verge of an international crisis but who, in the normal course of administration, was less intimate with his fellow politicians.

  “I Consider War with England Inevitable”

  On the Fourth of July 1809 President Madison and his cabinet attended church on F Street in Washington, where the ardent Republican poet Joel Barlow gave a patriotic oration. A band played, and as was customary, the Declaration of Independence was read. Toasts were presented, and enumerated in order of importance, to “the cardinal principles of democracy”; the office of the presidency; the memory of George Washington; “our beloved fellow citizen Thomas Jefferson”; and with an apparent flourish, while still identifying the new president as the untried heir, “James Madison, the Friend of Jefferson—That he may equal the virtues of his predecessor, is our sincere hope; that he will emulate them is our firm belief; may his life be happy and his memory revered!” At an Ohio gathering of Federalists, the message was somewhat different: the toast went out to “Thomas Jefferson—may his shin bones be converted into drumsticks, to beat the triumph of federalism in the U. States!”23

  In August, approaching six months on the job, President Madison paid a visit to Monticello in the company of Albert and Hannah Gallatin. There is no record of what transpired, but the familiar threesome no doubt covered a wide range of policy issues, foreign and domestic, giving considerable attention to the warring Europeans and only somewhat less attention to unresolved bad feelings within the Republican Party. In all, it was a busy month. Margaret Bayard Smith and her husband, editor Samuel Harrison Smith, stayed several days at Monticello—welcomed, she wrote, by her host’s “benignant smiles & cordial tones.” And as the Madison-Gallatin party rode off, Jefferson welcomed another fond visitor, the widowed Eliza House Trist, his and Madison’s Philadelphia landlady of years past. Three weeks later, not quite the detached farmer he claimed to be, Jefferson rode the twenty-five miles to Montpelier for one last visit before Madison had to return to Washington to take up troubling new developments relating to Anglo-American affairs.24

  In his letters to Madison, and no doubt in private conversation as well, the scenarios Jefferson spun all pointed to war with England. He called British foreign secretary George Canning (whose very name seemed a blend of “canny” and “cunning”) a m
an of “unprincipled rascality.” Canning’s “equivocations” degraded an already “shameless” government, Jefferson prodded Madison, adding without hesitation: “I despair of accommodation with them, because I believe they are weak enough to intend seriously to claim the ocean as their conquest, and think to amuse us with embassies and negociations until the claim shall have been strengthened by time and exercise, and the moment arrive when they may boldly avow what hitherto they have only squinted at.” By “weak,” Jefferson meant morally weak and brutally simple. He was most incensed by Britain’s denunciation of all sense of honor in its dealings with Washington.25

  Canning had told U.S. envoy William Pinkney the previous autumn that Jefferson’s embargo meant nothing to him; it was “only to be considered as an innocent municipal Regulation, which affects none but the United States themselves.” Canning’s may have been the most incendiary public voice emanating from London, but the fact was that England had no fear of America. If the leadership, concentrating on Napoleon, saw the United States as too insignificant a power for London to have to attend its demands, then we should not be surprised that Jefferson continued to see a British regime bound to its hostile foreign secretary as irredeemable.

  Madison was wrong to believe that the all-important impressment issue would be solved during the first year of his presidency. Congress had put an end to the unpopular embargo in the finals days of Jefferson’s second term, and Madison entered office wanting to show no signs of weakness. He believed he had done just that over the course of his first months on the job. The British, however, did not see things the same way. Madison stood behind the Non-Intercourse Act of March 1809, which replaced the embargo but was still meant to close to U.S. commerce those ports that remained under British or French control. In fact, though, the Non-Intercourse Act contained enough loopholes that U.S. vessels were able to trade with the British in neutral ports. In London, it appeared that the Madison administration had blinked.

  Until July, Madison could not have known that his reliance on David Erskine, the British minister in Washington, was ill considered. When it became clear that Erskine had gone beyond what his superiors intended, and that Canning saw no reason to bend, the menacing Orders in Council remained in place and Erskine was recalled to London. Jefferson first learned of this and wrote Madison with an I-told-you-so self-satisfaction: “I never doubted the chicanery of the Anglomen.”26

  With firm resolve, Madison communicated to Secretary of State Robert Smith the proper posture he should take toward Erskine’s replacement, Francis James Jackson, whose reputation for stuffiness and callousness Gallatin had earlier related. “From the character of the man, and the temper of his superiors,” wrote Madison, “any thing beyond that politeness which explains itself, and is due to ourselves, is more likely to foster insolence than to excite liberality or good will.” Whereas Jefferson never expected anything like a peaceful overture from London, Madison was aggravated because he had been deceived. Henceforth there would be no compromise. As long as Madison, like Jefferson, aimed to enlarge the borders of the United States, the British would remain the principal enemy, and Napoleon would be treated as the lesser of two evils. Not only were the British in Canada and in league with western Indian tribes; they appeared, at this point, more likely than Napoleon to advance into Spanish-held territories on America’s frontier.27

  Jefferson was extremely forceful. “Should Bonaparte have the wisdom to correct his injustice towards us, I consider war with England inevitable,” he goaded Madison, expecting that the president would wait for the inevitable seizure of a France-bound American vessel to claim a pretext for war. “I have no doubt you will think it safe to act on this hypothesis, and with energy.” He did not expect that Madison would shy from confrontation, but he wanted to be sure.

  If A, then B. As much for his own clarification as for Madison’s, Jefferson tried to foretell the course of events: “The moment that open war shall be apprehended from them, we should take possession of Baton rouge. If we do not, they will, and New Orleans becomes irrecoverable and the Western country blockaded during the war.” Baton Rouge was the westernmost point of Spanish West Florida, perched on the commercially and militarily vital Mississippi and, despite its proximity to New Orleans, not in American hands. Jefferson wanted Madison to take advantage of the first opportunity to occupy and annex all of Florida and fulfill America’s destiny.28

  In early November 1809 Madison vowed to Jefferson that he would “proceed with a circumspect attention” and “a just sensibility” that America’s interest should not be sacrificed to either England or France. We should not misread these words. For if Jefferson expressed his resentment in unmistakable terms and Madison sounded “circumspect,” Madison was just as deeply concerned about national humiliation and felt no pressure to reconcile with England.29

  “But Madison Must Also Die”

  With Madison’s administration showing early signs of vulnerability, Federalists looked for new ways to strike at the Republican core. Well into Madison’s second year in office, they continued to assume that Jefferson was pulling the strings.30 With perverse pleasure, they asserted that what the two administrations had in common was the habitual waste of public funds. Not only were dishonest appointees deliberately pilfering, they claimed, but the Republicans were blatantly incompetent in managing money. The most flagrant examples lay in the realm of military expenditures, where waste was apparent in the procurement of supplies—inexplicably, the quartermaster’s office had been eliminated. The notorious reliance on the expensive, lightly armed gunboats, meant to defend American harbors against larger, deadlier European war vessels, made no sense at all.

  Madison was less committed to the fifty-foot gunboats than Jefferson had been, but neither, as president, made a concerted study of what should be done to ensure an economically sound, militarily effective naval strategy in the period after the Chesapeake incident. In 1807 then-Secretary of the Navy (now Secretary of State) Robert Smith appears simply to have ratified what the president and secretary of state desired. Jefferson clearly did not wish at any time to participate in an “arms race” with Great Britain. Madison also appears to have believed that eventual U.S. expansion into Spanish Florida and western destinations required vessels equipped for service along the shallow rivers of the continent. Beyond that, privateering seemed a cost-effective solution. In sum, a British-style naval force was more than a pay-as-you-go government was willing to bear.31

  The Federalists’ hectoring satires did not let up either. The later months of 1809 saw the publication of Memoirs of the Hon. Thomas Jefferson, a two-volume send-up of the retired president meant to reflect equally on his hapless successor. The name of the anonymous author was exposed by the Carolina Gazette as one Stephen Cullen, alternately described as a “renegade Englishman,” “a foreign hireling,” and the “secret emissary” of Great Britain, who had lived in Charleston before removing to New York. “O my country!” the Republican newspaper claimed, “how art thou debased when such wretches find countenance and support from men who disgrace the name of AMERICANS by assuming it.” Amid the crisis of impressment, Cullen’s ability to pass for American reinforced the ambiguity of citizenship at this time of heightened Anglo-American antagonism.32

  The two volumes purport to be Jefferson’s actual memoir, though it is highly unlikely that anyone read ten pages into it without getting the joke. Jefferson’s achievements were noted, and then immediately discounted. The magnificent first inaugural address was “hypocrisy,” coming from a man who stood at the head of a political sect. Jefferson then “fell upon” the Federalists and “laid aside all decency, all shame” in persecuting them. Protesting that the third president misread British policy, Cullen made the actions of the Leopard in firing on the Chesapeake appear a reasonable action. Perhaps the most lurid characterization in the mock-memoir, though, was that of the proto-Jacobins who purportedly “joined in the diabolical orgies held at the house of Jefferson.”


  Moving on to Madison, Cullen found a “versatile president,” by which he meant wavering and lacking in the masculine qualities of firmness and resolve. “General Hamilton,” Cullen reminded, “declared that Mr. Madison was, during the agitation of the important question of a Constitution, far more zealous for monarchy than any other active public character in America.” It was Hamilton, not Madison, who had been so inclined in 1787; but by 1809 the Federalist narrative incorporated many such spurious charges.33

  Around the same time a long poem, printed as a broadside, lamented the death of Washington and the Republican era that opened in its wake. Like Cullen’s nasty memoir, it brought up every old charge against Jefferson before turning to the new Republican president:

  The Sage of Monticello’s run

  And left the throne to Madison

  His talents small, his courage less

  Has brought us all into distress.

  The partisan poet concluded that liberty was fading and would expire in Madison’s arms. How could America have gone from the sturdy Washington to the scrawny Madison in so short a time?

  Great Washington, our friend, is dead,

  And Madison reigns in his stead;

  Much reason then to mourn and sigh;

  But Madison must also die.34

  Of course, no Republican could ever be a Washington. Some Federalists, in the Joseph Dennie mold, had by now devised a kind of political eugenics. For them, the weak-kneed Madison was a worse incarnation—a lesser Jefferson. Politically powerless themselves, mock-poetry and song served as a kind of voodoo chant: it was meant to put a curse on Madison, the heir who lacked any part of the vitality of the foremost Federalist.