Madison and Jefferson
Page 103
53. Brian Schoen, “Calculating the Price of Union: Republican Economic Nationalism and the Origins of Southern Sectionalism, 1790–1828,” Journal of the Early Republic 23 (Summer 2003): 173–206; Charleston’s City Gazette editorialized: “If we have not virtue to withstand a temporary embargo, how can we expect to support a war, which when once declared no person can say when and where it will end” (as republished in the Republican Star of Easton, Maryland, November 8, 1808). In its inaugural issue, the Anti-Monarchist of Edgefield, South Carolina, adhered to the administration line, while acknowledging Britain’s preponderant power: “We are reduced to this situation,” the editor explained: “submit to pay TRIBUTE to England, and be plundered by France, to go to WAR, or hold to the Embargo … France we cannot touch; and England, by her powerful navy, could soon sweep us from the ocean.” Anti-Monarchist, and Republican Watchman, December 14, 1808.
54. Enquirer, December 10 and December 20, 1808.
55. Saunders Cragg, George Clinton Next President, and Our Republican Institutions Rescued from Destruction (New York, 1808), 4, 11–16; Ambler, Thomas Ritchie: A Study in Virginia Politics, 46–47.
56. Virginia Argus, January 1 and February 2, 1808; Cunningham, Jeffersonian Republicans in Power, 112–21; Parsons, John Quincy Adams, 92–93; Cheetham, reprinting a piece from the Troy, N.Y., Farmer’s Digest, cited in Brant, 4:439–40.
57. Lewis to JM, November 14, 1808, JMP-LC.
58. Cunningham, Jeffersonian Republicans in Power, 116, 273–74.
59. “A Farmer, No. VI,” National Intelligencer, July 13, 1808.
60. Virginia Argus, February 16 and March 11, 1808. To John Taylor of Caroline, Monroe later asserted that he “never had any connection” to those who advanced his candidacy for president; and that John Randolph knew nothing about his position on foreign affairs at the time of the latter’s break with the Jefferson administration. Monroe to Taylor, September 10, 1810, in Writings of James Monroe, ed. Hamilton, 5:133–36. The Richmond Enquirer accommodated both sides. Editor Ritchie published an angry letter directed toward those who espoused Randolph’s cause. Calling their protest against the caucus vote “vapid” and “spiritless,” the column urged the partisans to drop the matter with as much “grace and decency” as they could summon. For its part, Randolph’s vanguard denied that it had any responsibility for the development of a schism within the party. It was the Madison group, their leaders said, that had withdrawn from old friends in order to hold a dishonest caucus. Those who were suppressed by that caucus were not about to forget the slight. See Enquirer, March 25 and October 17, 1808.
61. Burstein, Inner Jefferson, 154–56, 160–61; Ammon, James Monroe, 271–77; Brant, 4:428–30.
62. Virginia Argus, March 11 and September 23, 1808; National Intelligencer, October 21, 1808; Federalist endorsement of Monroe in Virginia Gazette, similarly in the North American and Mercantile Daily Advertiser [Baltimore], October 21, 1808.
63. “Richard Saunders” in New-York Evening Post, June 28, 1808, reprinted from Republican Crisis (Albany, N.Y.).
64. Rush to Adams, September 22, 1808, Letters of Benjamin Rush, 2:984. Earlier Rush had told Adams that he regarded the embargo as “just,” noting that Philadelphians were not greatly hurt by it. By the end of 1808, he would come to feel, as did many other earlier supporters, that the embargo should be lifted.
65. Leonard D. White, The Jeffersonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1801–1829 (New York, 1961), chap. 24; Theodore J. Crackel, Mr. Jefferson’s Army: Political and Social Reform of the Military Establishment, 1801–1809 (New York, 1987), esp. 178–79, stressing the loyalty of the new army to the partisan Republican agenda. Although the administrative structure was unchanged, this, of course, did not obviate the impact of the partisan press. The National Intelligencer, for instance, kept up its extreme language, referring to Federalists as “the enemies of liberty,” men of “jaundiced minds,” while crediting Jefferson with having preserved peace “amidst convulsions almost without parallel” (issues of May 8 and May 13, 1808).
66. Henry S. Randall, Life of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1858), 1:404–5.
67. Broussard, Southern Federalists, 283, 286, 291.
68. On Sheffey, see Biographical Dictionary of the American Congress, 1774–1949 (Washington, D.C., 1950), 1802–3.
69. Gallatin to Joseph H. Nicholson, December 29, 1808, cited in Brant, 4:473.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Road to War, 1809–1812
1. National Intelligencer, March 3 and March 6, 1809; Charles Henry Ambler, Thomas Ritchie: A Study in Virginia Politics (Richmond, 1913), 49; Margaret Bayard Smith, The First Forty Years of Washington Society (New York, 1906), 410. U.S. survey texts, for one, generally highlight the War Hawks’ responsibility for the War of 1812, placing Henry Clay at their head and placing President Madison more or less in the background.
2. The full text of the address is in PJM-PS, 1:15–18.
3. Madison’s letter to a spokesman for the Creek Confederacy in the autumn of 1809 was a boilerplate example of the paternalistic approach of government toward those Indians who complained about encroachment onto their lands. The president assured the Creek leader that agreed-upon borders would not be crossed, then prescribed: “You say you are poor; look at your Father, the President when he talks to you concerning this. Turn your ear to him, and believe what he says. Fence in your Lands, plow as much land as you can, raise corn & Hogs & Cattle. Learn your young Women to card & spin, & let those who are older learn to weave. You will then have food and cloathing and live comfortably. The President advises you to do this. He knows that his red Children can live well if they follow his advice.” JM to Hobohoilthle, November 6, 1809, PJM-PS, 2:54.
4. Madison would meet with Paul Cuffe, a successful Quaker ship captain and son of a former slave, promising the full support of the federal government for Cuffe’s ambitious plan to colonize free blacks in Sierra Leone and to look for ways to increase trade between the United States and West Africa. With Virginia critics such as John Randolph and John Taylor watching his every move, the president was unwilling to risk anything bolder. Madison told Cuffe that he would provide government support “consistent with the Constitution.” This language suggests Madison believed slavery protected by the Constitution; he would support colonization without threatening the property or political interests of the slave states. See Cuffe to JM, June 22, 1812, in JMP-PS, 4:497–98. See also Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia, 2002); and Bernard Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1973).
5. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), chap. 3.
6. Smith, First Forty Years of Washington Society, 411–12.
7. Martha Jefferson Randolph to TJ, February 17, 1809, The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Edwin Morris Betts and James Adam Bear, Jr. (Charlottesville, Va., 1986), 382; PTJ-RS, 1:11–13.
8. Robert Allen Rutland, The Presidency of James Madison (Lawrence, Kan., 1990), 21.
9. Frances Few diary, cited in Ketcham, 476.
10. Robert Allen Rutland, James Madison: The Founding Father (New York, 1987), 179; Smith, First Forty Years of Washington Society, 61.
11. JMB, 2:1243; account with Joseph Milligan, March 8–10, 1809, PTJ-RS, 1:35–37.
12. TJ to JM, April 10, 1809, RL, 3:1582.
13. William Seale, The President’s House: A History (Baltimore, 1986), 119–26.
14. TJ to JM, March 17, 1809; JM to TJ, March 27, 1809, RL, 3:1576, 1578; TJ to Elijah Griffiths, May 28, 1809, PTJ-RS, 1:236–37.
15. JMB, 2:1244–46; Malone, 6:9, 15, 291–92.
16. TJ to JM, March 30, 1809, RL, 3:1580.
17. TJ to JM, April 10 and April 27, 1809; JM to TJ, April 24, RL, 3:1568, 1583, 1586–87. In alluding to Canada, Jefferson expressed his regret that the British province was not taken during the Revolution.
/> 18. John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (Charlottesville, Va., 1991), 138–41.
19. On House results, see PJM-PS, 1:140n.
20. TJ to JM, April 27, 1809, RL, 3:1587–88; JM to TJ, May 1, 1809, RL, 3:1587; JM to Lafayette, May 1, 1809, PJM-PS, 1:150.
21. Blodgett to JM, ca. March 11, 1809, PJM-PS, 1:32–34. In June, Aaron Burr’s daughter, Theodosia, sent her own tender appeal for clemency to Dolley Madison, who replied warmly but insisted that nothing could be done. See Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (New York, 2007), 384–85, 389.
22. Nicholas to JM, ca. March 3, 1809, PJM-PS, 1:10–11; TJ to Robert Smith, July 10, 1809, PTJ-RS, 1:340; RL, 3:1562, 1566; Henry S. Randall, Life of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1858), 3:357n; Malone, 6:30; Ketcham, 475, 481–82.
23. National Intelligencer, July 5 and September 6, 1809.
24. Ketcham, 480–81; “Margaret Bayard Smith’s Account of a Visit to Monticello,” PTJ-RS, 1:387; TJ to JM, September 18, 1809, RL, 3:1603; TJ to Charles Pinckney, August 29, 1809, PTJ-RS, 1:475; JMB, 2:1247.
25. TJ to JM, August 17 and September 12, 1809, RL, 3:1599–1600, 1602.
26. For a good synthesis, see RL, 3:1566–73.
27. Gallatin to JM, July 24, 1809, PJM-PS, 1:300. The predictably untrustworthy General James Wilkinson wrote to Madison from New Orleans of a conversation with the Spanish governor of West Florida, who purportedly wanted the United States to absorb the territory in the wake of Napoleon’s takeover of his homeland. On the subject of British designs in Florida, the Spaniard presumed any incursion would backfire because it was destined to belong to the United States. See Wilkinson to JM, May 1, 1809, PJM-PS, 1:156.
28. TJ to JM, August 17, 1809, RL, 3:1600.
29. JM to TJ, August 23 and November 6, 1809; TJ to JM, August 17 and September 12, 1809, RL, 3:1600–1603, 1607; JM to Smith, September 15, 1809, PJM-PS, 1:378; Bradford Perkins, Prologue to War: England and the United States, 1805–1812 (Berkeley, Calif., 1961), 186–87. Perkins concludes that “Canning and all England misunderstood Jeffersonianism and overestimated the amount of condescension America would tolerate.” Ibid., 222.
30. See, for example, the Norfolk Gazette, issue of April 22, 1810, taking its cue from the New York Evening Post, in assessing Federalist turncoat John Quincy Adams as a diplomat: “his master Jefferson or Madison, or who ever is at the head of affairs.” The Norfolk Gazette published other personal gibes, defining Madison’s conduct in office as “passive” (issue of September 24, 1810), and insulting pro-administration editor Thomas Ritchie of the Richmond Enquirer, “whose name adds no more weight to paper than the ink used in writing” (February 11, 1811).
31. James H. Broussard, The Southern Federalists, 1800–1816 (Baton Rouge, La., 1978), 115–16; Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812 (Urbana, Ill., 1989), 8–9; Randall, Life of Thomas Jefferson, 3:125–30; Malone, 5:497–503. Randall, writing when memories of the War of 1812 were still fairly fresh, described the pressures generally felt by an agricultural and commercial people in “avoidance mode,” and a political caste hamstrung by partisan considerations and ill equipped to argue naval policy based purely on tactical expertise; Malone inexplicably states that Jefferson was “less indifferent to the navy” than Madison.
32. Carolina Gazette, November 7, 1809; New Hampshire Gazette, November 14, 1809.
33. Cullen also reverted to unoriginal attacks on Jefferson’s wartime governorship (“more the cautious politician than the soldier”) and denied him credit for drawing up the Declaration of Independence. As to the election of 1800, Cullen more trenchantly wrote that after Burr made Jefferson’s election possible, “his scared imagination saw in the friend that helped and raised him, the rival also that might depress him.” Memoirs of the Hon. Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1809), 1:11, 25, 100–101, 2:320–21, 434.
34. The Death of Washington, with some remarks on Jeffersonian & Madisonian Policy (New York, ca. 1809). The coarsest criticism of Jefferson centered on his alleged cowardice during the Revolution.
35. JM to the Chairman of the Republican Meeting of Washington County, Maryland, January 31, 1810; to Pinkney, May 23, 1810, PJM-PS, 2:215, 348.
36. Macon’s Bill no. 1, drafted by Albert Gallatin and introduced in the House by Macon, was a version of the bill that eventually passed. It stirred up argument among Republicans, in addition to opposition from Federalists. It passed the House but died after the influential Senator Samuel Smith chopped it up and House and Senate could not agree on a compromise. Perkins, Prologue to War, 239–47; Robert A. Rutland, Madison’s Alternatives: The Jeffersonian Republicans and the Coming of the War of 1812 (Philadelphia, 1975), 94–101; Reginald Horsman, The War of 1812 (New York, 1969), 14–15; Hickey, War of 1812, 22–24.
37. Rodney to JM, January 16, 1810, PJM-PS, 2:181–86. “I have heard our seafaring men assert that the ‘Fair American’ & the ‘Holker’ [two privateers] did more injury to the British commerce in our last war [the Revolutionary] than all our thirteen frigates, the principal part of which, were soon captured.” Ibid., 183.
38. George Shackelford, Jefferson’s Adoptive Son: The Life of William Short, 1759–1848 (Lexington, Ky., 1993) 8, 129, 135, 197n; Henry Bartholomew Cox, The Parisian American: Fulwar Skipwith of Virginia (Washington, D.C., 1964), chaps. 1, 2, and 5; Harry Ammon, James Monroe: The Quest for National Identity (Charlottesville, Va., 1971), 116, 125, 208, 210, 213; JM to TJ, August 13, 1804; TJ to JM, August 18, 1804, RL, 2:1334, 1338; Brant, 4:219–20, 363–66; Fulwar Skipwith to TJ, March 8, 1808, TJP-LC; Roger G. Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, and the Louisiana Purchase (New York, 2003), 178–92, 295–96n.
39. “Notes on Jefferson’s ‘Statement’ on the Batture at New Orleans”; JM to Albert Gallatin, August 14 and August 22, 1810; to John Graham, August 24, 1810; John Graham to JM, August 20, 1810; John R. Bedford to JM (with August 5 enclosure from Bayou Sara, West Florida), August 26, 1810, PJM-PS, 2:475–77, 484, 498, 501–5, 508–10; William B. Hatcher, Edward Livingston: Jeffersonian Republican and Jacksonian Democrat (Baton Rouge, La., 1941), 92–98; Stanley Clisby Arthur, The Story of the West Florida Rebellion (St. Francisville, La., 1935), 35, 58, 131, 133.
40. Arthur, Story of West Florida Rebellion, 95–96, 103–10, 128–29; James A. Padgett, “The West Florida Revolution of 1810, As Told in the Letters of John Rhea, Fulwar Skipwith, Reuben Kemper, and Others,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 21 (January 1938): 5–7, 53.
41. Presidential Proclamation, October 27, 1810, PJM-PS, 2:595–96. The River Perdido translates from Spanish as “the lost river.”
42. James G. Cusick, The Other War of 1812: The Patriot War and the American Invasion of Spanish East Florida (Athens, Ga., 2003), 28–37, 56–61, 67–75, 138.
43. PJM-PS, 3:xxvii–xxviii; George W. Erving to JM, January 29, 1811, PJM-PS, 3:139–41; Frank Lawrence Owsley, Jr., and Gene A. Smith, Filibusters and Expansionists: Jeffersonian Manifest Destiny, 1800–1821 (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1997), 66–68; Cusick, Other War of 1812, 153.
44. TJ to Eppes, January 5, 1811, PTJ-RS, 3:281–82. Fulwar Skipwith’s motives, largely financial, were tied to the land of opportunity he knew best. Judging by his extensive activities in France, he would not have been in West Florida had he not figured that he had some land coming to him. During his years abroad, he had failed to get rich, but he never gave up and retained the aims of the Virginians of his class. For insight into the phenomenon of elite-bred Virginians scrambling to be successful, see Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson’s Virginia (New York, 1983), chap. 4.
When Mathews took possession of Amelia Island off the coast of Florida in 1812, claiming Madison’s approval, Monroe, as secretary of state, found it necessary to revoke his powers and the administration disavowed his actions. There was still some hope, as Georgian William Crawford told Monroe, that a “newly constituted revolutionary government” could be recognized, while keeping the U.S. government’s
agency hidden, but that prospect quickly faded. Madison wrote Jefferson on the matter: “In E. Florida, Mathews has been playing a tragi-comedy; in the face of common sense, as well as of his instructions.” He observed nervously of Mathews: “His extravagences [sic] place us in the most distressing dilemma.” Clearly, Madison ended up considering Mathews’s actions foolhardy and a potential embarrassment to the administration. Crawford to Monroe, April 5, 1812; Mathews to JM, April 16, 1812, PJM-PS, 4:291–96, 326–29; JM to TJ, April 24, 1812, RL, 3:1694.
45. Madison must have known how questionable his action was. Burr was put on trial not only for treason but for violating a 1794 law against filibustering. Burr and his lawyers had contended that the idea of a filibuster was legally acceptable during a time of war, and that Burr’s plan was contingent on the occurrence of a border clash between U.S. troops (led by General Wilkinson) and Spanish forces; as no conflict occurred, Burr abandoned his project. Technically, Fulwar Skipwith and the band of rebels in Baton Rouge should have been prosecuted for violating the same law against filibusters, but they went free.
46. Eppes to JM, December 15, 1809, January 18, 1810, February 18, 1810, and January 31, 1811, PJM-PS, 2:135, 189, 224, 3:143; TJ to Eppes, December 7, 1810; Eppes to TJ, December 14, 1810, PTJ-RS, 3:244, 256.
47. TJ to Barlow, May 3, 1802, TJP-LC; TJ to Barlow, April 16, 1811, PTJ-RS, 3:564; Andrew Burstein, Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello (New York, 2005), 214–16; Francis D. Cogliano, Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy (Charlottesville, Va., 2006).
48. JM to TJ, July 17, 1810; TJ to JM, July 26, 1810, RL, 3:1640–42; John Wayles Eppes to JM, November 1, 1810, PJM-PS, 2:610. The theme of Madison’s memory as well as his reluctance to expose himself in partisan readings of the past is addressed at length in the pages of Drew R. McCoy, The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (New York, 1989).