Founding Rivals

by Chris DeRose

  A week after his first letter to Madison, Monroe received a reply expressing regret that the two men had not been able to travel together from New York and congratulating him on surviving his close brush with death and returning unharmed to Trenton. Madison wrote that his own travels “extended neither into the dangers nor gratifications of yours.” Monroe received many such letters of congratulation, with one missive declaring that “hereafter you may certainly consider yourself as one of heaven’s favorites, for to what else can we impute you being in the land of the living (when all your comrades were lost) but the interposition of providence.”4

  The continuing correspondence between Madison and Monroe was characterized by reports of the latest developments in Congress and in Virginia government. These letters stand as some of the most important accounts of what transpired in the two governmental bodies at the time. In his first letter to Monroe, Madison reported that a statewide tax to fund the teaching of Christianity, known as the general assessment, had been proposed in the House of Delegates.5 The general assessment and the bill to establish the Episcopal Church as the official church of Virginia would ignite a pivotal debate on the proper relationship between religion and government in the next session of the House.

  For all its failings, the federal government under the Articles of Confederation did establish a popular and generally effective postal service. Monroe’s second letter from Trenton reached Madison in Richmond in only ten days.6 Ironically, Madison and Monroe were using the one effective service of the federal government to share their exasperation at that government’s many failures.

  While waiting for Congress to act on his extradition proposal, Madison created a mirror resolution for Virginia. Madison applauded Monroe’s efforts to spearhead the issue on the federal level: “We are every day threatened by the eagerness of our disorderly citizens for Spanish plunder and Spanish blood.”7 Since many of the settlers antagonizing the Spanish were within Virginia’s jurisdiction, Madison hoped his bill in the House of Delegates could stave off a conflict. As was characteristic of Madison’s time in the Virginia legislature, he was using his position to help strengthen the national interest. The term limits provision of the Articles prevented him from returning to Congress for at least two more years. What would those years bring? The machinery of government under the Articles of Confederation seemed ever more obviously inadequate for the needs of America.

  The states, enjoying the blessings of the successful Revolution, were refusing to contribute toward repayment of the soaring national debt and in some cases openly mocking the Congress. Congress, needing unanimous consent of the states to regulate trade, received affirmative votes from only four of the thirteen.8 States with active trade and manufacturing contingents, such as Massachusetts, were the hardest hit by the disarray in America’s commercial affairs. The American negotiators in Europe were having trouble concluding commercial treaties since they lacked authority to bind the states. The British continued oppressive trading measures against America, with heavy taxes and in some cases outright prohibitions on imports from America. Meanwhile, Britain flooded America with inexpensive goods that no American state could tax in return without being undercut by another state.

  Connecticut had resorted to the creative measure of voting a 5 percent impost on all goods imported from abroad—or from Rhode Island. The impost would commence when the remaining eleven states adopted the impost recommended by Congress. Perhaps, it was hoped, this measure could prevent Rhode Island from holding out while the other states did not.

  In Massachusetts, where the first shots of the revolution had been fired, a second, constitutional revolution was beginning. In 1785, the Massachusetts Assembly became the first state legislature to call for a convention of the states to revise the Articles of Confederation, which they deemed inadequate.9 This initial state proposal to amend the Articles went nowhere. It was no more significant to the events that followed than the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord were to the Revolutionary War. But a seed had been planted.

  A convention of this kind was already being discussed with growing seriousness in Congress. Monroe’s friend Mercer wrote to Madison, “For my part I have no hopes but in a convocation of the states.” Mercer expected a motion for such a convention to be introduced in the next Congress.10

  On Christmas Day, 1784, Madison wrote his friend Richard Henry Lee, who had returned that year to Congress. He confessed, “I have not yet found leisure to scan the project of a Continental Convention with so close an eye as to have made up any observations worthy of being mentioned to you. In general I hold it for a maxim that the union of the states is essential to their safety against foreign danger, and internal contention; and that the perpetuity and efficacy of the present system cannot be confided on. The question therefore is, in what mode and at what moment the experiment for supplying the defects ought to be made.”

  The cautious Madison was slow to warm to the concept of the Constitutional Convention, in connection with which he would ultimately perform the greatest, most enduring acts of his public life. In April of 1783, when Hamilton had made a motion in Congress for a new convention, Madison had done nothing to assist him.11 At that time Madison still believed that the most serious failings of the Articles of Confederation would be solved if the states would simply pass the impost and expand the trade power. By the dawn of 1785, however, it was obvious that the federal government would have neither one. Mercer, Lee, and others had come to believe that a convention was the last and best hope for America’s survival, and Madison was coming to the same conclusion.

  Madison’s letters to Monroe included matters ceremonial as well as substantive. He wrote one letter to his friend explaining that the legislature of Virginia had recently fêted Lafayette and Washington and voted to create a statue of Washington and a bust of Lafayette. These two works of art, the former of which was sculpted by Jean-Antoine Houdon and boasts an inscription by Madison himself, can still be seen on display in the Virginia capitol in Richmond, built in 1788. Marble busts of Madison and Monroe—among other Virginians who reached the summit of American political life—would one day join them.

  But in the days before they were marble, both Jameses of Virginia were terribly concerned with the uncertain course of their country. On the day Monroe received the letter mentioning the Washington statue, Madison was trying to overhaul the state court system and stop Virginia from seizing British property. Meanwhile Monroe was trying to prevent a war with Spain while maintaining the Mississippi River for America. Two men taxed with the burdens of a nation, they no doubt snuffed out their candles at the end of the day, crawled beneath their covers, and worried about what tomorrow would bring.

  At the end of December, Monroe wrote to Madison that Spain had presented Congress with claims of its exclusive rights to navigate the Mississippi. He sought his friend’s advice: should Adams, Jefferson, or someone new be the ambassador to Spain to resolve this issue?

  The next session of Congress convened in New York in January of 1785, and Monroe rented “three very excellent rooms in a convenient house, in a fashionable part of town,” with his friend Samuel Hardy, a Virginia congressman the same age as himself. The increasingly experienced and sure-footed Monroe was emerging as a leader, if not the leader, of the nationalist cause in the Congress. Before Lafayette returned to France at the end of his grand tour through America, he penned a letter to Madison telling him so. “Our friend Monroe,” he wrote, “is very much beloved and respected in Congress.”12

  In the issues he championed, Monroe was in many ways Madison’s heir, picking up the unfinished works of the elder statesman. The two were also partners, working in tandem and in total agreement about what needed to be done to advance the national cause. When Madison in the House of Delegates passed an instruction to the Virginia delegation in Congress to create an ambassadorship to Spain to secure the Mississippi, it was Monroe who chaired the committee. Monroe also chaired a committee which drafted “instruc
tions to the U.S. Minister to Spain,” restricting the ambassador from treating away the river, and detailing the states’ legal and historical rights to the same.13 Monroe was encouraged in his efforts by his partner and predecessor in the role of the Mississippi’s champion. “The use of the Mississippi is given by nature to our western country,” Madison wrote, “and no power on Earth can take it from them.”14

  John Jay, decidedly unsympathetic to the cause of the Mississippi, was appointed Secretary of Foreign Affairs, a post which had been vacant during the previous year. His acceptance was contingent on the capital’s planned relocation to New York, his home city.15

  Monroe participated in a committee report on the settlement of the West. Commissioners would be appointed to negotiate with Indians and to make temporary treaties for the purpose of trade. French and Canadians who, having previously held Virginia citizenship, were now living in the West would take an oath to the Union. An announcement that the Western land would be surveyed was to be published in newspapers as quickly as possible, and offices would be opened for selling it. Anyone who simply seized land would be removed.16

  Monroe successfully passed a resolution raising seven hundred men to protect settlers on the frontier.17 Fascinated by the West, and apprised of its dangers during his travels, he also shared the belief of Madison and other nationalists that it held out unlimited promise for America. Land sales in this uncharted territory were expected to help pay off the national debt, and the successful settlement of this region would make America—already the size of France and Spain combined—one of the largest and most prosperous nations in the world. Monroe’s success in sending troops to the area was hard won, given Americans’ deep suspicions about standing armies during peacetime. It was also a vital step in the development of a region that Monroe would promote for the rest of his life.

  Meanwhile, Jay bristled under the yoke of his instructions. He complained to Congress in February, just two months after accepting the Foreign Affairs portfolio, that he did not have the authority he needed and expected. Jay made veiled threats to quit.18

  In March of 1785, Lafayette wrote Madison of his efforts with the French government to resolve the Mississippi issue: “I am every day pestering government with my prophetics respecting the Mississippi.” He promised to discuss the issue with the new French ambassador to Spain.19

  The same month, Monroe served on a committee that proposed an amendment to Article IX of the Articles of Confederation. The committee published a report suggesting that Congress should have exclusive power over defense measures, treaties and alliances, sending and receiving ambassadors, regulating trade between states and foreign countries, and laying duties on imports and exports.20 Congress did not act on the report.

  Monroe, along with the rest of the delegation, saw the cessation of Virginia’s claims to the West through to completion. This measure was indispensable to consolidating the Union. In the case of the states’ Western claims, their eyes were bigger than their stomachs. Virginia, like the other states with plans for the West, had found the giant territories unwieldy, expensive, and impossible to manage. The western part of Virginia, then known as the Kentucky district, had long since been preparing to separate and become its own state with Virginia’s blessing. The legislature approved the final plan for Virginia to cede its claims after reimbursement for its protection of that area during the Revolution and thereafter. Monroe and the Virginia delegation in Congress steered this arrangement successfully to passage. A committee of three, consisting of one member from Congress, one chosen by Virginia, and a third chosen by agreement of the other two, would determine the amount of the reimbursement.21

  Monroe also worked on the establishment of a national capital. In a letter to Governor Patrick Henry, the Virginia delegates to Congress indicated their support for “a federal town. If we reason from experience, we are inclined to think many disadvantages must arise, from the residence of Congress in a great commercial city, a city more especially under the jurisdiction of a particular state.”22

  The Virginia legislature entered into a compact with Maryland to clear and expand the Potomac and to settle jurisdiction and navigation on the river. Washington was appointed as Virginia’s representative to settle these issues.23

  Madison wrote to Monroe in April that Massachusetts was pushing Rhode Island to accept the impost. He was hungry for information from the national government, the place where his true interests lay. “What other measures are on foot or in contemplation for paying off the public debt?” Madison asked. He wondered if any of the states were paying their share. It was clear that Madison increasingly valued Monroe’s friendship and their political connection. “I wish much to throw our correspondence into a more regular course,” he said.24 Madison’s next dispatch included a more developed cipher, which Monroe had requested some time before.

  During the 1740s, the American colonies had been swept by an evangelical Christian revival known today as the First Great Awakening. When the movement reached the frontier in Hanover County, Virginia, it divided the family of Patrick Henry. Henry’s mother and his maternal grandfather, Isaac Winston, became “born again.”25 Winston hosted traveling preachers and church services at his home and financed the construction of religious “reading houses.” Patrick Henry’s father, John Henry, remained loyal to the Church of England, in which Patrick’s uncle served as the local rector. Needless to say, the divide caused tension among family members. John Henry even had his father-in-law hauled into court and fined for avoiding Anglican services.

  For Henry, who was born in 1736, the evangelical revival and its aftermath were probably an early childhood memory. Henry accompanied his mother to the powerful sermons of the traveling preachers and was expected to recite their lessons during the carriage rides home.26 It was likely during these times that Henry, the greatest orator of his age, would first witness the power that the spoken word could have on people. Yet Patrick Henry would also remember that his father and uncle had characterized the new religious movement as a threat to the established church and the good order of society.27 Ultimately, Patrick adopted the views of his father and uncle and considered the “dissenters” a threat to public morality and civil order.

  This conflict between the establishment and the growing religious minority in Virginia would split the commonwealth as it did the Henry family. It would also determine the result of the 1789 congressional election between Madison and Monroe—and result in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

  Baptists made up the largest group of dissenters in Virginia. When they had first appeared in the colony, they were “viewed by men in power as being beneath their notice.” But as the Baptists grew in number, “men in power strained every law in the Virginia Penal Code to obtain ways and means to put down these disturbers of the peace, as they were called.”28

  The first known imprisonment of Baptist ministers in Virginia occurred in 1768 in Spotsylvania County, in the future 5th Congressional District twenty years before the race between Madison and Monroe. Three ministers were arrested and charged with disturbing the peace. The prosecutors brought evidence that the accused had preached the gospel to strangers. The magistrate, uncomfortable with hearing such a politically charged case, offered what he thought was a reasonable compromise: the ministers were to agree to stop preaching for a year and a day, and all charges would be dropped.

  But the ministers refused to agree to stop preaching the gospel, and the persecution became worse. Baptists were arrested for worshipping in private residences, incarcerated, and often beaten and whipped. Imprisoned Baptists continued to worship and preach from their jail cells. Rather than become embittered or curse their captors or doubt their God for not protecting them, they sang hymns, prayed out loud for their persecutors, and thanked Jesus that they were merely in prison, and not in hell.29

  In the years that followed, dissenting preachers were consistently arrested and brought to trial throughout Virginia. According to one histo
ry, these arrests were so common that “time and space would fail to enumerate them all.”30 Legal oppression of the dissenters gave license for private persecution as well. Without fear of punishment, people would interrupt services, ride their horses through the river while baptisms were being performed, and assault church members.

  This was the Virginia in which Madison was raised. He could not help but feel sympathy for people who wanted the right to worship in peace and according to the dictates of their consciences. While at Princeton he had lived in a colony with significant religious toleration and attended school with people who were members of many different Christian denominations. When he returned to Virginia, he was increasingly appalled by the systematic attempts to control religion.

  In October of 1776 the Virginia legislature had defunded the Church of England—not to disestablish religion in the colonies, but to cut ties with the British. Before the Revolution, taxes had been collected to support the Church and clerical salaries had been paid by the colonial government. The break with England had brought about an effective, if unintended, disestablishment of religion in Virginia. But by 1784, efforts to use tax dollars to support teachers of the Christian religion were back. Henry and other supporters of religious establishment believed that morality in the commonwealth had declined since the Revolution; they saw state-funded religion as a tool for reversing the moral decline. Henry argued that the public would benefit from the revitalization of the church, and thus of public morality, and that therefore the public should also bear the financial burden of supporting the church.