Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  Perhaps the infusion of new members helps explain Congress’s decision to go to war.3 In 1810 sixty-three new congressmen were elected to a 142-seat House of Representatives. The Twelfth Congress contained a number of young “War Hawks,” such as Henry Clay of Kentucky, Felix Grundy of Tennessee, and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who were eager to take strong measures against Great Britain. Since many of the War Hawks were from the West, however, it is not at all clear why they should have been so concerned for the nation’s maritime rights. Representatives from Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee cast more votes for the war (nine) than did those from the New England states of New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. In fact, New England congressmen voted twenty to twelve against the war, and most of the twelve votes in New England for the war came from congressmen representing the frontier areas of New Hampshire and Vermont.

  This paradox of Western support for a war that was ostensibly about maritime rights led historians at the beginning of the twentieth century to dig beneath the professed war aims in search of some hidden Western interests. They argued that the West supported the war because it was land hungry and had its eyes on the annexation of Canada. Others refined this interpretation by contending that the West was less interested in land than it was in removing the British influence over the Indians in the Northwest. Still others argued that low grain prices aroused Western resentment against British blockades of America’s Continental markets.

  But since the West had only ten votes in the House of Representatives, it could not by itself have led the country into war. It was the South Atlantic states from Maryland to Georgia that supplied nearly half (thirty-nine) of the seventy-nine votes for war. This Southern support for war led other historians to posit an unspoken alliance between Westerners who wanted Canada and Southerners who had their eyes on Florida. Yet Pennsylvania, which presumably had little interest in the West or Florida, provided sixteen votes for the war, the most of any state.4

  Although the vote for the war may remain something of a puzzle to some historians, one thing is clear: the war was very much a party issue, with most Republicans being for the war and all the Federalists against it. In fact, the war became the logical consequence of the Republicans’ diplomacy since 1805. As early as February 1809 President-elect Madison said as much to the American minister in London, William Pinkney. If America repealed the embargo and the British orders-in-council remained in effect, said Madison, “war is inevitable.”5 He believed war was inevitable because impressment and neutral rights had come to symbolize what he and other Republicans wanted most from Britain—unequivocal recognition of the nation’s sovereignty and independence.

  THE FIFTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD MADISON was presumably as well prepared for the presidency as anyone in the country. He had been involved in public service in one way or another during his entire adult life. He had been a principal force behind the calling of the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 and had composed the Virginia Plan that formed the working model for the Constitution. He was the co-author of the Federalist, surely the most important work of political theory in American history. He had been the leader and the most important member of the House of Representatives at the beginning of the new government in 1789. More than any other single person he was responsible for the congressional passage of the Bill of Rights. He was the co-founder of the Republican party and had been secretary of state for the entire eight years of Jefferson’s presidency.

  Despite all of Madison’s experience, however, he seemed awed by the prospect of becoming president. When in his timidly delivered inaugural address he referred in a conventional manner to his “inadequacies” for the high office, he appeared to mean it. He was by far the most uncharismatic president the country had yet experienced. His three predecessors had fit the king-like office much better than he. They either had been virtual royalty, as in the case of Washington, or had tried to be royalty, as in the case of Adams, or had achieved dominance by being the anti-royal people’s president, as in the case of Jefferson. Madison was none of these; he was not made for command. He lacked both the presence and the stature of his illustrious predecessors; indeed, as one observer noted, during social gatherings in the White House, “being so low in stature, he was in danger of being confounded with the plebeian crowds and was pushed and jostled about like a common citizen.”6

  Madison could be congenial in small groups of men, where he liked to tell smutty stories, but in large mixed groups he was shy, stiff, and awkward—”the most unsociable creature in existence,” concluded one female observer. Consequently, his gregarious wife, Dolley—who was described by an ungallant English diplomat as having “an uncultivated mind and fond of gossiping”—tended to dominate their social gatherings.7 When Madison held official dinners as president, Dolley, a large woman who dwarfed her husband, seated herself at the head of the table with Madison’s private secretary seated at the foot. Madison himself sat in the middle and was thus relieved of having to look after his guests and control the flow of conversation. But so alarmed did Dolley become over what she felt was the lack of regard paid Madison that she arranged for “Hail to the Chief” to be played at state receptions to rouse people to proper respect when her husband entered the room. As a brilliant Washington hostess, Dolley Madison, the “presidentess,” as she was called, created a public persona that rivaled that of her husband, who was seventeen years her senior. Her social skills and energy encouraged dozens of congressmen to bring their wives with them to the capital—something they had not done during Jefferson’s presidency.

  With his retiring personality and his constrained conception of the presidency, Madison was never able to control the Republican party to the extent Jefferson had. He fully accepted the Republican principle of executive deference to the people’s representatives in Congress but made none of the necessary efforts to manage the legislature as Jefferson had. He was unable, as one Pennsylvania Republican noted, to “hook men to his heart as his predecessor could.”8

  Because by 1808 the congressional Republican caucus clearly controlled the nomination of the party’s candidate for the presidency, it concluded that the president was in some measure its creature. As Congress gathered up the power draining away from the executive, it sought to organize itself into committees in order to initiate and supervise policy. But the rise of the committee system only further fragmented the government into contending interest groups. Madison thus faced a raucous Congress and a bitterly divided Republican party, various factions of which were opposed to his presidency. In trying to promote unity among the Republicans, the president allowed his critics to deny him the selection of his trusted ally, Albert Gallatin, as secretary of state. Instead, he felt compelled to appoint to that important post Robert Smith, the undistinguished secretary of the navy in Jefferson’s cabinet and a person totally unfit to be secretary of state.

  Madison ended up with a cabinet considerably weaker than that of any of his presidential predecessors. Madison’s cabinet, as John Randolph observed with his usual poisonous perceptivity, “presents a novel spectacle in the world, divided against itself, and the most deadly animosity raging between its principal members—what can come of it but confusion, mischief, and ruin?”9

  THE NEW PRESIDENT was immediately confronted with the ending of the embargo, which he wanted to continue. In its place Congress put the Non-Intercourse Act of 1809, which opened trade with the rest of the world but prohibited it with both Britain and France; it also authorized the president to reopen trade with whichever belligerent repealed its trade restrictions and recognized American neutral rights. With trade to the rest of the world reopened, the opportunities for evading the prohibition on trading with the belligerents were great, and many American ships took off ostensibly for neutral ports only to end up in Great Britain. Since British control of the seas prevented many American merchants from sailing to France, the Non-Intercourse Act actually favored Britain over France, a circumstance that left Madison at a total
loss: how could he coerce Britain with an act that actually benefited the former mother country? Britain reacted to the Non-Intercourse Act by issuing new orders-in-council in April 1809 that went some way toward meeting the Americans’ complaints, though the British government was always reluctant to admit that it was making any concessions whatsoever.

  Unfortunately, the British minister in Washington, David M. Erskine, had already reached an agreement with the Madison government that was not in line with the thinking of the British ministry in London. Erskine ignored several key instructions from his government, which disavowed his agreement when it learned of it, including one instruction stating that, while opening up American trade with Britain, the United States should allow the British navy to enforce the continued American prohibition on trade with France—a humiliating neocolonial stipulation that Madison rejected outright. The two nations could not be farther apart. While America wanted free neutral trade with both belligerents, Britain wanted a neutral United States that would help it defeat Napoleon.10

  Misled by Erskine into believing that Britain would repeal its trade restrictions, President Madison in April 1809 proclaimed that trade with the former mother country was now open. When in the summer of 1809 the United States learned that the British government had recalled Erskine and repudiated his agreement, the country had no choice but to reimpose non-intercourse with Britain. When Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin complained that the Non-Intercourse Act was hurting the duties from trade and creating a federal deficit, Congress was forced to turn its policy inside out and once again reopen trade with the belligerents.

  Republican policy was always caught in a dilemma. If the government restricted trade with Britain, which Madison and other Republicans wished to do, it lost considerable revenue from the duties on imports. With such a loss of revenue the government would be compelled to raise taxes or borrow money, which no good Republican wanted to do. As a way out of this dilemma, Madison at first sought an old-fashioned navigation act, Macon’s Bill No. 1 (named for Congressman Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina), which allowed British and French goods to enter American ports as long as they were carried in American ships. When an unlikely combination of Republican dissidents who wanted war and Federalists who feared it defeated this bill, a still much divided Congress passed Macon’s Bill No. 2 in May 1810. This bill once again opened trade with both Britain and France, with the provision that if either belligerent revoked its restrictions on neutral commerce, the United States in ninety days would restore non-intercourse against the other. Madison, who yearned to restore the embargo, was disgusted with the bill; though named for him, even Macon voted against it. As trade with Britain flourished, many Republicans, as one congressman complained, thought the new policy was simply offering “up the honor and character of this nation to the highest bidder.”11

  Madison’s only hope for this awkward policy was that its bias in favor of Britain might inspire Napoleon to remove his restrictions on American trade, which by 1810 were actually resulting in more French than British seizures of American ships and goods. Thus the president was primed to receive favorably an ambiguous note from France’s foreign minister, the ducde Cadore, issued in the summer of 1810 declaring that Napoleon would revoke his decrees after November 1, 1810, but only on the condition that the United States first reestablishes its prohibitions on British commerce. Since this conditional declaration did not actually fulfill the provisions of Macon’s Bill No. 2, the Cadore letter, as it was called, generated much controversy, with the Federalists denouncing it as trickery and the most rabid Republicans hailing it as France’s penance for its violations of American rights.

  Ambiguous as the Cadore letter was, it was enough for Madison, who was eager to escape from his awkward situation. On November 2, 1810, he publicly proclaimed that France had met the requirements of the Macon Bill and that if Britain failed to revoke its orders-in-council over the next ninety days, non-intercourse would be reimposed on Britain on February 2, 1811. Chief Justice Marshall could scarcely believe what was happening and declared that the president’s claim that France had revoked its decrees was “one of the most astonishing instances of national credulity . . . that is to be found in political history.”12 Although Madison well understood the equivocal nature of the Cadore letter, he felt he had to grasp at the opportunity to pressure the British into some sort of relaxation of their commercial restrictions. At any rate, he was only too eager to resume the policy of commercial sanctions against Great Britain that he had dreamed of implementing since the Revolution.

  Madison, however, confronted a Republican party in the Congress that was breaking apart, and the resultant factions always threatened to coalesce in opposition to the administration. There were the Old Republicans of ‘98, or Quids, led by John Randolph; the supporters of New Yorkers George Clinton and his nephew DeWitt Clinton, who was challenging Madison for the presidency; and the Invisibles in the Senate, led by William Branch Giles of Virginia and Samuel Smith of Maryland, the brother of the secretary of state, Robert Smith. Robert Smith’s mounting indiscretions at last gave Madison the opportunity to dismiss him from the cabinet and install his old opponent and fellow Virginian James Monroe as secretary of state. But the Smith family of Maryland in opposition only added to the disarray of the Republicans. Jefferson became so fearful of the disorder that he pleaded for unity. “If we schismatize on men and measures, if we do not act in phalanx,” he told the Republican journalist William Duane in the spring of 1811, “I will not say our party, the term is false and degrading, but our nation will be undone. For the Republicans are the nation.”13

  Whether the Americans, never mind the Republicans, were really a nation was the issue. Was the United States an independent nation like other nations with an explicit and peculiar tribal character? Could Americans establish their separate identity only by fighting and killing Britons to whom they were cultural kin and whom they so much resembled?

  In July 1811 Madison called Congress to meet in an early session in November in order to prepare the country for war, which seemed to be the only alternative if commercial sanctions failed. Despite the Cadore letter, Napoleon continued to enforce his various decrees making all neutral ships that brought goods from Britain to the Continent liable to confiscation. But the French emperor seized only some American ships but not all, thereby hoping to create sufficient confusion to prevent the British from repealing their own commercial restrictions, which they had always justified as acts of retaliation that would last only as long as Napoleon’s Continental System.

  In February 1811 Congress had passed a new Non-Importation Act that turned away British ships and goods coming to America but allowed American ships and produce to go to England. At the same time, the act required American courts to accept the president’s proclamation as conclusive evidence that France had indeed repealed its decrees—a strange stipulation that suggested the widespread doubts that Napoleon was behaving honestly. In fact, declared John Quincy Adams from his post in St. Petersburg, Napoleon’s conduct was so blatantly deceptive as “to give sight to the blind.”14 When the British government declared that it was unconvinced that France had abandoned its Continental System and that it would therefore not relax in any way its own commercial restrictions, Madison’s policy collapsed in failure. Other than throwing up the country’s hands in surrender, the United States had no choice now but war.

  Although some suggested that the United States might have to fight both belligerents simultaneously in what was called a “triangular war,” it was virtually inconceivable that the Republicans would go to war against France. Although Madison was well aware of “the atrocity of the French Government” in enforcing its “predatory Edicts,” he, like Jefferson, always believed “that the original sin against Neutrals lies with G.B.”15

  It seemed to the Republicans as if the Revolution of 1776 was still going on. The United States was trying to establish itself as an independent sovereign republic in the world, and Bri
tain, much more than France, seemed to be denying that sovereign independence. As one congressman put it in 1810, “The people will not submit to be colonized and give up their independence.”16 Even British concessions were now viewed suspiciously. When the British government in May 1812 offered to give the Americans an equal share of the ten thousand licenses it issued to merchants trading with the continent, Madison rejected the offer outright as degrading to American sovereignty. Most alarming to the Republicans was the quisling-like behavior of the New England Federalists, who endlessly harassed the Republicans for their timidity and inconsistencies all the while supporting continued ties and trade with Great Britain. Just as the Federalists in 1797–1798 had accused the Republicans of being more loyal to France than to America, so now the Republicans accused the Federalists of aiding and abetting the former mother country. Just as the Federalists in 1797–1798 had thought that the Republicans were trying to bring the Jacobinical French Revolution to America, so now the Republicans thought the Federalists were seeking to reverse the results of not just the Jeffersonian revolution of 1800 but the original Revolution of 1776. In the eyes of many Republicans this threat of the Federalists’ undoing the Revolution and breaking up the Union seemed real, perhaps more real than the threat of invasion by the French had been to the Federalists in 1797–1798.