James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (28 page)

Executing the bargain required staring down New Yorkers who were desperate to extract something—the temporary capital for five years, say, or failing that for two. The Senate didn’t admit visitors, but after that body passed the residence bill, as it was called, New Yorkers packed the House gallery for the debates that began on Tuesday, July 6. On the following Friday, they watched in anger and dismay as the House passed the residence bill by the narrow margin of 32 to 29. To finish the bargain, Hamilton’s bill for funding the debt, complete with assumption, passed the Senate on July 16. In the House, as William Loughton Smith recorded it, four congressmen had been persuaded to change their votes: “Lee and White of Virginia and Gale and Carroll of Maryland.”
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All four voted for the funding bill including
assumption on July 26, and it passed 34 to 28. Madison, as he had told Hamilton he would do, voted against assumption. Also true to his word, he did so silently.

Hamilton no doubt concluded that he got the best of the bargain. By giving up something on which he placed a lesser value (the capital), he got something supremely important to him (assumption). But Madison probably had a different view. Threats of secession and Washington’s illness might well have convinced him by the time of the dinner at Jefferson’s that assumption, although he did not like it, would keep the Union knit together. By giving up active opposition and thus doing right by the nation, he did very well for Virginia, not least by ensuring his home state proximity to the new capital. He also managed, by making his no vote a part of the bargain, to shield himself from the anger of Virginians who, no matter what the concessions, despised assumption.

Madison and Jefferson set out for Virginia in early September, accompanied by an ingratiating young Princeton graduate, Thomas Lee Shippen, who provided a rare picture of the two men at leisure. When they had to wait all day for a vessel to take them across the Chesapeake Bay, Shippen reported, “We talked and dined and strolled and rowed ourselves in boats and feasted upon delicious crabs.” In Annapolis they went to “the top of the State House” to enjoy what Shippen called “the finest prospect in the world, if interest, variety, wood, and water in all their happiest forms can make one so.” A friend of Shippens who accompanied them proved skilled at “opening the roofs of the houses and telling us the history of each family who lived in them.”

A few days later, after staying overnight in Georgetown, Madison, Jefferson, and Shippen set off on a daylong excursion to view the “fine prospects” of the area where the new capital would soon rise. In the early evening, they took a boat six miles upriver to the Little Falls of the Potomac, where they enjoyed what Shippen called a “romantic view.”
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Surveying the river and its unspoiled tree-lined shores, Madison must have enjoyed a moment of deep fulfillment. The new capital would grow far from cities in this bucolic place.

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A BITTER NOVEMBER
cold had settled in by the time Madison, in the company of Jefferson, arrived in Philadelphia, the new, albeit temporary seat of government. Madison moved into Mrs. House’s, as did Jefferson for a short time, while remodeling and expansion were being completed on a house he had rented several blocks west on Market Street. Once in his new quarters, Jefferson invited Madison “to come and take a bed and plate with me,” declaring that “it will be a relief from a solitude of which I have too much; and it may lessen your repugnance to be assured it will not increase my expenses an atom.” Madison, probably enjoying the familiar boardinghouse surroundings, politely declined.
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Congress met in Congress Hall, a Georgian structure of red brick next to the statehouse, and as the third session of the First Congress got under way, there was a period of unusual amity. Madison supported Secretary Hamilton’s proposal for a new source of revenue: an excise tax on domestic spirits. It had long seemed to Madison a sensible source of supplemental funds, and he defended it now because it would not only provide necessary revenue but also “tend to increase sobriety and thereby prevent disease and untimely deaths.”
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It would also, as he later found out, make farmers in the Pennsylvania backcountry furious.

But then came Hamilton’s report advocating a national bank, and Madison went into full revolt. He had long acknowledged the usefulness of banks. In the last days of the Constitutional Convention, he had tried to gain for Congress the power “to grant charters of incorporation,” which would have permitted the chartering of banks, but the effort had failed, and that was Madison’s point now. Hamilton’s proposal assumed authority that had not been designated. Madison did not believe, as bank proponents argued, that article 1, section 8, of the Constitution, which gave Congress the power to provide for the “general welfare of the United States,” justified establishing a bank. Such a stance would give Congress “unlimited power” and make pointless the list of specified powers set forth in that section. Nor did he think that “the power to pass all laws necessary and proper to execute the specified powers,” which
article 1, section 8, delegated to Congress, provided justification. “Whatever meaning this clause may have,” he said, “none can be admitted that would give an unlimited discretion to Congress.”
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During the course of debate, Congressman Elias Boudinot of New Jersey used
Federalist
44 (which he believed had been written by Hamilton) to support the assertion that the government had the constitutional power to establish a bank. This particular number of
The Federalist
had, in fact, been written by Madison, who had declared, “No axiom is more clearly established in law or in reason than that wherever the end is required, the means are authorized; wherever a general power to do a thing is given, every particular power necessary for doing it is included.”
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In Madison’s mind there was no contradiction between what he had written then and his stance now. He believed there was no power granted by the Constitution that a bank was necessary to carry out—unless one used a long and tortured chain of reasoning.

His emphasis had nonetheless changed from what the federal government could do to what it couldn’t. A supporter of a strong central government in the 1780s, Madison was now increasingly bent on limiting its power, in large part because of the value he placed on “the exact balance or equipoise contemplated by the Constitution,” a phrase he used during the bank debate. In the 1780s it was “the centrifugal tendency of the states” that jeopardized that balance and made creating a strong force at the center crucial. Without it, the states would fly out of their orbits and the United States join the long list of republics that had fallen apart and failed. Now, however, the expansive views of Hamilton and his supporters threatened to make the gravitational pull of the center so strong that the states would be pulled into its vortex and all counterpoise to central power annihilated. In later years, when charged with having deserted Hamilton, Madison would say, “Colonel Hamilton deserted me; in a word the divergence between us took place from his wishing . . . to administer the government . . . into what he thought it ought to be, while on my part I endeavored to make it conform to the Constitution as understood by the convention that produced and recommended it and particularly by the state conventions
that
adopted
it.”
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There was more than one way to destroy a republic, and Madison’s strategy changed as his perception of the danger changed.

The bill to establish a national bank passed the House 39 to 20, but Madison still hoped that it would not become law. During several conversations with the president, he found Washington “greatly perplexed” over the issue of the constitutionality of the bank. He was getting conflicting advice from his cabinet, with Hamilton urging him to sign the bill and Jefferson nearly as opposed to it as Madison. Madison believed that the president was inclined toward a veto, the first in American history, and his opinion was reinforced when Washington asked him to draft a document justifying such an action. But at the last moment, Washington signed the bill.
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Madison, who had once been the president’s closest adviser, found himself on the losing end of a debate over an issue that had vast implications. If the federal government could establish a national bank, he worried, were there any limits on federal power?

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MADISON’S RESPONSE
to Hamilton’s financial program and the bank bill, in particular, would lead to the establishment of the first opposition party in the United States, to the demise of the Federalists, and to the presidencies of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. Madison could not have had all these consequences mapped out, but when it came to building an opposing party, he seemed from the outset to have a sense for the necessary steps along the way.

The first was to bring balance to the debate over the country’s direction, which in Madison’s view was skewed because Congress was in Philadelphia. Merchant and moneyed interests prevailed there as they had in New York. “It is no reflection on Congress,” Madison wrote to Benjamin Rush, “to admit for one the united voice of the place where they may happen to deliberate.” Madison took up with Jefferson ways of expanding the number of opinions heard, and three days after Washington signed the bank bill, Jefferson wrote to Madison’s Princeton friend Philip Freneau offering him a position as a translator at the
Department of State. Moody and brilliant, Freneau had never quite found his place in life. Since his teaching days, he had been a poet and a privateer and had recently become a newspaper editor. Jefferson admitted in offering Freneau the translator’s job that the pay was modest, just $250 a year, but, he told him, the position “gives so little to do as not to interfere with any other calling the person may choose.”
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In other words, Freneau would have plenty of private time in which he could start a newspaper in Philadelphia, one that would counter the pro-Hamilton bias of both the city and John Fenno’s
Gazette of the United States
. Freneau at first declined, but Madison thought he could be persuaded and visited with him in New York as soon as Congress adjourned. He thought Freneau was coming around, but again his old friend demurred. As others had found, however, Madison did not give up easily, and he kept up the pressure on Freneau throughout the spring and into the summer.

The second step was a four-week excursion to the North with Jefferson, the aim of which, Madison said, was “health, recreation, and curiosity.” Political foes saw a political object, however, particularly after Madison and Jefferson visited with Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, the chief judicial officer of New York and a member of a powerful New York family, and with Aaron Burr, a sleek and ambitious new senator. Livingston, whom Madison had known since his days in the Continental Congress, had been frustrated in his quest for high office in the Washington administration and blamed his failure to receive an appointment on Hamilton. Burr had wrested his Senate seat from Hamilton’s wealthy father-in-law, Philip Schuyler. Thus Robert Troup, one of Hamilton’s friends, wrote to the Treasury secretary, “There was every appearance of a passionate courtship between the Chancellor, Burr, Jefferson and Madison when the two latter were in town.
Delenda est Carthago
[Carthage must be destroyed] I suppose is the maxim adopted with respect to you.” As Hamilton’s son later told the story, Madison and Jefferson subsequently traveled to Albany “under the pretext of a botanical excursion” to meet with another of Hamilton’s enemies, New York’s governor, George Clinton, “thence extended their journey
to Vermont; and having sown a few tares in Connecticut, returned to the seat of government.”
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Hamilton advocates overstated the case, but they likely had hold of an essential truth. The contextual evidence is strong that Madison in particular was working a political agenda. The trip occurred during a time when he was consumed with countering Hamilton, and the journey with Jefferson was not his only planned excursion. His schedule also included a trip to Boston with John Beckley, who with Madison’s help had become clerk of the House of Representatives. No “botanical” label was put on that planned journey, perhaps because Beckley’s relentlessly political approach to the world would have rendered it incredible.

Both Madison and Jefferson were interested in getting some idea of northern opposition to the plans Hamilton was so effectively putting in place. In Vermont, they met with the newly elected senator Moses Robinson, who in the years ahead would be an ally. On Long Island they visited with William Floyd, Kitty’s father, who was remarried now, with two small daughters. During his term in the First Congress, Floyd had usually been on the other side of issues from Madison, but the complicated politics of assumption had sometimes brought them together.
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Whether Jefferson, who prided himself on being above partisanship, had any notion of establishing a political party is doubtful, but Madison likely did. He had equated parties with factions, meaning that although they were to be looked upon with suspicion for the “instability, injustice, and confusion” they caused, they were a fact of human nature and could not be wished away. They could be opposed, however, and needed to be when they had the power and inclination to move the country in the wrong direction. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” he had written in
Federalist
51 to explain the Constitution. His subject then had been the branches of government, but now, as he and Jefferson sounded out opinion and looked for allies, he almost certainly perceived the usefulness of the concept in the larger society.
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The trip north was not all politics. Madison and Jefferson toured historic sites such as Saratoga and Bennington, where America had triumphed during the Revolution. They took a sail on Lake George (“the
most beautiful water I ever saw,” wrote Jefferson), and the fishing was good (“an abundance of speckled trout, salmon trout, bass, and other fish”). Near Fort George, Madison noted a flourishing farm owned by “a free Negro” who possessed “about 250 acres.” The man’s industry and good management would not have surprised Madison, who by this time was relying on Sawney, the slave who had accompanied him to Princeton, to oversee a 560-acre tract his father had deeded to him in 1784. Billey, the slave he had sold into indenture, was now a free man and would soon be acting as Madison’s agent in business transactions. But Madison found it noteworthy that the black farmer had “six white hirelings.”
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Madison was doubtful that a racially mixed society could work, in large part because, he believed, whites would never consider blacks their equals—but here was an example that turned that thesis upside down.