James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (29 page)

Both men hoped that the trip would improve their health, and at the end of it Jefferson reported that during the excursion he had been “entirely clear” of the headache with which he had “been persecuted through the whole winter and spring.” Madison, he said, was “in better health than I have seen him.” Soon, however, Madison was writing to Jefferson of both “a fever attended with pretty decided symptoms of bile” and “a nausea and irritation in the stomach which were the more disagreeable as they threatened a more serious attack.” Madison also mentioned “different shapes” of bile, indicating, perhaps, that he was suffering from more than one malady. A letter he received from Edmund Randolph after he had recovered contains a similar hint. Wrote Randolph, “I learn with sincere satisfaction that you have emerged from your late attack, but I wish that you would prevent a return in the fall by an abstinence from study.” On the one hand, Randolph is worried about a recurrence in the autumn months, high malarial season; on the other, he draws a line back to Princeton and too many hours spent studying. When Madison was an old man, his doctor would say that he had three diseases that might carry him off.
⁴²
Perhaps by 1791 he was already suffering from two, and they were interacting, with high malarial fevers triggering sudden attacks.

His health concerns were soon dwarfed by his outrage at the wild
speculative frenzy he witnessed in New York for subscriptions for shares in the Bank of the United States: “It seems admitted on all hands now that the plan of the institution gives a moral certainty of gain to the subscribers with scarce a physical possibility of loss. The subscriptions are consequently a mere scramble for so much public plunder which will be engrossed by those already loaded with the spoils of indi[vi]duals.” Hamilton, who took no part in the scramble, saw it merely as an unpleasant side effect of his financial plan, but to Madison it was galling, particularly since public officials were caught up in it: “Of all the shameful circumstances of this business, it is among the greatest to see the members of the legislature who were most active in pushing this job openly grasping its emoluments.”
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It would not have escaped Madison’s notice that also among the profiteers was the flashy William Duer, Hamilton’s close friend. After serving for a time as assistant secretary of the Treasury, Duer had resigned and set about making himself very rich.

The mania spread to Philadelphia, and Harry Lee reported it even south of there. Describing a journey from Philadelphia to Alexandria, Virginia, Lee wrote, “My whole route presented to me one continued scene of stock gambling; agriculture, commerce, and even the fair sex relinquished to make way for unremitted exertion in this favorite pursuit—thousands even at this late hour entering into a line of life which they abhor, in order to participate in legal spoil and preserve in some degree their relative station and rank with their neighbors.” Most confounding, Lee observed, the rapid appreciation of bank stock was reckoned “a positive proof of wisdom and integrity in government.”
⁴⁴
Not only was the new government further off course than Madison had ever imagined possible; there was popular support for its direction. Battling Hamilton in the councils of government was no longer enough, but Madison would soon have in place an instrument for conducting the fight in a larger arena. Freneau had finally agreed to come to Philadelphia, and before the next Congress convened, there would be a newspaper at the seat of government to provide an alternative view. No longer would Alexander Hamilton’s be the only voice that the public heard.

MADISON HAD BEEN CONSULTED
about the speech Washington was to give at the opening of the Second Congress, but as he listened to the president deliver the final version in the Senate chamber of Congress Hall, he could not have been happy. Washington, citing “the rapid subscriptions to the Bank of the United States” as a sign of the nation’s progress, sounded much like the misguided citizens Harry Lee had encountered on his trip south.
¹
What could be more wrongheaded than regarding a speculative frenzy as a positive sign?

As head of the committee charged with writing the House response to the president, Madison tried to damp down the idea that Hamilton’s financial plans had made the country better off. The representatives expressed “gratitude to Heaven” that the nation’s economic prospects had improved. They also credited “the Constitution and laws of the United States”—which was too much for Harry Lee, who had recently become governor of Virginia. He wrote to Madison, “Tell me how you could impute the prosperity of the United States in any degree, much more in the degree you did, to the laws of Congress. . . . We owe our prosperity, such as it is, for it is nothing extraordinary, to our own native
vigor as a people and to a continuation of peace, not to the wisdom or care of government.”
²

Madison replied rather sharply that it was an error to think that government had no role in improving the nation’s prospects. The Constitution and the laws enacted in accordance with it had provided the stability that America needed to flourish. Madison’s point was one that twenty-first-century scholars have begun to linger over: namely, that a country’s fundamental arrangements are critical to determining its long-term economic growth, even more critical than economic policies. Security in property rights, which Madison explained in
Federalist
10 as one of the purposes of the Constitution, is an essential underpinning of a sound economy. So too is security in contracts, which the Constitution addresses by forbidding states to impair them. So too are the uniform commercial regulations and the checks and balances on power that the Constitution provides.
³
Alexander Hamilton’s
Report on Public Credit
has been widely praised for moving the nation into the modern financial world, but the opportunity and prosperity that Americans have enjoyed owe at least as much to Madison’s work on the Constitution.

•   •   •

MADISON’S FINAL BREAK
with Hamilton came when he perceived that the secretary’s plans threatened to turn the limited government proposed by the Constitution into one with unlimited power. “This change,” he wrote to Harry Lee, “will take place in defiance of the . . . sense in which the instrument is known to have been proposed, advocated and ratified.” The question, as he saw it, was “whether the people of this country will submit to a constitution not established by themselves but imposed on them by their rulers. . . . It must unquestionably be the wish of all who are friendly to their rights that their situation should be understood by them and that they should have as fair an opportunity as possible of judging for themselves.”
⁴
For the next year and a half Madison worked not only to enlighten the public but to put forward the idea that an awareness of what was wrong wasn’t enough. Oppositional thought had to be organized in order to put ideas into
practice, which is what a party did. This was breakthrough thinking in a society where revolution was still a living memory. Americans had thrown off a king to become an independent people, and now, it was almost universally believed, citizens should work for unity and harmony, pulling together for the greater good. Partisanship was divisive, selfish, and even subversive, a threat to the order that had been won at such cost. No one had a kind word to say about parties until Madison concluded that the established order was itself undoing the Revolution and that the greater good required effective opposition.

Madison conducted his campaign to enlighten the public in Philip Freneau’s
National Gazette,
the newspaper he had made possible. Writing anonymously, he set the stage by describing a vision of the country in which people worked the land, were nourished by its harvests, and encouraged in “
health, virtue, intelligence,
and
competency
.” Manufacturing and mechanical industry, he wrote, ought not to be “forced or fostered by public authority,” but rather viewed as regrettable “as long as occupations more friendly to human happiness lie vacant.” He offered up the story of Great Britain’s shoe buckle industry to illustrate the instability fostered by the manufacture of superfluities. Twenty thousand people had been thrown out of work when shoestrings and slippers came into fashion: “What a contrast is here to the independent situation and manly sentiments of American citizens, who live on their own soil or whose labor is necessary to its cultivation, or who were occupied in supplying wants . . . founded in solid utility.”
⁵

Hamilton, meanwhile, was heading rapidly in the opposite direction. In his
Report on Manufactures
for Congress, he recommended having the government pay cash bounties for factory start-ups. “Incitement and patronage” on the part of government would hurry the country along to a state in which labor could be constant rather than seasonal, as on a farm; indeed, people could work around the clock. This new and prosperous world would see “the employment of persons who would otherwise be idle (and in many cases a burden on the community).” It was a measure of the relentlessness of Hamilton’s vision that he found it “worthy of particular remark that, in general, women and children are rendered
more useful and the latter more early useful by manufacturing establishments than they would otherwise be.” He helpfully pointed out that “of the number of persons employed in the cotton manufactories of Great Britain, it is computed that four-sevenths nearly are women and children, of whom the greatest proportion are children and many of them of a very tender age.”
⁶

Hamilton advanced an argument for the constitutionality of his proposal that Madison had contended with before—that the general welfare clause of article 1, section 8, permitted Congress a wide range of activities that were not specifically authorized. As Madison viewed it, the general welfare clause was simply a general expression of the enumerated powers that followed in section 8 of the Constitution, such as the powers to coin money and provide post offices. To interpret the clause as Hamilton did was to abolish the idea of limited government. “If Congress can apply money indefinitely to the general welfare and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare,” Madison said on the floor of the House, “they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may establish teachers in every state, county, and parish, and pay them out of the public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union, they may undertake the regulation of all roads, other than post roads. In short everything from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police would be thrown under the power of Congress.” Hamilton was driving the nation toward the Leviathan state that Thomas Hobbes had described, something never assented to in Philadelphia or the ratifying conventions. To a friend Madison wrote that if such an interpretation of the Constitution were to prevail, “the parchment had better be thrown into the fire at once.”
⁷

Madison’s opposition to the
Report on Manufactures
gained force from financial panic in 1792. Bank and government securities suddenly plummeted, and among those whose fortunes followed was former assistant Treasury secretary William Duer. Hamilton’s friend had borrowed vast amounts in all corners of the city to place large bets that
securities would continue to rise. When they fell instead, he ended up in debtors’ prison, and hundreds to whom he owed money were ruined as well. “The prince of the tribe of speculators has just become a victim to his enterprises,” Madison wrote to Edmund Pendleton. “Every description and gradation of persons from the church to the stews are among the dupes of his dexterity and the partners of his distress.” Among the swindled was the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, another brainchild of Hamilton’s, which with private funds and a charter from William Paterson, now governor of New Jersey, intended to build factories and a factory town (named Paterson) along the banks of the Passaic River. Hamilton had picked Duer to head the society, and it soon became evident that he had looted the society’s funds.
⁸
With government involvement in private industry suddenly having little appeal, Congress shelved Hamilton’s report.

Madison’s
National Gazette
essays now became more pointed. In “The Union: Who Are Its Real Friends?,” Madison did not mention Hamilton’s name, but he noted that real friends were “not those who favor measures, which by pampering the spirit of speculation within and without the government, disgust the best friends of the Union.” Nor did real friends “promote unnecessary accumulations of the debt of the Union instead of the best means of discharging it as fast as possible.”
⁹
Madison did not mention parties, but nevertheless took a crucial step in changing their image by putting Hamilton and his supporters on a level with those who opposed them. The public tended to view the Treasury secretary and his allies in Congress not as a faction but as the government. By setting their behavior against that of real friends of the Union—who dampened speculation and eschewed debt—Madison showed, though did not yet say, that the Hamiltonians weren’t above party, they
were
a party, one to which there was a vastly superior alternative.

In another of his
National Gazette
essays, Madison used Jefferson’s notion that each generation should bear its own burdens in order to attack the idea of accumulating debt. A friend of his from the Virginia House of Delegates, John Mercer, now a representative from Maryland,
subsequently took up the idea on the floor of the House: “The God of nature has given the earth to the living. That He will make our children and our children’s children as free as He made us is what no parent, I trust, will deny. Under the divine impression, the voice of United America has declared that we cannot deprive posterity of their natural rights, which, from generation to generation must continue the same as we came into the world with; we have a right to the fruits of our own industry—they to theirs.” Mercer had studied law with Jefferson, who might also have tutored him in the philosophy of his speech, but it was Madison who caught Hamilton’s attention by letting it be known that he favored Mercer’s sentiments.
¹⁰
Madison’s attacks on his policies vastly irritated Hamilton, but this assault on his legacy was more than he could endure.

Hamilton decided to “unbosom” himself. In a six-thousand-word letter full of furious underlinings to Edward Carrington of Virginia, he wrote that he would never have taken the post of secretary of the Treasury had he not expected to have “the firm support of Mr. Madison.” He had counted on it because the two of them had been in such agreement, but now instead of backing a strong central government, Madison was “disposed to narrow the federal authority.” Madison’s differences with him came from personal animosity, he believed. They had sprung “from a spirit of rivalship,” perhaps. Whatever the reason behind Madison’s opposition, Hamilton wrote, it had certainly caused him to change his mind about the man: “The opinion I once entertained of the candor and simplicity and fairness of Mr. Madison’s character has, I acknowledge, given way to a decided opinion that
it is one of a peculiarly artificial and complicated kind
.”

Time and again, Madison, in cooperation with Jefferson, had opposed him, not only on fiscal issues but also on foreign policy, Hamilton went on. “
They have a womanish attachment to France and a womanish resentment against Great Britain,
” he wrote. But the best example of their opposition was the
National Gazette
. Jefferson and Madison had brought Freneau to Philadelphia, where he had been given a State Department position and started a newspaper. Hamilton’s concern wasn’t
about the ethics of putting Freneau on the public payroll while he undertook other activities. It was not uncommon for even high officials to have second jobs, including ones that might take them away from the capital for extended periods. Rather, the issue was that Madison and Jefferson were behind “a paper devoted to the subversion of me and the measures in which I have had an agency.” An impartial man would also conclude, Hamilton wrote, “that it is a paper of a tendency
generally unfriendly
to the government of the United States.”
¹¹

Hamilton’s grandiosity seems to leap off the page. The idea that opposition to him and his policies was subversive to the Republic smacks of the kingly
l’état, c’est moi,
but to be fair to the Treasury secretary, he was representing—in an extreme way, to be sure—the widely held view that party spirit was evil and quite naturally exempting himself from it. Madison agreed that parties could have evil effects, but the difference was that he didn’t regard himself as above the fray. “Parties are unavoidable,” he wrote in one of his
National Gazette
essays, and the task was to make “one party a check on the other.”
¹²

•   •   •

WITH THE ELECTION
of 1792 on the horizon, George Washington was contemplating retirement. He sent a note to Madison requesting him to call and confided his reasons: he felt unfit to make many of the judgments required of him, particularly those of a constitutional nature. “He found himself also in the decline of life, his health becoming sensibly more infirm and perhaps his faculties also.” Moreover, he was miserable in his job, in part because of the “spirit of party” that had arisen. Madison summoned all his tact. Instead of confronting the president’s assumption that party spirit was ever and always a threat, he tacitly acknowledged that unchecked it could be. The president ought to remain rather than retire, Madison argued, because by the end of another term the government would have “a tone and firmness” that would protect against any of the dangers that party represented, such as “disaffection” for the government among a few on one side and an ambition on the other for “mixed monarchy.” A few days after meeting with
Washington, Madison agreed to suggest what the president might say in a farewell address, but he did so, he carefully noted, in a way that did not indicate even the slightest agreement to such a plan.
¹³