James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (30 page)

If Washington was aware of Madison’s involvement with the
National Gazette,
he betrayed no hint of it. Madison had never told him and might have felt some uneasiness about not doing so. A critique of Hamilton’s policies was inevitably a critique of the president who approved them, and after his meeting with Washington, in which the president had consulted him in such a personal way, Madison did not write for the
National Gazette
for more than five months. He would take up his pen again only after a severe escalation of the paper wars.

Washington himself helped in that escalation. He held off on making up his mind about a second term until the fall and thereby inflamed the party spirit he so despised. As Hamilton thought about a contest for the presidency, he became ever more convinced that the attacks on him had been orchestrated by Jefferson to get rid of him as a rival. He inundated John Fenno, editor of the
Gazette of the United States,
with letters written under a variety of pseudonyms that attacked Jefferson by name and told the story of Freneau’s being recruited to come to Philadelphia, work in Jefferson’s State Department, and begin a newspaper. This made Freneau, Hamilton wrote, “the faithful and devoted servant of the head of a party.” When Freneau responded that the modest pay he received for translating had nothing to do with the views he expressed in the
National Gazette,
Hamilton snipped his words into a seeming admission of guilt, then asked this pointed question: How could Jefferson continue to serve in an administration that he was attacking?
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Driving the knife in deeper, Hamilton cited the meddlesome letter that Jefferson had written prior to the Virginia ratifying convention, in which he had expressed the hope that nine states would ratify the Constitution but four hold out until amendments were agreed to. As Hamilton presented it, this meant that “Jefferson was in the origin opposed to the present Constitution.” Thus it made perfect sense that he should have established a paper to express views “virulently hostile both to the government and to its measures.”
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By conflating opposition to
government measures with opposition to the Constitution, Hamilton was at once reflecting the widely held view that government was above party and calling Jefferson disloyal.

Madison was at Montpelier when he learned of Hamilton’s attacks on Jefferson, and he immediately rode to Albemarle to confer with Jefferson and Monroe. Madison and Monroe took on the task of fighting back in
Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser
. They accused Hamilton (though not by name) of wanting to silence anyone who pointed out “the mischievous tendency of some of the measures of government.” They also published extracts of a number of letters that Jefferson had sent “to a particular friend” in order to show his support for the Constitution. Madison also defended Freneau, pointing out his Princeton friend’s education, his worthy character, and his suffering during the war, when he had been held in a British prison ship.
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Freneau needed some boosting. Skilled polemicist though he was, the assault on his journalistic integrity pained him. Nearly a decade later he would still be denying that he had been Jefferson’s “pensioner” or “confidential agent.” In the months ahead, as if to show his independence, Freneau would launch harsher attacks than either Jefferson or Madison thought wise on the president himself. A cartoon in the
National Gazette
that showed a kingly Washington paying for his misdeeds on the guillotine would cause the president to bring a cabinet meeting to a full stop while he raged about “that
rascal Freneau
.”
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While defending Jefferson and Freneau, Madison also continued his effort to shift public thinking about parties. In a
National Gazette
essay, he made their inevitability clear by placing them in historical context. They had been present when some argued for independence while others remained loyal to Britain. They had existed when some supported the Constitution and others opposed it. Now there was “a third division, which being natural to most political societies, is likely to be of some duration in ours.” Madison described one of the current parties as “more partial to the opulent than to the other classes of society; and having debauched themselves into a persuasion that mankind are incapable of governing themselves, it follows with them of course that government
can be carried only by the pageantry of rank, the influence of money and emoluments, and the terror of military force.” The other party, clearly needed as a check, believed “in the doctrine that mankind are capable of governing themselves.” This second party, he wrote, was “the Republican party, as it may be termed.”
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It was a designation that would cause confusion for generations of students because Madison’s Republican Party is unrelated to today’s, which came into being during the decade before the Civil War. The name was cleverly chosen, however, to indicate that Republicans adhered to the idea of the Republic as set forth in the Constitution. The opposing party, Madison suggested, should be known as Antirepublicans, but the Federalists, not surprisingly, preferred the name they’d had since the battle over the Constitution.

The fledgling Republicans tried out their wings in 1792. Once it was evident that George Washington was a candidate for the presidency, all idea of a contest for the top office was abandoned, but Republicans thought they saw a ripe target in Vice President John Adams. He had not only made himself ludicrous with his emphasis on high-sounding titles but actually written a series of essays in which he had praised the idea of hereditary succession. In the search for an alternative to Adams, Madison’s name was mentioned—presumably by Republicans who failed to understand that Virginia’s electors could not vote for both him and George Washington. The early favorite, however, was longtime New York governor George Clinton. Not only was he firmly opposed to everything Alexander Hamilton stood for, but with his flyaway hair and bulbous nose he looked the populist part. But in October, Republicans from New York and Pennsylvania wrote to Madison and Monroe to tell them that Aaron Burr had mounted a campaign. Where did they stand now that there was a choice? They remained with Clinton, as did Republicans who caucused in Philadelphia. John Beckley, clerk of the House and a reliable source of party intelligence, wrote to Madison that the caucus had dropped “all thoughts of Mr. Burr.” Beckley, who had been in New York, also warned Madison about Hamilton. “It would be wise to be watchful; there is no inferior degree of sagacity in the combinations of this
extraordinary
man, with a comprehensive eye, a subtle and contriving mind, and a soul devoted to his object.”
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In an age when it was difficult even to get out the news that Adams had an opponent, Madison knew that a Clinton victory was unlikely. But the Republicans hoped to make a good enough showing to provide Adams with some useful enlightenment. “As the opposition to him is leveled entirely against his political principles and is made under very great disadvantages,” Madison wrote, “the extent of it, whether successful or not, will satisfy him that the people at large are not yet ripe for his system.”
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In the end Clinton received fifty electoral votes to John Adams’s seventy-seven, which was impressive. Washington remained as popular as ever. For the second and last time in American history, the vote of the Electoral College for a presidential candidate was unanimous.

•   •   •

AMONG HAMILTON’S FOES
it was widely believed that he had used his office to enrich himself. John Beckley told Madison that he thought he had “a clue to something far beyond mere suspicion on this ground,” and at the end of 1792 a scandal seemed about to break.
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Three members of Congress received information that Hamilton had been providing money to James Reynolds, a shady character who had been jailed for fraud, and that the payments had to do with speculation. Since one of the members apprised of this was Senator James Monroe, it is likely that Jefferson and Madison were aware of the charges almost immediately—and were as stunned as Monroe when Hamilton confessed that yes, he had been paying Reynolds, but it had nothing to do with speculation. Rather, for more than a year, Hamilton, husband of the lovely Elizabeth Schuyler, who had recently borne him his fifth child, had been involved in an affair with Reynolds’s wife. He had been buying Reynolds’s silence.

Hamilton’s affair was not the kind of thing that gentlemen brought up in public. Indeed, the members who confronted Hamilton apologized for “the trouble and embarrassment” they had caused him, and it would be five years before the matter reached the press. Thus, even though Madison, Jefferson, and Monroe were now confirmed in their belief that Hamilton was hardly the paragon of virtue he liked to claim, they were constrained from making that evident. When the new Congress convened, William
Branch Giles of Virginia, who was Theodorick Bland’s successor, tried an attack along financial lines. A Princeton graduate with a sloping forehead and pugnacious manner, Giles proposed a series of resolutions intended, he said, “to obtain necessary information.” They suggested that Hamilton was playing fast and loose with Treasury funds, including putting money borrowed for one purpose to another use. Hamilton provided the information Giles requested—indeed, gave fulsome responses, indicating that if he had on occasion violated “the strict letter of the law,” it was for good reason and with presidential authority. And then, as if to drive his critics mad, he claimed that such administrative discretion was a necessary part of his office. Only “pusillanimous caution” would demand a “strict regularity.”
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The Second Congress was near adjournment, and Madison, aware that the questions raised and Hamilton’s answers needed a lengthy discussion, wanted to wait until a new Congress met to continue the dispute. But Jefferson wanted resolutions of censure against Hamilton introduced immediately and went so far as to draft them himself. Giles was his willing handmaiden, and Madison’s role seems simply to have been in softening Jefferson’s language before Giles brought the resolutions to the floor.
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The resolutions lost—and lost badly. Jefferson blamed the outcome on the number of “stockjobbers,” “bank directors,” and “holders of bank stock” in Congress and believed that the rejection would show the public “the desperate and abandoned dispositions with which their affairs were conducted.” But Madison viewed it as “very unfortunate” that the resolutions were offered.
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He was trying to build a party, and the last thing he needed was to force votes that drove members to the other side.

Not long after the Second Congress ended, Madison set out for Virginia with James Monroe, who just four years before had been his rival for a seat in Congress. Madison’s move away from an emphasis on strong central government and his opposition to Hamilton had strained some relationships, including with the president, but he found himself more in harmony than he had been for years with Virginians who were suspicious of federal power. George Mason, before he died, had made a
point of sending his respects to Madison and letting him know he was held in high regard. In a time that in many ways was disappointing, there was comfort to be found in being embraced at home.
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There was also pleasure in being recognized for the role he had played in advancing liberty. After arriving in Orange, he received notice that the French National Assembly had made him an honorary citizen. Like Jefferson, Madison saw the French Revolution as a continuation of the work America had begun in “reclaiming the lost rights of mankind,” and in that spirit he accepted.
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But the French Revolution was devolving into something very different from an uprising against tyranny. Savage mobs had stormed the Tuileries and slaughtered hundreds of the king’s Swiss Guards. Lafayette, who had been at the center of events in the Revolution’s hopeful early days, had been forced to flee France, had been arrested, and would endure a cruel imprisonment. Rampaging crowds had broken into Paris prisons and killed indiscriminately, piling the corpses of political prisoners, clergymen, common criminals, and children into bloody heaps. The royal family had been placed under arrest, and just a few months before Madison accepted honorary French citizenship, the National Assembly had passed a death sentence on Louis XVI (or Louis Capet, as the revolutionaries insisted, refusing to acknowledge him as a monarch). The sentence was carried out by guillotine.

From our perspective in the twenty-first century, we know that matters would only grow worse. The guillotine in Paris would soon be chopping off more than one head a minute. In outlying areas such as Pont-de-Cé and Avrillé thousands were shot. At Nantes, thousands were drowned in the Loire in what were called “republican baptisms.” But Madison did not know what lay ahead, and like many before and since who have watched the overthrow of tyrants with great hope, he convinced himself that the French Revolution would turn out for the best. Concern that failure of the Revolution would be seen as evidence that people could not govern themselves also influenced his thinking and made it easier in a time of uncertain communications, most filtered through a hostile British press, to dismiss reports of blood running in the streets of Paris. As for Louis XVI, Madison could not quite bring himself to say that he
had gotten what he deserved, but instead reported that plain men had repeatedly expressed to him a statement that seemed fair: “If he was a traitor, he ought to be punished as well as another man.” Madison’s old college friend Hugh Brackenridge was less respectful. He headlined a piece he wrote for the
National Gazette
on the king’s demise “Louis Capet Lost His Caput.”
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Madison’s hope in the French Revolution was widely shared—as became evident in the reception that Americans accorded to Edmond-Charles Genêt, or Citizen Genêt, as he was known in revolutionary France. Named minister to the United States, the thirty-year-old Genêt, a florid-faced, bright, and bustling redhead, arrived aboard the French frigate
Embuscade
in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 8, 1793. He was greeted by jubilant crowds and enthusiastic officials, who seemed not the least taken aback when he began to fit out privateers to sail in the French cause—and man them with Americans. He also began to recruit American citizens to invade Spanish possessions in the Southwest. As he made his way north, Genêt received one enthusiastic reception after another, all climaxed by a grand dinner in Philadelphia, where the company joined in singing “La Marseillaise” and took turns donning a
bonnet rouge,
the red cap symbolizing liberty. At Montpelier, Madison took heart when he heard of Genêt’s reception. He hoped it would “testify what I believe to be the real affections of the people,” he told Jefferson.
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