James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (31 page)

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ABOUT THE TIME
that Genêt arrived in America, so did news that revolutionary France had declared war on Great Britain. President Washington issued a proclamation that the United States would “pursue a conduct friendly and impartial toward the belligerent powers,” a policy with which Madison generally agreed, but he fretted about the word “impartial.” It seemed “stronger than was necessary,” he wrote to Jefferson, and perhaps stronger than was proper, given the treaty that the United States had signed with France in 1778. It might have been worse, Jefferson explained. He had at least managed to keep the word “neutrality” out of the proclamation.
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The president was soon under attack, particularly in the pages of the
National Gazette
. Someone, perhaps Freneau himself, writing under the pen name Veritas, accused Washington of “double-dealing” in the proclamation, effectively nullifying the United States’ treaty with France, although not saying so. Had the president consulted his fellow citizens, instead of relying on “the aristocratic few and their contemptible minions of speculators, Tories, and British emissaries,” he would have realized, wrote Veritas, that the people had no inclination to treat on equal terms those “who so lately deluged our country with the blood of thousands and the men who generously flew to her rescue and became her deliverers.” Madison wrote to Jefferson that the proclamation seemed “to violate the forms and spirit of the Constitution,” but he nonetheless regretted “the position into which the president has been thrown.” Jefferson began to think the attacks in the
National Gazette
were somehow a Federalist trick to further alienate Washington from Republicans and drive him into Federalist arms.
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Hamilton, with perfect timing, weighed in to defend Washington in a series of energetic essays in John Fenno’s
Gazette of the United States
. Writing under the pseudonym Pacificus, he brought forward the word that Jefferson had avoided and labeled the president’s statement a “Proclamation of Neutrality”—a name that would stick. He insisted that the treaty of 1788 put the United States under no obligation to assist France in its war on Great Britain. Moreover, he wrote, the president had the perfect right under the Constitution to make that judgment, and those who disagreed were angling for war with the British.
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A frantic Jefferson urged Madison to respond: “For god’s sake, my dear sir, take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public.” Jefferson was rattled in part because at the same time Hamilton was attacking the Republican, pro-French position in the pages of the
Gazette of the United States,
Genêt was undermining it by his conduct in Philadelphia. Warned by the president to cease fitting out privateers, Genêt had continued to do so right under the president’s nose, using the port of Philadelphia to arm a British vessel captured by the French. When told the vessel should not sail, he
responded by threatening to go over the president’s head to Congress and, if necessary, to the people. Jefferson, who had once had high hopes for Genêt, wrote to Madison, “Never, in my opinion, was so calamitous an appointment made, as that of the present minister of France.” He described Genêt as “hotheaded, all imagination, no judgment, passionate, disrespectful, and even indecent towards the president.” So destructive was Genêt’s behavior to the relationship between France and the United States that Madison was tempted to think him an agent of the anti-French Hamiltonians.
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It was not the last time that he would find the French to be difficult allies.

Madison was not eager to enter the fray. He was at Montpelier, far from the scene of the crisis, and deprived, as he put it, “of some material facts and many important lights.” He was no longer even sure what the president’s position was. He forced himself to take up the task but called it “the most grating one I ever experienced.” The pseudonym under which he wrote, Helvidius, for Helvidius Priscus, who had died resisting imperial rule, might have been an indication of his misery—as well as a biting comment on Washington’s administration. Madison’s task was complicated by the ground shifting under his feet. Even as he wrote, he learned that Jefferson was joining Hamilton and the rest of the president’s cabinet in demanding Genêt’s recall. As he was arguing the nuances of legislative versus executive power to make proclamations concerning war and peace (and favoring the legislative), he heard from Jefferson that the president’s proclamation was now so popular that “it would place the Republicans in a very unfavorable point of view with the people to be caviling about small points of propriety.” Madison threw up his hands. Citing social obligations and “the new posture of things,” he stopped writing.
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FALL WAS COMING ON,
a reflective, melancholy time, and as Madison looked back, he saw a Second Congress that had begun badly and ended worse. Hamilton’s
Report on Manufactures
had been shelved, but that was the result of speculation and panic as much as a triumph of
republican principles. His best effort had been the essays he had written to help enlighten public opinion. His pride in them would be apparent when in his old age he initialed them so there would be no question of authorship. He had written anonymously, but his role as opposition leader was widely acknowledged. The Republican Party was now often called Madison’s party.
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Jefferson was retiring, and while it might be a relief not to have his friend constantly urging him to the barricades, he would miss his companionship in Philadelphia. When he returned for the Third Congress, Madison would also be without his familiar household. Mrs. House had died in June, and Mrs. Trist was closing up the boardinghouse. Madison might have begun to think that the time was growing near when he, like Jefferson, could enjoy more permanently the pleasures of rural life. After his brother Ambrose died on October 3, necessity began to enter into his thinking. Ambrose had helped James Madison Sr. run Montpelier, and someone needed to take up his responsibilities.

But the pull of political life was strong, and he was making plans. He had worked with Jefferson on a report to be submitted to the Third Congress showing that Great Britain imposed more onerous duties on American products than any other nation and detailing the restrictions that it placed on American shipping. A recent British decree—called an Order in Council—authorizing the Royal Navy to stop and detain American vessels carrying grain to France would help him make his point that British policies should be resisted.
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Madison was convinced that the United States had the commercial power to change Great Britain’s ways, and he wanted to see the U.S. Congress use it.

As fall advanced, it became unclear when Congress would meet again. Yellow fever had struck Philadelphia and was taking a devastating toll. There was a report of 150 buried on a Wednesday, which a few days later was revised upward to 200. Jefferson described the course of the disease: “It comes on with a pain in the head, sick stomach, then a little chill, fever, black vomiting and stools and death from the second to the eighth day.” So many succumbed that the ringing of church bells for the dead was forbidden. As many as twenty thousand fled,
and even after spells of cool weather in early October the funerals continued.
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In mid-October, Madison received what was now very rare: an inquiry from the president. Washington wanted to know if he had power under the Constitution to call for Congress to meet in another place. He did not, Madison replied, but a late October frost rendered the question moot. No one understood that the freezing weather brought an end to the fever by killing the mosquitoes transmitting it, but Philadelphians knew that the terrible plague was over.
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The freeze did not come in time for John Todd, a young Quaker lawyer in Philadelphia. He had moved his wife, their toddler, and a newborn outside the city to lodgings on the west bank of the Schuylkill, where he hoped they would be safe, and then returned to Philadelphia to care for his parents. They died, and on October 14, 1793, Todd died, like his parents a victim of the fever. On the same day, the Todd baby, named William, died. Little John Payne Todd survived, and so did his twenty-five-year-old mother. Her name was Dolley.

AS THE FEVER ABATED,
Philadelphians whitewashed the walls of their homes, scrubbed the floors with vinegar, and burned gunpowder to cleanse the air. Finally, in mid-November 1793, the city was declared safe for the government to gather. Madison arrived, moved in with James Monroe on North Eighth Street, and reentered the political fray, putting forward measures to place the same restrictions on British shipping that Great Britain applied to the United States. “The commerce of the United States is not at this day on that respectable footing to which from its nature and importance it is entitled,” he declared on the House floor. The evidence was there for all to see, and he proposed tariffs and tonnage fees to bring the British around.
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Madison had tried before to institute commercial policies that he believed would change British behavior, and he had failed before. But now his proposals seemed to come at a particularly apt moment. Not only were the British treating grain as contraband; they had also brokered a truce between Portugal and Algiers that had resulted in freeing Algerine pirates to prey on American vessels in the Atlantic. Nevertheless, Madison ran into a firestorm of opposition from merchants and
shipowners who did not want to offend their biggest customer. Hamilton, who as recently as
Federalist
11 had been a proponent of using trade policy to influence other nations, was now fearful that Madison’s proposals, by leading to a decrease in trade, would bring a decrease in tariff revenues. He began passing talking points to Madison’s opponents, and both they and the Federalist press attacked him, alleging that his proposals would lead to war.

Provocations on the part of Britain soon muted that charge. News came of a speech by Lord Dorchester, the governor-general of Canada, confirming suspicions that the British were urging Indian attacks on Americans in the Northwest, where Great Britain still had not left military garrisons that it had agreed to give up in the peace treaty of 1783. The British also issued an even harsher Order in Council, one that put at risk not just foodstuffs but any cargo—and the vessels carrying it—to or from the French West Indies. Then, bringing the crisis to a head, the British began seizing American ships. Soon they had captured some 250 vessels in the West Indies and declared most of them prizes of war. They stripped crew members of papers and possessions, including the clothes they were wearing, and threw the naked seamen into rusting prison hulks.
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Retaliatory trade policies suddenly seemed beside the point, and leading Federalists began advocating a military buildup. In response to the threat posed by the Algerine corsairs, Congress passed and the president signed a bill authorizing the construction of six American warships. Madison voted against the measure, arguing that the ships could not be ready in time to deal with the crisis. Moreover, he said, since the Algerine pirates “were known to be in the habit of selling a peace,” the United States might find it could “be purchased for less money than the armament would cost.”
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In fact, the nation would bribe the Algerines—but also build the six frigates, a project for which Madison would one day be very grateful.

Federalist Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts followed up by proposing fifteen regiments of a thousand men each and authority for the president to declare an embargo. Madison regarded armies, like navies,
as potentially ruinous expenses. He also worried that a standing army would dangerously enhance governmental power. The Republic would be better off if the United States worked its will on the world through trade restrictions rather than military establishments, he believed. The embargo thus struck him as a wise move, and although New England members at first resisted, on March 25 the House unanimously passed a bill halting trade between America and all other countries for thirty days.
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Members clamored to do more, and partly in hopes of blocking further anti-British measures, President Washington, spurred on by Hamilton, decided to send an envoy to London. His choice, to Madison’s way of thinking, was not the worst he could have made. That would have been Hamilton himself. But Washington’s pick was nearly as bad: the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay. As Madison saw it, the tall, thin New Yorker simply wasn’t a dependable protector of America’s interests. It was he who had proposed that the United States forgo navigation on the Mississippi for thirty years in exchange for a trade deal with Spain. Moreover, Jay was decidedly pro-British and anti-French in his thinking, a bias that Madison attributed in part to anti-Catholicism.
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IN THE HIGH COUNCILS
of the executive branch, there was now no strong voice representing the Republican view, a situation that Madison could have remedied. President Washington had brought up the subject of his replacing Jefferson as secretary of state, but Madison had seen Jefferson’s frustration in a cabinet in which he was an outsider and wanted no part of it. Edmund Randolph had replaced Jefferson, and although ostensibly Republican, he vacillated so often that Jefferson called him a chameleon, “having no color of his own and reflecting that nearest him.” William Bradford, who had been Madison’s friend at Princeton, had become attorney general when Randolph moved up, but he and Madison were no longer close, and Bradford was a committed Federalist. The president was increasingly under the Federalist spell, as Madison saw it, and that, combined with his enormous popularity, was
“an overmatch for all the efforts Republicanism can make.” Allegiances were shifting in Congress so that the party of republican sentiment in the Senate was “completely wrecked,” he told Jefferson, and the House was headed in the same direction.
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IN THE MIDST
of what was not a good time for him politically, Madison experienced a most happy turn in his personal life. Out walking one spring day, he caught sight of the recently widowed Dolley Payne Todd. Nearly five feet eight inches tall and of shapely figure, she turned many a head. Her friends teased her about the men who lingered in the streets for a glimpse of her. “Really, Dolley,” they would say, “thou must hide thy face.”
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She had black hair, blue eyes, and a startlingly fair complexion that she had learned as a child growing up in Virginia to shelter from the sun. When she was fifteen, her Quaker father, John Payne, decided as a matter of conscience to free his slaves, and he moved his family to Philadelphia, where they joined the Northern District Meeting. Many years later, female Friends remembered that young Dolley was “inclined . . . for the gaieties of this world” and often gave offense with the way she wore her caps, “the cut of her gowns, and the shape of her shoes.” One Quaker matron recalled that during an effort to convince her of the seriousness of life, the young girl “at first smiled and afterwards fell fast asleep.”
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John Payne tried to support his family by manufacturing laundry starch, but the business went under, and overwhelmed by failure, he took to his bed. Dolley Payne, age twenty-one, fulfilled her dying father’s wish by becoming the wife of a promising young Quaker lawyer, twenty-seven-year-old John Todd, who had been kind to John Payne through his trials. The newlyweds, together with Dolley’s sister Anna, moved into an imposing brick house at Fourth and Walnut streets. Dolley’s mother, Mary, began to take in boarders, one of whom was Aaron Burr.
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Madison had known Burr since they had both been students at
Princeton, so it was natural for the congressman to turn to him when he wanted an introduction to the lovely widow Todd. “Thou must come to me,” Dolley wrote to a friend. “Aaron Burr says that the great little Madison has asked him to bring him to see me this evening.” Dolley wore mulberry satin and yellow glass beads to greet James in her parlor, and he was thoroughly smitten. Soon he was letting Dolley know how he felt through her friend Catharine Coles. “Now for Madison,” wrote Catharine to Dolley on the first day of June 1794: “He told me I might say what I pleased to you about him. To begin, he thinks so much of you in the day that he has lost his tongue; at night he dreams of you and starts in his sleep a calling on you to relieve his flame, for he burns to such an excess that he will be shortly consumed and he hopes that your heart will be callous to every other swain but himself.” Lest Dolley think this breathless prose didn’t sound like Madison, Catharine assured her, “He has consented to everything that I have wrote about him with sparkling eyes.” She also noted that James Monroe had been appointed minister to France and that Madison had taken over his house. “Do you like it?” she inquired.
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Madison was not Dolley’s only suitor. Another, Philadelphia lawyer William Wilkins, pursued her with such intensity that he felt obliged to apologize for the “violence of attachment which made me appear so unamiable in thy eyes.”
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That was not Madison’s style—except when Catharine Coles served as his amanuensis—and he had many other marks in his favor. A great man who would possibly be greater, he had achieved a level of fame and respect matched by few in the nation. He would be a powerful protector, which a struggle to extract her rightful inheritance from John Todd’s estate likely convinced Dolley she needed, and he would treat her with kindness and thoughtfulness. Dolley, like many a woman before and since, might have found that the most essential point.

They discussed finances and agreed to settle Dolley’s real property “with a considerable addition of money” upon two-year-old John Payne Todd.
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Dolley was aware that she would be expelled from meeting for marrying out of the Quaker faith, and they might have discussed that as well. It is entirely possible that Dolley, who felt hemmed in by Quaker strictures, looked forward to the event with relief.

By mid-August, Dolley had written James an affectionate letter accepting his offer of marriage. “I cannot express but hope you will conceive the joy it gave me,” he wrote back. The wedding took place in the parlor of the stone house at Harewood, the estate in Virginia where Dolley’s sister Lucy and her husband, George Steptoe Washington, the nephew of the president, lived. There is no record of Dolley’s dress, but we know that James’s shirt was trimmed with a Flemish lace that the exuberant young women who attended Dolley cut up for souvenirs.
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On the morning of her wedding, Dolley wrote a letter to her friend Eliza Collins Lee describing her husband-to-be as “the man whom of all others I most admire.” She wrote that “in this union, I have everything that is soothing and grateful in prospect—and my little Payne will have a generous and tender protector.” She signed the letter “Dolley Payne Todd,” but that evening, after the wedding, she signed it again, this time “Dolley Madison,” and she added, “Alass! Alass!” The marriage would endure until Madison’s death forty-two years later and be a happy one, but at that moment Dolley was distressed. Did the age difference suddenly hit home with her? James was seventeen years her senior and, as she was surely aware by this time, given to “sudden attacks, somewhat resembling epilepsy.”
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Perhaps she was simply responding to all she had been through in the last ten months—losing a husband and a baby and marrying again.

She was not a woman to be dispirited for long, and one imagines her smiling happily as she set out with James on their honeymoon, accompanied by Anna, her fourteen-year-old sister, whom she regarded as a daughter.
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Anna would live with James and Dolley until she married, providing company in which both Madisons delighted.

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WHILE MADISON
was traveling in northern Virginia with his new family, George Washington, spurred on by Hamilton, sent thirteen thousand militia into western Pennsylvania, where citizens were in open rebellion over the excise tax on domestic spirits that the First Congress had passed. Nearly every farm had a still, and the whiskey
produced wasn’t just for local consumption; it was transported for sale. Angry farmers tarred and feathered tax collectors and burned down the house of one. Some six thousand rebels gathered in an armed show of strength in a field a few miles outside Pittsburgh.
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In the face of the overpowering force with which the president responded, the Whiskey Rebellion, as it came to be called, quickly dissipated, but its effects lingered. For one thing, it made Hamilton an ever more menacing figure in Republican eyes. He had been in effective charge of the army in western Pennsylvania, the man on horseback using force to govern men. The Whiskey Rebellion also increased Washington’s suspicions of several dozen political societies that had formed across the country. They called themselves “democratic,” a word that had come to be interchangeable with “republican,” and they quickly adopted the agenda of the emerging Republican Party. Federalists regarded them as a threat, and Washington blamed them for the Whiskey Rebellion. Sitting in the audience in Congress Hall for the first presidential address since his marriage, Madison heard Washington denounce “associations of men” for threatening lawful agents of the government. “Certain self-created societies,” said the president, had incited riots and violence until the government had been forced to act.
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Madison was shocked. Although one of the democratic societies had named its branch after him, both he and Jefferson steered clear of the clubs, whose members did not make a practice of tact or subtlety. But their right to meet and make pronouncements seemed nonetheless clear. In a letter to Jefferson, Madison called Washington’s condemnation an “attack on the most sacred principle of our Constitution and of republicanism,” and to Monroe, now in Paris, he wrote that Washington’s “denunciation of the ‘self-created societies’ . . . was perhaps the greatest error of his political life.”
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Still, Madison’s instinct was to let the matter pass, and the House of Representatives’ reply to the president did not at first mention it, but Thomas FitzSimons of Pennsylvania insisted on the floor of the House that the reply condemn “the self-created societies . . . which by deceiving and inflaming the ignorant and the weak may naturally be supposed to
have stimulated and urged the insurrection.” In the ensuing debate Madison declared that “opinions are not the objects of legislation,” and he worried aloud, “How far will this go? It may extend to the liberty of speech and of the press.” Finally, a compromise was reached in which members expressed concern that “any misrepresentations whatever of the government and its proceedings, either by individuals or combinations of men, should have been made and so far credited as to foment the flagrant outrage which has been committed on the laws.” Madison wrote to Jefferson that Republicans considered the compromise language something of a victory while Federalists claimed “a final triumph on their side,” because Washington in his response made veiled reference to the democratic societies, urging that every effort be made “to discountenance what has contributed to foment” the rebellion.
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