James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (32 page)

As Madison saw it, an assault on fundamental rights had been undertaken for political reasons. He wrote to Jefferson, “The insurrection was universally and deservedly odious. The democratic societies were presented as in league with it. The Republican part of Congress were to be drawn into an ostensible patronage of those societies and into an ostensible opposition to the president.” He worried—rightly, as it would turn out—that this deeply troubling tendency would become ever more threatening to what he regarded as first principles of the Republic.
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JEFFERSON, HEARING RUMORS
that Madison would not be a candidate for Congress again, urged him to stay in office. “Hold on then, my dear friend,” he wrote, reporting that people with whom he talked had no “greater affliction than the fear of your retirement; but this must not be, unless to a more splendid and a more efficacious post.” Madison’s newly married state might have caused some to think that he would be settling into home life at Montpelier, and, as Madison told his father, there were “perhaps . . . many considerations to do so,” among them James senior’s need for assistance in the wake of Ambrose’s death. But Madison had unfinished business in Philadelphia, including the treaty that John Jay had been sent to negotiate with Great Britain. Madison
was hearing that it had been concluded on grounds disadvantageous to the United States. “I suspect that Jay has been betrayed by his anxiety to couple us with England and to avoid returning with his finger in his mouth,” he wrote to Jefferson. Dolley Madison might also have subtly encouraged him to serve another term. Their marriage meant that she and Anna, fifteen now, were included in all the festivities of the social season, including the splendid ball held by the City Dancing Assembly to celebrate Washington’s birthday.
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If James served until 1797, they could enjoy two more winters of the social whirl.

Madison asked his father to contradict the rumors of his retirement and began advising him by letter about crops and caretakers, a task that became easier once the mail route was extended to Orange Court House. It wasn’t a perfect solution. James senior was not always prompt about answering mail and seemed to ignore his son’s suggestions for a rotation of red clover in the fields, but the makeshift arrangement, Madison decided, would get him through another congressional term.
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WITH THE EUROPEAN WAR
expected to result in an influx of immigrants to the United States, the short session of the Third Congress passed a naturalization bill that extended the time of residence required from two years to five and mandated three years’ notice of intent to become a citizen. Madison supported the extension but objected to efforts to make the waiting period longer. He also supported a proposal from his colleague William Branch Giles that anyone wishing to become a citizen must renounce noble titles and took a certain pleasure in watching the Federalists, who had tried to devise such titles for Washington, squirm. But when Samuel Dexter of Massachusetts declared that “priestcraft had done more mischief than aristocracy” and mocked Catholicism, Madison was all business. He would have Catholics derided no more than he would have Baptists scorned. He said that he did not “approve the ridicule attempted to be thrown out on the Roman Catholics,” and added that there was nothing in Catholicism “inconsistent with the purest republicanism.”
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THE TREATY
that John Jay had negotiated did not arrive in Philadelphia until early March, and it was immediately cloaked in “impenetrable secrecy,” as Madison described it. Details had still not been made public in April, when Madison left Philadelphia with his wife, his sister-in-law Anna, and his stepson, Payne, to spend the interval between the Third and the Fourth Congresses in the Piedmont. The secrecy continued through May and into June, when a special Senate session began debating the treaty in secret. Shortly thereafter, Madison, at Montpelier, began to receive a leaked copy of the treaty, page by page. “Convinced that this—as they term it—most important secret is much safer with you than in the hands of many to whom it is confided,” South Carolina senator Pierce Butler wrote, “I shall by every post send you a sheet of it.”
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The treaty was worse than Madison had expected. The United States gained certain items: a British commitment to withdraw from posts in the territory northwest of the Ohio River, which was supposed to have happened earlier; the creation of commissions to which Americans could appeal for losses they had suffered at the hands of the Royal Navy; and the opening of some trade to the West Indies, though on terms so harsh the Senate would reject this provision. But there was no mention of impressment, the increasingly troublesome British practice of forcing seamen who were deemed British but were often American, into British service. And there was abandonment of the U.S. principle that the cargo of neutral vessels should not be subject to search and seizure by warring nations. Perhaps worst of all, the treaty barred the United States for ten years from imposing the kinds of restrictions on British trade that Madison had repeatedly proposed. Jay had guaranteed the British that no matter the circumstances they would pay no higher duties than any other nation, thus, in Madison’s view, making any effective retaliation short of war impossible. The treaty was, Madison wrote, “so full of shameful concessions, of mock reciprocities, and of party artifices that no other circumstances than the peculiar ones which mark our present political situation could screen it from universal execration.”
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The Federalist Senate approved the treaty, the article about West
Indian trade excepted, on June 24, 1795, by a vote that was exactly the two-thirds necessary: twenty senators in favor and ten opposed. The Senate voted not to release the treaty, but Virginia senator Stevens Thomson Mason decided the public deserved a look and sent a copy to Benjamin Franklin Bache’s Philadelphia newspaper, the
Aurora
. As Madison described it, from there “it flew with an electric velocity to every part of the Union.” Fourth of July crowds up and down the nation would probably not have reacted well to any treaty with Britain, but the taint of unfairness attaching to this one made them furious. On Bastille Day in Charleston, protesters dragged a Union Jack through the streets and set it afire. In Philadelphia, according to Vice President Adams, “an innumerable multitude” gathered at Washington’s house, “huzzaing, demanding war against England, cursing Washington, and crying success to the French patriots and virtuous Republicans.” In New York, when Hamilton tried a public defense of the treaty, someone threw a rock that struck him in the forehead. So many stuffed figures of Jay were set to the torch that it was said a person could travel from one end of the nation to the other by the light of his burning effigies.
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Madison noted that “addresses to the president against his ratification swarmed from all quarters,” but events behind the scenes were pushing Washington in the other direction. Not long after Senate passage of the treaty came news that the British had begun once more to seize American ships carrying grain to France, something they had not done while negotiations with Jay had been ongoing. Secretary of State Randolph recommended that the president hold off on ratification until the situation was better understood—and remedied. Washington agreed, and Randolph told the British minister George Hammond of the president’s intent. Perhaps Randolph, once described as “
too Machiavellian
and
not Machiavellian enough,
” exaggerated his role in delaying the treaty, because he soon became a British target. Hammond turned over a French dispatch that the British had intercepted at sea. Known as Number 10, it indicated that Randolph was conveying a decidedly Republican view of the administration to the French, portraying it as so bent on power that the Whiskey Rebellion had been exaggerated in
order to justify raising an army. The dispatch also reported Randolph making an “overture,” which was not fully described, apparently having been detailed in another dispatch. It was possible, however, to draw the worst possible conclusion about it: namely, that Randolph had demanded a bribe.
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The members of Washington’s inner circle were prepared to believe the worst. Secretary of War Timothy Pickering, stern-faced and humorless, declared to the president at first opportunity that Randolph was a “traitor.” Whether the president believed that accusation isn’t clear, but certainly Randolph’s having advanced the views reported in Number 10 would have infuriated him. In order, so he said, to give Randolph a chance to explain, he surprised the secretary by springing the dispatch on him in front of the cabinet and observing his reaction. Randolph, confused, hurt, and insulted, resigned—which might have been exactly what Washington wanted his far too talkative secretary of state to do.
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In the middle of these events, Washington put his signature to the ratification document. The intercepted dispatch had nothing to do with the treaty, as Madison wrote to Monroe, and should have had no influence. But the president’s angry response to betrayal by the person who had been urging him to delay seemed to have been to stop delaying. As Bache’s
Aurora
described it, the ratification came “in a fit of bad humor occasioned by an enigmatical intercepted letter,” an assessment that does not seem far off the mark when one remembers that Washington’s approval of ratification came while the British were still seizing American ships.
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Randolph, having departed the cabinet, tried proving his innocence in a pamphlet he called
Vindication
. He obtained other dispatches that Number 10 had referred to and printed them. He got an affidavit from the former French minister to the United States exonerating him. But he buried important information in so much extraneous detail that his main point was lost. He was far too expansive in his
Vindication,
as he apparently had been with the French—not betraying state secrets, but spilling forth too much. After reading Randolph’s pamphlet, Madison
wrote to Monroe, using code, “His greatest enemies will not easily persuade themselves that he was under a corrupt influence of France, and his best friend can’t save him from the self-condemnation of his political career as explained by himself.”
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Jefferson described the Jay Treaty as a political coup engineered by the executive and the Federalist Senate to circumvent the House, where the Republicans were strong. “A bolder party stroke was never struck,” he wrote to Madison. Hamilton was behind the whole thing, Jefferson believed, but neither he nor Madison had any idea of the extent of the New Yorker’s involvement. Hamilton had recommended that Washington send an envoy to London and, realizing that he himself was too much of a lightning rod for the assignment, suggested Jay. Hamilton had laid out the framework of Jay’s instructions in a letter to Washington and made private recommendations to Jay as well. Hamilton had even briefed the British minister to the United States and given him a clear indication of where Great Britain could hold fast in negotiations.
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One wonders: Could Washington possibly have known of this? Hamilton’s coaching the British was an indiscretion many times worse than Randolph’s loose talk with the French.

Hamilton, wanting to repair his family’s finances, had resigned from Treasury, but months later he remained influential. Watching him swing into action to defend the treaty, Jefferson could not help but be impressed. “Hamilton is really a colossus to the Antirepublican party,” he wrote. “Without numbers he is an host within himself.” Jefferson wanted Madison to answer the essays that Hamilton was publishing under the pseudonym Camillus, urging him as he had before: “For god’s sake take up your pen.” But Madison had had enough of warring with Hamilton from the isolation of Montpelier. Instead, he worked to involve the Virginia Assembly in efforts against the treaty and pondered what action he might take in Congress.
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BY THE TIME
Madison returned with his family to Philadelphia in late November 1795, it was clear that a majority of House members
disapproved of the treaty, thus opening an avenue for undoing it. While the president had the right to make treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate, the House had to approve funding for them. But, Madison was asking himself, if the House refused to approve funds, thus killing the treaty, did that mean it was assuming treaty powers—which the Constitution had not authorized?
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Sooner than he had expected, Madison found himself having to take a stand on this question. A new and impatient member from New York, Edward Livingston, called upon the president to turn over Jay’s instructions and all other documents relating to the treaty to the House of Representatives so that members could ponder “important constitutional questions.” The result was to inject into the great controversy over the treaty an issue that lent itself to easy demagoguery. Republicans were soon defending themselves against charges that they were traitors, intent on “
rebellion
against the constituted authorities.”
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Madison tried to defuse the confrontational mood with analysis, presenting a number of ways that the House might interpret its powers. None was perfect, he admitted, but the most “rational, consistent, and satisfactory” was to recognize that the president and the Senate had the authority to make treaties and the legislature the authority to make laws. It was not usurpation for the House to carry through on its legislative authority. Indeed, if members accepted the principle that they could not, what checks would there then be on the Senate and the president acting in concert? What if they decided to conclude “a treaty of alliance with a nation at war,” thus making the United States a party to that war?
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