James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (42 page)

Ironically, the administration also had difficulties with the measure that Congressman Gregg had introduced and that Randolph had used as a starting point for his fulminations. Cutting off British imports would mean a drastic decline of import duties to the Treasury and cause discontent among the merchant class. The president and his cabinet preferred a milder resolution offered by Congressman Joseph Nicholson of Maryland that listed specific goods that could no longer be imported from Great Britain. To Randolph, who had viewed the Gregg proposal as too strong, the Nicholson resolution was too weak, particularly since it wasn’t scheduled to take effect until November 1806. Randolph ridiculed it as “a milk and water bill, a dose of chicken broth to be taken nine months hence.”
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In a humiliating defeat for Randolph, Nicholson’s resolution passed the House by 87 to 35, and the Non-importation Act based upon it enjoyed an even wider margin: 93 to 32. Randolph was one of the most eloquent speakers ever to rise in the House of Representatives. Senators regularly came to the House to hear his speeches. But he had pushed too hard and gone too far. As Senator Samuel Smith of Maryland
described one of his performances, “He astonished all his hearers by the boldness of his animadversions on executive conduct, the elegance of his language, and the pointed and fine strokes of oratory. But he has left stings in the breasts of many that never can be extracted.” As Randolph’s tactics were becoming less and less effective, the president started reaching out to members of Congress, including a senator who had opposed the Non-importation Act and the Speaker, whom he invited to the president’s house for the evening. Jefferson also wrote to James Monroe in London. He knew that Randolph hoped that Monroe would challenge Madison for the presidency in 1808 and had already warned the minister to Britain that “some of your new friends are attacking your old ones out of friendship to you, but in a way to render you great injury.” The day after the Nicholson vote, on March 18, he emphasized how soundly Randolph had been defeated, writing to Monroe that he had “never seen a House of Representatives more solidly united in doing what they believe to be the best for the public interest. There can be no better proof than the fact that so eminent a leader should at once and almost unanimously be abandoned.” But neither of these letters reached Monroe, leaving him uninformed for months about Jefferson’s thinking on the political situation among Republicans.
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Monroe did hear from John Beckley, who described Randolph’s downfall but also told Monroe that he should be the one to succeed Jefferson. Apparently in the market for a new patron, Beckley turned on his old one, criticizing Madison as “too timid and indecisive as a statesman.” Randolph wrote to describe an administration plot intended to embarrass Monroe and elevate Madison. Monroe responded cautiously, writing to Randolph that there were “older men whom I have long been accustomed to consider as having higher pretentions to the trust than myself.” He didn’t quite close the door, however, saying that there would be other opportunities to discuss the matter.
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IN THE AUTUMN
of 1806, Jefferson received word that Meriwether Lewis and his party had arrived safely from their journey of exploration.
The news brought him “unspeakable joy,” he wrote, probably all the more so since most of the reports he received that fall and winter were discouraging. Both he and Madison had heard from credible sources that the former vice president Aaron Burr, who had taken a seven-month, three-thousand-mile excursion in the West, was up to no good. The chief suspicion was that he was involved in a conspiracy to separate western states and territories from the Union and create a separate empire. One of those whom he had repeatedly consulted about his plans was General James Wilkinson, who, despite his reputation for fast dealing, commanded the U.S. Army and was governor of the Louisiana Territory. In October, after a rush of rumors linking Wilkinson with Burr, the general decided that the better part of valor was to betray the former vice president. He wrote to Jefferson about a plan to converge an army in New Orleans and from thence, with naval assistance, to invade Mexico. He did not identify Burr as the leader of this enterprise, and neither did the president, when on November 27, 1806, he proclaimed a conspiracy and urged authorities to bring to punishment those involved. But whether he was named or not, by now everyone knew that this was about Burr. Wrote Senator Plumer on November 28, “Reports have for some time circulated from one end of the United States to the other that Aaron Burr, late vice president, with others in the western states are preparing gun boats, provisions, money, men and so forth to make war upon the Spaniards in South America; that his intention is to establish a new empire in the western world and that he contemplates forming this empire from South America and the western states of North America.”
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When John Randolph of Roanoke demanded more information, Jefferson sent a message to Congress that described the evidence for a Burr conspiracy as “a mixture of rumors, conjectures, and suspicions”; nevertheless, in an ill-considered statement, he also declared Burr’s guilt “beyond question.” Senator Plumer was not so sure. Much of the case against Burr was based on a ciphered letter that he had supposedly sent to Wilkinson and that the general had helpfully deciphered. Plumer thought the letter sounded more like Wilkinson than Burr, and in fact
Wilkinson had altered it. He was on the payroll of the Spanish and by no means the honorable soldier and good citizen that Jefferson credited him with being. But Wilkinson’s treachery did not mean that Burr was without guilt. As early as 1804, Burr had approached British minister Anthony Merry with a request for the British to assist in a scheme to liberate the inhabitants of Louisiana from the United States. To accomplish this purpose, Merry reported to his government, Burr wanted a half-million-dollar loan and a British squadron. When the British failed to come through, Burr sent one of his associates, former senator Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, to sketch out for the Spanish minister, the marquis de Yrujo, a plan for a coup d’état. Jefferson would be seized, along with the vice president, public money would be taken from Washington banks, and ships from the naval yard would be used in a plan to liberate the West. Burr himself began an effort to draw discontented military officers into the conspiracy.
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Captured in February 1807, Burr appeared in court in Richmond on April 1. Presiding was Chief Justice John Marshall, Jefferson’s longtime adversary. Marshall allowed a misdemeanor charge against Burr to go forward but refused to commit him on a charge of treason, saying that there was insufficient evidence. “The hand of malignity” could not “capriciously seize” and charge an individual, Marshall said, a comment that was widely assumed to be directed at the president. Jefferson, thoroughly enraged, assigned Madison to the task of gathering information for the trial. One of Madison’s contacts sent him a number of affidavits concerning Burr’s recruiting men and ordering arms and ammunition. Madison forwarded them to the lead prosecutor in the Burr case, George Hay. The president also asked Madison to arrange to get witnesses from distant places to the trial in Richmond and sent him a warrant for five thousand dollars to cover expenses.
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In June a grand jury that had assembled in Richmond handed down an indictment against Burr for treason. In August, the jury formed for his trial heard testimony centering on Blennerhassett Island in the Ohio River, where the prosecution alleged that Burr, by directing the assemblage of armed troops and boats, had levied war against the United
States. The phrase “levying war” was one of the constitutional definitions of treason.

Burr had left the island by the time the conspirators assembled, but the prosecution was confident in its approach because in a Supreme Court decision less than six months earlier, Chief Justice Marshall had written with regard to a case of treason that “all those who perform any part, however minute or however remote from the scene of action . . . are to be considered as traitors.” But after the prosecution had presented witnesses who told of the activities on Blennerhassett Island, the defense moved to have all further testimony declared irrelevant. Whatever further witnesses might reveal about Burr’s motives, intentions, and connections to the assemblage on the island, it wouldn’t show him actually levying war—because he wasn’t there when the forces came together, Burr’s lawyers argued. As for the Supreme Court’s recent statement that one did not have to be present to be a traitor, that should be regarded as
obiter dictum,
said the defense, something said merely in passing. The prosecution was startled, to say the least, at such a claim. A bright young attorney for the prosecution, William Wirt, responded, “A plain man would imagine that, when the Supreme Court had taken up and decided the case, its decision would form a precedent on the subject.”
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Marshall sided with the defense, writing in a long and, some have thought, labored opinion that “no testimony relative to the conduct or declarations of the prisoner elsewhere and subsequent to the transaction on Blennerhassett’s Island can be admitted.” With more than a hundred prosecution witnesses waiting in the wings, including some, no doubt, whom Madison had helped bring to Richmond, Marshall sent the case to the jury, which returned the predictable verdict but seemed irritated at not having heard the full prosecution case. Declared the members, “We of the jury say that Aaron Burr is not proved to be guilty under this indictment by any evidence submitted to us. We therefore find him not guilty.”
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Jefferson made no comment on the legal niceties of the trial, but the verdict was surely galling, as was the public pummeling the president
had taken. Not only had Marshall subpoenaed him (Jefferson provided papers but did not appear), but Luther Martin, the erstwhile defender of Justice Samuel Chase, had taken him to task for declaring Burr guilty before his trial had even begun: “The president . . . has assumed to himself the knowledge of the Supreme Being himself and pretended to search the heart of my highly respected friend. He has proclaimed him a traitor in the face of that country which has rewarded him. He has let slip the dogs of war, the hellhounds of persecution, to hunt down my friend.” Showing a side of himself that had no corollary in his friend Madison’s personality, Jefferson suggested that Martin also be tried for treason.
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THE BURR TRIAL
was not the only thing going wrong for the Jefferson administration. Not long after Jefferson and Madison had become truly alarmed at the former vice president’s activities, Madison had received a letter from John Armstrong, American minister to France, whom Jefferson had commissioned to reopen negotiations about the Floridas. Armstrong reported that efforts to get the French to help the United States persuade Spain in America’s favor had hit a wall. Napoleon had personally intervened, dressing down Talleyrand for even contemplating such an intervention.
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Some three months later came bad news about negotiations that James Monroe and William Pinkney had conducted with the British. Jefferson and Madison had initially been hopeful about them, partly because England had a new foreign secretary, Charles James Fox, thought to be friendly to the United States. One of his first acts had been to recall Anthony Merry, the “diplomatic pettifogger,” as Madison referred to him, whose relationship with the president and the secretary of state had been so strained. But the rotund Fox would die after only seven months in office, and when the new British minister to the United States, young David Erskine, came hurrying to Madison with a copy of the treaty that Monroe and Pinkney had negotiated, Madison suspected that all was not well. His first question was, “What [has] been determined on the point of impressment?” When Erskine told him the treaty
did not address the matter, Madison “expressed the greatest astonishment and disappointment,” Erskine wrote to his government. Madison was further dismayed when Erskine handed him a note supplementary to the treaty relating to a recent edict Napoleon had issued from Berlin. The emperor, having decided to use his control of Europe to impose a naval blockade on Britain, had decreed that British ships would no longer be received in continental ports, nor would any ship that had traded with Britain. The British wanted the United States to promise that it would defy the edict, which would inevitably have pushed it into war with France. Madison told Erskine that the note itself was sufficient to keep the treaty from being ratified.
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Jefferson was ill, suffering from a migraine that would plague him for most of March. As Dolley Madison described the situation, “The president has a sick headache every day so that he is obliged to retire to a dark room at 9:00 in the morning.” Thus it might have been Madison who made the decision not to try to keep Congress, which was about to adjourn, in session to deal with the treaty. If he did so, it was in the knowledge that the president thought that no treaty would be better than one that did not address impressment. Late that night Jefferson, who got relief from his migraines when the sun went down, made clear to a group of senators bringing bills for him to sign that the treaty would never be submitted.
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When Monroe, in London, learned of the treaty’s fate, he was shocked and angry. He believed that he had negotiated the best treaty possible and had fully expected the president to approve of it. Monroe’s disappointment was not likely to have been assuaged by Jefferson’s letter of March 21, 1807. Even though the president went to some effort to deny rumors in the Federalist press that the treaty was rejected in order to damage Monroe and advance Madison, he also emphasized how much he objected to the agreement Monroe had negotiated: “The British commissioners appear to have screwed every article as far as it would bear, to have taken everything and yielded nothing.” Nor would Monroe have responded well to the businesslike tone in which Madison wrote to him about “the particular difficulties” that had restrained the
president “from closing the bargain with Great Britain.” The spring of 1807 saw a deteriorating relationship not only between the United States and Britain but also between James Monroe and the administration he represented, particularly as it was embodied by James Madison. In a letter that he wrote to the president but never sent, Monroe declared his disappointment with the months he had spent negotiating with the British. “At no period of my life,” he wrote, “was I ever subjected to more inquietude.”
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