James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (43 page)

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IN JUNE 1807,
about the time of Aaron Burr’s indictment, word came of a disaster at sea. It involved the USS
Chesapeake,
one of the six frigates originally authorized in 1794. Although the
Chesapeake
was less gracefully shaped than its sister ships, it was nonetheless a beauty.
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A painting of the
Chesapeake
in the art collection of the U.S. Navy shows how it might have looked just before disaster struck, its sails full and the Stars and Stripes flying aft.

On June 22, the
Chesapeake
passed Cape Henry, headed for the Mediterranean. Its commodore, James Barron, noticed the maneuverings of a British frigate, HMS
Leopard,
but made little of them until late afternoon, when there came a message from the
Leopard
requesting permission to send an officer on board. When he arrived, he demanded that the crew of the
Chesapeake
be mustered so that he could look for a British deserter. Commodore Barron refused. The
Chesapeake
was not a private merchant ship but an American ship of war. He could not submit it to being boarded and searched.
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Barron ordered his men to prepare for battle, but before they were ready, the
Leopard
fired a warning shot, then another, and then, as Henry Adams described it, “poured [its] whole broadside of solid shot and canister, at the distance of one hundred and fifty or two hundred feet, point-blank into the helpless American frigate.” After taking another broadside, the
Chesapeake
struck its colors. As the flag was being lowered, a third broadside came, and then the British boarded. They left with four sailors they claimed were deserters, three of whom, it would
turn out, were American citizens. The
Chesapeake,
three of its crew dead and eighteen wounded, made its way back to Norfolk.
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As news spread of the attack, so did the public’s indignation. The
Chesapeake
incident seemed to encapsulate all the insults that Britain had dealt the United States since the beginning of the European wars, and Republicans and Federalists alike shook their fists and demanded vengeance. “This country has never been in such a state of excitement since the Battle of Lexington,” Jefferson wrote, a comment that conjured up a time when the nation had been a colony. Britain seemed to be treating the United States as though the American Revolution had never occurred, and resentment of that attitude fueled American anger. Madison, normally the coolest member of the cabinet, caught the fever. In the draft he prepared for the proclamation to be issued by the president on July 2, he wrote of British “insults as gross as language could offer” and described British actions as “lawless and bloody.” In a turning of the usual tables, it was Jefferson who toned down Madison’s rhetoric in the proclamation as it finally appeared.
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Meeting almost every day, the cabinet agreed on defensive measures, such as recalling warships from the Mediterranean, and approved Madison’s draft of a diplomatic dispatch to be sent to England aboard an aptly named schooner, the
Revenge
. The president decided to call Congress to meet on October 26, 1807, some three months hence, calculating that by that time there might be an answer to American demands for return of the
Chesapeake
seamen, reparations, and the ending of impressments. In an indication of the nature and pace of early-nineteenth-century diplomacy, the president then left for Monticello and Madison for Montpelier.
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By the time they returned and Congress had gathered, there was still no response to the dispatch. The actions of Admiral George Berkeley, who commanded British ships assigned to North America, made it hard to be optimistic. After a trial in Halifax, he ordered one of the men seized from the
Chesapeake,
who had been judged to be British, summarily hanged.
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The
Revenge
arrived in New York on December 12, and suddenly
there was a rush of news, none of it good. The king had declared that the practice of impressment, even from warships, would be accelerated. In a decree issued from Milan, Napoleon had made clear that his determination to blockade Britain included seizing American ships, not only those that had entered British ports but also ships that allowed themselves to be searched by the British. There was also word of a new British edict intended to counter Napoleon’s Berlin Decree. The British Order in Council declared that ships found in commerce with France, its allies, or its colonies would be seized.
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If American ships went to England, in other words, France threatened them. If they went to almost any other destination, they risked seizure by England.

The Non-importation Act that had been passed some twenty months previously was finally allowed to go into effect on December 14, 1807, but more was clearly needed. Jefferson recommended an embargo, which Congress quickly passed, and Madison explained the action in a series of unsigned editorials in the
National Intelligencer
. The embargo was a protective measure, he wrote, one that would keep American ships safe in harbor, and it would “have the collateral effect of making it the interest of all nations to change the system which has driven our commerce from the ocean.” It was an energetic measure, to be sure, but it would not lead to war, “being universal and therefore impartial.”
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Madison acknowledged the economic disruption the embargo would cause and tried, not very successfully, to put it in the best possible light. Yes, there would be privation among the citizenry, he wrote, but that, in turn, would encourage “frugality” and hard work, the virtues of the yeoman farmer. It would spur “household manufactures which are particularly adapted to the present stage of our society.” And, yes, there would be “much inconvenience” produced in the mercantile world, but that, in turn, would “separate the wheat from the chaff,” the responsible merchants from the irresponsible, speculative ones. It is hard to imagine either citizens or merchants drawing much comfort from these arguments. More persuasive, perhaps, was the case he made that an embargo was a step short of war that could allow the United States to achieve its ends.
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That argument, part of Madison’s long-held belief
that U.S. commercial power was sufficient to change the policies of other nations, would turn out to be wildly optimistic.

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MEANWHILE, THE PRESIDENTIAL CONTEST
of 1808 was under way, and it was almost certain to be won by the Republican nominee. For all the policy shifts and political attacks of the last seven years, Thomas Jefferson and his administration were still hugely popular. Jefferson had reduced taxes, he had paid down the public debt, and although war seemed constantly in the offing, he had kept the nation at peace. A senator from Vermont, who was dismayed by the clout that Jefferson’s popularity gave him, told Senator Plumer that “Mr. Jefferson’s influence in Congress was irresistible, that it was alarming, that if he should recommend to us to repeal the gospels of the evangelist, a majority of Congress would do it.”
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Madison had another advantage, which was that the congressional caucus would decide the Republican candidate and Dolley Madison was enormously skilled at winning over members of Congress. She repeatedly invited them to the Madison home, where for several hours they could forget their personal misery. Most of them lived in boardinghouses on Capitol Hill, rooming and taking meals with other members. One senator compared it to living “like bears, brutalized and stupefied . . . from hearing nothing but politics from morning to night.” There were no clubs or theaters they could escape to, except for one establishment that specialized in ropedancers.
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How pleasant, then, was an evening on F Street with the secretary of state and his wife.

One member described the edge that Dolley’s entertainments gave Madison over Vice President George Clinton, who, though long regarded as too feeble to run, was harboring presidential ambitions in his sixty-nine-year-old heart. Wrote Senator Samuel Mitchill to his wife, “The former gives dinners and makes generous displays to the members. The latter lives snug at his lodgings and keeps aloof from such captivating exhibitions. The secretary of state has a wife to aid his pretensions. The vice president has nothing of female succor on his side. And in these
two respects Mr. M. is going greatly ahead of him.” When James Monroe began to be talked about as a Republican contestant, Madison managed to keep quiet, even as he was experiencing a cash strain from paying off the last of the bank loans that had helped finance Monroe’s diplomatic venture. But Dolley Madison found it hard to bite her tongue. About the time that James Madison was arranging to borrow money in order to pay rent on the F Street house, Dolley, so John Quincy Adams reported, “spoke very slightingly of Mr. Monroe.”
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One can hardly blame her. Monroe was supposed to be her husband’s friend, but it was looking very much as though he were, for the second time, being seduced into running against him. As she must have seen it, he had succumbed to Patrick Henry’s blandishments in 1788 and now was letting John Randolph of Roanoke lead him astray.

Dolley paid for her visibility by often being the subject of ugly rumors. In the period before the 1804 election, both she and her husband had shown great shrewdness in dealing with one gossipy incident. A story passed around that a Federalist congressman had impugned Mrs. Madison’s morals and those of her sister Anna Cutts. Postmaster General Gideon Granger rushed to defend the Madison women, whereupon the congressman, Samuel Hunt of New Hampshire, challenged him to a duel. When Granger declined, thereby making himself look foolish, the Madisons did something quite unexpected. The secretary himself carried Mrs. Madison’s compliments and a dinner invitation to Congressman Hunt, courtesies that made clear they did not believe he had gossiped about her—and further implied that there was nothing to gossip about.
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But not all stories were easy to combat. At about the same time, James’s supposed friend Richard Peters had also weighed in on Dolley’s morals. In a letter to his fellow Federalist Timothy Pickering, who had talked about the sexual insatiability of democratic (that is, Republican) men, Peters wrote, “You should not have forgot to give precedence to the insatiability of democratic [that is, Republican] women. The leader of the ceremonious flock you mention carries with her, if not the thing itself, at least the appetites of the second of the four insatiable things
mentioned in the thirtieth chapter of Proverbs, verse 16.”
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The second of the things never satisfied in Proverbs
is “the barren womb.” Peters’s implication, which he, no doubt, thought wittily made, was that Dolley Madison was sexually insatiable because her husband had failed to impregnate her.

As the election of 1808 approached, the rumors picked up again. Senator Mitchill wrote to his wife, “Your friend Mrs. Madison is shockingly and unfeelingly traduced in the Virginia papers.” One of those encouraging the rumors was John Randolph of Roanoke. Writing to Monroe about opposition that was supposedly building against Madison, he cited a list of the secretary’s shortcomings, adding at the end, “There is another consideration which I know not how to touch. You, my dear sir, cannot be ignorant, although of all mankind you, perhaps, have the least cause to know it, how deeply the respectability of any character may be impaired by an unfortunate matrimonial connection. I can pursue this subject no further. It is at once too delicate and too mortifying.” The rumors were probably particularly painful for Dolley Madison because she was going through a very difficult time. Her mother died in October 1807 while nursing her sister Mary, who had tuberculosis and had lost two of her three daughters the previous year. Then Mary died in early 1808, about the time that the stories about Dolley were, to use Richard Peters’s delicate words, running “on all fours.”
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WHEN JAMES MONROE
returned home from England, he settled on a strategy of not promoting himself to be the Republican candidate in 1808 but not closing the door either. He would serve if elected, he said, and he stuck with this approach even as friend after friend, convinced he could not win, dropped away. He got only three votes in the Republican caucus to Madison’s eighty-three, a lopsided result that would have been a little better for him—though not much—if a number of Old Republicans hadn’t chosen to absent themselves. Many of the dissident Republicans were by now trying to avoid all association with Randolph,
but it was nonetheless he who took up the cudgels, leading a group to protest Madison’s nomination. Besides the accusation that Madison was a Yazoo man, members of the group claimed that he suffered from “want of energy,” which might have been a coded way of talking about his health. And they charged him with writing
The Federalist
with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, “in which the most extravagant of their doctrines are maintained and propagated.”
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Madison was not a true Republican, in other words.

Madison was fiercely defended by attorney William Wirt, who had been part of the prosecution team in the trial of Aaron Burr. Writing as “One of the People” in the pages of the Richmond
Enquirer,
he demanded to know just when Madison had lacked energy. Was it when he acted as one of “the first and most effective agents” in the creation of the Constitution? Was it when he triumphed over Patrick Henry in the Virginia ratifying convention? Or when “he watched the first movements of the federal Constitution” and resisted with boldness “what he deemed infractions of its spirit”? And what about the way he fought back when advocates of “the Alien and Sedition Laws waved their baleful scepters over the continent”? Those protesting Madison’s nomination had no evidence for their assertions, Wirt declared, regarding either Madison’s supposed want of energy or his association with
The Federalist
. “We know that it is a defense of the Constitution, which we are all sworn to support, and where is the crime of Mr. Madison’s having participated?”
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