James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (45 page)

Madison made the trip to Washington City in two and a half days and, after arriving, quickly settled a cabinet dispute. Secretary of State Smith was arguing that since Madison had received authority from Congress to lift nonintercourse with Britain, he needed congressional authority to reinstate it, but Congress was not in session, and Madison could hardly leave matters as they were. He did what the moment demanded, signing a new proclamation suspending trade with Great Britain. With matters back to where they had been when he entered office, he returned to Montpelier.
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BACK IN WASHINGTON
in the fall, Madison found a new British minister in place, Francis James Jackson, whom the British Foreign Office clearly believed would present a stout defense of British policy. Jackson was notorious for having been chosen in 1807 to deliver an ultimatum to the court of Denmark: either surrender the Danish fleet to the British or see Copenhagen destroyed. The prince regent had refused, and shelling began that ultimately killed some two thousand civilians. Caesar Rodney, Madison’s attorney general, recommended that the president not receive a minister whose conduct had made him “personally obnoxious to our country,” but after learning of Napoleon’s decisive defeat of the Austrian army at Wagram, Madison no doubt thought it was worth giving Jackson a chance.
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Perhaps Napoleon’s dramatic success would render the British willing to reach a real accommodation with the United States.

The thirty-eight-year-old Jackson, a round-faced man whose sideburns verged on muttonchops, found much to admire about the new capital to which he had been assigned. “I am surprised no one should before have mentioned the great beauty of the neighborhood,” he wrote. He shot partridge near the Capitol and took long rides with his wife,
Elizabeth, a Prussian baroness. But he could barely conceal his contempt for the president and his wife. He described Madison as not only “plain” but also “mean-looking,” by which he probably meant lacking in dignity and importance. As for Mrs. Madison, she was, he said, “fat and forty, but not fair.” He also passed along to his mother back in England Federalist gossip that the president’s wife had once been a comely barmaid.
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Madison quickly discerned that Jackson’s only purpose in the United States was to try to intimidate the government, but he also perceived the usefulness to be found in such an attitude. At his instructions, all official communications between the secretary of state, Robert Smith, and Jackson were to be in writing. This served a twofold purpose: first, putting Madison, who wrote all of Smith’s significant correspondence, in charge of negotiating with Jackson, and second, creating a record. Jackson fell into the trap right away, sending a letter to Smith in which he insinuated that the Americans had connived with Erskine, that the president himself had fully understood that the conditions set forth by the British were mandatory but chose to act as if they were not.
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On the surface Madison was all graciousness, hosting the Jacksons at a dinner party. “I do not know that I had ever more civility and attention shown me,” Jackson wrote. Madison even took Mrs. Jackson into dinner, thus settling what Jackson called the “foolish question of precedence” that had arisen when Anthony Merry was the British minister in Washington. Meanwhile, however, Madison was also demanding in a letter sent over Smith’s name “a formal and satisfactory explanation” for why the British government had disavowed an agreement made “by its acknowledged and competent agent.” The letter brushed lightly past the accusation of connivance, expressing surprise at “the stress you have laid on what you have been pleased to state as the substitution of the terms finally agreed on for the terms first proposed.” Some of the terms were “palpably inadmissible,” the letter noted. Did the British government really expect that the United States would give over the enforcement of its laws? When Erskine, the acknowledged agent of the king, saw that these proposals would not be successful, Madison-writing-as-Smith
explained, he did what negotiators do and went instead with the reasonable terms.
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Jackson foolishly responded by repeating his charge that the Americans had ratified the agreement in bad conscience, which brought a response from Madison, again writing as Smith, that “such insinuations are inadmissible.” When Jackson stood by the accusation, he received a letter signed by Secretary Smith informing him “that no further communications will be received from you.”
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Within a week, Jackson read an account in the
National Intelligencer
of his correspondence with the secretary of state. It portrayed the American government, in the face of repeated insults by the British, acting in a fashion both strong and reasonable. Jackson realized what had happened. The Americans had told the “story in their own way and at the time they [thought] best,” and he was indignant about it. He wrote to his brother that he had come “prepared to treat with a regular government and have had to do with a mob and mob leaders.” He demanded his passport and prepared to leave Washington. Just as he was departing, the
Intelligencer
struck again, editorializing that he was the “fit tool of a treacherous and abandoned government” and suggesting that a man of his ilk could succeed at diplomacy only when accompanied, as he had been in Copenhagen, by dozens of frigates and ships of the line, as well as thirty thousand troops.
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Jackson found some sympathy as he traveled north to New York and Massachusetts. In Boston, he was honored by a banquet at which Senator Timothy Pickering, the most extreme of the Federalist leaders, raised his glass to “the world’s last hope—Britain’s fast-anchored isle.” But Jackson’s reputation made him a difficult man to defend. Moreover, because the Federalists had been enthusiastic about the deal with Erskine, they looked foolish when they tried to reverse course and blame the administration for duping him. Madison had turned what could have been a political disaster into a benefit. Observed Representative Ezekiel Bacon, a New England Republican, “I think that James Madison’s administration is now as strongly entrenched in the public confidence as Thomas Jefferson’s ever was at its fullest tide, and I do
think that it will be quite as likely not to
ebb
as much as that did towards its close.”
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Just two days after Bacon’s positive assessment, Isaac Coles, Mrs. Madison’s cousin and the president’s secretary, caused a scandal by slapping Maryland congressman Roger Nelson in the face. Coles apologized to the House of Representatives, saying that he was “the last who would willfully manifest a deficiency of that reverence which is due to the representatives of my country,” and managed to get off with a reprimand for breaching House privileges, but he felt obliged to resign from his job and was replaced by his brother Edward.
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Coles’s assault on Representative Nelson, who was not only a member of the president’s party but a seemingly sensible fellow, was a personal matter. Coles thought Nelson had slandered him. But a more serious incident five days later had politics behind it. Virginia congressman John G. Jackson, Mrs. Madison’s fiery brother-in-law (the widower of her sister Mary), suffered a serious hip wound in a duel with a North Carolina congressman who had insulted Jefferson and Madison. Jackson, one of the president’s firmest allies, returned to the House the following spring but after an “unfortunate fall,” perhaps caused by the unsteady gait with which the gunshot wound left him, finally had to resign.
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Congress seemed disjointed, veering this way and that in an effort to find an alternative to either submission or war. In his message of January 3, 1810, Madison tried to provide direction, recommending that Congress reauthorize a statute that would allow him to raise 100,000 militiamen, provide for a standby volunteer force of 20,000, and fill out the regular army, which had been enlarged in the wake of the
Chesapeake
crisis. He also directed congressional attention to the navy, where, according to Secretary of the Navy Paul Hamilton, decommissioned frigates needed to be repaired and the cost would be $775,000. In addition, Madison noted “the solid state of the public credit,” indicating that a loan to finance these measures was appropriate.
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John Randolph of Roanoke, who had been ill, returned to Congress in time to object. “Is there a man who hears me who feels one atom of additional security to his person or property from the army of the
United States?” Randolph asked on the floor of the House. “Has it ever been employed to protect the rights of person and property? Has it ever been employed but in violation of personal rights and property—in the violation of the writ of
habeas corpus
and as a new modern instrument of ejectment?”

Randolph proposed “that the military and naval establishments ought to be reduced”—a proposition that was, as it turned out, not the most extreme to be offered. Other congressmen called for doing away with the army and navy entirely.
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Representative Roger Nelson of Maryland, several months earlier the recipient of Isaac Coles’s slap, pointed out how inane these proposals were in light of previous steps Congress had taken: “It is a perfect child’s game. At one session we pass a law for raising an army and go to expense. In another year, instead of raising money to pay the expense by the means in our power, we are to disband the army we have been at so much pains to raise. We shall well deserve the name of children instead of men if we pursue a policy of this kind.” On April 17, the House approved general proposals to reduce both the army and the navy, but when members began to discuss where to cut, consensus vanished, and Congress, proceeding in what Madison called its “unhinged state,” failed to resolve the issue.
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Members did pass a new trade measure, a mirror of the one expiring. Macon’s Bill Number 2, as it was known, lifted all trade restrictions but gave the president power to reimpose them on France should Britain withdraw its Orders in Council, or on Britain should Napoleon back off his edicts. It was widely regarded as an embarrassingly weak measure, a virtual surrender to both nations, but Madison saw possibilities in it. The French would have little interest in maintaining a situation in which all trade restrictions were lifted because it gave a clear advantage to the British, who dominated ocean commerce and thus benefited most when it was freed up. France might, therefore, by backing off, use the act “to turn the tables on Great Britain by compelling her either to revoke her orders or to lose the commerce of this country,” Madison wrote to William Pinkney, U.S. minister to Great Britain.
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Madison might have been looking into a crystal ball. Scarcely two months later Napoleon responded, dictating a letter to his foreign minister, the duc de Cadore. Addressed to John Armstrong, the American minister in Paris, the Cadore letter offered to lift the Berlin and Milan decrees, which were the French justification for seizing American ships. This revocation, proposed to go into effect after November 1, was conditioned upon the British renouncing their blockades—or the United States causing “their rights to be respected by the English.” In a highly controversial decision, the president accepted. On November 2, 1810, he issued a proclamation declaring that France had lifted the edicts violating the commerce of the United States and noting that according to Macon’s Bill Number 2, Great Britain had three months to either lift its decrees or find American commerce with it interdicted.
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Critics of Madison, both at the time and since, have pointed to this episode as evidence of his gullibility. How could he possibly have thought he could take Napoleon’s word? But Madison had been around too long not to have realized how untrustworthy Napoleon could be. Madison was a chess player, and his proclamation was not an end in itself but an opening move. While it was unlikely that the reimposition of trade restrictions would result in the British lifting their orders, it might; and if it did not, it clarified who the enemy was. No longer would the nation have to choose between “a mortifying peace or a war with both the great belligerents,” Madison wrote to Attorney General Caesar Rodney. A few weeks later, he wrote to Jefferson, “We hope from the step the advantage at least of having but one contest on our hands at a time.” And it was the right contest in Madison’s mind. As a neutral power in a warring world, the United States had suffered at the hands of both Britain and France, but, as Madison put it, “The original sin against neutrals lies with Great Britain.” The more potentially harmful offense did as well. For the United States, a former British colony, to submit to further injuries and insults from Great Britain would be to return to the subservient role Americans had cast off with the War of Independence.
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FOR MORE THAN
twenty years, since the convening of the first session of the First Congress, Madison had been trying to defend U.S. sovereignty with economic weapons, from discriminatory tariffs and tonnage fees, through embargoes, to the Non-intercourse Act and its reverse image, Macon’s Bill Number 2. He deeply believed that for a republican government, the peaceful way was the better way: “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies and debts and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”
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But the peaceful way simply hadn’t worked. Economic measures, even when they caused the British some pain, had not been enough to convince them, locked as they were in a death struggle with Napoleon, to ease off on Orders in Council. Nor were those measures enough to stop Britain from obtaining manpower for its fleet by impressing Americans. In accepting the offer in the Cadore letter, Madison, although still technically relying on economic measures, was clearing the path toward war.