James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (46 page)

Madison buttressed his acceptance of the Cadore letter with legislative sanction. Jefferson’s son-in-law John Eppes introduced a bill in the House imposing trade restrictions on Britain on the grounds that the French had lifted the Berlin and Milan decrees. The legislation emphasized that it was the president’s prerogative, not the courts’, to make the determination that the French decrees had been lifted. The last thing the president needed at this point was to have Federalists on the bench overturning his decision.

The bill was debated in the last days of the Eleventh Congress, and a handful of Federalists joined by John Randolph of Roanoke tried to defeat it by delaying it. When Eppes, speaking the truth, accused Randolph of dilatory tactics, Randolph called him a liar, reason aplenty according to the
code duello
for Eppes to issue a challenge, which he promptly did. In the confusion that followed, the Republican majority strong-armed the legislation through. Some weeks later Dolley Madison intervened to achieve an accommodation between Randolph and Eppes,
who wrote to his father-in-law, “So detestable a minority never existed in any country.”
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THE GENIAL MANNER
Madison assumed with most members of Congress seems to have kept them on occasion from realizing the audacity of his decisions. That phenomenon might have been at work as he took a very aggressive approach to West Florida, where the population was overwhelmingly American and since 1808, the year Napoleon invaded Spain, increasingly restive. With Spanish authority weakening, discontented citizens in West Florida held a convention, organized forces to capture Spain’s fort at Baton Rouge, and requested that the United States make them a part of the Union. Madison decided on a proclamation asserting that West Florida was a part of U.S. territory, a position he had maintained since the Louisiana Purchase. The United States had long expected to gain authority over West Florida through negotiations, the proclamation said, but now that a crisis had arisen, he, as president of the United States, had “deemed it right and requisite that possession should be taken of the said territory in the name and behalf of the United States.”
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To Jefferson, Madison admitted there were “questions as to the authority of the executive” concerning West Florida, but, he wrote, there was “great weight” in the argument that the United States could legally take possession of it, “above all if there be danger of its passing into the hands of a third and dangerous party.”
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The British had been losing no time in trying to take advantage of Spanish weakness in the New World, and a British threat to West Florida, as Madison saw it, trumped any doubts he had. If he did not act, the United States could find West Florida—and its invaluable outlets to the gulf—under British occupation.

Congress was between sessions, and so Madison, taking advantage of the long delays that occurred between making a decision and implementing it some distance away, sent copies of his proclamation south but made no public announcement until he delivered his message to Congress—which was about the same time that West Floridians began
to learn that the United States had taken possession. There was surprisingly little grumbling about the president’s having kept the proclamation secret for more than a month, and a Senate effort to prove the unconstitutionality of his actions came to a bad end. Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts tried to show that the United States had no right to occupy West Florida since it had not been part of the Louisiana grant. He read from a letter written by Talleyrand to make his point, but it turned out that document had never been made public. Pickering became the first person in the history of the Senate to be censured by that body. By a vote of 20 to 7, he was found to have violated the injunction of secrecy.
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MADISON HAD
fiercely opposed a national bank in 1791, but now, twenty years later, it had become a central part of the country’s financial system. Madison had become convinced of the necessity of renewing its charter, particularly as the country drew nearer to war and would likely need loans. But Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin, who worked on the renewal, found himself facing the same Republican senators who had objected to his presence in the Madison cabinet in the first place. On the crucial vote in the Senate, both Giles and Smith opposed the bank, with the result that the vote was tied. Vice President Clinton, who wanted to be president rather than Madison’s number two, cast the deciding vote—against the administration’s position and against the bill.
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Madison’s efforts to mollify Republican opponents in the Senate had not worked and had left him with a secretary of state who was not merely incompetent but untrustworthy. Time and again, the president heard reports of Secretary Smith undercutting his policies. His worst sin had been letting the British know that he, Smith, did not believe the French decrees had been lifted. Smith was also divisive, lining up with his brother and his senatorial allies, particularly in opposition to Gallatin. They used the Philadelphia
Aurora,
a newspaper with which they were aligned, to accuse Gallatin of everything from financial irregularities to being the real power behind Madison’s policies. Gallatin wrote
to the president pointing out the damage that a cabinet divided against itself was causing and submitting his resignation. Madison refused it. Gallatin was not the cabinet member he needed to get rid of. He called in Robert Smith, read him chapter and verse on his failings, and asked for his resignation.
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Getting rid of Smith was an essential step as the nation approached war, and so was appointing a qualified replacement. Good cabinet members have always been hard to find, but that was especially true in the early republic, when cabinet departments were very small, some composed of fewer than a dozen clerks. This meant there was no training ground to produce a cadre of former deputy and assistant secretaries from which a future president might choose. Thus it is not surprising, given his limited choices, that Madison thought of James Monroe, even though Monroe, despite their many personal connections, had twice challenged him for office. Madison had been truly irritated with Monroe for letting his name be put in competition for the presidency. In the months leading up to the 1808 election, he had pointedly skipped a summer visit to Monroe’s Albemarle County farm, a snub for which Dolley Madison tried to compensate by sending Mrs. Monroe some snuff wrapped in paper. But Jefferson had since been giving the president reports that Monroe had separated himself “from those who led him astray,” and while he was distinctly interested in “his own honor and grade,” he was “not unready to serve the public.” After ensuring that Monroe would accept the State Department position if asked and soothing Monroe’s feelings, still hurt over the treaty he had negotiated with the British in 1806 not being sent to the Senate, Madison offered him the position of secretary of state.
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Smith did not go quietly. He published a pamphlet in which he accused the president of being weak and endeavored to show himself as a strong defender of U.S. interests—his evidence of the latter being documents that Madison had written for him. Even the president’s opponents thought Smith’s pamphlet hurt him rather than the president. One of them called it a singular example “of a man’s giving the finishing stroke to his own character in his eagerness to ruin his enemy.”
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MADISON WAS NOW
on a track from which he would not waver, although the French frequently made a steady course difficult. While they left some American ships unmolested, they took hostile action against others, undercutting the president’s claim that the French decrees had been lifted. In July 1811 came reports that Napoleon had opened French ports to American commerce and released American ships that had been held there for having traded with Britain before they arrived in France. This news put the president in a triumphant mood—until he found out that the French were keeping American ships they had captured at sea.
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The British, by contrast, consistently justified the stance Madison had taken against them. Their frigates once more blockaded New York’s harbor, stopped American ships, and sailed away with impressed American sailors. To counter these activities, the forty-four-gun USS
President
was sent from Annapolis to New York, but before the ship rounded Cape Charles, the
President
’s commodore, John Rodgers, saw a British ship, apparently the
Guerriere,
a man-of-war. The
President
gave chase and late in the evening drew within hailing distance. As Rodgers explained what happened next, he called to the ship twice, and it answered with cannon fire. The
President
responded in kind, and after a few more exchanges the other ship grew silent in the ocean darkness. The next morning Rodgers discovered that instead of a frigate, he had been in combat with a much smaller twenty-gun ship, the
Little Belt
. Nine of its crew were dead, twenty-three wounded, and the British, who claimed that the Americans had fired first, were furious. The president supported Rodgers’s actions and so did most members of the public, who regarded the attack on the
Little Belt
as just retaliation for the British assault on the USS
Chesapeake
. Some measure of national feeling was evident in a toast offered at a Fourth of July party held on the banks of the Potomac. After high-ranking officials had departed, General John Mason raised his glass to Rodgers. “
Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re,
” he said, offering a loose translation: “Speak when you are spoken to, or God damn you, I’ll sink you.”
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The British government sent a new minister to the United States, Augustus John Foster, who upon arrival questioned Madison’s assertion that the French decrees had been lifted, protested the trade restrictions that the United States had imposed on his country, and threatened retaliation. Most important in the president’s eyes, Foster revealed that even if Britain were convinced that France had lifted the Berlin and Milan decrees insofar as the United States was concerned, the British would not rescind their Orders in Council. For that to happen, Foster said, the French would have to repeal the decrees with respect to Great Britain as well. This was an impossible condition, and if the British stuck to it, as they were likely to do, war, in Madison’s mind, was inevitable.
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Like most presidents before and since, Madison showed the weight of office. The lines in his face were frequently commented upon now, perhaps most unkindly by writer Washington Irving, who called him “a withered little apple-John.” Still, his health was generally good during the first two and a half years of his presidency. He had a fever in the summer of 1810 and apparently some anxiety that a sudden attack was in the offing, but the concern passed. He put the highest priority on keeping himself well, which meant that in 1811, even with war likely impending, he made plans to be out of Washington during the late summer months. After calling upon the Twelfth Congress to convene on November 4, a month early, to consider “great and weighty matters,” he departed for what Mrs. Madison called “two months on our mountain in health and peace.”
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THE TWELFTH CONGRESS
opened in November under new leadership. A young and charismatic Kentuckian, Henry Clay, was elected Speaker of the House, and his ascendancy was no accident. Clay had served briefly in the Senate, a body of too much “solemn stillness,” he said, but while he was there, he made his view on war with Great Britain unmistakable. In a memorable speech, he had declared, “I prefer the troubled ocean of war demanded by the honor and independence of the country . . . to the tranquil, putrescent pool of ignominious peace.”
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His election to the speakership had been driven by men of similar views, who were, like him, young and relatively new to the House. Coming from the South and the West, they brought a fiery frontier pride to Washington that made them regard British insults and injuries as intolerable. These war hawks, as they soon were called, hated the attack on the
Chesapeake,
deeply resented the ship seizures the British were guilty of, and viewed impressment as a dreadful affront to national honor.

Many of them had also lost close relatives in Indian raids. John C. Calhoun, an intense, square-jawed newcomer from South Carolina, had lost a grandmother, an uncle, and two cousins. His fellow South Carolinian the eloquent Langdon Cheves remembered an aunt who had been scalped near Bulltown Fort, where he had been born. Felix Grundy, a rotund Tennessean, had lost three brothers in the Indian wars, and among his indelible memories was the sight of his oldest brother dying from tomahawk wounds.
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It was an article of belief with these congressmen that the British were inciting Indians to murder settlers, and that conviction increased their determination for war.

Madison had a new and different audience to address in the Twelfth Congress, and the message he wrote for its opening was strong—too strong in Gallatin’s view. Madison softened some of his words in deference to the Treasury secretary, but the point of his address remained unmistakable. Despite all the efforts the United States had made, the British persisted in treating American commerce as though it were that of a colony: “With this evidence of hostile inflexibility in trampling on rights which no independent nation can relinquish, Congress will feel the duty of putting the United States into an armor and an attitude demanded by the crisis and corresponding with the national spirit and expectations.” Specifically, the president wanted the ranks of the regular army filled out and enlistments extended. He recommended both an auxiliary force and a volunteer force and noted that the militia should be readied. Aware of the resistance that remained in Congress to an expanded navy, he did not press hard on that point, simply asking members to consider “provisions on the subject of our naval force.” He was
also anticipating that the war would primarily be a land campaign, one that would attempt to coerce Britain by invading Canada.
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