James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (48 page)

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THE PRESIDENT
was keenly aware that U.S. victories at sea, exhilarating though they were, did not make up for the dreadful performances on land. Brigadier General Hull had not only failed to invade Canada successfully but also left the British in control of U.S. territory. Dearborn, who like Hull had compiled a fine record in the Revolution, had finally made it to the Canadian border with an army of six thousand but after a single skirmish had fallen back to northern New York. Neither Hull nor Dearborn should have been leading forces in 1812. They were fifty-nine and sixty-one, respectively, Hull was not well, and Dearborn was physically unfit. Their selection to lead military action revealed the failure of the United States to train new leaders. West Point, established in 1802, was small, its programs had not been formalized, and as Madison had noted in his 1810 message to Congress, its buildings were in decay. In that message as well as in the one sent to Congress in 1811, he had recommended additional “seminaries, where the elementary principles of the art of war can be taught without actual war and without the expense of extensive and standing armies.” Two months before war was declared, Congress had finally provided additional professors and expanded the corps of cadets at West Point, but the early war effort was at the mercy of generals whose time had passed. Madison’s secretary of war, William Eustis, though not responsible for the generals’ failings,
was widely perceived to be, and he knew it. On December 3, 1812, he resigned.
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The other change in the Madison cabinet was a different matter. Naval secretary Paul Hamilton’s department had overseen glorious successes, but his drunkenness had become notorious. He had been embarrassingly inebriated at the celebrations aboard the
Constellation
and at Tomlinson’s Hotel and was seldom able to work past noon. The French minister to the United States, Louis Sérurier, reported home that “Mr. Madison and his friends tried by every means to cure him. It was useless.”
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At the end of December, Hamilton resigned, and Madison replaced him with William Jones, a sea captain and former member of Congress, who would serve with distinction.

Finding a new secretary of war was much harder. Madison had at least two refusals (including Secretary of State James Monroe’s) before John Armstrong, who had recently served as U.S. minister to France, accepted. Armstrong’s résumé was impressive. He was a Republican from New York with military experience, had served in the Senate, and came with outstanding recommendations. But even after appointing him, Madison remained troubled by questions about how loyal he would be. It was widely known that he had authored the address posted at Newburgh at the end of the Revolution, which had urged army officers to threaten Congress if that was what was necessary to get their back pay. And Armstrong was a man of curious personality, haughty, disputatious, and ambitious, while at the same time being indolent.
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He left enemies wherever he served and quickly set about making more of them in Madison’s cabinet. Tensions grew particularly high between Armstrong and Secretary of State Monroe, both of whom saw themselves as potential presidents.

In the midst of making cabinet changes, Madison attended the launching of the rebuilt frigate
Adams
at Washington’s naval yard. As a newspaper reported it, “An opposition member of Congress, who was standing next the president when the frigate glided off the stocks, abruptly said to him, ‘What a pity, sir, that the vessel of
state
won’t glide as smoothly in her course as
this
vessel does.’ ‘It would, sir,’ replied the
president, ‘if the
crew
would do their duty as well.’” Madison’s sense of humor had taken on an edge. Although he had gotten much of what he wanted from the Twelfth Congress, he had endured unrelenting abuse from the Federalist minority. Boston’s Josiah Quincy, who said that the country had been led since 1801 by “two Virginians and a foreigner,” meaning Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin, distinguished himself with castigations so foul that he had to edit his words before they were printed. Fortunately, the president had Henry Clay on his side. Clay had worried to a friend that Madison was too kind “for the storms of war,” writing that “nature has cast him in too benevolent a mold,” but in two days of remarks on the floor of the House he put his much-lauded eloquence to use showing that virtue in the executive had its advantage. “The Rising Star of the West,” as the Speaker was called, reminded Josiah Quincy that Federalists had violated “freedom of the person” and “freedom of the press” with the Alien and Sedition Acts. There was a great difference, Clay said, between Madison’s administration and its opponents—and “it is in a sacred regard for personal liberty.”
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WHEN THE THIRTEENTH CONGRESS
gathered in May 1813, Madison had another naval victory to report. The American sloop of war
Hornet
had defeated the
Peacock,
a British sloop, near British Guiana. He had to work harder to make the case for good news on land. “The attack and capture of York [Toronto today] is . . . a presage of future and greater victories,” he told Congress. But American losses had been substantial at York, not in battle, but as the result of a powder magazine exploding. Among those killed was Brigadier General Zebulon Pike, famed for his expedition to the American Southwest. The victory would turn out to be costly in another way. The Parliament buildings of York, which was the capital of Upper Canada, had been set afire, and the British, convinced that the United States was responsible, would find occasion for revenge.
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In his address the president assured Congress that a loan arranged by the Treasury would suffice for the rest of the year. He did not
mention, though was surely aware, that no thanks was due to a new member of the House. Federalist Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, defeated in his reelection bid for the Senate and now returned to Washington as a freshman representative, had conducted a vigorous campaign in the pages of the
Salem Gazette
to discourage Federalist moneymen from subscribing to the loan. The strategy of starving the government in order to stop the war would be increasingly taken up by Federalist newspapers such as the
Boston Gazette
and even employed from the pulpit. Declared the Reverend Elijah Parish of Byfield, Massachusetts, “If the rich men continue to furnish money, war will continue till the mountains are melted with blood—till every field in America is white with the bones of the people.”
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Taxes would have to be laid going forward in order to ensure the nation’s credit, the president told Congress in his message, which was not news that was happily received. A new Republican member noted that “Congress was to impose the burden of taxes on a divided people” after years of hearing from party leaders “to look upon a tax gatherer as a thief, if not to shoot him as a burglar.”
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But perhaps the most newsworthy part of Madison’s message concerned his acceptance of an offer by Czar Alexander of Russia to mediate a peace settlement between the United States and Britain. The Russian offer had reached the United States at a crucial time. Napoleon, who had invaded Russia with some half million men, had been forced to retreat from Moscow and had fled to Paris, leaving behind the remnants of the Grande Armée. Such a huge defeat did not bode well for the United States. The weaker Napoleon became, the greater the likelihood of the British focusing more attention on their foe across the Atlantic. Great Britain had already announced a blockade of the coast, New England excepted, and a British flotilla had sailed into the Chesapeake, where it was burning and pillaging coastal areas, usually unhindered, though there were examples of citizen soldiers effectively fighting back. Militia and sailors on Craney Island turned back the British to save Norfolk from ruin. On St. Michaels on the Eastern Shore, a few hardy militiamen gave as good as they got from British artillery and managed
to save their town’s shipyards. The citizens of Washington feared that the British would march on the capital and, as Dolley Madison reported the rumor, “set fire to the offices and president’s house.” “I do not tremble at this,” she wrote, but she was insulted when the British rear admiral George Cockburn managed to get a message to her saying he would soon “make his bow” in her drawing room.
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Madison had not waited for Congress to assemble to name a delegation to the Russian peace talks. John Quincy Adams, already in St. Petersburg, was to be joined by Federalist senator James Bayard and Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin. By the time of the president’s message to Congress, Bayard and Gallatin had already sailed, Gallatin taking Dolley’s son, Payne, with him. Despite her efforts and those of the president, Payne had found no respectable occupation that interested him. The Madisons no doubt hoped that time spent in Gallatin’s sensible company would be of benefit.

Madison might have hoped that the Senate would regard the Treasury secretary’s posting as a fait accompli, but as anything concerning Gallatin had long done, his nomination as envoy sent some senators, Republicans as well as Federalists, into a rage. Senate committees demanded a meeting with the president, but before one could take place, Madison became extremely ill. James Monroe wrote to Thomas Jefferson that he suffered from a fever “of that kind called the remittent.” Because such fevers were thought to be caused by miasma, or bad air coming from marshes, they were also called
mal’aria,
or malaria. Chills and vomiting were followed by high temperatures, then sweating and remission before the cycle began again, usually in two or three days. Remittent fever was one of the few ailments for which there was an effective treatment in Madison’s time: Peruvian bark, or the bark of the cinchona tree. It worked because it contained quinine, which attacked the parasites transmitted to humans by infected mosquitoes. These mechanisms were not understood in Madison’s day, which meant that bark was also taken for other ailments. Jefferson took it for his headaches. William Cullen, author of
First Lines of the Practice of Physic,
recommended it for epilepsy.
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The bark in the president’s house was probably kept in a small maple medicine chest that is displayed today in the White House Map Room. Madison had three doctors in attendance, one of whom probably ground the bark and stirred it into a liquid, possibly wine, but Madison was so sick that for more than two weeks it was difficult for him to drink the bitter infusion.
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One imagines Dolley Madison, at his bedside around the clock, trying time and again to get him to take a sip.

Many well-wishers wrote to the president, but his political enemies were relentless. The
Federal Republican
predicted his demise, reporting that he was in “a state of debility, so exhausted, as to render his chance of even a few more months at least precarious.” The illness had affected his mind, the newspaper reported: “It is weakened and disordered, now utterly sinking beneath his high duties and
now
bursting forth in paroxysms of rage. . . . Not a few who have recently visited him have left his chamber under a full conviction of the derangement of his mind.”
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John Randolph of Roanoke was no longer a member of Congress, having been defeated by Jefferson’s son-in-law John Eppes, but there were new representatives with considerable skill at vituperation and little inclination to cut the president any slack. One was Representative Daniel Webster, a brash young lawyer from New Hampshire. From the moment he was sworn in, he was determined to prove that the president had duped the nation into war by misrepresenting French intentions. He went so far as to elbow his way into the president’s sickroom to present resolutions to that effect. “The president was in his bed,” he reported, “sick of a fever, his night cap on his head, his wife attending him.” Added Webster with satisfaction, “I think he will find
no relief
from my prescription.”
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Finally, on July 2, Mrs. Madison was able to tell the president’s secretary, Edward Coles, who was ill himself, “Mr. Madison recovers. For the last three days, his fever has been so slight as to permit him to take bark every hour and with good effect. It has been three weeks since I have nursed him night and day—sometimes in despair! But now that I see he will get well I feel as if I should die myself, with fatigue.” While Madison had been ill, details had come in of defeats on the Niagara
front at Stoney Creek and Beaver Dams. The president was probably still in his sickbed on July 6, 1813, when he ordered Secretary Armstrong to relieve General Dearborn of his command. He was still returning to health in mid-July when word came that British warships were headed up the Potomac. Secretary of War Armstrong rode with a troop of regulars to man Fort Warburton, which overlooked the Potomac. Secretary of State Monroe, not to be outdone, led volunteer cavalry all the way to Blackiston Island on the Chesapeake Bay and suggested attacking the British forces he found there. Madison told him no, tactfully emphasizing that if anything went wrong, it “would be peculiarly distressing not only to your friends but to the public.” After setting pulses racing in the summer of 1813, the British squadron moved away from the coast but continued to keep nerves frayed by leaving some ships to linger in the Chesapeake for months.
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Senators pushed again for a meeting about peace commissioners, and Madison received them but refused to discuss their objection that Gallatin should not serve as both Treasury secretary and envoy. Because he would go no further than acknowledging an executive-senatorial disagreement, the senators’ meeting with the president was brief—as was the interval before they voted down the Gallatin nomination.
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Madison’s stubborn defense of presidential prerogative had come at a cost.

His recovery continued despite the Senate, and on August 2, 1813, Richard Rush, the comptroller of the Treasury, was able to report to John Adams that “Mr. Madison rides out and attends to business again.” This was news the former president was glad to hear. He believed the war “both just and necessary” and was thrilled with U.S. victories at sea. He was gratified that Madison was in favor of expanding the navy, which he, Adams, had led the way in creating. “I rejoice that Mr. Madison[’s] health continues to improve,” he wrote. “His life is of great importance.”
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