Madison and Jefferson (102 page)

According to the anti-administration
Nantucket Gazette
, while the
National Intelligencer
“prattled about the purity of election,” pressure had been applied to the electors of at least two states in order to push Monroe past Crawford. Under the Republicans, the Constitution was ignored, and free suffrage was a myth: “These men carry all their elections by corruption.” Federalist holdouts took the position that there was hypocrisy galore among the Republicans, whether pro-Madison in 1808 or pro-Monroe in 1816. But that was all the discredited party could do now; its editorializers shook their heads at unmannerly democrats and charged that “Peter Porcupine” and Joseph Dennie had been right all along: the party of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe encouraged profligacy in America.
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The prevailing spirit among Republicans comes alive in the Fourth of July 1816 oration given in Windsor, Vermont, by a War of 1812 army officer named Selleck Osborn. As a Jeffersonian newspaper editor in Federalist Connecticut, Osborn had spent much of the year 1806 in jail for his supposedly libelous writings. He was a marvelous satirist who poked fun at the disgruntled Federalists who mechanically labeled Republicans as infidels and libertines. Osborn described his home state as “a country conquered by lawyers” and did not shy from exposing a justice of the peace who dispensed injustice. For speaking the truth he had to be punished most cruelly. It was not enough to lock him up—Osborn was given a mentally disturbed cellmate who had raped and murdered.
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The Republican editor was much restored by 1816 and living in the free state of Vermont. That year he delivered a Fourth of July oration lacking none of the pizzazz that had earlier gotten him into trouble. Painting the Federalist residue as men of gloom and doom, he berated their “idle talk” about the taxes of 1816 by asking them to remember the taxes of 1799, when their party had been in charge. They could speak at length about the faults of democracy but made no acknowledgment of democracy’s merits. “We shall hear many dismal prophecies,” he said pertly, “but nothing about the falsehood of all their preceding ones.” The one line summed up his critique of an effete ideology.

He did not profess that the Republicans were perfect. “The sun itself is not without spots,” he assured. But in praising the Virginia presidents for their efforts to see that independence stood “deeply rooted where it was planted forty years ago,” Osborn drew an unusual comparison between the wars waged by two chief executives: “In a second struggle for independence, we have, some of us, been prone to lay our misfortunes at the door of our best and ablest friends—The same spirit that would have consigned a Washington to oblivion and disgrace …, would have deposed and sent a Madison to Elba [Napoleon’s place of exile], and placed in his station, it is difficult to say whom, but certainly not a better man.” The comparison was meant to level the playing field of history: Madison had his detractors, and so did Washington.
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On that same Fourth of July, the Madisons threw what Dolley described as a “profuse and handsome” picnic dinner on the shady lawn of Montpelier. Ninety of their country neighbors attended. Jefferson was not present, being then at his Poplar Forest retreat, more than one hundred miles away. Returning to Albemarle, he paid the Madisons a visit at Montpelier in mid-August.
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Little could be done to stop one more Virginia Republican triumph. In the last year of his presidency, Madison spent June through early October in Virginia, his longest absence from the capital since 1800. It was a sign of his impending retirement and also a recognition that he was likely to spend the rest of his term without having to face any sudden crises. Entering the presidency at a time of acute anxiety, he exited it amid a growing sense of possibility. Meanwhile, to no one’s surprise, Monroe soundly defeated his Federalist rival, New York senator Rufus King, failing to win only the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware. Perhaps the oddly indifferent Federalist nominee said it best, as he explained why his loss was foreordained. Monroe, King observed, “had the zealous support of nobody, and he was exempt from the hostility of Everybody.”
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Before Madison took his leave, the overall atmosphere of experiment and renewal brought the constitutional issue of “internal improvements” (highway and canal building) front and center for the first time since 1808. Back then, with Jefferson’s blessing, and in a desire to secure the Union, Treasury Secretary Gallatin had prepared an elaborate report for Congress with a series of recommendations detailing the practical means and probable expense involved in linking North, South, and West. With the retirement of the national debt there would be fewer barriers to public works projects; and with its responsibility for appropriations, Congress could enact legislation without stepping on the rights of the states whose land and navigable waterways were involved in the prospective projects.

Like Jefferson, Madison favored internal improvements in principle. All understood that good roads contributed to an increase in land values. Local authorities had traditionally built and maintained roads through taxes, but work usually stopped at the county line. Internal improvement, as a unifying national program, was something different, and the problem that concerned both the third and fourth presidents was whether a constitutional amendment was necessary to enable the federal government to undertake large projects. But whereas Madison embraced a federal responsibility for road building in service to national security and mail delivery, Jefferson was less committed to the principle; both were skeptical about internal improvements for strictly commercial ends.

As Madison completed his second term, the age of the canal and steamboat
was getting under way. The expansive energy that these innovations were to provide to a generation of settlers, and to towns all along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, was entirely unprecedented. DeWitt Clinton, Madison’s opponent in the last presidential election, was, after many years of brash maneuvering, finally to achieve greatness as the lead proponent of the Erie Canal. When the federal government refused to offer support, he established a canal commission composed equally of Federalists and Clintonians. At the end of 1815 he began appealing for funds from within the Empire State.

Monroe’s running mate from New York, Governor Tompkins, was less than wholly enthusiastic about the project. Jefferson, on the other hand, looked over the plans Clinton had sent him and replied with zest: “The conception is bold and great, and the accomplishment will be equally useful.” Always eager for proofs of America’s superiority to the Old World, he added: “The works of Europe in that line shrink into insignificance in comparison.” For Jefferson, in so many ways a Virginia apologist, progress was, on certain occasions, a matter of national pride.

The New York canal commissioners went ahead with a memorial to Congress in December 1816, offering an attractive cost-benefit analysis. But their final gambit yielded nothing, because the outgoing president made the matter moot. Just one day before Monroe’s inauguration, Madison vetoed the Bonus Bill championed by Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, which would have taken the first steps toward defining a permanent federal role in this crucial arena of national development and national prosperity. Meanwhile the Erie Canal, as an entirely state-sponsored enterprise, went on to make a profit even before completion, spurring Ohio and other states to imitate it, while making the federal government appear inept in the realm of internal improvements.

Madison shocked his allies in Congress when he issued the veto.
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It was he, after all, who had urged Congress to take up the issue in his final annual message on December 3, 1816. And it was only after considerable wrangling that the House and Senate were able to come up with an agreement on the internal improvements dilemma. During those weeks of debate, the president reached the conclusion that the Bonus Bill was unconstitutional, that it undercut, in his words, the “definite partition” between the “General and State Governments.” It appeared to him too incoherent, too nonspecific, to accomplish its noble goal. It might feed dishonest dealings between national legislators and interested state officials looking for advantages.

Jefferson, and later Gallatin, agreed with Madison’s second reading of the Bonus Bill. The most respected analyst of the subject, historian John L. Larson, offers a somewhat cynical interpretation of what went on in President Madison’s mind: he had come to distrust the founders’ successors. Writes Larson, “Madison watched young men with no roots in the founding take up the game of constitutional construction … Madison hoped to bind the rising generation with the authority of the Union’s creators.” If true, it might have reflected his fear of the future, but it also shows a lack of introspection on Madison’s part—for he had broken with his own past views more than once.
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Another executive decision that Madison reached at the end of his tenure in office spoke to his interest in the authority of the Union’s creators, this one far less complicated. He directed the patriotic John Trumbull to paint four large murals for the Rotunda of the rebuilt Capitol building, taking as their subject what Madison viewed as the most memorable events of the Revolution: the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the resignation of George Washington from the Continental Army, the surrender of General John Burgoyne after the Battle of Saratoga, and the surrender of General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown. They would be life-size representations of dynamic proceedings, each one twelve by eighteen feet.

Jefferson had played an unconscious role in Madison’s executive decision. Trumbull had conceived his iconic
Declaration of Independence
and
Surrender at Yorktown
in 1786–87, while a guest at Jefferson’s home in Paris.
The Resignation of General Washington
was of particular significance to Jefferson: as a member of the Confederation Congress, he had been present at the ceremony in Annapolis, in December 1783, bearing witness as the victorious general, speaking in slow, hushed tones, resigned his military commission and acknowledged civilian authority over the United States. “Having now finished the work assigned to me, I retire from the great theatre of action,” Washington had recited at that time. And now Madison was to do the same.
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MADISON AND JEFFERSON EACH KEPT UP A SPIRITED CORRESPONDENCE
with state and national figures. But as their friend and neighbor Monroe assumed the presidency, their impact on current political debates was less direct and, to a certain degree, self-limited. When asked by the younger generation to clarify some past action or intent, they would do what they could to give a durable answer. As gentlemen, it mattered to them how they were received; as Revolutionaries who had lived through a highly partisan age, they cared how they would be thought of by posterity.

The political environment in which they had come of age was fast receding. Men born in the 1770s, and even the 1780s, were now the dominant voices in statehouses and the U.S. Congress. In 1813, when Benjamin Rush passed away, Jefferson and John Adams were already tallying the names of those signers of the Declaration of Independence whose obituaries had yet to be published. “I am the only one South of the Patomac,” Jefferson reported.
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As, one by one, the Revolutionary generation began to die off, Madison
and Jefferson both took more of an interest in replenishing the earth—that is, in scientific farming. Some of their most involved correspondence addressed matters of agriculture, and Madison became president of the agricultural society of Jefferson’s Albemarle County. The pair were as concerned now with the exhaustion of Virginia’s soil as they had been with Virginia’s stake in the American Union.

On March 4, 1817, outgoing President Madison was on hand for his successor’s inaugural address. It was delivered outdoors because the rebuilt Capitol would not be reoccupied until 1819. “National honor is national property of the highest value,” Monroe pronounced. “The sentiment in the mind of every citizen is national strength.” The style of address was not Madisonian, but it expressed a continuation of policy. At the end of Monroe’s oration, just as Madison had used the same occasion eight years earlier to ask to be “pardoned for not suppressing” his heartfelt sympathy with the retiring President Jefferson, Monroe said: “Of my immediate predecessor …, I shall be pardoned for expressing my earnest wishes that he may long enjoy in his retirement the affections of a grateful country, the best reward of exalted talents and the most faithful and meritorious service.”

Like Jefferson in 1809, Madison in 1817 remained in Washington to participate in celebrations in honor of the new president. And like Jefferson, he would never return to Washington after his retirement to central Virginia. “I shall hasten my departure from this place as much as possible,” he told Jefferson in mid-February, “but I fear I shall be detained longer after the 4th of March than I wish.” In fact it was a whole month into the Monroe administration before Madison rode home.
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The New Yorker James Kirke Paulding accompanied him by steamboat along the Potomac on the first leg of the journey. Nationally known for both political satire and romantic fiction, Paulding had pseudonymously authored a lovely farce,
The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan
, as the War of 1812 began. Madison enjoyed it immensely, complimenting it before knowing its author and calling it to Jefferson’s attention. In 1815 he gave Paulding his first Washington job, an appointment to the Board of Navy Commissioners. In the waning months of the Madison presidency, they relaxed on a good many evenings, after the day’s business was behind. “I have several times made the President laugh in a way altogether unbecoming a great man,” Paulding wrote then. “He enjoys a joke hugely.” Aboard the steamboat on his way to retirement, Madison was, Paulding reported, “as playful as a child.” He “talked and jested with every body on
board, & reminded me of a school Boy on a long vacation.” Later in 1817 the author of
The Diverting History
found that he could be easily diverted himself. Jim Paulding spent several leisurely weeks in Madison’s company at Montpelier, as much taken by Madison’s wit as by his stock of old anecdotes—“for he was a capital story teller.” Others said the same thing about this man whom history has painted too soberly.