Madison and Jefferson (104 page)

During Monroe’s two terms in office, it became increasingly apparent that the immediate future of the republic lay in the hands of those who had not been schooled in the Virginia way. It was the beginning of a long slide for the Old Dominion. Its planter gentry was treading water as the North developed vibrant new industries and the West took on a life of its own—
America’s fastest-growing city at this time was Cincinnati, Ohio. Canals and railroads were bound to connect the diversifying West to the Northeast, leaving the once-mighty South behind. Dependence on slavery intensified, old fears and jealousies refused to die, and the members of one section called into question the character and intentions of the other.

Though a southerner himself, a slave owner, and an ardent expansionist, Andrew Jackson made Thomas Jefferson politically uncomfortable. Nor did he relate easily to the mind of James Madison. The one occasion, in late 1815, when Jackson sat with the fourth president, their conversation was less than lively, and the frontier fighter’s eyes wandered to the ruins of public buildings. This brief vignette, recorded by a Jackson aide, does not say a lot, though perhaps it symbolizes the lack of connection between two who did not quite see eye to eye.

On the other hand, General Jackson believed that he had, in President Monroe, a man he could work with and, hopefully, influence. On the fifth president’s inauguration day, before launching into a long, advice-filled letter on everything from enforcing loyalty to directing policy, Jackson noted, with what sounds like mere formality: “Your Predecessor accomplished much for his country. None could have served with more virtuous zeal—yet there still remains undone, much for you to perform.” What he expected of Monroe was the cultivation of peace and safety on Jackson’s terms, which meant allowing his major general to push for wider national boundaries.
¹³

Before he became president himself, the irrepressible Jackson had a way of courting sitting presidents and their secretaries of war until all disappointed him. At the time of his first militia command, he had made hopeful appeals to Jefferson, only to be disgusted by the president’s embrace of the dishonest General Wilkinson. He found little to criticize as long as Madison condoned an aggressive Indian policy; but he never believed Madison at all skilled in war management. Monroe was different because he was the only member of the Virginia Dynasty who had been a soldier and had seen action on a Revolutionary battlefield. “I have waited with anxious solicitude,” he flattered Monroe, “for the period to arrive, when I could congratulate my Country and myself on your being placed in the Presidential Chair of this rising republic.” He despised Monroe’s secretary of the treasury (Madison’s last secretary of war) William H. Crawford of Georgia, and he did not know enough to distrust Monroe’s secretary of war, John C. Calhoun, who successfully hid his condemnation of the general.

Jackson sometimes misjudged men. Authorized by Calhoun, in 1818, to cross into Spanish East Florida for the sole purpose of pacifying the Seminole
Indians, he interpreted his orders loosely and launched a complete invasion, refusing to stop until he had embarrassed the administration. Monroe’s instinct was to accept his explanation that Indian aggressiveness was the result of “interference & excitement” by the Spanish authorities. But after word arrived that the Tennessean had reduced the Spanish forts, Monroe wrote to Madison: “The fact is, that genl Jackson was not authorised to take them, & did it on his own responsibility.” When Jackson hanged two British subjects for their collaboration with the Seminoles and caused an international uproar, Madison and Jefferson both rationalized that they were not close enough to the action to determine whether Jackson had overstepped his authority; they gave the general some leeway. A British political cartoonist labeled Jackson a “butcher,” while depicting President Monroe as manic, wild-eyed, and eternally grateful to the pitiless soldier.

To all appearances, President Monroe, like President Madison during the West Florida Republic interlude, was uninvolved in the action—reluctant to disturb relations with the Spanish and British. Most likely aggressive actions were condoned in both incidents because communications were slow and insufficiently specific: Madison, in 1810, and Monroe, in 1818, both enjoyed what is today called plausible deniability.

At the time of Fulwar Skipwith’s brief tenure as chief executive of the West Florida Republic, the Spanish military presence had been negligible, requiring nothing more than a token U.S. force to bring the disturbance to a resolution. In the case of Jackson’s bloodier invasion of East Florida, when the cabinet weighed in privately on the general’s behavior, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, whose background and personality was the least Jacksonian, proved to be the one voice, and yet an overpowering one, in favor of his precipitous move. It was in the nature of frontier warfare, he said, for “retributive justice” to be applied. Monroe adopted a neutral pose until Adams made his case. But Jackson allowed himself to believe that Monroe had been in his column all along.

Congress investigated, and Jackson, facing censure, was obliged to come to Washington to explain himself. Monroe told Jefferson that if Jackson had been brought to trial for exceeding his orders, “the interior of the country would have been much agitated, if not convulsed by appeals to sectional interests.” Most everyone believed it was high time that Madrid was pushed to negotiate a firm boundary between U.S. and Spanish possessions. Madison and Jefferson were on board with this policy, adding their tacit approval to an illegal invasion that ended with the long-sought acquisition of the whole of Florida, in the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819.
¹⁴

Events had played into Monroe’s hands. In the next phase of declaring American muscle, Monroe’s name would be affixed to a doctrine that rightly should have been named after his Federalist-born-and-bred secretary of state.

If any “good feelings” remained from Monroe’s Northeast tour, they were greatly shaken in 1819. A financial panic that year disrupted the nation’s sense of its unbounded economic promise. Credit suddenly tightened, banks called in loans made to farmers and land speculators, and western land values plummeted. Expansionists blamed the Bank of the United States and eastern money men rather than their own greed. On the heels of the panic, the Territory of Missouri applied for statehood. Congressional debate centered on whether, or how long, slavery would be permitted to exist in the new state. A New York member of the House, James Tallmadge, urged his colleagues to vote to prohibit the further importation of slaves into Missouri and to arrange for the gradual emancipation of those already present. At this time, according to the national census, there were 1.5 million slaves in the United States, more than double the number there had been in 1790, and southern representatives argued that Congress lacked the authority to impose conditions on the admission of new states. In point of fact, the South was afraid of losing ground, as well as population, which would be reflected in future censuses and thus in the future composition of the House of Representatives.

As it was, northerners had every right to grumble about the three-fifths clause in the Constitution. In 1820 the slave population accounted for nearly half of South Carolina’s electoral votes. When Senator Rufus King of New York declared that slavery was “contrary to the law of nature, which is the law of God,” southerners feared for their safety; the Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates responded that King would bring on “the tragical events of St. Domingo” in America. Virginia’s reliance on tobacco production was lessening as the number of slaves in the state increased through normal procreation. Thus slave owners in need of capital insisted on retaining the right to sell slaves to new western settlers. Eventually a compromise was reached that allowed Missouri to come into the Union as a slave state, while Maine (until this time part of Massachusetts) entered as a free state. The balance between slave and free remained unchanged for
the time being. A line was drawn west from Missouri’s southern border, defining where, if not precisely how, future slave and free states would be carved out.
¹⁵

At this point Jefferson decided to weigh in on the Missouri question, writing a much-quoted letter to John Holmes of Massachusetts/Maine. When Jefferson was president, Holmes had been a Federalist member of the Massachusetts state legislature; since 1817, however, he had been serving as a Republican member of the House of Representatives, resigning in 1820 in order to participate in Maine’s state constitutional convention. To advance statehood, he pragmatically adopted the compromise position on Missouri, though the citizens of Maine opposed slavery. With Maine’s admission to the Union, Holmes was elected as one of its first two U.S. senators. He took up his new duties just as Jefferson’s letter arrived in the mail.
¹⁶

Holmes had sent Jefferson a copy of his address to his constituents on the vexing problem of Missouri, in which he argued that the question was more complex than many of his neighbors realized. “The Constitution of the United States was a compromise of conflicting rights and interests,” he reminded them. No one wanted slavery to become intractable, he assured; allowing slaves to be “carried” west was a means “to disperse but not to increase” their number.
¹⁷

Jefferson answered Holmes’s welcome essay by expressing his fears for the future of the nation. The heated debate over Missouri was “a fire bell in the night,” he wrote, which “awakened and filled me with terror.” Unfortunately, he went on, its resolution was a temporary solution, a “reprieve” only: “As it is, we have the wolf by the ear and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” True to the spirit of his worried prognostication in
Notes on Virginia
so many years before, Jefferson underscored two, and only two, words in the letter to Holmes:
practicable
and
expatriation.
The only feasible long-term solution was the removal of black Americans—the same belief, subscribed to by a majority of whites, that had brought the purportedly philanthropic American Colonization Society into being three and a half years earlier. As the historian Francis Cogliano recently observed of the “wolf by the ear” metaphor: “It invites sympathy for the man holding the wolf and understanding of his unwillingness to let it go.”
¹⁸

Holmes was entranced by Jefferson’s reasoned reply, which emphasized the moral necessity to end slavery and deemphasized the comments on black inferiority in
Notes on Virginia
that are so repellent to the modern reader. The letter was vintage Jefferson, cleverly constructed to communicate
broad-mindedness and an essential humanity. He called the “cession” of his slaves—their complete emancipation—a “bagatelle,” a matter so simple to conceive and carry out that it was scarcely worth the thought. He was saying, of course, that emancipation would be simple
if
the ex-slaves’ removal from white society was accomplished at the same time. And that was all he was really saying.

While he and Holmes were exchanging letters, Jefferson wrote offhandedly to Jack Eppes: “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years more profitable than the best man on the farm.” Whether or not Jefferson did anything to encourage their fertility, it has been shown that slave women on his plantations began bearing children at a younger age than slaves on most other southern farms, and three years earlier than the average northern woman. But it was Jefferson’s literary hyperbole that Senator Holmes found especially appealing. He had captured Jefferson saying that he would be delighted—it would not “cost” him “a second thought”—if all the slaves of the South were freed. The Missouri Compromise could be twisted to mean that its supporters did not in all ways sanction slavery.
¹⁹

After he had pored over the “wolf by the ear” letter, the Maine senator wrote back enthusiastically, telling Jefferson, as was customary in the republic of letters, that he had shared their correspondence with “a few select friends” who could be relied on to be discreet. Jefferson’s was too good a letter to be filed away. It deserved to be widely publicized, and Holmes wanted his permission to release it to the press. But having endured much abuse as a result of the publication of his indelicate, undiplomatic, or thoughtless speech, Jefferson was loath to give his consent. He had memories of the controversial preface to Paine’s
Rights of Man;
and the notorious Mazzei letter, with its implied insult to George Washington. So when the former president addressed Holmes again, he begged to be allowed to enjoy some tranquillity in his old age. “Some, I know, have forgiven, some have forgotten me,” he wrote preciously, “but many still brood in silence over their angry recollections. And why should I rekindle these smoking embers?”
²⁰

There is a Madisonian parallel to Jefferson’s Holmes letter. Indeed, nothing demonstrates the unseen side of James Madison quite so well as a literary exercise he engaged in as the Missouri crisis was concluding. Without intending it for any eyes but those he most trusted, he composed “Jonathan Bull and Mary Bull,” a kind of soap opera inspired by Paulding’s War of 1812 parable,
The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan.
Both were absurd perspectives on old rivalries—except instead of England and America, this time it was North versus South.
²¹

In Madison’s version, more legalistic and less droll than Paulding’s, Jonathan and Mary were “distant relations of” (which he crossed out in favor of “dependants of”) “old Mr. Bull.” They had inherited “contiguous estates” and moved naturally toward matrimony despite the meddling of Old Bull, who used his ample purse and his knowledge of the “subtleties of the law” to come between them. Seeing rationally, the couple devised a plan, and “an intermarriage was determined on & solemnized with a deed of settlement as usual in such opulent matches.” In Madison’s rendering, the marriage is decidedly not based on affectionate ties, though it does seem to make sense.