Madison and Jefferson (85 page)

But how strong a president would he be? During the last week of December 1808, Albert Gallatin sized him up. “Mr. Madison is, as I always knew him, slow in taking his ground, but firm when the storm arises. What I had foreseen has taken place. A majority will not adhere to the embargo much longer, and if war be not speedily determined on, submission will soon ensue.” It was not a sanguine picture.
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Madison and Jefferson had persisted with the embargo to the detriment of their political reputations. That measure was to be repealed by Congress, and there was little they could do about it. Jefferson had come into office a hero to his party, and he left it wounded but with honor intact; even “schism” had not reduced him. In Madison’s case, a paradox presented itself: rejection accompanied by electoral victory. He had much to prove.

THE MARCH 3, 1809, ISSUE OF THE NATIONAL INTELLIGENCER
marked the transition in Republican administrations. “This day will form a bright aera on the page of history. Never will it be forgotten as long as liberty is dear to man, that it was on this day that
THOMAS JEFFERSON
retired from the supreme magistracy amidst the blessings and regrets of millions.” He had strengthened liberty, while creating an environment in which wealth had “outrun every calculation.” Had he chosen to serve a third term, the editor volunteered, Jefferson would have had no competition.

The following issue of the same paper came out on the sixth, two days after Madison became president. It related the events of inauguration day, from the “federal salutes” of navy guns to the cavalry troops that escorted the modest man’s carriage to Capitol Hill. The streets of Washington had been filled with inquisitive citizens. Some ten thousand people crowded
around the Capitol, most of them unsuccessful in obtaining access to the ceremony. Jefferson made his entrance as inconspicuous as possible, opting to ride his own horse to the event. He hitched it to a post and moved inside, so that he was already at the front of the House chamber when Madison entered and approached.

The incoming president took his seat beside the outgoing one. Chief Justice John Marshall rose to perform the swearing in. Marshall had recently completed the fifth and final volume of his widely read biography of George Washington, in which he painted Thomas Jefferson as a man of ambition who had tried to erase his countrymen’s love of the national father. Madison’s name was scarcely mentioned in Marshall’s work.

After the chief justice administered the oath of office, “two rounds of minute guns were fired.” Thomas Ritchie, whose Richmond newspaper, the
Enquirer
, was the only paper Jefferson would admit to reading in his retirement years, sat beside a thirty-one-year-old Virginia-born Kentuckian, already a U.S. senator and soon to be Speaker of the House. America would hear often from Henry Clay during the ensuing four years. Some argue that he influenced the nation’s political direction in ways Madison could not.
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The time arrived for Madison to deliver his inaugural address. It was a colorless speech, in which he soberly recognized his inheritance: “The present situation of the world is indeed without a parallel, and that of our own country full of difficulties.” The first, more substantive section of his address dealt with world affairs. He wanted nothing to do with Europe’s “bloody and wasteful wars,” he said, and he would seek “peace and friendly intercourse with all nations.” He claimed that his nation was righteous in its demand for neutral rights: “It has been the true glory of the United States to cultivate peace by observing justice, and to entitle themselves to the respect of the nations at war by fulfilling their neutral obligations with the most scrupulous impartiality.” To which he appended the morally assertive line: “If there be candor in the world, the truth of these assertions will not be questioned.”
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He dwelled on this subject long enough to provide evidence of America’s continuing concern with the two belligerent powers. Turning to domestic affairs, he had only platitudes to utter, evocations of the small-government, liberty-loving philosophy associated with republicanism: seeing the Constitution as “the cement of the Union, as well in its limitations as in its authorities”; deferring to the states instead of lording over them; avoiding “the slightest interference with the right of conscience or the functions of religion, so wisely exempted from civil jurisdiction”; observing
“economy in public expenditures”; and keeping “within the requisite limits” a standing army, that is, recognizing state militias as “the firmest bulwark of republics,” instrumental in the preservation of liberty. There was no indication of any alteration in the thinking that had governed the moderate Republicans before this.

As to the Indians of North America, Jefferson had left a memo regarding unresolved intrusions by whites on Cherokee and Chickasaw lands in Georgia. The third president’s thinking was that Indians should choose either incorporation into white society as individual farmers, or eventual banishment across the Mississippi, where a mobile, hunting society could be sustained for a period of time. The new chief executive, lacking, as the vast majority of his generation did, the impulse to accommodate alternative cultures on terms of political equality, vowed in his inaugural message to “carry on the benevolent plans which have been so meritoriously applied to the conversion of our aboriginal neighbors from the degradation and wretchedness of savage life to a participation of the improvements of which the human mind and manners are susceptible in a civilized state.”
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America’s priorities lay with Europe. The nation’s immediate future was thought to be most closely linked, economically and militarily, to Old World power relations. In such a political climate, dutiful attention was to be given, but little real sensitivity shown, to the needs of Indians and those with detectable African origins still in bondage in the South. An indulgent vocabulary of Christian charity coexisted with, but did little to counteract, common depictions of Indians and African Americans. This reading of race was manifest in visual, spoken, and written stereotypes destined to thrive in both North and South for many decades. In the minds of those who directed U.S. policy in Washington, Indian traditionalists were buried by material progress; blacks were adjudged by nature less attractive than whites and were assumed biologically distant as well. With such stereotypes ingrained, government policy in years to come was to center on Indian removal and black recolonization, accompanied by an upsurge in miscegenation fears. Laws that rendered mixed-race offspring as bastards, deprived of any inheritance, would outlast slavery itself. When freedom was defined exclusively as a white inheritance (though no one said so explicitly), Indians and blacks were seen not just as inferiors but also as social deviants who posed a credible danger to the wholesome vigor as well as necessary security of American expansionism.
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Congress had recently terminated the overseas slave trade in accordance with the twenty-year postponement written into the Constitution. But this
did not do much to stimulate thinking that a political solution might be found over the short term. To the extent that the politics of race was on the minds of Virginians and others in 1809, it was the frightening example of the black republic in Haiti. With attention focused on the future of Spanish Florida and the unsettled Louisiana Purchase lands, some began asking whether the black population might be relocated from the Atlantic states onto lands still populated by Indians.

New territory meant more opportunities for speculating slave owners, but it also meant new problems. In the commercially attractive, soon-to-be state of Louisiana, for instance, sugar plantation owners anxiously viewed the end of slave imports from abroad. When the embargo was declared, officials were forewarned that Louisiana could become another Haiti, and so they attempted to cut off smuggling. Slaves were arriving in New Orleans in substantial numbers from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Carolina. What would be considered the right balance between public safety and private profit? Edward Livingston, the prominent Republican congressman (and DeWitt Clinton’s predecessor as New York City mayor), had removed to New Orleans in the wake of a financial scandal, where he married an attractive young French widow, a refugee from Haiti, whose father had owned a sugar plantation there. A constitutional scholar as well as land developer, Livingston, as an adoptive southerner, challenged the prohibition on importation of slaves from Africa.
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Since Gabriel’s Rebellion in Virginia and the bloody course of events in Haiti, the possible growth and expansion of slavery appeared more unsettling than the possible relocation of Indians. That was why Madison found it easier, in the text of his inaugural address, to direct his attention to the relatively benign project of making Indians “white.” Indians were a mobile race, whereas slaves were bound to the land because their owners needed them to render it fruitful. Slavery remained a blight on the cultural landscape and an issue that was too huge to tackle head-on in the lead-up to the War of 1812.

As he approached the end of his address, the new president added a personal sentiment. He praised his immediate predecessor, asking to be “pardoned for not suppressing the sympathy with which my heart is full, in the rich reward he enjoys in the benediction of a beloved country.” Margaret Bayard Smith, wife of the editor of the
National Intelligencer
, described with pathos the affectionate respect Jefferson received from the ladies who visited the President’s House expressly to see him one last time. At the evening’s inaugural ball, Jefferson, who was among the first to arrive,
seemed uncomfortable and was heard to inquire: “You must tell me how to behave for it is more than forty years since I have been to a ball.”
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A month from his sixty-sixth birthday, Thomas Jefferson had been writing home frequently in eager anticipation of his return. “My heart beats with inexpressible anxiety and impatience,” his daughter appealed in mid-February, hopeful that his retirement might be passed “in serene and unclouded tranquility.” The mayor of Washington City presented a letter of farewell on behalf of the local citizenry, all of them members of a “great and flourishing nation,” the “solitary republic of the world.” They would “pray” for his “felicity,” and his release from the world of contention: “Happy, thrice happy retreat! where patriotism and philosophy, friendship and affection will animate, direct and soften the purest feelings of the heart!” Jefferson responded the same day with only slightly less florid language.
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A number of vignettes descend to us in which Jefferson’s quiet dignity yields to tenderness in conversation, and strangers (men and women alike) find an immediate attraction to his passion for knowledge. No one ever described a personal encounter with James Madison as an inspirational moment. He seemed too small to fill Jefferson’s shoes. At a glance, the Adamses, John and John Quincy, hardly seemed built of presidential materials, but the latter’s wife, Louisa Catherine, regarded Madison’s physique as almost cartoonish. He was, she wrote, “a
very
small man in
person
, with a
very
large
head.
” The agreeable Dolley Madison, “tall, large and rather masculine in personal dimensions” made her husband look that much odder. To Mrs. Adams, James was “her little man”; but she acknowledged too that once one got over his appearance, he could be a “lively” and “playful” conversationalist.
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The closest to a portrait of warmth comes from Albert Gallatin’s sister-in-law Frances Few, whose commentary differs somewhat from Mrs. Adams’s. The day before the inauguration, Few noted in her diary that Madison, up close, looked like “parchment,” his face so weather-beaten that he first appeared to have had smallpox. But after observing him a short while, she looked past his wasted appearance and discovered eyes that were “penetrating and expressive,” a smile that was “charming”—and
once again, “his conversation lively and interesting.” Though Dolley’s complexion was “brilliant” and stood in stark contrast to that of her husband, the first lady struck Mrs. Few as tasteless in her choice of wardrobe and opaque as a human being. “She is all things to all men,” the diarist recorded.
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President Madison did not wish to be all things to all men, certainly not in the sense that Jefferson had tried, when in his first inaugural address he reached out to the Federalists who distrusted him. Madison was rather less interested in force of personality and more interested in carrying out his duties. As he was eight years younger than Jefferson, he was the same age now as his predecessor had been when he first took the oath of office. He dressed routinely in dreary-looking outfits but was capable of flashing a warm and welcoming smile. At Montpelier he was known not only to tell good stories to his guests but also to send them into fits of laughter in the telling. With a less-than-formidable presence, he was nonetheless comfortable as a host and had a taste for fine foods and Madeira wine.
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The Madisons did not move into the President’s House until the outgoing president had vacated. After the inauguration, Jefferson needed time to gather up his belongings and take care of essential correspondence. Before leaving town a week later, he brought his account with Joseph Milligan, his preferred Washington bookseller and leather binder, up to date. Accompanied by two slaves, the now ex-president paid the toll at the Georgetown ferry and headed out in snowy conditions. Owing to the weather, it took a good bit longer than usual to reach Monticello.
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