Madison and Jefferson (90 page)

For years already Jefferson had been appealing to the poet Joel Barlow to write an authoritative political history. Though Connecticut-born and Yale-educated, Barlow was of a modest genealogy and a Republican in temperament. He had lived long in France before returning to the United States in 1802. “Mr. Madison and myself have cut out a piece of work for you,” then-President Jefferson had appealed. “We are rich ourselves in materials, and can open all the public archives to you.” He insisted that Barlow move to Washington, “because a great deal of knoledge of things is not on paper, but only within ourselves for verbal communication.” It is hard to know for sure whether the sly and seductive tone we automatically read into Jefferson’s language bore an equally conspiratorial flavor for Barlow as he read the letter. The poet kept Jefferson on hold, and when he was about to embark on a diplomatic mission for Madison in 1811, Jefferson appealed to him one last time: “What is to become of our Post-revolutionary history?” Joel Barlow died in 1812, while on that mission. And the history Jefferson wanted written would not appear in his lifetime.
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Because of Madison’s more guarded manner, far less is known of his predilections in this regard, though we have Jefferson’s testimony that the two of them were equally involved in the solicitation of Barlow. For some reason President Madison was poring through his papers at Montpelier during the summer of 1810 and was upset not to find among them “a delineation of Hamilton’s plan of a Constitution,” in Hamilton’s own hand, dating to the time of the Constitutional Convention. In 1791 he had asked Jefferson to make copies of his notes from the convention, for safekeeping, and in 1810 bade Jefferson to help him look for the missing Hamilton document. Jefferson in turn asked his son-in-law Eppes, who as an eighteen-year-old had written out the copies; he amazingly recalled the pin that fastened these particular pages. Writing Madison directly, the now-thirty-seven-year-old congressman Eppes detailed the procedure by which he undertook the “entirely confidential” trust of making the copies. All these years later he was able to assure Madison that he had returned the Hamilton piece with the rest of the papers, and indeed Madison took another look and found what he sought.
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Whatever it was in the historical record that concerned Madison at that moment, his history could not be completely written before relations with England and France were resolved. And for now he was strapped to a secretary
of state who was sapping the strength of the executive. Robert Smith demonstrated loyalty only to his senator-brother, Samuel, who had grown increasingly resentful toward Gallatin, the only cabinet member to whom Madison accorded real power. Gallatin knew infinitely more about international affairs than his rival Smith did, but he was convinced that the Smiths were conspiring to make Robert president in 1812. Jealousy was clearly a factor in the Smith-Gallatin rift. Even their wives quarreled. After one extremely bitter social encounter, Smith said he would have shot Gallatin if given the chance. Dolley Madison sought to calm matters between the Smiths and Gallatins, but to no avail.
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During the spring of 1811, when the administration could little afford it, its family squabble reached the breaking point. Smith revealed information about U.S. distrust of the French to a British representative, implying that the British had cause to question the president’s candor. Madison confronted Smith, denouncing him both for undermining Gallatin and for making the president’s job difficult by operating behind his back. Smith denied that he had any bad intent.

Technically, it was Gallatin who offered his resignation. But he may have done it as a ruse, in consultation with the president, to bring matters to a head and yield the result Madison wanted. Gallatin could not be spared, of course, and Smith was dismissed. Madison offered him, as a consolation prize, the St. Petersburg ministry, currently occupied by John Quincy Adams, who disliked Russia intensely. After initially expressing interest, Smith thought twice before rejecting what he termed an “insidious” offer. Next, he set out to repudiate Madison before the public, vowing to his brother that he would “overthrow” the president. The forty-page pamphlet he published in July 1811 was aimed at personal vindication, but it went so far as to label the president “unmanly” for conducting a weak foreign policy. Madison prepared to defend himself, drafting a memorandum on Smith’s activities in case public opinion turned against him or he was forced to answer charges before Congress. He told Jefferson that much of what Smith wrote could be answered only by “disclosures” from himself, which the duties and decorum of his office precluded. He could only hope, he said, that others would see to it that the “whole turpitude” of Smith’s conduct was exposed.
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How unmanly Madison was by the standard of the day is best measured in political terms, because that was what his opponents really meant by their insults. Madison was slender and never hearty, of course. The prolific Washington Irving, not yet thirty when he met the president, was already a
popular satirist, but his world-famous short stories were yet to be conceived. Introduced around Dolley’s drawing room, “hand in glove with half the people in the assemblage,” he pronounced upon the president: “Poor Jemmy! he is but a withered little apple-John.” Shriveled up perhaps, but Madison was a fan of Irving’s and approved his spicy attitude. Literature, he knew, could not exist without quirks and humorous distortions.
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Political emasculation was another matter entirely. Madison’s critics took aim at those they referred to as “submission men,” whose cowardly subservience left the country without a manly defense or its national honor. The so-called invisibles or malcontents who rallied round the Smiths demanded some form of military retaliation against Great Britain in place of passive economic coercion. Surprisingly, Madison’s old Virginia friend Wilson Cary Nicholas abandoned him in protest against the administration’s relatively modest commercial warfare policies. As Nicholas put it, “Every expedient short of war was submission.”
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To Madison’s dismay, Philadelphia
Aurora
editor William Duane, a longtime ally, became an angry opponent after 1809. Taking the side of the Smiths against Gallatin, he roundly criticized Madison. So despite a tormented history with printers and editors, Jefferson decided that this was one time when it made sense for him to get directly involved. He enjoyed a good rapport with Duane and felt he might persuade the editor to return to the fold.

In March 1811, only days before his first appeal to Duane, Jefferson received a letter from Jack Eppes that may have convinced him to pursue the course he ultimately took with Duane. “The rancor of party was revived with all its bitterness during the last Session of Congress,” Eppes wrote. “I consider the scenes of 1798 & 1799 again approaching.” No one else had presented such imagery to Jefferson—summoning back the “reign of witches”—and it had to have affected him in some way. Concerned about the election of 1812, Eppes laid out the risks and the possibilities: “Our principles are staked on the support of Mr. Madison—A change in our foreign relations would enable him to ride triumphant, put down his opponents in Congress & silence the growlings of those who ought to possess his entire confidence.”
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Jefferson knew that Madison could not afford to lose the state of Pennsylvania, where “growlings” were coming from the presses of the
Aurora.
Writing on March 28, he asked Duane to reconsider, and to indulge differences in political outlook that Jefferson considered relatively minor. “I believe Mr. Gallatin to be of as pure integrity … as [the] most affectionate
native citizen,” he testified. During his eight years as president he had come to know the character of his treasury secretary “more thoroughly perhaps than any other man living”; and, he amplified, “I have ascribed the erroneous estimate you have formed of it, to the want of that intimate knoledge [
sic
] of him which I possessed.”

Jefferson’s exhortation to Duane continued for pages, emphasizing the need for Republicans to recover their common purpose. “If we do not act in phalanx,” he wrote, “I will not say our
party
, the term is false and degrading, but our
nation
will be undone.” Alluding to the ambiguities that had resulted in schism, he added with conviction, if with a less than fully honest recollection: “I have ever refused to know any subdivisions among [the Republicans].”
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Jefferson sent Madison a copy of his letter. “I shall make one effort more to reclaim him from the dominion of his passions,” he said of Duane after several weeks had gone by. And when he did, he tried both stick and carrot, informing the editor that Virginians had lost both sympathy and respect for the
Aurora.
Jefferson appealed first to conscience, and then to a sense of honor, before suggesting to Duane that the mind can be led, “step by step, unintended & unpercieved by itself,” to self-destructive acts. “The example of John Randolph, now the outcast of the world, is a caution to all honest & prudent men,” he pressured, adding a personal touch before he closed: “It would afflict me sincerely to see you … become auxiliary to the enemies of our government.” This was a letter written with extreme care, but not without a tone of finality. Duane would recognize it as an ultimatum. After waiting another month for the answer that never came, Jefferson told Madison: “It probably closes our correspondence as I have not heard a word from him on the subject.” In the interim Jefferson redoubled his effort to see that Thomas Ritchie of the
Richmond Enquirer
was “correct as to the administration generally.” It was essential to shore up Virginia Republicanism before any other advantage could be sought.
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Madison had been far less sanguine all along. While he credited Duane as “a sincere friend of liberty,” he did not regard him as “rational or friendly” when it came to the team of Madison and Gallatin. Nor did Madison expect the editor ever to be anything but a slave to his passions. “He gives proofs of a want of candor, as well as of temperance,” the fourth president unloaded to the third. In the end Jefferson had to agree. When May rolled around, he told an ally, attorney (and future attorney general) William Wirt: “It is possible Duane may be reclaimed as to Mr. Madison, but as to Gallatin I despair of it.” In the same letter he echoed Madison’s
belief as to Duane: “His passions are stronger than his prudence, and his personal as well as general antipathies, render him very intolerant.” The Smiths and William Duane had succeeded in producing a schism in Madison’s first term to equal that which Jefferson had endured in his second. And the partisan newspaper, an American institution that Madison and Jefferson could not say they were entirely innocent of promoting, had become the channel through which President Madison—whose circle of friends was now much constricted—had to fight for his political life.
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Robert Smith’s long-overdue departure from State made it possible for Madison to redefine administration foreign policy. He did so by repairing, once and for all, the personal breach his predecessor had cared about most. Madison wrote Jefferson laconically: “You will have inferred the change which is taking place in the Department of State. Col. Monroe agrees to succeed Mr. Smith.” Jefferson was able to read into those two sentences everything Madison intended him to know. His reply was elaborate: “I do sincerely rejoice that Monroe is added to your councils. He will need only to perceive that you are without reserve towards him, to meet it with the cordiality of earlier times. He will feel himself to be again at home in our bosoms, and happy in a separation from those who led him astray.” There is an indication that before Madison made this appointment, he had asked Jefferson whether
he
would like to serve as secretary of state, in which case Monroe would have been placed at the head of the War Department.

Why would Madison have wanted Jefferson back at the State Department? Was it not obvious to him that if Jefferson rejoined the government, “Little Jemmy Madison’s” image problem would only have deepened? Or perhaps Madison’s ego was not so sensitive that he would be concerned about that. Surely his enemies would have termed the appointment an admission by Madison of his own incompetence. On the other hand, Madison’s motivation is fairly obvious: after all the problems caused by the Smiths, he wanted a reliable Virginian, someone he completely trusted, in key posts. Jefferson had to have thought Monroe the perfect candidate and was not being merely rhetorical when he said he was tired of the daily routine of government and unwilling to subject himself to further mutilation in the press. Refusing to reenter the maelstrom, Jefferson noted of Monroe’s new situation: “I learn that John Randolph is now open-mouthed against him.”
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The oft-dismissed Monroe had eased his way back into government. For nearly five years, from the time he had toiled in London, struggling to achieve better Anglo-American relations, through his lukewarm welcome
home and his acquiescence to the Old Republicans in the 1808 presidential campaign, he had wallowed in disappointment. His bruised feelings started to heal in 1810, when he campaigned successfully for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates and announced: “Mr. Madison is a Republican and so am I.” He had smoothed his way back into the good graces of regular Republicans, without alienating his 1808 supporters, by taking advantage of the peace-making skill of his and Madison’s old friend—turned Old Republican critic—John Taylor of Caroline. Taylor had been wary of Madison’s ascendancy in 1806, when he urged Jefferson to run for a third term. In the 1808 election, though closer in thinking to Monroe, he had chosen party unity over ideological purity. Endorsing the addition of Monroe to the cabinet, Taylor anticipated that the new secretary of state would keep the nation out of war, while dissuading Madison from consolidating the powers of the federal government. He guessed wrong.