Madison and Jefferson (91 page)

Monroe had accepted election as governor of Virginia in January 1811. It was a job he had performed a decade before, at the time of Jefferson’s election; but he would have little time for it as the Smith catastrophe played out and Madison sought a ready replacement at State. Given Robert Smith’s insult to Madison, it is altogether fitting that Monroe, as the incoming secretary of state, wrote to Jefferson of the president’s offer: “The manner in which the proposition was made to me, was liberal and manly.” This “manly” meant respectful, fair-minded, and morally self-assured. As he entered Madison’s fractured cabinet in April, Monroe hoped he could fulfill the president’s wish to see a more conciliatory spirit emanate from London.
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It would not be easy. In November 1811 a new Congress convened. Eppes had lost his seat, and there was no Virginian in the House with whom Madison could as comfortably sit down and chat. John G. Jackson, Dolley Madison’s brother-in-law, was defeated by a Federalist. Indeed, the Virginia delegation in Congress was, as a whole, a less impressive bunch than Madison had known at any previous time. Only a little more than half of the Eleventh Congress was returned in the Twelfth.

The most outspoken member of either branch of the national legislature in 1811–12 was Henry Clay. His mostly southern Republican cohort was soon to be known collectively as the War Hawks. Until recently a member
of the Senate from Kentucky, the Virginia-born Clay had moved over to the House and was promptly elected Speaker. Despite prior national service and training in the law from George Wythe (who had trained Thomas Jefferson a generation earlier), Clay was not especially well known until this moment. But from 1811 until his death four decades later, he would remain at the very center of national life.
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This son of a Baptist preacher had “a genius for self-dramatization,” as the historian Merrill D. Peterson has written of him. After leaving Virginia and settling in Lexington, Kentucky, Clay had distinguished himself as a criminal lawyer. There, in 1806, he successfully defended Aaron Burr against the U.S. attorney, a Federalist, who was hoping to prove that Burr aimed to sever the West from the Union. Arriving in Washington, Clay quickly acquired a reputation for dueling, cavorting, and gambling at cards—and predicting that America would have an easy time taking on the British military. He did not possess a military mindset, any more than Madison could be called a military adventurer; but both were not-so-secretly desirous of acquiring territory for the United States. While in the Senate, Clay had pushed for defiance of the Spanish and annexation of West Florida. He said he believed Madison was giving “proper energy” to the prospective acquisition of East Florida and would take a more aggressive stance with respect to Great Britain. Among his Federalist colleagues—though, of course, they opposed his policies—many called Clay well informed, allowing that he had assumed the Speaker’s role with customary dignity. He was the man to lead the War Congress.
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And Madison? In midsummer, looking ahead a year, the anti-administration
Alexandria Gazette
resorted to doggerel verse:

To whiffle was to waver. The
Gazette
proposed no Federalist names, nor likely Republican alternatives, for the first position. Its only requirement was that the next president not be “led by the nose” (whether, one presumes, by congressional War Hawks or by ex-President Jefferson), as Madison allegedly was.
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How much more forbearance would the United States have to exhibit, while England laughed at its feebleness? That question, in one form or another, made the rounds as Congress and the executive readied the populace for a war that was now more widely believed to be unavoidable. Though
military preparations were all too few, the president was willing to force the issue if the Orders in Council were not rescinded by spring and neutral commerce given proper protection.

Madison had returned to Washington from Montpelier in October 1811, in order to present his third annual message to Congress. He called for a buildup of regular troops in anticipation of war. Despite U.S. efforts to achieve “all the mutual advantages of reestablished friendship and confidence,” he said, the British had consistently upheld measures that bore “the character as well as the effect of war on lawful commerce.” He appealed to the legislative branch to heed the facts and authorize war preparations: “With this evidence of hostile inflexibility in trampling on rights which no Independent Nation can relinquish, Congress will feel the duty of putting the United States into an armour, and an attitude demanded by the crisis, and corresponding with the national spirit and expectations.”
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Madison’s message of firmness belied the “unmanly” smear that had long followed and besmirched him. One who offered praise was Constitutional Convention colleague Elbridge Gerry of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Gerry was an Adams Federalist in the 1790s who became a Republican on the eve of the 1800 election. “I have read your message, with great attention & pleasure,” he wrote now. “It is clear, candid, firm & dignified.” Gerry told Madison not to worry too much about the “british subjects, traders & partizans” of Boston. They would make themselves scarce if war erupted.
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The current British minister in Washington, Sir Augustus John Foster, gave an inch when he came through with an agreement to make reparations for the
Chesapeake
incident of 1807. But for Madison it was too little too late. It took “one splinter out of our wounds,” he wrote to John Quincy Adams. France had done precious little to satisfy U.S. requirements either, but there seemed to be a moral difference between the two situations—or perhaps, better put, a less unpleasant history.
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Canada again loomed large. In Indiana Territory, America’s northwestern frontier, fighting broke out at the end of 1811. While the Shawnee leader Tecumseh was attempting to build a tribal confederation for defensive political purposes, his more bellicose brother Tenskwatawa believed it was possible to turn back the onslaught of white settlers. Tenskwatawa ran into the crusading William Henry Harrison, who achieved a resounding victory at the Battle of Tippecanoe. Word reached Washington that the British to the north were supplying the Indians and stopping at nothing—which ballooned into emotional cries comparable to the extreme symbolism of impressment.

President Madison was even more cautious in his approach to the Northwest than he was with respect to the Gulf Coast. But he was hopeful that war with England would cause Canada to fall into U.S. hands. Andrew Jackson, at this time still an untested Tennessee militia general, commanded an army of volunteers who were ready and willing to march north. He wrote to General Harrison, asking whether he needed a resupply of forces. As the year 1812 began, boundary matters were again on the table.
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Louisiana was shortly to become a state. Territorial governor Claiborne reported a month before Tippecanoe that the newspapers reaching him all said war was likely. “The pulse of the English Government seems high for War,” he advanced in a letter to the president, “and instead of receiving reparations for the Many Wrongs offered our Country, we hear daily of further Aggressions.” Nothing of a deadly nature was happening in Louisiana other than “that dreadful Scourge, the Yellow Fever,” he said. But war fever was as prevalent, and building.
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Secretary of State Monroe was taking charge of negotiations with the British minister, fruitless though they appeared to be. And no American counterpart was left in London, once William Pinkney had returned home. Madison used Monroe as a liaison with Congress, improving relations with the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which allowed Madison to shape war measures that had a better chance of gaining majority approval. It did not take long before John Randolph began complaining about Monroe’s war politicking in the House.
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Madison’s annual message helped salvage his reputation. His bold language began the process of convincing reluctant Republicans that war was necessary, while solidifying his image as a man who was prepared to face military challenges. John Randolph still did what he could to derail war preparations, calling the Canadian invasion a “war of conquest” and declaring unequivocally: “Our people will not submit to being taxed for this war.” Combining race-baiting rhetoric with his penchant for the colorful and the absurd, he raised the specter of slave rebellions if the southern states were left unprotected after their militias were dragged to the “deserts of Labrador.” He ruminated aloud on what would happen if Frenchified Canadians, attracted to the same dangerous doctrines that had inspired the Haitian Revolution, should be incorporated into the “Anglo-Saxon” United States.

Randolph’s scare tactics did not work. His oratorical skills could not drown out the chorus that now backed the president. British aggression had pushed the country to the “brink of a second revolution, as important
as the first,” said Congressman Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky, praising Madison’s message for its “manly and bold attitude of war.” If Congress failed to follow through, he went on, it might as well “annul the Declaration of Independence” and acknowledge the states, “devoted colonies.”
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The War Hawks used Madison’s tough talk to good advantage. Madison’s enemies could no longer mock him as a “submission” man. This enabled his congressional supporters to shift the conversation away from ridicule of Madison’s weakness and toward the more positive metaphor of the president as “oracle” of a second War for Independence. In mid-December 1811, by overwhelming majorities, the House passed resolutions fashioned by its Foreign Affairs Committee that increased the regular army, called out fifty thousand volunteers, outfitted the navy, notified the militia, and armed merchant ships.

Henry Clay was so pleased with the message that he sent Madison a bottle of Maderia the next day. Outside Washington the message was as warmly received. A regiment of the Virginia militia in Lexington prepared its own address to the president, which praised him for his “laudable zeal & devotion” and then launched into militaristic flights of fancy: “Our swords leap flaming from their scabbards and cannot be returned appeased.” Repeating Madison’s phrase, “We have ‘put on the armour,’ ” they promised to fight “on the shores of the Atlantic or in the wilderness of Canada,” determined, they said, to relive the glory of Bunker Hill and Saratoga.
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While President Madison generally receives little credit either for his thinking or for his conduct in this time of high tension, his private secretary’s 1856 retrospective presents evidence of a different side of the war president. According to Edward Coles, Madison was “less rampant” than the “noisy politicians” in advance of the war; and later, in the midst of hostilities, he was “less crouching under difficulties” than these same individuals. As we have seen in other contexts, Madison was dogged and relentless but never hasty. He used war fever to political advantage.
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As Madison and Monroe were repairing their relationship, Jefferson and John Adams succeeded in repairing theirs as well. The same Edward Coles was on a tour of New England when he paid a visit to the Adams household in Braintree, Massachusetts. The subject of politics came up, as it naturally
would, and Coles heard Adams remark on the uncomfortable transition of power in 1801. As their conversation proceeded, Coles made it clear that Jefferson (who was also his Albemarle neighbor) had only kind things to say about Adams. As Coles subsequently explained, Adams became effusive: “I always loved Jefferson, and still love him.”

Benjamin Rush, the good friend and regular correspondent of both ex-presidents, had been trying to bring the two aging Revolutionaries back together for some time—at least through the mails, since travel was impossible for both. Rush had seen the abortive exchange of letters of 1804, between Jefferson and Abigail Adams, that were triggered by the death of Maria Jefferson Eppes: if Coles had gotten the ball rolling, Rush refused to drop the ball and persisted in coaxing the principals. On December 5, 1811, after Coles had spoken with him, Jefferson wrote to Rush, confirming the conversation as Coles had repeated it to him. Without waiting, Rush wrote to Adams, quoting back Coles’s recording of Adams’s “I always loved Jefferson” just as Jefferson had given it to him. Nothing, it seems, was left to chance.
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On January 1, 1812, Adams made the next move, writing to Jefferson directly: “I wish you Sir many happy New Years”; and Jefferson answered him by retrieving memories of 1776, “recollections very dear to my mind.” Momentous events had brought them to Philadelphia at the same time, all of which constituted a bond that ought not to be broken. By anchoring their destinies to the same cause, Jefferson fashioned Adams and himself as metaphorical mariners on the ocean of life: “We rode through the storm with heart and hand, and made a happy port.” Still cautious about reopening political wounds as he brought history forward, the Virginian pretended to be more remote from issues of national power than he actually was, claiming: “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides.” At least the second part was true.
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Jefferson’s home life was never as relaxing as he wished, or claimed. Suffering from rheumatic joints, his hip ached terribly when he walked. His indebtedness continued, though he claimed he was on the path to extinguishing all financial obligations. In 1812 he was convinced that his annual income from tobacco and wheat production in Bedford County was considerable enough to get him out from under. He was wrong. Adding to the imperfection of daily life, Jefferson’s slave Jame Hubbard, a habitual runaway, fled Monticello, and when he was found and returned, Jefferson ordered him flogged and jailed. Not always a pretty picture, the Virginia idyll.