Madison and Jefferson (92 page)

More was happening to divert Jefferson from his Tacitus and Thucydides. After he learned that Edward Livingston’s case against him over disposition of the batture had been dismissed, he prepared a lawyerly pamphlet on the subject, constituting his defense. When it went to the printer, he made a list of seventy-seven names, in addition to the members of Congress, to whom it was sent. The list took in the obvious, such as the president and his cabinet, Governor Claiborne, and other governors, judges, and national figures; it included some who might have been on the other side: Edward’s brother Robert Livingston, the critical William Duane, and John Wickham, one of Burr’s prominent defense attorneys. The pamphlet went out as well to one present and one former son-in-law, several nephews, and other family members. The one female on the list was Madison’s and Jefferson’s Philadelphia landlady, Eliza House Trist, so often in the midst of political talk, but whose use of the turgid treatise on property law is harder to gauge.
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One (unstated) reason for Jefferson to have committed himself to the batture pamphlet is that he wished to place his legal erudition before Chief Justice John Marshall. He believed that Livingston had taken up his suit in the hope that Marshall would preside in the case and intercede on his behalf. So often goaded by thoughts of his enemies’ maneuverings, Jefferson griped to Madison that the chief justice was prone to “reconcile law to his personal biases.” He was no doubt thinking of both
Marbury v. Madison
and the Burr trial.

As the batture matter simmered, Jefferson found cause to rebuke Marshall for his “twistifications” of the law. He badly wanted Madison to give Marshall competition by appointing a strong Republican to the Court. Jefferson’s attorney general, Levi Lincoln, turned down the offer, and so did another New Englander, John Quincy Adams—the appeal to whom showed President Madison’s predisposition to go outside Jefferson’s narrowly conceived list of acceptable justices. In the end Madison chose Joseph Story, who was possibly the last person Jefferson wanted to see on the High Court. He had specifically warned Madison about Story, calling him an outright “Tory” and no friend to the embargo. While the latter was true, Story, a Harvard graduate, had defended Jefferson in 1801 from the most hostile corner of New England.
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The war on John Marshall was not going Jefferson’s way. Nor was the war-in-waiting. In his correspondence of 1812, he stepped up his harangues about English arrogance, surmising that problems in Congress were preventing an early declaration of war: “That a body containing 100.
lawyers in it, should direct the measures of war, is, I fear, impossible,” he told Madison in February. A month later, he related the anxious sentiment that permeated central Virginia: “Every body in this quarter expects a declarance of war as soon as the season will permit the entrance of militia into Canada.” Madison replied to him that the decision for war or peace was in the hands of the British, who, he thought, “prefer war with us, to a repeal of their Orders in Council. We have nothing left therefore but to make ready for it.” In the final analysis, Madison judged that in ignoring the rights of neutrals Britain stood ready to “recolonize” America’s commerce and probably stood in the way of America’s continental ambitions as well. Westerners, meanwhile, wanted Indians cleared out, and they figured an invasion of Canada would achieve that object. To war-bent Americans, liberty, at this moment, meant the ability to spread in all directions without having to face domestic resistance or foreign pressure. Madison was with the hawks.
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Not content to wait for events to take their course, he upped the ante in March when he made a Jefferson-like move, declaring the existence of a disunionist plot, hatched by New England Federalists with British connivance. An Irishman named John Henry, who had lived in America for some years before migrating to Montreal, had been hired in 1808 by the governor of Lower Canada to discover whether disgruntled Yankees, angered by the embargo, might be interested in secession. When he could not get the kind of money he felt he deserved for his services, Henry decided to sell his correspondence to the United States. Somehow he convinced the Madison administration to pay him the incredible sum of $50,000, which reportedly drained the entire fund set aside for secret services.

Madison wrote to Jefferson that the documents obtained gave “formal proof, of the cooperation between the Eastern Junto [of Federalists] and the British Cabinet.” He sent the packet of materials to Congress, but John Henry’s papers turned out to contain no smoking gun, no names of Federalists willing to betray the Union. Madison turned next to New Jersey Federalist Jonathan Dayton, an old friend of Aaron Burr’s, convinced that Dayton was just disaffected enough from his party to reveal the names of secessionists. But Dayton had nothing to say, and Madison lost ground. The Federalists accused the administration of using the Henry incident as an “electioneering trick” to drum up Republican support in New England.

And perhaps it was. Monroe described these events to the French minister as “a last means of exciting the nation and Congress” to get on with the inevitable. The president hoped that by hinting at treason he would silence
New England; and he probably expected, too, that news of the intrigue with Henry would force London’s ministers to act with dispatch in resolving its dispute with the Madison administration. But once Henry broadcast how much he was paid, Madison suddenly looked foolish, if not crooked. Combined with the abortive attempt of George Mathews to wrest East Florida from the British-allied Spanish (called off by Madison), the president’s position was suddenly dubious, even in the South.
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Then again, Madison may have thought he had a very good reason to play up the Henry affair. A threat of disunion—an espionage caper originating in Canada, where many Loyalists had lived since the Revolution—would be quite enough to justify a northern invasion. This, plus British-inspired Indian attacks in the West, and Canada would no longer be a passive country. With a firm push north, the border would dissolve.

On June 1, 1812, Madison came forward with a definitive list of unredressed grievances against Great Britain. These included impressment, the Orders in Council, and incitement of Indians in the Northwest. The House Foreign Affairs Committee met and agreed that London’s hypocrisies could no longer be tolerated. The long period of anxious anticipation ended, as both houses of Congress voted for war. The tally was 79 to 49 in the House, 19 to 13 in the Senate (coming on June 17, and only after extended debate).

Madison sent Jefferson a copy of the war declaration. Without hesitation, Jefferson conveyed his overall strategy for success. “To continue the war popular two things are necessary mainly: 1. to stop Indian barbarities. The conquest of Canada will do this. 2. to furnish markets for our produce.” As to the first, he did not have to elaborate, because Madison and he were equally eager to see if, in fact, the Canadians could be prodded to rise up against the empire. But on the matter of maintaining markets for U.S. production, Jefferson went into greater detail. It did not concern him whether U.S. carriers, neutral vessels, or even enemy ships under neutral flags were under sail, just so long as America’s commerce remained healthy. The one “mortifying” possibility, which he knew would cause farmers to turn against the war, was for their surplus wheat, meant for export, to rot in their barns.
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It was hard to fight a war when the excitement was short-lived. Few Americans were willing to make significant sacrifices over maritime rights alone. Embargo had made that clear. And if one region of the country suffered a disproportionate burden, the war effort would certainly suffer. Madison and Jefferson both knew this. John Marshall exposed underlying
tensions when he wrote in early 1812: “There would be a great majority for war if it could certainly be carried on without money.” Bellicose words cost Virginians nothing, a Norfolk newspaper observed, but many cared more for their pocketbooks than for “the liberty of which they so much boast.”

Jefferson’s strategy was to keep the South and West happy. He was willing to concede that the Northeast was a lost cause. Madison saw things differently, by necessity. Regulars and volunteers from New England would be needed for the Canadian invasion, and he prayed that “the zeal of the S. & W. could be imparted to that region.” He assessed the situation in a letter to a friend in Massachusetts: the war would be “short and successful,” he said guardedly, if the enemy could be convinced that it was fighting “the whole and not a part of the nation.”
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The underlying theme in Madison’s war message to Congress was that England’s refusal to treat the United States as an independent nation challenged the nation to demonstrate its honor and self-worth. Seeing America as a rival, kidnapping its sailor-citizens, inciting “Savages” to attack women and children, stealing “the products of our soil and industry,” Great Britain would bully and intimidate for as long as the United States allowed the “spectacle of insults and indignities” to continue. As an individual, Madison, of course, had never even come close to engaging in a duel. But he understood the emotive force of this language. War Hawks in Congress had beaten their drums with such overwrought phrases as “the honor of a nation is its life” and to “abandon it is to commit political suicide.” They had compared America to a young man, kicked and cuffed, or robbed and stabbed, whose one recourse was to respond with force. Americans as a group had endured “mental debasement,” a prolonged state of humiliation. “To step one step further without showing that spirit of resentment becoming freemen,” as one congressman contended, “would but acknowledge ourselves unworthy of self-government.” The president and Congress had transformed the war into a coming-of-age story, a metaphorical battle for manly vindication.
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Reading much about neutral rights, Federalists had no idea that Jefferson was writing to Madison about improvements to the farm-based economy if the war should go as well as he expected. The voice of antiwar New England put forward a different logic: Madison was using “dark, ambiguous, and unintelligible” language to fabricate a threat of invasion where there was none. How could a “Quixotic expedition” into Canada, a foreign country, by American fighters, be called self-defense, or “proof that America was in danger”? Madison was susceptible to the same charge he had leveled
at John Adams in 1798, when criticizing “hot-headed proceedings” in advance of the Quasi-War with France.

The Federalists experienced a different reality. In 1812 they believed that Britain was willing to modify its stand on impressment. The great stumbling block, the Orders in Council, was finally being repealed. This being the case, the “rights” the president was poised to go to war over were “barren and useless” rationalizations, not real rights. The rejected Monroe-Pinkney Treaty could have achieved a reasonable settlement of Anglo-American conflict in 1807—Monroe had certainly thought so. He was cognizant of the unpreparedness of the U.S. military and sensitive to the vulnerability of U.S. coastal cities. Monroe, now a key member of Madison’s cabinet, had to know that the War of 1812 was pure folly.

But the problem went deeper. Madison was calling state militias into service, a move the Federalists judged to be unconstitutional under existing circumstances. They urged the states to resist the president’s instructions. Several New England governors did just that, refusing to hand over their militia to federal control—especially for a far-flung campaign into Canada. State sovereignty, the old Republican calling card, was now the Federalist mantra. As unlikely as it seemed, given his past behavior, Madison was, to his northern opponents, the architect of a “consolidation” of the military power of the country.
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Southern Federalists saw the irrationality of the president’s course with the same clarity. Waging war meant increasing the national debt that Gallatin was working so hard to retire. It also meant raising taxes on commerce, and Republicans were supposed to be staunchly opposed to taxes. The War Hawks seemed oddly unconcerned about these things. From Virginia to Georgia, Federalist newspapers pointed out that the president’s policy was upside down: Anglo-American trade was nearly ten times the volume of Franco-American trade, and worth protecting. U.S. interests would be served in allowing England to concentrate fully on defeating Napoleon, the real tyrant and only real threat in the long run.

For Federalists, north and south, then, the Republican majority was temporarily out of its senses and trapped in an uncompromising position. Former North Carolina governor William Richardson Davie, a Revolutionary War hero, saw an opportunity in the midst of upheaval. “We must touch an extreme point of public wretchedness,” he wrote, “before the people could be set right.” If enough Americans were killed in the war, the Federalists would be voted back into power. This is where politics stood.
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From the start, Vice President George Clinton had played no role whatsoever
in the Madison administration. When Jefferson wrote of his own impairments to Benjamin Rush, he ventured into the subject of human nature and the aging mind, and while on the subject he offered a medical opinion of Clinton, his own former vice president: “Our old revolutionary friend, Clinton, for example, who was a hero, but never a man of mind … tells eternally the stories of his younger days, to prove his memory. As if memory and reason were the same faculty, nothing betrays imbecility so much as the being insensible of it.” George Clinton’s value to Madison, as to Jefferson, was his “imbecility.”
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His nephew, New York mayor DeWitt Clinton, was quite a different story. A patron of the arts, surly, boastful, yet widely respected for his intellect, this Clinton was a crafty politician. In 1812, at the age of forty-three, he believed his time had come. Though a Republican, he thought he could defeat Madison by forging a coalition with New England Federalism and launched his campaign when Madison opted for war.