Madison and Jefferson (94 page)

Having defended Jefferson’s political reputation on the floor of the House, Speaker Henry Clay now gave his full support to the Madison administration. Over the months leading up to the declaration of war, and in the months after, Clay and Madison became comfortable in each other’s company. Madison opened his mouth more after he had wine at dinner, which may also have helped to bring the two closer. Privately, Clay expressed admiration for Madison’s mind; but in December 1812 he confided to Caesar Rodney, who had resigned as attorney general a year before: “Mr. Madison is wholly unfit for the storms of war.” Others had the same impression of him, no matter how aggressive a posture he took toward Great Britain.
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The president had not been blamed for Hull’s failure in the Northwest. But unless he could find able generals, James Madison would be unable to escape condemnation as new charges of incompetence surfaced.

THE FEDERALISTS HUNKERED DOWN AND PREPARED THEMSELVES
for a second term. Playing off the royal Stuarts of seventeenth-century England, they found a way to make a mockery out of America’s “King James,” the democratic monarch. A Hartford, Connecticut, paper provided the verse, which was reprinted across two columns of the
Federal Republican
—published, ever since its editor was run out of Baltimore, just down the road from the President’s House, in Georgetown.

The
Federal Republican
was the opposition’s answer to the fawning paper of the Madison court, the
National Intelligencer.
With the president’s reelection, its Federalist poet noted that Madison’s natural constituency was thriving:

Associated with the riff-raff of society, Madison was now being subjected to the same treatment as his predecessor had been, the difference being that Madison was seen not as the originator of bad policy so much as a stand-in for others. Forced into an unenviable position by events, he was a willing dupe of the ambitious and the unrestrained. As the Federalists saw things, the war was not going as planned, and the president could not figure out what to do next:

The Madison administration needed a more forward posture. One of the central players in national politics at this time was the Pennsylvania-born New Yorker John Armstrong. A Princetonian before the Revolution and a staff officer to General Horatio Gates at the Battle of Saratoga, he became connected to one of the most powerful families of New York State when he married the sister of Edward and Robert Livingston. He succeeded the latter of his brothers-in-law as U.S. minister to France, serving from 1804 to 1810.

Historians have called Armstrong moody, self-protective, and ambitious—adjectives that probably describe most of the political characters of the Revolutionary generation. His letters to Madison, and especially to Jefferson, are finely crafted and more than just courteous. He could use strong words at times and had a habit of fault-finding, which eventually caught up with him. The Virginians would never quite trust his motives.

Like Speaker of the House Henry Clay, Armstrong seems to have had doubts about Madison’s fitness as a wartime president. One of his more caustic comments, though it was not aimed at Madison directly, came in a private letter of 1811. “We are a nation of quakers,” he noted, “without either their morals or their motives.” Friendly with the Smith brothers of Maryland, Armstrong was thought a potential troublemaker during the lead-up to war, opposing, as he did, a continuation of the Virginia Dynasty. For this reason, Madison’s choice of Monroe as secretary of state did not please him. Yet in a meaningful turnabout, Armstrong pointedly criticized the divisive strategy of DeWitt Clinton in 1812, seeing the importance of a unity government in time of war. His reward was an appointment as brigadier general and commander of forces in New York City.

As 1813 began, practical solutions took precedence over partisan plans. Although Treasury Secretary Gallatin had nothing close to a warm relationship with Armstrong, his strong recommendation helped convince the president that the high-handed general could help the war effort. The administration’s strategy involved taking the war to Montreal through New York State. This required a secretary of war with a strong political base there—at the moment there were only 20,000 men in the entire American army, a mere 2,400 of whom were stationed in this theater. So in January 1813, and despite the fact that he was reckoned a likely presidential contender in 1816, General John Armstrong was named secretary of war.
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Secretary Eustis had resigned without complaint several weeks earlier. Even so, the transition was not smooth. At Madison’s request, Monroe had stepped in to fill the vacuum; but Monroe, too, presented problems because he had been giving Madison conflicting signals as to his own path to the presidency. Did he want the War Department? A battlefield appointment? Or to remain at State? So the choice of Armstrong may have reflected Madison’s annoyance with Monroe. For in spite of Armstrong’s flaws, Madison convinced himself that he could regulate the man’s “objectionable peculiarities,” as he later put it, with a deft combination of conciliation and control. He was conscious that Armstrong was capable of reining in Monroe and unlikely to tolerate his interference. And that is precisely what happened.

In February 1813, when Armstrong took up his post, he quashed Monroe’s plan to head the army in the Northwest by persuading the president that in making Monroe a lieutenant general and outranking all others, he would stir resentment in the officer corps. To keep the peace, Armstrong recommended that Monroe settle for the rank of brigadier general. Had he agreed, he would have been subordinate to the less-than-competent Dearborn.

Predictably, Monroe was outraged. To add insult to insult, he next discovered that Armstrong intended to head the new Canada campaign himself, prompting an emotion-charged letter to Madison in which Monroe accused Armstrong of fusing the roles of commander of the army and secretary of war and usurping the duties of the commander in chief. Madison was unmoved; he would uphold the principle of checks and balances within his cabinet, much as George Washington had done when the Hamilton-Jefferson feud first reached his desk.
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Accusations against Monroe came from several places. Federalist congressman Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts alleged that Monroe was at the
center of the cabinet’s machinations to prolong the war. Seeking popularity as a war leader, he claimed, the secretary of state was laying the groundwork for something potentially more dangerous than a Monroe presidency—a military dictatorship. Quincy was right about one thing: Monroe had put forward an audacious proposal to Congress, to raise an army of an unheard-of size, 55,000 troops, which he apparently expected to command. Gallatin and Congress trimmed down the proposal, and Monroe reluctantly went along. Ridiculed by Quincy as “James the Second” and chastised for his vanity, Monroe retreated from the spotlight, at least momentarily. Still, the “deadly feud,” as John Randolph described the Armstrong-Monroe competition, came to consume both men. Overlapping ambitions bred contempt, as both thought they could step over the unmartial Madison on the way to the presidency.
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Quincy’s scornful speech in Congress ignited a second scandal. Calling those New Englanders who sought patronage from the president “reptiles,” he suggested that they had left “slime” in the drawing room of the executive mansion. Several congressmen were appalled by the remark; one of these exploded, calling Quincy “filthy.” It was obvious to them (though not to a modern audience) that their colleague’s insinuation was aimed at Dolley Madison. At her weekly Wednesday drawing room gathering, young and old alike attended, all looking for favors as well as a good time. What Quincy was doing was joining a biblical metaphor to libertine fiction. Snakes oozing slime called up the history of European palace intrigues, where sexual liaisons were common. “Queen” Dolley was the Eve-like seductress, turning the President’s House into a harem.
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Such innuendo did not stop there. Alexander Contee Hanson, the Federalist editor whose establishment had come under attack in the Baltimore riots, was now a member of Congress. He showed little fear and no shame as he took up Quincy’s outrageous theme in his Georgetown-based newspaper. Hanson ran what purported to be an advertisement for a forthcoming book written by Madison’s new attorney general (and Monroe’s former diplomatic partner) William Pinkney. It was a work said to have been funded by his “illustrious patroness,” the first lady. One of the imaginary chapters publicized the concept, “
L’Amour et la fume ne peuvent se cacher
” (Love and smoke cannot be concealed), constituting a defense of polygamy and infidelity.

Was Hanson’s
Federal Republican
accusing Mrs. Madison of having an affair with Pinkney? It seems quite likely. The elegant Marylander was a favorite
among the ladies, who filled the courtroom to hear his colorful orations. Dolley was one of his admirers and attended court sessions with her retinue of family and friends. Hanson dropped a strong hint in his column, one that his classically trained readers would have easily recognized: he identified Dolley as “Corinna,” the Roman poet Ovid’s famous married mistress.
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Pinkney lasted only one more year in Madison’s cabinet. He was forced to resign after the House passed a law requiring cabinet members to live in Washington. It was a law written for him. With a flourishing law practice in Baltimore and Annapolis, he had no desire to move. Though considered one of the most talented lawyers in the nation, the House had little trouble passing this dubious piece of legislation, suggesting that Pinkney’s scandalous reputation—Hanson charged him with introducing the ways of “Modern Sodom” into a “chaste republic”—may have caught up with him. Pinkney would be succeeded, in 1814, by the reliable Richard Rush.
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Madison made one more change in his cabinet. Secretary of the Navy Paul Hamilton, like Pinkney, had become the focus of damning rumors. Washington was as yet a small town with few secrets, and all could see that Hamilton was an alcoholic who fell asleep at his desk and made a spectacle of himself at social events. The navy had been the only branch of the U.S. armed forces to perform admirably, but Hamilton had little to do with it. He begged Madison to keep him, desperately needing the income; but Madison forced him out, assuming that Congress would withhold funds to a department headed by an embarrassing drunk.

Madison offered the Navy Department to William Jones, whom Jefferson, in 1801, had tried unsuccessfully to recruit for the same office. A Pennsylvania merchant and former sea captain, Jones had been involved in the opium trade in southern China as recently as 1805. A man of pronounced wit and strong connections to the Pennsylvania Republicans, he promised to end the chaos in his department. Jones understood that the navy had to play a bigger role in the war, and he resolved to enlarge it by encouraging more privateers to harass British ships. After Hull’s devastating defeat, Madison had concluded that “ascendancy over those waters” was essential to any future Canadian campaign. Under Jones’s watch, a major program got under way to build warships on both Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.
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Madison was growing more daring. When he called for an enlarged navy and praised the crews of the victorious American ships for their gallant reprisals, he defended the war as one of “manly resistance” to British
tyranny. The United States would remain “colonists and vassals,” he said, as long as the nation submitted to British domination of the high seas—“that element which covers three-fourths of the globe.” He had begun to confront one of the unsound premises of Jefferson’s administration: that the United States did not need a navy of significance. The Royal Navy, with some thousand warships, completely outclassed the U.S. fleet, with barely five seaworthy frigates. A naval presence large enough to stand up to an aggressor had to become part of the American arsenal, not merely to carry on war but to prevent it. As Gallatin admitted to his brother-in-law at this time, the growth of the navy would be an essential ingredient in America’s autonomy after the war. “Taught by experience,” he wrote, the government would be channeling public resources into the navy so that “within five years” it would be in a “commanding position” in its Atlantic neighborhood.
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During the American Revolution, Madison had recognized the need for a strong navy. His assessment of the conditions the nation faced in 1813 marked a revival of that earlier commitment. In fact, war caused Madison to change his opinion about several articles of the Jeffersonian faith: no direct taxes, no national bank, and a reliance on gunboats. When he appointed Jones secretary, Madison selected a man who despised gunboats. Of the one hundred coast-hugging gunboats on the water in 1813, Jones took more than half out of commission, asking Congress to grant the president permission to sell boats not in use. They were “sluggish in their movements,” he said, and were no match for warships. Scattered about the country, the gunboats were mere “receptacles of idleness and objects of waste and extravagance without utility.” Jones did not mince words.