Madison and Jefferson (96 page)

Now in 1813, as he worried about the federal debt, he set out to protect future generations, each of which, in his words, constituted “a distinct nation.” One generation could no more bind its successor than it could pass laws for the inhabitants of a foreign country. When a generation ended, so did its sovereign debts. In Jefferson’s thinking, the boundary between generations was a natural chasm; it could not be crossed any more than the dead could return to the living over the river Styx.

As much as it made him secure in purging an evil, Jefferson’s plan was not at all democratic and stood in marked contrast to the democratic theory he was and is widely known for. In his own state of Virginia, many of the existing state banks were established to extend credit to those beyond the governing class. Jefferson’s view of lending perversely assumed that only individuals with money should be able to borrow. By this logic, he would restrict yeomen farmers from the purchase of land and equipment, or any sort of self-betterment; or, crucially, from picking up stakes and relocating west. Extending the privilege of borrowing money only encourages social mobility.

Jefferson had taken the time to write a long and polished disquisition, which he expected Jack Eppes to circulate among Republicans in Congress. “Use them or not as they appear to merit,” he said, a standard way of telling someone to spread the word. Jefferson needed congressmen in his corner before he would broach the subject with Madison. He would be sadly disappointed. Though Eppes did push the Treasury notes strategy and did oppose the charter of a new national bank, he gained few converts in Congress. Of the prominent Virginians in Washington, only Monroe seriously
considered the ex-president’s approach. It would be another year before Jefferson decided to write to Madison on these subjects, when he knew that the administration had every intention of backing a new national bank.
¹⁹

Madison did a most un-Republican thing when he raised taxes in order to conduct an aggressive war. Banking on an invasion of Canada to improve U.S. prospects, he simultaneously hoped that diplomacy, assisted by Tsar Alexander, would bring an end to impressment and obtain peace with honor. During the first half of 1813, the British buildup on the northeastern shore of Lake Ontario and along the St. Lawrence River was matched by an American buildup at Sackets Harbor, in New York State, on the eastern shore of the lake, some forty miles south of the St. Lawrence.

In the West the Shawnee leader Tecumseh proved as courageous as he was impatient with the tentative British commander with whom he was meant to coordinate operations. On the American side, William Henry Harrison seemed to be wasting money as he wasted time; the
Virginia Argus
thought of this native son as an inept watchmaker, “always winding up, but … never striking.” East and west, British and American forces alike exhibited their share of disorderly conduct, on and off the battlefield. In July 1813 Secretary of War Armstrong removed an increasingly despondent General Henry Dearborn (“Granny Dearborn,” to the Federalists) from his command.
²⁰

During the second half of the year, the United States gradually achieved naval supremacy on Lake Ontario, though the balance of power there kept shifting. On Lake Erie America’s newest naval hero, Oliver Hazard Perry, redefined coolness under fire as he braved some of the heaviest fire of the war and destroyed the best of the British fleet. As he reduced their profile, the British thought it prudent to abandon Detroit. This opened the door for William Henry Harrison. Boosted by Kentucky riflemen, he crossed into Canada in pursuit of the enemy; and at the Battle of the Thames in October, Tecumseh, the eloquent spokesman for pan-Indian alliance and most formidable of warriors, was killed. Montreal and Quebec remained too heavily defended to pose a real opportunity, even for a resilient American force.

General James Wilkinson, who tainted everything he touched, replaced
Dearborn. In the spring of 1813 he was called from New Orleans to New York State and took charge at Sackets Harbor. The army assembled there was weakened by a health crisis caused by the consumption of food polluted by water that flowed through the soldiers’ latrines. But it was not long before Wilkinson was claiming that he was primed to take the war to the enemy.

His survival as an active general, despite years of harassing civilian leaders and tormenting troops, is a remarkable story. Useful to Jefferson when he gave dubious substance to the rumors of Aaron Burr’s treasonous intent, Wilkinson found himself the subject of serious inquiry, and then a court-martial, in 1811. An investigation launched by President Madison himself found irregularities in the general’s behavior with respect to Burr and, ultimately of greater importance, in playing both sides in his dealings with Spanish authorities. But the evidence fell short of what was required to convict, and he retained his position in Louisiana, where he was universally despised. Armstrong’s decision to reassign Wilkinson to the Canadian front was done to take him out of harm’s way, politically speaking.

From Sackets Harbor, then, Wilkinson menacingly moved his force of seven thousand up the St. Lawrence in October and early November 1813, aiming for Montreal. Taking ill, the portly general self-medicated with the opiate laudanum, which slowed his thinking and slowed the advance. His senior officers favored continuing engagements along the river, but Wilkinson proved less bold than his rhetoric and returned to winter quarters. With all his ribbons, he revealed himself a rather indecisive soldier. Like Secretary of War Armstrong, he had never commanded an army in battle and left it up to a heartier breed to engage directly.
²¹

These were the kinds of men who directed Mr. Madison’s ground war. Slowly, as significantly higher bounties led more and more men to enlist, better soldiers rose in the ranks and replaced Wilkinson, Dearborn, and their like. In the West, the British-Indian alliance had weakened. Any northern push would now have to come from that direction.

Meanwhile, as he surveyed the failed Canadian campaigns, Armstrong became convinced that conscription was needed to produce a superior force. He published an editorial in a New York newspaper, calling for a regular army of 55,000 men, because the voluntary regular army and state militias had proven unreliable. Monroe, now sensitive to the political cost of such a move, persistently warned Madison against listening to his secretary of war—Monroe was convinced that militia units would fight as well as regular army. Madison ignored these warnings and allowed Armstrong to
make his case to Congress. On December 7, 1813, Madison gave an address to the national legislature, in which he endorsed conscription. He was ready for drastic measures, even if it meant raising the specter of a standing army, so long anathema to republicanism.

The collapse of the northern campaign made Monroe angry again. He demanded Armstrong’s removal. In fact, during Armstrong’s absence at the front, Monroe ordered all correspondence dealing with the 1813 campaign transferred to the State Department. His method for collecting evidence against Armstrong struck Madison as unsavory—in fact, the chief clerk at the War Department later recalled that he had never seen Madison “more in a passion.” The president was not likely to listen to a new round of Monroe’s complaints. Though wary of Armstrong, he was willing to give him another chance, believing that every move in the direction of Canada strengthened America’s hand in negotiations with England.

With Armstrong and Monroe jockeying for power and Gallatin overseas, Madison put greater trust in the loyal, enterprising, but less personally ambitious William Jones. When Gallatin’s appointment as a peace negotiator was officially approved in Congress, Jones finally stepped down as treasury secretary, leaving that key administration position open. Madison tried to enlist the Pennsylvanian Alexander James Dallas, an outspoken Republican since the mid-1790s, who was a close friend of Jones’s. But Dallas despised Armstrong and refused to serve in the cabinet with him. The president then settled on Senator George Washington Campbell of Tennessee, a man with little skill in the area of finance. His appointment was largely cosmetic, as it relieved Jones of the bureaucratic burdens of running two departments, though the president still came to him for economic advice.
²²

In the latest round of cabinet shuffling, Madison got rid of Postmaster General Gideon Granger, a DeWitt Clinton ally, after Granger attempted to use his patronage power to humiliate his boss. Instead of ratifying Madison’s choice for postmaster of Philadelphia, he had named one of Gallatin’s archenemies. Granger’s petty maneuver was, in Dolley Madison’s words, an “insult to
us
all.” Seeing what might occur next, Madison warned Jefferson to be wary of any “artful” letter he might receive from the outgoing official. Incredibly, Granger thought he could blackmail Jefferson into defending him. He directly threatened to publicize allegations about the sexual diversions of both the first lady and her sister. And he even insinuated that he might have to remind the public of Jefferson’s attempted seduction of his neighbor’s wife, a charge dating to the late 1760s, first leveled by James Callender, which Jefferson had owned up to.

Jefferson did not take Granger’s threats lightly. He replied to the unwelcome letter with a stern warning: If he dared to circulate “such gossiping trash,” Granger would quickly find himself ostracized by the Republican Party. With Granger out of the way, Madison appointed Ohio governor Return J. Meigs as postmaster general. It did not go unnoticed that after the death of Dolley Madison’s sister, the husband she left behind, John G. Jackson, congressman from Virginia, had recently married Meigs’s daughter.
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As president, Madison was not pressed by his fellow Virginians, or even by prominent northerners, to devise a remedy for slavery—except in private by his personal secretary Edward Coles. Madison did, however, witness during his second term the beginnings of what would become the South’s antebellum defense of slavery as a creditable institution. The man responsible was the quintessential Old Republican, Edmund Pendleton’s nephew and Madison’s longtime acquaintance, former U.S. senator John Taylor of Caroline.

In 1813 Taylor published the influential
Arator
(Latin for “cultivator”), a guide to healthy agricultural practices that was equally a defense of Virginia tradition. In the essays, Taylor showed no sympathy for African Americans. Claiming a realist perspective, he dismissed the arguments of humanitarians and insisted that slavery was an evil that could never be “wholly cured”; “to whine over it is cowardly,” he insisted, “to aggravate it, criminal.” The realist’s solution was to perfect slave owning and contain its violent potential. For this, Taylor drew a transparent analogy: “The history of parties in its utmost malignity is but a feint [
sic
] mirror for reflecting the consequences of a white and black party.” He played upon memories of the worst of the French Revolution, referencing the poorest and most shabbily dressed of the Jacobins: “For where will the rights of black sansculottes stop?” It was critical that slaves remained docile and disciplined, because slavery remained the only means to wealth in the South, and Taylor could see no better option than to maximize the efficiency of farms.
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Taylor was convinced that free blacks were “an unproductive class” and, lacking full political rights, turned easily to vice. Their “mingling” with enslaved brethren “mutually excit[ed] each other to rebellion.” The visibility of free blacks damaged the planter’s efforts to keep his slaves happy and productive. The national government, he said, as a composite of North and
South, was collectively ignorant of agricultural science and incapable of acting in the interest of the cultivator.

Taylor joined two themes: exhaustion of the soil of Virginia and big government’s taking the side of the moneyed interest over that of the endangered cultivator. Entranced with the banking community, government only added to the southern farmer’s woes by victimizing him for owning slaves, while at the same time consigning his agriculture to “contempt and misery.” Outside the United States, according to Taylor, the agricultural interest was “a slave”; “here she is only a dupe …, deluded by flattery and craft.” If nothing were done to reverse the trend, in the end the South’s entire wealth would be squandered.
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He had thrown down the gauntlet. Either Washington must protect the true, tangible wealth of the nation, or it would wreak economic havoc and increase the potential for widespread racial violence. Taylor insisted that the republican form of government was entirely compatible with the institution of slavery. “Slavery was carried farther among the Greeks and Romans than among ourselves,” he argued, “and yet these two nations produced more great and good citizens, than, probably, all the rest of the world.” Accordingly, Taylor rejected Jefferson’s warning in
Notes on Virginia
that slavery corrupted the manners of whites. Even Madison, despite an inclination to find comfort in the demonstrated abilities of free blacks in the North, would return before long to the familiar stereotype, praising the benevolent Virginia master and saying that emancipation was not likely to remedy the slave’s “natural and habitual repugnance to labour.”

President Madison did not entirely escape condemnation for his support of slavery. His papers reveal that at least one representative abolitionist was irate enough to write to him directly and expose the hypocrisy in his complaining about Britain’s “pressing and enslaving a few thousand of your seamen,” while “you southern Nabobs, to glut your avrise [
sic
] for sorded [
sic
] gain, make no scruple of enslaving millions of the sons and daughters of Africa, & their descendants.”
²⁶

While demeaning descriptions of the character of a slave fed the many rationalizations for the institution’s persistence, most everyone in the South agreed that a concentration of slaves in any one place increased the possibility of social unrest. The colonization/removal option, whether arising out of ostensibly humane concern for the enslaved or selfish motives on the part of whites, remained alive from the Revolution through the deaths of Jefferson and Madison.