Founding Brothers (18 page)

In the midst
of this willful confusion, one Madisonian conviction shone through with his
more characteristic clarity—namely, that slavery was an explosive topic
that must be removed from the political agenda of the new nation. It was taboo
because it exposed the inherent contradictions of the Virginia position, which
was much closer to the position of the Deep South than Madison wished to
acknowledge, even to himself. And it was taboo because, more than any other
controversy, it possessed the political potential to destroy the union.
Franklin wanted to put slavery onto the national agenda before it was too late
to take decisive action in accord with the principles of the Revolution.
Madison wanted to take slavery off the national agenda because he believed that
decisive action would result in the destruction of either the Virginia planter
class or the nation itself. (In the minds of many Virginians, the two items
were synonymous.) “The true policy of the Southern members,” he
explained to a fellow Virginian, “was to let the affair proceed with as
little noise as possible.” The misguided representatives of the Deep
South had spoiled that strategy. Now Madison resolved to seize the opportunity
created by their threats of secession to put Congress on record as rejecting
any constitutional right by the federal government to end slavery. It was the
South Carolina solution achieved in the Virginia style.
⁵¹

T
HE ESSENCE
of that style was
indirection. Madison was its master, so deft behind the scenes and in
unrecorded conversations that his most significant political achievements,
including his impact on the eventual shape of the Constitution and his enduring
influence on the thought and behavior of Thomas Jefferson, remain forever
hidden, visible only in the way that one detects the movement of iron filings
within a magnetic field. The Madisonian influence revealed itself in the House
debate of March 23 when the committee report came up for a vote.

Something had changed. Several northern members, who had previously sided
with the Quaker petitioners, now expressed their regret that the matter had
gotten out of hand. Fisher Ames of Massachusetts wondered out loud why the
House had allowed itself to be drawn into a debate over “abstract
propositions” and now urged that the committee report be tabled. Jackson
rose to thank Ames and his northern colleagues for seeing the light and
recovering the old conciliatory spirit that had once permitted northern and
southern interests to cooperate. One of the Quaker petitioners in the gallery,
John Pemberton, noted in his diary that some kind of sectional bargain had
obviously been struck: “It was a matter of scratch me and I will scratch
thee.” (Pemberton surmised that a secret deal had been arranged whereby
Massachusetts would align itself with the Deep South on the slavery issue in
return for southern support on assumption. If so, Jefferson’s dinner
party the following June was the culmination of an even more complicated
sectional negotiation than previously realized.) But all claims about what had
gone on behind the scenes are conjectural. Madison seldom left
footprints.
⁵²

The goal of
the Deep South, now with support from Massachusetts and Virginia, was to have
the committee report tabled, again threatening that further debate would risk
disunion, which William Loughton Smith likened to “heaving out an anchor
to windward.” Madison, however, wanted more than just an end to the
debate. He wished to establish a precedent that clarified the constitutional
ambiguities concerning the power of Congress over slavery. Therefore he
welcomed the positive vote (29 to 25) to accept the committee report (details
of which forthcoming), because he had resolved to use the occasion to establish
a constitutional precedent. In the twentieth century, what Madison aimed to
achieve would have required a decision by the Supreme Court. But in 1790 the
Supreme Court was a woefully weak third branch of the federal government and
the principle of judicial review had yet to be established. Madison wanted to
use the vote on the committee report to create the equivalent of a landmark
decision prohibiting any national scheme for emancipation.
⁵³

It happened
just as he desired. The committee report consisted of seven resolutions that
addressed this salient question: What are “the powers vested in Congress,
under the present constitution, relating to the abolition of slavery”?
The first resolution was designed to appease the Deep South by confirming that
the Constitution prohibited any federal legislation limiting or ending the
slave trade until 1808. The fourth was a gesture toward the northern interests,
authorizing Congress to levy a tax on slave imports designed to discourage the
practice without prohibiting it. The seventh was a nod toward the Quaker
petitioners, declaring that “in all cases, to which the authority of
Congress extends, they will exercise it for the humane objects of the
memorialists, so far as they can be promoted on the principles of justice,
humanity and good policy.” But what did this deliberately vague promise
mean? Specifically, how far did the authority of Congress extend? The implicit
answer was in the second resolution. It read: “That Congress, by a fair
construction of the Constitution, are equally restrained from interfering in
the emancipation of slaves, who already are, or who may, within the period
mentioned, be imported into, or born within any of the said
States.”
⁵⁴

This was the
key provision. In keeping with the compromise character of the committee
report, it gave the Deep South the protection it had demanded by denying
congressional authority to pass any gradual emancipation legislation. But it
also set a chronological limit to this moratorium. The prohibition would only
last “within the period mentioned”—that is, until 1808. In
effect, the committee report extended the deadline for the consideration of
emancipation to bring it into line with the deadline for the end of the slave
trade. The Deep South would get its way, but only for a limited time. After
1808, Congress possessed the authority to do what it wished; then all
constitutional restraints would lapse.

At this decisive moment, the
Madisonian magic worked its will. The House went into committee of the whole to
revise the language of the report. In parliamentary maneuverings of this sort,
Madison had no peer. The Virginia delegation had already received its marching
orders to mobilize behind an amended version of the report. And several
northern delegations, chiefly those of Massachusetts and New York, had clearly
been lobbied to support the amendments, though no one will ever know what
promises were made. In the end, the seven resolutions were reduced to three.
The tax on the slave trade was dropped altogether, as was the seventh
resolution, with its vague declaration of solidarity with the benevolent goals
of the Quaker petitioners. The latter gesture had become irrelevant because of
the new language of the second resolution. It now read: “The Congress
have no authority to interfere in the emancipation of slaves, or in the
treatment of them within any of the States; it remaining with the several
States alone to provide any regulation therein, which humanity and true policy
may require.” During the debate over this language, Madison provided the
clearest gloss on its fresh meaning by explaining that, instead of imposing an
eighteen-year moratorium on congressional action against slavery, the amendment
made it unconstitutional “to attempt to manumit them at any time.”
The final report passed by the House in effect placed any and all debate over
slavery as it existed in the South out of bounds forever. What had begun as an
initiative to put slavery on the road to extinction had been transformed into a
decision to extinguish all federal plans for emancipation. By a vote of 29 to
25 the House agreed to transcribe this verdict in the permanent record. A
relieved George Washington wrote home to a Virginia friend that “the
slave business has at last [been] put to rest and will scarce
awake.”
⁵⁵

As usual,
Washington was right. Congress had moved gradual emancipation off its political
agenda; its decision in the spring of 1790 became a precedent with the force of
common law. In November of 1792, for example, when another Quaker petition came
forward under the sponsorship of Fisher Ames, William Loughton Smith referred
his colleague to the earlier debate of 1790. The House had then decided never
again to allow itself to become inflamed by the “mere rant and rhapsody
of a meddling fanatic” and had argued “that the subject would never
be stirred again.” The petition was withdrawn. Over forty years later, in
1833, Daniel Webster cited the same precedent: “My opinion of the powers
of Congress on the subject of slaves and slavery is that Congress has no
authority to interfere in the emancipation of slaves. This was so resolved by
the House in 1790 … and I do not know of a different opinion
since.”
⁵⁶

Whatever
window of opportunity had existed to complete the one glaring piece of
unfinished business in the revolutionary era was now closed. As noted earlier,
perhaps the window, if in fact there ever was a window, had already closed by
1790, so the debate and decision in the House merely sealed shut what the
formidable combination of racial demography, Anglo-Saxon presumptions, and
entrenched economic interests had already foreclosed. Over two hundred years
after the event, it is still not possible to demonstrate conclusively that
Madison’s understanding of the political priorities was wrong, or that
the pursuit of Franklin’s priorities would not have dismembered the
American republic at the moment of its birth. Perhaps it was inevitable, even
preferable, that slavery as a national problem be moved from the Congress to
the churches, where it could come under scrutiny as a sin requiring a national
purging, rather than as a social dilemma requiring a political solution. That,
in any event, is what happened.

One can only speculate on what thought
and feelings went streaking through the conscience of James Madison after the
fleeting moment passed. Madison understood better than most what was at stake
in the debate over slavery. He knew what the American Revolution had promised,
that slavery violated that promise, and that Franklin had gone to his Maker
reminding all concerned that silence was a betrayal of the revolutionary
legacy. During the memorial service in Franklin’s honor on April 22,
Madison rose to deliver the final tribute of the House:

The House
being informed of the decease of BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, a citizen whose native
genius was not more an ornament to human nature, than his various exertions of
it have been precious to science, to freedom, and to his country, do resolve,
as mark of the veneration due to his memory, that the members wear the
customary badge of mourning for one month.
⁵⁷

The
symbolism of the scene was poignant, dramatizing as it did the passing of the
prototypical American and the cause of gradual emancipation. Whether they knew
it or not, the badge of mourning the members of the House agreed to wear also
bore testimony to the tragic and perhaps intractable problem that even the
revolutionary generation, with all its extraordinary talent, could neither
solve nor face.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Farewell

T
HROUGHOUT THE
first half
of the 1790s, the closest approximation to a self-evident truth in American
politics was George Washington. A legend in his own time, Americans had been
describing Washington as “the Father of the Country” since
1776—which is to say, before there was even a country. By the time he
assumed the presidency in 1789—no other candidate was even
thinkable—the mythology surrounding Washington’s reputation had
grown like ivy over a statue, effectively covering the man with an aura of
omnipotence, rendering the distinction between his human qualities and his
heroic achievements impossible to delineate.
¹

Some of the
most incredible stories also happened to be true. During Gen. Edward
Braddock’s ill-fated expedition against the French outside Pittsburgh in
1755, a young Washington had joined with Daniel Boone to rally the survivors,
despite having two horses shot out from under him and multiple bullet holes
piercing his coat and creasing his pants. At Yorktown in 1781, he had insisted
on standing atop a parapet for a full fifteen minutes during an artillery
attack, bullets and shrapnel flying all about him, defying aides who tried to
pull him down before he had properly surveyed the field of action. When
Washington spoke of destiny, people listened.
²

If there was a
Mount Olympus in the new American republic, all the lesser gods were gathered
farther down the slope. The only serious contender for primacy was Benjamin
Franklin, but just before his death in 1790, Franklin himself acknowledged
Washington’s supremacy. In a characteristically Franklinesque gesture, he
bequeathed to Washington his crab-tree walking stick, presumably to assist the
general in his stroll toward immortality. “If it were a sceptre,”
Franklin remarked, “he has merited it and would become it.”
³

In the America
of the 1790s, Washington’s image was everywhere, in paintings, prints,
lockets; on coins, silverware, plates, and household bric-a-brac. And his
familiarity seemed forever. His commanding presence had been the central
feature in every major event of the revolutionary era: the linchpin of the
Continental Army throughout eight long years of desperate fighting from 1775 to
1783; the presiding officer at the Constitutional Convention in 1787; the first
and only chief executive of the fledgling federal government since 1789. He was
the palpable reality that clothed the revolutionary rhapsodies in flesh and
blood, America’s one and only indispensable character. Washington was the
core of gravity that prevented the American Revolution from flying off into
random orbits, the stable center around which the revolutionary energies
formed. As one popular toast of the day put it, he was “the man who
unites all hearts.” He was the American Zeus, Moses, and Cincinnatus all
rolled into one.
⁴

Then, all of a
sudden, on September 19, 1796, an article addressed to “the PEOPLE of the
United States” appeared on the inside pages of the
American Daily
Advertiser,
Philadelphia’s major newspaper. The conspicuous
austerity of the announcement was matched by its calculated simplicity. It
began: “Friends, and Fellow Citizens: The period for a new election of a
Citizen, to Administer the Executive government of the United States, being not
far distant … it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a
more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you of
the resolutions I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of
those, out of whom a choice is to be made.” It ended, again in a gesture
of ostentatious moderation, with the unadorned signature: “G. Washington,
United States.”
⁵

Every major
newspaper in the country reprinted the article over the ensuing weeks, though
only one, the
Courier of New Hampshire,
gave it the title that would
echo through the ages—“Washington’s Farewell Address.”
Contemporaries began to debate its contents almost immediately, and a lively
(and ultimately silly) argument soon ensued about whether Washington or
Hamilton actually wrote it. Over a longer stretch of time, the Farewell Address
achieved transcendental status, ranking alongside the Declaration of
Independence and the Gettysburg Address as a seminal statement of
America’s abiding principles. Its Olympian tone made it a perennial
touchstone at those political occasions requiring platitudinous wisdom. And in
the late nineteenth century the Congress made its reading a mandatory ritual on
Washington’s birthday. Meanwhile, several generations of historians, led
by students of American diplomacy, have made the interpretation of the Farewell
Address into a cottage industry of its own, building up a veritable mountain of
commentary around its implications for an isolationist foreign policy and a
bipartisan brand of American statecraft.
⁶

But in the
crucible of the moment, none of these subsequent affectations or
interpretations mattered much, if at all. What did matter, indeed struck most
readers as the only thing that truly mattered, was that George Washington was
retiring. The constitutional significance of the decision, of course, struck
home immediately, signaling as it did Washington’s voluntary surrender of
the presidency after two terms, thereby setting the precedent that held firm
until 1940, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt broke it. (It was reaffirmed in 1951
with passage of the Twenty-second Amendment.) But even that landmark precedent,
so crucial in establishing the republican principle of rotation in office,
paled in comparison to an even more elemental political and psychological
realization.

For twenty years, over the entire life span of the
revolutionary war and the experiment with republican government, Washington had
stood at the helm of the ship of state. Now he was sailing off into the sunset.
The precedent he was setting may have seemed uplifting in retrospect, but at
the time the glaring and painful reality was that the United States without
Washington was itself unprecedented. The Farewell Address, as several
commentators have noted, was an oddity in that it was not really an address; it
was never delivered as a speech. It should, by all rights, be called the
Farewell Letter, for it was in form and tone an open letter to the American
people, telling them they were now on their own.
⁷

I
NSIDERS HAD
suspected that this was coming for about six
months. In February of 1796, Washington had first approached Alexander Hamilton
about drafting some kind of valedictory statement. Shortly thereafter, the
gossip network inside the government had picked up the scent. By the end of the
month, James Madison was writing James Monroe in Paris: “It is pretty
certain that the President will not serve beyond his present term.” On
the eve of the Farewell Address, the Federalist leader from Massachusetts,
Fisher Ames, predicted that Washington’s looming announcement would
constitute “a signal, like dropping a hat, for the party races to
start,” but in fact they had been going on unofficially throughout the
preceding spring and summer. In May, for example, Madison had
speculated—correctly, it turned out—that in the first contested
election for president in American history, “Jefferson would probably be
the object on one side [and] Adams apparently on the other.” By
midsummer, Washington himself was apprising friends of his earnest desire to
leave the government when his term was up, “after which no consideration
under heaven that I can foresee shall again with draw me from the walks of
private life.” He had been dropping hints, in truth, throughout his
second term, describing himself as “on the advanced side of the grand
climacteric” and too old for the rigors of the job, repeating his
familiar refrain about the welcome solace of splendid isolation beneath his
“vine and fig tree” at Mount Vernon.
⁸

But did he
mean it? Lamentations about the tribulations of public life, followed by
celebrations of the bucolic splendor of retirement to rural solitude, had
become a familiar, even formulaic, posture within the leadership class of the
revolutionary generation, especially within the Virginia dynasty. Everyone knew
the classical models of latter-day seclusion represented by Cincinnatus and
described by Cicero and Virgil. Declarations of principled withdrawal from the
hurly-burly of politics to the natural rhythms of one’s fields or farms
had become rhetorical rituals. If Washington’s retirement hymn featured
the “vine and fig tree,” Jefferson’s idolized “my
family, my farm, and my books.” The motif had become so commonplace that
John Adams, an aspiring Cicero himself, claimed that the Virginians had worn
out the entire Ciceronian syndrome: “It seems the Mode of becoming great
is to retire,” he wrote Abigail in 1796. “It is marvellous how
political Plants grow in the shade.” Washington had been threatening to
retire even before he was inaugurated as president in 1789, and he had repeated
the threat in 1792 prior to his reelection. While utterly sincere on all
occasions, his preference for a virtuous retirement had always been trumped by
a more public version of virtue, itself reinforced by the unanimous judgment of
his political advisers that he and he alone was indispensable. Why expect a
different conclusion in 1796?
⁹

The short
answer: age. Throughout most of his life, Washington’s physical vigor had
been one of his most priceless assets. A notch below six feet four and slightly
above two hundred pounds, he was a full head taller than his male
contemporaries. (John Adams claimed that the reason Washington was invariably
selected to lead every national effort was that he was always the tallest man
in the room.) A detached description of his physical features would have made
him sound like an ugly, misshapen oaf: pockmarked face, decayed teeth,
oversized eye sockets, massive nose, heavy in the hips, gargantuan hands and
feet. But somehow, when put together and set in motion, the full package
conveyed sheer majesty. As one of his biographers put it, his body did not just
occupy space; it seemed to organize the space around it. He dominated a room
not just with his size, but with an almost electric presence. “He has so
much martial dignity in his deportment,” observed Benjamin Rush,
“that there is not a king in Europe but would look like a valet de
chambre by his side.”
¹⁰

Not only did
bullets and shrapnel seem to veer away from his body in battle, not only did he
once throw a stone over the Natural Bridge in the Shenandoah Valley, which was
215 feet high, not only was he generally regarded as the finest horseman in
Virginia, the rider who led the pack in most fox hunts, he also possessed for
most of his life a physical constitution that seemed immune to disease or
injury. Other soldiers came down with frostbite after swimming ice-choked
rivers. Other statesmen fell by the wayside, lacking the stamina to handle the
relentless political pressure. Washington suffered none of these ailments.
Adams said that Washington had “the gift of taciturnity,” meaning
he had an instinct for the eloquent silence. This same principle held true on
the physical front. His medical record was eloquently empty.
¹¹

The
inevitable chinks in his cast-iron constitution began to appear with age. He
fell ill just before the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and almost missed
that major moment. Then in 1790, soon after assuming the presidency, he came
down with influenza, then raging in New York, and nearly died from pulmonary
complications. Jefferson’s statements about Washington were notoriously
contradictory and unreliable, as we shall see, but he dated Washington’s
physical decline from this moment: “The firm tone of his mind, for which
he had been remarkable, was beginning to relax; a listlessness of labor, a
desire for tranquillity had crept on him, and a willingness to let others act,
or even think, for him.” In 1794, while touring the terrain around the
new national capital that would bear his name, he badly wrenched his back while
riding. After a career of galloping to hounds, and a historic reputation as
America’s premier man on horseback, he was never able to hold his seat in
the saddle with the same confidence. As he moved into his mid-sixties, the
muscular padding around his torso softened and sagged, his erect bearing
started to tilt forward, as if he were always leaning into the wind, and his
energy flagged by the end of each long day. Hostile newspaper editorials spoke
elliptically of encroaching senility. Even his own vice president, John Adams,
conceded that Washington seemed dazed and wholly scripted at certain public
ceremonies, like an actor reading his lines or an aging athlete going through
the motions.
¹²