James Madison Part 8

[Ill.u.s.tration: D P Madison]

With the ensuing session of Congress, at the close of Washington's administration, Madison's congressional service ended. The leadership of the opposition, whatever may be thought of its influence upon the welfare of the country, or of the personal motives by which he may have been governed, had devolved upon him, almost from the beginning, by natural selection of the fittest for that position. It was not an easy place to take, either by one's own choice or by the suffrages of others; for at the head of the administration to be opposed stood the man most revered by a grateful country, surrounded by men among those, at least, who were best known for their past services and most esteemed for their ability and character. It was the more difficult for one whose personal relation to the President was that of the warmest friendship; to whom the President was accustomed to turn for counsel and even for guidance; and who, being among those eminent men to whom the people owed their new Const.i.tution, was counted upon to strengthen the union of the States and build up a strong and stable government. He played his difficult part, nevertheless, with dignity; if not brilliant, he was always ready with the best reasons that could be given for the measures he supported; and his zeal was invariably tempered with a wise moderation and a courtesy toward opponents which made him always respected, and sometimes feared for reserved force, in debate.

Somewhat more than a year before his retirement from Congress Mr.

Madison had married, and it is quite possible that this may in part have moved him to seek rest in the tranquillity of a country life. Tradition says that Mrs. Madison was a beautiful woman. She has in our time been a marked figure in the society of Washington, and many remember her for her fine presence, her powers of conversation, and that beauty which sometimes belongs to the aged, though it may not have been preceded by youthful comeliness. Her maiden name was Dolly Payne, and her parents were members of the Society of Friends. When Madison married her she was Mrs. Todd, the widow of John Todd, a lawyer of Philadelphia. Her age at this time was twenty-six years, Mr. Madison being forty-three, and she survived him thirteen years, dying in 1849. On her tombstone she is called "Dolley;" but Mr. Rives, in his life of her husband, ever mindful of the proprieties, calls her "Dorothea," or rather, Mrs.

Dorothea Payne Madison; for, like the Vicar of Wakefield, he loved to give the whole name.

CHAPTER XV

AT HOME--"RESOLUTIONS OF '98 AND '99"

Mr. Madison, in retiring for a time from public office, did not lose his interest in public affairs. Of few Americans can it be said with more truth that he had a genius for politics, and the subject, wherever he might be, was never out of his mind. There is not much else in the volumes of his published letters, while there is just enough else to show that in these he said all he had to say about anything. His more ambitious writings, the papers in "The Federalist," the essay on The British Doctrine of Neutral Trade, his controversial articles in the newspapers under various pseudonyms, are all political, all able, and all of great value as a part of the history of the times. Those which are controversial, however, must be taken, like his letters, as aids to knowledge rather than as definite conclusions to be accepted without question. It does not detract from the value of these letters, however, that they are written from the point of view of a party leader. Affairs of only temporary importance sometimes loom up before him merely because of their influence upon some immediate party movement; and others, of far-reaching consequences, which have no such bearing, escape his notice altogether; but the reader soon learns that he may, at any rate, confide in the sincerity of the writer, and accept as freely the reasons given for his course as they are frankly stated.

Of the literary value of his writings, aside from their historical interest, there is not much to be said, though Mr. Madison always wrote, even in his letters, as if writing for posterity. He was not felicitous in the use of language; the style is turgid, heavy with resounding words of many syllables, unillumined by any ray of imagination, any flash of wit or of humor; and the sentences are often involved and badly put together. But there is a genuineness, an evident sincerity of purpose, in all he wrote, and occasionally an expression of deep feeling, which are always impressive. We search for glimpses of his private life and character in such letters, for they are not easily apparent. In one sense he had no private life, or, at least, none that was not so subordinate to his public career that there was little in it either significant or attractive. There is, in this respect, a marked contrast between his correspondence and that of Jefferson. There was, possibly, a little affectation in Jefferson's frequent a.s.sertions of his intense desire for the quiet of the country and the tranquillity of home, and of his distaste for the turmoils and anxieties of public office. But he was certainly fond of country life, with the leisure to potter about among his sheep and his trees; to watch the growth of his wheat and his clover; to contrive new coulters for his plows; to talk of philosophy, of the Social Contract, of mechanics, and of natural history: if he was averse to public life, it was not because political power and distinction were a burden to him, except as they brought with them strife and unpopularity, which truly his soul loathed for himself, though he rather liked to set other people by the ears. His private life was unquestionably as full of interest to himself as it is entertaining to look upon in the unconscious revelation of his own letters.

But with Madison it was apparently quite otherwise. He unbent with difficulty. Always solemn and dignified, it was rather painful than pleasant to him to stoop to the petty matters of every-day existence. He had no small affectations, and was not forever a.s.serting that he was without ambition; as if that, without which n.o.body is of much use in the world either to himself or to others, were a weakness akin to depravity.

With brief intervals, covering only a few months altogether, he was where he best liked to be, from his entrance upon public life in 1775 till he stepped down in 1817 from that political elevation beyond which there are no ascending steps. During these forty-two years he found a certain enjoyment in a country home for a little while at a time, but it was chiefly the enjoyment of needed rest from official labor. The price of tobacco and the promise of the wheat crop interested him then, but only as they interested him always as a source of his own income, and as the index to the general prosperity. At the end of a letter upon political matters, he announces with satisfaction that his merino ewe has dropped a lamb, and both mother and offspring are as well as could be expected; but it was probably Mr. Jefferson's gratification rather than his own that he had in mind, for it was Mr. Jefferson who had imported the sheep. Again, in a similar letter, he takes a little remaining s.p.a.ce to express a hope that Mr. Jefferson may permit the use of the rams of that flock to improve the breed of the native stock; not, apparently, that he cared so much about wool as that he wished to show a courteous and friendly interest in one of Mr. Jefferson's many projects for the improvement of things generally.

It was probably during the year of comparative leisure after he left Congress that Mr. Madison built his house at Montpellier, though some question has been raised on this point. He certainly was building a house at that time, and it is not likely that he ever employed himself in that way more than once. Scattered among discussions of Alien and Sedition Laws, the war in Europe, free goods in neutral ships, and other public topics, are brief allusions to lathing nails which he depended upon Mr. Jefferson to supply; that gentleman having recently set up a machine for their manufacture, which, however, like a good many other of his contrivances, seems to have had a hitch in it. So also he asks the Vice-President to see to it that, when the window-gla.s.s and the pulleys are forwarded, the "chord" for the latter shall not be forgotten; and orders for other articles, only to be found in Philadelphia, are sent to his obliging friend. Mr. Jefferson, it is easy to believe, found them rather the most interesting part of the political letters to which they were appended; and he was quite willing, no doubt, to relieve the tedium of presiding over the Senate by searching through the Market Street shops for the latest improvements in builders' hardware. To Mr. Monroe, Madison wrote that, as he is sending off a wagon to fetch nails for his carpenters, "it will receive the few articles which you have been so good as to offer from the superfluities of your stock, and which circ.u.mstances will permit me now to lay in." Evidently he was getting ready to go to housekeeping with his young wife. Monroe's stock of household goods had been replenished, perhaps by importations from France on his recent return, and he was disposing of his old supplies, by gift or sale, among his neighbors. Madison, at any rate, sends this modest list of what he would like to have: "To wit, two table-cloths for a dining-room of about eighteen feet; two, three, or four, as may be convenient, for a more limited scale; four dozen napkins, which will not in the least be objectionable for having been used; and two mattresses."

It was not an extravagant outfit, even though it had not been meant for one of those lordly Virginia homes of which some modern historians give us such charming pictures. "We are so little acquainted,"--Mr.

Madison continues in that stately way which nothing ever surprised him into forgetting,--"we are so little acquainted with the culinary utensils in detail that it is difficult to refer to such by name or description as would be within our wants."

But pots and kettles,--though that may not be the name they were known by in Virginia,--table-cloths and mattresses, however moderate in number, are sure indications that the house, which was to be his residence when he should be content to retire from public service, was finished early in 1798. He had rested long enough, and was busy that year in attendance upon the state a.s.sembly at Richmond, to which he consented the next year to be returned as a member. Perhaps it was because he could not keep longer out of the fray. Perhaps he felt called to a special duty. Affairs, foreign and domestic, were in a critical condition. France, in her resentment at the Jay treaty, had committed so many fresh outrages upon American commerce; had so exasperated the American people by these outrages; and, by refusing to receive the ministers from the United States, had so insulted them and the government they represented in the proposed arrangements,--disclosed in the X. Y. Z. correspondence,--that all friendly relations between the two countries had ceased, and it had seemed impossible that war could be avoided.

For a while the popular sympathy was entirely with Mr. Adams's administration, and the promise could hardly be fairer that the Federalists, if they managed wisely, might remain in power and be sustained by the whole country. But in some respects they were as unwise as in others they were unfortunate. President Adams, though possessing many great qualities, was of too irascible and jealous a temper to be a successful leader or a good ruler. But there were other men of distinction among the Federalists who were hardly less fond of having their own way than the President was of having his. The incompatibility of temper was not altogether on one side in that family quarrel. But all were equally responsible for such a blunder as the enactment of the Alien and Sedition Laws. The provocation, it is true, was unquestionably great. Refugees from abroad had crowded to the United States, many of whom were professional agitators, and some were very sorry vagabonds.

Whatever reason they might have had for fomenting discontent with government in England or in France, there was nothing to justify any such violent measures in this country. But from their conduct as political partisans, particularly as newspaper editors, they soon came to be looked upon by the Federalists--for they all joined the other party--as a dangerous cla.s.s. There grew up a feeling that it would be wiser for civil affairs to remain, in city, state, and nation, in the hands of those who were born and educated under republican inst.i.tutions, and not to fall altogether under control of those who were alien in blood and religion, and who were inclined to look upon politics, not in the light of the citizen's duty to the common weal, but as an easy and profitable calling where the least scrupulous scoundrel could gather the largest share of spoils. It may be that the authors of those laws were so determined to forestall the apprehended evils of such a dispensation because use had not accustomed them, as it has later generations of American citizens, to live under it in humility if not content. Or, perhaps, they wanted that profound faith of our time that the longer this subversion of government is submitted to, the easier it will be to get back to the rule of the honest and wise.

But, at any rate, whatever their reasons, they meant by these laws relating to aliens to put the acquirement of citizenship under more stringent regulations, and to check the growth and promulgation of seditious doctrines. If it be true, as is sometimes maintained with some plausibility, that citizens, to be intrusted with self-government, should be endowed with a certain degree of intelligence and virtue, then the aim of the framers of the laws, in the first case, was a good one; and, in the second case, the country has had some experience in later times which tends to show that they were not altogether wrong in believing that doctrines and practices which may lead to insurrection and civil war might best be met, so far as is possible, at the outset.

Nevertheless, the laws, under the circ.u.mstances of the time, were ill-considered and injudicious. For one reason, they put an efficient weapon into the hands of the opposition at a moment when it was at a loss where to turn for one. "Anglicism" and "British gold" were blunderbusses which, in the present popular irritation against France, had for a time lost their usefulness, and were apt to miss fire. But an appeal to a generous and impulsive people on behalf of the unfortunate refugees, who had fled from the tyranny of the Old World to find liberty and a home in the New, was sure to be listened to. A good many, besides those who a.s.sumed that republicanism and the rights of man were in their special keeping, believed that an unfortunate cla.s.s had been dealt with hastily, and even cruelly. The clamor, once begun, told heavily against the Federalists. They could be denounced now, not only as the enemies of liberty in France, but as refusing it to men of any nation or any race who should seek it in the United States,--it being, of course, understood that races of black or yellow complexion need not apply. It was, indeed, advanced as an argument against one of the acts,--which gave the President power to order out of the country all aliens whose presence he thought dangerous,--that it might be used to prevent the importation of persons from Africa. On this point Mr. Gallatin, a native of Switzerland, was exceedingly anxious lest there be a violation of the Const.i.tution. But the outrage upon the rights of man here apprehended was the right of white men to make black men slaves.

Against the enactment of these laws Mr. Jefferson did nothing as Vice-President. But whatever was his motive for official inaction, it was not because he approved them. He wrote the Kentucky "resolutions of '98,"--the strongest protest that could be made against them, and to be thenceforth held by nullifiers and secessionists as their covenant of faith. But he acted secretly, taking counsel only with George Nicholas of Kentucky and William C. Nicholas of Virginia (brothers), and, Hildreth says, "probably with Madison." The resolutions were to be offered in the Kentucky legislature by George Nicholas, and, with some modifications, were pa.s.sed by that body in November. A year afterward other resolutions were pa.s.sed to rea.s.sert the opinions of the previous session, and to record against the laws the "solemn protest" of the legislature; and further declaring "that a nullification by those sovereignties [the States] of all unauthorized acts done under color of that instrument [the Const.i.tution] is the rightful remedy." In the resolutions which Mr. Jefferson had prepared for Nicholas the year before, this essential doctrine is found in that portion which Nicholas had omitted, in these words,--"where powers are a.s.sumed which have not been delegated, a nullification of the act is the rightful remedy." As originally prepared, the resolutions were found in Jefferson's handwriting after his death. Hildreth's conjecture that Madison, as well as the brothers Nicholas, was consulted in the preparation of these resolutions, rests only on circ.u.mstantial evidence. The Kentucky resolutions were pa.s.sed in November; those of Virginia in December; the former were written by Jefferson, the latter by Madison; and the doctrines in each are essentially the same. It would have been a perfectly natural thing for the two friends to consult together upon a measure of so much importance; there is no reason why they should not have done so; and these coincidences suggest that they probably did.

Jefferson clearly shirked the responsibility of an act which he knew would endanger the Union; but Madison made no secret, so far as can be seen now, of his going to Richmond, though not a member of the a.s.sembly, apparently for the express purpose of writing these resolutions and urging their adoption. But Jefferson was not a man of courage even in doing that which he believed to be wise. In Madison it was only the conscience that was timid; and having once convinced himself that the thing he proposed to do was right, he was always ready to face the consequences. It may be that neither of them foresaw that the real importance of this particular act was rather prospective than immediate; and if so, their conduct is to be measured by its instant purpose. If Jefferson meant then and there to dissolve the Union, or even to weaken the const.i.tutional bond that held it together, he was not overcautious in keeping out of sight. But if Madison's intention was to strengthen the Union by withstanding what he believed to be a perilous violation of the Const.i.tution, then his courage, though it is to be commended, is not to be wondered at. That, he said, was his motive, and to defend the resolutions and his own part in regard to them was the chief interest and serious labor of the latter years of his life. He was elected a member of the a.s.sembly for the session of 1799-1800, probably because he and his friends thought his official presence desirable when the subject should again come up for consideration at the reading of the replies from other States, to all which the resolutions had been sent.

The report on those replies was also written by him, and the position taken the year before was therein reaffirmed, explained, and elaborated at length.

In 1827-28 the doctrines of nullification and of secession were a.s.sumed to be the legitimate corollary of the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798 and 1799. Jefferson was dead; but Madison felt called upon to deny, in his own defense and the defense of the memory of his friend, that there was any similarity between them. From 1830 to 1836 his mind seems to have been chiefly occupied with this subject, upon which he wrote many letters, and a paper of thirty pages, ent.i.tled "On Nullification," which bears the date of 1835-36, the latter year being the last of his life. He resents the charge of any political inconsistency in the course of his long career, and most of all such an inconsistency as would impugn his attachment to the Const.i.tution and the Union. The resolutions of 1798, he maintains, do not and were not meant to a.s.sert a right in any one State to arrest or annul an act of the general government, as that is a right that can only belong to them collectively. Nullification and Secession he denounces as "twin heresies," that "ought to be buried in the same grave." "A political system," he declares, "which does not contain an effective provision for a peaceable decision of all controversies arising within itself would be a government in name only." He a.s.serts that "the essential difference between a free government and governments not free is that the former is founded in compact, the parties to which are mutually and equally bound by it. Neither of them, therefore, can have a greater right to break off from the bargain than the other or others have to hold them to it.... It is high time that the claim to secede at will should be put down by the public opinion." What,--he writes to another friend,--"what can be more preposterous than to say that the States, as united, are in no respect or degree a nation, which implies sovereignty, ... and on the other hand, and at the same time, to say that the States separately are completely nations and sovereigns?... The words of the Const.i.tution are explicit, that the Const.i.tution and laws of the United States shall be supreme over the Const.i.tution and laws of the several States; supreme in their exposition and execution, as well as in their authority. Without a supremacy in these respects, it would be like a scabbard, in the hand of a soldier, without a sword in it." Abraham Lincoln might have said this twenty-eight years later when he determined that his first duty as President was to suppress insurrection.

Such is the drift of the many pages Mr. Madison wrote upon the subject during the last five or six years of his life. He looked then, whatever he may have thought in the closing years of the preceding century, upon the United States as a nation, and not as a confederacy having its parts held together only by "a treaty or league" called a const.i.tution. But his object is to show that there is nothing inconsistent in the resolutions of 1798 with these opinions upon the sovereignty of the United States; that he held them just as strongly then as he held them now; and that they, and he as their author, looked to the States as a whole, not to a single State, to find and apply a remedy, in a const.i.tutional way, for an unconst.i.tutional measure of which an administration of the government might be guilty. His position is maintained with all the acuteness, ingenuity, and logical skill which mark his earlier writings. There is no sign of failure of mental power, of which those accused him who could not answer him. Such an imputation he resented with as much indignation as he did a charge of inconsistency, which here could only mean falsehood. There is no possibility, then, of misunderstanding his opinions during the last six years of his life; and the world has no right to doubt his repeated and earnest a.s.surances that these were his opinions when he wrote the resolutions of 1798. It can only be said that the construction he gave them thirty years afterward is opposed to the universal understanding of them at the time they were written.

But if his defense of himself be considered complete, it is not even specious when presented on behalf of Jefferson. Mr. Madison wrote in 1830: "That the term 'nullification' in the Kentucky resolutions belongs to those of 1799, with which Mr. Jefferson had nothing to do.... The resolutions of 1798, drawn by him, contain neither that nor any equivalent term." It was not then generally known, whether Mr. Madison knew it or not, that one of the resolutions and part of another which Jefferson wrote to be offered in the Kentucky legislature in 1798 were omitted by Mr. Nicholas, and that therein was the a.s.sertion already quoted,--"where powers are a.s.sumed which have not been delegated, a nullification of the act is the rightful remedy." The next year, when additional resolutions were offered by Mr. Breckenridge, this idea, in similar though not in precisely the same language, was presented in the words, "that a nullification by those sovereignties [the States] of all unauthorized acts, done under color of that instrument, is the rightful remedy." In 1832, this fact, on the authority of Jefferson's grandson and executor, was made public; and, further, that another declaration of Mr. Jefferson's in the resolution not used was an exhortation to the co-States "that each will take measures of its own for providing that neither these acts nor any others of the general government, not plainly and intentionally authorized by the Const.i.tution, shall be exercised within their respective territories." All this must have been known to Mr. Madison then, if not before. Yet, three years later, in that paper "On Nullification" which has been mentioned, he wrote: "The amount of this modified right of nullification is, that a single State may arrest the operation of a law of the United States.... And this newfangled theory is attempted to be fathered on Mr. Jefferson, the apostle of republicanism." It would be charitable here to believe that there was some lapse of memory in these latter days, and that he had forgotten that Jefferson was, above all things, his own words being witness, the apostle of nullification.

The Alien and Sedition Laws--of which the more obnoxious of the former was never enforced, and the latter expired by limitation in two years--had their influence in the presidential election of 1800. But it was due more to differences between the President and some of the leaders of the Federal party that that party lost its hold upon power, never to be regained. With the election of Jefferson, Madison entered upon another sphere of duty, which was politically a promotion, but where his influence, if it was so large, was not so evident as when an active leader of his party. It was at Mr. Jefferson's "pressing desire,"

Mr. Madison himself says, in a letter written many years afterward, that he took the office of secretary of state. In the same letter he explains that he had declined an executive appointment under Washington, because, in taking a seat in the House of Representatives, he would be less exposed to the imputation of selfish views in the part he had taken in "the origin and adoption of the Const.i.tution;" because there, if anywhere, he could be of service in sustaining it against its adversaries, especially as it was, "in its progress, encountering trials of a new sort in the formation of new parties attaching adverse constructions to it." The latter reason seems to be one of those happy after-thoughts which public men not unfrequently flatter themselves will antic.i.p.ate a question they would prefer should not be asked. Mr. Madison was a member of the First Congress from the first day it met, before the new Const.i.tution had encountered new trials from new parties by any constructions either one way or the other.

CHAPTER XVI

SECRETARY OF STATE

On the morning of March 4, 1801, Mr. Jefferson tied his horse to the fence and walked alone into the Capitol to take the oath of office as President. Mr. Madison was not present at that perfunctory ceremony, the death of his aged father detaining him at home. He soon after, however, a.s.sumed the duties of the station to which Mr. Jefferson had called him, and there he remained till he took the presidential office, in his turn, eight years afterward.

The new dynasty entered upon its course under happy circ.u.mstances. There was, of course, much to fear from the condition of affairs in Europe; for the United States must needs be in a perilous position so long as the struggle for supremacy continued between France and England, and that would be while Napoleon could command an army. But the danger of war with France was no longer imminent, since Mr. Adams had wisely reestablished friendly relations, though many of the leading Federalists believed it was at the cost of ruin to his own party. English aggressions upon American commerce had for the moment ceased, as fourteen years afterward they ceased altogether, when the provocation disappeared with the permanent establishment of peace in Europe. In the temporary lull of the tempest the sun shone out of a serene sky, and the land was blessed with quiet and prosperity. "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none," the President said in his inaugural address, were among "the essential principles of our government, and consequently those which ought to shape its administration." The condition of the country was in accord with the thought and may even have suggested it. "We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists," said Jefferson in his inaugural: it was meant, however, as an avowal of a tolerant belief in the patriotism of both parties, rather than, as has sometimes been supposed, an a.s.sertion that party lines, so clearly drawn in the election, were at length obliterated. But hardly a year had pa.s.sed before this seemed to be almost literally true. One after another, States. .h.i.therto Federal, both at the North and at the South, went over in their state elections to the Republican or Democratic party; till, with the exception of Delaware, there was not a single Federal State outside of New England; and even in that stronghold one State, Rhode Island, had marched off with the majority. "Everywhere," wrote Madison in October, "the progress of the public sentiment mocks the cavils and clamors of the malignant adversaries of the administration."

If it may not be a.s.serted that this overthrow of the Federal rule was fortunate at that juncture,--as nothing is more idle in history than speculation upon what might have been,--it may at least be said that Jefferson's administration for his first four years was a happy one for his country and acceptable to his countrymen. None since Washington's has ever been so popular; and no other, except Lincoln's, has ever been so successful. Nor can it be said of it that it was a happy period because it is without a history; for it included acts of moment, accepted then with an approbation and enthusiasm which time has justified. Not less shallow is that view of his character and of those years of his administration, taken by many of his contemporaries, who neither loved nor respected him, and who attributed his success and his popularity to his good fortune. This was a favorite and easy way, among his political opponents, of explaining a disagreeable fact. Parton notes in his Life that C. C. Pinckney could only understand Jefferson's hold upon public confidence as "the infatuation of the people." John Quincy Adams said: "Fortune has taken a pleasure in making Jefferson's greatest weaknesses and follies issue more successfully than if he had been inspired with the profoundest wisdom." "When the people," said Gouverneur Morris, "have been long enough drunk, they will get sober; but while the frolic lasts, to reason with them is useless." There has been more than one occasion of late years, and in more than one place, where this may be truly said of popular political enthusiasm; but it was not true of that which prevailed for the first four years of this century; and Mr. Adams's sarcasm can hardly fail to recall the fact that when Mr. Jefferson, in his second term, was really guilty of a great folly in adhering to a prolonged embargo, it was Mr. Adams who committed one of the few follies of his own life in abandoning his party to give his support to the President's blunder.

Though there were many changes in Mr. Jefferson's cabinet in the course of eight years, they were not the result of dissensions. Yet he was, perhaps, more an absolute President than any other man who has ever held that position. He sought and listened to counsel, no doubt; but taking it was another matter. He certainly did not take it if it did not suit him; and if it was not likely to suit him, he was in no hurry to ask for it. It was in his own fertile brain, not in the suggestions of others, that important measures had their birth. That trait in his character which phrenologists have named secretiveness largely governed his actions. It was natural for him to bring things about quietly and skillfully by setting others to do what he wanted done, without himself being seen, though sometimes there was no other motive than the mere gratification of secretiveness. He preferred often to suggest measures quietly to congressmen rather than to Congress, though the result in either case might be the same. At other times, where the end to be attained was of great importance and he was absolutely sure only of himself, he boldly took the responsibility, as he did in the purchase of Louisiana, and in the suppression of the Monroe-Pinckney treaty with England in his second term. It is not surprising, therefore, that Madison's part, during the eight years of Jefferson's presidency, is found to be more a secondary one than is usual with a secretary of state, or than was usual with him. He was in perfect accord with his chief, who held always in the highest esteem his knowledge and judgment, and sought, no doubt, his sound and moderate advice when he thought he needed advice from anybody. But Madison's influence is less visible in Jefferson's administration than in Washington's, when he was in the opposition. Washington, where he doubted his own ability to decide a question and felt the need of enlightenment, was accustomed to call in Madison, though he did not always accept his friend's conclusions. It was rarely that Jefferson was troubled with any doubt of his own judgment in the discussion or decision of any question that might come before him.

The most important measure of his administration was peculiarly his own, and when once determined upon it was pushed to a conclusion with vigor and courage. n.o.body doubts now, or has doubted since the abolition of slavery, that the purchase of Louisiana was an act of sound statesmanship. Jefferson did not foresee that the acquisition of that fertile territory would stimulate a domestic trade in slaves, as profitable to the slave-breeding as to the slave-consuming States; or that, as slavery increased and brought prosperity and power to a cla.s.s, there would grow up an oligarchy, resting on ownership in negroes, which, within sixty years, would have to be uprooted at an enormous cost. But his aim was to secure the peaceful possession of the Mississippi territory on both its banks, as a permanent settlement of a question which, so long as it remained open, was a perpetual menace of war with one or another European power. That danger would always involve the possibility of the Appalachian range becoming the western boundary of the United States; in which case the valley of the Mississippi, and the vast region west of it, would fall into the power of an alien people. So far was plain to Mr. Jefferson; but the result of the rebellion of 1861 proves that he was wiser than he knew when he acquired the territory stretching to the Sabine and the foot of the Rocky Mountains for the occupation of a free people.

It is not necessary to repeat here the story of the purchase. The news of it reached Washington in July and was received with enthusiasm. That there was no warrant in the Const.i.tution for an acquisition of territory by purchase was manifest; and Mr. Jefferson's opponents were not in the least backward in heaping reproaches and ridicule upon the great champion of strict construction, who had no hesitation in violating the Const.i.tution when it seemed to him wise to do so. Both the President and his secretary frankly met the accusation by acknowledging its entire justice; but at the same time they put in, as a sufficient defense, the plea of the general welfare. This did not abate the ridicule, though the argument was a hard one for the Federalists to withstand; for it could not be forgotten that it was on this ground that Hamilton, as secretary of the treasury, had justified the imposition of certain taxes, and the Republicans had maintained that the plain limitations of the Const.i.tution could not be overstepped on such a plea, even for the general good. Jefferson was so sensitive to this const.i.tutional objection that he proposed to meet it by an amendment to the Const.i.tution; but it was soon evident that the unwritten law of manifest destiny did not need the appeal to the ballot-box. "The grumblers,"

Jefferson wrote to a friend soon after the news of the treaty was received, "gave all the credit of the acquisition to the accident of war." "They would see," he added, in records on file, "that though we could not say when war would arise, yet we said with energy what would take place when it should arise." He only meant by this, probably, that from the beginning of his administration he had been prepared to take advantage of circ.u.mstances when war should break out again between England and France, as it was evident enough to the whole world that it must break out sooner or later. That the particular conjunction of circ.u.mstances, however, would occur that did occur, could not have been foreseen. Jefferson could have had no prescience that Spain would reconvey Louisiana to France; that Napoleon would enter at once upon extensive preparations for colonization on the banks of the Mississippi; and that he would be willing to relinquish this important step in his great scheme of a universal Latin Empire, that he might devote himself to the necessary preliminary work of subduing his most formidable enemy of the rival race. But it is Jefferson's best t.i.tle to fame that he was ready to take advantage of this conjunction of incidents at exactly the right moment. Doubtless the progress of civilization would have been essentially the same had he never been born. But having been born it fell to him to contribute largely to the events that have distributed the race speaking the English tongue the most widely over the globe, and to exercise a powerful influence upon the age. It does not detract from the merit of his act, however, that he by no means saw all its importance, nor even dreamed of its consequences. The region beyond the Mississippi, he thought, might be made useful as a refuge for Indian tribes of the East; but he neither saw nor could see then that the purchase of Louisiana was the essential though only the preliminary step toward the occupation of the continent to the Pacific by the English race. The expedition of Lewis and Clarke, which he sent out the next year, was in the interest of science, and especially of geography, rather than of any possible settlement of that distant region. Indeed, he said that if the new acquisition of territory were wisely managed, so as to induce the eastern Indians to cross the great river, the result would be the "condensing, instead of scattering, our population." But "man proposes and G.o.d disposes."

The immediate consequences, however, of the acquisition of Louisiana were enough to bring almost universal popularity to the President, especially at the South and West, without any revelation of the future.

Nor was the act the less popular because it was an immediate stimulus to the foreign slave trade, partly because at the North that excited but little interest, and partly because at the South it excited a great deal. The abolition societies, it is true, asked that the importation of slaves from Africa into the annexed territory should be forbidden; and an act was pa.s.sed prohibiting their introduction, except by those persons from other parts of the United States who intended to be actual settlers, and were, therefore, permitted to bring slaves imported previous to 1798. But the law might properly have been ent.i.tled An Act for the Encouragement of the Trade in Negroes; and so it seems to have been regarded by the older slave States. South Carolina reopened the trade to Africa, and, as Congress failed to levy the const.i.tutional tax of ten dollars a head, the raw material, so to speak, came in free. The rest could be safely left to the law of supply and demand. Neither South Carolina nor any other State had imported slaves since 1798. The whole slave population, therefore, could be legally taken into Louisiana by actual settlers, and its place supplied in the old States by new importations. The demand regulated the supply, and the supply came from Africa as truly as if the importation had been direct to New Orleans.

This was the legal course of trade till 1808; thenceforward it flourished, without the protection of law but in spite of it, so long as it was profitable,--so long, that is, as the natural increase of the eastern negro was insufficient to answer the demand of the south-western market.

But, besides the peaceful extension of the national domain, there was much else in the first four or five years of Jefferson's administration to commend it to his countrymen. His party had nothing to complain of, despite that genial and generous a.s.surance of the inaugural which could not be forgotten,--"we are all Republicans; we are all Federalists;" and the other party had reason to be thankful that, considering, as he said, "a Federalist seldom died, and never resigned," the number was not large who were reminded, by their removal from office, of their unreasonable delay in doing either the one thing or the other. It was only the politicians, however, a cla.s.s much smaller then than it is now, who were concerned in such matters; the people at large were influenced by other considerations. Credit was given to the President for things that he did not do, as well as for things that he did. It was due to him that the administration was an economical one, but it was through Mr.

Gallatin's skillful management of the finances that the old public debt was in process of speedy extinction. Occasional impeachments enlivened the proceedings of Congress, which otherwise were as harmless as they were dull. Jefferson was never so much out of his proper element as in war, yet a successful one was carried on, during his first term, with the Barbary States which put an end for many years to the exactions and outrages which had long been needlessly submitted to. It was a war, however, of only a few naval vessels in the hands of such energetic and brave men, destined to become famous in later years, as Bainbridge, Decatur, Preble, and Barron; and to send off the expedition was about all the government had to do with it. It was easy to keep clear of "entangling alliances," or entanglements of any sort with European powers, so long as they left the commerce of the United States to pursue its peaceful and profitable course without molestation. This both England and France did for several years, and there fell, in consequence, an immense carrying trade into the hands of American merchants, which brought prosperity to the whole country such as was never known before, and was not known again, after it was lost, for near a quarter of a century. All these things made Mr. Jefferson acceptable to the people as almost a heaven-appointed President. If, as John Quincy Adams thought, Fortune delighted to beam upon him with her sunniest smiles, he knew, at least, how best to take advantage of them.

While they lasted, his secretary of state sat in their light and warmth, quietly and contentedly busy and in the diligent and faithful discharge of official duty, which could not in those years of prosperous tranquillity be over-burdensome.

CHAPTER XVII

THE EMBARGO

Almost at the beginning of his second term, Jefferson found himself in troubled waters, as the United States was drawn slowly but surely into the vortex of European war. The carrying trade at home and abroad had fallen very much into the hands of Americans, and this became the root of bitterness. The tonnage of their vessels employed in foreign trade and entered at the custom-houses of the United States was equal to nearly four fifths of the tonnage of British vessels engaged in the same traffic and entered at home. But there was this difference: the foreign commerce of Great Britain was almost all carried on from her own ports, and the returns, therefore, showed its full volume. On the other hand, the American ships were largely the carriers between the ports of the belligerents and of other powers in Europe, and there were no entries at the American custom-houses of their employment, or that they were employed at all. As early as 1804-5, the aggregate value of this foreign trade in the hands of Americans was probably much larger than that controlled by English merchants; and the former increased to the time of the promulgation of the Berlin decree of 1806, and the British orders in council of the next year. Nor was it only that wealth flowed into the country as the immediate return from this trade abroad. It stimulated enterprise and industry at home by the increase of capital; and there was not only more money to work with, but more to spend. Consequently the increase in exports and in imports grew steadily. In 1805, 1806, and 1807, about one half the average total exports, something over the value of twenty million dollars, went to Great Britain alone; and the value of the imports from that country for the same period was about sixty million dollars a year. Nor did this disproportion, though increasing with the growing prosperity, represent a general balance of trade against the United States, as one school of political economists would insist it must have done. For the imports were small from other European countries in exchange for American products; and the difference, together with the profits of the carrying trade abroad, was remitted in English manufactures. In other words, the imports from England represented the returns for all exports to Europe, and the returns also--available in the first instance through bills of exchange--of the trade which had been gained by Americans, and lost by those nations whose ships the war had driven from the ocean.

The British manufacturer had no reason for discontent with this state of things. The best market for his goods was constantly improving, and he did not much care who took them to America. But the English government, and the English merchants who owned ships, looked on with neither pleasure nor patience. It was impossible not to see that the United States was fast becoming a great commercial rival. This in itself was bad enough; but it was the harder to bear when it was remembered--and it could not be forgotten--that the rivalry came from States so lately in revolt against England, and that their President at that moment was one of the most obnoxious of the rebels. Then what did it avail that England was mistress of the seas, if her formidable enemy could laugh at any effort of hers to destroy the commerce of France, so long as that commerce could be carried on in safety under a neutral flag? If that flag must be respected, English naval vessels and privateers would cruise in vain for prizes, for the merchant ships of any belligerent, not strong enough to protect them, stayed in port. It had not yet come to be the acknowledged law of nations that free ships make free goods.

But nearly the same purpose was answered if the property of belligerents could be safely carried in neutral ships under the pretense of being owned by neutrals. The products of the French colonies, for example, could be loaded on board of American vessels, taken to the United States and reshipped there for France as American property. England looked upon this as an evasion of the recognized public law that property of belligerents was good prize. Accordingly, when she saw that French commerce was thus put out of her reach, and that the rival she most dreaded was growing rich and powerful in the possession of it, she sought a remedy and was not long in finding one.

It was denied that neutrals could take advantage of a state of war to enter upon a trade which had not existed in time of peace; and American ships were seized on the high seas, taken into port, and condemned in the admiralty courts for carrying enemy's goods in such a trade. The exercise of that right, if it were one by the recognized law of nations, would be of great injury to American commerce, unless it could be successfully resisted. To show that it was not good law, Mr. Madison wrote his "Examination of the British Doctrine which Subjects to Capture a Neutral Trade not Open in the Time of Peace." The essay was a careful and thorough discussion of the whole question, and showed by citations from the most eminent writers on international law, by the terms of treaties, and by the conduct of nations in the past, that the British doctrine was erroneous and would lead to other infringements of the rights of neutrals. But argument, however unanswerable, has never yet brought the British government to reason, unless there was something behind it not so easy to disregard. The appropriation for Mr.

Jefferson's gunboats could not get that naval arm ready for effective service much before the year 1815, even if it could then be of use; and there was, moreover, this further difficulty in the way of its efficiency at the time,--that, as it could not go to the enemy, it must wait for the enemy to come to it; the conflagration would have to be brought to the fire-engines. A war with England must be a naval war; and the United States not only had no navy of any consequence, but it was a part of Mr. Jefferson's policy, in contrast with the policy of the preceding administrations, that there should be none, except these gunboats kept on wheels and under cover in readiness to repel an invasion. But there was no fear of invasion, for by that England could gain nothing. "She is renewing," Madison wrote in the autumn of 1805, "her depredations on our commerce in the most ruinous shapes, and has kindled a more general indignation among our merchants than was ever before expressed."

These depredations were not confined to the seizing and confiscating American ships under the pretense that their cargoes were contraband.

Seamen were taken out of them on the charge of being British subjects and deserters, not only on the high seas in larger numbers than ever before, but within the waters of the United States. No doubt these seamen were often British subjects and their seizure was justifiable, provided England could rightfully extend to all parts of the globe and to the ships of all nations the merciless system of impressment to which her own people were compelled to submit at home. Monroe, in a note to Madison, said that the British minister had informed him that "great abuses were committed in granting protections" in America, and acknowledged that "he gave me some examples which were most shameful."

But even if it could be granted that English naval officers might seize such men without recourse to law, wherever they should be found and without respect for the flag of another nation, it was a national insult and outrage, calling for resentment and resistance, to impress American citizens under the pretense that they were British subjects. But what was the remedy? As a last resort in such cases, nations have but one.

Diplomacy and legislation may be first tried, but, if these fail, war must be the final ordeal. For this the administration made no preparation, and the more evident the unreadiness the less was the chance of redress in any other way. Immediate war would, of course, have been unwise; for what could a nation almost without a ship hope from a contest with a power having the largest and most efficient navy in the world? If this, however, was true from 1805 to 1807, it was not less true in 1812. But it need not have been true when war was actually resorted to, had the intervening years been years of preparation. The fact was, however, that the party which supported the administration was no more in favor of war at the earlier period than the administration itself was; and meanwhile, till a war party had come into existence and gained the ascendency, the country had been growing every year less and less in a condition to appeal to war.

The first measure adopted to meet the aggressions of the English was an act prohibiting the importation of certain British products. This had always been a favorite policy with Madison. He had advanced and upheld it in former years, when a member of Congress, and when Great Britain had first violated the rights and dignity of the United States by interference with her foreign trade and by impressing her citizens.

Non-intercourse had been an effective measure thirty years before, and had a kind of prestige as an American policy. It was not seen, perhaps could not be seen without experience, that a measure suited to the colonial condition was not sufficient for an independent nation. But the President and secretary were in perfect accord; for Jefferson preferred anything to war, and Madison was persuaded that England would be brought to terms by the loss of the best market for her manufactures. Others, and notably John Randolph, saw in the measure only the first step which, if persisted in, must lead to war; while, in the mean time, to interfere with importations would be quite as great an injury to the United States as to Great Britain. Randolph was apt to blurt out a good deal of truth when it happened to suit him. Impressment, he said, was an old grievance which had been thought a sufficient provocation for war when the nation was not prepared; and it was no more ready to resort to that desperate remedy now than it had been in the past. Without a navy it would be impossible to prevent the blockading of all the princ.i.p.al American ports by English squadrons. The United States would need an ally, and he was not willing she should throw herself into the arms of that power which was seeking universal conquest. France, he said, would be the tyrant of the ocean if the British navy should be driven from it. The commerce, moreover, which it was proposed to protect, was not the "honest trade of America," but "a mushroom, a fungus of war,--a trade which, so soon as the nations of Europe are at peace, will no longer exist." It was only "a carrying trade which covers enemy's property;" and he did not believe in plunging a great agricultural country into war for the benefit of the shipping merchants of a few seaports. There were many who agreed with him; for it was one of the cardinal principles of the Jeffersonian school of politics that between commerce and agriculture there was a natural antagonism.