American Experiment (38 page)

Still, even this benign and potent leader came up against constraints on presidential power. The impeachment of Justice Samuel Chase suggested one of those constraints—the independence of the judiciary. A hard-line Federalist, Chase had turned his courtroom into a forum for intemperate attacks on the President and the Republican party. It was one thing when he lambasted the administration as weak and incompetent, something else when he condemned the repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801—an act validated by Chase’s own court—as a blow for “mobocracy.” Jefferson indirectly, and the Republican leadership in Congress directly, organized impeachment proceedings against Chase, but they could not mobilize the necessary two-thirds vote in the Senate, and the justice was acquitted, amid the huzzas of high Federalists.

Chase was small game compared to Jefferson’s real bête noire in the judiciary. Mustering majorities on critical issues, using his superb judicial and political mind to influence his brethren, the unassailable John Marshall continued to preside magisterially over the Supreme Court. The looming treason trial of Aaron Burr brought the two Virginians again into direct confrontation. Deeply disturbed over the “conspiracy,” Jefferson threw himself into the investigation and proceedings in the case. But the Chief Justice’s zeal for Burr’s punishment did not match the President’s. Marshall released two of Burr’s accomplices for lack of evidence of treason, claimed (but did not try to enforce) the right to subpoena the President to appear in court, and sharply narrowed the definition of treason. Burr was acquitted; when the New Yorker was presented with a new treason charge, Marshall allowed bail. Jefferson, who in his zeal had openly
prejudged Burr’s guilt, was appalled—and helpless. He could find some vindication but little comfort when Burr jumped bail, fled to France, and tried to interest Napoleon in making peace with England in order to organize an Anglo-French invasion of the United States.

Jefferson’s preoccupation with the prosecution of Burr and the latter’s acquittal clouded the final year or two of his presidency. But he was even more preoccupied with the embargo, and though this failed too, he was satisfied with his stewardship. Indeed, he felt that he had protected the nation’s internal security by his vigilant reaction to Burr’s adventurism, just as his economic war against Britain had saved the nation from both war and humiliation. He had served the people’s most basic need—security—and had done so without war. In March 1809 he left the presidency as he came in, a man of peace.

The final test of Jefferson’s power and leadership lay in the choice of his successor. Few in the Republican establishment doubted that this would be James Madison. For more than three decades the two men had worked so closely together that their adversaries could attack Madison for being Jefferson’s cat’s-paw or Jefferson’s mastermind with equal plausibility. A battle for the Republican party nomination loomed when James Monroe returned from England still smarting over Jefferson and Madison’s repudiation of the agreement he had signed with the British. With dismay the President saw a fight break out in his own party as John Randolph and other anti-Administration Republicans turned to Monroe in an attempt to head off Madison. “I see with infinite grief a contest arising between yourself and another, who have been very dear to each other, and equally so to me,” Jefferson wrote Monroe. “…I have ever viewed Mr. Madison and yourself as two principal pillars of my happiness.” He knew that the behavior of his two friends would be “chaste,” but he warned Monroe against letting “your friends” exacerbate passion and acrimony. In vain; while the rivals did not campaign, their friends fought a vitriolic battle in pamphlets and newspaper columns.

The President gave quiet but powerful support to his Secretary of State. When Madison’s conduct of foreign affairs was attacked, Jefferson released hundreds of documents attesting to Madison’s patriotic firmness with Britain and France. Election polemics turned mainly on foreign policy, especially the embargo; no one contended that “politics stops at the water’s edge.” The contest was further enlivened when the Federalists again chose a ticket of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina and Rufus King of Massachusetts and New York, and when the aging Vice-President,
George Clinton, simultaneously ran for President and Vice-President. In the end, Jefferson’s and Madison’s long years of leadership paid off. Madison bested Monroe handily both in Virginia and in the congressional caucus, and went on to defeat Pinckney in the electoral college, 122 to 47. Clinton won only six votes—all from New York—but hung on to his vice-presidency.

The man who entered the President’s mansion in March 1809 had stood so long in Jefferson’s shadow that for a time even his friends found it hard to accept him as chief executive. As unawesome as ever in appearance and demeanor, Madison was as poor a speaker as Jefferson and also lacked his intellectual versatility and spacious imagination. What he did bring to the presidency was a penetrating understanding of both the theory and practice of American government, a thorough grasp of Republican doctrine, a mastery of party and legislative mechanics, and long experience in the conduct of foreign relations, though he was criticized for never having served abroad. And if he was also faulted for his stiff and sometimes frigid manner, he had—Dolley.

Raised as a Quaker, widowed by a young lawyer who died of the plague, Dolley Payne Todd had grown into a woman of great charm and striking figure when she married James Madison, then forty-three and already famous. In the White House, as the mansion was just coming to be called, she was soon holding spirited levees and refurbishing the drab interior with the help of the queenly sum of $26,000 granted by Congress.

The new First Lady displayed her sense of diplomacy at the very start, when at dinner before the Inaugural Ball in Long’s Hotel she maneuvered her full and exuberant self between the English and French plenipotentiaries, thus fending off unpleasantness. Her action was symbolic as well as skillful. Her husband had entered office at a time when the struggle between Britain and France was engulfing more and more Europeans, with the United States now set on a relentless march toward war. It would be a poor war, and a poorly understood one. It was a war that Americans did not win—a fact ignored by latter-day patriots claiming that America had never lost a war or won a peace conference. Mislabeled as the War of 1812, it was actually the War of 1812-15. Misjudged in history as the outcome of drift and indecision and bungling and chance, it was rather an irresistible war—irresistible because Americans were caught up in ineluctable circumstances, irresistible because some Americans did not want to resist it.

The central circumstance towered over Madison’s first term as it had over Jefferson’s second: America was a third-rate power caught in the jaws of Great Power conflict because of her desire to sail on the high seas and to trade in foreign ports. Conflict was not a result of Washington misjudging the positions of London and Paris. It was clear to all that Britain continued to view her maritime supremacy, including the right of impressing her subjects on foreign ships, as absolutely vital to her national security and to the immediate purpose of fighting France. Napoleon was just as intent on excluding neutral ships from trading with Britain. After the failure of the embargo, the United States was insistent on its right to trade. Aside from the delays of several weeks in transatlantic messages, the diplomats of the three nations had no serious problem of communication. Literally thousands of hours were consumed in lengthy correspondence and face-to-face discussions. The nations were in conflict not because of ignorance but because they had conflicting interests.

Even if there had been some decisive way out of the impasse, Madison might have lacked the power to take advantage of it. He was not destined to be a strong President. At the very start he was denied the right to choose his own Cabinet. Having worked long and fruitfully with Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin, the new President wanted to promote the Pennsylvanian to Secretary of State. When a group of anti-Gallatin senators headed by Samuel Smith of Maryland warned Madison against this step, the President capitulated by shifting Smith’s brother Robert from the Navy Secretaryship to the top cabinet position. Gallatin nobly stayed on at Treasury.

Factionalism was rife in the Republican party as Jefferson’s harmonizing hand fell away. John Randolph, who had broken with Jefferson years before but muted his attacks on him, now turned on Madison in cold fury. Descended from a family long noted for its idiots, geniuses, neurotics, and eccentrics, Randolph lived alone on his plantation named Bizarre, excluded women from his intimate life, enjoyed bringing his hunting dogs onto the House floor—and was probably the most brilliant and ferocious orator in Congress. By this time Randolph headed a small but active band of “old Republicans” who came to be known as the “Quids.”

With his party divided between numerous Francophiles and a few Anglophiles such as Randolph, Madison groped for a foreign policy that would defend his nation’s rights and honor without embroiling it in a shooting war with Britain or France or both. The Non-Intercourse Act, which replaced the Embargo Act in March 1809, forbade trade with the two powers until they ceased violating neutral rights. This act seemed only to provoke the French into more ship seizures and the British into more
impressments. In May 1810 Madison and the Republicans tried a new tack—a measure authorizing the President to reopen trade with Britain and France, with the remarkable proviso that if either nation ceased violating America’s neutral rights, the President could prohibit trade with the other.

The Administration and Congress clearly were looking for the first sincere bidder, but this was a situation made to order for the Machiavellian ruler of France. Napoleon promised ambiguously to revoke his decrees against American shipping on condition that Washington would break off trade with Britain unless London ceased its interference with American ships. The President, eager for some way out of the impasse, seized this bait. On the understanding that Napoleon actually had canceled his earlier decrees, Madison prematurely issued a proclamation reopening trade with France and halting commerce with Britain. The Emperor in fact had not changed his policy, and at times there seemed to be a nightmarish possibility that the United States, France, and Great Britain might be engaged in a unique three-cornered war of all against all.

For a time the mobiles stayed in unsteady equipoise as Paris contended that it had in effect revoked its restrictive decrees, London claimed that the French had not, and Madison was left in an anti-British position because of his impetuous proclamation. Early in 1811 the President, convinced that his Secretary of State, Robert Smith, was both indiscreet and disloyal as well as incompetent, decided to strengthen his administration by appointing James Monroe in his place. The appointment had to be handled delicately, for Monroe had so deeply resented Madison’s earlier rejection of his treaty—and the “succession politics” of 1808—that he had broken off his relationship with his old friend. With the quiet help of Jefferson, communication between the two men was restored; it had not escaped the ambitious Monroe that both Presidents Jefferson and Madison had served earlier stints as Secretary of State. More Anglophilic than most Republicans, Monroe hoped to ease relations with Britain, but he found London to be intransigent.

By the fall of 1811 Washington seemed pinioned diplomatically between France and Britain, politically between Federalists opposing war with Britain and Republicans ready for it, or at least resigned to it. What could tip the balance? The answer came from the West. Some Easterners doubted that the settlers in the distant hinterland, in those obscure regions along the Ohio and the Mississippi, would feel much involved in a conflict over ships and men on the high seas.

“We, whose soil was the hotbed and whose ships were the nursery of Sailors,” the Boston
Columbian Centinel
protested later, “are insulted with the hypocrisy of a devotedness to Sailors’ rights…by those whose country
furnishes no navigation beyond the size of a ferryboat or an Indian canoe.” In fact those ships often carried western produce, those impressed sailors might hail from Ohio or Kentucky or Louisiana, and men used to protecting themselves with guns on the lawless frontier argued that the nation should do the same on the high seas. The Westerners had more proximate concerns. On the southwest lay West Florida, stretching west from the Mississippi to the Perdido River, a Spanish dominion that had been seized by southern adventurers in 1810 and later claimed by Madison on the grounds that West Florida had been included in the Louisiana Purchase. Spain was not strong enough to defend this strategic territory, with its navigable rivers reaching up into American territory, but Westerners feared that it might be seized by Spain’s ally, Britain.

To the northwest lay an even more vulnerable territory, in Westerners’ eyes. As more and more hunters, trappers, and land-hungry settlers moved into Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois, they encroached onto the living space of tens of thousands of Indians who, the settlers suspected, were being supplied with guns and ammunition by the English. For the most part, the Indians had been passive in the face of white intrusion, as some of their chiefs bartered away land rights for liquor, baubles, and pensions. But out of tribal demoralization had risen a new leader, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, who, with his brother the “Prophet,” began to organize a broad tribal confederacy against the westward sweep of the white man. The two leaders established their capital in Prophet’s Town, Indiana, at the juncture of the Tippecanoe and Wabash rivers. In the fall of 1811 the governor of Indiana Territory, General William Henry Harrison, marched about a thousand men to the Tippecanoe and provocatively encamped about a mile from the Indian capital. Tecumseh and his warriors attacked the encampment at dawn; Harrison’s troops beat them off, at a heavy price in casualties, destroyed their food supplies, and then fired the settlement. As a wave of indignation passed through the Northwest, the cry arose that the English were behind the “Indian troubles” and must be driven out of Canada.