James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (55 page)

When Jefferson, nearly eighty-three, wrote the letter explaining his financial woes, he was weighed down not only by debt but by thoughts of dying, “as I soon must.” He told Madison that “the friendship which has subsisted between us now half a century and the harmony of our political principles and pursuits have been sources of constant happiness to me through that long period.” He took “great solace,” he wrote, in knowing that Madison would live on to vindicate their efforts: “If ever the earth has beheld a system of administration conducted with a single and steadfast eye to the general interest and happiness of those committed to it . . . , it is that to which our lives have been devoted. To myself you have been a pillar of support through life. Take care of me when dead, and be assured that I shall leave with you my last affections.”

Madison wrote back, “You cannot look back to the long period of our private friendship and political harmony with more affecting recollections than I do. If they are a source of pleasure to you, what ought they
not to be to me? We cannot be deprived of the happy consciousness of the pure devotion to the public good with which we discharged the trusts committed to us. And I indulge a confidence that sufficient evidence will find its way to another generation to ensure, after we are gone, whatever of justice may be withheld whilst we are here.” Madison could not bring himself to acknowledge that his friend would soon be “beyond the bourne of life,” as Jefferson expressed it, but Jefferson died on July 4, 1826—the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the same day that John Adams died. Jefferson’s physician, Robley Dunglison, brought Madison a gift that Jefferson had bequeathed him as a token of their long friendship, a walking stick of animal horn, mounted in gold.
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Madison accepted the staff—and the duty of taking care of his dead friend’s reputation.

In the last months of his life, Jefferson had been particularly troubled by a message delivered to Congress by John Adams’s son John Quincy Adams, who had become president in 1825. In his first formal message, the sixth president had set forth plans for the federal government to undertake a wide range of internal improvements, from a canal connecting the Chesapeake Bay and the Ohio River to the continuation of the Cumberland Road. Jefferson had nothing against such projects, but he was extraordinarily concerned that the federal government would undertake them without constitutional authority. It was the same point that Madison had made on his last full day as president when he vetoed the improvements bill, but Jefferson’s reaction to Adams’s message, no doubt heightened by sickness and financial distress, was extreme. He composed the “Declaration and Protest,” which he planned to send to the Virginia legislature for its use. In it he returned to the ideas he had advanced in 1798: the Constitution was a compact that the states had entered into that granted certain powers to the federal government while retaining the rest; and when the federal government usurped state powers by “constructions, inferences, and indefinite deductions,” it was the right of the state to “protest” those usurpations “as null and void.”
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As he had done for decades when he knew he had written something likely to inflame opinion, Jefferson sent the protest to Madison for review.
With wisdom and patience, Madison discouraged him from sending it, and Jefferson listened, but he had already mailed a letter to the contentious William Branch Giles bemoaning “the rapid strides with which the federal branch of our government is advancing towards the usurpation of all the rights reserved to the states and the consolidation in itself of all powers, foreign and domestic.” Although Jefferson counseled patience in his letter to Giles, he also wrote that “when the sole alternatives left are the dissolution of our Union . . . or submission to a government without limitation of powers . . . there can be no hesitation.”
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Jefferson had written at the letter’s beginning that it was “not intended for the public eye,” but after his death Giles, who had run for and won the governorship of Virginia by attacking government encroachments, released the letter. Giles argued that not only were roads and canals “unauthorized oppressions of the general government” but so were tariffs that protected eastern manufacturers at the expense of southern agricultural interests, and his release of the letter made it seem as though Jefferson endorsed Giles’s views on tariffs—and supported going so far as secession should the federal government become too domineering.
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In fact, Jefferson, like Madison, was on record in favor of tariffs that protected American manufactures, and Madison, while privately admitting that Jefferson had been careless in his language, nonetheless thought it “monstrous” that a private communication would be used to make the former president “avow opinions in the most pointed opposition to those maintained by him in his more deliberate correspondence with others and acted on through his whole official life.” He took it as his mission to show the constitutionality of the Tariff of 1828 (known in the South as the Tariff of Abominations). The levying of tariffs was among the powers granted to Congress under the commerce clause, he wrote, and the practice had the weight of precedent behind it. For nearly forty years, tariffs had been sanctioned by every branch of federal and state government, and to overturn “so prolonged and universal a practice,” Madison wrote, would mean “an end of that stability in government and in laws, which is essential.”
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Because the issue of the tariff had become so hotly disputed, Madison held off publication of his pronouncements until after the presidential election of 1828. In that year, Andrew Jackson defeated John Quincy Adams, and John C. Calhoun, who as Adams’s vice president had worked mightily to defeat him, was reelected and became Jackson’s number two. Brilliant and ambitious, Calhoun sensed the power of the tariff issue, particularly when it was understood as he chose to understand it, as part of a larger effort to destroy “the peculiar domestic institution of the southern states and the consequent direction which that and her soil and climate have given to her industry.” In seizing upon the tariff to defend the right of a state to declare a law unconstitutional and thus “null and void,” he positioned himself as a defender of the southern way of life, and he pointed to two other southerners as having provided him precedent, Jefferson in the Kentucky Resolutions and Madison in the Virginia Resolutions and the
Report of 1800
.
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Thus Madison, who had tried to avoid the political storm, was drawn into the center of it. Far more was at stake now than a tariff. “Nullification,” in his words, “has the effect of putting powder under the Constitution and Union and a match in the hand of every party to blow them up at pleasure.” Madison did not say the words “civil war,” but the violence of his image suggests that he, so good at discerning the course of events, understood well that the doctrine of nullification opened the possibility of bloody conflict between the North and the South.
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He argued that neither the Virginia Resolutions nor his report had ever contemplated a single state’s overturning a federal law. The idea that such a thing was possible rested on an erroneous idea of how the Constitution had been created. State governments hadn’t formed it but rather the people of each state, “acting in their highest sovereign capacity.” Such a compact “constituting the people” of the states as “one people for certain purposes . . . cannot be altered or annulled at the will of the states individually.”
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Madison’s opposition to nullification brought out the worst in its supporters. They accused the former president of being senile and inconsistent. Governor Giles wrote that “what Mr. Madison’s opinions at
seventy-nine years of age may be,” he could not guess. He would “rely upon his opinions of fifty and the incontestable arguments which support them.”
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Madison made light of the charge that he was in his dotage: “A man whose years have but reached the canonical three score and ten (and mine are much beyond the number) . . . should never forget that his arguments whatever they be will be answered by allusions to the date of his birth.” He took the accusations of inconsistency more seriously but found himself faced with a knotty problem when denying that he had contemplated anything like nullification in the days of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Jefferson had caused the words “null, void, and of no force or effect” to be inserted into the Virginia Resolutions after Madison had drafted them but before they were presented to the House of Delegates. Madison could not, while remaining faithful to his friend, point this out, nor could he take the credit that was likely his due for getting the words omitted. He was left with arguing that the fact they had been struck showed that Virginia was “precisely against the doctrine.”
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Madison’s silence on Jefferson’s role in the Virginia Resolutions was a gift to his friend, all the more generous because it robbed Madison of his own best defense.

Madison never quit trying, but defending Jefferson against the nullifiers’ use of Jefferson’s words was a nearly impossible task. The thing to do, Madison advised Nicholas Trist, was to call attention to what Jefferson had said and done in earlier epochs of the Republic. He advised that “allowances also ought to be made for a habit in Mr. Jefferson, as in others of great genius, of expressing in strong and round terms impressions of the moment.”
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Madison, a man of steadier and more patient genius, had been doing exactly this for fifty years.

As part of his battle against the idea that a state could nullify a federal law, Madison publicly affirmed the constitutional authority of the federal judiciary to do so. It was impossible to conceive, he wrote in a letter to the
North American Review,
that there could be “a supremacy in a law of the land,” as provided for in article 6 of the Constitution, “without a supremacy in the exposition and execution of the law.” He was also clear,
however, that the power of the Supreme Court had “not always been rightly exercised.” He and John Marshall had by now become personally reconciled. Regarded as great sages, they had both been called upon for their wisdom when Virginia rewrote its constitution in 1829, and during the months of the convention they were often seen walking together on Shockoe Hill, the site of the Virginia capitol. But Madison had not reconciled himself to Marshall’s latitudinarian constructions of the Constitution, nor to the idea that the federal judiciary’s was the only opinion that counted. There were “proper measures” that citizens and state legislatures could take—as Virginia had in 1798—that could bring about a change in public opinion sufficient to alter judicial opinion.
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The Supreme Court might have the last word—but not for all time.

Madison did not cease his struggles against nullification even as he entered his ninth decade. He continued to send expository letters to Nicholas Trist, now an aide to Andrew Jackson, that Trist turned into newspaper essays opposing nullification. It was also to Trist that Madison lamented as South Carolina rushed headlong toward enacting a nullification ordinance: “The idea that a constitution which has been so fruitful of blessings and a union admitted to be the only guardian of the peace, liberty, and happiness of the people of the states comprising it should be broken up and scattered to the winds without greater than any existing causes is more painful than words can express.”
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Henry Clay devised a compromise tariff that calmed both nullifiers and President Jackson, who was intent on forcing compliance with federal law. Madison congratulated Clay for the “anodyne” he had provided for “the feverish excitement under which the public mind was laboring,” and he optimistically predicted that the South’s surplus of agricultural workers, both free and slave, would be partly absorbed into manufacturing in the North and that the South would increasingly turn to the North for manufactured goods. He even predicted that his beloved Virginia “must soon become manufacturing as well as agriculture,” and if he was troubled by this dimming of the agrarian vision, he did not say so. At stake was something much greater—healing the potentially calamitous rift between the North and the South. His hope was that the
intermixing of manufacturing with agriculture would alleviate the sharp divide and provide “a new cement of the Union.”
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Still, he was worried by “the torch of discord” that had been lit by the nullification crisis, “by the insidious exhibitions of a permanent incompatibility and even hostility of interests between the South and the North, and by the contagious zeal in vindicating and varnishing the doctrines of nullification and secession, the tendency of all of which, whatever be the intention, is to create a disgust with the Union and then to open the way out of it.” He wrote a statement to be released only after his death:

As this advice, if it ever see the light, will not do so till I am no more, it may be considered as issuing from the tomb, where truth alone can be respected and the happiness of man alone consulted. It will be entitled therefore to whatever weight can be derived from good intentions and from the experience of one who has served his country in various stations through a period of forty years, who espoused in his youth and adhered through his life to the cause of its liberty and who has borne a part in most of the great transactions which will constitute epochs of its destiny. The advice nearest my heart and deepest in my convictions is that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated. Let the open enemy to it be regarded as a Pandora with her box opened and the disguised one, as the serpent creeping with his deadly wiles into Paradise.
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He wanted his fellow citizens to contemplate the awful consequences of dissolving the Union, and a posthumous statement was the most powerful way he could think of to encourage that.

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