Madison and Jefferson (83 page)

In March 1808, in advance of scheduled communications with U.S. ministers in London and Paris, Jefferson issued formal instructions to his secretary of state. On the subject of neutral rights, England and France were
showing no signs of bending to U.S. demands, and the president wanted the two belligerent nations to understand his resolve. “Without assuming the air of menace,” he told Madison, “let them both percieve [
sic
] that if they do not withdraw their orders and decrees, there will arrive a time when our interests will render war preferable to a continuance of the embargo.” The language was meant to be absolute. “When that time arrives,” added Jefferson ominously, “if one has withdrawn and the other not, we must declare war against that other; if neither shall have withdrawn, we must take our choice of enemies between them.” If this pronouncement was Jefferson’s, and not jointly conceived, it effectively painted his successor into a corner. Jefferson had previewed this mind-set two months earlier, when he wrote on the embargo to John Taylor of Caroline: “Keeping at home our vessels, cargoes & seamen saves us the necessity of making their capture the cause of immediate war.” It was a puzzling, even perverse, way of looking at his options.
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Certainly the embargo was accomplishing less than the Jefferson administration imagined. The
National Intelligencer
insisted defensively that Virginia would experience the most “inconvenience” from the measure, but even this, the administration’s paper, went from consoling itself that “the temper of the nation remains unruffled” to acknowledging that news of the embargo “made no impression on the political circles in London.” The question was simple and fairly obvious: How long would Americans, no matter how incensed they were with Europeans’ might-makes-right posture on the high seas, remain willing to endure privations?
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Newspapers to the north, particularly those of the port cities, regularly expressed their concern that the embargo would be never-ending. The
North American and Mercantile Daily Advertiser
, a Baltimore paper, was one of these, reporting that the administration ignored sincere communications of friendship from London while permitting “breaches of the embargo law” by French privateers. British policy, it sought to explain, was “not meant as an injury or insult to America, but as a measure of self-defense for Great Britain.” The enemy to fear was Napoleon Bonaparte, who had overrun Spain and might well have designs on the United States.

How could the Republicans continue to overplay the threat of one power and underplay the threat of the other? A letter to the
Salem
(Massachusetts)
Gazette
from a presumably reliable source in Washington assured readers: “We shall have peace with Britain. War with France will follow … It is confidently said that Mr. Jefferson has declared his dread of the enormous and preponderating power of France!” Others accused the administration
of deliberately playing into Napoleon’s hands, which led a New York paper sympathetic to Madison and Jefferson to grouse: “The old story of French influence is again resuscitated, in the vain hope of enlisting odium against the embargo and the administration.” The
New-York Evening Post
offered a pithy prediction from its Connecticut correspondent: “Jefferson’s Embargo is an excellent mother, for she brings forth federal children in abundance.”
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Boston’s
Columbian Centinel
insisted that embargoes solved nothing and only destabilized. “How are the Poor to be fed?” it asked, with Virginia in its sights and satire on the tongue: the North’s poor, after all, were not as lucky as southern slaves, whose masters would always make sure they had their hominy grits to eat. For the equally unforgiving
Albany Gazette
, the embargo was an intentional ploy meant to maintain Virginia dominance. “Where are our defences?” it asked nervously, as it described the vulnerability of Manhattan and interior portions of the state. “Behold the effects of an
anticommercial
spirit—behold the effects of a deadly and unnatural hostility to the
State of New York
.” An interstate rivalry came into sharper focus: “Yes yes, the growing wealth and strength of New York must be checked! The omnipotence of Virginia must be maintained.” In this instance, Jefferson escaped mention, but the presumptive fourth president, coarchitect of the embargo, did not: “Let Mr. Madison look to it; let his supporters pause—for his French predilections may lead to the ruin of our Independence.” Madison and Jefferson did little to disabuse northerners of their apprehensions, convinced as they were that all sections of the country were in fact making equal sacrifices.
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On the Fourth of July, in the last year of his presidency, Thomas Jefferson opened the doors of the President’s House to citizens of the young national capital. He was dressed in “a neat suit of homespun,” the
National Intelligencer
reported, “in conformity to the spirit of the times.” A cavalry paraded before the Madisons’ home, and Dolley emerged to give a patriotic address to those assembled. In Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina’s two largest towns, celebrants selflessly toasted the embargo. “Its injurious effects will be borne with patience by every real friend of his country,” ran the one. “Better it is to bear all its attendant evils than to lay prostrate our dear bought independence,” proclaimed the other.
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Despite such gestures as these, the spirit of the times was not at all what Madison and Jefferson had prepared for. Their misplaced confidence in commercial restrictions soon led them to turn to more draconian enforcement measures along the coasts and on the Canadian border. In August
1808, while at Montpelier, Madison urged that Jefferson waste no time in deploying every available gunboat to attend to “the suspicions situations along the New England Coast.” That section’s much-valued lumber and flour were being smuggled into Canada and from there to the West Indies. Madison wanted a show of force to suppress all who were, as he stressed, “in collusion with British smugglers.” It took a Newark, New Jersey, newspaper to direct attention to an increasingly conspicuous problem of perception: “In order to render our embargo an effectual instrument against Great Britain, it ought obviously to operate more strongly upon her than on ourselves.” The Newarker restated his point neatly: “Our weapon recoils.”
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There were small signs of hope. Senator John Quincy Adams went against the New England grain and would eventually be rewarded for his courage in a Madison administration. This new, unexpected ally was toasted in the unlikeliest of places, such as Charleston, South Carolina, for his refusal to conform to “the dictates of party spirit.” But as the sole Federalist to vote in favor of the embargo, he succeeded only in guaranteeing the loss of his Senate seat.

The other Massachusetts senator, former secretary of state Timothy Pickering, had been fired by Adams’s father. Pickering could plainly see that his party would not regain the presidency, and he hoped in vain that Monroe (now presumed cured of his partiality toward France) might stand a chance against Madison. Just as Federalists once thought they could influence Aaron Burr if they should connive to sneak him into the presidency past Jefferson, there was thought that Monroe could be shaken loose from his Republican connections.

One of Pickering’s steady correspondents was Chief Justice John Marshall, who presumably was not wearing his judicial robe when he predicted where things were heading. The embargo, he wrote Pickering, “will impel us to a war with the only power which protects any part of the civilized world from the despotism of that tyrant [Napoleon] with whom we shall then be arranged.” Pickering had made noises about disunion in 1804, and now, four years later, his compatriot Harrison Gray Otis, ex-congressman and current state legislator, wrote suggesting a convention of New Englanders—inviting select New Yorkers too—to find ways of fighting the embargo. Others may have had secession in mind, but that was not Otis’s purpose. He simply wanted northern Federalists to show nerve. Some in the Northeast were threatening to nullify the embargo law, using Jefferson’s theory of states’ rights against him.
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Cotton producers of the Carolinas and Georgia, stuck with an unsold crop and unpaid debts, saw their circumstances uniquely. Their trade was exclusively with England, while New England had access to a number of markets. They also believed that a restoration of normal trade would benefit northern consumers more than it would southern producers. Placed in what they saw as the most unenviable position, cotton producers boasted their greater patriotism in putting up with trade restrictions. The Charleston papers in 1808 vowed that the Carolinians would hold on longer if the administration demanded.
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Resistance was not confined to the North, however. When the administration-friendly
Richmond Enquirer
finally admitted that “the inhabitants of the United States appear to differ from the government, with respect to the efficacy of the embargo,” it was all right to acknowledge publicly that it harmed neither Britain nor France. Softening the blow, the
Enquirer
reported at the same time that the Virginia House of Delegates had voted its “approbation” of President Jefferson’s policy, reminding citizens of their duty to rally round the measures of the government when the flag was insulted and commerce menaced by the “iniquitous edicts” of the European powers.
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Madison’s role in the embargo earned him a good many enemies, and not only in New England Federalist circles. As Morgan Lewis rightly construed, Republicans from Manhattan to Albany and beyond were cool to the plan of succession. The port of New York had eclipsed Philadelphia as a center of population, commerce, and finance. Its entrepreneurs were being held back, the city’s growth impeded. New Yorkers naturally resented the impotence of Vice President Clinton inside the Jefferson administration. Refusing to solicit Clinton’s advice as it plunged ahead with a destructive policy, the Virginia faction was showing that it did not care about anyone but themselves.

Activists who wished to end the stranglehold Virginia had on the rest of the country reminded voters that George Clinton had been a “friend and companion” to George Washington. By some unexplained logic, they maintained that this made him Washingtonian in his leadership skills, “as wise and discerning a statesman as he had been an expert and courageous
soldier.” For a time even some Virginia Republicans recognized the legitimacy of New York’s grievance: U.S. senator William Branch Giles and Richmond newspaper editor Thomas Ritchie, both deeply respectful toward President Jefferson, at least entertained the idea that it was New York’s turn to supply a Republican president.

But then the Clintonians got nastier, portraying the secretary of state as a shady character. The worst of these stated: “No man ever injured the United States in an equal degree with James Madison … The awful crisis in our public affairs: impending war, internal broils, the defenceless state of our country, are all the dreadful consequences of a system organized by this man.” That dread had grown from unmet expectations. Clinton supporters had hoped, if they did not assume, that their champion’s elevation to the vice presidency in 1805 was meant to groom him for the presidency when Jefferson retired. For those who distrusted the Virginians, and for the Madisonians who distrusted the Clintonians, the Republican Party did not appear to be national in character.
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The Republican nominating caucus was held in Washington on January 23, 1808, two days after the Virginia Assembly nominated Madison for the presidency. The
Virginia Argus
defined
caucus
as a “voluntary association of individuals agreeing to abide by the will of the majority” and (a bit too confidently) “the only proper way” of uniting Republicans. Knowing the foreordained outcome of the caucus, supporters of Clinton in New York and John Randolph’s pro-Monroe crowd in Virginia both registered their objections to the staged event and refused to attend. By now Senator Giles and editor Ritchie were staunch Madisonians, no longer flirting with the idea of being fair to New York. The new Madisonian John Quincy Adams took part in the caucus as well, and while his mother looked askance, his father warmly approved his son’s independent streak and declared that he himself had “renounced” those who went, these days, by the name of Federalist.

Candidate Madison won 83 of 89 votes cast at the Republican caucus. George Clinton and James Monroe received 3 each. On the ballot for vice president, Clinton was awarded 79 of 88 votes. The administration wing of the party had spoken.

Rather than agree to run for four more years of subordination, Clinton expressed personal dissatisfaction with the process in a letter to the
American Citizen
, the New York City newspaper edited by James Cheetham. The paper had vocally supported the Jefferson administration in the past, but it decided to withdraw support from Jefferson’s handpicked successor. If
Madison was elected, Cheetham said, “nothing short of a miracle can save the republican party from destruction.” And so he came out for a Clinton-Monroe ticket.

Not all New Yorkers took up Clinton’s cause—a sizable number stood behind Madison. By July these people were declaring that the two newspapers edited by Cheetham were “no longer to be considered by us as republican papers, and that they ought not to be any longer esteemed as organs of republican opinions.” Cheetham, undeterred, promulgated his reasoning as to why a vote for Madison, twelve years Clinton’s junior, was unsafe: “He is sickly, valetudinarian [obsessed with health issues], and subject to spasmodic affections [convulsive disturbances], considered by philosophers as one of the most powerful agents of our intellectual faculties.” Madison did, indeed, have a reputation for a weak physical constitution, but suggesting that his past medical history pointed to a deterioration of mental acuity was a stretch.
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