What Hath God Wrought (13 page)

Madison’s nationalist program put the Federalists in an embarrassing position; they could not offer consistent opposition to it.
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The most telling criticisms of it came from the Old Republicans, sometimes called “quids” because of their self-styled role as a
tertium quid
(third element or third force), alongside Federalists and administration Republicans. These Old Republicans claimed to defend their party’s original principles against corrupt innovation; they looked upon the nationalism of the Madison administration with profound suspicion. The quid leader, John Randolph, once a devoted Jeffersonian, then an opponent of the war, had become the harsh critic of an administration he felt had betrayed its principles. Heir of an aristocratic Virginia family, Randolph cut a self-consciously picturesque figure, attending the House with his riding crop in hand, accompanied by his hunting dogs and slave valet. (Appropriately, he named his Virginia plantation Bizarre.) His frail body and high-pitched voice provoked suspicion of sexual impotence.
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Politically, however, Randolph was far from impotent; his sharp mind and sharper tongue made him a power to be reckoned with. Randolph possessed a gift for apt phrases (he had invented the term “war hawk”), and his gibes at the Republican new nationalism hurt. The Madisonian program encouraged financial speculation and would be “fatal to Republican virtue,” he warned.
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Randolph spoke for a venerable tradition that grounded republicanism in the honest industry of those practicing agriculture and opposed it to the rapaciousness and luxury of courtier capitalism.
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Madison’s program would cost money, and ever since the 1790s the Republican Party had opposed both taxation and government debt. But Randolph was wrong to see in Madison’s program simply a craven betrayal of principle. In fact, aspects of it were legitimately Republican and different from the Federalist program Alexander Hamilton had advocated in the 1790s. Hamilton had presumed the national debt to be permanent, a means to enlist the support of the creditor class behind the federal government. For Madison the debt constituted a temporary means to financing projects for national defense and economic infrastructure. Hamilton’s program had been based on a tariff for revenue and American acquiescence in British maritime supremacy. Madison’s program was based on a tariff to protect domestic manufacturing, and came in the aftermath of a war demonstrating American unwillingness to submit to dictation by British commercial and naval interests.
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Jefferson himself had come around to the new, Madisonian version of Republicanism, at least with regard to the protective tariff. Early in 1816, he declared that circumstances had changed in the thirty years since he had expressed the hope that America might remain forever an agrarian arcadia. “We must now place the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturalist,” he declared.
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And when it came to promoting the development of transportation—“internal improvements,” in the language of the day—Republican nationalists went beyond anything Hamilton had envisioned. Where his outlook had been Atlanticist, theirs was continentalist. Internal improvements commended themselves to agrarians wanting to market their crops. Madisonians could invoke precedents for federal aid to internal improvements in the actions of Jefferson and his Treasury secretary Albert Gallatin.
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John Randolph expressed his bitterness against what he considered Jefferson’s apostasy from Old Republican virtue when he called Jefferson “St. Thomas of
Canting
bury.” Alluding to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury, Randolph added sarcastically that “Becket himself never had more pilgrims at his shrine than the Saint of Monticello.”
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Responding to the Madisonian Platform and its own leadership, the Fourteenth Congress achieved one of the most creditable legislative records in American history. Members appropriated most of what the president recommended for the defense establishment. The landmark tariff they enacted on April 27, 1816, was candidly protectionist in its features. Only articles that could not be produced in the United States were placed on the free list. Those (few) articles that could be produced in the United States in sufficient quantity to satisfy the national market enjoyed the absolute protection of prohibitively high duties. Those that could be produced domestically, but not in sufficient quantity to satisfy demand, were subjected to a modest tariff thought sufficient to allow domestic producers to survive, generally about 25 percent. The protection came none too soon, for with the return of peace British manufacturers had already begun to dump products in the American market below cost, hoping to drive the American producers out of business. Optimistically, the rate-setters decided that after three years the country’s infant industries ought to need less protection and no rates should be higher than 20 percent. This decision set the stage for future tariff debates.
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The most eloquent speech on behalf of the tariff came from John C. Calhoun on April 4. Calhoun argued for the encouragement of manufacturing on the grounds that a diversified economy would make the nation more self-sufficient, less dependent on foreign markets, and less vulnerable in time of war. Economic diversification would produce economic interdependence and “powerfully cement” the Union together. In opposition, John Randolph pointed out that a protective tariff was in effect a tax on consumers. “On whom do your impost duties bear?” he demanded. The burden of these taxes on “the necessaries of life” would fall on two classes: “on poor men, and on slaveholders.”
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Randolph had, as usual, cut to the heart of the matter. On this occasion his rhetoric was in vain, and the tariff passed the House, 88 to 54; but Randolph played the part of Cassandra to the new nationalists. Many times in the future, the political alliance of poor men with slaveholders would frustrate the hopes of tariff protectionists.

The same month, Congress passed an act authorizing a Second Bank of the United States, the result of cooperation between Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Dallas and Calhoun, who chaired the relevant House committee. It chartered the Bank for twenty years, with a capital of $35 million, of which $7 million would be provided by the federal government; in return the administration would get to choose five of the twenty-five members of the board of directors. (By comparison, Hamilton’s Bank had had a capitalization of only $10 million.) The congressional delegations of the South and West supported the proposed bank even more strongly than those from the Northeast, partly because it was a Republican Party measure, partly because their agricultural constituents looked to the new bank for credit.
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Scarcely any discussion addressed whether a national bank was constitutional, the issue that had so bitterly divided Hamilton and Jefferson a generation earlier. Madison had indicated in his message that he considered the constitutional question to have been settled by the precedent of the First Bank, and almost everyone in Congress accepted this resolution of the matter. “I seem to be the only person,” complained the aging quid Nathaniel Macon, “that still cannot find the authority for a bank in the constitution of the U.S.”
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Madison, after signing the Second Bank’s charter on April 10, 1816, happily appointed five Republicans as the government’s directors.

Congress also made a start on addressing the country’s transportation needs, appropriating $100,000 to build a segment of the National Road through Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia). The road represented an ambitious plan, crossing the Appalachian barrier, intended to link Baltimore in the Chesapeake with St. Louis near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri. It was a favorite project with Republican nationalists like Speaker Henry Clay. Madison raised no constitutional objection and signed the bill.
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The extension of the National Road accommodated the westward movement of white settlement prompted by the defeat of Tecumseh’s confederation. In Indiana Territory these settlers had multiplied from 24,520 in 1810 to 63,897 in 1815, according to a specially commissioned census, leading to pressure for Indiana statehood. Accordingly, on April 19, 1816, Madison signed an act enabling Indiana to draw up a state constitution.

Unfortunately the productive Fourteenth Congress ruined itself with the electorate by overreaching. More than two-thirds of its members were defeated for reelection or decided not to run again. The so-called salary-grab bill triggered this massive popular repudiation. Congress had voted itself a pay raise, from six dollars a day while in session to fifteen hundred dollars a year. By no means unreasonable, the new annual salary was less than twenty-eight federal civil servants earned. The president received a munificent salary of twenty-five thousand dollars, out of which he had to pay for running the White House. (Multiply these numbers by 100 for something like present-day equivalents.)
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Given the nationalist agenda, it made perfect sense to strengthen the national legislature by making service in it more attractive to talent.
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The electorate, however, would have none of it: Their wrath fell on Federalist and Republican alike. All told, of the eighty-one members who voted for the bill, only fifteen won reelection. Even some who voted against it were punished with defeat, on the grounds that they should not have accepted the money.
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It was a sad end for one of the most talented of American Congresses and helped perpetuate a pattern of low pay, high turnover, and all too common congressional ineffectiveness.

What made the Compensation Act such a political liability was the fact that the Fourteenth Congress applied the new salary to itself, rather than only to its successors. A generation earlier, while in the House of Representatives, Madison had proposed an amendment to the Constitution stating, “No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until after an election of Representatives shall have intervened.” The amendment had been approved by the First Congress along with the Bill of Rights but not ratified by the states. The prohibition that the state legislatures had neglected, the electorate enforced with a vengeance. The conflict of interest involved in Congress setting its own salary has remained a touchy matter; in 1992, more than two hundred years after its submission, Madison’s limitation on the right of Congress to vote itself a raise was finally ratified by a sufficient number of states. What had been intended as the Second Amendment to the Constitution became the Twenty-seventh.

But before it went out of existence, the Fourteenth Congress held one more session, in the winter of 1816–17. This strange practice of bringing the former Congress back after its successor had been elected, allowing legislators who had been repudiated at the polls a final chance to make history, became known as the “lame duck” session. It reflected the slow transportation and communication in the young republic, its rationale being that a month might not be long enough to sort out election returns and for the newly elected members to travel to Washington. The lame duck session long outlived this justification, for it persisted until the adoption of the Twentieth Amendment in 1933.

These particular lame ducks repealed the salary increase for their successors but not for themselves, then resumed work on their nationalist agenda. The Bank of the United States was scheduled to pay $1.5 million to the federal government as a “bonus” in return for its charter. Clay and Calhoun proposed that this bonus, together with the regular dividends the BUS would pay to the government as a stockholder, be earmarked for roads and canals. On behalf of the Bonus Bill, Calhoun waxed eloquent. “We are under the most imperious obligations to counteract every tendency to disunion,” he declared. “Let us, then, bind the republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals. Let us conquer space.”
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The conquest of space beckoned to the American spirit in Madison’s day no less than in John F. Kennedy’s race to the moon.

Marked regional differences in attitude toward the Bonus Bill appeared. New England and much of the South opposed it, feeling that they had little to gain from encouraging the development of the West and the out-migration of their own people. By contrast the Middle Atlantic states were eager, expecting commercial benefits from a transportation system linking the Hudson and Delaware Rivers with the Ohio and the Great Lakes. In order to maximize support for the Bonus Bill, Clay and Calhoun did not specify which projects would get aid, leaving as many congressmen as possible hopeful. Even with all their legislative skillfulness, the Bonus Bill passed but narrowly, 86 to 84 in the House and 20 to 15 in the Senate. Then it went to the president for signature.

On March 3, 1817, his last day in office, Madison vetoed the Bonus Bill on the grounds that it was unconstitutional. Neither the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution nor the “general welfare” clause, Madison declared, could be stretched enough to authorize federal spending on roads and canals. Clay and Calhoun felt dumbfounded. “No circumstance, not even an earthquake that should have swallowed up one half of this city, could have excited more surprise,” commented Clay. As recently as last December 3, the president had urged Congress to create “a comprehensive system of roads and canals, such as will have the effect of drawing more closely together every part of our country.”
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What was the problem? In the first place, Madison wanted an amendment to the Constitution to authorize federal aid to internal improvements; Jefferson had originally called for such an amendment back in 1805. Only thus could the two presidents reconcile their desire for better transportation with a strict construction of the Constitution. Having abandoned his earlier constitutional objections to a national bank, Madison could not bring himself to do the same with internal improvements. In the second place, Madison felt deeply suspicious of the kind of fund the Bonus Bill would create. A pool of money available for whatever roads and canals each Congress wanted would be an invitation to corruption and logrolling. Madison preferred an integrated national plan for internal improvements, such as the $20 million program Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin had drawn up back in 1808.
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