What Hath God Wrought (14 page)

Intellectually respectable as Madison’s conception was, it was politically impractical. The amendment for internal improvements found opponents not only among state-righters but also among broad constructionists who did not want to establish the precedent of having to amend the Constitution every time someone called a federal power into question. As the congressional salary amendment abundantly demonstrated, amending the Constitution is a protracted and imponderable process. If the advocates of internal improvements threw their weight behind such an amendment and it failed, they would be worse off than before. As for another Gallatin Plan, this ran up against all the local prejudices that have made Americans perennially suspicious of comprehensive national plans in general. The chance of such a program being approved in the first place, and then faithfully carried out over many years, was nil.

In the light of hindsight, Madison’s veto of the Bonus Bill seems a mistake. Faced with a choice between theoretical consistency and practical politics, Madison chose theory. By rejecting the “good” because it was not the “best,” Madison not only slowed the economic development of the country but, uncharacteristically, missed an opportunity to cement the Union together.
⁷⁶
With the chance to set the United States firmly on the course of development missed, the country would grope its way toward undefined possible futures.

IV

In those days before national party conventions had been invented, presidential candidates were nominated in Congress. On March 16, 1816, the caucus of Republican members of both houses, meeting together, nominated Secretary of State James Monroe of Virginia over Secretary of War William H. Crawford of Georgia by 65 votes to 54, with 22 absentees. Daniel Tompkins, the governor of New York, received the vice-presidential nomination. Madison, who had been grooming Monroe to be his successor, felt gratified and relieved. Crawford’s candidacy showed surprising strength, considering how inhibited he had been about opposing his senior cabinet colleague. Its appeal reflected discontent at the perpetuation of the “Virginia dynasty” of presidents.
⁷⁷

A dull presidential campaign ensued, its outcome a foregone conclusion. Senator Rufus King of New York served as standard-bearer of the Federalists’ forlorn hope. Like congressional elections, the balloting for president occurred across the calendar, with states choosing their members of the electoral college on different days and by different methods—in ten states by popular vote, in nine by the state legislature. The strength that the Federalists had shown in the middle states during the war years melted away. The congressional and presidential elections occurred with virtually no interaction between them; the Federalist Party did not turn popular dissatisfaction with the “salary-grab bill” to its advantage. And so, while the electorate drastically purged Madison’s Congress, his chosen presidential successor won handily in the electoral college, 183 to 34, with King carrying only Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware. The Federalists had not even bothered to nominate a running mate for King, so their electors scattered their vice-presidential votes among several candidates.

Monroe’s easy victory reflected the spirit of national self-satisfaction and self-congratulation following the War of 1812, from which the incumbent Republican Party benefited. While the Federalists’ quasi-war with France in the 1790s had divided their party between Hamiltonians and Adamsites, the Republicans’ War of 1812, once it was over, actually strengthened their party’s grip on power. Though Madison’s administration could be faulted for incompetence, no one could accuse it, as the Federalists had been accused, of militarism and authoritarianism.
⁷⁸
The Republican way of waging war on a shoestring, if militarily risky, had been politically safe. The Federalists had taxed; the Republicans had borrowed. The Federalists had recourse to repressive legislation (the Alien and Sedition Acts); the Republicans did not—partly because mobs like that in Baltimore in 1813 did their dirty work for them.
⁷⁹
However valid Federalist complaints that the War of 1812 had been unnecessary and mismanaged, they were politically futile. The antiwar Federalists found themselves stigmatized as disloyal; the Hartford Convention now looked almost treasonable and became a huge political liability. No one offered an effective rebuttal to Commodore Decatur’s toast.

Monday, March 4, 1817, was unseasonably warm and sunny in Washington—a stroke of good fortune for the eight thousand spectators who had come to witness the inauguration of the new president. The House and Senate had wrangled over plans for the event, and with the public buildings still not yet fully repaired from their burning two and a half years before, indoor options were limited. So it had been decided to hold the ceremony in the open air on the steps of the Capitol.
¹
The site became a tradition, although since inauguration day has been moved back to January 20 the chances of good weather are even less.

James Monroe was the third of the Virginia dynasty of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, and the last president to have won fame in the Revolution. He had crossed the Delaware with Washington and been wounded leading a charge against the Hessians at the Battle of Trenton. What’s more, he
looked
like a Revolutionary veteran. At a time when male fashions had changed to long trousers, the fifty-eight-year-old Monroe still wore the “small clothes” of the eighteenth century: knee breeches and buckled shoes, with powdered wig and three-cornered hat.
²
(Of course, it was a helpful image to cultivate.) Like all the early presidents, Monroe had served a long political apprenticeship. He had pursued an independent course and in earlier years had often been identified with state rights. Monroe had opposed the ratification of the Constitution and had run against Madison (and lost) for the House of Representatives in the First Congress. In 1808 the quids put him up against Madison again as their candidate for president. But in March 1811, Monroe and Madison achieved a momentous reconciliation and Madison named him secretary of state. From then on Monroe became Madison’s right-hand man, and after Armstrong’s resignation headed the War Department as well as the State Department. He emerged from the war a convert to nationalism and Madison’s chosen successor.

Monroe’s reputation has suffered somewhat by the inevitable comparisons with Jefferson and Madison.
³
Unlike them, he was no intellectual, but he was a hard worker with a thorough understanding of the personalities and political conventions of his age. He had friends and contacts throughout all factions of the Republican Party. He brought to the White House a reputation for strict integrity: “Turn his soul wrong side outwards, and there is not a speck on it,” declared Jefferson.
⁴
At a time that called for conciliation, Monroe conciliated well. In international affairs he possessed a firm grasp of U.S. national interest. In domestic affairs he knew how to wrap innovation in the mantle of respectable tradition. Behind the scenes, he was a more skillful practical politician than many people then or since have realized. Despite Jefferson’s confidence in the purity of his soul, Monroe appreciated the value of discretion over candor.

The president’s inaugural address emphasized continuity with his Jeffersonian predecessors and the new Republican nationalism, including protection for domestic manufacturing. He endorsed “the improvement of our country by roads and canals” but added “proceeding always with a constitutional sanction”—which seemed to second Madison’s Bonus Bill veto message of the day before. National self-congratulation provided the theme of his inaugural. Some of this was legitimate: Monroe gave thanks for peace, prosperity, and abundant natural resources. But in his enthusiasm for American institutions, the incoming president got carried away. “And if we look to the condition of individuals what a proud spectacle does it exhibit! On whom has oppression fallen in any quarter of our Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or property?”
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Monroe took it for granted that the answer to these rhetorical questions was negative. If someone had responded by pointing to 1.5 million persons held in chattel slavery, or to white women firmly deprived of rights of person and property, or to expropriated Native Americans, the president would have been startled, then irritated by the irrelevancy. To him and most of those in his audience, such people did not count. But within the next generation, that assumption would be seriously challenged.

Monroe’s inaugural address celebrated the people of the United States as “one great family with a common interest.” “Discord does not belong to our system.” While they may strike us as empty platitudes, these phrases actually embodied a key policy objective of the new administration. Monroe’s one-sided electoral victory led friend and foe alike to feel that the Federalists no longer provided a realistic alternative government. Party strife therefore seemed a thing of the past. “The existence of parties is not necessary to free government,” the president believed.
⁶
Monroe wanted to be a president of all the people, to govern by consensus. Accordingly, he set out on a triumphal national tour. He even included far-off New England on his itinerary, something no Virginia president had done since Washington’s trip in 1789. Monroe saw all the sights; on the Fourth of July he climbed Bunker Hill. The New Englanders were grateful for this gesture of reconciliation and hoped to be included in the favors of patronage. A Boston Federalist newspaper welcomed the president’s visit as evidence of a new “era of good feelings.”
⁷
The administration was happy with the expression, and the name stuck.

The concept of an era of good feelings that would transcend party conflict expressed some of the highest political ideals of the age. It was in keeping with the conventional wisdom of political philosophy, which viewed political parties as an evil. The political philosophers of classical times, including the Greek Aristotle and the Roman Polybius, taught that institutions of balanced government could prevent the rise of political parties and the decline of republicanism that partisanship heralded. Early-modern political theorists like Bolingbroke and the authors of
Cato’s Letters
and
The Federalist Papers
likewise relied upon balanced institutions of government rather than a balance between two or more political parties to preserve liberty. The framers of the American Constitution, far from favoring parties, had hoped to prevent their emergence.
⁸
Although political parties had nevertheless developed in the young republic as a result of the bitter policy debates of the 1790s, no one approved of them in principle. In his Farewell Address, Washington had warned his countrymen to beware “the baneful effects of the spirit of party.” Monroe felt he enjoyed an unparalleled opportunity to achieve the widely shared aspiration of eliminating parties. Through a quest for political unanimity, the original intention of the Founders could be restored. The elimination of party divisions was a goal shared by all of the first six presidents, but most especially sought by James Monroe.
⁹
Despite all such good intentions, however, much partisanship and bad feeling persisted.

As a practical matter, to bestow patronage on Federalists would anger many Republicans, especially of the older generation, and Monroe was not quite ready for this. When General Jackson, among others, urged him to appoint to his cabinet a Federalist who had supported the recent war, Monroe demurred. What emerged in the new administration was therefore not so much nonpartisanship as one-party rule by a broadly based party.
¹⁰

The closest Monroe came to a concession to the Federalists was to choose as his secretary of state John Quincy Adams, a New Englander and a former Federalist who had left that party back in 1807. This appointment strengthened the Republican Party in the Northeast, but it meant disappointing Henry Clay of Kentucky, who had hoped for the job. The State Department was perceived as a stepping-stone to the presidency, and some politicians already felt that William H. Crawford (his 1816 Republican challenger) should be Monroe’s successor. Monroe gave Crawford the Treasury Department. The War Department went to another rising light, John C. Calhoun. Calhoun’s ally John McLean of Ohio became postmaster general, a key position though not yet officially one of cabinet rank. It was a strong set of appointees, who made their mark on their respective departments. All save Crawford identified with the nationalist wing of the Republican Party, and all, including Crawford, aspired to the presidency. Throughout his incumbency, Monroe had to be careful to balance the rival ambitions of his cabinet secretaries in order to keep his administration from fragmenting. His triumphant reelection in 1820, winning every electoral vote but one, demonstrates Monroe’s measure of political skill.
¹¹

The administration sought not to absorb the Federalists but to render them irrelevant. At the national level this policy largely succeeded during Monroe’s first term. Supporters of a stronger central government, whether for internal improvements, banking, or the tariff, had no longer any need to embrace Federalist politicians. Meanwhile, the defeat and exile of Napoleon in Europe removed the fear of Revolutionary France, which had been an important wellspring of Federalist feeling throughout the country. What sealed the doom of the Federalists was their failure to develop a nationwide coherence, a failure for which their last nominal standard-bearer, Rufus King, must bear a good deal of the responsibility. The Federalists in Congress found it difficult to agree even on individual issues, much less on a program differentiating them from the administration. At the state level the party declined more slowly and continued to make its influence felt even in defeat. In several states serious issues pitted Federalists against Republicans after 1816—including the disestablishment of the Congregational Church in Connecticut and New Hampshire, and state constitutional conventions in Massachusetts and New York—but the Federalists wound up on the losing side of most of these battles. Only in little Delaware did the Federalist Party remain dominant. Such leverage as the Federalists might have exerted at the national level they dissipated by dividing their support among the various Republican presidential aspirants, including Calhoun, Crawford, Clay, Adams, and General Jackson.
¹²
The Federalists, who had identified themselves so strongly as the friends of national government, proved incapable of reorganizing as an effective national opposition to government. The demise of the Federalist Party had a significant ideological effect, extinguishing in America the tradition of statist conservatism that has been so strong in Europe.
¹³

Monroe expected and wanted one-party rule to evolve over time into true nonpartisanship. What actually happened was something different. Since virtually all ambitious politicians joined the Republican Party, the party ceased to have coherence. As these politicians jockeyed for influence and advancement, the internal divisions that had plagued the party during and before the War of 1812 reappeared. Sectional differences superimposed upon these divisions made for an even more complex grid of rivalries. Monroe’s Era of Good Feelings proved transitory, and during his second term it led not to nonpartisanship but to factionalism.

II

Monroe made use of his solid base of domestic support to achieve substantial results in foreign policy. Some of these achievements addressed business left unfinished by the indeterminate conclusion to the war with Great Britain. The first one was the agreement of April 1817 signed by Richard Rush for the United States and Charles Bagot for Britain. It provided gradual naval disarmament on the Great Lakes, forestalling a costly arms race between the still mutually suspicious powers. Rush–Bagot was one of the earliest arms limitation agreements and proved remarkably durable. Although the Lincoln administration threatened to abrogate it in retaliation for British help to the Confederacy, it persisted until World War II, when Canada and the United States agreed that the Great Lakes could be used for naval construction and training—no longer, of course, directed against each other.
¹⁴
Rush–Bagot did not deal with land defenses, and the U.S.–Canadian boundary on land was not demilitarized until 1871. (The Americans spent three years building a fort at the northern end of Lake Champlain only to discover in 1818 that it stood on the Canadian side of the boundary; it had to be evacuated.)
¹⁵

The Anglo-American Convention signed in London on October 20, 1818, dealt with a variety of subjects. From early colonial days to recent times, fishing rights in the North Atlantic have been a recurrent source of contention between Newfoundland and New England fishermen competing for cod and other marine resources. The Convention of 1818 redefined the rights Yankee fishermen enjoyed along the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador, though it did not restore all the privileges they had been granted in 1783.
¹⁶
The negotiators also fixed the boundary between Canada and the Louisiana Purchase at the 49th parallel, which was considerably more to the advantage of the United States than the natural boundary, the area drained by the Missouri River system, would have been. In another article of the convention, Britain and the United States temporarily resolved their dispute over the Oregon Country by agreeing to treat it as a condominium or jointly occupied territory for the next ten years. (In making their agreement the two countries conveniently ignored the claims of Russia and Spain to the same area.) The claim of the United States to Oregon arose out of the voyage of the
Columbia
in 1792 and the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–6. It had been weakened during the War of 1812, when the fur-trading post of Astoria had been sold to the North West Company of Montreal by John Jacob Astor, who feared that otherwise it would be captured by the British and no compensation paid. Finally, the issue of British payment for persons rescued from American slavery during the War of 1812 was referred to arbitration. All in all, the convention constituted a remarkably favorable agreement from the U.S. point of view, and the Senate gave unqualified consent to ratification.
¹⁷
It signaled the beginning of a new era of accommodation in Anglo-American relations.