due France—an “Anglified complexion,” in direct opposition
to the popular sympathy with France and French Republicanism.
In 1794 he tried again his commercial weapons, introducing in the
House of Representatives resolutions based on Jefferson’s report
on commerce, advising retaliation against Great Britain and discrimination
in commercial and navigation laws in favour of
France; and he declared that the friends of Jay’s treaty were “a
British party systematically aiming at an exclusive connexion
with the British government,” and in 1796 strenuously but
unsuccessfully opposed the appropriation of money to carry
this treaty into effect. Still thinking that foreign nations could
be coerced through their commercial interests, he scouted as
visionary the idea that Great Britain would go to war on a refusal
to carry Jay’s treaty into effect, thinking it inconceivable that
Great Britain “would wantonly make war” upon a country
which was the best market she had in the world for her manufactures,
and one with which her export trade was so much
larger than her import.
In 1797 Madison retired from Congress, but not to a life of inactivity. In 1798 he joined Jefferson in opposing the Alien and Sedition Laws, and Madison himself wrote the resolutions of the Virginia legislature declaring that it viewed “the powers of the Federal government as resulting from the compact to which the states are parties, as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting that compact; as no further valid than they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that, in case of a deliberate, palpable and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states, who are parties thereto, have the right and are in duty bound to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them.” The Virginia resolutions and the Kentucky resolutions (the latter having been drafted by Jefferson) were met by dissenting resolutions from the New England states, from New York, and from Delaware. In answer to these, Madison, who had become a member of the Virginia legislature in the autumn of 1799, wrote for the committee to which they were referred a report elaborating and sustaining in every point the phraseology of the Virginia resolutions.[1]
Upon the accession of the Republican party to power in 1801, Madison became secretary of state in Jefferson’s cabinet, a position for which he was well fitted both because he possessed to a remarkable degree the gifts of careful thinking and discreet and able speaking, and of large constructive ability; and because he was well versed in constitutional and international law and practised a fairness in discussion essential to a diplomat. During the eight years that he held the portfolio of state, he had continually to defend the neutral rights of the United States against the encroachments of European belligerents; in 1806 he published An Examination of the British Doctrine which subjects to Capture a Neutral Trade not open in Time of Peace, a careful argument—with a minute examination of authorities on international law—against the rule of war of 1756 extended by Great Britain in 1793 and 1803.
During Jefferson’s presidency and whilst Madison was secretary of state, by the purchase of Louisiana, Madison’s campaign begun in 1780 for the free navigation of the Mississippi was brought to a successful close. The candidate in 1808 of the Republican party, although bitterly opposed in the party by John Randolph and George Clinton, Madison was elected president, defeating C. C. Pinckney, the Federalist candidate, by 122 votes to 47. Madison had no false hopes of placating the Federalist opposition, but as the preceding administration was one with which he was in harmony, his position was different from that of Jefferson in 1801, and he had less occasion for removing Federalists from office. Jefferson’s peace policy—or, more correctly, Madison’s peace policy—of commercial restrictions to coerce Great Britain and France he continued to follow until 1812, when he was forced to change these futile commercial weapons for a policy of war, which was very popular with the extreme French wing of his party. There is a charge, which has never been proved or disproved, that Madison’s real desire was for peace, but that in order to secure the renomination he yielded to that wing of his party which was resolved on war with Great Britain. The only certain fact is that Madison, whatever were his personal feelings in this matter, acted according to the wishes of a majority of the Republicans; but whether in doing so he was influenced by the desire of another nomination is largely a matter of conjecture. Madison was renominated on the 18th of May 1812, issued his war message on the 1st of June, and in the November elections he was re-elected, defeating De Witt Clinton by 128 votes to 89. His administration during the war was pitiably weak. His cabinet in great part had been dictated to him in 1809 by a senatorial clique, and it was hopelessly discordant; for two years he was to all intents and purposes his own secretary of state, Robert Smith being a mere figure-head of whom he gladly got rid in 1811, giving Monroe the vacant place. Madison himself had attempted alternately to prevent war by his “commercial weapons” and to prepare the country for war, but he had met with no success, because of the tricky diplomacy of Great Britain and of France, and because of the general distrust of him coupled with the particular opposition to the war of the prosperous New England Federalists, who suggested with the utmost seriousness that his resignation should be demanded. In brief, Madison was too much the mere scholar to prove a strong leader in such a crisis. The supreme disgrace of the administration was the capture and partial destruction in August 1814 of the city of Washington—this was due, however, to incompetence of the military and not to any lack of prudence on the cabinet’s part. In general, Congress was more blamable than either the president or his official family, or the army officers. With the declaration of peace the president again gained a momentary popularity much like that he had won in 1809 by his apparent willingness at that time to fight France.
Retiring from the presidency in 1817, Madison returned to his home, Montpelier (in Orange county, Virginia), which he left in no official capacity save in 1829, when he was a delegate to the state constitutional convention and served on several of its committees. Montpelier, like Jefferson’s Monticello and Monroe’s Oak-Hill, was an expensive bit of “gentleman farming,” which with his generous Virginia hospitality nearly ruined its owner financially. Madison’s home was peculiarly a centre for literary travellers in his last years; when he was eighty-three he was visited by Harriet Martineau, who reported her conversations with him in her Retrospect of Western Travel (1838). He took a great interest in education—his library was left to the university of Virginia, where it was burned in 1895—in emancipation, and in agricultural questions, to the very last. He died at Montpelier on the 28th of June 1836. Madison married, in 1794, Dorothy Payne Todd (1772–1849), widow of John Todd, a Philadelphia lawyer. She had great social charm, and upon Madison’s entering Jefferson’s cabinet became “first lady” in Washington society. Her plump beauty was often remarked—notably by Washington Irving—in contrast to her husband’s delicate and feeble figure and wizened face—for even in his prime Madison was, as Henry Adams says, “a small man, quiet, somewhat precise in manner, pleasant, fond of conversation, with a certain
- ↑ Thirty years later Madison’s arguments for the Virginia resolutions and the resolutions themselves were freely used by Calhoun and his followers in support of his doctrine of nullification. But Madison insisted that the Resolutions of 1798 did not involve the principles of nullification. Nearly all his arguments, especially where he attempts to interpret Jefferson’s writings on the point, notably the Kentucky resolutions, are rather strained and specious, but it does seem that the Virginia resolutions were based on a different idea from Calhoun’s doctrine of nullification. Madison’s theory was that the legislature of Virginia, being one of the bodies which had chosen delegates to the constitutional convention, was legally capable of considering the question of the constitutionality of laws passed by the Federal government, and that the state of Virginia might invite other states to join her, but could not singly, as Calhoun argued, declare any law of the Federal legislature null and void. (It is to be noted the words “null and void” were in Madison’s first draft of the Virginia resolutions, but that they were omitted by the Virginia legislature.) It is notable, besides, that Madison had always feared that the national congress would assume too great power, that he had approved of Supreme Court checks on the national legislature, and of veto power by a council of revision.
