CHAPTER SEVEN
When James Madison first arrived in Washington in the spring of 1801, it was nowhere. The federal government had moved to its latest site in the summer and fall of 1800, but only small, stumbling steps had been taken to make the new capital a national city, or even a habitable place. The presidential mansion was a finished building, on the outside, at any rate, though the grounds were filled with the detritus of ongoing construction. The Capitol, a mile and a half away on a small hill, was just begun. There were a few boardinghouses, a handful of shops and taverns, and a scattering of private homes (many of them built on spec). The roads were unpaved paths. There was good partridge hunting on Capitol Hill, and locals grew vegetables in the Mall. Gouverneur Morris, who after a decade of high life in Europe was now a senator from New York, wrote a princess friend of his that “we want nothing here but houses, cellars, kitchens, well informed men, amiable women, and other little trifles of this kind, to make our city perfect.”
If Washington had been even grimmer, the prospect facing Madison still would have been glorious. He and his allies and their leader, Thomas Jefferson, had accomplished something brand-new in the history of the United States, rare enough in the history of the world: the peaceful ascent to the highest offices of government by one set of men replacing their opponents. The Republican sweep had been striking. Not only was Jefferson president, but Republicans held a three-to-two majority in the House (almost reversing the Federalist majority in the last Congress), and they had pulled nearly even in the Senate. The change had not been accomplished by revolutionary means: the Federalists had not crowned their heads, and the Republicans had not had to remove crowns or heads, despite the fears of both parties. But the changeover was felt to be revolutionary in fact. Jefferson considered it a second American Revolution.
For his cabinet, Jefferson turned to two Massachusetts men, Henry Dearborn (secretary of war) and Levi Lincoln (attorney general). Samuel Smith, the Baltimore congressman and merchant, preferred staying in the House to becoming secretary of the navy, so Jefferson appointed his younger brother Robert. Since the office of attorney general was a minor one in those days, and Jefferson intended to pursue a peace policy (no more chest thumping against France), these were minor appointments. For Treasury secretary he turned to the obvious Republican, Albert Gallatin. To fill the office of secretary of state, the job that he himself had held in George Washington’s cabinet, he turned to Madison.
The triumvirate of Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin was almost as brilliant as the triumvirate of Washington, Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton a decade earlier. The new trio, unlike that one, would hang together. The three great Republicans saw eye to eye. Not even ambition divided them. Gallatin could have dreamed of being president himself one day, for though he was foreign born, he had been a citizen when the Constitution was adopted, which made him eligible according to Article II, Section 1. Almost uniquely for a successful politician, though, he seemed entirely focused on doing his job, whatever that might be. Jefferson had already reached the top of the pole; his only ambition could be to stay there, with the nation’s love. Madison was the heir apparent.
No member of a cabinet had been so close to a president; none perhaps ever would be again. Washington’s cabinet had been separated from him by the barrier of his own uniqueness. Adams’s cabinet had been alienated by its littleness and his willfulness. Jefferson had done Madison’s job and therefore had opinions and hands-on experience, which is often a recipe for a president to overwhelm his secretary. But Madison’s long record of advising his chief on every subject gave him a compensating intimacy.
For three weeks, Madison and his household—Dolley, her son, Payne, and her sister, Anna—lived with Jefferson in the White House. Then, after a two-month stay on Pennsylvania Avenue, over the temporary offices of the State Department, he rented a house on F Street.
Madison was uniquely favored—therefore conspicuous, therefore vulnerable. To the Federalists, who had been transformed overnight into an almost impotent minority, Madison was only a tool and a toady. They saved their carping for Jefferson, their displacer, archenemy, and hate figure. But if any Republicans were unhappy with anything the Jefferson administration did, whom would they carp at? The lightning rod and scapegoat for Republican unease thus became the right hand, James Madison.
He made enemies over patronage. Ideally, Republicans would not deal in patronage. One of their complaints against Federalism was that it fortified itself by creating needless government offices and doling them out. Yet Republicans had created a party, and while partisans work for common ideals, they also work for their own interest and advancement. After the election of 1800, many Republicans came begging.
Even though Madison was the man who had slipped Philip Freneau into Jefferson’s State Department, he ran his own impartially, retaining a hard-line Federalist, Jacob Wagner, as chief clerk because he was capable. Madison’s attitude perplexed William Duane, Benjamin Franklin Bache’s successor at the Aurora, so much that he traveled from Philadelphia to Washington to urge Madison to do the right thing with his staff. Duane characterized the eight clerks he found at the State Department as four picaroons, or pirates, “a Hamiltonian, a nothingarian, a modest man and a nincompoop.” Duane complained in vain and from then on marked Madison as a weak reed.
Another Republican journalist, James Callender, one of the Sedition Act martyrs, made a patronage claim for himself. Jefferson had issued him a retroactive pardon and ordered the repayment of his $200 fine. Callender, however, wanted more than vindication; a postmastership in Richmond, Virginia, would fit the bill. He wrote Madison an oily letter pressing his claim (“I was extremely happy to hear that you had accepted of an office under the new presidency because . . . I was interested in having one person among them whom I could without hypocrisy profess to feel an attachment for”). (Beware the man who says he addresses you without hypocrisy.) Callender followed his letter with a visit to Madison in Washington. Too late, Jefferson and Madison were beginning to suspect their erstwhile supporter. The secretary of state told Callender not to get his hopes up.
But the most consequential patronage decision of the Jefferson administration’s first year concerned the new vice president. When the thirty-six-ballot drama of the tied presidential election had been performed in the House of Representatives, what role had Aaron Burr played? Innocent bystander, watching Federalists struggle to keep Jefferson out of the White House? Or backstairs intriguer, actively assisting their efforts? Contemporary gossips, Republican and Federalist alike, tagged Burr as an intriguer. Jefferson noted the talk—some of it conveyed to him by Madison—and kept his own counsel.
The first sign of his attitude toward his vice president came when Jefferson withheld a New York customs house appointment from Matthew Davis, a Burr ally who had been a poll watcher during the crucial legislative races a year earlier. (Davis was so zealous, he had gone fifteen hours without eating.) Burr wrote three letters on behalf of Davis, who even made a trip to Monticello to lobby for himself. At length Jefferson told his vice president that his policy on solicitations was to let his answer “be found in what is done or not done.” Davis never got the job.
New York was a key part of the victorious Republican coalition. One of Jefferson’s and Madison’s tasks over the next sixteen years would be managing their northern junior partners—and making sure they remained junior. Who in New York would the Virginians be better off working with—Burr, ambitious, vigorous, and forty-five years old? Or George Clinton, beginning his valedictory seventh term as governor as he turned sixty-two?
Madison would make another enemy on a matter of principle. The chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the new Republican House was a twenty-eight-year-old Virginian, and a second cousin of Jefferson’s, John Randolph of Roanoke. All his life, his voice never broke and he never used a razor. He kept the world in awe with his quick tongue and quicker temper. In his twenties and thirties, he was not as crazy as he would later become, after alcohol, opium, and disappointment had done their work. But he was already willful and domineering.
His collision with Madison was set up by a crooked real estate deal hanging over from the last decade. The state of Georgia claimed a vast western hinterland called the Yazoo country, after a river in what is now the state of Mississippi. In 1795, Georgia sold twenty million Yazoo acres to four land companies for half a million dollars. But the next year, the state voided the sale, on the grounds that every legislator but one had been bribed. Georgia and the land companies were not the only claimants: the federal government said it owned the land, and several Indian nations—Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw—actually occupied it.
To settle the matter, Jefferson tapped Madison, Gallatin, and Attorney General Lincoln as a commission. In April 1802, without trying to resolve any of the underlying issues of possession, they brokered an agreement among the state, the Indians, and the investors. It was “expedient,” the commissioners said, “to enter into a compromise on reasonable terms.” But expediency was not acceptable to Randolph, who thought his party stood for states’ rights and against corruption. He made Georgia’s sovereign power to punish its lawmakers and the greed of the land companies who had bribed them touchstones for good and evil.
All these feuds came to a boil at different times, like pots on a stove. Burr made the least fuss, at least as far as Madison was concerned. Clintonian Republicans began to attack Burr in his home base, New York City, using the American Citizen, a newspaper edited by an English immigrant with the self-descriptive name of James Cheetham. Late in Jefferson’s first term, Burr complained about the abuse to the president himself. Jefferson replied that he paid no more attention to it than to “the passing wind.” Cheetham, he admitted, had a contract for printing federal laws in New York City, a valuable subsidy for any newspaper. But those arrangements were made “by the Secretary of the State, without any reference to me.” In other words, all the dirt being done to Burr was done not with Jefferson’s help, only with the help of Jefferson’s best friend, who, additionally, had the most to gain by hobbling Aaron Burr. Burr decided he had better look outside the Republican Party for his future.
Randolph fell upon the Yazoo claims at the tail end of the term. He tried to read Madison and the other compromisers out of the party. The people of Georgia had a right to undo a corrupt contract, and anyone who disagreed must be corrupt himself. “What is the spirit against which we now struggle,” he asked, “ . . . a monster generated by fraud, nursed in corruption, that in grim silence awaits its prey! It is the spirit of Federalism—that spirit which considers the many as made only for the few, which sees in government nothing but a job, which is never so true to itself as when false to the nation!” Although his overheated rhetoric blocked Yazoo legislation for years, he would have less success blocking Madison. However wounding Randolph could be at any moment, he was not a bad enemy to have over the long haul; he palled through excess.
Duane remained a thorn in Madison’s side for a decade, attacking him and Gallatin while maintaining ostentatious loyalty to Jefferson, supporting a populist faction in Pennsylvania politics, and denouncing Republicans he disliked as Quids, from “tertium quid”—third things, neither fish nor fowl.
Of all the Republican dissenters, Callender had the greatest impact on the American mind, for in September 1802 he told the nation about Sally Hemings in an article for a Federalist newspaper, the Richmond Recorder (if he couldn’t work for the post office, he would work for the other side). Two hundred years later, the sly scorn of his attack is still startling. “It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is Tom. His features are said to bear a striking though sable resemblance to those of the president himself.” The italics allude to the sixth chapter of the Book of Esther, in which the villainous Haman thinks that Ahaseurus, king of Persia, delighteth to honor him, whereas the king actually delighteth to honor Haman’s enemy, the Jew Mordecai; when Mordecai gets the upper hand, Haman and his sons are hanged. Callender hoped to turn Jefferson into an American Haman.
Ten months later, in July 1803, Callender was found floating in the James River, dead. A coroner’s jury ruled that he had drowned accidentally, bathing while drunk. Callender did drink. But had someone helped him into the James and eternity?
When journalists went too far, it was not uncommon to beat them. A few months before he died, Callender had been attacked with a club by a Richmond lawyer who happened to be James Monroe’s son-in-law. If gentlemen (a class to which journalists did not belong) gave offense, satisfaction was sought on the dueling ground. Madison never fought a duel himself, but he acknowledged the practice. Back in the Adams administration, two congressmen had rumbled on the floor of the House, armed with a cane and a set of fireplace tongs; Madison thought they should have dueled instead. A political revolution had occurred without revolutionary violence, but man-to-man, ad hoc violence flickered on the edges of American politics. History has accepted the verdict of the coroner’s jury in Callender’s case, but political violence would appear in shocking forms in Madison’s later career.
The complaints against Madison by his fellow Republicans sound very modern; they are in fact eternal. Practical men (Duane) said he wouldn’t get his hands dirty; purists (Randolph) called him corrupt and a sellout. Neither Burr nor Callender attacked Madison directly; he could survive those who did, so long as he made no mistakes of his own and retained Jefferson’s support. Eminence can be a lonely thing, but it is on the whole better than obscurity.
So much for politics. What of Madison’s job?
Madison and Jefferson shared two goals, and two prejudices, which would guide their foreign policy for the next eight years and beyond. The goals were peace and expansion; the prejudices were a disposition to trust France and to distrust Britain.
They yearned for peace because war was expensive and vicious. War oppressed taxpayers, swelled the state, and caused panic and oppression (the Alien and Sedition Acts had just proven that). Their peace policy was not a passive one, however. American commerce, they believed, was so valuable to the world that it could be used as a weapon instead of armies and frigates.
They favored expansion because it was demographic destiny. American settlers were pouring into the Ohio Valley, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Neither Indians nor Europeans had any right to stand in their way.
As for their attitudes toward France and Britain, the passions awakened by the French Revolution had changed, both in them and in Europe. The French republic had been overthrown, in spirit if not yet in form, when Napoleon Bonaparte took the title First Consul in 1799. Guillotiners and extortionists gave way to a military man. When Napoleon first came to power, Jefferson wondered whether he would be more like George Washington or Oliver Cromwell—upholding the laws or twisting them to his own ends. Yet long after it became clear that Napoleon was a law unto himself, the two Virginians gave him the benefit of the doubt they were never willing to give Britain. Napoleonic France may have become an ex-friend, but they hoped it might be friendly once more; Britain was their lifelong enemy.
The secretary of state and the president could summon erudition, rhetoric, and (in Jefferson’s case) poetry to support these beliefs. But the beliefs themselves were first principles, axioms from which all else flowed. Jefferson’s and Madison’s agreement on their two goals and their two prejudices gave their actions consistency and, in many cases, force. But it could also blind them to difficulties and failure. The Jefferson administration benefited from the unity of its leaders—and suffered from it.
Madison took over the State Department at what seemed to be a lucky time. President Adams had resolved the ill feelings of the XYZ affair by negotiating a treaty with France, the Convention of Mortefontaine, which was signed in October 1800. Peace became general the following year. The coalition of enemies that had tried to tame France broke up, exhausted, and 1801 marked a pause in Europe’s wars.
The first order of business for Madison was the question: Who will get the Spanish empire? Spain’s possessions covered a continent and a half, from California to Cape Horn. They had even increased during the eighteenth century, as Spain acquired the ancient French dominion of Louisiana and lost, then regained Florida. (Both territories were larger than the modern states of the same name, Louisiana vastly so: western Florida ran all the way along the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans, while Louisiana stretched north and west to the sources of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.) Madison believed that Florida and a small part of Louisiana ought to belong to America. Several of the Yazoo country rivers flowed through the Florida Panhandle to the Gulf, and the Mississippi was the watershed of a vast arc of the interior of the United States, from Pittsburgh to Natchez. If American settlers, present and future, did not have the freedom to trade through Pensacola, Mobile, and above all New Orleans, they would be like people trying to live in a house with the doors barricaded from the outside.
But dealing with Spain meant dealing with France. In 1795, Spain had bowed out of the wars of the French Revolution, too weak to fight its northern neighbor. In 1800, Napoleon had tightened France’s embrace, by forcing Spain to give him Louisiana. The Treaty of San Ildefonso, which confirmed the deal, was signed the day after the Convention of Mortefontaine.
France kept the Treaty of San Ildefonso secret, especially from the United States, because it was a threatening, almost hostile act. The United States now found itself sharing a border not with a fading colossus, but with a superpower looking to rebuild its overseas empire.
Although Europe buzzed with rumors of the treaty, Madison did not learn definitively that it existed until November 1801. A year later, he learned something worse: the Spanish official who still administered New Orleans had closed the port to American trade (worth $2 million a year), presumably with the approval of its new owners.
Madison reacted with three strategies. The first was to lecture Louis André Pichon, the French chargé d’affaires in Washington, about geopolitical destiny. Louisiana, he told Pichon, was a white elephant, remote and vulnerable; France could enjoy possession of it only if she had friendly relations with the United States, which she could secure by ceding New Orleans and Florida. (Florida was owned by Spain, not France, but Madison assumed that France could make the deal.) He also threatened Pichon—a threat Jefferson repeated through other channels—with a British alliance if France proved hostile. “We must marry ourselves to the British fleet,” as Jefferson put it. Britain and the United States, the threat implied, would then divide the Spanish empire between them. Madison and Jefferson did not intend to marry themselves to the British fleet, but they were willing to use it as a bogeyman. Finally, Madison energized America’s diplomatic presence in Paris. Robert Livingston was America’s ambassador there—his consolation prize for never having been Jefferson’s running mate. In the spring of 1803, he was joined by James Monroe as a minister extraordinary. They were instructed to regain the right to trade through New Orleans—or to buy the city, and western Florida, too, for as much as $10 million.
This was able and varied diplomacy, playing different tunes on different instruments. Napoleon heeded none of it. He sent an army commanded by his brother-in-law, Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, to St. Domingo, the present-day Haiti, formerly a French colony, then in the midst of a revolution by its black and mulatto populations. If France could pacify St. Domingo, then it would have a staging area for occupying and developing Louisiana.
Jefferson’s and Madison’s enemies, the Federalists, had helped St. Domingo’s blacks win their freedom in the first place. At the end of the 1790s President Adams had given them naval aid and sent them an American diplomat, Edward Stevens, a childhood friend of Alexander Hamilton’s from the islands. Hamilton himself sketched a constitution for the new black state. In his last appearance as Publius, Hamilton concluded that only a military government would do, though he suggested some internal division of powers (e.g., judges appointed by generals for life; an assembly of generals to reject or ratify taxes).
In the spring of 1802, France seemed to win a great victory when Toussaint-Louverture, Haiti’s black leader, was tricked into surrendering (Leclerc and Napoleon sent him to a mountaintop fort in France, where he died of pneumonia). But the resistance of the liberated slaves, and the ravages of yellow fever, swept away Leclerc and his army before the year was out.
As soon as Napoleon saw that there was no quick route to empire in the New World, he decided to turn his attention back to the Old; he cut his losses by making a deal with the United States. In April 1803, an astonished Livingston wrote Madison that he had been offered all of Louisiana. Monroe arrived in Paris days later, and the two diplomats settled on a price of $15 million. With a few signatures, the United States nearly doubled in size. There had not been such a stupendous windfall since the treaty that ended the American Revolution, and this spurt of national growth had been accomplished without firing a shot.
Back home, Monroe got the credit for the Louisiana Purchase. His late arrival had coincided with the deal, and he was a Virginian in a Virginia administration. Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris noted that their fellow New Yorker Livingston was being given short shrift. “It is possible,” Morris wrote Livingston, “that I am unjust to Mr. Monroe, but really I consider him as a person of mediocrity in every respect.” So the bad blood between New York and Virginia continued to flow.
Actually, neither Monroe nor Livingston deserved as much credit as Napoleon, who had decided to make the United States the beneficiary of his own change of plan. Yet credit also belonged to Madison and Jefferson, who had pursued opportunities to expand with such single-mindedness that they were ready to grasp one when it came. Seek, and ye shall find.
There was only one problem: Jefferson and Madison thought the Louisiana Purchase included Florida. New Orleans and Florida had been their maximum goal; even though they had won so much more, they still wanted all of what they had originally desired. And, for little more reason than their wanting it, they believed they had actually gotten it. Napoleon would make use of their error.
Jefferson and Madison decided to teach Britain, the other great superpower, a lesson in American independence. A decade earlier, Alexander Hamilton had told Major Beckwith, the British agent, “We think in English.” Jefferson and Madison wanted to think in American, and one instrument they used to show the difference was etiquette.
The etiquette of republican government was uncharted territory, since there were so few modern models. When President Washington lived in New York and Philadelphia, he held weekly receptions on Tuesday afternoons from three to four, which he described in a letter. “Gentlemen, often in great numbers, come and go, chat with each other, and act as they please. A porter shows them into the room, and they retire from it when they please, and without ceremony. At their first entrance they salute me, and I them, and as many as I can talk to I do. What pomp there is in all this I am unable to discover.” The tone of Washington’s last line was defensive, because others had discovered the pomp in his simple routine. At first the criticism was confined to a few anti-Federalists, who thought he was coming on too grand (he bowed to guests but would not shake hands). In time, it was taken up by the Republican Party. Presidents should not hold receptions; they seemed like royal levees. Perhaps they were even intended (if not by Washington, then by Hamilton, Adams, and others) to prepare the public for monarchy. Although Madison never criticized Washington personally, he, like all good Republicans, grumbled about “the pageantry of rank” in one of his National Gazette essays.
The Republican simplicity of the Jefferson administration was abetted by the plainness, even poverty of the new capital city. But Jefferson and Madison also made it a point of pride and a matter of principle.
President Jefferson held no receptions; he gave dinners in the White House to small groups of congressmen, plus diplomats. In doing so, he played to his strengths, for in small groups his conversation shone. So did his kitchen, and his wine cellar. “The wine,” wrote one dazzled Federalist senator, “was the best I ever drank, particularly the champagne, which was indeed delicious. I wish his French politics were as good as his French wines.”
As secretary of state, Madison too hosted dinners, playing to his own strengths. He lacked Jefferson’s palate and his quirky brilliance, but in private Madison showed intelligence and humor. One evening he proposed an experiment to see how many bottles of champagne it would take to induce hangovers the next day. (No result was recorded.) Another of Madison’s strengths was his wife. Since Jefferson was a widower, Dolley, with some help from Hannah Gallatin, became the administration’s unofficial hostess.
In December 1803, Jefferson formalized the principles of Republican social life in a memorandum, Canons of Etiquette, written with the advice of his cabinet. In traditional diplomatic protocol, ministers (or ambassadors) outranked chargés d’affaires and secretaries of legations. Now all diplomats were considered equal—and all Americans were considered equal to them. At dinners or other public functions, gentlemen were to give precedence to ladies, but otherwise conduct was to be regulated by “the principle of equality, or pêle-mêle.” “Pell-mell”—Jefferson’s spelling reflected the French origin of the word—was not the most diplomatic word to use. It meant mingled or mixed-up, with a possible whiff of disorder, even violence. Shakespeare’s unique use of it (Henry IV, Part I) describes a rebellion: “pell-mell havoc and confusion.”
Republican pêle-mêle seemed disorderly enough to the British minister when he first encountered it. Anthony Merry had been sent to Washington in the fall of 1803. Merry was not some aristocrat marking time in the diplomatic service, but a wine merchant’s son; one American described him as “plain, unassuming and amiable.” But he was also a conventional Englishman, and a conventional career diplomat. He was thus surprised, when he paid his first call on the president in late November, that Jefferson received him in slippers. He was disconcerted by his first dinner at the White House early the next month, when Jefferson, instead of taking Mrs. Merry, the wife of the guest of honor, to the dinner table, took Dolley Madison instead. (Madison picked up Mrs. Merry.) He was angered a few nights later by a dinner at the secretary of state’s house when Madison took Hannah Gallatin in to dinner. No one at all looked out for Mrs. Merry, leaving the job of escorting her to Merry himself.
These snubs were made worse by the administration’s fondness for France. In December 1803, Jerome Bonaparte, Napoleon’s youngest brother, married Elizabeth Patterson, the eighteen-year-old niece of the Baltimore Smiths (Robert, still secretary of the navy, and Samuel, now a senator). Napoleon, in fact, disliked the match: he wanted European royalty for his in-laws, not Yankees. But Republican Washington gloried in it. Jefferson gave the young couple dinner at the White House, and Robert Smith threw them a fancy ball.
Elizabeth caused a sensation. “Mobs of boys,” wrote one of Dolley’s women friends, “have crowded round . . . to see what I hope will not often be seen in this country, an almost naked woman.... Her dress was the thinnest sarcenet and white crepe.” Sarcenet was a silk fabric, often used for undergarments—except when Elizabeth Bonaparte wore it as outer garments. “Her back, her bosom, part of her waist and her arms were uncovered and the rest of her form visible.” Her face was riveting, too. Gilbert Stuart did a dreamy portrait of her with three faces—profile, half profile, and full forward—as if he could not get enough of her.
If the Bonaparte marriage did not improve relations with France, it helped worsen them with the British minister. Pichon, the French chargé, noted cattily that the Bonapartes’ appearance in Washington “has furnished Mr. Merry with new griefs.”
Jefferson, Madison, and their colleagues had a serious point to make, both social and ideological: a new form of government required new manners, and Britain, they believed, was still the greatest threat in the world to republicanism. But their fecklessness was striking: Britain and France had resumed fighting in May 1803; the contest would soon involve all of Europe. The world is not a debating society; it was not wise to be provocative, without a plan. The Louisiana Purchase had gone to their heads.
At this moment of confidence and success, Madison sat for the best portrait ever made of him. Gilbert Stuart had set up shop in Washington, where, besides the lovely Elizabeth Bonaparte, he painted diplomats, local bigwigs, and James and Dolley Madison. In their portraits, Dolley’s eyes are bright and lips are slightly smiling; Madison wears the outfit that he settled on in early adulthood and favored till the end of his days—all black, with a white neckcloth. His hair is powdered, worn long at the sides and pulled back into a queue (a look that was already beginning to look old-fashioned). His hair comes to a peak over his forehead, receding on either side—a hairline that highlights his head, and the brains within. His expression is calm, perhaps determined. “Quite pretty he has made us,” wrote Dolley of Stuart’s handiwork.
Jefferson’s first term saw the violent death of one of Madison’s colleagues at the Constitutional Convention.
Richard Dobbs Spaight of North Carolina had been in Philadelphia the day the convention opened. He spoke up a dozen times, once joining Madison in an effort to give senators long terms (to give government “stability,” as Madison put it). After the Constitution was ratified, Spaight served as governor of his state and as congressman. In September 1802, he was shot and killed by a political rival in a duel.
Almost two years later, the same fate befell another of Madison’s former colleagues, Alexander Hamilton. In July 1804, the former Treasury secretary was shot and killed by Vice President Aaron Burr.
Hamilton and Burr had been rivals in New York politics since the early 1790s. During the endgame of the presidential election of 1800, when Federalists hoped to use the tie vote in the Electoral College to make Burr president, Hamilton had urged them to accept Jefferson. “If there be a man in the world I ought to hate,” he wrote Gouverneur Morris, “it is Jefferson. With Burr I have always been personally well. But the public good must be paramount.” Why was Hamilton so hostile toward Burr? For a reason that might have interested Madison, if he had known of it. Jefferson had bad principles, from Hamilton’s point of view, but Burr had none. “Is it a recommendation to have no theory?” Hamilton asked another Federalist. Without theory, Burr, he believed, must be ruled entirely by ambition.
In the spring of 1804, Hamilton repeated these arguments. Burr, abandoned by Jefferson, hoped to arrange his post–vice presidential future by running for governor of New York. But since the state Republican Party was backing a candidate handpicked by George Clinton, Burr had to run as a Federalist. Once again, Hamilton begged his party not to support Burr. Unlike the presidential election of 1800, the 1804 New York governor’s race was not even close. Burr was crushed and decided to challenge his nemesis. Each man shot once. Hamilton’s shot went high and wide; Burr’s pierced Hamilton’s liver and lodged in his spine.
Neither Jefferson nor Madison said much at the time about their dead enemy. In a letter to Monroe, Madison referred in passing to “the adventure between Burr and Hamilton.” Many years later, he took a longer view.
When James Paulding, a literary chum of Washington Irving, wrote the aged Madison asking for biographical details of long-dead fellow founders, Madison replied, “That [Mr. Hamilton] possessed intellectual powers of the first order, and the moral qualifications of integrity and honor in a captivating degree, has been decreed to him by a suffrage now universal.” Madison’s prose contains a lot of eighteenth-century filling. Usually it is just the way he writes, but sometimes it serves a purpose. Here the passive voice almost exempts Madison from the judgment. “If [Hamilton’s] theory of government deviated from the republican standard,” Madison went on, “he had the candor to avow it, and the greater merit of cooperating faithfully in maturing and supporting a system which was not his choice.” This ironically echoes Hamilton’s decision to back Jefferson over Burr: Hamilton had the wrong theory, but at least he had one, and he put his shoulder to the wheel nevertheless.
Toward the end of the letter, Madison warmed up a bit. Days before the duel, Hamilton had visited a friend’s office, where he slipped into a book on a shelf a note assigning authorship of the Federalist papers. Hamilton claimed far too many for himself; after his account was published, Madison had, from time to time, diffidently set the record straight. Hamilton’s “misstatement,” he now told Paulding, “was involuntary. . . . He was incapable of any that was not so.” His heart was pure, if his principles were not.
Two New Yorkers had been swept from the field, the brilliant intellect, the canny pol. No one, however brilliant or canny, could withstand Jefferson as the presidential election of 1804 came round. Gallatin had cut taxes; Jefferson and Madison had kept the peace, and acquired Louisiana. Callender’s trash talk was ignored.
This election avoided the awkward tie of 1800, thanks to the Twelfth Amendment, ratified in June 1804, which brought presidential tickets into the Constitution. In 1804, and in every election since, each elector cast a vote for president and for vice president on “distinct ballots.” This time Jefferson’s running mate was a New Yorker whom Madison would have little reason to fear—sixty-five-year-old George Clinton, closing out twenty-one years as governor and looking forward to the vice presidency as a “respectable retirement.” The Federalists put up Charles Coatesworth Pinckney, Adams’s running mate four years earlier, and Rufus King, another veteran of the Constitutional Convention.
It was no contest. Out of seventeen states (Ohio had joined the Union in 1803), Jefferson and Clinton carried fourteen, plus nine of Maryland’s electoral votes. Pinckney and King won two votes in Maryland and only two states, Connecticut and Delaware. The total electoral vote was 162 to 14. The Republicans swept four-fifths of the seats in the House and the Senate.
Victory could not be more complete.